With little and great lights mixed together: how great art thou, King above all for ever!
Nor is anything done upon the earth apart from thee: nor in the firmament, nor in the seas:
Save that which the wicked do: by their own folly.
But thine is the skill to set even the crooked straight: what is with out fashion is fashioned and the alien akin before thee.
Thus hast thou fitted together all things in one: the good with the evil:
That thy word should be one in all things: abiding for ever.
Let folly be dispersed from our souls: that we may repay thee the honor wherewith thou hast honored us:
Singing praise of thy works for ever: as becometh the sons of men."'
Man is to the universe as microcosm to macrocosm; he too is an organism with a material body and a material soul. For whatever moves or influences the body, or is moved or influenced by the body, must be corporeal. The soul is a fiery breath or pneu1na diffused through the body, just as the world soul is diffused through the world. At death the soul survives the body, but only as an impersonal energy. At the final conflagration the soul will be reabsorbed, like Atman into Brahm n, into that ocean of energy which is God.
Since man is a part of God or Nature, the problem of ethics can be easily solved: goodness is co-operation with God, or Nature, or the Law of the World. It is not the pursuit or enjoyment of pleasure, for such pursuit sub ordinates reason to passion, often injures the body or the mind, and seldom satisfies us in the end. Happiness can be found only through a rational ad justment of our aims and conduct to the purposes and laws of the universe. There is no contradiction between the good of the individual and the good of the cosmos, for the law of well-being in the individual is identical with the law of Nature. If evil comes to the good man it is only temporary, and
is not really evil; if we could understand the whole we should see the good
CHAP,XXIX)  THE  SURRENDER OF PHILOSOPHY	655
behind whatever evil appears in the parts.• The wise man will study science only sufficiently to find the law of Nature, and will then adapt his life to that Law. Zen kata physin, to live according to Nature-this is the pur pose and sole excuse of science and philosophy. Almost in Newman's words Cleanthes surrenders his will to God's:
Lead me,0 God, and thou my Destiny,
To that one place which you will have me fill. I follow gladly. Should I strive with thee,
A recreant, I needs must follow still.•
The Stoic, therefore, will shun luxury and complexity, economic or po litical strife; he will content himself with little, and will accept without complaint the difficulties and disappointments of life. He will be indiffer ent to everything but virtue and vice-to sickness and pain, good or ill re pute, freedom or slavery, life or death. He will suppress all feelings that may obstruct the course or question the wisdom of Nature: if his son dies he will not grieve, but will accept Fate's decree as in some hidden way the best. He will seek so complete an apatheia, or absence of feeling, that his peace of mind will be secure against all the attacks and vicissitudes of for
tune, pity, or love.t He will be a hard teacher and a stem administrator.
Determinism does not imply indulgence; we must hold ourselves, and others, morally responsible for every action. When Zeno beat his slave for steal ing, and the slave, having a little learning, said, "But it was fated that I should steal," Zeno answered, "And that I should beat you."11 The Stoic looks upon virtue as its own reward, and as an absolute duty or categorical impera tive, derived from his participation in divinity; and he will console himself, in misfortune, by remembering that in following the divine law he becomes an incarnate god."" When he is tired of life, and can leave it without injur ing others, he will have no scruples against suicide. Cleanthes, having reached his seventieth year, entered upon a long fast; and then, saying that he would not go back after coming halfway, continued it until he died...
The Stoic, however, is not unsocial, neither so proud of poverty as the Cynic, nor so enamored of solitude as the Epicurean. He accepts marriage and the fainily as necessary, though he has no praise for romantic love; he
Wars, said Chrysippus, are a useful corrective of overpopulation, and bedbugs do us the service of preventing us from oversleeping.•
t Chrysippus proposed to limit the care of dead relatives to the simplest and quietest burial; it would be still better, he thought, to use their flesh as food.•
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXIX
dreams of a utopia in which all women will be in common."' He accepts the state, even monarchy; he has no fond memories of the city-state, and con siders the average man a dangerous simpleton; he prefers the Antigonids to King Mob. In truth he cares little for any government; he wishes that all men might be philosophers, so that laws would be unnecessary; he thinks of perfection not, as Plato and Aristotle did, in terms of the good society, but in terms of the good man. He may take part in political affairs, and will support every move, however modest, toward human freedom and dignity; but he will not fetter his happiness to place or power. He may give his life for his country, but he will reject any patriotism that hinders his loyalty to all mankind; he is a citizen of the world. Zeno, in whose veins, as we have seen, there probably flowed both Greek and Semitic blood, longed like Alexander for a breaking down of racial and national barriers, and his in ternationalism reflects Alexander's passing unification of the eastern Medi terranean world. Ultimately, Zeno and Chrysippus hoped, all those war ring states and classes would be replaced by one vast society in which there would be no nations, no classes, no rich or poor, no masters or slaves; in which philosophers would rule without oppression, and all men would be brothers as the children of one God.1111
Stoicism was a noble philosophy, and proved more practicable than a modem cynic would expect. It brought together all the elements of Greek thought in a final effort of the pagan mind to create a system of morals ac ceptable to the classes that had abandoned the ancient creed; and though it naturally won only a small minority to its standard, those few were every where the best. Like its Christian counterparts, Calvinism and Puritanism, it produced the strongest characters of its time. Theoretically it was a mon strous doctrine of an isolated and pitiless perfection. Actually it created men of courage, saintliness, and good will like Cato the Younger, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius; it influenced Roman jurisprudence in building a law of nations for non-Romans; and it helped to hold ancient society together until a new faith came. The Stoics lent countenance to superstition, and had an injurious effect upon science; but they saw clearly the basic prob lem of their age-the collapse of the theological basis of morals-and they made an honest attempt to bridge the gap between religion and philosophy. Epicurus won the Greeks, Zeno won the aristocracy of Rome; and to the end of pagan history the Stoics ruled the Epicureans, as they always will. When a new religion took form out of the intellectual and moral chaos of the dying Hellenistic world, the way had been prepared for it by a philoso-


442	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.:XVIll
enormous sum of fifty talents ($300,000). About the same time (429) his sister and his two legitimate sons died of the plague. The Athenians, find ing no leader to replace him, recalled him to power (429); and, to show their esteem for him, and their sympathy i.n his bereavement, they over rode a law that he himself had passed, and bestowed citizenship upon the son that ,l\spasia had borne to him. But the aging statesman had himself been infected by the plague; he grew weaker day by day, and died within a few months after his restoration to office. Under him Athens had reached her zenith; but because that height had been attained in part through the wealth of an unwilling Confederacy, and through a power that invited almost universal hostility, the Golden Age was unsound in its foundations, and was doomed to disaster when Athenian statesmanship failed in the strategy of peace.
Perhaps, as Thucydides suggests, Athens might have come through to victory nevertheless, if it had pursued to the end the Fabian policy laid down by Pericles. But his successors were too impatient to carry out a program that required a proud self-control. The new masters of the demo cratic party were merchants like Cleon the dealer in leather, Eucrates the rope seller, Hyperbolus the lampmaker; and these men demanded an active war on land as well as sea. Cleon was the ablest of them, the most elo quent, unscrupulous, and corrupt. Plutarch describes him as "the first ora' tor among the Athenians that pulled off his cloak and smote his thigh when addressing the people";"' Cleon made it a point, says Aristotle, to appear on the rostrum in the garb of a workingman.11 1-{e was the first in a long line of demagogues that ruled Athens from the death of Pericles to the loss of Athenian independence at Chaeronea (338).
Cleon's ability was proved in 425 when the Athenian fleet besieged a Spartan army on the island of Sphacteria, near Messenian Pylus. No admiral seemed capable of taking the stronghold; but when the Assembly gave Cleon charge of the siege (half hoping that he would be killt>d in action), he surprised all by carrying through the attack with a skill and courage that forced the Lacedaemonians to an unprecedented surrender. Sparta, humbled, offered peace and alliance in return for the c_aptured men, but Cleon's oratory persuaded the Assembly to reject the offer and con tinue the war. His hold on the populace was strengthened by a proposal, easily carried, that the Athenians should henceforth pay no taxes to the support of the war, but should finance it by raising the tribute exacted of the subject cities in the Empire (424). In these cities, as in Athens, the policy of Cleon was to get as much money out of the rich as he could find.
CHAP, XVIII)	THE   SUICIDE  OF GREECE	443
When the upper classes of Mytilene rebelled, overthrew the democracy, and declared Lesbos free of allegiance to Athens (429), Cleon moved that all adult males in the disaffected city be . put to death. The Assembly perhaps a mere quorum-agreed, and sent a ship with orders to that effect to Paches, the Athenian general who had put down the revolt. When word of the ruthless edict got about Athens the steadier heads called for another meeting of the Assembly, secured the repeal of the decree, and dispatched a second ship which reached Paches just in time to prevent a massacre. Paches sent to Athens a thousand ringleaders, who, at Cleon's suggestion, and in accordance with the custom of the age, were all put to death."
Cleon redeemed himself by dying in battle against the Spartan hero Brasidas, who was capturing one after another of the cities subject or allied to Athens in the mainland north. It was in this campaign that Thucydides lost his naval commission and his Athenian residence by coming up too tardily to the relief of Amphipolis, which commanded the gold mines of Thrace. Brasidas having died in the same campaign, Sparta, left leaderless in the face of a threatened Helot revolt, offered peace again; and Athens, for once taking the advice of the oligarchic leader, signed the Peace of Nicias {421). The rival cities not only declared the war ended, but signed an alliance for .fifty years; and Athens committed herself to go to the help of Sparta should the Helots rise.115
ALCIBIADES
Three factors turned this pledge of a half century of friendship into a brief truce of six years: the diplomatic corruption of the peace into "war by other means"; the rise of Alcibiades as the leader of a faction that favored renewed hostilities; and the attempt of Athens to conquer the Dqrian colonies in Sicily. Sparta's allies refused to sign the agreement; they fell away from Sparta as now a weakened state, and transferred their alliance to Athens. Alcibiades,· while keeping Athens formally at peace, maneuvered them into a war with Sparta, and united them in battle against her at Mantinea (418). Sparta won, and Greece relapsed into an angry truce.
Meanwhile Athens sent a fleet to the Dorian isle of Melos to demand its entrance as a subject state into the Athenian Empire {416). According to Thucydides, who here probably sinks the historian into the sophistical philosopher or the revengeful exile, the Athenian envoys gave no other
444	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	( CHAP. XVIII
reason for their action than that might is right. "Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it; we found it existing before, and shall leave it to exist forever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do."'" The Melians refused to yield, and announced that they would put their trust in the gods. Later, as irresistible reinforcements came to the Athenian fleet, they surrendered at the discretion of the conquerors. The Athenians put to death all adult males who fell into their hands, sold the women and children as slaves, and gave the island to five hundred Athenian colonists. Athens rejoiced in the conquest, and prepared to illus trate in a living tragedy the theme of her dramatists, that a vengeful nemesis pursues all insolent success.
Alcibiades was one of those who, in the Assembly, defended the reso lution condemning the male population of Melos to death." His support for any motion usually sufficed to carry it, for he was now the most famous man in Athens, admired for his eloquence, his good looks, his versatile genius, even his faults and crimes. His father, the rich Cleinias, had been killed at the battle of Coronea; his mother, an Alcmaeonid and near rela tive of Pericles, had persuaded the statesman to bring up Alcibiades in his home. The boy was troublesome, but intelligent and brave; at twenty he fought beside Socrates at Potidaea, and at twenty-six at Delium (424). The philosopher seems to have felt a warm attachment for the youth, and . called him to virtue, says Plutarch, with words that "so overcame Alci biades as to draw tears from his eyes, and disturb his very soul. Yet some times he would abandon himself to flatterers, when they proposed to him varieties of pleasure, and would desert Socrates, who would then pursue him as if he had been a fugitive slave."18
The wit and pranks of the young man became the shocked and fas cinated gossip of Athens. When Pericles reproved his immodest dogma tism by saying that he too had talked cleverly in his youth, Alcibiades answered, "Pity I couldn't have known you when your brain was at its best.'m Purely to meet the challenge of his fellow roisterers, he publicly struck in the face one of Athens' richest and most powerful men, Hip ponicus. The next morning he entered the house of the frightened mag nate, bared his body, and begged Hipponicus to scourge him in punishment. The old man was so overwhelmed that he gave the youth his daugh ter Hipparete in marriage, with a dowry of ten talents; Alcibiades per-
CHAP. XVIII)	THE   SUICIDE  OF GREECE	445
suaded him to double it, and spent most of it on himself. He lived on a scale of luxury never known in Athens before. He filled his home with costly furniture, and engaged artists to paint pictures on the walls. He kept a stud of racing horses, and often won the chariot race at Olympia; once his entries took the first, second, and fourth prizes in one contest, whereupon he feasted the whole Assembly.20 He fitted out triremes, and paid the expenses of choruses; and when the state called for war contribu tors his donations topped all the rest. Free from any inhibition of con science, convention, or fear, he frolicked through youth and early manhood with such animal spirits that all Athens seemed to enjoy his happiness. He lisped a little, but with a charm that made all fashionable young men lisp; he wore a new cut of shoe, and soon all the gilded youth of the city were, wearing "Alcibiades shoes." He violated a hundred laws and injured a hundred men, but no one dared bring him before a court. His popularity with the hetairai was so general that he wore on his golden shield an Eros with a thunderbolt, as if to announce his victories in love.11 His wife, after bearing his infidelities with patience, returned to her father's house, and prepared to sue for divorce; but when she appeared before the archon Alcibiades caught her up in his arms and carried her home through the market place, no one venturing to oppose him. Thereafter she gave him full freedom, and contented herself with the crumbs of his love; but her early death suggests a heart broken by his inconstancy.
Entering politics after the death of Pericles, he found only one rival the rich and pious Nicias. But Nicias favored the aristocracy, a11d peace; therefore Alcibiades set himself to favor the commercial classes, and preached an imperialism that touched Athenian pride; the Peace of Nicias was sufficiently discredited in his eyes by bearing his rival's name. In 420 he was elected one of the ten generals, and began those ambitious schemes that led Athens back into war. When the Assembly acclaimed him Timon the misanthrope rejoiced, predicting great calamities."
THE SICILIAN ADVENTURE
It was the imagination of Alcibiades that ruined the work of Pericles. Athens had recovered from the plague and the war, and trade was again bringing her the wealth of the Aegean. But the law of every being' is self development;_no ambition, no empire, is ever content. Alcibiades dreamed of carving out a new realm for Athens in the rich cities of Italy and Sicily; there Athens would find grain, materials, and men; there she would control
446	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVIll
the foreign food supply of the Peloponnesus; there she might double the tribute that was making her the greatest city in Greece. Only Syracuse could rival her; and that was a thought hard for Athens to bear. If she could take Syracuse all the western Mediterranean would fall into her lap, and a splendor would come to Athens such as even Pericles had not con ceived.
In 427 Sicily, imitating the mainland, had divided into warring camps, one led by Dorian Syracuse, the other by Ionian Leontini. Leontini sent Gorgias to Athens to seek help, but Athens was then too weak to respond. Now, in 416, Segesta dispatched envoys to Athens to say that Syracuse was planning to subjugate all Sicily, make the island Dorian in government, and supply food and money to Sparta should the great war be renewed. Alcibiades leaped to his opportunity. He argued that the Sicilian Greeks were hopelessly divided, even within each city; that it would be a simple matter-given a little courage-to annex the whole island to the Empire; that the Empire must continue to grow, or begin to decay; and that a little war now and then was a necessary training for an imperial race." Nicias pied with the Assembly not to listen to any man whose personal extrava gance tempted him to wild schemes of aggrandizement; but the eloquence of Alcibiades and the imagination of a people now dangerously free from moral scruples won the day. The Assembly declared war against Syra cuse, voted funds for a vast armada, and, as if to ensure defeat, divided the command between Alcibiades and Nicias.
Preparations went on with the characteristic fever of war, and the occa sion of the fleet's departure was awaited as a patriotic festival. But shortly before this appointed day a strange occurrence shocked a city that had lost much of its piety but none of its superstitions. Some unknown per sons, under cover of night, had knocked off the noses, ears, and phalli from the figures of the god Hermes that stood before public buildings and many private dwellings as an emblem of fertility and a guardian of the home. An excited investigator brought forward the unreliable evidence of aliens and slaves that the prank had been perpetrated by a drunken party of Alci biades' friends, led by Alcibiades himself. The young general protested his innocence, and demanded to be tried at once, that he might be con victed or cleared before the departure of the fleet; but his enemies, fore seeing his acquittal, succeeded in postponing the trial. And so in 415 the great flotilla set sail, led by a timid pacifist who hated war, and by an audacious militarist whose genius of leadership was frustrated by the di-
CHAP. XVIII)	THE   SUICIDE  OF GREECE	447
vided command, and the dread, among the crews, that he had incurred the enmity of the gods.


was so pleased with the artist's busts of him that he made him the official royal
sculptor, as he had given the exclusive right to Apelles to paint his likeness, and to Pyrgoteles to engrave it upon gems.
Some of the finest sculptural remains of the fourth century are anony-
Other artists, said Lysippus, in a sentence that would have pleased Manet. made men as
they were. while he made them "as they appeared."18
CHAP. xx)   LETTERS AND ARTS IN THE  FOURTH CENTURY	499
mous: the bronze statue of a youth found in the sea near Marathon, an ancient copy of a fourth-century Hermes of Andros, and a modest, pen sive, delicate Hygiaea found at Tegea*-all three in the Athens Museum; and in the Boston Museum, from Chios, a profoundly beautiful Head of a Girl. To this period, so far as we can make out, belong most of the Niobid figures that came to Rome from Asia Minor in the days of Augus tus, and are now scattered among the museums of Europe. And perhaps to this age must be assigned the originals of three Aphrodites in the Praxit elean tradition: the hesitant Venus of Capua in the Naples Museum, the Vatican's Crouching Venus, and the modest Venus of Arles in the Louvre. Greater than these in mature beauty and quiet depth of feeling is the seated Demeter found at Cnidus in 1858, and now among the noblest fig ures in the British Museum. The subject is uncertain; perhaps it is merely the finest funerary piece that has come down to us from antiquity; per haps it represents the corn goddess as a mater dolorosa, silently mourning the rape of Persephone. The emotion is conveyed with classic restraint; all the tenderness of motherhood, and its silent resignation, are in the face and eyes. This and the Hermes, and not those ingratiating Aphrodites, are the living sculptural masterpieces of fourth-century Greece.
" This lovely head, which has been used as symbol and first illustration for this volume, was stolen from the little museum at Tegea, and, after nine years' search, was found in a granary in a village of Arcadia by Alexandre Philadelpheus, the gracious curator of the National Museum at Athens. Both the subject and the period are uncertain; but the Prax itelean style seem to date it in the fourth century. M. Philadelpheus considers it "the pearl of the National Musewn."
CHAPTER  XXI
TheZenith  of Philosophy
I.  THE SCIENTISTS
OMPARED with the bold advance of the fifth century, and the revolu
tionary achievements of the third, science in the fourth marked time, and contented itself, in great part, with recording its accumulations. Xenocrates wrote a history of geometry, Theophrastus a history of natural philosophy, Menon a history of medicine, Eudemus histories of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.1 The problems of religion, morals, and politics appearing to be more vital and pressing than the problems of nature, men turned with Socrates from the objective study of the material world to a consideration of the sou] and the state.
Plato loved mathematics, dipped his philosophy into it deeply, dedicated the Academy to it, almost, in Syracuse, gave a kingdom for it. But arithmetic was for him a half-mystical theory of number; geometry was not a measuring of the earth, it was a discipline of pure reason, a portal to the mind of God. Plu tarch tells of Plato's "indignation" at Eudoxus and Archytas for carrying on experiments in mechanics, "as the mere corruption and annihilation of the one good of geometry, which was thus shamefully turning its back upon the un embodied objects of pure intelligence to recur to sensation, and to ask help ... from matter." In this way, Plutarch continues, "Mechanics came to be sepa rated from geometry, and, repudiated or neglected by philosophers, took its place as a military art."" Nevertheless, in his own abstract way, Plato served mathematics well. He redefined the point as the beginning of a line," formu lated a rule for finding square numbers that are the sum of two squares,' and invented or developed mathematical analysis"-i.e., the proof or disproof of a proposition by considering the results that follow from assuming it; the reductio ad absurdum is one form of this method. The emphasis on mathematics, in 'the curriculum of the Academy, helped the science if only by training such crea tive pupils as Eudoxus of Cnidus and Heracleides of Pontus.
Plato's friend Archytas, besides being seven times chosen strategos of Taras, and writing several tracts of Pythagorean philosophy, developed the mathe matics of music, doubled the cube, and wrote the first known treatise on me chanics. Antiquity credited him with three epochal inventions-the pulley, the screw, and the rattle; the first two laid the foundations of machine industry, the
500
CHAP.XX!)	THE   ZENITH  OF PHILOSOPHY	501
third, says the grave Aristotle, "gave children something to occupy them, and so prevented them from breaking things about the house."" In this same age Dinostratus "squared the circle" by using the quadratrix curve. His brother Menaechmus, a pupil of Plato, founded the geometry of conic sections,• doubled the cube, formulated the theoretical construction of the five regular solids,t advanced the theory of irrational numbers, and gave the world a famous phrase. "0 King," he said to Alexander, "for traveling over the country there are both royal roads and roads for common citizens; but in geometry there is
one road for all."t8
The great name in fourth-century science is Eudoxus, who helped Praxiteles to give Cnidus a niche in history. Born there about 408, he set out at the age of twenty-three to study medicine with Philistion at Locri, geometry with Archytas at Taras, and philosophy with Plato at Athens. He was poor, and lived cheaply at the Piraeus, whence he walked to the Academy every scholastic day. After a stay in Cnidus he went to Egypt and spent sixteen months study ing astronomy with the priests of Heliopolis. We find him next in Propontine Cyzicus, lecturing on mathematics. At the age of forty he moved with his pupils to Athens, opened there a school of science and philosophy, and for a time rivaled Plato. Finally he returned to Cnidus, set up an observatory, and was entrusted with the task of giving the city a new code of laws.9
His contributions to geometry were fundamental. He invented the theory of proportion,§ and most of the propositions, transmitted to us in the fifth book of Euclid; and he devised the method of exhaustion which made it possible to calculate the area of the circle and the volume of the sphere, the pyramid, and the cone; without this preliminary work Archimedes would have been im possible. But the absorbing interest of Eudoxus was in astronomy. We catch the spirit of the scientist in his remark that he would gladly be consumed like Phaethon if he might thereby discover the nature, size, and form of the sun.'° The word astrology was then used to include what we call astronomy, but Eudoxus advised his pupils to ignore the Chaldean theory that a person's for tune could be told by noting the position of the stars at the time of his birth. He longed to reduce all celestial motions to fixed laws; and in his Phainomena which antiquity considered its greatest book on astronomy-he laid the founda tion for the scientific predicton of the weather.
The Greeks defined conic sections as the figures-ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola-pro duced by cutting an acute-angled, a right-angled, and an obtuse-angled cone with a plane perpendicular to an element.' Modem mathematics adds the circ;;le and intersecting lines.
t The tetrahedron (pyramid), hexahedron (cube), octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosa
hedron-convex solids enclosed by four, six, eight, twelve, or twenty regular polygons.
:j: The Royal Roads, or King's Highways, usually referred to the great roads of the Persian F.mpire. The story is told also of Euclid and Ptolemy l.88


A ROMAN HOLIDAY
Tbe Stage
Having many gods to worship, and many provinces to milk, Rome had many holidays, once solemn with religious pageantry, now gay with secular delight. In summer many of the poor fled from the humid heat to suburban or riverside taverns or groves, drinking, dining, dancing, and loving in the open air. Those who could afford it might go to the bathing resorts that lined the western coast, or sport with the rich on Baiae's bay. In winter it was the ambition of every caste-conscious Roman to go south, if possible to Rhegium or Tarentum, and return with a coat of tan as a certificate of class. But those who stayed in Rome found entertainment plentiful and cheap. Recitations, lectures, concerts, mimes, plays, athletic contests, prize fights, horse races, chariot races, mortal combats of men with men or beasts, not-quite-sham naval battles on artificial lakes-never was a city more bountifully amused. In the early Empire there were in the Roman year seventy-six festival days on which Judi were performed. Of these, fifty-five were Judi scenici,
Apicius squandered a huge fortune in extravagant living; then, being reduced to_10,000,000 sesterces ($1,500,000), he committed suicide.w Two hundred years later a classic of gas tronomy-De re coquinaria-was attributed to him by a device permitted in antiquity.
378	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVII
devoted to plays or mimes; twenty-two were games in the circus, the stadium, or the amphitheater. The number of Judi increased until by A.D. 354 they were presented on 175 days in the year.91 This meant no growth in the Roman drama; on the contrary, the drzma decayed while the stage prospered. Original dramas were now written to be read rather than played; the theater contented itself with old Roman and Greek tragedies, old Roman comedies, and mimes. Stars dominated the stage and made huge fortunes. Aesopus the tragedian, after a life of assiduous extravagance, left 20,000,- 000 sesterces. Roscius the comic actor made 500,000 sesterces a year and became so rich that for several seasons he acted without pay-a scorn of money that made this ex-slave the lion of aristocratic gatherings. The games of the circus and the amphitheater absorbed the interest and coarsened the taste of the public, and the Roman drama died in the arena, another martyr to Roman holidays.
Through emphasis on acting and scenery rather than plot or thought, the drama gradually yielded the stage to mimes and pantomimes. The mime contained little dialogue, chose its themes from lowly life, and relied on character sketches presented with skillful mimicry. Freedom of speech, hav ing disappeared from the assemblies and the Forum, survived for a moment in these brief farces, when a mime would risk his head to earn applause by a double-entendre aimed at an emperor or his favorites. Caligula had an actor burned alive in the amphitheater for such an allusion.92 On the day when the parsimonious Vespasian was buried a mime imitated the obsequies. During the procession the corpse sat up and asked how much this funeral was costing the state. "Ten million sesterces," was the answer. "Give me 100,000," said the imperial cadaver, "and throw me into the Tiber." 93 The mime alone admitted women as actors; and as these were thereby auto matically classed as prostitutes, they had nothing to lose by obscenity. On special occasions like the Floralia the audience called upon these performers to remove every garment.9-1 Both sexes attended these performances, as in our time. Cicero found brides there, and they found him.
By suppressing speech altogether, and raising the theme to subjects from classic literature, the pantomime ("all mimicry") was evolved out of the mime. There was a profit in foregoing language; the polyglot population of Rome, of which a considerable pan could understand only the simplest Latin, followed the acticn better when unburdened with words. In 21 B.C. two actors, Pylades of Cilicia and Bathyllus of Alexandria, came to Rome and introduced the pantomime-already popular in the Hellenistic East by performing one-act plays composed only of music, action, gesture, and dance. Tired of dramas in ancient and pompous verse, Rome welcomed the new an, thrilled to the grace and skill of the actors, enjoyed the gorgeousness
CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN  ROME	379
of their costumes, the splendor or humor of their masks, the trained and dieted perfection of their figures, the Oriental expressiveness of their hands, their quick znd versatile impersonation of diverse characters, their sensuous enactment of erotic scenes. Audiences divided into frantic cliques and claques in support of rival favorites; women of high station fell in love with the actors, and pursued them vvith gifts·and embraces, until one literally lost his head over Domitian's wife. The pantomime gradually drove all rivals but the mime from the Roman stage. The drama succumbed to the ballet.
Roman .Music
Such a triumph was made possible by the high development of music and the dance. Under the Republic dancing had been looked upon as disgraceful; the younger Scipio had compelled the closing of schools that taught music and dancing,95 and Cicero had remarked that "only a lunatic would dance when sober." 96 But the pantomimes made dancing a fashion, then a passion; nearly every private home, says Seneca, had a dancing platform, echoing to the feet of men and women; rich households now had a dancing master, as well as a chef and a philosopher, as part of their equipment. As practiced in Rome the dance involved the rhythmical movement of the hands and the upper body even more than of legs and feet. \Vomen cultivated the art not only for its own attractiveness, but because it gave them flexibility and grace. The Romans loved music only less than power, money, women, and blood.
Like nearly everything else in Rome's cultural life, her music came from Greece and had to fight its way against a conservatism that identified art with degeneration. In 1 r 5 B.C. the censors had forbidden the playing of any instrument except the short Italian flute. A century later the elder Seneca still considered music unmanly; but meanwhile Varro had devoted a book to De Musica, and this treatise, together with its Greek sources, became the support of many Roman works on musical theory.97 Finally the rich and sensuous Greek modes and instruments won the day over Roman awkward ness and simplicity, and music became a regular element in the education of women, and frequently of men. By A.D. 50 it had captured all classes and sexes; men as well as women spent whole days in hearing, composing, or singing airs; at last even emperors climbed and descended scales, and the philosophic Hadrian, as well as the effeminate Nero, was proud of his skill on the lyre. Lyric poetry was intended to be sung with music, and music was seldom composed except for poetry; ancient music was subordinated to the verse, whereas with us the music tends to overwhelm the words. Choral music was popular and was frequently heard at weddings, games,
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVII
religious ceremonies, and funerals. Horace was deeply moved by the sight and sound of youths and maidens singing his ccrmen saeculare. In such choruses all the voices sang the same note, though in different octaves; part singing was apparently unknown.
The basic instruments were the flute and the lyre. Our wind and string orchestras are still variations of these forms: the most heroic symphony is a judicious combination of puffing, plucking, scraping, and beating. The flute accompanied drama and was supposed to arouse emotion; the lyre attended song and was expected to elevate the soul. The flute1 was long, had many openings, and a greater range of expression than the modern instru ment. The lyre and the cithara were like our harp, but took a greater variety of shapes. Among the Greeks they had been of modest size, but the Romans magnified them until Ammianus described citharas "as large as carriages"; 98 in general the Roman instruments, like ours, improved upon earlier ones chiefly in sonorousness and size. The strings of the lyre were made of gut or sinew and numbered up to eighteen; they were plucked with a plectrum or with the fingers-which alone could execute the quicker runs. From Alexandria, early in the first century, came the hydraulic organ, with several registers, stops, and orders of pipes. Nero fell in love with it, and the calm Quintilian was impressed by its versatility and power.
Formal concerts were given, and musical contests played a part in some public games. Even modest dinners required a bit of music; Martial promises his guest at least a flute player;99 as for Trimalchio's feast, the tables are wiped in rhythm with song. Caligula h::id an orchestra and a chorus on his pleasure boat. At the pantomimes sy111pboniae were performed-i.e., a chorus sang and danced to the accompaniment of an orchestra. Sometimes the actcr would sing the solo parts, sometimes a professional singer (cantor) sang the words while the actor gestured or danced. It was not unheard of for a panto mime to be accompanied by 3000 singers and 3000 dancers.100 The orchestra was led by flutes, aided by lyres, cymbals, pipes, trumpets, "syringes," and scabella-boards fastened to the players' feet and capable of producing a pandemonium even more frightful than that of a modern orchestra at the height of its powers. Seneca mentions harmony in the playing of indi viduals,101 but there is no sign that ancient orchestras used harmony con trapuntally. The accompaniment was usually on a higher note than the song, but it did not, so far as we know, pursue a distinct sequence.
Virtuosi were plentiful and minor performers abounded. Talent con verged from all provinces upon the center of the world's gold, while the institution of slavery permitted the training of choruses and orchestras on a large but inexpensive scale. 1\lany rich establishments had their own musi cians, and sent the most promising to famous teachers for advanced instruc-
CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN   ROME
tion. Some became citbaroedi and gave concerts in which they sang and played the lyre; some specialized in singing, usually composing their own songs; some gave concerts on the organ or the flute like Cannus, who boasted, in the style of Beethoven, that his music could alleviate sorrow, increase joy, elevate piety, and fan the flame of love.102 These professionals went on extended concert tours throughout the Empire, earning plaudits, fees, public monuments, and infatuations; some, says Juvenal, sold their love for an added honorarium.103 "\Vomen fought for the plectra with which famous players had touched the strings, and offered sacrifice at the altars for the victory of their musical favorites in the Neronian and Capitoline games. We can faintly picture the imposing scene when musicians and poets from all the realm competed before great throngs, and the breathless winners re ceived the crown of oak leaves from the emperor's hands.
"\Ve do not know enough of Roman music to describe its quality. Ap parently it was louder, fuller, wilder than the Greek; a weird Oriental quality had entered it from Egypt, Asia .Minor, and Syria. Old men mourned that recent composers were abandoning the restraint and dignity of the classic style, and were disordering the soul and nerves of youth with extrava gant airs and noisy instruments. Certainly no people ever loved music more. The songs of the stage were caught up by a lively and volatile populace and rang through the streets and windows of Rome; the complex airs of the pantomimes were so fondly remembered that devotees could tell from the first notes of a strain to what play and scene it belonged. Rome made no real contribution to music, except perhaps through the better organiza tion of performers into larger groups. But it honored music with exuberant usage and resilient response; it gathered the musical heritage of the ancient world into its t-emples, theaters, and homes; and when it passed it left to the Church the instruments and elements of the music that moves and deepens us today.
Tbe Games
Now that war seemed banished, the great games were the most exciting event of the Roman year. They took place chiefly in celebration of religious festivals-of the Great Mother, of Ceres, of Flora, of Apollo, of Augustts; they might be the "Plebeian Games" to appease the plebs, or "Roman Games" in honor of the city and its goddess Roma; they might be offered in connection with triumphs, candidacies, elections, or imperial birthdays; they might, like the ludi saeculares, commemorate some cycle in Roman history. Like the games of Achilles in honor of Patroclus, those of Italy had originally been offered as a sacrifice to dead men. At the funeral of
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVII
Brutus Pera in 264 B.c. his sons gave a "spectacle" of three duels; at the funeral of Marcus Lepidus in 216 B.C. twenty-two comb2ts were fought; and in 174 B.c. Titus Fbminius celebrated his father's death with gladiatorial games in which seventy-four men fought.


Almost any kind of argument might be made by the advocate. He could show the court pictures of the alleged crime, painted on canvas or wood; he could hold a child in his arms while arguing a point; he could bare the scars of an accused soldier or the wounds of a client. Defenses were con trived against these weapons. Quintilian tells how one attorney, when his opponent illustrated a summation by bringing his client's children into court, threw dice among them; the children scrambled for the tesserae and ruined a peroration.43 The slaves of either party to a suit might be tortured to elicit evidence, but such evidence was not admissible against their owners. Hadrian decreed that slaves should be tortured for evidence only as a last resort and under the strictest regulations, and he warned the courts that evidence secured by torture could never be trusted. Legal torture neverthe less persisted, and was extended in the third century to freemen.44 The jury voted by depositing marked tablets in an urn; a majority sufficed for a decision. In most cases the loser might appeal to a higher court, and finally, if he could afford it, to the emperor.
Penalties were fixed by law rather than left to the discretion of the judge. They varied with the rank of the offender, being severest for the slave; he might be crucified, the citizen might not; and no Roman citizen, as every reader of the Acts of the Apostles knows, could be scourged, tortured, or put to death over his appeal to the emperor. Different penalties were laid upon bonestiores and bunziliores for the same crime; they varied also accord ing as the offender was freeborn or freeman, solvent or bankrupt, soldier or civilian. The simplest punishment was a fine. Since the value of currency changed more rapidly than the penalties named in the law, certain anomalies ensued. The Twelve Tables exacted a fine of twenty-five asses (originally twenty-five pounds of copper) for striking a freeman; when rising prices
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVIII
had lowered the as to six cents Lucius Veratius went about striking freemen in the face, followed by a slave who counted out nventy-five asses to each victim.45 Some offenses resulted in infamia ("speechlessness"), chiefly the inability to appear, or be represented by another, in an action at law. A more stringent punishment was loss of civic rights (capitis de-minutio), which took the progressive forms of incapacity to inherit, deportation, and enslavement. Deportation was the harshest form of exile: the condemned man was put in chains, confined in some inhospitable place, and deprived of all his property. Exilium was milder in allowing the victim to live in freedom wherever he pleased outside of Italy; relegatio, as in the case of Ovid, involved no con fiscation, but compelled the outcast to stay in a specified town, usually far from Rome. Imprisonment was seldom used as a permanent punishment, but men might be condemned to menial labor on public works, or in the mines, or in the quarries of the state. Under the Republic a freeman sentenced to death could escape the penalty by leaving Rome or Italy; under the Empire the death penalty was imposed with increasing frequency and ruthlessness. Prisoners of war, and in some cases other condemned men, might be thrown into the Career Tullianzmz, to die of starvation, rodents, and lice in under ground darkness and irremovable filth.46 There Jugurtha died, and Simon Ben-Giora, heroic defender of Jerusalem against Titus. There, said tradition, Peter and Paul had languished before their crucifixion, and had written their last addresses to the young Christian world.
THE  LAW OF THE  NATIONS
The most difficult problem of Roman law was to adjust itself as an intelli gent master to the varied codes and customs of the lands that Roman arms or diplomacy had won. J\1any of these states were older than Rome; what they had lost in military courage they made up in proud traditions and a jealous fondness for their peculiar ways. Rome met the situation ably. A praetor peregrinus was appointed at first for the foreigners in Rome, then for Italy, then for the provinces; and power was given him to make some viable union between Roman and local law. The annual edicts of this praetor and the provincial governors and aediles gradually created the ius gentium by which the Empire was ruled.
This "Law of the Nations" was not an international law-not a body of commitments accepted by the generality of states as governing their i ter relations. In a sense not much more tenuous than today there was in antiquity an international law, insofar as certain common customs were honored in peace and war-the mutual safeguarding of international merchants and
CHAP. xvm)	ROMAN  LAW
diplomats, the granting of truce for the burial of the·dead,.abstention from the use of poisoned arrows, etc. The jurists of Rome, by a patriotic ,fiction, described the ius gentium as law common to all nations. But they were too modest about Rome's part in it. Actually it·was local law adapted to Roman sovereignty, and designed to govern the peoples of Italy and the provinces without giving them Roman citizenship and the other rights of the ius civile. By a corresponding fiction the philosophers attempted to identify the Law of the Nations with the ''Law of Nature." The Stoics defined the latter as a moral code implanted in man by "natural reason." Nature, they held, was a system of reason, a logic and order in all things; this order, spontaneously developing in society, and coming to consciousness in man, was natural law.
Cicero phrased the fancy in a famous passage:
True law is. right reason in agreement with nature, world-wide in scope, unchanging, everlasting.... We may not oppose or alter that law, we cannot abolish it, we cannot be freed from its obligations by any legislature, and we need not look outside ourselves for an ex pounder of it. This law does not differ for Rome and for Athens, for the present and for the future; . . . it is and will be valid for all nations and all times. . . . He who disobeys it denies himself and his own nature.47
It was a perfect statement of an ideal that grew in force as Stoicism reached the throne in the Antonines. Ulpian developed it into the far-reaching prin ciple that class distinctions and privileges are accidental and artificial; and from this it was but a step to the Christian conception of all men as funda mentally equal. But when Gaius defined the ius ge11tiu111 as simply "the law which natural reason has established among all mankind," 48 he was mis taking Roman anus for Divine Providence. Roman law was the logic and economy of force; the great codes of ius civile and ius gentiunz were the rules by which a wise conqueror gave order, regularity, and time's sanctity to a sovereignty based upon the legions' strength. They were natural, but only in the sense that it is natural for the strong to use and abuse the weak.
Nevenheless, there is something noble in this imposing architecture of government called Roman law. Since the victor must rule, it is a boon that the rules of his mastery should be clearly expressed; in this sense law is the consistency of power. It was natural that the Romans should create the greatest system of law in history: they loved order and had the means to enforce it; upon the chaos of a hundred diverse nations they laid an imperfect but sublime authority and peace. Other states had had laws, and legislators like Hammurabi and Solon had issued small bodies of humane legislation; but no people had yet achieved that immense co-ordination, unification, and
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVIII
codification which occupied the highest legal minds of Rome from the Scaevolas to Justinian.
The flexibility of the ius gentium facilitated the transmission of Roman law to medieval and modem states. It was a happy accident that while the chaos of barbarian invasion was mutilating the legal heritage in the West, the Code, Digest, and Institutes of Justinian were collected and formulated in Constantinople, in the comparative security and continuity of the Empire in the East. Through those labors, and a hundred lesser channels, and the silent tenacity of useful ways, Roman law entered into the canon law of the medieval Church, inspired the thinkers of the Renaissance, and became the basic law of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, even-within the British Empire-of Scotland, Quebec, Ceylon, and South Africa. English law itself, the only legal edifice of comparable scope, took its rules of equity, admiralty, guardianship, and bequests from Roman canon law. Greek science and philosophy, Judeo-Greek Christianity, Greco-Ro man democracy, Roman law-these are our supreme inheritance from the ancient world.
The Philosopher Kings
A.D. 96-1 So
NERVA
ITH the assassination of Domitian the principle of heredity disap peared for a century from Roman monarchy. The Senate had never recognized inheritance as a source of sovereignty; now, after 12 3 years of submission, it reasserted its authority; and as in Rome's beginnings it had chosen the king, now it named one of its own members princeps and im perator. It was an act of courage intelligible only when we remember that the vigor of the Flavian family was exhausted in that same generation which had seen the vitality of the Senate renewed by Italian and provincial blood. Marcus Cocceius Nerva was sixty-six when supremacy surprised him.
The colossal Nerva of the Vatican shows a handsome and virile face; no one would suppose that this was a respectable jurist with a bad stomach, a mild and amiable poet who had once been hailed as "the Tibullus of our time." 1 Perhaps the Senate had chosen him for his gray harmlessness. He consulted it on all policies, and kept his pledge never to be the cause of death to any of its members. He recalled Domitian's exiles, restored their property, and moderated their revenge. He distributed 60,000,000 sesterces' worth of lands among the poor, and established the alimenta-a state fund to encourage and finance parentage among the peasantry. He annulled many taxes, low ered the inheritance dues, and freed the Jews from the tribute that Vespasian had laid upon them. At the same time he repaired the finances of the state by economy in his household and his government. With reason he thought that he had been just to all classes, and remarked that "I have done nothing that could prevent me from laying down the imperial office and returning to private life in safety." 2 But a year after his accession the Praetorian Guard, which had been forestalled in his nomination and resented his economy, besieged his palace, demanded the surrender of Domitian's assassins, and killed several of Nerva's councilors. He offered his throat to the swords of the soldiers, but they spared him. Humiliated, he wished to abdicate, but his friends persuaded him, instead, to return to Augustus' example and adopt as his son and successor a man acceptable to the Senate and capable of ruling
4°7
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIX
not only the Empire, but the Guard as well. The greatest debt that Rome owed Nerva was that he chose Marcus Ulpius Traianus to succeed him. Three months later, after a reign of sixteen months, he passed away (98).
The principle of adoption thus accidentally restored meant that each emperor, as he felt his powers decline, would associate with himself in rule the ablest and fittest man he could find, so that when death came there would be neither the absurdity of a Praetorian elevation, nor the risk of a natural but worthless heir, nor a civil war among competitors for the throne. It was a lucky chance that no son was born to Trajan, Hadrian, or Antoninus Pius, and that each could apply the adoptive plan without slighting his offspring or his own parental love. While the principle was maintained it gave Rome "the finest succession of good and great sovereigns the world has ever had." 3


But his triumph did not deceive him; he knew that the problem of Ger-• many had not been solved. Convinced that further invasions could be pre vented only by an active policy of extending the frontier to the mountains of Bohemia, he set forth with Commodus, in 178, on the Third Marcoman nic War. Crossing the Danube, he again defeated the Quadi after a long and arduous campaign. No resistance remained, and he was about to annex the lands of the Quadi, the Marcomanni, and the Sarmatians (roughly Bo hemia and Danubian Galicia) as new provinces, when sickness struck him down in his camp at Vindobona (Vienna). Feeling death's hand, he called Commodus to his side and warned him to carry through the policy which was now so near fulfillme t, and realize the dream of Augustus by pushing the boundary of the Empire to the Elbe.* Then he refused all further food or drink. On the sixth day he rose with his last strength and presented Com modus to the army as the new emperor. Returning to his couch he covered his head with the sheet and soon afterward died. vVhen his body reached Rome the people had already begun to worship him as a god who for a while had consented to live on the earth.
"\Ve must not merely acknowledge the resolution and tenacity of the ruler" says the impartial Mommsen, "but must also admit that he did what right policy enjoined/' 62
CHAPTER  XX
Life and Thought in the Second Century
TACITUS
HE policies of Nerva and Trajan liberated the suppressed mind of Rome, and gave to the literature of their reigns a note of fierce resent
ment against a despotism that had gone but might come again. Pliny's Pane gyric voiced it in welcoming the first of three great Spaniards to the throne; Juvenal seldom sang any other note; and Tacitus, the most brilliant of historians, became a delator temporis acti, an accuser of times past, and excoriated a century with his pen.
We do not know the date or place of Tacitus' birth, nor even his given name. Probably he was the son of Cornelius Tacitus, procurator of imperial revenue in Belgic Gaul; through this man's advancement the family was raised from the equestrian class into the new aristocracy.1 Our first definite fact about the historian is his own statement: "Agricola, during his consul ship (78) ...	agreed to a marriage between myself and his daughter, who might certainly have looked for a prouder connection." 2 He had re ceived the usual education, and had learned to the full those oratorical arts which enliven his style, that skill in pros and cons which marks the speeches in his histories. The younger Pliny often heard him in the courts, admired his "stately eloquence," and acclaimed him as the greatest orator in Rome.3 In 88 Tacitus was praetor; thereafter he sat in the Senate and con fesses with shame 4 that he failed to speak out against tyranny, and joined in the Senatorial condemnation of Domitian's Senatorial victims. Nerva made him consul (97), and Trajan appointed him proconsul of Asia. He was evidently a man of affairs and practical experience; his books were the aftenhought of a full life, the product of a leisurely old age, and of a mature and profound mind.
One theme unites them-hatred of autocracy. His Dialogue on Orators (if it is his) attributes the decline of eloquence to the suppression of libeny. His Agricola-the most perfect of those brief monographs to which the
433
434	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XX
ancients confined biography-proudly recounts the achievements of his father-in-law as general and governor, and then bitterly records Domitian's dismissal and neglect of him. The little essay On the Situation and Origin of the Germans contrasts the virile virtues of a free people with the degenera tion and cowardice of Romans under the despots. \Vhen Tacitus praises the Germans for considering infanticide an infamy, and giving no advantage to childlessness, he is not describing Germans but denouncing Romans. The philosophical purpose destroys the objectivity of the study, but allows a remarkable breadth of view in a Rom:m official praising the German power of resisting Rome.5 *
The success of these essays induced Tacitus to illustrate the evils of
tyranny by indicting the reccrd of the despcts in ruthless detail. He began with what was freshest in his memory and in the tes:imony of his older friends-the period from Galba to the death cf Dcmitian; and when these Historiae were acclaimed by a grateful aristccracy as the best historical writing since Livy, he continued his story a fronte by describing, in the Annales, the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Of the four teen (some say thiny) "books" of the Histories four and a h:1lf remain, all devoted to the years 69 and 70; of the Annals twelve books survive from an original sixteen or eighteen. Even in this mutilated form they are the most powerful works in extant Roman prose; we may vaguely imagine the grandeur and impress of the whole. Tacitus had hoped to chronicle also the reigns of Augustus, Nerva, and Trajan, mitigating the gloom of his published works with some commemoration of constructive statesmanship. But the years were not given him; and posterity has judged him, as he judged the past, from a somber aspect alone.
"The chief duty of the historian," he thought, "is to judge the actions of men, so that the good may meet with the reward due to virtue, and perni cious citizens may be deterred by the condemnation that awaits evil deeds at the tribun:11 of posterity." 6 It is a strange conception, which turns history into a Last Judgment and the histori:m into God. So conceived, history is a sermon-ethics teaching by horrible examples-and falls, as Tacitus· as sumed, under the rubric of rhetoric. It is easy for indi211ation to be eloquent but hard for it to be fair; no moralist should write history. Tacitus re- membered tyranny too intim tely to view tyrants calmly; he saw nothing in Augustus but th destrucuon of freedom and supposed that all Roman genius had ended with Actiu .7 Heseems never to hwe thought of temper ing his indictments by ecordmg the exc_ellent_ administration and growing prosperity of the provinces under the imperial monsters; no one would
It was probably written in 98, before Trajan's campaign against the Dacians.
CHAP.XX)   LIFE  IN THE SECOND CENTURY	435
suspect, from reading him, that Rome was an empire as well as a city. Per haps the lost "books" viewed the provincial world; those that remain make T acirus a deceptive guide, who never lies but never reveals the truth. He often cites, and sometimes critically examines, hissources-histories, speeches, letters, Acta Diurna, Acta Senatus, and the traditions of old families; but for the most'part he has heard only the stories of the persecuted nobility, and never imagines that'the executions of senators and the assassinations of emperors were incidents in a long contest between vicious, cruel, and com petent monarchs and a decadent, cruel, and incompetent aristocracy. He is fascinated by striking personalities and events rather than by forces, causes, ideas, and processes; he draws the most brilliant and unjust character por traits in history, but he has no conception of economic influences upon po litical events, no interest in the life and industry of the people, the stream of trade, the conditions of science, the status of woman, the vicissitudes of be lief, the achievements of poetry, philosophy, or art. In T acirus Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius die, but they do not write; the emperors kill, but they do not build. Perhaps the great historian was limited by his audience; prob ably he read parts of his work-following the custom of the time-to the aristocratic friends whom Pliny describes as crowding to his receptions; he would have told us that these men and women knew Roman life, ind1:stry, literature, and art, and did not have to be reminded of them; what they wanted to hear, again and again, was the exciting story of the evil emperors, the heroic deeds of stoic senators, the long war of their noble class against tyrannical power. We cannot condemn T acirus for not succeeding in what he did not attempt; we can only regret the narrowness of his great purpose and the limitations of his powerful mind.
He does not pretend to be a philosopher. He praises Agricola's mother for dissuading her son, who "had acquired a keener zest for philosophy than became a Roman and a senator." 8 His imagination and art, like Shakespeare's. were too creatively active to let him ponder quietly the meaning and possi bilities of life. He is as rich in illuminating comment as in unverified scandal: but it is difficult to find in him any consistent view of God, or man, or the state. He is cautiously ambiguous on matters of faith, and suggests 9 that it is wiser to accept one's native religion than to try to replace it with knowl edge. He rejects most astrologers, auguries, portents, and miracles, but accepts some; he is too much of a gentleman to deny the possibility of what so many have affirmed. In general, events seem to prove "the inaifference of the gods to good and bad alike," 10 and the existence of some unknown, perhaps capricious, force that drives men and states fatallv onward to their destiny 11-urgentibus i-mperii fatis.12 He hopes tliat Agricola has departed
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XX
to a happy life, but he obviously doubts it, and contents himself with the last delusion of great minds-an immortality of fame.13
Nor does any utopian aspiration console him. "Most plans of reforma tion are at first embraced with ardor; but soon the novelty ceases, and the scheme ends in nothing." 14 Matters are temporarily better in his time, he reluctantly admits; but not even the genius of Trajan will prevent renewed deterioration.15 Rome is rotten literally to the core, in the hearts of men, of a populace whose disorder of soul has made an anarchy of freedom,16 a rabble "fond of innovation and change, and ever ready to shift to the side of the strongest." 17 He mourns the "malignity of the human mind," 18 and scorns like Juvenal the alien stocks in Rome. After blackening the Empire he does not dream of returning to the Republic, but hopes that the adoptive emperors will reconcile the Principate with liberty.19 In the end, he thinks, character is more important than government; what makes a people great is not its laws but its men.
If, despite our surprise in finding a sermon and a drama where we had looked for history, we must nevertheless rank Tacitus among the greatest of historians, it is because the povver of his art redeems the limitations of his view. Above all he sees intensely, sometimes deeply, always vividly. The portraits he draws stand out more clearly, stride the stage more livingly, than any others in historical literature. Here, too, however, there are blemishes.Tacitus composes speeches for his varied personages, all in his own fashion and majestic prose; he describes Galba as a simpleton and makes him talk like a sage.20 And he does not rise to the difficult art of making his char acters develop in time. Tiberius is the same at the beginning of his reign as at the end; and if he appeared to be human at the outset it was, Tacitus thinks, pure dissimulation.
First and last in Tacitus is the splendor of his style. No other author has ever said so much so compactly. This does not mean that he is brief; on the contrary, he is desultory and diffuse and takes 400 pages of the Histories to chronicle two years of time. Sometimes the condensation is extreme to the point of affectation or obscurity; every second word then requires a sentence to translate it; verbs and conjunctions are disdained as crutches for crippled minds. his is the culmination of Sallust's concise rapidity, of Seneca's pithy epigrams, of the balanced clauses taught in the schools of rhetoric. In a long work such a style, unrelieved with passacres of a more even tenor, becomes an exhausting excitement to the reader, , ho neverthe less returns to it with mounting fascination. This martial brusqueness, more economical of words than of men, this scorn of the props of syntax, this
passion off eeling and cle1mess of visualization, this tang of a nm;el vocabu lary and murderous pungency of unhackneyed phrase, give to the writing


ing as a guest" in the human frame.37 He speaks hopefully of a life beyond death, where knowledge and virtue will be perfected; 38 and again he calls immortality "a beautiful dream." 39 In truth Seneca has never thought these matters out to a consistent (or public) conclusion; he talks of them with the cautious inconsistency of a politician who agrees with everybody. He has followed too successfully his father's oratorical lessons, and expresses every point of view with irresistible eloquence.
The same hesitations mar and grace his moral philosophy. He is too Stoic to be practical, and too lenient to be Stoic. He sees about him an immorality that exhausts the body and debases the soul, never satisfying either; avarice and luxury have destroyed peace and health, and power has made man only an abler brute. How shall one free himself from this ignominious agitation?
I read in Epicurus today: "If you would enjoy real freedom you must be the slave of philosophy." The man who submits to her is emancipated there and then.... The body, once cured, often ails again . . . but the mind, once healed, is healed for good and all. I shall tell you what I mean by health: if the mind is content and con fident; if it understands that those things for which all men pray, all the benefits that are sought or bestowed, are of no importance in relation to a life of happiness   Ishall give you a rule by which to
measure yourself and your development: in that day you will come into your own when you realize that the successful are of all men
most miserable.40
Philosophy is the science of wisdom, and wisdom is the art of living. Happiness is the goal, but virtue, not pleasure, is the road. The 'old ridiculed maxims are correct and are perpetually verified by experience; in the long run honesty, justice, forbearance, kindliness, bring us more happiness than ever comes from the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure is good, but only when consistent with virtue; it cannot be a wise man's goal; those who make it their end in life are like the dog that snaps at every piece of meat thrown to it, swallows it whole, and then, instead of enjoying it, stands with jaws agape anxiously awaiting more.41
But how does one acquire wisdom? By practicing it daily, in however
modest a degree; by examining your conduct of each day at its close; by being harsh to your own faults and lenient to those of others; by associating with those who e _cel you in wisdom and virtue; by taking some acknowl edged sage as your invisible counselor and judge. You will be helped by reading the philosophers; not outline stories of philosophy, but the original
·works; "give over hoping that you can skim, by me:ins of epitomes, the wisdom of distinguished men."H  "Every one of these men will send you
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP, XIV
away happier and more devoted, no one of them will allow you to depart empty-handed. . . . What happiness, and what a noble old age, await him who h given himself into their patronage!" 45 Read good books many times, rather than many books; travel slowly, and not too much; "the spirit can not mature into unity unless it has checked its curiosity and its wander ings." 46 "The primary sign of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company." 47 Avoid crowds. "Men are more wicked together than separately. If you are forced to be in a crowd, then most of all you should withdraw into yourself." 48
The final lesson of the Stoic is contempt and choice of death. Life is not
always so joyful as to merit continuance; after life's fitful fever it is well to sleep. "What is baser than to fret at the threshold of peace?" 49 If a man finds life grievous, and can leave it without serious injury to others, he should feel free to choose his own time and way. Seneca preaches suicide to Lucilius as if he were Lucilius' heir:
This is one reason why we cannot complain of life; it keeps no one against his will.... You have had veins cut for the purpose of re ducing your weight. If you would pierce your heart, a gaping wound is not necessary; a lancet will open the way to freedom, and tranquil lity can be purchased at the cost of a pinprick.50 •••	Wherever you look, there is an end to troubles. Do you see that precipice?-it is a descent to liberty. Do you see that river, that cistern, that sea? freedom is in their depths.51 •••  But I am running on too long. How can a man end his life if he cannot end a letter? 52 • • • As for me, my dear Lucilius, I have lived long enough. I have had my fill. I await death. Farewell.53
Life took him at his word. Nero sent a tribune to seek his answer to the charge that he had plotted to make Piso emperor; Seneca replied that he was no longer interested in politics, and sought nothing but peace and the opportunity to attend to "a weak and crazy constitution." "He showed no symptom of fear," reported the tribune, "no sign of sorrow ... his words and looks bespoke a mind serene, erect, and finn." "Return," said Nero, "and tell him to die." "Seneca heard the message," says Tacitus, "with calm composure." He embraced his wife, and bade her be comforted by the honorableness of his life and the lessons of philosophy. But Paulina refused to outlive him; when his veins were opened she had hers opened too. He called for a secret ry and ictated a letter of arewell to the Roman people. He asked and received a dnnk of hemlock, as1f resolved to die like Socrates. As the physician placed him in a warm bath to ease his pain he sprinkled the nearest servants with the water, saying "a libation to Jove the Deliverer"; and after much suffering he passed away (65). At Nero's command the
CHAP.XIV)	THE	SILVER  AGE
physician forcibly bound Paulina's wrists and stopped the flow of her blood; she survived her husband a few years, but her perpetual pallor re- called her stoic resolution.	"
Death glorified Seneca and made one generation forget his poses and his inconsistencies. Like all Stoics he underestimated the power and value of feeling and passion, exaggerated the worth and reliability of reason, and trusted too much to a nature in whose soil grow all the flowers of evil as well as of good. But he made Stoicism human, brought it down livably within the scope of men, and formed it into a spacious vestibule to Christi anity. His pessimism, his condemnation of the immorality of his time, his counsel to return anger with kindness,54 and his preoccupation with death 55 made Terrullian call him "ours," 56 and led Augustine to exclaim, "\Vhat more could a Christian say than this pagan has said?" 57 He was not a Christian; but at least he asked for an end to slaughter and lechery, called men to a simple and decent life, and reduced the distinctions between free man, freedman, and slave to "mere titles born of ambition or of wrong." 68 It was a slave in Nero's court, Epictetus, who profited most from his teach ing. Nerva and Trajan were in some measure molded by his writings and inspired by his example to conscientious and humanitarian statesmanship. To the end of antiquity and through the Middle Ages he remained popular; and when the rebirth came Petrarch placed him next to Virgil and upon Seneca's prose devotedly modeled his own. Montaigne's brother-in-law translated him into French, and Montaigne quoted him as fondly as Seneca quoted Epicurus. Emerson read him again and again 59 and became an Amer ican Seneca. There are few original ideas in him; but that may be forgiven,
for in philosophy all truth is old, and only error is original. With all his
faults he was the greatest of Rome's philosophers and, at least in his books, one of the wisest and kindliest of men. Next to Cicero he was the most lovable hypocrite in history.
ROMAN SCIENCE
Therefore we have given him too much space; nevertheless, we have not finished with him yet, for he was also a scientist. In those fertile years between his retirement and his death he amused himself with Quaestiones Naturales, and sought natural explanations of rain, hail, snow, wind, comets, rainbows, earth quakes, rivers, springs. In his drama ':'[! ea e ha s gg ste he existence of n other continent beyond the Atlantic. With similar mtmt10n, contemplating the overwhelming multitude of stars, he wrote, "How many an orb, moving in the depths of space, has never yet reached the eyes of men!" 61 And he adds, clairvoyantly, "How many things our sons will learn that we cannot now sus-
308	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XIV
pect!-what others await centuries when our names will be forgotten! ... Our de cendants will marvel at our ignorance." 62 We do. Seneca, though always
eloquent, adds little to Aristotle and Aratus, and borrows abundantly from Poseidonius. He believes in divination despite Cicero, lapses into ludicrous tele ology despite Lucretius, and interrupts his science at every turn to inculcate morality; he passes skillfully from mussels to luxury, and from comets to de generation. The Fathers of the Church liked this mixture of meteorology and morals, and made the Quaestiones N aturales the most popular textbook of science in the Middle Ages.


No biting storm can bring it down,
No impotent north wind, not the unnumbered series Of the years, nor the swift course of time.
I shall iiot wholly die.
The slandered crowd ignored the Odes, the critics denounced them as tiresome artifice, the puritans declaimed against the songs of love. Augustus pronounced the poems immortal, asked for a fourth group that would cele brate the exploits of Drusus and Tiberius in Germany, and chose Horace to write the carmen saeculare for the Secular Games. Horace complied, but without inspiration. The effort of the Odes had exhausted him. In his final
work he relaxed into the conversational hexameters of the Satires and wrote his Epistles as from a? easy chair. He had always wanted to be a p'hilosopher;
now he abandoned himself to wisdom, even while remaining a causeur. Since
CHAP.Xll)	THE  GOLDEN  AGE	249
a philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian, Horace, old at forty-five, was ripe to discuss God and man, morals and literature and art.
The most foamous of these letters, named by later critics "The Art of Poetry," was addressed Ad Pisones-to some uncertain members of the Piso clan; it was no formal treatise, but a bit of friendly advice on how to write. Choose a subject suited to your powers, Horace says; beware of laboring like a mountain and producing a mouse.47 The ideal book is that which at the same time instructs and entertains; "he who has mingled the useful with the pleasant wins every vote"-omne tztlit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.48 Avoid words that are new, obsolete, or "sesquipedalian" foot-and-a-half words. Be as brief as clarity allows. Go straight to the heart of the matter-in medias res. In writing poetry do not imagine that emotion is everything. It is true that you must feel an emotion yourself if you wish the reader to feel it (si vis me fiere, dolendum est priunmz ipsi tibi) .49 But art is not feeling; it is form (here again is the challenge of the classic to the romantic style).* To achieve form, study the Greeks day and night; erase almost as much as you write; delete every "purple patch" (purpureus pannus); submit your work to a competent critic, and beware of your friends. If it survives all this, put it away for eight years; if then you do not perceive the uses of oblivion, publish it, but remember that it can never be recalled except by time: verba volant, scripta manent. If you write drama let the action, not your words, tell the story and delineate the char acters. Do not represent horror on the stage. Obey the unities of action, time, and place: let the story be one and occur within a brief time in one place. Study life and philosophy, for without observation and understand ing even a perfect style is an empty thing. Sapere aude: dare to know.
Horace himself had obeyed all these precepts but one-he had not learned to weep. Because his feelings were too hin, or had been stifled into silence, he seldom rose to the high art that gives form to sincere sympathy, or to "emotion remembered in tranquillity." He was too urbane. Nil admirari, "to marvel at nothing," 50 was poor advice; to the poet everything should be a miracle, even when, like the sunrise or a tree, it greets him every day. Horace obsen°ed life, but not too deeply; he studied philosophy, but kept so persistently an "even mind" 51 that only his Odes rise above a "golden me diocrity." 52 He honored virtue like a Stoic, and respected pleasure like an Epicurean. "\Vho, then, is free?" he asks, and answers, like Zeno, "The wise man, he who is lord over himself, whom neither poverty nor death
. • Almost neglected in the Middle Ages, Horace came into his own in the seventeenth and e1ghtcent centuries, the age of modern classicism, when every statesman and pamphleteer, abo_ve all m England, turned the poet's phrases into prose cliches. Boileau's L'Art poetique renved Horace's Ad Pisones and formed and chilled the French drama till Hugo; Pope's Essay on Criticism attempted a similar refrigeration in England, but was thawed by Byron's fire.
250	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. Xll
nor bonds a.ffright, who defies his passions, scorns ambition, and is in him self a whole." 53 One of his noblest poems sings a Stoic strain:
Iustum et tenacem propositi viri si fractus inlabatur orbis
impavidum ferient ruinae-
"If a man is just and resolute, the whole world may break and fall upon him and find him, in the ruins, undismayed." 54 But despite all this he calls him self, with engaging honesty, "a pig from Epicurus' sty." 55 Like Epicurus he placed more store on friendship than on love; like Virgil he lauded the reforms of Augustus, and remained a bachelor. He did his best to preach religion, but he had none. Death, he felt, ends all.56
His last days were clouded with this thought. He had his share of pains stomach trouble, rheumatism, and much else. "The years as they pass," he mourned, "rob us of all joys, one by one." 57 And to another friend: "Alas, 0 Postumus, the fleeting years slip by; nor shall piety hold back our wrinkles, or pressing age, or indomitable death." 58 He recalled how, in his first satire, he had hoped, when his time came, to quit life contentedly, "like a guest who
has had his .fill." 59 Now he told himself: "You have played enough, eaten enough, drunk enough; it is time for you to go." 6°Fifteen years have passed
since he had told J\faecenas that he would not long survive the financier.61 In 8 B.c. Maecenas died, and a few months later Horace followed him. He left his property to the Emperor, and was laid to rest near Maecenas' tomb.
LIVY
Augustan prose achieved no triumphs equal to those of Augustan verse. Oratory subsided as the making of laws and decisions passed in reality if not in form from Senate and assemblies to the secret chambers of the prince. Scholarship continued its quiet course, sheltered from present storms by its ghostly interests. It was only in the writing of history that the age achieved a masterpiece in prose.
Born in Patavium (Padua) in 59, Titus Livius came to the capital, de voted himself to rhetoric and philosophy, and gave the last forty years of his life (2 3 B.C.-A.D. 17) to writing a history of Rome. That is all we know of him; "Rome's historian has no history." 63 Like Virgil he came from the region of the Po, retained the old virtues of simplicity and piety, and perhaps through the pathos of distance-developed a passionate reverence for the Eternal City. His work was planned on a majestic scale and was completed; of its 142 "books" only thirty-five have come down to us; as
CHAP.XII)	THE  GOLDEN  AGE	251
these fill six volumes we may judge the magnitude of the whole. Apparently it was published in parts, each with a separate title, and all under the general heading, Ab urbe condita-"From the city's foundation." Augustus could forgive its republican sentiments and heroes, since its religious, moral, and patriotic tone accorded well with the Emperor's policies. He took Livy into his friendship and encouraged him as a prose Virgil who was beginning where the poet had left off. Halfway on his long journey from 753 to 9 B.C., Livy thought of stopping, on the ground that he had already won lasting fame; he went on, he says, because he found himself restless when he ceased to write.64
Roman historians looked upon history as a hybrid child of rhetoric and philosophy: if we may believe them, they wrote to illustrate ethical pre cepts with eloquent narrative-to-adorn a moral with a tale. Livy was trained as an orator; finding oratory censured and dangerous, "he took to history," says Taine, "so that he could still be an orator."();; He began with a stem preface, denouncing the immorality, luxury, and effeminacy of the age; he buried himself in the past, he tells us, to forget the evils of his time, "when we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies." He would set forth, through history, the virtues that had made Rome great-the unity and holi ness of family life, the pietas of children, the sacred relation of men with the gods at every step, the sanctity of the solemnly pledged word, the stoic self-control and gravitas. He would make that stoic Rome so noble that its conquest of the Mediterranean would appear as a moral imperative, a divine order and law cast over the chaos of the East and the barbarism of the West. Polybius had ascribed Rome's triumph to its form of government; Livy would make it a corollary of the Roman character.


Soles occidere et redire possunt; nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda.
Da mi basia mille, deinde centum,
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum	,34
CHAP.VIII)  LITERATURE  UNDER  THE  REVOLUTION	157
We do not know how long this ecstasy lasted; probably his thousands wearied her, and she who had betrayed her husband for him found it a relief to betray him for another. Her benefactions now ranged so widely that Catullus madly fancied her "embracing at once three hundred adul terers." 35 In the very heat of his love he came to hate her (odi et amo 36) and rejected with a Keatsian image her protestations of fidelity:
A woman's words to hungry lover said Should be upon the flowing winds inscribed, Upon swift streams engraved.37
\Vhen sharp doubt became dull certainty his passion turned to bitterness and coarse revenge; he accused her of yielding to tavern habitues, denounced her new lovers with obscene abandon, and meditated·suicide, poetically. At the same time he was capable of nobler feelings: he addressed to his friend Manlius a touching epithalamium or wedding song, envying him the whole some comradeship of marriage, the security and stability of a home, and the happy tribulations of parentage. He snatched himself from the scene by accompanying Memmius to Bithynia, but he was disappointed in his hopes
of restoring there his spirits or his purse. He went out of his way to find the grave of a brother who had died in the Troad; over it he performed reverently the ancestral burial rites; and soon afterward he composed tender lines that gave the world a famous phrase:
Dear brother, through many states and seas Have I come to this sorrowful sacrifice, Bringing you the last gift for the dead. . . . Accept these offerings wet with fraternal tears; And forever, brother, hail and farewell.*
His sojourn in Asia changed and softened him. The skeptic who had written of death as "the sleep of an eternal night" was moved by the old religions and ceremonies of the East. In the rich and flowing verse of his greatest poem, "Atys," he described with vivid intensity the worship of Cybele, and caught an exotic fervor in the lament of the self-emasculated devotee over the joys and friends of his youth. In "Peleus and Thetis" he retold the tale of Peleus and Ariadne in hexameters of such melodious delicacy as even Virgil would hardly equal. In a small yacht bought at Amastris he sailed through the Black Sea, the Aegean, and the Adriatic, and
Multas per genres et multa per aequora vectus advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere monis. . . . Accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu, atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.38
CAESAR  AND CHRIST	(CHAP. VIII
up the Po to Lake Garda and his villa at Sinnio. "Oh, what happier way is there to escape the cares of the world," he asked, "than to return to our own homes and altars, and rest on our own beloved bed?" 39 Men begin by seeking happiness and are content at last with peace.
We know Catullus more intimately than most Roman poets, because his subject is nearly always himself. These lyric cries of love and hate reveal a sensitive and kindly spirit, capable of generous feeling even for relatives, but unpleasantly self-centered, deliberately obscene, and merciless to his enemies. He published their most private peculiarities, their pederastic pro pensities, their bodily odor. One of them washes his teeth with urine, after an old Spanish custom; 4-0 another is so foul of breath that if he should open his mouth all persons near him would fall dead.41 Catullus oscillates easily between love and offal, kisses and fundaments; he rivals Martial as a guide to the street-corner urology of Rome, and suggests in his contemporaries and his class a mixture of primitive coarseness with civilized refinement, as if educated Romans, however versed in the literature of Greece, could never quite forget the stable and the camp. Catullus pleads, like Martial, that he must salt his lines with dirt to hold his audience.
He atoned for these faults by the conscientious perfection of his verse. His hendecasyllabics leap with a naturalness and spontaneity that escape the artifices of Horace and occasionally rise above all the graces of Virgil. It took much art to conceal his art, and Catullus more than once refers to the painful toil and care that produced his quick intelligibility and apparent ease. His vocabulary helped him to this end; he molded the words of popular speech into poetry, and enriched the Latin of literature with affectionate diminutives as well as tavern slang. He avoided inversions and obscurities, and gave to his lines a limpid fluidity grateful to the ear. He pored over the poets of Hellenistic Alexandria and ancient Ionia: mastered the smooth technique and varied meters of Callimachus, the lusty directness of Archil ochus, the vinous exuberance of Anacreon, the amorous ecstasy of Sappho; indeed, it is largely through him that we must guess how these poets wrote. He learned their lessons so thoroughly that he became, from their pupil, . their equal. He did for Latin poetry what Cicero did for Latin prose: he took it as crude potency and lifted it to an art that only Virgil would surpass.
THE  SCHOLARS
How were Latin books written, illustrated, bound, published, sold? For school exercises, short letters, transient commercial records, the Romans through antiquity wrote with a stylus upon waxed tablets and erased with the thumb.
CHAP. vm)  LITERATURE  UNDER THE  REVOLUTION	159
Theoldest literary Latin known to us was written with quill and ink upon paper manufactured in Egypt from the pressed and glued leaves of the papyrus tree. In the first centuries of our era parchment made from the dried skins of animals began to rival papyrus as a receptacle of l:terature and important docu ments. A folded sheet of membrane, or vellum, constituted a diploma, or two fold. Usually a literary work was issued as a roll (volumen, "wound up"), and was read by unrolling as the reading progressed. The text was customarily written two or three narrow colzmmae to a page, often without punctuation of clauses or even separation of words. Some manuscripts were illustrated by ink drawings; Varro's Imagines, e.g., consisted of 700 portraits of famous men, each picture accompanied by a biographical note. Anyone could publish a manu script by hiring slaves to make copies, and selling the copies. Rich men had clerks who copied for them any book they wished to own. Since copyists were fed rather than paid, books were cheap. First "printings" were usually of a thou sand copies. Booksellers bought wholesale from publishers like Atticus, and sold at retail in arcade bookstalls. Neither publisher nor bookseller gave the author anything except courtesy and occasional gifts; royalties were unknown. Private libraries were now numerous; and about 40 B.C. Asinius Pollio made his great collection the first public library in Rome. Caesar planned a still larger one, and made Varro its director; but this, like so many of his ideas, waited upon Augustus for its fulfillment.
Stimulated by these facilities, Roman literature and scholarship began to equal the industry of the Alexandrians. Poems, pamphlets, histories, textbooks rivaled the Tiber's floods; every aristocrat adorned his escapades with verse, every lady composed words and music, every general wrote memoirs. It was an age of "outlines"; summaries on every subject struggled to meet the needs of a hurried commercial age. J\Iarcus Terentius Varro, despite many military campaigns, found time during his eighty-nine years ( 116-26 B.c.) to synopsize nearly every branch of knowledge; his 620 "volumes" (some seventy-four books) constituted a one-man encyclopedia for his time. Fascinated by the pedigrees of words, he wrote an essay On the Latin Language, now our chief guide to early Roman speech. Perhaps in co-operation with the aims of Augustus, he tried in his treatise On Country Life (De Re Rustica, 36 B.c.) to encourage a return to the land as the best refut;e from the disorder of civil strife. '?vly eightieth year," said his introduction, "warns me that I must pack up and prepare to leave this life"; 42 he would make his last testament a guide to rural happiness and peace. He admired the sturdy women who were delivered of children in the fields and soon resumed work.43 He mourned the low native birth rate that was transforming the popula tion of Rome; "formerly the blessing of children was woman's pride; now she boasts with Ennius that she 'would rather face battle three times than bear one child.' " In his Divine Antiquities he concluded that the fertility, order, and courage of a nation require moral commandments supported by religious belief. Adopting the distinction of the great jurist Q. Mucius Scaevola between two kinds of religion-one for philosophers and one for the people 44-he argued that
160	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. VIII
the second must be upheld regardless of its intellectual defects; and though he himself accepted only a vague pantheism,• he proposed a vigorous attempt to restore the worship of Rome's ancient deities. Influenced by Cato and Polybius, he in his turn decisively affected the religious policy of Augustus and the pious ruralism of Virgil.
As if to complete the work of the elder Cato in every field, Varro continued the censor's Origines in his Life of the Roman People-a history of Roman civil ization. It is a pity that time has scuttled this and nearly all of Varro's work, while preserving the schoolboy biographies of Cornelius Nepos. In Rome history was an art, never also a science; not even in Tacitus did it rise to a critical scrutiny and summary of sources. History as rhetoric, however, found in this age a bril liant practitioner-Caius Sallustius Crispus (86-35 B.c.). He play:ed a vigorous role as politician and warrior on Caesar's side, governed Numidia, stole with skill, and spent a fortune on women; then he retired to a life of luxury and letters in a Roman villa that became famous for jts gardens and was to be the home of emperors. His books, like politics, were a continuation of war by other means; his Histories, ]ugurthine War, and Catiline were able defenses of the populares, powerful attacks upon the "old guard." He exposed the moral decay of Rome,t charged the Senate and the courts with placing property rights above human rights, and put into the mouth of Marius a speech asserting the natural equality of all classes and demanding a career open to talent wherever born.46 He deepened his narratives with philosophical commentary and psychological analysis of char acter, and carved out a style of epigrammatic compactness and vivid rapidity which became a model for Tacitus.
That style, like almost all Roman prose of Sallust's century and the next, took its color and tone from the oratory of the Forum and the courts. The develop ment of the legal profession, and the growth of a talkative democracy, had widened the demand for public speaking. Schools of rhetoric were multiplying despite governmental hostility; "rhetoricians," said Cicero, "are everywhere." Great masters of the art appeared in the first half of the first century before Christ: Marcus Antonius (father of Mark), Lucius Crassus, Sulpicius Rufus, Quintus Hortensius. We may imagine the strength of their lungs when we hear of audiences that overflowed from the Forum into neighboring temples and balconies. The flamboyant eloquence and purchasable conscience of Hortensius made him the darling of the aristocracy and one of Rome's richest men; he left his heirs rn,ooo casks of wine.46b His delivery was so animated that famous actors like Roscius and Aesopus attended the trials at which he pleaded, to perfect their acting by studying his gestures and his delivery. Fallowing the example of old Cato, he revised and published his speeches-an art which his rival Cicero per fected, and which furthered the influence of rhetoric upon all Roman prose. It