"The soul of the world is God, and its parts are the true di,-inities." 45
t Varro claims_ that Sallust "was taken in a?ultery by Annius i\lilo, soundly beaten with thongs, and pernutted to escape only after paymg a sum of money"; 46a but this, too, may be politics.
CHAP.VIII)  LITERATURE  UNDER THE  REVOLUTION	r6r
was through oratory that the Latin language reached its full height of colorful eloquence, masculine power, and almost Oriental grace. Indeed, the younger orators who came after Hortensius and Cicero condemned the luxurious adorn ment and passionate turbulence of what they called the "Asianic" style; and Caesar, Calvus, Brutus, and Pollio pledged themselves to a calmer, chaster, sparer "Attic" speech. Here, so long ago, the battle lines formed between "romanticism" and "classicism"-between the emotional and the intellectual view of life and domination of style. Even in oratory, the young classicists complained, the East was conquering Rome.
CICERO'S PEN
Proud of his speeches, and aware that they were making literature, Cicero felt keenly the criticism of the "Attic" school, and defended himself in a long series of treatises on oratorical art. In lively dialogues he sketched the history of Roman eloquence and laid down the rules for composition, prose rhythm, and delivery. He did not admit that his own style was "Asian"; he had modeled it, he claimed, upon that of Demosthenes; and he reminded the Atticiscs that their cold and passionless speech drove audiences to sleep or flight.
The fifty-seven orations that have come down to us from Cicero illustrate all the cricks of successful eloquence. They excel in the passionate presenta tion of one side of a question or a character, the entertainment of the auditors with humor and anecdote, the appeal to vanity, prejudice, sentiment, patriot ism, and piety, the ruthless exposure of the real or reported, public or private, faults of the opponent or his client, the skillful turning of attention from unfavorable points, the barrage of rhetorical questions framed to make answer difficult or damaging, the heaping up of charges, in periodic sen tences whose clauses are lashes, and whose torrent ovenvhelms. These speeches do not pretend co be fair; they are defamations rather than declama tions, briefs that take every advantage of that freedom of abuse which, though forbidden to the stage, was allowed in the Forum and the courts. Cicero does not hesitate to apply to his victims terms like "swine," "pest," "butcher," "filth"; he tells Piso that virgins kill themselves to escape his lechery, and excoriates Antony for being publicly affectionate to his wife. Audiences and juries enjoyed such vituperation, and no one took it too seriously. Cicero corresponded amiably with Piso a few years after the brutal attack of the In Pisonem. It is to be admitted, further, that Cicero's orations abound rather in egotism and rhetoric than in moral sincerity, philosophical wisdom, or even legal acumen or depth. But what eloquence! Even Demos thenes was not so vivid, vital, exuberantly witty, so full of the salt and tang of the human fray. Certainly no man before or after Cicero spoke a Latin so
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VIII
seductively charming and fluent, so elegantly passionate; this was the zenith of Latin prose. "You have discovered all the treasures of oratory," said the generous Caesar in dedicating his book On Analogy to Cicero; "and you have been the first to employ them. Thereby you have laid the Roman people under a mighty obligation, and you honor your fatherland. You have gained a triumph to be preferred to that of the greatest generals. For it is a nobler thing to enlarge the boundaries of human intelligence than those of the Roman Empire." 47
The speeches betray the politician; the letters of Cicero bare the man, and make even the politician forgivable. Nearly all of them were dictated to a secretary and never revised by Cicero; most of them were written with no thought of publication; seldom, therefore, has a man's secret soul been so completely exposed. "He who reads these letters," said Nepos, "will not much need a history of those times";48 in them the most vital pan of the revolutionary drama is seen from within, all blinds removed. Usually their style is arrless and direct and dances with humor and ·wit; 49 their language is an attractive mixture of literary grace and colloquial ease. They are the most interesting of Cicero's remains; indeed, of all extant Latin prose. It is natural that we should find in so large a correspondence (864 letters, ninety of them to Cicero) occasional contradictions and insincerities. There is no sign here of the religious piety and belief that appear so frequently in Cicero's essays or in those speeches in which he plays up the gods as his last trump. His private opinion of various men, especially of Caesar, does not always conform with his public protestation.50 His incredible vanity ap pears more amiably here than in his orations, where he seems to be carrying his own statue with him wherever he goes; he smilingly confesses that "my own applause has the greatest weight with me." 51 He assures us, with charm ing innocence, that "if ever any man was a stranger to vainglory it is my self."52 We are amused to find so many letters about money and so much ado about so many homes. Besides modest villas at Arpinum, Astnrae, Puteoli, and Pompeii, Cicero had an estate at Formiae valued at 250,000, another at Tusculum worrh 500,000, and a palace on the Palatine that cost him 3,500,ooo sesterces.* Such comfort seems outrageous in a philosopher.
But which of us is so virtuous that his reputation could survive the publi cation of his intimate correspondence? Indeed, as we continue to read these letters, we almost come to like the man. He had no more faults, perhaps no
This last sum had been raised by a loan from a diem; we do not know if it was repaid. Forbidden by law to re eive f es,,Iawyers received loans instead._ Another way of being paid was to be remembered m a chem s will. Through bequests of this sort or another Cicero in herited 20,000,000 sesterces in thiny years.53 The constitutioa of man always rewrites the constitutions of states.
CHAP.VIII)   LITERATURE  UNDER THE  REVOLUTION	163
greater vanity, than we; he made the mistake of immortalizing them with perfect prose. At his best he was a hard worker, a tender father, a good friend. We see him in his home, loving his books and his children, and trying to love his wife, the rheumatic and irritable Terentia, whose wealth and eloquence equaled his own. They were too rich to be happy; their worries and quarrels were always in large figures; at last, in their old age, he divorced her over some financial dispute. Soon afterward he married Publilia, who attracted him by having more money than years; but when she showed dis like for his daughter Tullia he sent Publilia away, too. Tullia he loved hu manly beyond reason; he grieved almost to madness at her death and wished to build a temple to her as a deity. Pleasanter are the letters to and about Tiro, his chief secretary, who took his dictation in shorthand and managed his finances so ably and honestly that Cicero rewarded him with freedom. Most numerous are the letters to Atticus, who invested Cicero's savings, extricated him from financial difficulties, published his writings, and gave him excellent unheeded advice. To Atticus, wisely absent in Greece at the height of the revolution, Cicero writes a letter of typical cordiality and charm:
There is nothing of which I so much feel the want as of him with whom I can communicate everything that concerns me; who loves me, who is prudent; to whom I can speak without flattery, dissimulation, or reserve. My brother, who is all candor and kindness, is away. . .. And you, who have so often relieved my cares and anxieties by your counsel, who used to be my companion in public matters, my confi dant in all private ones, the partaker of all my words and thoughts where are you? 54
In those turbulent days when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, conquered Pompey, and made himself dictator, Cicero retired for a moment from politi cal life and sought solace in reading and writing philosophy. "Remember," he begged Atticus, "not to give up your books to anybody, but to keep them, as you promised, for me. I entertain the strongest affection for them, as I now feel disgust for everything else."55 In his youth, defending the poet Archias in the most modest and amiable of his speeches, he had praised the study of literature as "nourishing our adolescence, adorning our prosperity, and delighting our old age."56 Now he took his own counsel, and in little more than two years wrote almost a library of philosophy.* The dissolution of religious belief in the higher classes had left a moral vacuum, by which Rome seemed to be drawn into a disintegration of character and society.
De Republica, 54 B.c.; De Legibus, 52; Academica, De Consolatione, and De Finibur, 45; De Natura Deorum, De Divinatione, De Fato, De Virtutibus, De Officiis, De Amicitia, De 5enectute, De Glori:i, Disputatianes Tusculanae, all 4f B.c. In these same nvo years, .t5-44, Cicero wrote five books on oratory.	•
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. vm
Cicero dreamed that philosophy might serve as a substitute for theology in providing for these classes a guide and stimulus to right living. He resolved not to construct one more system, but to summarize the teachings of the Greek sages and offer them as his last gift to his people.51 He was honest enough to confess that he was for the most pan adapting, sometimes trans lating, the treatises of Panaetius, Poseidonius, and other recent Greeks.58 But he transformed the dull prose of his models into limpid and graceful Latin, enlivened his discourse with dialogue, and passed quickly over the deserts of logic and metaphysics to the living problems of con'duct and statesmanship. Like Lucretius he had to invent a philosophical terminology; he succeeded, and put both language and philosophy heavily in his debt. Not since Plato had wisdom worn such prose.
It was from Plato above all that his ideas stemmed. He did not relish the dog matism of the Epicureans, who "talk of divine things with such assurance that you would imagine they had come directly from an assemblage of the gods"; nor yet that of the Stoics, who so labor the argument from design that "you would suppose even the gods had been made for human use" 59-a theory that Cicero himself, in other moods, would not find incredible. His starting point is that of the New Academy-a lenient skepticism which denied all certainties and found probability sufficient for human life. "In most things,'' he writes, "my philosophy is that of doubt.60 •••  May I have your leave not to know what I do not know?" 61 "Those who seek to learn my personal opinion," he says, "show an unreasonable degree of curiosity"; 62 but his coyness soon yields to his talent for expression. He scorns sacrifices, oracles, and auguries, and devotes an entire treatise to disproving divination. Against the widespread cult of astrology he asks if all the men slain at Cannae had been born under the same star.63 He even doubts that a knowledge of the future would be a boon; the future may be as unpleasant as much else of the truth that we so recklessly chase. He vainly thinks to make short work of old beliefs by laughing them out of court: "When we call com Ceres and wine Bacchus we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?" 63a Nevertheless, he is as skeptical of atheism as of any other dogma. He rejects the atomism of Democritus and Lucretius; it is as unlikely that unguided atoms-even in infinite time-could fall into the order of the existing world as that the letters of the alphabet should spontaneously form the Anna/es of Ennius.64 Our ignorance of the gods is no guarantee of their nonexistence; and indeed, Cicero argues, the general agreement of mankind establishes a balance of probability in favor of Providence. He concludes that religion is indispensable to private morals and public order and that no man of sense will attack it.65 Hence, while writing against divination, he continued to fulfill the functions of official augur. It was not quite hypocrisy; he would have called it statesmanship. Roman morals, society, and government were bound up with the old religion
CHAP. vm)  LITERATURE  UNDER  THE  RE VOLUT ION	165
and could not safely let it die. (The emperors would reason so in persecuting Christianity.) When his beloved Tullia died, Cicero inclined more strongly than ever to the hope of personal immortality. Many years before, in the "Dream of Scipio" with which he ended his Rep11blic, he had borrowed from Pythagoras, Plato, and Eudoxus a complex and eloquent myth of a life beyond the grave, in which the good great dead enjoyed eternal bliss. But in his private correspond ence-even in the letters that condoled with bereaved friends-there is no men tion of an afterlife.
Knowing the skepticism of his age, he based his moral and political treatises
on purely secular grounds, independent of supernatural sanctions. He begins (in De Finibus) by inquiring for the road to happiness, and hesitantly agrees with the Stoics that virtue alone suffices. Therefore (in De Officiis) he examines the way of virtue, and by the charm of his style succeeds for a time in making duty interesting. "All men are brothers," he writes, and "the whole world is to be considered as the common city of gods and men." 66 The most perfect morality would be a conscientious loyalty to this whole. More immediately a man owes it to himself and society, first of all, to establish a sound economic basis to his life, and then to fulfill his duties as a citizen. Wise statesmanship is nobler than the subtlest philosophy.67
Monarchy is the best form of government when the monarch is good, the worst when he is bad-a truism soon to be illustrated in Rome. Aristocracy is good when the really best rule; but Cicero, as a member of the middle class, could not quite admit that the old entrenched families were the best. Democracy is good when the people are virtuous, which, Cicero thought, is never; besides, it is vitiated by the false assumption of equality. The best form of government is a mixed constitution, like that of pre-Gracchan Rome: the democratic power of the assemblies, the aristocratic power of the Senate, the almost royal power of the consuls for a year. Without checks and balances monarchy becomes despotism, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, democracy becomes mob rule, chaos,


He would have done well to take the advice for a time. His next publica tion, the Epodes, or "Refrains" (29 B.c.), is the least worthy of his works: harsh and coarse, ungenerous, tastelessly and bisexually obscene, forgiv able only as an experiment in the iambic meters of Archilochus. Perhaps his disgust with the "smoke and wealth and noise of Rome" 36 had mounted to bitterness; he could not bear the pressure of the "ignorant and evil thinking crowd." He pictures himself jostled and jostling in the human flotsam of the capital, and cries out: "O rural home! when shall I behold you? \Vhen shall I be able, now with the books of the ancients, now with sleep and idle hours, to quaff sweet forgetfulness of life's cares? \Vhen will beans, the very brethren of Pythagoras, be served to me, and greens well larded with fat bacon?0 nights and feasts divine!" 37 His stays in Rome be came shorter; he spent so much time in his Sabine villa that his friends, even Maecenas, complained that he had cut them out of his life. After the heat and dust of the city he found the pure air, the peaceful routine, and the simple workmen on his farm a cleansing delight. His health was poor, and like Augustus he lived for the most part on a vegetarian diet. ".My stream of pure water, my few acres of woodland, my sure trust in a crop of com, bring me·more blessing than the lot of the dazzling lord of fertile Africa." 39 In him, as in the other Augustan poets, the love of country life finds a warm expression rare in the literature of Greece. Beatus ille qui procul negotiis-
Happy is he who far from business cares, Even as the oldest race of men,
Tills ,vith his o,vn oxen his patrimonial fields, Freed from every debt....
How sweet it is to lie under the ancient ilex tree, Or on the matted grass,
While the stream flows on benveen high banks, And the woodland birds sing,
And springs with leaping ,vaters plash, Inviting to soft sleep! 40
It should be added, however, that these lines are put with Horatian irony into the mouth of a city moneylender, who, having uttered them, at once forgets them and loses himself in his coins.
Probably it was in those quiet haunts that he labored with "painstaking
CHAP. xn)	THE   GOLDEN  AGE	247
happiness"-curiosa felicitas *-over those odes by which he knew that his name would live or die. He ,vas tired of hexameters, the endless march of their measured feet, the sharp caesura cleaving the line like some inexorable guillotine. He had enjoyed in his youth the subtle and vivacious meters of Sappho, Alcaeus, Archilochus, and Anacreon; he proposed now to trans plant these "sapphics" and "alcaics," these iambics and hendecasyllabics, into Roman lyric form, to express his thoughts on love and wine, religion and the state, life and death, in stanzas refreshingly new, epigrammatically com pact, modeled for music, and teasing the mind with the complex skein of their weaving. He did not intend them for simple or hurried souls; indeed, he warned such away by the bluenosed opening of the third group:
Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.
Favete linguis. Carmina non prius audita Musarnm sacerdos
virginibus puerisque canto:-
"! hate and shun the profane crowd. Be silent! I, priest of the Muses, sing for maidens and youths songs never heard before."
The maidens, if they had cared to tread and skip their way through Horace's playful inversions of speech and desire, might have been pleasantly
.shocked by the chiseled epicureanism of these odes. The poet pictures the pleasures of friendship, eating and drinking, and making love; one would hardly surmise from such lauds that their author was a recluse who ate little and drank less. ,vhy disturb ourselves with Roman politics and distant wars? he asks (anticipating the reader of these pages). \Vhy plan so carefully a future whose shape will laugh at our plans? Youth and beauty touch us and flit away; let us enjoy them now, "reclining under the pine trees, our gray locks garlanded with roses and perfumed with Syrian nard." 42 Even as we speak, envious time runs out; seize the occasion, carpe diem, "snatch the day." 43 He intones a litany of loose ladies whom he claims to have loved: Lalage, Glycera, Neaera, Inacha, Cinara, Candia, Lyce, Pyrrha, Lydia, Tyndaris, Chloe, Phyllis, Myrtale. \Ve need not believe all his protestations of guilt; these were literary exercises almost compulsory among the poets of the day; the same ladies or names had served other pens. The now virtuous Augustus was not deceived by these iambic fornications; he was pleased to find, among them, stately praises of his reign, his victories, his aides, his moral reforms, and the Augustan peace. Horace's famous drinking song-Nunc est bibendzmr 44-was composed on receipt of the news that Cleopatra was dead and Egypt taken; even his sophisticated soul thrilled at the thought of
" This is the curious and happy phrase applied to Horace by Petronius.41
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XII
the Empire victorious and expanding as never before. He warned his readers that new laws could not take the place of old morals; mourned the spread of luxury and adultery, of frivolity and cynical unbelief. "Alas!" he says, ref erring to the latest war, "the shame of our scars and crimes, and of brothers slain! \Vhat have we of this hard generatioh shrunk from? ,vhat iniquity have we left untouched?" 45 Nothing could save Rome but a return to the simplicity and steadfastness of ancient ways. The skeptic who found it difficult to believe anything bent his hoary head before the ancient altars, acknowledged that without a myth the people perish, and lent his pen graciously to the ailing gods.
There is nothing in the world's literature quite like these poems-delicate and yet powerful, exquisite and masculine, subtle and intricate, hiding their art with perfect art, and their toil with seeming ease. This is music in another scale than Virgil's, less melodious and more intellectual, meant not for youths and maidens but for artists and philosophers. There is rarely any passion here, or enthusiasm, or "fine writing"; the diction is simple even where the sentence stands on its head. But in the greater odes there is a pride and majesty of thought, as if an emperor were speaking and not in letters but in bronze:
Exegi monumentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum.
Non omnis moriar.46
I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze, Loftier than the royal peak of pyramids;


but to kill a despot was an excellent thing.
Roman Stoicism had at first profited from the Principate; the limitations on political freedom had driven men from the forum to the study, and had inclined the finest of them to a philosophy that made the self-controlled subject more sovereign than the impassioned king. The government did not check freedom of thought or speech so long as these made no public attack upon the emperor, his family, or the official gods. But when the professors and their Senatorial patrons began to denounce tyranny, there arose between philosophy and au tocracy a war that lasted till the adoptive emperors united them on the throne.
\Vhen Nero ordered Thrasea to die (65), he at the same time exiled Thrasea's friend Musonius Rufus, the most sincere and consistent of the Stoic philosophers
in first-century Rome. Rufus had defined philosophy as inquiry into right conduct, and had taken his quest seriously. He denounced concubinaae despite
0
its legality, and demanded of men the same standard of sexual morality that they
CHAP. XIY)	THE  SILVER  AGE	301
required of women. Sexual relations, said this ancient T olstoiari, were permis sible only in marriage and for procreation. He believed in equal educational opportunities for both sexes and welcomed women to his lectures; but he bade them seek from education and philosophy the means of perfecting themselves as women.13 Slaves, too, attended his classes; one of them-Epictetus-honored his teacher by surpassing him. When civil war flared in Rome after Nero's death, Musonius went out to the attacking army and lectured it on the blessings of peace and the horrors of war. Antonius' troops laughed at him and resumed the ultimate arbitrament. Vespasian, in expelling the philosophers from Rome, ex cepted Rufus; but he kept his concubines.
SENECA
The Stoic philosophy found its most doubtful expression in the life, its most perfect expression in the writings, of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Born at Corduba about 4 B.c., he was soon taken to Rome, and received all the education available there. He imbibed rhetoric from his father, Stoicism from Attalus, Pythagoreanism from Sotion, and practical politics from his aunt's husband, the Roman governor of Egypt. He tried vegetarianism for a year, then gave it up, but remained always abstemious in food and drink; he was a millionaire in his surroundings rather than in his habits. He suffered so much froµi asthma and weak lungs that he often contemplated suicide. He practiced law, and was chosen quaestor about A.D. 33. Two years later he married Pompeia Paulina., with whom he lived in remarkable con tinuity until his death.
On inheriting his father's fortune he abandoned the law and indulged himself in writing. "\Vhen Cremutius Cordus was forced by Caligula to kill himself (40), Seneca addressed to Cordus' daughter Marcia a consolatio
-an essay of condolence which was a regularly practiced form in the schools of rhetoric and philosophy. Caligula wished to have him executed for his impertinence, but Seneca's friends saved his life by arguing that he would presently die of consumption in any case. Soon afterward Claudius accused him of improper relations with Julia, daughter of Germanicus; the Senate condemned him to death, but Claudius commuted this to exile in Corsica. On that rugged isle, amid a population as primitive as in Ovid's Tomi, the philosopher spent eight lonely years (41-49). At first he took his misfortune with true stoic calm, and comforted his mother with a touching Consolatio ad Helviam; but as the bitter years crawled on, his spirit broke, and he addressed to Claudius' secretary a Consolatio ad Polybium in a humble appeal for pardon. When this failed he tried to dull his sufferings by composing tragedies.
302	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIV
These strange productions, in which almost every character is an orator, were probably intended for the study rather than the stage; we do not hear of any of them being played; at most some brilliant episodes or resounding speeches were put to music and acted by a mime. The gentle philosopher incarnadines the stage with violence, as if he would rival in the theater the blood feasts of the games. Despite these heroic efforts he is too much of a thinker to be a good dramatist: he prefers ideas to men, and loses no chance for reflection, sentiment, or epigram. His plays contain some fine liIJes, but for the rest they may be forgotten with impunity. It should be added, however, that many good judges have not agreed with this verdict. Scaliger, lord of Renaissance critics, preferred Seneca to Euripides. When ancient literature came back to life it was Seneca who served as model for the first dramas in modern speech; from him came the classic form and unities that marked the plays of Corneille and Racine and dominated the French stage till the nineteenth century. In England, which felt his influence less, the translation of Seneca's dramas by Heywood ( 1 559) gave an exemplar to the first English tragedy, Gorboduc, and left its mark on Shakespeare.
In 48 the younger Agrippina replaced Messalina in power over Claudius and Rome. Anxious to turn her eleven-year-old son Nero into an Alexander, she looked about for an Aristotle and found him in Corsica. She had Seneca recalled and restored to his seat in the Senate. For five years he tutored the youth and for five more he guided the Emperor and the state. During this decade he wrote for the edification of Nero and sundry some genial exposi tions of the Stoic philosophy-On Anger, On the Brevity of Life, On the Tranquillity of the Soul, On Clemency, On the Happy Life, On the Con stancy of the Sage, On Benefits, On Providence. These formal treatises do not show him at his best. Like his plays they gleam with epigrams; but these, sent forth page after page in a staccato jet, at last weary the mind and lose their charm. Seneca's public, however, read these essays at intervals, and did not resent the gay wit that displeased the austere Quintilian,14 or the "sugar plums" and "glaring patches" that would offend Fronto's archaic taste; it was pleased that their rich premier spoke so amiably, and, like his pupil, tried so hard to win its applause. For many years Seneca was the leading author, statesman, and vinegrower of Italy.
He multiplied his patrimony by investments that apparently took full advantage of his official position and knowledge. If we may believe Dio, he lent money to provincials at such high interest that panic and insurrection broke out in Britain when he suddenly called in his loans there in the sum of 40,000,000 sesterces.15 His fortune, we are told, rose to 300,000,000 ($30,000,000).16 In 58 an old delator friend of Messalina, Publius Suilius, publicly attacked the premier as a "hypocrite, an adulterer, and a wanton;
a man who denounces courtiers and never leaves the palace; who denounces
CHAP. XIV)	THE  SIL VER  AGE	3o3
luxury, and displays 500 dining tables of cedar and ivory; who denounces wealth, and sucks the provinces dry by usury." 17 Like Caesar, Seneca con tented himself with a rebuttal when he might have arranged an execution. In his essay On the Happy Life he repeated the charges, and replied that the sage is not bound to poverty; if wealth comes to him honestly he may take it; but he must be capable of abandoning it at any time without serious regret.18 Meanwhile he lived ascetically amid his fine furniture, slept on a hard mattress, drank only water, and ate so sparingly that when he died his body was emaciated through undernourishment.19 "Abundance of food," he wrote, "dulls the wits; excess of food strangles the soul." 2-0 The charges of sexual irregularity were probably true of his youth, but he was noted for his unfailing tenderness to his wife. In truth he never made up his mind which he loved better-philosophy or power, wisdom or pleasure; and he was never convinced of their incompatibility. He admitted that he was a very imperfect sage. "I persist in praising not the life that I lead, but that which I ought to lead. I follow it at a mighty distance, crawling" 21-of which of us is this not true? If he is not sincere in saying that "mercy becomes no man so well as the king or the prince," 22 he at least phrases the sentiment almost as well as Portia. He condemned gladiatorial combats to the death,24 and Nero forbade them. He disarmed much criticism by what Tacitus calls "the grace with which he imparted wisdom." 25 He did not demand, any more than he practiced, perfection.
We have seen that he ruled the Empire well, and that he tarnished his record by condoning the worst of Nero's crimes, "letting much evil pass in order to have the power of doing a little good." 27 He felt disgraced, and longed to free himself from his imperial servitude; he described the Em peror's palace as triste ergastulum-"an unhappy prison for slaves." He began to wish that he had devoted all his life. to the study of wisdom and had shunned the dark labyrinths of power. \Vith pleasure he would put aside, now and then, the cares of politics, and at sixty attend like an eager youth the lectures of Metronax on philosophy.28 In the year 62, aged sixty six, he begged leave to resign his reduced place in the government, but Nero would not let him go. After the great fire of 64, when Nero asked all the Empire to send contributions for the rebuilding of Rome, Seneca donated the greater pan of his fortune. Gradually he succeeded in withdrawing from the coun; more and more he lived in his Campanian villas, hoping by an almost monastic seclusion to escape the attentions and spies of the Emperor. For a time he lived on wild apples and running water for fear of poison in his food.
It was in this atmosphere of leisurely terror that he wrote {63-65) his studies in natural science (Quaestiones Natura/es), and the most lovable
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIV
of his works, the Epistulae Morales. They were casual, intimate causeries addressed to his friend Lucilius-rich governor of Sicily, poet, philosopher, and frank Epicurean. There are few books in Roman literature more pleasant than these urbane attempts to adapt Stoicism to the n eds of a millionaire. Here begins the informal essay, which would be the favorite medium of Plutarch and Lucian, Montaigne and Voltaire, Bacon and Addi son and Steele. To read these letters is to be in correspondence with an enlightened, humane, and tolerant Roman who has reached the heights and known the depths of literature, statesmanship, and philosophy. They are Zeno speaking with Epicurus' lenience and Plato's charm. Seneca apolo gizes to Lucilius for the carelessness of his style (it is nevertheless delectable Latin): "I want my letters to you to be just what my conversation would be if you and I were sitting or walking together." 30 "I write this," he adds, "not for the many but for you; each of us is sufficient audience to the other" (satis magnum alter alteri thecttrum sunrus) 31-though the old dip lomat doubtless hoped that posterity would eavesdrop on his talk. He de scribes his asthma vividly but without self-pity; he cheerfully calls it "practicing how to die" by taking "last gasps" for an hour. He is sixty-seven now, but only in body: "my mind is strong and alert; it takes issue with me on the subject of old age; it declares that old age is its period of bloom." 32 He rejoices that he has time at last to read the good books he has had so long to put aside. Apparently he now reread Epicurus, for he quotes him with a frequency and an enthusiasm scandalous in a Stoic. He is frightened by the excesses of individualism and self-indulgence in Caligula, Nero, and thousands more; he wishes to offer some counterweight to the temptations that beset minds liberated before moral maturity; and he seems resolved to confute the epicureans out of the mouth of the master whose name they abused and whose doctrine they dared not understand.
The first lesson of philosophy is that we cannot be wise about everything. We are fragments in infinity and moments in eternity; for such forked atoms to describe the universe, or the Supreme Being, must make the planets tremble with mirth. Therefore Seneca has little use for metaphysics or theology. One may prove out of his writings that he was a monotheist, a polytheist, a pantheist, a materialist, a Platonist, a monist, a dualist. Some times God is to him a personal Providence who watches over all, "loves good men," 33 answers their prayers, and helps them by divine grace; 34 in other passages God is the First Cause in an unbroken chain of causes and effects, and the ultimate force is Fate, "an irrevocable cause which carries along human and divine affairs equally . . . leading the willing and dragging the unwilling along." 36 A like indecision obscures his conception of the soul: it is a finely material breath animating the body; but it is also "a god dwell-
CHAP. XIV)	THE   SILVER  AGE


CHAP. XX)	LIFE  IN  THE  SECOND  CENTURY	437
of Tacitus a swiftness, color, and force which no ancient author has equaled. The color is dark, the mood is gloomy, the sarcasm stings, and the tone of the whole is that of a Dante without tenderness; but the cumulative effect is overwhelming. Along this black river of relentless exposure we are carried, despite our reservations and objections, by a narrative at once dignified and turbulent, stately and impetuous. Character after character rises upon the stage and is struck down; scene after scene rushes on until all Rome seems ruined and all the participants are dead. We can hardly believe, when we emerge from this chamber of horrors, that this period of despotism, coward ice, and immorality flowed into the zenith of monarchy under Hadrian and the Antonines, and the quiet decency of Pliny's friends.
Tacitus was wrong in scorning philosophy-that is, perspective; all his faults were due to lack of it. If he could have disciplined his pen to the service of an open mind, he would have placed his name first on the list of those who have labored to give form and permanence to the memory and heritage of mankind.
JUVENAL
Unfortunately, Juvenal corroborates Tacitus. What the one writes in mordant prose about princes and senators, the other chants in bitter verse about women and men.
Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, son of a rich freedman, was born at Aquinum in Latium (59). He came to Rome for his education and practiced law there "for his own amusement." His satires betray the shock of rural tastes struck by the loose turmoil of city life; yet he appears to have been friends with Martial, whose epigrams show no prejudice in favor of morality. Shortly before Domitian's death, says an uncertain tradition, Juvenal composed, and circulated among his friends, a satire on the influence of dancers at court; the pantomime actor Paris, we are told, took offense and had him exiled to Egypt. \Ve cannot say if the story is true, nor when Juvenal re turned; in any case he published nothing till after Domitian's death. The first volume of his sixteen satires appeared in rnr, the remainder in four volumes at intervals in a long life. Probably they were unforgiving memories of Domitian's time; but the indignation that makes them so vivid and un reliable suggests that a few years of "the good emperors" had not cured the evils he denounced. Perhaps, again, he chose the satire as a characteristic Roman form, found models and some material in Lucilius, Horace, and Persius, and molded his fulminations and his wrath on the rhetorical prin ciples that he had learned in the schools. We shall never know how darkly
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XX
our picture of imperid Rome has been colored ty the pleasures of <:enuncia tion.
Juvenal takes everything for his subject, and bs  no trouble in Ending
in everything scme aspect that can bear condemning. "\Ve are arrived at the zenith of vice," he thinks, "and posterity will never be able to surpas.5 us"; 21 so far, so true. The root of the evil is the unscrupulous pursuit of wealth. He scorns the plebs that once ruled armies and unmade kings but can now be bought with panem et circenses, bread and circuses; 23 this is one of a hundred phrases to which Juvenal's vitality gave lasting life. He resents the influx of Oriental faces, dress, ways, smells, and gods; protests against the clannishness of the Jew, and likes least of all the "greedy little Greek" (Graeculus esuriens)-the degenerate descendant of a people once great but never honest. He loathes the informers who, like Pliny's Regulus, get rich by reporting "unpatriotic" remarks; the legacy hunters who flutter around childless old men; the proconsul living in lifelong luxury on the profits of a term in the provinces; the clever lawyers who spin out law suits like an excreted web. He is disgusted above all by sexual excesses and perversions: by the roue who on marrying finds that his lechery has left him impotent; by the dandies whose manners, perfumes, and desires make them indistinguishable from women; and by the women who think that emancipa tion means that they should be indistinguishable from men.
His sixth and bitterest satire is devoted to the gentler sex. Postumus is
thinking of marriage; don't do it, Juvenal warns him; and then the poet por trays the women of Rome as selfish, shrewish, superstitious, extravacrant, quarrelsome, haughty, vain, litigious, adulterous, equaling every mar;iage with a divorce, substituting lapdogs for children;24 going in for athletics, worse yet for literature, quoting Virgil at you, spoutinz rhetoric and phi losophy 25-"oh, may the gods save us from a learned wife!" 26 He concludes that there is h:irdly a woman in the city wonh marrying. A good wife is a rare bird (rara avis), stranger than a white crow. He marvels that Postumus shquld think of marriage when "there are so many halters to be had, so many high and dizzy windows are accessible, and the Aemilian Bridge is close at
hand." No; stay single. And get out of this nerve-wearyina bedlam called
.	•	I:>
Rome and live in some qwet Italian town where you will meet honest men
and be safe from criminals, poets, collapsing tenements, and Greeks.27 Put ambition behind you; the goal is not worth the striving, so long is labor and so brief is fame. Live simply, cultivate your garden, desire only so much as hunger and thirst, cold and heat demand;28 learn pity, be kind to children, keep a sane mind in a healthy body (mens sana in corpore sano 29). But only a fool will pray for a long life.
CRAP. xx)	LIFE  IN  THE  SECOND  CENTURY	439
\Ve can understand such a mood; it is pleas nt to contemplate the im perfecticns cf our neighbors and the despicable inferiority of the world as compared with our dreams. Our enjoyment in this case is sharpened by Juvenal's street-comer vocabulary, his easy-moving colloquial hexameters, his grim humor, and his lusty style. But we must not take him literally. He was angry; he had not made his way in Rome as rapidly as he had hoped; it was sweet revenge to lay about him with the bludgeon of a hatred that never feigned to be fair. His moral standard was high and sound, though tinged with conservative prejudices and delusions about the virtuous past; by those standards, used without mercy or modesty, we could indict any generation anywhere. Seneca knew how old a pastime this is. "Our fore fathers," he wrote, "complained, we complain, and our descendants will complain, that morals are corrupt, that wickedness holds sway, that men are sinking deeper and deeper into sinfulness, that the condition of mankind is going from bad to worse." 30 Around the immoral hub of any society is a spreading wheel of wholesome life, in which the threads of tradition, the moral imperatives of religion, the economic compulsions of the family, the instinctive love and care of children, the watchfulness of women and police men, suffice to keep us publicly decent and moderately sane. Juvenal is the greatest of Roman satirists, as Tacitus is the greatest of Roman historians; but we should err as much in taking their picture as accurate as we should were we to accept without scrutiny the pleasant and civilized scene that rises before us as we read the letters of Pliny.
A ROMAN GENTLEMAN
\Vhen he was born at Como in 61 he was named Publius Caecilius Secundus. His father owned a fann and villa near the lake and held high office in the town. Orphaned e::irly, Publius was adopted and educated first by Virginius Rufus, governor of Upper Germany, and then by his uncle Caius Plinius Secundus, author of the Natural History. This busy scholar made the boy his son and heir and died soon afterward. According to custom, the youth took his adoptive father's name, causing confusion for 2000 years. At Rome he studied under Quintilian, who formed his taste on Cicero and must receive some of the credit for the Ciceronian fluency of Pliny's style. At 18 he was admitted to the bar; at 39 he was chosen to deliver an address of welcome to Trajan. In the same year he was made consul; in 103, augur; in 105, "Curator of the Bed and Banks of the Tiber and the City Sewers." He took no fees or gifts for his legal services, but he was a rich man and could afford to be magnanimous. He had properties in
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XX
Etruria, at Beneventum, Como, and Laurentum, and offered 3,000,000
sesterces for another.31
Like many aristocrats of his time, he amused himself by writing: at first a Greek tragedy, then some poems, lighthearted and occasionally obscene. Reproved by some, he confessed his fault impenitently, and proposed again "to indulge in mirth, wit, and gaiety, and enter into the spirit of the most wanton muse." 32 Hearing his letters praised, he composed some for publica tion and issued them at intervals from 97 to ro9. Intended not only for the public but for the pleasure of the circles he described, they avoided the darker aspects of Roman life and passed by as too serious for his purpose the larger problems of philosophy and statesma_nship. Their worth is in their graceful intimacy, and in the rosy light they shed upon Roman character and patrician ways.
Pliny reveals himself with half the candor and all the felicity of


TRAJAN
Trajan received word of his accession while he was in charge of a Roman army in Cologne. It was characteristic of him that he went on with his work at the frontier and postponed his coming to Rome for nearly two years. He had been born in Spain of an Italian family long settled there; in him and in Hadrian Roman Spain arrived at political hegemony, asit had reached literary leadership in Seneca, Lucan, and Martial. He was the first in a long line of generals whose provincial birth and training seemed to give them the will-to life that had gone from the native Roman stock. That Rome made no pro test against this enthronement of a provincial was in itself an event and omen in Roman history.
Trajan never ceased to be a general. His carriage was military, his presence commanding; his features were undistinguished but strong. Tall and robust, he was wont to march on foot with his troops and ford with full armament the hundred rivers they had to cross. His courage showed a stoic impartiality between life and death. Told that Licinius Sura was plotting against him, he went to Sura's house for dinner, ate without scrutiny whatever food was offered him, and had himself shaved by Sura's barber.4 He was not in any technical sense a philosopher. He used to take Dio Chrysostom, the "golden mouthed" rhetor, with him in his chariot to discourse to him on philosophy, but he confessed that he could not understand a word of Dio's talk 5-the worse for philosophy. His mind was clear and direct; he uttered an amazing minimum of nonsense for a man. He was vain, like all human beings, but completely unassuming; he took no advantage of his office, joined his friends at table and the hunt, drank with them copiously, and induls-ed in occasional pederasty as if out of deference to the customs of his time. Rome thought it
CHAP.XIX)	THE   PHILOSOPHER  KINGS	409
worthy of praise that he never disturbed his wife Plotina by making love to another woman.
\Vhen, in the forty-second year of his age, Trajan reached Rome, he was at the height of his faculties. His simplicity, geniality, and moderation readily won a people so lately acquainted with tyranny. The younger Pliny was chosen by the Senate to pronounce the "panegyric" of greeting. About the same time Dio Chrysostom delivered before the Emperor a discourse on the duties of a monarch as viewed by the Stoic philosophy. Both Pliny and Dio distinguished between do-minatio and principatus: the prince was to be not lord of the state but its first servant, the executive delegate of the people, chosen through their representatives, the senators. I111peraturus 011mibus elegi debet ex omnibus, said Pliny: "He who is to command all should be elected by all." 6 The general listened courteously.
Such fair beginnings were not new in history; what astonished Rome was that Trajan fulfilled their promise abundantly. He gave to his aides or asso ciates the villas in which his predece5.5ors had stayed for a few weeks in the year; "he regarded nothing as his own," said Pliny, "unless his friends pos sessed it"; 7 as for himself he lived as simply as Vespasian. He asked the Sen ate's opinion on all matters of moment, and discovered that he might wield nearly absolute power if he never used absolute speech. The Senate was willing to let him rule if he would observe the forms that maintained its dignity and prestige; like the rest of Rome, it now loved security too much to be capable of freedom. Perhaps also it was pleased to find Trajan a con servative, who had no intention of mulcting the rich to appease the poor.
Trajan was an able and tireless administrator, a sound financier, a just judge. To him the Digest of Justinian ascribes the principle, "It is better that the guilty should remain unpunished than that the innocent should be con demned." 8 By careful supervision of expenditures (arid some lucrative conquests) he was able to complete extensive public works without increas ing taxation; on the contrary, he lowered taxes and published a budget to exp?s_e the revenues and outlays of the government to examination and cnt1 1 m. e required from the senators who enjoyed his comradeship an admm1strat1ve devotion almost as meticulous as his own. The patricians en tered the bureaucracy and worked as well as played; Trajan's extant correspondence with them suggests how carefully they labored under his watchful and inspiring leadership. Many of the Eastern cities had misman aged their finances to the point of bankruptcy, and Trajan sent curatores like the younger Pliny to help and check them. The procedure weakened municipal independence and institutions, but it was unavoidable; self-gov ernment, by extravagance and incompetence, had brought its own end.
Nurtured on war, the Emperor was a frank imperialist who preferred
410	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIX
order to liberty and power to peace. Hardly a year after his arrival in Rome he set out for the conquest of Dacia. Roughly corresponding to the Romania of 1940, Dacia plunged like a fist into the hean of Germany, and would there fore be of great military value in the struggle that Trajan foresaw between the Germans and Italy. Its annexation would give Rome control of the road that ran down the Save to the Danube and thence to Byz:mtium-an invalu able land route to the East. Besides, Dacia had gold mines. In a campaign brilliantly planned and swiftly executed, Trajan led his legions through all obstacles and resistance to the Dacian capital, Sarmizegetusa, and forced its surrender. A Roman sculptor has left us an impressive ponrait of the Dacian king Decebalus-a face noble with strength and character. Trajan reinstated him as a client king and returned to Rome ( 102); but Decebalus soon broke his agreements and resumed his independent sway. Trajan marched his army back into Dacia ( 105), bridged the Danube with a structure that was one of the engineering marvels of the century, and again stormed the Dacian capi tal. Decebalus was killed, a strong garrison was left to hold Sarmizegetusa, and Trajan went back to Rome to celebrate his victory with 10,000 gladiators (probably war captives) in r 2 3 days of public games. Dacia became a Roman province, received Roman colonists, married them, and corrupted the Latin language in its own Rumanian way. The gold mines of Transylvama were put under the direction of an imperial procurator and soon paid for the material cost of the war. To reimburse himself for his labors Trajan took out of Dacia a million pounds of silver and half a million pounds of gold the last substantial booty that the legions would win for Roman sloth.
With these spoils the Emperor distributed 650 denarii ($260) to all such citizens as applied for the gift-probably some 300,000; and enough remained to remedy the unemployment of demobilization with the greatest program of public works, governmental aid, and architectural adornment that Italy had seen since Augustus. Trajan improved the older aqueducts and built a new one which isstill in operation. At Ostia he constructed a spacious harbor connected by canals with the Tiber and the harbor of Claudius, and deco rated it with warehouses that were models of beauty as well as of use. His engineers repaired old roads, carried a new one across the Pontine marshes, and laid the Via T raiana from B neventum to Brundisium. They reopened the Claudian tunnel that had dramed the Fucine Lake, dredged harbors at Centumcellae and Ancona, gave Ravenna an aqueduct, and Verona an amphitheater. Trajan supplied the funds for new roads, bridges, and build ings throughout the Empire. But he discouraged the architectural rivalry of the cities and urged them to spend their surplus on improving the condi tion and environment of the poor. He was always ready to help any city that had suffered from earthquake, fire, or storm. He tried to promote agri-
CHAP. XIX)	THE   PHILOSOPHER  KINGS	41l
culture in Italy by requiring senators to invest a third of their capital in Italian land; and when he saw that this was extending the latifundia, he encouraged small proprietors by advancing them state funds at low interest for the purchase and improvement of their lands and homes.9 To raise the birth rate he enlarged the alimenta, or feeding fund: the state made mortgage loans at five per cent (half the usual rate) to Italian peasants, and allowed local charity boards to distribute the interest to poor parents at sixteen ses terces ($1.60) monthly for each boy raised by them, and twelve for each girl. The sums seem small, but contemporary testimony indicates that from sixteen to twenty sesterces sufficed for a month's care of a child on a first century Italian farm.10 ½-ith a similar hope Trajan allowed the children of Rome to receive the corn dole in addition to that given to their parents. The system of alimenta was enlarged by Hadrian and the Antonines, was ex tended to several parts of the Empire, and was supplemented by private phi lanthropy; so the younger Pliny gave 30,000 sesterces a year as alimenta to the children of Comum, and Caelia Macrina left a million to like purpose for the children of T arracina in Spain.
T rajm, like Augustus, favored Italy over the provinces, and Rome over Italy. He used to the full the architectural genius of Apollodorus, a Damas cene Greek who had designed the new roads and aqueduct, and the Danube bridge. The Emperor now commissioned him to clear away large blocks of houses, cut 1 3o feet from the base of the Quirinal hill, lay out in this and the adjoining space a new forum equal in area to all preceding forums combined, and surround it with buildings of a majesty fit for a world capital that had reached the height of its power and opulence. The Forum Traiarrum was entered through the Triumphal Arch of Trajan. The interior, 370 by 354 feet, was paved with smooth stone and surrounded by a high wall and portico; east and west walls were indented with hemicycle exedrae formed of Doric columns. In the center rose the Basilica Ulpia, named after Trajan's clan and intended as an office building for commerce and finance; its ex terior was adorned with fifty monolithic columns, its floor was of marble, its immense nave was enclosed by granite colonnades, its roof of massive be:.1ms was covered with bronze. Near the northern end of the new forum two libraries were built, one for Larin works, the other for Greek. Between them rose the column, behind them the temple, of Trajan. When the forum was complete it was accounted one of the architectural wonders of the world. The column, still standing, was first of all an achievement in transporta tion. It was cut from eighteen cubes of marble, each w ighing some fifty tons; the blocks were brought by ship from the island of Paros, were trans ferred to barges at Osria, were drawn against the current up the river, and were moved on rollers up the bank and through the streets to their site. The
412	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XIX
cubes were recut into thirty-two blocks. Eight formed the pedestal; three sides of this were decorated with sculptures; the fourth opened into a spiral stairway of 185 marble steps. The shaft, twelve feet in diameter at the bottom, and ninety-seven feet high, was composed of twenty-one blocks and was topped by a statue of Trajan holding a globe of the world. Before being raised into position the blocks were carved with reliefs picturing the cam paigns in Dacia. These reliefs are the culmination of Flavian realism and of ancient historical sculpture. They do not aim at the calm beauty or idealized types of Greek sculpture; they seek rather to convey a vivid impression of living individuals in the actual scenes and turmoil of war; they are Balzac and Zola after Corneille and Racine. In the 2000 figures of these 1 24 spiral panels we follow the conquest of Dacia step by step: the Roman cohorts is suing from their stations in full armor; the crossing of the Danube on a pon toon bridge; the pitching of a Roman camp in the enemy's land; the confused conflict of spears, arrows, sickles, and stones; a Dacian village set to the torch, with women and children begging Trajan for mercy; Dacian women torturing Roman prisoners; soldiers displaying before the Emperor the heads of slain enemies; surgeons treating the wounded; the Dacian princes drinking one after another the cup of poison; the head of Decebalus brought as a trophy to Trajan; the long file of captive men, women, and children snatched from their homes into foreign settlement or Roman slavery-this and more the dark column tells in the most masterly narrative relief in.sculp tural history. These artists and their employers were nor chauvinists; they showed Trajan's acts of clemency, but also they revealed the heroic aspects of a nation's struggle for freedom; and the finest figure in the scroll is the Dacian king. Ir is a strange document, too crowded for full effectiveness; some figures so crude that one wonders if a Dacian warrior carved them; superposition primitively substituted for perspective; and the whole ob servable, like Pheidias' frieze, only by some skylark scorner of the ground. But it was an interesting deviation from a classic style whose placidity had never expressed the overwhelming energy of the Roman character. Its "method of continuity" 11-making each scene melt into the next-carried on the suggestio:1-s of Titus' ar h.and prep red for medieval reliefs. Despite its defects the spiral story was imitated agam and again, from the column of
Aurelius in Rome, and that of Arcadius in Constantinople, to the Napoleonic shaft in the Place Vendee in Paris.
Trajan completed his building program by finishing in the grand manner the baths begun by Domitian. Meanwhile six ye:irs of peace had wearied him; administration was a task that did not awaken his reserve energies as war did; he did not feel alive in a palace. \Vhy not take up Caesar's plans where Antony had failed, settle the Parthian question once and for all, establish
CHAP. XIX)	THE   PHILOSOPHER  KINGS
a more strategic frontier in the East, and crepture control of the trade routes across Armenia and Parthia to Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and India? After careful preparation he set out again with his legions ( r 1 3). A year later he had taken Armenia; yet another year and he had marched down through Mesopotamia, captured Ctesiphon, and reached the Indian Ocean the first and last Roman general to stand before that sea. The population at home learned geography by following his victories; the Senate was amused to be informed, almost weekly, of another nation conquered or hastily sub mitting: the Bosporus, Colchis, Asiatic Iberia, Asiatic Albania, Osrhoene, Messenia, Media, Assyria, Arabia Petrea, at last even Parthia. Parthia, Ar menia, Assyria, and Mesopotamia were constituted proYinces, and the new Alexander had the glory of naming and crowning a client king ayer the ancient enemies of Rome. Standing on the shores of the Red Sea, Trajan mourned that he was too old to repeat the l\1acedonian's advance to the Indus. He contentep himself with building a Red Sea fleet to control the passage and commerce to India; left garrisons at all strategic points, and
turned back reluctantly toward Rome.
Like Antony he had gone too fast and too far and had neglected to con solidate his victories and his lines. On reaching Antioch he was informed that the Parthian king Osroes, whom he had deposed, had gathered another army and had reconquered central i\lesopotamia; that rebellion had broken out in all the new provinces; that the Jews of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Cyrene were in revolt; and that disaffection was flaring up in Libya, Maure tania, and Britain. The old wirrior wished to take the field again, but his flesh refused. He had worn himself out by living as actively in the hot East as in the \Vest; dropsy set in, and a paralytic stroke left the great will helpless in a broken frame. Sadly he commissioned Lucius Quietus to put down the up risings in Mesopotamia, sent i\larcius Turba to suppress the Jews in Africa, and left his nephew Hadrian in command of the main Roman army in Syria. He had himself carried down to the Cilician coast, hoping to sail thence to Rome, where the Senate was preparing for him the greatest triumph since Augustus. He died at Selinus on the way ( 117), aged sixty-four, after a reign of nineteen years. His ashes were taken to the capital, and were buried under the great column that he had chosen as his tomb.
HADRIA..
Tbe Ruler


The simplest public games were athletic contests, usually held in a stadium. The performers, mostly professionals and aliens, ran foot races, threw the discus, wrestled, and boxed. The Roman public, accustomed to sanguinary gladiatorial exhibitions, only mildly favored athletics, but relished the prize fights in which massive Greeks fought almost to the death with gloves re inforced at the knuckles with an iron band three quarters of an inch thick. The gentle Virgil describes a milder pugilistic feast in almost modern terms:
Then the son of Anchises brought out hide gloves of equal weight, and bound the hands of the antagonists. . . . Each took his stand, poised on tiptoe and raising one arm    Drawing their heads back
from the blows they spar, hand against hand. They aim many hard blows, wildly pummeling each other's s des and chests, ears and brows and cheeks, making the air resound with their strokes.    Entellus
puts forth his right; Dares slips aside in a nimble dodge   Entellus
furiously drives Dares headlong over the arena, redoubling his blows, now with the right hand, now with the left. . . . Then Aeneas put an end to the fray, Dares' mates led him to the ships with his knees shaking, his head swaying from side to side, his mouth spitting teeth and blood.104
Still more exciting were the races at the Circus Maximus. On two suc cessive days forty-four races were run, some of horses and jockeys, some of light two-wheeled chariots drawn by two, three, or four horses abreast. The cost was met by rival stables owned by rich men; the jockeys, drivers, and chariots of each stable were costumed or painted in distinctive colors white, green, red, or blue; and all Rome, as the time for these contests ap proached, divided into factions named from these colors, and particularly the red and the green. At home, in school, at lectures, in the forums, half the talk was about favorite jockeys and charioteers; their pictures were everywhere, their victories were announced in the Acta Diurna; some of them made great fortunes, some had statues raised to them in public squares. On the appointed day 180,000 men and women moved in festive colors to the enormous hippodrome. Enthusiasm rose to a mania. Excited partisans smelled the dung of the animals to assure themselves that the horses of their favorite drivers had been properly fed.105 The spectators passed by the shops and brothels that lined the outer walls; they filed through hund eds of en trances and sorted themselves with the sweat of anxiety into the great horse shoe of seats. Vendors sold them cushions, for the seats were mostly of hard
CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN  ROME
wood, and the program would last all day. Senators and other dignitaries had special seats of marble, ornamented with bronze. Behind the imperial box was a suite of luxurious rooms, where the emperor and his family might eat, drink, rest, bathe, and sleep. Gambling was feverish, and fortunes passed from hand to hand as the day advanced. From openings under the stands emerged the horses, the jockeys and drivers, and the chariots; and each faction shook the stands with applause as its favorite color appeared. The charioteers, mostly slaves, wore bright tunics and shining helmets; in one hand was a whip, and in their belts a knife to cut, in accident, the traces tied to their waists. Along the middle of the elliptical arena ran the spina ("thorn," "spine"), an island a thousand feet long, adorned with statues and obelisks; at one end were the metae ("measures"), circular pillars that served as goals. The usual len3th of a chariot race was seven circuits, about five miles. The test of skill lay in making the turns at the goals as swiftly and sharply as safety would ::llow; collisions were frequent there, and men, chariots, and animals minrrled in fascinating tragedy. As the horses or chariots clattered to the final post the hypnotized audience rose like a swell ing sea, gesticulated, waved handkerchiefs, shouted and prayed, groaned and cursed, or exulted in almost supernatural ecstasy. The applause that greeted the winner could be heard far beyond the limits of the city.
The most stupendous of all the spectacles offered at Roman celebrations was the sham naval battle. The first large naumachia was given by Caesar in a basin excavated for the purpose on the outskirts of the city. Augustus marked the dedication of his temple to Mars the AYenger by presenting
3000 fighters in a replica of the battle of Salamis on an artificial lake 1800
by r 200 feet. Claudius, as already noted, celebrnted the completion of the Fucine tunnel with a conflict of triremes and quadriremes involving 19,000 men. They fought with a disappointing courtesy, and soldiers had to be sent among them to ensure a proper shedding of blood.106 At the dedication of the Colosseum Titus had its arena flooded, and reproduced that battle of the Corinthians and Corcyreans whic'1 had brought on the Peloponnesian
\Var. The combatants in these engagements were war captives or con demned criminals. They butchered one another until one side or the other was killed off; the victors, if they had cut bravely, might be granted freedom.
The games reached their climax in the contests of animals and gladiators in the amphitheater-after Vespasian, in the Colosseum. The arena was an immense wooden floor strewn with sand; parts of this floor could be lowered and then quickly raised with a change of scene; and at brief notice the whole floor could be covered with water. Large chambers beneath it held the animals, machines, and men scheduled for the program of the day. Just above
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVII
the arena's guard wall was a podium or marble terrace on whose ornate seats sat senators, priests, and high officials; above this was the suggestum, a high loge where the emperor and empress sat on thrones of ivory and gold, sur rounded by their family and retinue. Behind this aristocratic circle sat the equestrian order, in twenty tiers of seats. A lofty intervening wall, decorated with statuary, separated the upper orders from the lower classes in the stands above. Any free person, male or female, could come, and apparently no admission was charged. The crowd took advantage of the emperor's presence, here and at the circus, to shout its wishes to him-for the pardon of a prisoner or a fallen fighter, the emancipation of a courageous slave, the appearance of favorite gladiators, or some minor reform. From the topmost wall awnings could be unrolled to the arena railing to shade such parts of the assemblage as might suffer from the sun. Here and there fountains threw up jets of scented water to cool the air. When noon came most of the spectators hurried below to eat lunch; concessionaires were on hand to sell them food and sweets and drinks. On occasion the entire multitude might be fed by the order and bounty of the emperor, or dainties and presents might be scattered among the scrambling crowd. If, as sometimes occurred, contests were presented at night, a circle of lights could be lowered over the arena and the spectators. Bands of musicians performed in the interludes and accompanied the crises of the combats with exciting crescendo strains. The simplest event in the amphitheater was an exhibition of exotic animals.
Gathered from all the known world, elephants, lions, tigers, crocodiles, hippopotami, lynxes, apes, panthers, bears, boars, wolves, giraffes, ostriches, stags, leopards, antelopes, and rare birds were kept in the zoological gardens of emperors and rich men, and were trained to skillful exploits or merry pranks; apes were taught to ride dogs, drive chariots, or act in plays; bulls let boys dance on their backs; sea lions were conditioned to bark in answer to their individual names; elephants danced to cymbals struck by other elephants, or they walked a rope, or sat down to table, or wrote Greek or Latin letters. Animals might be merely paraded in bright or humorous costumes; usually, however, they were made to fight one another, or with men, or they were hunted to death with arrows and javelins. In one day, under Nero, 400 tigers fought with bulls and elephants; on another day, under Caligula, 400 bears were slain; at the dedication of the Colosseum 5000 animals died.107 If the animals wished to compromise they were stung to combat by lashes, darts, and hot irons. Cbudius made a division of the Praetorian Guard fight panthers; Nero made them fight 400  bears and
300  lions.108
Combats of a bull with a man, long popular in Crete and Thessaly, were
CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN  ROME
introduced into Rome by Caesar and were a frequent spectacle in the amphitheater.109 Condemned criminals, sometimes dressed in skins to re semble animals, were thrown to beasts made ravenous for the occasion; death in such cases came with all possible agony, and wounds were so deep that physicians used such men to study internal anatomy. All the world knows the story of Andrades, the runaway slave; captured, he was flung into the arena with a lion; but this lion, we are told, remembered that Andrades had once drawn a thorn from its paw, and refused to injure him. Andrades was pardoned, and made a living by exhibiting his civilized lion in taverns.110 The condemned man was sometimes required to play in no make-believe way some famous tragic role: he might represent Medea's rival, and be garbed in a handsome robe that would suddenly burst into flame and consume him; he might be burned to death on a pyre as Heracles; he might (if we may believe Tertullian) be publicly castrated as Atys; he might play Mucius Scaevola and hold his hand over burning coals until it was shriveled up; he might be Icarus and fall from the sky into no merciful ocean but a crowd of wild beasts; he might be Pasiphae, and bear the embraces of a bull. One victim was dressed as Orpheus; he was sent with his lyre into an arena set as a pleasant grove of trees and brooks; suddenly hungry animals emerged from recesses and tore him to pieces.111 Laureolus, a robber, was crucified in the arena for the amusement of the populace; bur as he took too long in dying, a bear was brought in and was persuaded to eat him, piece by piece, as he hung upon the cross. Martial describes the spectacle with fascination and approval.112
The supreme events were the combats of armed men, in duels or en masse. The contestants were war captives, condemned criminals, or disobedient slaves. The right of victors to slaughter their prisoners was generally ac cepted throughout antiquity, and the Romans thought themselves generous in giving captives a chance for their lives in the arena. Men convicted of capital crimes were brought to Rome from all parts of the Empire, were sent to gladiatorial schools, and soon appeared in the games. If they fought with exceptional bravery the.y might win immediate freedom; if they merely survived they had to fight again and again as holidays recurred; if they lasted three years they were released into slavery; if then they satisfied their masters for two years they were freed. Crimes entailing condemnation to a gladiatorial career were limited to murder, robbery, arson, sacrilege, and mutiny, but sedulous governors responsive to imperial needs might override these restrictions if the arena ran short of men.113 Even knights and senators might be sentenced to fight as gladiators, and sometimes a passion for ap plause led members of the equestrian order to offer themselves as volunteers.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVII
Not a few men, under the lure of adventure and danger, enlisted in the gladiatorial schools.
Such schools had existed in Rome as early as 105 B.C. Under the Empire there were four of them there, several more in Italy, and one in Alexandria. Rich men, in Caesar's day, had their own schools for preparing slaves to be gladiators. They used the graduates as bodyguards in peace and as aides in war, hired them out to fight at private banquets, and lent them to the games. On entering a professional gladiatorial school many a novice took an oath "to suffer himself to be whipped with rods, burned with fire, and killed with steel." 114 Training and discipline were rigorous; diet was supervised by physicians, who prescribed barley to develop muscle; violation of rules was punished by scourging, branding, and confinement in chains. Not all of these candidates for death were discontented with their lot. Some were elated with victories and thought of their prowess rather than their peril; some complained that they were not allowed to fight often enough; 115 such men hated Tiberius for giving so few games. They had the stimulus and consolation of fame; their names were daubed by admirers upon public walls; women fell in love with them, poets sang of them, painters portrayed them, sculptors carved for posterity their iron biceps and terrifying frowns. Many, however, were despondent at their imprisonment, their brutalizing routine, and their brief expectation of life. Several committed suicide; one
by stuffing his throat with a sponge used to clean privies, another by insert ing his head between the spokes of a moving wheel, several by hara-kiri


The sculptural masterpiece of the period was the great mausoleum dedi cated to King Mausolus of Halicarnassus. Nominally a satrap of Persia, Mausolus had extended his personal sway over Caria and pans of Ionia and Lycia, and had used his rich revenues to build a fleet and beautify his capi tal. When he died (353), his devoted sister and wife, Artemisia, held a famous oratorical contest in his honor, and summoned the best artists of Greece to collaborate upon a tomb that should be a fitting memorial to his genius. She was a queen by nature as well as by marriage; when the Rho dians took advantage of the King's death to invade Caria, she' defeated them by clever strategy, captured their fleet and their capital, and soon brought the rich merchants to terms."" But her grief over the death of Mausolus weakened her, and she died two years after him, before she could see the completed monument that was to give a word to every Western tongue. Slowly Scopas, Leochares, Bryaxis, and Timotheus raised a rectangular tomb of white marble slabs over a base of bricks, covered it with a pyram idal roof, and adorned it with thirty-six columns and a wealth of statu ary and reliefs. A statue of Mausolus,• calm and strong, was found among the ruins of Halicarnassus by the English in 1857. Still more finished in workmanship is a frieze"" showing again the struggle of Greeks and Ama zons. These men, women, and horses are among the cbefs-d'oeuvres of the world's bas-,reliefs. The Amazons are not masculine females built for battle; they are women of a voluptuous beauty that should have tempted the Greeks to something gentler than war. The Mausoleum took its place, with the third temple at Ephesus, among the Seven Wonders of the World. In many respects sculpture now reached its apogee. It lacked the stimu lus of religion, and fell short of the majestic power of the Parthenon pedi ments; but it took a new inspiration from feminine grace, and achieved a loveliness never equaled before or since. The fifth century had modeled nude men and draped women; the fourth preferred to carve nude women and clothed men. The fifth century had idealized its types, and had cast or chiseled the harassed life of man into an emotionless repose; the fourth century tried tc realize in stone something of human individuality and
Now in the Brirish Museum.
CHAP. XX)   LETTERS AND ARTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY	49S
feeling. In male statuary the head and face took on more importance, the body less; the study of character replaced the idolatry of muscle; portraits in stone became the fashion for any subject who could pay. The body abandoned its stiff, straight pose, and leaned at ease upon a stick or tree; and the surface was modeled to let in the living play of light and shade. Anxious for realism, Lysistratus of Sicyon, apparently first among the Greeks, fitted a plaster mold upon the subject's face, and made a preliminary cast.88
The representation of sensuous beauty and grace came to perfection in Praxiteles. All the world knows that he conned Phryne, and gave a lasting form to her loveliness, but no one knows when he was born or when he died. He was both the son and father of sculptors named Cephisodotus, so that we picture him as the climax of a family tradition of patient anistry. He worked in bronze as well as marble, and won such repute that a dozen cities competed for his services. About 360 Cos commissioned him to carve an Aphrodite; with Phryne's help he did, but the Coans were scandalized to find the goddess quite nude. Praxiteles mollified them by making an other Aphrodite, clothed, while Cnidus bought the first. King Nicomedes of Bithynia offered to pay the heavy public debt of the city in return for the statue, but Cnidus preferred immortality. Tourists came from every nook of the Mediterranean to see the work; critics pronounced it the finest statue yet made in Greece, and gossip said that men had been stirred to amorous frenzy by viewing it.*"'
As Cnidus achieved fame through the Aphrodite, so the little town of Thespiae in Boeotia, binhplace of Phryne, attracted travelers because Phryne had dedicated there a marble Eros by Praxiteles. For she had asked of him, as a proof of his love, the most beautiful of the works in his studio. He wished to leave the choice to her; but Phryne, hoping to discover his own estimate, ran to him one day with news that his studio was on fire;
whereupon he cried out, "I am lost if my Satyr and my Eros are burned."88 Phryne chose the Eros, and gave it to her native town.t Eros, once the cre
ator god of Hesiod, became in Praxiteles' conception a delicate and dreamy youth, symbolizing the power of love to capture the soul; he had not yet become the mischievous and sportive Cupid of Hellenistic and Roman an. Presumably the Satyr of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, known to us
A Roman copr in the Vatican corresponds to the representation of the statue on ex humed Cnidian coms.
t Nero had it brought to Rome, where it perished in the conflagration of A.O. 6+ The
Vatican Cupid of Centocelle may be a copy.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XX
as Hawthorne's Mtrrble Faun, is a copy of the work that Praxiteles pre ferred to his Eros. Some have thought that a torso in the Louvre is part of the original itself... The satyr is represented as a well-formed and happy lad, whose only animal element is his long and pointed ears. He is resting lazily against a tree trunk, with one foot crossed behind the other. Seldom has marble conveyed so fully the sense of idle ease; all the charming care lessness of boyhood is in the relaxed limbs and trustful face. Perhaps the limbs are too rounded and soft; Praxiteles looked too long at Phryne to be able to model a man. The Apollo Sauroctonus-Apollo the Lizard-Killer is so feminine that we are half inclined to class him with the hermaphrodites that abound in Hellenistic statuary.
Pausanias remarks with regrettable brevity that among the statues in the Heraeum at Olympia was "a stone Hermes carrying Dionysus as a babe, by Praxiteles.".. German excavators digging on the site in 1877 crowned their labors by finding this figure, buried under centuries of rub bish and clay. Descriptions, photographs, and casts miss the quality of the work; one must stand before it in the little museum at Olympia, and clandestinely pass the fingers over its surface, to realize the smooth and living texture of this marble flesh. The messenger god has been entrusted with the task of rescuing the infant Dionysus from the jealousy of Hera, and taking him to the nymphs who are to rear him in secret. Jiermes pauses on the way, leans against a tree, and holds up a cluster of grapes before the child. The infant is crudely done, as if the inspiration of the artist had been exhausted on the older god. The right arm of the Hermes is gone, and parts of the legs have been restored; the remainder is appar ently as it came from the sculptor's hand. The firm limbs and broad chest show a healthy physical development; the head is in itself a masterpiece, with its aristocratic shapeliness, its chiseled refinement of features, and its curly hair; and the right foot is perfect where perfection in statuary is rare. Antiquity considered this a minor work; we may judge from this the artistic wealth of the age.
Another passage in Pausanias88 describes a marble group set up by Praxit eles in Mantinea. Excavation has found the base alone, bearing the figures of three Muses, carved probably by the pupils rather than by the master. If we put together the references in extant Greek writings to statues by Praxiteles, we find some forty major works;'° and these were doubtless but a part of his abundant production. We miss in the remains the sublimity and strength, the dignity and reverence of Pheidias; the gods have made way for Phryne, and the great issues of national life have been put aside
CHAP. xx)  LETTERS AND ARTS IN THE FOURTH CENTURY	497
for private love. But no sculptor has ever surpassed the sureness of Praxit eles' technique, the almost miraculous power to pour into hard stone ease and grace and the tenderest sentiment, sensuous delight and woodland joyousness. Pheidias was Doric, Praxiteles is Ionic; in him again we have a premonition of that cultµral conquest of Europe which was to follow Alexander's victories.
SCOPAS AND LYSIPPUS
Scopas played Byron to Pheidias' Milton and Praxiteles' Keats. We know nothing about his life except through his works, which are the real biography of any man; but even of his works we know none with certainty. The stocky and pugnacious heads of the statues that are attributed to him, or of the copies that are ascribed to his originals, stamp him as a man of passionate individuality and force. At Tegea, as we have seen, he served as both archi tect and sculptor, showing a versatility and power unsurpassed in all the cen turies between Pheidias and Michelangelo. Excavations have found only a few fragments of a pediment, chiefly two badly damaged heads marked by a brachy cephalic roundness, and a moody distant look, which are typical of Scopas' work; together with a battered and masculine figure of Atalanta. Strangely like these remains is the Meleager head in the Villa Medici at Rome; here again are the full cheeks, the sensual lips, the brooding eyes, the slightly projecting ridge of the forehead above the nose, and the half-disheveled curly hair; perhaps it is a Roman copy of a Me/eager set up by Scopas as part of a group represent ing the Calydonian hunt. Another head, in the Metropolitan Museum at New York, is almost surely by Scopas, or copied from him; blunt and powerful, and yet handsome and intelligent, it is one of the most characterful remains of ancient statuary.
At Elis, says Pausanias,'° Scopas cast "a brazen statue of the Pandemian Aphrodite sitting on a brazen he-goat." At Sicyon he made a marble Heracles, of which, perhaps, we have a Roman copy in the Lansdowne House at London: the body a relapse into Polycleitan stylized musculature, the head small and round_a5-l.lsual, the face almost as refined as in Praxiteles. He paused long enough at Megara, Argos, Thebes, and Athens to make statues that Pausanias saw there five centuries later; and perhaps he had a hand in rebuilding the sanc tuary at Epidaurus. Crossing the Aegean, he made an Athena and a Dionysus for Cnidus, and played a major role in the sculptures of the Mausoleum. Going north, he carved one of the column drums of the third temple at Ephesus. At Pergamum he made a colossal seated Ares; at Chrysa in the Troad he set up an Apollo Smintheus to scare mice from the fields. He contributed to the fame
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XX
of Samothrace with an Aphrodite; and in far-off Byzantium he carved a Bac chrmte of which the Dresden Albertinum may have a Roman copy in the Raging Maenad. This marble statuette, though only eighteen inches high, is worthy of a great artist-powerful in :figure, magnificent in drapery, unique in pose, alive with anger, and beautiful from every side. Pliny refers to many other statues by Scopas, which in his day stood in the palaces of Rome: an Apollo probably copied in the Apollo Citharoedus of the Vatican; a group of Poseidon, Thetis, Achilles, and Nereids, "an admirable piece of workmanship," says Pliny, "even if it had taken a whole life to complete it"; and a "naked Aphrodite, sufficient to establish the renown of any city."4
All in all, these works, if a judgment may be based upon a few hypothetical survivals, suggest for Scopas a rank·very near to Praxiteles. Here is originality without extravagance, strength without brutality, and a dramatic portrayal of impulse, emotion, and mood, without disfigurement by any strained intensity. Praxiteles loved beauty, Scopas was drawn to character; Praxiteles wished to reveal the grace and tenderness of womanhood, the buoyant health and gaiety of youth; Scopas chose to portray the pains and tragedies of life, and ennobled them with artistic representation. Perhaps, if we had more of his works, we should place him second only to Pheidias.
Lysippus of Sicyon began as a humble artisan in brass. He longed to be an artist, but could not afford a teacher; he took courage, however, when he heard Eupompus the painter announce that for his part he would imitate nature her- self, not any artist.411 Lysippus thereupon turned his face to the study of living beings, and formed a new canon of sculptural proportions to replace the stem rule of Polycleitus; he made the legs longer and the head shorter, extended the limbs into the third dimension, and gave the figure more vitality and ease. His Apoxyomenos is a vagrant son of the Diadumenos; Polycleitus' athlete bound a :fillet above his brow, Lysippus' scrapes the oil and dust from his arm with a bronze strigil, and achieves a greater slenderness and grace. More attractive and alive, if we judge from the marble copy in the Delphi Museum, was his portrait of Agias, a young Thessalian nobleman. Once free, Lysippus struck out into new fields, abandoning the type for the individual, the conventional for the impressionistic,• and almost creating portrait sculpture among the
Greeks. Philip interrupted his wars and amours to sit for Lysippus; Alexander  4


JET us, before facing the melancholy spectacle of the Peloponnesian War, L  glance at the Greek world outside of Attica. Our knowledge of these other states in this period is so fragmentary that we are left to assume-what we cannot prove-that they shared to a minor degree in the cultural blossoming of the Golden Age.
In 459 Pericles, anxious to control Egyptian grain, sent a great fleet to expel the Persians from Egypt. The expedition failed, and thereafter Pericles adopted the policy of Themistocles-to win the world by commerce rather than by war. Throughout the fifth century Egypt and Cyprus continued under Per sian rule. Rhodes remained free, and the merger of its three cities into one in 408 prepared it to become in the Hellenistic period one of the richest commer cial centers in the Mediterranean. The Greek cities of Asia preserved their independence, won at Mycale in 479, until the destruction of the Athenian Empire left them helpless again before the tribute collectors of the Great King. The Greek colonies in Thrace and on the Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Euxine prospered under Athenian domination, but were impoverished by the Peloponnesian War. Under Archelaus Macedonia passed out of barbarism and became one of the powers of the Greek world: good roads were laid down, a disciplined army was formed out of the hardy mountaineers, a handsome new capital was built at Pella, and many Greek geniuses, like Timotheus, Zeuxis, and Euripides, found welcome at the court. Boeotia in this period produced Pindar, and gave to Greece, in the Boeotian Confederacy, an unappreciated example of how independent states might live in peace and co-operation.
In Italy the Greek cities suffered from frequent wars, and from Athenian ascendancy in maritime trade. In 443 Pericles sent out a group of Hellenes, gathered from different states, to establish near the site of Sybaris the new col ony of Thurii, as an experiment in Panhellenic unity. Protagoras drew up a code of laws for the city, and Hippodamus the architect laid out the streets on a rectangular plan that was to be widely imitated in the following centuries. Within a few years the colonists divided into factions according to their origin, and most of the Athenians, probably including Herodotus, went back to Athens.
437
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVID
Sicily, always turbulent but always fertile, continued to grow in wealth and culture. Selinus and Acragas built massive temples; and under Theron Acragas became so rich that Empedocles remarked: "The men of Acragas devote them selves wholly to luxury as if they were to die tomorrow, but they furnish their houses as if they were to live forever.'n Gelon I, when he died in 478, left Syracuse a system of administration almost as effective as that which Napoleon bequeathed to modern France. Under his brother and successor, Hieron I, the city became a center not only of trade and wealth, but of literature, science, and art. There, too, luxury reached dizzy heights: Syracusan banquets became a byword for extravagance, and "Corinthian girls" were so numerous in the city that any man who slept at home was considered a saint.9 The citizens were quick of mind and sharp of tongue; they enjoyed good oratory to their ruin, and crowded to hear, in their magnificent open-air theater, the comedies of Epicharmus and the tragedies of Aeschylus.• Hieron was a tyrant of bad temper and good will, cruel to his enemies and generous to his friends. He opened his court and purse to Simonides, Bacchylides, Pindar, and Aeschylus, and with their help made Syracuse for a moment the intellectual capital of Greece.
But man cannot live on art alone. The Syracusans thirsted for the wine of freedom, and after the death of Hieron they deposed his brother and set up a limited democracy. The other Greek cities in the island took courage and likewise expelled their dictators; the trading classes overthrew the landowning aristocracies, and established a commercial democracy superimposed upon a system of ruthless shivery. After some sixty years, war ended this interlude of liberty as it had ended another through Gelon I. In 409 the Carthaginians, who had kept alive through three generations the memory of Hamilcar's defeat at Himera, invaded Sicily with an armada of fifteen hundred ships and twenty thousand men under Hamilcar's grandson, Hannibal. He laid siege to Selinus, which had become pacific under prosperity, and had neglected to keep its defenses in repair. The surprised city appealed for help to Acragas and Syra cuse, whose comfortable citizens responded with Spartan leisureliness. Selinus was taken, all the survivors were massacred and mutilated, and the city became a part of the Carthaginian Empire. Hannibal proceeded to Himera, captured it with ease, and put three thousand prisoners to torture and death to appease the shade of his grandfather. A plague decimated his troops and took off Hanni bal himself as they besieged Acragas, but his successor mollified the gods of Carthage by burning alive his own son as an offering. The Carthaginians took the city, took Gela and Camarina, and marched on toward Syracuse. The terrified Syracusans, interrupted in their banquets, gave absolute power to their ablest
The theater was probably built under Hieron I (478-67), and rebuilt under Hieron II (270-16). Much of it survives; and many ancient Greek dramas have been staged in it in our century.
CHAP. XVIII)	THE   SUICIDE  OF GREECE	439
general, Dionysius. But Dionysius made peace with the Carthaginians, ceded to them all southern Sicily, and used his troops to establish a second dictator ship (405). It was not all treachery. Dionysius knew that resistance was use less; he surrendered everything but his army and his city, and resolved to strengthen both until he too, like Gelon, could expel the invaders from Sicily.
HOW THE GREAT WAR BEGAN
Just as the simple soul must picture deity in the form of a man, so the simple citizen must conceive the causes of war to be personal-usually one person. Even Aristophanes, like some gossips of his time, would have it that Pericles brought on the Peloponnesian War by attacking Megara, because Megara had offended Aspasia.1
It is probable that Pericles, who had not hesitated to conquer Aegina, had dreamed of completing Athens' control of Greek trade by dominating not only Megara but Corinth, which was to Greece what Istanbul is to the eastern Mediterranean today-a door and a key to half a continent's trade. But the basic cause of the war was the growth of the Athenian Empire, and the development of Athenian control over the commercial and political life of the Aegean. Athens allowed free trade there in time of peace, but only by imperial sufferance; no vessel might sail that sea without her consent. Athenian agents decided the destination of every vessel that left the grain ports of the north; Methone, starving with drought, had to ask Athens' leave to import a little corn.' Athens defended this domination as a vital necessity; she was dependent upon imported food, and was deter mined to guard the routes by which that food came. In policing the ave nues of international trade Athens performed a real service to peace and prosperity in the Aegean, but the process became more and more irksome as the pride and wealth of the subject cities grew. The funds that these had contributed for defense against Persia were being used for the adorn ment of Athens, even for the financing of Athenian wars upon other Greeks." Periodically the assessment had been increased until it was now, in 432, some 460 talents ($2,300,000) per year. Athens reserved to Athe nian courts the right to try all cases, arising within the Confederacy, that involved Athenian citizens or major crimes. If any city resisted, it was reduced by force; so Pericles with efficient dispatch suppressed rebellions in Aegina (457), Euboea (446), and Samos (440). If we may believe Thucydides, the democratic leaders at Athens, while making liberty the idol of their policy among Athenians, frankly recognized that the Con-
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVDI
federacy of free cities had become an empire of force. "You should re member," says Thucydides' Cleon to the Assembly (427), "that your empire is a despotism exercised over unwilling subjects who are always con spiring against you; they do not obey in return for any kindness which you do them to your own injury, but only in so far as you are their master; they have no love for you, but they are held down by force.,,a The inherent contradiction between the worship of liberty and the despotism of empire co-operated with the individualism of the Greek states to end the Golden Age.
The resistance to Athenian policy came from nearly every state in Greece.' Boeotia fought off at Coronea (447) the attempt of Athens to include it in the Empire. Some subject cities, and others that feared to become subject, appealed to Sparta to check the Athenian power. The Spartans were not eager for war, knowing the strength and valor of the Athenian fleet; but the old racial antipathy between Dorian and Ionian inflamed them, and the Athenian custom of establishing in every city democracies dependent upon the Empire seemed to the landowning oli garchy of Sparta a threat to aristocratic government everywhere. For a time the Spartans contented themselves with supporting the upper classes in every city, and slowly forging a united front against Athens.
Surrounded by enemies abroad and at home, Pericles worked for peace and prepared for war. The army, he calculated, could protect Attica, or all of Attica s population gathered within Athens' walls; and the navy could keep open the routes by which Euxine or Egyptia1_1 grain might enter Athens' walled port. It was his judgment that no real concessions could be made without endangering that supply of ·food; it seemed to him, as now to England, a choice between empire and starvation. Nevertheless he sent envoys to all the Greek states, inviting them to an Hellenic Con ference which would seek a peaceful solution of the problems that were leading to war. Sparta refused to attend, feeling that her acceptance would be construed as an acknowledgment of Athenian hegemony, and at her secret suggestion' so many other states rejected the invitation that the project fell through. Meanwhile, says Thucydides, in a sentence that ex plains much history, "The Peloponnesus and Athens were both full of young men whose inexperience made them eager to take up arms.'"'
These basic factors being present, the coming of war awaited some provocative incident. In 435 _Corcyra, a Corinthian colony, declared itself independent of Corinth; and presently she joined the Athenian Confeder acy for protection. Corinth sent a fleet to reduce the island; Athens, ap-
CHAP. XVIII)	THE  SUICIDE  OF GREECE	441
pealed to by the victorious democrats of Corcyra, sent a fleet to help them. An indecisive battle took place, in which the navies of Corcyra and Athens fought against those of Megara and Corinth. In 432 Potidaea, a city in Chalcidice tributary to Athens but Corinthian in blood, attempted to expel the Athenian power. Pericles sent an army to besiege it, but its resistance continued for two years, and weakened the military resources and prestige of Athens. When Megara gave further help to Corinth Pericles ordered all Megarian products excluded from the markets of Attica and the Empire. Megara and Corinth appealed to Sparta; Sparta proposed to Athens a repeal of this Megarian decree; Pericles agreed on condition that Sparta permit foreign states to trade with Laconia. Sparta refused; instead, she laid down as a prerequisite to peace, that Athens should acknowledge the full inde pendence of all Greek cities-i.e., that Athens should surrender her Em pire. Pericles persuaded the Athenians to reject this -demand; and Sparta declared war.20
FROM THE PLAGUE TO THE PEACE
Nearly all Greece ranged itself on one or the other side. Every state in the Peloponnesus except Argos supported Sparta; so did Corinth, Megara, Boeotia, Locris, and Phocis. Athens, at the outset, had the half-hearted help of the Ionian and Euxine cities and the Aegean isles. Like the World War of our own time, the first phase of the struggle was a contest between sea power and land power. The Athenian fleet laid waste the coastal towns of the Peloponnesus, while the Spartan army invaded Attica, seized the crops, and ruined the soil. Pericles called the population of Attica within the walls of Athens, refused to let his troops go out to battle, and advised the excited Athenians to bide their time and wait for their navy to win the war.
His calculations were strategically sound, but they ignored a factor that almost decided the conflict. The crowding of Athens led (430) to a plague
-probably malaria11-which raged for nearly three years, killing a fourth of the soldiers and a great number of the civilian population.• The people, desperate with the combined sufferings of epidemic,and war, accused Peri cles of responsibility for both. Cleon and others indicted him on the charge of misusing public funds; since he had apparently employed state money to bribe the Spartan kings to peace, he was unable to give a satis factory accounting; he was convicted, deposed from office, and fined the
•Cf.Lucretius' powerful description of this plague in De ReTUm Natura, vi, 1138-1286.