Polybius is "the historians' historian" because he is as interested in his method as in his subject. He likes to talk about his plan of procedure, and philosophizes at every opportunity. Humanly he pictures his own quali fications as ideal. He insists that history should be written by those who have seen-or have directly consulted others who have seen-the events to be described. He denounces Timaeus for having relied on his ears rather than his eyes, and tells with pride of his own travels in search of data, documents, and geographical veracity; he reminds us how, in returning from Spain to Italy, he crossed the Alps by the same pass that Hannibal had used, and how he went down into the very toe of Italy to decipher an inscription left by Hannibal in Brutium... He proposes to make his history as accurate as "the magnitude of the work and its comprehensive treat ment" will allow;"" and he succeeds, so far as we can say, better than any other Greek except Thucydides. He argues that the historian should have been a man of affairs, versed in the actual processes of statesmanship, poli tics, and war; otherwise he will never understand the behavior of states or the course of history... He is a realist and a rationalist; he pierces the moral phrases of diplomats to the actual motives of policy. It amuses him to observe how easily men can be deceived, singly or en masse, and even repeatedly by the same tricks.'° "What is good," says a scandalous presage of Machiavelli, "very seldom coincides with what is advantageous, and few are those who can combine the two and adapt them to each other.'"' He accepts the Stoic theology of a Divine Providence, but he merely pities the popular cults of his day, and smiles at stories of supernatural interven tion... He recognizes the role of chance in history, and the occasional efficacy of great men,.. but he is resolved to lay bare the factual and often impersonal chain of causes and effects, so that history may be a lantern of
CHAP, XXVI)	BOOKS	615
understanding held up to the present and the future." "There is no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past"; and "the sound est education and training for a life of active politics is the study of his tory";'" "it is history, and history alone, which, without involving us in actual danger, will mature our judgment and prepare us to take right views, whatever may be the crisis or the posture of affairs.'"" The best method of history, he thinks, will be that which sees the life of a nation as an or ganic unity, an weaves the story of each part into the life history of the whole. "He who believes that by studying isolated histories he can acquire a just view of history as a whole is, as it seems to me, much in the case of one who, after having looked at the dissevered limbs of an animal once alive and beautiful, fancies he h .s been as good as an eyewitness of the creature itself in all its action and grace.""
Of the forty books into which Polybius divided his Histories, time has preserved five, and the epitomists have rescued substantial fragments of the rest. It is a great pity that the execution of this vast conception is marred by degenerate Greek, peevish critiques of other historians, an almost exclusive preoccupation with politics and war, and an absurd segmenta tion of the narrative into Olympiads, giving the history of all the Mediter ranean nations in each four-year period, and leading to exasperating digres sions and a baffling discontinuity. Sometimes, as in the story of Hannibal's invasion, Polybius mounts to drama and eloquence, but he reacts so strongly against the florid rhetoric popular among his immediate predecessors that he makes it a point of honor to be dull." "No one," said an ancient critic, "ever read him through."'" The world has almost forgotten him; but his torians will long continue to study him because he was one of the greatest theorists and practitioners of historiography; because he dared to take a
wide view and write a "universal history"; and because, above all, he un derstood that mere facts are worthless except through their interpretation, and that the past has no value except as our roots and our illumination.
CHAPTER  XXVII
The Art of the Dispersion
A MISCELLANY
HE decline of Greek civilization was longest deferred in the sphere of art. Here the Hellenistic age bears comparison, not only in fer
tility but even in originality, with any period in history. Certainly the minor arts suffered no deterioration. Skilled workers in wood, ivory, sil ver, and gold were scattered throughout the expanded Greek world. The engraving of gems and coins now reached its highest excellence; as far east as Bactria Hellenized kings lavished art upon their currency, and in the west the dekadrachma of Hieron II might be defended as the finest coin in numismatic record. Alexandria became famous for its goldsmiths and silversmiths, whose artistry rivaled the faultless style of its poets; for its de lightful cameos-precious stones or shells carved in colored relief; for its blue or green fai:ence, its skillfully glazed pottery, its delicately designed and many-colored glass. The Portland Vase, very likely a product of Alexandria, shows this art at its best: elegant figures cut into a layer of milk-white glass superimposed upon a body of blue glass; this is, so to speak, the Josiah Wedgwood masterpiece of antiquity.""
Music remained popular in all classes of the population. Scales and modes changed in the direction of refinement and novelty;' transient discords were admitted into harmony; instruments and compositions increased in com plexity." Towards 240, at Alexandria, the old "pipes of Pan" were en larged into an organ of bronze pipes; and about 17 5 Ctesibius improved this into an organ operated by a combination of water and air and enabling the player to control vast waves of sound. We know nothing more of its construction; but we shall see how rapidly it developed, in Roman days, into the organ of Christian and modern times.• Instruments were combined into orchestras, and semisymphonic performances of purely instrumental music, sometimes in five movements, were given in the theaters of Alex andria, Athens, and Syracuse.' Professional virtuosos rose to great prom inence, and to a social standing commensurate with their high fees. About
It derives its name from the Duke of Portland, who bought it in Rome. It is now in the British Museum.
616
CHAP.XXVII)	THE  ART  OF  THE  DISPERSION
318 Aristoxenus of Taras, a pupil of Aristotle, wrote a small treatise, Htrr monics, which became the classic ancient text in musical theory. Aristox enus was a very serious man, and like most philosophers he did not enjoy the music of his time. Athenaeus represents him as saying, in words that many generations have heard: "We also, since the theaters have become completely barbarized, and since music has become utterly ruined and vulgar-we, being but a few, will recall to our minds, sitting by ourselves, what music used to be."'
The architecture of the Hellenistic age cannot impress us, for time has leveled it away with indiscriminate hostility. And yet we know, from literature and the remains, that the Greek building art spread its sway in this period from Bactria to Spain. The mutual influence of Greece and the Orient brought in a mixture of styles: the colonnade and the architrave invaded inner Asia, while the arch, the vault, and the cupola entered the West; even so ancient an Hellenic center as Delos raised Egyptian and Persian capitals. The Doric order seemed too stern and stiff for an age that loved refinement and ornament; it gave ground city by city, while the ornate Corinthian style advanced to its highest excellence. The secularization of art kept pace with the secularization of government, law, morals, letters, and philosophy; stoas, porticoes, market places, courts, assembly rooms, libraries, theaters, gymnasiums, and baths began to crowd out the temples, and regal or private palaces gave a new outlet to Greek design and decoration. Domestic interiors were adorned with paintings, statues, and wall reliefs. Private gardens surrounded the more palatial homes. Royal parks, gar dens, lakes, and pavilions were built in the capitals, and were usually opened to public use. Town planning developed as a sister art to architecture; streets were laid out on Hippodamus' rectangular scheme, with main avenues as wide as thirty feet-an ample width for horse-and-chariot days. Smyrna boasted of paved thoroughfares,8 but presumably most Hellenistic streets were trampled dirt, and knew all the vicissitudes of mud.
Fine buildings developed beyond any precedent. At Athens, in the second century, the lofty Corinthian columns of the Olympieum were set up, and the general design of the extended edifice, the most magnificent in Athens, was laid down by the Roman architect Cossutius-a strange inversion of Rome's usual dependence upon the artists of Greece. Livy described this temple of the Olympian Zeus as the only structure he had seen that could be a fit dwelling for the god of gods.T Sixteen columns of it stand-the most beautiful existing speci mens of the Corinthian style. At Eleusis the dying piety of Athens and the genius of Philon completed the majestic temple of the Mysteries which Pericles had begun on a site already sacred in Mycenaean times; only fragments are left,
618	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXVII
but some of them show Greek design and carving still at their best. At Delos the French have excavated the ground plan of Apollo's sanctuary, and have re vealed a city once crowded with edifices devoted to commerce or t:he protec tion of a hundred Greek or foreign gods. At Syracuse Hieron II raised many impressive buildings, and restored and enlarged the extant municipal theater; to this day we may read his name on its stones. In Egypt the Ptolemies adorned Alexandria with edifices that gave the city a reputation for beauty, but no sign of them survives. Ptolemy III erected at Edfu a temple which is the noblest architectural relic of the Grecian occupation, and his successors built or rebuilt the temple of Isis at Philae. In Ionia new homes were given to the gods at Mi letus, Priene, Magnesia, and elsewhere; the third temple of Artemis at Ephesus was finished about 300 B.c. A still vaster fane was raised by the architects Paeonius and Daphnis at Didyma, near Miletus, in honor of Apollo ( 332 B.c. A.D. 41); some drums of the superb Ionic columns still remain. At Pergamum Eumenes II made his capital the talk of Greece by building, among many noble structures, that famous Altar to Zeus which the Germans exhumed in 1878, and have skillfully reconstructed in the Pergamum Museum in Berlin. A majestic flight of steps mounted between two porticoes to a spacious colonnaded court; and around one hundred and thirty feet of the base ran a frieze as supreme in its period as that of the Mausoleum in the fourth century, or the Parthenon in the fifth. Never had Greece been so handsomely adorned; and never had the en thusiasm of its citizens and the skill of its artists transformed with such splendor so many habitations of men.
PAINTING
Painting is usually the last great art to mature in a civilization; in the early stages of a culture it is subordinated to religious architecture and stat uary, and it acquires independence only when private life and private wealth invite the decoration of the home or the commemoration of a name. The death of democracy having weakened the sense of the state, the in dividual returned to domestic consolations. Rich men built themselves pala tial residences, and gave high fees to artists who could adorn a fountain or brighten a wall. Alexandria used painting on glass as one form of mural ornament; all Hellenistic cities employed for this purpose movable panels of wood; princes and magnates preferred to have immense pictures painted on detachable marble slabs. Pausanias describes a prodigious number of paintings seen by him in his tour of Greece, but nothing of this flourishing art has cheated time except some faded tints on pottery or stone. We are left to guess at its quality from the pale and middling copies found at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome.
CHAP.XXVII)	THE	ART	OF  TH·E  DISPERSION
Greece continued to rank its painters as high as its sculptors and archi tects, perhaps higher. It paid them American commissions, and told a thou sand fond stories about their lives. Ctesicles of Ephesus, failing to receive a desired boon from Queen Stratonice, painted her romping with a fisher man, exhibited the picture, and then took ship to safety; Stratonice, because "the likenesses of the two figures were so admirably expressed," forgave him and let him return.• When Aratus took Sicyon he ordered all portraits of its past dictators destroyed; one dictator, Archestratus, had been shown by Melanthus (a fourth-century painter) beside his chariot, and so vividly that the artist Neacles entreated Aratus to spare the picture; Aratus con sented, on condition that the figure of Archestratus be replaced by some less offensive form." Protogenes, says Strabo, painted a satyr with a par tridge so realistically that live partridges called to it; the painter finally blotted out the bird so that people might appreciate the excellence of his satyr.1° The same artist, Pliny tells us, applied four coats of paint to his most famous picture, Ialysus (supposed founder of the town of that name in Rhodes), so that when time wore out the uppermost layer the colors might still be fresh and clear. Vexed by his inability to represent with sufficient verisimilitude the foam that dripped from the mouth of Ialysus' dog, Protogenes lost his temper and hurled a sponge at the picture, willing to destroy it; the sponge, of course, struck just at the right place, and, when it fell, left a blotch of color marvelously like the foam of a panting hound. When Demetrius Poliorcetes besieged Rhodes he refrained from setting fire to the town lest this painting be destroyed. During the siege Protogenes continued at work in his village studio, in the direct line of the Macedonian advance. Demetrius sent for him and asked why he had not, like the other villagers, taken refuge within the city walls. "Because I know," answered Protogenes, "that you are waging war with the Rhodians, and not with the arts." The King assigned a guard to protect him, and neglected the siege to watch the artist work.11
Hellenistic painters knew the tricks of perspective, foreshortening, light ing, and grouping. Though they used landscapes only as background and decoration, and rendered them (if we may judge from the Pompeian cop ies) in a lifeless and conventional way, they at least realized the existence of nature, and brought it into art at the same time that Theocritus was im porting it into poetry. But they were so interested in man and all his works that they had little time for trees and flowers. Their predecessors had painted only the gods and the rich; the Hellenistic artists were fascinated by anything human, and discovered that an ugly subject might make a
620	THE   LIFE  9F  GREECE	( CHAP. XXVII


HREE strains merged in Greek philosophy: the physical, the meta physical, and the ethical. The physical culminated in Aristotle, the metaphysical in Plato, the ethical in Zeno of Citium. The physical develop ment ended in the separation of science from philosophy in Archimedes and Hipparchus; the metaphysical ended in the skepticism of Pyrrho and the later Academy; the ethical remained until Epicureanism and Stoicism
were conquered or absorbed by Christianity.
I. THE SKEPTICAL ATTACK
Amid this spreading Hellenistic culture Athens-mother of much of it, mistress of most of it-retained her leadership in two realms: the drama and philosophy. The world was not too busy with war and revolutions, new sciences and new religions, the love of beauty and the quest of gold, to spare some time for the unanswerable but inescapable problems of truth and error, matter and mind, freedom and necessity, nobility and baseness, life and death. From all the cities of the Mediterranean young men made their way, often through a thousand hardships, to study in the halls and gardens where Plato and Aristotle had left almost living memories.
At the Lyceum the industrious Theophrastus of Lesbos carried on the empirical tradition. The Peripatetics were scientists and scholars rather than philosophers; they devoted themselves to specialist research in zoology, botany, biography, and the history of science, philosophy, literature, and law. In his thirty-four years of leadership (322-288) Theophrastus ex plored many fields, and published four hundred volumes dealing with al most every subject from love to war. His pamphlet "On Marriage" severely handled the female sex, and was severely handled in turn by Epicurus' mis tress Leontium, who wrote a learned and devastating reply.1 Nevertheless it is to Theophrastus that Athenaeus attributes the tender sentiment that "it is through modesty that beauty becomes beautiful."" Diogenes Laertius de scribes him as "a most benevolent man, and very affable"; so eloquent that
640
CHAP.XXIX)   THE  SURRENDER OF PHILOSOPHY
his original name was forgotten in that which Aristotle gave him, meaning that he spoke like a god; so popular that two thousand students flocked to his lectures, and Menander was among his most faithful followers." Pos terity preserved with especial care his book of Characters, not because it created a literary form, but because it sharply satirized the faults that all men ascribe to other men. Here is the Garrulous Man who "begins with a eulogy of his wife, relates the dream he had the night before, tells dish by dish what he had for supper," and concludes that "we are by no means the men we were" in former times. And here is the Stupid Man who "when he goes to the play, is left at the end fast asleep in an empty house ... after a heany.supper he has to get up in the night, returns only half awake, misses the right door, and is bitten by his neighbor's dog."'
One of the few events in Theophrastus' life was the issuance of a state decree (307) requiring the Assembly's approval in the selection of leaders for the philosophical schools. About the same time Agnonides indicted Theophrastus on the old charge of impiety. Theophrastus quietly left Athens; but so many students followed him that the storekeepers com plained of a ruinous fall in trade. Within a year the decree was annulled, the indictment was withdrawn, and Theophrastus returned in triumph to preside ov:er the Lyceum almost till his death at eighty-five. "All Athens," we are told, attended his funeral. The Peripatetic school did not long sur vive him: science left i poverished Athens for affluent Alexandria, and the Lyceum, which had dedicated itself to research, subsided into a penurious obscurity.
Meanwhile Speusippus had succeeded Plato, and Xenocrates Speusippus, at the Academy. Xenocrates governed the school for a quarter of a cen tury (339-314), and brought new credit to philosophy by the honorable simplicity of his life. Absorbed in study and teaching, he left the Academy but once a year, to see the Dionysian tragedies; when he appeared, says Laenius, "the turbulent and quarrelsome rabble of the city made way for him to pass."" He refused all fees, and became so poor that he was on the verge of being imprisoned for taxes when Demetrius of Phalerum paid his arrears and had him freed. Philip of Macedon said that among the many Athenian ambassadors sent to him Xenocrates was the only one who proved incorruptible. His reputation for virtue annoyed Phryne. Pretending that she was being pursued, she took refuge in his house; and seeing that he had but one bed she asked if she might share it with him. He consented, we are told, out of humane considerations; but he proved so cold to her entreaties and her charms that she fled from his bed and board, and complained to
'l'HE  LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXIX
her friends that she had found a statue instead of a man.' Xenocrates would have no mistress but philosophy.
With his death the metaphysical strain in Greek thought neared exhaus tion in the very grove that had been its shrine. The successors of Plato were mathematicians and moralists, and spent little time on the abstract questions that had once agitated the Academy. The skeptical challenges of Zeno the Eleatic, the subjectivism of Heracleitus, the methodical doubt of Gorgias and Protagoras, the metaphysical agnosticism of Socrates, Aristip pus, and Eucleides of Megara resumed control of Greek philosophy; the Age of Reason was over. Every hypothesis had been conceived, aired, and forgotten; the universe had preserved its secret, and men had grown weary of a search in which even the most brilliant minds had failed. Aristotle had agreed with Plato on only one point-the possibility of acquiring ultimate truth.' Pyrrho voiced the suspicions of his time in suggesting that it was above all on this point that they had both been mistaken.
Pyrrho was born at Elis about 360. He followed Alexander's army to India, studied under the "Gymnosophists" there, and perhaps learned from them something of the skepticism for which his name became a synonym. Returning to Elis he lived in serene poverty as a teacher of philosophy. He was too modest to write books, but his pupil Timon of Phlius, in a series of Silloi or Satires, sent Pyrrho's opinions abroad into the world. These opin ions were basically three: that certainty is unattainable, that the wise man will suspend judgment and will seek tranquillity rather than truth, and that, since all theories are probably false, one might as well accept the myths and conventions of his time and place. Neither the senses nor reason can give us sure knowledge: the senses distort the object in perceiving it, and reason is merely the sophist servant of desire. Every syllogism begs the question, for its major premise assumes its conclusion. "Every reason has a correspond ing reason opposed to it";" the same experience may be delightful or un pleasant according to circumstance and mood; the same object may seem small or large, ugly or beautiful; the same practice may be moral or immoral according to where and when we live; the same gods are or are not, accord ing to the different nations of mankind; everything is opinion, nothing is quite true. It is foolish, then, to take sides in disputes, or to seek some other place or mode of living, or to envy the future or the past; all desire is delu sion. Even life is an uncertain good, death not a certain evil; one should have no prejudices against either of them. Best of all is a calm acceptance: not to reform the world, but to bear with it patiently; not to fever our selves with progress, but to content ourselves with peace. Pyrrho tried
CHAP. XXIX)   THE  SUR RENDER  OF P H IL OSOP H Y
sincerely to live this half-Hindu philosophy. He conformed humbly with the customs and worship of Elis, made no effort to avoid dangers or prolong his life,8 and died at the age of ninety. His fellow citizens so approved of him that in his honor they exempted philosophers from taxation.
By the irony of time it was the followers of Plato who carried forward this attack upon metaphysics. Arcesilaus, who became head of the "Middle Academy" in 269, transformed Plato's rejection of sense knowledge into a skepticism as complete as Pyrrho's, and probably under Pyrrho's influ ence."' "Nothing is certain," said Arcesilaus, "not even that.'m. When he was told that such a doctrine made life impossible he answered that life had longsince learned to manage with probabilities. A century later a still more vigorous skeptic took charge of the "New AcadeJny," and pressed the doc trine of universal doubt to the point of intellectual and moral nihilism. Carneades of Cyrene, coming to Athens like a Greek Abelard about 193, made life bitter for Chrysippus and his other teachers by arguing with galling subtlety against every doctrine that they taught. As they had undertaken to make him a logician he used to say to them (turning the tables on Protagoras): "If my reasoning is right, well and good; if it is wrong, give me back my tuition fee.'112 When he set up shop for himself he lectured one morning for an opinion, the next morning against it, prov ing each so well as to destroy both; while his pupils, and even his biog rapher, sought in vain to discover his real views. He undertook to refute the materialistic realism of the Stoics by a Platonic-Kantian critique of sen sation and reason. He attacked all conclusions as intellectually indefensible, and bade his students be satisfied with probability and the customs of their time. Sent to Rome by Athens as one of an embassy (155), he shocked the Senate by speaking one day in defense of justice, and on the morrow de riding it as an impracticable dream: if Rome wished to practice justice it would have to restore to the nations of the Mediterranean all that it had taken from them by superior force.11 On the third day Cato had the embassy sent home as a danger to public morals. Perhaps Polybius, who was then a hostage with Scipio, heard these addresses or of them, for he speaks with the anger of a practical man against those philosophers
who in the discussions of the Academy nave trained themselves in extreme readiness of speech. For some of them, in their efforts to puzzle the minds of their hearers, resort to such paradoxes, and are so fertile in inventing plausibilities, that they wonder whether or not it is possible for those in Athens to smell eggs roasted in Ephesus, and are in doubt whether all the time they are discussing the matter in
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP,XXIX
the Academy they are not lying in their beds at home and composing this discourse in a dream.... From this excessive love of paradox they have brought all philosophy into disrepute  They have im
planted such a passion in the minds of our young men that they never give even a thought to the ethical and political questions that really benefit students of philosophy, but spend their lives in the vain at tempt to invent useless absurdities."
II,  THE EPICUREAN ESCAPE
Though he described for many ages the theorist who loses his life in the cobwebs of speculation, Polybius was wrong in supposing that moral prob lems had lost their lure for the Greek mind. It was precisely the ethical strain that in this period replaced the physical and the metaphysical as the dominant note in philosophy. Political problems were indeed in abeyance, for freedom of speech was harassed by the presence or memory of royal garrisons, and national liberty was implicitly understood to depend upon quiescence. The glory of the Athenian state had departed, and philosophy had to face what to Greece was an unprecedented divorce between politics and ethics. It had to find a way of life at once forgivable to philosophy and compatible with political impotence. Therefore it conceived its problem no longer as one of building a just state, but as that of forming the self contained and contented individual.
The ethical development now took two opposite directions. One fol lowed the lead of Heracleitus, Socrates, Antisthenes, and Diogenes, and expanded the Cynic into the Stoic philosophy; the other stemmed from Democritus, leaned heavily on Aristippus, and drew out the Cyrenaic into the Epicurean creed. Both of these philosophical compensations for re ligious and political decay came from Asia: Stoicism from Semitic panthe ism, fatalism, and resignation; Epicureanism from the pleasure-loving Greeks of the Asiatic coast.
Epicurus was born at Samos in 341. At twelve he fell in Jove with philoso phy; at nineteen he went to Athens and spent a year anhe Academy. Like Francis Bacon he preferred Democritus to Plato and Aristotle, and took from him many bricks for his own construction. From Aristippus he learned the wisdom of pleasure, and from Socrates the pleasure of wisdom; from Pyrrho he took the doctrine of tranquillity, and a ringing word for it-ataraxia. He must have watched with interest the career of his contemporary Theodorus


Megara loved gold as much as Corinth did, and like her thrived on com merce; it had, however, a great poet, in whose verses the ancient city lives as if its revolutions were one with our own. Standing at the very entrance to the Peloponnesus, with a port on either gulf, it was in a position to bar gain with armies and levy tolls upon trade; to which it added a busy tex tile industry manned with men and women who, in the honest phraseology of the day, were called slaves. The city flourished best in the seventh and sixth centuries, when it disputed the commerce of the isthmus with Cor inth; it was then that it sent out, as trading posts, colonies as far-flung as Byzantium on the Bosporus and Megara Hyblaea in Sicily. Wealth mounted, but the clever gathered it so narrowly into their hands that the mass of the people, destitute serfs amid plenty,08 listened readily to men who promised them a better life. About 630 Theagenes, having decided to become dictator, praised the poor and denounced the rich, led a starv ing mob into the pastures of the wealthy breeders, had himself voted a bodyguard, increased it, and with it overthrew the government... For a generation Theagenes ruled Megara, freed the serfs, humbled the mighty, and patronized the arts. Towards 600 the rich deposed him in tum; but a third revolution restored the democracy, which confiscated the property of leading aristocrats, commandeered rich homes, abolished debts, and passed a decree requiring the wealthy to refund the interest that had been paid them by their debtors.•
Theognis lived through these revolutions, and described them in bitter poems that might be the voice of our class war today. He was, he. tells us (for he is our sole authority on this subject), a member of an ancient and noble family. He must have grown up in comfortable circumstances, for he was guide, philosopher, and lover to a youth named Cyrnus, who be-
CHAP.IV)	SPARTA	93
came one of the leaders of the aristocratic party. He gives Cymus much advice, and asks merely love in return. Like all lovers he complains of short measure, and his finest extant poem reminds Cymus that he will achieve immortality only through Theognis' poetry:
Lo, I have given thee wings wherewith to fly Over the boundless ocean and the earth;
Yea, on the lips of many shalt thou lie,
The comrade of their banquet and their mirth. Youths in their loveliness shall bid thee sound
Upon.the silver flute's melodious breath; And when thou goest darkling underground Down to the lamentable house of death,
Oh, yet not then from honor shalt thou cease, But wander, an imperishable name,
Cymus, about the seas and shores of Greece, Crossing from isle to isle the barren main. Horses thou shalt not need, but lightly ride, Sped by the Muses of the violet crown,
And men to come, while earth and sun abide, Who cherish song shall cherish thy renown.
Yea, I have given thee wings, and in return Thou givest me the scorn with which I bum.•
He warns Cymus that the injustices of the aristocracy may provoke a revolution:
Our state is pregnant, shortly to produce A rude avenger of prolonged abuse.
The commons hitherto seem sober-minded, But their superiors are corrupt and blinded. The rule of noble spirits, brave and high, Never endangered peace and harmony.
The supercilious, arrogant pretense
Of feeble minds, weakness and insolence; Justice and truth and law wrested aside By crafty shifts of avarice and pride; These are our ruin, Cyrnus!-never dream (Tranquil and undisturbed as it may seem) Of future peace or safety to the state;
Bloodshed and strife will follow soon or late.•100
The ascription of this poem, and of those quoted below, to certain periods in Theognis' life is hypothetical.
94	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. IV
The revolution came; Theognis was among the men exiled by the tri umphant democracy, and his property was confiscated. He left his wife and children with friends, and wandered from state to state-Euboea, Thebes, Sparta, Sicily; at first welcomed and fed for his poetry, then lapsing into a bitter and unaccustom d poverty. Out of his resentment he addresses to Zeus the questions which Job would ask of Yahweh:
Blessed, almighty Jove! with deep amaze
I view the world, and marvel at thy ways.... How can you reconcile it to your sense
Of right and wrong, thus loosely to dispense Your bounties on the wicked and the good? How can your laws be known or understood?101
He becomes bitter against the leaders of the democracy, and prays to this inscrutable Zeus for the boon of drinking their blood.:!02 In the first known use of this metaphor he likens the state of Megara to a ship whose pilot has been replaced by disorderly and unskilled mariners.108 He argues that some men are by nature abler than others, and that therefore aristoc racy in some form is inevitable; already men had discovered that majorities never rule. He uses hoi agathoi, the good, as synonymous with the aristo crats, and hoi kakoi, the bad, base, worthless, as signifying the common people.1°' These native differences, he thinks, are ineradicable; "no amount of teaching will make a bad man good,"--though he may merely mean here that no training can tum a commoner into an aristocrat. Like all good conservatives he is strong for eugenics: the evils of the world are due not to tne greed of the "good" but to their misalliances and their infertility.:ioe


The Golden Age ended with the death of Socrates. A.thens was ex hausted in body and soul; only the degradation of character by prolonged war and desperate suffering could explain the ruthless treatment of Melos, the bitter sentence upon Mytilene, the execution of the Arginusae generals, and the sacrifice of Socrates on the altar of a dying faith. All the founda tions of Athenian life were disordered: the soil of Attica had been devas tated by the Spanan raids, and the slow-growing olive trees had been burneq to the ground; the Athenian navy had been destroyed, and control of trade and the food supply had been lost; the state treasury was empty, and private fortunes had been taxed almost to extinction; two thirds of the citizen body had been killed. The damage done to Greece by the Persian invasions could not compare with the destruction of Greek life and prop"' eny by the Peloponnesian War. After Salamis and Pll!,taea Greece was left poor, but exalted with courage and pride; now Greece was poor again, and Athens had suffered a wound to her spirit which seemed too deep to be healed.
Grote"' doubts them, and they are rendered dubious by the efforts of Plato and Xenophon to defend Socrates' reputation. But these accounts were generally accepted in antiquity (e.g., by Tertullian and Augustine""), and accord admirably with the habits of the Athenian$.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVIIl
Two things sustained her: the restoration of democracy under men of judgment and moderation, and the consciousness that during the last sixty years, even during the War, she had produced such art and literature as surpassed the like product of any other age in the memory of man. Anaxag oras had been exiled and Socrates had been put to death; but the stimulus that they had given to philosophy sufficed to make Athens henceforth, and despite herself, the center and summit of Greek thought. What before had been formless tentatives of speculation were now to mature into great systems that would agitate Europe for centuries to come; while the hap hazard provision of higher education by wandering Sophists was to be re placed by the first universities in history-universities that would make Athens, as Thucydides had prematurely called her, "the school of Hellas." Through the bloodshed and turmoil of conflict the traditions of art had not quite decayed; for many centuries yet the sculptors and architects of Greece were to carve and build for all the Mediterranean world. Out of the despair of her defeat Athens lifted herself with startling virility to new wealth, culture, and power; and the autumn of her life was bountiful.
BOOK IV
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF GREEK FREEDOM
CI-lRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK IV
B,C.
399-6<>: Agesilaus king at Sparta
397: War between Syracuse and Cartha e 3¢: Aristippus of  Cyrene  and  Anus
thenes of Athens, philosophers 395: Athens rebuilds the Lmg Walls 394: Battles of Coronea and Cnidus
?393: Plato's Apology; Xenophon's Memo rabilia; Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae
391-87: Dionysius subjugates south Italy 391: lsocrates opens his school
390: Evagoras Hellenizes Cyprus
387: Peace of Antalcidas, or King's Peace; Plato visits Archytas of Taras, mathematician, and Dionysius I
386: Plato founds the Academy
383: Spartans occupy Cadmeia at Thebes 380: Isocrates' Panegyricus
379: Pelopidas and Melon liberate Thebes 378-54: Second Athenian Empire
375: Theaetetus, mathematician
371: Diogenes of Sinope, philosopher 371: Epaminondas victorious at Leuctra 370: Diodes of Euboea, embryologist;
Eudoxus of Cnidus, astronomer 367-57: Dionysius II dictator at Syracuse;
Dion plans reforms
367: Plato VJSits Dionysius II
361: Epaminondas wins and dies at Man tinea
361: Plato's third visit to Syracuse


THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XIX
in a Greek Confederacy that might free all Gr:eeks in the east and the west. But Athens, listening at last to Demosthenes, saw in Philip not a liberator but an enslaver, and decided to fight for the jealous sovereignty of the city-state, and the preservation of that free democracy which had made her the light of the world.
DEMOSTHENES
The Vatican statue of the great orator is one of the masterpieces of Hellenistic realism. It is a careworn face, as if every advance of Philip had cut another furrow into the brow. The body is thin and wearied; the aspect is that of a man who is about to make a final appeal for a cause that he considers lost; the eyes reveal a restless life, and foresee a bitter death.
His father was a manufacturer of swords and bedframes, who bequeathed to him a business worth some fourteen talents ($84,000) . Three execu tors administered the property for the boy, and squandered it so generously on themselves that when Demosthenes reached the age of twenty (363) he had to sue his guardians to recover the remains of his inheritance. He spent most of this in fitting out a trireme for the Athenian navy, and then settled down to earn his bread by writing speeches for litigants. He could compose better than he could speak, for he was weak in body and defective in articulation. Sometimes, says Plutarch, he prepared pleas for both the opposed parties to a dispute. Meanwhile, to overcome his impediments, he addressed the sea with a mouth full of pebbles, or declaimed as he ran up a hill. He worked hard, and his only distractions were courtesans and boys. "What can one do with Demosthenes?" his secretary complained. "Everything that he has thought of for a whole year is thrown into con fusion by one woman in one night.""' After years of effort he became one of the richest lawyers at the Athenian bar, learned in technicalities, eonvincing in discourse, and :flexible in morals. He defended the banker Phormio against precisely such charges as he had brought against his guardians, took substantial fees from private persons for introducing and pressing legislation, and never answered the accusation of his colleague Hypereides that he was receiving money from the Persian King to stir up • war against Philip.111 At his zenith his fortune was ten times as large as that which his father had left him.
Nevertheless he had the integrity to suffer and die for the views that h
CHAP. XIX)	PHILIP	479
was paid to defend. He denounced the dependence of Athens upon mer cenary troops, and insisted that the citizens who received money from the theoric fund should earn it by serving in the army; his courage rose to the point of demanding that this fund should be used not to pay citizens to attend religious ceremonies and plays, but to organize a better force for the defense of the state.* He told the Athenians that they were degenerate slackers who had lost the military virtues of their progenitors. He refused to admit that the city-state had stultified itself with faction and war, and that the times called for the unity of Greece; this unity, he warned, was a phrase to conceal the subjugation of Greece to one man. He detected the ambitions of Philip from their first symptoms, and begged the Athenians to fight to retain their allies and colonies in the north.
Against Demosthenes and Hypereides and the party of war stood Aeschines and Phocion and the party of peace. Very likely both sides were bribed, the one by Persia, the other by Philip,"' and both were sincerely moved by their own agitation. Phocion was by common consent the most honest statesman of his time-a Stoic before Zeno, a philosophical product of Plato's Academy, an orator who so despised the Assembly that when it applauded him he asked a friend, "Have I not unconsciously said some thing bad?""" Forty-five times he was chosen strategos, far surpassing the record of Pericles; he served ably as a general in many wars, but spent most of his life in advocating peace. His associate Aeschines was no stoic, but a man who had risen from bitter poverty to a comfortable income. His youth as a teacher and an actor helped him to become a fluent speaker, the first Greek orator, we are told, to speak extempore with success;"" his rivals wrote out their speeches in advance. Having served with Phocion in several engagements, he adopted Phocion's policy of compromising with Philip instead of making war; and when Philip paid him for his efforts his enthusiasm for peace became an edifying devotion.
Twice Demosthenes indicted Aeschines on the charge of receiving Macedonian gold, and twice failed to convict him. Finally, however, the martial eloquence of Demosthenes, and the southward advance of Philip, persuaded the Athenians to forego for a time the distribution of the theoric fund, and to employ it in war. In 338 an army was hastily organized, and marched north to face the phalanxes of Philip at Boeotian Chaeronea. Sparta
The theoric (i.e., spectacle) fund had now been extended to so many festivals as almost to pauperize a large part of the citizenry. "The Athenian Republic,'' says Glotz, "had be come a mutual benefit society, demanding from one class the wher_ewithal to support another.""" The Assembly had made it a capital crime to propose any diversion of this fund to other purposes.
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.XIX
refused to help, but Thebes, feeling Philip's fingers at her throat, sent her Sacred Band to fight beside the Athenians. Every one of its three hundred members died on that battlefield. The Athenians fought almost as bravely, but they had waited too long, and were not equipped to meet so novel an army as the Macedonian. They broke and fled before the sea of lances that moved upon them, and Demosthenes fled with them. Alexander, Phil ip's eighteen-year-old son, led the Macedonian cavalry with reckless cour age, and won the honors of a bitter day.
Philip was diplomatically generous in victory. He put to death some of the anti-Macedonian leaders in Thebes, and set up his partisans there in oligarchic power. But he freed the two thousand Athenian prisoners that he had taken, and sent the charming Alexander and the judicious Antipater to offer peace on condition that Athens recognize him as the general of all Greece against the common foe. Athens, which had expected harsher terms, not only consented, but passed resolutions showering compliments upon the new Agamemnon. Philip convened at Corinth a synedrion, or assem
bly, of the Greek states, formed them (except Sparta) into a federation modeled on the Boeotian, and outlined his plans for the liberation of Asia. He was unanimously chosen commander in this enterprise; each state pledged him men and arms, and promised that no Greek anywhere should fight against him. Such sacrifices were a small price to pay for his distance.
The results of Chaeronea were endless. The unity that Greece had failed to create for itself had been achieved, but only at the point of a half-alien sword. The Peloponnesian War had proved Athens incapable of organiz ing Hellas, the aftermath had shown Sparta incapable, the Theban hegem ony in its turn had failed; the wars of the armies and the classes had worn out the city-states, and left them too weak for defense. Under the circum stances they were fortunate to find so reasonable a conqueror, who pro posed to withdraw from the scene of his victory, and leave_ to the con quered a large measure of freedom. Indeed Philip, and Alexander after him, watchfully protected the autonomy of the federated states, lest any one of them, by absorbing others, should grow strong enough to displace Mace don. One great liberty, however, Philip took away-the right of revolu tion. He was a frank conservative who considered the stability of property an indispensable stimulus to enterprise, and a necessary prop to government. He persuaded the synod at Corinth to insert into the articles of federation a pledge against any change of constitution, any social transformation, any political reprisals. In each state he lent his influence to the side of property, and put an end to confiscatory taxation.
CHAP. XIX)	PHILIP
Hehad laid his plans well, except for Olympias; in the end his fate was determined not by his victories in the field but by his failure with his wife. She frightened him not only by her temper but by panicipating in the wildest Dionysian rites. One night he found a snake lying beside her in bed, and was not reassured by being told that it was a god. Worse, Olym pias informed him that he was not the real father of Alexander; that on the night of their wedding a thunderbolt had fallen upon her and set her afire; it was the great god Zeus-Ammon who had begotten the dashing prince. Discouraged by such varied competition, Philip turned his amours to other women; and Olympias began her revenge by telling Alexander the secret of his divine paternity.00 One of Philip's generals, Attalus, made matters worse by proposing a toast to Philip's expected child by a second wife, as promising a "legitimate" (i.e., completely Macedonian) heir to the throne. Alexander flung a goblet at his head, crying, "Am I, then, a bas tard?" Philip drew his sword against his son, but was so drunk that he could not stand. Alexander laughed at him: "Here,U he said, "is a man preparing to cross from Europe into Asia, who cannot step surely from one couch to another." A few months later one of Philip's officers, Pau sanias, having asked redress from PHilip for an insult from Attalus, and receiving no satisfaction, assassinated the King (336). Alexander, idolized by the army and supponed by Olympias,• seized the throne, overcame all opposition, and prepared to conquer the world.
Who was suspected of having urged on fausanias.
CH.APTER	XX
Letters and Arts
in the  Fourth Century
THE ORATORS
HROUGH all this turmoil literature reflected the declining virility of Greece. Lyrical poetry was no longer the passionate expression
of creative individuals, but a polite exercise of salon intellectuals, a learned echo of schoolday tasks. Timotheus of Miletus wrote an epic, but it did not accord with an argumentative age, and remained as unpopular as his early music. Dramatic performances continued, but on a more modest scale and in a lower key. The impoverishment of the public treasury and the weakened patriotism of private wealth reduced the splendor and sig nificance of the chorus; more and more the dramatists contented them selves with unrelated musical intermezzi in place of choruses organically united with the play. The name of the choragus disappeared from public notice, then the name of the poet; only the name of the actor remained. The drama became less and less a poem, more and more a histrionic exhibi tion; it was an era of great actors and small dramatists. Greek tragedy had been built upon religion and mythology, and required some faith and piety in its auditors; it naturally faded away in the twilight of the gods.


ghanistan and Persia to Seleucia, or through Arabia and Petra to Jerusalem and Damascus, or across the Indian Ocean to Adana (Aden), then through the Red Sea to Arsinoe (Suez), and thence to Alexandria. It was for control of the last two routes that the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties fought those "Syrian Wars" that finally weakened them both to the point of falling vassal to Rome.
The Seleucid monarchy, inheriting the Asiatic tradition, was absolute; no assembly limited its power. The court was planned on the Oriental style, with chamberlains and lace, eunuchs and uniforms, incense and music; only the speech and the inner dress remained Greek. The nobles were not half-inde pendent chieftains as in Macedonia or medieval Europe, but administrative or military appointees of the king. It was this structure of monarchy that passed down from Persia through the Seleucids and Sassanids to the Rome of Diocletian and the Byzantium of Constantine. Knowing that their power, in an alien scene, rested upon the loyalty of the Greek population, the Seleucid kings labored to restore the old Greek cities and to establish new ones. Seleucus I founded nine Seleucias, six Antiochs, five Laodiceas, three Apameas, one Stratonice; and his successors imitated him to the best of their lesser ability. Cities grew and multi plied as in nineteenth-century America.
Through them the Hellenization of western Asia proceeded, on the sur face, at a rapid pace. The process, of course, was old; it had begun with the Great Migration, and the Hellenistic Dispersion was in part the Renaissance of Ionia, a return of Greek civilization to its early Asiatic homes. Even before Alexander Greeks had held high offices in the Persian Empire, and Greek merchants had dominated the trade routes of the nearer East. Now the opening of political, commercial, and artistic opportunities drew from old Greece, Magna Graecia, and Sicily an emigrant flow of adventurers, settlers, scribes, soldiers, traders, doctors, scholars, and courtesans. Greek sculptors and engravers made statues and coins for Phoenician, Lycian, Carian, Cilician, Bactrian kings. Greek dancing girls became the rage of Asiatic ports.10 Sexual immorality took on a Greek grace, and Greek pa laestras and gymnasiums aroused in some Orientals an unwonted devotion to athletics and baths. Cities secured new water supplies and drainage sys tems; avenues were paved and cleaned. Schools, libraries, and theaters stimulated reading and literature; collegians ( epheboi) and university stu dents roamed the streets and played their ancient pranks upon one another and the populace. No one was counted cultured unless he understood
Greek and could enjoy the plays of Menander and Euripides. This imposi tion of Greek civilization upon the Near East is one of the startling phe nomena of ancient history; no change so swift and far-reaching had ever
CHAP. XXIV)	HELLENISM  AND THE  ORIENT	577
been seen in Asia. We know too little of its details and its results. We are poorly informed about the literature, philosophy, and science of Seleucid Asia; if we find in it few figures of prime magnitude-Zeno the Stoic, Seleu cus the astronomer, and, in the Roman period, Meleager the poet and Poseidippus the polymath-we cannot be sure that there were not many more. It was a flourishing culture, full of variety, refinement, and verve, and as fertile in art as any preceding age. Never before, so far as our knowl edge goes, had a civilization achieved so wide a spread and such complex unity amid so many diverse environments. For a century western Asia belonged to Europe. The way was prepared for the Pax Romana, and the embracing synthesis of Christendom.
But the East was not conquered. It was too deep1y and anciently itself to yield its soul. The masses of the people continued to speak their native tongues, to pursue their long-accustomed ways, and to worship their ances tral gods. Beyond the Mediterranean coasts the Greek veneer grew thin, and such Hellenic centers as Seleucia on the Tigris were Greek islands in an Oriental sea. There was no such fusion of races and cultures as Alex ander had dreamed of; there were Greeks and Greek civilization on the top, and a medley of Asiatic peoples and cultures underneath. The quali ties of the Greek intellect made no entry into the Oriental mind; the energy and love of novelty, the zest for worldliness and the passion for perfection, the expressiveness and individualism of the Greek effected no change in the Oriental character. On the contrary, as time moved on, Eastern ways of thought and feeling surged up from below into the ruling Greeks, and through them flowed westward to transform the "pagan" world. In Baby lon the patient Semitic merchant and the temple banker regained ascend ancy over the volatile Hellene, preserved the cuneiform writing, and forced back the Greek language into second place in the business world. Astrol ogy and alchemy corrupted Greek astronomy and physics; Oriental mon archy proved more powerful than Greek democracy, and finally im pressed its form upon the West; Greek kings and Roman emperors became gods in the manner of the East, and the Asiatic theory of the divine right of kings passed down through Rome and Constantinople into modern Europe. Through Zeno the East insinuated its quietism and fatalism into Greek philosophy; through a hundred channels it poured its mysticism and its piety into the vacuum left by the decay of the orthodox Greek faith. The Greek readily accepted the gods of the Orient as essentially identical with his own; but as the Greek did not really believe, and the Asiatic did, the Oriental god survived while the Greek god died. Artemis of the Ephe-
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. llIV
sians became again an Eastern maternity goddess, with a dozen breasts. Babylonian, Phoenician, and Syrian cults captured great numbers of the invading Hellenes. The Greeks offered the East philosophy, the East of fered Greece religion; religion won because philosophy was a luxury for the few, religion was a consolation for the many. In the rhythmic historic alternation of belief and unbelief, mysticism and naturalism, religion and science, religion returned to power because it recognized the secret help lessness and loneliness of man, and gave him inspiration and poetry; a dis illusioned, exploited, war-wearied world was glad to believe and hope again. The least expected and most profound effect of Alexander's conquest was the Orientalization of the European soul.
m. PERGAMUM
The gradual absorption of the Greeks by Asia weakened the Seleucid power, and generated independent kingdoms on the edge of the Hellen istic world. As early as 280 Armenia, Cappadocia, Pontus, and Bithynia set up their own monarchies; and soon the Greek cities of the Black Sea fell subject to Asiatic rule. Bactria and Sogdiana broke away about 2 50. In 247 Arsaces, chief of the Parni-an Iranian nomad tribe-killed the Seleucid governor of Persia and set up the kingdom of Parthia, destined to plague Rome for centuries. In 282 Philataerus, entrusted by Lysimachus with the care of nine thousand talents and the fortified hill of Pergamum in Asia Minor, appropriated the money and declared his independence. His nephew Eumenes I absorbed Pitane and Atarneus, and made Pergamum a sovereign monarchy (262). Attalus I earned the gratitude of Greek Asia by driving back the Gauls who had penetrated to his city walls ( 2 30); his eldest son, Eumenes II, continued his competent rule, but shocked Greece by calling in the aid of Rome against Antiochus III. After their defeat of Antiochus at Magnesia the Romans gave Eumenes nearly all of Asia Minor. His brother and successor, Attalus II, distrusted the power of his sons to keep Pergamum free, and at his death ( r 39) bequeathed his kingdom to Rome.
The little state did what it could to redeem the treachery of its birth and growth by making itself the rival of Alexandria as a center of art and learning. The wealth that came from the mines, vines, and cornfields, from the manufacture of woolens, parchments, and perfumes, from the making of bricks and tiles, and the mastery of north Aegean trade went not only to maintain a strong army and navy, but to encourage literature and art. The Pergamene kings believed that government and private business could
CHAP. XXIV)	HELLENISM   AND  THE  ORIENT	579
fruitfully compete, supplying a mutual check on inefficiency and greed. The king cultivated large tracts of land with slaves, and operated, though not as monopolies, many factories, quarries, and mines. Under this unique system wealth increased and multiplied. Pergarnum became an ornate capi tal, famous for its altar to Zeus, its luxurious palaces, its library and theater, its palaestras and baths; even its public lavatories upheld the municipal pride." The library was second only to Alexandria's in the number of its volumes and the repute of its scholars; and the pinakotheka housed, for the public enjoyment, a great collection of paintings. For half a century Pergamum was the finest flower of Hellenic civilization.
Meanwhile the House of Seleucus had fallen into decay. The rise of independent kingdoms almost confined its power to Mesopotamia and Syria. Parthia, Pergarnum, Egypt, and Rome patiently labored to weaken the dynasty by supponing pretenders at every succession, and fomenting faction and civil war. In 153, just as Demetrius I was restoring vigor to the Seleucid government, Rome collected mercenaries from every quarter to bolster up the false claims of a Smyrnean adventurer to the throne. Pergamum and Egypt joined in the attack; Demetrius fought and died heroically, and the Seleucid power fell into the hands of the wonhless Alexander Balas, the puppet of his mistresses and of Rome.
IV. HELLENISM AND THE JEWS
The history of Judea in the Hellenistic age turns on two conflicts: the external struggle between Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt for Palestine, and the internal struggle between the Hellenic and the Hebraic ways of life. The first conflict is dead history, and may be briefly dismissed; Matthew Arnold believed the second conflict to be one of the lasting cleavages of human feeling and thought. In the original division of Alexander's empire Judea (i.e., Palestine south of Samaria) had been awarded to Ptolemy. The Seleucids never accepted this decision; they saw themselves separated from the Mediterranean, and coveted the wealth that might come from the trade that passed through Damascus and Jerusalem. In the resultant wars Ptolemy I won, and Judea remained subject to the Ptolemies for more than a century (312-198). It paid an annual tribute of eight thousand tal ents, but despite this burden the land prospered. Judea was left a large measure of self-government under the hereditary high priest of Jerusalem and the Great Assembly. This gerousia, or Council of Elders, which Ezra
580	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XXIV
and Nehemiah had formed two centuries back, became both a senate and a supreme court. Its seventy or more members were chosen from the heads of the leading families, and from the most learned scholars (Soferim) of the land. Its regulations-the Dibre Soferim-set the pattern of orthodox Juda ism from the Hellenistic age to our own.
The basis of Judaism was religion: the idea of a surveillant and uphold ing deity entered into every phase and moment of Jewish life. Morals and manners were ordained by the gerousia in strictness and detail. Entertain ments and games were few and restrained. Intermarriage with non-Jews was forbidden; so were celibacy and infanticide. Hence the Jews bred abundantly, and reared all their children; despite war and famine their numbers grew throughout antiquity, until in the time of Caesar there were some seven million Jews in the Roman Empire. The bulk of the popula tion, before the Maccabean era, was agricultural. The Jews were not yet a nation of traders; even as late as the first century A.O. Josephus wrote: "We are not a commercial people";13 the great trading peoples of the age were the Phoenicians, the Arabs, and the Greeks. Slavery existed in Judea as elsewhere, but the class war was relatively mild. Art was undeveloped; only music flourished. The flute, the drum, the cymbal, the "ram's horn" or trumpet, the lyre, and the harp were used to accompany the single voice, the folk song, or the solemn religious antiphons. Jewish religion scorned the concessions of Greek ritual to popular imagination; it would have nothing to do with images, oracles, or birds' entrails; it was less anthropomorphic and superstitious, less colorful and joyful, than the religion of the Greeks. Face to face with the naive polytheism of Hellenic cults, the rabbis chanted the sonorous refrain still heard in every Jewish synagogue: Shammai Israel, Adonai eleenu, Adonai echod-"Hear, 0 Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is one."
Into this simple and puritan life the invading Greeks brought all the distractions and temptations of a refined and epicurean civilization. Around Judea was a ring of Greek settlements and cities: Samaria, Neapolis (Shechem), Gaza, Ascalon, Azotus (Ashdod), Joppa (Jaffa), Apollonia, Doris, Sycamina, Polis (Haifa), and Acco (Acre). Just across the Jordan was a leagued decapolis of Greek cities: Damascus, Gadara, Gerasa, Dium, Philadelphia, Pella, Raphia, Hippo, Scythopolis, and Canetha. Each of these had Greek institutions and establishments-temples to Greek gods and goddesses, schools and academies, gymnasiums and palaestras, and nude games. From such cities, and from Alexandria, Antioch, Delos, and Rhodes, Greeks and }ews came to Jerusalem, bringing the infection of
CHAP.XXIV)	HELLENISM  AND THE  ORIENT	581
a Hellenism devoted to science and philosophy, art and literature, beauty and pleasure, song and dance, drinking and feasting, athletics and courte sans and handsome boys, along with a gay sophistication that questioned all morals, and an urbane skepticism that undermined all supernatural be lief. How could Jewish youth resist these invitations to delight, this easy liberation from a thousand irksome restraints? Young wits among the Jews began to laugh at the priests as moneygrubbers, and at their pious followers as fools who allowed old age to come upon them without having ever known the pleasures, luxuries, and subtleties of life. Rich Jews were also won over, for they could afford to yield to temptation. Jews who sought appointment from Greek officials felt it the part of policy to speak the Greek language, to live in the Greek way, even to say a few kind words to the Greek gods.
Against this powerful assault upon both the intellect and the senses three forces defended the Jews: the persecution under Antiochus IV, the pro tection of Rome, and the power and prestige of a Law believed to be divinely revealed. Like antibodies gathering to attack an infection, the more religious among the Jews formed themselves into a sect called Chasidim the Pious. They began (about 300 B.c.) with a simple pledge to avoid wine for a given period; later, by the inevitable psychology of war, they went to the extremes of Puritanism, and frowned upon all physical pleasure as a surrender to Satan and the Greeks. The Greeks marveled at them, and classified them with the strange "gymnosophists," or nude ascetic philoso phers, whom Alexander's army had come upon in India. Even the common Jew deprecated the severe religiosity of the Chasidim, and sought for some middle way. Perhaps a compromise would have been reached had it not been for the attempt of Antiochus Epiphanes to force Hellenism upon Judea by persuasion of the sword.
In 198 Antiochus III defeated Ptolemy V, and made Judea a part of the Seleucid Empire. Tired of the Egyptian yoke, the Jews supported Antiochus, and welcomed his capture of Jerusalem as a liberation. But his successor, Antiochus IV, thought of Judea as a source of revenue; he was planning great' campaigns, and needed funds. He ordered the Jews to pay in taxes one third of their grain crops and one half of the fruit of their trees." Ignoring the usual inheritance of the office, he appointed as high priest the sycophantic Jason, who represented the Hellenizing party in Jerusalem and sought permission to establish Greek institutions in Judea. Antiochus heard him gladly, for he was disturbed by the diversity and persistence of Oriental cults in Greek Asia, and dreamed of unifying his


THE GREAT JURISTS
T AW	was the most characteristic and lasting expression of the Roman
L	spirit. As Greece stands in history for freedom, so Rome stands for
order; and as Greece bequeathed democracy and philosophy as the founda tions of individual liberty, so Rome has left us its laws, and its traditions of administration, as the bases of social order. To unite these diverse legacies, to attune their stimulating opposition into harmony, is the elemental task of statesmanship.
Since law is the essence of Roman history it has been impossible to keep them•separate, and this chapter can only be a structural and synoptic sup plement to preceding and subsequent details. The Roman constitution was like the British-no set of permanently binding rules, but a stream of prece dent giving direction without preventing change. As wealth increased, and life became more complex, new legislation issued from assemblies, Senate, magistrates, and princes; the body of the law grew as rapidly as the Empire and reached out to ever new frontiers. The education of lawyers, the guidance of judges, and the protection of the citizen from illegal judg ments demanded the organization and formulation of the law into some orderly and accessible form. Amid the turmoil of the Gracchan and Marian revolution Publius Mucius Scaevola (consul, 133 B.c.) and his son Quintus (consul, 95 B.c.) labored to reduce the laws of Rome to an intelligible system. Cicero, pupil of another Quintus l\lucius Scaevola (consul, 117 B.c.), wrote eloquently on the philosophy of law, and constructed an ideal code designed to preserve the fortune that he had gained and the faith that he had lost. The contradictory enactments of Marius and Sulla, the un precedented powers of Pompey, the revolutionary legislation of Caesar, and the new constitution of Augustus created fresh problems for minds that struggled to make a logic of the law; and the brilliant jurist Antistius Labeo confounded confusion by declaring the decrees of Caesar and Augustus
" This chapter will be of no use to lawyers, and of no interest to others.
391
392	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XVIII
void, as the expression of usurped and illegal authority. Not till the Princi pate had established itself, first by the use of force and then by the force of use, could the new legislation win acceptance in the minds of men as well as in the courts of power. To the second and third centuries of our era belongs the honor of giving Roman law its final formulation in the West-an achievement comparable to the formulation of science and philos ophy in Greece.
Here, too, Caesar had set the goal; but the actual work did not begin till Hadrian (A.D. 11 7). This best educated of the emperors gathered about him a corps of jurists as his Privy Council, and commissioned them to replace the variable annual edicts of the praetors with a Perpetual Edict to be observed by all future judges in Italy. The Greeks had produced since Solon no masterpiece of jurisprudence, and never a codified system of law; but the Greek cities of Asia and Italy had developed excellent municipal codes. The much-traveled Hadrian knew these cities well and was perhaps inspired by their constitutions to improve and co-ordinate the laws of Rome. Under his successors, the Antonines, the work of codification continued, and the half-official repute enjoyed by the Stoic philosophy permitted a profound Greek influence upon Roman law. The Stoics declared that law should ac cord with morality, and that guilt lay in the intention of the deed, not in the results. Antoninus, a product of the Stoic school, decreed that cases of doubt should be resolved in favor of the accused, and that a man should be held innocent until proved guilty 1-two supreme principles of civilized law.
Favored by imperial patronage, the science of jurisprudence nurtured a succession of geniuses. Salvius Julianus, a Roman of African birth, showed so much learning and industry as quaestor Augusti, or legal adviser to the emperor, that the Senate voted him double the usual salary of that office. His responsa were acclaimed for their logic and clarity; his Digesta pre sented a systematic arrangement of civil and praetorian law; it was he who, as the leading member of Hadrian's Council, formulated the Praetorian Perpetual Edict. Another jurist is known to us only by his first name, Gaius; his famous lnstitutiones was discovered by Niebuhr in 18 16 on a faded palimpsest overwritten with some essays by Saint Jerome; it is now our fullest authority for pre-Justinian Roman law. It was issued (ca. A.D. 161) not as a creative work but as an elementary manual for students; if we find it a masterpiece of orderly exposition, we may imagine the intellectual stature of the men whose lost treatises it summarized. Sixty years later Papinian, Paulus, and Ulpian brought Roman jurisprudence to its height; while the dmini_stration of th law fell a _victim to violence and chaos, they gave It a rational formulation and consIStency. After them the great science sank in the general ruin.
CHAP. XVIII)	ROMAN  LAW	393
THE SOURCES OF THE  LAW
As the terminology of science and philosophy comes mostly from the Greek, betraying their source, so the language of the law comes mostly from the Latin. Law in general was ius, justice or right; lex meant a specific law.• Jurisprudence wisdom in the law-was defined in the Digest of Justinian (A.D. 533) as both a science and an art: the "science of the just and the unjust," and the "art [i.e., administration] of the good and the equitable." 1 /us included unwritten law, or custom, as well as written law. The latter was composed of ius civile-the "law of [Roman] citizens"-and ius gentiu111-"the law of the nations." Civil law was "public law" when it related to the state or the official worship, and "private law" when it dealt with the legal inti;:rrelations of the citizens.
Roman law as a whole flowed from five sources. 1. Under the Republic the ultimate source of law was the will of the citizens, expressed as leges in the Curial and Centuria! Assemblies, and as plebiscita ("decided by the plebs") in the Tribal Assembly. The Senate acknowledged leges only when they had been pro
posed to the assemblies with the proper formalities and by a magistrate of	,
Senatorial rank. When Senate and assembly agreed in passing a measure, it was
proclaimed in the name of Senatus Populusque Romanus.
2. The Senate itself, in theory, had no lawmaking power under the Republic; its senatusconsulta were, formally, recommendations to the magistrates; gradu ally they became directives, then imperatives, until in the later Republic and under the Empire they took on the force of laws. Altogether the laws passed by the assemblies or the Senate were so few in the course of six centuries as to astonish one accustomed to the legislative flux of modem states.
3· The need for minor or more specific laws was met by the edicta of the municipal officials. Each new urban praetor (our "chief city magistrate") issued an edictum praetorium, announced by a herald in the Forum and inscribed upon a wall, and stating the legal principles on which the praetor proposed to act and judge during his year's term. Similar edicts could be put forth by circuit judges (pr etores peregrini) and provincial praetors. Through their power of im perzum, or rule, the praetors were allowed not only to interpret existing laws, but to ?1ak new ones. In this way Roman law combined the stability of its basic legislation with the flexibility of praetorian judgments. When a law or clause was carried down from one praetorian edict to the next for many years, it be came a definite part of the ius honorarium; by the time of Cicero this "law of the offices" had displaced the Twelve Tables as the main text of legal instruction in Ro e. Nevertheless, a praetor often reversed the decisions, and sometimes con tradicted the principles, of a predecessor, so that uncertainties of law and ar bitrariness of judgment were added to the abuses natural in every judicial system operated by men. It was to end this uncertainty that Hadrian instructed Julianus
Cf. French droit and loi, German Recht and Gesetz.
394	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVIII
to unify all preceding ius honorarium in a Perpetual Edict alterable only by the emperor.
The constitutiones principum, or statutes of the princes, became themselves
in the second century a varied source of law. They took four forms. (a) The prince issued edicta by virtue of his imperium as an official of the city; these were valid for the whole Empire, but apparently lapsed after his death. (b) His decreta as a judge, like those of other magistrates, had the force of law. (c) Im perial rescripta were his answers to inquiries. Usually they were epistulae-letters


Domitian shared Nero's architectural madness. For him Rabirius raised the domus Flavia, not quire as elephantine as Nero's museum, but yielding little to it in gaudy splendor and decor:ition. One wing alone contained a vast basilica, probably the court where the Emperor tried cases of final appeal; the same wing enclosed a peristylium covering 30,000 square feet. Adjoining this was a banquet hall, whose pavement of red porphyry and green serpentine survives; gone arc the delicate marble screens and beauti fully columned windows through which the diners might watch the waters splashing over the marble basins of the nympbaea or fountains outside. It should be added that Domitian used this building only for receptions and administration; usually he lived in the more modest quarters of Augustus' palace. Doubtless these royal edifices were part of the fas;ade of empire, designed to impress natives, visitors, and embassies, while the emperors them selves, perhaps excepting Caligula and Nero, fled from the constraining form2Iity of these ceremonial rooms to the ease and intimacy of their family quarters, and enjoyed, as Antoninus Pius would put it, "the pleasure of being men." 16
THE ARTS OF DECOR.ATIO
In these palaces, and in the homes of the rich, a hundred arts were employed to make everything if not beautiful, at least expensive. The floors were often of polychrome marble, or mosaics whose patient combination of tiny varicolored cubes (tesserae) resulted in paintings of remarkable realism and permanence. Furniture was less abundant and comfortable than among ourselves, but of gen eral!y superior design and workmanship. Tables, chairs, be.,ches, couches, beds,
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVI
lamps, and utensils were made of lasting materials, and lavishly adorned; the best wood, ivory, marble, bronze, silver, and gold were carefully turned and finished, decorated with plant or animal forms, or inlaid with ivory, tortoise shell, chased bronze, or precious stones. Tables were sometimes cut from costly cypress or citrus woods; some were of gold or silver; many were of marble or bronze. Chairs were of every sort from folding stool to throne, but less calculated than ours to deform the spine. Beds were of wood or metal, with slim but sturdy legs often ending in an animal's head or foot; a bronze web, instead of a spring, supported a mattress filled with straw or wool. Bronze tripods of elegant form took the place of our end tables; and here and there were cabinets with pigeon holes for rolled books. Bronze braziers warmed the rooms, and bronze lamps lighted them. Mirrors too were of bronze, highly polished, embossed or engraved with floral or mythical designs; some ,vere made horizontally or vertically convex or concave to distort reflections into a humorous slenderness or rotundity.17
The factories of Campania, working with the rich output of Spanish mines, produced silverware on a large scale for a wide market; silver services were now common in the middle and upper classes. In 1895 an excavator found in the cistern of a villa at Boscoreale a remarkable collection of silver, apparently de posited there by its owner before his unsuccessful flight from the embers of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. One of the sixteen cups bears an almost perfect representa tion of simple foliage; two depict skeletons in high relief; another pictures Au gustus enthroned between Venus and 1\1ars, the rival deities of mankind; the sliest shows Zeno the Stoic pointing with scorn at Epicurus, who is helping him self to a huge piece of cake, while a pig, with uplifted foreleg, politely asks for a share.
The coins and gems of the early Empire prove the progress of the engraver's art. Those of Augustus show the same good taste, sometimes the same designs, as the Altar of Peace. Precious stones imported from Africa, Arabia, and India were cut and set into rings, brooches, necklaces, bracelets, cups, even into walls. A ring on at least one fir:ger was a social necessity; a few fops wore rings on all fingers but one. The Roman sealed his signature ,vith his ring and therefore liked to have the seal individually designed. Some of the best-paid artists in Rome were gem cutters, like the Dioscurides who made Augustus' seal. In cutting cameos the Golden Age reached a level never surpassed; the gennna Augusta in Vienna is among the finest in existence. To collect gems and cameos became a hobby of rich Romans-Pompey, Caesar, Augustus; by inheritance the imperial gem cabinet grew till Marcus Aurelius sold it to help pay for his war against the 1\1arco manni. From the official guardian of the imperial seals and gems England derived her Keeper of the Great, or Privy, Seal.
Meanwhile the potters of Capua, Puteoli, Cumae, and Arretium were filling Italian homes with every variety of ceramic art. Arretium had mixing vats with a capacity of 10,000 gallons. Its red-glazed tableware ,vas for a century the most widely spread product of Italy; specimens of it have been found almost every where. Iron stamps, hollowed out in relief, were used to impress upon each vase,
CHAP. XVI)	ROME  AND  ITS  ART	347
lamp, or tile the name of the maker, sometimes also the names of the year's consuls, as a date. To this degree the ancients knew the art of printing; they left it undeveloped because slave copyists were cheap.18
From pottery the workers of Cumae, Liternum, and Aquileia turned to the production of artistic glass.* The Portland Vase is a famous example of
its kind; t finer still is the "Blue Glass Vase" found at Pompeii, depicting
in lively and graceful action a vintage feast of Bacchus.19 In the reign of Tiberius, say Pliny and Strabo,20 the art of glass blowing was brought from Sidon or Alexandria to Rome, and soon produced polychrome phials, cups, bowls, and other forms of such delicate beauty that they became for a time the favorite prey of art collectors and millionaires. In Nero's reign 6000 sesterces were paid for two small cups of blown glass now known as 1nillefiori, or "thousand flowers," produced by fusing together differently colored glass rods. Even more prized :vere the "Murrhine" vases imported from Asia and Africa. They were made by placing white and purple glass filaments side by side to form a desired pattern, and then firing them; or pieces of colored glass were embedded in a transparent white body. Pompey brought some to Rome after his victory over Mithridates; Augustus, though he melted down Cleopatra's gold plate, kept for himself her goblet of Murrhine glass. Nero paid a million sesterces for one such cup; Petronius, dying, broke another lest it should fall into Nero's hands. All in all, the Romans have had no superior in making glass; and there are few art collec tions in the world more precious than those of Roman glass in the British Museum and the .Metropolitan l\foseum of Art.
SCULPTURE
Pottery passed into sculpture through baked clay-terra-cotta reliefs and statuettes, toys, imitations of fruit, grapes, fish-at last full-sized statues. Glazed terra cotta-majolica-abounded in the ruins of Pompeii. Temple pediments and eaves were adorned with terra-cotta palmettes, acroteria,
The Syrians and Egyptians, some 200 years before Christ, had discovered that the fusion of sand with an alkaline substance at a high temperature produced a semitransparent liquid of greenish color (due to the iron oxide in the sand); that the addition of manganese and lead
?xide rendered the product colorless and fully transparent; and that different shades could be mduced by different chemicals-blue, for example, by cobalt. The fluid paste was shaped by hand or blown into molds; or the paste was allowed to harden, and then cut on a wheel.
t This vase of superimposed layers of glass was probably of Greek origin. It was found near
Rome in 1770, was bought by the Duke of Ponland, and was lent to the British Museum in 1810. In 1845 a maniac smashed it into 250 pieces, but it was so successfully restored that when the then Duke offered it for sale in 1929 he received a bid of S152,ooo. The bid was rejected as too low.18&
348	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVI
gargoyles, and reliefs. The Greeks laughed at these ornaments, and under the Empire they went out of fashion; Augustus was no friend of clay.
It was probably through his Attic taste that relief and sculpture attained in Rome an excellence comparable with the best Hellenistic work. For a generation the artists of. Rome carved fountains, tombstones, arches, and altars with a refinement of feeling, a precision of execution, a quiet dignity of form, a measure of modeling and perspective, that rank Roman reliefs among the masterpieces of the world's art. In 13 B.c. the Senate celebrated the return of Augustus from the pacification of Spain and Gaul by decreeing that an Ara Pacis Augustae, or "Altar of the Augustan Peace," should be erected in the Field of J\Iars. This is the noblest of all the sculptural remains of Rome. Perhaps the monument owed its form to the altar at Pergamum, and its processional motif to the Parthenon frieze; the altar was raised on a platform in an enclosure whose surrounding walls were partly carved in marble relief; the extant pieces are slabs from these walls.* One slab repre sents Tellus-Mother Earth-with two children in her arms, corn and flowers growing beside her, and animals lying contentedly at her feet. These were the leading ideas of the Augustan reformation: the family restored to parentage, the nation to agriculture, the Empire to peace. The central figure is unsurpassed; indeed, in its union of mature motherhood and womanly beauty, tenderness, and grace, there is a soft perfection unmatched by the stately goddesses of the Parthenon. The frieze of the outer wall had a lower panel of acanthus scrolls, broad-petaled peonies and poppies, and rich clusters of ivy berries; this too is unequaled in its class. Another panel
showed nvo processions moving in opposite directions to meet before the altar of the Goddess of Peace. In these groups are grave and quiet figures, probably of Augustus, Livia, and the imperial fainily, with nobles, priests, Vestal Virgins. and children. These last are engagingly real in their shy innocence. One is a baby toddling along with no taste for ceremony; another is a boy already proud of his years; another a little girl with a nosegay; an other, after some Inischief, is being gently admonished by his mother. Hence forth children would play a rising role in Italian art. But never again would Roman sculpture show such mastery of drapery, such natural and effective grouping, such modulations of light and shade. Here, as in Virgil, propa ganda had found a perfect medium.
The only Roman rivals of these reliefs are the carvings on the arches raised for the entry of triumphing generals. The finest survivor is the Arch of Titus, begun by Vespasian and completed by Doinitian to commemorate
The largest fragments were till recently in the J\Iuseo delle Terme at Rome· others were in the Vatican, the Uffizi Gallery at Florence, and in the Louvre. •	'


Berenice, as his mistress, and wished to marry her; again capta ferum victo renz cepit. The Emperor could not see why one should marry a mistress; he himself, after the death of his wife, lived with a freedwoman without
troubling to wed her; and when this Caenis died he distributed his love among several concubines.99 He was convinced that the succession to his power must be settled before his death, as the alternative to anarchy. The Senate agreed, but demanded that he should name and adopt "the best of the best"-presumably a senator; Vespasian answered that he reckoned that Titus was the best. To ease the situation the young conqueror dismissed Berenice, and sought consolation in promiscuity.100 The Emperor there upon associated Titus with himself on the throne and delegated to him an increasing share in the government.
In 79 Vespasian again visited Reate. vVhile in the Sabine country he drank copiously the purgative waters of Lake Cutilia and was seized with severe diarrhea. Though confined to his bed he continued to receive em bassies and perform the other duties of his office. Feeling the hand of death upon him he nevertheless kept his bluff humor. Vae! puto deus fio, he re marked-"Alas, I think I am becoming a god." 101 Almost fainting, he struggled to his feet with the help of attendants, saying, "An emperor should die standing." With these words he concluded a full life of sixty-nine years and a beneficent reign of ten.
TITUS
His older son, named like himself Titus Flavius Vespasianus, was the most fortunate of emperors. Titus died in the second year of his rule and the forty-second of his age, while still "the darling of mankind"; time did not suffice him for the corruptions of power or the disillusionment of desire.
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CHAP. xm)   THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF MONARCHY
As a youth he had distinguished himself in ruthless war and tarnished his name with loose living; now, instead of letting omnipotence intoxicate him, he reformed his morals and made is government a model of wisdom and honor. His greatest fault was uncontrollable generosity. He counted that day lost on which he had not made someone happy with a gift; he spent too much on shows and games; and he left the replenished Treasury almost as low as his father had found it. He completed the Colosseum and built another municipal bath. No one suffered capital punishment during his brief reign; on the contrary, he had informers flogged and banished. He swore that he would rather be killed than kill. When two patricians were detected in a conspiracy to depose him he contented himself with sending them a warning; then he dispatched a courier to relieve the anxiety of a conspirator's mother by telling her that her son was safe.
His misfortunes were disasters over which he could have little control. A three-day fire in the year 79 destroyed many important buildings, in cluding again the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva; in the same year Vesuvius buried Pompeii and thousands of Italians; and a year later Rome was stricken with a plague more deadly than any her history had yet recorded. Titus d d all he could to lessen the sufferings caused by these calamities; "he showed not merely the concern of an emperor, but a father's surpassing love." 102 He died of a fever in 8 r, in the same farmhouse in which his father had recently passed away. All Rome mourned him except the brother who succeeded to his throne.