refused to take interest.12 For several years now Cicero became the advocate of the Triumvirs in the Senate. When a dearth of grain threatened Rome ( 57), he secured for Pompey an extraordinary commission with full power for six years over all the food supply of Rome and over all ports and trade. Pompey again acquitted himself well, but the constitution of the Republic suffered another blow, and government by men continued to replace gov ernment by laws. In 56 Cicero persuaded the Senate to vote a substantial amount for the payment of Caesar's troops in Gaul. In 54 he unsuccessfully defended the extortionate provincial administration of Aulus Gabinius, a friend of the Triumvirs. In 55 he canceled all the favor he had gained with Caesar by an abusive attack upon another provincial governor, Calpurnius Piso. He remembered too vividly that Piso had voted for his banishment; he forgot that Piso's daughter was Caesar's wife.
Upon Cato's return (57) from lus brilliant reorganization of Cyprian affairs, the conservatives re-formed their lines. Clodius, now the enemy of Pompey, accepted the invitation of the aristocracy to lend it the assistance of his popularity and his thugs. Literature took on an anti-Caesarian tint; the epigrams of Calvus and Catullus flew like poisoned darts into the camp of the Triumvirs. As Caesar moved farther and farther into Gaul, and news came of the many dangers that he faced, hope sprung anew in noble breasts; after all, said Cicero, there are many ways in which a man may die. If we n:iay believe Caesar, several conservatives opened negotiations with Ario vistus, the German leader, for the assassination of Caesar.13 Domitius, run ning for the consulate, announced that if elected he would at once move for Caesar's recall-which meant Caesar's indictment and trial. Veering with the wind, Cicero proposed that on 1\1ay 25, 56, the Senate should consider the abrogation of Caesar's land laws.
THE CONQUEST OF GAUL
In the spring of 58 Caesar took up his duties as governor of Cisalpine and Narbonese Gaul-i.e., northern Italy and southern France. In 71 Ariovistus had led 15,000 Germans into Gaul at the request of one Gallic tribe seeking assistance against another. He had provided the desired aid and then had remained to establish his rule over all the tribes of northeastern Gaul. One of these, the Aedui, appealed to Rome for help against the Germans (61); the Senate authorized the Roman governor of Narbonese Gaul to comply, but almost at the same time it listed Ariovistus among rulers friendly to Rome. Meanwhile 120,000 Germans crossed the Rhine, settled in Flanders, and so strengthened Ariovistus that he treated the native population as sub-
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR	175
ject peoples and dreamed of conquering all Gaul.14 At the same time the Helvetii, centering about Geneva, began migrating westward, 368,ooo strong, and Caesar was warned that they planned to cross his province of Narbonese Gaul on their way to southwestern France. "From the sources of the Rhine to the Atlantic·ocean," says Mommsen, "the German tribes were in motion; the whole line of the Rhine was threatened by them; it was a movement like that when the Alemanni and the Franks threw themselves upon the falling empire of the Caesars ...  five hundred years afterward."15 While Rome plotted against him, Caesar plotted to save Rome.
At his own expense, and without the authority he should have sought from the Senate, he raised and equipped four extra legions besides the four already provided him. He sent a peremptory invitation to Ariovistus to come and discuss the situation; as he had expected, Ariovistus refused. Depu tations came now to Caesar from many Gallic tribes, asking for his pro tection. Caesar declared war against both Ariovistus and the Helvetii, marched northward, and met the Helvetian avalanche in a bloody battle at Bibracte, capital of the Aedui, near the modern Autun. Caesar's legions won, but by a narrow margin; in these matters we must for the most part follow his own account. The Helvetii offered to return to their Swiss homeland; Caesar agreed to give them safe passage, but on condition that their territory should accept the rule of Rome. All Gaul now sent him thanks for its deliv erance, and begged his aid in expelling Ariovistus. He met the Germans near Ostheim,* and slew or captured (he tells us) nearly all of them (58). Ario vistus escaped, but died soon afterward.
Caesar took it for granted that his liberation of Gaul was also a conquest of t: he began at once to reorganize it under Roman authority, with the excuse that in no other way could it be protected against Germany. Some Gauls, unconvinced, rebelled, and invoked the aid of the Belgae, a powerful tribe of Germans and Celts inhabiting north Gaul between the Seine and the Rhine. Caesar defeated their army on the banks of the Aisne; then, with a celerity of movement that never allowed his foes to unite, he moved in succession against the Suessiones, Ambiani, Nervii, and Aduatici, conquered them, despoiled them, and sold the captives to the slave merchants of Italy. Somewhat prematurely he announced the conquest of Gaul; the Senate proclaimed it a Roman province (56), and the common people of Rome, as imperialistic as any general, shouted the praises of their distant champion. Caesar recrossed the Alps into Cisalpine Gaul, busied himself with its internal administration, replenished his legions, and invited Pompey and Crassus to meet him at Luca to plan a united defense against the conservative reaction.
Ten miles west of the Rhine, 16o miles south of Cologne.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
To forestall Domitius they agreed that Pompey and Crassus should run against him for the consulate for 55 B.c.; that Pompey should be made gov ernor of Spain, and Crassus of Syria, for five years (54-50); that Caesar should be continued for another five years (53-49) as governor of Gaul; and that at the end of this term he should be allowed to seek a second con sulate. He furnished his colleagues and friends, from the booty of Gaul, with funds to finance their campaigns; he sent great sums to Rome to provide work for the unemployed, commissions for his supporters, and prestig for himself, by an extensive program of public buildings; and he so oiled the palms of the senators who came to sample his loot that the movement to repeal his laws collapsed. Pompey and Crassus were elected consuls after the usual bribery, and Caesar returned to the task of persuading the Gauls that peace is sweeter than freedom.
Trouble was brewing on the Rhine below Cologne. Two German tribes had crossed into Belgic Gaul as far as Liege, and the nationalist party in Gaul was seeking their help against the Romans. Caesar met the invaders near Xanten (55), drove them back to the Rhine, and slew such of them women and children as well as men-as were not drowned in the river. His engineers then built in ten days a bridge over the great stream, there 1400 feet wide; Caesar's legions crossed, and fought long enough on German soil to establish the Rhine as a secure frontier. After two weeks he retraced his steps into Gaul.
We do not know why he now invaded Britain. Possibly he was lured by rumors that gold or pearls abounded there; or he wished to capture the tin and iron deposits of Britain for Roman exportation; or he resented the aid that Britons had sent to the Gauls, and thought that Roman power in Gaul must be made secure in every direction. He led a small force across the Channel at its narrowest point, defeated the unprepared Britons, took a few notes, and returned (55). A year later he crossed again, overcame the British under Cassivelaunus, reached the Thames, exacted promise of tribute, and sailed back to Gaul.
Perhaps he had heard that revolt was once more agitating the Gallic
tribes. He suppressed the Eburones and marched again into Germany (53). Returning, he left his main army in northern Gaul, while with his remaining
troops he went to winter in north Italy, hoping to devote a few months to mending his fences in Rome. But early in 52 word came to him that Ver cingetorix, the ablest of the Gallic chieftains, had united nearly all the tribes in a war for independence. Caesar's situation was precarious in the extreme. Most of his legions were in the north, and the country between them and himself was in rebel hands. He led a small detachment over the snow-covered Cevennes against Auvergne; when Vercingetorix brought up his forces to
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR	177
defend it, Caesar left Decimus Brutus in command and, with a few horse men, rode in disguise across all Gaul from south•to north, rejoined his main army, and at once led them to the attack. He besieged, captured, and sacked Avaricum (Bourges) and Cenabum (Orleans), massacred their populations, and replenished his depleted supplies with their treasuries. He moved on to assail Gergovia; there, however, the Gauls resisted so resolutely that he was compelled to withdraw. The Aedui, whom he had rescued from the Germans, and who heretofore had remained his allies, now deserted him, captured his base and stores at Soissons, and prepared to drive him back into Narborft!se Gaul.
It was the lowest ebb of Caesar's fortunes, and for a time he considered himself lost. He staked everything upon a siege of Alesia (Alise Ste.-Reine), where Vercingetorix had gathered 30,000 troops. Caesar had hardly dis tributed a like number of soldiers around the city when word came that 250,000 Gauls were marching down upon him from the north. He ordered his men to raise two concentric walls of earth around the city, one before them, the other behind them. Against these walls and the desperate Romans the armies of Vercingetorix and his allies threw themselves in repeated vain attacks. After a week the army of relief broke up in disorder for lack of discipline and supplies, and melted into ineffectual bands at the very moment when the Romans had reached the end of their stores. Soon thereafter the starving city sent Vercingetorix at his own suggestion as a prisoner to Caesar, and then surrendered to the Roman's mercy (52). The town was spared, but all its soldiers were given to the legionaries as slaves. V ercinge torix was led in chains to Rome; there he later graced Caesar's triumph and paid with his life for his devotion to liberty.
The siege of Alesia decided the fate of Gaul and the character of French civilization. It added to the Roman Empire a country twice the size of Italy and opened the purses and markets of 5,000,000 people to Roman trade. It saved Italy and the Mediterranean world for four centuries from barbarian invasion; and it lifted Caesar from the verge of ruin to a new height of repu tation, wealth, and power. After another year of sporadic revolts, which the angry general put down with uncharacteristic severity, all Gaul accepted subjection to Rome. Once his victory was certain Caesar became again the generous conqueror; he treated the tribes with such lenience that in all the ensuing Civil vVar, when he and Rome would have been helpless to retaliate, they made no move to throw off the yoke. For three hundred years Gaul remained a Roman province, prospered under the Roman peace, learned and transformed the Latin language, and became the channel through which the culture of classic antiquity passed into northern Europe. Doubtless neither Caesar nor his contemporaries foresaw the immense consequences
CAESAR  AND CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
of his bloody triumph. He thought he had saved Italy, won a province, and forged an army; he did not suspect that he was the creator of French civili zation.
Rome, which had known Caesar only as a spendthrift, rake, politician, and reformer, was amazed to :find him also a tireless administrator and a resourceful general. At the same time it discovered in him a major historian. In the midst of his campaigns, disturbed by the attacks upon him in Rome, he had recorded and defended his conquest of Gaul in Commentaries whose military conciseness and artful simplicity raised them, despite a thousand milia passuum, from a partisan pamphlet to a high place in Latin literature. Even Cicero, shifting again, sang a paean in his praise, and anticipated the verdict of history:
It is not the ramparts of the Alps, nor the foaming and flooding Rhine, but the arms and generalship of Caesar which I account our true shield and barrier against the invasion of the Gauls and the bar barous tribes of Germany. It is to him we owe it that, should the mountains be leveled with the plain and the rivers be dried up, we should still hold our Italy fortified not by nature's bulwarks but by the exploits and victories of Caesar.16
To which should be added the tribute of a great German:


CHAP. XI)	AUGUSTAN  STATESMANSHIP	223
eager to reform morals by law; and probably Livia lent them her influence. By his powers as censor and tribune Augustus promulgated-or passed through the Assembly-a series of laws of now uncertain date and sequence, aimed at restoring morals, marriage, fidelity, parentage, and a simpler life. They forbade adolescents to attend public entertainments except in the cor.-.pany of an '.ldult relative; excluded women from athletic exhibitions, and restricted them to the upper seats at gladiatorial games; limited expenditure on homes, servants, banquets, weddings, jewels, and dress. The most im portant of these "Julian laws" * was the lex Julia de pudicitia et de coercendis adulteriis (18 B.c.)-"The Julian law of chastity and repressing adultery." Here for the first time in Roman history marriage was brought under the protection of the sta e, instead of being left to the patria potestas. The father retained the right to kill an adulterous daughter and her accomplice as soon as he discovered them; the husband was allowed to kill his wife's paramour if caught in the husband's house, but he might kill his wife only if he found
her sinning in his own home. Within sixty days of detecting a wife's adultery, the husband was required to bring her before the court; if he failed to do this, the woman's father was required to indict her; if he too failed, any citizen might accuse her. The adulterous woman was to be banished for life, was to lose a third of her fortune and half her dowry, and must not marry again. Like penalties ,vere decreed for a husband conniving at his wife's adultery. A wife, however, could not accuse her husband of adultery, and he might with legal impunity have relations with registered prostitutes. The law applied only to Roman citizens.
Probably at the same time Augustus passed another law, usually named
lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus, from its chapter on marriage in the "orders"
-i.e., the two upper classes. Its purpose was threefold: to encourage and yet restrict marriage, to retard the dilution of Roman with alien blood, and to restore the old conception of marriage as a union for parentage. Marriage was to be obligatory upon all marriageable males under sixty and women under fifty. Bequests conditional on the legatee remaining unmarried were made void. Penalties were imposed upon celibates: they could not inherit, except from ·ehtives, unless they were married within a hundred days after the testator's death; and they could not attend public festivals or games. Widows and divorcees might inherit only if remarried within six months after the death or divorce of the husband. Spinsters and childless wives could not inherit after fifty, nor before if they possessed 50,000 sesterces ($7500). Men of the Senatorial class could not marry a freedwoman, an actress, or a prostitute; and no actor or freedman could marry a senator's daughter.
So named from the clan to which Augustus beionged by adoption.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XI
Women owning above 20,000 sesterces were to pay a one per cent annual tax till married; after marriage this tax decreased with each child until the third, with whose coming it ceased. Of the two consuls the one with more children was to have precedence over the other. In appointments to office the father of the largest family was as far as feasible to be preferred to his rivals. The mother of three children acquired the ius triunz liberorum-the right to wear a special garment, and freedom from the power of her husband. These laws offended every class, even the puritans-who complained that the "right of three children" dangerously emancipated the mother from male authority. Others excused their celibacy on the score that the "modern woman" was too independent, imperious, capricious, and extravagant. The exclusioa of bachelors from public shows was considered too severe and impossible to enforce; Augustus had the clause rescinded in I 2 B.C. In A.D. 9 the lex Papia Poppaea further softened the Julian laws by easing the con ditions under which celibates might inherit, doubling the period in which widows and divorcees must remarry to inherit, and increasing the amount that childless heirs could receive. Mothers of three children were freed from those limits which the lex V ocoma (169 B.c.) had placed upon bequests to women. The age at which a citizen might stand for the various offices was lowered in proportion to the size of his family. After the law was passed men noted that the consuls who had framed it and given it their names were childless celibates. Gossip added that the reform laws had been suggested to Augustus, who had only one child, by Maecenas, who had none; and that while the laws were being enacted Maecenas was living in sybaritic luxury,
and Augustus was seducing Maecenas' wife.19
It is difficult to estimate the effectiveness of this, the most important social legislation in antiquity. The laws were loosely drawn, and recalcitrants found many loopholes. Some men married to obey the law and divorced their wives soon afterwards; others adopted children to secure offices or legacies and then "emancipated"-i.e., dismissed-them.:w Tacitus, a century later, pronounced the laws a failure; "marriages and the rearing of chil dren did not become frequent, so powerful are the attractions of a childless state." 21 Immorality continued, but was more polite than before; in Ovid we see it becoming a :fine art, the subject of careful instructions from experts to apprentices. Augustus himself doubted the effic:icy of his laws, and agreed
with Horace that laws are vain when hearts are unchanged.22 He strurraled
heroically to reach people' sh earts: r•n his hex at the games he dispbye:d:,::,the
numerous children of the exemplary Gerrnanicus; gave a thousand sesterces to parents of large families; 23 raised a monument to a slave girl who (doubt less without patriotic premeditation) had borne quintuplets; 24 and rejoiced when a peasant marched into Rome with eight children, thirty-six grand-
FIG. 8-The Young Augustus
Vatican, Rome
FIG. 9-Augttsttts l111perntor, from tbe Villa of Livia at Prima Porta
Vatican, Rome
CHAP. XI)	AUGUSTAN  STATESMANSHIP	225
children, and nineteen great-grandchildren in his train.2" Dio Cassius pic tures him making public addresses denouncing "race suicide." 26 He enjoyed, perhaps inspired, the moral preface of Livy's history. Under his influence the literature of the age became didactic and practical. Through Maecenas or in person he persuaded Virgil and Horace to lend their muses to the propaganda of moral and religious reform; Virgil tried to sing the Romans back to the farm in the Georgics, and to the old gods in the Aeneid; and Horace, after a large sampling of the world's pleasures, tuned his lyre to stoic themes. In 17 n.c. Augustus presented the ludi saeculares *-three days of ceremonies, contests, and spectacles, celebrating the return of Saturn's Golden Age; and Horace was commissioned to write the carmen saeculare to be chanted in procession by twenty-seven boys and as many girls. Even art was used to point a moral: the lovely Ara Pacis showed in relief the life and government of Rome; magnificent public buildings rose to represent the strength and glory of the Empire; scores of temples were erected to stir again a faith thaehad almost died.
In the end Augustus, skeptic and realist, became convinced that moral
reform awaited a religious renaissance. The agnostic generation of Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar had run its course, and its children had discovered that the fear of the gods is the youth of ,visdom. Even the cynical Ovid would soon write, Voltaireanly: expedit esse deos, et ·ut expedit esse putemus: "it is convenient that there should be gods, and that we should think they exist." 27 Conservative minds traced the Civil War, and the sufferings it had brought, to neglect of religion and the consequent anger of Heaven. Every where in Italy a chastened people was ready to turn back to its ancient altars and thank the deities who, it felt, had spared it for this happy restoration.
\Vhen, in I 2 B.c., Augustus, having waited patiently for the tepid Lepidus to die, succeeded him as pontif ex 1naxi11ms, "such a multitude from all Italy assembled for my election," the Emperor tells us, "as is never recorded to have been in Rome before." 28 He both led and followed the revival of religion, hoping that his political and moral reconstruction would win readier acceptance if he coulJ entwine it with the gods. He raised the four priestly colleges to unprecedented dignity and wealth, chose himself to each of them, took upon himself the appointment of new members, attended their meetings faithfully, and took part in their solemn pageantry. He banned Egyptian and Asiatic cults from Rome, but he made an exception in favor of the Jews, and permitted religious freedom in the provinces. He lavished gifts upon the temples and renewed old religious ceremonies, pro cessions, and festivals. The ludi saeculares were not secular; every day of
Literally, century games, because given only at long intervals.
226	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XI


them was marked with religious ritual and song; their chief significance was the return of a happy friendship with the gods. Nourished with such sovereign aid, the ancient cult took on fresh life, and touched again the dramatic impulses and supernatural hopes of the people. Amid the chaos of competing faiths that flowed in upcn Rome after Augustus, it held its own for three centuries more; and when it died it was at once reborn, under new symbols and new n mes.
Augustus himself became one of the chief competitors of his gods. His great-uncle had set the example: two years after being murdered, Caesar had been recognized by the Senate as a deity, and his worship spread throughout the Empire. As early as 36 B.c. some Italian cities had given Octavian a place in their pantheon; by 27 B.c. his name was added to those of the gods in official hymns at Rome; his birthday became a holy day as well as a holiday; and after his death the Senate decreed that his genius, or soul, was thereafter to be worshiped as cne of the official divinities. All this seemed quite natural to antiquity; it had never recognized an impassable difference between gods and men; the gods had often taken human form, and the creative genius of a Heracles, a Lycurgus, an Alexander, a Caesar, or an Augustus seemed, especially to the religious East, miraculous and divine. The Egypti:1ns had thought of the Pharaohs, of the Ptolemies, even of Antony, as deities; they could hardly think less of Augustus. The ancients were not in these cases such simpletons as their modem counterparts would like to believe. They knew well enough that Augustus was human; in deify ing his genius, er that of others, they used deus or theos as equivalent to our "canonized saint"; indeed, canonization is a descendant of Roman deifica tion; and to pray to such a deified human being seemed no more absurd then than prayer to a saint seems now.
In Italian homes ti1e worship of the Emperor's genius became associated
with the adoration given to the Lares of the household and the genius of the paterfamilias; there was nothing difficult in this for a people which through centuries had deified their dead parents, built altars to them, and given the name of temples to the ancestral tombs. vVhen Augustus visited Greek Asia in 2 1 n.c. he found that his cult had made rapid he:idway there. Dedications and orations hailed him as "S.1vior," "Bringer of Glad Tidings," "God the Sen of God"; some men argued that in him the long-awaited Messiah had come, bringing peace and happiness to mankind.29 The great provincial councils made his worship the center of their ceremonies; a new priesthood, the Augustales, was appointed by provinces and municipalities for the service of the new divinity. Augustus frowned upon all this, but finally accepted it as a spiritual enhancement of the Principate, a valuable
CHAP. XI)	AUGUSTAN  STATESMANSHIP
cementing of church and state, a uniting common worship amid diverse and dividing creeds. The moneylender's grandson consented to become a god.
AUGUSTUS HIMSELF
\Vhat sort of man was this who was heir to Caesar at eighteen, master of the world at thirty-one, ruler of Rome for half a century, and architect of the greatest empire in ancient history? He was at once dull and fascinating; no one more prosaic, yet half the world adored him; a physical weakling not p'.lrticularly brave, but able to overcome all enemies, regulate kingdoms, and fashion a government that would give the vast realm an unexampled prosperity for two hundred years.
Sculptors spent much marble and bronze in making images of him: some showing him in the timid pride of a refined and serious youth, some in the somber pose of a priest, some half covered with the insignia of power, some in military garb-the philosopher unwillingly and uneasily playing the general. These effi3ies do not reveal, though sometimes they suggest, the ailments that made his war against chaos depend precariously at every step upon his fight for health. He was unprepossessing. He had sandy hair, a strangely tri:mgular head, merging eyebrows, clear and penetrating eyes; yet his expression was so calm and mild, says Suetonius, that a Gaul who came to kill him changed his mind. His skin was sensitive and intermittently itched with a kind of ringworm; rheumatism weakened his left leg and made him limp a bit; a stiffness akin to arthritis occasionally incapacitated his right hand. He was one of many Romans attacked in 23 B.c. by a plague resem bling typhus; he suffered from stones in the bladder, and found it hard to sleep; he was troubled each spring by "an enlargement of the diaphragm; and when the wind was in the south he had catarrh." He bore cold so poorly that in winter he wore "a woolen chest protector, wraps for his thighs and shins, an undershirt, four tunics (blouses), and a heavy toga." He dared not expose his head to the sun. Horseback riding tired him, and he was some times carried in a litter to the battlefield.30 At thirty-five, having lived through one of the most intense dramas in history, he was already old nervous, sickly, easily tired; no one dreamed that he would live another forty years. He tried a variety of doctors, and richly rewarded one, Antonius Musa, for curing an uncertain illness (abscess of the liver?) with cold fomentations and baths; in Musa's honor he exempted all Roman physicians from taxation.31 But for the most part he doctored himself. He used hct salt water and sulphur baths for his rheumatism; he ate lightly and only the plainest food-coarse bread, cheese, fish, and fruit; he was so careful of his
2.28	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. ::'G
diet that "sometimes he ate alone either before a dinner party or after it, taking nothing during its course." 32 In him, as in some medieval saints, the soul bore its body like a cross.
His essence was nervous vitality, inflexible resolution, a penetrating, calculating, resourceful mind. He accepted an unheard-of number of offices, and took upon himself responsibility only less than Caesar's. He fulfilled the duties of. these .positions conscientiously, presided regularly over the Senate, attended innumerable conferences, judged hundreds of trials, suf fered ceremonies and banquets, planned distant campaigns, governed legions and provinces, visited nearly every one of them, and attended to infinite administrative detail. He m1de hundreds of speeches, and prepared them with proud attention to clarity, simplicity, and style; he read them instead of speaking extemporaneously, lest he should utter regrettable words. Sue tonius would have us believe that for the same reason he wrote out in advance, and read, important conversations with individuals, even with his wife.33
Like most skeptics of his time, he retained superstitions long after losing
his faith. He carried a sealskin about him to protect against lightning; he respected omens and auspices and sometimes obeyed warnings derived from dreams; he refused to begin a journey on what he reckoned to be unlucky days.34 At the same time he was remarkable for the objectivity of his judgment and the practicality of his thought. He advised young men to enter soon upon an active career, so that the ideas they had learned from books might be tempered by the experience and necessities of life.35 He kept to the end his bourgeois good sense, conservatism, parsimony, and caution. Festina lente-"make haste slowly"-was his favorite saw. Far more than most men of such power, he could take advice and bear reproof humbly.
. Athenodorus, a philosopher who was returning to Athens after living )Vith him for years, gave him some parting counsel: "\Vhenever you get angry do not say or do anything before repeating to yourself the twenty-four letters of the alphabet." Augustus was so grateful for the caution that he begged Athenodorus to stay another year, saying, "No risk attends the reward that silence brings." 36
Even tnore surprising than Caesar's development from a roistering politi cian into a great general and statesman was the transformation of the merci less and self-centered Octavian into the modest and magnanimous Augustus. He grew. The man who had allowed Antony to hang Cicero's head in the Forum, who had moved without scruple from one faction to another, who had run the gamut of sexual indulgence, who had pursued Antony and Oeopatra to the death unmoved by friendship or chivalry-this ten cious and unlovable youth, instead of being poisoned by power, became in his
CHAP. XI)	AUGUST AN STATESMANSHIP	229
last forty years a model of justice, moderation, fidelity, magnanimity, and toleration. He laughed at the lampoons that wits and poets wrote about him. He advised Tiberius to be content with preventing or prosecuting hostile actions and not seek to suppress hostile words. He did not insist upon others living as simply as himself; when he invited guests to dinner he would retire early to leave their appetite and merriment unrestrained. He had no pretentiousness; he buttonholed voters to ask their suffrages; he substituted for his lawyer friends in court; he left or entered Rome secretly, , abhorring pomp; in the reliefs of the Ara Pacis he is not set apart from the other citizens by any mark of distinction. His morning receptions were open to aII citizens, and aII were affably received. \Vhen one man hesitated to present a petition he jokingly chided him for offering the document "as if he were giving a penny to an elephant." 37
In his senile years, when disappointments had embittered him, and he had grown accustomed to omnipotence, even to being a god, he lapsed into intolerance, prosecuted hostile writers, suppressed histories of too critical a stamp, and gave no ear to Ovid's penitent verse. Once, it is said, he had the legs of his secretary Thallus broken for taking 500 denarii to reveal the contents of an official letter; and he forced one of his freedmen to kill him self when found guilty of adultery with a Roman matron. AII in aII, it is hard to love him. \Ve must picmre the frailty of his body and the sorrows of his old age before our beans can go out to him as to the murdered Caesar or the beaten Antony.
VI,  THE LAST DAYS OF A GOD
His failures and his tragedies were almost all ,vithin his home. By his three wives-Claudia, Scribonia, Livia-he had but one child: Scribonia unwit tingly avenged her divorce by giving him Julia. He had hoped that Livia would bear him a son whom he might train and educate for government; but though she had rewarded her first husband with two splendid children
-;-Tiberius and Drusus-her marriage with Augustus proved disappointingly sterile. Otherwise their union was a happy one. She was a woman of stately beauty, firm character, and fine understanding; Augustus rehearsed his most vital measures with her and valued her advice as highly as that of his maturest friends. Asked how she had acquired such influence over him, she replied, "by being scrupulously chaste . . . never meddling with his affairs, and pretending neither to hear of nor to notice the favorites with whom he had amours." 38 She was a model of the old virtues, and perhaps expounded them too persistently. In her leisure she devoted herself to
230	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XI
charity, helping parents of large f milies, providing dowries for poor brides, and maintaining many orphans at her own expense. Her palace itself was almost an orphanage; for there, and in the home of his sister Octavia, Au gustus supervised the educ2tion of his grandsons, nephews, nieces, and even the six surviving children of Antony. He sent the boys off early to war, saw to it that the girls should learn to spin and weave, and "forbade them to do or say anything except without concealment, and such as might be recorded in the household diary." 39
Augustus learned to love Livia's son Drusus, adopted and reared him, and would gladly have left him his wealth and power; the youth's early death was one of the Emperor's first bereavements. Tiberius he respected but could not love, for his future successor was a positive and imperious char acter, inclined to sullenness and secrecy. But the comeliness and vivacity of his daughter Julia must have given Augustus many happy moments in her childhood. When she had reached the age of burteen he persuaded Octavia to allow the divorce of her son Marcellus, and induced the youth to marry Julia. Two years later Marcellus died; and Julia, after brief mourning, set out to enjoy a freedom she had long coveted. But soon the matchmaking Emperor, craving a grandson as heir, coaxed the reluctant Agrippa to divorce his wife and marry the merry widow (21 B.c.). Julia was eighteen, Agrippa forty-two; but he was a good and great man and agreeably rich. She made his town house a salon of pleasure and wit, and became the soul of the younger and gayer set in the capital as against the puritans who took their lead from Livia. Rumor accused Julia of deceiving her new husband, and ascribed to her an incredible reply to the incredible question why, despite her adulteries, all the five children she gave Agrippa resembled him: Numquam nisi nave plena tollo vectorem.40 When Agrippa died (12 B.c.) Augustus turned his hopes to Julia's oldest sons, Gaius and Lucius, over whelmed them with affection and education, and had them promoted to office far sooner than was legally warranted by their years.


That there is a bridge connecting the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modem history, that western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe classic . . . all this is the work of Caesar; and while the creation of his great predecessor in the East has been almost wholly reduced to ruin by the tempests of the Middle Ages, the structure of Caesar has outlasted those thousands of years which have changed religions and states.17
THE	DEGRADATION  OF  DEMOCRACY
During the second quinquennium of Caesar in Gaul, Roman politics had become an unparalleled chaos of corruption and violence. Pompey and Crassus, as consuls, pursued their policies by the bribery of votes, the intimi- 3ation of juries, and occasional murder.18 \Vhen their year of office ended, Crassus recruited and conscripted a large army and sailed for Syria. He crossed the Eup tes and_ met the _Parthians at Carrhae. Their superior cavalry defeated him, and his son fell m the battle. Crassus was withdrawing his forces in good order when the Parthian general invited him to a confer ence. He went and was treacherously slain. His head was sent to play the part of Pentheus in a performance of Euripides' Baccbae at the Parthian
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR	179
court; and his leaderless anny, long wearied of the campaign, disappeared in a disorderly rout (53).
.Meanwhile Pompey too had levied an army, presumably to complete the conquest of Spain. Had Caesar's plans matured, Pompey would have brought Farther Spain, and Crassus Armenia and Parthia, within the orbit of Roman power at the same time that Caesar was extending the frontier to the Thames and the Rhine. Instead of leading his legions to Spain, Pompey kept them in Italy, except for one which he lent to Caesar in the crisis of the Gallic revolt. In 54 the strongest tie that held him to Caesar was cut by the death of his wife Julia in childbirth. Caesar offered him his grandniece Octavia, now Caesar's nearest female relative, and asked for the ha!]-d of Pompey's daughter; but Pompey refused both proposals. The debacle of Crassus and his army in the following year removed another balancing force, for a vic torious Crassus would have opposed the dictatorship of either Caesar or Pompey. Henceforth Pompey openly allied himself with the conservatives. His plan to secure supreme power through legal forms had now only one obstacle-the ambition and army of Caesar. Knowing that Caesar's com mand would expire in 49, Pompey secured decrees continuing his own command to the end of 46, and requiring all Italians capable of bearing arms to take an oath of military fealty to him personally; in this way, he trusted, time itself would make him master of Rome.19
"\Vhile the potential dictators maneuvered for position, the capital filled with the odor of a dying democracy. Verdicts, offices, provinces, and client kings were sold to the highest bidders. In the year 53 the first voting division in the Assembly was paid ro,000,000 sesterces for its vote.20 \Vhen money failed, murder was available; 21 or a man's past was raked over, and black mail brought him to terms. Crime flourished in the city, brigandage in the country; no police force existed to control it. Rich men hired bands of gladiators to protect them, or to suppon them in the contitia. The lowest elements in Italy were attracted to Rome by the smell of money or the gift of corn, and made the meetings of the Assembly a desecration. Any man who would vote as paid was admitted to the rolls, whether citizen or not; sometimes only a minority of those who cast ballots were entitled to vote. The privilege of addressing the Assembly had on several occasions to be won by storming the rostrum and holding it by main force. Legislation came to be determined by the fluctuating superiority of rival gangs; those who voted the wrong way were, now and then, beaten to within an inch of their lives, after which their houses were set afire. Following one such meeting Cicero wrote: "The Tiber W'.lS full of the corpses of citizens, the public sewers were stuffed with them, and slaves had to mop up with sponges the blood that streamed from the Forum." 22
180	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.IX
Clodius and Milo were Rome's most distinguished experts in this brand of parliament. They organized rival bands of ruffians for political purposes, and hardly a day passed without some test 0£ their strength. One day Clodius assaulted Cicero in the street; another day his warriors burned do,vn Milo's house; at last Clodius himself was caught by Milo's gang and killed
(52). The proletariat, not privy to all his plots, honored Clodius as a martyr, gave him a mighty funeral, carried the body to the senate house, and burned the building over him as his funeral pyre. Pompey brought in his soldiers and dispersed the mob. As reward he asked from the Senate, and received, appointment as "consul without colleague," a phrase that Cato recommended as more pleasant than "dictator." Pompey then put through the Assembly cowed by his troops-several measures aimed at political corruption, and another repealing the right (which his bill of 55 had granted to Caesar) to stand for the consulate while absent from Rome. He impartially supervised, with military force, the operation of the courts; Milo was tried for the murder of Clodius, was condemned despite Cicero's defense,* and fled to Marseilles. Cicero went off to govern Cilicia (51), and acquitted himself there with a degree of competence and integrity which surprised and offended his friends. All the elements of wealth and order in the capital resigned themselves to the dictatorship of Pompey, while the poorer classes hopefully awaited the coming of Caesar.
CIVIL WAR
A century of revolution had broken down a selfish and narrow aristoc racy, but had put no other government in its place. Unemployment, bribery, bread and circuses had corrupted the Assembly into an ill-informed and passion-ridden mob obviously incapable of ruling itself, much less an empire. Democracy had fallen by Plato's formula: liberty had become license, and chaos begged an end to liberty.24 Caesar agreed with Pompey that the Republic was dead; it was now, he said, "a mere name, without body or form"; 25 dictatorship was unavoidable. But he had hoped to establish a leadership that would be progressive, that would not freeze the status quo, but would lessen the abuses, inequities, and destitution which had degraded democracy. He was now fifty-four, and surely weakened by his long campaigns in Gaul; he did not relish a war against his fellow citizens and
The speech as it has come down to us was much revised. It differed so much from the actual address-which had been confused by hostile disturbances-that when Milo read it he exclaimed: "O Cicero! If you had only spoken as you have written I should not now be eating the very excellent fish of Marseilles." 2a
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR	181
his former friends. But he saw the snares that had been prepared for him, and resented them as an ill-reward for one who had saved Italy. His term as governor of Gaul would end on March 1, 49; he could not run for the consulship until the fall of that year; in the interval he would lose the immunity of an officeholder, and could not enter Rome without subjecting himself to those proscriptions which were among the favorite weapons of party warfare in Rome. Already Marcus Marcellus had proposed to the Senate that Caesar should be deposed from his governorship before its expira tion-which meant self-exile or trial. The tribunes of the plebs had saved him by their veto, but the Senate clearly favored the motion. Cato frankly expressed the hope that Caesar would be accused, tried, and banished from Italy.
Caesar made every effort at conciliation. \Vhen, at Pompey's suggestion, the Senate asked both generals to release to it a legion for use against Parthia, Caesar at once complied, though his force was small; and when Pompey asked Caesar for the return of the legion sent him a year before, Caesar dis patched it to him without delay. His friends inforn1ed him, however, that instead of being sent to Parthia these legions were being kept at Capua. Through his supporters in the Senate Caesar requested a renewal of the Assembly's earlier decree permitting him to stand for the consulship in absence. The Senate refused to submit the motion and demanded that Caesar disiniss his troops. Caesar felt that his legions were his only protection; per haps he had nourished their personal loyalty with a view to just such a crisis as this. Nevertheless, he proposed to the Senate that both he and Pompey should lay down their commissions-an offer which seemed to the people of Rome so reasonable that they garlanded his messenger with flowers. The Senate favored the plan, 370 to 22, but Pompey balked at it. In the last days of the year 50 the Senate declared Caesar a public enemy unless he should abandon his command by July 1. On the first day of 49 Curio read to the Senate a letter in which Caesar agreed to disband all but two of his ten legions if he might retain the governorship till 48; but he spoiled the offer by adding that he would look upon its rejection as a declaration of war. Cicero spoke for the proposal, and Pompey agreed to it; but the consul Lentulus intervened and drove Caesar's lieutenants, Curio and Antony, from the senate house.26 After a long debate the reluctant Senate, persuaded by Lentulus, Cato, and Marcellus, gave Pompey orders and powers to "see that no harm should come to the state"-the Roman phrase for dictatorship and martial law.
Caesar hesitated more than was his wont. Legally the Senate was right he had no authority to name the conditions under which he would resign his command. He knew that civil war might bring Gaul to revolt and Italy
182	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	•	(CHAP. IX
to ruin. But to yield was to surrender the Empire to incompetence and reaction. Amid his deliberations he learned that one of his nearest friends and ablest lieutenants, Titus Labienus, had gone over to Pompey. He sum moned the soldiers of his favorite Thirteenth Legion and laid the situation before them. His first word won them: Conmzilitones!-"fellow soldiers." They who had seen him share their hardships and perils, who had had to complain that he risked himself too readily, recognized his right to use this word; he had always addressed them so rather than with the curt .Milites! of less gracious commanders. Most of his men came from Cisalpine Gaul, to which he had extended Roman citizenship; they knew that the Senate had refused to recognize this grant and that one senator had flogged a Cisal pine Gaul just to show his contempt for Caesar's enfranchisement; it was illegal to flog a Roman citizen. They had learned to respect Caesar-even, in their rough mute way, to love him-during their many campaigns. He had been severe with cowardice and indiscipline, but he had been lenient with their human faults, had winked at their sexual escapades, had spared them unnecessary dangers, had saved them by skillful generalship, had doubled their pay, and had spread his spoils among them handsomely. He told them of his proposals to the Senate and how these had been received; he reminded them that an idle and corrupt aristocracy was unfit to give Rome order, justice, and prosperity. Would they follow him? Not one refused. When he told them that he had no money with which to pay them they emptied their savings into his treasury.
On January 10, 49, he led one legion across the Rubicon, a small stream, near Ariminum, that marked the southern boundary of Cisalpine Gaul. Iacta est alea, he is reported to have said-"the die is cast." 27 It seemed an act of folly, for the remaining nine legions of his army were still distant in Gaul and could not reach him for weeks to come; while Pompey had ten
legions, or 60,000 troops, authority to levy as many more as he pleased, and funds to arm and feed them. Caesar's Twelfth Legion joined him at Picenum, the Eighth at Corfinium; he formed three legions more from prisoners, vol unteers, and levies upon the population. He had little difficulty in getting recruits; Italy had not forgotten the Social War (88), and saw in Caesar a champion of Italian rights; one by one its cities opened their gates to him, some turned out en masse to welcome him; 28 "the towns," wrote Cicero, "salute him as a god." 29 Corfinium resisted briefly, then surrendered; Caesar protected it from sack by his soldiers, freed all captured officers, and sent to Pompey's camp the money and baggage that Labienus had left behind. Though almost penniless, he refrained from confiscating those estates of his opponents that fell into his hands-a characteristically wise measure, which won to neutrality most of the middle class. It would be his policy, he
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR
announced, to consider all neutrals his friends. At every new advance he tried again for reconciliation. He sent a message to Lentulus begging him to use his consular influence for peace. In a letter to Cicero he offered to
retire to private life and leave the field to Pompey, provided he should be allowed to live in security.3° Cicero labored to effect a compromise, but found his logic helpless before the rival dogmatisms of revolution.31
Though his forces still far oumumbered Caesar's, Pompey withdrew with them from the capital, and a disorderly stream of aristocrats followed him, leaving their wives and children to Caesar's mercy. Rejecting every over ture of peace, Pompey declared that he would consider as an enemy any senator who did not abandon Rome and join his camp. The majority of the Senate remained in Rome, and vacillating Cicero, despising Pompey's vacil lations, divided himself among his rural estates. Pompey marched to Brun disium and ferried his troops across the Adriatic. He knew that his undis ciplined army needed further training before it could stand up to Caesar's legions; meanwhile, he hoped, the Roman fleet under his control would starve Italy into destroying his rival.


,vithin a decade after his death his work was in ruins. Relaxed in the arms of victory, the patricians neglected the tasks of government to seek wealth in business and spend it in luxury. The struggle between the opti- 1;wtes and the populares continued \Vith a bitterness that passionately awaited another opportunity for violence. The optimates, or "best people," made nobilitas their creed; not in the sense of noblesse oblige, but on the theory that good government required the restriction of major magistracies to men whose ancestors had held high office. Anyone who ran for office without such forebears was scorned as novus homo-a "new man," or upstart; such were Marius and Cicero. The populares demanded "career open to talent," all power to the assemblies, and free land for veterans and the poor. Neither party believed in democracy; both aspired to dictatorship, and both prac ticed intimidation and corruption without conscience or concealment. The collegia that had once been mutual-benefit societies became agencies for the sale of great blocks of plebeian votes. The business of vote buying reached a scale where it required a high specialization of labor: there were divisores, who bought votes, interpretes, or go-betweens, and sequestres, who held the money until the votes had been delivered.2 Cicero describes candidates as going about purse in hand among the electors in the Field of Mars.3 Pompey
128
CHAP. vu)	THE  OLIGARCH IC  REACTION	129
had his mediocre friend Afranius made consul by inviting the le:.!ders of the tribes to his gardens and there paying them for the ballots of their groups.4 So much money was borrowed to finance candidacies that the campaigns raised the interest rate to eight per cent per month.5
The courts, now pre-empted by senators, rivaled the polls in corruption. Oaths had lost all value as testimony; perjury was as common as bribery. Marcus Messala, being indicted for buying his election to the consulate ( 5 3), was unanimously acquitted, though even his friends acknowledged his guilt.6 "Trials are now managed so venally," wrote Cicero to his son, "that no man will ever be condemned hereafter except for murder." 7 He should have said "no man of means"; for "without money and a good lawyer," said another advocate at this period, "a plain, simple defendant may be accused of any crime which he has not committed, and will certainly be convicted." 8 Lentulus Sura, having been acquitted by two votes, mourned the extra expense he had gone to in bribing one more judge than he had needed.9 lVhen Quintus Calidus, praetor, was convicted by a jury of senators, he calculated that "they could not honestly require less than 300,000 sesterces to condemn a praetor." 10
Protected by such courts, the Senatorial proconsuls, the tax gatherers, the moneylenders, and the business agents milked the provinces at a rate that would have angered their predecessors with envy. There were several hon orable and competent provincial governors, but what could be expected of the majority? They served without pay, usually for a year's term; in that brief time they had to accumulate enough to pay their debts, buy another office, and set themselves up for life in the style befitting a great Roman. The sole check upon their venality was the Senate; and the senators could be trusted as gentlemen not to raise a fuss, since nearly all of them had done, or hoped soon to do, the same. "'hen Caes:1r went to Fanher Spain as pro consul in 61 he owed $7,500,000; when he returned in 60 he cleared off these debts at one stroke. Cicero thought himself a painfully honest man; he made only $ 1 10,000 in his year as governor of Cilicia and filled his letters with wonder at his own moderation.
The generals who conquered the provinces were the first to profit from them. Lucullus, after his campaigns in the East, became a synonym for luxury. Pompey brought in from the same region $11,200,000 for the Treas ury and $21,000,000 for himself and his friends; Caesar took literally untold millions from Gaul. After the generals came the publicans, who collected from the people twice the amount which they remitted to Rome. ,vhen a province or city could not raise enough from its subjects to pay the de manded tribute or tax, Roman financiers or statesmen would lend them the necesssary funds at from twelve to forty-eight per cent interest, to be col-
130	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VII
lected, if need be, by the Roman army through siege, conquest, and pillage. The Senate had forbidden its members to take part in such loans, but pomp ous aristocrats like Pompey, and saints like Brutus, skirted the law by lend ing through intermediaries. In some years the province of Asia paid Romans twice as much in interest on loans as it paid to the publicans and the Treas ury.11 The paid and unpaid interest on money borrowed by the cities of Asia Minor to meet Sulla's exactions in 84 had swelled by 70 to six times the principal. To meet the charges on this debt communities sold their public buildings and statuary, and parents sold their children into slavery, for defaulting debtors could be stretched on the rack.12 If any wealth still remained, a flock of entrepreneurs came in from Italy, Syria, and Greece, with Senatorial contracts for "developing" the mineral, timber, or other resources of the province; trade followed the flag. Some bought slaves, some sold or bought goods, others purchased land and set up provincial latifundia larger than those of Italy. "No Gaul," said Cicero in 69, with his customary exaggeration, "carries through any business without the inter vention of a Roman citizen; not a penny changes hands there without passing through the ledgers of a Roman."
Antiquity had never known so rich, so powerful, and so corrupt a government.
THE MILLIONAIRES
The business classes reconciled themselves to the rule of the Senate because they were better prepared than the aristocracy to exploit the provinces. That "concord of the orders," or co-operation of the two upper classes, which Cicero was to preach as an ideal, was already a reality in his youth; they had agreed to unite and conquer. Businessmen and their aggressive agents crowded the basilicas and streets of Rome and swarmed into provincial markets and capitals. Bankers issued letters of exchange on their provincial affiliates,13 and lent money for everything, even political careers. Merchants and financiers swung their influence to the populares when the Senate proved selfish, and back to the optimates when democratic leaders tried to keep their pre-election promises to the proletariat.
Crassus, Atticus, and Lucullus typify the three phases of Roman wealth: acquisition, speculation, luxury. Marcus Licinius Crassus was of aristocratic lineage. His father, a famous orator, consul, and censor, had fought for Sulla and had killed himself rather than yield to i'.larius. Sulla rewarded the son by letting him buy at bargain prices the confiscated properties of proscribed men. As a youth Marcus had studied literature and philosophy and had assiduously practiced law; but now the smell of money intoxicated him. He
CHAP.VII)	THE   OLIGARCHIC  REACTION	13 I
organized a fire brigade-something new to Rome; it ran to fires, sold its services on the spot, or bout;ht endangered buildings at nominal sums and then put out the fire; in this way Crassus acquired hundreds of houses and tenements, which he let at high rentals. He bought state mines when Sulla denationalized them. Soon he had inflated his fortune from 7,000,000 to 170,000,000 sesterces ($25,500,000)-a sum nearly equal to the total yearly revenue of the Treasury. No man should consider himself rich, said Crassus, unless he could raise, equip, and maintain his own anny; 14 it was his destiny to perish by his definition. Having become the wealthiest man in Rome, he was still unhappy; he itched for public office, for a province, for the leader ship of an Asiatic campaign. He solicited votes humbly in the streets, memo rized the first names of countless citizens, lived in conspicuous simplicity, and, to tether influential politicians to his star, lent them money without interest but payable on demand. With all his eager ambitions he was a kindly man, accessible to everyone, generous without limit to his friends, and con tributing to both political parties with that bilateral wisdom which has al ways distinguished his kind. He fulfilled all his dreams: he became consul in 70 and again in 55, governed Syria, and helped to raise the great army that he led against Parthia. He was defeated at Carrhae, treacherously cap tured, and barbarously slain ( 53); his head was cut off, and into the mouth his conqueror poured molten gold.
Titus Pomponius Atticus, though of equestrian birth, was a truer aristo crat than Crassus and a higher type of millionaire: as honest as Meyer Anschel of the rot Schild, as learned as Lorenzo de' Medici, as financially astute as Voltaire. We hear of him fast as a student in Athens, when his conversation, and his reading of Greek and Latin poetry, so charmed Sulla that the blood stained co1c1mander wished, in vain, to take him back to Rome as a personal companion. He was a scholar and a historia11, wrote an outline of universal history,15 lived most of his life in the philosophical circles of Athens, and earned his cognomen from his Attic erudition and philanthropies. His father and his uncle left him some $960,000; he invested it in a great cattle ranch in Epirus, in buying and letting houses in Rome, in training gladiators and secretaries and hiring them out, and in publishing books. vVhen good open ings came he lent money at profitable rates; but to Athens and his friends he lent without interest.16 Men like Cicero, Honensius, and the younger Cato entrusted him with their savings and the management of their affairs, and honored him for his caution, his integrity, and his dividends. Cicero was glad to have his advice not only in purchasing houses, but in choosing statu ary tc adorn them and books to fill his library. Atticus entertained frugally and lived with the modesty of a true Epicurean; but his genial friendship and his cultivated conversation made his house in Rome the salon of all political
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VII
celebrities. He contributed to all parties and was spared in all proscriptions. At the age of seventy-seven, finding himself afflicted with a painful and incurable disease, he starved himself to death.
Lucius Licinius Lucullus, of high patrician family, sallied forth in 74 to complete Sulla's war against Mithridates. For eight years he led his inade quate forces with courage and skill; then, as his campaign was nearing full success, his tired troops mutinied, and he guided their retreat from Armenia to Ionia through perils as great as those that had immortalized Xenophon. Relieved of his command by political intrigue, he returned to Rome and, with his patrimony and his spoils, spent the rest of his life in quiet but ornate luxury. He built on the Pincian hill a palace with spacious halls, loggias, libraries, and gardens; at Tusculum his estate extended for many miles; he bought a villa at Misenum for 10,000,000 sesterces ($1,500,000); and he turned the entire island of Nisida into his summer resort. His various gar dens were famous for their horticultural innovations; it was he, for example, who introduced the cherry tree from Pontus to Italy, whence it was carried to north Europe and America. His dinners were the culinary events of the Roman year. Cicero tried once to find out how Lucullus ate when alone; he asked Lucullus to invite him and some friends to dinner that evening, but pledged Lucullus to send no word of warning to his servants. Lucullus agreed, merely stipulating that he be allowed to notify his staff that he would eat in the "Apollo Room" that evening. When Cicero and the rest came they found a lavish repast. Lucullus had several dining rooms in his city palace, each selected according to the splendor of the feast; the Apollo Room was reserved for meals costing 200,000 sesterces or more.17 But Lucullus was no gourmand. His houses were galleries of well-chosen an; his libraries were the resort of scholars and his friends; he himself was learned in both the classical literatures and in all the philosophies-naturally favoring that of Epicurus. He smiled at Pompey's strenuous life; one campaign seemed to him enough for one life; anything more was mere vanity.
His example spread without his taste among the rich of Rome; soon patri cians and magnates were competing in luxurious display, while revolt brewed in bankrupt provinces and men starved in the slums. Senators lounged in bed till noon and seldom attended sessions. Some of their sons dressed and walked like courtesans, wore frilled robes and women's sandals, decked themselves with jewelry, sprinkled themselves with perfume, deferred mar riage or avoided p"rentage, and emulated the bisexual impartiality of the Greeks. Senatorial houses cost up to ro,000,000 sesterces; Clodius, leader of the plebs, built a mansion costing 14,800,000. Lawyers like Cicero and Hor tensius,.despite the Cincian law against legal fees, competed in palaces as well as m oratory; the gardens of Hortensius contained the largest zoologi-
CHAP.vu)   THE  OLIGARCHIC REACTION	133
cal collection in Italy. All men of any pretension had villas at or near Baiae, where the aristocracy took the baths, enjoyed the Bay of Naples, and de clared a moratorium on monogamy. Other villas rose on the hills outside of Rome; rich men had several, moving from one to another as the season changed. Fortunes were spent on interior decoration, furniture, or silver plate. Cicero paid 500,000 sesterces for a table of citrus wood; a million ses terces might be paid for one of cypress wood; even the younger Cato, pillar of all Stoic virtues, was alleged to have paid 800,000 sesterces for some table spreads from Babylon.18
A horde of specialized slaves formed the staff of these palaces-valets, letter carriers, lamplighters, musicians, secretaries, doctors, philosophers, cooks. Eating was now the chief occupation of upper-class Rome; there, as in the ethics of Metrodorus, "everything good had reference to the belly." At a repast given in 63 by a high priest, and attended incongruously by Vestal Virgins and Caesar, the hors d'oeuvres consisted of mussels, spondyles, fieldfares with asparagus, fattened fowls, oyster pastries, sea nettles, ribs of roe, purple shellfish, and songbirds. Then came the dinner-sows' udders, boar's head, fish, duck, teals, hares, fowl, pastries, and sweets.19 Delicacies were imported from every pan of the Empire and beyond: peacocks from Samos, grouse from Phrygia, cranes from Ionia, tunnyfish from Chalcedon, muraenas from Gades, oysters from Tarentum, sturgeons from Rhodes. Foods produced in Italy were considered a bit vulgar, fit only for plebeians. The actor Aesopus gave a dinner t which songbirds were eaten to the cost of $5000.20 Sumptuary laws continued to denounce expensive meals, and to be ignored. Cicero tried to obey, ate the legally permitted vegetables, and suffered ten days of diarrhea.22
Some of the new wealth disported itself in enlarged theaters and extended games. In 58 Aemilius Scaurus built a theater with 8000 seats, 360 pillars, 3000 statues, a three-storied stage, and three colonnades-one of wood, one of marble, and one of glass; his slaves, rebelling against the hard labor he had exacted of them, burned down the theater soon afterward, netting him a loss of 100,000,000 sesterces.23 In 55 Pompey provided funds for the first perma nent stone theater in Rome-with 17,500 seats, and a spacious porticoed park for entr'acte promenades. In 53 Scribonius Curio, one of Caesar's generals, erected two wooden theaters, each a semicircle, back to back; in the morning the two stages presented plays; then, whJe the spectators were still in their seats, the two structures were turned on pivots and wheels, the semicircles formed an amphitheater and the united stages became an arena for gladia torial games.24 Never had such games been so frequent, costly, or prolonged. In a single day of the games given by Caesar 10,000 gladiators took part,
134	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VII


But the lover of philosophy will only reluctantly yield to science and art the supreme places in our Grecian heritage. Greek science itself was a child of Greek philosophy-of that reckless challenge to legend, that youthful love of inquiry, which for centuries united science and philosophy in one adventurous quest. Never had men examined nature so critically and yet so affectionately: the Greeks did no dishonor to the world in thinking that it was a cosmos of order and therefore amenable to understanding. They in vented logic for the same reason that they made perfect statuary: harmony, unity, proportion, form, in their view, provided both the art of logic and the logic of art. Curious of every fact and every theory, they not only estab lished philosophy as a distinct enterprise of the European mind, but they conceived nearly every system and every hypothesis, and left little to be said on any major problem of our life. Realism and nominalism, idealism and materialism, monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, feminism and com munism, the Kantian critique and the Schopenhaurian despair, the primitiv ism of Rousseau and the immoralism of Nietzsche, the synthesis of Spencer and the psychoanalysis of Freud-all the dreams and wisdom of philosophy are here, in the age and land of its birth. And in Greece men not only talked of philosophy, they lived it: the sage, rather than the warrior or the saint, was the pinnacle and ideal of Greek life. Through all the centuries from Thales that exhilarating philosophical bequest has come down to us, inspir ing Roman emperors, Christian Fathers, Sch<:?lastic theologians, Renaissance heretics, Cambridge Platonists, the rebels of the Enlightenment, and the devotees of philosophy today. At this moment thousands of eager spirits are reading Plato, perhaps in every country on the earth.
Civilization does not die, it migrates; it changes its habitat and its dress, but it lives on. The decay of one civilization, as of one individual, makes room for the growth of another; life sheds the old skin, and surprises death with fresh youth. Greek civilization is alive; it moves in every brea.th of mind that we breathe; so much of it remains that none of us in one lifetime could absorb it all. We know its defects-its insane and pitiless wars, its stagnant slavery, its subjection of woman, its lack of moral restraint, its
EPILOGUE	OUR  GREEK  HERITAGE	671
corrupt individualism, its tragic failure to unite liberty with order and peace. But those who cherish freedom, reason, and beauty will not linger over these blemishes. They will hear behind the turmoil of political history the voices of Solon and Socrates, of Plato and Euripides, of Pheidias and Prax iteles, of Epicurus and Archimedes; they will be grateful for the existence of such men, and will seek their company across alien centuries. They will think of Greece as the bright morning of that Western civilization which, with all its kindred faults, is our nourishment and our life.
TO TiiOSE WHO HAVE COME mus FAR:
THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNSEEN BUT EVER FELT COMPANIONSHIP.
Glossary
Aperfus-instinctive insights.
Bizarreries-strange or extravagant expressions or actions.
Bourgeoisie-the middle classes.
Cujus regio ejus religio-the religion of the region must be that of the ruler.
De nobis fabula narrabitur-about us the story will be told.
Deus ex machina-the god from the machine. Blan-spirited vitality.
In medias res-into the middle of things, or into the heart of the subject.
La Parisienne-The Parisian Woman. Mater Dolorosa-The Sorrowful Mother. Mise en scene-the surrounding situation. Nouveaux riches-the newly rich.
Oikoumene (sc. ge)-the inhabited world. Pace-despite, begging the pardon of.
Pinakotheka-picture gallery.
Plein air-open air. Pornaia-brothels. Sof erim-scholars.
Bibliography
Of Books Referred to in Text or Notes
The starred volumes are recommended for further study.
ADAMS, B.: The New Empire. N. Y., 1903.
.AEscHYLUS: The Oresteia. Tr. G. Murray. London, 1928.
ANDERSON, W. J., and SPIERS, R. P.: The Architecture of Greece and Rome, London, 1902.
ARISTOPHANES: The Eleven Comedies. 2v. N. Y., 1928.


From the Loeb Collection, Harvard Unh·ersity
FIG. 17-Tbe Portland Vase
British .\luscum
c.:i
CHAP. xv)	ROME  AT  WORK	337
Arabia secured the passage to India against the competition of Arabs and Parthians. Pliny complained that campaigns had been undertaken that Roman ladies and dandies might have a wider choice of perfumes.1-1
We must not exaggerate the wealth of ancient Rome. The total annual revenue of the state under Vespasian was at most 1,500,000,000 sesterces ($150,000,000)-less than a fifth of the budget of New York City today. The means of amassing great fortunes by large-scale production were unknown or ignored, and had not developed the immense and taxable industry and commerce of the modem world. The Roman government spent little on the navy, and nothing on servicing a national debt; it lived on its income, not on its debts. Industry being largely domestic, its products passed to the consumer with less intervening trade and taxation than today. .Men pro duced for their own localities rather than for the general market. They did more for themselves, less for unseen others, than we do. They used their bodies more, worked longer hours less intensely, and did not miss a thousand luxuries that lay outside their dreams. They could not begin to rival the wealth of even our less affluent years; but they enjoyed a degree of pros perity such as the Mediterranean nations had not known before and, as a whole, have never known again. It was the material zenith of the ancient world.
CHAPTER  XVI
Rome and Its Art
THE DEBT TO GREECE
HE Romans were not of themselves an artistic people. Before Augustus they were warriors, after him they were rulers; they counted the establishment of order and security through government a greater good and nobler task than the creation or enjoyment of beauty. They paid great sums for the works of dead masters, but looked down upon living artists as menials. "While we adore images," said the kindly Seneca, "we despise those who fashion them." 1 Only law and politics, and, of manual arts, only agri culture (by proxy), seemed honorable ways of life. Barring the architects, most artists in Rome were Greek slaves or freedmen or hirelings; nearly all worked with their hands and were classed as artisans; Latin authors seldom thought of recording their lives or their names. Hence Roman art is almost wholly anonymous; no vivid personalities humanize its history as Myron, Pheidias, Praxiteles, and Protogenes light up the aesthetic story of Greece. Here the historian is constrained to speak of things, not men, to catalogue coins, vases, statues, reliefs, pictures, and buildings in the desperate hope that their accumulation may laboriously convey the crowded majesty of Rome. The products of art appeal to the soul through eye or ear or hand rather than through the intellect; their beauty fades when it is diluted into ideas and words. The universe of thought is only one of many worlds; each sense has its own; each art has therefore its characteristic medium, which cannot
be translated into speech. Even an artist writes about art in vain.
A special misfortune clouds Roman art: we come to it from Greek art, which seems at first1its model and master. As the art of India disturbs us by strange shapes, so that of Rome chills us by the monotonous repetition of familiar forms. We have seen long since these Doric, Ionic, Corinthian col umns and capitals, these smooth idealized reliefs, these busts of poets, rulers, and gods; even the astonishing frescoes of Pompeii, we are told, were copies of Greek originals; only the "Composite" order is indigenously Roman, arid it offends our notions of classic unity, simplicity, and restraint. Certainly the art of the Augustan Age in Rome was overwhehningly Greek. Through
338
CHAP.XVI)	ROME  AND  ITS  ART	339
Sicily and Greek Italy, through Campania and Etruria, finally through Greece, Alexandria, and the Hellenic East, the aesthetic forms, methods, and ideals of Hellas passed into Roman art. When Rome became mistress of the Mediterranean, Greek artists poured into the new center of wealth and patronage and made countless copies of Greek masterpieces for Roman temples, palaces, and squares. Every conqueror brought home examples, every magnate scoured the cities for the surviving treasures, of Greek work manship. Gradually Italy became a museum of bought or stolen paintings and statuary that set the tone of Roman art for a century. Artistically Rome was swallowed up in the Hellenistic world.
All this is half the truth. In one aspect, as we shall see, the history of Roman art is a conflict between the architrave and the arch; in another it is the struggle of native Italian realism to recover from the invasion of the penin sula by a Greek art that had pictured gods rather than men, the type or Platonic idea rather than the earthly individual, and had sought a noble per fection of form rather than truth of perception and utterance. That virile indigenous art which had helped to carve the figures on Etruscan tombs hibernated between the Greek conquest and Nero's philhellenic ecstasy; but at last it broke the Hellenistic mold, and revolutionized classic art with real istic sculpture, impressionistic painting, and an architecture of arch and vault. Through these, as well as by her borrowed beauty, Rome became for eighteen centuries the art capital of the Western world.
THE TOILERS' ROME
The ancient traveler bent on making a tour of Flavian Rome, and coming northward up the Tiber from Ostia, would first of all have noted the swift ness of the muddy current, carrying along the soil of hills and valleys to the sea. In this simple fact lay the leisurely tragedy of erosion, the difficulty of two-way commerce on the river, the periodical silting of the Tiber's mouth, and the floods that almost every spring inundated the lower levels of Rome, confined the residents to upper stories reached by boats, and often destroyed the com stored in granaries on the wharves. When the waters fell they carried houses to ruin, and men and animals to death.2
As he neared the city* the visitor's eye would be caught by the Emporium, which ran for a thousand feet along the river's eastern edge, and was noisy with workers, warehouses, markets, and moving goods. Beyond it rose that Aventine hill on which the angry plebs had staged its "sit-down strikes" of
Cf. the map of Rome on the flyleaf of this volume.
340	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVI
494 and 449 B.c. On the left bank at this point were the gardens that Caesar had bequeathed to the people, and behind them the Janiculum. Near the eastern shore at the beautiful Pons Aemilius lay the Forum Boarium or Cattle Market, with its (still standing) temples to Fortune and Mater Ma tuta, the Goddess of the Dawn.Farther north on the right loomed the Palatine and Capitoline hills, thick with palaces and temples. On the left bank were Agrippa's gardens, and beyond them the Vatican hill. North of the city's center, off the eastern shore, stretched the spacious lawns and decorative buildings of the Campus Martius, or Field of Mars; here were the theaters of Balbus and Pompey, the Circus of Flaminius, the Baths of Agrippa, and Domitian's stadium; here the legions practiced, athletes competed, chariots raced, the people played ball,3 and the Assembly gathered, under the em perors, to go through the motions of democracy's ghost.
Disembarking at the city's northern limits, the visitor saw some remains of the wall ascribed to Servius Tullius. Rome had probably rebuilt it after the Gallic raid of 390 B.c., but the power of Roman arms, and the apparent security of the capital, allowed the rampart to lapse into ruins; not till Aurelian (A.D. 270) would another wall rise, a symbol of security gone. Gates had been cut in the wall, usually as single or triple archways, to permit the passage of the great roads from which they took their names. Touring the boundary of the city east and then south, the visitor would see the luxuriant gardens of Sallust, the dusty camp of the Praetorians, the arches of the Marcian, Appian, and Claudian aqueducts, and on his right, in turn, the Pincian, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, and Caelian hills. Leaving the walls and walking northwest on the Appian Way, he would pass through the Porta Capena along the southern slope of the Palatine to the Nova Via ("New Street"), and then northward through a maze of arches and buildings to stand in the ancient Forum, the head and heart of Rome.
Originally it had been a market place, some 600 by zoo feet; now (A.D. 96) the sellers had retired into the riear-by streets or into other forums, but in the adjoining basilicas men sold sh:1res in the publicans' corporations, made contracts with the government, defended themselves in the courts, or con sulted lawyers on how to escape the law. Around the Forum had been built, as around New York's \Vall Street, some modest temples to the gods, and some larger ones to l\fammon. A population of statues adorned it, and the col onnades of great edifices provided the shade that could hardly come from a few ancient trees. From·145 B.c. till Caesar it had been the meeting place of the assemblies. At either end stood a speaker's platform, named rostrum be cause an earlier stand had been decorated with the rostra or prows of ships captured from Antium in 338 B.c. At the western end was the l\Iillenarium Aureum, or Golden Milestone, a column of gilded bronze set up by Augustus


Caesar between the Palatine and Aventine hills. This was an immense ellipse
The_Roman baths pro ·ided n:io?els for many m dem strucrures faced with like problems
of covenng gr:eat 7pac_es w1_th a nummum of obstrucaon. The Pennsyh-ania Station and Grand Central Temunal m I'-ew \ ork are outstanding examples.
CHAP. XVI)	ROME  AND  ITS  ART
2200 feet long and 705 feet wide, ,vith wooden seats on three sides for 180,000 spectators.33 \Ve may judge the wealth of Rome by noting that Trajan rebuilt these seats in marble.
By comparison the Colosseum was a modest structure, seating only 50,000. Its plan was not new; the cities of Greek Italy had long since had amphi theaters; Curio, as we have seen, composed one in 53 B.c.; Caesar built an other in 46, Statilius Taurus another in 29 B.c. TheFlavian Amphitheater, as Rome called the Colosseum, was begun by Vespasian and finished by Titus (A.D. So); the architect's name is unknown. Vespasian chose as its site the lake in the gardens of Nero's Golden House, etween the Caelian and Pala tine hills. It was constructed of travertine stone in an ellipse 1790 feet around. Its external wall rose 1 57 feet and was divided into three stories, the first partly supported by Tuscan-Doric, the second by Ionic, the third by Corinthian, columns, with an arch in each intercolumnar space. The main corridors were roofed with barrel vaults, sometimes crossed in the stvle of medieval cloisters. The interior was also divided into three tiers, each u'pheld by arches, divided into concentric rings of boxes or seats, and cut by stair ways into ·cunei, "wedges." The aspect of the interior today is that of a mass of masonry into which some giant artisan has cut the arches, passages, and seats. Statues and other decorations adorned the whole, and many rows of seats were in marble. There were eighty entrances, two of them reserved for the emperor and his suite; these entrances and the exits (vomitoria) could empty the gigantic bowl in a few minutes. The a.r:_ena, 2 87 by 180	feet, was surrounded by a fifteen-foot wall topped with an iron grating to protect brutes from beasts. The Colosseum is not a beautiful building, and its very immensity reveJls a certain coarseness, as well as grandeur, in the Roman
character. It is only the most imposing of all the ruins left by the classic
world. The Romans built like giants; it would have been too much to ask that they should finish like jewelers.
Roman art had taken over in eclectic confusion the Attic, Asiatic, and Alexandrian styles-restraint, immensity, and elegance; it never quite com bined them into that organic unity which is one requisite of beauty. There is something Oriental in the crude strength of the typically Roman build ings; they are awe-inspiring rather than beautiful; even Hadrian's Pantheon is a structural marvel rather than an artistic whole. Except in certain mo ments, as in the Augustan reliefs and the glass, we must not look here for delicacy of feeling or refinement of execution; we must expect an engineer's art that seeks the perfection of stability, economy, and use, a parvenu's infatuation with immensity and ornament, a soldier's insistence en realism, a warrior's art of overwhelming force. The Romans did not finish like
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVI
jewelers because conquerors do not become jewelers. They finished like conquerors.
Without doubt they created the most influential and fascinating city in history. They made a plastic, pictorial, and structural art that every man could understand, and a city that every citizen could use. The free masses were poor, but in some measure they owned much of the wealth of Rome: they ate the corn of the state, they sat at almost no cost in the theaters, the circuses, the amphitheaters, and the stadiums; they exercised, refreshed, amused, and educated themselves in the baths, they enjoyed the shade of a hundred colonnades, and waJked under decorated porticoes that covered many miles of street and three miles in the Field of Mars alone. Never had the world seen such a metropolis. At its center a tumultuous Forum busy with business, resounding with oratory, alive with empire-shaking debates; then a ring of majestic temples, basilicas, palaces, theaters, and baths, in a profusion without parallel; then a ring of humming shops and teeming tene ments; still another ring of homes and gardens, again with temples and public baths; and last of all, a circle of villas and estates pushing the city into the countryside and binding the mountains with the sea: this was the Rome of the Caesars-proud, powerful, brilliant, materialistic, cruel, iniquitous, chaotic, and sublime.
CHAPTER  XVII
Epicurean Rome
30 B.C.-A.D. 96
THE PEOPLE
T ET us enter these dwellings, temples, theaters, and baths, and see how L  these Romans lived; we shall find them more interesting than their art. We must at the outset recall that by Nero's time they were only geographi cally Roman. The conditions that Augustus had failed to check-celibacy, childlessness, abortion, and infanticide among the older stocks, manumission and comparative fertility among the new-had transformed the racial char acter, the moral temper, even the physiognomy, of the Roman people.
Once the Romans had been precipitated into parentage by the impetus of sex, and lured to it by anxiety for the post-mortem care of their graves; now the upper and middle classes had learned to separate sex from parentage, and were skeptical about the afterworld. Once the rearing of children had been an obligation of honor to the state, enforced by public opinion; now it seemed absurd to demand more births in a city crowded to the point of redolence. On the contrary, wealthy bachelors and childless husbands con tinued to be courted by sycophants longing for legacies. "Nothing," said Juvenal, "will so endear you to your friends as a barren wife." 1 "Crotona," says a character in Petronius, "has only two classes of inhabitants-flatterers and flattered; and the sole crime there is to bring up children to inherit your money. It is like a battlefield at rest: nothing but corpses and the crows that pick them." 2 Seneca consoled a mother who had lost her only child by reminding her how popular she would now be; for "with us childlessness gives more power than it takes away." 3 The Gracchi had been a family of twelve children; probably not five families of such abundance could be found in Nero's age in patrician or equestrian Rome. Marriage, which had once been a lifelong economic union, was now among a hundred thousand Romans a passing adventure of no great spiritual significance, a loose con tract for the mutual provision of physiological conveniences or political aid. To escape the testatory disabilities of the unmarried some women took eunuchs as contraceptive husbands; 4 some entered into sham wedlock with poor men on the understanding that the wife need bear no -children and
363
CAESAR  AND• CHRIST	(CHAP.XVII
might have as many lovers as she pleased.5 Contraception was practiced in both its mechanical and chemical forms.6 If these methods failed there were many ways of procuring abortion. Philosophers and the law condemned it, but the finest families practiced it. "Poor women," says Juvenal, "endure the perils of childbirth, and all the troubles of nursing . . . but how often does a gilded bed harbor a pregnant woman? So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist!" Neverthele1s, he tells the husband, "rejoice; give her the potion ... for were she to bear the child you might find yourself the father of an Ethiopian." 7 In so enlightened a society infanticide was rare.*
The infertility of the moneyed classes was so offset by immigration and the fecundity of the poor that the population of Rome and the Empire continued to grow. Beloch estimated it at 800,000 forthe Rome of the early Empire, Gibbon at 1,200,000, Marquardt at 1,600,000.t Beloch com puted the population of the Empire at 54,000,000, Gibbon at 120,000,000.11 Thearistocracy was as numerous as before, but it was almost wholly altered in origin. We hear no more of the Aemilii, Claudii, Fabii, Valerii; only the Cornelii remained of the proud clans that, as late as Caesar, had strutted their Rome. Some had vanished through war or political execution; others had faded out through family limitation, physiological degeneration, or an im poverishment that had lowered them into the plebeian mass. Their places had been taken by Roman businessmen, Italian municipal dignitaries, and provincial nobles. In A.O. 56 a senator declared that "most of the knights, and many of the senators, \Vere descendants of slaves." 12 After a generation or two the new optimates adopted the ways of their predecessors, had fewer children and more luxuries, and surrendered to ,inundation from the East. First had come the Greeks-not so much from the mai]lland as from Cyrenaica, Egypt, Syria, and Asia l\1inor. They were eager, cle,·er, facile semi-Orientals; many of them small traders or import merchants; some of them scientists, writers, teachers, artists, physicians, musicims, actors; some sincerely, some venally, devoted to philosophy; some of them able ad ministrators and financiers, many of them without moral scruple, nearly all without religious belief. The mnjority had come as slaves and were not an ideal selection; freed, they kept their external servility, their internal hatred and scorn of the rich Roman who lived intellectually on the cultural leavings of ancient Bellas. The streets of the capital were now noisy with restless
Sometimes, in the first century, girls or illegitimate children were exposed, usually a·t the base of the Columna Lactaria-so named because the state provided wet nurses to feed and save the infants found there.10 The abandonment of unwanted babies, however is a custom to be found in all but the most uncivilized societies.	'
t In 1937 the population of Rome was 1,178,000.
CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN   ROME


-the mystical and the medical-met and warred in the conjunction of the two philosophers. Perhaps Aristotle would have developed a thoroughly scientific mind had he not listened so long to Plato (some say for twenty years); the doctor's son struggled in him with the Puritan's pupil, and neither side won; Aristotle never quite made up his mind. He gathered about him scientific observations sufficient for an encyclopedia, and then tried to force them into the Platonic mold in which his scholastic mind had been formed. He refuted Plato at every tum because he borrowed from him on every page.
He was an earnest student, and soon caught the eye of his master. When Plato read at the Academy his treatise on the soul, Aristotle, says Diogenes Laertius, "was the only person who sat it out, while all the rest rose up and went away."'.. After Plato's death (347) Aristotle went to the court of Hermeias, who had studied with him at the Academy and had raised himself from slavery to be the dictator of Atameus and Assus in upper Asia Minor. Aristotle married Hermeias' daughter Pythias (344), and was
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY
about to settle in Assus when Hermeias was assassinated by the Persians, who suspected him of planning to help Philip's proposed invasion of Asia."' Aristotle fled with Pythias to near-by Lesbos, and spent some time there in studying the natural history of the island."' Pythias died after giv ing him a daughter. Later Aristotle married, or lived with, the hetaira Herpyllis;"" but he maintained to the end a tender devotion to the memory of Pythias, and at his death asked that his bones be laid beside hers; he was not quite the emotionless bookworm that one might picture from his works. In 343 Philip, who probably had known him as a youth at Amyntas' court, invited him to undertake the education of Alexander, then a wild lad of thirteen. Aristotle came to Pella and labored at the task for four years. In 340 Philip commissioned him to direct the restoration and repeopling of Stageirus, which had been laid waste in the war with Olynthus, and to draw up a code of laws for it; all of which he accomplished to the satisfac tion of the city, which commemorated its re-establishment by him in an annual holiday.""
In 334 he returned to Athens, and-probably aided by funds from Alex ander-opened a school of rhetoric and philosophy. He chose as its home the most elegant of Athens' gymnasiums, a group of buildings dedicated to Apollo Lyceus (God of Shepherds), surrounded with shady gardens and covered walks. In the morning he taught advanced subjects to regular stu dents; in the afternoon he lectured to a more popular audience, probably on rhetoric, poetry, ethics, and politics. He collected here a large library, a zoological garden, and a museum of natural history. The school came to be called the Lyceum, and the group and its philosophy were named Peri patetic from the covered walks (peripatoi) along which Aristotle liked to move with his students as he discoursed."" A sharp rivalry developed be tween the Lyceum, whose students were mostly o the middle class, the Academy, which drew its membership largely from the aristocracy, and the school of Isocrates, which was frequented chiefly by colonial Greeks. The rivalry was eased in time by the emphasis of Isocrates on rhetoric, of the Academy on mathematics, metaphysics, and politics, and of the Lyceum on natural science. Aristotle set his pupils to gathering and co-ordinating knowledge in every field: the customs of barbarians, the constitutions of the Greek cities, the chronology of victors in the Pythian games and the Athe nian Dionysia, the organs and habits of animals, the character and distri bution of plants, and the history of science and philosophy. These re searches became a treasury of data upon which he drew, sometimes too confidently, for his varied and innumerable treatises.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XX!
For the layman he wrote some twenty-seven popular dialogues, which Cicero and Quintilian considered equal to Plato's; it was chiefly by these that he was known in antiquity."" These dialogues were among the casual ties of the barbarian conquest of Rome. What remains to us is a mass of technical, highly abstract, and inimitably dull works rarely referred to by ancient scholars, and apparently composed, in the last twelve years of his life, of notes made for his lectures by himself, or from his lectures by his pupils. These technical compendiums were not known outside the Lyceum until they were published by Andronicus of Rhodes in the first century B.c."" Forty of them survive, but Diogenes Laertius mentions 360 more probably brief monographs. In these ashes of scholarship we must seek the once living thought that in later ages won for Aristotle the title of The Philosopher. We must approach him expecting no brilliance like Plato's and no wit like Diogenes', but only a rich argosy of knowledge, and such conservative wisdom as befits the friend and pensioner of kings.*
The Scientist
Aristotle has traditionally been considered as primarily a philosopher. Perhaps this is a mistake. Let us, if only for a fresh view, consider him chiefly as a scientist.
His curious mind is interested, to begin with, in the process and tech nique of reasoning; and so acutely does he analyze these that his "Organon," or Instrument-the name given after his death to his logical treatises-be came the textbook of logic for two thousand years. He longs to think clearly, though he seldom, in his extant works, succeeds; he spends half his time defining his terms, and then feels that he has solved the problem. Definition itself he defines definitively as the specification of an object or idea by naming the genus or class to which it belongs ("man is an animal")
The most important of the extant treatises may be arranged under six heads:
LOGIC: Categories, Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, Soph ist Reasonings.
IL SCIENCE:
1. Natural Science: Physics, Mechanics, On the Heavens, Meteorology.
:z. Biology: History of Animals, Parts of Animals, Movements of Animals, Locomo tion of Animals, Reproduction of Animals.
3. Psychology: On the Soul, Little Essays on Nature.
m. Metaphysics.
ESTHETICS: Rhetoric, Poetics.
ETIDCS: Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics.
POUTICS: Politics, The Constitution of Athens.
CHAP. XXI)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY	527
and the specific difference that distinguishes it from all other members of that class ("man is a rational animal"). It is characteristic of his methodical way that he arranged in ten "categories" the basic aspects under which anything may be considered: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, possession, activity, passivity-a classification that some writers have found an aid in the amplification of their flagging thought.
He accepts the senses as the only source of knowledge. Universals are generalized ideas, not innate but formed from many perceptions of like objects; they are conceptions, not things.:IIO He lays down res'Olutely, as the axiom of all logic, the principle of contradiction: "It is impossible for the same attribute at once to belong and not to belong to the same thing in the same relation."101 He exposes the fallacies into which sophists fall or lure us. He criticizes his predecessors for having drawn the universe, or their theories of it, out of their heads, instead of devoting themselves to patient observation and experiment."' His ideal of deductive reasoning is the syllogism-a trio of propositions of which the third follows necessarily from the others; but he recognizes that a syllogism, to avoid begging the question, must presuppose a wide induction to make its major premise prob able. Though in his philosophical treatises he too often loses himself in deductive reasoning, he lauds induction, accumulates in his scientific works a mass of specific observations, and occasionally records his own or others' experiments.* With all his errors he is the father of scientific method, and the first man known to have organized co-operative scientific research.
He takes up science where Democritus left it, and dares to enter every field. He is weakest in mathematics and physics, and confines himself there to a study of first principles. He seeks in the Physics not new discoveries but clear definitions of the terms used-matter, motion, space, time, con tinuity, infinite, change, end. Motion and space are continuous, they are not made up, as Zeno assumed, of small indivisible moments or parts; the "infinite" exists potentially, but not actually.w He feels, though he does nothing to solve, the problems that were to arouse Newton-inertia, gravity, motion, velocity; he has some idea of the parallelogram of forces, and states the law of the lever: "The moving weight will more easily move" (the object) "the farther away it is from the fulcrum."""
He argues that the heavenly bodies-certainly the earth-ate spherical, for only a spherical earth could explain the shape of the moon when it is