Again a widow, Julia, richer and lovelier than ever, entered with saucy abandon upon a succession of amours which became at once the scandal
and the joy of a Rome that fretted under the "Julian laws." To quiet this gossip, and perhaps to reconcile his daughter with his wife, Augustus made
a third match for Julia. Livia's son Tiberius was compelled to divorce his ' pregnant wife, Vipsania Agrippina, daughter of Agrippa, and to marry the equally reluctant Julia (9 B.c.). The young old Roman did his best to be a good husband; but Julia soon gave up the effort to adjust her epicurean to his stoic ways, and resumed her illicit loves. Tiberius bore the infamy for a time in furious silence. The lex lulia de adulteriis required the husband of an adulteress to denounce her to the courts; Tiberius disobeyed the law
CHAP. XI)	AUGUSTAN  STATESMANSHIP	-  23 I
to protect its author, and perhaps himself, for he and Livia had hoped that Augustus would adopt him as his son and transmit to him the leadership of the Empire. \Vhen it became clear that the Emperor favored, instead, Julia's children by Agrippa, Tiberius resigned his official posts and retired to Rhodes. There for seven years he lived as a simple private citizen, de voting himself to solitude, philosophy, and astrology. Freer than ever, Julia passed from one lover to another, and the revels of her set filled the Forum with turmoil at night.41
Augustus, now (2 B.c.) an invalid of sixty, suffered all that a father and ruler could bear from the simultaneous collapse of his family, his honor, and his laws. By these laws the father of an adulteress was bound to indict her publicly if her husband had failed to do so. Procfs of her misconduct were laid before him, 2nd the friends of Tiberius let it be known that unless Augustus acted they would accuse Julia before the court. Augustus decided to anticipate them. While the merrymaking was at its height, he issued a decree banishing his daughter to the island of Pandateria, a barren rock off the Campanian coast. One of her lovers, a son of Antony, was forced to kill himself, and several others were exiled. Julia's freedwoman Phoebe hanged herself rather than testify against her; the distraught Emperor, hear ing of the act, said, "I would rather have been Phoebe's father than Julia's." The people of Rome begged him to forgive his daughter, Tiberius added his request to theirs, but pardon never came. Tiberius, enthroned, merely changed her place of residence to a less narrow confinement at Rhegium. There, broken and forgotten after sixteen years of imprisonment, Julia died. Her sons Gaius and Lucius had long preceded her in death: Lucius of an illness in l\1arseilles (A.D. 2), Gaius of a wound received in Armenia (A.D. 4). Left without aide or successor at a time when Germany, Pannonia, and Gaul were threatening revolt, Augustus reluctantly recalled Tiberius (A.D. 2), adopted him as son and coregent, and sent him off to put down the rebellions.
\Vhen he returned (A.D. 9), after five ye:irs of arduous and successful cam paigning, all Rome, which hated him for his stern puritanism, resigned itself to the fact that though Augustus was still prince, Tiberius had begun to rule.
Life's final tragedy is unwilling continuance-to outlive one's self and be forbidden to die. \Vhen Julia went into exile Augustus was not in years an old man; others were still vigorous at sixty. But he had lived too many lives, and died too many deaths, since he had come to Rome, a boy of eighteen, to avenge Caesar's murder and execute his will. How many wars and battles and near-defeats, how many pains and illnesses, how many con spiracies and perils, and bitter miscarriages of noble aims, had befallen him in those crowded forty-two years-and the snatching away of one hope
232	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XI
and helper after another, until at last only this dour Tiberius remained! Perhaps it had been wiser to die like Antony, at the peak of life and in the arms of love. How sadly pleasant must have seemed, in retrospect, the days when Julia and Agrippa were happy, and grandchildren frolicked on the palace floor. Now another Julia, daughter of his daughter, had grown up and was following her mother's morals as if resolved to illustrate all the amatory arts of her friend Qvid's verse. In A.D. 8, having received proofs of her adultery, Augustus exiled her to an isle in the Adriatic, and at the same time banished Ovid to Tomi on the Black Sea. "Would that I had never married," mourned the feeble and shrunken Emperor, "or that I had died without offspring!" Sometimes he thought of starving himself to death.
All the great structure that he had built seemed to be in ruins. The powers that he had assumed for order's sake had weakened into degeneration the Senate and the assemblies from which he had taken them. Tired of ratifica tions and adulations, the senators no longer came to their sessions, and a mere handful of citizens gathered in the comitia. Offices that had once stirred creative ambition by the power they brought were now shunned by the able as empty and expensive vanities. The very peace that Augustus had organized, and the security that he had won for Rome, had loosened the fibre of the people. No one wanted to enlist in the army, or recognize the inexorable periodicity of war. Luxury had taken the place of simplicity, sexual license was replacing parentage; by its own exhausted will the great race was beginning to die.
All these things the old Emperor keenly saw and s'.ld]y felt. No one then could tell him that despite a hundred defects and half a dozen idiots on the throne, the strange and subtle principate that he had established would give the Empire the longest period of prosperity ever known to mankind; and that the Pax Romana, which had begun as the Pax Augusta, would in the perspective of time be accounted the supreme achievement in the history of statesmanship. Like Leonardo, he thought that he had failed.
Death came to him quietly at Nola in the seventy-sixth year of his age (A.D. 14). Tothe friends at his bedside he uttered the words often used to conclude a Roman comedy: "Since well I've played my part, clap now your hands, and with applause dismiss me from the stage." He embraced his wife, saying, "Remember our long union, Livia; farewell"; and with this simple parting he passed away.42 Some days later his corpse was born<; through Rome on the shoulders of semtors to the Field of Mars, and there cremated while children of high degree chanted the lament for the dead.
CHAPTER  XII
TheGolden Age
30  B.C.-A.D. I 8
THE  AUGUSTAN STL"\1ULUS
F peace and security are more favorable than war to the production of literature and art, yet war and profound social disturbances tum up the earth about the plants of thought and nourish the seeds that mature in peace. A quiet life does not make great ideas or great men; but the compulsions of crisis, the imperatives of survival, weed out dead things by the roots and quicken the growth of new ideas and ways. Peace after successful war has all the stimulus of a rapid convalescence; men then rejoice at mere being,
and sometimes break into song.
The Romans were grateful to Augustus because he had cured, even if by a major operation, the cancer of chaos that had been consuming their civic life. They were astonished to find themselves rich so soon after devastation; and they were elated to note that despite their recent defenseless disorder they were still masters of what seemed to them the world. They looked back upon their history, from the first to this second Romulus, from creator to restorer, and judged it epically wonderful; they were hardly surprised when Virgil and Horace put their gratitude, their glory, and their pride into verse, and Livy into prose. Better still, the region they had conquered was only panly barbarous; a large area of it was the realm of Hellenistic culture-of refined speech, subtle literature, enlightening science, mature philosophy, and noble art. This spiritual wealth was now pouring into Rome, stirring imitation and rivalry, compeJJing language and letters to spruce up and grow. Ten thousand Greek words slipped into the Latin vocabulary, ten thousand Greek statues or paintings entered Roman forums, temples, streets, and homes.
Money was passing down, even to poets and artists, from the captors of Egypt's treasure, the absentee owners of Italy's soil, and the exploiters of the Empire's resources and trade. \Vriters dedicated their works to rich men in the hope of receiving gifts that would finance their further toil; so Horace addressed his odes to Sallust, Aelius Lamia, Manlius Torquatus, and Mun atius, Plancus. 1'1essala Corvinus gathered about him a coterie of authors
233
234	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XII
whose star was Tibullus, and Maecenas redeemed his wealth and poetry by presents to Virgil, Horace, and Propertius. Until his final irascible years, Augustus followed a liberal policy toward literature; he was glad to have letters and art take up the energies that had disturbed politics; he would pay men to write books if they would let him govern the state. His generosity to poets became so renowned that a swarm of them buzzed around him wherever he went. \Vhen a Greek persisted, day after day, in pressing verses into his hand as he left his palace, Augustus retaliated by stopping, composing some lines of his own, and having an attendant give them to the Greek. The latter offered the Emperor a few denarii and expressed his regret that he could not give more. Augustus rewarded his wit, not his poetry, with IOo,ooo sesterces.1
The stream of books swelled now to proportions unknown before. Everyone from fool to philosopher wrote poetry.2 Since all poetry, and most literary prose, were des:gncd to be read aloud, gatherings were formed at which authors read their productions to invited or general audiences or, in rare moments of tolerance, to one another. Juvenal thought that a compelling reason for living in the country was to escape the poets ,vho infested Rome.3 In the bookshops that crowded a district called the Argiletum, writers assembled to compute literary genius, while impecunious bibliophiles furtively read snatches of the books they could not buy. Placards on the walls announced new titles and their cost. Small volumes sold for four or five sesterces, average volumes for ten ($1. 50); elegant editions like Martial's epigrams, usually illustrated with a portrait of the author, brought some five denarii ($3).4 Books were exported to all parts of the Empire, or were published simultaneously in Rome, Lyons, Athens, and Alexandria;411 Martial was pleased to learn that he was bought and sold in Britain. Even poets now had private libraries; Ovid affectionately describes his.5 We gather from Martial that there were already book fanciers who collected de luxe editions, or rare manuscripts. Augustus established two public libraries; Tiberius, Vespasian, Domitian, Trajan, and Hadrian built others; by the fourth century there were twenty-eight in Rome. Foreign students and writers came to study in these libraries and in public archives; so Dionysius came from Halicarnassus, and Di odorus from Sicily. Rome was now the rival of Alexandria as the literary center of the W estem world.


Tragedy was rapidly catching up with his comedy. In March, 68, the Gallic governor of Lyons, Julius Vindex, announced the independence of Gaul; and when Nero offered 2,500,000 sesterces for his head, Vindex retorted, "He who brings me Nero's head may have mine in return." 87 Pre paring to take the field against this virile antagonist, Nero's first care was to choose wagons to carry along with him his musical instruments and theatrical effects.88 But in April word came that Galba, commander of the Roman army in Spain, had joined fortunes with Vindex and was marching toward Rome. Hearing that the Praetorian Guard was ready to abandon Nero for proper remuneration, the Senate proclaimed Galba emperor. Nero put some poison into a small box and, so anned, fled from his Golden House to the Servilian Gardens on the road to Ostia. He asked such officers of the Guard as were in the palace to accompany him; all refused, and one quoted to him a line of Virgil: "Is it, then, so hard to die?" He could not believe that the omnipotence which had ruined him had suddenly ceased. He sent appeals for help to various friends, but none replied. He went down to the Tiber to drown himself, but his courage failed him. Phaon, one of his freedmen, offered to conceal him in his villa on the Via Salaria; Nero grasped at the proposal, and rode through the dark four miles out from the center of Rome. He spent that night in Phaon's cellar, clad in a soiled tunic, sleep less and hungry, and trembling at every sound. Phaon's courier brought word that the Senate had declared Nero a public enemy, had ordered his arrest, and had decreed that he should be punished "after the ancient manner." Nero asked what this was. "The condemned man," he was told, "is stripped, is fastened to a post by a fork passing through his neck, and is
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
then beaten to death." Terrified, he tried to stab himself; but he made the mistake of testing the poniard's point first and found it disconcertingly sharp. Qua/is artif ex pereo! he moumed-"What an artist dies in me!"
As a new day dawned he heard the clatter of horses: the Senate's soldiers had tracked him down. Quoting a verse of poetry-"Hark! now strikes upon my ear the trampling of swift couriers"-he drove a dagger into his throat; his hand faltered, and his freedman Epaphroditus helped him to press the blade home. He had begged his companions to keep his corpse from being mutilated, and Galba's agents granted the wish. His old nurses, and Acte his former mistress, buried him in the vaults of the Domitii (68). Many of the populace rejoiced at his death and ran about Rome with liberty caps on their heads. But many more mourned him, for he had been as generous to the poor as he had been recklessly cruel to the great. They lent eager hearing to the rumor that he was not really dead but was fighting his way back to Rome; and when they had reconciled themselves to his passing they came for many months to strew flowers before his tomb.89
THE THREE EMPERORS
Servius Sulpicius Galba reached Rome in June of 68. He was of noble birth, for he traced his lineage on his father's side to Jupiter, and on his mother's to Pasiphae, wife of Minos and the bull. In this year of his exalta tion he was already bald, and his hands and feet were so crooked with gout that he could not wear a shoe or hold a book.90 He had the usual vices, normal and abnormal, but it was not these that made his reign so brief. What shocked army and populace were his economy of the public funds and his strict administration of justice.91 When he ruled that those who had received gifts or pensions from Nero must return nine tenths to the Treasury, a thousand new enemies arose, and Galba's days ran out.
A bankrupt senator, Marcus Otho, announced that he could pay his debts only by becoming emperor.92 The Guards declared for him, marched into the Forum, and met Galba riding in a litter. Galba offered his neck unresisting to their swords; they cut off his head, his arms, his lips; one of them carried the head to Otho, but as he could not hold it well by the sparse and blood-wet hair, he thrust his thumb into the mouth. The Senate hastened to accept Otho, just as Roman armies in Germany and Egypt were hailing as emperors their respective generals-Aulus Vitellius and Titus Flavius Vespasianus. Vitellius invaded Italy·with his hardy legions, and swept away the weak resistance of the northern garrisons and the Praetorian Guard.
CHAP.XIII)	THE	OTHER  SIDE  OF  MONARCHY
Otho killed himself after a reign of ninety-five days, and Vitellius mounted the throne.
It does not speak well for the Roman military system that so senile a man as Galba should have commanded in Spain, or so slothful an epicurean as Vitellius in Germany. He was a gourmand who thought of the Principate chiefly as a feast, and made a banquet of every meal. He governed in the intervals; and as these grew shorter he left state affairs to his freedman Asiaticus, who in four months became one of the richest men in Rome. When Vitellius learned that Vespasian's general Antonius was leading an army into Italy to dethrone him, he delegated his defense to subordinates and continued to feast. In October of 69 the troops of Antonius defeated the defenders of Vitellius at Cremona in one of the bloodiest battles of ancient times. They marched into Rome, where the remnants of Vitellius' legions fought bravely for him while he took refuge in his palace. The populace, says Tacitus, "flocked in crowds to behold the conflict, as if a scene of car nage were no more than a public spectacle exhibited for their amusement"; while the battle raged some of them plundered shops and homes, and prosti tutes plied their trade.93 The soldiers of Antonius triumphed, killed with out quarter, and pillaged without stint; and the mob, as ready as history to applaud the victors, helped them to ferret out their enemies. Vitellius, dragged from his concealment, was led half naked through the city with a noose around his neck, was pelted with dung, was tortured without haste, and at last, in a moment of mercy, was slain (December, 69). The corpse was drawn through the streets with a hook and flung into the Tiber.94
VESPASIAN
\Vhat a relief to meet a man of sense, ability, and honor! Vespasian, busy directing the war against Judea, took his time in coming to occupy the dangerous eminence that his soldiers had won for him, and which the Senate hurriedly confirmed. When he arrived (October, 70), he set himself with inspiring energy to restore order to a society disturbed in every aspect of its life. Perceiving that he would have to repeat the labors of Augustus, he modeled his behavior and policy upon those of that prince. He made his peace with the Senate and re-established constitutional government; he freed or recalled those who had been convicted of lese-majeste under Nero, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; he reorganized the army, limited the number and power of the Praetorian Guard, appointed competent generals to suppress revolts in the provinces, and was soon able to close the Temple of Janus as a sign and pledge of peace.
286	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XIII
He was sixty, but in the unimpaired vigor of his powerful frame. He was built foursquare in body and character, with a broad, bald, and massive head, coarse but commanding features, and small sharp eyes that pierced every sham. He had none of the stigmata of genius; he was merely a man of firm will and practical intelligence. He had been born in a Sabine village near Reate, of purely plebeian stock. His accession was a fourfold revolu tion: a commoner had reached the throne, a provincial army had overcome the Praetorians and crowned its candidate, the Flavians had succeeded the Julio-Claudians, and the simple habits and virtues of the Italian bourgeois replaced, at the court of the emperor, the epicurean wastefulness of the city bred descendants of Augustus and Livia. Vespasian never forgot, or sought to conceal, his modest ancestry. \Vhen expectant genealogists traced his family back to a companion of Hercules he laughed them into silence. Periodically he returned to the home of his birth to enjoy its rustic ways and fare, and he would not allow anything there to be changed. He scorned luxury and laziness, ate the food of peasants, fasted one day in each month, and declared war upon extravagance. \Vhen a Roman whom he had nominated for office came to him smelling of perfume, he said, "I would rather you smelled of garlic," and ,vithdrew the nomination. He made him self easily accessible, talked and lived on a footing of equality with the people, enjoyed jokes at his own expense, and allowed everyone great free dom in criticizing his conduct and his character. Having discovered a con spiracy against him he forgave the plotters, saying that they were fools not to realize what a burden of cares a ruler wore. He lost his good temper in one case only. Helvidius Priscus, restored to the Senate from the exile into which Nero had sent him, demanded the restoration of the Republic, and reviled Vespasian without concealment or restraint. Vespasian asked him not to attend the Senate if he proposed to continue such abuse; Helvidius refused. Vespasian banished him and tarnished an excellent reign by ordering him put to death. He regretted the action later, and for the rest, says Suetonius, showed "the greatest patience under the frank language of his friends ...  and the impudence of philosophers." 95 These latter were not so much Stoics as Cynics, philosophical anarchists who felt that all gov ernment was an imposition and attacked every emperor.
To get fresh blood into a Senate depleted by family limitation and civil
war, Vespasian secured appointment as censor, brought to Rome a thousand distinguished families from Italy and the western provinces, enrolled them in the patrician or equestrian orders, and over many bitter protests filled out the Senate from their ranks. The new aristocracy, under the stimulus of his example, improved Roman morals and society. It was not spoiled yet by idle wealth, nor yet so removed from labor and the soil as to disdain the
CHAP. xm)   THE  OTHER SIDE OF MONARCHY
routine tasks of life and administration; and it had something of the Emperor's order and decency of life. Out of it came those rulers who, after Domitian, gave Rome good government for a century. Conscious of the evils that had flowed from the use of freedmen as imperial executives, Vespasian replaced most of them with men from this provincial infiltration and from Rome's expanding business class. With their help he accomplished in nine years a miracle of rehabilitation.
He calculated that 40,000,000,000 sesterces were needed to transform bankruptcy into solvency.96 * To raise this sum he taxed almost everything, raised the provincial tribute, reimposed it upon Greece, recaptured and let public lands, sold royal palaces and estates, and insisted upon such economy that the citizens denounced him as a miserly peasant. A tax was placed even upon the use of the public urinals that adorned ancient like modem Rome; his son Titus protested against such undignified revenue, but the old Emperor held some coins of it to the youth's nose and said, "See, my child, if they smell." 97 Suetonious accuses him of adding to the imperial income by selling offices, and by promoting the most rapacious of his pro vincial appointees so that they might be swollen with spoils when he sud denly summoned them, examined their transactions, and confiscated their gains. The crafty financier, however, used none of the proceeds for him self, but poured them all into the economic recovery, architectural adorn ment, and cultural advancement of Rome.
It remained for this blunt soldier to establish the first system of state education in classical antiquity. He ordered that certain qualified teachers of Latin and Greek literature and rhetoric should thereafter be paid out of public funds and should receive a pension after twenty years of service. Perhaps the old skeptic felt that teachers had some share in forming public opinion and would speak better of a government that paid their way. Prob ably for like reasons he restored many of the ancient temples, even in rural districts. He rebuilt the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, which had been burned down by the Vitellians over his soldiers' heads; raised a majestic shrine to Pax, the goddess of peace; and began the most renowned of Roman buildings, the Colosseum. The upper classes mourned as they saw their for tunes taxed to provide public works for the state and wages for proletaires; and the workers were not particularly grateful. He roused the people to an energetic campaign for clearing away the debris left by the recent war, and he himself carried the first load. When an inventor showed him plans for a hoisting machine that would greatly reduce the need for human labor in these enterprises of removal and construction, he refused to use it, saying,
. " The fi e given by Suetonius is often rejected as incredible; but probably it was reckoned ma depreciated currency.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
"I must feed my poor." 98 In this moratorium on invention Vespasian recog nized the problem of technological unemployment, and decided against an industrial revolution.
The provinces prospered as never before. Their wealth was now twice as
great-at least in monetary terms-as under Augustus, and they bore the increased tribute without injury. Vespasian sent the able Agricola to govern Britain, and delegated to Titus the task of ending the revolt of the Jews. Titus captured Jerusalem and returned to Rome with all the honors that usually crown superior killing. A spectacular triumph led a long procession of captives and spoils through the streets, and a famous arch was raised to commemorate the victory. Vespasian was proud of his son's success but disturbed by the fact that Titus had brought home a pretty Jewish princess,


CHAP. xvi)	ROME  AND  ITS  ART	349
the capture of Jerusalem. One relief shows the burning city, its walls in ruins, its people wild with fear, its wealth looted by legionaries; another pictures Titus riding into Rome in his chariot amid soldiers, animals, magis trates, priests, and prisoners, followed by the holy candelabra of the Temple, and varied spoils of war. The artists here experimented bravely: they cut different figures to different levels, and distributed them on diverse planes; they chiseled the background to give an illusion of depth; and they painted the whole to convey additional shades of fullness and distance. The action was shown not in separate episodes but in continuity, as on the friezes of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and later on the columns of Trajan and Aurelius; so the sense of motion and life was better conveyed. The figures were not idealized and softened into a mood of Attic repose as in the Hellenistic Ara Pacis; they were taken from the flesh and the dirt, and carved in the eanhy tradition of Italian realism and vitality. The subject was not perfect gods but living men.
It is this vigorous realism that distinguishes Roman sculpture from the Greek; but for this recurrent fidelity to their own bent the Romans would have added little to art. About 90 B.c. a Greek from south Italy, Pasiteles,
'  went to Rome, lived there for sixty years, did excellent work in silver, ivory, and gold, introduced silver mirrors, made skillful copies of Greek master pieces, and wrote five volumes on the history of an; he was both the Vasari and the Cellini of his time. Another Greek, Arcesilaus, made for Caesar a famous statue of his distant relative, Venus Genetrix. Apollonius of Athens, probably in Rome, carved the powerful Torso Beli:edere of the Vatican: a work conceived with moderation, proclaiming no bulging muscles, but showing a man in the fullness of healthy strength; we can only say of it that it is perfect so tar as it goes. For a time the studios busied themselves giving Greek form to Italian gods, even to divine abstractions like Chance and Chastity. Presumably in this period and in Rome Glycon of Athens carved the Farnese Hercules. \Ve cannot tell to what age or country the Apollo Belvedere belongs; perhaps it was a Roman copy of an original by Leochares of Athens. Every student knows how its calm beauty stirred Winckelmann to Uranian ecstasy.21 Juno received now two renowned em bodiments: the porphyry Farnese Juno of the Naples l\1useum and the Ludovisi Juno of the Terme-cold and stern, righteous and just; one begins to understand Jove's wanderings.	•
All these, and the graceful Perseus and Andromeda of the Capitoline
.Museum, were in the Greek style, idealized and generalized, and tiresomely divine. More arresting are the ponrait busts that constitute a bronze-and marble dictionary of Roman physiognomy from Pompey to Constantine. Some of these too are idealized, particularly the Julio-Claudian heads; but
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVI
the old Etruscan realism, and the ever-present example of unflattering death masks, reconciled the Romans to being represented as ugly, provided they were shown as strong. So many of them bequeathed their effigies to public places that at times Rome seemed to belong less to the quick than to the dead. Some worthies could not bide their end, but erected themselves as statues before their death, until the jealous emperors, to make room for the living, forbade such premature immortality.
The greatest of the portrait busts is the so-named Head of Caestrr, of black basalt, in Berlin. We do not know whom it represents; but the sparse hair and sharp chin, the thin and bony face, the heavy lines of weary thought, the resolution yielding to disillusionment, accord well with the traditional attribution. Only second to it is the colossal head of Caesar in Naples: here the wrinkles have set almost into bitterness, as if the giant had at last dis covered that no mind is broad enough to understand, much less to rule, the world. Realistic to repulsiveness is the Pompey of the Ny Carlsberg Glyp totek in Copenhagen: all the brave triumphs of his youth forgotten in the dull obesity of a beaten man. Of Augustus we have half a hundred statues, many of them masterly: Augus s the boy (in the Vatican), serious, keen, noble-the finest portrait of an actual youth in any age; Augustus at thirty (in the British Museum )-a bronze figure of burning determination, remind ing us of Suetonius' statement that the Emperor could quell a mutiny with a glance; Augustus the priest (in the Terme), a profound and pensive face emerging from a prison of drapery; and Augustus imperator, found in the ruins of Livia's villa at Prima Porta, and now in the Vatican. The breast plate of this famous figure is covered with esoteric and distracting reliefs,• the pose is stiff, the legs are too mighty for such an invalid; but the head has a quiet and self-confident power that reveals the hand and soul of a great artist-who could not quite forget the Dorypboros of Polycleitus.
Livia herself was fortunate in the artist who made the head now in
Copenhagen. The hair is stately, the bent Roman nose smacks of character, the eyes are thoughtful and tender, the lips pretty but firm; this -is the woman who stood quietly behind Augustus' throne, overthrew all her rivals and enemies, and mastered everybody but her son. Tiberius too fared well; idealized though it is, the seated figure in the Lateran Museum is a chef d'oeuvre worthy of the hand that carved the diorite Chephren in Cairo. Claudius was not so lucky; surely the sculptor was making fun of him, or illustrating Seneca's Pumpkinification, when he carved him up as a worried Jupiter, fat and amiable and dumb. Nero tried hard to develop a sense of
'They ponra}'.' _the return of the Panhian standards, the submis ion of the conquered provinces, the fertility of the earth (Terra J\1ater) at peace, and the mantle of protection spread over all by Jove.
CHAP.XVI)	ROME  AND ITS ART	351
beauty, but his real passion was for fame and size; he saw no better function for Zenodotus, the Scopas of this age, than to consume his time in making a colossus of Nero as Apollo, 117 feet high.* Hadrian had it removed to the foreground of the Flavian Amphitheater, which thence derived its name of Colosseum.22
\Vith the honest Vespasian sculpture returned to reality. He let himself be represented frankly as a veritable plebeian, with coarse features, wrinkled brow, bald head, and enormous ears. Kinder is the bust in the Terme, show ing a spirit harassed with affairs of state, or the businesslike face of the massive head in Naples. Titus comes down to us with a like cubical cranium and homely countenance; it is hard to think of this stout street vendor as the darling of mankind. Domitian had the good sense, in the realistic Flavian age, to have himself so hated in life that all his images were ordered destroyed after his death.
When the artist left the palace and roamed the streets he could give free play to the Italic imp of humorous truth. Some old man, surely less equipped with wisdom and denarii than the philosopher-premier, posed for the disheveled scarecrow once labeled Seneca. Athletes had their muscles im mortalized for a moment by famous artists; and gladiators, as statues, found entry into the best homes, from patrician villas to Farnese palaces. The Roman sculptors relented when they handled the figures of women; now and then they carved an irascible shrew, but also they molded some Vestal Virgins of a graceful gravity, occasional incarnations of tenderness like the Clytie of the British Museum, and aristocratic ladies as fragilely charming as the dolls of Watteau or Fragonard.23 They were adept in the portrayal of children, as in the bronze Boy of the Metropolitan Museum, or the Innocenm of the Capitoline. They could chisel or cast the forms of animals with startling vividness, as in the wolves' heads found at Nemi in 1929, or the prancing horses of St. Mark's. They seldom achieved the smooth perfection of the Periclean schools; but that was because they loved tJ:ie individual more than the type, and relished the life-giving imperfections of the real. With all their limitations they stand supreme in the history of portrait art.
PAINTING
The ancient visitor would have found painting even more popular than sculpture in Rome's temples and dwellings, porticoes and squares. He would have come upon many works of old masters there-Polygnotus, Zeux.is,
\Vith its pedestal, 153. The Statue of Liberty, without its base, is 104 feet in height.
352	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVI
Apelles, Protogenes, and others-as dear to the opulent Empire as the paint ings of the Renaissance are to rich America; and he would have seen in greater abundance, through their better preservation, the products of Alexandrian and Roman schools. The art was old in Italy, where every wall craved ornament. Once even Rom'.ln nobles had practiced it; but the Hellenistic invasion had made painting Greek and servile, and at last Valerius Maximus marveled that Fabius Pictor should have stooped to paint murals in the Temple of He::tlth.24 There were exceptions: toward the end of the Republic Arellius made a name for himself by hiring prostitutes to pose for his goddesses; in the time of Augustus a dumb aristocrat, Quintus Pedius, took up painting because his defect closed most professions to him; and Nero employed for the interior of his Golden House one Amulius, who "painted with the greatest gravity, always in his toga." 25 But such men were rari names in the crowd of Greeks who, at Rome and Pompeii and throughout the peninsula, made copies or variations of Greek paintings on Greek or Egyptian themes.
The art was practically limited to fresco and tempera. In fresco a freshly plastered wall was painted with water-moistened colors; in tempera the pigments were mixed with an adhesive sizing and laid upon a dry surface. Portrait painters sometimes employed an encaustic process in which the tints were fused in hot w:ix. Nero had his picture painted on a canvas 120 feet high-the first known use of this material. Painting, as we have seen, was applied to statues, temples, stage scenery, and great linen pictures intended for exhibition in triumphs or in the Forum; but its favored re ceptacle was the external or intern:11 wall. The Romans seldom placed furniture against a wall or hung pictures there; they preferred to use the
entire space for one painting, or for a group of related designs. In this way the mural became a part of the house, an integral item in the architectural
design.
The caustic humor of Vesuvius has presen·ed for us some3 500 frescoes more paintings at Pompeii than can be found in all the rest of the classic world. Since Pompeii was a minor town we may imagine how many such murals brightened the homes and shrines of classic Italy. The best survivors have been removed to the Naples 1\foseum; even there their lithe grace impresses us; but only the ancients knew them in the full depth of their color and in the architectural framework that gave each picture a func tion and a place. In the House of Vettii the murals have been left in situ: in a dining room Dionysus surprises the sleeping Ariadne; on the opposite wall Daedalus displays his wooden cow to Pasiphae; at the farther end Hermes looks on calmly as Hephaestus fastens Ixion to the torturing wheel; and in another room a succession of humorous frescoes shows carefree


160: Galen, physician; Pausanias, geog rapher
190: Sexrus Empiricus, philosopher
227: End of the Arsacid Dynasty
CHAPTER  XXI
Italy
A ROSTER OF CITIES
J ET us stop at this precarious zenith and try to realize that the Empire
L was greater than Rome.vVe have lingered unduly at this brilliant center,
which hypnotizes historians as it fascinated provincials. In truth the vitality of the great realm no longer dwelt in the corrupt and dying capital; its surviving health and strength, much of its beauty, most of its mental life lay in the provinces and in Italy. We can have no just idea of what Rome meant, nor of its astonishing achievement in organization and pacification, until we leave it and surrender ourselves to a tour of the thousand cities that made up the Roman world.*
"How shall I commence this undertaking?" the elder Pliny asked as he began his description of Italy, "so vast is the number of places-what man could enumer ate them all?-and so great is their individual renown!" 1 Around and south of Rome lay Latium, once her mother, then her enemy, then her granary, then a paradise of suburbs and villas for Romans who had both money and taste. South and west from the capital fine roads and the Tiber led to the rival harbors of Portus and Ostia on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Ostia had its great age in the second and third centuries of our era. Merchants and longshoremen crowded its streets and filled its theaters; its homes and apartment houses were remarkably like those of Rome today; as late as the fifteenth century a Florentine traveler marveled at the wealth of the town and its sumptuous adornment. Some surviving columns, and an altar elegantly designed and carved with delicate floral reliefs, show that even this commercial population had absorbed the classic conception of the beautiful.
Southward on the coast rose Antium (Anzio), where the richest Romans, many emperors, and favored gods had palaces or temples reaching out into the Mediterranean to catch any passing breeze; in its three miles of ruins were found such master sculptures as the Borghese Gladiator and the Apollo Belvedere. Near by an extant monument reminds "excellent citizens," now nineteen centuries dead, that they have recently had the pleasure of seeing eleven gladiators die in combat with ten ferocious bears.2 To the north, beyond the coastal hills, Aquinum gave birth to Juvenal, and Arpinum plumed itself on Marius and Cicero. Twenty
The reader may follow this pilgrimage on the end maps of this book.
453
454	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXT
miles from Rome was the old town of Praeneste (Palestrina), its pretty homes built upon terraces in the mountain slopes, its g dens famous for their roses, its peak crowned with a celebrated temple to the goddess Fortuna Pri.nigenia, who gave good luck to women in childbirth, and exchanged oracles for cash. Tus culum, ten miles from Rome, was similarly rich in gardens and villas; here old Cato was born, and Cicero placed his Tusculan Disputations.• Most renowned of Rome's suburbs was Tibur (Tivoli), where Hadrian spread his country house and Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, spent her captive years.
North of Rome, Etruria experienced under the Principate a modest resurrec tion. Perusia was largely destroyed and partly restored by Augustus, whose artists beautified there an old Etruscan arch. Arretium gave Maecenas to. Rome and pottery to the world. Pisae was already hoar with age: it traced its name and origin to a colony of Greeks from Pisa in the Peloponnesus, and made a living by organizing the lumber business along the Arnus River. Farther up the same stream was a young Roman colony, Florentia, rare among cities because it probably underestimated its future. At the northwestern extremity of Etruria were the quarries of Carrara; Rome's finest marble was conveyed thence to the port of Luna, and went by ship to the capital. Genua had long served as an outlet for the goods of northwestern Italy; as far back as 209 B.c. we hear of the Carthaginians destroying it in a ruthless commercial war; it has been destroyed many times since, and has always achieved a fairer reincarnation.
Under the Alps lay Augusta Taurinorum, founded by the Taurini Gauls and made a Roman colony by Augustus; its ancient pavements and drains can still be seen under the streets of Turin; and a massive gate survives from Augustan days to remind us that the city was once a fortress against invaders from the north. Here the lazy Padus (Po), rising in the Cottian Alps, turns eastward 250 miles to divide north Italy into what the early Republic knew as Transpadane and Cis padane Gaul. In all the peninsula the valley of the Po was the region most fertile, populous, and prosperous. At the foot of the Alps were those lakes-Verbanus (Maggiore), Larius (Como), and Benacus (Garda)-whose splendor feasted the eye and soul of those generations as well as ours. From the younger Pliny's Comum a main trade route led south to Mediolanum (Milan). Settled by the Gauls in the fifth century B.c., it was already a metropolis and educational center in the days of Virgil; by A.D. 286 it would replace Rome as the capital of the W estem Empire. Verona controlled the trade over the Brenner Pass and was rich enough to have an amphitheater (recently restored) seating 25,000 specta tors. Along the winding Po rose Placentia (Piacenza), Cremona, Mantua, and Ferrara-originally frontier towns designed to hold the Gauls at bay.
North of the Po and east of the Adige lay Venetia. The district took its name from the Veneri, early immigrants from Illyria. Herodotus tells how the leaders of these tribes annually brought together the marriageable lasses in their villages, put a price upon each according to her beauty, wed her to the man who paid
Tusculum's heir, Frascati, is still the resort of the Italian rich; there are the villas Aldo brandini, T orlonia, Mondragone, etc.a
CHAP.XX!)	ITALY	455
the price, and used the money to provide alluring dowries for the less alluring girls.4 Venice itself was not yet born, but at Pola on the lstrian peninsula, at Tergeste (Trieste), Aquileia, and Patavium (Padua), substantial cities crowned the head of the Adriatic. Pola still has from Roman days a stately arch, a pretty temple, and an amphitheater only less impressive than its model, the Colosseum. South of the Po a line of important cities ran from Placentia through Parma, Mutina (Modena), Bononia (Bologna), and Faventia (Faenze) to Ariminum. Here, at Rimini, is one of the most perfectly preserved of the countless bridges built by Roman engineers; it carried the Flaminian Way into the city through an arch as strong and dominating as the Roman character. A branch road led from Bononia to Ravenna, the Venice of Roman days, built upon piles in marshes made by several rivers emptying into the Adriatic; Strabo describes it as "pro vided with thoroughfares by means of bridges and ferries." 5 Augustus stationed there his Adriatic fleet, and several emperors in the fifth century made the city their official residence. The superior fertility of northern Italy, its healthier and more stimulating climate, its mineral resources, varied industries, and cheaply borne river trade, raised the region to economic supremacy over central Italy in the first century of our era and to political leadership in the third.
South of Ariminum the eastern coast, rocky, stormy, and harborless, developed
few cities of moment north of Brundisium. And yet there were in Umbria, Picenum, Samnium, and Apulia many small towns whose wealth and art can be judged only by studying Pompeii. Asisium gave birth to Propertius as well as Saint Francis; Sarsina to Plautus, Amitemum to Sallust, Sulmo to Ovid, Venusia to Horace. Beneventum was famous not only for a Pyrrhic defeat but for the great arch erected there by Trajan and Hadrian; on its virile reliefs Trajan told the story of his achievements in war and peace. On the southeastern coast Brundisium commanded traffic with Dalmatia, Greece, and the East. Within the "heel" Tarentum, once a proud city-state, was now a declining winter resort for Roman magnates and aristocrats. In southern Italy large estates had absorbed most of the land and turned it to pasture; the cities lost their peasant patronage, and their business classes waned. The Greek communities that had sported their sybaritic wealth in earlier times had been ruined by barbarian infiltration and the Second Punic War, and were now reduced to small towns in which Latin was slowly replacing Greek. On the "toe" Rhegium (Reggio) had a good harbor and flourished on the trade with Sicily and Africa. Up the west coast Velia could hardly remember the days when Parmenides and Zeno had made it, as Elea, ring with metaphysical poetry and impish paradox. Poseidonia, which still amazes visitors with its majestic temples, had been renamed Paestum by its Roman col ony, and its Greek stock was melting in a flux of "barbarian"-here Italian-blood from the countryside. Only in Campania was Greek civilization alive in Italy.
Geographically Campania-the mountains and coast around Naples-was part of Sarnnium; economically and culturally it was a world by itself, industrially more advanced than Rome, financially powerful, and crowding
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXI


While the source of a virile and independent citizenry was drying up in the villages, industry and the class war were progressing in the towns. Small factories, and the slaves in them, were growing in number at Athens, as in all the larger cities of the Hellenistic world. Slave dealers accompanied the armies, bought unransomed captives, and sold them at three or four minas ($150 or $200) a head in the great slave markets of Delos and Rhodes. Some scruples, moral or economic, were felt about this ancient institution. A humanitarian sentiment arose as a by-product of philosophy; the cos mopolitan spirit of the age was negligent of racial distil'lctions; and casual hired labor, which could be thrown upon public relief whenever it ceased to be privately profitable, was in many circumstances cheaper !_ an slave labor that had to be continuously maintained.lll Towards the close of this period there was a substantial rise in manumissions.
Commerce languished in the older cities, but flourished in the new. The Greek pons of Asia and Egypt grew at the e.'l'.pense of the Piraeus; and even on the mainland it was Chalcis and Corinth that caught the swelling currents of Hellenistic trade. Through these strategically situated and well equipped centers, as through Antioch, Seleucia, Rhodes, Alexandria, and Syracuse, a busy stream of merchants flowed, spreading a cosmopolitan and skeptical point of view. Bankers multiplied, and lent not only to traders and proprietors but to cities and governments.1• Some cities, like Delos and Byzantium, had public or national banks holding government funds and managed by state officials."" In 324 Antimenes of Rhodes organized the
CHAP.xxm)	GREECE  AND  MACEDON
first known system of insurance by guaranteeing owners, for a premium of eight per cent, against loss from the flight of their slaves/" The release of Persian accumulations and the quickened circulation of capital reduced the rate of interest to ten per cent in the third century and seven per cent in the second. Speculation was widespread, but not organized. Some manipulators sought to raise prices by limiting production; there were advocates of restricting crops to keep up the purchasing power of the farming community... Prices in general were high, again because of the Achaemepid treasuries that Alexander had poured into the currency of the world; but at the same time, and partly by the same cause, trade was fa cilitated, production was stimulated, and prices gradually fell back to a nor mal range. The wealth of the wealthy grew beyond any precedent in Greek history. Homes became palaces, furniture and carriages more sump tuous, servants more numerous; dinners became orgies, and women became show windows of their husbands' prosperity."
Wages lagged behind rising prices, and rapidly followed their fall. They could support a single man only, and made for celibacy, pauperism, and depopulation; they left a diminishing economic distance between free worker and slave. Employment was irregular, and thousands of men aban doned the mainland cities for mercenary soldiering abroad, or to hide their poverty in rural isolation.u The Athenian government relieved the desti tute with grants of com; the rich amused them with free tickets to cele brations and games. The wealthy stinted in wages but were generous in charity; often they lent money to their cities without interest, or rescued them from bankruptcy with large gifts, or built public works out of their private funds, or endowed temples or universities, or paid handsomely for the statues or the poems that published their features or their largess. The poor organized themselves into unions for mutual aid, but they could do little against the power and cleverness of the rich, the conservatism of the peasants, and the readiness of otherwise rival governments and leagues to exchange armed assistance in suppressing revolts."" The freedom of un equal ability to accumulate or starve brought on again, as in Solon's days, an extreme concentration of wealth. The poor lent readier ear to socialistic gospels; their spokesmen called for the canc llation of debts, the redivision of the land, and the connscation of large fortunes; the boldest now and then proposed the liberation of the slaves...
The decay of religious belief promoted the growth of compensatory utopias: Zeno the Stoic described an ideal communism in his Republic (ca. 300), and his follower Iambulus (ca. 250) inspired Greek rebels with
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP,XXIII
a romance in which he described a Blessed Isle in the Indian Ocean (per haps Ceylon); there, he reported, all men were equal, not only in rights.but in ability and intelligence; all worked equally, and shared equally in the product; all took equal part, turn by turn, in administering the govern ment; neither wealth nor poverty existed there, nor any war of the classes; nature produced fruit abundantly of her own accord, and men lived in harmony and universal love."°"
Some governments nationalized certain industries: Priene took over the saltworks, Miletus the textile factories, Rhodes and Cnidus the potteries; but the governments paid as low wages as the private employer, and squeezed all possible profit from the labor of their slaves. The gulf between rich and poor widened;"' the class war became bitterer than before. Every city, young or old, echoed with the hatred of class for class, with uprisings, massacres, suppressions, banishments, and the destruction of property and life. When one faction won it exiled the other and confiscated its goods; when the exiles returned to power they revenged themselves in kind, and slaughtered their enemies; imagine the stability of an economic system subject to such decerebrations and disturbances. Some ancient Greek cities were so devastated by class strife that industry and men fled ,from them, grass grew in the streets, cattle came there to graze.= Polybius, writing about 150 n.c., describes certain timeless phases of the war from the view point of a rich conservative:
When they (the radical leaders) have made the populace ready and greedy to receive bribes, the virtue of democracy is destroyed, and it is transformed into a government of violence and the strong hand. For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has found a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, . . . produces a reign of violence. Then come tumultuous assemblies, massacres, banishments, redivisions of land.""
It was war and class war that weakened mainland Greece to the point of being easily overcome by Rome. The bitter ruthlessness of the victors the destruction of crops, vineyards, and orchards, the razing of farmhouses, the selling of captives into slavery-ruined one locality after another, and left an empty shell for the ultimate enemy. A land so wasted by strife, by erosion, deforestation, and the listless tillage of impoverished tenants or slaves, could not compete with the alluvial plains of the Orontes, the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile. The northern cities were no longer
CHAP.nm)	GREECE AND MACEDON
on the great routes of trade; they had lost their navies, and could not con trol the sources and avenues of the grain supply that Athens and Sparta had mastered in their imperial days. The centers of power, even of lit erary and artistic creation, passed back again to Asia and Egypt, from which, a thousand years before, Greece had humbly learned her letters and her arts.
m. THE MORALS OF DECAY
The failure of the city-state accelerated the decay of the orthodox re ligion; the gods of the city had proved helpless to defend it, and had for feited belief. The population was intermingled with foreign merchants who had no share in the city's civic or religious life, and whose amused skepticism spread among the citizens. The mythology of the ancient local gods survived among the peasantry and the simple townsfolk, and in the official rites; the educated used it for poetry and art, the half-liberated attacked it bitterly, the upper classes supported it as an aid to order, and discountenanced open atheism as bad taste. The growth of large states brought on a sympolity of the gods and made for a vague monotheism, while philosophers strove to formulate pantheism for the literate in a man ner not too obviously incompatible with orthodox belief. About 300 Euhemerus of Messana in Sicily published his Riera Anagrapha (literally Holy Scriptures, or Records), in which he argued that the gods were either personified powers of nature, or, more often, human heroes deified by popular imagination or gratitude for their benefits to mankind; that myths we.re allegories, and that religious ceremonies were originally exer cises in commemoration of the dead. So Zeus was a conqueror who had died in Crete, Aphrodite was the founder and patroness of prostitution, and the story of Cronus eating his children was only a way of saying that cannibalism had once existed on the earth. The book had a sharply atheis tic effect in third-century Greece.*113•
Skepticism, however, is uncomfortable; it leaves the common heart and imagination empty, and the vacuum soon draws in some new and encour aging creed. The victories of philosophy and Alexander cleared the way for novel cults. Athens in the third century was so disturbed by exotic faiths, nearly all of them promising heaven and threatening hell, that Epi curus, like Lucretius in first-century Rome, felt called upon to denounce religion as hostile to peace of mind and joy of life. The new temples, even
Perhaps it reflected and aided the Hellenistic deification of kings.
566	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXIII
in Athens, were now usually dedicated to Isis, Serapis, Bendis, Adonis, or some other alien deity. The Eleusinian mysteries flourished, and were imi tated in Egypt, Italy, Sicily, and Crete; Dionysus Eleutherios-the Lib erator-remained popular until he was absorbed into Christ; Orphism won fresh devotees as it renewed contact with the Eastern faiths from which it had sprung. The old religion had been aristocratic, and had excluded for eigners and slaves; the new Oriental cults accepted all men and women, alien or bond or free, and held out to all classes the promise of eternal life.
Superstition spread while science reached its apogee. Theophrastus' por trait of the Superstitious Man reveals how frail was the film of culture even in the capital of enlightenment and philosophy. The number seven was unspeakably holy; there were seven planets, seven days of the week, seven Wonders, seven Ages of Man, seven heavens, seven gates of hell. Astrology was rejuvenated by commerce with Babylonia; people took it for granted that the stars were gods who ruled in detail the destinies of individuals and states; character, even thought, was determined by the star or planet under which one had been born, and would therefore be jovial, or mercurial, or saturnine; even the Jews, the least superstitious of all peo ples, expressed good wishes by saying Mazzol-tov-"May your planet be favorable.""' Astronomy fought for its life against astrology, but finally succumbed in the second century A.D. And everywhere the Hellenistic world worshiped Tyche, the great god Chance.
Only an act of persistent imagination, or a gift for observation, can en able us to realize what it means to a nation to have its traditional religion die. Classic Greek civilization had been built upon a patriotic devotion to the city-state, and classic morality, though rooted in folkways rather than in faith, had been powerfully reinforced by supernatural bel,ef. But now neither faith nor patriotism survived in the educated Greek; civic frontiers had been erased by empires; and the growth of knowledge had secularized morals, marriage, parentage, and law. For a time the Periclean Enlighten ment helped morality, as in modern Europe; humanitarian feelings were developed, and aroused-ineffectually-a keener resentment against war; arbitration grew among cities and men. Manners were more polished, argument more urbane; courtesy trickled down, as in our Middle Ages, from the courts of the kings, where it was a matter of personal safety and royal prestige; when the Romans came Greece was amazed at their bad manners and blunt ways. Life was more refined; women moved about in it more freely, and stimulated the males to unwonted elegance. Men shaved now, especially in Byzantium and Rhodes, where the laws forbade it as effeminate... But the pursuit of pleasure consumed the adult life of the
CHAP. XXIII)	GREECE  AND  MACEDON
upper classes. The old problem of ethics and morals-to reconcile the nat ural epicureanism of the individual with the necessary stoicism of the state
-found no solution in religion, statesmanship, or philosophy.
Education spread, but spread thin; as in all intellectual ages it stressed knowledge more than character, and produced masses of half-educated people who, uprooted from labor and the land, moved about in unplaced discontent like loosened cargo in the ship of state. Some cities, like Miletus and Rhodes, established public-i.e., government-supported-schools; at Te os and Chios boys and girls were educated together, with an impartiality that only Sparta had shown... The gymnasium developed into a high school or college, with classrooms, lecture hall, and library. The palaestra flour ished, and proved popular in the East; but public games had degenerated into professional contests, chiefly boxing, in which strength counted for more than skill; the Greeks, who had once been a nation of athletes, became now a nation of spectators, content to witness rather than to do.


Adeimantus. But what is the next step? ...
Socr. The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction   Theexcess of liberty, whether in states
or individuals, seems only to pass into slavery   and the most aggra
vated form of tyranny arises out of the most extreme form of liberty.m
When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near. The rich, afraid that democracy will bleed them, conspire to overthrow it;""' or some enterpris ing individual seizes power, promises everything to the poor, surrounds himself with a personal army, kills first his enemies and then his friends "until he has made a purgation of the state," and establishes a dictatorship.1'" In such a conflict of extremes the philosopher who preaches moderation and mutual understanding is like "a man fallen among wild beasts"; if he is wise he will "retire under the shelter of a wall while the hurrying wind and the storm go by."w
Some students, in such crises, take refuge in the past, and write history; Plato takes refuge in the future, and models a utopia. First, he fancies, we must find a good king who will let us experiment with his people. Then we must send away all the adults except those necessary to maintain order and teach the young, for the ways of their elders would corrupt the young into an image of the past. To all the young, of whatever sex or class, twenty years of education will be given. It will include the teaching of myths-
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY	521
not the immoral myths of the old faith, but new myths that may tame the soul into obedience to parents and the state.• At twenty all are to be given physical, mental, and moral tests. Those that fail will become the economic classes of our state-businessmen, workingmen, farmers; they will have private property, and different degrees of wealth (within limits) according to their ability; but there will be no slaves. The survivors of the first test will receive ten further years of education and training. At thirty they will be tested again. Those that fail will become soldiers; they shall have no private property, and shall not engage in business, but shall live in a military communism. Those that pass the second test will now (and none before) take up for five years the study of "divine philosophy"120 in all its branches, from mathematics and logic to politics and law. At thirty-five the survivors, with all their theory on their heads, will be flung into the practical world to earn their living and make themselves a place. At fifty such of them as are still alive shall become, without election, members of the guardian or ruling class.
They shall have all powers, but no possessions. There will be no laws; all cases and issues will be decided by the philosopher-kings according to a wisdom untrammeled by precedent. Lest they abuse these powers, they shall have no property, no money, no families, no permanent individual wives; the people will hold the power of the purse, the soldiers the power of the sword. Communism is not democratic, it is aristocratic; the common soul is incapable of it; only soldiers and philosophers can bear it. As for marriage, it must in all classes be strictly regulated by the guardians as a eugenic sacrament: "The best of either sex should be united with the best as often as possible, and the inferior with the inferior; and they are to rear the offspring of one sort of union, but not of the other; for this is the only way of keeping the flock in prime condition.""" All children are to be brought up by the state, and given equal educational opportunity; classes are not to be hereditary. Girls shall have an equal chance with boys, and no office in the state shall be closed to women because they are women. By this combination of individualism, communism, eugenics, feminism, and aristocracy Plato thinks that a society might be produced in which a philosopher would be glad to live. And he concludes: "Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy ... cities will never cease from ill, nor the human race.",..,.
I.e., Plato concludes that a natural ethic is inadequate.
522	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXI
The Lawmaker
He thought that he had found such a prince in Dionysius II. He felt, like Voltaire, that monarchy has this advantage over democracy, that in a monarchy the reformer has only to convince one man.128 To make a better state "you would assume a dictator young, temperate, quick at learning, having a good memory, courageous, of a noble nature ... and fortunate; his good fortune must be that he is the contemporary of a great legislator, and that some happy chance brings them together."ue It was, as we have seen, an unhappy chance.
In his declining years, still longing to be a legislator, Plato offered a third best state. The Laws, besides being the earliest extant classic of European jurisprudence, is an instructive study in the senile aftermath of youthful romanticism. The new city, says Plato, must be placed inland, lest foreign ideas undermine its faith, foreign trade its peace, and foreign luxuries its self-contained simplicity.""' The number of free citizens shall be limited to the conveniently divisible number of 5040; in addition to these will be their families and their slaves. The citizens shall elect 360 guardians, divided into groups of thirty, each group administering the state for a month. The 360 shall choose a Nocturnal Council of twenty-six, which shall meet at night and legislate on all vital affairs.181 These councilors shall allot the land in equal, indivisible, and inalienable parcels among the citizen families. The guardians "shall provide against the rains doing harm instead of good to the land ...	and shall keep them back by works and ditches, and make" irrigation "streams furnish even to the dry places plenty of water.""" To control the growth of economic inequality, trade is to be held to a mini mum; no gold or silver is to be kept by the people, and there shall be no lending of money at interest;138 everyone is to be discouraged from living by investment, and is to be encouraged to live as an active farmer on the land. Any man who acquires more than four times the value of one share of land must surrender the surplus to the state; and severe limits are to be placed upon the power of bequest.™ Women are to have equal educational and political opportunity with men.1.. Men must marry between thirty and thirty-five, or pay heavy annual fines;'"" and they are to beget children for only ten years. Drinking and other public amusements are to be regu lated to preserve the morals of the people.m
To :iccomplish all this peaceably there must be complete state control of education, publication, and other means of forming public opinion and personil character. The highest official in the state is to be the minister of
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY	523
education. Authority will replace liberty in education, for the intelligence of children is too undeveloped to excuse us for leaving to them the guid ance of their own lives. Literature, science, and the arts are to be under censorship; they will be forbidden to express ideas which the councilors consider hurtful to public morals and piety. Since obedience to parents and the laws can be secured only through supernatural sanctions and aids, the state shall determine what gods are to be worshiped, and how, and when. Any citizen who questions this state religion is to be imprisoned; if he per sists he is to be killed.138
A long life is not always a blessing; it would have been better for Plato to have died before writing this indictment of Socrates, these prolegomena to all future Inquisitions. His defense would be that he loved justice more than truth; that his aim was to abolish poverty and war; that he could do this only by strict state control of the individual; and that this required either force or religion. The degenerative Ionian looseness of Athenian morals and politics, he thought, would be cured only by the Dorian disci pline of the Spartan code. Through all of Plato's thought runs the fear of the abuses of freedom, and the conception of philosophy as the policeman of the people and the regulator of the arts. The Laws offers the surrender of a dying Athens that had completely lived to a Sparta that, ever since Lycurgus, had been dead. When Athens' most famous philosopher could find so little to say for freedom Greece was ripe for a king.
Looking back over this body of speculation we are surprised to see how fully Plato anticipated the philosophy, the theology, and the organization of medieval Christianity, and how much of the modern Fascist state. The theory of Ideas became the "realism" of the Scholastics-the objective real ity of "universals." Plato is not only a prii-existent Christlieb, as Nietzsche called him, but a pre-Christian Puritan. He distrusts human nature as evil, and thinks of it as an original sin tainting the soul. He breaks up into an evil body and a divine spirit189 that unity of body and soul which had been the educated Greek ideal of the sixth and fifth centuries; like a Christian ascetic he calls the body the tomb of the soul. He takes from Pythagoras and Orphism an Oriental faith in transmigration, karma, sin, purification, and "release"; he adopts, in his last works, the other-worldly tone of a con verted and repentant Augustine. One would almost say that Plato was not Greek if it were not for his perfect prose.
He remains the most likable of the Greek thinkers because he had the attractive faults of his people. He was so sensitive that like Dante he could see perfect and eternal beauty behind the imperfect and temporal form;
524	THE	LIFE  OF GllEECE	(CHAP. XXI
he was an ascetic because at every moment he had to rein in a rich and impetuous temperament."" He was a poet possessed by imagination, allured by every whimsy of thought, enthralled by the tragedy and comedy of ideas, flushed with the intellectual excitement of the free mental life of Athens. But it was his fate that he was a logician as well as a poet; that he was the most brilliant reasoner of antiquity, subtler than Zeno of Elea or Aristotle; that he loved philosophy more than he loved any woman or any man; and that in the end, like Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor, he concluded to a suppression of all free reasoning, a conviction that philosophy must be destroyed in order that man may live. He himself would have been the first victim of his Utopias.
IV.  ARISTOTLE
Wander-Years
When Plato died Aristotle built an altar to him, and gave him almost divine honors; for he had loved Plato even if he could not like him. He had come to Athens from his native Stageirus, a small Greek settlement in Thrace. His father had been court physician to Philip's father, Amyntas II, and (if Galen was not mistaken) had taught the boy some anatomy be fore sending him to Plato.1" The two rival strains in the history of thought


and gave a banquet in his honor. But when Dionysius read more of his poetry, and asked Philoxenus to judge it, Philoxenus bade the attendants take him back to the quarries." Despite such discouragements Dionysius patronized literature and the arts, and was pleased for a moment to enter tain Plato, who was then {387) traveling in Sicily. According to a wide
spread tradition reported by Diogenes Laertius, the philosopher con demned dictatorship. "Your words," said Dionysius, "are those of an old dotard." "Your language," said Plato, "is that of a tyrant." Dionysius, we
CHAP. XIX)	PHILIP	473
are told, sold him mto slavery, but the philosopher was soon ransomed by Anniceris of Cyrene."'
The dictator's life was ended not by any of the assassins whom he feared, but by his own poetry. In 367 his tragedy, The R.tmsom of Hector, re ceived first prize at the Athenian Lenaea. Dionysius was so pleased that he feasted with his friends, drank much wine, fell into a fever, and died.
The harassed city, which had borne with him as an alternative to sub jection by Carthage, accepted hopefully the succession of his son to the throne. Dionysius II was now a youth of twenty-five, weak in body and mind, and therefore, thought the crafty Syracusans, likely to give them a mild and negligent rule. He had able advisers in Dion his uncle, and Philistius the historian. Dion was a man of wealth, but also a lover of letters and philosophy, and a devoted disciple of Plato. He became a member of the Academy, and livecl, at home and abroad, a life of philosophical simplicity. It occurred to him that the malleable youth of the new dictator offered an opportunity of establishing, if not quite the Utopia that Plato had described to him,"' at least a constitutional regime capable of uniting all Sicily for the expulsion of the Carthaginian power. At Dion's suggestion Dionysius II invited Plato to his court, and submitted himself to Plato's tutoring.
Doubtless the young autocrat put his best foot forward, and concealed from his teacher that addiction to drink and lechery'v which had drawn from his father the prediction that the dynasty would die with his son. Deceived by the youth's apparent willingness, Plato led him towards philosophy by its most difficult approaches-mathematics and virtue. The ruler was told, as Confucius had told the Duke of Lu, that the first princi ple of government is good example, that to improve his people he must make himself a model of intelligence and good will. All the court began to study geometry, and to stand in diplomatic awe over figures traced in the sand. But Philistius, eclipsed by Plato's ascendancy, whispered to the dictator that all this was merely a plot by which the Athenians, who had failed to conquer Syracuse with an army and a fleet, would capture it through a single man; and that Plato, having taken the impregnable citadel with diagrams and dialogues, would depose Dionysius and put Dion on the throne. Dionysius saw in these whispers an excellent escape from geometry. He banished Dion, confiscated his property, and gave Dion's wife to a courtier whom she feared. Despite the dictator's protestations of affection, Plato left Syracuse and joined Dion in Athens. Six years later
474	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.XIr
he returned at the King's invitation, and pied for Dion's recall. Dionysius refused, and Plato resigned himself to the Academy.•
In 357 Dion, poo.r in funds but rich in friends, recruited in mainland Greece a force of eight hundred men, and sailed for Syracuse. Landing secretly, he found the people eager to aid him. With one battle-in which, though he was now fi.fty, his own heroic fi.ghting turned the tide-he so completely defeated the army of Dionysius that the frightened youth fled to Italy. At this juncture, with Greek impulsiveness, the Syracusan As sembly that he had convened removed Dion from command, lest he should make himself dictator. Dion withdrew peaceably to Leontini; but the forces of Dionysius, lildng this tum of events, made a sudden attack upon the popular army, and defeated it. The leaders who had deposed him sent appeals to Dion to hurry back and take charge. He came, won another victory, forgave the men who had opposed him, and then announced a temporary dictatorship as necessary to order. Despite the advice of his friends he refused a personal guard, being "quite ready to die," he said, "rather than live perpetually on the watch against friends and foes alike.""9 Instead he maintained, amid surroundings of wealth and power, his accus- tomed modesty of life. For though, says Plutarch,
all things had now succeeded to his wish, yet he desired not to enjoy any present advantage of his good fortune. . . . He was content with a very frugal and moderate competency, and was indeed the wonder of all men, that when not only Sicily and Carthage but all Greece looked to him as in the height of prosperity, and no man living greater than he, no general more renowned for valor and success, yet in his guard, his attendance, his table, he seemed as if he rather communed with Plato in the Academy than lived among hired captains and paid soldiers, whose solace of tt1eir toils and dan gers it is to eat and drink their fill, and enjoy themselves plentifully every day.111
If we may credit Plato, it was Dion's aim to establish a constitutional monarchy, to reform Syracusan life and manners on the Spartan model, to .rebuild and unify the enslaved or desolate Greek cities of Sicily, and then to expel the Carthaginians from the island. But the Syracusans had set their hearts on democracy, and were no more hungry for virtue than either Dionysius. A friend of Dion murdered him, and chaos broke loose. Dionysius hurried home, recaptured Ortygia and the government, and ruled with the bitter cruelty of a despot deposed and restored.
Undeserved fates come sometimes to individuals, but rarely to nations.
CHAP. XIX)	PHILIP	475
The Syracusans appealed for aid to their mother city, Corinth. The call came at a time when a Corinthian of almost legendary nobleness was wait ing for a summons to heroism. Timoleon was an aristocrat who so loved liberty that when his brother Timophanes tried to make himself tyrant of Corinth, Timoleon killed him. Cursed by his mother and brooding over his deed, the tyrannicide withdrew to a woodland retreat, shunning all men. Hearing nevertheless of Syracuse's need, he came out of his re tirement, organized a small force of volunteers, sailed to Sicily, and de ployed his little band with such strategy that the royal army yielded after a brief tas.te of his generalship, and without killing any one of his men. Timoleon gave the humbled tyrant money enough to take himself to Corinth, where Dionysius spent the remainder of his life teaching school and sometimes begging his bread.11 Timoleon re-established democracy, tore down the fortifications that had made Ortygia a buttress of tyranny, repulsed a Carthaginian invasion, restored freedom and democracy in the Greek cities, and made Sicily for a generation so peaceful and prosper ous that new settlers were drawn to it from every part of the Hellenic world. Then, refusing public office, he retired to private life; but the island democracies, appreciating his wisdom and integrity, submitted all major matters to his judgment, and freely followed his advice. Two "sycophants" having indicted him on a charge of malfeasance, he insisted, over the protests of a grateful people, on being tried without favor accord ing to the laws, and thanked the gods that freedom of speech and equality before the law had been restored in Sicily. When he died ( 337) all Greece looked upon him as one of the greatest of her sons.
V, THE ADVANCE OF MACEDONIA
While Timoleon was restoring democracy for its last respite in ancient Sicily, Philip was destroying it on the mainland. Macedonia, despite the cultural hospitality of Archelaus, was still for the most part a barbarous country of hardy but letterless mountaineers when Philip came to the throne (359); indeed, to the end of its career, though it used Greek as its official language, it contributed no author, or artist, or scientist, or philoso pher, to the life of Greece.
Having lived for three years with the relatives of Epaminondas in Thebes, Philip had imbibed there a modicum of culture and a wealth of military ideas. He had all the virtues except those of civilization. He was
476	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XIX
strong in body and will, athletic and handsome, a magnificent animal try ing, now and then, to be an Athenian gentleman. Like his famous son he was a man of violent temper and abounding generosity, loving battle as much, and strong drink more. Unlike Alexander he was a jovial laugher, and raised to high office a slave who amused him. He liked boys, but liked women better, and married as many of them as he could. For a time he tried monogamy with Olympias, the wild and beautiful Molossian prin cess who gave him Alexander; but later his fancy traveled, and Olympias brooded over her revenge. Most of all he liked stalwart men, who could risk their lives all day and gamble and carouse with him half the night. He was literally (before Alexander) the bravest of the brave, and left a part of himself on every battlefield. "What a man!" exclaimed his great est enemy, Demosthenes. "For the sake of power and dominion he had an eye struck out, a shoulder broken, an arm and a leg paralyzed.".. He had a subtle intelligence, capable of patiently awaiting his chance, and of mov ing resolutely through difficult means to distant ends. In diplomacy he was affable and treacherous; he broke a promise with a light heart, and was always ready to make another; he recognized no morals for governments, and looked upon lies and bribes as humane substitutes for slaughter. But he was lenient in victory, and usually gave the defeated Greeks better terms than they gave one another. All who met him-except the obstinate Demosthenes-liked him, and ranked him as the strongest and most inter esting character of his time.
His government was an aristocratic monarchy in which the king's pow ers were limited by the duration of his superior strength of arm or mind, and by the willingness of the nobles to support him. Eight hundred feudal barons made up the "King's Companions"; they were great landowners who despised the life of cities, crowds, and books; but when, with their consent, the King announced a war, they came out of their estates physi cally fit and drunkenly brave. In the army they seryed as cavalry, riding the sturdy horses of Macedonia and Thrace, and trained by Philip to fight in a close formation that could change its tactics at once and as one at the commander's word. Beside these was an infantry of rugged hunters and peasants, arrayed in "phalanxes": sixteen rows of men pointing their lances over the heads-or resting them on the shoulders-of the rows ahead of them, making each phalanx an iron wall. The lance, twenty-one feet long, was weighted at the rear, so that when held aloft it projected fifteen feet forward. As each row of soldiers marched three feet before the next, the lances of the first five rows projected beyond the phalanx, and the lances
CHAP.XIX)	PHILIP	477
of the .first three rows had a greater reach than the six-foot javelin of the nearest Greek hoplite. The Macedonian soldier, after hurling his lance, fought with a short sword, and protected himself with a brass helmet, a coat of mail, greaves, and a lightweight shield. Behind the phalanx came a regiment of old-fashioned archers, who shot their arrows over the heads of the lancers; then came a siege train with catapults and battering rams. Resolutely and patiently-playing Frederick William I to Alexander's Fred erick-Philip drilled this army of ten thousand men into the most power ful .fighting instrument that Europe had yet known.
With this force he was determined to unify Greece under his leadership; then, with the help of all Hellas, he proposed to cross the Hellespont and drive the Persians out of Greek Asia. At every step toward this end he found himself running counter to the Hellenic love of freedom; and in trying to overcome this resistance he almost forgot the end in the means. His .first move brought him into conflict with Athens, for he sought to win possession of the cities that Athens had acquired on the Macedonian and Thracian coasts; these cities not only blocked his way to Asia, they also controlled rich gold mines and a taxable trade. While Athens was ab sorbed in the "Social War" that ended her second empire, Philip seized Amphipolis (357), Pydna, and Potidaea (356), and answered the protests of Athens with .fine compliments to Athenian literature and art. In 355 he took Methone, losing an eye in the siege; in 347, after a long campaign of chicanery and bravery, he captured Olynthus. He now controlled all the European coast of the north Aegean, had an income of a thousand talents a year from the mines of Thrace,"" and could tum his thoughts to winning the support of Greece.
To .finance his campaigns he had sold thousands of captives-many of them Athenians-into slavery, and had lost the good will of Hellenes. It was fortunate for him that during these years the Greek states were exhaust ing themselves in a second "Sacred War" (356-46) over the spoliation of the Oelphic treasury by the Phocians. The Spartans and Athenians fought for the Phocians, the Amphictyonic League-Boeotia, Locris, Doris, Thes saly-fought against them. Losing, the Amphictyonic Council besought the help of Philip. He saw his opportunity, came swiftly down through the open passes, overwhelmed the Phocians (346), was received into the Delphic Amphictyony, was acclaimed as the protector of the shrine, and accepted an invitation to preside over all the Greeks at the Pythian games. He cast his eyes upon the divided states of the Peloponnesus, and felt that he could win all of them except weakened Sparta to accept him as leader


On a long low hill five miles east of Argos and a mile north of the sea, stood, in the fourteenth century before our era, the fortress-palace of Tiryns. Today one reaches its ruins by a pleasant ride from Argos or Nauplia, and finds them half lost amid quiet fields of com and wheat. Then, after a little climb up prehistoric stone steps, the traveler stands before the cyclopean walls built, said Greek tradition, for the Argive prince Proetus, two centuries before the Trojan War.t Even then the town itself was old,
Towards the end of his life Dorpfeld and Virchow almost convinced him that he had found the remains not of Agamemnon but of a far earlier generation. After many heartaches Schliemann took the matter ood-naturedly. "What?" he exclaimed, "so this is not Agamem non's body, these are not hIS ornaments? All right, let's call him Schulze"; and thereafter they always spoke of "Schulze.""'
t The Greeks gave the name Cyclopean to such structures as in their mythical fancy could have been built only by giants like the one-eyed Titans called Cyclopes (Round-Eyes), who labored at the forges of Hephaestus in the volcanoes of the Mediterranean. Architecturally the term implied large unmortared stones, unhewn or roughly cut, and filled in at the joints with pebbles laid in clay. Tradition added that ProetuS had imported celebrated masons, called Cyclopes. from Lycia.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.II
having been founded, said ancient memory, by the hero Tiryns, son of Argus of the hundred eyes, in the infancy of the world." Proteus, the story went on, gave the palace to Perseus, who ruled Tiryns with the dusky Andromeda as his queen.
The walls that protected the citadel rose from.twenty-five to fifty feet in height, and were so thick that at several places they contained spacious galleries, vaulted and arched with immense overlapping horizontal slabs. Many of the stones still in place measure six feet in length by three in breadth and depth; the smallest of them, said Pausanias, "could hardly be moved by a pair of mules.""' Within the walls, behind a propylon or gate way that set a style for many an acropolis, lay a broad paved court bounded with colonnades; and around this, as at Cnossus, was a medley of rooms gathered about the megaron-a hall of state thirteen hundred square feet in area, with a pavement of painted cement, and a ceiling supponed by four columns enclosing a hearth. Here, in contrast to merry Crete, was estab lished a lasting principle of Greek architecture-the separation of the women's quarters, or gynaeceum, from the chambers of the men. The king's room and the queen's room were built side by side, but, so far as the remains reveal, they were eremitically sealed against intercommunication. Of this palace-castle Schliemann found only the ground plan, the column bases, and portions of the wall. At the foot of the hill were'the remnants of stone or brick houses and bridges, and some fragments of archaic pottery; there, in prehistoric days, the town of Tiryns huddled for protection below the palace walls. We must picture the life of Bronze Age Greece as moving insecurely around and within such feudal fortresses.
Ten miles farther nonh, perhaps in the founeenth century before Christ, Perseus (if we wish to believe Pausanias1•) built Mycenae-the greatest
capital of prehistoric Greece. Here too, around a forbidding citadel, a
town of several villages grew, housing a busy population of peasants, mer chants, artisans, and slaves, who had the happiness of eluding history. Six hundred years later Homer called Mycenae "a well-built city, broad avenued and abounding in gold."" Despite a hundred despoiling genera tions some parts of these also cyclopean walls survive; to attest the imme morial cheapness of labor and uneasiness of kings. In a corner of the wall is the famous Lion Gate, where, carved upon a stone triahgle over a massive lintel, two royal beasts, now worn and headless, dumbly stand guard over a grandeur that is gone. On the acropolis beyond are the ruins of the palace. Again, as at Tiryns and Cnossus, we can trace the divisions of throne room, altar room, storerooms, bathroom, and reception rooms. Here once
CHAP.II)	.l:IEFORE AGAMEMNON
were painted floors, columned porticoes, frescoed walls, and majestic flights of stairs.
Near the Lion Gate, in a narrow area enclosed by a ring of erect stone slabs, Schliemann's workers dug up nineteen skeletons, and relics so rich that one could forgive the great amateur for seeing in these shafts the burial chambers of the children of Atreus. Had not Pausanias described the royal graves as "in the ruins of Mycenae"?18 Here were male skulls with crowns of gold, and golden masks on the bones of the face; here were osseous ladies with golden diadems on what had been their heads; here were painted vases, bronze caldrons, a silver rhyton, beads of amber and amethyst, objects of alabaster, ivory, or faience, heavily ornamented daggers and swords, a gam ing board like that at Cnossus, and almost anything in gold-seals and rings, pins and studs, cups an beads, bracelets and breastplates, vessels of toilette, even clothing embroidered with thin plates of gold.10 These were assuredly royal jewels, royal bones.
In the hillside opposite the acropolis Schliemann and others discovered nine tombs altogether 4ifferent from these "shaft graves." Leaving the road that comes down from the citadel, one enters at the right a corridor lined with walls of large, well-cut stones. At the end is a plain portal, once adorned with slim cylindrical columns of green marble, now in the British Museum; above it is a simple lintel of two stones, one extending thirty feet and weighing 1 1 3 tons. Within, the traveler finds himself under a dome, or tholos, fifty feet high and as many wide; the walls are built of sawn blocks reinforced with decorative bronze rosettes; each stratum of stones overlaps the one beneath, until the uppermost layer closes the top. This strange structure, Schliemann thought, was the tomb of Agamemnon, and a smaller tholos near by, discovered by his wife, was at once described as the tomb of Clytaemnestra. All the "beehive" tombs at Mycenae were found empty; thieves had anticipated the archeologists by several centuries.
These gloomy ruins are the reminders of a civilization as ancient to Pericles as Charlemagne to ourselves. Current opinion dates the shaft graves near to 1600 B.c. (som four hundred years before the traditional age of Agamemnon), and the beehive tombs about 1450; but prehistoric chronol ogy is not a precision tool. We do not know how this civilization began, nor what people it was that built towns not only at Mycenae and Tiryns but at Sparta, Amyclae, Aegina, Eleusis, Chaeronea, Orchomenos, and Delphi. Probably, like most nations, it was already composite in stock and heritage; Greece was as diverse in blood before the Dorian invasion ( 1100 B.c.) as England before the Norman Conquest. So far as we can guess, the
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. D
Mycenaeans were akin to the Phrygians and Carians of Asia Minor, and to the Minoans of Crete."° The lions of Mycenae have a Mesopotamian coun tenance; this ancient motif probably came through Assyria and Phrygia to Greece."'a Greek tradition called the Mycenaeans "Pelasgi" (possibly mean ing People of the Sea-pelagos), and pictured them as coming down from Thrace and Thessaly into Attica and the Peloponnesus in a past so distant that the Greeks termed them autochthonoi-aborigines. Herodotus ac cepted this account, and ascribed the Olympian gods to a Pelasgic origin, but he "could not say with any certainty what the language of the Pelasgi was."m. No more can we.
Doubtless these autochthonoi were themselves late-comers into a land that had suffered cultivation since neolithic days; there are no aborigines. In their turn they too were overrun; for in the later years of Mycenaean his tory, towards 1600, we find many indications of a cultural-commercial, if not a military-political, conquest of the Peloponnesus by the products or emigrants of Crete."" The palaces at Tiryns and Mycenae, except for the gynaeceum, were designed and decorated. in the Minoan manner; Cretan vases and styles reached into Aegina, Chalcis, and Thebes; Mycenaean ladies and goddesses adopted the charming fashions of Crete, and the art revealed in the later shaft graves is unmistakably Minoan... Apparently it was this stimulating contact with a higher culture that lifted Mycenae to the peak of its civilization.
m. MYCENAEAN CIVILIZATION
The remains of this culture are too fragmentary to give us a picture as dis tinct as those that take form in the ruins of Crete or the poetry of Homer. Life on the mainland was a little nearer to the hunting stage than in Crete. The bones of deer, wild boars, goats, sheep, hares, oxen, and pigs among the Mycenaean leavings-not to speak of fishbones and marine shells-indicate an appetite al ready Homeric, and unfriendly to the Cretan waist. Here and there the relics reveal the strange contemporaneity of "ancient" and "modem" modes-obsidian arrowheads lying beside a hollow bronze drill apparently used in boring dowel holes into stones."'
Industry was less advanced than in Crete; there are no signs on the mainland of such industrial centers as Goumia. Trade grew slowly, for the seas were troubled with pirates, including the Mycenaeans; the kings of Mycenae and Tiryns had Cretan artists engrave for them, on their vases and rings, a proud record of their achievements in piracy.111 To protect thems<:lves against qther
CHAP.n)    BEFORE AGAMEMNON	31
pirates they b t their cities inland, far enough from the sea to guard against sudden attack, close enough to take readily to their ships. Lying on the road from the Axgolic Gulf to the Isthmus of Corinth, Tiryns and Mycenae were well situated both to plunder traders with feudal tolls, and to set out occasion ally on buccaneering raids. Seeing Crete grow rich on orderly trade, Mycenae learned that piracy-like its civilized offspring, tariff dues-can strangle com merce and internationalize poverty; it reformed, and allowed piracy to subside into trade. By 1400 its mercantile fleet was strong enough to defy the sea power of Crete; it refused to ship its Africa-bound goods across the island, but sent them directly to Egypt; possibly this was the cause, or result, of a war that ended in the destruction of the Cretan citadels.
The wealth that grew from this trade was not accompanied by any com mensurate culture visible in the remains. Greek tradition credited the Pelasgians with having learned the alphabet from Phoenician traders. At Tiryns and Thebes some jars have been found bearing unintelligible characters, but no clay tablets, or inscriptions, or documents have been discovered; probably when Mycenae decided to be literate it used perishable writing materials, as the Cretans did in their final period; and nothing has been preserved. In art the Mycenaeans followed Cretan models, and so faithfully that archeology suspects them of importing their major artists from Crete. But after Cretan art declined, painting flourished vigorously on the mainland. The decorative designs of borders and cornices are of the first-order, and persist into classic Greece, while the surviving frescoes indicate a keen feeling for moving life. The Ladies in the Box are splendid dowagers, who might adorn any opera promenade today and be in full fashion of coiffure and gowns; they are more alive than the stiffly conscious Ladies in the Chariot, who are out for an afternoon drive in the park. Better still is the Boar Hunt, a fresco from Tiryns: the boar and the flowers are unconvincingly conventional, the incredibly pink hounds are disfigured with stylized spots of scarlet, black, or blue, and the hind quarters of the plunging boar taper away into the likeness of some high-heeled maiden falling from her palace bower; nevertheless the chase is real, the boar is desperate, the dogs are in fast flight through the air, and man, the most sentimental and terrible of all beasts of prey, stands ready with his murderous spear.• One may suspect from such samples the active and physical life of the Mycenaeans, the proud beauty of their women, the vivid adornment of their palaces.
The highest art of Mycenae was in metals. Here the mainland equaled Crete, and dared to use its own forms and decoration. If Schliemann did not quite find. the bones of Agamemnon, he found their weight in silver and gold: jewelry of many kinds, in spendthrift quantities; stud buttons worthy of any king; intaglios alive with scenes of hunting, war, or piracy; and a cow's head in shining silver, with horns and frontal rosette of gold-at any moment one xpects from
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP, II