nothing.
Toward the end of the period a movement arises for the emancipation
of woman. Euripides defends the sex with brave speeches and timid innu-
CHAP. XIII)  THE  MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE  ATHENIANS    307
endoes; Aristophanes makes fun of them with boisterous indecency. The women go to the heart of the matter and begin to compete with the hetairai in making themselves as attractive as the progress of chemistry will permit. "What sensible thing are we women capable of doing?" asks Cleonica in Aristophanes' Lysistrata. "We do nothing but sit around with our paint and lipstick and transparent gowns, and all the rest of it."118 From
411 onward female roles become more prominent in Athenian drama, and reveal the growing escape of women from the solitude to which they have been confined.
Through it all the real influence of woman over man continues, making her subjection largely unreal. The greater eagerness of the male gives woman an advantage in Greece as elsewhere. "Sir," says Samuel Johnson, "nature has given woman so much power that the law cannot afford to give her more."'" Sometimes this natural sovereignty is enhanced by a substantial dowry, or an industrious tongue, or uxorious affection; more often it is the result of beauty, or the bearing and rearing of' fine children, or the slow fusion of souls in the crucible' of a common experience and task. An age that can portray such gentle characters as Antigone, Alcestis, Iphigenia, and Andromache, and such heroines as Hecuba, Cassandra, and Medea, could not be unaware of the highest and the deepest in woman. The average Athenian loves his wife, and will not always try to conceal it; the funeral stelae reveal surprisingly the tenderness of mate for mate, and of parents for children, in the intimacy of the home. The Greek Anthol ogy is vivid with erotic verse, but it contains also many a touching epigram to a beloved comrad . "In this stone," says one epitaph, "Marathonis laid Nicopolis, and bedewed the marble chest with tears. But it was of no avail. What profit hath a man whose wife is gone, and who is left solitary on earth? ,,ua
THEHOME
The Greek family, like the Inda-European household in general, 1s composed of the father, the mother, sometimes a "second wife," their unmarried daugh ters, their sons, their slaves, and their sons' wives and children and slaves. It remains to the end the strongest institution in Greek civilization, for both in agriculture and in industry it is the unit and instrument of economic produc tion. The power of the father in Attica is extensive, but much narrower than in Rome. He can expose the newborn child, sell the labor of his minor sons and unwedded daughters, give his daughters in marriage, and, under certain conditions, appoint another husband for his widow.:ua But he cannot, in Athe-
308	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XIII
nian law, sell the persons of his children; and each son, on marrying, escapes from parental authority, sets up his own home, and becomes an independent member of the gene.
The Greek house is unpretentious. The exterior is seldom more than a stout blank wall with a narrow doorway, dumb witnesses to the insecurity of Greek life. The material is sometimes stucco, usually sun-baked brick. In the city the houses are crowded together in narrow streets; often they rise to two stories, occasionally they are tenements housing several families; but nearly every citi zen owns an individual home. Dwellings in Athens are small till Alcibiades sets a fashion of magnificence; there is a democratic taboo, reinforced by aristo cratic precaution, against display; and the Athenian, living for the most part in the open air, does not endow the home with the significance and affection that it receives in colder zones. A rich house may have a colonnaded porch facing the street, but this is highly exceptional. Windows are a luxury, and are con fined to the upper story; they have no panes, but may be closed with shutters, or scre(!ned with lattices against the sun. The entrance door is ordinarily made of double leaves, turning upon vertical pivots running into the threshold and the lintel. On the door of many well-to-do houses is a metal knocker, often in the form of a ring in a lion's mouth.217 The entrance hallway, except in the poorer dwellings, leads into an aule, or uncovered court, commonly paved with stones. Around the court may run a columned portico; in the center may be an altar, or a cistern, or both, perhaps also adorned with columns, and paved with a mosaic floor. Light and air come to the house chiefly through this court, for upon it open nearly all the rooms; to pass from one room to another it is usually necessary to enter the portico or the court. In the shade and privacy of the court and the portico much of the family's life is lived, and much
of its work is done.
Gardens are rare in the city, and are confined to small areas in the court or behind the house. Country gardens are more spacious and numerous; but the scarcity of rain in summer, and the cost of irrigation, make gardens a luxury in Attica. The average Greek has no Rousseauan sensitivity to nature; his moun tains are still too troublesome to be beautiful, though his poets, despite its dangers, intone many paeans to the sea. He is not sentimental about nature, so much as animistically imaginative; he peoples the woods and streams of his country with gods and sprites, and thinks of nature as not a landscape but a Valhalla; he names his mountains and rivers from the divinities that inhabit them; and instead of painting nature directly he draws or carves symbolic images of the deities that in his poetic theology give it life. Not till Alexander's armies bring back Persian ways and gold will the Greek build himself a pleasure gar den or "paradise." Nevertheless, flowers are loved in Greece as much as any where, and gardens and florists supply them all the year round. Flower girls
CHAP. XIII)  THE  MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE  ATHENIANS   309
peddle roses, violets, hyacinths, narcissi, irises, myrtles, lilacs, crocuses, and anemones from house to house. Women wear flowers in their hair, dandies wear them behind the ear; and on festal occasions both sexes may come forth with flower garlands, lei-like, around the neck.w
The interior of the house is simple. Among the poor the floors are of hard ened earth; as income rises this basis may be covered with plaster, or paved with flat stones or with small round stones set in cement, as in the Near East im memorially; and all this may be covered with reed mats or rugs. The brick walls are plastered and whitewashed. Heating, which is needed for only three months of the year, is furnished by a brazier whose smoke has to find a way out through the door to the court. Decoration is minimal; but at the end of the fifth century the homes of the rich may have pillared halls, walls paneled with marble or painted imitations of it, mural paintings and tapestries, and ceiling arabesques. Furniture is scanty in the average home-some chairs, some chests, a few tables, a bed. Cushions take the place of upholstery on chairs, but the seats of the rich may be carefully carved, and inlaid with silver, tortoise, or ivory. Chests serve as both closets and chairs. Tables are small, and usually three-legged, whence their name trapezai; they are brought in and removed with the food, and are hardly sed for other purposes; writing is done upon the knee. Couches and beds are favorite objects for adornment, being often inlaid or elaborately carved. Leather thongs stretched across the bedstead serve as a spring; there are mattresses and pillows, and embroidered covers, and com monly a raised headrest. Lamps may be hung from the ceiling, or placed upon stands, or take the form of torches elegantly wrought.
The kitchen is equipped with a great variety of iron, bronze, and earthen ware vessels; glass is a rare luxury, not made in Greece. Cooking is done over an open fire; stoves are a Hellenistic innovation. Athenian meals are simple, like the Spartan and unlike the Boeotian, Corinthian, or Sicilian; but when hon ored guests are expected it is customary to engage a professional cook, who is always male. Cooking is a highly developed art, with many texts and heroes; some Greek cooks are as widely known as the latest victor in the Olympic games. To eat alone is considered barbarous, and table manners are looked upon as an index of a civilization's development. Women and boys sit at meals before small tables; men recline on couches, two on each. The family eats to gether when alone; if male guests come, the women of the family retire to the gynaeceum. Attendants remove the sandals or wash the feet of the guests before the latter recline, and offer them water to cleanse their hands; some times they anoint the heads of the guests with fragrant oils. There are no knives or forks, but there are spoons; solid food is eaten with the fingers. Dur ing the meal the fingers are cleaned with scraps or crumbs of bread; after it with water. Before dessert the attendants fill the cup of each guest from a
310	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XIII
krater, or mixing bowl, in which wine has been diluted with water. Plates are of earthenware; silver plate appears as the fifth century ends. Epicures grow in number in the fourth century; one Pithyllus has coverings made for his tongue and fingers so that he may eat food as hot as he likes.:ue There are a few vegetarians, whose guests make the usual jokes and complaints; one diner :flees from a vegetarian feast for fear that he will be offered hay for dessert.uo
Drinking is as important as eating. After the deipnon, or dinner, comes the symposion, or drinking together. At Sparta as well as at Athens there are drinking clubs whose members become so attached to one another that such organizations become potent political instruments. The procedure at banquets is complicated, and philosophers like Xenocrates and Aristotle think it desirable to set down laws for them.= The floor, upon which uneaten material has been thrown, is swept clean after the meal; perfumes are passed around, and much wine. The guests may then dance, not in pairs or with the other sex (for usually only males are invited), but in groups; or they may play games like kottabos;• or they may match poems, witticisms, or riddles, or watch profes sional performers like the female acrobat in Xenophon's Symposium, who tosses twelve hoops at once and then dances somersaults through a hoop "set all around with upright swords."m Flute girls may appear, play, sing, dance, and love as arranged for. Educated Athenians prefer, now and then, a symposium of conversation, conducted in an orderly manner by a symposiarch chosen by a throw of the dice to act as chairman. The guests take care not to break up the talk into small groups, which usually means small talk; they keep the con versation general, and listen, as courteously as their vivacity will permit, to each man in tum. So elegant a discourse as that which Plato offers us is doubtless the product of his brilliant imagination; but probably Athens has known dialogues as lively as his, perhaps profounder; and in any case it is Athenian society that suggests and provides the background. In that exciting atmosphere of free wits the Athenian mind is formed.
OLDAGE
Old age is feared and mourned beyond wont by the life-loving Greeks. Even here, however, it has its consolations; for as the used-up body is returned like worn currency to the mint, it has the solace of seeing, before it is consumed, the fresh new life through which it cheats mortality. It is true that Greek his tory reveals cases of selfish carelessness or coarse insolence towards the old. Athenian society, commercial, individualistic, and innovating, tends to be un kind to old age; respect for years goes with a religious and conservative society
Th.is consisted in throwing liquid from a cup so that it would strike some small object placeoi t a distance,
CHAP. XIII)  THE  MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS    311


byrejecting Judaism in the name of Christ; at every moment he was an apostle. Shocked by Stephen's disrespect for the Law, he joined in killing him, and led the first persecution of Christians in Jerusalem. Hearing that the new faith had made converts in Damascus, he obtained authorization from the high priest to go there, arrest all "who belonged to the Way," and bring them in chains to Jerusalem (A.D. 31?).30 It may be that the fervor of his persecution was due to secret doubts; he could be cruel, but not with out remorse; possibly the vision of Stephen stoned to death, perhaps even some youthful glimpse of Golgotha, troubled his memory and his journey, and fevered his imagination. As his party neared Damascus, says the Acts,
a sudden light flashed upon him from heaven, and he fell to the ground. Then he heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" "Who are you, sir?" he asked. "I am Jesus,"... said the voice. . .. Saul's fellow-travelers stood speechless, for they heard the voice but could not see anyone. When he got up from the ground and opened his eyes he could see nothing. They had to take him by the hand and lead him into Damascus. For three days he could not see.31
No one can say what natural processes underlay this pivotal experience The fatigue of a long journey, the strength of the desert sun, perhaps a stroke of heat lightning in the sky, acting by accumulation upon a frail and possibly epileptic body, and a mind tortured by doubt and guilt, may have brought to culmination the half-conscious process by which the pas sionate denier became the ablest preacher of Stephen's Christ. His Greek environment in Tarsus had spoken of a Soter or Saviour who redeemed mankind; his Jewish lore had told of a Messiah to come; how could he be sure that this mysterious and fascinating Jesus, for whom men were ready to die, was not the promised one? \Vhen, weak and still blind at the end of his journey, he felt upon his face the kindly, soothing hands of a convened Jew, "something like scales dropped from his eyes, and his sight was re stored; he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, regained his strength." 32 A few days later he entered the synagogues of Damascus, and told their congregations that Jesus was the Son of God.
The Missionary
The governor of Damascus, urged by the offended Jews, issued an order for Paul's arrest; Paul's new friends lowered him in a basket over the city walls. For three years, he tells us, he preached Christ in the hamlets of Arabia. Returning to Jerusalem, he won the forgiveness and friendship of Peter, and
582	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXVll
lived with him for a while. Most of the apostles distrusted him, but Barnabas, himself a recent convert, gave him a cordial hand, and persuaded the Jerusa lem church to commission its persecutor as a bearer of the Good News that the Messiah had come and would soon establish the Kingdom. The Greek speaking Jews to whom he brought the Gospel tried to kill him, and the apostles, perhaps fearing that his ardor would endanger them all, sent him to Tarsus.
For eight years he was lost to history in his native city; and perhaps again he felt the influence of the mystic salvation theology popular among the Greeks. Then Barnabas came and asked his aid in ministering to the church at Antioch. Working together (43-44?), they made so many converts that Antioch soon led all other cities in the number of its Christians. There for the first time the "Believers," "Disciples," "Brethren," or "Saints," as they had called themselves, received from the pagans, perhaps in scorn, the name Christianoi-followers of the Messiah or Anointed One. There too, for the first time, gentiles (i.e., people of the gentes or nations) were won to the new faith. Most of these were "God-f earers," predominantly women, who had already accepted the monotheism, and in some part the ritual, of the Jews.
The Antioch converts were not as poor as those in Jerusalem; a con siderable minority belonged to the merchant class. With the enthusiasm of a youthful and growing movement, they raised a fund to spread the Gospel. The elders of the church "laid their hands upon" Barnabas and Paul, and sent them out on what history, unduly belittling Barnabas, calls the "first missionary journey of Saint Paul" (45-47?). They sailed to Cyprus, and met with encouraging success among the many Jews of that island. From Paphos they took ship to Perga in Pamphylia, and traveled over dan gerous mountain roads to Antioch in Pisidia. The synagogue gave them a courteous hearing; but when they began to preach to gentiles as well, the orthodox Jews persuaded the municipal officers to banish the missionaries. Similar difficulties developed at lconium; and at Lystra Paul was stoned, dragged out of the town, and left for dead. Still "full of the joy of the Holy Spirit," Paul and Barnabas carried the Gospel to Derbe. Then they returned by the same route to Perga, and sailed to Syrian Antioch. There they found themselves faced by the most crucial problem in the history of Christianity. For some leading disciples of Jerusalem, hearing that the two preachers were accepting gentile converts without requiring circumcision, had come to Antioch "to teach the brethren that unless they were circumcized as Moses prescribed, they could not be saved." 33 To the Jew circumcision was not so much a ritual of health as a holy symbol of his people's ancient covenant with God; and the Christian Jew was appalled at the thought of breaking
CHAP.XXVII)	THE  APOSTLES
that covenant. For their part Paul and Barnabas realized that if these emis saries had their way, Christianity would never be accepted by any signifi cant number of gentiles; it would remain "a Jewish heresy" (as Heine was to call it), and would fade out in a century. They went down to Jerusalem (50?) and fought the matter out with the apostles, nearly all of whom were still faithful worshipers in the Temple. James was reluctant to consent; Peter defended the two missionaries; finally it was agreed that pagan prose lytes should be required only to abstain from immorality and from the eating of sacrificial or strangled animals.34 Apparently Paul eased the way by promising financial support for the impoverished community at Jerusa lem from the swelling funds of the Antioch church.35
The issue, however, was too vital to be so easily laid. A second group of orthodox Jewish Christians came from Jerusalem to Antioch, found Peter eating with gentiles, and persuaded him to separate himself, with the con vened Jews, from the uncircumcized proselytes. We do not know Peter's side of this episode; Paul tells us that "he withstood Peter to his face" at Antioch,36 and accused him of hypocrisy; perhaps Peter had merely wished, like Paul, to be "all things to all men."
Probably in the year 50 Paul left on his second missionary journey. He had quarreled with Barnabas, who now disappeared from history in his native Cyprus. Revisiting his churches in Asia Minor, Paul attached to himself at Lystra a young disciple named Timothy, whom he came to love with a profound affection that had long been starved for an object. Together they went through Phrygia and Galatia as far north as Alexandria Troas. Here Paul made the acquaintance of Luke, an uncircumcized proselyte to Judaism, a man of good mind and heart, probably the author of the Third Gospel and the Book of Acts-both designed to soften the conflicts that from the beginning marked the history of Christianity. From Troas Paul, Timothy, and another aide, Silas, sailed to .Macedonia, for the first time touching European soil. At Philippi, where Antony had conquered Brutus, Paul and Silas were arrested as disturbers of the peace, were scourged and jailed, but were freed on the discovery that they were Roman citizens. Pass ing on to Thessalonica, Paul went to the synagogue, and for three Sabbaths preached to the Jews. A few were convinced, and organized a church; others roused the town against Paul on the ground that he was proclaiming a new king; and his friends had to spirit him away to Beraea during the night.There "the Jews received the message with great eagerness"; but the Thessalonians came to denounce Paul as an enemy of Judaism, and he took ship for Athens (51?), discouraged and alone.
Here, in the heart of pagan religion, science, and philosophy, he found himself quite friendless. There were few Jews to give him a hearing; he
584	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVII
had to take his stand in the market place, like any modern haranguer of city crowds, and compete with a dozen rivals for passing ears. Some lis teners argued with him; some laughed at him, and asked, "vVhat is this rag picker trying to make out?" 37 Several were interested, and led him up to the Areopagus, or Hill of Mars, for a quieter hearing. He told them how he had noted, in Athens, an altar inscribed "To an Unknown God"; this dedication, which probably expressed the desire of the donors to thank, appease, or enlist the aid of a god of whose name they were not certain, Paul interpreted as a confession of ignorance concerning the nature of God. He proceeded with high eloquence:
Whom therefore ye worship though ye know him not, him I de clare unto you. God, who made the world and all things therein
. . . dwells not in temples made with hands.	It is he that giveth
life and breath unto all	And he made of one blood all the nations
of mankind	that they should seek God, if haply they might feel
after him, though he be not far from us; for in him we live and move and have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said.•
...  Forasmuch, then, as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by the art and device of man. Howbeit, those past times of ignorance God hath overlooked; but now he commandeth all men everywhere to repent, because he hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world ...  by that Man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all, in that he hath raised him from the dead.38
It was a brave effort to reconcile Christianity with Greek philosophy.t Nevertheless, it impressed only a few; the Athenians had heard too many ideas to have much enthusiasm for any. Paul left the city in disappointment and went to Corinth, where commerce had gathered a substantial com munity of Jews. He stayed there eighteen months (51-52?), earning his living as a tentmaker, and preaching every Sabbath in the synagogue. The leader of the synagogue was converted, and so many others that the alarmed Jews indicted Paul before the Roman governor, Gallio, on the charge of "trying to induce people to worship God in ways that are against the law." Gallio replied: "As it is only a question of words and titles and your own law, you must look after it yourselves; I will not decide such matters"; and he disinissed them from the coun. The two parties fell to blows, "but Gallio paid no attention." 3ll Paul offered his gospel to the gentiles of Corinth, and made many converts among them. Christianity may have seemed to
Paul quotes the line from Cleamhes' Hy11m to Zeus, or from Aratus' Phainomena.
t Perhaps we should credit the speech to the Hellenized author of the Acts.


The book of Joshua son of Sirach, which we know as Ecclesiasticus, may be 2s bte 2s this period; it is one of many Apocrypha-"hidden" or unau-
The  Talmud attributes to Hillel's reply the additional words, "This is all the Law, the rest is commentary." 36
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXV
thentic compositions not accepted into the Jewish canon of the Old Testa ment; rich in beauty and wisdom, it did not deserve to be excluded from the company of Ecclesiastes and Job. In its twenty-fourth chapter we find again, as in the eighth chapter of Proverbs, the doctrine of the Logos or Incarnate Word: "Wisdom the first product of God, created from the beginning of the world." Between r 30 B.c. and A.D. 40 an Alexandrian Jew-or a number of Hellenistic Jews-published a Book of the \Visdom of Solomon, which sought, like Philo, to harmonize Judaism and Platonism, and called Hellen izing Jews back to the Law in prose as noble as any since Isaiah. A lesser work, the Psalms of Solomon {ca. 50 B.c.), is rich in anticipation of a Re deemer for Israel.
This hope of salvation from Rome and earthly suffering through the coming of a divine Redeemer rings through nearly all the Jewish literature of this age. Many productions took the form of apocalypses or revelations, whose aim was to make the past intelligible and forgivable by presenting it as a prelude to a triumphant future revealed to some seer by God. The Book of Daniel, written about 165 B.C. to encourage Israel against Antiochus Epiphanes, was still circulating among Jews ,\-·ho could not believe that Yahveh would let them long remain under pagan domination. The Book of Enoch, probably the work of several authors between 170 and 66 B.c., took
the form of visions vouchsafed to the patriarch who, in Genesis (v, 24), had "walked with God." It recounted the fall of Satan and his cohons, the con
sequent intrusion of evil and suffering into human life, the redemption of mankind by a Messiah, and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. About 150 n.c. Jewish writers began to publish Sibylline Oracles, in which various sibyls or prophe_tesses were re resented as defending Judaism against pagan ism and foretellmg the final victory of the Jews over their enemies.
The idea of the saving god had probably come to western Asia from Persia and Babylonia.38 In the Zoroastrian creed all history and life were represented as a war between the holy forces of light and the diabolical powers of darkness; in the en? a savior woul? com:-Shaosyanr or Mirhras to judge all men and establish an everlastmg reign of righteousness and peace: To many Jews the rule of Rome seemed part of he transient victory
of ev . ,; ef.de ounced the ,fee , _tr,:achery brutality, and idolatry of "gentile c1vilizanon and th - atheistic hedornsm of an epicurean world.
According to the Book of \"\·1sdom
the ungodly said: Our life is short and tedious, and in the death of a man there is no remedy; neither was there any man known to re turn from the grave   For the breath in our nostrils is as smok
and a little spark in the rnoYing of_ our heart; which being e:
tinguished, our body shall be turned mto ashes, and our spirit shall
CHAP. xxv)	ROME  AND  JUDEA
vanish as the soft air, and our name shall be forgotten, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, as a mist dispersed by the beams of the sun.... Come on, let us enjoy the good things that are present ... let no flower of the spring pass us by; let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered; let us leave tokens of our joyfulness in every place.39
These epicureans reason falsely, says the author; they hitch their wagon to a falling star, since pleasure is a vain and transitory thing.
For the hope of the ungodly man is as chaff swept away by the ,vind, and as thin hoar-frost scattered by the tempest; it passeth as the remembrance of a guest who tarrieth but a day. But the righteous shall live forever, and the care of them is with the Most High. There fore shall they receive a glorious kingdom, and a diadem of beauty from the hand of the Lord.40
The reign of evil will be brought to an end, according to the apocalyptic books, either by the direct intervention of God himself or the earthly com ing of his son or representative, the Messiah or Anointed One.* Had not the prophet Isaiah, a century back foretold him?
For unto us a child is born, a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called ... the mighty God, the Prince of Peace.41
Many Jews agreed with Isaiah (xr, r) in describing the Messiah as an earthly king who would be born of the royal house of David; others, like the authors of Enoch and Daniel, called him the Son of Man, and pictured him as com ing down from heaven. The philosopher of Proverbs and the poet of the Wisdom of Solomon,42 perhaps influenced by Plato's Ideas or the Stoic anima mundi, saw him as incarnate Wisdom, the first-begotten of God, the Word or Reason (logos) that would soon play so great a role in Philo's phi losophy. Nearly all the apocalyptic authors thought that the Messiah would triumph speedily; but Isaiah in a remarkable passage had conceived him as
de pised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief	Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows
• • he was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniqui ties •..  and with his stripes we are healed. The Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all.    He was taken from prison and from
judgment, and was cut off out of the land of the living    He
bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.43
The word Afessiah !Heb. mahsiah) occurs frequently in the Old Testament. The Jews who made the Septuagint (ca. 280 B.c.) translated it into the Greek Christos, the Anointed, he upon whom has been poured a chrism or holy oil.


If heads of grain had feeling, ought they to pray that they should never be harvested? ... I would have you know that it is a curse never to die. . . . The ship goes down. What, then, am I to do? Whatever I can . . . I drown without fear, neither shrinking nor crying out against God, but recognizing that what is born must also
492	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIII
perish. For I am a part of the ·whole, as an hour is part of a day. I must come on as the hour, and like an hour pass away.30 •••	Re gard yourself as but a single thread of all that go to make up the garment.31 •••  Seek not that the things which happen to you should happen as you wish, but wish the things that happen to be as they are, and you will find tranquillity.32
Though he often speaks of Nature as an impersonal force, Epictetus as frequently infuses his conception with personality, intelligence, and love. The atmosphere of religion pervading his age warms his philosophy to a self surrendering piety akin to that of the Stoic emperor who would soon read him and echo his thought. He speaks with a fine eloquence of the majestic order prevailing in time and space, and the evidences of design in nature, but he proceeds to explain that "God has created some animals to be eaten, others to serve in farming, others to produce cheese." 33 The human mind itself, he thinks, is so marvelous an instrument that only a divine creator could have brought it into being; indeed, so far as we possess reason we are parts of the vVorld Reason. If we could trace our ancestry back to the first man we should find him begotten by God; God is therefore literally the father of us all, and all men are brothers.34
He who has once observed with understanding the administration of the world, and has learned that the greatest and most comprehen sive community is the system [systema, standing together] of men and God, and that from God came the seeds whence all things, and especially rational beings, spring-,vhy should not that man call him self a citizen of the world ...  nay, a son of God? ...  If a man could only subscribe heart and soul to this doctrine . . . I think he would entertain no mean or ignoble thought in himself	Bear
in mind, then, when you eat, who you are that eat, and whom you are nourishing; when you cohabit with women, ,vho you are that do this.    You are bearing God about with you, you poor wretch,
and know it not!,,ss
In a passage that Saint aul might have written, Epictetus exhorts his students not only to submit their wills trustingly to God's, but to be the apostles of God among mankind:
God says, "Go and bear witness for me." 36 •••   Think what it is to be able to say, "God has sent me into the world to be his soldier and witness, to tell men that their sorrows and fears are vain that to a good man no evil can befall, whether he live or die. God ends me at one tiz:ne h_ere, at another time there; he disciplines me by poverty and imprisonment, that I may be the better witness to him among men. \Vith such a ministry committed to me, can I any longer
CHAP. xxm)	ROMAN  GREECE	493
care in what place I am, or who my companions are, or what they say about me? Nay, rather, does not my whole namre strain after God, his laws and commandments?" 31
As for himself, he is filled with awe and gratitude by the mystery and splendor of things, and he intones to the Creator a pagan Magnificat that is one of the supreme passages in the history of religion:
What language is adequate to praise all the works of Providence?
...  If we had sense, ought we to be doing anything else, publicly or privately, than hymning and praising the Deity, and rehearsing his benefits? Ought we not, as we dig and plow and eat, to sing a hymn of praise to God? ... What then?-since most of you have become blind, ought there not to be someone to fulfill this office for you, and in behalf of all sing hymns of praise to God? 38
Though we have here no word for immortality, and can trace all these ideas back to the Stoics and the Cynics, we find in these· pages remarkable parallels to many attitudes of early Christianity: Epictetus, indeed, sometimes advances beyond Christianity: he denounces slavery, condemns capital pun ishment, and wishes to have criminals treated as sick men.39 He advocates a daily examination of conscience 40 and announces a kind of Golden Rule: "'Vhat you shun to suffer, do not make others suffer";41 and he adds: "If a man is reported to have spoken ill of you, make no defense, but say, "He did not know the rest of my faults, else he would not have mentioned only these." 42 He advises men to return good for evil,43 and to "submit when re viled";44 to fast now and then and "abstain from the things you desire." 45 Sometimes he speaks of the body with the blasphemous contempt of an un scoured anchorite: "The body is of all things the most unpleasant and most foul.    It is astonishing that we should love a thing to which we perform
such strange services every day. I fill this bag, and then I empty it; what is more troublesome?" 46 There are pas.5ages that breathe the piety of Augustine and the eloquence of Newman: "Use me henceforward, 0  God, as thou
' wilt; I am of one mind with thee. I am thine. I ask exemption from nothing that seems good in thy sight. -VVhere thou wilt, lead me; in what raiment thou wilt, clothe me." 47 And like Jesus he bids his disciples take no care of the morrow:
To have God as our maker, father, and guardian-shall not this suffice to keep us from grief and fear? And wherewithal shall I be fed, asks one, if I have nothing? But what shall we say of    the
animals, every one of which is sufficient to itself, and lacks neither its own proper food nor that way of life which is appropriate to it, and in harmony with nature? 48
494	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIII
Is it any wonder that Christians like Saint John Chrysostom and Augustine lauded him, and that his Encheiridion was adopted, with minor changes, as a rule and guide for the monastic life?49 YVho knows but that Epictetus had read in some form the sayings of Jesus and was, without knowing it, a convert to Christianity?
LUCIAN AND THE SKEPTICS
Nevertheless, in this final stage of Hellenistic culture, there were skeptics who recalled all the doubts of Protagoras, and a Lucian who laughed at belief with the insolence of Aristippus and almost Plato's charm. The school of Pyrrho was not dead; Aenesidemus of Cnossus rephrased its denials in the Alexandria of our first century, by propounding the famous "Ten Modes" (tropoi), or contradictions, that made knowledge impossible.* To wards the end of the second century Sextus Empiricus, of unknown date or place, gave the skeptical philosophy its final formulation in several destruc tive volumes of which three survive. Sextus takes all the world for his enemy; he divides philosophers into diverse species and shys each breed in turn. He writes with the vigor necessary to an executioner, the good order and clarity characteristic of ancient philosophy, occasional sarcastic humor, and much dreary chopping of logic.
To every arrrument, says Sextus, an equal argument can be opposed, so that in the end there is nothing so superfluous as reasoning. Deduction is un ttUstworthy unless based upon complete induction; but complete induction is impossible, for we can never tell when a "negative instance" will turn up.51 "Cause" is merely a regular antecedent (as Hume would repeat), and all knowledge is relative.52 Similarly there is no objective good or evil; morality changes across every frontier,53 and Yirtue has a different definition in every age. All the arguments of the nineteenth century against the possibility of knowino- whether God exists or not are stated here, and all the contradictions between benevolent omnipotence and worldly suffering.54 But Sextus is a
Some of them: (1) The sense organs (e.g., eyes) of different animals, even of different men varv in form and structure, and presumably gh-e diverse pictures of the world· how do we !;now which picture is true? (2) The senses convey only a fraction of the obje t-e.g., a limited range of co\ors, sounds, and smells; cl arly the con eption that we form of the object


xv
LIST  OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
FIG. 34. Temple of luppiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek	512
F1G. 35. Temple of Venus or Bacchus at Baalbek	513
FIG. 36. Arch of Septimius Severus, Rome	624
FIG. 37. Reconstruction of Interior of Baths of Caracalla	624
FIG. 38. Mithras and the Bull	625
FIG. 39. Sarcophagus of the Empress Helena	625
Maps of Ancient Rome and Ancient Italy and Sicily will be found on the inside covers. A map of the Roman Empire faces page 464.
XV1
INTRODUCTION
ORIGINS
CHAPTER I
Etruscan Prelude
800-508  B.C.
ITALY
DIET hamlets in the mountain valleys, spacious pastures on the slopes, lakes upheld in the chalice of the hills, fields green or yellow verging toward blue seas, villages and towns drowsy under the noon sun and then alive with passion, cities in which, amid dust and di.rt, everything from cot tage to cathedral seems beautiful-this for two thousand years has been Italy. "Throughout the whole earth, and wherever the vault of heaven spreads, there is no country so fair": thus even the prosaic elder Pliny spoke of his fatherland.1 "Here is eternal spring," sang Virgil, "and summer even in months not her own. Twice in the year the cattle breed, twice the trees serve us with fruit." 2 Twice a year the roses bloomed at Paestum, and in the north lay many a fertile plain like Mantua's, "feeding the white swans with grassy stream." 3 Like a spine along the great peninsula ran the Apen nines, shielding the west coast from the northeast winds, and blessing the soil with rivers l1at hurried to lose themselves in captivating bays. On the north the Alps stood guard; on every other side protecting waters lapped difficult and often precipitous shores. It was a land well suited to reward an industri ous population, and strategically placed athwart the Mediterranean to rule
the classic world.
The mountains broug?t death as well as splendor, for earthquakes and eruptions now and then embalmed the labor of centuries in ashes. But here, as usually, death was a gift to life; the lava mingled with organic matter to enrich the earth for a hundred generations.'' Part of the terrain was too steep for cultivation, and part of it was malarial marsh; the rest was so fertile that Polybius marveled at the abundance and cheapness of food in ancient Italy,5 and suggested that the quantity and quality of its crops might be judged from the vigor and courage of its men. Alfieri thought that the "man-plant" had flourished better in Italy than anywhere else.6 Even today the timid student is a bit frightened by the intense feelings of these fascinating folk-their taut muscles, swift love and anger, smoldering or blazing eyes; the pride and fury that made Italy great, and tore her to pieces, in the days of Marius and Caesar
3
4	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. I
and the Renaissance, still run in Italian blood, only awaiting a good cause or argument. Nearly aJJ. the men are virile and handsome, nearly all the women beautiful, strong, and brave; what land can match the dynasty of genius that the mothers of Italy have poured forth through thirty centuries? No other country has been so long the hub of history-at first in government, then in religion, then in an. For seventeen hundred years, from Cato Censor to Michelangelo, Rome was the center of the Western world.
"Those who are the best judges in that country," says Aristotle, "report that when !talus became king of Oenotria, the people changed their name, and called themselves no longer Oenotrians but Italians." 7 Oenotria was the toe of the Italian boot, so teeming with grapes that the word meant "land of wine." !talus, says Thucydides, was a king of the Sicels, \Vho had occupied. Oenotria on the way to conquer and name Sicily.8 Just as the Romans called all Hellenes Graeci, Greeks, from a few Graii who had emigrated from north Attica to Naples, so the Greeks gradually extended the name Italia to all the peninsula south of the Po.
Doubtless many chapters of Italy's story lie silent under her crowded soil. Remains of an Old Stone Age culture indicate that for at least 30,000 years before Christ the plains were inhabited by man. Between 10,000 and 6000


is partial an nrehable. (3) One sense_ somenmes comrad1 ts another. (4) Our physical and men:al cond1t1on c::>lors and perh_aps d1scolors our percepn0ns-awake or sleeping, youth or
age, m tion or rest, hu g_er or sanety, hatred _or lov_e.(6) _The appearance of an object varies a c?rcling t:J the o dm n of t_h; su_rrOl_mdmg med1 -light, air, cold, heat, moisture, etc.; which apf?Carance JS real ?_ (8)  N thil:g--1m ·n by_Itself or absolutely, but only in relation o s?m chmg else, ta pro_s ti. (_10) •• n _m_1v1dual s b he[s _depend upon the customs, religion, lilS0tut1ons, and laws anud which he \\as reared; no mdi..-1dual can think objectively.50
CHAP.XXIII)	ROMAN  GREECE	495
more complete agnostic than the agnostics, for he affirms that we cannot know that we cannot know; agnosticism is a dogma.55 But, he consoles us, we do not need certainty. Probability is enough for all practical purposes, and the suspension of judgment (epocbe, holding back; aphasia, saying nothing) in philosophical questions, instead of disturbing the mind, brings it a careless peace (ataraxia).56 Meanwhile, since nothing is cert:.:in, let us accept the conventions and beliefs of our time and place, and modestly worship our ancient gods.57
Lucian would have belonged to the Skeptic school if he had been so un wise as to fetter his judgment with a label. Like Voltaire, whom he resembled in all but pity, he wrote philosophy so brilliantly that no one supposed that he was writing philosophy. As if to show the spread of Hellenism, he was born at Samosata, in distant Commagene; "I am a Syrian from the Euphrates," he said; his native tongue was Syriac, his blood probably Semitic.58 He was apprenticed to a sculptor, but deserted to a rhetor. After a stay in Antioch practicing law he took to the road as a "dependent scholar," living by lec turing, especially in Rome and Gaul; then (A.D. r65) he settled down in Athens. In his later years he was rescued from poverty by the pious but tolerant Marcus Aurelius, who appointed the irreverent skeptic to an official post in Egypt. There, at a date unknown, he died.
Time has preserved seventy-six of Lucian's little books, and many of them arc as fresh and pertinent today as when he read them to friends and audi ences eighteen centuries ago. He tried his hand at a variety of forms, until he found a congenial medium in the dialogue. His Dialogues of the Hetairai were free enough to win a large audience. But at least in his works he is more absorbed in the gods than in courtesans; he is never through mishandling them. "vVhen I was a boy," says his Menippus, "and heard the tales of Homer and Hesiod about the gods-adulterous gods, rapacious gods, violent, litigious, incestuous gods-I found it all quite proper and, indeed, was intensely in terested. vVhen, however, I came to man's estate I observed th::;t the laws flatly contradicted the poets, forbidding adultery and rapacity." Perplexed,
.\Ienippus went to the philosophers for an explanation; but they were so busy refuting one another that they only confounded his confusion. So he made himself wings, flew up to heaven, and examined m::itters for himself. Zeus received him magnanimously and allowed him to watch Olympus functioning. Zeus himself was listening to prayers as they came up to him through "a row of openings with lids like well covers. . . . Of those at sea one prayed for a north, another for a south, wind. The farmer asked for rain, the fuller for sun.... Zeus seemed puzzled; he did not know which prayer to grant, and experienced a truly Academic suspension of judgment, showing a reserve and equilibrium worthy of Pyrrho himself." 59 The great
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIII
god rejects some petitions, grants others, and then arranges the day's weather: rain for Scythia, snow for Greece, a storm in the Adriatic, and "about a thou sand bushels of hail for Cappadocia." Zeus is disturbed by the new and outlandish gods who have stolen into his pantheon; he issues a decree that, whereas Olympus is crowded with polyglot aliens, who have caused a great rise in the price of nectar, and the old and only true gods are being squeezed out, a committee of seven shall be appointed to sit on claims. In "Zeus Cross Examined" an Epicurean philosopher asks Zeus are the gods also subject to Fate? Yes, answers the genial Jove. "Why, then, should men sacrifice to you?" asks the philosopher; and "if Fate rules men and gods, why should we be held responsible for our actions?" "I see," says Zeus, "that you have been with that accursed race, the sophists." 60 In "Zeus T ragoedus" the god is in a gloomy mood, for he observes a great crowd gathering in Athens to hear Damis the Epicurean deny, and Timocles the Stoic affirm, the existence and solicitude of the gods. Timocles breaks down and runs away, and Zeus de spairs about his own future. Hermes comforts him: "There are plenty of believers left-a majority of Greeks, the body and dregs of the people, and the barbarians to a man." 61 That such a piece should have brought no indict ment on Lucian's head proves either the tolerance of the times or the twilight of the Greek gods.
But Lucian was as skeptical of rhetoric and philosophy as of the old reli gion. In one of his Dialogues of the Dead Charon commands a rhetorician, whom he is ferrying to the other world, to "strip off that boundless length of sentences that is wrapped around you, and those antitheses, and balanced clauses"-otherwise the boat will surely sink.62 In "Hermotimus" a student
enters with enthusiasm upon the study of philosophy, hoping that it will give hi some substitute f r faith! but he is shocked by the vanity and greed of the nval teachers, and 1s left mtellectually and morally naked by their mutual refutations; henceforth, he concludes, "I shall tum aside from a phi losopher a /rom a mad_ dog." 63 Lu ian himself defi_nes philos_ophy as an attempt to get an elevation from which you may seem every direction." 64 From such an elevation life seems to him a ridiculous confusion, a chaotic chorus in which all the dancers move and shout each at his own indi,·idual will, "until the impresario ismisses them one by one from the stage." 6  In
"Charon" he paints a dark pic_ture of the human scene as witnessed by super human eyes from some celestial peak: men plowina toilina disputina suina
•	•	t>'	t>'	=>'	t,
in the courts, lendmg at  sury, cheatmg and being cheated, running after
gold or pleasure; over their heads a cloud of hopes, fears, follies, and hates; over these the Fates spinning the web of life for each human atom; one man is lifted high from the mass and then has a resounding fall; and each in turn is drawn away by some messenger of death. Charon observes two armies fight-
CHAP. XXIII)	ROMAN  GREECE	497
ing in the Peloponnesus; "Fools!" he comments, "not to know that though each of them should win a whole Peloponnesus he will get but a bare foot of ground in the end." 66 Lucian is as impanial as nature; he satirizes the rich for their greed, the poor for their envy, the philosophers for their cobwebs, the gods for their nonexistence. In the end he concludes with Voltaire that one must cultivate his garden. Menippus, finding T eiresias in the lower world, asks him, What is the best life? The old prophet answers:
The life of the ordinary man is the best and most prudent choice. Cease from the folly of metaphysical speculation and inquiry into origins and ends; count all this clever logic as idle talk, and pursue one end alone-how you may do what your hand finds to do, and go your way with never a passion and always a smile.67
If we sum up Greek thought in the first two centuries of our era, we find it, despite Lucian, overwhelmingly religious. Men had once lost faith in faith and taken to logic; now they were losing faith in logic and were flocking back to faith. Greek philosophy had completed the circuit from primitive theology through the skepticism of the early Sophists, the atheism of Democ ritus, the reconciliatory blandishments of Plato, the naturalism of Aristotle, and the pantheism of the Stoa back to a philosophy of mysticism, submission, and piety. The Academy had passed from the utilitarian myths of its founder through the skepticism of Carneades to the learned devotion of Plutarch; soon it would culminate in the heavenly visions of Plotinus. The scientific achievements of Pythagoras were forgotten, but his notion of reincarnation was having another life; Neo-Pythagoreans were exploring the mysticism of
?umber, were practicing a daily examination of conscience, and were pray mg that after a minimum of avatars they might pass-if necessary through Purgatory-into a b.lessed union with God.68 Stoicism was ceasing to be the proud and scornful philosophy of aristocrats, and had found its final and most eloquent voice in a slave; its doctrine of a final conflagration of the world, its rejection of all pleasures of the flesh, its humble surrender to the idden will of God, were preparing for the theology and ethics of Christian ity. The Oriental mood was capturing the Europea°: citadel.
CHAPTER  XXIV
TheHellenistic  Revival
ROMAN EGYPT
GYPT should have been the happiest of lands, for not only was the
	earth freely nourished by the Nile, but the country was the most self- sufficient in the whole Mediterranean basin-rich in cereals and fruits, cut ting three crops a year, unexcelled in its industries, exporting to a hundred nations, and seldom disturbed by foreign or civil war. And yet-perhaps for these reasons-"The Egyptians," Josephus notes, "appear never in all their history to have enjoyed one day of freedom." 1 Their wealth tempted, their semitropical lassitude suffered, one despot or conqueror after another through fifty centuries.


542	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXV
All, however, agreed that in the end the Messiah would subdue the heathen, free lsrael,44 make Jerusalem his capital, and win all men to accept Yahveh and the Mosaic Law.45 Thereafter a "Good Time" would come of happiness for the whole world: all the earth would be fertile, every seed would bear a thousandfold, wine would be plentiful, poverty would disappear, all men would be healthy and virtuous, and justice, good fellowship, and peace would reign over the earrh.46 Some seers thought that this joyful age would be interrupted, that the powers of darkness and evil would make a last assault upon the happy kingdom, and that the world would be consumed in chaos and conflagration. In the final "Day of God" the dead would rise and be judged by the "Ancient of Days" (Yahveh), or by the "Son of Man," to whom absolute and everlasting dominion would then be given over a reno vated world, the Kingdom of God. The wicked would be cast down head long and speechless "into Hell," 47 bur the good would be received into unending blessedness.
Essentially the movement of thought in Judea was parallel with that in the pagan rheology of the rime: a people that had once thought of the future in terms of its national destiny lost its trust in the state and thought of salva tion in spiritual and individual terms. The mystery religions had brought this hope to many millions in Greece, the Hellenic East, and Italy; bur nowhere was the hope so earnest, or its need so great, as in Judea. The poor or be reaved, rhe oppressed or scorned of the earth, looked for some divine re deemer of their subjection and their suffering. Soon, said the apocalypses, a savior would come, and in his triumph all just men would be lifted up, even out of the grave, into a paradise of eternal bliss. Old saints like Simeon, mystic women like Anna daughter of Phanuel, passed their lives about the Temple, fasting, waiting, praying that they might look upon the Redeemer before they died. A great expectation filled the hearts of men.
THE REBELLION
No people in history has fought so tenaciously for liberty as rhe Jews, nor any people against such odds. From Judas .Maccabee to Simeon Bar Cocheba, and even into our own rime, the struggle of the Jews to regain their freedom has often decimated them, but has never broken their spirit or their hope.
,vhen Herod the Great died the nationalists, spurning the pacific counsels of Hillel, declared a revolt against Herod's successor Archelaus, and encamped in tents about the Temple. _Archelaus' troops slew 3000 of them, manv of whom had come to Jerusalem for the Passover festival (4 B.c.). At the follo,{,ing feast of
CHAP. XXV)	ROME  AND  JUDEA	543
Pentecost the rebels gathered again, and orice more suffered great slaughter; the Temple cloisters were burned to the ground, the treasures of the sanctuary were plundered by the legions, and many Jews killed themselves in despair. Patriot bands took form in the countryside, and made life precarious for any supporter of Rome; one such band, under Judas the Gaulonite, captured Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee. Varus, governor of Syria, entered Palestine with 20,000 men, razed hundreds of towns, crucified 2000 rebels, and sold 30,000 Jews into slavery. A delegation of leading Jews went to Rome and begged Augustus to abolish the kingship in Judea. Augustus removed Archelaus, and made Judea a Roman province of the second class, under a procurator responsible to the governor of Syria (A.n. 6).
Under Tiberius the troubled land knew a moment's peace. Caligula, wishing to make the worship of the emperor a unifying religion throughout the Empire, ordered all cults to include a sacrifice to his image, and bade the Jerusalem officials to install his statue in the Temple. The Jews had compromised, under Augustus and Tiberius, by sacrificing to Yahveh in the name of the emperor; but they were so averse to setting up the graven image of a pagan in their Temple that thousands of them, we are told, went to the governor of Syria and asked to be slain in cold blood before the edict should be carried out.49 Caligula eased the situation by dying. Impressed by Herod's grandson Agrippa, Claudius made him king of nearly all Pales tine (41); bur Agrippa's sudden death released another outburst of disorder, and Claudius restored the procuratorial rule (44).
The men whom his mercenary freedmen chose for this office were mostly incompetents or scoundrels. Felix, made procurator by his brother Pallas
"governed Judea," says Tacitus, "with the powers of a king and the soul of a slave." 5°Festus ruled more justly, but died in the attempt. Albinus, if we may believe Josephus, plundered and taxed assiduously, and made a fortune
by releasing criminals from jail for a consideration; "nobody remained in prison but those who gave him nothing." 51 Florus, says the same friend and admirer of the Romans, behaved "like an executioner rather than a gov ernor," despoiled whole cities, and not only stole on his own account, but connived at other robberies if allowed to share the loot. These reports retain some odor of war propaganca; doubtless the procurators complained that the Jews were a very troublesome people to oppress.
Bands of "Zed<;>ts" and "Dag3"er-men" (Sicarii) were formed in protest against this misrule. Their members, pledged to kill any disloyal Jew, mingled in street gatherings, stabbed their appointed victims from behind, and disappeared in the chaos of the crowd.52 When Floros took seventeen talents ($61,200) from the Temple treasury, an angry mob collected before the shrine and cried our for his dismissal; some youths went about with
544	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXV
baskets begging alms for him as suffering from poverty. Florus' legions dispersed the assemblage, plundered hundreds of homes, and slew the occu pants; the leading rebels were scourged and crucified; on that day, says Josephus, 3600 Jews were slain.53 The old or well-to-do Hebrews counseled patience, arguing that revolt against so powerful an empire would be national suicide; the young or poor accused them of connivance and cowardice. The two factions divided the city and nearly every family; one seized the upper part of Jerusalem, the other the lower, and each attacked the other with every weapon at hand. In 68 a pitched battle was fought between the groups; the radicals won, and killed 12,000 Jews, including nearly all the rich;54 the revolt had become a revolution. A rebel force surrounded the Roman garrison at Masada, persuaded it to disarm, and then slaughtered every man of it. On that day the gentiles of Caesarea, the Palestinian capital, rose in a pogrom that slew 20,000 Jews; other thousands were sold into slavery. In one day the gentiles of Damascus cut the throats of 10,000 Jews.55 The enraged revolutionists laid waste many Greek cities in alestine and Syria, burned some of them to the ground, and killed and were killed in great number. "It was then common," says Josephus, "to see cities filled with dead bodies . . . unburied, those of old men mixed with infants, and women lying among them without any cover." 56 By September of 66 the revolution had won Jerusalem and nearly all of Pales tine. The peace party was discredited, and most of its members now joined in the revolt.	•
Among them was a priest named Josephus, then a young man of thirty, energetic, brilliant, and endowed with an intellect capable of transforming every desire into a virtue. Commissioned by the rebels to fortify Galilee, he defended its stronghold, Jotopata, against Vespasian's siege, until only forty Jewish soldiers remained alive, hiding with him in a cave. Josephus wished to surrender, but his men threatened to kill him if he tried it. Since they preferred death to capture, he persuaded them to draw lots to fix the order in which each should die by the hand of the next; when all were
dead but himself and one other, he induced him to join him in surrender.
They were about to be sent to Rome in chains when Josephus prophesied that Vespasian would be e p ror. Vespasia released him, and gradually accepted him as a seful adviser m the wa_r aga st the Jews. \Vhen Vespasian left for Alexandna, Josephus accomparued Titus to the siege of Jerusalem. The approach of the legions brought the def enders to a belated and fanatical unity. Tacitus reckons th t 600,000 rebels had gathered in the city. "All who were capable of servmg appeared in arms," and the women were not less martial than the men.5• Josephus, from the Roman lines called upon the besieged to surrender; they branded him as a traitor, and
CHAP. XXV)	ROME  AND  JUDEA	545
fought to the last. Starving Jews made desperate sorties to forage for food; thousands of them were captured by the Romans, and were crucified; "the multirude of these was so great," Josephus reports, "that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses were wanting for the bodies." In the later stages of the five-month siege the streets of the city were clogged with corpses; ghouls wandered about despoiling and stabbing the dead; we are told that 116,000 bodies were thrown over the walls. Some Jews swallowed gold pieces and slipped out from Jerusalem; Romans or Syrians, capturing them, slit open their bellies, or searched their offal, to find the coins.58 Having taken half the city, Tirus offered what he thought were lenient terms to the rebels; they rejected them. The flaming brands of the Romans set fire to the Temple, and the great edifice, much of it of wood, was rapidly con sumed. The surviving defenders fought bravely, proud, says Dio, to die on Temple grounds.59 Some killed one another, some fell upon their own swords, some leaped into the flames. The victors gave no quarter, but slew all Jews upon whom they could lay their hands; 97,000 fugitives were caught and sold as slaves; many of them died as unwilling gladiators in the triumphal games that were celebrated at Beryrus, Caesarea Philipp and Rome. Josephus numbered at 1,197,000 the Jews killed in this siege and its aftermath; Tacirus calculated them at 600,000 (A.D. 70).60
Resistance continued here and there till 73, but essentially the destruction of the Temple marked the end of the rebellion and of the Jewish state. The property of those who had shared in the revolt was confiscated and sold. Judea was almost shorn of Jews, and those that remained lived on the edge of starvation. Even the poorest Jew had now to pay to a pagan temple at Rome the half shekel that pious Hebrews had formerly paid each year for the upkeep of the Temple at Jerusalem. The high-priesthood and the San hedrin were abolished. Judaism took the fo  that it has kept till our own time: a religion without a central shrine, without a dominant priesthood, without a sacrificial service. The Sadducees disappeared, while the Pharisees and the rabbis became the leaders of a homeless people that had nothing left but its synagogues and its hope.
THE  DISPERSION
The flight or enslavement of a million Jews so accelerated their spread through the Mediterranean that their scholars came to date the Diaspora from the destruction of Herod's Temple. \Ve have seen that this Disper sion had begun six centuries before in the Babylonian Captivity, and had been renewed in the settling of Alexandria. Since fertility was commanded
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(cHAP.:XXV
and infanticide sternly forbidden by Jewish piety and law, the expansion of the Jews was due to biological as well as economic causes; Hebrews still played a vocy minor role in the commerce of the world. Fifty years before the fall of Jerusalem, Strabo, with anti-Semitic exaggeration, reported that "it is hard to find a single place on the habitable earth that has not admitted


CHAP. XXVII)	THE  APOSTLES	585
them an acceptable variation of the mystery faiths that had so often told them of resurrected saviors; possibly in accepting it they assimilated it to these beliefs, and influenced Paul to interpret Christianity in terms familiar to the Hellenistic mind.
From Corinth Paul went to Jerusalem (53?) to "salute the church." Soon, however, he was off on his third missionary journey, visiting the Christian communities in Antioch and Asia Minor, and reinvigorating them with his fervor and confidence. At Ephesus he spent two years, and "did such extraor dinary wonders" that many looked upon him as a miracle-worker, and sought to cure ailments by applying to the sick the linens Paul had used. The manufacturers of the images that pagan worshipers dedicated in the Temple of Artemis found their trade slackening; perhaps Paul had repeated here his Athenian indictment of image worship, or idolatry. One Demetrius, who made silver models of the great shrine for pious pilgrims, organized a protest against Paul and the new faith, and led to the city theater a crowd of Greeks whose catchword, repeated for two hours, was "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" A local official dissolved the gathering, but Paul thought it the better part of valor to leave for Macedonia.
He spent some happy months with the little congregations he had founded in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Beraea. Hearing that dissension and immoral ity were disordering the church at Corinth, he not only reprimanded it in several epistles, but went down to it in person (56?) to face his detractors. They had accused him of profiting materially from his preaching, laughed at his visions, and renewed the demand that all Christians should obey the Jewish Law. Paul reminded the turbulent community that he had every where earned his living with the work of his hands; and as to material profit, what had he not suffered from his missions?-eight floggings, one stoning, three shipwrecks, and a thousand dangers from robbers, patriots, and streams.40 Amid this turmoil word was brought him that the "party of the circumcision," apparently violating the Jerusalem agreement, had gone into Galatia and demanded of all converts the full acceptance of the Jewish Law. He wrote to the Galatians a wrathful epistle in which he broke completely with the Judaizing Christians, and declared that men were to be saved not by adherence to the Mosaic Law, but by an active faith in Christ as the redeeming Son of God. Then, not knowing what sharper tribulations awaited him there, he left for Jerusalem, eager to defend himself before the Apostles, and wishing to celebrate in the Holy City the ancient feast of Pentecost. From Jerusalem, he hoped, he might go to Rome, even to Spain, and never rest till every province of the Empire had heard the news and promise of the risen Christ.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXVIl
The Theologian
The leaders of the mother church gave him "a hearty welcome" (57?); but privately they admonished him:
You see, brother, how many thousand believers there are among the Jews, all of them zealous upholders of the Law. They have been told that you teach all Jews who live among the heathen to tum away from Moses, that you tell them not to circumcize their children, nor to observe the old customs.    They will be sure to hear that you
have come. So do what we tell you. We have four men here who are under a vow. Join them, undergo the rites of purification with them, and pay their expenses.... Then everybody will understand that there is no truth in the stories told about you, but that you yourself observe the Law.41
Paul took the advice in good spirit, and went through the rites of purifica tion. But when some Jews saw him in the Temple they raised an outcry against him as "the man who teaches everybody everywhere against our people and the Law." A mob seized him, dragged him from the Temple, and "were trying to kill him" when a squad of Roman soldiers rescued him by arrest. Paul turned to speak to the crowd, and affirmed both his Judaism and his Christianity. They shouted for his death. The Roman officer ordered him to be flogged, but desisted when he learned of Paul's Roman citizenship. The next day he brought the prisoner before the Sanhedrin. Paul addressed it, proclaimed himself a Pharisee, and won some support; but his excited opponents again sought to do him violence, and the officer withdrew him into the barracks. That night a nephew of Paul came to warn him that forty Jews had vowed not to eat or drink until they had killed him. The officer, fearing a disturbance that would compromise him, sent Paul in the night to the procurator Felix at Caesarea.
Five days later the high priest and some elders came up from Jerusalem, and accused Paul of being "a P:st and a disturber of the peace among Jews all over the world." Paul admitted that he was preaching a new religion, but added: "I believe everything that is taught in the Law." Felix dismi&5ed the accusers; nevertheless, he kept Paul under house arrest-accessible to friends-for two years (58-60?), hoping, perhaps, for a substantial bribe. When Festus succeeded Felix he suggested that Paul should stand trial before him at Jerusalem. Fearing that hostile environment, Paul exercised his rights as a Roman citzen, and demanded trial before the emperor. King Agrippa, passing through Caesarea, gave him another hearing, and judged
CHAP.xxvn)	THE  APOSTLES	587
him "mad with great learning," but otherwise innocent; "he might be let go," said Agrippa, "if he had not appealed to the emperor." Paul was put on a trading vessel, which sailed so leisurely that it encountered a winter storm before it could reach Italy. Through fourteen days of tempest, we are told, he gave crew and passengers an encouraging example of a man superior to death and confident of rescue. The ship broke to pieces on Malta's rocks, but all on board swam safely to shore. Three months later Paul arrived in Rome (61?). .
The Roman authorities treated him leniently, awaiting his accusers from Palestine, and Nero's leisure to hear the case. He was allowed to live in a house of his choosing, with a soldier to guard him; he could not move about freely, but he could receive whomever he wished. He invited the leading Jews of Rome to come to him; they heard him patiently, but when they perceived that in his judgment the observance of the Jewish Law was not necessary to salvation, they turned away; the Law seemed to them the indispensable prop and solace of Jewish life. "Understand, then," said Paul, "that this message of God's salvation has been sent to the heathen. They will listen to it!" 42 His attitude offended also the Christian community that he found in Rome. These converts, chiefly Jews, preferred the Christianity that had been brought to them from Jerusalem; they practiced circumcision, and were hardly distinguished by Rome from the orthodox Jews; they welcomed Peter, but were cold to Paul. He made some converts among the gentiles, even in high place; but a bitter sense of frustration darkened the loneliness of his imprisonment.
He found some solace in sending long and tender letters to his distant flocks. For ten years now he had written such epistles; there were doubtless many more than have come down to us under his name.• They did not come directly from his pen; he dictated them, often adding a postscript in his own rough hand; he left them apparently unrevised, with all their repetitions, obscurities, and bad grammar on their head. Nevenheless, the depth and sincerity of their feeling, their angry devotion to a great cause, their pro fusion of noble and memorable speech make them the most forceful and eloquent letters in all literature; even Cicero's charm seems slight beside this passionate faith. Here are strong words of love from one to whom his churches were his fiercely protected children; violent attacks upon his numberless enemies; reprimands to sinners, backsliders, and divisive dis putants; and everywhere tender exhortations.
Of these we may regard the letters to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans as authentic; probably also those to the Thessalonians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon; perhaps oven the epistle to the Ephesians.43
588	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVII
Be filled with thanksgiving. Let the presence of Christ dwell in you, a well-spring of abounding wisdom; teach and encourage one another with hymns and songs of the spiritual life; make music in your hearts in gratitude to God.44
Here are great phrases that all Christendom quotes and cherishes: "the letter kills, the spirit gives life";45 "evil communications corrupt good manners";46 "to the pure all things are pure";47 "the love of money is the root of all evil."48 Here are frank confessions of his faults, even of his statesmanlike hypocrisies:
I have made myself everyone's slave, so as to win over all the more. To the Jews I have become like a Jew to win Jews ... to those without the Law I have become like a man without any law . . . I have become all things to all men, that I might save some of them. I do it all tor the sake of the Good News, that I may share its blessings with the rest.49
These epistles were preserved, and often publicly read, by the congrega tions to which they were addressed. By the end of the first century many of them were widely known; Clement of Rome refers to them in 97, Ignatius and Polycarp soon afterwards; gradually they entered into the subtlest theology of the Church. Moved by his own somber spirit and remorse, and his transforming vision of Christ; influenced perhaps by Platonist and Stoic denunciations of matter and the body as evil; recalling, it may be, Jewish and pagan customs of sacrificing a "scapegoat" for the sins of the people, Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ: that every man born of woman inherits the guilt of Adam, and can be saved from eternal damnation only by the atoning death of the Son of God.* 50 Such a conception was more agreeable to the pagans than to the Jews. Egypt, Asia Minor, and Bellas had long since believed in gods-Osiris, Attis, Dionysus-who had died to redeem mankind-; such titles as Soter (Savior) and Eleutherios (Deliverer) had been applied to these deities; and the word Kyrios (Lord), used by Paul of Christ, was the term given in Syrian-Greek cults to the dying and redeem ing Dionysus.52 The gentiles of Antioch and other Greek cities, never having
The ancient Jews shared with the Canaanites, Moabites, Phoenicians Canhaginians and other peoples the custom o! sacrificing a child,.ev:en a b_eloved son, to appease the wra h of Heaven. In the course of time a condemned cnmmal might be substituted. In Babvlonia he was dressed in royal robes to represe1!-t the son of the king, and was then scourged and hanged. A similar sacrifice took place m Rho?e_s. at the_ ea5: of Cronus. The offering of a lamb or kid at the Passover was probably a cn,hzed mmgat1on of ancient human sacrifice. "On the dav of atonement," says Frazer. "the Jewish high priest laid both his hands on the head of a live goat, co essed over it all the iniquities of he diil ren of Israel, and having thereby transferred the sms of the people to .:he beast, sent It away mto the wilderness." 51
CHAP.XXVII)	THE  APOSTLES
known Jesus in the flesh, could only accept him after the manner of their savior gods. "Behold," said Paul, "I show you a mystery." 53
Paul added to this popular and consoling theology certain mystic con ceptions already made current by the Book of Wisdom and the philosophy of Philo. Christ, said Paul, is "the wisdom of God," 54 the first-born Son of God; "he is before all things, in him all things exist . . . through him all things have been created." 55 He is not the Jewish Messiah who will deliver Israel from bondage; he is the Logos whose death will deliver all men. Through these interpretations Paul could neglect the actual life and sayings of Jesus, which he had not directly known, and could stand on an equality with the immediate apostles, who were no match for him in metaphysical speculation; he could give to the life of Christ, and to the life of man, hi,;h roles in a magnificent drama that embraced all souls and all eternity. More over, he could answer the troublesome questions of those who asked why Christ, if very god, had allowed himself to be put to death: Christ had died to redeem a world lost to Satan by Adam's sin; he had to die to break the bonds of death and open the gates of heaven to all who should be touched by the grace of God.


Love, he loots
The rich of their chattels!
By delicate cheeks
On maiden's pillow
Watches he all the night-time long;
His prey he seeks Over the billow,
Pastoral haunts he preys among.
Gods are deathless, and they Cannot elude his whim;
And oh, amid us whose life's a day,
Mad is the heart that broodeth him!81•
304	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.XIII
as he can. The letter of the law forbids him to remain single, but the law is not always enforced in Periclean days; and after him the number of bachelors mounts until it becomes one of the basic problems of Athens."" There are so many ways of being amused in Greece! Those men who yield marry late, usually near thirty, and then insist upon brides not much older than fifteen.""° "To mate a youth with a young wife is ill," says a character in Euripides; "for a man's strength endures, while the bloom of beauty quickly leaves the woman's form."'01
A choice having been made, and the dowry agreed upon, a solemn be trothal takes place in the home of the girl's father; there must be witnesses, but her own presence is not necessary. Without such a formal betrothal no union is valid in Athenian law; it is considered to be the first act in the complex rite of marriage. The second act, which follows in a few days, is a feast in the house of the girl. Before coming to it the bride and bride groom, in their separate homes, bathe in-ceremonial purification. At the feast the men of both families sit on one side of the room, the women on the other; a wedding cake is eaten, and much wine is drunk. Then the bridegroom escorts his veiled and white-robed bride-whose face he may not yet have seen-into a carriage, and takes her to his father's dwelling amid a procession of friends and flute-playing girls, who light the way with torches and raise the hymeneal chant. Arrived, he carries the girl over the threshold, as if in semblance of capture. The parents of the youth greet the girl, and receive her with religious ceremony into the circle of the family and the worship of its gods; no priest, however, takes any part in the ritual. The guests then escort the couple to their room with an epithalamion, or marriage-chamber song, and linger boisterously at the door until the bridegroom announces to them that the marriage has been consummated.
Besides his wife a man may take a concubine. "We have courtesans for
the sake of pleasure," says Demosthenes, "concubines for the daily health of our bodies, and wives to bear us lawful offspring and be the faithful guardians of our homes":102 here in one startling sentence is the Greek view of woman in the classic age. Draco's laws permit concubinage; and after the Sicilian expedition of 415, when the roll of citizens has been depleted by war and many girls cannot find husbands, the law explicitly allows double marriages; Socrates and Euripides are among those who assume thls patriotic obligation.101 The wife usually accepts concubinage with Oriental patience, knowing that the "second wife," when her charms wear off, will become in effect a household slave, and that only the offspring of the first
CHAP. xm)  THE  MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS    305
wife are accounted legitimate. Adultery leads to divorce only when com mitted by the wife; the husband in such case is spoken of as "carrying horns" (keroesses), and custom requires him to send his wife away.10• The law makes adultery by woman, or by a man with a married woman, pun ishable with death, but the Greeks are too lenient to concupiscence to en force this statute. The injured husband is usually left to deal with the adulterer as he will and can-sometimes killing him in fiagrtmte delicto, sometimes sending a slave to beat him, sometimes contenting himself with a money indemnity."111
For the man divorce is simple; he may dismiss his wife at any time, with out stating the cause. Barrenness is accepted as sufficient reason for divorcing a wife, since the purpose of marriage is to have children. If the man is sterile, law permits, and public opinion recommends, the reinforcement of the husband by a relative; the child born of such a union is considered to be the son of the husband, and must tend his departed soul. The wife may not at will leave her husband, but she may ask the archons for a divorce on the ground of the cruelty or excesses of her mate.100 Divorce is also al lowed by mutual consent, usually expressed in a formal declaration to the archon. In case of separation, even where the husband has been guilty of adultery, the children remain with the man  All in all, in the matter of
sex relations, Athenian custom and law are thoroughly man-made, and represent an Oriental retrogression from the society of Egypt, Crete, and the Homeric Age.
WOMAN
As surprising as anything else in this civilization is the fact that it is brilliant without the aid or stimulus of women. With their help the Heroic Age achieved splendor, the age of the dictators a lyric radiance; then, al most overnight, married women vanish from the history of the Greeks, as if to confute the supposed correlation between the level of civilization and the status of woman. In Herodotus woman is everywhere; in Thucyd ides she is nowhere to be seen. From Semonides of Amorgos to Lucian, Greek literature is offensively repetitious about the faults of women; and towards the close of it even the kindly Plutarch repeats Thucydides: 108 "The name of a decent woman, like her person, should be shut up in the house."""'
This seclusion of woman does not exist among the Dorians; presumably it comes from the Near East to Ionia, and from Ionia to Attica; it is part
306	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHA.P.XIII
of the tradition of Asia. Perhaps the disappearance of inheritance through the mother, the rise of the middle classes, and the enthronement of the commercial view of life enter into the change: men come to judge women in terms of utility, and find them especially useful in the home. The Oriental nature of Greek marriage goes with this Attic purdah; the bride is cut off from her kin, goes to live almost as a menial in another home, and worships other gods. She cannot make contracts, or incur debts be yond a trifling sum; she cannot bring actions at law; and Solon legislates that anything done under the influence of woman shall have no validity at law.110 When her husband dies she does not inherit his property. Even physiological error enters into her legal subjection; for just as primitive ignorance of the male role in reproduction tended to exalt woman, so the male is exalted by the clieory popular in classic Greece that the generative power belongs only to man, the woman being merely the carrier and nurse of the child.m The older age of the man contributes to the subordina tion of the wife; he is twice her years when he marries her, and can in some degree mold her mind to his own philosophy. Doubtless the male knows too well the license allowed to his sex in Athens to risk his wife or daugh ter at large; he chooses to be free at the cost of her seclusion. She may, if properly veiled and attended, visit her relatives or intimates, and may take part in the religious celebrations, including attendance at the plays; but for the rest she is expected to stay at home, and not allow herself to be seen at a window. Most of her life is spent in the women's quarters at the rear of the house; no male visitor is ever admitted there, nor does she appear when men visit her husband.
In the home she is honored and obeyed in everything that does not con travene the patriarchal authority of her mate. She keeps the house, or superintends its management; she cooks the meals, cards and spins the wool, makes the clothing and bedding for the family. Her education is almost confined to household arts, for the Athenian believes with Euripides that a woman is handicapped by intellect.no The result is that the respectable women of Athens are more modest, more "charming" to men, than their like in Sparta, but less interesting and mature, incapable of being com rades to husbands whose minds have been filled and sharpened by a free and varied life. The women of sixth-century Greece contributed signifi cantly to Greek literature; the women of Periclean Athens contribute


mo.re graceful form in Aristophanes' masterpiece, The Birds (414). Two citizens who despair of Athens climb up to the abode of the birds, hoping to find there an ideal life. With the help of the birds they build, between earth and heaven, a Utopian city, Nephelococcygia, or Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The birds, in a chorus as lyrically perfect as anything in the tragic poets, apostrophize mankind:
Ye children of man, whose life is a span, Protracted with sorrow from day to day, Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous, Sickly calamitous creatures of clay,
Attend to the words of the sovereign birds, Immortal, illustrious lords of the air,
Who survey from on high, with a merciful eye, Your struggles of misery, labor, and care.
The birds plan to intercept all communication between the gods and men; no sacrifices shall be allowed to mount to heaven; soon, say the reformers, the old gods will starve, and the birds will be supreme. New gods are in vented in the image of birds, and those conceived in the image of men are deposed. Finally an embassy comes from Olympus, seeking a truce; the leader of the birds agrees to take as his wife the handmaiden of Zeus, and the play ends in a happy marriage.
The Artist and the Thinker
Aristophanes is an unclassifiable mixture of beauty, wisdom, and filth. When the mood is upon him he cart write lyrics of purest Greek serene, which no translator has ever yet conveyed. His dialogue is life itself, or perhaps it is swifter, racier, more vigorous than life dares be. He belongs with Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Dickens in the lusty vitality of his style; and like theirs his characters give us more keenly the shape and aroma of the time than all the works of the historians; no one who has nQt read Aristophanes can know the Athenians. His plots are ridiculous, and are put together with an almost extempore carelessness; sometimes the main theme is exhausted before the play is half through, and the remainder limps forward on the crutches of burlesque. The humor is generally of a low order; it cracks and groans with facile puns, drags itself out to tragic lengths, and too often depends upon digestion, reproduction, and excre tion. In The Acbarnians we hear of a character who eases himself con-
CHAP. XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	429
tinuously for eight months;,.. in The Clouds the major forms of human waste are mingled with sublime philosophy;m every second page offers us rumps, wind, bosoms, gonads, coitus, pederasty, onanism; everything is here.133 He charges his old rival, Cratinus, with nocturnal incontinence."" He is the most contemporary of ancient poets, for nothing is so timeless as obscenity. Coming to him after any other Greek author-worst of all, after Euripides-he seems depressingly vulgar, and we find it difficult to imagine the same audience enjoying them both.
If we are good conservatives we can stomach all this on the ground that Aristophanes attacks every form of radicalism, and upholds devotedly every ancient virtue and vice. He is the most immoral of all Greek writers
known to us, but he hopes to make up for it by attacking immorality. He is always found on the side of the rich, but he denounces cowardice; he lies pitilessly about Euripides, living and dead, but he assails dishonesty; he describes the women of Athens as unbelievably coarse, but he exposes Euripides for defaming them; he burlesques the gods so boldly* that in comparison with the pious Socrates we must picture him as an hilarious atheist-but he is all for religion, and accuses the philosophers of under mining the gods. Yet it took real courage to caricature the powerful Cleon, and to paint the faults of Demos to Demos' face; it took insight to see, in the trend of religion and morals from sophistic skepticism to epicurean individualism, a basic danger to the life of Athens. Perhaps Athens would have fared better if it had taken some of his advice, moderated her im perialism, made an early peace with Sparta, and mitigated with aristocratic leadership the chaos and corruption of post-Periclean democracy.
Aristophanes failed because he did not take his own counsels seriously enough to observe them himself. His excesses of pornography and abuse were partly responsible for the law forbidding personal satire; and though the law was soon repealed, the Old Comedy of political criticism died before the death of Aristophanes (385), and was replaced, even in his later plays, by the Middle Comedy of manners and romance. But the vitality of the Greek comic theater disappeared along with its extravagance and brutality. Philemon and Menander rose and passed and were forgotten, while Aristophanes survived all changes of moral and literary fashions to come down to our own time with eleven of his forty-two plays intact. Even today, despite all difficulties of understanding and translation, Aris tophanes is alive; and, if we hold our noses, we can read him with profane delight.
Some of the gods, he tells us, keep brothels in heaven.115
43°	THE  LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVII
THE HISTORIANS
Prose was not completely forgotten in this heyday of dramatic poetry. Oratory, stimulated by democracy and litigation, became one of the pas sions of Greece. As early as 466 Corax of Syracuse wrote a treatise, Techne Logon (The Art of Words), to guide the citizen who wished to address an assembly or a jury; here already are the traditional divisions of an ora tion into introduction, narrative, argument, subsidiary remarks, and perora tion. Gorgias brought the art to Athens, and Antiphon used the ornate style of Gorgias in speeches and pamphlets devoted to oligarchical propa ganda. In Lysias Greek oratory became more natur"al and vivid; but it was only in the greatest statesmen, like Themistocles and Pericles, that the pub lic address rose above all visible artifice, and proved the effectiveness of simple speech. The new weapon was sharpened by the Sophists, and so thoroughly exploited by their pupils that when the oligarchic party seized power in 404 it forbade the further teaching of rhetoric.ue
The great achievement of Periclean prose was history. In a sense it was the fifth century that discovered the past, and consciously sought for a
perspective of man in time. In Herodotus historiography has all the charm and vigor of youth; in Thucydides fifty years later, it has already reached a degree of maturity which no later age has ever surpassed. What separates and distinguishes these two historians is the Sophist philosophy. Herodotus was the simpler, _perhaps the kindlier, certainly the more cheerful spirit. He was born in Halicarnassus about 484, of a family exalted enough to participate in political intrigue; because of his uncle's adventures he was exiled at the age of thirty-two, and began those far-reaching travels that supplied the background for his Histories. He passed down through Phoe nicia to Egypt, as far south as Elephantine; he moved west to Cyrene, east to Susa, and north to the Greek cities on the Black Sea. Wherever he went he observed and inquired with the eye of a scientist and the curiosity of a child; and when, about 447, he settled down in Athens, he was armed with a rich assortment of notes concerning the geography, history, and man ners of the Mediterranean states. With these notes, and a little plagiarizing of Hecataeus and other predecessors, he composed the most famous of all historical works, recording the life and history of Egypt, the Near East, and Greece from their legendary origins to the close of the Persian War. An ancient story tells how he read parts of his book publicly at Athens and Olympia, and so pleased the Athenians with his account of the war.
CHAP. XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLD EN  AGE	431
and their exploits in it, that they voted him twelve talents ($60,000)-which any historian will consider too pleasant to be true.18'1
The  introduction announces the purpose of the book in grand style:
This is a presentation of the Inquiries (Historiai) of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, to the end that time may not obliterate the great and marvelous deeds of the Hellenes and the Barbarians; and espe cially that the causes for which they waged war with one another may not be forgotten.
Since all the nations of the eastern Mediterranean are brought into the narrative, the book is, in a limited sense, a "universal history," much broader in its scope than the narrow subject of Thucydides. The story is uncon sciously unified by the contrast of barbarian despotism with Greek democ racy, and moves, though by halting steps and confusing digressions, to a foreshadowed and epic end at Salamis. The purpose is to record "wondrous deeds and wars,"ias and in truth the tale sometimes recalls Gibbon's regret table misunderstanding of history as "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."""' Nevertheless Herodotus, though he speaks in only the most incidental way of literature, science, philosophy, and art, finds room for a thousand interesting illustrations of the dress, manners, morals, and beliefs of the societies he describes. He tells us how Egyptian cats jump into the fire, how the Danubians get drunk on smells, how the walls of Babylon were built, how the Massagetae eat their parents, and how the priestess of Athena at Pedasus grew a mighty beard. He presents not only kings :md queens, but men of all degrees; and women, who are excluded from Thucydides, enliven these pages with their scandals, their beauty, their cruelties, and their charm.
There is, as Strabo says, "much nonsense in Herodotus";uo but our his torian, like Aristotle, covers a vast field, and has many opportunities to err. His ignorance is as wide as his learning, his credulity is as great as his wis dom. He thinks that the semen of Ethiopians is black,m accepts the legend that the Lacedaemonians won battles because they had brought the bones of Orestes to Sparta,"' and reports incredible figures for the size of Xerxes' army, the casualties of the Persians, and the almost woundless victories of the Greeks. His account is patriotic, but not unjust; he gives both sides of most political disputes,* signalizes the heroism of the invaders, and tes tifies to the honor and chivalry of the Persians. When he depends upon
Cf. the imaginative but excellent discussion of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. in iii, 2.