fifty-five, a disillusioned misanthrope who found no happiness in power.
To understand him we must remember that he was a Claudian; with him began the Claudian branch of that Julio-Claudian dynasty which ended with Nero. Through both parents he inherited the proudest blood in Italy, the narrowest prejudices, the strongest will. He was tall, powerful, and well featured; but acne accentuated his shyness, his awkward manners, his moody diffidence, and his love of seclusion.2 The fine head of Tiberius in the Boston Museum shows him as a young priest, with broad forehead, large deep eyes, and pensive countenance; he was so serious in youth that wags called him "the old man." He received all the education that Rome, Greece, environment, and responsibility could afford; he learned the two classic languages and literatures well, wrote lyrics, dabbled in astrology, and "neglected the gods." 3 He loved his brother Drusus despite the young man's superior popularity; he was a devoted husband to Vipsania, and so generous to his friends that they could safely give him presents in the expectation of a fourfold return. The severest as well as the ablest general of his time, he gained the admiration and affection of his soldiers because he watched over
All further dates will be A.D. unless othenvise noted.
259
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
every detail of their welfare, and won his battles by strategy rather than by blood.
His vinues ruined him. He believed the stories told about the mos maiorum, and wished to see the stern qualities of old Rome reborn in the new Babylon; he approved the moral reforms of Augustus and made clear his intention to enforce them. He had no liking for tlie ethnic farrago that steamed in the caldron of Rome; he gave it bread but no circuses, and offended it by not attending the games presented by rich men. He was convinced that Rome could be saved from a vulgar degeneration only by an aristocracy stoic in conduct and refined in taste. But the aristocracy could no more than the people bear his "stiff neck" and sober countenance, his long silences and slow speech, his visible awareness of his own excellence, and, worst of all, his grim husbanding of the public funds. He had been misborn a stoic in an epicurean age, and he was too coldly honest to learn Seneca's art of preach ing the one doctrine in beautiful language and practicing the other with graceful constancy.
Four weeks after the death of Augustus, Tiberius appeared before the Senate and asked it to restore the Republic. He was unfit, he told them, to rule so vast a state; "in a city so well provided with men of illustrious character . . . the several departments of public business could be better filled by a coalition of the best and ablest citizens." 4 Not daring to take him at his word, the Senate exchanged bows with him until at last he accepted power "as a wretched and burdensome slavery," and in the hope that some day the Senate would permit him to retire to privacy and freedom.5 The play was well acted on both sides. Tiberius wanted the principate, or he would have found some way to evade it; the Senate feared and hated him, but shrank from re-establishing a republic based, like the old, upon theo retically sovereign assemblies. It wanted less democracy, not more; and it was pleased when Tiberius (A.D. 14) persuaded it to take over from the co111itia ceuturiata the power of choosing the public officials. The citizens complained for a time, mourning the loss of the sums they had received for their votes. The only political power now left to the common man was the right of electing the emperor by assassination. After Tiberius democracy passed from the assemblies to the army, and voted with the sword.
He seems to have sincerely disliked monarchy and to have considered himself the administrative head and arm of the Sen::te. He refused all titles that savored of royalty, contented himself with that of princeps smatus, stopped all effons to deify him or offer worship to his genius, and made evident his distaste for flattery. \Vhen the Senate wished to name a month after him, as it had done for Caesar and Augustus, he turned the compliment aside with dry humor: "\Vhat will you do if there should be thirteen
CHAP. XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF MONARCHY	261
Caesars?" 6 * He rejected a proposal that he should revise the Senatorial list. Nothing could surpass his courtesy to this ancient "assembly of kings"; he attended its meetings, referred "even the smallest matters" to its judgment, sat and spoke as merely a member, was often in the minority, and made no protest when decrees were passed contrary to his expressed opinion.7 "He was self-contained and patient," according to Suetonius, "in the face of abuse, slander, and lampoons against himself and his family; in a free country, he said, there should be freedom of speech and thought." 8 His nominations, the hostile Tacitus admits,
were made with judgment. The consuls and the praetors enjoyed the ancient honors of their rank. The subordinate officials exercised their functions free from imperial control. The laws, if we except those of violated majesty, flo,ved in their regular channel.   The
revenues were administered by men of distinguished probity... . In the provinces no new burdens were imposed, and the old duties were collected without cruelty or extortion. . . . Good order pre vailed among his slaves. . . . In all questions of right between the emperor and individuals the courts of justice were open, and the law decided.9
This Tiberian honeymoon lasted nine years, during which Rome, Italy, and the provinces enjoyed government as good as any in their history. "\Vithout additional taxes, despite many benefactions to stricken families and cities, the careful repair of all public property, the absence of booty-yielding wars, and the rejection of bequests made to the Prince by persons with children or near relatives, Tiberius, who had found 100,000,000 sesterces in the Treasury on his accession, left 2,700,000,000 there at his death. He tried to check extravagance by example rather than by law. He labored carefully on every aspect of domestic and foreign affairs. To provincial governors anxious to collect more revenues he wrote that "it was the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not fleece it." 10 Though skilled in the art of ,var, he denied himself, as Prince, the glories of the battlefield; and after the third year of his long reign he kept the Empire at peace.
It was this pacific policy that marred the progress of his rule. His hand
some and popular nephew, Germanicus, whom he had adopted as his son at Drusus' death, had won some victories in Germany and wished to go on to its conquest. Tiberius advised against it, to the disgust of the imperialistic populace. Because Germanicus was a grandson of l\1ark Antony, those who still dreamed of restoring the Republic used him as a symbol for their cause.
The Senate should have taken him at his word and divided the year into thirteen months of twenty-eight days each, with an intercalary holiday (in leap years two) at the end.
262	CAES~.\.R  AND	CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
\Vhen Tiberius transferred him to the East, half of Rome called the young commander a martyr to the Prince's jealousy; and when Germanicus sud denly took sick and died (19), nearly all Rome suspected that Tiberius had had him poisoned. Cnaeus Piso, an appointee of Tiberius in Asia Minor, was accused of the crime and was tried by the Senate; foreseeing condemnation, he killed himself to save his property for his family. No facts appeared to indicate Tiberius' innocence or guilt; we know only that he asked the Senate to give Piso a fair trial, and that Germanicus' mother, Antonia, re mained to the end of her life the most faithful friend of Tiberius.11
The exciteq participation of the public in the celebrated case, the scur rilous tales circulated about the Emperor, and the agitation now aroused
. against him by Germanicus' widow, Agrippina, induced Tiberius to avail himself of that lex Julia de nzaiestate, or law of treason, which Caesar had passed to define crimes against the state. Since Rome had no public prose cutor or attorney general, and (before Augustus) no police, every citizen was empowered and requested to accuse before the courts any person whom he knew to have violated a law. If the accused was condemned, the delator or informer was awarded a fourth of the convicted man's goods, while the state confiscated the rest. Augustus had used this dangerous procedure to enforce his marriage laws. Now, as plots multiplied against Tiberius, dela tores sprang up to profit from denouncing them; and the supporters of the Prince in the Senate were ready to prosecute such accusations vigorously. The Emperor sought to restrain them. He interpreted the law strictly in the case of persons charged with defaming the memory or statues of Augustus; but "personalities leveled against himself," says Tacitus, "were to be let pass unpunished." He assured the Senate that his mother Livia wished a similar leniency shown to assailants of her good name.12
Livia herself ·was now a major problem of state. Tiberius' failure to re marry left hin1 "\vith no protection against a strong-minded woman accus tomed to exercise authority over him. She felt that her maneuvers had cleared his way to the throne, and she gave him to understand that he held it only as her representative.13 During the earlier years of Tiberius' reign, though he was approaching sixty, his official letters were signed by her as well as by himself. "But not satisfied to rule on equal terms with him," says Dio, "she wished to assert a superiority over him . . . and undertook to manage everything like a sole ruler."H Tiberius long bore this situation patiently; but as Livia survived Augustus fifteen years, he at last built him self a separate palace and left his mother in undisputed possession of that which Augustus had raised. Gossip accused him of cruelty to her, and of having starved his exiled wife. i\leanwhile Agrippina was pushing her son Nero to succeed-if possible, to replace-Tiberius.15 This, too, he bore
CHAP. XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF  MONARCHY
with hot patience, merely chiding her with a Greek quotation: "Do you think a wrong is done you, dear daughter, if you are not empress?" * Hardest of all for him to bear was the realization that his only son, Drusus, borne to him by his first wife, was a worthless rake, cruel, ill-mannered, and lecherous.
The self-control with which Tiberius supported these tribulations left his nerves on edge. He retired more and more into himself, and developed a gloom of countenance and severity of speech that scattered all but his most hopeful friends. One man seemed unfailingly loyal to him-Lucius Aelius Sejanus. As prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Sejanus professed it his duty to protect the Prince; soon no one was admitted to the Emperor's presence except through the hands and under the watch of the crafty vizier. Gradu ally Tiberius entrusted to him more and more of the government. Sejanus persuaded him that the imperial safety required the closer presence of the Praetorian Guard. Augustus had stationed six of its nine cohorts outside the city limits; Tiberius now allowed all nine to pitch their camp at the Viminal Gate, only a few miles from the Palatine and the Capitol; there they became first the protectors, then the masters, of the emperors. So supported, Sejanus exercised his powers with increasing boldness and venality. He began by recommending men for office, he advanced his fortune by selling offices to the highest bidders, he ended by aspiring to the principate. A senate of real Romans would soon have overthrown him; but the Senate had, with many exceptions, become an epicure's club too listless to wield competently even the authority that Tiberius had urged it to retain. Instead of unseating Sejanus, it crowded Rome with statues voted by it in his image and honor, and at his suggestion it banished one after another of Agrippina's followers.


CHAP.VIII)  LITERATURE UNDER THE  REVOLUTION	147
and Sullan proscriptions; through Catiline's conspiracy and Caesar's con sulate. The aristocracy to which he probably belonged was in obvious decay; the world in which he lived was falling apart into a chaos that left no life or fortune secure. His poem is a longing for physical and mental peace.
Lucretius sought refuge in nature, philosophy, and poetry. Perhaps also he had a round of love; he must have fared badly, for he writes ungallantly of women, denounces the lure of beauty, and advises itching youth to appease the flesh with calm promiscuity.2 In woods and fields, in plants and animals, in mountain, river, and sea, he found a delight only rivaled by his passion for philosophy. He was as impressionable as \Vordsworth, as keen of sense as Keats, as prone as Shelley to find metaphysics in a pebble or a leaf. Nothing of nature's loveliness or terror was lost upon him; he was stirred by the forms and sounds, odors and savors, of things; felt the silences of secret haunts, the quiet falling of the night, the lazy waking of the day. Everything natural was a marvel to him-the patient flow of water, the sprouting of seeds, the endless changes of the sky, the imperturbable persistence of the stars. He observed animals with curiosity and sympathy, loved their forms of strength or grace, felt their sufferings, and wondered at their wordless philosophy. No poet before him had so expressed the grandeur of the world in its detailed variety and its congregated power. Here at last nature won the citadels of literature, and rewarded her poet with a force of descriptive speech that only Homer and Shakespeare have surpassed.
So responsive a spirit must have been deeply moved in youth by the mystery and pageantry of religion. But the ancient faith, which had once served family discipline and social order, had lost its hold on the educated classes of Rome. Caesar smiled indulgently as he played pontif ex 111aximus, and the banquets of the priests were the holydays of Roman epicures. A small minority of the people were open atheists; now and then some Roman Alcibiades nocturnally mutilated the statues of the gods.3 No longer inspired or consoled by the official ritual, many among the lower classes were flocking to the bloodstained shrines of the Phrygian Great Mother, or the Cappa docian goddess Ma, or some of the Oriental deities that had entered Italy with soldiers or captives from the East. Under the influence of Greek or Asiatic cults the old Roman idea of "Orcus" as a colorless subterranean abode of all the indiscriminate dead had developed into belief in a literal Hell-a "Tartarus" or "Acheron" of endless suffering for all but a "reborn" initiated few.4 The sun and the moon were conceived as gods, and every eclipse sent terror into lonely villages and teeming tenements. Chaldean fortunetellers and astrologers ,vere overrunning Italy, casting horoscopes for paupers r:nd millionaires, revealing hidden treasures and future events, interpreting omens and dreams ·with cautious ambiguity and profitable flattery. E,·ery unusual
CAESAR  AN"D  CHRIST	(CHAP. VIII
occurrence in nature was examined as the warning of a god. It was this mass of superstition, ritualism, and hypocrisy that Lucretius knew as religion.
No wonder that he rebelled against it, and attacked it with all the ardor of a religious reformer. We may judge from the bitterness of his resentment the depth of his youthful piety and the distress of his disillusionment. Seeking for some alternative faith, he passed through the skepticism of Ennius to the great poem in which Empedocles had expounded evolution and the con flict of opposites. When he discovered the writings of Epicurus it seemed to him that he had found the answers to his questions; that strange mixture of materialism and free will, of joyful gods and a godless world, appealed to him as a free man's answer to doubt and fear. A breath of liberation from supernatural terrors seemed to come out of Epicurus' garden, revealing the omnipresence of law, the self-ruled independence of nature, the forgivable naturalness of death. Lucretius resolved to take this philosophy out of the ungainly prose in which Epicurus had expressed it, fuse it into poetic form, and offer it to his generation as the way, the truth, and the life. He felt in himself a rare and double power-the objective perception of the scientist and the subjective emotion of the poet; and he saw in the total order of nature a sublimity, and in nature's parts a beauty, that encouraged and justified this marriage of philosophy and poetry. His great purpose aroused all his powers, lifted him to a unique intellectual exuberance, and left him, before its com pletion, exhausted and perhaps insane. But his "long and delightful toil" gave him a consuming happiness, and he poured into it all the devotion of a profoundly religious soul.
He chose for his work a philosophical rather than a poetic title-De Rerum Natura, "On the Nature of Things"-a simple translation of the Peri Physeos ("About Nature") which the pre-Socratics had used as a common name for their treatises. He offered it to the sons of Caius Memmius, praetor in 58, as a road from fear to understanding. He took as his model the Empedoclean epic of exposition, as his speech the quaint bluntness of Ennius, as his medium the mobile and versatile hexameter. And then, for getting for a moment the distant carelessness of the gods, he began with a fervent apostrophe to Venus conceived, like Empedocles' Love, as a symbol of creative desire and the ways of peace:
Mother of Aeneas' race, delight of men and gods, 0 nurturing Venus! ... Through thee every kind of life is conceived and born, and looks upon the sun; before thee and thy corning the winds flee, and the clouds of the sl..-y depart; to thee the miraculous earth lifts up sweet fl.o'\vers; for thee the waves of the sea laugh, and the peaceful heavens shine with overspreading light. For as soon as the springtime face of day appears, and the fertilizing south wind makes all things
CHAP.VIII)  LITERATURE  UNDER THE REVOLUTION	149
fresh and green, then first the birds of the air proclaim thee and thy advent,0 divine one, pierced to the heart by thy power; then the wild herds leap over the glad pastures, and cross the swift streams; so, held captive by thy charm, each one follows thee wherever thou goest to lead. Then through seas and mountains and rushing rivers, and the leafy dwellings of the birds, and the verdant fields, thou strikest soft love into the breasts of all creatures, and makest them to propagate their generations after their kinds. Since, therefore, thou alone rulest the nature of things; since without thee nothing rises to the shining shores of light, nothing joyful or lovely is born; I long for thee as partner in the writing of these verses. . . . Grant to my words,0 goddess, an undying beauty. Cause, meanwhile, the savage works of war to sleep and be still. ...  As Mars reclines upon thy sacred form, bend thou around him from above, pour sweet coaxings from thy mouth, and beg for thy Romans the gift of peace.5
DE RERUM NATURA
If we try to reduce to some logical fonn the passionate disorder of Lucretius' argument, his initial thesis lies in a famous line:
Tantum religio potuit suadere nralorum-
"to so many evils religion has persuaded men." 6 He tells the story of Iphigenia in Aulis, of countless human sacrifices, of hecatombs offered to gods conceived in the image of man's greed; he recalls the terror of sitn plicity·and youth lost in a jungle of vengeful deities, the fear of lightning and thunder, of death and Hell, and the subterranean horrors pictured in
Etruscan art and Oriental mysteries. He reproaches mankind for preferring sacrificial ritual to philosophical understanding:
0 miserable race of men, to impute to the gods such acts as these, and such bitter wrath! What sorrow did men [through such creeds] prepare for themselves, what wounds for us, what tears for our chil dren! For piety lies not in being often seen turning a veiled head to stones, nor in approaching every altar, nor in lying prostrate ... before the temples of the gods, nor in sprinkling altars with the blood of beasts ...	but rather in being able to look upon all things with amind at peace.1
There are gods, says Lucretius, but they dwell far off in happy isolation from the thought or cares of men. There, "beyond the flaming ramparts of the world" (extra fianmumtia moenia nmndi),8 beyond the reach of our sacrifices and prayers, they live like followers of Epicurus, shunning worldly
CAESAR  AND  CHRIS r	(CHAP. VII1
affairs, content with the contemplation of beauty and the practices of friend ship and peace.9 They are not the authors of creation, nor the causes of events; who would be so unfair as to charge them with the wastefulness, the disorder, the sufferings, and the injustices of earthly life? No, this infinite universe of many worlds is self-contained; it has no law outside itself; nature does everything of her own accord. "For who is strong enough to rule the sum of things, to hold in hand the mighty bridle of the unfathomable deep?
-who to turn all the heavens around at once . . . to shake the serene sky with thunder, to launch the lightning that often shatters temples, and cast the bolt that slays the innocent and passes the guilty by?" 10 The only god is Law; and the truest worship, as well as the only peace, lies in learning that Law and loving it. "This terror and gloom of the mind must be dispelled not by the sun's rays ...  but by the aspect and law of nature." 11
And so, "touching with the honey of the Muses" the rough materialism of Democritus, Lucretius proclaims as his basic theorem that "nothing exists but atoms and the void" 12-i.e., matter and space. He proceeds at once to a cardinal principle (and assumption) of modem science-that the quantity of matter and motion in the world never varies; no thing arises out of nothing, and destruction is only a change of fonn. The atoms are indestructible, unchangeable, solid, resilient, soundless, odorless, tasteless, colorless, infinite. They interpenetrate one another to produce endless com binations and qualities; and they move without cease in the seeming stillness of motionless things.
For often on a hill ... woolly sheep go creeping wherever the dew-sparkling grass tempts them, and the well-fed lambs play and butt their heads in sport; yet in the distance all these are blurred to gether and seem but a whiteness resting on a green hill. Sometimes great arrr:ics cover wide fields in maneuvers mimicking war; the bril liant bronze of their shields illumines the countryside and is mirrored in the sky; the ground trembles and thunders under their marching feet and their galloping steeds; and the mountains, buffeted by the sound, hurl it back to the very stars: and yet there is a place on the peaks from which these armies appear to be motionless, a little bright ness resting on the plain.13
The atoms * have pans-minima, or "least things"-each mininnmz being solid, indivisible, ultimate. Perhaps because of the different arrangement of these pans, the atoms vary in size and shape, and so make possible the re freshing diversity of nature. The atoms do not move in straight or uniform
Lucretius never uses this word, but calls his primordial panicles primordia, elementa, or


Only one officer emerged from these campaigns with credit. Gaius Marius, born like Cicero at Arpinurn, son of a day laborer, had enlisted in the army at an early age, had won his scars at Nurnantia, had married an aunt of Caesar, and despite, or because of, his lack of education or manners, had been chosen a tribune of the plebs. In the fall of 108  he returned from his
CHAP. VI)	THE AGRARIAN REVOLT	I 19
services as lieutenant to the incompetent Quintus Metellus in Africa, and ran for the consulate on a platform proposing that he should replace Metellus and bring the Jugurthine \Var to a successful end. He was elected, took command, and forced Jugurtha's surrender (106). The people did not learn at this time that the chief agent of this victory was a reckless young aristocrat, Lucius Sulla; they would hear from him later. Marius enjoyed a splendid tri umph, and was so loved that the Assembly, ignoring a dying constitution, elected him consul year after year ( 104-100). Thebusiness classes sup ported him partly because his victories opened new fields for their enter prises, partly because he was clearly the only man who could repel the Celtic hordes. Rome already recognized in Caesar's uncle the uses of Caesar ism; the dictatorship of a popular leader backed by a devoted army seemed to many weary Romans the only alternative to the oligarchic abuses of liberty.
After their victory at Arausio, the Cimbri had reprieved Rome by cross ing the Pyrenees and ravaging Spain. But in 102 they returned to Gaul, greater in number than before, and entered into an agreement with the T eutones for a simultaneous assault by separate routes upon the rich plains of northern Italy. To meet the peril Marius resorted to a new form of mili tary enrollment, which revolutionized first the army and then the state. He invited the enlistment of any citizen, property owner or not; offered attrac tive pay, and promised to release volunteers, and give them lands, after a completed campaign. The army now formed was composed chiefly of the city proletariat; its sentiments ·were hostile to the patrician Republic; it fought not for its country, but for its general and for booty; in this way, probably without knowing it, Marius laid the military basis of the Caesarian revolution. He was a soldier, not a statesman; he had no time to weigh distant political consequences. He led his recruits over the Alps, hardened their bodies with marches and drills, and developed their courage with attacks upon objectives that could be easily won; until they were trained he could not risk an engagement. The T eutones marched unhindered by his camp, asking the Romans derisively if they had messages for their wives in Rome, with whom the invaders proposed soon to refresh themselves; the number of the Teutones could be judged from the si'{ days they took to pass the Roman camp. \Yhen they had all filed by, Marius ordered his army to fall upon their rear. In the great battle that ensued at Aquae Sextiae (Aix in Provence), the new legions slew or captured 100,000 men ( 102). "They say," Plutarch reports, "that the inhabitants of Marseilles made fences round their vineyards with the bones, and that the soil, after the bodies had rotted and the winter rains had fallen, was so fertilized with the putrefied matter which sank into it, that in the following se:ison it yielded an unprecedented
120	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VI
crop." 15 After resting his army for several months, Marius led it back into Italy, and met the Cimbri at Vercellae, near the Po ( 1 o1), on the very field where Hannibal had won his first battle against Rome. The barbarians, to show their strength and courage, went naked in the snow, climbed over ice and through deep drifts to summits from which they tobogganed gaily along steep descents, using their shields as sleds.16 In the battle that followed they were nearly all slain.
Marius was received in the rejoicing capital as a "second Camillus" who had turned back a Celtic invasion, and another Romulus who had refounded Rome. Part of the spoils he brought was bestowed upon him as a personal reward; thereby he became a rich man, with estates big "enough for a kingdom." In 100  he was elected consul for the sixth time. His colleague was Lucius Saturninus, a fiery radical who was resolved to achieve the goals of the Gracchi by law if possible, otherwise by force. He pleased Marius with a bill that bestowed colonial lands upon the veterans of the recent campaign, and Marius raised no' objection when he lowered the price of state-doled corn from six and one third asses (thirty-nine cents) to five sixths of an as (five cents) per modius, or peck. The Senate sought to pro tect the Treasury and itself by having a tribune forbid the submission of these measures to a vote, but Saturninus proceeded with the voting neverthe less. Violence :flared up on both sides. \Vhen Saturninus' bands killed Caius Memmius, one of the most respected of the aristocracy, the Senate took its final resort and, by a se11atusconsultmn de re publica defendenda, ordered Marius, as consul, to suppress the revolt.
Marius faced the bitterest choice of his life. It seemed a miserable end to his long career of service to the common people of Rome that he should now attack their leaders and his former friends. And yet he too distrusted the appeal to violence, and saw in revolution more ills than it could cure. He led a force against the rebels, let S:iturninus be stoned to death, and then
:fled to a gloomy retirement, despised alike by the people he had championed and the aristocracy he had saved.
THE  REVOLT OF ITALY
The revolution was now passing into civil war. Vvhen the Senate asked for help against the Cimbri from the eastern kings allied with Rome, Nicomedes of Bithynia replied that all men of military value in his kingdom had been sold into slavery to satisfy the extortions of the Roman tax collectors. Preferring an army for the moment, the Senate decreed that all males enslaved for unpaid taxes should be freed. Hearing of this order, hundreds of slaves in Sicily, many of
CHAP. VI)	THE  AGRARIAN  REVOLT	12 I
them Greeks from the Hellenistic East, l'.'.:t their masters and, gathering before the palace of the Roman praetor, demanded their freedom. Their owners pro tested, and the praetor suspended the operation of the decree. The slaves or ganized themselves under a religious impostor, Salvius, and attacked the town of l\1organtia. The citizens there secured the loyalty of most of their slaves by promising to liberate them if they repelled the attack; they repelled it, but were not freed; and many of them joined the revolt. About the same time ( 1 o3), some 6000 slaves in the western end of the island rose under Athenian, a man of educa tion and resolution. This force defeated army after army sent against it by the praetor, and moving eastward, merged with the rebels under Salvius. Together they mastered an army dispatched from Italy, but Salvius died in the moment of victory. Still other legions crossed the straits, under the consul Manius Aquilius (10 r); Athenian engaged him in single combat and was killed; the leaderless slaves were overwhelmed; thousands of them died in the field, thousands were returned to their masters, hundreds were shipped to Rome to fight wild beasts in the games that celebrated Aquilius' triumph. Instead _of fighting, the slaves plunged their knives into one another's hearts until all lay dead.
A few years after this Second Servile war all Italy was in arms. For almost two centuries now Rome-a tiny nation between Cumae and Caere, between the Apennines and the sea-had ruled the rest of Italy as subject states. Even some cities close to Rome, like Tibur and Praeneste, had no representation in the government that ruled them. The Senate, th1;: assemblies, and the consuls meted out decrees and laws to the Italian communities with the same high hand as to alien and conquered provinces. The resources and man power of the "allies" were drained by wars whose chief effect was to enrich a few families in Rome. Those states that had remained loyal to Rome in the ordeal with Hannibal had received scant reward; those that had helped him in any way had been punished with so servile a subjection that many of their freemen joined the slave revolts. A few rich men in the cities had been granted Roman citizenship; and the power of Rome had everywhere been used to support the rich against the poor. In r 26 the Assembly forbade the inhabitants of the Italian towns to migrate to Rome; and in 95 a decree of the jealous capital expelled all residents whose citizenship was not Roman but merely Italian.
A member of the aristocrac•y paid with his life for try. inba to improve this situa- tion. 1\1. Livius Drusus was the son of the tribune who had rivaled Tiberius
Gracchus; since his adopted son became the father-in-law of Augustus, the family bound the beginnings of the revolution with its end. Elected tribune in 91, he proposed three measures: (1) to divide more state lands among the poor;
( z) to restore to the Senate its exclusive jury rights, but at the same time add 300 equites, or businessmen, to the Senate; and (3) to confer Roman citizenship upon all the freemen of Italy. The Assembly passed the first bill with pleasure, the second with indifference; the Senate rejected both and declared them void. The third never reached a vote, for an unknown assassin stabbed Drusus to death in his home.
122	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VI
Aroused to hope by Drusus' bill, and convinced by his fate that neither the Senate nor the Assembly would ever peaceably consent to share its privileges, the Italian states prepared for revolt. A federal republic was formed, Corfinium was named the capital, and the government was vested in a senate of 500 men chosen from all the Italian tribes except the Etruscans and Umbrians, who re fused to join. Rome at once declared war upon the secessionists. All parties in the capital co-operated in what seemed to them a defense of the union; and every Roman dreaded the revenge the rebel states would take if they won this fratricidal "Social War."* Marius emerged from his solitude, took command, and won victory after victory while all other Roman generals but Sulla met defeat. In three years of war 300,000 men fell, and central Italy was devastated. When Etruria and Umbria were on the verge of going over to the rebels, Rome pacified them by a grant of full Roman citizenship; and in 90 the Roman franchise was offered to all Italian freemen or freedmen who would swear fealtv to Rome. These belated concessions weakened the allies; one town after anoth r laid down its arms; and in 89 this ferocious and costly war ended in a sullen peace. The Romans nullified the franchise they had granted by enrolling the new citizens in ten new tribes, which voted only after the existing thirty-five, and therefore usually to no use; besides, only a few of the new citizens could attend the assem blies in Rome. The deceived and desolate communities bided their time. Forty years later they would open their gates in welcome to a Caesar who offered them citizenship in a democracy that was dead.
SULLA THE HAPPY
After a few years of peace the strife ofltalians against k:lians was resumed, merely changing its name from "Social" to "Civil," and its scene from the towns to Rome. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was chosen one of the consuls for 88, and took command of the army that was being prepared to march against Mithridates of Pontus. Sulpicius Rufus, a tribune, unwilling to put a conservative like Sulla in charge of so powerful a force, persuaded the Assembly to transfer the command to Marius, who, though fat and sixty nine, was still rumbling with military ambition. Sulla refused to let his long awaited chance for lead rship slip by through what seemed to him the whim of an assembly spellbound by a demagogue and bribed, he was sure, by the merchants who liked Marius. He fled to Nola, won the army to his support, and marched at its head against Rome.
Sulla was unique in his origins, character, and fate. Born poor, he became the defender of the aristocracy, as the aristocratic Gracchi, Drusi, and
This is the rime-honored mistranslation of Bel/um Sociale-the War of the Allies (socii)
against Rome.
CHAP. VI)	THE	AGRARIAN  REVOLT	123


114	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VI
'
lands that had been sold or leased to private individuals should be returned
to the state for the purchase or rental price plus an allowance for improve ments made.; and (3) that the returned lands should be divided into twenty acre lots among poor citizens, on condition that they agree never to sell their allotment, and to pay an annual tax on it to the Treasury. It was not a utopian scheme; it "\Vas merely an attempt to implement the Licinian laws passed in 367 B.c., which had never been repealed and never enforced. "The beasts of the field and the birds of the air," said Tiberius to the poorer plebeians in one of the epochal orations in Roman history,
have their holes and their hiding places; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy only the light and the air. Our generals urge their soldiers to fight for the graves and shrines of their ancestors. The appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar. You have no ancestral tomb. You fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others.You are called the masters of the world, but there is not a foot of ground that you can call your own.7
The Senate denounced the proposals as confiscatory, charged Tiberius with seeking a dictatorship, and persuaded Octavius, another tribune, to prevent by his veto the submission of the bills to the Assembly. Gracchus thereupon moved that any tribune who acted contrary to the wishes of his constituents should be immediately deposed. The Assembly passed the measure, and Octavius was forcibly removed from the tribune's bench by the lictors of Tiberius. The original proposals were then voted into law; and the Assem bly, fearing for Gracchus' safety, escorted him home.8
His illegal overruling of the tribunician veto, which the Assembly itself had long ago made absolute, gave his opponents a handle with which to frustrate him. They declared their purpose to impeach him at the end of his one-year term, as having violated the constitution and used force against a tribune. To protect himself he flouted the constitution further by seeking re-election to the tribunate for 132. As Aemilianus and Laelius and other senators who had defended his proposals now withdrew their support, he turned more completely to the plebs. He promised, if re-elected, to shorten the term of military service, to abolish the exclusive right of senators to act as jurors, and to admit the Italian allies to Roman citizenship. Meanwhile the Senate refused funds to the agrarian commission that had been appointed to execute Tiberius' laws. \Vhen Attalus III cf Pergamum bequeathed his kingdom to Rome ( I 33), Gracchus proposed to the Assembly that the personal and movable property of Attalus should be sold and the proceeds distributed to the recipients of state bnds to finance the equipment of their farms. The proposal infuriated the Senate, which saw its authority over the
CHAP, VI)	THE   AGRARIAN  REVOLT
provinces and the public purse being transferred to an unmanageable and unrepresentative Assembly largely of servile origin and alien stock. When election day came, Gracchus appeared in the Forum with armed guards and in mourning costume, implying that his defeat would mean his impeachment and death. As the voting proceeded, violence broke out on both sides. Scipio Nasica, crying that Tiberius wished to make himself king, led the senators, armed with clubs, into the Forum. The supporters of Gracchus, awed by patrician robes, gave way; Tiberius w s killed by a blow on the head, and several hundred of his followers perished with him. When his younger brother Caius asked permission to bury him he w2s refused, and the bodies of the dead rebels were thrown into the Tiber, while Cornelia mourned.
The Senate sought to mollify the bitter plebs by consenting to the enforce ment of the Gracchan laws. An increase of 76,000 in the register of citi zens from 1 3 1 to 1 2 5 suggests th:::t a large number of land allotments was actually m:!de. But the agrarian commission found itself faced by many difficulties. l\1uch of the land in question had been obtained from the state years or generations back and its present possessors claimed rights estab lished and sanctified by time. Many parcels had been bought by new owners, for a substantial price, from those who had bought them cheaply from the government. The landowners in Italian allied states, whose squatter rights were imperiled by the laws, appealed to Scipio Aemilianus to defend them against the land board; and through his influence its operations were sus pended. Public opinion flamed out against him; he was denounced as a traitor to the already sacred memory of Gracchus; and one morning in 129 he was discovered dead in his bed, apparently the victim of an assassin, who was never found.
CAIUS GRACCHUS
Ruthless gossip accused Comeli:i of conspiring with her daughter, Scipio's deformed and unloved wife, to murder him. In the face of these calamities she sought consolation by devoting herself to her surviving son, the last of her "jewels." The murder of Tiberius aroused in Caius no mere spirit of vengeance, but a resolve to complete his brother's work. He had served with intelligence and courage under Aeinilianus at Numantia, and he had won the admiration of all groups by the integrity of his conduct and the simplicity of his life. His passionate temperament, all the more vehement on occasion because so long controlled, made him the greatest of Roman orators before Cicero, and opened almost any office to him in a society where eloquence served only next to bravery in the advancement of men. In the fall of 124 he was elected tribune.
116	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VI
More realistic than Tiberius, Caius understood that no reform can endure which is opposed by the balance of economical or political power in the state. He aimed to bring five classes to his support: the peasantry, the army, the proletariat, and the businessmen. He ,von the first by renewing the agrarian legislation of his brother, extending its application to state-owned land in the provinces, restoring the land board, and personally attending to its operations. He fed the ambitions of the middle classes by establishing new colonies in Capua, Tarentum, Narbo, and Carthage, and by developing these as thriving centers of trade. He pleased the soldiers by passing a bill that they should be clothed at the public expense. He gained the grati tude of the urban masses by his lex frnmentarict, or corn law, which com mitted the government to distribute wheat at six and one third asses per modius (thirty-nine cents a peck-half the market price) to all who asked for it. It was a measure shocking to old Roman ideas of self-reliance, and destined to play a vital.role in Roman history. Caius believed that the grain dealers were charging the public twice the cost of production, and that his measure, through the economy of unified operation, would involve no loss to the state. In any case, the law turned the poor freemen of Rome from client supporters of the aristocracy into def enders of the Gracchi, as later of Marius and Caesar; it was the foundation stone of that democratic move ment which would reach its peak in Clodius, and die at Actium.
Caius' fifth measure sought to assure the power of his party by ending the tradition whereby the richer classes in the Centuria! Assembly voted first; hereafter the centuries were on each occasion to vote in an order determined by lot. He appeased the business class by giving them the exclu sive right to serve as jurors in trials for provincial malfeasance; i.e., they were hereafter to be in large measure their own judges. He ,vhetted their appe tites by proposing a tax of one tenth, to be collected by them, on all the produce of Asia Minor. He enriched contractors, and reduced unemploy ment, by a program of road building in every part of Italy. Altogether these laws, despite the political trickery that colored some of them, formed the most constructive body of legislation offered to Rome before Caesar.
Armed with such varied support, Caius was able to override custom and win election to a second and successive tribunate. Probably it was now that he sought to "pack" the Senate by adding to its 300 members 300 more to be chosen from the business class by the Assembly. He proposed also to extend the full franchise to all the freemen of Latium, and a partial franchise to the remaining freemen of Italy. This, his boldest move toward a broader democracy, was his first strategic error. The voters showed no enthusiasm for sharing their privileges, even with men of whom only a small minority could have attended their assemblies in Rome. The Senate acted on its
CHAP. VI)	THE  AGRARIAN  REVOLT	117
opportunity. Almost ignored by Caius, and reduced to apparent impotence, it saw in the brilliant tribune only a demagogic tyrant extending his personal power through the reckless distribution of state property and funds. Sud denly finding an ally in the jealous proletariat of Rome, and taking advantage of Caius' absence in establishing his colony at Carthage, the Senatorial party suggested to another tribune, Marcus Livius Drusus, that he should win over the new peasantry by a bill canceling the tax laid upon their lands in the Gracchan laws; and that he should at once please and weaken the proletariat by proposing the formation of twelve new colonies in Italy, each to take 3000 men from Rome. The Assembly readily passed the bills; and when Caius returned he found his leadership challenged at every step by the popular Drusus. He sought a third term as tribune but was defeated; his friends charged th2t he had been elected but that the ballots had been falsified. He counseled his followers against violence and retired to private life.
In the following year the Senate proposed the abandonment of the colony at Carthage; all sides interpreted the measure, openly or privately, as the first move in a campaign to repeal the Gracchan laws. Some of Caius' adher ents attended the Assembly armed, and one of them cut down a conservative who threatened to lay hands upon Caius. On the morrow the senators appeared in full battle array, each with two armed slaves, and attacked the popular party entrenched on the Aventine. Caius did his best to quiet the tumult and avert further violence. Failing, he fled across the Tiber; over taken, he ordered his servant to kill him; the slave obeved and then killed himself. A friend cut off Caius' head, filled it with molt;n lead, and brought it to the Senate, which had offered a reward of its weight in gold.9 Of Caius' supporters 2 50 fell in the fight, 3000 more were put to death by Senatorial decree. The city mob that he had befriended made no protest when his corpse, and those of his followers, were flung into the river; it was busy plundering his house.10 The Senate forbade Cornelia to wear mourning for her son.
MARIUS
The triumphant aristocracy devoted its subtlest intelligence to undoing the constructive, rather than the demagogic, elements in Caius' legislation. It did not dare eject the business class from the juries, or the contractors and publicans from their happy hunting ground in Asia; and it allowed the corn dole to stand as insurance against revolution. Into an otherwise attrac tive measure it inserted a clause permitting the recipients of the new lands to sell them; soon thousands of holders sold to the great slaveowners, and
II8	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VJ
the latifundia resumed their growth. In 1 18 the land board w s abolished. The masses in the capital raised' no objection; they had decided that to eat state corn in the city was better than to sweat on the land or toil in pioneer colonies. Sloth combined with superstition (for the soil of Carthage had been cursed) to frustrate till Caesar the attempt to miti3ate urban poverty by emigration.Wealth mounted, but it did not spread; in 104 B.C. a moderate democrat reckoned that only 2000 Roman citizens owned properry.11 "The condition of the poor," says Appian, "became even worse than before.... The plebeians lost everything. . . . The number of citizens and soldiers continued to decline." 12 More and more the legions had to be filled out with conscripts from the Italian states; but these men had no stomach for fighting or no love for Rome. Desertions multiplied, discipline deteriorated, and the defense of the Republic sank to its lowest ebb.
Consequently it was soon attacked, almost at the same time, on north and south. In 113 two Celtic tribes, the Cimbri and the Teutones, as if to give Rome a foretaste of its final fare, rolled down through Germany in a frightening avalanche of covered wagons-300,000 fighting men, with their wives, children, and animals. Perhaps the word had gone up over the Alps that Rome was in love with wealth and weary of war. The newcomers were tall and strong and fearless, so blond that the Italians described the children as having the white hair of old men. They met a Roman army at Noreia (now Neumarkt, in Carinthia) and destroyed it. They crossed the Rhine and defeated another Roman army; they poured west into southern Gaul and overcame a third, fourth, and fifth Roman army; at .{\.rausio (Orange) 80,000 legionnaires and 40,000 camp followers were left dead on the field.13 All Italy lay open to the invaders; and a terror rose in Rome such as it had not known since Hannibal.
Almost at the same time war broke out in Numidia. \Vhen Jugurtha, grandson of Masinissa, tortured his brother to death, and tried to deprive his cousins of their share in the kingdom, the Senate declared war upon him ( 111) , with a view to making N umidia a province and opening it to Roman commerce and capital. Jugurtha bought patricians to defend his cause and crimes before the Senate, and bribed the generals sent against him into harmless activities or a favorable peace. Summoned to Rome, he opened his royal purse more lavishly, and was able to return unhindered to his capital.14


The program on which he proposed to unite the heterogeneous elements of revolution was simple: novae tabulae-"new records"-i.e., a clean sweep and abolition of all debts. He labored for this purpose with all the energy of a Caesar; indeed, for a time he had the sympathy, if npt the secret support, of Caesar. "There was nothing," said Cicero, "that he could not undergo, no pains that he would spare of co-operation, vigilance, and toil. He could bear cold, hunger, and thirst." 42 We are assured by his enemies that he organized a band of 400 men who planned to kill the consuls and seize the government on the first day of 65. The day came, and nothing unusual transpired. At the end of 64 Catiline stood against Cicero for the consulate and waged a vigor ous campaign.* Capital took fright and began to leave Italy. The upper classes united in support of Cicero; for a year the concordia ordinum that he had asked for was a reality, and he was its perfect voice.
Blocked politically, Catiline turned to war. Secretly his followers organ ized an army of 20,000 men in Etruria, and gathered together in Rome a group of conspirators that included representatives of every class from senators to slaves, and two urban praetors-Cethegus and Lentulus. In the following October Catiline again ran for the consulate. To make sure of his election, conservative historians tell us, he planned to have his rival mur
dered during the campaign, and to have Cicero assassinated at the same time. Claiming that he had been apprised of these pl:ms, Cicero filled the Field of Mars with armed guards and superintended the voting. Despite the enthusi astic support of the proletariat, Catiline was again defeated. On November 7, says Cicero, several conspirators knocked 2t his door, but were driven away by his guards. On the morrow, seeing Catiline in the Senate, Cicero flung at him that superb excoriation which once every schoolboy mouthed. As the oration proceeded, the seats around Catilin were emptied one by one, until he sat alone. Silently he bore the torrent of accusations, the sharp, relentless phrases falling like whips upon his head. Cicero played upon every emotion; he spoke of the nation as the common father, and of Catiline as in intent a parricide; he charged him-not with evidence given, but by innuendo and
t was in this campaign that Cicero's brotl}er Quintus drew up for him a manual of electl >neering technique. '"Be lavish in your pro::'..ises," Ccintus adv:sed; "men prefer a false pronuse to a flat refusal   Contrive to get some new scandal aired against your rivals for
crime, corruption, or immorality." 43
144	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.VII
implication-with conspiracy against the state, with theft, adultery, and sexual abnormality; finally he petitioned Jove to protect Rome, and to de vote Catiline to eternal punishment. lVhen Cicero had finished, Catiline walked out unhindered, and joined his forces in Etruria. His general, L. Manlius, sent a last appeal to the Senate:
We call gods and men to witness that it is not against our country that we have taken up arms, nor against the safety of our fellow citizens. We, wretched paupers, who through the violence and cruelty of u urers are without a country, condemned to scorn and indigence, are actuated by only one wish: to guarantee our person;:il security against wrong. We demand neither pmver nor wealth, those great and external causes of strife among mankind. \Ve only ask for freedom, a treasure that no man will surrender except with life itself. We implore you, senators, have pity on your miserable fellow citizens! 44
The next day, in a second oration, Cicero described the rebel's following as centering around a coterie of perfumed perverts, and indulged without stint his genius for sarcasm and invective, ending again on a religious note. In the following weeks he presented evidence to the Senate purporting to
show that Catiline had tried to stir up revolution in Gaul. On December 3 he had Lentulus, Cethegus, and .five other adherents of Catiline arrested. In a third oration he declared their guilt, announced their imprisonment, and told the Senate and the people that the conspiracy was broken and that they might retire to their homes in security and peace. On December 5 he con voked the Senate and asked what should be done ,vith the prisoners. Silanus voted that they should be executed. Caesar advised mere imprisonment, recalling that the execution of a Roman citizen was forbidden by the Sem pronian Law. In a fourth oration Cicero gently advised death. Cato gave the opinion the sanction of his philosophy, and death won the day. Some young aristocrats tried to kill Caesar as he left the senate chamber, but he escaped. Cicero, with armed men, went to the jail and had the sentence carried out with a minimum of delay. Marcus Antonius, co-consul with Cicero...and father of a famous son, was sent north with an army to destroy Catiline's force. The Senate promised pardon and 200,000 sesterces to every man who would leave the rebel ranks; but, says Sallust, "not one deserted from Catiline's camp." On the plains of Pistoia battle was joined (6 I). The 3000 insurgents, far outnumbered, fought to the end around their treasured standards, the eagles of Marius. Nor.ie surrendered or took flight; every one
of them died on the field, among them Catiline.
Being essentially a man of thought rather than of action, Cicero was sur-
CHAP. VII)	THE  OLIGARCHIC  REACTION	145
prised and impressed by the skill and courage he had shown in suppressing a dangerous revolt. "The direction of so great an enterprise," he told the Senate, "seems scarcely possible to merely human wisdom." 45 He com pared himself with Romulus, but considered it a greater deed to have pre served Rome than to have founded it.46 Senators and magnates smiled at his language, but they knew that he had saved them. Cato and Carolus hailed him as pater patriae, father of his country. When, at the end of 63, he laid down his office, all the propertied classes in the community, he tells us, gave him thanks, named him immortal, and escorted him in honor to his home.47 The proletariat did not join in these demonstrations. It could not forgive him for violating the laws of Rome by putting citizens to death without appeal; it felt that he had made no effort to remove the causes of Catiline's revolt, or to mitigate the poverty of the masses. It refused to let him address the Assembly on that last day, and listened in anger when he swore that he had preserved the city. The revolution was not over. With Caesar's consulate it would begin again.
CHAPTER VIII
Literature Under the Revolution
145-30 B.C.
LUCRETIUS
j\MID this turbulent transformation of  economy,  government,  and
£1. morals, literature was not forgotten, and did not quite escape the fever
and stimulus of the age. Varro and N epos found safety in antiquarian scholar ship or historical research; Sallust retired from his campaigns to defend his party and disguise his morals with brilliant monographs; Caesar stooped from empire to grammar and continued his wars in his Commentaries; Catul lus and Calvus sought refuge from politics in the pursuit and poetry of love; timid and sensitive spirits like Lucretius hid themselves in the gardens of philosophy; and Cicero retreated now and then from the heat of the Forum to cool his blood with books. But not one of them found peace. War and revolution touched them with pervasive infection; and even Lucretius must have known the restlessness which he describes:
There is a weight on their minds, and a mountain of misery lies on their hearts    For each, not knowing what he wants, seeks ahrnys
to change his place, as if he could drop his burden. Here is one who, bored to death at home, goes forth every now and then from his palace; but feeling no better abroad, suddenly returns. Off he courses, driving his nags to his country house in headlong haste. . . . He has hardly crossed the threshold when he yawns, or seeks oblivion in a heavy sleep, or even hurries back to the city. So each man flees from himself; but, as one might expect, the self which he cannot escape cleaves to him all the more against his will. He hates himself because, a sick man, he does not know the cause of his complaint. Any man who could see that clearly would cast aside his business, and before all else would seek to understand the nature of things.1
His poem is our only biography of Titus Lucretius Carus; it is proudly reticent about its author; and outside of it, barring a few allusions, Roman literature is strangely silent about one of its greatest men. Tradition placed his birth at 99 or 95, his death at 55 or 51, B.c. He lived through half a century of the Roman revolution: through the Social War, Marian massacres,
146


\Vhen Tiberius' son Drusus died, Rome whispered that Sejanus had poi
soned him.
Overcome with disappointment and bitterness, Tiberius, now a lonely and melancholy man of sixty-seven, left the hectic capital and removed to the inaccessible privacy of Capri. But gossip followed him without impediment. People said that he wished to conceal his emaciated figure and scrofulous face, and to indulge himself in drink and unnatural vice.16 Tiberius drank considerably, but was no drunkard; the story of his vices was probably calumny;17 most of his companions on Capri, says Tacitus, "were Greeks distinguished in nothing but literature." 18 He continued to administer care fully the affairs of the Empire, except that he communicated his views and desires to officials and the Senate through Sejanus. Since the Senate increas ingly feared him, or Sejanus, or the hovering Guard, it accepted the wishes
Agrippina, daughter of Julia by Agrippa, was Tiberius' stepdaughter through his marriage with Julia, and his daughter-in-law through his adoption of Gennanicus. Her son Nero was the uncle, her daughter Agrippina the Younger the mother, of the Emperor Nero.
264	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XII]
of the Emperor as commands; and without any change in the constitution, and with no clear insincerity on Tiberius' part, the principate became a monarchy under the man who had proposed to restore the Republic.
Sejanus took advantage of his position to exile more of his enemies by having them accused under the "law of majesty," and the weary Emperor no longer interfered. If we may believe Suetonius, Tiberius was now often guilty of cruelty;19 and we have the word of the unreliable Tacitus that he asked and obtained the death penalty for Poppaeus Sabinus on the ground that spies had overheard him plot against the government.20 A year later
( 27) Livia died, sad and lonely in the home of her former husband; Tiberius, who had seen her but once since leaving Rome, did not attend her funeral. Freed from the restraint that the "Mother of her Country" might have exercised, Sejanus now persuaded Tiberius that Agrippina and her son Nero had been involved in the conspiracy of Sabinus. The mother was banished to Pandateria, and the son to the island of Pontia, where shortly afterward he killed himself.
Having won everything else, Sejanus now reached for the throne. Irked by a letter which Tiberius had written to the Senate recommending Gaius, son of Agrippina, as successor to the principate, Sejanus formed a plot to kill the Emperor (3 r). Tiberius was saved by Germanicus' mother, Antonia, who risked her life to send him a warning. The old Prince, not yet destitute of resolution, secretly placed a new prefect over the Praetorians, had Se janus arrested, and accused him to the Senate. Never had that body so gladly complied with the imperial wishes. It condemned Sejanus with expedition and had him strangled that very night. A reign of terror followed, led partly by senators whose interests, relatives, or friends had been injured by Sejanus, and partly by Tiberius, whom fear and anger, topping an accumulation of disillusionments, had plunged into a fury of revenge. Every important agent or supporter of Sejanus was put to death; even his young daughter was con demned; and since the law forbade the execution of a virgin, she was first deflowered and then strangled. Apicata, his divorced wife, committed sui cide, but only after she had sent Tiberius a letter assuring him that Antonia's daughter Livilla had joined with Sejanus in peiisoning her husband Drusus, the Emperor's son. Tiberius ordered Livilla tried, but she refused food until she died. Two years later (33) Agrippina killed herself in exile; and another of her sons, having been imprisoned, starved himself to death.
Tiberius lingered for six years after the fall of Sejanus. Probably his mind was now disordered; only on this supposition can ·we explain the incredible cruelties attributed to him. \Ve are told that he now supported, instead of checked, accusations for maiestas; all in all sixty-three persons were indicted on this charge during his reign. He begged the Senate to provide protection
CHAP.XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF  MONARCHY	265
for "an old and lonely man." In 37 he left Capri after nine years of self imprisonment, and visited some cities in Campania. While stopping at Lucul lus' villa in Misenum he fell in a fainting fit, and seemed dead. The courtiers at once flocked about Gaius, soon to be Emperor, and then were shocked to learn that Tiberius was recovering. A friend of all concerned ended the embarrassment by smothering Tiberius with a pillow (37).21
He was, said Mommsen, "the ablest ruler the Empire ever had." 22 Almost every misfortune had come to him during his life; and after his death he fell upon the pen of Tacitus.
GAIUS
The populace celebrated the old Emperor's passing with cries of "Tibe rius to the Tiber!" and hailed the Senate's ratification of Gaius Caesar Ger manicus as his successor. Born to Agrippina as she was accompanying Germanicus on his northern campaigns, Gaius had been brought up among soldiers, had imitated their dress, and had been affectionately named Caligula, or Little Boot, from the half boot (caliga) worn in the army. He now an nounced that he would follow the principles of Augustus in his policy and would co-operate respectfully with the Senate in everything. He distributed among the citizens the 90,000,000 sesterces that Livia and Tiberius had be queathed them, and added a gift of 300 sesterces to each of the 200,000 re cipients of state com. He restored to the comitia the power to choose the magistrates, promised low taxes and rich games, recalled the banished vic tims of Tiberius, and brought his mother's ashes piously to Rome. He seemed to be in all ways the opposite of his predecessor-prodigal, cheerful, humane. Within three months of his accession the people had sacrificed 160,000 victims to the gods in gratitude for so charming and beneficent a prince.23
They had forgotten his lineage. His father's mother was the daughter of Antony, his mother's mother was the daughter of Augustus; in his blood the war between Antony and Octavian was renewed, and Antony won. Caligula was proud of his skill as a dueler, a gladiator, and a charioteer; but he was "troubled with the falling sickness," and at times was "hardly able to walk or collect his thoughts." 24 He hid under the bed when it thundered, and fled in terror from the sight of Aetna's flames. He found it hard to sleep and would wander through his enormous palace at night crying for the dawn. He was tall, huge, hairy, except for a bald crown; his hollow eyes and temples made him look forbidding, to his delight; he "practiced all kinds of fearsome expressions before a mirror." 25 He had received a good schooling, was an eloquent orator, had a keen wit, and a sense of humor that knew no scruple and no law. Infatuated with the theater, he subsidized many per-
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
formers and himself privately acted and danced; desiring an audience, he summoned the leaders of the Senate as if to some vital conference, and then displayed his steps before them.26 A quiet life of responsible labor might have steadied him, but the poison of power made him mad. Sanity, like gov ernment, needs checks and balances; no mortal can be omnipotent and sane. When Caligula's grandmother Antonia gave him some advice he rebuked her with the remark, "Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody." In the midst of a banquet he reminded his guests that he could have them all killed where they reclined; and while embracing his wife or mistress he would say pleasantly, "Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word." 27
Soon therefore the young Prince who had been so respectful of the Senate began to give it orders and exact an Oriental subservience. He let senators kiss his feet in homage, and senators thanked him for the honor.28 He ad mired Egypt and its ways, introduced many of these to Rome, and longed to be worshiped, Pharaoh-like, as a god. He made the religion of Isis one of the official cults of the Roman state. He did not forget that his great-grand father had planned to unite the Mediterranean region under an Oriental monarchy; he too thought of making his capital at Alexandria, but distrusted the wit of its people. Suetonius describes him as living in "habitual incest with all his sisters";29 it seemed to him an excellent Egyptian custom. Ill, he made his sister Drusilla heir to his throne; when she married he made her divorce her husband, and "treated her as his lawful wife." 30 To other desired women he sent letters of divorce in their husbands' names, and invited them to his embraces; there was scarcely one woman of rank whom he did not approach. Amid these and some homosexual amours he found time for four marriages. Attending the wedding of Livia Orestilla and Gaius Pisa, he took the bride to his own house, married her, and in a few days divorced her. Hearing that Lollia Paulina was very beautiful, he sent for her, divorced her from her husband, married her, divorced her, and forbade her to have rela tions with any man thereafter. His fourth wife, Caesonia, was pregnant by her husband when he married her. She was neither young nor fair, but he loved her faithfully.
In this imperial frolic government was an aside, and could usually be left
to inferior minds. Caligula ably revised the roster of the business class and promoted its best members to the Senate. But his extravagance soon ex hausted the full treasuries left him by Tiberius. He took his baths not in water but in perfumes; on one banquet he spent 10,000,000 sesterces.31 He built great pleasure barges with colonnades, banquet halls, baths, gardens, fruit trees, and gem-set sterns. He had his engineers span Baiae's bay with a bridge resting on so many boats that Rome suffered famine for lack of ships
CHAP. XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF  MON ARCHY
to import corn. When the bridge was completed a great celebration took place, illuminated by flood lights in the modern manner; the people drank merrily, boats overturned, and many were drowned. From the roof of the Basilica Julia he would scatter gold and silver coins among the people below and watch with glee their fatal scrambling. He was so devoted to the green faction at the races that he gave a charioteer 2,000,000 sesterces. He built a marble stall and an ivory manger for the race horse Incitatus, invited it to dinner, and proposed to make it consul.
To raise funds for his lifelong Saturnalia, Caligula restored the custom of presenting gifts to the emperor; he accepted these in person, on his palace terrace, from all who came to give. He encouraged citizens to name him heir in their wills. He levied taxes upon everything: a sales tax on all food, a tax on all legal processes, a twelve and a half per cent tax on the wages of porters. "On the earnings of prostitutes," Suetonius avers, he laid a tax of "as much as each received for one embrace; and the law provided that those who had ever been prostitutes should remain subject to this tax even after they married." 32 He had rich men accused of treason and condemned to death as an aid to the Treasury. He personally auctioned off gladiators and slaves, and forced aristocrats to attend and bid; when one of these slept, Caligula interpreted his nods as bids, so that the sleeper, waking, found him self richer by thirteen gladiators and poorer by 9,000,000 sesterces.33 He compelled senators and knights to fight as gladiators in the arena.
After three years a conspiracy was formed to end this humiliating buf foonery. Caligula detected it and revenged himself by a reign of terror en hanced by his maniac joy in inflicting pain. The executioners were instructed to kill his victims "by numerous slight wounds, so that they may feel that they are dying." 34 If we may believe Dio Cassius, he forced his saintly grandmother Antonia to kill herself.35 Suetonius recounts that when meat ran short for feeding the beasts kept for gladiatorial games, Caligula ordered "all bald-headed" prisoners to be fed to the animals for the public good; that he had men of high rank branded with irons, condemned to mines, thrown to beasts, or shut up in cages and then sawn in two.36 These are stories that we have no means of disproving and must record as the tradi tion; but Suetonius loved gossip, the senator Tacitus hated the emperors, and Dio Cassius wrote two centuries after the event.37 More credible is the report that Caligula began the war between the principate and philosophy by exiling Carrinas Secundus and sentencing two other teachers to death. The young Seneca was marked for execution, but was spared because he was sickly and might be relied upon to die without prodding. Claudius, uncle of Caligula, escaped because he was, or pretended to be, an insignificant book-ridden dolt.


VllI. D01\UTIAN
Of Domitian it is harder to paint an objective portrait than even of Nero. Our chief sources for his reign are Tacitus and the younger Pliny; they prospered under him, but belonged to the senatorial party that engaged with him in a war almost of mutual extermination. To set against these hostile witnesses we have the poets Statius and Martial, who ate or sought Domitian's bread and literally praised him to the skies. Perhaps all four
were right, for the last of the Flavians, like many of the Julio-Claudians,
began like Gabriel and ended like Lucifer. In this respect Domitian's soul walked with his body: in youth he was modest, graceful, handsome, tall; in later years he had "a protruding belly, spindle legs, and a bald head"- though he had written a book On tbe C«re of tin H air.103 In adolescence he composed poetry; in obsolescence he distrusted his own prose and let others write his speeches and proclamations. He might have been happier had not Titus been his brother; but only the noblest spirits can bear with
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
equanimity the success of their friends. Domitian's jealousy soured into a taciturn gloom, then into secret machinations against his brother; Titus had to beg his father to forgive the younger son. \Vhen Vespasian died, Domitian claimed that he had been left partner in the imperial power but that the Emperor's will had been tampered with. Titus replied by asking him to be his partner and successor; Domitian refused, and continued to plot. When Titus fell ill, says Dio Cassius, Domitian hastened his death by packing him about with snow.104 We cannot assess the truth of these stories, nor of those tales of sexual license that have come down to us-that Domitian swam with prostitutes, made the daughter of Titus one of his concubines, and "was most profligate and lewd toward women and boys alike." 105 All Latin historiography is present politics, a partisan blow struck for con temporary ends.
"\Vhen we come to the actual policies of Domitian we find him, in his
first decade, surprisingly puritan and competent. As Vespasian had modeled himself on Augustus, s-o Domitian seemed to take over the policies and ID8.nners of Tiberius. Having made himself censor for life, he stopped the publication of scurrilous lampoons (though he winked at the epigrams of Martial), enforced the Julian laws against adultery, tried to end child prosti tution and reduce unnatural vi e, forbade the performance of pantomimes because of their indecency, ordered the execution of a Vestal Virgin con victed of incest or adultery, and put an end to the practice of castration, which had spread with the rising price of eunuch slaves. He shrank from any form of bloodshed, even the ritual sacrifice of oxen. He was honorable, liberal, and free from avarice. He refused legacies from those who had children, canceled all tax arrears more than five years old, and discounte nanced delation. He was a strict but impartial judge. He had freedmen secretaries, but kept them on their good behavior.
His reign was one of the great ages of Roman building. The fires of 79
and 82 having caused much destruction and destitution, Domitian organ ized a program of public works to provide employment and distribute wealth.106 He, too, hoped to reanimate the old faith by beautifying or multiplying its shrines. He raised the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva once more, and spent $22,000,000 on its gold-plated doors and gilded roof; Rome admired the result and mourned the extravagance. When Domitian built for himself and his administrative staff an enormous palace, the Domus Flavia, the citizens reasonably complained of the cost; but they raised no voice against the expensive games with which he sought to moderate his Tiberian unpopularity. He dedicated a temple to his father and his brother; he restored the Baths and Pantheon of Agrippa, the Portico of Octavia,
CHAP.XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF  MONARCHY	291
the temples of Isis and Serapis; he added to the Colosseum, finished the Baths of Titus, and began those that were completed by Trajan.
At the same time he did his dour best to encourage arts and letters. Flavian portrait sculpture reached its zenith in his principate; his coins are of outstanding excellence. To stimulate poetry he established in 86 the Capitoline games, which included contests in literature and music; and for these he built a stadium and a music hall in the Field of Mars. He gave modest help to the modest talent of Statius and the immodest talent of Martial. He rebuilt the public libraries, which had been destroyed by fire, and had their contents renewed by sending scribes to copy the manuscripts in Alexandria
-another proof that the great library there had lost only a small part of its treasures in the fire started by Caesar.
He managed the Empire well. He had Tiberius' grim resolution as an administrator, pounced upon peculation, and kept strict watch on all ap pointees and developments. As Tiberius had restrained Germanicus, so Domitian withdrew Agricola from Britain after that enterprising general had led his armies, and pushed the frontier, to Scotland; apparently Agricola wished to go farther, and Domitian demurred. The recall was attributed to jealousy, and the Emperor paid a heavy price for it when the history of his reign was written by Agricola's son-in-law. He was equally unfortunate
in war. In 86 the Dacians crossed the Danube, invaded the Roman province of Moesia, and defeated Domitian's generals. The Prince took command,
planned his campaign well, and was about to enter Dacia when Antoninus Saturninus, Roman governor of Upper Germany, persuaded two legions at Mainz to proclaim him emperor. The revolt was suppressed by Domitian's aides, but it disconcerted his strategy by allowing the enemy time to pre pare. He crossed the Danube, met the Dacians, and apparently suffered a reverse. He made peace with Decebalus, the Dacian king, sent him an annual douceur, and returned to Rome to celebrate a double triumph over the Chatti and the Dacians. He contented himself thereafter with th/building of a limes, or fortified road, between the Rhine and the Danube, and another between the northward turn of the Danube and the Black Sea.
The revolt of Saturninus was the turning point in Domitian's reign, the dividing line between his better and worse selves. 'He had always been coldly severe; now he slipped into cruelty. He was capable of good govern ment, but only as an autocrat; the Senate rapidly lost power under him; and his tenacious authority as censor made that body at once subservient and vengeful. Vanity, which flourishes even in the humble, had no check in Domitian's status: he filled the Capitol with statues of himself, announced the divinity of his father, brother, wife, and sisters as well as his own, organized a new order of priests, the Flawales, to tend the worship of these
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
new deities, and required officials to speak of him, in their documents, as Donnnus et Deus Noster-"Our Lord and God." He sat on a throne, en couraged visitors to embrace his knees, and established in his ornate palace the etiquette of an Oriental court. The Principate had become, through the power of the army and the decay of the Senate, an unconstitutional monarchy.
Against this new development rebellion rose not only in the aristocracy but among the philosophers and in the religions that were flowing into Rome from the East. The Jews and the Christians refused to adore the godhead of Domitian, the Cynics decried all government, and the Stoics, though they accepted kings, were pledged to oppose despots and honor tyrannicides. In 89 Domitian expelled the philosophers from Rome, in 95 he banished them from Italy. The earlier edict applied also to the astrologers, whose predictions of the Emperor's death had brought new terrors to a mind empty of faith and open to superstition. In 93 Domitian executed some Christians for refusing to offer sacrifice before his image; according to tradition these included his nephew Flavius Clemens.107
In the last years of his reign the Emperor's fear of conspiracy became almost a madness. He lined with shining stone the walls of the porticoes under which he walked, so that he might see mirrored in them whatever went on behind him. He complained that the lot of rulers was miserable since no man believed them when they alleged conspiracy, unless the con spiracy succeeded. Like Tiberius he listened more readily to informers as he grew older; and as the delatores multiplied, no citizen of any prominence could feel safe from spies, even in his home. After Saturninus' revolt indict ments and convictions rapidly increased; aristocrats were exiled or killed, suspected men were tortured, even by having "fire inserted into their private pans." 108 The terrified Senate, including the Tacitus who recounts these events most bitterly, was the agent of trial and condemnation; and at each execution it thanked the gods for the salvation of the Prince.
Domitian made the mistake of frightening his own household. In 96 he ordered the death of his secretary Epaphroditus because, twenty-seven years before, he had helped Nero to commit suicide. The other freedmen of the imperial household felt themselves threatened. To protect themselves they resolved to kill Domitian, and the Emperor's wife Domitia joined in the plot. On the night before his last he leaped from his bed in fright. \Vhen the appointed moment came, Domitia's servant struck the first blow; four others took part in the assault; and Domitian, struggling madly, met death in the forty-fifth year of his age and the fifteenth of his reign (96). \Vhen the news reached the senators they tore down and shattered all images of
CHAP.XIII)	THE	OTHER  SIDE  OF  MONARCHY	293
him in their chamber, and ordered that all statues of him, and all inscrip tions mentioning his name, should be destroyed throughout the realm.


CHAP. XVI)	ROME  AND  ITS  ART	341
to mark the junction and origin of several consular roads; on it were inscribed the major towns reached and their distances from Rome. Along the south west side ran the Sacra Via, or Sacred \,Vay, which led up to the temples of Jupiter and Saturn on the Capitoline hill. North of this Forum the visitor would find a larger one, the Forum lulium, built by Caesar to relieve the older area; near by were additional forums laid out for Augusms and Vespasian; and soon Trajan would clear and adorn the greatest of them all.
Even in so hasty a circuit the ancient tourist would have felt the crowded diversity of the city's population and the tortuous inadequacy of its hap hazard streets. A few of these were from sixteen to nineteen feet wide; most of them were meandering alleys in the Oriental style. Juvenal complained that carts rumbling over the uneven pavements at night made sleep im possible, while the jostling crowds made daytime walking a form of war. "Hurry as we may, we are blocked by a surging host in front, and by a dense mass of people pressing upon us from behind. One digs an elbow into me, another a sedan pole; one bangs a beam, another a wine cask, against my head. My legs are beplastered with mud; huge feet trample upon me from every side; a soldier plants his hobnail boot squarely upon my toes." 4 The main thoroughfares were paved with large pentagonal blocks of lava stone, sometimes so firmly set in concrete that a few have remained in place till our time. There was no street lighting; whoever ventured out after dark carried a lantern, or followed a torchbearing slave; in either case he ran the gauntlet of many thieves. Doors were fastened with locks and keys; windows were bolted at night, and those on the ground floor were guarded-as now by iron bars. To these perils Juvenal adds the objects, solid or liquid, thrown from upper-floor windows. All in all, he thought, only a fool would go out to dinner without making his will.5
Since there were no public vehicles to transport workers from their homes to their toil, most of the plebs lived in brick tenements near the heart of the town, or in rooms behind or above their shops. A tenement usually covered an entire square, and was therefore called an insula, or island. Many of these buildings were six or seven stories high, and so flimsily built that several collapsed, killing hundreds of occupants. Augustus limited the frontal height of buildings to seventy Roman feet, but apparently the law permitted greater elevations in the rear, for Martial tells of "a poor devil whose attic is 200 steps up." 6 Many tenements had shops on the ground floor; some had balconies on the second; a few were connected at the top with tenements across the street by arched passages containing additional rooms-precarious penthouses for particular plebeians. Such insulae almost filled the Nova Via, the Clivus Victoriae (Victory Hillfon the Palatine, and the Subura-a noisy
342	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XVI
brothel-ridden district between the Viminal and the Esquiline. In them dwelt the longshoremen of the Emporium, the butchers of the Macellum, the fishmongers of the Farum Piscatorium, the cattlemen of the Farum Boarium, the vegetable vendors of the Forum Holitorium, and the workers in Rome's factories, clerkships, and trades. The slums of Rome lapped the edges of the Forum.
The streets off the Farum were lined with shops and resounded with labor and bargaining. Fruit sellers, booksellers, perfumers, milliners, dyers, florists, cutlers, locksmiths, apothecaries, and other caterers to the needs, foibles,
and vanities of mankind blocked the thoroughfares with their projecting booths. Barbers plied their trade in the open air, where all could hear; wine taverns were so numerous that Rome seemed to Martial one vast saloon.7 Each trade tended to center in some quarter or street and often gave the locality a name; so the sandalmakers were gathered in the Viens Sandalarius, the harnessmakers in the Viens Lorarius, the glassblowers in the Vicus Vitrarius, the jewelers in the Vicus Mai-garitarius.
In such shops the artists of Italy did their work-all but the greatest of them, who drew high fees and lived in peripatetic luxury. Lucullus gave Arcesilaus a million sesterces to make a statue of the goddess Pelicitas, and Zenodorus received 400,000 for a colossus of J\1ercury.8 Architects and sculptors were ranked with physicians, teachers, and chemists as pursuing crr'tes liberales, arts of freemen; but the men who did most of the artwork of Rome were or had been slaves. Some owners had their bondsmen trained in carving, painting, and like skills, and sold their products in Italy and abroad. In such shops labor was sharply divided: some specialized in votive figures, others in decorative cornices; some cut glass eyes for statues; dif ferent painters made arabesques or flowers or landscapes or animals or men, and worked in tum on the same picture. Several artists were expert forgers, producing antiques of any marketable age.9 The Romans of the last century
B.C. were easily deceived in these matters, for, like most nouveaux riches,
they tended to value objects according to cost and rarity rather than by beauty and use. During the Empire, when it was no longer a distinction to be wealthy, taste improved, and a sincere love of excellence brought to many thousands of families a refinement of utensils and ornaments such as only a very few had known in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece. Art was to antiquity what industry is to modernity. Men could not then enjoy the lavish abundance of useful products now poured forth by our machines; but they could, if they cared enough, gradually surround themselves with objects whose zealously finished form gave to all who lived with them the subtle and quiet happiness of beautiful things.
CHAP. XVI)	ROME  AND  ITS  ART	343
m. THE HOMES OF THE GREAT
The visitor seeking to study the dwellings of the middle class would have found them away from the city's center on the main diverging roads. Their brick-and-stucco exteriors were still built, as before, in the plain and solid style dictated by insecurity and heat; the Roman bourgeois wasted no art on passers-by. Few houses rose to more than two stories. Cellars were rare; roofs sparkled with red tiles; windows were fitted with shutters or, occasionally, panes of glass. The entrance was usually a double door, each half turning on metal pivots. Floors were of concrete or tile, often of mosaic squares; there were no carpets. Around the central atrium were grouped the main rooms of the house: this is the archi tectural origin of the cloister and the college quadrangle. In the richer houses one or more rooms would be used for bathing, usually in tubs much like our own. Plumbing was carried by the Romans to an excellence unmatched before the twentieth century. Lead pipes brought water from the aqueducts and mains into most tenements and homes; fittings and stopcocks were of bronze, and some were molded into highly ornamental designs.10 Leaders and gutters of lead carried rain from the roof. Most rooms were heated, if at all, by portable charcoal braziers; a few homes, many villas and palaces, and the public baths enjoyed central heating from wood- or charcoal-burning furnaces supplying hot air to various rooms through tile pipes or passages in floors and walls.*
In the early Empire a Hellenistic addition was made to the rich Roman's house.
To provide a privacy not always possible in the atrium, he built behind it a peristylium, a court open to the sky, planted with flowers and shrubs, adorned by statues, surrounded by a portico, and centering about a fountain or a bathing pool. Around this court he raised a new set of rooms: a triclinium or dining room, an oecus ("house") for the women, a pinacotbeca for his art collection, a biblio theca for his books, and a lararimn for his household gods; there might also be extra bedrooms, and little alcoves called exedrae-"sitting-out" nooks. Less ex pensive homes substituted a garden for the peristyliwn; and if even that could find no ground, the Romans placed flower boxes in the windows or grew flowers and shrubs on the roof. Some large roofs, says Seneca, had grape arbors, fruit trees, and shade trees planted in boxes of soil;12 not a few had solaria for baking bellies in the sun.
Many Romans wearied of the roar and rush of Rome and fled to the peace and boredom of the countryside. Rich and poor alike developed a feeling for nature beyond anything discernible in ancient Greece. Juvenal thought a man foolish to live in the capital when, for the annual rental of a dark garret in Rome, he might buy a pretty house in some quiet Italian town and surround it with "a trim garden fit to feast a hundred Pythagoreans." 13 The well to do moved out of
" Vitruvius describes these bypoccrusta as introduced about 100 B.c.11 By A.D. 10 they were fairly common, particularly in the north, and even in Britain, which is slowly recapturing the idea.
344	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVI
Rome in early spring to villas in the foothills of the Apennines or on the shores of lakes or the sea. The younger Pliny has left us a pleasant description of his country house at Laurenrum on the coast of Latium. He calls it "large enough for my convenience, without being expensive to maintain"; but as he goes on we suspect a pose in his modesty. He describes "a small porch sheltered by glazed windows and overhanging eaves ...  a handsome dining room gently washed by the edge of the last breakers," and so bright with spacious windows as to give "a view in three directions, as if of three different seas"; an atrium "whence the prospect ends in woods and mountains"; two drawing rooms; a "semicircular library whose windows receive the sun all day long"; a bedchamber, and several rooms for servants. In an opposite wing were "an elegant parlor," a second dining room, and four small rooms; a bathroom suite consistiGg of "a pleasant undressing room," a frigidarium or cold bath, a tepidarium with three pools heated to dif ferent degrees, and a calidarium or hot bath; all centrally heated by hot-air pipes. Outside were a swimming pool, a ball court, a storehouse, a variegated garden, a private study and banquet hall, and an observation tower with two apartments and a dining room. "Tell me now," Pliny concludes, "ha,·e I not just cause to bestow my time and affection upon this agreeable retreat?" 14
If a senator could have such a villa on the sea, and another on Como, we may begin to imagine the sprawling luxury of Tiberius' estate at Capri, or Domitian's at Alba Longa-not to speak of the one that Hadrian would soon build at Tibur. To match this cubicular extravagance the visitor would have to find entry to the palaces of millionaires and emperors on the Palatine. In domestic architecture the Romans did not care to imitate classic Greece, where homes were modest and only temples were great; they modeled their palaces upon the residences of the half-Orientalized Hellenistic kings; Ptolemaic styles came to Rome with Cleopatra's gold, and royal architecture accompanied monarchical politics. The palace of Augustus, receiving the name from the hill it stood on, spread with extensions as the administrative functions of the imperial household increased. Most of his successors built additional palaces for themselves and their staffs: Tiberius his donnts Tiberi a11,1, Caligula his domus ,Gaiana, Nero his dounts aurea.
This Golden House became the passing wonder of Rome. Its buildings alone covered 900,000 square feet, and yet were but a small part of a mile square villa that overflowed from the Palatine upon the neighboring hills. A great park surrounded the palace, with gardens, meadows, fish ponds, game preserves, aviaries, vineyards, streams, fountains, waterfalls, lakes, im perial galleys, pleasure houses, summerhouses, flower houses, and porticoes
3000 feet long. An angry wit scratched a representative comment on a wall: "Rome has become the habitation of one man. It is time, citizens, to emigrate to Veii-unless, indeed, Veii itself is to be comprised in Nero's home." i:;
CHAP. xvi)	ROME  AND  ITS  ART	345
The interior of the palace gleamed with marble, bronze, and gold, with the gilded metal of countless Corinthian capitals, and with thousands of statues, reliefs, paintings, and objects of art bought or looted from the classic world; among them was the Laocoon. Some of the walls were inlaid with mother of-pearl and various costly gems. The ceiling of the banquet hall was covered with ivory flowers from which, at a nod of the emperor, a perfumed spray would fall upon his guests. The dining room had a spherical ceiling of ivory painted to _represent the sky and the stars, ,vhich was kept in constant slow rotation by hidden machines. A suite of rooms provided hot baths, cold baths, tepid baths, salt-water baths, and sulphur baths. \Vhen the Roman architects Celer and Severus had nearly finished the immense struc ture and Nero moved in, he remarked, "At last I am lodged." A generation later this Roman Versailles, too costly and dangerous to maintain amid sur rounding poverty, had fallen into neglect. Over its ruins Vespasian built the Colosseum, Titus and Trajan their enormous public baths.


·When Marcus died Rome had reached the apex of her curve and was already touched with decay. Her boundaries had been extended beyond the Danube, into Scotland and the Sahara, into the Caucasus and Russia, and to the gates of Parthia. She had accomplished for that confusion of peoples and faiths a unity not of language and culture, but at least of economy and law. She had woven it into a majesnc commonwealth, within which the exchange of goods moved in unprecedented plenty and freedom; and for two centuries she had guarded the great realm from barbarian inroads and had given it security and peace. All the white man's world looked to her as the center of the universe, the omnipotent and eternal city. Never had there been such wealth, such splendor, or such power.
Nevertheless, amid the prosperity that made Rome brilliant in this second century, all the seeds were germinating of the crisis that would ruin Italy in the third. Marcus had contributed heavily to the debacle by naming Commodus his heir and by wars that centralized ever more authority in the hands of the Emperor. Commodus kept in peace the prerogatives ;ssumed by Aurelius in war. Private and local independence, initiative, and pride withered as the power and functions of the state increased; and the wealth of nations was drained away by ever-rising taxation to support a self multiplying bureaucracy and the endle offensives of defense. The mineral wealth of Italy was diminishing,71 pestilence and famine had taken bitter toll, the system of tillage by slaves was failing, governmental expenditures and doles had exhausted the Treasury and debased the currency. Italian industry was losing its markets in the provinces through provincial compe tition, and no economic statesmanship appeared to make up for a languish ing foreign trade by a wider distribution of buying power at home. 1"1ean while the provinces had recovered from the exactions of Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, and Antony; their ancient skills had revived, their industries were flourishing, their new wealth was financing science, philos ophy, and art. Their sons replenished the legions, their generals led them; soon their armies would hold Italy at their mercy and make their generals
.,
;,
FIG. 30-Altar Found at Ostia
1vluseo delle Terme, Rome

, .
-, ,.
i  1:',
,,--
'

....,.·'
FIG. 31-Arch of Trajan at Be11e,:e11to
CHAP. XX)	LIFE  IN  THE  SECOND  CENTURY	449
emperors. The process of conquest was finished and was to be reversed; hencefonh the conquered would absorb the conquerors.
As if conscious of these omens and problems, the mind of Rome, at the close of the Antonine age, sank into a cultural and spiritual fatigue. The practical disfranchisement of first the assemblies and then the Senate had removed the mental stimulus that comes from free political activity and a widespread sense of libeny and power. Since the prince had almost all authority, the citizens left him almost all responsibility. More and more of them, e.ven in the aristocracy, retired into their families and their prirnte affairs; citizens became atoms, and society began to fall to pieces internally precisely when unity seemed most complete. Disillusionment with democ racy was followed by disillusionment with monarchy. The "Golden Thoughts" of Aurelius were often leaden thoughts, weighted <;iown with the suspicion that Rome's problems could not be solved, that the multiply ing barbarians could not long be held back by a sterile and pacific breed. Stoicism, which had begun by preaching strength, was ending by preaching resignation. Almost all the philosophers had made their peace with religion. For 400 years Stoicism had been to the upper classes a substitute for re ligion; now the substitute was put aside, and the ruling orders turned back from the books of the philosophers co the altars of the gods. And yet pagan ism, too, was dying. Like Italy, it was flushed only with governmental aid and was nearing exhaustion. It had conquered philosophy; but already its temple precincts heard reverently the names of invading deities. The age was heavy with the resurrection of the provinces and the incredible victory of Christ.
BOOK IV
THE	EMPIRE
146B.C.-A.D. 19 2
CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE
B.C.
1200: Goidelic Celts invade England 900: Brythonic and Belgic Celts invade
England