§ One of his favorite problems was to find the "golden section"-i.e., to divide a line at such a point that the whole lme should have the same proportion to the larger part as the larger to the smaller.
502	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXI
His most famous theory was a brilliant failure. He suggested that the universe was composed of twenty-seven transparent and therefore invisible spheres, re
•wlving in diverse directions and at various speeds about the center of the earth; and that the heavenly bodies were fixed upon the periphery or shell of these concentric spheres. The system now seems fantastic, but it was one of the first attempts to give a scientific explanation of celestial behavior. In accord with it Eudoxus calculated with considerable accuracy (if we may rashly take our present "knowledge" of these matters as a norm) the synodic and zodiacal pe riods of the planets.• The theory did more than any other in antiquity to stimulate astronomic research.
Ecphantus of Syracuse wrote, about 390: "The earth moves about its own center in an eastward direction."12 Heracleides of Pontus, one of the great polymaths of antiquity-the author of famous works on grammar, music, poetry, rhetoric, history, geometry, logic, and ethics-took up the suggestion, or ad vanced it independently, arguing that instead of the whole universe revolving about the earth, the relevant phenomena can be explained by supposing that the earth itself rotates daily upon its axis.13 Venus and Mercury, said Heracleides, revolve around the sun. For one brilliant moment, perhaps, Heracleides antici pated Aristarchus and Copernicus, for we read in the fragments of Geminus (ca. 70 B.c.): "Heracleides of Pontus said that, even on the assumption that the earth moves in a certain way, while the sun is in a certain ay at rest, the apparent irregularity with reference to the sun can be saved."" We shall prob ably never know just what Heracleides meant.
Meanwhile a modest progress was being made in the sciences. In geography Dicaearchus of Messana, the biographer of Greece, measured the height of mountains, established the circumference of the earth at some thirty thousand miles, and noted the influen e of the sun upon the tides. In 325 Nearchus, one of Alexander's generals, sailed from the mouth of the Indus along the southern coast of Asia to the Euphrates; his log, partly preserved in Arrian's Indica,,. was one of the classics of ancient geography. Geodesy-the measurement of land surfaces,· elevations, depressions, positions, and volumes-had already been christened (geodaisia) as distinct from geometry.'" Philistion of Italian Locri, at the beginning of the century, practiced animal dissection, and called the heart the main regulator of life, the seat of the pneuma, or soul. Diodes of
The synodic period of a heavenly body is the time between two successive conjunctions of it with the sun, as seen from the earth; the zodiacal period is the time between two succes sive appearances of a heavenly body in the same pan of the sky as imaginatively divided into the twelve signs of the zodiac. Eudoxus' figure for the synodic period of Saturn was 390 days, ours is 378; for Jupiter, 390, ours 399; for Mars, 260, ours 780; for Mercury, 110 (one manu script says u6), ours u6; for Venus, 570, ours 584. The zodiacal period given by Eudoxus for Saturn was 30 years, our figure, 29 years, 166 days; for Jupiter, 12 years, our figure, 11 years, 315 days; for Mars, 2 years, our figure, 1 year, 322 days; for Mercury and Venus, J year, our fi e. r vear.11
CHAP.XX!)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY
Euboean Carystus, about 370, dissected the womb of animals, described human embryos of twenty-seven to forty days, advanced anatomy, embryology, gyne cology, and obstetrics, and scotched a favorite Greek error by announcing that both sexes contribute "seed" to form the embryo." A second Aspasia became one of the famous physicians of founh-century Athens, renowned for her work in women's diseases, surgery, and other branches of medicine.:111 And lest medi cal science should lower the death rate too fast for the means of subsistence, Aeneas Tacticus, the Arcadian, published about 360, in time for Philip and Alexander, the first Greek classic on the an of war.
rr. THE SOCRATIC SCHOOLS
Aristippus
If it was a middling age in science the fourth century was the heyday of philosophy. The early thinkers had propounded vague cosmologies; the Sophists had doubted everything but rhetoric; Socrates had raised a thousand questions and answered none; now all the seeds that had been planted in two hundred years sprouted into great systems of metaphysical, ethical, and political speculation. Athens, too poor to maintain its state medical service, nevertheless opened private universities that made it, as Isocrates said, the "school of Bellas," the intellectual capital and arbiter of Greece. Having weakened the old religion, the philosophers struggled to find in nature and reason some substitute for it as a prop of morals and a guide to life.
They explored first the paths opened up by Socrates. While the Soph ists relapsed for the most part into the teaching of rhetoric, and disap peared as a class, the pupils of Socrates became the storm centers of vio lently divergent philosophies. Eucleides of Megara, who had often traveled to Athens to hear Socrates, stirred up his native city with "a rage of dis putes," as Timon of Athens phrased it," and developed the dialectic of Zeno and Socrates into an eristic, or art of argument, that questioned every conclusion, and led in the next century to the skepticism of Pyrrho and Cameades. After Eucleides' death his brilliant disciple Stilpo led the Megarian school more and more towards the Cynic point of view: since every philosophy can be refuted, wisdom lies not in metaphysical specu lation but in such simple living as will liberate the individual from depend ence upon the external factors in well-being. When, after the sack of Megara, Demetrius Poliorcetes inquired how much Stilpo had lost, the
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXI
sage replied that he had never possessed anything but knowledge, and no one had taken this away... In his later years he numbered among his stu dents the founder of the Stoic philosophy, so that the Megarian school may be said to have begun with one Zeno, and ended with another.
The elegant Aristippus, after Socrates' death, traveled to various cities, spent some time with Xenophon at Scillus but more with Lais in Corinth,n and then settled down to found a school of philosophy in his native Cy rene, on the coast of Africa. The wealth and luxury of the upper classes in the half-Oriental city had formed his habits, and he .agreed most with that part of his master's doctrine which called happiness the greatest good. Handsome in figure, refined in manners, clever in speech, he made a way for himself everywhere. Shipwrecked and penniless in Rhodes, he went to a gymnasium, discoursed, and so fascinated the men there that they provided him and his companions with all comfons; whereupon he re marked that parents should arm their children with such wealth that even after a shipwreck it should be able to swim to land with its owner.21
His philosophy was simple and candid. Whatever we do, said Aristip pus, is done through hope of pleasure or fear of pain-even when we im poverish ourselves for our friends, or give our lives for our generals. Therefore, by common consent, pleasure is the ultimate good, and every thing else, including virtue and philosophy, must be judged according to its capacity to bring us pleasure. Our knowledge of things is uncenain; all that we know directly and surely is our feelings; wisdom, then, lies in the pursuit not of abstract truth but of pleasurable sensations. The keen est pleasures are not intellectual or moral, they are physical or sensual; therefore the wise man will seek physical delights above all. Nor will he sacrifice a present good to a conjectural future good; only the present exists, and the present is probably as good as the future, if not better; the art of life lies in plucking pleasures as they pass, and making the most of what the moment gives... The use of philosophy is that it may guide us not away from pleasures, but to the most pleasant choice and use of them. It is not the ascetic who abstains that is pleasure's master, but rather the man who enjoys pleasures without being their slave, and can prudently distinguish between those that endanger him and those that do not; hence the wise man will show a discriminating respect for public opinion and the laws, but will seek as far as possible "to be neither the master nor the
,,..
s ave o any man.
If it is a credit to a man that he practices what he preaches, Aristippus
deserves some honor. He bore poverty and riches with equal grace, but
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF  PHILOSOPHY	5o5
made no pretense to impartiality between them. He insisted on being paid for his instructions, and did not hesitate to flatter tyrants to gain his end. He smiled patiently when Dionysius I spat upon him: "A fisherman," he said, "must put up with more moisture than this to.catch even a smaller fish.,,.. When a friend reproached him for kneeling before Dionysius he answered that it was not his fault if the King "had his ears in his feet"; and when Dionysius asked him why philosophers haunt the doors of the rich, but the rich do not frequent the presence of philosophers, he replied, "Because the first know what they want but the second do not.'"" Never theless he despised men who pursued wealth for its own sake. When the rich Phrygian Simus displayed to him an ornate house paved with marble, Aristippus spat in his face; and when Simus protested he excused himself on the ground that he could not find, amid all this marble, "a more suit able place to spit in.".. Having made money, he spent it lavishly on good food, good clothing, good lodging, and (as they seemed to him) good women. Being reproved for living with a courtesan, he answered that he had no objection to living in a house, or sailing in a ship, that other men had used before him... When his mistress said to him, "I am in a family way by you," he replied, "You can no more tell that it was I, than you could tell, after going through a thicket, which thorn had scratched you."111
People liked him despite his honest ways, for he was a person of pleasant manner, refined culture (pace Sim.us), and kindly heart. Doubtless his blunt hedonism was in part due to his delight in scandalizing the respect able sinners of the town. He gave himself away by reverencing Socrates, loving philosophy,• and confessing that the most impressive spectacle in life is the sight of a virtuous man steadily pursuing his course in the midst of vicious people.01 Before his death (356) he remarked that the greatest legacy he was leaving to his daughter Arete was that he had taught her "to set a value on nothing that she can do without"11-2 a strange surrender to Diogenes. She succeeded him as head of the Cyrenaic school, wrote forty books, had many distinguished pupils, and earned from her city an honorable epitaph-"The Light of Bellas."..
Diogenes


The fleet had been gone some days when new evidence, as unreliable as before, was brought out to the effect that Alcibiades and his friends had participated in an impious mimicry of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Urged on by an enraged populace, the Assembly sent the swift galley Salaminia to overtake Alcibiades and bring him back for trial. Alcibiades accepted the summons and went aboard the Sala111inia; but when the vessel stopped at Thurii he secretly made his way to shore, and escaped. The Athenian Assembly, baffled, pronounced judgment of exile upon him, with confisca tion of all his property, and a decree of death in case the Athenians, should ever capture him. Bitter at the thought that his plans for empire and glory had been frustrated by a condemnation which he continued to call unjust, Alcibiades took refuge in the Peloponnesus, and, appearing before the Spartan Assembly, proposed to help Sparta defeat Athens and establish there an aristocratic government. "As for democracy," Thucydides makes him say, "the men of sense among us knew what it was, and I perhaps as well as any, as I have the more cause to complain of it; but there is nothing new to be said of a patent absurdity."" He advised them to send a fleet to help Syracuse and an army to capture Deceleia-an Attic town whose pos session should give Sparta military command of everything in Attica but Athens. The silver mines at Laurium would cease to finance Athenian re sistance, and the subject cities, foreseeing the defeat of Athens, would stop their payment of tribute. Sparta took his advice.
The intensity of his own resolution appeared in the completeness with which he, so accustomed to luxury, took up the Spartan way of life. He became frugal and reserved, eating coarse food, wearing a rough tunic and no shoes, bathing in the Eurotas winter and summer, and observing all Lacedaemonian laws and customs faithfully. Even so his good looks and personal fascination ruined his plans. The Queen fell in love with him, bore him a son, and proudly whispered to her friends that he was the father. He excused himself to his intimates on the ground that he could not resist the chance to establish his race as kings over Laconia. King Agis, who had been away with the army, started home, and Alcibiades conveniently se cured a commission in a Spartan squadron that was sailing to Asia. The King disowned the child and sent out secret orders for the assassination of Alcibiades; but the latter's friends warned him, and he escaped and joined the Persian admiral Tissaphernes at Sardis.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVIIl
At the other end of the war front Nicias was encountering a resistance which only Alcibiades' genius for strategy and intrigue could have over come. Nearly all of Sicily came to the aid of Syracuse. In 414 a Spartan fleet under Gylippus helped the Sicilian navy to bottle up the Athenian ships in the harbor of Syracuse, cutting them off from any supply of food. A final chance to escape was lost because of an eclipse of the moon, which frightened Nicias and many of his soldiers into awaiting an opportunity more satisfactory to the gods. On the next day, however, they found themselves surrounded, and were forced to give battle. They were de feated, first on sea and then on land. Nicias, though ill and weak, fought bravely, and at last surrendered to the mercy of the Syracusans. He was at once put to death; and the surviving Athenians, almost all of the citizen class, were sent to die at hard labor in the quarries of Sicily, where they tasted the fate of the men who for generations had worked the mines of Laurium.
THE TRIUMPH OF SPARTA
The disaster broke the spirit of Athens. Nearly half the citizen body was now enslaved or dead; half the women of the citizen class were in effect widows, and the children were orphans. The funds that Pericles had ac cumulated in the treasury were almost exhausted; in another year the last penny would be gone. Thinking the fall of Athens imminent, the subject cities refused further tribute; most of her allies abandoned her, and many flocked to the side of Sparta. In 413 Sparta, claiming that the "fifty years" peace had been repeatedly violated by Athens, renewed the war. The Lacedaemonians now took and fortified Deceleia; the supply of food from Euboea and of silver from Laurium stopped; the slaves in the mines at Laurium revolted, and went over to the Spartans in a body of twenty thou sand men. Syracuse sent an army to join in the attack; and the Persian King, seeing an opportunity to avenge Marathon and Salamis, provided funds for the growing Spartan fleet, on the shameful understanding that Sparta would assist Persia in regaining mastery over the Greek cities of Ionia.•
It was a proof of Athenian courage, ana of the vitality of Athenian democracy, that Athens stood off her enemies for ten years more. The government was put upon an economical footing, taxes and capital levies were collected to build a new fleet, and within a year of the defeat at Syracuse Athens was ready to contest Sparta's new mastery of the sea.
CHAP, XVIII)	THE  SUICIDE  OF· GREECE	449
Just as recovery seemed assured, the oligarchic faction, which had never favored the war, and, indeed, looked to a Spartan victory to revive aris tocracy in Athens, organized a revolt, seized the organs of government, and set up a supreme Council of Four Hundred (411). The Assembly, cowed by the assassination of many democratic leaders, voted its own abdi cation. The rich supported the rebellion as the only way of controlling the class war that had crossed the lines of the war between Athens and Sparta-much as the struggle of the middle classes against aristocracy united the liberal factions in England and America in the American Revo lution. Once in power, the oligarchs sent envoys to make peace with Sparta, and secretly prepared to admit the Spartan army into Athens. Mean while Theramenes, leader of a center party of moderate aristocrats, led a counterrevolution, and replaced the Four Hundred-which had ruled some four months-with a Council of Five Thousand (411). For a brief while Athens enjoyed that combination of democracy and aristocracy which seemed to Thucydides and Aristotle• (aristocrats both) to have been the best and fairest government that Athens had known since Solon. But the second revolt, like the first, had forgotten that Athens depended for its food and life upon its navy, whose personnel, barring a few leaders, had been disfranchised by both revolutions. Incensed at the news, the sailors announced that unless the democracy were restored they would besiege Athens. The oligarchs waited hopefully for a Spartan army; the Spartans as usual were tardy; the new government took to its heels, and the vic torious democrats restored the old constitution (411).
Alcibiades had secretly supported the oligarchic revolt, hoping that it might smooth a way for his return to Athens. Now the re-empowered democracy, perhaps ignorant of these intrigues, but knowing how badly Athens had fared since his exile, called him home with a promise of amnesty. Deferring his triumph at Athens, he took charge of the fleet at Samos, and moved into action with a celerity and success that brought Athens a brief moment of happiness. Speeding through the Hellespont, he met and completely destroyed a Spartan fleet at Cyzicus (410). After a year's siege he captured Chalcedon and Byzantium, and thereby restored Athens' control of the food supply from the Bosporus. Sailing back south he en countered another Spartan squadron near the isle of Andros, and defeated it with ease. Returning now (407) to Athens, he was welcomed with uni versal acclaim: his sins were forgotten, only his genius was remembered,
and Athens' desperate need of an able general."' But Athens, while cele brating his victories, neglected to send him money for the pay of his crews.
45°	THE  LIFE  OF GREECE	( CHAP. XVIII
Once again Alcibiades' lack of moral scruple ruined him. Leaving the greater number of his vessels at Notium (near Ephesus) in command of one Antiochus, with strict instructions to stay in port and under no cir cumstances to give battle, he himself went with a small force to Caria to raise funds for his men by something less than due process of law. Antiochus, itching for fame, left his haven and challenged a Spartan flotilla under Lysander. Lysander accepted the taunt, killed Antiochus in a hand to-hand fight, and sank or captured most of the Athenian ships (407). When news of this catastrophe came to Athens the Assembly acted with characteristic haste; it censured Alcibiades for leaving his fleet, and removed him from command. Alcibiades, fearing now both Athens and Sparta, fled to a refuge in Bithynia.
Desperate, the Athenians ordered that the gold and silver in the statues and offerings on the Acropolis should be melted down for the building of a new flotilla of 1 50 triremes, and offered freedom to those slaves, and citi zenship to those aliens, who would fight for the city., The new armada defeated a Spartan fleet off the Arginusae Islands (south of Lesbos) in 406, and Athens again thrilled with the news of victory. But the Assembly was furious when it learned that its generals* had allowed the crews of twenty-five ships, sunk by the enemy, to drown in a storm. Hotheads. protested that these souls, for lack of proper burial, would wander rest lessly about the universe; and accusing the survivors of negligence in not attempting a rescue, they proposed that the eight victorious generals (in cluding the son of Pericles by Aspasia) should be put to death. Socrates, who happened to be a member of the presiding prytany for the day, re fused to put the motion to a vote. It was presented and passed over his protests, and the sentence was carried out with the same precipitation with which it had been decreed. A few days later the Assembly repented, and condemned to death those who had persuaded it to execute the generals. Meanwhile the Spartans, weakened by the defeat, offered peace again; but the Assembly, moved by the oratory of the drunken Cleophon, refused...
Led now by second-rate men, the Athenian fleet sailed north to meet the
Spartans under Lysander in the Sea of Marmora. From his hiding place in the hills Alcibiades saw that the Athenian ships had taken up a strategi cally perilous position at Aegospotami, near Lampsacus. He risked his life to ride down to the shore and advise the Athenian admirals to seek a more sheltered place; hut they distrusted his counsel, and reminded him that he was no longer in command. On the next day the decisive battle was fought;
The term strategos was applied to naval as well as military commanders.
CHAP. XVIII)	THE   SUICIDE  OF GREECE	451
all but eight of the 208 Athenian ships were scuttled or taken, and Lysander ordered the execution of three thousand Athenian captives.  Learning that
Lysander had issued orders for his assassination, Alcibiades sought refuge in Phrygia with the Persian general Pharnabazus, who assigned him a cas tle and a·courtesan. But the Persian King, persuaded by Lysander, ordered Pharnabazus to kill his guest. Two assassins besieged Alcibiades in his cas tle, and set fire to it; he came out naked and desperate, seeking the privilege of fighting for his life; but before his sword could touch his assailants he was pierced by their arrows and javelins. He died at the age of forty-six, the greatest genius and most tragic failure in the military history of Greece. Lysander, now absolute master of the Aegean, sailed down from city to city, ovenhrowing the democracies and setting up oligarchic governments subject to Spana. Entering the Piraeus unresisted, he proceeded to block ade Athens. The Athenians resisted with their accustomed bravery, but within three months their stock of food was exhausted, and the streets were full of dead or dying men. Lysander gave Athens bitter and yet lenient terms: he would not, he said, destroy a city that had in time past performed such honorable services for Greece, nor would he enslave its population; but he demanded the leveling of the Long Walls, the recall of the oligarchic exiles, the surrender of all but eight of the surviving Athenian ships, and a pledge to support Sparta actively in any further war. Athens protested,
and yielded.
Supported by Lysander, and led by Critias and Theramenes, the return ing oligarchs seized the government, and established a Council of Thirty to rule Athens (404). These Greek Bourbons had learned nothing; they confiscated the property and alienated the suppon of many rich merchants; they plundered the temples, sold for three talents the wharves of the Piraeus which had cost a thousand,.. exiled five thousand democrats, and put fifteen hundred others to death; they assassinated all Athenians who were distasteful to them politically or personally; they put an end to free dom of teaching, assemblage, and speech, and Critias himself, once his pupil, forbade Socrates to continue his public discourses. Seeking to com promise the philosopher to their cause, the Thirty ordered him and four others to arrest the democrat Leon. The others obeyed, but Socrates re fused.
All the sins of the democracy were forgotten as the crimes of the oli garchs increased and multiplied. The number of men, even of substantial means, who began to seek an end to this bloody tyranny grew from day to day. When a thousand armed democrats under Thrasybulus approached
452	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVIII
the Piraeus, the Thirty found that hardly any but their immediate partisans could be persuaded to fight for them. Critias organized a small army, went out to battle, and was defeated and killed. Thrasybulus entered Athens, and restored the democracy (403). Under his guidance the Assembly behaved with unwonted moderation:,it decreed death for only the highest surviving leaders of the revolution, and allowed them to escape this sentence by exile; it declared a general amnesty to all others who had supported the oli garchs; it even repaid to Sparta the hundred talents that the ephors had lent to the Thirty." These acts of humanity and statesmanship gave to Athens at last the peace that she had not known for a generation.


Everything harmonizes with e that harmonizes with thee, O universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late which is in due time for thee. Everything s frui to me that thy seasons bring, O Nature. From thee are all thmgs, m thee are all things, to thee all things retum.51
CHAP.XX)	LIFE  IN  THE  SECOND  CENTURY	445
Knowledge is of value only as a tool of the good life. "What, then, can direct a man? One thing only-philosophy" 52-not as logic or learning, but as a persistent training in moral excellence. "Be thou erect, or be made erect." 53 God has given every man a guiding daimon, or inner spirit-his reason. Virtue is the life of reason.
These are the principles of the rational soul. It traverses the whole universe, and surveys its form, and extends itself into the infinity of time, and embraces the cyclical renewal of all things, and compre hends that those who come after us will see nothing new, nor have those before us seen anything more; but in a manner he who is forty years old, if he has any understanding at all, has seen, by virtue of this uniformity, all things that have been or will be.54
Marcus thinks his premises compel him to puritanism. "Pleasure is neither good nor useful." 55 He renounces the flesh and all its works, and talks at times like some Anthony in the Thebaid:
Observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus, tomorrow will be a mummy or ashes.
. . . The whole space of man's life is but little, and yet with what troubles it is filled ... and with what a wretched body it must be passed! ...  Tum it inside out, and see what kind of thing it is.56
The mind must be a citadel free from bodily desires, passions, anger, or hate. It must be so absorbed in its work as hardly to notice the adversities of fortune or the barbs of enmity. "Every man is worth just so much as the things about which he busies himself." 57 He reluctantly concedes that there are bad men in this world. The way to deal with them is to remember that they, too, are men, the helpless victims of their own faults by the determinism of circumstance.58 "If any man has done thee wrong, the harm is his own; it is thy duty to forgive him." 511 If the existence of evil men saddens you, think of the many fine persons you have met, and the many virtues that are mingled in imperfect characters.60 Good or bad, all men are brothers, kinsmen in one God; even the ugliest barbarian is a citizen of the fatherland to which we all belong. "As Aurelius I have Rome for my country; as a man, the world." 61 Does this seem an impracticable philos ophy? On the contrary, nothing is so invincible as a good disposition, if it be sincere.62 A really good man is immune to misfortune, for whatever evil befalls him leaves him still his own soul.
Will this [evil] that has happened prevent thee from being just, magnanimous, temperate, prudent . . . modest, free?    Suppose
that men curse thee, kill thee, cut thee in pieces: what can these things do to prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, and just?
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XX
If a man stand by a limpid, pure spring and curse it, the spring never ceases to send up clean water; if he cast dirt into it, or filth, it will speecily wash them out and be unpolluted again.    On every oc
casion that brings thee trouble, remember to apply this principle: that this is not a misfortune, but that to bear it nobly is good for tune.    Thou seest how few the things are to which if a man lays
hold of, he is able to live a life that flows on quietly and is like the existence of the gods.63
Marcus' life, however, did not flow on quietly; he had to kill Germans while writing this Fifth Gospel, and in the end he faced death with no consolation in the son who wodd succeed him, and no hope of happiness beyond the grave. Soul and body alike return to their original elements.
For as the mutation and dissolution of bodies make roor.: for other bodies doomed to die, so the souls that arc removed into the air, after life's existence, are transmuted and diffused . . . into the seminal intelligence of the universe, and make room for new souls.6-1 ••• Thou hast existed as a part; thou shalt disappear in that which pro duced thee.... This, too, nature wills. . . . Pass, then, through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journeys in content, just as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the nature that produced it, and tl1ank:ng the tree en which it grew.U5
COM.MODUS
\'\'hen the officer of the gu:rd asked the dying l\farcus for the watchword of the day he answered: "Go to the rising sun; my sun is setting." The rising sun was then nineteen, a robust and dashing youth without inhibitions, morals, or fear. One would have expected of him, rather than of Marcus the ailing saint, a policy of war to victory or death; instead, he offered the enemy immediate peace. They were to withdraw from the vicinity of the Danube, to surrender most of their arms, return all Roman prisoners and deserters, pay Rome an annual tribute cf corn, and persuade 13,ooo of their soldiers to enlist in the Roman legions.66 All Rome condemned him except the people; his generals fumed at allowing the trapped prey to escape and fight again another day. During the reign of Commodus, how e\~er, no trouble came from the Danubi:m tribes.
The young prince, though no coward, had seen enough of war; he needed peace to enjoy Rome. Back in the capital, he snubbed the Sen::te and loaded the plebs with unprecedented gifts-725 demrii to each citizen. Finding no fidd in politics for his exuberant strength, he hunted beJsts on
CHAP. XX)	LIFE  IN  THE  SECOND  CENTURY	447
the imperial estates and developed such skill with sword and bow that he decided to perform pu!Jlicly. For a time he left the palace and lived in the gladiators' school; he drove chariots in the races, and fought in the arena ag:inst animals and men.67 Pre:::umably the men who opposed him took care to let him win; but he thought nothing of :fighting, unaided and before breakfast, a hippopotamus, an elephant, and a tiger, which made no dis tinctions for royalty.68 He was so perfect a bowman that with a hundred arrows he killed a hundred tif;ers in one exhibition. He would let a panther leap upon scme conc!emned criminal and then slay the animal with one arrcw, leaving the man unhurt to die again.69 He had his exploits recorded in the Acta Diurna and insisted on being paid, out of the Treasury, for each cf his thous:nd combats as a gladiator.
The historians upon whom we must here depend wrote, like Tacitus, from the viewpoint and traditions of the offended aristocracy; we cannot tell how much of the marvels they relate are history, how much are re venge. We are assured that Commodus drank and gambled, wasted the public funds, kept a harem of 300  women and 300  boys, and liked to vary his sex occasionally, at least by using a woman's garb, even at the public games. Tales of unbelievable cruelty are transmitted to us: Commodus ordered a votary of Bellona to amputate an arm in proof of piety; forced some women devotees of Isis to beat their breasts with pine cones till they died; killed men indiscriminately with his club of Hercules; gathered cripples together and slew them one by one with arrows....70One of his mistresses, Marcia, was apparently a Christian; for her sake, we are told, he pardoned some Christians who had been condemned to the Sardinian mines. Her devotion to him suggests that in this man, described as more bestial than any beast, there was some lovable element unrecorded by history.
Like his predecessors, he was aroused to the wildest ferocity by fear oi assassination. His aunt Lucilla formed a conspiracy to kill him; he discovered it, had her executed, and on proof or suspicion of participation put so many men of rank to death that soon hardly any survived who had been prominent in Marcus' reign. Delators, who had almost disappeared for a century, re turned to activity and favor, and a new terror raged in Rome. Appointing Perennis as praetorian prefect, Commodus yielded the reins of government to him, and (the tradition says) abandoned himself to sexual dissipation. Perennis ruled efficiently but mercilessly; he organized his own terror and had all his opponents slain. The Emperor, suspectil)g that Perennis planned to replace him, surrendered this second Sejanus to the Senate, which re enacted its role of glowing revenge. Cleander, a former slave, succeeded Perennis (185) and surpassed him in corruption and cruelty; any office
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XX
might be had for a proper bribe, any decision of any court could be re versed. Under his orders senators and knights were put to death for treason or criticism. In 190 a mob besieged the villa where Commodus was staying and demanded Cleander's death. The Emperor accommodated them. Cleander's successor, Laetus, after holding power for three years, judged that his time had come. One day he chanced upon a proscription list that contained the names of his supporters and friends, and of Marcia. On the last day of 192 Marcia gave Commodus a cup of poison; and when it worked too slowly the athlete whom he had kept to wrestle with strangled him in his bath. He was a youth of thirty-one.


In the spring of 12 3 he led some legions against the Moors of northwest Africa, who had been raiding the Roman towns of i\Iauretania. Having de feated them and driven them back into their hills, he took ship for Ephesus.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIX
After wintering there he visited the cities of Asia Minor, listening to peti tions and complaints, punishing m lf easance, rewarding c.impetence, and providing money, designs, and workmen for municipal temples, baths, and theaters. Cyzicus, Nicaea, and Nicomedia had suffered a severe earthquake; Hadrian had the damage made good by imperial funds, and built at Cyzicus a temple that was at once ranked among the seven wonders of the world.25 He pushed eastward along the Euxine to Trapezus, ordered the governor of Cappadocia-the historian Arrian-to examine and report to him the condi tion of all the ports on the Black Sea, moved southwest through Paphlagonia, and spent a winter at Perg::imum. In the fall of 1 2 5 he sailed to Rhodes and thence to Athens. He passed a happy winter there and then turned home ward. Still curious at fifty, he stopped in Sicily, and climbed Mt. Etna to see the sunrise from a perch 11,000 feet above the sea.
It is worthy of note that he could leave his capital for five years and trust to his subordinates to carry on; like a good manager, he had organized and trained an almost autom::itic government. He stayed in Rome something more than a ye::ir. But the lust for tr::ivel was in his blood, and so much of the world remained to rebuild! In 128 he set out again, this time to Utica, Car thage, and the flourishing new cities of northern Africa. Returning to Rome in the fall, he left soon afterward and spent another winter in Athens ( 128-
29). He was made archon, presided happily at games and festivals, and en joyed being called Liberator, Helios, Zeus, and Savior of the ,vorld. He
mingled with philosophers and artists, imitating the graces, without the fol lies, of Nero and Antony. Distressed by the free chaos of Athens' laws, he commissioned a corps of jurists to codify them. Always skeptically inter ested in religion, he h::id himself initi:1ted into the Eleusinian mvsteries. Find ing Athens beset with unemployment, and resolved to rest re the city to the splendor of Periclean days, he summoned architects, engineers, and skilled artisans, and began a building program more extensive than his public
	works in Rome. In a square enclosed by an extensive colonnade his workmen raised a library with marble walls, 120 columns, a gilded roof, and spacious rooms sparkling with alabaster, paintings, and statuary. They built a gym nasium, an aqueduct, a temple to Hera, and another to Zeus Panhellenicos god "of all the Greeks." The most ambitious of these architectural under takings was the completion ( 131) of the Olympieum-that lordly temple to Zeus the Olympian which Peisistratus had begun six centuries ·before and Antiochus Epiphanes had failed to finish. When Hadrian left Athens it was a cleaner, more prosperous, and more beautiful city than ever before in its history.26
In the spring of 129 he sailed to Ephesus and traveled again in Asia Minor, spawning buildings and cities as he went. He sallied into Cappadocia and re-
CHAP.XIX)	THE   PHILOSOPHER  KINGS	419
viewed the garrisons there. At Antioch he provided funds for an aqueduct, a te□ple, a theater, and public baths. In the fall he visited Palmyra and Arabia, and in 130 he journeyed to Jerusalem. The Holy City wasstill in ruins, almost as Titus had left it sixty years before; a handful of destitute Jews lived in lairs and hovels amid the rocks. Hadrian's heart was touched by the desolation; and his imagination was moved by the empty site. He had hoped, by his restoration of Greece and the Hellenistic East, to raise higher than before the barriers between Greco-Roman civilization and the Oriental world; now he dreamed of transforming Zion itself into a pagan citadel. He ordered that Jerusalem should be rebuilt as a Roman colony and renamed Aelia Capitolina in memory of Hadrian's gens and Jupiter's Capitol in Rome. It was an aston ishing error of psychology and statesmanship in one of the wisest statesmen in history.
He passed on to Alexandria ( I 30), smiled tolerantly at its disputatious populace, enriched the Museum, rebuilt Pompey's tomb, and then, surpassing Caesar, abandoned himself to a leisurely sail up the Nile with his wife Sabina and his beloved Antinolis. He had come upon the young Greek some years before in Bithynia; he had been stirred by the youth's rounded beauty, soft eyes, and curly head; he had made him his favored page and had formed for him a tender and passionate attachment. S::ibina made no protest that has come down to us, but the gossip of the cities assumed that the boy played Ganymede to the new Zeus; possibly, however, the childless Emperor loved him as a heaven-sent son. Now, at the height of Hadrian's happiness, An tinolis, still but eighteen, died-apparently by drowning in the Nile. The monarch of the world "wept like a woman," says Spartianus; he ordered a temple to be raised on the shore, buried the lad there, and offered him to the world as a god. Around the shrine he built a city, Antinoopolis, destined to be a Byzantine capital. While Hadrian returned sadly to Rome, legend began to remold the story: the Emperor, it said, had learned by magic divination that his greatest plans would succeed only if that which he loved most should die; Antinolis had heard of the prophecy and had gone voluntarily to his death. Perhaps the legend formed soon enough to embitter Hadrian's de clining years.
Back in Rome ( 1 31), he could feel that he had made the Empire better than he had found it. Never before, not even under Augustus, had it been so prosperous, and never has the Mediterranean world reached that fullness of life again; never has it again been the home of so advanced a civilization so widely spread and so deeply shared. And no man had so beneficently ruled it as Hadrian. Augustus had thought of the provinces as a lucrative appendage to Italy, to be husbanded for Italy's sake; now for the first time the ideas of Caesar and Claudius reached fulfillment, and Rome became not a tax col-
420	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIX
lector for Italy, but the responsible administrator of a realm in which all parts alike received the care of the government, and in which the Greek spirit ruled the East and the mind as openly as the Roman spirit ruled the state and the West. Hadrian had seen it all and had made it one. He had promised that he "would manage the commonwealth as conscious that it was the people's property, not his own";27 and he had kept his promise.
Tbe Builder
Only one thing remained-to make Rome, too, more beautiful than before. The artist in Hadrian was ever competing with the governor; he rebuilt the Pantheon while reorganizing Roman law. No other man ever built so plenti fully, no other ruler so directly. The structures erected for him were some times designed by him, and were always subject to his expert inspection as they progressed. He had a hundred edifices repaired or restored and in scribed his name on none of them. Rome in all quarters benefited from his rare union of wisdom with power. Si jeunesse savctit et vieillesse pouvait was in him a riddle solved.
His most famous reconstruction was the Pantheon-the best-preserved building of the ancient world. The rectangular temple reared by Agrippa had been destroyed by fire; apparently only the frontal Corinthian portico remained. North of this remnant Hadrian had his architects and engineers raise a circul.ar temple, in the most indigenous of Roman styles. His Hellenic tastes inclined him to prefer Greek to Roman forms in the architecture of his capital. The new temple did not form with the portico a harmonious whole; but the interior-a circle 132 feet in diameter, with no impeding supports gave a sense of space and freedom equaled only by the Gothic cathedrals. The walls were twenty feet thick, of brick externally faced in the lower section with marble, in the rest with stucco relieved by pilasters. The ceiling of the portico was of bronze plates so thick that when they were removed by Pope Urban VIII they sufficed to cast 110 cannon and to form the baldachin over the high altar in St. Peter's.29 The massive bronze doors were originally covered with gold. Sev.en niches were cut into the lower section of the win dowless interior wall and were adorned with lofty marble columns and entablatures; once these niches senTd as alcoves for statu ry, now they are modest chapels in a magnificent church. A higher section of the wall was plated with pane!s. of ostly stone, separated by pillars of porphyry. The coffered dome, nsmg mward from the top of the walls, was the supreme triumph of Roman engineering. It was erected by pourincr concrete into ribbed sections and letting the whole congeal into one solid ass. Its mono-
CHAP.XIX)	THE   PHILOSOPHER  KINGS	421
lithic character did away with lateral thrust, but to make security doubly sure the architect built buttresses into the walls. At the top of the dome an opening (the oculus, or "eye"), twenty-six feet in diameter, gave the interior its sole and sufficient illumination. From this majestic dome, the largest in history, an architectural lineage descends through Byzantine and Roman esque variations to the dome of St. Peter's, and to that of the Capitol in Washington.
Probably Hadrian himself designed the double-apsed temple to Venus and Roma which rose opposite the Colosseum, for legend tells how he sent his plans for it to Apollodorus and had the old architect put to death for returning a scornful comment.30 The temple was notable in several particu lars: it was the largest in Rome; it had two cellas, one for each of its gods, who sat back to back on incommunicative thrones; and its vaulted roof of gold-plated bronze tiles was among the most brilliant sights of the city. For himself the Emperor built a yet ampler home-the villa whose remains still draw visitors to the pleasant suburb known to him as Tibur, to us as Tivoli. There, in an estate seven miles in circumference, rose a palace with every variety of room, and gardens so crowded with famous works of art that every major museum in Europe has enriched itself from the ruins. The designer showed here the usual Roman indifference to symmetry; he added building to building as need or fancy prompted, and made no greater at tempt at harmony than we find in the architectural chaos of the Forum; perhaps the Romans, like the Japanese, were tired of symmetry and pleased with the surprises of irregularity. Besides porticoes, libraries, temples, a theater, a music hall, and a hippodrome, the profuse architect added small replicas of Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, and Zeno's Stoa-as if the Emperor, amid all this vain wealth, would make some amends to philosophy. The villa was finished in the last years of Hadrian's life. \Ve do not know that he found happiness there. The revolt of the Jews in 135 embittered him; he_ put it down without mercy nd fretted that he could not end his reign w1 hout war. In that same year, still only fifty-nine, he was stricken with a pamful and wasting illness-akin to tuberculosis and dropsy-which slowly crushed his body, his spirit, and his mind. His temper became sharper, his manner querulous; he suspected his oldest friends of conspiring to kill and replace him; at last-perhaps in an illucid interval, and how justly we cannot
say-he ordered that several of them should be put to death.
To end the war of succession that was fonning in his court, he adopted as heir his friend Lucius Verus. When, soon after, Lucius died, Hadrian called to his bedside at Tibur a man with an unblemished reputation for integrity and wisdom, Titus Aurelius Antoninus, and adopted him as his son and suc cessor. Looking far ahead, he advised Antoninus to adopt in tum, and edu-
422	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIX
cate for government, two youths then growing up at the court: Marcus Annius Verus, then seventeen, and Lucius Aelius Verus, then eleven, respec tively the nephew of Antoninus and the son of Lucius Verus. The title of Caesar, heretofore borne by the emperors and their agnatic descendants, was conferred by Hadrian upon Antoninus; and thereafter, while the emperors kept for themselves the title of Augustus, they granted the name Caesar to each heir presumptive to the throne.
Hadrian's sickness and sufferings had now increased; blood often gushed from his nostrils; and in his distress he began to long for death. He had already prepared his own tomb beyond the Tiber-that huge mausoleum whose gloomy remains are today the Castel Sant' Angelo, still reached by the Pons Aelius that Hadrian built. He was impressed by the example of the Stoic philosopher Euphrates, then in Rome, who, weary with illness and old age, asked Hadrian's permission to kill himself and, receiving it, drank hemlock.31 The Emperor begged for poison or a sword, but no attendant would accommodate him. He bade a Danubian slave stab him, but the slave fled; he commanded his physician to poison him, but the physician com mitted suicide.32 He found a dagger and was about to kill himself when it was taken from him. He mourned that he, who had the power to put anyone to death, was not himself permitted to die. Dismissing his doctors, he with drew to Baiae and deliberately fed on foods and drinks that would hasten his end. At last, exhausted and maddened with pain, he died (138), after sixty two years 'of life and twenty-one of rule. He left behind him a little poem that expressed like Dante the sadness of recalling in grief the days of our happiness:


The chief faults of his work derive from this moral intent. He gives many signs of being privately a rationalist; but his respect for religion is so great that he accepts almost any superstition, and litters his pages with omens, portents, and oracles, until we feel that here too, as in Virgil, the real actors
- are the gods. He expresses his doubts concerning the myths of early Rome; he gives the less credible ones with a smile; but as he goes on he ceases to distinguish legend from history, follows his predecessors with scant discrimi nation, and accepts at their face value the laudatory romances that earlier historians had composed to ennoble their ancestry.66 He rarely consults original sources or monuments, and never bothers to visit the scene of an action. Sometimes he paraphrases Polybius for pages.67 He adopts the old priestly method of annals, narrating events by consulates; consequently there is in him, aside from his moral theme, no tracing of causes, but only a succession of brilliant episodes. He makes no distinction between the rude patres of the early Republic and the aristocracy of his day, nor between the
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XII
virile plebs that had created Roman democracy and the venal mob that had destroyed it. His prejudices are always patrician.
The patriotic pride that makes Rome forever right in Livy was the secret of his greatness. It gave him an enduring happiness in his long toil; seldom has any writer executed so vast a plan so faithfully. It gave his readers, and still gives us, a sense of Rome's grandeur and destiny. This imperial con sciousness contributed to the energy of Livy's style, the vigor of his char acterizations, the brilliance and power of his descriptions, the majestic march of his prose. The invented speeches in which his history abounds are master pieces of oratory, and became models for the schools. The charm of good manners pervades the work: Livy never shouts, never severely condemns; his sympathy is broader than his scholarship and deeper than his thought. It fails him forgivably when he comes to Hannibal; but he atones with a sweep and splendor of narrative that reaches its zenith in describing the Second Punic War.
His reaoers did not mind his inaccuracies or his bias. They liked his style and story, and gloried in the vivid picture that he had drawn of their past. They took the Ab urbe condita as a prose epic, one of the noblest monu ments of the Augustan age and mood. From that time onward it was Livy's book that would color for eighteen centuries men's conception of Rome's history and character. Even readers in subject lands were impressed by this massive record of unprecedented conquests and titanic deeds. The younger Pliny tells of a Spaniard who was so moved by Livy's work that he traveled from far Cadiz to Rome in the hope of seeing him. Having accom plished his purpose and tendered his worship, he neglected other sights and returned content to his Atlantic home.68
THE AMORO"GS REVOLT
l\1eamvhile poetry continued to flourish, but not quite on the lines of Augustus' desire. Only supreme artists like Virgil or Horace can produce good verse to governmental specifications; greater men would refuse, lesser men are unable to comply. Of the three major sources of poetry-religion, nature, love-two had been brought under imperial sway; the third re mained lawless, even in Horace's Odes.Now, mildly in Tibullus and Proper tius, recklessly in Ovid, poetry escaped from the bureau of propaganda and staged a rebellion that proceeded "\Vith mounting gaiety to a tragic end. Albius Tibullus (54-19), like Virgil, lost his ancestral lands when the Civil ,var reached the little town of Peduni-near Tibor-that had seen his birth. l\1essala rescued him from poverty and took him in his train to
CHAP.XII)	THE   GOLDEN  AGE	253
the East, but Tibullus fell ill on the way and returned to Rome. He was happy to be free from war and politics; now he could give himself to genderless love and the polishing of elegiac verse in the manner of the Alexandrian Greeks. To Delia (otherwise unknown, and perhaps one name for many) he addressed the usual supplications, "sitting like a gatekeeper [ianitor] before her stubborn doors" 69 and reminding her, as so many maids have been reminded, that youth comes but once and soon steals away. It did not disturb him that Delia was married; he put the husband to sleep with undiluted wine-but fumed when her new lover played the same trick upon him.70 These ancient themes might not have harassed Augustus; what made Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid really disagreeable to a government that was finding it hard to enlist recruits for the army was the persuasive anti militarism of this love-loose set. Tibullus laughs at warriors who forage for death when they might have been seducing women. He mourns for the age of Saturn, when, he imagines,
there were no annies, no hatred, and no war. . . . There was no
·war when men drank from wooden cups. . .. Give me but love, and let others go to war. . .. The hero is he whom, ,vhen his chil dren have been begotten, old age overtakes in his humble cottage. He follows his·sheep, his son follows the lambs, ,vhile the good wife heats the water for his weary limbs. So let me live till the white hairs glisten on my head, and I tell in niy old man's fashion of the days gone by.71
Sextus Propertius (49-15) sang less simply and tenderly, and with more learned ornaments, the same idyl of peaceful lechery. Born in Umbria, educated in Rome, he soon lapsed into verse; and though few readers could fetch his thought from the wells of his pedantry, .i\1aecenas took him into his circle on the Esquiline. He describes with pride and pleasure the dinners there on the banks of the Tiber, when he would drink the wine of Lesbos in cups chiseled by great artists, and, "seated as on a throne amid merry women," would watch the vessels gliding by on the river below.72 To please his patron and his prince Propertius now and then plucked his lyre in praise of war; but to his mistress Cynthia he sang another tune: "Why should I raise sons for Parthian triumphs? No child of ours shall be a soldier." 73 Not all the martial glory in the world, he assured her, could equal one night with Cymhia.74
Of all these epicureans, light of heart and head, who spent their lives climbing and descending the mount of Venus, Publius Ovidius Naso was the happy model and poet laureate. Sulmo (Saloma) saw his birth (43 B.c.) in a pleasant valley of the Apennines some ninety miles east of Rome; how
254	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XII
beautiful, from the cold exile of his later years, would seem Sulmo's vine yards, olive groves, cornfields, and streams! His rich middle-class father sent him to Rome to study law, and was shocked to hear that the boy wished to be a poet; he held up to the lad the awful fate of Homer, who, according to the best authorities, had died blind and poor. So warned, Ovid managed to rise to the post of a judge in the praetorial courts. Then, to his father's dismay, he refused to run for the quaestorship (from which he would have emerged a senator), and retired to the cultivation of literature and love. He pleaded that he could not help being a poet; "I lisped in numbers and the numbers came." 75
Ovid traveled leisurely to Athens, the Near East, and Sicily, and, return ing, joined the loosest circles in the capfral. Possessed of chann, wit, educa tion, and money, he was able to open all doors. He married twice in early manhood, was twice divorced, and then grazed for a time in publi pas tures. "Let the past please others," he sang; "I congratulate myself on being born into this age, whose morals are so congenial to my own." 76 He laughed at the Aeneid, and merely concluded from it that since the son of Venus had founded Rome, it should, if only out of piety, become the city of love.77 He lost his head to a pretty courtesan, whose an nymity or multiplicity he hides under the name of Corinna. His racy couplets about her had no trouble in finding a publisher; under the title of Amores they were soon ( 14 B.c.) on the lips and lyres of youthful Rome. "On every hand people want to know who is this Corinna that I sing about." 78 He mystified them, in a second series of Amores, by writing a pronunciamento of promiscuity:
It is no fixed beauty that calls my passion fonh; there are a hundred causes to keep me always in love. If it is some fair one with modest eyes downcast upon her lap, I am aflame, and her innocence is my en snaring; if it is some saucy jade, I am smitten because she is not rustic simple, and gives me hope of enjoying her supple embrace on the soft couch. If she seems austere, and affects the rigid Sabine dame, I judge she would yield, but is deep in her conceit. If you are versed in books you win me by your rare accomplishments.    One treads
softly, and I fall in love with her step; another is hard, but can be softened by the touch of love. Because this one sings sweetly   I
would snatch kisses as she sings; this other runs with nimble fingers over the complaining strings-who could but fall in love with such cunning hands? Another takes me by her movement, swaying her arms in rhythm and curving her tender side with supple an-to say naught of myself, who take fire from every cause; put Hippolytus in my place, and he will be Priapus! ... Tall and shon are after the wish of my hean; I am undone by both.   i\ly love is candidate
for the favors of them all.79
CHAP. xn)	THE   GOLDEN  AGE	255
Ovid apologizes for not chanting the glory of war; Cupid came and stole a foot from his verse and left it lame.80 He wrote a lost play, Medea, which was well received, but for the most pan he pref erred "the slothful shade of Venus," and was content to be called "the well-known singer of his wonh less ways." 81 Here are the lays of the troubadours a thousand years before time, addressed like them to married ladies, and making flirtation the main business of life. Ovid instructs Corinna how to communicate with him by signs as she lies on her husband's couch.8 He assures her of his eternal fidelity, his strictly monogamous adultery: "I am no fickle philanderer, not one of those who love a hundred women at a time." At last he wins her and intones a paean of victory. He commends her for having denied him so long, and advises her to deny him again, now and then, so that he may love her forever. He quarrels with her, strikes her, repents, laments, and loves her more madly than before. Romeo-like he begs the dawn to delay, and hopes some blessed wind will break the axle of Aurora's car. Corinna deceives him in his tum, and he is furious on finding that she holds her favors insufficiently rewarded by the homage of his \'erse. She kisses him into forgiveness, but he cannot pardon the new skill of her loving; some other master has been teaching her.83 A few pages later he is "in love with two maids at once, each beautiful, each tasteful in dress and accomplish ment." 84 Soon, he fears, his simultaneous duties will undo him; but he will be happy to die on the field of love.85
These poems were tolerantly received by Roman society four years after the passing of the Julian reform laws. Great Senatorial families like the Fabii, the Corvini, the Pomponii continued to entertain Ovid in their homes. Buoyant with success, the poet issued a manual of seduction called Ars amatoria (2 n.c.). "I have been appointed by Venus," he says, "as tutor to tender love." 86 He chastely warns readers that his precepts must be applied only to courtesans and slaves; but his pictures of whispered confidences, secret assignations, billets-doux, raillery and wit, deceived husbands, and resourceful handmaids suggest the middle and upper classes of Rome. Lest his lessons should prove too apt, he added another treatise, Re111edia cnnoris, on curing love. The best remedy is hard work; next, hunting; third, absence; "it is also useful to surprise your lady in the morning, before she has com
pleted her toilette." 0°Finally, to make the balance even, he wrote De nzedi


There were a few men of scientific mind and interest in Rome, like Varro, Agrippa, Pomponius Mela, and Celsus; but they were scarce outside of geog raphy, horticulture, and medicine. For the rest, science had not yet detached it self from magic, superstition, theology, and philosophy; it consisted of collected observations and traditions, seldom of fresh inquiry into facts, and rarely of ex periment. Astronomy remained as Babylonia and Greece had left it. Time was still told by water clocks and sundials, and by the great obelisk that Augustus had stolen from Egypt and set up in the Field of .Mars; its shadow, falling upon a pavement marked off in brass, indicated both the hour and the season.63 Day and night were variably defined by the rising and setting of the sun; each had twelve hours, so that an hour of the day was longer, and an hour of the night shorter, in summer than in winter. Astrology was almost universally accepted. Pliny noted that in his time (A.D. 70) both learned and simple believed that a man's destiny was determined by the star under which he was born.64 They argued plausibly that vegetation, and perhaps the mating season in animals, depend upon the sun;* that the physical and moral qualities of people are affected by climatic factors themselves determined by the sun; and that individual character and fate, like these general phenomena, are the result of celestial conditions inadequately known. Astrology was rejected only by the skeptics of the later Academy, who denied its pretended know·ledge, and by the Christians, who scorned it as idolatry. Geography ,vas studied more realistically, for navigation's sake. Pomponius Mela (A.D. 43) published maps on which the surface of the globe was divided into a central torrid zon and north and south temperate zones. Roman geographers knew Europe, southwestern and southern Asia, and northern Africa; of the re mainder they had vague ideas and fantastic legends. Spanish and African skip pers reached Madeira and the Canary Islands,65 but no Columbus rose to test Seneca's dream.
The most extensive, industrious, and unscientific product of Italian science was the Historia Naturalis (77) of Caius Plinius Secundus. Though busy nearly all his life as soldier, lawyer, tra,,eler, administrator, and head of the western Roman fleet, he wrote treatises on oratory, grammar, and the javelin, a history of Rome, another of Rome's wars in Germany, and-
Many fanners today plant according to the phases of the moon.
CHAP. XIV)	THE	SILVER  AGE
sole survivor of this flood-thirty-seven "books" of natural history. How he managed all this in fifty-five years is explained in a letter of his nephew's:
He had a quick apprehension, incredible zeal, and an unequaled capacity to go without sleep. He would rise at midnight or at one, and never later than two in the morning, and begin his literary work.... Before daybreak he used to wait upon Vespasian, who likewise chose that season to transact business. When he had finished the affairs which the Emperor committed to his charge, he returned home to his studies. After a short_light repast at noon ...	he would frequently, in the summer, repose in the sun; but during that time some author was read to him, from whom he made extracts and notes . . . as was his method with whatever he read. . . . Thereafter he generally went into a cold bath, took a light refreshment, and rested for a while. Then, as if it were a new day, he resumed his studies till dinner, when again a book was read to him, and he made notes.	Such
was his manner of life amid the noise and hurry of the town. But in the country his whole time was devoted to study, except when he was actually bathing; all the while he ·was being rubbed and wiped he was employed in hearing some book read to him, or in dictating. In his journeys a stenographer constantly attended him in his chariot or sedan chair.... Hoence reproved me for walking; "you need not have lost those hours," he said, for he counted all time lost that was not given to study.60	•
His book, so sheared and sewn, was a one-man encyclopedia summariz ing the science and errors of his age. "1\Iy purpose," he says, "is to give a general description of everything that is known to exist throughout the eanh." 67 He deals with 20,000 topics and apologizes for omitting others; he refers to 2000 volumes by 473 authors, and admits his indebtedness by name with a candor exceptional in ancient literature; he notes, in passing, that he found many authors transcribing their predecessors word for word without acknowledgment. His style is dull, though sometimes purple, but we must not expect encyclopedias to be fascinating.
Pliny begins by rejecting the gods; they are, he thinks, merely natural phenomena, or planets, or services, personified and deified. The sole god is Nature, i.e., the sum of natur:.11 forces; and this god apparently pays no special attention to mundane affairs.68 Pliny modestly refuses to measure the universe. His astronomy is a galaxy of absurdities (e.g., "In the war of Octavian against Antony the sun remained dim for almost a year" 69); but he notes the aurora borealis,70 states with approximate modernity the orbital period of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn as respectively two, twelve, and thiny years, and argues for the spherical form of the earth.71 He tells of islands
310	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP, XIV
rising from the Mediterranean in his time, and surmises that Sicily and Italy, Boeotia and Euboea, Cyprus and Syria, were gradually sundered by the patience of the sea.72 He treats of the laborious and servile mining of precious metals and regrets th:u "many hands are worn down that one little joint may be adorned." 73 He wishes that iron had never been found, since it has made war more terrible; "as if to bring death upon man more swiftly, we have given wings to iron and taught it to fly" 74-referring to iron missiles equipped with leather feathers to help them keep their course. Following Theophrastus, he mentions under the name of _anthracitis a "stone that bums," 75 but says no more about coal. He speaks of "an incombustible linen," called by the Greeks asbestinon, "which is used to embalm the cadavers of kings." 76 He describes or lists many animals, lauds their sagacity, and tells how to predetermine their sex: "If you wish to have females, let the dams face north while being covered." 77 He has twelve wondrous books on medicine-i.e., on the curative vdue of various minerals and plants. Books xx-xxv are a Roman herbal, which the Middle Ages passed down to form the initial plant lore of modem medicine. He offers cures for every thing from intoxication and halitosis 78 to "a pain in the neck";79 he provides "stimulants for the sexual passion," 80 and warns women against sneezing after coitus, lest they abort there and then.81 He recommends coitus for physical weariness, hoarseness, pains in the loins, dim eyesight, melancholy, and "alienation of the mental faculties";82 here is a panacea rivaling Bishop Berkeley's tar water. Amid such nonsense occurs much useful information, especially about ancient industry, manners, or drugs; with interesting refer ences to atavism, petroleum, and change of sex after birth. "Mucianus in forms us that he once saw at Argos a person whose name was then Arescon, but had formerly been Arescusa; that this person had been married to a man, but that shortly aftenvard he developed a beard and other male character istics, upon which he took a wife." 83 Here and there valuable hints occur; e.g., Himly ( r 800) was led to investigate the action of jusquiamus and bella donna on the pupil by reading in Pliny a passage 84 about the use of anagallis juice before operations for cataract.85 There are precious chapters on paint ing and sculpture, which constitute our oldest and principal account of ancient art.
Pliny was not content with natural history; he wished also to be a philos opher; and throughout his pages he scatters comments on mankind. The life of animals, he thinks, is preferable to man's, for "they never think about glory, money, ambition, or death"; 86 they can learn without being taught and never have to dress; and they do not make war upon their own species. The invention of money was fatal to human happiness; it made interest pos sible, by which some could live in idleness while others worked";87 hence
CHAP. XIV)	THE  SILVER  AGE	311
the rise of great estates owned by absentee landlords, and the ruinous re placement of tillage with pasturage. Life, in Pliny's estimate, gives us much more grief and pain than happiness, and death is our supreme boon.88 After death there is nothing.89
The Natural History is a lasting monument to Roman ignorance. Pliny
gathers superstitions, portents, love charms, and magic cures as assiduously as anything else, and apparently believes in most of them. He thinks that a man, especially if fasting, can kill a snake by spitting into its mouth.90 "It is well known that in Lusitania the mares become impregnated by the west wind" 91-a point missed in Shelley's ode. Pliny condemns magic; but "on the approach of a menstruating woman," he informs us, "must will sour and seeds touched by her will become sterile; and fruit will fall from the tree under which she sits. Her look will blunt the edge of steel and take the polish from ivory; if it falls upon a swarm of bees they will die at once." 92 Pliny rejects astrology and then fills pages with "prognostics" derived from the behavior of the sun and the moon.93 "In the consulship of M. Acilius, and frequently at other times, it rained milk and blood." 94 \Vhen we reflect that this book, and Seneca's Quaestiones, were the chief legacy of Roman natural science to the Middle Ages, and compare them with the corresponding works and temper of Aristotle and Theophrastus four hundred years earlier, we begin to feel the slow tragedy of a dying culture. The Romans had con quered the Greek world, but they had already lost the most precious part of its heritage.
R01\1A'N' :MEDICINE
They did better in medicine. Medical science too they borrowed from the Greeks, but they formulated it well, and applied it ably to personal and public hygiene. Rome, almost surrounded by marshes, and subject to mephitic floods, had particular need of public sanitation. About the second century B.c. we hear of malaria in Rome; the anopheles mosquito had settled down in the Pontine swamps.95 Gout spread as luxury increased; the younger Pliny tells how his friend Corellius Rufus suffered its pains from his thirty-third to his sixty-seventh year before committing suicide, just to have the pleasure of outliving by one day "that brigand Domitian." 96 Some passages in the Roman satirists suggest the appearance of syphilis in the first century A.D.97 Great epidemics swept central Italy in 2 3 B.c., A.D. 65, 79, and 166.
The people had of old tried to meet disease and plague with magic and prayer; even now they begged the skeptical but complaisant Vespasian to heal their blindness with his spittle and their lameness with the touch of his foot.98 They brought their illnesses and votive offerings to the temples of Aesculapius and Minerva and many left gifts in gratitude for cures. But in the first century B.c. they turned more and more to secular medicine. There was as yet no state
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIV
regulation of medical practice; shoemakers, barbers, carpenters, added it to their operations as they pleased, called in magic to their aid, and compounded, touted, and sold their own drngs.99 There were the usual satires and complaints.
Pliny repeated old Cato's imprecations upon Greek physicians who "seduce our
wives, grow rich by feeding us poisons, learn by our suffering, and experiment by putting us to death." 100 Petronius, Manial, and Juvenal joined in the 2ssault; and a century later Lucian would score incompetent practitioners who hide their
incapacity under the elegance of their apparatus.101
Nevenheless, medicine, as we shall see, had made great progress in Alexandria, Cos, Tralles, Miletus, Ephesus, and Pergamum; and from these centers came Greek physicians who so raised the level of Roman practice that Caesar en franchised the profession in Rome, and Augustus exempted it from taxation. Asclepiades of Prusa won the friendship of Caesar, Crassus, and Antony. He declared that the hean pumps blood and air through the body; rarely prescribed drugs or drastic purges; and accomplished impressive cures by hydrotherapy (baths, fomentations, enemas), massage, sunshine, exercise (walking, horseback riding), diet, fasting, and abstinence from meat. He was distinguished for his treatment of malaria, his operations on the throat, and his humane handling of the insane.102 He gathered pupils about him and took some of them with him on his rounds. After his death they and similar students formed themselves into collegia and built for themselves a meeting place, on the Esquiline, called Schola


at usurious rates, bour:-ht slaves chea:i and-after trainina
L
them in some skill-sold them dear, and became so rich that he could afford to write books-an occupation he despised.
Cato was the first great writer of Larin prose. He be an by publishing his own speeches. Then he issued a manual of oratory, demanded a rugged Roman style instead of the Isocratean smoothness of the rhetors, and set a theme for Quintilian by defining the orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus 44-"a good man skilled in speaking" (but was there ever union so rare?). He put his fanning experiences to use by composing a treatise De agri cultura-the
104	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. V
only work of Cato, and the oldest literary Latin, that time has saved. It is written in a simple and vigorous style, pithily co□?act; C;:to wastes no words, and seldom condescends to a conjunction. He gives detailed advice on buying and selling slaves (old ones should be sold before they become a loss), on renting land to share-croppers, on viticulture and aboriculture, on domestic management and industries, on makin3 cement and cooking dainties, on curing constipation and diarrhea, on he:1ling snakebite with the dung of swine, and offering sacrifice to the gods. Asking himself what is the wisest use of agricultural land, he answers, "Profitable cattle raising." The next best? "Moderately profitable cattle raising." The third best? "Very unprofitable cattle raising." The fourth? "To plow the land." This was the argument that gave the latifundia to Italy.
The most important of his books was probably the lost Origines, a brave attempt to deal with the antiquities, ethnology, institutions, and history of Italy from the beginnings to the very year of Cato's death. Nearly all that we know of it is that, to spite the aristocracy through its touted ancestors, the author named no generals in it, but lauded by name an elephant that had fought well against Pyrrhus.45 Cato designed this work, and his essays on oratory, agriculture, sanitation, military science, and law, to form an ency clopedia for the education of his son. By writing in Latin he hoped to dis place the Greek textbooks that were in his judgment warping the minds of Roman youth. Though he himself studied Greek, he seems to have been sincere in his conviction that an education in Greek literature and philosophy
would so rapidly dissolve the religious beliefs of young Romans that their moral life would be left defenseless against the instincts of acquisition, pug nacity, and sex. His condemnation, like Nietzsche's, took in Socrates; that prattling old midwife, Cato thought, had been rightly poisoned for under mining the morals and laws of Athens.46 Even Greek physicians irked him; he preferred the old household remedies, and distrusted the ever-ready surgeons.
The Greeks [he ,vrote to his son] are an intractable and iniquitous race. You may take my word for it that when this people bestows its literature upon Rome it will ruin everything.    And all the sooner
if it sends us its physicians. They have conspired among themselves to murder all "barbarians." ... I forbid you to have anything to do with physicians.41
Having these ideas, he was a natural antagonist of the Scipionic circle, which thought the spread of Greek literature in Rome a necessary ferment in lifting Latin letters and the Roman mind to a fuller growth. Cato lent his aid to the prosecution of Africanus and his brother; the laws against embez-
CHAP. v)	THE  GREEK CONQUEST	105
zlement should be no respecters of persons. Toward foreign states, with one exception, he advocated a policy of justice and nonintervention. Despising Greeks, he respected Greece; and when the imperialistic plunderers in the Senate were for waging war upon rich Rhodes, he made-a decisive speech in favor of conciliation. The exception, as all the world knows, was Carthage. Sent there on an official mission in 175, he had been shocked by the rapid recovery of the city from the effects of the Hannibalic war, the fruitful orchards and vineyards, the wealth that poured in from revived commerce, the arms that mounted in the arsenals. On his return he held up before the Senate a bundle of fresh figs that he had plucked in Carthage three days before, as an ominous symbol of her prosperity and her nearness to Rome; and he predicted that if Carthage were left unchecked, she would soon be rich and strong enough to renew the struggle for the mastery of the Medi terranean. From that day, with characteristic pertinacity, he ended all his speeches in the Senate, on whatever subject, with his dour conviction: Ceterum censeo delendum esse Cartbaginem-"Besides, I think that Carthage must be destroyed." The imperialists in the Senate agreed with him, not so much because they coveted Carthage's trade, as because they saw in the well-irrigated fields of north Africa a new investment for their money, new latifundia to be tilled by new slaves. They awaited eagerly a pretext for the Third Punic War.
CARTHAGO DELET A
Their cue came from the most extraordinary ruler of his rime. Masinissa, King of Numidia, lived ninety years (238-148), begot a son at eighty-six,48 and by a vigorous regimen kept his health and strength almost to the end. He organized his nomad people into a settled agricultural society and a disciplined state, ruled them ably for SL'{ty years, adorned Cirta, his capital, with lordly architecture, and left as his tomb the great pyramid that still stands near the town of Constantine, in Tunisia. Having won the friendship of Rome, and knowing the political weakness of Carthage, he repeatedly raided and appropriated Carthaginian terrain, took Great Leptis and other cities, and finally controlled all land approaches to the harassed metropolis. Bound by treaty to make no war without Rome's consent, Carthage sent ambassadors to the Senate to protest against Masinissa's encroachments. The Senate reminded them that all Phoenicians were interlopers in Africa and had no rights there which any well-armed nation was obliged to respect.
\Vhen Carthage paid the last of her fifty annual indemnities of 200  talents to
Rome, she felt herself released from the treaty signed after Zama. In 151 she
106	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. V
declared war against Numidia, and a year later Rome declared war against her.
The latter decl ration, and the news that the Roman fleet had already sailed for Africa, reached Carthage at the same time. The ancient city, how ever rich in population and trade, was quite unprepared for a major war. She had a small army, a smaller navy, no mercenaries, no allies. Rome con trolled the sea. Utica therefore declared for Rome, and Masinissa blocked all egress from Carthage to the hinterland. An embassy hastened to Rome with authority to meet all demands. The Senate promised that if Carthage would turn over to the Roman consuls in Sicily 300 children of the noblest families as hostages, and would obey whatever orders the consuls would. give, the freedom and territorial integrity of Carthage would be preserved. Secretly the Senate bade the consuls carry out the instructions that they had already received. The Canhaginians gave up their children with fore bodings and laments; the relatives crowded the shores in a despondent farewell; at the last moment the mothers tried by force to prevent the ships from sailing; and some swam out to sea to catch a last glimpse of their children. The consuls sent the hostages to Rome, crossed to Utica with army and fleet, summoned the Carthaginian ambassadors, and required of Carthage the surrender of her remaining ships, a great quantity of grain, and all her engines and weapons of war. When these conditions had been fulfilled, the consuls further demanded that the population of Carthage should retire to ten miles from the city, which was then to be burned to the ground. The ambassadors argued in vain that the destruction of a city which had surrendered hostages and its arms without striking a blow was a treacherous atrocity unknown to history. They offered their own lives as a vicarious atonement; they flung themselves upon the ground and beat the earth with their heads. The consuls replied that the terms were those of the Senate and could not be changed.
When the people of Carthage heard what was demanded of them they lost their sanity. Parents mad with grief tore limb from limb the leaders who had advised surrendering the child hostages; others killed those who had counseled the surrender of arms; some dragged the returning ambas sadors through the streets and stoned them; some killed whatever Italians could be found in the city; some stood in the empty arsenals and wept. The Canhaginian Senate declared war against Rome and called all adults-men and women, slave or free-to form a new army, and to forge anew the weapo_ns of defense: Fury gave th m resolution. Public buildings were demolished to provide metal and nmber; the statues of cherished gods were melted down to make swords, and the hair of the women was shorn to make ropes. In two months the beleaguered city produced 8ooo shields,
CHAP. V)	THE  GREEK CONQUEST	107
18,000 swords, 30,000 spears, 60,000 catapult missiles, and built in its inner harbor a fleet of 1 20 ships.49
Three years the city stood siege by land and sea. Again and again the consuls led their armies against the walls, but always they were repulsed; only Scipio Aemilianus, one of the military tribunes, proved resourceful and brave. Late in 147 the Roman Senate and Assembly made him consul and commander, and even Cato approved. Soon afterward Laelius succeeded in scaling the walls. The Carthaginians, though weakened and decimated by starvation, fought for their city street by street, through six days of slaughter without quarter. Harassed by snipers, Scipio ordered all captured streets to be fired and leveled to the ground. Hundreds of concealed Cartha ginians perished in the conflagration. At last the population, reduced from 500,000 to 55,ooo, surrendered. Hasdrubal, their general, pleaded for his life, which Scipio granted, but his wife, denouncing his cowardice, plunged with her sons into the flames. The survivors were sold as slaves, and the city was turned over to the legions for pillage. Reluctant to raze it, Scipio sent to Rome for final instructions; the Senate replied that not only Carthage, but all such of her dependencies as had stood by her were to be completely destroyed, that the soil should be plowed and sown with salt, and a formal curse laid upon any man who should attempt to build upon the site. For seventeen days the city burned.
There was no treaty of peace, for the Carthaginian state no longer existed. Utica and other African cities that had helped Rome were left free under a protectorate; the remainder of Carthage's territory became the province of "Africa." Roman capitalists came in to divide the land into latifundia, and Roman merchants fell heir to Carthaginian trade. Imperialism became now the frank and conscious motive of Roman politics. Syracuse was absorbed into the province of Sicily, southern Gaul was subdued as a neces sary land route to completely subjected Spain, and the Hellenistic mon archies of Egypt and Syria were quietly induced-like Antiochus IV by Popilius-to submit to the wishes of Rome. From the moral standpoint, which is always a window dressing in international politics, the destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 must rank among the most brutal conquests in history; from the standpoint of empire-of security and wealth-it laid simultaneously the two cornerstones of Rome's commercial and naval supremacy. From that moment the political history of the Mediterranean flowed through Rome.


The ':"ords E picz!rean and _Stoic will be used in th se volumes as meaning a believer in the metaphysics and ethics of Ep!curus, or of Zeno; epicurean and stoic as meaning one who practices, or avoids, soft living and sensual indulgence.
CHAP.VIII)	LITERATURE  UNDER  THE  REVOLUTION	155
LESBIA's LOVER
In 57 B.c. the Caius Memmius to whom Lucretius dedicated his poem left Rome to serve as propraetor in Bithynia. After the growing custom of Roman governors he took with him an author-not Lucretius, but a poet different from the other in everything but the strength of his passion. Quintus (or Caius) Valerius Catullus had come to Rome some five years before from his native Verona, where his father was of sufficient standing to be frequent host to Caesar. Quintus himself must have had a substantial competence, for he owned villas near Tibur and on Lake Garda and had an elegant house in Rome. He speaks of these properties as choked with mortgages, and re peatedly proclaims his poverty; but the picture we form of him from his poems is that of a polished man of the world who did not bother to earn a living, but enjoyed himself unstintingly among the wilder set in the capital. The keenest wits, the cleverest young orators and politicians belonged to this circle: Marcus Caelius, the impecunious aristocrat who was to become a communist; Licinius Calvus, brilliant in poetry and in law; and Helvius Cinna, a poet whom Antony's mob would mistake for one of Caesar's assassins and beat to death. These men opposed Caesar with every epigram at their disposal, unaware that their literary revolt reflected the revolution in which they lived. They were tired of old forms in literature, of the crudity and bombast of N aevius and Ennius; they wished to sing the sentiments of youth in new and lyric meters, and with a refinement and delicacy of execution known once in the Alexandria of Callimachus, but never yet seen in Rome. And they were resentful of old morals, of the mos maiorum perpetually preached upon them by their exhausted elders; they announced the sanctity of instinct, the innocence of desire, and the grandeur of dissipation. They and Catullus were no worse than other young literary blades of their genera tion and the next; Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius, even the shy Virgil in his youth, made life and verse revolve around any woman, married or not, who fed their muses with facile casual love.
The liveliest lady in this group was Clodia, of the proud old Claudian gens that even now had emperors in its loins.* Apuleius 31 assures us that it was she whom Catullus named Leshia in memory of the Sappho whose poems he occasionally translated, often imitated, and always loved. Arriving in Rome at the age of twenty-two, he cultivated her friendship while her husband governed Cisalpine Gaul. He was fascinated the moment she "set her shining foot on the well-worn threshold"; he called her his "lustrous goddess of the
Cf. p. 135.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. Vlll
delicate step"; and indeed a woman's walk, like her voice, may be in itself a sufficient seduction. She accepted him graciously as one of her worshipers; and the enraptured poet, unable to match otherwise the gifts of his rivals, laid at her feet the most beautiful lyrics in the Latin tongue. For her he translated perf ecdy Sappho's description of the lover's frenzy that now raged in him;32 and to the sparrow that she pressed to her bosom he indited a jewel of jealousy:
Sparrow, delight of my beloved,
Who plays with you, and holds you to her breast; Who offers her forefinger to your seeking,
And tempts your sharp bite;
I know not what dear jest it pleases my shining one To make of my desire! ... *
For a while he was consumed with happiness, played attendance upon her daily, read his poems to her, forgot everything but his infatuation.
Let us live, Leshia mine, and love, And all the mumbling of harsh old men We shall reckon as a pennyworth.
Suns may sink and return;
For us, when once our brief sun has set,
There comes the long sleep of everlasting night. Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, Then another thousand, then a second hundred, Then still another thousand, then a hundred.
And when we shall have reached many thousands
We shall confuse the count, lest ,ve should ever know, Or some mean soul should envy us,
Learning the great sum of our kisses.t
No one has yet transformed Catµllus' poems into equivalent English verse. The foregoing is an ahnost literal translation of
Passer, deliciae meae puellae, quicum ludere, quern in sinu tenere, cui primum digitum dare adpetenti et acris solet incitari morsus,
cum desiderio meo nitenti
carom nescio quid libet iocari	33
tVivamus, mea Leshia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis.