In his later years Plato tried to prove the Pythagorean converse, that all Ideas are mathe matical forms.80
t Cf. Carrel: "For modern scientists, as for Plato, Ideas are the sole reality.""" Cf. Spinoza:
"I do not understand, by the series of causes and real entities, a series of individual mutable things, but rather the series of fixed and eternal things. For it would be impossible for human weakness to follow up the series of individual mutable things, not only because their number surpasses all counting, but because ... the existence of particular things has no connection with their essence, and is not an eternal truth." (In order that the geometry of triangles may be true, it is not necessary that any particular triangle should exist.) "However, there is no need that we should understand the series of individual mutable things, for their essence ... is only to be found in fixed and eternal things. and from the laws inscribed in those things as their true codes, according to which all individual things are made and arranged."00 Note that in Plato's theory of Ideas Heracleitus and Parmenides are reconciled: Heracleitus is right, and flux is true, in the world of sense; Parmenides is right, and changeless unity is true, in the world of Ideas.
CHAP.XX!)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY
(tome on), but is merely a principle of inertia, a possibility waiting for God or soul to give it specific form and being according to some Idea. The soul is the self-moving force in man, and is part of the self-moving Soul of all things... It is pure vitality, incorporeal and immortal. It existed before the body, and has brought with it from antecedent incarnations many memories which, when awakened by new life, are mistaken for new knowledge. All mathematical truths, for example, are innate in this way; teaching merely arouses the recollection of things known by the soul many lives ago... After death the soul or principle of life passes into other organisms, higher or lower according to the deserts it has earned in its previous avatars. Per haps the soul that has sinned goes to a purgatory or hell, and the virtuous soul goes to the Islands of the Blest.08 When through various existences the soul has been purified of all wrongdoing, it is freed from reincarnation, and mounts to a paradise of everlasting happiness.,...
The Moralist
Plato knows that many of his readers will be skeptics, and for a while he struggles to find a natural ethic that shall stir men's souls to righteous ness without relying on heaven, purgatory, and hell.101 The Dialogues of his middle period turn more and more from metaphysics to morals and poli tics: "The greatest and fairest sort of wisdom by far is that which is con cerned with the ordering of states and families."11"1 The problem of ethics lies in the apparent conflict between individual pleasure and social good. Plato presents the problem fairly, and puts into the mouth of Callias as strong an argument for selfishness as any immoralist has ever given."'" He recognizes that many pleasures are good; intelligence is needed to discrim inate between good and harmful pleasures; and for fear that intelligence may come too late we must inculcate in the young a habit of temperance, a sense of the golden mean.1°'
The soul or principle of life has three levels or parts-desire, will, and thought; each part has its own virtue-moderation, courage, and wisdom; to which should be added piety and justice-the fulfillment of one's obli gations to his parents and his gods. Justice may be defined as the co-opera tion of the parts in a whole, of the elements in a character, or of the people in a state, each part performing its fittest function properly."'" The Good
How much of this Hindu-Pythagorean-Orphic doctrine of immortality was protective coloration it is hard to say. Plato presents it half playfully, as if it were merely a useful myth, a poetic aid to decency.100
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXI
is neither reason alone nor pleasure alone, but that mingling of them, in pro ponion and measure, which produces the Life of Reason.108 The supreme good lies in pure knowledge of the eternal forms and laws. Morally "the highest good ... is the power or faculty, if there be such, which the soul has of loving the truth, and of doing all things for the sake of truth."11" He who so loves truth will not care to return evil for evil;= he will think it bet ter to suffer injustice than to do it; he will "go fonh by sea and land to seek after men who are incorruptible, whose acquaintance is beyond price.
. . . The true votaries of philosophy abstain from all fleshly lusts; and when philosophy offers them a purification and release from evil, they feel that they ought not to resist her influence; to her they incline, and whither she leads they follow her."'09
Plato had burned his poems, and lost his religious faith. But he remained a poet and a worshiper; his conception of the Good was suffused with esthetic emotion and ascetic piety; philosophy and religion became one in him, ethic and esthetic were fused. As he grew older he became incapable of seeing any beauty apart from goodness and truth. He would censor, in his ideal state, all an and poetry that might seem to the government to have an immoral or unpatriotic tendency,; all rhetoric and all nonreligious drama would be barred; even Homer-seductive painter of an immoral theology-would have to go. The Dorian and Phrygian modes of music might be allowed; but there must be no complicated instruments, no vir tuosos making "a beastly noise" with their technical displays,U0 and no radi cal novelties.
The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as im periling the whole state, for styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions   The
new style, gradually gaining a lodgment, quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs, and from these it . . . goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning everything.w
Beauty, like vinue, lies in :fitness, symmetry, and order. A work of art should be a living creature, with head, trunk, and limbs all vitalized and unified by one idea.= True beauty, thinks our passionate puritan, is intel lectual rather than physical; the figures of geometry are "eternally and ab solutely beautiful," and the laws whereby the heavens are made are fairer than the stars.na Love is the pursuit of beauty, and has three stages, accord ing as it is love of the body, or of the soul, or of truth. Love of the body, between man and woman, is legitimate as a means to generation, which is
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF  PHILOSOPHY
a kind of immortality;m nevertheless this is a rudimentary form of love, unworthy of a philosopher. Physical love between man and man, or woman and woman, is unnatural, and must be suppressed as frustrating reproduc tion."" This can be done by sublimating it in the second or spiritual stage of love: here the older man loves the younger because his comeliness is a symbol and reminder of pure and eternal beauty, and the yl1t:nger loves the older because his wisdom opens a way to understanding and honor. But the highest love is "the love of the everlasting possession of the Good," that love which seeks the absolute beauty of the perfect and eternal Ideas or forms."" This, and not fleshless affection between man and woman, is "Platonic love"-the point at which the poet and the philosopher in Plato merge in the passionate desire for understanding, an almost mystic longing for the Beatific Vision of the law and structure and life and goal of the world.
For he, Adeimantus, whose mind is fixed upon true being, has no time to look down upon the affairs of men, or to be filled with jealousy and enmity in the struggle against them; his eye is ever directed towards fixed and immutable principles, which he sees neither injuring nor injured by one another, but all in order mov ing according to reason; these he imitates, and on these, so far as he can, he will mold his life.UT
The Utopian
Nevertheless he is interested in the affairs of men. He sees a social vision too, and dreams of a society in which there shall be no corruption, no poverty, no tyranny, and no war. He is appalled at the bitterness of political faction in Athens, "strife and enmity and hatred and suspicion forever recurring."11" Like a blue blood, he despises the plutocratic oli garchy, "the men of business ... pretending never so much as to see those whom they have already ruined, inserting their sting-that is, their money into anybody else who is not on his guard against them, and recovering the principal sum many times over: this is the way in which they make drones and paupers to abound in the state.'1110 "And then democracy comes into being, after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power."120 The democrats turn out to be as bad as the pluto crats: they use the power of their number to vote doles to the people and offices to themselves; they flatter and pamper the multitudes until liberty
520	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXI
becomes anarchy, standards are debased by qmnipresent vulgarity, and manners are coarsened by unhindered insolence and abuse. As the mad pursuit of wealth destroys the oligarchy, so the excesses of liberty destroy democracy.
Socr. In such a state the anarchy grows and finds a way into pri vate houses, and ends by getting among the animals and infecting them. . . . The father gets accustomed to descend to the level of his sons ... and the son to be on a level with his father, having no fear of his parents, and no shame....Thmeaster fears and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters and tutors. . . . Young and old are alike, and the young man is on a level with the old, and is ready to compete with him in word or deed; and old men ...  imitate the young. Nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other    Truly,
the horses and asses come to have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen ... all things are just ready to burst with liberty....


The basic principle of democracy is freedom inviting chaos; the basic prin ciple of monarchy is power inviting tyranny, revolution, and war. From Philip to Perseus, from Chaeronea to Pydna (338-168), the foreign and civil wars of the city-states were supplemented by the external and internal wars of the king doms, for the perquisites of government tempted a hundred generals to contests for thrones. Violence was as popular, condottieri as numerous and brilliant, in Hellenistic Greece as in Renaissance Italy. When Antipater died Athens re volted again, and put to death old Phocion, who had ruled it as justly as possible in Antipater's name. Cassander, Antipater's son, recaptured the city for Macedon (318), widened the franchise to holders of a thousand drachmas, and left as his regent the philosopher, scholar, and dilettante Demetrius of Phalerum, who gave the city ten years of prosperity and peace. Meanwhile Antigonus I ("Cyclops") dreamed of uniting all of Alexander's empire under his one eye; he was defeated at lpsus (301) by a coalition, and lost Asia, Minor to Seleucus I. His son Demetrius Poliorcetes ("Taker of Cities") liberated Greece from Mace donian rule, gave Athens twelve years more of democracy, was lodged as the
grateful city's guest in the Parthenon, brought courtesans to live with him there: drove some young men to desperation by his amorous attentions,• won a brilliant
naval victory over Ptolemy I at Cyprus (308), besieged Rhodes for six years with new siege instruments but without success, made himself king of Macedon (294), ended Athenian liberty with a garrison, fell into ever new wars, was de feated and captured by Seleucus, and drank himself to death.
Damocles, sought out everywhere by Demetrius and at last about to be captured, killed himself by plunging into a caldron of boiling water.• We must not misjudge the Athemam from one such instance of virtue.
CHAP.XXIII)	GREECE  AND MACEDON	;59
Four years later (279), taking advantage of the disorder brought on by the struggle for power in the eastern Mediterranean, a horde of Celts, or "Gauls," under Brennus* marched down through Macedonia into Greece. Brennus, says Pausanias, "pointed out the weak state of Greece, the im mense wealth of her cities, the votive offerings in the temples, the great quantities of silver and gold."' At the same time a revolution broke out in Macedonia under the leadership of Apollodorus; part of the army joined in, and helped the angry poor in their periodical revenge of despoiling the rich. The Gauls, doubtless guided by a Greek, found their way through secret passes around Thermopylae, killed and plundered indiscriminately, and advanced upon the rich temple at Delphi. Repulsed there by a Greek force and a storm that in Greek belief was Apollo's defense of his shrine, Brennus retreated and killed himself in shame. The surviving Gauls crossed over into Asia Minor. "They butchered all the males," writes Pausanias,
and likewise old women, and babes at their mothers' breasts; they drank the blood, and feasted on the flesh of infants that were fat. High-spirited women, and maidens in their flower, committed sui cide ... those that survived were subjected to every kind of outrage.
. . . Some of the women rushed upon the swords of the Gauls, and voluntarily courted death; to others death came from absence of food or sleep, as these merciless barbarians ravished them in turn, and wreaked their lusts upon them whether dying or dead.t"
After suffering years of such devastation, the Greeks of Asia bought off the invaders, and persuaded them to retire into northern Phrygia (where their settlements become known as Galatia), Thrace, and the Balkans. For two generations the Gauls levied fear tribute from Seleucus I and the Greek cities of the Asiatic coasts and the Black Sea; Byzantium alone paid them $240,000 a year.t" As the emperors and generals of Rome were to be occupied, in the third century after Christ, in repelling barbarian inroads, so the kings and generals of Pergamum, Seleucia, and Macedonia gave much of their resources and energies, in the third century before Christ, to driv ing back the recurring waves of Celtic invasion. Throughout its history ancient civilization lived on the edge of a sea of barbarism that repeatedly threatened to inundate it. The stoic courage of citizens perpetually pre-
Not the Brennus who had invaded Italy in 390 B.c.
t We have no Gallic version of these matters, nor any "barbarian" account of Greek inva sions into Asia, Italy, or Sicily.
:j: In the following pages, to allow for the rise of prices in the Hellenistic age, the talent will be reckone.<! as equivalent to $3000 in the United States of 1939.
560	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CRAP,XXIII
pared had once kept back the peril; but stoicism was dying in Greece pre cisely at the time that d vised its classic formulation and its name..
Antigonus II, son of Demetrius Poliorcetes and called "Gonatas" for reasons now unknown, drove the Gauls out of Macedonia, put down the revolt of Apollodorus, and ruled Macedonia with a ility and moderation for thirty-eight years (277-39). He gave generously to literature, science, and philosophy, brought poets like Aratu of Soll to his court, and formed a lifelong friendship with Zeno the Stoic; he was the first of that very discontinuous line of philosopher-kings which ended in Marcus Aurelius. Nevertheless it was during his reign that Athens made a last bid for free dom. In 267 the nationalist party came into power under the leadership of a young pupil of Zeno's, Chremonides. It secured the aid of Egypt, ousted the Macedonian troops, and announced the liberation of Athens. Antigonus came down at his leisure and recaptured the city (262), but dealt with it as became one who respected philosophy and old age. He established garrisons in the Piraeus, on Salamis, and at Sunium, and en joined Athens from engaging in alliances or wars; for the rest he left the city completely free.
Other Greek states were solving in other ways the problem of recon ciling liberty with order. About 279 little Aetolia, peopled like Macedon with half-barbarous and never-conquered mountaineers, began to organize the cities of northern Greece-chiefly those of the Delphic Amphictyony into the Aetolian League; and about the same time the Achaean League of Patrae, Dyme, Pellene, and other towns attracted to its membership many cities of the Peloponnese. In either league the constituent municipalities kept control of all local government, but surrendered their armed forces and foreign relations to a federal council, and a st:rategos, elected by such of the citizens as could attend the annual assembly at Aegium in Achaea, or at Thermus in Aetolia. Each league maintained peace, and established common-measures, weights, and coinages throughout its area-an achieve ment in co-operation that makes the third century in some ways politically superior to the age of Pericles.
The Achaean League was transformed into a first-class power by Aratus of Sicyon. At the age of twenty this new Themistocles freed Sicyon from its dictator by a night attack with a handful of men. By eloquence and subtle negotiation he persuaded all the Peloponnesus except Sparta and Elis to join the League, which chose him as its st:rategos annually for ten years ( 245-35). With a few hundred men he secretly entered Corinth, scaled the almost inaccessible Acrocorinthus, routed the Macedonian troops, and re-
CHAP.XXIII)	GREECE  AND  MACEDON	561
stored the city to freedom. Passing on to the Piraeus, he bribed the Mace donian garrison tosurrender, and announced the liberation of Athens. From that moment to the Roman conquest Athens enjoyed a unique self-gov ernment-militarily powerless, but left inviolate by the Hellenistic states because her universities had made her the intellectual capital of the Greek world. Athens turned to philosophy, and contentedly disappeared from political history.
Now at the height of their power, the two leagues began to weaken themselves by war with each other and class war within. In 2 20 the Aetoli an League, with Sparta and Elis, fought the bitter "Social" War against the Achaean League and Macedon. Aratus, the defender of freedom, was also the protector of wealth; in each city the League supported the party of property. The poorer citizens complained that they could not afford to attend the distant assemblies of the League, and were thereby in effect disfranchised; they were skeptical of a liberty that meant the full privilege of the clever and the strong to exploit the simple and the weak; more and more they gave their applause to demagogues who called for a redistribu tion of the land. Like the rich of a century before, the poor began to favor Macedonia against their own governments.
Macedonia, however, was ruined by the honesty of Antigonus III. He had assumed power as regent for his stepson, Philip, and had promised to surrender the throne upon Philip's coming of age. The cynics of the time called him "Doson"-the Promiser-apparently because they took it for granted that he was lying. But he kept his word, and in 221 Philip V, aged seventeen, began a long reign of intrigue and war. He was a man of cour age and capacity, but of unscrupulous subtlety. He seduced the wife of Aratus' son, poisoned Aratus, killed his own son on suspicion of con spiracy, and arranged banquets of poisoned wine for those who stood in the way of his plans.' He enlarged and enriched Macedonia, and left it more populous and prosperous than for one hundred and fifty years past. But in 215, fearful of the growing power of Rome, he made the historic mistake of allying himself with Hannibal and Carthage. A year later Rome declared war upon Macedonia, and began the conquest of Greece.
Il.  THE STRUGGLE FOR WEALTH
Athenaeus, who is as reliable as any gossip, tells us that Demetrius of Phalerum, about 31 o, took a census of Athens, and reported 2 1 ,ooo citizens, 10,000 metics or aliens, and 400,000 slaves.• The last figure is incredible,
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.x:xm
but we know nothing that contradicts it. Very probably the number of rural slaves had grown; estates were becoming larger, and were being worked more and more by slaves under a slave overseer managing for an absentee landlord." Under this system a more scientific agriculture devel oped; Varro knew filty Greek manuals of the art. But the processes of erosion and deforestation had already gutted much of the land. Even in the fourth century Plato had expressed the belief that rain and flood, in the flow of time, had carried away much of the arable surface of Attica; the surviving hills, in his metaphor, were a skeleton from which the flesh had been washed away.10 Many areas of Attica were in the third century so denuded of topsoil that their ancient farms were abandoned. The for ests of Greece were vanishing, and timber, like food, had to be brought in from abroad.11 The mines at Laurium were worn out and almost deserted; silver could be gotten more cheaply from Spain; .and the gold mines of Thrace, which had once poured their wealth into Athens, now enriched the treasury and beautified the coinage of Macedon.


into a little space .an intense life of political turmoil, literary competition, artistic exuberance, epicurean lu.nrry, and exciting public games. The land was fertile and produced the finest olives and grapes in Italy; hence came the famous Surrentine and Falernian wines. Probably Varro was thinking of Campania when he challenged the world: "You who have wandered over many lands, have you ever seen any better cultivated than Italy? . . . Is not Italy so stocked with fruit trees as to seem one great orchard?" 6 At the southern end of Campania a precipitous peninsula ran out from Salernum to Surrentum. Villas nestled among the vines and orchards on the hills and garlanded the shore. Surrentum was as beautiful as Sorrento is now; the elder Pliny called it "Nature's own delight," upon which she had poured out all her gifts.7 Hardly anything seems to have changed there in two thousand years; the people and their customs are probably the same, almost the same their gods; and the cliffs still stand the sea's unending siege.
Facing this promontory lay the buffeted isle of Capreae (Capri). On the southern side of the gulf Vesuvius smoked, while Pompeii and Herculaneum slept under their lava coat. Then came Neapolis, "Newtown," the most Greek of Italian cities in Trajan's day; in Naples' laziness we watch an echo of its ancient addiction to love and sport and art. The people were Italian; the culture, customs, games, were Greek. Here were fine temples, palaces, and theaters; here, every fifth year, were held those contests in music and poetry at which Statius had won a prize. In the western corner of the gulf was the port of Puteoli (Pozzuoli), named from the stench of its sulphur pools; 8 it throve on Rome's trade and on manufactures of iron, pottery, and glass; an amphitheater here shows us, by its well-preserved underground passages, how gladiators and beasts were-introduced into the arena. Across the harbor of Puteoli sparkled the villas of Baiae, doubly attractive in their setting between mountains and sea; here Caesar, Caligula, and Nero played and rheumatic Romans came to bathe in mineral springs. The place profited from its reputation for gambling and immorality; Varro reports that maidens there were common property, and many boys were girls; 9 Claudius thought Cicero irremediably disgraced for having gone there once.10 "Do you sup pose," asks Seneca, "that Cato would ever have dwelt in a pleasure palace, so that he might count the lewd women as they sailed past, the many kinds of barges painted in all sorts of colors, the roses wafted about the lake?" 11 A few miles north of Baiae, in the crater of a dead volcano, Lake Avernus emitted sulphurous fumes of such potency that legend said no bird could fly above it and live. Near it was the cave through which Aeneas, in Virgil's epic, had made his facilis descensus Avenzi into Tartarus. North of the lake was the old city of Cumae, now slowly dying through the superior attrac tions of her daughter-city Neapolis, the better harbors of Puteoli and Ostia,
CHAP. XXI)	IT ALY	457
and the industries of Capua. Capua lay thirty miles inland, in a fenile region that sometimes harvested four crops in a year; 12 and its bronze and iron works were unrivaled in Italy. Rome had so severely punished it for help ing Hannibal that for two centuries it failed to recover, and Cicero spoke of it as the "abode of the politically dead." 13 Caesar restored it with thou sands of new colonists, and in Trajan's time it was prospering again.
Listed so rapidly, these major cities of classic Italy are merely names; we mistake them for words on a map and hardly feel that they were the noisy abodes of sensitive men eagerly pursuing food and drink, women and gold. Let us tum over the ashes of one Roman habitation, and from its strangely preserved vestiges try to recapture some movement of the Iife that ran in those ancient streets.
POMPEII
Pompeii was one of the minor towns of Italy, hardly noticed in Latin literature except for its fish sauces, its cabbage, and its burial. Founded by Oscans perhaps as early as Rome, peopled by Greek immigrants, captured by Sulla and turned into a Roman colony, it was partly destroyed by an eanhquake in A.O. 63 and was being rebuilt when Vesuvius destroyed it again. On August 24, A.O. 79, the volcano exploded and hurled dust and rock high into the air amid clouds of smoke and flashes of flame. A heavy rainfall turned the erupted matter into a torrent of mud and stone, which in six hours covered Pompeii and Herculaneum to a depth of eight or ten feet. All that day and the next the eanh shook and buildings fell. Audiences were buried in the ruins of theaters,1-1 hundreds were choked by dust or fumes, and tidal waves shut off escape by sea. The elder Pliny was at that time com manding the western fleer at Misenum, near Pureoli. Moved by appeals for help and by curiosity to observe the phenomenon at closer range, he boarded a small vessel, landed on the southern shore of rhe gulf, and rescued several persons; but as the party ran from the advancing hail and smoke, the old scientist was overcome, fell in his tracks, and died.15 The next morning his wife and his nephew joined the desperate crowd that fled down the coast, while from Naples to Sorrento the continuing eruption blackened the day into night. Many refugees, separated in the darkness from their husbands, wives, or children, made the terror worse with their laments and shrieks. Some prayed to divers gods for help; some cried out that all gods were dead and that the long-predicted end of the world had come.16 \Vhen, on the third day, the sky cleared at last, lava and mud had covered everything of Pompeii but the rooftops, and Herculaneum had completely disappeared. Of approximately 20,000 population in Pompeii, probably some 2000 lost
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXI
their lives. Several of the dead were preserved by a volcanic embalmment: the rain and pumice stone that fell-upon them made a cement that hardened as it dried; and the filling of these impromptu molds has made some grue some plaster casts. A few of the survivors dug into the ruins to recover valuables; thereafter the site was abandoned and was slowly covered by the detritus of time. In r 709 an Austrian general sank a shaft at Herculaneum, but the tufa layer was so thick (in some places sixty-five feet) that excava tions had to proceed by slow and costly tunneling. The exhuming of Pompeii began in 1749 and has gone on at intervals since. Today most of the ancient town has been uncovered and has revealed so many houses, ob jects, and inscriptions that in some ways we know ancient Pompeii better than ancient Rome.
The center of its life, as in every Italian city, was the forum. Once, doubt less, it had been the gathering point for farmers and their produce on market days; games were held there, and dramas were performed. There the citizens had raised shrines to their gods; at one end to Jupiter, at the other to Apollo, and near by to Venus Pompeiana, the patron goddess of the town. But they were not a religious people; they were too busy with industry and politics, games and venery, to have much time for worship; and even in worship they honored the phallus as the crown of their Dionysian ritual.17 When economic and state affairs swelled in volume and dignity, great buildings rose around the forum for administration, negotiation, and exchange.
We may judge from modern Italian towns how the adjoining streets throbbed with the hawking of peddlers, the disputes of buyers and sellers, the noise of crafts by day and revelry by night. In the ruins of the shops excavators found some of the charred and petrified nuts, loaves, and fruits that so narrowly escaped a purchaser. Farther down the streets were the taverns, gambling houses, and brothels, each zealous to be all in one.
We might not have guessed the keenness of Pompeii's life had not its people scratched their sentiments upon public walls. Three thousand such graffiti have been copied there, and presumably there were thousands more. Sometimes the authors merely inscribed their names or obscene audacities, as men still love to do; sometimes they gave hopeful instructions to enemies, as Sll11zius Cornelio, mspendere-"Samius to Cornelius: go hang yourself." Many of the inscriptions are love messages, often in verse: Romula notes that she "tarried here with Stephylus"; and a devoted youth writes, Victoria vale, et ubique es, suaviter stermttas-"Good-by, Victoria, and wherever you are may you sneeze pleasantly." 18
Quire as numerous as these messages are the carved or painted announce ments of public events or private offerings. Landlords advertised vacancies, losers described missing articles; guilds and other groups declared themselves
CHAP. XXI)	ITALY	459
for promising candidates in the municipal campaigns. So "the fishermen have named Popidius Rufus for aedile"; "the lumbermen and the char coal sellers ask you to elect l\tlarcellinus." 19 Some graffiti announced gladia torial games, others proclaimed the valor of famous gladiators like Celadus, suspirium puellarum, "the maidens' sigh," or breathed devotion to a favorite actor-"Actius, darling of the people, come back soon!" 20 Pompeii lived to be amused. It had three public baths, a palaestra, a small theater seating
2500, a larger one accommodating 5000, and an amphitheater where 20,000
persons could enjoy by proxy the agony of death. One inscription reads: "Thirty pairs of gladiators furnished by the duumvir . . . will fight at Pompeii on November 24, 25, and 26. There will be a hunt [venatio]. Hurrah for J\faius! Bravo, Paris!" Maius was duumvir or city magistrate; Paris was the leading gladiator.
The remains of the domestic interiors suggest a life of solid comfort and varied art. vVindows were xceptional, central heating was rare; bathrooms appear in the richer homes, and a few houses had an outdoor pool in a peri styled garden. Floors were of cement or stone, sometimes of mosaic. One frank moneymaker had the words Salve lucrum-"Hail, gain!" lettered in his floor; another inscribed his with Lucrum gandium-"Gain is joy." 21 Little has been found of the ancient furniture; nearly all was of wood, and perished; but a few tables, couches, chairs, and lamps of marble or bronze have survived. In the museums at Pompeii and Naples may be seen the miscellanea of domestic life: pens, inkstands, scales, kitchen utensils, toilet articles, and musical instruments.
The art recovered from Pompeii or near it suggests that not only the aristocrats of the villas, but the merchants of the city enjoyed the cultural accessories of life. A private library unearthed at Herculaneum had 1756 volumes or rolls. \Ye must not repeat what we have said of the Boscoreale cups, or the rich vistas and graceful women painted upon the walls of Pompeian homes. Many dwellings had excellent sculptures, and the forum contained 1 50 statues. In the Temple of Jupiter a head of the god was found which Pheidias himself might have carved-strength and justice framed in the curls of abounding hair and beard. In the Temple of Apollo was a statue of Diana, equipped with a hole in the back of the head through which a hidden ministrant might utter oracles. In one Herculanean villa enough first class bronzes were found to fill a famous room at the Naples Museum. Pre sumably the masterpieces in this collection-the Resting lvf.ercury, the Narcissus or Dionysus, the Drunken Satyr, and the Dancing Faun-were of Greek origin or workmanship; they reveal the skillful technique, and the shameless joy in the healthy body, characteristic of Praxitelean art. One of them, however, a bravely realistic bust in bronze, shows the bald head and
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXI
sharp but not unkindly face of L. Caecilius Iucundus, a Pompeian auctioneer whose accounts, inscribed upon 154 wax tablets, were found in his house at Pompeii. Supremely human in its mixture of coarseness and intelligence, wisdom and warts, this work of a contemporary-perhaps Italian-sculptor is a welcome foil to the unwrinkled gods and goddesses who surround it in the Naples Museum, and who confess by their smooth and placid features that they never lived.
MUNICIPAL LIFE
Life, private and public, individual and corporate, has never been lived more intensely than in ancient Italy. But the events of our own time are too vital and absorbing to let us spare interest for the details of municipal organi zation under the Caesars; the confusing diversities of constitution and the jealous gradations of franchise are no longer a part of that living past which is our matrix: and our theme.
It was a basic feature of the Roman Empire that though divided into provinces it was organized into an assemblage of relatively self-governed city-states each o\\·ning an extensive hinterland. Patriotism meant love of one's city rather than of the Empire. Normally the freemen of each community were content to exer cise a purely local franchise; and those non-Romans who had won Roman citizen ship rarely went to Rome to vote. As the example of Pompeii shows, the decay of the assemblies in the capital was not accompanied by a similar debasement in the cities of the Empire. Most Italian municipalities had a senate (curia)-and most Eastern cities had a council (bou/e)-that formulated ordinances, and an assembly ( c01nitia, ekklesia) that chose the magistrates. Each magistrate was expected to give his city a substantial sum (smmna bonoraria, from bonos, office) for the privilege of serving it, and custom required him also to make incidental dona tions for public benefits or games. As no pay attached to office, the democracy or aristocracy-of freemen issued almost everywhere in an oligarchy of wealth and power.
For two hundred years, from Augustus to Aurelius, the municipalities of Italy prospered. There was a majority of poor in them, of course; nature and privilege had seen to this; but never before or since, so far as history tells, have the rich done so much for the poor. Practically all the expenses of operating the city, of financing dramas, spectacles, and games, of building temples, theaters, stadiums, palaestras, libraries, basilicas, aqueducts, bridges, and baths, and adorning these with arches, porticoes, painting, and statuary, fell upon men of means; and in the first two centuries of the Empire these philanthropies were carried out with a competitive patriotism that in some cases bankrupted the families that con tributed, or the cities that maintained, the benefactions. In time of famine it was usual for the wealthy to buy food and distribute it gratis among the poor; on


CHAP. xn)	ROME  AND  ITS  ART	353
Cupids parodying the industries of Pompeii, including the wine business of the Vettii. The bite of time has gnawed in o these once brilliant surfaces, but enough remains to shock the visitor into modesty; the figures are almost perfectly drawn, and so colorful with the flesh of life that they can still make the blood stir lustily in living veins.
It is by reference to these Pompeian paintings that connoisseurs have tried to understand the nature, and classify the periods and styles, of pictorial art in ancient Italy. The method is precarious, for Pompeii was more Greek than Latin; but what remains of classic painting in Rome and its suburbs falls in tolerably well with the Pompeian development. In the First or In crustation Style (second century B.c.) walls were often colored to resemble inlaid marble slabs (crustae), as in the "House of Sallust" at Pompeii. In the Second or Architectural Style (first century B.c.) the wall was painted to simulate a building or fa ade or colonnade. Often the columns were repre sented as seen from within, and open country was pictured between them; in this way the artist gave to a probably windowless room cool vistas of trees and flowers, fields and streams, peaceful or playful animals; the im prisoned dweller could fancy himself in Lucullus' gardens by merely look ing at the wall; he might fish or row or hunt, or indulge a fondness for birds without suffering their untimeliness; nature was taken into the house. The Third or Ornate Style (A.D. 1-50) employed architectural forms purely for ornament, and subordinated landscape to figures. In the Fourth or Intri cate Style (A.D. 50-79) the artist let his fancy riot, im·ented fantastic struc tures and shapes, placed them in positions gaily scornful of gravity, piled gardens and columns, villas and pavilions, upon one another in modernistic disarray,26 and occasionally achieved the impressionistic effect of a picture supplemented by unconscious memory and suffused with light. In all these kindred styles architecture was handmaid and mistress to painting, served it and used it, and gave body to a tradition that reawoke, after sixteen cen turies, in Nicolas Poussin.
It is a pity that the subjects of the major extant paintings so seldom venture beyond Greek myth. \Ve tire of these same gods and satyrs, heroes and sinners-Zeus and Mars, Dionysus and Pan, Achilles and Odysseus, Iphigenia and Medea; though a like charge could be brought against the Renaissance. There are a few pictures of still life, and here and there a fuller, an innkeeper, or a butcher shines on Pompeian walls. Love often dominates the scene: a girl sits brooding over some secret longing not unrelated to the Eros who stands beside her; young men and women gambol amorously on the grass; Psyches and Cupids frolic as if the town haJ never known any thing but love and wine. If we may judge from their representation in these murals, the women of Pompeii deserved to have life center about their
354	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP, XVI
comeliness. vVe see them engrossed in the game of "knucklebones," or lean ing gracefully over a lyre, or composing poetry with a meditative stylus at the lips; their faces are quiet with maturity, their forms are healthily full, their robes fall about them with Pheidian amplitude and rhythm, they walk like Helens conscious of their divinity. One of them performs a Bacchic dance, apparently in thin air; her right arm, hand, and foot are as lovely as anything in the history of painting. Some male characters must be in cluded with these masterpieces: Theseus victor over the Minotaur, Hercules rescuing Deianira or adopting Telephus, Achilles angrily surrendering the reluctant Briseis; in this last picture every .figure nears perfection and Pompeian painting is at its best. Humor is represented, too: a disheveled pedagogue stumbles forward on his staff; a jolly satyr shakes his shanks in sardonic revelry, a bdd ribald Silenus is caught in a mood of musical ecstasy. Taverns and brothels came in for appropriate decoration, and no eager tourist need be told that Priapus still .flaunts his precious powers on Pompeian walls. At the other end of the gamut, in the Villa Item, is a series of religious pictures, suggesting the use of the place for celebrating the Dionysian mysteries: in one fresco a little girl, palsied with piety, reads from an apparently sacred book; in another a procession of damsels advances, blowing pipes and bringing sacrifice; in a third a nude lady dances on tip toe while a neophyte kneels exhausted by some ritualistic whipping.27 Finer than any of these is a mural found in the ruins of Stabiae, presaging Botti celli and called Spring: a woman walks slowly through a garden, gathering flowers; only her back is seen, and the graceful turning of her head; but seldom has any art conveyed so movingly the poetry of this simple theme. The most powerful of all the pictures recovered from these ruins is the Medea found at Herculaneum, and preserved in the Naples Museum-a brooding woman, magnificently draped, meditating the murder of her chil dren; apparently this is a copy of the painting for which Caesar paid the
artist, Timomachus of Byzantium, forty talents ($144,ooo).27a
Few pictures of such quality have been found in Rome. But in the suburban villa of Livia at Prima Porta a supreme example was discovered of that landscape painting in which Italy so far excels Greece. The eye is lured as if across a court to a marble trellis, beyond which is a jungle of plants and flowers so accurately eproduced that botanists can now identify and catalogue them; every leaf 1s carefully drawn and colored; birds perch here and there as if for a moment, and insects creep amid the foliage. Only less masterly is the "Aldobra11di11i'' lVedding found on the Esquiline in 16o6, and enthusiastically studied by Rube s,. Vand}'.'k , and Goethe. Perhaps it is a copy of a Greek work; perhaps It 1s an original by a Roman Greek, or by a Roman; we can only say that these figures-the quiet and timid bride,
CHAP. XVI)	ROME  AND  ITS  ART	355
the goddess who counsels her, the mother absorbed in preparations, the maidens waiting to play the lyre and sing-are all done with a delicacy and sensitivity that make this mural.a distinguished relic of classic art.
Roman painting laid no claim to originality; Greek artists carried with them everywhere the same traditions and methods; and even the vague impressionism of these pictures may be offshoots of Alexandrian skills. But there is in them a fineness of line, and a richness of color, that explain why painters like Apelles and Protogenes were held in as high repute as sculptors like Polycleitus and Praxiteles. Sometimes the color is as full as if Giorgione had laid it on; sometimes the subtle gradations of light and shade suggest Rembrandt; sometimes a crude figure catches the ungainly realism of Van Gogh. Perspective here is often faulty, and hasty workmanship limps behind mature conception. But a fresh vitality redeems these faults, the rhythm of the drapery lures the eye, and the woodland scenes must have been a delight to dwellers in a crowded town. Our taste today is more re strained; we like to leave a wall its own significance, and have hesitated, till yesterday, to cover it with paint. But to the Italian a wall was a prison, seldom opening through a window upon the world; he wished to forget the barrier, and be deluded by art into some verdant peace. Perhaps he was right: better a pictured tree on a wall than a m1gic casement's prospect of a thousand unkempt rooftops blaspheming the sky and festering in the sun.
ARCHITECTURE
Principles, Materials, and Forms
We have reserved for the climactic edification of our forgotten visitor the greatest of Rome's arts, that in which she most ably defended herself against the Greek invasion, and displayed all her originality, courage, and power. Originality, however, is not parthenogenesis; it is, like parentage, a novel combination of pre-existing elements. All cultures are eclectic in their youth, as education begins with imitation; but when the soul or nation comes of age it stamps its character, if it has any, upon all its works and words. Rome, like other Mediterranean cities, took the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders from Egypt and Greece; but also she took the arch, the vault, and the dome from Asia, and with them made such a city of palaces, basilicas, amphitheaters, and baths as the earth had not yet beheld. Roman architecture became the art expression of the Roman spirit and state: bold ness, organization, grandeur, and brutal strength raised these unparalleled structures upon the hills. They were the Roman soul in stone.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVI
Most of the leading architects in Rome were Romans, not Greeks. One of them, 1\larcus Vitruvius Pollio, wrote a world classic On Architecture (ca. 27 B.C.).* Having served as military engineer under Caesar in Africa, and as an architect under Octavian, Vitruvius retired in old age to formulate the principles of Rome's most honored art. "Nature has not given me
stature," he confessed, "my face is homely with years, and illness has stolen my strength; therefore I hope to win favor by my knowledge and my book." 29 As Cicero and Quintilian made philosophy a prerequisite for the orator, so Vitruvius required it of the architect; it would improve his pur poses while science improved his means; it would make him "high-minded, urbane, just, loyal, and without greed; for no true work can be done without good faith and clean hands." 30 He described the materials of architecture, the orders and their elements, and the diverse types of building in Rome;
and added discourses on machinery, water clocks, speedometers, t aqueducts,
town planning, and public sanitation. As against the rectangular design established by Hippodamus in many Greek cities, Vitruvius recommended the radial arrangement used in Alexandria (and modern \Vashington); the Romans, however, continued to lay out their towns on the rectangular plan of their camps. He warned Italy that in several localities its drinking water led to goiter, and declared that poisoning could come from working with lead. He explained sound as a vibratory motion of the air, and wrote our oldest extant discussion of architectural acoustics. His book, rediscovered in the Renaissance, deeply influenced Leonardo, Palladio, and Michelangelo. The Romans, says Vitruvius, built with wood, brick, stucco, concrete, stone, and marble. Bricks were the usual substance of walls, arches, and vaults, and served as a frequent facing for concrete. Stucco too was often used as a facing. It was made of sand, lime, marble dust, and water, took a high polish, and was laid on in several coats, often to a thickness of three inches; hence it could keep its form for nineteen centuries, as in some parts
of the Colosseum. In making and using concrete the Romans were un
rivaled until our time. They took the volcanic ash abounding near Naples, mixed it with lime and water, threw in fragments of brick, pottery, marble, and stone, and produced, from the second century B.c. onward, an opus caeme11ticum as ard as rock? and capable of being poured into almost any shape. They cast 1t as we do, m troughs formed of boards. By its means they could cover large unsupported spaces with rigid domes free from the lateral thrust of an arched roof; in this way they topped the Pantheon and the
Some students suspect the work of being a third-century forgery, but the evidence inclines toward authenticity.28
t More accurately, odometers. A peg att ched to the axle of the wheel advanced bya cog
a smaller wheel, whose much slower revoluoon caused a pebble to fall into a box,31
CHAP.XVI)	ROME  AND  ITS  ART	357


living by his art. He dreamed of performing publicly in one day on the water organ, the flute, and the pipes, and then appearing as actor and dancer in the part of Virgil's Turnus. In 59 he gave a semipublic concert as a harpist (citharoedus) in his gardens on the Tiber. For five years more he controlled his longing for a larger audience; at last he dared it in Naples; there the Greek spirit ruled, and the people would forgive and understand him. The auditorium was so overcrowded for his exhibition that it crumbled to pieces shortly after the audience had left. Encouraged, the young Emperor appeared as singer and harpist in the great theater of Pompey at Rome (65). In these recitals he sang poems apparently composed by himself;* some frag ments have survived and show a moderate talent. Besides many lyrics, he wrote a long epic on Troy (with Paris as hero), and began a still longer one on Rome. To complete his versatility, he came upon the boards as an actor, playing the roles of Oedipus, Heracles, Alcmaeon, even the matricide Orestes. The populace was delighted to have an emperor entertain it and kneel on the stage, as custom required, to ask for its applause. It took up the songs that Nero sang and repeated them in the taverns and the streets. His
Suetonius claims to have seen the royal manuscripts, with text and corrections in Nero's hand.77
CHAP.XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF  MON ARCHY	279
enth siasm for music spread through all ranks. His popularity, instead of wamng, grew.
The Senate was more horrified by these displays than by all the gossip of sexual license and perversion that ran about the palace. Nero replied that the Greek custom of confining athletic and artistic competitions to the citizen class was better than the Roman custom of leaving these to the slaves; certainly the contests should not take the form of slowly executing criminals. The young murderer decreed that so long as he ruled, no combat in the arenas should be carried to the death.78 To restore the Greek tradition and dignify his own performances, he persuaded or compelled certain senators to compete in public as actors, musicians, athletes, gladiators, and charioteers. Some patricians, like Thrasea Paetus, showed their disapproval of his ways by absenting themselves from the Senate when Nero c<'lme to address it; some others, like Helvidius Priscus, denounced him violently in those aristo cratic salons that had become the last refuge of free speech; and the Stoic philosophers in Rome spoke ever more openly against this impish epicurean on the throne. Plots were laid to depose him. His spies discovered them, and like his predecessors he countered with a reign of terror. The law of maiestas was revived (6 2), and accusations were brought against men whose opposi tion or wealth made their deaths culturally or financially desirable. For Nero, like Caligula, had now exhausted the Treasury with his extravagance, his gifts, and his games. He announced his intention to confiscate completely the estates of citizens whose wills left insufficient sums to the Emperor. He stripped many temples of their votive offerings, and melted down their images of silver or gold. When Seneca protested and privately criticized his conduct-worse, his poetry-Nero dismissed him from the court (62), and the old philosopher spent the remaining three years of his life in the seclu sion of his villas. Burrus had died some months before.
Nero now surrounded himself with new aides, mostly of coarser strain. Tigellinus, urban prefect, became his chief adviser, and smoothed the Prince's path to every indulgence. In 62 Nero divorced and dismissed Octavia on the ground of barrenness, and twelve days later married Poppaea. The people protested mutely by throwing down the statues that Nero had raised to Poppaea and crowning those of Octavia with flowers. The angry Poppaea convinced her lover that Octavia was planning to remarry, and that a revolution was being organized to replace him in power with Octavia's new mate. If we may follow Tacitus, Nero invited Anicetus, who had killed Agrippina, to confess adultery with Octavia and implicate her in a plot to overthrow the Prince. Anicetus played his part as commanded, was banished to Sardinia, and lived out his life in ease and wealth. Octavia was exiled to Pandateria. There, a few days after her arrival, imperial agents came to
280	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. Xlll
murder her. She was still but twenty-two, and could not believe that life must end so soon for one so guiltless. She pleaded with her slayers, saying that she was now only Nero's sister and could do him no harm. They cut off her head and brought it to Poppaea for their reward. The Senate, in formed that Octavia was dead, thanked the gods for having again preserved the Emperor.79
Nero himself was now a god. After the death of Agrippina a consul-elect had proposed a temple "to the deified Nero." When, in 63, Poppaea bore him a daughter who died soon afterward, the child was voted a divinity. When Tiridates came to receive the crown of Armenia he knelt and wor shipped the Emperor as Mithras. vVhen Nero built his Golden House he prefaced it with a colossus r 20 feet high, bearing the likeness of his head haloed with solar rays that identified him as Phoebus Apollo. Actually he was now, at twenty-five, a degenerate with swollen paunch, weak and slender limbs, fat face, blotched skin, curly yellow hair, and dull gray eyes. As a god and an artist he fretted over the :flaws of the palaces he had in herited, and planned to build his own. But the Palatine was crowded, and at its base were on one side the Circus .Maximus, on another the Forum, and on the .others slums. He mourned that Rome had grown so haphazardly, instead of being scientifically designed like Alexandria or Antioch. He dreamed of rebuilding Rome, of being its second founder, and renaming it
Neropolis.
On July 18, 64, a fire broke out in the Circus Mapmus, spread rapidly, burned for nine days, and razed two thirds of the city. Nero was at Antium when the conflagration started; he hurried to Rome and arrived in time to see the Palatine palaces consumed. The Domus Transitoria, which he had just built to connect his palace with the gardens of Maecenas, was one of the first structures to fall. The Forum and the Capitol escaped, and the region east of the Tiber; throughout the remainder of the city countless homes, temples, precious manuscripts, and works of art were destroyed. Thousands of people lost their lives amid falling tenements in the crowded streets; hundreds of thousands wandered shelterless through the nights, crazed with horror, and listening to rumors that Nero had ordered the fire, was scatter ing incendiaries to renew it, and was watching it from the tower of i\1aecenas while singing his lines on the sack of Troy and accompanying himself on the lyre.* He energetically guided attempts to control or localize the :flames and to provide relief; he ordered all public buildings and the imperial gardens to be thrown open to the destitute; he raised a city of tents on the
Tacirus <::v, 38), Sueto us (''Ner ,'' 38), and Dio Cassius (LXIT, 16) all agree in accusing Ne!o of stanmg and renewing the fire m order to rebuild Rome. There is no proof of his guilt or 1nnoccnce.
CHAP.xm)	THE OTHER  SIDE  OF MONARCHY
Field of Mars, requisitioned food from the surrounding country, and arranged for the feeding of the people.80 He bore without remonstrance the accusatory lampoons and inscriptions of the infuriated populace. According to Tacitus (whose Senatorial prejudice muse always be remembered), he cast about for some scapegoat, and found one in
a race of men detested for their evil practices, and commonly called Chrestiani. The name was derived from Chrestus, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered under Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judea. By that event the sect of which he was the founder received a blow which for a time checked the growth of a dangerous superstition; but it revived soon after, and spread with recruited vigor not only in Judea
... but even in the city of Rome, the common sink into which everything infamous and abominable flows like a torrent from all quarters of the world. Nero proceeded with his usual artifice. He found a set of profligate and abandoned wretches who were induced to confess themselves guilty; and on the evidence of such men a num ber of Christians were convicted, not indeed on clear evidence of having set the city on fire, but rather on account of their sullen hatred of the whole human race. They were put to death with exquisite cruelty, and to their sufferings Nero added mockery and derision. Some were covered with skins of ,vild beasts, and left to be devoured by dogs; others were nailed to crosses; numbers of them were burned alive; many, covered with inflammable matter, were set on fire to serve as torches during the night.... At length the brutality of these measures filled every breast with pity. Humanity relented in favor of the Christians.81
When the debris had been cleared away Nero undertook with visible pleasure the restoration of the city along the lines of his dream. Contribu tions for this purpose were solicited or elicited from every city in the Em pire, and those whose homes had been destroyed were enabled to rebuild out of these funds. The new streets were made wide and straight, the new houses were required to have their fa<;ades and first stories of stone, and had to be sufficiently separated from other buildings to oppose a protective gap to the spread of fire. The springs that flowed beneath the city were channeled
into a reserve water supply in case of future conflagrations. Out of the imperial Treasury Nero built porticoes along the main thoroughfares, pro viding a shaded porch for thousands of homes. Antiquarians and old men missed the picturesque, time-hallowed sights of the old city; but soon all agreed that a healthier, safer, and fairer Rome had risen from the fire.
Nero might have earned forgiveness for his crimes had he now molded his life as he had remade his capital. But Poppaea died in 65, in advanced pregnancy, allegedly from a kick in the stomach; rumor said this had been
282	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.Xlll
Nero's answer to her reproaches for having come home late from the races.82 He grieved bitterly over her passing, for he had eagerly awaited an heir. He had her body embalmed with rare spices, gave her a pompous funeral, and delivered a eulogy over the corpse. Having found a youth, Sporus, who closely resembled Poppaea, he had him castrated, married him by a formal ceremony, and "used him in every way like a woman"; whereupon a wit ex pressed the wish that Nero's father had had such a wife.83 In the same year he began the building of his Golden House; and its extravagant decoration, cost, and extent-covering an area that once had sheltered many thousands of the poor-renewed the resentment of the aristocracy and the suspicions of the plebs.
Suddenly Nero's spies brought him word of a widespread conspiracy to put Calpurnius Piso on the throne (65). His agents seized some minor per sonages in the plot, and by torture or threat drew from them confessions implicating, among others, Lucan the poet and Seneca. Bit by bit the whole plan was laid bare. Nero's revenge was so savage that Rome credited the rumor that he had vowed to wipe out the whole Senatorial class. \Vhen Seneca received the command to kill himself he argued for a while and then complied; L9can likewise opened his veins and died reciting his poetry. Tigellinus, jealous of Petronius' popularity with Nero, bribed one of the epicure's slaves to testify against his master, and induced Nero to order Petronius' death. Petronius died leisurely, opening his veins and then closing them, conversing in his usual light manner with his friends and reading poetry to them; after a walk and a nap he opened his veins again and passed away quietly.84 Thrasea Paetus, the leading exponent of the Stoic philosophy in the Senate, was condemned not for taking part in the plot, but on the general ground of deficient enthusiasm for the Emperor, for not enjoying Nero's singing, and for composing a laudatory life of Cato. His son-in-law Helvidius Priscus was merely banished, but two others were put to death for writing in their praise. Musonius Rufus, Stoic philosopher, and Cassius Longinus, a great jurist, were exiled; two brothers of Seneca-Annaeus Mela, father of Lucan, and Annaeus Novatus, the Gallia who in Athens had freed Saint Paul-were ordered to commit suicide.
Having cleared the lines in his rear, Nero left in 66 to compete in the Olympic games and make a concen tour of Greece. "The Greeks," he re marked, "are the only ones who have an ear for music." 85 At Olympia he drove a quadriga in the races; he was thrown from the car and was nearly crushed to death; restored to his chariot he continued the contest for a while, but gave up before the end of the course. The judges, however, knew an emperor from an athlete and awarded him the crown of victory. Overcome with happiness when the crowd applauded him, he announced
CHAP. XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF  MONARCHY
that thereafter not only Athens and Sparta but all Greece should be free i.e., exempt from any tribute to Rome. The Greek cities accommodated him by running the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games in one year; he responded by taking part in all of them as singer, harpist, actor, or athlete. He obeyed the rules of the various competitions carefully, was all courtesy to his opponents, and gave them Roman citizenship as consola tion for his invariable victories. Amid his tour he received news that Judea was in revolt and that all the \Vest was hot with rebellion. He sighed and continued his itinerary. When he sang in a theater, says Suetonius, "no one was allowed to leave, even for the most urgent reasons. And so it was that some women gave birth there, while some feigned death to be carried out." 86 At Corinth he ordered work started on a canal to cut the Isthmus as Caesar had planned; the task was begun, but was laid aside during the turmoil of the following year. Alarmed by further reports of uprisings and plots, Nero returned to Italy (67), entered Rome in a formal triumph, and showed, as trophies, the 1808 prizes he had won in Greece.


This efflorescence transformed both literature and society. Letters and the arts took on new dignity. Grammarians lectured on living authors; people sang snatches from them in the streets. \Vriters mingled with states men and highborn ladies in luxurious salons such as history would never know again until the flowering of France. The aristocracy became literary, literature became aristocratic. The lusty vigor of Ennius and Plautus, Lucre-
CHAP.XII)	THE  GOLDEN  AGE	235
tius and Catullus, was exchanged for a delicate beauty, or a teasing com plexity, in expression and thought. \Vriters ceased to mingle with the people, ceased therefore to describe their ways or speak their language; a divorce set in between literature and life that finally sucked the sap and spirit out of Latin letters. Forms were set by Greek models, themes by Greek tradition or Augustus' court. Poetry, when it could spare time from Theocritean shepherds or Anacreontic love, was to sing didactically the joys of agriculture, the morality of ancestors, the glory of Rome, and the splendor of its gods. Literature became a handmaiden of statesmanship, a polyphonic sermon calling the nation to Augustan ideas.
Two forces opposed this conscription of letters by the state. One was Horace's hated and "profane crowd," which liked the salty tang and inde pendence of the old satires and plays rather than the curled and perfumed beauty of the new. The other was that demimonde of jollity and sin to which Clodia and Julia belonged. This younger set was in full rebellion against the Julian laws, wanted no moral reform, had its own poets, circles, and norms. In letters as in life the two forces fought each other, crossing in Tibullus and Propertius, matching the chaste piety of Virgil with the obscene audacities of Ovid, crushing two Julias and one poet with exile, and at last exhausting each other in the Silver Age. But the ferment of great events, the releasing leisure of wealth and peace, the majesty of a world acknowledging Rome's sway, overcame the ccrrosion of state subsidies and produced a Golden Age whose liter::ture was the most perfect, in form and utterance, in all the memory of men.
VIRGIL
The most lovable of Romans was hem in 70 B.c. on a farm near Mantua, where the river Mincio wanders slowly toward the Po. The capital would henceforth give birth to very few great Romans; they would come from Italy in the century that was divided by the birth of Christ, and thereafter from the provinces. Perhaps Virgil's veins contained scme Celtic blood, for Mantua had long been peopled by Gauls; technically he w:::s a Gaul by birth, for it was only twenty-one years later that Cisalpine Gaul received the Roman franchise from Caesar. The man who most eloquently sang the majesty and destiny of Rome would never show the hard masculinity of the Roman stock, but would touch Celtic strings of mysticism, tenderness, and grace rare in the Roman breed.
His father saved enough as a coun clerk to buy a farm and raise bees.
236	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XII
In that murmurous quietude the poet spent his boyhood; the full foliage of the well-watered north lingered in his later memory, and he was never really happy away from those fields and streams. At twelve he was sent to school at Cremona, at fourteen to Milan, at sixteen to Rome. There he studied rhetoric and allied subjects under the same man who was to teach Octavian. Probably after this he attended the lectures of Siro the Epicurean at Naples. Virgil tried hard to accept the philosophy of pleasure, but his rural background had ill-equipped him. He seems to have returned north after his education, for in 41 B.c. we find him swimming for life to escape a soldier who seized by force his father':. farm; Octavian and Antony had confiscated it because the region had favored their enemies. Asinius Pollio, the learned governor of Cis:!lpine Gaul, tried to have the farm returned, but failed. He atoned by giving his patronage to the young man, and en couraging him to continue the Eclogues he was composing.
By the year 37 Virgil was drinking in the wine of fame in Rome. The Eclogues ("Selections") had just been published and had been well received; some verses had been recited on the stage by an actress and had been enthusiastically applauded.0 The poems were pastoral sketches in the man ner, sometimes the phrases, of Theocritus, beautiful in style and rhythm, the most melodious hexameters that Rome had yet heard, full of pensive tenderness and romantic love. The youth of the capital had been long enough detached from the soil to idealize country life; everyone was pleased to imagine himself a shepherd moving with his flocks up and down the Apen nine slopes, and breaking his heart with love unreturned.
Realer than these Theocritan ghosts were the rural scenes. Here, too, Virgil idealized, but he did not have to imitate. He had heard the wood man's lusty song and the hovering restlessness of bees; 8 and he had known the emptyhearted despair of the farmer who, like thousands then, had lost his land.9 Above all, he felt intensely the hopes of the age for an end to faction and war. The Sibylline Books had predicted that after the Age of Iron the Golden Age of Saturn would return. \Vhen, in 40 B.c., a son was born to Virgil's patron, Asinius Pollio, the poet announced in his Fourth Eclogue that this birth would usher in utopia:
Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas; magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. lam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna; iam nova progenies, caelo demittitur alto. Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum desinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo, casta fave Lucina; tuus iam regnat Apollo-
CHAP. XII)	THE  GOLDEN  AGE	237
"Now comes the final age [announced] in the Cumean [Sibyl's] chant; the great succession of epochs is born anew. Now the Virgin• returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new race descends from heaven on high.0 chaste Lucina [goddess of births]! smile upon the boy just born, in whose time the race of iron shall first cease, and a race of gold shall arise throughout the world. Thine own Apollo is now king."
Ten years later these prophecies were fulfilled. The iron tools of war were laid aside; a new generation took charge, armed and infatuated with gold. Through the brief remainder of Virgil's life Rome would know no funher turmoil; prosperity and happiness increased, and Augustus was hailed as a savior, though not an Apollo. The quasi-royal coun welcomed the optimism of the poet's verse; 1\faecenas invited him, liked him, and saw in him a popular instrument of Octavian's reforms. This judgment showed insight; for to all appearances Virgil, now thirty-three, was an awkward rustic, shy to the point of stammering, shunning any public place
·where he might be recognized and pointed out, ill at ease in the voluble and aggressive fashionable society of Rome. Besides, even more than Octavian, he was an invalid, suffering from headaches, throat ailments, stomach dis orders, and frequent spitting of blood. Virgil never married, and seems to have felt no more than his Aeneas the full abandon of love. Apparently he consoled himself for a time with the affection of a boy slave; for the rest he was known, at Naples, as "the virgin." 10
Maecenas treated the youth generously, had Octavian restore his farm, and suggested to him some poems glorifying agricultural life. At that moment (37 B.c.) Italy was paying a penalty for letting so much of her soil go to pasturage, orchards, and vines; Sextus Pompey was blocking the import of food from Sicily and Africa, and a shonage of grain threatened another revolution. City life was enervating the young manhood of Italy; from every standpoint the health of the nation seemed to require the restora tion of farming. Virgil readily agreed; he knew rural life; and though too frail now to bear its hardships, he was just the man to paint its attractive features with affectionate memory. He hid himself in Naples, and after seven years of file work emerged with his most perfect poems, the Georgics
-literally "the labor of the land." Maecenas was delighted, and brought Virgil south with him to meet Octavian, then (29 B.c.) returning from his victory over Oeopatra. At the little town of Atella the weary general rested and listened for four enchanted days to the 2000 lines. They fell in with his policies more completely than even Maecenas had foreseen. For he proposed now to disband the larger pan of the immense armies that had
Astraca, or Justice, the last immortal to leave the earth in the legend of the Saturnian age.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XII
won the world for him, to settle his veterans on the land, and at once to quiet them, feed the cities, and preserve the state, through rural toil. From that moment Virgil was free to think only of poetry.
In the Georgics a great artist deals with the noblest of the arts-the cultiva
tion of the earth. Virgil borrows from Hesiod, Aratus, Cato, Varro; but he transforms their rough prose or limping lines into finely chiseled verse. He covers dutifully the diverse branches of husbandry-the variety and treatment of soils, the seasons for sowing and reaping, the culture of the olive and the vine, the raising of cattle, horses, and sheep, and the care of bees. Every aspect of fanning interests and beguiles him; he has to caution himself to get on;
Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus,
Singula dum capti circum vectamur amore-11


CHAP. IX)	CAESAR
Ptolemy XII and his daughter Cleopatra, who were to marry each other and reign together.
Cleopatra was a Macedonian Greek by origin, and more probably blonde than brunette.45 She was not panicularly beautiful; but the grace of her carriage, the vivacity of her body and her mind, the variety of her accom plishments, the suavity of her manners, the very melody of her voice, com bined with her royal position to make her a heady wine even for a Roman general. She was acquainted with Greek history, literature, and philosophy; she spoke Greek, Egyptian, Syrian, and allegedly other languages, well; she added the intellectual fascination of an Aspasia to the seductive abandon of a completely uninhibited woman. Tradition credits her with a treatise on cosmetics and another on the alluring subject of Egyptian measures, weights, and coins.46 She was an able ruler and administrator, effectively promoted Egyptian commerce and industry, and was a competent financier even when making love. vVith these qualities went an Oriental sensuality, an impetuous brutality that dealt out suffering and death, and a political ambi tion that dreamed of empire and honored no code but success. If she had not borne the intemperate blood of the later Ptolemies in her veins she might have achieved her purpose of being the queen of a unified Mediter ranean realm. She saw that Egypt could no longer be independent of Rome and knew no reason why she should not dominate their union.
Caesar was not pleased to learn that Pothinus had banished Cleopatra and now ruled as regent for young Ptolemy. Secretly he sent for her, and secretly she came. To reach him she had herself concealed in some bedding which her attendant Apollodorus carried into Caesar's apartment. The amazed Roman, who never let his victories in the field outnumber his conquests in love, was captivated by her courage and wit. He reconciled her with Ptolemy, and re-established her with her brother on the throne of Egypt. Learning from his barber that Pothinus and the Egyptian general Achillas were plot ting to kill him and slaughter the small force that he had brought with him, he delicately arranged the assassination of Pothinus. Achillas escaped to the Egyptian army and roused it to insurrection; soon all Alexandria was alive with soldiers vowing death to Caesar. The Roman garrison which had been stationed in the city by the Senate was inspired by its officers to join in rising against this treasonable interloper who presumed to settle the suc cession to the throne of the Ptolemies, and even to beget an heir for its future. In this emergency Caesar acted with his customary resourcefulness. He turned the royal palace and the near-by theater into fortresses for himself and his men, and sent for reinforcements from Asia Minor, Syria, and Rhodes. When he saw that his defenseless fleet would soon fall into the hands of his enemies, he ordered it burned; in the fire an uncertain portion
188	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
of the Alexandrian library was consumed. By desperate sallies he captured, lost, and recaptured the island of Pharos, as being essential to the entry of the relief he awaited; in one of these engagements he swam for his life, amid a storm of arrows, when the Egyptians drove him and 400  of his men off the connecting mole into the sea. Thinking the rebels victorious, Ptolemy XII left the royal palace, joined them, and disappeared from history. When reinforcements arrived, Caesar routed the Egyptians and the Senatorial garri son in the Battle of the Nile. He rewarded Cleopatra for her fidelity to him in this crisis by making her younger brother Ptolemy XIII coregent with her, which left her in effect the supreme ruler of Egypt.
It is hard to understand why Caesar remained nine months in Alexandria while hostile armies were being organized against him nea:r Utica, and while Rome, stirred to radical revolt by Caelius and Milo, longed for his fine administrative hand. Perhaps he felt that he deserved a little rest and play after ten years of war. He "often feasted with Cleopatra till daybreak," says Suetonius, "and would have gone through Egypt with her in her royal barge almost to Ethiopia, had not his soldiers threatened mutiny"; 47 they had not all found queans. Perhaps he gallantly waited to share the pains of her confinement. A child was born to her in 47 and was named Caesarion; according to Mark Antony, Caesar acknowledged the boy as his son.48 It is not impossible that she whispered to him the pleasant thought of making himself king, marrying her, and uniting the .Mediterranean world under one bed.
This, however, is conjectural as well as scandalous; nothing but circum stantial evidence supports it. Certainly Caesar flew to action when he learned that Pharnaces, son of Mithridates, had recaptured Pontus, Lesser Armenia, and Cappadocia, and was inviting the East to rise once more against divided Rome. His wisdom in "pacifying" Spain and Gaul before meeting Pompey was now apparent; had the \Vest revolted at one time with the East the Empire would probably have broken up, the "barbarians" would have moved southward, and Rome might never have known an Augustan age. Re-forming his three legions, Caesar set out in June of 47, marched with characteristic speed along the coast of Egypt through Syria and Asia Minor into Pontus, defeated Pharnaces at Zela (August z), and sent to a friend at Rome the laconic report, Veni,vidi, vici-"I came, I saw, I conquered." 49 At Tarentum (September z6) he was met by Cicero, who asked forgive ness for himself and other conservatives. Caesar consented amiably. He was shocked to find that during his twenty months' absence from Rome the Civil War had become a social revolution: that Cicero's son-in-law Dola bella had joined forces with Caelius, and had proposed to the Assembly a bill canceling all debts; that Antony had let loose his soldiers upon Dolabella's
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR
anned proletaires, and 800 Romans had been killed in the Forum. Caelius, as praetor, had recalled Milo; together they had organized an army in southern Italy and had invited the slaves to unite with them in a thorough going revolution. They had met with small success, but their spirit was in the air. At Rome the radicals were celebrating the memory of Catiline and again garlanding his tomb. Meanwhile the Pompeian army in Africa had grown as large as the one that had been beaten at Pharsalus. Pompey's son Sextus had organized a new army in Spain, and the grain supply of Italy was once more hanging in the balance. Such was the situation in October, 47, when Caesar reached Rome and Calpumia, bringing with him Cleopatra, her boy husband-brother, and Caesarion.
In the few months permitted him between campaigns he set about restor ing order. Having been reappointed dictator, he appeased the radicals for a moment by repealing the last of Sulla's laws and canceling for a year all rents belo"\v 2000 sesterces in Rome; at the same time he tried to comfort the conservatives by making Marcus Brutus governor of Cisalpine Gaul, assuring Cicero and Atticus that he would abet no war against property, and ordering the re-erection of the statues of Sulla, which the proletaires had knocked down. \Vhen he turned his thoughts to the Pompeians he was discouraged to hear that his most trusted legions were in revolt because of long-overdue pay and were refusing to embark for Africa. As the Treasury was nearly empty, he raised funds by confiscating and selling the property of rebel aristocrats; he had learned, he said, that soldiers depend upon money, money upon power, and power upon soldiers.50 He suddenly ap peared among the rebellious legions, called them together, and quietly told them that they were released from service and might go to their homes; he added that he would make up all arrears to them when he had triumphed in Africa "with other soldiers." "At this expression," says Appian, "shame seized upon them all, that they were abandoning their commander in this moment when enemies surrounded him on every side. . . . They cried out that they repented of their revolt, and besought him to keep them in his service." 51 He yielded with charming reluctance, and sailed with them for Africa.
At Thapsus, on April 6, 46, he met the combined forces of Metellus Scipio, Cato, Labienus, and Juba I, the Numidian king. Again he lost the first encounter; again he re-formed his lines, attacked, and won. His blood crazed soldiers, blaming his clemency at Pharsalus for having to fight this second battle, slaughtered 10,000 of the 80,000 Pompeians, giving no quarter; they did not propose to meet these men again. Juba committed suicide-; Scipio fled and died in an engagement at sea; Cato with a small division escaped to Utica. When the officers wished to defend the city against
190	CAESAR  AND  CH RIST	(CHAP. IX
Caesar, Cato persuaded them that it was impossible. He provided funds for those who planned flight, but advised his son to submit to Caesar. He himself rejected both courses. He spent the evening in philosophical discussion; then he retired to his room and read Plato's Phaedo. Suspecting that he would kill himself, his friends took his sword from his bedside. When they had relaxed their vigil he compelled his servant to bring back the weapon. For a while he feigned sleep; then suddenly he took the sword and plunged it into his abdomen. His friends rushed in; a physician put back the extruding intestines and sewed and bandaged the wound. As soon as they had left the room Cato removed the bandage, tore open the wound, pulled out his entrails, and died.
When Caesar came he mourned that he had no chance to pardon Cato; he could only pardon the son. The Uticans gave the dead Stoic a magnificent funeral, as if knowing that they were burying a republic almost five cen turies old.
THE STATESMAN
After appomtmg Sallust governor of Numidia, and reorgamzmg the provinces of Africa, Caesar in the fall of 46 returned to Rome. The fright-
	ened Senate, recognizing the advent of monarchy, voted him the dictatorship for ten years, and such a triumph as Rome had never seen before. He paid each of his soldiers 5000 Attic drachmas ($3000), much more than he had promised them. He feasted the citizens at 22,000 tables, and for their amuse ment provided a sham sea battle involving 10,000 men. E:irly in 45 he left for Spain, and at Munda defeated the last Pompeian army. When, in October, he reached Rome, he found all Italy in chaos. Oligarchic misrule and a century of revolution had disordered agriculture, industry, finance, and trade. The exhaustion of the provinces, the hoarding of capital, and the precariousness of investment had disturbed the flow of money. Thousands of estates had fallen into ruin; 100,000 men had been drawn from production into war; peasants beyond number had been driven by the competition of foreign grain or latifundia slaves to join the proletariat in the towns and listen hungrily to promising demagogues. The surviving aristocracy, un melted by Caesar's clemency, plotted against him in their clubs and palaces. He appealed to them in the Senate to recognize the necessity of dictatorship, and to co-operate with him in a healing reconstruction. They scorned the advances of the usurper, denounced the presence of Cleopatra as his guest in Rome, and whispered that he was planning to make himself king and move the seat of the Empire to Alexandria or Ilium.
Caesar alone, therefore. though prematurely old at fifty-five, set himself
./
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR
with Roman energy to remake the Roman state. He knew that his victories would be meaningless if he could not build something better than the wreckage that he had cleared away. "\Vhen, in 44, his dictatorship for ten years was extended for life, he did not much exaggerate the difference, though he could hardly foresee that in five months he would be dead. The Senate heaped adulation and titles upon him, perhaps to make him odious to a people that hated the very name of king. It let him wear the laurel wreath, with which he hid his baldness, and carry even in peace the imperator's powers. Through these he controlled the Treasury, and as pontif ex maxinms, the priesthoods; as consul he could propose and execute laws; as tribune his person was inviolable; as censor he could make or unmake senators. The assemblies kept the right to vote on proposed measures, but Caesar's lieutenants, Dolabella and Antony, managed the assemblies, which in general favored his policies. Like other dictators he sought to base his power upon popularity with the people.
He subordinated the Senate almost to the role of an advisory council. He enlarged it from 600 to 900 members and permanently transformed it with 400 new appointees. i\fany of these were Roman businessmen; many were leading citizens of Italian or provincial cities; some had been cen turions, soldiers, or sons of slaves. The patricians were alarmed to see the chieftains of conquered Gaul enter the Senate and join the rulers of the Empire; even the wags of the capital resented this and circulated a •satiric couplet:
Gallos Caesar in trizmzphum ducit, idem in curicrm;
Galli braccas deposuerunt, latum clavum smnpserunt-


Caesar entered Rome (March 16) unresisted and unarmed, having left his troops in near-by towns. He proclaimed a general amnesty and restored municipal administration and social order. The tribunes convoked the Sen ate; Caesar asked it to name him dictator, but it refused; he asked it to send envoys to Pompey to negotiate peace, but it refused. He sought funds from the national Treasury; the tribune Lucius .Metellus barred his way, but yielded when Caesar remarked that it was harder for him to utter threats than to execute them. Henceforth he made free use of the state's money; but with unscrupulous impartiality he deposited in the Treasury the booty from his later c mpaigns. Then he returned to his soldiers, and prepared to meet the three annies that the Pompeians were organizing in Greece, Africa, and Spain.
To secure the grain supply upon which Italy's life depended, he sent the impetuous Curio with two legions to take Sicily. Cato surrendered the island and withdrew to Africa; Curio pursued him with the recklessness of Regu lus, gave battle prematurely, was defeated, and died in action, mourning not his own death, but the injury he had done to Caesar. Meanwhile Caesar had led an army to Spain, partly to ensure the renewal of its grain exports to Italy, partly to forestall a rear attack when he marched to meet Pompey. In Spain, as in Gaul, he made serious blunders in strategy.32 For a time his outnumbered army faced starvation and defeat; but, as usual, he redeemed himself by brillia t improvisation and personal bravery.33 By altering the course of a river he turned blockade into counterblockade; he waited patiently for the entrapped army to surrender, though his troops fretted for
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
action; at last the Pompeians gave in, and all Spain came over to Caesar (August, 49). Returning toward Italy by land, he found his way blocked at Marseilles by an army under Lucius Domitius, whom he had captured and released at Corfinium. Caesar took the town after a hard siege, reorganized the administration of Gaul, and by December was back in Rome.
His political position had been strengthened by this campaign, which had reassured the worried bellies of the capital. The Senate now named him dictator, but he surrendered that title after being elected one of the two consuls for 48. Finding Italy in a credit crisis due to the fact that the hoard ing of currency had depressed prices, and debtors were refusing to pay in dear money what they had borrowed in cheap money, he decreed that debts might be paid in goods valued by state arbitrators at prewar prices; this, he thought, was "the most suitable way both of maintaining the honor of the debtors and of removing or diminishing the fear of that general repudia
tion of debts which is apt to follow war." 31 It is a revelation of how slowly
reform had moved in Rome that he was compelled again to forbid enslave ment for debt. He permitted the interest already paid on debts to be deducted from the principal, and limited interest to one per cent per month. These measures satisfied most creditors, who had feared confiscation; correspond ingly they disappointed the radicals, who had hoped that Caesar would continue Catiline by abolishing all debts and redividing the land. He dis tributed corn to the needy, canceled all sentences of banishment except Milo's, and pardoned all returning aristocrats. No one thanked him for his moderation. The forgiven conservatives resumed their plotting against his life; and while he was facing Pompey in Thessaly the radicals abandoned him for Caelius, who promised them a complete abolition of debts, the confiscation of large properties, and the reallotment of all land.
Near the end of 49 Caesar joined the troops and fleet that his aides had collected at Brundisium. A winter crossing of the Adriatic by an army was in those days unheard of; the twelve vessels at his disposal could carry over only a third of his 60,000 men at one time; and Pompey's superior squadrons patrolled all islands and harbors along the opposite coast. Nevertheless, Caesar set sail and crossed to Epirus with 20,000 men. On their way back to Italy his ships were wrecked. Wondering what delayed the remainder of his army, Caesar tried to recross in a small skiff. The sailors rowed out against the surf and were nearly drowned. Caesar, dauntless amid their terror, encouraged them with the possibly legendary exhortation: "Fear not; you carry Caesar and his fortune." 35 But ,vind and waYe tossed the boat back upon the shore, and Caesar had to abandon the attempt. i\lean while Pompey, with 40,000 men, seized Dyrrhachium and its rich stores; then, with the indecision that marked his obese years, he failed to attack
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR	185
Caesar's depleted and starving force. During this delay Mark Antony gath ered another fleet and brought over the rest of Caesar's army.
Ready now to join battle, but still loath to turn Roman against Roman, Caesar sent an envoy to Pompey proposing that both leaders should lay down their commands. Pompey gave no reply.* Caesar attacked and was repulsed; but Pompey failed to follow his victory with pursuit. Against Pompey's advice his officers put all captives to death, while Caesar spared his 37-a contrast that raised the morale of Caesar's troops and lowered that of Pompey's. Caesar's men begged him to punish them for the cowardice they had shown in this their first fight against Roman legions. When he refused, they besought him to lead them back to battle; but he thought it wiser to retreat into Thessaly and let them rest.
Pompey now made the decision that cost him his life. Afranius advised him to return and recapture undefended Italy; but the majority of his coun selors urged him to pursue and destroy Caesar. The aristocrats in Pompey's camp exaggerated the victory at Dyrrhachium and supposed that the great issue had there been decided. Cicero, who had finally joined them, was shocked to hear them dispute as to their respective shares in the coming restoration, and to see with what luxury they lived in the midst of war their meals served on silver plate, their tents comfonable with carpets, bril liant with hangings, garlanded with flowers.
Excepting Pompey himself [Cicero wrote], the Pompeians carried on the war with such rapacity, and breathed such principles of cruelty in their conversation, that I could not contemplate even their success without horror    There was nothing good among them but their
cause.... A proscription was proposed not only individually but collectively.... Lentulus had promised himself Hortensius' house, Caesar's gardens, and Baiae.38
Pompey would have preferred a more Fabian strategy, but taunts of cow ardice prevailed upon him, and he gave orders to march.
At Pharsalus, August 9, 48, the decisive battle was fought to the bitter end. Pompey had 48,000 infantry, 7000 horse; Caesar had 22,000 and 1000.39 "Some few of the noblest Romans," says Plutarch, "standing as spectators outside the battle   could not but reflect to what a pass private ambition
had brought the Empire.... Thwheole flower and strength of the same city, meeting here in collision with itself, offered plain proof how blind and mad a thing human nature is when passion is aroused." 40 Near relatives, even brothers, fought in the opposed armies. Caesar bade his men spare all Romans who should surrender; as to the young aristocrat Marcus Brutus,
Our only authority for this embassy is Caesar.36
186	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
he said, they were to capture him without injuring him, or, if this proved impossible, they were to let him escape.41 The Pompeians were overwhelmed by superior leadership, training, and morale; 1 5,ooo of them were killed or wounded, 20,000 surrendered, the remainder fled. Pompey tore the insignia of command from his clothing and took flight like the rest. Caesar tells us that he lost but 200 men 42-which casts doubt upon all his books. His army was amused to see the tents of the defeated so elegantly adorned, and their tables laden with the feast that was to celebrate their victory. Caesar ate Pompey's supper in Pompey's tent.
Pompey rode all night to Larissa, thence to the sea, and took ship to Alexandria. At Mytilene, where his wife joined him, the citizens wished him to stay; he refused courteously, and advised them to submit to the con queror without fear, for, he said, "Caesar was a man of great goodness and clemency." 43 Brutus also escaped to Larissa, but there he dallied and wrote to Caesar. The victor expressed great joy on hearing that he was safe, readily forgave him, and at his request forgave Cassius. To the nations of the East, which-controlled by the upper classes-had supported Pompey, he was likewise lenient.,He distributed Pompey's hoards of grain among the starving population of Greece, and to the Athenians asking pardon he replied with a smile of reproof: "How often will the glory of your ancestors save you from self-destruction?" 44
Probably he had been warned that Pompey hoped to resume the contest with the army and resources of Egypt, and the forces that Cato, Labienus, and Metellus Scipio were organizing at Utica. But when Pompey reached Alexandria, Pothinus, eunuch vizier of young Ptolemy XII, ordered his servants to kill Pompey, presumably in expectation of reward from Caesar. The general was stabbed to death as he stepped upon the shore, while his wife looked on in helpless terror from the ship in ,vhich they had come.
\Vhen Caesar arrived, Pothinus' men presented him with the severed head. Caesar turned away in horror and wept at this new proof that by diverse means men come to the same end. He established his quarters in the royal palace of the Ptolemies and set himself to regulate the affairs of the ancient kingdom.
CAESAR A:!\"'D CLEOPATRA
Since the death of Ptolemy VI (145) Egypt h::d rapidly decayed. Her kings were no longer able to maintain social order or national freedom; the Roman Senate increasingly dictated their policy, and garrisoned Alexandria with Roman troops. By the will of Ptolemy XI, whom Pompey and Gabinius had established on the throne, the government had descended to his son