at these restrictions, and, without lawyers, get around them; they know that to most men nd to some women dress makes the woman; and their behavior in this matter reveals a wisdom gathered through a thousand cen turies.
MORALS
The Athenians of the fifth century are not exemplars of morality; the progress of the intellect has loosened many of them from their ethical tra ditions, and has turned them into almost unmoral individuals. They have a high reputation for legal justice, but they are seldom altruistic to any but their children; conscience rarely troubles them, and they never dream of loving their neighbors as themselves. Manners vary from class to class; in the dialogues of Plato life is graced with a charming courtesy, but in the comedies of Aristophanes there are no manners at all, and in public oratory
294	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XIII
personal abuse is relied upon as the very soul of eloquence; in such matters the Greeks have much to learn from the time-polished "barbarians" of Egypt or Persia or Babylon. Salutation is cordial but simple; there is no bowjng, for that seems to the proud citizens a vestige of monarchy; hand shaking is reserved for oaths or solemn farewells; usually the greeting is merely Chaire-"Rejoice"-followed, as elsewhere, by some brilliant re mark about the weather.81
Hospitality has lessened since Homeric days, for travel is a little more secure than then, and inns provide food and shelter for transients; even so it remains an outstanding virtue of the Athenians. Strangers are welcomed though without introduction; if they come with letters from a common friend, they receive bed and board, and sometimes parting gifts. An in vited guest is always privileged to bring an uninvited guest with him. This freedom of entry gives rise in time to a class of parasites-parasitoi a word originally applied to the clergy who ate the "com left over" from the temple supplies. The well to do are generous givers in both public and private philanthropy; the practice as well as the word is Greek. Char ity-charitas, or love-is also pr. sent; there are many institutions for the care of strangers, the sick, the poor, and the old... The government provides pensions for wounded soldiers, and brings up war orphans at the expense of the state; in the fourth century it will make payments to disabled work men... In periods of drought, war, or other crisis, the state pays two obols (34 cents) a day to the needy, in addition to the regular fees for attendance at the Assembly, the courts, and the plays. There are the normal scandals; a speech of Lysias concerns a man who, though on public relief, has rich men for his friends, earns money by his handicraft, and rides horses for recreation...,
The Greek might admit that honesty is the best policy, but he tries every thing else first. The chorus in Sophocles' Philoctetes expresses the tender est sympathy for the wounded and deserted soldier, and then takes advan tage of his slumber to counsel Neoptolemus to betray him, steal his weapons, and leave him to his fate. Everyone complains that the Athenian retailers adulterate their goods, give short weight and short change despite the gov rnment inspectors, shift the fulcrum of their scales towards the measur ing weights,'°a and lie at e'\'ery opportunity; the sausages, for example, are accused of being dogs.01 A comic dramatist calls the fishmongers "assas sins"; a gentler poet calls them "burglars."'" The politicians are not much better; there is hardly a man in Athenian public life that is not charged with crookedness;" an honest man like Aristides is considered exciting news, al-
CHAP. XIII)  THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS   295
most a monstrosity; even Diogenes' daytime lantern does not find another. Thucydides reports that men are more anxious to be called clever than honest, and suspect honesty of simplicity." It is an easy matter to find Greeks who will betray their country: "At no time," says Pausanias, "was Greece wanting in people afflicted with this itch for treason.".. Bribery is a popular way to political advancement, criminal impunity, diplomatic ac complishments; Pericles has large sums voted to him for secret uses, pre sumably for lubricating international negotiations. Morality is strictly tribal; Xenophon, in a treatise on education, frankly advises lying and rob bery in dealing with the enemies of one's country.'" The Athenian envoys at Sparta in 432 defend their empire in plain terms: "It has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger   no one has ever
allowed the cry for justice to hinder his ambition when he had a chance of gaining anything by might""-though this passage, and the supposed speech of the Athenian leaders at Melos,'" may be exercises of Thucydides' philosophical imagination, inflamed by the cynical discourses of certain Sophists; it would be as fair to judge the Greeks from the unconventional ethics of Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and Thucydides as it would be to describe the modern European by the brilliant bizarreries of Machia velli, La Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, and Stimer-not saying how fair that would be. That something of this superiority to morals is an active in gredient in the Greek character appears in the readiness with which the Spartans agree with the Athenians on these mooted points of morals. When the Lacedaemonian Phoebidas, despite a treaty of peace, treacherously seizes upon the citadel of Thebes, and the Spartan King Agesilaus is ques tioned about the justice of this action, he replies: "Inquire only if it is useful; for whenever an action is useful to our country it is right." Time and again truces are violated, solemn promises are broken, envoys are slain.•• Perhaps, however, the Greeks differ from ourselves not in conduct but in candor; our greater delicacy makes it offensive to us to preach what we practice.
Custom and religion among the Greeks exercise a very modest restraint upon the victor in war. It is a regular matter, even in civil wars, to sack the conquered city, to finish off the wounded, to slaughter or enslave all unransomed prisoners and all captured noncombatants, to burn down the houses, the fruit trees, and the crops, to exterminate the live stock, and to destroy the seed for future sowings.iro At the opening of the Peloponnesian War the Spartans butcher as enemies all Greeks whom they find on the sea, whether allies of Athens or neutrals;"' at the battle of Aegospotami,
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XIII
which closes the war, the Spartans put to death three thousand Athenian prisoners02-almost the selected best of Athens' depleted citizenry. War of some kind-of city against city or of class against class-is a normal condi tion in Hellas. In this way the Greece that defeated the King of Kings turns upon itself, Greek meets Greek in a thousand battles, and in the course of a century after Marathon the most brilliant civilization in history con sumes itself in a prolonged national suicide.
V. CHARACTER
H we are still attracted to these reckless disputants it is because they cover the nakedness of their sins with an exhilarating vigor of enterprise and intellect. The nearness of the sea, the opportunities of trade, the free dom of economic and political life form the Athenian to an unprecedented excitability and resilience of temper and thought, a very fever of mind and sense. What a change from the Orient to Europe, from the drowsy southern regions to these intermediate states where winter is cold enough to invigorate without dulling, and summer warm enough to liberate with out enfeebling body and soul! Here is faith in life and man, a zest of living never rivaled again until the Renaissance.
Out of this stimulating milieu comes courage, and an impulsiveness all the world away from the sophrosyne-self-control-which the philosophers vainly preach, or the Olympian serenity which young Winckelmann and old Goethe will foist upon the passionate and restless Greeks. A nation's ideals are usually a disguise, and are not to be taken as history. Courage and temperance-andreia, or manliness, and the meden agan, or "nothing in ex cess" of the Delphic inscription-are the rival mottoes of the Greek; he realizes the one frequently enough, but the other only in his peasants, philosophers, and saints. The average Athenian is a sensualist, but with a good conscience; he sees no sin in the pleasures of sense, and finds in them the readiest answer to the pessimism that darkens his meditative inter vals. He loves wine, and is not ashamed to get drunk now and then; he loves women, in an almost innocently physical way, easily forgives him self for promiscuity, and does not look upon a lapse from virtue as an irremediable disaster. Nevertheless he dilutes two parts of wine with three of water, and considers repeated drunkenness an offense against good taste. Though he seldom practices moderation he sincerely worships it, and for mulates more clearly than any other people in history the ideal of self mastery.
CHAP. xm)  THE  MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS   297
The Athenians are too brilliant to be good, and scorn stupidity more than they abominate vice. They are not all sages, and we must not pic ture their woman as all lovely Nausicaas or stately Helens, or their men as combining the courage of Ajax with Nestor's wisdom; history has remem bered the geniuses of Greece and has ignored her fools (except Nicias) ; even our age may seem great when most of us are forgotten, and only our mountain peaks have escaped the obscurity of time. Discounting the pathos of distance, the average Athenian remains as subtle as an Oriental, as enamored of novelty as an American; endlessly curious and perpetually mobile; always preaching a Parmenidean calm and always tossed upon a Heracleitean sea. No people ever had a livelier fancy, or a readier tongue. Clear thought and clear expression seem divine things to the Athenian; he has no patience with learned obfuscation, and looks upon informed and intelligent conversation as the highest sport of civilization. The secret of the exuberance of Greek life and thought lies in this, that to the Greek, man is the measure of all things. The educated Athenian is in love with reason, and seldom doubts its ability to chart the universe. The desire to know and understand is his noblest passion, and as immoderate as the rest. Later he will discover the limits of reason and human effort, and by a nat ural reaction will fall into a pessimism strangely discordant with the char acteristic buoyancy of his spirit. Even in the century of his exuberance the thought of his profoundest men-who are not his philosophers but his dramatists-will be clouded over with the elusive brevity of delight and the patient pertinacity of death.
As inquisitiveness generates the science of Greece, so acquisitiveness es
tablishes and dominates its economy. "Love of wealth wholly absorbs men," says Plato, with the exaggeration usual in moralists, "and never for a mo ment allows them to think of anything but their own private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen hangs suspended."1111 The Athenians are competitive animals, and stimulate one another with nearly ruthless rivalry. They are shrewd, and give the Semites a close run in cunning and strata gem; they are every bit as stiff-necked as the Biblical Hebrews, as pug nacious, obstinate, and proud. They bargain virulently in buying and sell ing, argue every point in conversation, and, when they cannot make war upon other countries, quarrel among themselves. They are not given to sentiment, and disapprove of Euripides' tears. They are kind to animals and cruel to men: they regularly use torture upon unaccused slaves, and sleep heartily, to all appearances, after slaughtering a cityful of noncom batants. Nevertheless they are generous to the poor or the disabled; and
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.xm
when the Assembly learns that the granddaughter of Aristogeiton the tyrannicide is living in destitution on Lemnos, it provides funds to bring her to Athens and to give her a dowry and a husband. The oppressed and hunted of other cities find a sympathetic refuge in Athens.
In truth the Greek does not think of character in our terms. He aspires neither to the conscience of the good bourgeois, nor to the sense of honor of the apstocrat. To the Greek the best life is the fullest one, rich in health, strength, beauty, passion, means, adventure, and thought. Virtue is arete, manly-literally and originally, martial-excellence (Ares, Mars); pre cisely what the Romans called vir-tus, man-liness. The Athenian ideal man is the kalokagathos, who combines beauty and justice in a. gracious art of living that frankly values ability, fame, wealth, and friends as well as vir tue and humanity; as with Goethe, self-development is everything. Along with this conception goes a degree of vanity whose candor is hardly to our taste: the Greeks never tire of admiring themselves, and announce at every tum their superiority to other warriors, writers, artists, peoples. If we wish to understand the Greeks as against the Romans we must think of the French vs. the English; if we wish to feel the Spartan spirit as opposed to the Athenian we must think of the Germans vs. the French.
All the qualities of the Athenians come together to make their city-state. Here is the creation and summation of their vigor and courage, their brilliance and loquacity, their unruliness and acquisitiveness, their vanity and patriotism, their worship of beauty and freedom. They are rich in passions but poor in prejudices. Now and then they tolerate religious in tolerance, not as a check upon thought but as a weapon in partisan politics, and as a bound to moral experimentation; otherwise they insist upon a degree of liberty that seems fantastically chaotic to their Oriental visitors. But because they are free, because, ultimately, every office is open to every citizen, and each is ruled and ruler in tum, they give half their lives to their state. Home is where they sleep; they live in the market place, in the Assembly, in the Council, in the courts, in the great festivals, athletic contests, and dramatic spectacles that glorify their city and its gods. They recognize the right of the state to conscript their persons and their wealth for its needs. They forgive its exactions because it gives more opportunity for human development than man has ever known before; they fight for it fiercely because it is the mother and guardian of their liberties. "Thus," says Herodotus, "did the Athenians increase in strength. And it is plain enough, not from this instance only but from many examples, that freedom is an excellent thing; since even the Athenians, who,, while they continued un-
CHAP. XIII)  THE MORALS AND MANNERS OF THE ATHENIANS   299


The maintenance of the army and the navy constitutes the chief expen diture of the state. Revenues come from traffic tolls, harbor dues, a two per cent tariff on imports and exports, a twelve-drachma annual poll tax on metics, a half-drachma tax on freedmen and slaves, a tax on prostitutes, a sales tax, licenses, fines, confiscations, and the imperial tribute. The tax on farm produce, which financed Athens under Peisistratus, is abandoned by the democracy as derogatory to the dignity of agriculture. Most taxes are farmed out to publicans, who collect them for the state and pocket a share as their profit. Considerable income is derived from state ownership of mineral resources. In emergencies the city resorts to a capital levy, the rate rising with the amount of property owned; by this method, for exam ple, the Athenians in 428 raise two hundred talents ($1,200,000) for the siege of Mytilene. Rich1men are also invited tu undertake certain leiturgiai, i.e., public services, such as equipping embassies, fitting out ships for the fleet, or paying for plays, musical contests, and games. These "liturgies" are voluntarily undertaken by some of the wealthy, and are forced by pub lic opinion upon others. To add to the discomfort of the well to do, any citizen assigned to a liturgy may compel any other to take it from him, or exchange fortunes with him, if he can prove the other to be richer than himself. As the democratic faction grows in power it finds ever more numerous occasions and reasons for using this device; and in return the financiers, merchants, manufacturers, and landed proprietors of Attica study the ans of concealment and obstruction, and meditate revolution.
Excluding such gifts and levies, the total internal revenue of Athens in the time of Pericles amounts to some four hundred talents ($2,400,000) a
266	THE	LIFE  OF  GREE.CE	(CHAP. XI
year; to which is added six hundred talents of contributions from subjects and allies. This income is spent without any budget, or advance estimate and allocation of funds. Under Pericles' thrifty management, and despite his unprecedented expenditures, the treasury shows a growing surplus, which in 440 stands at 9700 talents ($58,200,000); a pretty sum for any city in any age, and quite extraordinary in Greece, where few states-in the Peloponnesus none-have any surplus at all... In cities that have such a reserve it is deposited, usually, in the temple of the city's god-at Athens, after 434, in the Parthenon. The state claims the right to use not only this surplus, but, as well, the gold in the statues which it raises to its god; in the case of Pheidias' Athene Parthenos this amounts to forty talents ($240,- 000), and is so affixed as to be removable."" In the temple the city keeps also its "theoric fund," from which it makes the payments annually due the citizens for attendance at the sacred plays and games.
Such is Athenian democracy-the narrowest and fullest in history: nar rowest in the number of those who share its privileges, fullest in the direct ness and equality with which all the citizens control legislation, and administer public affairs. The faults of the system will appear vividly as its history unfolds; indeed, they are already noised about in Aristophanes. The irresponsibility of an Assembly that may without check of precedent or revision vote its momentary passion on one day, and on the next day its passionate regret, punishing then not itself but those who have misled it; the limitation of legislative authority to those who can attend the ekklesia; the encouragement of demagogues and the wasteful ostracism of able men; the filling of offices by lot and rotation, changing the personnel yearly and creating a chaos of government; the disorderliness of faction perpetually disturbing the guidance and administration of the state-these are vital de fects, for which Athens will pay the full penalty to Sparta, Philip, Alexan der, and Rome.
But every government is imperfect, irksome, and mortal; we have no reason to believe that monarchy or aristocracy would govern Athens bet ter, or longer preserve it; and perhaps only this chaotic democracy can release the energy that will lift Athens to one of the peaks of history. Never before or since has political life, within the circle of citizenship, been so intense or so creative. This corrupt and incompetent democracy is at least a school: the voter in the Assembly listens to the cleverest men in Athens, the juror in the courts has his wits sharpened by the taking and sifting of evidence, the holder of office is molded by executive responsibility and
CHAP.XI) PERICLES AND THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT   167
experience into a deeper maturity of understanding and judgment; "the city," says Simonides, "is the teacher of the man.""" For these reasons, it may be, the Athenians can appreciate, and thereby call into existence, Aes chylus and Euripides, Socrates and Plato; the audience at the theater has been formed in the Assembly and the courts, and is ready to receive the best. This aristocratic democracy is Do laissez-faire state, no mere watch man of property and order; it finances the Greek drama, and builds the Parthenon; it makes itself responsible for the welfare and development of its people, and opens up to them the opportunity ou monon tou zen, alla tou eu zen-"not only to live, but to live well." History can afford to for give it all its sins.
CHAPTER XII
Work and Wealth in Athens
LAND AND FOOD
J\ T the base of this democracy and this culture lies the production and fl.. distribution of wealth. Some men can govern states, seek truth, make music, carve statues, paint pictures, write books, teach children, or serve the gods because others toil to grow food, weave clothing, build dwellings, mine the earth, make useful things, transport goods, exchange them, or finance their production or their movement. Everywhere this is the foun dation.
Supporting all society is the peasant, the poorest and most necessary of men. In Attica he has at least the franchise; only citizens are permitted to own land, and nearly all peasants own the soil that they till. Clan control of the land has disappeared, and private ownership is solidly established. As in modem France and America, this great class of small proprietors is a steadying conservative force in a democracy where the propertyless city dwellers are always driving toward reform. The ancient war between the country and the city-between those who want high returns for agricul ture and low prices for manufactured goods, and those who want low prices for food and high wages or profits in industry-is especially con scious and lively in Attica. Whereas industry and trade are accounted plebeian and degrading by the Athenian citizen, the pursuits of husbandry are honored as the groundwork of national economy, personal character, and military power; and the freemen of the countryside tend to look down upon the denizens of the city as either weakling parasites or degraded slaves.'
The soil is poor: of 630,000 acres in Attica a third is unsuitable for cul tivation, and the rest is impoverished by deforestation, meager rainfall, and rapid erosion by winter floods. The peasants of Attica shirk no toil for themselves or their handful of slaves-to remedy this dry humor of the gods; they gather the surplus flow of headwaters into reservoirs, dike the channels of the streams to control the floods, reclaim the precious humus of the swamps, build thousands of irrigation canals to bring to their thirsty fields the trickle of the rivulets, patiently transplant vegetables to improve
268
CHAP. XII)	WORK  AND  WEALTH  IN  ATHENS
their size and quality, and let the land lie fallow in alternate years to regain its strength. They alkalinize the soil with salts like carbonate of lime, and fertilize it with potassium nitrate, ashes, and human waste;1 the gardens and groves about Athens are enriched with the sewage of the city, brought by a main sewer to a reservoir outside the Dipylon, and led thence by brick lined canals into the valley of the Cephisus River.• Different soils are mixed to their mutual benefit, and green crops like beans in flower are plowed in to nourish the earth. Plowing, harrowing, sowing, and planting are crowded into the brief days of the fall; the grain harvest comes at the end of May, and the rainless summer is the season of preparation and rest. With all this care Attica produces only 67 5,ooo bushels of grain yearly-hardly enough to supply a quarter of its population. Without imported food Periclean Athens would starve; hence the urge to imperialism, and the necessity for a powerful fleet.
The countryside tries to atone for its parsimonious grain by generous harvests of olives and grapes. Hillsides are terraced and watered, and asses are encouraged to make the vine more fruitful by gnawing off the twigs.' Olive trees cover many a landscape in Periclean Greece, but it is Peisistratus and Solon who deserve the credit for introducing them. The olive tree takes sixteen years to come to fruit, forty years to reach perfection; with out the subsidies of Peisistratus it might never have grown on Attic soil; and the devastation of the olive orchards in the Peloponnesian War will play a part in the decline of Athens. To the Greek the olive has many uses: one pressing gives oil for eating, a second, oil for anointing, a third, oil for illumination; and the remainder is used as fuel." It becomes Attica's richest crop, so valuable that the state assumes a monopoly of its export, and pays with it and wine for the grain that it must import.
It forbids altogether the export of figs, for these are a main source of health and energy in Greece. The fig tree grows well even in arid soil; its spreading roots gather whatever moisture the earth will yield, and its stinted foliage offers scant surface- for evaporation. Furthermore, the hus bandman learns from the East the secret of caprification: he hangs branches of the wild male goat fig (caprificus) among the boughs of the female cul tivated tree, and relies upon gall wasps to carry the fertilizing pollen of the male into the fruit of the female, which then bears richer and sweeter figs. These products of the soil-cereals, olive oil, figs, grapes, and wine-are the staples of diet in Attica. Cattle rearing is negligible as a source of food; horses are bred for racing, sheep for wool, goats for milk, asses, mules, cows, and oxen for transport, but chiefly pigs for food; and bees are kept as pro-
270	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XII
viders of honey for a sugarless world. Meat is a luxury; the poor have it only on feast days; the heroic banquets of Homeric days have dis.ippeared. Fish is both a commonplace and a delicacy; the poor man buys it salted and dried; the rich man celebrates with fresh shark meat and eels." Cereals take the form of porridge, flat loaves, or cakes, often mixed with honey. Bread and cake are seldom baked at home, but are bought from women peddlers or in market stalls. Eggs are added, and vegetables-particularly beans, peas, cabbage, lentils, lettuce, onions, and garlic. Fruits are few; oranges and lemons are unknown. Nuts are common, and condiments abound. Salt is collected in salt pans from the sea, and is traded in the in terior for slaves; a cheap slave is called a "salting," and a good one is "worth his salt." Nearly everything is cooked and dressed with olive oil, which makes an excellent substitute for petroleum. Butter is hard to keep in Mediterranean lands, and olive oil takes its place. Honey, sweetmeats, and cheese provide dessert; cheesecakes are so fancied that many classic treatises are devoted to their esoteric art.7 Water is the usual drink, but everyone has wine, for no civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics or stimulants. Snow and ice are kept in the ground to cool wine in the hot months." Beer is known but scorned in Periclean days. All in all, the Greek is a moderate eater, and contents himself with two meals daily. "Yet there are many," says Hippocrates, "who, if accustomed to it, can easily bear three full meals a day.'79
INDUSTRY
Out of the earth come minerals and fuels as well as food. Lighting is provided by graceful lamps or torches-burning refined olive oil, or resin-or by candles. Heat is derived from dry wood or charcoal, burning in portable braziers. The cutting of trees for fuel and building denudes the woods and hills near the towns; already in the fifth century timber for houses, furniture, and ships is imported. There is no coal.
Greek mining is not for fuels but for minerals. The soil of Attica is rich in marble, iron, zinc, silver, and lead. The mines at Laurium, near the southern tip of the peninsula, are in the phrase of Aeschylus "a fountain running silver"10 for Athens; they are a main support of the government, which retains all sub soil rights, and leases the mines to private operators for a talent ($6000) fee and one twenty-fourth of the product yearly.11 In 483 a prospector discovers the first really profitable veins at Laurium, and a silver rush takes place to the region of the mines. Only citizens are.allowed to lease the properties, and only slaves perform the work. The pious Nicias, whose superstition will help to
CHAP.XII)	WORK  AND  WEALTH  IN  ATHENS


Our oldest extant example is the Aethiopica, or "Egyptian Tales," of Heli odorus of Emesa. Of its date there is much dispute, but we may provisionally assign it to the third century. It begins in a style honorable with age:
The day had begun to smile cheerily, and the sun was already brightening the tops of the hills, when a band of men, in arms and appearance pirates, having ascended the summit of a slope that over looks the Heracleotic mouth of the Nile, paused and surveyed the sea. Finding no sail there to promise them booty, they turned their eyes to the shore beneath them; and this is what they saw.37
At once we meet the rich and handsome youth Theagenes, and the lovely and tearful princess Chariclea; they have been captured by pirates; and there
" •. The_ oldest mss. _assi t e essay in one case to "Dionysius Longinus," in the other to D1onysms or Longmus, without funher clue. The only literary Longinus known to us f om anti9.uity is_ Cassius L nginus, Ze ob •s p emi r. He was famous throughout the Em prre for h s.learnmg; Eunap1us called hun a livmg library," and Porphyry ranked him "the first of cnocs." 36
CHAP. XXIX)   THE  COLLAPSE  OF THE  EMPIRE	637
befalls them such a medley of mishaps, misunderstandings, battles, murders, and reunions as might supply a season's fiction today. Whereas in Petronius and Apuleius the chastity of maidens is a matter of swiftly passing concern, it is here the essence and pivot of the tale: Heliodorus preserves Chariclea's virginity through a score of narrow escapes, and writes persuasive homilies on the beauty and necessity of feminine virtue. There may be here some Christian influence; indeed, tradition made the author become the Christian bishop of Thessalonica. The Aethiopica unwittingly fathered an endless chain of imitations: here is the model for Cervantes' Persiles y Sigimmnda, the story of Clorinda in Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and the vast romances of Mme de Scudery; here are the love potions, signs, moans, faintings, and happy endings of a million pleasant tales; here is Clarissa Harlowe 1500 years before Richardson.
The most famous love story in ancient prose was Daphnis and Chloe. Of its author we know only the name Longus; and we merely guess at the third cen tury as his time. Daphnis is exposed at birth, is rescued and reared by a shepherd, and becomes a shepherd in tum. Excellent passages of rural description suggest that Longus, like his poetic model Theocritus, had discovered the country after long residence in the city. Daphnis falls in love with a peasant girl who has also been rescued from infant exposure; they tend their flocks in charming com radeship, bathe together in innocent nudity, and intoxicate each other with an unprecedented kiss. An old neighbor explains their fever to them, and describes from his own youth the sickness of romantic love. "I thought not of my food, I cared not for my drink. I could take no rest, and sleep deserted me. My soul was heavy with sadness, my heart beat quickly, my limbs felt a deadly chill." 38 In the end their fathers, now wealthy, discover and enrich them; but they ignore their wealth and return to their modest pastoral life. The tale is told with the simplicity of finished art. Translated into supple French by Amyot (1559), it became the model for Saint-Pierre's Paul and Virginia, and the inspiration of countless paintings, poems, and musical compositions.
Akin to it is a fragment of poetry kno-\vn as Pervigilium Veneris, "The Eve of Venus." No one knows who wrote it, or when; probably it belongs to this century.39 The theme is that of Lucretius' apostrophe and Longus' romance that the goddess of love, by inflaming all living things with reckless desire, is the real creator of the world:
Tomorrow shall he love who never loved; Tomorrow shall he love who loved before.
Fresh spring has come, and sings her amorous song; The world is born anew, and vernal love
Drives birds to mate, and all the waiting woods Unloose their tresses to the showers of spring. Tomorrow shall he love who never loved,
And he shall love who loved before.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIX
So the limpid verse flows on, finding the work of love in the fertilizing rain, in the forms of flowers, in the songs of merry festivals, in the awkward tentatives of desirous youth, in timid trysts amid woodland haunts; and after each stanza the pithy promise returns: Cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet. Here, in the last great lyric poem of the pagan soul, we hear the trochaic cadence of medieval hymns, and a melodious premonition of the troubadours.
THE  ORIENTAL MONARCHY
When Claudius II died of a pestilence that was decimating Goths and Romans alike ( 270), the army chose as his successor the son of an Illyrian
peasant. Domitius Aurelianus had risen from the lowest ranks by strength of body and will; his nickname was Mamt ad f errum-"hand on sword." It was a sign of reawakened good sense in the army that it chose a man who
exacted as hard a discipline from others as from himself.
Under his lead the enemies of Rome were repulsed at every point except the Danube. There Aurelian ceded Dacia to the Goths, hoping that they would stand as a barrier between the Empire and ulterior hordes. Perhaps encouraged by this surrender, the Alemanni and the Vandals invaded Italy; but Aurelian in three battles overcame and dispersed them. Meditating dis tant campaigns, and fearing an assault upon Rome during his absence, he persuaded the Senate to finance, and the guilds to erect, new walls around the capital. Everywhere in the Empire city walls were being built, signifying the weakening of the imperial power and the end of the Roman peace.
Preferring offense to defense, Aurelian determined to restore the Empire by attacking Zenobia in the East, and then Tetricus, who had succeeded Postumus as the usurper of sovereignty in Gaul. ,vhile his general Probus recovered Egypt from Zenobia's son, Aurelian marched through the Balkans, crossed the Hellespont, defeated the Queen's army at Emesa, and besieged her capital. She tried to escape and enlist Persia's aid, but was captured; the city surrendered and was spared, but Longinus was put to death (272).
\Vhile the Emperor was leading his army back to the Hellespont, Palmyra revolted and slew the garrison he had left there. He turned about with the speed of Caesar, again besieged and soon took the city; now he abandoned it to pillage by his troops, razed its walls, rerouted its trade, and let it lapse into the desert village that it had been before and is today. Zenobia graced in golden chains Aurelian's triumph in Rome, and was allowed to spend her remaining years in comparative freedom at Tibur.
In 2 4 urelian defe ted Tetricus at Cha.Ions, and returned Gaul, Spain, and Bntam to the Empire. Happy at the resumption of its mastery, Rome
CHAP, XXIX)   THE  COLLAPSE OF THE EMPIRE
hailed the victor as restitutor orbis, restorer of the world. Turning to the tasks of peace, he re-established some economic order by reforming the Roman coinage; and reorganized the government by applying to it the same severe discipline that had regenerated the army. Ascribing Rome's moral and political chaos in some degree to religious disunity, and im pressed by the political services of religion in the East, he sought to unite old faiths and new in a monotheistic worship of the sun-god, and of the Emperor as the vicar of that deity on earth. He informed a skeptical army and Senate that it was the god, and not their choice or confirmation, that had made him Emperor. He built at Rome a resplendent Temple of the Sun, in which, he hoped, the Baal of Emesa and the god of Mithraism would merge. Monarchy and monotheism were advancing side by side, each seek ing to make the other its aide. Aurelian's religious policy suggested that the power of the state was falling, that of religion rising; kings were now kings by the grace of God. This was the Oriental conception of government, old in Egypt, Persia, and Syria; in accepting it Aurelian advanced that Orientali zation of the monarchy which had begun with Elagabalus and would com plete itself in Diocletian and Constantine.
In 275, as Aurelian was leading an army across Thrace to settle matters with Persia, a group of officers, misled into thinking that he planned to execute them, assassinated him. Shocked by its own accumulated crimes, the anny asked the Senate to appoint a successor. None wanted an honor that so regularly heralded death; finally Tacitus, bein3 seventy-five years old, consented to serve. He claimed descent from the historian, and illustrated all the virtues preached by that laconic pessimist; but he died of exhaustion six months after takin3 the crown. The soldiers, repenting their repentance, resumed the prerogative of force, and saluted Probus as emperor (276).


the predestinarian creed. Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter; Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
JOHN
The accidents of history have transmitted Paul to us in comparative clarity, and have left the apostle John in obscurity and mystery. Besides three epistles, two major works have come down to us under his name.
Criticism tentatively assigns the Book of Revelation to the year 69-70,72 and to another John, "the Presbyter" mentioned by Papias (135).73 Justin Martyr (135) attributes this powerful Apocalypse to the "beloved" apostle;74
but as early as the fourth century Eusebius 75 noted that some scholars doubted its authenticity. The author must have been a man of considerable prominence, for he addresses the churches of Asia in a tone of menacing authority. If the apostle wrote it (and we may provisionally continue to think so), we can understand why, like his brother James, he was called Boanerges, Son of Thunder. In Ephesus, Smyrna, Pero-amum Sardis and other cities of Asia Minor, John, rather than Peter or Paul, was looked upon as the highest head of the Church. Tradition as reported by Eusebius 76 held that John had been banished to Patmos by Domitian, and had on that Aegean
CHAP.XXVII)	THE  APOSTLES	593
isle written both the Fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse. He lived to so great an age that people said he would never die.
In form Revelation resembles the books of Daniel and Enoch. Such prophetic-symbolic visions were a literary device frequently used by the Jews of the age; there were several other apocalypses ("hidden things revealed"), but. this one surpassed all the rest in lurid eloquence. Starting from the common belief that the coming of the Kingdom of God would be preceded by the reign of Satan and the heyday of evil, the author describes the principate of Nero as precisely this Satanic age. Satan and his followers, having revolted against God, are defeated by Michael's angelic hosts, are cast down upon the earth, and there lead the pagan world in the attack upon Christianity. Nero is the Beast and Antichrist of the book, a Messiah from Satan as Jesus was from God. Rome is described as "the harlot who sits on the great waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication"; she is the "whore of Babyl(?n," the source and center and summit of all iniquity, immorality, perversion, idolatry; there the blasphemous and bloodstained Caesars demand the worship that Chris tians must reserve for Christ.
In a succession of visions the author sees the punishments that will fall
upon Rome and its empire. A plague of locusts will for five months torture all inhabitants except the 144,000 Jews who have on their foreheads the sign of Christianity.77 Other angels will empty "the seven vials of God's wrath" upon the earth, affiicting men with terrible sores, and turning the sea "into blood like a dead man's," so that "every living thing in the sea" will die. Another angel will let loose the full heat of the sun upon all unrepentant men; another will cover the earth with darkness; four angels will lead "twice 10,000 times 10,000" knights to slaughter a third of mankind. Four horsemen w l ride forth to "kill the people with sword, famine, death, and the wild ammals of the earth." 78 A great earthquake will tumble the planet into ruins; huge hailstones will fall upon the surviving infidels, and Rome will be utterly destroyed. The kings of the earth will come together on the plains of Armageddon to make their last stand against God; but they will be overwhelmed in death. Satan and his cohorts, everywhere defeated, will be plunged into Hell. Only true Christians will be saved from these calamities; and those who have suffered for Christ's sake, who have been "washed in the blood of the Lamb," 79 will receive abounding reward.
After a thousand years Satan will be released to prey again upon mankind; sin will mount again in an unbelieving world; and the forces of evil will make a last effort to undo the work of God. But they will once more be overcome, and this time Satan and his followers will be cast into Hell for ever. Then will come the Last Judgment, when all the dead will be raised
594	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVII
from their graves, and the- drowned will be drawn up out of the seas. On that dread day all "whose names are not found in the Book of Life" will be "flung into ...  a burning lake of .fire and brimstone." 80 The faithful will "gather for God's great banquec, and will eat the bodies of kings, com manders, mighty men . . . the bodies of all men, slaves or freemen, high or low," 81 who have not heeded the call of Christ. A new heaven and earth will be formed, and a New Jerusalem will come down from the hand of God to be a paradise on earth. It will have a foundation of precious stones, buildings of translucent silver or gold, walls of jasper, and each gate a single pearl; through it will run a "river of living water," on whose bank will grow the "tree of life." The reign of evil will be ended for all time; the faithful of Christ will inherit the earth; "there will be no death any longer, nor night, nor any grief or pain." 82
The influence of the Book of Revelation was immediate, enduring, and profound. Its prophecies of salvation for loyal believers, and of punishment for their enemies, became the sustenance of a persecuted Church. Its theory of the millennium solaced those who mourned the long delay in the second coming of Christ. Its vivid images and brilliant phrases entered into both the popular and the literary speech of Christendom. For nineteen centuries men have interpreted the events of history as fulfillments of its visions; and in some recesses of the white man's world it still gives its dark colors and bitter flavor to the creed of Christ.
It seems incredible that the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel should have come from the same hand. The Apocalypse is Jewish poetry, the Fourth Gospel is Greek philosophy. Perhaps the apostle wrote Revelation in justifi able wrath after Nero's persecution, and the Gospel in the mellow meta physics of his old age (A.D. 90?). His memories of the Master may by this time have faded a bit, so far as one could ever forget Jesus; and doubtless in the isles and cities of Ionia he had heard many an echo of Greek mysticism and philosophy. Plato had set a theme by picturing the Ideas of God as the patterns on which all things were formed; the Stoics had combined these Ideas into the Logos Spermatikos or fertilizing wisdom of God; the Neo Pythagoreans had made the Ideas a divine person; and Philo had turned them into the Logos or Reason of God, a second divine principle, through which God created, and communicated with, the world. If we reread the famous exordium of the Fourth Gospel with all this in mind, and retain the Logos of the Greek original in place of the translation Word, we perceive at once that John has joined the philosophers:
In the beginning was the Logos; the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. . . . All things were made by the Logos; without
CHAP.xxvn)	THE	APOSTLES	595
him nothing was made that was made. It was by him that all things came into existence.	So the Logos became flesh and blood, and
dwelt amongst us.
Just as Philo, learned in Greek speculation, had felt a need to rephrase Judaism in forms acceptable to the logic-loving Greeks, so John, having lived for two generations in a Hellenistic environment, sought to give a Greek philosophical tinge to the mystic Jewish doctrine that the Wisdom of God was a living being,83 and to the Christian doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah. Consciously or not, he continued Paul's work of detaching Christianity from Judaism. Christ was no longer presented as a Jew, living more or less under the Jewish Law; he was made to address the Jews as "you," and to speak of their Law as "yours"; he was not a Messiah sent "to save the lost sheep of Israel," he was the coeternal Son of God; not merely the future judge of mankind, but the primeval creator of the universe. In this perspective the Jewish life of the man Jesus could be put into the back ground, faded almost as in Gnostic heresy; and the god Christ was assimilated to the religious and philosophical traditions of the Hellenistic mind. Now the pagan world-even the anti-Semitic world-could accept him as its own.
Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the Church; the Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of Christian literature and ritual; the Greek mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the Mass. Other pagan cultures con tributed to the syncretist result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the Last Judgment, and a personal immortality of reward and pun ishment; from Egypt the adoration of the Mother and Child, and the mystic theosophy that made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the Chris tian creed; there, too, Christian monasticism would find its exemplars and its source. From Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the resurrection drama of Adonis; from Thrace, perhaps, the cult of Dionysus, the dying and saving god. From Persia came millennarianism, the "ages of the world," the "final conflagration," the dualism of Satan and God, of Darkness and Light; already in the Fourth Gospel Christ is the "Light shining in the darkness, and the darknesshasneverputit out." 84The Mithraic ritual so closely resembled the eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass that Christian fathers charged the Devil with inventing these similarities to mislead frail minds.85 Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.
CHAPTER  XXVIII
TheGrowth of the Church
THE  CHRISTIANS
HEY met in private rooms or small chapels, and organized themselves on the model of the synagogue.1 Each congregation was called an ekklesia-the Greek term for the popular assembly in municipal govern ments. Slaves were welcomed, as in the Isiac and Mithraic cults; no attempt was made to liberate them, but they were comforted by the promise of a Kingdom in which all could be free. The early converts were predominantly proletarian, with a sprinkling of the lower middle classes and an occasional conquest among the rich. Nevertheless, they were far from being the "dregs of the people," as Celsus would claim; they lived for the most part orderly and industrious lives, financed missions, and raised funds for impoverished Christian communities. Little effort was made as yet to win over the rural population; these came in last, and it was in this strange way that their name pagani (villagers, peasants) came to be applied to the pre-Christian


cf kindly wisdom and steadfast friends!J.ip, just in judgment and blameless in life, and second only to Aemilianus in eloquence of speech and purity of style. Cicero, across a century, fell in love with Laelius, named after him his essay on friendship, and wished he might have lived not in his own turbu-
CHAP. v)	THE   GREEK  CONQUEi>T	97
lent epoch but in that exalted circle of Rome's intellectual youth. Its in fluence on literature was considen:)le; through p2rticipation in it Terence developed the elegant precision of his language; and Gaius Lucilius ( 180- 103) perhaps learned here to give a social purpose to the satires with which he lashed the vices and luxury of the a e.
The Greek mentors of this group were Polybius and Panaetius. Polybius lived for years in Scipio's home. He was a realist and a rationalist, and had few illusions about men and states. Panaetius came from Rhodes and, like Polybius, belonged to the Greek aristocracy. For many years he lived with Scipio in affectionate intimacy and reciprocal influence: he stirred Scipio to all the nobility of Stoicism, and probably it ;was Scipio who persuaded him to modify the extreme ethical demands of that philosophy into a more practicable creed. In a book On Duties Panaetius laid down the central ideas of Stoicism: that man is part of a whole and must co-operate with it-with his family, his country, and the divine Soul of the World; that he is here not to e joy the plea ures of the senses, but to do his duty without com plaint or stint. Panaetius did not, like the earlier Stoics, re uire a perfect virtue, or complete indifference to the goods and fortunes of life. Educated Romans grasped at this philosophy as a dignified and presentable substitute for a faith in which they had ceased to believe, and found in its ethic a moral code completely congenial to their traditions and ideals. Stoicism became the inspiration of Scipio, the ambition of Cicero, the better self of Seneca, the guide of Trajan, the consolation of Aurelius, and the conscience of Rome.
THE  AWAKENI G  OF LITERATURE
It was a basic purpose of the Scipionic circle to encourage literature as well as philosophy, to mold the Latin tongue into a refined and fluent literary medium, to lure the Roman muses to the nourishing springs of Greek poetry, and to provide an audience for promising writers of verse or prose. In 204 Scipio Africanus proved his character by welcoming to Rome a poet brought there by Cato, the strongest opponent of everything represented by the Scipios and their friends. Quintus Ennius had been born of Greek and Italian parentage near Brundisium ( 2 39).	He had received his education in Tarentum, and his enthusiastic spirit had been deepiy impressed by the Greek dramas presented on the T arentine stage. His courage as a soldier in Sardinia attracted Cato, who was quaestor there. Arrived in Rome, he lived by teaching Latin and Greek, recited his verses to his friends, and found admittance to the circle of the Scipios.
There ,,:as h2rdly a pcetic form that he did not try. He wrote a few
CAESAR AND CHRIST
"
(CHAP.V
comedies and at least twenty tragedies. He was in love with Euripides, flirted like him with radical ideas, and plagued the pious with such Epi curean quips as, "I grant you there are gods, but they don't care what men do; else it would go well with the good and ill with the bad-which rarely happens"; 28 according to Cicero the audience applauded the lines.29 He translated or paraphrased Euhemerus' Sacred History, which argued that the gods were merely dead heroes deified by popular sentiment. He was not immune to theology of a kind, for he announced that the soul of Homer, having passed through many bodies, including Pythagoras and a peacock, now resided in Ennius. He wrote with verve an epic history of Rome from Aeneas to Pyrrhus, and these Anna/es became, till Virgil, the national poem of Italy. A few fragments survive, of which the most famous is a line that Roman conservatives never tired of quoting:
Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque-
"the Roman state stands through its ancient morals and its great men." Metrically the poem was a revolution; it replaced the loose "Satumian" verse of Naevius with the flowing and flexible hexameters of Greek epic poetry. Ennius molded Latin to new forms and powers, filled his lines with the meat of thought, and prepared for Lucretius, Horace, and Virgil in method, vocabulary, theme, and ideas. To crown his career he wrote a treatise on the pleasures of the palate, and died of gout at seventy, after com posing a proud epitaph:
Pay me no tears, nor for my passing grieve; I linger on the lips of men, and live.30
Ennius succeeded in everything but comedy; perhaps he took philosophy too seriously, forgetting his counsel that "one must philosophize, but not too much."31 The people rightly preferred laughter to philosophy, and made Plautus rich and Ennius poor. For like reasons they gave little en couragement to the tragic drama in Rome. The tragedies of Pacuvius and Accius were acclaimed by the aristocracy, ignored by the people, and for gotten by time.
In Rome, as in Athens, plays were presented to the public by state officials as partial celebration of a religious festival or as the obsequies of some distinguished citizen. The theater of Plaums and Terence consisted of a wooden scatfoldir:o supporting a decorated background (the scae11a), and, in front of this, a circul orchestra, or platform for dancing; the rear half of this circle formed the pros caenium, or stage. These flimsy structures were tom down after each festival, like our reviewing stands today. The spectators stood, or sat on stools they had brought, or squatted on the ground under the sky. Not till 145 was a con=iplete
CHAP. v)	THE   GREEK  CONQUEST	99
theater built in Rome, still of wood and roofless, but fitted with seats in the Greek semicircular style. No admission was charged; slaves might attend, but not sit; women were admitted only in the rear. The audience in this period was prob ably the roughest and dullest in dramatic history-a jostling, boisterous crowd of "groundlings"; it is sad to note how often the prologues beg for quiet and better manners, and how the crude jokes and stereotyped ideas must be repeated to be understood. Some prologues ask mothers to leave their babies at home, or threaten noisy children, or admonish ·women not to chatter so much; such peti tions occur even in the midst of the published plays.32 If an exhibition of prize fighting or rope walking happened to compete, the play, as like as not, would be interrupted until the more exciting performance was over. At the end of a Roman comedy the words, Nzmc plaudite omnes, or some variant, made plain that the play was finished and that applause was in order.
The best feature of the Roman stage was the acting. The leading part was usually played by the manager, a freeman; the other performers were mostlr Greek slaves. Any citizen who became an actor forfeited his civic rights-a cus tom that lasted tiiI Voltaire. Female parts were taken by men. As audiences were small, actors in this age did not wear masks, but contented themselves with paint and wigs. About 100 B.c., as audiences grew larger, the mask became necessary to distinguish the characters; it was called persona, apparently from the Etruscan word for mask, phersu; and the parts were called dramatis personae-masks of the play. Tragedians wore a high shoe, or "buskin" (cotbumus), comedians a low shoe, or "sock" (soccus). Parts of the play were sung to the obbligato of a flute; sometimes singers sang the parts while actors performed them in pantomime.
The Plautine comedies were written in rough and ready iambic verse, imitating the meter as well as the matter of their Greek models. 1\1ost of the Latin comedies that have come down to us ,vere taken directly, or by combination, from one or more Greek dramas; usually from Philemon, l\lenander, or other practitioners of the New Comedy in Athens. The author and title of the Greek original were usually named on the title page. Adaptations of Aristophanes and the Old Comedy were ruled out by a law of the Twelve Tables punishing political satire with death.33 It was probably fear of this lethal legislation that led the Latin playwrights to keep the Greek scenes, characters, customs, names, even coins, of their originals; but for Plautus Roman law would have banished Roman life almost completely from the Roman stage. This police supervision did not exclude coarseness and obscenity; the aedile wished to amuse the crowd, not to elevate it; and the Roman goYernment was never displeased by the ignorance of the multi tude. The audience preferred broad humor to wit, buffoonery to subtlety, vul garity to poetry, Plautus to Terence.
T. Maccius Plautus-literally, Titus the flat-footed clown-had made his first entrance in Umbria in 2 54. Coming to Rome, he worked as a stage hand, saved his money, inyested it eagerly, and lost it. To eat he wrote plays; his adaptations from the Greek pleased by the Roman allusions scattered
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. V
through them; he made money again and was given the citizenship of Rome. He was a man of the people and the earth, exuberantly jolly, Rabelaisianly r?bust; he laughed with everyone at everyone, but felt a hearty good will toward all. He wrote or refurbished 130  plays, of which twenty survive. The Miles Gloriosus is a jolly picture of a braggart soldier, whose servant feeds him hopefully with lies:
Servant: You saw those girls who stopped me yesterday?
Captain: What did they say?


aisle for the admission of light and a:r. Here, of course, was the essential in terior forin of the medieval cathedral. With these vast edifices Rome began to take on that aspect of magnificence and strength which was to distinguish the city even after it ceased to be the capital of the world.
THE XEW GODS
How were the old gods faring in tllis age of reckless change? Apparently a rivulet of unbelief h d trickled down from the aristocracy to the crowd; it is hard to understand how a people still faithful to the ancient pantheon could have accepted with such boisterous approval those comedies in which Plautus-with whatever excuse of following Greek models-made fun of Jupiter's labors with Alcmena, and turned Mercury into a buffoon. Even Cato, so anxious to preserve old forms, m::rveled at the ability of two augurs to keep from laughing when they met face to face.21 Too long these takers of auspices had been suborned to political trickery; prodigies and portents had been concocted to mold public opinion, the vote of the people had been annulled by pious humbuggery, nd re!i3ion had consented to tum exploitation into a sacrament. It was a bad cmen that Pclybius, after living seventeen years among the hi;hest circles i:i Rome, cou!d write, about r 50 B.c., as if the Roman religion were merel·.1 a toe! of .r.,-overnment:
The	quality in which the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is, in my judgment, the nature of its religion. The very thino that among other nations is an object of reproach-i.e., supers.tition_:: is that which maintains the cohesion of the Roman state. These mat ters are clothed in such pomp, and introduced to such an extent into public and private life, as no other religion can parallel. . .. I be lieve that the government has adopted this course for the sake of t e c_ommon people. This might not have been necessary had it been pos sible to form a state composed 0f wise men; but as everv multitude s fickle full of l wless desires, unreasoned passion, and vfolent anger, 1t must be held m by invisible terrors and rel:gious pagear:tr:·.22
Polybius could have justified himself, perhaps, by recent incidents tend ing to show that, despite Plautus and philosophy, superstition still was king. "\Vhen the disaster of Cannae seemed to lewe Rome defenseless arrainst Hannibal, the excitable populace fell into a panic, and cried, "To wha god must we pray to save Rome?" The Senate sought to still the commotion by
94	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. V
human sacrifice; then·by prayers to Greek gods; then by applying the Greek ritual to all the gods, Roman and Greek alike. Finally the Senate decided that if it could not prevent superstition it would organize and control it. In 205 it announced that the Sibylline Books foretold that Hannipal would leave Italy if the l\fagna Mater-a form of the goddess Cybele-should be brought from Phrygian Pessinus to Rome. Attalus, King of Pergamum, con sented; the black stone which was believed to be the incarnation of the Great Mother was shipped to Ostia, where it was received with impressive cere mony by Scipio Africanus and a band of virtuous matrons. When the vessel that bore it was grounded in the Tiber's mud, the Vestal Virgin Claudia freed it, and drew it upstream to Rome, by the magic power of her chastity. Then the matrons, each holding the stone tenderly in her turn, carried it in solemn procession to the Temple of Victory, and the pious people burned incense at their doors as the Great Mother passed. The Senate was shocked to find that the new divinity had to be served by self-emasculated priests; such men were found, but no Roman was allowed to be among them. From that time onward Rome celebrated, every April, the Megalesia, or Feast of the Great Goddess, first with wild sorrow and then with wild rejoicing. For Cybele was a vegetation ceity, and legend told how her son Attis, symbol of autumn and spring, had died and gone to Hades, and then had risen from the dead.
In that same year (205) Hannibal left Italy, and the Senate complimented
itself on its handling of the reli;ious crisis. But the wars with Macedon opened the gates to Greece and the East; in the wake of soldiers returning with Eastern spoils, ideas, and myths came a flood of Greek and Asiatic captives, slaves, refugees, traders, travelers, athletes, artists, actors, musicians, teachers, and lecturers; and men in their migrations carry along their gods. The lower classes of Rome were pleased to learn of Dionysus-Bacchus, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of mystic rites that gave a divine inspiration and intoxication, of initiations that revealed the resurrected deity and promised the worshiper eternal life. In 186 the Senate was disturbed to learn that a considerable minority of the people had adopted the Dionysian cult, and that the new god was being celebrated by nocturnal bacchanalia whose secrecy lent color to rumors of unrestrained drinking and sexual revelry. "More uncleanliness was wrought with men than with women," says Livy; and he adds, probably turning gossip into history, that '\vhoever would not submit to defilement ...  was s:1crificed as a victim."23 The Senate sup pressed the cult, arrested 7000 of the devotees, and sentenced hundreds to
death. It was a temporary victory in the long war that Rome was to warre
0
against Oriental faiths.
CHAP.V}	THE  GREEK  CONQUEST	95
THE COMING OF PHILOSOPHY
The Greek conquest cf Rome took the form of sending Greek religion and comedy to the Roman plebs; Greek morals, philosophy, and art to the upper classes. These Greek gifts conspired with wealth and empire in that sapping of Roman faith and character which was one part of Bellas' long revenge upon her conquerors. The conquest reached its climax in Roman philosophy, from the stoic Epicureanism of Lucretius to the epicurean Stoicism of Seneca. In Christian theology Greek metaphysics overcame the gods of Italy. Greek culture triumphed in the rise of Constantinople as first the rival anµ· then the successor of Rome; and when Constantinople fell, Greek literature, philosophy, and art reconquered Italy and Europe in the Renaissance. This is the central stream in the history of European civili zation; all other currents are tributaries. "It was no little brook that flowed from Greece into our city," said Cicero, "but a mighty river of culture and leaming."24 Henceforth the mental, artistic, and religious life of Rome was a part of the Hellenistic world.*
The invading Greeks found a strategic opening in the schools and lec ture halls of Rome. A swelling stream of Graeculi-"Greeklings," as the scornful Romans called them-followed the armies returning from the East. Many of them, as slaves, became tutors in Roman families; some, the gra111- 1natici, inaugurated secondary education in Rome by opening schools for instruction in the language ::nd literature of Greece; some, the rbetores, gave private instruction and public lectures on oratory, literary composition, and philosophy. Roman orators-even the mishellenist Cato-began to model their addresses on the speeches of Lysias, Aeschines, and Demosthenes.
Few of these Greek teachers had any reli0ious belief; fewer transmitted any; a small minority of them followed Epicurus and preceded Lucretius in describing religion as the chief evil in human life. The patricians saw
where the wind was blowing, and tried to stop it; in 173 the Senate banished two Epicureans, and in 161 it decreed that "no philosophers or rhetors shall be permitted in Rome." The wind would not stop. In 159 Crates of
.'\fallus, Stoic head of the roval library at Perp-ainum, came to Rome on an official embassy, broke a leg, stayed on, and, while convalescing, gave lec- tures on literature and philosophy. In 155 Athens sent as ambassadors to Rome the leaders of its three great philosophical schools: Carne:ides the Academic or Platonist, Critolaus the Peripatetic or Aristotelian, and Diog-
Said Horace, in a now-trite line: Graecia capta fennn'Uictorem cepit: "Conquered Greece rook captive her barbarous conqueror." 24a
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. V
enes the Stoic of Seleucia. Their coming was almost as strong a stimulus as Chrysoloras would bring to Italy in 1453. Carneades spoke on eloquence so eloquently th t the younger set came daily to hear him.25 He was a com plete skeptic, doubted rhe existence of the gods, and argued that as good reasons could be given for doing injustice as for being just-a belated sur render of Plato to Thrasymachus.26 \Vhen old Cato heard of this he moved in the Senate that the ambassadors be sent home. They were. But the new generation had t2sted the wine of philosophy; and from this time onward the rich youth of Rome went eagerly to Athens and Rhodes to exchange their oldest faith for the newest doubts.
The very conquerors of Greece were in person the sponsors of Hellenistic culture and philosophy in Rome. Flamininus, who had loved Greek litera ture before invading Macedon and freeing Greece, was deeply moved by the art and drama he saw in Hellas. \Ve must lay it to the credit side of Rome that some of its generals could understand Polycleitus and Pheidias, Scopas and Praxiteles, even if they carried their appreciation to the point of robbery. Of all the spoils that Aemilius Paulus brought b:1ck from his victories over Perseus, he kept for himself only the library of the King, as a heritage for his children. He had his sons instructed in Greek literature and philosophy as well as in the Roman arts of the chase and war; and so far as his public duties permitted he shared in these studies with his children. When Paulus died, his youngest sen was adopted by his friend, P. Cor nelius Scipio, son of Africanus. Follcwing Roman custom, the lad took the name of his adoptive father and added the name of his father's clan; in this way he became the P. Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus whom we shall here: fter mean by Scipio. He was a handsome and healthy youth, simple in habits and moderate in speech, affectionate and generous, so honest that at his death, after having all the plunder of Carthage pass through his hands, he left only thirty-three pounds of silver and two of gold-though he had lived like a scholar rather than as a man of means. In his youth he met the Greek exile Polybius, who earr.ed h:s gr2t tude and lifelcng friendship by giving him good advice nd geed books. The boy won his spurs by fighting under his father at Pydna; iil Spain he accepted the challenge of the enemy to single
combat, and won.27
In private life he gathered abcut him a group of distinguished Romans interested in Greek thou_:;-ht. Chief amcn6 them was Gaius Laelius, a man


Two factors, said Paul, determine who shall be saved by Christ's death: divine election and humble faith. God chooses from all eternity those whom he will bless with his grace, and those whom he will damn.56 Nevertheless, Paul bestirred himself to awaken faith as a rod to catch God's grace; only through such "assurance of things longed for," such "confidence in things unseen," 57 can the soul experience that profound change which makes a new man, unites the believer with Christ, and allows him to share in the fruits of Christ's death. Good works and the performance of all the 613 precepts of the Jewish Law will not suffice, said Paul; they cannot remake the inner man, or wash the soul of sin. The death of Christ had ended the epoch of the Law; now there should no more be Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female, for "in union with Christ Jesus you are all one." 58 As to good works combined with faith, Paul never tired of inculcating them; and the most famous words ever spoken about love are his own:
Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of preaching, and understand all mysteries, and have all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I can move moun tains; if I have not love I am nothing. And though I give away every thing that I am, and give myself, but do it in pride, not love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient and kind. It is not envious or boastful.
. . . It does not insist on its rights    Itnever fails. So faith, hope,
and love endure, these three; and the greatest of these is love.59
CAESAR AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXVII
To sexual love, and marriage, Paul gives the most discouraging toleration. One passage 60 suggests, but does not prove, that he was married: "Have we not" (he and Barnabas) "a right to take a Christian wife about with us, like the rest of the apostles, and the Lord's brothers, and Peter?"-but in another 61 he calls himself single. Like Jesus, he had no sympathy for physical desire.62 He was horrified when he heard of promiscuity and perversions.63 "Do you not know," he asked the Corinthians, "that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit that is within you? ...  Honor God with your bodies." 64 Virginity is better than marriage, but marriage is better than concupiscence. The marriage of divorced persons is forbidden, except after mixed unions. Women are to be obedient to their husbands, slaves to their masters. "Everyone ought to remain in the station in which he was called" (i.e., converted to Christianity). "If you were a slave when you were called, never mind. Even if you can gain your freedom, make the most of your present condition instead. For a slave who has been called to union with
the Lord is a freedman of the Lord, just as a freeman who had been called is
a slave of Christ." 65 Freedom and slavery meant little if the world was
soon coming to an end. By the same token national liberty was unimportant. Let "every soul be in subjection to the higher powers, for there is no power but God, and the powers that be are ordained by God." 66 It was ungracious of Rome to destroy so accommodating a philosopher.
The Martyr
''Do your best to come to me soon," runs the doubtful second letter to Timothy,
for Demas has deserted me for love of the present world . . . Crescens has gone, and Titus; no one but Luke is with me.   At
my first appearance in court no one came to help me; everybody de serted me.    But the Lord stood by me. and gave me strength, so
that I might make a full presentation of the message and let all the heathen hear it. So I was saved from the jaws of the lion.    My
life is already being poured out, and the time has come for my de parture. I have had a part in the great contest. I have run my race, I have preserved the faith.66a
He spoke bravely, but he was desolate. One ancient tradition said that he was freed, went to Asia and Spain, preached again, and once more found himself a prisoner in Rome; probably he was never freed. \ Vithout wife or children to comfort him, with all friends gone but one, only his faith could
CHAP. XXVII)	THE  APOSTLES	591
support him; and perhaps that too was shaken. Like the other Christians of his age, he had lived on the hope of seeing Christ return. He had written to the Philippians: "We are eagerly awaiting the coming of a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.... The Lord is coming soon." 67 And to the Corin thians: "The appointed time has grown very short. From now on, those who have wives should live as though they had none . . . and those who buy anything as if they did not own it.... For the present shape of the world is passing away ...  Maranatha! Lord, come quickly!" 68 But in his second epistle to the Thessalonians he reproved them for neglecting the affairs of this world in expectation of Christ's early advent; the coming will be delayed until the "Adversary"-Satan-"makes his appearance and pro claims himself to be God." 69 \Ve surmise from his last letters that he had struggled, during his imprisonment, to reconcile his early faith with the long delay in the Parousia or Second Appearance. More and more he put his hope beyond the grave, and made for his own solace the great adjustment that saved Christianity-the transformation of the belief in Christ's earthly return into the hope of union with him in heaven after death. Apparently he was tried again, and convicted; Caesar and Christ came face to face, and Caesar won for a day. We do not know the precise charge; probably now, as at Thessalonica, Paul was accused of "disobeying the emperor's decrees, and claiming that someone else called Jesus is king." 70 This was a crime of 1naiestas, punishable with death. We have no ancient record of the trial; but Tertullian, writing about 200, reports that Paul was beheaded at Rome; and Origen, about 220, writes that "Paul suffered martyrdom in Rome under Nera." 71 Probably, as a Roman citizen, he had the honor of a distinct execution, and was not mingled with the Christians crucified after the fire of 64. Tradition united him with Peter in a simultaneous, though separate, martyrdom; and a touching legend pictured the great rivals meeting in friendship on the road to death. Over the place on the Via Ostia, where th Church believed that Paul had found peace, a shrine was raised in the third century. Remade in ever fairer form, it stands today as the basilica of San Paolo fuori le Mura-St. Paul beyond the Walls.
It is a fit symbol of his victory. The emperor who condemned him died
a coward's death, and soon nothing survived of his inordinate works. But from the defeated Paul came the theological structure of Christianity, as from Paul and Peter the astonishing organization of the Church. Paul had found a dream of Jewish eschatology, con.fined in Judaic Law; he had freed and broadened it into a faith that could move the world. With the patience of a statesman he had interwoven the ethics of the Jews with the met2- physics of the Greeks, and had transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into the Christ of theology. He had created a new mystery, a new form of the
592	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVII
resurrection drama, which would absorb and survive all the rest. He had replaced conduct with creed as the test of virtue, and in that sense had begun the Middle Ages. It was a tragic change, but perhaps humanity had willed it so; only a few saints could achieve the imitation of Christ, but many souls could rise to faith and courage in the hope of eternal life.
The influence of Paul was not immediately felt. The communities that
.. he had established were tiny isles in a pagan sea. The church at Rome was Peter's, and remained faithful to his memory. For a century after Paul's death he was almost forgotten. But when the first generations of Christianity had passed away, and the oral tradition of the apostles began to fade, and a hundred heresies disordered the Christian mind, the epistles of Paul provided the framework for a stabilizing system of belief that united the scattered congregations into a powerful Church.
Even so, the man who had detached Christianity from Judaism was still so essentially Jewish in intensity of character and sternness of morality that the Middle Ages, adopting paganism into a colorful Catholicism, saw no kindred spirit in him, built few churches to him, seldom sculptured his figure or used his name. Fifteen centuries went by before Luther made Paul the Apostle of the Reformation, and Calvin found in him the somber texts of


this tribe of men, and is not posses.sed by it." 61 Philo, twenty years before the Dispersion, described "the continents ...  full of Jewish settlements, and likewise the ...  islands, and nearly all Babylonia." 62 By A.D. 70 there were thousands of Jews in Seleucia on the Tigris, and in other Parthian cities; they were numerous in Arabia, and crossed thence into Ethiopia; they abounded in Syria and Phoenicia; they had large colonies in Tarsus, Antioch, Miletus, Ephesus, Sardis, Smyrna; they were only less numerous in Delos, Corinth, Athens, Philippi, Patrae, Thessalonica. In the west there were Jewish communities in Carthage, Syracuse, Puteoli, Capua, Pompeii, Rome, even in Horace's native Venusia. All in all we may reckon 7,000,000 Jews in the Empire-some seven per cent of the population, twice their pro portion in the United States of America today.63
Their number, dress, diet, circumcision, poverty, ambition, prosperity, exclu siveness, intelligence, aversion to images, and observation of an inconvenient Sabbath aroused an anti-Semitism that ranged from jokes in the theater and slurs in Juvenal and Tacitus to murders in the street and wholesale pogroms. Apion of Alexandria made himself the chief mouthpiece of these attacks, and Josephus answered him in an incisive pamphlet.•
After the fall of Jerusalem Josephus sailed to Rome with Titus, and accom panied the conqueror of his people in a triumphal procession that exhibited captive Jews and Jewish spoils. Vespasian gave him Roman citizenship, a pension, an apartment in his palace, and profitable lands in Judea.65 In return Josephus took Vespasian's family name Flavius, and wrote The Wars of the Jews (ca. ?S) to defend the actions of Titus in Palestine, to exonerate his own defection, and to discourage further revolt by showing forth the might of Rome. In his later years (ca. 93), feeling more keenly his isolation, he wrote The Antiquities of the Jews to regain the good ·will of his people by giving gentiles a more favorable view of Jewish achievements, customs, and character. His narratives are clear and forceful, and his account of Herod the Great is as engaging as Plutarch, but his bias and his aims impair his objectivity. The Antiquities required many years an  exhaust d the au hor's stre gth; the last four of the twenty books were written by h1S secretanes from his noteS.66 Josephus was still but fiftv-six when the work appeared, but he was already worn out by a life of adventure, controversy, and moral solitude.
With their characteristic resilience the Jews gradually rebuilt their economic
Josephus rejoiced to learn that an ulcer had compelled Apion to be circumcized.64
CHAP. xxv)	ROME  AND  JUDEA	547
and cultural life in Palestine. Amid the siege of Jerusalem an aged pupil of Hillel, Johanan ben Zakkai, fearful lest the carnage should destroy all teachers and transmitters of the oral tradition, escaped from the city, and set up an academy in a vineyard at Yahne, or Jamnia, near the Mediterranean coast. When Jerusalem fell Johanan organized a new Sanhedrin at Jamnia, composed not of priests, politicians, and rich men, but of Pharisees and rabbis-i.e., teachers of the Law. This Bet Din or Council had no political power, but most Palestinian Jews recognized its authority in all matters of religion and morals. The patriarch whom the Council chose as its head appointed the administrative officers of the Jewish community, and had the power to excommunicate recalcitrant Jews. The stem discipline of the Patriarch Gamaliel II (ca. 100) welded into unity first the Council, then the Jews of Jamnia, then the Jews of Palestine. Under his leadership the contradictory interpretations of the Law transmitted by Hillel and Shammai were reviewed and voted on; those of Hillel were for the most part approved, and were made binding upon all Jews.
Since the Law was now the indispensable cement of scattered and state less Jewry, the teaching of the Law became the chief occupation of the synagogue throughout the Diaspora; the synagogue replaced the temple, prayer replaced sacrifice, the rabbi replaced the priest. T a12naim-expositors
-interpreted one or another of the orally transmitted laws (Halacha) of the Jews, usually supported it with scriptural quotation, sometimes added to it, and illustrated it with stories, homilies, or other material ( Haggada). The most famous of the Tannaim was Rabbi Akiba hen Joseph. At the age of forty (ca. A.D. 80) he joined his five-year-old son at school, and learned to read. Soon he could recite the whole Pentateuch by heart. After thirteen years of study he opened his own school under a fig tree in a village near Jamnia. His enthusiasm and idealism, his courage and humor, even his lusty dogmatism, brought him many students. When, in 95, word came that Domitian was planning new measures against the Jews, Akiba was chosen with Gamaliel and two others to make a personal appeal to the Emperor. While they were in Rome Domitian died. Nerva heard their plea favorably, and ended the fiscus Iudaicus-the tax laid upon Jews for rebuilding Rome. On his return to Jamnia Akiba set himself the lifelong task of codifying the Halacha; his pupil Rabbi Meir and their successor Judah the Patriarch (ca. 200) completed the undertaking. Even in this classified form the Halacha r mained part of the oral trad:tion, handed down from generation to genera non by scholars and professional memorizers-living textbooks of the Law.
Akiba's methods were as absurd as his conclusions were sound; he derived liberal principles from a weird exegesis in which every letter of the Torah, or written law, was held to have a mysterious meaning; perhaps he had observed that men will accept the rational only in the form of the mystical.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXV
From Akiba came that painstaking organization and exposition of theology and ethics which passed down through _the Talmud to Maimonides, and ultimately to the methods of the Scholastic philosophers.
In his ninetieth year, when he had grown weak and reactionary, Akiba found himself, as in his youth, surrounded by revolution. In 115-16 theJews of Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia rose once more against Rome; the massacre of gentiles by Jews, and of Jews by Gentiles, became the order of the day; 220,000 men, says Dio, were killed in Cyrene, 240,000 in Cyprus; the figures are incredible, but we know that Cyrene never recovered from the devastation, and that for centuries thereafter no Hebrew was allowed in Cyprus. The uprisings were suppressed, but the surviving Jews kept fiercely alive their hope of a Messiah who would rebuild the Temple and restore them in triumph to Jerusalem. Roman stupidity reanimated the revolt. In
130  Hadrian declared his intention to raise a shrine to Jupiter on the site
of the Temple; in 131 he issued a decree forbidding circumcision and public instruction in the Jewish Law.67 Under the leadership of Simeon Bar Co cheba, who claimed to be the Messiah, the Jews made their last effort in antiquity to recover their homeland al'ld their freedom ( 13 2).  Akiba, who all his life had preached peace, gave his blessing to the revolution by accept ing Bar Cocheba as the promised Redeemer. For three years the rebels fought valiantly against the legions; finally they were beaten by lack of food and supplies. The Romans destroyed 985 towns in Palestine, and slew 580,000 men; a still larger number, we are told, perished through starvation, disease, and fire; nearly all Judea was laid waste. Bar Cocheba himself fell in defending Bethar. So many Jews were sold as slaves that their price fell to that of a horse. Thousands hid in underground channels rather than be captured; surrounded by the Romans, they died one by one of hunger, while the living ate the bodies of the dead.68
Resolved to destroy the recuperative virility of Judaism, Hadrian forbade not merely circumcision, but the observance of the Sabbath or any Jewish holyday, and the public performance of any Hebrew ritual.69 A new and heavier poll tax was placed upon all Jews. They were allowed in Jerusalem only on one fixed day each year, when hey might come and weep before the ruins of their Temple. The pagan city of Aelia Capitolina rose on the site of Jerusalem, with shrines to Jupiter and Venus, and with palaestras theaters, and baths. The Council at Jamnia was dissolved and outlawed· ; minor and powerless Council was permitted at Lydda, but public instructi n in the Law was prohibited on pain of death. Several rabbis were executed f r dis beying thi inj ction. Akiba, now ninety-five, insisted on teaching his pupils; he was nnpnsoned for three years, but taught even in jail; he was
CHAP. xxv)	ROME  AND  JUDEA	549
tried and condemned, and died, we are told, with the basic tenet of Judaism on his lips: "Hear,0 Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one." 70
Though Hadrian's decrees were softened by Antoninus Pius, the Jews did not for centuries recover from the disaster of Bar Cocheba's revolt. From this moment they entered their Middle Ages, abandoning all secular learning except medicine, renouncing every form of Hellenism, and taking comfort and unity only from their rabbis, their mystic poets, and their Law. No other people has ever known so long an exile, or so hard a fate. Shut out from their Holy City, the Jews were compelled to surrender it first to paganism, then to Christianity. Scattered into every province and beyond, condemned to poverty and humiliation, unbefriended even by philosophers and saints, they retired from public affairs into private study and worship, passionately preserving the words of their scholars, and preparing to write them down at last in the Talmuds of Babylonia and Palestine. Judaism hid in fear and obscurity while its offspring, Christianity, went out to conquer the world.
BOOKV
THE	YOUTH OF CHRISTIANITY
4 B.C.-A.D. 32 5
CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE
All dates except the first are A.n.; and all dates before 150  are uncertain.
B.c. 4: Binh of Christ


It was an excellent choice and a merited name, for Probus stood out in courage and integrity. He expelled the Germans from Gaul, cleared the Vandals from Illyricum, built a wall between the Rhine and the Danube, frightened the Persians with a word, and gave peace to the whole Roman realm. Soon, he pledged his people, there would be no arms, no armies, and no wars; and the reign of law would cover the earth. As a prelude to this utopia he compelled his troops to clear wastelands, drain marshes, plant vines, and perform other public works. The army resented this sublimation, murdered him (282), mourned him, and built a monument to his memory. It now hailed as imperator one Diodes, the son of a Dalmatian freedman.
Diocletian, as he henceforth called himself, had risen by brilliant talents and flexible scruples to the consulate, a proconsulate, and command of the palace guards. He was a man of genius, less skilled in war than in statesman-
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIX
ship. He came to the throne after a period of anarchy worse than that which had prevailed from the Gracchi to Antony; like Augustus, he pacified all parties, protected all frontiers, extended the role of government, and based his rule on the aid and sanction of religion. Augustus had created the Em pire, Aurelian had saved it; Diocletian reorganized it.
His first vital decision revealed the state of the realm and the waning of Rome. He abandoned the city as a capital, and made his emperial head quarters at Nicomedia in Asia Minor, a few miles south of Byzantium. The Senate still met in Rome, the consuls went through their ritual, the games roared on, the streets still bore the noisome pullulation of humanity; but power and leadership had gone from this center of economic and moral decay. Diocletian based his move on military necessity: Europe and Asia must be defended, and could not be def ended from a city so far south of the Alps. Hence he appointed a capable general, Maximian, as his cornier (286), charging him with defense of the West; and Maximian made not Rome but Milan his capital. Six years later, to further facilitate administra tion and defense, each of the two Augusti chose a "Caesar" as his aide and successor: Diocletian selected Galerius, who made his capital at Sirmium (Mitrovica on the Save), and was responsible for the Danube provinces; and Maximian appointed Constantius Chlorus (the Pale), who made his capital at Augusta Trevirorum (Treves). Each Augustus pledged himself to retire after twenty years in favor of his Caesar, who would then appoint a "Caesar" to aid and succeed him in turn. Each Augustus gave his daughter in marriage to his "Caesar," adding the ties of blood to those of law. In this way, Diocletian hoped, wars of succession would be avoided, government would recapture continuity and authority, and the Empire would stand on guard at four strategic points against internal rebellion and external
attack. It was a brilliant arrangement, which had every virtue but unity and freedom.
The monarchy was divided, but it was absolute. Each law of each ruler was issued in the name of all four, and was valid for the realm. The edict of the rulers became law at once, without the sanction of the Senate at Rome. All governmental o_fficia s were appointed by the rulers, and a,gigantic bureaucracy spread its coils around the state. To further fortify the system, Diocletian developed the cult of the Emperor's genius into a personal wor ship of himself as the earthly embodiment of Jupiter, while Maximian mod estly consented to be Hercules; wisdom and force had come down from heaven to restore order and peace on earth. Diocletian assumed a diadem-a broad white fillet set with pearls-and robes of silk and gold; his shoes were studded with precious gems; he kept himself aloof in his palace, and required visitors to pass the gantlet of ceremonious eunuchs and titled chamberlains,
CHAP. XXIX)   THE  COLLAPSE  OF THE  EMPIRE
and to kneel and kiss the hem of his robe. He was a man of the world, and doubtless smiled in private at these myths and fonns; but his throne lacked the legitimacy of time, and he hoped to buttress it, to check the turbulence of the populace and the revolts of the army, by enduing himself with divinity and awe. "He had himself called dominus," says Aurelius Victor, "but he behaved like a father." 40 This adoption of Oriental despotism by the son of a slave, this identification of god and king, meant the final failure of repub lican institutions in antiquity, the surrender of the fruits of Marathon; it was a reversion, like Alexander's, to the forms and theories of Achaemenid and Egyptian courts, of Ptolemaic, Parthian, and Sassanid kings. From this Orientalized monarchy came the structure of Byzantine and European king doms till the French Revolution. All that was needed now was to ally the Oriental monarch in an Oriental capital with an Oriental faith. Byzantinism began with Diocletian.
THE  SOCIALISM OF DIOCLETIAN
He proceeded with Caesarian energy to remake every branch of the gov ernment. He transformed the aristocracy by raising to it many civil or military officials, and making it a hereditary caste with an Oriental grada tion of dignities, profusion of titles, and complexity of etiquette. He and his colleagues redivided the Empire into ninety-six provinces grouped into seventy-two dioceses and four prefectures, and appointed civil and military rulers for each division. It was a frankly centralized state, which considered local autonomy, like democracy, a luxury of security and peace, and excused its dictatorship by the needs of actual or imminent war. Wars were waged, and with brilliant success; Constantius recovered revolted Britain, and Galerius defeated the Persians so decisively that they surrendered Meso potamia and five provinces beyond the Tigris. For a generation Rome's enemies were held at bay.
In years of peace Diocletian, with his aides, faced the problems of eco nomic decay.To overcome depression and prevent revolution he substituted a managed economy for the law of supply and demand.41 He established a sound currency by guaranteeing to the gold coinage a fixed weight and purity which it retained in the Eastern Empire till 1453. He distributed food to the poor at half the market price or free, and undertook extensive public works to appease the unemployed.42 To ensure the supply of neces saries for the cities and the armies, he brought many branches of industry under complete state control, beginning with the import of grain; he per-
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXll
suaded the shipowners, merchants, and crews engaged in this trade to accept such control in return for governmental guarantee of security in employ ment and returns.43 The state had long since owned most quarries, salt deposits, and mines; now it forbade the export of salt, iron, gold, wine, grain, or oil from Italy, and strictly regulated the importation of these articles.44 It went on to control establishments producing for the army, the bureaucracy, or the court. In munition factories, textile mills, and bakeries the government required a minimum product, bought this at its own price, and made the associations of manufacturers responsible for carrying out orders and specifications. If this procedure proved inadequate, it completely nationalized these factories, and manned them with labor bound to the job.45 Gradually, under Aurelian and Diocletian, the majority of industrial estab lishments and guilds in Italy were brought under the control of the corporate state. Butchers, bakers, masons, builders, glass blowers, ironworkers, en gravers, were ruled by detailed governmental regulations.46 The "various corporations," says Rostovtze.ff, "were more like minor supervisors of their own concerns on behalf of the state than their owners; they were themselves in bondage to the officials of the various departments, and to the commanders of the various military units." 41 The associations of tradesmen and artisans received various privileges from the government, and often exerted pressure upon its policies; in return they served as organs of national administration, helped to regiment labor, and collected taxes for the state from their mem bership.48 Similar methods of governmental control were extended, in the late third and early fourth centuries, to provincial armament, food, and clothing industries. "In every province," says Paul-Louis, "special procura tores superintended industrial activities. In every large town the state became a powerful employer ... standing head and shoulders above the private industrialists, who were in any case crushed by taxation." 49
Such a system could not work without price control. In 301 Diocletian and his colleagues issued an Edictum de pretiis, dictating maximum legal prices or wages for all important articles or services in the Empire. Its pre amble attacks monopolists who, in an "economy of scarcity," had kept goods from the market to raise prices:
Who is ... so devoid of human feeling as not to see that im moderate prices are widespread in the markets-of our cities, and that the passion for gain is lessened neither by plentiful supplies nor by fruitful years?-so that ... evil men reckon it their loss if abun dance omes. There are me_n whose ai_m it is to restrain general prospenty . . . to seek usunous and rumous returns.   Avarice
rages throughout the world.... Wherever our annies are com pelled to go forthe common safety, profiteers extort prices not merely
CHAP.XXIX)   THE  COLLAPSE OF THE  EMPIRE
four or eight times the normal, but beyond any words to describe. Sometimes the soldier must exhaust his salary and his bonus in one purchase, so that the contributions of the whole world to support the armies fall to the abominable profits of thieves.• 50
The Edict was until our time the most famous example of an attempt to replace economic laws by governmental decrees. Its failure was rapid and complete. Tradesmen concealed their commodities, scarcities became more acute than before, Diocletian himself was accused of conniving at a rise in prices,52 riots occurred, and the Edict had to be relaxed to restore pro-• duction and distribution.53 It was finally revoked by Constantine.
The weakness of this managed economy lay in its administrative cost. The required bureaucracy was so extensive that Lactantius, doubtless with political license, estimated it at half the population.54 The bureaucrats found their task too great for human integrity, their surveillance too sporadic for the evasive ingenuity of men. To support the bureaucracy, the court, the army, the building program, and the dole, taxation rose to unprecedented peaks of ubiquitous continuity. As the state had not yet discovered the plan of public borrowing to conceal its wastefulness and postpone its reckoning, the cost of each year's operations had to be met from each year's revenue. To avoid returns in depreciating currencies, Diocletian directed that, where possible, taxes should be collected in kind: taxpayers were required to trans
port their tax quotas to governmental warehouses, and a laborious organiza tion was built up to get the goods thence to their final destination.55 In each municipality the decuriones or municipal officials were held financially responsible for any shortage in the payment of the taxes assessed upon their communities.56
Since every taxpayer sought to evade taxes, the state organized a special force of revenue police to examine every man's property and income; tor ture was used upon wives, children, and slaves to make them reveal the hidden wealth or earnings of the household; and severe penalties were enacted for evasion.57 Towards the end of the third century, and still more in the fourth, flight from taxes became almost epidemic in the Empire. The
Some of the "ceilings" established in the Edict reveal the level of prices and wages in A._v. 301: \V eat, lentils, peas, $3.50 a bu.; barley, rye, beans, $2.10 a bu.; wine, 2_1-26 cents a pmt; olive od, 10.5 cents a pint; pork, 10.5 cents a lb., beef or mutton, 7 cents; chickens, 2 for
52.5 cents; dormice, IO for 35 cents; best cabbage or lettuce, 5 heads for 3.5 cents; green onions, 25 for 3.5 cents; best snails, 10 for 3,5 cents; large apples or peaches, 10 for 3.5 cents; figs, 25 for 3.5 cents; hair, 5 cents a lb.; shoes, 62 cents to .$1.38 a pair. \Vages of farm labor, 23-46 cents, plus keep, per day; stonemasons, carpenters, blacksmiths, bakers, 46 cents plus keep; barbers, $1.75 cents per man; scribes, 23 cents per 100 lines; elementary teachers, 46 cents per pupil per month; teachers of Greek or Larin literature, or geometry, .$1.84 per pupil per month; lawyers for pleading a case, .$7.36.51