CHAP. XXIX)   THE  SURRENDER  OF PHILO SOPHY
of Cyrene, who preached an unmoralistic atheism so openly in Athens that the Assembly indicted him for impiety,.-a lesson that Epicurus did not for get. Then he returned to Asia and lectured on philosophy at Colophon, Mytilene, and Lampsacus. The Lampsacenes were so impressed with his ideas and his character that they felt qualms of selfishness in keeping him in so remote a city; they raised a fund of eighty minas ($4000), bought .a house and garden on the outskirts of Athens, and presented it to Epicurus as his school and his home. In 306, aged thirty-five, Epicurus took up his resi dence there, and taught to the Athenians a philosophy that was Epicurean in name only. It was a sign of the growing freedom of women that he wel comed them to his lectures, even into the little community that lived about him. He made no distinctions of station or race; he accepted courtesans as well as matrons, slaves as well as freemen; his favorite pupil was his own slave, Mysis. The courtesan Leontium became his mistress as well as his pupil, and found him as jealous a mate as if he had secured her by due proc ess of law. Under his influence she had one child and wrote several books, whose purity of style did not interfere with her morals.lll
For the rest Epicurus lived in Stoic simplicity and prudent privacy. His motto was lathe biosas-"live unobtrusively." He took part dutifully in the religious ritual of the city, but kept his hands clear of politics, and his spirit free from the affairs of the world. He was content with water and a little wine, bread and a little cheese. His rivals and enemies charged that he gorged himself when he could, and became abstemious only when over eating had ruined his digestion. "But those who speak thus are all wrong," Diogenes Laertius assures us; and he adds: "There are many witnesses of the unsurpassable kindness of the man to everybody-both his own country, which honored him with statues, and his friends, who were so numerous that they could not be contained in whole cities."11 He was devoted to his parents, generous to his brothers, and gentle to his servants, who joined with him in philosophical studies.'" His pupils looked upon him, says Seneca, as a god among men; and after his death their motto was: "Live as though the eye of Epicurus were upon thee."
Between his lessons and his loves he wrote three hundred books. The ashes of Herculaneum preserved for us some fragments of his central work, On Nature; Diogenes Laertius, the Plutarch of philosophy, handed down three of his letters, and late discoveries have added a few more. Above all, Lucrecius enshrined the thought of Epicurus in the greatest of philosophical poems.
646	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXIX
Perhaps already conscious that Alexander's conquest was letting loose upon Greece a hundred mystic cults from the East, Epicurus begins with the arresting proposition that the aim of philosophy is to free men from fear-more than anything else, from the fear of gods. He dislikes religion because, he thinks, it thrives on ignorance, promotes it, and darkens life with the terror of celestial spies, relentless furies, and endless punishments. The gods exist, says Epicurus, and enjoy, in some far-off space among the stars, a serene and deathless life; but they are too sensible to bother with the affairs of so infinitesimal a species as mankind. The world is not de signed, nor is it guided, by them; how could such divine Epicureans have created so middling a universe, so confused a scene of order and disorder, of beauty and suffering?'" If this disappoints you, Epicurus adds, console yourself with the thought that the gods are too remote to do you any more harm than good. They cannot watch you, they cannot judge you, they cannot plunge you into hell. As for evil gods, or demons, they are the un happy fantasies of our dreams.
Having rejected religion, Epicurus goes on to reject metaphysics. We can know nothing of the suprasensual world; reason must confine itself to the experience of the senses, and must accept these as the final test of truth. All the problems that Locke and Leibnitz were to debate two thousand years later are here settled with one sentence: if knowledge does not come from the senses, where else can it come from? And if the senses are not the ultimate arbiter of fact, how can we find such a criterion in reason, whose data must be taken from the senses?
Nevertheless the senses give us no certain knowledge of the external world; they catch not the objective thing itself, but only the tiny atoms thrown off by every part of its surface, and leaving upon our senses little replicas of its nature and form. If, therefore, we must have a theory of the world (and really it is not altogether necessary), we had better accept Democritus' view that nothing exists, or can be known to us, or can even be imagined by us, except bodies and space; and that all bodies are com posed of indivisible and unchangeable atoms. These atoms have no color, temperature, sound, taste, or smell; such qualities are created by the corpus cular radiations of objects upon our sense organs. But the atoms do differ in size, weight, and form; for only by this supposition can we account for the infinite variety of things. Epicurus would like to explain the operation of the atoms on purely mechanical principles; but as he is interested in ethics far more than in cosmology, and is anxious to preserve free will as the source of moral responsibility and the prop of personality, he abandons
CHAP. XXIX)   THE  SURRENDER  OF PHILO SOPHY
Democritus in mid-air, and supposes a kind of spontaneity in the atoms: they swerve a bit from the perpendicular as they fall through space, and so enter into the combinations that make the four elements, and through them the diversity of the objective scene.'° There are innumerable worlds, but it is unwise to interest ourselves in them. We may assume that the sun and the moon are about as large as they appear to be, and then we can give our time to the study of man.
Man is a completely natural product. Life probably began by spontane ous generation, and progressed without design through the natural selection of the fittest forms.21. Mind is only another kind of matter. The soul is a delicate material substance diffused throughout the body." It can feel or act only by means of the body, and dies with the body's death. Despite all this we must accept the testimony of our immediate consciousness that the will is free; else we should be meaningless puppets on the stage of life. It is better to be a slave to the gods of the people than to the Fate of the philoso phers...
The real function of philosophy, however, is not to explain the world, since the part can never explain the whole, but to guide us in our quest of happiness. "That which we have in view is not a set of systems and vain opinio11s. but much rather a life exempt from every kind of disquietude.'111 Over the entrance to the garden of Epicurus was the inviting legend: "Guest, thou shalt be happy here, for here happiness is esteemed the high est good." Virtue, in this philosophy, is not an end in itself, it is only an indispensable means to a happy life.25 "It is not possible to live pleasantly without living prudently, honorably, and justly; nor to live prudently, honorably, and justly without living pleasantly.""" The only certain propo sitions in philosophy are that pleasure is good, and that pain is bad. Sensual pleasures are in themselves legitimate, and wisdom will find some room for them; since, however, they may have evil effects, they need such discrimi nating pursuit as only intelligence can give.
When, therefore, we say that pleasure is the chief good we are not speaking of the pleasures of the debauched man, or those that lie in sensual enjoyment ... but we mean the freedom of the body from pain, and of the soul from disturbance. For it is not continued drink ings and revels, or the enjoyment of female society, or feasts of fish or other expensive foods, that make life pleasant, but such sober con templation as examines the reasons for choice and avoidance, and puts to flight the vain opinions from which arises most of the confusion that troubles the soul.''
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXIX
In the end, then, understanding is not only the highest virtue, it is also the highest happiness, for it avails more than any other faculty in us to avoid pain and grief. Wisdom is the only liberator: it frees us from bondage to the passions, from fear of the gods, and from dread of death; it teaches us how to bear misfortune, and how to derive a deep and lasting pleasure from the simple goods of life and the quiet pleasures of the mind. Death is not so frightful when we view it intelligently; the suffering it involves may be briefer and slighter than that which we have borne time and again during our lives; it is our foolish fancies of what death may bring that lend to it so much of its terror. And consider how little is needed to a wise content fresh air, the cheapest foods, a modest shelter, a bed, a few books, and a friend. "Everything natural is easily procured, and only the useless is cost ly."'" We should not fret our lives out in realizing every desire that comes into our heads: "Desires may be ignored when our failure to accomplish them will not really cause us pain.'"" Even love, marriage, and parentage are unnecessary; they bring us fitful pleasures, but perennial grief... To accustom ourselves to plain living and simple ways is an almost certain road to health.a The wise man does not burn with ambition or lust for fame; he does not envy the good fortune of his enemies, nor even of his friends; he avoids the fevered competition of the city and the turmoil of political strife; he seeks the calm of the countryside, and finds the surest and deepest happiness in tranquillity of body and mind. Because he controls his ap petites, lives without pretense, and puts aside all fears, the natural "sweet ness of life" (hedone) rewards him with the greatest of all goods, which is peace.
This is a likably honest creed. It is encouraging to find a philosopher who is not afraid of pleasure, and a logician who has a good word to say for the senses. There is no subtlety here, and no warm passion for understanding; on the contrary Epicureanism, despite its transmission of the atomic theory, marks a reaction from the brave curiosity that had created Greek science and philosophy. The profoundest defect of the system is its negativity: it thinks of pleasure as freedom from pain, and of wisdom as an escape from the hazards and fullness of life; it provides an excellent design for bachelor hood, but hardly for a society. Epicurus respected the state as a necessary evil, under whose protection he might live unmolested in his garden, but he appears to have cared little about national independence; indeed, his school seems to have preferred monarchy to democracy, as less inclined to perse-
CHAP. XXO:)   THE  SURRENDER  OF PHILO SOPHY
cute heresy81-an arresting inversion of modern beliefs. Epicurus was ready to accept any government that offered no hindrance to the unobtrusive pursuit of wisdom and companionship. He dedicated to friendship the de votion that earlier generations had given to the state. "Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most im portant is friendship.".. The friendships of the Epicureans were proverbial for their permanence; and the letters of the master abound in expressions of ardent affection."' His disciples returned this feeling with Greek intensity._ Young Colotes, on first hearing Epicurus speak, fell on his knees, wept, and hailed him as a god.811
For thirty-six years Epicurus taught in his garden, preferring a school to a family. In the year 270 he was brought down with the stone. He bore the pains stoically, and on hrs deathbed found time to think of his friends. "I write to you on this happy day which is the last of my life. The obstruction of my bladder, and the internal pains, have reached the extreme point, but there is marshaled against them the delight of my mind in thinking over our talks together. Take care of Metrodorus' children in a way worthy of your lifelong devotion to me and to philosophy."88 He willed his property to the school, hoping "that all those who study philosophy may never be in want ... so far as our power to prevent it may extend."•
He left behind him a long succession of disciples, so loyal to his memory that for centuries they refused to change a word of his teaching. His most famous pupil, Metrodorus of Lampsacus, had already shocked or amused Greece by reducing Epicureanism to the proposition that "all good things have reference to the belly"•-meaning, perhaps, that all pleasure is physio logical, and ultimately visceral. Chrysippus countered by calling the Gas trology of Archestratus "the metropolis of the Epicurean philosophy."81) Popularly misunderstood, Epicureanism was publicly denounced and pri vately accepted in wide circles throughout Bellas. So many Hellenizing Jews adopted it that Apikiiros was used by the rabbis as a synonym for apostate."' In 173 or 155 two Epicurean philosophers were expelled from Rome on the ground that they were corrupting youth.a. A century later Ocero asked, "Why are there so many followers of Epicurus? "'11 and Lu cretius composed the fullest and finest extant exposition of the Epicurean system. The school had professed adherents until the reign of Constantine, some of them, by their lives, degrading the name of the master to mean "epicure," others faithfully teaching the simple maxims into which he had once condensed his philosophy: "The gods are not to be feared; death can not be felt; the good can be won; all that we dread can he conquered_,,..
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.XXIX
III. THE STOIC COMPROMISE
Since an increasing number of Epicurus' followers interpreted him as counseling the pursuit of personal pleasure, the essential problem of ethics what is the good life?-had reached not a solution but only a new formula tion: how can the natural epicureanism of the individual be reconciled with the stoicism necessary to the group and the race?-how can the members of a society be inspired to, or frightened into, the self-control and self-sacrifice indispensable to collective survival? The old religion could no longer fulfill this function; the old city-state no longer lifted men up to self-forgetfulness. Educated Greeks turned from religion to philosophy for an answer; they called in philosophers to advise or console them in the crises of life; they asked from philosophy some world view that would give to human existenc-e a permanent meaning and value in the scheme of things, and that would enable them to look without terror upon the certainty of death. Stoicism is the last effort of classical antiquity to find a natural ethic. Zeno tried once more to accomplish the task in which Plato had failed.
Zeno was a native of Citium in Cyprus. The city was partly Phoenician, chiefly Greek; Zeno is frequently called a Phoenician, sometimes an Egyp tian; he was almost certainly of mixed Hellenic and Semitic parentage." Apollonius of Tyre desc:ribes him as thin, tall, and dark; his head was bent to one side, and his legs were weak; Aphrodite, though Hephaestus was no better, would have surrendered him to Athena. Having no distractions, he rapidly amassed wealth as a merchant; when he first came to Athens, we are told, he had over a thousand talents. According to Diogenes Laertius he was shipwrecked on the Attic coast, lost his fortune, and arrived in Athens, about 314, almost destitute.'" Sitting down by a bookseller's stall he began to read Xenophon's Memorabilia, and was soon fascinated by the character of Socrates. "Where are such men to be found today?" he asked. At that moment Crates, a Cynic philosopher, passed by. "Follow that man," the bookseller advised him. Zeno, aged thirty, enrolled in Crates' school, and rejoiced in having discovered philosophy: "I made a prosperous voy age," he said, "when I was wrecked."'" Crates was a Theban who had turned over his fortune of three hundred talents to his fellow citizens and had taken up the ascetic life of a Cynic mendicant. He denounced the sexual looseness of his time, and counseled hunger as a cure for love. His pupil Hipparchia, having plenty to eat, fell in love with him, and threatened to kill herself unless her parents gave her to him. They begged Crates to dissuade her, which he tried to do by laying his beggar's wallet at her feet,
CHAP. XXIX)   THE   SURRENDER  OF PHILO SOPHY	651


CHAP. 1)	CRETE	9
lets on the brow, partly in tresses falling upori the shoulders or the breast. The women add ribbons for their curls, while the men, to keep their faces clean, provide themselves with a variety of razors, even in the grave.u
The dress is as strange as the figures. On their heads-most of ten bare the men have turbans or tam-o'-shanters, the women magnificent hats of our early twentieth-century style. The feet are usually free of covering; but the upper classes may bind them in white leather shoes, which among women may be daintily embroidered at the edges, with colored beads on the straps. Ordinarily the male has no clothing above the waist; there he wears a short skirt or waistcloth, occasionally with a codpiece for modesty. The skirt may be slit at the side in workingmen; in dignitaries and ceremo nies it reaches in both sexes to the ground. Occasionally the men wear drawers, and in winter a long outer garment of wool or skins. The clothing is tightly laced about the middle, for men as well as women are resolved to be
-or seem-triangularly slim.11 To rival the men at this point, the women of the later periods resort to stiff corsets, which gather their skirts snugly around their hips, and lift their bare breasts to the sun. It is a pretty custom among the Cretans that the female bosom should be uncovered, or revealed by a diaphanous chemiset no one seems to take offense. The bodice is laced below the bust, opens in a careless circle, and then, in a gesture of charming reserve, may close in a Medici collar at the neck. The sleeves are short, sometimes puffed. The skin, adorned with flounces and gay tints, widens out spaciously from the hips, stiffened presumably with metal ribs or horizontal hoops. There are in the arrangement and design of Cretan feminine dress a warm harmony of colors, a grace of line, a delicacy of taste, that suggest a rich and luxurious civilization, already·old in arts and wiles. In these matters the Cretans had no influence upon the Greeks; only in modern capitals have their styles triumphed. Even staid archeologists have given the name La Parisienne to the portrait of a Cretan lady with pro fulgent bosom, shapely neck, sensual mouth, impudent nose, and a persua sive, provocative chanp; she-sits saucily before us today as part of a frieze in which high personages gaze upon some spectacle that we shall never see.,. The men of Crete are evidently grateful for the grace and adventure that women give to life, for they provide them with costly ineans of en hancing their loveliness. The remains are rich in jewelry of many kinds: hairpins of copper and gold, stickpins adorned with golden animals or flow ers, or heads of crystal or quartz; rings or spirals of filigree gold mingling with the hair, fillets or diadems of precious metal binding it; rings and pendants hanging from the ear, plaques and beads and chains on the breast,
(0	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. I
bands and bracelets on the arm, finger rings of silver, steatite, agate, car nelian, amethyst, or gold. The men keep some of the jewelry for them selves: ..if they are poor they carry necklaces and bracelets of common stones; if they can afford it they flaunt great rings engraved with scenes of battle or the chase. The famous Cupbearer wears on the biceps of his left arm a broad band of precious metal, and on the wrist a bangle inlaid with agate. Everywhere in Cretan life man expresses his vainest and noblest passion-the zeal to beautify.
This use of man to signify all humanity reveals the prejudice of a patri archal age, and hardly suits the almost matriarchal life of ancient Crete..For the Minoan woman does not put up with any Oriental seclusion, any purdah or harem; there is no sign of her being limited to cenain quaners of the house, or to the home. She works there, doubtless, as some women do even today; she weaves clothing and baskets, grinds grain, and bakes bread. But also she labors with men in the fields and the potteries, she mingles freely with them in the crowds, she takes the front seat at the theater and the games, she sweeps through Cretan society with the air of a great lady bored with adoration; and when her nation creates its gods it is more often in her likeness than in man's. Sober students, secretly and forgivably enamored of the mother image in their hearts, bow down before her relics, and marvel at her domination."
Society
Hypothetically we picture Crete as at first an island divided by its moun tains among petty jealous clans which live in independent villages under their own chiefs, and fight, after the manner of men, innumerable territorial wan. Then a resolute leader appears who unites several clans into a kingdom, and builds his fortress palace at Cnossus, Phaestus, Tylissus, or some other town. The wars become less frequent, more widespread, and more efficient in killing; at last the cities fight for .the entire island, and Cnossus wins. The victor organizes a navy, dominates the Aegean, sup presses piracy, exacts tribute, builds palaces, and patronizes the arts, like an early Pericles."" It is as difficult to begin a civilization without robbery as it is to maintain it without slaves.•
The power of the king, as echoed in the ruins, is based upon force, re-
The usually cautious and accurate Thucydides writes: ''The first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic Sea, and ruled over the Cyclades   Hedid his best to put down piracy
in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use."•
	 CRETE	II
ligion, and law. To make obedience easier he suborns the gods to his use: his priests explain to the people that he is descended from Velchanos, and has received from this deity the laws that he decrees; and every nine years, if he is competent or generous, they reanoint him with the divine authority. To symbolize his power the monarch, anticipating Rome and France, adopts the•(double) ax and the fleur-de-lis. To administer the state he em ploys (as the litter of tablets suggests) a staff of ministers, bureaucrats, and scribes. He taxes in kind, and stores in giant jars his revenues of grain, oil, and wine; and out of this treasury, in kind, he pays his men. From his throne in the palace, or his judgment seat in the royal villa, he settles in person such litigation as has run the gauntlet of his appointed courts; and so great is his reputation as a magistrate that when he dies he becomes in Hades, Homer assures us, the inescapable judge of the dead.lll We call him Minos, but we do not know his name; probably the word is a title, like Pharaoh or Caesar, and covers a multitude of kings.
At its height this civilization is surprisingly urban. The Iliad speaks of Crete's "ninety cities," and the Greeks who conquer them are astonished at their teeming populations; even today the student stands in awe before the ruined mazes of paved and guttered streets, intersecting lanes, and count less shops or houses crowding about some center of trade or government in all the huddled gregariousness of timid and talkative men. It is not only Cnossus that is great, with palaces so vast that imagination perhaps exag gerates the town that must have been the chief source and beneficiary of their wealth. Across the island, on the southern shore, is Phaestus, from whose harbor, Homer tells us, "the dark-prowed ships are home to Egypt by the force of the wind and the wave.,,. The southbound trade of Minoan Crete pours out here, swelled by goods from nonhem merchants who ship their cargoes overland to avoid a long detour by perilous seas. Phaestus becomes a Cretan Piraeus, in love with commerce rather than with art. And yet t e palace of its prince is a majestic edifice, reached by a flight of steps forty-five feet wide; its halls and courts compare with those at Cnossus; its central coun is a paved quadrangle of ten thousand square feet; its megaron,
or reception room, is three thousand square feet in area, larger even than the great Hall of the Double Ax in the northern capital.
Two miles nonhwest is Hagia Triada, in whose "royal villa" (as archeo logical imagination calls it) the Prince of Phaestus seeks refuge from the summer heat. The eastern end of the island, in Minoan days, is rich in small towns: ports like Zakro or Mochlos, villages like Praesus or Pseira, resi dential quarters like Palaikastro, manufacturing centers like Goumia. The
12	THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CRAP. I
main street in Palaikastro is well paved, well drained, and lined with spa cious homes; one of these has twenty-three rooms on the surviving floor. Goumia boasts of avenues paved with gypsum, of homes built with mortar less stone, of a blacksmith's shop with extant forge, of a carpenter shop with a kit of tools, of small factories noisy with metalworking, shoemaking, vase making, oil refining, or textile industry; the modem workmen who excavate it, and gather up its tripods, jars, pottery, ovens, lamps, knives, monars, polishers, hooks, pins, daggers, and swords, marvel at its varied products and equipment, and call it he mechanike polis-"the town of machinery.'"" By our standards the minor streets are narrow, mere alleys in the style of a semitropical Orient that fears the sun; and the rectangular houses, of wood or brick or stone, are for the most pan confined to a single floor. Yet some Middle Minoan plaques exhumed at Cnossus show us homes of two, three, even five stories, with a cubicle attic or turret here and there; on the upper floors, in these pictured houses, are windows with red panes of unknown material. Double doors, swinging on posts apparently of cypress wood, open from the ground-floor rooms upon a shaded coun. Stairways lead to the upper floors and the roof, where the Cretan sleeps when the nights are very warm. H he spends the evening indoors he lights his room by burning oil, according to his income, in lamps of clay, steatite, gypsum, marble, or bronze.•
We know a trifle or two about the games he plays. At home he likes a form of chess, for he has bequeathed to us, in the ruins of the Cnossus palace, a magnificent gaming board with frame of ivory, squares of silver and gold, and a border of seventy-two daisies in precious metal and stone. In the fields he takes with zest and audacity to the chase, guided by half-wild cats and slender thoroughbred hounds. In the towns he patronizes pugilists, and on his vases and reliefs he represents for us a variety of contests, in which light weights spar with bare hands and kicking feet, middleweights with plumed helmets batter each other manfully, and heavyweights, coddled with helmets, cheekpieces, and long padded gloves, fight till one falls exhausted to the ground and the other stands above him in the conscious grandeur of victory.•
But the Cretan's greatest thrill comes when he wins his way into the crowd that fills the amphitheater on a holiday to see men and women face death against huge charging bulls. Time and again he pictures the stages of this lusty spon: the daring hunter capturing the bull by jumping astride its neck as it laps up water from a pool; the professional tamer twisting the animal's head until it learns some measure of tolerance for the acrobat's annoying tricks; the skilled performer, slim and agile, meeting the bull in
CHAP, I)	CRETE	13
the arena, grasping its horns, leaping into the air, somersaulting over its back, and landing feet first on the ground in the arms of a female companion who lends her grace to the scene.• Even in Minoan Crete this is already an an cient art; a clay cylinder from Cappadocia, ascribed to 2400 B.c., shows a bull-grappling sport as vigProus and dangerous as in these frescoes."' For a moment our oversimplifyii,g intellects catch a glimpse of the contradictory complexity of man as we perceive that this game of blood-lust and courage, still popular today, is as ol,1 as civilization.
Religion
The Cretan may be brutal, but he is certainly religious, with a thoroughly human mixture of fetishism and superstition, idealism and reverence. He wor ships mountains, caves, stones, the number 3, trees and pillars, sun and moon, goats and snakes, doves and bulls; hardly anything escapes his theology. He conceives the air as filled with spirits genial or devilish, and hands.down to Greece a sylvan-ethereal population of dryads, sileni, and nymphs. He does not directly adore the phallic emblem, but he venerates with awe the genera tive vitality of the bull and the snake.• Since his death rate is high he pays devout homage to fertility, and when he rises to the notion of a human divinity he pic tures a mother goddess with generous mammae and sublime flanks, with rep tiles creeping up around her arms and breasts, coiled in her hair, or rearing themselves proudly from her head. He sees in her the basic fact of nature that man's greatest enemy, death, is overcome by woman's mysterious power, reproduction; and he identifies this power with deity. The mother goddess represents for him the source of all life, in plants and animals as well as in men; if he surrounds her image with fauna and flora it is because these exist through her creative fertility, and therefore serve as her symbols and her emanations. Occasionally she appears holding in her arms her divine child Velchanos, whom she has borne in a mountain cave.• Contemplating this ancient image, we see through it Isis and Horus, Ishtar and T ammuz, Cybele and Attis, Aphrodite and Adonis, and feel the unity of prehistoric culture, and the continuity of religious ideas and symbols, in the Mediterranean world.


Nevertheless it is possible that some such story was used to make the adventure digestible for the common Greek; men must have phrases if they are to give their lives. Whatever may have been the face and shibboleth of the war, its cause and essence lay, almost beyond doubt, in the struggle of two groups of powers for possession of the Hellespont and the rich lands lying about the Black Sea. All Greece and all western Asia saw it as a decisive conflict; the little nations of Greece came to the aid of Agamemnon, and the peoples of Asia Minor sent repeated reinforcements to Troy. It was the beginning of a struggle that would be renewed at Marathon and
Helen, it need hardly be said, was the daughter of Zeus, who, in the form of a swan,
seduced Leda, wife of Sparta's King Tyndareus.
T·H·E  LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP.HI
Salamis, at Issus and Arbela, at Tours and Granada, at Lepanto and Vienna....
Of the events and aftermath of the war we can relate only what the poets and dramatists of Greece have told us; we accept this as rather litera tqre than history, but all the more for that .reason a part of the story of civilization; we know that war is ugly, and that the Iliad is beautiful. Art (to vary Aristotle) may make even terror beautiful-and so purify it-by giving it significance and form. Not that the form of the Iliad is perfect; the structure is loose, the narrative is sometimes contradictory or obscure, the conclusion does not conclude; nevertheless the perfection of the parts atones for the disorder of the whole, and with all its minor faults the story becomes one of the great dramas of literature, perhaps of history.
(1)• At the opening of the poem the Greeks have already besieged Troy for nine years in vain; they are despondent, homesick, and decimated with disease. They had been delayed at Aulis by sickness and a windless sea; and Agamem non had embittered Clytaemnestra, and prepared his own fate, by sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia for a breeze. On the way up the coast the Greeks had stopped here and there to replenish their supplies of food and concubines; Aga memnon had taken the fair Chryseis, Achilles the fair Briseis. A soothsayer now declares that Apollo is withholding success from the Greeks because Aga memnon has violated the daughter of Apollo's priest, Chryses. The King restores Chryseis to her father, but, to console himself and point a tale, he com pels Briseis to leave Achilles and take Chryseis' place in the royal tent. Achilles convokes a general assembly, and denounces Agamemnon with a wrath that provides the first word and the recurring theme of the Iliad. He vows that neither he nor his soldiers will any longer stir a hand to help the Greeks.
(n) We pass in review the ships and tribes of the assembled force, and (m) see bluff Menelaus engaging Paris in single combat to decide the war. The two armies sit down in civilized truce; Priam joins Agamemnon in solemn sacrifice to the gods. Menelaus overcomes Paris, but Aphrodite snatches the lad safely away in a cloud and deposits him, miraculously powdered and perfumed, upon his marriage bed. Helen bids him return to the fight, but he counterproposes that they "give the hour to dalliance." The lady, flattered by desire, yields.
Agamemnon declares Menelaus victor, and the war is apparently ended; but the gods, in imitative council on Olympus, demand more blood. Zeus votes for peace, but withdraws his vote in terrified retreat when Hera, his spouse, directs her speech upon him. She suggests that if Zeus will agree to the destruc tion of Troy she will allow him to raze Mycenae, Argos, and Sparta to the
Parenthetical numbers indicate books of the Iliad.
CHAP.Ill)	THE	BEllOIC  AGE	51
ground. The war is renewed; many a man falls pierced by arrow, lance, or sword, and "darkness enfolds his eyes."
The gods join in the merry slicing game; Ares, the awful god of war, is hurt by Diomed's spear, "utters a cry as of nine thousand men," and runs off to complain to Zeus. {VI) In a pretty interlude the Trojan leader Hector, before rejoining the battle, bids good-by to his wife Andromache. "Love," she whis pers to him, "thy stout heart will be thy death; nor hast thou pity of thy child or me, who shall soon be a widow. My father and my mother and my brothers all are slain; but, Hector, thou art father to me and mother, and thou art the husband of my youth. Have pity, then, and stay here in the tower." "Full well I know," he answers, ''that Troy will fall, and I foresee the sorrow of my breth ren and the King; for them I grieve not; but to think of thee a slave in Argos unmans me almost. Yet, even so, I will not shirk the fight.,,.,. His infant son Astyanax, destined shortly to be flung over the walls to death by the victorious Greeks, screams in fright at Hector's waving plumes, and the hero removes his helmet that he may laugh, weep, and pray over the wondering child. Then he strides down the causeway to the battle, and {VII) engages Ajax, King of Salamis, in single combat. They fight bravely, and separate at nightfall with exchange of praise and gifts--a flower of courtesy floating on a sea of blood. {VIII) After a day of Trojan victories Hector bids his warriors rest.
Thus made harangue to them Hector; and roaring the Trojans ap plauded.
Then from the yoke loosed their war-steeds sweating, and each by his chariot
Tethered his horses with thongs. And then they brought from the city,
Hastily, oxen and goodly sheep; and wine honey-hearted Gave them,	and com from the houses.
Firewood they gathered withal; and then from the plain to the heavens
Rose on the winds the sweet savor. And these by the highways
of battle
Hopeful sat through the night, and many their watchfires burning.
Even as when in the sky the stars shine out round the night-orb,
Wondrous to see, and the winds are laid, and the peaks and the headlands
Tower to the view, and the glades come out, and the glorious heaven Stretches itself to its widest, and sparkle the stars multitudinous, Gladdening the heart of the toil-wearied shepherd-even as count-
ies.,


666	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	(cHAP.XXX
paigns in Spain and Africa would divert her energies and incline her to a complaisant peace. A fever of patriotism swept the cities of the League. Slaves were freed and armed, a moratorium on debts was proclaimed, and land was promised to the poor, while the unhappy rich, trembling between socialism and Rome, reluctantly contributed their jewelry and their money to the cause of freedom. Athens and Sparta remained aloof, but Boeotia, Locria, and Euboea committed themselves bravely to the war. The repub lics of Macedonia joined in open revolt against Rome.
The angry Senate sent over an army under Mummius and a fleet under Metellus. Their combined forces overcame all resistance, and in 146 Mum
mius captured Corinth, the citadel of the League. Whether to destroy a commercial rival in the east as the younger Scipio was in that year destroy ing Carthage in the west, or to give rebellious Greece a lesson after the fashion of Alexander at Thebes, the rich city of merchants and courtesans was put to the flames, all the men were slaughtered, and all the women and children were sold into slavery. Mummius carried off to Italy whatever wealth could be moved, including the works of art with which the Corinthi ans had adorned their cities and their homes. Polybius tells how Roman soldiers used world-famous paintings as boards for their games of draughts or dice. The League was dissolved, and its leaders were put to death. Greece and Macedonia were united into one province under a Roman gov ernor. Boeotia, Locris, Corinth, and Euboea were subjected to annual tribute; Athens and Sparta were spared, and were allowed to remain under their own laws. The party of property and order was upheld everywhere, and all attempts to wage war, or make revolutions, or change the constitu tion, were proscribed. The turbulent cities had at last found peace.
EPILOGUE
Our Greek Heritage
REEK civilization was not dead; it had yet several centuries of life before it; and when it died* it bequeathed itself in an incomparable legacy to the nations of Europe and the Near East. Every Greek colony poured the elixir of Greek art and thought into the cultural blood of the hinterland-into Spain and Gaul, Etruria and R0me, Egypt and Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor, and along the shores of the Black Sea. Alexandria was the port of reshipment for ideas as well as goods: from the Museum and the Library the works and views of Greek poets, mystics, philosophers, and scientists were scattered through scholars and students into every city of the Mediterranean concourse. Rome took the Greek heritage in its Hellen istic form: her playwrights adopted Menander and Philemon, her poets imitated the modes, measures, and themes of Alexandrian literature, her arts used Greek craftsmen and Greek forms, her law absorbed the statutes of the Greek cities, and her later imperial organization was modeled upon the Greco-Oriental monarchies: Hellenism, after the Roman conquest of Gfeece, conquered Rome even as the Orient was conquering Greece. Every extension of Roman power spread the ferment of Hellenic civiliza tion. The Byzantine Empire wedded Greek to Asiatic culture, and passed on some part of the Greek inheritance to the Near East and the Slavic north. The Syrian Christians took up the torch and handed it to the Arabs, who carried it through Africa to Spain. Byzantine, Moslem, and Jewish scholars conveyed or translated the Greek masterpieces to Italy, arousing first the philosophy of the Schoolmen and then the fever of the Renaissance. Since that second birth of the European mind the spirit of Greece has seeped so thoroughly into modern culture that "all civilized nations, in all that con
cerns the activity of the intellect, are colonies of Hellas" today.t1
If we include in our Hellenic heritage not only what the Greeks in vented but what they adapted from older cultures and transmitted by these
We may arbitrarily date this at A.D. 32;, when Constantine founded Constantinople, and Christian Byzantine civilization began to replace the "pagan" Greek culture in the eastern Mediterranean.
t Increased knowledge of Egyptian and Asiatic civilization compels extensive modification
of Sir Henry Maine's classic hyPerbole: "Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek 10 its origin."•
667
668	THE   LIFE  OF GREECE	EPILOGUE
diverse routes to our own, we shall find that patrimony in almost every phase of modern life. Our handicrafts, the technique of mining, the essen tials of engineering, the processes of .finance and trade, the organization of labor, the governmental regulation of commerce and industry-all these have come down to us on the stream of history from Rome, and through Rome from Greece. Our democracies and ou_r dictatorships alike go back to Greek exemplars; and though the widened reach of states has evolved a representative system unknown to Hellas, the democratic idea of a govern ment responsible to the governed, of trial by jury, and of civil liberties of thought, speech, writing, assemblage, and worship, have been profoundly stimulated by Greek history. These things above all distinguished the Greek from the Oriental, and gave him an independence of spirit and enterprise that made him smile at the obeisances and inertia of the East.
Our schools and universities, our gymnasiums and stadiums, our athletics and Olympic games, trace their lineage to Greece. The theory of eugenic mating, the conception of self-containment and of self-control, the cult of health and natural living, the pagan ideal of a shameless enjoyment of every sense, found their historic formulations in Greece. Christian theology and practice (the very words are Greek) _stem in large part from the mystery religions of Greece and Egypt, from Eleusinian, Orphic, and Osirian rites; from Greek doctrines of the divine son dying for mankind and rising from the dead; from Greek rituals of religious procession, ceremonial puri.fica tion, holy sacrifice, and the sacred common meal; from Greek ideas of hell demons, purgatory, indulgences, and heaven; and from Stoic and.Neo-Pla tonic theories of the Logos, creation, and the .final conflagration of the world. Even our superstition is indebted to Greek bogies, witches, curses, omens, and unlucky days. And who could understand English literature, or one ode of Keats, without some tincture of Greek mythology?
Our literature could hardly have existed without the Greek tradition. Our alphabet came from Greece through Cumae and Rome; our language is littered with Greek words; our science has forged an international language through Greek terms; our grammar and rhetoric, even the punctuation and paragraphing of this page, are Greek inventions. Our literary genres are Greek the lyric, the ode, the idyl, the novel, the essay, the oration, the biography, the history, and above all the drama; again nearly all the words are Greek. The terms and forms of the modern drama-tragedy, comedy, and pantomime-are Greek; and though Elizabethan tragedy is unique, the comic drama has come down almost unchanged from Menander and Phile mon through Plautus and Terence, Ben Jonson and Moliere. The Greek dramas themselves are among the richest portions of our inheritance.
EPILOGUE	OUR  GREEK  HERITAGE
Nothing else in Greece seems so foreign to us as its music; and yet modem music (until its return to Africa and the Orient) was derived from medieval chants and dances, and these went back in part to Greece. The oratorio and the opera owe something to the Greek choral dance and drama; and the theory of music, so far as we know, was first explored and expounded by the Greeks from Pythagoras to Aristoxenus. Our debt is least in painting; but in the art of fresco a direct line can be traced from Polygnotus through Alexandria and Pompeii, Giotto and Michelangelo, to the arresting murals of our own day. The forms and much of the technique of modem sculpture are still Greek, for upon no other art has the Hellenic genius stamped itself so despotically. We are only now freeing ourselves from the fascination of Greek architecture; every city in Europe and America has some temple of commerce or finance whose form or columnar fa ade came from the shrines of Greek gods. We miss in Greek art the study of character and the por trayal of the soul, and its infatuation with physical beauty and health leaves it less mature than the masculine statuary of Egypt or the profound paint ing of the Chinese; but the lessons of moderation, purity, and harmony em bodied in the sculpture and architecture of the classic age are a precious heirloom for our race.
If Greek civilization seems more akin and "modem" to us now than that
of any century before Voltaire, it is because the Hellene loved reason as much as form, and boldly sought to explain all nature in nature's terms. The liberation of science from theology, and the independent development of scientific research, were parts of the heady adventure of the Greek mind. Greek mathematicians laid the foundations of trigonometry and calculus, they began and completed the study of conic sections, and they brought three-dimensional geometry to such relative perfection that it re mained as they left it until Descartes and Pascal. Democritus illuminated the whole area of physics and chemistry with his atomic theory. In a mere aside and holiday from abstract studies Archimedes produced enough new mechanisms to place his name with the highest in the records of invention. Aristarchus anticipated and perhaps inspired Copernicus;* and Hipparchus, through Claudius Ptolemy, constructed a system of astronomy which is one of the landmarks in cultural history. Eratosthenes measured the earth and mapped it. Anaxagoras and Empedocles drew the outlines of a theory of evolution. Aristotle and Theophrastus classified the animal and plant king doms, and almost created the scien es of meteorology, zoology, embryolo gy, and botany. Hippocrates freed medicine from mysticism and philo-
Copernicus knew of Aristarchus' heliocentric hypothesis, for he mentioned it in a para
graph that disappeared from later editions of his book.8
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	EPILOGUE
sophical theory, and ennobled it with an ethical code; Herophilus and Erasistratus raised anatomy and physiology to a point which, except in Galen, Europe would not reach again till the Renaissance. In the work of these men we breathe the quiet air of reason, always uncertain and unsafe, but cleansed of passion and myth. Perhaps, if we had its masterpieces entire, we should rate Greek science as the most signal intellectual achievement of mankind.


•Cf.the seated Chares from Miletus in the British Museum, or the Head of Cleobis by Polymedes in the museum at Delphi.
CHAP. IV)	SPARTA
to the Greeks its system of weights and measures,1° its water clock and sun• dial,11 its monetary units of obol, rnina, and talent,"' its astronomical principles, instruments, records, and calculations, its sexagesimal system of dividing the year, the circle1 and the four right angles that are subtended by a circle at its center, into 360 parts, each of the 360 degrees into 60 minutes, and each of the minutes into 60 seconds; it was presumably his acquaintance with Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy that enabled Thales to predict an eclipse of the sun... Probably from Babylonia came Hesiod's notion of Chaos as the origin of all things; and the story of Ishtar and Tammuz is suspiciously like those of Aphro.,. dite and Adonis, Demeter and Persephone.
Near the eastern end of the commercial complex that united the classic world lay the final enemy of Greece. In some ways-though few-the civilization of Persia was superior to that of contemporary Bellas; it produced a type of gentle man finer than the Greek in every respect except that of intellectual keenness and education, and a system of imperial administration that easily excelled the clumsy hegemonies of Athens and Sparta, and lacked only the Greek passion for liberty.-From Assyria the Ionian Greeks took a me.asure of skill in animal statuary, a certain thickness of figure and flatness of drapery in their early sculp ture, many decorative motives in friezes and moldings, and occasionally a style of relief, as in the lovely stela of Aristion."-Lydia maintained intimate relations with Ionia, and its brilliant capital, Sardis, was a clearinghouse for the traffic in goods and ideas between Mesopotamia and the Greek cities on the coast. The necessities of an extensive trade stimulated banking, and caused the Lydian government., about 680, to issue a state-guaranteed coinage. This boon to trade was soon imitated and improved by the Greeks, and had effects as momentous and interminable as those that came from the introduction of the alphabet. The influence of Phrygia was older and subtler. Its mother goddess, Cybele, entered directly and deviously into Greek religion, and its orgiastic flute music became that "Phrygian mode" so popular among the populace, and so dis turbing to the moralists, of Greece. From Phrygia this wild music crossed the Hellespont into Thrace, and served the rites of Dionysus. The god of wine was the chief gift of Thrace to Greece; but one Thracian city, Hellenized Abdera, sought to even the balance by giving Greece three philosophers-Leucippus, Democritus and Protagoras. It was from Thrace that the cult of the Muses passed down into Hellas; and the half-legendary founders of Greek music Orpheus, Musaeus, and Thamyris-were Thracian singers and bards.
From Thrace we move southward into Macedonia, and our cultural circum vallation of Greece is complete. It is a picturesque land, with a soil once rich in minerals, plains fertile in grain and fruit, and mountains disciplining a hardy stock that was destined to conquer Greece. The mountaineers and peasants were of mixed race, predominantly Illyrian and Thracian; perhaps they were
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP, IV
akin to the Dorians who conquered the Peloponnesus. The ruling aristocracy claimed Hellenic lineage (from Heracles himself), and spoke a dialect of Greek. The earlier capital, Edessa, stood on a vast plateau between the plains that stretched to Epirus and the ranges that reached to the Aegean. Farther east lay Pella, capital-to-be of Philip and Alexander; and near the sea was Pydna, where the Romans would conquer the conquering Macedonians, and win the right to transmit Greek civilization to the Western world.
This, then, was the environment of Greece: civilizations like Egypt, Crete, and Mesopotamia that gave it those elements of technology, science, and art which it would transform into the brightest picture in history; empires like Persia and Carthage that would feel the challenge of Greek commerce, and would unite in a war to crush Greece between them into a harmless vassalage; and, in the north, warlike hordes recklessly breeding, restlessly marching, who would sooner or later pour down over the moun tain barriers and do what the Dorians had done-break through what Cicero was to call the Greek border woven on the barbarian robe,"' and destroy a civilization that they could not understand. Hardly any of these surrounding nations cared for what to the Greeks was the very essence of life-liberty to be, to think, to speak, and to do. Every one of these peoples except the Phoenicians lived under despots, surrendered their souls to super stition, and had small experience of the stimulus of freedom or the life of reason. That was why the Greeks called them all, too indiscriminately, barharoi, barbarians; a barbarian was a man content to believe without rea son and to live without liberty. In the end the two conceptions of life the mysticism of the East and the rationalism of the West-would fight for the body and soul of Greece. Rationalism would win under Pericles, as under Caesar, Leo X, and Frederick; but mysticism would always return. The alternate victories of these complementary philosophies in the vast pendulum of history constitute the essential biography of Western civiliza tion.
ARGOS
Within this circle of nations little Greece expanded until its progeny peopled nearly every Mediterranean shore. For the gaunt hand that stretched its skeletal fingers southward into the sea was but a small part of the Greece whose history concerns us. In the course of their development the irrepressible Hellenes spread into every isle of the Aegean, into Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus, into Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor, into the Sea of Marmora and the Black Sea, into the shores and
CHAP.IV)	SPARTA
peninsulas of the north Aegean, into Italy, Gaul, Spain, Sicily, and northern Africa. In all these regions they built city-states, independent and diverse, and yet Greek; they spoke the Greek tongue, worshiped Greek gods, read and wrote Greek literature, contributed to Greek science and philosophy, and practiced democracy in the Greek aristocratic way. They did not leave Greece behind them when they migrated from their motherland, they carried it with them, even the very soil of it, wherever they went. For nearly a thousand years they made the Mediterranean a Greek lake, and the center of the world.
The most discouraging task faced by the historian of classic civilization is that of weaving into one pattern and story these scattered members of the body of Greece.* We shall attempt it by the pleasant method of a tour: with a map at our elbow and no expenditure but of the imagination, we shall pass from city to city of the Greek world, and observe in each center the life of the people before the Persian war-the modes of economy and government, the activities of scientists and philosophers, the achievements
of poetry, and the creations of art.t The plan has many faults: the geo
graphical sequence will not quite agree with the historical; we shall be leaping from century to century as well as from isle to isle; and we shall find ourselves talking with Thales and Anaximander before listening to Homer and Hesiod. But it will do us no harm to see the irreverent Iliad against its actual background of Ionian skepticism, or to hear Hesiod's dour plaints after visiting the Aeolian colonies from which his harassed father came. When at last we reach Athens we shall know in some measure the rich variety of the civilization that it inherited, and which it preserved so bravely at Marathon.
If we begin at Argos, where the victorious Dorians established their govern ment, we find ourselves in a scene characteristically Greek: a not too fertile plain, a small and huddled city of little brick-and-plaster houses, a temple on the acropolis, an open-air theater on the slope of the hill, a modest palace here and there, narrow alleys and unpaved streets, and in the distance the inviting and merciless sea. For Hellas is composed of mountains and ocean; majestic scenery is so usual there that the Greeks, though moved and inspired by it, seldom mention it in their books. The winter is wet and cold, the summer hot and dry; sowing is in our autumn, reaping is in our spring; rain is a heavenly
"To write the history of Greece at almost any period without dissipating the interest is a task of immense difficulty ... because there is no constant unity or fixed center to which the actions and aims of the numerous states can be subordinated or related."-Bury, Ancient Greek Historians, p. 22.
t To avoid returning too often to the same scene, the architectural history of minor cities
will be carried in these chapters (Book 11) down to the death of Alexander (3z3),
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. IV
blessing, and Zeus the Rain Maker is god of gods. The rivers are short and shallow, torrents for a winter spell, dry smooth pebbles in the summer heat. There were a hundred cities like Argos in the gamut of Greece, a thousand like it but·smaller; each of them jealously sovereign, separated from the rest by Greek pugnacity, or dangerous waters, or roadless hills.
The Argives ascribed the foundation of their city to Pelasgic Argus, the hero with a hundred eyes; and its first flourishing to an Egyptian, Danaus, who came at the head of a band of "Danaae" and taught the natives to irrigate their fields with wells. Such eponyms are not to be scorned; the Greeks preferred to end with myth that infinite regress which we must end with mystery. Under Temenus, one of the returning Heracleidae, Argos grew into the most power ful city of Greece, bringing Tiryns, Mycenae, and all Argolis under its sway. Towards 680 the government was seized by one of those tyrtmnoi, oi:- dictators, who for the next two centuries became the fashion in the larger cities of Greece. Presumably Pheidon, like his fellow dictators, led the rising merchant class- allied in a passing marriage of convenience with the commoners-against a land owning aristocracy. When Aegina was threatened by Epidaurus and Athens Pheidon went to its rescue and took it for himself. He adopted-probably from the Phoenicians-the Babylonian system of weights and measures, and the
1.,ydian plan of a currency guaranteed by the .state; he established his mint on Aegina, and the Aeginetan "tortoises" (coins marked with the island's symbol) became the first official coinage in continental Greece.•
Pheidon's enlightened despotism opened a period of prosperity that brought many arts to Argolis. In the sixth century the musicians of Argos were the most famous in Hellas;17 Lasus of Hermione won high place among the lyric poets of his time, and taught his skill to Pindar; the foundations were laid of that Argive school of sculpture which was to give Polycleitus and its canon to Greece; drama found a home here, in a theater with twenty thousand seats; and architects raised a majestic temple to Hera, beloved and especially wor shiped by Argos as the goddess-bride who renewed her virginity every year.18 But the degeneration of Pheidon's descendants-the nemesis of monarchy-and a long series of wars with Sparta weakened Argos, and forced it at last to yield to the Lacedaemonians the leadership of the Peloponndus. Today it is a quiet town, lost amid its surrounding fields; remembering vaguely the glories of its past, and proud that in all its long history it has never been abandoned.
m. LACONIA


CHAP. XXII)	ALEXANDER	539
worthier of you."1 Even on the march his wild energy found vent in shoot ing arrows at passing objects, or in alighting from, and remounting, his chariot at full speed. When a campaign lagged he would go hunting and, unaided and on foot, face any animal in combat; once, after an encounter with a lion, he was pleased to hear it said that he had fought as though it had been a duel to decide which of the two should be king.' He liked hard work and dangerous enterprises, and could not bear to rest. He laughed at some of his generals, who had so many servants that they themselves could find nothing to do. "I wonder," he told them, "that you with your experience do not know that those who work sleep more soundly than those for whom other people work. Have you yet to learn that the great est need after our victories is to avoid the vices and the weaknesses of those whom we have conquered?,,. He grudged the time given to sleep, and said that "sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was mortal."" He was abstemious in eating, and, until his last years, in drinking, though he loved to linger with his friends over a goblet of wine. He despised rich foods, and refused the famous chefs who were offered him, saying that a night march gave him a good appetite for breakfast, and a light breakfast gave him an appetite for dinner.' Perhaps in consequence of these habits his complexion was remarkably clear, and his body and breath, says Plutarch, "were so fragrant as to perfume the clothes that he wore."" Discounting the flattery of those who painted or carved or en graved his likeness, we know from his contemporaries that he was hand some beyond all precedents for a king, with expressive features, soft blue eyes, and luxuriant auburn hair. He helped to introduce into Europe the custom of shaving the beard, on the ground that whiskers offered too ready a handle for an enemy to grasp.•• In this little item, perhaps, lay his greatest influence upon history.
Mentally he was an ardent student, who was too soon consumed with
responsibilities to reach maturity of mind. Like so many men of action, he mourned that he could not be also a thinker. "He had," says Plutarch, "a violent thirst and passion for learning, which increased as time went on.... Hewas a lover of all kinds of reading and knowledge," and it was his delight, after a day of marching or fighting, to sit up half the night con versing with scholars and scientists. "For my part," he wrote to Aristotle, "I had rather surpass others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion."" Possibly at Aristotle's suggestion he sent a commission to explore the sources of the Nile, and he gave funds generously for a variety of scientific inquiries. Whether a longer life would
THE	LIFE  OF GREECE	(CHAP. XXII
have brought him to Caesar's clear intelligence, or the subtle understand ing of Napoleon, is to be doubted. Royalty found him at twenty, after which warfare and administration absorbed him; in consequence he re mained uneducated to the end. He could talk brilliantly, but fell into a hundred errors when he wandered from politics and war. With all his cam paigns he seems never to have gained such acquaintance with geography as the science of his time could have given him. He rose at times above the narrowness of dogma, but remained to the last a slave to superstition. He put great confidence in the soothsayers and astrologers that crowded his court; before the battle of .Arbela he spent the night performing magic ceremonies with the magician Aristander, and offered sacrifices to the god Fear; he who faced all men and beasts with a very ecstasy of courage was "easily alarmed by portents and prodigies," even to changing important plans.1° He could lead many thousands of men, could conquer and rule millions, but he could not control his own temper. He never learned to recognize his own faults or limitations, but allowed his judgment to be soaked and drowned in praise. He lived in a frenzy of excitement and glory, and so loved war that his mind never knew an hour of peace.
His moral character hovered between similar contradictions. He was at bottom sentimental and emotional, and had, we are told, "melting eyes"; he was moved sometimes beside himself by poetry and music; he played the harp with great feeling in his early youth. Teased about this by Philip, he abandoned the instrument, and thereafter, as if to overcome himself, refused to listen to any but martial airs.11 Sexually he was almost virtuous, not so much on principle as by preoccupation. His incessant activity, his long marches and frequent battles, his complex plans and administrative burdens, used up his resources, and left him little appetite for love. He took many wives, but as a sacrifice to statesmanship; he was gallant to ladies, but preferred the company of his generals. When his aides brought a beautiful woman to his tent late at night he asked her, "Why at this time?" "I had to wait," she replied, "to get my husband to bed." Alex ander dismissed her, and rebuked his servants, saying that because of them he had narrowly escaped becoming an adulterer.12 He had many of the qualities of a homosexual, and loved Hephaestion to madness; but when Theodorus of Taras offered to sell him two boys of great beauty he sent the Tarentine packing, and begged his friends to tell him what baseness of soul he had shown that anyone should make such a proposal to him.1" He gave to friendship the tenderness and solicitude that most men give to love. No statesman known to us, much less any general, ever surpassed him in
CHAP.xxn)	ALEXANDER	541
simple trustfulness and warmheartedness, in open sincerity of affection and purpose, or in generosity even to acquaintances and enemies.u. Plutarch remarks "upon what slight occasions he would write letters to serve friends." He endeared himself to his soldiers by his kindliness; he risked their lives, but not heedlessly; and he seemed to feel all their wounds. As Caesar for gave Brutus and Cicero, and Napoleon Fouche and Talleyrand, so Alex ander forgave Harpalus, the treasurer who had absconded with his funds and had returned to beg forgiveness; the young conqueror reappointed him treasurer to all men's astonishment, and apparently with good results.111 At Tarsus, in 333, Alexander being ill, his physician Philip offered him a purgative drink. At that moment a letter was brought to the King from Parmenio, warning him that Philip had been bribed by Darius to poison him. Alexander handed the letter to Philip, and as the latter read it, Alex ander drank the draught-with no ill effect. His reputation for generosity helped him in his wars; many of the enemy allowed themselves to be taken prisoner, and cities, not fearing to be sacked, opened their gates at his com ing.-Nevertheless, the Molossian tigress was in him, and it was his bitter fate to be ruined by his occasional paroxysms of cruelty. Having taken Gaza by siege and assault, and infuriated by its long resistance, Alexander caused the feet of Batis, its heroic commandant, to be bored, and brazen rings passed through them; then, intoxicated with memories of Achilles, he dragged the now dead Persian, tied by cords to the royal chariot, at full speed around the city."' His increasing resort to drink as a means of quieting his nerves led him more and more frequently, in his last years, to outbreaks of blind ferocity, followed by brooding fits of violent remorse. One quality in hitp. dominated all the rest-ambition. As a youth he had fretted over Philip's victories: "Father," he complained to his friends, "will get everything done before we are ready, and will leave me and you no chance of doing anything great and important.m1 In his passion for achieve ment he assumed every task, and faced every risk. At Chaeronea he was the .first man to charge the Theban Sacred Band; :it the Granicus he indulged to the full what he called his "eagerness for encountering danger.ms This, too, became an uncontrollable passion; the sound and sight of battle intoxi cated him; he forgot then his duties as a general, and plunged ahead into the thickest of the fight; time and again his soldiers, fearful of losing him, had to plead with him to go to the rear. He was not a great general; he was a brave soldier whose obstinate perseverance marched on, with boyish heedlessness of impossibilities, to unprecedented victories. He supplied the inspiration; probably his generals, who were able men, contributed organi-
542	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP.XXII
zation, training, tactics, and strategy. He led his troops by the brilliance of his imagination, the fire of his unstudied oratory, the readiness and sin cerity with which he shared their hardships and griefs. Without question he was a good administrator: he ruled with kindness and firmness the wide domain which his arms had won; he was loyal to the agreements which he signed with commanders and cities; and he tolerated no oppression of his subjects by his appointees. Amid all the excitement and chaos of his cam paigns he kept clearly at the center of his thoughts the great purpose that even his death would not defeat: the unification of all the eastern Mediter ranean world into one cultural whole, dominated and elevated by the ex panding civilization of Greece.
THE PATHS OF GLORY
On his accession Alexander found himself at the head of a tottering empire. The northern tribes in Thrace and Illyria revolted; Aetolia, Acar nania, Phocis, Elis, Argolis renounced their allegiance; the Ambraciotes ex pelled the Macedonian garrison; Artaxerxes III boasted that he had insti gated the killing of Philip, and that Persia now had nothing to fear from the immature stripling of twenty who had succeeded to the throne. When the glad tidings of Philip's death reached Athens, Demosthenes donned fes tal garb, placed a garland of flowers upon his head, and moved in the As sembly that a crown of honor should be voted to the assassin Pausanias.10 Within Macedonia a dozen factions conspired against the young King's life. Alexander rose to the situation with a decisive energy that ended all internal opposition, and set the tempo of his career. Having arrested and
decapitated the chief plotters at home, he marched south into Greece ( 336), and within a few days reached Thebes. The Greek states hastened to renew their allegiance; Athens sent him a profuse apology, voted him two crowns, and conferred upon him divine honors. Alexander, appeased, declared all dictatorships abolished in Greece, and decreed that each city should live in freedom according to its own laws. The Amphictyonic Council c<;m nrmed him in all the rights and honors that it had given to Philip; and a congress of all Greek states except Sparta, meeting .at Corinth, proclaimed him captain general of the Greeks, and promised to contribute men and supplies for the Asiatic campaign. Alexander returned to Pella, put the capital in order, and then marched north to suppress the rebellion of the barbarian tribes (335). With Napoleonic swiftness he led his troops as far as the modem Bucharest, and planted his standards upon the northern bank
CHAP.XXII)	ALEXANDER	543
of the Danube. Then, hearing that the Illyrians were advancing upon Macedonia, he marched two hundred miles through Serbia, surprised the invaders in the rear, defeated them, and drove the remnant back to their mountains.
But in the meantime a rumor had stirred Athens that Alexander had been killed in fighting on the Danube. Demosthenes called for a war of inde pendence, and felt justified in accepting large sums from Persia to further his plans. At his instigation Thebes revolted, killed the Macedonian offi cials left there by Alexander, and besieged the Macedonian garrison in the Cadmeia. Athens sent help to Thebes, and invited Greece and Persia to join in an alliance against Macedon. Alexander, furious over what seemed to him not a passion for freedom but the crudest ingratitude and treachery, marched his weary troops down again into Greece. Reaching Thebes after thirteen days, he defeated the army sent out against him. He left the fate of the defenseless city to her ancient enemies-Plataea, Orchomenos, Thes piae, and Phocis; they voted that Thebes should be burned to the ground, and her inhabitants sold as slaves. Hoping to give other rebels a lesson, Alexander signed the order, but stipulated that the victorious troops should spare the home of Pindar, and the lives of priests and priestesses, and of all Thebans who could prove that they had opposed the revolt. Later he looked back with shame upon this violent revenge, and "was sure to grant without the least difficulty whatsoever any Theban asked of him.""° He atoned in part by his leniency with Athens; he forgave her violation of the pledges made.o him a year before, and did not press his demand for the sur render of Demosthenes and the other anti-Macedonian leaders. To the end of his life he tjlaintained an attitude of respect and affection for Athens: he dedicated on 1the Acropolis various spoils from his Asiatic victories, sent back to Athens the Tyrannicide statues that Xerxes had taken away, and remarked, after an arduous campaign, "O ye Athenians, will you believe what dangers I incur to merit your praise?"91
Having received again the allegiance of all the Greek states except Sparta, Alexander returned to Macedonia, and prepared for the invasion of Asia. He found his state treasury almost empty, with a deficit of five hundred talents ($3,000,000) as a legacy from Philip's reign.111 He borrowed eight hundred talents, and set out to conquer not the world but his debts. He had hoped to fight Persia as the champion of all Bellas, but he knew that half of Greece was praying that he would soon be killed. It was reported that the Persians could muster a million men; Alexander's expeditionary force did not exceed thirty thousand infantry and five thousand cavalry.
544	THE	LIFE  OF  GREECE	(CHAP. XXII
Nevertheless the new Achilles, leaving twelve thousand soldiers under Antipater to guard Macedonia and watch Greece, set out in 334 upon the most daring and romantic enterprise in the history of kings. He would live eleven years more, but would never see home or Europe again. While his army crossed the Hellespont from Sestos to Abydos, he himself chose to land at Cape Sigeum, and retrace what he believed to have been Agamem non's path to Troy. At every step he quoted to his comrades passages from the Iliad, which he knew almost by heart. He anointed the reputed tomb of Achilles, crowned it with garlands, and ran naked around it according to the custom of antiquity. "Happy Achilles!" he exclaimed, "to have had in life so faithful a friend, and, after his death, so famous a poet to celebrate him.".. He vowed now to carry through to a successful end that long struggle, between Europe and Asia, which had begun at Troy.
It is not necessary to our purpose to tell again the story of his victories. He met the first Persian contingent at the river Granicus, and overwhelmed it. There Cleitus saved his life by severing the arm of the Persian who was about to strike Alexander from behind; a whimsical student might build upon such events an accidental interpretation of history. After giving his men a rest he marched down into Ionia, offering the Greek cities demo cratic self-government under his protectorate. Most of them opened their gates without resistance. At Issus he met the main force of the Persians, 600,000 men, under Darius III. Once more he won by using his cavalry for attack, his infantry for defense. Darius fled, leaving his purse and his family behind him, to be treated the one with gratitude, the other with chivalry. After peaceably taking Damascus and Sidon Alexander laid siege to Tyre, which was harboring a large Phoenician squadron in the pay of Persia. The ancient city resisted so long that when at last he captured it Alexander lost his head and allowed his men to massacre eight thousand Tyrians, and to sell thirty thousand as slaves. Jerusalem surrendered quietly, and was well treated; Gaza fought till every man in the city was dead and every woman raped.
The triumphant march of the Macedonians was resumed through the
Sinai desert into Egypt, where, when he showed a tactful respect for the country's gods, Alexander was welcomed as a divinely sent liberator from Persian rule. Knowing that religion is stronger than politics, he crossed another desert to the oasis of Siwa, and paid his respects to the god Am mon-his very father if Olympias could be believed. The pliant priests crowned him Pharaoh with the ancient rites, and so eased the way for the Ptolemaic dynasty. Returning to the Delta, Alexander conceived or ap-
CHAP.XXII)	ALEXANDER	545
proved the idea of building a new capital at one of the Nile's many mouths; perhaps the Greek merchants at near-by Naucratis suggested it as pro viding a more convenient depot for the enlarged Greek trade that might now be expected between Egypt and Greece. He marked out the orbit of the walls of Alexandria, the outline of the principal streets, and the sites for temples to the Egyptian and Grecian gods; further details he left to his architect, Dinocrates.*


Delicate lingerie was now added to the simple feminine garments of pre Hannibalic Rome. Scarfs fell over the shoulders, and veils made an alluring mystery of the face. In winter soft furs caressed affluent forms. Silk was so com mon that men as well as women wore it. Silk and linen were colored with costly dyes; Romans often paid a thousand denarii for a pound of double-dyed Tyrian wool.67 Embroideries of gold and silver thread decorated dresses, curtains, carpets, and coverlets. Women's shoes were made of soft leather or cloth, sometimes elaborately cut into an openwork pattern; they might be trimmed with gold and beset with jewelry; 68 and high heels were often added to remedy the shortcomings of nature.
Jewelry was an important part of a woman's equipment. Rings, earrings, neck laces, amulets, bracelets, breast chains, brooches, were necessities of life. Lollia Paulina once wore a dress covered from head to foot with emeralds and pearls, and carried with her the receipts showing that they cost 40,000,000 sesterces.69 Pliny describes over a hundred varieties of precious stones used in Rome. Expert imitations of these provided a busy industry; Roman "emeralds" of glass were superior to modem forgeries and were sold as genuine by jewelers as late as the nineteenth century.70 Men as well as ,vomen were fond of large and con spicuous stones. One senator had in his ring an opal as big as a filbert. Hearing of it, Antony had him proscribed; he escaped, carrying 2,000,000 sesterces on his finger; doubtless jewelry was then, as often, a hedge against inflation or revolution. Silver plate was now common in all but the lower classes. Tiberius and later emperors issued edicts against luxury, but these could not be enforced and were soon ignored. Tiberius yielded, and confessed that the extravagance of patricians and parvenus ga,'e employment to the artisans of Rome and the East, and allowed provincial tribute to flow back from the capital. "vVithout luxury," he said, "how could Rome, how could the provinces, live?''
Roman dress was not more luxurious than that cf modern women, and far less gorgeous and costly than the garb of medieval lords. Fashion did not change in Rome as rapidly as in modern cities; a good garment might be worn  lifetime and remain in style. But compared with the standards of the Republic before Lucullus and Pompey had brought in the loot and hedonism. of the East, upper class Rome was now an epicurean paradise of fine clothing, varied food, elegant furniture, and stately homes. Shorn of political leadership, almost of political power, the aristocracy retired from the curia to its palaces, and abandoned itself, with no morals but philosophy, to the pursuit of pleasure and the art of life.
374	CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XVII
A ROMAN DAY
The luxuries of the home far outran the luxuries of dress. Floors of marble and mosaic; columns of polychrome marble, alabaster, onyx; walls painted with brilliant murals or encrusted with costly stones; ceilings some times coffered in gold 71 or plate glass; 72 tables with citrus wood standing on ivory legs; divans decorated with tortoise shell, ivory, silver, or gold; Alex andrian brocades or Babylonian coverings for which common millionaires paid 800,000, Nero 4,000,000, sesterces;73 beds of bronze fitted with mosquito netting; candelabra of bronze, marble, or glass; statues and paintings and objects of art; vases of Corinthian bronze or Murrhine glass-these were some of the ornaments that crowded the mansions of Nero's age.
In such a home the master lived as in a museum. Slaves had to be bought to guard this wealth, and others to guard these. Some houses had 400 of them, engaged in attendance, supervision, or industry; the life of the great man, even in the privacy of his rooms, was spent in the publicity of his slaves. To eat with a servant at each elbow, to undress with a slave at each boot, to relax with a menial at every door-this is not paradise. To assure the misery of wealth the great man began his day, about seven, by receiving his "clients" and parasites and offering his cheeks to their kisses. After two hours of this he might breakfast. Then he received and returned formal visits of his friends. Etiquette required that one must repay the calls of every friend, help him in his lawsuits and candidacies, attend the betrothal of his daughter, the coming of age of his son, the reading of his poems, the signing of his will. These and other social obligations were performed with a grace and courtesy not exceeded in any civilization. Then the great man went to the Senate, or labored on some governmental commission, or attended to his personal affairs.
For the man of modest means life was simpler, but not less arduous. After the social calls of the early morning he gave himself to his business till noon. Humble folk were at their work by sunrise; as there was little night life, the Roman took full advantage of the day. A light luncheon came at noon, din ner at three or four-the higher the class, the later the hour. After luncheon and a siesta, the peasant and the employed proletaire returned to work till nearly sunset; others sought recreation outdoors or in the public baths. The Romans of the Empire took their bathing more religiously than their gods. Like the Japanese, they could bear public better than private smells, and no ancient people but the Egyptians rivaled them in cleanliness. They carried handkerchiefs (sudaria) to wipe away their sweat,74 and brushed their teeth with powders and paste. In the early Republic a bath every eighth day had
CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN   ROME	375
sufficed; now one had to bathe daily or risk a Martial's epigram; even the rustic, says Galen, bathed every day.75 Most homes had bathtubs, rich houses had bathroom suites sparkling with marble, glass, or silver fixtures and taps.76 But the majority of free Romans relied on the public baths.
Ordinarily these were privately owned. In 33 B.C. there were 170 in Rome; in the fourth century A.O. there were 856, besides 1352 public swim ming pools.77 More popular than such establishments were the great baths built by the state, managed by concessionaires and staffed by hundreds of slaves. These thermae-"hot [waters]"-erected by Agrippa, Nero, Titus, Trajan, Caracalla, Alexander Severus, Diocletian, and Constantine, were monuments of state-socialistic splendor. The Baths of Nero had 1600 marble seats and accommodated 1600 bathers at one time; the Baths of Caracalla and those of Diocletian accommodated 3000 each. Admission was open to
any citizen for a quadrans ( 1 ½ cents) ;78 the government met the balance of
the cost, and apparently oil and service were included in the fee. The baths were open from daybreak to one P.M. for women, from two to eight P.M. for men; but mixed bathing was allowed by most of the emperors. Normally the visitor went :first to a dressing room to change his clothes; then to the palaestra to box, wrestle, run, jump, hurl the disk or the spear, or play ball. One ball game was like our ''medicine ball"; in another two opposed groups scrambled for a ball, and carried it forward against each other with all the enterprise of a modem university.79 Sometimes professional ballplayers would come to the baths and give exhibitions.80 Oldsters who preferred to take their exercise by proxy went to massage rooms and had a slave rub away their fat.
Passing to the baths proper, the citizen entered the tepidarium-in this case a warm-air room; thence he went on to the calidarium, or hot-air room; if he wished to perspire still more freely, he moved into the laconicum, and gasped in superheated steam. Then he took a warm bath and washed himself with a novelty learned from the Gauls-soap, made from tallow and the ashes of the beech or the elm.81 These warm rooms were the most popular and gave the baths their Greek name; probably they were Rome's attempt to forestall or mitigate rheumatism and arthritis.82 The bather progressed to the frigidarium and took a cold bath; he might also dip into the ['iscina, or swim ming pool. Then he had himself rubbed with some oil or ointment, usually made from the olive; this was not washed off, but merely scraped off with a strigil and dried with a towel, so that some oil might be returned to the skin in place of that which the warm baths had removed.
The bather.seldom.left the thermae at this point. For these were clubhouses as well as baths; they provided rooms for games like dice and chess,83 galleries
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP.XVIl
of painting and statuary, exedrae where friends might sit and converse, li braries and reading rooms, and halls where a musician or a poet might give a recital or a philosopher might explain the world. In these afternoon hours after the bath Roman society found its chief meeting point; both sexes mingled freely in gay but polite association, flirtation, or discussion; there, and at the games and in the parks, the Romans could indulge their passion for talk, their fondness for gossip, and learn all the news and scandal of the day.
If they wished they could have dinner in the restaurant at the baths, but most of them dined at home. Perhaps because of the lassitude caused by exer cise and warm bathing, the custom was to recline at meals. Once the women had sat apart while the men reclined; now the women reclined beside the men. The triclinium, or dining room, was so named because it usually con tained three couches, arranged in square-magnet form around a serving table. Each couch normally accommodated three persons. The diner rested
\	his head on his left arm, and his arm on a cushion, while the body extended
diagonally away from the serving table.
The poorer classes continued to live chiefly on grains, dairy products, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Pliny lists a wide assortment of vegetables in the Roman dietary, from garlic to rape. The well to do ate meat, with the usual superabundance of reckless carnivores. Pork was the favorite flesh food; Pliny praises the pig for furnishing fifty different dainties.84 Pork sausages (botuli) were hawked through the streets in portable ovens, as on our high ways today.
\Vhen one dined at a banquet he expected rarer foods. The banquet began at four and lasted till late in the night or till the next day. The tables were strewn with flowers and parsley, the air was scented with exotic perfumes, the couches were soft with cushions, the servants were stiff with livery. Be tween the appetizer (gustatio) and the dessert (seczmda 111ensa, "second table") came the luxury dishes on which the host and his chef prided them selves. Rare·fish, rare birds, rare fruit, appealed to the curiosity as well as the palate. Mullets were bought at a thousand sesterces a pound; Asinius Celer paid 8000 forone; Juvenal growled that a fisherman cost less than a fish. As an added delight for the guests, the mullet might be brought in alive and boiled before their eyes, that they might enjoy the varied colors it took in the agony of death.85 Vedius Pollio raised these sesquipedalian fish in a large tank and fed them with unsatisfactory slaves.86 Eels and snails were con sidered dainties, but the law forbade the eating of dormice.87 The wings of ostriches, the tongues of flamingoes, the flesh of songbirds, the livers of geese, were favorite dishes. Apicius, a famous epicure under Tiberius, invented
CHAP.XVII)	EPICUREAN   ROME	377
the pate de fois gras by fattening the livers of sows with a diet of figs.88* Custom allowed the diner to empty his stomach with an emetic after a heavy banquet. Some gluttons performed this operation during the meal and then returned to appease their hunger; vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant, said Seneca-"they vomit to eat, and eat to vomit." 90 Such behavior was excep tional, and no worse than the braggart drunkenness of American conven tioneers. Pleasanter was the custom of presenting· gifts to the guests, or let ting flowers or perfumes fall upon them from the ceiling, or entertaining them with music, dancing, poetry, or drama. Conversation, loosened with wine and stimulated by the presence of the other sex, would conclude the evening.
We must not think of such banquets as the customary end of a Roman day, or as more frequent in a Roman's life than the dinners-cum-oratory so popu lar today. History, like the press, misrepresents life because it loves the ex ceptional and shuns the newsless career of an honest man or the quiet routine of a normal day. Most Romans were like our neighbors and ourselves: they rose reluctantly, ate too much, worked too much, played too little, loved much, seldom hated, quarreled a bit, talked a great deal, dreamed waking dreams, and slept.


We are in danger of exaggerating the cruelty of the past for the same
reason that we magnify the crime and immorality of the present-because cruelty is interesting by its very rarity. By and large the lot of a domestic slave under the Empire was lightened by a growing acceptance into the family, by mutual loyalty, by the pretty custom of owners waiting on the slaves at certain feasts, and by a security and permanence of employment exceptional in modern times. The joys of family life were not denied them, and their tombstones reveal as much tenderness as those of the free. One reads: "His parents have raised this monument to Eucopion, who lived six months and three days; the sweetest and most delightful babe, who, though he could not yet speak, was our greatest happiness." 62 Other epitaphs show the most affectionate relations between masters and slaves: one owner de clares that a dead servant was as dear to him as his son; a young noble mourns the death of his nurse; a nurse expresses her grief over a dead charge; a
CHAP. XV)	ROME  AT  WORK	335
learned lady raises an elegant memorial to her librarian.63 Statius writes a "Poem of Consolation to Flavius Ursus on the Death of a Favorite Slave." 64 le was not unusual for slaves to risk their lives to protect their masters; many voluntarily accompanied them into exile; several gave their lives for them. Some owners freed their slaves and married them; some treated them as
friends; Seneca ate with his.65 The refinement of manners and sensitivity,
the absence of a color line between master and slave, the tenets of che Stoic philosophy, and the classless faiths corning in from the East had a share in the mitigation of slavery; but the basic factors were the economic advantage of
the owner, and the rising cost of slaves. Many slaves were respected as having high cultural abilities-stenographers, research aides, financial secretaries and
managers, artists, physicians, grammarians, and philosophers. A slave could in many cases go into business for himself, giving a share of his earnings to his owner and keeping the rest as his peculium, a "little money" peculiarly his own. With such earnings, or by faithful or exceptional service, or by
personal attractiveness, a slave cou\d usually achieve freedom in six years.6G
The condition of the workers, and even of the slaves, was in some measure relieved by the collegia, or workers' organizations. By this period we hear of these in great number and in proud specialization; there were separate guilds of trumpeters, horn players, clarion blowers, tuba players, flutists, bagpipers, etc. Usually the collegia were modeled on the Italian municipality: they had a hierarchy of magistrates and one or more favorite deities whom they honored with a temple and an annual feast. Like the cities, they asked and found rich men and women to be their patrons, and to repay compliments by helping to finance their outings, their assembly halls, and their shrines. It would be an error to think of these associations as corresponding to the labor unions of our time; we can picture them better in terms of our fraternal orders, with their endless offices and titles of honor, their brotherly hilarity and jaunts, and their simple mutual aid. Rich men often encouraged the formation of these guilds and remembered them in their wills. In the collegium all the men ,vere "brothers" and all the women "sisters," and in some of them the slave could sit at table or in council with freeborn men. Every "member in good standing" was guaranteed a fancy funeral.
In the last century of the Republic demagogues of all orders discovered that many collegia could be persuaqed to vote almost to a man for any giving candi date. In this way the associations became political instruments of patricians, plutocrats, and radicals; and their competitive corruption helped to destroy Roman democracy. Caesar outlawed them, but they revived; Augustus dissolved all but a few useful ones; Trajan again forbade them; Aurelius tolerated them; obviously they persisted throughout, within or beyond the law. In the end they became vehicles through which Christianity entered and pervaded the life of Rome.
CAESAR  AND  CHRIST	(CHAP. XV
THE ECONOMY AND THE STATE
How far did the government, under the Empire, attempt to control the economic life? It tried, and largely failed, to restore peasant proprietorship; here the emperors were more enlightened than the Senate, which was dom inated by the owners of the latifundia. Domitian sought to encourage the planting of cereals in Italy, but without success; in consequence Italy was always in fear of starvation. Vespasian forced the Senate to accept him as emperor by holding Egypt, then the chief source of Italy's wheat; Septimius Severus would do the same by seizing north Africa. The state had to assure, and therefore supervise, the importation and distribution of grain; it offered privileges to merchants bringing grain to Italy; Oaudius guaranteed them against loss, and Nero freed their ships from the property tax. The delay or wrecking of the grain fleet was now the only cause that could stir the Roman populace to revolt.	/
The Roman economy was a system of laissez faire tempered with state
ownership of natural resources-mines, quarries, fisheries, salt deposits, and considerable tracts of cultivated ,land.68 The legions made the bricks and tiles needed for their buildings, and were often used on public construction, especially in the colonies. The manufacture of arms and machines of war was probably reserved for state arsenals; and there may have been, in the first century, such governmentally owned factories as we hear of in the third.69 Public works were normally let out to private contractors under such strict state supervision that they were usually well done, and with a minimum of corruption.70 About A.D. 80 sut.h rnterprises were increasingly carried out by the emperor's freedmen with the labor of governmental slaves. At all times, apparently, the mitigation of unemployment was one purpose of these state undertakings.71
Trade was moderately burdened with a one per cent sales tax, light custom dues, and occasional tolls for the passag pf goods over bridges and through towns. The aediles supervised retail trade under an excellent system of regula tions, but, if we may believe an irate character in Petronius, they were no better than similar officials in other times; "they graft with the bakers and other such scoundrels ...  and the jaws of the capitalists are always open." 72 Finance was subject to governmental manipulation of the cur rency, and to the competition of the Treasury, which appears to have been the largest banker in the Empire; it lent money at interest to farmers on the pledge of their crops, and to city dwellers on the security of their furni ture.73 Commerce was aided by ·wars, which opened new resources and markets and won control of trade routes; so the expedition of Gallus into
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Fm. 13-Temple of Castor and Pollux
Roman Forum
FIG. q-T.-.;,·o Rommz Jlosaics