Statues of Nike, or Victory, were often made without wings, so that she might not be able to abandon the city. The temple was pulled down by the Turks in A.o. 1687 to make a fortress. Lord Elgin rescued some slabs of the frieze and sent them to the British Museum. In 1835 the stones of the temple were put together again; the restored building was replaced on the original site, and terra-cotta casts were substituted for the missing parts of the badly damaged frieze.
!-32	THE	L IF E  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.XIV
columns as beautiful as any of their kind.• In the nonhern porch was a perfect ponal, adorned with a molding of marble flowers. In the cella was the primitive wooden statue of Athena, which the pious believed had fallen from heaven; there, too, was the great lamp whose fire was never extin guished, and which Callimachus, the Cellini of his time, had fashioned of gold and embellished with acanthus leaves, like his Corinthian capitals. The
south ponico was the famous Porch of the Maidens, or Caryatids.t These
patient women were descended, presumably, from the basket bearers of the Orient; and an early caryatid at Tralles, in Asia Minor, betrays the Eastern probably the Assyrian-origin of the form. The drapery is superb, and the natural flexure of the knee gives an impression of ease; but even these sub stantial ladies seem hardly strong enough to convey that sense of sturdy and reliable suppon which the finest architecture gives. It was an aberra tion of taste that Pheidias would probably have forbidden.
3. The Parthenon
In 447 lctinus, aided by Callicrates, and under the general supervision of Pheidias and Pericles, began to build a new temple for Athene Parthenos. In the western end of the structure he placed a room for her maiden priest esses, and called it the room "of the virgins"-ton parthenon; and in the course of careless time this name of a part, by a kind of architectural met aphor, was applied to the whole. lctinus chose as his material the white marble of Mt. Pentelicus, veined with iron grains. No monar was used; the blocks were so accurately squared and so finely finished that each stone grasped the next as if the two were one. The column drums were bored to let a small cylinder of olivewood connect them, and permit each drum to be turned around and around upon the one below it until the meeting sur faces were ground so smooth that the division between drums was almost invisible...
These columns, rather than those of the Parthenon, set the style for later architecture. The foot of each was modulated into the stylobate by an "Attic base" of three members, articulated by fillets or bands. The top of the column was graduated into the voluted capital by a band of flowers. The entablature had a richly decorated molding, a frieze of black stone, and, under the cornice, a series of reliefs. The egg-and-dart and honeysuckle orna ment of the molding was as carefully carved as the sculpture; the artists were paid as much for a foot of such molding as for a figure in the frieze.'"
t This term was applied to the figures by the Roman architect Vitruvius, from the name
given to the priestesses of Artemis at Caryae in Laconia. The Athenians called them simply
korai, or Maidens.
CHAP. XIV)	THE	ART	OF  PERICLEAN  GREECE	333
The style was pure Doric, and of classic simplicity. The design was rec tangular, for the Greeks did not care for circular or conical forms; hence there were no arches in Greek architecture, though Greek architects must have been familiar with them. The dimensions were modest: 2 2 8 x Io I x 65 feet. Probably a system of proportion, like the Polycleitan canon, prevailed in every part of the building, all measurements bearing a given relation to the diameter of the column."° At Poseidonia the height of the column was four times its diameter; here it was five; and the new form mediated success fully between Spartan sturdiness and Attic elegance. Each column swelled slightly (three quarters of an inch in diameter) from base to middle, tapered toward the top, and leaned toward the center of its colonnade; each corner column was a trifle thicker than the rest. Every horizontal line of stylobate and entablature was curved upward towards its center, so that the eye placed at one end of any supposedly level line could not see the farther half of the line. The metopes were not quite square, but were designed to ap pear square from below. All these curvatures were subtle corrections for optical illusions that would otherwise have made stylobate lines seem to sink in the center, columns to diminish upward from the base, and corner columns to be thinner and outwardly inclined. Such adjustments required considerable knowledge of mathematics and optics, and constituted but one of those mechanical features that made the temple a perfect union of science and art. In the Parthenon, as in current physics, every straight line was a curve, and, as in a painting, every part was drawn toward the center in subtle composition. The result was a certain flexibility and grace that seemed to give life and freedom to the stones.
Above the plain architrave ran an alternating series of triglyphs and metopes. In the ninety-two metopes were high reliefs recounting once more the struggle of "civilization" against "savagery" in the wars of Greeks and Trojans, Greeks and Amazons, Lapiths and centaurs, giants and gods. These slabs are clearly the work of many hands and unequal skills; they do not match in excellence the reliefs of the cella frieze, though some of the centaur heads are Rembrandts in stone. In the gable pediments were statu ary groups carved in the round and in heroic size. In the east pediment, over the entrance, the spectator was allowed to see the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus. Here was a powerful recumbent "Theseus,"• a giant capable of philosophical meditation and civilized repose; and a fine figure of Iris, the female Hermes, with drapery clinging and yet blown by the wind-for
The naming of the Parthenon figures is mostly conjectural.
334	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XIV
Pheidias considers it an ill wind that does not disturb some robe. Here also was a majestic "Hebe," the goddess of youth, who filled the cups of the Olympians with nectar; and here were three imposing "Fates." In the left corner four horses' heads-eyes flashing, nostrils snorting, mouths foaming with speed-announced the rising of the sun, while in the right corner the moon drove her chariot to her setting; these eight are the finest horses in sculptural history. In the west pediment Athena contested with Poseidon the lordship of Attica. Here again were horses, as if to redeem the forked absurdity of man; and reclining figures that represented, with unrealistic magnificence, Athens' modest streams. Perhaps the male figures are too muscular, and the female too spacious; but seldom has statuary been grouped so naturally, or so skillfully adjusted to the narrowing spaces of a pediment. "All other statues," said Canova, with some hyperbole, "are of stone; these are of flesh and blood."
More attractive, however, are the men and women of the frieze. For 525 feet along the top of the outer wall of the cella, within the portico, ran this most famous of all reliefs. Here, presumably, the youths and maids of Attica are bearing homage and gifts to Athena on the festival day of the Panathenaic games. One part of the procession moves along the west and north sides, another along the south side, to meet on the east front before the goddess, who proudly offers to Zeus and other Olympians the hospital ity of her city and a share of her spoils. Handsome knights move in graceful dignity on still handsomer steeds; chariots support dignitaries, while simple folk are happy to join in on foot; pretty girls and quiet old men carry olive branches and trays of cakes; attendants bear on their shoulders jugs of sacred wine; stately women convey to the goddess the peplos that they have woven and embroidered for her in long anticipation of this holy day; sacrificial vic tims move with bovine patience or angry prescience to their fate; maidens of high degree bring utensils of ritual and sacrifice; and musicians play on their flutes deathless ditties of no tone. Seldom have animals or men been honored with such painstaking art. With but two and a quarter inches of relief the sculptors were able, by shading and modeling, to achieve such an illusion of depth that one horse or horseman seems to be beyond another, though the nearest is raised no farther from the background than the rest.11 Perhaps it was a mistake to place this extraordinary relief so high that men could not comfortably contemplate it, or exhaust its excellence. Pheidias excused himself, doubtless with a twinkle in his eye, on the ground that the gods could see it; but the gods were dying while he carved.
Beneath the seated deities of the frieze was the entrance to the inner
Fie. 1-Hygiaea, Goddess of Health
A rhens ,\,f uscu111
(Sec page 499)
-·,  w-  ... .,  -	• -  ·-	......--,'lf'n,--.......,........---••,.,.iiar--,,,"1,i--.,.,,., ,n•.,+..4,.♦-◄"''"'' .w.. -■.w---
FIG. 2-The Cup-Bearer
From the P,1lace of Minos.


610	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXVIII
But what is God? "He" too is a triad-of unity (/Jen), reason (nous), and soul (psyche). "Beyond Being there is the One": 48 through the seeming chaos of mundane multiplicity runs a unifying life. We know almost nothing of it except its existence; any positive adjective or prejudiced pronoun applied to it would be an unwarrantable limitation; we may only call it One and First, and Good as the object of our supreme desire. Emanating from this Unity is the World Reason, corresponding to Plato's Ideas, the formative models and ruling laws of things; they are, so to speak, the thoughts of God, the Reason in the One, the order and rationality of the world. Since these Ideas persist while matter is a kaleidoscope of passing shapes, they are the only true or enduring reality. But Unity and Reason, though they hold the universe together, do not create it; this function is performed by the third aspect of the godhead-the vitalizing principle that fills all things and gives them their power and predestined form. Every thing, from atoms to planets, has an activating soul, which is itself a part of the World-Soul; every Atman is Brahman. The individual soul is eternal only as vitality or energy, not as a distinct character.49 Immortality is not the survival of personality; it is the absorption of the soul in deathless things.50 Virtue is the movement of the soul toward God. Beauty is not mere har mony and proportion, as Plato and Aristotle thought, but the living soul or unseen divinity in things; it is the predominance of soul over body, of form over matter, of reason over things; and an is the translation of this rational or spiritual beauty into another medium. The soul can be trained to rise from the pursuit of beauty in material or human forms to seeking it in the hidden soul in Nature and her laws, in science and the subtle order that it reveals, finally in the divine Unity that gathers all things, even striv ing and conflicting things, into a sublime and marvelous harmony.51 In the end beauty and virtue are one-the unity and co-operation of the pan with
the whole.
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful, yet act as does the creator of a statue . . . he cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line lighter, the other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked . . . and never cease chiseling your statue until . . . you see the perfect goodness established in the stainless shrine.52
vVe feel in this philosophy the same spiritual atmosphere as in contem porary Christianity-the withdrawal of tender minds from civic interest to religion, a flight from the state to God. It was no accident that Plotinus and Origen were fellow pupils and friends, and that Clement developed a
CHAP. xxvm)   THE  GROWTH  OF THE  CHURCH	611
Christian Platonism at Alexandria. Plotinus is the last of the great pagan philosophers; and like Epictetus and Aurelius, he is a Christian without Christ. Christianity accepted nearly every line of him, and many a page of Augustine echoes the ecstasy of the supreme mystic. Through Philo, John, Plotinus, and Augustine, Plato conquered Aristotle, and entered into the profoundest theology of the Church. The gap between philosophy and religion was closing, and reason for a thousand years consented to be the handmaiden of theology.
IV. THE DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH
The Church now won to its support some of the finest minds in the Em pire. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, began the powerful dynasty of the post apostolic "Fathers," who gave a philosophy to Christianity, and overwhelmed its enemies with argument. Condemned to be thrown to the beasts for refus ing to abjure his faith ( 108), Justin composed on his way to Rome several letters whose hot devotion reveals the spirit in which Christians could go to their death:
I give injunctions to all men that I am dying willingly for God's sake, if you do not hinder it. I beseech you, be not an unseasonable kindness to me. Suffer me to be eaten by the beasts, through whom I can attain to God.    Rather entice the wild beasts that they may
become my tomb, and leave no trace of my body, that when I fall asleep I be not burdensome to any. . . . I long for the beasts that are prepared for me     Let there come upon me fire and cross [cruci
fixion], struggles with wild beasts, cutting and tearing asunder, rack ings of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body, and cruel tortures of the devil, if so I may attain to Jesus Christ! 53
Quadratus, Athenagoras, and many others wrote "Apologies" for Christianity, usually addressed to the emperor. Minucius Felix, in an almost Ciceronian dia logue, allowed his Caecilius to defend paganism ably, but made his Octavius. answer him so courteously that Caecilius was almost persuaded to be a Chris tian. Justin of Samaria, coming to Rome in the reign of Antoninus, opened there a school of Christian philosophy, and, in two eloquent "Apologies," sought to convince the Emperor, and "Verissimus the Philosopher," that Christians were loyal citizens, paid their taxes promptly, and might, under friendly treatment, become a valuable support to the state. For some years he taught unmolested; but the sharpness of his tongue made him enemies, and in 166 a rival philosopher prodded the authorities to arrest him and six of his followers, and put them all to death. Twenty years later lrenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, struck a powerful blow
612	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVIII
for the unity of the Church in his Adversus Haereses, a blast at all heretics. The only way of preventing Christianity from disintegrating into a thousand sects, said lrenaeus, was for all Christians to accept humbly one doctrinal au thority-the decrees of the episcopal councils of the Church.
The doughtiest fighter for Christianity in this period was Quintus Sep timius Tertullianus of Carthage. Born there about 160, theson of a Roman centurion, he studied rhetoric in the same school that trained Apuleius; then for years he practiced law at Rome. Midway in life he was converted to Christianity, married a Christian, renounced all pagan pleasures, and (says Jerome) was ordained a priest. All the arts and tricks that he had learned from rhetoric and law were now put at the service of Christian apologetics, enhanced by a convert's ardor. Greek Christianity was theological, meta physical, mystical; Terrullian made Latin Christianity ethical, juristic, prac tical. He had the vigor and virulence of Cicero, the satirical scurrility of Juvenal, and sometimes he could rival Tacitus in concentrating acid in a phrase. Irenaeus had written in Greek; with Minucius and Tertullian Chris tian literature in the "\Vest became Latin, and Latin literature became Christian.
In the year r97, while Roman magistrates in Carthage were trying Chris tians on charges of disloyalty, Tertullian addressed to an imaginary court the most eloquent of his works-the Apologeticus. He assured the Romans that Christians "are always praying for all emperors, for . . . a safe dynasty, brave armies, a faithful Senate, and a quiet world." 54 He extolled the grandeur of monotheism, and found premonitions of it in pre-Christian writers.0 testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae! he cried in a happy phrase-"Behold the witness of the soul, by its very nature Christian!" 55 A year later, passing with strange celerity from persuasive defense to ferocious
attack, he issued De Spectaculis, a scornful description of the Roman theaters as citadels of obscenity, and of the amphitheaters as the acme of man's in humanity to man. And he concluded with a bitter threat:
Other spectacles will come-that last eternal Day of Judgment
. . . when all this old world and its generations shall be consumed in one fire. How vast the spectacle will be on that day! How I shall marvel, laugh, rejoice, and exult, seeing so many ki gs-supposedly received into heaven-groaning in the depths of darkness!-and the magistrates ,vho persecuted the name of Jesus melting in fiercer flames than they ever kindled ... against the Christians!-sages and phi losophers blushing before their disciples as they blaze together! . . . and tragic actors now more than ever vocal in their own tragedy, and
CHAP. xxvm)	THE	GROWTH  OF  THE  CHURCH	613
players lither of limb by far in the fire, and charioteers burning red on the wheel of flame! 56
Such unhealthy intensity of imagination does not make for orthodoxy. As T ertullian aged, the same energy that in his youth had courted pleasure now turned into a fierce denunciation of every consolation bur those of faith and hope. He addressed woman in the coarsest terms as "the gate by which the demon enters," and told her that "it is on your account that Jesus Christ died." 57 Once he loved philosophy, and had written works like De Aninza, applying Stoic metaphysics to Christianity; now he renounced all reasoning independent of revelation, and rejoiced in the incredibility of his creed. "God's son died: it is believable precisely because it is absurd [ineptum]. He was buried and rose again: it is certain because it is impos sible." 58 Sinking into a morose puritanism, Tertullian in his fifty-eighth year rejected the orthodox Church as too sullied with worldly ways, and embraced Montanism as a more outright application of the teachings of Christ. He condemned all Christians who became soldiers, artists, or state officials; all parents who did not veil their daughters; all bishops who restored repentant sinners to communion; finally he called the pope pastor moec horu111-"shepherd of adulterers." 59
Despite him the Church prospered in Africa. Able and devoted bishops like Cyprian made the diocese of Carthage almost as rich and influential as Rome's. In Egypt the growth of the Church was slower, and its early stages are lost to history; suddenly, late in the second century, we hear of a "Catechetical School" in Alexandria, which wedded Christianity to Greek philosophy, and produced two major fathers of the Church. Both Clement and Origen were well versed in pagan literature, and loved it after their own fashion; if their spirit had prevailed there would have been a less tlestructive break between classical culture and Christianity.
When Origenes Adamantius was seventeen (202) his father was arrested as a Christian, and condemned to death. The boy wished to join him in prison and martyrdom; his mother, failing to deter him by other means, hid all his clothes. Origen sent his father letters of encouragement: "Take heed," he bade him, "not to change your Inind on our accounr."60 The father was beheaded, and the youth was left to care for the mother and six young children. Inspired to greater piety by the many martyrdoms he saw, he adopted the ascetic life. He fasted much, slept little and on bare ground, wore no shoes, and subjected himself to,cold and nakedness; finally, in rigorous interpretation of Matthew xix, 1 2, he emasculated himself.* In


Barbarian inroads, and cenruries of mining the richer veins, had doubtless lowered Rome's supply of the precious metals. In central and southern Italy deforestation, erosion, and the neglect of irrigation canals by a diminishing peasantry and a disordered government had left Italy poorer than before. The cause, however, was no inherent exhaustion of the soil, no change in climate, but the negligence and sterility of harassed and discouraged men.
Biological factors were more fundamental. A serious decline of popula tion appears in the West after Hadrian. It has been questioned, but the mass importation of barbarians into the Empire by Aurelius, Valentinian, Au relian, Probus, and Constantine leaves little room for doubt.3 Aurelius, to replenish his army, enrolled slaves, gladiators, policemen, criminals; either the crisis was greater, or the free population less, than before; and the slave population had certainly fallen. So many farms had been abandoned, above all in Italy, that Percinax offered them gratis to anyone who would till them.
665
666	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST
A law of Septimius Severus speaks of a perzuria hominum-a shortage of men.4 In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alex andria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated t at the population had in his time (250) been halved. He mourned to "see the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away." 6 Only the barbarians and the Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.
What had caused this fall in population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced first by the educated classes, it had now seeped down to '1 prole tariat named for its fertility; 6 by A.D. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes, as shown by the use of imperial alimenta to encourage .rural par entage; by the third century it had overrun the western provinces, and was lowering man power in Gaul.7 Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished as poverty grew.8 Sexual excesses may have reduced human fer tility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect, and the making of eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed into the \Vest, Plantianus, Praetorian Prefect, had one hundred boys emasculated, and then gave them to his daughter as a wedding gift.9
Second only to family limitation as a cause of lessened population were the slaughters of pestilence, revolution, and war. Epidemics of major pro portions decimated the population under Aurelius, Gallienus, and Con stantine. In the plague of 260-65 almost every family in the Empire was attacked; in Rome, we are told, there were 5000 deaths every day for many weeks.10 The mosquitoes of the Campagna were winning their war against the human invaders of the Pontine marshes, and malaria was sapping the strength of rich and poor in Latium and Tuscany. The holocausts of war and revolution, and perhaps the operation of contraception, abortion, and infanticide, had a dysgenic as well as a numerical effect: the ablest men mar Jjed latest, bred least, and died soonest. The dole weakened the poor, luxury weakened the rich; and a long peace deprived all classes in the peninsula of the martial qualities and arts. The Germans who were now peopling north Italy and filling the army were physically and morally superior to the sur viving native stock; if time had allowed a leisurely assimilation they might have absorbed the classic culture and reinvigorated the Italian blood. But time was not so generous. Moreover, the population of Italy had long since been mingled with Oriental strains physically inferior, though perhaps men tally superior, to the Roman type. The rapidly breeding Germans could not understand the classic culture, did not accept it, did not transmit it; the rapidly breeding Orientals were mostly of a mind to destroy that culture; the Romans, possessing it, sacrificed it to the comforts of sterility. Rome was conquered not by barbarian invasion from without, but by barbarian multi plication within.
EPILOGUE	667
Moral decay contributed to the dissolution. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated sur veillance; immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differ ences rubbed themselves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.
The greatest of historians held that Christianity was the chief cause of Rome's fall.11 For this religion, he and his followers 12 argued, had destroyed the old faith that had given moral character to the Roman soul and stability to the Roman state. It had declared war upon the classic culture-upon science, philosophy, literature, and art. It had brought an enfeebling Ori ental mysticism into the realistic stoicism of Roman life; it had turned men's thoughts from the tasks of this world to an enervating preparation for some cosmic catastrophe, and had lured them into seeking individual salvation through asceticism and prayer, rather than collective salvation through de votion to the state. It had disrupted the unity of the Empire while soldier emperors were struggling to preserve it; it had discouraged its adherents from holding office, or rendering military service; it had preached an ethic ' of nohresistance and peace when the survival of the Empire had demanded
. a will to War. Christ's victory had been Rome's death.
There is some truth in this hard indictment. Christianity unwillingly shared in the chaos of creeds that helped produce that medley of mores which moderately contributed to Rome's collapse. But the growth of Chris tianity Was more an effect than a cause of Rome's decay. The breakup of the cld reli;ion h::id begun long before Christ; there were more vigorous attacks upon it in Ennius and Lucretius than in any pagan author after them. Moral disintegration had begun with the Roman conquest of Greece, and had culminated under Nero; thereafter Roman morals improved, and the ethical influence of Christianity upon Roman life was largely a wholesome one. It was because Rome was already dying that Christianity grew so rapidly. l\Ien lost faith in the state not because Christianity held them aloof, but because the state defended wealth against poverty, fought tb capture slav s, taxed toil to suppon luxury, and failed to protect its people from famine, pes::i!ence, invasion, and destitution; forgivably they turned from Caesar preaching war to Christ preac!ung peace, from incredible brutality to unprecedented charity, from a life without hope or dignity to a faith that consoled their poverty and honored their humanity. Rome was not destroyed
668	CAESAR  AND CHRIST
by Christianity, any more than by barbarian invasion; it was an empty shell when Christianity rose to influence and invasion came.
The economic causes of Rome's decline have already been stated as pre requisite to the understanding of Diocletian's reforms; they need only a re minding summary here. The precarious dependence upon provincial grains, the collapse of the slave supply and the latifundia; the deterioration of trans port and the perils of trade; the loss of provincial markets to provincial competition; the inability of Italian industry to export the equivalent of Italian imports, and the consequent drain of precious metals to the East; the destructive war between rich and poor; the rising cost of armies, doles, public works, an expanding bureaucracy, and a parasitic court; the depreci ation of the currency; the discouragement of ability, and the absorption of investment capital, by confiscatory taxation; the emigration of capital and labor, the strait jacket of serfdom placed upon agriculture, and of caste forced upon industry: all these conspired to sap the material bases of Italian life, until at last the power of Rome was a political ghost surviving its economic death.
The political causes of decay were rooted in one fact-that increasing despotism destroyed the citizen's civic sense and dried up statesmanship at its source. Powerless to express his political will except by violence, the Roman lost interest in government and became absorbed in his business, his amusements, his legion, or his individual salvation. Patriotism and the pagan religion had been bound together, and now together decayed.13 The Senate, losing ever more of its power and prestige after Pertinax, relapsed into indo lence, subservience, or venality; and the last barrier fell that might have saved the state from militarism and anarchy. Local governments, overrun by imperial correctores and exactores, no longer attracted first-rate men. The responsibility of municipal officials for the tax quotas of their areas, the rising expense of their unpaid honors, the fees, liturgies, benefactions, and games expected of them, the dangers incident to invasion and class war, led to a flight from office corresponding to the flight from taxes, factories, and farms. JVIen deliberately made themselves ineligible by debasing their social category; some fled to other towns, some became farmers, some monks. In 31 3 Constantine extended to the Christian clergy that exemption from municipal office, and from several taxes, which pagan priests had tradi tionally enjoyed; the Church was soon swamped with candidates for ordina tion, and cities complained of losses in revenue and senators; in the end Constantine was compelled to rule that no man eligible for municipal po sition should be admitted to the priesthood.14 The imperial police pursued fugitives from political honors as it hunted evaders of taxes or conscription;
EPILOGUE
it brought them back to the cities and forced them to serve; 15 finally it decreed that a son must inherit the social status of his father, and must accept election if eligible to it by .his rank. A serfdom of office rounded out the prison of economic caste.
Gallienus, fearing a revolt of the Senate, excluded senators from the army. As martial material no longer grew in Italy, this decree completed the mili tary decline of the peninsula. The rise of provincial and mercenary armies, the overthrow of the Praetorian Guard by Septimius Severus, the emergence of provincial generals, and their capture of the imperial throne, destroyed the leadership, even the independence, of Italy long before the fall of the Empire in the West. The armies of Rome were no longer Roman armies; they were composed chiefly of provincials, largely of barbarians; they fought not for their altars and their homes, but for their wages, their dona tives, and their loot. They attacked and plundered the cities of the Empire with more relish than they showed in facing the enemy; most of them were the sons of peasants who hated the rich and the cities as exploiters of the poor and the countryside; and as civil strife provided opportunity, they sacked such towns with a thoroughne that left little for alien barbarism to destroy.16 When military problems became more important than internal affairs, cities near the frontiers were made the seats of government; Rome became a theater for triumphs, a show place of imperial architecture, a museum of political antiquities and forms. The multiplication of capitals and the division of power broke down the unity of administration. The Empire, grown too vast for its statesmen to rule or its armies to defend, began to disintegrate. Left to protect themselves unaided against the Germans and the Scots, Gaul and Britain chose their own imperatores, and made them sovereign; Palmyra seceded under Zenobia, and soon Spain and Africa would yield almost unresisting to barbarian conquest. In the reign of Gallienus thirty generals governed thirty regions of the Empire in practical inde pendence of the central power. In this awful drama of a great state breaking into pieces, the internal causes were the unseen protagonists; the invading barbarians merely entered where weakness had opened the door, and where the failure of biological, moral, economic, and political statesmanship had left the stage to chaos, despondency, and decay.
Externally the fall of the Western Roman Empire was hastened by the expan sion and migration of the Hsiung-nu, or Huns, in northwestern Asia. Defeated in their eastward advance by Chinese armies and the Chinese Wall, they turned westward, and about A.D. 355 reached the Volga and the Oxus. Their pressure forced the Sarmatians of Russia to move into the Balkans; the Goths, so harassed, moved again upon the Roman frontiers. They were admitted across the Danube
670	CAESAR  AND CHRIST
to settle in Moesia (376); maltreated there by Roman officials, they rev0lted, defeated a large Roman army at Adrianople (378), and for a time threatened Constantinople. In 400 Alaric led the Visigoths over the Alps into Italy, and in 410 thev took and sacked Rome. In 429 Gaiseric led the Vandals to the conquest of Sp;in and Africa, and in 455 they took and sacked Rome. In 451 Attila led the Huns in an attack upon Gaul and Italy; he was defeated at Chalons, but overran Lombardy. In 472 a Pannonian general, Orestes, made his son emperor under the name of Romulus Augustulus. Four years later the barbarian mercenaries who dominated the Roman army deposed this "little Augustus," and named their leader Odoacer king of Italy. Odoacer recognized the supremacy of the Roman emperor at Constantinople, and was accepted by him as a vassal king. The Roman Empire in the East would go on until 1453; in the West it had come to an end.
JI. THE ROMAN ACHIEVEMENT
It is easier to explain Rome's fall than to account for her long sl).rvival, This is the essential accomplishment of Rome-that having won the Medi-. terranean world she adopted its culture, gave it order, prosperity, and peac for 200 years, held back the tide of barbarism for two centuries more, and transmitted he classic heritage to the West before she died.
Rome has had no rival in the art of government. The Roman state com-. mitred a thousand political crimes; it built its edifice upon a selfish oliga.rchy and an obscurantist priesthood; it achieved a democracy of freemen, and then destroyed it with corruption and violence; it exploited its conquests to support a parasitic Italy, which, when it could no longer exploit, collapsed,


Crossing the straits from Tangier, we pass from one of the newest to one of the oldest provinces of Rome. Standing strategically at the door of the Mediterranean, blessed and cursed with precious minerals that soaked her soil with the blood of greed, crossed with mountain ranges that hindered communications, assimilation, and unity, Spain has felt the full fever of life from the days when Old Stone Age artists painted bisons on the cave walls of Altamira down to our own disordered time. For thirty centuries the Spaniards have been a proud and warlike people, lean and tough, stoically brave, passionate a_nd obstinate? sober and melancholy, frugal and hospitable, courteous and chivalrous, easily provoked to hatred, more easily to love. When the R_omans came t ey toun a opulation even then inextricably diverse: Ibenans from Afnca (r ), L1gunans from Italy, Celts from Gaul, and a layer of Carth ginians at the top. If we i:nay believe their conquerors, the pre-Roman Spamards were close to barbansm, some livina in towns and houses, some in hamlets and huts and caves, sleeping on the floor or the earth, and washing their teeth with urine carefully aged.18 The men wore black cloaks, the ·women "long mantles and gay-colored gowns." In some parts, Strabo reprovingly adds, "the women dance promiscuously with men taking hold of their hands." 19	'
CHAP.xxu)	CIVILIZING  THE  WEST
As early as 2000 B.C. the inhabitants of southeastern Spain-Tartessus, the Phoenician "Tarshish"-had developed a bronze industry whose products were sold throughout• the Mediterranean. On this basis T artessus evolved in the sixth century B.c. a literature and art that claimed an antiquity of 6000 years. Little remains of it except a few crude statues and a strange polychrome bust in sandstone, The Lady of Eiche, carved on Greek models in a strong and fl.owing Celtic style. About 1000 B.c. thePhoenicians began to tap the mineral wealth of Spain, and by 800 they had taken Cadiz and Malaga, and built great temples there. Towards 500 B.c. Greek colonists settled along the northeastern coast. About the same time the Carthaginians, summoned by their Phoenician kin to help suppress a revolt, conquered T artessus and all south and eastern Spain. The rapid exploitation of the peninsula by Carthage between the First and Second Punic Wars opened the eyes of the Romans to the resources of what they then called "Iberia," and the passage of Hannibal into Italy was finally outweighed by the move ment of the Scipios into Spain. The disunited tribes fought fiercely for their independence; women killed their children rather than let them fall into Roman hands, and captive natives sang their war songs while dying on the cross.20 The conquest took two centuries, but once completed it proved more fundamental than in most other provinces. The Gracchi, Caesar, and Augustus changed the Republic's policy of ruthlessness to one of courtesy and consideration, with good and lasting results. Romanization proceeded rapidly; Latin was adopted and adapted, the economy expanded and pros pered, and soon Spain was contributing poets, philosophers, senators, and emperors to Rome.
From Seneca to Aurelius Spain was the economic mainstay of the Empire. Having enriched Tyre and then Carthage, Spanish minerals now enriched Rome; Spain became to Italy what Mexico and Peru would be to Spain. Gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, lead were mined with modern thoroughness; at Rio Tinto one may still see Roman shafts sunk to great depths through solid quartz, and Roman slag with an astonishingly low percentage of copper left in it.21 In these mines slaves and prisoners worked day after day, in many cases never seeing the light of the sun for months.22 Great metallurgical industries rose near the mines. Meanwhile the soil of Spain, despite mountains and arid wastes, produced esparto grass for cord, rope, baskets, bedding, and sandals, nourished prize sheep and a renowned woolen industry, and gave to the Empire the best olives, oil, and wine that antiquity knew. The Guadal quivir, the Tagus, the Ebro, and lesser streams helped a web of Roman roads to carry the products of Spain to her ports and innumerable towns.
Indeed, the most remarkable and characteristic result of Roman rule, here as elsewhere, was the multiplication or expansion of cities. In the province
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXII
of Baetica (Andalusia) were Caneia (Algeciras), Munda, Malaca, ltalica (birthplace of Trajan and Hadrian), Corduba, Hispalis (Seville), and Gades (Cadiz). Corduba, founded 152 B.c. was a literary· center famous for its schools of rhetoric; here were born Lucan, the Senecas, and Saint Paul's Gallia; this tradition of scholarship would last through the Dark Ages and make Cordova the most learned city in Europe. Gades was the most popu lous of Spanish towns, and notoriously rich; situated at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, it commanded the Atlantic trade with western Africa, Spain, Gaul, and Britain. Its sensuous dancing girls (puellae Gaditanae) contributed modestly to its fame.
Rome knew Portugal as the province of Lusitania, and Lisbon as Olisipo. At N orba Caesarina, to which the Arabs gave its present name of Alcantara (The Bridge), Trajan's engineers threw across the Tagus the most perfect of existing Roman bridges; its majestic arches, 1 oo feet wide and r So above the stream, still carry a busy four-lane ro:id. The capital cf Lusitania was Emerita (Merida), which boasted many temples, three aqueducts, a circus, a theater, a naumachia, and a bridge 2500 feet long. Farther east, in the province of Tarraconensis, Segovia still enjoys the pure water brought in by an aqueduct built in Trajan's reign. South of it was Toletum (Toledo), known in Roman times for its ironworks. On the eastern coast rose the great city of Nova Carthago (Cartagena), rich with mining, fisheries, and trade. Out in the Mediterranean lay the Baleares, where Palma and Pollentia were already old and flourishing cities. Northward on the coast were Valentia, Tarraco (Tarragona), Barcino (Barcelona), and, just below the Pyrenees, the old Greek town of Emporiae. A short sail around the eastern end of the mountains, and the traveler found himself in Gaul.
GAUL
In those days, when all ships were of moderate draught, even ocean-going vessels could navigate the Rhone from Marseilles to Lyons; smaller boats could continue to within thirty miles of the upper Rhine; after a short haul over level land goods could sail by a hundred cities and a thousand villas into the North Sea. Similar overland leaps led from the Rhone and the Saone to the Loire and the Atlantic, from the Aude to the Garonne and Bordeaux, from the Saone to the Seine and the English Channel. Trade followed these waterwa s and created cities at their meeting points. France, like Fgypt, was the gift of her streams.
In a sens French civilization began with "Aurignacian man" 3o,ooo years before Chnst; for even then, as the caves of lvlontignac attest, there were
CHAP. XXII)	CIVILIZING  THE  WEST	471
artists capable of rich color and vivid line. From that Old Stone Age of hunting and herding, France passed, about 12,000 B.c., to the settled life and tillage of the Neolithic Age, and, after ten long millenniums, to the Age of Bronze. About 900 B.c. a new race, "Alpine" and roundheaded, began to filter in from Germany and spread across France to Britain and Ireland and down into Spain. These "Celts" brought with them the Halstatt iron culture of Austria, and about 5 50 B.c. they imported from Switzerland the more developed iron technology of La Tene. YVhen Rome became conscious of France she named it Celtica; only in Caesar's time was this changed to Gallia, Gaul.
The immigrants conquered or outbred the natives and settled down in
independent tribes whose names still lurk in the cities they built.* The Gauls, said Caesar, were tall, muscular, and strong; 23 they combed their rich blond hair back over their heads and down the nape of their necks; some had beards, many had powerful mustaches curling around their mouths. They had brought from the East, perhaps from the ancient Iranians, the custom of wearing breeches; to these they added tunics dyed in many colors and embroidered with flowers, and striped cloaks fastened at the shoulders. They loved jewelry and wore gold ornaments-even if nothing else-in war.24 They liked abundant meat, beer, and undiluted wine, being "intemperate by nature" if we may believe Appian.23 Strabo calls them "simple and high spirited, boastful    insufferable when victorious, scared out of their wits
when defeated"; 26 but it is not always a boon that our enemies should write a book. Poseidonius was shocked to find that they hung the severed heads of their foes from the necks of their horses.27 They were easily aroused to argument and combat, and sometimes, to amuse themselves at banquets, they fought duels to the death. "They were," says Caesar, "our equals in valor and warlike zeal." 28 Ammianus Marcellinus describes them as
at all ages fit for military service. The old man marches out on a campaign with courage equal to that of the man in the prime of life.
. . . In fact a whole band of foreigners will be unable to cope with one Gaul if he call in his wife, who is usually far stronger and fiercer than he, above all when she swells her neck, gnashes her teeth, and poising her huge arms, begins to rain down blows and kicks like shots from a catapult.29
The Gauls believed in a variety of gods, now too dead to mind anonymity. Belief in a pleasant life after death was so keen as to be in Caesar's judgment an important source of Gallic bravery. On the strength of it, says Valerius
The Ambiani in Amiens, Bellovaci in Beauvais, Bituriges in Bourges, Carnutes in Chanres, Parisii in Paris, Pictones in Poiriers, Remi in Rheims, Senones in Sens, Suessiones in Soissons, etc.
472	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXII
Maximus, men lent money to be repaid in heaven; and Poseidonius claimed to have seen Gauls at a funeral write letters to their friends in the other world and throw them upon the pyre so that the dead man might deliver them;30 we should enjoy a Gaul's opinion of these Roman tales. A priestly class, the Druids, controlled all education and vigorously inculcated religious belief. They conducted a colorful ritual, in sacred groves more often than in temples; and to appease the gods they offered human sacrifice of men con demned to death for crime; the custom will appear barbarous to those who have not seen an electrocution. The Druids were the only learned, perhaps the only literate, part of the community. They composed hymns, poems, and historical records; they studied "the stars and their movements, the size of the universe and the earth, and the order of nature," 31 and formulated a practicable calendar. They served as judges and had great influence at the courts of the tribal kings. Pre-Roman, like medieval, Gaul was a political feudalism clothed in theocracy.
Under these kings and priests Celtic Gaul reached its zenith in the fourth century n.c. Population expanded with the productivity of the La Tene techniques, and the result was a series of ·wars for land. About 400 B.c. the Celts, who already held most of central Europe as well as Gaul, conquered Britain, Spain, and north Italy. In 390 they pushed sooth to Rome; in 278 they pillaged Delphi and conquered Phrygia. A century later their vigor began to wane, partly through the softening influence of wealth and Greek ways, partly through the political atomism of feudal barons. Just as in medieval France the kings broke the po"\ver of the barons and established a unified state, conversely, in the century before Caesar, the lords of the manors broke the power of the kings and left Gaul more fragmentary than before. The Celtic front was pushed back everywhere except in Ireland; the Carthaginians subdued the Celts in Spain, the Romans drove them out of Italy, the Cimbri and Teutones overran them in Germany and southern
Gaul. In r zs B.C. the Rori:ans, eager to con_trol the road to Spain, conquered southern Gaul and made 1t a Roman province. In 58 B.c. the Gallic leaders
begged Caesar to help them repel a German invasion. Caei;ar complied and named his own reward.


He  suffered from a peculiar squmt still known by his name.74 He traveled
extensively, apparently on diplomatic missions, and used every opponunity to gather geographical or historical information. He wrote a lost history con tinuing Polybius; and in 7 B.c. he issued his great Geography, of whose seventeen books time has preserved nearly all. Like Arrian he begins by pro claiming the virtues of his work:
I ask pardon of my readers, and appeal to them not to fasten the blame for the lengt_h of my discussion upon me rather than upon those who earnestly desire knowledge of thmgs famous and ancient. . . . In this work I must leave untouched what is small, and devote my attention to what is noble and great ... useful or memorable or entertaining. And just as, in judging the merits of colossal statues, we do not examine each individual part with minute care, but rather
•
CHAP. XXIV)	THE   HELLENISTIC  REVIVAL	521
consider the general effect ... so should this my book be judged. For it, too, is a colossal work ...  worthy of a philosopher.75
He borrows frankly from Polybius and Poseidonius, less frankly from Eratosthenes, brings them all sharply to account for their errors, and sug gests that his own should be blamed on his sources.76 But he acknowledges his sources with rare candor and usually selects them with discrimination. He notes that the extension of the Roman Empire has widened geographical knowledge, but believes that there are whole continents still unknown possibly in the Atlantic. He believes that the eanh is spheroidal (but the word probably meant spherical), and that if one were to sail westward from Spain he would in time come to India. He describes coastlines as always changing through erosion or eruption and conjectures that subterranean disturbances may someday sever Suez and unite the seas. His work was a brave summary of the global knowledge of his age and must be ranked as one of the major achievements of ancient science.
Far more renowned than Strabo in his time was Dio Chrysostom-Dio of the Golden Mouth (A.D. 40- 120). His family had long been distinguished in Prusa; his grandfather had exhausted a fortune in gifts to the Bithynian city and then had made another; his father had gone through the same experience; and Dio followed in their steps.77 He became an orator and a sophist, went to Rome, was converted to Stoicism by Musonius Rufus, and was banished from Italy and Bithynia by Domitian (82). Forbidden the use of his propeny or income, he wandered for thineen years from country to country as a penniless philosopher, refusing money for his discourses, and earning his bread for the most pan by the work of his hands. When Domitian was succeeded by Nerva, Dio's exile was changed into honors; Nerva and Trajan befriended him and gave his city many favors at his request. He returned to Prusa and devoted most of his wealth to beautifying it. Another philosopher accused him of embezzling public funds; he was tried by Pliny and appears to have been exonerated.
Dio left behind him eighty orations. For us today they contain more wind than meat; they suffer from empty amplification, deceptive analogies, and rhetorical tricks; they stretch half an idea to half a hundred pages; no wonder a weary listener complained, "You are letting the sun go down with your interminable questions." 78 But the man had charm and eloquence, else he could hardly have become the most celebrated orator of the century, for whose speeches men would interrupt a war. "I don't know what you mean," said the honest Trajan, "but I love you as myself." 70 The barbarians on the Borysthenes (Dnieper) heard him as gladly as the Greeks gathered at Olym pia, or the excitable Alexandrians; an army about to revolt against N erva was
I
522	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIV
mollified into acceptance by the impromptu address of the half-naked exile. Probably what drew people to him was not his fine Attic Greek, but the courage of his denunciations. Almost alone in pagan antiquity he condemned prostitution; and few writers of his time so openly attacked the institution of slavery. (He was a bit vexed, however, when he found that his slaves had run away.)80 His address to the Alexandrians was a castigation of their lux ury, superstition, and vice. He chose Ilium as the scene of an oration in which he argued that Troy had never existed and that "Homer was the boldest liar in history." In the heart of Rome he expounded the case of the countryside against the city, painted in vivid narrative a touching picture of rural poverty, and warned his audience that the land was being neglected and the agricultural basis of civilization was in decay. At Olympia, amid a multi tude of fanatical worldlings, he reproved the atheists and epicureans of the day. Though popular conceptions of deity may be absurd, said Dio, the wise man will understand that the simple mind needs simple ideas and pictorial symbols. In truth no man can conceive the form of the Supreme Being, and even Pheidias' noble statue was an anthropomorphic assumption as unwar rantable as the primitive identification of God with a star or a tree. We can not know what God is, but we have an innate conviction that he exists, and we feel that philosophy without religion is a dark and hopeless thing. The only real freedom is wisdom-i.e., the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong; the road to freedom lies not through politics or revolution, but through philosophy; and true philosophy consists not in the speculations of books, but in the faithful practice of honor and virtue according to the dic tates of that inmost voice which is, in some mystic sense, the word of God in
the heart of man.81
THE ORIENTAL TIDE
Religion, which had bided its time and nourished its roots through all the learned or ribald skepticism of the Periclean and Hellenistic periods, now in the second century resumed its immemorial sway as philosophy, baffled by infinity and human hope, confessed its limitations and abdicated its author ity. The people themselves had never lost their faith; most of them accepted in outline the Homeric description of the afterlife,82 sacrificed religiously before undertaking a voyage, and still placed an obol in the mouth of the dead to pay his passage across the Styx. Roman statecraft welcomed the aid of established priesthoods and sought popular support by building costly tem ples to local gods. Throughout Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, the wealth of the cler continued to grow. Hadad and Atargatis were still worshiped by the Synans and had an awesome shrine at Hierapolis; the resurrection of
CHAP. xxrv)	THE   HELLENISTIC  REVI;v AL	523
the god T ammuz was still hailed in the towns of Syria with the cry, "Adonis [i.e., the Lord] is risen," and his ascension into heaven was celebrated in the closing scenes of his festival.83 Similar ceremonies commemorated in Greek ritual the agony, death, and resurrection of Dionysus. From Cappadocia the worship of the goddess Ma had spread into Ionia and Italy; her priests (called fanatici as belonging to the fanum, or temple) danced dizzily to the sound of trumpets and drums, slashed themselves with knives, and sprinkled the goddess and her devotees with their blood.84 The making of new deities went on assiduously; Caesar and the emperors, Antinoiis and many local worthies, were deified (i.e., canonized) in life or death. Cross-fertilized by trade and war, pantheons were everywhere in flower, and prayers rose hope fully in a thousand tongues to a thousand gods. Paganism was not one re ligion; it was a jungle of rival creeds, often merging in eclectic confusion.
The worship of Cybele held its ground in Lydia and Phrygia, Italy and Africa and elsewhere, and its priests, as before, emasculated themselves in imitation of her beloved Attis. At her spring festival her worshipers fasted, prayed, and mourned the death of Attis; her priests cut their arms and drank their own blood; and a solemn procession bore the young god to his grave. But on the morrow the streets rang with exultant shouts as the people cele brated the resurrection of Attis and the renewal of the earth. "Take courage,
0 mystics," cried the priests, "the god is saved; and for you also will come salvation." 86 On the last day of the feast the image of the Great Mother was carried in triumph through crowds that hailed her, at Rome, as Nostra Domina, "Our Lady." 86
Even more widely honored than Cybele was the Egyptian goddess Isis, the sorrowing mother, the loving comforter, the bearer of the gift of eternal life. All the Mediterranean peoples knew how her great spouse Osiris had died and had risen from the dead; in nearly every great city on that historic sea this happy resurrection was commemorated with gorgeous pageantry, and jubilant worshipers sang, "We have found Osiris again." 87 Isis was represented in pictures and statues as holding her divine child Horus in her arms, and devout litanies hailed her as "Queen of Heaven," "Star of the Sea," and "Mother of God." 88 Of all pagan cults this came nearest to Chris tianity in the tenderness of its story, the refinement of its ritual, the solemnity and yet joyful atmosphere of its chapels, the moving music of its vespers, the conscientious ministry of its white-robed and tonsured priests,89 the honors and opportunities with which it charmed and comforted women, the universal welcome it gave to every nationality and every class. The religion of Isis spread from Egypt to Greece in the fourth century B.c., to Sicily in the third, to Italy in the second, and then to all parts of the Empire; her icons have been found on the Danube, the Rhine, and the Seine, and a temple to •
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIV
her has been unearthed in London.90 The Mediterranean soul has never ceased to worship the divine creativeness and maternal solicitude of woman. Meanwhile the masculine cult of Mithras was passing from Persia to the most distant Roman frontiers. In the later Zoroastrian theology Mithras was the son of Ahura-Mazda, the God of Light. He, too, was the god of light, of truth, purity, and honor; sometimes he was identified with the sun and led the cosmic war against the powers of darkness, always he mediated between his father and his followers, protecting and encouraging them in life's struggle with evil, lies, uncleanliness, and the other works of Ahriman, Prince of Darkness. When Pompey's soldiers brought this religion from Cappadocia to Europe a Greek artist pictured Mithras as kneeling on the back of a bull and plunging a poniard into its neck; this repri:sentation be came the universal symbol of the faith. The seventh day of each week was held sacred to the sun-god; and towards the end of December his followers celebrated the birthday of Mithras "the Invincible Sun," who, at the winter solstice, had won his annual victory over the forces of darkness, and day by day would now give longer light.91 Tertullian speaks of a Mithraic priest hood with a "high pontiff," and of celibates and virgins serving the god; daily sacrifice was offered at his altar, worshipers partook of consecrated bread and wine, and the climax of the ceremony was signaled by the sound ing of a bell.'2 A flame was kept ever burning before the crypt in which the young god was represented felling the bull. Mithraism preached a high morality and pledged its "soldiers" to a lifelong war against evil in every form. After death, said its priests, all men must appear before the judgment seat of Mithras; then unclean souls would be handed over to Ahriman for eternal torment, while the pure would rise through seven spheres, shedding some mortal element at each stage, until they would be received into the full radiance of heaven by Ahura-Mazda himself.93 This invigorating mythology spread in the second and third centuries of our era through western Asia and Europe (skipping Greece), and built its chapels as far north as Hadrian's
\Vall. Christian Fathers were shocked to find so many parallels between their own religion and Mithraism; they argued that these were thefts from Chris tianity, or confusing stratagems of Satan (a form of Ahriman). It is difficult to say which faith borrowed from the other; perhaps both absorbed ideas current in the religious air of the East.
Each of the great cults of the Mediterranean region had "mysteries," which were usually ceremonies of purification, sacrifice, initiation, revela tion, and regeneration, centering about the death and resurrection of the god. New members were admitted into the worship of Cybele by being placed naked in a pit over which a bull was slain; the blood of the sacrificed animal, falling upon the candidate, purified him of sin and gave him a new
CHAP. :0:IV)	THE  HELLENISTIC  REVIVAL


_it intheflesh, and therefore formed pan of it in its spiritual multitude and timeless unity.
Other spirits came to his aid as he grew up: Cuba watched over his sleep, Abeona guided his first steps, Fabulina taught him to speak. When he left the house he found himself again and everywhere in the presence of gods. The earth itself was a deity: sometimes Tellus, or Terra Mater-Mother Earth; sometimes Mars as the very soil he trod, and its divine fertility; sometimes Bona Dea, the Good Goddess who ga,·e rich wombs to women and fields. On the farm there was a helping god for every task or spot: Pomona for orchards, Faunus for cattle, Pales for pasturage, Sterculus for manure heaps, Saturn for sowing, Ceres for crops, Fomax for baking com in the oven, Vulcan for making the fire. Over the boundaries presided the great god Terminus, imaged and worshiped in the stones or trees that marked the limits of the farm. Other religions may have looked to the sky, and the Roman admitted that there too were gods; but his deepest piety and sincerest propitiations turned to the earth as the source and mother of his life, the home of his dead and the magic nurse of the sprouting seed. Every December the Lares of the soil were ·worshiped in the joyful Feast of the Crossroads, or Compitalia; every January rich gifts sought the favor of Tellus for all planted things; every i\lay the priests of the Arval (or PlO\-.;ing) Brother hood led a chanting procession along the boundaries of adjoining farms, gar landed the stones with flowers, sprinkled them ,vith the blood of sacrificial victims, and prayed to 1\1ars (the earth) to bear generous fruit. So religion sancti fied property, quieted disputes, ennobled the labor of the fields with poetry and drama, and strengthened body and soul with faith and hope.
The Roman did not, like the Greek, think of his gods as having human form; he called them simply mmzina, or spirits; sometimes they were abstractions like Health, You.:1, i\1emory, Fortune, Honor, Hope, Fear, Virtue, Chastity, Con cord, Victory, or Rome. Some of them, like the Lemures or Ghosts, were spirits
60	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IV
of disease, hard to propitiate. Some were spirits of the season, like Maia, the soul of May; others were water gods like Neptune, or woodland sprites like Silvanus, or the gods that dwelt in trees. Some lived in sacred animals, like the sacrificed horse or bull, or in the sacred geese that a playful piety preserved unharmed on the Capitol. Some were spirits of procreation; Tutumus supervised conception, Lucina protected menstruation and delivery. Priapus was a Greek god of fer tility soon domiciled in Rome: maidens and matrons (if we may believe the indignant Saint Augustine) sat on the male member of his statue as a means of ensuring pregnancy; 2 scandalous figures of him adorned many a garden; little phallic images of him were worn by simple persons to bring fertility or good luck or to avert the "evil eye."3 Never had a religion so many divinities. Varro reckoned them at 30,000, and Petronius complained that in some towns of Italy there were more gods than men. But deus, to the Roman, meant saint as well as god.
Under these basic concepts lurked a polymorphous mass of popular be liefs in animism, fetishism, totemism, magic, miracles, spells, superstitions, and taboos, most of them going back to the prehistoric inhabitants of Italy, and perhaps to Indo-European ancestors in their ancient Asiatic home. Many objects, places, or persons were sacred (sacer) and therefore taboo
-not to be touched or profaned: e.g., newborn children, menstruating women, condemned criminals. Hundreds of verbal formulas or mechan ical contraptions were used to achieve natural ends by supernatural means. Amulets were well-nieh universal; nearly every child wore a bu/la, or golden talisman, suspended from his neck. Small images were hung upon doors or trees to ward off evil spirits. Charms or incantations were used to avert accidents, cure disease, bring rain, destroy a hostile army, wither an en emy's crops or himself. "We are all afraid," said Pliny, "of being trans fixed by curses and spells." 4 \Vitches appear in Horace, Virgil, Tibullus, Lucian. They were believed to eat snakes, fly through the air at night, brew poisons from esoteric herbs, kill children, and raise the dead. All but a few skeptics seem to have believed in miracles and portents, in speak ing or sweating statues,5 in gods descending from Olympus to fight for Rome, in lucky odd and unlucky even days, and in the presaging of the future by strange events. Livy's history must contain several hundred such portents, reported with philosophic gravity; and the elder Pliny's volumes so abound in portents and magic cures that they might well have been called Supernatural History. The most serious business of commerce, govern ment, or war could be deferred or ended by the priestly announcement of an unfavorable omen like abnormal entrails in a sacrificial victim or a roll of thunder in the sky.
The state did what it could to check these excesses-called them, in-
CHAP. IV)	STOIC  ROME	61
deed, precisely that, superstitio. But it sedulously exploited the piety of the people to promote the stability of society and government. It adapted the rural divinities to urban life, built a national hearth for the goddess Vesta, and appointed a college of Vestal Virgins to serve the city's sacred fire. Out of the gods of the family, the farm, and the village it developed the di indigetes-or native gods-of the state, and arranged for these a solemn and picturesque worship in the name of all the citizens.
Among these original national gods Jupiter or Jove was the favorite, though not yet, like Zeus, their king. In the early centuries of Rome he was still a half-impersonal force-the bright expanse of the sky, the light of the sun and the moon, a bolt of thunder, or (as Jupiter Pluvius) a shower of fertilizing rain; even Virgil and Horace occasionally use "Jove" as a synonym for rain or sky.6 In time of drought the richest ladies of Rome walked in barefoot procession up the Capitoline hill to the Temple of Jupiter Tonans-Jove the Thunderer-to pray for rain. Probably his name was a corruption of Diuspater, or Diespiter, Father of the Sky. Perhaps primitively one with him was Janus, originally Dianus: first the two-faced spirit of the cottage door, then of the city gate, then of any opening or beginning, as of the day or year. The portals of his temple were open only in time of war, so that he might go forth with Rome's armies to overcome the gods of the foe. As old as Jupiter in the respect of the people was Mars, at first a god of tillage, then of war, then almost a symbol of Rome; every tribe in Italy named a month after him. Of like hoary antiquity was Saturn, the national god of the new-sown seed (sata). Legend pictured him as a prehistoric king who had brought the tribes under one law, taught them agriculture, and established peace and communism in the Saturnia regna the Golden Age of Saturn's reign.
Less powerful but more deeply loved than these were the goddesses of Rome. Juno Regina was the queen of heaven, the protective genius of wom anhood, marriage, and maternity; her month of June 7 was recommended as the luckiest for weddings. Minerva was the goddess of wisdom (mens) or memory, of handicrafts and guilds, of actors, musicians, and scribes; the Palladium on which the s·afety of Rome was believed to depend was an image of Pallas Minerva, fully armed, which Aeneas was said to have brought from Troy through love and war to Rome. Venus was the spirit of desire, mating, fertility; sacred to her was April, the month of opening buds (aperire); poets like Lucretius and Ovid saw in her the amorous origin of all living things. Diana was the goddess of the moon, of women and child birth, of the hunt, of the woods and their wild denizens, a tree spirit brought from Aricia when that region of Latium came under Roman power. Near Aricia were the lake and grove of Neini, and in that grove was a rich shrine
62	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IV
of Diana, the resort of pilgrims who believed that the goddess had once mated there with Virbius, the first "King of the Woods." To ensure the fertility of Diana and the soil, the successors of Virbius-all priests and husbands of the huntress-were replaced, each in turn, by any vigorous slave who, having taken as a talisman a sprig of mistletoe (the Golden Bough) from the sacred oak tree of the grove, attacked and slew the king
-a custom that endured till the second century of our era.8
These, then, were the major gods of the official Roman worship. There were lesser, but not less popular, national deities: Hercules, god of joy and wine, who was not above gambling gaily for a courtesan with the sacristan of his temple; 9 Mercury, the patron deity of merchants, orators, and thieves; Ops, goddess of wealth; Bellona, goddess of war; and count less more. As the city spread its rule it brought in new divinities-di no vensiles. Sometimes it imponed the god of a beaten city into the Roman pantheon as a sign and surety of conquest, as when the Juno of Veii was led captive to Rome. Conversely, when the citizens of a community were moved to the capital their gods were brought with them, lest the spiritual and moral roots of the new inhabitants should be too suddenly snapped short; so immigrants bring their gods to America today. The Romans did not question the existence of these foreign deities; most of them believed that when they led the statue away the god had to come with it; many be lieved that the statue was the god.10
But some of the di novensiles were not conquered but conquering; they seeped into Roman worship through commercial, military, and cultural contacts with Greek civilization-first in Campania, then in south Italy, then in Sicily, finally in Greece itself. There was something cold and im personal in the gods of the state religion; they could be bribed by offer ings or sacrifice, but they could seldom provide comfon or individual in spiration; by contrast the gods of Greece seemed intimately human, full of adventure, humor, and poetry. The Roman populace welcomed them, built temples for them, and willingly learned their ritual. The official priest hood, glad to enlist these new policemen in the service of order and con tent, adopted the Greek gods into the divine family of Rome, and merged them, when possible, with their nearest analogues in the indigenous deities. As far back as 496 B.C. came Demeter and Dionysus, who were attached to Ceres and Liber (god of the grape); twelve years later Castor and Pol lux were received, to become the protectors of Rome; in 43 r a temple was raised to Apollo the Healer in the hope that he might allay a plague; in 294 Aesculapius, the Greek god of medicine, was brought from Epidaurus to Rome in the form of a huge snake,11 and a temple-hospital was built in his honor on an island in the Tiber. Cronus was accepted as substantially
CHAP. IV)	STOIC  ROME
one with Saturn, Poseidon was identified with Neptune, Artemis with Diana, Hephaestus with Vulcan, Heracles with Hercules, Hades with Pluto, Hermes with l\lercury. \Vith the help of the poets Jupiter ,vas elevated into another Zeus, a stern witness and guardian of oaths, a bearded judge of morals, a custodian of laws, a god of gods; and slowly the educated Ro man was prepared for the monotheistic creeds of Stoicism, Judaism, and Christianity.
The Priests
To appease or enlist the aid of these gods Italy employed an elaborate clergy. In his home the father was priest; but public worship was con ducted by several collegia-associations-of priests, each filling its own va cancies, but all under the lead of a po11tif ex maximus elected by the cen turies. No special training was necessary for membership in these sacred colleges; any citizen might be enrolled in them or leave them; they formed no separate order or caste and were politically powerless except as tools of the state. They received the income of certain state lands for their sup port, with slaves to serve them; and grew rich through generations of pious legacies.
In the third century before Christ the main pontifical college had nine mem bers. They kept historical annals, recorded la"\VS, took auspices, offered sacrifices, and purified Rome with quinquennial lustrations. In performing the official ritual the pontiffs were aided by fifteen flamines-kindlers of the sacrificial flames.
.Minor pontifical colleges had special functions: the Salii, or Leapers, ushered in each New Year with a ritual dance to Mars; the fetiales sanctified the ratification of treaties and declarations of war; and the Luperci, or Brotherhood of the \Volf,
carried on the strange rites of the Lupercalia. The college of the Vestal Virgins tended the state hearth, and sprinkled it daily with holy water from the fountain of the sacred nymph Egeria. These white-clad, white-veiled nuns were chosen from among girls six to ten years of age; they took a vow of virginity and service for thirty years, but in return they received many public honors and privileges. If anv of them was found guilty of sexual relations she was beaten with rods and buried alive; Roman historians record twelve cases of such punishment. After thirty years they were free to leave and marry, but few took or found the opportunity.12
The most influential of the priestly colleges was that of the nine augures who


A legion was a mb:ed brigade of some 4200 infantry, 300 cavalry, and various auxiliary groups; 22 two legions made a consul's army. Each legion was sub divided into centuries-originally of one hundred, later of two hundred, men commanded by centurions. Every legion had its vcxillum-its banner or colors; honor forbade that this should ever fall into hostile hands, and clever officers sometimes threw it into the enemy's ranks to stir their men to a desperate recovery. In battle the front ranks of the infantry hurled at the foe, ten to twenty paces away, a volley of javelins-short wooden lances with an iron point-while on the wings archers and slingers attacked with arrows and stones, and the cavalry charged with pikes and sword ; hand-to-hand ombats with short swords were the final and decisive action. In a siege massive wooden catapults, worked by tension or torsion, hurled ten-pound rocks over 300 yards; immense batter ing rams, suspended on ropes, were drawn back like a swing and then released against the enemy's ,vaEs; an inclined ramp of earth and timber was built, wheeled towers were pushed and hauled up this ramp, and from these towers missiles were discharged upon the foe.23 Instead of the solid and unwieldy phalanx-six lines of 500 men each-which the early Republic seems to have taken
over from Etrur:a, the legion was rearranged, about 366 B.c., into maniples * of
two centuries each; free room was left between each maniple and its neighbors, and the maniplcs of e2ch succeeding line stood behind these open spaces. This formation made possible a rapid reinforcement of one line by the next, and a quick veering of one or more maniples to face a flank attack; and it gave free
Manipulus meant a handful of hay, fems, etc.; attached to a pole this seems_ to have formeda primitive military standard; hence the word came to mean a body of soldiers serv
ing under the same ensign.
34	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. II
play to that individual combat for which the Roman soldier was especially trained.
The major element in the success of this army was discipline. The young Roman was educated for war from his childhood; he studied the military art above all others, and spent ten formative years of his life in field or camp. Cowardice ,vas in that army the unforgivable sin, punished by flogging the offender to death.24 The general was empowered to behead any soldier or officer, not merely for flight from battle, but for any deviation from orders, however favorable the result. Deserters or thieves had their right hands cut off.25 Food in camp ,vas simple: bread or porridge, some vegetables, sour wine, rarely flesh; the Roman army conquered the world on a vegetarian diet; Caesar's troops complained when corn ran out and they had to eat meat.26 Labor was so arduous and long that the soldiers begged for battle instead; valor became the better part of discretion. The soldier received no pay till 405 B.c., and little thereafter; but he was allowed to share, according to his rank, in the booty of the defeated bullion and currency, lands and men and movable goods. Such training made not only brave and eager warriors but able and intrepid generals; the discipline of obedience developed the capacity to command. The army of the Republic lost battles, but it never lost a war. Men molded by stoic education and brutal spec tacles to a contemptuous familiarity with death carved out the victories that conquered Italy, then Carthage and Greece, and then the Mediterranean world.
Such in outline was the "mixed constitution" that Polybius admired as "the best of all existing governments": a limited democracy in the legislative sovereignty of the assemblies, an aristocracy in the leadership of the patrician Senate, a Spartan "dyarchy" in the brief royalty of the consuls, a monarchy in occasional dictatorships. Essentially it was an aristocracy, in which old and rich families, through ability and privilege, held office for hundreds of years, and gave to Roman policy a tenacious continuity that was the secret of its accomplishments.
But it had its faults. It was a clumsy confusion of checks and balances in
which nearly every command could in time of peace be nullified by an equal and opposite ctmunand. The division of power was an aid to liberty and
1
for a while-a restraint on malfeasance; on the other hand, it led to great
military disasters like Cannae, it dissolved democracy into mob rule, and at last brought on the permanent dictatorship of the Principate. YVhat aston ishes us is that such a government could last so long (508 to 49 B.c.) and achieve so much. Perhaps it endured because of its muddling adaptability to change, and the proud patriotism formed in the home, the school, the temple, the army, the Assembly, and the Senate. Devotion to the state marked the zenith of the Republic, as unparalleled political corruption
CHAP, II)	THE   STRUGGLE  FOR  DEMOCRACY	35
marked its fall. Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.
THE CONQUEST OF ITALY
Never had Rome been so encompassed by enemies as when she emerged from the monarchy as a weak city-state ruling only 350 square miles
-equivalent to a space nineteen by nineteen miles. "\Vhile Lars Porsena ad vanced upon her, many of the neighboring communities that had been sub jected by her kings resumed their liberty and formed a Latin League to withstand Rome. Italy was a medley of independent tribes or cities, each with its own government and dialect: in the north the Ligures, Gauls, Umbrians, Etruscans, and Sabines; to the south the Latins, Volscians, Sam nites, Lucanians, Bruttians; along the western and southern coasts Greek colonists in Cumae, Naples, Pompeii, Paestum, Locri, Rhegium, Crotona, Metapontum, Tarentum. Rome was at the center of them all, strategically placed for expansion, but perilously open to attack from all sides at once. It was her salvation that her enemies seldom united against her. In 505, while
she was at war with the Sabincs, a powerful Sabine clan-the Claudian gens
-came over to Rome and was granted citizenship on favorable terms. In 449 the Sabines were defeated; by 290 all their territory was annexed to Rome, and by 2 50 they had received the full Roman franchise.
In 496 the Tarquins persuaded some of the to,vns of Latium-Tusculum, Ardea, Lanuvium, Aricia, Tibur, and others-to join in a war against Rome. Faced with this apparently ovenvhelming combination, the Romans appointed their first dic tator, Aulus Postumius; at Lake Regillus they won a saving victory, helped, they assure us, by the gods Castor and Pollu.x, who left Olympus to fight in their ranks. Three years later Rome signed a treaty ,vith the Latin League in which all patties pledged that "between the Romans and the cities of the Latins there shall be peace as long as heaven and earth shall last.... Both shall share equally in all booty taken in a common war." 27 Rome became a member of the League, then its leader, then its master. In 493 she fought the Volscians; it was in this conflict that Caius Marcius ,von the name of Coriolanus by capturing Corioli, the Volscian capital. The historians add, probably with a touch of romance, that Coriolanus became a hard reactionarv, "·as banished on the insistence of the plebs (491 ), fled to the Volscians, reo ganized them, and led them in a siege of Rome. The starving Romans, we are told, sent embassy after embassy to dissuade him, to no avail, until his mother and wife went out to him and, failing in their pleas, threatened to block his advance with their bodies. Thereupon he ,vithdrew his
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. II
army, and was killed by the Volscians; or, says another story, he lived among them to a bitter ripe old age.28 In 405 Veii and Rome entered upon a duel to the death for control of the Tiber. Rome besieged the city for nine years without success, and the emboldened towns of Etruria joined in the war. Attacked on every side, and their very existence challenged, the Romans appointed a dictator, Camillus, who raised a new army, captured Veii, and divided its lands among the citizens of Rome. In 351, after sundry further wars, southern Etruria was an nexed to Rome under the almost modern name of Tuscia.
Meanwhile, in 390, a new and greater peril appeared, and that long duel had begun, between Rome and Gaul, which ended only with Caesar. While Etruria and Rome were fighting fourteen wars, Celtic tribes from Gaul and Germany had filtered down through the Alps and settled in Italy as far south as the Po. Ancient historians called the invaders Keltai or Celtae, Galatae or Galli, indif ferently. Nothing is known of their origin; we may only describe them as that branch of the lndo-European stock which peopled western Germany, Gaul, central Spain, Belgium, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and formed the pre Roman languages there. Polybius pictures them as "tall and handsome," relishing war, and fighting naked except for golden amulets and chains.29 When the Celts of southern Gaul tasted Italian wine, they were so pleased with it that they decided to visit the land that produced such transporting fruit; probably they were moved more by the quest for fresh acres and new pasturage. Entering, they lived for a time in abnormal peace, tilling and herding, and taking over the Etrus can culture which they found in the towns. About 400 B.c. they inYaded and plundered Etruria; the Etruscans resisted weakly, having sent most of their forces to defend Veii against Rome. In 391, 30,000 Gauls reached Clusium; a year later they met the Romans at the river Allia, routed them, and entered Rome un hindered. They sacked and burned large sections of the city, and for seven months besieged the remnants of the Roman army on the Capitol-the crest of the Capitoline hil_l. Finally the Romans yielded, and paid the Gauls a thousand pounds of gold to depart.* They left, but returned in 367, 358, and 350; repeatediy re pulsed, they at last contented themselves with northern Italy, which now became Cisalpine Gaul.	,


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Fie. ;-Tbe Orator
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l\luseo Archeologico, Florence
CHAP. I)	ETRUSCAN PRELUDE
monarchy had shielded them from aristocratic domination.47 The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty; but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.
The expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome, added to the defeat of the Etruscans by Greek colonists at Cumae in 524, threatened to end Etruscan leadership in central Italy. Responding for these reasons to Tarquin's appeal, Lars Porsena, chief magistrate of Clusium, collected an army from the feder ated cities of Etruria and advanced upon Rome. At the same time an attempt was made in Rome itself to restore T arquin. The two sons of Brutus were among the arrested conspirators, and the fiery first consul provided an exemplar-perhaps a myth-for all later Romans when he witnessed in stoic silence the flogging and beheading of his children. The Romans destroyed the Tiber bridges before Porsena could reach them; it was in this defense of the bridgeheads that Horatius Codes immortalized himself in Latin and English lays. Despite this and other legends with which defeat tried to cover itself with glory, Rome surrendered to Porsena,48 and yielded portions of her territory to Veii and to the Latin towns that had been despoiled by Rome's kings.49 Porsena showed his good taste by not demanding the restoration of T arquin; in Etruria, too, by this time, aristocracy had driven out monarchy. Rome was weakened for a generation, but her revolution remained.
The Etruscan power had been expelled, but the marks and relics of Etruscan influence were to survive in Roman civilization to its end. That influence was apparently least on the Latin language; nevertheless, the Roman numerals are probably Etruscan,50 and the name Roma may have come from the Etruscan rumon, river.51 The Romans believed that they had taken from Etruria the ceremonies of a returning conqueror's triumph, the purple-hemmed robes and ivory cu.rule (chariotlike) seat of the magistrates, and the rods and axes carried before each consul by twelve lictors in token of his authority to strike and kill.52 * The coins of Rome, centuries before she had a fleet, were adorned with the prow of a ship-long used in the coinage of Etruria to symbolize her commercial activity and naval power. From the seventh to the fourth centuries n.c. it was a custom among Roman aristocrats to send their sons to Etruscan cities for higher education; there, among other
In an Etruscan tomb at Vetulonia, dated back to the eighth centurv B.c., a double-headed iron a.-.. was found, with its shaft enclosed by eight iron rods.63 The double ax as a symbol of government is at least as old as Minoan Crete. The Romans gaYe to the bound rods and
axes the name of f asces, bundles. The twelve lictors (ligi'lre, to bind) owed their number to
the twelve cities of the Erruscan Federation, each of which provided a lictor for the chief officer of the Federation.64
18	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. I
things, they learned geometry, surveying, and architecture.55 Roman dress derived from the Etruscan, or both from a common source.
The first actors, and their name histriones, came to Rome from Etruria. It was Tarquinius Priscus, if we may believe Livy, who built the first Circus Maximus, and imported race horses and pugilists from Etruria for Roman games. The Etruscans gave Rome brutal gladiatorial contests, but they also transmitted to Rome a higher status of woman than could be found in Greece. Etruscan engineers built the walls and sewers of Rome, and turned it from a swamp into a protected and civilized capital. From Etruria Rome took most of her religious ritual, her augurs, haruspices, and soothsayers; as late as Julian (A.n. 36 3). Etruscan soothsayers were an official part of every Roman army. With Etruscan rites Romulus was believed to have laid out the limits of Rome. From the same source came the Roman wedding cere mony, with its symbolism of capture, and the Roman ceremonial funeral. Rome took her musical modes and instruments from Etruria.56 Most of her artists were Etruscans, and the Roman street where the artists worked was called Vicus Tuscus; the arts themselves, however, may have filtered in through Lacium from the Campanian Greeks. Sculptural portraiture in Rome was deeply influenced by the death masks made for the family gal lery-a custom taken from Etruria. Etruscan sculptors adorned the temples and palaces of Rome with bronze statuary and terra-cotta figures and reliefs; Etruscan architects bequeathed to Rome a "Tuscan style" that still survives in the colonnade of St. Peter's Church; Etruscan kings at Rome seem to have built her first large edifices, and to have transformed Rome from an assem blage of earthen or wooden huts into a city of wood, brick, and stone. Not till Caesar would Rome see again so much building as under Etruscan rule.
We must not exaggerate. However much Rome learned from her neigh bors, she remained, in all the basic fearures of life, distinctively herself. Nothing in Etruscan history quite suggests the Roman character, the grave self-discipline, the cruelty and courage, the patriotism and stoic devotion that patiently conquered, and then patiently ruled, the Mediterranean states. Now Rome was free, and the stage was cleared for the incomparable drama of the grandeur and decline of paganism in the ancient world.
BOOK I
THE	REPUBLIC
508-30 B.C.
CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE
B.C.
813 (?): Foundation of Carthage
558f: Carthage conquers western Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, etc.
509: Establishment of Roman Republic 508: War with Etruscans; Horatius Co