Thrice ten thy sum of years the nuptial prime, Nor fall far short, nor far exceed the time ... A virgin choose, that morals chaste imprest
By this wise love may stamp her yielding breast. Some known and neighboring damsel be thy prize; And wary bend around thy cautious eyes,
Lest by a choice imprudent thou be found
102	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
The merry mock of all the dwellers round. No better lot has Providence assigned Than a fair woman with a virtuous mind; Nor can a worse befall than when thy fate Allots a worthless, feast-continuing mate.
She with no touch of mere material flame Shall bum to tinder thy care-wasted frame; Shall send a fire thy vigorous bones within And age unripe in bloom of years begin.'"
Before this Fall of Man, says Hesiod, the human race lived through many happy centuries on the earth. First the gods, in the days of Cronus (Virgil's Saturnia regna), had made a Golden Race of men, who were themselves as gods, living without toil or care; of its own accord the earth bore ample food for them, and nourished their rich flocks; they spent many a day in joyous festival, and never aged; and when at last death came to them, it was like a painless and dreamless sleep. But then the gods, with divine whimsicality, made a Silver Race, far inferior to the first; these indi viduals took a century to grow up, lived through a brief maturity of suf fering, and died. Zeus made then a Brazen Race, men with limbs and weapons and houses of brass, who fought so many wars with one another that "black Death seized them and they quitted the bright sunlight." Zeus tried again and made the Heroic Race, which fought at Thebes and Troy; when these men died "they dwelt with carefree spirit in the Isles of the Blest." Last and worst came the Iron Race, mean and corrupt, poor and disorderly, toiling by day and wretched by night; sons dishonoring parents, impious and stingy to the gods, lazy and factious, warring among them selves, taking and giving bribes, distrusting and maligning one another, and grinding the faces of the poor; "Would," cries Hesiod, "that I had not been born in this age, but either before or after it!" Soon, he hopes, Zeus will bury this Iron Race under the earth."'
Such is the theology of history with which Hesiod explains the poverty and injustice of his time. These ills he knew by sight and touch; but the past, which the poets had filled with heroes and gods, must have been nobler and lovelier than this; surely men had not always been as poor and harassed and petty as the peasants whom he knew in Boeotia. He does not realize how deeply the faults of his class enter into his own outlook, how narrow and earthly, almost commercial, are his views of life and labor, women and men. What a fall this is from the picture of human
CHAP.V)	ATHENS
affairs in Homer, as a scene of crime and terror, but also of grandeur and nobility! Homer was a poet, and knew that one touch of beauty redeems a multitude of sins; Hesiod was a peasant who grudged the cost of a wife, and grumbled at the impudence of women who dared to sit at the same table with their husbands." Hesiod, with rough candor, shows us the ugly basement of early Greek society-the hard poverty of serfs and small farmers upon whose toil rested all the splendor and war sport of the aris tocracy and th1 kings. Homer sang of heroes and princes for lords and ladies; Hesiod knew no princes, but sang his lays of common men, and pitcht>d his tunt accordingly. In his verses we hear the rumblings of those peas _nt revolts r.hat would produce in Attica the reforms of Solon and the dic1:atorship of Peisistratus.*
In Boeotia, as in the Peloponnese, the land was owned by absentee nobles who (!1;1,elt in or near the towns. The most prosperous of the cities were built around Lake Copais, now dry but once supplying a complex system of irrigation tunnels and canals. Late in the Homeric Age this tempting region was invaded by peoples who took their name from that Mt. Boeon, in Epirus, near which they had had their home. They captured Chaeronea (near which Philip was to put an end to Greek liberty), Thebes, their future capital, and finally the old Minyan capital, Orchomenos. These and other towns, in classic days, joined under the leadership of Thebes in a Boeotian Confederacy, whose common affairs were managed by annu ally chosen boeotarchs, and whose peoples celebrated together at Coronea the festival of Panboeotia.
It was the custom of the Athenians to laugh at the Boeotians as dull witted, and to attribute this obtuseness to heavy eating and a moist and foggy climate-very much as the French used to diagnose the English. There may have been some truth in this, for the Boeotians play an unpre possessing part in Greek history. Thebes, for example, aided the Persian invaders, and was a thorn in the side of Athens for centuries. But in the other side of the scales we place the brave and loyal Plataeans, plodding Hesiod and soaring Pindar, the noble Epaminondas and the completely lovable Plutarch. We must beware of seeing Athens' rivals only through Athens' eyes.
History kn<;>WS nothing of Hesiod's death. l;egend_ tells how, at the age of eighty, he seduced the maiden Clymene; how her brother killed him and threw his body into the sea• and how Clymene bore as his son the lyric poet Stesichorus-who, however was born Sicily.•	'
104	THLIFE EOF GREECE
DELPHI
From Plutarch's city, Chaeronea, one passes at the continuous risk of his life over a dozen mountains into Phocis, to reach, on the very slope of Parnassus, the sacred city of Delphi. A thousand feet below is the Crisaean plain, bright with the silver leaves of ten thousand olive trees; five hundred feet farther down is an inlet of the Corinthian Gulf; ships move with the stately, silent slowness of distance over waters deceptively motionless. Be yond are other ranges, clothed for a moment in royal purple by the setting sun. At a turn in the road is the Castalian Spring, framed in a gorge of per pendicular cliffs; from the heights, legend said (adding another fable to his own), the citizens of Delphi hurled the wandering Aesop; over them, says history, Philomelus the Phocian drove the defeated Locrians in the Second Sacred War.*.. Above are the twin peaks of Parnassus, where the Muses dwelt when they tired of Helicon. Greeks who climbed a hundred tortuous miles to stand on this mountainside-poised on a ledge between mist-shrouded heights and a sunlit sea, and surrounded on every side with beauty or terror-could hardly doubt that beneath these rocks lived some awful god. Time and again eanhquake had rumbled here, frightening away the plundering Persians, and a century later the plundering Phocians, and a century later the plundering Gauls; it was the god protecting his shrine. As far back as Greek tradition could reach, worshipers had gathered here to find in the winds among the gorges, or the gases escaping from the earth, the voice and will of deity. The great stone that nearly closed the cleft from which the gases came was, to the Greeks, the center of Greece, and therefore the omphalos, as they called it, the umbilicus or very navel of the world.
Over that navel they built their altars, in older days to Ge, Mother Earth,
later to her bright conqueror Apollo. Once a terrible s.erpent had guarded the gorge, holding it against men; Phoebus had slain him with an arrow, and, as the Pythian Apollo, had become the idol of the shrine. There, when an earlier temple was destroyed by fire (548), the rich Alcmaeonids, aristocrats exiled from Athens, rebuilt it with funds subscribed by all Greece and augmented by their own; they gave it a fa ade of marble, sur-
Twice the Greeks waged Sacred Wars over the perquisites of Apollo's temple: once in 595-85, when the southern Greeks put an end to the exactmg of greedy tolls by the people of neighboring: Cirrha from pilgrims p g to Delphi through their port; and again m 356-46, when an allied Greek army under Philip of Macedon ousted the Phocians who had captured Delphi and appropriated the te;;c!:!unds. The first war led to the neutralization of Delphi and the establishment of the P • games; the second led to the Macedonian conquest of Greece.
CHAP. V)	ATHENS	105
rounded it with a Doric peristyle, and supported it with Ionic colonnades within; seldom had Greece seen so magnificent a shrine. A Sacred Way wound up the slope to the sanctuary, adorned at every step with statues, porticoes, and "treasuries"-miniature temples built in the sacred precincts (at Olympia, Delphi, or Delos) by Greek cities as repositories for their funds, or as their individual tributes to the god. A hundred years before the battle of Marathon, Corinth and Sicyon raised such treasuries at Del phi; later, Athens, Thebes, and Cyrene rivaled them, Cnidus and Siphnos surpassed them. Amid them all, as a reminder that Greek drama was a part of Greek religion, a theater was built into the face of Parnassus. Far above all the rest was a stadium, where Greece practiced its favorite wor ship of health, courage, beauty, and youth.
Imagination pictures the scene in the days of Apollo's festival-fervent pilgrims crowding the road to the sacred city, filling noisily the inns and tents thrown up to shelter them, passing curiously and skeptically among the booths where subtle traders displayed their wares, mounting in religious procession or hopeful pilgrimage to Apollo's temple, laying before it their offering or sacrifice, chanting their hymns or saying their prayers, sitting awed in the theater, and plodding up half a thousand trying steps to wit ness the Pythian games or gaze in wonder at mountains and sea. Life once passed this way in all its eagerness.
THE LESSER STATE
In the western mainlands of Greece life was content to be rural and subdued throughout Greek history-and is so today. In Locris, Aetolia, Acamania, and Aeniania men were too close to primitive realities, too far from the quickening currents of communication and trade, to have time or skill for literature, philosophy, or art; even the gymnasium and the theater, so dear to Attica, found no home here; and the temples were artless village shrines stirring no national sentiment. At long intervals modest towns arose, like Amphissa in Locris, or Aetolian Naupactus, or little Calydon, where once Meleager had hunted the boar with Atalanta.• On the west coast near Calydon is the modem Mesolongion, or Missolonghi, where Marco Bozzaris fought and Byron died.
A wild boar having devastated the fields of Calydon, Meleager, sen of Calydon's King Oeneus, organized a hunt for it, with such aides as Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Nestor, Jason, and the fair-faced, fleet-footed Atalanta. Several heroes were slain by the boar, but Atalanta shot it and Meleager killed it. Atalanta, sought by many wooers in her Arcadian home, agreed to marry any one of them that could outrun her, but those who lost were to be put to death. Hippomenes won by dropping as he ran the three golden apples of the Hesperides given him by Aphrodite; Atalanta stooped to pick them, and lost the race. Of Meleager's secret love for Atalanta, and his tragic death, the reader may learn in Swinburne's Atalll'llt4 in Calydon.


THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XIV
development it uses three methods: fresco, or painting upon wet plaster; tem pera, or painting upon wet cloth or boards with colors mixed with the white of eggs; and encaustic, which mixed the colors with melted wax; this is as near as antiquity comes to painting in oils. Pliny, whose will to believe sometimes rivals that of Herodotus, assures us that the art of painting was already so ad vanced in the eighth century that Candaules, King of Lydia, paid its weight in gold for a picture by Bularchus;9 but all beginnings are mysteries. We may judge the high repute of painting in Greece from the fact that Pliny gives it more space than to sculpture; and apparently the great paintings of the classic and Hellenistic periods were as much discussed by the critics, and as highly regarded by the people, as the most distinguished specimens of architecture or
statuary.20
Polygnotus -o·fThasos was as famous in fifth-century Greece as Ictinus or Pheidias. We find him in Athens about 472; perhaps it was the rich Cimon who procured him commissions to adorn several public buildings with murals.• Upon the Stoa, which thereafter was called Poecile, or the Painted Portico, and which, three centuries later, would give its name to the philosophy of Zeno, Polygnotus depicted the Sack of Troy-not the bloody massacre of the night of victory, but the somber silence of the morning after, with the victors quieted by the ruin around them, and the defeated lying calm in death. On the walls of the temple of the Dioscuri he painted the Rape of the Leucippidae, and set a precedent for his art by portraying the women in transparent drapery. The Amphictyonic Council was not shocked; it invited Polygnotus to Delphi, where, in the Lesche, or Lounge, he painted Odysseus in Hades, and another Sack of Troy. All these were vast frescoes, almost empty of landscape or background, but so cro ded with individualized figures that many assistants were needed to fill in with color the master's carefully drawn designs. The Lesche mural of Troy showed Menelaus' crew about to spread sail for the return to Greece; in the center sat Helen; and though many other women were in the picture, all appeared to be gazing at her beauty. In a comer stood Andromache, with Astyanax at her breast; in another a little boy clung to an altar in fear; and in the distance a horse rolled around on the sandy beach.1" Here, half a century before Euripides, was all the drama of The Trojan Women. Polygnotus refused to take pay for these pictures, but gave them to Athens and Delphi out of the generosity of confident strength. All Hellas acclaimed him: Athens conferred citizenship upon him, and the Amphictyonic Council arranged that wherever he went in Greece he should be (as Socrates wished to be) maintained at the public expense.211 All that remains of him is a little pigment on a wall at Delphi to remind us that artistic immortality is..a moment in geological time.
He repaid Cimon by making love to his sister Elpinice, and· painting her portrait as Laodicea among the women of Troy.11
CHAP.XIV)	THE	ART	OF  PERICLEAN  GREECE	317
About 470 Delphi and Corinth established quadrennial contests in paint ing as pan of the Pythian and Isthmian games. The an was now sufficiently advanced to enable Panaenus, brother (or nephew) of Pheidias, to make recognizable portraits of the Athenian and Persian generals in his Battle of Marathon. But it still placed all figures in one plane, and made them of on.e stature; it indicated distance not by a progressive diminution of. size and a modeling with light and shade, but by covering more c5f the lower half of the farther figures with the curves that-represented the ground. Towards
440 a vital step forward was taken. Agatharchus, employed by Aeschylus and Sophocles to paint scenery for their plays, perceived the connection between light and shade and distance, and wrote a treatise on perspective as a means of creating theatrical illusion. Anaxagoras and Democritus took up the idea from the scientific angle, and at the end of the century Apollo• dorus of Athens won the name of skiagraphos, or shadow painter, because he made pictures in chiaroscuro-i.e., in light and shade; hence Pliny spoke of him as "the first to paint objects as they really appeared.""
Greek painters never made full use of these discoveries; just as Solon frowned upon the theatrical art as a deception, so the artists seem to have thought it against their honor, or beneath their dignity, to give to a plane surface the appearance of three dimensions. Nevertheless it was through perspective and chiaroscuro that Zeuxis, pupil of Apollodorus, made him self the supreme figure in fifth-century painting. He came from Heracleia (Pontica?) to Athens about 424; and even amid the noise of war his coming was considered an event. He was a "character," bold and conceited, and he painted with a swashbuckling brush. At the Olympic games he strutted about in a checkered tunic on which his name was embroidered in gold; he could afford it, since he had already acquired "a vast amount of wealth,, from his paintings.u But he worked with the honest care of a great artist, and when Agatharc.hus boasted of his own speed of execution, Zeuxis said quietly, "I take a long time."'" He gave away many of his masterpieces, on the ground that no price could do them justice; and cities and kings were happy to receive them.
He had only one rival in his generation-Parrhasius of Ephesus, almost as great and quite as vain. Parrhasius wore a golden crown on his head, called himself "the prince of painters," and said that in him the art had reached per fection." He did it all in lusty good humor, singing as he painted.18 Gossip said that he had bought a slave and tortured him to study facial expression in pain for a picture of Prometheus;'• but people tell many stories about anists. Like Zeuxis he was a realist; his Runner was portrayed with such verisimili•
318	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP XIV
tude that those who beheld it expected the perspiration to fall from the pic ture, and the athlete to drop from exhaustion. He drew an immense mural. of The People of Athens, representing them as implacable and merciful, proud and humble, fierce and timid, fickle and generous-and so faithfully that the Athenian public, we are informed, realized for the first time its own complex and contradictory character.""
A great rivalry brought him into public competition with Zeuxis. The latter painted some grapes so naturally that birds tried to eat them. The judges were enthusiastic about the picture, and Zeuxis, confident of victory, bade Parrhasius draw aside the curtain that concealed the Ephesian's paint ing. But the curtain proved to be a part of the picture, and Zeuxis, hav
:ng himself been deceived, handsomely acknowledged his defeat. Zeuxis suffered no loss of reputation. At Crotona he agreed to paint a Helen for the temple of Lacinian Hera, on condition that the five loveliest women of the city should pose in the nude for him, so that he might select from each her fairest feature, and combine them all in a second goddess of beauty.11 Penelope, too, found new life under his brush; but he admired more his portrait of an athlete, and wrote under it that men would find it easier to criticize him than to equal him. All Greece enjoyed his conceit, and talked about him as much as of any dramatist, statesmen, or general. Only the prize fighters outdid his fame.
m. THE MASTERS OF SCULPTURE
Methods
None the less painting remained slightly alien to the Greek genius, which loved form more than color, and made even the painting of the classic age (if we may judge it from hearsay) a statuesque study in line and design rather than a sensuous seizure of the colors of life. The Hellene delighted rather in sculpture: he filled his home, his temples, and his grave with terra cotta statuettes, worshiped his gods with images of stone, and marked the tombs of his departed with stelae reliefs that are among the commonest and most moving products of Greek art. The artisans of the stelae were simple workers who carved by rote, and repeated a thousand times the familiar theme of the quiet parting, with clasped hands, of the living from the dead. But the theme itself is noble enough to bear repetition, for it shows classic restraint at its best, and teaches even a romantic soul that feeling speaks
CHAP. XIV)	THE   ART  OF  PERICLEAN  GREECE
with most power when it lowers its voice. These slabs show us the dead most often in some characteristic occupation of life-a child playing with a hoop, a girl carrying a jar, a warrior proud in his armor, a young woman admiring her jewels, a boy reading a book while his dog lies content but watchful under his chair. Death in these stelae is made natural, and there fore forgivable.
More complex, and supreme in their kind, are the sculptural reliefs of this age. In one of them Orpheus bids a lingering farewell to Eurydice, whom Hermes has reclaimed for the nether world;"' in another Demeter gives to Trip tolemus the golden grain by Iwhich he is to establish agriculture in Greece; here some of the coloring still adheres to the stone, and suggests the warmth and brilliance of Greek relief in the Golden Age."' Still more beautiful is Tbe Birth of Aphrodite, carved on one side of the "Ludovisi Throne"• by an un known sculptor of presumably Ionian training. Two goddesses are raising Aphrodite from the sea; her thin wet garment clings to her form and reveals it in all the splendor of maturity; the head is semi-Asiatic, but the drapery of
the attendant deities, and the soft grace of their pose, bear the stamp of the sensitive Greek eye and hand. On another side of the "throne" a nude girl plays the double flute. On a third side a veiled woman prepares her lamp for the evening; perhaps the face and garments here are even nearer to perfection than on the central piece.
The advance of the fifth-century sculptor upon his forebears is impressive. Frontality is abandoned, foreshortening deepens perspective, stillness gives place to movement, rigidity to life. Indeed, when Greek statuary breaks through the old conventions and shows man in action, it is an artistic revolu tion; rarely before, in Egypt or the Near East, or in pre-Marathon Greece, has any sculpture in the round been caught in action. These developments owe much to the freshened vitality and buoyancy of Greek life after Salamis, and more to the patient study of motile anatomy by master and apprentice through many generations. "Is it not by modeling your works on living beings," asks Socrates, sculptor and philosopher, "that you make your statues appear alive? ... And as our different attitudes cause the play of certain muscles of our body, upwards or downwards, so that some are contracted and some stretched, some wrung and some relaxed, is it not by expressing these efforts that you give greater truth and verisimilitude to your works?""' The Periclean sculptor is interested in every feature of the
A block of marble discovered in Rome in 1887 when the Villa Ludovisi was torn down. The original is in the Museo delle Terme in Rome; there is a good copy in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
320	THE	i.. IF E OF	GREECE	(CHAP. XIV
body-in the abdomen as much as the face, in the marvelous play of the elastic flesh over the moving framework of the bones, in the swelling of muscles, tendons, and veins, in the endless wonders of the structure and action of hands and ears and feet; and he is fascinated by the difficulty of molding the extremities. He does not often use models to pose for him in a studio; for the most part he is content to watch the men stripped and active in the palaestra or on the athletic field, and the women solemnly marching in the religious processions, or naturally absorbed in their domestic tasks. It is for this reason, and not through modesty, that he centers his studies of anatomy upon the male, and in his portraits· of women substitutes the re finements of drapery for anatomical detail-though he makes the drapery as transparent as he dares. Tired of the stiff skirts of Egypt and archaic Greece he loves to show feminine robes agitated by a breeze, for here again he catches the quality of motion and life.  .


THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XI
the zenith and unity of the life of Greece-statesmanship, art, science, philosophy, literature, religion, and morals living no separate career as in the pages of chroniclers, but woven into one many-colored fabric of a nation's history.
The affections of Pericles wavered between art and philosophy, and he might have found it hard to say whether he loved Pheidias or Anaxagoras the more; perhaps he turned to Aspasia as a comproinise between beauty
- and wisdom. For Anaxagoras he entertained, we are told, "an extraor dinary esteem and admiration.ms It was the philosopher, says Plato,u who deepened Pericles into statesmanship; from long intercourse with Anaxag oras, Plutarch believes, Pericles derived "not merely elevation of purpose and dignity of language, raised far above the base and dishonest buffoon eries of mob eloquence, but, besides this, a composure of countenance, and a serenity and calmness in all his movements, which no occurrence whilst he was speaking could disturb." When Anaxagoras was old, and Pericles was absorbed in public affairs, the statesman for a time let the philosopher drop out of his life; but later, hearing that Anaxagoras was starving, Pericles hastened to his relief, and accepted humbly his rebuke, that "those who have occasion for a lamp supply it with oil."•
It seems hardly credible, and yet on second thought most natural, that the stem "Olympian" should have been keenly susceptible to the charms of woman; his self-control fought against a delicate sensibility, and the toils of office must have heightened in him the normal male longing for feininine tenderness. He had been many years married when he met Aspasia. She belonged to-she was helping to create-the type of hetaira that was about to play so active a part in Athenian life: a woman rejecting the seclusion that marriage brought to the ladies of Athens, and preferring to live in unlicensed unions, even in relative promiscuity, if thereby she Inight enjoy the same freedom of movement and conduct as men, and par ticipate with them in their cultural interests. We have no testimony to Aspasia's beauty, though ancient writers speak of her "small, high-arched foot," "her silvery voice," and her golden hair."' Aristophanes, an unscrupu lous political enemy of Pericles, describes her as a Milesian courtesan who had established a luxurious brothel at Megara, and had now imported some of her girls into Athens; and the great comedian delicately suggests that the quarrel of Athens with Megara, which precipitated the Peloponnesian War, was brought about because Aspasia persuaded Pericles to revenge her upon Megarians who had kidnaped some of her personnel.• But Aris-
CHAP.XI) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT  2S3
tophanes was not an historian, and may be trusted only where he himself is not concerned.
Arriving in Athens about 450, Aspasia opened a school of rhetoric and philosophy, and boldly encouraged the public emergence and higher edu cation of women. Many girls of good family came to her classes, and some husbands brought their wives to study with her."' Men also attended her lectures, among them Pericles and Socrates, and probably Anaxagoras, Euripides, Alcibiades, and Pheidias. Socrates said that he had learned from her the art of eloquence,"' and some ancient gossips would have it that the statesman inherited her from the philosopher."" Pericles now found it admirable that his wife had formed an affection for another man. He of fered her her freedom in return for his own, and she agreed; she took a third husband,"" while Pericles brought Aspasia home. By his own law of 451 he could not make her his wife, since she was of Milesian birth; any child he might have by her would be illegitimate, and ineligible to Athenian citizenship. He seems to have loved her sincerely, even uxoriously, never leaving his home or returning to it without kissing her, and finally willing his fortune to the son that she bore him. From that time onward he fore went all social life outside his home, seldom going anywhere except to the agora or the council hall; the people of Athens began to complain of his aloofness. For her part Aspasia made his home a French Enlightenment salon, where the art and science, the literature, philosophy, and statesman ship of Athens were brought together in mutual stimulation. Socrates mar veled at her eloquence, and credited her with composing the funeral ora tion that Pericles delivered after the first casualties of the Peloponnesian War."' Aspasia became the uncrowned queen of Athens, setting fashion's tone, and giving to the women of the city an exciting example of mental and moral freedom.
The conservatives were shocked at all this, and turned it to their pur
poses. They denounced Pericles for leading Greeks out to war against Greeks, as in Aegina and Samos; they accused him of squandering public funds; -finally, through the mouths of irresponsible comic dramatists abus ing the free speech that prevailed under his rule, they charged him with turning his home into a house of ill fame, and having relations with the wife of his son.• Not daring to bring any of these matters to open trial, they attacked him through his friends. They indicted Pheidias for em bezzling, as they alleged, some of the gold assigned to him for his chrysele phantine Athen.a, and apparently succeeded in convicting him; they in-
254	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XI
dieted Anaxagoras on the ground of irreligion, and the philosopher, on Pericles' advice, fled into exile; they brought against Aspasia a like writ of impiety (graphe asebeias), complaining that she had shown disrespect for the gods of Greece.• The comic poets satirized her mercilessly as a Deianeira who had ruined Pericles,* and called her, in plain Greek, a concu bine; one of them, Hermippus, doubtless in turn a dishonest penny, ac cused her of serving as Pericles' procuress, and of bringing freeborn women to him for his pleasure.• At her trial, which took place before a court of fifteen hundred jurors, Pericles spoke in her defense, using all his elo quence, even to tears; and the case was dismissed. From that moment (432) Pericles began to lose his hold upon the Athenian people; and when, three years later, death came to him, he was already a broken man.
m. ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY
Deliberation
These strange indictments suffice to show how real was the limited de mocracy that functioned under the supposed dictatorship of Pericles. We must study this democracy carefully, for it is one of the outstanding experi ments in the history of government. It is limited, first, by the fact that only a small minority of the people can read. It is limited physically by the difficulty of reaching Athens from the remoter towns of Attica. The franchise is restricted to those sons, of two free Athenian parents, who have reached the age of twenty-one; and only they and their families enjoy civil rights, or directly bear the military and fiscal burdens of the state. Within this jealously circumscribed circle of 43,000 citizens out of an Attic population of 315 ,ooo, political power, in the days of Pericles, is formally equal; each citizen enjoys and insists upon isonomia and isegoria-equal rights at law and in the Assembly. To the Athenian a citi zen is a man who not only votes, but takes his turn, by lot and rote, as mag istrate or judge; he must be free, ready, and able to serve the state at any time.. No one who is subject to another, or who has to labor in order to live, can have the time or the capacity for these services; and therefore the manual worker seems to most Athenians unfit for citizenship, though, with human inconsistency they admit the peasant proprietor. All of the 1 15 ,ooo
	Deianira, wife of Heracles, caused his death by presenting him with a poisoned robe. Sophocles' Tracbinum Women.	.
CHAP.XI) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT   255
slaves of Attica, all women, nearly all workingmen, all of the 28,500 "met ics" or resident aliens,• and consequently a great part of the trading class,
are excluded from the franchise.t
The voters are not gathered into parties, but are loosely divided into fol lowers of the oligarchic or the democratic factions according as they oppose or favor the extension of the franchise, the dominance of the Assembly, and the governmental succor of the poor at the expense of the rich. The active members of each faction are organized into clubs called hetaireiai, com panionships. There are clubs of all kinds in Periclean Athens-religious
clubs, kinship clubs, military clubs, workers' clubs, actors' clubs, political clubs, and clubs honestly devoted to eating and drinking. The strongest of all are the oligarchic clubs, whose members are sworn to mutual aid in politics and law, and are bound by a common passionate hostility to those lower enfranchised ranks that press upon the toes of the landed aristocracy and the moneyed merchant class.81 Against them stand the relatively demo cratic party of small businessmen, of citizens who have become wage work ers, and of those who man the merchant ships and the Athenian fleet; these groups resent the luxuries and privileges of the rich, and raise up to leader ship in Athens such men as Cleon the tanner, Lysicles the sheep dealer, Eucrates the tow seller, Cleophon the harp manufacturer, and Hyperbolus the lampmaker. Pericles holds them off for a generation by a subtle mix ture of democracy and aristocracy; but when he dies they inherit the gov ernment and thoroughly enjoy its perquisites. From Solon to the Roman conquest this bitter conflict of oligarchs and democrats is waged with ora tory, votes, ostracism, assassination, and civil war.
Every voter is of right a member of the basic governing body-the ekklesia, or Assembly; there is at this level no representative government. Since transportation is difficult over the hills of Attica, only a fraction of tile eligible members ever attend any one meeting; there are rarely more than two or three thousand. Those citizens who live in Athens or at the Piraeus come by a kind of geographical determinism to dominate the As sembly; in this way the democrats gain ascendancy over the conservatives, who are for the most part scattered among the farms and estates of Attica. The Assembly meets four times a month, on important occasions in the agora, in the Theater of Dionysus, or at the Piraeus, ordinarily in a semi circular place called the Pnyx on the slope of a hill west of the Areopagus;
The Greek word, metoikoi, means "sharing the home."
tThe figures are from Gomme, A. W., The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C., pp. 21, 26, 47. They are frankly conjectural. The total figure include$ the wives and minor children of the citizens.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XI


But dwelling with the glorious gods in ease A tearless life they pass,
Whose joy on earth it was
To keep their plighted word. But, far from these, Torments the rest sustain too dark for human gaze.'"
The third and concluding section of a Pindaric ode was usually a word of moral counsel. We must not expect any subtle philosophy here; Pindar was no Athenian, and had probably never met or read a Sophist; his intellect was con sumed in his art, and no force remained for original thought. He was satisfied to urge his victorious athletes or princes to be modest in their success, and to show respect for the gods, their fellow men, and their own best selves. Now and then he mingled reproof with praise, and dared to warn Hieron against greed;" but neither was he afraid to say a kind word for that most maligned and loved of all goods-money. He abhorred the revolutionists of Sicily, and warned them almost in the words of Confucius: "Even for the feeble it is an easy thing to shake a city to its foundation, but it is a sore struggle to set it in its place again.'"11 He liked the moderate democracy of Athens after Salamis, h1;it sincerely believed aristocracy to be the least h1µ"mful of all forms of gov ernment. Ability, he thought, lies in the blood rather than in schooling, and
CHAP.XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	377
tends to appear in families that have shown .it before. Only good blood can prepare a man for those rare deeds that ennoble and justify human life. "Things of a day! What are we and what not? A dream about a shadow is man; yet when some god-given splendor falls, a glory of light comes over him, and his life is sweet."'•
Pindar was not popular in his lifetime, and for some centuries yet he will continu.e to enjoy the lifeless immortality of those writers whom all men praise and no one reads. While the world was moving forward he asked it to stand still, and it left him so far behind that though younger than Aeschylus h seems older than Aleman. He wrote a poetry as compact, involved, and devious as Tacitus' prose, in an artificial and deliberately archaic dialect of his own, in met rs so elaborate that few poets have ever cared to follow them,• and so varied that only two of the forty-five odes have the same metrical form. He is so obscure, despite the naivete of his thought, that grammarians spend a life time unraveling his Teutonic constructions, only to find, beneath them, a mine of sonorous platitudes. If despite these faults, and his frigid formality, and turgid metaphors, and tiresome mythology, some curious scholars are still per suaded to read him, it is because his narratives are swift and vivid, his simple morality is sincere, and the splendor of his language lifts to a passing grandeur even the humblest themes.
He lived to the age of eighty, secure in Thebes from the turmoil of Athenian thought. "Dear to a man," he sang, "is his own home city, his comrades and his kinsmen, so that he is well content. But to foolish men belongeth a love for things afar."" Ten days before his end (442), we are told, he sent to ask the oracle of Ammon, "What is best for man?"-to·which the Egyptian oracle answered, like a Greek, "Death.".. Athens put up a statue to him at the public cost, and the Rhodians inscribed his seventh Olympian ode-a panegyric of their island-in letters of gold upon a temple wall. When, in 335, Alexander ordered rebellious Thebes to be burned to the: ground he commanded his soldiers to leave unharmed the house in which Pindar had lived and died.
n. THE DIONYSIAN THEATER
The story is told in the Lexicon of Suidas19 that during the performance of a play by Pratinas, about 500 B.c., the wooden benches upon which the auditors sat gave way, injuring some, and causing such alarm that the Athenians built, on the southern slope of the Acropolis, a theater of stone,
A notable exception is Dryden's Alexander's Felllt.
378	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVII
which t ey dedicated to the god Dionysus.• In the next two centuries similar theaters rose at Eretria, Epidaurus, Argos, Mantinea, Delphi, T auro menium (Taormina), Syracuse, and elsewhere in the scattered Greek world. But it was on the Dionysian stage that the major tragedies and comedies were first played, and fought out the bitterest phase of that war, between the old theology and the new philosophy, which binds into one vast process of thought and change the mental history of the Periclean age.
The great theater is, of course, open to the sky. The fifteen thousand seats, rising in a fanlike semicircle of tiers toward the Parthenon, face Mt. Hymettus and the sea; when the persons of the drama invoke the earth and the sky, the sun and the stars and the ocean, they are addressing realities which most of the audience, as it listens to the speech or chant, can directly see and feel. The seats, originally of wood, later of stone, have no backs; many people bring cushions; but they sit through five plays in a day with no other known support for their spines than the unaccommodating knees of the auditors behind them. In the front rows are a few marble seats with backs for the local high priests of Dionysus and the officials of the
city.t At the foot of the auditorium is an orcbestra, or dancing space, for
the chorus. At the rear of this is a small wooden building known as the
skene, or scene, which serves to represent now a palace, now a temple, now a private dwelling, and probably also to house the players while off stage.+ There are such simple "properties''-altars, furniture, etc.-as the story may require; in the case of Aristophanes' Birds there are important adjuncts of scenery and costume;'° and Agatharchus of Samos paints backgrounds in such a way as to produce the illusion of distance. Several mechanical de vices help to vary the action or the place.§ To show an action that has transpired within the skene, a wooden platform (ekkyklema) may be wheeled out, and have human figures arranged on it in a tableau suggestive
This was not the Theater of Dionysus that tourists see today; the surviving structure was built under the direction of the Finance Minister Lycurgus about 338. Some parts of it are conjecturally traced back to 421; some others appear to have been added in the first and third centuries after Christ.
t This and the remarks about the stage presume that the theater built by Lycurgus followed
the general plan of the structure that it replaced.
:j: Whether the action took place on the roof of the skene, or upon the proskenion, or proscenium, before it, is uncertain; perhaps the action moved from one level to the other as the location of the story changed.
§ A drop curtain was used in the Roman period, being lowered into a crevice at the begin ning of a scene, and raised at the end; but our extant plays from the fifth century give no evidence of this, and apparently rely on choral interludes to serve the purpose of a curtain between the "acts."
CHAP.XVII)  THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE    379
of what has occurred; so a corpse may be on it, with che murderers holding bloody weapons in their hands; it is against the traditions of the Greek drama to represent violence directly on the stage. At either side of the proscenium is a large, triangular, upright prism that turns on a pivot; each face of the prism has a different scene painted on it; and by revolving these periaktoi the background can be altered in a moment. A still stranger apparatus is the mechme, or machine, a crane with pulley and weights; it is placed upon the skene at the left, and is used to lower gods or heroes from heaven down to the;: stage, or to raise them back to heaven, or even to exhibit them suspended in the air. Euripides in particular is fond of using this mechanism to let down a god-a deus ex machina, as the Romans put it-who piously unties the knot of his agnostic plays.
The tragic drama at Athens is not a secular or perennial affair, but part of the annual celebration of the feast of Dionysus."" From among many plays offered to the archon a few are selected for performance. Each of the ten tribes or demes of Attica chooses one of its rich citizens to serve as choragus, i.e., director of the chorus; it is his privilege to pay the cost of training the singers, dancers, and actors, and to meet the other expenses of presenting one of the compositions. Sometimes a choragus spends a for tune upon scenery, costumes, and "talent"-in this way every play financed by Nicias obtains a prize;"'" some other choragi economize by hiring second hand robes from dealers in theatrical costumes... The actual training of the chorus is usually undertaken by the dramatist himself.


325: Council of Nicaea
326: Constantine kills son, nephew and wile	'
330: Constantinople made the capital
337: Death of Constantine
•
CHAPTER  XXVI
Jesus
4 B.C.-A.D. 30
THE SOURCES
ID Christ exist? Is the life story of the founder of Christianity the product of human sorrow, imagination, and hope-a myth comparable
to the legends of Krishna, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysus, and .Mithras? Early in the eighteenth century the circle of Bolingbroke, shocking even Voltaire, privately discussed the possibility that Jesus had never lived. Vol ney propounded the same doubt in his Ruins of Empire in r79r. Napoleon, meeting the German scholar '\Vieland in 1 808, asked him no petty question of politics or war, but did he believe in the historicity of Christ? 1
One of the most far-reaching activities of the modem mind has been the "Higher Criticism" of the Bible-the mounting attack upon its authenticity and veracity, countered by the heroic attempt to save the historical foundations of Christian faith; the results may in time prove as revolutionary as Christianity itself. The first engagement in this two-hundred-year war was fought in silence by Hermann Reimarus, professor of Oriental languages at Hamburg; on his death in 1768 he left, cautiously unpublished, a 1400-page manuscript on the life of Christ. Six years later Gotthold Lessing, over the protests of his friends, published portions of it as the W olfenbiittel Frapnents. Reimarus argued that Jesus can only be regarded and understood not as the founder of Christianity, hut as the final and dominant figure in the mystical eschatology of the Jews i.e., Christ thought not of establishing a new religion, but of preparing men for the imminent destruction of the world, and God's Last Judgment of all souls. In 1796 Herder pointed out the apparently irreconcilable difference between the Christ of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the Christ of the Gospel of St. John. In 1828 Heinrich Paulus, summarizing the life of Christ in 1192 pages, proposed a rationalistic interpretation of the miracles-i.e., accepted their occurrence but ascribed them to natural causes and powers. In an epoch-marking Life of Jesus (1835-36) David Strauss rejected this compromise; the supernatural elements in the Gospels, he thought, should be classed as myths, and the actual career of Christ must be reconstructed without using these elements in any form. Strauss's massive volumes made Biblical criticism the storm center of German thought for a generation. In the same year Ferdinand Christian Baur attacked the Epistles
553
•
554	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVI
o.Pf aul, rejecting as unauthentic all but those to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans. In 1840 Bruno Bauer began a series of passionately controversial works aiming to show that Jesus was a myth, the personified form of a cult that evolved in the second century from a fusion of Jewish, Greek, and Roman theology. In 1863 Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus, alarming millions with its rationalism and charming millions with its prose, gathered together the results of German criti cism, and brought the problem of the Gospels before the entire educated world. The French school reached its climax at the end of the century in the Abbe Loisy, who subjected the New Testament to such rigorous textual analysis that the Catholic Church felt compelled to excommunicate him and other "Mod ernists." Meanwhile the Dutch school of Pierson, Naber, and i\1atthas carried the movement to its farthest point by laboriously denying the historical reality of Jesus. In Germany Arthur Drews gave this negative conclusion its definitive exposition (1906); and in England W. B. Smith and J.M. Robertson argued to a like denial. The result of two centuries of discussion seemed to be the annihila tion of Christ.
\Vhat evidence is there for Christ's existence? The earliest non-Christian reference occurs in Josephus' Antiquities of tbe Jews (A.D. 93?):
At that time lived Jesus, a holy man, if man he may be called, for he performed wonderful works, and taught men, and joyfully re ceived the truth. And he was followed by many Jews and many Greeks. He was the Messiah.2
There may be a genuine core in these strange lines; but the high praise given to Christ by a Jew uniformly anxious to please either the Romans or the Jews-both at that time in conflict with Christianity-renders the passage suspect, and Christian scholars reject it as almost certainly an interpolation.3 There are references to "Yeshu'a of Nazareth" in the Talmud, but they are too late in date to be certainly more than counterechoes of Christian
thought.4 The oldest known mention of Christ in pagan literature is in a letter of the younger Pliny (ca. 110),5 asking the advice of Trajan on the
treatment of Christians. Five years later TacitusG * described Nero's perse
cution of the Cbrestiani in Rome, and pictured them as already (A.D. 64) numbering adherents throughout the Empire; the paragraph is so T acitean in
style, force, and prejudice that of all Biblical critics only Drews questions its authenticity.7 Suetonius (ca. 125) mentions the same persecution,s and reports Claudius' banishment ca. 52).of ."Jews who, stirred up by Christ [impulsore Cbresto], were causing public disturbances," 9 the passage accords well with the Acts of the Apostles, which mentions a decree of Claudius that "the Jews should leave Rome." 10 These references prove the existence
Quoted on p. 281.
CHAP. XXVI)	JESUS	555


-at three in the afternoon-he "cried out with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost." Luke adds-again revealing the sympathy of the Jewish popu lace-that "all the people that came together to that sight . . . smote their breasts and returned" to the town.141 Two kindly and influential Jews, hav ing secured Pilate's permission, took the body down from the cross, em balmed it with aloes and myrrh, and placed it in a tomb.
\Vas he really dead? The two robbers beside him were still alive; their legs were brok;n by the soldiers so that the weight of the body would hang upon the hands, constricting the circulation and soon stopping the heart. This was not done in Jesus' case, though we are told that :1 soldier pierced his breast with a lance, drawing forth first blood and then lymph. Pilate expressed surprise that a man should die after six hours of crucifixion; he gave his consent to Christ's removal from the cross only when the centurion in charge assured him of Christ's death.
Two days later Mary Magdalene, whose love of Jesus partook of that nervous intensity which characterized all her feelings, visited the tomb with "Mary the mother of James, and Salome." They found it empty. "Frightened and yet overjoyed," they ran to tell the news to the disciples. On the way they met one whom they thought to be Jesus; they bowed down before him and clasped his feet. We can imagine the hopeful in credulity with which their report was greeted; the thought that Jesus had triumphed over death, and had thereby proved himself l\1essiah and Son of God,.filled the "Galileans" with such excitement that they were ready for any miracle and any revelation. That same day, we are told, Christ ap peared to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, talked with them, and ate with them; for a long time "they were prevented from recognizing him"; but when "he took the bread and blessed it . . . their eyes were opened, and they knew him, and he vanished from them." 142 The disciples went back to Galilee, and soon thereafter "saw him and bowed down before him, though some were in doubt." 143 While they were fishing they saw Christ join them; they cast their nets, and drew in a great haul.144
Forty days after his appearance to Mary Magdalene, says the beginning of the Book of Acts, Christ ascended physically into heaven. The idea of a saint being so "translated" into the sky in body and life was familiar to the
574	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVI
Jews; they told it of Moses, Enoch, Elijah, and Isaiah. The Master went as mystically as he had come; bur most of the disciples seem to have been sincerely convinced that he had, after his crucifixion, been with them in the flesh. "They went back with great joy to Jerusalem," says Luke,145 "and were constantly in the Temple, blessing God."
CHAPTER  XXVII
The Apostles
A.D. 30-95
PETER
HRISTIANITY arose out of Jewish apocalyptic-esoteric revelations of the coming Kingdom; it derived its impetus from the personality
and vision of Christ; it gained strength from the belief in his resurrection, and the promise of eternal life; it received doctrinal form in the theology of Paul; it grew by the absorption of pagan faith and ritual; it became a triumphant Church by inheriting the organizing patterns and genius of Rome.
The apostles were apparently unanimous in believing that Christ would soon return to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.* "The end of all things is near," says the first epistle of Peter; "be serious and collected, therefore, and pray." 3 "Children," says the first epistle of John, "it is the last hour.You have heard that Antichrist was coming, and many Antichrists" (Nero, Vespasian, Domitian?) "have indeed appeared. So we may be sure that it is the last hour." 4 The belief in the Messianic mission, bodily resur rection, and earthly return of Christ formed the basic faith of early Chris tianity. This creed did not prevent the apostles from continuing to accept Judaism. "Day after day," says Acts, "they all went regularly to the Tem ple"; 5 they obeyed the dietetic and ceremonial laws; 6 they proclaimed their faith at first only to Jews, and often preached it in the Temple courts.7
Our chief guide _for this period is the Acts of the Apostles. It is universally agreed that this book ? the Third Gospel are by the same author; but there is far less general acceptance of th tradlt!on that both were written by Luke, the gentile friend of Paul. As Acts makes no men on of Paul's death, the original work may have been composed about 63 as an effort ti> mollify Roman h?stility to Christianity and Paul; but it was probably expanded by a later hand. It abounds m the supernatural, but its basic narrative may be accepted as history.1 In the second century various apocryphal "Acts" and "Epistles" rounded out with legend the story of the Apostles after Christ. These "Acts" were the historical novels of the age, not nec arily _attempts at deception; the Church rejected them. but the pious accepted them, and mcreasmgly confused them with history.
Of the seven letters ascribed in the New Testament to the Twelve Apostles, criticism in clines to accept the first of Peter as substantially genuine,2 to identify the author of the epistles of John with the disputed author of the Fourth Gospel; and to reject the rest as of doubtful authenticity.
575
576	CAESAR  AND  CHR 1ST	(CHAP. XXVII
They believed that they had received from Christ or the Holy Spirit miraculous powers of inspiration, healing, and speech. Many sick and infirm persons came to them; some were cured, says Mark,8 by anointing with oil
-always a popular treatment in the East. The author of Acts draws a touch ing picture of the trustful communism in which these early Christians lived:
There was but one heart and soul in the multitude who had become believers, and not one of them claimed anything that belonged to him as his own, but they shared everything they had with one another.
. . . No one among them was in any want, for any who O\vned lands or houses would sell them and bring the proceeds and put them at the disposal of the Apostles; then they were shared with ev.eryone in pro portion to his need.9
As the number of proselytes increased, the apostles, by a !:lying on of hands, ordained seven deacons to administer the affairs of the community. For some time the Jewish authorities tolerated the sect as small and harmless; but as the "Nazarenes" multiplied in a few years from 120 to 8000,10 the priests became alarmed. Peter and others were arrested and questioned by the Sanhedrin; the Sadducees wished to condemn them to death, but a Pharisee named Gamaliel-probably the teacher of Paul-advised a sus pended judgment; as a compromise the prisoners were flogged and released. A little later (A.O. 30?) Stephen, one of the ordained deacons, was sum moned before the Sanhedrin on the charge that he had "used abusive lan guage about Moses and about God." 11 He defended himself with reckless vehemence:
You stubborn people, with heathen hearts and ears, you are always opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your forefathers did! Which of the prophets did not your forefathers persecute? They killed the men who foretold the coming of the righteous one, whom you have now betrayed and killed-you who had the Law given you by angels, and did not obey it! 12 •
The Sanhedrin, in a rage, had him dragged outside the city and stoned to death. A young Pharisee named Saul aided the attack; thereafter he went from house to house in Jerusalem, seized adherents of "the \Nay," and put them in jail.13
he Jewish converts o Greek na?1e and culture, who had had Stephen as t?eir leader, e_d to Samaria and Antioch, ·where they established strong Chris tian communmes. Most of the apostles, apparently spared in this persecution


Faced with this second threat in seven years to the very life of Rome, the Senate mobilized all its resources and called upon the states of Italy to unite in the defense of their land. \Vith their help Rome raised armies totaling 300,000 foot, 14,000 horse, and 456,000 reserves. One army, under the first of many famous Scipios, met Hannibal along the Ticino-a small river flowing into the Po at Pavia. Hannibal's Numidian cavalry put the Romans to flight, and Scipio, dangerously wounded, was saved by the brave interposition of the son who was destined to meet Hannibal again at Zama sixteen years later. At Lake Trasimene Hannibal encountered another Roman army, 30,000 strong, led by the tribune Caius Flaminius, and accom panied by slave dealers bringing fetters and chains for the prospective prisoners whom they hoped to sell. \Yith pan of his forces Hannibal de coyed this army into a plain surrounded by hills and woods that concealed most of his troops; at his signal the hidden columns debouched upon the Romans from every side and killed nearly all of them, including Flaminius himself (217).
Hannibal now controlled all nonhern Italy, but he knew that he was still outnumbered ten to one by a resolute foe. His only hope lay in persuading
50	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. Ill
at least some of the Italian states to revolt against Rome. He released all prisoners whom he had taken from Rome's allies, saying that he had come not to fight Italy but to set it free. He marched through flooded Etruria, where for four days no dry land could be found on which to pitch a camp; crossed the Apennines to the Adriatic, and there allowed his soldiers a long interval to refresh their energies and heal their wounds. He himself suffered from severe ophthalrnia, took no time to treat it, and lost the use of one eye. Then he marched down the eastern coast, inviting the Italian tribes to join him. None did; on the contrary, every city closed its gates against him and prepared to fight. As he moved south, his Gallic allies, inter ested only in their northern homes, began to desert him. Plots against his life were so numerous that he had to assume ever new disguises. He begged his government to send him supplies and men by some Adriatic port; it refused. He asked his younger brother Hasdrubal, whom he had left in Spain, to organize an army and cross Gaul and the Alps to join him; but the Romans had invaded Spain, and Hasdrubal did not dare to leave it. Ten years were to pass before his corning.
Rome now adopted against her greatest adversary his own baffiing policy of caution and attrition. Quintus Fabius Maxirnus, made dictator in 217, created an adjective by delaying as long as he could a direct engagement with Hannibal; in time, he believed, the invaders would be reduced by hunger, discord, and disease. After a year this "masterly inaction" irritated the Roman populace; the Assembly overruled the Senate, as well as all precedents and logic, by electing Minucius Rufus codictator with Fabius. Against Fabius' advice Minucius advanced against the enemy, fell into a trap, was severely beaten, and thereafter understood why Hannibal said that he feared Fabius, who would not fight, more than Marcellus, who would.25 A year later Fabius was deposed, and the Roman armies were entrusted to Lucius Aernilius Paulus and Caius T erentius Varro. Paulus the aristocrat counseled caution; Varro of the plebs was all for action; and as usual, caution lost the argument. Varro sought and found the Carthagin ians at Cannae, in Apulia, some ten miles from the Adriatic coast. The Romans had 80,000 infantry, 6000 cavalry; Hannibal had 19,000 veterans, 16,000 unreliable Gauls, 10,000 horse; and he had lured Varro to fight in a broad plain ideal for cavalry. He had placed the Gauls at his center, expect ing that they would give way. They did; and when the Romans followed them into the pocket, the subtle Carthaginian, himself in the thick of the fray, ordered his veterans to close in upon the Roman flanks and bade his cavalry smash through the opposed horsemen to attack the legions from behind. The Roman army was surrounded, lost all chance of maneuvering, and was almost annihilated; 44,000 of them fell, including Paulus and eighty
CHAP. III)	HANNIBAL  AGAINST  ROME	51
senators who had enlisted as soldiers; ro,ooo escaped to Canusium, among them Varro and the Scipio who was to win the surname of Af ricanus Maior ( 216). Hannibal lost 6000 men, two thirds of them Gauls. It was a supreme example of generalship, never bettered in history. It ended the days of Roman reliance upon infantry, and set the lines of military tactics for two thousand years.
SCIPIO
The disaster shattered Rome's hegemony in southern Italy. Samnites, Bruttians, Lucanians, Metapontum, Thurii, Crotona., Locri, and Capua joined Cisalpine Gaul in attaching themselves to Hannibal; only Umbria., Latium, and Etruria remained firm. Hiero of Syracuse was loyal to the death, but his successors declared for Carthage. Philip V of Macedon, fearful of Roman expansion through Illyria into the east, allied himself with Han nibal and declared war upon Rome. Carthage herself became interested and sent Hannibal meager reinforcements and supplies. Some of the young Roman nobles among the survivors at Canusium thought the situation hope less and meditated flight to Greece, but Scipio shamed them into courage. Rome was for a month hysterical with terror; only a small garrison remained to protect it against Hannibal. Matrons of high family ran weeping to the temples and cleansed with their hair the statues of the gods; some whose husbands and sons had fallen in battle cohabited with foreigners and slaves lest their strain should die. To regain the favor of obviously offended deities the Senate again sanctioned human sacrifice and buried alive two Gauls and two Greeks.26
But the Romans, says Polybius, "were most to be feared when they stood in real danger. . . . Though they were now so overwhelmingly defeated, and their military reputation had been destroyed, yet, by the peculiar virtues of their constitution, and by wise counsel, they not only recovered their supremacy in Italy . . . but in a few years made themselves masters of
the world." 21 The  class war ceased, and all groups rushed to the rescue of
the state. Taxes had already risen apparently beyond tolerance; but now the citizens, even widows and children, voluntarily brought their secret savings to the Treasury. Every male who could bear arms was called to the colors; slaves were accepted in the levies and were promised freedom in the event of victory. Not a single soldier would consent to receive pay. Rome prepared to contest every inch of ground against the new lion of Carthage.
But Hannibal did not come. His 40,000 men were too small a force, he thought, to besiege a city to whose defense many armies would converge
52	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. III
from still loyal states; and if he took it, how could he hold it? His Italian allies, instead of strengthening, weakened him; Rome and her friends were raising forces to attack them, and without his help they would succumb. His aides reproached his caution, and one of them remarked, sadly, "The gods have not given all their gifts to one man. You know how to win victory, Hannibal, but you do not know how to use it."28 Hannibal decided to wait till Carthage, Macedon, and Syracuse could unite with him in a multiple offensive that would retake Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and Illyria, and compel Rome to confine her power to Italy. He released all captives except Romans, and offered these to Rome for a small ransom. ,vhen the Senate refused this he sent most of them to Carthage as slaves, and forced the rest, in Roman style, to amuse his men by gladiatorial combats, even to the death. He besieged and took several towns and then led his army to winter in Capua. It was the most pleasant and dangerous place that he could have chosen.
For this second city of Italy-some twelve miles north of Naples-had learned from the Etruscans and the Greeks the vices as well as the graces of civilization; and Hannibal's troops felt entitled to indulge for a season the flesh that had borne so many hardships and wounds. They were never again the invincible soldiers who had through many campaigns been formed in their master's Spartan image. In the next five years Hannibal led them to some minor successes; but while they were so engaged the Romans laid siege to Capua. Hannibal sought to relieve it by marching to within a few miles of Rome; the Romans raised twenty-five new legions-200,000 men and Hannibal, still limited to 40,000, retired to the south. In 2 I I Capua fell; its leaders, who had let loose a massacre of Romans in the city, were beheaded or committed suicide; and the population, which had strongly sup ported Hannibal, was dispersed throughout Italy. A ye:1r before, Marcellus had taken Syracuse; and a year later Agrigentum yielded to Rome.
Meanwhile a Roman army under the two older Scipios had been sent to Spain to keep Hasdrubal occupied. They defeated him at the Ebro (215); but both of them were soon afterward killed in battle, and their gains were being lost when their son and nephew, Scipio Africanus, was dispatched to the Spanish command. He was but twenty-four, far below the legal age for so responsible a position; but the Senate was willing to stretch the constimtion to save the state, and the Assembly was by this time voluntarily subordinating itself to the Senate. The people admired him not only because he was handsome and eloquent, intelligent and brave, but pious, courteous, and just. It was his custom, before undertaking an enterprise, to commune with the gods in the temples on the Capitol, and, after his victories, to reward them with hecatombs. He believed-or represented-himself to be a favorite of Heaven; his successes spread the belief and filled his followers
CHAP. III)	HANNIBAL  AGAINST  ROME	53
with confidence. He soon restored discipline among the troops, captured Nova Carthago after a long siege, and scrupulously turned over to the Treasury the precious metal and stones that there fell into his hands. Most of the Spanish cities surrendered to him, and by 205 Spain had become a Roman province.
Nevertheless, Hasdrubal's main force had escaped and now crossed Gaul and the Alps into Italy. The young leader's message to Hannibal was inter cepted, and his plan of campaign was revealed to Rome. A Roman army met his modest force at the Metaurus River (207) and defeated him despite his excellent generalship. Seeing the battle lost and all hope of reaching his brother gone, Hasdrubal leaped into the midst of the legions and took death in his stride. The Roman historians, perhaps romancing, tell us that the victor cut off the yomh's head and sent it through Apulia to be cast over the ramparts into Hannibal's camp. Broken in spirit by the fate of a brother whom he had dearly loved, Hannibal withdrew his thinned-out forces to Bruttium. "No action was fought with him this year," says Livy, "nor did the Romans care to disturb him, so great was the reputation of his powers even while his cause was everywhere round him crumbling into ruin." 29 Carthage sent him a hundred ships laden with men and food, but a gale drove the vessels to Sardinia, where a Roman fleet sank or captured eighty of them; the rest fled home.
In 205 young Scipio, fresh from his victories in Spain, ·was chosen consul,
raised a new army, and sailed for Africa. The Carthaginian government appealed to Hannibal to come to the help of the city that had so long refused to support him. How shall we imagine the feelings of the half-blind warrior, driven into a corner of Italy by an endless stream of enemies, seeing all his toil and hardships of fifteen years brought to nothing, and all his triumphs summing up to futility and flight? Half of his troops refused to embark with him for Carthage; according to hostile historians he had 20,000 of them killed for disobedience and for fear that Rome might add them to her legions.30 Touching his native soil after an absence of thirty-six years, he hastily formed a new army and went out to face Scipio at Zama, fifty miles south of Carthage (202). The two generals met in a courteous inter view, found agreement impossible, and joined battle. For the first time in his life Hannibal was defeated; the Carthaginians, mostly mercenaries, gave ground before the Roman infantry and the reckless cavalry of Masinissa, the Numidian king; 20,000 Carthaginians were left dead on the field. Hannibal, now forty-five, fought with the energy of youth, attacked Scipio in personal combat and wounded him, attacked l\Iasinissa, re-formed his disordered forces again and again, and led them in desperate counrercharges. \Vhen all hope fled he eluded capture, rode to Carthage, announced that he had
54	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. Ill
lost not only a battle but the war, and advised the Senate to sue for peace. Scipio was generous. He allowed Carthage to retain her African empire but demanded the surrender of all her war vessels except ten triremes; she was not to make war outside of Africa or within it without Rome's consent; and she was to pay Rome 200 talents ($720,000) e;ery year for fifty years. Hannibal pronounced the terms just and persuaded his government to accept them.
The Second Punic War changed the face of the western Mediterranean. It gave Spain and all its wealth to Rome, providing the funds for the Ro.man conquest of Greece. It reunited Italy under Rome's unquestioned mastery and threw open all routes and markets to Roman ships and goods. But it was the most costly of all ancient wars. It ravaged or injured half the farms of Italy, destroyed 400	towns, killed 300,000 men;31 southern Italy has never quite recovered from it to this day. It weakened democracy by show ing that a popular assembly cannot wisely choose generals or direct a war. It began the transformation of Roman life and morals by hurting agricul ture and helping trade; by taking men from the countryside and teaching them the violence of battle and the promiscuity of the camp; by bringing the precious metals of Spain to finance new luxuries and imperialistic ex pansion; and by enabling Italy to live on the extorted wheat of Spain, Sicily, and Africa. It was a pivotal event for almost every phase of Roman history. To Carthage it was the beginning of the end. With much of its commerce and empire left to it, it might have solved the problems of regeneration. But the oligarchical government was so corrupt that it threw upon the lower classes the burden of raising the annual indemnity for Rome and embezzled part of it to boot. The popular party called upon Hannibal to come out of his retirement and save the nation. In 196 he was elected suffete. He shocked the oligarchs by proposing that the judges of the Court of 104 should be elected for one year and should be ineligible for a second term until after a year's interval. When the Senate rejected the measure he brought it be fore the Assembly, and carried it; by this law and this procedure he estab lished at one stroke a degree of democracy qual to Rome's. He punished and checked venality and pursued it to its source. He relieved the citizens of the extra taxes that had been laid upon them, and yet so managed the finances that by 1 88 Carthage was able to pay off the Roman indemnity in


B.C. a neolithic culture appeared: a longheaded race called by ancient tradi tion Liguri and Siceli fashioned rude pottery with linear ornament, made tools and weapons of polished stone, domesticated animals, hunted and fished, and buried their dead. Some lived in caves, others in round huts of wattle and daub; from these cylindrical cottages architecture pursued a continuous development to the round "House of Romulus" on the Palatine, the Temple of Vesta in the Forum, and the J\1ausoleum of Hadrian-the Castel Sant' Angelo of today.
About 2000 B.c. northern Italy was invaded-presumably not for the first time-by tribes from central Europe. They brought with them the custom of building their villages upon piles sunk in water, for safety from animal or human attack. They settled on Garda, Como, Maggiore, and the other en chanted lakes that still lure aliens to Italy. Later they moved south and, find ing fewer lakes, built their homes upon land, but still upon a foundation of piles. Their habit of surrounding these settlements with rampart and moat passed down to form features of Roman camps and medieval chateaux. They pastured flocks and herds, tilled the soil, wove clothing, fired pottery; and out of bronze, which had appeared in Italy toward the end of the Neo lithic Age (about 2500 B.c.), they forged a hundred varieties of tools and weapons, including combs, hairpins, razors, tweezers, and other timeless im, plements.9 They allowed their rubbish to accumulate so lavishly around the
CHAP. I)	ETRUSCAN  PRELUDE	5
villages that their culture has received the name of terramare-earth marl from the fertilizing potency of these remains. So far as we know, they were the direct ancestors of the basic population of Italy in historical times.
In the valley of the Po the descendants of these terramctricoli, about 1000
B.c., learned from Germany the use of iron, made from it improved imple ments, and, so armed, spread their "Vill::movan" culture from its center at Villanova, near Bologna, far down into Italy. From them, we may believe, came the blood, languages, and essential arts of the Umbrians, Sabines, and Latins. Then, about 800 B.c., a new flood of immigrants arrived, subjugated the Villanovan population, and established between the Tiber and the Alps one of the strangest civilizations in the records of mankind.
ETRUSCAN LIFE
The Etruscans are among the irritating obscurities of history. They ruled Rome for a hundred years or more, and left upon Roman ways so varied an influence that Rome can hardly be understood without them; yet Roman literature is as mute concerning them as a matron anxious to forget, pub licly, the surrenders of her youth. Italian civilization, as literate provision, begins with them: 8000 inscriptions, as well as many works of art, mingle with their remains; and there are indications of a lost literature in poetry, drama, and history.10 But only a few unrevealing words of the language have been deciphered, and scholarship stands in deeper darkness today before the Etruscan mystery than that which shrouded the Egypt of the Pharaohs before Champollion.
Consequently men still debate who the Etruscans were, and when and whence they came. Perhaps the old tradition has been too readily set aside; pedants love to disprove the accepted, which mischievously survives. Most Greek and Roman historians took it for granted that the Etruscans had come from Asia Minor.11 Many elements in their religion, dress, and art suggest an Asiatic origin; many, again, seem natively Italian. J\fost likely the civilization of Etruria was an out growth of the Villanovan culture, commercially influenced by Greece and the Near East, while the Etruscans themselves, as they believed, were invaders from Asia Minor, probably Lydia. In any case, their superior killing power made them the ruling caste in Tuscany.
We do not know where they landed; but we know that they founded, con quered, or developed many cities-not mere villages of mud and straw as before them, but walled towns with geometrically laid-out streets, and houses not only of beaten earth, but often of baked brick or stone. Twelve of these communities joined in a loose Etruscan Federation, dominated by Tarquinii (now Corneto),
6	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. I
Arretium (Arezzo), Perusia (Perugia), and Veii (Isola Farnese).* Hardships of transportation through mountains and forests collaborated with the jealous pubJTiacity of men, here as in Greece, to form independent city-states, seldom united against external foes; each cherished its separate security, often stood aside while others were attacked, and, one after another, succumbed to Rome. But through most of the sixth century B.C. these allied municipalities constituted the strongest political force in Italy, with a well-organized army, a famous cavalry, and a powerful navy that for a time ruled what is still called the Tyrrhene (i.e., Etruscan) Sea.t
As in the case of Rome, the government of the Etruscan cities began as a monarchy, became an oligarchy of "first families," and gradually gave over to an assembly of propertied citizens the right of choosing the annual magistrates. So far as ,ve can make out from the tomb paintings and reliefs, it was a thoroughly feudal society, with an aristocracy owning the soil and enjoying in luxury the surplus product of Villanovan serfs and war-won slaves. Under this discipline Tuscany was reclaimed from forest and swamp, and a system of rural irrigation and urban sewage was developed beyond anything discoverable in contemporary Greece. Etruscan engineers built drainage tunnels to take the overflow of lakes, and cut drained roadways through rock and hill.12 As early as 700 B.c. Etruscan industry mined the copper of the western coast and the iron of Elba, smelted the iron ore at Populonia, and sold pig iron throughout Italy.13 Etruscan merchants traded up and down the T yrrhene Sea, brought amber, tin, lead, and iron from northern Europe down the Rhine and the Rhone and over the Alps, and sold Etruscan products in every major port of the Mediterranean. About 500 n.c. S:truscan towns issued their own coins.
The people themselves are pictured on their tombs as short and stocky, with large heads, features almost Anatolian, complexion ruddy, especially in women; but rouge is as old as civilization.14 The ladies were famous for their beauty,15 and the men sometimes had faces of refinement and nobility. Civilization had already advanced to a precarious height, for specimens of dental bridgework have been found in the graves; 16 dentistry, like medicine and surgery, had been imported from Egypt and Greece.17 Both sexes_ wore the hair long, and the men fondled beards. Garments followed the Ionian styie: an inner shirt like the chiton, and an outer robe that became the Roman toga. Men as well as women loved ornament, and their tombs abounded in jeweiry.
If we may judge from the gay pictures of the sepulchers, the life of the Etruscans, like that of the Cretans, ,vas hardened with combat, softened with luxury, and brightened with feasts :ind games. The men waged war lustily, and practiced a variety of virile sports. They hunted, fought bulls in the arena, and
The names given are Roman; the Etruscan names are unknown.
t The GreeKs called the Etruscans Tyrrbeni or Tyrsroi; the Romans called them Etrusci
or Tusci. Possibly, like tyrant, the Greek name came from Tyrrha, a fortress in Lydia. Tower
is probably a kindred word.
CHAP. I)	ETRUSCAN   PRELUDE	7
drove their chariots, sometimes four horses abreast, around a dangerous course. They threw the discus and the javelin, pole-vaulted, raced, wrestled, boxed, and fought in gladiatorial bouts. Cruelty marked these games, for the Etruscans, like the Romans, thought it dangerous to let civilization get too far from the brute. Less heroic persons brandished dumbbells, threw dice, played the flute, or danced. Scenes of bibulous merriment relieve the paintings in the tombs. Sometimes they are symposia for men only, with vinous conversation; now and then they show both sexes, richly dressed, reclining in pairs on elegant couches, eating and drinking, waited on by slaves, and entertained by dancers and musicians.18 Occasionally the meal is adorned with an amorous embrace.
Probably the lady in this case was a courtesan, corresponding to the Greek hetaira. If we may believe the Romans, the young women of Etruria, like those of Greek Asia and Samurai Japan, were allowed to obtain dowries by prosti tution; 19 a character in Plautus accuses a girl of "seeking in the Tuscan way to earn her marriage by the shame of her body." 20 Nevertheless, women enjoyed a high status in Etruria, and the paintings represent them as prominent in every aspect of life. Relationship was traced through the mother in a manner sug gesting again an Asiatic origin.21 Education was not confined to the male, for Tanaquil, wife of the first Tarquin, was versed in mathematics and medicine as well as political intrigue.22 Theopompus ascribed a communism of women to the Etruscan,23 but no confirming evidence has come down to us of this Platonic utopia. Many of the pictures are scenes of marital concord and family life, with children romping about in happy ignorance.
Religion provided every incentive to a negative morality. The Etruscan pantheon was fully e,quipped to terrify the growing ego and ease the tasks of parentage. The greatest of the gods was Tinia, who wielded the thunder and the lightning. About him, as a committee pitilessly carrying out his commands, were the Twelve Great Gods, so great that it was sacrilege (and we may there fore neglect) to pronounce their names. Especially fearsome were Mantus and J\fania, master and mistress of the Underworld, each with an executive horde of winged demons. Least appeasable of all was Lasa or Mean, goddess of fate, brandishing snakes or a sword, and armed with stylus and ink to write, and hammer and nails to affix, her unalterable decrees. Pleasanter were the Lares and Penates-little statuettes kept on the hearth, and symbolizing the spirits of field and home.
The sacred science of ascertaining the future by studying the livers of sheep or the flight of birds had probably come down to the Etruscans from Babylonia; but according to their own traditions it had been revealed to them by a divine boy, grandson of Tinia, who sprang to life from a furrow freshly turned, and at once spoke with the wisdom of a sage. Etruscan ritual culminated in the sacrifice of a sheep, a bull, or a man. Human victims were slaughtered or buried alive at the funerals of the great. ln some cases prisoners of war were massacred as a propitiation of the gods; so the Phoceans taken at Alalia in 535 B.c. were stoned to death in the forum of Caere, and some 300 Romans captured in 358 B.c.
8	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. I


were sacrificed at Tarquinii. The Etruscan appears to have believed that for every enemy slain he could secure the release of a soul from hell.24
The belief in hell was the favorite feature of Etruscan theology. The dead spirit, as seen in the sepulchral representations, was conducted by genii to the tribunal of the Underworld, where in a Last Judgment it was given an oppor tunity to defend its conduct in life. If it failed, it was condemned to a variety of torments that left their mark on Virgil (reared on Mantua's Etruscan lore), on the early Christian conception of hell, and, through these and twenty cen turies, on Tuscan Dante's Inferno. From such damnation the good were spared, and the sufferings of the damned might be shortened by the prayers or sacrifices of their living friends. The saved soul passed from the Underworld to the society of the gods above, there to enjoy feasts, luxuries, and powers depicted hopefully on the tombs.
Normally the Etruscans buried their dead. Those who could afford it were laid to rest in sarcophagi of terra cotta or stone, and the lid was topped with reclining figures carved partly in their likeness, partly in the smiling style of the archaic Greek Apollos; here, again, Etruscan traditions contributed to medieval art. Occasionally the dead were cremated and placed in cinerary urns, which also might be adorned with the figure of the deceased. In many cases the um or tomb simulated a house; sometimes the tomb, cut into the rock, was divided into rooms, and was equipped for post-mortem living with furniture, utensils, vases, clothing, weapons, mirrors, cosmetics, and gems. In a tomb at Caere the skeleton of a warrior lay on a perfectly preserved bed of bronze, with weapons and chariots beside it; and in a chamber behind his were the ornaments and jewelry of a woman presumably his wife. The dust that )lad been her beloved body was clothed in her bridal robes.25
ETRUSCAN ART
Etruscan art is nearly all that we know of Etruscan history. We can trace in it_ the manners and mora:s of the people, the power of religion and caste, and the changing tides of economic and cultural contact with Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. It was an art fettered by ecclesiastical conventions and liber ated by technical skill; it reflected a brutal and obscurantist civilization, but expressed it with character and force. Oriental influences-Ionic, Cypriot, Egyptian-dictated its earlier forms and styles, and Greek models dominated its later sculpture and pottery. In architecture and painting, however, in bronze _ statuary and the working of metals, Etruscan art spoke with its own voice and was unique.
The architectural remains are never more than fragments or tombs. Parts of Etruria's city walls still stand-heavy structures of uncemented masonry firmly and accurately joined. The homes of rich Etruscans defined the classic design of the Italian house: a deliberately forbidding external wall, a central atriwn or
CHAP, I)	ETRUSCAN PRELUDE	9
reception room, an opening in the roof of the atrium to let rain fall into a cistern be1ow, and a circuit of small chambers surrounding the atrium and often faced by a colonnaded porch. Vitruvius has described Etruscan temples, and the tombs sometimes take their form. Essentially they followed Greek models; but the "Tuscan style" modified the Doric by leaving the column unfluted, giving it a base, and planning the cella on a six-to-five proportion of length to breadth, instead of the more graceful Attic relation of six-to-three. A cella of brick, a peristyle of stone, architraves and pediments of wood, reliefs and ornaments in terra cotta, the whole resting on a podium or elevation, and brightly painted outside and within: this was the Etruscan temple. For secular mass architecture
-for city gates and walls, aqueducts and drains-the Etruscans (so far as we know) introduced the arch and vault to Italy. Apparently they had brought these majestic forms from Lydia, which had taken them from Babylonia.• But they did not follow up this brilliant method of covering great spaces without a confusion of columns and an oppressive weight of architraves. For the most part they walked in the grooves worn by the Greeks, and left Rome to con summate the arcuate revolution.
The most renowned of Etruria's products is its pottery. Every museum abounds in it, setting the weary navigator of ceramic halls to wonder what unseen perfection exonerates these stores. Etruscan vases, when they are not clearly copies of Greek forms, are mediocre in design, crude in execution, barbarous in ornament. No other art has produced so many distortions of the human frame, so many hideous masks, uncouth animals, monstrous demons, and terrifying gods. But the black wares (bucchero nero) of the sixth century n.c. have an Italian vigor, and perhaps represent an indigenous development of Villanovan styles. Fine vases were found at Vulci and Tarquinii-imported from Athens or imitated from black-figured Attic shapes. The Fram;ois Vase, a huge amphora discovered at Chiusi by a Frenchman of that name, was apparently the work of the Greek masters Clitias and Ergotimus. The later urns, red-figured on a black ground, are elegant, but again evidently of Greek manufacture; their abundance suggests that the Attic potters had captured the Etruscan market and driven the native workers into merely industrial production. All in all, the robbers were justified who, when they rifled Etruscan tombs, left so much of the pottery.
We cannot speak of Etruscan bronzes with such reckless irreverence. The
bronze casters of Etruria were at the top of their craft. They almost rivaled the potters in productivity; one city alone is reported to have had two thousand statues in bronze. What remains to us from their hands belongs mostly to the period of Roman domination. Among these reliefs two masterpieces stand out: the Orator who now holds forth, with Roman dignity and bronze restraint, in the Archeological Museum at Florence; and-also at Florence-the Chimera found at Arezzo in 1553, and partly restored by Cellini. It is a disagreeable
They were used in Egyptian tombs and temples, and in the palaces of Nineveh. Some
Roman arches re s old as any that remain in Etruria.26
IO	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. I
figure, presumably the monster slain by Bellerophon-head and body of a lion, a serpent for a tail, a goat's head growing anomalously out of the back; but its power and finish reconcile us to its biological extravagance. Etruscan bronze workers produced, often for distant export, millions of statuettes, swords, hel mets, cuirasses, spears, shields, utensils, urns, coins, locks, chains, fans, mirrors, beds, lamps, candelabra, even chariots. Greeting the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is an Etruscan chariot: body and wheels of wood, sheathing and tires of bronze, the high front embossed with figures of consider able grace. Many bronze objects were delicately engraved. The surface was coated with wax, the design was etched in with a stylus, the piece was dipped into acid, the wax-freed lines were burned into the metal, and then the wax was melted away. In the working of silver and gold, bone and ivory, the Etruscan artist was the heir and peer of the Egyptian and the Greek.
Sculpture in stone was never popular in Etruria. Marble was scarce, and the quarries of Carrara were apparently unknown. Fine clays were at hand, how ever, and soon took shape in a profusion of terra-cotta reliefs, statuettes, and sepulchral or architectural ornaments. About the end of the sixth century an unknown Etruscan artist established a school of sculpture at Veii, and carved the chef-d'oeuvre of Etruscan art-that Apollo of Veii which was found on the site in 1916, and until lately stood in the Villa Giulia at Rome. Modeled on the Ionian and Attic Apollos of the time, this engaging statue shows an almost feminine Mona Lisa face, with delicate smile, archly slanting eyes, and a body of health, beautv, and life; the Italians call it il Apollo che cammina-"the Apollo that walks." In this, and in many excellent figures on sarcophagi, Etruscan sculptors carried to perfection the Asiatic stylization of hair and drapery, while in the Orator they or their Roman heirs established a tradition of realistic portraiture.
Etruscan painting collaborated with that of Greek Italy in transmitting another art to Rome. The elder Pliny described frescoes at Ardea "of older age than Rome itself"; and at Caere others of "still greater antiquity" and "supreme beauty." 27 The art used pottery, and the interiors of homes and tombs, for its surfaces; only tomb frescoes and vase pictures remain, but in such quantity that every stage of Etruscan painting can be traced in them, from Oriental and Egyptian, through Greek and Alexandrian, to Roman and Pompeian styles. In some tombs we find the first Italian examples of windows, portals, columns, porticoes, and other architectural forms mimicked by painting on inner walls, in the very manner of Pompeii. Often the colors of these frescoes are faded; a few are astonishingly fresh and brilliant after more than a score of centuries. The technique is mediocre. In the earlier pictures there is no perspective, no foreshortening, no use of light and shade to give fullness :md depth; the figures are Egyptianly slender, as if seen in a horizontally convex mirror; the faces are regularly in profile, wherever the feet may point. In the later examples perspec tive and foreshortening appear, and the proportions of the body are represented with greater fidelity and skill. But in either case there is in these paintings a
CHAP. 1)	ETRUSCAN  PRELUDE
frolicsome and impish vivacity that makes one wonder how pleasant the life
of the Etruscans must have been, if their tombs were so gay.
Here are men in battle, and enjoying it; or they play at war in the jousts of the arena. They hunt the boar or lion with all the bravery of men who have or expect an audience; they box or wrestle in the palaestra, while the spectators dispute more violently than the combatants; they ride their horses, or drive their chariots, around the amphitheater; sometimes, resigned to peace, they fish. One pleasant scene shows a couple idly boating on a quiet stream: so old is wisdom. In a grave at Caere the pictured man and his lady recline on a couch; garlanded with laurel, he pledges her his eternal fidelity with a goblet of wine; she smiles and believes him, though she knows he lies. In other burial chambers the Etruscan painter sketches his idea of paradise: endless revelry, with careless lasses dancing wildly to double-pipes and the lyre. Pipes and lyres, trumpets and syrinxes, were apparently essential to every banquet, wedding, and funeral; love of music and the dance is cne of the gracious aspects of Etruscan civiliza tion. In the Tomb of the Lioness at Corneto the figures whirl about in nude and Bacchic frenzy.28
It was the natural destiny of the Etruscans to expand north and south, to extend their sway to the foothills of the Alps and the Greek cities of Cam pania, and then to find themselves face to face, across the Tiber, with grow ing Rome. They established colonies at Verona, Padua, Mantua, Panna, Modena, Bologna, and beyond the Apennines at Rimini, Ravenna, and Adria; from this modest Etruscan outpost the Adriatic took its name. They hemmed in Rome with Etruscan settlements at Fidenae, Praeneste (Pales trina), and Capua, perhaps also at Cicero's Tusculum ("little Tuscany>'). Finally-in 618 B.C., according to a precise and precarious tradition-an Etruscan adventurer captured the throne of Rome; and for a century the Roman nation was ruled and formed by Etruscan civilization and power.
ROME UNDER THE  KINGS
About rooo B.c. Villanovan migrants crossed the Tiber and settled in Latium. No one knows whether they conquered, or exterminated, or merely married the neolithic population they found there. Slowly the agricultural villages of this historic region between the Tiber and the Bay of Naples coalesced into a few jealously sovereign city-states, loath to unite except in annual religious festivals or occasional wars. The strongest was Alba Longa, lying at the foot of Mt. Alban, probably where Castel Gandolfo now shelters the Pope on summer days. It was from Alba Longa, perhaps in the eighth century before Christ, that a colony of Latins-greedy for conquest, or driven by the pressure of the birth rate upon the land-moved some twenty