out a bite.34 He was sensitive and shy, and blushed when he had to address a public gathering, but in battle he was in these days impetuously brave; in later life timidity and corpulence burdened his generalship, and he hesitated till lost. His mind had neither brilliance nor depth; his policies were made for him, not by him-first by the politicians of the populares, then by the Senatorial oligarchy. His great wealth lifted him above the coarser tempta tions of politics; amid the selfishness and corruption of his time he shone by his patriotism and his integrity; he seems to have sincerely sought the public good as well as his own. His outstanding fault was vanity. His early successes led him to overrate his abilities, and he wondered why Rome waited so long to make him in everything but name a king.
The two favorites of Sulla, now consuls together, devoted themselves to overthrowing the Sullan constitution. Pompey and Crassus paid their debt to the populares by passing a b]l that restored all the power of the tribunes. They consolidated their alliance with business by directing Lucullus to give the publicans full charge of tax collections in the East; and they supported legislation that required juries to be drawn equally from the Senate, the equestrian class, and the tribunes of the Treasury. Crassus had to wait fifteen years for his reward-the privilege of drinking gold in Asia; Pompey received his in 67, when the Assembly voted him almost limitless authority to proce d against the pirates of Cilicia. Once Rhodes had kept the Aegean free of such marauders; but Rhodes, humiliated and impoverished by Rome and Delos, could no longer maintain the fleet required for such a service; and the landed aristocracy that controlled the Senate had no keen interest in making the channels of maritime commerce secure. Merchants and plebs felt the results more sharply: trade became almost impossible in the Aegean, even in the central Mediterranean; and imports of grain fell so rapidly that the price of wheat at Rome rose to twenty sesterces per modius, or three dollars a peck. The pirates flaunted their success with gilded masts, purple sails, and silver plated oars on their thousand ships; they took and held 400 coastal towns, plundered temples in Samothrace, Samas, Epid:mrus, Argos, Leucas, and Actium, kidnaped Roman officials, and assailed even the shores of Apulia and Etruria.
To meet this situation Pompey's friend Gabinius proposed a bill giving
him for three years absolute control of all Roman fleets, and all persons within fifty miles of any Mediterranean shore. Every senator but Caesar opposed this extraordinary measure, but the Assembly passed it with enthusi asm, voted Pompey an army of 1 2 5,ooo men and a navy of 500 vessels, and ordered the Treasury to place 144,000,000 sesterces at his disposal. In effect the bill deposed the Senate, ended the Sullan restoration, and established a provisional monarchy as a prelude and lesson to Caesar. The outcome
140	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. Vil
strengthened the precedent. The very day after Pompey's appointment the price of wheat began to fall. Within three months he accomplished his task captured the pirate ships, took their strongholds, executed their leaders-and yet without abusing his unusual authority. Commerce took heart and sailed again, and a river of cereals flowed into Rome.
While Pompey was still in Cilicia, his friend Manilius offered the Assem bly a bill transferring to him full command of the armies and provinces then
(66) under Lucullus, a:id prolonging the powers conferred upon him by the Gabinian Law. The Senate resisted, but the merchants and moneylenders gave strong support to the proposal. Pompey, they hoped, would be less lenient than Lucullus to their Asiatic debtors; he would restore the tax col lections to the publicans; he would conquer not only Bithynia and Pontus, but Cappadocia, Syria, and Judea; and these rich fields would be thrown open to Roman trade and finance under the protection of Roman arms. A "new man," Marcus Tullius Cicero, who had been elected praetor for that year with the aid of the business class, spoke "For the Manilian Law," and attacked the Senatorial oligarchy with a rash eloquence unheard in Rome since the Gracchi, and with a candor shocking in a politician:
The whole system of credit and finance which is carried on here at Rome is inextricably bound up with the revenues of the Asiatic prov inces. If these revenues are destroyed, our system of credit will crash.... If some lose their entire fortunes they will drag many more down with them. Save the state from such a calamity.... Prosecute with all your energies the war against Mithridates, by which the glory of the Roman name, the safety of our allies, our most valuable revenues, and the fortunes of innumerable citizens will be effectively preserved.35
The measure was readily passed by the Assembly. The plebs cared little for the fortunes of the financiers; but it rejoiced in having found, through the issuance of extraordinary powers to a general, a means of annulling the Sullan legislation and deposing its ancient enemy, the Senate. From that moment the d:iys of the Republic were numbered. The Roman revolution, helped by the oratory of its grea::est foe, had taken another step toward Caesar.
C!CERO AXD CATILCTE
Plutarch thought that Marcus Tullius was called Cicero because of a wart, shaped like a vetch (cicer), on an ancestor's nose; more probably his fore bears had earned the cognomen by raising renowned crops of chick-peas.
CHAP. VII)	THE  OLIGARCHIC  REACTION	141
In his Lav_,s Cicero describes with engaging tenderness the modest villa that had seen his birth near Arpinum, halfway between Rome and Naples, in the foothills of the Apennines. His father was just rich enough to give his son the best education that the age could provide. He engaged the Greek poet Archias to tutor Marcus in literature and Greek and then sent the youth to study law with Q. Mucius Scaevola, the greatest jurist of his time. Cicero listened eagerly to the trials and debates in the Forum, and rapidly learned the arts and tricks of forensic speech. "To succeed in the law," he said, "a man must renounce all pleasures, avoid all amusements, say farewell to recrea tion, games, e9tertainment, almost to intercourse with his friends." 36
Soon he was practicing law himself and making speeches whose brilliance and courage won him the gratitude of the middle classes and the plebs. He prosecuted a favorite of Sulla and denounced the proscriptions in the midst of the Sullan terror (So B.c.).37 Shortly afterward, perhaps to avoid the dic tator's revenge, he went to Greece, and continued there his studies of oratory and philosophy. After three happy years in Athens he passed over to Rhodes, where he heard the lectures of Apollonius, son of Molon, on rhetoric, and those of Poseidonius on philosophy. From the first he learned the periodic sentence structure and purity of speech that were to distinguish his style; and from the other that mild Stoicism which he would later expound in his essays on religion, government, friendship, and old age.
Returning to Rome at the age of thirty, he married T erentia, whose ample dowry now enabled him to go into politics. In 75 he distinguished himself by his just administration of a quaestorship in Sicily. In 70, having resumed the practice of law, he raised a furor among the aristocracy by accepting a retainer from the cities of Sicily and bringing suit against the senator Caius Verres, on the charge that as propraetor there (73-71) Verres had sold his appointments and decisions, had lowered individual tax assessments in inverse proportion to bribes received, had despoiled Syracuse of nearly all its statu ary, had assigned the revenues of a whole city to his mistress, and all in all had carried injustice, extortion, and robbery to such a pitch as to leave the island more desolate than after two Servile \Vars. "\Vorse yet, Verres had kept for himself some of the spoils that usually went to the publicans. The business class supported Cicero in the indictment, while Hortensius, aristo cratic leader of the Roman bar, led the defense for Verres. Cicero was al lowed some hundred days to gather evidence in Sicily; he took only fifty, but he presented so much damaging testimony in his opening address that Hortensius-who had decorated his gardens with part of Verres' sculptural loot-abandoned his client. Condemned to pay a fine of 40,000,000 sesterces, Verres fled into exile. Cicero published the five additional speeches that he
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VII
had prepared; they constituted an unsparing attack upon Roman malfeasance in the provinces. His energy and courage won him such support that when he ran for the consulate for 63 B.c. he was elected by acclamation.
Born of modest equestrian rank, Cicerohad naturally sided with the middle class and had resented the pride, privileges, and misrule of the aristocracy. But far more deeply he feared those radical leaders whose program, he thought, threatened all property with mob rule. He therefore made it his policy, now that he was in office, o promote a "concord of the orders" i.e., a co-operation of the aristocracy and the business class-against the returning tide of revolt.
The causes and forces of discontent, however, were too deep and varied to be easily dissolved. Many of the poor were listening to preachers of utopia, and some who listened were ripe for violence. A little above them were plebeians who had forfeited their property through defaulted mort gages. Some of Sulla's veterans had failed to make their land allotments pay and were ready for any disturbance that might give them loot without toil. Among the upper classes were insolvent debtors and ruined speculators who had lost all hope or wish to meet their obligations. Others had political ambi tions and saw their road to advancement cluttered with conservatives who took too long to die. A few revolutionists were sincere idealists, convinced that only a complete overturn could mitigate the corruption and inequity of the Roman state.
One man sought to unite these scattered groups into a coherent political
force. We know Lucius Sergius Catiline only through his enemies-through the history of his movement by the millionaire Sallust, and through the violent vituperation of Cicero's orations Against Catiline. Sallust describes him as a "guilt-stained soul at odds with gods and men, who found no rest either waking or sleeping, so cruelly did conscience ravage his overwrought mind. Hence his pall:d complexion, his bloodshot eyes, his gait now fast now slow; in short, his face and every glance showed the madman." 38 Such a description suggests the pictures that a people struggling for life or power paints of its enemies in war; when the battle is over the pictures are gradu ally revised, but in the case of Cati,line we have no revision. In youth he had been charged with d flowering a Vestal Virgin, a half sister of Cicero's first wife; the court had acquitted the Virgin, but gossip had not acquitted Cati line; on the contrary, it added that he had killed his son to please his jealous mistress.39 In the scale1against these stories we can only say that for four years after Catiline's.:death the common people of Rome-"the miserable, starveling rabble," Cicero called them-strewed flowers upon his tomb.40 Sallust quotes what purports to be one of his speeches:
CHAP. vu)	THE   OLIGARCHIC  REACTION
Ever since the state fell under the s,vay of a few powerful men .
all influence, rank, and wealth have been in their hands. To us they have left danger, defeat, prosecutions, poverty. . .. What have we left save only the breath of life? ... Is it not better to die valiantly than to lose our wretched and rushonored lives after being the sport of other men's insolence? 41


40: Rec nciliation of Antony and Oc tavian at Brundisium; Virgil's Fourth Ecloisue
36: Antony invades Parthia 32: Anton_y marries Cleopatra
31: Octavian defeats Antony at Acrium 30: Suicide of A ntonv :mri Cleopatra; Egypt annexed to the Empire; Oc
tavian sole ruler of Rome
CHAPTER  VI
The Agrarian Revolt
145-78 B.C.
ffiE BACKGROUND OF REVOLUTION
HE causes of revolution were many, the results were endless, the personalities thrown up by the crisis,·from the Gracchi to Augustus,
were among the most powerful in history. Never before, and never again till our own time, were such stakes fought for, never was the world drama more intense. The first cause was the influx of slave-grown corn from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain1 and Africa, which ruined many Italian farmers by reducing the price of domestic grains below the cost of production and marketing. Second, was the influx of slaves, displacing peasants in the countryside and free workers in the towns. Third, was the growth of large farms. A law of
220 forbade senators to take contracts or invest in commerce; flush with the spoils of war, they bought up extensive tracts of agricultural land. Con quered soil was sometimes sold in small plots to colonists, and eased urban strife; more of it was given to capitalists in part payment of their war loans to the state; most of it was bought or leased by senators or businessmen on terms fixed by the Senate. To compete with these latifzmdia the little man had to borrow money at rates that insured his inability to pay; slowly he sank into poverty or bankruptcy, ten::mcy or the slums. Finally, the peasant himself, after he had seen and looted the world as a soldier, had no taste or patience for the lonely labor and unadventurous chores of the farm; he preferred to join the turbulent proletariat of the city, watch without cost the exciting games of the amphitheater, receive cheap com from the govern ment, sell his vote to the highest bidder or promiser, and lose himself in the impoverished and indiscriminate mass.
Roman society, once a community of free farmers, now rested more and more upon external plunder and internal slavery. In the city all domestic service, many handicrafts, most trade, much banking, nearly all factory labor, and labor on public works, were performed by slaves, reducing the wages of free workers to a point where it was almost as profitable to be idle as to toil. On the latifzmdia slaves were preferred because they were not subject to military service, and their number could be maintained, genera-
l II
I 12	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VI
tion after generation, as a by-product of their only pleasure or their master's vice. All the Mediterranean region was raided to produce living machines for these industrialized farms; to the war prisoners led in after every vic torious campaign were added the victims of pirates who captured slaves or freemen on or near the coasts of Asia, or of Roman officials whose organized man hunts impressed into bondage any provincial whom the local authorities did not dare protect.1 Every week slave dealers brought their human prey from Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany, the Danube, Russia, Asia, and Greece to the ports of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It was not unusual for
10,000 slaves to be auctioned off at Delos in a single day. In 177, 40,000
Sardinians, in 167, 150,000 Epirotes, were captured by Roman armies and sold as slaves, in the latter case at approximately a dollar a head.2 In the city the lot of the slave was mitigated by humanizing contacts with his master and by hope of emancipation; but on the large farms no human relation interfered with exploitation. There the slave was no longer a member of the household, as in Greece or early Rome; he seldom saw his owner; and the rewards of the overseer depended upon squeezing every possible profit from the chattels entrusted to his lash. The wages of the slave on the great estates were as much food and clothing as would enable him to toil from sunrise to sunset every day-barring occasional holidays-until senility. If he complained or disobeyed, he worked with chains about his ankles and spent the night in an ergastztlum-a subterranean dungeon that formed a part of nearly every latifundium. It was a wasteful as well as a brutal system, for it supported hardly a twentieth of the families that once had lived on the same acreage as freemen.
If we remember that at least half these slaves had once been free (for slaves seldom fought in the wars), we can surmise the bitterness of these
broken lives, and must marvel at the rarity of their revolts. In 196 the rural slaves and free workers of Etruria rebelled; they were beaten down by Roman legions and, Livy tells us, "many were killed or taken prisoners; others were scourged and crucified." 3 In 185 a like uprising occurred in Apulia; 7000 slaves were captured and condemned to mines.4 In the mines of New Carthage alone 4000 Spaniards worked as slaves. In 139 the "First Servile War" broke out in Sicily. Four hundred slaves accepted the call of Eunus and massacred the free population in the town of Enna; slaves poured from the farms and private dungeons of Sicily and swelled the number of the rebels to 70,000. They occupied Agrigentum, defeated the forces of the Roman praetor, and held nearly all the island till 131, when a consular army penned them into Enna and starved them into surrender. Eunus was taken to Rome, dropped into an underground cell, and allowed to die of hunger and lice.5 In 133 lesser uprisings resulted in the execution of 150 slaves in
CHAP. VI)	THE	AGRARIAN  REVOLT	113
Rome, 450 in Mimurnae, 4000 in Sinuessa. In that year Tiberius Gra'cchus passed the agrarian law that opened the Roman Revolution.
TIBERIUS GRACCHUS
He was the son of the Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus who had earned the gratitude of Spain by his generous administration, had served twice as consul and once as censor, and had saved the brother and married the daughter of Scipio Africanus. Cornelia gave him twelve children, all but three of whom died in adolescence; and his own death left upon her the burden of rearing Tiberius and Caius and a daughter-also named Cornelia who became the wife of Scipio Aemilianus. Both parents shared in the Hellenistic culture and sympathies of the Scipionic circle. Cornelia gathered about her a literary salon, and wrote letters of so pure and elegant a style that they were reckoned as a distinguished contribution to Latin literature. An Egyptian king, says Plutarch, offered her his hand and throne in her widowhood, but she refused; she preferred to remain the daughter of one Scipio, the mother-in-law of another, and the mother of the Gracchi.
Brought up in the atmosphere of statesmanship and philosophy, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus knew both the problems of Roman government and the speculations of Greek thought. They were particularly influenced by Blossius, a Greek philosopher from Cumae, who helped to inspire in them a passionate liberalism that underestimated the power of the conservatives in Rome. The brothers were almost equally ambitious, proud, sincere, elo quent beyond reason, and brave without stint. Caius tells how Tiberius had the agrarian tragedy borne in upon him when, passing through Etruria, he "noted the dearth of inhabitants, and observed that those who tilled the soil and tended the flocks were foreign slaves." 6 Knowing that at that time only property holders could serve in the army, Tiberius asked himself how Rome could preserve its leadership or independence if the sturdy peas ants that h2d once filled its legions were displaced by desolate and alien bondsmen. How could Roman life and democracy ever be healthy with a city proletariat festering in poverty, instead of a proud yeomanry owning and tilling the land? A distribution of land among the poorer citizens seemed the obvious and necessary solution of three problems: rural slavery, urban congestion and corruption, and military decay.
Early in 1 33 Tiberius Gracchus. elected a tribune of the people, announced his intention to submit to the Tribal Assembly three proposals: (1) that no citizen should be permitted to hold more than 333-or, if he had two sons, 667-acres of land bought or rented from the state; (2) that all other public


History has been unfair to this "age of despots" because it has spoken here chiefly through the most brilliant and most prejudiced of historians. It is true that the gossip of Suetonius often confirms-or follows-the invective of Tacitus; but the study of literature and inscriptions has condemned them both as mistaking the vices of ten emperors for the record of an empire and a century. There was something good in the worst of these rulers devoted statesmanship in Tiberius, a charming gaiety in Caligula, a plodding wisdom in Claudius, an exuberant aestheticism in Nero, a stem competence in Domitian. Behind the adulteries and the murders an administrative organi zation had formed which provided, through all this period, a high order of provincial government. The emperors themselves were the chief victims of their power. Some disease in the blood, fired by the heat of loosed desire, had pursued the Julio-Claudians as fatally as the children of Atreus; and some flaw in the system had debased the Flavians in one generation from patient statesmanship to terrified cruelty. Seven of these ten men met a violent end; nearly all of them were unhappy, surrounded by conspiracy, dishonesty, and intrigue, trying to govern a world from the anarchy of a home. They indulged their appetites because they knew how brief was their omnipotence; they lived in the daily horror of men condemned to an early and sudden death. They went under because they were above the law; they became less than men because power had made them gods.
But we must not absolve the age or the principate of its ignominy and its crimes. It had given peace to the Empire, but terror to Rome; it had injured morals by the high example of cruelty and lust; it had torn Italy with a civil war more ferocious than that of Caesar and Pompey; it had filled the islands with exiles and had killed off the best and bravest men. It had suborned the treachery of relatives and friends by rewarding avaricious spies. It had, in Rome, replaced a government of laws with a tyranny of men It had raised gigantic edifices by accumulating tribute, but it had dwarfed the soul by frightening talented or creative minds into servility or silence. Above all, it had made the army supreme. The power of the prince over the Senate lay not in his superior genius, nor in custom, nor in prestige; it rested upon the pikes of the Guard. \Vhen provincial armies saw how emperors were made, how rich were the donatives and spoils of the capital, they deposed the Praetorians and themselves entered upon the business of making kings. For a century yet the wisdom of great rulers chosen by adoption rather than by heredity, violence, or wealth would hold the legions in check and
294	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
keep the frontiers safe. But when, through a philosopher's love, idiocy would again reach the throne, the annies would run riot, chaos would break through the fragile film of order, and civil war would join hands with the waiting barbarians to topple down the noble and precarious structure of government that the genius of Augustus had built.
CHAPTER  XIV
TheSilver  Age
THE DILETTANTES
RADITION has given to Latin letters from A.D. 14 to 117 the name of Silver Age, implying a fall from the cultural excellence of the Augustan Age. Tradition is the voice of time, and time is the medium of selection; a cautious mind will respect their verdict, for only youth knows better than twenty centuries. \Ve may be permitted, however, to suspend judgment, to give Lucan, Petronius, Seneca, the elder Pliny, Celsus, Statius, Martial, Quintilian-and, in later chapters, Tacitus, Juvenal, Pliny the Younger, and Epictetus-an unbiased hearing, and enjoy them as if we had
never heard that they belonged to a decadent period. In every epoch some thing is decaying and something is growing. In epigram, satire, the novel,
history, and philosophy the Silver Age marks the zenith of Roman litera ture, as it represents in realistic sculpture and mass architecture the climax . of Roman art.
The speech of the common man re-entered literature, diminishing inflections, relaxing syntax, and dropping final consonants with Gallic impertinence. About the middle of the first century the Latin V (which had been pronounced like our W) and B (between vowels) were both softened into a sound like the Eng lish V; so habere, to have, became in sound havere, and prepared for Italian avere and French avoir; while vinum, wine, began to approximate, by lazy slurring of the changing final consonant, the Italian vino and the French vin. The Latin language was preparing to mother Italian, Spanish, and French.
It must be admitted that rhetoric had now grown at the expense of eloquence, grammar at the expense of poetry. Able men devoted themselves beyond prece dent to studying the form, evolution, and niceties of the language, editing al ready "classical" texts, formulating the august rules of literary composition, forensic oratory, poetic meter, and prose rhythm. Claudius tried to reform the alphabet; Nero made poetry fashionable by his almost Japanese example; and the elder Seneca wrote manuals of rhetoric on the ground that eloquence gives to every power a double power. Without eloquence only generals could rise in Rome; and even generals had to be orators. The mania for rhetoric seized all
295
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIV
forms of literature: poetry became rhetorical, prose became poetical, and Pliny himself wrote an eloquent page in the six volumes of his Natural History. Men began to worry about the balance of their phrases and the melody of their clauses; historians wrote declamations, philosophers itched for epigrams, and every one wrote sententiae-concentrated pills of wisdom. All the polite world was writing poetry, and reading it to friends in hired halls or theaters, at table, even (Martial complained) in the bath. Poets engaged in public competitions, won prizes, were feted by municipalities and crowned by emperors; aristocrats and princes wel comed dedications or tributes and paid for them with dinners or denarii. The passion for poetry gave a pleasant aspect of amateur authorship to an age and city darkened with sexual license and periodic terror.
Terror and poetry met in the life of Lucan. The older Seneca was his grand father, the philosopher Seneca his uncle. Born in Corduba in 39, and named Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, he was brought in infancy to Rome and grew up in aristocratic circles ,vhere poetry and philosophy rivaled amorous and political intrigues as the foci of life. At twenty-one he competed in the Neronian Games with a poem "In Praise of Nero," and won a prize. Seneca introduced him at court, and soon the poet and the Emperor were bandying epics. Lucan made the mistake of winning first prize in a poetic contest with the Prince; Nero ordered him to publish no more, and Lucan withdrew to avenge himself in private with a vigorous but rhetorical epic, Pharsalia, which viewed the Civil War from the standpoint of the Pompeian aristocracy. Lucan is fair to Caesar, and writes of him an illuminating phrase: nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum "thinking nothing done while anything remained to do." 1 But the real hero of the book is the younger Cato, whom Lucan equals with the gods in a famous line: victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni-"the winning cause pleased the gods, but the lost one pleased Cato." 2 Lucan too loved a lost cause and died for it. He joined in the conspiracy to replace Nero with Piso, was arrested, broke down (he was only twenty-six), and revealed the names of other conspirators, even, we are told, of his mother. When Nero confirmed his death sentence he recovered his courage, summoned his friends to a feast, ate with them heartily, opened his veins, and recited his lines against despotism as he bled to death (65).
PETROXIUS
,ve are not certain-it is only the general opinion-that the Petronius whose Satyricon still finds many readers was the Caius Petronius who died by Nero's orders a year after Lucan. The book itself contains not a word to serYe as a clue; and T acirns, who describes the arbiter elegantiitrum with pithy eloquence, makes no mention of the disreputable masterpiece. Some forty epigrams are ascribed to a Petronius, including a line that almost sums up Lucretius: prinnzs in orbe deos fecit timor-"it was fear that first in the
CHAP. xiv)	THE   SILVER  AGE	297
world made gods"; 3 but these fragments too are silent about the author's identity.
The Satyricon was a collection of satires, probably in sixteen books, of which only the last two remain, themselves incomplete. They are saturae in the Latin sense of medleys-here of prose and verse, adventure and phi losophy, gastronomy and venery. The form owes something to the satires of Menippus, a Syrian Cynic who wrote in Gadara about 60 B.c., and to the "Milesian Tales," or love romances, that had become popular in the Hellenistic world. As all extant examples of these are later than Petronius, the Satyricon has the distinction of being the oldest known novel.
It is hardly credible that an aristocratic lord of luxury, and master of fine taste, should have fathered a book so profusely vulgar as the Satyricon.
All its active characters are plebeians, ex-slaves, or slaves, and all the scenes are of low life; here the Augustan preoccupation of literature with the upper classes is violently ended. Encolpius, who tells the tale, is an adulterer, a homosexual, a liar, and a thief, and takes it for granted that all sensible men are the same. ""\Ve had it understood between ourselves," he says of himself and his friend, "that whenever opportunity came we would pilfer whatever we could lay our hands upon, for the improvement of our common treasury." 4 The story begins in a brothel, where Encolpius meets Ascyltos, who has taken refuge there from a lecture on philosophy. Their escapades among the towns and trolls of southern Italy form the thread of the wandering narrative; their rivalry for the handsome slave boy Giron unites and divides them in picaresque romance. At last they come to the house of the merchant Trimalchio; and the rest of the extant work is given over to describing the Cena Trimalcbionis, the most astounding dinner in literature.
T rimalchio is an ex-slave who has made a fortune, has bought enormous latifundia, and lives in parvenu luxury with the appointments of a palace and the atmosphere of a stew. His estates are so vast that a daily gazette must be written to keep him abreast of his earnings. He begs his guests to drink:
If the wine don't please you I'll change it. I don't have to buy it, thank the gods. Everything here that makes your mouth water was produced on one of my country places, which I've never yet seen; but they tell me it's dO\vn Terracina and Tarentum way. I've got a notion to add Sicily to my other little holdings, so in case I want to go to Africa I'll be able to sail along my own coasts.    When it


268	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP, XIII
Caligula's final pleasantry was to announce himself as a god, equal to Jupiter himself. Famous statues of Jove and other deities were decapitated and crowned with heads of the Emperor. He enjoyed sitting on a throne in the Temple of Castor and Pollux and receiving divine worship. At times he would converse with an image of Jupiter, often in terms of reproof; and he had a contrivance made by which he could reply to Jove's thunder and lightning peal for peal and stroke for stroke.39 He set up a temple to his god head, with a corps of priests and a supply of select victims, and he appointed his favorite horse as one of the priests. He pretended that the moon-goddess had come down to embrace him, and asked Vitellius could he not see her. "No," answered that wise counier, "only you gods can see one another." 40 The people were not deceived. \Vhen a Gallic cobbler saw Caligula mas querading as Jupiter, and was asked what he thought of the Emperor, he said, simply, "A big humbug." Caligula heard, but did not punish such re freshing courage.41
At twenty-nine this god was an old man, worn out by excesses, probably venereally diseased, with a small and half-bald head upon a fat body, with a livid complexion, hollow eyes, and a sinister glance. His fate came suddenly, and from that Praetorian Guard whose suppon he had long purchased with gifts. A tribune of the Guard, Cassius Chaerea, insulted by the obscenities that Caligula gave him as passwords day after day, killed him in the secret passage of a theater (4r). When the news went out, the city hesitated to believe it; men feared that this was a trick of the imperial prankster to find out who would rejoice at his death. To clarify the issue the assassins killed Caligula's final wife and dashed out his daughter's brains against a wall. On that day, says Dio, Caligula learned that he was not a god.42
CLAUDIUS
\
I		Caligula had left the Empire in a dangerous condition: the Treasury empty, the Senate decimated, the people alienated, l\1auretania in rebellion, Judea in arms at his insistence on placing his cult statue in the Temple of Jerusalem. No one knew whereto find a ruler fit to face these problems. The Praetorians, coming upon the apparently imbecile Claudius hiding in a cor ner, procla d him imperator. The Senate, in terror of the army, and per haps relieved by the prospect of dealing with a harmless pedant instead of a reckless lunatic, confirmed the choice of the Guard; and Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus hesitantly mounted the throne.
He was the son of Antonia and Drusus, the brother of Germanicus and Livilla, the grandson of Octavia and Antony, of Livia and Tiberius Claudius
CHAP. XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF  MONARCHY
Nero. He had been born at Lugdunum (Lyons) in the year IO B.c. and was now fifty years old. He was tall and stout, with white hair and an amiable face; but infantile paralysis and other diseases had weakened his frame. His legs were precariously thin and gave him a shambling gait; his head wobbled as he walked. He loved good wines and rich food and suffered from gout. He stuttered a bit, and his laughter seemed too boisterous for an emperor. In anger, says the merciless gossiper, "he would foam at the mouth and trickle at the nose." 43 He had been brought up by women and freedmen, had developed a timidity and sensitivity hardly advantageous to a ruler, and had had few opportunities to practice government. His relatives had looked upon him as a feeble-minded invalid; his mother, who had inherited Octavia's gentleness, called him "an unfinished monster," and when she wished to stress a man's dullness she would tenn him "a bigger fool than my Claudius." Scorned by all, he lived in safe obscurity, absorbed in gambling, books, and drink. He became a philologist and antiquarian, learned in "ancient" art, religion, science, philosophy, and law. He wrote histories of Etruria, Car thage, and Rome, treatises on dice and the alphabet, a Greek comedy, and an autobiography. Scientists and savants corresponded with him and dedicated their tomes to him; Pliny the Elder cites him four times as an authority. As Emperor he told his people how to cure snakebite, and forestalled super stitious fears by predicting a solar eclipse on his birthday and explaining its cause. He spoke Greek well, and wrote several of his works in that language. He had a good mind; perhaps he was sincere when he told the Senate that he had pretended stupidity in order to save his head.
His first act as Emperor was to reward with a donative of 1 5,ooo sesterces every soldier of that Guard which had raised him to the throne. Caligula had given such gifts, but not so clearly in payment for the Empire; now Claudius acknowledged the sovereignty of the army, while canceling again the power of the Assembly to choose the magistrates. \Vith wiser generosity he ended accusations de 111aiestate, released persons imprisoned on such charges, recalled all exiles, restored confiscated property, returned to Greece the statues that Gaius had stolen, and abolished the taxes that Gaius had introduced. But he put to death Caligula's assassins, on the theory that it was unsafe to condone the murder of an emperor. He ended the practice of prostration, and announced simply that he was not to be worshiped as a god. Like Augustus he repaired the temples and with antiquarian fervor sought to reanimate the old religion. He applied himself personally and conscien tiously to public affairs; he even "made the rounds of those who sold goods and let buildings, and corrected whatever he deemed to be abuses." 44 But in truth, though he emulated the moderation of Augustus, his actual policies
270	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
went beyond that cautious conservatism to the bold and varied plans of Caesar: the reform of government and law, the construction of public works and services, the elevation of the provinces, the enfranchisement of Gaul, and the conquest and Romanization of Britain.
He surprised everyone by showing will and character as well as learning and intellect. Like Caesar and Augustus, he ·was convinced that the local magistrates were too few and untrained, the Senate too proud and impatient to do the com plex work of municipal and imperial administration. He bowed to the Senate, and left it many powers and more dignities; but the real labor of government was performed by himself, a cabinet of his appointees, and a civil service gradu ally organized, as under Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius, out of the freedmen of the Emperor's household, and using "public" slaves for clerical and minor tasks. Four cabinet members headed this bureaucracy: a secretary of state (ab epis tulis-"for communications"), a treasurer (a rationibus-"for accounts"), an other secretary (a libellis-for petitions), and an attorney general (a cognition ibus-"for actions at law"). Able freedmen-Narcissus, Pallas, and Callistus held the first three posts. Their rise to power and wealth was the symbol of a wide elevation of the freedman class, which had been going on for centuries and reached a new height in Claudius' reign. When the aristocracy protested against the empowerment of these parvenus, Claudius revived the office of censor, had himself chosen to it, revised the list of persons eligible to the Senate, eliminated the chief opponents of his policies, and added new members from the knights and the provinces.
Equipped with these administrative organs, he set himself an ambitious pro gram of construction and reform. He improved the procedure of the courts, de,. creed penalties for the law's delays, sat patiently as judge many hours every week, and forbade the application of torture to any citizen. To prevent the floods that endangered Rome all the more frequently as the Apennines were being denuded of timber, he had an additional channel dug for the lower course of the Tiber. To expedite the import of grain he had a new harbor (Portus) built near Ostia, with commodious 1varehouses and docks, two great moles to break the fury of the sea, and a channel connecting the harbor with the Tiber above the river's silted mouth. He finished the "Claudian" aqueduct begun by Caligula, and constructed another, the Anio N ovus, both immense works and notable for the beauty of their lofty arches. Observing that the lands of the Marsians were periodically swamped by the overflow of Lake Fucinus, he pro vided state funds for the labor of 30,000 men during eleven years, digging a three mile tunnel from the Jake through a mountain to the river Ciris. Before releasing the waters of the lake he staged on it a sham naval battle between two fleets manned by 19,000 condemned criminals, before spectators gathered from all Italy upon the slopes of the surrounding hills. The combatants saluted the Em peror with a historic phrase: A-i·e Caesar! morituri saluta11ms te-"Hail Caesar! we who are about to die salute you." 45
CHAP.XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF MONARCHY	271
Theprovinces prospered under him as in Augustan days. He punished decisively the malfeasance of officials, except in the case of Felix, procurator of Judea, whose misrule was concealed from him by Pallas, brother of Saint Paul's inquisitor. He busied himself with every phase of provincial affairs; his edicts and inscriptions, found throughout the Empire, are marked by his characteristic fussiness and prolixity, but they show a mind and will intel ligently devoted to the public good. He labored to improve communication and transport, to protect travelers from brigandage, and to reduce the cost of the official post to the communities it served. Like Caesar he wished to raise the provinces to the level of Italy in a Roman commonwealth. He car ried out Caesar's design in granting full citizenship to Transalpine Gaul; if he had had his way he would have enfranchised all freemen in the Empire.46 A bronze tablet unearthed at Lyons in 1524 has preserved for us part of the rambling speech in which he persuaded the Senate to admit to its member ship and to imperial office those Gauls who held the Roman franchise. l\leanwhile he did not allow the army to deteriorate or the frontiers to be infringed; his legions were kept busy and fit, and great generals like Corbulo, Vespasian, and Paulinus developed under his choice and encouragement. Again deciding to complete Caesar's plans, he invaded Britain in 43, con quered it, and was back in Rome within six months of setting out. In the triumph accorded him he violated precedent by pardoning the captured British king, Caractacus. The people of Rome laughed at their strange Em peror, but loved him; and when, on one of his absences from the capital, a false rumor spread that he had been killed, so great a turmoil of sorrow swept the city that the Senate had to issue official assurances that Claudius was safe and would soon be in Rome.
From that great height he fell because he had built a government too
complex for his personal supervision, and because his amiable spirit was too easily deceived by his freedmen and his family. The bureaucracy had im proved administration and had made a thousand new openings for corrup tion. Narcissus and Pallas were excellent executives, who considered their salaries unequal to their merits. To make up the difference they sold offices, extorted bribes by threats, and brought charges against men whose estates they wished to confiscate. They ended by being the richest individuals in all antiquity. Narcissus had 400,000,000 sesterces ($60,000,000); Pallas was miserable because he had only 300,000,000.47 "\Vhen Claudius complained of a deficit in the imperial Treasury, Roman wags remarked that he would have enough and to spare if he would take his two freedmen into partner ship.48 The old aristocratic families, now comparatively poor, looked with horror upon these accumulations and powers, and burned with anger when they had to court ex-slaves to obtain a word with the Emperor.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
Claudius was busy writing to appointees and scholars, preparing edicts and speeches, and attending to the needs of his wife. Such a man should have lived like a monk and barricaded himself against love; his wives proved a ruinous distraction, and his domestic policy was not as successful as his foreign. Like Caligula he married four times. His first wife died on her wed ding day, the next two he divorced; then, aged forty-eight, he married Valeria Messalina, sixteen. She was not unusually pretty: her head was flat, her face florid, her chest malformed;49 but a woman need not be beautiful to commit adultery. ,vhen Claudius became Emperor she assumed the rights and manners of a queen, rode in his triumph, and had her birthday celebrated throughout the Empire. She fell in love with the dancer Mnester; when he rejected her advances she begged her husband to bid him to be more obedient to her requests; Claudius complied, whereupon the dancer yielded to her patriotically. Messalina rejoiced at the simplicity of her formula, and adopted it with other men; those who still refused her were accused of invented crimes by officials pliant to her influence, and found themselves deprived of their property and their liberty, sometimes of their lives.50
Perhaps the Emperor tolerated these irregularities to secure indulgence for his own. "He was immoderate in his passion for women," says Suetonius, who adds, as a startling distinction, that Claudius "was wholly free from unnatural vice." 51 Messalina, says Dio, "gave him some attractive house maids for bedfellows." 52 Needing funds for her escapades, the Empress sold offices, recommendations, and contracts. Juvenal has handed down the story that she would disguise herself, enter a brothel, receive all comers, and gladly pocket their fees; the tale was probably taken from the lost memoirs of Messalina's successor and foe, the younger Agrippina. \Vhile Claudius, says Tacitus, "devoted all his time to the duties of his censorial office" 53- including the supervision and improvement of Roman morals-Messalina "gave a loose to love," and at last, while her husband was in Ostia, formally married a handsome youth, Caius Silius, "with pomp and all accustomed rites." 54 Narcissus informed the Emperor through the latter's concubines 55 and told him that an uprising was being planned to kill him and put Silius on the throne. Claudius rushed back to Rome, summoned the Praetorian Guard, had Silius and other lovers of 1\f essalina slain, and then retired in nervous exhaustion to his rooms. The Empress hid herself in those gardens of Lucullus which she had confiscated for her pleasure. Claudius sent her a message inviting her to come and plead her cause. Fearing that the Emperor would forgive her and turn against him, Narcissus dispatched some soldiers with instructions to kill her. They found her alone with her mother, slew her with one blow, and left her corpse in her mother's arms (48). Claudius
CHAP. xm)   THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF 1\'IONARCHY	273
told the Praetorian Guard that if he should every marry again they would be justified in killing him. He never mentioned Messalina again.*
\Vithin a year he was hesitating whether to marry Lollia Paulina or the younger Agrippina. Lollia, ex-wife of Caligula, was rich; sometimes, we are told, she wore jewelry worth 40,000,000 sesterces;59 perhaps Claudius ad mired her money more than her taste. Agrippina was the daughter of the elder Agrippina and Germanicus; she too, had in her the unreconciled blood of Octavian and Antony, and had succeeded to the beauty, ability, resolu tion, and unscrupulous vindictiveness of her mother. She was already twice a widow. By her first husband, Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, she had a son Nero, whose enthronement became the ruling passion of her life; and from her second husband Caius Crispus, whom rumor accused her of poisoning, she inherited the wealth that sinewed her aims. Her problem was to become the wife of Claudius, to get rid of his son Britannicus, and make Nero, by adoption, heir to the Empire. The fact that she was Claudius' niece did not deter her, but gave her opportunities for fond intimacies that stirred the aging ruler in no avuncular way. Suddenly he appeared before the Senate and asked it to bid him marry again for the good of the state. The Senate complied, the Praetorians laughed, and Agrippina reached the throne (48).
She was thirty-two, Claudius fifty-seven. His energies were failing; hers


Problems of ownership, obligation, exchange, contract, and debt took up by far the largest part of Roman law. Material possession was the very life of Rome, and the increase of wealth and the expansion of trade demanded a body of law immeasurably more complex than the simple code of the Decemvirs.
Ownership (dominium)" came by inheritance or acquisition. Since the father owned as agent and trustee of the family, the children and grandchildren were potential owners-mi heredes in the law's queer phrase-"their own heirs." 23 If the father died intestate they succeeded automatically to the family property, and the oldest father among the sons inherited the dominium. The making of valid wills was hedged about with hundreds of legal restrictions, and their com position required, as now, a gorgeous and sonorous tautology. Every testator was compelled to leave a specified portion of his estate to his children, another part to a wife who had borne him three children, and (in some cases) parts to his brothers, sisters, and ascendants. No heir might take any part of an estate with out assuming all the debts and other legal obligations of the deceased; not infre quently a Roman found himself saddled with a dcrmnosa hereditas-a legacy, so to speak, in the red. \Vhere an owner died without children and without a will, his property and his debts passed automatically t() the nearest "agnate," or relative descended from a common ancestor exclusively through males. In the later Em pire this male conceit abated, and by the time of Justinian 2gP-'.ltes and cognates (relatives through male or female lines of ascent) inherited with equal right. An old law passed on the urging of Cato ( 169 B.C.) had forbidden any Roman who owned 100,000 sesterces ($15,000) or more to bequeath any part of his estate to a woman. This lex Voconia was still on the statute books in Gaius' time, but love had found a way. The testator left property on trust (fideic01111niss1m2) to a qualified heir, and bound him by a solemn request to transfer the property before a stated date to the woman named. By this and other channels much of the wealth of Rome passed into the hands of women. Gifts offered another escape from testamentary law; but gifts made in prospect of death were subject to legal scrutiny, and under Justinian they were liable to the same laws as those that harassed legacies.
Acquisition came by transfer, or by legal conveyance resulting from a suit at law. Transfer (mancipatio, "taking in hand") was a formal gift or sale before witnesses and with scales struck by a copper ingot as token of a sale; without this ancient ritual no exchange had the sanction or protection of the law. An intermediate or potential ownership was recognized under the name of possessio-
400	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVIII
the right to hold or use property; e.g., tenants on state lands were possessores ("sitters," squatters), not domini; but their prescriptive right (usucapio, "taking by use") became dominiznn, and could no longer be questioned after two years of unchallenged occupancy. Probably this lenient conception of occupation as so soon generating ownership came from patricians who were in this manner acquiring public lands.24 By the same right of ttsttcapio a woman who lived with a man through a year without three nights' absence became the property (in manu) of the man.
Obligation was any compulsion by law to the performance of an act. It could arise by delict or by contract. Delicts or torts-noncontractual wrongs committed against a person or his property-were in many cases punished by an obligation to pay the injured person a sum of money in compensation. A contract ·was an agreement enforceable at law. It did not have to be written; indeed, until the second century A.D. the verbal agreement made by uttering the word spondeo "I promise"-before a witness was considered more sacred than any written com pact. The many witnesses and solemn ceremony once required for legal contract were no longer necessary; business was quickened by the legal recognition of any clear agreement-usually entries made by the parties in their account books (tabulae). But the law guarded transactions carefully: it warned the seller with a caveat venditor, as well as the buyer v..-ith a caveat emptor, against the myriad forms of cheating natural to civilized life. Any seller of slaves or cattle, for ex ample, was required by law to disclose their physical defects to the purchaser and was held accountable despite a plea of ignorance.25
Debt was contracted by loan, mortgage, deposit, or trust. Loans for consump tion were usually secured by a mortgage on realty or movable goods. A default in principal entitled the mortgagee to take over the property. In early republican law, as we have seen, such default permitted the lender to attach the person of the borrower asa bondsman.• The lex Poetelia (326 B.c.) modified this rule by allow ing the debtor to work off his obligation while retaining his freedom. After Caesar, defaulted mortgages were usually satisfied by the sale of the debtor's property without jeopardy to his person; but cases of enslavement to a creditor occur as late as Justinian. Commercial defaults were mitigated by a law of bank ruptcy which sold the bankrupt's property to pay his debts, but permitted him to keep as much of his later acquisitions as his subsistence required.
The chief crimes against property were damage, theft, and rapine-theft with violence. The Twelve Tables had condemned a detected thief to be flogged and then delivered as a bondsman to his victim; if the thief \Vas a slave he was to be scourged and flung from the T arpeian rock. Increased social security permitted praetorian law to soften these severities to a twofold, threefold, or fourfold restitution.26 In its final form the law of property was the most perfect part of the Roman code.
The mortgagor w:is in law bound (nexus) to the mortgagee; but the obscure term nexum
was apparently applied to any solemnly sworn obli!r-ltion.
CHAP. XVIII)	ROMAN  LAW
THE LA,V OF PROCEDURE
Of all ancient peoples the Romans ,vere the most prone to litigation, despite the discouraging complexity, technicality, and confusing fictions of their procedural law. Doubtless our own legal actions would have seemed to them equally devious and prolonged. The older the civilization, the longer the lawsuits. Any man, as noted above, could make himself a prosecutor in a Roman court. In the patrician Republic the accuser, the defendant, and the magistrate were required to follow a form called legis actio, or process of law, and the slightest deviation invalidated the action. "Thus," says Gaius, "a man who sued another for cutting his vines, and in his action called them 'vines,' lost his case because he should have called them 'trees,' since the Twelve Tables speak generally of trees, and not particularly of vines." 27 Each party deposited with the magistrate a sum of money (sacra mentum), which ,ns forfeited by the losing party to the state religion. The defendant also had to give bail (vad1111011ium) as security for his subsequent ap pearances. The magistrate then turned over the dispute to a person on the list of those qualified to act as judges. In some cases the judge issued an interim inter dictztm, requiring one or more of the parties in the case to perform or refrain from certain actions. If the defendant lost, his property-sometimes his person could be seized by the plaintiff until the judgment was satisfied.
About 150 B.C. the lex Aebutia abolished the necessity of using this ritual legis actio, and accepted in its place a procedure per formulam. Specific acts and words were no longer required; the parties shared with the magistrate in determining the form under which the matter was to be submitted to the judge; and the
magistrate then wrote to the judge an instruction (formula) on the factual and legal questions involved; it was partly in this way that the praetor, as magistrate, made "praetorian law." In the second century A.D. a third mode of action cognitio extraordinaria-came into use: the magistrate decided the case himself. By the end of the third century the formulary procedure had disappeared, and the summary judgment of a magistrate responsible only to the emperor, and usually owing his office to him, reflected the coming of absolute monarchy.
The litigants could conduct their case, and the praetor or judge decide it, without the help of lav,ryers if they wished; but as the iudex was not often a professional trained in the law, and the litigants might at every step stumble over a technicality, all parties to a dispute usually sought the aid of trial lawyers (advocati), leg:11 technicians (pragnzatici), consultants (iurisconsulti),or jurists (iurisprudentes). There was no lack oflegal talent, for every fond parent yearned tq see his son an advocate, and the law, then as now, was the vestibule to public office. A character in Petronius gives his son a collection of red-backed books (codices) "to learn a little law," as "it spells money." 28 A law student began by learning the elements from some
402	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVIII
private instructor; in his second stage he attended the consultations of eminent jurists; thereafter he apprenticed himself to a practicing la""Yer. Early in the second century A.D. certain iurisconsulti set up in various parts of Rome schools (stationes) at which they gave instruction or advice in the law; Ammianus complains of their high fees, saying that they charged even for their yawns and made matricide venial if the client paid enough.211 These teachers were called iuris civilis prof essores; apparently the title of
-professor came from the fact that they were required by law to declare (profiteri) their intention of teaching, and to secure a license therefor from the public authority.30
Out of the many la""Yers so trained there were inevitably some who sold their learning to sordid causes,31 accepted bribes to present their client's case weakly,32 found loopholes in the law for any crime, fomented disputes among rich men, dragged on suits to any lucrative length,33 and shook the courts or the Forum with their intimidating questioning and their vitupera tive summations. Forced to compete for cases, some lawyers sought to build a reputation by walking hurriedly through the streets with bundles of documents in their hands, borrowed rings on their fingers, dependents at tending them, and hired claqueurs to applaud their speech.34 So many ways had been found of circumventing the old Cincian law against fees that Claudius legalized them up to 10,000 sesterces per case; any fee above this figure was to be recoverable by law.35 This restriction was easily evaded, for we hear of a lawyer in Vespasian's reign amassing a fortune of 3 00,000,- 000 sesterces ($30,000,000).36 As in every generation, there were attorneys and judges whose clear and disciplined minds were at the service of truth and justice regardless of fee; and the lowest practitioners were redeemed by the great jurists whose names are the highest in the history of the law. Courts for the trial of offenders varied from the hearings held by indi vidual judges or magistrates to the assemblies, the Senate, and the emperor. Instead of a single judge the praetor might choose by lot (subject to a number of challenges by accuser and defendant) a jury of almost any size, usually fifty-one or seventy-five, from the 850 Senatorial or equestrian names on the jwy list. Two special courts were permanently maintained: the decemviri, or Ten Men, to try cases of civil status; and the centunwiri, or Hundred Men, to hear suits in property and bequest. The proceedings of these bodies were open to the public, for the younger Plinv describes the great crowd that came to hear him address the larger courr.37 Juvenal 38 and Apuleius 39 complain of judicial procrastination and venality, but their
very indignation suggests exceptional cases.
Trials were marked by a freedom of speech and action seldom known in modern courts. Several la"")7"ers might appear on each side; some specialized
CHAP. XVIII)	ROMAN  LAW
in preparing the evidence, some in presenting it. The proceedings were re corded by various clerks (notarii, actwrrii, scribae), and were sometimes taken down in shorthand; Martial says of certain scribes, "However fast the words may run, their hands are quicker still." 41 Plutarch tells how stenographers took down the speeches of Cicero, often to his discomfort. Witnesses were dealt with according to time-honored precedents. Says the exemplary Quintilian:
In the examination of a witness the first essential is to know his type. For a timid witness may be terrorized, a fool outwitted, an irascible man provoked, and vanity flattered. The shrewd and self possessed witness must be dismissed at once as malicious and obstinate; or ... if his past life admits of criticism, his credit may be over thrown by the scandalous charges that can be brought against him.42


313: Death of Alexander; Lamian War 311: Deaths of Aristotle, Demosthenes,
and Diogenes
CHAPTER  XIX
Philip
THE SPARTAN EMPIRE
PARTA now assumed for a spell the naval mastery of Greece, and offered to history another tragedy of success brought low by pride. Instead of the freedom which she had promised to the cities once subject to Athens, she levied upon them an annual tribute of a thousand talents ($6,000,000), and established in each of them an aristocratic rule con trolled by a Lacedaemonian harmost, or governor, and supported by a Spartan garrison. These governments, responsible only to the distant eph ors, practiced such corruption and tyranny that soon the new empire was
hated more intensely than the old.
In Sparta itself the influx of money and gifts from oppressed cities and obsequious oligarchs strengthened the internal forces that had long been leading to decay. By the fourth century the ruling caste had learned how to add private luxury to public simplicity, and even the ephors had ceased, except in outward show, to observe the Lycurgean discipline. Much of the land, by dowries and bequests. had fallen into the hands of women; and the wealth so accumulated gave to the Spartan ladies-free from the care of male children-an ease of life and morals hardly befitting their name.1 The repeated division of some estates had impoverished many families to a point where they could no longer contribute their quota to the public mess, and therefore lost the rights of citizenship; while the for mation of large properties through intermarriage and legacies had created in the few remaining "Equals" a provocative concentration of wealth.• "Some Spartans," Aristotle writes, "own domains of vast extent, the oth ers have ne rly nothing; all the land is in the hands of a few."" The dis franchised gentry, the exclud d Perioeci, and the resentful Helots made a population too restless and hostile to permit the government to engage, on any large scale of space or time, in those external military operations which imperial rule required.
Meanwhile civil war among the Persians was affecting the fortunes of
The homoioi, or Equals, numbered eight thousand in 480, two thousand in 371, seven hundred in 3-tr.1
459
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XIX
Greece. In 401 the younger Cyrus rebelled against his brother Artaxerxes II, enlisted Sparta's aid, and recruited an army from the thousands of Greek and other mercenaries left idle in Asia by the sudden termination of the Peloponnesian War. The two brothers met at Cunaxa, between the con verging Tigris and Euphrates; Cyrus was defeated and slain, and all of his army was captured or destroyed except a contingent of twelve thousand Greeks whose quickness of mind and foot enabled them to escape into the interior of Babylonia. Hunted by the King's forces, the Greeks chose, in their rough democratic way, three generals to lead them to safety. Among these was Xenophon, once a pupil of Socrates, now a young sol dier of fortune, destined to be remembered above all by the Anabasis, or Ascent, in which he later described with engaging simplicity the long "Re treat of the Ten Thousand" up along the Tigris and over the hills of Kur distan and Armenia to the Black Sea. It was one of the great adventures in human history. We are amazed at the inexhaustible courage of these Greeks, fighting their way on foot, day by day for five months, through two thousand miles of enemy country, across hot and foodless plains, and over perilous mountain passes covered with eight feet of snow, while armies and guerrilla bands attacked them in the rear and in front and on either flank, and hostile natives used every device to kill them, or mislead them, or bar their way. As we read this fascinating story, made so dull for us in youth by the compulsion to translate it, we perceive· that the most im portant weapon for an army is food, and that the skill of a commander lies as much in finding supplies as in organizing victory. More of these Greeks died from exposure and starvation than from battle, though the battles were as numerous as the days. When at last the 8600 survivors sighted the Euxine at Trapezus (Trebizond), their hearts overflowed.
As soon as the vanguard got to the top of the mountains, a great cry went up. And when Xenophon and the rear guard heard it they imagined that other enemies were attacking in front-for ene mies were following behind them.... They pushed ahead to lend aid, and in a moment they heard the soldiers shouting, "The sea! the sea!" and passing the word along. Then all the troops of the rear guard likewise broke into a run, and the pack animals began racing ahead. . . . And when all had reached the summit, then in deed they fell to embracing one another, and generals and captains as well, with tears in their eyes.•
For this was a Greek sea, and Trapezus a Greek city; they were safe now, and could rest without fear of death surprising them in the night. The
CHAP. XIX)	PHILIP
news of their exploit resounded proudly through old Hellas, and en couraged Philip, two generations later, to believe that a well-trained Greek force could be relied upon to defeat a Persian army many times its size. Unwittingly Xenophon opened the way for Alexander.
Perhaps this influence was already felt by Agesilaus, who in 399 had succeeded to the throne of Sparta. Persia might have been persuaded to overlook Sparta's aid to Cyrus. But to the ablest of the Spartan kings a war with Persia seemed only an interesting adventure, and he set out with a small force to free all Greek Asia from Persian rule.• When Artaxerxes II learned that Agesilaus was easily defeating all Persian troops sent against him, he dispatched messengers with abundant gold to Athens and Thebes to bribe these cities into declaring war upon Sparta." The effort readily succeeded, and after nine years of peace the conflict between Athens and Sparta was renewed. Agesilaus was recalled from Asia to meet, and barely defeat, the combined forces of Athens and Thebes at Coronea; but in the same month the united fleets of Athens and Persia under Conon destroyed the Spartan navy near Cnidus, and put an end to Sparta's brief domina tion of the seas. Athens rejoiced, and set to work energetically, with funds supplied by Persia, to rebuild her Long Walls. Sparta defended herself by sending an envoy, Antalcidas, to the Great King, offering to surrender the Greek cities of Asia to Persian rule if Persia would enforce among the mainland Greeks a peace that would protect Sparta. The Great King agreed, withdrew his financial support from Athens and Thebes, and com pelled all parties to sign at Sardis (387) the "Peace of Antalcidas," or the "King's Peace." Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros were conceded to Athens, and the major Greek states were guaranteed autonomy; but all the Greek cities of Asia, along with Cyprus, were declared the property of the King. Athens signed under protest, knowing that this was the most disgraceful event in Greek history. For a generation all the fruits of Marathon were lost; the Greek states of the mainland remained free in name, but in effect the power of Persia had engulfed them. All Greece looked upon Sparta as a traitor, and waited eagerly for some nation to destroy her.
EPAMINONDAS
As if to strengthen this feeling, Sparta assumed the authority to interpret and enforce the King's Peace among the Greek states. To weaken Thebes
"In what respect," he asked, "is the 'Great King' greater than I, unless he is more upright and self-restrained?""
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XIX
she insisted that the Boeotian Confederacy violated the autonomy clause of the treaty, and must be dissolved. With this excuse the Spartan army set up in many Boeotian cities oligarchic governments favorable to Sparta and in several cases upheld by Spartan garrisons. When Thebes protested, a Lacedaemonian force captured her citadel, the Cadmeia, and established an oligarchy subject to Spartan domination. The crisis aroused Thebes to unwonted heroism. Pelopidas and six companions assassinated the four "Laconizing" dictators of Thebes, and reasserted Theban liberty. The Confederacy was reorganized, and named Pelopidas its leader, or boeotarch. Pelopidas called to his aid his friend and lover Epaminondas, who trained and led the army that reduced Sparta to her ancient isolation.
Epaminondas camt: of a distinguished but impoverished family which proudly traced its origin to the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus a thousand years before. He was a quiet man, of whom it was said that no one talked less or knew more.1 His modesty and integrity, his almost ascetic life, his devotion to his friends, his prudence in counsel, his courage and yet self restraint in action, endeared him to all the Thebans despite the military discipline to which he subjected them. He did not love war, but he was convinced that no nation could lose all martial spirit and habits and yet maintain its freedom. Elected and many times re-elected boeotarch, he warned those who proposed to vote for him: "Bethink yourselves once more; for if I am made general you will be compelled to serve in my army."" Under his command the lax Thebans were drilled into good sol diers; even the "Greek lovers" who were so numerous in the city were formed by Pelopidas into a "Sacred Band" of three hundred hoplites, each of whom was pledged to stand by his friend, in battle, to the death.
When a Spartan army of ten thousand troops under King Cleombrotus invaded Boeotia, Epaminondas met it at Leuctra, near Plataea, with six thousand men, and won a victory that influenced the political history of Greece and the military methods of Europe. He was the first Hellene to make a careful study of tactics; he counted on facing odds in every battle, and concentrated his best fighters upon one wing for offense, while the remainder were ordered to follow a policy of defense; in this way the enemy, advancing in the center, could be disordered by a flank attack on its left. After Leuctra Epaminondas and Pelopidas marched into the Pelo ponnesus, freed Messenia from its century-long vassalage to Sparta, and founded the city of Megalopolis as a stronghold for all Arcadians. Even into Laconia the Theban army descended-an event without precedent for hundreds of years past. Sparta never recovered from her losses in this


t So named because addressed to the panegyris, or General Assembly (pan-agora) of the
Greeks, at the hundredth Olympiad.
CHAP. XX)   LETTERS AND ARTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY
while they view complacently the real sufferings, the many terrible sufferings, that result from our state of war; and they are so far from feeling pity that they even rejoice more in each other's sor rows than in their own blessings.8
If the Greeks must fight, why not fight a real enemy? Why not drive the Persians back to their plateau? A small detachment of Greeks, he prophesied, would defeat a large army of Persians.• Such a holy war might at last give unity to Greece; and t'.1e choice was between Greek unity or triumphant barbarism.
Two years a'ter publishing this appeal (378) lsocrates, turning theory into pracfr:e, toured the Aegean with his ex-pupil Timotheus, and helped to for mul::ite the terrr ; of the second Athenian Confederacy. The rise and fall of this ne,;- hope of u, .'.ty formed one more disappointment in his long life. In a brave
m.d vigorous pamphlet On the Peace he condemned Athens for again corrupt ing an allianct into an empire, and called upon her to sign a peace that would assure t;very Greek state against Athenian encroachments. "What we call em pire is in reality misfortune, for by its very nature it depraves all who have to do with it.""' Imperialism, he said, had ruined democracy by teaching Athenian& to live on foreign tribute; losing that, they now wished to live on state contri butions, and exalted to the highest offices those who promised them most.
Whenever you deliberate on the business of the state you dis trust and dislike men of superior intelligence, and cultivate in stead the most depraved of the orators who come before you; you prefer ...  those who are drunk to those who are sober, those who are witless to those who are wise, and those who dole out the public money to those who perform public services at their own expense.n
In his next address, the Areopagiticus, he spoke more leniently of democracy. "We sit around in our shops denouncing the present order," says a timeless pas sage, "but we perceive that even badly constituted democracies are responsible for fewer disasters than are oligarchies.,,,.. Had not Sparta made a worse mis tress for Greece than Athens had been?7and, "Have not we all of us, because of the madness of the Thirty, become greater enthusiasts for democracy than those who occupied Phyle?"•1a But Athens had ruined itself by carrying to excess the principles of liberty and equality, by "training the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and license to do what they pleased as hap piness."" All men are not equal, and should not be equally free to hold office. The institution of the lot, Isocrates felt, had lowered disastrously the level of Athenian statesmanship. Better than this "mob rule" was the "timocracy" of Solon and Cleisthenes; for then amiable ignorance and eloquent venality had
Tbrasybulus, Anytus, and the other restorers of democracy in 404.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	.  (CHAP.XX
less chance of being raised to leadership; able men rose naturally to the top, and the Areopagus, receiving them after their term of office, became auto matically the mature brain of the state.
In 346, when Athens came to terms with Philip, Isocrates, now ninety, ad dressed an open letter to the Macedonian King. He foresaw that Philip would make himself master of Greece, and begged him to use his power not as a ty rant, but as the unifier of autonomous Greek states in a war for the liberation of Greece from the King's Peace, and of Ionia from Persian rule. The war party denounced the letter as a surrender to despotism, and for seven years Isocrates held his pen. He spoke once more in 339, addressing his pamphlet to the Greeks who were gathering for the Panathenaic games. The Panathe naicus is a weak and prolix repetition of the Panegyricus; the style trembles in the old man's hand; but it is an astonishing performance for one who was only three years short of a century. Then in 338 came Chaeronea; Athens was de feated, but lsocrates' dream of a unified Greece was about to come true. A late Greek tradition says that when the news came he forgot about Philip and unity, and thought only of his native city humiliated, the days of her glory ended; and that, at the age of ninety-eight, having at last lived long enough, he starved himself to death.lll We do not know if this is true; but Aristotle tells us that within five days after Chaeronea, Isocrates was dead.
m. XENOPHON
The influence of "the old man eloquent"'" upon the statesmen of his time is open to doubt, but his influence upon letters was immediate and enduring.• It was felt first by the historians. Xenophon and others imitated his sketch of Evagoras,t and biography became a popular form of Greek literature, cul minating in the gossipy masterpieces of Plutarch. To one of his pupils, Ephorus of Cyme, Isocrates committed the t:rsk of writing a general history of Greece a record not of any one state, but of Greece as a whole. Ephorus carried out the assignment so well that his contemporaries ranked his Universal History with the books of Herodotus. To another pupil, Theopompus of Chios, lsocrates committed the field of recent events; Theopompus covered it in his Hellenica and Philippica, lively and rhetorical works highly praised by his contemporaries. About 340 Dicaearchus of Messana wrote a history of Greek civilization under the title of Bios Hellados-The Life of Greece; so ancient is our present enter prise, even, by chance, to its name.
Cicero, Milton, Massillon, Jeremy Taylor, and Edmund Burke formed their prose style upon the balanced clauses and long periods of Isocrates.
t The enlightened dictator who had imported Greek culture into Cyprus, 410-387.
CHAP. XX)  LETTERS AND ARTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY	489
The only one of the fourth-century historians who has survived is Xeno
phon. Diogenes Laertius describes him in his youth:
Xenophon was a man of great modesty, and as handsome as can be imagined. They say that Socrates met him in a narrow lane, and put his stick across it, and prevented him from passing by, asking where all kinds of necessary things were sold. And when Xenophon had answered him, he asked, again, where men were made good and virtuous. And as Xenophon did not know, Socrates said, "Follow me, then, and learn." And from that time forth Xenophon became a follower of Socrates."
He was among the more practical of Socrates' students. He liked his master's fascinating sleight-o'-mind, and loved him as a philosophic saint. But he enjoyed action as well as thought, and became a soldier of fortune while some other scholars, as Aristophanes disdainfully put it, were "meas uring the air."18 About the age of thirty he took service under the younger Cyrus, fought at Cunaxa, and led the Ten Thousand to safety. At Byzan tium he joined the Spartans in their war against Persia, captured a wealthy Mede, accepted a rich ransom for him, and lived on it for the rest of his life. He became a friend and admirer of the Spartan King Agesilaus, and made him the subject of a worshipful biography. Returning to Greece with Agesilaus after Athens had declared war upon Sparta, he chose to be loyal to him rather than to his city; whereupon Athens decreed him an exile, and confiscated his property. He fought on the side of the Lacedaemonians at Coronea, and received as a reward an estate at Scillus in Elis, then under Spartan domination. There he spent twenty years as a country gentle man, farming, hunting, writing, and bringing up his sons sternly on the Spartan plan.19
To his banishment we owe the varied works that lifted him to the front rank among the authors of his time. He wrote as his mood inclined him, about breaking in dogs, managing horses, training a wife, educating princes, fighting with Agesilaus, or raising revenues for Athens. In the Anabasis, with the fresh style of one who had seen or done the things he described, he told the thrilling (but quite uncorroborated) story of the Ten Thou sand's long trek to the sea. In the H ellenica he took up the history of Greece where Thucydides had left off, and brought it down to the battle of Mantinea, in which his own son Gryllus died fighting bravely after slay ing Epaminondas. The book is a dreary chronicle, in which history is con ceived as an endless chain of battles, a vain logic-chopping alternation of victory and defeat. The style is lively, the character sketches are vivid; but
49°	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE
the facts are judiciously hosen to prove the superiority of Spartan ways. Superstition, which disappeared from history in Thucydides, returns with Xenophon, and supernatural agency is invoked to explain the trajectory of events. With like simplicity or duplicity, the Memorabilia transforms Soc rates into a monster of perfection, orthodox in religion, in ethics, in gender less love, in everything except that scorn for democracy which particularly endeared him to the banished and Laconizing Xenophon. Still more unre liable is the Banquet, which reports conversations alleged to have occurred when Xenophon was a child.	•


AEGEAN  PRELUDE
3500-1000 B.C.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK I
Noms: All dates are approximate. Individuals are placed at their time of flourishing, which is assumed to be about forty years after their birth; their dates of birth and death, where possible, are given in the index. Dates of rulers are for their reigns. A question mark before an entry indicates a date given only by Greek uadition.
B.c. 9000: Neolithic Age in Crete
3400-3000: Early Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, I
3400-2100: Neolithic A!Je in Thessaly
3400-1200: Bronze Age 10 Crete
3000-26oo: Early Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, II
3000: Copper mined in Cyprus
2870: First known settlement at Troy
2600-2350: Early Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, III 2350-2rno: Middle Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, I 2200-1200: Bronze Age in Cyprus
2100-1950: Middle Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, II; first series of Cretan palaces
2100-1600: Chalcolithic Age in Thessaly
1950-1600: Middle Minoan, Helladic, Cycladic, III
1900: Desuuction of first series of Cre n palaces
16oo-1500: Late Minoan, Helladic (Mycenaean), Cycladic, I; second series of Cretan palaces
1600-1200: Bronze Age in Thessaly
1582: ? Foundation of Athens by Cecrops
1500-1400:  Late Minoan, Helladic (Mycenaean), Cycladic, II
1450-1400: Desuuction of second series of Cretan palaces
1433: ? Deucalion and the Flood
1400-1200: Late Minoan, Helladic (Mycenaean), Cycladic, III; palaces of Tiryns and Mycenae
1313: ? Foundation of Thebes by Cadmus
1300-1100: Age of Achaean domination in Greece


CHAP,XXVI)	BOOKS
Rhodes. He proved his courage by writing, in an age that preferred brevity, a very passable epic, the Argonautica. Callimachus dismissed it with an epigram "A big book is a big evil"-of whose truth the reader may find an instance at close hand. In the end Apollonius was rewarded; he received the coveted ap pointment of librarian, and even persuaded some of his contemporaries to read his epic. It still survives, and contains an excellent psychological study of Medea's love; but it is not indispensable to a modern education.•
The rise of pastoral poetry betrays almost statistically the growth of an urban civilization. The Greeks of earlier centuries had said little about the beauty of the countryside because most of them had once lived on farms or near them, and knew the lonely hardships, as well as the quiet beauty, of rural life. Doubtless the Alexandria of the Ptolemies was as hot and dusty as Alexandria is today, and the Greeks who lived in it looked back with idealizing memory upon the hills and fields of their motherland; the great city was just the place to breed bucolic poetry. Thither came, about 276, a confident young man with the pleasant name of Theocritus. He had begun life in Sicily, and had continued it in Cos; he had returned to Syracuse to seek the patronage of Hieron II, and had failed; but he could never forget the beauty of Sicily, its mountains and flowers, its coasts and bays. He moved to Alexandria, composed a panegyric on Ptolemy II, and won the passing favor of the court. For some years he seems to have lived amid royalty and scholarship, while his melodious pictures of coun try life made him popular among the sophisticates of the capital. His Praxinoa describes the terror of Alexandria's crowded streets:
0 Heavens, what a mob! I can't imagine
How we're to squeeze through, or how long it'll take;
An ant-heap is nothing to this hurly-burly ...
0 Gorgon, darling, look!-what shall we do? The royal cavalry! Don't ride us down! Eunoa, get out of the way!""
How could a man with the soul of a poet and memories of Sicily be happy in such an environment? He praised the King for bread, but fed his spirit on fancies of his native island, and perhaps of Cos; he envied the simple life of the shepherd pacing with his placid animals grassy slopes overlooking sunny seas. In this mood he perfected the idyl-the eidyllion or little picture-and gave it the connotation that it keeps today, of a rustic cameo or a poetic tale. Only ten of the thirty-two pieces that have come
Virgil copied it in form, sometimes in substance, sometimes line for line, in the Aeneid.•
610	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXVI
down to us from Theocritus are pastoral poetry; but these have set a half rural stamp· upon the name that covers them all. Here at last nature en tered Greek literature, not as a goddess merely, but as the living and lov able features of the earth. Never before had Greek literature conveyed so feelingly the secret sense of kinship that stirs the soul with gratitude and affection for rocks and streams, water and soil and sky.
But another theme reaches even more deeply into the heart of Theocritus
-romantic love. He is still a Greek, indites two lyrics (xii and xxix) to homosexual friendship, and tells with vivid sentiment the story of Heracles and Hylas (xiii)-how the giant, "who withstood the ferocity of the lion, loved a youth and taught him like a father everything by which he might become a good and illustrious man; nor would he leave the lad at dawn, or noon, or evening, but sought continually to fashion him after his own heart, and to make him a right yoke-fellow with him in mighty deeds." A more famous idyl (i) rehearses Stesichorus' tale of Daphnis the Sicilian shepherd, who piped and sang so well that legend made him the inventor of bucolic (i.e., cow-tending) poetry. For a while Daphnis watched his herd, and envied their amorous play. When the first hair had sprouted on his lip a divine nymph fell in love with him, and had him for her mate. But as the price of her favors, she made him swear that he would never love another woman. He tried hard to keep his vow, and succeeded till a king's daughter became enamored of his youth and gave herself to him in· the fields. Aphrodite saw it, and revenged her fellow goddess by making Daphnis waste away with unrequited love. As he died he bequeathed his pipe to Pan in a song to which the narrator adds a haunting refrain:
"Master, approach; take to thee this fair pipe Bedded in wax that breathes of honey still, Bound at the lips with twine. For Love has come To hale me off unto the house of Death."
Muses, forego, forego the pastoral song.
"Now let the briar and the thistle flower With violets, and the fair narcissus bloom On junipers; let all things go awry,
And pines grow pears, since Daphnis is for death. Let stags pursue the hounds, and from the hills The screeching owls outsing the nightingales."
Muses, forego, forego the pastoral song.
CHAP. XXVI)	BOOKS	611
So said he then-no more. And Aphrodite Was fain to raise him; but the Destinies
Had spun his thread right out. So Daphnis went Down-stream; the whirlpool closed above his head, The head of him whom all the Muses loved,
Of him from whom the Nymphs were not estranged.
Muses, forego, forego the pastoral song!'
The second idyl continues the theme of love, but in a fiercer mood. Simaetha, maid of Syracuse, seduced and deserted by Delphis, seeks to command his love by filters and charms; if she fails she is resolved to poison him. Standing under the stars she tells Selene, goddess of the moon, with what hot jealousy she saw Delphis walking with his comrade.
Scarce had we reached the midpoint.of the road by the dwelling of


having designed them, forgot them, and that Hieron, loving peace, never used them. Archimedes, says Plutarch,
possessed so high a spirit, so profound a soul, and such treasures of scientific knowledge, that though these inventions had now obtained for him the renown of more than human sagacity, he yet would not deign to leave behind him any writing on such subjects; but, repudi ating as sordid and ignoble ... every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit, he placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life-studies whose superiority to all others is unques tioned, and in which the only doubt can be whether the beauty and grandeur of the subjects examined, or the precision and cogency of the methods and means of proof, most deserve our admiration.11
But when Hieron was dead Syracuse became embroiled with Rome, and the doughty Marcellus assailed it by land and sea. Though Archimedes was now (212) a man of seventy-five, he superintended the defense on both fronts. Behind the walls that protected the harbor he set up catapults able to hurl heavy stones to a considerable distance; their rain of projectiles was so devastating that Marcellus retreated until he could advance by night. But when the ships were seen near the shore the sailors were harassed by bowmen who shot at them through the holes that Archimedes' aides had pierced in the wall. Moreover, the inventor had arranged within the waiis great cranes which, when the Roman vessels came within reach, were turned by cranks and pulleys so as to drop upon the ships heavy weights of stone or lead that sank many of them. Other cranes, armed with gigantic hooks, grasped vessels, lifted them into the air, dashed them against the rocks, or plunged them end-foremost into the sea.*" Marcellus withdrew his fleet, and put his hopes in an attack by land. But Archimedes bombarded the troops with large stones thrown by catapults to such effect that the Romans fled, saying that they were being opposed by gods; and they refused to ad vance again.1' "Such a great and marvelous thing," comments Polybius, "does the genius of one man show itself to be when properly applied. The Romans, strong both by sea and by land, had every hope of capturing the town at once if one old man of Syracuse were removed; as long as he was present they did not venture to attack."'"
Abandoning the idea of taking Syracuse by storm, Marcellus resigned
Lucian is our earliest, and not quite reliable, authority for the story that Archimedes set Roman ships on fire by concentrating the sun's rays up.'.'ln them through the use of great concave nurrors.11
CHAP.:xxvm)  TH   CLIMAX  OF GREEK  SCIENCE	633
himself to a slow blockade. After a siege of eight months the starving city surrendered. In the slaughter and pillage that followed Marcellus gave orders that Archimedes should not be injured. During the sack a Roman soldier came upon an aged Syracusan absorbed in studying figures that he had traced in the sand. The Roman commanded him to present himself at once to Marcellus. Archimedes refused to go until he had worked out his problem; he "earnestly besought the soldier," says Plutarch, "to wait a little while, that he might not leave what he was at work upon inconclusive and imperfect, but the soldier, nothing moved by this entreaty, instantly killed him.,,,. When Marcellus heard of it he mourned, and did everything in his power to console the relatives of the dead man.1' The Roman general erected to his memory a handsome tomb, on which was engraved, in ac cordance with the mathematician's expressed wish, a sphere within a cylin der; to have found formulas for the area and volume of these figures was, in Archimedes' view, the supreme achievement of his life. He was not far wrong; for to add one significant proposition to geometry is of greater value to humanity than to besiege or defend a city. We must rank Archi medes with Newton, and credit him with "a sum of mathematical achieve ment unsurpassed by any·one man in the world's history.'na
But for the abundance and cheapness of slaves Archimedes might have been the head of a veritable Industrial Revolution. A treatise on Mechanical Problems wrongly attributed to Aristotle, and a Treatise on Weights wr _mgly ascribed to Euclid, had laid down certain elementary principles of statics and dynamics a century before Archimedes. Strato of Lampsacus, who succeeded Theophrastus as head of the Lyceum, turned his deter ministic materialism to physics, and (about 280) formulated the doctrine that ''nature abhors a vacuum."'" When he added that "a vacuum can be created by artificial means," he opened the way to a thousand inventions. Ctesibius of Alexandria (ca. 200) studied the physics of siphons (which had been used in Egypt as far back as 1 500 B.c.), ana developed the force pump, the hydraulic organ, and the hydraulic clock. Archimedes probably impr6ved-and unwittingly gave his name to-the ancient Egyptian water screw, which literally made water flow uphill."° Philon of Byzantium, about 150, invented pneumatic machines, and various engines of war."' The steam engine of Heron of Alexandria, which came after the Roman con quest of Greece, brought this period of mechanical development to a climax and close. The philosophical tradition was too strong; Greek thought went back to theory, and Greek industry contented itself with slaves. TM
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXVIII
Greeks were acquainted with the magnet, and the electrical properties of amber, but they saw no industrial possibilities in these curious phenomena. Antiquity unconsciously decided that it was not worth while to be modem.
Ill. ARISTARCHUS, HIPPARCHUS, ERATOSTHENES
Greek mathematics owed its Hellenistic stimulus and blossoming to Egypt, Greek astronomy to Babylon. Alexander's opening of the East led to a resumption and extension of that trade in ideas which, three centuries earlier, had assisted at the birth of Greek science in Ionia. To this fresh contact with Egypt and the Near East we may ascribe the anomaly of Greek science reaching its height in the Hellenistic age, when Greek litera ture and art were in decline.
Aristarchus of Samos was a bright interregnum in the rule of the geo centric theory over Greek astronomy. He burned with such zeal that he studied almost all its branches, and achieved distinction in many of them.29 In his only extant treatise, On the Sizes tmd Disttmces of the Sun and the Moon,* there is no hint of heliocentricism; on the contrary it assumes that the sun and the moon move in circles about the earth. But Archimedes' Sand-Reckoner explicitly credits Aristarchus with the "hypothesis that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved; the earth revolves about the sun in the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit";"' and Plutarch reports that Cleanthes the Stoic held that Aristarchus should be indicted for "putting the Hearth of the Universe" (i.e., the earth) "in motion.".. Seleucus of Seleucia defended the heliocentric view, but the opinion of the Greek scientific world decided against it. Aristarchus himself seems to have abandoned his hypothesis when he failed to reconcile it with the supposedly circular movements of the heavenly bodies; for all Greek astronomers took it for granted that these orbits were circular. Perhaps a distaste for hemlock moved Aristarchus to be the Galileo as well as the Copernicus of the ancient world.
It was the misfortune of Hellenistic science that the greatest of Greek
astronomers attacked the heliocentric theory with arguments that seemed
Aristarchus estimated the volume of the sun as three hundred (it is over a million) times that of the earth-an estimate that seems low to us, but would have astonished Anaxagoras or Epicurus. He calculated the diameter of the moon as one mird that of the earth-an error of eight per cent-and our distance from the sun as twenty (it is almost four hundred) times our distance from the moon. "When the sun is totally eclipsed,'' reads one proposition, "the sun and the moon are then comprehended by one and the same cone, which has iai vertex at our eye.-
CHAP.XXVIII)  THE  CLIMAX OF GREEK SCIENCE
irrefutable before Copernicus. Hipparchus of Nicaea (in Bithynia), despite what seems to us an epoch-making blunder, was a scientist of the highest type-endlessly curious to know, devotedly patient in research, and so carefully accurate in observation and report that antiquity called him "the lover of truth.,,.. He touched and adorned nearly every field of astrono my, and fixed its conclusions for seventeen centuries. Only one of his many works remains-a commentary on the Phainomena of Eudoxus and Aratus of Soli; but we know him from Claudius Ptolemy's Almagest (ca. A.D. 140), which is based upon his researches and calculations; "Ptolemaic astronomy" should be called Hipparchian. He improved, probably on Babylonian models, the astrolabes and quadrants that were the chief astronomical instru ments of his time. He invented the method of determining terrestrial posi tions by lines of latitude and longitude, and tried to organize the astrono mers of the Mediterranean world to make observations and measurements that would fix in these terms the location of all important cities; political disturbances frustrated the plan until Ptolemy's more orderly age. His mathematical studies of astronomic relations led Hipparchus to formulate a table of sines, and thereby to create the science of trigonometry. Helped, no doubt, by the cuneiform records which had been brought from Baby
lonia, he determined with approximate accuracy the length of the solar, lunar, and sidereal years. He reckoned the solar year as 365¼ days minus
4 minutes and 48 seconds-an error of 6 minutes according to current calcu lations. His time for a mean lunar month was 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 2 ½ seconds-less than a second away from the accepted figure." He computed, with impressive approximation to modern measurements, the synodic periods of the planets, the obliquity of the ecliptic and of the moon's orbit, the apogee of the sun, and the horizontal parallax of the moon."" He estimated the distance of the moon from the earth as 250,000 miles-an error of only five per cent.
Armed with all this knowledge, Hipparchus concluded that the geocen tric view better explained the data than did the hypothesis of Aristarchus; the heliocentric theory could not stand mathematical analysis except by supposing an elliptical orbit for the earth, and this supposition was so un congenial to Greek thought that even Aristarchus does not appear to have considered it. Hipparchus verged upon it by his theory of "eccentrics," which accounted for the apparent irregularities in the orbital velocities of the sun and the moon by suggesting that the centers of the solar and lunar orbits were slighd-y to one side of the earth. So near did Hipparchus come
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXVIII
to being the greatest theorist, as well as the greatest observer, among ancient astronomers.
Watching the sky night after night, Hipparchus was surprised one eve ning by the appearance of a star where he was sure there had been none before. To certify later changes he made, about 129 B.c., a catalogue, a map, and a globe of the heavens, giving the positions of 1080 fixed stars in terms of celestial latitude and longitude-an immense boon to subsequent students of the sky. Comparing his chart with that which Timochares had made 166 years before, Hipparchus calculated that the stars had shifted their apparent position some two degrees in the interval. On this basis he made the subtlest of his discoveries*-the precession of the equinoxes-the slight advance, day by day, of the moment when the equinoctial points
come to the meridian.t He calculated the precession as thirty-six seconds