Rounding the toe of Italy northward, the traveler reaches B.ourishing Reggio, founded by the Messenians about 730 under the name of Rhegion, and known to the Romans as Rhegium. Slipping through the Straits of Messina-probably the "Scylla and Charybdis" of the Odyssey-one comes to where Laus stood; and then to ancient Hyele, the Roman Velia, known to history as Elea because Plato wrote it so, and because only its philosophers are remembered. There
Xenophanes of Colophon came about s10,  and founded the Eleatic School
He was a personality as unique as his favorite foe, Pythagoras. A man of dauntless energy and reckless initiative, he wandered for sixty-seven years, he tells us,"' ''up and down the land of Hellas," making observations and enemies everywhere. He wrote and recited philosophical poems, denounced Homer for his impious ribaldry, laughed at superstition, found a port in Elea, and obstinately completed a century before he died."' Homer and Hesiod, sang Xenophanes, "have ascribed to the gods all deeds that are a shame and a dis grace among men-thieving, adultery, and fraud.'71111 But he himself was not a pillar of orthodoxy.
There never was, nor ever will be, any man who knows with cer tainty the things about the gods   Mortals fancy that gods are born,
and wear clothes, and have voice and form like themselves. Yet if
oxen and lions had hands, and could paint and fashion images as men do, they would make the pictures and images of their gods in their own likeness; horses would make them like horses, oxen like oxen. Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; Thracians• give
The Greeks were so fond of this fable that they told it also of the laws of Catana and Thurii. The plan was especially pleasing to Michel de Montaigne, and may not have outlived its utility.
168	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. VII
theirs blue eyes and red hair.... There is one god, supreme among gods and men; resembling mortals neither in form nor in mind. The whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears. Without toil he rules all things by the power of his mind."'
This god, says Diogenes Laertius,"" was identified by Xenophanes with the universe. All things, even men, taught the philosopher, are derived from earth and water by natural laws... Water once covered nearly all the earth, for marine fossils are found far inland and on mountaintops; and at some future time water will probably cover the whole earth again."' Nevertheless all change in history, and all separateness in things, are superficial phenomena; beneath the flux and variety of forms is an unchanging unity, which is the innermost reality of God.
From this starting point Xenophanes' disciple, Parmenides of Elea, proceeded to that idealistic philosophy which was in tum to mold the thought of Plato and Platonists throughout antiquity, and of Europe even to our day.
IV. FROM ITALY TO SPAIN
Twenty miles north of Elea lay the city of Poseidonia-the Roman Paestum
-founded by colonists from Sybaris as the main Italian terminus of Milesian trade. Today one reaches it by a pleasant ride from Naples through Salemo. Suddenly, by the roadside, amid a deserted field, three temples appear, majes tic even in their desolation. For the river, by blocking its own mouth here with centuries of silt, has long since turned this once healthy valley into a swamp, and even the reckless race that tills the slopes of Vesuvius has fled in despair from these malarial plains. Fragments of the ancient walls remain; but better preserved, as if by solitude, are the shrines that the Greeks raised, in modest limestone but almost perfect form, to the gods of the com and the sea. The oldest of the buildings, lately called the "Basilica," was more likely a temple to Poseidon; men who owed their living to the fruit and commerce of the Mediterranean dedicated it to him towards the middle of this amazing sixth century B.c., which created great art, literature, and philosophy from Italy to Shantung. The inner as well as the outer colonnades remain, and attest the columnar passion of the Greeks. The following generation built a smaller tem ple, also Dorically simple and strong; we call it the "temple of Ceres," but we do not know what god sniffed the savor of its offerings. A yet later generation, just before or after the Persian War,"" erected the greatest and best-proportioned of the three temples, probably also to Poseidon-fittingly enough, since from its porticoes one gazes into the inviting face of the treacherous sea. Again almost everything is columns: a powerful and complete Doric peristyle with-
CHAP.VII)	THE  GREEKS  IN  THE  WEST
out, and, within, a two-storied colonnade that once upheld a roof. Here is one of the most impressive sights in Italy; it seems incredible that this temple, better preserved than anything built by the Romans, was the work of Greeks almost five centuries before Christ. We can imagine something of the beauty and vitality of a community that had both the resources and the taste to raise such centers for its religious life; and then we can conjure up less inadequately the splendor of richer and vaster cities like Miletus, Samos, Ephesus, Crotona, Sybaris, and Syracuse.
Slightly north of where Naples stands today adventurers from Chalcis, Ere tria, Euboean Cyme, and Graia founded, about 750, the great port of Comae, oldest of Greek towns in the West. Taking the products of eastern Greece and selling them in central Italy, Comae rapidly acquired wealth, colonized and controlled Rhegium, obtained command of the Straits of Messina, and excluded from them, or subjected to heavy tolls, the vessels of cities not leagued with it in trade... Spreading southward, the Cumaeans founded Dicaearchia which became the Roman port of Puteoli (Pozzuoli)-and Neapolis, or New City, our Naples. From these colonies Greek ideas as well as goods passed into the crude young city of Rome, and northward into Etruria. At Comae the Romans picked up several Greek gods-Apollo and Heracles especially-and bought for more than they were worth the scrolls in which the Cumaean Sibyl
-the aged priestess of Apollo-had foretold the future of Rome.
Near the beginning of die sixth century the Phocaeans of Ionia landed on the southern shore of France, founded Massalia (Marseilles), and carried Greek products up the Rhone and its branches as far as Aries and N1mes. They made friends and wives of the natives, introduced the olive and the vine as gifts to France, and so familiarized southern Gaul with Greek civilization that Rome found it easy to spread its kindred culture there in Caesar's time. Ranging along the coast to the east, the Phocaeans established Antipolis (Antibes), Nicaea (Nice), and Monoecus (Monaco). Westward they ventured into Spain and built the towns of Rhodae (Rosas), Emporium (Ampurias), Hemeroscopium, and Maenaca ( near Malaga). The Greeks in Spain flourished for a while by exploiting the silver mines of Tartessus; but in 535 the Carthaginians and Etruscans combined their forces to destroy the Phocaean fleet, and from that time Greek power in the western Mediterranean waned.
V, SICll.Y
We have left not quite to the last the richest of all the regions colonized by the Greeks. To Sicily nature had given what she had withheld from continental Greece-an apparently inexhaustible soil fertilized by rain and
170	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.VII
lava, and producing so much wheat and com that Sicily was thought to be if not the birthplace at least a favorite haunt of Demeter herself. Here were orchards, vineyards, olive groves, heavy with fruit; honey as succulent as Hymettus', and flowers blooming in their turn from the beginning to the end of the year. Grassy plains pastured sheep and cattle, endless timber grew in the hills, and the fish in the surrounding waters reproduced faster than Sicily could eat them.
A neolithic culture had flourished here in the third millennium before Christ, a bronze culture in the second; even in Minoan days trade had bound the island with Crete and Greece... Towards the end of the second millen nium three waves of immigration broke upon Sicilian shores: the Sicans came from Spain, the Elymi from Asia Minor, the Sicels from Italy." About 800 the Phoenicians established themselves at Motya and Panormus (Paler mo) in the west. From 735 on* the Greeks poured in, and in quick succes sion founded Naxos, Syracuse, Leoritini, Messana (Messina), Catana, Gela, Himera, Selinus, and Acragas. In all these cases the natives were driven from the coast by force of arms. Most of them retired to till the mountain ous interior, some became slaves to the invaders, so many others inter married with the conquerors that Greek blood, character, and morals in Sicily took on a perceptible native tint of passion and sensuality."" The Hellenes never quite conquered the island; the Phoerµcians and Carthagin ians remained predominant on the west coast, and for five hundred years periodic war marked the struggle of Greek and Semite, Europe and Africa, for the possession of Sicily. After thirteen centuries of domination by Rome that contest would be resumed, in the Middle Ages, between Norman and Saracen.
Catana was distinguished for its laws, the Lipari Islands for their communism, Himera for its poet, Segesta, Selinus, and Acragas for their temples, Syracuse for its power and wealth. The laws that Charondas gave to Catana, a full gen eration before Solon, became a model for many cities in Sicily and Italy, and served to create public order and sexual morality in communities unprotected by ancient mores and sacred precedents. A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone younger than the divorced mate.00 Charondas, according to a typically Greek tale, forbade the citizens to enter the assembly while armed. One day, how ever, he himself came to the public meeting forgetfully wearing his sword. When a voter reproached him for breaking his own law he answered, "I will rather confirm it," and slew himself.01


CHAP, VIII)	THE  GODS  OF  GREECE	193
inviolable; here the worshipers met, and here all pursued persons, even if tainted with serious crime, could find sanctuary. The temple was not for the congregation but for the god; there, in his home, his statue was erected, and a light burned before it which was not allowed to die. Often the peo ple identified the god with the statue; they washed, dressed, and tended the image carefully, and sometimes scolded it for negligence; they told how, at various times, the statue had sweated, or wept, or closed its eyes.11'1 In the temple records a history was .kept of the festivals of the god, and of the major events in the life of the city or group that worshiped him; this was the source and first form of Greek historiography.
The ceremony consisted of procession, chants, sacrifice, prayer, and sometimes a sacred meal. Magic and masquerade, tableaux and dramatic representations might be part of the procession. In most cases the basic ritual was prescribed by custom, and every movement of it, every word of the hymns and prayers, was preserved in a book kept sacred by the family or the state; rarely was any syllable or action altered, or any rhythm; the god might not like or comprehend the novelty. The living speech changed, the ritual speech remained as before; in time the worshipers ceased to understand the words they used,"" but the thrill of antiquity supplied the place of understanding. Often the ceremony outlasted even the memory of the cause that had prompted it; then new myths were invented to explain its establishment: the myth or creed might change, but not the ritual. Music was essential to the whole process, for without music religion would be difficult; music generates religion as much as religion generates music. Out of the temple and processional chants came poetry, and the meters that later adorned the robust profanity of Archilochus, the reckless passion of Sappho, and the scandalous delicacies of Anacreon.
Having reached the altar-usually in front of the temple-the worshipers sought with sacrifice and prayer to avert the wrath or win the aid of their god. As individuals they might off er almost anything of value-statues, re liefs, furniture, weapons, caldrons, tripods, garments, pottery; when the gods could make no use of such articles the priests could. Armies might offer part of their spoils, as Xenophon's Ten Thousand did in their retreat."" Groups would offer the fruits of the field, the vines or the trees; more often an animal appetizing to the god; sometimes, on occasions of great need, a human being. Agamemnon offered Iphigenia for a wind; Achilles slaugh tered twelve Trojan youths on the pyre of Patroclus;.., human victims were hurled from the cliffs of Cyprus and Leucas to satiate Apollo; others were presented to Dionysus in Chios and Tenedos; Themistocles is said to have
194	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP, VIII
sacrificed Persian captives to Dionysus at the battle of Salamis;01 the Spar tans celebrated the festival of Anemis Onhia by flogging youths, some times to death, at her altar;"' in Arcadia Zeus received human sacrifice till the second century A.o.;"" at Massalia, in time of pestilence, one of the poorer citizens was fed at public expense, clad in holy garments, decorated with sacred boughs, and cast over a cliff to death with prayers that he might bear punishment for all the sins of his people."' In Athens it was the cus tom, in famine, plague, or other crisis, to offer to the gods, in ritual mimicry or in actual fact, one or more scapegoats for the purification of the city; and a similar rite, mimic or literal, was annually performed at the festival of the Thargelia.... In .the course of time human sacrifice was mitigated by restricting its victims to condemned criminals, and dulling their senses with wine; finally it was replaced by the sacrifice of an animal. When, on the night before the battle of Leuctra ( 371 B.c.), the Boeotian leader Pe lopidas had a dream that seemed to demand a human sacrifice at the altar as the price of victory, some of his councilors advised it, but others pro tested against it, saying "that such a barbarous and impious obligation could not be pleasing to any Supreme Beings; that typhons and giants did not preside over the world, but the general father of gods and monals; that it was absurd to imagine any divinities and powers delighting in slaughter· and sacrifice of men."..
Animal sacrifice, then, was a major step in the development of civilization. The beasts who bore the brunt of this advance in Greece were the bull, the sheep, and the pig. Before any battle the rival armies sent up sacrifices in proportion to their desired victory; before any assembly in Athens the meeting place was purified by the sacrifice of a pig. The piety of the peo ple, however, broke down at the crucial point: only the bones and a little flesh, wrapped in fat, went to the god; the rest was kept for the priests and the worshipers. To excuse themselves the Greeks told how,, in the days of the giants, Prometheus had wrapped the edible ponions of the sacri ficiai animal in skin, and the bones in fat, and had asked Zeus to choose which he preferred. Zeus had "with both hands" chosen the fat. It was true that Zeus was enraged upon finding that he had been deceived; but he had made his choice, and must abide by it forever.• Only in sacrifice to the chthonian gods was everything surrendered to the deity, and the entire animal burnt to ashes in a holocaust; the divinities of the lower world were
These victims in Athens were called pharmakoi, which meant originally magicians; pharmakon meant a magic spell or formula, then a healing drug.• The question whether the pharmakoi were really slain is in dispute; but there is little doubt that the sacrifice was originally literal.•
CRAP.VIII)	THE  GODS OF GREECE	195
more feared than those of Olympus. No common meal followed a chthonic sacrifice, for that might tempt the god to come and join the feast. But after sacrifice to the Olympians the worshipers, not in awed atonement to the god but in joyous communion with him, consumed the consecrated victim; the magic formulas pronounced over it had, they hoped, imbued it with the life and power of the god, which would now pass mystically into his communicants. In like manner wine was poured upon the sacrifice, and
then into the cups of the worshipers, who drank, so to speak, with the gods.'lQ In the thiasoi, or fraternities, into which so many trade and social groups in Athens were organized, this idea of divine communion in a com mon religious meal formed the binding tie.11
Animal sacrifice continued throughout Greece until ended by Chris tianity,'ID which wisely substitUted for it the spiritual and symbolical sacri fice of the Mass. In some measure prayer too became a substitute for sacrifice; it was a clever amendment that commuted offerings of blood into litanies of praise. In this gentler way man, subject to chance and tragedy at every step, consoled and strengthened himself by calling to his aid the mysterious powers of the world.
SUPERSTITIONS
Between these upper and nether poles of Greek religion, the Olympian and the subterranean, surged an ocean of magic, superstition, and sorcery; behind and below the geniuses whom we shall celebrate were masses of people poor and simple, to whom religion was a mesh of fears rather than a ladder of hope. It was not merely that the average Greek accepted miracle stories-of Theseus rising from the dead to fight at Marathon, or of Dionysus changing water into wine:.. such stories appear among every people, and are part of the forgivable poetry with which imagination brightens the common life. One could even pass over the anxiety of Athens to secure the bones of Theseus, and of Sparta to bring back from Tegea the bones of Orestes;'6 the miraculous power officially attributed to these relics may well have been part of the technique of rule. What oppressed the pious Greek was the cloud of spirits that surrounded him, ready and able, he believed, to spy upon him, interfere with him, and do him evil. These demons were always seeking to enter into him; he had to be on his guard against them at all times, and to perform magical ceremonies to dis perse them.
This superstition verged on science, and in some measure forecast our germ theory of disease. All sickness, to the Greek, meant possession by an alien
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP, VIII
spirit; to touch a sick person was to contract his uncleanliness or "possession"; our bacilli and bacteria are the currently fashionable forms of what the Greeks called keres or little demons.... So a dead person was "unclean"; the keres had gotten him once for all. When the Greek left a house where a corpse lay, he sprinkled himself with water, from a vessel placed for such purposes at the door, to drive away from himself the spirit that had conquered the dead man.v• This conception was extended to many realms where even our bacteriophobia would hardly apply it. Sexual intercourse rendered a person unclean; so did birth, childbirth, and homicide (even if unintentional). Madness was posses sion by an alien spirit; the madman was "beside himself." In all these cases a ceremony of purification was considered necessary. Periodically homes, tem ples, camps, even whole cities were purified, and very much as we disinfect them-by water, smoke, or fire.Tl A bowl of clean water stood at the entrance to every temple, so that those who came to worship might cleanse themselves,"' perhaps by a suggestive symbolism. The priest was an expert in purification; he could exorcise spirits by striking bronze vessels, by incantations, magic, and prayer; even the intentional homicide might, by adequate ritual, be purified.'" Repentance was not indispensable in such cases; all that was needed was to get rid of the evil possessive demons; religion was not so much a matter of morals as a technique of manipulating spirits. Nevertheless the multiplication of taboos and purificatory rites produced in the religious Greek a state of mind surpris ingly akin to the Puritan sense of sin. The notion that the Greeks were immune to the ideas of conscience and sin will hardly survive a reading of Pindar and Aeschylus.
Out of this belief in an enveloping atmosphere of spirits came a thousand superstitions, which Theophrastus, successor to Aristotle, summarized in one of his Characters:
Superstitiousness would seem to be a sort of cowardice with re spect to the divine    Your Superstitious Man will not sally forth
for the day till he have washed his hands and sprinkled himself at the
Nine Springs, and put a bit of bay-leaf from a temple in his mouth. And if a cat cross his path he will not proceed on his way till some one else be gone by, or he have cast three stones across the street. Should he espy a snake in his house, if it be one of the red sort he will call upon Dionysus; if it be a sacred snake he will build a shrine then and there. When he passes one of the smooth stones set up at crossroads he anoints it with oil from his flask, and will not go his ways till he have knelt down and worshiped it. If a mouse gnaw a bag of his meal, he will off to the wizard and ask what he must do; and if the advice be, "Send the bag to the cobblers to be patched," he neglec.ts the advice and frees himself of the ill by rites of aversion.
CHAP. VIII)	THE  GODS  OF GREECE	197
...	If he catches sight of a madman or an epileptic, he shudders and spits into his bosom."'
The simpler Greeks believed, or taught their children to believe, in a great variety of bogies. Whole cities were disturbed, at short intervals, by "portents" or strange occurrences, like deformed births of animals or men.81 The belief in unlucky days was so widespread that on such days no marriage might take place, no assembly might be held, no courts might meet, no enterprise might begin. A sneeze, a stumble, might be reason for abandoning a trip or an under taking; a minor eclipse could stop or turn back armies, and bring great wars to a disastrous end. Again, there were persons gifted with the power of effective cursing: an angered parent, a neglected beggar might lay upon one a curse that would ruin one's life. Some persons possessed magic arts; they could mix love philters or aphrodisiacs, and could by secret drugs reduce a man to impotence or a woman to sterility.89 Plato did not consider his Laws complete without an enactment against those who injure or slay by magic arts.• Witches are not medieval inventions; note Euripides' Medea, and Theocritus' Simaetha. Superstition is one of the most stable of social phenomena; it re mains almost unchanged through centuries and civilizations, not only in its bases but even in its formulas.
ORACLES


. that would hold no toil too great that might give to the living moment of loveliness a lasting form. The women of Sparta placed in their sleeping chambers figures of Apollo, Narcissus, Hyacinthus, or some other hand some deity, in order that they might bear beautiful children."° Cypselus established a beauty contest among women far back in the seventh cen tury; and according to Athenaeus this periodical competition continued down to the Christian era.111 In some places, says Theophrastus, "there are contests between the women in respect of modesty and good manage ment ... ; and also there are contests about beauty, as for instance ... in Tenedos and Lesbos."..
Vtises
There was a pretty legend in Greece that the first cup was molded upon Helen's breast.63 If so, the mold was lost in the Dorian invasion; for what pot tery has come down to us from early Greece does not remind us of Helen. The invasion must have profoundly disturbed the arts, impoverishing crafts men, scattering schools, and ending for a time the transmission of technology; for Greek vases after the invasion begin again with primitive simplicity and crudity, as if Crete had never lifted pottery into an art.
Probably the rough mood of the Dorian conquerors, using what survived of Minoan-Mycenaean techniques, produced that Geometric style which domi nates the oldest Greek pottery after the Homeric age. Flowers, scenery, and plants, so luxuriant in Cretan ornament, were swept away, and the stem spirit that made the glory of the Doric temple contrived the passing ruin of Greek pottery. The gigantic jars that characterize this period made small pretense to beauty; they were designed to store wine or oil or grain rather than to interest a ceramic connoisseur. The decoration was almost all by repeated triangles, circles, chains, checkers, lozenges, swastikas, or simple parallel horizontal lines; even the human figures that intervened were geometrical-torsos were triangles, thighs and legs were cones. This lazy style of ornament spread through Greece,
CHAP. IX)  THE  COMMON CULTURE OF EARLY GREECE    219
and determined the form of the Dipylon vases• at Athens; but on these enor mous containers (usually made to receive the human dead) black silhouettes of mourners, chariots, and animals were drawn, however awkwardly, between the pattern's lines. Towards the end of the eighth century more life entered into the painting of Greek pottery; two colors were used for the ground, curves re placed straight lines, palmettes and lotuses, prancing horses and hunted lions took form upon the clay, and the ornate Oriental succeeded the bare Geometric style.
An age of busy experimentation followed. Miletus flooded the market with its red vases, Samos with its alabasters, Lesbos with its black wares, Rhodes with its whites, Clazomenae with its grays, and Naucratis exported faience and translucent glass. Erythrae was famous for the thinness of its vases, Chalcis for brilliance of finish, Sicyon and Corinth for their delicate "Proto-Corinthian" scent bottles and elaborately painted jugs like the Chigi vase in Rome. A kind of ceramic war engaged the potters of the rival cities; one or another of them found purchasers in every port of the Mediterranean, and in the interior of Russia, Italy, and Gaul. In the seventh century Corinth seemed to be winning; its wares were in every land and hand, its potters had found new techniques of incision and coloring, and had shown a fresh inventiveness in forms. But about 550 the masters of the Ceramicus-the potters' quarter on the outskirts of Ath ens-came to the front, threw off Oriental influence, and captured with their Black-Figure ware the markets of the Black Sea, Cyprus, Egypt, Etruria, and Spain. From that time onward the best ceramic craftsmen migrated to Athens or were born there; a great school and tradition formed as through many gen erations son succeeded father in the art; and the making of fine pottery became one of the great industries, finally one of the conceded monopolies, of Attica.
The vases themselves, now and then, bear pictures of the potter's shop, the master working with his apprentices, or watchfully supervising the various processes: mixing the pigments and the clay, molding the form, painting the ground, engraving the picture, firing the cup, and feeling the happiness of those who see beauty taking form under their hands. More than a hundred of these Attic potters are known to us; but time has broken up their masterpieces, and they are only names. Here on a drinking cup are the proud words, Nikosthenes me poiesen-"Nicosthenes made me."..• A greater than he was Execias, whose majestic amphora is in the Vatican; he was one of many artists encouraged by patronage and peace under the Peisistratids. From the hands of Clitias and Ergo timus came, about 560, the famous Franc:;ois vase, found in Etruria by a French man of that name, and now treasured in the Archeological Museum at Florence
-a  great mixing bowl covered with row upon row of figures and scenes from
Greek mythology." These men were the outstanding masters of the Black-
So called because they were found chiefly near the Double Gate of the city at the Ceramicas.
220	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. IX
Figure style in sixth-century Attica. We need not exaggerate the excellence of their work; it cannot compare, either in conception or in execution, with the best work of the T'ang or Sung Chinese. But the Greek had a different aim from
the Oriental: he sought not color but line, not ornament but form. The fo:cures on Jte Greek vases are conventional, stylized, improbably magnificent in the
shoulders and thin in the legs; and as this continued through the classic age, we must assume that the Greek potter never dreamed of realistic accuracy. He was writing poetry, not prose, speaking to the imagination rather than the eye. He limited himself in materials and pigments: he took the fine red clay of the Ceramicus, quieted its color with yellow, carefully engraved the figures, and filled out the silhouettes with brilliant black glaze. He transformed the earth into a profusion of vessels that wedded beauty and use: hydria, amphora, oenochoe, kylix, krater, lekythos-i.e., water jug, two-handled jar, wine bowl, drinking cup, mixing bowl, and unguent flask. He conceived the experiments, created the subjects, and developed the techniques that were taken up by bronzeworkers, sculptors, and painters; he made the first essays in foreshort ening, perspective, chiaroscuro, and modeling;... he paved the way for statuary by molding terra-cotta figures in a thousand themes and forms. He freed his own art from Dorian geometry and Oriental excess, and made the human figure the source and center of its life.
Towards the last quarter of the sixth century the Athenian potter tired of black figures on a red ground, inverted the formula, and created that Red Figure style which ruled the markets of the Mediterranean for two hundred years. The figures were still stiff and angular, the body in profile with the eyes in full view; but even within these limits there was a new freedom, a wider scope, of conception and execution. He sketched the figures upon the clay with a light point, drew them in greater detail with a pen, filled in the background with black, and added minor touches with colored glaze. Here, too, some of the masters made lasting names. One amphora is signed, "Painted by Euthym i .es, son of Pollias, as never Euphroniusrn•,-which was to challenge Euphro nius to equal it. Nevertheless this Euphronius is still rated as the greatest potter of his age; to him, some think, belongs the great krater on which Heracles wrestles with Antaeus. To his contemporary Sosias is attributed one of the most famous of Greek vases, whereon Achilles binds the wounded arm of Patroclus; every detail is lovingly carried out, and the silent pain of the young warrior has survived the centuries. To these men, and now nameless others, we owe such masterpieces as the cup in whose interior we see Dawn mourn ing over her dead son, and the hydria, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at New York, that shows a Greek soldier, perhaps Achilles, plunging his lance into a fair and not breastless Amazon. It was before such a vase as one of these that John Keats stood enthralled one day, until its "wild ecstasy" and "mad pursuit" fired his brain with an ode greater than any Grecian um.
CHAP. IX) THE	COMMON  CULTURE  OF EARLY  GREECE	221
Sculpture
The Greek settlement of western Asia, and the opening of Egypt to Greek trade towards 660 B.c., allowed Near Eastern and Egyptian forms.and methods of statuary to enter Ionia and European Greece. About 580 two Cretan sculp tors, Dipoenus and Scyllis, accepted commissions at Sicyon and Argos, and left behind them there not only statues but pupils; from this period dates a vigorous school of sculpture in the Peloponnese. The art had many purposes: it commemorated the dead first with simple pillars, then with herms whose head alone was carved, then with forms completely chiseled in the round, or with funeral-stelae reliefs; it made statues of victorious athletes, first as types, later as individuals; and it was encouraged by the lively imagination of Greek faith to make countless images of the gods.
Until the sixth century its material was most frequently wood. We hear a great deal of the chest of Cypselus, dictator. of Corinth. According to Pau sanias, it was made of cedar, inlaid with ivory and gold, and adorned with com plicated carvings. As wealth increased, wooden statues might be covered, in whole or part, by precious materials; indeed it was thus that Pheidias made his chryselephantine (i.e., gold and ivory) statues of Athene Parthenos and the Olympian Zeus. Bronze rivaled stone as sculptural material to the end of classical an. Few ancient bronzes have survived the temptation to melt them down, but we may judge from the perhaps too ministerial Charioteer of the Delphi Museum (ca. 490) how near to perfection the art of hollow casting had been carried since Rhoecus and Theodorus of Samos had introduced it into Greece. The most famous group in Athenian statuary, the Tyrannicides (Harmodius and Aristogeiton), was cast in bronze by Antenor at Athens shortly after the expulsion of Hippias. Many forms of soft stone were used before the sculptors of Greece undertook to mold harder varieties with hammer and chisel; but once they had learned the art they almost denuded Naxos and Paros of marble. In the archaic period ( 1100-490) the figures were often painted; but towards the end of that age it was found that a better effect could be secured, in representing the delicate skin of women, by leaving the polished marble without artificial tint.
The Greeks of Ionia were the first to discover the uses of drapery as a sculp tural element. Egypt and the Near East had left the clothing rigid-a vast stone apron nullifying the living form; but in sixth-century Greece the sculp tors introduced folds into the drapery, and used the garment to reveal that ultimate source and norm of beauty, the healthy human body. Nevertheless the Egypto-Asiatic influence remained so strong that in most archaic Greek sculpture the figure is heavy, graceless, and stiff; the legs are strained even in repose; the arms hang helpless at the sides; the eyes have the almond form, and
222	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. IX
occasionally an Oriental slant; the face is stereotyped, immobile, passionless. Greek statuary, in this period, accepted the Egyptian rule of frontality-i.e., the figure was made to be seen only from the front, and so rigidly bisymmetri cal that a vertical line would pass through the nose, mouth, navel, and genitals with never a right or left deviation, and no flexure of either motion or re&t. Perhaps convention was responsible for this dull rigidity: the law of the Greek games forbade a victor to set up a portrait statue of himself unless he had won all contests in the pentathlon; only then, the Greeks argued, would he achieve the harmonious physical development that would merit individual modeling.67 For this reason, and perhaps because, as in Egypt, religious convention before the fifth century governed the representation of the gods, the Greek sculptor confined himself to a few poses and types, and devoted himself to their mastery.
Two types above all won his study: the youth, or kouros, nearly nude, slightly advancing the left leg, with arms at the side or partly extended, fists closed, countenance quiet and stem; and the kore, or maiden, carefully coiffured, mod estly posed and draped, one hand gathering up the robe, the other offering some gift to the gods. History till lately called the kouroi "Apollos," but they were more probably athletes or funerary monuments. The most famous of the type is the Apollo of Tenea; the largest, the Apollo of Sunium; the most pretentious, the Throne of Apollo at Arnyclae, near Sparta. One of the finest is the small Strangford Apollo in the British Museum; finer still is the Choiseul Gouffier Apollo, a Roman copy of an early fifth-century original.68 To at least the male eye the korai are more pleasing: their bodies are gracefully slender, their faces are softened with a Mona Lisa smile, their drapery begins to escape the stiffness of convention; some of them, like those in the Athens Museum would be called masterpieces in any other land;•• one of them, which we may call the Kore of Chios,* is a masterpiece even in Greece. In them the sensuous Ionian touch breaks through the Egyptian immobility and Dorian austerity of the "Apollos." Archermus of Chios created another type, or followed lost models, in the Nike, or Victory, of Delos; out of this would come the lovely Nike of Paeonius at Olympia, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and, in Christian art, the winged figures of cherubim... Near Miletus unknown sculp tors carved a series of draped and seated females for the temple of the Branchi
dae, figures powerful but crude, dignified but ponderous, profound but dead.t


She becomes delirious, and swoons; soldiers carry her away. Menelaus appears, and bids his soldiers bring Helen to him. He has sworn that he will kill her, and Hecuba is comforted at the thought that punishment is at last to find Helen.
I bless thee, Menelaus, I bless thee,
If thou wilt slay her! Only fear to see
Her visage, lest she snare thee and thou fall!
Helen enters, untouched and unafraid, proud in the consciousness of her beauty.
Hecuba.	And comest thou now Forth, and hast decked thy bosom and thy brow, And breathest with thy lord the same blue air, Thou evil heart? Low, low, with ravaged hair, Rent raiment, and flesh shuddering, and within, Oh, shame at last, not glory for thy sin....
Be.true,0 King; let Hellas bear the crown
Of justice. Slay this woman....
Menelaus. Peace, aged woman, peace	(Tothe soldiers)
Have some chambered galley set for her, Where she may sail the seas....
Hecuba. A lover once, will always love again.
As Helen and Menelaus leave, Talthybius returns, bearing the dead body of Astyanax.
Talth. Andromache ...	hath charmed these tears into mine eyes, Weeping her fatherland, as o'er the wave.
She gazed, speaking words to Hector's grave. Howbeit, she prayed us that due rites be done For burial of this babe	And in thine hands
She bade me lay him, to be swathed in bands
CHAP.XVII) THE	LITERATURE  OF  THE  GOLDEN  AGE	409
Of death and garments	(Hecuba takes the body.)
Hecuba. Ah, what a death hath found thee, little one! ... Ye tender arms, the same dear mold have ye
As his.... And dear proud lips, so full of hope, And closed forever! What false words ye said At daybreak, when ye crept into my bed,
Called me kind names, and promised, "Grandmother, When thou art dead, I will cut close my hair
And lead out all the captains to ride by
Thy tomb." Why didst thou cheat me so? 'Tis I, Old, homeless, childless, that for thee must shed Cold tears, so young, so miserably dead.
Dear God! the pattering welcomes of thy feet, The nursing in my lap; and oh, the sweet Falling asleep together! All is gone.
How should a poet carve the funeral stone To tell thy story true? "There Heth here
A babe whom the Greeks feared, and in their fear Slew him." Aye, Greece will bless the tale it tells! ...


Over the upland folds thou roamest, and the trackless sea. Love the gods captive holds; shall mortals not yield to thee?,..
Haemon disappears; and in search for him Creon orders his soldiers to open the cave in which Antigone has been entombed. There they find Antigone dead and beside her Haemon, resolved to die.
We looked, and in the cavern's vaulted gloom I saw the maiden lying strangled there,
A noose of linen twined about her neck;
And hard beside her, clasping her cold form, Her lover lay bewailing his dead bride ...
When the King saw him, with a terrible groan
He moved towards him, crying, "O my son,
What hast thou done? What ailed thee? What mischance Has reft thee of thy reason? Oh, come forth,
Come forth, my son; thy father supplicates." But the son glared at him with tiger eyes, Spat in his face, and then, without a word, Drew his two-hilted sword and smote, but
Missed his father flying backwards. Then the boy, Wroth with himself, poor wretch, incontinent, Fell on his sword and drove it through his side Home; but, yet breathing, clasped in his lax arms The maid, her pallid cheek incarnadined
With his expiring gasps. So there they lay Two corpses, one in death."
The dominant qualities of these plays, surviving time and translation, are beauty of style and mastery of technique. Here is the typically "clas sic" form of utterance: polished, placid, and serene; vigorous but restrained, dignified but graceful, with the strength of Pheidias and the smooth deli cacy of Praxiteles. Classic too is the structure; every line is relevant, and moves towards that moment in which the action finds its climax and its significance. Each of these plays is built like a temple, wherein every part is carefully finished in detail, but has its proper and subordinate place ,in the whole; except that the Philoctetes lazily accepts the deus ex machina (which is a jest in Euripides) as a serious solution of a knotty plot. Here, as in Aeschylus, the drama moves upward towards the hybris of some crowning insolence (as in Oedipus' bitter curse upon the unknown mur derer) ; turns around some anagnorisis or sudden recognition, some peripeteia or reversal of fortune; and moves downward toward the nemesis
THE	LIFF  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XVI:ti
of inevitable punishment. Aristotle, when he wished to illustrate perfection of dramatic structure, always referred to Oedipus the King, and the two plays that deal with Oedipus illustrate well the Aristotelian definition of
tragedy as a purging of pity and terror through their objective presentation. The characters are more clearly drawn than in Aeschylus, though not as realistically as in Euripides. "I draw men as they ought to be drawn," said Sophocles, "Euripides draws them as they are'""-as if to say that drama should admit some idealization, and that art should not be photography. But the influence of Euripides appears in the argumentativeness of the dialogue and the occasional exploitation of sentiment; so Oedipus wrangles unroyally with Teiresias, and, blinded, gropes about touchingly to feel the faces of his daughters. Aeschylus, contemplating the same situation, would have forgotten the daughters and thought of some eternal law.
Sophocles, too, is a philosopher and a preacher, but his counsels rely less than those of Aeschylus upon the sanctions of the gods. The spirit of the Sophists has touched him, and though he maintains a prosperous orthodoxy, he reveals himself as one who might have been Euripides had he not been so fortunate. But he has too much of the poet's sensitivity to excuse the suffering that comes so often undeserved to men. Says Lyllus, over Heracles' writhing body:
We are blameless, but confess That the gods are pitiless.
Children they beget, and claim Worship in a father's name, Yet with apathetic eye
Look upon such agony."
He makes Jocasta laugh at oracles, though his plays tum upon them creakingly; Creon denounces the prophets as "all a money-getting tribe"; and Philoctetes asks the old question, "How justify the ways of Heaven, finding Heaven unjust?'"'' Sophocles answers hopefully that though the moral order of the world may be too subtle for us to understand it, it is there, and right will triumph in the end." Following Aeschylus, he iden tifies Zeus with this moral order, and cemes even more closely to mono theism. Like a good Victorian he is uncertain of his theology, but strong in his moral faith; the highest wisdom is to find that law which is Zeus, the moral compass of the world, and follow it.
Oh, may my constant feet not fail, Walking in paths of righteousness.
CHAP.XVII)  THE   LITERATURE  OF THE GOLD EN  AGE	399
Sinless in word and deed, True to those eternal laws
That scale forever the high steep
Of heaven's pure ether, whence they sprang: For only in Olympus is their home,


The chorus is in many ways the most important as well as the most costly part of the spectacle. Often it gives its name to the drama; anci through it, for the most part, the poet expresses his views on religion and philosophy. The history of the Greek theater is a losing struggle of the chorus to dominate the play: at first the chorus is everything; in Thespis and Aeschylus its role diminishes as the number of actors increase; in the drama of the third century it disappears. Usually the chorus is composed not of professional singers but of amateurs chosen from the civic roster of the tribe. They are all men, and number, after Aeschylus, fifteen. They dance as well as sing, and move in dignified procession across the long and narrow stage, interpreting through the poetry of motion the words and moods of the play.
Mu ic holds in the Greek drama a place second only to the action and the poetry. Usually the dramatist composes the music as well as the
Plays were also presented during the lesser Dionysia, or Lenaea, usually at the Piraeus;
:md at various times in the local theaters of the Attic towns.
THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XVII
words:11 Most of the dialogue is spoken or declaimed; some of it is chanted in recitative; but the leading roles contain lyrical passages that must be sung as solos, duets, trios, or in unison or alternation with the chorus."' The singing is simple, without "parts" or harmony. The accompaniment is usu ally given by a single flute, and accords with the voices note for note; in this way the words can be followed by the audience, and the poem is not drowned out in the song. These plays cannot be judged by reading them silently; to the Greeks the words are but a part of a complex art form that weaves poetry, music, acting, and the dance into a profound and moving unity.•
Nevertheless the play is the thing, and the prize is awarded less for the music than for the drama, and less for the drama than for the acting; a good actor can make a success of a middling play.'" The actor-who is always a male-is not disdained as in Rome, but is much honored; he is exempt from military service, and is allowed safe passage through the lines in time of war. He is called hypokrites, but this word means answerer-i.e., to the chorus; only later will the actor's role as an impersonator lead to the use of the word as meaning hypocrite. Actors are organized in a strong union or guild called the Dionysian Artists, which has members through out Greece. Troupes of players wander from city to city, composing their own plays and music, making their own costumes, and setting up their own stages. As in all times, the incomes of leading actors are very high, that of secondary actors precariously low;"' and the morals of both are what might be expected of men moving from place to place, fluctuating between lux ury and poverty, and too high-strung to be capable of a stable and normal life.
In both tragedy and comedy the actor wears a mask, fitted with a resonant mouthpiece of brass. The acoustics of the Greek theater, and the visibility of the stage from every seat, are remarkable; but even so it is found ad visable to reinforce the voice of the actor, and help the eye of the distant spectator to distinguish readily the various characters portrayed. All subtle play of vocal or facial expression is sacrificed to these needs. When real individuals are represented on the stage, like the Euripides of the Eccle-
Music continued to play a central role in the culture of the classic period (480-323). The ttreat name among the fifth-century composers was Timotheus of Miletus; he wrote nomes m which the music dominated the poetry, and represented a stc,ry and an action. His ex tension of the Greek lyre to eleven strings, and his experiments m complex and elaborate styles, provoked the conservatives of Athens to such denunciation that Timotheus, we are told, was about to take his own life when Euripides comforted him, collaborated with him, and correctly prophesied that all Greece would soon be at his feet.""
CHAP.XVII)  THE  LITERATURE  OF THE  GOLDEN  AGE	381
siazusae and the Socrates of the Clouds, the masks imitate, and largely cari cature, their actual features. The masks have come down into the drama from religious performances, in which they were of ten instruments of ter ror or humor; in comedy they continue this tradition, and are as grotesque and extravagant as Greek fancy can make them. Just as the actor's voice is strengthened and his countenance enlarged by the mask, so his dimen sions are extended with padding, and his height is enhanced by an onkos, or projection on his head, and by kothornoi, or thick-soled shoes, on his feet. All in all, as Lucian puts it, the ancient actor makes a "hideous and appalling spectacle."""
The audience is as interesting as the play. Men and women of all ranks are admitted," and after 420 all citizens who need it receive from the state the two obols required for entrance. Women sit apart from men, and courtesans have a place to themselves; custom keeps all but the looser ladies away from comedy... It is a lively audience, not less or more mannerly than such assemblages in other lands. It eats nuts and fruit and drinks wine as it listens; Aristotle proposes to measure the failure of a play by the amount of food eaten during the presentation. It quarrels about seats, claps and shouts for its favorites, hisses and groans when it is displeased; when moved to more vigorous protest it kicks the benches beneath it; if it becomes angry it may frighten an actor off the stage with olives, figs, or stones.81 Aeschines is almost stoned to death for an offensive play; Aeschylus is nearly killed because the audience believes that he has revealed some secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries. A musician who has borrowed a supply of stones to build a house promises to repay it with those that he expects to collect from his next performance... Actors sometimes hire a claque to drown out with applause the hisses they fear, and comic actors may throw nuts to the crowd as a bribe to peace." If it wishes, the audience can by deliberate noise prevent a drama from continuing, and compel the per formance of the next play;"' in this way a long program may be shortened within bearing.
There are three days of drama at the city Dionysia; on each day five plays are presented-three tragedies and a satyr play by one poet, and a comedy by another... The performance begins early in the morning and continues till dusk. Only in exceptional cases is a play performed twice in the Theater of Dionysus; those who have missed it there may see it in the theaters of other Greek cities, or with less splendor on some rural stage in Attica. Between 480 and 380 some two thousand new dramas are performed at Athens  In early times the prize for the best tragic trilogy was a goat, for
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XVII
the best comedy a basket of figs and a jug of wine; but in the Golden Age the three prizes for tragedy and the single prize for comedy take the form of grants of money by the state. The ten judges are chosen by lot in the theater itself on the first morning of the competition, out of a large list of candidates nominated by the Council. At the end of the last play each of the judges writes his selections for first, second, and third prizes upon a tablet; the tablets are placed in an urn, and an archon draws out five tablets at random. These five judgments, summed up, constitute the final award, and the other five are destroyed unread; no one, therefore, can know in advance who the judges are to be, or which of them will really judge. Despite these precautions there is some corruption or intimidation of judges."' Plato complains that the judges, through fear of the crowd, almost always decide according to the applause, and argues that this "theatroc racy" is debasing both the dramatists and the audience... When the contest is over the victorious poet and his choragus are crowned with ivy, and sometimes the victors set up a monument, like the choragic monument of Lysicrates, to commemorate their triumph. Even kings compete for this crown.
The size of the theater and the traditions of the festival determine in large measure the nature of the Greek drama. Since nuances cannot be conveyed by facial expression or vocal inflection, subtle character portraits are rare in the Dionysian theater. The Greek drama is a study of fate, or of man in conflict with the gods; the Elizabethan drama is a study of action, or of man in conflict with man; the modem drama is a study of character, or of man in conflict with himself. The Athenian audience knows in ad vance the destiny of each person represented, and the issue of each action; for religious custom is still strong enough in the fifth century to limit the theme of the Dionysian drama to some story from the accepted myths and legends of the early Greeks.* There is no suspense and no surprise, but, instead, the pleasures of anticipation and recognition. Dramatist after dramatist tells the same tale to the same audience; what differs is the poetry, the music, the interpretation, and the philosophy. Even the philosophy, before Euripides, is determined in large measure by tradition: throughout
There were a few dramas about later history; of these the only extant example is Aeschylus' Persian Women. About 493 Phrynichus presented The Fall of Miletus; but the Athenians were so moved to grief by contemplating the capture of their daughter city by the Peisians that they fined Phrynichus a thousand drachmas for his innovation, and forbade any repetition of the play.88 There are some indications that Themistocles had secretly arranged for the performance as a means of stirring up the Athenians to acnve war against
Peisia...
CHAP.XVII) THE  LITERATURE  OF THE GOLDEN  AGE	383
Aeschylus and Sophocles the prevailing theme is the nemesis of punish ment, by jealous gods or impersonal fate, for insolent presumption and irreverent pride (by bris); and the recurring moral is the wisdom of con science, honor, and a modest moderation (aidos). It is this combination of philosophy with poetry, action, music, song, and dance that makes the Greek drama not only a new form in the history of literature, but one that almost at the outset achieves a grandeur never equaled again.
Ill. AESCHYLUS
Not quite at the outset; for as many talents, in heredity and history, pre pare the way for a genius, so some lesser playwrights, who may here be forgotten with honor, intervened between Thespis and Aeschylus. Per haps it was the successful resistance to Persia that gave Athens the pride and stimulus necessary to an age of great drama, while the wealth that came with trade and empire after the war provided for the costly Dionysian con tests in dithyrambic singing and the choral play. Aeschylus felt both the stimulus and the pride in person. Like so many Greek writers of the fifth century, he lived as well as wrote, and knew how to do as well as to speak. In 499, at the age of twenty-six, he produced his first play; in 490 he and his two brothers fought at Marathon, and so bravely that Athens ordere.d a painting to commemorate their deeds; in 484 he won his first prize at the Dionysian festival; in 480 he fought at Artemisium and Salamis, and in 479 at Plataea; in 476 and 470 he visited Syracuse, and was honored at the court of Hieron I; in 468, after dominating Athenian literature for a generation, he lost the first prize for drama to the youthful Sophocles; in 467 he recaptured supremacy with his Seven against Thebes; in 458 he won his last and greatest victory with the Oresteia trilogy; in 456 he was again in Sicily; and there, in that year, he died.
It took a man of such energy to mold the Greek drama into its classic
form. It was Aeschylus who added a second actor to the one drawn out from the chorus by Thespis, and thereby completed the transformation of the Dionysian chant from an oratorio into a play.* He wrote seventy (some say ninety) dramas, of which seven remain. Of these, the earliest
Though in Aeschylus the actors were only two, the roles they played in a drama were limited only in the sense that no more than two characters could be on the stage at once. The leader of the chorus was sometimes individualized into a third actor. Minor chancters attendants. soldiers, etc.-were not counted as actors.


Here and there, in East and West, it created a desert and called it peace. But
amid all this evil it formed a majestic system of law which through nearly all Europe gave security to life and property, incentive and continuity to industry, from the Decemvirs to Napoleon. It molded a government of separated legislative and executive powers whose checks and balances in,. spired the makers of constitutions as late as revolutionary America and France. For a time it united monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy so suc cessfully as to win the applause of philosophers, historians, subjects, and enemies. It gave municipal institutions, and for a long period mtmicipal freedom, to half a thousand cities. It administered its Empire at first with greed and cruelty, then with such tolerance and essential justice that the great realm has never again known a like content. It made the desert; blossom with civilization, and atoned for its sins with the miracle of a lasting peace. Today our highest labors seek to revive the Pax Romana for a d ordered world.
Within that unsurpassed framework Rome built a culture Greek i_n Qrigin,
EPILOGUE
Roman in application and result. She was too engrossed in government to create as bountifully in the realms of the mind as Greece had done; but she absorbed with appreciation, and preserved with tenacity, the technical, intel lectual, and artistic heritage that she had received from Carthage and Egypt, Greece and the East. She made no advance in science, and no mechanical improvements in industry, but she enriched the world with a commerce moving over secure seas, and a network of enduring roads that became the arteries of a lusty life. Along those roads, and over a thousand handsome bridges, there passed to the medieval and modem worlds the ancient tech niques of tillage, handicraft, and art, the science of monumental building, the processes of banking and investment, the organization of medicine and military hospitals, the sanitation of cities, and many varieties of fruit and nut trees, of agricultural or ornamental plants, brought from the East to take new root in the West. Even the secret of central heating came from the warm south to the cold north. The south has created the civilizations, the north has conquered and destroyed or borrowed them.
Rome did not invent education, but she developed it on a scale unknown before, gave it state support, and formed the curriculum that persisted till our harassed youth. She did not invent the arch, the vault, or the dome, but she used them with such audacity and magnificence that in some fields her architecture has remained unequaled; and all the elements of the medieval cathedral were prepared in her basilicas. She did not invent the sculptural portrait, but she gave it a realistic power rarely reached by the idealizing Greeks. She did not invent philosophy, but it was in Lucretius and Seneca that Epicureanism and Stoicism found their most finished form. She did not invent the types of literature, not even the satire; but who could adequately record the influence of Cicero on oratory, the essay, and prose style, of Virgil on Dante, Tasso, Milton, ...  of Livy and Tacitus on the writing of history, of Horace and Juvenal on Dryden, Swift, and Pope?
Her language became, by a most admirable corruption, the speech of Italy, Rumania, France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; half the white man's world speaks a Latin tongue. Latin was, till the eighteenth century, the Esperanto of science, scholarship, and philosophy in the West; it gave a convenient international terminology to botany and zoology; it survives in the sonorous ritual and official documents of the Roman Church; it still writes medical prescriptions, and haunts the phraseology of the law. It entered by direct appropriation, and again through the Romance languages (regalis, regal, royal; paganus, pagan, peasant), to enhance the wealth and flexibility of English speech. Our Roman heritage works in our lives a thou sand times a day.
\Vhen Christianity conquered Rome the ecclesiastical structure of the
CAESAR AND CHRIST
pagan church, the title and vestments of the pontifex 11iaxirmts, the worship of the Great Mother and a multitude of comforting divinities, the sense of supersensible presences everywhere, the joy or solemnity of old festivals, and the pageantry of immemorial ceremony, passed like maternal blood into the new religion, and captive Rome captured her conqueror. The reins and skills of government were handed down by a dying empire to a virile papacy; the lost power of the broken swor was rewon by the magic of the consoling word; the armies of the state were replaced by the missionaries of the Church moving in all directions along the Roman roads; and the revolted provinces, accepting Christianity, again acknowledged the sov ereignty of Rome. Through the long struggles of the Age of Faith the authority of the ancient capital persisted an1 grew, until in the Renaissance the classic culture seemed to rise from the grave, and the immortal city became once more the center and summit of the world's life and wealth and art. When, in 1936, Rome celebrated the 2689th anniversary of her founda tion, she could look back upon the most impressive continuity of govern ment and civilization in the history of mankind. May she rise again.
THANK YOU, PATIENT READER.
Bibliographical Guide
to books mentioned in the Notes
(Books marked with tm asterisk are recommended for further study.)
ABBOTT, F., The Common People of Ancient Rome, N. Y., 1911.
AcroN, LoRD, The History of Freedom, London, 1907. ALCIPHRON, Letters, London, n.d.
ANDERSON, W., and SPIERS, R., The Architecture of Greece and Rome, Lon--
don, 1902.
APOCRYPHA AND PsEUDEPIGRAPHA OF THE OLD TEsTAlvIENT, Oxford, 1913. 2v.
APPIAN, Roman History, Loeb Classical Library. 4v. APULEIUS, The Golden Ass, tr. W. Adlington, N. Y., 1927. ArusTOTLE, Physics, Loeb Library. 2v.
Politics, Everyman Library.
ARNOLD, W., Roman System of Provincial Administration, Oxford, 1914. ARRIAN, Anabasis of Alexander, London, 1893.
ATHENAEus, The Deipnosophists, London, 1854, 3v. AUGUSTINE, ST., The City of God, London, 1934.
Select Letters, Loeb Library.
AUGUSTUS, Res gestae, Loeb Library.


"As it was Origen's general practice to allegorize Scripture," says Gibbon, "it seems un fortunate that, in this instance only, he should have adopted the literal sense." 61
614	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. xxvm
203 he succeeded Clement as head of the Catechetical School. Though he was only eighteen, his learning and eloquence drew many students, pagan as well as Christian, and his fame spread throughout the Christian world.
Some ancients reckoned his "books" at 6000; many, of course, were brief brochures; even so Jerome asked, "\Vhich of us can read all that he has written?" 62 In love with the Bible, which through boyhood memorizing had become part of his mind, Origen spent twenty years, and employed a corps of stenographers and copyists, collating in parallel columns the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, a Greek transliteration of that text, and Greek
translations of it by the Septuagint, Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion.*
By comparing these diverse renderings, and using his knowledge of Hebrew, Origen offered to the Church a corrected Septuagint. Insatiate, he added commentaries, sometimes of great length, on every book in the Bible. In Peri archon, "First Principles," he achieved the first orderly and philosophi cal exposition of Christian doctrine. In a ''i\liscellany" (Stro111ate-is) he undertook to demonstrate all Christian dogmas from the writings of the pagan philosophers. To lighten his task he availed himself of that allegorical method by which pagan philosophers had made Homer accord with reason, and Philo had reconciled Judaism with Greek philosophy. The literal mean ing of Scripture, argued Origen, overlay two deeper layers of meaning the moral and the spiritual-to which only the esoteric and educated few could penetrate. He questioned the truth of Genesis as literally understood: • he explained away as symbols the unpleasant aspects of Yahveh's dealings with Israel; and he dismissed as legends such stories as that of Satan taking Jesus up to a high mountain and offering him the kingdoms of the world.63 Sometimes, he suggested, scriptural narratives were invented in order to convey some spiritual truth.64 "What man of sense," he asked,
will suppose that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun or moon or stars? Who is so foolish as to believe that God, like a husbandman, planted a garden in Eden, and placed in it a tree of life ... so that one who tasted of the fruit obtained life? 65
As Origen proceeds it becomes apparent that he is a Stoic, a Neo-Pytha gorean, a Platonist, and a Gnostic, who is nonetheless resolved to be a Chris tian. It would have been too much to ask of a man that he should abandon the faith for which he had edited a thousand volumes and flung away his manhood. Like Plotinus he had studied under Ammonius Saccas, and some- times it is hard to distinguish his philosophy from theirs. God, in Origen, is
Of this Hexapla (s old) only fragments remain. Lost, too, is the Tetrapla, containing the four Greek translaoons.
CHAP. XXVIII)   THE  GROWTH  OF THE  CHURCH	615
not Yahveh, he is the First Principle of all things. Christ is not the human figure described in the New Testament, he is the Logos or Reason who organizes the world; as such he was created by God the Father, and is subordinate to him.66 In Origen, as in Plotinus, the soul passes through a succession of stages and embodiments before entering the body; and after death it will pass through a like succession before arriving at God. Even the purest souls will suffer for a while in Purgatory; but in the end all souls will be saved. After the "final conflagration" there will be another world with its long history, and then another, and another	Each will improve
on the preceding, and the whole vast sequence will slowly work out the design of God.67
We cannot wonder that Demetrius, Bishop of Alexandria, looked with some doubt upon the brilliant philosopher who adorned his diocese and corresponded with emperors. He refused to ordain Origen to the priest hood, on the ground that emasculation disqualified him. But while Origen was traveling in the Near East two Palestinian bishops ordained him. De metrius protested that this infringed his rights; he convened a synod of his clergy; it annulled Origen's ordination, and banished him from Alexandria. Origen removed to Caesarea, and continued his work as a teacher. There he wrote his famous defense of Christianity Contra Ce/sum (248). With magnanimous spirit he admitted the force of Celsus' arguments; but he replied that for every difficulty and improbability in Christian doctrine there were worse incredibilities in paganism. He concluded not that both were absurd, but that the Christian faith offered a nobler way of life than could possibly come from a dying and idolatrous creed.
In 2 50 the Decian persecution reached Caesarea. Origen, now sixty-five, was arrested, stretched on the rack, loaded with chains and an iron collar, and kept in prison for many days. But death caught up with Decius first, and Origen was released. He lived only three years more; torture had fatally injured a body already weakened by unremitting asceticism. He died as poor as when he had begun to teach, and the most famous Christian of his time. As his heresies ceased to be the secret of a few scholars, the Church found it necessary to disown him; Pope Anastasius condemned his "blas phemous opinions" in 400, and in 553 the Council of Constantinople pro nounced him anathema. Nevertheless, nearly every later Christian savant for
centuries learned from him, and depended upon his work; and his defense
of Christianity impressed pagan thinkers as no "apology" had done before him. With him Christianity ceased to be only a comforting faith; it became a full-fledged philosophy, buttressed with Scripture but proudly resting on reason.
616	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXVIII
V. THE ORGANIZATION OF AUTHORITY
The Church might be excused for condemning Origen: his principle of allegorical interpretation not only made it possible to prove anything, but at one blow it did away with the narratives of Scripture and the earthly life of Christ; and it restored individual judgment precisely while proposing to defend the faith. Faced with the hostility of a powerful government, the Church felt the need of unity; it could not safely allow itself to be divided into a hundred feeble parts by every wind of intellect, by disloyal heretics, ecstatic prophets, or brilliant sons. Celsus himself had sarcastically observed that Christians were "split up into ever so many factions, each individual desiring to have his own party." 68 About 187 Irenaeus listed twenty varieties of Christianity; about 384 Epiphanius counted eighty. At every point for
eign ideas were creeping into Christian belief, and Christian believers were deserting to novel sects. The Church felt that its experimental youth was ending, its maturity was near; it must now define its terms and proclaim the conditions of its membership. Three difficult steps were necessary: the formation of a scriptural canon, the determination of doctrine, and the organization of authority.
The literature of Christianity in the second century abounded in gospels, epistles, apocalypses, and "acts." Christians differed widely in accepting or rejecting these as authoritative expressions of the Christian creed. The Western churches accepted the Book of Revelation, the Eastern churches generally re jected it; these accepted the Gospel according to the Hebrews and the Epistles of James, the Western churches discarded them. Clement of Alexandria quotes as sacred scripture a late first-century treatise, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Marcion's publication of a New Testament forced the hand of the Church. We do not know when the books of our present New Testament were determined as canonical-i.e., as authentic and inspired; we can only say that a Latin fragment discovered by Muratori in 1740, named after him, and generally assigned to ca. 180, assumes that the canon had by that time been fixed.
Ecclesiastical councils or synods met with increasing frequency in the sec ond century. In the third they were limited to bishops; and by the close of that century they were recognized as the final arbiters of "Catholic"-i.e., universal
-Christian belief. Orthodoxy survived heresy because it satisfied the need for a definite creed that could moderate dispute and quiet doubt, and because it was supPorted by the power of the Church.
The problem of organization lay in determining the center of that power. After the weakening of the mother church at Jerusalem, the individual con gregations, unless established or protected by other communities, appear to have
CHAP.XXVIII)   THE  GROWTH OF THE  CHURCH	617


Farther north Alexandria Troas was made a Roman colony by Augustus in memory of Rome's supposed Trojan origin-which gave Rome a convenient claim to all these parts. On a near-by hill (Hissarlik) old Troy was rebuilt as new Ilium, and became a goal for tourists to whom guides pointed out the exact spot of every exploit in the Iliad, and the cave where Paris had judged Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena. On the Propontis Cyzicus built ships and sent out a ubiquitous merchant fleet rivaled only by that of Rhodes. Here Hadrian built a Temple of Persephone ,vhich was one of the glories of Asia. Its columns, says Dio Cassius, were six feet in diameter and seventy-five feet high, yet each was a single block of stone.64 Rising from a hill, it towered so high that Aelius counted the harbor's lighthouse superfluous.
From the Red to the Black Sea a hundred cities flourished under the RoIT.a::1 peace.
THE GREAT 1\IITHRIDATES
Along the northern shores of Asia Minor sprawled Bithynia and Fontus, mountainous in the interior, but rich in timber and minerals. Here a mixture of Thracians, Greeks, and Iranians overlay an antique Hittite stock. A line of Greco-Thracian kings ruled Bithynia, built a capital at Nicomedia (ls-nikmid), and major cities at Prusa and Nicaea (Is-nik). About 302 B.c.
CHAP. XXIV)	THE   HELLENISTIC  REVIVAL
a Persian noble, piously called Mithridates, carved a kingdom for himself out of Cappadocia and Pontus, and founded a dynasty of virile Hellenizing monarchs, with capitals at Comana Pontica and Sinope. Their rule spread until it impinged upon Roman economic and political interests. The result ing Mithridatic \Vars are fitly named from the redoubtable king who united western Asia and European Greece in a revolt which, if it had succeeded, would have changed the face of history.
Mithridates VI had inherited the throne of Pontus as a boy of eleven. His mother and his guardians, seeking to supplant him, tried to kill him. He fled from the palace, disguised himself, and for seven years lived in the woods as a hunter, dressed in skins. About 1 1 5 B.C. a coup d'etat deposed his mother and restored him to power. Surrounded by the conspiracies characteristic of Oriental courts, he took the precaution of drinking a little poison every day, until he had developed immunity to most of the varieties available to his intimates. In the course of his experiments he discovered many antidotes. From these his interest spread to medicine, on which he compiled data of such value that Pompey had them translated into Latin. His wild and exact ing life had given him strength of body as well as of will; he grew to so large a frame that he sent his suit of armor to Delphi to amuse the worshipers. He was an expert horseman and warrior, could (we are assured) run fast enough to overtake a deer, drove a SL\'.teen-horse chariot, and rode 120 miles in a day.65 He prided himself on being able to outeat and outdrink any man, and he attended to a numerous harem. Roman historians tell us that he was cruel and treacherous and slew his mother, his brother, three sons, and three daughters; 66 but Rome has not transmitted his side of this tale. He was a man of some culture, could speak twenty-two languages, and never used an interpreter; 67 he studied Greek literature, was fond of Greek music, en riched Greek temples, and had Greek scholars, poets, and philosophers at his court; he collected works of art and issued coins of surpassing excellence. But he shared in the sensuality and coarseness of his half-barbarian environ ment and accepted the superstitions of his time. He def ended himself against Rome not with the far-seeing maneuvers of a great general or statesman, but with the impromptu courage of an animal at bay.
Such a man could not be content with the reduced kingdom relinquished
by his mother. \Vith the help of Greek officers and mercenaries he con quered Armenia and the Caucasus, passed over the Kuban River and the Strait of Kerch into the Crimea, and brought under his sway all the Greek cities on the east, north, and west coast of the Black Sea. As the collapse of Greek military power had left these communities almost defenseless against the barbarians of their hinterland, they received the Greek phalanxes of
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIV
Mithridates as saviors. The subject cities included Sinope (Sinob), Trapezus (Trebizond), Panticapaeum (Kerch), and Byzantium; but Bithynian con trol of the Hellespont (Dardanelles) left the Mediterranean commerce of Pontus at the mercy of hostile kings. When Nicomedes II of Bithynia died (94 n.c.), his two sons contested the succession. One of them sought the aid of Rome, the other, Socrates, appealed to the Pantie king. Mithridates took advantage of the factional strife in Italy to invade Bithynia and en throne Socrates. Rome, unwilling to see the Bosporus in hostile hands, ordered Mithridates and Socrates out of Bithynia. Mithridates complied, Socrates refused. The Roman governor of Asia deposed him and crowned Nicomedes III. The new ruler, encouraged by the Roman proconsul Manius Aquilius, invaded Pontus, and the First Mithridatic \!Var began (88-84 n.c.). Mithridates felt that his sole chance of survival lay in arousing the Hellenic East to revolt against its Italian overlords. He announced himself as the liberator of Bellas and sent troops to free the Greek cities of Asia, if necessary by force. Opposed by the business classes of the towns, he courted the democratic parties with promises of semisocialistic reforms. Meanwhile his navy of 400 ships destroyed the Roman Black Sea fleet, and his army of 290,000 men overwhelmed the forces of Nicomedes and Aquilius. To ex press his scorn of Roman avarice,68 the victorious king poured molten gold down the throat of the captured Aquilius-fresh from his triumph over the revolted slaves of Sicily. The Greek cities of Asia Minor, shorn of Roman defense, opened their gates to the armies of Mithridates and declared their allegiance to his cause. At his suggestion, on an appointed day, they slew all Italians-80,000 men, women, and children-whom they found within
their walls (88 n.c.). Says Appian:
The Ephesians tore away the fugitives who had taken refucre in the Temple of Artemis and were clasping the images of the goddess, and slew them. The Pergamenes shot ,vith arrows the Romans who had sought sanctuary in the Temple of Aesculapius. The people of Adramyttium followed into the sea those who sought to escape by swimming, and killed them and drowned their children. The in habitants of Caunus (in Caria) pursued the Italians who had taken
refuge about the statue of Vesta, killed the children before their mothers' eyes, then the mothers, then the men.   By which it was
made plain that it was as much hatred of the Romans as fear of Mith ridates that impelled these atrocities.®
Doubtless the poorer classes, who had home the brunt of Roman domina tion, took the lead in this mad massacre; the propertied classes, long pro tected by Rome, must have trembled at so wild an uprising of revenge.
CHAP. XXIV)	THE   HELLENISTIC  REVIVAL	519
Mithridates sought to appease the well to do by exempting the Greek cities from taxes for five years and giving them complete home rule. At the same time, however, he "proclaimed the canceling of debts," says Appian,70 "freed the slaves, confiscated many estates, and redistributed the land." Leading men in the communities formed a conspiracy against him; he discovered it and had 1600 of them killed. The lower classes, aided by philosophers and university professors,71 seized power in many Greek cities, even in Athens and Sparta, and declared war against both Rome and wealth. The Greeks of Delos, in an ecstasy of freedom, slaughtered 20,000 Italians in one day. The fleet of Mithridates captured the Cyclades, and his armies took posses sion of Euboea, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace. The defection of rich "Asia" stopped the flow of tribute to the Roman treasury and of interest to Roman investors, and plunged Italy into a financial crisis that had something to do with the revolutionary movement of Satuminus and Cinna. Italy itself was divided, for the Samnites and Lucanians sent offers of alliance to the Pontic king.
Faced with war and revolution everywhere, the Senate sold the accumu lated gold and silver of Rome's temples to finance S lla's troops. We must not tell again how Sulla captured Athens, defeated the rebel armies, saved the Empire for Rome, and gave Mithridates a lenient peace. The King withdrew to his Pontic capital and quietly organized another army and fleet. Morena, the Roman legate in Asia, decided to attack him before he grew stronger. \Vhen, in this Second Mithridatic War (83-81), Morena was defeated, Sulla reprimanded him for violating the treaty and ordered hostilities ended. Six years later Nicomedes III bequeathed Bithynia to Rome. Mithridates realized that his own kingdom would soon be swallowed up if the Roman power, already controlling the Bosporus, should reach the borders of Paphlagonia and Fontus. In the Third Mithridatic \Var (75-63) he made a last effort, fought for twelve years against Lucullus and Pompey, was betrayed by his allies and aides, and fled to the Crimea. There the old warrior, now in his si--<ty-ninth year, tried to organize an army to cross the Balkans and invade Italy from the north. His son Phamaces revolted against his authority, his army refused the venture, and the deserted king tried to kill himself. The poison that he took failed to work because he had inured his system to it, and his hands were too weak to press home the blade from whose point he invited death. His friends and proteges, commissioned by his son to kill him, ended his life with their swords and spears.
520	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXIV
PROSE
It speaks well for Roman rule that the cities of Asia Minor recovered so rapidly from the intermittent fever of these wars. Nicomedia became the capital of the province of Bithynia-Pontus and later the imperial seat of Diocletian; Nicaea would be immortalized by the most important council in the history of the Christian Church. The two cities so rivaled one another in building that Trajan had to send the younger Pliny to draw them back from bankruptcy. Nicomedia made her offering to literature in Flavius Arrianus, whom we have seen recording the discourses of Epictetus. Governor of Cappadocia for six years, archon of Athens for one, Arrian yet found time to write many histories, of which only the Anabasis of Alex ander remains, with an appendix of Indica. It was written in clear and simple Greek, for Arrian took Xenophon as his exemplar in style as well as life. "This work," he says, with the bold vanity of the ancients, "is, and has been from my youth up, equivalent to native land, and family, and public office for me; and therefore I do not deem myself unworthy to rank among the greatest authors in the Greek language." 72
Other cities along the Black Sea had goodly buildings and famous scholars. Myrlea had 320,000 inhabitants; 73 Amastris (Amasra) impressed Pliny as "a neat and lovely city," known for its .fine box trees; Sinope flourished as a fishing center and an outlet for the timber and minerals of its countryside; Amisus (Samsun) and Trapezus made a living by trading across the waters with Scythia (southern Russia); and Amasea (Amasia) gave birth and a home to antiquity's most celebrated geographer.
Strabo came of a rich family, related, he assures us, to the Pantie kinQ"S.
.	•	.	t,


AEGY
ROMAN  EMPIRE
CHAP. LXII)	CIYILIZI G  THE WEST
Carth ge. After the battle of Actium Augustus took up the frustrated project of Carns Gracchus and Caesar and sent to Carthage as colonists some of the soldiers whose fidelity and victories he wished to reward with land. The geographical advantages of the site, the perfect harbor, the fertile Bagradas delta, the excellent roads opened or reopened by Roman engineers, soon enable Cart a e to recapture from Utica. the export and import trade of the reg10n; w1thm a century of its refounding it had become the largest city in the western pro,·inces. Rich merchants and landowners built mansions on the historic Byrsa, or villas in the f!o\'.rering suburbs, while peasants driven from the soil by the competition of latifundia joined prolctaires and slaves in slums whose fetid pm·erty would welcome the egalitarian gospel of Christianity. Houses rose to six or seven stories, public buildings gleamed with marble, and statuary of good Greek style abounded in the streets and squares. Temples were built again to the old Carthagini:m gods, and Mclkarr enjoyed till our second century the sacrifice of living children. The people rivaled the Romans in their p:ission for luxuries, cosmetics, jewelry, dyed hair, chariot races, and gladi:1corial games...\mong the sights of the city were the great public baths presented by 1\larcus Aurelius. There were lecture halls, schools of rhetoric, philosophy, medicine, and bw; Carthage rnnked only after Athens and Alexandria as a uni,·ersity town. Here Apuleius and Tenullian came to study everything, and Saint Augustine marveled at the pranks and immorality of the students, whose favorite philanthropy was to break into a lecture room and dismiss both the professor and his class.10
Carthage was the capital of the proYince called "Africa," now eastern Tunisia. South of it commerce bedecked the eastern coast with cities whose ancient wealth was re,·iving after rweh·e centuries when war struck them in our time: Hadrometum (Sousse), Leptis i\linor, Thapsus, and Tacapac (Gabcs). Farther east on the Mediterranean Jay a district named T ripolis from its federation of three cities: Oea (Tripoli), f unded by the Phoenicians in 900 R.c., Sabrata, and Leptis l\Iaana (Lebda). In this last city· the Emperor Septimius Severus was born (A.D. 146)he rewarded it with a basilica and municipal bath whose ruins astonish
	the traveler or warrior today. Pa\·ed roads busv with camel caravans connected these ports ,\·ith the towns f the interior: Suf tula, _now a ti y village ,vith t e remains of a great Roman temple; Thysdrus (EI D1em), \\·h1ch had an amphi theater seating 6o,ooo; and Thugga (Dougga), whose uin theater attests, by its graceful Corinthian columns, the ":ealth and taste of 1:5 cmzens. .	.
North of Carthaae \\'as her ancient mother and 1mpi.lcable nYal, Utica
(Utique). We catchi:,a hint of its Roman opulence ,vhen we kam that in 46 B.c.
300 Roman bankers and wholesalers had br:mc'.1 offices there.11 Its territory reached northward to Hi_ppo Diar ·hyrus, now B1zerte; thence a oa? led_ along the coast wesnrnrd to Hippo Rcgms (Bone), soon to be Augustine s episcopal
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XXII
see. South and inland lay Cirta (Constantine), capital of the province of Nu midia. Westward lay Thamugadi (Timgad), almost as well preserved as Pompei with paved and colonnaded streets, covered drains, an elegant arch, a forum, senate house, basilica, temples, baths, theater, library, and many private homes. On the pavement of the forum is a checkerboard engraved with the words, Venari, lavari, ludere, ridere, hoc est vivere-"to hunt, bathe, play, and laugh, this is to live." 12 Thamugadi was founded about A.O. 11 7 by the Third Legion, sole guard of the African provinces. About 1:? 3 the legion took up more perma nent headquarters a few miles to the west, and raised the city of Lambaesis (Lam bese). The soldiers married and settled there, and lived in their homes more th:!n in the camp; but even their praetorium was a stately and ornate edifice, whose baths were as fine as any in Africa. Outside the camp they helped to build a capitol, temples, triumphal 2rches, and an amphitheater where struggle and death might mitigate the monotony of their peaceful lives.
That a single legion could protect all north Africa from the marauding tribes of the interior was made possible by a network of roads, military in purpose but commercial in result, binding Carthage with the Atlantic, and the Sahara with the Mediterranean. The main road went westward through Cirta to Caesarea, capital of Mauretania (Morocco). Here King Juba II taught civilization to the
.Mauri or Moors from whom the province took its ancient and modern names. Son of the Juba who had died at Thapsus, he had been taken as a child to grace Caesar's triumph in Rome; he was spared, remained as a student, and became one of the most learned scholars of his time. Augustus made him client king of Maure tania and bade him spread among his people the classic culture he had so zealously acquired. He succeeded, being favored with a long reign of forty-eight years; his subjects marveled that a man could write books and yet rule so well. His son and heir was brought to Rome and starved to death by Caligula. Claudius an nexed the kingdom and divided it into two provinces: Mauretania Caesariensis and Mauretania Tingitana, named from its capital Tingis-our Tangier.
In hese African cities there were many schools, open to the poor as well as to the rich. We hear of courses in stenography,13 and Juvenal calls Africa nutricula causidiconmz-the nurse of oarristers.u It produced in this period
one minor and one major author-Fronto and Apuleius; only in its Christian heyday would African literature lead the world. Lucius Apuleius was a strange and picturesque character, far more than 1\-fontaigne "undulant and diverse." Born at Madaura of high family (A.O. 124), he studied there, at Carthage, and in Athens, spent a large inheritance recklessly, wandered from city to city and from faith to faith, had himself initiated into various relicrious mysteries, played with magic, wrote many works on subjects ranging from theolo .to tooth powder, l ctured at Ro_me and elsewhere on philosophy and religion, returned to Afnca, and marned at Tripoli a lady considerably richer than himself in both purse and years. Her friends and heirs-apparent
CHAP.XXII)	CIVILIZING  THE WEST
sued to annul the marriage, charging that he had persuaded the widow by magic arts; he defended himself before the court in an Apologia that has come down to us in refurbished form. He won his case and bride, but the people persisted in believing him a magician, and their pagan posterity sought to belittle Christ by recounting the miracles of Apuleius. He spent the re mainder of his days at Madaura and Carthage, practicing law and medicine,
letters and rhetoric. Most pf his writings were on scientific and philosophical subjects; his native city raised a monument to him labeled Philosophus Platonicus; and he would be chagrined, if he could return, to find himself remembered only for his Golden Ass.
It is a work akin to the Satyricon of Petronius and even more bizarre. Originally entitled Metamorphoseon Libri XI-Eleven Books of Trans formations-it expanded fantastically a story that Lucius of Patras had told of a man changed into an ass. It is a loose concatenation of adventures, descriptions, and extraneous episodes, seasoned with magic, horror, ribaldry, and deferred piety. The Lucius of the tale tells how he wandered into Thessaly, amused himself with various maidens, and sensed everywhere around him an atmosphere of sorcery.
As soon as night was past and a new day began to spring, I for tuned to a\vake, and rose out of mv bed as half amazed, and indeed desirous to know and see some st;ange and marvelous things. . . . Neither was there anything which I saw that I did believe to be the same which it was indeed, but everything seemed to me transformed into other shapes by the wicked power of enchantment, in so much that I thought the stones against which I might stumble were indurate and turned from men into that figure, and that the birds which I heard chirping, and the trees and the running waters were changed into such feathers and leaves and fountains. And further I thought that the statues and images would by and by move, and that the walls would talk, and the kine and other brute beasts would speak and. tell strange news, and that immediately I should hear some oracle from heaven and from the ray of the sun.15
Ready now for any adventure, Lucius rubs himself with a magic ointment, meanwhile mightily wishing to be changed into a bird; but as he rubs he becomes a perfect ass. Thenceforth the story records the tribulations of an ass with "the sense and understanding of a man." His single consolation lies in his "long ears, whereby I might hear all things that were even afar off." He will be restored to human shape, he is told, if he can find and eat a rose. He achieves this consummation after a long Asineid of vicissitudes. Dis enamored of life, he turns first to philosophy, then to religion, and composes a prayer of thanksgiving to Isis astonishingly like a Christian apostrophe to
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XXII
the Mother of God.16 He shaves his head, is received into the third order of Isiac initiates, and paves a road back to earth by revealing a dream in which Osiris, "greatest of the gods," bids him go home and practice law.
Few books embrace so much nonsense, but fewer still have phrased it so pleasantly. Apuleius tries every manner of style and manages each success fully; he loves most a rich and fanciful verbiage ornate with alliteration and assonance, picturesque slang and archaic speech, sentimental diminutives, rhythmic and sometimes poetic prose. An Oriental warmth of coloring ac companies here an Oriental mysticism and sensuality. Perhaps Apuleius wished to suggest, from the background of his experience, that sensual indulgence is an intoxicating ferment which changes us into beasts, and that we can become human again only through the rose of wisdom and piety. He is at his best in the incidental stories caught by his powerful and perambulat ing ears; so an old woman comfons a kidnaped maiden by recounting the romance of Cupid and Psyche-17 how the son of Venus fell in love with a pretty maid, gave her every joy but that of seeing him, aroused his mother to cruel jealousy, and came to a happy ending in the skies. No artist's brush, in many an effort, has bettered the hoar shrew's tongue in telling the ancient tale.
SPAIN