CHAP. XIX)	PHILIP
campaign: "She could not stand up against a single defeat," says Aristotle, "but was ruined through the small number of her citizens."'
Winter coming, the Thebans withdrew to Boeotia. Epaminondas, over reaching himself in typical Greek style, began to dream now of establish ing a Theban Empire to replace the unity that Athenian or Spartan lead ership had once given to Greece. His plans involved him in a war with the Athenians; and Sparta, thinking to rehabilitate herself, made an alliance with Athens. The hostile armies met at Mantinea in 362. Epaminondas won, but was killed in action by Gryllus, son of Xenophon. The brief hegemony of Thebes left no permanent boon to Bellas; it liberated Greece from the despotism of Sparta, but failed, like its predecessors, to create beyond Boeotia a coherent unity; and the conflicts that it engendered left the Greek states disordered and weakened when Philip came down upon them from the north.
THE SECOND ATHENIAN EMPIRE
Athens made a final attempt to forge such a unity. Through her rebuilt walls and fleet, the dependability of her coinage, her long-established facili ties for finance and trade, she slowly won back commercial supremacy in the Aegean. Her former subjects and allies had learned from the wars of the last half century the need for a larger security than individual sov ereignty could bring; and in 378 the majority of them combined again under Athens' leadership. By 370 Athens was once more the greatest power in the eastern Mediterranean.
Industry and trade were now the substance of her economic life. The soil of Attica had never been propitious to common tillage; patient labor had made it fruitful through tending the olive tree and the vine; but the Spartans had destroyed these, and few of the peasants were willing to wait half a generation for new olive orchards to yield. Most of the farmers of prewar days were dead; many of the survivors were too discouraged to go back to their ruined holdings, and sold them at low prices to absentee owners who could afford long-term investments. In this way, and through the eviction of peasant debtors, the ownership of Attica passed into a few families, who worked many of the large estates with slaves.10 The mines at Laurium were reopened, fresh vicrlms were sent into the pits, and new riches were transmuted but of silver ore and human blood. Xenophon" proposed a genial plan whereby Athens might replenish her treasury through the purchase of ten thousand slaves and their lease to the con-
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XIX
tractors at Laurium. Silver was mined in such abundance th c the supply of the metal outran the production of goods, prices rose faster than wages, and the poor bore the burden of the change.
Industry flourished. The quarries at Pentelicus and the potteries in the Ceramicus had orders from all the Aegean world. Fortunes were made by buying cheap the products of domestic handicraft or small factories, and selling them dear in the home market or abroad. The growth of com merce and the accumulation of wealth in money instead of in land rapidly multiplied the number of bankers in Athens. They received cash or valu ables for safekeeping, but apparently paid no interest on deposits. Soon discovering that under normal conditions not all deposits were reclaimed at once, the bankers began to lend funds at substantial rates of interest, providing, at first, money instead of credit. They acted as bail for clients, and made collections for them; they lent money on the security of land or precious articles, and helped to finance the shipment of goods. Through their aid, and even more through speculative loans by private individuals, the merchant might hire a ship, transport his goods to a foreign market, and buy there a return cargo-which, on reaching the Piraeus, remained the property of the lenders until the loan was repaid.12 As the fourth century progressed, a real credit system developed: the bankers, instead of advancing cash, issued letters of credit, money orders, or checks; wealth could now pass from one client to another merely by entries in the banker's books.a Businessmen or bankers issued bonds for mercantile loans, and every large inheritance included a number of such bonds. Some bankers, like the ex slave Pasion, developed so many connections, and acquired by a dis criminating honesty so widespread a reputation for reliability, that their bond was honored throughout the Greek world. Pasion's bank had many departments and employees, mostly slaves; it kept a complex set of books, in which every transaction was so carefully recorded that these accounts were usually accepted in court as indisputable evidence. Bank failures were not uncommon, and we hear of "panics" in which bank after bank closed its doors." Serious charges of malfeasance were brought against even the most prominent banks, and the people looked upon the bankers with that same mixture of envy, admiration, and dislike with which the poor favor the rich in all ages.""
The change from landed to movable wealth produced a feverish strug gle for money, and the Greek language had to invent a word, pleonexia, to denote this appetite for "more and more," and another word, chrematistike, for the busy pursuit of riches. Goods, services, and persons were increas-
CHAP.XIX)	PHILIP	46_;
ingly judged in terms of money and property. Fortunes were made and unmade with a new rapidity, and were spent in lavish displays that would have shocked the Athens of Pericles. The nouveaux riches (the Greeks had a name for them-neoplutoi) built gaudy houses, bedecked their women with costly robes and jewels, spoiled them with a dozen servants, and made it a principle to feed their guests with none but expensive drinks and foods...
In the midst of this wealth poverty increased, for the same variety apd freedom of exchange that enabled the clever to make money allowed the simple to lose it faster than before. Under the new mercantile economy the poor were relatively poorer than in the days of their serfdom on the land. In the countryside the peasants laboriously turned their sweat into a little oil or wine; in the towns the wages of free labor were kept down by the competition of slaves. Hundreds of citizens depended for their maintenance upon the fees paid for attendance at the Assembly or the courts; thousands of the population had to be fed by the temples or the state. The number of voters (not to speak of the general population) who had no property was in 43 I some forty-five per cent of the electorate; in 355 it had mounted to fifty-seven per cent." The middle classes, which had provided by their aggregate number and power a balance between the aristocracy and the commons, had lost much of their wealth, and could no longer mediate between the rich and the poor, between an unyielding conservatism and a utopian radicalism; Athenian society divided itself into Plato's "two cities"-"one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, the one at war with the other.",. The poor schemed to despoil the rich by legislation or revolution, the rich organized themselves for protection against the poor. The members of some oligarchic clubs, says Aristotle, took a solemn oath: "I will be an adversary of the people" (i.e., the com mons), "and in the Council I will do it all the evil that I can.':ns "The rich have become so unsocial," writes Isocrates, about 366, "that those who own property had rather throw their possessions into the sea than lend aid to the needy, while those who are in poorer circumstances would less gladly find a treasure than seize the possessions of the rich."""
In this conflict more and more of the intellectual classes took the side of the poor.11 They disdained the merchants and bankers whose wealth seemed to be in inverse proportion to their culture and taste; even rich men among them, like Plato, began to flirt with communistic ideas. Peri cles had used colonization as a safety valve to reduce the intensity of the class struggle;"" but Dionysius controlled the west, Macedonia was expand-
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.XIX
ing in the north, and Athens found it ever more difficult to conquer and settle new lands. Finally the poorer citizens captured the Assembly, and began to vote the property of the rich into the coffers of the state, for redistribution ameng the needy and the voters through state enterprises and fees."" The politicians strained their ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue. They doubled the indirect taxes, the customs dues on imports and exports, and the hundredth on real-estate transfers; they con tinued the extraordinary taxes of war time into peace; they appealed for "voluntary" contributions, and laid upon the rich ever new opportunities ("liturgies") to finance public enterprises from their private funds; they resorted every now and then to confiscations and expropriations; and they broadened the field of the property-income tax to include lower levels of wealth.IN Any man burdened with a liturgy could by law compel another to take it over if he could prove that the other was wealthier than he, and had home no liturgy within two years. To facilitate the collection of rev enue the taxpayers were divided into a hundred "symmories" (cosharers); the richest members of each group were required to pay, at the opening of each tax year, the whole tax due from the group for the year, and were left to collect during the year, as best they could, the shares due from the other members of the group. The result of these imposts was a wholesale hiding of wealth and income. Evasion became universal, and as ingenious as taxation. In 355 Androtion was appointed to head a squad of police em powered to search for hidden income, collect arrears, and imprison tax evaders. Houses were entered, goods were seized, men were thrown into jail. But the wealth still hid itself, or melted away. Isocrates, old and rich, and furious at being saddled with a liturgy, complained in 353: "When I was a boy, wealth was regarded as a thing so secure as well as admirable that almost everyone affected to own more property than he actually possessed.
. . . Now a man has to be ready to defend himself against being rich as if it were the worst of crimes.""" In other cities the process of decentralizing wealth was not so legal: the debtors of Mytilene massacred their creditors en masse, and excused themselves on the ground that they were hungry; the democrats of Argos {370) suddenly fell upon the rich, killed twelve hundred of them, and confiscated their property. The moneyed families of otherwise hostile states leagued themselves secretly for mutual aid against popular revolts. The middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, and the poor began to distrust it as a sham equality of votes stultified by a gaping inequality of wealth. The increas
ing bitterness of the class war left Greece internally as well as internation-
CHAP. XIX)	PHILIP
ally divided when Philip pounced down upon it; and many rich men in the Greek cities welcomed his coming as the alternative to revolution.•
Moral disorder accompanied the growth of luxury and the enlighten ment of the mind. The masses cherished their superstitions and clung to their myths; the gods of Olympus were dying, but new ones were being born; exotic divinities like Isis and Ammon, Atys and Bendis, Cybele and Adonis were imported from Egypt or Asia, and the spread of Orphism brought fresh devotees to Dionysus every day. The rising and half-alien bourgeoisie of Athens, trained to practical calculation rather than to mystic feeling, had little use for the traditional faith; the patron gods of the city won from them only a formal reverence, and no longer inspired them with moral scruples or devotion to the state.• Philosophy struggled to find in civic loyalty and a natural ethic some substitute for divine commandments and a surveillant deity; but few citizens cared to live with the simplicity of Socrates, or the magnanimity of Aristotle's "great-minded man."
As the state religion lost its hold upon the educated classes, the individual freed himself more and more from the old moral restraints-the son from parental authority, the male from marriage, the woman from motherhood, the citizen from political responsibility. Doubtless Aristophanes exagger ated these developments; and though Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates agreed with him, they were all conservatives who might be relied upon to trem ble at any doings of the growing generation. The morals, of war improved
in the founh century, and a wave of Enlightenment humanitarianism fol lowed the teachings of Euripides and Socrates, and the example f. Ages
ilaus." But sexual and political morality continued to decline. Bachelors and courtesans increased in fashionable co-operation, and free unions gained ground on legal marriage... "Is not a concubine more desirable than a wife?" asks a character in a fourth-century comedy. "The one has on her side the law that compels you to retain her, no matter how displeasing she may be; the other knows that she must hold a man by behaving well, or else look for another.".. So Praxiteles and then Hypereides lived with Phryne, Aristippus with Lais, Stilpo with Nicarete, Lysias with Metaneira, the austere Isocrates with Lagiscium... "The youl)g men," says Theopom pus, with a moralist's exaggeration, "sperit all their time among flute-girls and courtesans; those who were a little older devoted themselves to gam-
"Now that a certain portion of mankind," says Plato (Laws, 948), "do not believe at all in the existence of the gods ... a rational legislanon ought to do away with the oaths of the parties on either side."


-or subscriptiones, brief replies "written under" a question or petition. The wise and pithy letters in which Trajan answered the requests of governmental ap paintees for instruction were incorporated into the laws of the Empire and kept their validity long after his death. (d) The mandata of the emperors were their directives to officials; in the course of time these came to constitute a detailed code of administrative law.
Under certain circumstances law could be created by the responsa pru dentium. It must have been a pleasant sight when learned jurists sat in chairs in the open Forum (or, in later decades, in their homes), and gave legal opinions to all who asked, taking their chances on some indirect remuneration. Often their advice was solicited by lawyers or municipal judges. Like the great rabbis of the Jews they reconciled contradictions, drew subtle distinctions, interpreted and adjusted the ancient law to the needs of life or the exigencies of palitics. Their written replies, by unwritten custom, had an authority only less than the law's. Augustus gave such opinions full legal force on two conditions; that the jurist should have received from the Emperor the ius respondendi, or right of giving legal opinions; and that the reply should be sent under seal to the judge trying the case in point. By the time of Justinian these responsa had become a vast school and literature of law, the fountain and foundation of his culminating Digest and Code.
THE LAW OF PERSONS
"All law," says the precise Gaius, "pertains to persons, to property, or to procedure." 3 The word persona had signified an actor's mask; later it was applied to the part played by a man in life; finally it came to mean the man himself-as if to say that we can never know a man, but only the parts he plays, the mask or masks that he wears.
The first person in Roman law was the citizen. He was defined as any one who had been accepted into a Roman tribe by birth, adoption, emanci pation, or governmental grant. vVichin this franchise were three grades: ( 1) full citizens, who enjoyed the fourfold right of voting (ius suffragii), of holding office (ius ho11orum), of marriage with a freeborn person (ius
CHAP. XVIII)	ROMAN  LAW	395
connubii), and of engaging in commercial contracts protected by Roman law (ius c01mnercii); (2) "citizens without suffrage," who had the rights of marriage and contract, but not of voting or office; and (3) freedmen, who had the rights of voting and contract, but not of marriage or office. The full citizen had, furthermore, certain exclusive rights in private law: the power of the father over his children (patria potestas), of the husband over his wife (manus), of an owner over his property, including his slaves (dominium), and of a freeman over another by contract (mancipium) . A kind of potential citizenship, called Latinitas or ius Latii, was conferred by Rome upon the free inhabitants of favored towns and colonies, whereby they acquired the right of contract, but not of intermarriage, with Romans, and their magistrates received full Roman citizenship upon completing their terms of office. Each city of the Empire had its own citizens and condi tions of citizenship; and by a unique tolerance a man might be a citizen and enjoy the civic rights-of several cities at once. The most precious privi lege of a Roman citizen was the safeguarding of his person, property, and rights by the law, and his immunity from torture or violence in the trying of his case. It was the glory of Roman law that it protected the individual against the state.
The second person in Roman law was the father. The patria potestas had
been weakened by the spread of law into areas formerly governed by custom; but we may judge its surviving force from the fact that when Aulus Fulvius set out to join Catiline's army, his father called him back and put him to death. In general, however, the power of the father declined as that of the government rose; democracy entered the family when it left the state. In the early Republic the fathers had been the state; the family heads formed the Curial Assembly, and the clan heads probably constituted the Senate. Rule through family and clan diminished as population became more abundant and diverse, and life more mobile, commercial, and complex; kinship, status, and custom were replaced by contract and law.4 Children on greater freedom from their parents, wives from their husbands, indi viduals from their groups. Trajan compelled a father to emancipate a son whom he had maltreated; Hadrian took from the father the right of life and death over his household and transferred it to the courts; Antoninus forbade a father to sell his children into slavery.5 Custom had long since reduced the use of these old powers to rare occurrences. Law tends to lag behind moral development, not because law cannot learn, but because ex perience has shown the wisdom of testing new ways in practice before con gealing them into law.
The Roman woman gained new rights as the man lost old ones; but she was clever enough to disguise her freedom under continuing legal disa-
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVIII
bilities. The law of the Republic assumed that she was never sui iuris, "of her own right," but always dependent upon some male guardian; "according to our ancestors," said Gaius, "even women of mature age must be kept in tutelage because of the lightness of their minds." 6 In the later Republic and under the Empire this legal dependence was largely annulled by femi nine charms and willfulness, abetted by male susceptibility and affection. From Cato the Elder to Commodus Roman society, legally patriarchal, was ruled by women, with all the graceful mastery of Renaissance Italian or Bourbon French salons. The laws of Augustus made some obeisance to the facts by releasing from tutela any woman who had borne three legitimate children.7 Hadrian decreed that women might dispose of their property as they liked, provided they obtained the consent of their guardians; but actual procedure soon dispensed with this consent. By the end of the second cen tury all compulsory tutelage was ended in law for free women over twenty-five.	•
The consent of both fathers was still required for legal marriage.8 Mar riage by confarreatio was now (A.D. 160) confined to a few Senatorial families. Marriage by purchase (coemptio) lingered as a form; the bride groom paid for the bride by weighing an as or an ingot of bronze in a scale before five witnesses, her father or her guardian having consented.9 Most marriages were now by usus, i.e., cohabitation. To avoid falling under the manus or proprietory power of her husband, the wife absented herself three nights in each year; thereby she retained control of her property, excepting her dowry. Indeed, the husband often put his property in his wife's name to avoid suits for damages or the penalties of bankruptcy.10 Such marriage sine 11w11t could be ended by either party at will; marriage by other forms could be ended only by the husband. Adultery was still a minor offense in the man; in the woman it was a major offense against the institutions of property and inheritance. But th.!:! husband no longer had the right to kill his wife taken in adultery; this right was now vested tech nically in her father, actually in the courts; and the penalty was banishment. Concubinage was recognized by the law as a substitute for marriage, but not as an accompaniment to it; and a man could not legally have two concubines at once. Children by a concubine were classed as illegitimate and could not inherit-,vhich made concubinage all the more attractive to men who liked to be courted by hunters of legacies. Vespasian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius lived in concubinage after the death of their wives.11
The law struggled to encourage parentage among the freeborn, but with negligible results. Infanticide was forbidden except in the case of infants deformed or incurably diseased. The detected procurer of abortion was banished and lost part of his property; if the woman died he was to be put
CHAP. XVIII)	ROMAN  LAW	397
to death; 12 these laws, of course, were largely evaded then as now. Children of any age remained under the authority of the father except when thrice sold by him into bondage, or when formally emancipated, or when the son held a public office or became a fitrmen dialis, or when a daughter married cum manu or became a Vestal Virgin. If a son married in the lifetime of his father, the patria potestas over the grandchildren resided in the grandfather.13 By the legislation of Augustus the earnings of a son in the army, in public office, in priestly orders, or in the liberal professions were freed from the old rule that such gains belonged to the father. A son might still be sold into bondage (mancipium); but this differed from slavery (servitus) in leav ing the bondsman with his former civic rights.
The slave had no legal rights whatever; indeed, Roman law hesitated to apply the term persona to him and compromised by calling him an "imper sonal man." 14 It is only by a considerate error that Gaius discusses him under the law of persons; logically the slave came under the rubric of prop erty (res). He could not own, inherit, or bequeath; he could not make a legal marriage; his children were all classed as illegitimate, and the children of a slave woman were classed as slaves even if the father was free.15 Slaves male or female might be seduced by their master without legal redress. The slave could not bring action in the courts against those who injured him; he could proceed in such a case only through his owner. The latter, under the law of the Republic, could beat him, imprison him, condemn him to fight beasts in the arena, expose him to die of starvation, or kill him, with cause or without, and with no other control than a public opinion formed by slaveowners. If a slave ran away and was caught he could be branded or crucified; Augustus boasted that he had recaptured 30,000 runaway slaves and had crucified all who had not been claimed.16 If, under these or other provocations, a slave killed his master, law required that all the slaves of the murdered man should be put to death. ,Yhen Pedanius Secundus, urban prefect, was so slain (A.D. 61), and his 400 slaves were condemned to die, a minority in the Senate protested, and an angry crowd in the streets de manded mercy; but the Senate ordered the law to be carried out, in the belief that only by such measures could a master be secure.17
It is to the credit of the Empire-or perhaps of the diminishing supply of slaves-that their condition was progressively improved under the emperors. Claudius prohibited the killing of a useless slave and ruled that an abandoned sick slave who recovered should become automatically free. The lex Petronia, probably under Nero, forbade owners, without a magistrate's approval, to condemn slaves to fight in the arena. Nero allowed maltreated slaves to use his statue as an asylum and appointed a judge to hear their complaints a modest advance that seemed revolutionary to Rome, since it opened the
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. xvm
courts to slaves. Domitian made it a criminal offense to mutilate slaves for sensual purposes. Hadrian ended the right of the owner to kill a slave with out magisterial sanction. Antoninus Pius permitted an abused slave to take sanctuary in any temple and had him sold to another master if he could prove injury. Marcus Aurelius encouraged owners to bring before the courts, rather than themselves punish, damages sustained by them from their slaves; in this way, he hoped, law and judgment would gradually re place brutality and private revenge.18 Finally a great jurist of the third cen tury, Ulpian, proclaimed what only a few philosophers had dared suggest that "by the law of Nature all men are equal." 19 Other jurists laid it down a maxim that where the freedom or slavery of a man was in question, all doubts should favor liberty.20
Despite these mitigations, the legal subjection of slaves is the worst blot on Roman law. The last indignity was the tax and restrictions upon emanci pation. Many owners evaded the lex Fufia Canina by informally freeing a slave without official witness or legal ceremony; such liberation, however, conferred not citizenship but only Latinitas. The slave freed by process of law became a citizen with limited civic rights; but custom required him to pay his respects to his former owner every morning, attend him when needed, vote for him at every opportunity, and, in some cases, pay him a portion of all money earned. If the freedman died intestate, his property went automatically to his living patron; if he made a will he was expected to leave him a part of his estate.21 Only when the master was dead, dutifully mourned, and safely buried could the freedman really breathe the air of freedom.
To these general divisions of the law of persons must be added the legisla tion which in modem codes is separately known as criminal law. Roman jurisprudence recognized crimes against the individual, the state, and social or business groups considered as juridical persons. Against the state one might be guilty of maiestas, treason by act or word; vis publica, sedition; sacrilegiu111, offenses against the state religion; crmbitus, bribery; crimen repetundaru111, extortion or corruption in public administration; peculatus, embezzlement of state funds; and corruptio judicis, bribery of a judge or juryman; from this partial list we may see that corruption has an ancient pedigree and a probable future. Against the individual one could commit iniuria, physical injury; fa/sum, deception; stuprum, indecency; and caedes, murder. Cicero mentions a lex Scantinia against pederasty; 22 Aug-.istus cor rected the error with a fine, Martial with epigrams, Domitian with death. Personal injury was no longer punished with equivalent retaliation, as in the Twelve Tables, but by a fine. Suicide was no crime; on the contrary, before
CHAP. XVIII)	ROMAN  LAW	399
Domitian, it was in some sense rewarded; a man condemned to death could usually, by suicide, ensure the validation of his will and the unimpeded trans mission of his property to his heirs. The law left the last choice free.
THE LAW  OF PROPERTY


were at their height. Playing upon him ,vith all her charms, she persuaded him to adopt Nero as his son, and to give his thirteen-year-old daughter Oct::!via to the sixteen-year-old youth in marriage (53). She assumed more and more political power with each year, and finally sat beside him on the imperial dais. She recalled the philosopher Seneca from the exile to which Claudius had condemned him, and made him the tutor of her son (49); and she had her friend Burrus appointed prefect of the Praetorian Guard. So poised, she ruled with a virile hand and established order and economy in the imperial household. Her ascendancy might have been a boon to Rome had she not indulged her avarice and her revenge. She had Lollia Paulina put to death because Claudius, in a careless moment which no wife forgives, remarked on the elegance of Lollia's figure. She had Marcus Silanus poisoned because she feared that Claudius might name him his heir. She conspired with Pallas to overthrow Narcissus, and this moneyed potentate, as faithful as he was corrupt, ended his career in a dungeon. The Emperor, weakened by ill health, many labors, and sexual enterprise, allowed Pallas and Agrippina to establish another reign of terror. Men were accused, exiled, or killed because
" Ferrero 56 and Bury 57 have tried to explain away J\lessalina's bigamy, but Tacitus vouches for the story as "well attested bv writers of the period, and by grave and elderly men who lived at the time, and were informed of e\·cry circumstance." 5B
274	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
the Treasury was exhausted by public works and games and needed replen ishment by confiscated wealth. Thirty-five senators and 300 knights were condemned to death in the thirteen years of Claudius' reign. Some of these executions may have been justified by actual conspiracy or crime; we do not know. Nero later claimed that he had examined all the papers of Oaudius, and that from these it appeared that not one prosecution had been set on foot by the Emperor's order.60
After five years of his fifth marriage Claudius awakened to what Agrip pina was doing. He resolved to put an end to her power, and circumvent her plans for Nero, by naming Britannicus his heir. But Agrippina had more determination and less scruple. Perceiving the Emperor's intentions she risked everything: she fed Claudius poisonous mushrooms, and he died after twelve hours of agony, without being able to utter a word (54). When the Senate deified him, Nero, already enthroned, remarked that mushrooms must be the food of the gods, since by eating them Claudius had become divine.61
JV. NERO
On his father's side Nero belonged to the Domitii Ahenobarbi-so named from the bronzelike beards that ran in the family. For five hundred years they had been famous in Rome for ability, recklessness, haughtiness, courage, and cruelty. Nero's paternal grandfather had a passion for games and the stage; drove a chariot in the races, spent money with open hand on wild beasts and gladiatorial shows, and had to be reproved by Augustus for bar barous treatment of his employees and slaves. He married Antonia, daughter of Antony and Octavia. Their son Cnaeus Domitius enhanced the reputation of the family by adultery, incest, brutality, and treason. In A.D. 28 he married the second Agrippina, then thirteen years old. Knowing his wife's ancestry and his own, he concluded that "no good man can possibly be born from us." 62 They named their only child Lucius, and added the cognomen Nero, meaning, in the Sabine tongue, valiant and strong.
The chief authors of his education were Chaeremon the Stoic, who taught him Greek, and Seneca, who taught him literature and morals but not philos ophy. Agrippina forbade the last on the ground that it would unfit Nero for government;63 the result was creditable to philosophy. Like many a teacher, Seneca complained that his labors were thwaned by the mother: the boy would run to her when reproved, and was sure to be comfoned. Seneca sought to train him in modesty and courtesy, simplicity and stoicism. If he could not retail to him the doctrines and disputes of the philosophers, he could at least dedicate to him the eloquent philosophical treatises that he was
CHAP. XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE  OF MON ARCHY	275
composing, and hope that someday his pupil might read them. The young prince was a good student, wrote forgivable poetry, and addressed the Sen ate in the graceful manner of his master. When Claudius died, Agrippina had no great difficulty in securing the confirmation of her son on the throne, especially since her friend Burrus brought to him the full support of the Guard.
Nero rewarded the soldiers with a donative, and gave 400	sesterces to every citizen. He pronounced over his predecessor a eulogy composed by the same Seneca 64 who would soon publish, anonymously, a pitiless satire (Apocolocyntosis or Pumpkinification) on the late Emperor's ejection from Olympus. Nero made the usual obeisance to the Senate, modestly excused his youth, and announced that of the powers heretofore taken by the prince he would keep only the command of the armies-a highly practical choice for the pupil of a philosopher. The promise was probably sincere, since Nero kept it faithfully for five years 65-that quinquennium N eronis which Trajan later accounted the best period in the history of the imperial govemment.66 vVhen the Senate proposed that statues of gold and silver should be raised in his honor, the seventeen-year-old Emperor rejected the offer; when two men were indicted for favoring Britannicus, he had the accusations with drawn; and in a speech to the Senate he pledged himself to observe through out his reign that virtue of mercy which Seneca was then extolling in an essay De clementia. Asked to sign a death warrant for a condemned criminal, he sighed, "Would that I had never learned to write!" He abolished or re duced oppressive taxes, and gave annuities to distinguished but impoverished senators. Recognizing his immaturity, he allowed Agrippina to administer his affairs; she received embassies, and had her image engraved beside his own on the imperial coins. Alarmed by this matriarchate, Seneca and Burrus conspired, by playing upon Nero's pride, to win from her the administration of his powers. The infuriated mother announced that Britannicus was the true heir to the throne, and threatened to unmake her son as decisively as she had made him. Nero countered by having Britannicus poisoned. Agrippina retired to her villas and wrote her Memoirs as a last vindictive stroke-black ening all the enemies of herself and her mother, and providing Tacitus and Suetonius with that museum of horrors from which they drew the darker colors for their portraits of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero.
Under the guidance of the philosopher-premier, and on the impetus of the administrative organization already devised, the Empire prospered within and without. The frontiers were well guarded, the Black Sea was cleared of pirates, Corbulo brought Armenia back under Rome's protectorate, and Parthia signed a peace that endured for fifty years. Corruption was reduced in the courts and the provinces, bureaucratic personnel was improved, the
276	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
Treasury was managed with economy and wisdom. Probably at Seneca's suggestion Nero made the far-reaching proposal to abolish all indirect taxes, especially the customs duties collected at frontiers and ports, and so estab lish free trade throughout the Empire. The measure was defeated in the Senate through the influence of the tax-gathering corporations-a defeat which indicates that the Principate was still recognizing its constitutional limits.
To divert Nero from interference with state affairs, Seneca and Burrus allowed him to indulge his sensuality unrestrained. "At a time when vice had charms for all orders of men," says Tacitus,67 "it was not expected that the sovereign should lead a life of austerity and self-denial." Nor could religious belief encourage Nero to morality; a smattering of philosophy had liberated his intellect without maturing his judgment. "He despised all cults," says Suetonius, "and voided his bladder upon an image of the god dess whom he most respected, Cybele." 68 His instincts inclined him to excessive eating, exotic desires, extravagant banquets where the flowers alone cost 4,000,000 sesterces;69 only misers, he said, counted what they spent. He admired and envied Caius Petronius, for that rich aristocrat taught him new ways of combining vice with taste. Petronius, says Tacitus in a classic description of the epicurean's ideal,
passed his days in sleep, and his nights in business, joy, and revelry. Indolence was at once his passion and his road to fame. \Vhat others did by vigor and industry, he accomplished by his love of pleasure and luxurious ease. Unlike the men who profess to-understand social en joyment, and ruin their fortunes, he led a life of expense without pro fusion; an epicure, yet not a prodigal; addicted to his appetites, but with refinement and judgment; an educated and elegant voluptuary. Gay and airy in his conversation, he charmed by a certain graceful negligence, the more engaging as it flowed from the natural frankness of his disposition. With all his delicacy and careless ease, he showed, when he was governor of Bithynia, and again when consul, that vigor of mind and softness of manners may unite in the same per son. . . . From his public offices he returned to his usual gratifica tions, fond of vice, or of pleasures that bordered on it. . . . Cherished by Nero and his companions . . . he was allowed to be the arbiter of taste and elegance. Without his sanction nothing was ex quisite, nothing delightful or rare.70
Nero was not subtle enough to achieve this artistic epicureanism. He dis guised himself and visited brothels; he roamed the streets and frequented taverns at night with the comrades of his mood, robbing shops, insulting women, "practicing lewdness on boys, stripping those whom they encoun-
CHAP.XIII)	THE  OTHER  SIDE OF MONARCHY	277
tered, striking, wounding, murdering." 71 A senator who def ended him self vigorously against the disguised Emperor was soon afterward forced to kill himself. Seneca sought to divert the royal lust by condoning Nero's relations with an ex-slave, Claudia Acte. But Acte was too faithful to him to keep his affections; he soon exchanged her for a woman of superlative refinement in all the ways of love. Poppaea Sabina was of high family and great wealth; "she had everything," says Tacitus, "except an honest mind"; she was one of those women who sp nd all the day in adorning their persons, and exist only when they are desired. Her husband, Salvius Otho, boasted of her beauty to Nero; the Emperor at once commissioned him to govern Lusitania (Portugal), and laid siege to Poppaea. She refused to be his mis tress, but agreed to be his wife if he would divorce Octavia.
Octavia had borne the transgressions of Nero silently, and had preserved her own modesty and chastity amid the stream of sexual license in which she had been forced to live from her birth. It is to the honor of Agrippina that she lost her life in defending Octavia against Poppaea. She used every plea against the proposed divorce, even, says Tacitus, to offering her own charms to her son. Poppaea fought back with hers and won; youth was served. She taunted Nero with being afraid of his mother, and led him to believe that Agrippina was plotting his fall. Finally, in the madness of his infatuation, he consented to kill the woman who had borne him and given him half the world. He thought of poisoning her, but she had guarded against this by the habitual use of antidotes. He tried to have her drowned, but she swam to safery from the shipwreck he had arranged. His men pursued her to her villa; when they seized her she bared her body and said, "Plunge your sword into my womb." It took many blows to kill her. The Emperor, viewing the uncovered corpse, remarked, "I did not know I had so beautiful a mother." 72 Seneca, it js said, had no share in the plot; but the saddest lines in the history of philosophy tell how he penned the letter in which Nero explained to the Senate how Agrippina had plotted against the Prince and, being detected, had killed herself.73 The Senate gracefully accepted the explanation, came in a body to greet Nero returning to Rome, and offered thanks to the gods for having kept him safe.
It is hard to believe that this matricide was a youth of twenty-two with
a passion for poetry, music, art, drama, and athletic games. He admired the Greeks for their varied contests of physical and artistic ability, and sought to introduce like competitions to Rome. In 59 he instituted the Judi iuvenales, or Youth Games; and a year later he inaugurated the Neronia on the model of the quadrennial festival at Olympia, with contests in horse racing, athletics, and "music"-which included oratory and poetry. He built an amphitheater, a gymnasium, and a magnificent public bath. He practiced gymnastics with
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIII
skill, became an enthusiastic charioteer, and finally decided to compete in the games. To his philhellenic mind this seemed not only proper, but in the best tradition of Greek antiquity. Seneca thought it ridiculous, and tried to confine the imperial exhibitions to a private stadium. Nero overruled him and invited the public to witness his performance. It came, and applauded lustily.
But what this uninhibited satyr really wanted was to be a great artist. Having every power, he longed also for every accomplishment. It is to his credit that he applied himself with painstaking seriousness to engraving, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry.74 To improve his singing "he used to lie upon his back with a leaden plate upon his chest, purge himself by a syringe or by vomiting, and deny himself fruits and all foods injurious to the voice";75 on certain days, for the same purpose, he ate nothing but garlic and olive oil. One evening he summoned the foremost senators to his palace, showed them a new water organ, and lectured to them on its theory and construction.76 He wasso fascinated by the music which Terpnos drew from the harp that he spent entire nights with him in practicing on that instrument. He gathered artists and poets about him, competed with them in his palace, compared his paintings with theirs, listened to their poetry, and read his own. He was deceived by their praise, and when an astrologer predicted that he would lose his throne he replied cheerfully that he would then make a


comes to silver I'm a connoisseur; I have goblets as big as wine jars.
. . . I own a thousand bowls that Mummius left to my patron. I buy cheap and sell dear; others may have different ideas.5
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIV
He is a kindly fellow withal; he shouts at his slaves, but he pardons them readily. He has so many that only a tenth of them know him by sight. "Slaves are men," he says, generously remembering his origin; "they sucked the same milk that we did . . . and mine will drink the water of freedom if they live." To prove his intentions he has his will brought in and reads it to his guests. It includes specificationsfor his epitaph, which is to end with the proud claim that he "grew rich from little, left 30,000,000 sesterces, and never heard a philosopher." 6
Fony pages describe the dinner; a few sentences will convey its aroma:
There was a circular tray around which were displayed the signs of the zodiac, and upon each sign the caterer had placed the food best in keeping with it. Ram's vetches on Aries, beef on Taurus . . . the womb of an unfarrowed sow on Virgo . . . on Libra a balance hold ing a tart in one pan and a cake in the other.    Four dancers ran
in to music, and removed the upper part of the tray. Beneath it ... stuffed capons and sows' bellies, and in the middle a hare. At the comers four figures of Marsyas spouted from their bladders a highly spiced sauce upon fish which were swimming about.	A tray fol
lowed on which was served a wild boar; from its tusks hung baskets loaded with dates; around it were little suckling pigs made of pastry.
. . . When the carver plunged his knife into the boar's side, thrushes flew out, one for each guest.7
Three white hogs walk into the room, and the guests choose which one they will have cooked for them; while they eat, the winning hog is roasted; soon it re-enters; when it is carved, sausages and meat puddings emerge from its belly. When the dessen arrives Encolpius has no stomach for it; but Trimalchio urges his guests onward by assuring them that the dessert has been made entirely our of a hog. A hoop is lowered from the ceiling, bringing to each diner an alabaster jar filled with perfume, while slaves replenish empty glasses with ancient wines. T rimalchio gets drunk and makes love to a boy; his fat wife protests, and he throws a cup at her head. "This Syrian dancing whore," he says of her, "has a poor memory. I took her off the auction block and made her a woman, and now she puffs herself up like a frog.... But that's the way it is: if you're born in an attic you can't sleep in a palace." 8 And he bids his major-domo keep her statue off his tomb, "else I'll be nagged even after I'm dead."
It is a powerful and savage satire; realistic only in its details, and probably true of only a small segment of Roman life. If Nero's Petronius wrote it we must count it the merciless caricature of the nouveau ricbe freedman by a patrician who had never earned his keep. There is no mercy in the book, no tenderness, no ideal; immorality and corruption are taken for
CHAP. XIV)	THE  SILVER  AGE	299
granted, and the life of the underworld is presented with gusto, without indignation, and without comment. Here the gutter flows directly into classic literature, bringing its own judgments and taste, its own lusty vocabu lary and hilarious vitality. Sometimes the story rises to those sublime heights of nonsense, obscenity, and vituperation which crown the epic of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Apuleius' Golden Ass would follow in its steps; Gil Blas, seventeen centuries later, would rival it; Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones would continue its meandering tradition. It is the strangest book in the literature of Rome.
THE PHILOSOPHERS
In this loose and complex age, when freedom was so limited and life was so free, philosophy flourished alongside of sensuality, and the two were not above joining hands. The decay of the native religion had left a moral vacuum which philosophy sought to fill. Parents sent their sons, and them selves often went, to hear the lectures of men who offered to provide a rational code of civilized conduct, or a formal dress for naked desire. Those who could afford it paid philosophers to live with them, partly as educators, partly as spiritual counselors, partly as learned company; so Augustus had Areus, consulted him on almost everything, and for his sake (if we may believe a ruler) was lenient to Alexandria. \\'hen Drusus died Livia called in "her husband's philosopher"-so Seneca phrases it-"to help her bear her grief." 9 Nero, Trajan, and of course Aurelius had philosophers residing with them at court, as kings have chaplains now. In their last moments men would summon philosophers to chart their passing, as centuries later they would ask for a priest.10
The public never forgave these teachers of wisdom for taking salaries or fees. Philosophy was esteemed a sufficient substitute for food and drink, and philoso phers who had a less exalted opinion of their profession were the butt of popular jokes, of Quintilian's criticism, of Lucian's satire, and of imperial hostility. Many of them deserved it, for they put on the philosopher's coarse cloak, and grew a profound beard, to give a learned front to gluttony, avarice, and vanity. "A short survey of life," says a character in Lucian,
had convinced me of the absurdity and meanness	that pervade
all worldly purposes	In this state of mind the best I could think
of was to get at the truth of it all from the	philosophers. So I
selected the best of them-if solemnity of visage, pallor of complexion, and length of beard are a criterion	I placed myself in their hands.
For a considerable sum down, and more to be paid when they had per fected me in wisdom, I was to be	instructed in the order of the
300	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIV
universe. Unfortunately, so far from dispelling my previous igno rance, they perplexed me more and more with their daily drenches of beginnings and ends, atoms and voids, matters and forms. My greatest difficulty was that, though they differed among themselves, and all they said was full of contradictions, they expected me to believe them, each pulling me in his own direction.    Often one of them
could not tell you correctly the number of miles from Megara to Athens, but had no hesitation about the distance in feet from the sun to the moon.11
Most of the Roman philosophers followed the Stoic creed. The epicureans were too busy pursuing wine, woman, and food to have much time for theory. Here and there in Rome were mendicant preachers of the Cynic philosophy, ignoring speculation, and calling men to a simple and soapless life; they acceded to the popular demand that philosophers should be poor, and were in conse quence the least respected of the schools. Seneca, however, made one of them his intimate friend. "Why should I not hold Demetrius in high esteem?" he asked. "I have found that he lacks nothing;" and the millionaire sage marveled when the nearly naked Cynic refused a gift of 200,000 sesterces from Caligula.12 Since the Roman Stoic was a man of action rather than of contemplation, he eschewed metaphysics as a hopeless quest, and sought in Stoicism a philosophy of conduct that would support human decency, family unity, and social order independently of supernatural surveillance and command. The essence of his code was self-control: he would subordinate passion to reason, and train his will to desire nothing that would make his peace of soul contingent upon external goods. In politics he would recognize the universal brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God; at the same time he would love his country and hold himself ready to die at any time to avert its disgrace or his own. Life itself was always to remain within his choice; he was free to leave it whenever it should become an evil rather than a boon. A man's conscience was to be higher than any law. Monarchy was a sad necessity for the rule of wide and diverse realms;


73-71: Third Servile \Var; Spartacus
70: First consulate of Crassus and Pom- pey; trial of Verres; Virgil b.
6(;: Titus Pomponius .Atticus 68: Caesar quaestor in Spain 67: Pompey subdues the pirates 66: Cicero Pro lege Mmilia
63: Cicero exposes Catiline; Octavius b.
63-12: M. V. Agrippa, engineer
62: Caesar	praetor;	misconduct	of Clodius
58: Clodius,  tribune,  exiles  Cicero;
Caesar defeats Helvetii and Ario viscus in Gaul
57: Return of Cicero;· Caesar defeats Belgae
56: Meeting of triumvirs at Luca
55: Pompey and Crassus consuls; thea ter of Pompey; Caesar in Germany and Britain
54: Caesar's second invasion of Britain 53: Violence of Clodius and Milo in
Rome; defeat of Crassus at Carrhae 52: Murder of Clodius; trial of /\1ilo; Pompey sole consul; revolt of
Vercingetorix
51: Cicero governor of Cilicia; Cicero's De re publica; Caesar's De be/lo Gallico
49: Caesar crosses Rubicon and takes Rome
48: Battles of Dyrrachium and Phar salus
48-47: Caesar in Egypt and Syria; Vitru vius, architect; Columella, botanist
47: Caesar's victories at Zela and Thap sus; suicide of Cato the Younger
46: Caesar appointed dictator for ten vears; revision of calendar: Sallust historian: Cicero Pro Marcello '
45: Caesar defeats the Pompeians in Spain; Cicero's Academica and De finibus
44: Assassination of Caesar; Cicero's Dispmationes Tusculanae, De 11a t11T11 deormn, De officiis
43: Second Trium\·irate: Antonv, Oc- tavian, Lepidus; murder of ·cicero
42: Brutus and Cassius die at Philippi
41: Antony and Cleopatra at Tarsus


many of whom were killed. Sulla exhibited a fight involving a hundred lions, Cae;ar four hundred, Pompey six hundred. Beasts fought men, men fought men; and the vast audience waited hopefully for the sight of death.
THE NEW WOMAN
The increase of wealth conspired with the corruption of politics to loosen morals and the marriage bond. Despite increasing competition from women and men, prostitution continued to flourish; brothels and the taverns that usually housed them were so popular that some politicians organized votes through the collegium lupanariorum, or guild of brothelkeepers.25 Adultery was so common as to attract little attention unless played up for political purposes, and practically every well-to-do woman had at least one divorce. This was not the fault of women; it resulted largely from the subordination of marriage, in the upper classes, to money and politics. Men chose wives, or youths had wives chosen for them, to get a rich dowry or make advantageous connections. Sulla and Pompey married five times. Seeking to attach Pompey to him, Sulla persuaded him to put away his first wife and marry Aemilia, SuHa's stepdaughter, who was already married and with child; Aemilia reluc tantly agreed, but died in childbirth shonly after entering Pompey's house. Caesar gave his daughter Julia to Pompey in marriage as an item in their triumviral alliance. The Empire, growled Cato, had become a matrimonial agency.25a Such unions were mariages de politique; as soon as their utility ended, the husband looked for another wife as a steppingstone to higher place or greater w lth. He did not need to give a reason; he merely sent his wife a letter announcing her freedom and his. Some men did not marry at all, alleging dist:::ste for the forwardness and extravagance of the new woman; many lived in free unions with concubines or slaves. The censor Metellus l\facedonicus ( 1 3 r) had begged men to marry and beget children as a duty to the state, however much of a nuisance (molestia) a wife might be; 26 but the number of celibates and childless couples increased more rapidly after he spoke. Children were now luxuries which only the poor could afford.
Under these circumstances women could hardly be blamed for looking lightly upon their marriage vows and seeking in liaisons the romance or affection that political matrimony had failed to bring. There was, of course, a majority of good women, even among the rich; but a new freedom was breaking down the old patria potestas and the ancient family discipline. Roman women now moved about almost as freely as men. They dressed in diaphanous silks from India and China, and ransacked Asia for perfumes and jewelry. Marriage cum mamt disappeared, and women divorced their
CHAP.VU)	THE   OLIGARCHIC  REACTION	135
husbands as readily as men their wives. A growing proportion of women sought expression in cultural pursuits: they learned Greek, studied philoso phy, wrote poetry, gave public lectures, played, sang, and danced, and opened literary salons; some engaged in business; a few practiced medicine or law.
Clodia, the wife of Quintus Caecilius Metellus, was the most prominent of those ladies who in this period supplemented their husbands with a suc cession of cavalieri serventi. She had a gay passion for the rights of women; shocked the older generation by going about unchaperoned with her male friends after her marriage; accosted people whom she met and knew, and sometimes publicly kissed them, instead of lowering her eyes and crouching in her carriage as proper ,vomen were supposed to do. She invited her male friends to dine with her while her husband absented himself with the chiv alry of the Marquis du Chatelet. Cicero, who cannot be trusted, describes "her loves, adulteries, and lecheries, her songs and symphonies, her suppers and carousing, at Baiae on land and sea." 27 She was a clever woman, who could sin with irresistible grace, but he underestimated the selfishness of men. Each lover demanded her entirely until his appetite waned, and each became her shocked enemy when she found a new friend. So Catullus (if she was his Leshia) besmeared her with ribald epigrams; and Caelius, alluding to the price paid for the poorest prostitutes, called her in open court the quadrantaria-the quarter-of-an-as (one-and-a-half-cent) woman. She had accused him of trying to poison her; he hired Cicero to defend him; and the great orator did not hesitate to charge her with incest and murder, protest ing, however, that he was "not the enemy of women, still less of one who was the friend of all men." Caelius was acquitted, and Clodia paid some penalty for being the sister of that Publius Clodius who was the most radical leader in Rome and Cicero's implacable enemy.
ANOTHER  CATO
Amid all this corruption and la.'1:ity cne man stood out 2s an exemplar and professor of the ancient '\Vays. Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger had vio lated a precept of his great-great-grandfather by studying Greek; from it he derived that Stoic philosophy which shared ,vith his republican convic tions the inflexible devotion of his life. He inherited 120 dents ($432,000), but lived in sedulous simplicity. He lent money, but took no interest. He lacked his ancestor's rough humor, and frightened people by what seemed to them his obstinate incorruptibility and his untimely addiction to princi ples. His life was an unfc:giv::ble indictment of theirs; they wished he would
136	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VII
sin a little, if only out of a decent respect for the habits of mankind. They must have rejoiced when, with an almost Cynical conception of woman as a biological instrument, he "lent" his wife Marcia to his friend Hortensius i.e., divorced her and assisted at her marriage to the orator-and later, when Hortensius died, took her again to wife.28 He could not be popular, for he was the relentless enemy of all dishonesty, the stem defender of the patria potestas, a more merciless censor moralium than Cato Censor himself. He seldom laughed or smiled, made no effort to be affable, and sharply repri manded any who dared to flatter him. He was defeated for the consulship, said Cicero, because he acted like a citizen in Plato's republic instead of a Roman living among "the dregs of Romulus' posterity." 29
As quaestor Cato made himself a terror to all incompetence and malf eas ance, and guarded the Treasury ferociously from all political raids; nor did his watchfulness abate when his term expired. His indictments fell upon all parties and left him with a thousand admirers but hardly a friend. As praetor he persuaded the Senate to issue an order that all candidates, scon after election, must come into court and give under oath a detailed account of their expenses and proceedings in the campaign. The measure disturbed so many politicians, most of whom depended upon bribery, that they and their clients, when Cato next appeared in the Forum, reviled and stoned him; whereupcn he climbed to the rostrum, faced the crowd resolutely, and talked them into submission. As tribune he led a legion into Macedonia; his attendants rode on horseback, he went on foot. He scorned the business classes and def ended aristocracy, or rule by birth, as the only alternative to plutocracy, or rule by wealth. He warred without truce upon the men who were corrupting Roman politics with money, and Roman character with luxury; and he stood out to the last against every move, by either Pompey or Caesar, toward dictatorship. When Caesar had overthrown the Republic Cato died by his own hand, with a volume of philosophy by his side.
SPARTACUS
Misgovernment now reached a height, and democracy a depth, rare in the history of states. fa 98 n.c. the Roman general Didius repeated the exploit of Sulpicius Galba: he lured a whole tribe of troublesome natives into a Roman camp in Spain by pretending to register them for a distribution of land; when they had entered, with their wives and children, he had them all slaughtered. On his return to Rome he was a,varded a public triumph.30 Shocked by the brutalities of empire, a Sabine officer in the Roman army, Quintus Sertorius, went. over to the Spaniards, organized and drilled them, and led them to victory
CHAP.VII)	THE  OLIGARCHIC  REACTION	137
after victory over the legions sent to subdue him. For eight years (80-72) he ruled a rebel kingdom, winning the affection of the people by his just administra tion and by his establishment of schools for the education of native youth. 1\letellus, the Roman general, offered a hundred talents ($360,000) and 20,000 acres of land to any Roman who should kill him. Perpenna, a Roman refugee in Sertorius' camp, invited him to dinner, assassinated him, and made himself master of the army that Sertorius had trained. Pompey was sent against Perpenna and easily defeated him; Perpenna was executed, and the exploitation of Spain was resumed. ·
The next act of the revolution came not from the free but from the slave. Lentulus Batiates kept at Capua a school of gladiators-slaves or condemned criminals trained to fight animals, or one another, to the death in public arenas or private homes. Two hundred of them tried to escape; seventy-eight succeeded, armed themselves, occupied a slope of Vesuvius, and raided the adjoining towns for food (73). As their leader they chose a Thracian, Spartacus, "a man not only of high spirit and bravery," says Plutarch, "but also in understanding and gentleness superior to his condition." 31 He issued a call to the slaves of Italy to rise in revolt; soon he had 70,000 men, hunger ing for liberty and revenge. He taught them to manufacture their own
,veapons, and to fight with such order and discipline that for years they outmatch.ed every force sent to subdue them. His victories filled the rich men of Italy with fear, and its slaves with hope; so many of these tried to join him that after raising his army to 120,000 he refused further recruits, finding it difficult to care for them. He marched his horde toward the Alps, "intending, when he had passed them, that every man should go to his own home." 32 But his followers' did not share these refined and pacific sentiments; revolting against his leadership, they began to loot the towns of northern Italy. The Senate now sent both consuls, ,vith heavy forces, against the rebels. One army met a detachment that had seceded from Spartacus, and slaughtered it; the other attacked the main rebel body, and was defeated. Moving again toward the Alps, Spartacus encountered a third army, led by Cassius, and decimated it; but finding his way blocked by still other legions, he turned south and marched toward Rome.
Half the slaves of Italy were on the verge of insurrection, and in the capi tal no man could tell when the revolution would break out in his very home. All that opulent society, which had enjoyed every luxury slavery could produce, trembled at the thought of losing everything-mastery, property, life. Senators and millionaires cried out for a better general; few offered themselves, for all feared this strange new foe. At last Crassus came forward and was given the command, with 40,000 men; and many of the nobility,
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VII
not all forgetting the traditions of their class, joined him as voiunteers. Knowing that he had an empire against him, and that his men couJd never administer either the Empire or the capital, Spartacus passed Rome by and continued south to Thurii, mar<;hing the length of Italy in the hope of trans porting his men to Sicily or Africa. For a third year he fought off all attacks. But again his impatient soldiers rejected his authority and began to ravage the neighboring towns. Crassus came upon a horde of these marauders and slew them, 12,300 in number, every man fighting to the last. Meanwhile Pompey's legions, returning from Spain, were sent to swell the forces of Crassus. Despairing of victory over such a multitude, Spartacus flung him self upon the army of Crassus and welcomed death by plunging into the midst of the foe. Two centurions fell by his hand; struck down and unable to rise, he continued the fight on his knees; at last he was so cut to pieces that his body could not later be identified. The great majority of his fol lowers perished with him; some fled, and became hunted men in the woods of Italy; 6000 captives were crucified along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome (71). There their rotting bodies were left to hang for months, so that all masters might take comfort, and all slaves take heed.
POMPEY
When Crassus and Pompey returned from this campaign they did not, as the Senate wished and law required, disband or disarm their troops at the gates. Camping outside the walls, they asked permission to stand for the consulate without entering the city-again a violation of precedent; in addi tion Pompey demanded land for his soldiers and a triumph for himself. The Senate refused, hoping to play one general against the other. But Crassus and Pompey joined hands, made a sudden alliance with the populcrres and the business class, and by generous bribery won election as consuls for 70 B.c. The magnates entered the partnership for two immediate ends: to recapture power in the juries that tried them, and to replace Lucullus-who had ruled the Roman East with unprofitable integrity-by a man of their own class and views. In Pompey they recognized their man.
Pompey was now thirty-five, and already the veteran of many campaigns. Born of a rich equestrian family, he had won universal admiration by his courage and temperance, and his skill in every branch of sport and war. He had cleared Sicily and Africa of Sulla's enemies, and by his victories and his pride had earned from the humorous dictator the cognomen Magnus, the Great. He had achieved a triumph almost before a beard.33 He was so hand some that the courtesan Flora declared she could never part from him with-
CHAP. vu)	THE   OLIGARCHIC  REACTION	139


"But meanwhile time flies, flies irreparably, while we, charmed with love [of our theme], linger around each single detail." He has a word about the diseases of animals and how to treat them. He describes the common farm animals with understanding and sympathy; he is never through admiring the simplicity of their instincts, the power of their passions, the perfection of their forms. He idealizes rural life, but he does not ignore the hardships and vicissitudes, the crippling toil, the endless struggle against insects, the torturing pendulum of drought and storm. Nevertheless, labor omnia vincit; 12 there is in such toil a purpose and result that give it dignity; no Roman need feel ashamed to guide a plow. Moral character, says Virgil, grows on the farm; all the old virtues that made Rome great were planted and nourished there; and hardly any process of seed sowing, protection, cultivation, weeding, and harvesting but has its counterpart in the develop ment of the soul. And out of the fields, where the miracle of growth and the whims of the sky bespeak a thousand mystic forces, the soul, more readily than in the city, perceives the presence of creative life, and is deepened with religious intuition, humility, and reverence. Here Virgil breaks into his most famous lines, beginning with a noble echo of Lucretius, but passing into a pure Virgilian strain:
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum
subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari; fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis,
Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores-13
"Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things, and has
put under foot all fear and inexorable fate, and the noise of a greedy Hell.
CHAP.XII)	THE  GOLDEN  AGE	239
But happy too he who knows the rural deities, Pan and old Silvanus and the sister Nymphs." The peasant is right in seeking to propitiate the gods with sacrifice and enlist their good will; these exercises of piety brighten the round of toil with festivals and clothe earth and life with meaning, drama, and poetry.
Dryden considered the Georgics "the best poem of the best poet." 14 It shares with the De RerU1n Natura the rare distinction of being at once didactic and beautiful. Rome did not take it seriously as a handbook of agri culture; we do not hear that anyone, having read it, exchanged the Forum for a farm; indeed, as Senec::i (hought, Virgil may have written these rural ecstasies precisely to please an urban taste. In any case, Augustus felt that Virgil had performed Maecenas' assignment marvelously well. He called the poet to his palace and suggested a harder task, a vastly larger theme.
THE AENEID
At first the plan was to sing the battles of Octavian.15 But the supposed descent of his adoptive father from Venus and Aeneas led the poet-perhaps the Emperor-to conceive an epic on the founding of Rome. As the theme developed it came to include, by preview through prophecy, the expansion of Rome into the Augustan empire and peace. It would also show the role of Roman character in these achievements and seek to make the ancient virtues popular; it would picture its hero as reverent of the gods and guided by them, and would fall in with the Augustan reformation of morals and faith. Virgil retired to various lairs in Italy and spent the_ next ten years (29-19) on the Aeneid. He wrote slowly, with the devotion of a Flaubert, dictating a few lines in the fresh morning 2nd rewriting them in the after noon. Augustus waited impatiently for the poem's completion, repeatedly inquired about its progress, and importuned Virgil to bring him any finished fragment. Virgil put him off as long as he could, but finally read to him the second, fourth, and sixth books. Octavia, Antony's widow, fainted at the passage describing her son Marcellus, but lately dead.16 The epic was never completed, never finally revised. In 19 B.c. Virgil visited Greece, met Augustus in Athens, was sunstruck in Megara, started home, and died soon after reaching Brundisium. On his deathbed he begged his friends to destroy the manuscript of his poem, saying that at least three years more would have been necessary to give it :finished form. Augustus forbade them to carry out the req"1est.
Every schoolboy knows the story of the Aeneid. As Troy burns, the ghost of the slain Hector appears to the leader of his Dardanian allies, the
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XII
"pious Aeneas," and bids him resume from the Greeks the "holy things and household gods" of Troy-above all, the Palladium, or image of Pallas Athene, on the retention of which the preservation of the Trojans was be lieved to depend. "Seek for these" sacred symbols, says Hector, "the city which, when you have wandered over the sea, you shall at last establish." 17 Aeneas escapes with his old father Anchises and his son Ascanius. They set sail and stop at divers places; but always the voices of the gods command them to go on. Winds drive them ashore near Carthage, where a Phoenician princess, Dido, is founding a city. (When Virgil wrote this, Augustus was carrying out Caesar's plan for rebuilding Carthage.) Aeneas falls in love with her. A convenient stonn enables them to take refuge in the same cave and to consummate what Dido considers their marriage. For a time Aeneas accepts her interpretation, and shares with her and his willing men the tasks of construction. But the relentless gods-who, in classic myth, never cared much for marriage-warn him to depart; this is not the capital that he must make. Aeneas obeys, and leaves the mourning queen with a theme song in his words:
I will never deny,0 Queen, that thou hast deserved of me the ut most thou canst set forth in speech	I never held out the bride
groom's torch, nor took the marriage vow	But now Apollo has
bidden me sail	Cease then to consume thyself and me with these
complaints. Not of my own will do I seek ltaly.18
ltaliam non sponte sequor: this is the secret of the tale. ,ve who, after eight centuries of sentimental literature, judge Virgil and his hero in its terms, attach far more significance to romantic love, and to extramarital relations, than did either Greece or Rome. Marriage was to the ancients a union of families rather than of bodies or souls; and the demands of religion or fatherland were placed above the rights or whim of the individual. Virgil treats Dido sympathetically, and rises to one of his finest passages in telling how she flings herself upon a funeral pyre and is burned alive; then he follows Aeneas to Italy.
Landing at Cumae, the Trojans march into Latium and are welcomed by its king, Latinus. His daughter Lavini:1 is betrothed to Turnus, the hand some chief of the neighboring Rutuli. Aeneas alienates her affection and her father; Turnus declares war upon him and Latium, and mighty battles ensue. To refresh and encourage Aeneas the Cumaean Sibvl takes him throuo-h the grotto of Lake Avernus into Tartarus. As Virgil writes an Odyssey of Aeneas' wanderings and a short Iliad of his wars, so now he takes a lead from Odysseus' tour of Hades, and becomes in tum an exemplar and guide for Dante. Facilis descensus Averni-"easy isthe descent to Hell"- says Virgil; 19
CHAP.XU)	THE  GOLDEN  AGE	241
but his hero finds the way tortuous, and the lower world confusingly com plex. There he meets Dido, who scorns his protestations of love; there he sees the varied torments with which earthly sin is punished and the prison house where suffer, Lucifer-like, rebellious demigods. Then the Sibyl takes him through mystic passages to the Blissful Groves where those who led good lives bask in green valleys and endless joys. His father Anchises, who has died en route, expounds to him here the Orphic doctrine of heaven, purgatory, and hell, and reveals to him in panoramic vision the future glory and heroes of Rome. In a later vision Venus shows him the battle of Actium and the triumphs of Augustus. His spirits revived, Aeneas returns to the living world, kills T urnus, and scatters death about him with epic hand. He marries the shadowy Lavinia, and when her father dies he inherits the throne of Latium. Soon afterward he falls in battle and is transported to the Elysian Fields. His son Ascanius or Iulus builds Alba Longa as the new capital of the Latin tribes, and thence his descendants Romulus and Remus go forth to establish Rome.
It seems unmannerly to criticize so gentle a soul as Virgil for all these grateful flatteries to his country and his Emperor, or to find flaws in a work that perhaps he had never wished to write and never lived to complete. Of course it imitates Greek models; so does practically all Roman literature except the satire and the essay. The battle scenes are weak echoes of the Iliad's clanging frays, and Aurora rises as often as Homer's rosy-fingered Dawn. Naevius, Ennius, and Lucretius lend the poet episodes and phrases, sometimes whole lines; and Apollonius of Rhodes, through his Argonautica, provides a model for Dido's tragic love. Such borrowings were judged legitimate in Virgil's as in Shakespeare's days; all Mediterranean literature was viewed as the heritage and storehouse of e-very Mediterranean mind. The mythological background tires us, now that we are making our own; but these divine allusions and interpositions were familiar and pleasant even to skeptical readers of Roman poetry. "'e miss in the smooth epic of the ailing Virgil the torrential narrative of Homer, the life-and-blood reality that moves the giants of the Iliad or the homely folk of Ithaca. Virgil's story often lags, and his characters are almost all anemic except those whom Aeneas abandons or destroys. Dido is a living ·woman, gracious, subtle, passionate; T urnus is a simple and honest ·warrior, betrayed by Latinus, and doomed to an unmerited death by ridiculous gods. After ten cantos of cant we resent the "piety" of Aeneas, which leaves him no will of his own, excuses his treachery, and brings him success only by supernatural inter vention.,Ve do not enjoy the windy speeches ,vith which he kills good men, adding a rhetorical boredom to that competitive perforation \\·hich is humanity's final test of truth.
242	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XII
To understand and appreciate the Aeneid we must at every tum remind ourselves that Virgil was writing not a romance, but a sacred scripture for Rome. Not that he offers any clear theology. The gods who pull the strings of his drama are as vicious as Homer's and not as humorously human; indeed, all the mischief and suffering in the story are caused not by men and women but by deities. Probably Virgil conceived these divinities as poetical machinery, symbols of tyrannous circumstance and disruptive chance; in general he oscillates between Jove and an impersonal Fate as the ruler of all things. He likes the gods of the village and the field better than those of Olympus; he loses no opportunity to commemorate them and describe their rites; and he wishes that his fellow men could recapture the pietas-the reverence toward parents, fatherland, and gods-which was nourished by that primeval rural creed. Heu pietas! beu prisca fides! he moums-"alas for the old piety and faith!" But he rejects the traditional conception of a Hades in which all the dead bear alike a gloomy fate; he plays with Orphic and Pythagorean ideas of reincarnation and a future life, and makes as vivid as he can the notion of a rewarding heaven, a cleansing purgatory, and a punishing hell.


The real religion of the Aeneid is patriotism, and its greatest god is Rome. The destiny of Rome moves the plot, and all the tribulations of the tale find meaning in "the heavy task of establishing the Roman race"7tmztae 1110/is erat Romanam condere gentem. The poet is so proud of the Empire that he looks with no envy upon the superior culture of the Greeks. Let other peoples transform into living figures marble and bronze, and chart the courses of the stars:
But thou,0 Roman, must the peoples rule. Thine ans shall be to teach the ways of peace,
To spare the humbled, and throw dmvn the proud.20
Nor does Virgil resent the death of the Republic; he knows that class war, not Caesar, killed it; at every stage of his poem he foreshadows the restorative rule of Augustus, hails it as Saturn's reign returned, and promises him, as reward, admission to the company of the gods. No man ever fulfilled a literary commission more perfectly.
\Vhy do we retain a warm affection for this pietistic, moralistic, cham'inis tic, imperialistic propagandist? Partly because the gentleness of his spirit is on every page; because we feel that his sympathies ha,"e spread from his own
fair Italy to all men, even to all life. He knows the sufferino::-,s of the lowl.v and the great, the obscene ghastliness of war. the brief mortality that stalks the noblest men, the griefs and pains, the lacrimae rerum, or "tears in things,"
that mar and accentuate the sun...;hine of our da.vs. He is not merel.y imitatino::-,
CHAP. xn)	THE   GOLDEN  AGE	243
Lucretius when he writes of "the nightingale mourning beneath the poplar's shade the loss of her young ones, ,vhom some hard plowman has seen and tom unfledged from their nest; all night long she cries, and perched on a spray, rennvs her pitiful song, filling the ·woods with her sad lament." 21 But what draws us back to Virgil again and again is the persistent loveliness of his speech. It is not in vain that he pored over every line, "licking it into shape as the she-bear does her cubs"; 22 and only the reader who has tried to write can guess the toil that made this narrative so smooth and adorned it with so many passages of sonorous melody that every second page cries out for quotation, and tempts the tongue. Perhaps the poem is too uniformly beautiful; even beauty palls upon us if its eloquence is prolonged. There is a delicate feminine charm in Virgil, but seldom the masculine power and thought of Lucretius or the surging tide of that "many-billowed sea" called Homer. "\Ve begin to understand the melancholy ascribed to Virgil when we picture him preaching beliefs that he could never recapture, writing for ten years an epic whose every episode and line required the effort of artifi cial art, then dying with the haunting thought that he had failed, that no spark of spontaneity had set his imagination on fire or spurred his figures into life. But over his medium, if not over his subject, the poet won a com plete victory. Artifice has seldom achieved a brighter miracle.
Two years after his death his executors gave the poem to the world. There were some detractors: one critic published an anthology of his defects, another listed his pilferings, another printed eight volumes of Resemblances between lines in Virgil and in earlier poetry.23 But Rome soon forgave this literary communism. Horace ranked Virgil fondly with Homer, and schools inaugurated nineteen hundred years of memorizing the Aeneid. Plebeian and aristocrat mouthed him; artisans and shopkeepers, tombstones and scribbled walls, quoted him; temple oracles gave responses through ambigu ous verses of his epic; the custom began-and lasted till the Renaissance of opening Virgil at random and finding some counsel or prophecy in the first passage that struck the eye. His fame grew until in the l\Iiddle Ages he was considered a magician and a saint. Had he not, in the Fourth Ec logue, predicted the coming of the Saviour and, in the Aeneid, described Rome as the Holy City, from which the power of religion would uplift the world? Had he not in that terrible Book VI pictured the Last Judgment, the sufferings of the wicked, the cleansing fire of purgatory, the happiness of the blessed in paradise? Virgil too, like Plato, was anima naturaliter Cbristiana, despite his pagan gods. Dante loved the eleg:mce of his verse, and took him as guide not only through hell and purgatory, but also in the art of flowing narrative and beautiful speech. Milton thought of him ,vhen
244	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XII
writing Paradise Lost and the pompous orations of devils and men. And Voltaire, of whom we should have expected a harsher judgment, ranked the Aeneid as the finest literary monument left us by antiquity.24
HORACE
One of the pleasantest pictures in the world of letters-where jealousy is only less rife than in love-is Virgil introducing Horace to Maecenas. The two poets had met in 40 B.c., when Virgil was thirty and Horace twenty five. Virgil opened the doors of .l\.faecenas to him a year later, and all three remained fast friends till death.
In 1935 Italy celebrated the two thousandth birthday of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. He was born in the little town of Venusia, in Apulia. His father was an ex-slave who had risen to the dignity of a tax collector-or, some said, a fishmonger.25 Flaccus meant flap-eared; Horatius was probably the name of the master whom the father had served. Somehow the freedman prospered, sent Quintus to Rome for rhetoric, and to Athens for philosophy. There the youth joined the army of Brutus, and received command of a legion. It was dulce et decorum pro patria nzori-"sweet and honorable, to die for one's country"; 26 but Horace, who often imitated Archilochus, dropped his shield in the midst of battle and took to his heels. After the war was over he found himself shorn of all property and patrimony, and "bare faced poverty drove me to writing verses." 27 Actually, however, he but tered his bread by being a quaestor's clerk.
He was short and stout, proud and shy, disliking the common crowd and yet not having the garb or means to move in circles whose education might equal his own. Too cautious to marry, he contented himself with courtesans who may have been real or may have been forms of poetic license invented to demonstrate maturity. He wrote of prostitutes with scholarly restraint and intricate prosody, and thought he deserved much for not seducing married women.28 Too poor to ruin himself sexually, he took to books and composed Greek and Latin lyrics in the most recondite of Greek meters. Virgil saw one of these poems and praised it to .l\faecenas. The kindly epi cure was complimented by Horace's stammering timidity and found a sly relish in his sophisticated thought. In 37 l\Iaecenas took Virgil, Horace, and some others on a jaunt by canal boat, stagecoach, litter, and foot across Italy to Brundisium. Shortly afterward he introduced Horace to Octavian,
, ·ho proposed that Horace should become his secretary. The poet excused himself, having no passion for work. In 34 ldaecenas gave him a house and income-producing farm in the Sabine valley of Ustica, some forty-five miles
CHAP. xn)	THE   GOLDEN  AGE	245
from Rome. Horace was now free to live in the city or the country, and to write as authors dream of writing-with lazy leisure and laborious care.* For a while he stayed in Rome, enjoying the life of an amused spectator of the hurrying world. He mingled with all ranks, studying the types that made up Rome, contemplating with clinical pleasure the follies and vices of the capital. He pictured some of these types in two books of Satires ( 34 and 30 B.c.) modeled at first on Lucilius and later in a milder and more tolerant
strain. He called these poems sermones-not by any means sermons, but informal conversations, sometimes intimate dialogues, in almost colloquial hexameters; he confessed that they were prose in everything but meter, "for you would not call one a poet who writes, as I do, lines mor akin to prose." In these racy verses we meet the living men and women of Rome and hear them talking as Romans talked: not the shepherds, peasants, and heroes of Virgil, nor the legendary lechers and heroines of Ovid, but the saucy slave, the vain poet, the pompous lecturer, the greedy philosopher, the gabbing bore, the eager Semite, the businessman, the statesman, the streetwalker: this at last, we feel, is Rome. \Vith homicidal playfulness Horace lays down for the hunter of legacies the rules for success in that ghoulish game.20 He laughs at the gourmets who feast on delicacies and limp with gout.30 He reminds the laudator temporis acti-the "praiser of times past"-that "if some god were for taking you back to those days you would refuse every time"; 31 the chief charm of the past is that we know we need not live it again. He wonders, like Lucretius, at the restless souls who in the city long for the country, and there long for the city; who can never enjoy what they have because there is someone who has more; who, not content with their wives, hanker with too great and yet too little imagination for the charms of other women ,vho have in turn become prose to other men. l\ioney-madness, he concludes, is the basic disease of Rome. He asks the itching gold-seeker, "\Vhy do you laugh at Tantalus, from whose thirsty lips the ·water always moves away? Change the name, and the story is about you": 11nttato nmnine, de te fabula narratur.32 He satirizes himself, too: he represents his slave telling him to his face that he, the moralist, is hot-tempered, never knows his own mind or purpose, and is the menial of his passions like anybody else.
It is doubtless to himself, as well as to others, that he recommends the golden
mean, aurea mediocritas; 33 est modus in rebus, he says-"there's a limit, a measure in things," 34 which the intelligent man will neither fall short of
." Horace's estate, unearthed in 1932, turned out to be a spacious mansion, 363 by 142 feet, with twenty-four rooms, three bathing pools, se,·eral mosaic floors, and a large formal garden surrounded by a covered and enclosed portico. Beyond this was an extensive farm, worked by eight slaves and five families of leasehold coloni.28a
CAESAR  AND  CHR 1ST	(CHAP. XII
nor exceed. In opening his second series of Satires he complains to a friend that the first group were criticized as too savage and too weak. He asks advice and is told, "Take a rest." "What?" the poet objects, "not write verses at all?" "Yes." "But I can't sleep." 35