While all around shall bloom the purple rose. There let the vine with rich full clusters hang,
Its fair young tendrils flung around the stone; Due meed for that sweet wisdom which he sang,
By Muses and by Graces called their own.
EURIPIDES
The Plays
As Giotto rough-hewed the early path of Italian painting, and Raphael subdued the art with a quiet spirit into technical perfection, and Michel angelo completed the development in works of tortured genius; as Bach with incredible energy forced open a broad road to modern music, and
CHAP.XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	4()1
Mozart perfected its form in melodious simplicity, and Beethoven com pleted the development in works of unbalanced grandeur; so Aeschylus cleared the way and set the forms for Greek drama with his harsh verse and stern philosophy, Sophocles fashioned the art with measured music and placid wisdom, and Euripides completed the development in works of passionate feeling and turbulent doubt. Aeschylus was a preacher of almost Hebraic intensity; Sophocles was a "classic" artist clinging to a broken faith; Euripides was a romantic poet who could never write a perfect play because he was distracted by philosophy. They were the Isaiah, Job, and Ecclesiastes of Greece.
Euripides was born in the year-some say on the day-of Salamis, prob ably on the island itself, to which, we are told, his parents had fled for refuge from the invading Medes... His father was a man of some property and prominence in the Attic town of Phyla; his mother was of noble fam ily,81 though the hostile Aristophanes insists that she kept a grocer's shop and hawked fruit and flowers on the street. In later life he lived on Salamis, loving the solitude of its hills, and its varied prospects of blue sea. Plato wished to be a dramatist and became a philosopher; Euripides wished to be a philosopher and became a dramatist. He "took the entire course of Anaxagoras," says Strabo;"" he studied for a while with Prodicus, and was so intimate with Socrates that some suspected the philosopher of having a hand in the poet's plays."" The whole Sophistic movement entered into his education, and through him captured the Dionysian stage. He became the Voltaire of the Greek Enlightenment, worshiping reason with destruc tive innuendo in the midst of dramas staged to celebrate a god.
The records of the Dionysian Theater credit him with seventy-five plays, from The Daughters of Pelias in 455 to The Bacchae in 406; eighteen sur vive, and a medley of fragments from the rest.• Their subject matter tells again the legends of the early Greeks, but with a note of skeptical pro test sounding timidly and then boldly between the lines. The Ion presents the reputed founder of the Ionian tribes in a delicate dilemma: the oracle of Apollo declares Xuthus to be his father, but Ion discovers that he is the son of Apollo, who seduced his mother and then palmed her off on Xuthus; can it be, Ion asks, that the noble god is a liar? In Heracles and Alcestis the mighty son of Zeus and Alcmena is described as a good-natured drunk ard, with the appetite of Gargantua and the brains of Louis XVI. The
The major plays appeared in approximately the following order: Alcestis, 438; Medea, 431; Hippolytus, 418; Andromache, 417; Hecuba, ca. 41s; Electra, ca. 416; The Trojtm Women, 41s; Iphigenia in Tauris, ca. 413; Orestes, 408; lpbigenia in Aulis, 4oli; The Bat>· chae,4'llt
402	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVII
Alcestis recounts the unprepossessing story of how the gods, as a condition of allowing further life to Admetus (king of Thessalian Pherae), required that some other should consent to die in his stead. His wife offers herself as a sacrifice, and bids him a hundred-line farewell, which he hears with magnanimous patience. Alcestis is carried out for dead; but Heracles, be tween solitary drinking bouts and banquets, goes forth, argues and brow beats Death into relinquishing Alcestis, and brings her back alive. The play can be understood only as a subtle attempt to make the legend ridicu lous.•
The Hippolytus applies with more finesse and grace the same method of reduction to the absurd. The handsome hero is a youthful huntsman who vows to Artemis, virgin goddess of the chase, that he will always be faithful to her; will ever shun women, and will find his greatest pleasure in the woods. Aphrodite, incensed by this insulting celibacy, pours into the heart of Phaedra, Theseus' wife, a mad passion for Hippolytus, Theseus' son by the Amazon Antiope. Here is the first love tragedy in extant literature, and here at the outset are all the symptoms of love at the crisis of its fever: Phaedra, rejected by Hippolytus, languishes and fades to the point of death. Her nurse, suddenly become a philosopher, muses with Hamlet like skepticism about a life beyond the grave:
Yet all man's life is but ailing and dim,
And rest upon the earth comes never. But if any far-off state there be, Dearer than life to mortality,
The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof, And mist is under and mist above.
And some are sick for life, and cling
On earth to this nameless and shining thing; For other life is a fountain sealed,
And the deeps below us are unrevealed, And we drift on legends forever."'
The nurse bears a message to Hippolytus that Phaedra's bed will welcome him; he, knowing that she is his father's wife, is horrified, and bursts into one of those passages that earned Euripides a reputation for misogyny:
Oh God, why hast thou made this gleaming snare, Woman, to dog us on the happy earth?
It was presented in 438 as the fourth play in a group by Euripides; perhaps it was intended as a half-serious satyr play rather than as a half-com1c tragedy. In Balaustion's A.d'Uenture Browning, with generous simplicity, has taken the play at its face value.
CHAP. XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE  GOLD EN  AGE	403
Was it thy will to make man, why his birth Through love and woman?•


202	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.Vlll
fervor or insight into the Olympian creed, and Pheidias ennobled the gods with beauty and majesty; Pythagoras and Plato associated philosophy with religion, and supported the doctrine of immortality as a stimulus to morals. But Protagoras doubted, Socrates ignored, Democritus denied, Euripides ridiculed the gods; and in the end Greek philosophy, hardly willing it, destroyed the religion that had molded the moral life of Greece.
CHAPTER  IX
TheCommon Culture of Early Greece
THE INDIVIDUALISM OF THE STATE
HE two rival zeniths of European culture-ancient Bellas and Renais sance Italy-rested upon no larger political organization than the city state. Geographical conditions presumably contributed to this result in Greece. Everywhere mountains or water intervened; bridges were rare and roads were poor; and though the sea was an open highway, it bound the city with its commercial associates rather than with its geographical neighbors. But geography does not altogether explain the city-state. There was as much separatism between Thebes and Plataea, on the same Boeotian plain, as between Thebes and Sparta; more between Sybaris and Crotona on the same Italian shore than between Sybaris and Syracuse. Diversity of economic and political interest kept the cities apart; they fought one an other for distant markets or grain, ,or formed rival alliances for control of the sea. Distinctions of origin helped to divide them; the Greeks consid ered themselves to be all of one race,' but their tribal divisions-Aeolian, Ionian, Achaean, Dorian-were keenly felt, and Athens and Sparta disliked each other with an ethnological virulence worthy of our own age. Differ ences of religion strengthened, as they were strengthened by, political divi sions. Out of the unique cults of locality and clan came distinct festivals and calendars, distinct customs and laws, distinct tribunals, even distinct frontiers; for the boundary stones limited the realm of the god as well as of the community; cujus regio, ejus religio. These and many other factors
united to produce the Greek city-state.
It was not a new administrative form: we have seen that there were city states in Sumeria, Babylonia, Phoenicia, and Crete hundreds or thousands of years before Horner or Pericles. Historically the city-state was the vil lage community in a higher stage of fusion or development-a common market, meeting ground, and judgment seat for men tilling the same hin terland, belonging to the same stock, and worshiping the same god. Po litically it was to the Greek the best available compromise between those two hostile and fluctuating components of human society-order and lib-
203
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. IX
erty; a smaller community would have been insecure, a larger one tyran nical. Ideally-in the aspirations of philosophers-Greece was to consist of sovereign city-states co-operating in a Pythagorean harmony. Aristotle conceived the state as an association of freemen acknowledging one gov ernment and capable of meeting in one assembly; a state with more than ten thousand citizens, he thought, would be impracticable. In the Gttek language one word-polis-sufficed for both city and state.
All the world knows that this political atomism brought to Hellas many a tragedy of fraternal strife. Because Ionia was unable to unite for defense it fell subject to Persia; because Greece, despite confederacies and leagues, was unable to stand together, the freedom which it idolized was in the end destroyed. And yet Greece would have been impossible without the city-state. Only through this sense of civic individuality, this exuberant assertion of independence, this diversity of institutions, customs, arts, and gods, was Greece stimulated, by competition and emulation, to live human life with a zest and fullness and creative originality that no other society had ever known. Even in our own times, with all our vitality and variety, our mechanisms and powers, is there any community of like population or extent that pours into the stream of civilization such a profusion of gifts as flowed from the chaotic liberty of the Greeks?
LETTERS
Nevertheless there were common factors in the life of these watchfully separatist states. As far back as the thirteenth century B.c. we find one lan guage throughout the Greek peninsula. It belonged to the "lndo-European" group, like Persian and Sanskrit, Slavonic and Latin, German and English; thousands of words denoting the primary relations or objects of life have com mon roots in these tongues, and suggest not only the predispersion antiquity of the things denoted, but the kinship or association of the peoples who used them in the dawn of history.• It is true that the Greek language was diversi fied into dialects-Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, Attic; but these were mutually intelli gible, and yielded, in the fifth and fourth centuries, to a koine dialektos, or common dialect, which emanated principally from Athens, and was spoken by nearly all the educated classes of the Hellenic world. Attic Greek was a noble tongue, vigorous, supple, melodious; as irregular as any vital speech, but lending itself readily to expressive combinations, delicate gradations and dis-
Cf. in addition to numerals and family terms, such words as Sanskrit d11m(as) (house), Greek domos. Latin domus, English tim-ber; dvaras, tbyra, fores, door; venas, (f)oinos, tmmm, wine; naus, 'IIIIUS, navis, nave; aksbas, a:con, a:&is, ale; iug11m, zygon, iugum, yoke, etc.
CHAP.IX)  THE  COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE	20S
tinctions of meaning, subtle philosophical conceptions, and every variety of literary excellence from the "many-billowed surge" of Homer's verse to the placid flow of Plato's prose.•
Greek tradition attributed the introduction of writing into Greece to Phoe nicians in the fourteenth century B.c., and we know nothing to the contrary. The oldest Greek inscriptions, dating from the eighth and seventh centuries, show a close resemblance to the Semitic characters on the ninth-century Moabite stone.• These inscriptions were written, in Semitic fashion, from right to left; sixth-century inscriptions (e.g., at Gortyna) were made alternately from right to left and from left to right; later inscriptions are from left to right through
out, and certain letters are turned around accordingly, as a: and a to Band E.
The Semitic names for the letters were adopted with minor moclifications;t
but the Greeks made several basic changes. Above all, they added vowels, which the Semites had omitted; certain Semitic characters denoting consonants
or breathings were used to represent a, e, i, o, and u. Later the Ionians added
the long vowels eta (long e) and o-mega (long or double o). Ten different Greek alphabets struggled for ascendancy as part of the war of the city-states; in Greece the Ionian form prevailed, and was transmitted to eastern Europe, where it survives today; in Rome the Chalcidian form was adopted from Cumae to become the Latin alphabet, and ours. The Chalcidic alphabet lacked the long e and o, but, unlike the Ionian, retained the Phoenician vau as a con sonant (a v with approximately the sound of w); hence the Athenians called wine oinos, the Chalcidians called it voinos, the Romans called it vinum, we call it wine. Chalcis kept the Semitic koppa or q, and passed it on to Rome and ourselves; Ionia abandoned it, content with k. Ionia represented L as A, Chalcis as L; Rome straightened up the latter form and gave it to Europe. The Ionians used P for R, but in Greek Italy the P sprouted a tail, and became R/
The earliest uses of writing in Greece were probably commercial or religious; apparently priestly charms and chants are the mother of poetry, and bills of lading are the father of prose. Writing split into two varieties: the formal for literary or epigraphic purposes, the cursive for ordinary use. There were no accents, no spaces between words, no punctuation points;• but a change of topic was marked off by a horizontal dividing stroke called the paragraphos i.e., a sign "written on the side." The materials used to receive writing were various: at first, if we may believe Pliny, leaves or the bark of trees;" for inscrip-
•Wedo not know how ancient Greek was pronounced." The accents that trouble us so much were seldom used by the classical Greeks, but were insened into ancient texts by Aristophanes of Byzantium in the third century B.c. These accents should be ignored in reading Greek poetry.


The word mousike among the Greeks meant originally any devotion to any Muse. Plato's Academy was called a Museion or Museum-i.e., a place dedicated to the Muses and the many cultural pursuits which they patron ized; the Museum at Alexandria was a university of literary and scientific activity, not a collection of museum pieces. In the narrower and modem sense music was at least as popular among the Greeks as it is among our selves today. In Arcadia all freemen studied music to the age of thirty; everyone knew some instrument; and to be unable to sing was accounted a disgrace."" Lyric poetry was so named because, in Greece, it was com
posed to be sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, the harp, or the flute. The poet usually wrote the music as well as the words, and sang his own songs; to be a lyric poet in ancient Greece was far more difficult than to compose, as poets do today, verses for silent and solitary reading. Before the sixth century there was hardly any Greek literature divorced from music. Education and letters, as well as religion and war, were bound up with music: martial airs played an important part in military training, and nearly all instruction of the memory was through verse. By the eighth
CHAP.IX)  THE  COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE    227
century Greek music was already old, with hundreds of varieties and forms. The instruments were simple, and were based, like our vaster armory of sound, upon percussion, wind, or strings. The first class were not popu lar. The flute was favored at Athens until Alcibiades, laughing at his music master's inflated cheeks, refused to play so ridiculous an instrm:;nent, and set a fashion against it among Athenian youth. (Besides, said the Athenians, the Boeotians surpassed them with the flute, which branded the art as a vulgar one.08)  The simple flute, or aulos, was a tube of cane or bored wood with a detachable mouthpiece and from two to seven finger holes into which movable stopples might be inserted to modify the pitch. Some play ers used the double flute-a "masculine" or bass flute in the right hand and a "feminine" or treble flute in the left, both held to the mouth by a strap around the cheeks, and played in simple harmony. By attaching the flute to a distensible bag the Greeks made a bagpipe; by uniting several gradu
ated flutes they made a syrinx, or Pipe of Pan; by extending and opening the end, and closing the finger holes, they made a salpinx, or trumpet.'" Flute music, says Pausanias,.. was usually gloomy, and was always used in dirges or elegies; but the auletridai-the flute-playing geisha girls of Greece-do not seem to have purveyed gloom. String music was confined to plucking the strings with finger or plectrum; bowing was unknown... The lyre, phorminx, or kithara were essentially alike-four or more strings of sheep gut stretched over a bridge across a resonant body of metal or tor toise shell. The kithara was a small harp, used for accompanying narrative poetry; the lyre was like a guitar, and was chosen to accompany lyric poetry and songs.
The Greeks told many strange tales of how the gods-Hennes, Apollo, Athena-had invented these instruments; how Apollo had pitted his lyre against the pipes and flutes of Marsyas (a priest of the Phrygian goddess Cybele), had won-unfairly, as Marsyas thought-by adding his voice to the instrument, and had topped the performance by having poor Marsyas flayed alive: so legend personified the conquest of the flute by the lyre. Prettier stories were told of ancient musicians who had established or devel oped the musical art: of Olympus, Marsyas' pupil, who, towards 730, in vented the enharmonic scale;* of Linus, Heracles' teacher, who invented Greek musical notation and established some of the "modes";'° of Orpheus, Thracian priest of Dionysus; and of his pupil Musaeus, who said that "song
A scale employing quarter tones; e.g., E E' F A B B' C E-where the accent indicates a
quarter tone above the preceding note.
228	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. IX
is a sweet thing to monals."11 These tales reflect the probable fact that Greek music derived its forms from Lydia, Phrygia, and Thrace.•'lll
Song entered into almost every phase of Greek life. There were dithyrambs for Dionysus, paeans for Apollo, hymns for any god; there were enkomia, or songs of praise, for rich men, and epinikia, or songs of victory, for athletes; there were symposiaka, skolia, erotika, hymenaioi, elegiai, and threnoi for din ing, drinking, loving, marrying, mourning, and burying; herdsmen had their bukolika, reapers their lityerses, vinedressers their epilenia, spinners their iouloi, weavers their elinoi."' And then as now, presumably, the man in the market or the club, the lady in the home and the woman of the streets, sang songs not quite as learned as S onides'; vulgar music and polite music have come down dis tantly together through the centuries.
The highest form of music, in the belief and practice of the Greeks, was choral singing; to this they gave the philosophical depth, the structural com plexity, the emotional range, which in modern music tend to find place in the concerto or the symphony. Any festival-a harvest, a victory, a marriage, a holy day-might be celebrated with a chorus; and now and then cities and groups would organize great contests in choral song. The performance was in most cases prepared far in advance: a composer was appointed to write the words and music, a rich man was persuaded to pay the expense, professional singers
The music of Hellas was played in a variety of scales far more numerous and complex than ours. Our diatonic scale makes no smaller division than the half tone, and twelve balf tones constitute our octave; the Greeks used quarter tones, and had forty-five scales of Qigh teen notes apiece.'lll These scales were in three groups: the diatonic scales, based upon the tetrachord E D C B; the chromatic, upon E 01 C B; and the enharmonic, upon E C Cb B. From the Greek scales, by simplification, came those of medieval church music, and, through these, our own.
Within the diatonic tetrachord seven modes (harmoniai) were produced liy tuning the strings to alter the position of the semitones in the octave. The most imponant modes were the Dorian (E F G AB C D E), martial and grave though in a minor key; the Lydian (CD EFG ABC), tender and plaintive though in a major key; and the Phrygian (DEF GAB CD), minor in key, and orgiastically passionate and wild!' It is amusmg to read of the violent controversies concerning the musical, ethical, and medical effects, restorative or disastrous, which the Greeks-chiefly the philosophers-ascribed to these half-tone variations. Dorian music, we are told, made men brave and dignified, the Lydian made them sentimental and weak, the Phrygian made them excited and headstrong. Plato saw effeminate luxury and gross immorality as the offspring of most music, and wished to banish all instrumental per formances from his ideal state. Aristotle would have had all youths trained in the Dorian mode.'111 Theophrastus had a good word to say even for the Phrygian mode; serious diseases, he tells us, can be made painless by playing a Phrygian air near the affected part....
Greek musical notation used not ovals and stems on a staff of lines, but the letters of the alphabet, varied by inversion or transversion, augmented by dots and dashes to make sixty four signs, and placed above the words of the song. A few scraps of such notation have come down to console us for the loss of the rest; they indicate melodies akin rather to Oriental than to European strains, and would be more bearable to the Hindus, the Chinese, or the Japanese than to our dull Occidental ears, uotrained to quarter tones.
CHAP.IX)  THE  COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE    229
were engaged, and the chorus was carefully trained. All the singers sang the same note, as in the music of the Greek Church today; there was no "part song" except that in later centuries the accompaniment was played a :fifth above or below the voice, or ran counter to it; this is as near as the Greeks seem to have come to harmony and counterpoint.18
The dance in its highest development was woven into one art with choral singing, just as many forms and terms of modern music were once associated with the dance;• and dancing rivaled music in age and popularity among the Greeks. Lucian, unable to trace its earthly beginnings, sought the origins of the dance in the regular motions of the stars,80 Homer tells us not only of the dancing :floor made by Daedalus for Ariadne, but of an expert dancer among the Greek warriors at Troy, Meriones, who, dancing while he fought, could never be found by any lance.81 Plato described orchesis, or dancing, as "the instinctive desire to explain words by gestures of the entire body"-which is rather a description of certain modern languages; Aristotle better defined the dance as "an imitation of actions, characters, and passions by means of postures and rhythmical movements."'1 Socrates himself danced, and praised the art as giving health to every part of the body;• he meant, of course, Greek dancing.
For the Greek dance was quite different from ours. Though in some of its forms it may have served as a sexual stimulant, it rarely brought men into physical contact with women. It was an artistic exercise rather than a walking embrace, and, like the Oriental dance, it used arms and hands as much as legs and feet."' Its forms were as varied as the types of poetry and song; ancient authorities listed two hundred.811 There were religious dances, as among the Dionysiac devotees; there were athletic dances, like Sparta's Gymnopedia, or Festival of Naked Youth; there were martial dances, like the Pyrrhic, taught to children as part of military drill; there was the stately hyporchema, a choral hymn or play performed by two choirs of which one alternately sang or danced while the other danced or sang; there were folk dances for every major event of life and every season or festival of the year. And as for everything else, there were dance contests, usually involving choral song.
All these arts-lyric poetry, song, instrumental music, and the dance were closely allied in early Greece, and formed in many ways one att. As time went on, and already in the seventh century, specialization and professionalism set in. The rhapsodes abandoned song for recitation, and separated narrative verse from music  Archilochus sang his lyrics without
accompaniment,8T and began that long degeneration which at last reduced
The word foot, as meaning part of a verse, owes its origin to the dance that accompanied the song;'III orchestra, to the Greek. meant a dancing platform, usually in front of the stage.
2 30	T H E  L I F E  O F  GR E EC E	( CHAP. IX
poetry to a fallen angel silent and confined. The choral dance broke up into singing without dancing, and dancing without singing; for, as Lucian put it, "The violent exercise caused shortness of breath, and the song suf fered for it.".. In like manner there appeared musicians who played without singing, and won the applause of devotees by their precise and rapid execution of quarter tones... Some famous musicians, then as now,
:ngrossed the receipts; Amoebeus, harpist and singer, received a talent ($6000) each time that he performed.00 The common player, doubtless, lived from hand to mouth, for the musician, like other artists, belongs to a profession that has had the honor of starving in every generation.


elements of fear and superstition, in the worship of Apollo, and in his great festivals at Delphi and Delos, the dominant note was the rejoicing of a brilliant people in a god of health and wisdom, reason and song.
Happy, too, was his sister Artemis (Diana), maiden goddess of the chase, so absorbed in the ways of animals and the pleasures of the woods that she had no time for the love of men. She was the goddess of wild nature, of meadows, forests, hills, and the sacred bough. As Apollo was the ideal of Greek youth, so Artemis was the model of Greek girlhood-strong, athletic, graceful, chaste; and yet again she was the patroness of women in childbirth, who prayed to her to ease their pains. At Ephesus she kept her Asiatic character as a goddess of motherhood and fertility. In this way the ideas of virgin and mother became confused in her worship; and the Chris tian Church found it wise, in the fifth century of our era, to attach the rem nants of this cult to Mary, and to transform the mid-August harvest festival of Artemis into the feast of the Assumption."' In such ways the old is pre served in the new, and everything changes except the essence. History, like life, must be continuous or die; character and institutions may be altered, but slowly; a serious interruption of their development throws them into national amnesia and insanity.
A thoroughly human figure in this pantheon was the mastel' craftsman of
Olympus, that lame Hephaestus whom the Romans knew as Vulcan. At first he seems a pitiful and ridiculous figure, this insulted and injured Quasi modo of the skies; but in the end our sympathies are with him rather than with the clever and unscrupulous gods who maltreat him. Perhaps in early days, before he became so human, he had been the leaping spirit of the fire and the forge. In the Homeric theogony he is the son of Zeus and Hera; but other myths assure us that Hera, jealous of Zeus's unaided delivery of Athena, gave birth to Hephaestus without the aid of any male. Seeing him to be ugly and weak, she cast him down from Olympus. He found his way back, and built for the gods the many mansions in which they dwelt. Though his mother had dealt so cruelly with him, he showed her all kind ness and respect, and defended her so zealously in one of her quarrels with Zeus that the great Olympian seized him by the lt:g and hurled him down to the earth. A whole day Hephaestus fell; at last he landed on the island of Lemnos, and hurt his ankle; certainly thereafter (before that, says Homer) he was painfully lame. Again he found his way back to Olympus. In his resounding workshops he built a mighty anvil with twenty huge bellows, made the shield and armor of Achilles, statues that moved of their own accord, and other very wonderful things. The Greeks worshiped him as
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.VIII
the god of all metal trades, then of all handicrafts, and pictured the vol canoes as the chimneys of his subterranean forges. It was his misfortune that he married Aphrodite, for it is difficult for beauty to be virtuous. Learning of her affair with Ares, Hephaestus fashioned a trap that fell upon the lovers as they loved; and then the limping deity had his lame revenge by bringing his fellow gods to look in laughter upon the bound divinities of love and war. But to Hermes, Homer tells us, Apollo said:
"Hermes, son of Zeus ... wouldst thou in sooth be willing, even though ensnared with strong bonds, to lie on a couch by the side of golden Aphrodite?" Then the messenger answered him: "Would that this might befall, Lord Apollo, that thrice as many bonds inextricable might clasp me about, and that ye gods-aye, and all the goddesses, too-might be looking on, but that I might sleep by the side of golden Aphrodite."80
Ares (Mars) was never distinguished for intelligence or subtlety; his business was war, and even the charms of Aphrodite could not give him the thrill that came to him from lusty and natural killing. Homer calls him "the curse of men," and tells with pleasure how Athena laid him low with a stone; "he covered, as he lay, seven acres of the field."31 Hermes (Mercury) is more interesting. In origin he is a stone, and from the cult of sacred stones his worship is derived; the stages of his evolution are still visible. Then he is the tall stone placed upon graves, or he is the daimon, or spirit, in this stone. Then he is the boundary stone or its god, marking and guard ing a field; and because his function there is also to promote fenility, the phallus becomes one of his symbols. Then he is the herm or pillar-with carved head, uncarved body, and prominent male member-which was placed before all respectable houses in Athens;'"' we shall see how the mutila tion of these hermae on the eve of the expedition against Syracuse provided the proximate cause for the ruin of Alcibiades and Athens. Again he is the god of wayfarers and the protector of heralds; their characteristic staff, or caduceus, is one of his favorite insignia. As god of travelers he becomes a god of luck, trade, cunning, and gain, therefore an inventor and guarantor of measures and scales, a patron saint of perjurers, embezzlers, and thieves... He is himself a herald, bearing the billets and decrees of Olympus from god to god or man, and he moves on winged sandals with the speed of an angry wind. His running-about gives him a lithe and graceful form, and prepares him for Praxiteles. As a swift and vigorous youth he is the patron saint of athletes, and his shamelessly virile image has a place in every palaestra."' As
CHAP. vm)	THE  GODS  OF  GREECE
herald he is the god of eloquence; as celestial interpreter he is the first of a long hermeneutical line. One of the "Homeric" Hymns tells how, in his youth, he stretched strings across a tortoise shell, and so invented the lyre. Finally it comes his turn to appease Aphrodite; and their offspring, we are told,86 is a delicate hermaphrodite, sharing their charms and named from their names.
It was characteristic of Greece that in addition to deities of chastity, vir
ginity, and motherhood it should have a goddess of beauty and love. Doubt less in her Near-Eastern origins, and in Cyprus her half-Oriental home, Aphrodite was first of all a mother goddess; to the end of her tenure she remained associated with reproduction and fertility in the whole realm of plant, animal, and human life. But as civilization developed, and increasing security obviated the need for a high birth rate, the esthetic sense was left free to see other values in woman than those of multiplication, and to make Aphrodite not only the embodiment of the ideal of beauty, but the deity of all heterosexual pleasure. The Greeks worshiped her in many forms: as Aphrodite Urania, the Heavenly, the goddess of chaste or sacred love; as Aphrodite Pandemos, the Popular, the goddess of profane love in all its modes; and even as Aphrodite Kallipygos, the Venus of the Lovely Nates.• At Athens and Corinth the courtesans built temples to her as their patron saint. At the beginning of April various cities in Greece celebrated her great festival, the Aphrodisia; and on that occasion, for those who cared to take part, sexual freedom was the order of the day.21 She was the love goddess of the sensual and passionate south, ancient rival of Artemis, the love goddess of the cold and hunting north. Mythology, almost as ironic as history, made her the wife of the crippled Hephaestus, but she consoled herself with Ares, Hermes, Poseidon, Dionysus, and many a mortal like Anchises and Adonis.• To her, in competition with Hera and Athena, Paris awarded the golden apple as the prize of beauty. But perhaps she was never really beautiful until Praxiteles reconceived her, and gave her the loveliness for which Greece could forgive all her sins.
The myth of Adonis is one more variation on the vegetation theme-the annual death and resurrection of the soil. This handsome youth was desired by both Aphrodite and Persephone, the goddesses of love and of death. Ares, jealous of Adonis' success with Aphrodite, disguised himself as a wild boar and killed him. The anemone was born of Adonis' blood, and rivers of poetry from Aphrodite's grief. Zeus persuaded the goddesses to divide Adonis' time and attentions by leaving him for half a year with Persephone in Hades, and restoring him for half a year to eanhly life and love. In Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Athens the death of the boy was commemorated in the festival of the Adonia; women carried images of the Lord (for such was the meaning of his name), loudly bewailed his death, and triwnphantly celebrated his resurrection.88
186	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.VDI
To the legitimate or illegitimate children of Zeus we must add, as major Olympians, his sister Hestia, goddess of the hearth, and his unruly brother Poseidon. This Greek Neptune, secure in his watery realms, considered himself fully the equal of Zeus. Even landlocked nations worshiped him, for he commanded not only the sea but the rivers and the springs; it was he who guided the mysterious subterranean streams, and made earthquakes with tidal waves."' To him Greek mariners prayed, and raised appeasing temples on perilous promontories.
Subordinate deities were numerous even on Olympus, for there was no end to personifications. There was Hestia (the Roman Vesta), goddess of the hearth and its sacred fire. There was Iris, the rainbow, sometimes messenger for Zeus; Hebe, goddess of youth; Eileithyia, who helped women in childbirth; Dike or Justice; Tyche, Chance; and Eros, Love, whom Hesiod made the creator of the world, whom Sappho called "a limb-dis solving, bitter-sweet, impracticable wild beast."'° There was Hymeneus, the Marriage Song; Hypnos, Sleep; Oneiros, Dream; Geras, Old Age; Lethe, Oblivion; Thanatos, Death, and others beyond naming. There were nine Muses to inspire artists and poets: Clio for history, Euterpe for lyric poetry accompanied by the flute, Thalia for comic drama and idyllic poetry, Melpomene for tragedy, Terpsichore for choral dance and song, Erato for love verse and mimicry; Polymnia for hymns, Urania for astronomy, Cal liope for epic poetry. There were three Graces, and their twelve attendants, the Hours. There was Nemesis, who meted out good and evil to men, and visited with disaster all who were guilty of by bris-insolence in prosperity, There were the terrible Erinnyes, the Furies who left no wrong un revenged; the Greeks with deprecating euphemism called them Well Wishers, Eumenides. And finally: there were the Moirai, the Fates or Allotters who regulated inevitably the affairs of life, and ruled, some said, both gods and men. In that conception Greek religion found its limit, and flowed over into science and law.
We have left for the last the most troublesom , the most popular, the most difficult to classify, of all the Greek gods. Only late in his career was Dionysus received into Olympus. In Thrace, which gave him as a Greek gift to Greece, he was the god of liquor brewed from barley, and was known as Sabazius; in Greece he became a god of wine, the nourisher and guardian of the vine; he began as a goddess of fertility, became a god of intoxication, and ended as ason of god dying to save mankind. Many figures and legends were mingled to make his myth. The Greeks thought of him as
CHAP.VDI)	THE  GODS OF GREECE.
Zagreus, "the homed child" borne to Zeus by his daughter Persephone. He was the best beloved of his father, and was seated beside him on the throne of heaven. When the jealous Hera incited the Titans to kill him, Zeus, to disguise him, changed him into a goat, then a bull; in this form, nevenheless, the Titans captured him, cut his body into pieces, and boiled them in a caldron. Athena, like another Trelawney, saved the hean, and carried it to Zeus; Zeus gave it to Semele, who, impregnated with it, gave to the god a second birth under the name of Dionysus.•
Mourning for Dionysus' death, and joyful ce)ebration of his resurrection, formed the basiulLa_ritual extremely widespread among the Greeks. In springtime, when the vine was bursting into blossom, Greek women went up into the hills to meet the reborn god. For two days they drank without restraint, and like our less religious bacchanalians, considered him witless who would not lose his wits. They marched in wild procession, led by Maenads, or mad women, devoted to Dionysus; they listened tensely to the story they knew so well, of the suffering, death, and resurrection of their god; and as they drank and danced they fell into a frenzy in which all bonds were loosed. The height and center of their ceremony was to seize upon a goat, a bull, sometimes a man (seeing in them incarnations of the god); to tear the live victim to pieces in commemoration of Dionysus' dismember ment; then to drink the blood and eat the flesh in a sacred communion whereby, as they thought, the god would enter them and possess their souls. In that divine enthusiasmt they were convinced that they and the god be came one in a mys.tic and triumphant union; they took his name, called themselves, after one of his titles, Bacchoi, and knew that now they would never die. Or they termed their state an ecstasis, a going out of their souls to meet and be one with Dionysus; thus they felt freed from the burden of the flesh, they acquired divine insight, they were able to prophesy, they were gods. Such was the passionate cult that came down from Thrace into Greece like a medieval epidemic _of religion, dragging one region after another from the cold and clear Olympians of the state worship into a faith and ritual that satisfied the craving for excitement and release, the longing for enthusiasm and possession, mysticism and mystery. The priests of
Diodorus Siculus, as early as 50 B.c., interpreted the tale as a vegetation myth. Zagreus, the vine, is a child of Demeter, the earth, fertilized by Zeus, the rain. The vine, like the god, is cut (pruned) to give it new life; and the juice of the grape is boiled to make wine. Each year, under nourishing rains, the vine is reborn.a Herodotus found so many resemblances between the myths of Dionysus and Osiris that he ideI)tified the two gods in one of the first essays in compal"ative religion...
t From entheos, "a god within"; "enthusiasm" originally meant possession by a god.
188	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VIII
Delphi and the rulers of Athens tried to keep the cult at a distance, but
. failed; all they could do was to adopt Dionysus into Olympus, Hellenize and humanize him, give him an official festival, and turn the revelry of his worshipers from the mad ecstasy of wine among the hills into the stately processions, the robust songs, and the noble drama of the Great Dionysia. For a while they won Dionysus over to Apollo, but in the end Apollo yielded to Dionysus' heir and conqueror, Christ.


CHAP. XII)	WORK  AND  WEALTH  IN  ATHENS	285
with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of the political equality of the people, on the other of a moderate aris tocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish; and, recoiling from no means in their struggle for ascendancy, engaged in the direst excesses   Reli
gion was in honor with neither party, but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation   The ancient sim
plicity into which honor so largely entered was laughed down, and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow. . . . Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape  The
whole Hellenic world was convulsed."'
Athens survives this turbulence because every Athenian is at heart an individualist, and loves private property; and because the Athenian govern ment finds a practicable medium between socialism and individualism in a moderate regulation of business and wealth. The state is not afraid to regu late: it sets a limit upon the size of dowries, the cost of funerals, and the dress of women;"" it taxes and supervises trade, enforces fair weights and me sures and honest quality so far as the ingenuity of human rascality per mits;"" it limits the export of food, and enacts sharp laws to govern and chasten the practices of merchants and tradesmen. It watches the grain trade carefully, and legislates severely against corners-even to the death penalty-by forbidding the purchase of more than seventy-five bushels of wheat at a time; it interdicts loans on outgoing cargoes unless the return shipment is to bring grain to the Piraeus; it requires that all com loaded by vessels owned in Athens shall be brought to the Piraeus; and it prohibits the export of more than a third of any corn cargo that reaches that port.07 By keeping a reserve of grain in state-owned storehouses, and pouring this upon the market when prices rise too rapidly, Athens sees to it that the price of bread shall never be exorbitant, that millionaires shall not be cre ated out of the hunger of the people, and that no Athenian shall starve The
state regulates wealth through taxation and liturgies, and persuades or com pels rich men to supply funds for the fleet, the drama, and the theoric pay ments that enable the poor to attend the plays and the games. For the rest Athens protects freedom of trade, private property, and the opportunity to profit, deeming them the necessary implements of human liberty, and the most powerful stimuli to industry, commerce, and prosperity.
Under this system of economic individualism tempered with socialistic
286	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XII
regulation, wealth accumulates in Athens, and spreads sufficiently to pre vent a radical revolution; to the end of ancient Athens private property remains secure. The number of citizens with a comfortable income doubles between 480 and 431;6" the public revenue grows, public expenditures rise, and yet the treasury is full beyond any precedent in Greek history. The economic basis of Athenian freedom, enterprise, art, and thought is firmly laid, and will bear without strain every extravagance of the Golden Age except the war by which all Greece will be ruined.
CHAPTER XIII
TheMorals and Manners of the Athenians
CHILDHOOD
VERY Athenian citizen is expected to have children, and all the forces of religion, property, and the state unite to discountenance childlessness. Where no offspring comes, adoption is the rule, and high prices are paid for prepossessing orphans. At the same time law and public opinion accept infanti cide as a legitimate safeguard against excess population and a pauperizing frag mentation of the land; any father may expose a newborn child to death either as doubtfully his, or as weak or deformed. The children of slaves are seldom allowed to live. Girls are more subject to exposure than boys, for every daughter has to be provided with a dowry, and at marriage she passes from the home and service of those who have reared her into the service of those who have not. Exposure is effected by leaving the infant in a large earthenware vessel within the precincts of a temple or in some other place where it can soon be rescued if any wish to adopt it. The parental right to expose permits a rough eugenics, and co-operates with a rigorous natural selection by hardship and competition to make the Greeks a strong and healthy people. The philoso phers almost unanimously approve of family limitation: Plato will call for the exposure of all feeble children, and of those born of base or elderly parents;1 and Aristotle will defend abortion as preferable to infanticide.• The Hippo cratic code of medical ethics will not allow the physician to effect abortion, but the Greek midwife is an experienced hand in this field, and no law impedes
her.••
On or before the tenth day after birth the child is formally accepted into the family with a religious ritual around the hearth, and receives presents and a name. Usually a Greek has but one name, like Socrates or Archimedes; but since it is customary to call the eldest son after the paternal grandfather, repe tition is frequent, and Greek history is confounded with a multiplicity of Xeno phons, Aeschineses, Thucydideses, Diogeneses, and Zenos. To avoid ambiguity the father's name or the place of birth may be added, as with Kimon Miltiadou
We have no evidence of contraceptive devices among the Greeks.'
;287
288	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XIII
-Cimon son of Miltiades-or Diodorus Siculus-Diodorus of Sicily; or the prob lem may be solved by some jolly nickname, like Callimedon-The Crab."
Once the child is so accepted into the family it cannot lawfully be exposed, and is reared with all the affection that parents lavish upon their children in every age. Themistocles describes his son as the real ruler of Athens; for he, Themistocles, the most influential man in the city, is ruled by his wife, who is ruled by their child." Many an epigram in The Greek Anthology reveals a ten der parental love:
I wept at the death of my Theonoe, but the hopes centered in our child lightened my sorrows. And now envious Fate has be reaved me of the boy as well. Alas! I am cheated of thee, my child, all that was left to me. Persephone, hear this cry of a father's grief, and lay the child upon his dead mother's breast.'
The tragedies of adolescence are eased with many games, some of which will survive the memory of Greece. On a white perfume vase made for a child's grave a little boy is seen taking his toy cart with him down to Hades." Babies have terra-cotta rattles containing pebbles; girls keep house with their dolls, boys fight great campaigns with clay soldiers and generals, nurses push children on swings or balance them on seesaws, boys and girls roll hoops, fly kites, spin tops, play hide-and-seek or blindman's buff or tug of war, and wage a hundred merry contests with pebbles, nuts, coins, and balls. The marbles of the Golden Age are dried beans shot from the fingers, or smooth stones shot or tossed into a circle to dislodge enemy stones and come to rest as near as possible to the center. As children approach the "age of reason"-seven or eight-they take up the game of dice by throwing square knucklebones (astragali), the highest throw, six, being counted the best.• The games of the young are as old as the sins of their fathers.
EDUCATION
Athens provides public gymnasiums and palaestras, and exercises some loose supervision over teachers; but the city has no public schools or state universi ties, and education remains in private hands. Plato advocates state schools,20 but Athens seems to believe that even in education competition will produce the best results. Professional schoolmasters set up their own schools, to which freeborn boys are sent at the age of six. The name paidagogos is given not to the teacher but to the slave who conducts the boy daily to and from school; we hear of no boarding schools. Attendance at school continues till fourteen or sixteen, or till a later age among the well to do.11 The schools have no desks but only benches; the pupil holds on his knee the roll from which he reads or


Oedi'[J'Us Tyrannus is the most famous of Greek dramas. Its opening scene is impressive: a motley throng of men, women, boys, girls, and in fants sit before the royal palace in Thebes, carrying boughs of l,nirel and olive as symbols of supplication. A plague has fallen upon the city, and the people have gathered to beg King Oedipus to offer some appeasing sacrifice to the gods. An oracle announces that the plague will leave Thebes with the unknown assassin of Laius, the former king. Oedipus lays a bitter curse upon the murderer, whoever he may be, whose crime has brought such misery to Thebes. This is a perfect instance of that method
which Horace advised, of plunging m medias res, and letting explanations
enter afterward. But the audience, of course, knew the story, for the tale
of Laius, Oedipus, and the Sphinx was part of the folklore of the Greeks. Tradition said that a curse had been laid upon Laius and his children be cause he had introduced an unnatural vice into Hellas;"' the consequences of this sin, ruining generation after generation, formed a typical theme for Greek tragedy. Laius and his queen Jocasta, said an oracle, woula have a son who would slay his father and marry his mother. For once in the world's history two parents wanted a girl for their first child. But a son came; and to avoid fulfillment of the oracle he was exposed on the hills. A shepherd found him, called him Oedipus from his swollen feet, and gave him to the king and queen of Corinth, who reared him as their son. Grown to manhood, Oedipus learned, again from the oracle, that he was destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Believing the king and queen of Corinth to be his parents, he fled from that city and took the road to Thebes. On the way he met an old man, quarreled with him, and slew him, not knowing that the old man was his father. Nearing Thebes he encountered the Sphinx, a creature with the face of a woman, the tail of a lion, and the wings of a bird. To Oedipus the Sphinx pre-; sented its renowned riddle: "What is that which is four-footed, three footed, and two-footed?" All who failed to answer correctly were de stroyed by the Sphinx; and the terrified Thebans, longing to clear the highway of this monster, had vowed to have as their next ki g whoever should solve the riddle, for the Sphinx had agreed to commit suicide if any one answered it. Oedipus replied: "Man; for as a child he crawls on four feet, as an adult he walks on two, and as an old man he adds a cane." It was
394	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVII
a lame answer, but the Sphinx accepted it, and loyally plunged to its death. The Thebans hailed Oedipus as their savior, and when Laius failed to return they made the newcomer king. Obeying the custom of the land, Oedipus married the queen, and had by her four children: Antigone, Polynices, Eteocles, and Ismene. In the second scene in Sophocles' play-the most powerful scene in Greek drama-an old high priest, commanded by Oedi pus to reveal, if he can, the identity of Laius' murderer, names Oedipus himself. Nothing could be more tragic than the King's reluctant and ter rified realization that he is the slayer of his father and the mate of his mother. Jocasta refuses to believe it, and explains it away as a Freudian dream: "It has been the lot of many men in dreams," she reassures Oedi pus, "to think themselves partners of their mother's bed; but he passes through life most easily to whom these things become trifles.".. When the identification is complete she hangs herself; and Oedipus, mad with remorse, gouges out his own eyes, and leaves Thebes as an exile, with only Antigone to help him.
Ip Oedipus at Colonus, the second play of an unintentional trilogy,* the former king is a white-haired outcast leaning upon his daughter's arm and begging his bread from town to town. He comes in his wandering to shady Colonus, and Sophocles takes the opportunity to sing to his native village, and its faithful olive groves, an untranslatable song which ranks high in Greek poetry:
Stranger, where thy feet now rest In this land of horse and rider, Here is earth all earth excelling, White Colonus here doth shine. Oftenest here, and homing best
Where the close green coverts hide her, Warbling her sweet mournful tale, Sings the melodious nightingale ...
Fresh with heavenly dews, and crowned With earliest white in shining cluster, Each new mom the young narcissus Blooms....
And a marvelous herb of the soil grows here, Whose match I never had heard it sung
In the Dorian Isle of Pelops near Or in Asia far hath sprung.
Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Coloma, and Antigone were produced separately.
CHAP.XVII)  THE  LITERATURE  OF THE  GOLDEN  AGE	395
'Tis a plant that flourishes unsubdued, Self-engendering, self-renewed,
To her armed foes' dismay:
That never so fair but in this land bloomed, With the grey-blue silvery leaf soft-plumed,
Her nurturing Olive-Spray.
No force, no ravaging hand shall raze it, In youth so rash or in age so wise,
For the orb of Zeus in heaven surveys it, And blue-grey light of Athena's eyes.•
An oracle has foretold that Oedipus will die in the precincts of the Eu menides; and when he learns that he is now in their sacred grove at Colonus the old man, having found no loveliness in life, thinks that here it would be sweet to die. To Theseus, King of Athens, he speaks lines that sum up with clairvoyant insight the forces that were weakening Greece-the decay of the soil, of faith, of morals, and of men:
Only to gods in heaven Comes no old age, nor death of anything; All else is turmoiled by our master Time.
The earth's strength fades, and manhood's glory fades, Faith dies, and unfaith blossoms like a flower.
And who shall find in the open streets of men, Or secret places of his own heart's love,
One wind blow true forever?..


During the wars of old we bore with you.   But we observed
you carefully; and oftentimes, when we were at home, we used to hear that you had decided some matter badly. When we inquired about it, the men would answer, "What's that to you? Be silent." And we asked, "How is it, husband, that you men manage these affairs so foolishly?"
The leader of the men answers that women must keep out of public matten' because they cannot manage the treasury. (As they debate, some of thl women steal away to their husbands, muttering Aristophanic excuses.)
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVII
Lysistrata replies, "Why not? The wives have long had the management of their husbands' purses, to the great advantage of both." She argues so well that the men are finally persuaded to call a conference of the warring states. When the delegates are gathered, Lysistrata arranges that they shall have all the wine they can drink. Soon they are in a happy mood, and the long-delayed treaty is signed. The chorus ends the play with a paean to peace.
Aristophanes and the Radicals
Behind the disintegration of Athenian public life, in the view of Aris tophanes, lay two basic evils: democracy and irreligion. 'He agreed with Socrates that the sovereignty of the people had become a sovereignty of politicians; but he was convinced that the skepticism of Socrates, Anaxag oras, and the Sophists had helped to loosen those moral bonds which had once made for social order and personal integrity. In The Clouds he made uproarious fun of the new philosophy. An old-fashioned gentleman by the name of Strepsiades, who is looking for an argument that may jus tify him in repudiating his debts, is delighted to hear that Socrates operates a Thinking Shop where one may learn to prove anything, even if it is false. He finds his way to the "School of Very Hard Thinkers." In the middle of the classroom he sees Socrates suspended from the ceiling in a basket, engrossed in thought, while some of the students are bent down with noses to the ground.
Strep. What are those people doing, stooping so oddly?
Student. They are probing the secrets that lie deep as Tartarus.
Strep. But why-excuse me, but-their hind quarters-why are they stuck up so strangely in the air?
Stud. Their oth_er ends are studying astronomy.
(Strepsiades asks Socrates for lessons.)
Socr. By what gods do you swear? For the gods are not a cur rent coin with us. (Points to the chorus of clouds.) These are the real gods.
Strep. But come, is there no Zeus?
Socr. There is no Zeus.
Strep. But who makes it rain, then?
Socr. These clouds. For have you ever seen rain without clouds? But if it were Zeus he ought to rain in fine weather as well as when clouds appear....
CHAP.XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	425
Strep. But tell me, who is it that thunders? This makes me trem- ble.
Socr. These clouds, as they roll, thunder.
Strep. How?
Socr. When they are full of water, and are driven along, they fall heavily upon each other, and burst with a clap.
Strep. But who drives them? Is it not Zeus?
Socr. Not at all; the ethereal Vortex drives them on.
Strep. So the greatest of gods is Vortex. But what makes the clap of thunder?


Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He de stroyed his rivals in swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after a fo.ur years' siege, thereby lowering a barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (zu). "I have been everything," he said, "and it is worth nothing." 4 Caracalla, says Herodian, "was much vexed that his father's decease was so lingering . . . and solicited the physicians to dispatch the old man by any means that might come to hand." 5 Septimius had blamed Aurelius for yielding the Empire to Commodus; now he be queathed it to Caracalla and Geta, with cynical advice: "Make your soldiers rich, and do not bother about anything else." 6 He was the last emperor, for eighty years, who died in bed.
Caracalla,* like Commodus, seemed made to prove that a man's quota of energy seldom allows him to be great in both his life and his seed. Attrac tive and obedient in boyhood, he became in manhood a barbarian infatuated with hunting and war. He captured wild boars, fought a lion singlehanded, kept lions always near him in his palace, and had one as occasional table companion and bedfellow.7 He particularly enjoyed the company of gladi ators and soldiers, and would keep senators cooling their heels in his ante chambers while he prepared food and drink for his companions. Unwilling to share the imperial power with his brother, he had Geta assassinated in
21 z; the youth was slaughtered in his mother's arms, and covered her gar ments with his blood. We are told that Caracalla condemned to execution 20,000 of Geta's following, many citizens, and four Vestal Virgins whom he accused of adultery.8 \Vhen the army murmured at the killing of Geta, he silenced it with a donative equal to all the sums that Septimius had gathered into all the treasuries. He favored the soldiers and the poor against the busi ness classes and the aristocracy; possibly the stories we read about him in Dio Cassius are a senator's revenge. Anxious to raise more revenue, he doubled the inheritance tax to ten per cent; and noting that the tax applied only to Roman citizens, he extended the Roman franchise to all free male
He called himself so from the long Gallic tunic that he ·wore; his real name was Bassianius; as emperor he styled himself Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Caracalla.
CHAP. XXIX)   THE  COLLAPSE  OF THE  EMPIRE
adults in the Empire (2 12); they achieved citizenship precisely when it brought a maximum of obligations and a minimum of power. He added to the adornment of Rome an arch to Septimius Severus, which still stands, and public baths whose gigantic ruins attest their ancient grandeur. But for the most part he left the civil government to his mother, and absorbed him self in campaigns.
He had made Julia Domna secretary both a libellis and ab epistulis-of
petitions and correspondence. She joined or replaced him in greeting high members of the state or foreign dignitaries. Gossip whispered that she con trolled him by incestuous means; the wits of Alexandria maddened him by referring to her and him as Jocasta and Oedipus. Partly in revenge against these insults, partly because he feared that Egypt might revolt while he was fighting Parthia, he visited the city and superintended (we are assured) the massacre of all Alexandrians capable of bearing arms.9
Nevertheless, the founder of Alexandria was his model and envy. He organized I 6,000 troops into what he called "Alexander's phalanx," equipped them with ancient Macedonian arms, and dreamed of subduing Parthia as Alexander had conquered Persia. He tried hard to be a good soldier, sharing the food and toil and marches of his army, helping it to dig ditches and build bridges, bearing himself bravely in action, and often challenging the enemy to single combat. But his men were not as eager for the Parthian campaign as he was; they loved spoils more ardently than battle; and at Carrhae, where Crassus had been defeated, they stabbed him to death ( 2 17). Macrinus, prefect of the Guard, acclaimed himself emperor, and ordered the reluctant Senate to make Caracalla a god. Julia Domna, banished to Antioch, and bereft, within six years, of empire, husband, and sons, refused food until she died.10
She had a sister, Julia Maesa, as capable as herself. Returning to Emesa, this second Julia found there two promising grandsons. One, by her daughter Julia Soaemias, was a young priest of Baal; his name was Varius Avitus, and would be Elagabalus-"the creative god."* The other, by Maesa's daughter Julia Mamaea, was a boy of ten called Alexianus, and would be Alexander Severus. Though Varius was the son of Varius Marcellus, .Maesa spread the rumor that he was the natural son of Caracalla, and gave him the name Bassianus; the Empire was worth her daughter's reputation, and Marcellus was dead. The Roman soldiers in Syria were already half won to Syrian cults, and felt a pious respect for the fourteen-year-old priest; moreover, Maesa suggested that if they would make Elagabalus emperor she would distribute a substantial donative among them. The soldiers were convinced,
Wrongly transformed by Latin writers into Heliogabalus-"the sun-god."
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIX
and complied. Maesa's gold brought over to her cause the army that Macrinus sent against them. v\1hen Macrinus himself appeared with a substantial force, the Syrian mercenaries wavered; but Maesa and Soaemias sprang from their chariots, and led the softened army to victory. The men of Syria were women, and the women were men.
In the spring of 219 Elagabalus entered Rome dressed in robes of purple silk embroidered with gold, his cheeks stained with vermilion, his eyes arti ficially brightened, costly bracelets on his arms, a string of pearls around his neck, a jeweled crown on his pretty head. Beside him his grandmother and his mother rode in state. On his first appearance in the Senate he de manded that his mother should be allowed to sit beside him and attend the deliberations. Soaemias had the sense to withdraw, and contented herself with presiding over that Senaculum, or little Senate, of women, which Hadrian's Sabina had founded, and which dealt with questions of feminine dress, jewelry, precedence, and etiquette. Grandmother Maesa was left to govern the state.
The young emperor had some elements of charm. He made no reprisals against the supporters of Macrinus. He loved music, sang well, played the pipes, the organ, and the horn. Being too young to rule the Empire, he only asked permission to enjoy it. Pleasure, not Baal, was his god, and he was resolved to worship it in all its genders and forms. He invited every class of the free population to visit his palace; at times he would eat and drink and make merry with them; often he would distribute among them lottery prizes ranging from a furnished home to a handful of flies. He loved to play jokes upon his guests: to seat them on inflated cushions that would suddenly burst; to stupefy them with wine and let them wake up amid harmless
_leopards, bears, and lions. Lampridius assures us that Elagabalus never spent less than 100,000 sesterces ($10,000)-and sometimes 3 ,000,000-on a ban quet to his friends. He would mix gold pieces with peas, onyx with lentils, pearls with rice, amber with beans; he would present horses, or chariots, or eunuchs, as favors; often he bade each guest take home the silver plate and goblets in which the dinner had been served. As for himself, he would have nothing but the best. The water in his swimming pools was perfumed with essence of roses; the fixtures in his bathrooms were of onyx or gold; his food had to be of costly rarities; his dress was studded with jewelry from crown to shoes; and gossip said that he never wore the same rings twice. v\i'hen he traveled, 600 chariots were needed to carry his baggage and his bawds. Told by a soothsayer that he would die a violent death, he prepared worthy means of suicide if occasion required: cords of purple silk, swords of gold, poisons enclosed in sapphires or emeralds.11 He was slain in a latrine. Probably his enemies of the Senatorial class invented or exaggerated some
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CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIX
well to do concealed their riches, local aristocrats had themselves reclassified as humiliores to escape election to municipal office, artisans deserted their trades, peasant proprietors left their overtaxed holdings to become hired men, many villages and some towns (e.g., Tiberias in Palestine) were aban doned because of high assessments; 58 at last, in the fourth century, thousands of citizens fled over the border to seek refuge among the barbarians.59
It was probably to check this costly mobility, to ensure a proper flow of food to armies and cities, and of taxes to the state, that Diocletian resorted
to measures that in effect established serf <lorn in fields, factories, and guilds. Having made the landowner responsible, through tax quotas in kind, for the productivity of his tenants, the government ruled that a tenant must remain on his land till his arrears of debt or tithes should be paid. We do not know the date of this historic decree; but in 332 a law of Constantine assumed and confirmed it, and made the tenant adscriptitius, "bound in writing" to the soil he tilled; he could not leave it without the consent of the owner; and when it was sold, he and his household were sold with it.60 He made no protest that has come down to us; perhaps the law was presented to him as a guarantee of security, as in Germany today. In this and other ways agriculture passed in the third century from slavery through freedom to serf <lorn, and entered the Middle Ages.
Similar means of compelling stability were used in industry. Labor was "frozen" to its job, forbidden to pass from one shop to another without governmental consent. Each collegium or guild was bound to its trade and its assigned task, and no man might leave the guild in which he had been enrolled.61 Membership in one guild or another was made compulsory on all persons engaged in commerce and industry; and the son was required to follow the trade of his father.62 \\'hen any man wished to leave his place or occupation for another, the state reminded him that Italy was in a state of siege by the barbarians, and that every man must stay at his post.
In the year 305, in impressive ceremonies at Nicomedia and Milan, Dio cletian and Maximian abdicated their power, and Galerius and Constantius Chlorus became Augusti, emperors respectively of the East and the West. Diocletian, still but fifty-five years of age, lost himself in his immense palace at Spalato, spent there the remaining eight years of his life, and saw without interference the breakdown of his tetrarchy in civil war. When Maximian urged him to return to power and end the strife, he replied that if Maximian could see the excellent cabbages he was growing in his garden he would not ask him to sacrifice such content for the pursuit and cares of power.63
He deserved his ca bages and his rest. He had ended a half century of anarchy, had re-es abhshed government and law, had restored stability to industry and security to trade, had tamed Persia and stilled the barbarians,
CHAP. XXIX)   THE  COLLAPSE OF THE EMPIRE
and, despite a few murders, had been, all in all, a sincere legislator and a just judge. It is true that he had established an expensive bureaucracy, had ended local autonomy, had punished opposition harshly, had persecuted the church that might have been a helpful ally in his healing work, and had turned the population of the Empire into a caste society with an unlettered peasantry at one end and an absolute monarch at the other. But the conditions that Rome faced would not permit liberal policies; Marcus Aurelius and Alexan der Severus had tried these and failed. Confronted by enemies on every side, the Roman state did what all nations must do in crucial wars; it accepted the dictatorship of a strong leader, taxed itself beyond tolerance, and put individual liberty aside until collective liberty was secured. Diocletian had, with more cost but under harder circumstances, repeated the achievement of Augustus. His contemporaries and his posterity, mindful of what they had escaped, called him the "Father of the Golden Age." Constantine entered the house that Diocletian built.
CHAPTER  XXX
TheTriumph  of Christianity
A.D.  3 06-3 2 5
THE	WAR  OF  CHURCH  AND  STATE
N pre-Christian days the Roman government had for the most part allowed to the rivals of orthodox paganism a tolerance which they in turn had shown to the official and imperial cults; nothing was demanded from the adherents of new faiths except an occasional gesture of adoration to the gods and head of the state. The emperors were piqued to find that of all the heretics under their rule only the Christians and the Jews refused to join in honoring their genius. The burning of incense before a statue of the emperor had become a sign and affirmation of loyalty to the Empire, like the oath of allegiance required for citizenship today. On its side the Church resented the Roman idea that religion was subordinate to the state; it saw in emperor-worship an act of polytheism and idolatry, and instructed its followers to refuse it at any cost. The Roman government concluded that Christianity was a radical-perhaps a communist-movement, subtly
designed to overthrow the established order.
Before Nero the two forces had found it possible to live together without blows. The law had exempted the Jews from emperor-worship, and the Christians, at first confused with the Jews, were granted the same privilege. But the execution of Peter and Paul, and the burning of Christians to light up Nero's games, turned this mutual and contemptuous tolerance into un ceasing hrstility and intermittent war. vVe cannot wonder that after such provocation the Christians turned their full armory against Rome-de nounced its immorality and idolatry, ridiculed its gods, rejoiced in its calami ties,1 and predicted its early fall. In the ardor of a faith made intolerant by intolerance, Christians declared that all who had had a chance to accept Christ and had refused would be condemned to eternal torments; many of them foretold the same fate for all the pre-Christian or non-Christian world; some excepted Socrates. In reply, pagans called the Christians "dregs
646
CHAP. xxx)   THE   TRIUMPH  OF CHRISTIANITY
of the people" and "insolent barbarians," accused them of "hatred of the human race," and ascribed the misfortunes of the Empire to the anger of pagan deities whose Christian revilers had been allowed to live.2 A thousand slanderous legends arose on either side. Christians were charged with de monic magic, secret immorality, drinking human blood at the Paschal feast,3 and worshiping an ass.
But the conflict was profounder than mere pugnacity. Pagan civilization was founded upon the state, Christian civilization upon religion. To a Roman his religion was part of the structure and ceremony of government, and his morality culminated in patriotism; to a Christian his religion was something apart from and superior to political society; his highest allegiance belonged not to Caesar but to Christ. T ertullian laid down the revolutionary principle that no man need obey a law that he deemed unjust.4 The Christian revered his bishop, even his priest, far above the Roman magistrate; he submitted his legal troubles with fellow Christians to his church authorities rather than to the officials of the state.5 The detachment of the Christian from earthly affairs seemed to the pagan a flight from civic duty, a weakening of the national fiber and will. Terrullian advised Christians to refuse military serv ice; and that a substantial number of them followed his counsel is indicated by Celsus' appeal to end this refusal, and Origen's reply that though Chris tians will not fight for the Empire they will pray for it.6 Christians were exhorted by their leaders to avoid non-Christians, to shun their festival games as barbarous, and their theaters as stews of obscenity.7 Marriage with a non Christian was forbidden. Christian slaves were accused of introducing dis cord into the family by converting their masters' children or wives; Chris tianity was charged with breaking up the home.8
The opposition to the new religion came rather from the people than from the state. The magistrates were often men of culture and tolerance; but the mass of the pagan population resented the aloofness, superiority, and certainty of the Christians, and called upon the authorities to punish these "atheists" for insulting the gods. T errullian notes "the general hatred felt for us." 9 From the time of Nero Roman law seems to have branded the profession of Christianity as a capital offense; 10 but under most of the emperors this ordinance was enforced with deliberate negligence.11 If ac cused, a Christian could usually free himself by offering incense to a statue of the emperor; thereafter he was apparently allowed to resume the quiet prac tice of his faith.12 Christians who refused this obeisance might be imprisoned, or flogged, or exiled, or condemned to the mines, or, rarely, put to death. Domitian seems to have banished some Christians from Rome; but "being in some degree human," says T ertullian, "he soon stopped what he had
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXX
begun, and restored the exiles." 13 Pliny enforced the law with the officious ness of an amateur ( 111 ), if we may judge from his letter to Trajan:
The method I have observed toward those who have been de nounced to me as Christians is this: I interrogated them whether they were Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed. . .. The temples, which had been almost deserted, begin now to be frequented . . . and there is a gen eral demand for sacrificial animals, which for some time past have met with but few purchasers.
To which Trajan replied:


CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIII
the emperor, and a host of private lecturers and tutors. Instruction was given in literature, philology, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medi cine, and law-usually in gymnasia or theaters, sometimes in temples or homes. Except in oratory or law the curriculum had no thought of equipping the student to earn a living; it sought rather to sharpen his mind, deepen his understanding, and provide him with a moral code. It produced many bril liant intellects, but also it generated thousands of cobweb-spinners who would turn both philosophy and religion into a maze of controversial theories.
As Athens depended for a considerable part of its income on the students, it put up patiently with their hilarious ways. "Freshmen" were hazed with practical jokes that sometimes injured citizens; the students of rival profes sors became ardent partisans and attacked one another in occasional riots like the "cane rushes" of our youth. Some students felt that they could learn more from the courtesans and gamblers of the town than from all teachers of philosophy; and we gather from Alciphron that the ladies in question looked upon the professors as dull and incompetent competitors.17 But there was often a pleasant bond of friendship between learners and teachers; many of these invited students to dinner, guided their reading, visited them in illness, and kept their parents misinformed about their progress. Most of the lec turers lived on fees paid by each disciple; a small number of professors drew a salary from the state; and the heads of the four schools of philosophy re ceived rn,ooo drachmas ($6000) a year from the imperial Treasury.
Under these stimuli the period of the "Second Sophistic" developed-a revival of the orator-philosopher passing from city to city as honorariums might beckon, delivering addresses, teaching pupils, pleading cases in the courts, living in rich homes as spiritual counselors, and sometimes acting as honored emissaries of their city-states. The movement flourished throughout the Empire, but especially in the Greek world, in the first three centuries of our era; philosophers were then, says Dio, as numerous as cobblers.18 The new sophists, like the old, had no common doctrine, phrased their teaching eloquently, drew large audiences, and attained in many cases high social
status, imperial fav r, ?r gre t _wealth. They differed from the earlier Soph
ists in seldom quesnomng religion or morality; they were more interested in form and style, in oratorical technique and skill, than in the great questions that had shaken the beliefs and morals of the world; indeed, the new sophists were warm defenders of the ancient faith. Philostratus has preserved for us the lives of the leading sophists of this age; let one example suffice. Adrian of Tyre studied rhetoric at Athens and rose to the state chair of rhetoric there; he opened his inaugura! d?,ress with the proud wo ds, "Once again letters have come from Phoemc1a. He rode to his lectures m a carriage. with silver
CHAP. XXm)	ROMAN  GREECE	489
l
harness, in rich attire, and gleaming with gems. 1:Vhen Marcus Aurelius visited Athens he tested Adrian by asking him to improvise an oration on a difficult theme; Adrian carried the matter off so well that Marcus loaded him with honors, silver and gold, houses and slaves. Promoted to the chair of rhetoric at Rome, Adrian's lectures, though in Greek, proved so alluring that senators adjourned their sessions, and the populace deserted the panto mimes, to go and hear him.19 Such a career almost announces the death of philosophy; it had been swallowed up in an ocean of rhetoric, and had ceased to think when it learned to speak.
At the other extreme were the Cynics. We have described them else where-their tattered cloak, their unkempt hair and beard, their wallet and staff, their reduction of life to simplicities, sometimes obscenities. They lived like mendicant friars, had a hierarchical organization with novices and su periors,20 avoided marriage and work, scorned the conventions and arti ficialities of civilization, denounced all governments as thieves and super fluities, laughed at all oracles, "mysteries," and gods. Everyone satirized them, Lucian most savagely; yet even Lucian admired Demonax, a cultured Cynic who had abandoned his wealth to live in philosophical poverty. He gave his century of life (A.D. 50-150) tohelping others, reconciling hostile individuals and cities; and Athens, which ridiculed everything, respected him. Indicted before an Athenian court for refusing to offer sacrifice to the gods, he won acquittal by saying simply that the gods had no need of offer ings, and that religion consisted in kindness to all. When the Athenian as sembly was engaged in a quarrel of factions, his mere appearance sufficed to quiet the dispute; whereupon he left without having uttered a word. It was his custom, in old age, to enter any house uninvited and eat and sleep there; and every home in Athens sought the honor.21 Lucian speaks with less sympathy of Peregrinus, who tried Christianity, abandoned it for the Cynic regimen, denounced Rome, called all Greece to revolt, and astonished an assemblage at Olympia by making and lighting his own funeral pyre, leap ing into it, and allowing himself to be consumed in the flames (A.D. 16 5).22 In such scorn of wealth and life the Cynics were paving a way for the monks of the Christian Church.
When Vespasian, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius established chairs of philosophy at Athens they ignored the Cynics and the Skeptics, and recog nized only four schools of thought: the Platonic Academy, the Aristotelian Lyceum, the Stoics, and the Epicureans. The Academy had diluted Plato's proud faith in reason into the universal doubt of Cameades; but after the latter's death the school reacted toward orthodoxy, and Antiochus of As calon, who taught Cicero at the Academy (79 B.c.), returned to Plato's con ceptions of reason, immortality, and God. The Lyceum was now devoting
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIII
itself to natural science in the tradition of Theophrastus, or to pious com mentaries on Aristotle's works. The school of Epicurus was declining in this religious age; few men dared profess its doctrines without diplomatic reserva tions. In most of Greek Asia the words Epicurean, atheist, and Christian were synonyms expressive of horror and desecration.23
The dominant philosophy had long since been Stoicism. The rigorous perfectionism of its early forms had been softened by Panaetius and Posei donius, both citizens of Rhodes. Returning to Athens after Scipio's death (129 B.c.), Panaetius, now head of the Stoa, defined God as a material spirit or breath (pneu111a) permeating all things, appearing in plants as the power of growth, in animals as soul (psyche), in man as reason (logos). His suc cessors developed this vague pantheism into a more definitely religious phi losophy. The Stoic theory of moral discipline moved closer to Cynic as ceticism; and in the second century A.D. Cynicism, as one observer put it, differed from Stoicism only by a torn cloak. In Epictetus, as in Marcus Aurelius, we see both movements advancing toward Christianity.
EPICTETUS
Epictetus was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia about A.D. 50, a slave woman's son, and therefore himself a slave. He had little chance of education, for he was passed from one owner and city to another, until he found himself the property of Epaphroditus, a powerful freedman in Nero's court. He was of feeble health and lame, apparently through the brutality of one of his mas ters, but he lived the normal threescore years and ten. Epapµroditus allowed him to attend the lectures of Musoni s Rufus and later freed him. Epictetus must himself have set up as a teacher m Rome, for ,vhen Domitian banished the philosophers Epictetus was among those who fled. He settled in Nicop olis and drew to his lectures there students from many parts. One was Arrian of Nicomedia, later governor of Cappadocia; Arrian took down the words of Epictetus, probably in shorthand, and published them as Diatribai-"rub bings" or copies-now on all lists of the world's best books as the Discourses.• It is no dull formal treatise, but a classic of simple speech and bluff humor, intimately expressing a modest and kindly, yet sharp and vigorous character. E ictetus applie? his lusty sarcasms to himself and others impartially, and ga.1ly mocked 1s rough-and-tumble style. He made no complaint when De _onax, hean?g that the, old bachelor counse ed marriage, sarcastically petmoned for his daughters hand; he excused himself on the ground that teaching wisdom is as great a service as begetting "two or thre: pug-nosed
" Arrian later issued an Encbeiridion, or synoptic "Handbock" of Epictetus.
CHAP. XXIII)	ROMAN  GREECE	491
children." 24 In later years he took a wife to help him care for an infant that he had rescued from exposure. In those years his fame compassed the Empire, and Hadrian counted him among his friends.
Epictetus, resembling Socrates in this as in so many other ways, cared too little about physics or metaphysics to construct a system of thought; his one subject and passion was the good life. "What do I care," he asks, "whether all existing things are composed of atoms . . . or of fire and earth? Is it not enough to learn the true namre of good and evil?" 25 Philosophy does not mean reading books about wisdom, it means training oneself in the practice of wisdom. The essence of the matter is that a man should so mold his life and conduct that his happiness shall depend as little as possible upon external things. This does not require a hermit's solimde; on the contrary, "Epicure ans and blackguards" are to be condemned for detaching men from public service; the good man wilJ take his part in civic affairs. But he wiJl accept with equanimity all vicissitudes of formne-poverty, bereavement, humilia tion, p2in, slavery, imprisonment, or death; he will know how to "endure and renounce."
Never say about anything, "I have lost it," but only "I have given it back." Is your child dead? It has been given back. Is your ,vife dead? She has been returned. "I have had my farm taken away." Very well; this, too, has been given back. So long as God gives it to you take care of it as something not your own. . . . "Alas, that I should be lame in one leg!" Slave! do you then, because of one paltry leg, blame the universe? Will you not make a free gift of it to the whole?
. . . I must go into exile: does anyone keep me from going with a smile, serene? ...  "I will throw you into prison." It is only my body you imprison. I must die; must I then die complaining? ...
These are the lessons that philosophy ought to rehearse, and write down daily, and practice.    A platform or a prison are places, one
high, the other low; but your moral purpose can be kept the same in either place.27
The slave cm be spirimaHy free, like Diogenes; the prisoner can be free, like Socrates; the emperor can be a slave, like Nero.23 Even death is a minor incident in the good man's life; he may advance its coming if he finds that evil too heavily outweighs good;29 in any case he will receive it calmly as part of the secret wisdom of Nature.


Sing me your song, pale Xantho, sing.... Too soon the music ends. Again,
Again repeat the sad, sweet strain,
With perfumed fingers touch the string;
0 Love's delight, pale Xantho, sing.48
THE SYRIANS
Northward along the coast lay the ancient cities of Phoenicia, part, with Palestine, of the province of Syria. Their industrious workers skilled in handicrafts, their favored position as traditional ports of trade, their rich and subtle merchants sending ships and agents everywhere, had kept them alive through all the vicissitudes of a thousand years. Tyre (Sur) had taller dwellings than Rome's 49 and worse slums; it stank with the smell of its dye ing establishments, but it consoled itself with the thought that the whole world bought its richly colored textiles, above all its purple silks. Sidon had probably discovered the_ art of blo':i g g ass and now specialized in glass and bronze. Berytus (Beirut) was disnngwshed for its schools of medicine, rhetoric, and law; very likely from this university the great jurists Ulpian and Papinian went to Rome.
No province_ of th Empire surpasse Syria _in industry and prosperity. Where now 3,000,000 mhab1tants find a precanous exIStence, 10,ooo,ooo lived in Trajan's
CHAP. XXIV)	THE   HELLENISTIC  REVIVAL
time.50 Half a hundred cities here enjoyed the pure water, the public baths, the underground drainage system, the clean markets, the gymnasia and palaestras, the lectures and music, the schools and temples and basilicas, the porticoes and arches, the public statuary and picture galleries, characte.1;istic of the Hellenistic cities in the first century after Christ.51 The oldest of them was Damascus, over the Lebanons from Sidon, fortified by the surrounding desert, and turned almost into a garden by the spreading arms and tributaries of a stream gratefully called "the river of gold." Many caravan routes converged here, and poured into the bazaars the products of three continents.
Returning over the Anti-Lebanon hills and moving north over dusty roads, the modern traveler is astonished to find, in the tiny village of Baalbek, the ruins of two majestic temples and a propylaeum, once the pride of Heliopolis, the Greco-Roman-Syrian City of the Sun. Augustus planted a small colony there, and the town grew as the sacred seat of Baal the Sun-God and as the meeting point of roads to Damascus, Sidon, and Beirut. Under Antoninus Pius and his successors Roman, Greek, and Syrian architects and engineers raised, on the site of an old Phoenician temple to Baal, an imposing shrine to Iuppiter Heliopoli tanus. It was built of huge monoliths from a quarry a mile away; one block measures sixty-two by fourteen by eleven feet, and contains enough stone for a commodious house. Fifty-one marble steps 150 feet wide lead up to the propylaeum, a Corinthian portico. Beyond a colonnaded forecourt and court rose the main temple, of which fifty-eight columns still tower sixty-two feet into the air. Near it are the remains of a smaller temple, variously attributed to Venus, Bacchus, and Demeter; nineteen cf its columns survive, and a handsome portal delicately c rved. Resplendent in their solitary grandeur under the unclouded sun, the columns of these temples are among the fairest extant works of man. Seeing them we feel, better than in Italy, the grandeur that was Rome, the wealth and courage, skill and taste that could build, in so many scattered cities, temples greater and more majestic than the crowded capital ever knew.
A similar sight meets the traveler who strikes eastward across the desert from Homs, the ancient Emesa, to T admor, which the Greeks translated into Palmyra, City of a Myriad Palms. Its fortunate position and fertile soil around two gushing springs on the roads from Emesa and Damascus to the Euphrates made it grow in affluence until it was one of the major cities of the East; and its distance from other settlements enabled it to maintain practical independence despite nominal allegiance to Seleucid kings or Roman emperors. Its wide central thoroughfare was flanked by shady porticoes containing 454 columns; and at the four main crossings were stately arches, of which one remains to let us judge the rest. The glory of the city was the Temple of the.Sun, dedicated (A.D. 30) to the supreme trinity of Bel (Baal), Yarhibol {the sun), and Aglibol ( the moon). Its size continued Assyrian traditions of immensity. Its court, the largest in the Empire, had an unrivaled colonnade 4000 feet long, much of it composed of Corinthian columns running four abreast. Within the court and the temple were
512	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIV
paintings and sculptures whose extant examples reveal the approach of Palmyra to Parthia in art as in geography.
A main route eastward from Palmyra reached the Euphrates at Dura-Europus. There (A.D. 100) the merchants shared their gains with the Palmyrene trinity by rearing a temple half Greek and half Indian; and an eastern painter adorned the walls with frescoes that vividly illustrate the Oriental origin of Byzantine and early Christian art.52 Farther north on the great river were other important crossing towns at Thapsacus and Zeugma. Turning westward from Thapsacus the traveler passed through Beroea (Aleppo) and Apamea to the Mediterranean at Laodicea-still keeping its ancient name as Latakia, and still an active port. Between it and Apamea the river Orontes flowed north, between shores largely pre-empted by rich estates, to Antioch (Antakia), capital of Syria. The river, and a great network of roads, brought the goods of the East to Antioch, while its Mediterranean port, Seleucia Pieria, fourteen miles down the stream, brought in the products of the West. Most of the city rose on a mountain slope and had the Orontes at its feet; it was a picturesque location, that helped Antioch rival Rhodes as the most beautiful city of the Hellenic East. lt had a system of street lighting that made it safe and brilliant at night. The main avenue, four and a half miles long, was paved with granite and had a covered colonnade on either side, so that people could walk from one end of the town to the other immune to rain and sun. Pure water was supplied in abundance to every home. The complex population of 600,000 Greeks, Syrians, and Jews was notoriously gay, pursuing pleasure relentlessly, laughing at the pompous Romans who came to govern them, oscillating between the circus and the amphitheater, the brothels and the baths, and taking full advantage of Daphne, their famous suburban park. Festivals were numerous, and Aphrodite had a share in all of them. During the feast of Brumalia, lasting through most of December, the whole citv, says a contemporary, resembled a tavern, and the streets rang all night with ·song. and revelry.53 There were schools of rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine, but Antioch was not a center of learning. Its populace lived intensely for the day; and when it needed religion it flocked to astrologers, magicians, miracle- orkers, and charlatans.
The general picture of Syria under Roman rule is one of prosperity more continuous than in any other province. i\1ost of the workers were freemen, except in domestic service. The upper classes were Hellenized, the lower re mained Oriental; in the same town Greek philosophers rubbed elbows with temple prostitutes and emasculated priests; and even till Hadrian children were now and then offered as sacrifices to the gods.54 Sculpture and painting took on a semi-Oriental, h f-me ieval face nd form. The Greek language prevailed in government and literature, but native tongues-chiefly Aramaic-remained the speech of the people. Scholars were plenty and made the world ring with their moment's fame. Nicolaus of Damascus, besides mentoring Antony, Cleopatra, and Herod, undertook the weary task of writing a universal history-a labor, he

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FIG. 34-Tenzple of luppiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek
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