Industry was in the hands of independent craftsmen, working in their separate shops. Most such men were freemen, but an increasing proportion were freedmen or slaves. Labor was highly differentiated, and produced for the market rather than for the individual customer. Competition by slaves depressed the wages of free workers, and reduced the proletariat to a bitter life in slums. Strikes among these men were impracticable and rare,63 but slave uprisings were frequent; the "First Servile vVar" (139 B.c.) was not the :first. When public discontent became acute, some cause could be found for a war that would provide universal employment, spread depreciated money, and turn the wrath of the people against a foreign foe whose lands would feed the Roman people victorious, or receive them defeated and dead.64 The free workers had unions or guilds (collegia), but these seldom concerned themselves with wages, hours, or conditions of labor. Tradition credited Numa with having established or legalized them; in any case, the seventh century B.C. had organizations of flute players, goldsmiths, copper smiths, fullers, shoemakers, potters, dyers, and carpenters.65 The "Dionysian Artists"-actors and musicians-were among the most widespread associa tions in the ancient world. By the second century B.c. we :find guilds of cooks, tanners, builders, bronzeworkers, ironworkers, ropemakers, weav ers; but these were probably as old as the others. The chief aim of such unions was the simple pleasure of social intercourse; many of them were also mutual-benefit societies to defray the cost of funerals.
The state regulated not only the guilds, but mar:; aspects of Rome's eco nomic life. It supervised the operation of mines and other governmental concessions or contracts. It quieted agitation among the plebs by importing food and distributing it at nominal prices to the poor or to all applicants. It levied :fines upon monopolists, and it nationalized the salt industry to end a monopoly that had raised the price of salt beyond the reach of the work ing class. Its commercial policy was liberal: after overcoming Carthage it opened the western Mediterranean to all trade; and it protected Utica and, later, Delos on condition that they remain free ports, permitting the entry and exit of goods without fee. At various times, however, it forbade the export of arms, iron, wine, oil, or cereals; it laid a customs duty, usually of
CHAP. IV)	STOIC  ROME	81
two and a half per cent, upon the entry of most products into Rome, and afterward extended this modest tariff to other cities. Vntil 147 B.C. it required a tributum, or property tax, throughout Italy. All in all, its revenues were modest; and like other civilized states it used them chiefly for war.66
THE CITY
Through taxes, spoils, indemnities, and inflowing population Rome was now (202 B.c.) one of the major cities of the Mediterranean ensemble. The census of 2 34 listed 270,713 citizens-i.e., free adult males; the figure fell sharply during the great war, but rose to 258,318 in 189, and 322,000 in
147. We may calculate a population of approximately 1, 100,000 souls in
the city-state in 189 B.c., of whom perhaps 275,000 lived within the walls of Rome. Italy south of the Rubicon had some 5,000,000 inhabitants.67 Immi gration, the abs9rption of conquered peoples, the influx, emancipation, and enfranchisement of slaves, were already beginning the ethnic changes that by Nero's time would make Rome the New York of antiquity, half native and half everything.
Two main cross streets divided the city into quarters, each with its adminis trative officials and tutelary deities. Chapels ,vere raised at important intersec tions, and statues at lesser ones, to the /ares compitales, or gods of the crossings
-a pretty custom still found in Italy. Most streets ,vere plain earth; some were paved with small smooth stones from river beds, as in many Mediterranean cities today; about 174 the censor began to surface the major thoroughfares with lava blocks. In 312 Appius Claudius the Blind built the first aqueduct, bringing fresh water to a city that had till then depended upon springs and wells and the muddy Tiber. Piping water from aqueduct-fed reservoirs, the aristocracy began to bathe more than once a week; and soon after Hannibal's defeat Rome opened its first municipal baths. At an unknown date Roman or Etruscan engineers built the Cloaca Maxima, whose massive stone arches were so wide that a wagon loaded with hay could pass under them.68 Smaller sewers were added to drain the marshes that surrounded and invaded Rome. The city's refuse and rain water passed through openings in the streets into these drains and thence into the Tiber, whose pollution was a lasting problem of Roman life. The embellishment of the city was almost confined to its temples. Houses adhered to the plain Etruscan style already described, except that the exterior was more often of brick or stucco, and (as a sign of growing literacy) was often defaced with graffiti-"scratchings" of strictly fugitive verse or prose. Temples were mostly of wood, with terra-cotta revetments and decorations, and followed Etruscan plans. A temple to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva stood on the Capitoline hill; another to Diana on the Aventine; and others rose (be-
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IV
fore 201 B.c.) to Juno, Mars, Janus, Venus, Victory, Fortune, Hope, etc. In 303 Caius Fabius added to his leguminous clan name the cognomen of Pictor, painter, by executing frescoes in the Temple of Health on the Capitoline. Greek sculptors in Rome made statues of Roman gods and heroes in terra cotta, marble, or bronze. In 293 they erected on the Capitol a bronze Jupiter of such Olym pian proportions that it could be seen from the Alban hills twenty miles away. About 296 the aediles set up a bronze she-wolf, to which later artists added the figures of Romulus and Remus. \Ve do not know if this is the group described by Cicero, or if either of these is identical with the existing Wolf of the Capital; in any case, we have in this a masterpiece of the highest order, dead metal alive in every muscle and nerve.
While through painting and statuary the aristocracy commemorated its victories and recommended its lineage, the people consoled themselves with music md the dance, comedies and games. The roads and homes of Italy resounded with individual or choral song; men sang at banquets, boys and girls chorused hymns in religious processions, bride and groom were escorted with hymeneal chants, and every corpse was buried with song. The flute was the most popular instrument, but the lyre too had its devotees, and became the favorite accompaniment of lyric verse. ,vhen great holidays came, the Romans crowded to amphitheater or stadium, and pullulated under the sun while hirelings, captives, criminals, or slaves ran and jumped, or, better, fought and died. Two great amphitheaters-the Circus Maximus (attributed to the first Tarquin) and the Circus Flaminius (221 B.c.) admitted without charge all free men and women who came in time to find seats. The expense was met at first by the state, then by the aediles out of their own purse, often, in the later Republic, by candidates for the con sulate; the cost increased generation by generation, until in effect it barred the poor from seeking office.
Perhaps we should class with these spectacles the official "triumph" of a returning general. Only those were eligible for it who had won a campaign in which 5000 of the enemy had been slain; the unfortunate commander who had won with less slaughter received merely an ovation-for him no ox was sacrificed, but only a sheep (ovis). The procession formed outside the city, at whose borders the general and his troops were required to lay down their arms; thence it entered through a triumphal arch that set a fashion for a thousand monuments. Trumpeters led the march; after them came towers or floats representing the captured cities, and pictures showing the exploits of the victors; then wagons rumbled by, heavy with gold, silver, works of art, and other spoils. Marcellus' triumph was memorable for the
stolen statuary of Syracuse (2 12); Scipio Africanus in 207 displayed 14,000
and, in 202, 123,000 pounds of silver taken from Spain and Carthage. Seventy
CHAP. IV)	STOIC  ROME	83
white oxen followed, walking philosophically to their death; then the cap tured chiefs of the enemy; then lictors, harpers, pipers, and incense-bearers; then, in a flamboyant chariot, the general himself, wearing a purple toga and a crown of gold, and bearing an ivory scepter and a laurel branch as emblems of victory and the insignia of Jove. In the chariot with him might be his children; beside it rode his relatives; behind them his secretaries and aides. Last came the soldiers, some carrying the prizes awarded them, every one wearing a crown; some praising their leaders, others deriding them; for it was an inviolable tradition that on these brief occasions the speech of the army should be free and unpunished, to remind the proud victors of their fallible mortality. The general mounted the Capitol to the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, laid his loot at the feet of the gods, presented an animal in sacrifice, and usually ordered the captive chieftains to be slain as an additional thank-offering. It was a ceremony well designed to stir mili tary ambition and reward military effort; for man's vanity yields only to hunger and love.
POST MORTEM
War was the most dramatic feature of a Roman's life, but it did not play so absorbing a role as in the pages of Rome's historians. Perhaps even more than with us his existence centered about his family and his home. News reached him when it was old, so that his passions co ld not be stirred every day by the gathered turmoil of the world. The great events of his career were not politics and war, but anxious births, festal marriages, and somber· deaths.
Old age was not then the abandoned desolation that so often darkens it in an individualistic age. The young never questicned their duty to care for the old; the old remained to the end the first consideration and the last authority; and after their death their graves were honored as long :!S a male descendant survived. Funerals were as elaborate as weddings. The proces sion was led by a hired band of wailing women, whose organized hysteria was cramped by a law of the Twelve Tables71 forbidding them to tear out their hair. Then came the flute players, limited by a like Solonic law to ten; then some dancers, one of whom impersonated the dead. Then followed in strange parade actors wearing the death masks, or waxen images, of those ancestors of the corpse who h::!d held some magistracy. The deceased came next, in splendor rivaling a triumph, clothed in the full regalia of the highest office he had held, comfortable in a bier overspread with purple and gold embroidered coverlets, and surrounded by the weapons and armor of the enemies he had slain. Behind him came t!1e dead man's sons, dressed and
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IV
veiled in black, his daughters unveiled, his relatives, clansmen, friends, clients, and freedmen. In the Forum the procession stopped, and a son or kinsman pronounced a eulogy. Life was worth living, if only for such a funeral.
In the early centuries Rome's dead had been cremated; now, usually, they were buried, though some obstinate conservatives pref erred combustion. In either case, the remains were placed in a tomb that became an altar of wor ship upon which pious descendants periodically placed some flowers and a little food. Here, as in Greece and the Far East, the stability of morals and society was secured by the worship of ancestors and by the belief that some where their spirits survived and watched. If they were very great and good, the dead, in Hellenized Roman mythology, passed to the Elysian Fields, or the Islands of the Blessed; nearly all, however, descended into the earth, to the shadowy realm of Orcus and Pluto. Pluto, the Roman form of the Greek god Hades, was armed with a mallet to stun the dead; Orcus (our ogre) was the monster who then devou{ed the corpse. Because Pluto was the most exalted of the underground deities, and because the earth was the ultimate source of wealth and often the repository of accumulated food and goods, he was worshiped also as the god of riches and plutocrats; and his wife Proserpina-the strayed daughter of Ceres-became the goddess of the germinating corn. Sometimes the Roman Hell was conceived as a place of punishment; 72 in most cases it was pictured as the abode of half formless shades that had been men, not distinguished from one another by reward or punishment, but all equally suffering eternal darkness and final anonymity. There at last, said Lucian, one would find democracy.78
CHAPTER  V


PATRICIANS AND PLEBS
HO were the patricians? Livy 1 thought that Romulus had chosen a hundred clan heads of his tribe to help him establish Rome and be
his council or senate. These men were later called patres-"fathers"-and their descendants patricii-"derived from the fathers." Modem theory, which lives by nibbling at tradition, likes to explain the patricians as alien con querors, perhaps Sabines, who invaded Latium and thereafter ruled the Latin plebs, or populace, as a lower caste. \Ve may believe that they were composed of clans that through economic or military superiority had ac quired the best lands, and had transformed their agricultural leadership into political mastery. These victorious clans-the .Manlii, Valerii, Aemilii, Cor nelii, Fabii, Horatii, Claudii, Julii, etc.-continued for five centuries to give Rome generals, consuls, and laws. When the three original tribes united, their clan heads made a senate of some three hundred members. They were not such lords of comfort and luxury as their descendants; often they put their own hands to the ax or the plow, lived vigorously on simple fare, and wore clothing spun in their homes. The plebs admired them even when it fought them, and applied to almost anything appertaining to them the term classicus, "classical"-i.e., of the highest rank or class.2
Close to them in wealth, but far below them in political power, were the
equites, or businessmen. Some were rich enough to win their way into the
.Senate, and formed there the second part of its constituent patres (et) con scripti-i.e., "patricians and coinscribed men." These two classes were called the "orders," and were termed boni, "the good"; for early civilizations thought of virtue in terms of rank, ability, and power; virtus to the Roman meant manliness, the qualities that make a man ('vir). Populus, "people," took in only these upper classes; and originally it was in this sense that those famous initials were used-SP QR (Senatus Populusque Romanus)-which were to mark so proudly a hundred thousand monuments.3 Gradually, as democracy fought its way, the word populus came to include the plebs.
This was the main body of Roman citizens. Some were artisans or trades-
21
22	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.II
men, some were freedmen, many were peasants; perhaps, in the beginning, they were the conquered natives of the city's hills. Some were attached as clientes, or dependents, to an upper-class patronus; in return for land and protection they helped him in peace, served under him in war, and voted in the assemblies as he told them.
Lowest of all were the slaves. Under the kings they had been costly and few, and therefore had been treated with consideration as valuable members of the family. In the sixth century B.C., when Rome began her career of con quest, war captives were sold in rising number to the aristocracy, the busi ness classes, and even to plebeians; and the status of the slave sank. Legally he could be dealt with as any other piece of property; in theory, and accord ing to the custom of the ancients, his life had been forfeited by defeat, and his enslavement was a merciful commutation of his death. Sometimes he man aged his master's property, business, or funds; sometimes he became a teacher, writer, actor, craftsman, laborer, tradesman, or artist, and paid his master part of his earnings. In this or other ways he might earn enough to buy his freedom and become a member of the plebs.
Contentment is as rare among men as it is natural among animals, and no form of government has ever satisfied its subjects. In this system the business men were piqued by their exclusion from the Senate, the richer plebeians by their exclusion from the equites; and the poorer plebeians resented their poverty, their political disabilities, and their liability to enslavement for debt. The law of the early Republic allowed a creditor to imprison a per sistently defaulting debtor in a private dungeon, to sell him into slavery, even to kill him. Joint creditors might, said the law, cut up the corpse of the defaulting debtor and divide it among them-a provision apparently never enforced.4 The plebs demanded that these laws should be repealed and the burden of accrued debt reduced; that the lands won in war and owned by the state should be distributed among the poor instead of being given, or sold at nominal prices, to the rich; that plebeians should be eligible to the magis tracies and the priesthoods, be permitted to intermarry with the "orders," and have a representative of their class among the highest officials of the gov ernment. The Senate sought to frustrate the agitation by fomenting ,vars, but it was shocked to find its calls to the colors ignored. In 494 B.C. large masses of the plebs "seceded" to the Sacred l\,lount on the river Anio, three miles from the city, and declared that they would neither fight nor work for Rome until their demands had been met. The Senate used every diplomatic or religious device to lure the rebels back; then, fearing that invasion from without might soon be added to revolt within, it agreed to a cancellation or reduction of debts, and the establishment of two tribunes and three aediles as the elected defenders of the plebs. The plebs returned, but only after tak-
CHAP.II)	THE  STRUGGLE  FOR DEMOCRACY
ing a solemn oath to kill any man who should ever lay violent hands upon their representatives in the government.5
This was the opening battle in a class war that ended only with the Re public that it destroyed. In 486 the consul Spurius Cassius proposed an allot ment of captured lands among the poor; the patricians accused him of currying popular favor with a view to making himself king, and had him killed; this was probably not the first in a long line of agrarian proposals and Senatorial assassinations, culminating in the Gracchi and Caesar. In 439 Spurius Maelius, who during a famine had distributed wheat to the poor at a low price or free, was slain in his home by an emissary of the Senate, again on the charge of plotting to be king.6 In 384 Marcus Manlius, who had heroically defended Rome against the Gauls, was put to death on the same charge after he had spent his fortune relieving insolvent debtors.
The next step in the climb of the plebs was a demand for definite, written, and secular laws. Heretofore the patrician priests had been the recorders and interpreters of the statutes, had kept their records secret, and had used their monopoly, and the ritual requirements of the law, as weapons against social change. After a long resistance to the new demands, the Senate (454) sent a commission of three patricians to Greece to study and report on the legisla tion of Solon and other lawmakers. When they returned, the Assembly
(451) chose ten men-decemviri-to formulate a new code, and gave them supreme governmental power in Rome for two years. This commission, under the presidency of a resolute reactionary, Appius Claudius, trans formed the old customary law of Rome into the famous Twelve Tables, submitted them to the Assembly (which passed them with some changes), and displayed them in the Forum for all who would-and could-to read. This seemingly trivial event was epochal in Roman history and in the history of mankind; it was the first written form of that legal structure which was to be Rome's most signal achievement and her greatest contribution to civilization.
\Vhen the second year of the commission's tenure ended, it refused to restore the government to the consuls and tribunes, and continued to exercise supreme
-and ever more irresponsible-authority. Appius Claudius, says a story suspi ciously like Lucretia's, was stirred with a passion for the beautiful plebeian Virginia, and, to secure her for his pleasure, had her declared a slave. Her father, Lucius Virginius, protested; and when Claudius refused to hear him he slew his daughter, rushed out to his legion, and asked its aid in overthrowing the new despot. The enraged plebs once more "seceded" to the Sacred Mount, "imitating," says Livy, "the moderation of their fathers by abstaining from all injury." 7 Leaming that the army was supporting the plebs, the patricians gathered in the senate house, deposed the Decemvirs, banished Claudius, restored
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. II
the consulate, enlarged the tribunate, recognized the inviolability of the people's tribunes, and confirmed to the plebs the right of appealing to the Assembly of the Centuries from the decision of any magistrate.8 Four years later (445) the tribune Caius Canuleius moved that the plebs should have the right of inter marriage with patricians, and that plebeians should be eligible to the cons_ulate. The Senate, again faced by threats of war from vengeful neighbors, yielded the first point, and averted the second by agreeing that thereafter six of the tribunes chosen by the Centuria! Assembly should have the authority of consuls. The plebs responded handsomely by choosing all these tribuni militum consu/ari potestate from the patrician class.
The long war with Veii (405-396), and the assault of the Gauls upon Rome, unified the nation for a time, and stilled internal strife. But victory and disaster alike left the plebeians destitute. While they fought for their country their lands were neglected or ravaged, and the interest on their debts mounted beyond possible repayment. The lenders took no excuse, but demanded principal and interest, or the imprisonment and enslavement of the borrowers. In 376 the tribunes Licinius and Sextius proposed that interest already paid should be deducted from the principal, the balance to be met in three years; that no man should be allowed to own more than five hundred iugera (about three hundred acres) of land, or to use on them more than a certain proportion of slaves to free laborers; and that one of the two consuls should regularly be chosen from the plebs. For a decade the patricians resisted these proposals; meanwhile, says Dio Cassius, "they stirred up war after war, that the people might be too occupied to agitate about the land." 9 At last, threatened with a third secession, the Senate accepted the "Licinian laws," and Camillus, leader of the conservatives, celebrated the reconciliation of the classes by building a stately Temple of Concord in the Forum.
It was a major step in the growth of Rome's limited democracy. From that
moment the plebs progressed rapidly towards a formal equality with the "orders" in politics and law. In 356 a plebeian was made dictator for a year; in 351 the censorship, in 337 the praetorship, and in 300 the priesthoods were opened to the plebs. Finally (287) the Senate agreed that the decisions of the Tribal Assembly should also have the force of law, even when contrary to the resolu tions of the Senate. Since in this Assembly the patricians could easily be out voted by the plebs, this lex Hortensia was the capstone and triumph of Roman democracy.
Nevertheless, the power of the Senate soon recovered after these defeats. The demand for land was quieted by sending Romans as colonists to conquered soil. The cost of winning and holding office-which was unpaid-automatically dis qualified the poor. The richer plebeians, having secured political equality and opportunity, now co-operated with the patricians in checking radical legisla tion; the poorer plebeians, shorn of financial means, ceased for two centuries to play a significant role in the affairs of Rome. Businessmen fell in with patrician policy because it gave them contracts for public ,rnrks, openings for colonial


Medicine, till the third century, was largely a matter of family herbs, magic, and prayer; the gods alone could heal; and to make cure certain a special god was invoked for each disease 45-as one now invokes a spe cialist. Against the mosquitoes of the R9man campagna appeal was made to the goddesses Febris and Mephitis, as, until our cenrury, the Romans petitioned La Afado1111a della Febbre, Our Lady of the Fever.46 Healing shrines and sacred waters were as common as today. The temple of Aescu lapius was a busy center of religious healing, where diet and hydrotherapy, peaceful surroundings and a quiet routine, prayer and the soothing rirual of worship, the aid of practical physicians and the cheerfulness of skilled attend:mts, conspired to restore confidence and to effect apparently miracu lous cures.47 Nevertheless, there were slave doctors and quacks in Rome five centuries before Christ; and some of these practiced dentistry, for the Twelve Tables forbade the burial of gold with the dead except where gold had been used to wire teeth.48 In 219 we hear of the first freeman physician in Rome-Archagathus the Peloponnesian. His surgical opera-
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IV
tions so delighted the patricians that the Senate voted him an official resi dence and the freedom of the city; later his "mania for cutting and burning" won him the name of Carnifex, butcher.49 From that time onward Greek physicians flocked to Rome, and made the practice of medicine there a Greek monopoly.
THE  GROWTH OF THE  SOIL
The Roman of those centuries had little need of medicine, for his active life in farming or soldiering kept him healthy and strong. He took to the land as the Greek to the sea; he based his life on the soil, built his towns as meeting places for farmers and their products, organized his armies and his state on his readiness to defend and extend his holdings, and conceived his gods as spirits of the living earth and the nourishing sky.
As far back as we can reach into Rome's past we find private property.50 Part of the land, however, was ager publicus-public acreage usually acquired by conquest and owned by the state. The peasant family of the early Republic owned two or three acres, tilled them with all hands and occasionally a slave, and lived abstemiously on the product. They slept on stra\v,51 rose early, stripped to the waist,52 and plowed and harrowed behind leisurely oxen whose droppings served as fertilizer, and their flesh as a religious offering and a festival food. Human offal was also used to enrich the soil, but chemical fertilizers were rare in Italy before the Empire. .!Vlanuals of scientific agriculture were imported from Carthage and Greece. Crops were rotated between grains and legumes, and lands were turned periodically to pasturage to prevent their exhaustion. Veg etables and fruits were grown in abundance, and formed, next to grains, the chief articles of food. Garlic was already a favorite seasoning. Some aristocratic families derived their names in part from the vegetables traditionally favored in their plantings: Lentuli, Caepiones, Fabii, from lentils, onions, beans. Culture of the fig, olive, and grape gradually encroached upon cereal and vegetable crops. Olive oil took the place of butter in the diet and of soap in the bath; it served as fuel in torches and lamps and was the chief ingredient in the unguents made necessary for hair and skin by the dry winds and fiery sun of the i\'ledi terranean summer. Sheep were the favorite herd, for the Italians preferred cloth ing of wool. Swine and poultry were raised in the farmyard, and almost every family nursed a garden of flowers.54
War transformed this picture of rural toil. Many of the farmers who changed plowshares for swords were overcome by the enemy or the town and never ret:ur?ed to their fields; many others found their holdings so damaged by armies or neglect that they had not the courage to begin anew; others were broken by accumulated debt. Such men sold their lands at
CHAP. IV)	STOIC  ROME	77
depression prices to aristocrats or agricultural capitalists who merged the little homesteads into latifundia (literally, broad farms), turned these vast areas from cereals to flocks and herds, orchards and vines, and manned them with war-captured slaves under an overseer who was often himself a slave. The owners rode in now and then to look at their property; they no longer put their hands to the work, but lived as absentee landlords in their sub urban villas or in Rome. This process, already under way in the fourth century B.c., had by the end of the third produced a debt-ridden tenant class in the countryside, and in the capital a propertyless, rootless proletariat whose sullen discontent would destroy the Republic that peasant toil had made.
INDUSTRY
The soil was poor in minerals-a fact that would write much economic and political history in Italy. There was no gold and little silver; there was a fair supply of iron, some copper, lead, tin, and zinc, but too scarce to support an industrial development. The state owned all mines in the empire, but leased them to private operators, who worked them profitably by using up the lives of thousands of slaves. Metallurgy and technology made few advances. Bronze was still employed more frequently than iron, and only the best and latest mines were equipped with the winches, windlasses, and chain buckets that Archimedes and others had set up in Sicily and Egypt. The chief fuel was wood; trees were cut also for houses and ships and furniture; mile by mile, decade by decade, the forest retreated up the mountainside to meet the timber line. The most pros perous industry was the manufacture of weapons and tools in Campania. There was no factory system, except for armament and pottery. Potters made not only dishes but bricks and tiles, conduits and pipes; at Arretium and elsewhere the potters were copying Greek models and learning to make artistic wares. As early as the sixth century the textile industry, in the design, preparation, and dyeing of linen and wool, had grown beyond the domestic stage despite the busy spinning of daughters, wives, and slaves; free and unfree weavers were brought together in small factories, which produced not only for the local mar ket but also for export trade.
Industrial production for nonlocal consumption was arrested by difficulties of transport. Roads ,vere poor, bridges unsafe, oxcarts slow, inns rare, robbers plentiful. Hence traffic moved by choice along canals and rivers, while coastal towns imported by sea rather than from their hinterland. By 202, however, the Romans had built three of their great "consular roads"-so called because usually named after the consuls or censors who began them. Soon these high ways would far surpass in durability and extent the Persian and Carthaginian roads that had served them as models. The oldest of them was the via Latina which, about 370 B.c., brought Romans out to the Alban hills. In 312 Appius
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IV
Claudius the Blind, with the labor of thousands of criminals,55 started the via Appia, or Appian Way, between Rome and Capua; later it reached out to Beneventum, Venusia, Brundisium, and Tarentum; its 333 English miles bound the two coasts, eased trade with Greece and the East, and collaborated with the other roads to make Italy one nation. In 241 the censor Aurelius Cotta began the Aurelian Way from Rome through Pisa and Genoa to Antibes. Caius Flarninius in 2 20 opened the Flarninian Way to Arirninum; and about the same time the Valerian \Vay connected Tibur with Corfinium. Slowly the majestic network grew: the Aemilian Way climbed north from Ariminum through Bononia and Mutina to Placentia (187); the Posturnian Way linked Genoa with Verona ( 148); and the via Popilia led from Ariminum through Ravenna to Padua
(132). In the following century roads would dart out from Italy to York, Vienna, Thessalonica, and Damascus, and would line the north African coast. They defended, unified, and vitalized the Empire by quickening the movement of troops, intelligence, customs, and ideas; they became great channels of com merce, and played no minor role in the peopling and enrichment of Italy and Europe.
Despite these highways, trade never flourished in Italy as in the eastern Medi terranean. The upper classes looked with contempt upon buying cheap and selling dear, and left trade to Greek and Oriental freedmen; while the country side contented itself with occasional fairs, and "ninth-day" markets in the towns. Foreign commerce was similarly moderate. Sea transport was risky; ships were small, made only six miles an hour sailing or rowing, hugged the coast, and for the most part kept timidly in port from November to March. Carthage controlled the western Mediterranean, the Hellenistic monarchies controlled the east, and pirates periodically swept out of their lairs upon merchants rela tively more honest than themselves. The Tiber was perpetually silting its mouth and blocking Rome's port at Ostia; two hundred vessels foundered there in one gale; besides, the current was so strong that the voyage upstream to Rome hardly repaid the labor and the cost. About 200 B.C. vessels began to put in at Puteoli, 1 50 miles south of Rome, and ship their goods overland to the capital.
To facilitate this external and internal trade it became necessary to establish a state-guaranteed system of coinage, measures, and weights.* Till the fourth century B.c. cattle were still accepted as a medium of exchange, since they were universally valuable and easily moved. As trade grew, rude chunks of copper (aes) were used as money (ca. 330 B.c.); estimate was originally aes timare, to value copper. The unit of value was the as (one)-i.e., one pound of copper by weight; ex-pend meant weighed out. When, about 338 B.c., a copper coinage was issued by the state, it often bore the image of an ox, a sheep, or a hog, and was accordingly called pecunia (peezts, cattle). In the First Punic War, says Pliny, "the Republic, not having means to meet its needs, reduced the as to
Some Roman measures: a 111odius was approximately a peck; a foot was II 5/8 English inches; 5 Roman feet made a pace (passus); 1000 paces made a mile (111ilia passuu111) of 1619 English yards; a iugentm was about 2/3 of an acre. Twelve ounces (unciae) made a pound.
CHAP, IV)	STOIC  ROME	79
two ounces of copper; by this contrivance a saving of five sixths was effected, and the public debt was liquidated." 56 By 202 the as had fallen to an ounce; and in 87 n.c. it was reduced to half an ounce to help finance the Social War. In 269 two silver coins were minted: the denarius, equal to ten asses, and cor responding to the Athenian drachma in the latter's depreciated Hellenistic•form; and the sestertius, representing two and a half asses, or a quarter of a denarius. In 2 I 7 appeared the first Roman gold coins-the aurei-with values of twenty, forty, and sixty sesterces. In metallic equivalence the as would equal two, the sesterce five, the denarius twenty, cents in the currency of the United States; but as precious metals were much less plentiful than now, and therefore had a purchasing power several times greater than today,57 we shall, ignoring price fluctuations before Nero, roughly equate the as, sesterce, denarius, and talent ( 6000 denarii) of the Roman Republic with six, fifteen, and sixty• cents, and
$3600 respectively, in terms of United States currency in 1942.*
The issuance of this guaranteed currency promoted the profession and operations of .finance. The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples; and the state continued to the end to use its strongly built shrines as repositories for public funds, perhaps on the theory that religious scruples would help discourage robbery. Moneylending was an old business, for the Twelve Tables had forbidden interest above eight and one third per cent per annum.60 The legal rate was lowered to five per cent in 347, and to zero in 342, but this Aristotelian prohibition was so easily evaded that the actual minimum rate averaged twelve per cent. Usury (above twelve per cent) was widespread, and debtors had periodi cally to be rescued from their accumulating obligations by bankruptcy or legislation. In 352 B.C. the government used a very modern method of relief: it took over such mortgages as offered a fair chance of repayment, and persuaded mortgagees to accept a lower interest rate on the others.61 One of the streets adjoining the Forum became a banker's row, crowded with the shops of the moneylenders (argentarii) and money-changers (trapezitae). Money could be borrowed on land, crops, securities, or gov ernment contracts, and for .financing commercial enterprises or voyages. Co-operative lending took the place of industrial jnsurance; instead of one banker completely underwriting a venture, several joined in providing the funds. Joint-stock companies existed chiefly for the performance of govern ment contracts let out on bids by the censor; they raised their capital by selling their stocks or bonds to the public in the form of pcrrtes or pcrrticulae
* In northern Italy, about 250 B.c., a bushel of wheat cost half a denarius (thirty cents); bed and board at an inn cost half an as (three cents) a day; 58 in Delos, in the second century B.c., a house of medium type rented for four denarii ($2-40) a month; in Rome, A.O. 50, a cup and saucer cost half an as (three cents).511
80	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IV
-"little parts," shares. These companies of "publicans"-i.e., men engaged on public or state undertakings-played an active role in supplying and transporting materials for the army and navy in the Second Punic War not without the usual attempts to cheat the government.62 Businessmen (equites) directed the larger of these enterprises, freedmen the smaller. Non governmental business was carried on by negotiatores, who usually provided their own funds.


Galen's teleology and monotheism won him favor with Christians, as later with Moslems. Nearly all his writings were lost to Europe in the chaos of the barbarian invasions, but in the East they were preserved by Arab scholars, and were translated from Arabic into Latin from the eleventh cen• tury onward. Galen became then an uncriticized authority, an Aristotle for medieval medicine.
The last creative age of Greek science ended with Ptolemy and Galen. Experiment ceased, dogma ruled; mathematics relapsed into restatements of geometry, biology into Aristotle, natural science into Pliny; and medicine marked time until the Arab and Jewish physicians of the Middle Ages re newed the noblest of the sciences.
POETS IN  THE  DESERT
Across the Red Sea from Egypt lay Arabia. Neither the Pharaohs nor the Achaemenids nor the Seleucids nor the Ptolemies nor the Romans had been able
Cf. the emphasis of current medicine on glandular secretions.
508	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIV
to conquer the mysterious peninsula. Arabia Desena knew only Arab nomads, but in the southwest a mountain range and its streams gaYe milder temperatures and fruitful vegetation to Arabia Felix, the Yemen of today. In those recesses the little kingdom of Saba hid, the Sheba of the Bible, so rich in frankincense and myrrh, cassia and cinnamon, aloes and nard, senna and gum and precious stones that the Sabateans could build at Mariaba and elsewhere cities proud with temples, palaces, and colonnades.40 Arab merchants not only sold Arab products at high prices, but carried on a caravan trade with northwestern Asia and an active commerce by sea with Egypt, Parthia, and India. In 25 B.C. Augustus sent Ae!ius Gallus to absorb the kingdom into the Empire; the legions failed to take Mariaba and returned to Egypt decimated by disease and heat. Augustus contented himself with destroying the Arab port at Adana (Aden) and thereby secured control of the trade between Egypt and India.
The main commercial route running north from Mariaba went through the northwest corner of the peninsula, known to the ancients as Arabia Petraea from its capital at Petra, some forty miles south of Jerusalem. The city had been named from the circle of steep crags within which it was strategically placed. There, in the second century B.c., the Nabatean Arabs established a kingdom that slowly grew rich on passing caravans, until its rule extended from Leuce Come on the Red Sea along the eastern border of Palestine through Gerasa and Bostra to Damascus. Under King Aretas IV (9 B.C.-A.D. 40) the country reached its zenith; Petra became a Hellenistic city, Aramaic in speech, Greek in art, Alexandrian in the splendor of its streets. To this time belong the finest of the giant tombs that were carved into the rocks outside the city-crude but powerful fafades of double-tiered Greek colonnades, sometimes a hundred feet in height. After Trajan annexed Arabia Petraea into the Empire (106), Bostra became the capital of the province of Arabia, and raised in its tum the architectural symbols of wealth and power. Petra decayed as Bostra and Palmyra became the crossroads of the desert caravans, and the great tombs lapsed into "the nighrstalls of nomad flocks." 41
. !he most stri ng !eature of the great Empire w it numerous and populous c1nes. Never again till our own century _h s u:baruzat10n been so pronounced. Lucullus, Pompey, C_aesar, He o_d, Hellemsnc 1 gs and Roman emperors prided themselves on founding new c1t1es and embell1shmg old ones. So, movina north ward along the eis em Me_diterrane coast, one could hardly go twenry- miles without_ encount rmg a c1ty-Raph1a (Rafa ,.G za, Ascalon, Joppa (Jaffa) Apolloma, Samana-Sebaste, and Caesarea (Ka1sana). These cities, thouo-h in Palestine, we_re alf_Greek in population a pre ominantly Greek in Jan age, culture, and mst1tut10ns; they were Hellemst1c bridgeheads in the pagan invasion of Jud a. Herod spent large_ sum_s m king Caesarea worthy of Augustus, for whom it :was name,?; he provided 1t with a fine harbor, a lofty temple, a theater, an amphitheater, sumptuous palaces, and many edifices of white stone." 42 Farther inland were other Greek Palestinian cities-Livias, Philadelphia, Gerasa
CHAP.A'XlV)	THE   HELLENISTIC  REVIVAL	509
(Djerasch), and Gadara (Katra). At Gerasa stand a hundred columns of the colonnade that lined the main street; and the ruins of temples, theater, baths, and aqueduct proclaim the affluence of the town in the second century A.D.
Gadara, where the remains of two theaters echo with memories of Greek plays, was famous for its schools, professors, and authors. Here, in the third century B.c., had lived Menippus, the Cynic philosopher and humorist whose satires taught that everything is vain except an upright life, and gave a model to Lucilius, Varro, and Horace. Here in his "Syrian Athens," some hundred years before Christ, Meleager, the Anacreon of the age, polished epigrams to fair ladies and handsome boys and wore out his pen with love.
Brightly the goblet smiles since rested here Zenophila's sweet mouth, to Love so dear.
How blest "\\-'.Ould she to mine her rose-lips place, And drink my soul out in a long embrace.43
One of these flames, too soon snuffed out, burned with especial brightness in his memory-Heliodora, whom he loved in Tyre.
I'll twine white violets, and the myrtle green; Narcissus will I twine, and lilies sheen;
I'll twine sweet crocus, and the hyacinth blue; And last I'll twine the rose, love's token true: That all may form a wreath of beauty, meet To deck my Heliodora's tresses sweet.44
Now "Hades has snatched her, and the dust has tarnished her flower in bloom.
0 Mother Earth, I pray thee, clasp her gently to thy breast." 45
Meleager immortalized himself by gathering into a "garland" (stephanos) the elegiac verse of Greece from Sappho to Meleager; out of this and like collections grew, by merger, the Greek Anthology.* Here is the Greek epigram at its best and worst, polished like a jewel or empty as a pose; it was unwise to pluck these 4000 "flowers" from their branches to make this fading wreath. Some of the verses commemorate forgotten great men, or famous statues, or dead relatives; some, so to speak, are autotaphs, as when a woman who died of triplets says pithily, "After this let women pray for children." 46 Some are barbs aimed at physicians, shrews, undenakers, pedagogues, cuckolds; or the miser who, fainting, is revived by the smell of a penny; or the grammarian whose grandchild displayed successively all three gen ders; 47 or the pugilist who retires, marries, and gets more blows than he ever
l\Ieleager's Stepbanos was combined in our sixth century with the A1usa Paidike, a homo sexual anthology compiled by Strabo of Sardis (50 B.c.). Subsequent additions were made, chiefly of Christian verse; and the Anthology was given its present form at Constantinople about A.O. 920.
510	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIV
received in the ring; or the dwarf who, carried off by a mosquito, thinks he is suffering the rape of Ganymede. A single epigram celebrates "that famous woman who slept with only one man." Others dedicate offerings to the gods: Lais hangs up her mirror as useless now that it does not show her as she was; Nicias, after fifty years of serving men, surrenders her complaisant girdle to Venus. Some stanzas glorify the arterial dilation of wine as wiser than wisdom. One honors the unceasing monogamy of the adulterer who was buried by a wreck in the arms of his mistress. Some are pagan dirges on the brevity of life; some are Christian assurances of a happy resurrection. Most of them, of course, to.1st the beauty of women and boys and sing the painful ecstasy of love: everything that later literature has said about amorous itching is here said in brief and in full, with more than Elizabethan conceits. Meleager makes a mosquito his pander by charging it with a message to his lady of the hour. And his townsman Philodemus, philosophic mentor of Cicero, tunes a melancholy note to his Xantho:
White waxen cheeks, soft scented breast, Deep eyes wherein the Muses nest,
Sweet lips that perfect pleasure bring-


comparative rehg10n by his treatises on Roman and Egyptian cults.6 All deities, he argued, are aspects of one sur.reme being, timeless, indescribable, so far removed from earthly and temporal affairs that intermediary spirits (daimones) must create and regulate the world. There are also evil spirits, marshaled by some master demon who is the source and soul of all the chaf>s,
CHAP. XXIII)	ROMAN  GREECE
irrationality, and viciousness in nature and man. It is good, Plutarch thought, to believe in personal immortality-a rewarding Heaven, a cleansing Purga tory, a punishing Hell; he was comforted by the possibility that a stay in Purgatory might purify even Nero, and that only a few would suffer eternal damnation.7 He denounced the terrors of supersrition as worse than atheism, 1 but he accepted divination, oracles, necromancy, and the prophetic power of dreams. He did not pretend to be an original philosopher; like Apuleius and so many others of that age, he described himself as an adapter of Plato. He condemned the Epicureans for replacing the fear of Hell with the gloom of annihilation, and criticized the "repugnances" of Stoicism; but he held, like
a Stoic, that "to follow God and to obey reason are the same thing." 8
His lectures and essays have properly been collected under the title Moralia, for most of them are simple and genial preachments on the wisdom of life. They discuss everything, from the advisability of keeping old men in public office to the priority of the chicken or the egg. Plutarch is fond of his library, but confesses that good health is more precious than good books:
Some men, led by gluttony, rush off to join in drinking bouts, as if they were laying in provisions for a siege. . . . The less expensive foods are always more helpful.... When, in a precipitate retreat, Artaxerxes Memnon had nothing to eat but barley-bread and figs, he exclaimed, "What a pleasure is this, which has never been mine be fore!" ...  Wine is the most beneficial of beverages, provided there is a happy combination of it with the occasion as well as with water.
. . . Especially to be feared are indigestions arising from meats, for they are depressing at the outset, and a pernicious residue from them remains behind. It is best to accustom the body not to require meat in addition to other food. For the earth yields in abundance many things not only for nourishment but for comfort and enjoyment. But since custom has become a sort of unnatural second nature, our use of meat should be ...  as a prop and support of our diet; we should use other foods ...  more in accord with nature, and less dulling to the reasoning faculty, which, as it were, is kindled from plain and light substances.9
He follows Plato in advocating equal opportunity for women, and gives many examples of cultured ladies in antiquity (there were some in his own circle); but he views adultery by the man with all the lenience of a pagan male:
If a man in private life, who is incontinent and dissolute in regard to his pleasures, commit some peccadillo with a paramour or maid servant, his wedded wife ought not to be indignant or angry, but she should reason that it is respect for her that leads him to share his licentiousness with another woman.10
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. xxm
Nevertheless, we rise from these charming essays warmed by the fellow ship of a man humane, essentially wholesome, and complete. We are not offended by the commonness of his ideas; his moderation is a welcome anti dote to the ideological hysteria of our time; his good sense, his kindly humor, and his engaging illustrations carry us on unresisting, even over the shoals of his platitudes. It is refreshing to find a philosopher who is wise enough to be happy. Let us be thankful, he counsels us, for the common boons and graces of life, and feel them none the less gladly for their permanence:
We must not forget those blessings and comforts which we share with many more, bur must ...  joy in this, that we live, that we have our health, that we behold the light of the sun. . . . WiJJ not the good man consider every day a festival? ... For the world is the most august of temples, and most worthy of its Lord. Into this temple man is introduced at his birth, into the presence not of statues made with hands and motionless, but such as the Divine Mind has mani fested to our senses . . . even the sun, moon, and stars, and the rivers ever pouring forth fresh water, and the earth producing food.... As this life is the most perfect of initiations into the most exalted of mysteries, we should ever be .filled with good cheer and rejoicing.u
DIAN  SUMMER
Plutarch exemplifies two mm·er.ien s cf his time: the return to religion and the passing renaissance of Greek literature and philosophy. The former was universal, the latter was confined to Athens and the Greek East. Six cities of the Pelopcnnesus prospered, but contributed little to Greek thought.
\Vestem commerce and a busy textile industry kept Patrae alive through Roman and mecieval hi::tory e\·en to our day. Olympia throve on the leavings of tourists coming to see Pheidias' Zeus or the Olympic games. It is one of the pleasantest aspects of Greek history that these quadrennial contests continued from 776 B.C. to A.D. 394, w en Theodosius ended them. As in the days of Prodicus and Herodotus, philosophers and historians came to haramme the
ro d asse?1blin3" fo t_he f:;5tival. D o C ysostom describes authors eading their stupid composit10ns  to transient listeners, poets reciting their verses,
rhetoricians thumping the air, and "sophists in great number, like o-oraeous
peacocks,,' com•mg to blow th _e•ir w•m.d over the multitude;12 he pbrovbed no
more silent than the rest. Epictetus pictures the spectators cramped and s eltering in th unshaded _sta ds, burned by the sun or drenched by the ram, but forgettmg everythmg m the tumult and the shouting th t marked the final moments of each bout or race.13 The old Nemean, Isthmian, Pyth-
CHAP.xxm)	ROMAN  GREECE
ian, and Panathenaic games continued; new ones were added like the Pan hellenia of Hadrian; and many of them included competitions in poetry, oratory, or music. "Can you not hear classical music at the great festivals?" asks a character in Lucian.14 Ghdiatorial combats were introduced to Greece by the Roman colony at Corinth; thence they spread to other cities until even the Theater of Dionysus was befouled with butchery. Many Greeks-Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Plutarch-protested against the desecra tion; Demonax, the Cynic philosopher, begged the Athenians not to allow the innovation until they had thrown down the altar of Pity at Athens;15
but the Roman games continued in Greece till predominantly Christian times.	•
Sparta and Argos were still moderately alive, and Epidaurus grew rich on the visits of sick bodies and souls to the shrine of Asclepius. Corinth, control ling the trade across the isthmus, became, within half a century of i s re establishment by Caesar, the wealthiest city in Greece. Its heterogeneous population of Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians, most of them uprooted from their native lands and morals, was notorious for commercial ism, epicureanism, and immorality. The old Temple of Aphrodite Pandemos carried on an undiminished trade as the shrine and center of Corinthian pros titutes. Apuleius describes a gorgeous ballet that he saw in Corinth, represent ing the judgment of Paris. "Venus appeared all naked, save that her fine and comely middle was lightly covered with a thin silken smock; and this the wanton wind blew hither and thither." 16 Corinth had not mended her ways since Aspasia.
Passing through Megara into Attica, the rural scene was one of great poverty. Deforestation, erosion, and mineral depletion had been added to war, emigration, taxation, and race suicide to make a desert of the Roman peace. Two cities alone in Attica were prosperous: Eleusis, whose sacra mental Mysteries drew lucrative crowds to her every year; and Athens, the educational and intellectual center of the classic world. Its ancient institu tions-council, assembly, and archons-still functioned, and Rome had re stored the Areopagus to its primeval authority as the seat of judgment and the citadel of property rights. Rulers like Antiochus IV, Herod the Great, Augustus, and Hadrian rivaled millionaires like Herodes Atticus in benefac tions to the city. Herodes rebuilt the stadium in marble, almost exhausting Pentelicus, and raised an odeon, or music hall, at the foot of'the Acropolis. Hadrian provided funds to complete the Olympieum, and Zeus, who now had one foot in the grave, rec ived a home worthy of hiscCasanova prime.
Meanwhile the unrivaled fame of Athens in letters, philosophy, and educa tion brought a stream of rich youths and needy scholars to her schools. The University of Athens co isted of ten professorships endowed by the city or


The method you have pursued, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those denounced to you as Christians is eminently proper.   No
search should be made for these people; when they are denounced and found guilty they must be punished; but where the accused party denies that he is a Christian, and gives proof . . . by adoring our gods, he shall be pardoned.... Information without the accuser's name subscribed must not be admitted in evidence against anyone.14
The passage here italicized suggests that Trajan only reluctantly carried out a pre-existing statute. Nevertheless, we hear of two prominent martyrs in his principate: Simeon, head of the church of Jerusalem, and Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch; presumably there were others of less fame.
Hadrian, a skeptic open to all ideas, instructed his appointees to give the Christians the benefit of every doubt.15 Being more religious, Antoninus allowed more persecution. At Smyrna the populace demanded of the "Asiarch" Philip that he enforce the law; he complied by having eleven Christians executed in the amphitheater ( 1 55). The bloodthirst of the crowd was aroused rather than assuaged; it clamored for the death of Bishop Poly carp, a saintly patriarch of eighty-six years, who was said in his youth to have known Saint John. Roman soldiers found the old man in a suburban retreat, and brought him unresisting before the Asiarch at the games. Philip pressed him: "Take the oath, revile Christ, and I will let you go." Polycarp, says the most ancient of the Acts of the Martyrs, replied: "For eighty-six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?" The crowd cried out that he should be burned alive. The flames, says the pious document, refused to bum him, "but he was within them as bread that is being baked; and we perceived such a fragrant smell as might come from incense or other costly spices. At length the lawless men commanded an executioner to stab him. When he
CHAP. XXX)   THE  TRIUMPH  OF CHRISTIANITY
did this there came out a dove, and so much blood that the fire was quenched, and all the crowd marveled." 16
The persecutions were renewed under the saintly Aurelius. When famine, flood, pestilence, and war overwhelmed a once happy reign, the conviction spread that these evils were due to neglect and denial of the Roman gods. Aurelius shared the public terror, or yielded to it. In 177 he issued a rescript ordering the punishment of sects that caused disturbances by "exciting the ill-balanced minds of men" with new winds of doctrine. In that same year, at Vienne and Lyons, the pagan populace arose in fury against the Christians, and stoned them whenever they dared to stir from their homes. The im perial legate ordered the arrest of the leading Christians of Lyons. Bishop Pothinus, ninety years old, died in jail from the effects of torture. A mes senger was sent to Rome to ask the advice of the Emperor as to the treatment of the remaining prisoners. Marcus replied that those who denied Chris tianity should be freed, but those who professed it should be put to death according to the law.
The annual festival of the Augustalia was now to be celebrated in Lyons, and delegates from all Gaul crowded the provincial capital. At the height of the games the accused Christians were brought to the amphitheater and were questioned. Those who recanted were dismissed; forty-seven who persisted were put to death with a variety and barbarity of tortures equaled only by the Inquisition. Attalus, second to Pothinus in the Christian com munity, was forced to sit on a chair of red-hot iron and roast to death.17 Blandina, a slave girl, was tortured all day, then bound up in a bag, and thrown into the arena to be gored to death by a bull. Her silent fortitude led many Christians to believe that Christ made his martyrs insensitive to pain; the same result might have come from ecstasy and fear. "The Chris tian," said Tertullian, "even when condemned to die, gives thanks." 18 *
Under Commodus the persecutions waned. Septimius Severus renewed them, even to the point of making baptism a crime. In 203 many Christians suffered martyrdom in Carthage. One of them, a young mother named Perpetua, left a touching account of her days in prison, and her father's prostrate pleas that she should renounce Christianity. She and another young mother were tossed and gored by a bull; we have an indication of the anesthetic effect of fear and trance in her later query, "\Vhen are we to be tossed?" Story tells how she guided to her throat the dagger of the reluctant gladiator who had to kill her.19 The Syrian empresses who followed Sep timius had little concern for the Roman gods, and gave Christianity a careless
Our knowledge of the Lyons persecutions comes from a lener of "the sen,ants of Christ at Lugdunum and Vienna in Gaul, to the brethren in Asia and Phrygia," preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, v, 1. Some exaggeration may have crept into the report,
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXX
toleration. Under Alexander Severus peace seemed established among all
the rival faiths.
The renewal of the barbarian attacks ended this truce. To understand the persecution under Decius (or Aurelius) we must imagine a nation in the full excitement of war, frightened by serious defeats, and expecting hostile invasion. In 249 a wave of religious emotion swept the Empire; men and women flocked to the temples and besieged the gods with prayers. Amid this fever of patriotism and fear the Christians stood apart, still resenting and discouraging military service,20 scorning the gods, and interpreting the collapse of the Empire as the prophesied prelude to the destruction of "Babylon" and the return of Christ. Using the mood of the people as an opportunity to strengthen national enthusiasm and unity, Decius issued an edict requiring every inhabitant of the realm to offer a propitiatory act of homage to the gods of Rome. Apparently Christians were not asked to abjure their own faith, but were commanded to join in the universal supplicatio to the deities who, the populace believed, had so often saved imperiled Rome. Most Christians complied; in Alexandria, according to its Bishop Dionysius, "the apostasy was universal"; 21 it was likewise in Carthage and Smyrna; probably these Christians considered the supplicatio a patriotic formality. But the bishops of Jerusalem and Antioch died in jail, and the bishops of Rome and Toulouse were put to death ( 250). Hundreds of Roman Christians were crowded into dungeons; some were beheaded, some were burned at the stake, a few were giYen to the beasts in holiday festival. After a year the persecution abated; and by Easter of 25 1 it was practically at an end.
Six years later Valerian, in another crisis of invasion and terror, ordered that "all persons must conform to the Roman ceremonials," and forbade any Christian assemblage. Pope Sixtus II resisted, and was put to death with four of his deacons. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage was beheaded, the bishop of Tarragona was burned alive. In 261, after the Persians had removed Valeria'n from the scene, Gallienus published the first edict of toleration, recognizing Christianity as a permitted religion, and ordering that property taken from Christians should be restored to them. Minor persecutions occurred in the next forty years, bur for the most part these were for Christianity decades of unprecedented calm and rapid growth. In the chaos and terror of the third century men fled from the weakened state to the consolations of religion, and found them more abundantly in Christianity than in its rivals. The Church made rich converts now, built costly cathedrals, and allowed its adherents to share in the joys of this world. The odium theologicum sub sided among the people; Christians intermingled more freely with pagans,
CHAP. XXX)   THE  TRIUMPH  OF CHRISTIANITY
even married them. The Oriental monarchy of Diocletian seemed destined to consolidate religious as well as political security and peace.
Galerius, however, saw in Christianity the last obstacle to absolute rule, and urged his chief to complete the Roman restoration by restoring the Roman gods. Diocletian hesitated; he was averse to needless risks, and esti mated more truly than Galerius the magnitude of the task. But one day, at an imperial sacrifice, the Christians made the sign of the cross to ward off evil demons. When the augurs failed to find on the livers of the s_acrifi.ced animals the marks that they had hoped to interpret, they blamed the presence of profane and unbelieving persons. Diocletian ordered that all in attendance should offer sacrifice to the gods or be flogged, and that all soldiers in the army should similarly conform or be dismissed (302). Strange to say, Christian writers agreed with the pagan priests: the prayers of the Chris tian, said Lactantius,22 kept the Roman gods at a distance; and Bishop Dio nysius had written to the same effect a generation before. Galerius at every• opportunity argued the need of religious unity as a suppon to the new monarchy; and at last Diocletian yielded. In February, 303, the four rulers decreed the destruction of all Christian churches, the burning of Christian books, the dissolution of Christian congregations, the confiscation of their propeny, the exclusion of Christians from public office, and the punishment of death for Christians detected in religious assembly. A band of soldiers inaugurated the persecution by burning to the ground the cathedral at Nico media.
The Christians were now numerous enough to retaliate. A revolutionary movement broke out in Syria, and in Nicomedia incendiaries twice set fire to Diocletian's palace. Galerius accused the Christians of the arson; they accused him; hundreds of Christians were arrested and tortured, but the guilt was never fixed. In September Diocletian ordered that imprisoned Christians who would worship the Roman gods should be freed, but that those who refused should be subjected to every torture known to Rome. Infuriated by scornful resistance, he directed all provincial magistrates to seek out every Christian, and use any method to compel him to appease the gods. Then, probably glad to leave this miserable enterprise to his suc cessors, he resigned.
Maximian carried out the edict with military thoroughness in Italy. Galerius, become Augustus, gave every encouragement to the persecution in the East. The roll of martyrs was increased in every part of the Empire except Gaul and Britain, where Constantius contented himself with burning a few churches. Eusebius assures us, presumably with the hyperbole of indignation, that men were flogged till the flesh hung from their bones, or their flesh was scraped to the bone with shells; salt or vinegar was poured
652	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXX
upon the wounds; the flesh was cut off bit by bit and fed to waiting animals; or bound to crosses, men were eaten piecemeal by starved beasts. Some victims had their fingers pierced with sharp reeds under the nails; some had their eyes gouged out; some were suspended by a hand or a foot; some had molten lead poured down their throats; some were beheaded, or crucified, or beaten to death with clubs; some were tom apart by being tied to the momentarily bent branches of trees.23 We have no pagan narrative of these events.
The persecution continued for eight years, and brought death to ap
.proximately 1 500 Christians, orthodox or heretic, and diverse sufferings to countless more. Thousands of Christians recanted; tradition said that even Marcellinus, Bishop of Rome, denied his faith under duress of terror and pain. But most of the persecuted stood firm; and the sight or report of heroic fidelity under torture strengthened the faith of the wavering and won new members for the hunted congregations. As the.brutalities multi plied, the sympathy of the pagan population was stirred; the opinion of go9d citizens found courage to express itself against the most ferocious oppres sion in Roman history. Once the people had urged the state to destroy Christianity; now the people stood aloof from the government, and many pagans risked death to hide or protect Christians until the storm should pass.24 In 3 1 1 Galerius, suffering from a mortal illness, convinced of failure, and implored by his wife to make his peace with the undefeated God of the Christians, promulgated an edi t of toleration, recognizing Christianity as a lawful religion and asking the prayers of the Christians in return for "our most gentle clemency." 2;;
The Diocletian persecution was the greatest test and triumph of the Church. It weakened Christianity for a time through the natural defection of adherents who had joined it, or grown up, during a half century of unmolested prosperity. But soon the defaulters were doing penance and pleading for readmission to the fold. Accounts of the loyalty of martyrs who had died, or of "confessors" ,vho had suffered, for the faith were circulated from community to community; and these Acta Martyru111, intense with exaggeration and fascinating ·with legend, played a historic role in awaken ing or confirming Christian belief. "The blood of martyrs," said T ertullian, "is seed." 26 There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with .the word, brutality with hope, and_at last defe_ating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Chnst had met m the arena, and Christ had won.


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FIG. 37-Reco11struction of Interior of Baths of Caracalla
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FIG. 39-Sarcopbagus of the Empress Helena
Yatican, Rome
CHAP. XXIX)   THE  COLLAPSE OF THE EMPIRE	625
of these tales; certainly the stories of his sexual depravity are beyond belief. In any case he perfumed his lust with piety, and schemed to spread among the Romans some worship of his Syrian Baal. He had himself circumcized, and thought of emasculating himself in honor of his god. He brought from Emesa the conical black stone which he worshiped as the emblem of Elagabal; he raised an ornate temple to house it; the stone, encrusted with gems, was carried to it on a chariot drawn by six white horses, while the young emperor walked backward before it in dumb adoration. He was willing to recognize all other religions; he patronized Judaism, and proposed to legalize Chris tianity. He merely insisted, with admirable loyalty, that his stone was the greatest of gods.12
His mother, absorbed in amours, looked with indulgence upon this Priapic farce; but Julia Maesa, failing to control it, resolved to forestall a debacle that would end this remarkable dynasty of Syrian women. She persuaded Elagabalus to adopt his cousin Alexander as successor and Caesar. She and Mamaea trained the boy in the duties of his office, and by every art drew the Senate and the people to look upon him as a desirable alternative to the priestly satyr who had offended Rome not by his extravagance or obscenity, but by his subordination of Jupiter to a Syrian Baal. Soaemias discovered the plot, and stirred up the Praetorians against her sister and nephew; Maesa and Mamaea offered richer arguments; and the Guard slew Elagabalus and his mother, dragged his corpse through the streets and around the Circus, and :flung it into the Tiber. The Guard proclaimed, the Senate accepted, Alexander as emperor ( 22 2).
Marcus Aurelius Severus Alexander, like his predecessor, mounted the throne at the age of fourteen. His mother had given herself with singular consecration to the training of his body, mind, and character. He strength ened his frame with labor and exercise, swam in a cold pool for an hour every day, drank a pint of water before each meal, ate sparingly and of the simplest foods. He grew into a handsome youth, tall and strong, skilled in every sport and in the·arts of war. He studied Greek and Latin literature, and only moderated his love for them on the insistence of Mamaea, who quoted to him those verses of Virgil that called upon Romans to yield the graces of culture to others, and form themselves to organize a world state and rule it in peace. He painted and sang "with distinction," and played the organ and the lyre, but never allowed any but his own household to witness these performances. He dressed and behaved with modest simplicity, "was temperate in the enjoyment of love, and would have nothing to do with catamites." 13 He showed high respect for the Senate, treated its members as his equals, entertained them in his palace, and often joined them in their homes. Kindly and affable, he visited the sick ,vithout distinction of class,
626	CAESAR  AND  CH.R,,IST	(CHAP. XXIX
gave ready audience to any citizen of decent repute, quickly forgave op ponents, and shed no civilian blood in the fourteen years of his reign.14 His mother reproved his amiability, saying, "You have made your rule too gentle, and the authority of the Empire less respected"; to which he an swered, "Yes, but I have made it more lasting and secure." 15 He was a man of gold, without the alloy required to withstand the rough usage of this world.
He recognized the absurdity of his cousin's effort to replace Jove with Elagabal, and he co-operated with his mother in restoring the Roman tem ples and ritual. But to his philosophic mind it seemed that all religions were diverse prayers to one supreme power; he wished to honor all honest faiths; and in his private chapel, where he worshiped every morning, he had icons of Jupiter, Orpheus, Apollonius of Tyana, Abraham, and Christ. He quoted frequently the Judaeo-Christian counsel: "\Vhat you do not wish a man to do to you, do not do to him"; he had it engraved on the walls of his palace and on many a public building. He recommended the morals of the Jews and the Christians to the Roman people. The unimpressed wits of Antioch and Alexandria referred to him as "Head of the Synagogue." His mother favored the Christians, protected Origen, and summoned him to explain to her his flexible theology.
Julia Maesa having died soon after Alexander's accession, Mamaea, with his tutor Ulpian, determined the policies, and conceived the reforms, of Alexander's administration. She ruled with wisdom and restraint, caring more for the success of the dynasty than for the pageantry of power; she yielded to the great lawyer and the young emperor the credit for the achieve ments of his reign. She and Ulpian chose sixteen outstanding senators to serve as an imperial council, without whose approval no major measures were carried out. She could control everything except her love for her son. When he married and showed an affectionate partiality for his wife, Mamaea had her banished, and Alexander, forced to choose, surrendered to his mother. As he grew older he took a more active part in administration. "He would give his attention to public business even before dawn," says his ancient biographer, "and would continue at it to an advanced hour, never growing weary or irritated, but always cheerful and serene." 16
His basic policy was to weaken the disruptive dominance of the army by
restoring the prestige of the Senate and the aristocracy; rule by birth seemed to him the only actual alternative to rule by money, myth, or the sword. With the co-operation of the Senate he effected a hundred economies in administration, dismissed the supernumeraries in his palace, in governmental offices, and in provincial rule. He sold most of the imperial jewelry, and deposited the proceeds in the treasury. Perhaps with less Senatorial approval
CHAP. XXIX)   THE  COLLAPSE  OF THE  EMPIRE	627
he legalized, encouraged, and reorganized the workers' and tradesmen's associations, and "allowed them to have advocates chosen from their own numbers." 17 Assuming a severe censorship over public morals, he ordered the arrest of prostitutes and the deportation of homosexuals. While reduc ing taxes, he restored the Colosseum and the Baths of Caracalla, built a public library, a founeen-mile aqueduct, and new municipal baths, and financed the construction of baths, aqueducts, bridges, and roads throughout the Empire. To force down interest rates that were harassing debtors, he lent public money at four per cent, and advanced funds to the poor, with out any interest charge, for the purchase of agricultural land. All the Em pire prospered and applauded; the godly Aurelius, it seemed, had returned to earth and to power.
But as the Persians and the Germans had taken advantage of the philoso pher king, so now they took advantage of the emperor saint. In 2 30 Ardashir, founder of the Sassanid dynasty in Persia, invaded Mesopotamia and threat ened Syria. Alexander sent him a philosophical epistle reproving his violence, and arguing that "everyone ought to rest content with his own domain." 18
.A.rdashir judged him a weakling, and replied by demanding all Syria and Asia Minor. Accompanied by his mother, the young emperor took the field, and waged with more courage than subtlety an indecisive campaign. His tory is obscure as to his victories and defeats; in any case Ardashir withdrew from Mesopotamia, perhaps to meet attacks on his eastern front; and the Roman coins of 2 33 pictured Alexander crowned by Victory and having the Tigris and Euphrates at his feet.


Socr. I will teach you from your own case. Were you ever, after being stuffed with broth at a festival, later disturbed in your stomach, and did a tumult suddenly rumble through you?
In another scene Pheidippides, son of Strepsiades, meets in personifica tion Just Argument and Unjust Argument. The first tells him that he must imitate the stoic virtues' of the men of Marathon, but the other preaches to him the new morality. What good, asks Unjust Argument, have men ever gained by justice, or virtue, or moderation? For one hon est successful and respected man there can always be found ten dishonest successful and respected men. Consider the gods themselves: they lied, stole, murdered, and committed adultery; and they are worshiped by all the Greeks. When Just Argument doubts that most successful men have been dishonest, Unjust Argument asks him:
Come now, from what class do our lawyers spring?
]. A. Well-from the blackguards.
U. A. Surely. Tell me, again, what are our tragic poets?
]. A. Blackguards.
U. A. And our public orators?
]. A. Blackguards all.
U. A. Now look about you. (Turning and pointing to the audi ence.) Which class among our friends here seems the most numer- ous?	(J. A. gravely ex(llrlines the audience.)
]. A. The blackguards have it by a large majority.
Pheidippides is so apt a pupil of Unjust Argument that he beats his father, on the ground that he is strong enough to do it and enjoys it; and besides, he asks, "Did you not beat me when I was a boy?" Strepsiades begs for mercy in the name of Zeus, but Pheidippides informs him that Zeus no longer exists, having been replaced by Vortex. The enraged father runs out into the streets, and calls upon all good citizens to destroy this new
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVIl
philosophy. They attack and burn down the Thinking Shop, and Socrates barely escapes with his life.
We do not know what part this comedy played in the tragedy of Socrates. It was brought out in 42 3, twenty-four years before the famous trial. Its good-humored satire does not seem to have offended the philoso pher; we are told that he stood throughout the performance,""' to give his enemies a better shot. Plato pictures Socrates and Aristophanes as friends after the performance; Plato himself recommended the play to Dionysius I of Syracuse as a jolly extravaganza, and maintained his own friendship with Aristophanes even after his master's death.ll!O Of the three accusers of Socrates in 399 one, Meletus, was a child when the comedy was pre sented, and another Anytus, was on friendly terms with Socrates after the play."° Probably the later circulation of the play as literature did the sage more harm than its original performance; Socrates himself, in Plato's re port of his defense, referred to the play as one of the major sources of that bad reputation which was prejudicing his case with the jurors.
There was another target in Athens at which Aristophanes aimed his satire; and in this case the mood was one of implacable hostility. He dis trusted the skepticisms of the Sophists, the moral, economic, and political individualism that was undermining the state, the sentimental feminism that was agitating the women, and the socialism that was arousing the slaves. All these evils he saw at their clearest in Euripides; and he resolved to destroy with laughter the influence of the great dramatist upon the mind of Greece.
He began in 411 with a play which he called The Thesmophoriazusae, from the women who celebrated in sexual exclusiveness the feast of Deme ter and Persephone. The assembled devotees discuss the latest quips of Euripides against their sex, and plan revenge. Euripides gets wind of the proceedings, and persuades his father-in-law Mnesilochus to dress as a woman and enter the meeting to defend him. The first complainant alleges that the tragic dramatist has deprived her of a living: fo·rmerly she made wreaths for the temples, but since Euripides has shown that there are no gods, the temple business has been ruined. Mnesilochus defends Euripides on the ground that his worst sayings about women are visibly and audibly true, and are mild compared with what women themselves know to be their faults. The ladies suspect that this traducer of the sex cannot be a woman; they tear off Mnesilochus' disguise, and he saves himself from dismemberment only by snatching a babe from a woman's arms and
CHAP.XVII)  THE  LITERATURE  OF THE  GOLDEN  AGE	427
threatening to kill it if they touch him. As they nevertheless attack him, he unwraps the child, and finds that it is a wineskin disguised to escape the collector of internal revenue. He proposes to cut its throat just the same, much to the distress of its owner. "Spare my darling!" she cries; "or at least bring a bowl, and if it must die, let us catch its blood." Mnesilochus solves the problem by drinking the wine, and meanwhile sending an appeal to Euripides for rescue. Euripides appears in various parts from his plays
-now as Menelaus, now as Perseus, now as Echo-and finally arranges Mnesilochus' escape.
The Frogs (405) returns to the assault despite Euripides' death. Diony• sus, god of the drama, is dissatisfied with the surviving playwrights of
Athens, and descends to Hades to bring back Euripides. As he is ferried over to the lower world a choir of frogs greets him with a croaking chorus that must have provided a month's catchword for young Athenians. Aris tophanes pokes much fun at Dionysus in passing, and boldly parodies the Mysteries of Eleusis. When the god arrives in Hades he finds Euripides attempting to unseat Aeschylus as king of all dramatists. Aeschylus accuses Euripides of spreading skepticism and a dangerous casuistry, and of cor rupting the morals of Athenian women and youth; ladies of refinement, he says, have been known to kill themselves through shame at having heard Euripides' obscenities. A pair of scales is brought in, and each poet throws into it lines from his plays; one mighty phrase of Aeschylus (here the satire strikes the older poet too) tips the scale against a dozen of Euripides. At last Aeschylus proposes that the younger dramatist shall leap into one scale with wife, children, and baggage, while he will guarantee to find a couplet that will outweigh them all. In the end the great skeptic loses the contest, and Aeschylus is brought back to Athens as victor.• This oldest known essay in literary criticism received the first prize from the judges, and so pleased the audience that another performance of it was given a few days afterward.
In a middling play called The Ecclesiazusae (393)-i.e., The Assembly women-Aristophanes turned his laughter upon the radical movement in
general. The ladies of Athens disguise themselves as men, pack the Assem bly, outvote their husbands, brothers, and sons, and elect themselves rulers of the state. Their leader is a fiery suffragette, Praxagora, who berates her sex as fools for letting themselves be ruled by such dolts as men, and pro poses that all wealth shall be divided equally among the citizens, leaving the slaves uncontaminated with gold. The attack upon Utopia takes a
Possibly a reference to the repetition of Aeschylus' plays.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVII


Then, seeming to hear the call of a god, Oedipus bids a tender farewell to Antigone and Ismene, and walks into the dark grove, Theseus alone ac companying him.
Going on A little space we turned. And lo, we saw
The man no more; but he, the King,• was there, Holding a hand to shade his eyes, as one
To whom there comes a vision drear and dread He may not bear to look upon....
What form of death He died, knows no man but our Theseus only.... But either some one whom the gods had sent
To guide his steps, or else the abyss of earth In friendly mood had opened wide its jaws
•Theseus.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE
Without one pang. And so the man was led
With naught to mourn for-did not leave the world As worn with pain and sickness; but his end,
If any ever was, was wonderful.•
(CHAP. XVII
The last play in the sequence, but apparently the first of the three to be composed, carries the faithful Antigone to her grave. Hearing that her brothers Polynices and Eteocles are warring for the kingdom, she hurries back to Thebes in the hope of bringing peace. But she is ignored, and the brothers fight to their death. Creon, ally of Eteocles, seizes the throne, and, as punishment for Polynices' rebellion, forbids his burial. Antigone,
sharing the Greek belief that the spirit of t e dead is tortured so long as the corpse is not interred, violates the edict and buries Polynices. Mean while the chorus sings one of the most renowned of Sophocles' odes:
Many wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man. Over the surging sea, with a whitening south wind wan, Through the foam of the firth man makes his perilous way; And the eldest of deities, Earth that knows not toil or decay, Ever he furrows and scores, as his team, year in year out,
With breed of the yoked horse the ploughshare turneth about.
The light-witted birds of the air, the beasts of the weald and the wood,
He traps with his woven snare, and the brood of the briny flood. Master of cunning he: the savage bull, and the hart
Who roams the mountain free, are tamed by his infinite art; And the shaggy rough-maned steed is broken to bear the bit.
Speech, and the wind-swift speed of counsel and civic wit,
He hath learned for himself all these; and the arrowy rain to fly, And the nipping airs that freeze, 'neath the open winter sky.
He hath provision for all; fell plague he hath learned to endure; Safe whate'er may befall: yet for death he hath found no cure.•
Antigone is condemned by Creon to be buried alive. Creon's son Haemon protests against the awful sentence, and, being repulsed swears to his father "thou shalt never more set eyes upon my face." Here for a moment love plays a part in a Sophoclean tragedy and the poet intones to Eros a hymn long remembered in antiquity:
Love resistless in fight, all yield at a glance of thine eye; Love who pillowed all night on a maiden's cheek doth lie;
CHAP. XVII)  TH E  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	397