and voluble Greeks; the Greek language was more often heard there than the Latin; if one wished to be read by all classes he had to write in Greek. Nearly all the early Christians in Rome spoke Greek; so did the Syrians, the Egyptians, and the Jews. A large colony of Egyptians-traders, artisans, artists-lived in the Field of Mars. Syrians, thin, affable, shrewd, were every where in the capital, busy with trade, handicrafts, secretarial work, finance, and chicanery.
The Jews were already in Caesar's time a substantial element in the popu lation of the capital. A few had come as early as 140 B.c.;13 many had been brought to Rome as war captives after Pompey's campaign of 63 B.C. They were rapidly emancipated, partly by their industry and thrift, panly be cause their strict adherence to their religious customs was inconvenient for their masters. By 59 B.c. there were so many Jewish citizens in the assem blies that Cicero represented opposition to them as political temerity.14 In general the republican party was hostile to the Jews, the populares and the emperors were friendly.15 * By the end of the first century they numbered some 20,000 in the capital.18 They lived mostly on the west side of the Tiber, where they suffered periodically from the floods. They worked on the near-by docks, engaged in handicrafts and retail business, and peddled goods through the city. There were some rich men among them, but only a few great merchants; Syrians and Greeks dominated international commerce. Synagogues were numerous in Rome, and each had its school, its scribes, and its gerousia, or senate of elders.19 The separatism of the Jews, their scorn of polytheism and image worship, the severity of their morals, their refusal to attend the theaters or the games, their strange customs and cere monies, their poverty and resultant uncleanliness, led to the usual racial antagonisms. Juvenal denounced their fertility, Tacitus their monotheism, Ammianus Marcellinus their fondness for garlic.20 Bad feeling was heightened by the bloody capture of Jerusalem, and the procession of Jewish captives and sacred spoils featured in the triumph of Titus and in the reliefs on his arch. Vespasian heaped insult upon injury by ordering that the half shekel paid annually by the Jews of the Dispersion for the upkeep of the Temple at Jerusalem should henceforth be contributed yearly to the rebuilding of
They supponed Caesar consistently and were in turn protected by him. Augustus followed smt; but Tiberius, hostile to all foreign faiths, corujcripted 4000 of them for almost suicidal soldiering in Sardinia, aTid expelled the rest from Rome (A.D. 19).16 Twelve years later, con Yinced that he had been misled in this matter by Sejanus, he withdrew his edict and ordered that the Jews should be unmolested in the practice of their religion and the pursuit of their customs.17 Caligula protected them in Rome and oppressed them abroad. Claudius exiled some because of riots, but by a general edict (4z) confirmed the right of the Jews throughout the Empire to live by their own laws. In 9-f Domitian banished the Jev;s of Rome to the valley of Ege a; in C}6 Nerva brought rliem back, restored their civic rights, and allowed rliem a gen erauon of peace.
366	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XVII
Rome. Nevertheless, many educated Romans admired Jewish monotheism; some were convened to Judaism, and several, even of high family, observed. the Jewish Sabbath as a day of worship and rest.21
If we add to the Greeks, the Syrians, the Egyptians, and the Jews some Numidians, Nubians, and Ethiopians from Africa; a few Arabs, Parthians, Cappadocians, Armenians, Phrygians, and Bithynians from Asia; powerful "barbarians" from Dalmatia, Thrace, Dacia, and Germany; mustachioed nobles from Gaul, poets and peasants from Spain, and "tattooed savages from Britain" 22-we get an ethnic picture of a very heterogeneous and cosmopolitan Rome. Martial marveled at the pliable facility with which the courtesans of Rome readjusted their language and their charms to so varied and polyglot a clientele.23 Juvenal complained that the Orontes, Syria's great river, was flowing into the Tiber,24 and Tacitus described the capital as "the cesspool of the world." 25 Oriental faces, ways, dress, words, gestures, quar rels, ideas, and faiths made up a great part of the city's seething life. By the third century the government would be an Oriental monarchy; by the fourth the religion of Rome would be an Oriental creed, and the masters of the world would kneel to the god of the slaves.
There were elements of nobility in this motley crowd. It showed its con
tempt of Nero's mistress Poppaea when angry senators dared not speak, and it stormed the senate house to protest the wholesale slaughter of Pedanius Secundus' slaves.26 The simple virtues of the common man were not wanting in it; the family life of the Jews was exemplary, and the little Christian com munities were troubling the pleasure-mad pagan world with their piety and their decency. But most of the inflowing peoples had literally been demor alized by uprootage from their native surroundings, cultures, and moral codes; years of slavery had destroyed in them that self-respect which is the backbone of upright conduct; and daily friction with groups of different customs had worn away still more of their custom-made morality. If Rome had not engulfed so many men of alien blood in so brief a time, if she had passed all these newcomers through her schools instead of her slums, if she had treated them as men with a hundred potential excellences, if she had occasionally closed her gates to let assimiliation catch up with infiltration, she might have gained new racial and literary vitality from the infusion, and might have remained a Roman Rome, the voice and citadel of the West. The task was too great. The victorious city was doomed by the vastness and diversity of her conquests, her native blood was diluted in the ocean of her subjects, her educated classes were drawn down by the power of numbers to the culture of those who had been her slaves. Much breeding overcame good breeding; the fertile conquered became masters in the sterile master's house.
CHAP. XVII)	EPICUREAN   ROME
EDUCATION
We do not know much of Roman childhood, but we can judge from Roman art and epitaphs that when children came they were loved not wisely but too well. Juvenal interrupts his wrath to write a tender passage on the good examples we must place before our children's eyes, the evil sights and sounds we must keep from them, the respect that we should show them even in the excesses of our love.27 Favorinus, in a discourse premimicking Rousseau, begged mothers to nurse their babes.28 Seneca and Plutarch spoke to the same effect, which was slight indeed; wet-nursing was the rule in all families that could afford it, with no evident tragedies ensuing.•
Early education came from the nurse, who was usually Greek. There were fairy tales beginning, "Once upon a time a king and a queen . . ." Primary schooling was still entrusted to private enterprise. Rich men often hired tutors for their children, but Quintilian, like Emerson, warned against this as depriving the child of formative friendships and stimulating rivalries. Ordinarily the boy and girl of the free classes entered at the age of seven an elementary school, accom panied each way by a paedagogus ("child-leader") to guard his safety and his morals. Such schools existed everywhere in the Empire, even in small country towns; the wall scribblings at Pompeii suggest a general literacy, and probably education was then as widespread in the Mediterranean world as at any time be fore or since. Both the paedagogus and the teacher (Judi magister, "schoolmas ter") were usually Greek freedmen or slaves. In Horace's youth and native town
each pupil paid the teacher eight asses (forty-eight cents) monthly; 30 350 years later Diocletian fixed the maximum fee for the elementary teacher at fifty denarii ($20) per month per pupil; we may judge from this the rise of the teacher and the fall of the as.
About the age of thirteen the successful student, of either sex, was graduated into a secondary or high school; Rome had twenty of these in A.D. 1 30. Here the scholars studied more grammar, the Greek language, Latin and Greek litera ture, music, astronomy, history, mythology, and philosophy, generally through lecture-commentaries on the classic poets. Up to this point the girls seem to have taken the same courses as the boys, but they often sought additional instruc tion in music and dancing. Since the secondary teachers (grammatici) were nearly always Greek freedmen, they naturally emphasized Greek literature and history; Roman culture took on a Greek tint, until by the end of the second century almost all higher education was given in Greek, and Latin literature was swallowed up in the general Hellenic koine and culture of the age.
The Roman equivalent of our college and university education was provided in the schools of the rhetcrs. The Empire bristled with rhetoricians who spoke
Toys and games were much as today. Roman children played hopscotch, tug-of-war, pitch and toss, !:ilindman's buff, hide-and-seek; and with dolls, hoops, skipping ropes, hobbyhorses, and kites. Roman youth played five distinguishable games of ball. One resembled our football, except that (or in that) it was played rather with arms and hands than with legs and feet.29
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XVII
for their clients in court, or wrote speeches for them, or gave public lectures, or taught their art to pupils, or did all four. Many of them traveled from city to city, speaking on literature, philosophy, or politics, and giving exhibitions of how to handle any subject with oratorical skill. The younger Pliny tells of the Greek Isaeus, then sixty-three years old:
He proposes several questions for discussion, gives his audience liberty to call for any they please, and sometimes even to say what side of it he should defend; whereupon he rises, dons his gown, -.ind begins.... Hientroduces his theme with great propriety, his narrative is clear, his controversy ingenious, his logic forcible, and his rhetoric sublime.31
Such men might open a school, employ assistants, and gather a large student body. Pupils entered about their sixteenth year, and paid fees as high as 2000 sesterces per course. The chief subjects were oratory, geometry, astronomy, and philosophy-which included much that is now termed science. These con stituted a "liberal education"-i.e., one designed for a well-to-do freeman (homo liber), who would presumably have no physical \\'Ork to perform. Petronius complained, as every generation does, that education unfitted youth for the problems of maturity: "The schools are to blame for the gross foolishness of our young men, since in them they see or hear nothing at all of the affairs of everyday life." 32 We can only say that they gave the assiduous student that clarity and quickness of thought which have distinguished the legal profession in all ages, and that capacity for unscrupulous eloquence which marked the orators of Rome. Apparently no degrees were granted in these schools. The student might stay as long, and take as many courses, as he liked; Aulus Gellius remained till he was twenty-five. \Vomen also attended, some after marriage. Those who wished further instruction went to Athens for philosophy at its bubbling source, to Alexandria for medicine, or to Rhodes for the last subtleties of rhetoric. Cicero spent $4000 a year maintaining his son in the university of Athens.
By Vespasian's time the schools of rhetoric had so grown in number and influence that the wily Emperor thought it advisable to bring the more important ones in the capital under governmental control by paying their head professors a state salary-the highest being 100,000 sesterces (S10,000) a year. \Ve do not know to how many teachers or cities Vespasian e 1:ended this subsidy. We hear of private endowments for higher education, such as the younger Pliny estab lished at Comum.33 Trajan provided scholarships for 5000 boys who had less money than brains. By the reign of Hadrian goYemmental financing of secondary schools had been adopted in many municipalities throughout the Empire, and a pension fund had been set as:de for retired teachers. Hadrian and Antoninus exempted the leading professors of each city from taxation and other civic burdens. Education r ached its height while superstition grew, morals declined, and literature decayed.
FIG. 20-Portrait of a Y ozmg Girl
1\foseo delle Terme, Rome
......
;t	-


Animula vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quae nunc abibis in Ioca, Pallidula, rigida, nudula, Nee ut soles dabis iocos?
Soul of mine, pretty one, flitting one, Guest and panner of my clay, vVhither wilt thou hie away
Pallid one, rigid one, naked one,
Never to play again, never to play?33
ANTONINUS PIUS
Of Antoninus there is no history, for he had almost no faults and com mitted no rimes_. His ancestors had come_ fro:11 Nimes two generations be fore, and his family was one f the wealthies m Rome. Reaching the throne at fifty-one, he gave the Empire the most eqmtable, and not the least efficient, government it would ever have.
He was the most fortunate man that ever wore a crown. \Ve are told that he was tall and handsome, healthy and serene, gentle and resolute, modest and
CHAP.X"IX)	THE  PHILOSOPHER  KINGS
omnipotent, eloquent and a despiser of rhetoric, popular and immune to flat tery. If we are.to believe his adopted son Marcus we should have to reject him as "that faultless monster whom the world ne'er knew." The Senate called him Pius as a model of the milder Roman virtues, and Optimus Princeps as the best of princes. He had no enemies and hundreds of friends. But he was not unacquainted with grief. His elder daughter died as he was setting out as proconsul to Asia; his younger daughter proved a dubious wife to Aurelius; and scandal accused his own wife of being as faithless as she was beautiful. Antoninus bore these rumors silently; and after Faustina's death he established in her name and honor a fund for the support and education of girls and raised to her memory one of the loveliest temples in the Forum. He did not marry again, lest he mar the happiness and inheritance of his children, but contented himself with a concubine.
He was not a man of intellect in the narrower sense of that term. He had no learning and looked with an aristocrat's indulgence upon men of letters, philosophy, or art; nevertheless, he helped such men richly and invited them often to his home. He preferred religion to philosophy, worshiped the old gods with apparent sincerity, and gave his adopted sons an example of piety that Marcus never forgot. "Do everything as a disciple of Antoninus," Marcus bade himself; "remember his constancy in every reasonable act, his evenness in all things, his piety, and the serenity of his countenance, and his disregard of empty fame ... with how little he was satisfied; how laborious and patient, how religious without superstition." 34 Yet he was tolerant of non-Roman creeds, moderated Hadrian's measures against the Jews, and continued his predecessor's lenience toward the Christians. He was no kill joy; he loved a jest and made many a good one; he played, fished, and hunted with his friends, and from his behavior none could have guessed that he was emperor. He preferred the quiet of his villa at Lanuvium to the luxury of his official palace and nearly always spent the evenings in the intimacy of his family. \Vhen he inherited the throne he put aside all thought of that careless ease to which he had looked forward as the consolation of old age. Perceiving that his wife anticipated increased splendor he reproved her: "Do you not understand that we have now lost what we had before?" 35 He knew that he had succeeded to the cares of the world.
He began his reign by pouring his immense personal fortune into the imperial treasury. He canceled arrears of taxes, made gifts of money to the citizens, paid for many festival games, and relieved scarcities of wine, oil, and wheat by buying these and distributing them free. He carried on, but with moderation, the building program of Hadrian in Italy and the prov inces. Yet he managed the national finances so ably that at his death the
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIX
combined treasuries of the state had 2,700,000,000 sesterces. He gave a public accounting of all his receipts and expenditures. He behaved toward the Senate as merely one of it and never took important measures without consulting its leaders. He devoted himself to the chores of administration as well as to problems of policy; "he cared for all men and all things as his own." 36 He continued Hadrian's liberalization of the law, equalized the penalties of adultery for men and women, deprived ruthless masters of their slaves, restricted the torture of slaves ia trials, and decreed severe punish ment for any owner who killed a slave. He encouraged education with state funds, provided for the education of poor children, and extended to recog nized teachers and philosophers many privileges of the Senatorial class.
He ruled the provinces as well as he could without traveling. In all his long reign he was never absent for a day from Rome or its environs. He was con tent to appoint to provincial governorships men of tried competence and honor. He was anxious to keep the Empire safe without war; "he was con tinually quoting the saying of Scipio, that he would rather save a single citizen than slay a thousand foes." 37 He had to wage some minor wars in order to suppress revolts in Dacia, Achaea, and Egypt, but he left these tasks to subordinates and was satisfied with Hadrian's cautious frontiers. Some tribes in Germany interpreted his mildness as weakness and perhaps were encouraged by it to prepare those invasions which rocked the Empire after his death; this is the one flaw in his statesmanship. For the rest the provinces were happy under him and accepted the Empire as the only alternative to chaos and strife. They showered him with petitions, which he almost always granted; and they could rely upon him to repair the ravages of any public calamity. Provincial authors-Strabo, Philo, Plutarch, Appian, Epictetus, Aelius Aristides-sang the praises of the pax Romana; and Appian assures us that he had seen at Rome the envoys of foreign states vainly asking admission for their countries to the boons of the Roman yoke.38 Never had monarchy left men so free, or so respected the rights of its subjects.39 "The world's ideal seemed to have been attained. \Visdom reigned, and for twenty-three years the world was governed by a father." 40
It only remained for Antoninus to crown a good life with a peaceful death. In his seventy-fourth year he fell sick of a stomach disturbance and was seized with a high fever. He called .Marcus Aurelius to his bedside and com mitted to him the care of the state. He instructed his servants to transfer to Marcus' room the golden statue of Fortuna that had for many years stood in the bedchamber of the Prince. To the officer of the day he gave as watch word aequani111itas; soon afterward he turned as if to sleep, and died (161). All classes and cities vied with one another in honoring his memory.
CHAP. XIX)	THE	PHILOSOPHER   KINGS
THE PHILOSOPHER AS EMPEROR
Antoninus, said Renan, "would have been without competition for the reputation of being the best of sovereigns, had he not designated Marcus Aurelius as his heir." 41 "If," said Gibbon, "a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Aure lius. Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government." 42
Marcus Annius Verus was born in Rome in 121. TheAnnii had come a century before from Succubo, near Cordova; there, it seems, their honesty had won them the cognomen V erus, "true." Three months after the boy's birth his father died, and he was taken into the home of his rich grandfather, then consul. Hadrian was a frequent visitor there; he took a fancy to the boy and saw in him the stuff of kings. Seldom has any lad had so propitious a youth, or so keenly appreciated his good fortune. "To the gods," he wrote fifty years later, "I am indebted for having good grandparents, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good";43 time struck a balance by giving him a questionable wife and a worthless son. His Meditations lists the virtues these people had, and the lessons he received from them in modestr., patience, manliness, abstemious ness, piety, benevolence, and "a simplicity of life far removed from the habits of the rich"44-though wealth surrounded him on every side.
Never was a boy so persistently educated. He was attached in boyhood to the service of temples and priests; he committed to memory every word of the ancient and unintelligible liturgy; and though philosophy later shook his faith, it never diminished his sedulous performance of the old exacting ritual. Marcus liked games and sports, even bird snaring and hunting, and some efforts were made to train his body as well as his mind and character. But seventeen tutors in childhood are a heavy handicap. Four grammarians, four rhetors, one jurist, and eight philosophers divided his soul among them. The most famous of these teachers was M. Cornelius Fronto, who taught him rhetoric. Though J\1arcus loved him, lavished upon him all the kindnesses of an affectionate and royal pupil, and exchanged with him letters of intimate charm, the youth turned his back upon oratory as a vain and dishonest art, and abandoned himself to philosophy.
He thanks his instructors for sparing him logic and astrology, thanks Diognetus the Stoic for freeing him from superstition, Junius Rusticus for acquainting him with Epictetus, and Sextus of Chaeronea for teaching him
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIX
to live in conformity with nature. He is grateful to his brother Severus for telling him about Brutus, Cato of Utica, Thrasea, and Helvidius; "from him I received the idea of a state in which there is the same law for all, a polity of equal rights and freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government that most of all respects the freedom of the governed";45 here the Stoic ideal of monarchy takes possession of the throne. He thanks Maximus for teaching him "self-government, and not to be led aside by anything; cheerfulness in all circumstances, and a just admixture of gentleness and dignity, and to do appointed tasks without complaining." 46 lt is clear that the leading philoso phers of the time were priests without religion rather than metaphysicians without life. Marcus took them so seriously that for a time he almost ruined a naturally weak constitution with ascetic devotions. At the age of twelve he took on the rude cloak of a philosopher, slept on a little straw strewn over the floor, and long resisted the entreaties of his mother to use a couch. He was a Stoic before he became a man. He offers thanks "that I preserved the flower of my youth; that I took not upon me to be a man before my time, but rather put it off longer than I needed . . . that I never had to do with Benedicta . . . and afterwards, when I fell into some fits of love, I was soon cured." 47
Two influences diverted him from professional philosophy and sanctity. One was the succession of minor political offices to which he was appointed; the realism of an administrator was crossed with the idealism of a meditative youth. The other was his close association with Antoninus Pius. He did not fret at Antoninus' longevity, but continued his life of stoic simplicity, philosophical study, and official duties, while living in the palace and serving his protracted apprenticeship; and the example of his adoptive father's devo tion and honesty in government became a powerful influence in his develop ment. The name by which we know him, Aurelius, was the clan name of Antoninus, which both Marcus and Lucius, on their adoption, had taken as their own. Lucius became a gay man of the world, a graceful adept in the pleasures of life. When, in 146, Pius desired a colleague to share the govern ment with him, he named Marcus only and left to Lucius the empire of love. On the death of Antoninus, Marcus became sole emperor; but remember ing Hadrian's wish, he at once made Lucius Verus his full colleague and gave him his daughter Lucilla in marriage. At the outset of his reign, as at the end, the philosopher erred through kindness. The division of rule was a bad precedent, which, in the heirs of Diocletian and Constantine, would divide and weaken the realm.
Marcus asked the Senate to vote Pius diyine honors, completed with perfect taste the temple that Pius had raised to his wife, and rededicated it


318	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIV
He writes with unmanly ven cfulness of the women who have refused him, and flings his epigrammatic mud at them with the delicacy of a scavenger. His love lyrics are iddressed to boys; he climbs to ecstasy over the fragrance of "thy kisses, cruel lad." 133 One of his love poems begot a famous English counterpart:
I do not 10\·e you, Sabidius, the reason I cannot tell; This only I can say-I dislike you very well.•
Indeed there are many whom Martial does not like. He describes them under transparent pseudonyms and in language that can be found today only on the most private public walls.135 He is always libeling his enemies, as Statius is always celebrating his friends. Some of his victims retaliated by publishing under his name poems filthier than his own, or attacking the men whom Mar tial ,vas anxious to please. From these technically perfect epigrams one could construct a full vocabulary of barroom urology.
But Martial's obscenity sits on him lightly. He shares it with his time, and never doubts that even highborn maidens in palace bowers will like it. "Lucretia blushed and laid down my volume, but Brutus was present. Brutus, go away; she will read it." 136 The poetic license of the age allowed in decencies-, provided the meter and diction were correct. Sometimes Martial boasts of his lubricity; "no page of mine is without wantonness." 137 More often he is a bit ashamed of it, and begs us to believe that his life is cleaner than his verse.
At last he tired of purveying compliments and insults as a source of food; he began to long for a quieter, wholesomer life, and the haunts of his native Spain. He was now fifty-seven, with gray head and bushy beard, so swarthy that anyone, he tells us, could see at a glance that he had been born near the Tagus. He addressed a poetical bouquet to the younger Pliny and received in return a sum that paid his fare to Bilbilis. The little town welcomed him, forgiving his morals for his fame; he found simpler patrons there, but more open-handed than those at Rome. A kindly lady presented him with a modest villa, and there he spent his few remaining years. In Io r Pliny wrote: "I have just heard of Martial's death. The news has deeply grieved me. He was a man of wit, piquant and mordant, who mixed in his verse salt and honey, and rot least of all, candor." 138 There must have been some secret virtue in the man if Pliny loved him.
	Non amo te, Sabidi, nee possum dicere quare; Hoc canrum possum dicere, non amo te.134
CHAPTER XV
Rome at Work
AD. 14-96
mE  SOWERS
O the Silver Age belongs the classic Roman work on agriculture-the De Re Rustica (65) of Junius Columella. Like Quintilian, Martial, and the Senecas, he came from Spain; he farmed several estates in Italy and retired to a residence in Rome. The best lands, he found, were taken up by the villas and grounds of the rich; the next best by olive orchards and vineyards; only inferior soils were left for tillage. "\Ve have abandoned the husbanding of our soil to our lowest slaves, and they treat it like barbarians." The freemen of Italy, he thought, were degenerating in cities when they should have been hardening themselves by working the earth; "we ply our hands in circuses and theaters rather than among crops and vines." Columella loved the soil, and felt that the physical culture of the earth is saner than the literary culture of the town; farm ing "is a blood relative of wisdom" ( consanguine a sapientiae). To lure men back to the fields he adorned his subject with polished Latin, and when he came to speak
of gardens and flowers he fell into enthusiastic verse.
It was in this period that Pliny the naturalist pronounced a premature epitaph: latifundia perdidere ltaliam-"the large farms have ruined Italy." Similar judg ments occur in Seneca, Lucan, Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal. Seneca described cattle ranches wider than kingdoms, cultivated by fet ered slaves; some estates were so large, said Columella, that their masters could never ride around them.1 Pliny mentions an estate with 4117 slaves, 7200 oxen, and 257,000 other animals.2 Land distributions by the Gracchi, Caesar, and Augustus had raised the number of small holdings, but many of these had been abandoned during the ,vars and bought in by the rich. When imperial administration reduced plunder in the provinces, much patrician wealth went into large farms. The latifundia spread because greater profits flowed from producing cattle, oil, and ,vine than from growing cereals and vegetables, and the discovery that ranching, to be most profitable, required the operation of large areas under one management. By the close of the first Christian century these advantages were being offset by the rising cost of slaves and their slow and uninventive work.3 The long transition now began from slavery to serfdom. As peace diminished the flow of war cap tives into bondage, some owners of large estates, instead of operating them with slaves, divided them into small holdings and leased these to free tenants (coloni,
319
320	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XV
cultivators) who paid in rent and labor. Most of the ager publicus belonging to the government was now worked in this way. So were_ the extensive properties of the younger Pliny, who describes his tenants as healthy, sturdy, good-natured, talkative peasants-precisely such as one finds throughout Italy today, unchanged after all changes.
The modes and tools of tillage were essentially as they had been for centuries. Plow, spade, hoe, pick, pitchfork, scythe, rake, have preserved their forms almost unaltered for 3000 years. Com was ground in mills turned by water or by beasts. Screw pumps and water wheels raised water out of mines or into irrigation canals. Soils were protected by crop rotation, and fertilized by manure, alfalfa, clover, rye, or beans.4 Seed selection was highly developed. Skillful care drew three, sometimes four, harvests per year from the rich fields of the Campagna and the valley of the Po;5 from one planting of alfalfa four to six crops could be cut yearly for ten years.6 All but the rarest European vegetables were grown, some of them in greenhouses for the winter trade. Fruit and nut trees of every sort abounded, for Roman generals and merchants, and alien merchants and slaves, had brought in many new species: the peach from Persia, the apricot from Ar menia, the cherry from Pantie Cerasus (whence its name), the grape from Syria, the damson (pruna damascena) from Damascus, the plum and filbert from Asia Minor, the walnut from Greece, the olive and fig from Africa	Clever
arboriculturists had grafted the walnut upon the arbutus, the plum upon the plane tree, the cherry upon the elm. Pliny enumerates twenty-nine varieties of figs grown in ltaly.7 "Through the zeal of our farmers," said Columella, "Italy has learned to produce the fruits of almost the whole world." 8 In tum it trans mitted these arts to western and northern Europe. Our rich dietary has a wide geography and a long history behind it, and the very food that we eat may be part of our Oriental and classical heritage.
Olive orchards were numerous, but vineyards were everywhere, beautifully terraced on the slopes. Italy produced fifty famous kinds of wine, and Rome alone drank 25,000,000 gallons per year-two quarts per week for each man, woman, and child, slave or free. Most wines were produced by capitalistic organization by large-scale operations financed from Rome.9 Much of the product was ex ported and taught the graces of wine to beer-drinking countries like Germany and Gaul. During this first century Spain, Africa, and Gaul began to grow their own grapes; Italian vintners Jost one provincial outlet after another, and glutted their domestic market in one of the few "overproduction" crises of Roman econ omy. Domitian tried to ease the situation, and restore cereal culture, by prohibit ing the further plantings of vines in Italy and ordering half of all vineyards in the provinces destroyed.10 These edicts aroused a fury of protest and could not be enforced. In the second century the wines of Gaul and the oil of Spain, Africa, and the East began to crowd Italian products out of Mediterranean markets, and the economic decline of Italy began.
A large part of the peninsula was given over to grazing. The cheapest soils and
CHAP. XV)	ROME  AT  WORK	321
slaves could be used for the raising of cattle, sheep, and swine. Careful attention was paid to scientific breeding. Horses were bred chiefly for war, hunting, and sport, seldom as draft animals; oxen drew the plow and the cart, mules bore burdens on their backs. Cows, sheep, and goats gave three kinds of milk, from which the Italian made delectable cheeses then as now. Swine were herded in woods rich with acorns and nuts; Rome, said Strabo, lived chiefly on pork fat tened in the oak forests of northern Italy. Poultry fertilized the farmyard and helped feed the family, while bees provided the ancient and honorable substitute for sugar. If we add some acres of flax and hemp, a little hunting and much fish ing, we get a picture of the Italian countryside as it was nineteen hundred years ago, and is today.
THE ARTISANS
There was not in Roman life-and perhaps there would not be in a healthy economy-so geographical a division between agriculture and industry as in our modern states. The ancient rural home-cottage, villa, or estate-was literally a manufactory, where the hands of men carried on a dozen vital industries, and the skill of women filled the house and its environs with a score of wholesome arts. There the woods were turned into shelter, fuel, and furniture, cattle were slain and dressed, grain was milled and baked, oil and wine were pressed, food was prepared and preserved, wool and flax were cleaned and woven; sometimes clay was fired into vessels, bricks, and tiles, and metal was beaten into tools; life there had an educative fullness and variety that come to few of us in our time of wider movement and narrowing specialties. Nor was this diversity of occupation the sign of a poor and primitive economy; the wealthiest households were the most self-sufficient, and prided themselves on making the largest part of what they needed. A family was an organization of economic helpmate:; engaged in the united agriculture and industry of a home.


\Vhen this burned down after he had occupied it for twenty-eight years, he built his new palace on the plan of the old, and slept in the same narrow cubiculu111 as before. £yen when away from the eyes of the city he lived like a philosopher rather than a prince. His sole indulgence was to escape from public affairs by sailing leisurely along the Campanian coast.
Step by step he persuaded, or graciously permitted, the Senate and the assemblies to grant him powers that in their total made him in ali but name a king. He kept always the title of imperator, as commander in chief of all the armed forces of the state. As the army remained for the most part out side the capital and usually outside Italy, the citizens could forget, while they went through all the forms of the dead Republic, that they were living under a military monarchy in which force was hidden so long as phrases could rule. Octavian was chosen consul in 43 and 3 3, and in every year from 3 r to 2 3. By the tribunician authority conferred upon him in 36, 3o, and 2 3, he had for life the inviolability of a tribune, the right to initiate legislation in the Senate or the Assembly, and the power to veto the actions of any official in 'the government. No one protested against this amiable dictatorship. The businessmen who were making hay under the sun of peace, the senators who sniffed Octavian's Egyptian spoils, the soldiers who held their lands or status by his bounty, the beneficiaries of Caesar's laws, appointments, and will all were now agreed with Homer that the rule of one man is best, at least if
214	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XI
he should be so free with his funds as Octavian, so industrious and competent, and so visibly devoted to the good of the state.
In 2 8, as co-censor with Agrippa, he took a census of the people, revised the membership of the Senate, reduced it to 600, and was himself named permanently princeps senatus. The title had meant "first on the roll call of the Senate"; soon it would mean "prince" in the sense of ruler, just as imperator, through Octavian's life tenure of the name, would come to mean "emperor." History rightly calls his government, and that of his successors for two centuries, a "principate" rather than strictly a monarchy; for until the death of Commodus all the "emperors" recognized, at least in theory, that they were only the leaders (principes) of the Senate. To make the constitutional fa9ade of his authority more imposing, Octavian in 27 sur rendered all his offices, proclaimed the restoration of the Republic, and ex pressed his desire (at thirty-five) to retire to private life. Perhaps the drama had been arranged; Octavian was one of those cautious men who believe that honesty is the best policy, but that it must be practiced with discrimina tion. The Senate countered his abdication with its own, returned to him nearly all his powers, implored him to continue his guidance of the state, and conferred upon him the title of Augustus which history has mistaken as his name. Hitheno the word had been applied only to holy objects and places, and to cenain creative or augmenting divinities (augere, to increase); applied to Octavian it clothed him with a halo of sanctity, and the protection of religion and the gods.
The people of Rome seem to have thought for a while that the "restoration'' was real, and that they were receiving back the Republic in return for an ad jective. Did not the Senate and the assemblies still make the laws, still elect the magistrates? It was so; Augustus or his agents merely "proposed" the laws and "nominated" the more important candidates. As imperator and consul he ruled the army and the Treasury and administered the laws; and by his tribunician privileges he controlled all other activities of the government. His powers were not much greater than those of Pericles or Pompey, or any energetic American president; the difference lay in their permanence. In 2 3 he resigned the consulate, but received from the Senat a "proconsular authority" that gave him control of all officials in all provinces. Again no one objected; on the contrary, when a scarcity of grain threatened, the people besieged the Senate with derilands that Augustus be made dictator. They had fared so ill under the Senatorial oligarchy that they were inclined toward a dictatorship, which would presumably cultivate their favor as a foil to the power of wealth. Augustus refused; but he took charge of the annona, or food supply, quickly ended the shortage, and earned such gratitude that Rome looked on with complacency as he remolded its institutions in his image.
CHAP. XI)	AUGUSTAN  STATESMANSHIP	215
II. THE1'."EW ORDER
Let us study this principate government in some detail, for in many ways it was one of the subtlest political achievements in history.
The powers of the prince were at once legislative, executive, and judicial: he could propose laws or decrees to assemblies or Senate, he could administer and enforce them, he could interpret them, he could penalize their viola tion. Augustus, says Suetonius, regularly sat as a judge, sometimes till night fall, "having a litter placed upon the tribunal if he was indisposed.	He
was highly conscientious and very lenient." 1 Bearing the duties of so many offices, Augustus organized an informal cabinet of counselors like Maecenas, executives like Agrippa, generals like Tiberius, and an incipient clerical and administrative bureaucracy chiefly composed of his freedmen and slaves.
Caius Maecenas was a wealthy businessman who devoted half his life to helping Augustus in war and peace, in politics and diplomacy, at last, un willingly, in love. His palace on the Esquiline was famous for its gardens and its swimming pool of heated water. His enemies described him as an effeminate epicurean, for he flaunted silks and gems and knew all the lore of a Roman gourmet. He enjoyed and generously patronized literature and art, restored Virgil's farm to him and gave another to Horace, inspired the Georgics and the Odes. He refused public office, though he might have had almost any; he labored for years m··er principles and details of administration and foreign policy; he had the courage to reprove Augustus when he thought him seriously wrong; and when he died (8 B.c.) the Prince mourned his loss as beyond repair.
Perhaps it was on his advice that Augustus-himself of middle-class origin, and free from the aristocrat's contempt of trade-named so many businessmen to high administrative posts, even to provincial governorships. To a Senate offended by this innovation he made amends by many obeisances, by giving exceptional powers to Senatorial commissions, and by gathering about him a conci/ium prin cipis of some twenty men, nearly all senators. In the course of time the decisions of this council acquired the force of senct11sconsulta, or decrees of the Senate; its powers and functions grew as those of the Senate waned. However he might lavish courtesies upon it, the S:nate was merelv his hio-hest instrument. As censor he four times revised its membership; he could, and did, eject individuals from it for official incompetence or private immorality; most of its new members were nominated by him; and the quaestors, praetors, and consuls who entered it after their term of office had been chosen bv him or with his consent. The richest businessmen of Italy were enrolled in the" Senate, and the two orders were in some measure brought together in that concordia of united domination which
216	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XI
Cicero had proposed. The power of wealth checked the pride and privilege of birth, and an hereditary aristocracy checked the abuses and irresponsibility of wealth.
At the suggestion of Augustus the meetings of the Senate were confined to the first and fifteenth of each month and usually lasted but a day. As the princeps senatus presided, no measure could be submitted without his consent; and in fact all measures presented had been prepared by himself or his aides. The judicial and executive functions of the Senate now outweighed its lawmaking. It served as a supreme court, governed Italy through commissions, and directed the per formance of various public works. It ruled those provinces which required no extensive military control, but foreign relations were now controlled by the Prince. Shorn in this way of its ancient authority, the Senate grew negligent in even its limited functions, and yielded ever more responsibility to the Emperor and his staff.
The assemblies still met, though with decreasing frequency; they still voted, but only on measures or nominations approved by the Prince. The right of the plebs to hold office was practically ended in 18 B.c. by a law restricting office to men having a fortune of 400,000 sesterces ($60,000) or more.2 Augustus ran for the consulate thirteen times and canvassed for votes like the rest; it was a gracious concession to dramatic technique. Corruption was hindered by requiring every candic;late to deposit, before election, a financial guarantee that he would ab stain from bribery.3 Augustus himself, however, once distributed a thousand sesterces to each voting member of his tribe to make sure that its vote would be correct.4 Tribunes and consuls continued to be elected till the fifth century A.D.; 11 but as their major powers had fallen to the Prince, these offices were ad ministrative rather than executive and finally became mere dignities. The aetual government of Rome was placed by Augustus in the hands of salaried regional officials, equipped with a force of 3000 police under a praef ectus urbi, or munic ipal police commissioner. Further to assure order of the desired kind, and sup port his own power, Augusrus, seriously violating precedent, kept six cohorts of a thousand soldiers each near Rome and three cohorts within it. These nine cohorts became the Praetorian Guard-i.e., guard of the praetorimn, or head quarters of the commander in chief. It was this body that in A.D. 41 made Claudius emperor and began the subjection of the government to the army.
From Rome the administrative care of Augustus passed to Italy and the provinces. He conferred Roman citizenship, or the limited franchise of "Latin rights," upon all Italian communities that had borne their share in the war against Egypt. He helped the Italian cities with gifts, embellished them with new build ings, and devised a plan whereby their local councilors might vote by mail in the assembly elections at Rome. He divided the provinces into two classes: those that required active defense, and those that did not. The latter (Sicily, Baetica, Narbonese Gaul, Macedonia, Achaea, Asia Minor, Bithynia, Pontus, Cyprus, Crete and Cyrene, and north Africa) he allowed the Senate to rule; the others
-"imperial provinces"-were governed by his own legates, procurators, or pre-
CHAP. XI)	AUGUSTAN  STATESMANSHIP	217
fects. This pleasant arrangement allowed him to keep control of the army, which was mostly quarte.ted m the "endangered" provinces; it gave him the lush revenue of Egypt; and it enabled him to keep an eye on the Senatorial governors through the procurators whom he appointed to collect the tribute in all the provinces. Each governor now received a fixed salary, so that his tempta tion to mulct his subjects was moderately reduced; furthermore, a body of civil servants provided a continuing administration and a check upon the malfeasance of their temporary superiors. The kinglets of client states were treated with wise courtesy and gave Augustus full allegiance. He persuaded most of them to send their sons to live in his palace and receive a Roman education; by this generous arrangement the youths served as hostages until their accession, and then as un witting vehicles of Romanization.
In the flush aftermath of Actium, and possessed of an enormous army and navy, Augustus apparently planned to extend the Empire to the Atlantic, the Sahara, the Euphrates, the Black Sea, the Danube, and the Elbe; the pax Romana was to be maintained not by passive defense but by an aggres sive policy on every frontier. The Emperor in person completed the conquest of Spain and so ably reorganized the administration of Gaul that it remained at peace for nearly a century. In the case of Parthia he contented himself with the return of the standards and surviving captives taken from Crassus in 53; but he restored to the throne of Armenia a Tigranes favorable to Rome. He sent abortive expeditions to conquer Ethiopia and Arabia. In the decade from 19 to 9 B.c. his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus subjugated Illyria, Pannonia, and Raetia. Agreeably provoked by German invasions of Gaul, Augustus ordered Drusus to cross the Rhine, and rejoiced to learn that the brilliant youth had fought his way to the Elbe. But Drusus suffered internal injuries from a fall, lingered in pain for thirty days, and died. Tiberius, who loved Drusus with all the intensity of a restrained but passionate nature, rode
400  miles on horseback from Gaul into Germany to hold his brother in his
arms in the final hours; then he conveyed the body to Rome, walking before the cortege all the way (9 B.c.). Returning to Germany, Tiberius in two campaigns (8-7 B.c., A.D. 4-5) forced the submission of the tribes between the Elbe and the Rhine.
Two disasters, coming almost together, changed this fever of expansion into a policy of peace. In A.D. 6 the lately won provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia revolted, massacred all the Romans in their territory, organized an army of 200,000 men, and threatened to invade Italy. Tiberius quickly made peace with the German tribes and led his depleted forces into Pan nonia. \Vith patient and ruthless strategy he captured or destroyed the crops that could supply the enemy, and by guerrilla warfare prevented new plantings, while he saw to it that his own troops were well fed. For three


Antony was one half of what Caesar had been, as Augustus would be the other half; Antony was a good general, Augustus a superlative statesman; neither would be both. Born in 82 B.c., Antony had spent a large part of his life in camps and more in the quest of wine, women, good food, and fun. Though of high lineage and handsome features, he had the characteristic vir tues of the common man: strength of body, animal spirits, good nature, gen erosity, courage, and loyalty. He had scandalized even Caesar by keeping a harem of both sexes in Rome, and traveling with a Greek courtesan in his lit ter.1 He had bought in Pompey's house at auction, occupied it, and then re-
200	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.X
fused payment.2 Now he found in Caesar's papers, or (some said) placed there, whatever it suited him to find-appointmentsfor his friends, decrees for his purposes, perquisites for himself; in two weeks' time he had paid off
$1,500,000 in debts and had become a rich man. He seized the $25,000,000 that Caesar had deposited in the Temple of Ops and took another $5,000,000 from Caesar's private treasury. Noting that Decimus Brutus, whom Caesar had appointed governor of Cisalpine Gaul, had assumed that lucrative office despite sharing in the assassination of Caesar, Antony passed through the Assembly a bill giving himself that strategic province and consoling Decimus with Macedonia. Likewise Marcus Brutus and Cassius were to surrender Macedonia to Decimus and Syria to Dolabella, and were to content them selves with sharing Cyrene anJ Crete.
Alarmed by Antony's spreading power, the Senate invited to Rome, as a foil to him, Caesar's adopted son. Caius Octavius, who was to make himself the greatest statesman in Roman history, was eighteen years old in 44. By natural custom he took his adoptive father's name; adding his own as a modifier, he became Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, until, seventeen years later, he received that lofty name of Augustus by which the centuries have known him. His grandmother was Caesar's sister Julia; his grandfather had been a banker of plebeian stock at Velitrae, in Latium; his father had served as plebeian aedile, then praetor, then governor of Macedonia. The boy was trained to Spartan simplicity, and educated in the literature and philosophy of Greece and Rome. In the last three years he had lived a good part of the time in Caesar's palace. It was one of the sorrows of Caesar's life that he had no legitimate son and one of his profoundest insights that he adopted Oc tavius. He took the boy with him to Spain in 45 and was pleased to see the courage with which the frail and nervous invalid endured the perils and hard ships of the campaign. He had him carefully instructed in the arts of war and govemment.3 Many statues have made his features familiar: refined, deli cate, serious, at once diffident and resolute, yielding and tenacious; an idealist forced to be a realist, a man of thought painfully learning to be a man of action. He was thin and pale and suffered from a poor digestion. He ate little, drank less, and outlived the strong men around him by abstinence a d the regularity of his life.
Late in March of 44 a freedman arrived at Apollonia, in Illyria, where
Octavian was stationed with the army, and brought the news of Caesar's death and will. The sensitive youth was horrified at men's ingratitude; all his love for the great-uncle who had so cherished him, and had worked so feverishly to rebuild a shattered state, welled up in him and filled him with a silent resolve to complete the labors of Caesar and avenge his death. He rode down to the sea, crossed to Brundisiurn, and hastened to Rome. His
CHAP. X)	ANTONY	201
relatives there advised him to stay in hiding lest Antony destroy him; his mother likewise recommended inaction; but when he scorned such a course she rejoiced, merely suggesting that whenever possible he should use pa tience and subtlety rather than open war. He followed this wise counsel to the end.
He visited Antony and inquired what was being done against Caesar's enemies. He was shocked to find Antony busy planning to lead an army against Decimus Brutus, who had refused to surrender Cisalpine Gaul. He asked Antony to disburse Caesar's legacies according to will, especially the forty-five dollars bequeathed to every citizen. Antony saw many reasons for delay. Octavian thereupon distributed the money to Caesar's veterans out of funds borrowed by him from Caesar's friends, and with this approach, organized his own army.
Infuriated by the insolence of this "boy," as he called him, Antony an nounced that an attempt had been made upon his life and that the would-be assassin had named Octavian as the instigator of his plan. Octavian protested his innocence. Cicero took advantage of the quarrel to persuade him that Antony was a ruffian, who must be defeated. Octavian agreed, joined his two legions with those of the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, and marched with them northward to battle Antony. Cicero lent this new civil war the aid of his invective in fourteen powerful "Philippics" against the public policy and private life of Antony, some delivered to the Senate or the Assembly, the rest published as propaganda broadcasts in the best tradition of martial blackening. In the ensuing engagement at Mutina (Modena), Antony lost and fled (44); but Hirtius and Pansa fell, and Octavian returned to Rome sole commander of the Senate's legions as well as his own. vVith this force behind him he compelled the Senate to name him consul, to repeal its amnesty to the conspirators, and to sentence them all to death. Discovering that Cicero and the Senate were now his enemies, and were merely using him as a temporary tool against Antony, he composed his differences with An tony and formed with him and Lepidus the Second Triumvirate (43-33). Their combined armies marched into Rome and took it without resist ance. Many of the senators and conservatives fled to south Italy and the provinces. The Assembly ratified the Triumvirate and gave it full power for five years.
To pay their troops, replenish their coffers, and revenge Caesar, the three men now let loose the bloodiest reign of terror in Roman history. They listed 3oo senators and 2000 businessmen for execution, and offered 2 5 ,ooo drachmas ($1 5 ,ooo) to any freeman, and 10,000 to any slave, who would bring in the head of a person proscribed.4 To have money became a capital crime; children to whom fortunes had been left were condemned and killed;
202	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.X
widows were shorn of their legacies; 1400 rich women were required to turn over a large share of their property to the Triumvirs; at last even the savings deposited with the Vestal Virgins were seized. Atticus was spared because he had helped Antony's wife Fulvia; while acknowledging the courtesy, he sent great sums to Brutus and Cassius. The Triumvirs set their soldiers to guard all exits from the city. The proscribed hid in wells, sewers, attics, chimneys. Some died resisting, some submitted quietly to their slay ers; some starved, hanged, or drowned themselves; some leaped from a roof or into a fire; some were killed by mistake; some, not proscribed, committed suicide on the bodies of slain relatives. Salvius the tribune, knowing him self doomed, gave a last feast to his friends; the emissaries of the Triumvirs entered, cut off his head, left his body at the table, and bade the feast go on. Slaves took the opportunity to get rid of hard masters, but many fought to the death to protect their owners; one disguised himself as his master and suffered decapitation in his stead. Sons died to protect their fathers, others betrayed their fathers to inherit a part of their fortunes. Adulterers or de ceived wives surrendered their husbands. The wife of Coponius secured his safety by sleeping with Antony. Antony's wife Fulvia had tried to buy the mansion of her neighbor Rufus; he had refused to sell; now, though he of fered it to her as a gift, she had him proscribed and nailed his severed head to his front door/1
Antony placed Cicero high on the list of those who should be killed. Antony was the husband of Clodius' widow and the stepson of the Cata linarian Lentulus whom Cicero had slain in jail; and he resented with some reason the unstinted vituperation of the "Philippics." Octavian protested, but not too long; he could not forget Cicero's glorification of Caesar's assas sins and the pun by which that reckless wit had excused to the conservatives his dalliance with Caesar's heir.* Cicero tried to escape; but being buffeted and sickened by the sea, he disembarked and spent the night in his villa at Formiae. The next day he wished to stay there and await his executioners, preferring them to a choppy sea; but his slaves forced him into a litter and were carrying him toward the ship when Antony's soldiers came upon them. The servants wished to resist, but Cicero bade them set the litter down and yield. Then, "his person covered with dust, his beard and hair untrimmed, and his face worn with his troubles,"• he stretched his head out so that the soldiers might more conveniently decapitate him (43). By Antony's com mand Cicero's right hand was also cut off and brought with the he;d to the Triumvir. Antony laughed in triumph, gave the assassins 250,000 drachmas, and had head and hand hung up in the Forum.8
Cicero ad said of Octavian: laud fzmz adolescentem, ornandum, tollendzmz-"the boy
is to be pr:used, decorated, and exalted ; but tollendum also meant "to be killed." 6
CHAP.X)	ANTONY	203
Early in 42 the Triumvirs led their forces across the Adriatic and marched through .Macedonia into Thrace. There Brutus and Cassius had massed the last republican army, financed by exactions beyond even Roman precedent. Fram the Eastern cities of the Empire they demanded, and received, ten years' taxes in advance. \\Then the Rhodians _proved reluctant, Cassius stormed the great port, ordered all citizens to surrender their wealth, killed those who hesitated, and carried away $10,000,000. In Cilicia he quartered hissoldiers in the homes of Tarsus till it paid him $9,000,000 to leave; to raise this sum the citizens auctioned off all municipal lands, melted down all tem ple vessels and ornaments, and sold free persons into slavery-first boys and girls, then women and old men, finally youths; many, on learning that they had been sold, killed themselves. In Judea Cassius levied $4,200,000 and sold the inhabitants of four towns into slavery. Brutus, too, could raise money by force. \Vhen the citizens of Lycian Xanthus refused his demands, he besieged them until, starving but obdurate, they committed suicide en masse.9 For the most part Brutus, loving philosophy, tarried in Athens; but the city was filling with young Roman nobles clamoring for a war of restoration.
\Vhen sufficient funds had been raised Brutus closed his books, joined his troops with those of Cassius, and took the field.
The rival armies met at Philippi in September of 42. Brutus' wing forced back Octavian's and captured his camp; but Antony's routed the legions of Cassius. Cassius ordered his shield-bearer to kill him and was obeyed. Antony could not follow up his success at once; Octavian was confined to his tent with illness, and his troops were in disorder. Antony reorganized the whole army and after a few days' rest led them against Brutus and put the last remnants of the republican forces to flight. Seeing his men yield, Brutus realized, perhaps with relief, that all was lost; he threw himself upon the sword of a friend and died. Antony, coming upon the body, covered it with his own purple robe. They had once been friends.
ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA
The old aristocracy fought its last land battle at Philippi. Many of them
-Cato's son, Hortensius' son, Quintilius Varus, and Quintus Labeo-joined Brutus and Cassius in suicide. The victors divided the Empire between them: Lepidus was given Africa, Octavian took the West, Antony, having his choice, took Egypt, Greece, and the East. Always needing money, Antony forgave the Eastern cities their contributions to his enemies on condition that they give him a like sum-ten years' taxes within a year. His old geniality returned as victory made him seemingly secure. He reduced
204	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. X


his demands upon the Ephesians when their women, dressed as Bacchantes, greeted him as the god Dionysus; but he gave his cook the house of a Mag nesian magnate as reward for a distinguished supper. He called an assembly of the Ionian cities at Ephesus and settled the boundaries and affairs of these states with such good judgment that Augustus a decade later found little to change. He pardoned all who had fought against him except those who had shared in killing Caesar. He gave relief to the cities that had suffered most severely from Cassius and Brutus, released several of them from every Roman tax, freed many who had been sold into slavery by the conspirators, and liberated the cities of Syria from the despots who had overthrown their democracies.10
While displaying these graces of his simple character, Antony surren dered to such exuberant sensuality that his subjects lost respect for his authority. He surrounded himself with dancers, musicians, courtesans, and roisterers, and took wives and concubines whenever a fair woman struck his Olympian fancy. He had sent messengers to bid Cleopatra present herself before him at Tarsus and answer charges that she had aided Cassius to raise money and troops. She came, but in her own time and way. While Antony sat on a throne in the forum, waiting for her to plead and be judged, she sailed up the river Cydnus in a barge with purple sails, gilded stern, and silver oars that beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. Her maids, dressed as sea nymphs and graces, were the crew, while she herself, dressed as Venus, lay under a canopy of cloth of gold. When the news of this seductive apparition spread among the people of Tarsus they flocked to the shore, leaving Antony solitary on his throne. Cleopatra invited him to dine with her on her ship. He came with an overawing retinue; she feted them with every luxury, and corrupted his generals with gifts and smiles. Antony had almost fallen in love with her as a girl in Alexandria; now he found her, at twenty-nine, in the full maturity of her charms. He began by reproving her, and ended by presenting her with Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, Cyprus, and parts of Arabia, Cilicia, and Judea.11 She rewarded him accord ing to his desire and invited him to Alexandria. There he spent a carefree winter (41-40), drinking the Queen's love, listening to lectures at the Museum, and forgetting that he had an empire to rule. She herself was not in love. She knew that Egypt, rich but weak, would soon attract the cu pidity of omnipotent Rome; the only salvation for her country and her throne lay in marriage with Rome's lord. She had sought this with Caesar; she sought it now with Antony. And he, who had no policy but Caesar's, was tempted to realize the dream of uniting Rome and Egypt and making his capital in the fascinating East.	·
While Antony frolicked in Alexandria, his wife Fulvia and his brother
CHAP. X)	ANTONY	205
Lucius were plotting to overthrow Octavian's power in Rome. Octavian had found no happiness there: the Senate was a rump of adventurers and generals, labor was restless with unemployment, the populares were dis organized, Sextus Pompey was blocking the import of food, business was petrified with fear, taxation and spoliation had ruined nearly every fortune, and many men were living in a reckless and sensual riot on the ground that the morrow might in any case bring repudiation of the currency, or further spoliation, or death. Octavian himself was anything but an exemplar of chastity at this time. To perfect the confusion, Fulvia and Lucius raised an army and called upon Italy to oust him. Marcus Agrippa, Octavian's general, besieged Lucius in Perusia and starved him out (March, 40). Fulvia died of illness, frustrated ambition, and grief over Antony's neglect of her. Octavian pardoned Lucius in the hope of maintaining peace with Antony, but Antony crossed the sea and besieged Octavian's troops in Brundisium. The armies,showing more sense than their leaders,refused to fight each other, and compelled them to a peaceable agreement {40). As a pledge of good behavior Antony married Octavian's sister, the gentle and virtuous Octavia. Everybody was briefly happy; and Virgil, writing now his Fourth Eclogue, predicted the return of Satum's utopian reign.
In 38 Octavian fell in love with Livia, the pregnant wife of Tiberius
Claudius Nero. He divorced his first wife Scribonia, persuaded Nero to release Livia, married her, and found, in her persuasive counsel and her aristocratic connections as a member of the Claudian gens, a passage to rec onciliation with the propertied classes. He reduced taxes, returned 30,000 runaway slaves to their masters, and set himself patiently to restoring order in Italy."\Vith the help of Agrippa, and of 1 20 ships contributed by Antony, he destroyed the fleet of Sextus Pompey, secured Rome's food supply, and ended the resistance of the Pompeians {36). The Senate by acclamation named him tribune for life.
After marrying Octavia in a state ceremony at Rome, Antony went with her to Athens. There for a time he enjoyed the novel experience of living with a good woman. He put aside politics and war and, with Octavia at his side, attended the lectures of philosophers. Meanwhile, however, he studied the plans that Caesar had left for conquering Parthia. Labienus, son of Caesar's general, had entered the services of the Parthian king and had led Parthian armies victoriously into Cilicia and Syria-lucrative provinces of Rome (40). To meet this threat Antony needed soldiers; to pay soldiers he needed money; and of this Cleopatra had plenty. Suddenly tiring of virtue and peace, he sent Octavia back to Rome and asked Cleopatra to meet him at Antioch. She brought him a few troops, but she disapproved of his gran diose plans and apparently gave him little of her fabulous treasury. He
206	CAESAR  AN-D  CHRIST	(CHAP. X
invaded Parthia with 100,000 men (36), tried in vain to capture its citadels, and lost ahnost half his forces in a heroic retreat through 300 miles of hostile country. On the way he annexed Armenia to the Empire. He awarded him self a triumph and shocked Italy by celebrating it at Alexandria. He sent a letter of divorce to Octavia (32), married Cleopatra, confirmed her and Caesarian as joint rulers of Egypt and Cyprus, and bequeathed the Eastern provinces of the Empire to the son and daughter that Cleopatra had borne him. Knowing that he would soon have to square accounts with Octavian, he abandoned himself to a year of frolic and luxury. Cleopatra encouraged him to dare the last gamble for omnipotence, helped him to raise an army and a fleet, and chose as her favorite oath, "As surely as I shall one day give judg ment in the Capitol."13
ANTONY AND OCTAVIAN
Octavia bore her rejection silently, lived quietly in Antony's house at Rome, and brought up faithfully his children by Fulvia and the two daugh ters that she herself had given him. The daily sight of her mute desolation inflamed Octavian's conviction that both Italy and he were doomed if An tony's plans succeeded. He saw to it that Italy should realize the situation: Antony had married the Queen of Egypt, had assigned to her and her illep.-iti mate offspring the most tribute-yielding of Rome's provinces, was seeking to make Alexandria the capital of the Empire, and would reduce Rome and Italy to subordinate roles. When Antony sent a message to the Senate (which he had for years ignored) proposing that he and Octavian should retire to private life, and that the institutions of the Republic should be restored, Octavian escaped a difficult situation by reading to the Senate what he claimed was Antony's will, which he had taken by force from the Vestal Virgins. It named Antony's children by Cleopatra his sole heirs, and directed that he should be buried beside the Queen in Alexandria.14 The last clause was as decisive for the Senate as it should have proved suspicious; instead of raising doubts that a will filed in Rome should have made such provisions, it convinced the Senate and Italy that Cleopatra was scheming to absorb the Empire through Antony. With characteristic subtlety Octavian de clared war (32) against her rather than Antony, and made the conflict a holy war for the independence of Italy.
In September, 32, the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra sailed into the Ionian ea, 500 warships strong; n such armada had been seen before. Supporting It was an army of 100,000 mfantry and 12,000 cavalry, mostly supplied by Eastern princes and kings in the hope of makiag this a war of liberation from
CHAP. X)	ANTONY	207
Rome. Octavian crossed the Adriatic with 400 vessels, 80,000 foot, 12,000 horse. For almost a year the rival forces prepared and maneuvered; then, on September 2, 31, they fought at Actium, in the Ambracian Gulf, one of the decisive battles of history. Agrippa proved the better tactician, and his light ships more manageable than Antony's heavy-towered leviathans. Many of these were consumed by fires set by burning brands cast upon them by Octavian's crews. "Some sailors," says Dio Cassius,
perished by the smoke before the flames could reach them; others were cooked in their armor, ,vhich became red hot; others were roasted in their vessels as though in ovens. Many leaped into the sea; of these some were mangled by sea monsters, some were shot by arrows, some were drowned. The only ones to obtain an endurable death were those who killed one another.15
Antony saw that he was losing, and signaled to Cleopatra to carry out their prearranged plan for retreat. She headed her squadron southward and waited for Antony; unable to extricate his flagship, he abandoned it and rowed out to hers. As they sailed for Alexandria he sat alone on the prow, his head between his hands, conscious that everything was lost, even honor.
From Actium Octavian went to Athens; thence to Italy to quell a mutiny among his troops, who clamored for the plunder of Egypt; then to Asia to depose and punish Antony's adherents and raise new funds from long suffering cities; then to Alexandria ( 30). Antony had left Cleopatra and was staying on an island near Pharos; thence he sent offers of peace, which Oc ta,·ian ignored. Unknown to Antony, Cleopatra sent Octavian a golden scepter, crown, and throne as tokens of her submission; according to Dio he replied that he would leave her and Egypt untouched if she would kill Antony.16 The beaten Triumvir wrote to Octavian again, reminding him of their former friendship and of "all the wanton pranks in which they had shared as youths"; and agreed to kill himself if the victor would spare Cleo patra. Again Octavian made no reply. Cleopatra gathered all that she could of the Egyptian treasury into a palace tower and informed Octavian that she would destroy it all, and herself, unless he granted an honorable peace. Antony led what small forces remained to him in a last fight; his desperate courage won a temporary victory; but on the next day, seeing Cleopatra's mercenaries surrender, and receiving a report that Cleopatra was dead, he stabbed himself. \Vhen he learned that the repon was false he begged to be brought to the tower in whose upper chambers the Queen and her at tendants had locked themselves; they drew him up through the window, and he died in her arms. Octavian allowed her to come forth and bury her lover; then he granted her an audience and, immune to what lure survived in a
208	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. X
broken woman of thirty-nine, he gave her terms that made life seem worth less to one who had been a queen. Convinced that he intended to take her as captive to adorn a Roman triumph, she arrayed herself in her royal robes, put an asp to her breast, and died. Her handmaidens Charmion and Iris followed her in suicide.18
Octavian permitted her to be buried beside Antony. Caesarian, and An tony's eldest son by Fulvia, he slew; the children of Antony and the Queen he spared and sent to Italy, where Octavia reared them as ff they were her own. The victor found the Egyptian treasury intact and as abundant as he had dreamed. Egypt escaped the indignity of being named a Roman prov ince; Octavian merely mounted the throne of the Ptolemies, succeeded to their possessions, and left a praef ectus to administer the country in his name. Caesar's heir had conquered those of Alexander, and absorbed Alexander's realm; the West again, as at Marathon and Magnesia, had triumphed over the East. The battle of the giants was over, and an invalid had won.
The Republic died at Pharsalus; the revolution ended at Actium. Rome had completed the fatal cycle known to Plato and to us: monarchy, aris tocracy, oligarchic exploitation, democracy, revolutionary chaos, dictator ship. Once more, in the great systole and diastole of history, an age of freedom ended and an age of discipline began.
BOOK III
THE	PRINCIPA TE
30 B.C.-A.D. 192


218	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XI
years he persisted in this policy despite universal criticism at home; at last he had the satisfaction of seeing the starving rebels disband, and of re-estab lishing the Roman power. But in that same year (A.D. 9) Arminius organized a revolt in Germany, lured the three legions of Varos, the Roman governor, into a trap, and killed every man of them except those who, like Varos, fell upon their own swords. When Augustus heard of this he was "so deeply affected," says Suetonius, "that for several months he cut neither his beard nor his hair; and sometimes he would dash his head against a door, and cry out, 'Quintilius Varos, give me back my legions!' " 6 Tiberius hastened to Germany, reorganized the army there, stood off the Germans, and, by Au gustus' orders, withdrew the Roman boundary to the Rhine.
It was a decision costly to the Emperor's pride but creditable to his judg ment. Germany was surrendered to "barbarism"-i.e., to a nonclassic culture
-and was left free to arm its growing population against Rome. However, the same reasons that had argued for the conquest of Germany would have demanded the subjection of Scythia-southern Russia. Somewhere the Em pire had to stop; and the Rhine was a better frontier than any other west of the Urals. Having annexed northern and western Spain, Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia, Moesia, Galatia, Lycia, and Pamphylia, Augustus felt that he had sufficiently earned his title of "the increasing god." At his death the Empire covered 3,340,000 square miles, more than the mainland of the United States, and over a hundred times the area of Rome before the Punic \ Vars. Augustus advised his successor to be content with this, the greatest empire yet seen; to seek rather to unite and strengthen it within than to extend it without. He expressed his surprise "that Alexander did not regard it as a greater task to set in order the empire that he had won than to win it." 7 The Pax Romana had begun.
SATURN/A REGNA
It could not be said that Augustus had made a desert and called it peace. Within a decade after Actium the Mediterranean knew such economic quickening as no tradition could parallel. The restoration of order was in itself a stimulus to recovery. The renewed safety of the seas, the stability of government, the conservatism of Augustus, the consumption of Egypt's hoarded treasure, the opening of new mines and mints, the reliability and accelerated circulation of the curre!}cy, the easing of congested population into agricultural allotments and colonial settlements-how could prosperity resist so unanimous an invitation? A group of Alexandrian sailors, landing at Puteoli when Augustus was near by, approached him in festal dress and of-
CHAP. XI)	AUGUSTAN  STATESMANSHIP	219
fered him incense as to a deity. It was because of him, they said, that they could voyage in safety, trade in confidence, and live in peace.8
Augustus was convinced, as became the grandson of a banker, that the best economy was one that united freedom with security. He protected all classes with well-administered laws, guarded the highways of trade, lent money without interest to responsible land-owners, 9 and mollified the poor with state grain, lotteries, and occasional gifts; for the rest he left enterprise, production, and exchange freer than before. Even so, the works directed by the state were now of unprecedented magnitude, and played some part in restoring economic life. Eighty-two temples were built; a new forum and basilica were added to facilitate the operations of finance and the courts; a new senate house replaced the one that had incinerated Clodius; colonnades were erected to temper the sun; the theater that Caesar had begun was completed and named after Marcellus, son-in-law of Augustus; and rich men were prodded by the Emperor into spending part of their fortunes in adorning Italy with basilicas, temples, libraries, theaters, and roads. "Those that celebrated triumphs," says Dio Cassius, "he commanded to erect out of their spoils some public work to commemorate their deeds." 9a Augustus hoped to make the majesty of Rome enhance and symbolize her power and his own. Toward the close of his life he remarked that he had found Rome a city of brick and had left it a city of marble.9b It was a forgivable exaggera tion: there had been much marble there before, and much brick remained. But seldom had any man done so much for a city.
His indispensable aide in the reconstruction of Rome was Marcus Vip sanius Agrippa. This perfect friend had shared with Maecenas the guidance of Augustus' policy. In his year as aedile (33 B.c.) Agrippa had won the public to Octavian by opening 170 public baths, distributing free oil and salt, presenting games for fifty-five successive days, and providing free barbers for all citizens for a year-apparently all at his own expense. His ability might have made him another Caesar; he pref erred to serve Augustus for a generation. So far as we know, his life was unstained by public or private scan&:l; Roman gossip, which sooner or later besmirched everyone else, left him untouched. He was the first Roman to realize the importance of sea power. He planned, built, and commanded the fleet, defeated Sextus Pompey, suppressed piracy, and won a world for Augustus at Actium. After these victories and his pacification of Spain, Gaul, and the Bosporan kingdom, he was thrice offered a triumph and always refused. Enriched by a grateful prince, he continued to live without luxury, and devoted himself as ardently to public works as he had done to the preservation of the state. Out of his own purse he hired hundreds of laborers to repair roads, buildings,
220	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XI
and sewers, and reopen the Marcian aqueduct. He constructed a new aque duct, the Julian, and further improved the water supply of Rome with 700 wells, 500 fountains, and r 30 reservoirs. When the people complained of the high price of wine Augustus slyly remarked, "My son-in-law Agrippa has seen to it that Rome shall not go thirsty." 10 This greatest of Roman engineers created a spacious harbor and shipbuilding center by connecting the Lucrine and Avernian lakes with the sea. He built the first of the imposing public baths that were to distinguish Rome among the cities. He constructed, again out of his own funds, a temple to Venus and Mars, which was rebuilt by Hadrian, is known to us as the Pantheon, and stJl bears on its portico the words, M. AGRIPPA .•.	FECIT. He organized a thirty-year survey of the Empire, wrote a treatise on geography, and made in painted marble a map of the world. Like Leonardo he was a scientist, an engineer, an inventor of military projectiles, and an artist. His early death at the age of fifty ( r 2 B.c.) was among the many sorrows that darkened the later years of Augustus, who had given him his daughter Julia in marriage, and had hoped to bequeath the Empire to him as the man best fitted to govern it honestly and well.
Costly public works combined with extended governmental services to raise state expenditures beyond precedent. Salaries were now paid to provincial and municipal officials, bureaucrats and police; a large lrmy and navy were main tained; buildings were put up or restored without number; com and games bribed the populace to peace. Since expenses were met out of current revenue, and no national debt was laid upon the future, taxation under Augustus became a science and an unremitting industry. Augustus was not relentless; often he forgave taxes to harassed individuals and cities or paid them out of his personal funds. He returned to the municipalities 35,000 pounds of gold offered him as a "coronation gift" on the occasion of his fifth consulate; and he refused many other donations.12 He abolished the land tax laid upon Italy in the Civil War; in its stead he levied upon all citizens in the Empire a five per cent tax on be quests to any persons except near r"latives and the poor.13 A tax of one per cent was placed upon auction sales, four per cent upon the sale of slaves, five per cent upon their manumission; and custom dues from two and a half to five per cent were collected on nearly all ports of entry. All citizens were subject also to municipal taxes, and Roman realty did not share in Italy's exemption from the tax on land. Taxes were paid for water supplied from the public mains. Con siderable revenue came from the leasing of public lands, mines, and fisheries, from the state monopdy of salt, and the fines imposed by the courts. The prov inces paid a tributum soli, or land tax, and a tribzttztm capitis-literally a head or poll tax, actually a tax on personal property. Taxes flowed into two coffers at Rome, both stored in temples: the national Treasury (aerariztm) controlled by the Senate, and the imperial Treasury (fiscus) owned and managed by the
CHAP. XI)	AUGUSTAN  STATESMANSHIP	221
Emperor.• To the latter came the income not only from his vast personal prop erties, but bequests from well-wishers and friends. Such legacies, in the lifetime of Augustus, amounted to 1,400,000,000 sesterces.
All in all, taxation under the Principate was not oppressive, and until Com modus the results were worth the cost. The provinces prospered and raised altars of gratitude or expectation to Augustus the god; even in sophisticated Rome he had to censure the people for the extravagance of their eulogies. One enthusiast ran through the streets calling upon men and women to "devote" themselves to Augustus-i.e., promise to kill themselves when he died. In 2 n.c. Messala Corvinus, who had captured Octavian's camp at Philippi, proposed that the title of pater patriae should be conferred upon Augustus. The Senate, pleased to have so little responsibility while retain ing honors and wealth, gladly heaped upon the Emperor this and other titles of praise. The business classes, now richer than ever, celebrated his birthday with a two-day festival year after year. "All sorts and conditions of men," says Suetonius,14 "brought him gifts on the kalends of January" New Year's Day. When fire destroyed his old palace every city, apparently every tribe and guild, in the Empire sent him a contribution to rebuild it; he refused to take more than a denarius from any individual, but never theless he had more than enough. All the l\Iediterranean world, after its long ordeal, seemed happy; and Augustus might believe that his patience and labor had accomplished his great task.
THE AUGUSTA. REFORMATION
He destroyed his own happiness by trying to make people good as well as happy; it was an imposition that Rome hever forgave him. Moral reform is the most difficult and delicate branch of statesmanship; few rulers have dared to attempt it; most rulers have left it to hypocrites and saints.
Augustus began modestly enough by seeking to check the racial trans formation of Rome. Population there was not declining; on the contrary, it was growing by mass and dole attraction and the import of wealth and slaves. Since freedmen were included in the dole, many citizens freed old or sickly slaves to have them fed by the state; kinder motives freed more, and many slaves saved enough to buy their liberty. As the sons of freed men automatically became citizens, the emancipation of slaves and the fertility of aliens combined with the low birth rate of the native stocks to
The fisci were, in the Republic, the sealed baskets in which the provincial money tribute was brought to Rome.
222	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XI
change the ethnic character of Rome. Augustus wondered what stability there could be in so heterogeneous a population, and what loyalty to the Empire might be expected of men in whose veins ran the blood of subject peoples. By his urging, the lex Fufia Caninia (2 B.c.) and later measures enacted that an owner of not more than two slaves might free them all, the owner of from three to ten sbves might free half of them, the owner of from eleven to thirty one-third, the owner of from thirty-one to one
, hundred one-fourth, the owner of from 101 to 300 one-fifth; and no master might free more than a hundred.
One might wish that Augustus had limited slavery instead of freedom. But antiquity took slavery for granted, and would have contemplated with horror the economic and social effects of a wholesale emancipation, just as the employers of our time fear the sloth that might come from security. Augustus was thinking in terms of race and class; he could not conceive a strong Rome without the character, courage, and political ability that had marked the old Roman; above all, the old aristocracy. The decay of the ancient faith among the upper classes had washed away the supernatural supports of marriage, fidelity, and parentage; the passage from farm to city had made children less of an asset, more of a liability and a toy; women wished to be sexually rather than maternally beautiful; in general the desire for individual freedom seemed to be running counter to the needs of the race. To accentuate the evil, legacy hunting had become the most profitable occupation in ltaly.16 .Men without children were sure to be courted in their declining years by expectant ghouls; and so large a number of Romans relished this esurient courtesy that it became an added cause of childlessness. Protracted military service drew a considerable proportion of young men from marriage in their most nubile years. A large number of native-stock Romans avoided wedlock altogether, preferring prostitutes or concubines even to a varied succession of wives. Of those who married, a majority appear to have limited their families by abortion, infanticide, coitus inter ruptus, and contraception.18
Augustus was disturbed by these insignia of civilization. He began to feel that a movement backward to the old faith and morals was necessary. Respect for the mos maiorum revived in him as the years cleared his vision and tired his frame. It was not good, he felt, for the present to break too sharply with the past; a nation must have a continuity of traditions to be sane, as a man must have memory. He read with aging seriousness the historians of Rome, and envied the virtues they ascribed to the ancients. He relished the speech of Quintus Metellus on marriage, read it to the Senate, and recommended it to the people by imperial proclamation. A large part of the older generation agreed with him; it formed a kind of puritan p;rty


Erasure is as important as writing. Prune what is turgid, elevate what is commonplace, arrange what is disorderly, introduce rhythm where the 1:inguage is harsh, modify where it is too absolute   The best
method of correction is to put aside for a time what we have written, so that when we come to it again it may have an aspect of novelty, as of being another man's work; in this way we may preserve ourselves from regarding our writings with the affection that we lavish upon a newborn child.121
Delivery, like composition, should touch the emotions, but avoid exuberant gesticulation. "It is feeling and force of imagination that makes us eloquent," but "shout and bellow with uplifted hand, pant, wag your head, smite your hands together, slap your thigh, your br:!ast, your forehead, and you will go straight to the heart of the dingier members of your audience." 122
To all this excellent counsel Quintilian adds, in his twelfth book, the best literary criticism that has survived from antiquity. He enters with zest into the ancient and modern war between the ancients and the moderns, and finds truth precariously in the middle. He does not, li!-:e Fronto, wish to return to the rude simplicity of Cato and Ennius, but still more he would shun the "voluptuous and affected" fluency of Seneca; he prefers, as a model for students, the virile yet polished speech of Cicero, the one Roman writer who had in his line surpassed the Greeks.123 Quintilian's own style is often that of a schoolmaster, moribund with definitions, classification, and distinc tions, and rising to eloquence only in denouncing Seneca; but it is a vigorous style, whose dignity is lightened now and then with touches of humanity and wit. Behind the good sense of the words we feel always the quiet good ness of the man; it is a moral stimulus to read him. Perhaps the Romans \.Vho had the privilege of his instruction took from it some part of the moral renovation that, more than any brilliance of letters, ennobled the age of the
younger Pliny and Tacitus.
STATIUS A1'"'D MARTIAL
We have left to the last two poets who belonged to the sa'11e epoch, sough the favor of the same emperor and the same patrons, and yu never mentior,
CAESAR  AND CHRIST	(CHAP. XIV
each other: one the purest, the other the coarsest, poet in the history of im perial Rome. Publius Papinius Statius was the son of a Neapolitan poet and grammarian; his environment and his education gave him everything but money and genius. He lisped in numbers, startled salons with poetical im provisations, and wrote an epic, the Thebaid, on the war of the Seven against Thebes. We cannot read it today, for its movement is obstructed with dead gods, and its smooth verses have an overpowering virtus dormitiva. But his contemporaries liked it; crowds gathered to hear him recite it in a Naples theater; they understood his mythological machinery, welcomed the deli cacy of his sentiment, and found that his lines ran trippingly on the tongue. The judges in the Alban poetry contest gave him the first prize; rich men became his friends and helped him stave off penury;124 Domitian himself in vited him to dinner in the domus Flavia, and Statius repaid him by describing the palace as heaven and the Emperor as god.
To Domitian and other patrons, to his father and his friends, he addressed the most pleasing of his poems, the Silvae, modest idyls and eulogies in light and happy verse. In the Capitoline games, however, another poet won the crown, Statius' star waned in fickle Rome, and he persuaded his reluctant wife to return with him to his boyhood home. In Naples he began another epic, the Achilleid; then suddenly, in 96, he died, a youth of thirty-five. He was not a great poet; but he struck a welcome note of kindliness and tenderness amid a literature too often sarcastic and bitter, and a society corrupt and coarse beyond any precedent. He would have been as famous as Martial if he had been as obscene.
Marcus Valerius .i\1artialis was born at Bilbilis in Spain in the fortieth year of our era. At twenty-four he came to Rome and won the friendship of Lucan and Seneca. Quintilian advised him to butter his bread by practicing law, but Martial preferred to starve on poetry. His friends were suddenly swept away in the conspiracy of Piso, and he was reduced to addressing his poems to rich men who might give him a dinner for an epigram. He lived in a third-floor garret, probably alone; for thou3h he indites two poems to a woman whom he calls his wife, they are so foul that she must have been an invention or a bawd.126
His poems, he lets us know, were read throughout the Empire, even among the Goths; he rejoices to learn that he was almost as famous as a racehorse, but he fretted to see his publisher enriched while he himself received nothing from the sale of his books. He descended to suggesting, in an epigram, that he badly needed a toga; the Emperor's rich freedman Parthenius sent him one; he replied in two stanzas, one of which celebrated the newness of the garment, the other its cheap worthlessness. In time he found some more gen erous patrons; one gave him a little farm at Nomentum, and somehow he
CHAP.XIV)	THE  SILVER  AGE
raised funds to buy a simple home on the Quirinal hill. He became a "client" or retainer to one rich man after another, waited upon them in the morning, and received an occasional gift; but he felt the shame of liis situation and
mourned that he did not have the courage to be contentedly poor and therefore free.127He could not afford to be poor, for he had to mingle in the
society of men who could reward his verse. He showered Domitian with lauds and announced that if Jupiter and Domitian were to invite him to din ner on the same day he would tum down the god; but the Emperor pre
ferred Statius. Martial became jealous of the younger poet and suggested that a live epigram was worth more than a dead epic.128
The epigram had till now been a pretty conceit on any passing subject, sometimes a dedication, a compliment, an epitaph; Martial molded it into a briefer, sharper form, barbed with satiric sting. We do him injustice when we read these 1561 epigrams in a few sittings; they were issued in twelve books at divers times, and the reader was expected to use them in small por tions as bors d'oeuvres, not as a prolonged feast. Most of them seem trivial today; their allusion was local and temPorary, too well timed to endure.
Martial does not take them very seriously; the bad ones, he agrees, out number the good, but he had to fill a volume.129 He is a master of versifica
tion, knows all the meters and all the tricks of the poetic trade; but he avoids rhetoric as proudly as his prose patrician analogue, Petronius. He cares nothing for the mythological furniture that littered the literature of his age; he is interested in real men and women and their intimate life and describes
them with relish and spite; "my pages," he says, "taste of men." 130 He  can
"take down" some stiff aristocrat or stingy millionaire, some pompous lawyer or fa.mous orator; but he likes better to tell of barbers, cobblers, hawkers, jockeys, acrobats, auctioneers, poisoners, perverts, and prostitutes. His scenes are laid not in ancient Greece but in the baths, the theaters, the streets, the circus, the homes, and tenements of Rome. He is the poet laureate of worthless men.
He is more interested in money than in love, and most often thinks of the latter in one gender. There is some sentiment in him, and he speaks very tenderly of a friend's child just dead; but there is no gallant line in his books,
not even a noble wrath. He chants a litany of evil smells, and adds, "All these stenches I prefer to yours, Bassa." 131 He describes one of his m!5tressr.;:
Your tresses, Galla, are manufactured far away; you lay aside your teeth at night as you do your silk dresses; you lie stored away in a hundred caskets, and your face does not sleep with you; you wink with an eyebrow brought to you in the morning. No respect moves you for your outworn carcass, which you may now count as one of your ancestors.132