The surviving Romans found their city so devastated that m ny of them wished to abandon the site and make Veii their capital. Camillus dissuaded them, and the government provided financial aid for rebuilding homes. This rapid reconstruction in the face of many enemies was a part cause of Rome's design lessness and the venturesome crookedness of her narrow streets. The subject peoples, seeing her so near destruction, revolted again and again, and half a century of intermittent war was required to cure their lust for freecom. The Latins, Aequi, Hernici, and Volscians attacked in turn or together; if the Vol scians had succeeded they would have shut off Rome from southern Italy and
" Livy's story 30 that at the last moment Camillus refused to hand over the gold, and drove the Gauls out by force, is now by common consent rejected as an im·encion o.t Roman pride. No nation is ever defeated in its textbooks.
CHAP.II)	THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  DEMOCRACY	37
the sea, and perhaps have put an end to her history. In 340 the cities of the Latin League were defeated; two years later Rome dissolved the League and annexed nearly all Latium.•
Meanwhile the victories of Rome over the Volscians had brought her face to face with the powerful Samnite tribes. These held a large cross section of Italy from Naples to the Adriatic, with such rich cities as Nola, Beneventum, Cumae, and Capua. They had absorbed most of the Etruscan and Greek settlements of the west coast, and enough of Hellenism to produce a distinctive Campanian art; probably they were more civilized than the Romans. With them Rome fought three long and bloody wars for the control of Italy. At the Caudine Forks (321) the Romans suffered one of their greatest defeats, and their beaten army passed "under the yoke"-an arch of hostile spears-in token of submission. The con suls at the front signed an abject peace, which the Senate refused to ratify. The Samnites won the Etruscans and Gauls as allies, and for a time Rome faced nearly all Italy in arms. But the legions gained a decisive victory at Sentinum ( 295), and Rome added Campania and Umbria to her domain. Twelve years later she drove the Gauls back beyond the Po, and again reduced Etruria to a subject state.
Between the Gallic north and the Greek south, Rome was now master of Italy. Insatiate and insecure, she offered the cities of Magna Graecia a choice between alliance under Roman hegemony and war. Preferring Rome to further absorption by the "barbarian" (i.e., Italian) tribes who were multi plying around and within them, Thurii, Locri, and Crotona consented; probably they, too, like the towns of Latium, were troubled by class war, and received Roman garrisons as a protection of property owners against a rising plebs.32 Tarentum was obstinate, and called over to her aid Pyrrhus, King of Epirus. This gallant warrior, fevered with memories of Achilles and Alexander, crossed the Adriatic with an Epirote force, defeated the Romans at Heraclea (280), and gave an adjective to European languages by mourning the costliness of his victory.33 All the Greek cities of Italy now joined him, and the Lucanians, Brutti:ms, and Samnites declared themselves his allies. He dispatched Cineas to Rome with offers of peace, and freed his 2000 Roman prisoners on their word to return if Rome preferred war. The Senate was about to make terms "vhen old blind Appius Claudius, who had long since retired from public life, had himself carried to the senate house and demanded that Rome should never make peace with a foreign am1y on Italian soil. The Senate sent back to Pyrrhus the prisoners whom he had released, and resumed the war. The young king won another victory; then, disgusted with the sloth and cowardice of his allies, he sailed with his
This war was marked by two probably legen_dary d eds. One consul, Publius Decius, rode to his death amid the enemy as a sacrifice to wm the a1rl of rhe gods for Rome: the other consul, Titus J\lanlius Torquatus, bchcJdcJ his son for winning an engagement by disobeying orders.31
38	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.11
depleted army to Sicily. He relieved the Canhaginian siege of Syracuse and drove the Carthaginians from nearly all their possessions on the island; but his imperious rule offended the Sicilian Greeks, who thought they could have freedom without order and courage; they withdrew their support, and Pyrrhus returned to Italy, saying of Sicily, "What a prize I leave to be fought for by Carthage and Rome!" His army met the Romans at Bene ventum, where for the first time he suffered defeat (275); the light-armed and mobile maniples proved superior to the unwieldy phalanxes, and began a new chapter in military history. Pyrrhus appealed to his Italian allies for new troops; they refused, doubting his fidelity and persistence. He re turned to Epirus, and died an adventurer's death in Greece. In that same year ( 2 72) Milo betrayed Tarentum to Rome. Soon all the Greek cities yielded, the Samnites sullenly surrendered, and Rome was at last, after two centuries of war, the ruler of Italy.
The conquest was quickly consolidated with colonies, some sent out by the Latin League, some by Rome. These colonies served many pur poses: they relieved unemployment, the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence, and consequent class strife in Rome; they acted as garrisons or loyal nuclei amid disaffected subjects, provided outposts and outlets for Roman trade, and raised additional food for hungry mouths in the capital; conquests in Italy were completed with the plow soon after they had been begun by the sword. In these ways hundreds of Italian towns that still live today received their foundation or their Romanization. The Latin language and culture were spread throughout a peninsula still largely polyglot and barbarous, and Italy was slowly forged into a united state. The first step had been taken in a political synthesis brutal in execution, majestic in result.
But in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and Africa, closing the western Medi terranean to Roman trade, and imprisoning Italy in her own seas, stood a power older and richer than Rome.
CHAPTER  III
Hannibal Against Rome
CARTHAGE
OME eleven hundred years before our era the inquisitive traders of Phoenicia discovered the mineral wealth of Spain. Soon a fleet of mer chant vessels plied between Sidon, Tyre, and Byblus, at one end of the Mediterranean, and Tartessus, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, on the other. Since such voyages could not then be made without many stops, and the southern shores of the Mediterranean provided the shortest and safest route, the Phoenicians established intermediate posts and trading stations on the African coast at Leptis Magna (now Lebda), Hadrumetum (Sousse), Utica (Utique), Hippo Diarrhytus (Bizerte), Hippo Regius (Bone), and even beyond Gibraltar at Lixus (south of Tangier). The Semitic settlers at these posts married some of the natives and bribed the rest to peace. About 813 B.c. a new group of colonists, perhaps from Phoenicia, perhaps from expanding Utica, built their homes upon a promontory ten miles northwest of the modern Tunis. The narrow peninsula could be easily defended, and the land, watered by the Bagradas (Medjerda) River, was so fertile that it quickly recovered from repeated devastation. Classic tradition ascribed the founding of the city to Elissa, or Dido, daughter of the king of Tyre: her husband having been slain by her brother, she had sailed with other ad venturous souls to Africa. Her settlement was called Kart-badasbt-New town-to distinguish it from Utica; the Greeks transformed the name into Karchedon, the Romans into Carthago. The Latins gave the name Africa to the region around Carthage and Utica, and followed the Greeks in call ing its Semitic population Poeni-i.e., Phoenicians. The sieges of Tyre by Shalmaneser, Nebuchadrezzar, and Alexander drove many wealthy Tyrians
to Africa. Most of them went to Carthage, and made it a new center of Phoenician trade. Carthage grew in power and splendor as Tyre and Sidon declined.
The strengthened city drove the African natives farther and farther in land, ceased to pay tribute to them, exacted tribute from them, and used them asslaves and serfs in its homes and fields. Large estates took form, some
39
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. III
with 20,000 men; 1 in the hands of the practical Phoenicians agriculture be came a science and an industry, which the Carthaginian Mago summarized in a famous manual. Irrigated with canals, the soil flowered into gardens, cornfields, vineyards, and orchards of olives, pomegranates, pears, cherries, and figs.2 Horses and cattle, sheep and goats, were bred; asses and mules were the beasts of burden, and the elephant was one of many domesticated ani mals. Urban industry was relatively immature, except for metalwork; the Carthaginians, like their Asiatic forebears, preferred to trade what others made. They led their pack mules east and west and across the Sahara to find elephants, ivory, gold, or slaves. Their immense galleys carried goods
to and from a hundred ports between Asia and Britain, for they refused to tum back, like most other mariners, at the Pillars of Hercules. It was pre sumably they who, about 490 B.C., financed Hanna's voyage of exploration 2600 miles down the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the voyage of Himilco along the northern shores of Europe. Though their coinage was undis tinguished, they were apparently the first to issue the equivalent of a paper currency-leather strips stamped with signs of value, and accepted through out the Carthaginian realm.
Probably it was the rich merchants, rather than the aristocratic land owners, who provided the funds for those armies and navies which trans formed Carthage from a trading post into an empire. The African coast except Utica-was conquered from Cyrenaica to Gibraltar and beyond. Tartessus, Gades (Cadiz), and other Spanish towns were captured, and Carthage grew wealthy from the gold, silver, iron, and copper of Spain. It took the Balearic Islands, and reached out even to J\ladeira; it conquered Malta, Sardinia, Corsica, and the western half of Sicily. It treated these subject lands with varying degrees of severity, charging them annual tribute, conscripting their population for its army, and strictly controlling their foreign relations and their trade. In return it gave them military protection, local self-government, and economic stability. We may judge the wealth of these dependencies from the fact that the town of Leptis Minor paid 365 talents ($1, 3 14,000) a year into the Carthaginian treasury.
The exploitation of this empire and trade made Carthage, in the third century n.c., the richest of Mediterranean cities.Tariffs and tribute brought her annually 12,000 talents-twenty times the revenue of Athens at her zenith. The upper classes lived in palaces, wore costly robes, and ate exotic delicacies. The city, crowded with a quarter of a million inhabitants, became famous for its gleaming temples, its public baths, above all for its secure harbors and spacious docks. Each of the 2 20 docks was faced with two Ionic pillars, so that the inner harbor ("cothon") presented a majestic circle of 440  marble columns. Thence a broad avenue led to the Forum, a colon-
CHAP. III)	HANNIBAL  AGAINST  ROME
naded square adorned with Greek sculpture and containing administrative buildings, commercial offices, law courts, and temples; while the adjoining streets, Orientally narrow, teemed with a thousand shops plying a hundred crafts and resounded with bargaining. Houses rose to six stories, and often crowded a family into a single room. In the center of the city, providing one of many hints to the later builders of Rome, stood a hill or citadel the Byrsa; here were the Treasury and the Mint, more shrines and colon nades, and the most brilliant of Carthaginian temples-to the great god Eshmun. Around the landward side of the city ran a threefold protective wall forty-five feet high, with still higher towers and battlements; within the wall were accommodations for 4000 horses, 300 elephants, and 20,000 men.3 Outside the walls were the estates of the rich, and beyond these, the fields of the poor.


studied the intent or will of the gods, in earlier times b , watching the flight of birds,* later by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals. Before every im-
Hence the words augurs-bird carriers (a ·es-gero )-and auspices-bird inspection (aves spicio). Primitive man may actually have learned to forecast weather through the movements of birds.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IV
portant act 9f policy, government, or war, the "auspices were taken" by the magistrates and interpreted by the augurs, or by special haruspices-liver in spectors-whose art went back through Etruria to Chaldea and beyond. As the priests were occasionally open to financial persuasion, their pronouncements were sometimes adjusted to the needs of the purchaser; for example, incon venient legislation could be stopped by announcing that the auspices were un favorable for further business on that day; or the Assembly might be induced by "favorable" auspices to vote a war.13 In major crises the government professed to learn the pleasure of Heaven by consulting the Sibylline Books-the recorded oracles of the Sibyl, or priestess of Apollo, at Cumae. Through such means, and occasional deputations to the oracle at Delphi, the aristocracy could influence the people in any direction to almost any end.14
The ritual of worship aimed merely to offer the gods a gift or sacrifice to win
their aid or avert their wrath. To be effective, said the priests, the ceremony had to be performed with such precision of words and movements as only the clergy could manage. If any mistake was made, the rite had to be repeated, even to thirty times. Religio meant the performance of ritual with religious care.15 The essence of the ceremony was a sacrifice-literally making a thing sacer-i.e., belonging to a god. In the home the offering would normally be a bit of cake or wine placed on the hearth or dropped into the domestic fire; in the village it would be the first fruits of the crops, or a ram, a dog, or a pig; on great occasions, a horse, a hog, a sheep, or an ox; on supreme occasions the last three were slaughtered together in the su-ove-taur-ilia. Holy formulas pronounced over the victim turned it into the god who was to receive it; in this sense the god himself was sacrificed; 10 and since only the viscera were burned on the altar, while priests and people ate the rest, the strength and glory of the god ( men hoped) passed into his feasting worshipers. Sometimes human beings ,vere offered in sacrifice; it is significant that a law had to be passed as late as 97 n.c. forbidding this. By a variant of these ideas of vicarious atonement a man might offer his life for the state as the Decii had done, or Marcus Curtius, who, to propitiate angry sub terranean powers, leaped into a chasm that an earthquake had opened in the Forum-whereupon, we are told, the chasm closed and all was well.17
Pleasanter was the ceremony of purification. This might be of crops or flocks, of an army or a city. A procession made the circuit of the objects to be purified, prayer and sacrifice were offered, evil influences were thereby dispelled, and misfortune was turned away. Prayer was still imperfectly evolved from magic incantations; the words for it-carmen-meant not only a chart but a cbann; and Pliny frankly reckoned prayer as a form of magical utterance.18 If the formula was properly recited, and was addressed to the correct deity according to the indigitamenta, or classified directory of the gods compiled and kept by the priests, the request was certain to be granted; if not granted there must have been an error in the ritual. Akin to magic were also the 7,•ott1, or vowed offerings, with which the people sought to gain the help of the gods; sometimes great temples rose in fulfillment of such vows. The multitude of votive offerings found
CHAP. IV)	STOIC  ROME
in Roman remains suggests that the religion of the people was warm and tender with piety and gratitude, a feeling of kinship with the hidden forces in nature, and an anxious desire to be in harmony with them all. By contrast the state religion was uncomfonably formal, a kind of legal and cont'ractual relation between the government and the gods. When new cults flowed in from the con quered East it was this official worship that declined first, while the picturesque and intimate faith and ritual of the countryside patiently and obstinately sur vived. Victorious Christianity, half surrendering, wisely took over much of the faith and ritual; and, under new forms and phrases, they continue in the Latin world to this day.
8. Festivals
If the official worship was gloomy and severe, its festivals redeemed it, and showed men and gods in a lighter mood. The year was adorned with over a hundred holy days (feriae), including the first of every month and
sometimes the ninth and fifteenth. Some of the feriae "·ere sacred to the
dead or to the spirits of the lower world; these were "apotropaic" in their ceremonies, aiming to- PFfase the departed and turn away wrath. On May 11-13 Roman families commemorated with awe the feast of the Lenmres, or dead souls; the father spat black beans from his mouth, and cried: "\Vith these beans I redeem myself and mine. . . . Shades of my ancestors, de part!" 19 The Parentalia and the Feralia, in February, were similar attempts to propitiate the fearsome dead. But for the most part the festivals were occasions of feasting and jollity, often, among the plebs, of sexual freedom; on such days, says a character in Plautus, "you may eat what you like, go where you like . . . and love whom you like, provided you abstain from wives, widows, virgins, and free boys";20 apparently he felt that a wide
choice would still remain.
On February 15 came the strange Lupercalia, sacred to the God Faunus as averter of wolves (lupercus): goats and sheep were sacrificed; and the luperci
-priests clad only in goatskin girdles-ran around the Palatine praying to Faunus to drive away evil spirits, and striking the women whom they encountered with thongs of hide from the sacrificed animals, to purify them and make them fertile; then puppets of straw were cast into the Tiber to appease or deceive the river god, who had perhaps, in wilder days, demanded living men. On March 15 the poor emerged from their hovels and, like the Jews on the Feast of Tabernacles, built themselves tents in the Field of Mars, celebrated the coming of the New Year, and prayed to the goddess Anna Perenna (Ring of the Years) for as inany years as they quaffed cups of wine.21 April alone had six festivals, culminating in the Floralia; this Feast of Flora, goddess of flowers and springs, continued for six days of bibulous and promiscuous revelry. The first of May was the Feast of the Good Goddess, Bona Dea. On May 9, 11, and 13 Liber and Libera,
66	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IV
god and goddess of the grape, were celebrated in the Liberalia; the phallus, symbol of fenility, was frankly honored by gay crowds of men and women.23 At the end of May the Arval Brethren led the people in the solemn and yet joyful Ambarvalia. The gods were neglected in the autumn months, after the crops were safely in, but December was again rich in feasts. The Saturnalia ran from the 17th to the 23rd; they celebrated the sowing of the seed for the next year and commemorated the happy classless reign of Saturn; gifts were ex changed, and many libenies were allowed; the distinction benveen slave and free was for a while abolished or even inverted; slaves might sit down with their owners, give orders to them, rail at them; the masters waited upon their slaves, and did not eat till all the slaves were filled.24
These festivals, though agricultural in origin, remained popular in the cities and survived through all vicissitudes of belief into the fourth and fifth centuries of our era. Their number was so confusing that one of the prime purposes of the Roman calendar was to list them for the guidance of the people. In early Italian custom the chief priest had convened the citizens at the beginning of every month and named the festivals to be observed in the next thirty days; this calling (cafatio) gave a name (calendae) to the first day of each month. To the Romans, as in some measure to modern Catholics or orthodox Jews, a calendar meant a priestly list of holidays and business days, interspersed with scraps of sacred, legal, historical, and astronomical information. Tradition ascribed to Numa the calendar that governed Roman chronology and life till Caesar. It divided the year into twelve lunar months, with complex intercalations that summed up to an average of 366 days per year. To remedy the mounting excess the pontiffs were empowered ( 191 B.C.) to revise the intercalations; but they used their authority to lengthen or shorten magistracies pleasing or displeasing to them, so that by the end of the Republic the calendar, then three months amiss, was a monster of chaos and chicanery.
In the early days time had been measured simply by the height of the sun in the sky. In 263 B.c. a sundial was brought from Catana, in Sicily, and placed in the Forum; but as Catana was four degrees south of Rome, the dial was deceptive, and the priests were for a century unable to make the needed adjustments. In 158 B.c. Scipio Nasica set up a public clepsydra, or water clock. The month was divided into three periods by the kalends (first), the nones (fifth or seventh), and the ides (thirteenth or fifteenth); and the days were clumsily named by their distance before these dividing lines; so March 1 2 was "the third day before the ides of March." A loose economic week was marked out by the nundinae, or every ninth day, when the villagers came to market in the towns. The year began with the com ing of spring, and the first month, Martius, bore the name of the god of
CHAP. IV)	STOIC  ROME
sowing; next came Aprilis, sprouting; Maius, month of Maia, or perhaps of increase; lunius, month of Juno, or possibly of thriving; then Quinctilis, Sextilis, September, October, November, and December, named from their numerical _order in the year; then January for Janus, and February for
the f ebrua, or magic objects by which persons might be purified. The year itself was called anmts, ring; as if to say that in reality there is no begin
ning and no end.
4. Religion and Cbaracter


GOVERNMENT OF INDIA
DEPARTMENT OF ARCHAEOLOGY
CENTRAL	ARCHAEOLOGICAL
LIBRARY
ANCIENT
ROME
CAESAR AND CHRIST
B
Preface
THIS volume, while an independent unit by itself, is Part III in a history of civilization, of which Part I was Our Oriental Heritage, and
Part II was The Life of Greece. \Var and health pennitting, Pan IV, The Age of Faith, should be ready in 1950.
The method of these volumes is synthetic history, which studies all the major phases of a people's life, work, and culture in their simultaneous opera tion. Analytic history, which is equally necessary and a scholarly prerequis ite, studies some separate phase of man's activity-politics, economics, morals, religion, science, philosophy, literature, art-in one civilization or in all. The defect of the analytic method is the distorting isolation of a part from the whole; the weakness of the synthetic method lies in the impossibility of one mind speaking with firsthand knowledge on every aspect of a complex civilization spanning a thousand years. Errors of detail are inevitable; but only in this way can a mind enchanted by philosophy-the quest for under standing through perspective-content itself with delving into the past. We may seek perspective through science by studying the relations of things in space, or through history by studying the relations of events in time.We shall learn more of the nature of man by watching his behavior through sixty centuries than by reading Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant. "All philos ophy," said Nietzsche, "has now fallen forfeit to history."*
The study of antiquity is properly accounted worthless except as it may be made living drama, or illuminate our contemporary life. The rise of Rome from a crossroads town to world mastery, its achievement of two centuries of security and peace from the Crimea to Gibraltar and from the Euphrates to Hadrian's Wall, its spread of classic civilization over the Mediterranean and western European world, its struggle to preserve its ordered realm from a surrounding sea of barbarism, its long, slow crumbling and final catastrophic collapse into darkness and chaos-this is surely the greatest drama ever played by man; unless it be that other drama which began when Caesar and Christ stood face to face in Pilate's court, and continued until a handful of hunted Christians had grown by time and patience, and through persecution and terror, to be first the allies, then the masters, and at last the heirs, of the greatest empire in history.
PREFACE
But that multiple panorama has greater meaning for us than through its scope and majesty: it resembles significantly, and sometimes with menacing illumination, the civilization and problems of our day. This is the advantage of studying a civilization in its total scope and life-that one may compare each stage or aspect of its career with a corresponding moment or element of our own cultural trajectory, and be warned or encouraged by the ancient aftermath of a modern phase. There, in the struggle of Roman civilization against barbarism within and without, is our own struggle; through Rome's problems of biological and moral decadence signposts rise on our road today; the class war of the Gracchi against the Senate, of Marius against Sulla, of Caesar against Pompey, of Antony against Octavian, is the war that con sumes our interludes of peace; and the desperate effort of the Mediterranean
soul to maintain some freedom against a despotic state is an augury of our coming task. De nobis f abula narratur: of ourselves this Roman story is told.
I wish to acknowledge the invaluable and self-sacrificing aid of Wallace Brockway at every step in the preparation of this book; the patience of my daughter, Mrs. David Easton, and of Miss Regina Sands, in typing I 200 pages from my minuscule script; and above all to the affectionate toleration and protective guidance accorded me by my wife through many years of dull and plodding and happy scholarship.
viii
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION:  ORIGINS
Chapter I. ETRUSCAN PRELUDE: 800-508 B.c.	3
BOOK 1: THE REPUBLIC: 508-30 B.c.
Chronological Table	20
Chapter II. THE  STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY: 508-264 B.c	21
1.Patricians and Plebs .............. 21	3. The Beginnings of Roman


spiritual and eternal Iife. The genitals of the bull, representing his sacred fer tility, were placed in a consecrated vessel and were dedicated to the god dess.94 Mithraism had a siinilar rite, known to the classic world as the tauro bolium, or throwing of the bull. Apuleius described in ecstatic terms the degrees of initiation into the service of Isis-the long novitiate of fasting, continence, and prayer, the purifying submersion in holy water, and at last the mystic vision of the goddess offering everlasting bliss. At Eleusis the candidate was required to confess his sins (which discouraged Nero), ab stain for a time from certain foods, bathe in the bay for spiritual as well as physical cleansing, and then offer sacrifice, usually of a pig. For three days, at the Feast of Demeter, the initiates mourned with her the snatching of her daughter into Hades, and meanwhile lived on consecrated cakes and a mystic mixture of flour, water, and mint. On the third night a religious drama represented the resurrection of Persephone, and the officiating priest prom ised a like rebirth to every purified soul.95 Varying the theme under Hindu Qr Pythagorean influence, the Orphic sect throughout Greek lands taught that the soul is imprisoned in a succession of sinful bodies and can be released from this degrading reincarnation by rising to ecstatic union with Dionysus. At their gatherings the members of the Orphic brotherhood drank the blood of a bull sacrificed to-and identified with-the dying and atoning savior. Communal partaking of sacred food or drink was a frequent feature of these
.Mediterranean faiths. Often the food was thought to take on, by sanctifica tion, the powers of the god, which were then magically conveyed to the communicant.96
All sects asrumed the possibility of magic. The Magi had disseminated their art through the East and had given a new name to old jugglery. The Mediterranean world was rich in magicians, miracleworkers, oracles, astrol ogers, ascetic saints, and scientific interpreters of dreams. Every unusual oc currence was widely hailed as a divine portent of future events. Askesis, which the Greeks had used to denote the athletic training of the body, came now to mean the spiritual taming of the flesh; men scourged themselves, mutilated themselves, starved themselves, or bound themselves to one place with chains; some of them died through self-torture or self-denial.97 In the Egyptian desert near Lake Mareotis a group of Jews and non-Jews, male and female, lived in solitary cells, avoided sexual relations, met on the Sabbath for common prayer, and called themselves Tbe-rapeutae, healers of the soul.98 Millions believed that the writings ascribed to Orpheus, Hermes, Pythagoras, the sibyls, etc., had been dictated or inspired by a god. Preachers
. claiming divine inspiration traveled from city to city, performing apparently miraculous cures. Alexander of Abonoteichus trained a serpent to hide its head under his arm and allow a half-human mask to be affi.\'.ed to its tail; he
526	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. llIV
announced that the serpent was the god Asclepius come to earth to serve as an oracle; and he amassed a fortune by interpreting the sounds made by reeds inserted in the false head.99
Beside such charlatans there were probably thousands of sincere preachers of the pagan faiths. Early in the third century Philostratus painted an ideal ized picture of such a man in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana. At sixteen Apollonius adopted the strict rule of the Pythagorean brotherhood, renounc ing marriage, meat, and wine, never shaving his beard, and keeping silence for five years.100 He distributed his patrimony among his relatives and wandered as a penniless monk through Persia, India, Egypt, western Asia, Greece, and Italy. He imbibed the lore of the Magi, the Brahmans, and the Egyptian ascetics. He visited temples of any creed, implt)red the priests to abandon the sacrifice of animals, worshiped the sun, accepted the gods, and taught that behind them there was one supreme unknO\vable deity. His life of abne gation and piety led his followers to cbim that he was the son of a god, but he described himself simply as the son of Apollonius. Tradition credited him with many miracles: he walked through closed doors, understood all languages, cast out demons, and raised a girl from the dead.101 But he was a philosopher rather than a magician. He knew and loved Greek literature and expounded a simple but exacting morality. "Grant me," he prayed the gods, "to have little and to desire nothing." Asked by a king to choose a gift, he answered, "Dried fruit and bread." 102 Preaching reincarnation, he bade his followers injure no living creature and eat no flesh. He exhorted them to shun enmity, slander, jealousy, and hatred; "if we are philosophers," he told them, "we cannot hate our fellow men." 103 "Sometimes," says Philostratus, "he discussed communism and taught that men ought to support one an other." 104 He was accused of sedition and witchcraft, came of his own accord to Rome to answer these charges before Domitian, was imprisoned, and escaped. He died about A.O. 98, at an advanced age. His followers claimed that he had appeared to them after his death and had then ascended bodily into heaven.105
What were the qualities that won half of Rome, half the Empire, to these ew a ths? Partly their classless, race!ess character; they accepted all na t1onaht1es, all freemen, and all slaves, and rode with consoling indifference over inequalities of pedigree and wealth. Their temples were made spacious to welcome the people as well as to enshrine the god. Cybele and Isis were mother-goddesses acquainted with grief, who mourned like millions of bereaved women; they could understand what the Roman deities seldom knew-the emptied hearts of the defeated. The desire to re!:urn tc the mother is stronger than the impulse to depend upon the fath::r; it is the mother name that comes spontaneously to the lips in great joy or distress; therefore
CHAP. XXIV)	THE   HELLENISTIC  REVIVAL	527
men as well as women found comfort and refuge in Isis and Cybele. Even today the Mediterranean worshiper appeals more often to Mary than to the Father or the Son; and the lovely prayer that he most frequently repeats is addressed not to the Virgin but to the Mother, blessed in the fruit of her womb.
The new faiths not only entered more deeply into the heart; they appealed more colorfully to the imagination and the senses with processions and chants alternating between sorrow and rejoicing, and a ritual of impressive symbolism that brought fresh courage to spirits heavy with the prose of life. The new priesthoods were filled not by politicians occasionally don ning sacerdotal garb, but by men and women of all ranks, graduating through an ascetic novitiate to continual ministration. By their help the soul conscious of wrongdoing could be purified; sometimes the body racked with illness could be healed by an inspiring word or ritual; and the mysteries at which they officiated symbolized the hope that even death might be over come.
Once men had sublimated their longing for grandeur and continuance in the glory and survival of their family and their clan, and then of a state that was their creation and collective self. Now the old clan lines were melting away in the new mobility of peace; and the imperial state was the spiritual embodiment only of the master class, not of the powerless multitude of men. Monarchy at the top, frustrating the participation and merger of the citizen in the state, produced individualism at the bottom and through the mass. The promise of personal immortality, of an endless happiness after a life of subjection, poverty, tribulation, or toil, was the final and irresistible attrac tion of the Oriental faiths and of the Christianity that summarized, absorbed, and conquered them. All the world seemed conspiring to prepare the way for Christ.
CHAPTER  XXV
Rome and Judea
I 3 2 B.C.-4 B.C.
PARTHIA
ETWEEN Pontus and the Caucasus rose the troubled mountains of Armenia, on whose crest, story told, Noah's ark had found a mooring. Through the fertile valleys ran the roads that led from Parthia and Mesopotamia to the Black Sea; hence•empires competed for Armenia. The people were Indo European, akin to the Hittites and the Phrygians, but they had never surrendered their sweeping Anatolian nose. They were a vigorous race, patient in agricul ture, skilled in handicraft, unequaled in commercial acumen; they made the best
of a difficult terrain and raised enough wealth to keep their kings in luxury if
not in power. Darius I, in the Behistun inscription ( 52 1 B.c.), named Armenia among the satrapies of Persia; later it gave a nominal allegiance to the Seleucids and then alternately to Parthia and Rome; but its remoteness allowed it a prac tical independence. Its most famous king, Tirgranes the Great (94-56 B.c.), conquered Cappadocia, added a second capital, T riganocerta, to Artaxata, and joined Mithridates' revolt against Rome. When Pompey accepted his apologies he gave the victorious general 6000 talents ($21,600,000), 10,000 drachmas ($6000) toeach centurion, and fifty to each soldier, in the Roman army.1 Under Caesar, Augustus, and Nero Armenia acknowledged the suzerainty of Rome, and under Trajan it was for a time :. Roman province; nevertheless, its culture was Iranian, and its usual orientation was toward Parthia.
The Parthians had for centuries occupied the region south of the Caspian Sea as subjects of the Achaemenid, then of the Seleucid, kings. They were of Scythian-Turanian stock-i.e., they belonged racially with the peoples of south ern Russia and Turkestan. About 248 B.c. a Scythian chief, Arsaces, revolted against the Seleucid authority, made Parthia a sovereign state, and established the Arsacid dynasty. The Seleucid kings, weakened by Rome's defeat of Anti ochus III (189 B.c.), were unable to defend their territory against the reckless, half-barbarous Parthians, and by the end of the second century B.c. all Meso potamia and Persia were absorbed into a new Parthian Empire. Three capitals, according to the season, entertained the new royalty: Hecatompylus in Parthia, Ecbatana in Media, and Ctesiphon on the lower Tigris. Across from Ctesiphon lay the former Seleucid capital Seleucia, which remained for centuries a Greek city in a Parthian realm. The Arsacid rulers kept the administrative structure
528
CHAP.XXV)	ROME  AND  JUDEA	529
built up by the Seleucids, but overlaid it with a feudalism derived from the Achaemenid kings. The mass of the population was composed of agricultural serfs and slaves; industry was backward, but the Parthian ironworkers made a fine steel, and "the brewing trade was highly profitable." 2 The wealth of the state came partly from the trade that passed along the great rivers, partly from the caravans that crossed Parthia on the way between farther Asia and the West. From 53 B.c., when the Parthians defeated Crassus at Carrhae, to A.D. 217, when Macrinus bought peace from Artabanus, Rome fought war after war for the control of these routes and the Red Sea.
The Parthians were too rich or too poor to indulge in literature. The aristo crats, as in all ages, preferred the art of life to the life of art, and the serfs were too illiterate, the artisans too busy, the merchants too commercial, to produce great art or great books. The people spoke Pahlavi and wrote in Aramaic on parchment, which now replaced cuneiform; but not a line of Parthian literature has been preserved. We know that Greek plays were enjoyed in Ctesiphon as well as in Seleucia, for the head of Crassus played a part there in the Bacchae of Euripides. The paintings and sculptures discovered at Palmyra, Dura-Europus, and Ashur were probably the work of Iranian artists; their crude amalgam of Greek and Oriental stvles affected later art from China to Byzantium. A vivid relief of a mounted ar her has come down to us to suggest that we might have a higher opinion of Parthian art if more of it remained.2a At Hatta, near Mosul, an Arabian feudatory of the Parthian king built (88 B.c.?) a limestone palace of seven arched and vaulted halls, in a powerful but barbarous style. Good Parthian work has survived in engraved silverware and jewelry.
The Parthians excelled in man's favorite art-personal adornment. Both sexes curled their hair; the men nursed frizzed beards and flowing mustaches, and clothed themselves in tunic and baggy trousers, usually covered with a many colored robe; the women swathed themselves in delicate embroideries and decked their hair with flowers. Free Parthians amused themselves with hunting, ate and drank abundantly, and never went on foot when they could ride. They were brave warriors and honorable foes, treated prisoners decentlv, admitted foreigners to high office, and gave asylum to refugees; sometime;, however, they mutilated dead enemies, tortured witnesses, and corrected trifling offenses with the scourge. They practiced polygamy according to their means, veiled and secluded their women, severely punished the infidelity of their wives, but permitted divorce to either sex almost at will.3 When the Parthian general Surena led an army against Crassus he took with him zoo concubines and a thousand camels for his baggage.4 All in all the Parthians impress us as less civilized than the Achaemenid Persians and more honorable gentlemen than the Romans. They were tolerant of religious diversities, allowing the Greeks, Je,vs, and Christians among them to practice their rituals unhindered. They themselves, veering from Zoroastrian orthodoxy, worshiped the sun and the moon, and preferred l\'lithras to Ahura-Mazda, much as the Christians preferred Christ to Yahveh. The Magi, neglected by the later Arsacid kings, abetted the overthrow of the dynasty.


Caesar and Augustus reorganized Gaul into four provinces: Gallia Narbon ensis in the south, known to the Romans as pro·,:incia, and to us as Provence, then largely Hellenized through the Greek settlements on the Mediterranean coast; Aquitania in the southwest, chiefly Iberian in population; in the center Gall a Lugdunensis, overwhelmin ly Celtic; and in the northeast Belgica, pre dommantly German. Rome recogmzed and abetted these ethnic divisions to fore stall united revolt. The tribal cantons were retained as administrative areas·, the-
CHAP.XXII)	CIVILIZING  THE  WEST	473
magistrates were chosen by owners of property, whose allegiance was secured by Rome's support of them against the lower classes; and Roman citizenship was granted as a prize to loyal and useful Gauls. A provincial assembly of repre sentatives chosen from every canton met each year in Lyons; at first it limited itself cautiously to the ritual of Augustan worship, but soon it passed on to sending requests to the Roman governors, then recommendation , then demands. The administration of justice was taken out of the hands of the Druids, who were suppressed, and France received Roman law. For almost a century Gaul sub mitted peacefully to the new yoke; for a moment in A.D. 68, and again in 71, revolt flared under Vindex and Civilis; but the people gave scant support to these movements, and the love of liberty yielded to the enjoyment of prosperity, se- curity, and peace.	-
Under the Pax Romana Gaul became one of the richest parts of the Empire. Rome marveled at the wealth of the Gallic nobles who entered the Senate under Claudius, and a century later Florus contrasted the :flourishing economy of Gaul with the decline of ltaly.33 Forests were cleared, swamps were drained, agriculture was improved even to the introduction of a mechanical reaper,34 and the grape and the olive spread into every canton of Gaul. Already in the first century Pliny and Columella praised the wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. There were large estates tilled by serfs and slaves and o,vned by the forerunners of medieval feudal lords; but there were also many small proprietors, and wealth was more evenly distributed in ancient Gaul, as in modem France, than in almost any other civilized state. Progress was especially rapid in industry. By A.D. 200 Gallic potters and ironworkers were stealing the markets of Germany and the West from Italy, Gallic weavers were doing the largest textile business in the Empire, and the factories of Lyons were turning out not only commercial glass, but wares of artistic excellence.35 Industrial techniques were handed down from father to son and formed a precious part of the classical heritage. Over 13,000 miles of road, built or improved by Roman engineers, teemed with transport and trade.
Enriched with this expanded economic life, the towns of ancient Celtica be came the cities of Roman Gaul. In Aquitania the capital, Burdigala (Bordeaux), was one of the busiest of Atlantic ports; Limonum (Limoges), Avaricum (Bourges), and Augustonemetum (Clermont-Ferrand) were already rich; the last paid Zenodotus 400,000 sesterces for a colossus of i\'lercury.36 In Gallia Nar bonensis there were so many cities that Pliny described it as "more like Italy than a province." 37 Farthest west was Tolosa (Toulouse), famous for its schools. Narbo (Narbonne), capital of the province, was in our first century the greatest city of Gaul, the chief port of exit for Gallic goods to Italy and Spain; "here," Sidonius Apollinaris would say, "are walls, promenades, taverns, arches, porti coes, a forum, a theater, temples, baths, markets, meadows, lakes, a bridge, and the sea." 38 Farther east, on the great Via Domitia from Spain to Italy, lay Nemausus (Nimes). Its pretty Maison Carree was raised by Augustus and the town to commemorate his grandsons Lucius and Caius Caesar; its inner colonnade
474	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXII
is lamentably sunk into the cella wall, but its free Corinthian columns are as lovely as any in Rome. The amphitheater, which seated 20,000, is still the scene of periodical pageantry. The Roman aqueduct that brought Nimes fresh water became·in time the Pont du Gard, or Bridge of the Gard River; standing today as a gigantic ruin in the rugged countryside beyond the city, its massive lower arches contrast to fine effect with the smaller arches above them to make the structure a revealing witness of Rome's engineering art.
Eastward on the Mediterranean, at the mouth of the Rhone, Caesar founded Arelate (Arles), in the hope that it would replace rebellious Massalia as a ship building center and port. Mass:1lia (Marseilles), already old when Caesar was born, remained Greek in language and culture until his death. Through its harbor Hellenic agriculture, arboriculture, viticulture, and culture had entered Gaul; here, above all, western Europe exchanged its goods for those of the classic world. It was one of the great university centers of the Empire, especially re nowned for its school of law. It declined after Caesar, but maintained its ancient status as a free city, independent of the provincial governor. Farther east were Forum Iulii (Frejus), Antipolis (Antibes), and Nicaea (Nice)-this in the little province of the Maritime Alps. Sailing up the Rhone from Arelate the traveler came to Avenio (Avignon) and Arausio (Orange); here a powerful arch sur vives from Augustus' days, and an immense Roman theater still hears ancient plays.
The largest of the Gallic provinces was Gallia Lugdunensis, named from Lug
dunum (Lyons), its capital. Situated at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saone, and at the crossing of great highways built by Agrippa, the city became the trading center of a rich region and the capital of all Gaul. Iron, glass, and ceramic industries helped to sustain a population of 200,000 in our first century.4o Northward lay Cabillonum (Chalon-sur-Saone), Caesarodunum (Tours), Au
gusto unu (Autun), C nabum (Orleans), nd . utetia (Paris). "I have spent the wmter (357-58), writes the Emperor Julian, m our beloved Lutetia, for so the Gauls term the little town of the Parisii, a small island in the river....
Good wine is grown here." 41
Belgica, w ch_ included parts of France and Switzerland, was almost entirely agricultural; 1ts industry was for the most part attached to the villas whose numerous rem s suggest a baronial li!e of comfort an luxury. Her Augustus founded the cities now known as SoISsons, St. Quentm, Senlis, Beauvais, and Treves. The last,_Augusta revirorum, r se t pr minence as the headquarters of the army def ndmg the Rhine; u der D10clet1an It re laced Lyons as the capital of Gau1, and in he fift century It wa\ he re test city north of the Alps. It is still rich in classic remains-the Porta N1gra m its Roman wall, the Baths of St. Barbara, the Tomb of the Secundini family at nearby Igel, and the crude reliefs on the fortress blocks of neighboring Neumagen.
In and around these towns life slowly ch nged its surface and obstinately renewed its elements. The Gauls kept theu- character, their breeches, and
CHAP.XXII)    CIVILIZING  THE  WEST	475
for three centuries their language. Latin triumphed in the sixth century, chiefly through its use by the Roman Church, but it was already being clipped and nosed into French. In Gaul Rome achieved her greatest triumph in the transmission of civilization. Great French historians like Jullian and Funck-Brentano 43 have thought that France would have fared better with out the Roman conquest, but a still greater historian believed that the Roman conquest was the sole alternative to a German conquest of Gaul. If Caesar had not won there, says J\1ommsen,
the migration of peoples would have occurred 400 years sooner than it did, and would have come at a time when Italian civilization had not become naturalized either in Gaul, or on the D:mube, or in Africa and Spain. Inasmuch as the great Roman general and statesman with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the rival antagonists of the Romano-Greek world; inasmuch as with firm hand he established the new system of aggressive defense, down even to its details, and taught men to protect the frontiers of the Empire by rivers and artifi cial ramparts . . . he gained for the Greco-Roman culture the in terval necessary to civilize the West.44
The Rhine was the frontier between classic and primitive civilization. Gaul could not defend that frontier; Rome d1d; and that fact detennined the history of Europe to this day.
BRITAIN
About 1200 B.c. a branch of the Celts crossed over from Gaul and settled in England. They found there a mingled population of dark-haired people, possibly Iberian, and light-haired Scandinavians. They conquered these na tives, married them, and spread through England and \Vales. About roo B.C. (for so the egocentric foreshortening of history telescopes eventful cen turies, and erases vital generations from a crowded memory) another branch of Celts came from the Continent and dispossessed their kinsmen of southern and e::stern Britain. When Caesar came he found the island peopled by several independent tribes, each with its expansive king. He gave to all the popula tion the name Britarmi, from a Gallic tribe, so called, just south of the Chan nel, in the belief that the same tribe inhabited both shores.
Celtic Britain was in customs, langu:ige, and reiigion essentially like Celtic Gaul, but its civilization was less advanced. It passed from bronze to iron some six cent:Gries before Christ, three centuries after Gaul. Pythe:is, the Massiliot explorer, sailing the Atlantic to England about 350 B.c., found the
476	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXII
Cantii of Kent already prosperous with agriculture and trade. The soil was fertile from abundant rain and contained rich ores of copper, iron, tin, and lead. By Caesar's time domestic industry was able to supply an active com merce among the tribes and with the Continent, and coins were minted in bronze and gold.45 His invasions were reconnaissance raids; he brought back the double assurance that the tribes were incapable of united resistance and that the crops were adequate to feed an invading army coming at the proper time. A century later (A.D. 43) Claudius crossed the Channel with 40,000 men whose discipline, armament, and skill proved too much for the natives; Britain in her turn became a Roman province. In 61 a British tribal queen, Boudicca or Boadicea, led a furious revolt, alleging that Roman officers had ravished both her daughters, plundered her realm, and sold many of its free men into slavery. \Vhile the Roman governor Paulinus was busy conquering
the Isle of Man, Boudicca's army overcame the single legion that opposed it and marched upon Londinium-already, says Tacitus, "the chief residence of merchants, and a great mart of trade." 46 Every Roman found there or in Verulamium (St. Albans) was killed; 70,000 Romans and their allies were slain before Paulinus and his legions caught up with the rebel force. Boudicca, standing with her daughters in a chariot, fought heroically in def eat. She drank poison, and 80,000 Britons were put to the sword.
Tacitus tells how his son-in-law Agricola, as governor of Britain (A.D.78-84), brought civilization to a "rude, scattered, and warlike people" by establishing


CHAP.XXX)   THE  TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY	661
siastical majority that the organization and survival of the Church required a certain fixity of doctrine; and in final effect it achieved that practical unanim ity of basic belief which gave the medieval Church its Catholic name. At the same time it marked the replacement of paganism with Christianity as the religious expression and support of the Roman Empire, and committed Con stantine to a more definite alliance with Christianity than ever before. A new civilization, based on a new religion, would now rise over the ruins of an exhausted culture and a dying creed. The Middle Ages had begun.
CONSTANTINE AND CMLIZATION
A year after the Council Constantine dedicated, amid the desolation of Byzantium, a new city which he termed Nova Roma, and which posterity called by his name. In 330 he turned his back upon both Rome and Nico media, and made Constantinople his capital. There he surrounded himself with the impressive pomp of an Oriental court, feeling that its psychological influence upon army and people would make its expensive pageantry a subtle economy in government. He protected the anny with able diplomacy and arms, tempered despotism with humane decrees, and lent his aid to letters and the arts. He encouraged the schools at Athens, and founded at Con stantinople a new university where state-paid professors taught Greek and Latin, literature and philosophy, rhetoric and law, and trained officials for the Empi.re.52 He confirmed and extended the privileges of physicians and teachers in all provinces. Provincial governors were instructed to establish schools of architecture, and to draw students to them with divers privi leges and .rewards. Artists we.re exempted from civic obligations, so that they Inight have time to learn their art thoroughly and transinit it to their sons. The art t:easures of the Empire were drawn upon to make Constantinople an elegant capital.
In Rome the architectural works f this period were inaugurated by
Maxentius. He began (306), and Constantine finished, an immense basilica that marked the climax of classical architecture in the West. Adapting the structure of the great baths, this edifice cove.red an area 330 by 250 feet. Its central hall, 114  by 82 feet, was roofed by three cross vaults of concrete
120 feet high, partly supported by eight broad piers faced with fluted Co rinthian columns sixty feet tall. Its pavement was of colored marble; its bays were peopled with statuary; and the walls of these bays were prolonged above their roofs to serve as elevated buttresses for the central vaults. Gothic and Renaissance architects found much instruction in these vaults and but tresses. Bramante, designing St. Peter's, planned to "raise the Pantheon over
662	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXX
the Basilica of Constantine" 03-i.e., to crown a spacious nave with a massive dome.
The first Christian emperor built many churches in Rome, probably including the original form of San Lorenzo outside the Walls. To celebrate his victory at the Mulvian Bridge he raised in 31 5 the arch that still towers over the Via dei Trionfi.. It is one of the best preserved of Rome's remains; and its majesty is not visibly injured by the diverse pilferage of its parts. Four finely proportioned shafts, rising from sculptured bases, divide the three arches, and support an ornate entablature. The attic story bears reliefs and statues taken from monuments of Trajan and Aurelius; while the medallions between the columns are from some building of Hadrian's reign. Two of the reliefs appear to be the work of Con stantine's artists. The crude squat figures, the awkward quarrel of profile faces with frontal legs, the rude piling of heads upon heads as a substitute for perspec tive, betray a coarsening of technique and taste; but the deep drilling produces, in the play of light and shade, an impressive effect of depth and space; and the episodes are presented with a rough vitality as if Italian art had resolved to return to its source. The colossal figure of Constantine in the Palazzo dei Con servatori carries this primitiveness to a repellent extreme; it seems incredible that the man who presided so graciously over the Council of Nicaea should have resembled this dour barbarian-unless the artist had a mind to illustrate in advance the cynical summary of Gibbon: "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion." 54
Early in this fourth century a new art took form-the "illumination" of manu scripts with miniature paintings. Literature itself ,vas now predominantly Chris tian. Lucius Firmianus Lactantius expounded Christianity eloquently in Divinae lnstitutiones (307 ), and in De Mortibus Persecutormn ( 31-t-) described the final agonies of the persecuting emperors with Ciceronian elegance and venom. "Re ligion," wrote Lactantius, "must by its very nature be untrammeled, unforced, free" 55-a heresy which he did not live to expiate. J\fore famous was Eusebius Pamphili, bishop of Caesarea. He began his literary career as a priestly scribe and librarian for his episcopal predecessor, Pamphilus, whom he loved so well that he adopted his name. Pamprnlus had acquired Origen's library, and had built around it the largest Christian collection of books yet known. Living among these volumes, Eusebius became the most erudite cleric of his time. Pamphilus lost his life in the Galerian persecution ( 31 o), and Eusebius was much plagued by later queries as to how he himself had survived. He made diverse enemies by taking a middle position between Arius and Alexander; nevertheless, he became the Bossuet of Constantine's court, and was commissioned to write the imperial biography. Part of his scholastic harvest ,vas gathered into a Universal History-the most complete of ancient chronologies. Eusebius arranged sacred and profane history in parallel columns divided by a synchronizing row of dates, and tried to fix the time of every important event from Abraham to Constantine. All later chronologies rested on this "canon."
CHAP. XXX)	THE	TRIUMPH  OF CHRISTIANITY
Putting flesh upon these bones, Eusebius issued in 325 an Ecclesiastical History describing the development of the Church from its beginnings to the Council of Nicaea. Here in the first chapter, again serving as a model for Bossuet, was the earliest philosophy of history-portraying time as the battleground of God and Satan, and all events as advancing the triumph of Christ. The book was poorly arranged but well written. The sources were critically and conscientiously examined, the statements are as accurate as in any ancient work of history; and at every turn Eusebius put posterity in his debt by quoting important docu ments that would otherwise have been lost. The bishop's learning is enormous, his style is warmed with feeling and rises to eloquence in moments of theological odium. He frankly excludes such matters as might not edify his Christian readers or support his philosophy, and he manages to write a history of the great Council without mentioning either Arius or Athanasius. The same honest dishonesty makes his Life of Constantine a panegyric rather than a biography. It begins with eight inspiring chapters on the Emperor's piety and good works, and tells how he "governed his empire in a godly manner for more than thirty years." One would never guess from this book that Constantine had killed his son, his nephew, and his wife.
For like Augustus, Constantine had managed well everything but his family. His relations with his mother were generally happy. Apparently by his commis sion she went to Jerusalem, and leveled to the ground the scandalous Temple of Aphrodite that had been built, it was said, over the Saviour's tomb. According to Eusebius the Holy Sepulcher thereupon came to light, with the very cross on which Christ had died. Constantine ordered a Church of the Holy Sepulcher to be built over the tomb, and the revered relics were preserved in a special shrine. As in classical days the pagan world had cherished and adored the relics of the Trojan War, and even Rome had boasted the Palladium of Troy's Athene, so now the Christian world, changing its surface and renewing its essence in the immemorial manner of human life, began to collect and worship relics of Christ and the saints. Helena raised a chapel over the traditional site of Jesus' birth at Bethlehem, modestly served the nuns who ministered there, and then returned to Constantinople to die in the arms of her son.
Constantine had been twice married: first to Minervina, who had borne him a son Crispus; then to Maximian's daughter Fausta, by whom he had three daughters and three sons. Crispus became an excellent soldier, and rendered vital aid to his father in the campaigns against Licinius. In 326 Crispus was put to death by Constantine's order; about the same time the Emperor decreed the execution of Licinianus, son of Licinius by Constan tine's sister Constantia; and shonly thereafter Fausta was slain by her hus band's command. Y\:e do not know the reasons for this triple execution. Zosimus assures us that Crispus had made love to Fausta, who accused him to the Emperor; and that Helena, who loved Crispus dearly, had avenged
CAESAR  AND CHRIST	(CHAP. XXX
him by persuading Constantine that his wife had yielded to his son.57 Possibly Fausta had schemed to remove Crispus from the path of her sons' rise to imperial power, and Licinianus may have been killed for plotting to claim his father's share of the realm.
Fausta achieved her aim after her death, for in 335 Constantine bequeathed the Empire to his surviving sons and nephews. Two years later, at Easter, he celebrated with festival ceremonies the thirtieth year of his reign. Then, feeling the nearness of death, he went to take the warm baths at near-by Aquyrion. As his illness increased, he called for a priest to administer to him that sacrament of baptism which he had purposely deferred to this moment, hoping to be cleansed by it from all the sins of his crowded life. Then the tired ruler, aged sixty-four, laid aside the purple robes of royalty, put on the white garb of a Christian neophyte, and passed away.
He was a masterly general, a remarkable administrator, a superlative states man. He inherited and completed the restorative work of Diocletian; through them the Empire lived I I 50 years more. He continued the monarchical forms of Aurelian and Diocletian, partly out of ambition and vanity, partly, no doubt, because he believed that absolute rule was demanded by the chaos of the times. His greatest error lay in dividing the Empire among his sons; presumably he foresaw that they would .fight for sole supremacy as he had done, but surmised that they would .fight even more certainly if he chose another heir; this, too, is a price of monarchy. His executions we cannot judge, not knowing th ir provocation; burdened with the problems of rule, he may have allowed fear and jealousy to dethrone his reason for a while;·and there are signs that remorse weighed heavily upon his declining years. His Christianity, beginning as policy, appears to have graduated into sincere conviction. He became the most persistent preacher in his realm, persecuted heretics faithfully, and took God into partnership at every step. Wiser than Diocletian, he gave new life to an aging Empire byassociating it with a young religion, a vigorous organization, a fresh morality. By his aid Christianity became a state as well as a church, and the mold, for foorteen centuries, of European life and thought. Perhaps, if we except Augustus, the grateful Church was right in naming him the greatest of the emperors.
Epilogue
I. WHY  ROME FELL
"THE two greatest problems in history," says a brilliant scholar of our time, are "how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account
for her fall." 1 We may come nearer to understanding them if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell.
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars. Christian writers were keenly appreciative of this decay. Tertullian, about 200, heralded with pleasure the ipsa clausula saeculi-literally the fin de siecle or end of an era-as probably a prelude to the destruction of the pagan world. Cyprian, towards 2 50, answering the charge that Christians were the source of the Empire's misfortunes, attributed these to natural causes:
You must know that the world has grown old, and does not remain in its former vigor. It bears witness to its own decline. The rainfall and the sun's warmth are both diminishing; the metals are nearly exhausted; the husbandman is failing in the fields.2


Of minor heresies there was no end. The Encratites abstained from meat, wine. and sex; the Abstinents practiced self-mortification and condemned marriage as a sin; the Docetists taught that Christ's body was merely a phantom, not hu man flesh; the Theodotians considered him only a man; the Adoptionists and the followers of Paul of Samosata thought that he had been born a man, but had achieved divinity through moral perfection; the Modalists, Sabellians, and Mo na chians recognized in the Father and the Son only one person, the Monoph ys1tes only one nature, the Monothelites only one will. The Church overcame them by its superior organization, its doctrinal tenacity, and its better under standing of the ways and needs of men.
In the third century a new danger rose in the East. At the coronation of Shapur I (242) a young Persian mystic, Mani of Ctesiphon, proclaimed himself a Messiah sent upon earth by the True God to reform the religious and moral
606	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. xxvm
life of mankind. Borrowing from Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Judaism, and Gnosticism, Mani divided the world into rival realms of Darkness and Light; the earth belonged to the kingdom of Darkness, and Satan had created man. Nevertheless, the angels of the God of Light had surreptitiously introduced some elements of light into humanity-mind, intelligence, reason. Even woman, said Mani, has in her some sparks of light; but woman is Satan's masterpiece, his chief agent in tempting man to sin. If a man will refrain from sex, idolatry, and sorcery, and lead an ascetic life of vegetarianism and fasting, the elements of light in him can 1,1vercome his Satanic impulses, and lead him, like a kindly light, to salvation. After thirty years of successful preaching Mani was crucified at the suggestion of the Magian clergy, and his skin, stuffed with straw, was hung from one of Susa's gates. Martyrdoms enflamed the faith to wild enthusiasm; Manicheism spread into western Asia and north Africa, won Augustine for ten years, survived the persecutions of Diocletian and the conquests of Islam, and maintained a declining life for a thousand years till the coming of Genghis Khan.
The old religions still claimed a majority of the Empire's population. Judaism gathered its impoverished exiles into scattered synagogues, and poured its piety into its Talmuds. The Syrians continued to worship their Baals under Hellenistic names, and the Egyptian priests tended faithfully their zoological pantheon. Cybele, Isis, and Mithras retained their addicts till the close of the fourth century; under Aurelian a modified Mithraism captured the Roman state. Votive offerings to the classical divinities still came to the temples, initiates and candidates journeyed to Eleusis, and throughout the Empire aspiring citizens performed the motions of the im perial cult. But life had gone out of the classic creeds. .They no longer
aroused, except here and there, the warm devotion that makes a religion live. It was not that the Greeks and the Romans abandoned these faiths, once so lovely or austere; they abandoned rather the will to live, and by exces sive family limitation, or physiological exhaustion, or devastating wars, so
reduced their own number that the temples lost their cultivators step by step with the farms.
About the year 178, while Aurelius fought the Marcomanni on the Danube, paganism made a lusty attempt to defend itself against Christianity. We know of it only through Origen's book Against Celsus, and the quota tions recklessly made there from Celsus' True Word. This second Celsus in our story was a gentleman of the world rather than a speculative philosopher; he felt that the civilization which he enjoyed was bound up with the old Roman faith; and he resolved to defend that faith by attacking the Chris tianity that was now its most challenging enemy. He made so intimate a study of the new religion that the learned Origen was astounded by his erudition. Celsus assailed the credibility of the Scriptures, the character
CHAP.xxvm)  THE  GROWTH OF THE  CHURCH	607
of Yahveh, the importance of Christ's miracles, the incompatibility of Christ's death with his omnipotent divinity. He ridiculed the Christian belief in a final conflagration, the Last Judgment, and the resurrection of the body:
It is silly to suppose that when God, like a cook, brings the fire, the rest of mankind will be roasted, and only the Christians will re main-not merely the living ones, but those who died long ago, rising from the earth with the identical flesh they had before. Really, it is the hope of worms! . . . It is only the simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless-slaves and women and children-whom Christians can per suade-wool-dressers, and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and common men, whoever is a sinner ...  or a godforsaken fool.42
Celsus was alarmed by the spread of Christianity, by its scornful hostility to paganism, military service, and the state; how was the Empire to protect itself from the barbarians prowling on every frontier if its inhabitants suc cumbed to so pacifistic a philosophy? A good citizen, he thought, should conform to the religion of his country and his time without public criticism of its absurdities; these did not much matter; what counted was a unifying faith supporting moral character and civic loyalty. Then, forgetting the insults he had heaped upon them, he appealed to the Christians to come back to the old gods, to worship the guardian genius of the emperor, and to join in the defense of the imperiled state. No one paid much attention to him; pagan literature does not mention him; he would have been quite forgotten had not Origen undertaken to refute him. Constantine was wiser than Celsus, and knew that a dead faith could not salvage Rome.
PLOTINUS
Moreover, Celsus was out of step with his time; he asked men to behave like gentlemen skeptics when they were withdrawing from a society that enslaved so many of them into a mystic world that made every man a god. That consciousness of supersensible powers which is the foundation of religion was prevailing universally over the materialism and determinism of a prouder age. Philosophy was abandoning the interpretation of that sense experience which is the realm of science, and was devoting itself to astudy of the unseen world. Neo-Pythagoreans and Neoplatonists developed Pythagoras' theory of transmigration, and Plato's contemplation of the Divine Ideas, into an asceticism that sought to sharpen spiritual perception by starving the physical senses, and to reclimb by self-purification the steps by which the soul had been degraded from heaven into man.
608	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVIII
Plotinus was the culmination of this mystic theosophy. Born at Lycopolis in 203, he was a Coptic Egyptian with a Roman name and a Greek educa tion. In his twenty-eighth year he discovered philosophy, passed unsatisfied from teacher to teacher, and found at last, in Alexandria, the man he sought. Ammonius Saccas, a Christian converted to paganism, was attempting to reconcile Christianity and Platonism, as his pupil Origen would do. After studying under Ammonius for ten years, Plotinus joined a Persia-bound army in the hope of learning the wisdom of the Magi and the Brahmans at first hand. He reached Mesopotamia, turned back to Antioch, went to Rome (244), and remained there till his death. His school of philosophy became so fashionable that the Emperor Gallienus made him a court favorite, and agreed to help him establish in Campania an ideal Platonopolis, to be gov erned on the principles of the Republic. Gallienus later withdrew his con sent, perhaps to spare Plotinus an ignominious failure.
Plotinus restored the repute of philosophy by living like a saint amid the luxuries of Rome. He had no care for his body; indeed, says Porphyry, "he was ashamed that his soul had a body." 43 He refused to sit for his portrait, on the ground that his body was the least important part of him-a hint to art to seek the soul. He ate no meat and little bread, was simple in his habits, kindly in his ways. He avoided all sexual relations, but did not con demn them. His modesty befitted a man who saw the part in the perspective of the whole. When Origen attended his class, Plotinus blushed and wished to end his lecture, saying, "The zest dies down when the speaker feels that his hearers have nothing to learn from him." 44 He was not an eloquent speaker, but his devotion to his subject, and his absorbed sincerity, were good substitutes for oratory. Reluctantly, and only late in life, he put his doctrines into writing. He never revised his first draft, and despite Por phyry's editing, the Enneads remain among the most disorderly and difficult works in the history of philosophy.*
Plotinus was an idealist who graciously recognized the existence of mat ter. But matter by itself, he argued, is only the formless possibility of form. Every form that matter takes is given it by its inward energy or soul (psyche). Nature is the total of energy or soul, producing the totality of forms in the world. The lower reality does not produce the higher; the higher being, soul, produces the lower-embodied form. The growth of the individual man from his beginnings in the womb, through the slow formation of organ after organ to full maturity is the work of the psyche
.  •  Porphyry' arranged _the _fifty-four treatises into roul?s ?f nine (ennea) on the ground that m Pythagoras theory rune 1s the perfect number, smce It 1s the square of three which is the trinity of complete harmony.45	'
CHAP.XXVIII)   THE  GROWTH OF THE  CHURCH
or vital principle within him; the body is gradually molded by the longings and directives of the soul. Everything has soul-an inward energy creating outward form. Matter is evil only insofar as it has not received mature form; it is an arrested development; and evil is the possibility of good.
We know matter only through idea-through sensation, perception, thought; what we call matter is (as Hume would say) only a bundle of ideas; at most it is an elusive hypothetical something pressing against our nerve ends (Mill's "permanent possibility of sensation"). Ideas are not material; the notion of extension in space is obviously inapplicable to them. The capacity to have and use ideas is reason (nous); this is the peak of the human triad of body, soul, and mind. Reason is determined insofar as it depends upon sensation; it is free insofar as it is the highest form of the creative, molding soul.
The body is both the organ and the prison of the soul. The soul knows that it is a higher kind of reality than the body; it feels its kinship with some vaster soul, some cosmic creative life and power; and in the perfection of thought it aspires to join again that supreme spiritual reality from which it appears to have fallen in some primeval catastrophe and disgrace. Plotinus here surrenders discursively to the Gnosticism that he professes to reject, and describes the descent of the soul through various levels from heaven to corporeal man; generally he prefers the Hindu notion that the soul trans migrates from lower to higher, or from higher to lower, forms of life accord ing to its virtues and vices in each incarnation. Sometimes he is playfully Pythagorean: those who have loved music too much will become song birds in their next avatar, and overspeculative philosophers will be trans formed into eagles.46 The more developed the soul is the more persistently it seeks its divine source, like a child strayed from its parent, or a wanderer longing for home. If it is capable of virtue, or true love, or devotion to the Muses, or patient philosophy, it will find the ladder down which it came, and will climb it to its God. Let the soul, then, purify itself, let it desire the unseen essence passionately, let it lose the world in meditation; suddenly, perhaps in some moment when all the noise of the senses is stilled, and matter ceases to pound on the gates of mind, the soul will feel itself absorbed in the ocean of being, the spiritual and final reality. ("Sometimes," wrote Thoreau, idly drifting on Walden Pond, "I ceased to live, and began to be.") "When this takes place," says Plotinus,
The soul will see divinity as far as it is lawful.    And she will see
herself illuminated, full of intellectual light; or, rather, she will per ceive herself to be a pure light, unburdened, agile, and becoming god.47


During the fifth century the Doric order consolidated its conquest of Greece. Among all the Greek temples built in this prosperous age only a few Ionic shrines survive, chiefly the Erechtheum and the temple of Nike Apteros on the Acropolis. Attica remained faithful to Doric, yielding to the Ionic order only so far as to use it for the inner columns of the Propylaea, and to place a frieze around the Theseum and the Parthenon; perhaps a tendency to make the Doric column longer and slenderer reveals a further influence of the Ionic style. In Asia Minor the Greeks imbibed the Oriental love of delicate ornament, and expressed it in the complex elaboration of the Ionic entablature, and the creation of a new and more ornate order, the Corinthian. About 430 (as Vitruvius tells the tale) an Ionian sculptor, Callimachus, was struck by the sight of a basket of votive offerings, covered with a tile, which a nurse had left upon the tomb of her mistress; a wild acanthus had grown around the basket and the tile; and the sculptor, pleased with the natural form so suggested, modified the Ionic capitals of a temple that he was building at Corinth, by mingling acanthus leaves with the volutes." Probably the story is a myth, and the nurse's basket had less influence than the palm and papyrus capitals of Egypt in generating the Corinthian style. The new order made little headway in classic Greece; lctinus used it for one isolated column in the court of an Ionic temple at Phigalea, and towards the end of the fourth century it was used for the choragic monument of Lysicrates. Only under the elegant Romans of the Empire did this delicate style reach its full development.
All the Greek world was building temples in this period. Cities almost bank rupted themselves in rivalry to have the fairest statuary and the largest shrines. To her massive sixth-century edifices at Samos and Ephesus Ionia added new Ionic temples at Magnesia, Teos, and Priene. At Assus in the Troad Greek colonists raised an almost archaic Doric fane to Athena. At the other end of Hellas Crotona built, about 480, a vast Doric home for Hera; it survived till 1600, when a bishop thought he could make better use of its stones."' To the fifth century belong the greatest of the temples at Poseidonia (Paestum), Segesta, Selinus, and Acragas, and the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus. At Syracuse the columns still stand of a temple raised to Athena by Gelon I, and partly preserved by its transformation into a Christian church, At Bassae, near
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XIV
Phigalea in the Peloponnesus, lctinus designed a temple of Apollo strangely different from his other masterpiece, the Parthenon; here the Doric periptery enclosed a space occupied by a small naos and a large open court surrounded by an Ionic colonnade; and around the interior of this court, along the inner face of the Ionic columns, ran a frieze almost as graceful as the Parthenon's, and having the added virtue of being visible.•
At Olympia the Elian architect Libon, a generation before the Parthenon, raised a rival to it in a Doric shrine to Zeus. Six columns stood at each end, thirteen on either side; perhaps too stout for beauty, and unfortunate in their material-a coarse limestone coated with stucco; the roof, however, was of Pentelic tiles. Paeonius and Alcamenes, Pausanias tells us,'" carved for the pediments powerful figurest portraying on the eastern gable the chariot race between Pelops and Oenomaus, and on the western gable the struggle of Lapiths and centaurs. The Lapiths, in Greek legend, were a mountain tribe of Thes saly. When Pirithous, their king, married Hippodameia, daughter of King Oenomaus of Pisa in Elis, he invited the centaurs to the wedding feast. The centaurs dwelt in the mountains about Pelion; Greek art represented them as half man and half horse, possibly to suggest their untamed woodland nature, or because the centaurs were such excellent horsemen that each man and his mount seemed to be one animal. At the feast these horsemen got drunk, and tried to carry off the Lapith women. The Lapiths fought bravely for their ladies, and won. (Greek art never tired of this story, and perhaps used it to symbolize the clearing of the wilderness from wild beasts, and the struggle between the human and the bestial in man.) The figures on the east pediment are archaically stiff and still; those on the west seem hardly of the same period, for though some of them are crude, and the hair is stylized in ancient fashion, they are alive with action, and show a mature grasp of sculptural grouping. Startlingly beau tiful is the bride, a woman of no fragile slenderness, but of a full-bodied love liness that quite explains the war. A bearded centaur has one arm around her waist, one hand upon her breast; she is about to be snatched from her nuptials, and yet the artist portrays her features in such calm repose that one suspects him of having read Lessing or Winckelmann; or perhaps, like any woman, she is not insensitive to the compliment of desire. Less ambitious and massive, but more delicately finished, are the extant metopes of the temple, recounting cer tain labors of Heracles; one, wherein Heracles holds up the world for Atlas, stands out as a work of complete mastery. Heracles here is no abnormal giant, rock-ribbed with musculature, but simply a man of full and harmonious devel opment. Before him is Atlas, whose head would adorn the shoulders of Plato. At the left is one of Atlas' daughters, perfect in the natural beauty of healthy
Thirty-eight of the columns remain, the walls of the naos, and parts of the inner colon nade. Fra$ffients of the frieze are in the British Museum.
t Now m the Olympia Musewn.
CHAP. XIV)	THE  ART  OF  PERICLEAN  GREECE
womanhood; perhaps the artist had some symbolism in mind when he showed her gently helping the strong man to bear the weight of the world. The spe cialist finds some faults of execution and detail in these half-ruined metopes; but to an amateur observer the bride, and Heracles, and the daughter of Atlas, are as near to perfection as anything in the history of sculptural relief.
2. The Reconstruction of Athens
Attica leads all Greece in the abundance and excellence of its fifth-cen tury building. Here the Doric style, which tends elsewhere to a bulging corpulence, takes on Ionian grace and elegance; color is added to line, orna ment to symmetry. On a dangerous headland at Sunium those who risked the sea raised to Poseidon a shrine of which eleven columns stand. At Eleusis lctinus designed a spacious temple to Demeter, and under Pericles' persua sion Athens contributed funds to make this edifice worthy of the Eleusinian festival. At Athens the proximity of good marble on Mt. Pentelicus and in Paros encouraged the artist with the finest of building materials. Seldom, until our periods of economic breakdown, has a democracy been able or willing to spend so lavishly on public construction. The Parthenon cost seven hundred talents ($4,200,000); the Athene Ptrrthenos (which, how ever, was a gold reserve as well as a statue) cost $6,000,000; the unfinished Propylaea, $2,400,000; minor Periclean structures at Athens and the Piraeus,
$18,000,000; sculpture and other decoration, $16,200,000; altogether, in the sixteen years from 447 to 4 31, the city of Athens voted $57,600,000 for public buildings, statuary, and painting." The spread of this sum among artisans and artists, executives and slaves, had much to do with the pros perity of Athens under Pericles.
Imagination can picture vaguely the background of this courageous ad venture in art. The Athenians, on their return from Salamis, found their city almost wholly devastated by the Persian occupation; every edifice of any value had been burned to the ground. Such a calamity when it does not destroy the citizens as well as the city, m:ikes them stronger; the "act of God" clears away many eyesores and unfit habitations; chance accomplishes what human obstinacy would never allow; and if food can be found through the crisis, the labor and genius of men create a finer city than be fore. The Athenians, even after the war with Persia, were rich in both labor and genius, and the spirit of victory doubled their will for great enterprise. In a generation Athens was rebuilt; a new council chamber rose, a new
33°	THE  LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XIV
prytaneum, new homes, new porticoes, new walls of defense, new wharves and warehouses at a new port. About 446 Hippodamus of Miletus, chief town-planner of antiquity, laid out a new Piraeus, and set a new style, by replacing the old chaos of haphazard and winding alleys with broad, straight streets crossing at right angles. On an elevation a mile northwest of the Acropolis unknown artists raised that smaller Parthenon known as the Theseum, or temple of Theseus.• Sculptors filled the pediments with statuary and the metopes with reliefs, and ran a frieze above the inner columns at both ends. Painters colored the moldings, the triglyphs, metopes, and frieze, and made bright murals for an interior dimly lit by light shining
through marble tiles.t
The finest work of Pericles' builders was reserved for the Acropolis, the ancient seat of the city's government and faith. Themistocles began its re construction, and planned a temple one hundred feet long, known there fore as the Hecatompedon. After his fall the work was abandoned; the oligarchic party opposed it on the ground that any dwelling for Athena, if it was not to bring bad luck to Athens, must be built upon the site of the old temple of Athene Polias (i.e., Athena of the City), which the Persians had destroyed. Pericles, caring nothing about superstitions, adopted the site of the Hecatompedon for the Parthenon, and, though the priests pro tested to the end, went on with his plans. On the southwestern slope of the Acropolis his artists erected an Odeum, or Music Hall, unique in Athens for its cone-shaped dome. It offered a handle to conservative satirists, who thenceforth referred to Pericles' conical head as his odeion, or hall of song. The Odeum was built for the most part of wood, and soon succumbed to time. In this auditorium musical performances were presented, and the Dionysian dramas were rehearsed; and there, annually, were held the con tests instituted by Pericles in vocal and instrumental music. The versatile statesman himself often acted as a judge in these competitions.
The road to the summit, in classical days, was devious and gradual, and was flanked with statues and votive offerings. Near the top was a majes tically broad flight of marble steps, buttressed with bastions on either side.
The name is a mistake, since this temple, erected in 425, could not have been the Theseum to which, in 469, Cimon brought the supposed bones of Theseus; but time sanc tifies error as well as theft, and ·the traditional name is commonly retained for lack of a certain designation.
t The Theseum is the best preserved of all ancient Greek buildings; even so it lacks its
marble tiles, its murals, its interior statuary, its pedimental sculptures, and nearly all of its external coloring. The metopes are so badly damaged that their reliefs are almost undis tinguishable.
CHAP.XIV)	THE  ART  OF  PERICLEAN  GREECE	331
On the south bastion Callicrates raised a miniature Ionic temple to Athena as Nike Apteros, or the Wingless Victory.• Elegant reliefs (partly pre served in the Athens Museum) adorned the external balustrade with figures of winged Victories bringing to Athens their far-gathered spoils. These Nikai are in the noblest style of Pheidias, less vigorous than the massive god desses of the Parthenon, but even more graceful in motion, and more deli cate and natural in their protrayal of drapery. The Victory tying her sandals deserves her name, for she is one of the triumphs of Greek art.
At the top of the Acropolis steps Mnesicles built, in elaboration of Mycenaean pylons, an entrance with five openings, before each of which stood a Doric portico; these colonnades in time gave to the whole edifice their name of Propylaea, or Before the Gates. Each portico carried a frieze of triglyphs and metopes, and was crowned with a pediment. Within the passageway was an Ionic colonnade, boldly inserted within a Doric form. The interior of the northern wing was decorated with paintings by Polygnotus and others, and contained votive tablets (pinakes) of terracotta or marble; hence its name of Pinakotheka, or Hall of Tablets. A small south wing remained unfinished; war, or the reaction against Pericles, put a stop to the work, and left an ungainly mass of beautiful parts as a gateway to the Parthenon.
Within these gates, on the left, was the strangely Oriental Erechtheum. This, too, was overtaken by war: not more than half of it was finished when the disaster of Aegospotami reduced Athens to chaos and poverty. It was begun after Pericles' death, under the prodding of conservatives who feared that the ancient heroes Erechtheus and Cecrops, as well as the Athena of the older shrine, and the sacred snakes that haunted the spot, would punish Athens for building the Parthenon on another site. The varied purposes of the structure determined its design, and destroyed its unity. One wing was dedicated to Athene Polias, and housed her ancient image; another was devoted to Erechtheus and Poseidon. The naos or cella, instead of being enclosed by a unifying peristyle, was here buttressed with three separate porticoes. The northern and eastern porches were upheld by slender Ionic


Iphig. Is this the babe I knew,
The little babe, light-lifted like a bird? ...
0 Argos land,0 hearth and holy .flame That old Cyclopes lit,
I bless ye that he lives, that he is grown,
A light and strength, my brother and mine own; I bless your name for it.05
They offer to rescue her, and in tum she helps them to capture the image of Artemis. By her subtle ruse they reach their ship safely, and carry the statue to Brauron; there Iphigenia becomes a priestess, and there, after her death, she is worshiped as a deity. Orestes is released from the Furies, and knows some years of peace. The thirst of the gods is sated, and the drama of The Children of Ttmtalus is complete.
The Dramatist
We must agree with Aristotle that these plays, from the viewpoint of dramatic technique, fall short of the standards set by Aeschylus and Sophocles... The Medea, the Hippolytus, and The Bacchae are well planned, but even they cannot compare with the structural integrity of the Oresteia, or the complex unity of Oedipus the King. Instead of plunging at once into the action, and explaining its antecedents gradually and naturally in the course of the story, Euripides employs the artificial expedient of a pedagogical prologue, and, worse still, puts it sometimes into the mouth of a god.  Instead of showing us the action directly, which is the function
of drama, he too often introduces a messenger to describe the action, even
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVII
when no violence is involved. Instead of making the chorus a part of the action he transforms it into a philosophical aside, or uses it to interrupt the development with lyrics always beautiful, but often irrelevant. In stead of presenting ideas through action, he sometimes displaces action with ideas, and turns the stage into a school for speculation, rhetoric, and argu ment. Too often his plots depend upon coincidences and "recognition"- though these are well arranged and dramatically presented. Most of the plays (like a few by his predecessors) end with intervention by the deus ex machina, the .god from the crane-a device that can be forgiven only on the assumption that for Euripides the real play ended before this theophany, and the god was let down to provide the orthodox with a virtuous conclusion to what would otherwise have been a scandalous per formance.07 With such prologues and epilogues the great humanist won the privilege of presenting his heresies on the stage.
The material, like the form, is a medley of genius and artifice. Euripides is above all sensitive, as every poet must be; he feels the problems of man kind intensely, and expresses them with passion; he is the most tragic and the most human of all dramatists. But his feeling is too frequently senti mentality; his "droppings of warm tears"08 are too easily released; he loses no chance to show a mother parting from her children, and wrings all possible pathos out of every situation. These scenes are always moving, and sometimes are described with a power unequaled in tragedy before or since; but they descend occasionally to melodrama, and a surfeit of vio lence and horror, as at the close of the Medea. Euripides is the Byron and Shelley and Hugo of Greece, a Romantic Movement in himself.
He easily surpasses his rivals in the delineation of character. Psychologi cal analysis replaces with him, even more than with Sophocles, the opera tion of destiny; he is never weary of investigating the morals and motives of human conduct. He studies a great variety of men, from Electra's peasant husband to the kings of Greece and Troy; no other dramatist has drawn so many types of women, or drawn them with such sympathy; every shade of vice and virtue interests him, and is realistically portrayed. Aeschylus and Sophocles were too absorbed in the universal and eternal to see the temporal and the particular clearly; they created profound types, but Euripides creates living individuals; neither of the older men, for example, realized Electra so vividly. In these plays the drama of the conflict with fate yields more and more to the drama of situation and character, and the way is prepared by which, in the following centuries, the Greek stage will be captured by the comedy of manners under Philemon and Menander.
CHAP.XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	413
The Philosopher
But it would be foolish to judge Euripides chiefly as a playwright; his ruling interest is not dramatic technique but philosophical inquiry and political reform. He is the son of the Sophists, the poet of the Enlighten ment, the representative of the radical younger generation that laughed at the old myths, flirted with socialism, and called for a new social order in which there should be less exploitation of man by man, of women by men, and of all by the state. It is for these rebel souls that Euripides writes; for them he adds his skeptical innuendoes, and inserts a thousand heresies between the lines of supposedly religious plays. He covers his tracks with pious passages and patriotic odes; he presents a sacred myth so literally that its absurdity is manifest and yet his orthodoxy cannot be impeached; he gives the body of his plays over t-0 doubt, but surrenders the first and last words to the gods. His subtlety and brilliance, like those of the French Encyclopedists, is due in some part to the compulsion laid upon him to speak his mind while saving his skin.
His theme is that of Lucretius-
Ttmtum religio potuit suadere malorum
-so great are the evils to which religion has led men: oracles that breed violence upon violence, myths that exalt immorality with divine example, and shed supernatural sanctions upon dishonesty, adultery, theft, human sacrifice, and war. He describes a soothsayer as "a man who speaks few truths but many lies";" he calls it "sheer folly" to chart the future from the entrails of birds;",. he denounces the whole apparatus of oracles and divination.101 Above all he resents the immoral implications of the legends:
Men shall know there is no God, no light
In heaven, if wrong to the end shall conquer right.... Say not there be adulterers in heaven,
Nor prisoner gods and gaolers: long ago
My heart hath named it vile, and shall not alter.... These tales be false, false as those feastings wild
Of Tantalus, and gods that tare a child. This land of murderers to its gods hath given
Its own lust. Evil dwelleth not in heaven....