was less diluted, sometimes not at all. Sumptuary laws were passed by the Senate limiting expenditure on banquets and clcthing, but as the senators ignored these regulations, no one bothered to observe them. "The citizens," Cato mourned, "no longer listen to good advice, for the belly has no ears."9 The individual became rebelliously conscious of himself as against the state, the son as against the father, the ·woman as against the man.
Usually the power of wom:m rises with the we lth of a society, for when the stomach is satisfied hun3er leaves the field to love. Prostitution flourished. Homosexualism was· stimd:1!:ed by ccntact with Greece and Asia; many rich men paid a talent ($3600) for a m:::!e favorite; Cato complained that a
pretty boy cost more than a farm.10 But women did not yield the field to
these Greek and Syrian invaders. They took e:igerly to all th8se supports of beauty that wealth now put within their reach. Cosmetics became a neces sity, and caustic soap imported from Gaul tinged graying hair into auburn locks.11 The rich bourgeois took pride in adorning his wife and daughter with costly clothing or jcwdq an<l ma<le them the town criers of his pros perity. Even in government t 1c role of women grew. Cato cried out that "all other men rule ever women; but we Romans, who rule all men, are ruled by ou,rvomen."'12 In 195 B.c. the free women of Rome swept into the Forum and demanded the repeal of the Oppian Law of 215, which had forbidden women to use gold ormments, varicolored dresses, or chariots. Cato predicted the ruin of Rome if the bw should be repealed. Livy puts into his mouth a speech that every generation has heard:
If we had, each of us, upheld the rights and authority of the hus band in our own households, we should not today have this trouble with our women. As things are now, our liberty of action, which has been annulled by female despotism at home, is crushed and trampled on here in the orum	Call to mind all the regulations respecting
women by which our ancestors curbed their license and made them obedient to their husbands; and yet with all those restrictions you can scarcely hold them in. If now you permit them to remove these restraints . . . and to put themselves on an equality with their hus bands, do you imagine that you will be able to bear them? From the moment that they become your equals they will be your masters.13
The women laughed him down, and stood their ground until the law w2s repealed. Cato revenged himself as censor by multiplying by ten the taxes on the articles that Oppius had forbidden. But the tide was in flow, and could not be turned. Other laws disadvantageous to women were repealed or modified or ignored. \Vomen won the free administration of their dowries, divorced their husbands or occasionally poisoned them, and
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. V
doubted the wisdom of bearing children in an age of urban congestion and imperialistic wars.
Already by I 60 Cato and Polybius had noted a decline of population and
the inability of the state to raise such armies as had risen to meet Hannibal. The new generation, having inherited world mastery, had no time or inclina tion to defend it; that readiness for war which had characterized the Roman landowner disappeared now that ownership was being concentrated in a few families and a proletariat without stake in the country filled the slums of Rome. Men became brave by proxy; they crowded the amphitheater to see bloody games, and hired gladiators to fight before them at their ban quets. Finishing schools were opened for both sexes, where young men and women learned to sing, play the lyre, and move gracefully.H In the upper classes manners became more refined as morals were relaxed. In the lower classes manners continued to be coarse and vigorous, amusements often violent, language freely obscene; we get the odor of this lusty prof anum vulgus in Plautus, and understand why it wearied of Terence. When a band of flute players attempted a musical concert at a triumph in 167, the audience forced the musicians to change their performance into a boxing match.15 In the widening middle classes ccmmercialism ruled unhindered. Their wealth was based no lonier on realty but on mercantile investment or man agement. The old morality and a few Catos could not keep this new regime of mobile capital from setting the tone of Roman life. Everyone longed for money, everyone judged or was judged in terms of money. Contractors cheated on such a scale that many government properties-e.g., the Mace donian mines-had to be abandoned bec:!use the lessees exploited the work ers and mulcted the state to a point where the enterprise brought in more tribulation than profit.16 Th:it aristocracy which (if we may believe the historians-and we must not) had once esteemed honor above life adopted the new morality and shared in the new wealth; it thought no longer of the nation, but of class and individual privileges and perquisites; it accepted presents and liberal bribes for bestowing its favor upon men or states, and found ready reasons for war with countries that had more wealth than power. Patricians stopped plebeians in the street and asked or paid for their votes. It became a common thing for magistrates to embezzle public funds and an uncommon thing to see them prosecuted; for who could punish rob bery among his fellows when half the members of the Senate had joined in violating treaties, robbing allies, and despoiling provinces? "He who steals from a citizen," said Cato, "ends his days in fetters and chains; but he who
steals from the community ends them in purple and gold."17
Nevertheless, the prestige of the Senate was higher than ever before. It
\
CHAP. v)	THE  GREEK  CONQUEST	91
had brought Rome successfullj through two Punic vVars and three Mace donian \Vars; it had challenged and overcome all of Rome's rivals, had won the subservient friendship of Egypt, and had captured so much of the world's wealth that in 146 Italy was freed from direct taxation. In the crises of war and policy it had usurped many powers of the assemblies and the magis trates, but victory sanctified its usurpations. The machinery of the comitia had been made ridiculous by empire; the turbulent peoples who now sub mitted to rule by a Senate la.rgely composed of seasoned statesmen and tri umphant generals would have protested passionately against having their affairs determined by the few thousand Italians who could attend the assem blies in Rome. The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other. vVar demands superior intelligence and courage, quick decisions, united action, immediate obedi ence; the frequency of war doomed democracy. By law the Centuria! As sembly alone had the right to declare war or make peace; but by its power to conduct foreign relations the Senate could usually bring matters to a point where the Assembly had no lcnger any practical choice.18 The Senate controlled the Treasury and all outlays of public funds; and it controlled the judiciary by the rule that all important juries had to be taken from the Senatorial list. The formulation and interpretation of the laws were in the hands of the patrician class.
\Vithin this aristocracy there was an oligarchy of dominant families. Till Sulla, Roman history is a reccrd cf families rather than of individuals; no great statesman stands out, but gener:1tion after generation the same names occur in the higher offices of the state. Out of 200 consuls between 23 3 and 133 B.c., 159 belonged to twenty-six families, one hundred to ten. The most powerful family in this period was the Cornelii. From the Publius Cornelius Scipio who lost the battle cf the Trebia (218), through his son Scipio Africanus who defeated Hannibal, to the latter's adoptive grandson, Scipio Aemilianus, ·who destroyed Canhage in 146, the history of Rcman politics and war is largely the story of this family; and the revolution that destroyed the aristocracy was begun by the Gracchi, grandsons of Aemilianus. The s1ving victory at Zama made Africanus so popular with all classes that for a time Rome was ready to give him any office he desired. But when he and his brother Lucius returned from the war in Asia ( 187), the party of Cato demanded that Lucius should gi,re an account of the money paid him by Antiochus as an indemnity to be transmitted to Rome. A: anus refused to let his brother answer; instead he tore the records to shreds before the Senate. Lucius was brought to trial before the Assembly and was con victed of embezzlement; he was saved from punishment by the tribunician
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. V
veto of Africanus' son-in-law, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. Summoned to trial in his turn, Africanus disrupted the proceedings by inviting and lead ing the Assembly to the Temple of Jupiter to celebrate the anniversary of Zama. Summoned 2gain, he refused to obey the call, retired to his estate at Liternum, and remained there unmolested till his death. The emergence of such individualism in politics corresponded with the growth of individu alism in commerce and morals. The Roman Republic would soon be de stroyed by the unfettered energy of its great men.
The redeeming feature of this aristocracy and this age was their awakened appreciation of the beautiful. Contact with Greek culture in Italy, Sicily, and Asia had acquainted the Romans not merely with the appurtenances of luxury but with the highest products of classic art. The conquerors brought back with them world-famous paintings and statues, cups and mirrors of chased metal, cost!y textiles and furniture. The older generation was sh-eked by Marcellus' adcrnment of Roman squares with the stolen sculptures of Syracuse; they com plained not of the robbery, but of the "idleness and vain talk" amon once in dustrious citizens who now stopped to "examine and criticize trifles." 19 Fulvius carried off 101 5 statues from Pyrrhus' collection in Ambracia; Aemilius Paulus filled fifty chariots in his triumph with the art treasures he had taken from Greece as partial paymer.t for liberating her; Sulla Verres, Nero, and a thousand other Romans were to do likewise through two hundred years. Greece was denuded to clothe the Roman mind.
Overwhelmed with this invasion, Italian art abandoned its native quality and styles and, with one exception, surrendered to Greek artists, themes, and forms. Greek sculptors, painters, and architects, following the line of greatest gold, migrated to Rome and slowly Hellenized the capital of their conquerors. Rich Romans began to build their mansions in the Greek manner around an open court, and to adorn them with Greek columns, statuary, paintings, and furni ture. Temples changed more slowly, lest the gods take offense; for them the short cella and high podium of the Tuscan style remained the rule; but as more Olympians were domiciled in Rome it seemed appropr:ate to ces=gn their homes on the slenderer Hellenic scale. In one vital respect, however, Rcman art, while still taking hints from Greece, expressed with unique means and power the sturdy Italic scul. Fer triumphal ar.d decorative monuments, bas:licas and aque ducts, the Roman architect replaced the architrave ,v:th the arc!1. In 1 84 Cato built in stone the Basilica Porc:a; five years later Aernilius Pat:lus gave its first form to that Basilica Aemilia ,vhich his d scePdants would rep ir a:-:.d beautify through many generatiolis.* The typical Ro:-:-!an basilica, designed for tI1e transaction cf bus:::css or law, was a lo:-ig rectangle div1ded into nave and aisles
!he basilica (sc. stoa-i. ., royal ponico) was a Hellenistic application of the arch to the Persian palace and the [gypoan hypostyle hall; Delos and Syracuse had raised such structures in the third century B.c.
CHAP. V)	THE  GREEK  CONQlIEST	93
by two internal rows of columns, and usually roofed with a coffered barrel
vau!t-a dcvcl::pmer:t taken from Alexandr:a.=w Since the nave was hi6her than the aiJes, a clerestory of pierced stcne trellises could be can·ed above each


The term respublica (the public property, or commonwealth) ·was applied by the Romans to all three forms of their state-monarchy, "democracy," and principate; histonans now agree in limiting it to the period between 508 and 49 n.c.
CHAP.II)	THE  STRUGGLE  FOR DEMOCRACY
nd public games. If again successful, he might be made one of the four praetors who in war led armies, and in peace acted as judges and interpreters of the law.*
At about this point in the cursus bonorum, or sequence of offices, the citizen who had made a name for integrity and judgment might become one of the two censors ("valuators") chosen every fifth year by the Centuria! Assembly. One of them would take the quinquennial census of the citizens, and assess their property for political and military status and for taxation. The censors were required to examine the character and record of every candidate for office; they watched over the honor of women, the education of children, the treatment of slaves, the collection or farming of taxes, the construction of public buildings, the letting of governmental property or contracts, and the proper cultivation of the land. They could lower the rank of any citizen, or remove any member of the Senate, whom they found guilty of immorality or crime; and in this function the power of either censor was immune to the veto of the other. They could try to check extravagance by raising tax:es on lu.·mries. They prepared and published a budget of state expenditures on a five-year plan. At the close of their eighteen-month tenn they would gather the citizens together in a solemn ceremony of national purification (/ustrzmz), as a means of maintaining cordial relations with the gods. Appius Claudius Caecus (the Blind), great-grandson of the Decemvir, was the first to make the censorship rival the consulate in dignity. During his term (312) he built the Appian Aqueduct and the Appian \Vay, promoted rich plebeians to the Senate, reformed land laws and state finances, helped to break down the priestly and p_atrician monopoly and manipulation of the law, left his mark on Roman grammar, rhetoric, and poetry, and, by his deathbed speech against Pyrrhus, decided the Roman conquest of Italy.
Theoretically one of the two consuls ("consultants") had to be a plebeian; actually very few plebeians were chosen, for even the plebs pref erred men of education and training for an office that would have to deal with every executive phase of peace and war throughout the Mediterrnean. On the eve of the election the magistrate in charge of it observed the stars to see if they favored the presentacio.n of the several candidates' names; presiding over the Centuria} Assembly on the morrow, he might offer to its choice only those names that the auspices had approved; 14 in this way the aris tocracy discouraged "upstarts" and demagogues, and in most cases the Assembly, awed or intimidated. submitted to the pious fraud. The candidate appeared in person, dressed in a plain white (ca11didus) toga to emphasize
"Quaestor from quaerere, to inquire-hence a trial was a quaestio; aedile from aedes, build ing; praetor from prae-ire, to go in advance, to lead-hence the cohon that watcheJ over him was called the Praetorian Guard.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. II
the simplicity of his life and morals, and perhaps the more easily to sh?w the scars he had won in the field. If elected, he entered office on the ensumg March 15. The ·consul took on sanctity by leading the state in the most solemn religious rites. In peace he summoned and presided over the Senate and the Assembly, initiated legislation, administered justice, and in general executed the laws. In war he levied armies, raised funds, and shared with his fellow consul command of the legions. If both of them died or were captured during their year of office, the Senate declared an interregnum, and appointed an interrex (or interval-king) for five days, while a new elec tion was being prepared. The word suggests that the consuls had inherited, for their brief term, the powers of the kings.
The consul was limited by the equal authority of his colleague, by the pressure of the Senate, and by the veto power of the tribune. After 367 B.c. fourteen military tribunes were chosen to lead the tribes in war, and ten "tribunes of the plebs" to represent them in peace. These ten were sacro sancti: it was a sacrilege, as well as a capital crime, to lay violent hands upon them except under a legitimate dictatorship. Their function was to protect the people against the government, and tostop by one word-veto, 1'I forbid"
-the whole machinery of the state, whenever to any one of them this seemed desirable. As a silent observer the tribune could attend the meetings of the Senate, report its deliberations to the people, and, by his veto, deprive the Senate's decisions of all legal force. The door of his inviolable home remained open day and night to any citizen who sought his protection or his aid, and this right of sanctuary or asylum provided the equivalent of habeas corpus. Seated on his tribunal he could act as judge, and from his decision there was no appeal except to the Assembly of the Tribes. It was his duty to secure the accused a fair trial, and, when possible, to win some pardon for the condemned.
How did the aristocracy retain its ascendancy despite these obstructive powers? First, by limiting them to the city of Rome and to times of peace; in war the tribunes obeyed the consuls. Secondly, by persuading the Tribal Assembly to elect wealthy plebeians as tribunes; the prestige of wealth and the diffidence of poverty moved the people to choose the rich to defend the poor. Thirdly, by allowing the number of tribunes to be raised from four to ten; if only one of these ten would listen to reason or money, his veto could frustrate the rest.15 In the course of time the tribunes became so
?epen?able _that they could b trusted to con_vene the Senate, take part in 1ts deliberations, and become life members of 1t after their terms.
If all these maneuvers failed, a last bulwark of social order remained dictatorship. The Romans recognized that in times of national chaos or peril their liberties and privileges, and all the checks and balances that they
CHAP.II)	THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  DEMOCRACY	31
had created for their own protection, might impede the rapid and united action needed to save the state. In such cases the Senate could declare an emergency, and then either consul could name a dictator. In every instance but one the dictators came from the upper classes; but it must be said that the aristocracy rarely abused the possibilities of this office. The dictator received almost complete authority over all persons and property, but he could not use public funds without the-Senate's consent, and his term was limited to six months or a year. All dictators but two obeyed these restric tions, honoring the story of how Cincinnatus, called from the plow to save the state (456 B.c.), returned to his farm as soon as the task was done. \Vhen this precedent was violated by Sulla and Caesar, the Republic passed back into the monarchy out of which it had come.
S. The Beginnings of Roman Law
Within this unique constitution the magistrates administered a system of law based upon the Twelve Tables of the Decemvirs. Before that epochal enactment Roman law had been a mixture of tribal customs, royal edicts, and priestly commands. 1Hos maiorttnz-the way of the ancients-remained to the end of pagan Rome the exemplar of morals and a source of law; and though imagination and edification idealized the ruthless burghers of the early Republic, the tales told of them helped educators to form a stoic character in Roman youth. For the st, early Roman law was a priestly rule, a branch of religion, surrounded with sacred sanctions and solemn rites. Law was both lex and ius-command and justice; it was a relation not only between man and man but between man and the gods. Crime was a disturbance of that relation, of the pax deorum or peace of the gods; law and punishment were in theory designed to maintain or restore that rela tion and peace. The priests declared what was right and wrong (fas et nef as), on what days the courts might open and the assemblies meet. All questions regarding marriage or divorce, celibacy or incest, wills or transfers, or the rights of children, required the priest as now so many of them require the lawyer. Only the priests knew the formulas without which hardly any thing could be legally done. They were in Rome the first iurisconsulti, consultants in the law, counselors; they were the first to give responsa, or legal opinions. The laws were recorded in their books, and these volumes were so securely guarded from the plebs that suspicion charged the priests with altering the texts, on occasion, to suit ecclesiastical or aristocratic ends. The Twelve Tables effected a double juristic revolution: the publication and secularization of Roman law. Like other codes of the sixth and fifth
32	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. II
centuries-those of Charondas, Zaleucus, Lycurgus, Solon-they represented a change from uncertain unwritten custom to definite written law; they were a result of increasing literacy and democracy. The ius civile, or law of citizens, freed itself in these Tables from the ius divimmz, or divine law; Rome decided not to be a theocracy. The priestly monopoly was further deflated when the secretary of Appius Claudius the Blind published (304) a calendar of court days (dies fasti-"days of utterance"), and a "fonnulary" of proper legal procedures, which had till then been known to few but the priests. Secularization took another step when Coruncanius ( 2 So) began the first known public instruction in Roman law; from that time onward the lawyer replaced the priest and dominated the mind and life of Rome. Soon the Tables were m2de the basis of education; till Cicero's day all schoolboys had to learn them by heart; and doubtless they had a share in forming the stern and orderly, litigious and legalistic, Roman soul. Amended and sup plemented again and again-by legislation, praetorial edicts, senatztsconsulta, and imperial,decrees-the Twelve Tab!es remained for nine hundred years the basic law of Rome.
The law of procedure was already complex in this code. Almost any magistrate might act as a judge; but the praetors were the usual court, and their revisions and interpretations of the statutes kept Roman law a living growth instead of a corpse of precedents. Every year the praetor -urbanus, or chief city magistrate, drew up a list or "white tablet" (album) of senators and equites eligible for jury serrice; the presiding judge i:1 an action chcse jurors from this list, subject to a limited number of rejections by plaintiff and defendant. Lawyers were per mitted to advise clients and plead in court; and some senators gave legal advice in public sittings or at home. The law of Cincius (204 B.c.) forbade taking pay for legal services, but legal skill four.cl ways of circumventing this counsel of perfection. Slaves were often tortured to elicit evidence.
The Twelve Tables constituted one of the severest codes in history. They retained the old paternal omnipotence of a military-agricultural society; allowed the father to scourge, chain, imprison, sell, or kill any of his children-merely adding that a son thrice sold was therea:ter free from his father's rule.16 Class division was preserved by forbidding the marriage of a patrician with a plebeian. Creditors received every right against debtors.17 Owners could dispose freely of their property by w]l; property rights were held so sacred that a thief caught in the act was given as a slave to the man ·whom he had robbed. Penalties rangc:d from simple fines to exile, ensla,·ement, or death. Several took the form of equivalent retaliation (lex talio11is); mar:y ·were fines delicately adjusted to the rank of the victim. "For breaking the bones of a freeman, 300 asses; of a slave, 150 asses." 18 Death was decreed for libel, bribery, perjury, harvest thiev ing, nocturnal damage to a neighbor's crops, the defrauding of a "client" bv a patron, "practicing enchantments," arson, murder, and "seditious gatheri gs
CHAP.II)	THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  DEMOCRACY	33
in the city by night." 19 The parricide was tied in a sack, sometimes with a cock, a dog, a monkey, or a viper, and cast into the river.20 Within the capital, how ever, appeal from any but a dictator's sentence of death could be taken by a citizen to the Assembly of the Centuries; and if the accused perceived that ·the vote there was going against him he was free to commute his sentence into exile by leaving Rome.21 Consequently, despite the severity of the Twelve Tables, capital punishment of freemen was rare in republican Rome.
4. The Army of the Republic
The Roman constitution rested finally on the most successful military organi zation in history. The citizens and the army were one; the army assembled in its centuries was the chief lawmaking body in the state. The first eighteen cen turies supplied the cavalry; the "first class" formed the heavy infantry, armed with two spears, a dagger, and a sword, and protected by bronze helmet, cuirass, greaves, and shield; the second class had all of these except the cuirass; the third and fourth had no armor; the fifth had only slings and stones.


Between the Rhine and the Danube, as we have seen, Rome's military engineers built a fortified road (Limes), with a fortress every nine miles, and 300 miles of wall. It served Rome for a century, but availed little when the Roman birth rate fell too far below the German. Still weaker as a frontier was the Danube, which the ancients considered the longest river in the world. South of it lay the half barbarous provinces of Raetia, Noricum, and Pannonia, approximately compos ing what our youth knew as Austria-Hungary and Serbia. On the site of modem Augsburg (i.e., Augustus' town) the Romans established a colony, Augusta Vindelicorum, as a main station on the road from Italy over the Brenner Pass to the Danube. On the river they built two fortress cities-at Vindobona, now Vienna, and at Aquincum on the heights from which Buda looks down upon Pesch. In southeastern Pannonia, on the Save River west of the modem Belgrade, the city of Sirmium (Mitrovica) rose to be in Diocletian's time one of the four imperial capitals. South of Pannonia, in the province of Dalmatia, the commercial energy of Greeks, Romans, and natives had developed the Adriatic ports of Salona (Spalato), Apollonia (near Valona), and Dyrrhachium (Durazzo). From these provinces below the Danube came imperial Rome's sturdiest soldiers and, in the third century, the martial emperors who w'ould for 200 years hold back the bar barian avalanche. East of Pannonia lay Dacia (Rumania), with its now vanished capital of Sarmizegetusa. South and east of this Moesia (parts of Yugoslavia, Ru mania, and Bulgaria) boasted t\vo cities on the Danube-Singidunum (Belgrade) and Troesmis (Iglitza); one near the lsker-Sardica (Sofia); and three major towns on the Black Sea-lstrus, Tomi (Constanta), and Odessus (Varna). In these harassed settlements Greek chTilization and Roman arms struggled in vain to maintain themselves against the Goths, Sarmatians, Huns, and other barbarian tribes breeding and v,,andering north of the great stream.
It was Rome's inability to civilize these provinces south of the Danube that led to her fall. The task was too great for a people suffering from old age; the vitality of the master race was ebbing in sterile comfort while the t ?es of the north_ were adYancing in re kless health. When Trajan sub Sidized the Sarmauans to keep the peace it was the beginnincr of the end· when Marcus _Aurelius brought thousands of_ Germans into the Empire a settlers, the dikes were down. German soldiers were welcomed into the Roman army and rose to positions of command; German families multiplied
L
CHAP. XXII)	CIVILIZING  THE  WEST
in Italy while Italian families died. In this process the movement of Roman ization was reversed: the barbarians were barbarizing Rome.
Nevertheless, it was a magnificent and precious achievement that the vVest, if not the North, had been won for the classical heritage. There, at least, the arts of peace had emerged from the travail of war, and men could tum their swords into plowshares without decaying in urban ease and slums. Out of the earthy vigor of Spain and Gaul a new civilization would rise when the barbarian flood would fall; and the seed of despot centuries would come to fruit and pardon in the lands where the merciless legions had brought the law of Rome and the enkindling light of Greece.
CHAPTER XXIII
Roman Greece
PLUTARCH
OME tried hard to be generous to Greece and did not quite fail. No garrisons were placed in the new province of Achaea; less was exacted from it than its own taxgatherers had claimed before; the city-states were allowed to govern themselves by their old constitutions and laws; and many of them-Athens, Sparta, Plataea, Delphi, and others-were "free cities"
exempt from all restrictions except the right to wage foreign or class war.
Nevertheless, hungry for its ancient liberties, and bled by Roman generals, moneylenders, and businessmen skilled in buying cheap and selling de:ir, Greece joined in Mithridates' revolt and paid the heaviest penalty. Athens suffered a devastating siege, and Delphi, Elis, and Epidaurus were pillaged of their sanctuary hoards. A generation later Caesar and Pompey, then An tony and Brutus, fought their duels on Greek territory, conscripted Greek men, requisitioned Greek crops nd gold, levied twenty years' taxes in two, and left the cities destitute. Under Augustus Greek Asia recovered, but Greece herself remained poor, ruined not so much by the Roman conquest as by a stifling despotism in Sparta, a chaotic freedcm in Athens, a blighting sterility in soil and men. Her most enterprising sons deserted her for younger and richer lands. The rise of new powers in Egypt, Carthage, and Rome, and the development of industry in the Hellenistic E'.".st, left the homeland of the classic spirit outmoded and forlorn. Rome loaded Greece with compliments and ravaged her art: Scaurus took 3000 statues for his theater, Caliaula or dered the husband of his mistress to comb Greece for statuary, a;d Nero
. alone took half the sculptures of Delphi. Not till Hadrian w·ould Athens smile again.
Epirus bore the brunt of Rome's anger in the Macedonian Wars; the Senate delin:red it t the rapine of the soldiers, and 150,000 Epirots ,vere sold as slayes. Augustus built a new capital for Epirus at Nicopolis to celebrate his triumph at near-by Actium; ci,·ilization must have had some homage there, since the Citv of Victory ga,·e Epictetus an audience and a home. Macedonia fared better tha; its
!o.val nei0o-hbor; it was rich in minerals and timber, and its commercial life was quickened by the Via Egnatia that spanned it and Thrace from Apollonia and Dyrrhachium to Byzantium. On tli:s great highway, still in part preserved, lay the
482
CHAP.. XXIII)	ROMAN  GREECE
chief cities of the province-Edessa, Pella, and Thessalonica. This last-known to us as Salonika, but to modern Greeks by its ancient name (Victory of Thes saly)-was the capital of the province, seat of the provincial council, and one of the great ports of trade between the Balkans and Asia. Thrace, farther east, de voted itself to agriculture, herding, and mining; but it had considerable cities at Serdica (Sofia), Philippopolis its capital, Adrianople, Perinthus, and Byzantium (Istanbul). Here at the Golden Horn the merchants and fishmongers grew rich while the Greek settlers of the hinterland gave way to the encroaching bar barians; all the grain of the interior came down to its docks; all the commerce of Scythia and the Black Sea paid toll as it passed by, and the fish almost leaped into the net as they poured through the narrow Bosporus. Soon Constantine would recognize this site as the key city of the classic world.
Thessaly, south of J\Iacedonia, specialized in wheat and fine horses. Euboea, the great island named of old (like Boeotia) for its fine cattle, was described by Dio Chrysostom 1 as reverting to barbarism in our second century; here, above all, the discouragement of the poor by the concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a few families, the discouragement of the rich by ever-rising taxes and liturgies, and the discouragement of parentage by selfish wealth and desperate poverty had almost wiped out a once thriving agricultural population, and cattle grazed within the walls of Chalcis and Erctria. Boeotia had not recovered from the death and taxes laid upon it by Su1la's campaigns; "Thebes," said Strabo, "is only a village," huddled into what had once been merely its Cadmea or citadel. A century of peace, however, brought some prosperity to Plataea; and Chaeronea, on whose plains Philip and Sulla had won empires, retained enough charm to keep its most famous citizen; it had become so small, said Plutarch, that he would not make it smaller by leaving it.2 In his calm career and genial thought we find a fairer side of a somber scene, a decent middle class clingin3 to ancient virtues, capable of civic devotion, warm friendship, and parental love. There is no more pleasant character in our tale than Plutarch of Chaeronea.
He was born there about A.D. 46, and died there about 126. He was a student at Athens when Nero collected triumphs in Greece. He must have had a fair income, for he traveled in Egypt and Asia Minor and t\vice in Italy; he lectured in Greek at Rome and seems to have served his country in some diplomatic role. He liked the great capital and the good manners and honorable life of its new aristocracy; he admired their stoic code, and agreed with Ennius that Rome had been made by morality rnd character. As he contemplated these living nobles and the noble dead, the thought came to him of comparing the heroes of Rome with those of Greece. He proposed not merely to write history or even biography, but to teach virtue and hero ism by historic exemplars; even his·Parallel Lives were in his mind Moralia. He was dways a teacher and never lost a chance to tie a moral to a tale; but who has ever done it more gracefully? He warns us, in his "Alexander," that
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIII
he is more interested in character than in history; he hopes that by pairing and comparing great Romans with great Greeks he will pass on some moral stimulus, some heroic impulse, to his readers. With disarming candor he confesses that he himself has become a better man through keeping company so long with distinguished men.3
We must not expect to find in him the conscience and accuracy of a proper historian; he is rich in errors of name and place and date and occasionally (if we may judge) misunderstands events; he even fails in two major tasks of the biographer-to show the derivation of his subject's character and work from heredity, environment, and circumstance, and the development of character through growth, responsibility, and crisis; in Plutarch, as in Heracleitus, a man's character is his fate. But no one who has read the Lives can feel their shortcomings; these are lost in the vivid narrative, the exciting episodes, the fascinating anecdotes, the wise comments, the noble style. In all these 1500 pages there is not a line of padding; every sentence counts. A hundred eminent men-generats, poets, and philosophers-have borne witness to the book; "it is," said Mme Roland, "the pasture of great souls." 4 "I can hardly do without Plutarch," wrote Montaigne; "it is my breviary." 5 Shakespeare takes many stories here, and his view of Brutus goes back through Plutarch to Roman aristocrats. Napoleon carried the Lives with him almost every where; and Heine, reading them, could hardly restrain himself from leaping upon a horse and riding forth to conquer France. Greece has not left us a more precious book.
Having seen the Mediterranean world Plutarch returned to Chaeronea, raised four sons and a daughter, lectured and wrote, journeyed now and then to Athens, but for the most part shared to the end of his days the simple life of his native town. He thought it an obligation to combine public office with his scholarly pursuits. His fellow citizens elected him building inspector, then chief magistrate, then Boeotarch-member of the national council. He pre sided over municipal ceremonies and festivals, and became in his spare mo ments a priest of the revived oracle at Delphi. He thought it unwise to reject the old faith because of its !ntellectual incredibility; the vital thing was not the creed but the support 1t gave to man's weak morality, the reinforcing bond it wove among the members and generations of a family and a state. The thrill of religious emotion was in his judgment the most deepening ex
perience ?f life._ olerant swell s pious, he almost founded the study of


Just as the Syntaxis gathered ancient astronomy into its final fonn, so Ptolemy's Geographical Outline summarized antiquity's knowledge of the earth's surface. Here, too, his industrious tables of latitude and longitude for the major cities of the globe were vitiated by accepting Poseidonius' modest estimate of the earth; but to this encouraging mistake, as transmitted by Ptolemy, Columbus owed his belief in the possibility of reaching the Indies in a practicable time by sailing west.21 Ptolemy was the first to use the tenns parallels and meridians in geography; and in his maps he successfully pro jected a spherical upon a flat surface. But he was a mathematician rather than an astronomer or a geographer; his work consisted chiefly in mathematical
formulations. In the Syntaxis he drew up an excellent table of chords. He
divided the radius of the earth into sixty partes nzinutae prinure ("first small parts"), which became our "minutes," and subdivided each of these into sixty partes nzinutae secundae ("second small parts"), now our "seconds."
Though he made many mistakes, Ptolemy had the temper and patience of a true scientist. He tried to rest all conclusions upon observation-too seldom his own. In one field he carried out a long series of experiments: his Optica, a study of refraction, has been acclaimed as "the most remarkable experi mental research of antiquity." 22 lt is significant that this greatest astronomer, geographer, and mathematician of his age wrote also a Tetrabiblios, or "Four Books," on the control of human life by the stars.
Meanwhile a minor Archimedes was giving the classic world a second chance to stage an industrial revolution. A brilliant inventor or compiler, of
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIV
whom we know only the one name, Hero, issued in this age* at Alexandria a long succession of treatises on mathematics and physics, of which several have been preserved through Arabic translations. He warned his readers frankly that the theorems and inventions which he presented were not neces sarily his own, but were the accumulations of centuries. In the Dioptra he described an instrument like the theodolite, and formulated principles for measuring, by surveying, the distances to inaccessible points. In the Me chanica he considered the uses and combinations of simple devices like the wheel, axle, lever, pulley, wedge, and screw. In the Pneznnatica he studied air pressure in seventy-eight experiments, most of them playful tricks; e.g., he showed how either wine or water could be made to .flow from the same small orifice in the bottom of a jug by closing one or the other of the air holes at the top of the divided container.
From these amusements he was led on to make a force pump, a fire-engine pump with piston and valves, a hydraulic clock, a water organ, and a steam engine. In this contraption the steam from heated water was passed into a globe by a tube, and escaped through curved outlets at opposite sides, causing the globe to revolve in a direction contrary to that of the expelled steam. Hero's keen sense of humor kept him from developing this invention to industrial uses. He employed steam to support a ball in mid-air, to make a mechanical bird sing, to cause a statue to blow a horn. So in the Catoptrica he studied the reflection of light and showed how to construct mirrors that would enable a person to see his back, or appear with head downward, or with three eyes, two noses, etc. He told magicians how to perform tricks by concealed apparatus. He made water pour from a font when a coin was inserted in the slot. He constructed a hidden machine by which heated water overflowed into a bucket, whose increasing weight, by pulleys, opened temple doors. In these and a hundred other ways Hero succeeded in beino- a thaumaturgist, and failed to become a \Vatt.	::,
Alexandria had long since been the chief center of medical education. There were famous schools of medicine at Marseilles, Lyons Sara<Tossa Athens, Antioch, Cos, Ephesus, Smyrna, and Pergamum; but medical stu- dents came to the Egyptian capital from every province. Even as late as the fourth century, when Egypt was in decline, Ammianus Marcellinus wrote tha_t "it is enough t	?:1;mend_ a _Phfsician's skill if e can say that he was tramed at Alexandna.-		Spec1ahzat1on ·was progressrng; "no one can be a universal physician," said Philostratus (ca. A.D. z z 5); "there must be special ists for wounds, fevers, eyes, consumption." 25 Dissection of cadavers was practiced at Alexandria, and there seem to have been cases of human vivi-
His date is disputed. Pauly-\Vissowa place him about 50 B.c.; Heiberg Diels and Heath about A.D. 225.23	'	,
CHAP.XXIV)	THE   HELLENISTIC  REVIVAL	505
section.26 Surgery was probably as well developed there in the first century
A.D. as anywhere in Europe before the nineteenth century. Women physi cians were not rare; one of them, Metrodora,. wrote an extant treatise on diseases of the womb.27 Great names adorned the medical history of this age: Rufus of Ephesus, who described the anatomy of the eye, distinguished between motor and sensory nerves, and improved methods for stopping the
.flow of blood in surgery; Marinos of Alexandria, famous for his operations on the skull; and Antyllus, the greatest ophthalmologist of the time. Dios corides of Cilicia (A.D. 40-90) wrote a Materia Medica which scientifically described 600 medical plants so well that his book remained the chief author ity on its subject until the Renai§ance. He recommended medicated pes saries for contraception;28 and his recipe for wine of mandragora to produce surgical anesthesia was succe§fully applied in 1874.29
Soranus of Ephesus, about A.D. r r6, published a treatise on the diseases of women and the birth and care of children; it ranks only below the Hippo cratic collection and the works of Galen among the extant products of an cient medicine. He describes a vaginal speculum and an obstetric chair, gives an excellent anatomy of the uterus, offers almost modern dietetic and opera tive advice, such as bathing the eyes of the newborn child with oil,30 sug gests half a hundred contraceptive devices, mostly by vaginal medication,31 and (unlike Hippocrates) allows abortion where delivery would endanger
the mother's life.32 Soranus was the greatest gynecologist of antiquity; no advance was made on his work till Pare, .fifteen centuries after him. If all his forty treatises were extant we should probably rank him with Galen.
The most famous physician of the period was the son of a Pergamese architect, who named him Galenus, i.e., quiet and peaceable, in the hope that he would not take after his mother.33 At fourteen the youth found his first love in philosophy, from whose dangerous lure he was never freed. At seventeen he turned to medicine, studied in Cilicia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Cyprus, Crete, Greece, and Alexandria (a mobility typical of ancient schol ars), served as a surgeon in the gladiatorial school at Pergamum, and prac ticed for a time in Rome (A.D. 164-68). There his successful cures brought him many rich patients, and his lectures drew distinguished audiences. His repute rose to such a point that people wrote to him from every province for medical advice; and he confidently prescribed by mail. His good father, for getting the purpose of his name, had counseled him to join no sect or party and always to tell the truth. Galen obeyed, exposed the ignorance and venality of many physicians in Rome, and in a few years had to flee from his enemies. Marcus Aurelius called him back to care for young Commodus ( r69) and tried to take him on a Marcomannic campaign; but Galen was
506	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIV
clever enough to be soon back in Rome. Thereafter we know nothing of
him except his works.
He was almost as voluminous as Aristotle. Of 500 volumes ascribed to him some 118 have survived, covering in 20,000 pages all branches of medi cine and several fields of philosophy. They are of little medical value today, but they abound in incidental information and in the vitality of a vigorous and controversial spirit. His fondness for philosophy had given him a bad habit of drawing large deductions from small inductions; his faith in his own knowledge and powers often betrayed him into a dogmatism impossible to a scientific mind; and his great authority prolonged for centuries the life of serious errors. Nevenheless, he was an accurate observer and the most experimental of ancient physicians. "I confess the disease from which I have suffered all my life-to trust . . . no statements until, so far as possible, I have tested them for myself." 34 Forbidden by the Roman government to dissect the human body alive or dead, he dissected and vivisected animals, and sometimes too readily concluded to human anatomy from a study of apes, dogs, cows, and pigs.
Despite his limitations Galen made more contributions to anatomy than any other observer in antiquity. He described accurately the bones of the cranium and the spinal column, the muscular system, the lacteal vessels, the ducts of the lingual and submaxillary glands, and the valves of the heart. He showed that an excised heart can continue to beat outside the body; he proved that the arteries contain blood, not air (as the Alexandrian school had taught for 400 years). He missed anticipating Harvey; he thought that most of the blood traveled forth as well as back in the veins, while the re mainder, mixed with air from the lungs, moved to and fro in the arteries. He was the first to explain the mechanism of respiration, and brilliantly cou jectured that the principal element in the air we breathe is also that which is active in combustion.35 He differentiated pleurisy and pneumonia, described aneurism, cancer, and tuberculosis, and recognized the infectious nature of the last. Above all, he founded experimental neurology. He made the first experimental sections of the spinal cord, determined the sensory and motor functions of each segm nt, unde tood the sympathetic system, recognized seven of the twelve pairs of crarual nerves, and caused aphasia at will by cutting the laryngeal nerve. He showed that injuries to one side of the brain produce derangements in the opposite side of the body. He cured the sophist Pausanias of numbness in the fo_urth and fifth fingers of the left hand by stimulating the brachia! plexus in which the ulnar nerve arises that controls those fingers.36 He was o killed in sy:11ptomatology that he preferred to diagnose without questiorung the pattent.37 He made much use of diet, exercise, and massage, but he was also an expert on drugs and traveled widely
CHAP. XXIV)	THE  HELLENISTIC  REVIVAL
to secure rare medicines. He condemned the prescription of offal and urine, still popular with some cf his contemporaries,38 recommended dried cicadas for colic, applied goat dung to a tumor, and gave a long list of illnesses that could be cured by theri c-a f:-m us drug made as an antidote for .Mith ridates the Great, daily imbibed by Marcus Aurelius, and containing the flesh of snakes.39
He tarnished his record as an experimentalist by a torrent of precipitate theory. He ridiculed magic and spells, accepted divination by dreams, and thought that the phases of the moon affected the condition of patients. He took up Hippocrates' notion of the four humors (blood and phlegm, black and 'yellow bile),* added a dash of Pythagoras' doctrine of four elements (earth, ai:.-, fire, and water), and tried to reduce all diseases to derangement of these humors or these elements. He was a firm vitalist, convinced that a pnezmza, a vital breath or spirit, pervaded and activated every part of the body. Mechanistic interpretations of biology had been advanced by several physicians, as for example by Asclepiades, who held that physiology should be treated as a branch of physics; Galen objected that whereas a machine is merely the sum of its parts, an organism implies the purposive control of the parts by the whole. And just as purpose alone can explain the origin, structure, and function of organs, so the universe, Galen thought, can be understood only as the expression and instrument of some divine plan. God, however, operates solely through natural laws; there are no miracles, and the best revelation is Nature herself.


CHAP.xxvm)  THE  GROWTH OF THE  CHURCH	601
these ceremonies in terms of their literal claims; in terms of human encourage ment and inspiration they were the wisest medicaments of the soul.
Christian burial was the culminating honor of the Christian life. Since the new faith proclaimed the resurrection of the body as well as of the soul, every care was taken of the dead; a priest officiated at the interment, and each corpse received an individual tomb. About the year 1 oo the Christians of Rome, following Syrian and Etruscan traditions, began to bury their dead in catacombs-probably not for concealment but for the economy of space and expense. Workmen dug long subterranean passages at various levels, and the dead were laid in superimposed crypts along the sides of these galleries. Pagans and Jews practiced the same method, perhaps as a con venience for burial societies. Some of the passages seem purposely devious, and suggest their use as hiding places in persecutions. After the triumph of Christianity the custom of catacomb burial died out; the crypts became objects of veneration and pilgrimage; by the ninth century they had been blocked up and forgotten, and only accident discovered them in 1578.
What remains of early Christian art is for the most part preserved in the frescoes and reliefs of the catacombs. Here, about 180, appear the symbols that were to be so prominent in Christianity: the dove, representing the soul freed from the prison of this life; the phoenix, rising out of the ashes of death; the palm branch, announcing victory; the olive branch, offering peace; and the fish, chosen because the Greek word for it, i-ch-tb-u-s, formed the initials of the phrase lesous Christos theou uios soter-"Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour." Here also is the famous theme of the Good Shepherd, frankly modeled on a Tanagra statue of Mercury carrying a goat. Occasionally these designs catch a certain Pompeian grace, as in the flowers, vines, and birds that decorated the ceiling of St. Domitilla's tomb; usually they are the undistinguished work of minor craftsmen corrupting with Oriental obscurity the clearness of classic line. Christianity was in these centuries so absorbed in the other world that it had little interest in adorning this one. It continued the Judaic aversion to statuary, confused imagery with idolatry, and condemned sculpture and painting as too often glorying in the nude; consequently, as Christianity grew, plastic art de clined. Mosaic was more popular; the walls and floors of basilicas and baptistries were inlaid with tesselated foliage and flowers, the Paschal Lamb, and pictures from the Testaments. Similar scenes were carved in rough relief on sarcophagi. l\Ieanwhile architects were adapting the Greco-Roman basilica to the needs of Christian worship. The small temples that had housed the pagan gods could offer no models for churches designed to enclose whole congregations; the spacious nave and aisles of the basilica lent themselves to this purpose, and its apse seemed naturally destined to become the sanctuary. In these new shrines Christian music inherited diffidently the Greek notation, modes, and scales. Many
602	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVIIJ
theologians frowned upon the singing of women in church, or, indeed, in any public place; for a woman's voice might arouse some profane interest in the ever excitable male.31 Nevertheless, the congregations often expressed in hymns their hope, thanksgiving, and joy; and music began to be one of the fairest adorn ments and subtlest servants of the Christian faith.
All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to man kind. It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes, and na tions; it was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freemen of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome. By making all men heirs of Christ's victory over death, Christianity announced the basic equality of men, and made transiently trivial all differences of earthly degree. To the miserable, maimed, bereaved, disheartened, and humiliated it brought the new virtue of compassion, and an ennobling dignity; it gave them the inspiring figure, story, and ethic of Christ; it brightened their lives with the hope of the coming Kingdom, and of endless happiness beyond the grave. To even the greatest sinners it promised forgiveness, and their full acceptance into the community of the saved. To minds harassed with the insoluble problems of origin and destiny, evil and suffering, it brought a system of divinely revealed doctrine in which the simplest soul could find mental rest. To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life a vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world sick of brutality, cruelty, oppres sion, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed no longer to need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace.
So molded to men's wants, the new faith spread with fluid readiness. Nearly every convert, with the ardor of a revolutionary, made himself an office of propaganda. The roads, rivers, and coasts, the trade routes and facilities, of the Empire largely determined the lines of the Church's growth: eastward from Jerusalem to Damascus, Edessa, Dura, Seleucia, and Ctesiphon; southward through Bostra and Petra into Arabia; westward through Syria into Egypt; northward through Antioch into Asia Minor and Armenia; across the Aegean from Ephesus and T roas to Corinth and Thessalonica; over the Egnatian ,vay to Dyrrhachium; across the Adriatic to Brundisium, or through Scylla and Charybdis to Puteoli and Rome; through Sicily and Egypt to north Africa; over the Mediterranean or the Alps to Spain and Gaul, and thence to Britain: slowly the cross followed the fasces, and the Roman eagles made straight the way for Christ. Asia
CHAP. XXVIII)  THE  GROWTH OF THE CHURCH	603
Minor was in these centuries the stronghold of Christianity; by 3oo the majority of the population in Ephesus and Smyrna were Christians.32 The new faith fared well in north Africa: Carthage and Hippo became leading centers of Christian learning and dispute; here rose the great Fathers of the Latin Church-Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine; here the Latin text of the Mass, and the first Latin translation of the New Testament, took form. In Rome the Christian community numbered some 100,000 bythe end of the third century; it was able to send financial aid to other congregations; long since it had claimed for its bishop the supreme authority in the Church. Altogether we may count a fourth of the population in the East as Christian by 300, and a twentieth in the West. "Men proclaim," said Tertullian (ca. 200), "that the state is beset with us. Every age, condition, and rank is coming over to us. We are only of yesterday, but already we fill the world."33
THE  CONFLICT OF CREEDS
It would have been surprising if, in the multitude of relatively independ ent centers of Christianity, subject to different traditions and environments, there had failed to develop a diversity of customs and creeds. Greek Chris tianity in particular was destined to a flood of heresies by the metaphysical and argumentative habits of the Greek mind. Christianity can be understood only in the perspective of these heresies, for even in defeating them it took something of their color and form.
One faith united the scattered congregations: that Christ was the son of God, that he would return to establish his Kingdom on earth, and that all who believed in him would at the Last Judgment be rewarded with eternal bliss. But Christians differed as to the date of the second advent. When Nero died and Titus demolished the Temple, and again when Hadrian destroyed Jerusalem, many Christians hailed these calamities as signs of the second coming. When chaos threatened the Empire at the close of the second cen tury, Tertullian and others thought that the end of the world was at hand; 34 a Syrian bishop led his flock into the desert to meet Christ halfway, and a bishop in Pontus disorganized the life of his community by announcing that Christ would return within a year.35 As all signs failed, and Christ did not come, wiser Christians sought to soften the disappointment by reinterpreting the date of his return. He would come in a thousand years, said an epistle
ascribed to Barnabas;36 he would come, said the most cautious, when the "generation" or race of the Jews was quite extinct, or when the Gospel had been preached to all gentiles; or, said the Gospel of John, he would send
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXVIII
in his stead the Holy Spirit or Paraclete. Finally the Kingdom was trans ferred from earth to heaven, from the years of our life to a paradise beyond the grave. Even the belief in the millennium-in the return of Jesus after a thousand years-was discouraged by the Church, and was ultimately con demned. The faith in the second advent had established Christianity; the hope of heaven preserved it.*
Aside from these basic tenets, the followers of Christ, in the first three cen turies, divided into a hundred creeds. We should misjudge the function of his tory-which is to illuminate the present through the past-were we to detail the varieties of religious belief that sought and failed to capture the growing Church, and which the Church had to brand, one after another, as disintegrating heresies. Gnosticism-the quest of godlike knowledge (gnosis) through mystic means
-was not a heresy so much as a rival; it antedated Christianity, and had pro claimed theories of a Soter, or Savior, before Christ was born.37 That same Simon Magus of Samaria, whom Peter rebuked for "simony," was probably the author of a Great Exposition which gathered together a maze of Oriental notions about the complicated steps that could lead the human mind to a divine comprehension of all things. In Alexandria the Orphic, Neo-Pythagorean, and Neoplatonist traditions, fusing with the Logos philosophy of Philo, stirred Basilides ( 117), Valentinus (160), and others to form weird systems of divine emanations and personified "aeons" of the world. In Edessa Bardesanes ( 200) created literary Syriac by describing these aeons in prose and verse. In Gaul the Gnostic Marcus offered to reveal to women the secrets of their guardian angels; his revelations were flattering, and he accepted their persons as his reward.88
The greatest of the early heretics was not quite a Gnostic, but was influenced by their mythology. About 140 Marcion, a rich youth of Sinope, came to Rome vowing to complete Paul's work of divorcing Christianity from Judaism. The Christ of the Gospels, said J\larcion, had described as his father a God of tender ness, forgiveness, and love; but the Yahveh of the Old Testament was a harsh god of unrelenting justice, tyranny, and war; this Yahveh could not be the father of the gentle Christ. \Vhat good god, asked Marcion, would have condemned all mankind to misery for eating an apple, or desiring knowledge, or loving woman? Yahveh exists, and is the creator of the world; but he made the flesh and bones of man from matter, and therefore left man's soul imprisoned in an evil frame. To release the soul of man a greater god sent his son to earth; Christ appeared,
i::housands of Christi ns, including 1!1any who actually p actice Christianity, interpret the disturbances of our Orne as the predicted porrems of Chnst's earlv return. Millions of Chris ans, non-Ch?stians, an ath ists still belie ·e n an innninent eanhly paradise where war and wickedness will ce'.'5e. Historically the belief m heaven and the belief in utopia are like cm_npensatory buckets ma v ll: '\":he one go s down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, commurnsac agitaoon rose m Athens (430 B.c.), and reYolution began in Ro e _( 1 3 B.c.); w en thes movements failed, rcs1:11" ection.faiths succeeded, cuhninating in Chrisnarnty; when, m our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reap peared. In this perspectiYe the future of religion is secure.
CHAP.xxvm)   THE  GROWTH  OF  THE  CHURCH	605
already thirty years of age, in a phantasmal, unreal body, and by his death won for good men the privilege of a purely spiritual resurrection. The good, said Marcion, are those who, following Paul, renounce Yahveh and the Jewish Law, reject the Hebrew Scriptures, shun marriage and all sensual enjoyment, and overcome the flesh by a stern asceticism. To propagate these ideas .Marcion issued a New Testament composed of Luke's Gospel and the letters of Paul. The Church excommunicated him, and returned to him the substantial sum that he had pre sented to it on coming to Rome.
While the Gnostic and Marcionite sects were spreading rapidly in both East and West, a new heresiarch appeared in Mysia. About 156 Montanus denounced the increasing worldliness of Christians and the growing autocracy of bishops in the Church; he demanded a return to primitive Christian simplicity and austerity, and a restored right of prophecy, or inspired speech, to the members of the congregations. Two women, Priscilla and Maximilla, took him at his word and fell into religious trances; and their utterances became the living oracles of the sect. Montanus himself prophesied with such eloquent ecstasy that his Phrygian followers-with the same religious enthusiasm that had once begotten Dionysus-hailed him as the Paraclete promised by Christ. He announced that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, and that the New Jerusalem of the Apoca lypse would soon descend from heaven upon a neighboring plain. To the pre destined spot he led so large a host that some towns were depopulated. As in early Christian days, marriage and parentage were neglected, goods were com munistically shared, and an absorbed asceticism anxiously prepared the soul for Christ.39 When, about 190, the Roman proconsul Antonius persecuted Chris tianity in Asia Minor, hundreds of Montanists, eager for paradise, crowded before his tribunal and asked for martyrdom. He could not accommodate them
all; some he executed; but most of them he dismissed with the words: "Miserable creatures! If you wish to die are there not ropes and precipices?" 40 The Church
banned Montanism as a heresy, and in the sixth century Justinian ordered the extinction of the sect. Some Montanists gathered in their churches, set fire to them, and let themselves be burned alive:11


Meanwhile the Alemanni and the Marcomanni, noting that the Rhine and Danube garrisons had been depleted to reinforce the legions in Syria, broke through the Roman limes and ravaged eastern Gaul. After celebrating his Persian triumph, Alexander, again with Mamaea at his side, rejoined his army, and led it to Mainz. On his mother's advice he negotiated with the enemy, offering them an annual sum to keep the peace. His troops con demned his weakness, and mutinied; they had never forgiven his economy, his discipline, and his subordination of them to the Senate and a woman's rule. They acclaimed as emperor C. Juliu Maximinus, commander of the Pannonian legions. The soldiers of Maximinus forced their way into Alex ander's tent, and slew him, his mother, and his friends (235).
ANARCHY
It was no whim of history that made the army supreme in the third cen tury; internal causes had weakened the state and left it exposed on every
'
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIX
front. The cessation of expansion after Trajan, and again after Septimius Severus, was the signal for attack; and as Rome had conquered. nations by dividing them, so now the barbarians began to conquer her by uniting in simultaneous assaults. The necessity of defense exalted the power of arms and the prestige of soldiery; generals replaced philosophers on the throne, and the last reign of the aristocracy yielded to the revived rule of force.
Maximinus was a good soldier and no more, the robust son of a Thracian peasant; history assures us that he was eight feet tall, and had a thumb of such circumference that he could wear his wife's bracelet on it as a ring. He had no education, scorned it, and envied it. In his three years as emperor he never visited Rome, but preferred the life of his camp on the Danube or the Rhine. To support his campaigns and appease his troops, he laid such taxes upon the well to do that an upper-class revolt soon formed against his rule. Gordianus, the wealthy and learned proconsul of Africa, accepted the nomination of his army as a rival emperor; being eighty years old, he asso ciated his son with him in the lethal office; they failed to withstand the forces sent against them by Maximinus; the son was killed in battle, the father killed himself. Maximinus revenged himself by proscriptions and confiscations that almost destroyed the aristocracy. "Every day," says Herodian, "one could see the richest men of yesterday turned beggars today." 19 The Senate, which had been reconstituted and reinvigorated by Severus, fought back valiantly; it declared Maximimis an outlaw, and chose two of its members, Maximus and Balbinus, as emperors. Maximus led an improvised anny to meet Maximinus, who came down across the Alps and besieged Aquileia. Maximinus was the better general, and had the superior forces; the fate of the Senate and the propertied classes seemed sealed; but a group of Maximinus' soldiers, who had suffered from his savage punish ments, killed him in his tent. Maximus returned in triumph to Rome, and was assassinated, along with Balbinus, by the Praetorian Guard. The Prae torians made a third Gordian emperor, and the Senate confirmed the choice.
\Ve shall not repeat in bloody detail the names and battles and deaths of these emperors of anarchy. In the thirty-five years ·between Alexander Severus and Aurelian, thirty-seven men were proclaimed emperors. Gordian III was slain by his troops while fighting the Persians ( 244); his successor,
Philip the Arab, was defeated and killed at Verona by Decius ( 249), an Illyrian of wealth and culture whose devotion to Rome well deserved a
name so honorable in ancient story. Benveen campaigns against the Goths he laid out an ambitious program for the restoration of Roman religion, morals, and character, and gave orders for the destruction of Christianity; then he returned to the Danube, met the Goths, saw his son slain beside him told his wavering army that the loss of any one individual was of littl
I
CHAP. XXIX)   THE  COLLAPSE OF THE EMPIRE
importance, pressed on against the enemy, and was himself struck down in one of the worst defeats in Roman history ( 2 51). He was succeeded by Gallus, who was murdered by his troops (253), and then by Aemilianus, who was murdered by his troops (253).
The new emperor, Valerian, already sixty, and facing war at once with the Franks, the Alemanni, the Marcomanni, the Goths, the Scythians, and the Persians, made his son Gallienus ruler of the \Vestem Empire, kept the East for himself, and led an army into Mesopotamia. He was too old for his tasks, and soon succumbed. Gallienus, now thirty-five, was a man of courage, intelligence, and a culture that seemed almost out of place in this century of barbaric war. He reformed the civilian administration in the
\Vest, led his armies to victory against one after another of the Empire's enemies, and yet found time to enjoy and patronize philosophy and litera ture, and promote a transient revival of classic art. But even his varied genius was overwhelmed by the accumulating evils of the time.
In 2 54 the Marcomanni raided Pannonia and north Italy. In 2 5 5 the Goths invaded Macedonia and Dalmatia, Scythians and Goths invaded Asia Minor, the Persians invaded Syria. In 2 57 the Goths captured the fleet of the Bos poran kingdom, ravaged the Greek cities on the Black Sea coasts, burned Trapezus and enslaved its people, and raided Pontus. In 258 they took Chalcedon, Nicomedia, Prusa, Apamea, Nicaea; in the same year the Per sians conquered Armenia, and Postumus declared himself the independent ruler of Gaul. In 259 the Alemanni broke into Italy, but were defeated by Gallienus at Milan. In 260 Valerian was ovenvhelmed by the Persians at Edessa, and died in captivity at a time and place unknown. Shapur I and his clouds of cavalry advanced through Syria to Antioch, surprised the population in the midst of its games, sacked the city, killed thousands, and led more thousands into slavery. Tarsus was taken and devastated, Cilicia and Cappadocia were overrun, and Shapur returned to Persia laden with spoils. \Vithin a decade three ignominious tragedies had overtaken Rome: a Roman emperor had for the first time fallen in defeat, another had been captured by the enemy, and the unity of the Empire had been sacrificed to the necessity of meeting simultaneous attacks on many fronts. Under the force of these blows, and the disorderly elevation and assassination of em perors by troops, the imperial prestige collapsed; those psychological forces which time consecrates into habitual and unquestioned authority lost their hold upon Rome's enemies, even upon her subjects and citizens. Revolts broke out everywhere: in Sicily and Gaul the oppressed peasantry flared up in wild jacqueries; in Pannonia Ingenuus proclaimed himself sovereign of the eastern provinces. In 263 the Goths sailed down the Ionian coast,
630	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIX
sacked Ephesus, and burned down the great Temple of Artemis. All the Hellenistic East was in terror.
An unexpected ally saved the Empire in Asia. 0denathus, who governed Palmyra as a vassal of Rome, drove the Persians back across Mesopotamia, defeated them at Ctesiphon (261), and declared himself king of Syria, Cilicia, Arabia, Cappadocia, and Armenia. He was assassinated in 266; his youthful son succeeded to his titles, his widow to his power. Like Oeopatra, from whom she claimed descent, Zenobia combined beauty of person with states:rp.anly capacity and many accomplishments of mind. She studied Greek literature and philosophy, learned Latin, Egyptian, and Syriac, and wrote a history of the East. Apparently connecting chastity with vigor, she allowed herself only such sexual relations as were needed for motherhood.20 She inured herself to hardship and fatigue, enjoyed the dangers of the chase. and marched on foot for miles at the head of her troops. She governed with sternness and wisdom, made the philosopher Longinus her premier, gathered scholars, poets, and artists at her court, and beautified her capital with Greco-Roman-Asiatic palaces whose ruins startle the desert traveler today. Feeling that the Empire was breaking up, she planned a new dynasty and realm, brought Cappadocia, Galatia, and most of Bithynia under her con trol, fitted out a great army and fleet, conquered Egypt, and took Alexandria after a siege that destroyed half the population. The subtle "Queen of the East" pretended that she was proceeding as the agent of the Roman power; but all the world knew that her victories were an act in the spacious drama of Rome's collapse.
Seeing the wealth and weakness of the Empire, the barbarians poured down into the Balkans and Greece. vVhile the Sarmatians pillaged again the cities on the Black Sea, a branch of the Goths sailed in 500 ships through the Hellespont into the Aegean, took isle after isle, anchored in the Piraeus, and sacked Athens, Argos, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes (z67). While their navy brought some of the marauders back to the Black Sea, another group fought its way overland towards its Danube home. Gallienus met them at the river Nestus in Thrace, and won a costly victory; but a year later he was murdered by his troops. In 269 another Gothic horde descended into Macedonia, besieged Thessalonica, and pillaged Greece, Rhodes, Cyprus, and the Ionian coast. The Emperor Claudius II rescued Thessalonica, drove the Goths up the Vardar valley, and defeated them with great slaughter at Naissus, the modem Nish (269). If he had lost that battle no army would have intervened between the Goths and Italy.
CHAP.XXIX)	THE	COLLAPSE  OF  THE  EMPIRE	631
m. THE  :ECONOMIC DECLINE
Political anarchy accelerated economic disintegration, and economic decline promoted political decay; each was the cause and effect of the other. Roman statesmanship had never found a healthy economic life for Italy; and perhaps the narrow plains of the peninsula have never provided an adequate base for the soaring aims of the Italian state. The production of cereals was discouraged by the competition of cheap grains from Sicily, Africa, and Egypt, and the great vineyards were losing their markets to provincial wines. Farmers complained that high taxes consumed their pre carious profits and left them too little to keep the drainage and irrigation canals in repair; the canals filled up, the marshes spread, and malaria weak ened the population of the Campagna and Rome. Large tracts of fertile land had been withdrawn from cultivation for residential estates. The absentee owners of the latifundia exploited labor and the soil to the limit of tolerance, and absolved themselves by philanthropies in the towns; urban architecture and games profited while the countryside grew desolate. Many peasant pro prietors and free rural workers abandoned the farms for the cities, leaving Italian agriculture for the most part to latifundia manned by listless slaves. But the latifundia themselves were ruined by the ?ax Romana, the dearth of wars of conquest in the first and second centuries, and the consequent fall in the supply, and rise in the cost, of slaves. Compelled to lure free labor back to the land, the great landlords divided their holdings into units which they leased to coloni, "cultivators"; they required from these tenants a small money rent or a tenth of the produce, and a period of unpaid labor in the owner's villa or on his private domain. In many cases landlords found it profitable to emancipate their slaves and change them into coloni. In the third century the owners, harassed by invasion and revolution in the cities, took more.and more to living in their villas; these were fortified into castles, and were gradually transformed into medieval chateaux.*
The lack of slaves strengthened for a time the position of free labor in industry as well as in agriculture. But while the resources of the rich were
" The "colonate" probably had a major beginning when Aurelius settled captive Germans on imperial estates (172), an·d gave them hereditary possession on condition of an annual tax, military se i e atcall,_ a_nd an agreement not to leave their allotm t withou permission of t e st3.te. S1m1lar_ condmons were laid upon Roman veterans rece1vmg front1 r lands, espe cially m the agn decumates-"tithe-paying fields"-along the Danube and Rhme.21 A great extension of this imperial colonate occurred under Septimius Severus, who divided the lands he had appropriated into parcels tilled by tenants paying taxes in money or kind. As Septimius imitated the Ptolemies, so private landowners imitated him; the colonate began with mon archs, and produced a feudalism that undermined monarchy.


CHAP.XXX)	THE	TRIUMPH  OF  CHRISTIANITY
THE RISE OF  CONSTANTIJ\TE
Diocletian, peaceful in his Dalmatian palace, saw the failure of both the persecution and the tetrarchy. Seldom had the Empire witnessed such con fusion as followed his abdication. Galerius prevailed upon Constantius to let him appoint Severus and Maximinus Daza as "Caesars" ( 305). At once the principle of heredity asserted its claims: Maxentius, son of Maximian, wished to succeed his father's authority, and a like resolution fired Con stantine.
Flavius Valerius Constantinus had begun life at Naissus in Moesia (272?) as the illegitimate son of Constamius by his legal concubine Helena, a bar maid from Bithynia.27 On becoming a "Caesar," Constantius was requireJ by Diocletian to put away Helena and to take Maximian's stepdaughter Theodora as his wife. Constantine received only a meager education. He took up soldiering early, and proved his valor in the wars against Egypt and Persia. Galerius, on succeeding Diocletian, kept the young officer near him as a hostage for the good behavior of Constantius. \Vhen the latter asked Galerius to send the youth to him Galerius procrastinated craftily; but Constantine escaped from his watchers, and rode night and day across Europe to join his father at Boulogne and share in a British campaign. The Gallic army, deeply loyal to the humane Constantius, came to love his handsome, brave, and energetic son; and when the father died at York (306), the troops acclaimed Constantine not merely as "Caesar" but as Augustus-emperor. He accepted the lesser title, excusing himself on the ground that his life would be unsafe without an army at his back. Galerius, too distant to intervene, reluctantly recognized him as a "Caesar." Con stantine fought successfully against the invading Franks, and fed the beasts of the Gallic amphitheaters with barbarian kings.
Meanwhile in Rome the Praetorian Guard, eager to restore the ancient capital to leadership, hailed Maxemius as emperor (306). Severus descended from Milan to attack him; Maximian, to confound the confusion, returned to the purple at his son's request, and joined in the campaign; Severus was deserted by his troops and put to death (307). To help himself face the growing chaos, the aging Galerius appointed a new Augustus-Flavius Li cinius; hearing which, Constantine assumed a like dignity (307). A year later Maximinus Daza adopted the same title, so that in place of the two Augusti of Diocletian's plan there were now six; no one cared to be merely "Caesar." Maxemius quarreled with his father; Maximian went to Gaul to seek Constantine's aid; while the latter fought Germans on the Rhine, Maximian tried to replace him as commander of the Gallic armies; Con-
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XX:X
stantine marched across Gaul, besieged the usurper in Marseilles, captured
him, and granted him the counesy of suicide (310).
The death of Galerius (3 n) removed the last barrier between intrigue and war. Maximinus plotted with Maxentius to overthrow Licinius and Constantine, who conspired to overthrow them. Taking the initiative, Con stantine crossed the Alps, defeated an army near Turin, and advanced upon Rome with a celerity of movement, and a restraining discipline of his troops, that recalled the march of Caesar from the Rubicon. On October 27, 312, he met the forces of Maxentius at Saxa Rubra (Red Rocks) nine miles north of Rome; and by superior strategy compelled Maxentius to fight with his back to the Tiber, and no retreat possible except over the Mulvian Bridge. On the afternoon before the battle, says Eusebius,28 Constantine saw a flaming cross in the sky, with the Greek words en toutoi nika-"in this sign con quer."* Early the next morning, according to Eusebius and Lactantius,31 Constantine dreamed that a voice commanded him to have his soldiers mark upon their shields the letter X with a line drawn through it and curled around the top-the symbol of Christ. On arising he obeyed, and then advanced into the forefront of battle behind a standard (known henceforth as the Jabarum) carrying the initials of Christ interwoven with a cross. As Max entius displayed the Mithraic-Aurelian banner of the Unconquerable Sun, Constantine cast in his lot with the Christians, who were numerous in his army, and made the engagement a turning point in the history of religion. To the worshipers of Mithras in Constantine's forces the cross could give no offense, for they had long fought under a standard bearing a Mithraic cross of light.32 In any case Constantine won the battle of the Mulvian Bridge, and Ma.."\'.entius perished in the Tiber with thousands of his troops. The victor entered Rome the welcomed and undisputed master of the \Vest.
Early in 313 Constantine and Licinius met at Milan to co-ordinate their rule. To consolidate Christian support in all provinces, Constantine and Licinius issued an "Edict of Milan," confirming the religious toleration proclaimed by Galerius, extending it to all religions, and ordering the restora tion of Christian properties seized during the recent persecutions. After this historic declaration, which in effect conceded the defeat of paganism, Constantine returned to the defense of Gaul, and Licinius moved eastward to overwhelm Maximinus (313). Thedeath of .Maximinus shortly afterward left Constantine and Licinius the unchallenged rulers of the Empire. Licinius
Usually handed down by tradition in a Latin form: in hoc vince, or in hoc signo vinces "inthis sign thou shalt conquer." Eusebius, our sole authority for this vision, is confessedly 29 prone to edification; "but seeing," he pleads, "that the Emperor did with an oath confirm it to be true when he related it to me who intended to write his history . . . who can doubt his relation?" 30
CHAP. XXX)    THE  TRIUMPH  OF CHRISTIANITY	655
married Constantine's sister, and a war-weary people rejoiced at the prospect of peace.
But neither of the Augusti had quite abandoned the hope of undivided supremacy. In 314 their mounting enmity reached the point of war. Con stantine invaded Pannonia, defeated Licinius, and exacted the surrender of all Roman Europe except Thrace. Licinius revenged himself upon Con stantine's Christian supporters by renewing the persecution in Asia and Egypt. He excluded Christians from his palace at Nicomedia, required every soldier to adore the pagan gods, forbade the simultaneous attendance of both sexes at Christian worship, and at last prohibited all Christian services within city walls. Disobedient Christians lost their positions, their citizen ship, their property, their liberty, or their lives.
Constantine watched for an opportunity not only to succor the Christians of the East, but to add the East to his realm. \Vhen barbarians invaded Thrace, and Licinius failed to move against them, Constantine led his army from Thessalonica to the rescue of Licinius' province. After the barbarians were driven back Licinius protested Constantine's entry into Thrace; and as neither ruler desired peace, war was renewed. The defender of Chris tianity, with 130,000 men, met the defender of paganism, with 160,000 men, first at Adrianople and then at Chrysopolis (Scutari), won, and became sole emperor (323). Licinius surrendered on a promise of pardon; but in the following year he was executed on the charge that he had resumed his intrigues. Constantine recalled the Christian exiles, and restored to all "con fessors" their lost privileges and property. \Vhile still proclaiming liberty of worship for all, he now definitely declared himself a Christian, and invited his subjects to join him in embracing the new faith.
CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTIANITY
\Vas his conversation sincere-was it an act of religious belief, or a con summate stroke of political wisdom? Probably the latter.33 His mother Helena had turned to Christianity when Constantius divorced her; presum ably she had acquainted her son with the excellences of the Christian way; and doubtless he had been impressed by the invariable victory that had crowned his arms under the banner and cross of Christ. But only a skeptic would have made so subtle a use of the religious feelings of humanity. The Historia Augusta quotes him as saying, "it is Fortuna that makes a man emperor" 34-though this was a bow to modesty rather than to chance. In his Gallic court he had surrounded himself with pagan scholars and philos ophers.35 After his conversion he seldom conformed to the ceremonial re-
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXX
quirements of Christian worship. His letters to Christian bishops make it clear that he cared little for the theological differences that agitated Chris tendom-though he was willing to suppress dissent in the interests of im perial unity. Throughout his reign he treated the bishops as his political aides; he summoned them, presided over their councils, and agreed to enforce whatever opinion their majority should formulate. A real believer would have been a Christian first and a statesman afterward; with Constantine it was the reverse. Christianity was to him a means, not an end.
He had seen in his lifetime the failure of three persecutions; and it was not lost upon him that Christianity had grown despite them. Its adherents were still very much in the minority; but tl\ey were relatively united, brave, and strong, while the pagan majority was divided among many creeds, and included a dead weight of simple souls without conviction or influence. Christians were especially numerous in Rome under Maxentius, and in the East under Licinius; Constantine's support of Christianity was worth a dozen legions to him in his wars against these men. He was impressed by the com parative order and morality of Christian conduct, the bloodless beauty of Christian ritual, the obedience of Christians to their clergy, their humble acceptance of life's inequalities in the hope of happiness beyond the grave; perhaps .this new religion would purify Roman morals, regenerate marriage and the family, and allay the fever of class war. The Christians, despite bitter oppression, had rarely revolted against the state; their teachers had incul cated submission to the civil powers, and had taught the divine right of kings. Constantine aspired to an absolute monarchy; such a government would profit from religious support; the hierarchical discipline and ecu menical authority of the Church seemed to offer a spiritual correlate for monarchy. Perhaps that marvelous organization of bishops and priests could become an instrument of pacification, unification, and rule?
Nevertheless, in a world still preponderantly pagan, Constantine had to feel his way by cautious steps. He continued to use vague monotheistic lan guage that any pagan could accept. During the earlier years of his supremacy he carried out patiently the ceremonial required of him as pontifex maxi1nus of the traditional cult; he restored pagan temples, and ordered the taking of the auspices. He used pagan as well as Christian rites in dedicating Con stantinople. He used pagan magic formulas to protect crops and heal disease.36
Gradually, as his ow r grew more secure, he favored Christianity more openly. After 31 7 his cams dropped one by one their pagan effigies, until by 32 3 they bore only neutral inscriptions. A legal text of his reign, ques tioned but not disproved, gave Christian bishops the authority of judges in their dioceses; 37 other laws exempted Church realty from taxation,38 made
CHAP.XXX)   THE  TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY
Christian associations juridical persons, allowed them to own land and re ceive bequests, and assigned the property of intestate martyrs to the Church.39 Constantine gave money to needy congregations, built several churches in Constantinople and elsewhere, and forbade the worship of images in the new capital. Forgetting the Edict of Milan, he prohibited the meet ings of heretical sects, and finally ordered the destruction of their con venticles.40 He gave his sons an onhodox Christian education, and financed his mother's Christian philanthropies. The Church rejoiced in blessings be yond any expectation. Eusebius broke out into orations that were songs of gratitude and praise; and all over the Empire Christians gathered in festal thanksgiving for the triumph of their God.
Three clouds softened the brilliance of this "cloudless day": the monastic secession, the Donatist schism, the Arian heresy. In the interval between the Decian and the Diocletian persecution the Church had become the richest religious organization in the Empire, and had moderated its attacks upon wealth. Cyprian complained that his parishioners were mad about money, that Christian women painted their faces, that bishops held lucrative


CHAP.XVII)  THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	387
where his ships were becalmed on the way to Troy, Agamemnon, to the horror of Clytaemnestra, sacrificed Iphigenia to induce the winds to blow. While Agamemnon besieged Troy, Aegisthus courted his brooding wife, won her, and plotted with her to kill the King. It is at this point that Aeschylus takes up the tale.
The news has come to Argos that the war is over, and proud Agamem non-"robed in steel, and armies trembled at his wrath"-has landed on Peloponnesian shores, and is approaching Mycenae. A Chorus of Elders appears before the royal palace. and in ominous chant recalls Agamem non's abandonment of Iphigenia:
In that which Must Be he armed him slowly, And a strange wind within his bosom tossed,
A wind of dark thought, unclean, unholy; And he rose up, daring to the uttermost.
For men are boldened by a Blindness, straying Toward base desire, which brings grief hereafter,
Yea, and itself is grief.
So this man hardened to his own child's slaying, As help to avenge him for a woman's laughter,
And bring his ships relief....
With violence and a curb's voiceless wrath
Her stole of saffron to the ground she threw, And her eye with an arrow of pity found its path
To each man's heart that slew:
A face in a picture, striving amazedly;
The little maid who danced at her father's board, The innocent voice man's love came never nigh, Who joined to his her little paean-cry
When the third cup was poured."
Agamemnon's herald enters to announce the coming of the King. Aes chylus realizes with fine imagination the joy of the simple soldier as he sets foot, after a long absence, upon his native soil; now, says the herald, "I am ready, if God will, to die." He describes to the Chorus the terror and filth of the war, the rain that sent a moisture into the bones, the vermin that multiplied in the hair, the breathless heat of Ilion's summer, and the winter so cold that all the birds fell dead. Clytaemnestra comes from the palace, somber, nervous, and yet proud, and orders rich hangings to be strewn for Agamemnon's path. The King enters in the royal chariot,
388	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVII
escorted by his troops, and erect in the pride of victory. Behind him is another chariot, bearing the darkly beautiful Cassandra, Trojan princess and prophetess, the resentful slave of Agamemnon's lust, who bitterly pre dicts his punishment, and gloomily foresees her own death. With clever speech Clytaemnestra recounts to the King her years of longing for this return. "For you indeed the rushing fountains of my tears have run dry, and there is no drop left. But in my eyes, worn with late watching, you may see how I sorrowed for the signals of your victory that ever tarried; and in my disturbed sleep I started at the faint buzzing of the gnat's wing, for I dreamt of you long tales of woe, crowded into a short moment of repose.'"" He suspects her sincerity, and reproves her dourly for the lavish outlay of broidered hangings under his horses' feet; but he follows her into the palace, and Cassandra resignedly accompanies him. Through an intense pause in the action the Chorus intones softly a song of evil premoni tion. Then from within comes the cry towards which every line of the drama has moved, the death cry of Agamemnon slain by Aegisthus and Clytaemnestra. The portals open; Clytaemnestra is shown with ax in hand and blood on her brow, standing triumphant over the corpses of Cassandra and the King; and the Chorus chants the end:
Would God that suddenly, With no great agony,
No long sick-watch to keep, My hour would come to me, My hour, and presently
Bring the eternal, the Unwaking Sleep,
Now that my Shepherd, he Whose love watched over me,
Lies in the deep...
The second play in the trilogy, the Cboephoroe, or Libation Bearers, takes its title from the chorus of women who bring offerings to the grave of the King. Clytaemnestra has sent her young son Orestes to be reared in distant Phocis, hoping that he may forget his father's death. But old men there teach him the ancient law of vengeance: "The shed drop doth crave new blood"; the state, in those dark days, left the punishment of mur der to the dead man's kin; and men believed that the soul of the slain would know no peace till he had been avenged. Orestes, haunted and horrified with the thought of his mission-to kill his mother an Aegisthus-comes secretly to Argos with his comrade Pylades, seeks out his father's tomb,
CHAP. XVII)  TH E  L IT ER AT U RE  OF  TH E  G O L D EN  AG E	389