CHAP. IX)	CAESAR	195
suspected of plotting against his life. To Cicero, who had trimmed his wind to every sale, he offered not only pardon but honor, and refused nothing that the orator asked for himself or his Pompeian friends; he even forgave, at Cicero's urging, the unrepentant Marcus Marcellus. In a pretty speech For Marcellus (46) Cicero acclaimed Caesar's "unbelievable liberality," and admitted that Pompey, victorious, would have been more vengeful. "I have heard with regret," he said, "your celebrated and highly philosophical remark, lam satis vixi, 'I have lived enough, whether for nature or for fame.' . . . Put aside, I beg you, that wisdom of rhe sage; do not be wise at the cost of our peril. ...  You are still far from the completion of your greatest labors; you have not yet laid th1!ir foundations." And he solemnly promised Caesar, in the name of all the Senate, that they would watch over his safety and oppose with their own bodies any attack upon him.57 Cicero now prospered so well that he planned to buy still another palace-no less than that of Sulla himself. He enjoyed the dinners to which he was invited by Antony, Balbus, and others of Caesar's aides; never before had his letters been so gay.68 Caesar was not deceived; he wrote to Matius: "If anyone is gracious, it is Cicero; but I doubt not that he hates me bitterly." 59 When reassured Pompeians resumed their opposition, this unctuous Talleyrand of the pen fell in with their hopes and wrote a eulogy of the younger Cato that should have put Caesar on his guard. Caesar contented himself with writing a reply, the Anti-Cato, which did not show the dictator at his best; in this duel he had given Cicero the choice of weapons, and the orator had won. Public opinion praised Cicero's style, and the mildness of a ruler who com posed a pamphlet when he might have signed a death warrant.
l\1en who have been deprived of wonted power cannot be mollified by pardoning their resistance; it is as difficult to forgive forgiveness as it is to forgive those whom we have injured. The aristocrats fretted in a Senate that dared not reject the proposals that Caesar so constitutionally submitted to them. They patriotically denounced the destruction of a liberty that had fattened their purses, and would not admit that the restoration of order required the limitation of their freedom. They looked with horror upon the presence of Cleopatra and Caesarian in Rome; it was true that Caesar was living with his wife Calpurnia apparently in mutual affection; but who could say-who would not say-what happened on his frequent visits to the gorgeous queen? Rumors persisted that he would make himself king, marry her, and place the capital of their united empires in the East. Had he not ordered his statue to be erected on the Capitol next to those of Rome's ancient kings? Had he not stamped his own image upon Roman coins-an unprecedented insolence? Did he not wear robes of purple, usually reserved for kings? At the Lupercalia, on February r5, 44, the consul Antony,
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
sacerdotally naked * and impiously drunk, tried thrice to place a royal crown upon Caesar's head. Thrice Caesar refused; but was it not because the crowd murmured disapproval? Did he not dismiss from office the tribunes who removed from his statue the royal diadem placed upon it by his friends? When the Senate approached him as he sat in the Temple of Venus, he did not rise to receive them. Some explained that he had been overcome by an epileptic stroke; others, that he was suffering from diarrhea and had remained seated to avoid a movement of his bowels at so unpropitious a moment.60 But many patricians feared that any day might see him pro claimed a king.
Shortly after the Lupercalia, Gaius Cassius, a sickly man-"pale and lean," as Plutarch describes him 61-approached Marcus Brutus and suggested the assassination of Caesar. He had already won tb his plan several senators, some capitalists whose provincial pillage had fallen with Caesar's restriction of the publicans, even some of Caesar's generals, who felt that the spoils and offices awarded them had not quite equaled their deserts. Brutus was needed as the front of the conspiracy, for he had won a wide reputation as the most virtuous of men. He was supposedly descended from the Brutus who had expelled the kings 464 years before. His mother Servilia was Cato's half sister; his wife Portia was Cato's daughter and the widow of Caesar's enemy Bibulus. "It was thought," says Appian, "that Brutus was Caesar's son, as Caesar was the lover of Servilia about the time of Brutus' birth"; 62 Plutarch adds that Caesar believed Brutus to be his son.63 Possibly Brutus himself shared this opinion, and hated the dictator for having seduced his mother and made him, in the gossip of Rome, a bastard instead of a Brutus. He had always been moody and taciturn, as if brooding over a secret wrong; at the same time he carried himself proudly, as one who in any case bore noble blood in his veins. He was a master of Greek and a devotee of philos ophy; in metaphysics a follower of Plato, in ethics, of Zeno. It was not lost upon him that Stoicism, like Greek and Roman opinion, approved tyranni cide. "Our ancestors," he wrote to a friend, "thought that we ought not to endure a tyrant even if he were our own father." 6-1 He composed a treatise on Virtue and was later confused with that abstraction. Through interme diaries he lent money at forty-eight per cent to the citizens of Cyprian Salamis; when they balked at paying the accumulated interest he urged Cicero, then proconsul in Cilicia, to enforce the collection with Roman arms.65 He governed Cisalpine Gaul with integrity and competence and, returning to Rome, was made urban praetor by Caesar (45).
Every generous element in his nature rebelled against Cassius' proposal.
Cf. p. 65.
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR	197
Cassius reminded him of his rebel ancestry, and perhaps Brutus felt chal lenged to prove it by imitation. The sensitive youth blushed when he saw, aflixed to statues of the older Brutus, such inscriptions as "Brutus, are you dead?"-or, "Your posterity is unworthy of you." 66 Cicero dedicated to him several treatises written in these years. Meanwhile it was whispered among the patricians that at the next meeting of the Senate, on March r 5, Lucius Cotta would move that Caesar be made king, on the ground that according to the Sibylline oracle the Parthians would be conquered only by a king.67 A Senate half filled with Caesar's appointees, said Cassius, would pass the measure, and all hope of res1:oring the Republic would be lost. Brutus yielded; and the conspirators then made definite plans. Portia drew the secret from her husband by stabbing her thigh to show that no physical injury could make her speak against her will. In a moment of unprophetic sentiment Brutus insisted that Antony should be spared.
On the evening of March 14, to a gathering at his home, Caesar proposed as topic of conversation, "\Vhat is the best death?" His own answer was, "A sudden one." The next morning his wife begged him not to go to the Senate, saying that she had dreamed of seeing him covered with blood. A like-minded servant sought to provide a deterrent omen by causing an ancestral picture to fall from the wall. But Decimus Brutus, who was one of his closest friends and was also one of the conspirators-urged him to attend the Senate if only to adjourn it courteously in person. A friend who had learned of the plot came to warn him, but Caesar had already left. On his way to the Senate he met a soothsayer who had once whispered to him, "Beware the ides of March"; Caesar remarked, sxniling, that the ides had come and all was well. "But they have not passed," answered Spurinna.
\Vhile Caesar was offering the usual presession sacrifice before Pompey's theater, where the Senate was to meet, a tablet informing him of the c@m spiracy was put into his hands. He ignored it, and tradition says that it was found in his hand after his death.*
Trebonius, a conspirator who had been a favored general of Caesar, detained Antony from the meeting by conversation. When Caesar entered the theater and took his seat, the "Liberators" flung themselves upon him without delay. "Some have written," reports Suetonius, "that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him he said, in Greek, kai stt teknon-'Y ou, too, my child?' "69 \Vhen Brutus struck him, says Appian, Caesar ended all resist ance; drawing his robe over his face and head, he subxnitted to the blows and fell at the foot of Pompey's statue.70 One wish had been granted to the most complete man that antiquity produced.
These stories of the ides of March appear in Suetonius, Plutarch, and Appian; 68 but they may be legend nevertheless.
CHAPTER  X
Antony
44-30 B.C.
ANTONY A TO BRUTUS
HE assassination of Caesar was one of the major tragedies of history. Not merely in the sense that it interrupted a great labor of statesman
ship and led to fifteen years more of chaos and war; civilization survived, and Augustus completed what Caesar had hp-::r;n. It was a tragedy also in the sense that probably both parties were right: the conspirators in thinking that Caesar meditated monarchy, Caesar in thinking that disorder and empire had made monarchy inevitable. Men have divided on the issue ever since the Senate sat for a moment in consternation at the deed and then fled in tumult and terror from the hall. Antony, arriving after the event, saw valor in discretion and fortified himself in his house. Cicero's eloquence lost its tongue, even when Brutus, dagger in hand, hailed him as "Father of His Country." Emerging, the conspirators found an excited populace in the square; they tried to win it with catchwords of Liberty and the Republic, but the dazed crowd had no homage for phrases so long used to cover greed. Fearing for their lives, the assassins took refuge in the buildings on the Capitol and surrounded themselves there with their personal gladiatorial guards. Toward evening Cicero joined them. Antony, approached by their emissaries, sent a friendly reply.
The next day a larger crowd gathered in the Forum. The conspirators sent agents to buy its support and organize it into a legal assembly; then they ventured down from the Capitol, and Brutus delivered an oration which he had prepared for the Senate. The speech failed to move its hearers. Cassius tried and was met with cold silence. The Liberators returned to the Capitol, and as the crowd thinned out theystealthily departed to their homes. Antony, thinking himself Caesar's heir, obtained from the stunned Calpurnia all the ' papers and funds that the dictator had left in his palace; at the same time he secretly summoned Caesar's veterans to Rome. On the 17th, by his authority as tribune, he convened the Senate and astonished all parties by his amiability and calm. He accepted Cicero's proposal for a general amnesty, and agreed that Brutus and Cassius should receive provincial governorships
198
CHAP.X)	ANTONY	199
(i.e., flight withsafety and power), on condition that the Senate should ratify all the decrees, legislation, and appointments of Caesar. Since a majority of the Senate owed office or emoluments to these acts, it consented; and when it adjourned Antony was acclaimed as a statesman who had snatched peace out of the jaws of war. That evening he entertained Cassius for dinner. On the 18th the Senate met again, recognized Caesar's will, voted him a public funeral, and appointed Antony to deliver the customary eulogy.
On the 19th Antony secured the will from the Vestal Virgins, with whom it had been deposited, and read it, first to a small, then to a larger gathering. It bequeathed Caesar's private forrune to three grandnephews and (to the astonishment and anger of Antony) named one of them, Caius Octavius, as adoptive son and heir. The dictator had devised his gardens to the people as a public park and had left 300 sesterces to every citizen of Rome. The news of these benefactions sped through the city; and when, on the 20th, Caesar's body, which had been embalmed in his home, was brought into the Farum for the last rites, a great concourse of people, including Caesar's veterans, gathered to do him reverence. Antony seems to have spoken at first with cautious restraint; but as he went on, his pent-up feelings flared into eloquence. \Vhen he raised from the ivory bier the torn and bloody robe through which Caesar had been stabbed, the emotions of the crowd were stirred beyond control. Amid weird wailing and frenzied cries men gathered wood anywhere and built a fire beneath the corpse. Veterans threw their weapons upon the pyre as an offering, actors threw their costumes, musicians their instruments, women their most precious ornaments. Taking brands from the fire, some enthusiasts sought to burn down the houses of the conspirators; but these buildings were well guarded, and their masters had fled from Rome. A large part of the crowd stayed all night long by the smoldering pyre; many Jews, grateful for Caesar's sympathetic legislation, remained there three days, intoning their ancient funeral chants. During those days riot surged through the capital; at last Antony directed his sol diers to restore order and to fling persistent marauders from the T arpeian rock.


166-80: \Var with the Marcomanni
17+ (?): 1\Iarcus writes the Meditations
17\": Rebellion of Avidius Cassius
180: Death of Marcus Aurelius
180-9 : Pr;;,cipate of Commodus 183: Conspiracy of Lucilla 185: Fxecution of Perennis
189: Famine; execution of Cleander
190: Pertinax, prefect
193  (Jan. 1): Murder of Commodus
CHAPTER  XI
Augustan Statesmanship
30  B.C.-A.D. I 4
I. THE ROAD TO MONARCHY
ROM Alexandria Octavian passed to Asia and continued the reallotment of kingdoms and provinces. Not till the summer of 29 did he reach Italy. There almost all classes welcomed and feted him as a savior and joined in a triumph that lasted three days. The Temple of Janus was closed as a sign that for a moment Mars had had his fill. The lusty peninsula was worn out with twenty years of civil war. Its farms had been neglected, its towns had been sacked or besieged, much of its wealth had been stolen or destroyed. Administration and protection had broken down; robbers made every street unsafe at night; highwaymen roamed the roads, kidnaped travelers, and sold them into sbvery. Trade diminished, investment stood still, interest rates soared, property values fell. Morals, which had been loosened by riches and luxury, had not been improved by destitution and chaos, for few conditions are more demor::lizing than poyerty that comes after wealth. Rome was full cf men who had lost their economic footing and then their moral stability: soldiers who had tasted adventure and had learned to kill; citizens who had seen their savings consumed in the taxes and inflation of war and waited vacuously for some returning tide to lift them back to affiu ence; women dizzy with freedom, multiplying divorces, abortions, and adulteries. Childlessness was spreading as the ideal of a declining vitality; and a shallow sophistication prided itself upon its pessimism and cynicism. This was not a full picture of Rome, but a dangerous disease burning in its blood. On the sea piracy had returned, rejoicing in the suicide of states.
Cities and provinces licked their wounds after the successive exactions of Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Gabinius, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, and Octavian. Greece, which had been the battlefield, was ruined; Egypt was despoiled; the Near East had fed a hundred armies and bribed a thousand generals; their peoples hated Rome as a master who had destroyed their freedom without giving them security or peace. \Vhat if some leader should arise among them, discover the exhaustion of Italy, and unite them in an other war of liberation against Rome?
211
lll	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XI
Once a virile Senate would have faced these dangers, raised sturdy legions, found for them able captains, and guided them with far-seeing statesman ship. But the Senate was now only a name. The great families that had been its strength had died out in conflict or sterility, and the traditions of state craft had not been transmitted to the businessmen, soldiers, and provincials who had succeeded them. The new Senate gratefully yielded its major powers to one who would plan, take responsibility, and lead.
Octavian hesitated before abolishing the old constitution, and Dio Cas sius represents him as discussing the matter at great length with Maecenas and Agrippa. Since in their judgment all governments were oligarchies, the problem could not present itself to them as a choice among monarchy, aris tocracy, and democracy; they had to decide whether, under the given condi tions of space and time, oligarchy was to be preferred in a monarchical form based upon an army, or an aristocratic form rooted in heredity, or a demo cratic form resting on the wealth of the business class. Octavian combined them all in a "principate" that mingled the theories of Cicero, the precedents of Pompey, and the policies of Caesar.
The people accepted his solution philosophically. They were no longer enamored of freedom, but wearily wished for security and order; any man might rule them who guaranteed them games and bread. Vaguely they under stood that their clumsy comitia, clogged with corruption and racked with violence, could not govern the Empire, could not restore health to Italy, could not even administer Rome. The difficulties of freedom multiply with the area it embraces. When Rome ceased to be a city-state, empire drove it inexorably toward the imitation of Egypt, Persia, and Macedon. Out of the collapse of freedom into individualism and chaos a new government had to be created to forge a new order for a widened realm. All the Mediter ranean world lay in disorder at Octavian's feet, waiting for statesmanship.
He succeeded where Caesar had failed, because he was more patient and devious, because he understood the strategy of words and forms, because he was willing to move cautiously and slowly where his great-uncle had been forced by the brevity of time to wound living traditions and crowd a generation of changes into half a year of life. Moreover, Octavian had money. When he brought the treasury of Egypt to Rome, says Suetonius,
	"money became so abundant that the interest rate fell" from twelve to four per cent, and "the value of real estate rose enormously." As soon as Octavian made it clear that property rights were again sacred, that he was through with proscriptions and confiscations, money came out of hiding, investment took courage, trade expanded, wealth resumed its accumulation, and some of it trickled down to the workers and the slaves. All ranks in Italy were pleased to learn that Italy was to remain the beneficiary, and Rome the
CHAP. XI)	AUGUSTAN  STATESMANSHIP	113
capital, of the Empire; that the threat of a resurrected East had for a time been laid; and that Caesar's dream of a commonwealth with equal rights had been replaced by a quiet return to the privileges of the master race.
From this bountiful rapine Octavian first paid his debts to his soldiers. He kept 200,000 men in service, each bound to him by an oath of personal loyalty; the remaining 300,000 he discharged with an allotment of agri cultural land; and to each soldier he gave a substantial gift of money. He lavished presents upon his generals, his supporters, and his friends. On several occasions he made up deficits in the public treasury from his private funds. To provinces suffering from political depredations or acts of God he re mitted a year's tribute and sent large sums for relief. He forgave property owners all tax arrears and publicly burned the records of their debts to the state. He paid for the corn dole, provided prodigal spectacles and games, and presented cash to every citizen. He undertook great public works to end unemployment and beautify Rome, and paid for them out of his purse. Was it any wonder that the nations looked upon him as a god?
\Vhile all this money slipped through his hands this bourgeois empereur lived simply, shunning the luxuries of the nobles and the emoluments of office, wearing the garments woven by the women in his home, and sleep ing always in one small room of what had been the palace of Hortensius.


CHAP. IX)	CAESAR
and games; at one time Caesar owed him 800 talents ($2,880,000). Such loans were not acts of generosity or friendship; they were campaign con tributions, to be repaid with political favors or military spoils. Crassus, like Atticus, needed protection and opportunities for his millions. Most Roman politicians of the time incurred similar "debts": Mark Antony owed 40,000,- 000 sesterces, Cicero 60,000,000, iviilo 70,000,000-though these figures may be conservative slanders. We must think of Caesar as at first an unscrupulous politician and a reckless rake, slowly transformed by growth and respon sibility into one of history's most profound and conscientious statesmen. We must not forget, as we rejoice at his faults, that he was a great man not withstanding. We cannot equate ourselves with Caesar by proving that he seduced women, bribed ward leaders, and wrote books.
THE  CONSUL
Caesar began as the secret ally of Catiline and ended as the remaker of Rome. Hardly a year after Sulla's death he prosecuted Gnaeus Dola bella, a tool of the Sullan reaction; the jury voted against Caesar, but the people applauded his democratic offensive and his brilliant speech. He could not rival Cicero's verve and wit, passionate periods, and rhetorical flagella tions; indeed, Caesar disliked this "Asianic" style and disciplined himself to the masculine brevity and stern simplicity that were to distinguish his Com mentaries on the Gallic and Civil vVars. Nevenheless, he was soon ranked as second only to Cicero in eloquence.6
In 68 he was chosen quaestor and was assigned to serve in Spain. He led military expeditions against the native tribes, sacked towns, and collected enough plunder to pay off some of his debts. Ar the same time he won the gratitude of Spanish cities by lowering the interest charges on the sums that had been lent them by the Roman bankers. Coming at Gades upon a statue of Alexander, he reproached himself for having accomplished so little at an age when the Macedonia!} had conquered half the Mediterranean world. He returned to Rome and plunged again into the race for office and power. In 6 5 he was elected aedile, or commissioner of public works. He spent his money-i.e., the money of Crassus-in adorning the Forum with new build ings and colonnades, and courted the populace with unstinted games. Sulla had removed from the Capitol the trophies of .Marius-banners, pictures, and spoils representing the features and victories of the old radical; Caesar had these restored, to the joy of Marius' veterans; and by that act alone he announced his rebel policy. The conservatives protested and marked him out as a man to be broken.
170	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
In 64, as president of a commission appointed to try cases of murder, he summoned to his tribunal the surviving agents of Sulla's proscriptions and sentenced several of them to exile or death. In 63 he voted in the Senate against the execution of Catiline's accomplices and remarked casually, in his speech, that human personality does not outlive death; 7 it was apparently the only part of his speech that off ended no one. In that same year he was elected pontifex maxinms, head of the Roman religion. In 62 he was chosen praetor, and prosecuted a leading conservative for embezzling public funds. In 61 he was appointed propraetor for Spain, but his creditors prevented his departure. He admitted that he needed 25,000,000 sesterces in order to have nothing.8 Crassus came to his rescue by underwriting all his obligations. Caesar proceeded to Spain, led militarily brilliant campaigns against tribes with a passion for independence, and came back to Rome with spoils enough to pay off his debts and yet so enrich the Treasury that the Senate voted him a triumph. Perhaps the optimates were subtle; they knew that Caesar wished to stand for the consulate, that the law forbade candidacy in absence, and that the triumpbator was required by law to remain outside the city until the day of his triumph-which the Senate had set for after the election. But Caesar forewent his triumph, entered the city, and campaigned with irre sistible energy and skill.
His victory was obtained by his clever attachment of Pompey to the liberal cause. Pompey had just returned from the East after a succession of military and diplomatic achievements. By clearing the sea of pirates he had restored security to Mediterranean trade, and prosperity to the cities it served. He had pleased the capitalists of Rome by conquering Bithynia, Pontus, and Syria; he had deposed and set up kings and had lent them money from his spoils at lush rates of interest; he had accepted a huge bribe from the king of Egypt to come and quell a revolt there, and then had ref rained from carrying out the compact on the ground that it was illegal;9 he had pacified Palestine and made it a client state of Rome; he had founded thirty nine cities and had established law, order, and peace; all in all he had behaved with judgment, statesmanship, and profit. Now he had brought back to Rome such wealth in taxes and tribute, goods captured and slaves ransomed or sold, that he was able to contribute 200,000,000 sesterces to the Treasury, add 350,000,000 to its annual revenues, distribute 384,000,000 among his soldiers, and yet keep enough for himself to rival Crassus as one of the two richest men in Rome.
The Senate was more frightened than pleased at these accomplishments. It trembled when it heard that Pompey had landed at Brundisium (62) with army personally evoted to im a d capable at ?is word of making him dictator. He magnanimously relieved its fears by disbanding his troops and
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR
entering Rome with no other retinue than his personal staff. His triumph lasted two days, bur even that time pro\Ted insufficient for all the floats that pictured his victories and displayed his garnerings. The ungrateful Senate rejected his request that state lands be given his soldiers, refused to ratify his agreements with conquered kings, and restored those arrangements that Lucullus had made in the East and which Pompey had ignored. The effect of these actions was to break down Cicero's concordia ordinum, or alliance of the higher classes, and throw Pompey and the capitalists into a flirtation with the populares. Taking full advantage of the situation, Caesar formed with Pompey and Crassus the First Triumvirate (60), by which each pledged himself to oppose legislation unsatisfactory to any one of them. Pompey agreed to support Caesar for the consulate, and Caesar promised, if elected, to carry through the measures in which Pompey had been rebuffed by the Senate.
The campaign was bitter, and bribery flourished on both sides. When Cato, leader of the conservatives, heard that his party was buying votes, he unbent and approved the procedure as in a noble cause. The populares elected Caesar, the optimates Bibulus. Caesar had hardly entered upon his consulate (59) when he proposed to the Senate the measures asked for by Pompey: a distribution of land to 20,000 of the poorer citizens, including Pompey's soldiers; the ratification of Pompey's arrangements in the East; and a one-third reduction of the sum which the publicans had pledged them selves to raise from the Asiatic provinces. As the Senate opposed each of these measures by every means, Caesar, like the Gracchi, offered them di rectly to the Assembly. The conservatives induced Bibulus to use his veto power to forbid a vote, and had omens declared unfavorable. Caesar ignored the omens and persuaded the Assembly to impeach Bibulus; and an enthusi astic popularis emptied a pot of ordure upon Bibulus' head. Caesar's bills were carried. As in the case of the Gracchi, they combined an agrarian policy with a financial program pleasing to the business class. Pompey was im pressed by Caesar's performance of his pledges. He took Caesar's daughter Julia as his fourth wife, and the entente between plebs and bourgeoisie became a feast of love. The Triumvirs promised the radical wing of their following that they would support Publius Clodius for the tribunate in the fall of 59. Meanwhile they kept the voters in good humor with profuse amusements and games.
In April Caesar submitted his second land bill, bv which the areas owned by the state in Campania were to be distributed ;mong poor citizens who had three children. The Senate was again ignored, the Assembly passed the bill, and, after a century of effort, the Gracchan policy triumphed. Bibulus kept to his house and contented himself with periodical announcements that
172 ,	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
the omens were unpropitious to legislation. Caesar administered public affairs without consulting him, so that the town wits referred to the year as "the consulate of Julius and Caesar." To bring the Senate under public scrutiny, he established the first newspaper by having clerks make a record of Sena torial and other public proceedings and news, and post these Acta Diurna, or "Daily Doings," on the walls of the forums. From these walls the reports were copied and sent by private messengers to all parts of the Empire.10 Toward the end of this historic consulate Caesar had himself appointed governor of Cisalpine and Narbonese Gaul for the ensuing five years. As no troops could lawfuliy be stationed in Italy, the command over the legions stationed in north Italy gave its possessor military power over the whole peninsula. To guarantee the maintenance of his legislation, Caesar secured the election of his friends Gabinius and Piso as consuls for 58 and married Piso's daughter Calpurnia. To ensure continued support from the plebs he lent his decisive aid to the election of Clodius as tribune for 58. He did not let his plans be influenced by the fact that he had recently divorced his third
wife, Pompeia, on suspicion of adultery with Clodius.
MORALS AND POLITICS
Publius Clodius Pulcher (the Handsome) was a scion of the Claudian gens, a young aristocrat whose courage knew no fear and his morals no restraint. Like Catiline and Caesar he descended from his rank to lead the poor against the rich. To be eligible as a tribune of the people he had himself adopted into a plebeian family. To redistribute the concentrated wealth of Rome and to destroy Cicero-who had abused his sister-Clodia and stood for the sanctity of property-he•served as a subaltern to Caesar until he could take power into his own hands. He admired Caesar's policies and loved Caesar's wife. To gain access to her he disguised himself as a woman, entered the house of Caesar, then (62) high priest, took part in the ceremonies of fered by women alone to the Bona Dea, was detected, accused, and publicly tried (61) for having violated the mysteries of the Good Goddess. Caesar, called as a witness, said that he had no charge to make against Clodius. "\Vhy, then, asked the prosecutor, had he divorced Pompeia? "Because," said Caesar, "my wife must be above suspicion." It was a clever answer, which neither exonerated nor condemned a valuable political aide. Various wit nesses-perhaps bribed-told the court that Clodius had had relations with Clodia and had seduced his sister Tertia after her marriage to Lucullus. Clodius pro ested t at he had been away from Rome on the day of the alleged sacr'Jege; Cicero, however, testified that Clodius had on that day
CHAP. IX)	CAESAR	173
been with him in Rome. The populace thought the whole affair a Senatorial plot to destroy a populares leader and cried out for acquittal. Crassus some say at Caesar's behest-bribed a number of judges for Clodius. The radicals for once had the more money, and Clodius was freed. Caesar took advantage of the situation to exchange an inconveniently conservative wife for the daughter of a senator allied to the popular cause.
He had hardly retired from office when some conservatives proposed the complete annulment of his legislation. Cato did not conceal his opinion that these "Julian laws" should be wiped off the statute books. The Senate hesitated to fling so open a challenge to Caesar armed with legions and to Clodius wielding the tribunate. In 63 Cato had wooed the populace for the conservatives by renewing the state distribution of cheap corn; now
(58) Clodius countered by making the dole completely free to all who came for it. He passed bills through the Assembly forbidding the use of religious vetoes against legislative procedures and restoring the legality of the collegia, which the Senate had tried to disband. He reorganized these guilds into voting blocs and won such fealty from them that they provided him with an armed guard. Fearing that after his year as tribune had expired Cato or Cicero might attempt to undo Caesar's work, Clodius persuaded the As sembly to send Cato as commissioner to Cyprus, and to pass a decree banish ing any man who had put Roman citizens to death without securing, as law required, the Assembly's consent. Cicero saw that the measure was aimed at him and fled to Greece, where cities and dignitaries rivaled one another in offering him hospitality and honors. The Assembly decreed that Cicero's property should be confiscated, and his house on the Palatine was razed to the ground.
It was Cicero's good fortune that Oodius, overcome with success, now attacked both Pompey and Caesar, and planned to make himself sole leader of the plebs. Pompey retaliated by supporting the petition of Cicero's brother Quintus for the orator's recall. The Senate appealed to all Roman citizens in Italy to come to the capital and vote on the proposal. Clodius brought an armed gang into the Field of Mars to supervise the balloting, and Pompey engaged a needy aristocrat, Annius Milo, to organize a rival band. Riot and bloodshed ensued, many men were killed, and Quintus barely escaped with his life. But his measure carried, and after months of exile Cicero returned in triumph to Italy (57). Multitudes greeted him as he passed from Brun disium to Rome; there the welcoming crowd was so great that Cicero feigned fear that he would be accused of having contrived his banishment for the sake of this glorious restoration.11
Apparently he·had pledged himself to Pompey, and perhaps to Caesar, as the price of his recall. Caesar lent him large sums to recoup his finances and
174	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX


and dictatorship. Writing five years after Caesar's consulate, Cicero cast a dart in his direction:
Plato says that from the exaggerated license which people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root	and that at last such lib
erty reduces a nation to slavery. Everything in excess is changed into its opposite.... For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as leader ...	someone bold and unscrupulous ... who curries favor with the people by giving them other men's prop erty. To such a man, because he has much reason for fear if he remains a private citizen, the protection of public office is given, and continu ally renewed. He surrounds himself with an armed guard, and emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power.68
Nevertheless, Caesar won; and Cicero thought it best to bury his discontent in melodious platitudes on law, friendship, glory, and old age. Silent leges inter
166	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VIII
arma, he said-"laws are silent in time of war"; but at least he could muse on the philosophy of law. Following the Stoics, he de.fined law as "right reason in agree ment with nature"; 69 i.e., law seeks to make orderly and stable the relations that rise out of the social impulses of men. "Nature·has inclined us to love men"
(society), "and this is the foundation of law." 7° Friendship should be based
not upon mutual advantage but upon common interests cemented and limited by virtue and justice; the law of friendship should be "neither to ask dishonorable things, nor to do them if asked." 71 An honorable life is the best guarantee of a pleasant old age. An indulgent and intemperate youth delivers to age a body prematurely worn out; but a life well spent can leave both body and mind sound to a hundred years; witness Masinissa. Devotion to study may make one "unaware of the stealthy approach of old age." 72 Age as well as youth has its glories-a tolerant wisdom, the respectful affection of children, desire and ambition's fever cooled. Age may fear death, but not if the mind has been formed by philosophy. Beyond the grave there will be, at the best, a new and happier life; and at the worst there will be peace.73
All in all, Cicero's essays in philosophy are meager in result. Like his states manship they clung too anxiously to onhodoxy and tradition. He had all the curiosity of a scientist and all the timidity of a bourgeois; even in his philosophy he remained a politician, reluctant to offend any vote. He col lected the ideas of others, and balanced pros and cons so well that we come out from his sessions by the same door wherein we went. Only one thing redeems these little books-the simple beauty of their style. How pleasant Cicero's Latin is, how easy to read, how smoothly and clearly the stream of language flows! When he narrates events he catches some of the vivacity that made his speeches chain attention; when he describes a character it is with such skill that he mourns that he has no time to be Rome's greatest historian; 74 when he lets himself go he flowers into the balanced clauses and crashing periods which he had learned from Isocrates, and with which he had made the Forum resound. His ideas are those of the upper classes, but his style aims to reach the people; for them he labors to be clear, toils to make his truisms thrilling, and salts abstractions with anecdote and wit.
He re-createc the Latin language. He extended its vocabulary, forged from it a flexib!,; nstrument for philosophy, fitted it to be the vehicle of learning and literature in western Europe for seventeen hundred years. Posterity remembered him more as an author than as a statesman. When, despite all his reminders, men had almost forgotten the glory of his consulate, they cherished his conquests in letters and eloquence. And since the world
hon_ors form as well as substance, art as well as knowledge and power, he achieved, of all Romans, a fame second only to Caesar's. It was an exception that he could never forgive.
CHAPTER  IX
Caesar
100-44 B.C.
THE RAKE
AIUS JULIUS CAESAR traced his pedigree to Iulus Ascanius, son of Aeneas, son of Venus, daughter of Jupiter: he began and ended as
a god. The Julian gens, though impoverished, was one of the oldest and noblest in Italy. A Caius Julius had been consul in 489, another in 482, a Vopiscus Julius in 473, a Sextus Julius in 157, another in 91.1 From his uncle in-law .Marius he derived by a kind of avuncular heredity an inclination toward radical politics. His mother Aurelia was a matron of dignity and wisdom, frugally managing her small home in the unfashionable Subura a district of shops, taverns, and brothels. There Caesar was born 100 B.c., allegedly by the operation that bears his name.*
"Now was this Caesar," says Holland's Suetonius, "wondrous docible and apt to learn." His tutor in Latin, Greek, and rhetoric was a Gaul; with him Caesar unconsciously began to prepare himself for his greatest conquest. The youth took readily to oratory and almost lost himself in juvenile author ship. He was s:wed by being made military aide to Marcus Thermus in Asia. Nicomedes, ruler of Bithynia, took such a fancy to him that Cicero and other gossips later taunted him with having "lost his virginity to a king."2 Returning to Rome in 84, he married Cossutia to please his father; when, soon afterward, his father died, he divorced her and married Cornelia, daughter of that Cinna who had taken over the revolution from Marius. When Sulla came to power he ordered Caesar to divorce Cornelia; when Caesar refused, Sulla confiscated his patrimony and Cornelia's dowry, and listed him for death.
Caesar fled from Italy and joined the army in Cilicia. On Sulla's death he returned to Rome (78), but :finding his enemies in power he left again for Asia. Pirates captured him on the way, took him to one of their Cilician lairs, and offered to free him for twenty talents ($72,000); he reproached
It was already an ancient mode of binh, being mentioned in the laws ascribed to Numa. c_aesar's cognomen was not derived from the operation (caems ab utero matris); long before him there had been Caesars among the Julii.
1"67
168	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
them for underestimating his value, and volunteered to give them fifty. Hav ing sent his servants to raise the money, he amused himself by writing poems and readir.g them to his captors. They did not like them. He called them dull barbarians and promised to hang them at the earliest opportunity. When the ransom came he hurried to Miletus, engaged vessels and crews, chased and caught the pirates, recovered the ransom, and crucified them; but being a man of great clemency, he had their throats cut fust.3 Then he went to Rhodes to study rhetoric and philosophy.
Back again in Rome, he divided his energies between politics and love. He was handsome, though already worried about his thinning hair. When Cornelia died (68) he married Pompeia, granddaughter of Sulla. As this was a purely political marriage, he did not scruple to carry on liaisons in the fashion of his time; but in such number and with such ambigendered di versity that Curio (father of his later general) called him omnium mulierum vir et 01rmium virorum mulier-"the husband of every woman and the wife of every man."4 He would continue these habits in his campaigns, dallying with Oeopatra in Egypt, with Queen Eunoe in Numidia, and with so many ladies in Gaul that his soldiers in fond jest called him moechus calvus, the "bald adulterer"; in his triumph after conquering Gaul they sang a couplet warning all husbands to keep their wives under lock and key as long as Caesar was in town. The aristocracy hated him doubly-for undermining their privileges and seducing their wives. Pompey divorced his wife for her intimacy with Caesar. Cato's passionate hostility was not all philosophical: his half sister Servilia was the most devoted of Caesar's mistresses. When Cato, suspecting Caesar's complicity with Catiline, challenged him in the Senate to read aloud a note just brought to him, Caesar passed it to Cato without comment; it was a love letter from Servilia.5 Her passion for him continued throughout his life, and merciless gossip, in her later years, charged her with surrendering her daughter Tertia to Caesar's lust. During the Civil War, at a public auction, Caesar "knocked down" some confiscated estates of irreconcilable aristocrats to Servilia at a nominal price; when some ex pressed surprise at the low figure, Cicero remarked, in a pithy pun that might have cost him his life, Tertia deducta, which could either mean "a third off," or refer to the rumor that Servilia had brought her daughter to Caesar. Tertia became the wife of Caesar's prime assassin, Cassius. So the amours of men mingle with the commotions of states.
Probably these diversified investments helped Caesar's rise as well as his fall. Every woman he won was an influential friend, usually in the enemy's camp; and mOst of them remained his devotees even when his passion had cooled to courtesy. Crassus, though his wife Tertulla was reported to be Caesar's mistress, lent him vast sums to finance his candidacies with bribes


"Caesar le'.lds Gauls in his triumph, then into the Senate; the Gauls have removed their breeches, and put on the broad-rimmed toga" of the sena tors.52
Perhaps Caesar purposely made the new Senate too cumbersome a body for effective deliberation or unified opposition. He chose a group of friends Balbus, Oppius, Matius, and others-as an informal executive cabinet, and inaugurated the bureaucracy of the Empire by delegating the clerical details of his government, and the minutiae of administration, to his household of freedmen and slaves. He allowed the Assembly to elect half the city magis trates; he chose the rest by "recommendations" which the Assembly regu larly approved. As tribune he could veto the decisions of other tribunes or consuls. He increased the praetors to sixteen; and the quaestors to forty, to expedite municipal and judicial business. He kept a personal eye on every aspect of the city's affairs, and tolerated no incompetence or waste. In the city charters that he granted he placed severe injunctions and penalties
192	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
agaip.st electoral corruption and official malfeasance. To end the domination of politics by organized vote buying, and perhaps to secure his power against proletarian revolt, he abolished the collegia, except some of ancient origin and the essentially religious associations of the Jews. He restricted jury service to the two upper classes and reserved for himself the right to try the most vital cases; frequently he sat as judge, and none could deny the wisdom and impartiality of his decisions. He proposed to the jurists of his time an orderly codification of existing Roman law, but his early death frustrated the plan.
Resuming the work of the Gracchi, he distributed lands to his veterans and the poor; this policy, continued by Augustus, for many years pacified the agrarian agitation. To forestall the rapid reconcentration of landowner ship he ruled that the new lands could not be sold within twenty years; and to check rural slavery he passed a measure requiring that a third of the laborers on ranches should be freemen. Having turned many idle proletaires into soldiers and then into peasant proprietors, he further diminished their ranks by sending 80,000 citizens as colonists to Carthage, Corinth, Seville, Aries, and other centers. To provide work for the remaining unemployed in Rome he spent 160,000,000 sesterces in a great building program. He had a new and more spacious meeting place for the assemblies set up in the Field of Mars, and relieved the congestion of business in the Forum by adding, near ir, a Forum lulium. He embellished likewise many cities in Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Greece. Having so eased the pressure of poverty, he required a means test for eligibility to the state dole of grain. At once the number of applicants fell from 320,000 to 150,000.
So far he had remained true to his role as a champion of the populares. But since the Roman revolution was more agrarian than industrial, and was aimed chiefly at the landed slave-driving aristocracy, then at the money lenders, and only mildly at the business classes, Caesar continued the Gracchan policy of inviting businessmen to support the agrarian and fiscal revolution. Cicero sought to unite the middle classes with the aristocracy; Caesar sought to unite them with the plebs. Many of the great capitalists, from Crassus to Balbus, helped to finance him, as similar men helped the American and French Revolutions. Nevertheless, Caesar ended one of the richest sources of financial profiteering-the collection of provincial taxes through corporations of publicans. He scaled down debts, enacted severe laws against excessive interest rates, and relieved extreme cases of insolvency by establishing the law of bankruptcy essentially as it stands today. He restored the stability of the currency by basing it upon gold and iss ina a golden trUreus, equivalent in purchasing power to the British pound sterling in the nineteenth century. The coins of his government were stamped with
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CHAP. IX)	CAESAR	193
his own features and were designed with an artistry new to Rome. A novel order and competence entered the administration of the Empire's finances, with the result that when Caesar died the Treasury contained 700,000,000 sesterces, and his private treasury 100,000,000.
As a scientific basis for taxation and administration, he had a census taken of Italy, and planned a like census of the Empire. To replenish a citizenry decimated by war, he granted the Roman franchise widely-among others, to physicians and teachers in Rome. Long disturbed by the fall in the birth rate, he had in 59 given precedence in land allotments to fathers of three children; now he promulgated rewards for large families and forbade child less women under forty-five to ride in litters or wear jewelry-the weakest and most futile part of his varied legislation.
Still an agnostic, though not quite free from superstitions,53 Caesar remained high priest of the state religion and provided it with the usual funds. He restored old temples and built new ones, honoring above all his alma mater Venus. But he allowed full liberty of conscience and worship, withdrew old prohibitions against the Isis cult, and protected the Jews in the exercise of their faith. Noting that the calendar of the priests had lost all concord with the seasons, he commissioned the Alexandrian Greek Sosigenes to devise, on Egyptian models, the "Julian calendar": henceforth the year was to consist of 365 days, with an added day in every fourth Feb ruary. Cicero complained that Caesar, not content with ruling the earth, was now regulating the stars; but the Senate accepted the reform gr:;aciously, and gave the dictator's family name, Julius, to the month Quinctilis-which had been fifth when March opened the year.
As impressive as these things done are the works begun or planned by Caesar but postponed by his assassination. He laid the foundations of a great theater, and of a temple to Mars propartioned to that god's voracity. He appointed Varro to head an organization for the establishment of public libraries. He designed to free Rome from malaria by draining Lake Fucinus and the Pontine marshes, and reclaiming these acres for tillage. He proposed to raise dykes to control the Tiber's floods; by diverting the course of that stream he hoped to improve the harbor at Ostia, periodically ruined by the river's silt. He instructed his engineers to prepare plans for building a road across central Italy and for cutting a canal at Corinth.
The most resented of his undertakings was to make the freemen of Italy equal citizens with those of Rome, and the provinces ultimately equal with Italy. In 49 he had enfranchised Cisalpine Gaul; now (44) he drew up a municipal charter, apparently for all the cities of Italy, equalizing their rights with Rome's; probably he was planning some representative govern ment by which they would have had a democratic share in his constitutional
194	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. IX
monarchy.55 He took the appointment of provincial governors out of the hands of the corrupt Senate and himself named to these posts men of proved ability, who remained at every moment subject to recall at his will. He reduced provincial taxes by a third, and entrusted their collection to special officials responsible to himself. He overrode ancient curses to restore Capua, Carthage, and Corinth-completing again the work of the Gracchi. To the colonists whom he sent to found or people a score of cities from Gibraltar to the Black Sea, he gave Roman or Latin rights, and evidently
hoped to extend Roman citizenship to all free adult males in the Empire; the Senate was then to represent not a class 1n Rome, but the mind and will of every province. This conception of government, and Caesar's reorgani zation of Rome and Italy, completed the miracle whereby the youthful spendthrift and roisterer had become one of the ablest, bravest, fairest, and most enlightened men in all the sorry annals of politics.
Like Alexander he did not know where to stop. Contemplating his re ordered realm, he resented its exposure to attack at the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Rhine. He dreamed of a great expedition to capture Parthia and avenge his old pocketbook Crassus; of a march around the Black Sea and the pacification of Scythia; of the exploration of the Danube and the conquest of Germany.56 Then, having made the Empire secure, he would return to Rome laden with honor and spoils, rich enough to end economic depression, powerful enough to ignore all opposition, free at last to name his successor, and to die with the pax Romana as his supreme legacy to the world.
BRUTUS
\Vhen news of this plan trickled through Rome the common people, who love glory, applauded; the business classes, smelling war orders and pro vincial loot, licked their chops; the aristocracy, foreseeing its extinction on Caesar's return, resolved to kill.him before he could go.
He had treated these bluebloods with such generosity as to stir Cicero's eloquence in his praise. He had forgiven all surrendering foes and had con demned to death only a few officers who, defeated and pardoned, had fought against him again. He had burned unread the correspondence he had found in the tents of Pompey and Scipio. He had sent the captured daughter and grandchildren of Pompey to Pompey's son Sextus, who was still in arms against him; and he had restored the statues of Pompey which his followers had thrown down. He had given provincial governorships to Brutus and Cassius, and high office _to any others of th_eir class. He bore silently a thousand slanders, and msatuted no proceedmgs against those whom he


330	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XV
This immense trade produced prosperity for two centuries, but its un sound basis ruined Roman economy in the end. Italy made no attempt at equaling imports with exports; she appropriated the mines, and taxed the people, of half a hundred states to provide her with the money to meet her international balances. As the richer veins of the mines gave out, and the zest for exotic luxuries continued, Rome tried to stave off the breakdown of her import system by conquering new mineral regions like Dacia, and by de basing her once incorruptible currency-turning ever less bullion into ever more coin. "\Vhen the costs of administration and war mounted nearer to the profits of empire, Rome had to pay for goods with goods, and could not. Italy's dependence upon imported food was her viral weakness; the moment she could not force other countries to send her food and soldiers she was doomed. i\leanwhile the provinces recovered not only prosperity but eco nomic initiative: Italian merchants, in this first century A.D., almost disap peared from Eastern ports, while Syrian and Greek traders established them selves at Delos and Puteoli and multiplied in Spain and Gaul. In the leisurely oscillation of history the East was preparing once more to dominate the West.
IBE  BANKERS
How were production and commerce financed? First by the maintenance of a comparatively reliable currency internationally honored. All Roman coins had suffered gradual depreciation since the First Punic War, for the Treasury had found it convenient to pay off governmental war debts by permitting the inflation that naturally comes from the multiplication of money and the diminution of goods. The as, originally a pound of copper, had been reduced to two ounces in 241, one ounce in 202, half an ounce in 87 B.C., and a quarter ounce in A.D. 60. During the final century of the Re public the generals had issued their own coinage, usually in aurei, gold coins, normally worth one hundred sesterces. From this military coinage that of the emperors was descended, and the emperors followed Caesar's custom of stamping their effigies on their issues as symbols of the state's guarantee. The sesterce was now made from copper instead of silver and was revalued at four asses.* Nero lowered the silver content of the demrius to ninety per cent of its former quantity, Trajan to eighty-five per cent, Aurelius to seventy-five, Commodus to seventy, Septimius Severus to fifty. Nero re-
In referring to the period a_frer Nero, Roman currency will be equated at two thirds its general value under the Republic: th as at two and half, the sesterce at ten, the denarius at fol'o/,.cents,.and t e tal nr at $2400. m re  of Umted States currency of 1942. Since lesser vanan ns will agam be ignored, the reader will remember that all equivalents are very loosely approximate.
CHAP. XV)	ROME  AT  WORK	33 I
duced the aureus from one fortieth of a pound of gold to one forty-fifth, Caracalla to one fiftieth. A general rise of prices accompanied these deprecia-
	tions, but income seems to have risen commensurately until Aurelius; per haps this controlled inflation was a simple way of relieving debtors at the expense of creditors whose superior ability and opportunity, unchecked, would have concentrated wealth to the point of economic coagulation and political revolution. Despite these changes we must consider the Roman fiscal system one of the most successful and stable in history. For two cen turies a single monetary standard was honored throughout the Empire; and with this stable medium investment and trade flourished as never before in the memory of men.
Consequently bankers were everywhere. They served as money-changers, accepted checking accounts and interest-bearing deposits, issued travelers' checks and bills of exchange, managed, bought, and sold re::ilty, placed in vestments and collected debts, and lent money to individuals and parmer ships. This banking system had come from Greece and the Gr ek East, and was mostly in the hands of Greeks and Syrians even in Italy and the \Vest; in Gaul the words for Syrian and banker were synonyms. 9 Interest rates, which had sunk to four per cent under the weight of Augustus' Egyptian spoils, rose to six per cent after his death, and reached their legal maximum of twelve per cent by the age of Constantine.
The famous "panic" of A.D. 33 illustrates the development and complex interdependence of banks and commerce in the Empire. Augustus had coined and spent money lavishly, on the theory tha·t its increased circulation, low interest rates, and rising prices would stimulate business. They did; but as the process could not go on forever, a reaction set in as early as 10 B.c., when this flush minting ceased. Tiberius rebounded to the opposite theory that the most economical economy is the best. He severely limited the governmental expenditures, sharply restricted new issues of currency, and hoarded 2,700,000,000 sesterces in the Treasury. The resulting dearth of circulating medium was made worse by the drain of money eastward in exchange for luxuries. Prices fell, interest rates rose, creditors foreclosed on debtors, debtors sued usurers, and moneylending almost ceased. The Senate tried to check the export of capital by requiring a high percentage of every senator's fortune to be invested in Italian land; senators thereupon called in loans and foreclosed mortgages to raise cash, and the crisis rose. \Vhen the senator Publius Spinther notified the bank of Balbus and Ollius that he must withdraw 30,000,000 sesterces to comply with the new law, the furn an nounced its bankruptcy. At the same time the failure of an Alexandrian firm, Seuthes and Son-due to their loss of three ships laden with costly spices and the collapse of the great dyeing concern of Malchus at Tyre, led to
332	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XV
rumors that the Roman banking house of Maximus and Vibo would be broken by their extensive loans to these firms. vVhen its depositors began a "run" on this bank it shut its doors, and later on that day a larger bank, of' the Brothers Pettius, also suspended payment. Almost simultaneously came news that great banking establishments had failed in Lyons, Carthage, Cor inth, and Byzantium. One after another the banks of Rome closed. Money could be borrowed only at rates far above the legal limit. Tiberius finally met the crisis by suspending the land-investment act and distributing 1 00,- 000,000 sesterces to the banks, to be lent without interest for three years on the security of realty. Private lenders were thereby constrained to lower their interest rates, money came out of hiding, and confidence slowly re tumed.50
THE CLASSES
Nearly evfrybody in Rome worshiped money with mad pursuit, and all but the bankers denounced it. "How little you know the age you live in," says a god in Ovid, "if you fancy that honey is sweeter than cash in hand!" 51
-and a century later Juvenal sarcastically hails the sanctissima divitiarum mai
estas, "the most holy majesty of wealth." To the end of the Empire Roman law forbade the Senatorial class to invest in commerce or industry; and though they evaded the prohibition by letting their freedmen invest for them, they despised their proxies and upheld rule by birth as the sole alternative to rule by money, or myths, or the sword. After all the revolutions and the deci mations the old class divisions remained, with brand-new titles: members of the Senatorial and equestrian orders, magistrates and officials, were called honestiores, i.e., "men of honors" or offices; all the rest were humiliores, "lowly," or tenuiores, "weak." A sense of honor often mingled with the proud gravity of the senator: he served in a succession of public posts with out pay and at much personal expense; he administered important functions with a fair degree of competence and integrity; he provided for public games, helped his clients, freed some of his slaves, and shared a pan of his fortune with the people through benefactions before or after his death. Be cause of the obligations his position entailed, he was required to have a million sesterces to enter or remain in the Senatorial class.
One senator, Gnaeus Lentulus, had 400,000,000 sesterces; but with this exception the greatest fortunes in Rome were those of businessmen who did not disdain to handle money or trade. While reducing the powers of the Senate, the emperors had favored the business class with high office, had protected industry, commerce, and finance, and had based upon equestrian support the security of the Principate against patrician intrigue..Membership
CHAP, XV)	ROME  AT  WORK	333
in this second order required 400,000 sesterces and specific nomination by the prince. Consequently many men of means belonged to the plebs.
The plebs was now a motley receptacle of such innominate businessmen, freeborn workers, peasant proprietors, teachers, doctors, artists, and freed men. The census defined the proletarii not by their occupation but by their offspring (proles); an old Latin treatise called them "plebeians who offer nothing to the state but children." 52 Most of them found employment in the shops, factories, and commerce of the city at an average wage of a denarius (forty cents) a day; this rose in later centuries, but not faster than prices.53 Exploitation of the weak by the strong is as natural as eating and differs from it only in rapidity; we must expect to find it in every age and under every form of society and government; but rarely has it been so thorough and unsentimental as in ancient Rome. Once all men had been poor, and had not known their poverty; now penury rubbed elbows with wealth, and suffered from consciousness. Absolute destitution, however, was prevented by the dole, the occasional gifts of patrons to clients, and the lordly legacies of rich men like Balbus, who left twenty-five denarii to every citizen of Rome. Class divisions verged upon caste; yet an able man might free himself from slavery, make a fortune, and rise to high office in the service of the prince. The freedman's son became a fully enfranchised free man, and his grandson could become a senator; soon a freedman's grandson, Pertinax, would be emperor.
During the first century many high offices were filled by freedmen. They
often had charge of the imperial finances in the provinces, the waterways of Rome, the mines and quarries and estates of the emperor, and the provision ing of the army camps. Freedmen and slaves, nearly all of Greek or Syrian origin, managed the imperial palaces and held vital positions in the imperial cabinet. Petty industry and trade fell increasingly into the control of freed men. Some of them became great capitalists or landowners; some accumu lated the largest fortunes of their time. Their past had seldom given them moral standards or elevated interests; after their liberation money became the absorbing interest of their lives; they made it without scruple and spent it without taste. Petronius savagely excoriated them in Trirnalchio, and Seneca, less bitter, smiled at the new rich who bought books in orna mental sets but never read them.54 Probably these satires were in part the jealous reactions of a caste that saw its ancient prerogatives of exploitation and luxury encroached upon, and could not forgive the men who were rising to share its perquisites and power.
The success of the freedmen must have given some consoling hope to the class that did most of the manual work in Italy. Beloch estimated the slaves in Rome about 30  B.c. at some 400,000, ornearly half the population; in
334	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XV
Italy at 1,500,000. If we may believe the table gossipers of Athenaeus, some Romans had 20,000 slaves.55 A proposal that slaves be required to wear a distinctive dress was voted down in the Senate lest they should realize their numerical strength.56 Gden reckoned the proportion of slaves to freemen at Pergamum about A.D. 170 as one to three-i.e., twenty-five per cent; probably this proportion was not much different in other cities.56a Human prices varied from 330  sesterces for a farm slave to the 700,000 ($105,000) paid by Marcus Scaurus for Daphnis the grammarian;57 the average price was now 4000 sesterces ( $400). Eighty per cent of the employees in industry and retail trade were slaves, and most of the manual or clerical work in govern ment was performed by servi publici-"public slaves." Domestic slaves were of every variety and condition: personal servants, handicraftsmen, tutors, cooks, hairdressers, musicians, copyists, librarians, artists, physicians, philos ophers, eunuchs, pretty boys to serve at least as cupbearers, and cripples to provide amusement by their deformities; there was a special market at Rome where one might buy legless, armless, or three-eyed men, giants, dwarfs, or hermaphrodites.58 Household slaves were sometimes beaten, occasionally killed. Nero's father killed his freedmen because they refused to drink as much as he wished.59 In an angry passage of his essay on anger Seneca de scribes the "wooden racks and other instruments of torture, the dungeons and other jails, the fires built around imprisoned bodies in a pit, the hook dragging up the corpses, the many kinds of chains, the varied punishments, the tearing of limbs, the branding of foreheads";59a all these, apparently, entered into the life of the agricultural slave. Juvenal describes a lady as having slave after slave thrashed while her hair was being curled,60 and Ovid pictures another mistress jabbing hairpins into her maidservant's arms;61 but these tales have the earmarks of literary concoctions and must not be taken for history.


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CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN   ROME
THE SEXES
The moral life of youth was carefully guarded in the girl, leniently super vised in the young man. The Roman, like the Greek, readily condoned the resort of men to prostitutes. The profession was legalized and restricted; brothels (lupanaria) were by law kept outside the city walls and could open only at night; prostitutes (meretrices) were registered by the aediles and were required to wear the toga instead of the stola. Some women enrolled as prostitutes to avoid the legal penalties of detected adultery. Fees were ad justed to bring promiscuity within the reach of every pocketbook; we have heard of the "quarter-of-an-as woman." But there was now a rising number of educated courtesans who sought to win patrons by poetry, singing, music, dancing, and cultured conversation. One did not have to go outside the walls to find these or other ladies of easy persuasion; Ovid assures us that they could be met under the porticoes, at the circus, in the theater, "as numerous as stars in the sky";84 and Juvenal found them in the precincts of temples, particularly that of Isis, a goddess lenient to love.85 Christian authors charged that prostitution was practiced within the cellas and between the altars of Roman temples.36
Male prostitutes were also available. Condemned by law, tolerated by
custom, homosexualism flourished with Oriental abandon. "I am stricken with the heavy dart oflove," sings Horace-and forwhom?-"for Lyciscus, who claims in tenderness to outdo any woman"; from this passion he can be freed "only by another flame for some fair maid or slender youth." 37 Mar rial's choicest epigrams turn upon pederasty; and one of Juvenal's least publishable satires represents the complaint of a woman against this out rageous competition.38 Erotic pcetry of indifferent worth and gender, the Priapeia, circulated freely among sophisticated youths and immature adults. Marriage contended bravely with these rival outlets and, helped by anxious parents and matrimonial brokers, managed to find at least temporary hus bands for nearly every girl. Unmarried women above nineteen were con sidered "old maids," but they were rare. The betrothed couple seldom saw each other; there was no courtship, not even a word for it; Seneca com plained that everything else was tested before purchase, but not the bride by the groom.39 Sentimental attachment before marriage was uncommon; love poetry was addressed to married women or to women whom the poet never thought of marrying; and women's escapades came after marriage, as under similar conditions in medieval and modern France. The elder Seneca assumed widespread adultery among Roman women,40 and bis philosopher
370	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVII
son thought that a married woman content with two lovers was a paragon of fidelity.41 "Pure women," sang the cynical Ovid, "are only those who have not been asked; and a man who is angry at his wife's amours is a mere rustic." 42 These may be literary conceits; more reliable is the simple epitaph of Quintus Vespillo to his wife: "Seldom do marriages last without divorce until death; but ours continued happily for forty-one years." 43 Juvenal tells of a woman who married eight times in five years.44 Having been wed for property or politics rather than for love, some women considered their duty fulfilled if they surrendered their dowries to their husbands and their per sons to their lovers. "Did we not agree," an adulteress in Juvenal explained to her unexpected husband, "that we should both do as we liked?" 45 The "emancipation" of women was as complete then as now, barring the formali ties of the franchise and the letter of dead laws. Legislation kept women subject, custom made them free.
In a number of cases emancipation, as in our time, meant industrialization. Some women worked in shops or factories, especially in the textile trades; some became lawyers and doctors;46 some became politically powerful; the wives of provincial governors reviewed and addressed troops.47 The Vestal Virgins secured political appointments for their friends, and the women of Pompeii announced their political preferences on the walls. Conservatives moaned and gloated over the apparent fulfillment of Cato's warning that if women achieved equality they would turn it into mastery. Juvenal was horrified to find women actresses, athletes, gladiators, poets;48 Martial de scribes them as fighting wild beasts, even lions, in the arena;49 Statius tells of women dying in such jousts.50 Ladies rode through the streets in sedan chairs, "exposing themselves on every side to the view";51 they conversed with men in porticoes, parks, gardens, and temple courts; they accompanied them to private or public banquets, to the amphitheater and the theater, where "their bare shoulders," said Ovid, "give you something charming to contem plate." 52 It was a gay, colorful, multisexual society that would have aston ished the Periclean Greeks. In the spring fashionable women filled the boats, shores, and villas of Baiae and other resorts with their laughter, their proud beauty, their amorous audacities, and political intrigue. Old men denounced them longingly.
Frivolous or immoral women were then, as now, a conspicuous minority. Quite as numerous-though not always distinct-were the ladies who fell in love with art, religion, or literature. Sulpicia's verses were thought worthy of being handed down with those of Tibullus; they were highly erotic, but as they were addressed to her husband they were almost virtuous.53 Martial's friend Theophila was a philosopher, a real expert on the Stoic and Epicurean
CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN  ROME	371
systems. Some women busied themselves in philanthropy and social service, gave temples, theaters, and ponicoes to their towns, and contributed as patronesses to collegia. An inscription at Lanuvium speaks of a curia ntuli erum, "an assembly of women"; Rome had a conventus matronarum; perhaps Italy had a national federation of women's clubs. In any case, after reading Martial and Juvenal, we are disconcened to find so many good women in Rome. Octavia faithful to Antony through every betrayal, and rearing devotedly his exotic children; Antonia her loving daughter, the chaste widow of Drusus, and the perfect mother of Germanicus; Mallonia, who publicly reproved Tiberius for his wickedness and then killed herself; Arria Paeta, who, when Caecina Paetus was ordered by Claudius to die, plunged a dag3"er into her breast and, dying, handed the weapon to her husband with the assuring words, "It does not hurt";54 Paulina, who tried to die with Seneca; Politta, who, when Nero had her husband executed, began to starve herself, and, when the same sentence came to her father, joined him in suicide;55 Epicharis, the freedwoman who suffered every tor ture rather than betray the conspiracy of Piso; the unnumbered women who concealed and protected their husbands in the proscriptions, went with them into exile, or like Fannia, wife of Helvidius, defended them at great risk and cost: these alone would tip the scale against all the trollops of Manial's epigrams and Juvenal's stings.
Behind such heroines were the nameless wives whose marital fidelity and maternal sacrifices sustained the whole structure of Roman life. The old Roman virtues-pietas, gravitas, simplicitas-the mutual devotion of parents and children, a sober sense of responsibility, an avoidance of extravagance or display-still survived in Roman homes. The refined and wholesome families described in Pliny's letters did not suddenly begin with Nerva and Trajan; they had existed quietly through the age of the despots; they had survived the espionage of emperors, the debasement of a helpless populace, the vulgarity of the demimonde. We catch glimpses of such homes in the epitaphs of mate to mate and of parents to children. "Here," reads one, "lie the bones of Urbilia, wife of Primus. She was dearer to me than life. She died at twenty-three, beloved of all. Farewell, my consolation!" And another: "To my dear wife, with whom I passed eighteen happy years.For love of her I have sworn never to remarry." 56 We can picture these women in their homes-spinning wool, scolding and educating their children, directing servants, carefully administering their modest funds, and sharing with their husbands in the immemorial worship of the household gods. Despite her immorality it was Rome, not Greece, that raised the family to new heights in the ancient world.
372	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XVII
DRESS
If we may judge from a few hundred statues, the Roman males of Nero's day were stouter and softer in figure and features than the men of the young Republic. World rule kept many of them characteristically hard and stem, fearful rather than lovable; but food and wine and sloth had rounded many others into shapes that would have scandalized the Scipios. They still shaved, or, more usually, were shaved by barbers (to11sores). A youth's first shave was a holyday in his life; often he piously dedicated his original whiskers to a god.57 Common Romans continued the republican tradition and had their hair cut close, or even cropped, but an increasing number of dandies had theirs curled; Mark Antony and Domitian are so represented. Many men wore wigs, some had the semblance of hair painted on their pates.58 All classes, indoors and out, now dressed in a simple tunic or blouse; the toga was donned only for formal occa sions, by clients at receptions and by patricians in the Senate or at the games. Caesar wore a purple toga as a sign of office; many dignitaries imitated him; but soon the purple robe became a prerogative of the emperors. There were no irksome trousers, no elusive buttons, no drooping'hose; but in the second century men began to wrap their legs with fasciae, or bands. Footwear ranged from the sandal-a leather or cork sole attached Nipponwise by a thong between the big and second toes-to the high shoe of full leather, or of leather and cloth, usually worn with the toga in synthesis or full dress.
Roman women of the early Empire, as seen in frescoes and statuary and on coins, were much like the women of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, except that they were nearly all brunette. Their figures were moderately slender, and their robes gave their carriage a hypnotic grace. They knew the value of sunshine, exercise, and fresh air; some brandished dumbbells, some swam assiduously, some dieted; others reined in their bosoms with stays.59 Feminine hair was usually combed back and bound in a knot behind the neck, often enclosed in a net, and tied with a band or ribbon over the head. Later fashions demanded a loftier coiffure, supported by wire and elaborated with a wig of blonde hair imported from German maids.60 A woman of fashion might occupy several slaves for hours in manicuring her nails and dressing her hair.61 Cosmetics were as varied as today. Juvenal describes "beautification" as one of the most important technologies of the age; physicians, queens, and poets wrote volumes on the subject.62 A Roman lady's boudoir was an arsenal of cosmetic instruments-tweezers, scissors, razors, files, brushes, combs, strigils, hair nets, wigs-and jars or phials of perfumes, creams, oils, pastes, pumice stone, soaps. Depilatories were used to remove hair, scented ointments to wave it or fix it. 1\fany women applied to their faces a nocturnal mask of dough and asses' milk in a mixture concocted by Poppaea, who found it helpful in repairing a bad complexion; therefore asses followed her in all her travels; sometimes she took a
CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN   ROME	373
whole herd with her and bathed in asses' milk.63 Faces were whitened or rouged with p:iint, brows and eyelashes were dyed black or painted over, sometimes the veins of the temple were traced with delicate lines of blue.64 Juvenal complained that a rich woman "reeks of Poppaean oinnnents that stick to the lips of her unfortunate husband," who never sees her face. Ovid found these arts disillusion ing and advised the ladies to conceal them from their lovers-all but the combing of their hair, which entranced him.66


Marching back into Asia, he met the vast polyglot army of D..rius at Gaugamela, near Arbela, and was dismayed by their multitude; he knew that one defeat would cancel all his victories. His soldiers comforted him: "Be of good cheer, Sire; do not fear the great number of the enemy, for they will not be able to stand the very smell of goat that clings to us.,,.• He spent the night in reconnoitering the ground on which he was to give battle, and in offering sacrifices to the gods. His victory was decisive. The disorderly hosts of Darius could make no headway against the phalanxes, and knew not how to defend themselves against the swift and incalculable dashes of the Macedonian cavalry; they broke and fled, and Darius was not the last to go. While Darius' generals assassinated him as a coward, Alexander received the submission of Babylon, partook of its weaith, distributed some of it to his soldiers, but charmed the city by making obeisance to its gods, and decreeing the restoration of its sacred shrines. By the end of the year
( 331) he had reached Susa, whose population, still remembering the ancient glory of Elam, welcomed him as a deliverer. He protected the city from pillage, but comforted his troops by dividing among them some of the fifty thousand talents ($300,000,000) that he found in Darius' vaults. To the people of Plataea he sent a substantial sum because they had so bravely resisted the Persians in 480; and to the Greek cities of Asia he appears to have remitted the "donations" that he had elicited from them at the outset of his campaign."" And he announced proudly to the Greeks of the world that they were now completely free from Persian rule.
Hardly stopping to rest at Susa, he marched over mountains in the depth of winter to seize Persepolis; and so rapidly did he move that he was in Darius' palace before the Persians could conceal the royal treasury. Here again his good judgment left him, and he burned the magnificent city to the ground. His soldiers looted the houses,.ravaged the women, and killed
Dinocrates had pleased Alexander by proposing to carve Mt. Athos-six thousand feet high--into a figure of Alexander standing waist deep in the sea, holding a city in one hand and a harbor in the other."' The project was never carried out.
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXII
the men. Perhaps they had been infuriated by seeing, on their approach to the town, eight hundred Greeks who, for various reasons, had suffered mutilation at the hands of Persians by the cutting off of legs, arms, or ears, or the gouging out of the eyes. Alexander, moved to tears by the sight, gave them lands, and assigned dependents to work for them.
Still insatiate, he attempted now what Cyrus the Great had failed to ac complish-the subjugation of the tribes that hovered on the eastern borders of Persia. Perhaps in his simple geography he hoped to find, beyond that mystic East, the ocean that would serve as a natural frontier for his con quered realm. Entering Sogdiana, he came upon a village inhabited by the descendants of those Branchidae who, in 480, had surrendered to Xerxes the treasures of their temple near Miletus. Fevered with the thought that he was revenging the pillaged god, he ordered all the inhabitants slain, in cluding the women and children-visiting the sins of the fathers upon the fifth generation. His campaign in Sogdiana, Ariana, and Bactriana was bloody and bootless; he achieved some victories, found some gold, and left enemies everywhere behind him. Near Bokhara his men captured Bessus, who had slain Darius. Alexander, suddenly making himself the avenger of the Great King, had Bessus whipped almost to death, had his nose and ears cut off, and then sent him to Ecbatana, where he was executed by having his arms tied to one, and his legs to the other, of two trees that had been drawn together by ropes, so that when the ropes were cut the trees pulled the body to pieces... At every new remove from Greece Alexander was becoming less and less a Greek, more and more a barbarian king.
The year 32 7 found him passing over the Himalayas into India. Vanity conspired with curiosity to lead him into such distant territory; his gen erals advised against it, his army obeyed him unwillingly. Crossing the Indus, he defeated King Porus, and announced that he would continue to the Ganges. But his soldiers refused to go farther. He pied with them, and for three days, like a scion of Achilles, pouted in his tent; but they had had enough. Sadly he turned back, loath to face west again, and forced his way through hostile tribes with such personal bravery that his soldiers wept at their inability to realize all his dreams. He was the first to scale the walls of the Mallians; after he and two others had leaped into the city the ladders broke, and they found themselves alone amidst the enemy. Alexander fought till he sank exhausted by his wounds. •Meanwhile his troops had made their way into the town, and soldier after soldier sacrificed his life to protect the fallen King. When the battle was over Alexander was carried to his tent, and his veterans kissed his garments as he passed. After three
CHAP.xxn)	ALEXANDER	S47
months of convalescence he renewed his march along the Indus, and at last reached the Indian Ocean. There he sent on part of his forces by water under Nearchus, who skillfully accomplished the long voyage in unfamiliar seas. Alexander himself led the rest of his army northwest along the coast of India and through the desert of Gedrosia (Baluchistan), where the suf ferings of hIS men rivaled those of Napoleon's army on the return from Moscow. Heat killed thousands, thirst killed more. A little water was found, and was brought to Alexander, but he deliberately poured it out upon the ground." When th.i:: remnants of his force reached Susa some ten thousand had died, and Alexander was half insane.
Ill. THEDEATH OF A GOD
He had now spent nine years in Asia, and he had changed the continent by his victories less than it had transformed him by its ways. He had been told by Aristotle to treat Greeks as freemen, "barbarians" as slaves. But he had been surprised to find among the Persian aristocrats a degree of refinement and good manners not often seen in the turbulent democracies of Greece; he admired the manner in which the Great Kings had organized their empire, and wondered how his rough Macedonians could replace such governors. He concluded that he could give some permanence to his conquests only by reconciling the Persian nobles to his lea,dership, and using them in administrative posts. More and more charmed by his new subjects, he abandoned the idea of ruling over them as a Macedonian, and conceived himself as a Greco-Persian emperor governing a realm in which- Persians and Greeks would be on an equal footing, and would peaceably mingle their culture and their blood. The long quarrel of.Europe and Asia would end in a wedding feast.
Already thousands of his soldiers had married native women, or were living with them; should he not do likewise, marry the daughter of Darius, and reconcile the nations by begetting a king who would unite both dynas ties in his veins? He had already married Roxana, a Bactrian princess; but this was a negligible impediment. He broached the plan to his officers, and suggested that they, too, should take Persian wives. They smiled at his hopes of uniting the two nations, but they had been a long time away from home, and the Persian ladies were beautiful. So in one great nuptial at Susa (324) Alexander married Statira, daughter of Darius III, and Pary satis, daughter of Artaxerxes III, attaching himself in this way to both
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXII
branches of Persian royalty, while eighty of his officers took Persian brides. Thousands of similar marriages were soon afterward celebrated among the soldiers. Alexander gave each officer a substantial dowry, and paid the debts of the marrying soldiers-which amounted (if we may believe Ar rian) to twenty thousand talents ($120,000,000) ... Tofurther this union of peoples he opened lands in Mesopotamia and Persia to Greek colonists, thereby reducing the pressure of population in some of the Greek states, and mitigating the class war; now began those Hellenized Asiatic cities which were to be a vital part of the Seleucid Empire. At the same time he drafted thirty thousand Persian youths, had them educated on Greek lines, and taught them the Greek manual of war.
Possibly his wives had something to do with his rapid adoption of Orien tal ways; possibly it was a failure of modesty, or a part of his plan. "In Persia," says Plutarch, "he first put on the barbaric" (i.e., foreign) "dress, perhaps with the view of making the work of civilizing the Persians easier, as nothing gains more upon men than a conformity to their customs. . . . However, he followed not the Median fashion ... but taking a middle way between the Persian mode and the Macedonian, so contrived his habit that it was not so flaunting as the one, and yet more pompous and magnificent than the other.""° His soldiers saw in this change the conquest of Alexan der by the Orient; they felt that they had lost him, and they mournfully missed the signs of solicitude and affection which he had once showered upon them. The Persians made every obeisance to him, and flattered him to his heart's content; the Macedonians, themselves softened by Oriental luxury, grumbled at the tasks that he laid upon them, forgot his beneficence, murmured of desertion, and even plotted against his life. He began to pre fer the society of the Persian grandees.
His culminating apostasy, or diplomacy, was his announcement of his own divinity. In 324 he sent word to all the Greek states except Mace donia (where the insult to Philip might have aroused resentment) that he wished hereafter to be publicly recognized as the on of Zeus-Ammon. Most of the states complied, feeling it to be merely a form; even the ob stinate Spartans agreed, saying, "Let Alexander be a god if he wants to." It was not so much for a man to be a god in the Greek sense of the term; the chasm between humanity and deity was not as wide then as it was to become in modern theology; several Greeks had overleaped it, like Hip podameia, Oedipus, Achilles, Iphigenia, and Helen. The Egyptians had always thought of their Pharaohs as gods; if Alexander had neglected to rank himself similarly the Egyptians might have been disturbed by so bold
CHAP.XXII)	ALEXANDER	549
a violation of precedent. The priests at Siwa, Didyma, and Babylon, who were believed to have special sources of information in this field, had all assured him of his divine origin. That (as Grote thought11) Alexander actu ally believed himself to be a god in a more than metaphorical sense is quite unlikely. It is true that after his self-deification he became increasingly irritable and arrogant; that he sat on a golden throne, wore sacred vest ments, and sometimes adorned his head with the horns of Ammon."' But when he was not playing his divinity for world stakes he smiled at his own honors. Being injured by an arrow, he remarked to some friends, "This, you see, is blood, and not such ichor as flows from the wounds of the Immortals."11 That he had not taken too seriously his mother's tale of the thunderbolt appears from his flaming anger at Attalus' imputations on his birth, and his remark about the need of sleep as distinguishing man from the gods. Even Olympias laughed when she heard that Alexander had made her legend official. "When," she asked, "will Alexander stop slander ing me to Hera?""' Despite his godhead Alexander continued to offer sac rifice to the gods-an unheard-of thing for a divinity. Plutarch and Arrian, able to judge the matter as Greeks, took it for granted that Alexander deified himself as a means to easier rule over a superstitious and heterogeneous population... Doubtless he felt that the task of unifying two hostile worlds would be facilitated by the reverence which the common people would give him if his claims to divinity were accepted by the upper classes. Per haps, indeed, he thought to overcome the disruptive diversity of faiths in his empire by providing, in his own person, the beginning of a sacred myth and a common unifying faith.*
The Macedonian officers could not fathom Alexander's policy. The Greek spirit had touched them to the point of mental emancipation, but not to the point of philosophical toleration; they found it humiliating to prostrate themselves, as he now demanded, in approaching the King. One of his bravest officers, Philotas, son of his ablest and most favored general, Parmenio, entered into a conspiracy to kill the new god. Alexander got wind of it, had Philotas arrested, and wrung from,him by torture a confes sion implicating his own father. Philotas was forced to repeat the confes sion before the soldiers, who, in accord with their custom in such cases, at once stoned him to death; Parmenio was executed by messenger as prob-
Lucian gives the ancient view in one of his Dialogues of the Dead: "Philip. You cannot deny that you are my son, Alexander; if you had been Ammon's son you would not have died. Alex. I knew all the time that you were my father. I only accepted the statement of the oracle because I thought it was good policy   When the barbarians thought they had a
god to deal with, they gave up the struggle; which made their conquest an easy matter.',.
550	T.HE  LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.llll
ably guilty, and in any case a presumptive enemy. From that moment to the end, the relations between Alexander and his army became increas ingly strained-the troops ever more discontent, the King ever more sus picious, severe, and lonely.
His solitary exaltation and the growing multitude of his cares inclined him to seek forgetfulness in heavy draughts of wine. At a banquet in Samarkand Cleitus, who had saved his life at the Granicus, drank himself into such candor as to tell Alexander that his victories had been won by his soldiers rather than by him, and that Philip's achievement had been much greater. Alexander, equally drunk, rose to strike him, but Ptolemy Lagus (soon to be ruler of Egypt) hurried Cleitus away. Cleitus, however, had more to say; he escaped from Ptolemy, and went back to finish his tirade. Alexan der hurled a lance at him and killed him. Overcome with remorse, the King secluded himself for three days, refused to eat, fell into hysteria, and tried to end his own life. Soon afterward Hermolaus,	page whom Alex ander had unjustly punished, formed another conspiracy against him. The boy was appre·hended, and under torture made a confession incriminating Aristotle's nephew Callisthenes. The latter, who was accompanying the expedition as official historian, had already offended the King by refusing to prostrate himself before him, openly criticizing him for his Oriental ways, and boasting that Alexander would be known to posterity only through Callisthenes the historian. Alexander had him put in prison, where, seven months later, he died.• This incident put an end to the friendship between Alexander and Aristotle, who had for years been risking his life to defend Alexander's cause in Athens.		•


166: First rismg o the Maccabees; Book
of Daniel
165: Judas Maccabee restores theTemple services
163-62: Antiochus V (Eupator) Seleucid emperor
162-50: Demetrius I (Soter) Seleucid em peror
161: Judas Maccabee makes treaty with Rome
16o: Defeat and death of Judas Mac
cabee
160-39: Attalus II King of Pergamum
157: Judea becomes an independent priestly state
155: Carneades in Rome
150-45: Alexander Balas, Seleucid emperor
150: Hipparchus of Nicaea and Seleucus of Seleucia, astronomers; Moschus of Smyrna, poet
146: Mummius sacks Corinth; Greece and Macedonia become a province of Rome
CHAPTER XXIII
Greece and Macedon
I. THE STRUGGLE FOR POWER
ISTORIANS divide the past into epochs, years, and events, as thought divides the world into groups, individuals, and things; but history, like nature, knows only continuity amid change: historia non facit saltum-history makes no leaps. Hellenistic Greece did not feel Alexan der's death as "the end of an age"; it looked upon him as the beginning of "modern" times, and as a symbol of vigorous youth rather than a factor in decay; it was convinced that it had now entered upon its richest maturity, and that its leaders were as magnificent as any in the past except the in comparable young King himself.' In many ways it was right. Greek civ ilization did not die with Greek freedom; on the contrary it conquered new areas and spread in three directions as the formation of vast empires broke down the political barriers to communication, colonization, and trade. Still enterprising and alert, the Greeks moved by hundreds of thousands into Asia and Egypt, Epirus and Macedon; and not only did Ionia flower again, but Hellenic blood, language, and culture made its way into the interior of Asia Minor, into Phoenicia and Palestine, through Syria and Babylonia, across the Euphrates and the Tigris, even to Bactria and India.
Never had the Greek spirit shown more zest and courage; never had Greek
letters and arts won so wide a victory.
Perhaps that is why historians are wont to end their histories of Greece with Alexander; after him the extent and complexity of the Greek world baffle any unified view or continuous narrative. There were not only three major monarchies-Macedonia, Seleucia, and Egypt; there were a hundred Greek city-states, of all degrees of independence; there was a maze of alliances and leagues; there were half-Greek states in Epirus, Judea, Pergamum, Byzantium, Bithynia, Cappadocia, Galatia, Bactria; and in the west were Greek Italy and Sicily, torn between aging Carthage and youth ful Rome. Alexander's rootless empire was too loosely bound together by language, communication, customs, and faith to survive him. He had left not one but several strong men behind him, and none could be content with less than sovereignty. The size and diversity of the new realm dis-
557
558	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	( CHAP, XXIII
missed all thought of democracy; self-government, as the Greeks under stood it, presupposed a city-state whose citizens could come periodically to a common meeting place; and besides, had not the philosophers of demo cratic Athens denounced democracy as the enthronement of ignorance, envy, and chaos? Alexander's successors-who were therefore termed Diadochi-had been Macedonian chieftains, long accustomed to rule by the sword; democracy, except as the occasional consultation of their aides, never entered their heads. After some minor trials at arms which disposed
-0f lesser contenders, they divided the empire into five parts (32 1 )-An tipater taking Macedonia and Greece, Lysimachus Thrace, Antigonus Asia Minor, Seleucus Babylonia, and Ptolemy Egypt. They did not bother to call a confirming synod of the Greek states. From that moment, except for some fitful interludes in Greece, and the aristocratic republic of Rome, monarchy ruled Europe until the French Revolution.