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+            <titleStmt>
+                <title>Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius</title>
+                <author><name reg="Dill, Samuel">Samuel Dill</name></author>
+            </titleStmt>
+            <publicationStmt>
+                <publisher>Project Gutenberg</publisher>
+                <date value="2010-10-23">October 23, 2010</date>
+                <idno type='etext-no'>34122</idno>
+                <availability>
+                  <p>This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere
+                  at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
+                  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under
+                  the terms of the Project Gutenberg License online at
+                  www.gutenberg.org/license</p>
+                </availability>
+            </publicationStmt>
+            <sourceDesc>
+                <bibl><author><name reg="Dill, Samuel">Samuel Dill</name></author>
+                <title>Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius</title>
+                    <edition>Second edition</edition>
+                    <imprint><pubPlace>London</pubPlace>
+                    <publisher>Macmillan and Co.</publisher>
+                    <date>1905; reprint 1925</date></imprint>
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+            <date value="2010-10-23">October 23, 2010</date>
+            <respStmt>
+                <resp>Produced by <name>Stefan Cramme</name>
+                    and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net</resp>
+            </respStmt>
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+    <titlePage rend="center; page-break-before: always">
+        <pb/><anchor id="Pgiii"/>
+        <docTitle>
+            <titlePart type="main" rend="font-size: xx-large">ROMAN SOCIETY</titlePart><lb/><lb/><lb/>
+            <titlePart type="sub">FROM</titlePart><lb/><lb/>
+            <titlePart type="sub" rend="font-size: x-large">NERO TO MARCUS AURELIUS</titlePart>
+        </docTitle>
+        <lb/><lb/><lb/>
+        <byline>BY<lb/>
+            <docAuthor rend="font-size: large">SAMUEL DILL, M.A.</docAuthor><lb/>
+            <hi rend="font-size: small">HON. LITT.D. DUBLIN, HON. LL.D. EDINBURGH, HON. FELLOW AND LATE TUTOR, C.C.C., OXFORD;<lb/>
+                PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN QUEEN’S COLLEGE, BELFAST; AUTHOR OF <q>ROMAN SOCIETY<lb/>
+                IN THE LAST CENTURY OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE</q></hi>
+        </byline>
+        <lb/><lb/><lb/>
+        <docImprint><publisher>MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED</publisher><lb/>
+            <pubPlace>ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON</pubPlace><lb/>
+            <docDate>1925</docDate></docImprint>
+        
+    </titlePage>
+    
+    <div rend="center; page-break-before: always">
+<pb/><anchor id="Pgiv"/>
+
+<p>
+COPYRIGHT
+</p>
+
+<p rend="margin-top: 1em">
+<hi rend="italic">First Edition 1904</hi>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<hi rend="italic">Second Edition 1905</hi>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<hi rend="italic">Reprinted December 1905, 1911, 1919, 1920, 1925</hi>
+</p>
+
+<p rend="margin-top: 3em">
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
+</p>
+
+</div><div rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="v"/><anchor id="Pgv"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="Preface"/><index index="pdf" level1="Preface"/>
+<head>PREFACE</head>
+
+<p>
+There must always be something arbitrary in the choice
+and isolation of a period of social history for special study.
+No period can, from one point of view, be broken off and isolated
+from the immemorial influences which have moulded it, from
+the succession of coming ages which it will help to fashion.
+And this is specially true of the history of a race at once so
+aggressive, yet so tenacious of the past, as the Roman. The
+national fibre was so tough, and its tone and sentiment so
+conservative under all external changes, that when a man
+knows any considerable period of Roman social history, he may
+almost, without paradox, be said to know a great deal of it
+from Romulus to Honorius.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, as in the artistic drama there must be a beginning
+and an end, although the action can only be ideally severed
+from what has preceded and what is to follow in actual life, so
+a limited space in the collective history of a people may be
+legitimately set apart for concentrated study. But as in the
+case of the drama, such a period should possess a certain
+unity and intensity of moral interest. It should be a crisis
+and turning-point in the life of humanity, a period pregnant
+with momentous issues, a period in which the old order and the
+new are contending for mastery, or in which the old is melting
+into the new. Above all, it should be one in which the
+great social and spiritual movements are incarnate in some
+striking personalities, who may give a human interest to dim
+forces of spiritual evolution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such a period, it seems to the writer of this book, is that
+<pb n="vi"/><anchor id="Pgvi"/>which he now presents to the reader. It opens with the
+self-destruction of lawless and intoxicated power; it closes
+with the realisation of Plato’s dream of a reign of the
+philosophers. The revolution in the ideal of the principate,
+which gave the world a Trajan, a Hadrian, and a Marcus
+Aurelius in place of a Caligula and a Nero, may not have
+been accompanied by any change of corresponding depth in
+the moral condition of the masses. But the world enjoyed
+for nearly a century an almost unexampled peace and
+prosperity, under skilful and humane government. The civic
+splendour and social charities of the Antonine age can be
+revived by the imagination from the abundant remains and
+records of the period. Its materialism and social vices
+will also sadden the thoughtful student of its literature and
+inscriptions. But if that age had the faults of a luxurious
+and highly organised civilisation, it was also dignified and
+elevated by a great effort for reform of conduct, and a
+passion, often, it is true, sadly misguided, to rise to a higher
+spiritual life and to win the succour of unseen Powers. To
+the writer of this book, this seems to give the Antonine age
+its great distinction and its deepest interest for the student of
+the life of humanity. The influence of philosophy on the
+legislation of the Antonines is a commonplace of history.
+But its practical effort to give support and guidance to moral
+life, and to refashion the old paganism, so as to make it a real
+spiritual force, has perhaps hardly yet attracted the notice
+which it deserves. It is one great object of this book to
+show how the later Stoicism and the new Platonism, working
+in eclectic harmony, strove to supply a rule of conduct and a
+higher vision of the Divine world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But philosophy failed, as it will probably fail till some
+far-off age, to find an anodyne for the spiritual distresses of the
+mass of men. It might hold up the loftiest ideal of conduct;
+it might revive the ancient gods in new spiritual power; it
+might strive to fill the interval between the remote Infinite
+<pb n="vii"/><anchor id="Pgvii"/>Spirit and the life of man with a host of mediating and
+succouring powers. But the effort was doomed to failure. It
+was an esoteric creed, and the masses remained untouched
+by it. They longed for a Divine light, a clear, authoritative
+voice from the unseen world. They sought it in ever more
+blind and passionate devotion to their ancient deities, and in
+all the curiosity of superstition. But the voice came to
+them at last from the regions of the East. It came through
+the worships of Isis and Mithra, which promised a hope of
+immortality, and provided a sacramental system to soothe
+the sense of guilt and prepare the trembling soul for the
+great ordeal on the verge of another world. How far these
+eastern systems succeeded, and where they failed, it is one
+great purpose of this book to explain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The writer, so far as he knows himself, has had no <hi rend="italic">arrière
+pensée</hi> in describing this great moral and spiritual movement.
+As M. Boissier has pointed out, the historian of the Antonine
+age is free to treat paganism apart from the growth of the
+Christian Church. The pagan world of that age seems to
+have had little communication with the loftier faith which,
+within a century and a half from the death of M. Aurelius,
+was destined to seize the sceptre. To Juvenal, Tacitus, and
+Pliny, to Plutarch, Dion Chrysostom, Lucian, and M. Aurelius,
+the Church is hardly known, or known as an obscure off-shoot
+of Judaism, a little sect, worshipping a <q>crucified Sophist</q> in
+somewhat suspicious retirement, or more favourably distinguished
+by simple-minded charity. The modern theologian
+can hardly be content to know as little of the great movement
+in the heathen world which prepared or deferred the
+victory of the Church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It will be evident to any critical reader that the scope of
+this book is strictly limited. As in a former work on the
+Society of the later Empire, attention has been concentrated on
+the inner moral life of the time, and comparatively little space
+has been given to its external history and the machinery
+<pb n="viii"/><anchor id="Pgviii"/>of government. The relation of the Senate to the Emperor
+in the first century, and the organisation of the municipal
+towns have been dwelt on at some length, because they
+affected profoundly the moral character of the age. On the
+particular field which the writer has surveyed, Dean Merivale,
+Dr. Mahaffy, Professor Bury, and Mr. Capes have thrown
+much light by their learning and sympathy. But these distinguished
+writers have approached the period from a different
+point of view from that of the present author, and he believes
+that he has not incurred the serious peril of appearing to compete
+with them. He has, as a first duty, devoted himself to a complete
+survey of the literature and inscriptions of the period.
+References to the secondary authorities and monographs which
+he has used will be found in the notes. But he owes a special
+obligation to Friedländer, Zeller, Réville, Schiller, Boissier,
+Martha, Peter, and Marquardt, for guidance and suggestion.
+He must also particularly acknowledge his debt to M. Cumont’s
+exhaustive work on the monuments of Mithra. Once more
+he has to offer his warmest gratitude to his learned friend, the
+Rev. Charles Plummer, Fellow of C.C.C., Oxford, for the patience
+and judgment with which he has revised the proof sheets. His
+thanks are also due to the Messrs. R. and R. Clark’s reader, for
+the scrupulous accuracy which has saved the author much time
+and labour.
+</p>
+
+<dateline rend="text-align: left">
+<date><hi rend="italic">September 19, 1904.</hi></date>
+</dateline>
+
+</div><div rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="ix"/><anchor id="Pgix"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="Contents"/><index index="pdf" level1="Contents"/>
+<head>CONTENTS</head>
+    
+    <p rend="center; font-size: large">BOOK I</p>
+    
+    <p rend="center">CHAPTER I</p>
+    
+    <p rend="center; font-size: small">THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR</p>
+    
+    <p>
+        How far the Antonine age is marked by a moral and spiritual revolution—Light 
+            which Seneca throws on the moral condition of his class in Nero’s
+        reign—Value of his testimony—His pessimism—Human degeneracy the
+        result of selfish greed and luxury—Picture of contemporary society—Cruel
+        selfishness and the <hi rend="italic">taedium vitae</hi>—The <hi rend="italic">Ardelio</hi>—The terror under which
+        Seneca lived—Seneca’s ideal of the principate expounded to Nero in the
+        <hi rend="italic">De Clementia</hi>—The character of Nero—Taint in the blood of the Domitii—Nero
+        at first showed glimpses of some better qualities—How he was injured
+        by the ambition to be an artist—False aestheticism and insane profusion—Feeling
+        of Tacitus as to his time—His career—Views as to his impartiality
+        as a historian—He was under complex influences—His chief motive as a
+        historian—He is not a political doctrinaire—He is avenging a moral, not a
+        political ideal—His pessimism—His prejudices and limitations—His ideal
+        of education and character—His hesitating religious faith—His credulity
+        and his scepticism—His view of the corrupting influence of despotic power—The
+        influence of imperial example—Profusion of the early Caesars,
+        leading to murder and confiscation in order to replenish their treasury—Dangers
+        of life about the court from espionage—Causes of delation—Its
+        temptations and its great rewards—The secret of the imperial terror—Various
+        theories of it—Was the Senate a real danger?—Its impotence in
+        spite of its prestige and claims—The philosophic opposition—Was it really
+        revolutionary?—<q>Scelera sceleribus tuenda</q>—The undefined position of
+        the principate—Its working depended greatly on the character of the
+        Emperor for the time—Pliny’s ideal of the principate—The danger from
+        pretenders—Evil effects of astrology—The degradation of the aristocracy
+        under Nero and Domitian illustrated from the Pisonian conspiracy—and
+        the Year of the Four Emperors—The reign of Domitian—Its puzzling
+        character—Its strange contrasts—The terrors of its close—Confiscation and
+        massacre—The funereal banquet
+    </p>
+    <p rend="right">Pages <ref target="Pg1">1</ref>-57</p>
+
+<pb n="x"/><anchor id="Pgx"/>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER II</p>
+    
+    <p rend="center; font-size: small">THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST</p>
+    
+    <p>
+        Juvenal and Tacitus compared—Social position and experience of Juvenal—Juvenal
+and Martial deal with the same features of society—Their motives
+compared—Character of Martial—The moral standard of Juvenal—His
+humanity and his old Roman prejudices—He unites the spirit of two
+different ages—His rhetorical pessimism—His sweeping generalisations—Abnormal
+specimens become types—Roman luxury at its height—Yet
+similar extravagance is denounced for five centuries—Such judgments
+need qualification—The great social changes depicted by Juvenal, some
+of which he misunderstands—Roman respect for birth—The decay of the
+aristocracy and its causes—Aristocratic poverty and servility—How the
+early Emperors lowered senatorial dignity—Aristocratic gladiators and
+actors—Nero made bohemianism the fashion—<q>The Legend of Bad
+Women</q>—Its untrustworthiness and defects of treatment—High ideals of
+womanhood among contemporaries of Juvenal—He is influenced by old
+Roman prejudice—Juvenal hates the <q>new woman</q> as much as the
+vicious woman—The emancipation of women began in the second century
+<hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>—Higher culture of women and their growing influence on public
+affairs—Juvenal’s dislike of the oriental worships and their female devotees—This
+is another old movement—The influence of Judaism at Rome,
+even in the Imperial household—Women in Juvenal’s day were exposed
+to serious dangers—The corruptions of the theatre and the circus—Intrigues
+with actors and slaves—The invasion of Hellenism—Its history—The
+Hellenism of the Emperors—The lower Hellenism which Juvenal
+attacks—Social and economic causes of the movement—Greek tutors and
+professors—The medical profession chiefly recruited from foreigners—The
+character of the profession in those days—The astrologer and the parasite—The
+client of the early Empire—His degradation and his hardships—General
+poverty—The contempt for trade and industry—The growth of
+captation—The worship of wealth—The cry of the poor
+    </p>
+    
+    <p rend="text-align: right">Pages <ref target="Pg58">58</ref>-99</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER III</p>
+    
+    <p rend="center; font-size: small">THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN</p>
+    
+    <p>
+ The rise of the freedmen a great movement—Roman prejudice against them
+expressed in the literature of the age—Economic and social causes of the
+movement—Trade and industry despised—The freedmen occupied a vacant
+place—Causes of the contempt for them—Their many vices and vulgar
+taste—Yet their rise was a hopeful sign—The freedmen in imperial office—The
+policy of the early Emperors to employ freedmen in their bureaux—Vitellius
+the first Emperor to employ Equites as imperial secretaries—Hadrian
+confined the three great ministries to men of equestrian rank—The
+great imperial freedmen—Polybius, Claudius Etruscus, and Abascantus—Their
+career and their immense power described by Statius—The<pb n="xi"/><anchor id="Pgxi"/>
+intrigues and crimes of the freedmen of Claudius—The insolence of Pallas—The
+wealth of the freedmen and its sources—Their luxurious display—The
+baths of Cl. Etruscus and the gardens of Entellus—Yet the freedmen
+were seldom admitted to equal rank with the aristocracy—The Senate
+flattered and despised them—The doubtful position of freedwomen—Plebeian
+Aspasias—The influence of Acte, Caenis, and Panthea—Manumission—It
+was often not a very abrupt change—The better side of slave
+life—Trusted and favourite slaves—How they could obtain their freedom—Slaves
+employed in offices of trust—The growing <hi rend="italic">peculium</hi>—The close
+tie between patron and freedman—The freedman gets a start in trade—His
+rapid rise in wealth—His vulgar ostentation—The <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> of
+Petronius—Theories as to its motive, date and authorship—Its author
+probably the C. Petronius of Nero’s reign—His character in Tacitus—His
+probable motive—The literary character and scene of the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi>—The
+character of the Greek adventurers—Trimalchio’s dinner, to which they are
+invited—Sketch of Trimalchio’s career—The dinner—Carving to music—Dishes
+descend from the ceiling—Wine 100 years old—Confused recollections
+of Homer—Hannibal at the Trojan war—Rope-dancers and tales of
+witchcraft—The manners of Fortunata—The conversation of some of the
+guests—True bourgeois vulgarity—Grumbling about the management of
+the aediles—<q>Everything is going back—It all arises from neglect of
+religion</q>—The coming gladiatorial show, when there will be plenty of
+blood—The education of a freedman’s son—<q>You learn for profit</q>—Fast
+and furious—The ladies get drunk, and Trimalchio gives an unflattering
+account of his wife’s history—He gives directions to his friend, the stone-cutter,
+for the erection of his monument—He has himself laid out for dead,
+and the horn-blowers sound his lament
+    </p>
+
+<p rend="text-align: right">Pages <ref target="Pg100">100</ref>-137</p>
+    
+     <p rend="center; font-size: large">BOOK II</p>
+    
+    <p rend="center">CHAPTER I</p>
+    
+    <p rend="center; font-size: small">THE CIRCLE OF THE YOUNGER PLINY</p>
+    
+    <p>
+The contrast between the pictures of society in Juvenal and in Pliny—They
+belonged to different worlds—They were also of very different temperaments—Moral
+contrasts side by side in every age—There were puritan
+homes in Italy, even in the worst days—Influence of old Roman tradition
+and country life—The circle at Como—Pliny’s youth and early training—Character
+of the Elder Pliny—His immense industry—Retreats of old
+Roman virtue—The character and reforms of Vespasian—His endowment
+of education—The moral influence of Quintilian on Roman youth—Pliny’s
+student friends—His relations with the Stoic circle—His reverence for
+Fannia—His career at the Bar—He idealises the practice in the Centumviral
+court—Career of M. Aquilius Regulus, the great delator and advocate—Pliny’s
+passion for fame—The crowd of literary amateurs in his day—Pliny
+and Martial—Pliny’s relation to the literary movement of his time—His
+<pb n="xii"/><anchor id="Pgxii"/>admiration for Cicero—His reverence for Greece—He once wrote a Greek
+tragedy—His apology for his loose verses—His ambition as an orator, and
+canons of oratorical style—Pliny’s Letters compared with Cicero’s—The
+merits and fame of the Letters—Their arrangement—They are a memorial
+of the social life and literary tone of the time—The character of Silius
+Italicus—Literary coteries—Pliny’s friendship with Suetonius—The
+devotion of literary amateurs to poetic composition and its causes—The
+influence of the great Augustan models read at school—Signs of decay
+in literature—The growing love of the archaic style—Immense literary
+ambition of the time—Attempts of Nero and Domitian to satisfy it by
+public literary competitions—The plague of recitations—Pliny believes in
+the duty of attending them—The weariness and emptiness of life in the
+capital—The charm of the country—Roman country seats on the Anio or
+the Laurentine and Campanian shores—The sites of these villas—Their
+furniture and decorations—Doubtful appreciation of works of art—The
+gardens of the villa—The routine of a country gentleman’s day—The
+financial management of an estate—Difficulties with tenants—Pliny’s
+kindness to freedmen and slaves—The darker side of slavery—Murder of a
+master—Pliny’s views on suicide—Tragedies in his circle—Pliny’s charity
+and optimism—The solidarity of the aristocratic class—Pliny thinks it a
+duty to assist the career of promising youth—The women of his circle—His
+love for Calpurnia and his love letters—The charity and humanitarian
+sentiment of the age—<hi rend="italic">Bene fac, hoc tecum feres</hi>—The wealthy recognise
+the duties of wealth—Charitable foundations of the emperors—Pliny’s
+lavish generosity, both private and public—Yet he is only a shining
+example among a crowd of similar benefactors in the Antonine age        
+    </p>
+
+<p rend="text-align: right">Pages <ref target="Pg141">141</ref>-195</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER II</p>
+    
+    <p rend="center; font-size: small">MUNICIPAL LIFE</p>
+    
+    <p>
+Little known of country town life from Roman literature—Yet the love of the
+country was strong—A relief from the strain of the capital, which, however,
+always maintained its attraction—The Empire a realm of cities—Immense
+development of urban life in the first two centuries—The rise of
+Thamugadi in Numidia—Great tolerance of municipal freedom under the
+early Empire—Yet there was a general drift to uniformity of organisation—Influence
+of the capital—The rage for travel—Travelling became easy and
+luxurious—Posting facilities on the great roads—The speed of travelling
+by land and sea—Growth of towns—Many sprang from the <hi rend="italic">canabae legionis</hi>—History
+of Lambesi—Aristocratic or timocratic character of municipal
+organisation—Illustrated by the <hi rend="italic">album Canusii</hi>—The sharp demarcation
+of social grades—Yet, in the first century, the Commons had still considerable
+power—Examples from Pompeii—The magistracies and popular
+election—The <hi rend="italic">honorarium</hi> payable on admission to office—The power of
+the duumvirs—Position of the Curia—The mode of filling its ranks—Local
+Equites—The origin and position of the Augustales—Their organisation
+and their importance in the Roman world—Municipal finance—Direct
+taxation in the first century almost unknown—Sources of municipal
+<pb n="xiii"/><anchor id="Pgxiii"/>revenue—The objects of expenditure—Municipal mismanagement, as in
+Bithynia—Signs of decay in Trajan’s reign—First appointment of <hi rend="italic">Curatores</hi>—Immense
+private munificence—Examples from Pompeii, which was
+only a third rate town—Other instances—Pliny—The Stertinii—Herodes
+Atticus, the prince of benefactors—Testimony of the Inscriptions—Example
+of imperial liberality—The public works of the Flavian and Antonine
+Emperors—Feasts to the populace—Distributions of money, graduated
+according to social rank—The motives of this munificence were mixed—Yet
+a high ideal of the duties of wealth—The better side of municipal life—Local
+patriotism and general kindly feeling—But there is another side
+to the picture—Immense passion for amusement, which was often debasing—Games
+and spectacles on 135 days in the year—Description of a scene
+in the amphitheatre in the Antonine age—Passion for gladiatorial shows
+especially in Campania—Remains of gladiatorial barracks at Pompeii—Advertisements
+of games—Pictures on tombs and on the walls—The shows
+in small country towns—Shows at Cremona a few days after the battle of
+Bedriacum—Greece was little infected with the taste—The feeling of the
+philosophers—Statistics as to the cost of a gladiatorial show—How the
+ranks of the profession were recruited—Its attractions—Organisation of the
+gladiatorial schools—The gladiator in retirement—How municipal benefactors
+were honoured—Municipal life begins to lose its attractions—The
+causes of this—Plutarch on municipal duty—The growth of centralisation—The
+beginning of the end       
+    </p>
+<p rend="text-align: right">Pages <ref target="Pg196">196</ref>-250</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER III</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: small">THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE</p>
+
+<p>The <hi rend="italic">plebs</hi> of the municipal town chiefly known from the Inscriptions—Great
+development of a free proletariat—The effects of manumission—The artisan
+class in the Inscriptions—Their pride in their callings—Emblems on their
+tombs—Early history of the <hi rend="italic">Collegia</hi>—Rigorous restraint of their formation
+by Julius and Augustus—The evidence of Gaius—Dangers from the
+colleges not imaginary—Troubles in the reign of Aurelian—Yet the great
+movement could not be checked—The means of evading the law—Extended
+liberty in reigns of M. Aurelius and Alexander Severus—The social forces
+behind the movement of combination—The wish for funeral rites and
+lasting remembrance—Evidence of the Inscriptions—The horror of loneliness
+in death—The funerary colleges—That of Lanuvium shows how the
+privilege granted to them might be extended—Any college might claim it—Description
+of the college at Lanuvium—Its foundation deed—The fees—The
+grants for burial—The college of Aesculapius and Hygia—Its
+organisation for other objects than burial—Any college might assume a
+quasi-religious character—The influence of religion on all ancient social
+organisation—The colleges of traders—Wandering merchants organise
+themselves all over the world—And old soldiers—Colleges of youth for
+sporting purposes—Every branch of industry was organised in these
+societies—Evidence from Ostia, Lyons, and Rome, in the Inscriptions—Clubs
+of slaves in great houses, and in that of the Emperor—They were
+<pb n="xiv"/><anchor id="Pgxiv"/>encouraged by the masters—The organisation of the college was modelled
+on the city—Its officers bear the names of republican magistrates—The
+number of members limited—Periodical revision of the <hi rend="italic">Album</hi>—Even in
+the plebeian colleges the gradation of rank was observed—Patrons carefully
+sought for—Meeting-place of the college—Description of the <hi rend="italic">Schola</hi>—Sacred
+associations gathered round it—Even the poorest made presents to
+decorate it—The poor college of Silvanus at Philippi—But the colleges
+relied on the generosity of patrons—Their varying social rank—Election of
+a patron—A man might be a patron of many colleges—The college often
+received bequests to guard a tomb, and perform funerary rites for ever—The
+common feasts of the colleges—The division of the <hi rend="italic">sportula</hi> by ranks—Regulations
+as to decorum at college meetings—The college modelled on
+the family—Mommsen’s opinion—Fraternal feeling—The slave in the
+college, for the time, treated as an equal—Yet the difference of rank, even
+in the colleges, was probably never forgotten—Were the colleges really
+charitable foundations?—The military colleges—Their object, not only to
+provide due burial, but to assist an officer throughout his career—The
+extinction of a college—The college at Alburnus in Dacia vanishes probably
+in the Marcomannic invasion</p>
+
+<p rend="right">Pages <ref target="Pg251">251</ref>-286</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: large">BOOK III</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER I</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: small">THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR</p>
+
+<p>The great change in the motive and character of philosophy—The schools forsook
+metaphysical speculation, and devoted themselves to the cultivation of
+character—Why faith in abstract thought declined, and the conduct of life
+became all important—The effect of the loss of free civic life and the establishment
+of world-empires—The commonwealth of man—The great <hi rend="italic">ars vivendi</hi>—Spiritual
+directors before the imperial times—They are found in
+every great family—The power of Seneca as a private director of souls—How
+his career and experience prepared him for the office—He had seen the
+inner life of the time, its sensuality, degradation, and remorse—He was
+himself an ascetic, living in a palace which excited Nero’s envy—His experience
+excited an evangelistic passion—His conception of philosophy as the
+art of saving souls—His contempt for unpractical speculation—Yet he
+values Physics for its moral effect in elevating the mind to the region of
+eternal truth—Curious examples of physical study for moral ends—The
+pessimism of Seneca—Its causes in the inner secrets of his class—It is a
+lost world which must be saved by every effort—Stoicism becomes transfigured
+by moral enthusiasm—Yet can philosophic religion dispense with
+dogma?—Empirical rules of conduct are not enough—There must be true
+theory of conduct—Seneca not a rigorous dogmatist—His varying conceptions
+of God—Often mingles Platonic conceptions with old Stoic
+<pb n="xv"/><anchor id="Pgxv"/>doctrine—But all old Stoic doctrine can be found in him—<q>The kingdom
+of Heaven is within</q>—Freedom is found in renunciation, submission to
+the Universal Reason—Whence comes the force of self-reform?—The
+problem of freedom and necessity—How man may attain to moral
+freedom—The struggle to recover a primeval virtue—Modifications of old
+Stoic theory—The ideal <hi rend="italic">sapiens</hi>—Instantaneous conversion—Ideas fatal to
+practical moral reform—For practical purposes, Stoic theory must be
+modified—The <hi rend="italic">sapiens</hi> a mythical figure—There may be various stages of
+moral progress—Aristotelian ideas—Seneca himself far from the ideal of the
+Stoic sage—The men for whom Seneca is providing counsel—How their
+weaknesses have to be dealt with—The <q>ars vitae</q> develops into
+casuistry in the hands of the director—Obstacles in the way to the higher
+life—Seneca’s skill in dealing with different cases—His precepts for reform—Necessity
+of confession, self-examination, steadiness of purpose, self-denial—<hi rend="italic">Vivere militare est</hi>—The real victor—The mind can create its own
+world, and triumph even over death—Seneca’s not the Cynic ideal of
+moral isolation—Competing tendencies in Stoicism—Isolated renunciation
+and social sympathy—A citizen of two cities—The great commonwealth of
+humanity—The problem of serving God and man variously solved by the
+Stoics—Seneca’s ideas of social duty—Social instinct innate—Duty of help,
+forgiveness, and kindness to others—The example of the Infinite Goodness—The
+brotherhood of man includes the slave—Seneca’s attitude to slavery—His
+ideal of womanhood—Women may be the equals of men in culture
+and virtue—The greatness of Seneca as a moral teacher—He belongs to the
+modern world, and was claimed by the Church—A pagan Thomas à
+Kempis</p>
+
+<p rend="right">Pages <ref target="Pg289">289</ref>-333</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER II</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: small">THE PHILOSOPHIC MISSIONARY</p>
+
+<p>Seneca the director of an aristocratic class—The masses needed a gospel—Their
+moral condition—The Antonine age produced a great movement for
+their moral elevation—Lucian’s attitude to the Cynics—His kindred with
+them—Detached view of human life and its vanity—Gloomy view of the
+moral state of the masses—The call for popular evangelism—Can philosophy
+furnish the gospel?—Lucian’s Hermotimus—The quarrels of the
+schools—Yet they show real agreement on the rule of life—The fashionable
+sophist—Rhetorical philosophy despised by more earnest minds—Serious
+preaching—The sermons of Apollonius of Tyana—Sudden conversions—The
+preaching of Musonius, Plutarch, and Maximus of Tyre—The mystic
+fervour of Maximus—Dion’s view of the Cynic preacher—The <q>mendicant
+monks of paganism</q>—Lucian’s caricature of their vices—Many vulgar
+impostors adopt the profession—It offered a tempting field—Why the
+charges against the Cynics must be taken with reserve—S. Augustine’s
+testimony—Causes of the prejudice against Cynicism—Lucian’s treatment
+of Peregrinus—The history of Peregrinus—The credibility of the charges
+which Lucian makes against him—He is about to immolate himself at
+Olympia when Lucian arrives—Lucian treats the self-martyrdom as a piece
+<pb n="xvi"/><anchor id="Pgxvi"/>of theatrical display—Yet Peregrinus may have honestly desired to teach
+contempt for death—Stoic suicide—The scene at the pyre—The last words
+of Peregrinus—Lucian creates a myth and sees it grow—Testimony of A.
+Gellius as to Peregrinus—The power of the later Cynicism—The ideal Cynic
+in Epictetus—An ambassador of God—Kindred of Cynicism and Monasticism—Cultivated
+Cynics—The character of Demetrius, a leader of the
+philosophic opposition—Cynic attitude to popular religion—Oenomaus a
+pronounced rationalist—Disbelief in oracles—The character of Demonax—His
+great popular influence—Prosecuted for neglect of religious observances—His
+sharp sayings—Demonstrations of reverence for him at his death—The
+career of Dion Chrysostom—His conversion during his exile—Becomes
+a preacher with a mission to the Roman world—The character of his eighty
+orations—He is the rhetorical apostle of a few great truths—His idea of
+philosophy—His pessimism about the moral state of the world—A
+materialised civilisation—Warning to the people of Tarsus—Rebukes the
+feuds of the Bithynian cities—A sermon at Olbia on the Black Sea—The
+jealousies of the Asiatic towns—Prusa and Apamea—Sermon on civic
+harmony—He assails the vices and frivolity of the Alexandrians—His
+prose idyll—Simple pastoral life in Euboea—The problems and vices of city
+life exposed—Dion on true kingship—The vision of the Two Peaks—The
+ideal king—The sermon at Olympia inspired by the Zeus of Pheidias—Its
+majesty and benignity—Sources of the idea of God—The place of art in
+religion—Relative power of poetry and sculpture to express religious truth—Pheidias
+defends his anthropomorphism—His Zeus a God of mercy and
+peace</p>
+
+<p rend="right">Pages <ref target="Pg334">334</ref>-383</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER III</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: small">THE PHILOSOPHIC THEOLOGIAN</p>
+
+<p>The pagan revival and the growth of superstition called for a theodicy—Old
+Roman religion was still powerful—But there was an immense accretion
+of worships from the conquered countries—And an immense growth in the
+belief in genii, dreams, omens, and oracles—Yet amid the apparent chaos,
+there was a tendency, in the higher minds, to monotheism—The craving
+for a moral God in sympathy with man—The ideas of Apuleius, Epictetus,
+M. Aurelius—The change in the conception of God among the later Stoics—God
+no longer mere Force or Fate or impersonal Reason—He is a Father
+and Providence, giving moral support and comfort—The attitude of the
+later Stoics to external worship and anthropomorphic imagery—How was
+the ancient worship to be reconciled with purer conceptions of the Divine?—God
+being so remote, philosophy may discover spiritual help in all the
+religions of the past—The history of Neo-Pythagoreanism—Apollonius
+of Tyana—His attitude to mythology—His mysticism and ritualism—Plutarch’s
+associations and early history—His devotion to Greek tradition—His
+social life—His Lives of the great Greeks and Romans—He is a
+moralist rather than a pure philosopher—The tendency of philosophy in his
+day was towards the formation of character—The eclecticism of the time—Plutarch’s
+attitude to Platonism and Stoicism—His own moral system
+was drawn from various schools—Precepts for the formation of
+character—<pb n="xvii"/><anchor id="Pgxvii"/>Plutarch on freedom and necessity—His contempt for rhetorical philosophy—Plutarch
+on Tranquillity—How to grow daily—The pathos of life—The
+need for a higher vision—How to reconcile the God of philosophy with the
+ancient mythology was the great problem—Plutarch’s conception of God—His
+cosmology mainly that of the <hi rend="italic">Timaeus</hi>—The opposition between the
+philosophic idea of God and the belief of the crowd was an old one—Yet
+great political and spiritual changes had made it a more urgent question—The
+theology of Maximus of Tyre—His pure conception of God, combined
+with tolerance of legend and symbolism—Myth not to be discarded, but
+interpreted by philosophy, to discover the kernel of truth which is
+reverently veiled—The effort illustrated by the treatise of Plutarch on
+Isis and Osiris—Its theory of Evil and daemonic powers—The Platonist
+daemonology—The history of daemons traced from Hesiod—The conception
+of daemons justified by Maximus—The daemonology of the early Greek
+philosophers—The nature of daemons as conceived by Maximus and
+Plutarch—The ministering spirits of Maximus—The theory of bad daemons
+enabled Plutarch to explain the grossness of myth and ritual—The
+bad daemons a <hi rend="italic">damnosa hereditas</hi>—The triumphant use made of the
+theory by the Christian Apologists—The daemonology of Plutarch was
+also used to explain the inspiration or the silence of the ancient oracles—<q>The
+oracles are dumb</q>—Yet in the second century, to some extent,
+Delphi revived—Questions as to its inspiration debated—The quality of
+Delphic verse—The theory of inspiration—Concurrent causes of it—The
+daemon of the shrine may depart—The problem of inspiration illustrated
+by a discussion on the daemon of Socrates—What was it?—The result of
+the inquiry is that the human spirit, at its best, is open to influences from
+another world</p>
+
+<p rend="right">Pages <ref target="Pg384">384</ref>-440</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: large">BOOK IV</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER I</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: small">SUPERSTITION</p>
+
+<p>Superstition a term of shifting meaning—Plutarch’s treatise on Superstition—Why
+it is worse than atheism—Immense growth of superstition in the
+first century, following on a decay of old religion—Forgotten rites and
+fallen temples—The revival of Augustus—The power of astrology—The
+Emperors believed in it and dreaded it—Tiberius and Thrasyllus at
+Capreae—The attitude of Nero, Otho, and Vitellius to astrology—The
+superstition of the Flavian Emperors—And of Hadrian and M. Aurelius—The
+superstition of the literary class—The Elder Pliny—Suetonius—Tacitus—His
+wavering treatment of the supernatural—How it may be
+explained by the character of the age—Epictetus on divination—The
+superstition of Aelian of Praeneste—His credulity and his anathemas
+on the sceptics—P. Aelius Aristides—His history and character—His
+illness of thirteen years—Was he a simple devotee?—The influence of
+<pb n="xviii"/><anchor id="Pgxviii"/>rhetorical training on him—The temples of healing in his time—Their
+organisation and routine—Recipes by dreams in the temples of Asclepius,
+Isis, and Serapis—Medical skill combined with superstition—The amusements
+and cheerful social life of these temple-hospitals were powerful
+healers—The ailments of Aristides and his journeys in quest of health—Strange
+divine prescriptions astonish the medical attendants—Their own
+heroic remedies—Epiphanies of the Gods—The return of his rhetorical
+power—The debt is repaid in the Sacred Orations—The treatise on dreams
+by Artemidorus—His idea of founding a science of dreams—His enormous
+industry in collecting materials—His contempt for less scientific interpreters—His
+classification of dreams and methods of interpretation—The
+new oracles—The failure of the old was not so complete as it is sometimes
+represented—The revival of Delphi—The history of the oracle of Alexander
+of Abonoteichos—His life and character—How he played on the
+superstition of the Paphlagonians—The business-like management of the
+oracle—Its fees and revenue—Its secret methods—Its fame spreads everywhere—Oracles
+in many tongues—Rutilianus, a great noble, espouses
+Alexander’s daughter—The Epicureans resist the impostor, but in vain—The
+mysteries of Glycon—Alexander, a second Endymion—Immense
+superstition of the time—Apotheosis in the air—The cult of Antinous—And
+of M. Aurelius—In Croton there were more gods than men!—The
+growing faith in daemons and genii—The evidence of inscriptions as to the
+adoption of local deities all over the world—Revived honours of classic
+heroes—The belief in recurring miracle—Christian and pagan were equally
+credulous—The legend of the <q>Thundering Legion</q>—Sorcery in Thessaly—The
+lawless romance of Apuleius</p>
+
+<p rend="right">Pages <ref target="Pg443">443</ref>-483</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER II</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: small">BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY</p>
+
+<p>The conception of immortality determined by the idea of God—Religion supplies
+the assurance denied by philosophy—Vagueness of the conception natural
+and universal—<q>It doth not yet appear what we shall be</q>—Confused and
+various beliefs on the subject in the Early Empire—The cult of the Manes
+in old Italian piety—The guardianship of the tomb, and call for perpetual
+remembrance—The eternal sleep—The link between the living and the dead—The
+craving for continued human sympathy with the shade in its eternal
+home—The Lemures and the Lemuria—Visitations from the other world—The
+<hi rend="italic">Mundus</hi> in every Latin town—The general belief in apparitions illustrated
+from the <hi rend="italic">Philopseudes</hi> of Lucian, from the Younger Pliny, Suetonius,
+Dion Cassius, and Maximus of Tyre—The eschatology of Virgil a mixture
+of different faiths—Scenes from the Inferno of the <hi rend="italic">Aeneid</hi>—Its Pythagorean
+elements—How Virgil influenced later conceptions of the future state—Scepticism
+and credulity in the first century—Perpetuity of heathen
+beliefs—The inscriptions, as to the future state, must be interpreted with
+care and discrimination—The phrases often conventional, and springing
+from different orders of belief—Inscriptions frankly atheistic or sensualist—Ideas
+of immortality among the cultivated class—The influence of
+<pb n="xix"/><anchor id="Pgxix"/>Lucretius—The Stoic idea of coming life, and the Peripatetic—The
+influence of Platonism—In the last age of the Republic, and the first of the
+Empire, educated opinion was often sceptical or negative—J. Caesar, the
+Elder Pliny, Tacitus—The feeling of Hadrian—Epictetus on immortality—Galen—His
+probable influence on M. Aurelius—The wavering attitude of
+M. Aurelius on immortality—How he could reconcile himself by a saintly
+ideal to the resignation of the hope of a future life—His sadness and
+pessimism fully justified by the circumstances of the time—<q>Thou hast
+come to shore, quit the ship</q>—Change in the religious character long
+before M. Aurelius—Seneca’s theology as it moulded his conception of
+immortality—A new note in Seneca—The influence of Pythagorean and
+Platonic conceptions in modifying Stoicism—The revival of Pythagoreanism
+in the first century—Its tenets and the secret of its power—Apollonius of
+Tyana on immortality—His meeting with the shade of Achilles—Plutarch
+and Maximus of Tyre on immortality—Plutarch’s arguments for the faith
+in it—The Delays of Divine Vengeance—But, like Plato, Plutarch feels
+that argument on such a subject must be reinforced by poetic imagination—The
+myths of Thespesius of Soli and Timarchus in Plutarch—Mythic
+scenery of the eternal world</p>
+
+<p rend="right">Pages <ref target="Pg484">484</ref>-528</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER III</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: small">THE OLD ROMAN RELIGION</p>
+
+<p>The decay of old religion in the last age of the Republic—Its causes—Influence
+of Greek philosophy and rationalism—Distinction drawn between the
+religion of philosophy and that of the State—The moral and religious
+results—Sceptical conformity or desuetude of ancient rites—The religious
+revival of Augustus—How far a matter of policy—Ancient temples
+and worships restored—The position of Pontifex Maximus—How the
+Emperors utilised the dignity and kept a firm hold on the old religion—The
+religious character of the early Emperors—The force of antiquarian
+sentiment in the second century—The Inscriptions plainly show that the
+popular faith in old Latin religion was still strong—The revival of the
+Arval brotherhood—Its history and ritual described—A stronghold of
+imperial power—How the Arval College supported and flattered the
+Emperors—How the cultivated class reconciled themselves to the rudest
+forms of the ancient religion—The philosophic reconciliation—The influence
+of patriotism in compelling men to support a religion which was intertwined
+with all social and political life—The sentiment powerful down to the
+end of paganism—But other religious ideas were in the air, preparing the
+triumph of the cults of the East</p>
+
+<p rend="right"><ref target="Pg529">529</ref>-546</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER IV</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: small">MAGNA MATER</p>
+
+<p>The fascination of the worship of the Great Mother—It was still powerful in
+the days of S. Augustine—Its arrival from Pessinus in 204 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>—The
+<pb n="xx"/><anchor id="Pgxx"/>history of its growing influence—The taurobolium in the second century—The
+legend and its interpretations—The Megalesia in spring—The priesthood—The
+sacred colleges of the worship—Evidence of the Inscriptions—The
+worship in country places—Vagabond priests in Thessaly described by
+Apuleius—Picture of their wild orgies—The problem of these eastern
+cults—From a gross origin, they became transmuted into a real spiritual
+power—The elevation of Magna Mater—The rite of the taurobolium—Its
+history in Asia Minor—Its immense influence in the last age of the
+Empire—A challenge to the Church—The history of the taurobolium in
+the West from the Inscriptions—Description of the scene from Prudentius—The
+connection of Magna Mater with Mithra and other deities</p>
+
+<p rend="right">Pages <ref target="Pg547">547</ref>-559</p>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER V</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: small">ISIS AND SERAPIS</p>
+
+<p>Their long reign in Europe—Established at Peiraeus in the fourth century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>—And
+in Asia Minor—How the Egyptian cults had been transformed
+under Greek influences—Greek settlers, soldiers, and travellers in Egypt
+from the seventh century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>—Greek and Egyptian gods identified—The
+new propaganda of the Ptolemies—Theories of the origin of Serapis—The
+new Egyptian Trinity—The influence of Greek mysticism—The worship
+probably established in Campanian towns before 150 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>—The religious
+excitement in Italy in the early part of the second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>—The
+Bacchanalian scandal—The apocryphal books of Numa—Efforts of the
+Government in the first century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> to repress the worship—A violent
+struggle with varying fortunes—The triumvirs in 42 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> erect a temple
+of Isis—Persecution of eastern worships in the reign of Tiberius—Thenceforth
+there was little opposition—Attitude of the Flavian Emperors—Domitian
+builds a temple of Isis, 92 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>—The Egyptian worship
+propagated from Alexandria by slaves, officials, philosophers, and savants—Votaries
+in the imperial household—Spread of Isiac worship through
+Europe—It reaches York—The secret of its fascination—The cult
+appealed to many kinds of mind—Its mysticism—Its charm for women—Its
+pomp and ceremonial—How a religion originally gross may be transformed—The
+zoolatry of Egypt justified as symbolism by Greek philosophers—But
+there is little trace of it in the Isiac worship of the West—Isis
+becomes an all-embracing spiritual power—And Serapis is regarded by
+Aristides as sovereign lord of life—Yet the worship never broke away from
+the traditions of idolatry—It fostered an immense superstition—The
+Petosiris—But there was undoubted spiritual power in the worship—The
+initiation of Lucius—The faith in immortality—<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εὐψύχει</foreign> on tombs—Impressive
+ritual—Separation of the priesthood from the world—Description
+of the daily offices—Matins and Vespers—Silent meditation—The great
+festivals of the Isiac calendar—Ascetic preparation—The blessing of the
+sacred ship—Description of the procession in Apuleius—The grades of
+priests—The sacred guilds—The place of women—The priesthood an
+aggressive power—The Isiac presbytery—Priestly rule of life—Tertullian
+holds it up as an example—The popular charm of the Divine Mother</p>
+
+<p rend="right"><anchor id="corrxx"/><corr sic="560-584">Pages <ref target="Pg560">560</ref>-584</corr></p>
+
+<pb n="xxi"/><anchor id="Pgxxi"/>
+
+<p rend="center">CHAPTER VI</p>
+
+<p rend="center; font-size: small">THE RELIGION OF MITHRA</p>
+
+<p>The causes which in the second century <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> prepared the triumph of Mithra—Heliolatry
+the natural goal of heathenism—Early history of Mithra
+in the Vedas and Avestas—He is a moral power from the beginning—His
+place in the Zoroastrian hierarchy—His relation to Ormuzd—The
+influence of Babylon on the Persian worship—Mithra identified with
+the Sun—The astral lore of Babylonia inseparable from Mithraism—Yet
+Mithra and the Sun are distinct in the later Inscriptions—How Mithra
+worship was modified in Asia Minor—The influence of Greek mythology,
+philosophy, and art—The group of the Tauroctonus probably first
+fashioned by a Pergamene artist—Mithra in literature—Herodotus—Xenophon—The
+<hi rend="italic">Thebaid</hi> of Statius—Plutarch—Lucian may have heard
+the Mazdean litany—Mithra’s first coming to the West probably in the
+reign of Tiberius—The earliest inscriptions of Mithraism belong to the
+Flavian age—At the same time, the worship is established in Pannonia—The
+earliest temples at Ostia and Rome—The power of Mithra in the
+capital—The secret of the propaganda—Soldiers were the most effective
+missionaries of Mithra—Slaves and imperial officials of every degree
+propagate the Persian faith—Its progress traced around Rome and through
+various regions of Italy, especially to the north—Mithra’s chapels in the
+valleys of the Alps and on the roads to the Danube from Aquileia—Along
+the line of the Danube—His remains abundant in Dacia and Pannonia—Chapels
+at Aquincum and Carnuntum—The enthusiasm of certain
+legions—The splendid remains of Mithra worship in Upper Germany in
+the early part of the second century <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>—Mithra passes on, through
+Cologne and Boulogne, to London, Chester, York and the wall of
+Hadrian—Mithra made least impression on W. Gaul, Spain, and N.
+Africa—In spite of tolerance and syncretism, Mithraism never ceased to be
+a Persian cult—The influence of astrology—The share of Babylonia in
+moulding the worship—Yet Greek mystic influences had a large part in it—The
+descent and ascent of the soul—Yet, although Mithraism came to
+be a moral creed, it never ceased to be a cosmic symbolism—The great
+elemental powers—The daemonology of Mithraism—Its affinity with the
+later Neo Platonism—The evil effect of belief in planetary influences—The
+struggle between formal and spiritual ideals of religion—The craving for
+mediatorial sympathy in the moral life was urgent—Mithra was a mediator
+both in a cosmic and a moral sense—He stands between Cautes and
+Cautopates, and between Ormuzd and Ahriman—The legend of Mithra as
+faintly recovered from the monuments—The <hi rend="italic">petra genetrix</hi>—The adoration
+of the shepherds—The fountain gushing at the arrow stroke—The legend
+of the mystic bull—Its chase and slaughter—Its death as the source of
+resurgent life—The mysterious reconciliation of Mithra and the Sun—Their
+solemn agape—Various interpretations of the legend—Yet there was
+a real spiritual meaning under it all—A religion of strenuous combat—How
+it touched the Roman soldier on the Danube—Its eschatology—Its
+promise of immortality and final triumph over evil—The sacramental
+mystery of Mithraism—The daily offices, and the annual festivals—The
+<pb n="xxii"/><anchor id="Pgxxii"/>mysteries of Mithra and the seven grades of initiation—Symbolic
+ceremonies—The colleges of Mithra—Their influence in levelling social
+distinctions—The suspicions of the Apologists—Description of a chapel of
+Mithra—The form of the cave always preserved—The scene of full
+initiation—Mithraism as an imperial cult and a support of imperial power—Sketch
+of the history of imperial apotheosis—The historic causes which
+aided it—The influence of Egypt and Persia on the movement—The
+Persian attitude to kings—The Fortune of the monarch—How these ideas
+blended with old Roman conceptions—The influence of Sun-worship in the
+third century, in stimulating theocratic ideas—The Emperors appropriate
+the titles and insignia of the Sun—The imperial house consecrate a temple
+to Mithra at Carnuntum, twenty years before the conversion of Constantine—Could
+Mithra ever have become the god of western Europe?—His
+chances of success in the chaos of belief seemed promising—His syncretism
+and tolerance, yet his exclusive claims—His moral charm—The fears of
+the Fathers—Parallels between his legend and the Bible—His sacramental
+system a travesty of the mysteries of the medieval church—Yet there
+was a great gulf between the two religions—The weaknesses of Mithraism—It
+did not appeal to women—It had no Mater Dolorosa—It offered little
+human sympathy—And in its tolerance of other heathen systems lay its
+great weakness—A Mithraist might be a votary of all the ancient gods—Mithraism
+was rooted in nature-worship, and remained the patron of the
+worst superstitions—Mithra belonged to the order which was passing
+away</p>
+
+<p rend="right">Pages <ref target="Pg585">585</ref>-626</p>
+        
+    </div>
+</front>
+<body>
+    <div type="book" n="1" rend="page-break-before: right">
+        <pb/><anchor id="Pgxxiii"/>
+        <index index="toc" level1="Book I. Infesta virtutibus tempora"/><index index="pdf" level1="Book I. Infesta virtutibus tempora"/>
+        <head>BOOK I.</head>
+        
+        <head type="sub"><hi rend="italic">INFESTA VIRTUTIBUS TEMPORA</hi></head>
+        
+        <pb/><anchor id="Pgxxiv"/>
+              
+        <div type="chapter" n="1" rend="page-break-before: right">
+<pb n="1"/><anchor id="Pg1"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="I. The aristocracy under the terror"/><index index="pdf" level1="I. The aristocracy under the terror"/>
+<head>CHAPTER I</head>
+
+<head type="sub">THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR</head>
+
+<p>
+The period of social history which we are about to study is
+profoundly interesting in many ways, but not least in the
+many contrasts between its opening and its close. It opens
+with the tyranny of one of the worst men who ever occupied
+a throne; it ends with the mild rule of a Stoic saint. It
+begins in massacre and the carnage of civil strife; it closes
+in the apparent triumph of the philosophic ideal, although
+before the end of the reign of the philosophers the shadows
+have begun to fall. The contrast of character between the two
+princes is generally supposed to find a correspondence in the
+moral character and ideals of the men over whom they ruled.
+The accession of Vespasian which, after a deadly struggle, seemed
+to bring the orgies of a brutal despotism to a close, is regarded
+as marking not only a political, but a moral, revolution. It was
+the dawn of an age of repentance and amendment, of beneficent
+administration, of a great moral revival. We are bound to
+accept the express testimony of a contemporary like
+Tacitus,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 55; xvi. 5; cf.
+    Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> ix. xii.</note>
+who was not prone to optimist views of human progress, that
+along with the exhaustion of the higher class from massacre
+and reckless extravagance, the sober example of the new
+emperor, and the introduction of fresh blood and purer manners
+from the provinces, had produced a great moral improvement.
+Even among the old noblesse, whose youth had fallen on the
+age of wild licence, it is probable that a better tone asserted
+itself at the beginning of what was recognised by all to be a
+new order. The crushed and servile, who had easily learnt to
+<pb n="2"/><anchor id="Pg2"/>imitate the wasteful vices of their oppressors, would probably,
+with equal facility, at least affect to conform to the simpler
+fashions of life which Vespasian inherited from his Sabine ancestors
+and the old farm-house at Reate.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> ii. quare princeps
+    quoque et locum incunabulorum assidue
+    frequentavit, manente villa, qualis
+    fuerat olim, etc.</note> The better sort, represented
+by the circles of Persius, of Pliny and Tacitus, who had
+nursed the ideal of Stoic or old Roman virtue in some retreat
+on the northern lakes or in the folds of the Apennines, emerged
+from seclusion and came to the front in the reign of Trajan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet neither the language of Tacitus nor the testimony from
+other sources justify the belief in any sudden moral revolution.
+The Antonine age was undoubtedly an age of conscientious
+and humane government in the interest of the subject; it was
+even more an age of religious revival. But whether these
+were accompanied by a corresponding elevation of conduct and
+moral tone among the masses may well be doubted. On the
+other hand the pessimism of satirist and historian who had
+lived through the darkness of the Terror has probably
+exaggerated the corruption of the evil days. If society at
+large had been half as corrupt as it is represented by Juvenal,
+it would have speedily perished from mere rottenness. The
+Inscriptions, the Letters of the younger Pliny, even the pages
+of Tacitus himself, reveal to us another world from that of
+the satirist. On countless tombs we have the record or
+the ideal of a family life of sober, honest industry, and pure
+affection. In the calm of rural retreats in Lombardy or
+Tuscany, while the capital was frenzied with vicious indulgence,
+or seething with conspiracy and desolated by massacre,
+there were many families living in almost puritan quietude,
+where the moral standard was in many respects as high as
+among ourselves. The worst period of the Roman Empire was
+the most glorious age of practical Stoicism. The men of that
+circle were ready, at the cost of liberty or life, to brave an
+immoral tyranny; their wives were eager to follow them into
+exile, or to die by their side.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 23; xvi. 21, 34; <hi rend="italic">Agric.</hi>
+    2, 45; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 16, § 10; vii. 19,
+    § 3; iii. 11, § 3; ix. 13, § 3.</note> And even in the palace of Nero
+there was a spotless Octavia, and slave-girls who were ready to
+defend her honour at the cost of torture and death.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 60.</note> In the
+darkest days, the violence of the bad princes spent itself on
+<pb n="3"/><anchor id="Pg3"/>their nobles, on those whom they feared, or whom they wished
+to plunder. The provinces, even under a Tiberius, a Nero, or
+a Domitian, enjoyed a freedom from oppression which they
+seldom enjoyed under the Republic.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 6; i. 80; xiii. 50, 51;
+    xi. 24; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, x.; <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> viii.; cf.
+    Merivale, vii. 385; Renan, <hi rend="italic">Apôtres</hi>, p.
+    308 sqq; Gréard, <hi rend="italic">Morale de Plut.</hi> p. 200.</note> Just and upright governors
+were the rule and not the exception, and even an Otho
+or a Vitellius, tainted with every private vice, returned from
+their provincial governments with a reputation for integrity.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> v.; <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, iii. provinciam
+    administravit moderatione atque
+    abstinentia singulari.</note>
+Municipal freedom and self-government were probably at their
+height at the very time when life and liberty in the capital
+were in hourly peril. The great Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood
+and equality of men, as members of a world-wide
+commonwealth, which was destined to inspire legislation in
+the Antonine age, was openly preached in the reigns of Caligula
+and Nero. A softer tone—a modern note of pity for the
+miserable and succour for the helpless—makes itself heard in
+the literature of the first century.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 47; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, i. 5; iii. 24;
+    <hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi> iv. 11, § 3; <hi rend="italic">De Brev. Vit.</hi>
+    xiii. § 7; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 22; Juv. xiv. 15
+    sqq.; xv. 131; D. Cass. lxvi. 15; <hi rend="italic">Or.
+        Henz. Inscr. Lat.</hi> 7244, Bene fac, hoc
+    tecum feres; Denis, <hi rend="italic">Hist. des Idées
+        Morales</hi>, ii. 156, 172, 181.</note> The moral and mental
+equality of the sexes was being more and more recognised in
+theory, as the capacity of women for heroic action and self-sacrifice
+was displayed so often in the age of the tyranny and
+of the Stoic martyrs. The old cruelty and contempt for the
+slave will not give way for many a generation; but the slave is
+now treated by all the great leaders of moral reform as a being
+of the same mould as his master, his equal, if not his superior,
+in capacity for virtue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The peculiar distinction of the Antonine age is not to be
+sought in any great difference from the age preceding it in conduct
+or moral ideals among the great mass of men. Nor can
+it claim any literary distinction of decided originality, except
+in the possession of the airy grace and half-serious mockery
+of Lucian. Juvenal, Tacitus, and the younger Pliny, Suetonius
+and Quintilian, Plutarch and Dion Chrysostom, were probably all
+dead before Antoninus Pius came to the throne. After Hadrian’s
+reign pure Roman literature, in any worthy sense, is extinct;
+it dies away in that Sahara of the higher intellect which
+stretches forward to the Fall of the Empire. There is no great
+<pb n="4"/><anchor id="Pg4"/>historian after Tacitus; there is no considerable poet after
+Statius and Juvenal, till the meteor-like apparition of Claudian
+in the ominous reign of Honorius.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The material splendour and municipal life of the Antonine
+age are externally its greatest glory. It was pre-eminently a
+sociable age, an age of cities. From the wall of Hadrian to
+the edge of the Sahara towns sprang up everywhere with as
+yet a free civic life. It was an age of engineers and architects,
+who turned villages into cities and built cities in the desert,
+adorned with temples and stately arches and basilicas, and
+feeding their fountains from the springs of distant hills. The
+rich were powerful and popular; and never had they to pay
+so heavily for popularity and power. The cost of civic feasts
+and games, of forums and temples and theatres, was won by
+flattery, or extorted by an inexorable force of public opinion
+from their coffers. The poor were feasted and amused by their
+social superiors who received a deference and adulation expressed
+on hundreds of inscriptions. And it must be confessed
+that these records of ambitious munificence and expectant
+gratitude do not raise our conception of either the economic
+or the moral condition of the age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The glory of classic art had almost vanished; and yet,
+without being able to produce any works of creative genius,
+the inexhaustible vitality of the Hellenic spirit once more
+asserted itself. After a long eclipse, the rhetorical culture of
+Greece vigorously addressed itself in the reign of Hadrian to
+the conquest of the West. Her teachers and spiritual directors
+indeed had long been in every family of note. Her sophists
+were now seen haranguing crowds in every town from the Don
+to the Atlantic. The influence of the sophistic discipline in
+education will be felt in the schools of Gaul, when Visigoth
+and Burgundian will be preparing to assume the heritage of
+the falling Empire.<note place="foot">Sid. Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 6, § 5.</note> From the early years of the second
+century can be traced that great combined movement of the
+Neo-Pythagorean and Platonist philosophies and the renovated
+paganism which made a last stand against the conquering
+Church in the reigns of Julian and Theodosius. Philosophy
+became a religion, and devoted itself not only to the private
+direction of character and the preaching of a higher life, but
+<pb n="5"/><anchor id="Pg5"/>to the justification and unification of pagan faith. In spite
+of its rather bourgeois ideal of material enjoyment and splendour,
+the Antonine age, at least in its higher minds, was
+an age of a purified moral sense and religious intuition. It
+was, indeed, an age of spiritual contradictions. On the one
+hand, not only was the old ritual of classical polytheism
+scrupulously observed even by men like Plutarch and M.
+Aurelius, but religious imagination was appropriating the
+deities of every province, almost of every canton, embraced by
+the Roman power. At the same time the fecundity of superstition
+created hosts of new divinities and genii who peopled
+every scene of human life.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> iii. Ind. p. 27 sq.</note> On the other hand syncretism
+was in the air. Amid all the confused ferment of devotion
+a certain principle of unity and comprehension was asserting
+itself, even in popular religion. The old gods were losing
+their sharp-cut individuality; the provinces and attributes of
+kindred deities tended to fade into one another, and melt into
+the conception of a single central Power. The religions of Egypt
+and the remoter East, with their inner monotheism, supported
+by the promise of sacramental grace and the hope of immortality,
+came in to give impetus to the great spiritual movement.
+The simple peasant might cling to his favourite god, as his
+Neapolitan descendant has his favourite saint. But an Apuleius,
+an Apollonius, or an Alexander Severus<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Apol.</hi> c. 55, sacrorum pleraque
+    initia in Graecia participavi, et
+    plurimos ritus ... didici; Lamprid.
+    <hi rend="italic">Alex. Sev.</hi> c. 29, 43.</note> sought a converging
+spiritual support in the gods and mysteries of every clime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Platonist philosophy strove to give rational expression to
+this movement, to reconcile cultivated moral sense with the
+worships of the past, to find a bond between the vagrant religious
+fancies of the crowd and the remote esoteric faith of the
+philosophic few. On the higher minds, from whatever quarter,
+a spiritual vision had opened, which was strange to the ancient
+world, the vision of One who is no longer a mere Force, but
+an infinite Father, Creator, Providence and Guardian, from
+whom we come, to whom we go at death. Prayer to Him is a
+communion, not the means of winning mere temporal blessings;
+He is not gratified by bloody sacrifice; He is dishonoured by
+immoral legend.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> viii.; xi. § 3;
+    xvii.; D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. § 83.</note> He cannot be imaged in gold or ivory graven
+<pb n="6"/><anchor id="Pg6"/>by the most cunning hand, although the idealised human form
+may be used as a secondary aid to devotion. These were some
+of the religious ideas current among the best men, Dion Chrysostom,
+Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, which the Neo-Platonic
+school strove to harmonise with the rites and legends of the
+past. The means by which they tried to do so, and the measure
+of their success, it is one purpose of this book to explain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Antonine age saw for a brief space the dream of Plato
+realised, when kings should be philosophers, and philosophers
+should be kings. Philosophy had given up its detached and
+haughty reserve, or outspoken opposition to imperial power.
+In the second century it lent all its forces to an authority
+which in the hands of the Antonine princes seemed to answer
+to its ideals.<note place="foot">Renan, <hi rend="italic">Les Évangiles</hi>, p. 382.</note> The votaries of the higher life, after their
+persecution under the last cruel despot, rose to an influence
+such as they had never wielded save in the Pythagorean aristocracies
+of southern Italy. Philosophy now began to inspire
+legislation and statesmanship.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iv. 420; Denis,
+<hi rend="italic">Idées Morales</hi>, ii. 200 sqq.; Renan, <hi rend="italic">M.
+Aurèle</hi>, p. 24 sqq.</note> Its professors were raised to
+the consulship and great prefectures. Above all, it was
+incarnate, as it were, in the ruler who, whatever we may think
+of his practical success, brought to the duties of government a
+loftiness of spiritual detachment which has never been equalled
+by any ruler of men. Whether there was any corresponding
+elevation of conduct or moral tone in the mass of men may
+well be doubted by any one who has studied the melancholy
+thoughts of the saintly emperor. Lucian and M. Aurelius
+seem to be as hopeless about the moral condition of humanity
+as Seneca and Petronius were in the darkest days of Nero’s
+tyranny.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Som.</hi> 32; <hi rend="italic">Traj.</hi> 15; <hi rend="italic">Charon</hi>,
+15, 20; <hi rend="italic">Tim.</hi> 14, 36; M. Aurel. v. 10,
+33: ix. 29; 34; x. 19: cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">De
+Ira</hi>, ii. 8; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> ii. 17, 20, 22;
+Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 88.</note> Such opinions, indeed, have little scientific value.
+They are often the result of temperament and ideals, not of
+trustworthy observation. But it would be rash to assume
+that heightened religious feeling and the efforts of philosophy
+had within a hundred years worked any wide-spread transformation
+of character. It was, however, a great step in
+advance that the idea of the principate, expounded by Seneca,
+and the younger Pliny, as a clement, watchful, infinitely
+<pb n="7"/><anchor id="Pg7"/>laborious earthly providence had been realised since the accession
+of Trajan. It was easier to be virtuous in the reign
+of M. Aurelius than in the reign of Nero, and it was especially
+easier for a man of the highest social grade. The
+example of the prince for good or evil must always powerfully
+influence the class who are by birth or office nearest to the
+throne. And bad example will be infinitely more corrupting
+when it is reinforced by terror. A fierce, capricious tyranny
+generates a class of vices which are perhaps more degrading
+to human dignity, and socially more dangerous, than the
+vices of the flesh. And the reign of such men as Caligula,
+Nero, and Domitian not only stimulated the grossness of self-indulgence,
+but superadded the treachery and servility of
+cowardice. In order to appreciate fully what the world had
+gained by the mild and temperate rule of the princes of the
+second century, it is necessary to revive for a moment the
+terrors of the Claudian Caesars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The power of Seneca as a moral teacher has, with some
+reservations, been recognised by all the ages since his time.
+But equal recognition has hardly been given to the lurid
+light which he throws, in random flashes, on the moral conditions
+of his class under the tyranny of Caligula and Nero.
+This may be due, perhaps, to a distrust of his artificial
+declamation, and that falsetto note which he too often strikes
+even in his most serious moments. Yet he must be an unsympathetic
+reader who does not perceive that, behind the
+moral teaching of Seneca, there lies an awful experience, a lifelong
+torture, which turns all the fair-seeming blessings of
+life, state and luxury and lofty rank, into dust and ashes.
+There is a haunting shadow over Seneca which never
+draws away, which sometimes deepens into a horror of darkness.
+In whatever else Seneca may have been insincere, his
+veiled references to the terrors of the imperial despotism
+come from the heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca’s life almost coincides with the Julio-Claudian
+tyranny. He had witnessed in his early manhood the gloomy,
+suspicious rule of Tiberius, when no day passed without an
+execution,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, § 22; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> lxi. nullus a poena hominum cessavit dies.</note> when every accusation was deadly, when it might be
+fatal for a poet to assail Agamemnon in tragic verse, or for a
+<pb n="8"/><anchor id="Pg8"/>historian to praise Brutus and Cassius,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> 61; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 34.</note> when the victims of
+delation in crowds anticipated the mockery of justice by self-inflicted
+death, or drank the poison even in the face of the
+judges. Seneca incurred the jealous hatred of Caligula by a
+too brilliant piece of rhetoric in the Senate,<note place="foot">D. Cass. lix. 19; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> 53.</note> and he has taken
+his revenge by damning the monster to eternal infamy.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Nec. Inj.</hi> xviii.; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi>
+50; Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, i. 20; iii. 18; <hi rend="italic">De
+Tranq.</hi> xiv.; <hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> xiii. xvii.; <hi rend="italic">Ad
+Helv.</hi> x. 4; <hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi> iv. 31.</note> Not
+even in Suetonius is there any tale more ghastly than that told
+by Seneca of the Roman knight whose son had paid with his
+life for a foppish elegance which irritated the tyrant.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 33.</note> On the
+evening of the cruel day, the father received an imperial command
+to dine. With a face betraying no sign of emotion, he
+was compelled to drink to the Emperor, while spies were eagerly
+watching every expression of his face. He bore the ordeal
+without flinching. <q>Do you ask why? He had another son.</q>
+Exiled to Corsica in the reign of Claudius,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 8; D. Cass. 60. 8;
+61. 10; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> 13. 2; <hi rend="italic">Ad
+Helv.</hi> 15. 2.</note> Seneca bore the
+sentence with less dignity than he afterwards met death. He
+witnessed the reign of the freedmen, the infamies of Messalina,
+the intrigues of Agrippina, and the treacherous murder of
+Britannicus; he knew all the secrets of that ghastly court.
+Installed as the tutor of the young Nero, he doubtless, if we
+may judge by the treatise on Clemency, strove to inspire him
+with a high ideal of monarchy as an earthly providence. He
+probably at the same time discovered in the son of Cn.
+Domitius Ahenobarbus and Agrippina the fatal heritage of a
+vicious blood and the omens of a ghastly reign. The young
+tiger was held on leash for the famous quinquennium by
+Burrus and Seneca. It seemed only the device of a divine
+tragic artist, by a brief space of calm and innocence, to deepen
+the horror of the catastrophe. And, for Seneca, life darkened
+terribly towards its close. With high purposes for the commonweal,
+he had probably lent himself to doubtful means of
+humouring his wayward pupil, perhaps even to crime.<note place="foot">For the worst charges <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> D. Cass.
+lxii. 2; lxi. 10; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> 13. 13.</note> His
+enormous wealth, whether won from imperial favour, or gained
+by usury and extortion,<note place="foot">D. Cass. <hi rend="italic">l.c.</hi>; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> 13. 42.
+But cf. Seneca’s reply, Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> 14.
+53, and 15. 62.</note> his power, his literary brilliance, aroused
+<pb n="9"/><anchor id="Pg9"/>a host of enemies, who blackened his character and excited the
+fears or the jealousy of Nero. He had to bear the unenviable
+distinction of a possible pretender to the principate.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> 15. 65.</note> He withdrew
+into almost monastic seclusion, and even offered to resign
+his wealth.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Frag.</hi> 108.</note> He strove to escape the evil eyes of calumny and
+imperial distrust by the most abject renunciation. But he could
+not descend from the precipice on which he hung; his elevation
+was a crucifixion.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> x. 6.</note> Withdrawn to a remote corner of his
+palace, which was crowded with the most costly products of the
+East, and surrounded by gardens which moved the envy of
+Nero,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 18; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> 14. 52.</note> the fallen statesman sought calm in penning his counsels
+to Lucilius, and bracing himself to meet the stealthy stroke
+which might be dealt at any moment.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 70, § 14; 88, § 17; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 77;
+<hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, iii. 15; <hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi> 5, § 4.</note> In reading many
+passages of Seneca, you feel that you are sitting in some
+palace on the Esquiline, reading the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi> or listening to the
+consolations of a Stoic director, while the centurion from
+the palace may at any moment appear with the last fateful
+order.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca, like Tacitus, has a remarkable power of moral
+diagnosis. He had acquired a profound, sad knowledge of
+the pathology of the soul. It was a power which was almost
+of necessity acquired in that time of terror and suspicion,
+when men lived in daily peril from seeming friends. There
+never was a period when men more needed the art of reading
+the secrets of character. Nor was there ever a time when
+there were greater facilities for the study. Life was sociable
+almost to excess. The Roman noble, unless he made himself
+deliberately a recluse, spent much of his time in those social
+meeting-places of which we hear so often,<note place="foot">Mart. vii. 27, 11; Juv. xi. 4; Sen.
+<hi rend="italic">Dial.</hi> 1, 5, 4; <hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi> vii. 22, 2;
+Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. 281.</note> where gossip and
+criticism dealt mercilessly with character, where keen wits
+were pitted against one another, sometimes in a deadly game,
+and where it might be a matter of life or death to pierce the
+armour of dissimulation.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 33; <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> xii. 7.</note> Seneca had long shone in such circles.
+In his later years, if he became a recluse, he was also a spiritual
+director. And his Letters leave little doubt that many a restless
+or weary spirit laid bare its secret misery to him, for advice or
+<pb n="10"/><anchor id="Pg10"/>consolation. Knowing well the wildest excesses of fantastic
+luxury, all the secrets of the philosophic confessional, the
+miseries of a position oscillating between almost princely state
+and monastic renunciation, the minister of Nero, with a self-imposed
+cure of souls, had unrivalled opportunities of ascertaining
+the moral condition of his class.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca is too often a rhetorician, in search of striking
+effects and vivid phrase. And, like all rhetoricians, he is often
+inconsistent. At times he appears to regard his own age as
+having reached the very climax of insane self-indulgence. And
+yet, in a calmer mood, he declares his belief that the contemporaries
+of Nero were not worse than the contemporaries of
+Clodius or Lucullus, that one age differs from another rather
+in the greater prominence of different vices.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 97, § 2; Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi>
+i. 10, § 1. Cf. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 8; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95,
+§ 20; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 115, § 10.</note> His pessimism
+extends to all ages which have been allured by the charm of
+ingenious luxury from the simplicity of nature. In the fatal
+progress of society, the artificial multiplication of human wants
+has corrupted the idyllic innocence of the far-off Eden, where
+the cope of heaven or the cave was the only shelter, and the
+skin-clad savage made his meal on berries and slaked his thirst
+from the stream.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 90, § 42.</note> It is the revolutionary dream of Rousseau,
+revolting from the oppression and artificial luxury of the <hi rend="italic">Ancien
+Régime</hi>. Seneca’s state of nature is the antithesis of the
+selfish and materialised society in which he lived. Our early
+ancestors were not indeed virtuous in the strict sense.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 90, § 40.</note> For
+virtue is the result of struggle and philosophic guidance. But
+their instincts were good, because they were not tempted.
+They enjoyed in common the natural bounties of mother earth.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 90, § 38.</note>
+Their fierceness of energy spent itself on the beasts of the
+chase. They lived peaceably in willing obedience to the
+gentle paternal rule of their wisest and best, with no lust of
+gold or power, no jealousy and hatred, to break a contented
+and unenvious harmony. The great disturbers of this primeval
+peace were avarice and luxury.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 90, § 5, § 36, avaritia atque
+luxuria dissociavere mortales.</note> The moment when the first
+nugget flashed its baleful temptations on the eyes of the
+roaming hunter was the beginning of all human guilt and
+misery.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 90, § 12.</note> Selfish greed, developing into insatiable appetite, is
+<pb n="11"/><anchor id="Pg11"/>the original sin which turned the garden into wilderness.
+In individualist cravings men lost hold on the common wealth
+of nature. Luxury entered on its downward course, in the
+search for fresh food and stimulus for appetite, till merely superfluous
+pleasures led on to those from which untainted nature
+recoils.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 90, § 19.</note> Man’s boasted conquests over nature, the triumphs
+of his perverted ingenuity, have bred an illimitable lust,
+ending in wearied appetite; they have turned those who were
+brothers into cunning or savage beasts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such a theory of society has, of course, no value or interest
+in itself. Its interest, like that of similar <hi rend="italic">à priori</hi> dreams,
+lies in the light which it sheds on the social conditions which
+gave it birth. Like the Germany of Tacitus, and the Social
+Contract of Rousseau, Seneca’s theory of the evolution of
+humanity is an oblique satire on the vices of his own age.
+And not even in Tacitus or Suetonius are to be found more
+ghastly revelations of a putrescent society, and the ennui and
+self-loathing which capricious sensualism generates in spirits
+born for something higher. It may be worth noting that the
+vices which Seneca treats as most prevalent and deadly are
+not so much those of sexual impurity, although they were rife
+enough in his day, as those of greed, gross luxury, treacherous
+and envious cruelty, the weariness of jaded nerves and exhausted
+capacities of indulgence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Brev. Vit.</hi> xvi. tarde ire horas
+    queruntur; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 77; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 104, § 15.</note> It is not the coarse vices of the
+Suburra, but the more deadly and lingering maladies of the
+Quirinal and the Esquiline which he is describing. There is a
+universal lust of gold:<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 115, § 10; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, iii. 33; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+    60; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 74.</note> riches are the one ornament and stay
+of life. And yet in those days a great fortune was only a
+splendid servitude.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> vi. 5, magna servitus est
+    magna fortuna.</note> It had to be guarded amid perpetual
+peril and envy. The universal greed and venality are worthily
+matched by the endless anxiety of those who have won the
+prize. Human life has become a scene of cruel and selfish
+egotism, a ferocious struggle of beasts of prey, eager for rapine,
+and heedless of those who go down in the obscene struggle.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 8.</note>
+It is an age when men glorify the fortunate and trample on
+the fallen. The cunning and cruelty of the wild beast on the
+throne have taught a lesson of dissimulation to the subject.
+    <pb n="12"/><anchor id="Pg12"/>At such a court it is a miracle to reach old age, and the feat
+can only be accomplished by accepting insult and injury with
+a smiling face.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 33.</note> For him who goes undefended by such
+armour of hypocrisy there is always ready the rack, the
+poisoned cup, the order for self-murder. It is characteristic
+of the detachment of Seneca that he sees the origin of this
+hateful tyranny. No modern has more clearly discerned the
+far-reaching curse of slavery.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 35, deinde idem de republica
+libertatem sublatam quereris
+quam domi sustulisti.</note> Every great house is a
+miniature of the Empire under a Caligula or Nero, a nursery
+of pretenders capable of the same enormities. The unchecked
+power of the master, which could, for the slightest faults, an ill-swept
+pavement, an unpolished dish, or a sullen look, inflict the
+most brutal torture,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 24, 32; Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 49,
+53; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 47, § 10; Juv. vi. 490;
+Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 18.</note> produced those cold hearts which gloated
+over the agony of gallant men in the arena, and applauded
+in the Senate the tyrant’s latest deed of blood. And the
+system of household slavery enervated character while it made
+it heartless and cruel. The Inscriptions confirm Seneca’s
+picture of the minute division of functions among the household,
+to anticipate every possible need or caprice of the master.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. 353; Marq.
+<hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 142; Wallon, <hi rend="italic">L’Escl. dans
+l’Ant.</hi> ii. 146.</note>
+Under such a system the master became a helpless dependent.
+There is real truth, under some ludicrous exaggeration, in the
+tale of a Roman noble, taking his seat in his sedan after the
+bath, and requiring the assurance of his slave that he was
+really seated.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Brev.</hi> <hi rend="italic">V.</hi> xiii.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is little wonder that on such lives an utter weariness
+should settle, the disgust of oversated appetite, which even the
+most far-fetched luxuries of the orient, the most devilish
+ingenuity of morbid vice, could hardly arouse. Yet these
+jaded souls are tortured by an aimless restlessness, which frets
+and chafes at the slow passing of the hours,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xvi. transilire dies volunt.</note> or vainly hopes
+to find relief in change of scene.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 104, § 15; 89, § 20; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 28.</note> The more energetic spirits,
+with no wholesome field for energy, developed into a class
+which obtained the name of <q>Ardeliones.</q> Seneca,<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> xii. § 7.</note> Martial,<note place="foot">Mart. ii. 7, 8 (<hi rend="italic">v.</hi> note on the word
+in Friedländer’s ed.); iv. 78.</note>
+and the younger Pliny<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 9; cf. Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi>
+i. 271.</note> have left us pictures of these idle
+<pb n="13"/><anchor id="Pg13"/>busybodies, hurrying round the forums, theatres, and great
+houses, in an idle quest of some trivial object of interest,
+waiting on patrons who ignore their existence, following some
+stranger to the grave, rushing pell-mell to the wedding of a
+much-married lady, or to a scene in the law courts, returning at
+nightfall, worn out with these silly labours, to tread the same
+weary round next day. Less innocent were they who daily
+gathered in the <hi rend="italic">circuli</hi>,<note place="foot">Juv. xi. 4; Mart. vii. 97; Quintil.
+vi. 3, 105; Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> xii. § 7;
+<hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> vii. 22, 2; <hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> i. 5, 4;
+Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 201 sqq.</note> to hear and spread the wildest rumours
+about the army on the frontier, to kill a woman’s reputation
+with a hint, to find a sinister meaning in some imperial order,
+or to gloat in whispers over the last highly-coloured tale of
+folly or dark guilt from the palace. It was a perilous enjoyment,
+for, with a smiling face, some seeming friend was probably
+noting every hint which might be tortured into an
+accusation before the secret tribunal on the Palatine, or
+angling for a sneer which might cost its author a fortune, or
+send him to the rocks of Gyarus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In reading Seneca’s writings, especially those of his last
+years, you are conscious of a horror which hardly ever takes
+definite shape, a thick stifling air, as it were, charged with
+lightning. Again and again, you feel a dim terror closing in
+silently and stealthily, with sudden glimpses of unutterable
+torture, of cord and rack and flaming tunic.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> xx.; <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> x.; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+94 <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi>; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 70.</note> You seem to see
+the sage tossing on his couch of purple under richly <anchor id="corr13"/><corr sic="pannelled">panelled</corr>
+ceilings of gold, starting at every sound in the wainscot,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 90, § 43, at vos ad omnem
+tectorum pavetis sonum et inter
+picturas vestras, si quid increpuit,
+fugitis attoniti.</note> as he
+awaits the messenger of death. It is not so much that
+Seneca fears death itself, although we may suspect that his
+nerves sometimes gave the lie to his principles. He often
+hails death as welcome at any age, as the deliverer who strikes
+off the chain and opens the prison door, the one harbour on a
+tempestuous and treacherous sea.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 70, § 14; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 88, § 17, malis
+paratus sum; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24, § 11; <hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi>
+ix. nullus portus nisi mortis; <hi rend="italic">Ad
+Marc.</hi> xx. mors quae efficit ut nasci non
+supplicium sit.</note> He is grateful for having
+always open this escape from life’s long torture, and boldly
+claims the right to anticipate the executioner. The gloom of
+Seneca seems rather to spring from a sense of the terrible con<pb n="14"/><anchor id="Pg14"/>trast between wealth and state and an ignominious doom which
+was ever ready to fall. And to his fevered eye all stately rank
+seems at last but a precipice overhanging the abyss, a mark for
+treacherous envy or the spitefulness of Fortune.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> x.</note> <q>A great
+fortune is a great servitude,</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> vi.</note> which, if it has been hard to
+win, is harder still to guard. And all life is full of these
+pathetic contrasts. Pleasure is nearest neighbour to pain; the
+summer sea in a moment is boiling in the tempest; the labour
+of long years is scattered in a day; there is always terror lurking
+under our deepest peace. And so we reach the sad gospel of
+a universal pessimism; <q>nothing is so deceitful and treacherous
+as the life of man.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> xxii. § 3.</note> No one would knowingly accept such a
+fatal gift, of which the best that can be said is that the torture
+is short, that our first moment of existence is the first stage to
+the grave.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> ix.; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 77; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> xxi. § 7.</note> Thus to Seneca, with all his theoretical indifference
+to things external to the virtuous will, with all his admiration
+for the invulnerable wisdom, withdrawn in the inner citadel of
+the soul, and defying the worst that tyrants or fortune could
+inflict, the <hi rend="italic">taedium vitae</hi> became almost unendurable. The
+interest of all this lies, not in Seneca’s inconsistency, but in the
+nightmare which brooded on such minds in the reign of Nero.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Something of the gloom of Seneca was part of the evil
+heritage of a class, commanding inexhaustible wealth and
+assailed by boundless temptations to self-indulgence, which
+had been offered by the conquest of East and West. The
+weary senses failed to respond to the infinite sensual seductions
+which surrounded the Roman noble from his earliest years.
+If he did not succeed in squandering his fortune, he often
+exhausted too early his capacity for healthy joy in life, and
+the nemesis of sated appetite and disillusionment too surely
+cast its shadow over his later years. Prurient slander was
+rife in those days, and we are not bound to accept all its
+tales about Seneca. Yet there are passages in his writings
+which leave the impression that, although he may have
+cultivated a Pythagorean <anchor id="corr14"/><corr sic="aceticism">asceticism</corr> in his youth,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, § 17. He adopted the
+Pythagorean discipline under the influence
+of Sotion, a pupil of Sextius,
+but gave it up on the proscription of
+suspected rites in the reign of Tiberius,
+cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> 36; cf. Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Die Phil.
+der Gr.</hi> iii. 1, 605.</note> he did not
+<pb n="15"/><anchor id="Pg15"/>altogether escape the taint of his time.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 62. 2; 61. 10. Zeller, iii.
+1, 641, n. 1.</note> His enormous
+fortune did not all come by happy chance or the bounty of
+the emperor.<note place="foot">D. Cass. <hi rend="italic">l.c.</hi></note> His gardens and palace, with all its priceless
+furniture, must have been acquired because at one time he
+felt pleasure in such luxuries. A soul so passionate in its
+renunciation may, according to laws of human nature, have
+been once as passionate in indulgence. In his case, as so
+often in the history of the Church, the saint may have had a
+terrible repentance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is probable, however, that this pessimism is more the
+result of the contrast between Seneca’s ideal of the principate,
+and the degradation of its power in the hands of his pupil
+Nero. Seneca may have been regarded once as a possible
+candidate for the throne, but he was no conspirator or revolutionary.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Tac. Ann.</hi> xv. 55.</note>
+He would have condemned the visionaries
+whose rudeness provoked even the tolerant Vespasian.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> 15.</note> In a
+letter, which must have been written during the Neronian
+terror, he emphatically repudiates the idea that the votaries of
+philosophy are refractory subjects. Their great need is quiet
+and security. They should surely reverence him who, by his
+sleepless watch, guards what they most value, just as, on a
+merchantman, the owner of the most precious part of the
+cargo will be most grateful for the protection of the god
+of the sea.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 73, § 3.</note> Seneca would have his philosophic brethren
+give no offence by loud self-assertion or a parade of superior
+wisdom.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 103, § 4.</note> In that deceitful dawn of his pupil’s reign, Seneca
+had written a treatise in which he had striven to charm him
+by the ideal of a paternal monarchy, in the consciousness of
+its god-like power ever delighting in mercy and pity, tender to
+the afflicted, gentle even to the criminal. It is very much the
+ideal of Pliny and Dion Chrysostom under the strong and
+temperate rule of Trajan.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 19; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> i. 72;
+D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> ii. § 77; iii. § 39; 70
+sqq.</note> Addressed to one of the worst
+emperors, it seems, to one looking back, almost a satire. Yet
+we should remember that, strange as it may seem, Nero,
+with all his wild depravity, appears to have had a strange
+charm for many, even to the end. The men who trembled
+<pb n="16"/><anchor id="Pg16"/>under the sombre and hypocritical Domitian, regretted the
+wild gaiety and bonhomie of Nero, and each spring, for
+years after his death, flowers were laid by unknown hands
+upon his grave.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> <anchor id="corr16"/><corr sic="23,">23;</corr> <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, 57; cf. Tac.
+<hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 7, ipsa aetas Galbae irrisui ac
+fastidio erat adsuetis juventae Neronis
+et imperatores forma ac decore corporis
+... comparantibus.</note> The charm of boyhood, with glimpses of
+some generous instincts, may for a time have deceived even
+the experienced man of the world and the brooding analyst of
+character. But it is more probable that the piece is rather a
+warning than a prophecy. Seneca had watched all the caprices
+of an imperial tyrant, drunk with a sense of omnipotence,
+having in his veins the maddening taint of ancestral vice,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> 50; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Nec. Inj.</hi>
+18; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, i. 20; ii. 33; iii. 18; <hi rend="italic">De
+Ben.</hi> ii. 12, 21.</note>
+with nerves unstrung by maniacal excesses, brooding in the vast
+solitudes of the Palatine till he became frenzied with terror,
+striking down possible rivals, at first from fear or greed,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> 38.</note> in the
+end from the wild beast’s lust for blood, and the voluptuary’s
+delight in suffering. The prophecy of the father as to the
+future of Agrippina’s son<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, 6.</note> found probably an echo in the fears
+of his tutor. But, in spite of his forebodings, Seneca thought
+the attempt to save him worth making. He first appeals to
+his imagination. Nero has succeeded to a vicegerency of God
+on earth.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 1, § 2, electusque sum
+qui in terris deorum vice fungerer.</note> He is the arbiter of life and death, on whose word
+the fortunes of citizens, the happiness or misery of whole
+peoples depend.  His innocence raises the highest hopes.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. § 5.</note>
+But the imperial task is heavy, and its perils are appalling.
+The emperor is the one bond by which the world-empire is
+held together;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 4, 1, ille vinculum per quod
+respublica cohaeret, ille spiritus vitalis.</note> he is its vital breath. Man, the hardest of all
+animals to govern,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 17, 1.</note> can only be governed long by love, and love
+can only be won by beneficence and gentleness to the frowardness
+of men. In his god-like place, the prince should imitate
+the mercy of the gods.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 7, 2.</note> Wielding illimitable power, he is yet
+the servant of all, and cannot usurp the licence of the private
+subject. He is like one of the heavenly orbs, bound by inevitable
+law to move onward in a fixed orbit, unswerving and
+unresting. If he relies on cruel force, rather than on
+clemency, he will sink to the level of the tyrant and meet
+<pb n="17"/><anchor id="Pg17"/>his proper fate.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 12.</note> Cruelty in a king only multiplies his
+enemies and envenoms hatred. In that fatal path there is no
+turning back. The king, once dreaded by his people, loses
+his nerve and strikes out blindly in self-defence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 13, 2, scelera enim sceleribus
+tuenda sunt.</note> The
+atmosphere of treachery and suspicion thickens around him,
+and, in the end, what, to his maddened mind, seemed at first a
+stern necessity becomes a mere lust for blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been suggested that Seneca was really, to some extent,
+the cause of the grotesque or tragic failure of Nero.<note place="foot">Renan, <hi rend="italic">L’Antéchr.</hi> p. 125.</note> The
+rhetorical spirit, which breathes through all Seneca’s writings,
+may certainly be an evil influence in the education of a ruler
+of men. The habit of playing with words, of aiming at
+momentary effect, with slight regard to truth, may inspire the
+excitable vanity of the artist, but is hardly the temper for
+dealing with the hard problems of government. And the
+dazzling picture of the boundless power of a Roman emperor,
+which Seneca put before his pupil, in order to heighten his
+sense of responsibility, might intoxicate a mind naturally prone
+to grandiose visions, while the sober lesson would be easily
+forgotten. The spectacle of <q>the kingdoms of the world and
+all the glory of them</q> at his feet was a dangerous temptation
+to a temperament like Nero’s.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 1, § 2, egone ex omnibus
+mortalibus placui electusque sum
+qui in terris deorum vice fungerer?</note> Arrogance and cruelty were
+in the blood of the Domitii. Nero’s grandfather, when only
+aedile, had compelled the censor to give place to him; he
+had produced Roman matrons in pantomime, and given gladiatorial
+shows with such profusion of cruelty, as to shock that
+not very tender-hearted age.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 4.</note> The father of the emperor, in
+addition to crimes of fraud, perjury, and incest, had, in the
+open forum, torn out the eye of a Roman knight, and deliberately
+trampled a child under his horse’s feet on the Appian
+Way.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 5.</note> Yet such is the strange complexity of human nature,
+that Nero seems by nature not to have been destitute of some
+generous and amiable qualities. We need not lay too much
+stress on the innocence ascribed to him by Seneca.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 1, § 5.</note> Nor need
+we attribute to Nero’s initiative the sound or benevolent measures
+which characterised the beginning of his reign. But he showed
+<pb n="18"/><anchor id="Pg18"/>at one time some industry and care in performing his judicial
+work.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 15; cf. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> c. viii.</note> He saw the necessity, in the interests of public health
+and safety, of remodelling the narrow streets and mean insanitary
+dwellings of Rome.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 16.</note> His conception of the Isthmian
+canal, if the engineering problem could have been conquered,
+would have been an immense boon to traders with the Aegean.
+Even his quinquennial festival, inspired by the Greek contests
+in music and gymnastic,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 12, instituit et quinquennale
+certamen primus omnium Romae more
+Graeco triplex, etc.</note> represented a finer ideal of such gatherings,
+which was much needed by a race devoted to the coarse
+realism of pantomime and the butchery of the arena. Fierce and
+incalculably capricious as he could be, Nero, at his best, had
+also a softer side. He had a craving for love and appreciation<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 20; 53; Renan, <hi rend="italic">L’Antéchr.</hi>
+p. 132.</note>;
+some of his cruelty was probably the revenge for the denial
+of it. He was singularly patient of lampoons and invective
+against himself.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 39.</note> Although he could be brutal in his treatment
+of women, he also knew how to inspire real affection, and perhaps
+in a few cases return it. He seems to have had something of
+real love for Acte, his mistress. His old nurses consoled him
+in his last hour of agony, and, along with the faithful Acte,
+laid the last of his race in the vault of the Domitii.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 50.</note> Nero
+must have had something of that charm which leads women in
+every age to forget faults, and even crimes in the men whom
+they have once loved. And the strange, lingering superstition,
+which disturbed the early Church, and which looked for his
+reappearance down to the eleventh century, could hardly have
+gathered around an utterly mean and mediocre character.<note place="foot">Renan, <hi rend="italic">L’Antéchr.</hi> p. 316.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Nero uttered the words <q>Qualis artifex pereo,</q><note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 49; Renan, <hi rend="italic">L’Antéchr.</hi>
+130. sqq.</note> he
+gave not only his own interpretation of his life, he also revealed
+one great secret of its ghastly failure. It may be admitted
+that Nero had a certain artistic enthusiasm, a real ambition to
+excel.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 24, 49, 52, 55; Tac.
+<hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 16; cf. Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p.
+179; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 265.</note> He painted with some skill, he composed verses not
+without a certain grace. In spite of serious natural defects,
+he took endless pains to acquire the technique of a singer.
+Far into the night he would sit in rapt enthusiasm listening to
+<pb n="19"/><anchor id="Pg19"/>the effects of Terpnus, and trying to copy them.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 53, c. 20, cf. c. 24.</note> His artistic
+tour in Greece, which lowered him so much in the eyes of the
+West, was really inspired by the passion to find a sympathetic
+audience which he could not find at Rome. And, in spite of
+his arrogance and vanity, he had a wholesome deference for the
+artistic judgment of Greece. Yet it is very striking that in the
+records of his reign, the most damning accusation is that he
+disgraced the purple by exhibitions on the stage. His songs
+to the lyre, his impersonation of the parturient Canace or the
+mad Hercules, did as much to cause his overthrow as his
+murders of Britannicus and Agrippina.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 36, 39;
+Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 15, 16; xv. 67, odisse
+coepi postquam parricida matris et
+uxoris, auriga et histrio et incendiarius
+extitisti; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 21; D. Cass.
+63. 9, 10.</note> The stout Roman
+soldier and the Pythagorean apostle have the same scorn
+for the imperial charioteer and actor. A false literary
+ambition, born of a false system of education, was the bane
+of Roman culture for many ages. The dilettante artist on
+the throne in the first century had many a successor in the
+literary arts among the grand seigneurs of the fifth. They
+could play with their ingenious tricks of verse in sight of
+the Gothic camp-fires. He could contend for the wreath at
+Olympia when his faithful freedman was summoning him
+back by the news that the West was seething with revolt.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 23.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nero’s mother had dissuaded him from the study of philosophy;
+his tutor debarred him from the study of the manly
+oratory of the great days.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 32.</note> The world was now to learn the
+meaning of a false artistic ambition, divorced from a sense
+of reality and duty. Aestheticism may be only a love of
+sensational effects, with no glimpse of the ideal. It may be
+a hypocritical materialism, screening itself under divine names.
+In this taste Nero was the true representative of his age. It
+was deeply tainted with that mere passion for the grandiose
+and startling, and for feverish intellectual effects, which a true
+culture spurns as a desecration of art.<note place="foot">Merivale, viii. p. 70 sq.; Schiller,
+<hi rend="italic">Gesch. der Röm. Kaiserzeit</hi>, i. p. 467.</note> Mere magnitude and
+portentousness, the realistic expression of physical agony, the
+coarse flush of a half-sensual pleasure, captivated a vulgar
+taste, to which crapulous excitement and a fever of the
+senses took the place of the purer ardours and visions of the
+<pb n="20"/><anchor id="Pg20"/>spirit.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 8, where the decay
+of artistic sense is traced to the grossness
+of evil living; at nos vino scortisque
+demersi ne paratas quidem artes
+audemus cognoscere.</note> Nero paid the penalty of outraging the conventional
+prejudices of the Roman. And yet he was in some respects
+in thorough sympathy with the masses. His lavish games
+and spectacles atoned to some extent for his aberrations of
+Hellenism. He was generous and wasteful, and he encouraged
+waste in others,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 11, 12.</note> and waste is always popular till the bill has
+to be paid. He was a <q>cupitor incredibilium.</q><note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> 15. 42.</note> The province
+of Africa was ransacked to find the fabled treasure of Dido.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 16. 1; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, 31.</note>
+Explorers were sent to pierce the mysterious barrier of the
+Caucasus, and discover the secret sources of the Nile. He had
+great engineering schemes which might seem baffling even to
+modern skill, and which almost rivalled the wildest dreams of
+the lunatic brain of Caligula.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 16, 31.</note> His Golden House, in a park
+stretching from the Palatine to the heights of the Esquiline,
+was on a scale of more than oriental magnificence. At last
+the master of the world was properly lodged. With colonnades
+three miles long, with its lakes and pastures and sylvan glades,
+it needed only a second Nero in Otho to dream of adding to
+its splendour.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 31; cf. <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, 7.</note> To such a prince the astrologers might well
+predict another monarchy enthroned on Mount Zion, with
+the dominion of the East.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 40.</note> The materialist dreamer was, like
+Napoleon I., without a rudimentary moral sense. Stained
+with the foulest enormities himself, he had a rooted conviction
+that virtue was a pretence, and that all men were equally
+depraved.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 29 <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi></note> His surroundings gave him some excuse for
+thinking so. He was born into a circle which believed chiefly
+in <q>the lust of the eye and the pride of life.</q> He formed a
+circle many of whom perished in the carnage of Bedriacum.
+With a treasury drained by insane profusion, Nero resorted to
+rapine and judicial murder to replenish it.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 32; D. Cass. 63. 17.</note> The spendthrift
+seldom has scruples in repairing his extravagance. The
+temples were naturally plundered by the man who, having no
+religion, was at least honest enough to deride all religions.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 56.</note>
+The artistic treasures of Greece were carried off by the votary
+of Greek art; the gold and silver images of her shrines were
+<pb n="21"/><anchor id="Pg21"/>sent to the melting-pot.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 32; D. Cass. 63. 11.</note> Ungrateful testators paid their due
+penalty after death; and delation, watching every word or
+gesture, skilfully supplied the needed tale of victims for plunder.
+It is all a hackneyed story. Yet it is perhaps necessary to
+revive it once more to explain the suppressed terror and
+lingering agony of the last days of Seneca.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The impressions of the Terror which we receive from
+Seneca are powerful and almost oppressive. A thick atmosphere
+of gloom and foreboding seems to stifle us as we turn
+his pages. But Seneca deals rather in shadowy hint and
+veiled suggestion than in definite statement. For the minute
+picture of that awful scene of degradation we must turn to
+Tacitus. He wrote in the fresh dawn of an age of fancied
+freedom, when the gloom of the tyranny seemed to have
+suddenly vanished like an evil dream. Yet he cannot shake
+off the sense of horror and disgust which fifteen years of
+ignoble compliance or silent suffering have burnt into his soul.
+Even under the manly, tolerant rule of Trajan, he hardly seems
+to have regained his breath.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agric.</hi> c. 3, sic ingenia
+studiaque oppresseris facilius quam
+revocaveris.</note> He can scarcely believe that
+the light has come at last. His attitude to the tyranny is
+essentially different from that of Seneca. The son of the
+provincial from Cordova views the scene rather as the cosmopolitan
+moralist, imperilled by his huge fortune and the
+neighbourhood of the terrible palace. Tacitus looks at it as
+the Roman Senator, steeped in all old Roman tradition, caring
+little for philosophy, but caring intensely for old Roman dignity
+and the prestige of that great order, which he had seen humbled
+and decimated.<note place="foot">Peter, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. 53 sqq.</note> The feeling of Seneca is that of a Stoic monk,
+isolated in a corner of his vast palace, now trembling before
+the imperial jealousy, which his wealth and celebrity may
+draw down upon him, and again seeking consolation in
+thoughts of God and eternity which might often seem to
+belong to Thomas à Kempis. The tone of Tacitus is sometimes
+that of a man who should have lived in the age of the
+Samnite or the Carthaginian wars, before luxury and factious
+ambition had sapped the moral strength of the great aristocratic
+caste, while his feelings are divided between grim anger at
+<pb n="22"/><anchor id="Pg22"/>a cruel destiny, and scornful regret for the weakness and the
+self-abandonment of a class which had been once so great.
+The feelings of Seneca express themselves rather in rhetorical
+self-pity. The feelings of Tacitus find vent in words which
+sometimes veil a pathos too proud for effusive utterance, sometimes
+cut like lancet points, and which, in their concentrated
+moral scorn, have left an eternal brand of infamy on names
+of historic renown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More than forty years had passed between the date of
+Seneca’s last letters to Lucilius and the entry of Tacitus on his
+career as a historian.<note place="foot">Seneca died in 65 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> The
+<hi rend="italic">Histories</hi> of Tacitus were published
+<hi rend="italic">circ.</hi> 106-107; cf. Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 20;
+Peter, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. 42.</note> He was a child when Seneca died.<note place="foot">Tacitus was born about 55 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>
+(Peter, ii. 43; Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 35, 81;
+Momms. <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> p. 51). He was, perhaps,
+fifteen years older than Suetonius, and
+seven years older than Pliny.</note>
+His life is known to us only from a few stray glimpses in the
+Letters of Pliny,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 6, 20; iv. 13; vi. 9,
+16, 20; vii. 20, 33; viii. 7; ix. 10,
+14.</note> eked out by the inferences of modern
+erudition. As a young boy, he must have often heard the
+tales of the artistic follies and the orgies of Nero, and the
+ghastly cruelties of the end of his reign. As a lad of fifteen, he
+may have witnessed something of the carnival of blood and
+lust which appropriately closed the régime of the Julio-Claudian
+line. He entered on his <hi rend="italic">cursus honorum</hi> in the reign
+of Vespasian, and attained the praetorship under Domitian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 1; <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 11. This
+latter important passage fixes the date
+of his praetorship, 88 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>; cf. Teuffel,
+ii. p. 165 n. 6; Peter, ii. 43.</note>
+A military command probably withdrew him from Rome for
+three years during the tyranny of the last Flavian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Agric.</hi> c. 45.</note> He was
+consul suffectus in 97, and then held the proconsulship of Asia.
+It cannot be doubted from his own words that, as a senator,
+he had to witness tamely the Curia beset with soldiery, the
+noblest women driven into exile, and men of the highest rank
+and virtue condemned to death on venal testimony in the secret
+tribunal of the Alban Palace. His hand helped to drag
+Helvidius to the dungeon, and was stained with the blood of
+Senecio. He lived long enough under a better prince to
+leave an unfading picture of the tragedy of solitary and
+remorseless power, but not long enough to forget the horrors
+and degradation through which he had passed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The claim of Tacitus to have been uninfluenced by passion
+<pb n="23"/><anchor id="Pg23"/>or partiality<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 1, sed incorruptam fidem professis,
+neque amore quisquam et sine odio
+dicendus est; Nipperdey, <hi rend="italic">Einl.</hi> xxvi.</note> has been disputed by a modern school of critics.<note place="foot">Merivale, viii. 84, Schiller, <hi rend="italic">Gesch.
+der Röm. Kaiserzeit</hi>, i. 140, 586. According
+to Schiller, Tacitus has no research,
+no exactness of military or
+geographical knowledge, no true conception
+of the time. He is an embittered
+aristocrat and rhetorician. For a sounder
+estimate <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Peter, ii. 43, 60, 63; Nipperdey,
+<hi rend="italic">Einl.</hi> xxv. For the influence
+on the work of Suetonius of the Senatorial
+tradition, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 84;
+Peter, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. 69.</note>
+Sometimes, from a love of Caesarism and strong government,
+sometimes from the scholarly weakness for finding a new
+interpretation of history, the great historic painter of the
+Julio-Claudian despotism has been represented as an acrid
+rhetorician of the Senatorial reaction, a dreamer who looks
+back wistfully to the old Republic, belonging to one of those
+haughty circles of the old régime which were always in chronic
+revolt, which lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and poisonous
+gossip, and nourished its dreams and hatreds till fiction
+and fact melted into one another in gloomy retrospect.<note place="foot">Peter, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. 66.</note> He
+is the great literary avenger of the Senate after its long
+sanguinary conflict with the principate, using the freedom of
+the new order to blacken the character of princes who had
+been forced, in the interests of the world-wide empire, to fight
+and to crush a selfish and narrow-minded caste.<note place="foot">Merivale, viii. 95 sqq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The weakness of all such estimates of Tacitus lies in their
+failure to recognise the complex nature of the man, the
+mingled and crossing influences of training, official experience,
+social environment, and lofty moral ideals<note place="foot">Peter, ii. 46 sqq.</note>; it lies even more
+in a misconception of his aims as a historian. Tacitus was a
+great orator, and the spirit of the rhetorical school, combined
+with the force and dexterity of style which it could communicate,
+left the greatest Roman historians with a less
+rigorous sense of truth than their weakest modern successors
+often possess.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 188, 200.</note> No Roman ever rose to the Thucydidean
+conception of history. Moreover Tacitus, although originally
+not of the highest social rank,<note place="foot">His father was probably a Roman
+Eques, procurator in Belgium; Plin.
+<hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> vii. 16, 76.</note> belonged to the aristocratic
+class by sympathy and associations. Like Suetonius, he
+necessarily drew much of his information from the memories
+of great houses and the tales of the elders who had lived
+through the evil days.<note place="foot">Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 83, Peter, ii. 69
+sqq.</note> He acquired thus many of the
+<pb n="24"/><anchor id="Pg24"/>prejudices of a class which, from its history, and still more
+from its education, sought its ideals in the past rather than
+in the future. He mingled in those circles, which in every
+age disguise the meanness and bitterness of gossip by the
+airy artistic touch of audacious wit, polished in many social
+encounters. He had himself witnessed the triumph of delation
+and the cold cruelty of Domitian. He had shared in
+the humiliation of the Senate which had been cowed into
+acquiescence in his worst excesses. And the spectacle had
+inspired him with a horror of unchecked power in the hands
+of a bad man, and a gloomy distrust of that human nature
+which could sink to such ignoble servility.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 7; xv. 71; <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 45;
+Peter, ii. 62.</note> Yet on the
+other hand Tacitus had gained practical experience in high
+office, both as soldier and administrator, which has always a
+sobering effect on the judgment. He realised the difficulties
+of government and the unreasonableness of ordinary men.
+Hence he has no sympathy with a doctrinaire and chimerical
+opposition even under the worst government.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 12, 57; <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 6;
+<hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 42; Peter, ii. 47.</note> However much
+he might respect the high character of the philosophic
+enthusiasts of the day, he distrusted their theatrical defiance
+of power, and he threw his shield over a discreet reserve,
+which could forget that it was serving a tyrant in serving
+the commonwealth.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 42.</note> Tacitus may at times express himself
+with a stern melancholy bitterness, which might at first
+seem to mark him as a revolutionary dreamer, avenging an
+outraged political ideal. Such an interpretation would be a
+grave mistake, which he would himself have been the first to
+correct. The ideal which he is avenging is not a political,
+but a moral ideal.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 65, praecipuum munus
+annalium reor, ne virtutes sileantur,
+utque pravis dictis factisque ex posteritate
+et infamia metus sit; cf. Peter,
+ii. 46; Nipperdey, <hi rend="italic">Einl.</hi> xxvi.</note> The bitter sadness is that of the profound
+analyst of character, with a temperament of almost feverish
+intensity and nervous force. The interest of history to
+Thucydides and Polybius lies in the political lessons which
+it may teach posterity. Its interest to Tacitus lies in the
+discovery of hidden motives and the secret of character, in
+watching the stages of an inevitable degeneracy, the moral
+preparation for a dark, inglorious end. And the analyst
+<pb n="25"/><anchor id="Pg25"/>was a curiously vivid painter of character, the character of
+individuals, of periods, and of peoples. His portraits burn
+themselves into the imaginative memory, so that the impression,
+once seized, can never be lost. Tiberius and Claudius
+and Nero, Messalina and Agrippina, in spite of the most
+mordant criticism, will live for ever as they have been
+portrayed by the fervid imagination of Tacitus. Nor is he
+less searching and vivid in depicting the collective feeling
+and character of masses of men. We watch the alternating
+fury and repentance of the mutinous legions of Germanicus,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 39, 41.</note>
+or the mingled fierceness and sorrow with which they
+wandered among the bleaching bones on the lost battlefield
+of Varus,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 61, 62.</note> or the passion of grief and admiration with which
+the praetorian cohorts kissed the self-inflicted wounds of
+Otho.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 49.</note> Or, again, we follow the changing moods of the
+Roman populace, passing from anger and grief to short-lived
+joy, and then to deep silent sorrow, at the varying rumours
+from the East about the health of Germanicus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> ii. 82.</note> In Tacitus
+events are nearly always seen in their moral setting. The
+misery and shame of the burning of the Capitol by the
+Vitellians are heightened by the thought that the catastrophe
+is caused by the madness of civil strife.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iii. 72.</note> In the awful
+conflict which raged from street to street, the horror consists
+in the mixture of cruelty and licence. The baths and
+brothels and taverns are crowded at the very hour when the
+neighbouring ways are piled with corpses and running with
+blood; the rush of indulgence paused not for a moment; men
+seemed to revel in the public disasters. There was bloodshed
+enough in the days of Cinna and Sulla, but the world
+was at least spared such a carnival of lust.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 83.</note> Even in
+reporting or imagining the speech of Galgacus to his warriors
+on the Grampians,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 32.</note> even in the pictures of the German
+tribes,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Germ.</hi> 17, 19, 20, 23, 25.</note> the ethical interest is always foremost. The cruel
+terror of the prince, the effeminacy and abandoned adulation
+of the nobles, the grossness and fierceness of the masses,
+contrasted with the loyalty, chastity, and hardihood of the
+German clans, seem to have dimly foreshadowed to Tacitus
+<pb n="26"/><anchor id="Pg26"/>a danger from which all true Romans averted their eyes till
+the end.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Germ.</hi> 33, <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The key to the interpretation of Tacitus is to regard him
+as a moralist rather than a politician. And he is a moralist
+with a sad, clinging pessimism.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 3; ii. 38; iii. 72; Peter,
+ii. 62. Yet this should be qualified by
+such passages as <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 55; <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> i.;
+cf. Nipperdey, <hi rend="italic">Einl.</hi> xxvii.</note> He is doomed to be the
+chronicler of an evil time, although he will save from oblivion
+the traces and relics of ancient virtue.<note place="foot"> <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 65.</note> He has Seneca’s
+pessimist theory of evolution. The early equality and peace and
+temperance have been lost through a steady growth of greed
+and egotistic ambition.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 26.</note> It is in the past we must seek our
+ideals; it is from the past we derive our strength. With
+the same gloomy view of his contemporaries as M. Aurelius
+had,<note place="foot">M. Aurel. ix. 29, 34; x. 19.</note> he holds vaguely a similar view of cycles in human
+affairs.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 55; M. Aurel. vii.
+1; ix. 4; x. 23; ix. 28.</note> And probably the fairest hope which ever visited the
+mind of Tacitus was that of a return to the simplicity of a long
+gone age. He hailed the accession of Vespasian and of Trajan
+as a happy change to purer manners and to freedom of speech.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 3.</note>
+But the reign of Vespasian had been followed by the gloomy
+suspicious despotism of Domitian. Who could be sure about
+the successors of Trajan? Tacitus hardly shared the enthusiasm
+and exuberant hopes expressed by his friend Pliny in his
+<hi rend="italic">Panegyric</hi>. It was a natural outbreak of joy at escaping from
+the dungeon, and the personal character of Trajan succeeded
+in partially veiling the overwhelming force of the emperor
+under the figment of the freely accepted rule of the first citizen.
+Tacitus no doubt felt as great satisfaction as his friend at the
+suppression of the informers, the restored freedom of speech,
+the recovered dignity of the Senate, the prince’s respect for old
+republican forms and etiquette.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 35, 53, 54, 66; cf.
+Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 1.</note> He felt probably even keener
+pleasure that virtue and talent had no longer to hide themselves
+from a jealous eye, and that the whole tone of society
+was being raised by the temperate example of the emperor.
+But he did not share Pliny’s illusions as to the prince’s altered
+position under the new régime. The old Republic was gone
+for ever.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 1, omnem potentiam ad
+unum conferri pacis interfuit; cf. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi>
+i. 16; ii. 38.</note> It was still the rule of one man, on whose character
+<pb n="27"/><anchor id="Pg27"/>everything depended. He would never have joined Plutarch
+and Dion in exalting the emperor to the rank of vicegerent
+of God. With his experience and psychologic skill, he
+was bound to regard all solitary power as a terrible danger
+both to its holder and his subjects.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 47; <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 8, bonos
+imperatores voto expetere, qualescumque
+tolerare.</note> <q>Capax imperii, nisi
+imperasset</q> condenses a whole disquisition on imperialism.
+In truth, Tacitus, like many thoughtful students of politics,
+had little faith in mere political forms and names.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 46; vi. 42; iv. 33; iii.
+27; <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 38.</note> They are
+often the merest imposture: they depend greatly on the spirit
+and social tone which lie behind them. In the abstract,
+perhaps, Tacitus would have given a preference to aristocracy.
+But he saw how easily it might pass into a selfish despotism.<note place="foot">Peter, ii. 53; <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> vi. 42.</note>
+He had no faith in the people or in popular government, with
+its unstable excitability. He admitted that the conquests of
+Rome, egotistic ambition, and the long anarchy of the Civil
+Wars had made the rule of one inevitable. But monarchy
+easily glides into tyranny, and he accepts the Empire only as a
+perilous necessity which may be justified by the advent of a
+good prince. The hereditary succession, which had been grafted
+on the principate of Augustus, had inflicted on the world a
+succession of fools or monsters. The only hope lay in elevating
+the standard of virtue, and in the choice of a worthy successor
+by the forms of adoption.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 16; Peter, ii. 61.</note> The one had in his own time given
+the world a Domitian, and was destined within three generations
+to give it a Commodus. The other secured to it the peace and
+order of the age of which Tacitus saw the dawn.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> i.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The motive of Tacitus was essentially ethical, and his moral
+standard was in many respects lofty. Yet his standard was
+sometimes limited by the prejudices of his class. He cherished
+the old Roman ideal of <q>virtus</q> rather than the Stoic gospel
+of a cosmopolitan brotherhood of man.<note place="foot">Peter, ii. 48.</note> Like Pliny, he felt
+little horror at gladiatorial combats,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 76; quanquam <hi rend="italic">vili</hi>
+sanguine nimis gaudens. Cf. <hi rend="italic">Dial. de
+Or.</hi> 29; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 34, 1.</note> although he may have had
+a certain contempt for the rage for them. He had probably
+far less humane feelings than Pliny on the subject of slavery.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 43; <hi rend="italic">Germ.</hi> 20.</note>
+<pb n="28"/><anchor id="Pg28"/>While he admired many of the rude virtues of the Germans,
+he prayed Heaven that their tribal blood-feuds might last for
+ever.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Germ.</hi> 33. Cf. his contempt for
+the Christians and devotees of Eastern
+cults, <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> ii. 85; xv. 44.</note> He has all the faith of Theognis in the moral value of
+blood and breeding. He feels a proud satisfaction in recording
+the virtues of the scion of a noble race, and degeneracy from
+great traditions moves his indignant pity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 53; iv. 3; iii. 39: vi. 29;
+xii. 12; iii. 24; xvi. 16. Cf. Peter,
+ii. 51.</note> He sometimes
+throws a veil over the degenerates.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 14.</note> The great economic
+revolution which was raising the freedman, the petty trader,
+the obscure provincial, to the top, he probably regarded with
+something of Juvenal’s suspicion and dislike. The new man
+would have needed a fine character, or a great record of service,
+to commend him to Tacitus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> ii. 21; vi. 27; iv. 3.</note> But, with all these defects of
+hard and narrow prejudice, Tacitus maintains a lofty ideal of
+character, a severe enthusiasm for the great virtues which are
+the salt of every society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of the early nurture of Tacitus nothing is directly known.
+But we may be permitted to imagine him tenderly yet strictly
+guarded from the taint of slave nurses<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Or.</hi> 29.</note> by a mother who was
+as unspotted as Julia Procilla, the mother of his hero Agricola.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 4.</note>
+What importance he attached to this jealous care of a good
+woman, what a horror he had of the incitements to cruelty
+and lust which surrounded the young Roman from his cradle,
+are to be traced in many a passage coming from the heart. His
+ideal of youthful chastity and of the pure harmony of a single
+wedded union, reveals to us another world from the scene of
+heartless, vagrant intrigue, on which Ovid wasted his brilliant
+gifts. His taste, if not his principles, revolted against the coarse
+seductions of the spectacles and the wasteful grossness of the
+banquets of his time.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Germ.</hi> 19, saepta pudicitia agunt,
+nullis spectaculorum inlecebris ... corruptae;
+<hi rend="italic">De Or.</hi> 29.</note> He envies the Germans their freedom
+from these great corrupters of Roman character, from the lust
+for gold, and the calculating sterility which cut itself from
+nature’s purest pleasure, to be surrounded on the deathbed by a
+crowd of hungry, shameless sycophants. While Tacitus had a
+burning contempt for the nerveless cowardice and sluggishness
+which degraded so many of his order,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iii. 37; <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 7; xv. 57, 71.</note> he may have valued
+<pb n="29"/><anchor id="Pg29"/>even to excess, although it is hardly possible to do so, the
+virtues of the strenuous soldier. Proud submission to authority,
+proud, cold endurance in the face of cruel hardship and
+enormous odds, readiness to sacrifice even life at the call of
+the State, must always tower over the safe aspirations of
+an untried virtue. The soldier, though he never knows it,
+is the noblest of idealists. The ideal of Tacitus, although he
+sees his faults of temper,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 22.</note> was probably the character of his
+father-in-law, Agricola, grave, earnest and severe, yet with a
+mingled clemency, free from all vulgar avarice or ostentation
+of rank, from all poisonous jealousy, an eager ambitious warrior,
+yet one knowing well how to temper audacious energy with
+prudence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 40.</note> Tacitus would probably have sought his ideal
+among those grey war-worn soldiers on a dangerous frontier,
+half warrior and half statesman, just and clement, stern in
+discipline, yet possessing the secret of the Roman soldier’s love,
+the men who were guarding the Solway, the Rhine, and the
+Danube, while their brethren in the Senate were purchasing
+their lives or their ease by adulation and treachery. Yet, after
+all, Tacitus was too great for such a limited ideal. He could
+admire faith and courage and constancy in any rank.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 60.</note> With
+profound admiration and subdued pathos, he tells how the
+freedwoman Epicharis, racked and fainting in every limb with
+the extremity of torture, refused to tell the secret of the
+Pisonian conspiracy, and by a voluntary death shamed the
+knights and nobles who were ready to betray their nearest
+kin.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xv. 57.</note> The slave girls of the empress, who defiantly upheld
+her fair fame, under the last cruel ordeal, are honoured by a
+like memorial.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiv. 60.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The deepest feeling of Tacitus about the early Empire
+seems to have been that it was fatal to character both in
+prince and subject. This conviction he has expressed with the
+burning intensity of the artist. He could never have penned
+one of those laborious paragraphs of Suetonius which seem
+transcribed from a carefully kept note-book, with a lifeless
+catalogue of the vices, the virtues, and the eccentricities of the
+subject. For Tacitus, history is a living and real thing, not a
+matter of mere antiquarian interest. He has seen a single
+<pb n="30"/><anchor id="Pg30"/>lawless will, unchecked by constitutional restraints or ordinary
+human feeling, making sport of the lives and fortunes of men.
+He has seen the sons of the proudest houses selling their
+ancestral honour for their lives, betraying their nearest and
+dearest, and kissing the hand which was reeking with innocent
+blood.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 71.</note> When he looked back, he saw that, for more than
+fifteen years, with brief intervals, virtue had been exiled or
+compelled to hide itself in impotent seclusion, and that power
+and wealth had been the reward of perfidy and grovelling self-abasement.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 2.</note>
+The brooding silence of those years of humiliating
+servitude did not extinguish the faith of Tacitus in human
+virtue, but it almost extinguished his faith in a righteous God.
+Tacitus is no philosopher, with either a reasoned théodicée or a
+consistent repudiation of faith.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 4, memoria teneo solitum
+ipsum narrare se studium philosophiae
+acrius, ultra quam concessum Romano
+ac Senatori, exhausisse. Cf. Fabian,
+<hi rend="italic">Quid Tac. de num. Div. judicaverit</hi>,
+p. 1.</note> He uses popular language
+about religion, and often speaks like an old Roman in all things
+touching the gods.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> v. 5; Nipperdey, <hi rend="italic">Einl.</hi> xiv.</note> He is, moreover, often as credulous as
+he is sceptical in his treatment of omens and oracles.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 22; ii. 78; i. 86. But cf.
+<hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 43, 64; xiv. 32; xv. 8;
+<hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 3; ii. 50; and Fabian, pp. <anchor id="corr30"/><corr sic="17">17,</corr>
+19.</note> But,
+with all his intense faith in goodness, the spectacle of the world
+of the Caesars has profoundly shaken his trust in the Divine
+justice. Again and again, he attributes the long agony of the
+Roman world to mere chance or fate,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 20; cf. vi. 22.</note> or the anger of Heaven,
+as well as to the madness of men.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 38.</note> Sometimes he almost
+denies a ruling power which could permit the continuance of
+the crimes of a Nero.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 12; Fabian, p. 23.</note> Sometimes he grimly notes its impartial
+treatment of the good and the evil.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 33, aequitate deum erga
+bona malaque documenta.</note> And again, he speaks of
+the Powers who visit not to protect, but only to avenge. And
+so, by a curse like that which haunted the Pelopidae in tragic
+legend, the monarchy, cradled in ambition and civil strife, has
+gone on corrupting and corrupted. The lust of despotic power
+which Tacitus regards as the fiercest and most insatiable of
+human passions, has been intensified by the spectacle of a
+monarchy commanding, with practically unlimited sway, the
+resources and the fortunes of a world.</p>
+
+<pb n="31"/><anchor id="Pg31"/>
+
+<p>
+It was a dazzling prize, offering frightful temptations both
+to the holder and to possible rivals and pretenders. The day
+on which a Nero or a Caligula awoke to all the possibilities of
+power was a fateful one. And Tacitus, with the instinct of
+the tragic artist, has painted the steady, fatal corruption of
+a prince’s character by the corroding influence of absolute and
+solitary sway. Of all the Caesars down to his time, the
+only one who changed for the better was the homely Vespasian.
+In Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, some of this deterioration of
+character must be set down to the morbid strain in the Julio-Claudian
+line, with its hard and cruel pride, and its heritage
+of a tainted blood, of which Nero’s father knew the secret so
+well. Much was also due to the financial exhaustion which,
+in successive reigns, followed the most reckless waste. It
+would be difficult to say whether the emperors or their nobles
+were the most to blame for the example of spendthrift extravagance
+and insane luxury. Two generations before the foundation
+of the Empire, the passion for profusion had set in, which,
+according to Tacitus, raged unchecked till the accession of
+Vespasian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 55; cf. xvi. 5.</note> Certainly, the man who would spend £3000 on
+a myrrhine vase, £4000 on a table of citrus-wood, or £40,000
+on a richly wrought carpet from Babylon, had little to learn
+even from Nero.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. pp. 80, 81.</note> Yet the example of an emperor must always
+be potent for good or evil. We have the testimony of Pliny
+and Claudian,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 45; Claudian, <hi rend="italic">In
+Cons. Hon.</hi> 299, componitur orbis Regis
+ad exemplum.</note> separated by an interval of three hundred years,
+that the world readily conforms its life to that of one man,
+if that man is head of the State. Nero’s youthful enthusiasm
+for declamation gave an immense impulse to the passion for
+rhetoric.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">De Clar. Rhet.</hi> c. 1.</note> His enthusiasm for acting and music spread through
+all ranks, and the emperor’s catches were sung at wayside
+inns.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, 21; Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll.
+Tyan.</hi> iv. 39.</note> M. Aurelius made philosophy the mode, and the Stoic
+Emperor is responsible for some of the philosophic imposture
+which moved the withering scorn of Lucian. The Emperor’s
+favourite drug grew so popular that the price of it became
+almost prohibitory.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. 54.</note> If the model of Vespasian’s homely habits
+had such an effect in reforming society, we may be sure that
+<pb n="32"/><anchor id="Pg32"/>the evil example of his spendthrift predecessors did at least
+as much to deprave it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And what an example it was! The extravagance of the
+Claudian Caesars and the last Flavian has become a piece of
+historic commonplace. Every one has heard of the unguent
+baths of Caligula, his draughts of melted pearls, his galleys
+with jewel-studded sterns and gardens and orchards on their
+decks, his viaduct connecting the Palatine with the Capitoline,
+his bridge from Bauli to Puteoli, and many another scheme
+of that wild brain, which had in the end to be paid for in
+blood.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> 37; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi> x.</note> In a single year Caligula scattered in reckless waste
+more than £20,000,000.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> 37.</note> Nero proclaimed that the only use
+of money was to squander it, and treated any prudent calculation
+as meanness.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. 30.</note> In a brief space he flung away nearly
+£18,000,000. The Egyptian roses for a single banquet cost
+£35,000.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 27.</note> He is said never to have made a progress with less
+than a thousand carriages; his mules were shod with silver.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 30.</note>
+He would stake HS.400,000 on a single throw of the dice.
+The description of his Golden House is like a vision of lawless
+romance.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 31; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 42.</note> The successors of Galba were equally lavish
+during their brief term. Otho, another Nero, probably regarded
+death in battle as a relief from bankruptcy.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, 5, nihilque referre, ab
+hoste in acie, an in foro sub creditoribus
+caderet.</note> Within a very
+few months, Vitellius had flung away more than £7,000,000
+in vulgar luxury.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> c. 13.</note> Vespasian found the exhaustion of the
+public treasury so portentous<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> 16; D. Cass. 66. 2, 8, 10.</note> that he had to resort to unpopular
+economies and taxation on a great scale. Under
+Domitian, the spectacles and largesses lavished on the mob
+undid all the scrupulous finance of his father,<note place="foot">D. Cass. 67. 5; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> 12.</note> and Nerva had
+to liquidate the ruinous heritage by wholesale retrenchment,
+and the sale even of the imperial furniture and plate,<note place="foot">D. Cass. 68. 2,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">συστέλλων ὡς οἷόν τε τὰ δαπανήματα</foreign>.</note> as M.
+Aurelius brought to the hammer his household treasures, and
+even the wardrobe and jewels of the empress, in the stress of
+the Marcomannic war.<note place="foot">Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Aurel.</hi> c. 17, in foro
+divi Trajani auctionem ornamentorum
+imperialium fecit vendiditque aurea
+pocula et cristallina, etc.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the great imperial spendthrifts resorted to more
+<pb n="33"/><anchor id="Pg33"/>simple and primitive methods of replenishing their coffers.
+Self-indulgent waste is often seen linked with meanness
+and hard cruelty. The epigram of Suetonius on Domitian,
+<hi rend="italic">inopia rapax, metu saevus</hi>,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> iii.</note> sums up the sordid history of
+the tyranny. The cool biographer of Caligula, Nero, and
+Domitian, when in his methodical fashion, he has recorded
+their financial difficulties, immediately proceeds to describe
+the unblushing rapine or ingenious chicanery by which the
+needy tyrants annexed a coveted estate. The emperors now
+generally protected the provinces from plunder,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, iii.; <hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> v.; <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi>
+viii.; <anchor id="corr33"/><corr sic="Bossier">Boissier</corr>, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 170.</note> but they
+applied all the Verrine methods to their own nobles. It was
+not hard with the help of the sleuth hounds who always
+gather round the despot, to find plausible grounds of accusation.
+The vague law of majesty, originally intended to guard
+the security of the commonwealth, was now used to throw its
+protection around the sacrosanct prince in whom all the highest
+powers of government were concentrated.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 72; ii. 50; xiv. 48.
+For a clear account of this <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Boissier,
+<hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 165.</note> The slightest suspicion
+of disloyalty or discontent, the most insignificant act
+or word, which a depraved ingenuity could misinterpret, was
+worked up into a formidable indictment by men eager for
+their share of the plunder. To have written the memoir of a
+Stoic saint or kept the birthday of a dead emperor, to possess
+an imperial horoscope or a map of the world, to call a slave
+by the name of Hannibal or a dish by that of Lucullus, might
+become a fatal charge.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> x.; cf. xii. satis erat obici
+qualecunque factum dictumve adversus
+majestatem principis.</note> <q>Ungrateful testators</q> who had
+failed to remember the emperor in their wills had to pay
+heavily for the indiscreet omission.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xii.</note> The materials for such
+accusations were easily obtained in the Rome of the early
+Caesars. Life was eminently sociable. A great part of the day
+was spent at morning receptions, in the Forum, the Campus
+Martius, the barber’s or bookseller’s shops, or in the colonnades
+where crowds of fashionable idlers gathered to relieve the
+tedium of life by gossip and repartee. It was a city, says
+Tacitus, which knew everything and talked of everything.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 27; xiii. 6, in urbe
+sermonum avida; <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 91; Mart.
+v. 20; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. p. 280.</note>
+Never was curiosity more eager or gossip more reckless. Men
+were almost ready to risk their lives for a <hi rend="italic">bon mot</hi>. And in the
+<pb n="34"/><anchor id="Pg34"/>reign of Nero or Domitian, the risk was a very real one.
+The imperial espionage, of which Maecenas in Dion Cassius
+recognised at once the danger and the necessity,<note place="foot">D. Cass. 52. 37.</note> was an
+organised system even under the most blameless emperors
+It can be traced in the reigns of Nerva, Hadrian, and
+Antoninus Pius.<note place="foot">Mart x. 48, 21; cf. Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Chronologie
+der Epigr. Mart.</hi> p. 62; Friedl.
+<hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. p. 285; Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iv.
+13, 21, 5; Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> ix. 62.</note> But under the tyrants, voluntary informers
+sprang up in every class. Among the hundreds of
+slaves attached to a great household, there were in such times
+sure to be spies, attracted by the lure of freedom and a
+fortune, who might report and distort what they had observed
+in their master’s unguarded hours. Men came to dread possible
+traitors even among their nearest of kin, among their
+closest friends of the highest rank.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 69.</note> Who can forget the
+ignominy of those three Senators, one of them bearing the
+historic name of Cato, who, to win the consulship from
+Sejanus, hid themselves between the ceiling and the roof, and
+caught, through chinks and crannies, the words artfully drawn
+from the victim by another member of the noble gang? The
+seventh book of the <hi rend="italic">Life of Apollonius</hi> by Philostratus is a
+revelation of the mingled caution and truculence of the
+methods of Domitian. Here at least we have left the world
+of romance behind and are on solid ground. We feel around
+us, as we read, the hundred eyes of an omnipresent tyranny.
+We meet in the prison the magistrate of Tarentum who had
+been guilty of a dangerous omission in the public prayers, and
+an Acarnanian who had been guilty of settling in one of the
+Echinades.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> vii. 24.</note> A spy glides into the cells, to listen to the
+prisoners’ talk, and is merely regaled by Apollonius with a
+description of the wonders he has seen in his wanderings.
+When we are admitted to the secret tribunal on the Palatine,
+after Domitian has paid his devotion to Athene, we have before
+us a cruel, stealthy despot, as timid as he is brutally truculent.
+In spite of all scepticism about Philostratus, we are
+there at the heart of the Terror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Compared with this base espionage, even the trade of the
+delator becomes almost respectable. Like everything in
+Roman social organisation, delation had a long history, too
+<pb n="35"/><anchor id="Pg35"/>long to be developed within the space of this work. The
+work of impeachment, which might be wholesome and
+necessary under the Republic, in exposing the enormities of
+provincial government, became the curse of the Empire. The
+laws of Augustus for the restoration of social morality gave
+the first chance to the professional delator. The jealous,
+secretive rule of Tiberius welcomed such sinister support,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 72, 74, Crispinus formam
+vitae iniit quam postea celebrem
+miseriae temporum et audaciae hominum
+fecerunt, etc.; cf. iii. 25; Sen.
+<hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iii. 26; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> lxi.</note>
+and although the dark, tortuous policy of the recluse of
+Capreae might punish the excess of zeal in the informers, it
+was also ready to reward them for opportune displays of
+energy.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 20.</note> The open and daring tyranny of Caligula and Nero
+often dispensed with the hypocrisy of judicial forms of
+assassination. It was reserved for the last Flavian to revive
+the methods of Tiberius.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xx. praeter commentarios
+et acta Tiberii nihil lectitabat;
+Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 42, 48.</note> Domitian was at once timid and
+cruel. He was also a pedant who concealed from himself his
+own baseness by a scrupulous devotion to ancient forms even
+in religion. The obscene libertine, who chose the Virgin Goddess
+as his patroness,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xv.</note> could easily make the forms of old Roman
+justice a cloak for confiscation and massacre. In theory the
+voluntary accuser, without a commission from authority, was
+a discredited person. And successive emperors punished or
+frowned upon the delators of a previous reign.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 10; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 35;
+D. Cass. 68. 1; Jul. Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Ant. P.</hi>
+c. 7; id. <hi rend="italic">M. Aurel.</hi> c. 11; Meriv. vii.
+370.</note> Yet the
+profession grew in reputation and emolument. It is a
+melancholy proof of the degradation of that society that the
+delator could be proud of his craft and even envied and
+admired. Men of every degree, freedmen, schoolmasters,
+petty traders, descendants of houses as old as the Republic,
+men from the rank of the shoemaker Vatinius<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 34; iii. 66; <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi>
+iv. 42.</note> to a Scaurus,
+a Cato, or a Regulus, flocked to a trade which might earn a
+fabulous fortune and the favour of the prince. There must
+have been many a career like that of Palfurius Sura, who had
+fought in the arena in the reign of Nero, who had been
+disgraced and stripped of his consular rank under Vespasian,
+who then turned Stoic and preached the gospel of popular
+<pb n="36"/><anchor id="Pg36"/>government, and, in the reign of Domitian, crowned his career
+by becoming a delator, and attempting to found a juristic
+theory of absolute monarchy.<note place="foot">Schol. ad Juv. iv. 53; Duruy, iv.
+660.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The system of Roman education, which was profoundly
+rhetorical, became a hot-bed of this venal oratory. It nourished
+its pupils on the masterpieces of free speech; it inflamed their
+imaginations with dreams of rhetorical triumph. When they
+went forth into the world of the Empire, they found the only
+arena for displaying their powers to be the dull court of the
+Centumviri, or the hired lecture hall, where they might dilate
+on some frigid or silly theme before a weary audience. It was
+a tempting excitement to exert the arts learnt in the school of
+Quintilian in a real onslaught, where the life or liberty of the
+accused was at stake. And the greatest orators of the past
+had never offered to them such a splendid material reward.
+One fourth of the estate of the condemned man had been the
+old legal fee of the accuser.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 20.</note> But this limit was left far
+behind in the judicial plunder of the early Caesars. Probably
+in no other way could a man then so easily make himself a
+millionaire. The leading accusers of Thrasea and Soranus in
+the reign of Nero received each £42,000 as their reward.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xvi. 33; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 186.</note>
+These notorious delators, Eprius Marcellus and Vibius Crispus,
+accumulated gains reaching, in the end, the enormous amount
+of £2,400,000. The famous, or infamous, Regulus, after the
+most prodigal expenditure, left a fortune of half a million.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 20, 13; iv. 2; cf. Tac.
+<hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 42; Mart. vii. 31.</note>
+His career is a striking example of the arts by which, in
+a debased society, men may rise to fortune, and the readiness
+with which such a society will always forgive anything
+to daring and success. Sprung from an illustrious but
+ruined race,<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 193.</note> Regulus possessed shameless audacity and
+ruthless ambition,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 11, 22.</note> which were more valuable than birth and
+fortune. He had every physical defect for a speaker, yet he
+made himself an orator, with a weird power of strangling his
+victims.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 7; i. 20, 15.</note> He was poor, but he resolved to be wealthy, and he
+reached the fortune which he proposed to himself as his goal.
+He was vain, cruel, and insolent, a slave of superstition,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 11, 22; ii. 20.</note>
+<pb n="37"/><anchor id="Pg37"/>stained with many a perfidious crime. He was a peculiarly
+skilful and perfectly shameless adept in the arts of captation.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 20, 2.</note>
+Yet this cynical agent of judicial murder, who began his
+career in the reign of Nero, lived on in peace and wealth into
+the reign of Trajan. He even enjoyed a certain consideration
+in society.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 7.</note> The humane and refined Pliny at once detested and
+tolerated him. The morning receptions of Regulus, in his distant
+gardens on the Tiber, were thronged by a fashionable crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inner secret of the imperial Terror will probably
+always perplex the historian. The solution of the question
+depends, not only on the value which is to be attached to our
+authorities, but on the prepossessions and prejudices which are
+brought to their interpretation. To one critic Tacitus, although
+liable to the faults which spring from rhetorical training and
+fervid temperament, seems fairly impartial and trustworthy.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">E.g.</hi> Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 296; Peter,
+<hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. p. 65: Teuffel, § 328,
+15; Mackail, <hi rend="italic">Lat. Lit.</hi> p. 215.</note>
+Another treats the great historian as essentially a partisan who
+derived his materials from the memoirs and traditions of a class
+inflamed with reactionary dreams and saturated with a hatred
+of monarchy.<note place="foot">Schiller, i. pp. 140, 586; Meriv.
+viii. 89 sqq.</note> Some regard the tragedy of the early Empire as
+the result of a real peril from a senatorial conspiracy which
+perpetually surrounded the emperor. Others trace it to the
+diseased brains of princes, giddy with the sense of omnipotence,
+and often unstrung by vicious excesses, natures at once timorous
+and arrogant, anticipating danger by a maniacal cruelty
+which ended in creating the peril that they feared. Is it not
+possible that there may be truth in both theories? It
+may be admitted that there probably was never a powerful
+opposition, with a definitely conceived purpose of overthrowing
+the imperial system, as it had been organised by Augustus, and
+of restoring the republican rule of the Senate. It may be
+admitted that, while so many of the first twelve Caesars died a
+violent death, the violence was used to rid the world of a
+monster, and not to remodel a constitution; it was the
+emperor, not the Empire, that was hated. Yet these admissions
+need to be qualified by some reservations. The effect
+of the rhetorical character of Roman education in moulding the
+temper and ideals of the upper classes, down to the very end
+<pb n="38"/><anchor id="Pg38"/>of the Western Empire, has hardly yet been fully recognised.
+It petrified literature by the slavish imitation of unapproachable
+models. It also glorified the great ages of freedom and
+republican government; it exalted Harmodius and Aristogeiton,
+Brutus and Cassius, to a moral height which might
+suggest to generous youth the duty or the glory of imitating
+them. When a rhetor’s class, in the reign of Caligula or of
+Nero, applauded the fall of a historic despot, is it not possible
+that some may have applied the lesson to the reigning emperor?
+Although it is evident that philosophic debates on the three
+forms of government were not unknown, yet probably few ever
+seriously thought of a restoration of the republic. None but a
+maniac would have entrusted the nerveless, sensual mob of
+Rome with the destinies of the world. As a matter of fact,
+the mob themselves very much preferred the rule of a lavish
+despot, who would cater for their pleasures.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> x.; <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> lx.; D.
+Cass. 60. 1. On the assassination of
+Caligula, the Senate debated the question
+of abolishing the memory of the
+Caesars, and restoring the Republic;
+but the mob outside the temple of the
+Capitoline Jupiter demanded <q>one
+ruler</q> of the world.</note> But the Senate
+was still a name of power. In the three or four generations
+which had passed since the death of the first Caesar, men had
+forgotten the weakness and perfidy which had made senatorial
+government impossible. They thought of the Senate as the
+stubborn, haughty caste which had foiled the strategy of Hannibal,
+which had achieved the conquest of the world. The
+old families might have been more than decimated; new men
+of doubtful origin might have filled their places.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 25; xiii. 27.</note> But ancient
+institutions possess a prestige and power which is often independent
+of the men who work them. Men are governed largely
+through imagination and mere names. Thus the Senate remained
+an imaginative symbol of the glory of Roman power,
+down to the last years of the Western Empire. The accomplished
+Symmachus cherishes the phantasm of its power under
+Honorius. And although a Caligula or Nero might conceive a
+feverish hatred of the assembly which they feared,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xxx.; xxvi.; <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>,
+xxxvii. eumque ordinem sublaturum
+quandoque e republica...; cf. xliii.
+creditur destinasse senatum universum
+veneno per convivia necare....
+D. Cass. 63. 15, 17.</note> while they
+affected to despise it, the better emperors generally made almost
+a parade of their respect for the Senate.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 54, 62, 64; Spart.
+<hi rend="italic">Hadrian</hi>, 6, 7, § 4; 8, § 6.</note> The wisest princes had
+<pb n="39"/><anchor id="Pg39"/>a feeling that, although they might have at their back the devotion
+of the legions, and an immense material force, still it was
+wiser to conciliate old Roman feeling by a politic deference to a
+body which was surrounded by the aureole of antiquity, which
+had such splendid traditions of conquest and administration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Senate was thus the only possible rival of the Emperor.
+The question is, was the Senate ever a dangerous rival?
+The true answer seems to be that the Senate was dangerous
+in theory, but not in fact. There can be little doubt that, in
+the reigns of Caligula and Nero, there were men who dreamed
+of a restored senatorial power.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> x.</note> It is equally certain that the
+Senate was incapable of asserting it. Luxury, self-indulgence,
+and conscription had done their work effectually. There were
+many pretenders to the principate in the reign of Nero, and
+even some in the reign of Vespasian.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 66. 16; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xxv.</note> But they had not a
+solid and determined Senate at their back. The world, and
+even the Senate, were convinced that the Roman Empire
+needed the administration of one man. How to get the one
+man was the problem. Hereditary succession had placed only
+fools or monsters on the throne. There remained the old principle
+of adoption. An emperor, feeling that his end was
+approaching, might, with all his vast experience of the government
+of a world, with all his knowledge of the senatorial class,
+with no fear of offence in the presence of death,<note place="foot">See the speech of the dying Hadrian
+to the Senators, D. Cass. 69. 20.</note> designate one
+worthy of the enormous charge. If such an one came to the
+principate, with a generous desire to give the Senate a share of
+his burdens and his glory, that was the highest ideal of the
+Empire, and that was the ideal which perhaps was approached in
+the Antonine age. Yet, outside the circle of practical statesmen,
+there remained a class which was long irreconcilable. It has
+been recently maintained with great force that the Stoic opposition
+was only the opposition of a moral ideal, not the deliberate
+propaganda of a political creed.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> 102.</note> This may be true of some of
+the philosophers: it is certainly not true of all. Thrasea was a
+genial man of the world, whose severest censure expressed itself
+in silence and absence from the Senate,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 21; xv. 23; xiv. 48,
+id <hi rend="italic">egregio</hi> sub principe ... senatui
+statuendum disseruit.</note> who could even, on
+occasion, speak with deference of Nero. But his son-in-law,
+<pb n="40"/><anchor id="Pg40"/>Helvidius Priscus, seemed to exult in flouting and insulting a
+great and worthy emperor such as Vespasian.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xv.; cf. xiii., where
+Demetrius is guilty of similar rudeness;
+D. Cass. 66. 12.</note> And the life
+of Apollonius by Philostratus leaves the distinct impression
+that philosophy, in the reign of Nero and Domitian, was a
+revolutionary force. Apollonius, it is true, is represented by
+Philostratus as supporting the cause of monarchy in a debate
+in the presence of Vespasian.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> v. 35.</note> But he boasted of having
+been privy to conspiracies against Nero,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 3, 4.</note> and he was deeply
+involved with Nerva and Orfitus in a plot against Domitian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 8, 33; cf. D. Cass. 67. 18.</note>
+He was summoned before the secret tribunal to answer
+for speeches against the emperor delivered to crowds at
+Ephesus.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> vii. 9.</note> It may be admitted that the invective or scorn
+of philosophy was aimed at unworthy princes, rather than at
+the foundations of their power. Yet Dion Cassius evidently
+regards Helvidius Priscus as a turbulent agitator with dangerous
+democratic ideals,<note place="foot">D. Cass. 66. 12,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">βασιλείας τε ἀεὶ κατηγόρει καὶ δημοκρατίαν ἐπῄνει</foreign>.</note> and he contrasts his violence with the
+studied moderation, combined with dignified reserve, displayed
+by Thrasea in the reign of Nero. The tolerant Vespasian,
+who bore so long the wanton insults of the philosophers, must
+have come at length to think them not only an offence but a
+real danger when he banished them. In the first century
+there can be little doubt that there were members of the
+philosophic class who condemned monarchy, not only as a moral
+danger, but as a lamentable aberration from the traditions of
+republican freedom. There were probably some, who, if the
+chance had offered itself, might even have ventured on a
+republican reaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With a gloomy recognition of the realities of life,
+Domitian used to say that conspiracy against an emperor was
+never believed till the emperor was killed.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xxi.</note> Of the first twelve
+Caesars seven died a violent death. Every emperor from
+Tiberius to M. Aurelius was the mark of conspiracy. This
+was often provoked by the detestable character of the prince.
+But it sometimes sprang from other causes than moral disgust.
+The mild rule of Vespasian was generally popular; yet even he
+had to repel the conspiracy of Aelianus and Marcellus.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 66. 16.</note> The
+<pb n="41"/><anchor id="Pg41"/>blameless Nerva, the emperor after the Senate’s own heart,
+was twice assailed by risings organised by great nobles of
+historic name.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 68. 3.</note> The conspiracy of Nigrinus against Hadrian
+received formidable support, and had to be sternly crushed.<note place="foot">Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> 7, § 15.</note>
+M. Aurelius had to endure with sad resignation the open
+rebellion of Avidius Cassius.<note place="foot">Jul. Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant.</hi> 24, 25.</note> The better emperors, strong in
+their character and the general justice of their administration,
+might afford to treat such opposition with comparative calmness.
+But it was different in the case of a Nero or a Domitian. The
+conspiracy of Piso and the conspiracy of Saturninus formed, in
+each case, a climax and a turning-point. Springing from real
+and justified impatience, they were ruthlessly crushed and
+followed up with a cruel and suspicious repression which only
+increased the danger of the despot. <q>Scelera sceleribus
+tuenda</q> sums up the awful tale, in the words of Tacitus, <q>of
+the wrath of God and the madness of men.</q>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were many causes which rendered the tragedy of the
+early Empire inevitable. Probably the most potent was the
+undefined position of the prince and the dreams of republican
+power and freedom which for ages were cherished by the
+Senate. Carefully disguised under ancient forms, the principate
+of Augustus was really omnipotent, through the possession of the
+proconsular imperium in the provinces, and the tribunician prerogative
+at home.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Staatsr.</hi> ii. 787-821;
+Professor Pelham has given a luminous
+account of the Principate in <hi rend="italic">Encycl.
+Brit.</hi> vol. xx. p. 769.</note> In the last resort there was no legal means
+of challenging the man who controlled the legions, nominated
+the magistrates, and manipulated a vast treasury at his pleasure.
+The fiction of Augustus, that he had restored the Republic to
+the hands of the Senate and people, is unlikely to have deceived
+his own astute intellect.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> xxviii.</note> The hand which, of its grace
+could restore the <hi rend="italic">simulacra libertatis</hi>, might as easily withdraw
+them. The Comitia lost even the shadow of constitutional
+power in the following reign.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 15.</note> Henceforth the people is the
+army.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> x.; D. Cass. 60. 1;
+where the soldiers plainly close the
+impotent debates in the Senate, and by
+hailing Claudius as emperor.</note> The holders of the great republican magistracies are
+mere creatures of the prince and obedient ministers of his
+power. The Senate alone retained some vestiges of its old
+<pb n="42"/><anchor id="Pg42"/>power, and still larger pretensions and antiquarian claims. In
+theory, during a vacancy in the principate, the Senate was the
+ultimate seat of authority, and the new emperor received his
+prerogatives by a decree of the Senate. In the work of legislation,
+its decisions divided the field with the edicts of the
+prince,<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Röm. Staatsr.</hi> ii. 839.</note> and it claimed a parallel judicial power. But all this
+was really illusory. The working of such a system manifestly
+depends on the character and ideas of the man who for the time
+wields the material force of the Empire. And <q>the share of
+the Senate in the government was in fact determined by the
+amount of administrative activity which each emperor saw
+fit to allow it to exercise.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Pelham, <hi rend="italic">Encycl. Brit.</hi> xx. p. 779.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The half-insane Caligula had really a clearer vision of the
+emperor’s position than the reactionary dreamers, when he told
+his grandmother Antonia, <q><hi rend="italic">Memento omnia mihi in omnes licere</hi>.</q><note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xxix.</note>
+He did not need the lessons of Agrippa and Antiochus to teach
+him the secret of tyranny.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 59. 24.</note> Yet institutions can never be
+separated from the moral and social forces which lie behind
+and around them. The emperor had to depend on agents and
+advisers, many of them of social rank and family traditions
+equal to his own. He had by his side a Senate with a history
+of immemorial antiquity and glory, which cast a spell on the
+conservative imagination of a race which recoiled from any
+impiety to the past. Above all, he was surrounded by a
+populace which took its revenge for the loss of its free Comitia
+by a surprising licence of lampoon and epigram and mordant
+gossip and clamorous appeal in the circus and theatre.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 56. 1; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> vi. 13; Suet.
+<hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xiii.; Plut. <hi rend="italic">Galba</hi>, 17.</note> And
+even the soldiers, who were the sworn supporters of the prince,
+and who often represented better than any other class the tone
+of old Roman gravity and manly virtue, could sometimes make
+their Imperator feel that there was in reserve a power which
+he could not safely defy. Hence it was that, with the changing
+character of the prince, the imperial power might pass into a
+lawless tyranny, only to be checked by assassination, while again
+it might veil its forces under constitutional forms, adopt the
+watchwords of the Republic, exalt the Senate to a place beside
+the throne, and make even accomplished statesmen fancy for
+the time that the days of ancient liberty had returned.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="43"/><anchor id="Pg43"/>
+
+<p>
+Such a dream, not altogether visionary, floated before Pliny’s
+mind when he delivered his <hi rend="italic">Panegyric</hi> in the presence of Trajan.
+That speech is at once an act of thanksgiving and a manifesto
+of the Senate. The tone of fulsome extravagance is excused
+by the joy at escaping from a treacherous tyranny, which drove
+virtue into remote retreat, which made friendship impossible,
+which poisoned the security of household life by a continual
+fear of espionage.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 43, 44, 35.</note> The confidence which Pliny expresses in
+the majestic strength, mingled with modesty and self-restraint,
+which Trajan brought to the task of the principate, was amply
+justified. The overwhelming force of the emperor seemed,
+in the new age, to pass into the freely accepted rule of the
+great citizen.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 24, 62, 63, 66.</note> Pliny indeed does not conceal from himself
+the immense actual power of the emperor. He is the vicegerent
+of God, an earthly Providence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 80.</note> His power is not less
+than Nero’s or Domitian’s, but it is a power no longer wielded
+wildly by selfish or cruel self-will; it is a power inspired by
+benevolence, voluntarily submitting itself to the restraints of
+law and ancient sentiment.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 62, 63, 64.</note> Founded on service and virtue,
+it can fearlessly claim the loving support of the citizens,
+while it recalls the freedom of the old Republic. A prince who
+is hedged by the devotion of his people may dispense with
+the horde of spies and informers, who have driven virtue into
+banishment and made a crowd of sneaks and cowards. Free
+speech has been restored. The Senate, which has so long been
+expected to applaud with grovelling flattery the most trivial
+or the most flagitious acts of the emperor, is summoned to a
+share in the serious work of government.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 66.</note> A community of
+interest and feeling secures to it a free voice in his counsels,
+without derogating from his dignity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 72.</note> All this is expressed
+by a scrupulous observance of old republican forms. The
+commander of conquering legions, the Caesar, Augustus,
+Pontifex Maximus, has actually condescended to take the oath
+of office, standing before the consul seated in his chair!<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 64.</note> Here
+we seem to have the key to the senatorial position. They
+were ready to recognise the overwhelming power of the prince,
+if he, for his part, would only respect in form, if not in substance,
+the ancient dignity of the Senate. Tolerance, affability,
+<pb n="44"/><anchor id="Pg44"/>politic deference to a great name, seemed to Pliny and his
+kind a restoration of the ancient freedom, almost a revival of
+the old Republic. Fortunately for the world a succession of
+wise princes perceived that, by deference to the pride of the
+Senate, they could secure the peace of their administration,
+without diminishing its effective power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, even from Pliny’s <hi rend="italic">Panegyric</hi>, we can see that the
+recognition of the prerogatives, or rather of the dignity, of
+the Senate, the coexistence of old republican forms side by
+side with imperial power, depended entirely on the grace and
+tolerance of the master of the legions. Nothing could be more
+curious than Pliny’s assertion of the senatorial claims, combined
+with the most effusive gratitude to Trajan for conceding them.
+The emperor is only <hi rend="italic">primus inter pares</hi>, and yet Pliny, by
+the whole tone of his speech, admits that he is the master who
+may equally indulge the constitutional claims or superstitions
+of his subjects or trample on them. In the first century a
+power, the extent of which depended only on the will of the
+prince, and yet seemed limited by shadowy claims of ancient
+tradition, was liable to be distrustful of itself and to be
+challenged by pretenders. In actual fact, the prince was so
+powerful that he might easily pass into a despot; in theory
+he was only the first of Roman nobles, who might easily have
+rivals among his own class. Pliny congratulates Trajan on
+having, by his mildness and justice, escaped the terror of pretenders
+which haunted the earlier emperors, and was often
+justified and cruelly avenged.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 69.</note> In spite of the lavish splendour
+of Nero or Caligula, the imperial household, till Hadrian’s
+reorganisation, was still modelled on the lines of other great
+aristocratic houses. Nero’s suspicions were more than once
+excited by the scale of establishments like that of the Silani,
+by wealth and display like Seneca’s, by the lustre of great
+historic traditions in a gens like the Calpurnian.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 1; xiv. 52; xv.
+48.</note> The loyalty
+of Corbulo could not save him from the jealousy aroused by
+his exploits in eastern war.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 63.17,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πᾶσι γὰρ παρ’ αὐτῷ δημόσιον ἔγκλημα ἦν ἀρετή τε καὶ πλοῦτος καὶ γένος</foreign>: Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 76.</note> And the power of great provincial
+governors, in command of great armies, and administering
+realms such as Gaul or Spain or Syria, was not an altogether
+imaginary danger. If Domitian seemed distrustful of Agricola
+<pb n="45"/><anchor id="Pg45"/>in Britain, we must remember that he had in his youth seen
+Galba and Vindex marching on Rome, and his father concentrating
+the forces of the East for the overthrow of Vitellius
+in the great struggle on the Po.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The emperor’s fears and suspicions were immensely
+aggravated by the adepts in the dark arts of the East. The
+astrologers were a great and baneful power in the early Empire.
+They inspired illicit ambitions, or they stimulated them, and
+they often suggested to a timorous prince the danger of
+conspiracy. These venal impostors, in the words of Tacitus,
+were always being banished, but they always returned. For
+the men who drove them into temporary exile had the
+firmest faith in their skill. The prince would have liked to
+keep a monopoly of it, while he withdrew from his nobles the
+temptation which might be offered to their ambition by the
+mercenary adept.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> ii. 32; xii. 52; D. Cass.
+49. 43; D. Cass. 66. 10, 9; Suet <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> lxiii.</note> Dion Cassius and Suetonius, who were themselves
+eager believers in this superstition, never fail to record
+the influence of the diviners. The reign of Tiberius is full of
+dark tales about them.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> xiv. lxix.</note> Claudius drove Scribonianus into
+exile for consulting an astrologer about the term of his reign.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 52.</note>
+On the appearance of a flaming comet, Nero was warned by
+his diviner, Bilbilus, that a portent, which always boded ill
+to kings, might be expiated by the blood of their nobles.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxxvi.</note>
+Otho’s astrologer, Seleucus, who had promised that he should
+survive Nero,<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, iv.</note> stimulated his ambition to be the successor of
+Galba. Vitellius, as superstitious as Nero or Otho, cruelly
+persecuted the soothsayers and ordered their expulsion from
+Italy.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> xiv.</note> He was defied by a mocking edict of the tribe,
+ordaining his own departure from earth by a certain day.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ne Vitellius Germanicus intra
+eundem kalendarum diem usquam esset.</note>
+Vespasian once more banished the diviners from Rome, but,
+obedient to the superstition which cradled the power of his
+dynasty, he retained the most skilful for his own guidance.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 66. 10, 9.</note> The
+terror of Domitian’s last days was heightened by a horoscope,
+which long before had foretold the time and manner of his
+end.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xv.</note> Holding such a faith as this, it is little wonder that
+the emperors should dread its effect on rivals who were equally
+<pb n="46"/><anchor id="Pg46"/>credulous, or that superstition, working on ambitious hopes,
+should have been the nurse of treason. Thus the emperor’s
+uncertain position made him ready to suspect and anticipate a
+treachery which may often have had no existence. The objects
+of his fears in their turn were driven into conspiracy, sometimes
+in self-defence, sometimes from the wish to seize a prize
+which seemed not beyond their grasp. Gossip, lampoon, and
+epigram redoubled suspicion, while they retaliated offences.
+And cruel repression either increased the danger of revolt in
+the more daring, or the degradation of the more timorous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the eyes of Tacitus, the most terrible result of the tyranny
+of the bad emperors was the fawning servility of a once proud
+order, and their craven treachery in the hour of danger. He
+has painted it with all the concentrated power of loathing and
+pity. It is this almost personal degradation which inspires the
+ruthless, yet haughtily restrained, force with which he blasts
+for ever the memory of the Julio-Claudian despotism. It was
+in this spirit that he penned the opening chapters of his
+chronicle of the physical and moral horrors of the year in
+which that tyranny closed. The voice of history has been
+silenced or perverted, partly by the ignorance of public affairs,
+partly by the eagerness of adulation, or the bitterness of
+hatred. It was an age darkened by external disasters, save
+on the eastern frontier, by seditions and civil war, and the
+bloody death of four princes. The forces of nature seemed to
+unite with the rage of men to deepen the universal tragedy.
+Italy was overwhelmed with calamities which had been
+unknown for many ages; Campania’s fairest cities were
+swallowed up; Rome itself had been wasted by fire; the
+ancient Capitol was given to the flames by the hands of
+citizens. Polluted altars, adultery in high places, the islands
+of the sea crowded with exiles, rank and wealth and virtue
+made the mark for a cruel jealousy, all this forms an awful
+picture.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 2.</note> But even more repulsive is the spectacle of treachery
+rewarded with the highest place, slaves and clients betraying
+their master for gain, and men without an enemy ruined by
+their friends. When the spotless Octavia, overwhelmed by
+the foulest calumnies, had been tortured to death, to satisfy
+the jealousy of an adulteress, offerings were voted to the
+<pb n="47"/><anchor id="Pg47"/>temples.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 64.</note> And Tacitus grimly requests his readers to presume
+that, as often as a banishment or execution was ordered by
+Nero, so often were thanksgivings offered to the gods. The
+horrors of Nero’s remorse for the murder of Agrippina were
+soothed by the flatteries and congratulations of his staff, and
+the grateful sacrifices which were offered for his deliverance by
+the Campanian towns.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiv. 10, 12.</note> Still, the notes of a funereal trumpet
+and ghostly wailings from his mother’s grave were ever in
+his ears,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiv. 10; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxxiv.</note> and he long doubted the reception which he might
+meet with on his return to the capital. He need not have
+had any anxiety. Senate and people vied with one another
+in self-abasement. He was welcomed by all ranks and ages
+with fawning enthusiasm as he passed along in triumphal
+progress to return thanks on the Capitol for the success of an
+unnatural crime.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Pisonian conspiracy against Nero was undoubtedly
+an important and serious event. Some of the greatest names
+of the Roman aristocracy were involved in it, and the man
+whom it would have placed on the throne, if not altogether
+untainted by the excesses of his time, had some imposing
+qualities which might make him seem a worthy competitor for
+the principate.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 48.</note> But, to Tacitus, the conspiracy seems to be
+chiefly interesting as a damning proof of the degradation of
+the aristocracy under the reign of terror. Epicharis, the poor
+freedwoman of light character, who bore the accumulating
+torture of scourge and rack and fire, and the dislocation of
+every limb, is brought into pathetic contrast with the high-born
+senators and knights, who, without any compulsion of
+torture, betrayed their relatives and friends.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xv. 57.</note> Scaevinus, a man
+of the highest rank, knowing himself betrayed by his freedman
+and a Roman knight, revealed the whole plot.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xv. 54.</note> The poet
+Lucan tried in vain to purchase safety by involving his
+own mother. But Nero was inexorable, and the poet died
+worthily, reciting some verses from the <hi rend="italic">Pharsalia</hi>, which
+describe a similar end.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xv. 70; probably Lucan, <hi rend="italic">Phars.</hi> iii. 638.</note> The scenes which followed the
+massacre are an awful revelation of cowardly sycophancy.
+While the streets were thronged with the funerals of the victims,
+<pb n="48"/><anchor id="Pg48"/>the altars on the Capitol were smoking with sacrifices of gratitude.
+One craven after another, when he heard of the murder
+of a brother or a dear friend, would deck his house with
+laurels, and, falling at the emperor’s feet, cover his hand
+with kisses.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 71.</note> The Senate prostrated themselves before Nero
+when, stung by the popular indignation, he appeared to
+justify his deed. The august body voted him thanksgivings
+and honours.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xv. 73.</note> The consul elect, one of the Anician house,
+proposed that a temple should be built with all speed to the
+divine Nero! Tacitus relieves this ghastly spectacle of effeminate
+cowardice by a scene which is probably intended, by way
+of contrast, to save the tradition of Roman dignity. Vestinus,
+the consul of that fatal year, had been a boon companion of
+the emperor, and had shown contempt for his cowardice in
+dangerous banter. Nero was eager to find him implicated
+in the plot, but no evidence of his guilt could be obtained.
+All legal forms at length were flung aside, and a cohort was
+ordered to surround his house. Vestinus was at dinner in his
+palace which towered over the Forum, surrounded by guests,
+with a train of handsome slaves in waiting, when he received
+the mandate. He rose at once from table, and shut himself in
+his chamber with his physician, lancet in hand, by his side.
+His veins were opened, and, without a word of self-pity,
+Vestinus allowed his life to ebb away in the bath.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xv. 68, 69.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Vestinus, after all, only asserted, in the fashion of the time,
+his right to choose the manner of a death which could not be
+evaded. But Tacitus, here and there, gives glimpses of self-sacrifice,
+courageous loyalty and humanity, which save his
+picture of society from utter gloom. The love and devotion
+of women shine out more brightly than ever against the
+background of baseness. Tender women follow their husbands
+or brothers into exile, or are found ready to share their death.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 16; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi>
+xv. 63.</note>
+Even the slave girls of Octavia brave torture and death in
+their hardy defence of her fair fame.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 60.</note> There is no more
+pathetic story of female heroism than that of Politta, the
+daughter of L. Vetus. He had been colleague of the emperor
+in the consulship, but he had the misfortune to be father-in-law
+<pb n="49"/><anchor id="Pg49"/>of Rubellius Plautus, whose lofty descent and popularity drew
+down the sentence of death, even in distant exile.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 22, 57.</note> Politta had
+clasped the bleeding neck of Plautus in her arms, and nursed
+her sorrow in an austere widowhood.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xvi. 10.</note> She now besieged the
+doors of Nero with prayers, and even menaces, for her father’s
+acquittal. Vetus himself was of the nobler sort of Roman men,
+who even then were not extinct. When he was advised, in order
+to save the remnant of his property for his grandchildren, to
+make the emperor chief heir, he spurned the servile proposal,
+divided his ready money among his slaves, and prepared for the
+end.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xvi. 11.</note> When all hope was abandoned, father, grandmother, and
+daughter opened their veins and died together in the bath.
+Plautius Lateranus met his end with the same stern dignity.
+Forbidden even to give a last embrace to his children, and
+dragged to the scene of servile executions, he died in silence by
+the hand of a man who was an undiscovered partner in the plot.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xv. 60.</note>
+Even the mob of Rome, for whose fickle baseness Tacitus has a
+profound scorn, now and then reveal a wholesome moral feeling.
+When Octavia, on a trumped-up charge of adultery, was
+divorced and banished by Nero, the clamour of the populace
+forced him to recall her for a time, and the mob went so far
+in their virtuous enthusiasm as to overthrow the statues of
+the adulteress Poppaea, and crown the images of Octavia with
+flowers.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiv. 61.</note> Perhaps even more striking is the humane feeling
+displayed towards the slaves of the urban prefect, Pedanius
+Secundus. He had been murdered by a slave, and the ancient
+law required, in such a case, the execution of the whole household.
+The proposal to carry out the cruel custom drove the
+populace almost to revolt. And it is a relief to find that a
+strong minority of the Senate were on the side of humanity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiv. 42, senatusque obsessus in
+quo ipso erant studia nimiam severitatem
+aspernantium.</note>
+But the army, above all other classes, still bred a rough, honest
+virtue. It was left, amid the general effeminate cowardice,
+for a tribune of a pretorian cohort to tell Nero to his face that
+he loathed him as a murderer and an incendiary.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xv. 67.</note> Again and
+again, in that terrible year, when great nobles were flattering
+the Emperor, whom in a few days or hours they meant to
+desert, the common soldiers remained true to the death of
+<pb n="50"/><anchor id="Pg50"/>their unworthy chiefs. When Otho redeemed a tainted life
+by a not ignoble end, the pretorians kissed his wounds, bore
+him with tears to burial, and many killed themselves over his
+corpse.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 49.</note> In the storming of the pretorian camp by the troops
+of Vespasian, the soldiers of Vitellius, outnumbered and doomed
+to certain defeat, fell to a man with all their wounds in front.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 84.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To these faithful, though often bloodthirsty, warriors the
+senators and knights of those days offered a contemptible
+contrast. Often the inheritors of great names and great
+traditions, the mass of them knew nothing of arms or the
+military virtue of their ancestors.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 88, segnis et oblita bellorum
+nobilitas, etc.</note> Sunk in sloth and
+enervated by excess, they followed Otho to the battlefield
+on the Po with their cooks and minions and all the apparatus
+of luxury.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 88.</note> In the rapid changes of fortune, from Galba
+to Otho, from Otho to Vitellius, from Vitellius to Vespasian,
+the great nobles had one guiding principle, the determination
+to be on the winning side. It was indeed a puzzling and
+anxious time for a calculating selfishness, when a reign might
+not last for a month, and when the adulation of Otho or
+Vitellius in the Senate-house was disturbed by the sound of
+the legions advancing from East and West. But the
+supple cowards of the Senate proved equal to the strain.
+They had the skill to flatter their momentary master without
+any compromising word against his probable successor. They
+soothed the anxieties of Vitellius with unstinted adulation,
+yet carefully refrained from anything reflecting on the
+Flavianist leaders.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 37, nulla in oratione cujusquam
+erga Flavianos duces obtrectatio;
+cf. i. 90; of the Acta of the Arval College,
+<hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2051 sq.</note> Within a few months, full of joy and
+hope, which were now at last well founded, they were voting
+all the customary honours of a new principate to Vespasian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 3.</note>
+The terror of Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero had done its work
+effectually. And its worst result was the hopeless self-abandonment
+and sluggish cowardice of a class, whose chief
+<hi rend="italic">raison d’être</hi> in every age is to maintain a tradition of gallant
+dignity. It is true that many of the scions of great houses
+were mere mendicants, ruined by confiscation or prodigality, and
+compelled to live on the pension by which the emperor kept
+them in shameful dependence,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, x.; <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xvii.; Spart.
+<hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> 7, § 9.</note> or on the meaner dole of some
+<pb n="51"/><anchor id="Pg51"/>wealthy patron.<note place="foot">Juv. i. 100.</note> A Valerius Messala, grandson of the great
+Corvinus, had to accept a pension from Nero.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 34.</note> A grandson
+of Hortensius had to endure the contempt of Tiberius in
+obtaining a grant for his sons.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 37, 38.</note> Others were unmanned by the
+voluptuous excesses of an age which had carried the ingenuity
+of sensual allurement to its utmost limits. The hopelessness
+of any struggle with a power so vast as that of the emperor,
+so ruthless and wildly capricious as that of the Claudian
+Caesars, reduced many to despairing apathy.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 35.</note> And while,
+from a safe historic distance, we pour our contempt on the
+cringing Senate of the first century, it might be well to remind
+ourselves of their perils and their tortures. There was many
+a senatorial house, like that of the Pisos, whose leading
+members were never allowed to reach middle age.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 33; cf. iii. 19.</note> Much
+should be forgiven to a class which was daily and hourly
+exposed to such danger, so sudden in its onsets, so secret and
+stealthy, so all-pervading. It might come in an open circumstantial
+indictment, with all the forms of law and the weight of
+suborned testimony; it might appear in a quiet order for suicide;
+the stroke might descend at the farthest limits of the Empire,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 58.</note>
+in some retreat in Spain or Asia. The haunting fear of death
+had an unnerving effect. But not less degrading were the
+outrages to Roman, or ordinary human dignity to which the
+noble order had to submit for more than a generation. They
+had seen their wives defiled or compelled to expose themselves
+as harlots in a foul spectacle, to gratify the diseased prurience
+of the emperor.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxxvii.</note> They had been forced to fight in the arena
+or to exhibit themselves on the tragic stage.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 14; Juv. viii. 193;
+Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xviii. xxx.; D. Cass. lix.
+10.</note> Men who had
+borne the ancient honours of the consulship had been ordered
+to run for miles beside the chariot of Caligula, or to wait at
+his feet at dinner.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xxvii.</note> Fathers had had to witness without
+flinching the execution of their sons, and drink smilingly to
+the emperor on the evening of the fatal day.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 33.</note> The only
+safety at such a court lay in calmly accepting insults with
+affected gratitude. The example of Nero’s debauchery, and
+the seductive charm which he undoubtedly possessed, were
+<pb n="52"/><anchor id="Pg52"/>probably as enfeebling and demoralising as the Terror. He
+formed a school, which laughed at all virtue and made self-indulgence
+a fine art. Men who had shared in these obscene
+revels were the leaders in the awful scenes of perfidy, lust,
+and cruelty which appropriately followed the death of their
+patron.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 12; xvi. 18; Suet.
+<hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> iv.</note> Some of them, Petronius, Otho, Vitellius, closed
+their career appropriately by a tragic death. But others
+lived on into the age of reformation, to defame the stout
+Sabine soldier who saved the Roman world.<note place="foot">Renan, <hi rend="italic">Les Év.</hi> p. 140. Some of
+their anonymous sneers may be traced
+in Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xvi. xxiii. xiv.; cf.
+Duruy, iv. 653.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In spite of the manly virtue and public spirit of Vespasian,
+the Roman world had to endure a fierce ordeal before it
+entered on the peace of the Antonine age. Even Vespasian’s
+reign was troubled by conspiracy.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 66. 16,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐπεβουλεύθη μὲν ὑπό τε τοῦ Ἀλιηνοῦ καὶ ὑπὸ τοῦ Μαρκέλλου</foreign>.
+Cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xiv.; Macé,
+<hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 86.</note> His obscure origin moved
+the contempt of the great senatorial houses who still survived.
+His republican moderation gave the philosophic doctrinaires a
+chance of airing their impossible dream of restoring a municipal
+Republic to govern a world. His conscientious frugality,
+which was absolutely needed to retrieve the bankruptcy of the
+Neronian régime, was despised and execrated both by the nobles
+and the mob. Another lesson was needed both by the Senate
+and the philosophers. Society had yet to be purged as by fire,
+and the purging came with the accession of Domitian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inner secret of that sombre reign will probably remain
+for ever a mystery. There is the same question about
+Domitian as there is about Tiberius. Was he bad from the
+beginning, or was he gradually corrupted by the consciousness
+of immense power,<note place="foot">Cf. Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 169 sqq.;
+Bury, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Emp.</hi> p. 395.</note> and the fear of the great order who
+might challenge it? Our authorities do not furnish a satisfying
+answer. We know Domitian only from the narrative of
+men steeped in senatorial traditions and prejudices,<note place="foot"><anchor id="Note52"/>On the sources of the history of the
+Flavians, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Krause, <hi rend="italic">De C. Sueton.
+Tranq. Fontibus</hi>; Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p.
+364, 376; Peter, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt. d. Kaiserzeit</hi>,
+ii. 69, 70. For the senatorial
+attitude to Domitian, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi>
+48; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 3, 41, 42, 45; <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv.
+51; iv. 2; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xxiii.</note> and,
+some of them, intoxicated by the vision of a reconciliation
+of the principate with the republican ideals. The dream
+was a noble one, and it was about to be partially realised
+<pb n="53"/><anchor id="Pg53"/>for three generations, under a succession of good emperors.
+But the men inspired with such an ideal were not likely to be
+impartial judges of an emperor like Domitian. And even
+from their narrative of his reign, we can see that he was not,
+at least in the early years of his reign,<note place="foot">Nagel, <hi rend="italic">Imp. T. Flav. Domitianus
+iniquius dijudicatus</hi>.</note> the utter monster he
+has been painted. Even severe judges in modern days admit
+that he was an able and strenuous man, with a clear, cold,
+cynical intellect,<note place="foot">Meriv. vii. 356.</note> which recognised some of the great problems
+of the time, and strove to solve them. He was indefatigable in
+judicial work.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> viii.</note> In spite of the sneers at his mock triumphs,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 39; cf. 41, tot exercitus
+in Moesia ... amissi. D. Cass. 67. 4,
+7; cf. Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> iv. 3, 153; Mart.
+ix. 102; vii. 80, 91, 95; Meriv. vii.
+347.</note>
+his military and provincial administration was probably
+guided by a sound conception of the resources and the
+dangers of the Empire. His recall of Agricola, after a seven
+years’ command in Britain, was attributed to jealousy and fear.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 39.</note>
+It is more probable that it was dictated by a wish to stop a
+campaign which was diverting large sums to the conquest of
+barren mountains. Domitian was an orator and verse writer
+of some merit, and he gave his patronage, although not in a
+very liberal way, to men like Quintilian, Statius, and Martial.<note place="foot">Quintil. iv.,
+    <anchor id="corr53"/><corr sic="proem.">prooem.</corr> 2; Statius,
+<hi rend="italic">Silvae</hi>, iv. 2, 13; iii. 1, 1; Mart. ii.
+91; iv. 27, iii. 95. For the flattery
+of Martial, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> esp. v. 19, 6; ix. 4;
+<hi rend="italic">Spectac.</hi> 33.</note>
+Like Nero, he felt the force of the new Hellenist movement,
+and, under forms sanctioned by Roman antiquarians, he established
+a quinquennial festival in which literary genius was
+pompously rewarded.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> iv.</note> He had the public libraries, which had
+been devastated by fires in the previous reigns, liberally restocked
+with fresh stores of MSS. from Alexandria.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xx.</note> He gave
+close attention, whatever we may think of his science, to the
+economic problems of the Empire. And his discouragement
+of the vine, in favour of a greater acreage of corn, would find
+sympathy in our own time, as it was applauded by Apollonius
+of Tyana.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii.; Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> vi.
+42; <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> i. 12.</note> The man who decimated the Roman aristocracy
+towards the end of his reign, advanced to high positions some
+of those who were destined to be his bitterest defamers. Pliny
+and Tacitus and Trajan’s father rose to high office in the
+<pb n="54"/><anchor id="Pg54"/>earlier part of Domitian’s reign.<note place="foot">Pliny was probably Quaestor in 90
+<hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>; Trib. Pleb. 92; Praetor 93. Cf.
+Momms. (Morel) p. 61. Tacitus says,
+<hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 1, dignitatem a Domitiano
+(81-96) longius provectam non abnuerim.
+From <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 11 it appears
+that he was Praetor in 88. Cf. Peter,
+<hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. 43.</note> He designated to the
+consulship such men as Nerva, Trajan, Verginius Rufus,
+Agricola, and the grandfather of Antoninus Pius.<note place="foot">Duruy, iv. 697 n.</note> This strange
+character was also a moral reformer of the antiquarian type.
+He punished erring Vestals, <hi rend="italic">more majorum</hi>. He revived the
+Scantinian law against those enormities of the East, of which
+Statius shows that the emperor was not guiltless himself.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> iii. 4, 37.</note> Yet
+a voluptuary, with a calm outlook on his time, may have a wish
+to restrain vices with which he is himself tainted. A statesman
+may be a puritan reformer, both in religion and morals, without
+being personally severe and devout. Domitian may have
+had a genuine, if a pedantic, desire to restore the old Roman
+tone in morals and religion. He was, after all, sprung from a
+sober Sabine stock,<note place="foot">Meriv. vii. 354.</note> although he may have sadly degenerated
+from it in his own conduct. And his attempt to reform Roman
+society may perhaps have been as sincere as that of Augustus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there can be little doubt that Domitian, although he
+was astute and able, was also a bad man, with the peculiar
+traits which always make a man unpopular. He was disloyal
+as a son and as a brother. He was morose, and he cultivated
+a suspicious solitude,<note place="foot">D. Cass. 67. 14; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xiv.</note> around which evil rumour is sure to
+gather. The rumour in his case may have been well-founded,
+although we are not bound to believe all the tales of prurient
+gossip which Suetonius has handed down. It is the penalty
+of high place that peccadilloes are magnified into sins, and
+sins are multiplied and exaggerated. It was a recognised and
+effective mode of flattering a new emperor to blacken the
+character of his predecessors; Domitian himself allowed his
+court poets to vilify Caligula and Nero.<note place="foot">Mart. iv. 63; vi. 21, crudelis
+nullaque invisior umbra.</note> And Pliny in his
+fulsome adulation of Trajan, finds his most effective resource in
+a perpetual contrast with Domitian. Tacitus could never forgive
+the recall and humiliation of his father-in-law. The Senate
+as a whole bore an implacable hatred to the man who carried
+to its furthest point the assertion of imperial prerogative.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xxiii.</note>
+<pb n="55"/><anchor id="Pg55"/>Still the authorities are so unanimous that we are bound to
+believe that Domitian, with some strength and ability, had
+many execrable qualities. He shows the contradictions of a
+nature in which the force of a sturdy rural ancestry has not
+been altogether sapped by the temptations of luxury and
+power. He had a passionate desire to rival the military glory
+of his father and brother, yet he was too cautious and self-indulgent
+to attain it. He had some taste for literature, but
+he kept literature in leading-strings, and put one man to death
+for his delight in certain speeches in Livy, and another for a
+too warm eulogy of Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> x.</note> He threw
+his whole strength into a moral and religious reaction, while
+he was the bitterest enemy of the republican pretensions and
+dreams of the Senate. Great historical critics have called him
+a hypocrite.<note place="foot">Renan, <hi rend="italic">Les Évang.</hi> p. 291, Domitien,
+comme tous les souverains hypocrites,
+se montraite sévère conservateur.</note> It may be doubted whether any single phrase
+or formula could express the truth about such a twisted and
+perverse <anchor id="corr55"/><corr sic="character">character.</corr> Probably his dominant passion was vanity
+and love of grandiose display. He assumed the consulship
+seventeen times, a number quite unexampled.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xiii.</note> His pompous
+triumphs for unreal victories were a subject of common jest.
+He filled the Capitol with images of himself, and a colossal
+statue towered for a time over the temple roofs.<note place="foot">Mart. viii. 65.</note> The son
+and brother of emperors, already exalted to divine honours, he
+went farther than any of his predecessors in claiming divinity
+for himself, and he allowed his ministers and court poets to
+address him as <q>our Lord God.</q><note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xiii.; Mart. v. 8, 1 (<hi rend="italic">v.</hi>
+Friedländer’s note), vii. 2 and 34; viii.
+2, 6; Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> v. 1, 37; Meriv. vii.
+375.</note> His lavish splendour in
+architecture was to some extent justified by the ravages of fire
+in previous reigns. But the £2,400,000 expended on the
+gilding of a temple on the Capitol,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi>
+    <anchor id="corr55-2"/><corr sic="v">v.</corr>; Gregorov. <hi rend="italic">Gesch. St.
+Rom.</hi> i. 41.</note> was only one item in an
+extravagance which drained the treasury. Its radiance, which
+dazzled the eyes of Rutilius in the reign of Honorius,<note place="foot">Rutil. Namat. i. 93.</note> was
+paid for in blood and tears. The emperor, who was the ruthless
+enemy of the nobles, like all his kind, was profusely
+indulgent to the army and the mob. The legions had their pay
+increased by a fourth. The populace of Rome were pampered
+<pb n="56"/><anchor id="Pg56"/>with costly and vulgar spectacles,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> v. <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi>; iv.</note> as they were to the end of
+the Western Empire. Domitian’s indulgence of that fierce and
+obscene proletariat was only a little more criminal than that
+of other emperors, because it ended in a bankruptcy which was
+followed by robbery and massacre. While the rich and noble
+were assailed on any trivial accusation, in order to fill an
+empty treasury, the beasts of Numidia were tearing their
+victims, gladiators were prostituting a noble courage in dealing
+inglorious wounds in the arena, and fleets of armed galleys
+charged and crashed in mimic, yet often deadly, battle in the
+flooded Flavian amphitheatre.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 67. 8.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To repair this waste the only resource was plunder. But
+Domitian was a pettifogger as well as a plunderer; he would
+fleece or assassinate his victims under forms of law. The
+law of majesty, and the many laws for restoring old Roman
+morality, needed only a little ingenuity and effrontery to
+furnish lucrative grounds for impeachment.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xii.</note> The tribe of
+delators were ready to his hand. He had punished them for
+serving Nero; they were now to reap a richer harvest under
+Domitian. Every fortune which rose above mediocrity, every
+villa with rich pastures and woodlands in the Apennines, or
+on the northern lakes, was marked for plunder.<note place="foot">Pliny, <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 50.</note> Domitian was
+the first and only emperor who assumed the censorship for
+life.<note place="foot">Dion Cass. 67. 4,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τιμητὴς δὲ διὰ βίου πρῶτος δὲ καὶ μόνος καὶ ἰδιωτῶν καὶ αὐτοκρατόρων ἐχειροτονήθη</foreign>: Momms.
+<hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> ii. 1012.</note> The office made him absolute master of the lives and
+fortunes of his nobles. A casual word, a thoughtless gesture,
+might be construed into an act of treason; and the slave
+households furnished an army of spies. Nay, even kindred
+and near friends were drawn into this vast conspiracy against
+domestic peace and security. It may be admitted that
+Domitian had to face a real peril. The rebellion of Antonius
+Saturninus was an attempt which no prince could treat lightly,
+and the destruction of the correspondence in which so many
+men of rank were involved, may well have heightened
+Domitian’s alarm.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 67. 11.</note> He struck out blindly and savagely.
+He compelled the Senate to bear a part in the massacre, and
+Tacitus has confessed, with pathetic humiliation, his silent share
+in the murder of the upright and innocent.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 45.</note> Yet the imperial
+<pb n="57"/><anchor id="Pg57"/>inquisitor was himself racked with terror in his last hours. He
+walked in a corridor where the walls were lined with mirrors,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xiv. parietes phengite lapide distinxit.</note>
+so that no unseen hand might strike him from behind. On
+his last morning he started in terror from his bed and called
+for the diviner whom he had summoned from Germany.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xvi.</note> But,
+amid all his terror, Domitian had a deep natural love of
+cruelty. He was never more dangerous than when he chose
+to be agreeable;<note place="foot">D. Cass. 67. 9.</note> he loved to play with his victims. What
+a grim delight in exquisite torture, what a cynical contempt
+for the Roman nobles, are revealed in the tale of his funereal
+banquet!<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 67. 4.</note> The select company were ushered into a chamber
+draped from floor to ceiling in black. At the head of each
+couch stood a pillar like a tombstone, with the guest’s name
+engraved upon it, while overhead swung a cresset such as men
+hang in vaults of the dead. A troop of naked boys, black as
+all around, danced an awful measure, and then set on the
+dismal meal which was offered, by old Roman use, to the spirits
+of the departed. The guests were palsied with terror, expecting
+every moment to be their last. And the death-like
+silence was only broken by the voice of the Emperor as he
+told a gruesome tale of bloody deaths. In such cynicism of
+lawless power, in such meek degradation of a once proud
+order, did the tyranny of the first century reach its close.
+</p>
+
+</div><div type="chapter" n="2" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="58"/><anchor id="Pg58"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="II. The world of the satirist"/><index index="pdf" level1="II. The world of the satirist"/>
+<head>CHAPTER II</head>
+
+<head type="sub">THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST</head>
+
+<p>
+Juvenal and Tacitus, although they moved in different circles
+and probably never met, have much in common. Both were
+released from an ignominious silence by the death of Domitian.
+Both were then at the age which combines the ripeness
+of experience and reflection with a fire and energy still
+unflagging.<note place="foot">Tacitus b. probably 55 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Dial.
+de Or.</hi> 1, juvenis admodum in 75
+or 76; cf. <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 9. He was betrothed
+in 77 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>; cf. Meriv. viii. 92; Peter,
+<hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. 43; Nipperdey, <hi rend="italic">Einl.</hi> iv.
+Juvenal b. <hi rend="italic">circ.</hi> 55 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> (Peter, ii. 77);
+decessit longo senio confectus exul Ant.
+Pio imp. Vit. iv.; Teuffel, § 326, 1.</note> They were, from different causes, both filled with
+hatred and disgust for the vices of their time, and their experience
+had engendered in both a pessimism which darkened
+their faith. Tacitus belonged to the senatorial order who had
+held high office, and had seen its ranks decimated and its
+dignity outraged under the tyranny. Juvenal sprang from the
+lower middle class, which hated alike the degenerate noble and
+the insolent <hi rend="italic">parvenu</hi> far more than it hated even a Domitian.
+Yet both Juvenal and Tacitus are united in a passionate
+admiration for the old Roman character. Their standards and
+ideals are drawn from the half-mythical ages of the simple
+warriors and farmer-statesmen of the old Republic. And their
+estimate of their time needs to be scrutinised in the light both
+of their hatreds and of their ideals.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The life of Juvenal is wrapt in obscurity, although nine
+lives of him are extant.<note place="foot">Nettleship, <hi rend="italic">Lectures and Essays</hi>,
+pp. 118 sqq.</note> Scholars are still at variance as to
+the date of his birth, the date of many of his satires, and
+especially as to the time and circumstances of his banishment,
+about which there is so uniform a tradition. But, for our
+purpose, some facts are clear enough. Juvenal was the son of
+<pb n="59"/><anchor id="Pg59"/>a well-to-do freedman of Aquinum, and rose to the highest
+magisterial office in his native town at some time of his career.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 5599, IIVir. Quinq.
+Flamen Divi Vespasiani.</note>
+He carefully hides his personal history from us; but we might
+gather from his Satires that he belonged to the lower middle
+class,<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 316.</note> that he was in temper and tone an old plebeian of the
+times of the Republic, although vividly touched by the ideas
+of a new morality which had been afloat for more than two
+generations. But, like Tacitus, he has little sympathy with the
+great philosophic movement which was working a silent revolution.
+He had the rhetorical training of the time, with all
+its advantages and its defects. And he is more a rhetorician
+than a poet. We can well believe the report that his early
+literary enthusiasm found vent in declamation on those
+mythical or frivolous themes which exercised the youth in
+the Roman schools for many centuries. Although he was
+hardly a poor man<note place="foot">Juv. xi. 74, 150; cf. xiv. 322.</note> in the sense in which Martial, his
+friend, was poor, yet he had stooped to bear the ignominy and
+hardships of client dependence. He had hurried in rain and
+storm in the early morning to receptions at great houses on
+the Esquiline, through the squalor and noises and congested
+traffic of the Suburra.<note place="foot">Mart. xii. 18.</note> He had doubtless often been a guest
+at those <q>unequal dinners,</q> where the host, who was himself
+regaled with far-fetched dainties and old crusted Alban or
+Setine wine, insulted his poorer friends by offering them the
+cheapest vintage and the meanest fare.<note place="foot">Juv. v. 30 sqq.; cf. Mart. iii. 49;
+iii. 60.</note> He had been compelled,
+as a matter of social duty, to sit through the recitation
+of those ambitious and empty Theseids and Thebaids, with which
+the rich amateur in literature in those days afflicted his long-suffering
+friends.<note place="foot">Juv. i. 52; Mart. x. 4; iv. 49.</note> He may have been often elbowed aside by
+some supple, clever Greek, with versatile accomplishments and
+infinite audacity. He may have been patronised or insulted by
+a millionaire <hi rend="italic">parvenu</hi>, like the Trimalchio of Petronius, tainted
+with the memories of a shameful servitude. He saw new
+vulgar wealth everywhere triumphant, while the stiff, yet, in
+many ways, wholesome conventionality of old Roman life was
+defied and trampled upon by an aggressive vulgarity. In such
+a world there was little room for the man whose wealth is
+<pb n="60"/><anchor id="Pg60"/>in his genius, and who clings to the traditions of ages which
+believed that men had a soul as well as a body. A man like
+Juvenal, living in such a society, almost necessarily becomes
+embittered. Like Johnson, in his Grub Street days, he will
+have his hours when bitterness passes into self-abandonment,
+and he will sound the depths of that world of corruption which
+in his better moods he loathes. Some of the associates of
+Juvenal were of very doubtful position, and more than doubtful
+morals;<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 43: v. 30 sqq.; ix. 10 sqq.;
+xi. 186.</note> and the warmth of some of his realistic painting of
+dark sides of Roman life arouses the suspicion that he may
+have at times forgotten his moral ideal. He certainly knows
+the shameful secrets of Roman life almost as well as his friend
+Martial does. But his knowledge, however gained, was turned
+to a very different purpose from that which inspired Martial’s
+brilliant prurience.<note place="foot">It has been remarked that Martial’s
+Epigrams on Juvenal all contain some
+obscenity, vii. 24; vii. 91, xii. 18.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Satires of Juvenal were probably not given to the
+world till after the death of Domitian.<note place="foot">Teuffel, § 326, 4; Peter, <hi rend="italic">Gesch.
+Litt.</hi> ii. 77; Nettleship, <hi rend="italic">Lectures and
+Essays</hi>, p. 122, brings together the indications
+of date from 96-127 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> He
+thinks that perhaps some of the earlier
+<hi rend="italic">Satires</hi> belong to the last years of
+Domitian, and that the words, spes
+et ratio studiorum in Caesare tantum,
+in <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> vii., may refer to that Emperor
+(p. 132).</note> The date of the earliest
+is about 100 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, that of the latest probably 127. Juvenal
+cautiously disguises his attacks on his own time. He whets his
+sword against the sinners whose ashes have long reposed beside
+the Flaminian and the Latin ways.<note place="foot">Juv. i. 170.</note> Very few of his contemporaries
+appear in his pages,<note place="foot">Marius Priscus, Isaeus, Archigenes.</note> and the scenery is often that
+of the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, or Nero. But his deepest
+and most vivid impressions must have come to Juvenal in that
+period which has been photographed with such minute exactness
+by Martial. And there is a striking correspondence between
+the two writers, not only in many of the characters whom they
+introduce, but in their pictures of the whole state of morals and
+letters.<note place="foot">See a comparison of passages in
+Nettleship, pp. 125 sqq.</note> They both detested that frigid epic which laboriously
+ploughed the sands of conventional legend, and they turned
+with weariness from the old-world tales of Thebes or Argos to
+the real tragedy or comedy of Roman life around them.
+Although they were friends and companions, it is needless to
+<pb n="61"/><anchor id="Pg61"/>assume any close partnership in their studies. Starting with
+the same literary impulse, they deal to a large extent with the
+same vices and follies, some of them peculiar to their own age,
+others common to all ages of Rome, or even of the world of
+civilisation. A long list might easily be compiled of their
+common stock of subjects, and their common antipathies. In
+both writers we meet the same grumbling of the needy client
+against insolent or niggardly patrons, the complaints of the
+struggling man of letters about the extravagant rewards of low
+vulgar impostors. Both are bored to death, like the patient
+Pliny, by the readings of wealthy scribblers, or by tiresome
+pleadings in the courts, measured by many a turn of the
+clepsydra. They feel an equal disgust for the noise and
+squalor of the narrow streets, an equal love for the peace and
+freshness and rough plenty of the country farm. In both may
+be seen the scions of great houses reduced to mendicancy,
+ambitious poverty betaking itself to every mean or disreputable
+device, the legacy-hunter courting the childless rich with
+flattery or vicious compliance. You will often encounter the
+sham philosopher, as you meet him sixty years afterwards in
+the pages of Lucian, with his loud talk of virtue and illustrious
+names, while his cloak covers all the vices of dog and ape. Both
+deal rather ungently with the character of women,—their
+intrigues with actors, gladiators, and slaves, their frequent
+divorces and rapid succession of husbands, their general
+abandonment of antique matronly reserve. Both have, in fact,
+with different motives, uncovered the secret shame of the
+ancient world; and, more even than by that shame, was their
+indignation moved by the great social revolution which was
+confusing all ranks, and raising old slaves, cobblers, and
+auctioneers to the benches of the knights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet with this resemblance in the subjects of their choice,
+there is the widest difference between the two writers in their
+motive and mode of treatment. Martial, of course, is not a
+moralist at all; the mere suggestion excites a smile. He is a
+keen and joyous observer of the faults and follies, the lights
+and shades, of a highly complex and artificial society which is
+<q>getting over-ripe.</q> In the power of mere objective description
+and minute portraiture of social life, Martial is almost
+unique. Through his verses, we know the society of Domitian
+<pb n="62"/><anchor id="Pg62"/>as we know hardly any other period of ancient society. But
+this very vividness and truthfulness is chiefly due to the fact
+that Martial was almost without a conscience. He was indeed
+personally, perhaps, not so bad as he is often painted.<note place="foot">He says of himself, i. 5, 8, lasciva
+est nobis pagina, vita proba est; cf. iii.
+68; v. 2; Ausonius urges the same
+plea, cf. <hi rend="italic">Idyll.</hi> xiii. Pliny finds a
+long series of examples to warrant his
+indulgence in loose verses, <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv.
+14; cf. v. 3. It was a bad tradition
+of literature; cf. Nettleship, <hi rend="italic">Lectures
+and Essays</hi>, p. 39.</note> He
+knows and can appreciate a good woman;<note place="foot">i. 14; iv. 13, 75.</note> he can love, with
+the simplest, unsophisticated love, an innocent slave-child, the
+poor little Erotion,<note place="foot">v. 34, 37; x. 61.</note> whom he has immortalised. He can
+honour a simple manly character, free from guile and pretence.<note place="foot">i. 79; vii. 52.</note>
+He has a genuine, exuberant love of the fresh joys of
+country life, sharpened, no doubt, by the experience of the
+client’s sordid slavery, amid the mingled poverty and lavish
+splendour of the capital.<note place="foot">iii. 58; i. 56; ii. 38; cf. iii. 38.</note> Where could one find a fresher,
+prettier idyll than his picture of the farm of Faustinus, with its
+packed granaries, and its cellars fragrant with the juice of many
+an old autumn vintage, the peacock spreading his jewelled
+plumage, and the ring-dove cooing overhead from the towers?
+The elegant slaves of the great house in the city are having
+a holiday, and busy, under the bailiff’s care, with rural toils,
+or fishing in the stream. The tall daughters of the neighbouring
+cottages bring in their well-stocked baskets to the
+villa, and all gather joyously at evening to a plenteous meal.<note place="foot">iii. 58.</note>
+Martial has, moreover, one great virtue, which is a powerful antidote
+for many moral faults, the love of the far-off home of his
+childhood, the rugged Bilbilis, with its iron foundries near
+the sources of the Tagus, to which he retreated from the crush
+and din of plebeian life at Rome, and where he rests.<note place="foot">i. 50; iv. 55; xii. 18.</note> But
+when charity or justice has done its best for Martial,
+and no scholar will repudiate the debt, it still remains true
+that he represents, perhaps better than any other, that pagan
+world, naked and unabashed, and feels no breath of inspiration
+from the great spiritual movement which, in paganism itself,
+was setting towards an ideal of purity and self-conquest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juvenal, at least in his later work, reveals a moral
+standard and motive apparently unknown to Martial.<note place="foot">Especially <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> xi. xiii. xiv. xv.;
+cf. Munding, <hi rend="italic">Über die Sat. Juv.</hi> p. 12.</note> It may
+<pb n="63"/><anchor id="Pg63"/>be admitted, indeed, that Juvenal did not always write under
+the same high impulse. He had the rhetorician’s love of
+fine, telling phrases, and startling effects. He had a rare gift
+of realistic painting, and he exults in using it. He has also
+burning within him an old plebeian pride which looked down
+at once on the degenerate son of an ancient house, and on
+the <hi rend="italic">nouveaux riches</hi>, whose rise seemed to him the triumph of
+vulgar opulence without the restraint of traditions or ideals.
+Conscious of great talents, with a character almost fierce in
+its energy, he felt a burning hatred of a society which seemed
+to value only material success, or those supple and doubtful
+arts which could invent some fresh stimulus for exhausted
+appetite. In Juvenal a great silent, sunken class, whom
+we hardly know otherwise than from the inscriptions on their
+tombs,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Bk. ii. c. 3 of this work. M.
+Boissier has thrown a vivid light on
+this class in his <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> iii. 3.</note> finds for once a powerful voice and a terrible avenger.
+But, along with this note of personal or class feeling, there is
+in Juvenal a higher moral intuition, a vision of a higher life,
+which had floated before some Roman minds long before his
+time,<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. 198; Nettleship,
+<hi rend="italic">Lectures and Essays</hi> p. 136.</note> and which was destined to broaden into an accepted ideal.
+Juvenal, indeed, was no philosopher, and he had, like Tacitus,
+all the old Roman distrust of the theories of the schools.<note place="foot">xiii. 120; ii. 1 sqq.; cf. Mart.
+ix. 48.</note>
+He had probably little respect for such teaching as Seneca’s.<note place="foot">He refers, however, with respect
+to Seneca, viii. 212.</note>
+Yet in important points he and Seneca belong to the same order
+of the elect. Although, perhaps, a less spotless character than
+Tacitus, he is far more advanced and modern in his breadth
+of sympathy and moral feeling. He feels acutely for the
+conquered provinces which have been fleeced and despoiled
+of their wealth and artistic treasures, and which are still
+exposed to the peculation and cruelty of governors and their
+train.<note place="foot">viii. 90 sqq.; cf. Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi>
+p. 332.</note> He denounces, like Seneca, the contempt and cruelty often
+shown to slaves. The man whose ideal seems often to be drawn
+from the hard, stern warriors who crushed the Samnites and
+baffled the genius of Hannibal, in his old age has come to
+glorify pity and tenderness for suffering as the best gift of
+God, the gift that separates him most widely from the brute
+<pb n="64"/><anchor id="Pg64"/>creation.<note place="foot">Juv. xv. 131; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, i. 5;
+ii. 10, 25; iii. 24.</note> He preaches sympathy and mutual help, in an
+age torn by selfish individualist passions. He denounces the
+lust for revenge almost in the tones of a Christian preacher.<note place="foot">Juv. xiii. 190.</note>
+What heathen moralist has painted more vividly the horrors
+of the guilty conscience, that unseen inquisitor, with sterner
+more searching eyes than Rhadamanthus? Who has taught
+with greater power that the root of sin is in the evil thought?<note place="foot">xiii. 208, nam scelus intra se tacitum
+qui cogitat ullum Facti crimen
+habet.</note>
+Juvenal realises, like Tacitus and Quintilian, the curse of a
+tainted ancestry, and the incalculable importance of pure
+example in the education of youth.<note place="foot">xiv. 30; Tac. <hi rend="italic">De Or.</hi> 28, 29.</note> He, who knew so well
+the awful secrets of Roman households, sets an immense value
+on the treasure of an untainted boyhood, like that of the ploughman’s
+son, who waits at Juvenal’s simple meal <q>and sighs for
+his mother, and the little cottage, and his playmates the kids.</q><note place="foot">xi. 153.</note>
+Observation of character had also taught him the fatal law that
+the downward path in conduct, once entered on, is seldom retraced.
+And this moral insight seems to come to Juvenal not from
+any consciously held philosophic doctrine, nor from a settled
+religious faith. His faith, like that of many of his time, was
+probably of the vaguest. He scorns and detests the Eastern
+worships which were pouring in like a flood, and carrying
+away even loose women of the world.<note place="foot">vi. 510.</note> He pillories the
+venal star-reader from the East and the Jewish hag who
+interprets dreams. But he has also scant respect for classic
+mythologies, and regrets the simple, long-gone age, before
+heaven became crowded with divinities, before Saturn had
+exchanged the diadem for the sickle, when Juno was still a
+little maid,<note place="foot">xiii. 39.</note> when the terrors of Tartarus, the wheel, the
+vulture, and the lash of the Furies had not taken the place of
+a simple natural conscience.<note place="foot">xiii. 208.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juvenal’s moral tone then appears to unite the spirit of two
+different ages. In some of his later Satires you catch the accent
+of the age which was just opening when Juvenal began to write,
+its growing sense of the equality and brotherhood of man, its
+cosmopolitan morality, its ideals of spiritual culture. But
+there are other elements in Juvenal, derived from old Roman
+<pb n="65"/><anchor id="Pg65"/>prejudice and conventionality, or the result of personal temperament
+and experience, which are quite as prominent. Juvenal
+is an utter pessimist about his time, more extreme even than
+Tacitus. His age, if we believe him, has attained the climax
+of corruption, and posterity will never improve upon its
+finished depravity.<note place="foot">Juv. i. 87, 147; x. 172 cf. Sen.
+<hi rend="italic">Nat. Q.</hi> vii. 31; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 8 sq.</note> His long practice as a declaimer had
+given him a habit of exaggeration, and of aiming rather at
+rhetorical brilliancy than truth. Whole passages in his
+poems read like declamatory exercises turned into verse.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">e.g.</hi> the picture of Otho, ii. 99;
+of Messalina, vi. 114; Lateranus, viii.
+146; Sejanus, x. 56; Cicero, etc., viii.
+231.</note>
+A mere hanger-on of great society, one of the obscure crowd
+who flocked to the rich man’s levée, and knowing the life of
+the aristocracy only by remote observation or the voice of
+scandalous gossip, he hardly deserves the implicit trust which
+has been often accorded to his indictments of the society of
+his day. His generalisations are of the most sweeping kind;
+the colours are all dark. He thinks that the number of
+decent people in his day is infinitesimally small. And yet
+we may reasonably suspect, from his own evidence, that he
+often generalised from single cases, that he treated abnormal
+specimens as types. His moral ideals cannot have been a
+monopoly of his own. In the palace of Nero in the worst
+days, there was a pure Octavia as well as a voluptuous Poppaea.
+The wife and mother of the gross Vitellius were women of spotless
+fame.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 64; cf. Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv.
+19; iii. 16; D. Cass. 68. 5; Sen. <hi rend="italic">ad
+Helv.</hi> xiv.</note> And in reading the fierce, unmeasured declamation
+of Juvenal, we should never forget that he knew nothing personally
+of Pliny or Tacitus, or of the circle which surrounded
+Verginius Rufus and Spurinna. He has the same pessimist
+theory of human declension which was held by Seneca and by
+Tacitus. Every form of crime and sensuality has been rampant
+since Rome lost the treasure of poverty, since the days when
+silver shone only on the Roman’s arms.<note place="foot">Juv. xi. 109; iii. 152, 183.</note> Juvenal’s ideal lies
+in that mythical past when a Curius, thrice consul, strode
+homeward from the hills, mattock on shoulder, to a meal
+of home-grown herbs and bacon served on earthenware.<note place="foot">xi. 78.</note>
+It is the luxury of the conquered lands which has relaxed
+the Roman fibre, which has introduced a false standard of
+<pb n="66"/><anchor id="Pg66"/>life, degraded great houses, and flooded the city with an alien
+crew of astrologers and grammarians, parasites and pimps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Modern criticism has laboured hard to correct some of the
+harsher judgments on the luxury and self-indulgence of the
+period of the early Empire. Perhaps the scholarly reaction
+against an indictment which had degenerated sometimes into
+ignorant commonplace, may have been carried here and there
+too far. The testimony of Tacitus is explicit that the luxury
+of the table reached its height in the hundred years extending
+from the battle of Actium to the accession of Vespasian.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 55; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi>
+x. 3; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 89, § 22.</note> It
+was a period of enormous fortunes spent in enormous waste.
+Seneca or Pallas or Narcissus had accumulated wealth probably
+three or four times greater than even the fortune of a Crassus
+or a Lucullus. The long peace, the safety of the seas, and
+the freedom of trade, had made Rome the entrepôt for the
+peculiar products and the delicacies of every land from the
+British Channel to the Ganges. The costly variety of these
+foreign dainties was vulgarly paraded at every great dinner-party.
+Palaces, extending almost over the area of a town, were
+adorned with marbles from the quarries of Paros, Laconia,
+Phrygia, or Numidia,<note place="foot">Statius, <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> v. 36; ii. 85.</note> with gilded ceilings and curious panels
+changing with the courses of the banquet,<note place="foot">Petron. c. 60; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 9;
+Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. p. 67.</note> with hundreds of
+tables of citrus-wood, resting on pillars of ivory, each costing
+a moderate fortune, with priceless bronzes and masterpieces
+of ancient plate. Nearly a million each year was drained
+away to the remoter East, to purchase aromatics and jewels
+for the elaborate toilette of the Roman lady.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> vi. 26; ix. 58; xii.
+41. Cf. Friedl. iii. p. 80; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm.
+St.</hi> ii. 53.</note> Hundreds
+of household slaves, each with his minute special function,
+anticipated every want, or ministered to every passion of their
+masters. Every picturesque or sheltered site on the great lakes,
+on the Anio, or the Alban hills, in the Laurentine pine forests,
+or on the bays of Campania, was occupied by far-spreading
+country seats. Lavish expenditure and luxurious state was
+an imperious duty of rank, even without the precept of an
+emperor.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxx. putabat sordidos
+ac parcos esse quibus ratio impensarum
+constaret, etc.</note> The senator who paid too low a rent, or rode
+along the Appian or Flaminian Way with too scanty a train,
+<pb n="67"/><anchor id="Pg67"/>became a marked man, and immediately lost caste.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 87, § 4; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> xxxv.;
+Friedl. i. 196.</note> These
+are the merest commonplace of the social history of the
+time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet in spite of the admitted facts of profusion and self-indulgence,
+we may decline to accept Juvenal’s view of the
+luxury of the age without some reserve. It is indeed no
+apology for the sensuality of a section of the Roman aristocracy
+in that day, to point out that the very same excesses made
+their appearance two centuries before him, and that they will
+be lamented both by Pagan and Christian moralists three
+centuries after his death. But these facts suggest a doubt
+whether the cancer of luxury had struck so deep as satirists
+thought into the vitals of a society which remained for so
+many centuries erect and strong. Before the end of the third
+century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, began the long series of sumptuary laws which
+Tiberius treated as so futile.<note place="foot">Liv. xxxiv. 1; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 53, 54.</note> The elder Pliny and Livy date
+the introduction of luxurious furniture from the return of the
+army in 188 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, after the campaign in Asia.<note place="foot">Liv. xxxiv. 6, 7; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 62,
+162; Momms. <hi rend="italic">R. Hist.</hi> ii. 409.</note> Crassus, who left,
+after the most prodigal expenditure, a fortune of £1,700,000,
+had a town house which cost over £60,000.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">R. Hist.</hi> iii. 417.</note> The lavish
+banquets of Lucullus were proverbial, and his villa at Misenum
+was valued at £24,000. It was an age when more than
+£1000 was given for a slave-cook or a pair of silver cups.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 418; cf. Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> ix. 80, 81;
+x. 23; Plut. <hi rend="italic">Lucull.</hi> c. 40; Macrob.
+<hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> iii. 13, § 1.</note>
+Macrobius has preserved the menu of a pontifical banquet, at
+which Julius Caesar and the Vestals were present, and which in
+its costly variety surpassed, as he says, any epicurism of the
+reign of Honorius.<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> iii. 13, § 11.</note> And yet Ammianus and S. Jerome level
+very much the same charges against the nobles of the fourth
+century,<note place="foot">Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 117, § 8; Amm. Marc.
+xiv. 6, 7; xxviii. 4.</note> which satire makes against the nobles of the first.
+When we hear the same anathemas of luxury in the days of
+Lucullus and in the reign of Honorius, separated by an interval
+of more than five centuries, in which the Roman race stamped
+itself on the page of history and on the face of nature by the
+most splendid achievements of military virtue and of civilising
+energy, we are inclined to question either the report of our
+authorities, or the satirist’s interpretation of the social facts.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="68"/><anchor id="Pg68"/>
+
+<p>
+The good faith of the elder Pliny, of Seneca and Juvenal,
+need not, indeed, be called in question. But the first two
+were men who led by preference an almost ascetic life. The
+satirist was a man whose culinary tastes were satisfied by the
+kid and eggs and asparagus of his little farm at Tibur.<note place="foot">Juv. xi. 69.</note>
+And the simple abstemious habits of the south, which are
+largely the result of climate, tended to throw into more
+startling contrast any indulgence of superfluous appetite. It
+is true that the conquests which unlocked the hoarded
+treasures of eastern monarchies, gave a great shock to the
+hardy frugality and self-restraint of the old Roman character,
+just as the stern simplicity of Spartan breeding was imperilled
+by contact with the laxer life of the Hellespontine towns and the
+wealth of the Persian court.<note place="foot">Thucyd. i. 95.</note> The Roman aristocracy were for
+two centuries exposed to the same temptations as the treasures
+of the Incas offered to Pizarro,<note place="foot">Prescott, <hi rend="italic">Conquest of Peru</hi>, i. 304.</note> or the treasures of the Moguls
+to Clive. In the wild licence, which prevailed in certain circles
+for more than a century, many a fortune and many a character
+were wrecked. Yet the result may easily be exaggerated.
+Extravagant luxury and self-indulgence is at all times only
+possible to a comparatively small number. And luxury, after
+all, is a relative term. The luxuries of one age often become
+the necessities of the next. There are many articles of food or
+dress, which free-trade and science have brought to the doors
+of our cottagers, which would have incurred the censure of
+the elder Pliny or of Seneca. There are aldermanic banquets
+in New York or the city of London in our own day, which far
+surpass, in costliness and variety, the banquets of Lucullus or
+the pontiff’s feast described by Macrobius. The wealth of
+Pallas, Narcissus, or Seneca, was only a fraction of many a
+fortune accumulated in the last thirty years in the United
+States.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 53 (Pallas); D. Cass.
+60. 34 (Narcissus); Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 42;
+D. Cass. 61. 10; cf. Duruy, v. p. 598.</note> The exaggerated idea of Roman riches and waste has
+been further heightened by the colossal extravagance of the
+worst emperors and a few of their boon companions and
+imitators. But we are apt to forget that these were the
+outbreaks of morbid and eccentric character, in which the last
+feeble restraints were sapped and swept away by the sense of
+<pb n="69"/><anchor id="Pg69"/>having at command the resources of a world. Nero is
+expressly described by the historian as a lover of the impossible;<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 42.</note>
+and both he and Caligula had floating before their
+disordered imaginations the dream of astounding triumphs, even
+over the most defiant forces and barriers of nature. There
+was much in the extravagance of their courtiers and imitators,
+springing from the same love of sensation and display. Rome
+was a city of gossip, and the ambition to be talked about,
+as the inventor of some new freak of prodigality, was probably
+the only ambition of the blasé spendthrift of the time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, after all the deductions of scrupulous criticism, the
+profound moral sense of Juvenal has laid bare and painted
+with a realistic power, hardly equalled even by Tacitus,
+an unhealthy temper in the upper classes, which was full of
+peril. He has also revealed, alongside of this decline, a great
+social change, we may even call it a crisis, which the historian,
+generally more occupied with the great figures on the stage, is
+apt to ignore. The decay in the morale and wealth of the
+senatorial order, together with the growing power of a new
+moneyed class, the rise to opulence of the freedman and the
+petty trader, the invasion of Greek and Oriental influences,
+and the perilous or hopeful emancipation, especially of women,
+from old Roman conventionality, these are the great facts in
+the social history of the first century which, under all his
+rhetoric, stand out clearly to the eye of the careful student of
+the satirist.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The famous piece, in which Juvenal describes an effeminate
+Fabius or Lepidus, before the mutilated statues and smoke-stained
+pedigree of his house, rattling the dice-box till the
+dawn, or sunk in the stupor of debauch at the hour when his
+ancestors were sounding their trumpets for the march,<note place="foot">Juv. viii. 10.</note> has, for
+eighteen centuries, inspired many a homily on the vanity
+of mere birth. Its moral is now a hackneyed one. But,
+when the piece was written, it must have been a powerful
+indictment. For the respect for long descent was still deep
+in the true Roman, and was gratified by fabulous genealogies
+to the end. Pliny extols Trajan for reserving for youths of
+illustrious birth the honours due to their race.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 69.</note> Suetonius
+recounts the twenty-eight consulships, five dictatorships, seven
+<pb n="70"/><anchor id="Pg70"/>censorships, and many triumphs which were the glory of
+the great Claudian house,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> i. Cf. the funeral
+oration of Julius Caesar over his aunt,
+quoted by Suet. <hi rend="italic">Jul. Caes.</hi> 6.</note> and the similar honours which
+had been borne by the paternal ancestors of Nero.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, i.</note> Tacitus,
+although not himself a man of old family, has a profound belief
+in noble tradition, and sometimes speaks with an undisguised
+scorn of a low alliance.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> vi. 33.</note> As the number of the <q>Trojugenae</q>
+dwindled, the pride of the vanishing remnant probably grew
+in proportion, and a clan like the Calpurnian reluctantly
+yielded precedence even to Tiberius or Nero.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xv. 48.</note> It is a sign
+of the social tone that the manufacture of genealogies for the
+new men, who came into prominence from the reign of
+Vespasian, went on apace. A Trojan citizen in the days
+of Apollonius traced himself to Priam.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 12.</note> Herodes Atticus
+claimed descent from the heroes of Aegina,<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> ii. 1.</note> just as some of the
+Christian friends of S. Jerome confidently carried their pedigree
+back to Aeneas or Agamemnon.<note place="foot">Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, § 4.</note> Juvenal would certainly
+not have accepted such fables, but he was no leveller. He
+had a firm belief in moral heredity and the value of tradition.
+Plebeian as he was, he had, like Martial, his own old
+Roman pride, which poured contempt on the upstarts who,
+with the stains of servile birth or base trade upon them, were
+crowding the benches of the knights. He would, indeed,
+have applauded the <hi rend="italic">mot</hi> of Tiberius, that a distinguished man
+was his own ancestor;<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 21, Curtius Rufus
+videtur mihi ex se natus.</note> he recalls with pride that one humble
+son of Arpinum had annihilated the hordes of the Cimbri, and
+another had crushed the rising of Catiline.<note place="foot">Juv. viii. 285 sqq.</note> But he had the
+true Roman reverence for the Curii, Fabii, and Scipios, and
+would gladly salute any of their descendants who reproduced
+their virtues.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is a melancholy certainty that a great many of the senatorial
+class in Juvenal’s day had fallen very low in all things
+essential to the strength of a great caste. Their numbers had
+long been dwindling,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 25.</note> owing to vicious celibacy or the cruel
+proscriptions of the triumvirate and the four Claudian Caesars,
+or from the unwillingness or inability of many to support the
+<pb n="71"/><anchor id="Pg71"/>burdens of their rank. It was a rare thing in many great
+houses to reach middle age.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 33, § 2; Juv. iv. 96.</note> Three hundred senators and two
+thousand knights had fallen in the proscription of the second
+triumvirate.<note place="foot">Appian, <hi rend="italic">B. C.</hi> iv. 5.</note> The massacre of old and young of both sexes,
+which followed the fall of Sejanus, must have extinguished
+many an ancient line; not a day passed without an execution.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> 61, nullus a poena hominum
+cessavit dies.</note>
+Three hundred knights and thirty-five senators perished in the
+reign of Claudius.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> xxix.</note> Very few of the most ancient patrician
+houses were left when Claudius revised the lists of the Senate,
+and introduced a fresh element from Gaul.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 25.</note> Who can tell
+the numbers of those who fell victims to the rage or greed
+or suspicion of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian? The list must
+have been enormously swelled by the awful year of the four
+emperors. Vespasian found it necessary to recruit the ranks
+of the aristocracy from Italy and the provinces.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> ix.; cf. Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 55.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the same time, prodigality or confiscation had rendered
+many of those who survived unable to maintain their rank, and
+to bear the social and official burdens which, down to the end
+of the Western Empire were rigorously imposed on the great
+order. The games of the praetorship in the first century, as in
+the fifth,<note place="foot">Sym. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 78; Seeck, <hi rend="italic">Prol.</hi> xlvi.</note> constituted a tax which only a great fortune could
+easily bear. Aristocratic poverty became common. As early
+as the reign of Augustus, the emperor had found it politic to
+subsidise many great families.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> xli.</note> The same policy had been
+continued by Tiberius, Nero, and Vespasian.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, x.; <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xvii.</note> Tiberius, indeed,
+had scrutinised and discouraged some of these claims
+on grounds which the treasury officials of every age would
+applaud.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> ii. 37, 38.</note> A grandson of the great orator Hortensius once
+made an appeal in the Senate for the means of supporting
+the dignity of his name. He had received a grant from
+Augustus to enable him to rear a family, and four sons were
+now waiting at the doors of the Curia to second his prayer.
+Hortensius, who was the great rival of Cicero, had possessed
+immense wealth. He had many splendid villas, he used to
+give dinners in his park, around which the deer would troop
+<pb n="72"/><anchor id="Pg72"/>to the lute of a slave-Orpheus; he left 10,000 casks of old
+Chian in his cellars. His mendicant and spiritless descendant
+had to go away with a cold withering refusal from Tiberius,
+softened by a contemptuous dole to his sons. The revision
+of the senatorial roll by Claudius in 48 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, revealed a portentous
+disappearance of old houses of the Republic, and the
+gaps had to be filled up from the provinces in the teeth of
+aristocratic exclusiveness.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 25; D. Cass. lx. 29.
+The last revision of the Senate was in
+the reign of Augustus; D. Cass. lv.
+13.</note> Among the boon companions of
+Nero there must have been many loaded with debt, like
+Otho and Vitellius. The Corvinus in Juvenal who is keeping
+sheep on a Laurentine farm, and his probable kinsman who
+obtained a subsidy from Nero, the Fabii and Mamerci
+who were dancing and playing the harlequin on the comic
+stage, or selling their blood in the arena, must represent
+many a wreck of the great houses of the Republic.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 34; Juv. i. 107.</note> Among
+the motley crowd who swarm in the hall of the great patron
+to receive the morning dole, the descendants of houses
+coeval with the Roman State are pushed aside by the
+freedmen from the Euphrates.<note place="foot">Juv. i. 103.</note> But aristocratic poverty
+knew no lower depth of degradation than in the hungry
+adulation which it offered to the heirless rich. Captation
+became a regular profession in a society where trade, industry,
+and even professional skill, were treated as degrading to the
+men of gentle blood.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> c. 116, 124; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+ii. 20; Juv. i. 37; iii. 31.</note> It is characteristic of Juvenal that he
+places on the same level the legacy-hunter, who would stoop
+to any menial service or vicious compliance, with the honest
+tradesfolk, in whose ranks, if we may judge by their funerary
+inscriptions, was to be found, perhaps, the wholesomest moral
+tone in the society of the early Empire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a satire written after Domitian’s death,<note place="foot">Juv. iv.; i. 27.</note> Juvenal has
+described a scene of fatuous adulation which, if not true in
+fact, is only too true to the character of the time. A huge
+mullet, too large for any private table, had been caught in a
+bay of the Adriatic. Its captor hastens through winter storms
+to lay his spoil at the emperor’s feet. The kitchen of the
+Alban palace had no dish large enough for such a monster, and
+<pb n="73"/><anchor id="Pg73"/>a council of trembling senators is hastily summoned to consult
+on the emergency. Thither came the gentle Crispus, that
+Acilius, whose son was to be the victim of the despot’s
+jealousy, Rubrius tainted with a nameless crime, the bloated
+Montanus, and Crispinus, once an Egyptian slave, now a
+vulgar exquisite, reeking with unguents. There, too, was the
+informer whose whisper stabbed like a stiletto, the lustful,
+blind Catullus, and the arch flatterer Veiento, who had
+revelled at the Gargantuan feasts of Nero from noon till
+midnight. These are worthy brethren of the assembly who
+stabbed Proculus to death with their stiles at the nod of the
+freedman of Caligula,<note place="foot">D. Cass. lix. 26.</note> and led Nero home in triumphal procession
+after his mother’s murder.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 12.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many things had contributed to the degradation of the
+senatorial character. The dark and tortuous policy of
+Tiberius tended, indeed, to absolutism; yet he still maintained
+a tone of deference to the Senate, and sometimes, with cold
+good sense, repelled a too eager adulation.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> lxvii.</note> But, in the reigns
+of Caligula and Nero, the great order had to submit to the
+deepest personal degradation, and were tempted, or compelled
+by their masters to violate every instinct of Roman dignity.
+The wild epileptic frenzy of Caligula, who spared not the
+virtue of his sisters,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xxiii. xxiv.; cf. L. comitiali
+morbo vexatus, which explains much
+to a medical man.</note> as he boasted of his own incestuous
+birth,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxiii.</note> who claimed divine honours,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxii.; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, i. 20.</note> temples, and costly
+sacrifices, who, as another Endymion, called the Moon to his
+embraces, who dreamt of obliterating the memory of Homer
+and Virgil and Livy, was not likely to spare the remnant of
+self-respect still left in his nobles.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xxxiv. xxxv. vetera
+familiarum insignia nobilissimo cuique
+ademit; xxii.</note> He gave an immense
+impetus to the rage for singing, dancing, and acting,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> liv. lv. quorum vero studio
+teneretur, omnibus ad insaniam favit.</note> for
+chariot-driving and fighting in the arena, not unknown before,
+which Juvenal and Tacitus brand as the most flagrant sign of
+degenerate morals. There was indeed a great conflict of
+sentiment under the early Empire as to some of these arts.
+Julius Caesar had encouraged or permitted Roman senators
+and knights to fight in the gladiatorial combats, and a Laberius
+<pb n="74"/><anchor id="Pg74"/>to act in his own play.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Jul. Caes.</hi> xxxix.</note> But a decree of the Senate, not long
+afterwards, had placed a ban on these exhibitions by men of
+noble rank.<note place="foot">D. Cass. xlviii. 43.</note> Tiberius, who was, beyond anything, a haughty
+aristocrat, at a later date intervened to save the dignity of
+the order.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tiberius</hi>, xxxv.</note> But the rage of the rabble for these spectacles
+had undoubtedly caught many in the ranks of the upper
+class. And Caligula and Nero<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xviii. nec ullis nisi ex
+senatorio ordine aurigantibus; D.
+Cass. 59. 10, 13, Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xii.</note> found, only too easily, youths
+of birth and breeding, but ruined fortune, who were ready to
+exhibit themselves for a welcome <hi rend="italic">douceur</hi>, or to gain the
+favour of the prince, or even to bring down the applause
+of the crowded benches of the amphitheatre or the circus.
+Yet the old Roman feeling must have been very persistent,
+when a man like Domitian, who posed as a puritan, found
+it politic to remove from the Senate one who had disgraced
+his order by dancing in the pantomime, and even
+laid his interdict on all public theatrical performances.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> viii. vii.</note>
+The revels and massacres and wild debauchery of Nero did
+not so much to hasten his destruction as his singing his
+catches to the lute, or appearing in the parts of the incestuous
+Canace and the matricide Orestes.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xx. xxi.</note> From every part of the
+world, in all the literature of the time, there is a chorus of
+astounded indignation against the prince who could stoop to
+pit himself against Greek players and singers at Delphi or
+Olympia. Juvenal has been reproached for putting the chariot-driving
+of Damasippus in the same category with the Verrine
+plunder of provinces.<note place="foot">Juv. viii. 89, 147.</note> He is really the exponent of old
+Roman sentiment. And it may be doubted whether, from the
+Roman point of view, Juvenal might not justify himself to
+his critics. Even in our own emancipated age, we might be
+pardoned for feeling a shock if an English prime minister rode
+his own horse at the Derby, or appeared in a risky part on the
+boards of the Gaiety. And the collective sense of senatorial
+self-respect was too precious to a Roman patriot and moralist,
+to be flung away for mere love of sport, or in a fit of spurious
+artistic enthusiasm. Nero, and in an even lower fashion
+Caligula, were rebels against old Roman conventional restraints,
+<pb n="75"/><anchor id="Pg75"/>and it is possible that some of the hideous tales about them,
+which were spread in the <q>circuli,</q> may have been the vengeance
+of Roman pride on shameless social revolutionaries, who
+paraded their contempt for old-fashioned dignity and for social
+tradition. Nero was never so happy as when he was deafened
+with applause, and smothered with roses at the Greek festivals.
+He had once predicted for him a monarchy in those regions of
+the East,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xl.; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Krause, <hi rend="italic">De
+Sueton. Fontibus</hi>, pp. 57, 80; Peter,
+<hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. 69.</note> where he would have escaped from the tradition of
+old Roman puritanism, and combined all the ingenious sensuality
+of Syria with the doubtful artistic taste of a decadent
+Hellenism. The cold haughty refinement of senatorial circles
+of the old régime, and the rude honest virtue of the plebeian
+soldiery,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 67.</note> rightly mistrusted this false sensational artist on the
+throne of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Art, divorced from moral ideals, may become a dangerous
+thing. The emperor might spend the morning with his
+favourites in patching up lilting verses which would run well
+to the lute.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiv. 16; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, lii.,
+where Suetonius distinctly says that
+some of Nero’s verses, which he had
+seen, bore all the marks of originality.
+Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 39; Macé,
+<hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 127; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p.
+248.</note> But the scene soon changed to a revel, where
+the roses and music hardly veiled the grossness of excess. The
+<q>noctes Neronis</q> made many a debauchee and scattered many
+a senatorial fortune.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxvii.</note> And amid all this elaborate luxury and
+splendour of indulgence, there was a strange return to the
+naturalism of vice and mere blackguardism. A Messalina or
+a Nero or a Petronius developed a curious taste for the low
+life that reeks and festers in the taverns and in the stews.
+Bohemianism for a time became the fashion.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxvi.; cf. Juv. vi. 115.</note> Its very grossness
+was a stimulant to appetites jaded with every diabolical
+refinement of vicious ingenuity. The distinguished dinner
+party, with the emperor at their head, sallied forth to see how
+the people were living in the slums. Many a scene from these
+midnight rambles has probably been preserved in the tainted,
+yet brilliant, pages of the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi>. Petronius had probably
+often plunged with Nero after night-fall into those low dens,
+where slave minions and sailors and the obscene priests of the
+great Mother were roistering together, or sunk in the slumber
+<pb n="76"/><anchor id="Pg76"/>of debauch.<note place="foot">Juv. viii. 172.</note> These elegant aristocrats found their sport in
+rudely assaulting quiet citizens returning from dinner, or
+plundering some poor huckster’s stall in the Suburra, or insulting
+a lady in her chair. In the fierce faction fights of the
+theatre, where stones and benches were flying, the Emperor
+had once the distinction of breaking a praetor’s head.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxvi.</note> It was
+nobles trained in this school, experts in vice, but with no
+nerve for arms, who encumbered the train of Otho on his
+march to the sanguinary conflict on the Po.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 88.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The demoralisation of a section of the upper class under the
+bad emperors must have certainly involved the degradation of
+many women. And one of the most brilliant and famous of
+Juvenal’s Satires is devoted to this unsavoury subject. The
+<q>Legend of Bad Women</q> is a graphic picture, and yet it
+suffers from a defect which spoils much of Juvenal’s work.
+Full of realistic power, with an undoubted foundation of truth,
+it is too vehement and sweeping in its censures to gain full
+credence. It is also strangely wanting in balance and due order
+of idea.<note place="foot">See some admirable criticism in
+Nettleship’s <hi rend="italic">Lectures and Essays</hi>, 2nd
+series, p. 141; cf. Munding, <hi rend="italic">Über die
+Sat. des Juv.</hi> p. 7.</note> The problem of marriage is illustrated by a series
+of sketches of female manners, which are very disconnected,
+and, indeed, sometimes inconsistent. Thorough depravity,
+superstition, and ignorant devotion, interest in literature and
+public affairs, love of gymnastic and decided opinions on
+Virgil—in fact, vices, innocent hobbies, and laudable tastes are
+all thrown together in a confused indictment. The bohemian
+man of letters had heard many a scandal about great ladies,
+some of them true, others distorted and exaggerated by
+prurient gossip, after passing through a hundred tainted
+imaginations. In his own modest class, female morality, as
+we may infer from the Inscriptions and other sources, was
+probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average
+morality of any age.<note place="foot">Duruy, v. 673; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi>
+ii. 233 sqq.</note> There were aristocratic families, too,
+where the women were as pure as Lucretia or Cornelia, or any
+matron of the olden days.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 19; iii. 16; iii. 3;
+Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi> xiv. xix.; D. Cass.
+lxviii. 5 <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi></note> The ideal of purity, both in men
+and women, in some circles was actually rising. In the families
+of Seneca, of Tacitus, of Pliny and Plutarch, there were, not
+<pb n="77"/><anchor id="Pg77"/>only the most spotless and high minded women, there were
+also men with a rare conception of temperance and mutual
+love, of reverence for a pure wedlock, to which S. Jerome and
+S. Augustine would have given their benediction. Even Ovid,
+that <q>debauchee of the imagination,</q> writes to his wife, from
+his exile in the Scythian wilds, in the accents of the purest
+affection.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Trist.</hi> iii. 3, 15—
+
+<lg>
+<l>Omnia cum subeant, vincis tamen omnia, conjux;</l>
+<l>Et plus in nostro pectore parte tenes.</l>
+<l>Te loquor absentem, te vox mea nominat unam:</l>
+<l>Nulla venit sine te nox mihi, nulla dies.</l>
+</lg></note> And, amid all the lubricity of his pictures of
+gallantry, he has not lost the ideal of a virgin heart, which
+repels and disarms the libertine by the spell of an impregnable
+purity.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Amor.</hi> iii. 4, 3; cf. <hi rend="italic">Ars Am.</hi>
+ii. 599, iii. 440, 613, Denis, <hi rend="italic">Idées
+Morales</hi>, ii. 124.</note> Plutarch’s ideal of marriage, at once severe
+and tender, would have satisfied S. Paul.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Uxor.</hi> x.; <hi rend="italic">Conj.
+Praec.</hi> iv. xliv. xlvii.</note> Favorinus, the
+friend and contemporary of Plutarch, thought it not beneath
+the dignity of philosophic eloquence to urge on mothers
+the duty of suckling and personally caring for their infants.<note place="foot">A. Gell. xii. 1.</note>
+Seneca and Musonius, who lived through the reign of Nero,
+are equally peremptory in demanding a like continence
+from men and from women. And Musonius severely condemns
+concubinage and vagrant amours of every kind, the
+man guilty of seduction sins not only against another, but
+against his own soul.<note place="foot">Denis, ii. 134; Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Die Phil. der
+Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p. 660.</note> Dion Chrysostom was probably the first
+of the ancients to raise a clear voice against the traffic in frail
+beauty which has gone on pitilessly from age to age. Nothing
+could exceed the vehemence with which he assails an evil
+which he regards as not only dishonouring to human nature,
+but charged with the poison of far spreading corruption.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> vii. 133.</note>
+Juvenal’s ideal of purity, therefore, is not peculiar to himself.
+The great world was bad enough, but there was another world
+beside that whose infamy Juvenal has immortalised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is also to be observed that Juvenal seems to be quite
+as much under the influence of old Roman conventionality as of
+permanent moral ideals. He condemns eccentricities, or mere
+harmless aberrations from old-fashioned rules of propriety, as
+ruthlessly as he punishes lust and crime. The blue-stocking
+who is a purist in style, and who balances, with deafening
+<pb n="78"/><anchor id="Pg78"/>volubility, the merits of Homer and Virgil,<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 436—
+
+<lg>
+<l>Committit vates et comparat; inde Maronem,</l>
+<l>Atque alia parte in trutina suspendit Homerum.</l>
+<l>Cedunt grammatici, vincuntur rhetores—</l>
+</lg></note> the eager gossip
+who has the very freshest news from Thrace or Parthia, or the
+latest secret of a tainted family,<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 400 sqq.</note> the virago who, with an
+intolerable pride of virtue, plays the household tyrant and
+delivers curtain lectures to her lord,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 268.</note> seem to be almost as
+detestable in Juvenal’s eyes as the doubtful person who has
+had eight husbands in five years, or one who elopes with an
+ugly gladiator,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 108, 60.</note> or tosses off two pints before dinner.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 427.</note> We
+may share his disgust for the great ladies who fought in the
+arena and wrestled in the ring,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 252.</note> or who order their poor tire-women
+to be flogged for deranging a curl in the towering
+architecture of their hair.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 493.</note> But we cannot feel all his contempt
+for the poor penitent devotee of Isis who broke the ice to
+plunge thrice in the Tiber on a winter morning, and crawled
+on bleeding knees over the Campus Martius, or brought a phial
+of water from the Nile to sprinkle in the fane of the goddess.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 528.</note>
+Even lust, grossness, and cruelty, even poisoning and abortion,
+seem to lose some of their blackness when they are compared
+with an innocent literary vanity, or a pathetic eagerness to
+read the future or to soothe the pangs of a guilty conscience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The truth is that Juvenal is as much shocked by the <q>new
+woman</q> as he is by the vicious woman. He did not understand,
+or he could not acquiesce in the great movement for the
+emancipation of women, which had set in long before his time,
+and which, like all such movements, brought evil with it as
+well as good. There is perhaps nothing more striking in
+the social history of Rome than the inveterate conservatism
+of Roman sentiment in the face of accomplished change.
+Such moral rigidity is almost necessarily prone to pessimism.
+The Golden Age lies in the past; the onward sweep of
+society seems to be always moving towards the abyss.
+The ideal past of the Roman woman lay more than two
+centuries and a half behind the time when Juvenal was
+born. The old Roman matron was, by legal theory, in the
+power of her husband, yet assured by religion and sentiment a
+dignified position in the family, and treated with profound, if
+somewhat cold, respect; she was busied with household cares,
+<pb n="79"/><anchor id="Pg79"/>and wanting in the lighter graces and charms, austere, self-contained,
+and self-controlled. But this severe ideal had
+begun to fade even in the days of the elder Cato.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">R. Hist.</hi> ii. 408 (Tr.).</note> And there
+is hardly a fault or vice attributed by Juvenal to the women
+of Domitian’s reign, which may not find parallel in the nine or
+ten generations before Juvenal penned his great indictment
+against the womanhood of his age. The Roman lady’s irritable
+pride of birth is at least as old as the rivalry of the two Fabiae
+in the fourth century.<note place="foot">Liv. vi. 34.</note> The elder Cato dreaded a rich wife
+as much as Juvenal,<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Cato Maj.</hi> c. xx.; Juv. vi.
+165, 460.</note> and satirised as bitterly the pride and
+gossip and luxury of the women of his time. Their love of
+gems and gold ornaments and many-coloured robes and richly
+adorned carriages, is attested by Plautus and the impotent legislation
+of C. Oppius.<note place="foot">Val. Max. ii. 1, 5; Liv. xxxiv. 1, 3;
+Marq. i. p. 62.</note> Divorce and ghastly crime in the noblest
+families were becoming common in the days of the Second Punic
+War. About the same time began that emancipation of
+women from the jealous restraints of Roman law, which was to
+be carried further in the Antonine age.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">R. Hist.</hi> ii. 408.</note> The strict forms of
+marriage, which placed the wife in the power of her husband,
+fell more and more into desuetude. Women attained more
+absolute control over their property, and so much capital
+became concentrated in their hands that, about the middle of
+the second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, the Voconian law was passed to prohibit
+bequests to them, with the usual futile result of such
+legislation.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">in Verr.</hi> i. 42, 107.</note> Yet the old ideal of the industrious housewife
+never died out, and Roman epitaphs for ages record that the
+model matron was a wool-worker and a keeper at home. A
+senator of the reign of Honorius praises his daughter for the same
+homely virtues.<note place="foot">Sym. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 67; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi>
+lxiv.; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2677, 4629, 4629,
+lanifica, pia, pudica, casta, domiseda.</note> But from the second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> the education
+of the Roman girl of the higher classes underwent a great
+change.<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> iii. 14, 11.</note> Dancing, music, and the higher accomplishments
+were no longer under a ban, although they were still suspected
+by people of the old-fashioned school. Boys and girls received
+the same training from the grammarian, and read their Homer
+and Ennius together.<note place="foot">Friedl. i. 312; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi>
+ii. 240.</note> There were women in the time of
+<pb n="80"/><anchor id="Pg80"/>Lucretius, as in the time of Juvenal, who interlarded their
+conversation with Greek phrases.<note place="foot">Lucr. iv. 1160; Juv. vi. 192.</note> Cornelia, the wife of
+Pompey, was trained in literature and mathematics, and even
+had some tincture of philosophy.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Pomp.</hi> lv.</note> The daughter of Atticus,
+who became the wife of Agrippa, was placed under the tuition
+of a freedman, who, as too often happened, seems to have
+abused his trust.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Gram. Ill.</hi> 16.</note> Even in the gay circle of Ovid, there
+were learned ladies, or ladies who wished to be thought so.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Ars Am.</hi> ii. 282.</note>
+Even Martial reckons culture among the charms of a woman.
+Seneca maintained that women have an equal capacity for cultivation
+with men.<note place="foot">Mart. xii. 98, 3; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi>
+xvii.; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> xvi.</note> Thus the blue-stocking of Juvenal, for whom
+he has so much contempt, had many an ancestress for three
+centuries, as she will have many a daughter till the end of the
+Western Empire.<note place="foot">Claud. <hi rend="italic">Laus Serenae</hi>, 146.</note> Even in philosophy, usually the last study
+to attract the female mind, Roman ladies were asserting
+an equal interest. Great ladies of the Augustan court, even
+the empress herself, had their philosophic directors,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> 4.</note> and
+the fashion perhaps became still more general under M.
+Aurelius. Epictetus had met ladies who were enthusiastic
+admirers of the Platonic Utopia, but the philosopher rather
+slyly attributes their enthusiasm to the absence of rigorous
+conjugal relations in the Ideal Society.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Fr.</hi> liii.</note> Even in the field of
+authorship, women were claiming equal rights. The <hi rend="italic">Memoirs of
+Agrippina</hi> was one of the authorities of Tacitus.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 53; cf. Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi>
+vii. 8, 46.</note> The poems of
+Sulpicia, mentioned by Martial,<note place="foot">Mart. x. 35; vii. 69.</note> were read in Gaul in the days
+of Sidonius.<note place="foot">Sid. Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Carm.</hi> ix. 261.</note> Greek verses, of some merit in spite of a pedantic
+affectation, by Balbilla, a friend of the wife of Hadrian, can
+still be read on the Colossus of Memnon.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.G.</hi> 4725-31.</note> Calpurnia, the wife
+of Pliny, may not have been an author; but she shared all
+Pliny’s literary tastes; she set his poems to music, and gave
+him the admiration of a good wife, if not of an impartial critic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juvenal feels as much scorn for the woman who is interested
+in public affairs and the events on the frontier,<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 403; cf. 434.</note> as he
+feels for the woman who presumes to balance the merits of
+Virgil and Homer. And here he is once more at war with a
+<pb n="81"/><anchor id="Pg81"/>great movement towards the equality of the sexes. From the
+days of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, to the days of
+Placidia, the sister of Honorius, Roman women exercised, from
+time to time, a powerful, and not always wholesome, influence
+on public affairs. The politic Augustus discussed high matters
+of state with Livia.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> lxxxiv.</note> The reign of Claudius was a reign of
+women and freedmen. Tacitus records, with a certain distaste
+for the innovation, that Agrippina sat enthroned beside Claudius
+on a lofty tribunal, to receive the homage of the captive Caractacus.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 37, novum sane et
+moribus veterum insolitum, feminam
+signis Romanis praesidere.</note>
+Nero emancipated himself from the grasping ambition
+of his mother only by a ghastly crime. The influence of
+Caenis on Vespasian in his later days tarnished his fame.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxvi. 14; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi>
+xvi.; Krause, <hi rend="italic">De Suet. Fontibus</hi>, p. 75.</note>
+The influence of women in provincial administration was also
+becoming a serious force. In the reign of Tiberius, Caecina
+Severus, with the weight of forty years’ experience of camps, in
+a speech before the Senate, denounced the new-fangled custom
+of the wives of generals and governors accompanying them
+abroad, attending reviews of troops, mingling freely with the
+soldiers, and taking an active part in business, which was not
+always favourable to pure administration.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 33; cf. i. 64; i. 69,
+sed femina [<hi rend="italic">i.e.</hi> Agrippina] ingens animi
+munia ducis per eos dies induit, etc.</note> In the inscriptions
+of the first and second centuries, women appear in a more
+wholesome character as <q>mothers of the camp,</q> or patronesses
+of municipal towns and corporations.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6000, 4036, 5158, 4643,
+5134, 3774, 2417, 4055, 4056, 7207,
+3815.</note> They have statues dedicated
+to them for liberality in erecting porticoes or adorning
+theatres or providing civic games or feasts.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3738, 3773, 6992.</note> And on one of
+these tablets we read of a <hi rend="italic">Curia mulierum</hi> at Lanuvium.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3740.</note>
+We are reminded of the <q>chapter of matrons</q> who visited
+Agrippina with their censure,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Galba</hi>, v.</note> and another female senate, under
+Elagabalus, which dealt with minute questions of precedence
+and graded etiquette.<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Heliogab.</hi> iv.; cf. Lamprid.
+<hi rend="italic">Aurelian.</hi> xlix.</note> On the walls of Pompeii female admirers
+posted up their election placards in support of their
+favourite candidates.<note place="foot">Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi> (Kelsey Tr.), p. 479.</note> Thus Juvenal was fighting a lost battle,
+lost long before he wrote. For good or evil, women in the
+first and second centuries were making themselves a power.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="82"/><anchor id="Pg82"/>
+
+<p>
+Although he was probably a very light believer in the old
+mythology,<note place="foot">Juv. ii. 31; iv. 34; xiii. 38; vi.
+394; vii. 194.</note> and treated its greatest figures with scant respect,
+Juvenal had all the old Roman prejudice against those eastern
+worships which captivated so many women of his day. And, here
+again, the satirist is assailing a movement which had set in long
+before he wrote, and which was destined to gain immense impetus
+and popularity in the two following centuries. The eunuch
+priests of the Great Mother, with their cymbals and Phrygian
+tiaras, had appeared in Italy in the last years of the Hannibalic
+War.<note place="foot">Liv. xxix. 14.</note> The early years of the second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> were convulsed
+by the scandals and horrors of the Dionysiac orgies,
+which fell on Rome like a pestilence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxxix. 8; cf. Lafaye, <hi rend="italic">Culte des
+Div. d’Alexandrie</hi>, c. iii.</note> The purity of women
+and the peace of families were in serious danger, till the
+mischief was stamped out in blood. The worship of Isis
+found its way into the capital at least as early as Sulla, and
+defied the hesitating exclusion of Augustus.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. 817; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi>
+xciii.; D. Cass. liii. 2.</note> At this distance,
+we can see the <hi rend="italic">raison d’être</hi> of what the satirist regarded
+as religious aberrations, the full treatment of which must
+be reserved for another chapter. The world was in the
+throes of a religious revolution, and eagerly in quest of some
+fresh vision of the Divine, from whatever quarter it might
+dawn. The cults of the East seemed to satisfy cravings and
+emotions, which found no resting-place in the national religion.
+Their ritual appealed to the senses and imagination, while their
+mysteries seemed to promise a revelation of God and immortality.
+Their strange mixture of the sensuous and the ascetic
+was specially adapted to fascinate weak women who had deeply
+sinned, and yet occasionally longed to repent. The repentance
+indeed was often shallow enough; the fasting and mortification
+were compatible with very light morals.<note place="foot">Catull. x. 26; Tibull. i. 3, 23; cf.
+Juv. xiii. 93.</note> There were the gravest
+moral abuses connected with such worships as that of Magna
+Mater. It is well known that the temples of Isis often
+became places of assignation and guilty intrigue.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Ars Am.</hi> i. 77.</note> An infatuated
+Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius had been
+seduced by her lover in the pretended guise of the god
+Anubis.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. 347.</note> The Chaldaean seer or the Jewish hag might often
+<pb n="83"/><anchor id="Pg83"/>arouse dangerous hopes, or fan a guilty passion by casting
+a horoscope or reading a dream.<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 547.</note> But Juvenal’s scorn seems
+to fall quite as heavily on the innocent votary who was striving
+to appease a burdened conscience, as on one who made her
+superstition a screen for vice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In spite of the political extinction of the Jewish race, its
+numbers and influence grew in Italy. The very destruction
+of the Holy Place and the external symbols of Jewish worship
+threw a more impressive air of mystery around the dogmas
+of the Jewish faith, of which even the most cultivated Romans
+had only vague conceptions.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> v. 2, 4; Juv. xiv. 97.</note> The Jews, from the time of
+the first Caesar, had worked their way into every class of
+society.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Fr.</hi> 42 (in Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>,
+vi. 11), victi victoribus leges dederunt.</note> A Jewish prince had inspired Caligula with an
+oriental ideal of monarchy.<note place="foot">Cf. Meriv. vi. 6.</note> There were adherents of Judaism
+in the household of the great freedmen of Claudius, and their
+growing influence and turbulence compelled that emperor to
+expel the race from the capital.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> xxv.</note> The worldly, pleasure-loving
+Poppaea had, perhaps, yielded to the mysterious charm of the
+religion of Moses.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 22; Duruy, iv. 505.</note> But it was under the Flavians, who had
+such close associations with Judaea, that Jewish influences
+made themselves most felt. And in the reign of Domitian,
+two members of the imperial house, along with many others,
+suffered for following the Jewish mode of life.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xv.; D. Cass. lxvii.
+14; Ren. <hi rend="italic">Les Év.</hi> p. 228.</note> Their crime
+is also described as <q>atheism,</q> and Clemens is, in the old
+Roman spirit, said to have been a man of the most <q>contemptible
+inactivity.</q> In truth, the <q>Jewish life</q> was a
+description which might cover many shades of belief and
+practice in religion, including Christianity itself. The secret
+worship of a dim, mysterious Power, Who was honoured
+by no imposing rites, a spirit of detachment and quietism,
+which shrank from games and spectacles and the scenes of
+fashion, and nursed the dream of a coming kingdom which
+was not of this world, excited the suspicion and contempt
+of the coarse, strenuous Roman nature. Yet, in the gloom
+and deep corruption of that sombre time, such a life of
+retreat and renunciation had a strange charm for naturally
+<pb n="84"/><anchor id="Pg84"/>pious souls, especially among women. There were indeed
+many degrees of conformity to the religion of Palestine.
+While some were attracted by its more spiritual side, others
+confined themselves to an observance of the Sabbath, which
+became very common in some quarters of Rome under the
+Empire. The children, as Juvenal tells us, were sometimes
+trained to a complete conformity to the law of Moses.<note place="foot">Juv. xiv. 96; vi. 544; iii. 15;
+Ren. <hi rend="italic">Les Év.</hi> p. 234.</note>
+But Juvenal is chiefly thinking of the mendicant population
+from Palestine who swarmed in the neighbourhood of the
+Porta Capena and the grove of the Muses, practising all the
+arts which have appealed in all ages to superstitious women.
+Thus the Judaism of the times of Nero or Domitian might
+cover anything from the cunning of the gipsy fortune-teller
+to the sad, dreaming quietism of Pomponia Graecina.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 32.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet it must be admitted that, although Juvenal, in his
+attacks on women, has mixed up very real vice with superstition
+and mere innocent eccentricity, or the explosive energy
+of a new freedom, the real vices of many women of his time
+are a melancholy fact. The Messalinas and Poppaeas had
+many imitators and companions in their own class. It is
+true that even the licentious fancy of Ovid and Martial
+generally spares the character of the unmarried girl. She was,
+in the darkest times, as a rule, carefully guarded from the
+worst corruptions of the spectacles,<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. p. 332; cf. Plin.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 24.</note> or from the reckless
+advances of the hardened libertine, although an intrigue with a
+tutor was not unknown.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Ill. Gram.</hi> xvi.</note> Her marriage was arranged often
+in mere childhood, seldom later than her seventeenth year.
+A girl was rarely betrothed after nineteen.<note place="foot">Friedl. i. 314; <hi rend="italic">Inscr. Or.</hi> 2656,
+2668, 4803.</note> Her temptations
+and danger often began on her wedding-day. That there was
+a high ideal of pure and happy marriage, even in the times
+of the greatest licence, we know from Pliny and Plutarch,
+and from Martial himself.<note place="foot">Mart. iv. 13—
+
+<lg>
+<l>Diligat illa senem quondam: sed et ipsa marito,</l>
+<l>Tunc quoque cum fuerit, non videatur anus.</l>
+</lg>
+
+Plut. <hi rend="italic">Conj. Praec.</hi> xliv. xxxiv.; Plin.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 19; vi. 4; vii. 5.</note> But there were serious perils
+before the child-bride, when she was launched upon the great
+world of Roman society. A marriage of convenience with
+some member of a tainted race, <hi rend="italic">blasé</hi> with precocious and
+<pb n="85"/><anchor id="Pg85"/>unnatural indulgence, and ready to concede the conjugal
+liberty which he claimed, was a perilous trial to virtue. The
+bonds of old Roman marriage had, for ages, been greatly
+relaxed, and the Roman lady of independent fortune and
+vigorous, highly trained intellect, could easily find consolation
+for marital neglect. From Seneca to S. Jerome, the foppish
+procurator of the great lady was a dangerous and suspected
+person,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Fr.</hi> xiii. de Matrimonio,
+formosus assecla et procurator calamistratus,
+etc., sub quibus nominibus adulteri
+delitescunt; cf. S. Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 54,
+§ 13. S. Jerome is evidently imitating
+Seneca; cf. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 639, Mart. v.
+61.</note> and not always without good cause. Surrounded by an
+army of slaves and the other obsequious dependents of a great
+house, treated with profound deference, and saluted with the
+pompous titles of <hi rend="italic">domina</hi> and <hi rend="italic">regina</hi>, the great lady’s lightest
+caprice became law.<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 460; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Fr.</hi> 51.</note> Costly jewels and the rarest luxuries of the
+toilet poured in upon her from regions which were only visited
+by the captains of Red Sea merchantmen, or by some Pythagorean
+ascetic seeking the fountains of the wisdom of the East.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iii. 35, Luc.
+<hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> 44.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The political life of Rome had been extinguished by a
+jealous despotism, but social life in the higher ranks was never
+so intense and so seductive, and women had their full share in
+it. Ladies dined out regularly with their husbands, even at
+the emperor’s table,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 81, erat Othoni celebre
+convivium primoribus feminis virisque.
+D. Cass. lx. 7.</note> and they were liable to be assailed by
+the artistic wiles of which Ovid taught the secret, or by the
+brutal advances of the lawless Caligula.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xxxvi.</note> It was a time when
+people loved to meet anywhere, under the trees of the Campus
+Martius, in the colonnades of the theatre, or round the
+seats of the public squares. Everywhere were to be seen
+those groups which spared no reputation, not even the emperor’s.
+And behind the chair of the young matron often
+hovered the dangerous exquisite, who could hum in a whisper
+the latest suggestive song from Alexandria or Gades,<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Ars Am.</hi> i. 67, Friedl. i. 281.</note> who
+knew the pedigree of every racehorse and the secret of every
+intrigue. It is at such scenes that Tacitus is probably
+glancing when he says that in Germany no one makes a jest
+of vice, or calls the art of corruption the fashion of the world;<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Germ.</hi> 19, nec corrumpere et
+corrumpi saeculum vocatur.</note>
+chastity is not sapped by the seductions of the spectacles.
+<pb n="86"/><anchor id="Pg86"/>Augustus had, indeed, set apart the upper seats for women in
+the theatre and amphitheatre,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> xliv.</note> but on the benches of the circus
+the sexes freely mingled. It was there, while the factions of the
+red and blue were shouting themselves hoarse, Ovid pointed
+out to his pupil in gallantry, that he had his fairest chance of
+making a dangerous impression.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Ars Am.</hi> i. 139—
+
+<lg>
+<l>Proximus a domina, nullo prohibente, sedeto.</l>
+</lg></note> Yet even Ovid is half inclined
+to be shocked at the scenes on the stage which were
+witnessed by women and young boys.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Trist.</hi> ii. 503—
+
+<lg>
+<l>Nec satis incestis temerari vocibus aures:</l>
+<l rend="margin-left: 2">Adsuescunt oculi multa pudenda pati.</l>
+</lg>
+
+Cf. 515.</note> The foulest tales of
+the old mythology, the loves of Pasiphae or the loves of Leda,
+were enacted to the life, or told with a nakedness of language,
+compared with which even Martial might seem chaste.<note place="foot">Mart. iii. 86 says of his poems—
+
+<lg>
+<l>Non sunt haec mimis improbiora: lege.</l>
+</lg></note> Not
+less degrading were the gladiatorial shows, so lavishly provided
+by Augustus and Trajan, as well as by Caligula and Domitian,
+at which the Vestals had a place of honour.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> xliv.</note> It is little
+wonder that women accustomed to take pleasure in the sufferings
+and death of brave men, should be capable of condemning
+their poor slave women to torture or the lash for a sullen look,
+or a half-heard murmur. The grossness with which Juvenal
+describes the effect of the stage on the morals of women savours
+of the Suburra.<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 62.</note> But of the poisonous character of these performances
+there can be no doubt. And actors, musicians, and
+gladiators became a danger to the peace of households, as well
+as to the peace of the streets. The artistes of the pantomime
+were sternly suppressed both by Tiberius and Domitian, and
+not without good cause.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> vii.; <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> xxxiv.</note> One famous dancer had the fatal
+honour of captivating Messalina.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lx. 22, 28.</note> The empress of Domitian
+was divorced for her love of Paris.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> iii.; D. Cass. lxvii. 3.</note> And the scandals
+which darkened the fame of the younger Faustina, and
+impeached the legitimacy of Commodus, even if they were
+false, must have rested on a certain ground of probability.<note place="foot">Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Anton.</hi> xix.</note>
+It is melancholy to hear that M. Aurelius had to restrain
+the excesses of Roman matrons even under the reign of the
+philosophers.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxiii. mores matronarum conposuit
+diffluentes, etc.</note> To all these perils must be added the allurements
+of household slavery. While a Musonius or a Seneca
+<pb n="87"/><anchor id="Pg87"/>was demanding equal chastity in man and woman, the new
+woman of Juvenal boldly claims a vicious freedom equal to
+her husband’s.<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 281.</note> The testimony of Petronius is tainted by
+a suspicion of prurient imagination. But the student of other
+sources can hardly doubt that, in the first century, as in the
+fourth, the Roman lady of rank sometimes degraded herself by
+a servile <hi rend="italic">liaison</hi>. A decree of Vespasian’s reign, which his
+biographer tells us was called for by the general licence,
+punished the erring matron with the loss of her rank.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xi. auctor senatui fuit
+decernendi ut quae se alieno servo
+junxisset ancilla haberetur; cf. Mart.
+vi. 39; <hi rend="italic">C. Th.</hi> iv. 9, 1.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These illustrations from other authorities may serve
+towards a judicial estimate of Juvenal’s famous satire on
+women. That it is not a prurient invention is proved by the
+pages of Tacitus and Suetonius and the records of Roman
+morals for more than two centuries. On the other hand, it
+must be read with some reservations. Juvenal is a rhetorician
+with a fiery temperament, who will colour and exaggerate, if
+he will not invent. He is intensely prejudiced and conventional,
+a man to whom desertion of ancient usage is almost as
+bad as a breach of the moral law, a man incapable of seeing
+that the evils of a new social movement may be more than compensated
+by the good which it brings. Moreover, the graver
+vices which he depicts with so much realistic power were
+certainly not so general as he implies. It is to be suspected
+that single instances of abnormal depravity have swelled in
+his heated imagination till they have become types of whole
+classes of sinners. At the worst, these vices infected only a
+comparatively small class, idle, luxurious, enervated by the
+slave system, depraved by the example of a vicious court.
+The very scorn and indignation with which Juvenal pillories
+the aristocratic debauchee reveal the existence of a higher
+standard of virtue. Both the literature and the inscriptions
+of that age make us acquainted with a very different kind of
+woman. Over against the Hippia or Saufeia or Messalina of
+Juvenal we must set the pure and cultivated women whom
+we meet in the pages of Pliny or Tacitus, or the poor soldier’s
+concubine in the Inscriptions, who has all the self-denying love
+and virtue of our own cottagers’ wives.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2669, 4653, 7383.</note>
+</p>
+
+<pb n="88"/><anchor id="Pg88"/>
+
+<p>
+Just as Juvenal misunderstood the movement of female
+emancipation, which was to culminate in the legislation of the
+Antonine age, so has he misconceived some other great social
+movements of his time. Two in particular, the invasion of the
+new Hellenism and the rise of the Freedmen, he anathematises
+with the scorn and old Roman prejudice of the elder Cato.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was nothing new in the invasion of Hellenism in the
+time of Juvenal. Nearly three hundred years before his day,
+the narrow conservatism of ancient Rome was assailed by
+the cosmopolitan culture of Hellas, which it alternately hated
+and admired. The knowledge of Greek was widely diffused
+in Italy in the time of the Hannibalic war.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">R. H.</hi> ii. 414 sqq.</note> Almost the last
+Roman of the ancient breed stooped in his old age to learn
+Greek, in order to train his son in the culture of the world.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 469; cf. Plut. <hi rend="italic">Cato</hi>, xxiii.</note>
+But there were two different aspects of Hellenism. There
+was the Hellenism represented by Homer and Plato and
+Chrysippus; and there was the Hellenism of the low comic
+stage, of the pimp and parasite. And there were reactions
+against the lower Greek influences long before the days of
+Juvenal. Cicero, who did more than any man of his race
+to translate Greek thought into Roman idiom, yet expressed
+as bitter a contempt as Juvenal’s for the fickle, supple,
+histrionic Greek adventurer.<note place="foot">Mahaffy, <hi rend="italic">Greek World under
+Roman Sway</hi>, p. 127.</note> Juvenal is not waging war
+with that nobler Hellenism which had furnished models and
+inspiration to the great writers of the Augustan age, and
+which was destined to refashion Italian culture in the generation
+following his death. The emperors, from Julius Caesar
+to M. Aurelius, were, with few exceptions, trained in the
+literature of Greece, and some of them gave a great impetus to
+Greek culture in the West. Augustus delighted in the Old
+Comedy, entertained Greek philosophers in his house, and
+sprinkled his private letters to Tiberius with Greek quotations.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> 89; <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> 21.</note>
+Tiberius, although he had lived at Rhodes in his youth, seems
+to show less sympathy for the genius of Greece.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> 71, sermone Graeco, quanquam
+alioquin promptus et facilis, non
+tamen usquequaque usus est.</note> Caligula also
+can hardly be claimed as a Hellenist. Although he had once
+a wild dream of restoring the palace of Polycrates, and one,
+more sane, of a canal through the Corinthian Isthmus, he also
+<pb n="89"/><anchor id="Pg89"/>thought of wiping out the memory of the poems of Homer.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xxi. xxxiv.</note>
+Dr. Mahaffy is probably right in treating Claudius as the first
+really Hellenist emperor.<note place="foot">Mahaffy, <hi rend="italic">The Greek World</hi>, p. 255.</note> Like our own James I., Claudius
+was a learned and very ludicrous person. Yet he was perhaps
+not so contemptible a character as he is painted by Suetonius.
+He had, at any rate, the merit of being a lover of Greek literature,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> xlii.</note>
+and he heaped honour on the country which gave it birth.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxv.</note>
+He used to quote Homer in his speeches in the Senate, and
+he composed histories in the Greek language, which, by an
+imperial ordinance, were to be read aloud regularly in the
+Museum of Alexandria.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xlii.</note> In spite of the vices and pompous
+follies of Nero, his phil-Hellenism seems to have been a genuine
+and creditable impulse. His visits to the Greek festivals, and
+his share in the competitions, were not all mere vanity. He
+had a futile passion for fame as an artist, and he sought the
+applause of the race which had a real artistic tradition.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, lv. erat illi aeternitatis
+perpetuaeque famae cupido. Cf. xxiv.</note>
+When we reach the plebeian Flavian race, Hellenism is still
+favoured. The bluff soldier, Vespasian, had an adequate command
+of the Greek language, and was the first emperor who
+gave liberal endowments to Greek rhetoric.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xviii.</note> His son
+Domitian, that puzzling enigma, the libertine who tried to
+revive the morality of the age of Cato, the man who was said,
+but most improbably, to confine his reading to the memoirs
+of Tiberius, founded a quinquennial festival, with competitions,
+on the Greek model, in music, gymnastic, and horsemanship.
+By drawing on the inexhaustible stores of Alexandria, he
+also repaired the havoc which had been wrought in the Roman
+libraries by fire.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xx.</note> Already in Juvenal’s life the brilliant
+sophistic movement had set in which was destined to carry
+the literary charm of Hellenism throughout the West. From
+the close of the first century there appeared in its full bloom
+that ingenious technique of style, that power of conquering
+all the difficulties of a worn-out or trifling subject, that
+delicate command of all varieties of rhythm, which carried the
+travelling sophist through a series of triumphs wherever he
+wandered. Classical Latin literature about the same time came
+<pb n="90"/><anchor id="Pg90"/>to a mysterious end. The only authors of any merit in the
+second century wrote in both languages indifferently.<note place="foot">And many in the first century,
+Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 3; viii. 4, 1; Friedl. iii. 360;
+Martha, <hi rend="italic">Les Moralistes sous l’Empire
+Rom.</hi> p. 267; Teuffel, <hi rend="italic">R. Lit.</hi> § 342;
+Mackail, <hi rend="italic">R. Lit.</hi> 232.</note> And
+the great Emperor, who closes our period, preferred to leave
+his inner thoughts to posterity in Greek.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juvenal, however, was not thinking of this great literary
+movement. Like so many of his literary predecessors, who
+had been formed by the loftier genius of the Greek past,
+like Plautus and Cicero, he vented his rage on a degenerate
+Hellenism. His shafts were levelled at the suttlers and camp-followers
+of the invading army from the East. The phenomena
+of Roman social history are constantly repeating themselves
+for centuries. And one of the most curious examples of
+perpetuity of social sentiment is the hatred and scorn for the
+Greek or Levantine character, from the days of Plautus and
+the elder Cato to the days of the poet Claudian.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Cato</hi>, c. xxii.; Claud. <hi rend="italic">In
+Eutrop.</hi> ii. 137, 339.</note> For more
+than 600 years, the Roman who had borrowed his best culture,
+his polish and ideas from the Greek, was ready to sneer at
+the <q>Greekling.</q> The conquerors of Macedon could never
+forgive their own conquest by Greek knowledge and versatility,
+by which old Roman victories in the field had been avenged.
+And, as the pride of the imperial race grew with the consciousness
+of great achievements, the political degradation and
+economic decay of Greece and Greek-speaking lands produced
+a type of character which combined the old cleverness and
+keenness of intellect with the moral defects of an impoverished
+and subject race. Something of Roman contempt for the Greek
+must be set down to that national prejudice and difference of
+temperament, which made our ancestors treat the great French
+nation, with all its brilliant gifts and immense contributions
+to European culture, as a race of posturing dancing-masters.<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 85.</note>
+Such prejudices are generally more intense in the lower than
+in the upper and the cultivated classes. Juvenal, indeed, was
+a cultivated man, who knew Greek literature, and had been
+formed by Greek rhetors in the schools. But he was also a
+Roman plebeian, with that pride of race which is often as deep
+in the plebeian as in the aristocrat. He gives voice to the
+<pb n="91"/><anchor id="Pg91"/>feeling of his class when he indignantly laments that the true-born
+Roman, whose infancy has drunk in the air of the
+Aventine, should have to yield place to the supple, fawning
+stranger, who has come with the same wind as the figs and
+prunes. The Orontes is pouring its pollutions into the Tiber.<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 62 sqq.</note>
+Every trade and profession, from the master of the highest
+studies down to the rope-dancer and the pander, is crowded
+with hungry, keen-witted adventurers from the East. Every
+island of the Aegean, every city of Asia, is flooding Rome with
+its vices and its venal arts.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 69-77.</note> Quickness of intellect and
+depravity of morals, the brazen front and the ready tongue are
+driving into the shade the simple, unsophisticated honesty of
+the old Roman breed. At the morning receptions of the great
+patron, the poor Roman client, who has years of honest, quiet
+service to show, even the impoverished scion of an ancient
+consular line, are pushed aside by some sycophant from the
+Euphrates,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 104.</note> who can hardly conceal the brand of recent
+servitude upon him. These men, by their smooth speech,
+their effrontery and ready wit, their infinite capacity for
+assuming every mood and humouring every caprice of the
+patron, are creeping into the recesses of great houses, worming
+out their secrets, and mastering their virtue.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 72, viscera magnarum
+domuum dominique futuri.</note> Rome is
+becoming a Greek town,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 60.</note> in which there will soon be no
+place for Romans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Much of this indictment, as we have said, is the offspring
+of prejudice and temperament. But there was a foundation
+of truth under the declamation of Juvenal. The higher
+education of Roman youth had for generations been chiefly
+in the hands of men of Greek culture, from the days of
+Ennius and Crates of Mallus, before the third Punic War.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Ill. Gram.</hi> i. ii. antiquissimi
+doctorum qui iidem et poëtae et semigraeci
+erant (Livium et Ennium dico),
+etc.; Strab. vi. 3, 5; A. Gell. xvii. 17, i.</note>
+The tutor’s old title <hi rend="italic">literatus</hi> had early given place to that of
+<hi rend="italic">grammaticus</hi>.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Ill. Gram.</hi> iv.</note> And, of the long line of famous <hi rend="italic">grammatici</hi>
+commemorated by Suetonius, there are few who were not by
+origin or culture connected with the Greek east. Most of them
+had been freedmen of savants or great nobles.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xx. xix. xvi. xv.</note> Some had
+<pb n="92"/><anchor id="Pg92"/>actually been bought in the slave market.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Ill. Gram.</hi> xiii. Staberius ...
+emptus de catasta.</note> The profession
+was generally ill-paid and enjoyed little consideration, and
+it was often the last resort of those who had failed in other
+and not more distinguished callings. Orbilius, the master
+of Horace, had been an attendant in a public office.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiii.</note> Others
+had been pugilists or low actors in pantomime.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xviii. xxiii.</note> Q. Remmius
+Palaemon, whose vices made him infamous in the reign of
+Tiberius and Claudius, had been a house-slave, and was
+originally a weaver.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxiii.</note> He educated himself while attending
+his young master at school, and by readiness, versatility, and
+arrogant self-assertion, rose to an income of more than £4000
+a year. Sometimes they attained to rank and fortune by being
+entrusted with the tuition of the imperial children.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xvii.; cf. Quintilian, iv. Prooem.
+2; cf. Juv. viii. 186-97.</note> But
+the grammarian, to the very end, as a rule never escaped the
+double stigma of doubtful origin and of poverty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The medical profession, according to the elder Pliny, was
+a Greek art which was seldom practised by Romans.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> xxix. 17.</note> Julius
+Caesar, by giving civic rights to physicians from Egypt and
+Hellenic lands,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Jul. Caes.</hi> xlii.</note> while he raised the status of the medical calling,
+also stimulated the immigration of foreign practitioners. The
+rank and fortune attained by the court physicians of the early
+Caesars, Antonius Musa, the Stertinii,<note place="foot">D. Cass. liii. 30; Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> xxix.
+4; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2983.</note> and others, which
+almost rivalled the medical successes of our own day, seemed
+to offer a splendid prize. Yet the profession was generally in
+low repute.<note place="foot">Juv. x. 221; Petron. 42; D. Cass.
+lxxi. 33; lxix. 22; Mart. ii. 16; v. 9;
+vi. 31; vi. 53; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 31, 35.</note> It was long recruited from the ranks of old slaves,
+and men of the meanest callings. Carpenters and smiths and
+undertakers flocked into it, often with only a training of six
+months.<note place="foot">Mart. i. 31; i. 48; viii. 74.</note> Galen found most of his medical brethren utterly
+illiterate, and recommends them to pay a little attention to
+grammar in dealing with their patients.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. 231.</note> They compounded
+in their own shops, and touted for practice.<note place="foot">Epict. ii. 23, 30, 27.</note> They called in
+the aid of spells and witchcraft to reinforce their drugs. We
+need not believe all the coarse insinuations of Martial against
+their morality, any more than the sneers of Petronius against
+<pb n="93"/><anchor id="Pg93"/>their skill. But we are bound to conclude that the profession
+held a very different place in public esteem from that which
+it enjoys and deserves in our own time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Astrology, which was the aristocratic form of divination,
+and involved in many a dark intrigue of the early Empire, was a
+Greek as well as a Chaldaean art. The name of the practitioner
+often reveals his nationality. The Seleucus<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, iv. vi.</note> and Ptolemaeus
+who affected to guide the fate of Otho, and the Ascletarion of
+Domitian’s reign,<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xiv. xv.; cf. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> xiv.;
+<hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxxvi.</note> are only representatives of a nameless crowd.
+And their strange power is seen in that tale of a Greek
+diviner, Pammenes, in the last years of Nero, whose horoscopes
+led to the tragic end of P. Anteius and Ostorius Scapula.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 14.</note> In
+other countless arts of doubtful repute, which ministered to the
+pleasure or amusement of the crowd, the Greek was always
+an adept. But it was his success as a courtier and accomplished
+flatterer of the great, which chiefly roused the scornful
+hatred of Juvenal and his fellows. The <q>adulandi gens prudentissima,</q>
+would hardly have been guilty of the simple and
+obvious grossness of flattery which the rhetoric of Juvenal
+attributes to them.<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 100.</note> They knew their trade better than the
+Roman plebeian. It was an old and highly rewarded profession
+in Greece, and had often been the theme of Greek moralists.
+Plutarch wrote an elaborate treatise on the difference between
+the sycophant and the true friend, in which he seems almost
+to exhaust the wily resources of the pretender. Lucian, with
+his delicate irony, seems almost to raise the Greek skill in
+adulation to the level of a fine art.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Merc. Cond.</hi> c. 16, 19.</note> And the polished and
+versatile Greek, with his lively wit, his delicate command of
+expression, his cool audacity, and his unscrupulousness, was a
+formidable rival of the coarser Roman parasite celebrated in
+Latin comedy. We can well imagine that the young Greek,
+fresh from the schools of Ionia, was a livelier companion at
+dinner than the proud Roman man of letters who snatched
+the dole and disdained himself for receiving it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is perhaps no phase of Roman society in Domitian’s
+day which we know more intimately than the life of the client.
+It is photographed, in all its sordid slavery, by both Juvenal
+and Martial. And Martial himself is perhaps the best example
+<pb n="94"/><anchor id="Pg94"/>of a man of genius submitting, with occasional intervals of
+proud rebellion,<note place="foot">Mart. i. 104, ii. 68.</note> to a degradation which in our eyes no poverty
+could excuse. The client of the early Empire was a totally
+different person from the client of Republican times. In
+the days of freedom, the tie of patron and client was rather
+that of clansman and chief; it was justified by political and
+social necessity, and ennobled by feelings of loyalty and mutual
+obligation. Under the Empire, the relation was tainted by
+the selfish materialism of the age; it had seldom any
+trace of sentiment. The rich man was expected to have a
+humble train of dependents to maintain his rank and consequence.
+There was a host of needy people ready to do him
+such service. The hungry client rushed to his patron’s morning
+reception, submitted to all his coldness and caprice, or to the
+insolence of his menials, followed his chair through the streets,
+and ran on his errands, for the sake of a miserable alms in
+money or in kind.<note place="foot">Juv. i. 100; v. 17; Mart. xii. 18—
+
+<lg>
+<l>Dum per limina te potentiorum</l>
+<l rend="margin-left: 2">Sudatrix toga ventilat, etc.;</l>
+</lg>
+
+iii. 7, 36; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xvi; <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> vii.</note> The payment was sometimes supplemented
+by a cast-off cloak, or an invitation at the last moment to fill
+a place at dinner, when perhaps it could not be accepted.<note place="foot">Mart. ii. 79; Juv. v. 17.</note> In
+the train which the great man gathered about him, to swell his
+importance, were to be seen, not only the starving man of
+letters, the loafer and mere mendicant, but the sons of ruined
+houses <q>sprung from Troy,</q> and even senators and men of
+consular rank who had a clientèle of their own.<note place="foot">Juv. i. 100—
+
+<lg>
+<l rend="margin-left: 6">Jubet a praecone vocari</l>
+<l>Ipsos Trojugenas.</l>
+</lg></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nothing throws a more lurid light on the economic
+condition of Italy in the time of the early Empire than this
+form of pensioned dependence. The impression which we
+derive from Juvenal and Martial is that of a society divided
+between a small class of immensely wealthy people, and an
+almost starving proletariat.<note place="foot">Mart. ii. 43; iii. 38, 12, pallet cetera
+turba fame; Juv. iii. 153, 161; xi. 40.</note> Poverty seems almost universal,
+except in the freedman class, who by an industrial energy and
+speculative daring, which were despised by the true-born
+Roman, were now rapidly rising to opulence. The causes of
+this plebeian indigence can only be glanced at here. The
+agricultural revolution, which ruined the small freeholders and
+created the plantation system,<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">R. H.</hi> ii. 374 (Tr.).</note> had driven great numbers of
+<pb n="95"/><anchor id="Pg95"/>once prosperous farmers to the capital, to depend on the
+granaries of the State, or on the charity of a wealthy patron.
+Such men were kept in poverty and dependence by that general
+contempt for trade and industrial pursuits which always prevails
+in a slave-owning society. Many of the greatest families
+had been reduced to poverty by proscription and confiscation.
+A great noble might be keeping sheep on a Laurentine farm,
+if he could not win a pension from the grace of the Emperor.
+At the same time, from various causes, what we should call
+the liberal professions, with the doubtful exception of medicine,
+tortured those engaged in them by the contrast between ambitious
+hopes and the misery of squalid poverty. <q>Make your son an
+auctioneer or an undertaker rather than an advocate or a man
+of letters</q> is the advice of Martial and Juvenal, and of the
+shrewd vulgar guests of Trimalchio.<note place="foot">Mart. iv. 5; v. 56—
+
+<lg>
+<l>Artes discere vult pecuniosas?</l>
+<l>Fac discat citharoedus aut choraules.</l>
+<l>Si duri puer ingeni videtur,</l>
+<l>Praeconem facias, vel architectum;</l>
+</lg>
+
+Juv. vii. 104; x. 226; Petron. 46,
+destinavi illum artificii docere, aut
+tonstreinum aut praeconem etc.</note> Any mean and malodorous
+trade will be more lucrative than the greatest knowledge and
+culture. The rich literary amateur, who should have been a
+Maecenas, in that age became an author himself, composed his
+own Thebaid or Codrid, and would only help the poor man of
+genius by the loan of an unfurnished hall for a reading.<note place="foot">Juv. vii. 38 sqq.</note> The
+unabashed mendicancy of Martial shows the mean straits to
+which the genuine literary man was reduced.<note place="foot">Mart. ii. 43; iv. 40; v. 42, quas
+dederis, solas semper habebis opes.</note> The historian will
+not earn as much as the reader of the <hi rend="italic">Acta Diurna</hi>.<note place="foot">Juv. vii. 104.</note> It is the
+same with education. What costs the father least is the training
+of his son. The man who will expend a fortune on his baths
+and colonnades, can spare a Quintilian only a fraction of what he
+will give for a pastry cook.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 180.</note> The grammarian, who is expected
+to be master of all literature, will be lucky if he receives as much
+for the year as a charioteer gains by a single victory.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. ad fin.</note> If the
+rhetor, weary of mock battles, descends into the real arena of
+the courts, he fares no better.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 121 sqq.</note> The bar is overcrowded by men
+to whom no other career of ambition is open, by old informers
+who find their occupation gone, by the sons of noble houses
+who parade the glory of their ancestors in order to attract
+vulgar clients. They are carried in a litter, surrounded by
+<pb n="96"/><anchor id="Pg96"/>slaves and dependents, down to the courts of the Centumviri.
+The poor pleader must hire or borrow purple robes
+and jewelled rings, if he is to compete with them. And in
+the end, he may find his honorarium for a day’s hard pleading
+to be a leg of pork, a jar of tunnies, or a few flasks of cheap
+wine. In this materialised society all the prizes go to the
+coarser qualities; there is nothing but neglect and starvation
+before taste and intellect. And poverty is punished by being
+forced to put on the show of wealth.<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 182; Martha, <hi rend="italic">Moralistes
+sous l’Emp.</hi> p. 400.</note> That stately person in
+violet robes who stalks through the forum, or reclines in a
+freshly decorated chair, followed by a throng of slaves, has
+just pawned his ring to buy a dinner.<note place="foot">Mart. ii. 57.</note> That matron, who has
+sold the last pieces of her ancestral plate, will hire splendid
+dress, a sedan chair, and a troop of attendants, to go in proper
+state to the games.<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 353.</note> Thus you have the spectacle of a
+society divided between the idle, luxurious rich and the lazy,
+hungry poor, who imitate all the vices of the rich, and although
+too proud to work, are not ashamed to borrow or to beg.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In such a society, where the paths of honest industry seemed
+closed to the poor, or as yet undiscovered, the great problem
+was how to secure without labour a share of the wealth which
+was monopolised by the few. The problem was solved by the
+obsequiousness of the client, or by the arts of the will-hunter.
+Owing to celibacy and vice, childlessness in that age was extraordinarily
+common in the upper class. In a society of <q>ambitious
+poverty,</q> a society where poverty was unable, or where
+it disdained, to find the path to competence through honest toil,
+the wealthy, without natural heirs, offered a tempting prey to
+the needy adventurer. Captation by every kind of mean flattery,
+or vicious service, became a recognised profession. In the
+Croton of Petronius there are only two classes, the rich and
+the sycophant, the hunters and the hunted.<note place="foot">Petron. 116, in hac urbe nemo
+liberos tollit ... aut captantur aut
+captant.</note> Even men of
+high position, with no temptation from want, would stoop to
+this detestable trade.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">e.g.</hi> Regulus, Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 20.</note> And the social tone which tolerated
+the captator, made it almost an honour to be beset on a <anchor id="corr96"/><corr sic="sick bed">sick-bed</corr> by these rapacious sycophants. One of the darkest and
+most repulsive features in that putrescent society was the
+<pb n="97"/><anchor id="Pg97"/>social value which attached to a vicious and shameful childlessness.
+A morose and unlovely old age could thus gather
+around it a little court of dependents and pretended friends,
+such as a career of great achievement would hardly attract.
+There have been few more loathsome characters than the
+polished hypocrite by the sick-bed of his prey, shedding tears
+of feigned sympathy, while with eager eyes he is noting every
+symptom of the approaching end.<note place="foot">Juv. xii. 100; i. 36; Mart. v. 39;
+Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii, 20; Petron. 140.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Juvenal and Petronius, the embittered plebeian, and the
+cynical, fastidious epicure of Nero’s court, alike treat their age
+as utterly corrupted and vulgarised by the passion for money;
+<q>inter nos sanctissima divitiarum Majestas.</q><note place="foot">Juv. i. 112; Petron. 88, pecuniae
+cupiditas haec tropica instituit.</note> No virtue, no
+gifts, no eminence of service, will be noticed in the poor.<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 164.</note> A
+great fortune will conceal the want of talent, sense, or common
+decency. Everything is forgiven to the master of money
+bags, even the brand of the slave prison.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 131, 103; i. 26; iv. 98; Mart.
+ii. 29, iii. 29; v. 13, 35.</note> In Juvenal and
+Martial probably the most resonant note is the cry of the poor—<q>How
+long.</q> Yet, after all, it is not a fierce cry of revolt;
+against that highly organised and centralised society the disinherited
+never dreamed of rebellion, even when the Goths were
+under the walls. It is rather an appeal, though often a bitter and
+angry appeal, for pity and a modest share in a wasted abundance.
+In the poems of Juvenal and Martial, as in the sentiment of
+the colleges and municipalities for generations, the one hope for
+the mass of helpless indigence lay in awaking the generosity and
+charity of the rich. The rich, as we shall see in another
+chapter, admitted the obligation, and responded to the claim,
+often in the most lavish fashion. A long line of emperors not
+only fed the mob of the capital, but squandered the resources
+of the State in providing gross and demoralising amusements
+for them.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> xliii.-v.; <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xviii.;
+<hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> xxi; <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xi. xii.; <hi rend="italic">Titus</hi>, vii.;
+<hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> iv.; D. Cass. 65. 25; Spart.
+<hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> vii. D. Cass. 68. 10, 15;
+Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Anton.</hi> vi.; but cp. Suet.
+<hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> xlvii.; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii 62, D. Cass.
+66. 15; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> xliv.; D. Cass.
+54. 2; 68. 2; Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Anton. P.</hi> xii.</note> Under the influence of the Stoic teaching of the
+brotherhood of man and the duty of mutual help, both private
+citizens and benevolent princes, from Nero to M. Aurelius,
+created charitable foundations for the orphan and the
+<pb n="98"/><anchor id="Pg98"/>needy.<note place="foot">Victor. <hi rend="italic">Epit.</hi> 12; Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> vii.
+§ 12; Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Anton.</hi> xxvi.; <hi rend="italic">Ant.
+P.</hi> viii.; D. Cass. 68. 5; <hi rend="italic">Orelli Henz.</hi>
+4365, 7244; Friedländer, <hi rend="italic">Petron. Einleit.</hi>
+49; Duruy, v. 429; iv. 787; Boissier,
+<hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. 208; cf. Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ix. 30.</note> Public calamities were relieved again and again by
+imperial aid and private charity.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 62; ii. 47, 48.</note> The love of wealth was
+strong, but a spirit of benevolence was in the air, even in the
+days of Juvenal; and the constant invectives of poet or philosopher
+against wealth and luxury are not so much the sign
+of a growing selfishness, as of a spreading sense of the duty
+of the fortunate to the miserable. Although the literary
+men seem never to have thought of any economic solution of
+the social problem, through the tapping of fresh sources of
+wealth from which all might draw, yet there can be no doubt
+that there was, at least in provincial cities, a great industrial
+movement in the Antonine age, which gave wealth to some,
+and a respectable competence to many. The opulent freedman
+and the contented artisan have left many a memorial in the
+inscriptions. Yet the movement had not solved the social
+problem in the days of Lucian, as it has not solved it after
+seventeen centuries. The cry of the poor against the selfish
+rich, which rings in the ears of the detached man of letters at
+the end of the Antonine age, will still ring in the ears of the
+ascetic Salvianus, when the Germans have passed the Rhine.<note place="foot">Salv. <hi rend="italic">De Gub. Dei</hi>, v. 30; <hi rend="italic">Ad
+Eccles.</hi> iv. 22.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The scorn and hatred of Juvenal for wealth and its vices is
+natural to a class which was too proud to struggle out of poverty,
+by engaging in the industries which it despised. And the freedman,
+who occupied the vacant field, and rose to opulence, is
+even more an object of hatred to Juvenal and Martial than
+the recreant noble or the stingy patron. He was an alien
+of servile birth, and he had made himself wealthy by the
+usual method of thinking of nothing but gold. These men,
+who were not even free Romans, had mastered the power
+which commands the allegiance of the world. The rise of
+this new class to wealth and importance probably irritated
+men of Juvenal’s type more than any other sign of social
+injustice in their time. And the Trimalchio of Petronius, a
+man of low, tainted origin, the creature of economic accident,
+whose one faith is in the power of money, who boasts of his
+fortune as if it had been won by real talent or honourable
+<pb n="99"/><anchor id="Pg99"/>service, who expends it with coarse ostentation and a ludicrous
+affectation of cultivated taste, may be tolerated in literature,
+if not in actual life, for the charm of a certain kindly bonhomie
+and honest vulgarity, which the art of Petronius has
+thrown around him. Yet, after all, we must concede to
+Juvenal and Martial, that such a person is always a somewhat
+unpleasing social product. But the subject is so important
+that it claims a chapter to itself. And, fortunately
+for us and our readers, the new freedmen were not all of the
+type of Trimalchio.
+</p>
+
+</div><div type="chapter" n="3" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="100"/><anchor id="Pg100"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="III. The society of the freedmen"/><index index="pdf" level1="III. The society of the freedmen"/>
+<head>CHAPTER III</head>
+
+<head type="sub">THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN</head>
+
+<p>
+The historian, who is occupied with war and politics, and the
+fate of princes and nobles, is apt to lose sight of great silent
+movements in the dim masses of society. And, in the history
+of the early Empire, the deadly conflict between the Emperor
+and the Senate, the carnival of luxury, and the tragic close of
+so many reigns, have diverted attention from social changes of
+immense moment. Not the least important of these was the
+rise of the freedmen, in the face of the most violent prejudice,
+both popular and aristocratic. And literature has thrown
+its whole weight on the side of prejudice, and given full vent
+alike to the scorn of the noble, and to the hate and envy of the
+plebeian. The movement, indeed, was so swift and far spreading
+that old conservative instincts might well be alarmed.
+Everywhere in the inscriptions freedmen are seen rising to
+wealth and consequence throughout the provinces, as well
+as in Italy, and winning popularity and influence by profuse
+benefactions to colleges and municipalities. In almost every
+district of the Roman Empire the order of the Augustales,
+which was composed to a great extent of wealthy freedmen,<note place="foot">On the Augustales <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Orell. Henz.</hi>
+ii. p. 197; iii. p. 427; Friedländer,
+<hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> p. 39; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm.
+Staatsverw.</hi> i. 513 sqq.; Nessling, <hi rend="italic">De
+Seviris Augustalibus.</hi></note>
+has left its memorials. <q>Freedman’s wealth</q> in Martial’s day
+had become a proverb.<note place="foot">v. 13, 6, et libertinas arca flagellat
+opes; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 27, § 5, patrimonium
+libertini.</note> Not only are they crowding all the
+meaner trades, from which Roman pride shrank contemptuously,
+but, by industry, shrewdness, and speculative daring,
+they are becoming great capitalists and landowners on a
+senatorial scale. The Trimalchio of Petronius, who has not
+<pb n="101"/><anchor id="Pg101"/>even seen some of his estates,<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 48.</note> if we allow for some artistic
+exaggeration, is undoubtedly the representative of a great
+class. In the reign of Nero, a debate arose in the Senate
+on the insolence and misconduct of freedmen.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 27, si separarentur
+libertini manifestam fore penuriam
+ingenuorum.</note> And it was
+argued by those opposed to any violent measures of repression,
+that the class was widely diffused; they were found in overwhelming
+numbers in the city tribes, in the lower offices
+of the civil service, in the establishments of the magistrates
+and priests; a considerable number even of the knights and
+Senate drew their origin from this source. If freedmen were
+marked off sharply as a separate grade, the scanty numbers
+of the freeborn would be revealed. In the reigns of Claudius
+and Nero especially, freedmen rose to the highest places in
+the imperial service, sometimes by unquestionable knowledge,
+tact, and ability, sometimes by less creditable arts. The
+promotion of a Narcissus or a Pallas was also a stroke of
+policy, the assertion of the prince’s independence of a jealous
+nobility. The rule of the freedmen was a bitter memory
+to the Senate.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 88.</note> The scorn of Pliny for Pallas expresses
+the long pent-up feelings of his order; it is a belated
+vengeance for the humiliation they endured in the evil days
+when they heaped ridiculous flattery on the favourite, and
+voted him a fortune and a statue.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 29; viii 6.</note> Some part of the joy
+with which the accession of Trajan was hailed by the aristocracy
+was due to the hope that the despised interlopers would
+be relegated to their proper obscurity. Tacitus is undoubtedly
+glancing at the Claudian régime when he grimly congratulates
+the Germans on the fact that their freedmen are little above
+the level of slaves, that they have seldom any power in the
+family, and never in the State.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Germ.</hi> 25, liberti non multum
+supra servos sunt, raro aliquod momentum
+in domo, nunquam in civitate.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It shows the immense force of old Roman conservatism
+and of social prejudice which is the same from age to age,
+when men so cultivated, yet of such widely different temperament
+and associations as Pliny and Tacitus, Juvenal and
+Martial<note place="foot">Mart. ii. 29; iii. 29; xi. 37; iii.
+82; v. 14.</note> and Petronius, denounce or ridicule an irresistible
+social movement. We can now see that the rise of the
+<pb n="102"/><anchor id="Pg102"/>emancipated slave was not only inevitable, but that it was, on
+the whole, salutary and rich in promise for the future. The
+slave class of antiquity really corresponded to our free labouring
+class. But, unlike the mass of our artisans, it contained many
+who, from accident of birth and education, had a skill and
+knowledge which their masters often did not possess.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Ill. Gram.</hi> xiii., xvii., xx.; cf.
+Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 158.</note> The
+slaves who came from the ancient seats of civilisation in the
+East are not to be compared with the dark gross races who
+seem to be stamped by nature as of an inferior breed. This
+frequent mental and moral equality of the Roman slave with
+his master had forced itself upon men of the detached
+philosophic class, like Seneca, and on kindly aristocrats, like
+Pliny.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 47, § 1; <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 18,
+3; <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iii. 21; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 77, § 31; Plin.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 16, 1; iii. 19, 7; ii. 17, 9;
+cf. Juv. xiv. 16.</note> It must have been hard to sit long hours in the
+library beside a cultivated slave-amanuensis, or to discuss the
+management of lands and mines and quarries with a shrewd,
+well-informed slave-agent, or to be charmed by the grace and
+wit of some fair, frail daughter of Ionia, without having some
+doubts raised as to the eternal justice of such an institution.
+Nay, it is certain that slaves were often treated as friends,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 47, servi sunt, immo
+humiles amici. Cf. Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i.
+11, 12; Eurip. <hi rend="italic">Ion</hi>, 854; <hi rend="italic">Helen.</hi> 730;
+Wallon, <hi rend="italic">L’Esclav.</hi> iii. 22.</note>
+and received freedom and a liberal bequest at their master’s
+death. Many educated slaves, as we have seen, rose to
+distinction and fortune as teachers and physicians.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> supra, <ref target="Pg92">p. 92</ref>.</note> But the
+field of trade and industry was the most open and the most
+tempting. The Senator was forbidden, down to the last age of
+the Empire, both by law and sentiment, to increase his fortune
+by commerce.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 69. 16; <hi rend="italic">C. Th.</hi> xiii. 1, 21;
+Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i 197.</note> The plebeian, saturated with Roman prejudice,
+looking for support to the granaries of the state or the dole
+of the wealthy patron, turned with disdain from occupations
+which are in our days thought innocent, if not honourable.
+Juvenal feels almost as much scorn for the auctioneer and
+undertaker as he has for the pander, and treats almost as a
+criminal the merchant who braves the wintry Aegean with a
+cargo of wine from Crete.<note place="foot">Juv. xiv. 270.</note> His friend Umbricius, worsted in
+the social struggle, and preparing to quit Rome for a retreat in
+Campania, among the other objects of his plebeian scorn, is
+<pb n="103"/><anchor id="Pg103"/>specially disgusted with the low tribe who contract for the
+building of a house, or who farm the dues of a port or undertake
+to cleanse a river-bed.<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 32.</note> There is no room left in Rome
+for men who will not soil themselves with such sordid trades.
+Manifestly, if the satirist is not burlesquing the feeling of his
+class, there was plenty of room left for the vigorous freedman
+who could accept Vespasian’s motto that no gain is unsavoury.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xxiii.</note>
+But those men had not only commercial tact and ability, the
+wit to see where money was to be made by seizing new openings
+and unoccupied fields for enterprise; they had also among
+them men of great ambitions, men capable of great affairs. It
+required no common deftness, suppleness, and vigilant energy
+for an old slave to work his way upwards through the grades
+of the imperial chancery, to thread the maze of deadly intrigue,
+in the reigns of Claudius or Nero, and to emerge at last as
+master of the palace. Yet one of these freedmen ministers,
+when he died, had served ten emperors, six of whom had
+come to a violent end.<note place="foot">Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> iii. 3, 83, Tu toties
+mutata ducum juga rite tulisti Integer, etc.</note> That a class so despised and depressed
+should rise to control the trade, and even the administration
+of the Empire, furnishes a presumption that they were needed,
+and that they were not unworthy of their destiny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet however inevitable, or even desirable, this great revolution
+may seem to the cool critic of the twentieth century, it is
+possible that, had he lived in the first, he might have denounced
+it as vigorously as Juvenal. The literary and artistic spirit,
+often living in a past golden age, and remotely detached from
+the movements going on around it, is prone to regard them
+with uneasy suspicion. It is moved by sacred sentiment, by
+memories and distant ideals, by fastidious taste, which expresses
+itself often with passionate hatred for what seems to it
+revolutionary sacrilege. It is also apt to fasten on the more
+grotesque and vulgar traits of any great popular movement,
+and to use a finished skill in making it ridiculous. It was in
+this way that literature treated the freedmen. They had many
+gross and palpable faults; they were old slaves and Orientals;
+as they rose in the world they were eager for money, and
+they got it; they were, many of them, naturally vulgar, and
+they paraded their new wealth with execrable taste, and
+<pb n="104"/><anchor id="Pg104"/>trampled on better, though poorer, men than themselves,
+Juvenal and Martial, by birth and associations, have little in
+common with that accomplished exquisite of the Neronian
+circle who has painted with the power of careless genius the
+household of the <hi rend="italic">parvenu</hi> Trimalchio. Yet they have an
+equal scorn or detestation for the new man who was forcing
+his way from the lowest debasement of servile life to fortune
+and power. But the embittered man of letters, humiliated by
+poverty, yet brimful of Roman pride, avenges his ideals with
+a rougher, heavier hand than the Epicurean noble, who had
+joined in the <q>Noctes Neronis</q> with a delicate, scornful
+cynicism, who was too disillusioned, and too fastidiously contemptuous,
+to waste anger on what he despised. Juvenal
+would blast and wither the objects of his hatred. Petronius
+takes the surer method of making these people supremely
+ridiculous. The feeling of men like Juvenal and Martial is
+a mixture of contempt and envy and outraged taste. The
+Grub Street man of letters in those days despised plodding
+industry because he dearly loved fits of idleness; he hated
+wealth because he was poor. The polished man of the world
+was alternately amused and disgusted by the spectacle of
+sudden fortune accumulated by happy chance or unscrupulous
+arts, with no tradition of dignity to gild its grossness, yet
+affecting and burlesquing the tastes of a world from which it
+was separated by an impassable gulf. There is more moral
+sentiment, more old Roman feeling, in the declamation of
+Juvenal than in the cold artistic scorn of the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi>; there
+is also more personal and class feeling. The triumph of mere
+money is to Juvenal a personal affront as well as a moral
+catastrophe. Poverty now makes a man ridiculous.<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 153, Nil habet infelix
+paupertas durius in se, Quam quod
+ridiculos homines facit; 164.</note> It blocks
+the path of the finest merit. The rich freedman who claims
+the foremost place at a levée is equally objectionable because
+he was born on the Euphrates, and because he is the owner
+of five taverns which yield HS.400,000 a year.<note place="foot">Id. i. 104.</note> The impoverished
+knight must quit his old place on the benches to
+make way for some auctioneer or pimp, some old slave from
+the Nile who stalks in with purple robes and bejewelled
+fingers, and hair reeking with unguents.<note place="foot">Id. i. 26; iv. 108.</note> The only refuge
+<pb n="105"/><anchor id="Pg105"/>will soon be some half-deserted village on old-fashioned Sabine
+ground, where the country folk sit side by side in the
+same white tunics with their aediles in the grassy theatre.<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 173.</note>
+It is evident from Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius that
+the popular hostility to the new men was partly the result of
+envy at their success, partly of disgust at their parade of it.
+Juvenal and Martial are often probably dressing up the rough
+epigrams of the crowd. We can almost hear the contemptuous
+growl as one of these people, suspected of a dark crime,
+sweeps by in his downy sedan. That other noble knight used
+to hawk the cheap fish of his native Egypt, and now possesses
+a palace towering over the Forum, with far-spreading colonnades
+and acres of shady groves.<note place="foot">Id. iv. 5, 23; vii. 180.</note> A eunuch minister has reared a
+pile which out-tops the Capitol.<note place="foot">Id. xiv. 91, Ut spado vincebat
+Capitolia nostra Posides; cf. Suet.
+<hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> xxviii.; Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> xxxi. 2.</note> Fellows who used to blow
+the horn in the circus of country towns now give gladiatorial
+shows themselves.<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 34 sqq.</note> Prejudice or envy may not improbably
+have invented some of the tales of crime and turpitude by
+which these fortunes had been won. Rome was a city of
+poisonous rumour. Yet slavery was not a nursery of virtue,
+and the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> leaves the impression that the emancipated
+slave too often imitated the vices of his master. The poisoner,
+the perjurer, the minion, were probably to be found in the
+rising class. After their kind in all ages, they looked down
+with vulgar insolence on those less fortunate or more scrupulous.
+When they rose to the highest place, the imperial freedmen
+were often involved in peculation and criminal intrigue.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 37; xii. 25, 65;
+xi. 29; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> lxvii.; D. Cass.
+lix. 29.</note> Yet,
+after all reservations, the ascent of the freedmen remains a
+great and beneficent revolution. The very reasons which made
+Juvenal hate it most are its best justification to a modern
+mind. It gave hope of a future to the slave; by creating
+a free industrial class, it helped to break down the cramped
+social ideal of the slave-owner and the soldier; it planted in
+every municipality a vigorous mercantile class, who were
+often excellent and generous citizens. Above all, it asserted
+the dignity of man. The vehement iteration of Juvenal is the
+best testimony to the sweep and force of the movement. And
+<pb n="106"/><anchor id="Pg106"/>the later student of Roman society cannot afford to neglect a
+great social upheaval which, in an aristocratic society, dominated
+by pride of class and race, made an Oriental slave first
+minister of the greatest monarchy in history, while it placed
+men of servile origin in command of nearly all the industrial
+arts and commerce of the time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The reign of the freedman in public affairs began with the
+foundation of the Empire, when Julius Caesar installed some of
+his household as officers of the mint.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Jul. Caes.</hi> lxxvi.; cf. Friedl.
+<hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. 56 sqq.</note> The emperor in the
+first century was, theoretically at least, only the first citizen, and
+his household was modelled on the fashion of other great
+houses. In the management of those vast senatorial
+estates, which were often scattered over three continents, there
+was need of an elaborate organisation, and freedmen of education
+and business capacity were employed to administer such
+private realms. And in the organisation of a great household,
+there was a hierarchy of office which offered a career to
+the shrewd and trustworthy slave. Many such careers can
+be traced in the inscriptions, from the post of valet or groom
+of the bedchamber, through the offices of master of the jewels
+and the wardrobe, superintendent of the carriages or the vineyards,
+up to the highest financial control.<note place="foot">For such a career cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6344.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the first century the same system was transferred
+to the imperial administration. It suited the cautious
+policy of Augustus to disguise his vast powers under the quiet
+exterior of an ordinary noble; and the freedmen of his
+household carried on the business of the State. He sternly
+punished any excesses or treachery among his servants.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> lxvii.</note>
+Tiberius gave them little power, until his character began to
+deteriorate.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 6.</note> Under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, the imperial
+freedmen attained their greatest ascendency. Callistus,
+Narcissus, and Pallas rose to the rank of great ministers, and,
+in the reign of Claudius, were practically masters of the world.
+They accumulated enormous wealth by abusing their power,
+and making a traffic in civic rights, in places or pardons.
+Polyclitus, who was sent to compose the troubles in Britain
+in 61 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, travelled with an enormous train, and gave the
+provinces an exhibition of the arrogance of their servile masters.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiv. 39.</note>
+<pb n="107"/><anchor id="Pg107"/>Helius was left to carry on the government during Nero’s
+theatrical travels, and the exhibitions of his artistic skill in
+Greece.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxiii.</note> Galba put to death two of the great freedmen of
+Nero’s reign, but himself fell under the influence of others as
+corrupt and arrogant, and he showered the honours of rank on
+the infamous Icelus.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxiv. 3; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Galba</hi>, xiv.;
+Plut. <hi rend="italic">Galba</hi>, c. 17.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is curious that it was left for Vitellius to break the
+reign of the freedmen by assigning offices in the imperial
+bureaux to the knights, the policy which was said to have
+been recommended by Maecenas,<note place="foot">D. Cass. lii. 25; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 58,
+Vitellius ministeria principatus per
+libertos agi solita in equites Romanos
+disponit.</note> and which was destined to
+prevail in the second century. But the change was very
+incomplete, and the brief tragic reign of Vitellius was disgraced
+by the ascendency for a time of his minion Asiaticus,
+whom the Emperor raised to the highest honours, then sold
+into a troop of wandering gladiators, and finally received back
+again into freedom and favour.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> xii.</note> The policy of the Flavian
+dynasty in the employment of freedmen is rather ambiguous.
+Vespasian is charged with having elevated Hormus, a disreputable
+member of the class, and with having appointed
+to places of trust the most rapacious agents.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xvi.</note> But this is
+probably a calumny of the Neronian and Othonian circle who
+defamed their conqueror. Under Domitian, the freedmen,
+Entellus and Abascantus, held two of the great secretaryships.
+But it is distinctly recorded that Domitian distributed offices
+impartially between the freedmen and the knights.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> vii. quaedam ex maximis
+officiis inter libertinos equitesque communicavit.</note> On the
+accession of Trajan, Pliny, in his Panegyric, exults in the fall of
+the freedmen from the highest place.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 88.</note> Yet Hadrian is said to
+have procured his selection as emperor by carefully cultivating
+the favour of Trajan’s freedmen. Hadrian, in reorganising
+the imperial administration, and founding the bureaucratic
+system, which was finally elaborated by Diocletian and Constantine,
+practically confined the tenure of the three great
+secretaryships to men of equestrian rank. Among his secretaries
+was the historian Suetonius.<note place="foot">Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> iv., xxi.; Macé,
+<hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 91.</note> Antoninus Pius severely
+repressed men of servile origin in the interest of pure
+<pb n="108"/><anchor id="Pg108"/>administration;<note place="foot">Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Ant. P.</hi> vi., xi.</note> but they regained some influence for a time
+under M. Aurelius, and rose still higher under his infamous son.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The position of freedmen in the imperial administration
+was partly, as we have seen, a tradition of aristocratic households.
+The emperor employed his freedmen to write his
+despatches and administer the finances of the Empire, as
+he would have used them to write his private letters or to
+manage his private estates. But, in the long conflict between
+the prince and the Senate, the employment of trusted freedmen
+in imperial affairs was also a measure of policy. It was meant
+to teach the nobles that the Empire could be administered
+without their aid.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. 56.</note> Nor was the confidence of the Emperor
+in his humble subordinates unjustified. The eulogies of the
+great freedmen in Seneca and Statius, even if they be exaggerated,
+leave the impression that a Polybius, a Claudius
+Etruscus, or an Abascantus were, in many respects, worthy of
+their high place. The provinces were, on the whole, well
+governed and happy in the very years when the capital was
+seething with conspiracy, and racked with the horrors of confiscation
+and massacre. This must have been chiefly due to
+the knowledge, tact, and ability of the great officials of the
+palace. Although of servile origin, they must have belonged
+to that considerable class of educated slaves who, along with
+the versatility and tact of the Hellenic East, brought to their
+task also a knowledge and a literary and linguistic skill which
+were not common among Roman knights. The three imperial
+secretaryships, <hi rend="italic">a rationibus</hi>, <hi rend="italic">a libellis</hi>, and <hi rend="italic">ab epistulis</hi>, covered
+a vast field of administration, and the duties of these great
+ministries could only have been performed by men of great
+industry, talent, and diplomatic adroitness.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. p. 83.</note> The Polybius
+to whom Seneca, from his exile in Sardinia, wrote a consolatory
+letter on the death of his brother, was the successor
+of Callistus, as secretary of petitions, in the reign of Claudius,
+and also the emperor’s adviser of studies. Seneca magnifies
+the dignity, and also the burden, of his great rank, which
+demands an abnegation of all the ordinary pleasures of life.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> vi. vii.</note>
+A man has no time to indulge a private grief who has to study
+and arrange for the Emperor’s decision thousands of appeals
+<pb n="109"/><anchor id="Pg109"/>coming from every quarter of the world. Yet this busy man
+could find time for literary work, and his translations from the
+Greek are lauded by the philosopher with an enthusiasm of
+which the cruelty of time does not allow us to estimate the
+value.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> xi.</note> The panegyric on Claudius Etruscus, composed by
+Statius, records an even more remarkable career.<note place="foot">Statius, <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> iii. 3.</note> Claudius
+Etruscus died at the age of eighty, in the reign of Domitian,
+having served in various capacities under ten emperors,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 66, Tibereia primum Aula tibi—Panditur.</note> six
+of whom had died by a violent death. It was a strangely
+romantic life, to which we could hardly find a parallel in
+the most democratic community in modern times. Claudius,
+a Smyrniote slave,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 60.</note> in the household of Tiberius, was emancipated
+and promoted by that Emperor. He followed the
+train of Caligula to Gaul,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 70.</note> rose to higher rank under Claudius,
+and, probably in Nero’s reign, on the retirement of Pallas,
+was appointed to that financial office of which the world-wide
+cares are pompously described by the poet biographer.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 86.</note> The
+gold of Iberian mines, the harvests of Egypt, the fleeces of
+Tarentine flocks, pearls from the depths of Eastern seas, the
+ivory tribute of the Indies, all the wealth wafted to Rome by
+every wind, are committed to his keeping. He had also the task
+of disbursing a vast revenue for the support of the populace,
+for roads and bulwarks against the sea, for the splendour of
+temples and palaces.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 100.</note> Such cares left space only for brief
+slumber and hasty meals; there was none for pleasure. Yet
+Claudius had the supreme satisfaction of wielding enormous
+power, and he occasionally shared in its splendour. The poor
+slave from the Hermus had a place in the <q>Idumaean
+triumph</q> of Vespasian, which his quiet labours had prepared,
+and he was raised by that emperor to the benches of the
+knights.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 145.</note> The only check in that prosperous course seems to
+have been a brief exile to the shores of Campania in the reign
+of Domitian.<note place="foot">Mart. vi. 83; Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> iii. 160.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Abascantus,<note place="foot">As to the form of his name <hi rend="italic">v.</hi>
+Markland’s <hi rend="italic">Statius</hi>, p. 238.</note> the secretary <hi rend="italic">ab epistulis</hi> of Domitian’s reign,
+has also been commemorated by Statius. That great office
+which controlled the imperial correspondence with all parts of
+<pb n="110"/><anchor id="Pg110"/>the world, was generally held by freedmen in the first century.
+Narcissus, in the reign of Claudius, first made it a great
+ministry.<note place="foot">Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 91; cf. Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi>
+xi. 33.</note> Down to the reign of Hadrian the despatches both
+in Greek and Latin were under a single superintendence. But
+in the reorganisation of the service in the second century, it
+was found necessary, from the growing complication of business,
+to create two departments of imperial correspondence.<note place="foot">Macé, 92, 93; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi>
+i. 86, 87.</note> Men
+of rank held the secretaryship from the end of the first century.
+Titinius Capito, one of Pliny’s circle, filled the office
+under Domitian; Suetonius was appointed by Hadrian.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 12; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 798;
+Macé, pp. 89, 115.</note> And
+during the Antonine age, the secretaries were often men of
+literary distinction.<note place="foot">Macé, pp. 90, 116.</note> Abascantus, the freedman secretary in
+the Silvae, had upon his shoulders, according to the poet, the
+whole weight of the correspondence with both East and West.<note place="foot">Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> v. 1, 80.</note>
+He received the laurelled despatches from the Euphrates, the
+Danube, and the Rhine; he had to watch the distribution of
+military grades and commands. He must keep himself informed
+of a thousand things affecting the fortunes of the
+subject peoples. Yet this powerful minister retained his
+native modesty with his growing fortune. His household was
+distinguished by all the sobriety and frugality of an Apulian
+or Sabine home.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> v. 118 sqq.</note> He could be lavish, however, at the call of
+love or loyalty. He gave his wife Priscilla an almost royal
+burial.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> v. 210.</note> Embalmed with all the spices and fragrant odours
+of the East, and canopied with purple, her body was borne
+to her last stately home of marble on the Appian Way.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. 88.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some of the great imperial freedmen were of less unexceptionable
+character than Claudius Etruscus and Abascantus,
+and had a more troubled career. Callistus, Narcissus, and
+Pallas, were deeply involved in the intrigues and crimes
+connected with the history of Messalina and Agrippina.
+Callistus had a part in the murder of Caligula, and prolonged
+his power in the following reign. Narcissus revealed the
+shameless marriage of Messalina with Silius, and, forestalling
+the vacillation of Claudius, had the imperial harlot ruthlessly
+struck down as she lay grovelling in the gardens of Lucullus.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 30, 37, 88.</note>
+<pb n="111"/><anchor id="Pg111"/>But he incurred the enmity of a more formidable woman even
+than Messalina, and his long career of plunder was ended by
+suicide.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 57; xiii. 1.</note> Pallas had an even longer and more successful, but
+a not less infamous and tragic career.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xii. 25, 65.</note> Of all the great freedmen,
+probably none approached him in magnificent insolence.
+When he was impeached along with Burrus, on a groundless
+charge of treason, and when some of his freedmen were called
+in evidence as his supposed accomplices, the old slave answered
+that he had never degraded his voice by speaking in such
+company.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiii. 23.</note> Never, even in those days of self-abasement, did
+the Senate sink so low as in its grovelling homage to the
+servile minister. At a meeting of the august body in the
+year 52, the consul designate made a proposal, which was
+seconded by a Scipio, that the praetorian insignia, and a sum
+of HS.15,000,000, should be offered to Pallas, together with
+the thanks of the state that the descendant of the ancient
+kings of Arcadia had thought less of his illustrious race than
+of the common weal, and had deigned to be enrolled in the
+service of the prince!<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xii. 53; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 6.</note> When Claudius reported that his
+minister was satisfied with the compliment, and prayed to be
+allowed to remain in his former poverty, a senatorial decree,
+engraved on bronze, was set up to commemorate the old-fashioned
+frugality of the owner of HS.300,000,000! His
+wealth was gained during a career of enormous power in the
+worst days of the Empire. He was one of the lovers of
+Agrippina,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 25, 65.</note> and, when he made her empress on the death of
+Messalina, two kindred spirits for a time ruled the Roman
+world. He gratified his patroness by securing the adoption
+of Nero by Claudius, and he was probably an accomplice in
+that emperor’s murder. But his fate was involved with that
+of Agrippina. When Nero resolved to shake off the tyranny
+of that awful woman, his first step was to remove the haughty
+freedman from his offices.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiii. 14.</note> Pallas left the palace in the
+second year of Nero’s reign. For seven years he lived on undisturbed.
+But at last his vast wealth, which had become a
+proverb, became too tempting to the spendthrift prince, and
+Pallas was quietly removed by poison.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiv. 65; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxxv.;
+D. Cass. 62. 14.</note>
+</p>
+
+<pb n="112"/><anchor id="Pg112"/>
+
+<p>
+The wealth of freedmen became proverbial, and the
+fortunes of Pallas and Narcissus reached a figure hardly ever
+surpassed even by the most colossal senatorial estates.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> ii. p. 55; Duruy,
+v. p. 598; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. p. 192;
+cf. Olympiod. <hi rend="italic">ap.</hi> Phot. § 44 (Müll.
+<hi rend="italic">Frag. Hist. Gr.</hi> iv.).</note> The
+means by which this wealth was gained might easily be inferred
+by any one acquainted with the inner history of the times.
+The manner of it may be read in the life of Elagabalus, whose
+freedman Zoticus, the son of a cook at Smyrna, piled up vast
+riches by levying a payment, each time he quitted the presence,
+for his report of the emperor’s threats or promises or intentions.<note place="foot">Ael. Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Heliogab.</hi> x.; cf. Capitol.
+<hi rend="italic">Anton. P.</hi> xi.; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> xxviii.</note>
+In the administration of great provinces, in the distribution of
+countless places of trust, in the chaos of years of delation,
+confiscation, and massacre, there must have been endless opportunities
+for self-enrichment, without incurring the dangers
+of open malversation. Statius extols the simple tastes and
+frugality of his heroes Abascantus and Claudius Etruscus, and
+yet he describes them as lavishing money on baths and tombs
+and funeral pomp. The truth is that, as a mere matter of
+policy, these wealthy aliens, who were never loved by a jealous
+aristocracy, had to justify their huge fortunes by a sumptuous
+splendour. The elder Pliny has commemorated the vapour
+baths of Posides, a Claudian freedman, and the thirty pillars
+of priceless onyx which adorned the dining saloon of Callistus.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> xxxi. 2; xxxvi. 12.</note>
+A bijou bath of the younger Claudius Etruscus seems to have
+been a miracle of costly beauty. The dome, through which a
+brilliant light streamed upon the floor, was covered with scenes in
+rich mosaic. The water gushed from pipes of silver into silver
+basins, and the quarries of Numidia and Synnada contributed
+the various colours of their marbles.<note place="foot">Statius, <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> i. 5, 36; Mart. vi.
+42, et certant vario decore saxa.</note> The gardens of Entellus,
+with their purple clusters which defied the rigours of winter,
+seemed to Martial to outrival the legendary gardens of Phaeacia.<note place="foot">Mart. viii. 68.</note>
+In the suburbs, hard by the Tiburtine way, rose that defiant
+monument of Pallas, bearing the decree of the Senate, which
+aroused the angry scorn of the younger Pliny.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 29.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The life of one of these imperial slave ministers was a
+strangely romantic career which has surely been seldom
+matched in the history of human fortunes. Exposed and sold
+<pb n="113"/><anchor id="Pg113"/>in early youth in the slave markets of Smyrna, Delos, or
+Puteoli, after an interval of ignominious servitude, installed
+as groom of the chambers, thence promoted, according to his
+aptitudes, to be keeper of the jewels, or tutor of the imperial
+heir, still further advanced to be director of the post, or to a
+place in the financial service, the freedman might end by
+receiving the honour of knighthood, the procuratorship of a
+province, or one of those great ministries which placed him in
+command of the Roman world. Yet we must not deceive ourselves
+as to his real position.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. 75; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi>
+6344.</note> To the very end of the Empire,
+the fictions on which aristocratic power is largely based,
+retained their fascination. In the fifth century a Senate, whose
+ancestors were often originally of servile race, could pour their
+scorn on the eunuch ministers of the East.<note place="foot">Claud. <hi rend="italic">In Eutrop.</hi> ii. 137.</note> And the decaying
+or <hi rend="italic">parvenu</hi> Senate of the Flavians had, when they were free
+to express it, nothing but loathing for the reign of the freedmen.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 88.</note>
+These powerful but low-born officials are a curious
+example of what has been often seen in later times, the
+point-blank refusal, or the grudging concession, of social
+status to men wielding vast and substantial power. The
+younger Pliny, in his Panegyric on Trajan, glories in the
+preference shown under the new régime for young men of
+birth, and in his letters he vents all the long-suppressed
+scorn of his order for the Claudian freedmen. Even the
+emperors who freely employed their services, were chary of
+raising them to high social rank. Freedmen ministers were
+hardly ever admitted to the ranks of the Senate<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xv. in curiam libertinorum
+filios diu non admisit.</note>; they were
+rarely present at its sittings, even at the very time when they
+were governing the world. Sacerdotal and military distinctions
+were seldom conferred upon any of them. They were
+sometimes invested with the insignia of praetorian or quaestorian
+rank.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 38; xii. 53.</note> A few were promoted to the dignity of knighthood,
+Icelus, Asiaticus, Hormus, and Claudius Etruscus<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Galba</hi>, xiv.; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii.
+57; iv. 39.</note>; but many
+a passage in Martial or Juvenal seems to show that ordinary
+equestrian rank was in those days a very doubtful distinction.<note place="foot">Mart. iii. 29; v. 8, 14, 35, 23; cf.
+Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. 212.</note>
+The emperors, as raised above all ranks, might not
+<pb n="114"/><anchor id="Pg114"/>have been personally unwilling to elevate their creatures to
+the highest social grade.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> c. xxviii.</note> But even the emperors, in matters
+of social prejudice, were not omnipotent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still, the men who could win the favours of an Agrippina
+and a Messalina, could not be extinguished by the most jealous
+social prejudice. The Roman Senate were ready, on occasion,
+to fawn on a Pallas or a Narcissus, to vote them money and
+insignia of rank, nor did they always refuse them their
+daughters in marriage. In the conflict which is so often seen
+between caste pride and the effective power of new wealth,
+the wealth and power not unfrequently prevail. The lex
+Julia prohibited the union of freedmen with daughters of a
+senatorial house.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Dig.</hi> xxiii. 2, 44.</note> Yet we know of several such marriages
+in the first century. The wife of the freedman Claudius
+Etruscus, was the sister of a consul who had held high
+command against the Dacians.<note place="foot">Statius, iii. 3, 115.</note> Priscilla, the wife of
+Abascantus, another minister of servile origin, belonged to
+the great consular family of the Antistii. Felix, the brother
+of Pallas, had married in succession three ladies of royal blood,
+one of them the granddaughter of Cleopatra.<note place="foot">Id. v. 1, 53; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> v. 9; Suet.
+<hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> xxviii. Felicem ... Judaeae
+proposuit—trium reginarum maritum.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The women of this class, for generations, wielded, in their
+own way, a power which sometimes rivalled that of the
+men. These plebeian Aspasias are a puzzling class. With
+no recognised social position, with the double taint of servile
+origin and more than doubtful morals, they were often
+endowed with many charms and accomplishments, possessing
+a special attraction for bohemian men of letters. Their
+morals were the result of an uncertain social position, combined
+with personal attractions and education. To be
+excluded from good society by ignoble birth, yet to be more
+than its equal in culture, is a dangerous position, especially for
+women. Often of oriental extraction, these women were the
+most prominent votaries of the cults or superstitions which
+poured into Rome from the prolific East. Loose character
+and religious fervour were easily combined in antiquity. And
+the <hi rend="italic">demi-monde</hi> of those days were ready to mourn passionately
+for Adonis and keep all the feasts of Isis or Jehovah, without
+<pb n="115"/><anchor id="Pg115"/>scrupling to make a temple a place of assignation.<note place="foot">Catull. x. 26; Tibull. i. 3, 33; Ov.
+<hi rend="italic">Ars Am.</hi> iii. 635; cf. <hi rend="italic">Amor.</hi> i. 8, 73;
+iii. 9, 33.</note> The
+history of the early Empire, it has been rather inaccurately
+said, shows no reign of mistresses. Yet some of the freedwomen
+have left their mark on that dark page of history.
+Claudius was the slave of women, and two of his mistresses
+lent their aid to Narcissus to compass the ruin of Messalina.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 29.</note>
+The one woman whom Nero really loved, and who loved him
+in return, was Acte, who had been bought in a slave market
+in Asia. She captured the heart of the Emperor in his early
+youth, and incurred the fierce jealousy of Agrippina, as she
+did, at a later date, that of the fair, ambitious Poppaea.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiii. 12, 46; xiv. 2; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>,
+xxviii. Acten libertam paullum abfuit
+quin justo matrimonio sibi conjungeret.</note>
+Acte was faithful to his memory even after the last awful
+scene in Phaon’s gardens.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, l.</note> And, along with his two nurses,
+the despised freedwoman guarded his remains and laid the
+last of his line beside his ancestors. Caenis, the mistress
+who consoled Vespasian after his wife’s death, without
+any attractions of youth or beauty, suited well the taste of
+the bourgeois Emperor. It was a rather sordid and prosaic
+union. And Caenis is said to have accumulated a fortune,
+and besmirched the honest Emperor’s name, by a wholesale
+traffic in State secrets and appointments.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxvi. 14.</note> In the last years
+of our period a very different figure has been glorified by
+the art of Lucian. Panthea, the mistress of L. Verus, completely
+fascinated the imagination of Lucian when he saw
+her at Smyrna, during the visit of her lover to the East.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Imag.</hi> 10. See Croiset’s <hi rend="italic">Lucien</hi>,
+p. 273, on the <hi rend="italic">Imagines</hi> as illustrating
+Lucian’s power as a critic of art.</note>
+Lucian pictures her delicately chiselled beauty and grace of
+form by recalling the finest traits in the great masterpieces
+of Pheidias and Praxiteles and Calamis, of Euphranor and
+Polygnotus and Apelles; Panthea combines them all. She
+has a voice of a marvellous and mellow sweetness, which lingers
+in the ear with a haunting memory. And the soul was worthy
+of such a fair dwelling-place. In her love of music and
+poetry, combined with a masculine strength of intellect capable
+of handling the highest problems in politics or dialectic, she
+was a worthy successor of those elder daughters of Ionia whose
+<pb n="116"/><anchor id="Pg116"/>charm and strength drew a Socrates or a Pericles to their feet.<note place="foot">Xen. <hi rend="italic">Mem.</hi> iii. 11; Plat. <hi rend="italic">Menex.</hi>
+c. iv.</note>
+Surrounded by luxury and the pomp of imperial rank, and
+linked to a very unworthy lover, Panthea never lost her
+natural modesty and simple sweetness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great freedmen, who held the highest offices in the
+imperial service till the time of Hadrian with almost undisputed
+sway, are interesting by reason of the strangely romantic
+career of some of them. But these are very exceptional
+cases. In the bureaux of finance, it has been discovered from
+the inscriptions that the officials were all of equestrian rank.
+On the other hand, a great number of the provincial procurators
+were freedmen. And the agents of the Emperor’s
+private fisc seem to have been nearly always drawn from
+this class. The lower grades of the civil service were full
+of them.<note place="foot">Cf. Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> i. 82.</note> But to the student of society, the official freedmen
+are, as a class, not so interesting as their brethren who in
+these same years were making themselves masters of the trade
+and commercial capital of the Roman world. And the
+interest is heightened by the vivid art with which Petronius
+has ushered us into the very heart of this rather vulgar
+society. The <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> is to some extent a caricature. There
+were hosts of modest, estimable freedmen whose only record is
+in two or three lines on a funeral slab. Yet a caricature must
+have a foundation of truth, and a careful reader may discover
+the truth under the humorous exaggeration of Petronius.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The transition from the status of slave to that of freedman
+was perhaps not so abrupt and marked as we might at first
+sight suppose. It is probable that many a slave of the better
+and more intelligent class found little practical change in the
+tenor of his life when he received the touch of the wand
+before the praetor. Some, like Melissus, the free-born slave
+of Maecenas, actually rejected the proffered boon.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">De Ill. Gram.</hi> xxi.</note> There
+was, of course, much cruelty to slaves in many Roman households,
+and the absolute power of a master, unrestrained by
+principle or kindly feeling, was an unmitigated curse till it
+was limited by the humane legislation of the second century.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 189; Denis, <hi rend="italic">Idées
+Morales</hi>, ii. 208; Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> xvii.</note>
+But there must have been many houses, like that of the
+younger Pliny, where the slaves were treated, in Seneca’s
+<pb n="117"/><anchor id="Pg117"/>phrase, as humble friends and real members of the family,
+where their marriages were fêted with general gaiety,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iii. 21; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 47;
+Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 17, 9; viii. 16; cf. Marq.
+<hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 175.</note> where
+their sicknesses were tenderly watched, and where they were
+truly mourned in death. The inscriptions reveal to us a
+better side of slave life, which is not so prominent in our
+literary authorities. There is many an inscription recording
+the love and faithfulness of the slave husband and wife,
+although not under those honoured names. And it is
+significant that on many of these tablets the honourable
+title of <hi rend="italic">conjunx</hi> is taking the place of the old servile <hi rend="italic">contubernalis</hi>.
+The inscriptions which testify to the mutual love
+of master and servant are hardly less numerous. In one a
+master speaks of a slave-child of four years as being dear to
+him as a son.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2808.</note> Another contains the memorial of a learned
+lady erected by her slave librarian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2874.</note> Another records the
+love of a young noble for his nurse,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2816.</note> while another is the
+pathetic tribute of the nurse to her young charge, who died
+at five years of age. The whole city household of another
+great family subscribe from their humble savings for an
+affectionate memorial of their young mistress.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2862.</note> Seneca, in
+his humanitarian tone about slavery, represents a great
+moral movement, which was destined to express itself in
+legislation under the Antonines. And the energy with which
+Seneca denounced harsh or contemptuous conduct to these
+humble dependents had evidently behind it the force of a
+steadily growing sentiment. The master who abused his
+power was already beginning to be a marked man.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 18.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Frequent manumissions were swelling the freedman class
+to enormous dimensions. The emancipation of slaves by
+dying bequest was not then, indeed, inspired by the same
+religious motive as in the Middle Ages. But it was often
+dictated by the natural, human wish to make some return to
+faithful servants, and to leave a memory of kindness behind.
+But without the voluntary generosity of the master, the slave
+could easily purchase his own freedom. The price of slaves
+varied enormously, according to their special aptitude and grade
+of service. It might range from £1700, in rare cases, to £10,
+or even less, in our money.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 174.</note> But taking the average price of
+<pb n="118"/><anchor id="Pg118"/>ordinary slaves, one careful and frugal might sometimes save
+the cost of his freedom in a few years. The slave, especially if he
+had any special gift, or if he occupied a prominent position in
+the household, had many chances of adding to his <hi rend="italic">peculium</hi>.
+But the commonest drudge might spare something from the
+daily allowance of food.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 80, § 4, peculium suum
+quod comparaverunt ventre fraudato
+pro capite numerant.</note> Others, like the cooks in Apuleius,
+might sell their perquisites from the remains of a banquet.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> x. 14; cf. Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel.
+Rom.</hi> ii. 397.</note>
+The door-keepers, a class notorious for their insolence in
+Martial’s day,<note place="foot">v. 22, 10, negat lasso janitor esse
+domi; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Nec. Inj.</hi> xiv. cubicularii
+supercilium.</note> often levied heavy tolls for admission to their
+master’s presence. And good-natured visitors would not
+depart without leaving a gift to those who had done
+them service. It must also be remembered that the slave
+system of antiquity covered much of the ground of our
+modern industrial organisation. A great household, or a
+great estate, was a society almost complete in itself. And
+intelligent slaves were often entrusted with the entire management
+of certain departments.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">R. H.</hi> ii. 380 (Tr.)</note> The great rural properties had
+their quarries, brickworks, and mines; and manufactures of all
+kinds were carried on by servile industry, with slaves or
+freedmen as managers. The merchant, the banker, the
+contractor, the publisher, had to use, not only slave labour,
+but slave skill and superintendence.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 162 sq.</note> The great household
+needed to be organised under chiefs. And on rural estates,
+down to the end of the Western Empire, the villicus or
+procurator was nearly always a man of servile origin.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C. Th.</hi> ix. 30, 2; ii. 30, 2.</note> In
+these various capacities, the trusted slave was often practically
+a partner, with a share of the profits, or he had a
+commission on the returns. Such a fortunate servant, by
+hoarding his <hi rend="italic">peculium</hi>, might soon become a capitalist on his
+own account, and well able, if he chose, to purchase his
+freedom. His <hi rend="italic">peculium</hi>, like that of the son <hi rend="italic">in manu patris</hi>,
+was of course by law the property of his master. But the
+security of the <hi rend="italic">peculium</hi> was the security for good service.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. p. 163.</note>
+Thus a useful and favourite slave often easily became a
+freedman, sometimes by purchase, or, as often happened in
+the case of servants of the imperial house, by the free gift of
+<pb n="119"/><anchor id="Pg119"/>the lord. There are even cases on record where a slave was
+left heir of his master’s property. Trimalchio boasted that he
+had been made by his master joint heir with the Emperor.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 76.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tie between patron and freedman was very close. The
+emancipated slave had often been a trusted favourite, and even
+a friend of the family, and his lord was under an obligation
+to provide for his future. The freedman frequently remained
+in the household, with probably little real change in his position.
+His patron owed him at least support and shelter. But he
+often gave him, besides, the means of an independent life,
+a farm, a shop, or capital to start in some trade.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 165.</note> In the
+time of Ovid, a freedman of M. Aurelius Cotta had more than
+once received from his patron the fortune of a knight, besides
+ample provision for his children.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 178, n.</note> A similar act of generosity,
+which was recklessly abused, is recorded by Martial.<note place="foot">Mart. v. 70; cf. vii. 64.</note> By
+ancient law, as well as by sentiment, senators were forbidden
+to soil themselves by trade or usury.<note place="foot">Liv. xxi. 63, quaestus omnis patribus
+indecorus visus; D. Cass. 69. 16;
+cf. <hi rend="italic">C. Th.</hi> xiii. 1, 4; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Godefroy’s note.</note> But so inconvenient a
+prohibition was sure to be evaded. And probably the most
+frequent means of evasion was by entrusting senatorial capital
+to freedmen or clients, or even to the higher class of slaves.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Cat. Maj.</hi> 21.</note>
+When Trimalchio began to rise in the social scale, he gave up
+trade, and employed his capital in financing men of the freedman
+class.<note place="foot">Petron. 77, sustuli me de negotiatione
+et coepi libertos foenerare.</note> These people, generally of Levantine origin, had the
+aptitude for commerce which has at all times been a characteristic
+of their race. And, in the time of the Empire, almost all
+trade and industry was in their hands. The tale of Petronius
+reveals the secret of their success. They value money beyond
+anything else; it is the one object of their lives. They frankly
+estimate a man’s worth and character in terms of cash.<note place="foot">Id. 77, assem habeas, assem valeas.</note> Keen,
+energetic, and unscrupulous, they will <q>pick a farthing out of a
+dung-heap with their teeth</q>; <q>lead turns to gold in their hands.</q><note place="foot">Id. 43, paratus fuit quadrantem de
+stercore mordicus tollere:—in manu
+illius plumbum aurum fiebat.</note>
+They are entirely of Vespasian’s opinion that gold from any
+quarter, however unsavoury, <q>never smells.</q> Taking the world
+as it was, in many respects they deserved to succeed. They
+were not, indeed, encumbered with dignity or self-respect. They
+<pb n="120"/><anchor id="Pg120"/>had one goal, and they worked towards it with infinite industry
+and unfailing courage and self-confidence. Nothing daunts or
+dismays them. If a fleet of merchantmen, worth a large fortune,
+is lost in a storm, the freedman speculator will at once sell his
+wife’s clothes and jewels, and start cheerfully on a fresh venture.<note place="foot">Petron. 76.</note>
+When his great ambition has been achieved, he enjoys its fruits
+after his kind in all ages. Excluded from the great world of
+hereditary culture, these people caricature its tastes, and imitate
+all its vices, without catching even a reflection of its charm
+and refinement. The selfish egotism of the dissipated noble
+might be bad enough, but it was sometimes veiled by a careless
+grace, or an occasional deference to lofty tradition. The selfishness
+and grossness of the upstart is naked and not ashamed,
+or we might almost say, it glories in its shame. Its luxury is
+a tasteless attempt to vie with the splendour of aristocratic
+banquets. The carver and the waiter perform their tasks to
+the beat of a deafening music. Art and literature are prostituted
+to the service of this vulgar parade of new wealth, and the
+divine Homer is profaned by a man who thinks that Hannibal
+fought in the Trojan War.<note place="foot">Id. 50</note> The conversation is of the true
+bourgeois tone, with all its emphasis on the obvious, its unctuous
+moralising, its platitudes consecrated by their antiquity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is this society which is drawn for us with such a sure,
+masterly hand, and with such graceful ease, by Petronius.
+The <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> is well known to be one of the great puzzles and
+mysteries in Roman literature. Scholars have held the most
+widely different opinions as to its date, its author, and its purpose.
+The scene has been laid in the reign of Augustus or of
+Tiberius, and, on the strength of a misinterpreted inscription,
+even as late as the reign of Alexander Severus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1175; cf. Teuffel, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Lit.</hi> ii.
+§ 300, n. 4.</note> Those who
+have attributed it to the friend and victim of Nero have been
+confronted with the silence of Quintilian, Juvenal, and Martial,
+with the silence of Tacitus as to any literary work by
+Petronius, whose character and end he has described with a
+curious sympathy and care.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 18, 19.</note> It is only late critics of the
+lower empire, such as Macrobius,<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Som. Scip.</hi> i. 2, 8.</note> and a dilettante aristocrat
+like Sidonius Apollinaris,<note place="foot">Sidon. Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Carm.</hi> ix. 268.</note> who pay any attention to this
+    re<pb n="121"/><anchor id="Pg121"/>markable work of genius. And Sidonius seems to make its
+author a citizen of Marseilles.<note place="foot">Sidon. Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Carm.</hi> xxiii. 155, et te
+Massiliensium per hortos sacri stipitis,
+Arbiter, colonum Hellespontiaco parem
+Priapo, etc.</note> Yet silence in such cases may
+be very deceptive. Martial and Statius never mention one
+another, and both might seem unknown to Tacitus. And
+Tacitus, after the fashion of the Roman aristocrat, in painting
+the character of Petronius, may not have thought it relevant or
+important to notice a light work such as the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi>, even
+if he had ever seen it. He does not think it worth while to
+mention the histories of the Emperor Claudius, the tragedies of
+Seneca, or the <hi rend="italic">Punica</hi> of Silius Italicus.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 8; xiii. 2; xv. 45,
+60, 65; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iii. 65.</note> Tacitus, like Thucydides,
+is too much absorbed in the social tragedy of his time to
+have any thought to spare for its artistic efforts. The rather
+shallow, easy-going Pliny has told us far more of social life in
+the reigns of Domitian and Trajan, its rural pleasures and its
+futile literary ambitions, than the great, gloomy historian who was
+absorbed in the vicissitudes of the deadly duel between the
+Senate and the Emperors. One thing is certain about the author
+of this famous piece—he was not a plebeian man about town,
+although it may be doubted whether M. Boissier is safe in
+maintaining that such a writer would not have chosen his own
+environment of the Suburra as the field for his imagination.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 257, ce n’est
+pas la coutume qu’on mette son idéal
+près de soi.</note>
+It is safer to seek for light on the social status of the author
+in the tone of his work. The <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> is emphatically the
+production of a cultivated aristocrat, who looks down with
+serene and amused scorn on the vulgar bourgeois world which he
+is painting. He is interested in it, but it is the interest of the
+detached, artistic observer, whose own world is very far off.
+Encolpius and Trimalchio and his coarse freedman friends are
+people with whom the author would never have dined, but
+whom, at a safe social distance, he found infinitely amusing as
+well as disgusting. He saw that a great social revolution
+was going on before his eyes, that the old slave minion, with
+estates in three continents, was becoming the rival of the great
+noble in wealth, that the new-sprung class were presenting to
+the world a vulgar caricature of the luxury in the palaces on
+the Esquiline. Probably he thought it all bad,<note place="foot">Petron. 88, at nos vino scortisque
+demersi ne paratas quidem artes audemus
+cognoscere, sed accusatores antiquitatis vitia tantum docemus et discimus.
+This rather applies to the higher cultivated class.</note> but the bad
+<pb n="122"/><anchor id="Pg122"/>became worse when it was coarse and vulgar. The ignorant
+assumption of literary and artistic taste in Trimalchio must
+have been contrasted in the author’s mind with many an
+evening at the palace, when Nero, in his better moods, would
+recite his far from contemptible verses, or his favourite passages
+from Euripides, and when the new style of Lucan would be
+balanced against that of the great old masters.<note place="foot">Petron. 118; cf. Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> 213.</note> And the man
+who had been charmed with the sprightly grace of the stately
+and charming Poppaea may be forgiven for showing his
+hard contempt for Fortunata, who, in the middle of dinner,
+runs off to count the silver and deal out the slaves’ share of
+the leavings, and returns to get drunk and fight with one of
+her guests.<note place="foot">Petron. 70, 67.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The motive of the work has been much debated. It has
+been thought a satire on the Neronian circle, and again an
+effort to gratify it, by a revelation of the corruptions of the
+plebeian world, the same impulse which drove Messalina to the
+brothel, and Nero to range the taverns at midnight.<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 115; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxvi.</note> It has
+been thought a satire on the insolence and grossness of Pallas
+and the freedmen of the Claudian régime which Nero detested,
+to amuse him with all their vulgar absurdities. Is it not
+possible that the writer was merely pleasing himself—that he
+was simply following the impulse of genius? Since the
+seventh century the work has only existed in fragments.<note place="foot">Teuffel. <hi rend="italic">Rom. Lit.</hi> § 300, n. 1.</note> Who
+can tell how much the lost portions, if we possessed them,
+might affect our judgment of the object of the work? One
+thing is certain, its author was a very complex character, and
+would probably have smiled at some of the lumbering efforts
+to read his secret. Even though he may have had no lofty
+purpose, a weary man of pleasure may have wished to display,
+in its grossest, vulgarest form, the life of which he had tasted the
+pleasures, and which he had seen turning into Dead Sea fruit.
+He was probably a bad man in his conduct, worse perhaps in
+his imagination; and yet, by a strange contradiction, which is
+not unexampled in the history of character, he may have had
+dreams of a refined purity and temperance which tortured and
+embittered him by their contrast with actual life.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="123"/><anchor id="Pg123"/>
+
+<p>
+Out of the smoke of controversy, the conclusion seems
+to have emerged that the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> is a work of Nero’s reign,
+and that its author was in all probability that Caius Petronius
+who was Nero’s close companion, and who fell a victim to the
+jealousy of Tigellinus. Not the least cogent proof of this is the
+literary criticism of the work. It is well known that Lucan,
+belonging to the Spanish family of the Senecas, had thrown
+off many of the conventions of Roman literature, and
+discarded the machinery of epic mythology in his <hi rend="italic">Pharsalia</hi>.
+He had also incurred the literary jealousy of Nero. The
+attack in the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> on Lucan’s literary aberrations can
+hardly be mistaken. The old poet Eumolpus is introduced to
+defend the traditions of the past. And he gives a not very
+successful demonstration, in 285 verses, of the manner in which
+the subject should have been treated, with all the scenery and
+machinery of orthodox epic.<note place="foot">Petron. 118, 119; cf. Boissier,
+<hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 239. Other proofs of the
+date of the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> are the occurrence
+of names like Apelles and Menecrates,
+c. 64, 73; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> 33; <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>,
+30; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> 9; the
+reflections on decline of oratory, <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi>
+1; cf. Tac. <hi rend="italic">Dial. Or.</hi> c. 35; the
+invention of a peculiar glass, which
+belongs to the reign of Tiberius, cf.
+Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> xxxvi. 66; D. Cass. 57.
+21 ad fin.</note> This specimen of conservative
+taste is the least happy part of the work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such evidence is reinforced by the harmony of the whole
+tone of the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> with the clear-cut character of Petronius
+in Tacitus. There was evidently a singular fascination about
+this man, which, in spite of his wasted, self-indulgent life,
+was keenly felt by the severe historian. Petronius was
+capable of great things, but in an age of wild licence he
+deliberately devoted his brilliant talent to making sensuality
+a fine art. Like Otho, who belonged to the same circle,
+he showed, as consul and in the government of Bithynia,
+that a man of pleasure could be equal to great affairs.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 18, vigentem se
+ac parem negotiis ostendit.</note> After
+this single digression from the scheme of the voluptuary, he
+returned to his pleasures, and became an arbiter in all questions
+of sensual taste, from whose decision there was no appeal.
+His ascendency over the Emperor drew upon him the fatal
+enmity of Tigellinus. Petronius was doomed. It was a time
+when not even the form of justice was used to veil the caprices
+of tyranny, and Petronius determined not to endure a long
+suspense when the issue was certain. He had gone as far as
+<pb n="124"/><anchor id="Pg124"/>Cumae to attend the Emperor. There he was stopped. He
+retired to his chamber and had his veins alternately opened
+and rebound, meanwhile conversing with his friends or listening
+to light verses, not, as the fashion then was, seeking consolation
+from a Stoic director on the issues of life and death. He
+rewarded some of his slaves; others he had flogged before
+his eyes. After a banquet he fell calmly into his last sleep
+In his will there was none of the craven adulation by which
+the victim often strove to save his heirs from imperial rapacity.
+He broke his most precious myrrhine vase, to prevent its being
+added to Nero’s treasures.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> xxxvii. 7 (20), T. Petronius
+consularis moriturus invidia
+Neronis, ... trullam myrrhinam
+HS.c̅c̅c̅ emptam fregit.</note> His only bequest to the Emperor
+was a stinging catalogue of his secret and nameless sins.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 19, sed flagitia principis
+et novitatem cujusque stupri perscripsit
+atque obsignata misit Neroni.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi>, as we have it, is only a fragment, containing
+parts of two books, out of a total of sixteen. It is full of
+humorous exaggeration and wild Aristophanic fun, along with,
+here and there, very subtle and refined delineation of character.
+But, except in the famous dinner of Trimalchio, there are few
+signs of regular construction or closeness of texture in plot
+and incident. Even if we had the whole, it might have been
+difficult to decipher its motive or to unlock the secret of the
+author’s character. We can only be sure that he was a man
+of genius, and that he was interested in the intellectual pursuits
+and tendencies of his time, as well as in its vices and
+follies. We may perhaps surmise that he was at once perverted
+and disillusioned, alternately fascinated and disgusted
+by the worship of the flesh and its lusts in that evil time.
+He is not, as has been sometimes said, utterly devoid of
+a moral sense. Occasionally he shows a gleam of nobler
+feeling, a sense of the <hi rend="italic">lacrimae rerum</hi>, as in that passage
+where the corpse of the shipwrecked Lichas is washed
+ashore. <q>Somewhere a wife is quietly awaiting him, or
+a father or a son, with no thought of storm; some one
+whom he kissed on leaving.... He had examined the
+accounts of his estates, he had pictured to himself the day of
+his return to his home. And now he lies, O ye gods, how far
+from the goal of his hopes. But the sea is not the only
+mocker of the hopes of men. If you reckon well, there is
+<pb n="125"/><anchor id="Pg125"/>shipwreck everywhere.</q><note place="foot">Petron. 115, si bene calculum
+ponas, ubique naufragium est.</note> There is also a curious note of contempt
+for his own age in a passage on the decay of the fine
+arts. The tone is, for the moment, almost that of Ruskin.
+The glories of the golden age of art were the result of
+simple virtue. An age like the Neronian, an age abandoned
+to wine and harlotry, which dreams only of making money
+by any sordid means, cannot even appreciate what the great
+masters have left behind, much less itself produce anything
+worthy. Even the gods of the Capitol are now honoured by
+an offering of crude bullion, not by the masterpieces of a
+Pheidias or an Apelles. And the race which created them
+are now for us, forsooth, silly Greeklings!<note place="foot">Id. 88. For a favourable estimate
+of the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi>, cf. Schiller’s
+<hi rend="italic">Gesch. röm. Kaiserzeit</hi>, i. 469, 470.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet side by side with a passage like this, there are descriptions
+of abnormal depravity so coarsely realistic that it has
+often been assumed, and not unnaturally, that the writer rioted
+in mere filth. It should be remembered, however, that there
+was a tradition of immorality about the ancient romance,<note place="foot">See Boissier’s remarks, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p.
+228.</note> and
+Petronius, had he cared to do so, might have made the same
+apology as Martial, that he provided what his readers
+demanded.<note place="foot">Mart. v. 2; iii. 68; cf. Mahaffy,
+<hi rend="italic">Greek World under Roman Sway</hi>, p.
+298.</note> That Petronius was deeply tainted is only too
+probable from his associations, although Tacitus implies that
+he was rather a fastidious voluptuary than a gross debauchee.
+Yet a sensualist of the intellectual range of Petronius may
+have occasionally visions of a better world than that to which
+he has sunk. Is it not possible that the gay elegant trifler
+may sometimes have scorned himself as he scorned his time?
+Is it not possible that, along with other illusions, he had
+parted with the illusions of vice, and that in the <q>noctes
+Neronis</q> he had seen the adder among the roses? He has
+written one of the keenest satires ever penned on the vulgarity
+of mere wealth, its absurd affectations, its vanity, its grossness.
+May he not also have wished, without moralising in a fashion
+which so cultivated a trifler would have scorned, to reveal the
+abyss towards which a society lost to all the finer passions
+of the spirit was hurrying? In the half comic, half ghastly
+scene in which Trimalchio, in a fit of maudlin sentiment,
+<pb n="126"/><anchor id="Pg126"/>has himself laid out for dead, while the horns blare out his
+funeral lament, we seem to hear the knell of a society which
+was the slave of gold and gross pleasure, and seemed to be
+rotting before its death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it need hardly be said that the prevailing note of the
+<hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> is anything but melancholy. The author is intensely
+amused with his subject, and the piece is full of the most
+riotous fun and humour. It belongs formally to the medley
+of prose and verse which Varro introduced into Roman
+literature on the model of Menippus of Gadara.<note place="foot">Teuffel, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Lit.</hi> i. p. 239; Friedl.
+<hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> 5.</note> It contains
+disquisitions on literary tendencies of the day in poetry and
+oratory, anecdotes and desultory talk. But Petronius has
+given a new character to the old <q>Satura,</q> more in the
+manner of the Greek romance. There probably was no regular
+plot in the complete work, no central motive, such as the
+wrath of Priapus,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 5.</note> to bind it together. Yet there is a certain
+bond of union in the narrative of lively, and often questionable,
+adventures through which Petronius carries his very disreputable
+characters. In this life and movement, this human
+interest, the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> is the distant ancestor of <hi rend="italic">Gil Blas</hi>,
+<hi rend="italic">Roderick Random</hi>, and <hi rend="italic">Tom Jones</hi>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The scene of the earlier part, long since lost, may have been
+laid at Massilia.<note place="foot">Sidon. Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Carm.</hi> ix. 268; xxiii.
+155.</note> In the two books partially preserved to us, it
+lies in southern Italy, at Cumae or Croton, in those Greek towns
+which had plenty of Greek vice, without much Greek refinement.<note place="foot">Petron. 81, cf. Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena
+Trim. Einl.</hi> 6. Puteoli is excluded
+by the complaints of municipal decay
+in c. 44: Naples, by the fact that
+the town is a Roman colony (44, 57);
+Cumae was the only town in this region
+which had Praetors. Cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi>
+1498, 2263; Petron. 65.</note>
+The three strangers, whose adventures are related,
+Encolpius, Ascyltus, and Giton, if we may judge by their
+names, are also Greek, with the literary culture of their time,
+and deeply tainted with its worst vices. At the opening of
+our fragment, Encolpius, a beggarly, wandering sophist, is
+declaiming in a portico on the decay of oratory.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 1, 2.</note> He is
+expressing what was probably Petronius’s own judgment, as
+it was that of Tacitus,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">De Or.</hi> c. 31, 35.</note> as to the evil effects of school
+declamation on musty or frivolous subjects. He is met by a
+<pb n="127"/><anchor id="Pg127"/>rival lecturer, Agamemnon, who urges, on behalf of the
+unfortunate teachers of this conventional rhetoric, that the
+fault lies not with them, but with the parents and the public,
+the same excuse, in fact, which Plato had long before made
+for the maligned sophist of the fifth century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Rep.</hi> vi. p. 492 <hi rend="small">A.</hi></note> But
+Encolpius and his companions, in spite of these literary
+interests, are the most disreputable adventurers, educated
+yet hopelessly depraved. They are even more at home
+in the reeking slums than in the lecture hall. Encolpius has
+been guilty of murder, theft, seduction. The party are
+alternately plunderers and plundered. They riot for the
+moment in foul excesses, and are tortured by jealousy and
+the miseries of squalid vice. Only those who have a taste
+for pornography will care to follow them in these dark paths.
+Reduced to the last pinch of poverty, they are invited to dine
+at the all-welcoming table of Trimalchio, and this is for us the
+most interesting passage in their adventures. But, on leaving
+the rich freedman’s halls they once more pass into scenes
+where a modern pen cannot venture to follow them. Yet soon
+afterwards, Encolpius is found in a picture gallery discussing
+the fate of literature and art with Eumolpus,<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 83.</note> an inveterate
+poet, as vicious as himself. Presently the party are on
+shipboard off the south Italian coast. They are shipwrecked
+and cast ashore in a storm near the town of Croton.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 114.</note> A
+friendly peasant informs them that, if they are honest
+merchants, that is no place for their craft. But if they
+belong to the more distinguished world of intrigue, they may
+make their fortune. It is a society which has no care for
+letters or virtue, which thinks only of unearned gain. There
+are only two classes, the deceivers and their victims. Children
+are an expensive luxury, for only the childless ever receive an
+invitation or any social attention. It is like a city ravaged by
+the plague; there are only left the corpses and the vultures.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 116, nihil aliud est nisi
+cadavera quae lacerantur aut corvi
+qui lacerant.</note>
+The adventurers resolve to seize the rare opportunity; they
+will turn the tables on the social birds of prey. The pauper
+poet is easily translated into a millionaire with enormous
+estates in Africa.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 117.</note> A portion of his wealth has been engulfed
+<pb n="128"/><anchor id="Pg128"/>in the storm, but a solid HS.300,000,000, with much besides,
+still remains. He has a cough, moreover, with other signs of
+debility. There is no more idiotic person, as our Stock
+Exchange records show, than a man eager for an unearned
+fortune. The poor fools flocked around Eumolpus, drinking in
+every fresh rumour about his will. He was loaded with gifts;<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 124.</note>
+great ladies made an easy offer of their virtue and even that of
+their children.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 140.</note> Meanwhile he, or Petronius, plays with their
+follies or tortures their avidity. In one of his many wills, the
+heirs of the pretended Croesus are required not to touch their
+booty till they have devoured his remains before the people!<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 141.</note>
+The tales of barbarian tribes in Herodotus, the memories of
+the siege of Saguntum and Numantia, are invoked in brutal
+irony to justify the reasonableness of the demand. <q>Close
+your eyes,</q> the cynic enjoins, <q>and fancy that instead of
+devouring human flesh, you are swallowing a million of
+money.</q> Petronius could be very brutal as well as very
+refined in his raillery. The combined stupidity and greed of
+the fortune-hunter of all ages are perhaps best met by such
+brutality of contempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The really interesting part of their adventure is the
+dinner at the house of Trimalchio, a rich freedman, to which
+these rascals were invited. Trimalchio is probably in many
+traits drawn from life, but the picture of himself, of his
+wife and his associates, is a work of genius worthy of Fielding
+or Smollett or Le Sage. Petronius, it is clear, enjoyed his
+work, and, in spite of his contempt for the vulgar ambition
+and the coarseness and commonness of Trimalchio’s class, he
+has a liking for a certain simplicity and honest good nature in
+Trimalchio. The freedman tells the story of his own career<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 75, 76.</note>
+without reserve, and with a certain pride in the virtue and
+frugality, according to his standards, which have made him
+what he is. He also exults in his shrewdness and business
+capacity. His motto has always been, <q>You are worth just
+what you have.</q> <q>Buy cheap and sell dear.</q> Coming as a
+little slave boy from Asia, probably in the reign of Augustus,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> p. 7.
+His cognomen Maecenatianus marks
+him as a slave of the friend of Augustus
+who died 8 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> Trimalchio would
+therefore be born <hi rend="italic">circ.</hi> 18 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> (<hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 71,
+29, 75). He was perhaps over seventy
+at the time of the dinner (<hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 27, 77),
+which may therefore be placed about
+57 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi></note>
+<pb n="129"/><anchor id="Pg129"/>he became the favourite of his master, and more than the
+favourite of his mistress. He found himself in the end the
+real master of the household, and, on his patron’s death, he was
+left joint-heir to his property with the emperor. But he had
+ambitions beyond even such a fortune. He became a ship-owner
+on a great scale. He lost a quarter of a million in a
+single storm, and at once proceeded to build more and larger ships.
+Money poured in; all his ventures prospered. He bought estates
+in Italy, Sicily, and Africa. Some of his purchases he had never
+seen.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 48.</note> He built himself a stately house, with marble porticoes,
+four great banqueting-halls, and twenty sleeping-rooms.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 77.</note> Everything
+to satisfy human wants was produced upon his lands. He
+was a man of infinite enterprise. He had improved the breed
+of his flocks by importing rams from Tarentum. He had bees
+from Hymettus in his hives. He sent to India for mushroom
+spawn.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 38, scripsit ut illi ex India
+semen boletorum mitteretur.</note> A gazette was regularly brought out, full of statistics,
+and all the daily incidents on his estates;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 53.</note> the number of slave
+births and deaths; a slave crucified for blaspheming the genius
+of the master; a fire in the bailiff’s house; the divorce of a watchman’s
+wife, who had been caught in adultery with the bathman; a
+sum of HS.100,000 paid into the chest, and waiting for
+investment—these are some of the items of news. Trimalchio, who
+bears now, after the fashion of his class, the good Roman name
+of Caius Pompeius, has risen to the dignity of Sevir Augustalis
+in his municipality;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 71; cf. Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim.</hi> p.
+308.</note> he is one of the foremost persons in it,
+with an overwhelming sense of the dignity of wealth, and with
+a ridiculous affectation of artistic and literary culture, which he
+parades with a delightful unconsciousness of his blunders.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the wandering adventurers arrive for dinner,<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 27.</note> they
+find a bald old man in a red tunic playing at ball, with eunuchs
+in attendance. While he is afterwards being rubbed down
+with unguents in the bath, his servants refresh themselves
+with old Falernian. Then, with four richly dressed runners
+preceding him, and wrapped in a scarlet mantle, he is borne to
+the house in his sedan along with his ugly minion. On the wall
+of the vestibule, as you entered, there were frescoes, one of
+which represented the young Trimalchio, under the leadership
+<pb n="130"/><anchor id="Pg130"/>of Minerva, making his entry into Rome, with other striking
+incidents of his illustrious career, while Fortune empties her
+flowing horn, and the Fates spin the golden thread of his
+destiny.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 29.</note> The banquet begins; Alexandrian boys bring iced
+water and delicately attend to the guests’ feet, singing all the
+while.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 31.</note> Indeed, the whole service is accompanied by singing,
+and the blare of instruments. To a great, deafening burst of
+music, the host is at last borne in buried in cushions, his bare
+shaven head protruding from a scarlet cloak, with a stole
+around his neck, and lappets falling on each side; his hands
+and arms loaded with rings.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 32.</note> Not being just then quite ready
+for dinner, he, with a kindly apology, has a game of draughts,
+until he feels inclined to eat, the pieces on the terebinthine
+board being, appropriately to such a player, gold and silver
+coins.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 33.</note> The dinner is a long series of surprises, on the artistic
+ingenuity of which Trimalchio plumes himself vastly. One
+course represents the twelve signs of the Zodiac, of which
+the host expounds at length the fateful significance.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 35.</note>
+Another dish was a large boar, with baskets of sweetmeats
+hanging from its tusks. A huge bearded hunter pierced its
+sides with a hunting knife, and forthwith from the wound
+there issued a flight of thrushes which were dexterously captured
+in nets as they flew about the room.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 40.</note> Towards the end
+of the meal the guests were startled by strange sounds in the
+ceiling, and a quaking of the whole apartment. As they raised
+their eyes, the ceiling suddenly opened, and a great circular
+tray descended, with a figure of Priapus, bearing all sorts of
+fruit and bon-bons.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 60; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 90, § 15,
+laquearia ita coagmentat ... ut totiens
+tecta quotiens fercula mutentur.</note> It may be readily assumed that in
+such a scene the wine was not stinted. Huge flagons, coated
+with gypsum, were brought in shoulder high, each with a label
+attesting that it was the great Falernian vintage of Opimius,
+one hundred years old.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 34; Cic. <hi rend="italic">Brut.</hi>, lxxxiii. The
+Consulship of Opim. was <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> 121.</note> As the wine appeared, the genial
+host remarked with admirable frankness, <q>I did not give as
+good wine yesterday, although I had a more distinguished
+company!</q>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The amusements of the banquet were as various, and some
+of them as coarse or fantastic, as the dishes. They are gross
+<pb n="131"/><anchor id="Pg131"/>and tasteless exaggerations of the prevailing fashion. In a
+literary age, a man of Trimalchio’s position must affect some
+knowledge of letters and art. He is a ludicrous example of
+the dogmatism of pretentious ignorance in all ages. He has a
+Greek and Latin library,<note place="foot">Petron. 48; on private and public
+libraries, cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> c. ix.; Plin.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 8, § 2; ii. 17, § 8; iii. 7, § 7;
+iv. 28, § 1; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Pers.</hi>; Luc. <hi rend="italic">Adv.
+Indoct.</hi> 1, 16; Mart. vii. 17, 1; Suet.
+<hi rend="italic">J. Caes.</hi> xliv.; <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> xxix.; Marq.
+<hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 114; Gregorov. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> (Tr.) p.
+210; Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 220; Sid.
+Apoll. ii. 9.</note> and pretends to have once read
+Homer, although his recollections are rather confused. He
+makes, for instance, Daedalus shut Niobe into the Trojan horse;
+Iphigenia becomes the wife of Achilles; Helen is the sister of
+Diomede and Ganymede.<note place="foot">Petron. 52.</note> One of the more refined entertainments
+which are provided is the performance of scenes
+from the Homeric poems, which Trimalchio accompanied by
+reading in a sonorous voice from a Latin version.<note place="foot">Id. 59.</note> He is himself
+an author, and has his poems recited by a boy personating
+the Bacchic god.<note place="foot">Id. 41; cf. Epict. iii. 23; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+i. 13; iii. 18, 4; vi. 15; Mart. iii. 44,
+45; 50.</note> As a connoisseur of plate he will yield to
+no one,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Brev. Vit.</hi> xii. 2; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi>
+3838; Mart. iv. 39; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> ii.
+688: Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. 84.</note> although he slyly confesses that his <q>real Corinthian</q>
+got their name from the dealer Corinthus. The metal came
+from the fused bronze and gold and silver which Hannibal flung
+into the flames of captured Troy. But Trimalchio’s most genuine
+taste, as he naïvely confesses, is for acrobatic feats and loud
+horn-blowing. And so, a company of rope-dancers bore the guests
+with their monotonous performances.<note place="foot">Petron. 53.</note> Blood-curdling tales of
+the wer-wolf, and corpses carried off by witches, are provided
+for another kind of taste.<note place="foot">Id. 62, 63; cf. Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> i. 8.</note> A base product of Alexandria
+imitates the notes of the nightingale, and another, apparently
+of Jewish race, equally base, in torturing dissonant tones
+spouted passages from the <hi rend="italic">Aeneid</hi>, profaned to scholarly ears by
+a mixture of Atellan verses.<note place="foot">Petron. 68.</note> Trimalchio, who was anxious that
+his wife should display her old powers of dancing a <hi rend="italic">cancan</hi>, is
+also going to give an exhibition of his own gifts in the
+pantomimic line,<note place="foot">Id. 52.</note> when the shrewd lady in a whisper warned
+him to maintain his dignity. How far she preserved her
+own we shall see presently.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="132"/><anchor id="Pg132"/>
+
+<p>
+The company at this strange party were worthy of their
+host. And Petronius has outdone himself in the description
+of these brother freedmen, looking up to Trimalchio as the
+glory of their order, and giving vent to their ill-humour, their
+optimism, or their inane moralities, in conversation with the
+sly observer who reports their talk. They are all old slaves
+like their host, men who have <q>made their pile,</q> or lost it.
+They rate themselves and their neighbours simply in terms of
+cash.<note place="foot">Petron. 38, 43.</note> The only ability they can understand is that which
+can <q>pick money out of the dung-heap,</q> and <q>turn lead to
+gold.</q><note place="foot">Id. 43, in manu illius plumbum
+aurum fiebat.</note> These gross and infinitely stupid fellows have not
+even the few saving traits in the character of Trimalchio. He
+has, after all, an honourable, though futile, ambition to be a
+wit, a connoisseur, a patron of learning. His luxury is
+coarse enough, but he wishes, however vainly, to redeem it by
+some ingenuity, by interspersing the mere animal feeding with
+some broken gleams, or, as we may think, faint and distorted
+reflections, of that great world of which he had heard, but the
+portals of which he could never enter. But his company are
+of mere clay. Trimalchio is gross enough at times, but,
+compared with his guests, he seems almost tolerable. And
+their dull baseness is the more torturing to a modern reader
+because it is an enduring type. The neighbour of the Greek
+observer warns him not to despise his company;<note place="foot">Id. 38, Collibertos ejus cave contemnas,
+valde succosi sunt. <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Friedl.
+<hi rend="italic">Cena Trim.</hi> p. 223.</note> they are
+<q>warm</q> men. That one at the end of the couch, who began
+as a porter, has his HS.800,000. Another, an undertaker, has
+had his glorious days, when the wine flowed in rivers;<note place="foot">Petron. 38.</note> but
+he has been compelled to compound with his creditors, and he
+has played them a clever trick. A certain Seleucus, whose
+name reveals his origin, explains his objections to the bath,
+especially on this particular morning, when he has been at a
+funeral.<note place="foot">Id. 42.</note> The fate of the departed friend unfortunately leads
+him to moralise on the weakness of mortal men, mere
+insects, or bubbles on the stream. As for medical aid, it
+is an imaginary comfort; it oftener kills than cures.<note place="foot">Id. 42, medicus nihil aliud est
+quam animi consolatio. For similar
+opinions of the medical profession, cf.
+Petron. 56; D. Cass. lxix. 22, lxxi.
+33; Mart. vi. 31; vi. 53; ii. 16; Epict.
+iii. 23, § 27; Juv. iii. 77; Luc. <hi rend="italic">Philops.</hi>
+c. 21, 26; <hi rend="italic">Adv. Indoct.</hi> c. 29; Marq.
+<hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> ii. 779. Sen. gives a higher idea
+of the craft, <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> vi. 16; cf. Apul.
+<hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> x. 8, where the doctor rejects the
+base proposals made to him.</note> The
+<pb n="133"/><anchor id="Pg133"/>great consolation was that the funeral was respectably done,
+although the wife was not effusive in her grief.<note place="foot">Petron. 42, planetus est optime,
+etiam si maligne illum ploravit uxor.</note> Another
+guest will have none of this affected mourning for one who
+lived the life of his choice and left his solid hundred thousand.<note place="foot">Id. 43.</note>
+He was after all a harsh quarrelsome person, very different from
+his brother, a stout, kindly fellow with an open hand, and a
+sumptuous table. He had his reverses at first, but he was set
+up again by a good vintage and a lucky bequest, which he knew,
+by a sly stroke, how to increase; a true son of fortune, who
+lived his seventy years and more, as black as a crow, a man
+who lustily enjoyed all the delights of the flesh to the
+very end.<note place="foot">Id. 43, noveram hominem olim
+oliorum, et adhuc salax est. On the
+phrase olim oliorum <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena
+Trim.</hi> p. 237.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the most interesting person for the modern student is
+the grumbler about the management of town affairs, and here a
+page or two of the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> is worth a dissertation. The price
+of bread has gone up, and the bakers must be in league with
+the aediles. In the good old times, when the critic first came
+from Asia, things were very different.<note place="foot">Petron. 44.</note> <q>There were giants in
+those days. Think of Safinius, who lived by the old arch, a
+man with a sharp, biting tongue, but a true friend, a man who,
+in the town council, went straight to his point, whose voice in
+the forum rang out like a trumpet. Yet he was just like one
+of us, knew everybody’s name, and returned every salute. Why,
+in those days corn was as cheap as dirt. You could buy for an
+as a loaf big enough for two. But the town has since gone
+sadly back.<note place="foot">Id. 44, haec colonia retroversus
+crescit tanquam coda vituli. This
+passage is used to prove that Puteoli
+cannot be Trimalchio’s town. Friedl.
+<hi rend="italic">Cena Trim.</hi> p. 239.</note> Our aediles now think only how to pocket in
+a day what would be to some of us a fortune. I know how a
+certain person made his thousand gold pieces. If this goes on,
+I shall have to sell my cottages. Neither men nor the gods
+have any mercy. It all comes from our neglect of religion. No
+one now keeps a fast, no one cares a fig for Jove. In old days
+when there was a drought, the long-robed matrons with bare
+feet, dishevelled hair, and pure hearts, would ascend the hill to
+entreat Jupiter for rain, and then it would pour down in
+<pb n="134"/><anchor id="Pg134"/>buckets.</q><note place="foot">Petron. 44 <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi> itaque statim
+urceatim plovebat.</note> At this point the maundering, pious pessimist is
+interrupted by a rag dealer<note place="foot">Id. 45. On the meaning of Centonarius
+<hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> ii. 585. They
+had a great number of Collegia, often
+leagued with the Fabri; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Henz. Ind.</hi>
+pp. 171-72; <hi rend="italic">C. Th.</hi> xiv. 8.</note> of a more cheerful temper. <q>Now
+this, now that, as the rustic said, when he lost his speckled pig.
+What we have not to-day will come to-morrow; so life rubs
+along. Why, we are to have a three days’ show of gladiators
+on the next holiday, not of the common sort, but many freedmen
+among them. And our Titus has a high spirit; he will
+not do things by halves. He will give us cold steel without
+any shirking, a good bit of butchery in full view of the amphitheatre.
+And he can well afford it. His father died and left
+him HS.30,000,000. What is a paltry HS.400,000 to such a
+fortune?<note place="foot">For the cost of such shows, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi>
+81; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. <hi rend="italic">Suppl.</hi> p. 1034; Friedl.
+<hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> p. 58; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi>
+ii. p. 136.</note> and it will give him a name for ever. He has some
+tit-bits, too, in reserve, the lady chariot-driver, and the steward
+of Glyco, who was caught with his master’s wife; poor wretch,
+he was only obeying orders. And the worthless Glyco has
+given him to the beasts; the lady deserved to suffer. And I
+have an inkling that Mammaea is going to give us a feast, where
+we shall get two denarii apiece. If she does the part expected
+of her, Norbanus will be nowhere. His gladiators were a
+wretched, weedy, twopenny-halfpenny lot, who would go down
+at a mere breath. They were all cut to pieces, as the cowards
+deserved, at the call of the crowd, <q>give it them.</q> A pretty
+show indeed! When I applauded, I gave far more than I got.
+But friend Agamemnon, you are thinking <q>what is all this
+long-winded chatter.</q><note place="foot">Petron. 46, quid iste argutat molestus?</note> Well, you, who dote on eloquence, why
+won’t you talk yourself, instead of laughing at us feeble folk.
+Some day I may persuade you to look in at my farm; I daresay,
+though the times are bad, we shall find a pullet to eat. And I
+have a young scholar ripening for your trade. He has good
+wits and never raises his head from his task. He paints with
+a will. He has begun Greek, and has a real taste for Latin.
+But one of his tutors is conceited and idle. The other is very
+painstaking, but, in his excess of zeal, he teaches more than he
+knows. So I have bought the boy some red-letter volumes,
+that he may get a tincture of law for domestic purposes. That
+<pb n="135"/><anchor id="Pg135"/>is what gives bread and butter. He has now had enough of
+literature. If he gives it up, I think I shall teach him a trade,
+the barber’s or auctioneer’s or pleader’s,<note place="foot">Petron. 46 <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi>; cf. Mart. v. 56;
+Juv. vii. 5, 176.</note> something that only
+death can take from him. Every day I din into his ears,
+Primigenius, my boy, what you learn you learn for profit. Look
+at the lawyer Philero. If he had not learnt his business, he
+could not keep the wolf from the door. Why, only a little
+ago, he was a hawker with a bundle on his back, and now he
+can hold his own with Norbanus. Learning is a treasure, and
+a trade can never be lost.</q>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To all this stimulating talk there are lively interludes. A
+guest thinks one of the strangers, in a superior way, is making
+game of the company, and assails him with a shower of the
+choicest abuse, in malodorous Latin of the slums, interlarded
+with proud references to his own rise from the slave ranks.<note place="foot">Petron. 57.</note>
+Trimalchio orders the house-dog, Scylax, to be brought in, but
+the brute falls foul of a pet spaniel, and, in the uproar, a lamp
+is overthrown, the vases on the table are all smashed, and
+some of the guests are scalded with the hot oil.<note place="foot">Id. 64.</note> In the
+middle of this lively scene, a lictor announces the approach of
+Habinnas, a stone-cutter, who is also a great dignitary of the
+town. He arrives rather elevated from another feast of which
+he has pleasant recollections. He courteously asks for
+Fortunata,<note place="foot">Id. 67.</note> who happens to be just then looking after the
+plate and dividing the remains of the feast among the slaves.
+That lady, after many calls, appears in a cherry coloured
+tunic with a yellow girdle, wiping her hands with her neckerchief.
+She has splendid rings on her arms, legs, and fingers,
+which she pulls off to show them to the stone-cutter’s lady.
+Trimalchio is proud of their weight, and orders a balance to
+be brought in to confirm his assertions. It is melancholy to
+relate that, in the end, the two ladies get hopelessly drunk,
+and fall to embracing one another in a rather hysterical fashion.
+Fortunata even attempts to dance.<note place="foot">Id. 70.</note> In the growing confusion
+the slaves take their places at table, and the cook begins to
+give imitations of a favourite actor,<note place="foot">Id. Ephesum tragoedum coepit
+imitare—Sonst unbekannt, Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena
+Trim.</hi> 306.</note> and lays a wager with his
+master on the chances of the green at the next races. Trimal<pb n="136"/><anchor id="Pg136"/>chio, who by this time was becoming very mellow and sentimental,
+determines to make his will, and to manumit all his
+slaves, with a farm to one, a house to another. He even gives
+his friend the stone-cutter full directions about the monument
+which is to record so brilliant a career. There is to be ample
+provision for its due keeping, in the fashion so well known
+from the inscriptions, with a fair space of prescribed measurements,
+planted with vines and other fruit trees. Trimalchio
+wishes to be comfortable in his last home.<note place="foot">Cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4070, 7321; Petron.
+71, valde enim falsum est vivo quidem
+domos cultas esse, non curari eas ubi
+diutius nobis habitandum est.</note> On the face of
+the monument ships under full sail are to figure the sources
+of his wealth.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> the monument of C. Munatius
+Faustus at Pompeii, <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. 1030.
+But Mau, p. 415 (Tr.), interprets it
+differently from Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim.</hi> p.
+307.</note> He himself is to be sculptured, seated on
+a tribunal, clothed with the <hi rend="italic">praetexta</hi> of the Augustalis,
+with five rings on his fingers, ladling money from a bag,
+as in the great banquet with which he had once regaled the
+people.<note place="foot">See the monument of the surgeon
+oculist of Assisi, <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2983, who records
+the amount he gave for his freedom,
+his benefactions, and his fortune. <hi rend="italic">v.
+C.I.L.</hi> v. 4482, the monument of
+Valerius Anteros Asiaticus, a Sevir
+Aug. of Brescia.</note> On his right hand there is to be the figure of his
+wife holding a dove and a spaniel on a leash. A boy is to
+be graved weeping over a broken urn. And, finally, in
+the centre of the scene, there is to be a horologe, that the
+passer-by, as he looks for the hour, may have his eyes
+always drawn to the epitaph which recited the dignities and
+virtues of the illustrious freedman. It told posterity that
+<q>C. Pompeius Trimalchio Maecenatianus was pious, stout, and
+trusty, that he rose from nothing, left HS.30,000,000, and
+never heard a philosopher.</q> The whole company, along with
+Trimalchio himself, of course wept copiously at the mere
+thought of the close of so illustrious a career. After renewing
+their gastric energy in the bath, the company fell to another
+banquet. Presently a cock crows, and Trimalchio, in a fit of
+superstition, spills his wine under the table,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> xxvi. 2 (26); xxviii. 6
+(57), plerique (suadent) anulum e sinistra
+in longissimum dextrae digitum
+transferre.</note> passes his rings to
+the right hand, and offers a reward to any one who will bring
+the ominous bird. The disturber was soon caught and handed
+over to the cook for execution. Then Trimalchio excites his
+wife’s natural anger by a piece of amatory grossness, and, in
+<pb n="137"/><anchor id="Pg137"/>retaliation for her very vigorous abuse, flings a cup at her
+head. In the scene which follows he gives, with the foulest
+references to his wife’s early history, a sketch of his own career
+and the eulogy of the virtues that have made him what he is.<note place="foot">Petron. 75, ad hanc me fortunam
+frugalitas mea perduxit.</note>
+Growing more and more sentimental, he at last has himself
+laid out for dead;<note place="foot">Id. 78; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Brev. Vit.</hi> xx.
+3, where a similar scene is described.
+Turannius—componi se in lecto et velut
+exanimem a circumstante familia plangi
+jussit.</note> the horn-blowers sound his last lament,
+one of them, the undertaker’s man, with such a good will, that
+the town watch arrived in breathless haste with water and axes
+to extinguish a fire. The strangers seized the opportunity to
+escape from the nauseous scene. Their taste raised them
+above Trimalchio’s circle, but they were quite on the level of
+its morals. Encolpius and his companions are soon involved
+in other adventures, in which it is better not to follow them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The lesson of all this purse-proud ostentation and
+vulgarity, the moral which Petronius may have intended to
+point, is one which will be taught from age to age by descendants
+of Trimalchio, and which will be never learnt till a far off
+future. But we need not moralise, any more than Petronius.
+We have merely given some snatches of a work, which is now
+seldom read, because it throws a searching light on a class
+which was rising to power in Roman society. We have now
+seen the worst of that society, whether crushed by the
+tyranny of the Caesars, or corrupted and vulgarised by sudden
+elevation from ignominious poverty to wealth and luxury.
+But there were great numbers, both among the nobles and the
+masses, who, in that evil time, maintained the traditions of old
+Roman soberness and virtue. The three following chapters
+will reveal a different life from that which we have hitherto
+been describing.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="138"/><anchor id="Pg138"/>
+
+</div></div>
+    <div type="book" n="1" rend="page-break-before: right">        
+        <pb n="139"/><anchor id="Pg139"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="Book II. Rara temporum felicitas"/><index index="pdf" level1="Book II. Rara temporum felicitas"/>
+<head>BOOK II</head>
+
+<head type="sub"><hi rend="italic">RARA TEMPORUM FELICITAS</hi></head>
+
+<pb n="140"/><anchor id="Pg140"/>
+        
+        <div type="chapter" n="1" rend="page-break-before: right">
+<pb n="141"/><anchor id="Pg141"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="I. The circle of the younger Pliny"/><index index="pdf" level1="I. The circle of the younger Pliny"/>
+<head>CHAPTER I</head>
+
+<head type="sub">THE CIRCLE OF THE YOUNGER PLINY</head>
+
+<p>
+It is a great relief to turn from the picture of base and vulgar
+luxury in the novel of Petronius to the sobriety and refinement
+of a class which has been elaborately painted by a less skilful
+artist, but a better man. The contrast between the pictures of
+Petronius and those of Pliny, of course, raises no difficulty.
+The writers belonged indeed to the same order, but they were
+describing two different worlds. The difficulty arises when we
+compare the high tone of the world which Pliny has immortalised,
+with the hideous revelations of contemporary licence in
+the same class which meet us in Juvenal, Martial, and Tacitus.
+And historical charity or optimism has often turned the contrast
+to account. But there is no need to pit the quiet testimony of
+Pliny against the fierce invective of Juvenal. Indeed to do so
+would indicate an imperfect insight into the character of the
+men and the associations which moulded their views of the
+society which surrounded them. The friends of Pliny were for
+the most part contemporaries of the objects of Juvenal’s wrath
+and loathing.<note place="foot">Some of Pliny’s older friends, the
+elder Pliny, Quintilian, Spurinna, Verginius
+Rufus, go back to the age which
+Juvenal professes to attack (i. 170). But,
+although Juvenal mentions few names
+of his own generation, such as Isaeus,
+Archigenes, and Marius Priscus, a
+comparison between his subjects and those
+of Martial shows that they were dealing
+with the same social facts. Cf. Teuffel,
+<hi rend="italic">R. Lit.</hi> ii. § 326, n. 5; Nettleship,
+<hi rend="italic">Lectures and Essays</hi>, p. 124 sqq.</note> But although the two men lived side by side
+during the same years, and probably began to write for the
+public about the same date,<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> (Morel), p. 7; Peter,
+<hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. 77; Nettleship, <hi rend="italic">Lectures
+and Essays</hi>, 131.</note> there is no hint that they ever
+met. They were socially at opposite poles; they were also as
+widely separated by temperament. Pliny was a charitable, good-natured
+man, an aristocrat, living among the <hi rend="italic">élite</hi>, with an
+<pb n="142"/><anchor id="Pg142"/>assured position and easy fortune—a man who, as he admits
+himself, was inclined to idealise his friends.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 28.</note> He probably
+shut his eyes to their moral faults, just as he felt bound in
+honour to extol their third-rate literary efforts. Juvenal was,
+as in a former chapter we have seen reason to believe, a
+soured and embittered man, who viewed the society of the
+great world only from a distance, and caught up the gossip of
+the servants’ hall. With the heat of an excitable temperament,
+he probably magnified what he heard, and he made
+whole classes responsible for the folly and intemperance of a
+few. Martial, the friend of Juvenal, lived in the same atmosphere,
+but, while Juvenal was inspired by a moral purpose,
+Martial caters, unabashed, for a prurient taste.<note place="foot">Mart. iii. 68, 86; v. 2.</note> Both the
+charitable optimist and the gloomy, determined pessimist, by
+limiting their view, can find ample materials for their respective
+estimates of pagan society towards the end of the first century.
+A judicial criticism will combine or balance the opposing
+evidence rather than select the witnesses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The truth is that society in every age presents the most
+startling moral contrasts, and no single comprehensive description
+of its moral condition can ever be true. This has
+been too often forgotten by those who have passed judgment
+on the moral state of Roman society, both in the first age of the
+Empire and in the last. That there was stupendous corruption
+and abnormal depravity under princes like Caligula, Nero, and
+Domitian, we hardly need the testimony of the satirists to
+induce us to believe. That there were large classes among
+whom virtuous instinct, and all the sober strength and gravity
+of the old Roman character, were still vigorous and untainted,
+is equally attested and equally certain. Ingenious immorality
+and the extravagance of luxury were no doubt rampant in the
+last century of the Republic and in the first century of the
+Empire, and their enormity has been heightened by the perverted
+and often prurient literary skill with which the orgies of
+voluptuous caprice have been painted to the last loathsome
+details. Yet even Ovid has a lingering ideal of womanly
+dignity which may repel, by refined reserve, the audacity of
+libertinism.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Amor.</hi> iii. 4, 2.</note> He was forced, by old-fashioned scruple or
+imperial displeasure, to make an elaborate apology for the
+<pb n="143"/><anchor id="Pg143"/>lubricities of the <hi rend="italic">Ars Amandi</hi>.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Trist.</hi> ii. 212, 346, 353, Vita
+verecunda est, Musa jocosa mihi; 497.</note> The most wanton writer of
+the evil days shrinks from justifying adultery, and hardly ever
+fails to respect the unconscious innocence of girlhood. In the
+days when, according to Juvenal, Roman matrons were eloping
+with gladiators, and visiting the slums of Rome, Tacitus and
+Favorinus were preaching the duties of a pure motherhood.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">De Or.</hi> 28, non in cella emptae
+nutricis sed gremio ac sinu matris
+educabatur; A. Gell. xii. 1.</note>
+In the days when crowds were gloating over the obscenities of
+pantomime, and aristocratic dinner-parties were applauding the
+ribaldry of Alexandrian songs, Quintilian was denouncing the
+corruption of youth by the sight of their fathers toying with
+mistresses and minions.<note place="foot">Quintil. i. 2, 4, 8; nostras amicas,
+nostros concubinos vident.</note> In an age when matrons of noble rank
+were exposing themselves at the pleasure of an emperor, the
+philosopher Musonius was teaching that all indulgence, outside
+the sober limits of wedlock, was a gross, animal degradation of
+human dignity.<note place="foot">Stob. <hi rend="italic">Flor.</hi> vi. 61; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>,
+xxvii.; cf. Denis, <hi rend="italic">Idées Morales, etc.</hi>,
+ii. p. 134.</note> And it is thus we may balance Juvenal and
+Martial on the one side and Pliny on the other. The gloomy
+or prurient satirist gives us a picture of ideal baseness; the
+gentle and charitable aristocrat opens before us a society in which
+people are charmingly refined, and perhaps a little too good.
+Yet it is said with truth that an age should be judged by its
+ideals of goodness rather than by its moral aberrations. And
+certain it is that the age of Pliny and Tacitus and Quintilian
+had a high moral ideal, even though it was also the age of
+Domitian. The old Roman character, whatever pessimists,
+ancient or modern, may say, was a stubborn type, which
+propagated itself over all the West, and survived the
+Western Empire. It is safe to believe that there was in Italy
+and Gaul and Spain many a <hi rend="italic">grand seigneur</hi> of honest, regular
+life, virtuous according to his lights, like Pliny’s uncle, or his
+Spurinna, or Verginius Rufus, or Corellius. There were
+certainly many wedded lives as pure and self-sacrificing as
+those of the elder Arria and Caecina Paetus, or of Calpurnia
+and Pliny.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 16; iii. 5; iv. 19; vi.
+4; vii. 5.</note> There were homes like those at Fréjus,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agric.</hi> 4.</note> or
+Como, or Brescia,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 14.</note> in which boys and girls were reared in a
+refined and severe simplicity, which even improved upon the
+<pb n="144"/><anchor id="Pg144"/>tradition of the golden age of Rome. And, as will be seen
+in a later chapter, many a brief stone record remains which
+shows that, even in the world of slaves and freedmen, there
+were always in the darkest days crowds of humble people,
+with honest, homely ideals, and virtuous family affection,
+proud of their industries, and sustaining one another by help
+and kindness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this sounder class of Roman society, it will be found
+that the saving or renovating power was, not so much any
+religious or philosophic impulse, as the wholesome influence,
+which never fails from age to age, of family duty and affection,
+reinforced, especially in the higher ranks, by a long tradition of
+Roman dignity and self-respect, and by the simple cleanness and
+the pieties of country life. The life of the blameless circle of
+aristocrats which Pliny determined to preserve for the eyes of
+posterity, seems to be sometimes regarded as the result of a
+sudden transformation, a rebound from the frantic excesses of
+the time of the Claudian Caesars to the simpler and severer
+mode of life of which Vespasian set a powerful example. That
+there was such a change of moral tone, especially in the
+class surrounding the court, partly caused by financial exhaustion,
+partly by the introduction of new men from the
+provinces into the ranks of the Senate, is certified by the
+supreme authority of Tacitus.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 55, sed praecipuus
+adstricti moris auctor Vespasianus erat;
+Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> ix.; cf. Schiller, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. Röm.
+Kaiserz.</hi> ii. 506; Duruy, iv. 646; Renan,
+<hi rend="italic">Les. Év.</hi> 140, 381; <hi rend="italic">L’Antéchr.</hi> 494.</note> Yet we should remember that
+men like Agricola, the father-in-law of Tacitus, or Verginius
+Rufus, or Fabatus, the grandfather of Pliny’s wife, or the
+elder Pliny, and many another, were not converted prodigals.
+They knew how to reconcile, by quietude or politic deference,
+the dignity of Roman virtue with a discreet acquiescence even
+in the excesses of despotism. The fortunes of many of them
+remained unimpaired. The daily life of men like the elder
+Pliny and Spurinna, is distinguished by a virtuous calm, an
+almost painful monotony of habit, in which there seems to
+have been nothing to reform except, perhaps, a certain moral
+rigidity.<note place="foot">Pliny is pleased with the virtuous
+monotony, <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. i. § 2, me autem ut
+certus siderum cursus ita vita hominum
+disposita delectat, senum praesertim;
+cf. iii. 5.</note> Above all, and surely it is the most certain proof
+and source of the moral soundness of any age, the ideal of
+<pb n="145"/><anchor id="Pg145"/>womanhood was still high, and it was even then not seldom
+realised. There may have been many who justified the
+complaint of moralists that mothers did not guard with
+vigilant care the purity of their children. But there were
+women of the circle of Tacitus and Pliny as spotless as the
+half-legendary Lucretia, as they were far more accomplished,
+and probably far more charming. It is often said that women
+sink or rise according to the level of the men with whom they
+are linked. If that be true, there must have been many good
+men in the days of the Flavian dynasty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The younger Pliny, whose name, before his adoption, was
+Publius Caecilius Secundus,<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> (Morel), p. 32.</note> was descended from families which
+had been settled at Como since the time of the first Caesar.<note place="foot">The Caecilii were probably established
+at Como from 59 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>; cf. Catull.
+35; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 30, 1; vii. 32, 1; vi.
+24, 5; ix. 7; Momms. <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> p. 33
+(Morel).</note>
+They belonged to the local aristocracy, and possessed estates
+and villas around the lake. Pliny’s father, who had held high
+municipal office, died early, but the boy had the great advantage
+of the guardianship of Verginius Rufus, for whose
+character and achievements his ward felt the profoundest
+reverence.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 1; vi. 10.</note> That great soldier had been governor of Upper
+Germany at the close of Nero’s reign, and, with a deference
+to old constitutional principles, which Pliny must have
+admired, had twice, at the peril of his life, refused to receive
+the imperial place at the hands of his clamorous legions.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 8, 52; ii. 49.</note>
+Pliny was born in 61 or 62 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, the time which saw the death
+of Burrus, the retirement of Seneca from public life, and
+the marriage of Nero with Poppaea.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 20, 5. He was in his
+eighteenth year when the famous eruption
+of Vesuvius took place 79 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, D.
+Cass. lxvi. 21 sq.</note> His infancy therefore
+coincided with the last and wildest excesses of the Neronian
+tyranny. But country places like Como felt but little of the
+shock of these moral earthquakes. There was no school in
+Como till one was founded by Pliny’s own generosity.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 13, 3.</note> But
+the boy had probably, in his early years, the care of his uncle,
+the author of the <hi rend="italic">Natural History</hi>, who, during the worst
+years of the Terror, was living, like many others, in studious
+retirement on his estates.<note place="foot">Rendall, xiii. in Mayor’s ed. Plin.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii.; Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> ii. 85 (199).</note> The uncle and nephew were men
+<pb n="146"/><anchor id="Pg146"/>of very different temperament, but there can be little doubt that
+the character and habits of the older man profoundly influenced
+the ideals of the younger. The elder Pliny would have
+been an extraordinary character even in a puritan age; he
+seems almost a miracle in the age of the Claudian Caesars.
+He was born in 23 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, in the reign of Tiberius; and his early
+youth and manhood cover the reigns of Caligula and Claudius.
+He was only 32 when Nero came to the throne. He returned
+to Rome in 71 to hold a high place in the councils of
+Vespasian.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 5; <hi rend="italic">Hist. Nat. Praef.</hi>
+3; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Plin.</hi> He was 56 at his
+death in <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 79; cf. Peter, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi>
+i. 119, 420.</note> That more than monastic asceticism, that jealous
+hoarding of every moment,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 5, § 13; Persius, who
+was eleven years younger than the
+elder Pliny, shows a character of the
+same type, cf. Pers. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> ii. 71-74; iii.
+66 sqq.; cf. Martha, <hi rend="italic">Les Moralistes
+sous l’Emp.</hi> p. 131 sqq.</note> that complete indifference to
+ordinary pleasures, in comparison with the duty, or the
+ambition, of transmitting to future ages the accumulations
+of learned toil, is a curious contrast to the Gargantuan
+feasts or histrionic aestheticism which were the fashion in
+the circle of the Claudian Emperors. The younger Pliny
+has left us a minute account of his uncle’s routine of life,
+and justly adds that the most intense literary toil might seem
+mere idleness in comparison.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 5.</note> His studies often began soon
+after midnight, broken by an official visit to the emperor
+before dawn. After administrative work was over, the remainder
+of the day was spent in reading or writing. Even
+in the bath or on a journey, this literary industry was never
+interrupted. A reader or amanuensis was always at hand
+to save the moments that generally are allowed to slip away
+to waste. He tells Titus in his preface that he had consulted
+2000 volumes for his <hi rend="italic">Natural History</hi>.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Praef. H. N.</hi> § 17; cf. § 18, profecto
+enim vita vigilia est.</note> The 160 volumes of
+closely written notes, which the austere enthusiast could have
+sold once for £3500, might have challenged the industry of a
+Casaubon or a Mommsen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The laborious intensity of the elder Pliny was probably
+unrivalled in his day. But the moral tone, the severe self-restraint,
+the contempt for the sensual, or even the comfortable,
+side of life, the plain unspeculative stoicism, was a tone which,
+from many indications in the younger Pliny and in the other
+<pb n="147"/><anchor id="Pg147"/>literature of the time, appears to have been not so rare as the
+reader of Juvenal or Martial might suspect. A book like the
+Caesars of Suetonius, concentrating attention on the life of the
+emperor and his immediate circle, is apt to suggest misleading
+conclusions as to the condition of society at large. The old
+Roman character, perhaps the strongest and toughest national
+character ever developed, was an enduring type, and its true
+home was in the atmosphere of quiet country places in northern
+or central Italy, where the round of rural labour and simple
+pleasures reproduced the environment in which it first took
+form. We have glimpses of many of these nurseries or
+retreats of old-fashioned virtue in Pliny’s Letters. Brescia
+and Padua, in the valley of the Po, were especially noted for
+frugality and severity.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 14; cf. Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> iv.;
+Juv. iii. 165.</note> And it was from among the youth of
+Brescia that Pliny suggested a husband for the daughter of
+the stoic champion, Arulenus Rusticus. There must have been
+many a home, like those of Spurinna, or Corellius Rufus, or
+Fabatus,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. i; ii. 7; i. 12; v. 11.</note> or the poet Persius, where, far from the weary conventionality
+of the capital, the rage for wealth, the rush of
+vulgar self-assertion, there reigned the tranquil and austere
+ideal of a life dedicated to higher ends than the lusts of the
+flesh, or the ghoul-like avarice that haunted death-beds.
+There are youths and maidens in the portrait-gallery of Pliny
+whose innocence was guarded by good women as pure and
+strong as those matrons who nursed the stern, unbending
+soldiers of the Samnite and Punic wars.<note place="foot">Cf. Pliny’s letter to Calpurnia’s
+aunt, <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 19, quae nihil in contubernio
+tuo viderit nisi sanctum honestumque;
+cf. viii. 5; v. 16.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great struggle in which the legions of the East and
+West met again, and yet again, in the valley of the Po, probably
+did not much disturb the quiet homes on lake Como.
+The close of that awful conflict gave the world ten years of
+quiet and reformation, which were a genial atmosphere for the
+formation of many characters like Pliny’s. The reign of
+the Flavians was ushered in by the mystery and glamour of
+Eastern superstition, by oracles on Mount Carmel and miracles
+at Alexandria.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 78; iv. 81.</note> But the plain Sabine soldier, who was the
+saviour of the Roman State, brought to his momentous task
+a clear unsophisticated good sense, with no trace of that
+<pb n="148"/><anchor id="Pg148"/>crapulous excitement which had alternated between the heroics
+of spurious art and the lowest bohemianism. Vespasian,
+although he was not a figure to strike the imagination, was
+yet, if we think of the abyss from which, by his single
+strength, he rescued the Rome world,<note place="foot">Cf. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 746, 2364.</note> undoubtedly one of
+the greatest of the emperors. And his biographer, with an
+unusual tact, suggests what was probably one secret of his
+strength. Vespasian regularly visited the old farmhouse at
+Reate which was the cradle of his race. Nothing in the old
+place was ever changed. And, on holidays and anniversaries
+the emperor never failed to drink from the old silver goblet
+which his grandmother had used.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> ii. locum incunabulorum
+assidue frequentavit, manente
+villa qualis fuerat olim, etc.</note> The strength and virtue of
+the Latin race lay, not in religion or philosophy, but in the
+family pieties and devotion to the State. Vespasian found it
+urgent to bring order into the national finances, which had been
+reduced to chaos by the wild extravagance of his predecessors,
+and to recruit the Senate, which had been more than decimated
+by proscription, confiscation, and vicious self-abandonment.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> viii. ix.</note>
+In performing his task, he did not shrink from the charge of
+cheese-paring, just as he did not dread the unpopularity of
+fresh taxation.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxvi. 8, Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xvi.,
+cf. Meriv. vii. 274; cf. Schiller, <hi rend="italic">Gesch.
+röm. Kaiserzeit</hi>, p. 515.</note> But he could be liberal as well as parsimonious.
+He restored many of the ancient temples, even in
+country places.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> lx.; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 746, sacr.
+aedium restitutori, 1460, 1868, 2364,
+D. Cass. lxvi. 10.</note> He made grants to senators whose fortunes
+had decayed or had been wasted.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xvii.</note> He spent great sums on
+colossal buildings and on amusements for the people.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xix.</note> But
+the most singular and interesting trait in this remarkable man
+is that, with no pretensions to literary or artistic culture, he
+was the first Caesar who gave a fixed endowment to professors
+of the liberal arts, and that he was the founder of that public
+system of education<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xviii.;
+    continued by Hadrian,
+Spart. xvi.; by Ant. Pius, Capitol.
+xi.; by Alex. Severus, Lamprid. xliv.;
+cf. <hi rend="italic">C. Th.</hi> xiii. 3, 1, 2, 3; Eum. <hi rend="italic">Or.
+pro Scholis</hi>, c. 11.</note> which, for good or evil, produced profound
+effects on Roman character and intellect down to the end of the
+Western Empire. His motive was not, as some have suggested,
+to bring literature into thraldom to the State. He
+was really making himself the organ of a great intellectual
+<pb n="149"/><anchor id="Pg149"/>movement. For, while the vast field of administration absorbed
+much of the energy of the cultivated class, the decay
+of free institutions had left a great number with only a
+shadow of political interest, and the mass of unoccupied talent
+had to find some other scope for its energies. It found it for
+ages, till the end of the Western Empire, in fugitive and
+ephemeral composition, or in the more ephemeral displays of
+the rhetorical class-room.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Rom. Soc. in the Last Century
+of the Western Empire</hi> (1st ed.), p. 355.</note> Vespasian perhaps did a greater
+service in renovating the upper class of Rome by the introduction
+of many new men from the provinces, to fill the
+yawning gaps in senatorial and equestrian ranks. Spain contributed
+more than its fair share to the literature and statesmanship
+of this period.<note place="foot">Mommsen, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Prov.</hi> (Tr.) i. p. 76.</note> And one of the best and most
+distinguished sons of that province who found a career at
+Rome, was the rhetor Quintilian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young Pliny, under his uncle’s care, probably came to
+Rome not long after Quintilian entered on his career of twenty
+years, as a teacher of rhetoric.<note place="foot">Pliny probably came to Rome
+about 72 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> Rendall, xiv.; in Mayor’s
+Pliny, <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii.; cf. Quintil. <hi rend="italic">Prooem.</hi> i.</note> While the elder Pliny was one of
+Vespasian’s trusted advisers, and regularly visited the emperor
+on official business before dawn, his nephew was forming his
+taste and character under the greatest and best of Roman
+teachers. Quintilian left a deep impression on the younger
+Pliny.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 14, 10; vi. 6, 3;
+vi. 32.</note> He made him a Ciceronian, and he fortified his
+character. The master was one who believed that, in
+education, moral influence and environment are even more
+important than intellectual stimulus. He deplores the moral
+risks to which the careless, self-indulgent parent, or the
+corrupt tutor, may expose a boy in the years when the
+destiny of a life is decided for better or worse. Intellectual
+ambition is good. But no brilliancy of intellect will compensate
+for the loss of the pure ingenuous peace of boyhood. This is
+the faith of Quintilian, and it was also the faith of his pupil.<note place="foot">Quintil. <hi rend="italic">Inst. Or.</hi> i. 2, 6; cf. Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+iii. 3, 4, cui in hoc lubrico aetatis non
+praeceptor modo sed custos etiam rectorque
+quaerendus est; cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 13, 4,
+ubi enim pudicius contineantur quam
+sub oculis parentum; cf. Tac. <hi rend="italic">Dial. de
+Or.</hi> 28.</note>
+And it may be that the teaching of Quintilian had a larger
+share in forming the moral ideals of the Antonine age in the
+<pb n="150"/><anchor id="Pg150"/>higher ranks than many more definitely philosophic guides,
+whose practice did not always conform to their doctrine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quintilian’s first principle is that the orator must be a good
+man in the highest and widest sense, and, although he will not
+refuse to borrow from the philosophical schools, he yet boldly
+asserts the independence of the oratorical art in moulding the
+character of the man who, as statesman or advocate, will have
+constantly to appeal to moral principles.<note place="foot">Quintil. <hi rend="italic">Inst. Prooem.</hi> i. 9-11; ii.
+2, 15; xii. 1, 1; xii. 7, 7, non convenit
+ei, quem oratorem esse volumus,
+injusta tueri scientem.</note> This tone, combined
+with his own high example of seriousness, honour, and the purest
+domestic attachment,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. <hi rend="italic">Prooem.</hi> 4.</note> must have had a powerful effect on the
+flower of the Roman youth, who were his pupils for nearly a
+generation. There are none of his circle whose virtues Pliny
+extols more highly than the men who had sat with him on the
+same benches, and who accompanied or followed one another
+in the career of public office. One of the dearest of these
+youthful friends was Voconius Romanus, who, besides being
+a learned pleader, with a keen and subtle intellect, was gifted
+with a singular social charm and sweetness of manner.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 13, hunc ego, cum
+simul studeremus, arte familiariterque
+dilexi, etc.</note>
+Another was Cornutus Tertullus, who was bound to Pliny by
+closer ties of sympathy than any of his friends, and for whose
+purity of character he had a boundless admiration. They were
+also united in the love and friendship of the best people of the
+time.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> v. 14; <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 91, 92; cf.
+Momms. <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> p. 64.</note> They were official colleagues in the consulship, and in
+the prefecture of the treasury of Saturn. For another academic
+friend, Julius Naso, who had been his loyal supporter in all
+his work and literary ambitions, he earnestly begs the aid of
+Fundanus, to secure him official advancement.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 6.</note> Calestrius
+Tiro, who rose to be proconsul of the province of Baetica, must
+be included in this select company. He had served with Pliny
+in the army of Syria, and had been his colleague in the
+quaestorship; they constantly visited one another at their
+country seats.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 16, 2; i. 10, 3; cf. Momms. p.
+52. Pliny’s service with the iii. Gallica
+was later than September, <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 81.</note> Such men, linked to one another by memories
+of boyhood and by the cares of the same official career, must
+have been a powerful and salutary element in social and
+political life at the opening of the Antonine age.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="151"/><anchor id="Pg151"/>
+
+<p>
+It is a curious thing that, while Pliny lived in the closest
+friendship with the Stoic opposition of Domitian’s reign, and
+has unbounded reverence for its canonised saints, as we may
+call them, he shows few traces of any real interest in speculative
+philosophy. Indeed, in one passage he confesses that on such
+subjects he speaks as an amateur.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 10, 4; cf. Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> iv.</note> He probably thought, like
+his friend Tacitus, that philosophy was a thing to be taken
+in moderation by the true Roman. It was when he was
+serving on the staff in Asia that he formed a close friendship
+with Artemidorus, whom Musonius chose for his daughter’s
+hand.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 11, 5.</note> Pliny has not a word to say of his opinions, but he
+extols his simplicity and genuineness—qualities, he adds, which
+you rarely find in the other philosophers of the day. It was
+at the same time that he formed a friendship with the Stoic
+Euphrates. That philosopher, who is so studiously maligned
+by Philostratus, was a heroic figure in Pliny’s eyes.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 10; cf. Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll.
+Tyan.</hi> v. 37, 40; vi. 8.</note> But what
+Pliny admires in him is not so much his philosophy, as his
+grave ornate style, his pure character, which showed none of that
+harsh and ostentatious severity which was then so common in
+his class. Euphrates is a polished gentleman after Pliny’s
+own heart, tall and stately, with flowing hair and beard, a
+man who excites reverence but not fear, stern to vice, but
+gentle to the sinner. Pliny seems to have set little store by
+the formal preaching of philosophy. In a letter on the uses
+of sickness, he maintains that the moral lessons of the sick-bed
+are worth many formal disquisitions on virtue.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 26, 4.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet this man, apparently without the slightest taste for
+philosophic inquiry, or even for the homilies which, in his
+day, had taken the place of real speculation, had a profound
+veneration for the Stoic martyrs, and, true gentleman as he was,
+he risked his life in the times of the last Terror to befriend
+them. It needed both nerve and dexterity to be the friend
+of philosophers in those days. In that perilous year, 93 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>,
+when Pliny was praetor,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 11, 2; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> x.; D.
+Cass. lxvii. 10; cf. Momms. p. 59,
+where the date of Pliny’s praetorship
+is fixed.</note> the philosophers were banished from
+the city. Yet the praetor visited Artemidorus in his suburban
+retreat, and, with his wonted generosity, he helped the philo<pb n="152"/><anchor id="Pg152"/>sopher to wipe out a heavy debt which he had contracted.
+One of Pliny’s dearest friends was Junius Mauricus, the
+brother of Arulenus Rusticus, who had been put to death by
+Domitian for writing a eulogy on Thrasea the Stoic saint,
+the champion of the higher life in Nero’s reign.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> x.</note> Junius
+Mauricus afterwards suffered exile himself in the same cause.
+He had charged himself with the care of his martyred
+brother’s children, and Pliny helped him to find a worthy
+husband for the daughter of Rusticus.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 14; cf. iii. 11, 3.</note> With Fannia the
+widow of Helvidius, and the daughter of Thrasea, Pliny’s
+intimacy seems to have been of the closest kind. From her
+he heard the tales, now too well worn, of the fierce firmness
+of the elder Arria in nerving her husband Paetus for death,
+and of her own determined self-immolation.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 16; cf. vii. 19; ix. 13.</note> The mother of
+Fannia, the younger Arria, when Thrasea her husband was
+condemned to die in the reign of Nero, was only prevented
+from sharing his fate by the most earnest entreaties of her
+friends.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 34.</note> Fannia had followed Helvidius into exile in Nero’s
+reign,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 19, 4; for the character
+of Helvidius Priscus, cf. Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 5.</note> and again under Vespasian, when the philosopher, with a
+petulance very unlike the reserve of Thrasea, brought his fate
+upon himself by an insulting disregard of the emperor’s
+dignity as first magistrate of the State, if not by revolutionary
+tendencies.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xv.; D. Cass. lxvi. 12;
+cf. Peter, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. 98.</note> Fannia seems to have inherited many of the
+great qualities of her father Thrasea, the noblest and the
+wisest member of the Stoic opposition. He sprang from a
+district in Lombardy which was noted for its soundness and
+gravity of character. Unlike Paetus<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 16, 7.</note> and Helvidius, he never
+defied or intrigued against the emperor, even when the
+emperor was a Nero. And, though he belonged to the
+austere circle of Persius, he did not disdain to sing in tragic
+costume, at a festival of immemorial antiquity, in his native
+Patavium.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 21; D. Cass. lxii. 26.</note> He performed his duties as senator with firm
+dignity, and yet with cautious tact. His worst political crime,
+and that which proved his ruin, was a severe reserve and a
+refusal to join in the shameful adulation of the matricide
+prince. He would not stoop to vote divine honours to the
+<pb n="153"/><anchor id="Pg153"/>adulteress Poppaea, and for three years he absented himself
+from the Senate-house.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 12; xvi. 21, 22; cf.
+D. Cass. 61. 15.</note> Yet, when the end came, he would
+not allow the fiery Arulenus Rusticus to imperil his future,
+by interposing his veto as tribune.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 26.</note> His daughter Fannia
+was worthy of her illustrious descent. She showed all the
+fearless defiance of the elder Arria, when she boldly admitted
+that she had asked Senecio to write her husband’s life, and
+she uttered no word to deprecate her doom. When all her
+property was confiscated, she carried the dangerous volume with
+her to her place of exile.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 19.</note> Yet this stern heroine had also
+the tenderer virtues. She nursed her kinswoman Junia, one
+of the Vestals, through a dangerous fever, and caught the seeds
+of her own death from her charge. With all her masculine
+firmness and courage, she had a sweetness and charm which
+made her not less loved than venerated. With her may be
+said to have expired the peculiar tradition of a circle which,
+for three generations, and during the reigns of eight emperors,
+guarded, sometimes with dangerous defiance, the old ideal of
+uncompromising virtue in the face of a brutal and vulgar
+materialism. It was the tradition which inspired the austere
+detachment of the poetry of Persius, with its dim solemnity
+and obscure depths, as of a sacred grove. These people were
+hard and stern to vicious power,<note place="foot">Renan, <hi rend="italic">Les Évangiles</hi>, p. 142, treats
+the philosophic opposition as a mere
+aristocratic reaction; cf. pp. 287, 382.
+Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 103; Schiller,
+<hi rend="italic">Gesch. d. röm. Kaiserz.</hi> pp. 509, 536.</note> like our own Puritans of
+the seventeenth century. Like them too, they were exclusive
+and defiant, with the cold hauteur of a moral aristocracy, a
+company of the elect, who would not even parley with evil,
+for whom the issues of life and death were the only realities
+in a world hypnotised by the cult of the senses and the spell
+of tyranny. Their intense seriousness was a religion, although
+they had only the vaguest and most arid conception of God,
+and the dimmest and least comforting conception of any future
+life. They seemed to perish as a little sect of troublesome
+visionaries; and yet their spirit lived on, softened and sweetened,
+and passed into the great rulers of the Antonine age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before his formal period of military service as tribune of the
+3rd Gallic legion in Syria, Pliny had, in his nineteenth year,
+entered on that forensic career which was perhaps the greatest
+<pb n="154"/><anchor id="Pg154"/>pride of his life.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 8, 8; Momms. p. 52.</note> He practised in the Centumviral court, which
+was chiefly occupied with questions of property and succession.
+Occasionally he speaks with a certain weariness of the trivial
+character of the cases in which he was engaged. But his
+general estimate is very different. The court is to him an
+arena worthy of the greatest talent and industry,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 1; iv. 16; vi. 23, 2.</note> and the
+successful pleader may win a fame which may entitle him to
+take rank with the great orators of the past. Pliny, inspired
+by memories of Quintilian’s lectures, has always floating before
+him the glory of Cicero.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 20, 7.</note> He will prepare for publication a
+speech delivered in an obscure case about a disputed will.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 33, 8-11.</note>
+He is immensely proud of its subtlety and point, and the
+sweep of its indignant or pathetic declamation, and he is not
+unwilling to believe his legal friends who compared it with
+the <hi rend="italic">De Corona</hi>! The suppression of free political life, the
+absence of public interests, and the extinction of the trade of
+the delator, left young men with a passion for distinction few
+chances of gratifying it. The law courts at any rate provided
+an audience, and the chance of momentary prominence. In the
+Letters of Pliny, we can see the young advocate pushing his
+way through the dense masses of the crowded court, arriving
+at his place with torn tunic, holding the attention of his
+audience for seven long hours, and sitting down amid the
+applause even of the judges themselves.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 16.</note> Calpurnia often
+arranged relays of messengers to bring her news of the
+success, from point to point, of one of her husband’s speeches.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 19, 3. disponit qui nuntient
+sibi quem assensum, quos clamores excitarim,
+quem eventum judicii tulerim.</note>
+Youths of the highest social rank—a Salinator, or a Ummidius
+Quadratus—threw themselves eagerly into the drudgery which
+might make an ephemeral name.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 11.</note> Ambitious pretenders,
+with no talent or learning, and arrayed perhaps in hired purple
+and jewels, like Juvenal’s needy lawyer, forced themselves
+on to the benches of the advocates, and engaged a body of
+claqueurs whose applause was purchased for a few denarii.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 14, 4.</note>
+Pliny has such a pride in this profession, he so idealises what
+must have been often rather humdrum work, that he feels a
+personal pain at anything which seems to detract from the
+<pb n="155"/><anchor id="Pg155"/>old-fashioned, leisurely dignity of the court. In his day the
+judges seem to have been becoming more rapid and business-like
+in their procedure, and less inclined to allow the many
+<hi rend="italic">clepsydrae</hi> which men of Pliny’s school demanded for the
+gradual development of all their rhetorical artifices. He
+regrets the good old times, when adjournments were freely
+granted,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 2, 6.</note> and days would be spent on a case which was now
+despatched in as many hours. It is for this reason that he
+cannot conceal a certain admiration for Regulus, in other
+respects, <q>the most detestable of bipeds</q> but who redeemed
+his infamy by an enthusiasm and energy as an advocate
+which rivalled even that of Pliny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Aquilius Regulus, the prince of delators, and one of
+the great glories of the Roman bar in Domitian’s reign, is a
+singular figure. His career and character are a curious illustration
+of the social history of the times. Regulus was the
+son of a man who, in Nero’s reign, had been driven into exile
+and ruined.<note place="foot">For the career and character of M.
+Aquilius Regulus, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 42;
+Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 5; i. 20, 15; ii. 11; ii.
+20; iv. 2; vi. 2; and Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi>
+p. 193.</note> Bold, able, recklessly eager for wealth and
+notoriety at any cost, as a mere youth he resolved to raise
+himself from obscure indigence, and soon became one of the
+most capable and dreaded agents of the tyranny. He gained
+an evil fame by the ruin of the great houses of the Crassi and
+Orfiti. Lust of blood and greed of gain drove him on
+to the wholesale destruction of innocent boys, noble matrons,
+and men of the most illustrious race. The cruelty of Nero
+was not swift enough to satisfy him, and he called for the
+annihilation of the Senate at a stroke. He rose rapidly to
+great wealth, honours were showered upon him, and, after a
+prudent retirement in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, he
+reached the pinnacle of his depraved ambition under Vespasian’s
+cruel son. He figures more than once in the poems of Martial,
+and always in the most favourable light. His talent and
+eloquence, according to the poet, were only equalled by his
+piety, and the special care of the gods had saved him from
+being buried under the ruins of a cloister which had suddenly
+fallen in.<note place="foot">Mart. i. 13, 83, 112, Cum tibi
+sit sophiae par fama et cura deorum,
+etc.</note> He had estates at Tusculum, in Umbria and
+<pb n="156"/><anchor id="Pg156"/>Etruria.<note place="foot">Mart. vii. 31.</note> The courts were packed when he rose to plead.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 38; vi. 64, 11.</note>
+Unfortunately, the needy poet furnishes a certain key to all
+this flattery, when he thanks Regulus for his presents, and then
+begs him to buy them back.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 16.</note> It is after Domitian’s death
+that we meet Regulus in Pliny’s pages. The times are
+changed, the delator’s day is over, and Regulus is a humbler
+man. But he is still rich, courted, and feared; he is still a
+great power in the law courts. With a weak voice, a bad
+memory, and hesitating utterance,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 7, § 4.</note> by sheer industry and
+determination he had made himself a powerful speaker, with a
+style of his own, sharp, pungent, brutally incisive, ruthlessly
+sacrificing elegance to point.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 20, 15; cf. references to the
+archaic literary taste of the day in
+Mart. v. 10.</note> He belonged to the new school,
+and sometimes sneered at Pliny’s affectation of the grand
+Ciceronian manner.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 12.</note> Yet to Pliny’s eyes, his earnest
+strenuousness in his profession redeems some of his vices. He
+insists on having ample time to develop his case.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 2, 5.</note> He appears
+in the morning pale with study, wearing a white patch on his
+forehead. He has consulted the diviners as to the success of
+his pleadings.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 20.</note> It is a curious sign of the times that this
+great advocate, who already possessed an enormous fortune,
+was a legacy-hunter of the meanest sort. He actually visited,
+on her death-bed, Verania, the widow of that Piso, the adopted
+son of Galba, over whose murder Regulus had savagely gloated,
+and by telling her that the stars promised a hope of recovery,
+he obtained a place in her will. His mourning for his son displayed
+all the feverish extravagance and grandiose eccentricity
+of a true child of the Neronian age.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 2.</note> The boy’s ponies and
+dogs and pet birds were slaughtered over his pyre. Countless
+pictures and statues of him were ordered. His memoir was
+read by the father to a crowded audience, and a thousand
+copies of it were sent broadcast over the provinces.<note place="foot">For the light which this throws on
+the production of books in that age, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi>
+Haenny, <hi rend="italic">Schriftsteller u. Buchhändler</hi>, pp. 39-41.</note> In
+Regulus we seem to see the type of character which, had
+fortune raised him to the throne, would have made perhaps a
+saner Caligula, and an even more eccentric Nero.
+</p>
+            
+<pb n="157"/><anchor id="Pg157"/>
+
+<p>
+The struggles of the law courts were idealised by Pliny, and
+their transient triumphs seemed to him to match the glory of
+the Philippics or the Verrines. Yet, to do him justice, Pliny
+had sometimes a truer idea of the foundations of lasting fame.
+The secret of immortality, the one chance of escaping oblivion,
+is to leave your thought embalmed in choice and distinguished
+literary form, which coming ages will not willingly let die.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 10, 4; iii. 7, 14, quatenus
+nobis denegatur diu vivere, relinquamus
+aliquid quo nos vixisse testemur;
+v. 5, 4; v. 8, 2, me autem nihil
+aeque ac diuturnitatis amor sollicitat;
+cf. vii. 20.</note>
+This, probably the only form of immortality in which Pliny
+believed, is the great motive for literary labour. The longing
+to be remembered was the most ardent passion of the Roman
+mind in all ages and in all ranks, from the author of the
+<hi rend="italic">Agricola</hi> to the petty artisan, who commemorated the homely
+virtues of his wife for the eyes of a distant age, and made provision
+for the annual feast and the tribute of roses to the tomb.
+Of that immense literary ambition which Pliny represented,
+and which he considered it a duty to foster, only a small part
+has reached its goal. The great mass of these eager litterateurs
+have altogether vanished, or remain as mere shadowy names in
+Martial or Statius or Pliny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The poems of Martial and Statius leave the impression that, in
+the reign of Domitian, the interest in poetical literature was keen
+and widely diffused, and that, besides the poets by profession,
+there were crowds of amateurs who dabbled in verse. The <hi rend="italic">Silvae</hi>
+transport us into a charming, if rather luxurious world, where men
+like Atedius Melior or Pollius amuse themselves with dilettante
+composition among their gardens and marbles on the bays of
+Campania.<note place="foot">Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> ii. 2.</note> Martial has a host of friends similarly engaged,
+and the versatility of some of them is suspiciously wide. An
+old Ardelio is twitted by Martial with his showy and superficial
+displays in declamation and history, in plays and epigrams,
+in grammar and astronomy.<note place="foot">Mart. ii. 7; v. 30; iii 20; iv. 23;
+v. 23. For the same breadth of
+accomplishment in the fifth century,
+cf. Sidon. Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Carm.</hi> v. 97; ii. 156;
+xxiii. 101; <hi rend="italic">Rom. Soc. in the Last
+Cent. of the Western Empire</hi> (1st ed.),
+p. 375.</note> Canius Rufus, his countryman
+from Gades, Varro, Bassus, Brutianus, Cirinius, have all an
+extraordinary dexterity in almost every branch of poetical
+composition. Martial is too keen a critic not to see the
+fugitive character of much of this amateur literature. Like
+<pb n="158"/><anchor id="Pg158"/>Juvenal, he scoffs at the thin talent which concealed its feebleness
+behind the pomp and faded splendour of epic or tragic
+tradition.<note place="foot">Mart. vi. 60.</note> He roughly tells the whole versifying crowd that
+genius alone will live in coming ages. The purchased applause
+of the recitation hall merely gratifies for an hour the vanity of
+the literary trifler. It is a pity for his fame that Martial did
+not always maintain this tone of sincerity. He can at times
+sell his flattery to the basest and most stupid. He is capable
+of implying a comparison of the frigid pedantry of Silius
+Italicus to the majesty of Virgil.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 14.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pliny was a friend and admirer of Martial, and, with his
+usual generous hand, he made the poet a present when he
+left Rome for ever to pass his last years at Bilbilis.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 21. This book is
+dated by Mommsen 101 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> (<hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> p.
+14, Morel; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> App. C, p. 95); cf. Friedländer’s
+<hi rend="italic">Martial</hi>, <q>Chronologie der
+Epigr. Mart.</q> p. 66.</note> The
+needy epigrammatist was only a distant observer, or hanger-on
+of that world of wealth and refinement in which Pliny was
+a conspicuous figure. But from both Pliny and Martial we
+get very much the same impression of the literary movement
+in the reign of Domitian. Pliny himself is perhaps its best
+representative. He is a true son of the Roman schools, as
+they had been revived and strengthened by Vespasian, for a life
+of many generations. Pliny does not think slightly of the
+literary efforts of his own day: some of them he even overrates.
+But already the Roman mind had bent its neck to that thraldom
+to the past, to that routine of rhetorical discipline, which,
+along with other causes, produced the combination of ambitious
+effort and mediocre performance that, for the last three centuries
+of the Empire, is the characteristic of all literary culture.
+From his great teacher Quintilian Pliny had imbibed a profound
+reverence for Cicero.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 8, 4; v. 12, est mihi
+cum Cicerone aemulatio.</note> Alike in his career of honours
+and his literary pursuits, he loves to think that he is treading
+in the great orator’s footsteps. In answer to a taunt of
+Regulus, he once boldly avowed his preference for the Ciceronian
+oratory to that of his own day. Demosthenes is also sometimes
+his model, though he feels keenly the difference that
+separates them.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 30.</note> Indeed his reverence for Greece as the
+mother of letters, art, and civic life was one of Pliny’s sincerest
+<pb n="159"/><anchor id="Pg159"/>and most honourable feelings. To a man who had been
+appointed to high office in Greece he preaches, in earnest tones,
+the duty of reverence for that gifted race whose age was consecrated
+by the memories of its glorious prime.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 24, reverere gloriam
+veterem et hanc ipsam senectutem quae
+in homine venerabilis, in urbibus sacra.</note> Pliny’s Greek
+studies must have begun very early. At the age of fourteen
+he had written a Greek tragedy, for which, however, he modestly
+does not claim much merit.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 4, 2, Qualem? inquis.
+Nescio; tragoedia vocabatur.</note> He had always a certain taste
+for poetry, but it seems to have been merely the taste created
+or enforced by the constant study of the poets under the
+grammarian. Once, while detained by bad weather on his way
+back from military service in Asia, he amused himself with
+composing in elegiac and heroic verse.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 4, 3.</note> Later in his career, he
+published a volume of poems in hendecasyllabic metre, written
+on various occasions. But there was no inspiration behind
+these conventional exercises. He was chiefly moved to write
+in verse, as he naïvely confesses, by the example of the great
+orators who beguiled their leisure in this way. Among his
+published poems there were some with a flavour of Catullan
+lubricity, which offended or astonished some of his severer
+friends, who thought such doubtful lightness unworthy of a
+grave character and a great position.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 14, cf. Ov. <hi rend="italic">Trist.</hi> ii. 365,
+who makes pretty much the same
+excuse to Augustus.</note> No better illustration
+could be found of Pliny’s incorrigible conventionality in such
+things than the defence which he makes of his suspected verses
+to Titius Ariston.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 3.</note> It is to Pliny not a question of morals or
+propriety. The ancient models are to be followed, not only
+in their elevated, but in their looser moods. The case seems
+to be closed when Pliny can point to similar literary aberrations
+in a long line of great men from Varro and Virgil and Cicero
+to Verginius Rufus and the divine Nerva.<note place="foot">Cf. Nettleship, <hi rend="italic">Lectures and Essays</hi>,
+2nd Series, p. 39.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pliny, however, though vain of his dexterity in these trifles,
+probably did not rate them very highly. It was to oratorical
+fame that his ambition was directed. He was dissatisfied with
+the eloquence of his own day, which, to use the words of
+Regulus, sprang at the throat of its subject, and he avowed
+himself an imitator of Cicero. His speeches, even for the
+centumviral court, were worked up with infinite care, although
+<pb n="160"/><anchor id="Pg160"/>with too self-conscious an aim to impress an audience. We
+can hardly imagine Cicero or Demosthenes coldly balancing
+their tropes and figures after the fashion of Pliny. When the
+great oratorical effort was over, the labour was renewed, in order
+to make the speech worthy of the eyes of posterity. It was
+revised and polished, and submitted to the scrutiny of critical
+readers for suggestions of emendation.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 13, 5; vii. 17.</note> Pliny was probably
+the first to give readings of speeches to long-suffering friends.
+We hear with a shudder that the recital of the <hi rend="italic">Panegyric</hi> was
+spread over three days!<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 18; cf. ii. 19.</note> The other speeches on which Pliny
+lavished so much labour and thought, have perished, as they
+probably deserved to perish. The <hi rend="italic">Panegyric</hi> was preserved,
+and became the parent and model of the prostituted rhetoric
+of the Gallic renaissance in the fourth century.<note place="foot">Teuffel, <hi rend="italic">R. Lit.</hi> § 387; Mackail,
+<hi rend="italic">Lat. Lit.</hi> p. 264; <hi rend="italic">Rom. Soc. in the Last
+Cent. of the W. Empire</hi> (1st ed.), p. 357.</note> Pliny was
+by no means a despicable literary critic, when he was not
+paying the tribute of friendly flattery which social tyranny
+then exacted. He could sometimes be honestly reserved in his
+appreciation of a friend’s dull literary efforts.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 15.</note> But in his
+ideals of oratory, he seems to be hopelessly wrong. There are
+some terse and epigrammatic sentences in the <hi rend="italic">Panegyric</hi>, which
+redeem it by their strong sincerity. But Pliny’s canons of
+oratorical style would have excited the ridicule of his great
+models, who were thinking of their goal, and not measuring
+every pace as they strained towards it. Pliny’s theory that the
+mere length of a speech is a great element in its excellence, that
+swift directness is inartistic, that lingering diffuseness is an
+oratorical charm, that laboured manufacture of turgid phrases
+may produce the effect of the impetuous rush of Demosthenes
+and Cicero in their moments of inspiration, makes us rather
+glad, who love him, that we have not more of Pliny’s oratory.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1, 20. It is curious that this
+praise of amplitude should be addressed
+to Tacitus; cf. Nipperdey, <hi rend="italic">Einleit.</hi>
+xxxiv.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is by his letters that Pliny has lived, and will live on, so
+long as men care to know the inner life of the great ages that
+have gone before. The criticism, which is so quick to seize
+the obvious weaknesses of the author of a priceless picture of
+ancient society, seems to be a little ungrateful. We could forgive
+almost any failing or affectation in one who had left us a
+<pb n="161"/><anchor id="Pg161"/>similar revelation of society when M. Aurelius was holding
+back the Germans on the Danube, or when Probus was shattering
+the invaders of the third century. The letters of Cicero
+offer an apparently obvious comparison, which may be used
+to the detriment of Pliny. Yet the comparison is rather
+inept. Cicero was a man of affairs in the thick of a great
+revolution, and his letters are invaluable to the student of
+politics at a great crisis in history. But in the calm of
+Trajan’s reign, a letter-writer had to seek other subjects of
+interest than the fortunes of the state. Literature, criticism,
+the beauties of nature, the simple charm of country life,
+the thousand trivial incidents and eccentricities of an over-ripe
+society in the capital of the world, furnished a ready
+pen and a genial imagination, which could idealise its surroundings,
+with ample materials. Pliny is by some treated as a
+mediocrity; but, like our own Horace Walpole, he had the keen
+sense to see that social routine could be made interesting, and
+that the man who had the skill to do so might make himself
+famous. He was genuinely interested in his social environment.
+And intense interest in one’s subject is one great secret
+of literary success. Pliny had also the instinct that, if a
+work is to live, it must have a select distinction of style,
+which may be criticised, but which cannot be ignored. He
+had the laudable ambition to put his thoughts in a form of
+artistic grace which may make even commonplace attractive.
+So good a judge as the late Mr. Paley did not hesitate to
+put the Latinity of Pliny on the level of that of Cicero.
+Pliny’s Letters, perhaps even more than the masterpieces of
+the Augustine age, fascinated the taste of the fourth and fifth
+centuries. They were the models of Symmachus and Sidonius,
+who tried, but in very different fashion, to do for their age
+what Pliny did for his.<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> v. 1, 7; Sidon. Apoll.
+i. 1, 1; iv. 22, 2, ego Plinio ut
+discipulus assurgo.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like his imitators, Sidonius and Symmachus, Pliny intended
+his Letters to go down to the future as a masterpiece of style,
+and as a picture of his age. We know that the letters of Symmachus
+were carefully preserved in duplicate by his scribes,
+probably by his own instructions, although they were edited
+and published by his son only after his death.<note place="foot">Sym. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 85. Seeck, <hi rend="italic">Prol.</hi> xlv.</note> Pliny, like
+<pb n="162"/><anchor id="Pg162"/>Sidonius, gave his Letters to the public in successive portions
+during his life.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> (Tr.) p. 2; cf.
+Haenny, <hi rend="italic">Schriftsteller</hi>, etc. p. 19.</note> Like Sidonius too, he felt that he had not
+the sustained power to write a consecutive history of his time
+and the Letters of both are probably far more valuable. Pliny’s
+first book opens with a kind of dedication to Septicius Clarus,
+who was the patron of Suetonius, and who rose to be praetorian
+prefect under Hadrian.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 1; vii. 28; i. 15; viii.
+1; Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 87.</note> Pliny appears to disclaim any
+order or principle of arrangement in these books, but this
+is the device of an artistic negligence. Yet it has been
+proved by the prince of European scholars in our day that
+both as to date and subject matter, Pliny’s Letters reveal
+signs of the most careful arrangement. The books were
+published separately, a common practice down to the end of
+Roman literary history. The same subject reappears in the
+same book or the next.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> p. 4.</note> Groups of letters dealing with the
+same matter are found in their natural order in successive
+books. The proof is made even clearer by the silence or
+the express references to Pliny’s family relations. Finally, the
+older men, who fill the stage in the earlier Letters, disappear
+towards the end; while a younger generation, a Salinator or a
+Ummidius Quadratus, are only heard of in the later. Men of
+Pliny’s own age, like Tacitus or Cornutus Tertullus, meet us
+from first to last. The dates at which the various books were
+published have been fixed with tolerable certainty. It is
+enough for our present purpose to say that the earliest letter
+belongs to the reign of Nerva, and the ninth book was probably
+given to the world a year or two before the writer was appointed
+by Trajan to the office of imperial legate of Bithynia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> pp. 7, 24; Teuffel, § 335, 1.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is easy, as we have said, and apparently congenial to
+some writers, to dwell on the vanity and self-complacency of
+the writer of these letters. By some he seems to be regarded
+chiefly as a <hi rend="italic">poseur</hi>. To discover the weaknesses of Pliny is
+no great feat of criticism: they are on the surface. But
+<q>securus judicat orbis terrarum,</q> and Pliny has borne the
+scrutiny of the great judge. Men of his own race and age,
+who spoke and wrote the most finished Latin, awarded him
+the palm of exquisite style.  But Pliny has many qualities of
+<pb n="163"/><anchor id="Pg163"/>the heart, which should cover a multitude of sins, even more
+serious than any with which he is charged. He had the great
+gift of loyal friendship, and he had its usual reward in a
+multitude of friends. It has been regretted that Pliny does
+not deal with serious questions of politics and philosophy,
+that his Letters rather skim the surface of social life, and
+leave its deeper problems untouched. Pliny himself would
+probably have accepted this criticism as a compliment. The
+mass of men are little occupied with insoluble questions.
+And Pliny has probably deserved better of posterity by leaving
+us a vivid picture of the ordinary life of his time or of his
+class, rather than an analysis of its spiritual distresses and
+maladies. We have enough of that in Seneca, in M. Aurelius,
+and in Lucian. Of the variety and vividness of Pliny’s
+sketches of social life there can never be any question. But
+our gratitude will be increased if we compare his Letters with
+the collections of his imitators, Symmachus and Sidonius, whose
+arid pages are seldom turned by any but a few curious and
+weary students. Martial, in his way, is perhaps even more
+clear-cut and minute in his portraiture. But Martial is essentially
+a wit of the town, viewing its vices, follies, and fashions
+with the eye of a keen, but rather detached observer. In
+reading Pliny’s Letters, we feel ourselves introduced into the
+heart of that society in its better hours; and, above all, we seem
+to be transported to those quiet provincial towns and secluded
+country seats where, if life was duller and tamer than it was
+in the capital, the days passed in a quiet content, unsolicited
+by the stormier passions, in orderly refinement, in kindly
+relations with country neighbours, and amid the unfading
+charm of old-world pieties and the witchery of nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pliny has also done a great service in preserving a memorial
+of the literary tone and habits of his time. Even in that
+age of fertile production and too enthusiastic appreciation,
+Pliny, like Seneca and Statius, has a feeling that the love
+for things of the mind was waning.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 18, 5; viii. 12, literarum
+senescentium reductor; Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi>
+i. Prooem.; <hi rend="italic">Petron.</hi> 88; cf. Sidon. Apoll.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 8; ii. 14; vii. 15; ii. 10, 1.</note> And he deemed it
+an almost religious duty, as Symmachus and Sidonius did
+more than three centuries after him, to arouse the flagging
+interest in letters, and to reward even third-rate literary
+<pb n="164"/><anchor id="Pg164"/>effort with exuberant praise. He avows that it is a matter
+of duty to admire and venerate any performance in a field
+so difficult as that of letters.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 17, § 5.</note> Yet Pliny was not by any
+means devoid of critical honesty and acumen. He could
+be a severe judge of his own style. He expects candid
+criticism from his friends, and receives it with gratitude and
+good temper.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 17; v. 12.</note> This is to him, indeed, the practical purpose of
+readings before final publication. He made emendations and
+excisions in the Histories of Tacitus, which the great author
+had submitted for his revision.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 20; viii. 7.</note> In his correspondence with
+Tacitus, there is a curious mixture of vanity along with a clear
+recognition of his friend’s immense superiority of genius, and
+a sure prescience of his immortal fame. He is proud to hear
+their names coupled as chiefs of contemporary literature,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 20; ix. 23, ad hoc illum
+<q>Tacitus es an Plinius?</q></note>
+and he cherishes the hope that, united by loyal friendship
+in life, they will go down together to a remote future.
+When, in the year 106, Tacitus had asked him for an account
+of the elder Pliny’s death, in the great eruption of Vesuvius,
+Pliny expressed a firm belief that the book on which Tacitus
+was then engaged was destined to an enduring fame.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 16, 2.</note> He
+was not quite so confident as to the immortality of Martial’s
+work,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 21, 6, at non erunt aeterna
+quae scripsit; non erunt fortasse; ille
+tamen scripsit tanquam essent futura.</note> although he appreciates to the full Martial’s brilliant and
+pungent wit. On the other hand, writing to a friend about the
+death of Silius Italicus, he frankly recognises that the Epic of
+the Punic War is a work of industry rather than of genius.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 7, scribebat carmina majore
+cura quam ingenio.</note> Yet
+he cannot allow the author of this dull mechanical poem to
+pass away without some record of his career.<note place="foot">Mart. vii. 63; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iii. 65.</note> The death at
+seventy-five of the last surviving consular of the Neronian
+age, of the consul in whose year of office the tyranny of Nero
+closed, inspired a feeling of pathos which was probably genuine,
+in spite of the rather pompous and pedantic expression of it.
+And although he wrote the <hi rend="italic">Punica</hi>, a work which was almost
+buried till the fifteenth century,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Teuffel, <hi rend="italic">R. Lit.</hi> § 315, n. 5,
+    and the opinions collected by Mayor, <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> iii. p. 120.</note> Silius was probably a not
+uninteresting person. He had been a delator under Nero, and
+<pb n="165"/><anchor id="Pg165"/>had enjoyed the friendship of Vitellius, but he knew how to
+redeem his character under the Flavian dynasty, and he had
+filled the proconsulate of Asia with some credit.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 7, 3.</note> Henceforth
+he enjoyed the lettered ease and social deference which were
+the privilege of his class for centuries. He retired finally
+to the shores of Campania, where, moving from one villa to
+another, and surrounding himself with books and gems of
+art, his life flowed away undisturbed by the agony of Rome
+in the last terror of the Caesars. Among his many estates
+he was the proud owner of one of Cicero’s villas, and of the
+ground where Virgil sleeps. He used to keep the great poet’s
+birthday with a scrupulous piety, and he always approached
+his tomb as a holy place. This apparently placid and fortunate
+life was, like so many in those days, ended by a voluntary
+death.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Mayor, <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> iii. p. 114, for a
+learned note on suicide in the early
+Empire.</note> Silius Italicus, in his life and in his end, is a true type
+of a generation which could bend before the storm of despotism,
+and save itself often by ignominious arts, which could recover
+its dignity and self-respect in the pursuit of literary ideals,
+and, at the last, assert the right to shake off the burden of
+existence when it became too heavy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pliny’s theory of life is clearly stated in the Letters, and it
+was evidently acted on by a great number of the class to which
+he belonged.<note place="foot">Pliny, <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 23, 3. For a similar
+ideal in the fifth century, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Roman
+Society in the Last Century of the
+Western Empire</hi>, p. 165 (1st ed.).</note> The years of vigorous youth should be given to
+the service of the state, in pursuing the well-marked and carefully-graduated
+career of honours, or in the strenuous oratorical
+strife of the law courts. The leisure of later years might be
+portioned out between social duty, the pleasures or the cares
+of a rural estate, and the cultivation of literary taste by reading
+and imitation of the great masters. The last was the most
+imperious duty of all, for those with any literary gifts, because
+charm of style gives the one hope of surviving the wreck of
+time;<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 8, § 1.</note> for mere cultivated facility, as the most refined and
+creditable way of filling up the vacant spaces of life. Even if
+lasting fame was beyond one’s reach, it was something to be
+able to give pleasure to an audience of cultivated friends at
+a reading, and to enjoy the triumph of an hour. There must
+<pb n="166"/><anchor id="Pg166"/>have been many a literary coterie who, if they fed one another’s
+vanity, also encouraged literary ideals, and hinted gentle criticism,<note place="foot">For a good example cf. Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+iii. 15.</note>
+in that polite delicacy of phrase in which the Roman
+was always an adept. One of these literary circles stands out
+in Pliny’s pages. At least two of its members had held great
+office. Arrius Antoninus, the maternal grandfather of the
+Emperor Antoninus Pius,<note place="foot">Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Ant. P.</hi> 1.</note> had twice borne the consulship
+with antique dignity, and shown himself a model governor as
+proconsul of Asia.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 3.</note> He was devoted to Greek literature, and
+seems to have preferred to compose in that language. We
+need not accept literally Pliny’s praises of his Atticism, and
+of the grace and sweetness of his Greek epigrams. But he
+seems to have had a facility which Pliny tortured his ingenuity
+in vain to imitate with the poorer resources of the Latin
+tongue.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 18; cf. viii. 4.</note> Among the friends of Antoninus was Vestricius
+Spurinna, who had defended Placentia for Otho, who was
+twice consul under Domitian, and was selected by Trajan to
+command the troops in a campaign in Germany.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 11; ii. 18, 36; Plin.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 5; ii. 7; iii. 1, scribit et
+quidem utraqua lingua, lyra doctissima.
+Spurinna was 77, at the date of
+this letter, <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 101-102; Momms. p. 11.</note> This dignified
+veteran, who had passed apparently untainted through the
+reigns of the worst emperors, varied and lightened the ordinary
+routine of his old age by the composition of lyrics, both in
+Greek and Latin, which seemed to his admirers to have a
+singular sweetness. Sentius Augurinus, a familiar friend of
+the two consulars, was also a brilliant verse writer,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 27; cf. ix. 8.</note> who could
+enthral Pliny by a recitation lasting for three days, although
+the fact that Pliny was the subject of one of the poems may
+account for the patience or the pleasure. One of Pliny’s
+dearest friends was Passennus Paullus, who claimed kindred
+with the poet Propertius, and, at any rate, came from the
+same town in Umbria. Passennus has been cruelly treated by
+Time, if his lyric efforts recalled, as we are asked to believe,
+the literary graces of his ancestor, and even those of Horace.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 15; ix. 22.</note>
+Vergilius Romanus devoted himself to comedy, and was thought
+to have reproduced not unworthily the delicate charms of
+Menander and Terence, as well as the scathing invective of older
+<pb n="167"/><anchor id="Pg167"/>Greek masters of the art.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 21.</note> But there were others of Pliny’s
+circle who essayed a loftier and weightier style. Probably the
+foremost of these was Titinius Capito, who, as an inscription
+records,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 798; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 801. He was
+Secretary (ab Epistulis) under Domitian,
+Nerva, and Trajan; cf. Macé,
+<hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, pp. 91, 93, 115.</note> had held high civil office under Domitian, Nerva, and
+Trajan. He was an enthusiastic patron of letters, and readily
+offered his halls to literary friends for their recitations, which
+he attended with punctilious politeness. Cherishing the
+memory of the great men of the Republic, the Cassii, the
+Bruti, and the Catos, he composed a work on the death of the
+noble victims of the Terror.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 17; viii. 12. Cf. C.
+Fannius, who wrote a history of the
+victims of Nero, Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 5. He
+died <hi rend="italic">circ.</hi> 106, Macé, p. 82.</note> He tried in vain to draw Pliny
+into the field of historical composition.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 8. For similar unwillingness,
+cf. Sidon. Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 22.</note> But the man who
+thought more of style and graceful charity than of truth, was
+not the man to write the history of such a time. He has done
+a much greater service in providing priceless materials for the
+reconstruction of its social history. Caninius Rufus was a
+neighbour of Pliny at Como.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 3.</note> He was one of those for whom
+the charms of country life had a dangerous seduction. His
+villa, with its colonnades, <q>where it was always spring,</q> the
+shining levels of the lake beneath his verandah, the water
+course with its emerald banks, the baths and spacious halls,
+all these delights seem to have relaxed the literary energy and
+ambition of their master. Caninius meditated the composition
+of a Greek epic on the Dacian wars of Trajan.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> viii. 4; ix. 33.</note> But he was
+probably one of those lingering, dilatory writers who meet us in
+Martial,<note place="foot">Mart. iv. 33; vi. 14.</note> waiting for the fire from heaven which never comes.
+The intractable roughness of barbarian names, which, as Pliny
+suggests, might have been eluded by a Homeric licence in
+quantity, was probably not the only difficulty of Caninius.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Among the literary friends of Pliny, a much more important
+person than Caninius was Suetonius, but Suetonius was
+apparently long paralysed by the same cautious hesitation to
+challenge the verdict of the public. A younger man than
+Pliny,<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> p. 13, puts his birth
+in 77 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>; but cf. Macé, p. 35, who
+places it in the year 69; see too Peter,
+<hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. 67. The indications
+in Suet. are <hi rend="italic">Domit.</hi> xii.; <hi rend="italic">Ill. Gramm.</hi>
+iv.; <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, lvii.</note> Suetonius was one of his most intimate friends. They
+<pb n="168"/><anchor id="Pg168"/>both belonged to that circle which nursed the senatorial tradition
+and the hatred of the imperial tyrants.<note place="foot">Macé, p. 83; Peter, ii. 69; cf.
+Krause, <hi rend="italic">De Sueton. Fontibus.</hi></note> The life of
+Suetonius was not very effectual or brilliant, from a worldly
+point of view. Although born within the rank to which every
+distinction was open,<note place="foot">For the authorities, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Macé, p. 29.</note> he was a man of modest and retiring
+tastes, devoted to quiet research, and destitute of the eager
+ambition and vigorous self-assertion which are necessary for
+splendid success. He was probably for some years a professor
+of grammar.<note place="foot">From 97 to 101 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, <hi rend="italic">ib.</hi> pp. 53-57.</note> He made a half-hearted attempt to gain a footing
+at the bar. In 101 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> he obtained a military tribunate,
+through Pliny’s influence, but speedily renounced his command.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 8.</note>
+Henceforth he devoted himself entirely to that historical
+research, which, if it has not won for him any dazzling
+fame, has made historical students, in spite of some reservations
+as to his sources, his debtors for all time. Pliny had the
+greatest esteem for Suetonius, and was always ready to befriend
+him, whether it were in the purchase of a quiet little
+retreat near Rome,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 24; of the year 97. On the
+meaning of <hi rend="italic">contubernalis</hi>, Suetonius
+being 28, and Pliny 35 years of age, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi>
+Macé, p. 50.</note> or in obtaining for the childless antiquary
+the <hi rend="italic">Jus trium liberorum</hi> from Trajan.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ad Traj.</hi> 94; cf. Macé, p. 50.</note> The two men were
+bound to one another by many tastes and sympathies, not the
+least strong being a curious superstition, which infected, as we
+shall see in a later chapter, even the most vigorous minds of
+that age. Suetonius had once a dream which seemed to
+portend failure in some legal cause in which he was engaged.
+He sought the aid of Pliny to obtain an adjournment. Pliny
+does not question the reality of such warnings, but merely
+suggests a more cheering interpretation of the vision.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 18.</note>
+Although devoted to research, and a most laborious student,
+the biographer of the Caesars was strangely tardy in letting his
+productions see the light. In 106, he had been long engaged
+on a work, which was probably the <hi rend="italic">De Viris Illustribus</hi>.<note place="foot">Macé, p. 68; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 10;
+Momms. <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> p. 18.</note> Pliny
+assailed him with bantering reproaches on his endless use of
+the file, and begs him to publish without delay. From several
+indications, it appears that the lingering volume did not appear
+till 113.<note place="foot">Macé, p. 69.</note> It was not till the year 118, when Hadrian arrived
+<pb n="169"/><anchor id="Pg169"/>from the East after his accession, that Suetonius attained the
+rank of one of the imperial secretaryships.<note place="foot">Macé, p. 90. For the disgrace of
+Suetonius, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> xi. 2.</note> Pliny in all probability
+had died some years before the elevation of his friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But although the dawn of a new age of milder and less
+suspicious government had, for the first time since Augustus,
+left men free to compose a true record of the past, and even
+to vilify the early Caesars,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 53.</note> the great mass of cultivated men
+in Pliny’s time, as in the days of Ausonius and Sidonius, were
+devoted to poetry. The chief cause in giving this direction to
+the Roman mind was undoubtedly the system pursued in the
+schools. In the first century, as in the fifth, the formative
+years of boyhood were devoted almost entirely to the study of
+the poets. The subject-matter of their masterpieces was not
+neglected by the accomplished grammarian, who was often
+a man of learning, and sometimes a man of taste; and the
+reading of poetry was made the text for disquisitions on
+geography and astronomy, on mythology or the antiquities
+of religious ritual and constitutional lore.<note place="foot">See <hi rend="italic">Roman Society in the Last
+Century of the Western Empire</hi>, p. 348
+sq. (1st ed.).</note> But style
+and expression were always of foremost interest in these
+studies. The ear of the South has always felt the charm of
+rhythmical or melodious speech, with a keenness of pleasure
+generally denied to our colder temperament. And the Augustan
+age had, in a single generation, performed miracles, under
+Greek inspiration, in moulding the Latin tongue to be the
+apt vehicle of every mood of poetic feeling. That inspired
+band of writers, whose call it was to glorify the dawn of a
+world-wide empire and the ancient achievements of the Latin
+race,<note place="foot">Virg. <hi rend="italic">Aen.</hi> vi. 848 sq.</note> rose to the full height of their vocation. They were
+conscious that they were writing for distant provinces won
+from barbarism, and for a remote posterity.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Trist.</hi> iv. 128; Hor. <hi rend="italic">Carm.</hi> ii.
+20; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. p. 299.</note> They discovered
+and revealed resources in the language, hitherto undreamt of.
+They wedded to its native dignity and strength a brilliancy,
+an easy grace and sprightliness, which positively ravished the
+ear of the street boys in Pompeii, or of the rude dweller on
+the Tanais or the Baetis.<note place="foot">Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi> (Tr.), 486, 488;
+<hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. 4967.</note> In his own lifetime Virgil became
+a popular hero. His Eclogues were chanted on the stage;
+<pb n="170"/><anchor id="Pg170"/>verses of the Aeneid can still be seen, along with verses of
+Propertius, scrawled on the walls of Campanian towns. Virgil,
+when he visited Rome, was mobbed by admiring crowds. When
+his poetry was recited in the theatre, the whole audience rose
+to their feet as if to salute the emperor.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">De Or.</hi> 13, auditis in theatro
+Virgilii versibus surrexit universus
+populus, etc.</note> He had the doubtful
+but significant honour of being recited by Alexandrian boys at
+the coarse orgies of a Trimalchio.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 68.</note> Never was a worthy fame
+so rapidly and splendidly won: seldom has literary fame and
+influence been so lasting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Flavian age succeeded to this great heritage. Already
+there were ominous signs of a decay of originality and force, of
+decadence in the language itself.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 18, 4; viii. 12, 1;
+cf. Seneca’s complaints of his time,
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 23; 100; Petron. 83-4.</note> The controversy between
+the lovers of the new and the lovers of the archaic style was
+raging in the reign of Vespasian, and can be still followed in
+the <hi rend="italic">De Oratoribus</hi> of Tacitus, or even in the verses of Martial.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Dial. de Or.</hi> 20; Mart. v. 10;
+cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> 86, Cacozelos et antiquarios,
+ut diverso genere vitiosos, pari
+fastidio sprevit; Pers. i. 69 sq.; Sen.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 114. For Hadrian’s preference of
+Ennius to Virgil, etc., <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi>
+c. 16; A. Gell. xii. 2; Macé, p. 96;
+Martha, <hi rend="italic">Les Moralistes sous l’Empire
+Rom.</hi> p. 184.</note>
+Already the taste for Ennius and the prae-Ciceronian oratory had
+set in, for the dialect of the heroes of the Punic Wars, even for
+<q>the Latin of the Twelve Tables,</q><note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 114, § 13, duodecim tabulas
+loquuntur.</note> a taste which was destined
+to produce its Dead Sea fruit in the age of the Antonines. But
+whoever might cavil at Cicero,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Dial. de Or.</hi> 20.</note> no one ever questioned the
+pre-eminence of Virgil, and he and his contemporaries were
+still the models of a host of imitators. The mass of facile
+talent, thrown back on itself by the loss of free republican
+life and public interests, fascinated from earliest infancy by
+the haunting cadences of the grand style, rushed into verse-writing,
+to beguile long hours of idleness, or to woo a shadowy
+fame at an afternoon recital, with a more shadowy hope of
+future fame. The grand style was a charmer and deceiver. It
+was such a perfect instrument, it was so protean in its various
+power, it was so abundant in its resources, that a man of third-rate
+powers and thin commonplace imagination, who had been
+trained in skilful manipulation of consecrated phrase, might
+for the moment delude himself and his friends by faint echoes
+of the music of the golden age.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="171"/><anchor id="Pg171"/>
+
+<p>
+The brilliancy of inherited phrase concealed the poverty of
+the literary amateur’s fancy from himself. And, even if he
+were not deluded about his own powers, the practice in skilful
+handling of literary symbols, which was acquired in the schools,
+furnished a refined amusement for a too ample leisure. It is
+clear from the dialogue <hi rend="italic">De Oratoribus</hi>, and from Pliny’s Letters,
+that the meditative life, surrounded by the quiet charm of stream
+and woodland, far from the din and strife and social routine of
+the great city,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">De Or.</hi> 12.</note> attracted many people much more than the
+greatest oratorical triumphs in the centumviral court, which,
+after all, were so pale and bourgeois beside the glories of the
+great ages of oratory. And although Aper, in the Dialogue of
+Tacitus, sneers at the solitary and unsocial toil of the poet,
+rewarded by a short-lived <hi rend="italic">succès d’estime</hi>,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 9, 10.</note> there can be no
+doubt that the ambition to cut a figure, even for a day, was
+a powerful inspiration at a time when the ancient avenues to
+fame had been closed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was to satisfy such ambitions that Domitian founded the
+quinquennial competition on the Capitol, in the year 86 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> iv.</note>
+as well as the annual festival in honour of Minerva on the
+Alban Mount. A similar festival, for the cultivation of Greek
+poetry, had been established at Naples in honour of Augustus,
+at which Statius had won the crown of corn-ears.<note place="foot">Stat. v. 3, 225; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi>
+xi. A Greek comedy in honour of
+Germanicus was performed.</note> And Nero
+had founded another, apparently only for his own glorification.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Ner.</hi> xii. Suetonius says it
+was the first of the kind. It was
+called <q>Neronia.</q></note>
+The festival established by Domitian was more important and
+enduring. The judges were taken from the priestly colleges,
+and, amid a concourse of the highest functionaries of the state,
+the successful poet received his crown at the hands of the
+emperor. The prospect of such a distinction drew competitors
+from distant provincial parts. It is a curious illustration of
+the power and the skill of the literary discipline of the schools
+that, twice within a few years, the crown of oak leaves was
+won by boys under fourteen years of age. The verses of one
+of them may still be read upon his tomb.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2603, to L. Val. Pudens,
+erected by his fellow-citizens in <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>
+110. He was only 13. <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Teuffel,
+§ 314, n. 4; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. p.
+324.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But these infrequent chances of distinction could not suffice
+<pb n="172"/><anchor id="Pg172"/>for the crowd of eager composers. In those days, although the
+bookselling trade was extensive and vigorous, there was no
+organised publishing system by which a new work could be
+brought to the notice of the public.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 2; ix. 11, 2; Mart.
+vii. 8. Cf. Haenny, <hi rend="italic">Schriftst. u. Buchh.</hi>
+ii. p. 24 sqq.</note> The author had to
+advertise himself by giving readings, to which he invited his
+friends, and by distributing copies of his book. The mania
+for recitation was the theme of satirists from the days of
+Horace to the days of Epictetus.<note place="foot">Epict. iii. 23, § 11.</note> Martial comically describes
+the frenzied poet torturing his friends day and night, pursuing
+them from the bath to the dining-room, and spreading a
+solitude around him.<note place="foot">Mart. iii. 44, 45; iv. 81.</note> Juvenal congratulates his friend on
+escaping to the country from the hoarse reciter of a frigid
+Theseid.<note place="foot">Juv. i. 2; iii. 9.</note> In the bohemian scenes of Petronius, the inveterate
+versifier, who will calmly finish a passage, after being cast
+ashore from a shipwreck, makes himself a nuisance by his
+recitations in the baths and porticoes of Croton, and is very
+properly stoned by a crowd of street boys.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 90, 91, 115.</note> No aspect of
+social life is more prominent in the Letters of Pliny than the
+reading of new works, epics, or lyrics, histories, or speeches,
+before fashionable assemblies. A liberal patron like Titinius
+Capito would sometimes lend a hall for the purpose. But the
+reciter had many expenses, from the hire of chairs to the
+fees to freedmen and slaves, who acted as <hi rend="italic">claqueurs</hi>. In
+the circle of a man like Pliny, to attend these gatherings was
+a sacred duty both to letters and to friendship. In a year
+when there was a more than usually abundant crop of poets,
+the eager advocate could boast that he had failed no one, even
+in the month when the courts were busiest.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 13; ii. 19; iv. 5;
+27; v. 12; vi. 17, 21; viii. 21.</note> Doubtless, many
+of the fashionable idlers, who dawdled away their time in the
+many resorts devoted to gossip and scandal, were glad to show
+themselves in the crowd. Old friends would consider it a
+duty to support and encourage the budding literary ambition
+of a young aspirant of their set. Some sincere lovers of
+literary art would be drawn by a genuine interest and a wish
+to maintain the literary tradition, which was already betraying
+signs of weakness and decay. But, to a great many, this duty,
+<pb n="173"/><anchor id="Pg173"/>added to the endless round of other social obligations, was
+evidently becoming repulsive and wearisome.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 17.</note> Pliny could
+listen with delight and admiration to Sentius Augurinus
+reciting his poems for three long days.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 27.</note> He would calmly
+expect his own friends to listen for as many days to a whole
+volume of his poems, or to his <hi rend="italic">Panegyric</hi> on Trajan.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 18; iv. 5.</note> Such was
+his high breeding, his kindliness, and such was his passion for
+literature in any form or of any quality, that he could hardly
+understand how what to him seemed at once a pleasure and
+duty should be regarded by others as an intolerable nuisance.
+The conduct of such people is treated with some disdain in
+one or two of the rare passages in which he writes of his
+circle with any severity. Some of these fashionable folk,
+after lingering in some place of gossip until the reading was
+well advanced, would enter the hall with ostentatious reluctance,
+and then leave before the end. Others, with an air
+of superiority, would sit in stolid silence and disguise the
+slightest expression of interest. This seemed to Pliny, not
+only grossly bad manners, but also neglect of a literary duty.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 13, 2; vi. 17; viii. 12, 1.</note>
+The audience should not only encourage honest effort;
+they should contribute their judgment to the improvement
+of style. Pliny, like Aristotle, has an immense faith in the
+collective opinion of numbers, even in matters of artistic
+taste.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii 17, 7, quia in numero
+ipso est quoddam magnum conlatumque
+consilium. Cf. Arist. <hi rend="italic">Pol.</hi> iii. 11,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">διὸ καὶ κρίνουσιν ἄμεινον οἱ πολλοὶ καὶ τὰ τῆς μουσικῆς ἔργα καὶ τὰ τῶν ποιητῶν</foreign>.</note> He used to read his own pieces to successively wider
+circles, each time receiving suggestions for amendment.
+Many of Pliny’s Letters, like the dialogue <hi rend="italic">De Oratoribus</hi>, reveal
+the keenness with which in those days questions of style were
+debated. But, as in the circle of Sidonius, this very energy
+of criticism was perhaps due to a dim consciousness of waning
+force.<note place="foot">Sidon. Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 14; vii. 15;
+i. 6.</note> Pliny, with all his kindly optimism, lets fall a phrase
+here and there which betrays an uneasiness about the future
+of letters.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 12. Seneca was even
+more pessimist, cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 23; 100;
+<hi rend="italic">De Brev. V.</hi> xiii. 1.</note> Enthusiasm is failing. Nay, there is a hardly
+veiled contempt for that eager mediocrity which Pliny and
+Titinius Capito made it a point of honour to encourage. We
+feel that we are on the edge of that arid desert of cultivated
+<pb n="174"/><anchor id="Pg174"/>impotence in which the freshness and vigour of Roman
+literature was soon mysteriously to disappear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Great as were the attractions of the capital, its gay social
+circles with their multifarious engagements, its games and
+spectacles, and literary novelties, yet the most devoted
+<q>Ardelio,</q> in the end, felt the strain and the monotony to be
+oppressive.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 9; quot dies quam
+frigidis rebus absumpsi! cf. the social
+life of Symmachus, <hi rend="italic">Roman Society in
+the Last Century of the Western Empire</hi>,
+p. 128 sq. (1st ed.).</note> Seneca and Pliny, Martial and Juvenal,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> xii.; Juv. iii. xi.
+Mart. xii. 18.</note> from
+various points of view, lament or ridicule the inanity and the
+slavery of city life. Roman etiquette was perhaps the most
+imperious and exacting that ever existed. Morning receptions,
+punctilious attendance at the assumption of the toga, at
+betrothals, or the sealing of wills, or the reading of some tedious
+epic, advice or support in the law courts, congratulations to
+friends on every official success, these duties, and many others,
+left men, who had a large circle of acquaintance, hardly a moment
+of repose. Hence the rapture with which Pliny escapes to
+the stillness of the Laurentine pine woods, or the pure cold
+breezes that blew from the Apennines over his Tuscan seat.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 9; iv. 1.</note>
+In these calm solitudes the weary advocate and man of letters
+became for a little while his own master, and forgot the din
+and crush of the streets, the paltry ambitions, the malevolent
+gossip and silly rumours of the great world, in some long-suspended
+literary task. There can be no doubt that an intense
+enjoyment was becoming more and more felt in country
+life. Its unbought, home-grown luxuries, its common sights
+and sounds, its antique simplicity, have a strange charm even
+for a hardened bohemian like Martial.<note place="foot">Mart. iii. 58.</note> But Pliny, besides this
+commoner form of enjoyment, has a keen and exquisite feeling for
+beauty of scenery. He loves the amphitheatre of hills, crowned
+with immemorial forest that looks down on rich pastoral slope,
+or vineyard or meadow, bright with the flowers of spring, and
+watered by the winding Tiber; he loves the scenery of Como,
+where you watch the fishermen at his toils from some retreat
+on the terraced banks.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 6, § 7, 8; i. 3; ix. 7
+§ 4.</note> Where in ancient literature can you
+find a more sharp and clear-cut picture of a romantic scene than
+<pb n="175"/><anchor id="Pg175"/>in his description of the Clitumnus?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 8; cf. Virg. <hi rend="italic">Georg.</hi> ii. 146;
+once visited by Caligula, Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi>
+43.</note> The famous stream rises
+under a low hill, shaded by ancient cypresses, and broadens
+into a basin in whose glassy ice-cold waters you may count the
+pebbles. Soon the current grows broader and swifter, and the
+barges are swept along under groves of ash and poplar, which,
+so vivid is their reflection, seem to be growing in the river-bed.
+Hard by, is a temple of the river-god, with many other chapels,
+and a seat of ancient augury; the magic charm of antique religious
+awe blends with the witchery of nature, and many a villa
+is planted on fair spots along the banks. There was plenty of
+sport to be had in the Apennines or the Laurentine woods. But
+Pliny was plainly not a real sportsman. He once tells his friend
+Tacitus, who seems to have rallied him on this failing, that
+although he has killed three boars, he much prefers to sit,
+tablets in hand beside the nets, meditating in the silent glade.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 6, solitudo ipsumque
+illud silentium quod venationi datur
+magna cogitationis incitamenta sunt.</note>
+The country is charming to Pliny, but its greatest charm lies in
+the long tranquil hours which can be given to literary musing.
+Part of the well-regulated day of Spurinna, a man who had commanded
+armies and governed provinces, and who had reached
+his seventy-seventh year, is devoted to lyric composition both
+in Greek and Latin.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 1, § 7.</note> Pliny once or twice laments the mass
+of literary talent which, from diffidence or love of ease, was
+buried in these rural retreats.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 25.</note> There must have been many
+a country squire, like that Terentius, who, apparently lost in
+bucolic pursuits, surprised his guest by the purity of his taste
+and his breadth of culture. We often meet the same buried
+talent after nearly four centuries in the pages of Sidonius.<note place="foot">Sidon. Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 6; ii. 14; vii.
+15.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The literature of the Flavian age has preserved for us many
+pictures of Roman villas. They occupied every variety of site.
+They were planted on rocks where the sea-foam flecked their
+walls,<note place="foot">Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> ii. 2, 22, spumant
+templa salo.</note> or on inland lakes and rivers, embowered in woods, or
+on the spurs of the Apennines, between the ancient forest and
+the wealthy plain.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 6.</note> Some of these mansions were remote and
+secluded. But on the Bay of Naples, on the Laurentine
+shore or the banks of Lake Como,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 17, § 27.</note> they clustered thickly.
+<pb n="176"/><anchor id="Pg176"/>Building in the days of Domitian was as much the rage as
+it was in the days of Horace, and, just as then, all natural
+obstacles were defied in preparing a site to the builder’s
+taste. In the grounds of Pollius Felix in the <hi rend="italic">Silvae</hi>, whole
+hills had been levelled, and rocks had been cleared away to
+make a space for the house with its gardens and woodlands.<note place="foot">Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> ii. 2, 53; cf. iii. 1, 124.</note>
+Manlius Vopiscus had built two luxurious seats on opposite
+banks of the Anio, where the stream glides silently under
+overarching boughs.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 3, 20-37.</note> The villas pressed so close to the water
+that you could converse, and almost touch hands, across the
+interval between them. The love of variety, or the obligation
+imposed on senators to invest a third of their fortune in Italian
+land,<note place="foot">Imposed by Trajan on candidates
+for office, Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 19. This was
+a repetition of former enactments, <hi rend="italic">e.g.</hi>
+Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> 48. It was revived again by
+M. Aurelius, <anchor id="corr176"/><corr sic="Capitol">Capitol.</corr> xi. Exclusion
+from commerce necessitated investments
+in land. Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 19, sum prope
+totus in praediis, aliquid tamen foenero.
+In <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 106 the price of land was
+rising, <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 19; but cf. iii. 19 (<hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>
+101); see Friedl. i. p. 197.</note> may account for the number of country seats possessed
+even by men who were not of the wealthiest class.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi> vii. 10, 5; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 89,
+§ 20; Mart. v. 13, 7; Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi>
+76, 77; Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> ii. 6, 62.</note> Pliny had
+villas at Laurentum, at Tifernum Tiberinum, at Beneventum,
+and more than two on Lake Como.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 17; v. 6; ix. 7; iv.
+1; iv. 13.</note> The orator Regulus had
+at least five country seats.<note place="foot">Mart. vii. 31.</note> Silius Italicus had several stately
+abodes in the same district of Campania, and, with capricious
+facility, transferred his affections to each new acquisition.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 7.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is by no means an easy task, and perhaps not a very
+profitable one, to trace minutely the arrangement of one of
+these great houses. Indeed there seems to have been a good
+deal of caprice and little care for symmetry in their architecture.
+The builder appears to have given no thought to external
+effect. To catch a romantic view from the windows, to escape
+the sultry heat of midsummer, or woo the brief sunshine of
+December, above all to obtain perfect stillness, were the objects
+which seem to have dictated the plans of the Roman
+architect.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. 64.</note> The Laurentine villa of Pliny and the Surrentine
+of Pollius Felix from their windows or colonnades gave glimpses
+of forest or mountain, or sea, or fat herds browsing on the
+meadow grass, or a view seaward to the islands off the
+Cam<pb n="177"/><anchor id="Pg177"/>panian shore.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 17; Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> ii. 2,
+76.</note> One room admits the morning sun, another is
+brightened by the glow of evening. Here is a colonnade
+where in winter you can pace up and down with shutters
+closed on the weather side, or in spring-time enjoy the scent
+of violets and the temperate sunshine.<note place="foot">Plin. ii. 17, § 16.</note> In the mansions on
+the Anio, there is, according to Statius, an air of everlasting
+quietness, never broken even by wandering wind, or ripple
+of the stream.<note place="foot">Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> i. 3, 29.</note> Pliny has a distant room at Laurentum, to
+which even the licensed din of the Saturnalia never penetrates.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 17, § 24.</note>
+Thus these villas threw out their chambers far and wide,
+meandering in all directions, according to the fancy of the
+master, or the charms of the neighbouring scenery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The luxury of the Roman villa consisted rather in the
+spaciousness and variety of building, to suit the changing
+seasons, than in furniture for comfort or splendour. There were,
+indeed, in many houses some costly articles, tables of citrus and
+ivory, and antique vases, of priceless worth.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. 87.</note> But the chambers
+of the most stately houses would probably, to modern taste, seem
+scantily furnished. It was on the walls and ceiling and columns
+that the Roman of taste lavished his wealth. The houses of
+Pliny, indeed, seem to have been little adorned by this sort of
+costly display.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 6.</note> But the villa of Pollius Felix, like the baths
+of Claudius Etruscus, shone with all the glory of variegated
+marbles on plaque and pillar, drawn from the quarries of
+Phrygia, Laconia, and Syene, Carystus and Numidia.<note place="foot">Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> ii. 2, 85; i. 5, 36;
+Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. 65.</note> Pliny
+confesses that he is not a connoisseur in art. He speaks
+with hesitation of the merit of a Corinthian bronze which he
+has acquired.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 6; cf. the taste of Silius
+Italicus, iii. 7, 8; Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 50, 88;
+Mahaffy, <hi rend="italic">Greek World</hi>, etc., p. 139 sq.</note> But he was surrounded in his own class by
+artistic enthusiasm, much of it, it is to be feared, pretentious
+and ignorant. The dispersion of the artistic wealth of Greek
+lands had flooded Italy with the works of the great masters.
+Collectors of them, like Silius Italicus, abounded. The
+fashion became so general and so imperious, that it penetrated
+even into the vulgar circle of people like Trimalchio, who, in
+interpreting the subject of the chasing on a cup, could confuse
+the Punic and the Trojan wars. In the villas described
+<pb n="178"/><anchor id="Pg178"/>by Statius, it would seem that the art of Apelles, Pheidias,
+Myron, and Polycletus adorned the saloons and colonnades.<note place="foot">Stat. <hi rend="italic">Silv.</hi> i. 3, 50; ii. 2, 63 sq.;
+Mart. iv. 39.</note>
+It may be doubted, however, whether many of these works
+could claim such illustrious parentage. There was plenty of
+facile technique in those days which might easily deceive the
+vulgar collector by more or less successful reproduction.<note place="foot">Friedl. iii. 196; cf. Croiset, <hi rend="italic">Lucien</hi>,
+c. ix. p. 265; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> ii. 611.</note> The
+confident claim to artistic discrimination was not less common
+in the Flavian age than in later days, and it was probably as
+fallible. It is rather suspicious that, in the attempts at
+artistic appreciation in this period, attention seems to be
+concentrated on the supposed antiquity, rarity, or costliness of
+material. There is little in the glowing descriptions in the
+<hi rend="italic">Silvae</hi> to indicate a genuine appreciation of real art.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is possible that the great Roman country seat, in its vast
+extent, although not in the stateliness of its exterior, may have
+surpassed the corresponding mansions of our time. It was the
+expression in stone of the dominant passion of an enormously
+wealthy class, intoxicated with the splendour of imperial power,
+and ambitious to create monuments worthy of an imperial
+race. Moreover, the Roman’s energy always exulted in
+triumphing over natural difficulties. Just as he drove his
+roads unswerving over mountain and swamp, so he took a
+pride in rearing his piles of masonry on the most obstinate
+and defiant sites, or even in the middle of the waves. But, in
+the extent of their parks, and the variety of floral display, the
+Romans of the most luxurious age seldom reached the modern
+English standard. The grounds of the villas which, in thick
+succession, lined the Laurentine or Campanian shore, cannot
+have been very extensive. Pliny has splendid views from his
+windows of forest, mountain, and meadow, but the scene lies
+plainly beyond the bounds of his demesne.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 6, 7; cf. ii. 17, § 3.</note> The gardens and
+shrubberies are very artificial, arranged in terraces or labyrinths
+close to the house, or with hedges of box clipped into shapes of
+animals along an open colonnade. The hippodrome at his
+Tuscan seat, for riding exercise, is formed by lines of box and
+laurel and cypress and plane tree. The fig and mulberry
+form a garden at the Laurentine villa.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 17, § 15; v. 6, § 33.</note> The cultivated
+<pb n="179"/><anchor id="Pg179"/>flowers are few, only roses and violets. But the Romans made
+up for variety by lavish profusion. In the Neronian orgies a
+fortune was sometimes spent on Egyptian roses for a single
+banquet.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xxvii.; Friedl. iii. 77 sqq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We might almost conjecture how the days passed amid
+such scenes, even without any formal diary. But Pliny has
+left us two descriptions of a gentleman’s day in the country.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ix. 36; iii. 1.</note>
+Pliny himself, as we might expect, awoke early, about six
+o’clock, and in one of those sleeping-rooms, so carefully shut
+off from the voices of nature or from household noise, with
+shutters still closed, he meditated some literary piece. Then,
+calling for his amanuensis, he dictated what he had composed.
+About ten or eleven, he passed into a shady cloister, opening
+on a bed of violets, or a grove of plane trees, where he
+continued his literary work. Then followed a drive, during
+which, according to his uncle’s precept and example, his
+studies were still continued.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 5, § 15.</note> A short siesta, a walk, declamation
+in Greek and Latin, after the habit of Cicero, gymnastic
+exercise, and the bath, filled the space till dinner time arrived.
+During this meal, a book was read aloud, and the evening
+hours were enlivened by acting or music and the society of
+friends. Occasional hunting and the cares of a rural estate
+came in to vary this routine. The round of Spurinna’s day,
+which excited Pliny’s admiration by its rigid regularity, is
+pretty much the same as his own, except that Spurinna
+seems to have talked more and read less.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 1.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To the ordinary English squire Pliny’s studious life in the
+country would not seem very attractive. And his pretence
+of sport was probably ridiculed even in his own day.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ix. 36, § 6.</note> But
+his Letters give glimpses of a rural society which, both in its
+pleasures and its cares, has probably been always much the
+same from one age to another in Europe. On his way to
+Como, Pliny once turned aside for a couple of days to his
+Tuscan estate, to join in the dedication of a temple which he
+had built for the people of Tifernum Tiberinum. The consecration
+was to be followed by a dinner to his good neighbours,
+who had elected him patron of their township, who were
+very proud of his career, and greeted him warmly whenever
+<pb n="180"/><anchor id="Pg180"/>he came among them.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 1.</note> There is also the record of the restoration,
+in obedience to the warning of a diviner, of an ancient
+temple of Ceres on his lands, with colonnades to shelter the
+worshippers who frequented the shrine. And the venerable
+wooden statue of the goddess, which was much decayed, had
+to be replaced by a more artistic image. But the life of a
+Roman proprietor, of course, had its prosaic and troublesome
+side which Pliny does not conceal. There is an interesting
+letter in which he consults a friend on the question of the
+purchase of an estate.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 19.</note> It adjoined, or rather cut into his
+own lands. It could be managed by the same bailiff, and
+the same staff of labourers and artisans would serve for both
+estates. On the other hand, Pliny thinks, it is better not
+to put too many eggs into one basket. It is more prudent
+to have estates widely dispersed, and thus less exposed to a
+single stroke of calamity. Moreover this estate, however
+tempting, with its fertile, well-watered meadows, its vineyards
+and woods, is burdened by an insolvent tenantry, who, through
+faulty management, have been allowed to fall into arrear.
+Pliny, however, is tempted to buy at a greatly reduced price,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 7. This estate was once
+worth HS.5,000,000; it was now offered
+for HS.3,000,000, <hi rend="italic">i.e.</hi> £25,000; cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+iv. 6; ii. 4, 3. The letter iii. 19
+belongs to the year 101 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>; but in
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 19 (106 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>) it appears that
+the price of land was rising, owing to
+competition, and Pliny advises Nepos
+to sell his Italian estates and buy
+others in the provinces; cf. vi. 3, 1.</note>
+and, in order to meet the payment, although his wealth is
+nearly all in land, he can call in some loans at interest, and
+the balance can be borrowed from his father-in-law, whose
+purse is always at his disposal. Pliny was sometimes worried
+by the complaints of the people on his estates, and finds it
+very difficult to secure solvent tenants on a five years lease.
+He made liberal remissions of rent, but arrears went on
+accumulating, until the tenant in despair gave up any attempt
+to repay his debt. In this extremity, Pliny resolved to adopt
+a different system of letting. He substituted for a fixed rent
+a certain proportion of the produce,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ix. 37, medendi una ratio, si
+non nummo sed partibus locem; cf.
+J. S. Mill, <hi rend="italic">Pol. Econ.</hi> bk. ii. c. 8, 1;
+A. Young, <hi rend="italic">Travels in France</hi>, p. 18.</note> in fact the métayer
+system, and employed some of his people to see that the
+returns were not fraudulently diminished. At another time
+he is embarrassed by finding that, owing to a bad vintage,
+<pb n="181"/><anchor id="Pg181"/>the men who have bought his grapes in advance are going to
+be heavy losers. He makes a uniform remission to all of
+about twelve per cent. But he gives an additional advantage to
+the large buyers, and to those who had been prompt in their
+payments.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 2; ix. 37, 3.</note> It is characteristic of the man that he says, quite
+naturally, that the landlord should share with his tenant such
+risks from the fickleness of nature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So good a man was sure to be far more afflicted by the
+troubles of his dependents than by any pecuniary losses of his
+own. One year, there were many deaths among his slaves.
+Pliny feels this acutely, but he consoles himself by the reflection
+that he has been liberal in manumission, and still more liberal in
+allowing his slaves to make their wills, the validity of which he
+maintains as if they were legal instruments.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> viii. 16; cf. the Lex Coll.
+Cultorum Dianae et Antinoi, <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi>
+6086. The slave member is permitted
+to dispose of his funeraticium by will.
+Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 189.</note> If Pliny shows
+a little too much self-complacency in this human sympathy,
+there can be no doubt that, like Seneca, he felt that slaves
+were humble friends, men of the same flesh and blood as the
+master, and that the master has a moral duty towards them,
+quite apart from the legal conventions of Rome.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 31; 47; 77; <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i.
+18, 3; <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iii. 21; Juv. xiv. 16;
+D. Chr. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> x.; Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> 18, § 7;
+Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. 358; Denis, <hi rend="italic">des
+Idées Morales</hi>, etc., ii. 208 sq.; Wallon,
+<hi rend="italic">L’Esclav.</hi> i. c. 11; Marq. i. 189.</note> When his
+wife’s grandfather proposed to make numerous manumissions,
+Pliny rejoiced greatly at the accession of so many new citizens
+to the municipality.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 32. Fabatus seems to have
+been a model country squire; cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+iv. 1; v. 11; vi. 12; vii. 11; viii. 10.</note> When his favourite reader, Encolpius,
+was seized with hemorrhage, Pliny displayed a genuine and most
+affectionate concern for the humble partner of his studies.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> viii. 1.</note>
+Another member of his household, a freedman named Zosimus,
+suffered from the same malady. Zosimus seems to have
+been a most excellent, loyal, and accomplished man. He was
+very versatile, a comedian, a musician, a tasteful reader of
+every kind of literature.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> v. 19; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 27, § 6;
+Friedl. <hi rend="italic">SG.</hi> iii. 89; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 158.</note> His patron sent him to Egypt to
+recruit his health. But, from putting too great a strain upon
+his voice, he had a return of his dangerous illness, and once
+more needed change of air. Pliny determined to send him to
+the Riviera, and begs a friend, Paulinus, to let Zosimus have the
+use of his villa and all necessary attention, for which Pliny will
+<pb n="182"/><anchor id="Pg182"/>bear the cost.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 19.</note> In his social relations with his freedmen Pliny
+always shows himself the perfect, kindly gentleman. Juvenal
+and Martial poured their scorn on those unequal dinners, where
+the guests were graduated, and where poorer wine and coarser
+viands were served out to those of humble degree.<note place="foot">Mart. i. 44; iii. 49; Juv. v. 25 sqq.;
+cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> vi. 33, § 4.</note> Pliny
+was present at one of these entertainments, and he expresses
+his contempt for the vulgar host in terms of unwonted energy.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 6.</note>
+His own freedmen, as he tells a fellow-guest, are entertained as
+equals at his table. If a man fears the expense, he can find a
+remedy by restraining his own luxury, and sharing the plain
+fare which he imposes on his company. Pliny’s relations
+with his slaves and freedmen were very like those which the
+kindly English squire cultivates towards his household and
+dependents. The affectionate regret for a good master or
+mistress, recorded on many an inscription of that age,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2862, 2874, 6389.</note> shows
+that Pliny’s household was by no means a rare exception.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet the Letters of Pliny, with all their charity and
+tranquil optimism, reveal now and then a darker side of
+household slavery. A man of praetorian rank named Largius
+Macedo, who forgot, or perhaps too vividly remembered, his
+own servile origin, was known as a cruel and haughty master.
+While he was enjoying the bath in his Formian villa, he was
+suddenly surrounded by a throng of angry slaves who, with
+every expression of hatred and loathing, inflicted on him such
+injuries that he was left for dead on the glowing pavement.
+He seemed, or pretended for a while, to be dead. A few who
+remained faithful took up the apparently lifeless corpse, amid
+the shrieks of his concubines, and bore him into the Frigidarium.
+The coolness and the clamour recalled him from his
+swoon. The would-be murderers meanwhile had fled, but many
+of them were caught in the end, and the outrage was sternly
+avenged.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 14.</note> In another letter, Pliny tells the tale of the
+mysterious disappearance of one Metilius Crispus, a citizen
+of Como, for whom Pliny had obtained equestrian rank, and
+made him a gift of the required HS.400,000. Metilius set
+out on a journey and was never heard of again.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 25; cf. the similar fate
+of Lampridius, at the close of the Western
+Empire in Gaul, Sid. Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii.
+11. § 10.</note> It is
+<pb n="183"/><anchor id="Pg183"/>significant that of the slaves who attended him no one ever
+reappeared. Amid such perils, says Pliny, do we masters live,
+and no kindness can relieve us from alarm. Seneca remarks
+that the master’s life is continually at the mercy of his slaves.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 4, § 8; 107, 5.</note>
+And the cruel stringency of legislation shows how real was the
+peril.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pliny was only an infant in the evil days when suicide
+was the one refuge from tyranny, when the lancet so often
+opened the way to <q>eternal freedom.</q> Yet, even in his later
+years, men not unfrequently escaped from intolerable calamity
+or incurable disease by a voluntary death.<note place="foot">See a great mass of instances and
+authorities collected, with his unique
+learning, by Mayor, <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> iii. pp. 114,
+115; cf. Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 212.</note> The morality
+of suicide was long a debated question. There were strict
+moralists who maintained that it was never lawful to quit
+one’s post before the final signal to retreat. Men like Seneca
+regarded it as a question to be determined by circumstances
+and motives.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24, § 11; 58, § 36; 70, §
+8; 117, § 22; <hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> ii. 10; vi. 7;
+<hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, iii. 15; Epict. i. 24; cf. ii. 15;
+iii. 24; M. Aurel. x. 8; x. 32; cf.
+Mommsen, <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 100.</note> He would not palliate wild, impetuous self-murder,
+without a justifying cause. On the other hand, there
+might be, especially under a monster like Nero, cases in which
+it were mere folly not to choose an easy emancipation rather
+than a certain death of torture and ignominy. Eternal law,
+which has assigned a single entrance to this life, has mercifully
+allowed us many exits. Any death is preferable to servitude.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 70, § 21, dum hoc constat
+praeferendam esse spurcissimam mortem
+servituti mundissimae.</note>
+So, in the case of disease and old age, it is merely a question
+whether the remainder of life is worth living. If the mental
+powers are falling into irreparable decay, if the malady is
+tormenting and incurable, Seneca would permit the rational
+soul to quit abruptly its crumbling tenement, not to escape
+pain or weakness, but to shake off the slavery of a worthless
+life.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 58, § 36, non adferam mihi
+manus propter dolorem: hunc tamen si
+sciero perpetuo mihi esse patiendum,
+exibo; non propter ipsum, sed quia
+impedimento mihi futurus est ad omne
+propter quod vivitur ... prosiliam ex
+aedificio putri ac ruenti.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pliny was not a philosopher, and had no elaborate theory of
+suicide or of anything else. But his opinion on the question
+may be gathered from his remarks on the case of Titius Aristo,
+the learned jurist. To rush on death, he says, is a vulgar,
+<pb n="184"/><anchor id="Pg184"/>commonplace act. But to balance the various motives, and make
+a deliberate and rational choice may, in certain circumstances,
+be the proof of a lofty mind.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 22, 10; Aristo was a
+fine type of the puritan pagan, an
+<q>imago priscae frugalitatis.</q></note> The cases of suicide described
+in the Letters are nearly always cases of incurable or prolonged
+disease. The best known is that of the luxurious Silius
+Italicus, who starved himself to death in his seventy-fifth year.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 7, 1. For similar instances,
+<hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 70, § 6; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 3;
+Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> 53; Petron. 111; Epict. ii.
+15.</note>
+He was afflicted with an incurable tumour, almost the only
+trouble in his long and happy life. Corellius Rufus, who had
+watched over Pliny’s career with almost parental care,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ix. 13, 6; cf. iv. 17, 4;
+vii.</note> chose
+to end his life in a similar manner. Pliny was immensely
+saddened by the close of a life which seemed to enjoy so many
+blessings, high character, great reputation and influence, family
+love and friendship. Yet he does not question the last resolve
+of Corellius. In his thirty-third year he had been seized with
+hereditary gout. During the period of vigorous manhood, he
+had warded off its onsets by an extreme abstinence. But as
+old age crept on, its tortures, wracking every limb, became
+unendurable, and Corellius determined to put an end to the
+hopeless struggle. His obstinacy was proof against all the
+entreaties of his wife and friends, and Pliny, who was called
+in as a last resource, came only to hear the physician repelled
+for the last time with a single energetic word.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 12, 10. It is characteristic
+of the time that his last word was
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">κέκρικα</foreign>.</note> Sailing once
+on Lake Como, Pliny heard from an old friend the tragic tale
+of a double suicide from a verandah overhanging the lake.
+The husband had long suffered from a loathsome and hopeless
+malady. His wife insisted on knowing the truth, and, when
+it was revealed to her, she nerved him to end the cruel ordeal,
+and promised to bear him company. Bound together, the pair
+took the fatal leap.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 24.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In spite of his charity and optimism,<note place="foot">Pliny boasts of idealising his
+friends; vii. 28, agnosco crimen....
+Ut enim non sint tales quales a me
+praedicantur, ego tamen beatus quod
+mihi videntur.</note> it would not be altogether
+true to say that Pliny was blind to the faults and vices
+of his time. He speaks, with almost Tacitean scorn, of the
+rewards which awaited a calculating childlessness, and of the
+<pb n="185"/><anchor id="Pg185"/>eager servility of the will-hunter.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 18; iv. 21; viii. 10,
+11, neque enim ardentius tu pronepotes
+quam ego liberos cupio; cf. iv. 15, 3,
+fecunditate uxoris frui voluit eo saeculo
+quo plerisque etiam singulos filios orbitatis
+praemia graves faciunt.</note> In recommending a tutor for
+the son of Corellia Hispulla, he regards the teacher’s stainless
+character as of paramount importance in an age of dangerous
+licence, when youth was beset with manifold seductions.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 3, in hac licentia temporum.</note> He
+blushes for the degradation of senatorial character displayed in
+the scurrilous or obscene entries which were sometimes found on
+the voting tablets of the august body.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 25, proximis comitiis in
+quibusdam tabellis multa jocularia
+atque etiam foeda dictu ... inventa
+sunt.</note> The decline of modesty
+and courteous deference in the young towards their elders
+greatly afflicted so courteous a gentleman. There seemed to be
+no respect left for age or authority. With their fancied omniscience
+and intuitive wisdom, young men disdain to learn from
+any one or to imitate any example; they are their own models.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> viii. 23, 3, ipsi sibi exempla sunt.</note>
+Among the many spotless and charming women of Pliny’s
+circle, there is one curious exception, one, we may venture to
+surmise, who had been formed in the Neronian age. Ummidia
+Quadratilla was a lady of the highest rank, who died at the age
+of eighty in the middle of the reign of Trajan.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 24,
+    she was born about
+<hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 27, in the reign of Tiberius. Ummidia
+had the virtue of liberality; she
+built an amphitheatre and temple for
+Casinum, <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 781.</note> She preserved
+to the end an extraordinary health and vigour, and evidently
+enjoyed the external side of life with all the zest of the old
+days of licence in her youth. Her grandson, who lived under
+her roof, was one of Pliny’s dearest friends, a spotless and
+almost puritanical character. Ummidia, even in her old age,
+kept a troop of pantomimic artistes, and continued to enjoy
+their doubtful exhibitions. But her grandson would never
+witness them, and, it must be said, Ummidia respected and
+even encouraged a virtue superior to her own.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been remarked that, in nearly all these cases, where
+Pliny has any fault to find with his generation, the evil seems
+to be only a foil for the virtue of some of his friends. Even in
+his own day, there were those who criticised him for his extravagant
+praise of the people he loved. He takes the censure
+as a compliment, preferring the kind-heartedness which is
+occasionally deceived, to the cold critical habit which has
+lost all illusions.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 28, 2.</note> Pliny belonged to a caste who were linked
+<pb n="186"/><anchor id="Pg186"/>to one another by the strongest ties of loyalty and tradition.<note place="foot">Cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 14, on his relations with
+Cornutus Tertullus: quae societas amicitiarum
+artissima nos familiaritate
+conjunxit.</note>
+The members of it were bound to support one another by
+counsel, encouragement, and influence, they were expected
+to help a comrade’s advancement in the career of honours, to
+applaud and stimulate his literary ambition, to be prodigal of
+sympathy or congratulation or pecuniary help in all the vicissitudes
+of public or private life.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 6; vi. 32; in which
+he offers a dowry to Quintilian’s
+daughter in the most delicate way;
+cf. Juv. iii. 215; xv. 150; Sen. <hi rend="italic">De
+Benef.</hi> ii. 21, 5; iv. 11, 3; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi>
+iv. 62; yet cf. the judgment of D.
+Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> vii. § 82; Denis, <hi rend="italic">Idées
+Morales</hi>, ii. 175 sqq.</note> The older men, who had borne
+the weight of great affairs, recognised the duty of forming the
+character of their juniors by precept and criticism. In this
+fashion the old soldier Spurinna, on his morning drive, would
+pour forth to some young companion the wealth of his long experience.
+In this spirit Verginius Rufus and Corellius stood by
+Pliny throughout his official career, to guide and support him.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 23, 2; vi. 11, 3;
+i. 12, 12; ii. 1, 8 (of Verginius Rufus),
+sic candidatum me suffragio ornavit,
+etc., iii. 1, 6 (of Spurinna), quibus praeceptis
+imbuare!</note>
+Pliny, in his turn, was always lavish of this kind of help, and
+deemed it a matter of pride and duty to afford it. Sometimes
+he solicits office for a friend’s son, or commends a man to the
+emperor for the <hi rend="italic">Jus trium liberorum</hi>.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ad Traj.</hi> 87, 94.</note> Sometimes he applauds
+the early efforts of a young pleader at the bar, or gives him
+counsel as to the causes which he should undertake, or the
+discipline necessary for oratorical success.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 29.</note> He was often consulted
+about the choice of a tutor for boys, and he responded
+with all the earnestness of a man who believed in the infinite
+importance of sound influence in the early years of life.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 3.</note> To
+his older friends he would address disquisitions on style, consolations
+in bereavement, congratulations on official preferment,
+descriptions of some fair scene or picturesque incident in rural
+life. He often wrote, like Symmachus, merely to maintain
+the connection of friendly sympathy by a chat on paper. His
+vanity is only too evident in some of these letters. But it is,
+after all, an innocent vanity and the consuming anxiety to
+cherish the warmth and solidarity of friendship, and a high
+tone in the great class to which he belonged, might well cover
+even graver faults. If there was too much self-indulgence in
+<pb n="187"/><anchor id="Pg187"/>that class, if they often abandoned themselves to the seductions
+of ease and literary trifling in luxurious retreats, it is also to
+be remembered that a man of rank paid heavily for his place
+in Roman society, both in money and in the observance of a
+very exacting social code. And no one recognised the obligation
+with more cheerful alacrity than Pliny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pliny felt a genuine anxiety that young men of birth should
+aim at personal distinction. Any gleam of generous ambition,
+any sign of strenuous energy, which might save a young
+aristocrat from the temptations of ease and wealth, were hailed
+by him with unaffected delight. He was evidently very susceptible
+to the charm of manner which youths of this class
+often possess. When to that was added strength of character,
+his satisfaction was complete. Hence his delight when Fuscus
+Salinator and Ummidius Quadratus, of the very cream of
+the Roman nobility, entered on the conflicts of the Centumviral
+Court.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 11.</note> And indeed these young men appear to have
+had many graces and virtues. Salinator, in particular, with
+exquisite literary culture, had a mingled charm of boyish
+simplicity, gravity, and sweetness.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 26.</note> Asinius Bassus, the son
+of Asinius Rufus, was another of this promising band of youth,
+blameless, learned, and diligent, whom Pliny commends for the
+quaestorship to Fundanus, then apparently designated as consul.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 15. Fundanus’s consulship
+is mentioned in two inscriptions, <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi>
+1588, 2471. There is a difficulty about
+the dates which is discussed in Momms.
+<hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> p. 17, n. 3. Fundanus does not
+appear in the <hi rend="italic">Fasti</hi>.</note>
+There is no more genuine feeling in the Letters than the grief
+of Pliny for the early death of Junius Avitus, another youth
+of high promise. Pliny had formed his character, and supported
+him in his candidature for office. He had helped him
+with advice in his studies, or in his administrative duties.
+Avitus repaid all this paternal care by a docility and deference
+which were becoming rare among the young men of the day.
+Winning the affection and confidence of his elders in the
+service, Avitus was surely destined to develop into one of those
+just and strenuous imperial officers, like Corbulo or Verginius
+Rufus, many of whom have left only a name on a brief inscription,
+but who were the glory and strength of the Empire
+in the times of its deepest degradation. But all such hopes for
+Avitus were extinguished in a day.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="188"/><anchor id="Pg188"/>
+
+<p>
+The upright and virtuous men of Pliny’s circle, Corellius
+Rufus, Titinius Capito the historian, Pegasus the learned
+jurist, Trebonius Rufus the magistrate who suppressed the
+games at Vienne, Junius Mauricus, who would have denied
+them to the capital, and many others of the like stamp, have
+often been used to refute the pessimism of Juvenal. We have
+in a former chapter seen reason to believe that the satirist’s
+view of female character needs to be similarly rectified. Even
+in the worst reigns the pages of Tacitus reveal to us strong
+and pure women, both in the palace and in great senatorial
+houses. In the wide philosophic class there was probably
+many an Arria and Plotina. In the <hi rend="italic">Agricola</hi>, and in Seneca’s
+letters to Marcia and Helvia, we can see that, even at the
+darkest hour, there were homes with an atmosphere of old
+Roman self-restraint and sobriety, where good women wielded
+a powerful influence over their husbands and their sons,
+and where the examples of the old Republic were used,
+as Biblical characters with us, to fortify virtue.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> xiii. xiv.; <hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi>
+xvi.</note> Seneca, in
+his views about women, as in many other things, is essentially
+modern. He admires indeed the antique ideal of self-contained
+strength and homely virtue. But he also believes
+in the equal capacity of women for culture, even in the field of
+philosophy, and he half regrets that an old-fashioned prejudice
+had debarred Helvia from receiving a philosophic discipline.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> xvi. par illis, mihi crede,
+vigor, etc. <hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi> xvii. 4, cf. Plut.
+<hi rend="italic">Conj. Praec.</hi> xlviii.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">φαρμάκων ἐπῳδὰς οὐ προσδέξεται (ἡ γυνὴ) τοῖς Πλάτωνος ἐπᾳδομένη λόγοις, κτλ.</foreign>; cf. Juv. vi. 450;
+Mart. vii. 69.</note>
+Tacitus and Pliny, who had no great faith in philosophy as a
+study for men, would hardly have recommended it for women.
+But they lived among women who were cultivated in the
+best sense. Pliny’s third wife, Calpurnia, was able to give
+him the fullest sympathy in his literary efforts.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 19, § 4.</note> But her
+fame, of which she probably little dreamt, is founded on her
+purity and sweetness of character. Her ancestors, like Pliny’s,
+belonged to the aristocracy of Como. Her aunt, Calpurnia
+Hispulla, who was a dear friend of Pliny’s mother, had watched
+over her during the years of girlhood with a sedulous care
+which made her an ideal wife. What Calpurnia was like as a
+girl, we may probably picture to ourselves from the prose elegy
+<pb n="189"/><anchor id="Pg189"/>of Pliny on the death of the young daughter of Minutius
+Fundanus.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> v. 16.</note> It is the picture of a beautiful character, and a
+fair young life cut off too soon. The girl had not yet reached
+her fourteenth year. She was already betrothed when she
+was seized with a fatal sickness. Her sweet girlish modesty,
+which was combined with a matronly gravity, charmed all her
+father’s friends. She had love for all the household, her tutors
+and slaves, nurses and maids. A vigorous mind triumphed
+over bodily weakness, and she passed through her last illness
+with a sweet patience, encouraging her father and sister to
+bear up, and showing no shrinking from death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although we know of a good many happy wedded lives in
+that age,<note place="foot">Seneca and Paulina, Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi>
+xv. 64; Plutarch, <hi rend="italic">Ad Uxorem</hi>, iv. v.</note> there is no picture so full of pure devotion and tenderness
+as that which we have in Pliny’s letters to Calpurnia. They
+are love-letters in the best sense and the most perfect style.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 4, 5, 7.</note>
+Pliny’s youth was long past when he won the hand of Calpurnia,
+yet their love for one another is that of boy and girl. When
+she has to go into Campania for her health, he is racked with
+all sorts of anxiety about her, and entreats her to write once,
+or even twice, a day. Pliny reads her letters over and over
+again, as if they had just come. He has her image before him
+by night, and at the wonted hour by day his feet carry him to
+her vacant room. His only respite from these pains of a lover
+is while he is engaged in court. Pliny had frequent care about
+Calpurnia’s health. They did not belong to the hideous class
+who preferred <q>the rewards of childlessness,</q> but their hopes
+of offspring were dashed again and again. These griefs were
+imparted to Calpurnia’s aunt, and to her grandfather, Calpurnius
+Fabatus, a generous old squire of Como, who was as anxious as
+Pliny to have descendants of his race. At the time of the old
+man’s death, Calpurnia was with her husband in Bithynia, and
+she wished to hasten home at once to console her aunt. Pliny,
+not having time to secure the emperor’s sanction, gave her
+the official order for the use of the public post on her journey
+back to Italy. In answer to his letter of explanation and
+excuse, Trajan sent his approval in his usual kind and
+courteous style. This is the last glimpse we have of Pliny
+and Calpurnia.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Ad Traj.</hi> 121, 122.</note>
+</p>
+
+<pb n="190"/><anchor id="Pg190"/>
+
+<p>
+Pliny’s character, as displayed in his Letters, is the embodiment
+of the finest moral tone of the great age which had
+opened when he died, in kindlier or juster treatment of the
+slave, in high respect for women, in conscientious care for the
+education of the young, in beneficent provision for the helpless
+and distressed. But it would be a mistaken view to regard
+these ideas as an altogether new departure. It is dangerous
+to assert that anything is altogether new in Roman social
+history. The truth is that the moral sentiment in which these
+movements took their rise had been for generations in the air.
+It was diffused by the Stoic preaching of the brotherhood and
+equality of men as fellow-citizens of one great commonwealth.
+The duty of redeeming the captive and succouring the poor
+had been preached by Cicero a century and a half before Pliny’s
+Letters appeared.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Off.</hi> ii. 18 (63), atque haec
+benignitas etiam reipublicae est utilis,
+redimi e servitute captos, locupletari
+tenuiores.</note> Horace had, a few years later, asked the
+searching question, <q>Why should the worthy be in want while
+you have wealth?</q><note place="foot">Hor. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> ii. 2, 103—
+
+<lg>
+<l>Cur eget indignus quisquam, te divite?</l>
+</lg></note> Seneca preaches, with the unction of
+an evangelist, all the doctrines on which the humane legislation
+of the Antonine age was founded, all the principles
+of humanity and charity of every age. He asserts the
+natural equality of bond and free, and the claim of the
+slave to kindness and consideration.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 47, § 1, 31; <hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi> iii.
+21; <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 18, 3; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, iii. 24.</note> He brands in many
+a passage the cruelty and contempt of the slaveholder. He
+preaches tolerance of the froward, forgiveness of insult and
+injury.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 52.</note> He enforces the duty of universal kindness and helpfulness
+by the example of God, who is bounteous and merciful
+even to the evildoer.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Benef.</hi> iv. 5; iv. 26; iv. 28,
+Di multa ingratis tribuunt.</note> Juvenal was little of a philosopher, but
+he had unconsciously drunk deep of the gospel of philosophy.
+Behind all his bitter pessimism there is a pure and lofty moral
+tone which sometimes almost approaches the ideal of charity
+in S. Paul. The slave whom we torture or insult for some
+slight negligence is of the same elements as we are.<note place="foot">Juv. xiv. 16; vi. 219, 476.</note> The
+purity of childhood is not to be defiled by the ribaldry of the
+banquet and the example of a mother’s intrigues or a father’s
+brutal excesses.<note place="foot">Id. xiv. 31.</note> Revenge is the pleasure of a puny soul.<note place="foot">Id. xiii. 190.</note>
+<pb n="191"/><anchor id="Pg191"/>The guilty may be left to the scourge of the unseen inquisitor.
+Juvenal regards the power of sympathy for any human grief
+or pain as the priceless gift of Nature, <q>who has given us tears.</q><note place="foot">Juv. xv. 133.</note>
+It is by her command that we mourn the calamity of a friend
+or the death of the babe <q>too small for the funeral pyre.</q> The
+scenes of suffering and pity which the satirist has sketched in
+some tender lines were assuredly not imaginary pictures. We are
+apt to forget, in our modern self-complacency, that, at least among
+civilised races, human nature in its broad features remains
+pretty much the same from age to age. On an obscure epitaph
+of this period you may read the words—<hi rend="italic">Bene fac, hoc tecum
+feres.</hi><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6042.</note> Any one who knows the inscriptions may be inclined
+to doubt whether private benefactions under the Antonines
+were less frequent and generous than in our own day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The duties of wealth, both in Greece and Rome, were at
+all times rigorously enforced by public opinion. The rich had
+to pay heavily for their honours and social consideration in
+the days of Cicero, and in the days of Symmachus, as they
+had in the days of Pericles.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Off.</hi> i. 14; Sym. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii.
+78; ix. 126; Olympiod. § 44 (Müller,
+<hi rend="italic">Fr. H. Gr.</hi> iv. p. 68); cf. Boeckh,
+<hi rend="italic">Public Ec. of Athens</hi> (Trans. Lewis),
+pp. 458, 520, 578.</note> They had to contribute to the
+amusement of the people, and to support a crowd of clients
+and freedmen. In the remotest municipality, the same
+ambitions and the same social demands, as we shall show
+in the next chapter, put an enormous strain on the resources
+of the upper class. Men must have often ruined themselves
+by this profuse liberality. In the reign of Augustus a great
+patron had several times given a favourite freedman sums of
+£3000 or £4000. The patron’s descendant in the reign of
+Nero had to become a pensioner of the emperor. Juvenal and
+Martial reveal the clamorous demands by which the great
+patron was assailed.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 178 n. 10; cf. Juv.
+ii. 117; Mart. vii. 64, dominae munere
+factus eques; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 34.</note> The motives for this generosity of the
+wealthy class were at all times mixed and various. But in
+our period, the growth of a pure humane charity is unmistakable,
+of a feeling of duty to the helpless, whether
+young or old. The State had from the time of the Gracchi
+taken upon itself the immense burden of providing food for a
+quarter of a million of the proletariat of Rome. But in the
+<pb n="192"/><anchor id="Pg192"/>days of Pliny it recognised fresh obligations. The importance
+of education and the growth of poverty appealed powerfully
+to a ruling class, which, under the influence of philosophy, was
+coming to believe more and more in the duty of benevolence
+and of devotion to things of the mind. All the emperors
+from Vespasian to M. Aurelius made liberal provision for the
+higher studies.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> 18; Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> 16,
+§ 8; Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Ant. P.</hi> 11, § 3.</note> But this endowment of culture, which in
+the end did harm as well as good, is not so interesting to us
+as the charitable foundations for the children of the poor.
+It was apparently the emperor Nerva, the rigid economist
+who sold the imperial furniture and jewels to replenish the
+treasury,<note place="foot">D. Cass. 68. 2; Victor, <hi rend="italic">Epit.</hi> 12.</note> who first made provision for the children of needy
+parents throughout Italy. But epigraphy tells us more than
+literary history of the charity of the emperors. The tablet of
+Veleia is a priceless record of the charitable measures adopted
+by Trajan. The motive of the great emperor was probably,
+as his panegyrist suggests, political as much as benevolent.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6664; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 28, hi
+subsidium bellorum, ornamentum pacis
+publicis sumptibus aluntur. Duruy,
+iv. 784; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. 211;
+Kratz, <hi rend="italic">De Benef., a Traj. collatis</hi>, p. 11.</note>
+He may have wished to encourage the rearing of children who
+should serve in the armies of the State, as well as to relieve
+distress. The provision was even more evidently intended to
+stimulate agriculture. The landed proprietors of the place, to
+the number of forty-six, received on mortgage a loan from the
+State of about £10,000 in our money, at an interest of five per
+cent, which was less than half the usual rate of that time.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> x. 62. The letter reveals
+an unwillingness among the people of
+Bithynia to become debtors to the
+public treasury.</note>
+The interest was appropriated to the maintenance of 300
+poor children, at the rate of about £1:11s. a year for
+each male child, and £1 for each girl. The illegitimate
+children, who, it may be noted, were only two or three out of
+so many, received a smaller allowance. The boys were supported
+till their eighteenth year, the girls till fourteen. It
+was a bold and sagacious attempt to encourage Italian agriculture,
+to check the ominous depopulation of Italy,<note place="foot">Cf. Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 27, minore in dies
+plebe ingenua; iii. 25; cf. Meriv. viii.
+353.</note> and to
+answer the cry of the poor. Hadrian continued and even
+added to the benefaction of Trajan.<note place="foot">Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> 7.</note> Antoninus Pius, in
+<pb n="193"/><anchor id="Pg193"/>honour of his wife Faustina, established a foundation for
+young girls who were to be called by her not altogether unspotted
+name.<note place="foot">Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Ant. P.</hi> 8.</note> A similar charity was founded in honour of
+her daughter by M. Aurelius.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">M. Aurel.</hi> 26; cf. Capitol.
+<hi rend="italic">Pertin.</hi> 9. He found the interest on
+Trajan’s foundation nine years in arrear.
+Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Alex. Sev.</hi> 57, 7; his charity
+children were called Mammaeani; Kratz,
+p. 11.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, while the emperors were responding to the call of
+charity by using the resources of the State, it is clear, from
+the Letters of Pliny and from the inscriptions, that private
+benevolence was even more active. Pliny has a conception
+of the uses and responsibilities of wealth which, in spite of
+the teaching of Galilee, is not yet very common. Although
+he was not a very wealthy man, he acted up to his principles
+on a scale and proportion which only a few of our millionaires
+have yet reached. The lavish generosity of Pliny is a
+commonplace of social history. We have not the slightest
+wish to detract from the merited fame of that kindliest of
+Roman gentlemen. But a survey of the inscriptions may
+incline the inquirer to believe that, according to their means,
+there were many men and women in obscure municipalities
+all over the world, who were as generous and public-spirited
+as Pliny.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6694 to a man who left
+Tibur his sole heir; 3733 ob munificentiam;
+3765, 3766, 3882, 7190,
+6993, 7001, 781; cf. Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit.
+Soph.</hi> ii. 1 sqq.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἄριστα δὲ ἀνθρώπων πλούτῳ ἐχρήσατο</foreign>. Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> xxix. 4
+(8); Friedländer, <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi>
+46 sq.</note> With Pliny, as with those more obscure benefactors,
+the impelling motive was love for the parent city or
+the village which was the home of their race, and where the
+years of youth had been passed. Pliny, the distinguished
+advocate, the famous man of letters, the darling of Roman
+society, still remained the loyal son of Como, from which his
+love never strays.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 3, § 1, Comum meae
+deliciae; v. 11, 2; iv. 13, respublica
+nostra pro filia vel parente.</note> He followed and improved upon the
+example of his father in munificence to his native place.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> the inscr. in Momms. <hi rend="italic">Plin.</hi> p. 31.</note>
+He had little liking for games and gladiatorial shows, which
+were the most popular objects of liberality in those days. But
+he gave a sum of nearly £9000 for the foundation of a town
+library, with an annual endowment of more than £800 to
+maintain it.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 8; v. 7; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1172.</note> Finding that promising youths of Como had
+to resort to Milan for their higher education, he offered to
+<pb n="194"/><anchor id="Pg194"/>contribute one-third of the expense of a high school at Como,
+if the parents would raise the remainder. The letter which
+records the offer shows Pliny at his best, wise and thoughtful
+as well as generous.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 13.</note> He wishes to keep boys under the
+protection of home influence, to make them lovers of their
+mother city; and he limits his benefaction in order to
+stimulate the interest of the parents in the cause of education,
+and in the appointment of the teachers. Another sum of
+between £4000 and £5000 he gave to Como for the support
+of boys and girls of the poorer class.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 18; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1172.</note> He also left more than
+£4000 for public baths, and a sum of nearly £16,000 to
+his freedmen, and for communal feasts. On two of his estates
+he built or repaired temples at his own expense.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 1; cf. ix. 12.</note> His private
+benefactions were on a similar scale. It is not necessary to
+adopt the cynical conclusion that Pliny has told us all his
+liberality. The kindly delicacy with which Pliny claims the
+right of a second father to make up the dowry of the daughter
+of his friend Quintilian, might surely save him from such an
+imputation.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 32.</note> In the same spirit he offers to Romatius Firmus
+the £2500 which was needed to raise his fortune to the level
+of equestrian rank.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 19.</note> When the philosophers were banished by
+Domitian, Pliny, who was then praetor, at the most imminent
+risk visited his friend Artemidorus, and lent him, free of
+interest, a considerable sum of money.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 11.</note> The daughter of one of
+his friends was left with an embarrassed estate; Pliny took up
+all the debts and left Calvina with an inheritance free from
+all burdens.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 4.</note> He gave his old nurse a little estate which cost
+him about £800.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 3.</note> But the amount of this good man’s gifts,
+which might shame a modern testator with ten times his
+fortune, is not so striking as the kindness which prompted
+them, and the modest delicacy with which they were made.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet Pliny, as we have said, is only a shining example of a
+numerous class of more obscure benefactors. For a thousand
+who know his Letters, there are few who have read the stone
+records of similar generosity. Yet these memorials abound for
+those who care to read them. And any one who will spend a
+few days, or even a few well-directed hours, in examining the
+<pb n="195"/><anchor id="Pg195"/>inscriptions of the early Empire, will find many a common, self-complacent
+prejudice melting away. He will discover a profusion
+of generosity to add to the beauty, dignity, or convenience
+of the parent city, to lighten the dulness of ordinary life, to bring
+all ranks together in common scenes of enjoyment, to relieve want
+and suffering among the indigent. The motives of this extraordinary
+liberality were indeed often mixed, and it was, from
+our point of view, often misdirected. The gifts were sometimes
+made merely to win popularity, or to repay civic honours
+which had been conferred by the populace. They were too
+often devoted to gladiatorial shows and other exhibitions which
+only debased the spectators. Yet the greatest part of them
+were expended on objects of public utility—baths, theatres,
+markets, or new roads and aqueducts, or on those public
+banquets which knitted all ranks together. There was in
+those days an immense <q>civic ardour,</q> an almost passionate
+rivalry, to make the mother city a more pleasant and a more
+splendid home. The endless foundations for civic feasts to
+all orders, in which even children and slaves were not forgotten,
+with a distribution of money at the close, softened the
+sharp distinctions of rank, and gave an appreciable relief to
+poverty. Other foundations were more definitely inspired by
+charity and pity. In remote country towns, there were pious
+founders who, like Pliny and Trajan, and the Antonines, provided
+for the nurture of the children of the poor. Bequests
+were left to cheapen the main necessaries of life.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einleit.</hi> p. 48.</note> Nor were
+the aged and the sick forgotten. In Lorium, near the old
+home of the Antonines, a humble spice dealer provided in his
+will for a free distribution of medicines to the poor people of
+the town.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 114.</note> The countless gifts and legacies to the colleges,
+which were the refuge of the poor in that age, in every region
+of the Roman world, are an irresistible proof of an overflowing
+charity. Pliny’s love of the quiet town where his infancy
+was passed, and the record of a like patriotism or benevolence
+in so many others, draw us on to the study of that free and
+generous municipal life which was the great glory of the
+Antonine age.
+</p>
+</div><div type="chapter" n="2" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="196"/><anchor id="Pg196"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="II. Municipal life"/><index index="pdf" level1="II. Municipal life"/>
+<head>CHAPTER II</head>
+
+<head type="sub">MUNICIPAL LIFE</head>
+
+<p>
+Nearly all the intimate friends of Pliny were, like himself, bred
+in the country, and, as we have seen, he has left us a priceless
+picture of that rural aristocracy in the calm refinement of
+their country seats. But of the ordinary life of the provincial
+town we learn very little from Pliny. Indeed, the silence
+of Roman literature generally as to social life outside the
+capital is very remarkable.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Promenades Archæologiques</hi>,
+p. 330, ce qui nous échappe c’est
+la vie de province.</note> In the long line of great Latin
+authors from Ennius to Juvenal, there is hardly one whose
+native place was Rome. The men who are the glory of
+Roman letters in epic and lyric poetry, in oratory and
+history, in comedy and satire, were born in quiet country towns
+in Italy or the remoter provinces. But the reminiscences of
+the scenes of their infancy will generally be found to be faint
+and rare. Horace, indeed, displays a tender piety for that
+borderland of Apulia, where, in the glades of Mount Vultur as
+a child, he drank inspiration from the witchery of haunted
+groves.<note place="foot">Hor. <hi rend="italic">Carm.</hi> iii. 4, 9.</note> And Martial, the hardened man about town, never
+forgot the oak groves and iron foundries of Bilbilis.<note place="foot">Mart. iv. 55, 11; xii. 18, 9; i. 50.</note> But
+for the municipal system and life, the relations of its various
+social grades, the humdrum routine of the shops and forums,
+the rustic rites and deities,<note place="foot">It must, however, be said that
+Virgil has preserved much of local
+religious sentiment. Cf. Sellar, <hi rend="italic">Virgil</hi>,
+p. 365 sq.</note> the lingering echoes of that dim
+common life with its vices and honest tenderness, its petty
+ambitions or hopeless griefs, we must generally go to the
+records in stone, and the remains of buried cities which the
+spade has given back to the light.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="197"/><anchor id="Pg197"/>
+
+<p>
+This silence of the literary class is not due to any want of
+love in the Roman for the calm and freshness and haunting
+charm of country scenes, still less to callousness towards old
+associations. Certainly Virgil cannot be charged with any
+such lack of sensibility. In the Eclogues and the Georgics,
+the memory of the old farm at Andes breaks through the
+more conventional sentiment of Alexandrian tradition. In
+the scenery of these poems, there are <q>mossy fountains and
+grass softer than sleep,</q> the hues of violet, poppy, and hyacinth,
+the shade of ancient ilex, and the yellow wealth of cornfield.
+We hear the murmur of bees, <q>the moan of doves in immemorial
+elms,</q> the rush of the river, the whispering of the
+wind. The pastoral charm of the midsummer prime is
+there, from the freshness of fields under the morning
+star, through the hours alive with the song of the cicala
+and the lowing of the herds around the pool, through the
+still, hot, vacant noontide, till the moonbeams are glinting
+on the dewy grasses of the glades.<note place="foot">Virg. <hi rend="italic">Ecl.</hi> ii. 48; <hi rend="italic">Georg.</hi> ii. 466
+sqq.; iii. 324-338, et saltus reficit
+jam roscida luna; cf. Sellar, <hi rend="italic">Virgil</hi>, pp.
+166-167.</note> Nor can any lover
+of Virgil ever forget the fire of old sentiment in the
+muster of Italian chivalry in the seventh book of the
+Aeneid.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Aen.</hi> vii. 630 sqq.; Sellar, p. 80.</note> Tibur and Praeneste, Anagnia, Nomentum, and
+Amiternum, and many another old Sabine town, which send
+forth their young warriors to the fray, are each stamped
+on the imagination by some grace of natural beauty, or some
+glory of ancient legend. In the Flavian period, as we have
+seen, the great nobles had their villas on every pleasant
+site, wherever sea or hill or woodland offered a fair prospect
+and genial air. To these scenes they hastened, like emancipated
+schoolboys, when the dog-days set in. They had a genuine
+love of the unspoilt countryside, with its simple natural
+pleasures, its husbandry of the olden time, its joyous plenty,
+above all its careless freedom and repose.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 3; i. 6; i. 9; vii. 30;
+ix. 36. Mart. iii. 58; i. 56; iv. 66;
+iv. 90; vi. 43.</note> The great charm
+of a rural retreat was its distance from the <q>noise and smoke
+and wealth</q> of Rome. The escape from the penalties of fame,
+from the boredom of interminable dinners, the intrusive importunity
+of curious busybodies, the malice of jealous rivals,
+gives a fresh zest to the long tranquil days under the ilex
+<pb n="198"/><anchor id="Pg198"/>shade among the Sabine hills.<note place="foot">Hor. <hi rend="italic">Carm.</hi> i. 17.</note> Horace probably felt more
+keenly than Juvenal the charm of hill and stream and the
+scenes of rustic toils and gaiety. Yet the exquisite good
+sense of Horace would have recoiled from the declamatory
+extravagance with which Juvenal justifies his friend’s
+retirement from the capital, by a realistic picture of all
+its sordid troubles and vices and absurdities.<note place="foot">Juv. iii.</note> <q>To love
+Rome at Tibur and Tibur at Rome</q> was the expression
+of the educated Roman’s feelings in a form which he would
+have recognised to be as just as it was happy. In spite of
+the charm of the country, to any real man of letters
+or affairs, the fascination of Rome was irresistible. Pliny,
+and no doubt hundreds of his class, from Augustus to
+Theodosius, grumbled at the wasteful fashion in which their
+lives were frittered away by monotonous social duties, as
+imperious as they were generally vain.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Rom. Society in the Last Century
+of the Western Empire</hi>, p. 128 sq.
+(1st ed.); Sym. i. 101; ii. 26; v. 78.
+Cf. Auson. <hi rend="italic">Idyl.</hi> x. 20, 155, 189.</note> Yet to Pliny, as to
+Symmachus, the prospect of never again seeing the city, so
+seductive and so wearying, would have been absolutely intolerable.
+Martial, when he retired to Bilbilis, seems to pity his
+friend Juvenal, wandering restlessly through the noisy Suburra,
+or climbing the Caelian in hot haste, to hang on the outskirts of
+a levee.<note place="foot">Mart. xii. 18—
+
+<lg>
+<l rend="margin-left: 2">Dum per limina te potentiorum</l>
+<l rend="margin-left: 4">Sudatrix toga ventilat, vagumque</l>
+<l rend="margin-left: 2">Major Caelius, et minor fatigat.</l>
+</lg></note> Yet in the preface to this last book, Martial seems
+to feel his banishment as keenly as Ovid felt his among the
+frozen rivers of Scythia.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Trist.</hi> ii. 196; iii. 2, 21, Roma
+domusque subit, desideriumque locorum;
+cf. Hor. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> ii. 7, 28.</note> He misses in the <q>provincial
+solitude</q> the sympathetic public which was eager for his
+latest epigram, the fine critical judgment to appreciate, the
+concourse of elegant idlers to supply the matter for his verses.<note place="foot">Mart. xii. <hi rend="italic">Praef.</hi> illam judiciorum
+subtilitatem, illud materiarum ingenium,
+bibliothecas, theatra, conventus,
+quasi destituti desideramus.</note>
+And worst of all, the most famous wit of Rome is now the
+mark for the ignorant spite and envy of a provincial clique.
+Martial evidently feels very much as Dr. Johnson would have
+felt if he had been compelled to live out his days in Skye.
+Juvenal may affect to regret the simple ways of those rustic
+places, where on festal days in the grass-grown theatre the
+infant in his mother’s arms shudders at the awful masks of
+<pb n="199"/><anchor id="Pg199"/>the actors, and the aediles take their places in white tunics
+like the humble crowd.<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 173 sqq.</note> But, in spite of this sentiment, the
+true Roman had a certain contempt for municipal life,<note place="foot">Illustrations may be found in Plaut.
+<hi rend="italic">Mil. Glor.</hi> 653; <hi rend="italic">Captiv.</hi> 879; <hi rend="italic">Trinum.</hi>
+609; <hi rend="italic">Bacch.</hi> 24; Cic. <hi rend="italic">Phil.</hi> iii. 6, 15,
+videte quam despiciamur omnes qui
+sumus e municipiis, id est, omnes
+plane; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 3, seque ac
+majores et posteros municipali adultero
+foedabat.</note> for
+the narrow range of its interests, the ludicrous assumption of
+dignity by its petty magistrates, and its provincialisms.<note place="foot">Juv. x. 100; cf. Cic. <hi rend="italic">post Red. in
+Sen.</hi> 17; Hor. <hi rend="italic">S.</hi> i. 5, 34, Insani
+ridentes praemia scribae, etc.</note> It was
+indeed only natural that the splendour and the vivid energy
+of life in the capital of the world should throw provincial
+life into the shade. Yet we can realise now, as a Roman
+wit or man of fashion could hardly do, that the municipal
+system, which had overspread the world from the Solway
+to the edge of the Sahara, was not the least glory of the
+Antonine age. And in any attempt to estimate the moral
+condition of the masses in that age, the influence of municipal
+life should occupy a large place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is beyond the scope of this work to trace provincial
+towns through all their various grades, and their evolution in
+the hands of Roman statesmanship from the time of Augustus.
+What we are chiefly concerned with is the spirit and the rapid
+development of that brilliant civic life, which not only covered
+the worlds both of East and West with material monuments of
+Roman energy, but profoundly influenced for good, or sometimes
+for evil, the popular character. The magical transformation
+wrought by Roman rule in a century and a half seized the
+imagination of contemporaries such as the rhetor Aristides. And
+the mere wreck of that brilliant civilisation which now meets
+the traveller’s eye, in regions that have long returned to waste,
+will not permit us to treat his eulogy of Rome as only a piece
+of rhetoric. Regions, once desert solitudes, are thickly dotted
+with flourishing cities; the Empire is a realm of cities. The
+world has laid the sword aside, and keeps universal festival,
+with all pomp and gladness. All other feuds and rivalries are
+gone, and cities now vie with one another only in their splendour
+and their pleasures. Every space is crowded with
+porticoes, gymnasia, temple fronts, with studios and schools.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xiv. (223), 391, (Jebb. i. p.
+223),
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">μία δὲ αὔτη κατέχει ἔρις, ὅπως ἔτι καλλίστη καὶ ἡδίστη ἑκάστη φανείται·
+πάντα δὲ μεστὰ γυμνασίων, κρηνῶν, προπυλαίων, νεῶν, δημιουργίων, διδασκάλων.</foreign></note>
+<pb n="200"/><anchor id="Pg200"/>Sandy wastes, trackless mountains, and broad rivers present no
+barriers to the traveller, who finds his home and country
+everywhere.  The earth has become a vast pleasure garden.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xiv. (225), 393-4,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἡ γῆ πᾶσα οἷον παράδεισος ἐγκηκόσμηται.</foreign></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This glowing description of the Roman world of the
+Antonine age is not perhaps strengthened by the appeal to the
+doubtful statistics of other contemporaries, such as Aelian and
+Josephus. We may hesitate to accept the statement that Italy
+had once 1197 cities, or that Gaul possessed 1200.<note place="foot">Aelian, <hi rend="italic">V. Hist.</hi> ix. 16,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ᾤκησαν καὶ πόλεις τὴν Ἰταλίαν πάλαι ἑπτὰ καὶ ἐνηνήκοντα καὶ ἑκατὸν πρὸς ταῖς χιλίαις</foreign>;
+Jos. <hi rend="italic">B. J.</hi> ii. 16.</note> In these
+estimates, if they have any solid foundation, the term <q>city</q>
+must be taken in a very elastic sense. But there are other
+more trustworthy reckonings which sufficiently support the
+glowing description of Aristides. When the Romans conquered
+Spain and Gaul, they found a system of <hi rend="italic">pagi</hi> or cantons,
+with very few considerable towns. The 800 towns which
+are said to have been taken by Julius Caesar can have been
+little more than villages. But the Romanisation of both
+countries meant centralisation. Where the Romans did not
+find towns they created them.<note place="foot">Arnold, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Prov. Administration</hi>,
+p. 203.</note> Gradually, but rapidly, the
+isolated rural life became more social and urban. In the
+north-eastern province of Spain, out of 293 communities in the
+time of the elder Pliny, 179 were in some sense urban, 114
+were still purely rustic;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> iii. 4.</note> and we may be sure that this is an
+immense advance on the condition of the country at the time
+of the conquest. In the reign of Antoninus Pius, only 27 of
+these rural districts remained without an organised civic centre.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Rom. Prov.</hi> i. 73.</note>
+In Gaul, Julius Caesar impressed the stamp of Rome on the
+province of Narbo, by founding cities of the Roman type, and
+his policy was continued by Augustus. The loose cantonal
+system almost disappeared from the province in the south,
+although it lingered long in the northern regions of Gaul. Yet
+even in the north, on the borders of Germany, Cologne, from
+the reign of Claudius, became the envy of the barbarians across
+the Rhine,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 168; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 36; Marq.
+<hi rend="italic">Röm. Staatsverw.</hi> i. 121; Bury, <hi rend="italic">Rom.
+Emp.</hi> p. 83.</note> and Trèves, from the days of Augustus, already
+anticipated its glory as a seat of empire from Diocletian to
+Gratian and Valentinian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C. Theod.</hi> xiii. 3, 11.</note> In the Agri Decumates, between
+<pb n="201"/><anchor id="Pg201"/>the Rhine and Neckar, the remains of baths and aqueducts, the
+mosaics and bronzes and pottery, which antiquarian industry
+has collected and explored, attest the existence of at least 160
+flourishing and civilised communities.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i. 125.</note> Baden was already a
+crowded resort for its healing waters when, in <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 69, it was
+given up to fire and sword by Caecina in his advance to meet
+the army of Otho in the valley of the Po.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 67; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> the dedication
+of a temple to Isis by a magistrate of
+Baden and his wife and daughter; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi>
+457.</note> The Danube was
+lined with flourishing communities of Roman origin. In the
+170 years during which Dacia was included in the Empire,
+more than 120 towns were organised by the conquering race.<note place="foot">Marq. i. 155, in keiner andern
+Provinz lässt sich die Entwickelung
+der römischen Städteanlagen so genau
+verfolgen als in Dacien. Arnold, <hi rend="italic">R.
+Prov. Admin.</hi> p. 205.</note>
+Greek cities, like Tomi on the Euxine, record their gratitude to
+their patrons in the same formal terms as Pompeii or Venusia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 5287.</note>
+If we may believe Philostratus, there were 500 flourishing
+cities in the province of Asia which more than rivalled the
+splendour of Ionia before the Lydian and Persian conquests.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> ii. 3.</note>
+Many of these were of ancient origin, but many had been
+founded by Rome.<note place="foot">Arnold, p. 205; Marq. i. 199.</note> Laodicea was regarded as an unimportant
+place in the reign of Tiberius; yet the wealth of its private
+citizens was celebrated.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 55; Strab. xii. 578.</note> One of them had attained a fortune
+which enabled him to bequeath it a sum of nearly half
+a million. The elder Pliny could reckon 40 cities of importance
+in Egypt, which had in his time a population of
+over seven millions;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> v. 60; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">SG.</hi> iii. 110.</note> and Alexandria, next after Rome herself,
+was regarded as the most dazzling ornament of the Empire.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xiv. 223 (392),
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πόλις ἐγκαλλώπισμα τῆς ὑμετέρας γέγονεν ἡγεμονίας</foreign>.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Perhaps nowhere, however, had the <q>Roman peace</q> worked
+greater miracles of civic prosperity than in North Africa.
+That the population of Roman Africa was in the period of
+the Empire extraordinarily dense, appears from the number
+of its episcopal sees, which in the fifth century had reached
+a total of 297.<note place="foot">Cf. Victor, <hi rend="italic">Vit.</hi> i. 7; v. 9; Friedl.
+<hi rend="italic">SG.</hi> iii. 110; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Migne, <hi rend="italic">Patrol. Lat.</hi>
+t. lviii. 270, notitia Africae.</note> The remains of more than 20 amphitheatres
+can still be traced. There is indeed no more startling proof of
+the range and sweep of Roman civilisation than the wreck of
+<pb n="202"/><anchor id="Pg202"/>those capitols, forums, aqueducts, and temples in what are now
+sandy solitudes, not even occupied by a native village. In
+the province of Numidia, within a few leagues of the Sahara,
+the Roman colony of Thamugadi (Timgad) was founded, as an
+inscription tells, by Trajan in the year 100.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2355; Cagnat, <hi rend="italic">L’Armée
+Rom. d’Afrique</hi>, p. 582; Boissier,
+<hi rend="italic">L’Afr. Rom.</hi> p. 180.</note> There, in what
+is now a scene of utter loneliness and desolation, the remains
+of a busy and well-organised community have been brought to
+light by French explorers. The town was built by the third
+legion, which for generations, almost as a hereditary caste,
+protected Roman civilisation against the restless tribes of the
+desert. The chief buildings were probably completed in 117.
+The preservation of so much, after eighteen centuries, is a
+proof that the work was well and thoroughly done. The ruts
+of carriage wheels can still be seen in the main street, which is
+spanned by a triumphal arch, adorned with marble columns.
+Porticoes and colonnades gave shelter from the heat to the
+passers-by, and two fountains played at the further end. Water,
+which is now invisible on the spot, was then brought in
+channels from the hills, and distributed at a fixed rate among
+private houses.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 5326.</note> The forum was in the usual style, with raised
+side walks and porticoes, a basilica, a senate-house and rostrum,
+a shrine of Fortuna Augusta, and a crowd of statues to the
+emperors from M. Aurelius to Julian.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Afr. Rom.</hi> p. 187.</note> This petty place had
+its theatre, where the seats can still be seen rising in their
+due gradation of rank. An imposing capitol, in which, as at
+home, the Roman Trinity, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, were
+duly worshipped, was restored in the reign of Valentinian I.,
+and dedicated by that Publius Caeionius Albinus who was one
+of the last of the pagan aristocracy, and who figures in the
+Letters of Symmachus and the <hi rend="italic">Saturnalia</hi> of Macrobius.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2388; Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 107,
+§ 1; Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i, 2, 15.</note> The
+inscriptions on the site reveal the regular municipal constitution,
+with the names of seventy decurions, each of whom probably
+paid his honorarium of £13 or more when he entered on
+his office.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2403; <hi rend="italic">Suppl.</hi> ii. 17903;
+<hi rend="italic">Suppl.</hi> i. 12058. This inscription, from
+an obscure place, shows how an original
+honorarium of HS. 1600 was finally
+increased by voluntary generosity to
+HS. 12,000.</note> The honours of the duumvirate and the aedileship
+cost respectively £32 and £24.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2341, 17838.</note> And here, as elsewhere, the
+<pb n="203"/><anchor id="Pg203"/>public monuments and buildings were generally erected by
+private ambition or munificence. A statue and little shrine
+of Fortuna Augusta were given by two ladies, at a cost of over
+£200, in the days of Hadrian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii.; <hi rend="italic">Suppl.</hi> ii. 17831.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The greatest glory of the imperial administration for
+nearly two centuries was the skilful and politic tolerance
+with which it reconciled a central despotism with a remarkable
+range of local liberty. It did not attempt to impose a
+uniform organisation or a bureaucratic control on the vast
+mass of races and peoples whom the fortune of Rome had
+brought under her sway. Rather, for ages its guiding
+principle was, as far as possible, to leave ancient landmarks
+undisturbed, and to give as much free play to local liberties
+as was compatible with the safety and efficiency of the
+imperial guardian of order and peace. Hence those many
+diversities in the relation between provincial towns and Rome,
+represented by the names of free, federate, or stipendiary
+cities, municipium and colonia. Many retained their old
+laws, constitution, and judicial system.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i. 45; Bury, <hi rend="italic">Rom.
+Emp.</hi> p. 77; Arnold, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Prov.
+Admin.</hi> p. 210.</note> They retained in
+some cases the names of magistracies, which recalled the
+days of independence: there were still archons at Athens,
+suffetes in African towns, demarchs at Naples. The title of
+medixtuticus still lingered here and there in old Oscan
+communities.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3720, 3800, 3801, 3056,
+3057, 3804.</note> When she had crushed the national spirit,
+and averted the danger of armed revolt, Rome tolerated, and
+even fostered, municipal freedom, for more than a hundred
+years after the last shadowy pretence of popular government
+had disappeared from her own forum.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 15; Momms. <hi rend="italic">Röm.
+St.</hi> ii. 1002; Duruy, v. pp. 336-346;
+Gréard, <hi rend="italic">Plut.</hi> 221, 237; Plut. <hi rend="italic">Reip. Ger.
+Pr.</hi> c. 17, 19. The first curatores
+civitatum are heard of in the reigns
+of Nerva and Trajan; cf. Marq. i. 510,
+n. 10.</note> Central control and
+uniformity were established in those departments which
+affected the peace and welfare of the whole vast commonwealth.
+Although the interference of the provincial governor
+in local administration was theoretically possible in varying
+degrees, yet it may well be doubted whether a citizen of
+Lyons or Marseilles, of Antioch or Alexandria, was often
+made conscious of any limitation of his freedom by imperial
+<pb n="204"/><anchor id="Pg204"/>power. While delation and confiscation and massacre were
+working havoc on the banks of the Tiber, the provinces were
+generally tranquil and prosperous. The people elected their
+magistrates, who administered municipal affairs with little
+interference from government. The provincial administration
+of a Nero, an Otho, a Vitellius, or a Domitian was often no less
+prudent and considerate than that of a Vespasian or a Trajan.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> 32; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 6;
+Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, x.; <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, iii. provinciam
+administravit moderatione singulari;
+<hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> v. Vespasian had to increase
+burdens, Suet. xvi.; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 84;
+as to Trajan, cf. Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 20; Suet.
+<hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> 8. Nero, it is true, is said to
+have encouraged plunder (Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>,
+32; Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> 18, 6). Yet the
+general prosperity was undisturbed,
+Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> 170; Arnold, <hi rend="italic">Rom.
+Prov. Admin.</hi> 135; Gréard, <hi rend="italic">Plut.</hi>
+199.</note>
+And the worst of the emperors share with the best in the
+universal gratitude of the provinces for the blessings of the
+<q>Roman peace.</q><note place="foot">See a crowd of inscriptions to
+Domitian and Commodus in remote
+places in Africa; cf. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 1016,
+1019; 10570, 8702, in which Commodus
+is described as indulgentissimus
+princeps, etc.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But although for generations there was a settled abstinence
+from centralisation on the part of the imperial government,
+the many varieties of civic constitution in the provinces
+tended by an irresistible drift to a uniform type of organisation.
+Free and federate communities voluntarily sought the position
+of a colony or a municipium.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i. 517 sq.; Arnold,
+p. 212.</note> Just as the provincial town
+must have its capitol, with the cult of Jupiter, Juno, and
+Minerva, or imported the street names Velabrum or Vicus
+Tuscus, so the little community called itself <hi rend="italic">respublica</hi>, its
+commons the <hi rend="italic">populus</hi>, its curia the senate or the <hi rend="italic">amplissimus
+et splendidissimus ordo</hi>; its magistrates sometimes bore the
+majestic names of praetor, dictator, or censor, in a few cases
+even of consul.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Henz.</hi> iii. <hi rend="italic">Ind.</hi> p. 156; Inscr. 2322,
+6980, 4983; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i. 477.
+There were consuls at Tusculum and
+Beneventum. But the grand style was
+ridiculed by Cicero, <hi rend="italic">In Pis.</hi> xi. 24.</note> This almost ludicrous imitation of the great
+city is an example of the magical power which Rome always
+exercised on her most distant subjects, and even on the outer
+world of barbarism, down to the last days when her forces
+were ebbing away. The ease and rapidity of communication
+along the great routes, the frequent visits of proconsuls and
+procurators and generals, with the numerous train which
+attended them, the presence of the ubiquitous Roman merchant
+and traveller, kept even remote places in touch with the
+<pb n="205"/><anchor id="Pg205"/>capital. The <hi rend="italic">acta diurna</hi>, with official news and bits of
+scandal and gossip, regularly arrived in distant provincial
+towns and frontier camps.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 31; xvi. 22, diurna
+per provincias, per exercitus curatius
+leguntur. Peter, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> i. 212;
+Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 191; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i.
+88; cf. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 11813; Lamprid.
+<hi rend="italic">Com.</hi> 15.</note> The last speech of Pliny, or the
+freshest epigrams of Martial, were within a short time selling
+on the bookstalls of Lyons or Vienne.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ix. 11, 2; Mart. vii. 88.</note> Until the appearance of
+railways and steamboats, it may be doubted whether there was
+any age in history in which travelling was easier or more general.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Apart from the immense stimulus which was given to
+trade and commerce by the pacification of the world, liberal
+curiosity, or restless ennui, or the passion to preach and
+propagate ideas, carried immense numbers to the most distant
+lands.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 28, 104; Luc. <hi rend="italic">Tox.</hi> 27;
+<hi rend="italic">De Dips.</hi> 6; <hi rend="italic">Philops.</hi> 33; <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> 44;
+Epict. <hi rend="italic">Dis.</hi> iii. 13.</note> The travelling sophist found his way to towns on the
+edge of the Scythian steppes, to the home of the Brahmans,
+or to the depths of the Soudan.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iii. 50, vi.;
+D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 36.</note> The tour up the Nile was
+part of a liberal culture in the days of Lucian as it was in the
+days of Herodotus. The romantic charm of travel in Greece
+was probably heightened for many by the tales of Thessalian
+brigands and sorceresses which meet us in the novel of
+Apuleius. The Emperor Hadrian, who visited almost every
+interesting scene in his dominions, from the Solway to the
+Euphrates, often trudging for days at the head of his soldiers,
+is a true representative of the migratory tastes of his time.
+Seneca, indeed, finds in this rage for change of scene only
+a symptom of the universal unrest. Epictetus, on the other
+hand, and Aristides expatiate with rapture on the universal
+security and wellbeing, due to the disappearance of brigandage,
+piracy, and war. The seas are alive with merchantmen;
+deserts have become populous scenes of industry; the
+great roads are carried over the broadest rivers and the most
+defiant mountain barriers. The earth has become the common
+possession of all. Nor is this mere rhetoric. Travelling to all
+parts of the known world had become expeditious, and even
+luxurious. From the Second Punic War, traders, couriers, and
+travellers had moved freely along the great roads.<note place="foot">Hudemann, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. des röm. Postwesens</hi>,
+p. 8 <anchor id="corr205"/><corr sic="sq.">sq.;</corr> Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i.
+417; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">SG.</hi> ii. 8.</note> The
+<pb n="206"/><anchor id="Pg206"/>government post, which was first organised by Augustus on
+the model of the Persian, provided at regular intervals the
+means of conveyance for officials, or for those furnished with
+the requisite diploma. Private enterprise had also organised
+facilities of travel, and at the gates of country towns such as
+Pompeii, Praeneste, or Tibur, there were stations of the posting
+corporations (the <hi rend="italic">cisiarii</hi> or <hi rend="italic">jumentarii</hi>) where carriages could
+be hired, with change of horses at each stage.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4093, 2413, 5163, 6983.</note> The speed
+with which great distances were traversed in those days is at
+first sight rather startling. Caesar once travelled 100 miles
+a day in a journey from Rome to the Rhone.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Jul. Caes.</hi> 57.</note> The freedman
+Icelus in seven days carried the news of Nero’s death to Galba
+in Spain,<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Galba</hi>, 7.</note> the journey of 332 miles from Tarraco to Clunia
+having been made at the rate of nearly ten miles an hour.
+This of course was express speed. The ordinary rate of
+travelling is probably better represented by the leisurely
+journey of Horace and Maecenas to Brundisium, or that of
+Martial’s book from Tarraco to Bilbilis.<note place="foot">Mart. x. 104; cf. Hor. <hi rend="italic">S.</hi> i. 5, 104.</note> About 130 miles a
+day was the average distance accomplished by sea. Vessels put
+out from Ostia or Puteoli for every port in the Mediterranean.
+From Puteoli to Corinth was a voyage of five days. About
+the same time was needed to reach Tarraco from Ostia. A
+ship might arrive at Alexandria from the Palus Maeotis in a
+fortnight.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">SG.</hi> ii. 12 sqq.</note> Many a wandering sophist, like Dion Chrysostom
+or Apollonius of Tyana, traversed great distances on foot, or
+with a modest wallet on a mule. The rhetor Aristides once
+spent a hundred days in a journey at mid-winter from Mysia
+to Rome.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxiv. 537; cf. Hor. <hi rend="italic">S.</hi>
+i. 6, 105.</note> But there was hardly any limit to the luxury and
+ostentatious splendour with which the great and opulent made
+their progresses, attended or preceded by troops of footmen and
+runners, and carrying with them costly plate and myrrhine
+vases.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 123, § 7.</note> The thousand carriages which Nero took with him on a
+progress, the silver-shod mules of Poppaea, the paraphernalia of
+luxury described by Seneca, if they are not mythical, were
+probably the exceptional displays of a self-indulgence bordering
+on lunacy.<note place="foot">Cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xliv. xxx.; Sen.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 87, § 9; 123.</note> But practical and sensible comfort in travelling
+<pb n="207"/><anchor id="Pg207"/>was perhaps then commoner than it was, until quite recently,
+among ourselves. The carriages in which the two indefatigable
+Plinies used to ride, enabled them to read at their ease, or dictate
+to an amanuensis.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 5, 15; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi>
+xxxiii.; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">SG.</hi> ii. 19.</note> The inns, from the time of Horace to the
+time of Sidonius, were as a rule bad, and frequently disreputable,
+and even dangerous, places of resort.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> i. 7; i. 17; Sidon.
+Apoll. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 11. Cf. <hi rend="italic">Rom. Soc. in
+the Last Century of the Western Empire</hi>,
+p. 172 (1st ed.); Friedl. ii. 20.</note> And vehicles were
+often arranged for sleeping on a journey. We may be sure
+that many an imperial officer after the time of Julius Caesar
+passed nights in his carriage, while hurrying to join the forces
+on the Rhine or the Danube. With all this rapid circulation
+of officials and travellers, the far-stretching limits of the
+Roman world must, to the general eye, have contracted, the
+remotest places were drawn more and more towards the centre,
+and the inexhaustible vitality of the imperial city diffused itself
+with a magical power of silent transformation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The modes in which the fully developed municipalities of
+the Antonine age had originated and were organised were
+very various. Wherever, as in the Greek East or Carthaginian
+Africa, towns already existed, the Romans, of course, used them
+in their organisation of a province, although they added liberally
+to the number, as in Syria, Pontus, and Cappadocia.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i. 17, 199, 214, 317;
+Arnold, <hi rend="italic">Prov. Adm.</hi> 203.</note> Where
+a country was still in the cantonal state, the villages or markets
+were grouped around a civic centre, and a municipal town,
+such as Nîmes or Lyons, would thus become the metropolis
+of a considerable tract of territory. The colony of Vienne was
+the civic centre of the Allobroges.<note place="foot">Arn. 205, 208; Marq. i. 114, 118.</note> In the settlement of the
+Alps many of the remote mountain cantons were attached to
+towns such as Tridentum, Verona, or Brixia.<note place="foot">Marq. i. 14.</note> Sometimes, as
+in Dacia, the civic organisation was created at a stroke.<note place="foot">Id. i. 155.</note> But
+it is well known that, especially towards the frontiers of the
+Empire, in Britain, on the Rhine, and in North Africa, the
+towns of the second century had often grown out of the <hi rend="italic">castra
+stativa</hi> of the legions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great reorganisation of Augustus had made each legion
+a permanent corps, with a history and identity of its own.
+To ensure the tranquillity of the Empire the legions were
+<pb n="208"/><anchor id="Pg208"/>distributed in permanent camps along the frontier, the only
+inland cities with a regular military garrison being Lyons and
+Carthage.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Afr. Rom.</hi> p. 104.</note> Many legions never changed their quarters for
+generations. The Tertia Augusta, which has left so many
+memorials of itself in the inscriptions of Lambaesis, remained,
+with only a single break, in the same district from the time
+of Augustus to that of Diocletian.<note place="foot">See the history of this legion in
+Cagnat, <hi rend="italic">L’Armée Rom. d’Afrique</hi>, p.
+148 sqq. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii., Momms. <hi rend="italic">Praef.</hi>
+xix. sq. The legion was first stationed
+at Thevesta.</note> There, for two generations,
+it kept sleepless watch against the robber tribes of the
+Sahara. The legion was also peacefully employed in erecting
+fortifications and making roads and bridges, when the camp was
+visited by Hadrian in the year 130.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 5319; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2532,
+10048; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Mommsen, p. 21. For the
+date of this visit, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Cagnat, p. 154.
+<hi rend="italic">Vit. Hadr.</hi> 12, 13.</note> Gradually soldiers were
+allowed to form family relations, more or less regular, until,
+under Septimius Severus, the legionary was permitted to live
+in his household like any other citizen.<note place="foot">Herodian, iii. 8; cf. Cagnat, p. 451.</note> From the remains
+at Lambaesis, it is now considered certain that, in the third
+century, the camp had ceased to be the soldier’s home. The
+suttlers and camp-followers had long gathered in the neighbourhood
+of the camp, in huts which were called <hi rend="italic">Canabae legionis</hi>.
+There, for a long time, the soldier, when off duty, sought his
+pleasures and amusements, and there, after the changes of
+Septimius Severus, he took up his abode. At first the
+Canabae of Lambaesis was only a <hi rend="italic">vicus</hi>; it became, under
+Marcus Aurelius, a <hi rend="italic">municipium</hi>—the <hi rend="italic">Respublica Lambaesitanorum</hi>,
+with the civic constitution which is rendered familiar to
+us by so many inscriptions.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2611; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 7408.</note> The Legionaries seem to have
+been happy and contented at Lambaesis; their sons were trained
+to arms and followed their fathers in the ranks;<note place="foot">Cagnat, 365, 453; cf. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii.
+3015.</note> the legion
+became to some extent a hereditary caste. Old veterans
+remained on the scene of their service, after receiving their
+discharge with a pension from the chest.<note place="foot">Cagnat, 481-87; Marq. ii. 544.</note> The town developed
+in the regular fashion, and dignified itself by a capitol,
+an amphitheatre, two forums, a triumphal arch; and the many
+monuments of public and private life found on the site reveal
+a highly organised society, moulded out of barbarous and alien
+<pb n="209"/><anchor id="Pg209"/>elements, and stamped with the inimitable and enduring
+impress of Rome. Out of such casual and unpromising
+materials sprang numbers of urban communities, which reproduced,
+in their outline and in their social tone, the forms and
+spirit of the free Republic of Rome. The capitol and the
+forum are merely the external symbols of a closer bond of
+parentage. The Roman military discipline did not more
+completely master and transform the Numidian or Celtic
+recruit, than the inspiration of her civil polity diffused among
+races imbruted by servitude, or instinct with the love of
+a lawless, nomadic freedom, the sober attachment to an ordered
+civic life which was obedient to a long tradition, yet vividly
+interested in its own affairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On hardly any side of ancient life is the information
+furnished by the inscriptions so rich as on the spirit and
+organisation of municipalities. Here one may learn details of
+communal life which are never alluded to in Roman literature.
+From this source, also, we must seek the only authentic
+materials for the reconstruction of a municipality of the first
+century. The <hi rend="italic">Album Canusii</hi> and the tablets containing the
+laws of Malaga and Salpensa have not only settled more than
+one question as to the municipal organisation of the early
+Empire, but have enabled us to form almost as clear-cut a
+conception of it as we have of the corporate organisation of
+our own great towns.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, unlike our civic republics, the Roman municipal town
+was distinctly aristocratic, or rather timocratic, in its constitution.
+A man’s place in the community, as a rule, was fixed by his
+ancestry, his official grade, or his capacity to spend. The
+dictum of Trimalchio was too literally true in the municipal
+life of that age—<q>a man is what he is worth.</q> Provincial
+society was already parted and graduated, though less decidedly,
+by those rigid lines of materialistic demarcation which became
+gaping fissures in the society of the Theodosian code. The
+Curia or Senate was open only to the possessor of a certain
+fortune; at Como, for instance, HS.100,000, elsewhere perhaps
+even more. On the other hand, the richest freedman could not
+become a member of the Curia or hold any civic magistracy,<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i. 499; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> 29; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 19;
+Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Afr. Rom.</hi> p. 195.</note>
+<pb n="210"/><anchor id="Pg210"/>although he might be decorated with their insignia. His
+ambition had to be satisfied with admission to the order of
+the Augustales, which ranked socially after the members of the
+Curia. In the list of the Curia, which was revised every five
+years, the order of official and social precedence was most
+scrupulously observed. In the Album Canusii of the year
+<hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 223,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3721; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim.
+Einl.</hi> 30.</note> the first rank is assigned to thirty-nine patrons,
+who have held imperial office, or who are senators or knights.
+Next come the local magnates who have been dignified by
+election to any of the four great municipal magistracies.
+Last in order are the <hi rend="italic">pedani</hi>, that is, the citizens possessing
+the requisite qualification, who have not yet held any municipal
+office. At the bottom of the list stand twenty-five <hi rend="italic">praetextati</hi>,
+who were probably the sons of the more distinguished
+citizens, and who, like the sons of senators of the Republic,
+were silent witnesses of the proceedings in the Curia. From
+this body, and from all the magistracies, all persons engaged
+in certain mean or disgraceful occupations were expressly
+excluded, along with the great mass of the poorer citizens,
+the <hi rend="italic">tenuiores</hi>. The taint of servile birth, the possession of
+<hi rend="italic">libertinae opes</hi>, was an indelible blot. In countless inscriptions
+this gradation of rank is sharply accentuated. If a man leaves
+a bequest for an annual feast, with a distribution of money, the
+rich patron or the decurio will receive perhaps five times the
+amount which is doled out to the simple plebeian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6989, 7001, 7199, ob
+duplam sportulam collatum sibi, 4020,
+3703.</note> The distinction
+of rank, even in punishment for crime, which meets
+us everywhere in the Theodosian Code, has already appeared.
+The <hi rend="italic">honestior</hi> is not to be degraded by the punishment of
+crucifixion or by the stroke of the rod.<note place="foot">Hartmann, <hi rend="italic">De Exilio</hi>, pp. 58 sq.;
+Duruy, <hi rend="italic">Hist. Rom.</hi> vi. 643.</note> But it is on their
+tombs that the passion of the Romans for some sort of distinction,
+however shadowy, shows itself most strikingly. On these slabs
+every grade of dignity in a long career is enumerated with
+minute care. The exact value of a man’s public benefactions
+or his official salary will be recorded with pride.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 946, 3708.</note> Even the
+dealer in aromatics or in rags will make a boast of some petty
+office in the college of his trade.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7192.</note> But, although rank and office
+<pb n="211"/><anchor id="Pg211"/>were extravagantly valued in these societies, wealth was after
+all the great distinction. The cities were in the hands of the
+rich, and, in return for social deference and official power, the
+rich were expected to give lavishly to all public objects. The
+worship of wealth, the monumental flattery of rich patrons and
+benefactors, was very interested and servile. On the other
+hand, there probably never was a time when the duties of wealth
+were so powerfully enforced by opinion, or so cheerfully, and
+even recklessly, performed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, although these communities were essentially aristocratic
+in tone and constitution, the commonalty still retained some
+power in the Antonine age. On many inscriptions they appear
+side by side with the Curial <q>ordo</q> and the Augustales.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3703, 3706, 4009, 3937,
+3704, 3725, 4020; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> x. 111; cf.
+Ohnesseit, <hi rend="italic">De Jure Municip.</hi> 41.</note> They
+had still in the reign of Domitian the right to elect their
+magistrates. It was long believed that, with the suppression
+of popular elections at Rome in the reign of Tiberius, the
+popular choice of their great magistrates must also have been
+withdrawn from municipal towns.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i. 472.</note> This has now been disproved
+by the discovery of the laws of Malaga and Salpensa,
+in which the most elaborate provisions are made for a free and
+uncontaminated election by the whole people.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.
+    <anchor id="corr211"/><corr sic="Henz,">Henz.</corr></hi> 7421; <hi rend="italic">Lex Mal.</hi> §§ 53, 55.</note> And we can
+still almost hear the noise of election days among the ruins of
+Pompeii.<note place="foot">Mau, 376, 388-89 (Tr.).</note> Many of the inscriptions of Pompeii are election
+placards, recommending particular candidates. There, in red
+letters painted on the walls, we can read that <q>the barbers
+wish to have Trebius as aedile,</q> or that <q>the fruit-sellers, with
+one accord, support the candidature of Holconius Priscus for
+the duumvirate.</q> The porters, muleteers, and garlic dealers
+have each their favourite. The master fuller, Vesonius Primus,
+backs Cn. Helvius as a worthy man. Even ladies took
+part in the contest and made their separate appeals. <q>His
+little sweetheart</q> records that she is working for Claudius.<note place="foot">Claudium iivir. animula facit, <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iv. 425, 677, 644.</note>
+Personal popularity no doubt then, as always, attracted such
+electoral support. But the student of the inscriptions may be
+inclined to think that the free and independent electors had
+also a keen eye for the man who was likely to build a new
+colonnade for the forum, or a new <hi rend="italic">schola</hi> for the guild, or, best
+<pb n="212"/><anchor id="Pg212"/>of all, to send down thirty pairs of gladiators into the arena
+<q>with plenty of blood.</q><note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 45, ferrum optimum
+daturus est, sine fuga, carnarium in
+medio, etc.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The laws of Malaga and Salpensa prescribe, in the fullest
+detail, all the forms to be observed in the election of magistrates.
+These were generally six in number—two duumvirs,<note place="foot">The title of the highest magistracy
+varied a good deal: cf. Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi>
+i. 475, 89, <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> iii. <hi rend="italic">Ind.</hi> 154.</note> who were
+the highest officers, two aediles, and two quaestors, for each year.
+Every fifth year, instead of the duumvirs, two <hi rend="italic">quinquennales</hi>
+were elected, with the extraordinary duty of conducting the
+municipal census.<note place="foot">Marq. i. 485; <hi rend="italic">Henz. Ind.</hi> p. 157.
+Often described as iivir quinquennalis,
+or iivir censoria potestate quinq. etc.,
+or shortly quinquennalis; cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi>
+3882, 3721.</note> The candidates for all these offices were
+required to be free born, of the age of twenty-five at least, of
+irreproachable character, and the possessors of a certain fortune.
+The qualifications were the same as those prescribed by the <hi rend="italic">lex
+Julia</hi> for admission to the municipal Senate, which expressly
+excluded persons engaged in certain disreputable callings—gladiators,
+actors, pimps, auctioneers, and undertakers.<note place="foot">Arnold, <hi rend="italic">Prov. Adm.</hi> pp. 225, 226.</note> In
+the best days the competition for office was undoubtedly keen,
+and the candidates were numerous. In the year <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 4, the year
+of the death of C. <anchor id="corr212"/><corr sic="Cæsar">Caesar</corr>, the grandson of Augustus, so hot was
+the rivalry that the town of Pisa was left without magistrates
+owing to serious disturbances at the elections.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 643.</note> But it is an
+ominous fact that the law of Malaga, in the reign of Domitian,
+makes provision for the contingency of a failure of candidates.
+In such a case the presiding duumvir was to nominate the required
+number, they in turn an equal number, and the combined
+nominees had to designate a third set equal in number to themselves.
+The choice of the people was then restricted to these
+involuntary candidates. The city has evidently advanced a stage
+towards the times of the Lower Empire, when the magistrates
+were appointed by the Curia from among themselves, with no
+reference to the people.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Lex Malag.</hi> § 51; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 7421; Marq.
+i. 475; <hi rend="italic">C. Th.</hi> xii. 5, 1.</note> A man might, indeed, well hesitate
+before offering himself for an office which imposed a heavy expenditure
+on the holder of it. The honorarium payable on
+admission amounted, in an obscure place like Thamugadi, to
+about £32 for the duumvirate, and £24 for the aedileship.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2341, 17838.</note> In
+<pb n="213"/><anchor id="Pg213"/>the greater Italian cities it probably would be much more; at
+Pompeii the newly elected duumvir paid more than £80.<note place="foot">Marq. i. 499 n. 13.</note> But
+the man chosen by the people often felt bound to outstrip the
+bare demands of law or custom by a prodigal liberality. He
+must build or repair some public work, to signalise his year of
+office, and, at the dedication of it, good taste required him to
+exhibit costly games, or to give a banquet to the citizens, with a
+largess to all of every rank small or great.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 7080, 7082, 3811, 3817, 3882.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in return for its liabilities, the position of a duumvir
+gave undoubted power and distinction. The office was the
+image or shadow of the ancient consulship, and occasionally,
+as the inscriptions attest, a Hadrian or an Antoninus Pius
+did not disdain to accept it.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3817; cf. Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 19.</note> The duumvirs commanded the
+local militia, when it was, on emergency, called out.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Lex Urson.</hi> § 103.</note> They
+presided at meetings of the people and the Curia, they proposed
+questions for their deliberation, and carried the decrees
+into effect. They had civil jurisdiction up to a certain
+amount, and their criminal jurisdiction, which, in the third
+century, had been transferred to imperial functionaries, was,
+according to the most probable opinion, undiminished at least
+down to the end of the first century.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> 28;
+Duruy, v. 349 sqq.</note> This judicial power,
+however, was limited by the <hi rend="italic">intercessio</hi> of colleagues and the
+right of appeal. They had extensive responsibilities in finance,
+for the collection of dues and taxes, and the recovery of all
+moneys owing to the municipality.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Lex Malag.</hi> § 60 sq.</note> After the fall of the
+free Republic, when so many avenues of ambition were closed,
+many an able man might well satisfy his desire for power
+and distinction by the duumvirate of a provincial town.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Curia, or local senate, is peculiarly interesting to the historical
+student, because it was to the conversion of the curiales
+into a hereditary caste, loaded with incalculable liabilities,
+that the decay of the Western Empire was to a large extent
+due.<note place="foot">See <hi rend="italic">Roman Society in the Last
+Century of the Western Empire</hi>, bk.
+iii. c. 2.</note> But, in the reign of Domitian, the Curia is still erect
+and dignified. Although the individual decurio seldom or never
+assumes the title senator in the inscriptions,<note place="foot">There is one case in <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2279.</note> the Curia as a
+<pb n="214"/><anchor id="Pg214"/>whole often bears the august name and titles of the majestic
+Roman Senate.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> vol. iii. <hi rend="italic">Ind.</hi> p. 152.</note> And assuredly down to the middle of the
+second century there was no lack of candidates for admission.
+Every five years the roll of the Curia was revised and drawn
+up afresh by the quinquennales. The conditions were those
+for holding a magistracy, including a property qualification,
+which varied in different places.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 19; at Como the census
+was HS.100,000; cf. Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 44.</note> The number of ordinary
+members was generally 100.<note place="foot">The Curia is sometimes designated
+as Cviri, <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 764, 3737, 1552.
+Or., however, interprets CV. as Civium
+universorum in 764.</note> But it was swelled by patrons
+and other extraordinary members. The quinquennales, in
+framing the list, took first the members on the roll of the
+previous term, and then those who had been elected to
+magistracies since the last census. If any vacancies were still
+left, they were filled up from the ranks of those who, not
+having yet held any municipal office, were otherwise qualified
+by the possession of a sufficient fortune.<note place="foot">Ohnesseit, <hi rend="italic">De Jure Municip.</hi> p.
+55; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i. 504.</note> In the <hi rend="italic">Album
+Canusii</hi>, the men who had held official rank constitute at least
+two-thirds of the Curia. In the composition of such a body
+there would appear to be ample security for administrative
+skill and experience. And yet we shall find that it was
+precisely through want of prudence or skill that the door was
+opened for that bureaucratic interference which, in the second
+century, began, with momentous results, to sap the freedom
+and independence of municipal life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The honours and powers of the provincial council were
+long sufficient to compensate the decurio for the heavy
+demands made upon his generosity. To all but comparatively
+few the career of imperial office and distinction was closed.
+His own town became each man’s <q>patria,</q> as Como was even
+to a man like Pliny, who played so great a part in the life of
+the capital.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 13, 9.</note> There is the ring of a very genuine public spirit
+and a love for the local commonwealth in a host of the
+inscriptions of that age.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">e.g.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3703, 7190.</note> The vastness and overwhelming
+grandeur of a world-wide Empire, in which the individual
+citizen was a mere atom, made men crave for any distinction
+which seemed to raise them above the grey flat level which
+surrounds a democratic despotism. And even the ordinary
+<pb n="215"/><anchor id="Pg215"/>decurio had some badges to mark him off from the crowd.
+The pompous honorific titles of the Lower Empire, indeed,
+had not come into vogue. But the Curial had a place of
+honour at games and festivals, a claim to a larger share in
+the distributions of money by private benefactors, exemption,
+as one of the <hi rend="italic">honestiores</hi>, from the more degrading forms of
+punishment, the free supply of water from the public sources,<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> 31.</note>
+and other perquisites and honours, which varied in different
+localities. The powers of the Curia were also very considerable.
+The duumvirs indeed possessed extensive prerogatives
+which strong men may have sometimes strained.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 22. This autocratic
+act was the abolition of the games at
+Vienne by a duumvir.</note> But there
+was a right of appeal to the Curia from judicial decisions of
+the duumvirs in certain cases. And their control of games and
+festivals, and of the finances of the community, was limited
+by the necessity of consulting the Curia and of carrying out
+its orders.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Lex Urson.</hi> § 129.</note> In the <hi rend="italic">lex Ursonensis</hi> we find a long list of
+matters on which the duumvirs were obliged to take their instructions
+from the Curia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 99; Ohnesseit, <hi rend="italic">De Jure
+Municip.</hi> p. 51.</note> The quorum needed for a valid
+decision varied in different places. In the election of a patron
+a quorum of two-thirds of the decurions was legally required.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 53; <hi rend="italic">Lex Urson.</hi> §§ 96, 97,
+130.</note>
+The names of the duoviri appeared at the head of every curial
+decree, as those of the consuls in every senatusconsultum.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the local aristocracy of curial rank came, in order of
+social precedence, members of the knightly class and the order
+of the Augustales. In the latter half of the first century equestrian
+rank had been conferred with perhaps too lavish a hand.
+And satire was never tired of ridiculing these sham aristocrats,
+Bithynian knights as they were called, often of the lowest
+origin, who on public occasions vulgarly asserted their mushroom
+rank.<note place="foot">Mart. iii. 29; v. 14; v. 23; Juv.
+i. 28; iii. 131, 159.</note> In particular, the army contributed many new
+knights to the society of the provincial towns. A veteran,
+often of humble birth, who had risen to the first place among
+the sixty centurions of a legion, was, on his discharge with
+a good pension, sometimes raised to equestrian rank. He
+frequently returned to his native place, where he became a
+personage of some mark. Such men, along with old officers of
+<pb n="216"/><anchor id="Pg216"/>higher grade, frequently appear in the inscriptions invested
+with priesthoods and high magistracies,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 7002, 7018, 3785, 3789,
+3798, 3733, 3747.</note> and were sometimes
+chosen as patrons of the community.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2287, 3714, 3851.</note> Many of them were
+undoubtedly good and public-spirited men, with the peculiar
+virtues which the life of the Roman camp engendered. But
+some of their class also displayed that coarse and brutal self-assertion,
+and that ignorant contempt for the refinement of
+culture, on which Persius and Juvenal poured their scorn.<note place="foot">Pers. iii. 77; Juv. xvi.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Augustales, ranking next to the curial order, are peculiarly
+interesting, both as representing the wide diffusion of
+the cult of the emperors, and as a class composed of men of
+low, or even servile origin, who had made their fortunes in
+trade, yet whose ambition society found the means of satisfying,
+without breaking down the barriers of aristocratic exclusiveness.<note place="foot">In the Inscr. they are mentioned
+after the decurions and before the
+plebs; cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4009, 3807, 1167.
+On the distinction between the Augustales
+and the Seviri Aug. <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Marq.
+<hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i. 514; Ohnesseit, <hi rend="italic">De Jure
+Munic.</hi> 46; Nessling, <hi rend="italic">De Seviris Aug.</hi>
+    <anchor id="corr216"/><corr sic="(italics removed)">Marq.</corr> says, scheinen die Augustales
+als lebenslängliche Mitglieder des
+Collegiums, die Seviri als jährlich
+<anchor id="corr216a"/><corr sic="wechselude">wechselnde</corr> Beamte desselben zu betrachten
+zu sein.</note>
+The origin of the order of the Augustales was long a subject of
+debate. But it has now been placed beyond doubt that in
+the provincial towns it was a plebeian institution for the cult
+of Augustus, and succeeding emperors, modelled on the aristocratic
+order of the Sodales Augustales, which was established
+by Tiberius in the capital.<note place="foot">Marq. i. 513; Ohnesseit, p. 46; cf.
+<hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3959, 7089; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i.
+54, 73.</note> The Augustales were elected by
+vote of the local curia, without regard to social rank, although
+probably with due respect to wealth, and they included the
+leaders of the great freedman class, whose emergence is one of
+the most striking facts in the social history of the time.
+Figuring on scores of inscriptions, the Augustales are mentioned
+only once in extant Roman literature, in the novel of Petronius,
+where the class has been immortalised, and probably caricatured.<note place="foot">Petron. 65, 71.</note>
+The inscription, for which Trimalchio gives an order to his
+brother Augustal, the stone-cutter, is to record his election in
+absence to the Sevirate, his many virtues and his millions.
+Actual monuments at Assisi and Brescia show that Trimalchio
+was not an altogether imaginary person.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2983; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> v. 4482.</note>
+</p>
+    
+<pb n="217"/><anchor id="Pg217"/>
+
+<p>
+Yet the Augustales, in spite of the vulgar ostentation and
+self-assertion, which have characterised similar classes of the
+<hi rend="italic">nouveaux riches</hi> in all ages, were a very important and useful
+order. They overspread the whole Roman world in the West.
+Their monuments have been traced, not only in almost every
+town in Italy, and in great provincial capitals, like Lyons or
+Tarraco, but in Alpine valleys and lonely outposts of civilisation
+on the edge of the Sahara.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3917, 3924, 1561, 7092,
+4077, 3127, 4020, 5655, 2374.</note> Their special religious duties
+involved considerable expense, from which no doubt the more
+aristocratic class were glad to be relieved. They had to bear
+the cost of sacrifices and festivities on certain days in honour
+of dead emperors. They had to pay an entrance fee on
+admission to the college, which the ambitious among them
+would often lavishly exceed.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> 37.</note> They were organised on the
+lines of other colleges, with patrons, quinquennales, and other
+officials. They had their club-houses where their banquets
+were regularly held, they possessed landed property, and had
+their common places of burial.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3787-8; 7103.</note> But their expenditure and
+their interests were by no means limited to their own immediate
+society. They regarded themselves, and were generally
+treated as public officials, ranking next to the magistrates of
+the Curia. They had the right to wear the purple-bordered
+toga, and to have lictors attending them in the streets.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 65.</note> Places
+of honour were reserved for them at the games and festivals.
+Although as a class they were not eligible for a seat in the
+Curia, or for the municipal magistracies, yet the <hi rend="italic">ornamenta</hi>, the
+external badges and honours attached to these offices, were
+sometimes granted even to freedmen who had done service to
+the community. Thus an Augustal who had paved a road at
+Cales received the <hi rend="italic">ornamenta</hi> of a decurio.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6983.</note> And another, for
+his munificence to Pompeii, by a decree of the Curia, was
+awarded the use of the <hi rend="italic">bisellium</hi>, a seat of honour which was
+usually reserved for the highest dignitaries.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4044, 7094.</note> But the ornaments
+and dignities of their own particular college became
+objects of pride and ambition. Thus a man boasts of having
+been made <hi rend="italic">primus Augustalis perpetuus</hi>, by a decree of the
+Curia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7112.</note> A worthy of Brundisium received from the Curia a
+<pb n="218"/><anchor id="Pg218"/>public funeral, with the ornaments and insignia of an Augustal.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ix. 58.</note>
+In this way, in a society highly conventional, and dominated
+by caste feeling, the order of the Augustales provided both a
+stimulus and a reward for the public spirit of a new class,
+powerful in its wealth and numbers, but generally encumbered
+by the heritage of a doubtful origin. It was a great elevation
+for a man, who, perhaps, had been sold as a boy in some
+Syrian slave market into the degradation of a minion, and
+who had emerged, by petty savings or base services, into the
+comparative freedom of a tainted or despised trade, to find
+himself at last holding a conspicuous rank in his municipality,
+and able to purchase honour and deference from those who
+had trampled on him in his youth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Augustales shared with the members of the Curia the
+heavy burdens which public sentiment then imposed upon the
+rich. Direct taxation for municipal purposes was in the first
+century almost unknown. The municipalities often possessed
+landed property, mines, or quarries. Capua is said to have had
+distant possessions in the island of Crete.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> 42.</note> The towns also
+derived an income from the public baths,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 8, 6.</note> from the rent
+of shops and stalls in the public places, from the supply
+of water to private houses or estates, and from port dues
+and tolls. A very considerable item of revenue must have
+been found in the fee which all decurions, Augustales, and
+magistrates paid on entering on their office or dignity.
+Since the reign of Nerva, the towns had the right of receiving
+legacies and bequests.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> 43.</note> And, on the occurrence of any desolating
+calamity, an earthquake or a fire, the emperor was never
+slow or niggardly in giving relief. In the year 53 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> the town
+of Bologna received an imperial subsidy of about £83,000.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 58.</note>
+The cities of Asia were again and again relieved after desolating
+earthquakes.<note place="foot">Sueton. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> 13; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> ii. 47;
+cf. Nipperdey’s note referring to the
+monument erected to Tiberius in <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>
+30, at Puteoli.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With regard to municipal expenditure, the budget was free
+from many public charges which burden our modern towns.
+The higher offices were unpaid, and in fact demanded large
+generosity from their holders. The lower functions were dis<pb n="219"/><anchor id="Pg219"/>charged, to a great extent, by communal slaves. The care or
+construction of streets, markets, and public buildings, although
+theoretically devolving on the community through their aediles,
+was, as a matter of fact, to an enormous extent undertaken by
+private persons. The city treasury must have often incurred
+a loss in striving to provide corn and oil for the citizens at a
+limited price, and the authorities were often reviled, as at Trimalchio’s
+banquet, for not doing more to cheapen the necessaries
+of life.<note place="foot">Petron. 44.</note> Although our information as to municipal expenditure
+on education and medical treatment is scanty, it is pretty clear
+that the community was, in the Antonine age, beginning to
+recognise a duty in making provision for both. Vespasian
+first gave a public endowment to professors of rhetoric in the
+capital.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xviii. Latinis Graecisque
+rhetoribus annua centena constituit.</note> The case of Como, described in Pliny’s Letters,
+was probably not an isolated one. Finding that the youth
+of that town were compelled to resort to Milan for higher
+instruction, Pliny, as we have seen, proposed to the parents to
+establish by general subscription a public school, and he offered
+himself to contribute one-third of the sum required for the
+foundation, the rest to be provided by the townsfolk, who were
+to have the management and selection of teachers in their
+hands.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 13.</note> The Greek cities had public physicians 500 years
+before Christ,<note place="foot">Herodot. iii. 131.</note> and Marseilles and some of the Gallic towns in
+Strabo’s day employed both teachers and doctors at the public
+expense.<note place="foot">Strab. iv. c. i. 5 (181),
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">σοφιστὰς γοῦν ὑποδέχονται ... κοινῄ μισθούμενοι καθάπερ καὶ ἰατρούς</foreign>.</note> The regular organisation of public medical attendance
+in the provinces dates from Antoninus Pius, who required
+the towns of Asia to have a certain number of physicians
+among their salaried officers.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> ii. 777.</note> The title <hi rend="italic">Archiater</hi>, which in
+the Theodosian Code designates an official class in the provinces
+as well as at Rome, is found in inscriptions of Beneventum
+and Pisaurum belonging to an earlier date.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3994, 4017.</note> But these
+departments of municipal expenditure were hardly yet fully
+organised in the age of the Antonines, and were probably not
+burdensome. The great field of expenditure lay in the
+basilicas, temples, amphitheatres, baths, and pavements, whose
+<pb n="220"/><anchor id="Pg220"/>vanishing remains give us a glimpse of one of the most brilliant
+ages in history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The municipal towns relied largely on the voluntary munificence
+of their wealthy members for great works of public utility
+or splendour. But we have many records of such enterprises
+carried out at the common expense, and the name of a special
+magistracy (<hi rend="italic">curator operum publicorum</hi>) to superintend them
+meets us often in the inscriptions.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3716, 6709, 7146.</note> These undertakings were
+frequently on a great scale. The famous bridge of Alcantara
+was erected in the reign of Trajan by the combined efforts of
+eleven municipalities in Portugal.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. 116; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. pp. 89-96.</note> In Bithynia the finances of
+some of the great towns had been so seriously disorganised by
+expensive and ill-managed undertakings that the younger Pliny
+was in the year 111 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> sent as imperial legate by Trajan to repair
+the misgovernment of the province.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ad Traj.</hi> 17.</note> Pliny’s correspondence
+throws a flood of light on many points of municipal administration,
+and foreshadows its coming decay. The cities appear
+to have ample funds, but they are grossly mismanaged. There
+is plenty of public money seeking investment, but borrowers
+cannot be found at the current rate of 12 per cent. Pliny
+would have been inclined to compel the decurions to become
+debtors of the state, but Trajan orders the rate of interest to be
+put low enough to attract voluntary borrowers.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 54, 55, 23.</note> Apamea,
+although it had the ancient privilege of managing its own affairs,
+requested Pliny to examine the public accounts.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 47.</note> He did the
+same for Prusa, and found many signs of loose and reckless
+finance, and probable malversation.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 17.</note> Nicaea had spent £80,000
+on a theatre, which, from some faults either in the materials
+or the foundation, was settling, with great fissures in the walls.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 39.</note>
+The city had also expended a large sum in rebuilding its
+gymnasium on a sumptuous scale, but the fabric had been
+condemned by a new architect for radical defects of structure.
+Nicomedia has squandered £40,000 on two aqueducts which
+have either fallen or been abandoned.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 37.</note> In authorising the construction
+of a third the emperor might well emphatically order
+the responsibility for such blunders to be fastened on the proper
+<pb n="221"/><anchor id="Pg221"/>persons.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ad Traj.</hi> 38.</note> In the same city, when a fire of a most devastating
+kind had recently occurred, there was no engine, not even a
+bucket ready, and the inhabitants stood idly by as spectators.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 33.</note>
+Pliny was most assiduous in devising or promoting engineering
+improvements for the health and convenience of the province,
+and often called for expert assistance from Rome. Irregularities
+in the working of the civic constitutions also gave him
+much trouble. The <hi rend="italic">ecdicus</hi> or <hi rend="italic">defensor</hi> has demanded repayment
+of a largess made to one Julius Piso from the treasury of
+Amisus, which the decrees of Trajan now forbade.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 110; cf. Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> i. 522.</note> Just as
+Pliny had suggested that members of a curia should be forced
+to accept loans from the State, so we can see ominous signs of
+a wish to compel men to accept the curial dignity beyond the
+legal number, in order to secure the honorarium of from £35
+to £70 on their admission.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ad Traj.</hi> 112, 114, 116.</note> The <hi rend="italic">Lex Pompeia</hi>, which forbade
+a Bithynian municipality to admit to citizenship men from
+other Bithynian states, had long been ignored, and in numbers
+of cities there were many sitting in the senate in violation of
+the law. The Pompeian law also required that a man should
+be thirty years of age when he was elected to a magistracy or
+took his place in the Curia, but a law of Augustus had reduced
+the limit for the minor magistracies to twenty-two. Here was
+a chance of adding to the strength of the Curia which was
+seized by the municipal censors. And if a minor magistrate
+might enter the Curia as a matter of course at twenty-two, why
+not others equally fit?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 79.</note> In another typical case the legate
+was disturbed by the lavish hospitality of leading citizens. On
+the assumption of the toga, at a wedding, or an election to
+civic office, or the dedication of a public work, not only the
+whole of the Curia, but a large number of the common people,
+were often invited to a banquet and received from their host
+one or two denarii apiece.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 116.</note> Pliny was probably unnecessarily
+alarmed. The inscriptions show us the same scenes all over
+the Empire,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 7001; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena
+Trim. Einl.</hi> 53; corruption, however,
+by means of hospitality is expressly
+forbidden by the <hi rend="italic">Lex Urson.</hi> § 132;
+<hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. <hi rend="italic">Suppl.</hi> p. 852.</note> and the emperor with calm dignity leaves the question
+of such entertainments to the prudence of his lieutenant.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="222"/><anchor id="Pg222"/>
+
+<p>
+There are many religious questions submitted to the
+emperor in these celebrated despatches, especially those relating
+to the toleration of Christians.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ad Traj.</hi> 96.</note> But, however profoundly
+interesting, they lie beyond the scope of this chapter. We are
+occupied with the secular life of the provincial town. And the
+Letters of Pliny place some things in a clear light. In the first
+place, the state has begun in the reign of Trajan to control
+the municipality, especially in the management of its finances;
+but the control is rather invited than imposed. At any rate,
+it has become necessary, owing to malversation or incompetence.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> 33;
+Gréard, <hi rend="italic">Plut.</hi> pp. 246-7.</note>
+Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between
+the civic bungling exposed by Pliny, and the clear, patient
+wisdom of the distant emperor. And in another point we
+can see that the municipalities have entered on that disastrous
+decline which was to end in the ruin of the fifth century.
+Wasteful finance is already making its pressure felt on
+the members of the Curia, and membership is beginning to
+be thought a burden rather than an honour. From the reign
+of Trajan we begin to hear of the <hi rend="italic">Curatores</hi>, who were
+imperial officers, appointed at first to meet a special emergency,
+but who became permanent magistrates, with immense powers,
+especially over finance.<note place="foot">The different classes of Curatores,
+which must be carefully distinguished,
+are clearly given by Arnold, <hi rend="italic">Prov.
+Admin.</hi> 236. Cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3899,
+3902, 3989. For a good example of the
+function of the Curator, cf. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 3787.</note> The free civic life of the first century
+is being quietly drawn under the fatal spell of a bureaucratic
+despotism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cities did much for themselves out of the public
+revenues.<note place="foot">For the sources of these, cf. Marq.
+<hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> ii. p. 96.</note> But there are many signs that private ambition
+or munificence did even more. The stone records of
+Pompeii confirm these indications in a remarkable way.
+Pompeii, in spite of the prominence given to it by its tragic fate,
+was only a third-rate town, with a population probably of not
+more than 20,000.<note place="foot">Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi> (Eng. Tr.), p. 16.</note> Its remains, indeed, leave the impression
+that a considerable class were in easy circumstances; but it
+may be doubted whether Pompeii could boast of any great
+capitalists among its citizens. Its harbour, at the mouth of
+the Sarno, was the outlet for the trade of Nola and Nuceria.
+<pb n="223"/><anchor id="Pg223"/>There were salt works in a suburb near the sea. The fish
+sauces of Umbricius Scaurus had a great celebrity.<note place="foot">Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi> (Eng. Tr.), p. 15.</note> The
+vine and the olive were cultivated on the volcanic offshoot
+from Vesuvius; but the wine of Pompeii was said by the elder
+Pliny to leave a lingering headache. Mill-stones were made
+from the lava of the volcano. The market gardeners drove a
+flourishing trade, and the cabbage of Pompeii was celebrated.
+On the high ground towards Vesuvius many wealthy Romans,
+Cicero, and Drusus, the son of Claudius, built country seats, in
+that delicious climate where the winters are so short, and the
+summer heats are tempered by unfailing breezes from the
+mountains or the western sea. All these things made Pompeii
+a thriving and attractive place; yet its trade hardly offered
+the chance of the huge fortunes which could be accumulated
+in those days at Puteoli or Ostia.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 38.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, a large number of the public buildings of
+Pompeii were the gift of private citizens. The Holconii were
+a great family of the place in the reign of Augustus. M.
+Holconius Rufus had been ordinary duumvir five times, and
+twice quinquennial duumvir; he was priest of Augustus, and
+finally was elected patron of the town.<note place="foot">Mau, p. 143.</note> Such dignities in
+those days imposed a corresponding burden. And an inscription
+tells that, on the rebuilding of the great theatre, probably
+about 3 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, Holconius Rufus and Holconius Celer defrayed
+the expense of the crypt, the tribunals, and the whole space for
+the spectators. Women did not fall behind men in their
+public benefactions. On the eastern side of the forum of
+Pompeii there is a building and enclosure, with the remains of
+porticoes, colonnades, and fountains, which are supposed to
+have been a cloth market. In a niche stood a marble statue,
+dedicated by the fullers of Pompeii to Eumachia, a priestess of
+the city. And Eumachia herself has left a record that she
+and her son had erected the building at their own expense.<note place="foot">Id. p. 111.</note>
+The dedication probably belongs to the reign of Tiberius. The
+visitor who leaves the forum by the arch, at the north-east
+corner, and turns into the broadest thoroughfare of the town,
+soon reaches the small temple of Fortuna Augusta, erected in
+the reign of Augustus. Both the site and the building were
+<pb n="224"/><anchor id="Pg224"/>the gift of one M. Tullius, who had, like M. Holconius, borne all
+the honours which the city could bestow.<note place="foot">Mau, p. 124.</note> The amphitheatre
+in the south-east corner of the town, the scene of so many
+gladiatorial combats recorded in the inscriptions, was erected
+by two men of the highest official rank, C. Quinctius Valgus
+and M. Porcius, probably the same men who bore at least part
+of the cost of the smaller theatre of Pompeii.<note place="foot">Id. pp. 147, 206.</note> The last
+instance of this generous public spirit which we shall mention
+is of interest in many ways. It is well known that in the
+year 63 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> an earthquake overthrew many buildings, and
+wrought great havoc in Pompeii. Among other edifices, the
+temple of Isis was thrown down. The temple, of which we
+can now study the remains, had been built by a boy of six
+years of age, Numerius Popidius Celsinus, who, in acknowledgment
+of his own, or rather of his father’s liberality, was at that
+unripe age co-opted a member of <q>the splendid order.</q><note place="foot">Id. p. 164.</note> This
+mode of rewarding a father by advancing his infant son to
+premature honours is not unknown in other inscriptions.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 7008, 7010.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The literature of the age contains many records of profuse
+private liberality of the same kind. The circle and family of
+Pliny were, as we have seen in this, as in other respects, models
+of the best sentiment of the time. Pliny was not a very rich
+man, according to the standard of an age of colossal fortunes; yet
+his benefactions, both to private friends and to the communities
+in which he was interested, were on the scale of the largest
+<anchor id="corr224"/><corr sic="wealth">wealth.</corr> It has been calculated that he must have altogether
+given to his early home and fatherland, as he calls it, a sum
+of more than £80,000; and the gifts were of a thoroughly
+practical kind—a library, a school endowment, a foundation for
+the nurture of poor children, a temple of Ceres, with spacious
+colonnades to shelter the traders who came for the great fair.<note place="foot">Duruy, v. 396.</note>
+A great lady, Ummidia Quadratilla, known to us not altogether
+favourably in Pliny’s letters, built a temple and amphitheatre
+for Casinum.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 781.</note> From the elder Pliny we learn that the distinguished
+court physicians, the two Stertinii, whose professional
+income is said to have ranged from £2000 to £5000 a
+year, exhausted their ample fortune in their benefactions to
+<pb n="225"/><anchor id="Pg225"/>the city of Naples.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> xxix. 5.</note> A private citizen bore the cost of an aqueduct
+for Bordeaux, at an expenditure of £160,000.<note place="foot">Duruy, v. 396.</note> Another
+benefactor, one Crinas, spent perhaps £80,000 on the walls of
+Marseilles.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">l.c.</hi></note> The grandfather of Dion Chrysostom devoted his
+entire ancestral fortune to public objects.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 46 (519).</note> Dion, himself,
+according to his means, followed the example of his ancestor.
+The site alone of a colonnade, with shops and booths, which he
+presented to Prusa, cost about £1800. When Cremona was
+destroyed by the troops of Vespasian in <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 69, its temples and
+forums were restored by the generous zeal of private citizens,
+after all the horror and exhaustion of that awful conflict.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iii. 34, reposita fora
+templaque munificentia municipum.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the prince of public benefactors in the Antonine age
+was the great sophist Herodes Atticus, the tutor of M. Aurelius,
+who died in the same year as his pupil, 180 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> He acted up
+to his theory of the uses of wealth on a scale of unexampled
+munificence.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> ii. 1; Friedl.
+<hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> ii. p. 120.</note> His family was of high rank, and claimed descent
+from the Aeacidae of Aegina. They had also apparently inexhaustible
+resources. His father spent a sum of nearly
+£40,000 in supplementing an imperial grant for the supply of
+water to the Troad. The munificence of the son was extended
+to cities in Italy, as well as to Corinth, Thessaly, Euboea,
+Boeotia, Elis, and pre-eminently to Athens. He gave an
+aqueduct to Canusium and Olympia, a racecourse to Delphi,
+a roofed theatre to Corinth.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> ii. 5.</note> He provided sulphur baths at
+Thermopylae for the visitors from Thessaly and the shores of
+the Maliac gulf. He aided in the restoration of Oricum in
+Epirus, and liberally recruited the resources of many another
+decaying town in Greece. He was certainly benevolent, but
+he had also a passion for splendid fame, and cherished an
+ambition to realise the dream of Nero, by cutting a canal
+across the Corinthian Isthmus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 6.</note> But Attica, where he
+was born, and where he had a princely house on the Ilissus,
+was the supreme object of his bounty. In his will he left
+each Athenian citizen an annual gift of a mina. He would
+offer to the Virgin Goddess a sacrifice of a hundred oxen on a
+single day; and, when the great festivals came round, he used to
+<pb n="226"/><anchor id="Pg226"/>feast the people by their tribes, as well as the resident strangers,
+on couches in the Ceramicus. He restored the ancient shrines
+and stadia with costly marbles. And, in memory of Rhegilla,
+his wife, he built at the foot of the acropolis a theatre for
+6000 spectators, roofed in with cedar wood, which, to the eye
+of Pausanias, surpassed all similar structures in its splendour.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> ii. 3.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The liberality of Herodes Atticus, however astonishing it
+may seem, was only exceptional in its scale. The same spirit
+prevailed among the leading citizens or the great <hi rend="italic">patroni</hi> of
+hundreds of communities, many of them only known to us
+from a brief inscription or two; and we have great reason to
+be grateful on this score to the imperial legislation of later
+days, which did its best to preserve these stone records for the
+eyes of posterity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C. Theod.</hi> ix. 17, 5; <hi rend="italic">Nov. Valent.</hi>
+5.</note> But in forming an estimate of the splendid
+public spirit evoked by municipal life, it is well to remind
+ourselves that much has necessarily been lost in the wreck of
+time, and also that what we have left represents the civic life
+of a comparatively brief period. Yet the remains are so
+numerous that it is almost impossible to give any adequate
+idea of their profusion to those who are unacquainted with
+the inscriptions. The objects of this liberality are as various
+as the needs of the community—temples, theatres, bridges,
+markets, a portico or a colonnade, the relaying of a road or
+pavement from the forum to the port, the repair of an aqueduct,
+above all the erection of new baths or the restoration
+of old ones, with perhaps a permanent foundation to provide
+for the free enjoyment of this greatest luxury of the south.
+The boon was extended to all citizens of both sexes, and in
+some cases, even to strangers and to slaves.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6993, 7013, 7190, 6622,
+2287, 6985, 3325.</note> There is an
+almost monotonous sameness in the stiff, conventional record
+of this vast mass of lavish generosity. It all seems a spontaneous
+growth of the social system. One monument is
+erected by the senate and people of Tibur to a man who
+had borne all its honours, and had left the town his sole
+heir.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6994.</note> On another, an Augustal of Cales, who had received
+the insignia of the duumvirate, tells posterity that he had
+laid down a broad road through the town.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6983.</note> Another
+    bene<pb n="227"/><anchor id="Pg227"/>factor bore the chief cost of a new meat market at Aesernia, the
+authorities of the town supplying the pillars and the tiles.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 7013.</note>
+A priestess of Calama in Numidia expended a sum of £3400
+on a new theatre.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 5366; she received the
+honour of five statues in return.</note> Perhaps the commonest object of private
+liberality was the erection or maintenance of public baths. An
+old officer of the fourth legion provided free bathing at Suessa
+Senonum for every one, even down to the slave girls.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2287.</note> At
+Bononia, a sum of £4350 was bequeathed for the same liberal
+purpose.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3325.</note> A magnate of Misenum bequeathed 400 loads of
+hard wood annually for the furnaces of the baths, but with
+the stipulation that his son should be made patron of the
+town, and that his successors should receive all the magistracies.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3772.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These are only a few specimens taken at random from the
+countless records of similar liberality to the parent city. The
+example of the emperors must have stimulated the creation
+of splendid public works in the provinces. It has been
+remarked by M. Boissier that the imperial government at
+all times displayed the politic or instinctive love of monarchy
+for splendour and magnificence.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 44.</note> The Roman Code, down to
+the end of the Western Empire, gives evidence of a jealous
+care for the preservation of the monuments and historic
+buildings of the past, and denounces with very unconventional
+energy the <q>foul and shameful</q> traffic in the relics of ancient
+glory which prevailed in the last age of the Empire.<note place="foot">See <hi rend="italic">Rom. Soc. in the Last Century of
+the Western Empire</hi> (1st ed.), p. 202.</note> After
+great fires and desolating wars, the first thought of the most
+frugal or the most lavish prince was to restore in greater
+grandeur what had been destroyed. After the great conflagration
+of <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 64, which laid in ashes ten out of the fourteen
+regions of Rome, Nero immediately set to work to rebuild the
+city in a more orderly fashion, with broader streets and open
+spaces.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xvi.</note> Vespasian, on his accession, found the treasury
+loaded with a debt of £320,000,000. Yet the frugal emperor
+did not hesitate to begin at once the restoration of the Capitol,
+and all the other ruins left by the great struggle of <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 69
+from which his dynasty arose.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> ix.; D. Cass. lxvi. 10.</note> He even undertook some new
+<pb n="228"/><anchor id="Pg228"/>works on a great scale, the temple of Peace and the amphitheatre,
+on the plans projected by Augustus. Titus completed
+the Colosseum, and erected the famous baths.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tit.</hi> vii. nemine ante se
+munificentia minor.</note> Domitian once
+more restored the Capitol, and added many new buildings,
+temples to his <q>divine</q> father and brother, with many shrines
+of his special patroness Minerva; a stone stadium for 30,000
+people, and an Odeum for an audience of 10,000.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Domit.</hi> v.</note> Trajan
+was lauded by Pliny for his frugal administration of the
+treasury, combined with magnificence in his public works.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 51.</note>
+Nor was the encomium undeserved. He made docks and erected
+warehouses at Ostia; he ran a new road through the Pomptine
+marshes; he lavished money on aqueducts and baths.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxviii. 7, 15; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi>
+29, 51.</note> His
+most imposing construction was a new forum between the
+Capitoline and the Quirinal, with stately memorials of the
+achievements of his reign. But the prince of imperial builders
+and engineers was Hadrian. Wherever he went he took with
+him in his journeys a troop of architects to add something to
+the splendour or convenience of the cities through which he
+passed. <q>In almost every city,</q> says his biographer, <q>he
+erected some building.</q><note place="foot">Ael. Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 29.</note> But the capital was not neglected
+by Hadrian. He restored historic structures such as the
+Pantheon and the temple of Neptune, the forum of Augustus,
+and Agrippa’s baths, with no ostentatious intrusion of his
+own name.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 19, § 10, eaque omnia propriis
+auctorum nominibus consecravit.</note> In his own name he built the temples of Venus
+and Roma, the bridge across the Tiber, and that stately
+mausoleum, which, as the castle of S. Angelo, links the
+memory of the pagan Empire with the <anchor id="corr228"/><corr sic="mediæval">mediaeval</corr> Papacy and
+the modern world. The example of the imperial masters of
+the world undoubtedly reinforced the various impulses which
+inspired the dedication of so much wealth to the public
+service or enjoyment through all the cities of the Empire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the wealthy and public-spirited citizen was also
+expected to cater for the immediate pleasure or amusement of
+his neighbours in games and feasts. We have seen that Pliny,
+during his administration of Bithynia, seems to have regarded
+the public feasts given to a whole commune on occasions of
+<pb n="229"/><anchor id="Pg229"/>private rejoicing, as dangerous to the general tranquillity. Yet
+the usage meets us everywhere in the inscriptions, and even in
+the literary history of the time. This spacious hospitality was
+long demanded from the rich and powerful, from the general
+at his triumph, from the great noble on his birthday or his
+daughter’s marriage, from the rich burgher at the dedication
+of a temple or a forum which he had given to the city, from
+the man who had been chosen patron of a town in expectation
+of such largesses, not to speak of the many private patrons
+whose morning receptions were thronged by a hungry crowd,
+eager for an invitation to dinner, or its equivalent in the
+sportula.<note place="foot">On the sportula at this time, cf.
+Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xvi., <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> vii.; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Pr.</hi>
+<anchor id="corr229"/><corr sic="1">i.</corr>, 207 sq.; Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 109.</note> Julius Caesar on his triumph in 46 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> had
+feasted the people at 22,000 tables.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Caes.</hi> 55,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἑστιάσας μὲν ἐν δισμυρίοις καὶ δισχιλίοις τρικλίνοις ὁμοῦ σύμπαντας</foreign>: D. Cass. 43, 21, 3.</note> Great houses, like the
+sumptuous seat of Caninius Rufus at Como, had enormous
+banquet halls for such popular repasts.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 3, triclinia illa popularia.</note> The Trimalchio of
+Petronius desires himself to be sculptured on his tomb in
+the character of such a lavish host.<note place="foot">Petron. 71.</note> There was in that age
+no more popular and effective way of testifying gratitude for
+the honours bestowed by the popular voice, or of winning
+them, than by a great feast to the whole commune, generally
+accompanied by a distribution of money, according to social
+or official grade. It was also the most popular means of
+prolonging one’s memory to bequeath a foundation for the
+perpetual maintenance of such repasts in honour of the dead.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 7115, 1368, 4088, 4115.</note>
+One P. Lucilius of Ostia had held all the great offices of his town,
+and had rewarded his admirers with a munificence apparently
+more than equivalent to the official honours they had bestowed.
+He had paved a long road from the forum to the arch, restored
+a temple of Vulcan, of which he was the curator, and the
+temples of Venus, Spes, and Fortuna; he had provided standard
+weights for the meat market, and a tribunal of marble for the
+forum. But probably his most popular benefaction was a
+great banquet to the citizens, where 217 couches were arrayed
+for them.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3882.</note> The same munificent person had twice entertained the
+whole of the citizens at luncheon. Elsewhere a veteran, with
+a long and varied service, had settled at Auximum where he
+<pb n="230"/><anchor id="Pg230"/>had been elected patron of the community. His old comrades,
+the centurions of the Second Legion (Traj. Fortis) erected a
+monument to his virtues, and, at the dedication, he gave a
+banquet to the townsfolk.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3868.</note> One other example, out of the
+many which crowd the inscriptions, may serve to complete
+the picture of civic hospitality. Lucius Cornelius of Surrentum
+received on his death the honour of a public funeral by a
+vote of the Curia. The inscription on his statue records that, on
+assuming the garb of manhood, he had provided a meal of pastry
+and mead for the populace; when he became aedile, he exhibited
+a contest of gladiators; and, twice reaching the honours
+of the duumvirate, he repaid the compliment by splendid
+games and a stately banquet.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6211.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At these entertainments a gift of money, always graduated
+according to the social rank of the guests, decurio, augustal,
+or plebeian, was generally added to the fare.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 210; Petron. 45;
+<hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 842; Momms. <hi rend="italic">Colleg.</hi> p. 110.</note> Sometimes the
+distribution took the form of a lottery. A high official of
+Beneventum, who had probably inherited a fortune from his
+father, a leading physician of the capital, once scattered
+tickets among the crowd, which gave the finder the right to
+a present of gold, silver, dress, or other smaller prizes.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3394; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> 18.</note>
+Women appeared sometimes both as hostesses and guests
+on these occasions. Caesia Sabina of Veii, on the day on
+which her husband was entertaining all the citizens, invited
+the female relatives of the decurions to dinner, with the
+additional luxury of a gratuitous bath.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3738.</note> It is curious to
+observe that at the festivities in which women are entertained,
+the sharp demarcation of ranks is maintained as strictly
+as it is among their male relations. Thus, in a distribution
+at Volceii, the decurions, augustales, and vicani, receive
+respectively thirty, twenty, and twelve sesterces apiece; while
+the proportion observed among the ladies of the three social
+grades is sixteen, eight, and four. Nor were children, even
+those of the slave class, forgotten on these festive occasions.
+One kindly magnate of Ferentinum left a fund of about £750
+to give an annual feast of pastry and mead upon his
+birthday for all the inhabitants with their wives, and at the
+<pb n="231"/><anchor id="Pg231"/>same time, 300 pecks of nuts were provided for the children,
+bond and free.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. 5853; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim.</hi> p. 55.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These provincial societies, as we have already seen, were organised
+on aristocratic or plutocratic principles. The distinction
+between <hi rend="italic">honestior</hi> and <hi rend="italic">humilior</hi>, which becomes so cruel in the
+Theodosian Code, was, even in the Antonine age, more sharply
+drawn and more enduring than is agreeable to our modern
+notions of social justice. The rich have a monopoly of all
+official power and social precedence; they have even the
+largest share in gifts and paltry distributions of money which
+wealth might be expected to resign and to despise. Their sons
+have secured to them by social convention, or by popular
+gratitude and expectancy, a position equal to that of their
+ancestors. The dim plebeian crowd, save for the right
+of an annual vote at the elections, which was in a few
+generations to be withdrawn, seem to be of little more
+consequence than the slaves; they were of far less consequence
+than those freedmen who had the luck or the
+dexterity to build up a rapid fortune, and force their way
+into the chasm between the privileged and the disinherited.
+Yet this would hardly be a complete and penetrating view
+of the inner working and the spirit of that municipal society.
+The apparent rigidity and harshness of the lines of demarcation
+were often relieved by a social sentiment which, on the
+one hand, made heavy demands on rank and wealth, and on
+the other, drew all classes together by the strong bond of
+fellowship in a common social life. There has probably seldom
+been a time when wealth was more generally regarded as a
+trust, a possession in which the community at large has a
+right to share. There never was an age in which the wealthy
+more frankly, and even recklessly, recognised this imperious
+claim. It would indeed be difficult to resolve into its
+elements the complicated mass of motives which impelled
+the rich burgher to undertake such enormous, and often
+ruinous, expenditure for the common good or pleasure. There
+was of course much of mere selfish ambition and love of
+popularity. The passion for prominence was probably never
+stronger. Direct or even veiled corruption of the electors was,
+indeed, strictly prohibited by law.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Lex Urson.</hi> § 132.</note> But it was a recognised
+<pb n="232"/><anchor id="Pg232"/>principle of public life that the city should honour its benefactors,
+and that those whom she had raised to her highest
+distinctions should manifest their gratitude by some contribution
+to the comfort or the enjoyments of the people. But,
+when we have admitted all vulgar motives of munificence, a
+man would show himself a very unobservant, or else a very
+cynical student of the time, if he failed to recognise that,
+among these countless benefactors, there were many animated,
+not only by a sense of duty, but by a real ardour of public
+spirit, men who wished to live in the love and memory of
+their fellows, and who had a rare perception of the duties of
+wealth. Philostratus has left us in his own words a record
+of the principles which inspired Herodes Atticus in his almost
+fabulous donations to many cities in Asia, Greece, and Italy.
+Herodes used to say that the true use of money was to succour
+the needs of others; riches which were guarded with a niggard
+hand were only a <q>dead wealth</q>; the coffers in which they
+were stowed away were merely a prison; and the worship of
+money resembled the sacrifice which the fabled Aloidae offered
+to a god after putting him in chains.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> ii. 1.</note> The main characteristics
+of human nature are singularly fixed from age to age,
+although the objects of its love and devotion may endlessly
+vary. The higher unselfish impulses must assert themselves
+in any society which is not plunging into the abyss. The
+choicer spirits will be always ready to lavish effort or material
+wealth on objects which are sacred to their own age, although
+they may seen chimerical or unworthy to the next. And we
+may well believe that the man who in the second century
+built a bath or a theatre for fellow townsmen, might possibly,
+had he lived in the fifth, have dedicated a church to a patron
+saint, or bequeathed his lands to a monastery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Antonine age was on one side perhaps rather coarse in
+its ideals, passionately fond of splendour and brilliant display,
+proud of civic dignity, and keenly alive to the ease and
+comfort and brightness which common effort or individual
+generosity might add to the enjoyment of life. It was also
+an intensely sociable age. Men looked for their happiness to
+their city rather than to the family or the state. If their city
+could not play a great part as an independent commonwealth,
+<pb n="233"/><anchor id="Pg233"/>it might, by the self-sacrifice of its sons, assert its dignity
+among its rivals. It could make itself a society which men
+would proudly or affectionately claim as their <q>patria</q> and
+their parent, and on which they would vie with one another in
+lavishing their time and their gold. And the buildings and
+banquets and bright festivals, on which so much was lavished,
+were enjoyed by all citizens alike, the lowest and the highest,
+although high and low had sometimes by prescriptive usage an
+unequal share in the largesses. The free enjoyment of sumptuous
+baths, of good water from the Atlas, the Apennines, or the
+Alban Hills, the right to sit at ease with one’s fellows when
+the <hi rend="italic">Pseudolus</hi> or the <hi rend="italic">Adelphi</hi> was put upon the boards, the
+pleasure of strolling in the shady colonnades of the forum or
+the market, surrounded by brilliant marbles and frescoes, with
+fountains shedding their coolness around; the good fellowship
+which, for the time, levelled all ranks, in many a simple communal
+feast, with a coin or two distributed at the end to recall
+or heighten the pleasure—all these things tended to make the
+city a true home, to some extent almost a great family circle.
+There was much selfishness and grossness, no doubt, in all this
+civic life. Which later age can cast the first stone? Yet
+a study of the inscriptions of the Antonine age leaves the
+impression that, amid all the sharply drawn distinctions of
+rank, with all the petty ambition and self-assertion, or the
+fawning and expectant servility, there was also a genuine
+patriotic benevolence on the one hand, and a grateful recognition
+of it on the other. The citizens record on many a tablet
+their gratitude to patron or duumvir or augustal, or to some
+simple old centurion, returned from far frontier camps, who
+had paved their promenade, or restored their baths, or given
+them a shrine of Neptune or Silvanus. They also preserved
+the memory of many a kindly benefactor who left, as he fondly
+thought for ever, the funds for an annual feast, with all the
+graduated shares scrupulously prescribed, to save an obscure
+tomb from the general oblivion. Thus, although that ancient
+city life had its sordid side, which is laid bare with such
+pitiless Rabelaisian realism by Petronius, it had its nobler
+aspect also. Notwithstanding the aristocratic tone of municipal
+society in the age of the Antonines, it is possible that the
+separation of classes in our great centres of population is
+<pb n="234"/><anchor id="Pg234"/>morally more sharp and decided than it was in the days when
+the gulf between social ranks was in theory impassable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is however another side to this picture of fraternal
+civic life. If some of its pleasures were innocent and even
+softening and elevating, there were others which pandered to
+the most brutal and cruel passions. The love of amusement
+grew upon the Roman character as civilisation developed in
+organisation and splendour, and unfortunately the favourite
+amusements were often obscene and cruel. The calendar of
+the time is sufficiently ominous. The number of days which
+were annually given up to games and spectacles at Rome rose
+from 66 in the reign of Augustus, to 135 in the reign of
+M. Aurelius, and to 175, or more, in the fourth century. In
+this reckoning no account is taken of extraordinary festivals
+on special occasions.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> ii. 142; cf. Jul.
+Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant.</hi> c. x.</note> The Flavian amphitheatre was inaugurated
+by Titus with lavish exhibitions extending over 100
+days.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tit.</hi> vii.</note> The Dacian triumphs of Trajan were celebrated by
+similar rejoicings for 123 days, and 10,000 gladiators were
+sent down into the arena.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 68. 15,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ θέας ἐν τρισὶ καὶ εἴκοσι καὶ ἑκατὸν ἡμέραις ἐποίησεν ...
+    καὶ μονομάχοι μύριοι ἠγωνίσαντο</foreign>.</note> The rage of all classes of the
+Roman populace for these sights of suffering and shame continued
+unabated to the very end of the Western Empire. The
+lubricity of pantomime and the slaughter of the arena were
+never more fiercely and keenly enjoyed than when the Germans
+were thundering at the gates of Trèves and Carthage.<note place="foot">Salv. <hi rend="italic">De Gub. Dei</hi>, vi. § 69.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is difficult for us now to understand this lust of cruelty
+among a people otherwise highly civilised, a passion which was
+felt not merely by the base rabble, but even by the cultivated
+and humane.<note place="foot">Aug. <hi rend="italic">Conf.</hi> vi. 8; cf. Sym. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 46.</note> There was undoubtedly at all times a coarse
+insensibility to suffering in the Roman character. The institution
+of slavery, which involves the denial of ordinary human
+rights to masses of fellow-creatures, had its usual effect in rendering
+men contemptuously callous to the fate of all who did not
+belong to the privileged class. Even a man of high moral tone
+like Tacitus, while he condemns Drusus for gloating over his
+gladiatorial shows, has only a word of scorn for the victims
+of the butchery.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 76, <hi rend="italic">vili</hi> sanguine nimis
+gaudens.</note> And the appetite grew with what it fed on.
+<pb n="235"/><anchor id="Pg235"/>From father to son, for nearly seven centuries, the Roman
+character became more and more indurated under the influence
+of licensed cruelty. The spectacle was also surrounded
+by the emperors, even the greatest and best, for politic reasons,
+with ever growing splendour. The Flavian amphitheatre,
+which remains as a monument of the glory of the Empire and
+of its shame, must have been a powerful corruptor. There,
+tier above tier, was gathered the concentrated excitability and
+contagious enthusiasm of 87,000 spectators. The imperial
+circle and the emperor himself, members of high senatorial
+houses, the great officers of state, the priests, the vestal virgins,
+gave an impressive national dignity to the inhuman spectacle.
+And now and then an Eastern prince or ambassador, or the
+chief of some half-savage tribe in Germany or Numidia,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xxxv.</note> amused
+the eyes of the rabble who swarmed on the upper benches.
+Every device of luxurious art was employed to heighten the baser
+attractions of the scene. The magnificent pile was brightened
+with gems of artistic skill.<note place="foot">Calpurn. <hi rend="italic">Ecl.</hi> vii. 24 sqq.
+
+<lg>
+<l>Vidimus in caelum trabibus spectacula textis</l>
+<l>Surgere, Tarpeium prope despectantia culmen—</l>
+<l>... Sic undique fulgor</l>
+<l>Percussit: stabam defixus et ore patenti,</l>
+<l>Cunctaque mirabar, etc.</l>
+</lg></note> The arena was tesselated with rich
+colouring from the sunlight which streamed through the awnings.
+The waters of perfumed fountains shot high into the air, spreading
+their fragrant coolness; and music filled the pauses in the
+ghastly conflict. From scenes like these was probably drawn
+the picture in the Apocalypse: <hi rend="italic">Mulier circumdata purpura et
+coccino—mater fornicationum—ebria de sanguine sanctorum.</hi>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the first and second centuries the passion for cruel
+excitement was as strong in the provincial towns as it was even
+at Rome. This may have been partly due to the monotony of
+provincial life. It was also stimulated by the ease with which
+public sentiment extorted the means for these gratifications
+from the richer citizens. The opinion of the powerful and
+enlightened class, with rare exceptions, made no effort to purify
+and humanise the grossness of the masses. Seneca and Demonax
+indeed display a modern humanity in their view of the degrading
+influence of these displays.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Brev. Vit.</hi> viii.; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 33;
+Plut. <hi rend="italic">Reipubl. Ger. Pr.</hi> c. 29; Luc. <hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi>
+c. 57.</note> A humane magistrate of
+Vienne, one Trebonius Rufinus, in the reign of Trajan, having
+autocratically abolished them in his city, was called upon to
+<pb n="236"/><anchor id="Pg236"/>defend his conduct before the emperor, and Junius Mauricus had
+the courage to express before the council a wish that they could
+be abolished also at Rome.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iv. 22.</note> Augustus had, by an imperial edict,
+restrained the cruel exhibitions of the father of Nero.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, iv.</note> Vespasian,
+according to Dion Cassius,<note place="foot">D. Cass. 66. 15; cf. M. Aur. vi. 46.</note> had little pleasure in the
+shows of the arena. But the emperors generally, and not
+least Vespasian’s sons, encouraged and pandered to the lust
+for blood.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 68. 10 and 15, 66. 25;
+Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xi.; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> iv.</note> The imperial gladiators were organised elaborately
+in four great schools by Domitian,<note place="foot">D. Cass. 67. 1; cf. Friedl. ii. 202.</note> with a regular administration,
+presided over by officers of high rank. The gentle Pliny,
+who had personally no liking for such spectacles, applauded
+his friend Maximus for giving a gladiatorial show to the people
+of Verona, to do honour to his dead wife, in the true spirit
+of the old Bruti and Lepidi of the age of the Punic Wars.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 34; <hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 33.</note>
+He found in the shows of Trajan a splendid incentive of contempt
+for death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is little wonder that, with such examples and such
+approval, the masses gloated unrestrained over these inhuman
+sports. The rag-dealer at Trimalchio’s dinner is certainly
+drawn to the life.<note place="foot">Petron. 45.</note> They are going to have a three days’
+carnival of blood. There is to be no escape; the butcher is
+to do his work thoroughly in full view of the crowded tiers
+of the amphitheatre. It was in Etruria, and in Campania,
+where Trimalchio had his home, that the gladiatorial combats
+took their rise. Campanian hosts used to entertain their guests
+at dinner with them in the days before the second Punic War.<note place="foot">Strabo, v. c. 4, 13.</note>
+And it was in Campanian towns that in the first century was
+displayed most glaringly the not unusual combination of
+cruelty and voluptuousness. The remains of Pompeii furnish
+us with the most vivid and authentic materials for a study of
+the sporting tastes of a provincial town. It is significant
+that the amphitheatre of Pompeii, which was capable of
+holding 20,000 people, was built fifty years before the first
+stone amphitheatre erected by Statilius Taurus at Rome.<note place="foot">Mau, 206, 207.</note> It
+is also remarkable that, although Pompeii is mentioned only
+twice by Tacitus, one of the references is to a bloody riot
+<pb n="237"/><anchor id="Pg237"/>arising out of the games of the amphitheatre.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 17.</note> In the year
+59 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> a Roman senator in disgrace, named Livineius Regulus,
+gave a great gladiatorial show at Pompeii, which attracted
+many spectators from the neighbouring town of Nuceria.
+The scenes of the arena were soon reproduced in a fierce
+street fight between the people of the two towns, in which
+many Nucerians were left dead or wounded. The catastrophe
+was brought before the emperor, and referred by him to the
+Senate, with the result that Pompeii was sternly deprived of
+its favourite amusement for a period of ten years. But when
+the interdict was removed, the Pompeians had the enjoyment
+of their accustomed pleasure for ten years more, till it was
+finally interrupted by the ashes of Vesuvius.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A building at Pompeii, which was originally a colonnade
+connected with the theatre,<note place="foot">Mau, 152.</note> had been converted into barracks
+for a school of gladiators in the time of the early Empire.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> ii. 206.</note>
+Behind the colonnade of more than seventy Doric columns
+had been built a long row of small cells, with no opening
+except on the central enclosure. There was a mess room,
+and the <hi rend="italic">exedra</hi> on the southern side served as a retiring
+room for the trainers and the men in the intervals of
+exercise. The open area was used for practice. These
+buildings have yielded many specimens of gladiators’ arms,
+helmets, and greaves richly embossed in relief, scores of mail-coats,
+shields, and horse-trappings. In one room there were
+found the stocks, and four skeletons with irons on their legs.
+In another, eighteen persons had taken refuge in the last
+catastrophe, and, among them, a woman wearing costly jewels.
+The walls and columns were covered with inscriptions and
+rude sketches of gladiatorial life. Indeed the graffiti relating
+to it are perhaps the most interesting in Pompeii. On some
+of the tombs outside the city we can still read the notices
+of coming games, painted on the walls by a professional
+advertiser, one Aemilius Celer, <q>by the light of the moon.</q><note place="foot">Mau, 216, 217. The words in one
+of these, flaminis Neronis Caesaris Aug.
+fili, fix the date between 50 and 54 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi></note>
+They announce that a duumvir or aedile or flamen will exhibit
+twenty or thirty pairs of combatants on the calends of May
+or the ides of April. There will also be a hunt, athletic
+<pb n="238"/><anchor id="Pg238"/>games, a distribution of gifts, and awnings will be provided.
+Programmes were for sale in advance, with a list of the
+events. The contents of one can still be read scratched on
+a wall, with marginal notes of the results of the competition.
+In one conflict, Pugnax, in the Thracian arms, had beaten
+Murranus the Myrmillo, fighting in the arms of Gaul, with
+the fish upon his helmet; and the fate of Murranus is
+chronicled in one tragic letter p. (<hi rend="italic">periit</hi>). Two others fought
+in chariots in old British fashion. And the Publius Ostorius
+who won was, as his name may suggest, a freedman, now
+fighting as a voluntary combatant, according to the inscription,
+in his fifty-first conflict.<note place="foot">Mau, 217, 218.</note> The tomb of Umbricius Scaurus, on
+the highway outside the Herculaneum gate, was adorned in
+stucco relief with animated scenes from the arena of hunting
+and battle. Hunters with sword and cloak, like a modern
+toréador, are engaging lions or tigers. Two gladiators are
+charging one another on horseback. Here, a vanquished
+combatant, with upturned hand, is imploring the pity of
+the spectators, while another is sinking in the agony of death
+upon the sand. The name, the school, and the fighting
+history of each combatant are painted beside the figure.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 411.</note>
+The universal enthusiasm for the shows is expressed in many
+a rude sketch which has been traced by boyish hands upon
+the walls. The record of the heroes of the arena was evidently
+then as familiar as that of a champion footballer or
+cricketer is now to our own sporting youth. In the peristyle
+of a house in Nola Street, the names of some thirty gladiators
+can be read, with the character of their arms and the number
+of their conflicts. Portraits of gladiators are figured on lamps
+and rings and vases of the period. The charm of their manly
+strength, according to Juvenal, was fatal to the peace of many
+a Roman matron of the great world. And the humbler girls
+of Pompeii have left the memorial of their weakness in more
+than one frank outburst of rather unmaidenly admiration.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 220; Juv. vi. 82 sqq.; cf. Mart. v. 24.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is a grave deduction from the admiring judgment of the
+glory of the Antonine age, that its most splendid remains
+are the stately buildings within whose enclosure, for centuries,
+the populace were regaled with the sufferings and the blood of
+<pb n="239"/><anchor id="Pg239"/>the noblest creatures of the wild animal world and of gallant
+men. The deserts and forests of Africa and the remotest East
+contributed their elephants and panthers and lions to these
+scenes. And every province of the Empire sent its contingent
+of recruits for the arena, Gaul, Germany, and Thrace, Britain
+and Dacia, the villages of the Atlas, and the deserts of the
+Soudan.<note place="foot">Friedl. ii. 189.</note> Just in proportion to the depth of the impress made by
+Roman civilisation, was the amphitheatre more or less popular
+in the provinces. In Italy itself the passion was naturally
+strongest. Quiet little places, buried in the Apennines, or in
+the mountains of Samnium, had their regular spectacles, and
+record their gratitude for the pleasure to some magistrate or
+patron.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 92.</note> The little town of Fidenae, in the reign of Tiberius,
+gained for a moment a sinister fame by the collapse of its amphitheatre,
+involving the death or mutilation of 50,000 spectators.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 62.</note>
+An augustal of Praeneste endowed his town with a school of
+gladiators, and received a statue for this contribution to the
+pleasures of the populace.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2532.</note> A. Clodius Flaccus of Pompeii, in
+his first duumvirate, on the Apollinaria, gave an exhibition in the
+forum of bull-fighting, pugilism, and pantomime. He signalised
+his second tenure of the office by a show of thirty-five pairs
+of gladiators, with a hunting scene of bulls, boars, and bears.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2530.</note>
+At Minturnae, a monument reminds <q>the excellent citizens</q>
+that, in a show lasting for four days, eleven of the foremost of
+Campanian gladiators had died before their eyes, along with
+ten ferocious bears.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6148; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. 1074, 6012.
+This was given <hi rend="italic">postulante populo</hi>.</note> At Compsa in Samnium, a place hardly
+ever heard of, the common people erected a statue to a priest
+of Magna Mater, who had given them a splendid show, and he
+in turn rewarded their gratitude by a feast to both sexes,
+which lasted over two days.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 5963, 5972, 2531; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi>
+x. 228.</note> Similar records of misplaced
+munificence might be produced from Bovianum and Beneventum,
+from Tibur and Perusia, and many another obscure Italian
+town. But the brutal insensibility of the age is perhaps nowhere
+so glaringly paraded as in the days following the short-lived
+victory of the Vitellian arms at Bedriacum. There, on
+that ghastly plain, on which his rival had been crushed and
+had closed a tainted life by a not inglorious death, Vitellius
+<pb n="240"/><anchor id="Pg240"/>gloated over the wreck of the great struggle. The trees were cut
+down, the crops trampled into mire; the soil was soaked and
+festering with blood, while mangled forms of men and horses
+still lay rotting till the vultures should complete their obsequies.
+Within forty days of the battle, the emperor attended great
+gladiatorial combats given by his generals at Cremona and
+Bononia, as if to revive the memory of the carnage by a
+cruel mimicry.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 70-72.</note> The grim literary avenger of that carnival of
+blood has pictured the imperial monster’s end, within a short
+space, in colours that will never fade, deserted by his meanest
+servants, shuddering at the ghastly terrors of the vast, silent
+solitudes of the palace, dragged forth from his hiding, and flung
+with insults and execrations down the Gemonian Stairs. The
+dying gladiator of Cremona was more than avenged.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 84.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The western provinces bordering on the Mediterranean, Gaul,
+Spain, and Africa, drank deepest of the spirit which created the
+great amphitheatres of Arles, Trèves, and Carthage, Placentia and
+Verona, of Puteoli, Pompeii, and Capua. But the East caught
+the infection, and gladiatorial combats were held at Antioch in
+Pisidia, at Nysa in Caria, and at Laodicea; Alexandria had its
+amphitheatre from the days of Augustus, and a school of
+gladiators, presided over by a high imperial officer.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3725, 6156; Strab.
+xvii. 1, 10; Friedl. ii. 204, 378 sqq.</note> The
+Teutonic regions of the north and Greece were almost the only
+provinces in which the bloody games were not popular. The
+one Greek town where the taste for them was fully developed
+was the mongrel city of Corinth, which was a Roman colony.
+In the novel of Apuleius we meet a high Corinthian magistrate
+travelling through Thessaly to collect the most famous gladiators
+for his shows.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> x. 18; cf. iv. 13.</note> Yet even in Greece, even at Athens, which had
+been the home of kindly pity from the days of Theseus, the cruel
+passion was spreading in the days of the Antonines. Plutarch
+urges public men to banish or to restrain these exhibitions in their
+cities.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Reipubl. Ger. Pr.</hi> 30; Philostr.
+<hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 21.</note> When the Athenians, from an ambition to rival the
+splendour of Corinth, were meditating the establishment of a
+gladiatorial show, the gentle Demonax bade them first to overturn
+their altar of Pity.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi> 57; cf. Mahaffy, <hi rend="italic">Greek
+World under Roman Sway</hi>, p. 271.</note> The apostles of Hellenism, Dion, Plutarch,
+<pb n="241"/><anchor id="Pg241"/>and Lucian, were unanimous in condemning an institution
+which sacrificed the bravest men to the brutal passions of
+the mob.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The games of the arena were sometimes held at the expense
+of the municipality on great festivals, with a public officer,
+bearing the title of <hi rend="italic">curator</hi>,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2373, 7037, 148, 2532.</note> to direct them. But, perhaps more
+frequently, they were given by great magistrates or priests at
+their own expense; or some rich <hi rend="italic">parvenu</hi>, like the cobbler of
+Bologna or the fuller of Modena, who have been ridiculed by
+Martial, would try by such a display to force an entrance into
+the guarded enclosure of Roman rank.<note place="foot">Mart. iii. 59, 16.</note> There were also frequent
+bequests to create a permanent agonistic foundation.
+The most striking example of such a legacy is to be found on
+an inscription in honour of a munificent duumvir of Pisaurum.
+He left a capital sum of more than £10,000 to the community.
+The interest on two-fifths of this bequest, perhaps amounting
+to £500, was to be spent in giving a general feast on the
+birthday of the founder’s son. The accumulated interest of the
+remaining three-fifths, amounting, perhaps, to £4000, was to
+be devoted to a quinquennial exhibition of gladiators.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 81.</note> An
+aedile in Petronius is going to spend between £3000 and
+£4000 on a three days’ show.<note place="foot">Petron. 45.</note> The cost of these exhibitions,
+however, must have widely varied. We hear of one in the
+second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> which cost over £7000.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> ii. 137, Doch
+diese Summe erscheint gering im Vergleich
+mit der kolossalen Verschwendung,
+mit der die Schauspiele in der
+letzten Zeit der Republik gegeben
+wurden; cf. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. 6278 (<hi rend="italic">Suppl.</hi> p.
+1032).</note> The number of
+pairs engaged appears from the inscriptions to have ranged
+from five to thirty. The shows lasted from one to as many
+as eight days.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2530; 2533; Friedl.
+<hi rend="italic">Cena Trim.</hi> p. 58; Cic. <hi rend="italic">Ad Att.</hi> 12, 2.</note> And the quality of the combatants was
+also very various. Tiberius once recalled some finished veterans
+from their retirement at a fee of about £800 each.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> vii.</note> On the
+other hand, a grumbler at Trimalchio’s dinner sneers at a stingy
+aedile, whose gladiators were <q>two-penny men,</q> whom you
+might knock over with a breath.<note place="foot">Petron. 45.</note> Besides the great imperial
+schools at Praeneste, Capua, or Alexandria, and the <q>families</q>
+maintained at all times by some of the great nobles, there
+<pb n="242"/><anchor id="Pg242"/>were vagrant troops, kept up by speculative trainers for hire,
+such as that gang into which Vitellius sold his troublesome
+minion Asiaticus.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> ii. 202; Suet.
+<hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> xii. circumforaneo lanistae
+vendidit.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The profession of gladiator was long regarded as a tainted
+one, on which social sentiment and law alike placed their
+ban. It was a calling which included the vilest or the most
+unfortunate of mankind. Slaves, captives in war, or criminals
+condemned for serious offences, recruited its ranks.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> ii. 192.</note> The death
+in the arena was thus often, really, a deferred punishment for
+crime. But even from the later days of the Republic, men of
+free birth were sometimes attracted by the false glory or the
+solid rewards of the profession. Freedmen sometimes fought
+at the call of their patrons.<note place="foot">Petron. 45; D. Cass. 60. 30.</note> And, when Septimius Severus
+began to recruit the Pretorian guard from the provinces, the
+youth of Italy, who had long enjoyed the monopoly of that
+pampered corps, satisfied their combative or predatory instincts
+by joining the ranks either of the gladiators or of the brigands.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 74. 2.</note>
+The gladiator had, indeed, to submit to fearful perils and a
+cruel discipline. His oath bound him to endure unflinchingly
+scourging, burning, or death.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> ii. 196.</note> His barracks were a closely
+guarded prison, and, although his fare was necessarily good,
+his training was entirely directed to the production of a fine
+fighting animal, who would give good sport in the arena. Yet
+the profession must have had some powerful attractions.
+Some of the emperors,<note place="foot">D. Cass. 66. 15; Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> 14;
+cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xxxiv.</note> Titus and Hadrian, themselves took a
+pleasure in the gladiatorial exercises. Commodus, as if to
+confirm the scandal about his parentage, actually descended
+into the arena,<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Com.</hi> xi.; cf. viii.;
+Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> ii. 150.</note> and imperial example was followed by men of
+high rank, and even, according to the satirist, by matronly
+viragoes.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Jul. Caes.</hi> xxxix.; Juv. vi.
+252.</note> The splendour of the arms, the ostentatious pomp
+of the scene of combat, the applause of thousands of spectators
+on the crowded benches, the fascination of danger, all this
+invested the cruel craft with a false glory.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> ii. 198.</note> The mob of
+all ages are ready to make a hero of the man who can
+perform rare feats of physical strength or agility. And the
+<pb n="243"/><anchor id="Pg243"/>skilful gladiator evidently became a hero under the early
+Empire, like his colleague of the red or green. His professional
+record was of public interest; the number of his
+combats and his victories was inscribed upon his tomb.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2571, 2572; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x.
+7364; xii. 5836.</note> His
+name and his features were scratched by boys on the street
+walls. He attracted the unconcealed, and not always discreet,
+admiration of women,<note place="foot">Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi>, p. 219 sq.</note> and his praise was sung in classic verse,
+as his pathetic dignity in death has been immortalised in
+marble. The memories of a nobler life of freedom sometimes
+drove the slave of the arena to suicide or mutiny.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 70, § 20; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv.
+46. Sym. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> ii. 46; cf. Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi>
+ii. 211.</note> But he was
+oftener proud of his skill and courage, and eager to display
+them. When shows were rare in the reign of Tiberius, a
+Myrmillo was heard to lament that the years of his glorious
+prime were running to waste.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> iv.</note> Epictetus says that the imperial
+gladiators were often heard praying for the hour of conflict.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> i. 29, § 37.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Great imperial schools were organised on the strictest
+military principles, and were under the command of a
+procurator who had often held high office in the provinces
+or the army.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> ii. 204.</note> Each school had attached to it a staff of
+masseurs, surgeon-dressers, and physicians to attend to
+the general health of the members. There were various
+grades according to skill or length of service, and a man
+might rise in the end to be trainer of a troop. Gladiators,
+like all other callings in the second century, had their colleges.
+We have the roll of one of these, in the year 177 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>,
+a college of Silvanus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2566.</note> The members are divided into three
+decuries, evidently according to professional rank, and their
+names and arms are also given. Their comrades often erected
+monuments to them with a list of their achievements. Thus
+a dear companion-in-arms commemorates a young Secutor at
+Panormus, who died in his thirtieth year, who had fought in
+thirty-four combats, and in twenty-one came off victorious.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2571.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our authorities do not often permit us to follow the
+gladiator into retirement. The stern discipline of the <hi rend="italic">Ludus</hi>
+no doubt made better men even of those condemned to it for
+grievous crimes. The inscriptions contain a few brief records
+<pb n="244"/><anchor id="Pg244"/>of their family life, which seems to have been as natural and
+affectionate as that of any other class; wives and daughters
+lamenting good husbands and fathers in the usual phrases,
+and fathers in turn mourning innocent young lives, cut short
+by the cruelty of the gods.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2572-9; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 3329.</note> Sometimes the veteran gladiator
+might be tempted to return to the old scenes for a high fee,
+or he might become a trainer in one of the schools.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2573-5; D. Cass. 72. 22.</note> His son
+might rise even to knightly rank;<note place="foot">Juv. iii. 158.</note> but the career of ambition
+was closed to himself by the taint of a profession which the
+people found indispensable to their pleasures, and which they
+loaded with contempt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inscriptions pay all honour to the voluntary, single-minded
+generosity with which men bore costly charges, and
+gave time and effort to the business of the city. But there
+was a tendency to treat public benefactions as the acknowledgment
+of a debt, a return for civic honours. We can sometimes
+even see that the gift was extorted by the urgency of the
+people, in some cases even by menaces and force.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. 1074.</note> The cities
+took advantage of the general passion for place and social
+precedence, and, often from sordid motives, crowded their
+curial lists with <hi rend="italic">patroni</hi> and persons decorated with other
+honorary distinctions. On the famous roll of the council of
+Canusium, out of a total of 164 members, there are 39
+<hi rend="italic">patroni</hi> of senatorial or knightly rank, and 25 <hi rend="italic">praetextati</hi>,
+mere boys, who were almost certainly of the same aristocratic
+class, and were probably destined to be future patrons of
+the town.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3721.</note> In the desire to secure the support of wealth and
+social prestige, the municipal law as to the age for magisterial
+office was frequently disregarded, and even mere infants were
+sometimes raised to the highest civic honours.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7008, 7010; cf. 7082, where a
+youth of twenty had been iivir quinquennalis,
+and had given a gladiatorial
+show. Cf. 3714, quaestor designatus
+est annorum xxiiii., 3745, 3246, 3768.</note> The position
+of patron seems to have been greatly prized, as it was heavily
+paid for. A great man with a liberal soul might be patron of
+several towns,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3764.</note> and sometimes women of rank had the honour
+conferred on them.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3773, 4036, 82, 5134; cf. 3744.</note> The <hi rend="italic">ornamenta</hi> or external badges of
+official rank were frequently bestowed on people who were not
+eligible by law for the magistracy. A resident alien (<hi rend="italic">incola</hi>),
+<pb n="245"/><anchor id="Pg245"/>or an augustal, might be co-opted into the <q>splendid order</q>
+of the Curia, or he might be allowed to wear its badges, or
+those of some office which he could not actually hold.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3709, 3750; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii.
+3203, 3219.</note> But it
+is plain that such distinctions had to be purchased or repaid.
+The city seldom made any other return for generous devotion,
+unless it were the space for a grave or the pageant of a public
+funeral. It is true that a generous benefactor or magistrate is
+frequently honoured with a statue and memorial tablet. Indeed,
+the honour is so frequently bestowed that it seems to dwindle
+to an infinitesimal value.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Reipubl. Ger. Pr.</hi> c. 27.</note> And it is to our eyes still further
+reduced by the agreeable convention which seems to have
+made it a matter of good taste that the person so distinguished
+by his fellow-citizens should bear the expense of the record
+himself!<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6992.</note> Nor did the expectations of the grateful public end
+even there; for, at the dedication of the monument, it was
+seemingly imperative to give a feast to the generous community
+which allowed or required its benefactor to bear the
+cost of the memorial of his own munificence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3811, 3722, 6999, 7007, 7004
+(honore usus inpensam remisit), 7011,
+7190, 4100.</note> It is only fair,
+however, to say that this civic meanness was not universal,
+and that there are records to show that even the poorest
+class sometimes subscribed among themselves to pay for the
+honour which they proposed to confer.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3865, ex aere collato; 6996.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Antonine age was an age of splendid public spirit and
+great material achievement. But truth compels us to recognise
+that even in the age of the Antonines, there were ominous signs
+of moral and administrative decay. Municipal benefactors
+were rewarded with local fame and lavish flattery; but the
+demands of the populace, together with the force of example
+and emulation, contributed to make the load which the rich
+had to bear more and more heavy. Many must have ruined
+themselves in their effort to hold their place, and to satisfy an
+exacting public sentiment. Men actually went into debt to
+do so;<note place="foot">This seems clear from Plut. <hi rend="italic">Reip.
+Ger. Pr.</hi> c. 31,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ μὴ δανειζόμενον οἰκτρὸν ἅμα καὶ καταγέλαστον εἶναι περὶ τὰς λειτουργίας</foreign>.</note> and as municipal life became less attractive or more
+burdensome, the career of imperial office opened out and
+offered far higher distinction. The reorganisation of the
+<pb n="246"/><anchor id="Pg246"/>imperial service by Hadrian had immense effects in diverting
+ambition from old channels. It created a great hierarchy of
+office, which absorbed the best ability from the provinces.
+Provincials of means and position were constantly visiting the
+capital for purposes of private business or pleasure, or to
+represent their city as envoys to the emperor. They often
+made powerful friends during their stay, and their sons, if not
+they themselves, were easily tempted to abandon a municipal
+career for the prospect of a high place in the imperial army
+or the civil service.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Reip. Ger. Pr.</hi> c. 18; cf. c. 10.</note> It is true that the local tie often remained
+unbroken. The country town, of course, was proud
+of the distinction to which its sons rose in the great world;
+and many a one who had gained a knighthood or some military
+rank, returned to his birthplace in later years, and was
+enrolled among its patrons. We may be sure that many a
+successful man, like the Stertinii of Naples, paid <q>nurture
+fees</q> in the most generous way. But already in the reign of
+Domitian, as we have seen, legal provision had to be made for
+the contingency of an insufficient number of candidates for the
+municipal magistracies. Already, in the reign of Trajan, the
+cities of Bithynia are compelling men to become members
+of the Curia, and lowering the age of admission to official
+rank.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> x. 113; 79.</note> Plutarch laments that many provincials are turning
+their backs on their native cities and suing for lucrative
+offices at the doors of great Roman patrons.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Reip. Ger. Pr.</hi> c. 18.</note> Apollonius of
+Tyana was indignant to find citizens of Ionia, at one of their
+great festivals, masquerading in Roman names.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. T.</hi> iv. 5.</note> The illustrious
+son of Chaeronea, with a wistful backward glance
+at the freedom and the glories of the Periclean age, frankly
+recognises that, under the shadow of the Roman power, the
+civic horizon has drawn in.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Reip. Ger. Pr.</hi> c. 32; cf.
+Gréard, <hi rend="italic">Morale de Plut.</hi> p. 230.</note> It is a very different thing to
+hold even the highest magistracy at Thebes or Athens from
+what it was in the great days of Salamis or Leuctra. But
+Plutarch accepts the Empire as inevitable. He appreciates
+its blessings as much as Aristides or Dion Chrysostom. He
+has none of the revolutionary rage which led Apollonius to
+cast reproaches at Vespasian, or to boast of his complicity
+<pb n="247"/><anchor id="Pg247"/>in the overthrow of Nero.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. T.</hi> v. 41, 10; cf.
+Gréard, p. 227.</note> He has little sympathy with
+philosophers like Epictetus, who would sink the interests of
+everyday politics in the larger life of the universal commonwealth
+of humanity. The Empire has extinguished much
+of civic glory and freedom, but let us recognise its compensating
+blessings of an ordered peace. <hi rend="italic">Spartam nactus es, hanc
+exorna</hi>, might be the motto of Plutarch’s political counsels. He
+himself, with a range of gifts and culture, which has made his
+name immortal, did not disdain to hold a humble office in the
+poor little place which was his home. And he appeals to the
+example of Epameinondas, who gave dignity to the magistracy
+which was concerned with the duty of the cleansing of the
+sewers and streets of Thebes.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Reip. Ger. Pr.</hi> c. 15.</note> He tells his young pupil that,
+although we have now no wars to wage, no alliances to conclude,
+we may wage war on some evil custom, revive some
+charitable institution, repair an aqueduct, or preside at a sacrifice.
+Yet Plutarch has a keen insight into the municipal
+vices of his age, the passion for place and office, the hot
+unscrupulous rivalry which will stoop to any demagogic arts,
+the venality of the crowd, and the readiness of the rich to
+pamper them with largesses and shows, the insane passion for
+pompous decrees of thanks and memorial statues; above all,
+the eager servility which abandoned even the poor remnant of
+municipal liberty, and was always inviting the interference of
+the prince on the most trivial occasions.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 27, 29, 30, 20.</note> Such appeals paralyse
+civic energy and hasten the inevitable drift of despotism. He
+exhorts men to strive by every means to raise the tone of
+their own community, instead of forsaking it in fastidious
+scorn, or ambition for a more spacious and splendid life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The growing distaste for municipal honours was to some
+extent caused by bureaucratic encroachments on the independence
+of the Curia. As early as the reign of Trajan there are
+unmistakable signs, as we have seen, of financial mismanagement
+and decay. The case of Bithynia, in Trajan’s reign, is
+sometimes treated as an exceptional one. It may be doubted
+whether it is not a conspicuous example of general disorganisation.
+The Bithynian towns were probably not alone
+in their ill-considered expenditure on faultily planned aqueducts
+<pb n="248"/><anchor id="Pg248"/>and theatres. Apamea was certainly not the only city
+which called for an imperial auditor of its accounts. Inscriptions
+of the reign of Trajan show that many towns in
+Italy, Como, Canusium, Praeneste, Pisa, Bergamum, and
+Caere, had curators of their administration appointed, some as
+early as the reigns of Hadrian or Trajan.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4007 (Canusium), 2391
+(Praeneste), 4491 (Pisa), 3898 (Bergamum),
+3787 (Caere). For places
+out of Italy, cf. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 3212 (datus
+a Trajano); viii. 2403, 2660 (Timgad
+and Lambesi); iii. 3485 (Aquincum);
+ii. 484 (Emerita); 4112 (Tarraco); cf.
+x.; ii. p. 1158; Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant.</hi> c. 11.</note> These officers,
+who were always unconnected with the municipality, took
+over the financial control, which had previously belonged to
+the duumvirs and quaestors. They were often senators or
+equites of high rank, and a single curator sometimes had the
+supervision of several municipalities. The case of Caere is
+peculiarly instructive and interesting.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3787, placuit tibi scribi
+an in hoc quoque et tu consensurus
+esses.</note> There, an imperial freedman,
+named Vesbinus, proposed to erect at his own cost
+a club-house (<hi rend="italic">phretrium</hi>), for the augustales, and asked the
+municipal authorities for a site close to the basilica. At a
+formal meeting of the Curia, the ground was granted to him,
+subject to the approval of Curiatius Cosanus, the curator,
+with a vote of thanks for his liberality. A letter to that
+official was drawn up, stating the whole case, and asking for
+his sanction. The curator, writing from Ameria, granted it in
+the most cordial terms. It is noteworthy that at the very time
+when Caere was consulting its curator about the proposal of
+Vesbinus,<note place="foot"><hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 113, as the names of the
+consuls show.</note> the Bithynian cities were laying bare their
+financial and engineering difficulties to Pliny and Trajan. The
+glory of free civic life is already on the wane. The municipality
+has invited or submitted to imperial control. The burdens of
+office have begun to outweigh its glory and distinction. In a
+generation or two the people will have lost their elective power,
+and the Curia will appoint the municipal officers from its own
+ranks. It will end by becoming a mere administrative machine
+for levying the imperial taxes; men will fly from its crushing
+obligations to any refuge; and the flight of the curiales will
+be as momentous as the coming of the Goths.<note place="foot">See <hi rend="italic">Roman Society in the Last
+Century of the Western Empire</hi>, p. 208
+sqq. (1st ed.).</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The judgment on that externally splendid city life of the
+<pb n="249"/><anchor id="Pg249"/>Antonine age will be determined by the ideals of the inquirer.
+There was a genuine love of the common home, a general pride
+in its splendour and distinction. And the duty, firmly
+imposed by public sentiment on the well-endowed to contribute
+out of their abundance to its material comfort and its glory,
+was freely accepted and lavishly performed. Nor was this
+expenditure all devoted to mere selfish gratification. The
+helplessness of orphanhood and age, the penury and monotonous
+dulness of the lives of great sunken classes, the education of
+the young, were drawing forth the pity of the charitable. Munificence
+was often indeed, in obedience to the sentiment of the
+time, wasted on objects which were unworthy, or even to our
+minds base and corrupting. Men seemed to think too much of
+feasting and the cruel amusement of an hour. Yet when a whole
+commune was regaled at the dedication of a bath or a temple,
+there was a healthy social sympathy diffused for the moment
+through all ranks, which softened the hard lines by which that
+ancient society was parted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, in looking back, we cannot help feeling that over
+all this scene of kindliness and generosity and social good-will,
+there broods a shadow. It is not merely the doom of free
+civic life, which is so clearly written on the walls of every curial
+hall of assembly from the days of Trajan, to be fulfilled
+in the long-drawn tragedy of the fourth and fifth centuries;
+three hundred years have still to run before the inevitable
+catastrophe. It is rather the feeling which seems to lurk
+under many a sentence, half pitiful, half contemptuous, of
+M. Aurelius, penned, perhaps, as he looked down on some
+gorgeous show in the amphitheatre, when the Numidian
+lion was laid low by a deft stroke of the hunting-spear, or
+a gallant Myrmillo from the Thames or the Danube sank
+upon the sand in his last conflict.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. vi. 46; vii. 3; ix. 30.</note> It is the feeling of
+Dion, when he watched the Alexandrians palpitating with
+excitement over a race in the circus, or the cities of Bithynia
+convulsed by some question of shadowy precedence or the
+claim to a line of sandhills. It is the swiftly stealing shadow
+of that mysterious eclipse which was to rest on intellect and
+literature till the end of the Western Empire. It is the
+burden of all religious philosophy from Seneca to Epictetus,
+<pb n="250"/><anchor id="Pg250"/>which was one long warning against the perils of a materialised
+civilisation. The warning of the pagan preacher was
+little heeded; the lesson was not learnt in time. Is it
+possible that a loftier spiritual force may find itself equally
+helpless to arrest a strangely similar decline?
+</p>
+
+</div><div type="chapter" n="3" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="251"/><anchor id="Pg251"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="III. The colleges and plebeian life"/><index index="pdf" level1="III. The colleges and plebeian life"/>
+<head>CHAPTER III</head>
+
+<head type="sub">THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE</head>
+
+<p>
+The <hi rend="italic">Populus</hi> or <hi rend="italic">Plebs</hi> of a municipal town of the early Empire
+is often mentioned in the inscriptions along with the <hi rend="italic">Ordo</hi>
+and the Augustales, generally in demanding some benefaction,
+or in doing honour to some benevolent patron.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz. Ind.</hi> 151; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. p.
+940; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3763, 7170 (consensus
+plebis); <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 3185 (ex postulatione
+populi); x. 5067, 1030, 8215, 3704.</note> They also
+appear as recipients of a smaller share at public feasts and
+distributions. They occasionally engage in a fierce conflict
+with the higher orders, as at Puteoli in the reign of Nero,
+when the discord was so menacing as to call for the presence
+of a praetorian cohort.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 48; Hi (<hi rend="italic">i.e.</hi> plebs)
+magistratuum et primi cujusque avaritiam
+increpantes.</note> The election placards of Pompeii also
+disclose a keen popular interest in the municipal elections.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iv. 202, 710, 787.</note>
+But the common people are now as a rule chiefly known to us
+from the inscriptions on their tombs. Fortunately there is an
+immense profusion, in all the provinces as well as in Italy, of
+these brief memorials of obscure lives. And although Roman
+literature, which was the product of the aristocratic class or
+of their dependents, generally pays but little attention to the
+despised mass engaged in menial services or petty trades, we
+have seen that the novel of Petronius flashes a brilliant light
+upon it in the reign of Nero.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The immense development of the free proletariat, in the
+time of the early Empire, is one of the most striking social
+phenomena which the study of the inscriptions has brought to
+light. It has sometimes been the custom to speak of that
+society as depending for the supply of its wants entirely on slave
+labour. And undoubtedly at one time slave labour occupied
+the largest part of the field of industry. A household in the
+<pb n="252"/><anchor id="Pg252"/>time of the Republic, of even moderate wealth, might have
+400 slaves, while a Crassus would have as many as 20,000,
+whom he hired out in various industries.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 159, 160; Duruy,
+<hi rend="italic">Hist. des Rom.</hi> v. 631; Athen. vi. 272 <hi rend="small">D.</hi></note> But several causes
+conspired gradually to work a great industrial revolution.
+From the days of Augustus, the wars beyond the frontier,
+which added fresh territory and yielded crowds of captives to
+the slave-markets, had become less frequent. And it is probable
+that births among the slave class hardly sufficed to
+maintain its numbers against the depletion caused by mortality
+and manumission. The practice of emancipating slaves of
+the more intelligent class went on so rapidly that it had even
+to be restrained by law.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> 40; D. Cass. 55. 13.</note> Masters found it economically
+profitable to give skilful slaves an interest in the profits of
+their industry, and the <hi rend="italic">peculium</hi>, which was thus accumulated,
+soon provided the means of purchasing emancipation. At
+the same time, the dispersion of colossal fortunes, gained in the
+age of rapine and conquest, and squandered in luxury and
+excess, together with the exploitation of the resources of
+favoured regions, which were now enjoying the blessings of
+unimpeded commerce, rapid intercommunication, and perfect
+security, must have given an immense stimulus to free
+industry. A very casual glance at the inscriptions, under
+the heading <hi rend="italic">Artes et Opificia</hi>,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> iii. <hi rend="italic">Ind.</hi> p. 180.</note> will show the enormous
+and flourishing development of skilled handicrafts, with
+all the minutest specialisation of the arts that wait on a
+highly-organised and luxurious society. The epitaphs of these
+obscure toilers have been brought to light in every part of
+the Roman world, in remote towns in Spain, Gaul, Noricum,
+Dacia, and North Africa, as well as in the ancient centres of
+refinement in Italy or the Greek East. On a single page or
+two you can read the simple record of the bridle-maker or
+flask-maker of Narbonne, the cabriolet-driver of Senegallia, the
+cooper of Trèves, the stone-cutter of Nîmes, the purple-dealer
+of Augsburg, beside those of the wool-comber of Brescia, the
+oculist of Bologna, the plumber of Naples, or the vendors of
+unguents in the Via Sacra, and the humble fruiterer of the
+Circus Maximus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4148, 4143, 4268, 4154.
+For the provinces of <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. Suppl.
+p. 1171; viii. p. 1102; x. 1163; xii.
+p. 943.</note> Many of these people had risen from
+<pb n="253"/><anchor id="Pg253"/>slavery into the freedman class. Most of them are evidently
+humble folk, although, like a certain female pearl-dealer of the
+Via Sacra, they may have freedmen and freedwomen of their
+own, for whom they provide a last resting-place beside themselves.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi>, 4148, Marcia margaritaria
+de Via Sacra legavit ... libertis
+libertabusque suis....</note>
+The barber, or auctioneer, or leather-seller, who had
+become the owner of lands and houses, and who could even
+give gladiatorial shows, excited the contempt of Juvenal and
+Martial.<note place="foot">Juv. i. 24; x. 224; Mart. iii. 16, 59.</note> But these insignificant people, although despised by
+the old world of aristocratic tradition, were proud of their crafts.
+They tell posterity who and what they were, without any vulgar
+concealment; nay, they have left expensive tombs, with the
+emblems or instruments of their petty trades proudly blazoned
+upon them like the armorial devices of our families of gentle
+birth. In the museum of S. Germain may be seen the effigy
+of the apple-seller commending his fruit to the attention of the
+ladies of the quarter; the cooper, with a cask upon his shoulder;
+the smith, hammer in hand, at the forge; the fuller, treading
+out and dressing the cloth.<note place="foot">Duruy, v. 637.</note> This pride in honest industry is
+a new and healthy sign, as a reaction from the contempt for it
+which was engrained in old Roman society, and which is always
+congenial to an aristocratic caste supported by slave labour.
+In spite of the grossness and base vulgarity of sudden wealth,
+portrayed by Petronius and Juvenal, the new class of free
+artisans and traders had often, so far as we can judge by stone
+records, a sound and healthy life, sobered and dignified by
+honest toil, and the pride of skill and independence. Individually
+weak and despised, they were finding the means of
+developing an organisation, which at once cultivated social
+feeling, heightened their self-respect, and guarded their collective
+interests. While the old aristocracy were being rapidly
+thinned by vice and extravagance, or by confiscation, the leaders
+of the new industrial movement probably founded many a
+senatorial house, which, in the fourth and fifth centuries, in an
+ever-recurring fashion, came to regard manual industry with
+sublime contempt, and traced themselves to Aemilius Paullus
+or Scipio, or even to Aeneas or Agamemnon.<note place="foot">S. Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, § 3.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The organisation of industry through the colleges attained
+<pb n="254"/><anchor id="Pg254"/>an immense development in the Antonine age, and still more
+in the third century, after the definite sanction and encouragement
+given to these societies by Alexander Severus. The
+records of the movement are numerous, and we can, after the
+scholarly sifting of recent years, now form a tolerably complete
+and vivid conception of these corporations which, springing up
+at first spontaneously, in defiance of government, or with its
+reluctant connivance, were destined, under imperial control, to
+petrify into an intolerable system of caste servitude in the last
+century of the Empire of the West.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Roman Society in the Last Century
+of the Western Empire</hi> (1st. ed.), p.
+193.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sodalitia and collegia were of immemorial antiquity.
+Certain industrial colleges and sacred sodalities were traced
+back to Numa, and even to the foundation of Rome.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> (Morel) p. 28 sq.;
+Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. 278; Plut.
+<hi rend="italic">Numa</hi>, c. 17,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἦν δὲ διανομὴ κατὰ τὰς τέχνας αὐλητῶν, χρυσοχόων, κτλ.</foreign></note> In the
+flourishing days of the Republic they multiplied without
+restraint or suspicion, the only associations at which the law
+looked askance being those which met secretly or by night.
+It was only in the last century of the Republic that the
+colleges came to be regarded as dangerous to the public peace,
+and they were, with some necessary exceptions, suppressed by
+a decree of the Senate in 64 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> They were revived again
+for factious or revolutionary purposes in 58 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> by Clodius.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 76.</note>
+The emperors Julius and Augustus abolished the free right of
+association, except in the case of a few consecrated by their
+antiquity or their religious character.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Caes.</hi> 42; <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> 32.</note> And it was enacted
+that new colleges could not be created without special
+authorisation. In the middle of the second century, the jurist
+Gaius lays it down that the formation of new colleges
+was restrained by laws, decrees of the Senate, and imperial
+constitutions, although a certain number of societies, both in
+Rome and the provinces, such as those of the miners, salt
+workers, bakers, and boatmen, were authorised.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 84.</note> And down to
+the time of Justinian, the right of free association was jealously
+watched as a possible menace to the public peace. The
+refusal of Trajan to sanction the formation of a company of
+firemen in Nicomedia, with the reasons which he gave to
+Pliny for his decision, furnishes the best concrete illustration
+<pb n="255"/><anchor id="Pg255"/>of the imperial policy towards the colleges.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> x. 34.</note> That the
+danger from the colleges to the public order was not an
+imaginary one, is clear from the passage in Tacitus describing
+the bloody riots between the people of Nuceria and Pompeii in
+the reign of Nero, which had evidently been fomented by
+<q>illicit</q> clubs.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 17, re ad patres
+relata ... collegia quae contra leges
+instituerant dissoluta.</note> It is seen even more strikingly in the serious
+troubles of the reign of Aurelian, when 7000 people were
+killed in the organised outbreak of the workmen of the mint.<note place="foot">Vop. <hi rend="italic">Aurel.</hi> c. 38.</note>
+Yet it is pretty clear that, in spite of legislation, and imperial
+distrust, the colleges were multiplying, not only in Rome, but
+in remote, insignificant places, and even in the camps, from
+which the legislator was specially determined to avert their
+temptations. In the blank wilderness, created by a universal
+despotism, the craving for sympathy and mutual succour
+inspired a great social movement, which legislation was powerless
+to check. Just as in the reigns of Theodosius and
+Honorius, imperial edicts and rescripts were paralysed by the
+impalpable, quietly irresistible force of a universal social
+need or sentiment. One simple means of evasion was provided
+by the government itself, probably as early as the first
+century. In an inscription of Lanuvium, of the year 136 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>,
+there is a recital of a decree of the Senate according the
+right of association to those who wish to form a funerary
+college, provided the members did not meet more than once a
+month to make their contributions.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6086; cf. Momms.
+<hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 98; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii.
+313; Duruy, v. 408.</note> It appears from
+Marcian’s reference to this law that other meetings for
+purposes of religious observance might be held, the provisions
+of the <hi rend="italic">senatusconsultum</hi> against illicit colleges being
+carefully observed.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 87.</note> Mommsen has shown that many other
+pious and charitable purposes could be easily brought within
+the scope of the funerary association. And it was not
+difficult for a society which desired to make a monthly
+contribution for any purpose to take the particular form
+recognised by the law. In the reign of M. Aurelius, although
+membership of two colleges is still prohibited, the colleges
+obtained the legal right to receive bequests, and to emancipate
+<pb n="256"/><anchor id="Pg256"/>their slaves. And finally, Alexander Severus organised all
+the industrial colleges and assigned them <hi rend="italic">defensores</hi>.<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Alex. Sev.</hi> c. 33; cf. Duruy, v. 408.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The law against illicit associations, with all its serious
+penalties, remained in the imperial armoury. But the Empire,
+which had striven to prevent combination, really furnished
+the greatest incentive to combine. In the face of that world-wide
+and all-powerful system, the individual subject felt, ever
+more and more, his loneliness and helplessness. The imperial
+power might be well-meaning and beneficent, but it was so
+terrible and levelling in the immense sweep of its forces, that
+the isolated man seemed, in its presence, reduced to the insignificance
+of an insect or a grain of sand. Moreover, the aristocratic
+constitution of municipal society became steadily more and more
+exclusive. If the rich decurions catered for the pleasures of
+the people, it was on the condition that they retained their
+monopoly of political power and social precedence. The
+plebeian crowd, recruited from the ranks of slavery, and ever
+growing in numbers and, in their higher ranks, in wealth, did
+not indeed dream of breaking down these barriers of exclusiveness;
+but they claimed, and quietly asserted, the right to
+organise a society of their own, for protection against oppression,
+for mutual sympathy and support, for relief from the deadly
+dulness of an obscure and sordid life. Individually weak and
+despised, they might, by union, gain a sense of collective
+dignity and strength. To our eyes, as perhaps to the eyes of
+the Roman aristocrat, the dignity might seem far from imposing.
+But these things are greatly a matter of imagination, and
+depend on the breadth of the mental horizon. When the
+brotherhood, many of them of servile grade, met in full conclave,
+in the temple of their patron deity, to pass a formal
+decree of thanks to a benefactor, and regale themselves with
+a modest repast, or when they passed through the streets and
+the forum with banners flying, and all the emblems of their
+guild, the meanest member felt himself lifted for the moment
+above the dim, hopeless obscurity of plebeian life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No small part of old Roman piety consisted in a scrupulous
+reverence for the dead, and a care to prolong their memory
+by solid memorial and solemn ritual, it might be to maintain
+some faint tie of sympathy with the shade which had passed
+<pb n="257"/><anchor id="Pg257"/>into a dim and rather cheerless world. The conception of
+that other state was always vague, often purely negative. It
+is not often that a spirit is sped on its way to join a loved
+one in the Elysian fields, and we may fear that such phrases,
+when they do occur, are rather literary and conventional.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4841, Elysiis campis
+floreat umbra tibi; but cf. 4793, manus
+levo contra deum qui me innocentem
+sustulit; 4796, Dii irati aeterno somno
+dederunt.</note> The
+hope of blessed reunion after death seldom meets us till we
+come to some monument of a Christian freedman.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4662, Qutia Silvana Uxor virum
+expecto meum.</note> But two
+of the deepest feelings in the Roman mind did duty for a
+clear faith in the life beyond the tomb: one was family piety,
+the other the passionate desire of the parting spirit to escape
+neglect and oblivion. Whoever will cast his eyes over some
+pages of the sepulchral inscriptions will be struck with the
+intensity and warmth of affection, the bitterness of loss and
+grief, which have been committed to the stone. The expressions,
+of course, are often conventional, like obituary memorials in
+every age. The model wife appears again and again, loving,
+chaste, pious, a woman of the antique model, a keeper at home,
+who spun among her maids and suckled her own children, who
+never gave her husband a moment’s vexation, except when she
+died.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2677, 2655, 4626, 4639, 4848,
+Domum servavit, lanam fecit. Dixi, abei.</note> Good husbands seem to have been not less common.
+And the wife’s grief sometimes far outruns the regular forms
+of eulogy or regret. In one pathetic memorial of a union
+formed in earliest youth, the lonely wife begs the unseen
+Powers to let her have the vision of her spouse in the hours
+of night, and bring her quickly to his side.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4775.</note> There is just the
+same pure affection in the less regular, but often as stable,
+unions of the slaves and soldiers, and the <hi rend="italic">contubernalis</hi> is
+lamented with the same honourable affection as the great lady,
+although the faulty Latin sometimes betrays the class to which
+the author belongs. The slave world must always have its
+shame and tragedy; yet many an inscription shows, by a
+welcome gleam of light, that even there human love and ties
+of family were not always desecrated.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2669, 4653, 2413, 2414.</note> The slave nurse
+erects a monument to her little foster child; or a master and
+mistress raise an affectionate memorial to two young <hi rend="italic">vernae</hi>
+<pb n="258"/><anchor id="Pg258"/>who died on one day. A freedman bewails, with warm sincerity,
+a friendship begun in the slave market, and never interrupted
+till the last fatal hour.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2815, 2817, 4687, 4777,
+4653.</note> The common tragedies of affection
+meet us on these slabs, as they are reproduced from age to
+age with little variation. The prevalent note is, <hi rend="italic">Vale vale
+in aeternum</hi>, with thoughts of the ghostly ferryman and the
+infernal stream and hopeless separation. Now and then,
+but seldom, a soul passes cheerfully from the light which it
+has loved, happy to escape the burden of old age.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4852, effugi crimen longa senecta
+tuum.</note> And
+sometimes, too, but seldom, we meet with a cold, hard grossness,
+which looks back with perfect content upon a full
+life of the flesh and takes the prospect of nothingness with a
+cheerful acquiescence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4816, balnea, vina, Venus corrumpunt
+corpora nostra, sed vitam
+faciunt. Vixi; quod comedi et ebibi
+tantum meum est. Non fui, fui; non
+sum, non curo; 4807, 7407, 7387.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The true Roman had a horror of the loneliness of death,
+of the day when no kindly eye would read his name and
+style upon the slab, when no hand for evermore would bring
+the annual offering of wine and flowers. It is pathetic to see
+how universal is the craving to be remembered felt even by
+slaves, by men plying the most despised or unsavoury crafts.
+The infant Julius Diadumenus, who has only drawn breath
+for four hours, receives an enduring memorial. A wife consoles
+her grief with the thought that her husband’s name and fame
+will be forever prolonged by the slab which she dedicates.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4795, 7406.</note>
+On another monument the traveller along the Flaminian Way
+is begged to stop and read again the epitaph on a boy of nine.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4836.</note>
+Many are tortured by the fear of the desertion or the violation
+of their <q>eternal home.</q> An old veteran bequeaths from his
+savings a sum of about £80, to provide a supply of oil for
+the lamp above his tomb.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4416.</note> An unguent seller of Montferrat
+leaves a fine garden to afford to the guardians of his grave an
+annual feast upon his birthday, and the roses which are to be
+laid upon it for ever.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4417.</note> Many a prayer, by the gods of the
+upper and the lower worlds, appeals to the passing wayfarer
+not to disturb the eternal rest.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4781, 4783, 4.</note> The alienation or desecration
+of a tomb is forbidden with curses or the threat of heavy
+<pb n="259"/><anchor id="Pg259"/>penalties.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4386, 4357, 4360, 4362,
+4388, 4396, 4423, 4425, 4427.</note> A place of burial was a coveted possession, which
+was not easily attainable by the poor and friendless, and
+practical persons guarded their repose against lawless intrusion
+by requiring the delinquent to pay a heavy fine to the
+municipal or to the imperial treasury, or to the pontifical
+college. It was the most effectual way of securing the peace
+of the dead. For the public authorities had a direct pecuniary
+interest in enforcing the penalty for the desecration. But it
+would be interesting to know how long these provisions to
+protect for ever the peace of the departed fulfilled the hopes
+of the testator.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The primary object of a multitude of colleges, like that
+of the worshippers of Diana and Antinous at Lanuvium, was
+undoubtedly, after the reign of Nerva, the care of the memory
+of their members after death. In the remarkable inscription
+of Lanuvium, as we have seen, the formal permission by
+decree of the Senate, to meet once a month for the purpose of
+a funerary contribution is recorded.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6086. Ex S.C.P.R. quibus
+coire convenire collegiumque habere
+liceat qui stipem menstruam conferre
+volent in funera, in id collegium coeant
+neque sub specie ejus collegii nisi
+semel in mense coeant, etc.</note> It was a momentous
+concession, and carried consequences which the legislator may
+or may not have intended.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. 313.</note> The jurist Marcian, who gives
+an imperfect citation of this part of the decree, goes on to
+add, that meetings for a religious purpose were not prohibited,
+provided that the previous legislation against illicit societies
+was observed.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 87.</note> And the law of the Lanuvian College shows
+how often such meetings might take place. It did not need
+much ingenuity to multiply occasions for reunion. The
+anniversary of the foundation, the birthday of founders or
+benefactors, the feast of the patron deity, the birthday of the
+emperor, these and the like occasions furnished legal pretexts
+for meetings of the society, when the members might have a
+meal together, and when the conversation would not always
+be confined to the funerary business of the college. At a
+time when, according to juristic theory, a special permission
+was needed for each new foundation, and when the authority
+was grudgingly accorded, the whole vast plebeian mass of
+petty traders, artisans, freedmen, and slaves were at one stroke
+<pb n="260"/><anchor id="Pg260"/>allowed to organise their societies for burial. We may
+fairly assume that, liberally interpreted, the new law was
+allowed to cover with its sanction many a college of which
+funeral rites were not the sole, or even the primary object.
+And this would be made all the easier because many of the
+industrial colleges, and perhaps still more of the strictly
+religious colleges, had a common burial-place, and often
+received bequests for funerary purposes. This is the case,
+for example, with a college of worshippers of Hercules at
+Interamna, and a similar college at Reate.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2399, 2400.</note> A young Belgian,
+belonging to the guild of armourers of the 20th legion,
+was buried by his college at Bath.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4079.</note> One C. Valgius Fuscus
+gave a burial-ground at Forum Sempronii, in Umbria, to a
+college of muleteers of the Porta Gallica, for their wives or
+concubines, and their posterity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4093.</note> There is even a burial-place,
+duly defined by exact measurement, for those <q>who are in the
+habit of dining together,</q> a description which, as time went
+on, would have applied as accurately as any other to many
+of these clubs.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4073, Loc. sep. convictor. qui
+una epulo vesci solent.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are, by a rare piece of good fortune, admitted to the
+interior of one of the purely funerary colleges. In the reign
+of Hadrian there was at Lanuvium a college which, by a
+curious fancy, combined the worship of the pure Diana
+with that of the deified minion of the emperor. It was
+founded in <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 133, three years after the tragic death of
+the young favourite. And in 136, the patron of the society,
+who was also a magnate of the town, caused it to be convened
+in the temple of Antinous. There he announced
+the gift of a sum of money, the interest of which was to be
+spent at the festivals of the patron deities; and he directed
+that the deed of foundation should be inscribed on the inner
+walls of the portico of the temple, so that newly admitted
+members might be informed of their rights and their obligations.
+This document, discovered among the ruins of the
+ancient Lanuvium in 1816, reveals many important facts in
+the constitution and working of funerary colleges.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6086; Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 98;
+Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. p. 309 sqq.;
+Duruy, v. 412.</note> It recites,
+as we have seen, a part of the <hi rend="italic">senatusconsultum</hi>, which
+<pb n="261"/><anchor id="Pg261"/>authorised the existence of such colleges, and after loyal
+wishes for the prosperity of the emperor and his house, it
+prays for an honest energy in contributing to the due interment
+of the dead, that by regular payments the society may
+prolong its existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The entrance fee of the college is to be 100 sesterces
+(16s. 8d.), together with a flagon of good wine. A monthly
+subscription of five asses is appointed. It is evident that
+the members are of the humblest class, and one clause shows
+that they have even a sprinkling of slaves among them, who,
+with the permission of their masters, might connect themselves
+with these burial clubs.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6086; Col. ii., placuit
+ut quisquis servus ex hoc collegio liber
+factus fuerit, etc.</note> The brethren could not aspire
+to the erection even of a <hi rend="italic">columbarium</hi>, still less to the possession
+of a common burial-ground. They confined themselves
+to making a funeral grant of HS.300 to the appointed heir
+of each member who had not intermitted his payments to the
+common fund.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 99; Boissier,
+<hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. p. 309.</note> Out of this sum, HS.50 are to be paid to
+members present at the funeral. The member dying intestate
+will be buried by the society, and no claim upon his remaining
+interest in it will be recognised. The slave, whose
+body was retained by his master after death, was to have a
+<hi rend="italic">funus imaginarium</hi>, and probably a cenotaph. In the case
+of a member dying within a radius of twenty miles from
+Lanuvium, three members, on timely notice, were deputed to
+arrange for the funeral, and required to render an account of the
+expenses so incurred. A fee of HS.20 was granted to each.
+But if any fraud were discovered in their accounts, a fine of
+quadruple the amount was imposed. Lastly, when a member
+died beyond the prescribed limit, the person who had arranged
+his funeral, on due attestation by seven Roman citizens, and
+security given against any further claims, received the burial
+grant, with certain deductions.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 104.</note> In such precise and orderly
+fashion, with all the cautious forms of Roman law, did this
+poor little society order its performance of duty to the
+dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Our knowledge of the funerary colleges is still further
+amplified by an inscription of a date twenty years later than
+<pb n="262"/><anchor id="Pg262"/>that of Lanuvium.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2417; Junio Rufino Cos. <hi rend="italic">i.e.</hi> <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 153; Momms. p. 73.</note> In the reign of Antoninus Pius a lady
+named Salvia Marcellina resolved to commemorate her husband
+by a gift to the college of Aesculapius and Hygia. She
+presented to it the site for a shrine close to the Appian Way,
+a marble statue of Aesculapius, and a hall opening on a terrace,
+where the banquets of the brotherhood should be held. To
+this benefaction Marcellina, along with one P. Aelius Zeno,
+who apparently was her brother, added two donations of
+HS.15,000 and HS.10,000 respectively, the interest of
+which was to be distributed in money, or food and wine, at
+six different festivals. The proportions assignable to each rank
+in the college were determined at a full meeting, held in the
+shrine of the <q>Divine Titus.</q> Marcellina attaches certain
+conditions to her gift. The society is to be limited to sixty
+members, and the place of each member, on his decease, is to
+be filled by the co-optation of his son. If any member
+chooses to bequeath his place and interest, his choice is
+confined to his son, his brother, or his freedman, and he is
+required to pay for this limited freedom of selection by refunding
+one-half of his burial grant to the chest of the
+college.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 93.</note> The college of Aesculapius is nominally a religious
+and funerary corporation, yet there is only a single reference,
+in a long document, to the subject of burial. No information is
+given as to the amount of the <hi rend="italic">funeraticium</hi> or burial grant, the
+sources from which it is derived, or the conditions on which
+it is to be paid. The chief object of Marcellina seems to have
+been to connect the memory of her husband with a number of
+festivals, for the perpetuity of which she makes provision, to
+promote social intercourse, and to prevent the intrusion of
+strangers by making membership practically hereditary.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The colleges, of whose inner working we have tried to give
+a picture, are classed as religious corporations in the collections
+of the inscriptions. They bear the name of a god, and
+they provide a solemn interment for their members. But in
+these respects they do not differ from many other colleges
+which are regarded as purely secular. The truth is, that any
+attempt to make a sharp division of these societies on such
+lines seems futile. Sepulture and religion being admitted by the
+<pb n="263"/><anchor id="Pg263"/>government as legitimate objects for association, any college,
+however secular in its tone, might, and probably would, screen
+itself under sacred names. Nor would this be merely a
+hypocritical pretence. It is clear that many of the purely
+industrial colleges, composed as they were of poor people who
+found it impossible to purchase a separate burial-place, and
+not easy, unaided, to bear the expense of the last rites, at once
+consulted their convenience, and gratified the sentiment of
+fraternity, by arranging for a common place of interment.
+And with regard to religion, it is a commonplace to point out
+that all Graeco-Roman societies, great or small, rested on
+religion. The state, the clan, the family, found their ideal
+and firmest bond in reverence for divine or heroic ancestors, a
+reverent piety towards the spirits who had passed into the
+unseen world. The colleges, as we shall see presently, were
+formed on the lines of the city which they almost slavishly
+imitated.<note place="foot">They have their ordo, plebs, decuriones,
+quinquennales, curatores,
+honorati, patroni, quaestores, etc.; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi>
+    <hi rend="italic">Henz. Ind.</hi> p. 176 sqq.</note> It would be strange and anomalous if they should
+desert their model in that which was its most original and
+striking characteristic. And just as Cleisthenes found divine
+and heroic patrons for his new tribes and demes,<note place="foot">Herodot. v. 66.</note> so would a
+Roman college naturally place itself under the protection of
+one of the great names of the Roman pantheon. Sometimes,
+no doubt, there may not have been much sincerity in this
+conformity to ancient pieties. But do we need to remind
+ourselves how long a life the form of ancient pieties may
+have, even when the faith which gave birth to them has
+become dim and faint?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The usual fashion of writing Roman history has concentrated
+attention on the doings of the emperor, the life of the
+noble class in the capital, or on the stations of the legions and
+the political organisation of the provinces. It is a stately and
+magnificent panorama. But it is apt to throw the life of the
+masses into even deeper shadow than that in which time has
+generally enwrapped them. We are prone to forget that,
+behind all this stately life, there was a quiet yet extraordinarily
+busy industrial activity which was its necessary
+basis and which catered for all its caprices. In the most
+cursory way Tacitus tells us that a great part of Italy
+<pb n="264"/><anchor id="Pg264"/>was gathered for the great fair at Cremona, on the fateful
+days when the town was stormed by the army of Vespasian.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iii. 32, tempus quoque
+mercatus ditem alioqui coloniam majore
+opum specie complebat.</note>
+Yet what a gathering it must have been! There were laid
+out in the booths the fine woollens of Parma and Mutina, the
+mantles of Canusium, the purples of Tarentum, the carpets
+of Patavium. Traders from Ilva brought their iron wares,
+Pompeii sent its fish sauces, and Lucania its famous sausages.
+Nor would there be missing in the display the oil of Venafrum,
+and the famous Setine and Falernian vintages.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Cena Trim. Einl.</hi> p. 63.</note> The improvement
+of the great roads in the reign of Trajan must have
+given a vast stimulus to inland commerce. And we may be
+sure that many a petty merchant with his pack was to be
+seen along the Aemilian or Flaminian ways, like the travelling
+vendor of honey and cheese, whom Lucius, in the tale of
+Apuleius, meets hurrying to Hypata.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> i. 5.</note> The great roads of
+Spain, since the days of Augustus, carried an immense traffic,
+which made even the distant Gades a magnificent emporium
+and one of the richest places in the Roman world.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Rom. Prov.</hi> i. 74.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The wandering traders in Germany, Spain, or Syria, by a
+natural instinct drew together in their exile. In the revolt
+of Julius Civilis, they are found settled among the Batavians,
+and a <hi rend="italic">collegium peregrinorum</hi> has left its memorial on the
+lower Rhine.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 178; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 5.</note> The <hi rend="italic">sodalicium urbanum</hi> at Bracara Augusta is
+a similar society.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. 2423.</note> Another mercantile college meets us at
+Apulum in Dacia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 1500.</note> The Syrians of Berytus had a club at
+Puteoli, and there were at least two clubs of Syrian traders at
+Malaga.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> x. 1634, 1579.</note> The graves of Syrian traders have been found at
+Sirmium in Pannonia, and, on the other hand, there are
+memorials of Roman merchants at Apamea and Tralles, at
+Salamis and Mitylene.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 365, 444, 455, 6051.</note> Immense stimulus to this transmarine
+trade must have been given by the Emperor Claudius, who
+provided insurance against loss by storms, and a liberal system
+of bounties and rewards for shipping enterprise.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> xviii.; cf. Merivale,
+vi. 126 sq.</note> Apollonius
+of Tyana once expostulated with a young Spartan, who claimed
+descent from Callicratidas, for having forsaken the true career
+<pb n="265"/><anchor id="Pg265"/>of a man of his race, to soil himself with the trade of
+Carthage and Sicily. It is the sentiment of Juvenal who
+treats as a lunatic the man who will venture his life with a
+cargo on the wintry Aegean.<note place="foot">Juv. xiv. 276.</note> But the antiquarian rhetoric
+attributed to Apollonius embalms the fact that at the opening
+of a springtime in the reign of Domitian, a great merchant
+fleet was lying at Malea, ready to sail to the western seas.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 34.</note>
+These wandering merchants, wherever they went, banded themselves
+in colleges for mutual protection and for society. In
+the same way, old soldiers, on their return from long service
+on the frontiers, gathered in military brotherhoods at such
+places as Ostia or Misenum.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6111, 6835.</note> The veterans of Augustus seem
+to have become a distinct and recognised class, like the
+Augustales.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4109.</note> Colleges of youth sprang up everywhere from
+the days of Nero, at Beneventum, Cremona, and Ameria, or at
+Moguntiacum, Lauriacum, and Poetovio.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6414, 2211, 4095, 4100, 4096;
+<hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. 5928, 1493; iii. 4045, 5678.</note> They were formed,
+like our own sporting clubs, for exercise and healthy rivalry,
+often under the patronage of the divine hero who, to all the
+moralists of that age, had become the mythic type of the
+continent vigour of early manhood. There is one sodality at
+least devoted to the preservation of chastity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2401.</note> But it is
+balanced by the clubs of the <q>late sleepers</q> and <q>late
+drinkers</q> of Pompeii.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iv. 575, 581.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The colleges in which the artisans and traders of the
+Antonine age grouped themselves are almost innumerable,
+even in the records which time has spared. They represent
+almost every conceivable branch of industry or special skill
+or social service, from the men who laid the fine sand in the
+arena, to the rich wine merchants of Lyons or Ostia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4063, 4072, 4087, 7007.</note> The
+mere catalogue of these associations in an index will give an
+enlarged conception of the immense range and minute specialisation
+of Roman industry. It may be doubted whether a
+similar enumeration of our English crafts would be longer or
+more varied. The great trades, which minister to the first
+necessities of human life, occupy of course the largest space,
+the bakers, the cloth-makers, the smiths, carpenters, and wood-<pb n="266"/><anchor id="Pg266"/>merchants, trades often grouped together, the shoemakers
+and fullers and carders of wool. The mechanics, who made
+the arms and engines for the legions, naturally hold a
+prominent place. Nor less prominent are the boatmen of
+Ostia, and of the Rhone and the Saône.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4243, 7205, 6950.</note> The sailors of
+these great rivers had several powerful corporations at
+Lyons, and, on many an inscription,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7007, 7254, 4110, 6950.</note> claim the wealthiest
+citizens, men who have gained the whole series of municipal
+honours, as their chiefs and patrons. Arles, which was
+then a great sea-port, had its five corporations of sailor-folk,
+and Ostia an equal number, charged with the momentous
+task of taking up the cargoes of the African corn-ships for
+the bakeries of Rome.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3655, 6029, 3178.</note> Transport by land is represented by
+colleges of muleteers and ass drivers in the Alps and Apennines.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4093, 7206.</note>
+All the many trades and services which ministered to
+the wants or pleasures of the capital were similarly banded
+together, the actors and horn-blowers, the porters and paviors,
+down to the humble dealers in pastils and salt fish.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4105, 2619, 4113, 4112, 2625.</note> We
+have seen that even the gladiators, in their barrack-prisons,
+were allowed to form their clubs. Although traces of these
+combinations are found in remote and obscure places all
+over the Roman world, it is at great commercial centres,
+at Ostia, Puteoli, Lyons, and Rome itself, that they have
+left the most numerous remains. They had probably for
+one of their objects the protection of their members against
+encroachments or fiscal oppression. Strabo once came across a
+deputation of fishermen on their way to plead with the Emperor
+for a reduction of their dues.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. p. 286.</note> Yet it would be a mistake to
+suppose that these trades unions were always organised for
+trade objects, or that the separate colleges were composed of
+people engaged in the same occupation. They had many
+honorary members from among the richer classes, and, even
+in the lower ranks, in defiance of the law,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Dig.</hi> L. 7.</note> a dealer in salt
+might be enrolled among the boatmen of the Rhone, and
+member of a college of builders.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. 287.</note> In truth, the great object
+of association among these humble people appears to have
+been not so much the protection of their trade, as the cheer<pb n="267"/><anchor id="Pg267"/>fulness of intercourse, the promotion of fellowship and good-will,
+the relief of the dulness of humdrum lives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Probably no age, not even our own, ever felt a greater
+craving for some form of social life, wider than the family,
+and narrower than the State. It was a movement at which,
+as we have seen, even the greatest and strongest of the
+emperors had to connive. It penetrated society down to
+its lowest layers. Even the slaves and freedmen of great
+houses organised themselves in colleges. There were colleges
+in the imperial household.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6302.</note> T. Aelius Primitivus, chief of the
+imperial kitchen, being a man of great posthumous ambition,
+left the care of his own and his wife’s monument to the
+college of the palatine cooks.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi></note> In the inscriptions of Moesia
+there is the album of a Bacchic club of household slaves
+containing 80 names, with apparently different grades among
+them, designated by such titles as <hi rend="italic">archimysta</hi>, <hi rend="italic">bouleuta</hi>, <hi rend="italic">frater</hi>
+and <hi rend="italic">filius</hi>.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 2, 6150.</note> A similar club of the servile class, devoted to
+the worship of Isis, existed at Tarraco.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 6004.</note> The officers of
+another bear the pompous titles of tribune, quaestor, and
+triumvir, and the slab records the thanks of one Hilara,
+that her ashes have been allowed to mingle in the same urn
+with those of Mida the chamberlain.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2863, Hilara viva rogavit
+ut ossa sua in olla Midaes coicerentur
+cum mort. esset.</note> A provincial treasurer
+at Ephesus, who was a <hi rend="italic">verna Augusti</hi>, commits the custody
+of his wife’s monument to five colleges of slaves and freedmen
+in the emperor’s household. One of the colleges bears the
+name of Faustina. Another college is devoted to the cult
+of the Lares and images of Antoninus Pius.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 6077, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> note.</note> Private masters
+seem to have encouraged the formation of such associations
+among their dependents, and sometimes to have endowed
+them with a perpetual foundation.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2386, 4938, 4123.</note> It was probably politic,
+as well as kind, to provide for slaves social pleasures within
+the circle of the household, and thus to forestall the attractions
+of the numerous clubs outside, which freely offered their
+hospitality.<note place="foot">Such as that in <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6086.</note> We may be sure that the college <q>which was
+in the house of Sergia Paulina</q> was not encouraged by the
+mistress without good reason.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="268"/><anchor id="Pg268"/>
+
+<p>
+Thus it appears that in every part of the Roman world,
+in the decaying little country town, and in the great trading
+centres, the same great movement of association, is going
+on apace. It swept into its current almost every social grade,
+and every trade, handicraft or profession, the pastil-makers,
+the green-grocers and unguent sellers of Rome, the muleteers
+of the Alps, the fullers of Pompeii, the doctors at Beneventum,
+the boatmen of the Seine, the wine merchants of Lyons. Men
+formed themselves into these groups for the most trivial or
+whimsical reasons, or for no reason at all, except that they
+lived in the same quarter, and often met.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6010, Colleg. Capitolinorum, etc.; cf. Cic. <hi rend="italic">Ad Quint. Fratr.</hi> ii. 5.</note> From the view
+which the inscriptions give us of the interior of some of these
+clubs, it is clear that their main purpose was social pleasure.
+And this is especially true of the clubs of the humblest class.
+M. Boissier has well remarked that the poor workman, the
+poor freedman, with the brand of recent slavery upon him,
+who was often engaged in some mean or disgusting occupation,
+amidst a society which from tradition regarded any industry
+soiled by servile touch with distant scorn, must have felt
+themselves solitary exiles in the desert of a great town, the
+most awful desert in the world. The remote splendour of the
+court and aristocratic life must have deepened the gloom of
+isolation and helplessness. Shut out for ever from that
+brilliant world of fashion and pleasure and power, whose social
+life seemed so charming and gay and friendly, the despised and
+lonely toiler sought a refuge in little gatherings of people as
+lonely as himself. At some chance meeting, some one, more
+energetic than the rest, would throw out the suggestion to form
+a club, on the model of some of the old trade societies which
+had always been authorised by the State from the days of
+Numa, or of those newer associations which were now tacitly
+permitted under the guise of religion. A small entrance fee
+would meet, for the time, their modest expenses. In that age
+of generous or ambitious profusion, it was not hard to find
+some influential patron, a kindly gracious noble, or an aspiring
+or generous <hi rend="italic">parvenu</hi>, to give the infant society his countenance,
+along with a substantial donation for the building of a club-house,
+and for simple convivial pleasures on his birthday, and
+other festivals which could easily be multiplied. Then the
+<pb n="269"/><anchor id="Pg269"/>brethren met in solemn form to frame their constitution and
+commemorate their benefactor, on one of those many monuments
+which illuminate a social life on which the literature of
+the age is generally silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The continuity and repetition of proved political organisation
+is a notable characteristic of the great races which have
+left, or are destined to leave, their mark on history. The
+British settlers on the prairies of Oregon or Manitoba immediately
+order themselves into communities, which are modelled
+on a social system as old as the Heptarchy. The Latin
+race had perhaps an even more stubborn conservatism than
+the English. Under the most various circumstances, the
+Roman instinctively clung to forms and institutions of tested
+strength and elasticity, and consecrated by the immemorial
+usage of his race. The most distant and most humble municipality
+was fashioned after the pattern of the great <q>city which
+had become a world.</q><note place="foot">Rutil. Namat. i. 63.</note> It had its senate, the <hi rend="italic">ordo splendidissimus
+et amplissimus</hi>, and the popular assembly which elected
+the magistrates. The municipal magistrates, if they do not
+always bear the ancient names, reproduce in shadowy form
+the dictators, the praetors, the aediles, quaestors, and censors of
+the old republic.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz. Ind.</hi> p. 154 sqq.</note> The same continuity of form is seen in the
+colleges. As the municipal town was modelled on the constitution
+of the State, so we may say that the college was modelled
+on the municipal town. The college, indeed, became a city for
+the brotherhood, at once a city and a home. They apply to it
+such terms as <hi rend="italic">respublica collegii</hi>.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4068, 4107.</note> The meetings often took place
+in a temple, whether of a patron deity or of an emperor, as
+those of the Roman Senate were held in the temple of Concord
+or of Bellona. There they elected their administrative officers,
+generally for a period of one year; in some cases, by way of
+special distinction, for life. The heads of these little societies
+bear various names, <hi rend="italic">magistri</hi>, <hi rend="italic">curatores</hi>, <hi rend="italic">quinquennales</hi>, <hi rend="italic">praefecti</hi>,
+or <hi rend="italic">praesides</hi>.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6127, 7181, 7182, 3217, 4138 (<hi rend="italic">v.</hi>
+Orelli’s note to this Inscription), 4071;
+<hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. p. 1163; iii. (2) p. 1180.</note> They have also quaestors,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2863, 7183, 5372.</note> who managed their
+financial affairs, which, although perhaps on no great scale,
+still involved the investment of trust moneys to yield the
+prescribed amounts which had to be distributed either as burial
+<pb n="270"/><anchor id="Pg270"/>payments, or in food and money on the high festivals. The
+number of the members was generally limited, either by the
+government in the interests of public order, or by the will of
+a benefactor, to prevent the progressive diminution in the
+value of the divisible shares of the income.<note place="foot"> <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2417, ut ne plures adlegantur
+quam numerus s. s. etc.; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii.
+1167, collegio hominum centum <sic>dumtaxet</sic>
+constituto. Cf. Plin. x. 33, where
+the coll. fabrorum is to be limited to
+150.</note> A periodical
+revision of the roll of members was therefore conducted every
+five years, as it was in the municipality, by the chief officers,
+exercising for the time censorial powers in miniature. Fortunately
+the albums of three or four colleges have been preserved.
+The lists throw a vivid light on their constitution and social
+tone. We have drawn attention in a former chapter to the
+strict gradation of social rank in the city polity. The same
+characteristic is repeated in the collegiate organisation. In these
+humble plebeian coteries, composed of <q>men without a grandfather,</q>
+of men, perhaps, whose father was a slave, or of men
+who were slaves themselves, there emerges, to our astonishment,
+a punctilious observance of shadowy social distinctions, which
+is an inheritance from the exclusive aristocratic pride of the
+old republic. This characteristic has excited in some French
+critics and historians a certain admiration,<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. 295.</note> in which it is
+not altogether easy to join. Gradation of rank to ensure
+devotion and order in public service is a precious and admirable
+thing. But artificial and unreal distinctions, invented and
+conferred to flatter wealth, to stimulate or reward the largesses
+of the rich patron, to gratify the vulgar self-complacency of
+the <hi rend="italic">parvenu</hi>, are only a degrading form of mendicancy. Some
+indulgence is no doubt due to men who were still under the yoke
+of slavery, or only just released from it; the iron had entered
+into their souls. But both the college and the municipality
+of the Antonine age cannot be relieved of the charge of
+purchased or expectant deference to mere wealth. Hence we
+cannot altogether share the pleasure of M. Boissier in these
+pale and vulgar reproductions of the hierarchy of a real
+aristocracy. But the image of the hierarchy is there, and it is
+very instructive. In a college of smiths in Tarraconensis, there
+were fifteen patrons at the head of the roll, followed by
+twelve decurions, including two doctors and a soothsayer, one
+<pb n="271"/><anchor id="Pg271"/>man isolated by the honours of the <hi rend="italic">bisellium</hi>, two honorary
+members, twenty-eight plain plebeians. There were also several
+<q>mothers</q> and <q>daughters</q> of the society.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4055.</note> The album of
+another club at Ostia shows a list of nine patrons, two holders
+of quinquennial rank, and one hundred and twenty-three
+plebeians.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4054, 2417, 4056.</note> The plebs of many colleges included slaves, and
+in more than one inscription the men of ingenuous and those
+of servile birth are carefully distinguished, the slaves being
+sometimes placed at the bottom of the roll.<note place="foot">The ranks are mingled, however,
+in <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2394; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 633.</note> Yet it was surely
+a great advance when slaves and freemen could meet together
+for the time, on a certain footing of equality, for business or
+convivial intercourse. The rigid lines of old pagan society are
+indeed still marked on the face of these clubs. And yet many
+an inscription leaves the impression that these little societies
+of the old pagan world are nurseries, in an imperfect way, of
+the gentle charities and brotherliness which, in shy retirement,
+the young Church was cultivating in her disciples to be
+the ideal of the world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These colleges became homes for the homeless, a little
+fatherland, or <hi rend="italic">patria</hi>, for those without a country. Sometimes
+they may have met in low taverns, which were on that
+account jealously watched by some of the emperors.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 60. 6,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τά τε καπελεῖα ἐς ἃ συνιόντες ἔπινον κατέλυσε, κτλ.</foreign></note> But
+they generally attained to the possession of a club-room or
+<hi rend="italic">schola</hi>, a name which had been previously given to the
+lounging-room of the public baths. Sometimes the <hi rend="italic">schola</hi>
+was erected at their own cost, the site being perhaps granted
+by some rich patron, or by the town council, on a vacant
+spot close to the basilica or the theatre.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4088, 3298, 2279, 3787,
+4085.</note> But frequently a
+hall was built for them by some generous friend. A like
+generosity often provided for them a little chapel of their
+patron deity, with a shaded court, or a balcony open to the
+air and sun, where the brethren took their common meals.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2417, solarium tectum junctum
+in quo populus collegi s. s. epuletur.</note>
+Or a rich patron, anxious to secure some care and religious
+observance of his last resting-place, would bequeath to a
+college a pleasant garden adjoining the tomb, with a house
+in which to hold their meetings.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4070.</note> And, as a further security
+<pb n="272"/><anchor id="Pg272"/>against neglect and oblivion, a sum of 10,000 or 15,000
+sesterces would be invested to provide a dinner for the
+college on their benefactor’s birthday.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 65, 900, 4088; cf. 4107,
+4366.</note> As years went on,
+the scene of many a pleasant gathering became a centre
+round which clustered a great deal of sentiment, and even
+pride. We may imagine that, allowing for differences of
+time and faith, the little school or shrine would, in the course
+of years, attract something of the feeling which consecrates
+an ancient village church in England, or a little Bethel which
+was built in the year of the visit of John Wesley. It became
+a point of honour to make gifts to the schola, to add to its
+comfort or beauty. One benefactor would redeem a right of
+ancient lights, or build a boundary wall.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2416, 4057.</note> Another would
+make a present of bronze candelabra on a marble stand, with
+the device of a Cupid holding baskets in his hands.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4068.</note> Or a
+college would receive from its curator a gift of some silver
+statues of the gods, on the dedication of the <hi rend="italic">schola</hi>, with a
+brass tablet, no doubt recording the event.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2502.</note> The gift of a
+place where the brethren of the club might be buried beside
+their wives or concubines, was probably, to these poor people,
+not the least valued benefaction.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2400, 4093.</note> Many a humble donation
+was probably made, which was too slight for a memorial.
+But it happens that we have one record of gifts evidently
+offered by poor, insignificant people. It is contained in a very
+interesting inscription found upon a rock near the theatre at
+Philippi in Macedonia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 1, 633.</note> It records that P. Hostilius Philadelphus,
+in recognition of the aedileship of the college, which
+had been conferred upon him, bore the expense of polishing
+the rock, and inscribing upon it the names of the members of
+a college of Silvanus, sixty-nine in number, together with a list
+of those who had presented gifts to their temple. The college
+was a religious one, with a priest who is named in the first
+place. It is also a funerary society, and seems to be composed
+of freedmen and of slaves, either belonging to the colony
+or private masters. They had just erected a temple of their
+patron god, to which some had given subscriptions in money,
+while others made various offerings for its adornment. One
+<pb n="273"/><anchor id="Pg273"/>brother presents an image of the god in a little shrine, another
+statuettes of Hercules and Mercury. There is another
+donation of some stone-work in front of the temple, and
+Hostilius, at his own expense, cut away the rock to smooth
+the approach to the shrine. Most of the gifts are of trifling
+value, a poor little picture worth 15 <hi rend="italic">denarii</hi>, a marble image
+of Bacchus costing not much more. But they were the
+offerings of an enthusiastic brotherhood, and the good Hostilius
+has given them an immortality of which they never dreamed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The contributions of the members would generally have
+been but a sorry provision for the social and religious life of a
+college. Reproducing, as it did, the constitution and the tone
+of the city in so many traits, the college in nothing follows
+its model so closely as in its reliance on the generosity of
+patronage. At the head of the album of the society there
+is a list, sometimes disproportionately long, of its <hi rend="italic">patroni</hi>.
+Countless inscriptions leave us in no doubt as to the reason
+why the patron was elected. His <hi rend="italic">raison d’être</hi> in the
+club is the same as in the city; it is to provide luxuries or
+amusements for the society, which the society could not
+generally obtain for itself. The relation of patron and client
+is, of all the features of ancient life, the one which, being so
+remote from the spirit of our democratic society, is perhaps
+most difficult for us to understand. The mutual obligations,
+enforced by a powerful traditional sentiment, were of the most
+binding, and sometimes burdensome character. And in that
+form of relation, between former master and freedman, which
+became so common in the first age of the Empire, the old
+master was bound to continue his support and protection to
+the emancipated slave.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 203.</note> Although there was much that
+was sordid and repulsive in the position of the client in
+Juvenal’s and Martial’s days, we must still recognise the fact
+that the fortune of the rich patron had to pay a heavy price
+for social deference. Not less heavy was the demand made
+on the patrons of municipalities and colleges.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There must have been wide distinctions of dignity and
+importance among the industrial colleges of the Empire.
+The <hi rend="italic">centonarii</hi>, the <hi rend="italic">fabri</hi>, and <hi rend="italic">dendrophori</hi> of the more
+important centres, such as Aquileia, Lyons and Milan, the
+<pb n="274"/><anchor id="Pg274"/>boatmen of Arles or Ostia, would probably have looked
+down with scorn on the flute-players of the Via Sacra, the
+hunters of Corfinium, or the muleteers of the Porta Gallica.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4082, 4118.</note>
+And there was a corresponding variety in the rank of the
+patrons. Some are high officials of the Empire, procurators
+of provinces, curators of great public works, or distinguished
+officers of the legions. Or they are men evidently of high
+position and commanding influence in their province, priests
+of the altar of Augustus, augurs of the colony, magistrates
+or decurions of two or three cities.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4082, 194, 73, 4077, 6654, 4109,
+4069; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 1, 1209, 1497, 1051;
+x. 228; 1696; 3910.</note> Sometimes the
+patron is a great merchant, with warehouses of oil or wine
+at Lyons or Tarragona or Ostia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 7007, 4109.</note> Yet in spite of his wealth,
+the patron’s social position in those days might be rather
+uncertain, and we may without difficulty, from modern
+analogies, believe that a new man might find his vanity
+soothed, or his position made less obscure, by being known
+as the titular head of an ancient corporation of the clothworkers,
+or <hi rend="italic">dendrophori</hi>, or of the boatmen on the Saône.
+Probably in obscure country towns, remote from the seat of
+Empire, these bourgeois dignities were even more valued.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 1968; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3927,
+3321, 6275.</note> The
+humbler colleges would have to be content with one of the new
+freedmen, such as the vulgar friends of Trimalchio, who, after
+a youth of shameful servitude, had leapt into fortune by
+some happy chance or stroke of shrewdness, and who sought
+a compensation for the contempt of the great world in the
+deference and adulation of those who waited for their largesses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The election of a patron was an event of great moment,
+especially to a poor college. And it was conducted with a
+formal preciseness, and an assumption of dignity, which, at this
+distance of time, are sometimes rather ludicrous. In a little town
+of Cisalpine Gaul in the year 190, the college of smiths and
+clothworkers met in solemn session in their temple. Their
+quaestors, who may have had the financial condition of the
+college in view, made a formal proposal that the college should
+set an example of the judicious reward of merit, by electing
+one Tutilius Julianus, a man distinguished by his modesty
+and liberality, as the patron of their society. The meeting
+<pb n="275"/><anchor id="Pg275"/>commended the sage proposal of the quaestors, and formally
+resolved that the honourable Julianus should be requested
+to accept the distinction, with an apology for so tardy a
+recognition of his merits, and that a brass plate, containing a
+copy of this decree, should be placed above his door.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4133.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is significant that the patrons were, in very many cases,
+Seviri and Augustales, a body which in the provinces, as we have
+seen, was generally composed of new men of the freedman class.
+Although they were steadily rising in importance and in strength
+of organisation, the provincial Augustales always ranked after
+the decurions of a town. They often displayed boundless
+liberality to their city and to their own order.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7116, 3914, 3923, 4080, qui
+facultates suas coll. reliq.</note> But the
+leading Augustales seem to have been quite as generous to the
+other corporations who placed themselves under their patronage.
+And they were not unfrequently patrons of several colleges.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4109; 194, 4069, 4071, 4094,
+7194.</note>
+It is no long task to find men who were the titular protectors
+of two or three, of eight, or even of as many as twelve or
+fifteen colleges. One inscription to Cn. Sentius of Ostia would
+seem to include among his dependents almost every industrial
+college in that busy port.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4109.</note> Sentius must have been a very
+wealthy and a very generous man to accept the patronage of
+so many societies, which in those days expected or demanded
+that their honours should be paid for in solid cash. The
+crowning distinction of a statue, or a durable inscription, was
+often solemnly decreed with all seemly forms of deference or
+unstinted flattery in a full meeting of the society. But in a
+great majority of cases we are amused or disgusted to read
+that, after all his other liberalities, the benefactor or his heir
+is permitted to pay for the record of popular gratitude.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3724, honore usus impensam
+remisit; cf. 7011, 6992, 7190, so
+<hi rend="italic">passim</hi>.</note> This
+fact may explain the extraordinary abundance of these honours,
+if it somewhat lowers their value in the eyes of posterity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, besides the benefactions which sprang either from
+ambition or real generosity, a vast number were inspired by the
+Roman passion for long remembrance, and for the continuity
+of funerary ritual. The very position of so many tombs by
+the side of the great roads beyond the city gates, was a silent
+<pb n="276"/><anchor id="Pg276"/>appeal to the passing traveller not to forget the departed. The
+appeal is also often expressly made on the stone by those who
+had no other means of prolonging their own memory or that of
+some one they loved. It is impossible to read without some
+emotion the prayer of an old Spanish soldier, that his brethren
+of the college may never suffer grief like his, if they will only
+keep the lamp burning for ever over the tomb of his child.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. 2102.</note> The
+more opulent took more elaborate measures to provide for the
+guardianship of their <q>last home.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4371, 4070, 4400, 7365;
+cf. Marq. <hi rend="italic">Pr.</hi> i. 370.</note> They often attached to the
+tomb a field or gardens of considerable extent, to be cultivated
+for profit, or to bear the roses for the annual offering.
+The whole area, the dimensions of which, in many inscriptions,
+are defined with mathematical precision, would be surrounded
+by a wall. Within the enclosure there would be a little
+shrine containing statues of the dead, an arbour and a well, and
+a hall in which the kindred of coming generations might hold
+their annual banquet, till the tie was dissolved by the cruel oblivion
+of time.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4456 aediculae in quibus
+simulacra, etc., 4510, 4400 area quae
+ante se est maceria cincta long. p. x̅l̅i̅i̅x̅., lat. p. x̅x̅x̅i̅x̅., 7365, 4337, 4070,
+4085.</note> There will be a cottage (<hi rend="italic">taberna</hi>) in which a freedman
+or dependent of the house may be lodged, to watch over the
+repose of the dead.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4366 ejusque mausolei claves
+duae penes aliquem libertorum meorum
+... sint, 4637, 4353.</note> But all these precautions, as the testator
+feels, were likely to be defeated in the end by the vicissitudes
+of human fortunes.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6206.</note> He had, indeed, before his eyes the fate
+of many a forsaken and forgotten tomb of old worthies of the
+Republic. Families die out; faithful freedmen and their children
+cannot keep their watch for ever. The garden will grow
+wild, a time may come when no kindly hand will pour the
+libation or scatter the roses on the natal day. Families will die
+out, but a college may go on for ever by the perpetual renewal
+of its members. Inspired with this idea, a worthy of Nîmes
+created a funerary college to dine regularly in his honour.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4366.</note>
+It was to consist of thirty persons, and the number was
+to be maintained by co-optation into the places of deceased
+members. Members of the college who were obliged to be
+absent might send one of their friends to join in the repast.
+Thus the dead man, who had taken such care to prolong his
+<pb n="277"/><anchor id="Pg277"/>memory, would at no distant date be festively celebrated by
+people who barely knew his name. Many another left a
+bequest to a college to be spent in a feast on the testator’s
+memorial day.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 3999, 4076, 4107, 4088.</note> A freedman of Mevania leaves a tiny
+legacy of HS.1000 to the guild of clothworkers, of whom he
+is patron, with the condition that not less than twelve of
+their number shall feast once a year in memory of him.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 3999.</note> A
+more liberal provision for convivial enjoyment was left to
+a college of Silvanus in honour of Domitian. It consisted
+of the rents of four estates, with their appurtenances, which
+were to be spent on the birthdays of the emperor and his
+wife, <q>for all time to come,</q> with the sacrifices proper to
+such a holy season.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6085.</note> Due provision is often made for the
+seemly and impressive performance of a rite which was at
+once a religious duty and a convivial pleasure. There is
+a curious letter of the time of Antoninus Pius containing a
+deed of gift to the college of the <hi rend="italic">fabri</hi> at Narbo, in return for
+their constant favours to the donor. One Sextus Fadius
+presents them with the sum of 16,000 sesterces, the interest
+of which is to be divided every year at the end of April for
+ever, at a banquet on his birthday; the guests on this festive
+occasion are to be habited in their handsomest attire.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7215 (<hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 149).</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the fullest and minutest arrangements for these modest
+meals are to be found in the document relating to the foundation
+of the poor college of Diana and Antinous, to which reference
+has already been made. The master of the feast was taken in
+regular order from the roll of the society. Each brother had to
+accept this office in his turn, or pay a fine of five shillings of our
+money. The regular festivals of the club were six in the year,
+on the natal days of Diana and Antinous, and those of the
+founder and some of his relatives. There is some obscurity in
+the regulations for these common feasts, and at first sight they
+are a ludicrous contrast to the pontiff’s famous banquet in the
+days of Julius Caesar, described by Macrobius.<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> iii. 13, 11-13.</note> M. Boissier
+naturally refuses to imagine that even the poor brethren of the
+club of Diana and Antinous would be contented with bread,
+four sardines, a bottle of good wine, with hot water and the
+<pb n="278"/><anchor id="Pg278"/>proper table service. The slave steward of Horace probably
+found much better fare in his <hi rend="italic">popina</hi>.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> ii. 319; Marq.
+<hi rend="italic">Pr.</hi> i. 208; Hor. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 14, 21.</note> Dr. Mommsen has
+resolved the mystery. It is evident, from several inscriptions,
+that <hi rend="italic">sportulae</hi> were sharply distinguished from distributions of
+bread and wine.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Colleg.</hi> p. 109; cf. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi>
+2385 (panem vinum et sportulas dedit),
+3949.</note> The <hi rend="italic">sportula</hi> was a gift of richer food or
+dainties, which in public distributions might be carried home;
+it was sometimes an equivalent in money. If those who
+received the <hi rend="italic">sportula</hi> preferred to enjoy it at a common table,
+an appointed member of the college would have the food
+prepared, or convert the money into dishes for the feast. The
+bread and wine he might add from his own pocket, if they were
+not provided by the foundation. How much for these meals
+came from the club funds, and how much out of the pocket of
+the <hi rend="italic">magister coenae</hi>, is not always clearly stated. But we may
+be sure, from the tone of the times, that additions to a modest
+<hi rend="italic">menu</hi> were often made by the generosity of patrons and officers
+of the club.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be futile and uninteresting to pursue into all its
+minute details throughout the inscriptions, the system of
+<hi rend="italic">sportulae</hi> founded by so many patrons and benefactors. Any
+one who wishes can temperately regale himself for hours at
+these shadowy club-feasts of the second century. Perhaps
+the clearest example of such distributions is the donation of
+Marcellina and Aelius Zeno to the little college of Aesculapius,
+to which reference has been made for another purpose.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2417.</note> On
+seven different anniversaries and festivals, sums of money, with
+bread and wine, were distributed to the brethren of the college
+in due proportions, according to their official dignity and social
+rank. Thus, in the division on the 4th of November, the fête-day
+of the society, the shares in money, according to the various
+grades, from the father of the college downwards, are six, four,
+and two. The division of the wine, according to social rank,
+follows the proportion of nine, six, and three. A slightly different
+scale is followed on the birthday of the Emperor Antoninus
+Pius in September, and on the day for New Year’s gifts in
+January. But in these benefactions the difference of grade is
+always observed, the patron and the chief magistrates and
+<pb n="279"/><anchor id="Pg279"/>magnates of the society always receiving a larger share than
+the obscure brethren at the bottom of the list. In the college
+of Aesculapius, Marcellina herself, and Aelius Zeno, the two
+great benefactors of the society, along with the highest of its
+dignitaries, are allotted three times as much as the plebeian
+brother. The excellent Marcellina, who, in the fourth century
+might perhaps have followed S. Jerome and Paula to Bethlehem,
+was the widow of a good and tender husband, who had been
+curator of the imperial picture galleries.<note place="foot">Fl. Apolloni Proc. Aug. qui fuit a
+pinacothecis.... Optimi piissimi, etc.</note> Had she been drawn
+into the ranks of that hidden society, who were beginning to
+lay their dead in the winding vaults beneath the Appian Way,
+she would certainly have dealt out her bounty on a different
+scale and on different principles. Her bequest to the college
+of Aesculapius reveals how deep in the soul of a charitable
+pagan woman, who was probably sprung from servile stock,
+lay that aristocratic instinct of the Roman world which survived
+the advent of the Divine Peasant and the preaching of the
+fishermen of Galilee, for far more than four hundred years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The most curious and interesting among the regulations for
+these club entertainments are those relating to order and
+decorum. The club of Diana and Antinous was not very
+select, being probably composed of poor freedmen and slaves.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6086, quisquis ex hoc
+collegio servus defunctus fuerit, etc.;
+cf. the composition of the club in <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi>
+2394.</note>
+The manners of this class, if we may judge by the picture
+given by Petronius, were, to say the least, wanting in reserve
+and self-restraint. The great object of such reunions was, as
+the founder tells us, that the brethren might dine together
+cheerfully and quietly.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ut quieti et hilares diebus
+solemnibus epulemur, etc.</note> Hence he most wisely orders that
+all serious proposals and complaints shall be reserved for
+business meetings. If any member quits his place or makes
+a disturbance, he is to pay a fine of four sesterces. Twelve
+sesterces is the penalty for insulting a fellow-guest. The
+man who, under the influence of good wine, so far forgot
+himself as to insult the chief officer of the society, was to be
+punished by a forfeit of twenty sesterces, which would probably
+be a powerful discouragement of bad manners to most of the
+brotherhood of Antinous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many another gift or bequest, of the same character as
+<pb n="280"/><anchor id="Pg280"/>Marcellina’s, meets the eye of the student of the inscriptions
+The motives are singularly uniform—to repay the honours conferred
+by a college, to celebrate the dedication of a statue, to
+save from forgetfulness a name which to us is only a bit of the
+wreckage of time. Everything is conventional about these bequests.
+The money is nearly always left for the same purpose,
+an anniversary repast in honour of the humble dead, of the
+emperor, or of the patron gods. Sometimes the burial fee is
+refunded to the college, with the prayer that on the natal
+day the poor pittance derived from the gift be spent on pious
+rites, with roses strewn upon the grave.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4107.</note> Another will beg only
+that the lamp in the humble vault may be kept for ever burning.
+These pieties and longings, which have their roots in a
+rude pagan past before the dawn of history, were destined to
+prolong their existence far into Christian times. The lamp
+will be kept burning over many a tomb of saint or martyr in
+the fourth or fifth century. And the simple feasts which the
+clothworkers of Brescia, or the boatmen of Ostia or Lyons,
+observed to do honour to some departed patron, will be
+celebrated, often in riotous fashion, over the Christian dead
+in the days of S. Augustine and S. Paulinus of Nola.<note place="foot">S. Paul. Nol. <hi rend="italic">Carm.</hi> xxvii. 547-585;
+S. Aug. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 32; <hi rend="italic">Serm.</hi> v.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dr. Mommsen believes that the collegiate life which blossomed
+forth so luxuriantly in the early Empire, was modelled
+on the sacred union of the Roman family.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 3.</note> And the instinct
+of the Roman nature for continuity in institutions prepossesses
+us in favour of the theory. In the college endowed by
+Marcellina and Zeno, there are a father and a mother, and elsewhere
+we read of daughters of a college. The members sometimes
+call themselves brethren and sisters.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2417, 4055, 2392, 3774,
+3815, 1485, 4134.</note> One of the feasts
+of the brotherhood is on the day sacred to <q>dear kinship,</q> when
+relations gathered round a common table, to forget in kindly
+intercourse any disturbance of affection.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2417, Item viii K. Mart. die
+Karae cognationis eodem loco dividerent
+sportulas, etc.</note> They also met in the
+early days of January, when presents were exchanged. Above
+all, like the primal society, they gathered on the birthdays of
+the revered dead to whom they owed duty and remembrance.
+And in many cases the members of the society reposed beside
+<pb n="281"/><anchor id="Pg281"/>one another in death.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2399, 4073, 4093.</note> The college was a home of fraternal
+equality in one sense. As M. Boissier has pointed out, the
+members had equal rights in the full assembly of the club.
+A quorum was needed to pass decrees and to elect the officers.
+And, in the full conclave, the slave member had an equal voice
+with the freeman, and might, perchance, himself even be elected
+to a place of dignity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> i. 1406; ii. 5927.</note> He might thus, in a very humble realm,
+wield authority for the time over those who were accustomed
+to despise him. It is true that he needed his master’s leave
+to join a college, and his master had the legal power to deny
+to him the last boon of burial by the hands of his collegiate
+brethren.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi> p. 102; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+viii. 16.</note> Yet it was undoubtedly a great stride in advance
+when a slave could sit at table or in council on equal terms
+with free-born men, and might receive pious Roman burial,
+instead of being tossed like a piece of carrion into a nameless
+grave. The society of one of these humble colleges must
+have often for the moment relieved the weariness and misery
+of the servile life, and awakened, or kept alive, some sense
+of self-respect and dignity. The slave may have now and
+then felt himself even on the edge of political influence, as
+when his college placarded its sympathies in an election contest
+on the walls of Pompeii. Yet we must not allow ourselves to
+be deceived by words and appearances. In spite of legislative
+reform, in spite of a growing humane sentiment, whether in the
+Porch or the Christian Church, the lot of the slave and of the
+poor plebeian will be in many respects as hopeless and degraded
+in the reign of Honorius as it was in the reign of Trajan.<note place="foot">For the contempt for slaves in the
+fourth and fifth centuries, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> S. Hieron.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 54, § 5; Salv. <hi rend="italic">De Gub. Dei</hi>, iv. 26.
+For humaner sentiment, cf. Macrob.
+<hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i. 11, 12 sqq.; <hi rend="italic">C. Theod.</hi> ix. 6, 2,
+3, vii. 13, 8; ix. 7, 4; ix. 9, 1; ix. 12,
+1.</note> Even
+in the reign of Trajan, it is true, perhaps even in the reign of
+Nero, there were great houses like the younger Pliny’s, where
+the slaves were treated as humble friends, where their weddings
+were honoured by the presence of the master, where, in spite
+of legal disabilities, they were allowed to dispose of their
+savings by will.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> viii. 16, § 1; on the more
+humane feeling to slaves, cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+47; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, iii. 24, 32; <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i.
+18; <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iii. 18, 19, 20; Juv. xiv.
+16; Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 18; Wallon,
+<hi rend="italic">L’Esclav.</hi> i. c. 11; Marq. <hi rend="italic">Pr.</hi> i. 177.</note> And the inscriptions record the gratitude
+<pb n="282"/><anchor id="Pg282"/>and affection to their masters and mistresses of many who
+were in actual slavery, or who had but just emerged from it.
+But these instances cannot make us forget the cruel contempt
+and barbarity of which the slave was still the victim, and
+which was to be his lot for many generations yet to run. And
+therefore the improvement in the condition of the slave or of
+his poor plebeian brother by the theoretical equality in the
+colleges, may be easily exaggerated. In the humblest of these
+clubs, the distribution of good fare and money is not according
+to the needs of the members, but regulated by their social
+and official rank. We cannot feel confident that in social
+intercourse the same distinction may not have been coldly
+observed. In modern times we often see a readiness to accord
+an equality of material enjoyment, along with a stiff guardianship
+of social distinctions which are often microscopic to
+the detached observer. And it would not be surprising to
+discover that the <q>master</q> or the <q>mother</q> of the college of
+Antinous protected their dignity by an icy reserve at its
+festive meetings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The question has been raised whether the ordinary colleges
+were in any sense charitable institutions for mutual help. And
+certainly the inscriptions are singularly wanting in records of
+bequests made directly for the relief of poverty, for widows and
+orphans or the sick. The donations or bequests of rich patrons
+seem to have had chiefly two objects in view, the commemoration
+of the dead and the provision for social and convivial enjoyment.
+It is true that, just as in municipal feasts, there is often a distribution
+of money among the members of colleges. But this
+appears to be deprived of an eleemosynary character by the
+fact that by far the largest shares are assigned to those who
+were presumably the least in need of them. Yet it is to be
+recollected that we probably have left to us the memorial of
+only a small proportion of these gifts, and that, if we had a full
+list of all the benefactions bequeathed to some of the colleges,
+the total amount received by each member in the year might
+be very considerable, if judged by the standard of ordinary
+plebeian incomes. To the ambitious slave any addition, however
+small, to his growing <hi rend="italic">peculium</hi>, which might enable him
+to buy his freedom, would certainly be grateful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is one class of colleges, however, which were
+un<pb n="283"/><anchor id="Pg283"/>doubtedly formed to meet various exigencies in the course of
+life, as well as to make a provision for decent burial. These
+are the military clubs, on the objects and constitution of which
+a flood of light has been thrown by the study of the inscriptions
+in the great legionary camps of North Africa.<note place="foot">Cagnat, <hi rend="italic">L’Armée Rom.</hi> pp. 457 sqq.</note> A passage
+of Vegetius shows us the provident arrangement made by
+government for the future of the ordinary legionary.<note place="foot">Veget. ii. 20.</note> It is
+well known that, on the accession of each new emperor, or
+on the occurrence of some interesting event in the history of
+the prince’s family, or of some great military success, and often
+without any particular justification, a donative was distributed
+throughout the army. It sometimes reached a considerable
+amount, ranging from the 25 <hi rend="italic">denarii</hi> granted by Vespasian,
+to the 5000 of M. Aurelius.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 65. 22; Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant.</hi>
+c. 7; D. Cass. 73. 8; Cagnat, p. 459;
+Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> ii. pp. 136, 543.</note> One half of this largess was
+by orders set aside, and retained under the custody of the
+standard-bearers, to provide a pension on the soldier’s retirement
+from the service. Another fund, entirely different, was
+formed by the soldiers’ own contributions, to furnish a decent
+burial for those who died on service. But the law against
+the formation of colleges fell with peculiar severity on the
+soldier.<note place="foot">Cf. Marcian ap. Momms. <hi rend="italic">De Coll.</hi>
+p. 87, neve milites collegia in castris
+habeant.</note> Not even for a religious purpose was he permitted
+to join such a society. This prohibition, however, seems to
+have been relaxed in the case of the officers, and some of the
+more highly skilled corps.<note place="foot">Cagnat, p. 463.</note> And we have among the inscriptions
+of Lambaesis a few instructive records of these military
+colleges.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2552-7.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lambaesis, as we have seen, was one of those camps which
+developed into a regular municipality, after the recognition of
+soldiers’ marriages by Septimius Severus. Henceforth the
+camp became only a place of drill and exercise, and ceased to
+be the soldier’s home. And on the ground where the soldiers’
+huts used to stand, there are left the remains of a number of
+buildings of the basilica shape, erected probably in the third
+century, which were the club-houses of the officers of the Tertia
+Augusta. The interior was adorned with statues of imperial
+personages, and on the wall was inscribed the law of the college,
+<pb n="284"/><anchor id="Pg284"/>commencing with an expression of gratitude for the very
+liberal pay which enabled the college to make provision for
+the future of its members.<note place="foot">Cagnat, pp. 467, 540; cf.
+    <anchor id="corr284"/><corr sic="Boissier">Boissier,</corr>
+<hi rend="italic">L’Afr. Rom.</hi> p. 111. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2554,
+optiones scholam suam cum statuis et
+imaginibus domus div. ex largissimis
+stipendiis ... fecerunt, etc.</note> The provision was made in various
+ways. An ambitious young officer was allowed a liberal
+viaticum for a journey across the sea to seek promotion. If
+promotion came, he received another grant to equip him. One
+half the amount granted in these cases was mercifully paid to
+him in the unpleasant contingency of his losing his grade. If
+he died on active service, his heir received a payment on the
+larger scale. And, when a man, in due course, retired from
+the army, he received the same sum under the name of
+<hi rend="italic">anularium</hi>, which has puzzled the antiquary.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2552, 3, 4; 2557, iii.
+3524; <hi rend="italic">Henz.</hi> 6790; Cagnat, p. 472;
+Marq. <hi rend="italic">Röm. St.</hi> ii. 544.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been maintained that these military clubs were
+really and primarily funerary societies.<note place="foot">Cagnat, p. 474.</note> And provision for
+burial was certainly one of their objects. Yet, on a reading
+of the law of the society of the <hi rend="italic">Cornicines</hi>, it may be doubted
+whether the subject of burial is more prominent than the
+other contingencies of the officer’s life, and in some of the
+inscriptions, burial is not even alluded to. The grant on
+retirement or promotion, and the grant to his heir on the
+death of a member, are the same. But probably the majority
+of officers had the good fortune to carry the money with
+them into peaceful retirement, if not into higher rank in
+another corps. In this case they would probably join another
+college, whether of soldiers or veterans, and secure once more
+the all-important object of a decent and pious interment.
+The military clubs seem rather intended to furnish an insurance
+against the principal risks and occasions of expenditure
+in a soldier’s career. A calculation shows that, after providing
+for all these liabilities, the military college must have had a
+considerable surplus.<note place="foot">The Cornicines of the 3rd Legion
+at Lambesi paid an entrance fee of 750
+denarii (<hi rend="italic">Scamnari nomine</hi>). The anularium
+on retirement, and the funeraticium,
+were each 500 <hi rend="italic">denarii</hi>. It would
+seem that there must have been a considerable
+surplus. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2557.</note> How it was spent, it is not hazardous
+to conjecture. If the poor freedmen and slaves at Ostia
+or Lanuvium could afford their modest meals, with a fair
+allowance of good wine, drunk to the memory of a generous
+<pb n="285"/><anchor id="Pg285"/>benefactor, we may be sure that the college of the <hi rend="italic">Cornicines</hi>
+at Lambesi would relieve the tedium of the camp by many
+a pleasant mess dinner, and that they would have been
+astonished and amused on such occasions to hear themselves
+described merely as a burial society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The foundation law of the college of Diana and Antinous
+betrays some anxiety lest the continuity of the society should
+be broken. And in many a bequest, the greatest care is taken
+to prevent malversation or the diversion of the funds from
+their original purpose.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6086, universi consentire
+debemus ut longo tempore inveterescere
+possimus; cf. 4357, 4360, 4366, 4386,
+4395.</note> We feel a certain pathetic curiosity,
+in reading these records of a futile effort to prolong the
+memory of obscure lives, to know how long the brotherhoods
+continued their meetings, or when the stated offerings of wine
+and flowers ceased to be made. In one case the curiosity is
+satisfied and we have before our eyes the formal record of the
+extinction of a college. It is contained in a pair of wooden
+tablets found in some quarry pits near Alburnus, a remote
+village of Dacia. The document was drawn up, as the names
+of the consuls show, in the year 167, the year following the
+fierce irruption of the Quadi and Marcomanni into Dacia,
+Pannonia, and Noricum, in which Alburnus was given to the
+flames.<note place="foot">The diptych, which has been singularly
+preserved, was found in a deserted
+mine or quarry about 1780, along with
+some other private documents of a
+commercial character; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii.
+p. 213, and 921. The dates range from
+131 to 167 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> Cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6087;
+Schiller, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. der röm. Kaiserzeit</hi>, i.
+2, p. 643.</note> Artemidorus the slave of Apollonius, and Master of
+the college of Jupiter Cernenius, along with the two quaestors,
+places it on record, with the attestation of seven witnesses,
+that the college has ceased to exist. Out of a membership of
+fifty-four, only seventeen remain. The colleague of Artemidorus
+in the mastership has never set foot in Alburnus since
+his election. The accounts have been wound up, and no balance
+is left in the chest. For a long time no member has attended
+on the days fixed for meetings, and, as a matter of course, no
+subscriptions have been paid. All this is expressed in the
+rudest, most ungrammatical Latin, and Artemidorus quaintly
+concludes by saying, that, if a member has just died, he must
+not imagine that he has any longer a college or any claim to
+funeral payments! The humble brothers of the society, whom
+<pb n="286"/><anchor id="Pg286"/>Artemidorus reproaches for their faithless negligence, may
+probably have fled to some refuge when their masters’ lands
+were devastated by the Marcomanni, or been swept on in the
+fierce torrent of invaders which finally broke upon the walls of
+Aquileia.
+</p>
+
+</div></div><div type="book" n="3" rend="page-break-before: right">
+<pb n="287"/><anchor id="Pg287"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="Book III. Nec philosophia sine virtute est nec sine philosophia virtus"/><index index="pdf" level1="Book III. Nec philosophia sine virtute est nec sine philosophia virtus"/>
+<head>BOOK III.</head>
+
+<head type="sub"><hi rend="italic">NEC PHILOSOPHIA SINE VIRTUTE EST NEC SINE
+PHILOSOPHIA VIRTUS</hi></head>
+
+<pb n="288"/><anchor id="Pg288"/>
+    
+    <div type="chapter" n="3" rend="page-break-before: right">
+<index index="toc" level1="I. The philosophic director"/><index index="pdf" level1="I. The philosophic director"/>
+<pb n="289"/><anchor id="Pg289"/>
+
+<head>CHAPTER I</head>
+
+<head type="sub">THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR</head>
+
+<p>
+Philosophy in the time of Seneca was a very different thing
+from the great cosmic systems of Ionia and Magna Graecia,
+or even from the system of the older Stoicism. Speculative
+interest had long before his time given way to the study of
+moral problems with a definite practical aim. If the stimulus
+of the searching method of Socrates gave an impetus for a
+century to abstract speculation, it had an even more decided
+and long-lived influence in diverting thought to moral questions
+from the old ambitious paths. His disciples Antisthenes
+and Aristippus prepared the way for the Stoic and Epicurean
+schools which dominated the Roman world in the last century
+of the Republic and the first of the Empire. And even Plato
+and Aristotle indirectly helped forward the movement. It is
+not merely that, for both these great spirits, the cultivation of
+character and the reform of society have a profound interest.
+But even in their metaphysics, they were paving the way for
+the more introspective and practical turn which was taken by
+post-Aristotelian philosophy, by giving to what were mere
+conceptions of the mind a more real existence than to the
+things of sense.<note place="foot">See Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1,
+13, 14, Jener dualistische Idealismus,
+welchen Plato begründet, und auch
+Aristoteles nicht grundsätzlich überwunden
+hatte, <anchor id="corr289"/><corr sic="fuhrt">führt</corr> in letzter Beziehung
+auf nichts anderes zurück, als
+auf den Gegensatz des Inneren und
+Aeusseren des Denkens und der gegenständlichen
+Welt.... Es war nur ein
+Schritt weiter in dieser Richtung, wenn
+die nacharistotelische Philosophie den
+Menschen in grundsätzlicher Abkehr
+von der Aussenwelt auf sich selbst
+wies, um in seinem Innern die Befriedigung
+zu suchen, etc.</note> The <q>ideas</q> or <q>forms</q> which they contrast
+with the world of concrete things, are really creations of the
+individual mind of which the reality must be sought in the
+<pb n="290"/><anchor id="Pg290"/>depths of consciousness, however they may be divinised and
+elevated to some transcendental region beyond the limits of
+sense and time. With Aristotle, as with Plato, in the last
+resort, the higher reason is the true essence of man, coming
+into the body from a diviner world, and capable of lifting
+itself to the ideal from the cramping limitations of sensuous
+life. The philosopher in the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi> who turns his gaze
+persistently from the confusing phantasmagoria of the senses
+to that realm of real existence, eternal and immutable, of
+which he has once had a vision, is really the distant progenitor
+of the sage of Stoicism, who cuts himself off from the external
+objects of desire, to find within a higher law, and the peace
+which springs from a life in harmony with the Reason of the
+world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ancient schools, if they maintained a formal individuality
+even to the days of Justinian,<note place="foot">See Luc. <hi rend="italic">Eun.</hi> c. 3,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">συντέτακται ἐκ βασιλέως μισθοφορά τις οὐ φαύλη κατὰ γένη τοῖς φιλοσόφοις,
+    Στοϊκοῖς λέγω, κτλ.</foreign>
+Cf. Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant.</hi> c. 3; Philostr.
+<hi rend="italic">Apoll.</hi> T. i. 7, § 8.</note> had worked themselves
+out. A host of scholarchs, from all the cities of the Greek
+East, failed to break fresh ground, and were content to guard
+the most precious or the least vulnerable parts of an ancient
+tradition. Moreover, the scrutiny of the long course of speculation,
+issuing in such various conclusions, with no criterion
+to decide between their claims, gave birth to a scepticism
+which sheltered itself even under the great name of the
+Academy. And as the faith in the truth of systems dwindled,
+the marks of demarcation between them faded; men were less
+inclined to dogmatise, and began to select and combine
+elements from long discordant schools. In this movement the
+eclectic and the sceptic had very much the same object in view—the
+support and culture of the individual moral life.<note place="foot">Zeller, iii, 1, 16.</note> The
+sceptic sought his ideal in restrained suspense of judgment
+and in moral calm. The eclectic, without regard to speculative
+consistency, and with only a secondary interest in speculation,
+sought for doctrines from any quarter which provided a basis
+for the moral life, and, in the conflict of systems on the deeper
+questions, would fall back, like Cicero, on intuition and the
+consent of consciousness.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 493-5; Überweg, <hi rend="italic">Hist. of Phil.</hi>
+i. 220; Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Nat. Deor.</hi> i. c. 17; <hi rend="italic">De
+Fin.</hi> i. c. 9.</note> Creative power in philosophy was
+no more. Speculative curiosity, as pictured in the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi> or
+<pb n="291"/><anchor id="Pg291"/>the <hi rend="italic">Theaetetus</hi>, had lost its keenness. The imperious craving
+was for some guide of life, some medicine for the deeply-felt
+maladies of the soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The extinction of the free civic life of Greece, the conquests
+of Macedon, the foundation of the world-wide empire of Rome,
+had wrought a momentous moral change. In the old city-state,
+religion, morals, and political duty were linked in a
+gracious unity and harmony. The citizen drew moral support
+and inspiration from ancestral laws and institutions clothed
+with almost divine authority. Even Plato does not break
+away from the old trammels, but requires the elders of his
+Utopia as a duty, after they have seen the vision of God,
+to descend again to the ordinary tasks of government. But
+when the corporate life which supplied such vivid interests
+and moral support was wrecked, the individual was thrown
+back upon himself. Morals were finally separated from
+politics. Henceforth the great problem of philosophy was
+how to make character self-sufficing and independent; how to
+find the beatitude of man in the autonomous will, fenced
+against all assaults of chance and change.<note place="foot">Bussell, <hi rend="italic">School of Plato</hi>, p. 264; Zeller, iii. 1; p. 8, 9.</note> At the same
+time, the foundation of great monarchies, Macedonian or Roman,
+embracing many tribes and races and submerging old civic or
+national barriers, brought into clearer light the idea of a universal
+commonwealth, and placed morals on the broad foundation
+of a common human nature and universal brotherhood.
+The mundane city of old days, which absorbed, perhaps too
+completely, the moral life and conscience of her sons, has
+vanished for ever. And in its place and over its ruins has
+risen an all-embracing power which seems to have all the
+sweep of an impersonal force of nature, though it is sometimes
+impelled by one wild, lawless will. If, in return for the loss
+of civic freedom, ambitious and patriotic energy, or pride of
+civic life, it has given to its subjects a marvellous peace and
+order and culture, have not the mass of men become grosser
+and more materialised? If there is greater material well-being
+and better administration, have not the moral tone and
+ideal, in the lack of stimulus, been lowered? Has not vice
+become more shameless, and the greed for all things pleasant
+grown harder and more cruel? Are not the mass of men
+<pb n="292"/><anchor id="Pg292"/>hopelessly and wearily wandering in a tangled maze without
+a clue?<note place="foot">On pessimism in the reign of
+Augustus, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. p.
+241. Cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 8; <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi>
+i. 10; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> 20, 22; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii.
+37; Petron. 88.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With such questionings ringing in his inner ear, the man
+with some lingering instinct of goodness might well crave,
+beyond anything else, for an inner law of life which should
+bring order into the chaos of his conduct and desires.<note place="foot">Cf. Epict. iii. 13, §§ 9, 10, where the
+contrast between the <q>pax Romana</q>
+and moral unrest is drawn.</note> And
+philosophy, having in magnificent effort failed to scale the
+virgin heights, fell back on conduct, which seemed then, even
+more than to a lost teacher of our youth, <q>three-fourths of
+life.</q> The great science which, in the glory and fresh vigour
+of the Hellenic prime, aspired to embrace all existence and all
+knowledge, to penetrate the secret of the universe and God,
+by general consent narrowed its efforts to relieve the struggles
+of this transient life set <q>between two eternities.</q> The
+human spirit, weary of the fruitless quest of an ever-vanishing
+ideal of knowledge, took up the humbler task of solving the
+ever-recurring problem of human happiness and conduct.
+Henceforth, in spite of traditional dialectic discordance, all the
+schools, Stoic or Epicurean, Sceptic or Eclectic, are seeking for
+the secret of inner peace, and are singularly unanimous in their
+report of the discovery.<note place="foot">Zeller, iii. 1, pp. 12, 14, cf. Baur,
+<hi rend="italic">Ch. Hist.</hi> i. p. 14 (Tr.).</note> The inner life of the spirit becomes
+all in all. Speculation and political activity are equally unimportant
+to the true life of the soul. Calm equipoise of the
+inner nature, undisturbed by the changes of fortunes or the
+solicitations of desire, is the ideal of all, under whatever difference
+of phrase. What has he to do with any single state who
+realises his citizenship in the great commonwealth of man? If
+the secret of peace cannot be won by launching in adventurous
+thought into the Infinite, perchance it may be found in discipline
+of the rebellious will. Philosophy, then, must become the guide
+of life, the healer of spiritual maladies.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">Tusc.</hi> iii 3, est profecto animi
+medicina philosophia, Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 22,
+vena tangenda est; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 53, Epict. iii.
+23, § 30,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἰατρεῖόν ἐστι τὸ τοῦ φιλοσόφου σχολεῖον</foreign>.</note> It must teach the
+whole duty of man, to the gods, to the state, to parents and
+elders, to women and to slaves. It must attempt the harder
+task of bringing some principle of order into the turmoil of
+<pb n="293"/><anchor id="Pg293"/>emotion and passion: it must teach us, amid the keen claims
+of competing objects of desire, to distinguish the true from the
+false, the permanent from the fleeting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moral reformer cannot indeed dispense with theory and
+a ground of general principles,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 94, § 5, § 22.</note> but he will not forget that his
+main business is to impart the <hi rend="italic">ars vivendi</hi>; he will be more occupied
+with rules which may be immediately applied in practice,
+than with the theory of morals. A profound acquaintance with
+the pathology of the soul, minute study of the weaknesses of
+character, long experience of the devices for counteracting
+them, will be worth far more than an encyclopædic knowledge
+of centuries of speculation.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 64, § 8.</note> He will not undervalue the moral
+discourse, with the practical object of turning souls from their
+evil ways; but he has only contempt for the rhetoric of the
+class-room which desecrates solemn themes by the vanities of
+phrase-making.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Rect. Rat. Aud.</hi> c. 8; Epict.
+iii. 23, § 23.</note> The best and most fruitful work of practical
+philosophy is done by private counsel, adapted to the special
+needs of the spiritual patient. He must be encouraged to
+make a full confession of the diseases of his soul.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Rect. Rat. Aud.</hi> c. 12.</note> He must
+be trained in daily self-examination, to observe any signs of
+moral growth or of backsliding. He must be checked when
+over confident, and cheered in discouragement. He must have
+his enthusiasm kindled by appropriate examples of those who
+have trodden the same path and reached the heights.<note place="foot">Plut. (?) <hi rend="italic">De Lib. Ed.</hi> c. 14.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This serious aim of philosophy commended itself to the
+intensely practical and strenuous spirit of the Romans. And
+although there were plenty of showy lecturers or preachers in
+the first century who could draw fashionable audiences, the
+private philosophic director was a far more real power. The
+triumph of Aemilius Paulus brought numbers of Greek exiles
+to Italy, many of whom found a home as teachers in Roman
+families.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, 487;
+Plut. <hi rend="italic">Aemil. P.</hi> c. vi.; Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi>
+xxxv. 135; Polyb. xxxii. 10. But cf.
+Mahaffy on Zeller’s view, in <hi rend="italic">Greek
+World under Roman Sway</hi>, p. 67.</note> Panaetius, who revolutionised Stoicism, and made
+it a working system, profoundly influenced the circle of Scipio
+Aemilianus, in whose house he lived. Great generals and
+leaders of the last age of the Republic, a Lucullus or a Pompey,
+often carried philosophers in their train. From Augustus to
+<pb n="294"/><anchor id="Pg294"/>Elagabalus we hear of their presence at the imperial court.
+The wife of Augustus sought consolation on the death of Drusus
+from Areus, her husband’s philosophic director.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> 4.</note> Many of these
+men indeed did not take their profession very seriously, and in
+too many cases they were mere flatterers and parasites whom the
+rich patron hired from ostentation and treated with contumely.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Merc. Cond.</hi> 2, 4, 25.</note>
+Both Nero and Hadrian used to amuse themselves with the
+quarrels and vanity of their philosophers.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 16, etiam sapientiae
+doctoribus tempus impertiebat post
+epulas, utque contraria adseverantium
+discordia frueretur; Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> 15.</note> But in the terror
+of the Claudian Caesars, the Stoic director is often seen performing
+his proper part. Julius Canus, when ordered to execution
+by Caligula, had his philosopher by his side, with whom he discussed
+till the last fatal moment the future of the soul.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> xiv. § 7.</note> The
+officer who brought the sentence of death to Thrasea found him
+absorbed in conversation with the Cynic Demetrius on the
+mystery which the lancet was in a few moments to resolve.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 34.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of this great movement to cultivate a moral life in paganism
+L. Annaeus Seneca was not the least illustrious representative.
+Musonius, his younger contemporary, and Epictetus, the pupil
+of Musonius, were engaged in the same cure of souls, and
+taught practically the same philosophic gospel. They equally
+paid but slight attention to the logic and physics of the older
+schools.<note place="foot">Zeller, iii. 1, 656, 663.</note> Virtue, to all of them, is the one great end of philosophic
+effort. They were all deeply impressed by the spiritual
+wants of the time,<note place="foot">Epict. iii. 23, §§ 24-34; i. 4, § 9,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὗτος, φησίν, ἤδη δι’ αὐτοῦ δύναται Χρύσιππον ἀναγιγνώσκειν.
+Εὖ, νὴ τοὺς θεούς, προκόπτεις ἄνθρωπε. Ποίαν προκοπήν;</foreign></note> and they all felt that men needed not
+subtleties of disquisition or rhetorical display, but direct, personal
+teaching which appealed to the conscience. To all of them
+the philosopher is a physician of souls. Musonius and Epictetus
+were probably loftier and more blameless characters than
+Seneca. Epictetus especially, from the range and simple
+attractiveness of his teaching, might seem to many a better representative
+of the philosophic director than Seneca. Seneca,
+as the wealthy minister of Nero, excites a repugnance in some
+minds, which prevents them doing justice to his unquestionable
+power and fascination. His apparent inconsistency has
+<pb n="295"/><anchor id="Pg295"/>condemned him in the eyes of an age which professes to believe
+in the teaching of the Mount, and idolises grandiose wealth
+and power. His rhetoric offends a taste that can tolerate and
+applaud verbose banalities, with little trace of redeeming art.
+He cannot always win the hearing accorded to the repentant
+sinner, whose dark experience may make his message more
+real and pungent. The historian, however, must put aside
+these rather pharisaic prejudices, and give Seneca the position
+as a moral teacher which his writings have won in ages not
+less earnest than ours. Nor need we fear to recognise a power
+which led the early Fathers to trace the spiritual vision of
+Seneca to an intercourse with S. Paul,<note place="foot">Tertull. <hi rend="italic">De An.</hi> c. 20, Seneca saepe
+noster; S. Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Adv. Jovin.</hi> i.
+49.</note> supported by a feigned
+correspondence which imposed on S. Augustine and S. Jerome.<note place="foot">S. Hieron, <hi rend="italic">Adv. Jovin.</hi> i. 29; <hi rend="italic">De
+Scrip. Eccl.</hi> 12; S. Aug. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 153, cujus
+etiam ad Paulum apostolum leguntur
+epistolae.</note>
+The man who approaches Seneca thinking only of scandals
+gleaned from Tacitus and Dion Cassius,<note place="foot">The worst about Seneca is collected
+in D. Cass. 61. 10. But cf. the attack
+of P. Suillius, Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 42 and
+xiv. 52.</note> and frozen by a criticism
+which cannot feel the power of genius, spiritual imagination, and
+a profound moral experience, behind a rhetoric sometimes forced
+and extravagant, had better leave him alone. The Christianity
+of the twentieth century might well hail with delight the
+advent of such a preacher, and would certainly forget all the
+accusations of prurient gossip in the accession of an immense
+and fascinating spiritual force. The man with any historical
+imagination must be struck with amazement that such spiritual
+detachment, such lofty moral ideals, so pure an enthusiasm for
+the salvation of souls, should emerge from a palace reeking
+with all the crimes of the haunted races of Greek legend.
+That the courtier of the reigns of Caligula and Claudius, the
+tutor and minister of Nero, should not have escaped some
+stains may be probable: that such a man should have composed
+the Letters and the <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi> of Seneca is almost a miracle. Yet
+the glow of earnestness and conviction, the intimate knowledge
+of the last secrets of guilty souls, may well have been the
+reward of such an ordeal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca’s career, given a latent fund of moral enthusiasm,
+was really a splendid preparation for his mission, as an analyst
+of a corrupt society and a guide to moral reform. He lived
+<pb n="296"/><anchor id="Pg296"/>through the gloomiest years of the imperial tyranny; he had
+been in the thick of its intrigues, and privy to its darkest
+secrets; he had enjoyed its favour, and knew the perils of
+its jealousy and suspicion. He came as an infant from
+Cordova to Rome in the last years of Augustus.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi> xix. § 2.</note> In spite of
+weak health, he was an ardent student of all the science and
+philosophy of the time, and he fell under the influence of
+Sotion, a member of the Sextian School, which combined a
+rigorous Stoicism with Pythagorean rules of life.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, §§ 13-17.</note> As a young
+advocate and prosperous official, he passed unharmed through
+the terror and ghastly rumours of the closing years of Tiberius.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, § 22. He abandoned
+Pythagorean abstinence, as suspicious,
+during the persecution of eastern cults;
+cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> 36.</note>
+His eloquence in the Senate excited the jealousy of Caligula,
+and he narrowly escaped the penalty.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 59. 19.</note> In the reign of Claudius
+he must have been one of the inner circle of the court, for his
+banishment, at the instance of Messalina, for eight years to
+Corsica was the penalty of a supposed intrigue with Julia, the
+niece of the emperor.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 60. 8; 61. 10; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii.
+42, schol. Juv. v. 109.</note> Seneca knew how to bend to the storm,
+and, by the influence of Agrippina, he was recalled to be the
+tutor of the young Nero, and on his accession four years afterwards,
+became his first minister by the side of Burrus.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 61. 4; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 2.
+Dion suggests an intrigue with Agrippina,
+61. 10.</note> The
+famous <hi rend="italic">quinquennium</hi>, an oasis in the desert of despotism, was
+probably the happiest period of Seneca’s life. In spite of some
+misgivings, the dream of an earthly Providence, as merciful as it
+was strong, seemed to be realised.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 5, 8.</note> But it was, after all, a giddy
+and anxious elevation, and the influence of Seneca was only
+maintained by politic concessions, and was constantly threatened
+by the daemonic ambition of Agrippina.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 2, quo facilius
+... voluptatibus concessis retinerent,
+etc.</note> And Seneca had
+enemies like P. Suillius, jealous of his power and his millions,
+and eagerly pointing to the hypocrisy of the Stoic preacher,
+whom gossip branded as an adulterer and a usurer.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiii. 42; D. Cass. 61. 10.</note> The
+death of Burrus gave the last shock to his power.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 52, mors Burri
+infregit Senecae potentiam, etc.</note> His
+enemies poured in to the assault. The emperor had long
+wished to shake off the incubus of a superior spirit; and the
+<pb n="297"/><anchor id="Pg297"/>riches, the pointed eloquence, and more pointed sarcasms, the
+gardens and villas and lordly state of the great minister, suggested
+a possible aspirant to the principate. Seneca acted on
+his principles and offered to give up everything.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 54.</note> But his
+torture was to be prolonged, and his doom deferred for about
+two years. His release came in the fierce vengeance for the
+Pisonian conspiracy.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xv. 56 sqq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca was an ideal director for the upper class of such an
+age. He had risen to the highest office in a world-wide
+monarchy, and he had spent years in hourly fear of death.
+He had enjoyed the society of the most brilliant circles, and
+exchanged epigrams and repartees with the best; he had also
+seen them steeped in debauchery and treachery, and terror-stricken
+in base compliance. He had witnessed their fantastic
+efforts of luxury and self-indulgence, and heard the tale of
+wearied sensualism and disordered ambition and ineffectual
+lives.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 55; <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> 1 and 2.</note> His disciples were drawn, if not from the noblest class,
+at any rate from the class which had felt the disillusionment
+of wealth and fashion and power. And the vicissitudes in his
+own fate and character made him a powerful and sympathetic
+adviser. He had long to endure the torturing contrast of
+splendid rank and wealth, with the brooding terror of a doom
+which might sweep down at any moment. He was also tortured
+by other contrasts, some drawn by the fierceness of envious
+hatred, others perhaps acknowledged by conscience. Steeped in
+the doctrines of Chrysippus and Pythagoras, he had subdued
+the ebullient passions of youth by a more than monastic asceticism.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, §§ 17-22.</note>
+He had passionately adopted an ethical creed which
+aimed at a radical reform of human nature, at the triumph of
+cultivated and moralised reason and social sympathy over the
+brutal materialism and selfishness of the age. He had pondered
+on its doctrines of the higher life, of the nothingness of the
+things of sense, on death, and the indwelling God assisting
+the struggling soul, on the final happy release from all the
+sordid misery and terror, until every earthly pleasure and
+ambition faded away in the presence of a glorious moral ideal.<note place="foot">Cf. Baur, <hi rend="italic">Ch. Hist.</hi> i. p. 16 (Tr.).</note>
+And yet this pagan monk, this idealist, who would have been
+at home with S. Jerome or Thomas à Kempis, had accumulated
+<pb n="298"/><anchor id="Pg298"/>a vast fortune, and lived in a palace which excited the envy
+of a Nero. He was suspected of having been the lover of two
+princesses of the imperial house.<note place="foot">D. Cass. 61. 10.</note> He was charged with having
+connived at, or encouraged the excesses of Nero, and even of
+having been an accomplice in the murder of Agrippina, or its
+apologist.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 13; xiv. 7; and
+11, sed Seneca adverso rumore erat,
+quod oratione tali confessionem scripsisset.</note> Some of these rumours are probably false, the work
+of prurient imaginations in the most abandoned age in history.
+Yet there are traces in Seneca’s writings that he had not
+passed unscathed through the terrible ordeal to which character
+was exposed in that age. There are pictures of voluptuous
+ease and jaded satiety which may be the work of a keen sympathetic
+observation, but which may also be the expression of
+repentant memory.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 77, § 16, ecquid habes
+propter quod expectes? Voluptates ipsas
+quae te morantur consumpsisti....
+Nihil tibi luxuria tua in futuros annos
+reservavit intactum: cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 89, § 21;
+90, § 42.</note> In any case, he had sounded the very
+depths of the moral abysses of his time. He had no illusions
+about the actual condition of human nature. The mass of
+men, all but a few naturally saintly souls, were abandoned to
+lust or greed or selfish ambition. Human life was an obscene
+and cruel struggle of wild beasts for the doles flung by fortune
+into the arena.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 8.</note> The peace and happiness of the early Eden
+have departed for ever, leaving men to the restlessness of
+exhausted appetite, or to the half-repentant sense of impotent
+lives, spent in pursuing the phantoms of imaginary pleasure,
+with broken glimpses now and then of a world for ever lost.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 90, §§ 38-41.</note>
+With such a scene about him in his declining years, whatever
+his own practice may have been, Seneca came to feel an
+evangelistic passion, almost approaching S. Paul’s, to open to
+these sick perishing souls the vision of a higher life through
+the practical discipline of philosophy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tendency to regard the true function of philosophy as
+purely ethical, reforming, guiding and sustaining character and
+conduct, finds its most emphatic expression in Seneca. He is
+far more a preacher, a spiritual director, than a thinker, and he
+would have proudly owned it. His highest, nay, one may
+almost say his only aim, is, in our modern phrase, to which
+his own sometimes approaches, to save souls. Philosophy
+<pb n="299"/><anchor id="Pg299"/>in its highest and best sense is not the pursuit of knowledge
+for its own sake, nor the disinterested play of intellect,
+regardless of intellectual consequences, as in a Platonic
+dialogue.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 49, § 5, non vaco ad istas
+ineptias: ingens negotium in manibus
+est; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 75, § 5, non delectent, verba
+nostra, sed prosint ... non quaerit
+aeger medicum eloquentem; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 88, §
+36, plus scire quam sit satis, intemperantiae
+genus est. Cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 71, § 6.</note> It is pre-eminently the science or the art of right
+living, that is of a life conformed to right reason.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 89, § 8, nec philosophia sine
+virtute est, nec sine philosophia virtus.</note> Its great
+end is the production of the <hi rend="italic">sapiens</hi>, the man who sees, in
+the light of Eternal Reason, the true proportions of things,
+whose affections have been trained to obey the higher law,
+whose will has hardened into an unswerving conformity to it,
+in all the difficulties of conduct.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 66, § 12.</note> And the true philosopher
+is no longer the cold, detached student of intellectual problems,
+far removed from the struggles and the miseries of human
+life. He has become the <hi rend="italic">generis humani paedagogus</hi>,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 89, § 13; 117, §§ 30, 31.</note> the
+schoolmaster to bring men to the Ideal Man. In comparison
+with that mission, all the sublimity or subtlety of the great
+masters of dialectic becomes mere contemptible trifling, as if a
+man should lose himself in some game, or in the rapture of
+sweet music, with a great conflagration raging before his eyes.
+In the universal moral shipwreck, how can one toy with these
+old world trifles, while the perishing are stretching out their
+hands for help?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 48, § 8; 75, § 6.</note> Not that Seneca despises the inheritance of
+ancient wisdom, so far as it has any gospel for humanity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 64, § 3; 58, § 26.</note> He
+will accept good moral teaching from any quarter, from Plato
+or Epicurus, as readily as from Chrysippus or Panaetius.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Vita B.</hi> xiii, where he defends
+Epicurus.</note> He
+is ready to give almost divine honours to the great teachers
+of the human race. But he also feels that no moral teaching
+can be final. After a thousand ages, there will still be room
+for making some addition to the message of the past. There
+will always be a need for fresh adjustments and applications
+of the remedies which past wisdom has handed down.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 64, § 8.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is almost needless to say that Seneca has almost a contempt
+for the so-called liberal studies of his day.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 88, § 37, § 20.</note> There is only
+one truly liberal study, that which aims at liberating the will
+from the bondage of desire. Granted that it is necessary as a
+<pb n="300"/><anchor id="Pg300"/>mental discipline to submit to the grammarian in youth; yet
+experience shows that this training does nothing to form the
+virtuous character.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 88, § 2, unum studium vere
+liberale est quod liberum facit, etc.</note> Who can respect a man who wastes his
+mature years, like Didymus, in inquiries as to the relative
+ages of Hecuba or Helen, or the name of the mother of <anchor id="corr300"/><corr sic="Æneas">Aeneas</corr>,
+or the character of Anacreon or Sappho?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 39; cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 88.</note> The man of serious
+purpose will rather try to forget these trifles than continue
+the study of them. And Seneca treats in the same fashion the
+hair-splitting and verbal subtleties of some of the older Stoics.
+He acquiesces indeed, in their threefold division of Philosophy
+into Logic, Physics, and Ethics; but for the first department
+he seems to have but scant respect, though once or twice he
+amuses his pupil Lucilius by a disquisition on Genus and
+Species, or the Platonic and Aristotelian <q>Causes,</q> in the
+style of the Stoic scholasticism.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 89; 66, § 33; 58, § 8.</note> Seneca was writing for
+posterity; he has his intellectual vanity; and he probably
+wished to show that, while he set but little store by such
+studies, this was not due to an imperfect knowledge of them.
+It is because life is too short, and its great problems are too
+urgent, to permit a serious man to spend his precious years in
+fruitless intellectual play. He calls on Lucilius to leave such
+barren subtleties, which bring the greatest of all themes down
+to the level of intellectual jugglery.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 71, § 6, erige te et relinque
+istum ludum literarium philosophorum
+qui rem magnificam ad syllabas vocant,
+etc.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the department of Physics Seneca has much more
+respect, and he evidently devoted much attention to it. We
+have traces of some lost works of his on scientific subjects, and
+there is still extant a treatise in seven books on <hi rend="italic">Natural
+Questions</hi>, which became a handbook of science in the Middle
+Ages.<note place="foot">Teuffel, ii. § 284, n. 6; cf. Zeller,
+<hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p. 623.</note> It deals with such subjects as we meet with in the
+poem of Lucretius, thunder and lightning, winds and earthquakes,
+and rising and failing springs. But it has perhaps
+less of the scientific spirit than Lucretius, according to our
+modern standards. We have abundant reference to old
+physical authorities, to Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander,
+Diogenes of Apollonia, to Caecina and Attalus. But
+the conception of any scientific method beyond more or
+<pb n="301"/><anchor id="Pg301"/>less ingenious hypothesis, or of any scientific verification of
+hypothesis, is utterly absent. This is of course a general
+characteristic of most of the scientific effort of antiquity. The
+truth is that, although Seneca probably had some interest in
+natural phenomena, he had a far more profound interest in
+human nature and human destiny. The older Stoics, with some
+variations, subordinated Physics to Ethics, as of inferior and
+only subsidiary importance.<note place="foot">Zeller, iii. 1, p. 56.</note> Seneca carries this subordination
+almost to extremes, although he also is sometimes inconsistent.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 117, § 19; <hi rend="italic">Nat. Quaest. Prol.</hi>;
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 65, § 15; cf. Zeller, iii. 1. 622.</note>
+He thinks it significant that while the World-Spirit has hidden
+gold, the great tempter and corruptor, far beneath our feet, it
+has displayed, in mysterious yet pompous splendour, in the
+azure canopy above us, the heavenly orbs which are popularly
+believed to control our destiny in the material sense, and which
+may really govern it, by raising our minds to the contemplation
+of an infinite mystery and a marvellous order.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Nat. Quaest.</hi> v. 15; cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 88, § 15.</note> To Seneca, as
+to Kant, there seems a mystic tie between the starry heavens
+above and the moral law within. In the prologue to the <hi rend="italic">Natural
+Questions</hi>, indeed, carried away for the moment by the grandeur
+of his theme, Seneca seems to exalt the contemplation of the
+infinite distances and mysterious depths and majestic order of
+the stellar world far above the moral struggles of our mundane
+life. The earth shrinks to a mere point in infinitude, an
+ant-hill where the human insects mark out their Lilliputian
+territories and make their wars and voyages for their lifetime
+of an hour.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Nat. Quaest. Prol.</hi> § 11, formicarum
+iste discursus est in augusto laborantium....
+Punctum est istud in quo
+navigatis, in quo bellatis; Sursum ingentia
+spatia sunt, etc.; cf. Macrob.
+<hi rend="italic">Som. Scip.</hi> i. 16, § 6.</note> This, however, is rather a piece of rhetoric than a
+careful statement of Seneca’s real view. In the Letters, again
+and again, we are told that virtue is the one important thing,
+that the conquest of passion raises man to be equal to God,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 73, § 13, sic deus non vincit
+sapientem felicitate etiamsi vincit
+aetate.</note>
+and that in the release of the rational or divine part of us
+from bondage to the flesh, man recovers a lost liberty, a
+primeval dignity. But in this struggle the spirit may refresh
+and elevate itself by looking up to the divine world
+from which it draws its origin, and to which it may, perchance,
+return. To Seneca’s mind the so-called physics really involve
+<pb n="302"/><anchor id="Pg302"/>theology and metaphysics. In the contemplation of the vastness
+of the material universe, the mind may be aroused to
+the urgency and interest of the great questions touching God,
+His relation to fate, to the world, and man.<note place="foot">Cf. Pl. <hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi> 79 <hi rend="small">D</hi>; Arist. <hi rend="italic">Eth.</hi>
+ix 8, § 7.</note> The scientific interest
+in Seneca is evidently not the strongest. There are still
+indeed the echoes of the old philosophies which sought man’s
+true greatness and final beatitude in the clear vision of abstract
+truth. But Seneca is travelling rapidly on the way which
+leads to another vision of the celestial city, in which emotion,
+the passionate yearning for holiness as well as truth, blends
+with and tends to overpower the ideal of a passionless eternity
+of intellectual intuition. In Seneca’s rapturous outburst on
+the gate of deliverance opened by death, making allowance for
+difference of associations and beliefs, there is surely a strange
+note of kindred sympathy, across the gulf of thirteen centuries,
+with Thomas à Kempis.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 102, § 26, dies iste, quem
+tanquam extremum reformidas, aeterni
+natalis est ... discutietur ista caligo
+et lux undique clara percutiet ...
+nulla serenum umbra turbabit. Cf.
+<hi rend="italic">De Imit.</hi> iii. 48, § 1, O supernae
+civitatis mansio beatissima! O dies
+aeternitatis clarissima, quam nox non
+obscurat, sed summa Veritas semper
+irradiat! Lucet quidem Sanctis perpetua
+claritate splendida, sed non nisi
+a longe et per speculum peregrinantibus
+in terra.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <hi rend="italic">Natural Questions</hi> were, as he tells us, the work of his
+old age.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Nat. Quaest.</hi> iii. Praef., non praeterit
+me quam magnarum rerum fundamenta
+ponam senex.</note> He has a lofty conception of his task, of the importance
+of the subject to the right culture of the spirit, and
+he summons up all his remaining energy to do it justice.
+But the work falls far short, in interest and executive skill,
+of a treatise like the <hi rend="italic">De Beneficiis</hi>, and the principle of
+edification—<hi rend="italic">omnibus sermonibus aliquid salutare miscendum</hi><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 59, § 2.</note>—is
+too obtrusive, and sometimes leads to incongruous and
+almost ludicrous effects. A reference to the mullet launches
+him on a discourse on luxury.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii, § 18.</note> A discourse on mirrors would
+hardly seem to lend itself to moralising. Yet the invention
+furnishes to Seneca impressive lessons on self-knowledge, and
+a chance of glorifying the simple age when the unkempt
+daughter of a Scipio, who received her scanty dowry in
+uncoined metal, had never had her vanity aroused by the
+reflected image of her charms.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 17, § 8, An tu existimas auro
+inditum habuisse Scipionis filias speculum
+cum illis dos fuisset aes grave?</note> The subject of lightning
+<pb n="303"/><anchor id="Pg303"/>naturally gives occasion to a homily against the fear of death.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Nat. Quaest.</hi> ii. 59, § 3.</note>
+A prologue, on the conflict to be waged with passion and
+luxury and chance and change, winds up abruptly with the
+invitation—<hi rend="italic">quaeramus ergo de aquis</hi> ... <hi rend="italic">qua ratione fiant</hi>.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 1, § 1.</note> The
+investigation closes with an imaginative description of the
+great cataclysm which is destined to overwhelm in ruin the
+present order. The earthquakes in Campania in <sic>66</sic> <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>
+naturally furnish many moral lessons.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 32.</note> The closing passage of
+the <hi rend="italic">Natural Questions</hi> is perhaps the best, and the most worthy
+of Seneca. In all these inquiries, he says, into the secrets of
+nature, we should proceed with reverent caution and self-distrust,
+as men veil their faces and bend in humbleness before
+a sacrifice.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 30, § 1.</note> How many an orb, moving in the depths of space,
+has never yet risen upon the eyes of man.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 30, § 3, quam multa praeter
+hos per secretum eunt nunquam humanis
+oculis orientia?</note> The Great Author
+Himself is only dimly visible to the inner eye, and there are
+vast regions of His universe which are still beyond our ken,
+which dazzle us by their effulgence, or elude our gross senses
+by their subtle secrecy. We are halting on the threshold of
+the great mysteries. There are many things destined to be
+revealed to far-distant ages, when our memory shall have
+passed away,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 5, multa venientis aevi populus
+ignota nobis sciet, multa saeculis
+tunc futuris, cum memoria nostra exoleverit,
+reservantur.</note> of which our time does not deserve the revelation.
+Our energies are spent in discovering fresh ingenuities of
+luxury and monstrous vice. No one gives a thought to
+philosophy; the schools of ancient wisdom are deserted and
+left without a head.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 31.</note> It is in this spirit that Seneca undertook
+his mission as a saviour of souls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca, in the epilogue to the <hi rend="italic">Natural Questions</hi>, remarks
+sarcastically that, as all human progress is slow, so, even with
+all our efforts of self-indulgence, we have not yet reached the
+finished perfection of depravity; we are still making discoveries
+in vice. In another passage he maintains that his own age is no
+worse than others.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi> i. 10.</note> But this is only because at all times the mass
+of men are bad. Such pessimism in the first and second centuries
+was a prevalent tone. We meet it alike in Persius, Petronius,
+Martial, and Juvenal, and in Seneca, Tacitus, Pliny, Epictetus,
+<pb n="304"/><anchor id="Pg304"/>and Marcus Aurelius.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 8, 9; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> ii.
+11, 17, 20; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 37; Petron.
+<hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 88; M. Aurel. v. 33; v. 10.</note> The rage for wealth and luxury, the
+frenzy of vice which perverted natural healthy instincts and
+violated the last retreats of modesty, the combination of
+ostentation and meanness in social life, the cowardice and the
+cruelty which are twin offspring of pampered self-indulgence,
+the vanity of culture and the vanishing of ideals, the vague
+restless ennui, hovering between satiety and passion, between
+faint glimpses of goodness and ignominious failure, between fits
+of ambition and self-abandoned languor, all these and more had
+come under the eye of Seneca as an observer or a director of
+souls.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 77, § 6; 24, § 25; 89, § 21;
+95, § 16; <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> c. i.</note> It is a lost world that he has before him, trying fruitless
+anodynes for its misery, holding out its hands for help from
+any quarter.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 48, § 8.</note> The consuming earnestness of Seneca, about which,
+in spite of his rhetoric, there can be no mistake, and his endless
+iteration are the measure of his feeling as to the gravity of the
+case. Seneca is the earliest and most powerful apostle of a
+great moral revival. His studied phrase, his epigrammatic
+point seem often out of place; his occasionally tinsel rhetoric
+sometimes offends a modern taste. We often miss the austere
+and simple seriousness of Epictetus, the cultivated serenity and
+the calm clear-sighted resignation of Marcus Aurelius. Still let
+us admit that here is a man, with all his moral faults which he
+freely confesses, with all his rhetoric which was a part of
+his very nature, who felt he had a mission, and meant to fulfil
+it with all the resources of his mind. He is one of the
+few heathen moralists who warm moral teaching with the
+emotion of modern religion, and touch it with the sadness
+and the yearning which spring from a consciousness of man’s
+infinite capacities and his actual degradation; one in whose
+eyes can be seen the <hi rend="italic">amor ulterioris ripae</hi>, in whose teaching
+there are searching precepts which go to the roots of conduct,
+and are true for all ages of our race. He adheres formally to
+the lines of the old Stoic system in his moments of calm
+logical consistency. But when the enthusiasm of humanity, the
+passion to win souls to goodness and moral truth is upon him,
+all the old philosophical differences fade, the new wine bursts
+the old bottles; the Platonic dualism, the eternal conflict of
+<pb n="305"/><anchor id="Pg305"/>flesh and spirit,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 71, § 27; 94, § 50; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi>
+24, § 5; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 79, § 12, tunc animus
+noster habebit quod gratuletur sibi,
+cum emissus his tenebris, in quibus
+volutatur, non tenui visu clara perspexerit
+... et caelo redditus suo
+fuerit; Zeller, iii. i. 637.</note> the Platonic vision of God, nay, a higher
+vision of the Creator, the pitiful and loving Guardian, the Giver
+of all good, the Power which draws us to Himself, who receives
+us at death, and in whom is our eternal beatitude, these
+ideas, so alien to the older Stoicism, transfigure its hardness,
+and its cold, repellent moral idealism becomes a religion.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 79, § 12; 102, § 22, per has
+mortalis aevi moras illi meliori vitae
+longiorique proluditur, §§ 26, 28; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+73, § 15, Deus ad homines venit, etc.
+But cf. Zeller, iii. 1, 650; and for a
+different view, <anchor id="corr305"/><corr sic="Burgmann.">Burgmann,</corr> <hi rend="italic">Seneca’s
+Theologie in ihrem Verhältn. zum
+Stoicismus</hi>, etc. pp. 20-32. That Burgmann’s
+is the truer view appears from
+Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 49; 65, § 9; <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi>
+i. 5, § 7; <hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi> ii. 29, § 4; <hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi>
+v. 10; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 28, § 1; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 41, §
+    <anchor id="corr305-2"/><corr sic="2">2.</corr></note>
+Seneca’s system is really a religion; it is morality inspired by
+belief in a spiritual world and <q>touched by emotion.</q> In a
+remarkable letter, he discusses the question whether, for the
+conduct of life, precept is sufficient without dogma, whether
+a man can govern his life by empirical rules, without a
+foundation of general principles. Can a religion dispense with
+dogma?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 10.</note> Seneca, as a casuist and spiritual director, was not
+likely to undervalue the importance of definite precept, adapted
+to the circumstances of the case. The philosopher, who was
+a regular official in great families, probably dealt chiefly in
+precept, on a basis of authority concealed and rarely scrutinised.
+But Seneca is not an ordinary professional director. He has
+a serious purpose; he feels that he is dealing with the
+most momentous of all problems—how to form or reform a life,
+with a view to its true end, how the final good of man is to
+be realised only in virtuous action. But action will not be right
+and virtuous unless the will be also right, and rightness of will
+depends on ordered habit of the soul,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 57, rursus voluntas non erit
+recta nisi habitus animi rectus fuerit,
+etc.</note> and that again springs
+from right general principles or dogmas. In other words, a true
+theory of conduct is necessary to virtue in the highest sense.
+Mere imperative precept and rule cannot give steadiness and
+continuity to conduct. The motive, the clear perception of the
+guiding principle, can alone dignify an act with a peculiar moral
+distinction. In order to possess that character, the external
+act must be rooted in a faith in the rational law of conduct.
+Particular precepts may produce an external obedience to
+<pb n="306"/><anchor id="Pg306"/>that law, but they cannot give the uniformity and certainty of
+the inner light and the regulated will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca is not a sectarian dogmatist, although he lays so
+much stress on the necessity of dogma to virtuous conduct. He
+boldly declares that he does not follow absolutely any of
+the Stoic doctors. He defends Epicurus against the vulgar
+misunderstanding of his theory of pleasure, and the more
+vulgar practical deductions from it. He often quotes his
+maxims with admiration to Lucilius.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Vit. Beat.</hi> xii. § 4, nec aestimant,
+voluptas illa Epicuri quam sobria
+et sicca sit, sed ad nomen ipsum advolant
+quaerentes libidinibus suis patrocinium
+aliquod ac velamentum. Cf.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 18, § 14; 16, § 7; 22, § 13; 28,
+§ 9.</note> In his views of the
+nature of God and His relation to the external world and to
+the human soul, Seneca often seems to follow the old Stoic
+tradition. There are other passages where he seems to waver
+between different conceptions of God, the Creator of the universe,
+the incorporeal Reason, the divine breath diffused through all
+things, great and small, Fate, or the immutable chain of interlinked
+causation.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi> viii. § 3, quisquis formator
+universi fuit, sive ille deus est
+potens omnium, sive incorporalis ratio
+ingentium operum artifex, sive divinus
+spiritus per omnia aequali intentione
+diffusus, sive fatum et immutabilis
+causarum inter se cohaerentium series.
+Cf. <hi rend="italic">N. Quaest.</hi> ii. 45, § 2.</note> It is also clear that, from the tone of his
+mind, and the fact that the centre of philosophical interest for
+him is the moral life of man, he tends towards a more ethical
+conception of the Deity, as the Being who loves and cares for
+man. All this may be admitted and will be further noticed
+on a later page. Yet Seneca, in strict theory, probably never
+became a dissenter from the physical or ontological creed of
+his school. He adhered, in the last resort, to the Stoic pantheism,
+which represented God and the universe, force and
+formless matter, as ultimately issuing from the one substratum
+of the ethereal fire of Heraclitus, and in the great cataclysm,
+returning again to their source.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 71, § 14.</note> He also held theoretically the
+Stoic materialism, and the Stoic principle, that only corporeal
+natures can act on one another.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 57, § 8; 66, § 12; 117, § 2.</note> The force which moulds
+indeterminate matter into concrete form is spirit, breath, in the
+literal sense, interfused in rude matter, and by its tension,
+outward and again inward upon itself, producing form and
+quality and energy. Mere matter could never mould itself,
+or develop from within a power of movement and action. But
+<pb n="307"/><anchor id="Pg307"/>this material force which shapes the universe from within is
+also rational, and the universe is a rational being, guided by
+the indwelling reason to predestined ends, and obedient to
+a universal law. The God of the Stoics is thus a very elastic
+or comprehensive conception. He may be viewed as the
+ubiquitous, impalpable force, which may, in the lack of more
+accurate expression, be called air, ether, fire. He is the soul,
+the breath, the Anima Mundi. He is also the universal law,
+the rational principle, underlying all the apparently casual and
+fitful phenomena of physical nature and human life. God
+may also surely be regarded as the eternal Fate, the power in
+the ruthless, yet merciful sequence of inevitable causation.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, 122;
+cf. <hi rend="italic">Nat. Quaest.</hi> ii. 45, § 2.</note>
+And, in milder and more optimistic moods, we may view Him
+as a watchful Providence, caring for men more than they seem
+to care for themselves, saving them from the consequences of
+their own errors and misdeeds. In Seneca, He develops into
+a moral and spiritual Being, the source of all spiritual intuition
+and virtuous emotion, the secret power within us making for
+righteousness, as He is the secret force in all nature making
+for order.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> i. ii. § 6; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 27;
+<hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi> ii. 29; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 73, § 16.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seems a little crude and superficial to contrast the
+materialist and idealist conceptions of God in the later Stoic
+creed. What human conception of Him is free from similar
+contradictions? How can any conception of Him, expressed
+in human language, avoid them? And in Seneca’s conception
+of soul, even as material, there is something so thin, so subtle,
+and elusive, that the bounds of matter and spirit seem to
+melt away and disappear.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 57, § 8, animus qui ex tenuissimo
+constat, deprehendi non potest, etc.</note> However loyal he may be in
+form to Stoic materialism, Seneca in the end regards God as
+no mere material force, however refined and etherealised, but
+a spiritual power; not perhaps limited by the bounds of
+personality, but instinct with moral tendencies, nay, a moral
+impetus, which no mere physical force could ever develop.<note place="foot">Burgmann, <hi rend="italic">Seneca’s Theologie</hi>, p.
+41.</note> The
+growing dualism in Seneca’s metaphysics is the result of the
+growing dualism of his psychology. In accord with the old
+Stoic doctors, he sometimes formulates the material nature of
+the soul, and its essential unity. It is, like the Anima Mundi,
+<pb n="308"/><anchor id="Pg308"/>warm breath or subtle fire, penetrating all parts of the body,
+discharging currents from the central heart to the several organs.
+It is primarily rational, and all the lower powers of passion are
+derived from the controlling and unifying reason. It is a spark
+of the universal Spirit, holding the same place in the human
+organism as the Divine Spirit does in the universe.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 65, § 24, quem in hoc mundo
+deus obtinet, hunc in homine animus.</note> But
+experience and reflection drove Seneca more and more into an
+acceptance of the Platonic opposition of reason and passion, an
+unceasing struggle of the flesh and spirit, in which the old
+Stoic theory of the oneness of the rational soul tended to
+disappear.<note place="foot">Pl. <hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi> 83 <hi rend="small">C, D</hi>; 79 <hi rend="small">B</hi>; <hi rend="small">D</hi>; cf.
+Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 183; iii.
+2, p. 634; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 71, § 27.</note> This is only one, but it is the most important,
+modification of ancient theory forced on Seneca by a closer
+application of theory to the facts of human life, and a completer
+analysis of them. The individual consciousness, and the
+spectacle of human life, alike witness to the inevitable tendency
+of human nature to corruption. Even after the great cataclysm,
+when a new earth shall arise from the waters of the deluge,
+and a new man, in perfect innocence, shall enter on this fair
+inheritance, the clouds will soon gather again, and darken
+the fair deceitful dawn.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Nat. Quaest.</hi> iii. 30, § 8, sed illis
+quoque innocentia non durabit—cito
+nequitia subrepit.</note> The weary struggle of flesh and
+spirit will begin once more, in which the flesh is so often the
+victor. For to Seneca, as to the Orphic mystics and to Plato,
+the body is a prison, and life one long punishment.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 120, § 14; 65, § 16, nam corpus
+hoc animi pondus ac poena est;
+premente illo urgetur, in vinculis
+est, etc. <hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> ix. § 6, omnis vita
+supplicium est; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> xx. § 2.</note> Such
+is the misery of this mortal life, such the danger of hopeless
+corruption, that no one would accept the gift of existence if
+he could foresee the evil in store for him.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 22, § 3.</note> And death, the
+object of dread to the blind masses, is really the one compensation
+for the calamity of birth, either as a happy return to
+antenatal tranquillity, or as the gateway to a glorious freedom
+and vision of the Divine.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24, § 18, mors nos aut consumit
+aut eximit; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 36, § 10;
+102, § 23; <hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> vi. § 6; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi>
+25, § 1; <hi rend="italic">ib.</hi> 19, § 5; 20, § 2, quae efficit
+ut nasci non sit supplicium; cf. Epict.
+ii. 1; iii. 10; iii. 13; iv. 1; M. Aurel.
+viii. 18; vi. 28; iii. 3; ix. 3.</note> Seneca, indeed, does not always
+express himself in this strain. He is often the consistent,
+orthodox Stoic, who glories in the rounded perfection of the
+<pb n="309"/><anchor id="Pg309"/><hi rend="italic">sapiens</hi>, triumphing, even in this life, over all the seductions
+of sense and the fallacies of perverted reason, and, in virtue
+of the divine strength within him, making himself, even here
+below, equal with God in moral purity and freedom.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 53, § 11, est aliquid quo sapiens
+antecedat deum; cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 59, § 16,
+talis est sapientis animus, qualis mundus
+super lunam; semper illic serenum
+est; 72, § 8.</note> In such
+moods, he will adhere to the Stoic psychology: reason will be
+all in all; virtue will be uniform, complete, attained by one
+supreme victorious effort. But the vision is constantly crossed
+and darkened by doubts which are raised by the terrible facts
+of life. The moral problem becomes more difficult and complicated;
+the vision of perfection recedes to an infinite distance,
+and the glorious deliverance is reserved for an immortal life
+of which the older Stoics did not often dream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still, we can find in Seneca all the Stoic gospel, and
+moral idealism. <q>Nil bonum nisi verum</q> is the fundamental
+principle. The failures, aberrations, and sins of men arise
+from a false conception of what is good, produced by the
+warping effect of external things upon the higher principle.
+The avaricious, the ambitious, the sensual, live in a vain show.
+They are pursuing unreal objects of desire, which cheat and
+befool the reason, and turn to ashes when they are won.
+The <q>kingdom of Heaven is within.</q> It is the freedom, the
+peace, the tranquil sense of power over all that is fortuitous
+and external and fleeting, which alone can realise the highest
+good of man.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 74, § 1; 62, § 3, brevissima ad
+divitias per contemptum divitiarum
+via est; 59, § 14.</note> It is attained only by virtue, that is, by living
+in obedience to the law of reason, which has its voice and
+representative in each human soul. The summons to yield
+ourselves to the law of nature and reason simply calls us to
+obey our highest part (<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ ἡγεμονικόν</foreign>), which is a steadfast
+witness to the eternal truth of things, and, if unbribed and
+unperverted, will discern infallibly the right line of conduct
+amid all the clamorous or seductive temptations of the flesh or
+of the world. Nothing is a real good which has not the
+stamp and hall-mark of reason, which is not within the soul
+itself, that is within our own power. Everything worth
+having or wishing for is within. External things, wealth,
+power, high place, the pleasures of sense, are transitory, deceptive,
+unstable, the gifts of Fortune, and equally at her
+<pb n="310"/><anchor id="Pg310"/>mercy. In the mad struggle for these ephemeral pleasures,
+the wise man retires unobserved from the scene of cruel and
+sordid rapacity, having secretly within him the greatest prize
+of all, which Fortune cannot give or take away.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 74, §§ 6-12; cf. M. Aurel. v.
+15,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">νῦν δὲ ὅσῳ περ πλείω τις ἀφαιρῶν ἑαυτοῦ τούτων ἢ καὶ ἀφαιρούμενός τι
+τούτων ἀνέχηται, τοσῷδε μᾶλλον ἀγαθός ἐστι</foreign>: Epict. ii. 16, § 18; iii. 3, § 14.</note> If these
+things were really good, then God would be less happy than
+the slave of lust and ambition, than the sensualist who is fascinated
+by a mistress or a minion, the trader who may be ruined
+by a storm, the wealthy minister who may at any moment be
+ordered to death by a Nero.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 31, § 10; 74, § 14 aut
+ista bona non sunt, quae vocantur, aut
+homo felicior deo est, etc.</note> The only real liberty and
+human dignity are to be found in renunciation. If we
+jealously guard and reverence the divine reason within us,
+and obey its monitions, which are in truth the voice of God,
+the Universal Reason, then we have an impregnable fortress
+which cannot be stormed by any adverse fortune. The peace
+and freedom so won may be called, although Seneca does not
+so call it, the <q>peace of God.</q> For it is in fact the restored
+harmony between the human spirit and the Reason of the
+world, and the cessation of the weary conflict between the
+<q>law in the members</q> and <q>the law of the mind,</q> which
+ends so often in that other peace of a <q>mare mortuum,</q> a
+stillness of moral death.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 67, § 14.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The gospel of Seneca, with all its searching power, seems
+wanting in some of the essentials of an effective religion which
+can work on character. Where, it may be asked, is the force
+to come from which shall nerve the repentant one to essay
+the steep ascent to the calm of indefectible virtue? And
+what is the reward which can more than compensate for the
+great renunciation? With regard to the first question, the
+Stoic answer is clear. The reforming force is the divine
+reason, indwelling in every human soul,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 66, § 12, ratio autem nihil aliud
+est quam in corpus humanum pars
+divini spiritus mersa.</note> which, if it is able,
+or is permitted, to emancipate itself from bondage to the things
+of sense, will inevitably gravitate to the divine world, from
+which it sprang. The question of necessity and freedom of the
+will has not much interest for Seneca, as a practical moralist.
+He believes theoretically in the old Stoic dogmas on the subject.
+<pb n="311"/><anchor id="Pg311"/>From one point of view, God may be regarded as the eternal
+Fate, the inevitable law of causation. And as the Universal
+Reason, He cannot act otherwise than He does, without violating
+His very nature. But His action is self-determined and therefore
+free and spontaneous.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Nat. Quaest.</hi> ii. 36; <hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> 5,
+§ 8, eadem necessitate et deos adligat
+... ille ipse omnium conditor scripsit
+quidem fata, sed sequitur; semper paret,
+semel jussit.</note> This freedom man only attains by
+breaking away from the cruel servitude to passion and external
+circumstance. As a practical moral teacher, Seneca is bound
+to say that we can take the higher road if we will. The first
+step towards freedom is to grasp firmly the fundamental law
+of the moral life—that the only good lies in conformity to
+reason, to the higher part of our being. If we yield to its
+bidding, we can at once cut ourselves off from the deceitful life
+of the senses, and the vision of the true beatitude in virtue at
+once opens on the inner eye. When that vision has been seen,
+we must then seek to form a habit of the soul which shall
+steadily conform to the universal law, and finally give birth
+to a settled purpose, issuing inevitably in virtuous act.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 57; cf. 116, § 7, satis
+natura dedit roboris si illo utamur.</note> It
+is this fixed and stable resolution which is the Stoic ideal,
+although experience showed that it was rarely attained. The
+great renunciation is thus the entrance on a state of true freedom,
+which is realised only by submitting ourselves to the
+law of reason, that is of God. By obedience to rational law
+man is raised to a level far transcending the transient and
+shadowy dignities of the world. His rational and divine part
+is reunited to the Divine Spirit which <q>makes for righteousness</q>;
+he places himself in the sweep and freedom of a movement
+which finds its image and counterpart in the majestic
+and ordered movements of the heavenly spheres. If we ask,
+how can poor humanity, so abject, so brutalised, so deadened
+by the downward pressure of the flesh and the world, ever
+release itself and rise to those empyrean heights, the answer is,
+through the original strength of the rational, which is the
+divine element in the human soul. It may be, and actually
+is, in the mass of men, drugged and silenced by the seductions
+of sense and the deceptions of the world. But if, in some
+moment of detachment and elation, when its captors and
+jailors relax their guard, it can escape their clutches, it will at
+<pb n="312"/><anchor id="Pg312"/>once seek the region of its birth, and its true home. It is in
+the kindred of the human reason with the Divine, the Reason
+of the world, that we must seek the reconciliation of two
+apparently opposite points of view. At one time the Stoic
+doctor tells us that we must trust to our own strength in the
+moral struggle. And again Seneca, in almost Christian phrase,
+comforts his disciple with the vision of God holding out a
+succouring hand to struggling virtue, just as he warns the
+backslider of an eye <q>that seeth in secret.</q> Woe to him
+who despises that Witness.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 73, § 15, non sunt di
+    <anchor id="corr312"/><corr sic="fastidiodosi">fastidiosi</corr>:
+adscendentibus manum porrigunt;
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 83, § 1, nihil deo clusum est;
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 43, § 5, O te miserum si contemnis
+hunc testem.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With such a conception of the relation of the human reason to
+the Divine, Seneca was bound to believe that human nature, as
+it is, had fallen away from original and spontaneous innocence.
+In the equal enjoyment of the unforced gifts of nature, in the
+absence of the avarice and luxury which the development of
+the arts, the exploitation of the earth’s hidden wealth, and the
+competitive struggle, born of a social life growing more and
+more complicated, have generated, the primeval man was unsolicited
+by the passions which have made life a hell.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>, 90, § 38 sqq. avaritia omnia
+fecit aliena et in angustum ex immenso
+redacta paupertatem intulit, et multa
+concupiscendo omnia amisit.</note> Yet
+this blissful state was one of innocence rather than of virtue;
+it was the result of ignorance of evil rather than determined
+choice of good.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 46, non fuere sapientes;...
+ignorantia rerum innocentes erant.</note> And the man who, in the midst of a corrupt
+society, fights his way to virtue, will take far higher moral rank
+than our simple ancestors, who wandered in the unravaged
+garden of the Golden Age. For the man born in a time when
+the nobler instincts have been deadened by the lust of gold
+and power and sensual excess, the virtuous will can only be
+won by a hard struggle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Confronted with the facts of life, and fired with a passion to
+win men to a higher law, the later Stoicism had in some points
+to soften the rigid lines of earlier theory. The severe idealism
+of the great doctors was a mere dream of an impossible detachment,
+the inexorable demand of a pitiless logic. Virtue, being
+conformity to the immutable law of reason, was conceived as a
+rounded, flawless whole, to which nothing could be added, and
+to which nothing must be wanting. It presupposes, or is
+<pb n="313"/><anchor id="Pg313"/>identical with, a settled intellectual clearness, an unclouded
+knowledge of the truly good, which must inevitably issue in
+perfect act. It is a single, uniform mental state from which all
+the separate virtues spring as from a single root.<note place="foot">Sen.
+    <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 66, § 13 sqq.; 113, § 14,
+Cic. <hi rend="italic">Tusc.</hi> iv. 15, 34; Plut. <hi rend="italic">Virt. Mor.</hi>
+c. 2; Zeller, iii. 1, p. 224.</note> The moral
+value of an act depends entirely on will, intention, that is, on
+the intellectual perception. And as there are no gradations in
+the mental state, so there are no gradations in moral conduct
+which issues from it. There are no distinctions between
+things morally good, between <q>divine</q> things; and so, just as
+in the older Calvinistic system, there is no class intermediate
+between the wise and the foolish, the saved and the lost.
+And conversion, <q>transfiguration,</q> the change from folly to
+wisdom, is regarded as instantaneous and complete.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p.
+235; Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Prof. in Virt.</hi> i.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὥστε τὸν πρωΐ κάκιστον ἑσπέρας γεγονέναι κράτιστον κτλ.</foreign>;
+    <hi rend="italic">Adv. St.</hi> c. x.; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+76, § 19.</note> Even
+those who are struggling upward, but have not yet reached
+the top, are still to be reckoned among the foolish, just as the
+man a few inches below the waves will be drowned as certainly
+as if he were sunk fathoms deep. And, as there is no mean state
+in morals, so the extremes are necessarily finished and perfect
+types of virtue and reprobacy. The ideal <hi rend="italic">sapiens</hi>, who combines
+in himself all the moral and intellectual attributes that
+go to make up the ideal of serene, flawless virtue, has been the
+mark for ridicule from the days of Horace.<note place="foot">Hor.
+    <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i. 3, 124; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 1,
+106; cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 73, § 13; Aelian, <hi rend="italic">Var. Hist.</hi>
+iv. 13; Luc. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Auct.</hi> c. 20,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">μόνος οὗτος σοφός, μόνος καλός, μόνος ανδρεῖος βασιλεὺς ῥήτωρ, κτλ.</foreign></note> Such an ideal,
+soaring into the pure cold regions of virgin snow, left the great
+mass of men grovelling in filth and darkness. And it was in
+this light that the severe Stoic regarded the condition of the
+multitude. They are all equally bad, and they will always be
+bad, from age to age. Every generation mourns over its degeneracy,
+but it is no worse than its ancestors, and its posterity
+will be no better. The only variation is in the various fashion of
+the vices.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi> i. 10, § 1, hoc majores
+nostri questi sunt, hoc nos querimur,
+hoc posteri nostri querentur, eversos
+mores regnare nequitiam, in deterius
+res humanas labi. Cf. <hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> c. iv.</note> In any crowded scene, says Seneca, in the forum or
+the circus, you have a mere gathering of savage beasts, a spectacle
+of vice incarnate.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 8, § 1, istic
+    tantumdem
+esse vitiorum quantum hominum.</note> In the garb of peace, they are engaged in
+a truceless war, hating the fortunate, trampling on the fallen.
+<pb n="314"/><anchor id="Pg314"/>Viewing this scene of shameless lust and cupidity where every
+tie of duty or friendship is violated, if the wise man were to
+measure his indignation by the atrocity of the offenders, his
+anger must end in madness. But we are all bad men living
+among the bad, and we should be gentle to one another.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The idealism and the pessimism of the earlier Stoics were
+alike fatal to any effort of moral reform. The cold, flawless
+perfection of the man of triumphant reason was an impossible
+model which could only discourage and repel aspirants to the
+higher life. The ghastly moral wreck of ordinary human nature,
+in which not a single germ of virtuous impulse seemed to have
+survived the ruin, left apparently no hope of rescue or escape.
+If morals were to be anything but an abstract theory, if they
+were to have any bearing on the actual character and destiny
+of man, their demand must be modified. And so in many
+essential points it was, even before Seneca.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p.
+637; cf. p. 249. Cf. Martha, <hi rend="italic">Mor.
+sous l’Emp.</hi> p. 62. On Seneca’s relation
+to the old Stoic theology, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi>
+Burgmann, <hi rend="italic">Seneca’s Theologie</hi>, p. 42 sq.</note> The ideal contempt
+for all external things had to give way to an Aristotelian
+recognition of the value of some of them for a virtuous life.
+And Seneca is sometimes a follower of Aristotle, as in the
+admission, so convenient to the millionaire, that wealth may be
+used by the wise man for higher moral ends.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Vit. Beat.</hi> c. 22.</note> He will not be
+the slave of money; he will be its master. He will admit it
+to his home, but not to his heart, as a thing which may take to
+itself wings at any moment, but which may meanwhile be used
+to cheer and warm him in his struggles, and may be dispensed
+in beneficent help to dependents. In the same way, beside the
+ideal of perfect conformity to the law of reason, there appeared
+a class of conditional duties. To conform absolutely to the law
+of reason, to realise the highest good through virtue, remains
+the highest Stoic ideal. But if, beside the highest good,
+it is permitted to attach a certain value to some among
+the external objects of desire, manifestly a whole class of
+varying duties arises in the field of choice and avoidance.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 74, § 17; 87, § 29 sq.: <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi>
+v. 13, § 1 sq.; Zeller, iii. 1, p. 638.</note>
+And again the ideal of imperturbable calm, which approached
+the apathy of the Cynics, was softened by the admission of
+rational dispositions of feeling.<note place="foot"><foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εὐπάθειαι</foreign>, cf. <hi rend="italic">De Brev. Vit.</hi> xiv. §
+2; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 2-4; Zeller, iii. 1, p. 216.</note> These concessions to
+    im<pb n="315"/><anchor id="Pg315"/>perious facts of human life, of course, modified the awful
+moral antithesis of wise and foolish, good and reprobate.
+Where is the perfectly wise man, with his single moral
+purpose, his unruffled serenity, his full assurance of his own
+impregnable strength, actually to be found?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> vii. § 4, ubi enim
+istum invenies quem tot seculis quaerimus?
+Pro optimo est minime malus.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 42, § 1.</note> He is not to
+be discovered among the most devoted adherents of the true
+philosophic creed. Even a Socrates falls short of the sublime
+standard. If we seek for the wise man in the fabulous past,
+we shall find only heroic force, or a blissful, untempted ignorance,
+which are alike wanting in the first essential of virtue.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 90, § 44 sqq.</note> As
+the perfect ideal of moral wisdom, imperturbable, assured,
+and indefectible, receded to remote ideal distances, so the
+condemnation of all moral states below an impossible perfection
+to indiscriminate reprobacy<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 72, §§ 6-11.</note> had to be revoked.
+Seneca maintains that men are all bad, but he is forced to
+admit that they are not all equally bad, nay, that there are
+men who, although not quite emancipated from the snares of
+the world and the flesh, have reached various stages on the
+upward way. He even distinguishes three classes of <hi rend="italic">proficientes</hi>,
+of persons on the path of moral progress.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 75, § 8 sqq.</note> There is
+the man who has conquered many serious vices, but is still
+captive to others. Again, there is the man who has got rid
+of the worst faults and passions, but who is not secure against
+a relapse. There is a third class who have almost reached
+the goal. They have achieved the great moral victory; they
+have embraced the one true object of desire; they are safe
+from any chance of falling away; but they want the final
+gift of full assurance reserved for the truly wise.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 72, <sic>§ 8 sapiens</sic> laetitia fruitur
+maxima, continua, sua.</note> They have
+not attained to the crowning glory of conscious strength. Seneca
+is still in bondage to the hard Stoic tradition, in spite of his
+aberrations from it. The great Catholic virtue of humility is
+to him still, theoretically at least, a disqualification for the
+highest spiritual rank.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet Seneca is far from wanting in humility. In giving
+counsels of perfection, he candidly confesses that he is himself
+far from the ideal.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 57, § 3, non de me loquor, qui
+multum ab homine tolerabili, nedum a
+perfecto absum: cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 89, § 2.</note> Indeed, his <hi rend="italic">Letters</hi> reveal a character
+<pb n="316"/><anchor id="Pg316"/>which, with lofty ideals, and energetic aspiration, is very far
+removed from the serene joy and peace of the true Stoic sage.
+He has not got the invulnerable panoply from which all the
+shafts of fortune glance aside. He shows again and again how
+deep a shadow the terror of his capricious master could cast
+over his life, how he can be disturbed even by the smaller
+troubles of existence, by the slights of great society, by the
+miseries of a sea voyage, or the noises of a bath.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> ii. § 1; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 53, § 4;
+<sic>56 §§ 1-3</sic>.</note> In the
+counsels addressed to Lucilius, Seneca is probably quite as
+often preaching to himself. The ennui, the unsteadiness of
+moral purpose, the clinging to wealth and power, the haunting
+fears or timid anticipations of coming evil, for which he is
+constantly suggesting spiritual remedies, are diagnosed with
+such searching skill and vividness that we can hardly doubt
+that the physician has first practised his art upon himself.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24; esp. § 14.</note>
+Nor has he entire faith in his own insight or in the potency
+of the remedies which ancient wisdom has accumulated. The
+great difficulty is, that the moral patient, in proportion to the
+inveteracy of his disease, is unconscious of it.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 53, § 7, quo quis pejus se habet,
+minus sentit.</note> Society, with
+its manifold temptations of wealth and luxury and irresponsible
+ease, can so overwhelm the congenital tendency to virtue,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 94, §§ 55, 56.</note>
+that the inner monitor may be silenced, and a man may
+come to love his depravity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 112, vitia sua et amat simul et
+odit.</note> If men are not getting better,
+they are inevitably getting worse. There is such a state, in
+the end, as hopeless, irreclaimable reprobacy. Yet even for
+the hoary sinner Seneca will not altogether despair, so long
+as there lingers in him some divine discontent, however faint,
+some lingering regret for a lost purity. He will not lose
+hope of converting even a mocker like Marcellinus, who
+amuses himself with jeers at the vices and inconsistencies of
+professing philosophers, and does not spare himself. Seneca
+may, perchance, give him a pause in his downward course.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 29.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca’s gospel, as he preaches it, is for a limited class.
+With all his professed belief in the equality and brotherhood
+of men, Seneca addresses himself, through the aristocratic
+Epicurean Lucilius, to the slaves of wealth and the vices
+<pb n="317"/><anchor id="Pg317"/>which it breeds. The men whom he wishes to save are
+masters of great households, living in stately palaces, and
+striving to escape from the weariness of satiety by visits to
+Baiae or Praeneste.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 28, § 1.</note> They are men who have awful secrets,
+and whose apparent tranquillity is constantly disturbed by
+vague terrors,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 13, § 4 sq.; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24, § 11.</note> whose intellects are wasted on the vanities
+of a conventional culture or the logomachies of a barren
+dialectic.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 117, § 31; 75, § 6.</note> They are people whose lives are a record of weak
+purpose and conflicting aims, and who are surprised by old
+age while they are still barely on the threshold of real moral
+life.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 13, § 17, quid est turpius quam
+senex vivere incipiens?</note> With no religious or philosophic faith, death is to such
+men the great terror, as closing for ever that life of the
+flesh which has been at once so pleasant and so tormenting.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24.</note>
+In dealing with such people, Seneca recognises the need both
+of the great principles of right living and of particular precepts,
+adapted to varieties of character and circumstance. The
+true and solid foundation of conduct must always be the clear
+perception of moral truth, giving birth to rightly-directed purpose
+and supplying the right motive. For example, without a
+true conception of God as a spirit, worship will be gross and
+anthropomorphic.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 49.</note> The doctrine of the brotherhood of all men
+in the universal commonwealth is the only solid ground of the
+social charities and of humanity to slaves. Yet dogma is not
+enough; discipline must be added. The moral director has to
+deal with very imperfect moral states, some of quite rudimentary
+growth, and his disciples may have to be treated as boys
+learning to write, whose fingers the master must guide
+mechanically across the tablet.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 94, § 5, digiti puerorum tenentur
+et aliena manu per literarum
+simulacra ducuntur.</note> The latent goodness of
+humanity must be disencumbered of the load which, through
+untold ages, corrupt society has heaped upon it. The delusions
+of the world and the senses must be exposed, the judgment,
+confused and dazzled by their glamour, must be cleared and
+steadied, the weak must be encouraged, the slothful and backsliding
+must be aroused to continuous effort in habitual converse
+with some good man who has trodden the same paths
+before.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 11, § 8; Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Pr. Virt.</hi> xv.</note>
+<pb n="318"/><anchor id="Pg318"/>Thus the great <q>Ars Vitae,</q> founded on a few simple
+principles of reason, developed into a most complicated system
+of casuistry and spiritual direction. How far it was successful
+we cannot pretend to say. But the thoughtful reader of
+Seneca’s <hi rend="italic">Letters</hi> cannot help coming to the conclusion that,
+even in the reign of Nero, there must have been many of the
+<hi rend="italic">proficientes</hi>, of candidates for the full Stoic faith. If Seneca
+reveals the depths of depravity in his age, we are equally
+bound to believe that he represents, and is trying to stimulate,
+a great moral movement, a deep seated discontent with the hard,
+gross materialism, thinly veiled under dilettantism and spurious
+artistic sensibility, of which Nero was the type. Everything
+that we have of Seneca’s, except the <hi rend="italic">Tragedies</hi>, deals with the
+problems or troubles of this moral life, and the demand for
+advice or consolation appears to have been urgent. Lucilius,
+the young Epicurean procurator, who has been immortalised
+by the <hi rend="italic">Letters</hi>, is only one of a large class of spiritual inquirers.
+He not only lays his own moral difficulties before
+the master, but he brings other spiritual patients for advice.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 25, § 1.</note>
+There were evidently many trying to withdraw from the
+tyranny or temptations of high life, with a more or less stable
+resolution to devote themselves to reflection and amendment.
+It is a curious pagan counterpart to the Christian ascetic
+movement of the fourth and fifth centuries.<note place="foot">S. Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 127, §§ 5-7; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+118, § 5; Sulp. <hi rend="italic">Sev.</hi> ii. 13, § 7.</note> And, just as in
+the days of S. Jerome and S. Paulinus, the deserter from the
+ranks of fashion and pleasure in Nero’s time had to encounter
+a storm of ridicule and misrepresentation. Philosophic retreat
+was derided as mere languid self-indulgence, an unmanly
+shrinking from social duty, nay, even a mere mask for the
+secret vices which were, too often with truth, charged against
+the <hi rend="italic">soi-disant</hi> philosopher.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 36, § 1, illum objurgant
+quod umbram et otium petierit; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+123, § 15, illos quoque nocere nobis
+existimo, qui nos sub specie Stoicae
+sectae hortantur ad vitia: hoc enim
+jactant solum sapientem et doctum esse
+amatorem.</note> Sometimes the wish to lead a
+higher life was openly assailed by a cynical Epicureanism.
+Virtue and philosophy were mere idle babble. The only
+happiness is to make the most of the senses while the senses
+still keep their fresh lust for pleasure. The days are fleeting
+away never to return in which we can drink with keen zest
+<pb n="319"/><anchor id="Pg319"/>the joys of the flesh. What folly to spare a patrimony for a
+thankless heir!<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 123, § 10. Cf. <hi rend="italic">Inscr. Or.
+Henz.</hi> 4806, 4807, 4816.</note> Seneca had to deal with many souls wavering
+between the two ideals. One of his treatises is addressed
+to a kinsman, Annaeus Serenus, who had made a full confession
+of a vague unrest, an impotence of will, the conflict of moral
+torpor with high resolve.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> i.</note> In his better moments, Annaeus
+inclines to simplicity of life and self-restraint. Yet a visit to
+a great house dazzles him and disturbs his balance, with the
+sight of its troops of elegant slaves, its costly furniture and
+luxurious feasting. He is at one time drawn to philosophic
+quietude; at another he becomes the strenuous ambitious
+Roman of the old days, eager for the conflicts of the forum.
+He is always wavering between a conviction of the vanity of
+literary trifling and the passion for literary fame.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. §§ 13-15, nec aegroto nec
+valeo;... In omnibus rebus haec
+me sequitur bonae mentis infirmitas.
+<hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 17, rogo, si quod habes remedium
+quo hanc fluctuationem meam sistam,
+dignum me putes qui tibi tranquillitatem
+debeam.</note> Cannot
+Seneca, to whom he owes his ideal, furnish some remedy for
+this constant tendency to relapse and indecision?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is in the sympathetic handling of such cases, not in
+broad philosophic theory, that the peculiar strength of Seneca
+lies. His counsels were adapted to the particular difficulties
+presented to him. But many of them have a universal validity.
+He encourages the wish to retire into meditative quietude, but
+only as a means to moral cure.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 7, § 8; 19, § 2.</note> Retreat should not be an
+ostentatious defiance of the opinion of the world.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 68, ipsum otium absconde;
+jactandi autem genus est nimis latere.</note> Nor is it
+to be a mere cloak for timid or lazy shrinking from the
+burdens of life. You should withdraw from the strife and
+temptations of the mundane city, only to devote yourself to
+the business of the spiritual city, to cultivate self-knowledge
+and self-government, to inspire the soul with the contemplation
+of the Eternal and the Divine. Solitude may be a
+danger, unless a man lives in the presence of <q>One who seeth
+in secret,</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 43, § 4; cf. 83, § 1; 10, § 2,
+mecum loquor ... cave ne cum
+homine malo loquaris.</note> from whom no evil thought is hidden, to whom
+no prayer for evil things must be addressed.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 10, § 5, turpissima vota dis
+insusurrant; cf. Pers. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> ii. 7-18;
+Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 41, § 1.</note> And, lest the
+thought of God’s presence may not come home with sufficient
+<pb n="320"/><anchor id="Pg320"/>urgency, Seneca recommends his disciples to call up the
+image of some good man or ancient sage, and live as if under
+his eye.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 11, § 8; 104, § 21, vive cum Chrysippo,
+cum Posidonio.</note> The first step in moral progress is self-knowledge
+and confession of one’s faults.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 6, § 1; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 28; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 50, § 4;
+Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Prof. in Virt.</hi> c. xi.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ πάθος λέγειν καὶ τὴν μοχθηρίαν ἀποκαλύπτειν οὐ φαῦλον ἂν εἴη προκοπῆς σημεῖον</foreign>.</note> Ignorance of our spiritual
+disease, the doom of the indurated conscience, is the great
+danger, and may be the mark of a hopeless moral state.
+Hence the necessity for constant daily self-examination. In
+the quiet of each night we should review our conduct and
+feeling during the day, marking carefully where we have
+fallen short of the higher law, and strengthening ourselves
+with any signs of self-conquest. Seneca tells us that this
+was his own constant practice.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, iii. 36, § 3.</note> For progress is only slow
+and difficult. It requires watchful and unremitting effort to
+reach that assured and settled purpose which issues spontaneously
+in purity of thought and deed, and which raises man
+to the level of the Divine freedom. There must be no pauses
+of self-complacency until the work is done. There is no
+mediocrity in morals. There must be no halting and unsteadiness
+of purpose, no looking back to the deceitful things of
+the world. Inconstancy of the wavering will only shortens the
+span of this short life. How many there are who, even when
+treading the last stage to death, are only beginning to live,
+in the true sense, and who miss the beatitude of the man
+who, having mastered the great secret, can have no addition
+to his happiness from lengthened years. In the long tract of
+time any life is but a moment, and of that the least part by
+most men is really lived.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 32, § 2, in tanta brevitate vitae
+quam breviorem inconstantia facimus,
+etc.; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 99, § 11,
+    <anchor id="corr320"/><corr sic="intelliges">intelleges</corr> etiam in
+longissima vita minimum esse quod
+vivitur.</note> And this unsettled aim is liable to
+constant temptation from without. We are continually within
+sight and earshot of the isles of the Sirens, and only the
+resolution of a Ulysses will carry us past in safety.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 56, § 15; 51, § 5.</note> In fact
+no isle of the Sirens can have been more dangerous than the life
+of a great household in the Neronian age, when the dainties
+and the vices of every land assailed the senses with multiplied
+seductions, and men craved in vain for a heightened and keener
+sensibility. Perpetual change of scene to the shores of Baiae,
+<pb n="321"/><anchor id="Pg321"/>to Apulia, to some glen in the Apennines, or to the northern
+lakes, or even further, to the Rhone, the Nile, the Atlas, was
+sought by the jaded man of pleasure or the man struggling in
+vain to reform. But Seneca warns his disciple that wherever
+he may go he will take his vices and his weakness with him.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 51, § 4; 104, § 20, si vis peregrinationes
+habere jucundas, tuum
+comitem sana.</note>
+Let him try to work out his salvation within his great palace
+on the Esquiline. Surrounded by splendour and luxury,
+let him, for a time, isolate himself from them; let him lie
+on a hard bed, and live on scanty fare, and fancy himself
+reduced to that poverty which he dreads so much and so
+foolishly.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 17, § 5; 18, § 8; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 87, § 1;
+cf. Martha, p. 42.</note> The change will be good for body and soul; and
+the temporary ascetic may return to his old life, at least
+released from one of his bugbears, and refreshed with a new
+sense of freedom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such were some of the precepts by which Seneca strove to
+fortify the struggling virtue of his disciples. But he never
+concealed from them that it is only by struggle that the remote
+ideal can be attained. <q>Vivere militare est.</q> And almost in
+the words of S. Paul, he uses the example of the gladiator or
+the athlete, to arouse the energy of the aspirant after moral
+perfection.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 96, § 5.</note> <q>They do it for a corruptible crown.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 78, § 16, 4, nos quoque evincamus
+omnia, quorum praemium non
+corona nec palma est, etc.</note> The
+reward of the Stoic disciple is vain and poor to the gross
+materialist. But, from the serene heights, where ideal Reason
+watches the struggle, the only victor is the man who has
+adopted the watchwords—self-knowledge, renunciation, resignation.
+Only by following that steep path can any one ever
+reach the goal of assured peace within, and be delivered from
+the turmoil of chance and change. The misery of the sensual,
+the worldly, and the ambitious lies in the fact that they have
+staked their happiness on things which are beyond their own
+power, which are the casual gifts of fortune, and may be as
+capriciously withdrawn. This state is one of slavery to
+external things, and the pleasure, after all, which can be drawn
+from them is fleeting. Hence it is that the sensualist is
+equally miserable when his pleasures are denied, and when
+they are exhausted.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Vit. Beat.</hi> vii. § 4; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 83, § 27.</note> He places his happiness in one brief
+<pb n="322"/><anchor id="Pg322"/>moment, with the danger or the certainty either of privation
+or satiety. The wise man of the Stoics, on the other hand,
+has built his house upon the rock. He shuns, according to
+the Pythagorean maxim, the ways of the multitude, and
+trusting to the illumination of divine Reason, he takes the
+narrow path.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 37.</note> His guiding light is the principle that the
+<q>kingdom of heaven is within,</q> that man’s supreme good
+depends only on himself, that is, on the unfettered choice of
+reason. To such a man <q>all things are his,</q> for all worth
+having is within him. His mind creates its own world, or
+rather it rediscovers a lost world which was once his. He can,
+if he will, annihilate the seductions of the flesh and the world,
+which cease to disturb when they are contemned. He may
+equally extinguish the griefs and external pains of life, for each
+man is miserable just as he thinks himself.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 96; 98, §§ 2, 7.</note> Human nature,
+even unfortified by philosophic teaching, has been found capable
+of bearing the extremity of torture with a smile. The man
+who has mastered the great secret that mind may, by its latent
+forces, create its own environment, should be able to show the
+endurance of a Scaevola or a Regulus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> iii. § 4.</note> All he needs to do is to
+unmask the objects of his dread.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24, § 13, rebus persona demenda
+est.</note> For just as men are deluded
+by the show of material pleasure, so are they unmanned by
+visionary fears. Even the last event of life should have no
+terror for the wise man, on any rational theory of the future of
+the soul. The old mythical hell, the stone of Sisyphus, the
+wheel of Ixion, Cerberus, and the ghostly ferryman, may be
+dismissed to the limbo of fable.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 18; cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 36, § 10; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 30,
+§ 17; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 58, § 27; cf. Epict. ii. 1.</note> For the man who has followed
+the inner light, death must either be a return to that
+antenatal calm of nothingness which has left no memory, or
+the entrance to a blissful vision of the Divine.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> vi. § 6; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> 25; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+102, §§ 23-26, Per has mortalis aevi
+moras illi meliori vitae longiorique proluditur.</note> Even in this
+luxurious and effeminate time, men and women of all ranks and
+ages have shown themselves ready to escape from calamity or
+danger by a voluntary death.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24, § 11.</note> And what after all is death?
+It is not the terminus of life, a single catastrophe of a moment.
+In the very hour of birth we enter on the first stage in the
+journey to the grave. We are dying daily, and our last day
+<pb n="323"/><anchor id="Pg323"/>only completes the process of a life-long death.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24, § 20; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 36.</note> And as to
+the shortness of our days, no life is short if it has been full.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 93, § 2, longa est vita si
+plena est; cf. 101, § 10, singulos dies
+singulas vitas puta.</note>
+The mass of men are only living in an ambiguous sense; they
+linger or vegetate in life, they do not really live. Nay, many
+are long since dead when the hour of so-called death arrives.
+And the men who mourn over the shortness of their days are
+the greatest prodigals of the one thing that can never be
+replaced.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Brev. Vit.</hi> viii. § 1.</note> In the longest life, on a rational estimate, how
+small a fraction is ever really lived! The whole past, which
+might be a sure and precious possession, is flung away by the
+eager, worldly man.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> x.</note> The fleeting present is lost in unrest or
+reckless procrastination, or in projecting ourselves into a future
+that may never come. Thus old age surprises us while we
+are mere children in moral growth.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ix. § 4, pueriles adhuc animos
+senectus opprimit.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At certain moments, the Stoic ideal might seem to be in
+danger of merging itself in the self-centred isolation of the
+Cynic, asserting the defiant independence of individual virtue,
+the nothingness of all external goods, the omnipotence of the
+solitary will. And undoubtedly, in the last resort, Seneca
+has pictured the wise man thus driven to bay, and calmly
+defying the rage of the tyrant, the caprices of fortune, the
+loss of health and wealth, nay the last extremity of torture
+and ignominious death. His own perilous position, and the
+prospect of society in the reign of Nero, might well lead a
+man of meditative turn so to prepare himself for a fate which
+was always imminent. But the Stoic doctor could never
+acquiesce in a mere negative ideal, the self-centred independence
+of the individual soul. He was too cultivated, he
+had drunk too deep of the science and philosophy of the
+past, he had too wide an outlook over the facts of human life
+and society, to relegate himself to a moral isolation which was
+apt to become a state of brutal disregard of the claims of
+social duty, and even of personal self-respect.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p.
+329, der Stoiker ist zu gebildet ... um
+den Werth der wissenschaftlichen Weltbetrachtung
+zu verkennen.</note> Such a position
+was absolutely impossible to a man like Seneca. Whatever
+his practice may have been, it is clear that in temperament he
+was almost too soft and emotional. He was a man with an
+<pb n="324"/><anchor id="Pg324"/>intense craving for sympathy, and lavish of it to others; he was
+the last man in the world who could enjoy a solitary paradise
+of self-satisfied perfection. It is true the Roman world to
+the eyes of Seneca lay in the shadow of death, crushed under
+a treacherous despotism, and enervated by gross indulgence.
+Yet, although he sees men in this lurid light, he does not
+scorn or hate them. It was not for nothing that Seneca had
+been for five years the first minister of the Roman Empire.
+To have stood so near the master of the world, and felt the
+pulse of humanity from Britain to the Euphrates, to have
+listened to their complaints and tried to minister to their needs,
+was a rare education in social sympathy. It had a profound
+effect on M. Aurelius, and it had left its mark on Seneca.<note place="foot">Cf. Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1,
+p. 277, die Philosophie immer nur die
+geschichtlich vorhandenen Zustände
+abspiegele.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two competing tendencies may be traced in Stoicism, and
+in Seneca’s exposition of it. On the one hand, man must
+seek the harmony of his nature by submitting his passions
+and emotions to his own higher nature, and shaking himself free
+from all bondage to the flesh or the world. On the other
+hand, man is regarded as the subject of the universal Reason,
+a member of the universal commonwealth, whose maker and
+ruler is God.<note place="foot">Burgmann, <hi rend="italic">Seneca’s Theologie</hi>, p.
+26.</note> The one view might make a man aim merely
+at isolated perfection; it might produce the philosophic monk.
+The other and broader conception of humanity would make man
+seek his perfection, not only in personal virtue, but in active
+sympathy with the movement of the world. The one impulse
+would end in a kind of spiritual selfishness. The other
+would seek for the full development of spiritual strength in
+the mutual aid and sympathy of struggling humanity, in
+friendship,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 109, § 10; 9, § 15.</note> in the sense of a universal brotherhood and the
+fatherhood of God. There are two cities, says Seneca, in
+which a man may be enrolled—the great society of gods and
+men, wide as the courses of the sun; the other, the Athens or
+the Carthage to which we are assigned by the accident of
+birth.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Otio</hi>, iv.; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 68, § 2; cf. S.
+Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>, xi. 1.</note> A man may give himself to the service of both
+societies, or he may serve the one and neglect the other. The
+wise man alone realises to the full his citizenship in the
+spiritual commonwealth, in pondering on the problems of
+<pb n="325"/><anchor id="Pg325"/>human conduct, the nature of the soul, of the universe and
+God, and conforming his moral being to the eternal law of
+Nature. The sage, a Zeno or a Chrysippus, may rightly devote
+himself exclusively to contemplation and moral self-culture.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p.
+274; Stob. <hi rend="italic">Flor.</hi> 45, 29; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 29,
+§ 11.</note>
+He may not, by wealth and station, have access to the arena of
+active life. And, although a seeming recluse, he may really be
+a far greater benefactor of his kind than if he led the Senate,
+or commanded armies. There may be cases in which a man
+may be right in turning his back on public life, in order to
+concentrate all his energies on self-improvement. And Seneca
+does not hesitate to counsel Lucilius to withdraw himself from
+the thraldom of office.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 19, § 6, subduc cervicem jugo
+tritam.</note> Yet Zeno’s precept was that the
+wise man will serve the State unless there be some grave
+impediment in his way.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Otio</hi>, iii. § 2, accedet ad rempublicam
+nisi si quid impedierit.</note> For, on Stoic principles, we are all
+members one of another, and bound to charity and mutual
+help. And all speculation and contemplation are vain and
+frivolous unless they issue in right action. Yet the practical
+difficulty for the <hi rend="italic">sapiens</hi> was great, if not insuperable. What
+earthly commonwealth could he serve with consistency; is it
+an Athens, which condemned a Socrates to death, and drove an
+Aristotle into exile?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> viii. § 1, interrogo ad quam
+rempublicam sapiens sit accessurus,
+ad Athenas in qua Socrates damnatur,
+etc.; cf. Diog. <anchor id="corr325"/><corr sic="(italics removed)">Laert.</corr> v. 1.</note> How please the vulgar sensual crowd
+without displeasing God and conscience? It might seem that
+the true disciple of Stoicism could not take a part in public
+life save under some ideal polity, such as Plato or Chrysippus
+dreamed of.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. § 131.</note> Here, as elsewhere, the problem was solved
+with varying degrees of consistency. The problem is stated
+by Seneca—<q>Se contentus est sapiens ad beate vivendum,
+non ad vivendum.</q><note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 9, § 13.</note> It is the ever-recurring conflict between
+lofty idealism and the facts of human life, which is softened,
+if not solved, from age to age by casuistry. The wise and
+good man should have the springs of his happiness in himself.
+Yet a wise friend may call forth his powers, and furnish an
+object of self-sacrifice.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 109, § 3 sqq.</note> The wise man will not entangle
+himself in the cares of family life.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iii. 22, § 69.</note> Yet wife and child are
+<pb n="326"/><anchor id="Pg326"/>needed to give completeness to the life of the citizen. Since
+man exists for the general order, how can he avoid lending his
+services to the State, unless there be some insuperable bar?
+The controversy between the dream of solitary perfection and
+altruism was variously solved, and the particular solution
+could always be defended in the light of the great law of
+life. Epictetus, cut off from the great world by servile birth
+and poverty, could make light of marriage, of the begetting of
+future citizens, and the duties of political life.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> i. 9, § 1 sqq.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἢ τὸ τοῦ Σωκράτους, μηδέποτε πρὸς τὸν πυθόμενον, ποδαπός ἐστι,
+    εἰπεῖν ὅτι Ἀθηναῖος ἢ Κορίνθιος, ἀλλ’ ὅτι Κόσμος</foreign>.</note> On the other
+hand, M. Aurelius, by nature as detached as Epictetus, might
+refuse to follow the transcendental counsels of Chrysippus and
+Seneca. He might strive painfully to reconcile devotion to an
+irksome political charge with a dream of that unseen commonwealth
+<q>in which the cities of men are as it were houses.</q><note place="foot">M. Aurel. iii. 11; vi. 44,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πόλις καὶ πατρὶς ὡς μὲν Ἀντωνίνῳ μοι ἡ Ῥώμη, ὡς δὲ ἀνθρώπῳ ὁ Κόσμος</foreign>.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet in spite of these difficulties about public duty, no
+one outside the pale of Christianity has perhaps ever insisted
+so powerfully on the obligation to live for others, on the
+duty of love and forgiveness, as Seneca has done. We are
+all, bond or free, ruler or subject, members one of another,
+citizens of a universal commonwealth.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 52; cf. M. Aurel.
+iv. 4,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὁ κόσμος ὡσανεὶ πόλις ἐστί</foreign>: Epict.
+<hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> i. 13, § 3; Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Leg.</hi> i. 7, 23, ut
+jam universus hic mundus una civitas
+sit communis deorum atque hominum
+existimanda.</note> We have all within
+us a portion of the Divine spirit. No man can live entirely
+to himself.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 47, § 2, alteri vivas oportet,
+si vis tibi vivere; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 55, non sibi vivit
+qui nemini.</note> If we are not doing good to others we are doing
+harm. The nature of man and the constitution of the universe
+make it a positive obligation to seek the welfare of our fellows.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Otio</hi>, iii. § 5.</note>
+The social instinct is innate and original in us. As man is
+flung upon the world at birth, or in the natural state, with all
+his immense possibilities as yet undeveloped, no creature is
+so helpless.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Benef.</hi> iv. 18, § 2, nudum et
+infirmum societas munit.</note> It was only by combination and mutual good
+offices that men were able to repel the dangers which surrounded
+the infancy of the race, and to conquer the forces
+of nature. Man is born for social union, which is cemented
+by concord, kindness, and love,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, i. 5, § 2.</note> and he who shows anger,
+selfishness, perfidy, or cruelty to his fellows strikes at the
+<pb n="327"/><anchor id="Pg327"/>roots of social life. Nor should the spectacle of universal
+depravity cause us to hate or despise our kind.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 10, § 5 sqq.</note> It is quite
+true that the mass of men are bad, and always will be bad,
+with only rare exceptions. If society is the source of many
+blessings, it is also a great corruptor, and the conquest of
+nature and the development of the arts have aroused insatiable
+passions which have darkened the eye of reason.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 8 and 9; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 90, § 9 sqq.;
+<hi rend="italic">N. Quaest.</hi> v. 15.</note> Yet this
+crowd of sinners are our brothers, with the germs of virtue in
+their grain. They have taken the broad way almost necessarily,
+because it is broad. A general may punish individual soldiers,
+but you must pardon an army when it deserts the standards.
+The truly wise, not knowing whether to laugh or weep, will
+look kindly on the erring masses, as sick men who need a
+physician.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 10, §§ 6-8.</note> And beside the few truly wise, who can cast the
+first stone? We are all more or less bad, we have all gone
+astray.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 6, § 3, peccavimus
+omnes.</note> And yet we constantly show the utmost severity to
+the faults of others, while we forget or ignore our own.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 28, § 8, aliena vitia in
+oculis habemus, a tergo nostra sunt.</note> Even
+as God is long-suffering to transgressors, and sends His rain
+upon the evil and good alike, so should we be merciful in
+judgment and lavish in beneficence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iv. 4 and 5; iv. 28; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>,
+iii. 26.</note> The spectacle of universal
+greed and selfishness and ingratitude should not harden
+us against our fellows, but rather make us turn our eyes to our
+own faults.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 28.</note> Sometimes, indeed, the note of humility is
+absent, and Seneca is the serene <hi rend="italic">sapiens contra mundum</hi>, or
+the proud Roman gentleman who will not demean himself to
+resent or even notice the insults or injuries of the spiteful
+crowd.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 5, ingens animus et verus
+aestimator sui non vindicat injuriam
+quia non sentit.... Ultio doloris
+confessio est.</note> They will pass him by as the licensed jests of the
+slaves on the Saturnalia. He reminds himself that it is the lower
+air which is turbid with storm and thunder; the ether which
+spreads around the stars is never vexed and darkened by the
+tempest.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 6.</note> This is one of the recurring contrasts in Seneca
+between the moral tone of the old world and that of the great
+movement which was setting in. But the new prevails in the
+end. The conception of God as cold reason or impersonal law
+<pb n="328"/><anchor id="Pg328"/>or fate gives way to the thought of a God who guides by His
+providence, who embraces all by His love, whose goodness is
+as boundless as His power, who is best worshipped by the
+imitation of His goodness.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 65, § 24; <hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi> viii. § 3; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+41, § 2; <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iv. 4 and 7; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 10,
+§ 5, sic vive tamquam deus videat;
+Siedler, <hi rend="italic">De Sen. Phil. Mor.</hi> p. 14;
+Burgmann, <hi rend="italic">Seneca’s Theologie</hi>, p. 32.</note> As the vision grows, the pride of
+the invulnerable <hi rend="italic">sapiens</hi>, who might make himself the equal or
+more than the equal of God,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> vi. § 6, hoc est quo deum
+antecedatis.</note> shrinks and is abased. We are
+all more or less bad, and we should be gentle to one another.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, iii. 26; <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> i. 10.</note>
+Do we complain of coldness and ingratitude? Let us think
+how many a kindness done to us in early days, the tenderness
+of a nurse, a friend’s wise counsel or help in critical times,
+we have carelessly let slip from memory.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> vii. 28, § 2.</note> The faults which
+irritate us in another are often lurking in ourselves. Forgive
+if you wish for forgiveness; conquer evil with good; do good
+even to those who have wrought you evil.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, iii. 26; ii. 28; ii. 31.</note> Let us copy the
+serene example of those Eternal Powers who constantly load
+with their benefits even those who doubt of their existence,
+and bear with unruffled kindness the errors of frail souls that
+stumble by the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as we shall not be harsh to those of our own external
+rank, so shall we soften the lot of those whom fortune has
+condemned to slavery. Even the slave is admitted to that
+great city of gods and men, which has no frontiers, which
+embraces all races and ranks, where all ranks should be
+levelled by the consciousness of a common Divine descent and
+a universal brotherhood of men.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iii. 28, unus omnium
+parens mundus est. Cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 47; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>,
+iii. 24; iii. 35; <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 18.</note> The conquests of Macedon
+and Rome, overthrowing all old-world national barriers, had
+prepared the way for the greatest and most fruitful triumph
+of ancient philosophy. And the Stoic school has the glory of
+anticipating the diviner dream, yet far from realised, of a
+human brotherhood under the light from the Cross. Seneca
+has never risen higher, or swept farther into the future than
+in his treatment of slavery. He is far in advance of many
+a bishop or abbot or Christian baron of the middle age. Can
+a slave confer a benefit? he asks.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iii. 18.</note> Is his service, however
+lavish, not merely a duty to his lord, which, as it springs
+<pb n="329"/><anchor id="Pg329"/>from constraint, is undeserving of gratitude? Seneca repudiates
+the base suggestion with genuine warmth. On
+the same principle a subject cannot confer a benefit on his
+monarch, a simple soldier on his general. There is a limit
+beyond which power cannot command obedience. There is a
+line between cringing compliance and generous self-sacrifice.
+And the slave has often passed that limit. He has often borne
+wounds and death to save his master’s life in battle. He has
+often, in the years of the terror, endured the last extremity of
+torture, rather than betray his secrets.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iii. 19 and 26; cf. Macrob.
+<hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i. 11, § 16.</note> The body of the slave
+is his master’s; his mind is his own.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iii. 20, interior illa pars
+mancipio dari non potest.</note> It cannot be bought and
+sold. And in his inner soul, the slave is his master’s equal.
+He is capable of equal virtue and equal culture; nay, in both he
+may be his master’s superior. He can confer a benefit if he can
+suffer injury in the outrages which cruelty and lust inflict upon
+him. When he confers a benefit, he confers it as man upon
+man, as an equal in the great family whose Father is God.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca gives a lurid picture of the corruption of women in
+the general licence of his age.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi> xvi. § 3; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, § 21,
+libidine vero ne maribus quidem
+cedunt.</note> Yet he has a lofty ideal of
+what women might become. Like other Stoic preachers, it
+was his good fortune to be surrounded by good women from
+his infancy. He remembers the tenderness of his aunt, in
+whose arms he first entered Rome as a child, who nursed him
+through long sickness, and broke through her reserve to help
+him in his early career of ambition. Her blameless character
+escaped even the petulance of Alexandrian gossip.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi> xix. § 2, § 6; Marcia’s
+husband, probably Vitrasius Pollio,
+was governor of Egypt.—Teuffel, <hi rend="italic">R.
+Lit.</hi> § 282, 1.</note> His letters
+to his mother, Helvia, reveal a matron of the best Roman
+type—strong, self-denying, proud of her motherhood, and
+despising the extravagance and ostentation of her class. In
+spite of her father’s limited idea of female culture, she had
+educated herself in liberal studies, and found them a refuge
+in affliction.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Helv.</hi> xv.-xvii. § 3.</note> Marcia was of a softer type, and gave way to
+excessive grief for a lost child. Yet it is to her that Seneca
+unfolds most fully his ideal of feminine character. He will not
+admit the inferior aptitude of women for virtue and culture.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> xvi. par illis, mihi crede,
+vigor, etc.</note>
+<pb n="330"/><anchor id="Pg330"/>Women have the same inner force, the same capacity for nobleness
+as men. The husband of Paulina who surrounded him
+with affectionate sympathy, and was prepared to die along with
+him, the man who had witnessed the stern courage and loving
+devotion of the wives of the Stoic martyrs, might well have a
+lofty ideal of woman’s character.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 63, 64; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+104, §§ 1-6.</note> But to any true disciple of
+the Porch that ideal had a surer ground than any personal
+experience, however happy. The creed which Seneca held was
+at once a levelling and an elevating creed. It found the only
+nobility or claim to rank in higher capacity for virtue.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iii. 28; iii. 20.</note> It
+embraced in the arms of its equal charity all human souls,
+bond or free, male or female, however they might be graded
+by convention or accident, who have a divine parentage, and
+may, if they will, have a lofty, perhaps an eternal future.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And now, in taking leave of Seneca, let us forget the
+fawning exile in Corsica, the possible lover of Julia or
+Agrippina, the millionaire minister of Nero, who was surrounded
+by a luxury and state which moved the envy of the tyrant.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> xii. xiii. § 4; D. Cass.
+lxi. 10; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 42.</note>
+Rather let us think of the ascetic from his early youth, who,
+raised by his talents to the highest place, had to reconcile an
+impossible ideal with the sordid or terrible realities of that rank
+which was at once a <q>pinnacle and a precipice.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 94, § 73, quae aliis excelsa
+videntur, ipsis praerupta sunt.</note> He was
+continually torn by the contrast between the ideal of a lofty
+Stoic creed and the facts of human life around him, between
+his own spiritual cravings and the temptations or the necessities
+of the opportunist statesman. He was imbued with principles
+of life which could be fully realised only in some Platonic
+Utopia; he had to deal with men as they were in the reign of
+Nero, as they are painted by Tacitus and Petronius. If he
+failed in the impossible task of such a reconciliation, let us do
+him the justice of recognising that he kept his vision clear,
+and that he has expounded a gospel of the higher life, which,
+with all its limitations from temperament or tradition, will be
+true for our remotest posterity, that he had a vision of the City
+of God.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Otio</hi>, iv. duas respublicas
+animo complectamur, etc.</note> He was not personally perhaps so pure and clear a
+soul as Plutarch or Aristides or Dion Chrysostom. But he
+<pb n="331"/><anchor id="Pg331"/>had utterly cast off that heathen anthropomorphism which
+crossed and disturbed their highest visions of the Divine.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Frag.</hi> ap. Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>,
+vi. 10; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 41, § 1, non sunt ad caelum
+elevandae manus, nec exorandus aedituus,
+ut nos ad aurem simulacri quasi
+magis exaudiri possimus admittat.</note>
+Seneca is far more modern and advanced than even the
+greatest of the Neo-Platonic school, just because he saw that
+the old theology was hopelessly effete. He could never have
+joined in the last struggle of philosophic paganism with
+the Church. And so the Church almost claimed him as
+her son, while it never dreamt of an affinity with Plutarch
+or Plotinus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Indeed, there needed only the change of some phrases to
+reconcile the teaching of Seneca with that of the great ascetic
+Christian doctors. Many of the headings of the <hi rend="italic">Imitation</hi>
+might be attached to paragraphs of Seneca—<q>of bearing with
+the faults of others</q>; <q>of inordinate affections</q>; <q>of the
+love of solitude and silence</q>; <q>of meditation on death</q>; <q>of
+humble submission</q>; <q>that to despise the world and serve
+God is sweet</q>; <q>of the acknowledgment of our own infirmities,
+and the remembrance of God’s benefits</q>; <q>of the contempt of
+temporal honour and vain secular knowledge</q>; <q>of the day of
+eternity and this life’s straitness.</q> In truth, the great spirits
+of all ages who have had a genius for religion, after due allowance
+for difference of association and difference of phrase, are
+strangely akin and harmonious. And Seneca had one great
+superiority over other equally religious souls of his time, which
+enables him to approach mediaeval and modern religious thought—he
+had broken absolutely with paganism. He started with
+belief in the God of the Stoic creed; he never mentions the
+Stoic theology which attempted to reconcile Him with the
+gods of the Pantheon. In spite of all his rhetoric, he tries to
+see the facts of human life and the relation of the human spirit
+to the Divine in the light of reason, with no intervening veil
+of legend. God is to Seneca the great Reality, however halting
+human speech may describe Him, as Fate, or Law, or Eternal
+Reason, or watchful loving Providence. God is within us,
+in whatever mysterious way, inspiring good resolves, giving
+strength in temptation, with all-seeing eye watching the issue
+of the struggle. God is without us, loading us with kindness
+<pb n="332"/><anchor id="Pg332"/>even when we offend, chastising us in mercy, the goal of all
+speculation, He from whom we proceed, to whom we go at death.
+The true worship of Him is not in formal prayer and sacrifice,
+but in striving to know and imitate His infinite goodness.
+We mortal men in our brief life on earth may be citizens of
+two commonwealths, one the Rome or Corinth of our birth,
+the other that great city of gods and men, in which all are
+equally united, male and <anchor id="corr332"/><corr sic="female">female,</corr> bond and free, as children
+of a common Father. In this ideal citizenship, in obedience
+to the law of the spiritual city, the eternal law which makes
+for righteousness, man attains his true freedom and final
+beatitude in communion with kindred souls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, as in mediaeval and puritan religious theory, there is
+in Seneca a strange conflict between pessimism and idealism.
+To the doomed philosophic statesman of the reign of Nero, the
+days of man’s life are few and evil. Life is but a moment in
+the tract of infinite age, and so darkened by manifold sins and
+sorrows that it seems, as it did to Sophocles, a sinister gift.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Polyb.</hi> iv.</note>
+On the other hand, its shortness is a matter of no importance;
+the shortest life may be full and glad if it be dignified by
+effort and resignation and conformity to the great law of the
+universe. The wise and pious man, ever conscious of his brief
+time of probation, may brighten each passing day into a
+festival and lengthen it into a life. The shortness of a life is
+only an illusion, for long or short have no meaning when
+measured by the days of eternity. And the philosopher may
+unite many lives in one brief span. He may join himself to
+a company of sages who add their years to his, who counsel
+without bitterness, and praise without flattery; he may be
+adopted into a family whose wealth increases the more it is
+divided; in him all the ages may be combined in a single life.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Brev. Vit.</hi> xv. § 3 sq.</note>
+To such a spirit death loses all its terrors. The eternal mystery
+indeed can be pierced only by imaginative hope. Death, we
+may be sure, however, can only be a change. It may be a
+passage into calm unconsciousness, as before our birth, which
+will release us from all the griefs and tumults of the life here
+below. It may, on the other hand, prove to be the morning
+of an eternal day, the entrance to a radiant and untroubled
+world of infinite possibilities. In any case, the spirit which
+<pb n="333"/><anchor id="Pg333"/>has trained itself in obedience to eternal law, will not tremble
+at a fate which is surely reserved for the universe, by fire
+or flood or other cataclysmal change. The future in store for
+the soul is either to dwell for ever among things divine, or
+to sink back again into the general soul, and God shall be
+all in all.
+</p>
+
+</div><div type="chapter" n="2" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="334"/><anchor id="Pg334"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="II. The philosophic missionary"/><index index="pdf" level1="II. The philosophic missionary"/>
+<head>CHAPTER II</head>
+
+<head type="sub">THE PHILOSOPHIC MISSIONARY</head>
+
+<p>
+The gospel of philosophy expounded by Seneca was rather an
+esoteric or aristocratic creed. With all his liberal sentiment,
+his cosmopolitanism, his clear conception of human equality
+and brotherhood, Seneca always remains the director of souls
+like his own, enervated by wealth, tortured with the ennui of
+jaded sensibility, haunted by the terror of the Caesars.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 77, § 6, cogita quamdiu
+jam idem facias: cibus, somnus, libido;
+per hunc circulum curritur; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24,
+§ 25, quosdam subit eadem faciendi
+videndique satietas; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 89, § 21; 95,
+§ 20; 13, § 4; 24, §§ 11-14; 91, § 5, 6;
+<hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> ii. § 13; x. § 5, 6.</note> Indeed
+Stoicism was always rather a creed for the cultivated upper
+class than for the crowd. In its prime, its apparatus of
+logical formulae, its elaborate physics and metaphysics, its
+essentially intellectual solution of the problems both of the
+universe and human life, necessarily disabled it from ever
+developing into a popular system. And in the later days
+of the Republic, theory became more important than practice,
+and logic passed into casuistry.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, pp.
+46, 47; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 88, § 20; 117, § 20.</note> But in the first century,
+Stoicism came to be much more a religion than a philosophy,
+or even a theology. Its main business, as conceived by
+men like Seneca, is to save souls from the universal shipwreck
+of character<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 48, § 8, omnes undique ad
+te manus tendunt, etc.</note> caused by the capricious excesses of
+luxury, the idolatry of the world and the flesh, which
+sprang from a riotous pride in the material advantages of
+imperial power, without a sobering sense of duty or a moral
+ideal. But, in the nature of things, this wreck of character
+was most glaringly seen among the men who were in close
+contact with the half insane masters of the world in the first
+century, and who possessed the resources to exhaust the
+possi<pb n="335"/><anchor id="Pg335"/>bilities of pleasure or the capacities of the senses to enjoy.
+It is to people of this class, who still retained some lingering
+instincts of goodness, weary with indulgence, bewildered and
+tortured by the conflict of the lower nature with the weak,
+but still disturbing, protests of the higher, that Seneca
+addresses his counsels.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But what of the great masses lying outside the circle of
+cultivated and exhausted self-indulgence, that plebeian world
+of which we have seen the picture in their municipalities and
+colleges? It is clear from the records of their daily life, their
+ambitions, their tasks and amusements, that, although perhaps
+not generally tainted with such deep corruption as the nobles
+of the Neronian age, their moral tone and aspirations hardly
+correspond to the material splendour of the Empire. Even
+apart from the glimpses of low life in Petronius, Martial,
+and Apuleius, apart from the revelations of Pompeii, and the
+ghastly traditions which haunt the ruins of countless theatres
+and amphitheatres, the warnings of preachers of that age,
+such as Dion Chrysostom, and the reflections of the infinitely
+charitable M. Aurelius, leave no very favourable impression of
+the moral condition of the masses.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. ix. 34; v. 33,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">γυμνὰ νόμιζε βλέπειν τὰ ψυχάρια αὐτῶν. ὅτε δοκοῦσι βλάπτειν ψέγοντες ἢ ὠφελεῖν
+    ἐξυμνοῦντες, ὅση οἴησις; ... καὶ κυνίδια διακναιόμενα καὶ παιδία φιλόνεικα,
+    γελῶντα, εἶτα εὐθὺς κλαίοντα. Πίστις δὲ καὶ αἰδὼς καὶ δίκη καὶ ἀλήθεια
+    πρὸς Ὄλυμπον ἀπὸ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης.</foreign> Petron.
+<hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 88; Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 8; D. Chrys.
+xiii. § 13, 33; vii. 133.</note> How could it be otherwise?
+The old paganism of Rome did indeed foster certain
+ancestral pieties which were the salt of the Roman character.
+But it unfortunately also gave its sanction to scenes of lust
+and cruelty which went far to counteract in later times any
+good it did. Nor had the old religion any means for edification
+and the culture of character. It had no organisation for
+the care and direction of souls in moral doubt and peril. If
+its oracles might, from a few old-world examples, seem to
+supply such a spiritual want, the appearance is delusive even
+according to pagan testimony. Poets and moralists alike
+thundered against the shameless impiety which often begged
+the sanction of a prophetic shrine for some meditated sin,<note place="foot">Pers. ii. 4 sqq.; cf. Herod. vi. 86;
+Luc. <hi rend="italic">Icaromen.</hi> 25.</note>
+and the charge has been confirmed by the resurrection of these
+old profanities from the ruins of Dodona.<note place="foot">Bernays, <hi rend="italic">Lucian und die Kyniker</hi>,
+p. 34.</note> But even without
+<pb n="336"/><anchor id="Pg336"/>direct testimony, we might fairly conclude that the Antonine
+Age was, by reason of its material development, in special
+need of spiritual teaching and evangelism. The whole stress
+of public and private effort was towards the provision of
+comfort or splendour or amusement for the masses. And,
+within the range of its ambition, it succeeded marvellously.
+Nor should an impartial inquirer refuse to admit that such an
+immense energy has its good moral side. The rich were
+rigorously taught their duty to society, and they improved
+upon the lesson. The masses responded to their generous
+public spirit with gratitude and affection; and the universal
+kindliness and fraternity diffused through all ranks on days of
+high religious festival or civic interest, afforded a very wholesome
+and gratifying spectacle.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <ref target="Pg231">p. 231</ref> of this work. Yet cf.
+Luc. <hi rend="italic">Somn. seu Gallus</hi>, 22,
+   <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οἱ δὲ πλούσιοι φρίττουσι καὶ διανομαῖς ἱλάσκονταί σε κτλ.</foreign></note> There was an undoubted
+softening of the Roman character. And the labours of the
+great Stoic lawyers were giving expression to cultivated moral
+feeling, in a more liberal recognition of the natural rights of
+the weak and oppressed, of women and of slaves. Yet a
+society may be humane and kindly while it is also worldly
+and materialised. To us at least, the forces of the Antonine
+age seem to have expended themselves chiefly on the popular
+pleasures and external adornments of life, or a revival, often in
+the grossest and most absurd forms, as we shall see in a later
+chapter, of the superstitions of the past. With all its humanitarian
+sentiment and all its material glories, the Roman world
+had entered on that fatal incline, which, by an unperceived yet
+irresistible movement, led on to the sterilisation of the higher
+intellect, and the petrifaction of Roman society which ended in
+the catastrophe of the fifth century.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The triumphs and splendour of corporate life in the age of
+the Antonines are certainly a dazzling spectacle. Yet to the
+student who is more occupied with the painful moral education
+of the race, the interest lies in a different direction. It was
+a worldly age, but it was also an age ennobled by a powerful
+protest against worldliness. And in this chapter we shall
+study a great movement, which, under the name of philosophy
+or culture, called the masses of men to a higher standard of
+life. This movement, like all others of the same kind, had its
+<pb n="337"/><anchor id="Pg337"/>impostors who disgraced it. Yet the man who has pursued
+them with such mordant ridicule and pitiless scorn, the man
+who was utterly sceptical as to the value of all philosophic
+effort, in the last resort approaches very near to the view of
+human life which was preached by the men whom he derides.<note place="foot">Croiset, <hi rend="italic">Lucien</hi>, p. 164, il a subi
+fortement leur influence en écrivant les
+<hi rend="italic">Dialogues des morts</hi>.</note>
+Lucian belonged to no philosophic school; he would himself
+have repudiated adhesion to any system. The advice of
+Teiresias to Menippus, when he sought him in the shades,
+would certainly have been Lucian’s to any young disciple who
+consulted him. Have done with all these verbal subtleties and
+chimeras; swear allegiance to no sect; make the best of the
+present; and take things generally with a smile.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Menip.</hi> c. 21.</note> Yet who
+can read the <hi rend="italic">Dialogues of the Dead</hi> without feeling that there
+is a deeper and more serious vein in Lucian than he would
+confess? Although he poured his contempt upon the Cynic
+street preachers, although in the <hi rend="italic">Auction of Lives</hi> the Cynic’s
+sells for the most paltry price, the Cynic alone is allowed to
+carry with him across the river of death his characteristic
+qualities, his boldness and freedom of speech, his bitter
+laughter at the follies and illusions of mankind.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Auct.</hi> 11; <hi rend="italic">Traj.</hi> 24;
+<hi rend="italic">Dial. Mort.</hi> x. 9.</note> There
+are many indications in these dialogues that, if Lucian had
+turned Cynic preacher, he would have waged the same war on
+the pleasures and illusory ambitions of man, he would have
+outdone the Cynics in brutal frankness of exposure and denunciation,
+as he would have surpassed them in rhetorical and
+imaginative charm of style.<note place="foot">Cf. Luc. <hi rend="italic">Char.</hi> 15, 20; <hi rend="italic">Dial. Mort.</hi>
+i. 3; <hi rend="italic">Somn.</hi> 21.</note> He has a vivid and awful conception
+of Death, the great leveller, and sees all earthly wealth
+and glory in the grey light of the land where all things are
+forgotten. Rank and riches, beauty and strength, the lust of
+the eye and the pride of life, are all left behind on the borders
+of the realm of <q>sapless heads.</q><note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Traj.</hi> 15; <hi rend="italic">Necyom.</hi> 12.</note> If Lucian has any gospel it
+is that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor. He is as
+ready as some of the Christian Fathers to condemn the rich
+eternally.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Traj.</hi> 19; <hi rend="italic">Cyn.</hi> 7; <hi rend="italic">Menip.</hi> 11,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">χωρὶς δὲ οἵ τε πλούσιοι προσῄεσαν ὠχροί κτλ.</foreign> Cf. <hi rend="italic">Somn.</hi> 14, 15,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οἱ δὲ (πλούσιοι) εὖ ἴσθι πολὺ ὑμῶν ἀθλιώτερον τὸν βίον βιοῦσι</foreign>, cf. 22.</note> And therefore we are not surprised that Lucian
+has little eye for the splendour of his age, unless indeed in
+<pb n="338"/><anchor id="Pg338"/>the phrase, <q>Great cities die as well as men.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Char.</hi> 23,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀποθνήσκουσι γάρ, ὦ πορθμεῦ, καὶ πόλεις ὥσπερ ἄνθρωποι</foreign>.</note> He seems to
+have little appreciation for its real services to humanity. Its
+vain, pretentious philosophy, its selfishness of wealth, its vices
+hidden under the guise of virtue, drew down his hatred and
+scorn. Yet one cannot help feeling, in reading some of Lucian’s
+pieces, that, man of genius as he was, a man of no age, or a
+man of all ages, he is looking at human life from far above,
+with no limitations of time, and passing a judgment which
+may be repeated in the thirtieth century.<note place="foot">As in <hi rend="italic">Icaromen.</hi> 15; <hi rend="italic">Char.</hi> 17.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This lofty or airy detachment in regarding the toils and
+ambitions of men is perhaps best seen in the <hi rend="italic">Charon</hi>. In this
+piece Lucian shows us the ideal spectator taking an outlook
+over the scene of human life. The ferryman of the dead,
+who has heard so many laments from his passengers for the
+joys they have lost, wishes to have a glance at this upper
+world which it seems so hard to leave behind. He joins
+the company of Hermes, and, by an old-world miracle, they
+gain an observatory on high-piled Thessalian mountains from
+which to watch for a while the comedy or the tragedy of
+human life.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Char.</hi> 3; cf. a saying of Plato,
+quoted in M. Aurel. vii. 48, <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ δὴ περὶ ἀνθρώπων τοὺς λόγους ποιούμενον ἐπισκοπεῖν δεῖ καὶ
+<anchor id="corr338"/><corr sic="τά">τὰ</corr> ἐπίγεια, ὥσπερ ποθὲν ἄνωθεν, κατὰ ἀγέλας ...
+    γάμους, γενέσεις, θανάτους, δικαστηρίων θόρυβον, ἑορτάς, θρήνους, κτλ.</foreign></note> A magic verse of Homer gives the spectral
+visitor the power to observe the scene so far below. And
+what a sight it is! It is a confused spectacle of various effort
+and passion—men sailing, fighting, ploughing, lending at usury,
+suing in the law-courts. It is also a human swarm stinging
+and being stung. And over all the scene flits a confused cloud
+of hopes and fears and follies and hatreds, the love of pleasure
+and the love of gold. Higher still, you may see the eternal
+Fates spinning for each one of the motley crowd his several
+thread. One man, raised high for the moment, has a resounding
+fall; another, mounting but a little way, sinks unperceived.
+And amidst all the tumult and excitement of their hopes and
+alarms, death kindly snatches them away by one of his many
+messengers. Yet they weep and lament, forgetting that they
+have been mere sojourners for a brief space upon earth and
+are only losing the pleasures of a dream.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Char.</hi> 17,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀπίασιν ὥσπερ ἐξ ὀνείρατος πάντα ὑπὲρ γῆς ἀφέντες</foreign>.</note> To Charon the
+bubbles in a fountain are the truest image of their phantom
+<pb n="339"/><anchor id="Pg339"/>life—some forming and bursting speedily, others swelling out
+for a little longer and more showy life, but all bursting at the
+last. Charon is so moved by the pathos of it all, that, from
+his mountain peaks, he would fain preach a sermon to the silly
+crowd and warn them of the doom which is in store for all.
+But the wiser or more cynical Hermes tells him that all
+except a few have their ears more closely stopped than the
+crew of Odysseus when they passed the Siren isles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This view of human life, half-contemptuous, half-pathetic,
+which the great iconoclast of all the dreams of religion or
+philosophy in his time has sketched with his own graphic
+power, was the view of the very philosophy which he derided.
+Philosophy had a second time turned from heaven to earth.
+The effort to solve the riddle of the universe by a single
+formula, or by the fine-drawn subtleties of dialectic, has been
+abandoned. In Lucian’s <hi rend="italic">Auction of Lives</hi>, in which the merits
+of the various schools are balanced and estimated in terms
+of cash, it is significant that only a slight and perfunctory
+reference is made to the great cosmic or metaphysical theories
+of Elea or Ionia, to the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers, to
+the Ephesian doctrine of the eternal flow, or the ideal system
+of Plato.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Auct.</hi> 3, 13, 16.</note> We have seen that, although Seneca has a certain
+interest in the logic and physics of the older Stoicism, he
+makes all purely speculative inquiry ancillary to moral progress.
+The same diversion of interest from the field of speculation to
+that of conduct is seen even more decidedly in Epictetus and
+M. Aurelius.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iv. i. 138,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Ἆρον ἐκεῖνα τὰ τῶν σχολαστικῶν καὶ τῶν μωρῶν κτλ.</foreign> M. Aurel. vii. 67; cf. Zeller,
+<hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 2, p. 203; Hatch,
+<hi rend="italic">Hibbert Lec.</hi> p. 142.</note> The philosophic Emperor had, of course, studied
+the great cosmic systems of Heraclitus and Epicurus, Plato
+and Aristotle.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. vi. 15; vii. 19; vi. 24, 42,
+47; viii 6; xi. 20; viii. 3; vii. 67.</note> They furnish a scenery or background, sometimes,
+especially that of Heraclitus, a dimly-seen foundation,
+for his theory of conduct. But, in spite of his sad, weary view
+of the pettiness and sameness of the brief space of consciousness
+between <q>the two eternities,</q> the whole thought of M.
+Aurelius is concentrated on the manner in which that brief
+moment may be worthily spent. So, Epictetus asks, What do
+I care whether all things are composed of atoms or similar
+parts or of fire or earth? Is it not enough to know the
+<pb n="340"/><anchor id="Pg340"/>nature of good and evil?<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Fr.</hi> 175; cf. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iii. 21,
+§ 23,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλά, εἴ σε ψυχαγωγεῖ τὰ θεωρήματα, καθήμενος αὐτὰ στρέφε
+αὐτὸς ἐπὶ σεαυτοῦ· φιλόσοφον δὲ μηδέποτ’ εἴπῃς σεαυτόν</foreign>:
+cf. M. Aurel. ii. 17,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τοῦ ἀνθρωπίνου βίου ὁ μὲν χρόνος στιγμή ... τί οὖν τὸ παραπέμψαι
+δυνάμενον; ἓν καὶ μόνον, φιλοσοφία</foreign>.</note> Just as in the days of Socrates
+the whole stress of philosophy is directed towards the discovery
+of a rule of life, a source of moral clearness and guidance,
+with a view to the formation or reformation of character.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca and Epictetus and Lucian and M. Aurelius all alike
+give a gloomy picture of the moral condition of the masses.
+And we may well believe that, in spite of the splendour of
+that age, in spite of a great moral movement which was stirring
+among the leaders of society, the mass of men, as in every age,
+had little taste for idealist views of life. Yet Seneca, notwithstanding
+his pessimism, speaks of the multitudes who were
+stretching out their hands for moral help. There must have
+been some demand for that popular moral teaching which is a
+striking feature of the time. Men might jeer at the philosophic
+missionary, but they seem to have crowded to listen to him—on
+the temple steps of Rome or Ephesus, in the great squares
+of Alexandria,<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> v. 26; D.
+Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxii.</note> or in the colonnades at Olympia, or under the
+half-ruined walls of an old Milesian colony on the Euxine.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 41; iv.
+24; D. Chrys. xxxvi, § 17.</note>
+The rush of the porters and smiths and carpenters to join the
+ranks of the Cynic friars, which moved the scorn of Lucian,<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Fug.</hi> c. 12.</note> must
+have corresponded to some general demand, even if the motive
+of the vagrant missionary was not of the purest kind. There
+must have been many an example of moral earnestness like
+that of Hermotimus, who had laboured hard for twenty years
+to find the true way of life, and had only obtained a distant
+glimpse of the celestial city.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hermot.</hi> c. 2, 25.</note> After Dion’s conversion, as we
+may fairly call it, he deems it a sacred duty to call men to the
+way of wisdom by persuasion or reproach, and to appeal even
+to the turbulent masses.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> lxxviii.; Martha,
+<hi rend="italic">Mor. sous L’Emp. rom.</hi> p. 300.</note> We shall see how well he fulfilled
+the duty. For nearly a century at Athens, the gentle Demonax
+embodied the ideal which his friend Epictetus had
+formed of the Cynic father of all men in God; and his immense
+ascendency testifies at least to a widespread respect and
+admiration for such teaching and example.<note place="foot">Luc. (?) <hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi> c. 7, 8.</note> It is not necessary
+<pb n="341"/><anchor id="Pg341"/>to suppose that the people who thought it an honour if
+Demonax invited himself to their tables, the magistrates who
+rose up to do him reverence as he passed, or the riotous
+assembly which was awed into stillness by his mere presence,
+were people generally who had caught his moral enthusiasm.<note place="foot">Luc. (?) <hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi> c. 63.</note>
+They were at the very time eager to have gladiatorial shows
+established under the shadow of the Acropolis. But it is something
+when men begin to revere a character inspired by moral
+forces of which they have only a dim conjecture. And amid all
+the material splendour and apparent content of the Antonine age,
+there were signs that men were becoming conscious of a great
+spiritual need, which they often tried to satisfy by accumulated
+superstitions. The ancient routine was broken up; the forms
+of ancestral piety no longer satisfied even the vulgar; the forms
+of ancient scholastic speculation had become stale and frigid
+to the cultivated; the old philosophies had left men bewildered.
+Henceforth, philosophy must make itself a religion; the philosopher
+must become an <q>ambassador of God.</q>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<q>There is no philosophy without virtue; there is no virtue
+without philosophy,</q> said Seneca,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 89, § 6; cf. A. Gell. xvii.
+19, 4.</note> and herein he expressed truly
+the most earnest thought of his own age and the next. Lucian,
+in the dialogue which is perhaps his most powerful exposure of
+the failure of philosophy, bears testimony to the boundless expectations
+which it aroused in its votaries. Hermotimus, the
+elderly enthusiast, whom the mocker meets hurrying with his
+books to the philosophic school, has been an ardent student for
+twenty years; he has grown pale and withered with eager
+thought. Yet he admits that he has only taken a single step on
+the steep upward road. Few and faint and weary are they who
+ever reach the summit.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Hermot.</hi> c. 5.</note> Yet Hermotimus is content if, at the
+close of the efforts of a lifetime, he should, if but for a moment,
+breathe the air of the far-off heights and look down on the
+human ant-hill below. Such spirits dream of an apotheosis like
+that which crowned the hero on Mount Oeta, when the soul
+shall be purged of its earthly passions as by fire, and hardly a
+memory of the illusions of the past will remain.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 7,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ οὗτοι δὴ ὑπὸ φιλοσοφίας ὥσπερ ὑπό τινος πυρὸς ἅπαντα ταῦτα
+περιαιρεθέντες κτλ.</foreign></note> Lycinus, his
+friend, has once himself had a vision of a celestial city, from
+<pb n="342"/><anchor id="Pg342"/>which ambition and the greed of gold are banished, where there
+is no discord or strife, but the citizens live in a deep peace of
+sober virtue. He had once heard from an aged man how any
+one might share its citizenship, rich or poor, bond or free, Greek
+or barbarian, if only he had the passion for nobleness and were
+not overcome by the hardness of the journey. And the sceptic
+avows that long since he would have enrolled himself among
+its citizens, but the city is far off, and only dimly visible.
+The paths which are said to lead to it run in the most various
+directions, through soft meadows and cool shaded slopes, or
+mounting over bare rough crags under a pitiless blaze. And
+at the entrance to each avenue there is a clamorous crowd of
+guides, each vaunting his peculiar skill, abusing his rivals, and
+pointing to the one sure access of which he alone has the
+secret key. A similar scene, equally illustrative of the moral
+ferment of the time, is sketched in another charming piece.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Bis Acc.</hi> c. 11.</note>
+It is that in which the rustic Pan, with his memories of the
+shepherd’s pipe and the peace of Arcadian pastures, describes
+the strange turmoil of contending sects which rings around his
+cave on the edge of the Acropolis. There, in the Agora below,
+rival teachers, with dripping brow and distended veins, are
+shouting one another down before an admiring crowd. And
+the simple old deity, to whom the language of their dialectic
+is strange, seems to think that the victory rests with the loudest
+voice and the most blatant self-assertion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sly ridicule of Lucian, so often crossed by a touch
+of pathos, is perhaps the best testimony to the overpowering
+interest which his age felt in the philosophy of conduct. And
+it was no longer the pursuit merely of an intellectual aristocracy.
+Common, ignorant folk have caught the passion for apostleship.
+Everywhere might be met the familiar figure, with long
+cloak and staff and scrip, haranguing in the squares or lanes to
+unlettered crowds.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 6,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἁπανταχοῦ πώγων βαθὺς καὶ βιβλίον ἐν <sic>τῃ ἀριστερᾳ</sic> καὶ πάντες ὑπὲρ
+σοῦ φιλοσοφοῦσι κτλ.</foreign></note> And the preacher is often as unlearned as
+they, having left the forge or the carpenter’s bench or the slave
+prison,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Fug.</hi> c. 12; <hi rend="italic">Vit. Auct.</hi> c. 10; D.
+Chrys. xxxii. 9; xxxiv. 3.</note> to proclaim his simple gospel of renunciation, with
+more or less sincerity. Lucian makes sport of the quarrels
+and contradictions of the schools. And it is true that the old
+<pb n="343"/><anchor id="Pg343"/>names still marked men off in different camps, or rather
+churches. But their quarrels in Lucian and in Philostratus<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> v. 37.</note>
+seem to be personal, the offspring of very unphilosophic
+ambition and jealousy, or greed or petty vanity, rather than the
+wholesome and stimulating collision of earnest minds contending
+for what they think a great system of truth. The rival
+Sophists under the Acropolis were quarrelling for an audience
+and not for a dogma. Scientific interest in philosophy was to
+a great extent dead. For centuries no great original thinker
+had arisen to rekindle it. And in the purely moral sphere
+to which philosophy was now confined, the natural tendency of
+the different schools, not even excluding the Epicurean, was
+to assimilation and eclecticism.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p.
+483. Renan, <hi rend="italic">Les Év.</hi> p. 384, les différences
+des écoles étaient à peu près
+effacées. Un éclecticisme superficie
+était à la mode.</note> They were all impartially
+endowed at the university of Athens, and a youth of enthusiasm
+would attend the professors of all the schools. Apollonius,
+although he finally adopted the Pythagorean discipline, pursued
+his studies at Aegae under Platonists and Stoics,<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> i. 7.</note> and even under
+Epicureans. Seneca came under Pythagorean influences in his
+youth, and he constantly rounds off a letter to Lucilius with
+a quotation from Epicurus. Among the tutors of M. Aurelius
+were the Peripatetic Claudius Severus, and Sextus the Platonist
+of Chaeronea.<note place="foot">Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant.</hi> c. 3.</note> Hence, although a man in the second century
+might be labelled Platonist or Stoic, Cynic or Pythagorean, it
+would often be difficult from his moral teaching to discover
+his philosophic ancestry and affinities. And, just as in modern
+Christendom, although sectarian landmarks and designations are
+kept up, the popular preaching of nearly all the sects tends to a
+certain uniformity of emphasis on a limited number of momentous
+moral truths, so the preaching of pagan philosophy dwells, almost
+to weariness, on the same eternal principles of true gain and loss,
+of the illusions of passion, of freedom through renunciation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moral teaching or preaching of the Antonine age
+naturally adapted its tone to the tastes of its audience; there
+was the discourse of the lecture-room, and the ruder and
+more boisterous appeal to the crowd. Both passed under the
+name of philosophy, and both often degraded that great name
+by an affectation and insincerity which cast discredit on a
+<pb n="344"/><anchor id="Pg344"/>great and beneficent movement of reform. The philosophic
+lecturer who has a serious moral purpose is in theory distinguished
+from the rhetorical sophist, who trades in startling
+effects, who rejoices in displaying his skill on any subject
+however trivial or grotesque, who will expatiate on the gnat or
+the parrot, or debate the propriety of a Vestal’s marriage.<note place="foot">Martha, <hi rend="italic">Moralistes sous l’Emp.</hi> p.
+275; Capes, <hi rend="italic">Univ. Life</hi>, p. 58 sqq.</note> The
+exercises of the rhetorical school had gone on for five hundred
+years, and, with momentous effects on Roman culture, they
+were destined to continue with little change till the Goths
+were masters of Rome.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Roman Society in the Last Century
+of the Western Empire</hi> (1st ed.), p. 355.</note> The greed, the frivolity, and the
+overweening vanity of these intellectual acrobats are a
+commonplace of literary history.<note place="foot">Capes, <hi rend="italic">Univ. Life</hi>, p. 69.</note> The sophist and the
+lecturing philosopher were theoretically distinct. But unfortunately
+a mass of evidence goes to show that in many
+cases the lecturing philosopher became a mere showy rhetorician.
+A similar desecration of a serious mission is not
+unknown in modern times. The fault is often not with the
+preacher, but with his audience. If people come not to be
+made better, but to be amused, to have their ears soothed by
+flowing declamation, to have a shallow intellectual curiosity
+titillated by cheap displays of verbal subtlety or novelty,
+the unfortunate preacher will often descend to the level of
+his audience. And in that ancient world, according to the
+testimony of Seneca, Musonius, Plutarch, and Epictetus, the
+philosophic preacher too often was tempted to win a vulgar
+applause by vulgar rhetorical arts.<note place="foot">Epict. ii. 19; iii. 23; Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Recta
+Rat. Aud.</hi> vii. viii.; A. Gell. v. i.;
+Zeller, iii. 1, p. 657.</note> He was sometimes a
+man of no very serious purpose, with little real science or
+originality. He had been trained in the school of rhetoric,
+which abhorred all serious thought, and deified the master of
+luscious periods and ingenious turns of phrase. He was,
+besides, too often a mere vain and mercenary adventurer, trading
+on an attenuated stock of philosophic tradition, and a boundless
+command of a versatile rhetoric, cultivating intellectual
+insolence as a fine art, yet with a servile craving for the
+applause of his audience.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> i. 3.</note> Many a scene in the now faded
+history of their failures or futile triumphs comes down to us
+<pb n="345"/><anchor id="Pg345"/>from Plutarch and Epictetus and Philostratus.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> i. iv.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἔθελγε τῇ τε ἠχῇ τοῦ φθέγματος καὶ τῷ ῥυθμῷ τῆς γλώττης</foreign>. A. Gell. v. 1, 3; Sen.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, § 6, non id agunt ut aliqua illo
+vitia deponant sed ut oblectamento
+aurium perfruantur. Cf. Philostr.
+<hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> i. 7.</note> Sometimes
+the gaps upon the benches, the listless, inattentive air, the
+slow feeble applause, sent the vain preacher home with gloomy
+fears for his popularity. On other days, he was lifted to the
+seventh heaven by an enthusiastic genteel mob, who followed
+every deft turn of expression with shouts and gestures of delight,
+and far-fetched preciosities of approbation. At the close, the
+philosophic performer goes about among his admirers to
+receive their renewed tribute. <q>Well, what did you think of
+me?</q>—<q>Quite marvellous, I swear by all that is dear to me.</q>—<q>But
+how did you like the passage about Pan and the
+nymphs?</q>—<q>Oh, superlative!</q> It is thus that a real winner
+of souls describes the impostor.<note place="foot">Epict. iii. 23,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλ’ ἐπαίνεσόν με· εἰπέ μοι Ούᾶ καὶ Θαυμαστῶς</foreign>.  Plut.
+<hi rend="italic">De Recta Rat. Aud.</hi> c. viii.; cf. Hatch,
+<hi rend="italic">Hibbert Lec.</hi> p. 95.</note> Even estimable teachers did
+not disdain to add to the effect of their lectures by carefully
+polished eloquence, an exquisite toilet, and a cultivated dignity.
+Such a courtly philosopher was Euphrates, the Syrian Stoic,
+whose acquaintance Pliny had made during his term of service in
+the East. Euphrates was stately and handsome, with flowing
+hair and beard, and a demeanour which excited reverence without
+overawing the hearer.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 10.</note> Irreproachable in his own life, he
+condemned sin, but was merciful to the sinner. Pliny, the
+amiable man of the world, who had no serious vices to reform,
+found Euphrates a charming lecturer, with a subtle and ornate
+style which was entirely to his taste. He treats Euphrates as
+a rhetorician rather than as a philosopher with a solemn
+message to deliver. To serious moralists like Seneca, Musonius,
+Plutarch, and Epictetus the showy professor of the art of
+arts was an offence. With their lofty conception of the task
+of practical philosophy, they could only feel contempt or
+indignation for the polished exquisite who trimmed or inflated
+his periods to please the ears of fashionable audiences. They all
+condemn such performances in almost identical terms. The
+mission of true philosophy is to make men examine themselves,
+to excite shame and pain and penitence, to reveal a law of life
+and moral freedom which may lead to amendment and peace.<note place="foot">Epict. iii. 21; ii. 1; ii. 23; Sen.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, § 6.</note>
+<pb n="346"/><anchor id="Pg346"/><q>There is no good in a bath or in a discourse which does not
+cleanse.</q> The true disciple and the true teacher will be too
+much absorbed in the gravity of the business to think of the
+pleasure of mere style. To make aesthetic effect the object of
+such discourses, when the fate of character is at stake, is to
+turn the school into a theatre or a music-hall, the philosopher
+into a flute-player.<note place="foot">A. Gell. v. 1, 2, tum scias neque
+illi philosophum loqui sed tibicinem
+canere. Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> iii. 3,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ῥυθμούς τε ποικιλωτέρους αὐλοῦ καὶ λύρου ἐσηγάγετο ἐς τὸν λόγον</foreign>. D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi>
+xxxv. §§ 7, 8.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The volume and unanimity of these criticisms of the rhetorical
+philosopher show that such men abounded; but they also
+show that there must have been a great mass of serious teachers
+whom they travestied. It has perhaps been too little recognised
+that in the first and second centuries there was a great propaganda
+of pagan morality running parallel to the evangelism
+of the Church.<note place="foot">For a comparative estimate see
+Capes, <hi rend="italic">Univ. Life in Ancient Athens</hi>,
+p. 90; Hatch, <hi rend="italic">Hibbert Lec.</hi> p. 105.</note> The preaching was of very different kinds,
+according to the character of the audiences. The preachers,
+as we have said, belonged to all the different schools, Stoic or
+Platonist, Cynic or Pythagorean; sometimes, like Dion, they
+owed little academic allegiance at all. Sometimes the preaching
+approached to modern conceptions of its office;<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 3; iv. 42;
+D. Chrys. xxxiii. § 28; xxxiv. § 4; xl.
+§ 31.</note> at others, it
+dealt with subjects and used a style unknown to our pulpits.<note place="foot">Cf. A. Gell. xii. 1, nihil, inquit,
+dubito quin filium lacte suo nutritura
+sit.</note>
+The life of Apollonius of Tyana may be a romance; it
+certainly contains many narratives of miracles and wonders
+which cast a suspicion upon its historical value. Yet even
+a romance must have real facts behind to give it probability,
+and the preaching, at least, of Apollonius seems to belong to
+the world of reality. Apollonius was probably much nearer
+to the true ecclesiastic and priest of modern times than any
+ancient preacher. He had been trained in all the philosophies;
+he had drunk inspiration from the fountain of all spiritual
+religion, the East. He was both a mystic and a ritualist. He
+rejoiced in converse with the Brahmans, and he occupied
+himself with the revival or reform of the ritual in countless
+Greek and Italian temples.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iii. 41 sqq.;
+iv. 24; iv. 18, 20; i. 11; i. 31.</note> He had an immense and curious
+faith in ancient legend.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 13, 16, 19, 20, 33; vi. 40.</note> The man who could busy himself
+<pb n="347"/><anchor id="Pg347"/>with the restoration of the true antique form of an obsolete
+rite at Eleusis or Athens or Dodona, also held conceptions of
+prayer and sacrifice and mystic communion with God, which
+might seem irreconcilable with any rigidly formal worship.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> v. 25,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ δὲ τῶν ταύρων αἷμα καὶ ὁπόσα ἐθύετο, οὐκ
+ἐπῄνει τὰ τοιάδε, κτλ.</foreign></note>
+The ritualist was also the preacher of a higher morality. From
+the steps of the temples he used to address great audiences on
+their conspicuous faults, as Dion did after him. In the parable
+of the sparrow who by his twitter called his brethren to a heap
+of spilt grain, he taught the people of Ephesus the duty of
+brotherly helpfulness.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 3.</note> He found Smyrna torn by factious
+strife, and he preached a rivalry of public spirit.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 8.</note> Even at
+Olympia, before a crowd intent on the strife of racers and
+boxers and athletes, he discoursed on wisdom and courage
+and temperance.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 31.</note> At Rome, under the tyranny of Nero, he
+moved from temple to temple exciting a religious revival by
+his preaching.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 41.</note> One text, perhaps, contains a truth for all
+generations—<q>My prayer before the altars is—Grant me, ye
+Gods, what is my due.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 11; iv. 40,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὦδε εὔχομαι, ὦ θεοὶ δοίητέ μοι τὰ ὀφειλόμενα</foreign>.</note> What effect on the masses such
+preaching had we cannot tell—who can tell at any time? But
+there are well-attested cases of individual conversion under
+pagan preaching. Polemon, the son of a rich Athenian, was
+a very dissolute youth who squandered his wealth on low
+pleasure. Once, coming from some revel, he burst with his
+companions into the lecture room of Xenocrates, who happened
+to be discoursing on temperance. Xenocrates calmly continued
+his remarks. The tipsy youth listened for a while,
+then flung away his garland, and with it also his evil ways;<note place="foot">Diog. Laert. iv. 3, 1,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καί ποτε ... μεθύων καὶ ἐστεφανωμένος εἰς τὴν Ξενοκράτους ᾖξε σχολήν κτλ.</foreign>: Epict.
+iii. 1, § 14; Hor. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> ii. 3, 253, quaero,
+faciasne, quod olim Mutatus Polemon?
+Cf. the conversion of Isaeus, Philostr.
+<hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> i. 217.</note>
+he became the head of the Academy. A similar change was
+wrought by the teaching of Apollonius on a debauched youth
+of Corcyra, which we need not doubt although it was accompanied
+by a miracle.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 20; cf.
+i. 13.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Musonius, another preacher, was a younger contemporary
+of Apollonius. His fame as an apostle of the philosophic life
+aroused the suspicions of Nero, and he was exiled to Gyarus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 16; cf. Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 71;
+D. Cass. lxii. 27.</note>
+<pb n="348"/><anchor id="Pg348"/>The suspicion may have been confirmed by his intimacy
+with Rubellius Plautus and great Stoics like Thrasea.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 71; xiv. 59; Epict.
+i. 1, 27. The Rufus is Musonius Rufus.</note> He
+met with gentler treatment under the Flavians,<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxvi. 13,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πάντας τοὺς φιλοσόφους ὁ Οὐεσπασιανὸς πλὴν τοῦ Μουσωνίου
+ἐκ τῆς Ῥώμης ἐξέβαλε</foreign>.</note> and he probably
+saw the reign of Trajan. He is not known to have written
+anything. The fragments of his teaching in Stobaeus are
+probably drawn from notes of his lectures, as the teaching of
+Epictetus has been preserved by Arrian. Musonius is not a
+speculative philosopher but a physician of souls. Philosophy
+is the way to goodness: goodness is the goal of philosophy.
+And philosophy is not the monopoly of an intellectual caste;
+it is a matter of precept and practice, not of theory. The true
+moral teacher, working on the germ of virtue which there
+is in each human soul, thinking only of reforming his disciples,
+and nothing of applause, may win them to his ideal. Musonius
+fortified the austere Stoic and Cynic precepts by the ascetic
+discipline of the Pythagorean school. He taught the forgiveness
+of injuries and gentleness to wrongdoers. He is one of the few
+in the ancient world who have a glimpse of a remote ideal
+of sexual virtue. While his ascetic principles do not lead him
+to look askance at honourable marriage, he denounces all
+unchastity, and demands equal virtue in man and woman.<note place="foot">Zeller. <hi rend="italic">Phil. der
+    <anchor id="corr348"/><corr sic="Greich.">Griech.</corr></hi> iii. 1,
+pp. 651-658.</note>
+He was, according to Epictetus, a searching preacher. He spoke
+to the conscience, so that each hearer felt as if his own faults
+were set before his eyes. His name will go down for ever in the
+pages of Tacitus. When the troops of Vespasian and Vitellius
+were fighting in the lanes and gardens under the walls of Rome,
+Musonius joined the envoys of the Senate, and at the risk of
+his life harangued the infuriated soldiery on the blessings of
+peace and the horrors of civil war.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iii. 81.</note> Many of the moral
+treatises of Plutarch are probably redacted from notes of
+lectures delivered in Rome. As we shall see in a later chapter,
+Plutarch is rather a moral director and theologian than a
+preacher. But his wide knowledge of human nature, his keen
+analysis of character and motive and human weakness, his
+spiritual discernment in discovering remedies and sources of
+strength, above all his lofty moral ideal, would have made him
+a powerful preacher in any age of the world. But it is in
+<pb n="349"/><anchor id="Pg349"/>the discourses of Maximus of Tyre that we have perhaps the
+nearest approach in antiquity to our conception of the sermon.
+Probably if any of us were asked to explain that conception,
+he might say that a sermon was founded on some definite idea
+of the relation of man to the Infinite Spirit, that its object
+was, on the one hand, to bring man into communion with God,
+and, on the other, to teach him his duty to his fellowmen and
+to himself. The discourses of Maximus have all these
+characteristics. Maximus of Tyre is little known now, and
+although to the historian of thought and moral life he is
+attractive, he has not the strength of a great personality. Yet,
+along with Plutarch, he shows us paganism at its best, striving
+to reform itself, groping after new sources of spiritual strength,
+trying to wed new and purer spiritual ideals to the worn-out
+mythology of the past. Maximus is very much in the position
+of one of our divines who finds himself bound in duty to edify
+the spiritual life of his flock, without disowning the religious
+traditions of the past, and without refusing to accept the ever-broadening
+revelation of God. Some of his discourses may
+seem to us frigid and scholastic, with a literary rather than
+a religious interest. But in others, there is a combination of a
+systematic theology with a mystic fervour and a moral purpose,
+which seems hardly to belong to the ancient world.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. v. viii. §§ 3, 10; xi.;
+xiv. § 8; xvii. For the little known
+of him, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii.
+2. p. 182, n. 3.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his oration to the Alexandrians,<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxii. § 9,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὗτοι δὲ (οἱ Κυνικοὶ) ἔν τε τριόδοις καὶ στενωποῖς καὶ πυλῶσιν ἱερῶν
+ἀγείρουσι καὶ ἀπατῶσι παιδάρια καὶ ναύτας, κτλ.</foreign></note> Dion Chrysostom speaks
+with unwonted asperity of the Cynics, haranguing with coarse
+buffoonery a gaping crowd in the squares and alleys or in the
+porches of the temples. He thinks that these men are doing
+no good, but rather bringing the name of philosophy into
+contempt. It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that
+this view of the Cynic profession was very general in that age.
+The vulgar Cynic, with his unkempt beard, his mantle, wallet,
+and staff, his filth and rudeness and obscenity, insulting every
+passer-by with insolent questions, exchanging coarse jests and
+jeers with the vagabond mob which gathers at his approach,
+is the commonest figure in Greek and Roman literature of the
+time. The <q>mendicant monks</q> of paganism have been painted
+with all the vices of the dog and ape by Martial and Petronius
+<pb n="350"/><anchor id="Pg350"/>and Seneca, by Dion and Athenaeus and Alciphron and
+Epictetus, above all by Lucian.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 5, § 1; 29, § 1; Mart. iv.
+53, cum baculo peraque senem ... cui
+dat latratos obvia turba cibos; Epict.
+iii. 22; D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxiv. § 2;
+Athen. iii. 113; Petron. 14; Aleiphr.
+iii. 55; Caspari, <hi rend="italic">De Cynicis</hi>, p. 10.</note> The great foe of all extravagance
+or enthusiasm in religion and philosophy fastened on
+the later followers of Diogenes with peculiar bitterness. His
+hostility, we may surmise, is directed not against their tenets,
+but their want of decent culture. In the <hi rend="italic">Banquet</hi>, the Cynic
+Alcidamas is drawn with a coarse vigour of touch which is
+intended to match the coarseness of the subject. He bursts
+into the dinner-party of Aristaenetus uninvited, to the terror
+of the company, ranges about the room, snatching tit-bits
+from the dishes as they pass him, and finally sinks down
+upon the floor beside a mighty flagon of strong wine. He
+drinks to the bride in no elegant fashion, challenges the
+jester to fight, and, when the lamp is extinguished in the
+obscene tumult, is finally found trying to embrace the
+dancing girl.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Conviv.</hi> c. 16, 35, etc.</note> But Lucian’s bitterest attack on the class is
+perhaps delivered in the dialogue entitled the <hi rend="italic">Fugitives</hi>.
+Philosophy, in the form of a woman bathed in tears, appears
+before the Father of the gods. That kindly potentate is
+affected by her grief, and inquires the cause of it. Philosophy,
+who had been commissioned by Zeus to bring healing and
+peace to human life in all its confusion and ignorance and
+violence, then unfolds the tale of her wrongs.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Fug.</hi> c. 5, 15.</note> It is a
+picture of vulgar pretence, by which her fair name has been
+besmirched and disgraced. Observing the love and reverence
+which her true servants may win from men, a base crew of
+ignorant fellows, trained in the lowest handicrafts, have forsaken
+them, to assume the garb and name of her real followers.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 12,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">κατεῖδον τὴν αἰδῶ ὅση παρὰ τῶν πολλῶν ἐστι τοῖς ἑταίροις τοῖς ἐμοῖς, ...
+    ταῦτα πάντα τυραννίδα οὐ μικρὰν ἡγοῦντο εἶναι</foreign>.</note>
+It is a pleasant change from a life of toil and danger and
+hardship, to an easy vagabond existence, nor is the transformation
+difficult. A cloak and a club, a loud voice and a
+brazen face and a copious vocabulary of scurrilous abuse,
+these are all the necessary equipment. Impudent assurance
+has its usual success with the crowd, who are unable to see
+through the disguise. If any one attempts to challenge the
+<pb n="351"/><anchor id="Pg351"/>claims of the impostors, he is answered with a blow or a taunt.
+And thus by terrorism or deceit, they usurp the respect which
+is due to the real philosopher, and manage to live in plenty and
+even in luxury. Nor is this the worst. For these pretended
+ascetics, who profess to scorn delights, and to endure all
+manner of hardness, are really coarse common sensualists,
+who go about corrupting and seducing. Many of them heap
+up a fortune in their wanderings, and then bid farewell to scrip
+and cloak and the tub of Diogenes. And so plain unlearned
+men come to regard the very name of philosophy with hatred
+and contempt, and all her work is undone, like another
+Penelope’s web.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Fug.</hi> c. 17-21,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οἱ ἰδιῶται δὲ ταῦτα ὁρῶντες καταπτύουσιν ἤδη φιλοσοφίας, κτλ.</foreign></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even the stoutest defender of the Cynic movement, as a
+whole, feels constrained to admit that the charges against the
+Cynics were, perhaps, in many cases, true.<note place="foot">Bernays, <hi rend="italic">Die Kyniker</hi>, p. 39<sic>.</sic>
+Roheit und arbeitsscheues Vagabundenthum ... mussten die Kynische
+Lebensweise sehr bequem finden.</note> It was a movement
+peculiarly attractive to the lawless, restless hangers-on
+of society, who found in an open defiance of social restraints
+and a wandering existence, a field of licence and a chance of
+gain. Some of the great Cynics, indeed, were interested in
+physical speculation, and were widely cultivated men.<note place="foot">Plut. (?) <hi rend="italic">De Plac. Phil.</hi> ii. 8; iv. 5;
+Luc. (?) <hi rend="italic">Demon.</hi> 4,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ποιηταῖς σύντροφος ἐγένετο ... καὶ τὰς ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ προαιρέσεις ...
+    ἠπίστατο</foreign>: cf. Caspari,
+<hi rend="italic">De Cyn.</hi> p. 6; Zeller, iii. 1, p. 685.</note> But
+the Cynic movement, as a whole, rested on no scientific tradition,
+and the most serious and effective preacher of its doctrine
+needed only a firm hold of a few simple truths, with a command
+of seizing and incisive phrase.<note place="foot">Cf. Luc. (?) <hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi> 14 sqq.; Caspari,
+p. 6.</note> There was no professional
+barrier to exclude the ignorant and corrupt pretender.
+For the Cynics, from the very nature of their mission and
+their aims, never formed an organised school or society.
+Each went his own way in complete detachment. To the
+superficial observer, the only common bond and characteristic
+were the purely external marks of dress and rough
+bearing and ostentatious contempt for the most ordinary
+comforts and decencies of life, which could easily be assumed
+by the knave and the libertine. Hence, as time went on,
+although good Cynics, like Demonax or Demetrius, acquired
+a deserved influence, yet the greed, licentiousness, and brutal
+<pb n="352"/><anchor id="Pg352"/>violence of others brought great discredit on the name.
+Epictetus, who had a lofty ideal of the Cynic preacher
+as an ambassador of God, lays bare the coarse vices of the
+pretender to that high service with an unsparing hand.<note place="foot">Epict. iii. 22, § 80,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εἰς τοὺς νῦν ἀποβλέπομεν τοὺς τραπεζῆας πυλαωροὺς κτλ.</foreign>,
+    Luc. <hi rend="italic">Fug.</hi> 14,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ οὐ πολλῆς πραγματείας δεῖ τριβώνιον περιβαλέσθαι</foreign>.</note> It is
+evident, however, that certain of the gravest imputations,
+which had been developed by prurient imaginations, were, by
+an unwholesome tradition, levelled at even the greatest and best
+of the Cynics.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Ver. Hist.</hi> ii. 18; Athen. iv.
+158; xiii. 588.</note> And S. Augustine, in referring to these foul
+charges, affirms, with an honourable candour, that they could
+not be truly made against the Cynics of his own day.<note place="foot">S. Aug. <hi rend="italic">Civ. D.</hi> xiv. 20, nemo
+tamen eorum audet hoc facere.</note> Moreover,
+the Roman nature never took very kindly, even in some
+of the cultivated circles, to anything under the name of
+philosophy.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> lxxii. 2; Pers. v.
+189; Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 71; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> 4;
+<hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 5; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 22; Quintil.
+xi. 1, 35; xii. 2, 6.</note> Even M. Aurelius could not altogether disarm
+the suspicion with which it was regarded. And the revolt of
+Avidius Cassius was to some extent an outburst of impatience
+with the doctrinaire spirit of the <hi rend="italic">philosopha anicula</hi>, as Cassius
+dared to call him.<note place="foot">Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Avid. Cass.</hi> 1, § 8, in a
+letter of Verus, te philosopham aniculam,
+me luxuriosum morionem
+vocat: cf. c. 14.</note> And there were many things in the Cynic
+movement which specially tended to provoke the ordinary
+man. It threw down the gauntlet to a materialised age. It
+preached absolute renunciation of all social ties and duties, and
+of all the pleasures and refinements with which that society
+had surrounded itself. In an age which, even on its tomb-stones,
+bears the stamp of a starched conventionality and
+adherence to use and wont, the Cynic was a defiant rebel
+against all social restraints. In an age which was becoming
+ever more superstitious, he did not shrink from attacking the
+faith in the gods, the efficacy of the mysteries, the credit of
+the most ancient oracles.<note place="foot">Bernays, <hi rend="italic">Die Kyniker</hi>, p. 31, sie
+sind die am reinsten deistische Sect,
+welche das hellenisch-römische Alterthum
+hervorgebracht hat.</note> And, finally, while philosophy in
+general after Domitian found support and patronage at the
+imperial court, no emperor gave his countenance to the Cynics
+till the Syrian dynasty of the third century.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 30; cf. D. Cass. lxxvii. 19,
+for the favours showered on the Cynic
+Antiochus by Severus.</note> We have here
+surely a sufficient accumulation of reasons for hesitating to
+<pb n="353"/><anchor id="Pg353"/>accept the wholesale condemnation of a class of men who,
+instead of disarming opposition, rather plumed themselves on
+provoking it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A good example of the merciless, and not altogether
+scrupulous fashion in which the Cynics were handled by contemporaries
+is to be found in Lucian’s piece on the death of
+Peregrinus.<note place="foot">On Lucian’s <hi rend="italic">Peregrinus</hi>, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Caspari,
+<hi rend="italic">De Cyn.</hi> p. 24 sq.; Bernays, p. 42 sqq.</note> Peregrinus was a native of Parium on the Propontis,
+and a man of fortune. He loved to call himself
+Proteus, and, indeed, the strange vicissitudes of his career
+justified his assumption of the name.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Morte Peregr.</hi> c. 5, 10 sq.</note> On reaching manhood,
+he wandered from land to land, and in Palestine he joined a
+Christian brotherhood, in which he rose to a commanding
+influence, which drew down the suspicion of the government,
+and he was thrown for a time into prison.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 11, 12.</note> His persecution
+called forth, as Lucian ungrudgingly admits, all the fearless
+love and charity of the worshippers of <q>the crucified Sophist.</q>
+Released by a philosophic governor of the type of Gallio, he
+gave up the remnant of his paternal property, amounting to
+fifteen talents, to his native city.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 14.</note> Peregrinus had already
+assumed the peculiar dress of the Cynic, and set out on fresh
+wanderings, having, from some difference on a point of ritual,
+severed his connection with the Christian brotherhood. He
+then came under the influence of an Egyptian ascetic and of
+the mysticism of the East. In a visit to Italy he acquired
+celebrity by his fierce invectives, which did not spare even
+the blameless and gentle Antoninus Pius.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 17, 18; cf. the rudeness of
+Demetrius to Vespasian, Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi>
+xiii.; D. Cass. lxvi. 13.</note> The Emperor himself
+paid little heed to him, but the prefect of the city thought
+that Rome could well spare such a philosopher, and Peregrinus
+was obliged to return to the East. Henceforth Greece, and
+especially Elis, was the scene of his labours. He abated
+none of his energy, dealing out his denunciations impartially,
+and not sparing even the philosophic millionaire Herodes
+Atticus for providing the visitors to Olympia with the luxury
+of pure water.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Morte Peregr.</hi> c. 19,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">κακῶς ἠγόρευεν ὡς καταθηλύναντα τοὺς Ἕλληνας</foreign>.</note> He even tried to stir up Greece to armed
+revolt. His fame and power among the Cynic brotherhood
+were at their height, or perhaps beginning to wane, when
+<pb n="354"/><anchor id="Pg354"/>he conceived the idea of electrifying the world and giving a
+demonstration of the triumph of philosophy even over death
+by a self-immolation at Olympia. There, before the eyes of
+men gathered from all quarters, like Heracles, the great Cynic
+exemplar, on Mount Oeta, he resolved to depart in the blaze
+and glory of the funeral pyre kindled by his own hand. And
+perhaps some rare lettered Cynic brother set afloat a Sibylline
+verse, such as abounded in those days, bidding men prepare to
+revere another hero, soon to be enthroned along with Heracles
+in the broad Olympus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such a career, ambiguous, perhaps, on the most charitable
+construction, attracted the eye of the man who sincerely
+believed, under all his persiflage, that both the religion and the
+philosophy of the past were worn out, and were now being
+merely exploited by coarse adventurers for gain or ambition.
+Moreover, the Philoctetes of the Cynic Heracles, his pupil
+Theagenes, was attracting great audiences in the Gymnasium
+of Trajan at Rome.<note place="foot">Caspari, <hi rend="italic">De Cyn.</hi> p. 16; Bernays, <hi rend="italic">Luc. u. die Kyniker</hi>, p. 16.</note> The self-martyrdom of their chief
+had given a fresh inspiration to the Cynic brotherhood.
+Who knows but a legend may gather round his name, altars
+may be raised to him, and the ancient glamour of the
+<q>flashing Olympus</q> will lend itself to glorify the uncultivated
+crew who profane the name of philosophy, and are an
+offence to culture?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There is no mistaking the cold merciless spirit in which
+Lucian, by his own avowal, addressed himself to the task of
+exposing what he genuinely believed to be a feigned enthusiasm.
+Even the lover of Lucian receives a kind of shock from
+the occasional tone of almost cruel hardness in his treatment of
+the Cynic apostle. When Lucian’s narrative of the youthful
+enormities of Peregrinus is analysed, it is perceived that the
+accuser is anonymous, and that other names and particulars
+are carefully suppressed.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 54.</note> For the gravest charges of youthful
+depravity no proof or authority is given; they seem to be the
+offspring of that prurient gossip which can assail any character.
+They are the charges which were freely bandied about in the
+age of Pericles and M. Aurelius, in the age of Erasmus and the
+age of Milton. There must have been something at least
+<pb n="355"/><anchor id="Pg355"/>remarkable and fascinating, although marred by extravagance,<note place="foot">This offended Demonax, cf. Luc. (?)
+<hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi> c. 21,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Περεγρῖνε οὐκ ἀνθρώπιζεις</foreign>.</note>
+about the man who became a great leader and prophet among
+the Christians of Palestine, and who was almost worshipped
+as a god. When he was thrown into jail, their widows and
+orphans watched by the gates; his jailers were bribed to admit
+some of the brethren to console his solitude; large sums were
+collected from the cities of Asia for his support and defence.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Morte Peregr.</hi> c. 13.</note>
+The surrender of his paternal property to his native city, an
+act of generosity which had many parallels in that age, is
+attributed to no higher motive than the wish to hush up a
+rumour that Peregrinus had murdered his father. The charge
+apparently rested on nothing more substantial than malignant
+gossip.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 10, 14, 37; Bernays, p. 54.</note> The migration of Peregrinus from the Christian to
+the Cynic brotherhood was not so startling in that age as it
+may appear to us. Transitions to and fro were not uncommon
+between societies which had the common bond of asceticism
+and contempt for the world.<note place="foot">Cf. Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xlvi. (Dind. vol. ii.
+p. 402),
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τοῖς ἐν τῇ Παλαιστίνῃ δυσσεβέσι παραπλήσιοι τοὺς τρόπους</foreign>. Bernays, p.
+36, Übertritte aus dem einen in das
+andere Lager vorkamen; Hatch, <hi rend="italic">Hib.
+Lec.</hi> p. 166; cf. Caspari, <hi rend="italic">De Cyn.</hi> p. 25;
+Jul. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> vii. 224. C.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὰ δὲ ἄλλα γε πάντα ἐστὶν ὑμῖν τε κἀκείνοις</foreign>
+    (<hi rend="italic">i.e.</hi> <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Χριστιανοῖς</foreign>)
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">παραπλήσια. καταλελοίπατε τὴν πατρίδα ὥσπερ ἐκεῖνοι</foreign>.</note> Moreover, Lucian, with all his
+delicate genius, had little power of understanding the force
+of religious enthusiasm. It is pretty clear that Peregrinus
+was not an ordinary Cynic; he had felt the spell of Oriental
+and Pythagorean mysticism. His Cynicism was probably
+tinctured with a religion of the same type as that of Apollonius
+of Tyana.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Morte Peregr.</hi> c. 36,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐς τὴν μεσημβρίαν ἀποβλέπων</foreign>: c. 25,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὅπως τὴν καρτηρίαν ἐπιδείξηται ὥσπερ οἱ Βραχμᾶνες,
+    ἐκείνοις γὰρ αὐτὸν ἠχίου Θεαγένης εἰκάζειν</foreign>.</note> And it is his failure to appreciate the fervour of
+this mystical elation in Peregrinus and his disciples which
+misled Lucian, and makes his narrative misleading.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lucian suggests that, when he visited Olympia for the
+fourth time, he found that the influence of Peregrinus was
+on the wane.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 2.</note> Yet even from Lucian’s own narrative it is
+clear that Peregrinus and his doings were attracting almost as
+much attention as the games. On Lucian’s arrival, the first thing
+he heard was a rumour that the great Cynic had resolved to
+die upon a flaming pyre, like the hero who was the mythic
+patron of the school. Peregrinus professed that by his
+self-<pb n="356"/><anchor id="Pg356"/>immolation he was going to teach men, in the most impressive
+way, to make light of death. And many a Cynic sermon was
+evidently delivered on the subject, the greatest preacher being
+Theagenes, for whom Lucian displays a particular aversion.
+There were, of course, many sceptics like Lucian himself. And
+it is in the mouth of one of these enemies of the sect, in reply
+to Theagenes, that Lucian has put the defamatory version of
+the life of Peregrinus,<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Morte Peregr.</hi> c. 7 sqq.</note> to which we have referred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lucian assumes from the first that the self-martyrdom of
+Peregrinus was prompted by mere vulgar love of notoriety.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 4,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εἰς κενοδοξίαν τινὲς τοῦτο ἀναφέρουσι</foreign>.</note>
+Yet it is quite possible that this is an unfair judgment. The
+Stoic school, with which the Cynics had such a close affinity,
+allowed that, in certain circumstances, suicide might be not
+only a permissible, but a meritorious, nay, even a glorious act
+of self-liberation.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 58, § 36; 70, § 8; <hi rend="italic">De
+Prov.</hi> ii. 10; vi. § 7; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, iii. 15;
+<hi rend="italic">De V. Beat.</hi> 19; Epict. i. 24. Cf. Plin.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 12; i. 22; iii. 7; iii. 9; vi.
+24; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">L’Opp.</hi> p. 212 sqq.</note> Seneca had often looked gladly to it as
+the ever open door of escape from ignominy or torture. The
+brilliant Stoic Euphrates, the darling of Roman society, weary
+of age and disease, sought and obtained the permission of
+Hadrian to drink the hemlock.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxix. 8,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ ὁ Εὐφράτης ὁ φιλόσοφος ἀπέθανεν ἐθελοντής, ἐπιτρέψαντος αὐτῷ
+    καὶ τοῦ Ἁδριανοῦ κωνεῖον διὰ τὸ γῆρας καὶ διὰ τὴν νόσον πιεῖν</foreign>.</note> And that emperor himself,
+in his last sickness, begged the drug from his physician who
+killed himself to escape compliance.<note place="foot">Ael. Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 24.</note> Diogenes had handed
+the dagger to his favourite pupil, Antisthenes, when tortured
+by disease.<note place="foot">Diog. Laert. vi. 18; cf. vi. 77, for
+the death of Diogenes himself.</note> The burden of the Cynic preaching was the
+nothingness of the things of sense and contempt for death.
+Is it not possible that what Lucian heard from the lips of
+Peregrinus himself was true, and that he wished, it may be
+with mingled motives, by his own act to show men how to
+treat with indifference the last terror of humanity?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That the end of Peregrinus was surrounded by superstition
+and magnified by grandiose effects is more than probable.
+Such things belonged to the spirit of the age. And the calm,
+critical good sense of Lucian, which had no sympathy with
+these weaknesses, saw nothing in the scene but calculating
+imposture. Already oracles were circulating in which
+Pere<pb n="357"/><anchor id="Pg357"/>grinus appears as the phœnix, rising unscathed and rejuvenescent
+from the pyre, predicting that he is to be a guardian spirit
+of the night, that altars will rise in his honour, and that he
+will perform miracles of healing. Theagenes blazed abroad a
+Sibylline verse which bade men, <q>when the greatest of the
+Cynics has come to lofty Olympus, to honour the night-roaming
+hero who is enthroned beside Hephaestus and the
+princely Hector.</q><note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Morte Peregr.</hi> c. 29.</note> Lucian found himself wedged in a dense
+crowd who came to hear the last apology of the Cynic
+apostle. Some were applauding, and some denouncing him
+as an impostor. Lucian could hear little in the melée. But
+now and then, above the roar, he could hear the pale,
+tremulous old man tell the surging crowd that, having lived
+like Heracles, he must die like Heracles, and mingle with the
+ether, <q>bringing a golden life to a golden close.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 33.</note> Lucian
+thought his paleness was due to terror at the nearness of his
+self-imposed death. It was more probably the result of
+ascetic fervour and overstrained excitement. The spectacle
+sent Lucian away in a fit of rather cruel laughter.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 34,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐγὼ δέ, εἰκάζεις, οἶμαι, πῶς ἐγέλων</foreign>. <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Baur’s view of this
+piece (<hi rend="italic">Ch. Hist.</hi> ii. 170). He thinks
+the self-immolation of Peregrinus pure
+fiction, and that Lucian’s object throughout
+was to discredit Christianity.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The closing scene, which took place two or three miles
+from Olympia, was ordered with solemn religious effect. It
+evidently impressed even the sceptic’s imagination. A high
+pyre had been prepared, with torches and faggots ready. As
+the moon rose, the voluntary victim appeared in the garb of
+his sect, surrounded by his leading disciples. He then disrobed
+himself, flung incense on the flame, and, turning to the
+south, cried aloud—<q>Daemons of my father and my mother
+graciously receive me.</q> After these words, he leapt into the
+blaze which at once enveloped him, and he was seen no more.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Morte Peregr.</hi> c. 36.</note>
+The Cynic brothers stood long gazing into the pyre in silent
+grief, until Lucian aroused their anger by some jeers, not, perhaps,
+in the best taste. On his way back to Olympia, he pondered
+on the follies of men, and the craving for empty fame.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 38.</note> To
+Lucian there was nothing more in the tragic scene than that.
+And he amused himself by the way with the creation of a
+myth, and watching how it would grow. To some who met
+<pb n="358"/><anchor id="Pg358"/>him on the road, too late for the spectacle, he told how, as
+the pyre burst into flame, there was a great earthquake accompanied
+by subterranean thunder, and a vulture rose from the
+fire, proclaiming in a high human voice, as it winged its way
+heavenwards, <q>I have left earth behind, and I go to Olympus.</q><note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Morte Peregr.</hi> c. 39.</note>
+The poor fools, on whose credulity Lucian was rather heartlessly
+playing, with a shudder of awe fell to questioning him
+whether the bird flew to the east or the west. And, on his
+return to Olympia, he was rewarded in the way he liked best,
+by finding the tale which he had cradled already full grown.
+A venerable man, whom he encountered, related that with his
+own eyes he had seen the vulture rising from the pyre, and
+added that he had just met Peregrinus himself walking in the
+<q>seven-voiced cloister,</q> clothed in white raiment, and with a
+chaplet of olive on his head.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 40.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lucian’s picture of the death of Peregrinus, whatever we
+may think of its fairness and discernment, is immensely
+valuable for many things besides the light which it casts on
+Lucian’s attitude to all forms of extravagance and superstition.
+In spite of his contempt for them, he himself reveals that the
+Cynics were a great popular force. We see also that Cynicism
+was, in spite of its generally deistic spirit, sometimes leagued
+with real or affected religious sentiment. As to the real
+character of Peregrinus, there is reason to believe that Lucian
+did not read it aright. The impression which the Cynic made
+on Aulus Gellius was very different. When Gellius was at
+Athens in his student days, he used often to visit Peregrinus,
+who was then living in a little hut in the suburbs, and he found
+the Cynic’s discourses profitable and high-toned. In particular,
+Peregrinus used to tell his hearers that the chance of apparent
+evasion or concealment would never tempt the wise man to sin.
+Concealment was really impossible, for, in the words of
+Sophocles, <q>Time, the all-seeing, the all-hearing, lays bare all
+secrets.</q> Evidently Peregrinus had other admirers besides the
+Cynic brethren who hailed his apotheosis at Olympia.<note place="foot">A. Gell. xii. 11, virum gravem
+atque constantem vidimus ... deversantem
+in quodam tugurio extra
+urbem.</note> Who
+can draw the line, in such an age, between the fanatic and
+the impostor?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bitterness with which Lucian assails the Cynics
+<pb n="359"/><anchor id="Pg359"/>of his day, while it was justified by the scandalous morals
+of a certain number, is also a testimony to the world-wide
+influence of the sect. The ranks of these rude field-preachers
+would not have attracted so many impostors if the
+profession had not commanded great power and influence over
+the masses. The older Cynicism, which sprang from the
+simpler and more popular aspect of the Socratic teaching, had
+long disappeared. Its place was taken by the Stoic system,
+which gave a broad and highly elaborated scientific basis to the
+doctrine of the freedom and independence of the virtuous will.
+The rules of conduct were deduced from a well-articulated theory
+of the universe and human nature, and they were expounded
+with all the dexterity of a finished dialectic. The later
+Stoicism, as we have seen, like the other schools, tended to
+neglect theory, in the effort to form the virtuous character—a
+tendency which is seen at its height in Musonius and
+Epictetus. But, as Stoicism became less scientific, it inclined
+to return more and more to the spirit and method of the
+older Cynicism. The true, earnest Cynic seems to be almost
+the philosophic ideal of Epictetus. Thus it was that, in the
+first century after Christ, Cynicism emerged from its long
+obscurity to take up the part of a rather one-sided popular
+Stoicism. It was really pointed or sensational preaching of a
+few great moral truths, common to all the schools, which the
+condition of society urgently called for.<note place="foot">Zeller,
+    <hi rend="italic"><anchor id="corr359"/><corr sic="Phil der.">Phil. der</corr> Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p.
+685; Bernays, <hi rend="italic">Luc. u. die Kyniker</hi>, p.
+27 sq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ideal of the Cynic life has been painted with gentle
+enthusiasm by Epictetus.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iii. 22, § 23,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλ’ εἰδέναι δεῖ ὅτι ἄγγελος ἀπὸ Διὸς ἀπέσταλται πρὸς τοὺς ἀνθρώπους,
+    περὶ ἀγαθῶν καὶ κακῶν ὑποδείξων αὐτοῖς ὅτι πεπλάνηται καὶ ἀλλαχοῦ
+    ζητοῦσι τὴν οὐσίαν τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ὅπου οὐκ ἔστιν, ὅπου δ’ ἔστιν οὐκ ἐνθυμοῦνται κτλ.</foreign></note> The true Cynic is a messenger from
+Zeus, to tell men that they have wandered far from the right
+way, that they are seeking happiness in regions where
+happiness is not to be found. It is not to be found in the
+glory of consulships, or in the Golden House of Nero.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 22, §§ 28-30.</note> It
+lies close to us, yet in the last place where we ever seek it,
+in ourselves, in the clear vision of the ruling faculty, in
+freedom from the bondage to imagined good, to the things of
+sense.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 38,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὅπου οὐ δοκεῖτε οὐδὲ θέλετε ζητῆσαι αὐτό. εἰ γὰρ ἠθέλετε,
+    εὕρετε ἂν ἐν ὑμῖν ὄν κτλ.</foreign></note> This preaching was also to be preaching by example.
+<pb n="360"/><anchor id="Pg360"/>The gospel of renunciation has been discredited from age to age
+when it has come from the lips of a man lapped in downy
+comfort, who never gave up anything in his life, and who indolently
+points his flock to the steep road which he never means
+to tread with his own feet. But the Cynic of Epictetus, with
+a true vocation, could point to himself, without home or wife
+or children, without a city, without possessions, having forsaken
+all for moral freedom.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iii. 22, § 47,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἴδετέ με, ὅτι ἄπολίς εἰμι, ἄοικος, ἀκτήμων, ἄδουλος</foreign>.</note> He has done it at the call of God,
+not from mere caprice, or a fancy to wander lawlessly on the
+outskirts of society.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 56,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Κυνικῷ δὲ Καῖσαρ τίς ἐστιν ἢ ὁ καταπεπομφὼς αὐτὸν καὶ
+    ᾧ λατρεύει, ὁ Ζεύς</foreign>.</note> He has done it because the condition of
+the world demands such stern self-restraint in the chief who
+would save the discipline of an army engaged in desperate
+battle. It is a combat like the Olympian strife which he has
+to face, and woe to him who enters the lists untrained and
+unprepared.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 52.</note> The care of wife and children is not for one who
+has laid upon him the care of the family of man, who has to
+console and admonish, and guide them into the right way.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 67.</note>
+All worldly loves and entanglements must be put aside by one
+who claims to be the <q>spy and herald of God.</q> The Cynic is
+the father of all men; the men are his sons, the women his
+daughters.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 81,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πάντας ἀνθρώπους πεπαιδοποίηται, τοὺς ἄνδρας υἱοὺς ἔχει,
+    τὰς γυναῖκας θυγατέρας</foreign>.</note> When he rebukes them, it is as a father in God,
+a minister of Zeus. Nor may he take a part in the government
+of any earthly state, which is a petty affair in comparison
+with the ministry with which he is charged. How should he
+meddle with the administration of Athens or Corinth, who has
+to deal with the moral fortunes of the whole commonwealth of
+man.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 84.</note> Possessing in himself the secret of happiness and woe,
+he never descends into the vulgar contest, where he may be
+overcome by the vilest and poorest spirits, for objects which
+he has trained himself to regard as absolutely indifferent or
+worthless. And so, he is proof against the spitefulness of
+fortune and the baseness or violence of man. He will calmly
+suffer blows or insults as sent by Zeus, just as Heracles bore
+cheerfully and triumphantly the toils which were laid on him
+by Eurystheus. The true Cynic will even love those who
+buffet and insult him.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 100.</note> He will also resemble his patron hero
+<pb n="361"/><anchor id="Pg361"/>in the fresh comely strength of his body, which is the gift of
+temperance and long days passed under the open sky.<note place="foot">Epict. iii. 22, §§ 86, 87.</note> Above
+all, he will have a conscience clearer than the sun, so that, at
+peace with himself and having assurance of the friendship of the
+gods, he may be able to speak with all boldness to his brothers
+and his children.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 93,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πρὸ πάντων δὲ τὸ ἡγεμονικὸν αὐτοῦ δεῖ καθαρώτερον
+    εἶναι τοῦ ἡλίου</foreign>.</note> This was the kind of moral ministry which
+was needed by the age, and, in spite of both undeserved calumny,
+and the real shame of many corrupt impostors in its ranks, the
+missionary movement of Cynicism was one of undoubted power
+and range. The resemblance, in many points, of the Cynics to
+the early Christian monks and ascetics has been often noticed,
+and men sometimes passed from the one camp to the other
+without any violent wrench.<note place="foot">Bernays, <hi rend="italic">Luc. u. die Kyniker</hi>, pp.
+36-38.</note> The rhetor Aristides, in a
+fierce attack on the Cynic sect, makes it a reproach that they
+have much in common with <q>the impious in Palestine.</q> Tatian,
+and others of the Gnostic ascetics, were in close connection
+with leading Cynics.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 99.</note> How easily they were absorbed into
+the bosom of the Church we can see from the tale of
+Maximus, an Egyptian Cynic of the fourth century, who
+continued to wear the distinctive marks of the philosophic
+brotherhood, till he was installed as bishop of Constantinople.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 37; Caspari, <hi rend="italic">De Cyn.</hi> p. 25.</note>
+And the contemporary eulogies of Cynic virtue by John
+Chrysostom and Themistius testify at once to the importance of
+a movement the strength of which was not spent till after the
+fall of the Western Empire, and to its affinities for the kindred
+movement of Christian asceticism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+These <q>ambassadors of God,</q> as they claimed to be, cared
+little, like S. Paul, for <q>the wisdom of the world,</q> or for the
+figments of the poets, and those great cosmic theories which
+enabled Seneca to sustain or rekindle his moral faith. With
+rare exceptions, such as Oenomaus of Gadara, they seldom
+committed their ideas to writing.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 5.</note> For the serried dialectic
+of the Stoics they substituted the sharp biting epigram and
+lively repartee, in which even the gentle Demonax indulged.<note place="foot">Luc. (?) <hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi> c. 16-21.</note>
+Demetrius, who saw the reigns of both Caligula and Domitian,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ben.</hi> vii. 11; Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll.
+T.</hi> vii. 42.</note>
+was a man of real power and distinction. He was revered by
+<pb n="362"/><anchor id="Pg362"/>Seneca as a moral teacher of remarkable influence, <q>a great man
+even if compared with the greatest,</q><note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ben.</hi> vii. i. 3, vir meo judicio
+magnus etiamsi maximis comparetur;
+vii. 8, 2.</note> who lived up to the
+severest counsels which he addressed to others. He would bear
+cold and nakedness and hard lodging with cheerful fortitude,
+he was a man whom not even the age of Nero could corrupt.
+His poverty was genuine, and he would never beg.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 20, 9; <hi rend="italic">Vit. B.</hi> xviii. 3.</note> He
+set little store by philosophical theory, in comparison with
+diligent application of a few tried and well-conned precepts.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> vii. 1, § 3, egregia hoc
+dicere solet, Plus prodesse, si pauca
+praecepta sapientiae teneas, sed illa in
+promptu tibi sint, etc.</note>
+Yet he had the brand of culture, and once, when his taste was
+offended by a bad, tactless reader, who was ruining a passage
+in the <hi rend="italic">Bacchae</hi>, he snatched the book from his hands and tore
+it in pieces.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Adv. Indoct.</hi> 19.</note> Although he disdained the trimmed, artificial
+eloquence of the schools, he had the fire and impetus of the
+true orator.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> vii. 8, 2.</note> With little taste for abstract musings, he consoled
+the last hours of Thrasea in prison with a discourse on
+the nature of the soul and the mystery of its severance from
+the body at death.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 34.</note> He formed a close alliance for a time with
+that roaming hierophant of philosophy, Apollonius of Tyana,
+the bond between them being probably a common asceticism
+and a common hatred of the imperial tyranny.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 25, 42;
+vi. 13; viii. 10; vii. 42.</note> For Demetrius,
+if not a revolutionary, was a leader of the philosophic opposition,
+which assailed the emperors, not so much in their political
+capacity, as because they too often represented and stimulated
+the moral lawlessness and materialism of the age. Our
+sympathies must be with Demetrius when he boldly faced the
+dangerous scowl of Nero with the <hi rend="italic">mot</hi>, <q>You threaten me with
+death, but nature threatens you.</q><note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> i. 25, § 22,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀπειλεῖς μοι θάνατον σοὶ δ’ ἡ φύσις</foreign>.</note> But our sympathies will
+be rather with Vespasian, the plain old soldier, who, when
+Demetrius openly insulted him, treated the <q>Cynic bark</q> with
+quiet contempt.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> xiii. philosophorum
+contumaciam lenissime tulit; <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> x.;
+D. Cass. lxvi. 13.</note> In truth, the Flavian emperors, till the expulsion
+of the philosophers by Domitian, seem to have been on
+the whole indulgent to the outspoken freedom of the Cynics.<note place="foot">Bernays, <hi rend="italic">Luc. u. die Kyniker</hi>, p. 29.</note>
+Occasionally, however, the daring censor had, in the interests of
+<pb n="363"/><anchor id="Pg363"/>authority, to be restrained. Once, when Titus was in the
+theatre, with the Jewess Berenice by his side, a Cynic, bearing
+the name of the founder of the sect, gave voice in a long
+bitter oration to popular feeling against what was regarded as
+a shameful union. This Cynic John the Baptist, got off with
+a scourging.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxvi. 15.</note> A comrade named Heros, however, repeated the
+offensive expostulation, and lost his head. Peregrinus, for a
+similar attack on Antoninus Pius, was quietly warned by the
+prefect to leave the precincts of Rome. In the third century
+there was a great change in the political fortunes and attitude
+of the sect; Cynics are even found basking in imperial
+favour, and lending their support to the imperial power.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Morte Peregr.</hi> c. 19; the
+attempt of Peregrinus in Greece is probably
+referred to in Jul. Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Ant.
+P.</hi> 5, § 5; cf. Bernays, p. 30; Caspari,
+<hi rend="italic">De Cyn.</hi> p. 15.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Cynics, from the days of Antisthenes, had poured
+contempt on the popular religion and the worship of material
+images of the Divine. They were probably the purest
+monotheists that classical antiquity produced.<note place="foot">Bernays, p. 31.</note> Demetrius
+is almost Epicurean in his belief in eternal Fate, and his contempt
+for the wavering wills and caprices which mythological
+fancy ascribed to the Olympian gods.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> 5, §§ 5-7.</note> Demonax, the
+mildest and most humane member of the school in imperial
+times, refused to offer sacrifices or even to seek initiation
+in the Mysteries of Eleusis.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi> c. 11; Oenom. <hi rend="italic">Fr.</hi> 13,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὐκ ἀθάνατοι, ἀλλὰ λίθινοι καὶ ξύλινοι δεσπόται ἀνθρώπων</foreign>, 14; cf. Julian, <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi>
+vii. 204, <hi rend="italic">a</hi>.</note> When he was impeached for
+impiety before the Athenian courts, he replied that, as for
+sacrifices, the Deity had no need of them, and that touching
+the Mysteries, he was in this dilemma: if they contained
+a revelation of what was good for men, he must in duty
+publish it; if they were bad and worthless, he would feel
+equally bound to warn the people against the deception.
+But the most fearless and trenchant assailant of the popular
+theology among the Cynics was Oenomaus of Gadara, in the
+reign of Hadrian.<note place="foot">Caspari, <hi rend="italic">De Cyn.</hi> p. 12; Bernays, p.
+35; Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p. 690.</note> Oenomaus rejected, with the frankest scorn,
+the anthropomorphic fables of heathenism. In particular, he
+directed his fiercest attacks against the revival of that faith
+in oracles and divination which was a marked characteristic
+of the Antonine age. Plutarch, in a charming walk
+<pb n="364"/><anchor id="Pg364"/>round the sights of Delphi, in which he acts as cicerone,
+describes a Cynic named Didymus as assailing the influence
+of oracles on human character.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> vii.</note> But Oenomaus, as we know
+him from Eusebius, was a far more formidable and more
+pitiless iconoclast than Didymus. He constructed an elaborate
+historical demonstration to show that the oracles were inspired
+neither by the gods nor by daemons, but were a very human
+contrivance to dupe the credulous. And in connection with
+the subject of oracles, he dealt with the question of free-will,
+and asserted man’s inalienable liberty, and the responsibility
+for all his actions which is the necessary concomitant of
+freedom. Oenomaus treated Dodona and Delphi with such
+jaunty disrespect that, at the distance of a century and a
+half, his memory aroused the anger of Julian to such a degree,
+that the imperial champion of paganism could hardly find
+words strong enough to express his feelings.<note place="foot">Julian, <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> vii. 209.</note> Oenomaus is
+a wretch who is cutting at the roots, not only of all reverence
+for divine things, but of all those moral instincts implanted
+in our souls by God, which are the foundation of all right
+conduct and justice. For such fellows no punishment could
+be too severe; they are worse than brigands and wreckers.<note place="foot">Jul. vii. 209, 210,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">διαφέρουσι γὰρ οὗτοί τι τῶν ἐπ’ ἐρημίας λῃστευόντων καὶ κατειληφότων
+    τὰς ἀκτὰς ἐπὶ τῷ λυμαίνεσθαι τοῖς καταπλέουσι</foreign>.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The resolute rejection of the forms of popular worship, and
+of the claims of divination, is hardly less marked in the mild
+and tolerant Demonax.<note place="foot">Bernays, <hi rend="italic">Luc. u. die Kyniker</hi>, p. 104,
+agrees with Bekker that the <hi rend="italic">Demonax</hi>
+can hardly be a genuine work of Lucian.
+But its author was a contemporary and
+friend of Demonax (c. i.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐπὶ μήκιστον συνεγενόμην</foreign>).</note> Demonax, whose life extended probably
+from 50 to 150 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>,<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p.
+691, n. 6.</note> sprang from a family in Cyprus of
+some wealth and distinction, and had a finished literary culture.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi> c. 3 sqq.</note>
+But he had conceived from childhood a passion for the philosophic
+life, according to the ideal of that age. His teachers
+were Cynics or Stoics, but in speculative opinion he was
+broadly Eclectic. In his long life he had associated with Demetrius
+and Epictetus, Apollonius and Herodes Atticus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 3, 24, 31.</note> When
+asked once who was his favourite philosopher, he replied that
+he reverenced Socrates, admired Diogenes, and loved Aristippus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 62.</note>
+His tone had perhaps the greatest affinity for the simplicity of
+<pb n="365"/><anchor id="Pg365"/>the Socratic teaching. But he did not adopt the irony of the
+master, which, if it was a potent arm of dialectic, often left the
+subject of it in an irritated and humiliated mood. Demonax
+was a true Cynic in his contempt for ordinary objects of greed
+and ambition,<note place="foot">Luc. (?) <hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi> c. 5, 6.</note> in the simple, austere fashion of his daily life,
+and in the keen epigrammatic point, often, to our taste, verging
+on rudeness, with which he would expose pretence and rebuke
+any kind of extravagance.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 14.</note> But although he cultivated a
+severe bodily discipline, so as to limit to the utmost his external
+wants, he carefully avoided any ostentatious singularity of
+manner to win a vulgar notoriety. He had an infinite charity
+for all sorts of men, excepting only those who seemed beyond
+the hope of amendment.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 7.</note> His counsels were given with an Attic
+grace and brightness which sent people away from his company
+cheered and improved, and hopeful for the future. Treating
+error as a disease incident to human nature, he attacked the
+sin, but was gentle to the sinner.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 6.</note> He made it his task to
+compose the feuds of cities and to stimulate unselfish patriotism;
+he reconciled the quarrels of kinsmen; he would, on occasion,
+chasten the prosperous, and comfort the failing and unfortunate,
+by reminding both alike of the brief span allotted to either joy
+or sorrow, and the long repose of oblivion which would soon set
+a term to all the agitations of sorrow or of joy.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 9, 10.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was another side to his teaching. Demonax was
+no supple, easy-going conformist to usages which his reason
+rejected. Early in his career, as has been said, he had to face
+a prosecution before the tribunals of Athens, because he was
+never seen to sacrifice to the gods, and declined initiation at
+Eleusis. In each case, he defended his nonconformity in the
+boldest tone.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 11,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τραχύτερον ἢ κατὰ τὴν ἑαυτοῦ προαίρεσιν ἀπελογήσατο</foreign>.</note> To a prophet whom he saw plying his trade
+for hire, he put the dilemma: <q>If you can alter the course of
+destiny, why do you not demand higher fees? If everything
+happens by the decree of God, where is the value of your art?</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 37.</note>
+When asked if he believed the soul to be immortal, he answered,
+<q>It is as immortal as everything else.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 32.</note> He derided, in almost
+brutal style, the effeminacy of the sophist Favorinus, and the
+extravagant grief of Herodes Atticus for his son.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 12, 24.</note> He
+    ruth<pb n="366"/><anchor id="Pg366"/>lessly exposed the pretences of sham philosophy wherever he
+met it. When a youthful Eclectic professed his readiness to
+obey any philosophic call, from the Academy, the Porch, or
+the Pythagorean discipline of silence, Demonax cried out,
+<q>Pythagoras calls you.</q><note place="foot">Luc. (?) <hi rend="italic">Dem.</hi> c. 14,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὗτος, ἔφη, προσειπὼν τὸ ὄνομα, καλεῖ σε Πυθαγόρας</foreign>.</note> He rebuked the pedantic archaism
+of his day by telling an affected stylist that he spoke in the
+fashion of Agamemnon’s time.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 26,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">σὺ δὲ μοι ὡς ἐπ’ Ἀγαμέμνονος ἀποκρίνῃ</foreign>.</note> When Epictetus advised him to
+marry and become the father of a line of philosophers, he asked
+the celibate preacher to give him one of his daughters.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 55.</note> The
+Athenians, from a vulgar jealousy of Corinth, proposed to
+defile their ancient memories by establishing gladiatorial shows
+under the shadow of the Acropolis. Demonax, in the true spirit
+of Athens from the time of Theseus, advised them first to sweep
+away the altar of Pity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 57.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demonax lived to nearly a hundred years. He is said
+never to have had an enemy. He was the object of universal
+deference whenever he appeared in public. In his old age he
+might enter any Athenian house uninvited, and they welcomed
+him as their good genius. The children brought him their
+little presents of fruit and called him father, and as he passed
+through the market, the baker-women contended for the
+honour of giving him their loaves. He died a voluntary
+death, and wished for no tomb save what nature would give
+him. But the Athenians were aware that they had seen in
+him a rare apparition of goodness; they honoured him with
+a splendid and imposing burial and mourned long for him.
+And the bench on which he used to sit when he was weary
+they deemed a sacred stone, and decked it with garlands long
+after his death.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 63 sqq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Demonax, by a strange personal charm, attained to an
+extraordinary popularity and reverence. But the great mass
+of philosophic preachers had to face a great deal of obloquy
+and vulgar contempt. Apart from the coarseness, arrogance,
+and inconsistency of many of them, which gave just offence,
+their very profession was an irritating challenge to a pleasure-loving
+and worldly age. Men who gloried in the splendour
+of their civic life, and were completely absorbed in it, who
+<pb n="367"/><anchor id="Pg367"/>were flattered and cajoled by their magistrates and popular
+leaders, could hardly like to be told by the vagrant, homeless
+teacher, in beggar’s garb, that they were ignorant and perverted
+and lost in a maze of deception. They would hardly
+be pleased to hear that their civilisation was an empty show,
+without a solid core of character, that their hopes of happiness
+from a round of games and festivals, from the splendour of art
+in temples and statues, were the merest mirage. The message
+<hi rend="italic">Beati pauperes spiritu—Beati qui lugent</hi>, will never be a
+popular one. That was the message to his age of the itinerant
+Cynic preacher, and his unkempt beard and ragged cloak and
+the fashion of his life made him the mark of cheap and
+abundant ridicule. Sometimes the contempt was deserved;
+no great movement for the elevation of humanity has been
+free from impostors. Yet the severe judgment of the Cynic
+missionaries on their age is that of the polished orator, who
+had as great a scorn as Lucian for the sensual or mercenary
+Cynic, and yet took up the scrip and staff himself, to propagate
+the same gospel as the Cynics.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxiv. § 2; lxxii. § 2.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dion Chrysostom was certainly not a Cynic in the academic
+sense, but he belonged to the same great movement. He
+sprang from a good family at Prusa in Bithynia.<note place="foot">Cf. Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> i. 7. For
+other authorities <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der
+Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p. 729, n. 1. Martha,
+<hi rend="italic">Moralistes sous l’Emp. rom.</hi> 294, gives
+a good sketch of Dion’s career.</note> He was
+trained in all the arts of rhetoric, and taught and practised
+them in the early part of his life. A suspected friendship led
+to his banishment in the reign of Domitian, and in his exile,
+with the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi> and the <hi rend="italic">De Falsa Legatione</hi> as his companions,
+he wandered over many lands, supporting himself
+often by menial service.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xiii. § 1.</note> He at last found himself in his
+wanderings in regions where wild tribes of the Getae for a
+century and a half had been harrying the distant outposts of
+Hellenic civilisation on the northern shores of the Euxine.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> i. 7.</note>
+The news of the death of Domitian reached a camp on the
+Danube when Dion was there. The soldiery, faithful to their
+emperor, were excited and indignant, but, under the spell of
+Dion’s eloquence, they were brought to acquiesce in the
+accession of the blameless Nerva. Dion at length returned
+to Rome, and rose to high favour at court. Trajan often
+<pb n="368"/><anchor id="Pg368"/>invited him to his table, and used to take him as companion
+in his state carriage, although the honest soldier did not
+pretend to appreciate Dion’s rhetoric.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> i. 2;
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἔλεγε θαμὰ ἐπιστρεφόμενος ἐς τὸν Δίωνα “τί μὲν λέγεις,
+        οὐκ οἶδα, φιλῶ δέ σε ὡς ἐμαυτόν.”</foreign></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During his exile, as he tells us, Dion had been converted
+to more serious views of life. The triumphs of conventional
+declamation before fashionable audiences lost their glamour.
+Dion became conscious of a loftier mission to the dim masses
+of that far-spreading empire through whose cities and
+wildernesses he was wandering.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xiii. § 6, 9, 10,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">στολήν τε ταπεινὴν ἀναλαβὼν καὶ τἆλλα κολάσας ἐμαυτὸν
+ἠλώμην πανταχοῦ</foreign>.</note> As to the eyes of Seneca,
+men seemed to Dion, amid all their fair, cheerful life, to
+be holding out their hands for help. Wherever he went, he
+found that, in his beggar’s dress, he was surrounded by crowds
+of people eager to hear any word of comfort or counsel
+in the doubts and troubles of their lives. They assumed that
+the poor wanderer was a philosopher. They plied him with
+questions on the great problem, How to live; and the elegant
+sophist was thus compelled to find an answer for them and
+for himself.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 12,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πολλοὶ γὰρ ἠρώτων προσιόντες, ὅ τι μοι φαίνοιτο ἀγαθὸν ἢ κακόν.
+    ὥστε ἠναγκαζόμην φροντίζειν ὑπὲρ τούτων ἵνα ἔχοιμι
+ἀποκρίνεσθαι τοὶς ἐρωτώσιν</foreign>.
+With the conversion of Dion cf. of that
+of Isaeus and Polemon, etc., Philostr.
+<hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> i. p. 218; <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> i.
+13; iv. 20; Epict. iii. 1; Diog. Laert.
+iv. 3, § 1.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dion never quite shook off the traditions and tone of the
+rhetorical school. The ambition to say things in the most
+elegant and attractive style, the love of amplifying, in leisurely
+and elaborate development, a commonplace and hackneyed theme
+still clings to him. His eighty orations are many of them
+rather essays than popular harangues. They range over all sorts
+of subjects, literary, mythological, and artistic, political and
+social, as well as purely ethical or religious. But, after all, Dion is
+unmistakably the preacher of a great moral revival and reform.
+He cannot be classed definitely with any particular school of
+philosophy. He is the apostle of Greek culture, yet he admires
+Diogenes, the founder of the Cynics.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxvii. § 25; iv. § 1;
+vi.</note> If he had any philosophic
+ancestry, he would probably have traced himself to the
+Xenophontic Socrates.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> liv.; xiii. § 13, 14,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐνίοτε ὑπὸ ἀπορίας ᾖα ἐπί τινα λόγον ἀρχαῖον λεγόμενον ὑπό τινος
+Σωκράτους κτλ.</foreign>: cf.
+xviii. § 14,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πάντων ἄριστος ἐμοὶ καὶ λυσιτελέστατος πρὸς ταῦτα πάντα Ξενοφῶν</foreign>.</note> But he is really the rhetorical apostle
+<pb n="369"/><anchor id="Pg369"/>of the few great moral principles which were in the air, the
+common stock of Platonist, Stoic, Cynic, even the Epicurean.
+Philosophy to him is really a religion, the science of right
+living in conformity to the will of the Heavenly Power. But
+it is also the practice of right living. No Christian preacher
+has probably ever insisted more strongly on the gulf which
+separates the commonplace life of the senses from the life
+devoted to a moral ideal.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> lxx. § 1, 7;
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καθόλου βίος ἄλλος μὲν τοῦ φιλοσοφοῦντος, ἄλλος δὲ τῶν πολλῶν ἀνθρώπων</foreign>; cf. xiii. § 33.</note> The only philosophy worth the
+name is the earnest quest of the path to true nobility and
+virtue, in obedience to the good genius, the unerring monitor
+within the breast of each of us, in whose counsels lies the
+secret of happiness properly so called.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiii. § 28; xxiii. § 7,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὐκοῦν τὸν τυχόντα ἀγαθοῦ δαίμονος ἡγῇ δικαίως ζῆν καὶ
+φρονίμως καὶ σωφρόνως</foreign>; cf. Epict.
+i. § 14,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐπίτροπον ἑκάστῳ παρέστησε, τὸν ἑκάστου δαίμονα κτλ.</foreign> M. Aurel. v. 27.</note> Hence Dion speaks
+with the utmost scorn alike of the coarse Cynic impostor, who
+disgraces his calling by buffoonery and debauchery,<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxii. § 9; xxxv. § 2,
+3; xxxiv. § 2.</note> and the
+philosophic exquisite who tickles the ears of a fashionable
+audience with delicacies of phrase, but never thinks of trying
+to make them better men. He feels a sincere indignation at this
+dilettante trifling, in view of a world which is in urgent need
+of practical guidance.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xvi. § 2, 3; xxxv. § 8; cf. xiii.
+§ 11,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οἱ μὲν γὰρ πολλοὶ τῶν καλουμένων φιλοσόφων αὐτοὺς
+ἀνακηρύττουσιν κτλ.</foreign></note> For Dion, after all his wanderings
+through the Roman world, has no illusions as to its moral
+condition. He is almost as great a pessimist as Seneca or
+Juvenal. In spite of all its splendour and outward prosperity,
+society in the reign of Trajan seemed to Dion to be in a perilous
+state. Along with his own conversion came the revelation of
+the hopeless bewilderment of men in the search for happiness.
+Dimly conscious of their evil plight, they are yet utterly
+ignorant of the way to escape from it. They are swept hither
+and thither in a vortex of confused passions and longings for
+material pleasures.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xiii. § 13, 34,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐδόκουν δέ μοι πάντες ἄφρονες, φερόμενοι τάντες ἐν ταὐτῷ καὶ
+περὶ τὰ αὐτά, περί τε χρήματα καὶ δόξας καὶ σωμάτων τινὰς ἡδονάς κτλ.</foreign></note> Material civilisation, without any accompanying
+moral discipline, has produced the familiar and inevitable
+result, in an ever-increasing appetite for wealth and
+enjoyment and showy distinction, which ends in perpetual disillusionment.
+Dion warns the people of Tarsus that they are all
+<pb n="370"/><anchor id="Pg370"/>sunk in a deep sensual slumber, and living in a world of mere
+dreams, in which the reality of things is absolutely inverted.
+Their famous river, their stately buildings, their wealth, even
+their religious festivals, on which they plume themselves, are
+the merest show of happiness.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxiii. § 17, 23, 32; cf. the
+ghastly exposure in <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> vii. § 133.</note> Its real secret, which lies in
+temperance, justice, and true piety, is quite hidden from their
+eyes. When that secret is learnt, their buildings may be less
+stately, gold and silver will perhaps not be so abundant, there
+will be less soft and delicate living, there may be even fewer
+costly sacrifices as piety increases; but there will be a clearer
+perception of the true values of things, and a chastened
+temperance of spirit, which are the only security for the
+permanence of society. And the moralist points his audience
+to the splendid civilisations of the past that have perished
+because they were without a soul. Assyria and Lydia, the
+great cities of Magna Graecia which lived in a dream of luxury,
+what are they now? And, latest example of all, Macedon,
+who pushed her conquests to the gates of India, and came
+into possession of the hoarded treasures of the great Eastern
+Empires, is gone, and royal Pella, the home of the race, is now
+a heap of bricks.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxiii. §§ 24-28,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εἴ τις διέρχοιτο Πέλλαν οὐδὲ σημεῖον ὄψεται πόλεως,
+οὐδὲν δίχα τοῦ πολὺν κέραμον εἶναι συντετριμμένον ἐν τῷ τόπῳ</foreign>. Cf. xiii. §§ 33, 34.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It needed a courage springing from enthusiasm and conviction
+to preach such unpalatable truths to an age which
+gloried in its material splendour. Dion is often conscious
+of the difficulty of his task; and he exerts all his trained
+dexterity to appease opposition, and gain a hearing for his
+message.<note place="foot">A good example is the opening of
+<hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxii.</note> As regards the reform of character, Dion has no
+new message to deliver. His is the old gospel of renunciation
+for the sake of freedom, the doctrine of a right estimate of competing
+objects of desire and of the true ends of life. Dion, like
+nearly all Greek moralists from Socrates downwards, treats moral
+error and reform as rather a matter of the intellect than of
+emotional impulse. Vice is the condition of a besotted mind,
+which has lost the power of seeing things as they really are;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xiv. § 2; xiii. § 13,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐδόκουν δέ μοι πάντες ἄφρονες, κτλ.</foreign>: cf. Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil.
+der Gr.</hi> iii. 1, p. 730, er zeigt mit den
+Stoikern, dass die wahre Freiheit mit
+der Vernünftigkeit, die Sklaverei mit
+der Unvernunft zusammenfalle; cf. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi>
+xvi. § 4.</note>
+<pb n="371"/><anchor id="Pg371"/>conversion must be effected, not by appeals to the feelings, but
+by clarifying the mental vision. There is but little reference
+to religion as a means of reform, although Dion speaks of the
+love of God as a support of the virtuous character. As an
+experienced moral director, Dion knew well the necessity of
+constant iteration of the old truths. Just as the sick man
+will violate his doctor’s orders, well knowing that he does so
+to his hurt, so the moral patient may long refuse to follow a
+principle of life which his reason has accepted.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xvii. 2, 3.</note> And so the
+preacher, instead of apologising for repeating himself, will regard
+it as a duty and a necessity to do so.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Dion did not aim at the formation of any cloistered
+virtue, concentrated on personal salvation. He has a fine
+passage in which he shows that retreat, (<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀναχώρησις</foreign>) detachment
+of spirit, is quite possible without withdrawing from the
+noises of the world.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xx. § 8,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">μὴ οὖν βελτίστη καὶ λυσιτελεστάτη πασῶν ἡ εἰς αὐτὸν
+ἀναχώρησις κτλ.</foreign> Hatch, <hi rend="italic">Hib. Lec.</hi> p. 150.</note> And he felt himself charged with a
+mission to bring the higher principles of conduct into the civic
+life of the time. We know from Pliny’s correspondence with
+Trajan, that the great cities of Bithynia, and not least Dion’s
+birthplace,<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> x. 17, 23, 24, 58; Bury,
+<hi rend="italic">Rom. Emp.</hi> p. 439.</note> were then suffering from unskilful administration
+and wasteful finance. Dion completes the picture by showing
+us their miserable bickerings and jealousies about the most
+trivial things. He denounces the unscrupulous flattery of the
+masses by men whose only object was the transient distinction
+of municipal office, the passion for place and power, without any
+sober wish to serve or elevate the community. He also exposes
+the caprice, the lazy selfishness, and the petulant ingratitude of
+the crowd.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxiv. § 10, 14, 48;
+xxxviii. § 11; xxxiv. § 16, 19, 29, 31.</note> Dion, it is true, is an idealist, and his ideals of society
+are perhaps not much nearer realisation in some of our great cities
+than they were then. He often delivered his message to the
+most unpromising audiences. Some of his finest conceptions
+of social reorganisation were expounded before rude gatherings
+on the very verge of civilisation.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxxvi.</note> Once, in his wanderings, he
+found himself under the walls of a half-ruined Greek town,
+which had been attacked, the day before, by a horde of Scythian
+barbarians. There, on the steps of the temple of Zeus, he
+<pb n="372"/><anchor id="Pg372"/>expounded to an eager throng of mean Greek traders, with
+all the worst vices, and only some faded traces of the culture
+of their race, the true meaning of city life.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxvi. § 15, 8, 9,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πάντες οἱ Βορυσθενῖται περὶ τὸν ποιητὴν ἐσπουδάκασιν κτλ.</foreign> Cf. § 20, 23.</note> It is a society of
+men under the kingship of law, from which all greed, intemperance,
+and violence have been banished; a little world which,
+in its peaceful order and linked harmonies, should be modelled
+on the more majestic order of the great city of the universe,
+the city of gods and men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How far from their ideal were the cities of his native land,
+Dion saw only too well. The urban life of Asia, as the result
+of the Greek conquests, has perhaps never been surpassed in
+external splendour and prosperity, and even in a diffusion of
+intellectual culture. The palmy days of the glorious spring-time
+of Hellenic vigour and genius in Miletus, Phocaea, and
+Rhodes, seemed to be reproduced even in inland places, which
+for 1500 years have returned to waste.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Rom. Prov.</hi> i. pp. 326, 354;
+cf. Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xiv. xv. 223-230 (Dind.).</note> Agriculture and
+trade combined to produce an extraordinary and prosperous
+activity. Education was endowed and organised, and literary
+culture became almost universal.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Rom. Prov.</hi> i. p. 362; cf.
+Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> i. 7; <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi>
+i. p. 220,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ προβήσεσθαι ἐπὶ μέγα τὰς Κλαζομενὰς ἡγουμένων εἰ τοιοῦτος δὴ ἀνὲρ
+ἐμπαιδεύσοι σφισίν κτλ.</foreign></note> Nowhere did the wandering
+sophist find more eager audiences, and no part of the Roman
+world in that age contributed so great a number of teachers,
+physicians, and philosophers. The single province of Bithynia,
+within half a century, could boast of such names as Arrian, Dion
+Cassius, and Dion Chrysostom himself. But moral and political
+improvement did not keep pace with an immense material
+and intellectual progress. The life of the cities indeed was very
+intense; but, in the absence of the wider interests of the great
+days of freedom, they wasted their energies in futile contests
+for visionary distinctions and advantages. A continual struggle
+was going on for the <q>primacy</q> of the province, and the name
+of metropolis. Ephesus, the real capital, was challenged by
+Smyrna, which on its coins describes itself as <q>first in greatness
+and beauty.</q><note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Rom. Prov.</hi> i. pp. 329, 330;
+cf. Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xv.; Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll.
+Tyan.</hi> iv. 7,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">φρονεῖν ἐκέλευεν ἐφ’ ἑαυτοῖς μᾶλλον ἢ τῷ τῆς πόλεως εἴδει.</foreign> D.
+Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxiv. 48; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sitteng.</hi>
+iii. p. 111.</note> The feuds between Nicomedia and its near
+neighbour Nicaea caused Dion particular anxiety, and his speech
+<pb n="373"/><anchor id="Pg373"/>to the people of Nicomedia is the best picture of the evils
+which we are describing.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxviii. § 7, 31, 36.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The two cities have much in common. Their families have
+intermarried; they are constantly meeting in their markets
+and great religious festivals. They are bound together by
+innumerable ties of private friendship.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xl. § 27,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἡ δὲ τῶν ἐγγὺς οὕτως καὶ ὀμόρων διαφορὰ καὶ τὸ μῖσος οὐδὲν
+ἄλλο ἔοικεν ἢ στάσει μιᾶς πόλεως ὅπου καὶ γάμων κοινωνία, κτλ.</foreign></note> The primacy for which
+they contend is the merest figment; there are no material
+advantages at stake. Rather, these dissensions give a corrupt
+Roman governor, who trades upon them, the power to injure
+both the rival claimants.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxxviii. §§ 26-31.</note> The same is true of other cities.
+Tarsus is engaged in bitter contention with Mallus for a mere
+line of sandhills on their frontiers.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxxiv. §§ 44-48,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">αἱ μὲν οὖν θῖνες καὶ τὸ πρὸς τῇ λίμνῃ χωρίον οὐδενὸς ἄξια</foreign>.</note> Dion’s native Prusa has
+an exasperated quarrel with Apamea for no solid reason whatever,
+although the two towns are closely linked by nature to
+one another, and mutually dependent through their trade and
+manufactures. All this miserable and foolish jealousy Dion
+exposes with excellent skill and sense; and he employs an
+abundant wealth of illustration in painting the happiness which
+attends harmony and good-will. It is the law of the universe,
+from the tiny gregarious insect whose life is but for a day, to
+the eternal procession of the starry spheres. The ant, in the
+common industry of the Lilliputian commonwealth, yields to
+his brother toiler, or helps him on his way.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xl. § 35.</note> The primal
+elements of the Cosmos are tempered to a due observance of
+their several bounds and laws. The sun himself hides his
+splendour each night to give place to the lesser radiance of
+the stars. This is rhetoric, of course, but it is rhetoric with a
+moral burden. And it is impossible not to admire the lofty
+tone of this heathen sophist, preaching the duty of forgiveness,
+of mutual love and deference, the blessing of the quiet spirit
+<q>which seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh
+no evil.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxxviii. §§ 42-46.</note> There is a certain pathos in remembering that,
+within the very walls where these elevated orations were
+delivered, there were shy companies of men and women meeting
+in the early dawn to sing hymns to One who, three
+generations before in Galilee, had taught a similar gospel of love
+<pb n="374"/><anchor id="Pg374"/>and self-suppression, but with a strange mystic charm, denied
+to the pagan eloquence, and that Dion seems never to have
+known those with whom he had so close a kindred.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> x. 96, § 7.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In many another oration Dion strove to raise the moral
+tone of his age. His speech to the Alexandrians is probably
+his most gallant protest against the besetting sins of a great
+population. Alexandria was a congeries of many races, in
+which probably the Hellenic type of the Ptolemies had succumbed
+to the enduring Egyptian <hi rend="italic">morale</hi>.<note place="foot">Mahaffy, <hi rend="italic">Greek World under
+Roman Sway</hi>, p. 242; Merivale, viii.
+p. 239; Momms. <hi rend="italic">Rom. Prov.</hi> ii. p. 264.</note> It was a populace at once
+sensual and superstitious, passionately devoted to all excitement,
+whether of games or orgiastic religious festival, with a
+jeering irreverent vein, which did not spare even the greatest
+Emperors. It was a curious medley—the seat of the most
+renowned university of the ancient world, the gathering-place
+and seed-ground of ideas which united the immemorial
+mysticism of the East with the clear, cold reason of Hellas—and
+yet a seething hot-bed of obscenity, which infected the
+Roman world, a mob who gave way to lunatic excitement over
+the triumph of an actor, or a singer, or the victor in a chariot-race.<note place="foot">Momms. ii. p. 263; D. Chrys. xxxii.;
+Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 81; Ael. Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c.
+12, 14; D. Cass. lxix. 11; Petron. 31, 68.</note>
+It required no ordinary courage to address such a crowd,
+and to charge them with their glaring faults. The people of
+Alexandria are literally intoxicated with a song. The music
+which, according to old Greek theory, should regulate the passions,
+here only maddens them.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxii. § 57, 41, 51,
+55; Pl. <hi rend="italic">Rep.</hi> iii. 399; Arist. <hi rend="italic">Pol.</hi> viii. 5.</note> And in the races all human
+dignity seems to be utterly lost in the futile excitement of the
+spectators over some low fellow contending for a prize in solid
+cash.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xxxii. § 75.</note> Such a mob earns only the contempt of its rulers, and
+men say that the Alexandrians care for nothing but the <q>big
+loaf</q> and the sight of a race.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 31,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οἷς μόνον δεῖ παραβάλλειν τὸν πολὺν ἄρτον</foreign>.</note> All the dignity which should
+surround a great people is forgotten in the theatre. It is
+useless to boast of the majestic and bounteous river, the
+harbours and markets crowded with the merchandise of
+Western or Indian seas, of the visitors from every land, from
+Italy, Greece, and Syria, from the Borysthenes, the Oxus, and
+the Ganges.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 40.</note> They come to witness the shame of the second
+<pb n="375"/><anchor id="Pg375"/>city in the world, which, in the wantonness of prosperity, has
+lost the temperate dignity and orderly calm that are the real
+glory of a great people.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As a foil to the feverish life of luxury, quarrelsome rivalry,
+and vulgar excitement which prevailed in the great towns,
+Dion has left a prose idyll to idealise the simple pleasures and
+virtues of the country.<note place="foot">See an excellent analysis of this
+piece (vii.) in Mahaffy’s <hi rend="italic">Greek World
+under Roman Sway</hi>, pp. 277-288.</note> It is also a dirge over the decay
+of Greece, when crops were being reaped in the agora of historic
+cities, and the tall grasses grew around the statues of gods and
+heroes of the olden time.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> vii. § 34 sqq.</note> A traveller, cast ashore in the wreck
+of his vessel on the dreaded Hollows of Euboea, was sheltered, in
+a rude, warm-hearted fashion, by some peasants. Their fathers
+had been turned adrift in the confiscation of the estate of a
+great noble in some trouble with the emperor, and they had
+made themselves a lonely home on a pastoral slope, close to a
+stream, with the neighbouring shade of trees. They had taken
+into tillage a few fields around their huts; they drove their
+cattle to the high mountain pastures in summer time, and in
+the winter they turned to hunting the game along the snowy
+tracks. Of city life they know hardly anything. One of them,
+indeed, had been twice in the neighbouring town, and he tells
+what he saw there in a lively way. It is all a mere shadow
+or caricature of the old civic life of Greece. There are the
+rival orators, patriot or demagogue, the frivolous and capricious
+crowd, the vote of the privilege of dining in the town-hall. The
+serious purpose of the piece, however, is to idealise the simple
+virtue and happiness of the country folk, and to discuss the
+disheartening problem of the poor in great cities.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> §§ 105-108.</note> It is in
+the main the problem of our modern urban life, and Dion had
+evidently thought deeply about it, and was an acute observer
+of the social misery which is the same from age to age.
+Fortified by the divine Homer and ordinary experience, he
+points out that the poor are more generous and helpful to the
+needy than are the rich out of their ample store. Too often
+the seeming bounty of the wealthy benefactor is of the nature
+of a loan, which is to be returned with due interest.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> §§ 82-89,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">αἱ γὰρ δὴ φιλοφρονήσεις καὶ χάριτες, ἐὰν σκοπῇ τις ὀρθῶς, οὐδὲν διαφέρουσιν
+ἐράνων καὶ δανείων</foreign>.</note> The
+struggles and temptations of the poor in great cities suggest a
+<pb n="376"/><anchor id="Pg376"/>discussion of the perpetual problem of prostitution, which
+probably no ancient writer ever faced so boldly. The double
+degradation of humanity, which it involved in the ancient world,
+is powerfully painted;<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> vii. § 133; Musonius,
+Stob. <hi rend="italic">Flor.</hi> vi. 61; cf. on this
+subject Denis, <hi rend="italic">Idées Morales</hi>, etc. ii. p.
+134.</note> and the plea that the indulgence in venal
+immorality is the only alternative to insidious attacks on family
+virtue is discussed with singular firmness and yet delicacy of
+touch.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> vii. § 139.</note> The same detachment from contemporary prejudice is
+shown in Dion’s treatment of slavery. He sees its fell effects
+on the masters, in producing sensuality, languor, and helpless
+dependence on others for the slightest services. He points
+out that there is no criterion afforded by nature to distinguish
+slave and free. The so-called free man of the highest rank
+may be the offspring of a servile amour, and the so-called slave
+may be ingenuous in every sense, condemned to bondage by an
+accident of fortune.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> x. § 13; xv. § 5; 6, 31; cf.
+Juv. xiv. 16; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ben.</hi> iii. 21; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+47; cf. Denis, ii. 152; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel.
+Rom.</hi> ii. p. 354.</note> Just as external freedom does not imply
+moral worth, so legal enslavement does not imply moral degradation.<note place="foot">Cf. Newman’s <hi rend="italic">Politics of Aristotle</hi>,
+Introd. p. 144.</note>
+If moral justice always fixed the position of men
+in society by their deserts, master and slave would often have
+to change places.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xv. § 31.</note> In Dion’s judgment as to the enervating
+effects of slavery on the slave-owning class, and the absence of
+any moral or mental distinction to justify the institution, he
+is in singular harmony with Seneca.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The similarity of tone between Seneca and Dion is perhaps
+even more marked in their treatment of monarchy. Inherited,
+like so much else, from the great Greek thinkers of the fifth
+and fourth centuries <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, the ideal of a beneficent and unselfish
+prince, the true <q>shepherd of the people,</q> the antithesis of
+the lawless and sensual tyrant, had become, partly, no
+doubt, through the influence of the schools of rhetoric, a
+common possession of cultivated minds. Vespasian gave it
+a certain reality, if his son Domitian showed how easily the
+king might pass into the tyrant. The dream of an earthly
+providence, presiding over the Roman world, dawned in more
+durable splendour with the accession of Trajan, and Pliny,
+his panegyrist, has left us a sketch of the patriot prince,
+<pb n="377"/><anchor id="Pg377"/>which is almost identical with the lines of Dion’s ideal.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> i. § 13; ii. §§ 75-77;
+iii. § 39, 62, 107; iv. § 63; cf. Plin.
+<hi rend="italic">Paneg.</hi> 72, 80, 67; Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 13,
+§ 4; i. 19, § 2.</note>
+Both Dion and Pliny were favourites of Trajan, and some of
+Dion’s orations were delivered before his court. As a court
+preacher, he justly boasts that he is no mere flatterer, although
+we may suspect that his picture of the ideal monarch might
+have been interpreted as drawn from the character of Trajan,
+just as his picture of the tyrant was probably suggested by
+Domitian.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> i. § 79; cf. iii. §§ 5, 6.</note> Still, we may well believe the orator when he
+says that the man who had bearded the one at the cost of
+long exile and penury, was not likely to flatter the other for
+the gold or honours which he despised. And in these
+discourses, Dion seems full of the sense of a divine mission.
+Once, on his wanderings, he lost his way somewhere on the
+boundaries of Arcadia, and, ascending a knoll to recover the
+track, he found himself before a rude, ruined shrine of
+Heracles, hung with votive offerings of the chase.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. § 52.</note> An aged
+woman sat by them who told him that she had a spirit of
+divination from the gods. The shepherds and peasants used
+to come to her with questions about the fate of their flocks
+and crops. And she now entrusted Dion with a message to
+the great ruler of many men whom she prophesied Dion was
+soon to meet.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 56.</note> It was a tale of Heracles, the great benefactor
+of men from the rising to the setting sun, who, by his simple
+strength, crushed all lawless monsters and gave the world
+an ordered peace. His father inspired him with noble
+impulse for his task by oracle and omen, and sent Hermes
+once, when Heracles was still a boy at Thebes, to show him
+the vision of the Two Peaks, and strengthen him in his virtue.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 66.</note>
+They rose from the same rocky roots, amid precipitous crags
+and deep ravines, and the noise of many waters. At first they
+seemed to be one mountain mass, but they soon parted wide
+asunder, the one being sacred to Zeus, the other to the lawless
+Typhon. On the one crest, rising into the cloudless ether,
+Kingship sits enthroned, in the likeness of a fair, stately
+woman, clad in robes of glistening white, and wielding a
+sceptre of brighter and purer metal than any silver or gold.
+Under her steady gaze of radiant dignity, the good felt a
+<pb n="378"/><anchor id="Pg378"/>cheerful confidence, the bad quailed and shrank away. She
+was surrounded by handmaidens of a beauty like her own,
+Justice and Peace and Order. The paths to the other peak
+were many and secret, and skirted an abyss, streaming with
+blood or choked with corpses. Its top was wrapped in mist
+and cloud, and there sat Tyranny on a far higher and more
+pompous throne, adorned with gold and ivory and many a
+gorgeous colour, but a throne rocking and unstable. She
+strove to make herself like to Kingship, but it was all mere
+hollow pretence. Instead of the gracious smile, there was a
+servile, hypocritical leer; instead of the glance of dignity,
+there was a savage scowl. And around her sat a throng
+bearing ill-omened names, Cruelty and Lust, Lawlessness and
+Flattery and Sedition. On a question from Hermes, the
+youthful Heracles made his choice, and his father gave him
+his commission to be the saviour of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this fashion Dion, like Aeschylus, recasts old myth to
+make it the vehicle of moral instruction, just as he finds in
+Homer the true teacher of kings.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> iv. § 39.</note> The theory of ideal monarchy
+is developed at such length as may have somewhat wearied
+the emperor. But it really is based on a few great principles.
+True kings, in Homer’s phrase, are sons of Zeus, and they are
+shepherds of the people. All genuine political power rests on
+virtue, and ultimately on the favour of Heaven. A king is
+appointed by God to work the good of his subjects. And, as
+his authority is divine, an image on earth of the sovereignty of
+Zeus, the monarch will be a scrupulously religious man in the
+highest sense,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. §§ 51, 62,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ ἄρχειν οὐδαμῶς ῥᾴθυμον ἀλλ’ ἐπίπονον κτλ.</foreign></note> not merely by offering costly sacrifices, but by
+righteousness, diligence, and self-sacrifice in performing the duties
+of his solemn charge. The many titles addressed to Father Zeus
+represent so many aspects of royal activity and virtue. The
+true prince will be the father of his people, surrounded and
+guarded by a loving reverence, which never degenerates into
+fear. His only aim will be their good. He will keep sleepless
+watch over the weak, the careless, those who are heedless for
+themselves. Commanding infinite resources, he will know less
+of mere pleasure than any man within his realm. With such
+immense responsibilities, he will be the most laborious of all.
+His only advantage over the private citizen is in his boundless
+<pb n="379"/><anchor id="Pg379"/>command of friendship; for all men must be well-wishers to
+one wielding such a beneficent power, with whom, from his
+conception of his mission, they must feel an absolute identity
+of interest. And the king’s greatest need is friendship, to
+provide him with myriads of hands and eyes in the vast work
+of government.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> iii. §§ 38, 88, 107.</note> Herein lies the sharpest contrast between the
+true king and the tyrant, a contrast which was a commonplace
+in antiquity, but which was stamped afresh by the juxtaposition
+of the reign of Domitian and the reign of Trajan. The universal
+hatred which pursued a bad Caesar even beyond the grave,
+which erased his name from monuments and closed its eyes
+even to intervals of serious purpose for the general weal, was a
+terrible illustration of the lonely friendlessness of selfish power.<note place="foot">Sueton. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xxxiii.; <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> lx.
+abolendam Caesarum memoriam ac diruenda
+templa censuerunt; cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi>
+698, 699, 767, where the names of
+Caligula and Domitian have been
+erased.</note>
+Instead of loyal and grateful friendship, the despot was mocked
+by a venal flattery which was only its mimicry. The good
+monarch will treat flatterers as false coiners who cause the
+genuine currency to be suspected. This counsel and others of
+Dion were often little regarded by succeeding emperors. Yet
+even the last shadowy princes of the fifth century professed
+themselves the guardians of the human race, and are oppressed
+by an ideal of universal beneficence which they are impotent
+to realise.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Nov. Valent.</hi> tit. viii.; <hi rend="italic">Leg. Anthem.</hi>
+tit. i.; <hi rend="italic">Nov. Mart.</hi> ii.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hitherto we have been occupied with the preaching of
+Dion on personal conduct, the reform of civic life, or the
+duties of imperial power. It cannot be said that he discusses
+these subjects without reference to religious beliefs and
+aspirations.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> vii. § 135, where the
+gods of pure wedlock are appealed to
+against vagrant vice.</note> But religion is rather in the background; the
+reverence for the Heavenly Powers is rather assumed as a
+necessary basis for human life rightly ordered. There is one
+oration, however, of supreme interest to the modern mind, in
+which Dion goes to the root of all religion, and examines the
+sources of belief in God and the justification of anthropomorphic
+imagery in representing Him. This utterance was
+called forth by a visit to Olympia when Dion was advanced
+in years.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xii. § 20.</note> The games of Olympia were a dazzling and
+<pb n="380"/><anchor id="Pg380"/>inspiring spectacle, and the multitude which gathered there
+from all parts of the world was a splendid audience. But,
+with the sound of the sacred trumpet, and the herald’s voice,
+proclaiming the victor, in his ears, Dion turns away from all
+the glory of youthful strength and grace, even from the
+legendary splendour of the great festival,<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. § 26.</note> to the majestic
+figure of the Olympian Zeus, which had been graved by the
+hand of Pheidias more than 500 years before, and to the
+thoughts of the divine world which it suggested. That
+greatest triumph of idealism in plastic art, inspired by
+famous lines in the <hi rend="italic">Iliad</hi>, was, by the consent of all antiquity,
+the masterpiece of Pheidias. Ancient writers of many ages
+are lost in admiration of the mingled majesty and benignity
+which the divine effigy expressed. To the eyes of Lucian it
+seemed <q>the very son of Kronos brought down to earth, and
+set to watch over the lonely plain of Elis.</q><note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Sacrif.</hi> 11,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οἴονται ὁρᾶν ... αὐτὸν τὸν Κρόνου καὶ Ῥέας εἰς τὴν γῆν
+ὑπὸ Φειδίου μετῳκισμένον καὶ τὴν Πισαίων ἐρημίαν ἐπισκοπεῖν
+κεκελευσμένον</foreign>.</note> There it sat
+watching for more than 800 years, till it was swept away in
+the fierce, final effort to dethrone the religion of the past.
+Yet the majestic image, which attracted the fury of the
+iconoclasts of the reign of Theodosius, inspired Dion with
+thoughts of the Divine nature which travelled far beyond the
+paganism either of poetry or of the crowd. It was not merely
+the masterpiece of artistic and constructive skill which had
+fascinated the gaze, and borne the vicissitudes, of so many
+centuries, that moved his admiration; it was also, and more,
+the moral effect of that miracle of art on the spectator. The
+wildest and fiercest of the brute creation might be calmed and
+softened by the air of majestic peace and kindness which
+floated around the gold and ivory. <q>Whosoever among
+mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit, having drunk
+the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before
+this image, methinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and
+woes of this mortal life.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. § 51,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">άνθρώπων δέ, ὃς ἂν ῃ παντελῶς ἐπίπονὰς τὴν ψυχήν,
+πολλὰς ἀπαντλήσας ξυμφορὰς καὶ λύπας ἐν τῷ βίῳ ...
+καὶ ὃς δοκεῖ μοι κατεναντίον στὰς τῆσδε τῆς εἰκόνος ἐκλαθέσθαι
+πάντων ὅσα ἐν ἀνθρωπίνῳ βίῳ δεινὰ καὶ χαλεπὰ
+γίγνεται παθεῖν.</foreign></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the thoughts of Dion, in presence of the majestic
+figure at Olympia, take a wider range. His theme is nothing
+<pb n="381"/><anchor id="Pg381"/>less than the sources of our idea of God, and the place of art in
+religion. He pours his scorn upon hedonistic atheism. Our
+conception of God is innate, original, universal among all the
+races of men.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. §§ 27, 28, 33, 42; cf. Sen.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 117, § 6, omnibus insita de dis
+opinio est.</note> It is the product of the higher reason, contemplating
+the majestic order, minute adaptation, and beneficent
+provision for human wants in the natural world. In
+that great temple, with its alternations of gloom and splendour,
+its many voices of joy or of terror, man is being perpetually
+initiated in the Great Mysteries, on a grander scale than at
+Eleusis, with God Himself to preside over the rites. The
+belief in God depends in the first instance on no human
+teaching, any more than does the love of child to parent.
+But this original intuition and belief in divine powers finds
+expression through the genius of inspired poets; it is reinforced
+by the imperative prescriptions of the founders and lawgivers
+of states; it takes external form in bronze or gold and ivory
+or marble, under the cunning hand of the great artist; it is
+developed and expounded by philosophy.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. §§ 42, 43.</note> Like all the
+deepest thinkers of his time, Dion is persuaded of the certainty
+of God’s existence, but he is equally conscious of the remoteness
+of the Infinite Spirit, and of the weakness of all human
+effort to approach, or to picture it to the mind of man. We
+are to Dion like <q>children crying in the night, and with no
+language but a cry.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 61,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὥσπερ νήπιοι παῖδες πατρὸς ἢ μητρὸς ἀπεσπασμένοι ...
+ὀρέγουσι χεῖρας οὐ παροῦσι πολλάκις ὀνειρώττοντες κτλ.</foreign></note> Yet the child will strive to image
+forth the face of the Father, although it is hidden behind a
+veil which will never be withdrawn in this world. The
+genius of poetry, commanding the most versatile power of
+giving utterance to the religious imagination, is first in order
+and in power. Law and institution follow in its wake. The
+plastic arts, under cramping limitations, come later still to
+body forth the divine dreams of the elder bards. Dion had
+thought much on the relative power of poetry and the
+sculptor’s art to give expression to the thoughts and feelings
+of man about the Divine nature. The boundless power or
+licence of language to find a symbol for every thought or
+image on the phantasy is seen at its height in Homer, who
+<pb n="382"/><anchor id="Pg382"/>riots in an almost lawless exercise of his gifts.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. § 62.</note> But the chief
+importance of the discussion lies in an arraignment of Pheidias
+for attempting to image in visible form the great Soul and
+Ruler of the universe, Whom mortal eye has never seen and
+can never see. His defence is very interesting, both as a
+clear statement of the limitations of the plastic arts, and as a
+justification of material images of the Divine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Pheidias pleads in his defence that the artist could not, if
+he would, desert the ancient religious tradition, which was
+consecrated in popular imagination by the romance of poetry;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 56.</note>
+that is fixed for ever. Granted that the Divine nature is far
+removed from us, and far beyond our ken; yet, as little
+children separated from their parents, feel a strong yearning
+for them and stretch out their hands vainly in their dreams,
+so the race of man, from love and kindred, longs ever to draw
+nigh to the unseen God by prayer and sacrifice and visible
+symbol. The ruder races will image their god in trees or shapeless
+stones, or may seek a strange symbol in some of the lower
+forms of animal life.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 61; cf. Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi>
+lxxi., lxxii., lxxvi.; Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll.
+Tyan.</hi> vi. 19; Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> viii.
+§ 5.</note> The higher may find sublime expression
+of His essence in the sun and starry spheres. For the pure
+and infinite mind which has engendered and which sustains the
+universe of life, no sculptor or painter of Hellas has ever found,
+or can ever find, full and adequate expression.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. § 59,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">νοῦν γὰρ καὶ φρόνησιν αὐτὴν καθ’ αὑτὴν οὔτε τις πλάστης
+οὔτε τις γραφεὺς εἰκάσαι δυνατὸς ἔσται</foreign>: Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> lxxix.</note> Hence men
+take refuge in the vehicle and receptacle of the noblest spirit
+known to them, the form of man. And the Infinite Spirit, of
+which the human is an effluence, may perhaps best be embodied
+in the form of His child.<note place="foot">Cf. Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> viii. § 3,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ μὲν Ἑλληνικὸν τιμᾶν τοὺς θεοὺς ἐνομίσε τῶν ἐν γῇ καλλίστοις,
+ὕλῃ μὲν καθαρᾷμορφῇ δὲ ἀνθρωπίνῃ τέχνῃ δὲ ἀκριβεῖ</foreign>.</note> But no effort or ecstasy of artistic
+fancy, in form or colour, can ever follow the track of the Homeric
+imagination in its majesty and infinite variety of expression.
+The sculptor and painter have fixed limits set to their skill,
+beyond which they cannot pass. They can appeal only to the
+eye; their material has not the infinite ductility and elasticity
+of the poetic dialect of many tribes and many generations.
+They can seize only a single moment of action or passion, and
+fix it for ever in bronze or stone. Yet Pheidias, with a certain
+<pb n="383"/><anchor id="Pg383"/>modest self-assertion, pleads that his conception of the Olympian
+Zeus, although less various and seductive than Homer’s, although
+he cannot present to the gazer the crashing thunderbolt or the
+baleful star, or the heaving of Olympus, is perhaps more elevating
+and inspiring.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. § 78.</note> The Zeus of Pheidias is the peace-loving
+and gentle providence of an undisturbed and harmonious
+Greece, the august giver of all good gifts, the father and
+saviour and guardian of men. The many names by which
+men call him may each find some answering trait in the
+laborious work of the chisel. In the lines of that majestic
+and benign image are shadowed forth the mild king and father,
+the hearer of prayer, the guardian of civic order and family
+love, the protector of the stranger, and the power who gives
+fertile increase to flock and field. The Zeus of Pheidias and
+of Dion is a God of mercy and peace, with no memory of the
+wars of the Giants.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> §§ 74, 75.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Dion is a popular teacher of morality, not a thinker or
+theologian. But this excursion into the field of theology
+shows him at his best. And it prepares us for the study of
+some more formal efforts to find a theology in the poetry
+of legend.
+</p>
+
+</div><div type="chapter" n="3" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="384"/><anchor id="Pg384"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="III. The philosophic theologian"/><index index="pdf" level1="III. The philosophic theologian"/>
+<head>CHAPTER III</head>
+
+<head type="sub">THE PHILOSOPHIC THEOLOGIAN</head>
+
+<p>
+The times were ripe for a theodicy. Religion of every mood
+and tone, of every age and clime, was in the air, and philosophy
+had abandoned speculation and turned to the direction of conduct
+and spiritual life. The mission of philosophy is to find
+the one in the many, and never did the religious life of men
+offer a more bewildering multiplicity and variety, not to say
+chaos, to the ordering power of philosophy. The scepticism
+of the Neronian age had almost disappeared. The only
+rationalists of any distinction in the second century were
+Lucian and Galen.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. pp. 430, 435; cf. Thiersch, <hi rend="italic">Politik u. Phil. in ihrem
+Verhältn. zur Religion</hi>, p. 9.</note> It was an age of imperious spiritual
+cravings, alike among the cultivated and the vulgar. But
+the thin abstractions of the old Latin faith and the brilliant
+anthropomorphism of Greece had ceased to satisfy even the
+crowd. It was an age with a longing for a religious system
+less formal and coldly external, for a religion more satisfying
+to the deeper emotions, a religion which should offer divine
+help to human need and misery, divine guidance amid the
+darkness of time; above all, a divine light in the mystery of
+death. The glory of classic art had mysteriously closed. It
+was an age rather of material splendour, and, at first sight, an
+age of bourgeois ideals of parochial fame and mere enjoyment
+of the hour. Yet the Antonine age has some claim to spiritual
+distinction. In the dim, sub-conscious feelings of the masses,
+as well as in the definite spiritual effort of the higher minds,
+there was really a great movement towards a ruling principle
+of conduct and a spiritual vision. Men often, indeed, followed
+<pb n="385"/><anchor id="Pg385"/>the marsh-light through strange devious paths into wildernesses
+peopled with the spectres of old-world superstition. But the
+light of the Holy Grail had at last flashed on the eyes of some
+loftier minds. From the early years of the second century we
+can trace that great combined movement of the new Platonism
+and the revived paganism,<note place="foot">Thiersch, <hi rend="italic">Politik und Philosophie
+in ihrem Verhältniss zur Religion</hi>, pp.
+14, 15.</note> which so long retarded the triumph
+of the Church, and yet, in the Divinely-guided evolution, was
+destined to prepare men for it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old religion had not lost all hold on men’s minds, as it is
+sometimes said to have done, in rather too sweeping language.
+The punctilious ritual with which, in the stately narrative of
+Tacitus, the Capitol was restored by Vespasian, the pious care
+with which the young Aurelius recited the Salian litany in
+words no longer understood, the countless victims which he
+offered to the guardian gods of Rome in evil days of pestilence
+and doubtful war, these things reveal the strength of the
+religion of Numa. Two centuries after M. Aurelius was in his
+grave, the deities which had cradled the Roman state, and
+watched over its career, were still objects of reverence to the
+conservative circle of Symmachus. A religion which was
+intertwined with the whole fabric of government and society,
+which gave its sanction or benediction to every act and
+incident in the individual life, which was omnipresent in game
+and festival, in temple and votive monument, was placed far
+beyond the influence of changing fashions of devotion. It
+was a powerful stay of patriotism, a powerful bond of civic
+and family life; it threw a charm of awe and old-world sanctity
+around everything it touched. But for the deeper spiritual
+wants and emotions it furnished little nutriment. To find
+relief and cleansing from the sense of guilt, cheer and glad
+exaltation of pious emotion, consolation in the common miseries
+of life, and hope in the shadow of death, men had to betake
+themselves to other systems. The oriental religions were pouring
+in like a flood, and spreading over all the West. One
+Antonine built a shrine of Mithra,<note place="foot">Réville, <hi rend="italic">Rel. unter den Sev.</hi> p. 81.</note> another took the tonsure
+of Isis.<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Commodus</hi>, c. 9.</note> The priests and acolytes of the Egyptian goddess
+were everywhere, chanting their litanies in solemn processions
+<pb n="386"/><anchor id="Pg386"/>along the streets, instructing and baptizing their catechumens,
+and, in the alternating gloom and splendour of their mysteries,
+bearing the entranced soul to the boundaries of life and death.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 11, 22.</note>
+Mithra, <q>the Unconquered,</q> was justifying his name. In
+every district from the Euxine to the Solway he brought a
+new message to heathendom. Pure from all grossness of
+myth, the Persian god of light came as the mediator and
+comforter, to soothe the poor and broken-hearted, and give the
+cleansing of the mystic blood. His hierarchy of the initiated,
+his soothing symbolic sacraments, his gorgeous ritual, and his
+promise of immortality to those who drank the mystic Haoma,
+gratified and stimulated religious longings which were to find
+their full satisfaction in the ministry of the Church.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the religious imagination was not satisfied with historic
+and accredited systems. Travel and conquest were adding to
+the spiritual wealth or burden of the Roman race. In lonely
+Alpine passes, in the deserts of Africa, or the Yorkshire dales,
+in every ancient wood or secret spring which he passed in his
+wanderings or campaigns, the Roman found hosts of new
+divinities, possible helpers or possible enemies, whose favour
+it was expedient to win.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 186, 193, 228 sqq., 275,
+1637, 1580, 5873, 5879, 5887, 1993.</note> And, where he knew not their
+strange outlandish names, he would try to propitiate them all
+together under no name, or any name that pleased them.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 110, 111.</note>
+And, as if this vague multitude of ghostly powers were not
+large enough for devotion, the fecundity of imagination created
+a host of genii, of haunting or guarding spirits, attached to
+every place or scene, to every group or corporation of men
+which had a place in Roman life. There were genii of the
+secret spring or grove, of the camp, the legion, the cohort, of
+the Roman people, above all, there was the genius of the
+emperor.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6628 (fontis), 4922
+(castrorum), 1704 (legionis), 1812
+(Neronis), 3953 (Hadriani).</note> Apotheosis went on apace—apotheosis not merely
+of the emperors, but of a theurgic philosopher like Apollonius,
+of a minion like Antinous, of a mere impostor like Alexander
+of Abonoteichos.<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Alex. Sev.</hi> c. 29; Spart.
+<hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> 14, § 5; Luc. <hi rend="italic">Peregr.</hi> c. 29;
+Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. pp. 454-456.
+Thiersch, <hi rend="italic">Pol. u. Phil. in Verhältn.
+zur Rel.</hi> p. 10.</note> Old oracles, which had been suppressed or
+decadent in the reign of Nero, sprang into fresh life and
+popularity in the reign of Trajan. New sources of oracular
+<pb n="387"/><anchor id="Pg387"/>inspiration were opened, some of them challenging for the
+time the ancient fame of Delphi or Dodona.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> 19; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sitteng.</hi>
+iii. p. 470; Thiersch, p. 19.</note> According to
+Lucian, oracles were pealing from every rock and every altar.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Deor. Conc.</hi> 12,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλὰ ἤδη πᾶς λίθος καὶ πᾶς βωμὸς ... χρησμῳδεῖ</foreign>.</note>
+Every form of revelation or divination, every avenue of access
+to the Divine, was eagerly sought for, or welcomed with pious
+credulity. The study of omens and dreams was reduced to the
+form of a pseudo-science by a host of writers like Artemidorus.
+The sacred art of healing through visions of the night found a
+home in those charming temples of Asclepius, which rose
+beside so many hallowed springs, with fair prospect and genial
+air, where the god revealed his remedy in dreams, and a lore
+half hieratic, half medical, was applied to relieve the sufferer.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sitteng.</hi> iii. pp 474-478;
+Wolff, <hi rend="italic">De Nov. Orac. Aetate</hi>, p. 29 sq.</note>
+Miracles and special providences, the most marvellous or the
+most grotesque, were chronicled with unquestioning faith, not
+only by fanatics like Aelian, but by learned historians like
+Tacitus and Suetonius. Tales of witchcraft and weird sorcery
+are as eagerly believed at Trimalchio’s dinner-table<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 61, 62.</note> as in
+lonely villages of Thessaly. On the higher level of the new
+Pythagorean faith, everything is possible to the pure spirit.
+To such a soul God will reveal Himself by many voices to
+which gross human clay is deaf; the future lays bare its secrets;
+nature yields up her hidden powers. Spiritual detachment
+triumphs over matter and time; and the Pythagorean apostle
+predicts a plague at Ephesus, casts out demons, raises the
+dead, vanishes like a phantom from the clutches of Domitian.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> v. 12; iv.
+5; iv. 10; vii. 5.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At a superficial glance, a state of religion such as has been
+sketched might seem to be a mere bewildering chaos of infinitely
+divided spiritual interest. Men seem to have adopted the
+mythologies of every race, and to have superadded a new
+mythology of positively boundless fecundity. A single votive
+tablet will contain the names of the great gods of Latium and
+Greece, of Persia, Commagene, and Egypt, and beside them,
+strange names of British or Swiss, Celtic, Spanish, or Moorish
+gods, and the vaguely-designated spirits who now seemed
+to float in myriads around the scenes of human life.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 3070, 4316; viii. 9195;
+viii. 4578, Jovi, Junoni, Minervae, Soli
+Mithrae, Herculi, Marti, Genio loci,
+Diis, Deabusque omnibus; cf. viii.
+4578; vi. 504.</note> Yet,
+<pb n="388"/><anchor id="Pg388"/>unperceived by the ordinary devotee, amid all this confused
+ferment, a certain principle of unity or comprehension was
+asserting its power. Although the old gods in Lucian’s piece
+might comically complain that they were being crowded out
+of Olympus by Mithra and Anubis and their barbarous company,<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Jup. Trag.</hi> 8, 9; <hi rend="italic">Deor. Conc.</hi>
+8 sqq.</note>
+there was really little jealousy or repulsion among the
+pagan cults. Ancient ritual was losing its precision of outline;
+the venerable deities of classical myth were putting off
+the decided individuality which had so long distinguished them
+in the popular imagination.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. T.</hi> vi. 40; Baumgart,
+<hi rend="italic">Aristides als Repräsentant der
+Soph. Rhet.</hi> pp. 62, 84; cf. Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi>
+xi. c. 5; Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i. 17.</note> The provinces and attributes
+of kindred deities melted into one another and were finally
+identified; syncretism was in the air. Without the unifying
+aid of philosophy, ordinary piety was effecting unconsciously
+a vast process of simplification which tended to ideal unity.
+In the Sacred Orations of Aristides, Poseidon, Athene, Serapis,
+Asclepius, are dropping the peculiar powers by which they
+were so long known, and rising, without any danger of collision,
+to all-embracing sway. So, the Isis of Apuleius, the <q>goddess
+of myriad names,</q> in her vision to Lucius, boldly claims
+to be <q>Queen of the world of shades, first of the inhabitants
+of Heaven, in whom all gods find their unchanging type.</q><note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. cc. 3-6.</note>
+Of course, to the very end, the common superstitious devotion
+of the masses was probably little influenced by the great
+spiritual movement which, in the higher strata, was moulding
+heathen faith into an approach to monotheism. The simple
+peasant still clung to his favourite deity, as his Catholic
+descendant has to-day his favourite saint. But it is in the
+higher minds that the onward sweep of great spiritual movements
+can really be discerned. The initiation of Apuleius in
+all the mysteries, the reverent visits of Apollonius to every
+temple and oracle from the Ganges to the Guadalquivir, the
+matins of Alexander Severus in a chapel which enshrined the
+images of Abraham and Orpheus, of Apollonius and Christ;<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Alex. Sev.</hi> c. 29.</note>
+these, and many other instances of all-embracing devotion,
+point forward to the goal of that Platonist théodicée which it
+is the purpose of this chapter to expound.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The spectacle of an immense efflorescence of pure paganism,
+<pb n="389"/><anchor id="Pg389"/>most of it born of very mundane fears and hopes and desires,
+to men like Lucian was a sight which might, according to the
+mood, move to tears or laughter. But the same great impulse
+which drove the multitude into such wild curiosity of superstition,
+was awaking loftier conceptions of the Divine, and
+feelings of purer devotion in the educated. And sometimes
+the very highest and the very lowest developments of the
+protean religious instinct may be seen in a single mind. Was
+there ever such a combination of the sensualist imagination
+with the ideal of ascetic purity, of the terrors and dark arts
+of anile superstition with the mystic vision of God, as in the
+soul of Apuleius? The painter of the foulest scenes in ancient
+literature seems to have cherished the faith in a heavenly King,
+First Cause of all nature, Father of all living things,<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Apol.</hi> c. 64 (536), totius
+naturae causa et ratio, summus animi
+genitor, aeternus animantum sospitator
+... neque tempore neque loco neque
+vice ulla comprehensus, nemini effabilis;
+cf. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 25; Denis, <hi rend="italic">Hist.
+des Idées Morales</hi>, ii. p. 264.</note> Saviour of
+spirits, beyond the range of time and change, remote, ineffable.
+The prayer of thanksgiving to Isis might, <hi rend="italic">mutatis mutandis</hi>, be
+almost offered in a Christian church. The conception of the
+unity and purity of the Divine One was the priceless conquest
+of Greek philosophy, and pre-eminently of Plato. It had
+been brought home to the Roman world by the teaching of
+Stoicism. But there is a new note in the monotheism of
+the first and second centuries of the Empire. God is no
+longer a mere intellectual postulate, the necessary crown
+and lord of a great cosmic system. He has become a moral
+necessity. His existence is demanded by the heart as well as
+by the intellect. Men craved no longer for a God to explain
+the universe, but to resolve the enigma of their own lives; not
+a blind force, moving on majestically and mercilessly to <q>some
+far-off event,</q> but an Infinite Father guiding in wisdom,
+cherishing in mercy, and finally receiving His children to
+Himself. This is the conception of God which, from Seneca
+to M. Aurelius, is mastering the best minds, both Stoic and
+Platonist.<note place="foot">Thiersch, <hi rend="italic">Pol. u. Phil. in ihrem
+Verhältn. zur Rel.</hi> p. 21, man nennt den
+Marcus einen Stoiker.... Aber
+seine Dogmatik und seine ganze Seelenbestimmung
+gehört schon weit mehr
+dem Neoplatonismus an. Cf. Bussell,
+<hi rend="italic">School of Plato</hi>, pp. 278-290.</note> Seneca, as we have seen in a former chapter, often
+speaks in the hard tones of the older Stoicism. Sometimes
+<pb n="390"/><anchor id="Pg390"/>God, Nature, Fate, Jupiter, are identical terms<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iv. 7.</note>. But the
+cold, materialistic conception of God is irreconcilable with
+many passages in his writings. Like Epictetus and M. Aurelius,
+Seneca is often far more emotional, we may say, far more
+modern, than his professed creed. The materialistic <hi rend="italic">Anima
+Mundi</hi>, interfused with the universe and the nature of man,
+becomes the infinitely benign Creator, Providence, and Guardian,
+the Father, and almost the Friend of men. He is the Author
+of all good, never of evil: He is gentle and pitiful, and to
+attribute to Him storm or pestilence or earthquake or the
+various plagues of human life is an impiety. These things are
+the result of physical law. To such a God boundless gratitude
+is due for His goodness, resignation in the wise chastenings of
+His hand. He chastises whom he loves. In bereavement, He
+takes only what He has given. He is our ready helper in
+every moral effort; no goodness is possible without His succour.
+In return for all His benefits, He asks for no costly material
+offerings, no blood of victims, no steaming incense, no adulation
+in prayer. Faith in God is the true worship of Him. If you
+wish to propitiate Him, imitate His goodness. And for the
+elect soul the day of death is a birthday of eternity, when the
+load of corporeal things is shaken off, and the infinite splendour
+of the immortal life spreads out with no troubling shadow.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p. 649.
+Cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 10, § 5; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 73, § 16; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+41, § 2; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 63, § 7; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 83, § 1; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+95, § 50; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 102, § 28, nulla serenum
+umbra turbabit; <hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> iv. 7; <hi rend="italic">De
+Ira</hi>, ii. 27; <hi rend="italic">De Clem.</hi> i. 7; <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> 1.
+29.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hardly less striking is the warmth of devout feeling which
+suffuses the moral teaching of Epictetus and M. Aurelius.
+They have not indeed abandoned the old Stoic principle that
+man’s final good depends on the rectitude of the will. But
+the Stoic sage is no longer a solitary athlete, conquering by
+his proud unaided strength, and in his victory rising almost
+superior to Zeus. Growing moral experience had taught
+humility, and inspired the sense of dependence on a Higher
+Power in sympathy with man.<note place="foot">Epict. i. 9, § 7,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ δὲ τὸν θεὸν ποιητὴν ἔχειν καὶ πατέρα καὶ κηδεμόνα,
+οὐκέτι ἡμᾶς ἐξαιρήσεται λυπῶν καὶ φόβων</foreign>: cf. i. 3, § 3; Denis, <hi rend="italic">Hist. des
+Idées Morales</hi>, ii. p. 241.</note> No true Stoic, of course,
+could ever forget the Divine element within each human soul
+which linked it with the cosmic soul, and through which man
+might bring himself into harmony with the great polity of
+<pb n="391"/><anchor id="Pg391"/>gods and men. But, somehow, the Divine Power immanent in
+the world, from a dim, cold, impalpable law or fate or impersonal
+force, slowly rounds itself off into a Being, if not
+apart from man, at any rate his superior, his Creator and
+Guardian, nay, in the end, his Father, from whom he comes,
+to whom he returns at death. Some may think this a decline
+from the lofty plane of the older school. The answer is that the
+earlier effort to find salvation through pure reason in obedience
+to the law of the whole, although it may have been magnificent,
+was not a working religion for man as he is constituted. The
+eternal involution of spirit and matter in the old Stoic creed,
+the cold, impersonal, unknowable power, which, under whatever
+name, Law, Reason, Fate, Necessity, permeates the universe,
+necessarily exclude the idea of design, of providence, of moral
+care for humanity. The unknown Power which claims an
+absolute obedience, has no aid or recognition for his worshipper.
+The monism of the old Stoics breaks down. The human
+spirit, in striving to realise its unity with the Universal Spirit,
+realises with more and more intensity the perpetual opposition
+of matter and spirit, while it receives no aid in the conflict from
+the power which ordains it; it <q>finds itself alone in an alien
+world.</q> The true Stoic has no real object of worship. If he
+addresses the impassive centre and soul of his universe, sometimes
+in the rapturous tones of loving devotion, it is only a
+pathetic illusion born of the faiths of the past, or inspired by a
+dim forecast of the faiths of the coming time. How could the
+complex of blind forces arouse any devotion? It demanded
+implicit submission and self-sacrifice, but it gave no help,
+save the name of a Divine element in the human soul; it
+furnished no inspiring example to the sage in the conflicts of
+passion, under obloquy, obstruction, and persecution. Meanwhile,
+in this forlorn struggle, the human character was through
+stress and storm developing new powers and virtues, lofty
+courage in the face of lawless power, pious resignation to the
+blows of fortune, gentle consideration and mercy even for
+slaves and the outcasts of society, ideals of purity unknown to
+the ancient world in its prime. The sage might, according to
+orthodox theory, rest in a placid content of rounded perfection.
+But human nature is not so constituted. In proportion to
+spiritual progress is the force of spiritual longings; <hi rend="italic">beati
+<pb n="392"/><anchor id="Pg392"/>mundo corde, ipsi Deum videbunt</hi>. The fruitful part of
+Stoicism as a religion was the doctrine that the human reason
+is a part of the soul of the world, a spark of the Divine mind.
+At first this was only conceived in the fashion of a materialistic
+pantheism.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, pp.
+179, 184.</note> The kindred between the individual and the
+general soul was little more than a physical doctrine. But it
+developed in minds like Epictetus and Seneca a profound
+spiritual meaning; it tapped the source of all real religion.
+Pure reason can never solve the religious problem. The
+history of religions shows that a conception of God which is
+to act effectually on composite human nature is never reached
+by the speculative intellect. What reason cannot do is effected
+by the <q>sub-conscious self,</q><note place="foot">James, <hi rend="italic">Varieties of Religious Belief</hi>,
+pp. 511, 512.</note> which is the dim seat of the
+deeper intuitions, haunted by vague memories, hereditary
+pieties, and emotional associations, the spring of strange
+genius, of heroic sacrifice, of infinite aspiration. There throbs
+the tide <q>which drew from out the boundless deep.</q> Thus
+the Stoic of the later time became a mystic, in the sense
+that <q>by love and emotion he solved the dualism of
+the world.</q><note place="foot">Bussell, <hi rend="italic">School of Plato</hi>, p. 296.</note> God is no longer a mere physical law or
+force, however subtilised, sweeping on in pitiless impetus or
+monotony of cyclic change. God is within the human soul,
+not as a spark of empyreal fire, but as the voice of conscience,
+the spiritual monitor and comforter, the <q>Holy Spirit,</q><note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 41, § 2, sacer intra nos
+spiritus sedet.</note>
+prompting, guarding, consoling in life and death. God is no
+longer found so much in the ordered movement of the
+spheres and the recurring processes or the cataclysms of the
+material universe. He is heard in the still small voice.
+It is thus that the later Stoicism melts into the revived
+Platonism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Probably Seneca and Epictetus, had they been interrogated,
+would have loyally resolved their most rapturous and devout
+language into the cold terms of Stoic orthodoxy. But the
+emotional tone is a really new element in their teaching, and
+the language of spiritual abandonment, joyful resignation to a
+Higher Will, free and cheerful obedience to it in the confidence
+of love, would be absurdly incongruous if addressed to an
+<pb n="393"/><anchor id="Pg393"/>abstract law or physical necessity.<note place="foot">Yet cf. Zeller, iii. 1, p. 649, der göttliche
+Beistand, welchen er verlangt, ist
+kein übernatürlicher. Seneca had
+broken away unconsciously from the
+old Stoic idea of God, more than Zeller
+will admit, or his words have no
+meaning.</note> The fatherhood of God
+and the kinship of all men as His sons is the fundamental
+principle of the new creed, binding us to do nothing unworthy
+of such an ancestry.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, §§ 51, 52.</note> At other times we are soldiers of God
+in a war with evil, bound to military obedience, awaiting calmly
+the last signal to retreat from the scene of struggle.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 107, § 9; Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iii. 24.</note> The
+infinite benevolence of God is asserted in the face of all appearances
+to the contrary. This of course is all the easier to one
+trained in the doctrine that the external fortune of life has
+nothing to do with man’s real happiness. The fear of God is
+banished by the sense of His perfect love. The all-seeing eye,
+the all-embracing providence, leave no room for care or foreboding.
+The Stoic optimism is now grounded on a personal
+trust in a loving and righteous will: <q>I am Thine, do with me
+what Thou wilt.</q> <q>For all things work together for good to
+them who love Him.</q> The external sufferings and apparent
+wrongs of the obedient sons of God are no stumbling-blocks to
+faith.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iii. 20, § 11,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">κακὸς γείτων; Αὑτῷ· ἀλλ’ ἐμοὶ ἀγαθός· γυμνάζει μου τὸ εὔγνωμον,
+    τὸ ἐπιεικές</foreign>: iv.
+1, § 89; M. Aurel. vi. 44.</note> The great heroic example, Heracles, the son of Zeus,
+was sorely tried by superhuman tasks, and won his crown of
+immortality through toil and battle. <q>Whom He loves He
+chastens.</q> Even apparent injustice is only an education through
+suffering. These things are <q>only light afflictions</q> to him who
+sees the due proportions of things and knows Zeus as his father.
+Even to the poor, the lame, the blind, if they have the divine
+love, the universe is a great temple, full of mystery and joy,
+and each passing day a festival. In the common things of life,
+in ploughing, digging, eating, we should sing hymns to God.
+<q>What else can I do,</q> says Epictetus, <q>a lame old man, than sing
+His praise, and exhort all men to join in the same song?</q><note place="foot"><anchor id="Note393-5"/>Epict. i. 16, § 20,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τί γὰρ ἄλλο δύναμαι γέρων χωλὸς εἰ μὴ ὑμνεῖν τὸν θεόν; κτλ.</foreign></note>
+Who shall say what depth of religious emotion, veiled under old-world
+phrase, there was in that outburst of M. Aurelius: <q>All
+harmonises with me which is in harmony with thee, O Universe.
+Nothing for me is too early nor too late which is in due season
+for thee.... For thee are all things, in thee are all things,
+<pb n="394"/><anchor id="Pg394"/>to thee all things return. The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops;
+and wilt not thou say, Dear City of Zeus?</q><note place="foot">M. Aurel. iv. 23.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The attitude of such souls to external worship in every
+age may be easily divined without the evidence of their words.
+If God is good and wishes only the good of His creatures,
+then to seek to appease His wrath and avert His capricious
+judgments becomes an impiety. If men’s final good lies in
+the moral sphere, in justice, gentleness, temperance, obedience
+to the higher order, then prayer for external goods, for mere
+indulgences of sense or ambition, shows a hopeless misconception
+as to the nature of God and the supreme destiny of
+man.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ix. 40; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 10, § 5.</note> On the other hand, without giving up the doctrine
+that the highest good depends on the virtuous will, the later
+Stoics and Platonists have begun to feel that man needs
+support and inspiration in his moral struggles from a higher
+Power, a Power without him and beyond him, yet who is allied
+to him in nature and sympathy. Prayer is no longer a means
+of winning temporal good things <q>for which the worthy need
+not pray, and which the unworthy will not obtain.</q> It is a
+fortifying communion with the Highest, an act of thanksgiving
+for blessings already received, an inspiration for a fuller and
+diviner life.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 40,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὦδε εὔχομαι, ὦ θεοί, δοίετέ μοι τὰ ὀφειλόμενα</foreign>.
+Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> xi. 8,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλὰ σὺ μὲν ἠγεῖ τὴν τοῦ φιλοσόφου εὐχὴν αἴτησιν εἶναι τῶν οὐ παρόντων·
+    ἐγὼ δὲ ὁμιλίαν καὶ διάλεκτον πρὸς τοὺς θεοὺς περὶ τῶν παρόντων
+    καὶ ἐπίδειξιν τῆς ἀρητῆς</foreign>.</note> It is an effort of gratitude and adoration to draw
+from the Divine source of all moral strength.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It must always remain to moderns an enigma how souls
+living in such a spiritual world refused to break with heathen
+idolatry. Seneca, indeed, poured contempt on the grossness
+of myth in a lost treatise on superstition;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Frag.</hi> preserved in S. Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ.
+Dei</hi>, vi. 10.</note> and he had no
+liking for the external rites of worship. But in some
+strange way M. Aurelius reconciled punctilious devotion to
+the popular gods with an austere pantheism or monotheism.
+It is in Platonists such as Dion or Maximus of Tyre that
+we meet with an attempted apology for anthropomorphic
+symbolism of the Divine.<note place="foot">D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. § 24 (412 R);
+Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> viii. 10.</note> The justification lies in the vast
+gulf which separates the remote, ineffable, and inconceivable
+purity of God from the feebleness and grossness of man. Few
+<pb n="395"/><anchor id="Pg395"/>are they who can gaze in unaided thought on the Divine
+splendour unveiled. Images, rites, and sacred myth have
+been invented by the wisdom of the past, to aid the memory
+and the imagination of weak ordinary souls. The symbols
+have varied with the endless variety of races. Animals or
+trees, mountain or river, rude unhewn stones, or the miracles of
+Pheidias in gold and ivory, are simply the sign or picture by
+which the soul is pointed to the Infinite Essence which has
+never been seen by mortal eye or imaged in human phantasy.
+The symbol which appeals to one race may be poor and contemptible
+in the eyes of another. The animal worship of
+Egypt gave a shock to minds which were lifted heavenwards by
+the winning majesty of the Virgin Goddess or of the Zeus of
+Olympia. The human form, as the chosen tabernacle of an
+effluence of the Divine Spirit, might well seem to Dion and
+Maximus the noblest and most fitting symbol of religious
+worship. Yet, in the end, they are all ready to tolerate any
+aberration of religious fancy which is justified by its use.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> viii. §§ 5-10;
+Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> vi. 19.</note>
+The most perfect symbol is only a faint adumbration of <q>the
+Father and Creator of all, Who is older than the sun and
+heavens, stronger than time and the ages and the fleeting
+world of change, unnamed by any lawgiver, Whom tongue
+cannot express nor eye see. Helpless to grasp His real
+essence, we seek a stay in names or images, in beast or
+plant, in river or mountain, in lustrous forms of gold and
+silver and ivory. Whatever we have of fairest we call by His
+name. And for love of Him, we cling, as lovers are wont, to
+anything which recalls Him. I quarrel not with divers
+imagery, if we seek to know, to love, to remember Him.</q><note place="foot">Max. Tyr. viii. 10,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὐ νεμεσῶ τῆς διαφωνίας, ἴστωσαν μόνον, ἐράτωσαν μόνον,
+    μνημονευέτωσαν μόνον</foreign>.</note>
+This is the outburst of a tolerant and eclectic Platonism, ready
+to condone everything in the crudest religious imagery. But
+a more conscientious scrutiny even of Grecian legend demanded,
+as we shall see, a deeper solution to account for dark rites and
+legends which cast a shadow on the Infinite Purity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Stoic theology, which resolved the gods of legend into
+thin abstractions, various potencies of the Infinite Spirit
+interfused with the universe,<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p.
+299 sqq.; S. Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>, vi. 5.</note> was in some respects congenial
+<pb n="396"/><anchor id="Pg396"/>to the Roman mind, and reflected the spirit of old Roman
+religion. That religion of arid abstractions, to which no myth,
+no haunting charm of poetic imagination attached,<note place="foot">Mommsen, <hi rend="italic">Hist. of Rome</hi>, i. p. 183
+(Tr.); Preller, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Myth.</hi> p. 2.</note> easily lent
+itself to a system which explained the gods by allegory or
+physical rationalism. That was not an eirenicon for the
+second century, at least among thoughtful, pious men. The
+philosophic effort of so many centuries had ended in an
+eclecticism for purely moral culture, and a profound scepticism
+as to the attainment of higher truth by unaided reason.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, pp.
+18-20.</note> Mere
+intellectual curiosity, the desire of knowledge for its own sake,
+and the hope of attaining it, are strangely absent from the
+loftiest minds, from Seneca, Epictetus, and M. Aurelius.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 117, §§ 19-30; Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi>
+i. 17; M. Aurel. vii. 67. But cf. viii.
+13; xii. 14; viii. 3.</note> Men
+like Lucian, sometimes in half melancholy, half scornful derision,
+amused themselves with ridiculing the chaotic results of the
+intellectual ambition of the past.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Hermot.</hi> c. 25, 34, 37 sqq.</note> They equally recognised
+the immense force of that spiritual movement which was
+trying every avenue of accredited religious system or novel
+superstition, that might perchance lead the devotee to some
+glimpse of the divine world. And side by side with the
+recrudescence of old-world superstitions, there were spreading,
+from whatever source, loftier and more ethical conceptions of
+God, a dim sense of sin and human weakness, a need of
+cleansing and support from a Divine hand. Stoicism, with all
+its austere grandeur, had failed in its interpretation both of
+man and of God. Popular theology, however soothing to old
+associations and unregenerate feelings, often gave a shock to
+the quickened moral sense and the higher spiritual intuitions.
+Yet the venerable charm of time-honoured ritual, glad or
+stately, the emotional effects and dim promise of revelation in
+the mysteries of many shrines, the seductive allurements of new
+cults, with a strange blending of the sensuous and the mystic,
+all wove around the human soul such an enchanted maze of
+spiritual fascination that escape was impossible, even if it were
+desired. But it was no longer desired even by the highest
+intellects. The efforts of pure reason to solve the mystery of
+God and of man’s destiny had failed. Yet men were ever
+<q>feeling after God, if haply they might find Him.</q> And the
+<pb n="397"/><anchor id="Pg397"/>God whom they sought for was one on whom they might hang,
+in whom they might have rest. Where was the revelation to
+come from? Where was the mediator to be sought to reconcile
+the ancient faiths or fables with a purified conception of the
+Deity and the aspiration for a higher moral life?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The revived Pythagorean and Platonist philosophy which
+girded itself to attempt the solution was really part of a great
+spiritual movement, with its focus at Alexandria.<note place="foot">Überweg, <hi rend="italic">Hist. Phil.</hi> i. p. 232;
+Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 2, p. 83;
+Thiersch, <hi rend="italic">Politik u. Phil.</hi> etc., pp. 15, 16.</note> In that
+meeting-point of the East and West, of all systems of thought
+and worship, syncretism blended all faiths. Hadrian, in his
+letter to Servianus, cynically observes that the same men were
+ready to worship impartially Serapis or Christ.<note place="foot">Flav. Vop. <hi rend="italic">Vit.
+    <anchor id="corr397"/><corr sic="Saturn,">Saturn.</corr></hi> c. 8, § 2,
+illic qui Serapem colunt Christiani
+sunt, et devoti sunt Serapi, qui se
+Christi episcopos dicunt, etc.</note> Philosophy
+became more and more a religion; its first and highest aim
+is a right knowledge of God. And philosophy, having failed
+to find help in the life according to nature, or the divine
+element in individual consciousness, had now to seek support
+in a God transcending nature and consciousness, a God such as
+the mysticism of the East or the systems of Pythagoras and
+Plato had foreshadowed. But such a God, transcending nature
+and consciousness, remote, ineffable, only, in some rare moment
+of supreme exaltation, dimly apprehensible by the human
+spirit,<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> xiv. 8,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἦ γὰρ ἂν τῷ διὰ μέσου πολλῷ τὸ θνητὸν πρὸς τὸ ἀθάνατον
+    διετειχίσθη τῆς οὐρανίου ἐπόψεώς τε καὶ ὁμιλίας ὅτι
+    μὴ τῆς δαιμονίου ταύτης φύσεως, κτλ.</foreign> Cf. xvi. 9.</note> could not call forth fully the loving trust and fervent
+reverence which men longed to offer. Heaven being so far from
+earth, and earth so darkened by the mists of sense, any gleam
+of revelation must be welcomed from whatever quarter it
+might break. And thus an all-embracing syncretism, while it
+gratified ancestral piety, and the natural instinct of all religion
+to root itself in the past, offered the hope of illumination from
+converging lights. Or rather, any religion which has won the
+reverence of men may transmit a ray from the central Sun.
+The believer in God, who longs for communion with Him, for
+help at His hands, might by reverent selection win from all
+religions something to satisfy his needs. A revelation was the
+imperious demand. Where should men be so likely to find it
+as in the reverent study of great historic efforts of humanity
+to pierce the veil?
+</p>
+
+<pb n="398"/><anchor id="Pg398"/>
+
+<p>
+The philosophy which was to attempt the revival of
+paganism in the second century, and which was to fight its
+last battles in the fourth and fifth, traced itself to Pythagoras
+and Plato. Plato’s affinity with the older mystic is well known.
+And the reader of the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi> or the <hi rend="italic">Republic</hi> will not be surprised
+to find the followers of the two masters of Greek thought
+who believed most in a spiritual vision and in an ordered
+moral life, united in an effort which extended to the close of the
+Western Empire,<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Som. Scip.</hi> i. 8; ii. 17.</note> to combine a lofty mysticism with ancestral
+faith. The two systems had much in common, and yet each
+contributed a peculiar element to the great movement. Pythagoreanism,
+although its origin is veiled in mystery, was always
+full of the mysticism of the East. Platonism was essentially
+the philosophy of Greek culture. The movement in which
+their forces were combined was one in which the new Hellenism of
+Hadrian’s reign reinforced itself for the reconstruction of western
+paganism with those purer and loftier ideas of God of which the
+East is the original home. The effort of paganism to rehabilitate
+itself in the second century drew no small part of its inspiration
+from the regions which were the cradle of the Christian faith.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 2, pp. 57-62.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca seems to regard Pythagoreanism as extinct.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Nat. Q.</hi> vii. 32, 2, Pythagorica
+illa invidiosa turbae schola praeceptorem
+non invenit.</note> Yet
+one of his own teachers, Sotion, practised its asceticism,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 49, § 2; 108, § 17.</note>
+and in the first century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, the traces of at least ninety
+treatises by members of the school have been recovered by
+antiquarian care, many of them forgeries foisted on ancient
+names.<note place="foot">Zeller, iii. 2, p. 85.</note> As a didactic system, indeed, the school had long
+disappeared, but the Pythagorean <hi rend="italic">askesis</hi> seems never to have
+lost its continuity. It drew down the ridicule of the New
+Comedy. It may have had a share in forming the Essene
+and Therapeutic discipline.<note place="foot">Überweg, <hi rend="italic">Hist. Phil.</hi> i. p. 228; cf.
+Hatch, <hi rend="italic">Hibbert Lec.</hi> p. 148.</note> In the first century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> it had a
+distinguished adherent in P. Nigidius Figulus, and a learned
+expositor in Alexander Polyhistor. Its enduring power as a
+spiritual creed congenial to paganism is shown by the fact that
+Iamblichus, one of the latest Neo-Platonists, and one of the
+ardent devotees of superstition, expounded the Pythagorean
+system in many treatises and composed an imaginative biography
+<pb n="399"/><anchor id="Pg399"/>of the great founder.<note place="foot">Überweg, <hi rend="italic">Hist. Phil.</hi> i. p. 252; cf.
+Eunapius, <hi rend="italic">Vit. Iambl.</hi></note> To the modern it is best known
+through the romantic life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus,
+which was composed at the instance of Julia Domna,
+the wife of Septimius Severus, who combined with a doubtful
+virtue a love for the mysticism of her native East.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> i. 3, 1; cf.
+Ael. Spart. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Sev.</hi> 18.</note> Apollonius
+is surrounded by his biographer with an atmosphere of mystery
+and miracle. But although the critical historian must reject
+much of the narrative, the faith of the Pythagorean missionary
+of the reign of Domitian stands out in clear outline.
+Apollonius is a true representative of the new spiritual
+movement. His mother had a vision before his birth. His
+early training at Aegae was eclectic, like the spirit of the age,
+and he heard the teaching of doctors of all the schools, not
+even excluding the Epicurean.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> i. 7.</note> But he early devoted himself
+to the severe asceticism of the Pythagorean sect, wore pure
+linen, abstained from wine and flesh, observed the five years
+of silence, and made the temple his home. The worship of
+Asclepius, which was then gaining an extraordinary vogue, had
+a special attraction for him, with its atmosphere of serenity
+and ritual purity and its dream oracles of beneficent healing.
+Apollonius combines in a strange fashion, like Plutarch and
+the eclectic Platonists, a decided monotheism with a conservative
+devotion to the ancient gods. He looks to the East, to
+the sages of the Ganges, for the highest inspiration. He
+worships the sun every day.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 38.</note> Yet he has a profound interest
+in the popular religion of the many lands through which he
+travelled. He frequented the temples of all the gods, discoursed
+with the priests on the ancient lore of their shrines,
+and corrected or restored, with an authority which seems to
+have never been challenged, their ritual where it had been
+forgotten or mutilated in the lapse of ages.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 11, § 16; i. 31; iv. 19, 20;
+iv. 41.</note> He sought initiation
+in all the mysteries. He wrote a book on Sacrifices which
+dealt with the most minute details of worship.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 41.</note> He had a
+profound interest in ancient legend, and the fame of the great
+Hellenic heroes, and, having spent a weird night with the
+shade of Achilles in the Troad, he constrained the Thessalians
+<pb n="400"/><anchor id="Pg400"/>to restore his fallen honours.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 13; iv.
+16.</note> The temples recognised in him
+at once a champion and a reformer. The oracular seats of
+Ionia showed an unenvious admiration of his gift of prophecy,
+and hailed him as a true son of Apollo.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 1,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">λόγοι τε περὶ αὐτοῦ ἐφοίτων οἱ μὲν ἐκ τοῦ Κολοφῶνι
+μαντείου κοινωνὸν τῆς ἑαυτοῦ σοφίας καὶ ἀτεχνῶς
+σοφὸν τὸν ἄνδρα ᾄδοντες, οἱ δὲ ἐκ Διδύμων</foreign>.</note> His visit to Rome
+in the darkest hour of the Neronian terror seems to have
+aroused a strange religious fervour; the temples were thronged
+with worshippers; it was a heathen revival.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 41.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet this strange missionary held principles which ought to
+have been fatal to heathen worship. He drew his central
+principle from Eastern pantheism, which might seem irreconcilable
+with the anthropomorphism of the West. It is true
+that under the Infinite Spirit, as in the Platonist théodicée, the
+gods of heathen devotion find a place as His ministers and
+viceroys.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 35,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὴν δὲ (ἔδραν ἀποδοτέον) ἐπ’ ἐκείνῃ θεοῖς,
+    οἱ τὰ μέρη αὐτοῦ κυβερνῶσι</foreign>:
+cf. Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> xiv. § 6 sqq.</note> But the eternal antithesis of spirit and matter, and
+the contempt for the body as a degrading prison of the divine
+element in man,<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> ii. 37; vi.
+11; vii. 26; Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> xiii. § 5.</note> the ascetic theory that by crucifying the
+flesh and attenuating its powers, the spirit might lay itself open
+to heavenly influences, these are doctrines which might appear
+utterly hostile to a gross materialist ritual. And as a matter
+of fact, Apollonius to some extent obeyed his principles. He
+scorned the popular conception of divination and magic.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> vi. 10; iv.
+40; v. 12; iv. 18; iv. 44.</note> The
+only legitimate power of foreseeing the future or influencing
+the material world is given to the soul which is pure from all
+fleshly taint and therefore near to God. He feels profoundly
+that the myths propagated by the poets have lowered the ideal
+of God and the character of man, and he greatly prefers the
+fables of Aesop, which use the falsehoods of the fancy for a
+definite moral end.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 13; iii. 25.</note> The mutilation of a father, the storming
+of Olympus by the Giants, incest and adultery among the gods,
+must be reprobated, however they have been glorified by poetry.
+Apollonius poured contempt on the animal worship of Egypt,
+even when defended by the dialectic subtlety of Greece.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 19.</note> He
+was repelled by the grossness of bloody sacrifices, however consecrated
+by immemorial use. For the nobler symbolism of
+<pb n="401"/><anchor id="Pg401"/>Hellenic art he had a certain sympathy, like Dion, but only as
+symbolism. Any sensible image of the Supreme, which does
+not carry the soul beyond the bounds of sense, defeats its
+purpose and is degrading to pure religion. Pictured or
+sculptured forms are only aids to that mystic imagination
+through which alone we can see God. Finally, his idea of
+prayer is intensely spiritual or ethical. <q>Grant me, ye gods,
+what is my due</q> is the highest prayer of Apollonius.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 40.</note> Yet, as
+we have already seen, the religion of Apollonius is thoroughly
+practical. He was a great preacher. He addressed vast
+crowds from the temple steps at Ephesus or Olympia, rebuking
+their luxury and effeminacy, their feuds and mean civic ambition,
+their love of frivolous sports or the bloody strife of the arena.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 22; iv. 41; v. 26.</note>
+Next to the knowledge of God, he preached the importance of
+self-knowledge, and of lending an attentive ear to the voice of
+conscience. He crowned his life by asserting fearlessly the cause
+of righteousness in the awful presence-chamber of Domitian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+About the very time when Apollonius was bearding the last
+of the Flavians, and preaching a pagan revival in the porticoes
+of the Roman temples, it is probable that Plutarch, in some
+respects a kindred spirit, was making his appearance as a lecturer
+at Rome.<note place="foot">Gréard, <hi rend="italic">De la Morale de Plutarch</hi>,
+p. 32; Volkmann, <hi rend="italic">Leben</hi>, etc. p. 37.</note> The greatest of biographers has had no authentic
+biography himself.<note place="foot">For the apocryphal accounts, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi>
+Gréard, p. 3 sqq.</note> The few certain facts about his life must
+be gleaned from his own writings. He was the descendant of
+an ancient family of Chaeronea, famous as the scene of three
+historic battles, <q>the War-God’s dancing-place,</q> and his great-grandfather
+had tales of the great conflict at Actium.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Vit. Anton.</hi> c. 68,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὁ γοῦν πρόπαππος ἡμῶν Νίκαρχος διηγεῖτο κτλ.</foreign>: Volkmann,
+p. 21.</note> In the
+year 66 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, when Nero was distinguishing or disgracing himself
+as a competitor at the Greek festivals, Plutarch was a
+young student at the university of Athens, under Ammonius,<note place="foot">Plut.
+    <hi rend="italic">De <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ΕΙ</foreign> ap. Delph.</hi> c. 1; cf. 17;
+<hi rend="italic">Vit. Themist.</hi> c. 32; <hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> iii. 1,
+§ 1; ix. 14, § 2; ix. 14, § 7; i. 9;
+Eunap. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph. Prooem.</hi> 5,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐν οἷς Ἀμμώνιός τε ἦν Πλουτάρχου τοῦ θειοτάτου γεγονὼς διδάσκαλος</foreign>.</note>
+who, if he inspired him with admiration for Plato, also taught
+him to draw freely from all the treasures of Greek thought.
+Plutarch, before he finally settled down at Chaeronea, saw
+something of the great Roman world. He had visited
+Alex<pb n="402"/><anchor id="Pg402"/>andria and some part of Asia Minor.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> v. 5, § 1, <hi rend="italic">Vit. Agesil.</hi> c.
+19; Volkmann, pp. 34, 63.</note> He was at an early age
+employed to represent his native town on public business,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Praec. Ger. Reipub.</hi> c. 20.</note> and
+he had thus visited Rome, probably in the reign of Vespasian,
+and again, in the reign of
+Domitian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> viii. 7, § 1,
+    <hi rend="italic">Vit. Dem.</hi> c.
+2. In this passage he says,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὐ σχολῆς οὔσης γυμάζεσθαι περὶ τὴν Ῥωμαικὴν διάλεκτον ὑπὸ χρειῶν πολιτικῶν ...
+ὀψέ ποτε καὶ πόρρω τῆς ἡλικίας ἠρξάμεθα Ῥωμαικοῖς γράμμασιν ἐντυγχάνειν</foreign>. Cf.
+<hi rend="italic">Frat. Am.</hi> 4.</note> It was a time when
+original genius in Roman literature was showing signs of failure,
+but when minute antiquarian learning was becoming a passion.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> c. xx.; Spart. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Hadr.</hi>
+c. 16, § 5, Aul. Gell. xii. 2; Luc.
+<hi rend="italic">Lexiph.</hi> c. 20; Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii.
+p. 278; Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 96; Gréard,
+<hi rend="italic">Morale de Plut.</hi> p. 33; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+114, § 13, multi ex alieno seculo petunt
+verba: duodecim tabulas loquuntur.</note>
+It was also the age of the new sophist. Hellenism was in the air,
+and the lecture theatres were thronged to hear the philosophic
+orator or the professional artist in words.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. p. 360.</note> Although Plutarch is
+never mentioned beside men like Euphrates, in Pliny’s letters,
+he found an audience at Rome, and the famous Arulenus Rusticus
+was once among his hearers.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Curios.</hi> c. 15,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐμοῦ ποτε ἐν Ῥώμῃ διαλεγομένου Ῥούστικος ἐκεῖνος ὃν
+ἀπέκτεινε Δομιτιανὸς ... ἠκροᾶτο κτλ.</foreign></note> While he was ransacking the
+imperial libraries, he also formed the acquaintance, at pleasant
+social parties, of many men of academic and official fame, some
+of whom belonged to the circle of Pliny and Tacitus.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> c. 1;
+    <hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> i.
+9; v. 7, § 10; viii. 1; <hi rend="italic">De Cohib. Ira</hi>,
+c. 1; <hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> ii. 3; i. 5; cf. Plin.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 9; iv. 5; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> i. 13; iv. 4;
+Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agr.</hi> c. 2; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> c. xxii.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his native Greece, with its great memories, and his
+native Chaeronea, to which he was linked by ancestral piety,
+had for a man like Plutarch far stronger charms than the
+capital of the world. With our love of excitement and
+personal prominence, it is hard to conceive how a man of
+immense culture and brilliant literary power could endure the
+monotony of bourgeois society in depopulated and decaying
+Greece.<note place="foot">For a description of this society,
+see Mahaffy’s <hi rend="italic">Greek World under Rom.
+Sway</hi>, c. xliv.</note> Yet Plutarch seems to have found it easy, and even
+pleasant. He was too great to allow his own scheme of life
+to be crossed and disturbed by vulgar opinion or ephemeral
+ambition. His family relations were sweet and happy. His
+married life realised the highest ideals of happy wedlock.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Ux.</hi> c. iv. x.;
+<hi rend="italic">Conj. Praec.</hi> c. xliv.</note> He
+had the respectful affection of his brothers and older kinsmen.
+The petty magistracies, in which he made it a duty to serve
+<pb n="403"/><anchor id="Pg403"/>his native town, were dignified in his eyes by the thought
+that Epameinondas had once been charged with the cleansing of
+the streets of Thebes.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Praec. Ger. Reipub.</hi> c. 15;
+cf. <hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> vi. 8, § 1.</note> His priesthood of Apollo at Delphi
+was probably far more attractive than the imperial honours
+which, according to legend, were offered to him by Trajan and
+Hadrian.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">An Seni Sit Ger. Resp.</hi> c. 17,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οἶσθά με τῷ Πυθίῳ λειτουργοῦντα πολλὰς πυθιάδας</foreign>.
+    Suidas, <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Πλούταρχος</foreign>: cf.
+Volkmann, p. 91.</note> To his historic and religious imagination the
+ancient shrine which looked down on the gulf from the foot
+of the <q>Shining Rocks,</q> was sacred as no other spot on earth.
+Although in Plutarch’s day Delphi had declined in splendour
+and fame,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Def. Orac.</hi> c. v. viii.</note> it was still surrounded with the glamour of
+immemorial sanctity and power. It was still the spot from
+which divine voices of warning or counsel had issued to the
+kings of Lydia, to chiefs of wild hordes upon the Strymon,
+to the envoys of the Roman Tarquins, to every city of
+Hellenic name from the Euxine to the Atlantic. We can
+still almost make the round of its antiquarian treasures under
+his genial guidance. Probably Plutarch’s happiest hours were
+spent in accompanying a party of visitors,—a professor on his
+way home from Britain to Tarsus, a Spartan traveller just returned
+from far Indian seas,—around those sacred scenes; we
+can hear the debate on the doubtful quality of Delphic verse or
+the sources of its inspiration: we can watch them pause to
+recall the story of mouldering bronze or marble, and wake the
+echoes of a thousand years.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. ii.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plutarch must have been a swift and indefatigable worker,
+for his production is almost on the scale of Varro, Cicero, or
+the elder Pliny. Yet he found time for pleasant visits to
+every part of Greece which had tales or treasures for the
+antiquary. He enjoyed the friendship of the brightest intellects
+of the day, of Herodes Atticus, the millionaire rhetorician,<note place="foot">Trench, <hi rend="italic">Plutarch</hi>, p. 22; Volkmann,
+p. 58.</note>
+of Favorinus, the great sophist of Gaul, the intimate friend
+of Herodes and the counsellor of the Emperor Hadrian, of
+Ammonius, who was Plutarch’s tutor; of many others, noted
+in their time, but who are mere shadows to us. They met
+in a convivial way in many places, at Chaeronea, at Hyampolis,
+at Eleusis after the Mysteries, at Patrae, at Corinth during
+<pb n="404"/><anchor id="Pg404"/>the Isthmian games, at Thermopylae, and Athens in the
+house of Ammonius, or at Aedepsus, the Baden of Euboea,
+where in the springtime people found pleasant lodgings and
+brisk intercourse to relieve the monotony of attendance at the
+baths.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> ii. 2, § 1 (Eleusis);
+v. 8, § 1 (Athens); i. 10, § 1; ii. 1,
+§ 1 (Patrae); iii. 1, § 1; iv. 4, § 1
+(Aedepsus),
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">χωρίον κατεσκευασμένον οἰκήσεσι ... μάλιστα δ’ ἀνθεῖ τὸ χωρίον
+ἀκμάζοντος ἔαρος. πολλοὶ γὰρ άφικνοῦνται τὴν ὥραν αὐτόθι,
+καὶ συνουσίας ποιοῦνται μετ’ ἀλλήλων ἐν ἀφθόνοις πᾶσι,
+καὶ πλείστας περὶ λόγους ὑπὸ σχολῆς διατριβὰς ἔχουσι</foreign>: cf. Volkmann,
+p. 57.</note> Plutarch had a large circle of relatives,—his grandfather
+Lamprias, who had tales from an actual witness of the revels
+of Antony at Alexandria;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Vit. Anton.</hi> c. 28,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">διηγεῖτο γοῦν ἡμῶν τῷ πάππῳ Λαμπρίᾳ Φιλώτας
+ὁ Ἀμφισσεὺς ἰατρὸς εἶναι μὲν ἐν Ἀλεξανδρεῖᾳ τότε μανθάνων τὴν τέχνην, κτλ.</foreign></note> Lamprias his elder brother, a true
+Boeotian in his love of good fare, a war-dance, and a jest;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> ii. 2, § 1; ix. 15, § 1;
+viii. 6, § 5.</note> his
+younger brother Timon, to whom Plutarch was devotedly
+attached.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Fr. Am.</hi> c. 16.</note> His ordinary society, not very distinguished
+socially, was composed of grammarians, rhetoricians, country
+doctors, the best that the district could afford.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> iv. 1, 1; iv. 4, 1; v. 10,
+1; v. 5, 1.</note> The talk is
+often on the most trivial or absurd subjects, though not more
+absurdly trivial than those on which the polished sophist displayed
+his graces in the lecture-hall.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ix. 4, § 1; Mahaffy, <hi rend="italic">Greek
+World</hi>, <hi rend="italic">etc.</hi> p. 338.</note> Yet graver and more
+serious themes are not excluded,<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> viii. 2; viii. 7.</note> and the table-talk of Greece
+in the end of the first century is invaluable to the student of
+society. In such scenes Plutarch not only cultivated friendship,
+the great art of life, not only watched the play of intellect
+and character; he also found relief from the austere labours
+which have made his fame. It is surely not the least of his
+titles to greatness that, in an environment which to most men
+of talent would have been infinitely depressing, with the
+irrepressible vitality of genius he contrived to idealise the
+society of decaying Greece by linking it with the past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, with such a power of reviving the past, even the
+dulness of the little Boeotian town was easily tolerable. We
+can imagine Plutarch looking down the quiet street in the
+still vacant noontide, as he sat trying to revive the ancient
+glories of his race, and to match them with their conquerors,
+while he reminded the lords of the world, who, in Plutarch’s
+<pb n="405"/><anchor id="Pg405"/>early youth, seemed to be wildly squandering their heritage, of
+the stern, simple virtue by which it had been won. For in the
+Lives of great Greeks and Romans, the moral interest is the
+most prominent. It is biography, not history, which Plutarch
+is writing.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Vit. Alex.</hi> c. 1,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὔτε γὰρ ἱστορίας γράφομεν ἀλλὰ βίους οὔτε ταῖς ἐπιφανεστάταις
+    πράξεσι πάντως ἔνεστι δήλωσις ἀρετῆς ἢ κακίας</foreign>.
+    So <hi rend="italic">Vit. Nic.</hi> c. 1,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὐ τὴν ἄχρηστον ἀθροίζων ἱστορίαν ἀλλὰ τὴν πρὸς κατανόησιν
+ἤθους καὶ τρόπου παραδιδούς</foreign><anchor id="corr405"/><corr sic="missing">.</corr></note> Setting and scenery of course there must be; but
+Plutarch’s chief object is to paint the character of the great
+actors on the stage. Hence he may slur over or omit historic
+facts of wider interest, while he records apparently trivial
+incidents or sayings which light up a character. But Plutarch
+has a fine eye both for lively social scenes and the great
+crises of history. The description of the feverish activity of
+swarming industry in the great days of Pheidias at Athens, once
+read, can never be forgotten.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Vit. Pericl.</hi> c. 12.</note> Equally indelible are the pictures
+of the younger Cato’s last morning, as he finished the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi>,
+and the birds began to twitter,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Vit. Cat. Min.</hi> c. 70.</note> of the flight and murder of
+Pompey, of the suicide of Otho on the ghastly field of Bedriacum,
+which seemed to atone for an evil life. Nor can we
+forget his description of one of the saddest of all scenes in Greek
+history, which moved even Thucydides to a restrained pathos,—the
+retreat of the Athenians from the walls of Syracuse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plutarch was before all else a moralist, with a genius for
+religion. His ethical treatises deserve to be thoroughly explored,
+and as sympathetically expounded, for the light which they
+throw on the moral aspirations of the age, as Dr. Mahaffy has
+skilfully used them for pictures of its social life. He must
+be a very unimaginative person who cannot feel the charm of
+their revelation. But the man of purely speculative interest
+will probably be disappointed. Plutarch is not an original
+thinker in morals or religion. He has no new gospel to expound.
+He does not go to the roots of conduct or faith. Possessing
+a very wide knowledge of past speculation, he might have
+written an invaluable history of ancient philosophy. But he
+has not done it. And, as a man of genius, with a strong
+practical purpose to do moral good to his fellows, his choice of
+his vocation must be accepted without cavil. He was the
+greatest Hellenist of his day, when Hellenism was capturing
+<pb n="406"/><anchor id="Pg406"/>the Roman world. He was also a man of high moral ideals,
+sincere piety, and absorbing interest in the fate of human
+character. With all that wealth of learning, philosophic or
+historical, with all that knowledge of human nature, what
+nobler task could a man set himself than to attempt to give
+some practical guidance to a generation conscious of moral
+weakness, and distracted between new spiritual ideals and the
+mythologies of the past? The urgent need for moral culture and
+reform of character, for a guiding force in conduct, was profoundly
+felt by all the great serious minds of the Flavian age, by
+Pliny and Tacitus, by Juvenal and Quintilian. But Plutarch
+probably felt it more acutely than any, and took endless pains
+to satisfy it. It was an age when the philosophic director and
+the philosophic preacher were, as we have seen, to be met with
+everywhere. And Plutarch took his full share in the movement,
+and influenced a wide circle.<note place="foot">Gréard, <hi rend="italic">Morale de Plut.</hi> pp. 36,
+52, 67.</note> If he did not elaborate an
+original ethical system, he had studied closely the art of
+moral reform, and Christian homilists, from Basil to Jeremy
+Taylor, have drawn freely from the storehouse of his precept
+and observation. In many tracts he has analysed prevailing
+vices and faults of his time,—flattery, vain curiosity, irritable
+temper, or false modesty,—and given rules for curing or avoiding
+them. In these homilies, the fundamental principle is that of
+Musonius, perhaps adapted from an oracle to the people of
+Cirrha <q>to wage war with vice day and night, and never to
+relax your guard.</q><note place="foot">Cf. A. Gell. xviii. 2.</note> The call to reform sounded all the louder
+in Plutarch’s ears because of the high ideal which he had conceived
+of what life might be made if, no longer left to the play of
+passion and random influences, character were moulded from
+early youth to a temperate harmony. To such a soul each
+passing day might be a glad festival, the universe an august
+temple full of its Maker’s glories, and life an initiation into the
+joy of its holy mysteries.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> c. xx.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀνὴρ δὲ ἀγαθὸς οὐ πᾶσαν ἡμέραν ἑορτὴν ἡγεῖται; κτλ.</foreign> 
+</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the work of moral and religious reconstruction Plutarch
+and his contemporaries could only rely on philosophy as their
+guide. Philosophy to Plutarch, Apollonius, or M. Aurelius,
+had a very different meaning from what it bore to the great
+<pb n="407"/><anchor id="Pg407"/>thinkers of Ionia and Magna Graecia. Not only had it
+deserted the field of metaphysical speculation; it had lost
+interest even in the mere theory of morals. It had become
+the art rather than the science of life. The teacher of an art
+cannot indeed entirely divorce it from all scientific theory.
+The relative importance of practical precept and ethical theory
+was often debated in that age. But the tendency was
+undoubtedly to subordinate dogma to edification.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 88, ad virtutem nihil
+conferunt liberalia studia; cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 94,
+95, § 41.</note> And where
+dogma was needed for practical effect, it might be drawn from
+the most opposite quarters. Seneca delights in rounding off a
+letter by a quotation from Epicurus. M. Aurelius appeals
+both to the example of Epicurus and the teaching of Plato.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. vii. 35; ix. 41; Epict.
+<hi rend="italic">Frag.</hi> lii.</note>
+Man might toy with cosmic speculation; the Timaeus had
+many commentators in the first and second centuries.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Gr.</hi> iii. 1, p. 720 n.</note> But,
+for Plutarch and his contemporaries, the great task of philosophy
+was to bring some sort of order into the moral and
+religious chaos. It was not original thought or discovery
+which was needed, but the application of reason, cultivated by
+the study of the past, to the moral and religious problems of
+the present. The philosopher sometimes, to our eyes, seems to
+trifle with the smallest details of exterior deportment or idiom
+or dress; he gives precepts about the rearing of children; he
+occupies himself with curious questions of ritual and antiquarian
+interest.<note place="foot">A. Gell. i. 10; ii. 26; vii. 13; xii.
+1; Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 20; v.
+16.</note> These seeming degradations of a great mission, after
+all, only emphasise the fact that philosophy was now concerned
+with human life rather than with the problems of speculation.
+It had in fact become an all-embracing religion. It supplied the
+medicine for moral disease; it furnished the rational criterion
+by which all myth and ritual must be judged or explained.<note place="foot">Oakesmith,
+    <hi rend="italic">Rel. of Plutarch</hi>, p. <anchor id="corr407"/><corr sic="64">64.</corr></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plutarch was an eclectic in the sense that, knowing all the
+moral systems of the past, he was ready to borrow from any
+of these principles which might give support to character.
+Whether, if he had been born four or five hundred years
+earlier, he might have created or developed an original theory
+himself, is a question which may be variously answered. One
+may reasonably hesitate to assent to the common opinion that
+<pb n="408"/><anchor id="Pg408"/>Plutarch had no genius for original speculation. Had he come
+under the influence of Socrates, it is not so certain that he
+might not have composed dialogues with a certain charm of
+fresh dialectic and picturesque dramatic power. It is a little
+unhistorical to decry a man of genius as wanting in speculative
+originality, who was born into an age when speculation had run
+dry, and thought was only subsidiary to conduct. When the
+dissonant schools forsook the heights of metaphysic and cosmology
+to devote themselves to moral culture, an inevitable tendency
+to eclecticism, to a harmony of moral theory, set in. The
+practical interest prevailed over the infinitely divisive forces
+of the speculative reason. Antiochus, the teacher of Cicero,<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Cic.</hi> c. 4.</note>
+while he strove to re-establish Platonism, maintained the
+essential agreement of the great schools on the all-important
+questions, and freely adopted the doctrines of Zeno and
+Aristotle.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Gr.</hi> iii. 1, p. 534,
+in der Hauptsache die bedeutendsten
+Philosophenschulen übereinstimmen,
+etc.</note> Panaetius, the chief representative of Roman
+Stoicism in the second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, had a warm admiration
+for Plato and Aristotle, and in some essential points forsook
+the older teaching of the Porch.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 503.</note> Seneca, as we have seen,
+often seems to cling to the most hard and repellent tenets of
+the ancient creed. Yet a sense of practical difficulties has led
+him to soften and modify many of them—the identity of
+reason and passion, the indifference of so-called <q>goods,</q> the
+necessity of instantaneous conversion, the unapproachable and
+unassailable perfection of the wise man. Plutarch’s own
+ethical system, so far as he has a system, is a compound of
+Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, with a certain tincture of
+Stoicism.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 2, pp. 144, 145.</note> Platonism, which had shaken off its sceptical
+tendencies in the first century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, had few adherents at
+Rome in the first century of the Empire.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Nat. Qu.</hi> vii. 32, 2; Academici
+et veteres et minores nullum antistitem
+reliquerunt.</note> The Stoic and
+Epicurean systems divided the allegiance of thinking people
+till the energetic revival of Hellenism set in. Epictetus
+indeed speaks of women who were attracted by the supposed
+freedom of sexual relations in Plato’s Utopia.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Fr.</hi> liii.</note> Seneca often
+refers to Plato, and was undoubtedly influenced by his spirit.
+<pb n="409"/><anchor id="Pg409"/>But in the second century, the sympathetic union of Platonic
+and Pythagorean ideas with a vigorous religious revival became
+a real power, with momentous effects on the future of
+philosophy and religion for three centuries. Plutarch’s reverence
+for the founder of the Academy, even in little things, was
+unbounded.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> vii. 1; <hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Apoll.</hi>
+xxxvi.</note> It became with him almost a kind of cult. And
+he paid the most sincere reverence to his idol by imitating, in
+some of his treatises, the mythical colouring by which the
+author of the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi> and the <hi rend="italic">Republic</hi> had sought to give body
+and reality to the unseen world.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">e.g.</hi>
+    <hi rend="italic">De Gen. Socr.</hi> xxii. sqq.; <hi rend="italic">De
+Ser. Num. Vind.</hi> xxii.</note> Plutarch condemned in very
+strong language the coarse and sophistical modes of controversy
+with which the rival schools assailed one another’s tenets.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Non posse Suav. vivi sec. Epic.</hi> c.
+ii.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὰ γὰρ αἴσχιστα ῥήματα, βωμολοχίας, ληκυθισμούς, ἀλαζονείας,
+ἡεταιρήσεις, ἀνδροφονίας ... συνάγοντες Ἀριστοτέλους
+καὶ Σωκράτους καὶ Πυθαγόρου καὶ τίνος γὰρ οὐχὶ τῶν ἐπιφανῶν,
+κατεσκέδασαν</foreign>:
+<hi rend="italic">Adv. Col.</hi> c. ii.</note>
+Yet he can hardly be acquitted of some harshness in his
+polemic against the Stoics and Epicureans. Archbishop Trench,
+in his fascinating and sympathetic treatment of Plutarch,
+laments that he did not give a more generous recognition to
+that noblest and most truly Roman school which was the last
+refuge and citadel of freedom.<note place="foot">Trench, <hi rend="italic">Plut.</hi> p. 93.</note> We may join the archbishop
+in wishing that Plutarch, without compromising principle, had
+been more tolerant to a system with which he had so much in
+common, and which, in his day, had put off much of its old
+hardness. But he was essentially a practical man, with a
+definite moral aim. He took from any quarter principles
+which seemed to him to be true to human nature, and which
+furnished a hopeful basis for the efforts of the moral teacher.
+But he felt equally bound to reject a system which absorbed
+and annihilated the emotional nature in the reason,<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Virt. Mor.</hi> c. vii. sqq.</note> which cut
+at the roots of moral freedom, which recognised no degrees in
+virtue or in vice, which discouraged and contemned the first
+faint struggles of weak humanity after a higher life, and froze
+it into hopeless impotence by the remote ideal of a cold, flawless
+perfection, suddenly and miraculously raised to a divine
+independence of all the minor blessings and helps to virtue.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Adv. Stoicos</hi>, c. x.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλὰ ὥσπερ ὁ πηχύν ἀπέχων ἐν θαλάσσῃ ἐπιφανείας
+οὐδὲν ἥττον πνίγεται τοῦ καταδεδυκότος ὀργυιὰς πεντακοσίας, κτλ.</foreign>
+Cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi>
+66, § 10; Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der. Griech.</hi> iii.
+1, p. 230.</note>
+<pb n="410"/><anchor id="Pg410"/>Such an ideal may be magnificent, but it is not life. For man,
+constituted as he is, and placed in such an environment, it is
+a dangerous mental habit to train the soul to regard all things
+as a fleeting and monotonous show, to cultivate the <hi rend="italic">taedium
+vitae</hi>, or a calm resignation to the littleness of man placed for
+a brief space between the two eternities.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. ix. 32; xii. 32; ix. 14;
+xi. 1; vii. 1; vi. 46; ix. 14.</note> The philosophic
+sufferer may brace himself to endure the round of human
+duties, and to live for the commonwealth of man; he may he
+generous to the ungrateful and tolerant to the vulgar and the
+frivolous; he may make his life a perpetual sacrifice to duty
+and the higher law, but it is all the while really a pathetic
+protest against the pitiless Power which has made man so little
+and so great, doomed to the life of the leaves and the insects,
+yet tortured with the longing for an infinite future.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On some great central truths, such as the inwardness of
+happiness and the brotherhood of man, Plutarch and the Stoics
+were at one. And the general tone of his moral teaching
+bears many marks of Stoic influence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> c. iii., iv., xiv., xvii.;
+<hi rend="italic">De Cup. Div.</hi> iii., iv.; <hi rend="italic">De Exil.</hi> v.; <hi rend="italic">De
+Alex. Virt.</hi> c. vi.; ad init.; Zeller, iii.
+1. p. 281.</note> But the Stoic psychology,
+the Stoic fatalism and pantheism aroused all the controversial
+vehemence of Plutarch.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Gr.</hi> iii. 1, p. 208;
+cf. iii. 2, p. 163; Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Virt. Mor.</hi> c.
+viii.</note> The Stoic held the essential unity
+of the soul, that reason and passion are not two distinct
+principles, but that passion is reason depraved and diverted to
+wrong objects. It is the same simple, indivisible power which
+shifts and changes and submits itself to opposing influences.
+Passion, in fact, is an impetuous and erring motion of the
+reason, and vice, in the old Socratic phrase, is an error of judgment,
+a fit of ignorance of the true ends of action. But as,
+according to Stoic theory, the human reason is a portion of
+the Divine, depravity becomes thus a corruption of the Divine
+element, and the guarantee for any hope of reform is lost.
+For himself, Plutarch adopts the Platonic division of the soul
+into the rational, spirited, and concupiscent elements, with some
+Aristotelian modifications.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Virt. Mor.</hi> l.c.</note> The great fact of man’s moral
+nature is the natural opposition between the passions and the
+rational element of the soul; it corresponds to a similar
+division in the mundane soul.<note place="foot">Zeller. iii. 2, p. 154.</note> All experience attests a
+    con<pb n="411"/><anchor id="Pg411"/>stant, natural, and sustained rebellion of the lower against the
+higher. Principles so alien and disparate cannot be identified,
+any more than you can identify the hunter and his quarry.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Virt. Mor.</hi> vii.</note>
+But, although in the unregulated character, they are in violent
+opposition, they may, by proper culture, be brought at last
+into a harmony. The function of the higher element is not
+to extinguish the lower, but to guide and control and elevate
+it.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. sq.; <hi rend="italic">De Cur.</hi> i.</note> Passion is a force which may be wasted in vagrant, wild
+excess, but which may also be used to give force and energy
+to virtue. To avoid drunkenness, a man need not spill the
+wine; he may temper its strength. A controlled anger is
+the spur of courage. Passion in effect is the raw material
+which is moulded by reason into the forms of practical virtue,
+and the guiding principle in the process is the law of the
+mean between excess and defect of passion.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Virt. Mor.</hi> vi.; Gréard, p.
+78.</note> This is, of
+course, borrowed from Aristotle, and along with it the theory of
+education by habit, which to Plato had seemed a popular and
+inferior conception of the formation of the virtuous character.<note place="foot">Pl. <hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi> 82 <hi rend="small">B</hi>; cf. Archer-Hind,
+App. i. to <hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi></note>
+By the strong pressure of an enlightened will, the wild insurgent
+forces of the lower nature are brought into conformity to a
+higher law. It is a slow, laborious process, demanding infinite
+patience, daily and hourly watchfulness, self-examination, frank
+confession of faults to some friend or wise director of souls.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Cohib. Ira</hi>, i. ii.; <hi rend="italic">De
+Prof. in Virt.</hi> xiii. xi. iii.</note>
+It needs the minutest attention to the details of conduct and
+circumstance, and a steady front against discouragement from
+the backsliding of the wavering will.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Prof.</hi> iv.; <hi rend="italic">De Cohib. Ira</hi>, ii.</note> In such a system the
+hope of reform lies not in any sudden revolution. Plutarch has
+no faith in instant conversion, reversing in a moment the ingrained
+tendencies of years, and setting a man on a lofty height
+of perfection, with no fear of falling away. That vain dream
+of the older Stoicism, which recognised no degrees in virtuous
+progress, made virtue an unapproachable ideal, and paralysed
+struggling effort. It was not for an age stricken or blest with
+a growing sense of moral weakness, and clutching eagerly at
+any spiritual stay. Plutarch loves rather to think of character
+under the image of a holy and royal building whose
+founda<pb n="412"/><anchor id="Pg412"/>tions are laid in gold, and each stone has to be chosen and
+carefully fitted to the line of reason.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Prof.</hi> xvii.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλ’ οἵ γε προκόπτοντες, οἷς ἤδη καθάπερ ἱεροῦ τινος
+οἰκοδομήματος καὶ βασιλικοῦ τοῦ βίου κεκρότηται
+χρυσέα κρηπὶς οὐδὲν εἰκῆ προσίενται τῶν γινομένων, κτλ.</foreign>
+</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plutarch also accepted from the Peripatetic school the
+principle, which Seneca was in the end compelled to admit,
+that the finest paragon of wisdom and virtue is not quite
+self-sufficing, that virtuous activity needs material to work
+upon,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Adv. St.</hi> iv. vii.</note> and that the good things of the world, in their proper
+place, are as necessary to the moral musician as the flute to
+the flute-player. Above all, Plutarch, with such a theory of
+character, was bound to assert the cardinal doctrine of human
+freedom. He had a profound faith in a threefold Providence,
+exercised by the remote Supreme Deity, by the inferior
+heavenly powers, and by the daemons.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Fato</hi>, c. ix. (572). (Plut.?)</note> But Providence is a
+beneficent influence, not a crushing force of necessity. To
+Plutarch fatalism is the blight of moral effort. Foreknowledge
+and Fate are not conterminous and coextensive. Although
+everything is foreseen by heavenly powers, not everything
+is foreordained.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. iv. v.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὐ πάντα καθαρῶς οὐδὲ διαρρήδην ἡ εἱμαρμένη περιέχει,
+ἀλλ’ ὅσα καθόλου</foreign>.</note> The law of Fate, like the laws of
+earthly jurisprudence, deals with the universal, and only
+consequentially with the particular case. Certain consequences
+follow necessarily from certain acts, but the acts are not
+inevitably determined.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. iv.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὕτω καὶ ὁ τῆς φύσεως νόμος τὰ μὲν καθόλου συμπεριλαμβάνει
+προηγουμένως, τὰ δὲ καθ’ ἕκαστα ἐπομένως</foreign>.</note> Man, by nature the most helpless
+and defenceless of animals, becomes lord of creation by
+his superior reason, and appropriates all its forces and its
+wealth by his laborious arts.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Fort.</hi> c. iii. iv.</note> And the art of arts, the art
+of life, neither trusting to chance nor cowed by any fancied
+omnipotence of destiny, uses the will and reason to master
+the materials out of which happiness is forged. Thus the
+hope of a noble life is securely fenced in the fortress of the
+autonomous will. To the Stoic the vicious man was a
+fool, whose reason was hopelessly besotted. The Platonist
+cherished the better hope, that reason, though darkened for a
+time and vanquished by the forces of sense, could never
+assent to sin, that there still remained in every human
+soul a witness to the eternal law of conduct.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="413"/><anchor id="Pg413"/>
+
+<p>
+With such a faith as this, an earnest man like Plutarch
+was bound to become a preacher of righteousness and a
+spiritual director. Many of his moral treatises are the
+expanded record of private counsel or the more formal
+instruction of the lecture-hall. He had disciples all over the
+Roman world, at Rome, Chaeronea, Ephesus, and Athens.<note place="foot">Gréard, p. 68 sq.</note> His
+conception of the philosophic gathering, in which these
+serious things were discussed, is perhaps the nearest approach
+which a heathen ever made to the conception of the Christian
+church.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Rect. Rat. Aud.</hi> c. vi.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">διὸ δεῖ ἀκροάσθαι τοῦ λέγοντος ἴλεων καὶ πρᾷων ὥσπερ ἐφ’ ἑστίασιν
+ἱερὰν καὶ θυσίας ἀπαρχὴν παρειλημμένον κτλ.</foreign>: cf.
+viii.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλ’ εἰς διδασκαλεῖον ἀφῖκται τῷ λόγῳ τὸν βίον ἐπανορθωσόμενος</foreign>: c. xii.</note> In theory, the philosopher’s discourse on high moral
+themes was a more solemn affair than the showy declamation
+of the sophist, whose chief object was to dazzle and astonish
+his audience by a display of rhetorical legerdemain on the
+most trivial or out-worn themes. But the moral preacher in
+those days, it is to be feared, often forgot the seriousness of
+his mission, and degraded it by personal vanity and a tinsel
+rhetoric to win a cheap applause.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. vii. viii.; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108,
+§ 6, magnam hanc auditorum partem
+videbis cui philosophi schola diversorium
+otii sit, etc.; Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> ii. 23.</note> The sophist and the
+philosopher were in fact too often undistinguishable, and the
+philosophic class-room often resounded with new-fangled
+expressions of admiration. For all this Plutarch has an
+indignant contempt. It is the prostitution of a noble mission.
+It is turning the school into a theatre, and the reformer of
+souls into a flatterer of the ear. To ask rhetoric from the
+true philosopher is as if one should require a medicine
+to be served in the finest Attic ware.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Rect. Rat. Aud.</hi> c. ix.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὅμοιός ἐστι μὴ βουλομένῳ πιεῖν ἀντίδοτον ἂν μὴ τὸ
+ἀγγεῖον ἐκ τῆς Ἀττικῆς κωλιάδος ᾖ κεκεραμευένον</foreign>.</note> The profession of
+philosophy becomes in Plutarch’s eyes a real priesthood for
+the salvation of souls. He disapproves of the habit, which
+prevailed in the sophist’s lecture theatre, of proposing subtle
+or frivolous questions to the lecturer in order to make a display
+of cleverness. But he would have those in moral difficulty to
+remain after the sermon, for such it was, and lay bare their
+faults and spiritual troubles.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xii.</note> He watched the moral progress
+of his disciples, as when Fundanus is congratulated on his
+growing mildness of temper.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Cohib. Ira</hi>, c. i.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ δὲ σφοδρὸν ἐκεῖνο καὶ διάπυρον πρὸς ὀργὴν ὁρῶντί μοι
+πρᾷον οὕτω καὶ χειρόηθες τῷ λογισμῷ γεγενημένον ἐπέρχεται
+πρὸς τὸν θυμὸν εἰπεῖν κτλ.</foreign>
+</note> The philosopher was in those
+<pb n="414"/><anchor id="Pg414"/>days, and often too truly, charged with gross inconsistency in his
+private conduct. Plutarch believed emphatically in teaching by
+example. The preacher of the higher life should inspire such
+respect that his frown or smile shall at once affect the disciple.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Rect. Rat. Aud.</hi> c. xii.; cf. <hi rend="italic">De
+Prof.</hi> c. xv.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τίθεσθαι πρὸ ὀφθαλμῶν τοὺς ὄντας ἀγαθοὺς ἢ γεγενημένους καὶ
+    διανοεῖσθαι τί δ’ ἂν ἔπραξεν ἐν τούτῳ Πλάτων κτλ.</foreign></note>
+Plutarch evidently practised his remedies on himself. His
+great gallery of the heroes of the past was primarily intended
+to profit others. But he found, as the work went on, that he
+was himself <q>much profited by looking into these histories, as
+if he looked into a glass, to frame and fashion his life to the
+mould and pattern of these virtuous noblemen.</q><note place="foot">Trench, <hi rend="italic">Plut.</hi> p. 33.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plutarch, as we have seen, waged determined war with the
+older Stoic and Epicurean systems; yet his practical teaching
+is coloured by the spirit of both. This is perhaps best seen in
+the tract on Tranquillity, which might almost have been written
+by Seneca. Although Plutarch elsewhere holds the Peripatetic
+doctrine that the full life of virtue cannot dispense with the
+external gifts of fortune, he asserts as powerfully as any Stoic
+that life takes its predominant colour from the character, that
+<q>the kingdom of Heaven is within,</q> that no change of external
+fortune can calm the tumults of the soul. You seem to be
+listening to a Stoic doctor when you hear that most calamities
+draw their weight and bitterness from imagination, that excessive
+desire for a thing engenders the fear of losing it, and
+makes enjoyment feeble and uncertain, that men, by forgetting
+the past in the vanishing present, lose the continuity of their
+lives.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> c. xvi. xvii. xiv. xv.</note> Is it Plutarch himself, or some Christian preacher, who
+tells us that seeming calamity may be the greatest blessing,
+that the greatest folly is unthankfulness and discontent with
+the daily lot, that no wealth or rank can give such enchanted
+calm of spirit as a conscience unstained by evil deed or thought,
+and the power of facing fortune with steady open eye?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xix.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀγνοουντες ὅσον ἐστὶ πρὸς ἀλυπίαν ἀγαθὸν τὸ μελετᾶν
+    καὶ δύνασθαι πρὸς τὴν τύχην ἀνεῳγόσι τοῖς ὄμμασιν ἀντιβλέπειν</foreign>.</note> It is
+surely the greatest literary genius of his age, buried in a dull
+Boeotian town, who bids us think of the good things we have,
+instead of envying a life whose inner griefs we know not, who
+ever looks on the brighter side of things and dignifies an obscure
+<pb n="415"/><anchor id="Pg415"/>lot by grateful content, who is not vexed by another’s splendid
+fortune, because he knows that seeming success is often
+a miserable failure, and that each one has within him the
+springs of happiness or misery.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Tranq.</hi> c. xi. xiii. xiv.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὅτι ἕκαστος ἐν ἑαυτῷ τὰ τῆς εὐθυμίας καὶ τῆς δυσθυμίας
+    ἔχει ταμεῖα</foreign>.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The discipline by which this wise mood, which contains the
+wisdom of all the ages, is to be attained is expounded by Plutarch
+in many tracts, which are the record of much spiritual counsel.
+The great secret is a lover’s passion for the ideal and a scorn for
+the vulgar objects of desire.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Prof.</hi> c. xiv.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">δήμωμα δὲ αὐτοῦ πρῶτα μὲν ὁ πρὸς τὰ ἐπαινούμενα ζῆλος
+καὶ τὸ ποιεῖν εἴναι προθύμους, ἃ θαυμάζομεν, κτλ.</foreign></note> Yet moral growth must be slow,
+though steady and unpausing, not the rush of feverish excitement,
+which may be soon spent and exhausted.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. i.-iv.</note> The true
+aspirant to moral perfection will not allow himself to be cast
+down by the obstacles that meet him at the entrance to the
+narrow way, nor will he be beguiled by pomp of style or
+subtlety of rhetoric to forget the true inwardness of philosophy.
+He will not ask for any witness of his good deeds or his
+growth in virtue; he will shrink from the arrogance of the
+mere pretender. Rather will he be humble and modest,
+harsh to his own faults, gentle to those of others. Like the
+neophyte in the mysteries, he will be awed into reverent
+silence, when the light bursts from the inner shrine.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. x.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὁ δὲ ἐτὸς γενομένος καὶ φῶς μέγα ἰδὼν οἷον ἀνακτόρων
+ἀνοιγομένων, ὥσπερ θεῷ τῷ λόγῳ ταπεινὸς συνέπεται κτλ.</foreign></note> This
+humility will be cultivated by daily self-scrutiny, and in
+this self-examination no sins will seem little, and no addition
+to the growing moral wealth, however slight, will be despised.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xvii.</note>
+To stimulate effort, we must set the great historic examples of
+achievement or self-conquest before our eyes, and in doubt or
+difficulty, we must ask what would Plato or Socrates have done
+in such a case?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c.
+    <anchor id="corr415"/><corr sic="xv;">xv.;</corr> cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 11, § 8;
+aliquis vir bonus nobis eligendus est
+... ut sic tanquam illo spectante
+vivamus, et omnia tanquam illo
+vidente faciamus.</note> Where they have suffered, we shall love
+and honour them all the more. Their memory will work as a
+sacred spell.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plutarch expounded the gospel of a cheerful and contented
+life, and he evidently practised what he preached. Yet, like
+all finely strung spirits, he had his hours when the pathos of
+<pb n="416"/><anchor id="Pg416"/>life was heavy upon him, and death seemed the sovereign
+remedy for it all. Any one who shares the vulgar notion
+that the Greeks, even of the great age, were a race living in
+perpetual sunshine and careless enjoyment of the hour, should
+read the Consolation to Apollonius on the death of his son. He
+will there find all the great poets, from Homer downwards, cited
+in support of the most pessimist view of human life.<note place="foot">Plut. (?) <hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Apoll.</hi> c. vi. vii.
+sqq.</note> In the field
+of philosophy, it finds the most withering expression in the
+doctrine of Heraclitus, which did so much to mould the thought
+of Plutarch’s great master, and which coloured so many of the
+meditations of M. Aurelius.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. vii. 1; vii. 19; vi. 15;
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐν δὴ τούτῳ τῷ ποταμῷ τί ἄν τις τούτων παραθεόντων
+    ἐκτιμήσειεν ἐφ’ οὗ στῆναι οὐκ ἔξεστιν</foreign>: ix. 32; cf. <hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Apoll.</hi>
+c. x.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ ᾗ φησιν Ἡράκλειτος, ταὐτό τ’ ἔνι ζῶν καὶ τεθνηκός</foreign>.</note> Our life is but in miniature a
+counterpart of the universal flux, and each moment is the meeting
+place of life and death. Years, many or few, are but a point,
+a moment in the tract of infinite age.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Apoll.</hi> c. xvii.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τό τε πολὺ δήπυθεν ἢ μικρὸν οὐδὲν διαφέρειν δοκεῖ
+πρὸς τὸν ἄπειρον ἀφορῶσιν αἰῶνα</foreign>.</note> The noble fulness of a
+life must be sought not in a sum of years, but in a rounded
+completeness of virtue. When we look at the chance and
+change and sorrow of life, death seems really the great deliverer,
+and in certain moments, it may be hailed as Heaven’s last, best
+gift.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xiv.</note> Whether it be an unawaking sleep or the entrance to
+another scene of being, it cannot be an evil; it may perchance
+be a blessing. If there is nothing after it, we only return to
+our calm antenatal unconsciousness.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xv.; cf. Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 99, § 30;
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 36; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 24.</note> Or if there be another
+life, then for the good and noble there is a place assuredly
+prepared in some happy island of the West, or other mystic
+region, which we may picture to ourselves, if we please, in the
+Orphic visions glorified by Pindar.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Apoll.</hi> c. xxxiv. xxxv.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ χῶρός τις ἀποτεταγμένος ἐν ᾧ διατρίβουσιν αἱ τούτων ψυχαί</foreign>: Pind. <hi rend="italic">Ol.</hi> ii. 106 sqq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+We are now on the threshold of another world, from which
+many voices were coming to the age of Plutarch. After
+philosophy has done its utmost to mould the life of sixty or
+seventy years into a moral harmony, with its music in itself,<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Virt. Mor.</hi> c. vi.</note>
+the effort ends in a melancholy doubt. The precept of Seneca
+and Plutarch, that you should live under the tutelary eye of
+some patron sage of the past, revealed a need of exterior help
+<pb n="417"/><anchor id="Pg417"/>for the virtuous will. The passion for continued existence was
+sobered by the sense of continued moral responsibility and the
+shadow of a judgment to come. Vistas of a supernatural world
+opened above the struggling human life on earth and in far
+mysterious distances beyond. When philosophy had done its
+utmost to heal the diseases of humanity, it was confronted with
+another task, to give man a true knowledge of God and assurance
+of His help in this world and the next. Philosophy had
+for ages held before the eyes of men a dim vision of Him, sublime,
+remote, ineffable. But it was a vision for the few, not for the
+many. It was rather metaphysical than moral and spiritual.
+It paid little heed to the myths and mysteries by which
+humanity had been seeking to solve its spiritual enigmas.
+This long travail of humanity could not be ignored by a true
+religious philosophy. Some means must be found to reconcile
+ancient religious imagination with the best conception of the
+Divine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The problem indeed was not a new one, except in the sense
+that an intense revival of religious faith or superstition
+demanded a fresh théodicée. As early as the sixth century
+<hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, the simple faith in legend had been shaken among the
+higher minds in a great philosophic movement which extended
+over many ages. Some had rejected the myths with scorn.
+Others had proceeded by the method of more or less critical
+selection. Others, again, strove to find in them a historical
+kernel, or an esoteric meaning veiled in allegory. The same
+methods reappeared in the age of Varro and Scaevola,<note place="foot">S. Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>, iv. 27; vi.
+2.</note> and,
+five centuries later, in the theology of Macrobius.<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i. c. 17; cf. <hi rend="italic">Roman
+Society in the Last Century of the W.
+Empire</hi>, p. 77 (1st ed.).</note> The effort,
+however, of the Platonists of the second century has a peculiar
+interest, because some fresh elements have been added to the
+great problem since the days of Xenophanes and Euhemerus
+and Varro.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Plutarch, theology is the crown of all philosophy.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. 2.</note> To
+form true and worthy conceptions of the Divine Being is not
+less important than to pay Him pious worship. Plutarch’s
+lofty conception of the Infinite and Supreme, like that of
+Maximus of Tyre, dominates all his system. In a curious
+<pb n="418"/><anchor id="Pg418"/>treatise on Isis and Osiris, he reviews many a device of scholastic
+subtlety, many a crude guess of embryonic science, many a dream
+of Pythagorean mysticism, to find an inner meaning in the
+Egyptian myth. Yet it embalms, in all this frigid scholasticism,
+the highest and purest expression of Plutarch’s idea of the
+Supreme. In the end he breaks away from all lower mundane
+conceptions of the Divine, and reveals a glimpse of the beatific
+vision. <q>While we are here below,</q> he says, <q>encumbered by
+bodily affections, we can have no intercourse with God, save as
+in philosophic thought we may faintly touch Him, as in a dream.
+But when our souls are released, and have passed into the region
+of the pure, invisible, and changeless, this God will be their
+guide and king who depend on Him and gaze with insatiable
+longing on the beauty which may not be spoken of by the lips of
+man.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. lxxix.</note> To Plutarch God is the One, Supreme, Eternal Being,
+removed to an infinite distance from the mutable and mortal—the
+Being of whom we can only predicate that <q>He is,</q> who lives
+in an everlasting <q>now,</q> of whom it would be irrational and
+impious to speak in the terms of the future or the past.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ΕΙ</foreign> ap. Delph.</hi> c. xix.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὅθεν οὐδ’ ὅσιόν ἐστιν οὐδὲν τοῦ ὄντος λέγειν ὡς ἦν ἢ ἔσται</foreign>.</note> He
+is the One, the Absolute of Eleatic or Pythagorean philosophy,
+the Demiurgus of Plato, the primal motive power of Aristotle,
+the World-Soul of the Stoics. Yet Plutarch is as far removed
+from the Epicureanism which banishes God from the universe
+as he is from the pantheism of east or west, which interfuses
+the world and God.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. 54, 78;
+    <hi rend="italic">De <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ΕΙ</foreign> ap. Delph.</hi> c. 20; <hi rend="italic">Def. Or.</hi> c. 9, <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi>;
+Oakesmith, <hi rend="italic">Rel. of Plut.</hi> p. 88; Zeller,
+<hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 2, p. 148; <hi rend="italic">De Is.
+et Osir.</hi> c. 40, 66; <hi rend="italic">non p. Suav.</hi> c. 22,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">βοηθεῖν πέφυκεν, ὀργίζεσθαι δὲ καὶ κακῶς ποιεῖν οὐ πέφυκεν</foreign>: <hi rend="italic">De Ser. Num. Vind.</hi>
+c. iv. v. xviii.; Nitsch, <hi rend="italic">De Plut. Theologo</hi>,
+p. 8; Gréard, <hi rend="italic">Morale de Plut.</hi> p.
+263; cf. Burgmann, <hi rend="italic">Seneca’s Theologie</hi>,
+pp. 14-20.</note> Plutarch never abandons the Divine
+personality, in whatever sense he may hold it. God is the
+highest perfection of goodness and intelligence, the Creator, the
+watchful and benevolent Providence of the world, the Author
+of all good. His power, indeed, is not unlimited. There is a
+power of evil in the world which must be recognised. And,
+as good cannot be the author of evil, the origin of evil must
+be sought in a separate and original principle, distinct from,
+but not co-equal with, God: a principle recognised in many a
+theology and philosophy of east and west, and called by many
+<pb n="419"/><anchor id="Pg419"/>names—Ahriman or Hades, the <q>dyad</q> of Pythagoras, the
+<q>strife</q> of Empedocles, the <q>other</q> of Plato.<note place="foot">Zeller, iii. 2, p. 152; <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. 45-49;
+<hi rend="italic">De St. Rep.</hi> c. 33.</note> Its seat is the
+World-Soul, which has a place alongside of God and Matter,
+causing all that is deadly in nature, all moral disorder in the
+soul of man. Matter is the seat both of evil and good.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De An. Procr.</hi> c. 6.</note> In
+its lower regions it may seem to be wholly mastered by the
+evil principle; yet in its essence it is really struggling towards
+the good, and, as a female principle, susceptible to the formative
+influence of the Divine, as well as exposed to the incursions of
+evil. Plutarch’s theory of creation is, in the main, that of
+the Timaeus, with mingled elements of Stoic cosmogony.
+Through number and harmony the Divine Mind introduces
+order into the mass of lawless chaos. But while God stands
+outside the cosmos as its creator, He is not merely the divine
+craftsman, but a penetrating power. For from Him proceeds
+the soul which is interfused with the world and which sustains
+it. Through the World-Soul, God is in touch with all powers
+and provinces of the universe. Yet throughout the universe,
+as in the human soul, there are always present the two elements
+side by side, the principles of reason and unreason, of evil and
+of good.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 2,
+p. 155; Plat. <hi rend="italic">Tim.</hi> 29, 30.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The vision of the one eternal, passionless Spirit, far removed
+from the world of chance and change and earthly soilure, was
+the conquest of Greek philosophy, travailing for 800 years.
+But it was a vision far withdrawn; it was separated by an
+apparently impassable gulf alike from the dreams of Hellenic
+legend and from the struggling life of humanity. The poets,
+and even the poet of divinest inspiration, had bequeathed a mass
+of legend, often shocking to the later moral sense, yet always
+seductive by its imaginative charm. How to reconcile the
+fictions of poetry, which had so long enthralled all imaginations,
+with higher spiritual intuitions, that was the problem. It was
+not indeed a new problem. It had driven Xenophanes into open
+revolt, it had exercised the mind of the reverent Pindar and
+the sceptical Euripides. It had suggested to Plato the necessity
+of recasting myth in the light of the Divine purity.<note place="foot">Diog. Laert. ix. § 18,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">γέγραφε δὲ καὶ [Ξενοφάνης] ἰάμβους καθ’ Ἡσιόδου καὶ Ὁμήρου
+ἐπισκώπτων αὐτῶν τὰ περὶ θεῶν εἰρημένα</foreign>: <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> extracts in Ritter
+and Preller, <hi rend="italic">Hist. Phil.</hi> p. 82; Plat.
+<hi rend="italic">Rep.</hi> ii. pp. 378-380.</note> But the
+<pb n="420"/><anchor id="Pg420"/>new Hellenism of the second century was a great literary, even
+more than a theological or philosophic, movement; and the
+glory of Greek literature was inseparably linked with the glory
+and the shame of Greek mythology. To discard and repudiate
+the myths was to give the lie to the divine poets. To explain
+them away by physical allegory, in the fashion of the
+Stoic theology, or to lower the <q>blessed ones</q> of Olympus
+to the stature of earthly kings and warriors, after the manner
+of Euhemerus, was to break the charm of poetic legend, and
+violate the instincts of ancestral piety.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. xxiii.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὃς (Εὐήμερος) ... πᾶσαν αθεότητα κατασκεδάννυσι τῆς οἰκουμένης</foreign>.</note> And there were many
+other claimants for devotion beside the ancient gods of Rome
+and Greece. Persia and Phrygia, Commagene and Egypt, every
+region from the Sahara to Cumberland, were adding to the
+pantheon. Soldiers and travellers were bringing their tales of
+genii and daemons from islands in the British seas and the
+shores of the Indian Ocean.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. 18, 21.</note> How could a man trained in the
+mystic monotheism of 800 years reconcile himself to this
+immense accretion of alien superstition?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the other hand, from whatever quarter, a new spiritual
+vision had opened, strange to the ancient world. It is not merely
+that the conception of God has become more pure and lofty;
+the whole attitude of the higher minds to the Eternal had altered.
+A great spiritual revolution had concurred with a great political
+revolution. The vision of the divine world which satisfied men
+in the age of Pericles or in the Punic wars, when religion,
+politics, and morality were linked in unbroken harmony, when,
+if spiritual vision was bounded, spiritual needs were less
+clamorous, and the moral life less troubled and self-conscious,
+could no longer appease the yearnings of the higher minds. Both
+morality and religion had become less formal and external, more
+penetrating and exigent. Prayer was no longer a formal litany
+for worldly blessings or sinful indulgence, but a colloquy with
+God, in a moment of spiritual exaltation.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 10, § 5; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 41, § 1; Pers.
+ii. 73; Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> xi. § 8,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">σὺ μὲν ἡγεῖ τὴν τοῦ φιλοσόφου εὐχὴν αἴτησιν τῶν οὐ παρόντων·
+    ἐγὼ δὲ ὁμιλίαν καὶ διάλεκτον πρὸς τοὺς θεοὺς περὶ τῶν παρόντων, κτλ.</foreign>: Martha, <hi rend="italic">Moralistes sous
+l’Emp.</hi> p. 163; Denis, <hi rend="italic">Idées Morales</hi>,
+ii. p. 245 sqq.</note> The true sacrifice
+was no longer <q>the blood of bulls,</q> but a quiet spirit. Along
+with a sense of frailty and bewilderment, men felt the need of
+<pb n="421"/><anchor id="Pg421"/>purification and spiritual support. The old mysteries and the
+new cults from the East had fostered a longing for sacramental
+peace and assurance of another life, in which the crooked should
+be made straight and the perverted be restored.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In Maximus of Tyre,<note place="foot">Of the life of Maximus of Tyre little
+is known. He began his career as a
+teacher probably about 155 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> Like
+other philosophers of his time, he had
+travelled widely. See the references to
+Arabia and Phrygia in <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> viii., <hi rend="italic">e.g.</hi>
+§ 8,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Ἀράβιοι μὲν σέβουσι μὲν ὅντινα δὲ οὐκ οἶδα· τὸ δὲ ἄγαλμα εἶδον,
+λίθος ἦν τετράγωνος</foreign>. Cf. Zeller, iii. 2, p. 183 n.</note> although he has no claim to the reputation
+of a strong and original thinker, we see this new religious
+spirit of the second century perhaps in its purest form. Man
+is an enigma, a contradiction, a being placed on the confines of
+two worlds. A beast in his fleshly nature, he is akin to God
+in his higher part, nay, the son of God.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iv. § 7.</note> Even the noblest
+spirits here below live in a sort of twilight, or in a heady excitement,
+an intoxication of the senses. Yet, cramped as it is in
+the prison of the flesh, the soul may raise itself above the misty
+region of perpetual change towards the light of the Eternal. For,
+in the slumber of this mortal life, the pure spirit is sometimes
+visited by visions coming through the gate of horn,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xvi. § 1, § 8.</note> visions
+of another world seen in some former time. And, following
+them, the moral hero, like Heracles, the model of strenuous
+virtue, through toil and tribulation may gain the crown.
+On this stormy sea of time, philosophy gives us the veil of
+Leucothea to charm the troubled waters. It is true that only
+when release comes at death, does the soul attain to the full vision
+of God. For the Highest is separated from us by a great gulf.
+Yet the analysis of the soul which Maximus partly borrows from
+Aristotle, discovers His seat in us, the highest reason, that power
+of intuitive, all-embracing, instantaneous vision, which is distinct
+from the slower and tentative operations of the understanding.
+It is by this higher faculty that God is seen, so far as He may
+be, in this mixed and imperfect state.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xvii. § 8.</note> For the vision of God
+can only in any degree be won by abstraction from sense and
+passion and everything earthly, in a struggle ever upwards,
+beyond the paths of the heavenly orbs, to the region of eternal
+calm <q>where falls not rain or hail or any snow, but a white
+cloudless radiance spreads over all.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 10.</note> And when may we see
+God? <q>Thou shalt see Him fully,</q> Maximus says, <q>only when
+<pb n="422"/><anchor id="Pg422"/>He calls thee, in age or death, but meantime glimpses of the
+Beauty which eye hath not seen nor can tongue speak of, may
+be won, if the veils and wrappings which hide His splendour
+be torn away.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> xvii. § 11.</note> But do not thou profane Him by offering vain
+prayers for earthly things which belong to the world of chance
+or which may be obtained by human effort, things for which the
+worthy need not pray, and which the unworthy will not obtain.
+The only prayer which is answered, is the prayer for goodness,
+peace, and hope in death.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xi. § 2, § 7.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How could a Platonist of the second century, we may ask,
+holding such a spiritual creed, reconcile himself to Greek
+mythology, nay, to all the mythologies, with all the selfish grossness
+of their ritual? Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre answer
+the question by a piously ingenious interpretation of ancient
+legend, and partly by a system of daemons, of mediating and
+ministering spirits, who fill the interval between the changeless
+Infinite and the region of sin and change.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In religion, they say, in effect, we must take human nature
+as we find it. We are not legislating for a young race, just
+springing from the earth, but for races with conceptions of
+the Divine which run back through countless ages. There may
+be, here and there, an elect few who can raise their minds, in
+rare moments, to the pure vision of the Eternal. But heaven is so
+far from earth, and earth is so darkened by the mists of sense,
+that temple and image and sacred litany, and the myths created
+by the genius of poets, or imposed by lawgivers, are needed to
+sustain and give expression to the vague impotent yearnings of
+the mass of men.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> viii. § 2,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλ’ ἀσθενὲς ὃν κομιδῇ τὸ ἀνθρωπεῖον καὶ διεστὸς τοῦ θείου
+ὅσον οὐρανοῦ γῆ, σημεῖα ταῦτα ἐμηχανήσατο</foreign>.</note> The higher intuitions of religion must be
+translated into material symbolism; <q>here we see, as through
+a glass darkly.</q> And the symbols of sacred truth are as various
+as the many tribes of men. Some, like the Egyptian worship
+of animals, are of a degraded type. The Greek anthropomorphism,
+although falling far short of the grandeur and purity of
+the Infinite, yet furnishes its noblest image, because it has glorified
+by artistic genius the human body, which has been chosen as
+the earthly home of the rational soul.<note place="foot">Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. § 59 (404 R).</note> And the cause of myth
+and plastic art are really one; nay, there is no opposition or
+con<pb n="423"/><anchor id="Pg423"/>trast, in fact, between poetic mythology and religious philosophy.
+They are different methods of teaching religious truth, adapted
+to different stages of intellectual development. Myth is the
+poetic philosophy of a simple age, for whose ears the mystic
+truth must be sweetened by music, an age whose eyes cannot
+bear to gaze on the Divine splendour unveiled.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> x. § 3,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἡ ψυχὴ ... ἐδεῖτο φιλοσοφίας μουσικῆς τινος κτλ.</foreign> Cf.
+§ 5,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πάντα μεστὰ αἰνιγμάτων καὶ παρὰ ποιηταῖς καὶ παρὰ φιλοσόφοις</foreign>.</note> Philosophic
+theology is for an age of rationalism and inquiry; it would have
+been unintelligible to the simple imaginative childhood of the
+race. Maximus has the same faith as Plutarch that the
+mythopoeic age possessed, along with an enthralling artistic
+skill, all the speculative depth and subtlety of later ages. It
+is almost a profanity to imagine that Homer or Hesiod or
+Pindar were less of philosophers than Aristotle or Chrysippus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> x. § 3.</note>
+It was assumed that the early myth-makers and lawgivers
+possessed a sacred lore of immense value and undoubted truth,
+which they dimly shadowed forth in symbolism of fanciful
+tale or allegory.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> lxviii.; xx.; Max. Tyr.
+x. §§ 5-7; cf. Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Som. Scip.</hi> i. 2,
+7-19; Hatch, <hi rend="italic">Hibbert Lec.</hi> p. 55 sq.</note> The myth at once hides and reveals the
+mystery of the Divine. If a man comes to its interpretation
+with the proper discipline and acumen, the kernel of spiritual
+or physical meaning which is reverently veiled from the profane
+eye will disclose itself. And thus the later philosophic
+theologian is not reading his own higher thoughts of God into
+the grotesque fancies of a remote antiquity; he is evolving
+and interpreting a wisdom more original than his own. In
+this process of rediscovering a lost tradition, he pushes aside
+the mass of erroneous interpretations which have perverted
+the original doctrine, by literal acceptance of what is really
+figurative, by abuse of names and neglect of realities, by
+stopping at the symbol instead of rising to the divine fact.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> lxvi. <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The treatise of Plutarch on Isis and Osiris is the best
+illustration of this attitude to myth. Plutarch’s theology,
+though primarily Hellenic, does not confine its gaze to the
+Greek Olympus; it is intended to be the science of human
+religion in general. It gives formal expression to the growing
+tendency to syncretism. The central truth of it is, that as
+the sun and moon, under many different names, shed their
+<pb n="424"/><anchor id="Pg424"/>light on all, so the gods are variously invoked and honoured
+by various tribes of men.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. lxvii.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὥσπερ ἥλιος καὶ σελήνη καὶ οὐρανὸς καὶ γῆ κοινὰ πᾶσιν,
+ὀνομάζεται δ’ ἄλλος ὑπ’ ἄλλων, οὕτως ἑνὸς λόγου τοῦ ταῦτα κοσμοῦντος
+καὶ μιᾶς προνοίας ἐπιτροπευούσης, καὶ δυνάμεων ὑπουργῶν
+ἐπὶ πάντας τεταγμένων, ἕτεραι παρ’ ἑτέροις κατὰ νόμους
+γεγόνασι τιμαὶ καὶ προσηγορίαι, κτλ.</foreign></note> But there is one supreme Ruler
+and Providence common to all. And the lower deities of
+different countries may often be identified by the theologian,
+under all varieties of title and attribute. So, to Plutarch as
+to Herodotus, the immemorial worships of Egypt were the
+prototypes or the counterparts of the cults of Greece.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. lxi.; xxxv.; cf. Herodot. ii.
+c. 50.</note> There
+was a temple of Osiris at Delphi, and Clea, to whom Plutarch’s
+treatise is addressed, was not only a hereditary priestess of the
+Egyptian god, but held a leading place among the female
+ministers of Dionysus.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. xxxv.</note> It was fitting that a person so
+catholic in her sympathies should have dedicated to her the
+treatise in which Plutarch expounds his all-embracing theology.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In this treatise we see the new theology wrestling in a
+hopeless struggle to unite the thought of Pythagoras and
+Plato with the grossness of Egyptian myth. It is a striking,
+but not a solitary, example of the misapplication of dialectic
+skill and learning, to find the thoughts of the present in the
+fancies of the past, and from a mistaken piety, to ignore the
+onward march of humanity. Arbitrary interpretations of
+myth, alike unhistorical and unscientific, make us wonder how
+they could ever have occurred to men of intellect and learning.
+Yet the explanation is not far to seek. More elevated conceptions
+of God, the purged and clarified religious intuition,
+do not readily find a substitute for the old symbolism to
+express their visions. Religion, beyond any other institution,
+depends for its power on antiquity, on the charm of ancestral
+pieties. A religious symbol is doubly sacred when it has ministered
+to the devotion of many generations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In interpreting the powerful cult of Isis, which was spreading
+rapidly over the western world, Plutarch had two objects
+in view. By reverent explanation of its legends and ritual, he
+desired to counteract its immoral and superstitious tendencies;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xx.</note>
+he also wished, in discussing a worship so multiform as that
+of Isis, to develop his attitude to myth in general. We
+<pb n="425"/><anchor id="Pg425"/>cannot follow him minutely in his survey of the various
+attempts of philosophy to find the basis of truth in Egyptian
+legend. Some of these explanations, such as the Euhemerist,
+he would dismiss at once as atheistic.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. xxiii.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πᾶσαν ἀθεότητα κατασκεδάννυσι τῆς οἰκουμένης</foreign>.</note> On others, which
+founded themselves on physical allegory, he would not be
+so dogmatic, although he might reject as impious any tendency
+to identify the gods with natural powers and products.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. lxvi.</note> As
+a positive contribution to religious philosophy, the treatise is
+chiefly valuable for its theory of Evil and of daemonic powers,
+and above all for the doctrine of the unity of God, the central
+truth of all religions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The daemonology of the Platonists of the second century
+had its roots deep in the Hellenic past, as it was destined to
+have a long future. But it was specially evoked by the needs
+of the pagan revival of the Antonine age. The doctrine had
+assumed many forms in previous Greek thought from the days
+of Hesiod, and it has various aspects, and serves various
+purposes, in the hands of Plutarch, Apuleius, and Maximus of
+Tyre. It was in the first place an apologetic for heathenism
+in an age distracted between a lofty conception of one infinite
+Father and legends of many lands and many ages, which were
+consecrated by long tradition, yet often shocking to the spiritual
+sense. As the conception of God became purer and seemed to
+withdraw into remoter distances, souls like Apuleius, wedded
+to the ancient rites, found in the daemons, ranging between
+earth and ether, the means of conveying answers to prayer, of
+inspiring dreams and prophecy, of ordering all the machinery
+of divination.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">De Deo Socr.</hi> c. vi. (133).</note> To others, such as Maximus of Tyre, the
+doctrine seemed to discover a spiritual support for human
+frailty, guardians in temptation and the crises of life, mediators
+between the human spirit, immured for a time in the prison
+of the flesh, and the remote purity of the Supreme.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> xiv. §§ 7, 8.</note> To other
+minds the daemon is no external power, but dwelling within
+each soul, as its divine part, a kind of ideal personality,<note place="foot">Cf. Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. 361, 1. M.
+Aurel. v. 10, 27,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὅτι ἔξεστί μοι μηδὲν πρᾶττειν παρὰ τὸν ἐμὸν θεὸν καὶ δαίμονα</foreign>:
+vii. 17; Epict. i. 14, § 12,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ (ὁ θεὸς) ἐπίτροπον ἑκάστῳ παρέστησε, τὸν ἑκάστου δαίμονα,
+καὶ παρέδωκε φυλάσσειν αὐτὸν αὐτῷ, κτλ.</foreign></note> in
+following whose ghostly promptings lies the secret of happiness.
+<pb n="426"/><anchor id="Pg426"/>Finally, the doctrine created an eschatology by which vistas
+of moral perfection were opened before purer spirits in worlds
+to come, and the infinite responsibilities of this life were
+terribly enforced by threats of endless degradation.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Sera Num. Vind.</hi> c.
+xxii.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The daemons who came to the aid of mythology
+in the Antonine age, were composite beings, with a double
+nature corresponding to the two worlds of the Divine and
+human which they linked together. They are at once divine
+in power and knowledge, and akin to humanity in feeling and
+passion.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">De Deo Socr.</hi> c. xiii.; Max.
+Tyr. xv. § 4; Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. x.</note> They are even liable to mortality, as was proved by
+the famous tale of the voice which floated to the Egyptian
+pilot from the Echinad isles, announcing that the great Pan
+was dead.<note place="foot">Plut <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. xvii.</note> Their sphere is the middle space between the lofty
+ether and the mists of earth. This spiritual mediation, as
+Maximus points out, is not an exceptional principle. There is a
+chain of being in the universe, as it had been developed in the
+cosmic theory of Aristotle, by which the remote extremes are
+linked in successive stages, and may be blended or reconciled,
+in a mean or compound, as in a musical harmony. The
+principle is seen operating in the relation of the great physical
+elements. Thus, for example, fire and water are at opposite
+poles: they cannot pass immediately into one another, but air
+furnishes a medium between the two, and reconciles their
+opposition by participating in the warmth of the one element
+and in the moisture of the other.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. xv. § 3.</note> The suggestions of cosmic
+theory seemed to receive support from many tales which, in
+that age of luxuriant superstition, were accepted even in
+educated circles. Travellers, returning from Britain, told
+weird stories of desolate islands in the northern seas which
+were the haunts of genii.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. xviii.</note> A Spartan visitor to Delphi related
+how, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, he had met with a
+hermit of a beautiful countenance and proof against all disease,
+who spoke with many tongues, and derived his mystic powers
+from intercourse with the spirits which haunted those distant
+solitudes.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xxi.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plutarch also justifies his theory of daemons by an appeal
+to the authority of Hesiod, of Pythagoras and Plato, Xenocrates
+<pb n="427"/><anchor id="Pg427"/>and Chrysippus.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. xxv.; <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi>
+c. x.</note> He might have added others to the list.
+For, indeed, the conception of these mediators between the
+ethereal world and the world of sense has a long history—too
+long to be developed within our present limits. Its earliest
+appearance in Greece was in the <hi rend="italic">Works and Days</hi> of Hesiod, who
+first definitely sketched a great scale of being—gods, heroes,
+daemons, and mortal men. Hesiod’s daemons are the men of
+the golden age, translated to a blissful and immortal life, yet
+linked in sympathy with those still on earth—<q>Ministers of
+good and guardians of men.</q><note place="foot">Hes. <hi rend="italic">Op. et D.</hi> 125; cf. Rohde,
+<hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, i. p. 96.</note> The conception was introduced
+at a time when new moral and spiritual forces were at work,
+which were destined to have a profound and lasting influence
+on paganism for a thousand years. The glamour of the radiant
+Olympus and the glory of heroic battle were fading. Men were
+settling down to humdrum toil, and becoming acutely conscious
+of the troubles and sadness of life. With a craving for
+support and comfort which the religion of Homer could not
+give, the pessimist view of life, which colours Hesiod’s poetry,
+sought consolation in a mysticism altogether strange to Homer,
+and even to Hesiod. The feeling that humanity had declined
+from a glorious prime and, in its weakness and terror at death,
+needed some new consolations, was met by a system which,
+although Orpheus may never have existed, will always be
+called by his name.<note place="foot">For the spiritual influences at
+work <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Lobeck, <hi rend="italic">Aglaoph.</hi> p. 312;
+Grote, i. p. 23; Bury, <hi rend="italic">Hist. of Greece</hi>,
+p. 312; Hardie, <hi rend="italic">Lectures</hi>, p. 57.</note> The Chthonian deities, Dionysus and
+Demeter, sprang into a prominence which they had not in
+Homer. The immortal life began to overshadow the present,
+and in the mysteries men found some assurance of immortality,
+and preparation for it by cleansing from the stains of time.
+That idea, which was to have such profound influence upon
+later thought, that there is a divine element in man, which is
+emancipated from the prison of the flesh at death, became an
+accepted doctrine. At the same time, the faith in helpers and
+mediators, half human, half divine, lent itself to the support
+of human weakness. The heroic soul who passed victoriously
+through the ordeal of this life, might in another world become
+the guardian and exemplar of those who were still on earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the Ionian and Eleatic schools the doctrine was held
+<pb n="428"/><anchor id="Pg428"/>in some sense by all the great thinkers, by Thales, Anaximander,
+Heraclitus, Xenophanes. To Thales the world was
+full of daemons.<note place="foot">Diog. Laert. i. 27,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀρχὴν δὲ τῶν πάντων ὕδωρ ὑπεστήσατο, καὶ τὸν κόσμον
+ἔμψυχον καὶ δαιμόνων πλήρη</foreign>.</note> In the mystic teaching of Heraclitus the
+universe teems with such spirits, for in the perpetual flux and
+change, the divine is constantly passing into the death of
+mortal life and the mortal into the divine.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Heracl. Reliq.</hi> p. 26 Bywater,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάνατοι ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον,
+τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶντες. ὁ δὲ Ἡράκλειτός φησιν ὅτι
+καὶ τὸ ζῆν καὶ τὸ ἀποθανεῖν καὶ ἐν τῷ ζῆν ἡμᾶς ἐστι
+καὶ ἐν τῷ τεθνάναι, κτλ.</foreign>
+Cf. <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀνὴρ νήπιος ἤκουσε πρὸς δαίμονος ὅπωσπερ παῖς πρὸς ἀνδρός</foreign>. Ritter and
+Preller, <hi rend="italic">Hist. Phil.</hi> p. 23; Diog.
+Laert. ix. 1, § 7.</note> Empedocles, in
+conformity with his cosmic dualism, first made the distinction
+between good and bad daemons, and followed Pythagoras in
+connecting daemonic theory with the doctrine of a fall from
+divine estate, and long exile and incarnation in animal forms.<note place="foot">Ritter and Preller, <hi rend="italic">Hist. Phil.</hi> pp.
+126, 7; Hild, <hi rend="italic">Étude sur les Démons</hi>,
+p. 228.</note>
+It was in the dim system of Pythagoras that the doctrine
+became a really religious tenet, as it was to the Platonists of
+the Antonine age. Pythagoras was more priest and mystic
+than philosopher. He had far more in common with the
+Orphici, with Abaris and Epimenides, than with Thales or
+Anaximander. His school, for we can hardly speak of himself,
+connected the doctrine of daemons with the doctrines of metempsychosis
+and purification and atonement in another world.
+Souls released from the prison-house of the flesh are submitted
+to a purgatorial cleansing of a thousand years. Some pass the
+ordeal victoriously, and ascend to higher spheres. Others are
+kept in chains by the Erinnyes. The beatified souls become
+daemons or good spirits, ranging over the universe, and
+manifesting themselves in dreams and omens and ghostly
+monitions, sometimes becoming even visible to the eye.<note place="foot">Diog. Laert. viii. 1, § 30 sqq.</note> But
+their highest function is to guide men in the path of virtue
+during life, and after death to purify the disembodied spirit,
+which may become a daemon in its turn. This is the theory,
+which, with some modifications, was adopted by the later
+Platonists. It was popularised by Pindar, <q>the Homer of the
+Pythagorean school.</q> He was captivated by its doctrine of
+the migrations of the soul, of its ordeal in a future life, and
+its chastisement or elevation to lofty spiritual rank as daemon
+or hero. In the second Olympian ode, the punishment of the
+<pb n="429"/><anchor id="Pg429"/>wicked and the beatitude of noble spirits, in the company
+of Peleus and Achilles in the happy isles, are painted in all
+the glowing imagery of the Apocalypse.<note place="foot">Pind. <hi rend="italic">Ol.</hi> ii. 105 sqq.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἔνθα μακάρων νᾶσος ὠκεανίδες αὖραι περιπνέοισιν·
+ἄνθεμα δὲ χρυσοῦ φλέγει τὰ μὲν χερσόθεν ἀπ’ ἀγλαῶν δενδρέων,
+ὕδωρ δ’ ἄλλα φέρβει</foreign>.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The daemonology of Pythagoras, along with the doctrine
+of metempsychosis in its moral aspect, was adopted by Plato,
+whether as a serious theory or as a philosophic myth. The
+chief passages in Plato where the daemons are mentioned are
+suffused with such mythic colour that it would perhaps be rash
+to extract from them any sharp dogmatic theory.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> 202 <hi rend="small">E</hi>; <hi rend="italic">Polit.</hi> 271 <hi rend="small">D</hi>;
+<hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi> 107 <hi rend="small">D</hi>, 108 <hi rend="small">B</hi>; <hi rend="italic">Tim.</hi> 90 <hi rend="small">A</hi>.</note> But Plato,
+holding firmly the remote purity of God, strove to fill the
+interval between the mortal and the Infinite by a graded scheme
+of superhuman beings. The daemon is a compound of the
+mortal and the divine, spanning the chasm between them. This
+is the power which conveys to God the prayers and sacrifices of
+men, and brings to men the commands and rewards of the gods,
+which operates in prophecy, sacrifice, and mystery. And again
+the daemon is a power which is assigned to each soul at birth,
+and which at death conducts it to the eternal world, to receive
+judgment for its deeds, and perhaps to be condemned to return
+once more to earth. The reason in man, his truly divine part,
+is also called his daemon, his good genius. It is the power
+whose kindred is with the world of the unseen, which is immortal,
+and capable of a lofty destiny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Like his master Plato, Maximus of Tyre seems to know
+nothing of the evil daemons, who, as we shall presently see,
+were used by Plutarch to account for the immorality of myth.
+To Maximus the daemons are rather angelic ministers, sent
+forth to advise and succour weak mortal men.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> xiv. § 8.</note> They are
+the necessary mediators between the one Supreme and our
+frail mortal life. Dwelling in a region between earth and ether,
+they are of mingled mortal and divine nature, weaker than the
+gods, stronger than men, servants of God and overseers of men,
+by kinship with either linking the weakness of the mortal with
+the Divine. Great is the multitude of this heavenly host,
+interpreters between God and man: <q>thrice ten thousand are
+they upon the fruitful earth, immortal, ministers of Zeus,</q>
+healers of the sick, revealers of what is dark, aiding the
+<pb n="430"/><anchor id="Pg430"/>craftsman, companions of the wayfarer. On land and sea, in
+the city and the field, they are ever with us. They inspired a
+Socrates, a Pythagoras, a Diogenes, or a Zeno; they are present
+in all human spirits. Only the lost and hopeless soul is
+without the guardianship of such an unearthly friend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The earlier Platonist or Pythagorean daemonology was not
+employed to explain or rehabilitate polytheism. Although
+Plato would not banish myth from his Utopia, he placed his
+ban on the mythopoeic poets who had lent their authority to
+tales and crimes and passions of the gods. Myth could only
+be tolerated in the education of the young if it conformed
+to the standard of Divine perfection.<note place="foot">Plat. <hi rend="italic">Rep.</hi> ii. 377-380.</note> God cannot be the
+author of evil, evil is the offspring of matter; it is a
+limitation or an incident of the fleeting world of sense. It is
+only relative and transitory, and can never penetrate the realm
+of the ideal. But to Plutarch evil was an ultimate principle
+in the universe, ever present along with the good, although
+not perhaps of equal range and power.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. xlv.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">αἰτίαν δὲ κακοῦ τἀγαθὸν οὐκ ἂν παράσχοι, δεῖ γένεσιν
+ἰδίαν καὶ ἀρχήν, ὥσπερ ἀγαθοῦ καὶ κακοῦ, τὴν φύσιν ἔχειν</foreign>: cf. Hatch, <hi rend="italic">Hibbert
+Lec.</hi> p. 218.</note> And Plutarch would
+not banish and disown the poets for attributing to the gods
+passions and crimes which would have been dishonouring to
+humanity. He would not abandon the ancient ritual because
+it contained elements of gloom and impurity which shocked
+a refined moral sense. Mythology and ritual, as they had been
+moulded by poets or imposed by lawgivers, were intertwined
+with the whole life of the people and formed an essential
+element in the glory of Hellenic genius. The piety and
+aesthetic feeling of the priest of Delphi still clung to ancient
+ritual and legend, even when the lofty morality of the Platonist
+was offended by the grossness which mingled with their artistic
+charm. Might it not be possible to moralise the pagan system
+without discrediting its authors, to reconcile the claims of
+reason and conservative religious feeling? Might it not be
+possible to save at once the purity and majesty of God and the
+inspiration of the poets?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Plutarch the doctrine of daemons seemed to furnish an
+answer to this question; it also satisfied other spiritual cravings
+which were equally urgent. The need of some mixed nature
+<pb n="431"/><anchor id="Pg431"/>to mediate between the ethereal world and the region of
+sense became all the more imperious as the philosophic conception
+of God receded into a more remote and majestic purity.
+The gradation of spiritual powers, which had been accepted by
+so many great minds from the time of Hesiod, at once guarded
+the aloofness of the Supreme and satisfied the craving of the
+religious instinct for some means of contact with it, for divine
+help in the trials of time. These mediating spirits were also
+made in Plutarch’s theology to furnish an explanation of
+oracles and all forms of prophecy, of the inspired enthusiasm
+of artist, sage, and poet. Finally, the theory, with the aid of
+mythic fancy, cast a light on the fate of souls beyond the
+grave, and vindicated the Divine justice by a vision of a judgment
+to come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plutarch’s daemonology, as he admits himself, is an inheritance
+from the past. The daemons are beings half divine, half
+human; they are godlike in power and intelligence, they
+are human in liability to the passions engendered by the flesh.
+This host of spirits dwell in the borderland below the moon,
+between the pure changeless region of the celestial powers and
+the region of the mutable and the mortal. Linking the two
+worlds together by their composite nature, the daemons differ in
+degrees of virtue; some are more akin to the Divine perfection,
+others more tainted by the evil of the lower world.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. xxvi.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὡς τῶν δαιμόνων μικτὴν καὶ ἀνώμαλον φύσιν ἐχόντων καὶ προαίρεσον</foreign>: <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. x., c. xvi.</note> The good
+spirits, as they are described by Maximus of Tyre, are true
+servants of God and faithful guardians of human virtue. But
+the bad daemons assume a special prominence in the theology
+of Plutarch. Nor was the development unnatural. His
+conception of immortality, and the necessity of purification in
+another world, raised the question as to the destiny of souls
+whose stains were indelible. If purified souls are charged as
+daemons with offices of mercy, may not the impure prolong their
+guilt in plaguing and corrupting mankind? May not the existence
+of such sombre spirits account for the evil in the world, the
+existence of which cannot be blinked? Although there are traces
+of this moral dualism long before Plutarch’s time, both in Greek
+poetry and speculation, it was Xenocrates who first formulated
+the doctrine of evil daemons in relation to mythology.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. xxv.</note> <q>It
+can<pb n="432"/><anchor id="Pg432"/>not be,</q> he taught, <q>that unlucky days and festivals, conducted
+with scourgings and fasts, lamentations and lacerations and
+impure words and deeds, are celebrated in honour of the blessed
+gods or good daemons. They are rather offered to those
+powerful and terrible spirits of evil in the air whose sombre
+character is propitiated by such gloomy rites.</q> These
+sinister spirits assert their vast power, and display their
+malevolence, not only in plague, pestilence, and dearth, and all
+the desolating convulsions of the physical world, but in the
+moral perversion and deception of the human race. They are
+accountable for all that shocks the moral sense in the impure
+or ghastly tales which the poets have told of the gods,
+and in the gloomy or obscene rites which are celebrated
+in their honour. The poets and early myth-makers have not
+invented the evil in myth and rite; they have been deceived
+as to the authors of the evil. Each of the blessed gods has
+attached to him a daemon who is in some respects his counterpart,
+wielding his power, but who may perpetrate every kind of
+moral enormity in his name, and who demands to be honoured
+and propitiated after his own evil nature. The bad daemons,
+in fact, masquerade as gods and bring disgrace upon them. It
+was not the Blessed Ones who mutilated a father, who raised
+rebellion in Olympus and were driven into exile, who stooped to
+be the lovers of mortal women. These are the works of spirits
+of evil, using their fiendish cunning to deceive a simple
+age. Its poetry was seduced to cast a magical charm over
+their lusts and crimes; its superstition was terrified into
+appeasing the fiends by shameful orgies or dark bloody rites.
+Poets and founders of ritual have been faithful to supernatural
+fact, but they did not see that in the supernatural order there are
+evil powers as well as good. They are sound in their record
+but wrong in their interpretation. In this fashion Plutarch
+and his school strove to reconcile a rational faith with the
+grossness of superstition, to save the holiness of God and the
+glory of Homer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the bad daemons who were called in to save the
+ancient cults proved dangerous allies in the end. Few who
+really know him will be inclined to question the sincere monotheistic
+piety of Plutarch. And a sympathetic critic will even
+not withhold from him a certain respect for his old-world
+<pb n="433"/><anchor id="Pg433"/>attachment to the forms of his ancestral worship. He knew
+no other avenue of approaching the Divine. Yet only the
+imperious religious cravings and the spiritual contradictions of
+that age could excuse or account for a system which was
+disastrous both to paganism and philosophy. The union of
+gross superstition with ingenious theology, the licence of
+subtlety applied to the ancient legends, demanded too much
+credulity from the cultivated and too much subtlety from
+the vulgar. It undermined the already crumbling polytheism;
+it made philosophy the apostle of a belief in a baleful
+daemonic agency. If a malign genius was seated beside every
+god to account for the evil in nature or myth, might not a day
+come when both friends and enemies would confound the
+daemon and the god?<note place="foot">Mr. Oakesmith thinks that Plutarch
+tended to identify them, <hi rend="italic">Rel. of Plut.</hi>
+p. 127.</note> Might not philosophy be led on in a
+disastrous decline to the justification of magic, incantations,
+and all theurgic extravagance? That day did come in the
+fourth century when Platonism and polytheism in close league
+were making a last stand against the victorious Church. Even
+then indeed a purer Platonism still survived, as well as a purer
+paganism sustained by the mysteries of Mithra or Demeter.
+But the paganism which the Christian empire found it hardest
+to conquer, and which propagated itself far into the Christian
+ages, was the belief in magic and occult powers founded on
+the doctrine of daemons. And the Christian controversialist,
+with as firm a faith in daemons as the pagan, turned that
+doctrine against the faith which it was invented to support.
+The distinction of good and bad daemons, first drawn by
+Xenocrates and Chrysippus, and developed by Plutarch, was
+eagerly seized upon by Tatian and S. Clement of Alexandria, by
+Minucius Felix and S. Cyprian.<note place="foot">Tatian, <hi rend="italic">Adv. Gr.</hi> 20; Clem. Alex.
+<hi rend="italic">Ad Gent.</hi> 26; Cypr. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 75, 10; Min.
+Felix, c. 26, 27, isti igitur impuri
+spiritus daemones, ... sub statuis et
+imaginibus delitescunt, et adflatu suo
+auctoritatem quasi praesentis numinis
+consequuntur, dum inspirant interim
+vates, dum fanis immorantur ...
+sortes regunt, oracula efficiunt, falsis
+pluribus involuta, etc. Cf. Tertull.
+<hi rend="italic">Apol.</hi> c. xxii. operatio eorum est
+hominis eversio.... Itaque corporibus
+quidem et valitudines infligunt et aliquos
+casus acerbos, etc. Cf. <hi rend="italic">De Idol.</hi>
+c. ix; Maury, <hi rend="italic">La Magie</hi>, p. 99 sqq.</note> But the good became the
+heavenly host of Christ and His angels; the bad were identified
+with the pagan gods. What would have been the anguish of
+Plutarch could he have foreseen that his theology, elaborated
+<pb n="434"/><anchor id="Pg434"/>with such pious subtlety and care, would one day be used
+against the gracious powers of Olympus, and that the spirits
+he had conjured up to defend them would be exorcised
+as maleficent fiends by the triumphant dialectic of S.
+Augustine.<note place="foot">Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>, viii. 14-22.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The daemonology of Plutarch also furnished a theory of
+prophetic powers, and especially of the inspiration of Delphi.
+It was in the porticoes of the shrine of Apollo, or among the
+monuments of ancient glory and devotion, that the most interesting
+of Plutarch’s religious essays were inspired. He probably
+bore the honours of the Delphic priesthood down to the last days
+of his long life. But in the years when Plutarch was ordering
+a sacrifice or a procession, or discussing antiquarian and philosophic
+questions with travellers from Britain or the eastern
+seas, Delphi had lost much of its ancient power and renown.
+Great political and great economic changes had reduced the
+functions of the oracle to a comparatively humble sphere. It
+was no longer consulted on affairs of state by great potentates
+of the East and West. The farmers of Boeotia or the Arcadian
+shepherds now came to seek the causes of failure in their
+crops or of a murrain among their herds, to ask advice about
+the purchase of a piece of land or the marriage of a child. So
+far back as the days of Cicero the faith in oracles had been
+greatly shaken,<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Div.</hi> ii. 57, 117, cur isto
+modo jam oracula Delphis non eduntur
+... ut nihil possit esse contemptius?
+Strab. vii. 7, 9,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐκλέλοιπε δέ πως καὶ τὸ μαντεῖον τὸ ἐν Δωδώνῃ καθάπερ τἆλλα</foreign>.</note> and even the most venerable shrines were no
+longer resorted to as of old. Powerful philosophic schools,
+the Cynic and the Epicurean, poured contempt on all the arts
+of divination. Many of the ancient oracles had long been
+silent. In Boeotia, where, in the days of Herodotus, the air
+was full of inspiration,<note place="foot">Herodot. viii. 134.</note> the ancient magic only lingered around
+Lebadea. Sheep grazed around the fanes of Tegyra and the
+Ptoan Apollo. While in old days at Delphi, the services of
+two, and even three, Pythian priestesses were demanded by the
+concourse of votaries, in Plutarch’s time one priestess sufficed.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. v. viii.</note>
+But the second century brought, along with a general religious
+revival, a restoration of the ancient faith in oracles. The
+voice of Delphi had been silenced for a time by Nero, and
+the sacred chasm had been choked with corpses because the
+<pb n="435"/><anchor id="Pg435"/>priestess had branded the emperor as another Orestes.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxiii. 14,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ τὸ μαντεῖον κατέλυσεν, ἀνθρώπους ἐς τὸ στόμιον,
+ἐξ οὗ τὸ ἱερὸν πνεῦμα ἀνῄει, σφάξας</foreign>.</note> But the
+oracle, although shorn of much of its glory, recovered some of
+its popularity in the second century. It received offerings
+once more from wealthy votaries. The emperor Hadrian
+characteristically tested its omniscience by a question as to
+the birthplace of Homer. Curious travellers from distant
+lands, even philosophers of the Cynic and Epicurean schools,
+came to visit the ancient shrine, to make the round of its
+antiquarian treasures, and to discuss the secret of its inspiration.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. ii.</note>
+A new town sprang up at the gates of the sanctuary;
+sumptuous temples, baths, and halls of assembly replaced the
+solitude and ruins of many generations. The god himself
+seemed to the pious Plutarch to have returned in power to his
+ancient seat.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Pyth. Or.</hi> c. xxix.; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Gréard,
+p. 252.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The revival of Delphi gladdened the heart of Plutarch as
+a sign of reviving religion and Hellenism. And although the
+oracle no longer wielded an oecumenical primacy, its antiquities
+and its claims to inspiration evidently attracted many curious
+inquirers. We are admitted to their conversations in the
+Delphic treatises of Plutarch. His characters bear the names
+of the old-world schools, but there is a strangely modern tone
+in their discussions. Sometimes we might fancy ourselves
+listening to a debate on the inspiration of Scripture between
+an agnostic, a Catholic, and an accommodating broad Churchman.
+Plutarch himself, or his representative, generally holds
+the balance between the extreme views, and tries to reconcile
+the claims of reason and of faith. It is clear that even in
+that age of religious revival there was no lack of a scepticism
+like that of Lucian. Even in the sacred courts of Delphi the
+Epicurean might be heard suggesting that, because, among a
+thousand random prophecies of natural events, one here and
+there may seem to tally with the fact, it does not follow that
+the prediction was sure and true at the moment of deliverance;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Pyth. Or.</hi> c. x.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τοῦτό γε μᾶλλον ῥίψαι καὶ διασπεῖραι λόγους ...
+οἷς πλανωμένοις ἀπῄντῃσε πολλάκις ἡ τύχη, κτλ.</foreign></note>
+the wandering word may sometimes hit the mark. The
+fulfilment is a mere coincidence, a happy chance. Boethus, the
+sceptic, is easily refuted by the orthodox Serapion, who makes an
+<pb n="436"/><anchor id="Pg436"/>appeal to well-known oracles which have been actually fulfilled,
+not merely in a loose, apparent fashion, but down to the
+minutest details of time, place, and manner.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Pyth. Or.</hi> c. xi.</note> In these discussions,
+although the caviller is heard with a tolerant courtesy,
+it is clear that faith is always in the ascendant. Yet even
+faith has to face and account for an apparent degeneracy
+which might well cause some uneasiness. For instance, is it
+not startling that, in the name of the god of music, many oracles
+should be delivered in trivial, badly-fashioned verses?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. v. xvii.</note> Can
+it be that Apollo is a meaner artist than Hesiod or Homer?
+On the other side, it may be said that the god is too lofty to
+care to deck his utterances in the graces of literary form, or,
+by a more probable theory, he inspires the vision but not the
+verse. But what of the oracles of later days, which are
+delivered in the baldest prose? Is this not a disturbing sign
+of degeneracy? Can this be worthy of the god? The defender
+of the faith has no difficulty in quieting the suspicion. Even
+in the great ages we know that oracles were sometimes
+delivered in prose,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xix.</note> and in ancient times excited feeling ran
+naturally into verse.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xxiii.</note> The stately hexameter was the
+appropriate form of utterance when the oracle had to deal with
+great events affecting the fate of cities and of nations.
+Inspiration is not independent of surrounding circumstances,
+and the functions of the oracle have changed since the days of
+Croesus and Themistocles. The whole style of human life and
+the taste of men are less imposing and stately. The change
+in the style of the oracle is only part of a general movement.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xxiv.</note>
+For ages simple prose has taken the place of artistic rhythm in
+other departments besides the sphere of prophecy. We do
+not despise the philosophy of Socrates and Plato, because it
+does not come to us clothed in verse, like the speculations of
+Thales, Parmenides, and Empedocles. And who can expect the
+simple peasant girl, who now occupies the tripod, to speak in
+the tones of Homer?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xxii.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τραφεῖσα ἐν οἰκίᾳ γεωργῶν πενήτων κτλ.</foreign></note> The dim grandeur of the old poetic
+oracles had indeed some advantages, in aiding the memory by
+the use of measured and musical expression, and in veiling the
+full meaning of the God from irreverent or hostile eyes. But
+<pb n="437"/><anchor id="Pg437"/>their pompous ambiguity, providing apparently so many loopholes
+for evasion, brought discredit on the sacred art, and
+encouraged the imitative ingenuity of a host of venal
+impostors who, around the great temples, cheated the ears of
+slaves and silly women with a mockery of the mysterious
+solemnity of the Pythian verse.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Pyth. Or.</hi> c. xxv.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πλείστης μέντοι ποιητικὴν ἐνέπλησεν ἀδοξίας τὸ ἀγυρτικὸν
+καὶ ἀγοραῖον καὶ περὶ τὰ μητρῷα καὶ σεράπεια
+βωμολόχον καὶ πλανώμενον γένος κτλ.</foreign></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The more serious question as to the cause of the extinction
+of oracles brings the discussion nearer to the great problem of
+the sources of inspiration. It is true that the fact may be
+accounted for to some extent by natural causes. Oracles have
+never ceased, but the number has been diminished. God
+measures His help to men by their needs, and as they grow
+more enlightened they feel less need for supernatural guidance.
+This, however, is evidently dangerous ground. But surely the
+poverty and depopulation of Greece are enough to account for
+the disappearance of oracles. A country which can hardly
+put three thousand hoplites in the field—as many as Megara
+alone sent forth to fight at Plataea—cannot need the many
+shrines which flourished when Greece was in its glory.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. viii.</note> But
+it may be admitted that oracles can and do disappear. And
+this is in no way derogatory to the power of God. For it is
+not the great God Himself who utters the warning or the
+prophecy by the voice of the priestess. Such a doctrine is
+lowering to His greatness and majesty. In prophecy and
+divination, as in other fields, God operates, through instruments
+and agents, on a given matter, and in concurrence with physical
+causes. The matter in this case is the human soul, which, in
+greater or less degrees, can be acted on by supernatural influences.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. ix.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εὐηθές γὰρ κομιδῇ τὸ οἴσεθαι τὸν θεὸν αὐτὸν ... ἐνδυόμενον
+εἰς τὰ σώματα τὼν προφητὼν ὑποφθέγγεσθαι</foreign>;
+c. xlviii.; <hi rend="italic">De Pyth. Or.</hi> c. xxi.</note>
+The exciting cause of the <q>enthusiasm</q> or inspiration,
+applying a sudden stimulus to the soul, may be some vapour
+or exhalation from the earth, such as that which rose from the
+cleft beneath the Delphic tripod.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> xlii.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ψυχῆς τὸ μαντικὸν ὥσπερ ὄμμα δεῖται τοῦ συνεξάπτοντος
+οἰκείου καὶ συνεπιθήγοντος</foreign>.</note> Lastly, there is the daemon,
+a supernatural being, who, by his composite nature, as we have
+seen, is the channel of sympathy between the human and the
+Divine.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. x. xii.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">φύσεις εἰσί τινες ἐν μεθορίῳ θεῶν καὶ ἀνθρώπων,
+δεχόμεναι πάθη θνητά, οὗς δαίμονας ὀρθῶς ἔχει κατὰ νόμον
+πατέρων σέβεσθαι</foreign>: cf. Plat.
+<hi rend="italic">Sympos.</hi> 202 <hi rend="small">E</hi>; Apul. <hi rend="italic">De Deo Socr.</hi>
+c. vi.; Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic"><anchor id="corr437"/><corr sic="Diss">Diss.</corr></hi> xiv. §§ 2-8.</note> But among the causes of afflatus or inspiration,
+<pb n="438"/><anchor id="Pg438"/>some may, in cases, disappear and cease to operate. The
+intoxicating fume or vapour is a force of varying intensity
+and may exhaust itself and be spent, as a spring may fail, or
+a mine may be worked out.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. xliii.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τῶν δὲ περὶ αὐτὴν (τὴν γῆν) δυνάμεων πῆ μὲν ἐκλείψεις πῆ δὲ γενέσεις ...
+εἰκὸς ἐστι συμβαίνειν, κτλ.</foreign></note> The daemon may migrate from
+one place to another, and with its disappearance, the oracle
+will become silent, as that of Teiresias at Orchomenus has
+long been, just as the lyre becomes silent when the musician
+ceases to strike the strings.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. xxxviii.; Maury, p. 149.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In all this theory Plutarch is careful to guard himself against a
+purely materialistic theory of the facts of inspiration.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. xlvi.</note> Physical
+causes may assist and predispose, but physical causes alone will
+not account for the facts of inspiration. The daemon is a
+necessary mediator between the human soul and God, a messenger
+of the divine purpose. But the real problem of inspiration
+is in the soul of man himself, in the possibility of contact
+between the soul and a supernatural power. This question
+is illuminated in Apuleius and Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre
+by a discussion of the daemon of Socrates. It was by a natural
+instinct that the Antonine Platonists went back to the great
+teacher of Plato for support of the system which was to link
+religion with philosophy by the daemonic theory. In Plutarch’s
+dialogue on the Genius of Socrates, the various theories of that
+mysterious influence current in antiquity are discussed at length.
+The language in which Socrates or his disciples spoke of its monitions
+lent itself to different interpretations. Was his daemon
+an external sign, as in augury, an audible voice, or an inner,
+perhaps supernatural light, a voice of reason, speaking to the
+soul’s highest faculty, through no uttered word or symbol?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Gen. Socr.</hi> c. xi. xx.; cf.
+Hild, <hi rend="italic">Étude sur les Démons</hi>, p. 263
+sqq.</note>
+The grosser conceptions of it may be dismissed at once. The
+daemon of Socrates does not belong to the crude materialism
+of divination, although the philosopher could forecast the
+disaster of Syracuse.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Gen. Socr.</hi> c. xi.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀκούω δὲ καὶ τὴν ἐν Σικελίᾳ τῆς Ἀθηναίων δυνάμεως φθορὰν
+προειπεῖν αὐτόν κτλ.</foreign></note> Nor was it any ordinary faculty of keen
+intellectual shrewdness, strengthened and sharpened by the
+cultivation of experience. Still less was it any hallucination,
+<pb n="439"/><anchor id="Pg439"/>bordering on insanity, which is merely a perversion of the
+senses and reason. It was rather a spiritual intuition, an
+immediate vision, not darkened or weakened by passing through
+any symbolic medium of the senses, a flash of sudden insight
+such as is vouchsafed only to the select order of pure and
+lofty spirits, in whom from the beginning the higher portion of
+the soul has always risen high above the turbid and darkening
+influence of the senses.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Gen. Socr.</hi> c. xx.</note> That such a faculty exists is certain to
+the Platonist and the Pythagorean. But in the mass of men it is
+struggling against fleshly powers, sometimes defeated, sometimes
+victorious, inspiring ideals, or stinging with remorse, until
+perchance, late and slowly, after chastisement and struggle, it
+emerges into a certain calm. Pythagoreans, such as Apollonius,
+taught that the diviner, the mantic, faculty in man was more
+open to higher influences when emancipated from the body
+in sleep, and that it could be set free in waking hours by
+abstinence and ascetic discipline.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. T.</hi> vi. 11.</note> Plutarch laid stress on the
+latter part of this theory, but ridiculed the notion that the soul
+could be most clear and receptive when its powers were relaxed.
+But the capacity of the higher reason in the loftier souls is
+almost without limit. The reason, which is the daemon in
+each, when unimpeded by bodily obstruction, is open to the
+lightest, most ethereal touch. Spirit can act directly by
+immediate influence upon spirit, without any sensuous aid of
+word or sign.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Gen. Socr.</hi> c. xx.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">αἱ δὲ τῶν δαιμόνων φέγγος ἔχουσαι τοῖς δυναμένοις ἐλλάμπουσιν,
+    οὐ δεόμεναι ῥημάτων οὐδ’ ὀνομάτων κτλ.
+    οὕτως οἱ τῶν δαιμόνων λόγοι διὰ πάντων φερόμενοι μόνοις
+    ἐνηχούσι τοῖς ἀθόρυβον ἦτος καὶ νήμενον ἔχουσι τὴν ψυχήν·
+οὓς δὲ καὶ ἱεροὺς καὶ δαιμονίους ἀνθρώπους καλοῦμεν</foreign>; cf. <hi rend="italic">De
+Def. Or.</hi> c. xxxvii.</note> The influence is a <q>wind blowing where it
+listeth,</q> or a strange sudden illumination, revealing truth as by
+a flash. The disembodied spirit, cleansed and freed from the
+servitude of the body, and now a real daemon, possesses all
+these powers and receptivities in the fullest measure. But it
+gains no new power when it quits the body, although its
+spiritual faculties may have been dulled and obstructed by
+the flesh. The sun does not lose its native radiance when
+for a moment it is obscured by clouds.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. xxxix.</note> And thus a Socrates
+may even here below have a spiritual vision denied to us; a
+Pythia may be inspired by the daemon of the shrine to read
+the future of a campaign. Nor is there anything more
+<pb n="440"/><anchor id="Pg440"/>wonderful in prediction than in memory.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. xxxix.</note> In this unresting
+flux of existence, the present of brief sensation is a mere
+moment between the past which has ceased to be and the
+future which is to be born. If we can still grasp the one, may
+we not anticipate the other?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is thus that, by a far-reaching theory of inspiration,
+Plutarch strove to rehabilitate the faith in oracular lore. The
+loftier philosophic conception of the Supreme is saved from
+contamination with anything earthly by the doctrine of daemons
+themselves released from the body, yet, through the higher
+faculty in all souls, able to act directly upon those still in the
+flesh. The influence is direct and immediate, yet not independent
+of purely physical causes or temperament. <q>The
+treasure is in earthen vessels.</q> But the full vision is only
+reserved for the spirit unpolluted and untroubled by sense
+and passion. Plutarch is preparing the way for the <q>ecstasy</q>
+of later Neo-Platonism. All this speculation of course lent
+itself to a revival of heathen superstition. Yet it is interesting
+to see how, in many a flash of insight, Plutarch reveals a truth
+for all generations. We, in our time, are perhaps too much
+inclined to limit the powers of the human spirit to the field of
+sense and observation. The slackening hold on faith in a
+spiritual world and a higher intuition may well be visited by
+the proper Nemesis, in the darkening of the divine vision,
+whether as religious faith or artistic inspiration. The dream
+of an earthly paradise enriched with every sensuous gratification
+by a science working in bondage to mere utility may have
+serious results for the spiritual future of humanity. It may
+need a bitter experience to dispel the gross illusion; yet men
+may once more come to believe with Plutarch that, as it were,
+at the back of every soul there is an opening to the divine
+world from which yet may come, as of old, the touch of an
+unseen hand.
+</p>
+
+</div></div><div type="book" n="4" rend="page-break-before: right">
+<index index="toc" level1="Book IV. Adscedentibus di manum porrigunt"/><index index="pdf" level1="Book IV. Adscedentibus di manum porrigunt"/>
+<pb n="441"/><anchor id="Pg441"/>
+
+<head>BOOK IV.</head>
+
+<head type="sub"><hi rend="italic">ADSCENDENTIBUS DI MANUM PORRIGUNT</hi></head>
+
+<pb n="442"/><anchor id="Pg442"/>
+
+<div type="chapter" n="3" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<index index="toc" level1="I. Superstition"/><index index="pdf" level1="I. Superstition"/>
+<pb n="443"/><anchor id="Pg443"/>
+
+<head>CHAPTER I</head>
+
+<head type="sub">SUPERSTITION</head>
+
+<p>
+Superstition in all ages is a term of unstable meaning. Men
+even of the same time will apply it or deny its application to
+the same belief. The devout beliefs of one period may become
+mere superstitions to the next. And, conversely, what for a
+time may be regarded as alien superstition, may in course of
+time become an accepted portion of the native creed. This was
+the history of those Eastern cults which will be described in
+coming chapters. At first, they fell under Cicero’s definition
+of superstition, viz. any religious belief or practice going beyond
+the prescription of ancestral usage.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Nat. Deor.</hi> i. 17, 42, §
+117; ii. 28, § 70; <hi rend="italic">De Div.</hi> ii. 72; Sen.
+<hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 123; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. 23.</note> But a day came when
+they were the most popular worships of the Roman world,
+when great nobles, and even the prince himself, were enthusiastic
+votaries of them.<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Com.</hi> c. 9.</note> The religion of Mithra, when it was confined
+to an obscure circle of slaves or freedmen at Ostia, was a
+superstition to the pontifical college. It took its place with
+the cult of the Roman Trinity when Aurelian built his temple
+to the Sun and endowed his priesthood.<note place="foot">Vop. <hi rend="italic">Aurelian.</hi> c. 35, § 3.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plutarch devoted a treatise to the subject of superstition.
+And his conception of it is more like our own, less formal and
+external, than that of Cicero. He develops his view of the
+degradation of the religious sense by contrasting it with
+atheism. Atheism is a great calamity, a blindness of the
+reason to the goodness and love which govern the universe.
+It is the extinction of a faculty rather than the perversion of
+one.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Superst.</hi> c. 5, 6,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἡ μὲν ἀθεόθης ἀπάθεια πρὸς τὸ θεῖόν ἐστι ... ἡ δὲ δεισιδαιμονία
+    πολυπάθεια κακὸν τὸ ἀγαθὸν ὑπονοοῦσα</foreign>.</note>
+<pb n="444"/><anchor id="Pg444"/>But superstition both believes and trembles. It acknowledges
+the existence of supernatural powers, but they are to
+it powers of evil who are ready to afflict and injure, to be
+approached only in terror and with servile prostration. This
+craven fear of God fills the whole universe with spectres. It
+leaves no refuge whither the devil-worshipper can escape from
+the horrors which haunt him night and day. Whither can he
+flee from that awful presence? Sleep, which should give a
+respite from the cares of life, to his fevered mind, swarms
+with ghostly terrors.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Superst.</hi> c. 3,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">μόνη γὰρ οὐ σπένδεται πρὸς τὸν ὕπνον ... εἴδωλα φρικώδη
+καὶ τεράστια φάσματα καὶ ποινάς τινας ἐγείρουσα καὶ στροβοῦσα
+τὴν ἀθλίαν ψυχήν</foreign>.</note> And death, the last sleep, which
+should put a term to the ills of life, only unrolls before the
+superstitious votary an awful scene of rivers of fire and blackness
+of darkness, and sounds of punishment and unutterable
+woe.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 4,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">συνάπτουσα τῷ θανάτῳ κακῶν ἐπίνοιαν ἀθανάτων</foreign>.</note> To such a soul the festivals of ancestral religion lose
+all their solemn gladness and cheering comfort. The shrines
+which should offer a refuge to the troubled heart, even to the
+hunted criminal, become to him places of torture. And the
+believer in a God of malignant cruelty betakes himself in
+despair to dark rites from foreign lands, and spends his
+substance on impostors who trade upon his fears. Better,
+says the pious Plutarch, not believe in God at all, than
+cringe before a God worse than the worst of men. Unbelief,
+calamity though it be, at least does not dishonour a Deity
+whose existence it denies. The true impiety is to believe that
+God can be wantonly faithless and revengeful, fickle and
+cruel.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 6,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">φοβοῦνται τοὺς θεοὺς καὶ καταφεύγουσιν ἐπὶ τοὺς θεούς,
+    κολακεύουσι καὶ λοιδοροῦσιν</foreign>. Cf. Bacon’s <hi rend="italic">Essays, Of
+Superstition</hi>, <q>It were better to have
+no opinion of God at all, than such an
+opinion as is unworthy of Him.</q></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The earnestness, and even bitterness, with which Plutarch
+assails the degrading fear of the supernal Powers have caused
+some rather shallow critics to imagine that he had a sympathy
+with scepticism.<note place="foot">Gréard, p. 269.</note> How such an idea could arise in the mind
+of any one who had read his treatise on the Genius of Socrates
+or on Isis and Osiris, or on the Delays of Divine Justice, it is
+difficult to imagine. Plutarch’s hatred of superstition is that
+of a genuinely pious man, with a lofty conception of the Divine
+love and pity, who is revolted by the travesty of pure religion,
+<pb n="445"/><anchor id="Pg445"/>which is repeated from age to age. It is the feeling of a man
+to whom religion is one of the most elevating joys of life, when
+he sees it turned into an instrument of torture. But the
+force of the protest shows how rampant was the evil in that
+age. Lucretius felt with the intensity of genius all the misery
+which perverted conceptions of the Divine nature had inflicted
+on human life.<note place="foot">Luc. i. 65; iii. 991; cf. Cic. <hi rend="italic">De
+Div.</hi> ii. 72.</note> But the force of Roman superstition had
+endlessly multiplied since the days of Lucretius. It was
+no longer the exaggeration of Roman awe at the lightning,
+the flight of birds, the entrails of a sacrificial victim, or anxious
+observance of the solemn words of ancestral formulae, every
+syllable of which had to be guarded from mutilation or omission.
+All the lands which had fallen to her sword were, in Plutarch’s
+day, adding to the spiritual burden of Rome. If in some cases
+they enriched her rather slender spiritual heritage, they
+also multiplied the sources of supernatural terror. If in the
+mysteries of Isis and Mithra they exalted the soul in
+spiritual reverie and gave a promise of a coming life,<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 24.</note> they
+sent the Roman matron to bathe in the freezing Tiber at early
+dawn and crawl on bleeding knees over the Campus Martius,
+or purchase the interpretation of a dream from some diviner of
+Palestine or a horoscope from some trader in astral lore.<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 523, 547; Mart. vii. 54;
+Luc. <hi rend="italic">Philops.</hi> c. 7-13.</note>
+The Platonist, nourished on the pure theism of the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi>
+and the <hi rend="italic">Republic</hi>, and the priest of that cheerful shrine, which
+the young Ion had each bright morning swept with myrtle
+boughs and sprinkled with the water of the Castalian spring,<note place="foot">Eurip. <hi rend="italic">Ion</hi>, 104.</note>
+whose holy ministry gladdened even the years of boyhood—a
+man with such experience had a natural horror of the dark
+terrors which threatened to obscure the radiant visions of
+Delphi and Olympus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Livy complained of the neglect in his day of signs and
+omens which formerly were deemed worthy of historical
+record.<note place="foot">Liv. xliii. 13.</note> The contempt for augury in the time of Cicero was
+hardly concealed among the cultivated.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Div.</hi> ii. 24.</note> The details of parts
+of the ancient bird-lore eluded the researches of the elder
+Pliny. The emperor Claudius, lamenting the neglect of the
+ancient science, demanded a decree of the Senate to restore it
+<pb n="446"/><anchor id="Pg446"/>to its former efficiency.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xi. 15, rettulit deinde
+ad senatum super collegio haruspicum,
+ne vetustissima Italiae disciplina per
+desidiam exolesceret.</note> These are some signs of that general
+decay of old Roman religion in the last century of the
+Republic, which was partly due to philosophic enlightenment
+partly to the confusion and demoralisation of civil strife, but
+perhaps even more to the dangerous seductions of foreign
+superstitions.<note place="foot">Warde Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Festivals</hi>,
+p. 343.</note> Among the counsels of Maecenas to Augustus
+none is more earnest and weighty than the warning against
+these occult arts.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lii. 36,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τοὺς δὲ ξενίζοντάς τι περὶ τὸ θεῖον καὶ μίσει καὶ κόλαζε</foreign>.</note> Augustus is advised to observe, and enforce
+the observance of the time-honoured ancestral forms, but he
+must banish sorcerers and diviners, who may sow the seeds of
+conspiracy against the prince. The advice was acted on.
+While the emperor rebuilt the fallen temples and revived the
+ancient Latin rites, 2000 books of unlicensed divination were
+in one day given to the flames.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> xxxi.</note> The old religion, which had
+absorbed so much from the augural lore of Etruria,<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Leg.</hi> ii. 9; Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Rom.
+Fest.</hi> p. 233.</note> was itself
+certainly not free from superstition. The wrath of the
+Lemures,<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Fast.</hi> iii. 285; Lucr. i. 131;
+Liv. i. 20.</note> the darkness of the inner forest, the flash of
+lightning, the flight of birds, the entrails of a sacrifice, excited
+many a fear, and might cause a man to suspend a journey, or
+break up an assembly of the people. But the Romans had,
+in the early ages, after their orderly legal fashion, reduced the
+force of these terrors by an elaborate art which provided a
+convenient resource of statecraft, and a means of soothing the
+alarms of the crowd.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But foreign and unregulated superstitions, from the second
+century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, were pouring in from the East to put a fresh load
+on the human spirit or to replace the waning faith in Italian
+augury. In 139 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> Cornelius Scipio Hispalus vainly strove
+by an edict to stop the inroads of the star readers.<note place="foot">Val. Max. i. 3, 3; cf. Cic. <hi rend="italic">De
+Div.</hi> ii. 43.</note> But
+treatises on this pretended science were in vogue in Varro’s
+time, and are quoted by the great savant with approval.<note place="foot">Aul. Gell. iii. 10.</note>
+These impostors were swarming in Rome at the time of
+Catiline’s conspiracy,<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">In Catil.</hi> iii. 4; cf. Plut. <hi rend="italic">Vit.
+Cic.</hi> c. 17.</note> inflating the hopes of the plotters.
+<pb n="447"/><anchor id="Pg447"/>Suetonius has surpassed himself in the collection, from many
+sources, of the signs and wonders which foreshadowed the
+great destiny, and also the death of Augustus. And it is
+noteworthy that, among these predictions, are some founded on
+astrology.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> xciv. xcvii.</note> On the day of the emperor’s birth, P. Nigidius,
+a learned astrologer, found that the position of the stars
+foretold a coming master of the world. Augustus himself
+received a similar forecast from Theagenes, a star-reader of
+Apollonia. He had his horoscope drawn out, and a silver coin
+was struck with the stamp of Capricorn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This fatalist superstition infected nearly all the successors
+of Augustus in the first and second centuries. Astrology is
+essentially a fatalist creed, and the heir to the great prize of
+the principate, with the absolute control of the civilised world,
+was generally designated by that blind impersonal power
+whose decrees might be read in the positions of the eternal
+spheres, or by signs and omens upon earth. Suetonius, Tacitus,
+Dion Cassius, have chronicled, with apparent faith, the
+predictions of future power which gathered round the popular
+candidate for the succession, or the dark warnings of coming
+disaster which excited the prince’s fears and gave courage
+to enemies and rivals. It is not hard to see why the
+emperors at once believed in these black arts and profoundly
+distrusted their professors. They wished to keep a monopoly
+of that awful lore, lest it might excite dangerous hopes in
+possible pretenders.<note place="foot">Cf. D. Cass. lxvi. 9,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τούς τε ἀστρολόγους ἐκ τῆς Ῥώμης ἐξώρισεν (Οὐεσπασιανὸς)
+    καίτοι πᾶσι τοῖς ἀρίστοις χρώμενος</foreign>.</note> To consult a Chaldaean seer on the fate
+of the prince, or to possess his horoscope, was always suspicious,
+and might often be fatal.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> x. interemit Met.
+Pompeianum quod habere imperatoriam
+genesin vulgo ferebatur.</note> The astonishing thing is, that men
+had such implicit faith in the skill of these Eastern impostors,
+along with such distrust of their honesty. They were banished
+again and again in the first century, but persecution only
+increased their power, and they always returned to exercise
+greater influence than ever.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 52; ii. 32, 75; D.
+Cass. xlix. 43; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> xiv.</note> Never was there a clearer proof
+of the impotence of government in the face of a deep-seated
+popular belief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tiberius, who had probably no real religious faith, was,
+<pb n="448"/><anchor id="Pg448"/>from his youth, the slave of astrology.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> lxix., circa deos negligentior
+quippe addictus mathematicae,
+etc.</note> An adept had, at his
+birth, predicted his lofty destiny.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xiv. Yet cf. his love of mythical
+<hi rend="italic">nugae</hi>, <hi rend="italic">ib.</hi> lxx.</note> He had in his train one
+Thrasyllus, a noted professor of the science, who had often to
+read the stars in the face of death, and he was surrounded in
+his gloomy retirement at Capreae by a <q>Chaldaean herd.</q><note place="foot">Juv. x. 94. See the remarkable
+chapters in Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> vi. 21-22.</note>
+Claudius was pedantic and antiquarian in his religious tastes,
+and, while he tried to revive old Roman augury, he banished
+the astrologers.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xii. 52.</note> A great noble who had the temerity to
+consult them as to the time of the emperor’s death shared
+the same fate. Nero, who despised all regular religion, except
+that of the Syrian goddess, was the prey of superstitious terror.
+The Furies of the murdered Agrippina, as in Aeschylean
+tragedy, haunted him in dreams, and he used the aid of magic
+to evoke and propitiate the awful shade.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Ner.</hi> lx.; xxxiv., facto per
+magos sacro evocare manes et exorare
+tentavit.</note> When, towards
+the end of his reign, his prospects grew more threatening, the
+appearance of a comet drove him to consult Balbillus, his
+astrologer, who advised that the portended danger should be
+diverted from the emperor by the destruction of the great
+nobles. Some of the craft had predicted that Nero should
+one day be deserted and betrayed, while others consoled
+him with the promise of a great monarchy of the East with
+its seat at Jerusalem.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xl.</note> The terrible year which followed
+Nero’s death was crowded with portents, and all the rivals
+for the succession were equally slaves of the adepts, who
+exploited their ambitions or their fears. The end of Galba
+was foreshadowed, from the opening of his reign, by ominous
+dreams and signs.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Galb.</hi> xviii.</note> The hopes of Otho had long been inflamed
+by the diviner Seleucus,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, iv.</note> and by Ptolemaeus, who
+was his companion during his command in Spain.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 22.</note> When
+he had won the dangerous prize, Otho was tortured by
+nightly visions of the spirit of Galba, which he used every
+art to lay. Yet this same man set out for the conflict
+on the Po in defiant disregard of omens warranted by
+the ancient religion.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, vii. viii.</note> His end, which, by a certain calm
+<pb n="449"/><anchor id="Pg449"/>nobility, seemed to redeem his life, was portended by a sign
+which Tacitus records as a fact. At the very hour when Otho
+was falling on his dagger, a bird of strange form settled in
+a much frequented grove, and sat there undisturbed by the
+passers-by, or by the flocks of other fowls around.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 50.</note> The horoscope
+of Otho’s rival Vitellius had been cast by the astrologers,
+and their reading of his fate gave his parents acute anxiety.
+He used to follow the monitions of a German sorceress. Yet,
+like so many of his class in that age, he had but scant respect
+for accredited beliefs. It was noted with alarm that he
+entered on his pontificate on the black day of the Allia.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> iii. xi. xiv.</note>
+The astrologers he probably found more dangerous than helpful,
+and he ordered them to be expelled from Italy.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 62.</note> But it is
+a curious sign of their conscious power and their audacity, that
+a mocking counter edict to that of Vitellius was immediately
+published by unknown hands, ordaining the death of the persecutor
+within a certain day.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxv. 1,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀντιπαρήγγειλαν ἀπαλλαγῆναι ἐκ τοῦ βίου ἐντὸς τῆς ἡμέρας κτλ.</foreign></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The emperors of the Flavian dynasty, although their power
+was stable and the world was settling down, were not less
+devoted to Eastern superstitions than any of their predecessors.
+Vespasian indeed once more exiled the astrologers, but he
+still kept the best of them in his train.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> lxvi. 9, 10.</note> He had consulted
+the oracle on Mount Carmel, and obeyed the vision vouchsafed
+in the temple of Serapis.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 78.</note> His son Titus, who may have had
+romantic dreams of an Eastern monarchy, consulted foreign
+oracles, worshipped in Egyptian temples, and was a firm
+believer in the science of the stars.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Titus</hi>, v. viii. ix.</note> Domitian was perhaps
+the most superstitious of all his race. The rebuilder of
+Roman temples and the restorer of Roman orthodoxy had
+also a firm faith in planetary lore. He lived in perpetual
+fear of his sudden end, the precise hour and manner of which
+the Chaldaeans had foretold in his early youth.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> xiv. xv.</note> Among
+the many reasons for his savage proscription of the leading
+nobles, one of the most deadly was the possession of an
+imperial horoscope. On his side too, the haunted tyrant
+diligently studied the birth-hour of suspected or possible
+<pb n="450"/><anchor id="Pg450"/>pretenders to the throne. In the last months of his reign
+his terror became more and more and more intense; never
+in the same space of time had the lightning been so busy.
+The Capitol, the temple of the Flavians, the palace, even
+Domitian’s own sleeping chamber, were all struck from heaven.
+In a dream, the haunted emperor beheld Minerva, the
+goddess whom he specially adored, quitting her chapel, with
+a warning that she could no longer save him from his doom.
+On the day before his death, the emperor predicted that, on
+the next, the moon would appear blood red in the sign of
+Aquarius. On his last morning, a seer, who had been
+summoned from Germany to interpret the menacing omens
+and who had foretold a coming change, was condemned to
+death.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> x. xiv. xv. xvi.; D.
+Cass. lxvii. 15,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πάντως γὰρ καὶ ὁ Δομιτιανὸς τῶν πρώτων τάς τε ἡμέρας
+καὶ τὰς ὥρας ἐν αἷς ἐγεγένητο διασκοπῶν ... προανήλισκε</foreign>.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hadrian, that lover of the exotic and the curious, was
+particularly fascinated by the East. He had probably no
+settled faith of any kind, but he dabbled in astrology, as he
+dabbled in all other arts.<note place="foot">Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 16; cf. Renan,
+<hi rend="italic">L’Égl. Chrét.</hi> c. 2.</note> It was a study which had been cultivated
+in his family. His great-uncle, Aelius Hadrianus, was an
+adept in the science of the stars, and had read the prediction
+of his nephew’s future greatness.<note place="foot">Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 2, § 4.</note> When the future emperor
+was a young military tribune in lower Moesia, he found the
+forecast confirmed by a local astrologer. He consulted the
+<hi rend="italic">sortes Virgilianae</hi> about his prospects, with not less hopeful
+results. He practised with intense curiosity other dark
+magical arts, and the mysterious death of Antinous on the
+Nile was by many believed to have been an immolation for the
+Emperor’s safety.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxix. 11,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">μαντείαις μαγγανείαις τε παντοδαπαῖς ἐχρῆτο κτλ.</foreign></note> Hadrian was glad to think that the spirit
+of his minion had passed into a new star which had then for
+the first time appeared. On every 1st of January, Hadrian
+predicted, with perfect assurance, the events of the year, down
+to his own last hour.<note place="foot">Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 16, § 7.</note> Even the last great imperial figure
+in our period is not free from the suspicion of having
+tampered with the dark arts. Julius Capitolinus reports a
+rumour that M. Aurelius consulted the Chaldaeans about
+the infatuated passion of Faustina for a gladiator.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">M. Anton.</hi> c. 19.</note> In his
+<pb n="451"/><anchor id="Pg451"/>account of the famous rainfall that miraculously refreshed the
+Roman troops in the Marcomannic war, D. Cassius ascribes
+the miracle to the magic arts of an Egyptian sorcerer whom M.
+Aurelius kept in his train.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxxi. 8.</note> Xiphilinus, however, who attributes
+the marvel to the prayers of the Thundering Legion, expressly
+denies that the emperor gave his countenance to these impostors.
+Another suspicious incident comes to us on the authority of
+Lucian. When the war on the Danube was at its height,
+the new oracle of Alexander of Abonoteichos had, by mingled
+audacity and skill, rapidly gained an extraordinary influence
+even among the greatest nobles in Italy. Rutilianus, one of
+the foremost among them, was its special patron and devotee,
+and actually married the daughter of Alexander by an
+amour with Selene! Probably through his influence, an
+oracle, in verse of the old Delphic pattern, was despatched
+to the headquarters of the emperor, ordering that a pair
+of lions should be flung into the Danube, with costly sacrifices
+and all the fragrant odours of the East.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> c. 35, 47.</note> The oracle was
+obeyed, but the rite was followed by an appalling disaster to
+the Roman arms. The impostor was equal to the occasion,
+and defended himself by the example of the ambiguity of
+the Delphic oracle to Croesus, before the victory of Cyrus.
+What part M. Aurelius had in this scene we cannot pretend
+to tell, but the ceremony could hardly have been performed
+without, at least, his connivance. Nor does his philosophic
+attitude exclude the possibility of a certain faith in oracular
+foresight and divination. He believed that everything in
+our earthly lot was ordained from eternity, and, with the
+Stoic fatalism, he may have held the almost universal Stoic
+faith in the power to discover the decrees of fate.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. x. 5; ix. 27: on the
+Stoic belief in divination, <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Cic. <hi rend="italic">De
+Div.</hi> i. 38 (82); Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der
+Griechen</hi>, iii. 1, p. 313 sqq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nearly all the writers from whom we derive our impressions
+of that age were more or less tinged with its superstitions.
+Even the elder Pliny, who rejected almost with scorn the
+popular religion, was led by a dream to undertake his history
+of the wars in Germany.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> iii. 5, § 4.</note> His nephew, although he rejoiced
+at being raised to the augurate, and restored a temple of Ceres
+on his lands, seems to have clung to the old religion rather
+<pb n="452"/><anchor id="Pg452"/>as a matter of sentiment than from any real faith. But he
+had a genuine belief in dreams and apparitions, and he sends his
+friend Sura an elaborate account of the romance of a haunted
+house at Athens.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 27.</note> His friend Suetonius had been disturbed
+by a dream as to the success of a cause in which he was to
+appear. Pliny consoled him with the hackneyed interpretation
+of dreams by contraries.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 18, v. 5, 5; cf. Mayor’s learned
+note on iii. 5, 4; Gregorovius, <hi rend="italic">Hadrian</hi>,
+p. 229 sqq.</note> The biographer of the Caesars may
+contend with Dion Cassius for the honour of being probably
+the most superstitious chronicler who ever dealt with great
+events. Suetonius is shocked by the arrogance of Julius Caesar
+when he treated with disdain the warning of a diviner from
+the inspection of a victim’s entrails.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Jul. Caes.</hi> lxxvii.</note> He glorifies the pious
+Augustus by a long catalogue of signs and celestial omens
+which foretold the events of his career.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> xciii.</note> Suetonius must
+have been as keen in collecting these old wives’ tales as the
+more sober facts of history,<note place="foot">Cf. Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 59 sqq.</note> and, if we may believe him, the
+palace of the Caesars for a hundred years was as full of
+supernatural wonders and the terrors of magic and dark
+prophecy as the Thessalian villages of Apuleius.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> iv. 27; i. 8; cf. Petron.
+<hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 62, 63.</note> The superstitions
+of the Claudian and Flavian Caesars could nowhere
+have found a more sympathetic chronicler.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Immensely superior in genius as Tacitus is to Suetonius,
+even he is not emancipated from the superstition of the age.
+But he wavers in his superstition, just as he wavers in his
+conception of the Divine government of the world.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Fabian, <hi rend="italic">Quid Tac. de num. div.
+judicaverit</hi>, pp. 7, 13, 16, 21, 24, 29;
+Nipperdey, <hi rend="italic">Einleitung</hi>, xiv. xxvi.;
+Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> v. 5; ii. 38; <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iii. 18;
+vi. 22; xiv. 12; cf. Peter, <hi rend="italic">Die Gesch.
+Litt.</hi> ii. p. 221.</note> Although
+he occasionally mentions, and briefly discusses, the tenets of the
+Epicurean and the Stoic schools, it does not seem probable that
+Tacitus had much taste for philosophy. Full of the old senatorial
+ideals, he considered such a study, if carried to any depth,
+or pursued with absorbing earnestness, to be unbecoming the
+gravity and dignity of a man of rank and affairs.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agric.</hi> c. 2, 4; <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 5;
+<hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiv. 12.</note> Moreover,
+his views of human destiny and the Divine government were
+coloured and saddened by the Terror. Having lived himself
+through the reign of Domitian, and seen all the horrors of its
+<pb n="453"/><anchor id="Pg453"/>close, having witnessed, in humiliating silence, the excesses
+of frenzied power and the servility of cringing compliance,
+Tacitus had little faith either in Divine benevolence or in
+tempted human virtue.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Agric.</hi> c. 45; <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 2; iii. 37;
+<hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 7.</note> Even the quiet and security of
+Trajan’s reign seemed to him but a precarious interval, not to
+be too eagerly or confidently enjoyed, between the terror of
+the past and the probable dangers of a coming age.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 1.</note> The
+corruption of Roman virtue has justly earned the anger of
+gods, who no longer visit to protect, but only to avenge.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 3 <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi></note>
+And, in the chaos of human affairs, the Divine justice is
+confused; the good suffer equally with the guilty.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xvi. 33, aequitate deum erga
+bona malaque documenta.</note> Amid
+obscure and guarded utterances, we can divine that, to Tacitus,
+the ruling force in human fortunes is a destiny which is blind
+to the deserts of those who are its sport.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 22; cf. Mackail, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Lit.</hi>
+p. 210.</note> He probably held
+the widespread belief that the fate of each man was fixed
+for him at his birth, and, although he has a profound scorn for
+the venality and falsehood of the Chaldaean tribe, he probably
+had a wavering faith in the efficacy of their lore.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 22, genus hominum
+potentibus infidum sperantibus fallax,
+quod in civitate nostra et vetabitur semper
+et retinebitur; cf. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> v. 4; <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi>
+vi. 28; iv. 58; cf. Fabian, p. 19.</note> Nor did
+he reject miracle and supernatural portent on any ground of a
+scientific conception of the universe.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 50.</note> His language on such
+subjects is often perhaps studiously ambiguous. Sometimes he
+appears to report the tale of a portent, as a mere piece of vulgar
+superstition. But at other times, he records the marvel with
+no expression of scepticism.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 81; cf. Nipperdey, <hi rend="italic">Einl.</hi>
+xxvi.</note> And in his narrative of Otho’s
+death and the miracles of Vespasian, the threats of heaven
+which ushered in Galba’s brief reign in darkness broken by
+lurid lightnings, the neglected signs of the coming doom of
+Jerusalem, the glare of arms from contending armies in the
+sky, the ghostly voices, as of gods departing from the Holy of
+Holies, as in the tale of many another omen, dream, or oracle,
+the historian gives an awe and grandeur to a superstition which
+he does not explicitly reject.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 50; iv. 81; i. 6; i. 18;
+v. 13; <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> i. 65; ii. 14; <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iii.
+56; iv. 83; cf. Fabian, <hi rend="italic">Quid Tac. de
+num. div. judicaverit</hi>, p. 19.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor need we be superciliously surprised that the greatest
+<pb n="454"/><anchor id="Pg454"/>master of historic tragedy, born into such an age, should have
+had the balance of his faith disturbed. His infancy and boyhood
+coincided with the last years of Nero.<note place="foot">Peter, <hi rend="italic">Gesch. Litt.</hi> ii. p. 42.</note> His youthful
+imagination must have been disordered and inflamed by the
+tales, circulating in grave old Senatorial houses, of wild excess
+or mysterious crime on the Palatine, the daring caprice of
+imperial harlots, the regal power and fabulous wealth and
+luxury of the imperial freedmen, the lunacy of the great line
+which had founded the Empire, and which seemed destined to
+end it in shame and universal ruin. That the destinies of the
+world should be at the mercy of a Pallas, a Caligula, or an
+Agrippina was a cruel trial to any faith. The carnival of lust
+and carnage in which the dynasty disappeared,<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iii. 83, simul cruor et
+strues corporum, juxta scorta et scortis similes, etc.</note> the shock of
+the fierce struggle on the Po, in which the legions of the East
+and the West fought with demoniac force for the great prize,
+deepened the horrors of the tragedy and the gloomy doubts of
+its future historian. The dawn of a timorous hope, which broke
+under the calm, strong rule of Vespasian, was overcast, during
+the early manhood of Tacitus, by the old insanity of power which
+seemed to revive in the last of the Flavians. Such an experience
+and such an atmosphere were enough to disorder any imagination.
+The wild Titanic ambition in the Claudian Caesars, a
+strange mixture of vicious, hereditary insanity,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. iv. vi.</note> with a fevered
+imagination which, intoxicated with almost superhuman power,
+dreamt of unheard of conquests over nature, made the Julio-Claudian
+emperors, in the eyes of men, a race half-fiend, half-god.
+Men hated and loathed them, yet were ready to deify
+them. It did not seem unnatural that Caligula should throw
+a gigantic arch over the Forum, to link the imperial palace
+with the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> xxi. xxii. xxix. xxxiv.
+xxxvii.; cf. Mackail, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Lit.</hi> p. 213.</note> Men long refused
+to believe in the death of Nero, and his reappearance was
+expected for generations.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, lvii.</note> In spite of the Augustan revival,
+the calm, if rather formal, sanity of old Roman religion had
+lost its power over cultivated minds. The East, with its
+fatalist superstitions, its apotheosis of lofty earthly sovereignty,
+its enthronement of an evil power beside the good, was
+completing the overthrow of the national faith. The air was
+<pb n="455"/><anchor id="Pg455"/>full of the lawless and the supernatural. Science, in the
+modern sense, was yet unborn; it was a mere rudimentary
+mass of random guesses, with as little right to command the
+reason as the legends which sprang from the same lawless
+imagination. Philosophic speculation in any high sense had
+almost disappeared. The most powerful system which still
+lingered, resolved the gods into mere names for the various
+potencies of that dim and awful Power which thrills through
+the universe, which fixes from the beginning the destinies of
+men and nations, and which deigns to shadow forth its
+decrees in omen or oracle. Awestruck and helpless in the
+face of a cruel and omnipresent despotism, with little light from
+accredited systems of philosophy or religion, what wonder that
+even the highest and most cultivated minds were darkened
+and bewildered, and were even ready to lend an ear to the
+sorcery of the mysterious East? The hesitating acceptance
+of the popular belief in clairvoyance hardly surprises us in a
+man like Tacitus, bewildered by the chaos of the Empire, and
+possessing few reasoned convictions in religion or philosophy.
+It is more surprising to find so detached a mind as Epictetus
+recognising in some sort the power of divination. He admits
+that men are driven to practise it by cowardice or selfish
+greed.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> ii. 7, § 10,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τί οὖν ἡμᾶς ἐπὶ τὸ συνεχῶς μαντεύεσθαι ἄγει; Ἡ δειλία, τὸ
+    φοβεῖσθαι τὰς ἐκβάσεις</foreign>.</note> He agrees that the diviner can only predict the
+external changes of fortune, and that on their moral bearing,
+on the question whether they are really good or evil, he can
+throw no light. Yet even this preacher of a universal
+Providence, of the doctrine that our true good and happiness
+are in our own hands, will not altogether deny that the augur
+can forecast the future. We should, indeed, Epictetus says,
+come to consult him, without any selfish passion, as a wayfarer
+asks of a man whom he meets which of two roads leads to
+his journey’s end.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi>
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὡς ὁ ὁδοιπόρος πυνθάνεται ... ποτέρα τῶν ὁδῶν φέρει ...
+    οὕτως ἔδει καὶ ἐπὶ τὸν θεὸν ἔρχεσθαι, ὡς ὁδηγόν</foreign>.
+Cf. <hi rend="italic">Ench.</hi> 32.</note> But the field for such guidance is limited,
+Where the light of reason or conscience is a sufficient guide,
+the diviner’s art is either useless or corrupting. Nor should
+any ominous signs deter a man from sharing a friend’s peril,
+even though the diviner may give warning of exile or death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next to Aristides, there is probably no writer who reveals
+<pb n="456"/><anchor id="Pg456"/>so strikingly the mingled pietism and superstition of the time
+as Aelian. Although he preferred to compose his works in
+Greek, he was a native of the Latian Praeneste, that cool
+retreat of the wearied Roman, and the seat of the famous
+shrine of Fortuna Primigenia.<note place="foot">Warde Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Roman Festivals</hi>,
+p. 72; Preller, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Myth.</hi> (Tr.), p. 381.</note> It is a disputed point whether
+Aelian belongs to the second century or the third. But the
+more probable conclusion, favoured by the authority of Suidas,
+is that he lived shortly after the time of Hadrian.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> ii. p. 273,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐθαύμαζε δὲ τὸν Ἡρώδην ὡς ποικιλώτατον ῥητόρων</foreign>: cf. <hi rend="italic">Praef. Jac. Perizonii
+ed. Aeliana</hi>, Gronov.; Suid.
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ ἐσοφίστευσεν ἐν Ῥώμῃ αὐτῇ ἐπὶ τῶν μετὰ Ἁδριανὸν χρόνων</foreign>.</note> His
+historical Miscellanies are a good example of that uncritical
+treatment of history and love of the sensational which were
+held up to scorn by Lucian.<note place="foot">Ael. <hi rend="italic">Var. Hist.</hi> xi. 13.</note> But it is in the fragments of
+his work on Providence, that we have the best illustration of
+his religious attitude. The immediate interference of the
+Heavenly Powers, to reward the pious believer, or to punish the
+defiant sceptic, is triumphantly proclaimed. Miracles, oracles,
+presages, and warning dreams startle the reader on every page.
+Aelian wages war <hi rend="italic">à outrance</hi> with the effeminate and profane
+crew of the Epicureans, whom he would certainly have handed
+over pitilessly to the secular arm, if he had had the power.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Fragm. Ael. ap. Gronov.</hi> p.
+1014.</note>
+He records with delight the physical maladies which are said
+to have afflicted Epicurus and his brothers, and the persecution
+of their sect at Messene and in Crete.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 1022.</note> After the tale of some
+specially impressive interference of Providence, he launches
+ferocious anathemas at the most famous sceptics, Xenophanes,
+Diagoras, and Epicurus.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 1024.</note> He pursues Epicurus even to the
+tomb, and pours all his scorn on the unbelieving voluptuary’s
+arrangements for biennial banquets to his shade.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 1023.</note> He exults
+in the fate of one who, without initiation, tried to get a sight
+of the holy spectacle at Eleusis, and perished by falling from
+his secret point of observation.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 1011.</note> It is needless to say that
+miraculous cures by Asclepius are related with the most
+exuberant faith. Aristarchus the tragic poet, and Theopompus
+the comedian, were restored from wasting and hopeless sickness
+by the god.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 1030.</note> Another patient of the shrine had the vision, which
+<pb n="457"/><anchor id="Pg457"/>was probably often a real fact, of a priest standing beside his
+bed in the night, bringing counsels of healing.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Fragm. Ael.</hi> pp. 1009, 1034.</note> But the
+climax of ludicrous credulity is reached in the tale of the
+pious cock of Tanagra.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 1013.</note> This favoured bird, being maimed in
+one leg, appeared before the shrine of Asclepius, holding out
+the injured limb, and, taking his place in the choir that sung
+the morning paean, begged the god for relief and healing. It
+came before the evening, and the grateful bird, with crest
+erect, with stately tread, and flapping wings, gave voice to his
+deliverance in his own peculiar notes of praise! The Divine
+vengeance is also displayed asserting itself in dreams. A
+traveller, stopping for the night at Megara, had been murdered
+for his purse of gold by the keeper of his inn, and his corpse,
+hidden in a dung-cart, was carried through the gates before
+dawn. At that very hour his wraith appeared to a citizen
+of the place, and told him the tale of the tragedy. The
+treacherous assassin was caught at the very point indicated
+by the ghost.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 1049.</note> The last dream of Philemon is of a more
+pleasing kind.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi>
+    <anchor id="corr457"/><corr sic="(missing)">p.</corr> 1051.</note> The poet, being then in his full vigour, and
+in possession of all his powers, once had a vision in his home
+at Peiraeus. He thought he saw nine maidens leaving the
+house, and heard them bidding him adieu. When he awoke,
+he told the tale to his boy, and finished the play on which he
+was at work; then, wrapping himself in his cloak, he lay down
+to sleep, and when they came to wake him, he was dead.
+Aelian challenges Epicurus to deny that the maidens of the
+vision were the nine Muses, quitting an abode which was soon
+to be polluted by death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Publius Aelius Aristides is one of the best representatives
+of the union of high culture with the forces of the religious
+revival. He saw the beginning and the end of the Antonine
+age. He was born in 117 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> at Adriani, in Mysia, where his
+family held a high position, his father being priest of Zeus.
+He received the most complete rhetorical training, and had been
+a pupil of Herodes Atticus. Travelling through Greece, Italy,
+and Egypt, and giving exhibitions of his skill in the fashion
+of the day,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Jebb’s <hi rend="italic">Aristides</hi>, <hi rend="italic">Collect. Hist.</hi>
+§ vi.</note> Aristides won a splendid reputation, which swelled
+<pb n="458"/><anchor id="Pg458"/>his vanity to proportions rare even in a class whose vanity
+was proverbial. He won the restoration of the ruined Smyrna
+from M. Aurelius, by an oration which moved the Emperor to
+tears.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Soph.</hi> ii. p. 253.</note> With a naturally feeble constitution and epileptic
+tendencies, the excitement of the sophist’s life brought on an
+illness which lasted thirteen years. During that long ordeal,
+he developed a mystic superstition which, along with an ever-growing
+self-consciousness, inspired the <hi rend="italic">Sacred Orations</hi>, which
+appeared in 177, long after his health had been restored. He
+visited many seats of sacred healing—Smyrna, Pergamum,
+Cyzicus, Epidaurus—and, often in a cataleptic state, between
+sleep and waking, he had visitations of the Higher Powers in
+dreams. They gave him prescriptions of the strangest remedies,
+along with eulogies on his unrivalled talent, which he was
+solemnly enjoined to devote to the celebration of his deliverance
+by the Divine favour.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. p. 440 sqq.;
+Baumgart, <hi rend="italic">Ael. Aristides als Repräsentant
+der Soph. Rhet.</hi> pp. 68, 96.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Aristides zealously obeyed the Divine command. But
+whether his sole inspiration was simple gratitude and unsophisticated
+piety, crossed by superstition, as has generally
+been assumed, may well be doubted.<note place="foot">Baumgart rejects Welcker’s view of
+the essentially religious character of
+Aristides, pp. 112, 113.</note> The truth is, that in
+Aristides met all the complex influences of his age, both
+intellectual and spiritual. He was the most elaborate product
+of the rhetorical school, with its cultivated mastery of phrase,
+its exuberant pride in the power of words, its indifference to
+truth, in comparison with rhetorical effect. The whole force of
+revived Hellenism was concentrated in this declamatory skill.<note place="foot">Baumgart, pp. 62, 102, Bald ist in
+der ganzen Heilungsgeschichte dies die
+Hauptsache, dass nun sein Rhetorentum
+die höchste Weihe erhalten habe.</note>
+At the same time, the religious revival was very far from being
+a return to the old religion, in its clear firm outlines and
+simple wholeness.<note place="foot">Id. p. 62.</note> The Zeus and Athene and Poseidon of the
+age of Aristides were not the divinities of the great age.
+Many influences had been at work to blur the clean-cut outlines
+of Hellenic imagination, and to sophisticate the ancestral
+faith both of Greece and Rome. Men wished to believe in
+the ancient gods, but they were no longer the gods of Homer
+or of Aeschylus, the gods worshipped by the men who fought
+<pb n="459"/><anchor id="Pg459"/>in the Samnite or the Punic wars. Greek philosophy for eight
+centuries had been teaching a doctrine of one Divine force or
+essence, transcending the powers and limitations of sense, or
+immanent in the fleeting world of chance and change. Pagan
+theology had elaborated a celestial hierarchy, in which the
+Deity, removed to an infinite distance, was remotely linked to
+humanity by a graduated scale of inferior spiritual beings,
+daemons, and heroes.<note place="foot">Baumgart, pp. 60, 61.</note> Then came the religions of the East,
+with their doctrines of expiation for sin and ascetic preparation
+for communion, and visions of immortality. And, alongside
+of all these developments, there was a portentous growth of
+vulgar superstition, belief in dreams, omens, and oracles, in
+any avenue to the <q>Great Mystery.</q> Sophistic rhetoric, from
+its very nature and function, was bound to reflect the religious
+spirit of the age, in all its confusion. The ancient myths,
+indeed, were revived and decked out with rich poetic colouring.
+Yet it is not the simple, naïve, old pagan faith which inspires
+the rhetorical artist. The pantheistic or theosophist doctrines,
+which were in the air, disturbed the antique character of the
+<anchor id="corr459"/><corr sic="piece">piece.</corr><note place="foot">Id. p. 64.</note> But the sophist, if he occasionally catches the tone
+of new mysticism, or even of rationalist interpretation, is
+nothing if not orthodox on the whole, and he anathematises
+the impiety of free-thinking philosophy, with the same energy
+as Aelian. Above all, Aristides is in harmony with the infinite
+faith in miracle and heavenly vision which was rife.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From whatever cause, the worship of Asclepius had
+attained an extraordinary popularity in the age of the Antonines.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> c. iii. of Pater’s <hi rend="italic">Marius the
+Epicurean</hi>.</note>
+The conditions of health and disease are so obscure,
+the influences of will and imagination on our bodily states
+are so marked, that, in all ages, the boundaries between the
+natural and the unknowable are blurred and may be easily
+crossed. The science of medicine, even down to the age of
+Hippocrates, or the age of Galen, had not abandoned all faith
+in the magical and mysterious.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iii. 44; D.
+Cass. lxix. 22,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Ἁδριανὸς δὲ μαγγανείαις μέν τισι καὶ γοητείαις ἐκενοῦτό ποτε
+τοῦ ὑγροῦ</foreign>.</note> Incantations long held their
+ground beside more scientific remedies. Health being the
+most precious and the most precarious of earthly blessings, it
+is not strange that, in an age of revived belief in the
+super<pb n="460"/><anchor id="Pg460"/>natural, the god of health should attain a rank even on
+level with the great Olympian gods. His temples rose in every
+land where Greek or Roman culture prevailed. They were
+generally built with an eye to beauty of scenery, or the virtues
+of some clear, cold, ancient spring, or other health-giving
+powers in the site, which might reinforce the more mysterious
+influences of religion. And in every temple there was a
+hierarchy of sacred servants, who guarded a tradition of
+hieratic ceremonial and of medical science.<note place="foot">Caton, <hi rend="italic">Temples and Ritual of
+Asklepios</hi>, p. 27.</note> There was the
+chief priest, who may or may not have been a trained physician.
+There were the <hi rend="italic">daduchi</hi> and <hi rend="italic">pyrophori</hi>, who attended to the
+punctual service of the altars. There were the <hi rend="italic">neocori</hi>,
+who were probably physicians, and who waited on the
+patients, interpreting their visions, and often supplementing
+them by other visions of their own.<note place="foot">Baumgart, p. 97; cf. Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi>
+p. 574 (Jebb’s Ed.), 531.</note> There were also, in a
+lower rank, nurses, male and female, who, if we may judge
+from Aristides, performed the sympathetic part of our own
+hospital-nurses.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> p. 530 (Jebb).</note> The patients came from all parts of the
+Graeco-Roman world. After certain offerings and rites, the
+sufferer took his place in the long dormitory, which often contained
+beds for 200 or 300, with windows open all night
+long to the winds of the south. The sick man brought his
+bed-coverings, and made his gift on the altar. The lamps were
+lighted in the long gallery, a priest recited the vesper prayers.
+At a later hour, the lights were extinguished, strict silence was
+enjoined, and a hope for some soothing vision from above was
+left as a parting gift or salutation by the minister as he
+retired.<note place="foot">Caton, p. 29.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Divination by dreams was one of the most ancient and
+universal of superstitions in the pagan world.<note place="foot">Maury, <hi rend="italic">La Magie</hi>, p. 231.</note> It was also one
+of the most persistent to the last days of paganism in the West.
+The god of Epidaurus was still visiting his votaries by night,
+when S. Jerome was composing his commentary on Isaiah.<note place="foot">S. Hieron. in <hi rend="italic">Is.</hi> c. lv. p. 482.</note>
+Nor is the superstition unnatural. Sleep, the most mysterious
+of physical phenomena, gives birth to mental states which are
+a constant surprise. Thoughts and powers which are latent
+in the waking hours, then start into life with a strange
+vivid<pb n="461"/><anchor id="Pg461"/>ness and energy. Memory and imagination operate with a
+force which may well, in an age of faith, be taken for inspiration.
+The illusion of a double personality, which results from
+the helplessness of the mind to react on the impressions of
+sense, also easily passes into the illusion of messages and
+promptings from powers beyond ourselves. Religious hopes
+and cravings may thus easily and honestly seem to be fulfilled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But external causes also reinforced in the ancient world
+the deceptions of the inner spirit. The dream-oracle was
+generally on a site where nature might touch the awe and
+imagination of the votary. Few could have descended into the
+gloom of the cave of Trophonius without having their fancy
+prepared for visions.<note place="foot">Pausan. ix. 39, § 4; Max. Tyr.
+<hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> xiv. 2.</note> Exhalations from secret chasms, as at
+Delphi and Lebadea, aided by the weird spells of the Nymphs
+who haunted such scenes, often produced a physical excitement
+akin to madness. Opiates and potions administered by
+the priests, with the effect of solemn religious rites, prepared
+the votary for voices from another world.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. 41-46; Philostr.
+<hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> i. 8; cf. Maury, <hi rend="italic">La
+Magie</hi>, p. 237.</note> Soul and body
+were still further prepared for the touch of a Divine hand by
+rigorous fasting, which was enjoined as a preparatory discipline
+in so many mysteries of the renascent paganism.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 22.</note> The
+heavenly vision could only come to the clear spirit, purged as
+far as might be from the grossness of the flesh.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. xvi. i.; Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll.
+Tyan.</hi> ii. 37; vi. 11.</note>
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Ἐγκοίμησις</foreign>
+for the sake of healing became a great, and probably in the
+main, a beneficent institution in the temples of many deities,<note place="foot">See a list in Tertullian, <hi rend="italic">De Anima</hi>,
+c. 46.</note> pre-eminently
+in those of Isis, Serapis, and Asclepius. The temple
+of Serapis at Canopus in Strabo’s time was thronged by patients
+of the noblest rank, and was famous for its miraculous cures.<note place="foot">Strab. xvii. 17 (1052).</note>
+Among the many attributes of Queen Isis, none made a deeper
+impression than her benignant power of healing even the most
+desperate cases.<note place="foot">Diod. Sic. i. 25.</note> Her temples rose everywhere. Her dream
+interpreters were famous from the days of Cicero.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Div.</hi> i. 58.</note> In her
+shrine at Smyrna Aristides had many of his most startling
+experiences. According to Diodorus, her priests could point
+to numberless proofs of the power of the great goddess to cure
+<pb n="462"/><anchor id="Pg462"/>the most inveterate disease. But the great healer was, of
+course, Asclepius. The remains of his splendid shrine at
+Epidaurus are a revelation at once of his fame and power,
+and of the scenes and occupations in which the devout health-seekers
+passed their days and nights. In his temple on the
+island in the Tiber, dreams of healing were still sought in the
+time of Iamblichus. His shrine at Pergamum, which was
+the scene of so many of the strange visions of Aristides, in
+his many years of struggle with disease, was one of the most
+famous, and its inspired dreams were sought long afterwards
+by the emperor Caracalla.<note place="foot">Wolff, <hi rend="italic">De Nov. Orac. Aet.</hi> p. 29.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be idle to speculate on the relative effects of
+sound medical treatment and of superstition, stimulated by
+more or less pious arts, upon the constitution of the sufferer.
+The virtues of herb or mineral drug, of regulated food and
+abstinence, of bathing in naturally medicated waters, above
+all of a continual freshness in the air, must have become a
+tradition in these sacred homes of the god of health. Physical
+disease is often rooted in moral disorder, and for such troubled,
+tainted souls, with hereditary poison in vein and nerve, the
+bright cheerfulness, the orderly calm and confidence of the
+ritual, which had such a charm for the soul of Plutarch, may
+have exorcised, for the time, many an evil spirit, and wiped
+out the memory of old sins. Soothed and relieved in mind
+and body, the sufferer lay in the dimly lighted corridor,
+sinking to sleep, with a confidence that the god would somehow
+make his power felt in visions of the night.<note place="foot">Caton, p. 28.</note> Through
+a sliding panel, hidden in the wall, a dim figure of gracious
+aspect might glide to the side of his couch, and whisper
+strange sweet words of comfort. But in many cases, there is
+no need to assume the existence of sanctified imposture.<note place="foot">Diod. Sic. i. 25.</note> A
+debilitated frame, nerves shattered by prolonged suffering, an
+imagination excited by sacred litany, ghostly counsels and tales
+of miracle, the all-pervading atmosphere of an immemorial
+faith, may easily have engendered visions which seemed to
+come from another world.<note place="foot">Wolff, <hi rend="italic">De Nov. Orac. Aet.</hi> p. 31,
+Ejus sacerdotes fraudibus famosi opportune
+Isidis templo Pompeiano culpae
+convicti sunt; ubi ipse scalinam vidi
+secretam, etc. Maury, <hi rend="italic">La Magie</hi>, pp.
+237-8.</note>
+</p>
+
+<pb n="463"/><anchor id="Pg463"/>
+
+<p>
+But from whatever source the visions came, they had a
+powerful effect on the imagination, and, through that, on the
+bodily health. Some of the prescriptions indeed given by
+these voices of the night may seem to us ludicrous or
+positively dangerous.<note place="foot">Cf. Maury, p. 240.</note> But the tone and surroundings of
+these shrines, and the sense of being encompassed by Divine
+as well as human sympathy, probably counteracted any ill
+effects of quackery. The calm, serene order, which the
+hieratic spirit cultivates at its best, the cheerful routine of
+the sacred service, blending indistinguishably with the ministry
+to suffering, and consecrating and ennobling it, the confidence
+inspired by the sedate cheerfulness of the priests and attendants,
+reinforced by the countless cases of miraculous cures
+recorded on the walls,<note place="foot">See a list in Caton, p. 36 sq.</note>—all this must have had a powerful
+and beneficent influence. And the visitors were not all
+invalids. The games and festivals drew together many merely
+for society and amusement. The theatre at Epidaurus
+must have provided constant entertainment for a far larger
+concourse than the patients of the temple.<note place="foot">Caton, p. 28; Pausan. ii. 27, § 5;
+cf. Strab. viii. 6, § 15.</note> A healthy
+regimen, which is abundantly attested,<note place="foot">Caton, pp. 40, 38.</note> with the charms
+of art and surrounding beauties of hill and woodland, tended
+of themselves to restore peace and balance to disordered
+nerves. And the social life, especially to Greeks, was
+probably the most potent influence of all. We can see from
+Aristides that troublesome cases were watched by a circle of
+curious sympathisers.<note place="foot">Baumgart, p. 101.</note> In those marble seats, which can still
+be seen on the site, many a group, through many generations,
+must have sat listening to music or recitation, or discussing
+high themes of life and death, or amused with the more trivial
+gossip of all gatherings of men.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Amid such scenes Aristides spent thirteen years of the
+prime of his manhood. With all the egotism of the self-pitying
+invalid, he has recorded the minutest details of his
+ailments. He seems to have been disordered in every organ,
+dropsical, asthmatic, dyspeptic, with a tumour of portentous
+size, and agonising pains which reduced him to the extremity
+of weakness.<note place="foot">Cf. Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 536-538 (Jebb, t. i.).</note> But the extraordinary toughness and vitality
+<pb n="464"/><anchor id="Pg464"/>of the man is even more striking than his sufferings. Aristides
+regarded health as the greatest of all blessings, the condition
+on which the value of all other blessings depends. And he
+acted on the belief. His hundred days journey to Rome is
+a miracle of endurance.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 537,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Ἕβρος πᾶς ἠπείρωτο ὑπὸ κριστάλλου, πεδία δὲ λιμνάζοντα</foreign>.</note> Racked with fever and asthma,
+unable to take any food except milk, he struggled along, alternately
+through plains turned into lakes, or across the frozen
+Hebrus, amid storm or rain or freezing cold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The effects of this journey in aggravated suffering from
+asthma, dropsy, nervous agony, are described with painful
+vividness. They were dealt with by the Roman surgeons in a
+fashion which makes one wonder how the patient survived such
+laceration.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 538,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ τέλος, οἱ ἰατροὶ κατέτεμνον ἐκ τοῦ στήθους ἀρξάμενοι πάντα
+    ἑξῆς ἄχρι πρὸς τὴν κύστιν κατω. κτλ.</foreign></note> The invalid hastened home to Asia by sea. The
+voyage was long and weary, a very Odyssey of storm and
+wandering. Aristides reached Smyrna in mid-winter, and all
+the physicians were puzzled to find any alleviation for his
+troubles.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 541,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὔτε βοηθεῖν εἴχον οὔτε ἐγνώριζον τὴν ποικιλίαν τῆς νόσου.
+    τοσοῦτον δ’ οὖν συνέδοξεν εἰς τὰς πηγὰς τὰς θερμὰς κομίσαι.</foreign> Cf. 514,
+        <anchor id="corr464"/><corr sic="κτλ"><foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">κτλ.</foreign></corr>, and <hi rend="italic">Collect.
+Hist. ad an.</hi> 160, in Jebb’s Ed.</note> Henceforth he passed, for thirteen years, from
+one temple to another, at the bidding of the gods—from
+Smyrna to Pergamum, or Chios, or Cyzicus, or Epidaurus—enduring
+often frightful hardships by land or sea. The
+description of his sufferings sometimes excites the suspicion
+that a warm imagination and the vanity of the literary artist
+have heightened the effect. A tumour of monstrous size,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 504.</note>
+agonies of palpitation and breathlessness, the torture of
+dyspepsia, vertigo, and neuralgia which doubled up his limbs,
+and seemed to bend the spine outward like a bow<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 554,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ δὲ στῆθος ἔξω παρεωθεῖτο καὶ τὸ νῶτον εἰς τοὔπισθεν ἀντεσπᾶτο
+ἠρέμει δὲ οὐδὲν τοῦ σώματος, κτλ.</foreign></note>—these
+are only a few of the morbid horrors which afflicted him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The divine prescriptions were often as astounding as the
+malady was severe. Fresh air, exercise, bathing in the sacred
+wells, fasting and abstinence, indeed, may often have been
+sound treatment. But to these were added astonishing
+prescriptions of food or drugs, purgings and blood-letting
+which drained the body of its slight remaining strength, and
+which horrified the attendant physicians.<note place="foot">Arist. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 501-3, 506, 531, 532.</note> But these were
+<pb n="465"/><anchor id="Pg465"/>not the worst. Again and again, Aristides was enjoined, when
+in a high fever, to bathe two or three times in an ice-cold
+river running in full flood, and then race a mile at full speed
+in the face of a northerly gale. He obeyed in spite of all
+remonstrance, and the doctors and his anxious friends could
+only follow him to await the result of such extraordinary
+remedies. Strange to relate, their fears and forebodings
+proved groundless. Religious excitement, combined with
+immense vanity and a strange vitality, carried Aristides
+victoriously through these ordeals,<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 521.</note> and his friends received
+him at their close, with an indescribable genial warmth spreading
+through his whole body, and a lightness and cheerfulness
+of spirit which more than rewarded him for these strange
+hardships of superstition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The faith of Aristides must have been very robust. His
+tortures lasted for nearly thirteen years, during which the
+divine prescriptions only seemed to add to their poignancy.
+But he was upheld by the belief that he was a special object
+of the Divine favour, and he persistently followed Divine
+recipes, which ordinary human skill and prudence would have
+rejected. No doubts, such as troubled his attendants, ever crossed
+his mind. How far his illness was prolonged by this obstinate
+adherence to the illusions of sleep and superstition,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 504-5, 541-2.</note> in the
+face of expert advice, is a matter on which it would be useless
+to speculate. It is probable that the imagination and exuberant
+vanity of Aristides made him a more difficult patient
+than the ordinary people who frequented these shrines of
+healing. It is also evident that there was a body of more or
+less skilled medical opinion connected with the cult of Asclepius.
+Practical physicians came to the temples,<note place="foot">Baumgart, p. 101; Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> p.
+550 (Jebb, t. i.).</note> with the benevolence
+and the curiosity of their craft in all ages, to observe and study,
+or to advise a cautious interpretation of the revelations of the
+night. Aristides has preserved the names of some—Theodotus,
+Asclepiacus, and Satyrus. Long observation of the freaks of
+individual temperament and constitution must have suggested
+to thoughtful minds, with some instincts of scientific method,
+that the supernatural vision should be interpreted in the light
+of experience. An awful dream of Aristides that all his bones
+<pb n="466"/><anchor id="Pg466"/>and sinews must be excised, turned, in the hands of a faithful
+attendant, into a prediction of renewed vitality.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 553; Baumgart, p. 99.</note> And although
+some of the nurses, to whom he is so grateful, confirmed his
+visions by precisely similar revelations of their own,<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 506, 515; cf. Baumgart,
+p. 122.</note> others, of
+the more skilled physicians, openly blamed his too confident
+reliance on his dreams, and his unwillingness to try the effect
+of more scientific treatment.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 505,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οἱ δὲ ἐνεκάλουν ὡς λίαν ἅπαντα ἐπὶ τοῖς ὀνείρασι ποιουμένῳ, κτλ.</foreign></note> Their proposals, however, were
+sometimes so severe and heroic that we may excuse him for
+preferring on the whole the more patient and gentle methods
+of the god. The sufferer was sometimes favoured with
+epiphanies of Athene, Apollo, Serapis, and other great
+divinities, exalting him far above the rank of common votaries.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 529.</note>
+And Asclepius himself, to whom his special devotion was
+given, not only lightened his physical tortures, although after
+long years, but endowed him with hitherto unknown powers
+of rhetorical skill and readiness. The god became the patron
+of his whole professional life.<note place="foot">Baumgart, p. 64, und dabei entwickelte
+sich der Glaube, dass er dem
+Asklepios alles verdanke, Leib, Leben,
+und speciell die Gabe der Rede, etc.; cf.
+p. 68, erhebt er ihn auch als den eigentlichen
+Verleiher und Spender seiner
+rednerischen Gaben, etc., p. 69, er dem
+Gotte einen stärkeren und bleibenden
+Einfluss auch auf die Gestaltung seines
+inneren Lebens zuschreibt.</note> And Aristides regarded him
+as the source of fresh inspiration, in the exercise of that wordcraft
+of which he was the greatest master in his time. It is
+not hard to discern the meaning of this self-deception. Before
+Aristides began to visit the temples of the god, he was already
+a finished rhetor, possessed of all the skill which the Greek
+schools could impart.<note place="foot">Id. p. 69.</note> Prostrated by bodily suffering for years,
+cut off from that life of brilliant display, which was so lavishly
+rewarded by applauding crowds, the vain and ambitious
+declaimer had lost not only his bodily health, but all the joy
+and excitement of rhetorical triumph. Suddenly he found his
+balance restored; the tide of energy returned to its old channels.
+He could once more draw music from the almost forgotten
+instrument. He had once more the full lecture-hall under his
+spell. What wonder that he should feel his powers redoubled
+when they were recovered, and that he should regard the god
+who had healed his bodily ailments as the author of a fresh
+literary inspiration?
+</p>
+
+<pb n="467"/><anchor id="Pg467"/>
+
+<p>
+The debt was repaid in these Sacred Orations.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 512,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εὐθὺς ἐξ ἀρχῆς προεῖπεν ὁ θεὸς ἀπογράφειν τὰ ὀνείρατα</foreign>.</note> Some treat
+them as the expression of a genuine mystical piety, others are
+inclined to think that the incorrigible rhetorician is quite as
+evident as the pious votary.<note place="foot">Baumgart, pp. 112, 123.</note> It would be an excess of
+scepticism to doubt that Aristides believed in his visions, and
+in the beneficent power of the god, for which he was full of
+pious gratitude. Yet the rhetorical spirit of that age was an
+influence of singular intensity. It mastered not only the faculty
+of utterance, but the whole mind and life of the rhetorician.
+The passion to produce a startling or seductive effect on the
+audience had become a second nature. Truth was a secondary
+matter, not from any moral obliquity, but from the influence
+of prolonged training. And so, we may retain a belief in the
+genuine piety or superstition of Aristides, while we may distrust
+his narrative. The piety or the mystic superstition may not
+have been less sincere, although it was mingled with egregious
+vanity, and expressed itself in the carefully moulded and highly
+coloured phrases of the schools. Nor should we doubt the
+piety of Aristides because he deemed himself the special object
+of Divine favour. On such a principle all prayer for personal
+benefits would become profane egotism. And although Aristides
+was profoundly conscious that he was the first of Greek
+orators,<note place="foot">On his vanity <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Baumgart, p. 110.
+The most glaring example is in <hi rend="italic">Or. Sac.</hi>
+4, 591-2,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐξεβόησα, εἶς, λέγων τὸν θεόν, καὶ ὅς ἔφη, σὺ εἶ</foreign>.</note> he was also profoundly grateful for the Divine grace
+which had renewed his powers for the glory of God and the
+delight and profit of mankind. Whether he would have been
+content to enjoy his mystic raptures without publishing them
+to the world, is a question which will be variously answered
+according to the charity and spiritual experience of the inquirer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Many another less famous shrine than that of Epidaurus
+offered this kind of revelation. The gods were liberal in their
+prophetic gifts in that age, and dreams were as freely sent as
+they were generally expected. There is no more striking
+example of the superstition of the age than the treatise of
+Artemidorus on the interpretation of dreams. Artemidorus
+lived towards the end of the second century. He was a
+native of Ephesus, but he called himself Daldianus, in order
+to share his distinction with an obscure little town in Lydia,
+<pb n="468"/><anchor id="Pg468"/>which was the birthplace of his mother.<note place="foot">Artemid. <hi rend="italic">Oneirocrit.</hi> iii. 66.</note> The treatise is in
+five books, three of which are dedicated to Cassius Maximus,
+a Roman of rank, who was an adept in this pretended
+science; the others are inscribed to the son of the author.
+In spite of absurd credulity, wild and perverted ingenuity
+and a cold, quasi-scientific tolerance of some of the worst
+moral enormities of antiquity, Artemidorus seems to have
+been an earnest and industrious man, who wrote with the
+mistaken object of doing a service both to his own age
+and to posterity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 1,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">διὰ τὴν εὐχρηστίαν οὐ μόνον τὴν ἡμῶν αὐτῶν ἀλλὰ καὶ
+    τῶν μετέπειτα ἐσωμένων ἀνθρώπων</foreign>.</note> Like other pious men of the time, he
+was afflicted by the profane attitude of the sceptics,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> Cf. Tertullian, <hi rend="italic">De An.</hi> 46, 47.</note> and
+determined to refute them by the solid proofs of a sifted
+experience. He also wished to furnish guidance to the crowd,
+who believed in their visions, but were bewildered from the
+want of clear canons of interpretation. There was evidently
+afloat a voluminous oneirocritic literature. But it was, according
+to Artemidorus, frequently wanting in depth and system,<note place="foot">Artemid. <hi rend="italic">Oneirocrit.</hi>
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὐ γὰρ ἀπὸ πείρας ἀλλ’ αὐτοσχεδιάζοντες ... οὕτως ἔγραφον</foreign>. Praef.</note> and
+random guesses had too often been the substitute for minute,
+exhaustive observation and a clear scientific method. Artemidorus
+was inspired to supply the want by a vision from Apollo,
+his ancestral patron.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 70, <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi></note> He procured every known treatise on
+dreams.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. Praef.,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὐκ ἔστιν ὅ τι βιβλίον οὐκ ἐτησάμην ὀνειροκριτικόν</foreign>.</note> He travelled all over Asia, Greece, and Italy, and
+the larger islands, visiting the great festivals and centres of
+population, and consulting with all the seers and diviners, even
+those of the lowest repute. He took the greatest pains to
+ascertain the facts of the reported fulfilment of dreams, and to
+compare and sift the facts of his own observation. No austere
+scientific student of nature in our day ever took himself more
+seriously than this collector of the wildest and foulest hallucinations
+of pagan imagination. Artemidorus really believed that
+he was founding an enduring science for the guidance of all
+coming generations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet the foundation of it all is essentially unscientific.
+To Artemidorus dreams are not the result of natural causes,
+of physical states, or of the suggestions of memory and
+<pb n="469"/><anchor id="Pg469"/>association. They are sent directly by some god, as a promise
+or warning of the future. Nor should any apparent failure of
+the prediction tempt us to impeach the truthfulness of the
+Divine author. Artemidorus affirms as emphatically as Plato,
+that the gods can never lie.<note place="foot">Artemid. <hi rend="italic">Oneirocrit.</hi> iv. 71.</note> But although they sometimes express
+themselves plainly, they also frequently veil their meaning
+in shadowy, enigmatic form, in order to test men’s faith and
+patience.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi>
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλὰ ποτὲ μὲν ἁπλῶς λέγουσι, ποτὲ δὲ αἰνίσσονται ...
+    ἐπειδὴ καὶ σοφώτεροι ὄντες ἡμῶν αὐτῶν οὐδὲν ἡμᾶς
+ἀβασανίστως βούλονται λαμβάνειν</foreign>.</note> Hence there is need of skilled interpretation, which
+demands the widest observation, acute criticism combined with
+reverent faith, and deference to ancient custom and traditional
+lore. It is curious to see how this apostle of what, to our minds,
+is a pestilent superstition, pours his scorn on the newer or lower
+forms of divination.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 69.</note> The Pythagorean dream-readers, the interpreters
+from hand and face and form, the interpreters of sieve
+and dish and dice, are all deceivers and charlatans. The old
+formulated and accredited lore of birds and sacrificial entrails,
+of dreams and stars and heavenly portents, should alone be
+accepted by an orthodox faith. It is needless to say that
+Artemidorus believed in astrology as he believed in oneiromancy.
+Both beliefs go back to the infancy of the race, and
+both extended their dominion far into the Middle Ages.<note place="foot">Maury, p. 241.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would be impossible, in our space, to give any detailed
+conception of the treatment of dreams by Artemidorus. Nor
+would the attempt reward the pains; the curious specialist
+must read the treatise for himself. He will find in it one
+of the most astonishing efforts of besotted credulity to disguise
+itself under the forms of scientific inquiry. He will find an
+apparently genuine piety united with an unprotesting record
+of the most revolting prurience of the lawless fancy. He will
+find a subtlety and formalism of system and distinction worthy
+of a finished schoolman of the fourteenth century, and all
+employed to give order and meaning to the wildest vagaries
+of vulgar fancy. The classification of dreams by Artemidorus
+is a great effort, and is followed out in an exhaustive order.
+Every possible subject, and many that seem to a modern
+almost inconceivable, are catalogued, each in its proper place,
+with the appropriate principles of explanation. The hierarchy
+<pb n="470"/><anchor id="Pg470"/>of gods and heroes in their various grades, the orbs of the
+sky, the various parts of the bodily frame, from the hair of
+the head to the toes and nails, the various occupations and
+multiform incidents in the life of man from the cradle to
+the grave,<note place="foot">Artemid. <hi rend="italic">Oneirocrit.</hi> iv. Praef.</note> the whole list of animals, plants, and drugs which
+serve his uses,—all these things, and many others which might
+conceivably, or inconceivably, enter into the fabric of a
+dream, are painfully collected and arranged for the guidance
+of the future inquirer. And this demands not only an
+effort of logical classification, but also an immense knowledge
+of the customs and peculiarities of different races,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 4.</note>
+the special attributes of each of the gods, and a minute
+acquaintance with the natural history of the time. For,
+special circumstances and details cannot be safely neglected
+in the interpretation of dreams. It may make the greatest
+difference whether the same dream comes to a rich man or a
+poor man,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 13, 17.</note> to a man or a woman, to a married woman or a
+virgin, to old or young, to king or subject. To one it may
+mean the greatest of blessings, to another calamity or death.
+For instance, for a priest of Isis to dream of a shaven head is
+of good omen; to any other person it is ominous of evil.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 22.</note> To
+dream that you have the head of a lion or elephant is a
+prediction of a rise above your natural estate; but to dream
+that you have the horns of an ox portends violent death.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 37, 39.</note> To
+dream of shoemaking and carpentry foretells happy marriage
+and friendship, but the vision of a tanner’s yard, from its
+connection with foul odours and death, may foreshadow disgrace
+and disaster.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 51.</note> To dream of drinking cold water is a wholesome
+sign; but a fancied draught of hot fluid, as being
+unnatural, may forbode disease or failure.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> i. 66.</note> A man dreamt
+that his mother was bearing him a second time; the issue
+was that he returned from exile to his motherland, found his
+mother ill, and inherited her property. Another had a vision
+of an olive shooting from his head; he developed a vigour
+and clearness of thought and language worthy of the goddess
+to whom the olive is sacred.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> v. 18.</note> It would be wearisome, and even
+disgusting, to give other examples of this futile and almost
+<pb n="471"/><anchor id="Pg471"/>idiotic superstition, masquerading as a science. A painstaking
+student might easily classify the modes of interpretation.
+They are tolerably uniform, and rest on fanciful but obvious
+conceits, superficial analogies, mere play upon words and
+impossible etymologies. The interpretations are as dull and
+monotonous as the dreams are various and fantastic. Many
+of these visions seem like the wildest hallucinations of prurient
+lunacy. It is difficult to conceive what was the ordinary state
+of mind and the habits of a people whose sleep was haunted
+by visions so lawless. It is perhaps even harder to imagine
+a father, with the infinite industry of which he is so proud,
+compiling such a catalogue for the study of his son.<note place="foot">Artemid. <hi rend="italic">Oneirocrit.</hi> v. Praef.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lucian, through the mouth of Momus, pours his scorn on
+the new oracles which were chanting from every rock, vending
+their lies at two obols apiece, and overshadowing the ancient
+glories of the more ancient shrines.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Concil. Deor.</hi> c. 12,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλ’ ἤδη πᾶς λίθος καὶ πᾶς βωμὸς χρησμῳδεῖ, κτλ.</foreign>
+Cf. Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 14.</note> In the last century of
+the Republic, and in the first century of the Empire, the faith
+in oracles had suffered a portentous decay. The exultation of
+the Christian Fathers at the desertion of the ancient seats
+of prophecy seems to find an echo in the record of heathen
+authors. Cicero speaks as if Delphi were almost silent.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De. Div.</hi> ii. 57, cur isto modo
+iam oracula Delphis non eduntur non
+modo nostra aetate, sed jamdiu, jam
+ut nihil possit esse contemptius?</note>
+Strabo tells us that Delphi, Dodona, and Ammon had shared
+in the general contempt which had fallen on oracular divination.<note place="foot">Strab. ix. 3, 4, (419),
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὠλιγώρεται δ’ ἱκανῶς καὶ τὸ ἱερόν, κτλ.</foreign>: vii. 7, 9,
+(328) (Dodona); xvii. 1, 43 (Ammon).</note>
+From Plutarch we have seen that in Boeotia, the most
+famous home of the art, all the oracular shrines were silent
+and deserted, except that of Trophonius at Lebadea.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. 5.</note> And
+curious inquirers gave various explanations of this waning
+faith. Strabo thought that, with the spread of Roman power,
+the Sibylline prophecies and the Etruscan augury eclipsed the
+Greek and Eastern oracles. The explanation in Plutarch, as
+we have seen, is involved in an interesting discussion of the
+various sources of inspiration, and, in particular, of the office
+of daemons. One theorist of the positive type attributes the
+failure of the Greek oracles to the growing depopulation of
+Greece. It is a question of demand and supply. Others find
+<pb n="472"/><anchor id="Pg472"/>the explanation in physical changes, which have extinguished
+or diverted the exhalation that used to excite the prophetic
+powers of the Pythia. Another falls back on the theory of
+daemonic inspiration, which, mysteriously vouchsafed, may be
+as mysteriously withdrawn.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Def. Or.</hi> c. 8, 38.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The eclipse of the oracles was really a phase of that pagan
+unbelief or indifference which tended to disappear towards
+the end of the first century <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> And the eclipse perhaps
+was not so complete as it is represented. Cicero himself
+consulted the Pythia about his future fame, and received an
+answer which revealed insight into his character.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Cic.</hi> c. 5.</note> Germanicus
+in the reign of Tiberius visited the shrine of the Clarian
+Apollo, and that of Apis at Memphis;<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> ii. 54.</note> Tiberius tried the
+sacred lottery at Padua,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> c. xiv.</note> Caligula that of Fortune at Antium.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> c. lvii.</note>
+Nero, although he is said to have choked the sacred chasm at
+Delphi with corpses, had previously sought light from the
+god on his perilous future.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, xl.</note> Before the altar of the unseen
+God on Mount Carmel, Vespasian received an impressive
+prophecy of his coming greatness.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> ii. 78.</note> Titus had his hopes
+confirmed in the shrine of the Paphian Venus.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tit.</hi> c. v.</note> When these
+lords of the world, some of whom were notorious sceptics, thus
+paid deference to the ancient homes of prophecy, it may be
+doubted whether their prestige had been seriously shaken.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Although Delphi had not for many ages wielded the
+enormous political, and even international, power which it
+enjoyed before the Persian wars, still, even in the days of its
+greatest obscurity, it was the resort of many who came to
+consult it in the ordinary cares of life. Apollonius of Tyana,
+in the reign of Nero, visited the old oracular centres, Delphi,
+Dodona, Abae, and the shrines of Amphiaraus and Trophonius.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 24.</note>
+They seem to be still active, although the sage had, in
+fulfilment of his mission, to correct their ritual. The newer
+foundations, like that at Abonoteichos, found it politic to
+defer to the authority of oracles, such as those of Clarus and
+Didyma, with a great past.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> c. 29.</note> If the conquests of Rome for
+a time obscured their fame, the ease and rapidity of
+com<pb n="473"/><anchor id="Pg473"/>munication along the Roman roads, and the safety of the seas,
+must have swelled the number of their votaries from all parts
+of the world. It is a revelation to find a Tungrian cohort at
+a remote station in Britain setting up a votive inscription in
+obedience to the voice of the Clarian Apollo.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. p. 469.</note> If new oracles
+were springing up in the Antonine age, the old were certainly
+not quite neglected. In the reign of Trajan the shrine of Delphi
+recovered from its degradation by the violence of Nero.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxiii. 14.</note> And
+Hadrian, as we have seen, tested the inspiration of the Pythia
+by a question as to the birthplace of Homer, which was
+answered by a verse tracing his ancestry to Pylos and Ithaca.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Wolff. <hi rend="italic">De Nov. Orac. Aet.</hi> p. 5.</note>
+The ancient oracles were in full vigour under the emperors of
+the third century. Some of the greatest and most venerable—Delphi,
+Didyma, Mallus, and Dodona—were not reduced
+to silence till the reign of Constantine.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> pp. 6, 52.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the old oracles could not satisfy the omnivorous superstition
+of the time. The outburst of new oracles may be compared,
+perhaps, to the fissiparous tendencies of Protestantism
+in some countries, at each fresh revival of religious excitement.
+Any fresh avenue to the <q>Great Mystery</q> was at once eagerly
+crowded. And the most recent claimant to inspiration sometimes
+threatened to overshadow the tradition of a thousand
+years, and to assert an oecumenical power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One such case has been recorded and exposed with the
+graphic skill and penetrating observation of the greatest
+genius of the age. Lucian’s description of the foundation of
+the new oracle of Asclepius at Abonoteichos in Paphlagonia,
+if it is wanting in the sympathetic handling which modern
+criticism has attained or can affect, is an unrivalled revelation
+of the superstition of the time. And a brief narrative
+of the imposture will probably give a more vivid idea of it
+than any abstract dissertation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Alexander, the founder, was a man of mean parentage,
+but of remarkable natural gifts. Tall and handsome in no
+ordinary degree, he had eyes with a searching keenness, a look
+of inspiration, and a voice most clear and sweet.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> c. 3,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὀφθαλμοὶ πολὺ τὸ γοργὸν καὶ ἔνθεον διεμφαίνοντες, κτλ.</foreign></note> His mental
+gifts were equal to his physical charm. In memory, quick
+<pb n="474"/><anchor id="Pg474"/>perception, shrewdness, and subtlety, he had few equals. But
+from his early youth, with the affectation of Pythagorean
+asceticism, he had all the vices which go to make the finished
+reprobate.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> c. 4, 5.</note> After a youth of abandoned sensuality, in concert
+with a confederate of no better character, he determined to
+found an oracle. The times were favourable for such a
+venture. Never had selfish desire and terror, twin roots of
+superstition, such a hold on mankind.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 8,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ῥᾳδίως κατενόησαν τὸν τῶν ἀνθρώπων βίον ὑπὸ δυοῖν τούτοιν
+μεγίστοιν τυραννούμενον</foreign>.</note> The problem was,
+where to establish the new shrine. It must be founded among
+a crassly stupid population, ready to accept any tale of the
+marvellous with the most abandoned credulity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 9.</note> Paphlagonia
+seemed to the shrewd observers the readiest prey. Tablets
+were dug up, which predicted an epiphany of Asclepius at
+Abonoteichos. A Sibylline oracle, in enigmatic verse, heralded
+the coming of the god. Alexander, magnificently attired,
+appeared upon the scene, with all the signs of mysterious
+insanity, and the Paphlagonians were thrown into hysterical
+excitement.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 12.</note> Their last new god was fished up from a lake
+in the form of a young serpent, which had been artfully sealed
+up in a goose’s egg. When the broken shell revealed the
+nascent deity, the multitude were in an ecstasy of excitement
+at the honour vouchsafed to their city. The infant reptile was
+soon replaced by one full grown, to which a very elementary
+art had attached a human head. It was displayed to the
+crowds who trooped through the reception-room of the
+impostor, and they went away to spread throughout all Asia the
+tidings of the unheard-of miracle.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 15-18.</note> Alexander had carefully
+studied the system of the older oracles, and he proceeded to
+imitate it. He received inquiries on sealed tablets, and, with
+all ancient pomp and ceremony of attendance, returned them,
+apparently untouched, with the proper answer. But Lucian
+minutely explains the art with which the seal of the missive
+was dexterously broken and restored.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 20.</note> A hot needle and a
+delicate hand could easily reveal the secret of the question,
+and hide the trick. The oracle was primarily medical. Prescriptions
+were given in more or less ambiguous phrases.
+The charge for each consultation was, in our money, the
+<pb n="475"/><anchor id="Pg475"/>small fee of a shilling.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> c. 23,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐτέτακτο δὲ καὶ μισθὸς ἐφ’ ἑκάστῳ χρησμῷ δραχμὴ καὶ δύ’ ὀβολώ</foreign>.</note> Alexander was evidently a shrewd
+business man, and his moderate charges attracting a crowd of
+inquirers, the income of the oracle rose, according to Lucian,
+to the then enormous sum of nearly £7000 a year.<note place="foot">If I am right in interpreting
+Lucian’s statement,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλ’ εἰς ἑπτὰ ἢ ὀκτὼ μυριάδας ἑκάστου ἔθους ἤθροιζεν</foreign>.</note> But the
+manager was liberal to his numerous staff of secretaries, interpreters,
+and versifiers.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> c.
+    <anchor id="corr475"/><corr sic="23">23,</corr>
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἅπασιν ἔνεμεν ἑκάστῳ τὸ κατ’ ἀξίαν</foreign>.</note> He had, moreover, missionaries who
+spread his fame in foreign lands, and who offered the service
+of the oracle in recovering runaway slaves, discovering buried
+treasure, healing sickness, and raising the dead.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 24.</note> Even the
+barbarians on the outskirts of civilisation were attracted by
+his fame, and, after an interval required to find a translator
+among the motley crowd who thronged from all lands, an
+answer would be returned even in the Celtic or Syrian
+tongue.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 51,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλὰ καὶ βαρβάροις πολλάκις ἔχρησεν ... Συριστὶ ἢ Κελτιστί</foreign>.</note> The fame of the oracle, of course, soon spread to
+Italy, where the highest nobles, eager for any novelty in
+religion, were carried away by the pretensions of Alexander.
+None among them stood higher than Rutilianus, either in
+character or official rank. But he was the slave of every
+kind of extravagant superstition.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 30,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλόκοτα περὶ τῶν θεῶν πεπιστευκώς, κτλ.</foreign></note> He would fall down and
+grovel along the way before any stone which was shining
+with oil or decked with garlands. He sent one emissary after
+another to Abonoteichos to consult the new god. They
+returned, some full of genuine enthusiasm, some hiding their
+doubts by interested exaggeration of what they had seen.
+Soon society and the court circle felt all the delight of a new
+religious sensation. Great nobles hurried away to Paphlagonia,
+and fell an easy prey to the gracious charm and the ingenious
+charlatanry of Alexander.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 31.</note> Some, who had consulted the
+oracle by questions which might have a sinister meaning, and
+suggest dangerous ambitions, he knew how to terrify into his service
+by the hint of possible disclosure.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 32.</note> All came back to swell
+the fame of the Paphlagonian oracle and to make it fashionable
+in Italy. But none were so besotted as Rutilianus. This great
+Roman noble, who had been proved in a long career of office,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 30,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐν πολλαῖς τάξεσι ἐξητασμένος</foreign>.</note>
+<pb n="476"/><anchor id="Pg476"/>at the mature age of sixty, stooped to wed the supposed
+daughter of the vulgar charlatan by Selene, who had honoured
+him with the love which she gave of old to Endymion!<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> c. 35.</note>
+And Rutilianus henceforth became the stoutest champion
+of Alexander against all assaults of scepticism. For, in
+spite of the credulity of the crowd and of the visitors from
+Rome, there was evidently a strong body of sturdy dissent.
+There were, in those days, followers of Epicurus even in
+Paphlagonia, and, by a strange freak of fortune, the followers
+of Christ found themselves making common cause against a
+new outbreak of heathenism with the atheistic philosophy of
+the Garden.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 38,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εἴ τις ἄθεος ἢ Χριστιανὸς ἢ Ἐπικούρειος ἥκει κατάσκοπος
+    τῶν ὀργίων, κτλ.</foreign>: cf. 25,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">λέγων ἀθέων ἐμπεπλῆσθαι καὶ Χριστιανῶν τὸν Πόντον, κτλ.</foreign></note> An honest Epicurean once convicted Alexander
+of a flagrant deception, and narrowly escaped being stoned to
+death by the fanatics of Paphlagonia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 46.</note> One of the books of
+Epicurus was publicly burnt in the agora by order of Alexander,
+and the ashes cast into the sea. Lucian himself, with his sly,
+amused scepticism, tested and exposed the skill of the oracle
+at the most imminent risk to his life.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> cc. 53 sqq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But in spite of all exposure and opposition, the oracle,
+managed with such art and supported with such blind
+enthusiasm, conquered for a time the Roman world. It was
+a period of calamity and gloom. Plague and earthquake added
+their horrors to the brooding uncertainty of the dim conflict
+on the Danube.<note place="foot">Jul. Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant.</hi> cc. 22, 17.</note> The emissaries of Alexander went everywhere,
+exploiting the general terror. Prediction of coming evil was
+safe at such a time; any shred of comfort or hope was eagerly
+sought for. A hexameter verse, promising the help of Apollo,
+was inscribed over every doorway as an amulet against the
+awful pestilence of 166 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> Another ordered two lion’s cubs
+to be flung into the Danube, to check the advance of the Marcomanni.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> cc. 36-48.</note>
+Both proved dismal failures, but without shaking the
+authority of the impostor, who found an easy apology in the
+darkness of old Delphic utterances. He established mysteries
+after the model of Eleusis, from which Christians and Epicureans
+were excluded under a solemn ban. Scenes of old and new
+mythologies were presented with brilliant effects—the labour of
+<pb n="477"/><anchor id="Pg477"/>Leto, the birth of Apollo, the birth of Asclepius, the epiphany
+of Glycon, the new wondrous serpent-deity of Abonoteichos, the
+loves of Alexander and Selene. The second Endymion lay
+sleeping, as on Latmus in the ancient story, and the moon
+goddess, in the person of a great Roman dame, descended from
+above to woo a too real earthly lover.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Alex.</hi> c. 38.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lucian’s history of the rise of the new oracle in Paphlagonia
+is not, perhaps, free from some suspicion of personal
+antipathy to the founder of it. He attributes to Alexander
+not only the most daring deceit and calculating quackery, but
+also the foulest vices known to the ancient world. These
+latter charges may or may not be true. Theological or anti-theological
+hatred has in all ages too often used the poisoned
+arrow. And the moral character of Alexander has less
+interest for us than the spiritual condition of his many
+admirers and votaries. He can hardly be acquitted of some
+form of more or less pious imposture. How far it was
+accompanied by real religious enthusiasm is a problem which
+will be variously solved, and which is hardly worth the trouble
+of investigation, even if the materials existed for a certain
+answer. But the eager readiness of a whole population to
+hail the appearance of a new god, and the acceptance of his
+claims by men the most cultivated and highly placed in
+the Roman Empire, are facts on which Lucian’s testimony,
+addressed to contemporaries, cannot be rejected. Nor is there
+anything in our knowledge of the period from other sources
+which renders the thing doubtful. Creative mythology had
+revived its activity. Not long before the epiphany of Glycon,
+in a neighbouring part of Asia Minor the Apostles Paul and
+Barnabas, after the miraculous cure of the impotent man, had
+difficulty in escaping divine honours. The Carpocratians, a
+Gnostic sect, about the same time built a temple in honour
+of the youthful son of their founder.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. 456.</note> The corn-goddess
+Annona first appears in the first century, and inscriptions,
+both in Italy and Africa, were set up in honour of the power
+who presided over the commissariat of the Roman mob.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 1810, 5320; cf. Preller,
+<hi rend="italic">Rom. Myth.</hi> (Tr.), p. 415.</note> The
+youthful favourite of Hadrian, after his mysterious death in
+the waters of the Nile, was glorified by instant apotheosis.
+<pb n="478"/><anchor id="Pg478"/>His statues rose in every market-place and temple court; his
+soul was supposed to have found a home in a new star in the
+region of the milky way; temples were built in his honour,
+and the strange cult was maintained for at least a hundred
+years after any motive could be found for adulation.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxix, 11; cf. Gregorov.
+<hi rend="italic">Hadrian</hi>, p. 128.</note> The
+Cynic brothers, and the gaping crowd who stood around the
+pyre of Peregrinus at Olympia were eager, as we have seen, to
+hail the flight of a great soul to join the heroes and demigods
+in Olympus.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Morte Peregr.</hi> c. 29.</note> The cult of M. Aurelius was maintained by an
+enthusiasm very different from the conventional apotheosis of
+the head of the Roman State. We are told that he was adored,
+by every age and sex and class, long after his death. His
+sacred image found a place among the <hi rend="italic">penates</hi> of every
+household, and the home where it was not honoured was of
+more than suspected piety. Down to the time of Diocletian,
+the saintly and philosophic emperor, who had preached an
+imperturbable indifference to the chances and changes of life,
+was believed to visit his anxious votaries with dreams of
+promise or warning.<note place="foot">Jul. Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant.</hi> c. 18,
+hodieque in multis domibus M. Antonini
+statuae consistunt inter deos
+penates ... sacrilegus judicatus est
+qui ejus imaginem in sua domo non
+habuit.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maximus of Tyre may have been guilty of no exaggeration
+when he reckoned the heavenly host as thrice ten thousand.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> xiv. 8.</note>
+The cynical voluptuary of Nero’s reign, who said that a town
+of Magna Graecia was inhabited by more gods than men, only
+used a comic hyperbole to enforce a striking fact.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 17.</note> The
+anthropomorphic conceptions of Deity, which were prevalent,
+easily overleapt the interval between the human and Divine.
+The crowds of the Antonine age were as ready to recognise
+the god in human form as the Athenians of the days of
+Pisistratus, who believed that they saw in the gigantic Phye
+an epiphany of the great goddess of their Acropolis, leading
+the tyrant home.<note place="foot">Herod. i. 60.</note> In the minds of a philosophic minority,
+nurtured on the theology of Plato, there might be the dim
+conception of one awful and remote Power, far removed from
+the grossness of earth, far above the dreams of mythologic
+poetry and the materialist imagination of the masses. Yet
+<pb n="479"/><anchor id="Pg479"/>even philosophy, as we have already seen, had succumbed to
+the craving for immediate contact, or for some means of communication,
+with the Infinite Spirit. The daemons of Plutarch
+and Maximus of Tyre were really a new philosophic mythology,
+created to give meaning and morality to the old gods. These
+hosts of baleful or ministering spirits, with which the Platonist
+surrounded the life of man, divine in the sweep of their power,
+human in their passions or sympathies, belong really to the
+same order as the Poseidon who pursued Odysseus with tempest,
+or the Moon goddess who descended on Latmus to kiss the
+sleeping Endymion. Anthropomorphic paganism was far from
+dead; it was destined to live openly for more than three hundred
+years, and to prolong a secret life of subtle influence under
+altered forms, the term of which who shall venture to fix?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The daemons of the Platonic philosophers find their counterpart
+in the popular cult of <hi rend="italic">genii</hi>. If there was a visible
+tendency to syncretism and monotheistic faith in the second
+century, there was a no less manifest drift to the endless
+multiplication of spiritual powers. The tendency, indeed, to
+create divine representatives of physical forces and dim
+abstract qualities was from early ages congenial to the Roman
+mind. All the phenomena of nature—every act, pursuit, or
+vicissitude in human life—found a spiritual patron in the
+Roman imagination.<note place="foot">Preller, <hi rend="italic">Myth. Rom.</hi> p. 65, 66,
+387.</note> But the tendency received an immense
+impulse in the age with which we are dealing, and the
+inscriptions of the imperial period reveal an almost inexhaustible
+fertility of religious fancy. Every locality, every
+society and occupation of men, has its patron genius, to whom
+divine honours are paid or recorded,—the canton, the municipality,
+the curia; the spring or grove; the legion or cohort
+or troop; the college of the paviors or smiths or actors; the
+emperors, or even the great gods themselves.<note place="foot">Cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> Ind. pp. 27, 28; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi>
+especially 1730 (genius Jovis), 1812
+(Neronis), 193 (Arvernorum), 2204
+(Col. Ostiensis), 689 (municipii), 1704
+(legionis), 4113 (pavimentariorum),
+6628 (fontis).</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old gods of Latium still retained a firm hold on the
+devotion of the simple masses, as crowds of inscriptions record.
+But ancient religion, in its cruder forms, divided and localised
+the Divine power by endless demarcations of place and
+function. Although the Roman centurion or merchant might
+<pb n="480"/><anchor id="Pg480"/>believe in the power of his familiar gods to follow him with
+their protection, and never forgot them, still each region, to
+which his wanderings carried him, had its peculiar spirits, who
+wielded a special potency within their own domain, and whom
+it was necessary to propitiate. On hundreds of provincial
+inscriptions we can read the catholic superstition of the
+Roman legionary. The mystery of desert or forest, the
+dangers of march and bivouack, stimulated his devotion. If
+he does not know the names of the strange deities, he will
+invoke them collectively side by side with the gods whom he
+has been taught to venerate. He will adore the <q>genius
+loci,</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2135, Sei Deo Sei Deivae
+Sac. etc.; 1580, Aesculapio et Hygiae
+caeterisque diis deabusque hujus loci
+Salutaribus; 5902, Hospitibus diis
+Mauricis et genio loci, etc.</note> or all the gods of Mauritania or of Britain. And so
+the deities of Alsace and Dacia and Lusitania, of the Sahara
+and Cumberland, easily took their place in his growing
+pantheon.<note place="foot">Cf. Tertull. <hi rend="italic">Apol.</hi> c. 24.</note> They were constantly identified with the great
+figures of Greek or Roman mythology. Many an inscription
+is dedicated to Apollo Grannus of Alsace, whom Caracalla
+invoked for the recovery of his health, along with Serapis and
+Aesculapius.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 1997-2001; cf. D. Cass.
+lxxvii. 15.</note> Apollo Belenus, a favourite deity in Southern
+Gaul, was the special patron of Aquileia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 823, 1967.</note> Batucardus and
+Cocideus received vows and dedications in Cumberland and
+Westmorland, Arardus and Agho in the Pyrenees, Abnoba in
+the Black Forest;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1959, 1986, 1954; cf. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi>
+xii. 1556, 3097; viii. 9195, 4578, 8834.</note> and many another deity with strange, outlandish
+name, like their provincial votaries, were honoured
+with sacred Roman citizenship, and took their places, although
+in a lower grade, with Serapis of Alexandria or <anchor id="corr480"/><corr sic="Aesclepius">Asclepius</corr> of
+Epidaurus. The local heroes were also adored at wayside
+shrines or altars, which met the traveller in lonely passes. In
+the heart of the Nubian desert, inscriptions, scratched on obelisk
+or temple porch, attest the all-embracing faith of the Roman
+legionary.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. pp. 482-4.</note> At Carlsbourg in Transylvania, a legate of the
+5th Legion records his own gratitude to Aesculapius and all
+the gods and goddesses of the place, and that of his wife and
+daughter, for the recovery of his sight.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 1580.</note> A praetorian prefect,
+visiting the hot springs of Vif left a graceful inscription to
+<pb n="481"/><anchor id="Pg481"/>the gods of the eternal fire.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 5689.</note> A legate of the 5th Legion
+returns pious thanks to Hercules and the <hi rend="italic">genius loci</hi>, at the
+baths in Dacia sacred to the hero.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1560.</note> Many a slab pays honour
+to the nymphs who guarded the secret spring, especially where
+a source, long since forgotten, had resumed its flow.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1632, 4, 7; Nymphis ob reditum
+aquarum, etc.</note> A chief
+magistrate of Lambesi is specially grateful that the town has
+been refreshed by a new fountain during his year of office.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 5758.</note>
+The heroes of poetic legend were still believed to haunt the
+scene of their struggles. Apollonius once spent a night in
+ghostly converse with the shade of Achilles beside his tomb in
+the Troad, and was charged by the divine warrior to convey his
+reproaches for the neglect of his worship in the old Thessalian
+home of the Myrmidons.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 16,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Θετταλοὶ γὰρ τὰ ἐναγίσματα χρόνον ἤδη πολὺν εκλελοίπασί μοι</foreign>.</note> The Troad had a hero of much
+later date, the proconsul Neryllinus, who was believed to deliver
+oracles and to heal the sick.<note place="foot">Friedl. <hi rend="italic">Sittengesch.</hi> iii. p. 479.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In a time of such vivid belief in the universal presence
+of divine beings, faith in miracle was a matter of course.
+Christian and pagan were here at least on common ground.
+Nay, the Christian apologists did not dispute the possibility
+of pagan miracles, or even of pagan oracular inspiration. It
+is curious to see that Origen and Celsus, as regards the probability
+of recurring miracle, are on very much the same plane
+of spiritual belief, and that the Christian apologist is fighting
+with one arm tied. He is disabled from delivering his assaults
+at the heart of the enemy’s position. The gods of heathenism
+are still to him living and potent spirits, although they are
+spirits of evil.<note place="foot">Orig. <hi rend="italic">C. Celsum</hi>, lib. iii. p. 124,
+ed. Spencer; lib. vii. p. 334, Friedl.
+iv. p. 458; S. Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. D.</hi> xix. 23,
+quis ita stultus est qui non intelligat ... consilio
+simili ab impuris daemonibus
+ita fuisse responsa, etc.; cf.
+viii. 22, mirabilibus et fallacibus signis
+sive factorum sive praedictorum deos
+se esse persuaserunt.</note> The pagan daemonology, on its worse side,
+had been accepted by the champion of the Church. Yet
+it is hard to see how, on such principles, he could deal
+with the daemon of the Apolline shrine at Delphi, when he
+denounced the Spartan Glaucus for the mere thought of a
+breach of faith to his friend,<note place="foot">Herodot. vi. 86.</note> or the daemon who lurked under
+the pure stately form of Athene Polissouchos, when she threw
+<pb n="482"/><anchor id="Pg482"/>a maiden goddess’s protection around the Antigones of Athens.
+In the field of miracle in the second century the heathen could
+easily match the Christian. With gods in every grove and
+fountain, and on every mountain summit; with gods breathing
+in the winds and flashing in the lightning, or the ray of sun
+and star, heaving in the earthquake or the November storm in
+the Aegean, watching over every society of men congregated
+for any purpose, guarding the solitary hunter or traveller in
+the Alps or the Sahara, what is called miracle became as
+natural to the heathen as the rising of the sun. In fact, if
+the gods had not displayed their power in some startling way,
+their worshippers would have been shocked and forlorn. But
+the gods did not fail their votaries. Unquestioning and
+imperious faith in this kind is always rewarded, or can always
+explain its disappointments. The Epicurean, the Cynic, or the
+Aristotelian, might pour their cold scorn on tales of wonder.
+An <hi rend="italic">illuminé</hi> like Lucian, attached to no school, and living
+merely in the light of clear cultivated sense, might shake his
+sides with laughter at the tales which were vouched for by a
+spiritualist philosophy. But the drift of the time was against
+all such protests. The Divine power was everywhere, and
+miracle was in the air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Enough has been said of the dreams and signs and omens
+which in the first and second century heralded every accession
+to the throne and every death of a prince, and which even
+Tacitus records with more or less vacillating faith. Enough,
+too, has been said of the miracles of healing which were
+wrought by the sons of Asclepius in his many shrines from
+Pergamum to the island in the Tiber. The miracles wrought
+by Vespasian at Alexandria are the most hackneyed example
+of belief in miracle, because the tale is told by the greatest
+master of vivid narrative in a book which every educated
+man has read. The sensible Vespasian was not confident
+of his power to give energy to the impotent, even on the
+strength of a dream sent by Serapis, just as he jested on his
+deathbed about his approaching apotheosis. But the efficiency
+of the imperial touch was vouched for by eye-witnesses, to
+whom Tacitus would not refuse his credence. The chronicler
+of the age of Diocletian has surrounded the death-bed of
+Hadrian with similar wonders. A blind man from Pannonia
+<pb n="483"/><anchor id="Pg483"/>came and touched the fever-wracked emperor, and immediately
+regained his sight. The legend of the Thundering Legion was
+long the battle-ground of opposing faiths equally credulous, and
+equally bent on securing the credit of supernatural powers.
+The timely rainfall was attributed with equal assurance to
+the incantations of an Egyptian sorcerer, to the prayers of
+the believers in Jupiter, or the prayers of the believers in
+Christ. Apuleius, who was himself prosecuted for practising
+the black art, has filled his Thessalian romance with the most
+astounding tales of fantastic sorcery. He may have copied
+other lawless romances, but he would hardly have given
+such space to these weird arts if his public had not had an
+uneasy belief in them. The home of Medea in the days of
+M. Aurelius was a veritable witch’s cave: the air is tremulous
+with superstitious fear: everything seems possible in the field
+of miraculous metamorphosis or monstrous vice. If Apuleius
+had meant to discredit superstition by wedding it to disgusting
+sensuality, he could hardly have succeeded better. But
+he was more probably bent, with perverted skill, on producing
+a work which might allure imaginations haunted by
+the ghosts of hereditary sensuality and a spiritual terror revived
+in redoubled force. An Egyptian priest with tonsure and linen
+robes raises a dead man to life who has been <q>floating on
+the Stygian streams.</q> Or you are admitted to a witch’s
+laboratory, open to all the winds and stored with all the
+wreckage of human life—timbers of ships splintered on cruel
+rocks, the curdled blood and mangled flesh of murdered men,
+toothless skulls gnawed by beasts of prey. You see the
+transformation going on before your eyes under the magic of
+mysterious unguents, the feathers springing from the flesh, or
+the human sinking into the ass’s form. Tales like these,
+which to us are old wives’ tales, may have had a strange
+charm for an age when human life was regarded as the slave
+of fate, or the sport of the inscrutable powers of the unseen
+universe.
+</p>
+
+</div><div type="chapter" n="2" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="484"/><anchor id="Pg484"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="II. Belief in immortality"/><index index="pdf" level1="II. Belief in immortality"/>
+<head>CHAPTER II</head>
+
+<head type="sub">BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY</head>
+
+<p>
+A great part of the charm of those oriental religions, on the
+study of which we are about to enter, lay in the assurance
+which they seemed to give of an immortal life. It would,
+therefore, appear a necessary preface to such a review to examine
+some of the conceptions of the state of the departed
+which the missionaries of Isis and Mithra found prevalent
+in the minds of their future votaries. Immortality, in any
+worthy sense, is inseparable from the idea of God. And the
+conception of continued life must always be shaped by the
+character of a people’s beliefs as to the powers of the unseen
+world. A pantheon of dim phantasms or abstractions will not
+promise more than a numb spectral future to the human shade.
+The nectar and ambrosia of Olympian feasts may have their
+human counterpart in an <q>eternal debauch.</q> The Platonist will
+find his eternal hope in emancipation from the prison of the flesh,
+and in the immediate vision of that Unity of all beauty, truth,
+and goodness, which is his highest conception of God. But
+not only does religion necessarily colour the conception of
+the eternal state: it may also furnish the warrant for a belief
+in it. And a religion which can give men a firm ground for
+that faith will have an immense advantage over others which
+are less clear and confident as to another world. It is generally
+admitted that the long array of philosophic arguments
+for immortality have by themselves little convincing power.
+They are not stronger, nor perhaps so strong as the argument
+from the wish for continued life, inveterate in the human
+spirit, on which Plutarch laid so much stress.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Non posse suav. vivi</hi>, etc. c. 26 sq.; <hi rend="italic">De Ser. Num. Vind.</hi> c. 18.</note> Even amid the
+<pb n="485"/><anchor id="Pg485"/>triumphant dialectic of the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi>, an undertone of doubt
+in any human proof of immortality is sometimes heard, along
+with the call for some <q>divine doctrine</q> as a bark of safety
+on perilous seas.<note place="foot">Plat. <hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi> 85 <hi rend="small">D</hi>,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εἰ μή τις δύναιτο ἀσφαλέστερον ἐπὶ βεβαιοτέρου ὀχήματος
+[ἢ] λόγου θείου τινὸς διαπορευθῆναι</foreign>.</note> The inextinguishable instinct of humanity
+craves for a voice of revelation to solve the mystery of life
+and death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Roman spirit, down to the Antonine age, had been the
+subject of many influences which had inspired widely various
+ideas of the future state. And the literary and funerary
+remains from Nero to M. Aurelius are full of contradictions
+on the subject. Nor, in the absence of authoritative revelation
+on a field so dark to reason, is this surprising. Even
+Christian teaching, while it offers a sure promise of a life to
+come, has not lifted the veil of the great mystery, and the
+material imagery of the Apocalypse, or the shadowed hints of
+Jesus or S. Paul, have left the believer of the twentieth century
+with no clearer vision of the life beyond the tomb than that
+which was vouchsafed to Plato, Cicero, Virgil, or Plutarch.
+<q>We know not what we shall be,</q> is the answer of every
+seer of every age. Something will always <q>seal the lips of the
+Evangelist,</q> as the key of the Eumolpidae closed the lips of
+those who had seen the vision of Eleusis.<note place="foot">Soph. <hi rend="italic">O.C.</hi> 1055.</note> The pagans of the
+early Empire were thus, in the absence of dogma and ecclesiastical
+teaching, free to express, with perfect frankness, their
+unbelief or their varying conceptions of immortality, according
+to the many influences that had moulded them. Nor could
+these influences be kept apart even in the same mind. Even
+the poet seer, who was to be the guide of Dante in the shades,
+has failed to blend the immemorial faith of the Latin race with
+the dreams of future beatitude or anguish which came to him
+from Pythagorean or Platonic teaching.<note place="foot">Sellar’s <hi rend="italic">Virgil</hi>, p. 367; cf. Boissier,
+<hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. 367.</note> In the sixth book of
+the <hi rend="italic">Aeneid</hi> the eschatologies of old Rome and Greece are combined,
+but not blended, with the doctrines of transmigration
+and purgatorial expiation descending from Pythagoras or the
+Orphic mystics. Virgil, in fact, mirrors the confusion of beliefs
+which prevailed in his own age, and which pre-eminently
+characterised the age of the Antonines.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="486"/><anchor id="Pg486"/>
+
+<p>
+Along with other archaic elements of the Latin faith, the
+cult of the Manes held its ground, especially in secluded homes
+of old Italian piety. The most ancient Indo-European conception
+of the state after death was that of a continuance or
+faint, shadowy reproduction of the life on earth; it was not
+that of a vast and mysterious change to a supernatural order.
+The departed spirit was believed to linger in a dim existence
+in the vault or grave near the familiar homestead.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">Tusc.</hi> i. 16, sub terra censebant
+reliquam vitam agi mortuorum; cf. F.
+de Coulanges, <hi rend="italic">La Cité Ant.</hi> p. 8.</note> The tomb
+is not a temporary prison, but an everlasting home,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4525.</note> and often
+provides a chamber where the living members of the family
+or clan may gather on solemn days around the ashes of the
+dead.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4433, posticum cum apparitorio,
+et compitum a solo pecun. sua fecerunt,
+etc.; cf. 4353; Petron. c. 71.</note> Provision is made for the sustenance of this spectral
+life. Vessels for food and drink, the warrior’s arms, the workman’s
+tools, the cosmetics of the lady, the child’s playthings,
+are buried with them.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 367.</note> Or they are figured on their tombs
+cheerfully engaged in their familiar crafts,<note place="foot">Cf. Duruy, <hi rend="italic">Hist. Rom.</hi> v. 637.</note> not with folded
+hands, and calm, expectant faces, like the marble forms which
+lie in our cathedral aisles awaiting the Resurrection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With such views of the tomb, the perpetual guardianship
+of it became to the Roman a matter of supreme moment. It
+is a chapel or an altar, as well as a last home.<note place="foot">Aesch. <hi rend="italic">Choeph.</hi> 92, 488; F. de
+Coulanges, <hi rend="italic">La Cité Ant.</hi> p. 16.</note> It is the
+meeting-place, in faint ghostly communion, of the society which
+embraced, by its solemn rites, the members of the household
+church in the light or in the shades. All the cautious forms
+of Roman law are invoked to keep the sepulchre, with its
+garden and enclosure, from passing into alien hands. Its
+site is exactly described, with the minutest measurements,
+and the intruder or the alienator is threatened with curses or
+with fines, to be paid into the public treasury.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 7364, 7338, 4076, 4417,
+4422.</note> Here, among
+his children and remotest descendants, among his freedmen
+and freedwomen, the Roman dreamed of resting for ever
+undisturbed.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4428, somno aeterno sacr. ... fecerunt
+sibi et suis libertis libertabusque,
+etc., 4631, 4435.</note> And many an appeal comes to us from the
+original slab not to violate the eternal peace.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4781, 3, 5, 6, 4790, quisquis
+hoc sustulerit aut laeserit ultimus
+suorum moriatur.</note> What that dim
+<pb n="487"/><anchor id="Pg487"/>life beneath the marble or the sod, at least in the later times,
+was conceived to be, how far it involved a more or less vivid
+consciousness of what was passing in the world above, how far
+it was a numb repose, almost passing into <q>the eternal sleep,</q>
+seems to be uncertain. The phrases on the tomb in all ages are
+apt to pass into conventional forms, and personal temperament
+and imagination must always give varying colour to the picture.
+Such phrases as <q>eternal sleep,</q> however, did not probably at
+any time imply complete unconsciousness. The old Latin
+faith that the Manes had a real life and some link of
+sympathy with the living was still strong and vivid in an age
+which was eager to receive or answer voices from the world
+beyond the senses. The wish to maintain, in spite of the
+severance and shock of death, a bond of communion between
+the living and the departed was one of the most imperious
+instincts of the Latin race. It was not a mere imagination,
+projected on far distant years, which craved for the yearly
+offering of violets and roses, or the pious <hi rend="italic">ave</hi> of the passing
+traveller.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4775, 4419, 4420, 4415,
+4737; T. Lollius positus propter viam
+ut dicant praeterientes, Lolli ave, cf.
+4745.</note> The dwellers in the vault still remained members
+of the family, to which they are linked for ever by a dim
+sympathy expressed in ritual communion. Every year, on the
+<hi rend="italic">dies parentales</hi> in February, there was a general holiday,
+cheerfully kept in honour of all those whose spirits were at
+peace.<note place="foot">Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Festivals</hi>, p. 307.</note> On the eighth day, the festival of <hi rend="italic">cara cognatio</hi>,
+there was a family love-feast, in which quarrels were forgotten,
+and the members in the spirit-world joined in the sacred meal.
+But besides this public and national commemoration, the birthday
+of each departed member was observed with offerings of wine
+and oil and milk. The tomb was visited in solemn procession;
+dead and living shared the sacred fare; flowers were scattered,
+and with an <hi rend="italic">ave</hi> or a prayer for help and good fortune, the
+shade was left to its renewed repose.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4414, 4417, nam curatores
+substituam qui vescantur ex
+horum hortorum reditu natali meo et
+praebeant rosam in aeternum. Hos
+neque dividi neque alienari volo.</note> Many a slab makes
+anxious provision for these communions, and the offering of
+violets and roses in their season.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4084, 4100, 4420.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the Roman in his tomb longed to be near the sound of
+<pb n="488"/><anchor id="Pg488"/>busy human life, and to feel the tread of pious feet, which
+might turn aside for a moment to salute even a stranger’s
+memory. This feeling is expressed in the long rows of vaults
+which line so many of the great roads, the Via Appia, or the
+way from Pompeii to Nola.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. 362; Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi>,
+p. 421 sqq.; cf. Cic. <hi rend="italic">Tusc.</hi> i. 16.</note> There were many like that Titus
+Lollius who had himself laid close to the road into Aquae
+Sextiae, that the passers might for ever greet his spirit with
+an <hi rend="italic">ave</hi>.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4737.</note> Others leave a prayer for all good things to those
+who will stop an instant and read the legend; <q>may the earth
+lie light upon them when they too depart.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7396, 7402, vivite felices qui
+legitis.</note> The horror of the
+lonely soul, cut off from the kindly fellowship of the living,
+and lingering on in a forgotten grave, to which no loving hand
+should ever more bring the libation or the violets in spring,
+which should one day awake no memory or sympathy in
+any human heart, was to the old Roman the worst terror in
+death. This passion for continued memory, especially in great
+benefactors of their kind, is used by Cicero as an argument
+for immortality,<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">Tusc.</hi> i. 12, 27, quas (caeremonias
+sepulcrorum) ingeniis praediti
+nec tanta cura coluissent, nec violatas
+tam inexpiabili religione sanxissent,
+nisi haereret in eorum mentibus mortem
+non interitum esse omnia tollentem,
+etc.</note> and the passion for enduring life blends
+indistinguishably with the wish to be long remembered.
+Even Epicurus, the apostle of annihilation, made provision in
+his last testament for yearly offerings in honour of himself
+and Metrodorus his disciple—a curious instance of agnostic
+conformity.<note place="foot">Aelian, <hi rend="italic">Fr.</hi> p. 1023 (Gronov.).</note> The passion for remembrance was responded to
+by the dutiful devotion of many generations. The cult of the
+dead long survived in the cult of martyrs, and the pagan
+feasting at their tombs disturbed and perplexed S. Augustine
+and S. Paulinus of Nola.<note place="foot">S. Paulin. Nol. <hi rend="italic">Carm.</hi> 27; S.
+Aug. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 22, <hi rend="italic">Serm.</hi> v. xvii.; cf. Sidon.
+Apoll. v. 17; Bingham, <hi rend="italic">Antiq. of Chr.
+Church</hi>, ii. p. 1165.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The old Roman thought of his departed friends as a company
+of good and kindly spirits, who watched over the family
+on earth. But there was another conception of spirits in the
+other world, whether derived from the gloomy superstition of
+Etruria, or descending from days anterior to orderly devotion
+to the dead.<note place="foot">Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Festivals</hi>, p. 108.</note> The Lemures were a name of fear. They
+<pb n="489"/><anchor id="Pg489"/>were dark, malevolent spirits who craved for blood, as they
+had departed this life by a violent end. Their festival, the
+Lemuria in May, was quite distinct from the festival of the
+Manes, and the household ritual for laying the ghosts by the
+spitting of black beans and a ninefold form of exorcism savours
+of a far-gone age. These maleficent powers were propitiated
+by blood—especially by the blood of men in the combats of
+the arena.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The visitations of these beings, whether as guardian,
+ministering spirits or as evil powers, were expected and believed
+in for many ages by all classes of Roman minds. The ancient
+Latin faith as to the state of the dead was, according to Cicero,
+confirmed by many tales of spiritual apparition. There are
+pathetic memorials which end with an appeal in which the
+lonely wife entreats the lost one sometimes to return in dream
+or vision.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4775, horis nocturnis ut
+eum videam, et possim dulcius et
+celerius aput eum pervenire.</note> One vivacious inscription challenges the sceptic to
+lay his wager and make the experiment of a summons from
+the unseen world.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7346.</note> The spread of cremation instead of burial
+gradually led to a new conception of the spirit as having a
+separate existence from the body, now reduced to a handful
+of grey ashes.<note place="foot">Marq. <hi rend="italic">Priv.</hi> i. pp. 438-9; Preller,
+<hi rend="italic">Rom. Myth.</hi> (Tr.), p. 331.</note> And spirits no longer clung to the body in
+the family vault, but were gathered in a dim region near the
+centre of the earth, where, according to gloomy Etrurian fancy,
+they were under the cruel care of the conductor of the dead, a
+brutal figure, with wings and long, matted beard, and armed
+with a hammer, who for ages appeared in human form to close
+the last ghastly scene in the gladiatorial combats.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Rom. Hist.</hi> i. p. 189;
+Tertull. <hi rend="italic">Apol.</hi> xv. vidimus et Jovis
+fratrem gladiatorum cadavera cum
+malleo deducentem.</note> From
+this limbo of the departed a sort of gateway was provided in
+every Latin town in the <hi rend="italic">Mundus</hi>, a deep trench intended to represent
+an inverted heaven, which was dug before the <hi rend="italic">pomoerium</hi>
+was traced. Its lower aperture was closed by the stone of the
+Manes, which on three solemn days, in August, October, and
+November, was lifted to permit the spirits from the deep to
+pass for a time into the upper world. Thus a public sanction
+was given to the belief in the commerce between this life and
+the next.<note place="foot">Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Festivals</hi>, p. 211.</note>
+</p>
+
+<pb n="490"/><anchor id="Pg490"/>
+
+<p>
+Cicero had said that the faith in immortality was sustained
+by the fact of spirits returning to the world of sense. In the
+first and second centuries there was no lack of such aids to
+faith. Apparitions became the commonest facts of life, and
+only the hardiest minds remained incredulous about them.
+Philosophers of all schools, except the Epicurean, were swept
+into the current. The <hi rend="italic">Philopseudes</hi> of Lucian is a brilliant
+effort to ridicule the superstition of the age, but the attack
+would have been discredited if it had not had a foundation
+of fact. There, around the sick-bed of Eucrates, himself
+saturated with philosophy, are gathered a Stoic, a Peripatetic,
+a Pythagorean, a Platonist, and a trained physician.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Philops.</hi> c. 6.</note> And
+they regale one another with the most weird and exciting
+tales of the marvellous. Ion, the Platonic student, has seen
+the exorcism of a black and smoky daemon.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 16.</note> Eucrates has
+seen such spirits a thousand times, and, from long habit, has
+lost all fear of them. At vintage time, he once saw a gigantic
+Gorgon figure in the woods in broad daylight, and by the
+turning of a magic ring had revealed to him the gulf of
+Tartarus, the infernal rivers, and been even able to recognise some
+of the ghosts below.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> cc. 22-24.</note> On another day, as he lay upon his bed
+reading the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi>, his <q>sainted wife,</q> who had recently died,
+appeared and reproached him because, among all the finery
+which had been burnt upon her pyre, a single gold-spangled
+shoe, which slipped under the wardrobe, had been forgotten.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 27.</note>
+Plutarch reports, apparently with perfect faith, the appearance
+of such spectral visitors at Chaeronea.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Cim.</hi> c. 1,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐπὶ πολὺν χρόνον εἰδώλων τινῶν ἐν τῷ τόπῳ προφαινομένων,
+ὡς οἱ πατέρες ἡμῶν λέγουσι, κτλ.</foreign></note> The younger Pliny consulted
+his friend Sura as to the reality of such apparitions, and
+reveals his faith in the gruesome tale of a haunted house at
+Athens, where a restless ghost, who had often disturbed the quiet
+of night with the clank of chains, was tracked to the mystery of
+a hidden grave.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vii. 27.</note> Suetonius, of course, welcomes tales of this
+kind from every quarter. Before Caligula’s half-burnt remains
+were borne stealthily to a dishonoured burial, the keepers of
+the Lamian Gardens had been disturbed each night by ghostly
+terrors.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> c. 59.</note> The pages of Dion Cassius abound in similar wonders.
+<pb n="491"/><anchor id="Pg491"/>When Nero attempted to cut through the Isthmus of Corinth,
+the dead arose in numbers from their graves.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxii. 17.</note> In such an
+age the baleful art of <q>evocation</q> acquired a weird attraction
+and importance. By spells and incantations Hecate was
+invoked to send up spirits, often for evil ends.<note place="foot">Lobeck, <hi rend="italic">Aglaoph.</hi> i. p. 221.</note> And there
+were dark rumours of the spell being fortified by the blood of
+children. Many of the emperors from Tiberius to Caracalla
+had dabbled in this witchcraft.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lvii. 15.</note> When Nero was haunted by
+the Furies of his murdered mother, he is said to have offered a
+magic sacrifice to evoke and appease her spirit.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>, c. xxxiv.</note> The early
+Neo-Platonists were, of course, eager to admit the reality of such
+visits from the unseen world. In anxious quest of any link
+of sympathy between this world and the next, Maximus tries
+to fortify his doctrine of daemons by stories of apparitions.<note place="foot">Max. Tyr. xv. 7.</note>
+Hector has been often seen darting across the Troad in shining
+armour. At the mouth of the Borysthenes, Achilles has been
+espied by mariners, who were sailing past his isle, careering
+along with his yellow locks and arms of gold, and singing his
+paean of battle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In enlarging its rather blank and poor conception of the
+future state, the Latin race, as in other fields, was content to
+borrow rather than invent. The Sixth Book of the Aeneid was
+an effort not only to glorify the legendary heroes of Rome, but
+to appease a new or revived longing for the hope of immortality,
+after the desolating nihilism of the Epicurean philosophy had
+run its course.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. p. 316.</note> Virgil has some touches of old Roman faith
+about the dead, but the scenery of his Inferno is mainly
+derived from Greek poetry inspired by Orphism, and the
+vision is moralised, and also confused, by elements drawn from
+Pythagoras or Plato.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 279; cf. Conington, <hi rend="italic">Introd.
+Aen.</hi> vi. p. 419; Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. p.
+165.</note> The scene of Aeneas’s descent to the
+underworld is laid by the lake of Avernus, where, buried
+amid gloomy woods, was the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl.
+Cumae was the oldest Greek colony in the West. Its foundation
+was placed long before the days of Romulus. Rich,
+prosperous, and cultivated, at a time when the Romans were
+a band of rude warriors, it must have early transmitted Greek
+<pb n="492"/><anchor id="Pg492"/>ideas of religion to the rising power on the Tiber.<note place="foot">Grote, ii. p. 518 (ed. 1862).</note> The
+Etrurians also, who affected so profoundly the tone of Roman
+religion, had come under Greek influences. The spectral ferryman
+of the dead was a familiar figure in Etruscan art. Thus,
+both on the south and north, Latium had points of contact
+with the world of Hellenic legend. And from the early days
+of the Republic, the worship of Greek gods—Apollo, Asclepius,
+or the Dioscuri—became naturalised at Rome. Probably of
+even earlier date was the influence of the oracular lore of
+Greece through Delphi and the oracle of Cumae.<note place="foot">Mommsen, <hi rend="italic">R. Hist.</hi> i. p. 187;
+Preller, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Myth.</hi> pp. 197, 407, 438.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the threshold of the underworld Aeneas and the Sibyl
+are confronted by the monstrous forms of Hellenic legend—Centaurs
+and Scyllas, Harpies and Gorgons, the fire-armed
+Chimaera, and the hissing hydra of Lerna.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Aen.</hi> vi. 289.</note> They have to
+pass the ninefold barrier of the Styx in Charon’s steel-grey
+bark. The grisly ferryman of the infernal stream, foul and
+unkempt, with fixed eyes of flame, is surrounded by a motley
+crowd, thick as autumnal leaves, all straining and eager for
+the further shore. Landed on a waste expanse of mud and
+sedge,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 313, 416.</note> they pass the kennel of triple-headed Cerberus, and on
+to the judgment seat, where Minos assigns to each soul its
+several doom, according to the deeds done in the body. Thence
+they traverse the <q>mourning fields,</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 441.</note> where are those sad
+queens of Grecian tragedy whose wild loves have been their
+undoing, and among them Phoenician Dido, who, with stony
+silence and averted gaze, plunges into the darkness of the
+wood.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 472.</note> As the dawn is breaking, they find themselves before
+the prison-house of the damned, rising amid the folds of
+the river of fire, with walls of iron and adamant, its portals
+watched by a sleepless Fury in blood-red robe.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 555.</note> From within
+are heard the cries of anguish and the clank of chains, as
+the great rebels and malefactors of old-world story—Ixion,
+Salmoneus, and the Titans—are tortured by lash and wheel
+and vulture.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 600.</note> And with them, sharing the same agony, are
+those who have violated the great laws on which the Roman
+character was built.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 608.</note> Through other dusky ways and Cyclopean
+portals they at last reach the home of the blessed, as it was
+<pb n="493"/><anchor id="Pg493"/>pictured long before in the apocalypse of Pindar—the meads
+and happy groves of Elysium, under another sun and other
+stars than ours, and bathed in the splendour of an ampler
+air.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Aen.</hi> 640; cf. Pind. <hi rend="italic">Ol.</hi> ii. 130.</note> Here is the eternal home of the heroic souls of a nobler
+age, men who have died for fatherland, holy priests and
+bards and founders of the arts which soften and embellish
+the life of men. But though their home is radiant with a
+splendour not of earth, they are, in old Roman and Greek
+fashion, occupied with the toils or pleasures of their earthly
+life. Youthful forms are straining their sinews in the
+wrestling-ground as of old. The ancient warriors of Troy
+have their shadowy chariots beside them, their lances planted
+in the sward, their chargers grazing in the meadow. Others
+are singing old lays or dancing, and the bard of Thrace
+himself is sweeping the lyre, as in the days when he sped the
+Argo through the <q>Clashing Rocks</q> in the quest of the fleece
+of gold.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Aen.</hi> vi. 645.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The vision closes with a scene which criticism has long
+recognised as irreconcilable with the eschatology of Greek
+legend hitherto followed by the poet, but which is drawn from
+a philosophy destined to govern men’s thoughts of immortality
+for many ages. In a wooded vale, far withdrawn, through
+which Lethe glided peacefully, countless multitudes are
+gathered drinking the <q>water of carelessness and oblivion.</q>
+These are they, as Anchises expounds to his son, who, having
+passed the thousand purgatorial years, to cleanse away the
+stains of flesh in a former life, and, having effaced the memory
+of it, now await the call of Destiny to a new life on earth.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 748; cf. Conington’s <hi rend="italic">Virg.
+Introd. Aen.</hi> vi. p. 419; Lobeck,
+<hi rend="italic">Aglaoph.</hi> ii. 798.</note>
+This theory of life and death, coming down from Pythagoras,
+and popularised by Platonism, with some Stoic elements,
+had gained immense vogue among educated men of the
+last period of the Republic. Varro had adopted it as a
+fundamental tenet of his theology, and Cicero had embalmed
+it in his dream of Scipio, which furnished a text for Neo-Platonist
+homilies in the last days of the Western Empire.<note place="foot">Diog. Laert. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Pythag.</hi> viii. 1,
+§ 14;
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πρῶτόν τέ φασι τοῦτον ἀποφῆναι τὴν ψυχὴν κύκλον ἀνάγκης
+ἀμείβουσαν ἄλλοτ’ ἄλλοις ἐνδεῖσθαι ζῴοις</foreign>: S. Aug.
+<hi rend="italic">De Civ. D.</hi> vii. 6; cf. Liebaldt, <hi rend="italic">Theolog.
+Varr.</hi> i. p. 14; Cic. <hi rend="italic">Rep.</hi> vi. 15-25;
+Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Som. Scip.</hi> i. 14.</note>
+<pb n="494"/><anchor id="Pg494"/>A fiery spirit animates the material universe, from the farthest
+star in ether down to the lowest form of animal life. The
+souls of men are sparks or emanations from this general
+soul which have descended into the prison of the body, and
+during the period of their bondage have suffered contamination.<note place="foot">Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. 161, n. 1, 34, 312;
+Cic. <hi rend="italic">De N. D.</hi> i. 11, 27; Pythagoras
+qui censuit animum esse per naturam
+rerum omnem intentum et commeantem,
+ex quo nostri animi carperentur,
+etc.</note>
+And the prison walls hide from their eyes for a time
+the heaven from which they come. Nor when death releases
+them do they shake off the engrained corruption. For a
+thousand years they must suffer cleansing by punishment till
+the stains are washed away, the deeply festering taint burnt
+out as by fire. Then only may the pure residue of ethereal
+spirit seek to enter on another life on earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Virgil, in his Nekuia, mirrored the confusion of beliefs
+as to the future state prevailing in his time. For his
+poetic sensibility, the old Roman faith of the Manes, the
+Greek legends of Tartarus and Elysium, the Pythagorean
+or Orphic doctrine of successive lives and purgatorial
+atonement, had each their charm, and a certain truth. On
+a subject so dim and uncertain as the future life, the
+keenest minds may have wavering conceptions, and in different
+moods may clothe them in various guise. This is the field of
+the protean poetic imagination inspired by religious intuition,
+not of the rigorous dogmatist. But a great poet like Virgil
+not only expresses an age to itself: he elevates and glorifies
+what he expresses. He gives clear-cut form to what is vague,
+he spreads the warmth and richness of colour over what is
+dim and blank, and he imparts to the abstract teaching of
+philosophy a glow and penetrating power which may touch
+even the unthinking mass of men. The vision of the Sixth
+Book, moreover, like the Aeneid as a whole, has a high note of
+patriotism. Beside the water of Lethe are gathered, waiting
+for their call to earthly life, all the great souls from the Alban
+Silvius to the great Julius, all the Scipios, Gracchi, Decii, and
+Fabricii, who were destined through storm and stress to give
+the world the calm of the Roman peace.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Aen.</hi> vi. 756 sqq.</note> The poet of Roman
+destiny had a marvellous fame among his countrymen. Men
+rose up to do him honour when he entered the theatre; the
+<pb n="495"/><anchor id="Pg495"/>street boys of Pompeii scratched his verses on the walls.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iv. 2361, 1982; Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi>,
+486-8; Friedl. iii. p. 300.</note> Can
+we doubt that the grandest part of his great poem, which lifts
+for a moment the veil of the unseen world, had a profound
+effect on the religious imagination of the future?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The opinion long prevailed that the period of the early
+Empire was one of unbelief or scepticism as to the future life.
+The opinion was founded on literary evidence accepted without
+much critical care. Cicero and Seneca, Juvenal and Plutarch,<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad. Marc.</hi> xix. 4; Cic. <hi rend="italic">Tusc.</hi>
+i. 21, 48; Juv. xiii. 48; Plut. <hi rend="italic">De
+Superst.</hi> c. 4.</note>
+had spoken of the Inferno of Greek legend, its Cerberus
+and Chimaera, its gloom of Tartarus, as mere old wives’ fables,
+in which even children had ceased to believe. But such
+testimony should always be taken with a good deal of reserve.
+The member of a comparatively small literary and thoughtful
+circle is apt to imagine that its ideas are more widely diffused
+than they really are. It may well have been that thoughtful
+men, steeped in Platonic or Pythagorean faith as to the
+coming life, rejected as anthropomorphic dreams the infernal
+scenery of Greek legend, just as a thoughtful Christian
+of our day will hardly picture his coming beatitude in the
+gorgeous colouring of the Book of Revelation. Yet the mass
+of men will always seek for concrete imagery to body forth
+their dim spiritual cravings. They always live in that uncertain
+twilight in which the boundaries of pictured symbolism
+and spiritual reality are blurred and effaced. Lucian was a
+pessimist as to spiritual progress, and he may have exaggerated
+the materialistic superstition of his time; he had ample excuse
+for doing so. Yet, artist as he was, his art would have
+been futile and discredited in his own time, if it had not had
+a solid background in widely accepted beliefs. And we cannot
+refuse to admit his testimony that the visions of the grim
+ferryman over the waters of Styx, the awful judge, the tortures
+of Tartarus, the asphodel meads, and the water of Lethe, the
+pale neutral shades who wandered expectant of the libation
+on the grave, filled a large space in the imagination of the
+crowd.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Luctu</hi>, cc. 1-10.</note> Plutarch, who sometimes agrees with Juvenal and
+Seneca as to the general incredulity, at others holds that a
+large class of remorseful sinners have a wholesome fear of the
+<pb n="496"/><anchor id="Pg496"/>legendary tortures of lost souls, and that they are eager to
+purge their guilt before the awful ordeal of the Eternal
+Judgment.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Non p. Suav.</hi> c. 27.</note> And, however pure and etherealised his own views
+may have been as to the life to come, no one has left a more
+lurid picture of the flames, the gloom, the sounds of excruciating
+anguish from the prison-house of the damned, which oppressed
+the imagination of the multitude in his time. One part of
+that vision had a peculiarly tenacious hold.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">De. Ser. Num. Vind.</hi> iv. 44;
+<hi rend="italic">De Gen. Socr.</hi> c. 22.</note> The belief in
+the gruff ferryman of the dead, who sternly exacted his fare,
+and drove from the banks of Styx those who had no right to
+cross the awful stream, was widely diffused and survived far
+into the medieval times. For many centuries, long before and
+long after the coming of Christ, the coin which was to secure
+the passage of the shade into the world below was placed in
+the mouth of the corpse.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">De Luctu</hi>, c. 10; Friedl. iii.
+p. 632; Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, i. p. 306, n. 3;
+Maury, <hi rend="italic">La Magie</hi>, p. 158.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inscriptions might be supposed to give authoritative
+evidence as to the belief of ordinary men about the future
+state. The funerary monuments from every part of the
+Roman world are almost countless for the period of the early
+Empire. Yet such records, however abundant, are not so
+clear and satisfactory as they are by some taken to be.
+The words of a tombstone are sometimes a sincere utterance
+of real affection and faith. They are also not unfrequently
+purely conventional, representing a respectable, historic creed,
+which may not be that of the man who erects the slab. Just
+as a Frenchman, who has never from infancy entered a church,
+may have his wife interred with all the solemn forms with
+which the Catholic Church makes the peace of the passing
+soul, so the Roman pagan may have often inscribed on his
+family tomb words which expressed the ancient creed of his
+race rather than his personal belief. Heredity in religion is
+a potent influence, and may be misleading to the inquirer of
+a later age. An epitaph should not be construed as a confession
+of faith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great mass of these inscriptions are couched in the
+same phrases, with only slight variations. The dedication Dis
+Manibus, representing the old Roman faith, is the heading of
+<pb n="497"/><anchor id="Pg497"/>the majority of them. The vault is an <q>eternal home,</q> whose
+peace is guarded by prayers or threats and entreaties. There
+is a rare dedication to the <q>ashes</q> of the dead. There are
+many to their <q>eternal repose.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4443.</note> But it is surely rather
+absurd to find in expressions which occur almost in the same
+form in the niches of the Catacombs a tinge of Epicureanism.
+The poor grammarian of Como, who left all his substance
+to his town, may be permitted to enjoy <q>the calm peace</q> he
+claims after all the troubles of his life, without a suspicion
+that he meant the peace of nothingness.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1197.</note> A pious Christian
+may rejoice at escaping the miseries of old age, and even hail
+death as the last cure of all mortal ills.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2982.</note> Death and sleep
+have always seemed near akin, and when the Roman spoke of
+the sleep of death, he probably did not often mean that it had
+no awaking. The morning indeed, as we have seen, to old
+imaginations was not very bright. <q>The day of eternity</q> was
+not irradiated with the golden splendour of Pindar’s Happy
+Isles; it was grey and sad and calm. But that it was felt
+to be a real existence is shown by the insistent demand on
+scores of monuments for the regular service of the living.
+Every possible precaution is taken by the testator that his
+family or his club shall maintain this sympathetic observance
+for ever.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4433, 4416, 4417.</note> With the idea of prolonged existence, of course, is
+blended the imaginative hope of having a continued memory
+among men. And probably the majority of the funerary
+inscriptions express this feeling chiefly. But the same is true
+of the monuments of every age, and warrants no conclusion as
+to the opinions about immortality held by those who raised
+them. There is abundance of the purest affection expressed
+on these memorials, and sometimes, although not very often,
+there is the hope of reunion after death. The wife of a
+<hi rend="italic">philologus</hi> at Narbonne confidently expects to meet him, or a
+mother prays her son to take her to himself.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 4662, 4755.</note> Such expressions
+of a natural feeling, the same from age to age, have really little
+value as indications of religious belief. But there are not wanting
+in the inscriptions references to Tartarus and the Elysian
+fields, to Pluto and Proserpine, to Orcus who has snatched
+away some one in his bloom. <q>One little soul has been
+<pb n="498"/><anchor id="Pg498"/>received among the number of the gods.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4581, 4841, 4849, 4701,
+7352.</note> There are others,
+impregnated with the prevalent philosophy, which speak of
+the soul returning to its source, or of being dissolved into the
+infinite ether, or of passing to a distant home in the stars.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7392.</note>
+This, however, as M. Boissier says,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. 342.</note> must have been the dream
+of a small minority. The funerary inscriptions leave the
+impression that, down to the final triumph of the Church, the
+feeling of the Romans about death was still in the main the
+feeling of their remote ancestors of the Samnite and Punic
+wars. It was a social feeling, in the prospect of a dim life
+dependent on the memory of the living, a horror of loneliness
+and desertion, the longing for a passing prayer even from a
+stranger. Blessings are heaped on him who will not forget
+the pious duty to the shade. On him who refuses it is invoked
+the bitterest curse to Roman imagination—<q>May he die the
+last of his race.</q>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no dogmatic ecclesiastical system deterred the Roman
+from expressing frankly his unbelief in any future state.
+And the rejection of all hope for the future, sometimes coupled
+with a coarse satisfaction with a sensual past, is the note of
+not a few epitaphs of this period. Matrinia, the wife of one
+C. Matrinius Valentius, an Epicurean philosopher, dedicates a
+tablet to his <q>eternal sleep,</q> which in this case is no conventional
+phrase.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 1192.</note> And others, in even more decided language,
+parade their withering faith that this brief life is only a
+moment of consciousness between the blank of the past and
+the blank of the future, and record their indifference at passing
+again into the nothingness from which they came.
+The formula is frequent—<q>Non fueram, non sum, nescio</q>; or
+<q>Non fui, fui; non sum, non curo.</q> Another adds <q>non
+mihi dolet.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7387, 4809, 4810, 4811, 4807,
+4813, vixi dum vixi bene; jam mea
+peracta mox vestra agetur fabula;
+velete et plaudite, 7411.</note> The subjects of some of these epitaphs
+seem to have obeyed literally the counsel of their master
+Lucretius, though in a sense different from his, and to have
+risen up sated with the banquet of life. They express, with
+cynical grossness, their only faith in the joys of the flesh, and
+their perfect content at having made the most of them.
+<pb n="499"/><anchor id="Pg499"/><q>Balnea, Vina, Venus,</q> sums up the tale.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 4806, 7; 4; 4816, hic
+secum habet omnia. Balnea, vina,
+venus corrumpunt corpora nostra, set
+vitam faciunt.</note> <q>What I have
+eaten, what I have drunk, is my own. I have had my life.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7407.</note>
+And the departing voluptuary exhorts his friends to follow his
+example: <q>My friends, while we live, let us live</q>; <q>Eat,
+drink, disport thyself, and then join us.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. 1877.</note> A veteran of the
+fifth legion records, probably with much truth, that <q>while
+he lived he drank with a good will,</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6674, dum vixi bi(bi)
+libenter; bibite vos qui vivitis.</note> and he exhorts his
+surviving friends to drink while they live. Under the confessional
+of St. Peter’s at Rome, in the year 1626, was found
+a monument of one Agricola of Tibur and his wife. There
+was a figure holding a wine-cup, and an inscription so frankly
+sensual that the whole was destroyed by order of the Pope.
+From the copy which was kept, it appears that Agricola was
+perfectly satisfied with his life, and recommended his example
+to others, <q>since it all ends in the grave or the funeral fire.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 7410—miscete Lyaeum, etc.,
+caetera post obitum tellus consumit
+et ignis.</note>
+But inscriptions such as these are the exception. The funerary
+records, as a whole, give a picture of a society very like our
+own, with warm affections of kindred or friendship, clinging
+to ancestral pieties, ready to hope, if sometimes not clear and
+confident in faith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was probably a much more settled faith in immortality
+among the ordinary masses than among the highly
+educated. The philosophy of Greece came to the cultivated
+Roman world with many different voices on the greatest
+problem of human destiny. And the greatest minds, from
+Cicero to M. Aurelius, reflect the discordance of philosophy.
+Nay, some of those who, in more exalted moods, have left
+glowing pictures of the future beatitude, have also at times
+revealed a mood of melancholy doubt as to any conscious
+future life. The prevailing philosophy in the last generation
+of the Republic, demoralised by an internecine strife, was
+that of Epicurus.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. 312-316;
+Thiersch, <hi rend="italic">Politik und Phil. in ihrem
+Verhältn. zur Rel.</hi> p. 13.</note> It harmonised with the decay of old
+Roman religion, and with the more disastrous moral deterioration
+in the upper cultivated class. The cultivated patrician,
+enervated by vice and luxury, or intoxicated with the
+<pb n="500"/><anchor id="Pg500"/>excitement of civil war and the dreams of disordered ambition,
+flung off all spiritual idealism, and accepted frankly a
+lawless universe and a life of pleasure or power, to be ended
+by death. The great poem of Lucretius, the greatest <hi rend="italic">tour de
+force</hi> in Latin, if not in any literature, braving not only
+the deepest beliefs of the Latin race, but the instinctive longings
+of humanity, was a herculean attempt to relieve men
+from the horrors of Graeco-Etruscan superstition. Even the
+gay frivolity of the comic stage reveals the terror which the
+path to Acheron inspired in the thoughtless crowd<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. 310.</note>—the
+terror from which, with all the fervid zeal of an evangelist,
+Lucretius sought to relieve his countrymen.<note place="foot">Lucret. iii. 952, 991.</note> The pictures of
+Tartarus had burnt themselves into the popular imagination.
+And no message of Epicurus seems to his Roman interpreter
+so full of peace and blessing as the gospel of nothingness after
+death, the <q>morningless and unawakening sleep</q> which ends
+the fretful fever of life. As we felt no trouble when the
+storm of Punic invasion burst on Italy, we shall be equally
+unconscious when the partnership of soul and body is dissolved,
+even in the clash and fusion of all the elements in some great
+cosmic change.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 844 sqq.</note> The older Stoicism permitted the hope of a
+limited immortality until the next great cataclysm, in which,
+after many ages, all things will be swallowed up.<note place="foot">Plut. (?) <hi rend="italic">De Plac. Phil.</hi> iv. 7,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οἱ Στωικοὶ ἐξιοῦσαν ἐκ τῶν σωμάτων ὑποφέρεσθαι, τὴν μὲν
+ἀσθενεστέραν ἅμα τοῖς συγκρίμασι γενέσθαι· τὴν δὲ ἰσχυροτέραν,
+οἵα ἐστὶ περὶ τοὺς σοφούς, καὶ μέχρι τῆς ἐκπυρώσεως</foreign>.</note> But
+Chrysippus admitted this prolonged existence only for the
+greater souls. And Panaetius, in the second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, among
+other aberrations from the old creed of his school, abandoned
+even this not very satisfactory hope of immortality.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p.
+185; Cic. <hi rend="italic">Tusc.</hi> i. 32, 79.</note> Aristotle,
+while he held the permanence of the pure thinking principle
+after death, had given little countenance to the hope of a
+separate conscious personality. And the later Peripatetics,
+like Alexander Aphrodisias, had gone farther even than
+their master in dogmatic denial of immortality.<note place="foot">Zeller, iii. 1, p. 711, keine Seelenthätigkeit
+ist ohne körperliche
+Bewegung möglich; Renan, <hi rend="italic">Averroès</hi>,
+pp. 128 sq., 418; Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii.
+p. 309.</note> Whatever
+support the instinctive craving of humanity for prolonged
+existence could obtain from philosophy was offered by the
+<pb n="501"/><anchor id="Pg501"/>Platonic and Neo-Pythagorean schools. And their influence
+grew with the growing tendency to a revival of faith in the
+supernatural. For Plato, with his intense belief in the divine
+affinity of the human spirit, must always be the great leader
+of those who seek in philosophy an interpreter and a champion
+of religious intuition. The Phaedo was the last consolation of
+many a victim of conscription or imperial tyranny. Its fine-spun
+arguments may not have been altogether convincing, as
+they hardly seem to be even to the Platonic Socrates. But Plato
+was not merely a dialectician, he was also a seer and a poet.
+And, on a subject so dim as immortality, where mere intellectual
+proof, it is generally recognised, can be no more than
+tentative and precarious, men with a deep spiritual instinct have
+always felt the magnetism of the poet who could clothe his
+intuitions in the forms of imagination, who, from a keener sensibility
+and a larger vision, could give authority and clearness
+to the spiritual intuitions of the race.<note place="foot">Cf. Graham, <hi rend="italic">Creed of Science</hi> (2nd
+ed.), p. 183, <q>The poets must count
+for much in the argument, since they
+possess in higher degree than others
+the great creative faculty of imagination
+which outlines the province of
+the possible</q>; Jowett, <hi rend="italic">Plato</hi>, i. pp.
+389 sqq., etc.</note> The philosophy of the
+Porch gave to the Antonine age some of its loftiest characters.
+But it was not the philosophy of the future. It was too cold,
+and too self-centred. It had too little warmth of sympathy
+with religious instincts which were becoming more and more
+imperious. Although, as we have seen in Seneca, it was softened
+by elements borrowed from Platonic sources, in Epictetus and
+M. Aurelius, in spite of a rare spiritual elevation, it displays
+the old aloofness from the mass of men, and a cold temperance
+of reserve on the great question of the future of the soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There can be little doubt that in the last age of the Republic
+a negative philosophy conspired with a decaying religious sense
+to stifle the hope of immortality among the cultivated class.
+Lucretius was certainly not a solitary member of his order.
+His great poem, by its combination of dialectic subtlety, poetic
+charm, and lofty moral earnestness, may have made many
+converts to its withering creed. In the debate on the fate of
+the Catilinarian conspirators, Julius Caesar could assert, without
+fear of contradiction or disapproval, that death was the final
+term alike of joy and sorrow in human life.<note place="foot">Sall. <hi rend="italic">Catil.</hi> c. 51.</note> This philosophy,
+<pb n="502"/><anchor id="Pg502"/>indeed, was waning in force in the time of Augustus, and its
+forces were spent before the close of the first century. Yet
+the elder Pliny, who saw the reign of Vespasian, inveighs
+almost fiercely against the vanity or madness which dreams of
+a phantom life beyond the tomb, and robs of its great charm
+the last kindly boon of nature.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> vii. 55, 188.</note> Seneca on this, as on many
+other questions of high moment, is not steady and consistent.
+In moments of spiritual exaltation he is filled with apocalyptic
+rapture at the vision of an eternal world. At other times he
+speaks with a cold resignation, which seems to have been the
+fashion with men of his class and time, at the possibility of
+extinction in death. To the toil-worn spirit, weary of the
+travail and disappointments of life, death will be a quiet haven
+of rest.<note place="foot">Cf. Plut. (?) <hi rend="italic">Cons. ad Apoll.</hi> c. xii.
+xiii.</note> The old terrors of Charon and Cerberus, of the
+awful Judge and the tortures of Tartarus, are no longer
+believed in even by children.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> c. xix.</note> And stripped of its mythic
+horrors, death, being the loss of consciousness, must be the
+negation of pain and desire and fear. It is, in fact, a return
+to the nothingness from which we come, which has left
+no memory. <hi rend="italic">Non miser potest esse qui nullus est.</hi><note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 54, 99, § 30; <hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> vi.
+§ 6; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> 25.</note> The
+literary men and men of the world in the age of the Flavians,
+like their successors ever since, probably occupied themselves
+little with a problem so long debated and so variously solved.
+Quintilian treats the question of the existence of the disembodied
+spirit as an open one for dialectical debate.<note place="foot">Quint. <hi rend="italic">Inst.</hi> v. 14, 13, cum, soluta
+corpore anima an sit immortalis vel ad
+tempus certe maneat, sit in dubio.</note> Tacitus,
+at once credulous and sceptical, is no clearer on the subject of
+immortality than he is on the subject of miracles, or omens, or
+Providence. In his eulogy on Agricola he expresses a faint,
+pious hope of eternal peace for his hero, if there is a place in
+some other world for pious shades, and the sages are right
+in thinking that great souls do not perish with the body.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Agric.</hi> c. 46; cf. Rohde,
+<hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. p. 318, n. 3.</note>
+This is a very guarded and hypothetical hope; and, probably,
+the only immortality for his friend in which Tacitus had much
+confidence was the undying fame with which the pen of
+genius can invest its subject. Tacitus, like so many of his
+<pb n="503"/><anchor id="Pg503"/>class, had the old Roman distrust of philosophy, and the
+philosophies of which men of his generation had a tincture
+had no very confident or comforting message about the soul’s
+eternal destiny.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Hadrian, the most interesting of the emperors, was probably
+a sceptic on this as on all kindred subjects. The
+greatest practical genius in the imperial line had, in the field
+of religion and speculation, an infinite passion for all that was
+curious and exotic.<note place="foot">Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 13, § 3; 14, § 3;
+17, § 9; cf. Gregorovius, p. 303.</note> Tramping at the head of his legions
+through his world-wide domains, he relieved the tedium of
+practical administration by visiting the scenes of historic
+fame or the homes of ancient religion both in the East and
+West. The East particularly attracted him by its infinite
+fecundity of superstition. He came to see whether there was
+anything in these revelations of the unseen world; he went
+away to mock at them. His insatiable curiosity had an endless
+variety of moods, and offered an open door to all the influences
+from many creeds. The restorer of ancient shrines, the
+admirer of Epictetus, the dabbler in astrology, the votary of
+Eleusis<note place="foot">Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> 13, § 1.</note> and all the mysteries of the East, the munificent
+patron of all professors of philosophy and the arts, the
+man who delighted also to puzzle and ridicule them,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 15, § 12; 16, § 8.</note> had
+probably few settled convictions of his own. His last words
+to his soul, in their mingled lightness and pathos, seem to
+express rather regret for the sunlight left behind than any
+hope in entering on a dim journey into the unknown.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Antonine age was for the masses an age of growing
+faith, and yet three or four of its greatest minds, men who
+had drunk deep of philosophy, or who had a rare spiritual
+vision, either denied or doubted the last hope of humanity.
+Epictetus came from Phrygia as the slave of a freedman of
+Nero.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1,
+p. 660 n.</note> Even in his days of slavery, he had absorbed the
+teaching of Musonius.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iii. 6, § 10.</note> He received his freedom, but lived
+in poverty and physical infirmity till, in the persecution of
+Domitian’s reign he was, with the whole tribe of philosophic
+preachers, driven from Rome,<note place="foot">A. Gell. xv. 11.</note> and he settled at Nicopolis in
+Epirus, where Arrian heard his discourses on the higher life.
+<pb n="504"/><anchor id="Pg504"/>According to Hadrian’s biographer, he lived in the greatest
+intimacy with that emperor.<note place="foot">Ael. Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 16.</note> He refers more than once to
+the reign of Trajan,<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iv. 5, § 17.</note> but it is hardly possible that the tradition
+is true which carries his life into the reign of M. Aurelius,
+although the great philosophic emperor owed much to his
+teaching.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. i. 7,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ τὸ ἐντυχεῖν τοῖς Ἐπικτητείοις ὑπομνήμασιν ὧν οἴκοθεν μετέδωκε</foreign>.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Epictetus is an example of a profoundly religious mind, to
+whom personal immortality is not a necessity of his religion.
+The great law of life is glad submission to the will of God, to
+the universal order. Death, as an event which is bound to
+come soon or late, should be regarded without fear. The
+tremors it excites are like the shuddering of children at a tragic
+mask of Gorgon or Fury. Turn the mask, and the terror is
+gone.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> ii. 1, § 17.</note> For what is death? A separation of soul and body,
+a dissolution of our frame into the kindred elements.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 24, § 93; cf. M. Aurel. iv.
+14, 21, and Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. 330.</note> The
+door is opened, God calls you to come, and to no terrible
+future. Hades, Acheron, and Cocytus are mere childish
+fancies.<note place="foot">Epict. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> iii. 13, § 15.</note> You will pass into the wind or earth or fire from
+which you come. You will not exist, but you will be something
+else of which the world now has need, just as you came
+into your present existence when the world had need of you.
+God sent you here subject to death, to live on earth a little
+while in the flesh, to do His will and serve His purpose, and
+join in the spectacle and festival. But the spectacle for you
+is ended; go hence whither He leads, with adoration and gratitude
+for all that you have seen and heard. Make room for
+others who have yet to be born in accordance with His will.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> § 14,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὅταν δὲ μὴ παρέχῃ τἀναγκαῖα, τὸ ἀνακλητικὸν σημαίνει,
+τὴν θύραν ἤνοιξε, καὶ λέγει σοι, Ἔρχου, Ποῦ; Εἰς οὐδὲν δεινόν·
+ἀλλ’ ὅθεν ἐγένου, εἰς τὰ φίλα καὶ συγγενῆ, εἰς τὰ στοιχεῖα</foreign>.</note>
+Language like this seems to give slight hope of any personal,
+conscious life beyond the grave. Epictetus, like the pious
+Hebrew of many of the Psalms, seems to be satisfied with
+the present vision of God, whether or not there be any fuller
+vision beyond the veil. Yet he elsewhere uses almost Platonic
+language, which seems to imply that the soul has a separate
+life, that it is a prisoner for a time in the bonds of the flesh,
+and that it passes at death to the kindred source from which
+<pb n="505"/><anchor id="Pg505"/>it sprang.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> i. 9, § 14,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἄφες ἡμᾶς ἀπελθεῖν ὅθεν ἐληλύθαμεν κτλ.</foreign></note> Yet even here the hope of an individual immortality,
+of any future reproduction on a higher scale of the life
+on earth, need not be implied; it is indeed probably absent.
+It is enough for the profoundly religious spirit of Epictetus that
+God calls us; whither He calls us must be left to His will.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Galen the physician shows a similar detachment from
+the ordinary hopes of humanity as to a future life, although
+it springs from a very different environment and training
+from those of Epictetus. Born in the reign of Hadrian,
+and dying in the reign of Septimius Severus, Galen represents
+the religious spirit of the Antonine age in his firm belief
+in a spiritual Power and Providence.<note place="foot">Überweg, <hi rend="italic">Hist. Phil.</hi> i. p. 237.</note> But in philosophy
+he was an eclectic of the eclectics. His medical studies
+began at the age of seventeen. The influence of the Platonist,
+Albinus of Smyrna, above all his stay at Alexandria, while
+they gave him a wide range of sympathy, account for
+the mingled and heterogeneous character of his philosophic
+creed, which contains elements from every system except that
+of Epicurus.<note place="foot">Zeller, iii. 1, p. 735.</note> The result is a curious hesitation and equipoise
+between conflicting opinions on the greatest questions. He is
+particularly uncertain as to the nature of the soul and its
+relation to the body. The Platonic doctrine that the soul is
+an immaterial essence, independent of corporeal support, seems
+to Galen very disputable. How can immaterial essences have
+any separate individuality? How can they diffuse themselves
+over a corporeal frame and alter and excite it, as in lunacy
+or drunkenness? And again, if the Peripatetic doctrine be
+true, that the soul is the <q>form</q> of the body, we are soon
+landed in the Stoic materialism from which Galen shrank.
+The soul will become, as in the well-known theory refuted in
+the Phaedo,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi>, 86 <hi rend="small">B</hi>.</note> a <q>temperament</q> of bodily states, and its superior
+endurance, its immortality, will become a baseless dream. On
+these great questions the cautious man of science will not
+venture to come to any dogmatic conclusion.<note place="foot">Zeller, iii. 1, p. 740; Überweg, <hi rend="italic">Hist.
+Phil.</hi> i. p. 237.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Galen came to Rome in the year 164, at the beginning of
+the reign of M. Aurelius. He soon rose to great fame in his
+profession, and when, in 168, he had returned to his native
+<pb n="506"/><anchor id="Pg506"/>Pergamum, he was recalled by the emperors to meet them at
+Aquileia. It was an anxious time. It was the second year
+of the campaign against the Marcomanni, and the legions,
+returning with Verus from the East, had brought with them
+the taint of a pestilence which spread a desolation throughout
+Italy from which it did not recover for ages. The slaves
+were called to arms as in the Punic invasion, along with the
+gladiators, and even the brigands of Dalmatia, and the massing
+of the forces on the Adriatic only concentrated the malignity
+of the plague.<note place="foot">Jul. Capit. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant.</hi> c. 13; c. 21;
+cf. Merivale, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Hist.</hi> viii. pp. 335-6.</note> Galen remained with the army for some
+time, lending his skill to mitigate the horrors of the disease.
+He returned to Rome in 170, and was left there in charge of
+the youthful Commodus. The philosophic Emperor and his
+philosophic physician must have often met in those dreadful
+years. And we may be sure, from the detachment of
+M. Aurelius, that their conversations would take a wider
+range than the sanitary arrangements of the camp. With
+death in the air, how could two such men, trained under such
+masters, fail to question one another as to the sequel of death?
+At any rate the fact remains that M. Aurelius on this question
+is as submissive as Epictetus, as hesitating as Galen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Aurelius is commonly spoken of as realising Plato’s
+dream of the philosopher on the throne. And yet the
+description is, without some additions and explanations, somewhat
+misleading. Philosopher, in the large speculative sense,
+he certainly is not in his Meditations. For the infinite
+curiosity of intellect, the passion to pierce the veil of the
+unknown, to build a great cosmic system, he seems to have
+had but little sympathy.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. vii. 67; Zeller, iii. 1, p. 677.</note> His is the crowning instance of
+philosophy leaving the heights and concentrating itself on conduct,
+which becomes not merely <q>three-fourths of life,</q> but the
+whole, and his philosophy is really a religion. It is a religion
+because it is founded on the great principle of unquestioning,
+uncomplaining submission to the will of God, the law of the
+whole universe. It is a religion because the repellent and
+rigorous teaching of the older Stoicism is, as it is in Epictetus,
+suffused with a glow of emotion.<note place="foot">M. Arnold, <hi rend="italic">Essays in Criticism</hi>, p. 427.</note> And yet this religion, which
+<pb n="507"/><anchor id="Pg507"/>makes such immense demands on human nature, cuts itself off
+from any support in the hope of a future life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the subject of immortality, indeed, M. Aurelius sometimes
+seems to waver. He puts the question hypothetically,
+or he suggests immortality as an alternative to extinction
+at death. <q>If thou goest indeed to another life, there is no
+want of gods, not even there. But if to a state without
+sensation, thou wilt cease to be held by pains and pleasures,
+and to be a slave to the vessel.</q><note place="foot">M. Aurel. iii. 3,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εἰ δὲ ἐν ἀναισθησίᾳ, παύσῃ πόνων καὶ ἡδονῶν ἀνεχόμενος,
+καὶ λατρεύων τοσούτῳ χείρονι τῷ ἀγγείῳ ἢ περίεστι
+τὸ ὑπηρετοῦν</foreign>: Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>,
+ii. pp. 327-28.</note> In one doubtful passage he
+speaks of <q>the time when the soul shall fall out of this
+envelop, like the child from the womb.</q><note place="foot">ix. 3,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὕτως ἐνδέχεσθαι τὴν ὥραν ἐν ᾓ τὸ ψυχάριόν σου τοῦ ἐλύτρου
+τούτου ἐκπεσεῖται</foreign>.</note> He does not dogmatise
+on a subject so dark. But his favourite conception
+of death is that of change, of transformation, of dissolution
+into the original elements. An Infinite Spirit, of which the
+individual soul is an emanation, pervades the universe, and at
+death the finite spirit is reabsorbed by the Infinite.<note place="foot">xii. 30-32.</note> With this
+is coupled the doctrine of the dark Ephesian philosophy, which
+through Platonism had a profound influence on later thought.
+Life is but a moment of consciousness in the unresting flow of
+infinite mutation;<note place="foot">vi. 42, 47; ix. 29, 32; vi. 15; vii.
+19; vi. 36, 
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πᾶν τὸ ἐνεστὼς τοῦ χρόνου, στιγμὴ τοῦ αἰῶνος</foreign>: Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii.
+p. 147.</note> it is a dream, a mere vapour, the sojourn of
+a passing stranger. And the last thought of Aurelius probably
+was that there was no place for a hope of separate conscious
+existence after the last mortal change. Soul and body alike
+are swept along the stream of perpetual transformation, and
+this particular <q>ego,</q> with all its dreams and memories, will
+never re-emerge in a separate personality.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Aurelius, from the frequency with which he returns to
+the subject, seems fully conscious of the instinctive passion
+for continued life. But he refuses to recognise it as original
+and legitimate, and therefore demanding some account to be
+given of it.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. vi. 49,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">μήτι δυσχεραίνεις ὅτι τοσῶνδέ τινων λιτρῶν εἶ καὶ οὐ
+    τριακοσίων; οὕτω δὲ καὶ ὅτι μέχρι τοσῶνδε ἐτῶν βιωτέον
+σοι καὶ οὐ μέχρι πλείονος</foreign>.</note> Still less would he ever dream of erecting it, as
+Cicero and Plutarch did, into a powerful argument for some
+corresponding satisfaction in another world. It is simply one
+<pb n="508"/><anchor id="Pg508"/>of the irrational appetites, a form of rebellion against the
+universal order, which must be crushed and brought into submission
+to inexorable law.  Neither do we find in M. Aurelius
+any feeling of the need for a rectification of the injustices of
+time, for any sphere for the completion of ineffectual lives,
+where the crooked may be made straight and the perverted
+be restored. He has, apparently, no sympathy with the sadness
+so often felt by the noblest minds, at having to go hence with
+so little done, so little known. The philosopher seems to have
+no wish to explore in some coming life the secrets of the
+universe, to prolong under happier conditions the endless quest
+of the ideal in art and knowledge and thought, which seems so
+cruelly baffled by the shortness of the life here below. The
+affectionate father and husband and friend seems to have no
+dream of any reunion with kindred souls. Above all, this
+intensely religious and devout spirit seems to have no conception,
+such as sometimes flashes on the mind of Seneca and of
+Plutarch, of a future beatitude in the full vision of God.
+This austere renunciation, if it was deliberate, of feelings and
+hopes so dear to humanity, excites a certain admiration, as
+the result of a stern self-discipline. It is the resignation
+of what are thought to be mere fond, self-flattering fancies
+in the cold light of truth, and, as such, it must ever command
+a reverent respect. Yet how completely the renunciation
+cuts off M. Aurelius from the spiritual movement of his time,
+from the great onward sweep of humanity to a spiritual
+reconstruction!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The attitude of M. Aurelius to the instinctive longing for
+immortality is partly dictated by logical loyalty to the fundamental
+principles of his theory of life, partly by personal
+temperament and sad experience. The cosmic theory of
+Heraclitus, the infinite flux of cyclic change, left little ground
+for faith in the permanence of consciousness. The Stoic
+principle of submission to the law of the whole made it a duty
+to acquiesce calmly, or even cheerfully, in what has been
+ordained for us. The whole duty, the sole blessedness of man,
+lie in bringing his will into conformity with the Eternal
+Reason, and in moulding this brief mundane life into a slight
+counterpart of the order of the mighty world. From one
+point of view the single human life is infinitely small, a mere
+<pb n="509"/><anchor id="Pg509"/>point in infinite age,<note place="foot">M. Aurel. ix. 32,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀχανὲς δὲ τὸ πρὸ τὴς γενέσεως ὡς καὶ τὸ μετὰ
+τὴν διάλυσιν ὁμοίως ἄπειρον</foreign>.</note> agitated by hopes and fears which are
+mere flitting dreams of a momentary consciousness. Nay,
+the grandest features of its earthly home shrink to mean
+proportions before the eye of reason. Asia is a mere corner,
+the sea a drop, Athos a tiny clod in the universe.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 36,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἡ Ἀσία, ἡ Εὐρώπη, γωνίαι τοῦ κόσμου ... Αθως
+βωλάριον τοῦ κόσμου</foreign>.</note> Life is so
+little a thing that death is no evil.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 35.</note> Yet, looked at on another
+side, the daemon, the divine spark within each of us, may, by
+its irresistible power, create a moral whole in each human
+spirit which, during its short space of separate being, may
+have the rounded harmony and perfectness of the whole vast
+order—it may become a perfect miniature of the universe of
+God.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> x. 33; v. 11; v. 27.</note> This consummate result, attainable, though so rarely
+attained, is the ideal which alone gives dignity to human life.
+The ideal of humanity lies not in any future life or coming
+age; it may be, were the will properly aroused to its divine
+strength, realised here and now in our short span of forty years
+of maturity.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xi. 1.</note> Get rid of gross fears and hopes, aim only at
+the moral ends which the will, aided by the daemon within,
+can surely reach, dismiss the fear of censure from the ephemeral
+crowd around us, the craving for fame among ephemeral
+generations whom we shall not see,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 16; vi. 2; vi. 51; vii. 21,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐγγὺς μὲν ἡ σὴ περὶ πάντων λήθη ἐγγὺς δὲ ἡ πάντων περὶ σοῦ λήθη</foreign>.</note> let the divine impulse
+within us gravitate to its proper orbit, and this poor human life
+is swept into the eternal movement of the great whole, and,
+from a moment of troubled consciousness, becomes a true life
+in God. Such a life, having fulfilled the true law of its being,
+is in itself rounded and complete: it needs no dreams of
+future beatitude to rectify its failures or reward its eager
+effort. Death to such a soul becomes an unimportant incident,
+fixed, like all other changes, in the general order. And
+the length or shortness of life is not worth reckoning. The
+longest life is hardly a moment in eternity: the shortest is
+long enough if it be lived well. This life, as fixed by eternal
+law, is a whole, a thing by itself, a thing with innumerable
+counterparts in the infinite past, destined to be endlessly
+reproduced in the years of the limitless future.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xi. 1; vii. 1.</note> To repine at
+<pb n="510"/><anchor id="Pg510"/>its shortness is no more rational than to mourn the swift
+passing of a springtime, whose glorious promise, yet ever-withering
+charm, have come and gone in the self-same way
+through myriads of forgotten years.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This is the ideal view of an austere creed, with a grandeur
+of its own which all generations of the West have agreed to
+venerate. But the temperament and the history of M. Aurelius
+had also their share in shaping his views of life and death.
+With infinite charity, indulgence, and even love for his fellows,
+he was a pessimist about human life.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. vi. 46, 47; vii. 3; ix. 30.</note> He had good excuse
+for being so. In the words of one who knew that age as only
+genius combined with learning can, <hi rend="italic">le monde s’attristait</hi>; and
+with good cause. The horizon was darkened with ominous
+thunder-clouds. The internal forces of the Empire were becoming
+paralysed by a mysterious weakness. The dim hordes beyond
+the Danube had descended with a force only to be repelled in
+many weary campaigns. Famine and pestilence were inflicting
+worse horrors than the Marcomanni. It was the beginning of
+the end, although the end was long deferred. The world was
+growing sad; but there was no sadder man than the saintly
+Stoic on the throne, who had not only to face the Germans on
+the Danube, and bear the anxieties of solitary power, but who
+had to endure the keener anguish of a soul which saw the
+spiritual possibilities of human nature, but also all its littleness
+and baseness. The Emperor needed all the lessons of self-discipline
+and close-lipped resignation which he had painfully
+learnt for himself, and which he has taught to so many generations.
+There have been few nobler souls, yet few more hopeless.
+Like the arch mocker of the time, although from a very
+different point of view, he sees this ephemeral life, with its
+transient pleasures and triumphs, ending in dust and oblivion.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 47; cf. Luc. <hi rend="italic">Icaromenippus</hi>,
+c. 18; <hi rend="italic">Traj. sive Tyr.</hi> c. 8; <hi rend="italic">Charon</hi>, c.
+17; <hi rend="italic">Menip.</hi> c. 15,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀλλ’ ὅμοια τὰ ὀστᾶ ἦν, ἄδηλα καὶ ἀνεπίγραφα κτλ.</foreign></note>
+And its fragility is only matched by its weary sameness from
+age to age. The wintry torrent of endless mutation sweeps
+all round in an eternal vortex.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. vii. 19,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">διὰ τῆς τῶν ὅλων οὐσίας, ὡς διὰ χειμάρρου, διεκπορεύεται
+    πάντα τὰ σώματα</foreign>. Cf. ix. 29,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">χειμάρρους ἡ τῶν πάντων αἰτία· πάντα φέρει</foreign>.</note> This restless change is a
+movement of cyclic monotony.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 49; vii. 1; ix. 14; x. 23;
+xi. 1.</note> Go back to Vespasian or
+<pb n="511"/><anchor id="Pg511"/>Trajan: you will find the same recurring spectacle, men
+plotting and fighting, marrying and dying.<note place="foot">M. Aurel. iv. 32.</note> The daughter
+who watches by her mother’s death-bed soon passes away under
+other eyes. The soul can in vision travel far, and survey the
+infinity of ages.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xi. 1.</note> It can stretch forward into the endless ages
+to come, as it can go back in historic imagination through the
+limitless past. Yet it finds nothing strange in the experience
+of the past, as there will be nothing new in the experience
+of our remotest posterity. The man whose course has run for
+forty years, if he has any powers of perception, has concentrated
+in his brief span the image of all that has been, all that ever
+will be in human thought or fate. The future is not gilded
+by any dream of progress: it is not to be imaged in any magic
+light of a Platonic Utopia, or City of God descending from
+heaven like a bride.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ix. 29,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">μηδὲ τὴν Πλάτωνος πολιτείαν ἔλπιζε, ἀλλ’ ἀρκοῦ εἰ τὸ
+βραχύτατον πρόεισι</foreign>.</note> From this <q>terrene filth,</q> from these
+poor frivolous souls, what celestial commonwealth could ever
+emerge?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vii. 47; ix. 34.</note> The moral is, both on the ground of high philosophy
+and sad experience—<q>be content, thou hast made thy voyage,
+thou hast come to shore, quit the ship.</q>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But even in heathendom, long before M. Aurelius was born,
+the drift of thought towards the goal of a personal immortality
+was strong and intense. And this was only one consequence
+of a movement which had profoundly affected human thought,
+and had compelled Stoicism to recast itself, as in the teaching of
+Seneca. Pure reason could not explain the relation of man to
+the universe, it could not satisfy the deepest human instincts.
+The maxim, <q>live according to Nature,</q> was interpreted by the
+Stoic to mean a life in accordance with our own higher nature, the
+Divine element within us. Yet this interpretation only brought
+out the irreconcilable discordance between the two conceptions
+of Nature in the physical universe and in the human spirit.
+There are depths and mysteries in the one which have no
+answering correspondence in the other. Something more than
+reason is needed to solve the problems of human destiny, the
+mysterious range of human aspiration. Nature, as a system
+of cold impersonal processes, has no sympathy with man, she
+may be icily indifferent or actively hostile. To conform one’s
+<pb n="512"/><anchor id="Pg512"/>life to the supposed dictates of an abstract Reason, asserting
+itself in physical laws, which seem often to make a mockery
+of the noblest effort and aspiration of man, demanded a servility
+of submission in human nature, and called upon it to disown a
+large part of its native powers and instincts. Man, a mere
+ghost of himself, attenuated to a bloodless shade, finds himself
+in presence of a power cold, relentless, unmoral, according to
+human standards, a power which makes holocausts of individual
+lives to serve some abstract and visionary ideal of the whole.
+The older Stoicism provided no object of worship. For worship
+cannot be paid to an impersonal law without moral attributes.
+You may in abject quietism submit to it, but you cannot revere
+or adore it. It is little wonder that the Stoic sage, who could
+triumph over all material obstructions by moral enthusiasm,
+was sometimes exalted above the Zeus who represented mere
+passionless physical law. Such an idea—for it cannot be
+called a Being—has no moral import, it supplies no example,
+succour, or inspiration. The sage may for a moment have
+a superhuman triumph, in his defiance of the temptations
+or calamities with which Nature has surrounded him, but it
+is a lonely triumph of inhuman pride.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 109, § 9.</note> It may be the divine
+element within him which has given him the victory, but this
+is conceived as the mere effluence of that subtle material force
+which moves under all the phenomena of physical Nature.
+In surrendering yourself to the impulse of such a power you
+are merely putting yourself in line with the other irrational
+subjects of impersonal law. There is here, it need not be said,
+no stimulus to moral life, there is the absolute negation of it.
+The affinity of the human soul with the soul of the world is a
+mere physical doctrine, however refined and subtle be the <q>fiery
+breath</q> which is the common element of both. But prolonged
+ethical study and analysis combined with the infiltration of
+Platonism by degrees to modify profoundly the Stoic conception
+of the nature of God, and of the relation of man to Him.
+God tended to become more and more a person, a moral power,
+a father. And the indwelling God became the voice of
+conscience, consoling, prompting, supporting, inspiring an
+ideal of fuller communion in another sphere. Was the
+longing for continued life, in communion with kindred souls,
+<pb n="513"/><anchor id="Pg513"/>with a Divine Spirit, which has made us what we are, to be
+relegated to the limbo of anthropomorphic dreams?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Seneca, as we have seen in a former chapter, still retains
+some of the hard orthodoxy of the older Stoicism. In his
+letters to Lucilius he occasionally uses the language of the
+old Stoic materialism.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 57, § 7.</note> But there can be little doubt that
+Seneca had assimilated other conceptions antagonistic to it.
+God becomes more a Person, distinct from the world, which
+He has created, which He governs, which He directs to
+moral ends.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 73, § 16; <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 83.</note> He is not merely the highest reason, He is
+also the perfect wisdom, holiness, and love. He is no longer
+a mere blind force or fate; He is the loving, watchful Father,
+and good men are His sons. The apparent calamities which
+they have to suffer are only a necessary discipline, for, <q>whom
+He loves He tries and hardens by chastisement.</q><note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">De Prov.</hi> iv. § 7, quos amat
+indurat, exercet.</note> God can
+never really injure, for His nature is love, and we are continually
+loaded with His benefits.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">De Ben.</hi> iv. 4; <hi rend="italic">De Ira</hi>, ii. 27.</note> In his view of the constitution of
+man, Seneca has deviated even further from the creed of his
+school. He appears indeed to assert sometimes that the soul
+is material, but it is matter so fine and subtle as to be indistinguishable
+from what we call spirit. And the ethical studies
+of Seneca compelled him to abandon the Stoic doctrine of the
+simple unity of the soul for the Platonic dualism, with the
+opposition of reason and animal impulse. The latter has its
+seat in the body, or the flesh, as he often calls it. And of the
+flesh he speaks with all the contempt of the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi>. It is a
+mere shell, a fetter, a prison; or a humble hostelry which the
+soul occupies only for a brief space.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 65, § 22; 102, § 26;
+    <hi rend="italic"><anchor id="corr513"/><corr sic="Ad.">Ad</corr>
+Helv.</hi> 11, § 7; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> 24, § 5. Cf.
+Plat. <hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi> 83 <hi rend="small">C, D</hi>. Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll.
+Tyan.</hi> vi. 11; vii. 26.</note> With the flesh the spirit
+must wage perpetual war, as the alien power which cramps its
+native energies, darkens its vision, and perverts its judgment
+of the truth. The true life of the spirit will, as in the theology
+of Plato, only begin when the unequal partnership is dissolved.<note place="foot">Plat. <hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi> 79 <hi rend="small">C</hi>; 81 <hi rend="small">A</hi>.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The orthodox Stoic doctrine allowed a limited immortality,
+till the next great cosmic conflagration. But it was doubtful
+whether even this continued existence was real personal life,
+and with some Stoic doctors it was a privilege confined to the
+<pb n="514"/><anchor id="Pg514"/>greater souls.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 1, p. 185.</note> Like nearly all philosophers of this age, Seneca
+occasionally seems to admit the possibility of a return to antenatal
+nothingness at death. <q>Non potest miser esse qui nullus
+est</q> is a consolation often administered even by those who
+have the hope of something better than the peace of annihilation.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> c. 19, 20; cf. Plut. (?)
+<hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Apoll.</hi> c. 15,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εἰς τὴν αὐτὴν οὖν τάξιν οἱ τελευτήσαντες καθίστανται
+    τῇ πρὸ τῆς γενέσεως</foreign>: cf. <hi rend="italic">ib.</hi> c. 34.</note>
+It was a consolation which might be a very real one
+to men living in the reign of Nero. Taken at the worst, death
+can only be dissolution, for the rivers of fire and the tortures
+of Tartarus are mere figments of poetic fancy. The mind
+trained in submission to universal law will not shrink from a
+fate which awaits the universe by fire or cataclysmal change.
+Its future fate can only be either to dwell calmly for ever
+among kindred souls, or to be reabsorbed into the general
+whole.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 36; 71, § 12; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi>
+19, § 4. Cf. Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. p. 328.</note> But in moments of spiritual exaltation, such an
+alternative does not satisfy Seneca. He has got far beyond
+the grim submission, or graceful contempt, of aristocratic suicide,
+or even the faith in a bounded immortality. He has a hope
+at times apparently more clear than any felt by the Platonic
+Socrates on the last evening in prison. Death is no longer a
+sleep, a blank peace following the futile agitations of life: it
+is the gateway to eternal peace. The brief sojourn in the body
+is the prelude to a longer and nobler life.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 102, § 21.</note> The hour, at which
+you shudder as the last, is really the birthday of eternity,
+when the mind, bursting from its fetters, will expatiate in
+all the joy of its freedom in the light, and have unrolled
+before it all the secrets and splendour of starry worlds, without
+a haunting shadow.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 120, § 14; 102, § 28,
+aliquando naturae tibi arcana retegentur:
+discutietur ista caligo ...
+nulla serenum umbra turbabit, cf.
+Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. p. 328, n. 4. Rohde,
+like Zeller, seems to me not to recognise
+sufficiently how far Seneca has departed
+from the old Stoicism.</note> Nay, the vision is moralised almost in
+Christian fashion. The thought of eternity compels us to think
+of God as witness of every act, to remember that <q>decisive
+hour</q> when, with all veils and disguises removed, the verdict
+on our life will be pronounced. It also gives the hope of
+purging away for ever the taint of the flesh and entering on
+communion with the spirits of the blessed.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 26, § 5; <hi rend="italic">Ad Marc.</hi> xxv.</note> Thus as though
+<pb n="515"/><anchor id="Pg515"/>with the Eternal eyes upon him, a man should shrink from all
+the baser and meaner side of his corporeal life, and so prepare
+himself for the great ordeal, and the beatitude of the life to
+come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the apocalypse of Seneca a new note is struck in pagan
+meditation on the immortality. We have left far behind the
+thought of the Manes haunting the ancestral tomb, and soothed
+in returning years by the jet of wine or the bunch of violets.
+We are no longer watching, with Pindar or Virgil, the spirits
+basking in Elysian meads and fanned by ocean breezes. We
+are far on the way to the City of God, <hi rend="italic">cujus fundamenta in
+montibus sanctis</hi>. And indeed Seneca has probably travelled
+as far towards it as any one born in heathendom ever did.
+It is not wonderful that, in the fierce religious struggle of the
+fourth century, his moral enthusiasm, his view of this life as a
+probation for the next, his glowing vision of an almost Christian
+heaven, should have suggested an imaginary intercourse with
+St Paul.<note place="foot">See the apocryphal letters, p. 477,
+of Haase’s ed. of Sen.; cf. Lightfoot,
+<hi rend="italic">S. Paul’s Ep. to the Philippians</hi>, p.
+268 sqq. Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii.
+1, p. 637, n. 1; Baur, <hi rend="italic">Ch. Hist.</hi> i. p. 16.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What were the influences which really moulded his
+highest conception of the future state, how much was due
+to a pure and vigorous spiritual intuition, how much to
+Platonic and Pythagorean sources, we cannot pretend to say.
+In Seneca’s most enraptured previsions of immortality, the
+very exuberance of the rhetoric seems to be the expression of
+intense personal feeling. But Seneca’s was a very open and
+sensitive mind. One of his teachers was Sotion, who, like his
+master Sextius, was called a Pythagorean, and who, on true
+Pythagorean principles, taught Seneca to abstain from animal
+food.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, § 17; cf. Philostr.
+<hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> i. 7, 8.</note> We may be sure that no Pythagorean teacher of that age
+would fail to discuss with his pupil the problem of the future
+life. It is true that Seneca only once or twice alludes to the
+doctrine of a previous life, and he only mentions the Pythagorean
+school to record the fact that in his day it was without a head.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Nat. Qu.</hi> vii. 32, § 2, Pythagorica
+illa invidiosa turbae schola praeceptorem
+non invenit.</note>
+But that does not preclude the supposition that he may have
+felt its influence in the formative years of youth. And the
+Pythagoreans of the early empire were a highly eclectic school.
+<pb n="516"/><anchor id="Pg516"/>They still reproduced the spirit of their founder in mathematical
+symbolism, in the ideal of asceticism, in a pronounced religious
+tendency.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 2, p. 95.</note> But they had absorbed much from Platonism, as
+well as from the Lyceum and the Porch. These mingled influences
+also account for the profound alterations which Stoicism
+had undergone in the mind of Seneca. And his contempt for
+the body or the flesh, and many of the phrases in which its
+cramping, lowering influences are described, savour of the
+Pythagorean and Platonist schools.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Seneca is an inconsistent, though eloquent and powerful,
+expounder of that faith in personal immortality, with its
+moral consequences, which goes back through many ages to
+Plato, to Pythagoras, to the obscure apostles of the Orphic
+revelation, perhaps to Egypt.<note place="foot">Herodot. ii. 123.</note> The mythical Orpheus represents,
+in the field of religion and in the theory of life and death, an
+immense revolution in Greek thought and an enduring spirit
+which produced a profound effect down to the last years of
+paganism in the West.<note place="foot">Herodotus never mentions Orpheus,
+but speaks of
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὰ Ὀρφικά</foreign>, ii. 81; nor do
+the schol. on Homer allude to him (Lob.
+<hi rend="italic">Aglaoph.</hi> i. p. 540; cf. <hi rend="italic">Aglaoph.</hi> p. 255
+sqq.). His existence was denied by
+Aristotle (Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Nat. Deor.</hi> 1. 38, 108).
+Plato seems to be as assured of it as
+Iamblichus, <hi rend="italic">Cratyl.</hi> 402; cf. Iambl.
+<hi rend="italic">Pythag.</hi> 145, 243.</note> With the names of Orpheus and
+Pythagoras are connected the assured faith in immortality,
+the conception of this life as only preparatory and secondary
+to the next, the need for purgation and expiation for deeds
+done in the body, the doctrine of transmigration and successive
+lives, possibly in animal forms. Orpheus was also the
+mythical founder of mysteries in whose secret lore the initiated
+were always supposed to receive some comforting assurance
+of a life to come.<note place="foot">Iambl. <hi rend="italic">Pythag.</hi> 151; Lobeck, <hi rend="italic">Aglaoph.</hi>
+i. p. 238.</note> A spokesman in one of Cicero’s dialogues
+recalls with intense gratitude the light of hope and cheerfulness
+which the holy rites had shed for him both on life
+and death.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Leg.</hi> ii. 14, 36, neque solum
+cum laetitia vivendi rationem accepimus,
+sed etiam cum spe meliore moriendi.</note> And Plutarch, on the death of their daughter, reminded
+his wife of the soothing words which they had together
+heard from the hierophant in the Dionysiac mysteries.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Cons. ad Ux.</hi> c. 10.</note> Long
+before their day Plato had often, on these high themes, sought
+a kind of high ecclesiastical sanction or suggestion for the
+tentative conclusions of dialectic.<note place="foot">Plat. <hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi> 70 <hi rend="small">C</hi>; 69 <hi rend="small">C</hi>.</note> The great name of Orpheus,
+<pb n="517"/><anchor id="Pg517"/>and the mystic lore of this esoteric faith, had indeed in Plato’s
+day been sadly cheapened and degraded by a crowd of mercenary
+impostors.<note place="foot">Plat. <hi rend="italic">Rep.</hi> ii. 364 <hi rend="small">B</hi>.</note> And even the venerable rites of Eleusis may have
+contained an element of coarseness, descending from times
+when the processes of nature were regarded unveiled.<note place="foot">Cf. Gardner and Jevons, p. 268,
+who think the ceremonies never were
+indecent. Rohde, i. p. 289.</note> But
+philosophy and reason, which purged and elevated religion as
+a whole, did the same service for the mysteries, and Orphic and
+Pythagorean became almost convertible.<note place="foot">Herodot. ii. 81; Iambl. <hi rend="italic">Pythag.</hi>
+151; Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. p. 103.</note> The systems represent
+a converging effort to solve those great questions which lie on
+the borderland of religion and philosophy, questions on which the
+speculative intellect is so often foiled, and has to fall back on
+the support of faith and religious intuition.<note place="foot">Baur, <hi rend="italic">Ch. Hist.</hi> ii. p. 178.</note> In an age which
+had forsaken curious speculation, whose whole interest was concentrated
+on the moral life, an age which longed for spiritual
+vision and supernatural support, an essentially religious philosophy
+like the new Pythagoreanism was sure to be a great
+power. Gathering up impartially whatever suited its main
+end from the ancient schools, maintaining a scrupulous reverence
+for all the devotion of the past, it shed over all a higher
+light, issuing, as its votaries believed, from the lands of the
+dawn.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii.
+    <anchor id="corr517"/><corr sic="2">2,</corr> p. 99.</note> Keeping a consecrated place for all the gods of
+popular tradition, linking men to the Infinite by a graduated
+hierarchy of spirits with their home in the stars, it rose to the
+conception of the One, pure, passionless Being to whom no
+bloody sacrifice is to be offered, who is to be worshipped best
+by silent adoration and a life of purity. And in cultivating
+this purity, the grossness of the body must be attenuated by a
+strict rule of life.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> i. 7, 8; cf.
+Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 108, §§ 17-20.</note> And though the Highest be so remote and
+so ethereal, He has not left us without messengers and interpreters
+to bridge the vast interval between us and the Infinite,
+by means of dream and vision and oracle. A world of strange
+daemonic life surrounds us, a world of spirits and heroic souls
+akin to ours.<note place="foot">Zeller, iii. 2, p. 122.</note> For though we are immersed in the alien element
+of the flesh, yet our complex soul has a divine part, which may
+even here below have converse with the Divine. During its
+<pb n="518"/><anchor id="Pg518"/>period of duress and probation, it may indeed become irremediably
+tainted by contact with matter. It may also, hearkening
+to the voice of philosophy, hold itself clear and pure from such
+defilement. When the mortal severance of the two natures
+comes, the divine part does not perish with its mouldering
+prison, but it may have a very different destiny in the ages to
+come, according to the manner of its earthly life. This life
+and the eternal state are linked in an inevitable moral
+sequence; as we sow, so shall we reap in successive lives.
+There is a Great Judgment in the unseen world, with momentous,
+age-long effects. The spirit which has refused to yield to the
+seductions of the flesh may, in the coming life, rise to empyrean
+heights beyond human imagination to picture. The soul
+which has been imbruted by its environment may have to
+pass a long ordeal of three thousand years, and then return
+to another sojourn in human form, or it may sink hopelessly
+to ever lower depths of degradation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The biography of Apollonius of Tyana is, of course, in
+one sense a romance.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> i. 2; cf.
+Zeller, iii. 2, p. 134, n.; Baur, <hi rend="italic">Ch. Hist.</hi>
+ii. pp. 174, 206.</note> Yet its tales of miracle should hardly
+be allowed to obscure its value as a picture of the beliefs of
+that age. We cannot doubt that the Pythagorean apostle of
+the time of the Flavians went all over the Roman world,
+preaching his gospel of moral and ritual purity, kindling or
+satisfying the faith in the world of spirit, striving in a strange
+fashion to reconcile a mystic monotheism and devotion to
+a pure life of the soul with a scrupulous reverence for
+all the mythologies. It may, at first sight, appear strange
+that a mystic like Apollonius, of the Pythagorean school,
+should so seldom allude to the subject of immortality.
+The truth is that Apollonius was not a dogmatic preacher;
+he dealt little in theories. His chief business, as he
+conceived it, was with practical morality, and the reform or
+restoration of ritual where it had fallen into desuetude and
+decay.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> iv. 20; iii.
+41; i. 11, 16; vi. 40.</note> Penetrated as he was with the faith in a spiritual
+world, he seems to assume as a postulate the eternity of the
+soul, and its incarnation for a brief space on earth. During
+its sojourn in the flesh, it is visited by visions from on high,
+<pb n="519"/><anchor id="Pg519"/>and such revelations are vouchsafed in proportion to its
+ascetic purity.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> ii. 37; vi. 11.</note> What conception of the life to come Apollonius
+entertained we cannot say; but its reality to him was a self-evident
+truth. We are surrounded by the spirits of the
+departed, although we know it not. Sailing among the islands
+of the Aegean, he once gratified his disciples by the tale of
+his having met the shade of Achilles at his tomb in the Troad.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 16.</note>
+Men said that the hero was really dead, and in the old home
+of the Myrmidons, his worship was forgotten. But Apollonius,
+in a prayer which he had learnt from the sages on the
+Ganges, called upon the heroic shade to dispel all doubts by
+appearing at his call. At once an earthquake shook the tomb,
+and a fair youthful form was by his side of wondrous beauty
+and superhuman stature, clothed in a Thessalian mantle. His
+stature grew more majestic, and his beauty more glorious as
+Apollonius gazed. But the sage had no weak fears in the
+presence even of so august a spirit, and pressed him with
+questions which savour far more of antiquarian than spiritual
+interest. Was Helen really in Troy? Why does not Homer
+mention Palamedes? The hero resolved his doubts, sent a
+warning message to the Thessalians to restore his forgotten
+honours, and in a soft splendour vanished at the first cock-crow.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iv. 16.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The biography of Apollonius closes with a tale which
+throws a strong light on the spiritual cravings of that age.
+The sage firmly believed in transmigration and immortality,
+although he discouraged debate on these high themes.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> viii. 31,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">περὶ ψυχῆς δὲ, ὡς ἀθάνατος εἴη, ἐφιλοσόφει ἔτι διδάσκων
+μὴν ὅτι ἀληθὴς ὁ ὑπὲρ αὐτῆς λόγος, πολυπραγμονεῖν
+δὲ μὴ ξυγχωρῶν τὰ ὦδε μεγάλα</foreign>.</note> After
+his death, the youth of Tyana were much occupied with
+solemn thoughts. But there was a sceptic among them who
+had vainly besought the departed philosopher to return from
+spiritland and dispel his doubts as to the future life. At
+last one day he fell asleep among his companions, and then
+suddenly started up as one demented, with the cry—<q>I believe
+thee.</q> Then he told his friends that he had seen the spirit of
+the sage, that he had been actually among them, though they
+knew it not, chanting a marvellous song of life and death. It
+told of the escape of the soul from the mouldering frame and
+<pb n="520"/><anchor id="Pg520"/>of its swift flight to ethereal worlds. <q>Thou shalt know all
+when thou art no more; but while thou art yet among the
+living, why seek to pierce the mystery?</q><note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> viii. 31,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἢ τὶ μετὰ ζῳοῖσον ἐὼν περὶ τῶνδε ματεύεις;</foreign></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The new Platonist school, with Plutarch and Maximus at
+their head, were, in this age, the great apostles of the hope of
+immortality. Platonists in their theory of mind and God, Neo-Pythagorean
+in their faith in the openness of the human
+spirit at its best to supernatural influences, they felt the
+doctrine of the coming life to be axiomatic. It is true that
+the author of the <hi rend="italic">Consolation to Apollonius</hi>, seems at times to
+waver, as Seneca did, between the idea of extinction at death
+and the hope of eternal beatitude.<note place="foot">Plut. (?) <hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Apoll.</hi> c. 34; cf.
+c. 15.</note> This piece is full of
+pessimist thoughts of life, and embalms many a sad saying of
+the Greek poets on its shortness and its misery.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 7 sqq.</note> Bringing
+far more sorrow than joy, life may well be regarded as a
+mysterious punishment. That Thracian tribe which mourned
+at each birth as others do at death, had a true philosophy of
+man’s estate. The great consolation is that, in the phrase of
+Heraclitus, death and life are one, we are dying every moment
+from our birth. Death is the great healer, in the words of
+Aeschylus, the deliverer from the curse of existence, whether it
+be an eternal sleep or a far journey into an unknown land.
+The prospect of blank nothingness offers no terrors; for the
+soul only returns to its original unconsciousness. But this
+was hardly a congenial mood to the author, and before the close,
+he falls back on the solace of mystic tradition or poetic vision,
+that, for the nobler sort, there is a place prepared in the ages
+to come, after the Great Judgment, when all souls, naked and
+stripped of all trappings and disguises, shall have to answer
+for the deeds done in the body.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 36,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τεθνεῶτας γὰρ δεῖ κρίνεσθαι κτλ.</foreign></note> The same faith is professed
+by Plutarch to his wife in the Consolation on the death of
+their little daughter, which took place while Plutarch was from
+home. The loss of a pure bright young soul, full of love and
+kindness to all, even to her lifeless toys, was evidently a heavy
+blow.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Ux.</hi> c. 3.</note> But Plutarch praises his wife’s simple restraint and
+abstinence from the effusive parade of conventional mourning.
+All such displays seemed to him a rather vulgar intemperance
+<pb n="521"/><anchor id="Pg521"/>and self-indulgence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Ux.</hi> c. 4, 6.</note> And why grieve for one who is spared
+all grief? She had her little joys, and, knowing no other, she
+suffers no pain of loss. Yet Plutarch would not have his wife
+accept the cold consolation that death brings unconsciousness.
+He reminds her of the brighter, more cheering vision which
+they have enjoyed together as communicants in the Dionysiac
+mysteries. If the soul is undying, if it is of divine parentage
+and has a divine destiny, then the shortness of its imprisonment
+and exile is a blessing. The captive bird may come by
+use and wont actually to love its cage. And the worst misery
+of old age is not grey hairs and weakness, but a dull absorption
+in the carnal and forgetfulness of divine things. <q>Whom the
+gods love die young.</q> By calling them back early, they save
+them from long wanderings.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Apoll.</hi> c. 17-24.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plutarch’s belief in immortality is a religious faith, a
+practical postulate. He nowhere discusses the bases of the
+belief in an exhaustive way. It is rather inseparable from his
+conception of God and His justice, and the relation of the
+human soul to God.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ser. Num. Vind.</hi> c. 18 (561 <hi rend="small">A</hi>).</note> He admits that the prospect of reward
+or punishment in another world has but little influence on
+men’s conduct.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi>
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὐδέν ἐστι πρὸς ἡμᾶς τοὺς ζῶντας ἀλλ’
+    ἀπιστοῦνται καὶ λανθάνοισιν</foreign>.</note> Few believe in the tales of tortures of the
+damned. And those who do can soothe their fears, and purchase
+a gross immortality, by initiations and indulgences.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Non p. Suav.</hi> c. 26, 27.</note>
+Yet it is impossible to doubt that to Plutarch the hope of the
+eternal life was a precious possession. He assails with force,
+and even asperity, the Epicurean school for their attempt to rob
+humanity of it, on the pretext of relieving men of a load of superstitious
+fears. They are like men on board a ship who, letting
+the passengers know that they have no pilot, console them with
+the further information that it does not matter, as they are
+bound to drive upon the rocks.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 23 (1103).</note> The great promise of Epicurus
+was to free men from the spectral terrors with which poetic
+fancy had filled the scenery of the under world. But in doing
+so, he invested death with a new horror infinitely worse than
+the fabled tortures of the damned. It was a subtle fallacy
+which taught that, as annihilation involves the extinction of
+consciousness, the lamented loss of the joys and vivid energy
+<pb n="522"/><anchor id="Pg522"/>of life was a mere imagination projected on a blank future
+where no regret could ever disturb the tranquillity of nothingness<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Non. p. Suav.</hi> c. 30, 26.</note>.
+Plutarch took his stand on psychology. The passion
+for continued existence is, as a matter of fact, the most imperious
+in our nature. With the belief in immortality, Epicurus
+sweeps away the strongest and dearest hopes of the mass of
+men. This life is indeed full of pain and sorrow; yet men
+cling to it passionately, merely as life, in the darkest hours.
+And they are ready to brave the worst horrors of Cerberus
+and Chimaera for the chance of continued existence.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 27,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">δι’ ἣν ὀλίγου δέω λέγειν πάντας καὶ πάσας εἶναι προθύμους
+τῷ Κερβέρῳ διαδάκνεσθαι ὅπως ἐν τῷ εἶναι
+διαμένωσι μηδ’ ἀναιρεθῶσι</foreign>.</note> The
+privation of a dream of happiness in another world is a real
+loss, even though, when the grey day of nothingness dawns,
+the consciousness of loss be gone. Is it a light thing to tell
+the nobler spirits, the moral athletes, who have battled with
+evil all life long, that they have been contending for a visionary
+crown?<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 28.</note> Is it nothing to the idealist who, amid all the
+obstructions of the life in the flesh, has been fostering his
+nobler powers, in the hope of eternal freedom and the full
+vision of truth, that that real life to which he fancied
+death was only the gateway is, after all, a mere illusion?
+Nor does Plutarch disdain to take account of that vivacity of
+love which in all ages has sought to soften the bitterness
+of parting by the hope of reunion and recognition in other
+worlds.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 28,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἡλίκης ἑαυτοὺς χαρᾶς ἀποστεροῦσι ... καὶ τὸν φίλον πατέρα
+    καὶ τὴν φίλην μητέρα καί που γυναῖκα χρησθὴν ὄψεσθαι
+    μὴ προσδοκῶντες μηδ’ ἔχοντες ἐλπίδα τῆς ὁμιλίας
+    ἐκείνης καὶ φιλοφροσύνης ἣν ἔχουσιν οἱ τὰ αὐτὰ
+    Πυθαγόρᾳ καὶ Πλάτωνι δοξάζοντες</foreign>.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Consolation to Apollonius only refers briefly to the
+punishment of lawless wealth and power, as the complement
+to the reward of virtue.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Consol. ad Apoll.</hi> c. 36.</note> But this aspect of immortality is
+dwelt on at length in the remarkable treatise on the Delays of
+the Divine Vengeance. The problem of hereditary guilt, and
+the punishment of the children for the sins of the fathers in
+this world, in view of the justice and benevolence of God, leads
+on to the thought of another tribunal which may terribly correct
+the injustices of time.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ser. Num. Vind.</hi> c. 16: cf.
+Gréard, <hi rend="italic">De la Morale de Plut.</hi> p. 283;
+Oakesmith, <hi rend="italic">Rel. of Plut.</hi> p. 111 sqq.</note> The doctrine of Divine providence and
+<pb n="523"/><anchor id="Pg523"/>the doctrine of immortality stand or fall together.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Ser. N. Vind.</hi> v. c. 17,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εἷς οὖν, ἔφην, λόγος ὁ τοῦ θεοῦ τὴν πρόνοιαν καὶ τὴν διαμονὴν
+τῆς ἀνθρωπίνης ψυχῆς βεβαιῶν, κτλ.</foreign></note> God could
+not take so much care for ephemeral souls, blooming for a brief
+space and then withering away, as in the women’s soon-fading
+gardens of Adonis.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 17 (560 <hi rend="small">F</hi>).</note> Above all, Apollo would be the greatest
+deceiver, the god who has so often solemnly from the tripod
+ordered rites of expiation and posthumous honours to be paid to
+lofty souls departed.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 17, ad fin.</note> Yet, like his great master Plato, Plutarch
+felt that the full assurance of the long dream of humanity lies
+beyond the veil—that we know not what we shall be. And,
+like the master, he invoked the apocalyptic power of the
+religious and poetic imagination to fortify the hesitating
+conclusions of the reason.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The visionary power and charm of the great master, whose
+reign was to be prolonged for ages after Plutarch’s time, is seen,
+perhaps in a faint reflection, in Plutarch’s mythical forecast of
+the future of the soul. Plato’s psychology, his sharp opposition
+of the reason to the lower nature rooted in the flesh, his
+vision of the Eternal Goodness, his intensely moral conception
+of the responsibility of life on earth, its boundless possibilities
+of future unimpeded intuition, its possible eternal degradation
+through ages of cyclic change, all this, together with kindred
+elements, perhaps from the Semitic east, had left a profound
+effect on religious minds. The greatness of S. Augustine is
+nowhere more apparent than in his frank recognition of the
+spiritual grandeur of Plato. And that great spirit, so agile in
+dialectic subtlety, so sublime in its power of rising above the
+cramping limitations of our mortal life, is also, from its vivid
+poetic sympathy, most ready to aid weak ordinary souls to
+climb <q>the altar stairs.</q> Never was pure detached intelligence
+wedded so harmoniously to glowing imagination, never was
+ethereal truth so clothed in the warm colouring and splendour
+of the world of sense. Where reason has strained its utmost
+strength to solve the eternal riddle, ecstatic vision and religious
+myth, transcending the limits of space and time, must be called
+in to lend their aid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Plato and the Platonic Socrates are fully conscious that
+the conclusions of philosophic reason on a future state can be
+<pb n="524"/><anchor id="Pg524"/>only tentative. And they often fall back on a divine doctrine,
+or tradition, or a <anchor id="corr524"/><corr sic="mythopœic">mythopoeic</corr> power by which poetic imagination
+peoples the dim regions of a world beyond the senses.
+The visions of Timarchus and Thespesius in Plutarch are, like
+the Nekuia of the <hi rend="italic">Phaedo</hi> and of the <hi rend="italic">Republic</hi>, an effort of the
+religious imagination to penetrate the darkness from which
+reason recoils. Nor is the effort strange in one who, along with
+the purest conception of an immaterial spirit, still believed in
+the efficacy of legend and material symbol to reveal the truth
+which they veiled.<note place="foot">Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. pp. 275, 279;
+Jowett’s <hi rend="italic">Plato</hi>, i. p. 396; Pl. <hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi>
+85 <hi rend="small">C</hi>, <hi rend="small">D</hi>; 60 <hi rend="small">B</hi>, <hi rend="small">C</hi>; 69 C; <hi rend="italic">Meno</hi> 81 <hi rend="small">A</hi>;
+<hi rend="italic">Phaed.</hi> 114 <hi rend="small">D</hi>,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ μὲν οὖν τοιαῦτα διισχυρίσασθαι οὕτως ἔχειν, οὐ πρέπει
+νοῦν ἔχοντι ἀνδρί, κτλ.</foreign></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thespesius of Soli, a man of evil life, once fell from a height,
+was taken up for dead, but revived again on the third day, on
+the eve of his funeral. He came back to the living an altered
+man, after a marvellous experience. His soul, on escaping from
+the body, was swept along a sea of light among the stars.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Ser. Num. Vind.</hi> c. 22
+(563 <hi rend="small">C</hi>).</note> He
+saw other souls emerging in the form of fiery bubbles, which
+burst and gave forth a subtle form in the likeness of man.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi>
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εἶτα ῥηγνυμένης ἀτρέμα τῆς πομφόλυγος, ἐκβαίνειν τύπον
+ἐχούσας ἀνθρωποειδῆ, τὸν δ’ ὄγκον εὐσταλεῖς κτλ.</foreign></note> Three
+or four he recognised, and would have spoken to them, but they
+seemed delirious or senseless, and shrank away from him, forming
+in the end little companies of their own, who swept along in
+wild disordered movements, uttering strange cries of wailing or
+terror. The soul of an old acquaintance then hailed him and
+became his guide, pointing out that the souls of the really dead
+cast no shadow, being perfectly pellucid, surrounded by light.
+Yet some of them are marked with scales and weals and
+blotches. Adrasteia is the inevitable judge of all, and, through
+three ministers, three great classes of criminals receive their
+proper doom. Some are punished swiftly on earth, another
+class meet with heavier judgment in the shades. The utterly
+incurable are ruthlessly pursued by the Erinnys, and finally
+plunged in a dark abyss, of which the horrors might not be
+told. The second class undergo a fierce purgatorial cleansing, in
+which some spirits have all their stains wiped out and become
+clear and lustrous. But where evil is more obstinate, and
+passion again and again asserts its power, the soul long retains
+a colour appropriate to its peculiar vice. The mean avaricious
+<pb n="525"/><anchor id="Pg525"/>soul is dark and squalid; the cruel is blood-red; the envious
+violet and livid. Short of the worst eternal torture, souls
+with insatiable craving for fleshly delights, gravitate to a birth
+into low animal forms.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Ser. Num. Vind.</hi> c. 22
+(565).</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thespesius and his guide are then swept on wings of
+light to other and less gloomy scenes. Over the chasm of
+Forgetfulness, clothed in its recesses with flowers and herbs
+which exhale a fragrant odour, the opening through which
+Dionysus had passed to his place among the gods, floated a
+cloud of spirits like birds, drinking in the fragrance with
+mirth and gladness. On again they passed, till they came to
+a crater which received the flow of many-coloured streams,
+snow-white or rainbow-hued,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 22 (566),
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἔδοξεν ἀφορᾶν κρατῆρα μέγαν, εἰς δὲ τούτον ἐμβάλλοντα
+ῥεύματα τὸ μὲν ἀφροῦ θαλάσσης ἢ χιόνων λαμπρότερον κτλ.</foreign></note> and hard by was the oracle of
+Night and Selene, from which issue dreams and phantoms to
+wander among men. Then Thespesius was dazzled with the
+radiance which shot from the Delphic tripod upwards to the
+peaks of Parnassus; and, blinded by the radiance, he could
+only hear the shrill voice of a woman chanting a song which
+seemed to tell of the hour of his own death. The woman, his
+guide explained, was the Sibyl who dwells on the face of the
+moon. The sweep of the moon’s onward course prevented
+him catching the Sibyl’s words to the full, but he heard a
+prophecy of the desolation of Campania by the fires of Vesuvius,
+and the death of the emperor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Other scenes of punishment follow, among which Thespesius
+saw his own father rising from the abyss, covered with weals
+and marks of torture which had been inflicted for a long-buried
+crime. Finally, the friendly guide vanished, and
+Thespesius was forced onwards by dread spectral forms to
+witness fresh scenes of torment. The hypocrite who had
+hidden his vices under a veil of decorum was forced, with
+infinite pain of contortion, to turn out his inmost soul. The
+avaricious were plunged by daemons by turns in three lakes,
+one of boiling gold, one of freezing lead, and one of hardest
+iron. But the worst fate of all was reserved for those whose
+sins had been visited on their innocent descendants upon
+earth, who pursued them with curses, or clung around them
+<pb n="526"/><anchor id="Pg526"/>in clouds like bees or bats, keeping ever poignant the memory
+of transmitted guilt and suffering.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Ser. Num. Vind.</hi> c. 22
+(567 <hi rend="small">D</hi>),
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">πάντων δὲ πάσχειν ἔλεγεν οἰκτρότατα τὰς ἤδη δοκούσας ἀφεῖσθαι
+    τῆς Δίκης, εἶτ’ αὖθις συλλαμβανομένας· αὖται δ’ ἦσαν
+    ὧν εἴς τινας ἐκγόνους ἢ παῖδας ἡ ποινὴ περιῆλθεν κτλ.</foreign></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The vision of Timarchus, in the piece on the Genius of
+Socrates, has a rather different motive from that which inspired
+the vision of Thespesius. Thespesius came back with a
+message as to the endless consequences of sin in worlds
+beyond the senses, and the far-reaching responsibilities of
+the life on earth. The experiences of Timarchus in the
+cave of Trophonius were intended to teach the doctrine of
+the existence, apart from the lower powers akin to fleshly
+nature, of the pure intelligence or daemon, which, coming
+from the Divine world, can catch its voices and transmit
+them to the mortal life here below. Timarchus made the
+descent into the cave of Trophonius and spent in its weird
+darkness two nights and a day, during which he saw a wondrous
+revelation of the spirit-world.<note place="foot">Cf. Pausan. ix. 39, § 5; Philostr.
+<hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> viii. 19; Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Gen.
+Socr.</hi> c. 21, 22 (589, 590); cf. Gardner
+and Jevons, <hi rend="italic">Greek Antiq.</hi> pp. 267-8.</note> His higher part, escaping
+from the sutures of the head, emerged in pellucid ether.
+There was no trace of earthly scenery, but countless islands swept
+around him, gleaming with the shifting colours of lambent fire,
+amid tones coming from ethereal distances.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Gen. Socr.</hi> c. 22 (590),
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἀναβλέψας δὲ τὴν μὲν γῆν οὐδαμοῦ καθορᾶν, νήσους δὲ
+λαμπομένας μαλακῷ πυρί κτλ.</foreign></note> From a yawning
+abyss of surging darkness arose endless wailings and moans.
+An unseen guide explained to him the fourfold division of the
+universe and the boundaries of its provinces. High above all
+is the sphere of the One and the Invisible. Next in order is
+the region of pure mind, of which the Sun is lord. The third
+is the debatable land between pure intelligence and the sensible
+and mortal—the region of soul, whose mistress is the moon.
+Styx is the boundary between this lunar kingdom and the low
+world of matter, sin, and death. The three realms beneath
+the highest correspond to the three elements of our composite
+nature,—mind, soul, and body.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> (591).</note> This mortal life is a temporary
+and unequal partnership of the Divine reason with the lower
+appetites, which have their roots in the flesh. It is an exile,
+an imprisonment; it is also a probation of the higher part of
+human nature, and its escape comes to it by a twofold death.
+<pb n="527"/><anchor id="Pg527"/>The first, imperfect and incomplete, is the severance of soul
+from body in what men call death, the falling away of the
+gross wrappings of matter. This death is under the sway of
+Demeter. The second, under the care of Persephone, is a
+slower process, in which the ethereal reason, the true eternal
+personality of man, is finally released from association with
+the passionate and sensitive nature, which is akin to the bodily
+organism. After the first corporeal death, all souls wander
+for a time in the space between the moon and earth. In
+the vision of Timarchus, he saw over the chasm of darkness
+a host of stars with a curious variety of motion. Some
+shot up from the gulf with a straight decided impetus.
+Others wavered in deflexions to right or left, or, after an
+upward movement, plunged again into the abyss. These
+motions, as the invisible guide expounded, represent the
+various tendencies of souls, corresponding to the strength or
+weakness of the spiritual force within them. All souls have
+an element of the Divine reason, but it is variously blended
+with the baser elements in different natures. In some it
+becomes completely sunk and absorbed in the life of the
+senses. In others, the rational part holds itself above the
+lower bodily life, and maintains an almost separate existence.
+And yet there are natures in which the rational
+and irrational elements wage a long and indecisive conflict
+until, slowly, at last, the passions recognise their rightful
+master, and become obedient to the heavenly voice within.
+The debased and hopeless souls, rising for a moment after
+death, are repelled with fierce angry flashes by the moon,
+and fall back again to the world of sense and corruption, to
+undergo a second birth. The purer souls are received by her
+for a loftier destiny. In some, the pure spiritual part is finally
+released by the love of the Sun from the lower powers of the
+soul, which wither and fade away as the body does on earth.
+Others, still retaining the composite nature, though no longer
+tainted by the flesh, dwell in the moon as daemons, but often
+revisit the earth on various missions, to furnish inspiration to
+oracles and mysteries, to save men from crime or to punish,
+to help the struggling by land or sea. But even the daemons
+may fall from their high estate. If, in their duties of providence
+and succour, they show anger or favour or envy, they
+<pb n="528"/><anchor id="Pg528"/>may be thrust down once more into the purgatory of material
+form.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Fac. in Orb. Lun.</hi> c. 30.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It may well be that the unsympathetic critic will regard
+such an imaginative invasion of the unseen as a freak of
+lawless fancy, hardly worth chronicling. And like all similar
+attempts, the apocalypse of Plutarch may easily be treated
+with an airy ridicule. To a more serious criticism, it seems
+vitiated by a radical inconsistency. Starting with the principle
+of the absolutely immaterial nature of the immortal part of
+man, it yet depicts its future existence in the warmest colours
+of the world of sense. Its struggles, its tortures, its beatitude
+are described in terms which might seem fitting only to a
+corporeal nature. All this is true; and yet the answer which
+Plutarch would probably have made to any such cavils is very
+simple. How can you speak of pure disembodied spirit at all,
+how can you imagine it, save in the symbolism of ordinary
+speech? Refine and subtilise your language to the very
+uttermost, and it will still retain associations and reminiscences,
+however faint and distant, of the material world. Myth and
+symbol are necessary to any expression of human thought
+alike about God and the future of the soul. The Infinite
+Spirit and the future destiny of the finite, which is His child,
+are equally beyond the range of human sense and speech.
+When the human spirit has exhausted all its efforts of
+imagination to pierce the darkness of the world beyond the
+grave, it takes refuge in some religious system which claims
+to have a divine message and speaks in the tones of another
+world. The voice from eternity came to troubled heathendom
+from Egypt and the East.
+</p>
+
+</div><div type="chapter" n="3" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="529"/><anchor id="Pg529"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="III. The old Roman religion"/><index index="pdf" level1="III. The old Roman religion"/>
+<head>CHAPTER III</head>
+
+<head type="sub">THE OLD ROMAN RELIGION</head>
+
+<p>
+It is well known that, from the second Punic War to the
+revival of Augustus, old Roman religion was falling into
+decay. Yet sweeping assertions about the religious condition
+of any age must he taken with some reserve. They are
+often unsafe about a contemporary society; they must be still
+more so with regard to a society which is known to us almost
+entirely through the literary remains of a comparatively small
+cultivated class. Even among that limited circle, we can
+know only the opinions of a few, and hardly anything of its
+silent members, still less of the feelings of its women and
+dependents. A deep shadow rests on those remote granges
+and quiet country towns in Samnium or Lombardy where
+character remained untainted in the days of Nero or Domitian,
+and where the religion of Numa long defied the penal edicts of
+Theodosius and Honorius. Lucretius, whose mission it was to
+liberate men from the terrors of old Latin and Etrurian superstition,
+was not contending against an imaginary foe. The
+sombre enthusiasm which he throws into the conflict reveals
+the strength of the enemy. The grandmother of Atticus and
+Terentia, the wife of Cicero, were timorous devotees. Among
+the aristocratic augurs of Cicero’s day there were firm believers
+in the sacred birds; and Lentulus, a confederate of Catiline,
+trusted implicitly in the oracles of the Sibyl.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. p. 67.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still there can be no doubt that in the governing and thinking
+class of the last century of the Republic, scepticism and
+even open contempt for the old religion were rampant. Many
+causes were at work to produce this decadence of old Roman
+<pb n="530"/><anchor id="Pg530"/>faith. It was hardly possible for the cultivated Roman of the
+days of Scipio Aemilianus, or of Cicero and Caesar, who had
+fought and travelled in many lands, and studied their
+mythologies and philosophies, to acquiesce in the faith of the
+simple farmers of Latium, who founded the Ambarvalia and
+Lupercalia, who offered the entrails of a dog to Robigus<note place="foot">W. Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Festivals</hi>, p. 89.</note> and
+milk to Pales and Silvanus, who worshipped Jupiter Feretrius
+under the mountain oak.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 229.</note> Since those far-off days, Latium
+had come under many influences, and added many new deities
+to her pantheon. The gods of Hellas had come to be identified
+with the gods of Rome, or to share their honours. Syncretism
+had been at work in Italy centuries before the days of Plutarch
+and Aristides. And the old Italian deities, who had only a
+shadowy personality, with no poetry of legend to invest them
+with human interest, melted into one another or into forms of alien
+mythology. Greek literature became familiar to the educated
+from the Hannibalic war, and a writer like Euripides, who had
+a great popularity, must have influenced many by the audacious
+skill with which he lowered the dignity and dimmed the
+radiance of the great figures of Greek legend. The comic
+stage improved upon the lesson. Early in the second century
+Ennius translated the Sacred Histories of Euhemerus, and
+familiarised his countrymen with a theory which reduced
+Jupiter and Saturn, Faunus and Hercules, to the stature of
+earthly kings and warriors. But Greek philosophy was the
+great solvent of faith. The systems of the New Academy and
+Epicurus were openly or insidiously hostile to religious belief.
+But they had not so long and powerful a reign over the Roman
+mind as Stoicism, and, although the earlier Stoicism extended
+a philosophic patronage to popular religion, it may be doubted
+whether it stimulated faith. There was indeed a certain
+affinity between Stoical doctrine and old Roman religion, as
+there was between Stoic morals and old Roman character. In
+resolving the gods by allegory and pseudo-scientific theory into
+various potencies of the great World-Soul, the follower of Zeno
+did not seem to do much violence to the vaguely personified
+abstractions of the old Latin creed. Above all, with the exception
+of Panaetius, the Stoic doctors did not throw doubt
+on the powers of divination and augury, so essential an element
+<pb n="531"/><anchor id="Pg531"/>in the religion of Rome. The power to read the future was a
+natural corollary to the providence and benevolence of the
+gods.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Div.</hi> i. 5, 9, existimo ...
+si Dii sint, esse qui divinent; i, 38,
+82; si sunt Dii, neque ante declarant
+hominibus quae futura sint, aut non
+diligunt homines, aut quid eventurum
+sit ignorant. This argument is attributed
+to Chrysippus and Diogenes in ii.
+49, 101.</note> Yet, although the Stoic might strive to discover the
+germ of truth, he did not conceal his contempt for the husk of
+mythology in which it was hidden, and for many of the practices
+of worship.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Frag.</hi> 39 (Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. D.</hi>
+vi. 11). See Varro’s opinion, <hi rend="italic">ib.</hi> vi. 5.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quintus Scaevola and Varro applied all the forces of subtle
+antiquarianism and reverence to sustain the ancestral faith.
+But they also drew the line sharply between the religion of
+philosophy and the religion of the State. And Varro went so
+far as to say that the popular religion was the creation of early
+statesmen,<note place="foot"><anchor id="Note531-3"/><hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>, vi. 4.</note> and that if the work had to be done again, it might
+be done better in the light of philosophy. The Stoic in
+Cicero, as Seneca did after him, treated the tales of the gods
+as mere anile superstition.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Nat. D.</hi> ii. 28, 70; cf. Sen.
+<hi rend="italic">Frag.</hi> 39, cf. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, 47.</note> It is probable that such was the
+tone, in their retired debates, of the remarkable circle which
+surrounded Scipio and Laelius. Panaetius, their philosophic
+guide, had less sympathy than any great Stoic with popular
+theology.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Div.</hi> i. 3, 6.</note> Polybius gave small place to Providence in human
+affairs, and regarded Roman religion as the device of statesmen
+to control the masses by mystery and terror.<note place="foot">Polyb. vi. 56,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ μοι δοκεῖ τὸ παρὰ τοῖς ἄλλοις ἀνθρώποις ὀνειδιζόμενον
+τοῦτο συνέχειν τὰ Ῥωμαίων πράγματα, λέγω δὲ τὴν δεισιδαιμονίαν,
+ἐπὶ τοσοῦτον γὰρ ἐκτετραγῴδεται ... ὥστε μὴ καταλιπεῖν ὑπερβολἠν, κτλ.</foreign></note> Yet these men
+were enthusiastic champions of a system which they regarded
+as irrational, but which was consecrated by immemorial
+antiquity. Laelius defended the institutions of Numa in a
+speech of golden eloquence which moved the admiration of
+Cicero, just as Symmachus defended them five centuries later
+before the council of Valentinian.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Nat. Deor.</hi> iii 17, 43, in
+illa aureola oratiuncula, cf. Sym. <hi rend="italic">Rel.</hi> iii.</note> The divorce between
+esoteric belief and official profession must have insidiously
+lowered the moral tone of those who were at once thinkers
+and statesmen. Such a false position struck some of the
+speakers in Cicero’s theological dialogues, and it makes his own
+opinions an enigma.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. p. 60.</note> The external and utilitarian attitude to
+<pb n="532"/><anchor id="Pg532"/>the State religion hardly secured even punctual or reverent
+conformity in the last age of the Republic. Divination and
+augury had become mere engines of political intrigue, and the
+aristocratic magistrate could hardly take the omens without a
+smile. Varro could not repress the fear that the old religion,
+on which he expended such a wealth of learning, might perish
+from mere negligence.<note place="foot">Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. D.</hi> vi. 2; cf. Cic. <hi rend="italic">De
+Leg.</hi> ii. 13, 33, dubium non est quin
+haec disciplina et ars augurum evanuerit
+jam et vetustate et negligentia.</note> The knowledge of liturgical usage
+began to fade, and Varro had to recall the very names of
+forgotten gods. An ancient priesthood of the highest rank
+remained unfilled for seventy years.<note place="foot">D. Cass. liv. 36; cf. W. Fowler’s
+<hi rend="italic">Rom. Fest.</hi> p. 343, Preller, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Mythol.</hi>
+p. 24.</note> Scores of the most
+venerable temples were allowed to fall into ruin,<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> c. 30.</note> and ancient
+brotherhoods like the Titii and Fratres Arvales are hardly
+heard of for generations before the reforms of the Augustan age.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is not within the scope of this work to enter minutely
+into the subject of that great effort of reform or reaction.
+It is commonly said that the cool imperial statesman had
+chiefly political ends in view, and especially the aggrandisement
+and security of the principate. And certainly Ovid, who
+strove to interest his countrymen in the revival of their religion,
+does not display much seriousness in religion or morals. He
+treats as lightly the amours of Olympus as the intrigues of
+the Campus Martius and the Circus. Yet it may well have
+been that after the terrible orgies of civil strife through which
+the Roman world had passed, Augustus was the convinced
+representative of a repentant wish to return to the old paths.
+The Roman character, through all wild aberrations of a trying
+destiny, was an enduring type. And Augustus, if he may have
+indulged in impious revels in his youth, which recall the
+wanton freaks of Alcibiades,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 70, coena
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">δωδεκάθεος</foreign>: cf.
+Thuc. vi. c. 28, § 1.</note> had two great characteristics of
+the old Roman mind, formalism and superstition. He had
+an infinite faith in dreams and omens. He would begin no
+serious business on the Nones.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> c. 91, 92.</note> When he had to pronounce
+a funeral oration over his sister, Octavia, he had a curtain
+drawn before the corpse, lest the eyes of the pontiff might be
+polluted by the sight of death.<note place="foot">D. Cass. liv. 35 <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi></note> We may think that his
+<pb n="533"/><anchor id="Pg533"/>religious revival was not inspired by real religious sentiment.
+Yet it is well to remind ourselves that old Roman religion,
+while it consecrated and solemnised the scenes and acts of
+human life, was essentially a formal religion; the <hi rend="italic">opus
+operatum</hi> was the important thing. Its business was to avert
+the anger or win the favour of dim unearthly powers; it was
+not primarily to purify or elevate the soul. Above all, it was
+interwoven from the beginning with the whole fabric of society
+and the State. Four centuries after Augustus was in his
+grave, it was only by a violent wrench, which inflicted infinite
+torture even on pagan mystics of the Neoplatonist school, that
+Rome was severed from the gods who had been the guardians
+and partners of her career for twelve hundred years. The
+altar of Victory which Augustus had placed in the Senate-house,
+and before which twelve generations of senators after
+him offered their prayers for the chief of the State, the most
+sacred symbol of the pagan Empire, was only removed after a
+fierce, obstinate struggle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The religious revival of Augustus may not have aroused
+any deep religious sentiment; that, as we shall see, was to
+come from a different source. But it gave a fresh life to the
+formal religion of the State, which maintained itself till within
+a few years before the invasion of Alaric. The title Augustus
+which the new emperor assumed was one which, to the
+Roman mind, associated him with the majesty of Jupiter and
+the sanctity of all holy places and solemn rites.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Fasti</hi>, i. 609, hic socium
+summo cum Jove nomen habet. Sancta
+vocant augusta patres; augusta vocantur
+Templa, sacerdotum rite dicata
+manu.</note> It was
+the beginning of that theocratic theory of monarchy which
+was to culminate, under the influence of Sun-worship, in the
+third century, and to propagate itself into ages far removed
+from the worship of Jupiter or the Sun. Although
+the counsels of Maecenas, recorded by Dion Cassius, may be
+apocryphal, Augustus acted in their spirit.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lii. 36,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ μὲν θεῖον πάντῃ πάντως αὐτός τε σέβου καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους
+τιμᾷν ἀνάγκαζε</foreign>.</note> As triumvir he
+had raised a shrine to Isis,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xlvii. 15 <hi rend="italic">ad fin.</hi></note> as emperor he frowned on alien
+worships.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> liv. 6.</note> His mission was to restore the ancient religion of
+Latium. He burnt two thousand books of spurious augury,
+retaining only the Sibylline oracles.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> c. 31.</note> He restored the ancient
+<pb n="534"/><anchor id="Pg534"/>temples, some of them, like those of Jupiter Feretrius and
+Juno Sospita, coeval with the Roman State, and encouraged
+his friends to do the same for other venerable monuments of
+devotion. The most lavish gifts of gold and jewels were
+dedicated in the Capitoline temples. The precision of ancient
+augury was restored. Ancient priesthoods which had been
+long vacant were filled up, and the sacred colleges were raised
+in dignity and wealth.<note place="foot">D. Cass. li. 20.</note> Special care was taken to recall the
+vestals to the chaste dignity from which they had fallen for a
+hundred years. Before taking his seat, each senator was
+required to make a prayer, with an offering of incense and
+wine before the altar. Three worships, specially connected
+with the fortunes of Augustus or his race,—those of Venus
+Genetrix, Mars Ultor, and the Palatine Apollo,—were revived
+with added splendour.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. 87.</note> The emperor paid special attention
+to the ancient sacred colleges, such as the Salii and Arvales,
+which went back to days far earlier than the Republic. Amid
+all the cares of State, he attended their meetings punctually.
+The dangerous right of co-optation was quietly withdrawn, till
+the members in the end owed their appointment to the sacerdotal
+chief of the State.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Röm. Staatsr.</hi> ii. p.
+1024.</note> The colleges became the most courtly
+and deferential supports of the prince’s power. Prayers for
+his safety soon found a place in their antique litanies. It has
+been said with some truth that the Salii and Arvales seem to
+be thinking more of the emperors than of the gods. The
+colleges had a courtly memory for all anniversaries in the
+imperial family. The Arval brothers achieved the infamy of
+complimenting Nero on his return after the murder of Agrippina,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2042; cf. 2444 and 2034.
+Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. p 363.</note>
+and made vows of equal fervour for all the emperors
+of the year 69.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2051, 2.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was through the chief pontificate that the emperors
+did most at once to fortify and dignify their secular power,
+and to prolong the reign of the old Latin religion. It was
+the highest religious dignity of ancient Rome. The college of
+which the emperor, as Pontifex Maximus, was head exercised
+a supreme and comprehensive control over the whole field
+of religion.<note place="foot">Momms. <hi rend="italic">Röm. Staatsr.</hi> ii. p. 1022.</note> It was charged with the duty of maintaining
+<pb n="535"/><anchor id="Pg535"/>the ancestral purity and exactness of the national worship,
+and of repressing tendencies to innovation and the adoption
+of alien rites. It selected the virgins who guarded the
+eternal fire, and sat in judgment on erring vestals and their
+betrayers. It had special jurisdiction in questions of adoption,
+burial, and sacred sites.<note place="foot">Liv. i. 20.</note> From Augustus every emperor
+was also chief pontiff;<note place="foot">Habel, <hi rend="italic">De Pontif. Rom.</hi> p. 45.</note> even the Christian princes from
+Constantine to Valentinian and Valens bear the honoured
+title in the inscriptions, and accepted the pontifical robes.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1080, 1117; cf. Zosim. iv. 36;
+Amm. Marc. xvi. 10; Sym. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> x. 54.</note> Thus
+the emperors strove in their religious attributes to connect
+themselves with the sacred tradition of Numa and the Roman
+kings. And, as time went on, the imperial house claimed a
+growing share in the pontifical honours. Nero, indeed, had
+been a member of all the sacred colleges as well as chief
+pontiff.<note place="foot">Habel, <hi rend="italic">De Pontif. Rom.</hi> p. 13.</note> But down to the reign of Vespasian only one of the
+<q>Caesares</q> could belong to the sacred college. But his sons
+Titus and Domitian were co-opted to the pontificate and all
+the priestly colleges before his death.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> pp. 16, 17, 62; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 932,
+1984.</note> From Hadrian the
+pontificate and all the highest sacerdotal honours were held by
+all designated successors of the emperor.<note place="foot">Habel, p. 62.</note> Antoninus Pius has
+the insignia of four priestly colleges on his coins.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 24.</note> M. Aurelius
+was one of the Salian brotherhood in his eighth year,<note place="foot">Jul. Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant. Phil.</hi> c. 4.</note> and was
+received into all the colleges at nineteen.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 6.</note> Commodus had
+reached the same sacred honours before he assumed the toga,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 16; Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Com.</hi> c. 12
+(a. 175).</note> and
+in five years more was Pontifex Maximus. Thus deeply had
+the policy of Augustus sunk into the minds of his successors.
+It is little wonder that never in the great days of the Republic
+were the forms of ancient religion more scrupulously observed
+than in the reign of M. Aurelius.<note place="foot">Jul. Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Ant.</hi> c. 13.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Private opinion after the Augustan revival greatly varied
+as to matters of faith. Men like the elder Pliny and Seneca
+scoffed at anthropomorphic religion. Men like Juvenal
+and Tacitus maintained a wavering attitude, with probably a
+receding faith. Others like Suetonius were rapacious collectors of
+every scrap of the miraculous. The emperors who succeeded
+<pb n="536"/><anchor id="Pg536"/>Augustus were, with the exception of Nero, loyal supporters
+and protectors of the religion of the State. Tiberius, although
+personally careless of religion, displayed a scrupulous respect
+for ancient usage in filling up the ancient priesthoods, and in
+guarding the Sibylline verses from interpolations.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 16. Yet he is said
+to be <hi rend="italic">circa deos negligentior</hi>, c. 69.</note> He also
+frowned on the imported rites of Egypt.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 36.</note> Claudius, at once
+pedantic and superstitious, revived venerable rites of the days
+of Tullus Hostilius, and, when an ill-omened bird alighted on
+the temple of Jupiter, as supreme pontiff, the emperor pronounced
+the solemn form of expiation before the assembled
+people.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> c. 22; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi>
+xii. 8.</note> Nero, and the Neronian competitors for the Empire,
+in the fierce conflict which followed his death, were, indeed,
+often, though not always, careless of ancient rite, but they were
+all the slaves of superstition.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, c. 7, 8, 12; <hi rend="italic">Vitell.</hi> c.
+5, 11; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 87.</note> The Flavians and Antonines
+were religious conservatives of the spirit of Augustus. There
+is a monument to Vespasian of the year 78 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> as <q>the
+restorer of temples and public ceremonies.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2364.</note> The restoration
+of the Capitol, which had been burned down in the civil war,
+was one of the first tasks of his reign. And the ceremony
+made such an impression on the imagination of the youthful
+Tacitus, that he has recorded with studied care the stately
+and accurate ritual of olden time which was observed by the
+emperor.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 53.</note> Domitian carried on the restoration on even a
+more splendid scale; he was a devotee of Minerva, and a
+rigorous vindicator of old ascetic religious law.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> c. 5, 15.</note> The emperor
+Hadrian, whose character is an enigma of contrasts, to judge by
+his last famous <hi rend="italic">jeu d’esprit</hi> on his death-bed, probably died a
+sceptic. Yet his biographer tells us that he was a careful
+guardian of the ancient ritual.<note place="foot">Ael. Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 22.</note> The archaistic fashion in
+literary taste, which had begun in the first century, and which
+culminated in Hadrian’s reign, favoured and harmonised with
+a scrupulous observance of ancient forms in religion.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 16, § 5; Plin. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> vi. 21,
+§ 1; Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, p. 96; Martha,
+<hi rend="italic">Moralistes</hi>, p. 184 sq.</note> The
+genius of one too early taken away has done more than a
+legion of historic critics to picture for us the sad, dutiful piety
+of a spirit of the Antonine age, steeped in philosophies which
+<pb n="537"/><anchor id="Pg537"/>made the passing moment of vivid artistic perception the
+great end of life, yet still instinct with the old Roman love
+of immemorial forms at the harvest gathering or the yearly
+offering to the dead members of the household.<note place="foot">Pater, <hi rend="italic">Marius</hi>, chap. ii., xxvii.</note> The cheerless
+negation of Epicurus, and the equally withering theology
+of the Stoics, could not weaken in Roman hearts the spell of
+ancestral pieties which clustered round the vault near the grey
+old country house of the race, looking down on the Tyrrhene
+sea, or the awe of ancient grove or spring sacred to Silvanus
+and the Nymphs, or the calm, chastened joy in a ritual in which
+every act was dictated by a love of ceremonial cleanness and
+exactness, and redolent of an immemorial past. In such a
+household, and in such an atmosphere, the two great Antonines
+were reared. The first, who was before all else an honest
+country gentleman, fond of hunting, fishing, and the gladness
+of the vintage at Lorium, never failed to perform all due
+sacrifices unless he was ill. His coins bear the pictured
+legends of the infancy of Rome.<note place="foot">Jul. Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Ant. P.</hi> c. 11.</note> M. Aurelius was famous
+as a boy for his knowledge of Roman ritual. Enrolled in the
+college of the Salii in his eighth year, he performed all its
+sacred offices with perfect composure, reciting from memory,
+with no one to dictate the form, every word of the ancient
+liturgy which had in his generation become almost unintelligible.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 4.</note>
+In the terror of the Marcomannic invasion he
+delayed his departure for the seat of war to summon around
+him all the priests; he had the city purified in solemn,
+decorous fashion, not excluding even the rites of alien lands;
+and for seven days the images of the gods were feasted on
+their couches along all the streets.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 13.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The emperors from Augustus found religion a potent ally of
+sovereignty, and the example of the master of the world was a
+great force. Yet it may well be doubted whether, in the matter
+of religious conservatism, the emperors were not rather following
+than leading public opinion. Gods were in those times being
+created by the score; apotheosis was in the air from the days of
+Nero to the days of the Severi. Petronius, with an exaggeration
+which has a certain foundation in fact, affirms that in Croton
+you could more readily light upon a god than on a man.<note place="foot">Petron. c. 17.</note> The
+<pb n="538"/><anchor id="Pg538"/>elder Pliny uses almost the same strength of language. The
+grumbler in Lucian indignantly complains of the fashion in
+which the ancient gods of Olympus are being overshadowed by
+the divine <hi rend="italic">parvenus</hi> of every clime. And, as we shall presently
+see, the inscriptions reveal an immense propaganda of worships
+in tone and spirit apparently hostile to the old religion of the
+Latin race. Yet the inscriptions also show that the old gods
+had really little to fear from the new. A survey of the index
+to almost any volume of the Corpus will convince the student
+that the Trinity of the Capitol,—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva,—that
+Hercules and Silvanus, the Nymphs, Semo Sancus and
+Dea Dia, Mars and Fortuna, so far from being neglected, were
+apparently more popular than ever.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. p. 1160 sqq.; xii. p.
+924 sqq.; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> iii.; <hi rend="italic">Ind.</hi> pp. 25,
+29, 30, 33.</note> In an age of growing
+monotheism the King of the gods was, of course, still supreme
+in his old ascendency. Jupiter is worshipped under many
+titles; he is often coupled or identified with some provincial
+deity of ancient fame.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 3070, 3077; 2383; iii.
+2804, 5787; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 1244, 1245.</note> But Jupiter is everywhere. The
+Lord of the thunder and the tempest has shrines on the
+high passes of the Apennines or the Alps,<note place="foot">Liv. xxi. 38, quem in summo sacratum
+vertice Poeninum montani appellant;
+<hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 231-6, 5028, 1271.</note> and soldiers or
+travellers leave the memorials of their gratitude for his
+protection on perilous journeys.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 1267, 1271.</note> The women of Campanian
+towns go in procession to implore him to send rain.<note place="foot">Petron. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> 44.</note> Antoninus
+Pius built a temple to Juno Sospita of Lanuvium, where the
+goddess had a sacred grove, and a worship of great antiquity.<note place="foot">Jul. Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Ant. P.</hi> c. 8;
+Preller, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Myth.</hi> p. 185.</note>
+The Quinquatria of Minerva were not only celebrated with
+special honour by Domitian, but by large and powerful classes
+who owned her divine patronage, physicians and artists, orators
+and poets.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Dom.</hi> c. 4.</note> Some of the old Latin deities seem to have even
+grown in popularity under the early Empire. Hercules, the
+god of plenty, strong truth, and good faith, whose legend is
+intertwined with the most venerable names in Roman story,
+has his altars and monuments everywhere.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 1561, 1590; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii.
+4316; iii. 1162.</note> Combining with
+his own native Latin character the poetic prestige of his
+brother of Greek legend, he became the symbol of world-<pb n="539"/><anchor id="Pg539"/>wide conquest, and was associated in the end with the triumph
+of the <q>unconquered</q> Mithra. His image is stamped upon the
+coins of some of the emperors. Septimius Severus, Caracalla,
+and Diocletian took him for their great divine patron and
+ensample.<note place="foot">Preller, p. 437.</note> Silvanus, too, the god of the primeval forest, and,
+when the forest had receded, the god of the shepherd and the
+farmer, the guardian of boundaries, acquired a strange vogue
+in what was eminently an age of cities. One is apt, however,
+to forget sometimes that it was an age which had also a charming
+country life. A Roman cavalry officer in Britain has left
+a memorial of his gratitude to Silvanus for the capture of a
+wild boar of surpassing size and strength,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 1603.</note> which had long
+defied the hunter. In one of the forest cantons of the Alps a
+procurator of the imperial estates inscribed his gratitude in
+a pretty set of verses to the god of the wilds, whose image
+was enshrined in the fork of a sacred ash.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1613.</note> It is the record
+of many a day passed in lonely forest tracks, coupled with a
+prayer to be restored safely to Italian fields and the gardens
+of Rome. The nymphs and river gods had all their old honours.
+Chapels and hostelries, in the days of Pliny, rose on the banks
+of the Clitumnus, where the votaries easily combined pleasure
+with religious duty. The nymphs receive votive thanks for
+the discovery of hidden springs, or for the reappearance of some
+fountain long dried up.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1632, 1634, 1637, 5758a.</note> Aesculapius, who had been naturalised
+in Italy since the beginning of the third century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, sprang
+to a foremost place in the age of the Antonines. Whether it
+was <q>an age of valetudinarians,</q> as has been said, may be
+doubtful; but it was an age eagerly in quest of the health
+which so often comes from the quiet mind. Whatever we
+may think of the powers of the old Olympians, there can be
+no doubt about the beneficent influence of the god of Epidaurus.
+He was summoned to Rome 300 years before Christ, and
+obtained a home in the island in the Tiber, where for ages he
+gave his succour in dreams. His worship spread far and wide,
+and was one of the last to succumb to the advance of the
+Church.<note place="foot">Preller, pp. 406-8; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1580, 1581,
+1572.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The unassailable permanence of the old religion may perhaps
+<pb n="540"/><anchor id="Pg540"/>be still more vividly realised in the long unbroken life of
+sacred colleges, such as the Salii and the Fratres Arvales. The
+Arval brotherhood was probably the oldest sacred corporation
+of Latium, as its liturgy, preserved in the Acta from the reign
+of Augustus to that of Gordian, is the oldest specimen of the
+Latin language.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2270; cf. Wordsworth,
+<hi rend="italic">Specimens of Early Latin</hi>, p. 158;
+<hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2024 sqq.</note> According to the legend, the first members
+were the twelve sons of Acca Larentia, the foster-mother of
+Romulus, and Romulus himself first held the dignity of master
+of the brotherhood.<note place="foot">Preller, p. 293.</note> Its patron goddess, Dea Dia,<note place="foot">Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Festivals</hi>, p. 74, 275.</note> was, as
+her very name suggests, one of those dim shadowy conceptions
+dear to old Roman awe, who was worshipped in the still
+solitude of ancient groves, on whose trunks no axe of iron
+might ever ring,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2059, ob inlatum ferrum,
+etc.</note> a power as elusive and multiform to picturing
+fancy as the secret forces which shot up the corn ear from the
+furrow. The whole tone of the antique ritual savours of a time
+when the Latin race was a tribe of farmers, believing with a simple
+faith that the yearly increase of their fields depended on the
+favour of secret unearthly powers. The meetings of the college
+took place on three days in May, the precise dates being fixed and
+solemnly announced by their master on the 3rd of January.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> vi. 2040, 2041, 2043; Preller,
+p. 294; Oldenberg, <hi rend="italic">De Sacris Fr. Arv.</hi>
+p. 5.</note>
+The festival began and ended in the master’s house at Rome, the
+intermediate day being spent in a sacred grove on the right bank
+of the Tiber, about four miles from the city. There was much
+feasting, at which the brethren were attended by the Camilli,
+four sons of high-born senators. Corn of the new and the
+preceding year was touched and blessed; libations and incense
+were offered to the goddess, and all the rites were performed
+with many changes of costume, which were rigidly observed.<note place="foot">Oldenberg, p. 9.</note>
+In the ceremonies which took place in the grove, an expiatory
+sacrifice of two porkers and a white cow was always offered,
+to atone for the use of any iron implement, or other infringement
+of the ancient rubric.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2086.</note> Fat lambs were offered in
+sacrifice to Dea Dia, and ancient earthen vessels of rude make,
+resembling those of the age of Numa, were adored upon the
+altar.<note place="foot">Boissier, i. p. 369; Oldenberg, p.
+41.</note> Ears of corn, plucked in some neighbouring field, were
+<pb n="541"/><anchor id="Pg541"/>blessed and passed from the hand of one member to another,
+and back again in reverse order, and, at last, in the closed
+temple, along with solemn dancing, the famous chant was intoned
+from ancient scrolls, the words of which had long become
+strange even to the antiquary. After another meal in the hall
+of the brotherhood, the members passed on to the circus and
+gave the signal for the races to begin.<note place="foot">Boissier, i. p. 374; Preller, p. 295.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This ritual, so little heard of before the time of Augustus,
+is chiefly known to us from the Acta which have been recovered
+from the site of the ancient grove. The monuments of it
+extend from the reign of Augustus to the year 241 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2023-2113.</note>
+Members of the highest aristocracy and princes of the imperial
+house appear on its lists. Its membership was a high distinction,
+and was sometimes conferred by the potent recommendation
+of the emperor.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2056, ex tabella missa Imp.
+Vesp. cooptamus, etc.</note> The college evidently became a
+great support of the imperial power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The emperors were elected <hi rend="italic">magistri</hi> of the College, and we
+can read that Caligula, Nero, Vespasian, and Titus were present
+at its meetings. In the opening days of January the most
+solemn vows are made in old Roman fashion for the emperor’s
+safety, to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, to Salus and Dea Dia,
+and they are duly paid by offerings of oxen with gilded horns.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2024.</note>
+So servile or so devoted to the throne was the brotherhood,
+that their prayers were offered with equal fervour for three
+emperors in the awful year 69 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2051.</note> The vows made for
+Galba in the first week of January were alertly transferred to
+the cause of Otho the day after Galba’s murder.<note place="foot">Jan. 16, 69 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi></note> The college
+met to sacrifice in honour of Otho’s pontificate on the day
+(March 14) on which he set out to meet his doom in the battle
+on the Po. Thirteen days after his death, while the spring air
+was still tainted with the rotting heaps on the plain of Bedriacum,
+vows as fervent or as politic were registered for Vitellius.
+In the summer of the following year, the arrival of Vespasian in
+the capital was celebrated by the Arval brothers with sacrifices
+to Jupiter, Juno, Minerva and Fortuna Redux.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2052.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The college, as a matter of course, paid due honour to
+the emperor’s birthday and all important anniversaries in his
+<pb n="542"/><anchor id="Pg542"/>family. It is interesting to see how for years the Neronian
+circle, the Othos and Vitellii, along with Valerii and Cornelii,
+appear in all the records of the college.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2040, 2041.</note> It was apparently
+devoted to Nero. The brothers celebrate his birthday and all
+the civic and sacerdotal honours heaped upon him.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2039.</note> They make
+vows for his wife Octavia, and soon after, for the safety of
+Poppaea in childbirth. The matricide dreaded to return from
+Campania after his unnatural crime, but his admirers knew well
+the abasement of the Roman aristocracy, and promised him an
+enthusiastic reception. The Arval brotherhood, which then
+included a Regulus and a Memmius, redeemed the promise,
+and voted costly sacrifices for his safe restoration to the
+capital.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2042.</note> They execrate the secret plots against his sacred
+person, and offer thanksgiving for the detection of the Pisonian
+conspiracy.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2044; cf. 2029 (Caligula).</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The extant prayers and congratulations for the safety of
+Vespasian are much more quiet and restrained than those for
+his cruel son Domitian.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2064, 2067.</note> The public joy at Domitian’s
+safe return from ambiguous victories in Germany or Dacia is
+faithfully re-echoed, and effusive supplications are recorded for
+his safety from all peril and for the eternity of the Empire whose
+bounds he has enlarged. There is a sincerer tone in the prayers,
+in the spring of 101, for the safe return of Trajan, when he was
+setting out for his first campaign on the Danube, and on his
+home-coming four years later.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2074.</note> The Arval records of Hadrian’s
+reign are chiefly noteworthy for his letters to the college,
+recommending his friends for election.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2078.</note> In the reign of
+Antoninus Pius the Acta register those perfervid acclamations
+which meet us in the later Augustan histories:<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 2086; cf. Flav. Vop. <hi rend="italic">Probus</hi>, c. 12.</note>—<q>O nos
+felices qui te Imperatorem videmus; Di te servent in perpetuo;
+juvenis triumphis, senex Imperator!</q> The young M. Aurelius
+is first mentioned in 155 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> Probably the sincerest utterance
+in the Arval liturgies is the petition for his safety, and
+that of L. Verus, from peril in the years when the Quadi and
+Marcomanni swept down through Rhaetia and the Julian
+Alps to the shores of the Adriatic.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2092.</note>
+</p>
+    
+<pb n="543"/><anchor id="Pg543"/>
+
+<p>
+It was thus that the antique ritual of a rustic brotherhood
+was converted into a potent support of the imperial power.
+No part of the Augustan revival was perhaps so successful.
+Probably few of the emperors, or of the aristocratic brothers
+who intoned the litany for the safety of the imperial house,
+had much faith in its efficacy. But the ceremony linked the
+principate with the most venerable traditions of Latium, and
+with Romulus the first master of the college. When we read
+the minute and formal record of these coarse sacrifices and
+rude, fantastic rites, with the chanting of prayers no longer
+understood, we are amazed at the prolongation for so many
+ages of religious ideas which the Roman mind might appear to
+have outgrown. Yet in such inquiries there is often a danger
+of treating society as a uniform mass, moving together along
+the same lines, and permeated through all its strata by the
+same influences. In another chapter we have shown that the
+masses were probably never so superstitious as in the second
+century. And the singular thing is that the influx of foreign
+religions, due to the wide conquests of Rome, never to the end
+seems to have shaken the supreme attachment of the people
+to their ancient gods. It is true that the drift towards
+monotheism was felt even among the crowd. But while the
+educated might find expression for that tendency in the adoration
+of Isis or the Sun, the dim monotheism of the people turned to
+the glorification of Jupiter. Dedications to him are the most
+numerous in all lands. He is often linked with other gods or all
+the gods,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 5788; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1245, 1290.</note> but he is always supreme. And, while he is the lord
+of tempest and thunder,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1238, Fulguratori, 1240, 1271,
+Jovi O. M. tempestatum potenti.</note> he is also addressed by epithets which
+show that he is becoming a moral and spiritual power. On
+many a stone he appears as the governor and preserver of all
+things, monitor, guardian, and heavenly patron, highest and
+best of the heavenly hierarchy.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii, 1032, 1948, 1590; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi>
+1269, 1248, 1225, 1269; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii.
+1066.</note> Yet it is equally clear that
+other gods are worshipped in the same spirit as of old. Roman
+religion was essentially practical. Prayer and vow were the
+means to win temporal blessings. The gods were expected, in
+return for worship, to be of use to the devotee. It is evident
+from the inscriptions that this conception of religion was as
+<pb n="544"/><anchor id="Pg544"/>prevalent in the age of the Antonines, or of the oriental princes,
+as it was under the Republic. The sailor still offers thanks
+for his preservation to Neptune and the gods of the sea.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1335.</note> The
+successful merchant still honours Mercury.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1410.</note> Minerva Memor
+receives thanks for succour in sickness. A lady of Placentia
+even pays her vows for the recovery of her hair.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1428, 1429, restitutione facta sibi capillorum.</note> The reappearance
+of a hidden spring is still attributed to the grace of
+the Nymphs.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1634.</note> And in many a temple the healing power of
+Aesculapius is acknowledged by grateful devotees.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 1572, 1576.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A more difficult problem is presented by the attitude of the
+cultivated class to the old mythologies. Since the days of
+Xenophanes and of Plato, philosophy had revolted against the
+degradation of the Divine character by ancient legend. It had
+taught for ages the unity of the mysterious Power or Goodness
+which lies behind the shifting scene of sense. Moreover,
+philosophy for generations had deserted the heights of speculative
+inquiry, and addressed itself to the task of applying the
+spiritual truth which the schools had won to the problems of
+practical religion and human life. Alike in Cicero, in Seneca,
+in Plutarch, and M. Aurelius, there are conceptions of God and
+the worship due to Him, of prayer, of the relation of conduct
+to religion, which seem irreconcilable with conformity to the
+old religion of Rome. How could a man, nourished on such
+spiritual ideas and refined by a thousand years of growing
+culture, take part in a gross materialistic worship, and even
+gallantly defend it against all assailants?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The conformity of highly instructed minds to ancient
+systems which their reason has outgrown is not always to be
+explained by the easy imputation of dishonesty. And that
+explanation is even less admissible in ancient than in modern
+times. Roman religion did not demand any profession of faith
+in any theory of the unseen; all it required was ceremonial
+purity and exactness. And the Roman world was never
+scandalised by the spectacle of a notorious sceptic or libertine
+holding the office of chief pontiff. If a man were more
+scrupulous himself, philosophy, whether of the Porch or the
+Academy, came to his aid. It would tell him that frail
+<pb n="545"/><anchor id="Pg545"/>humanity, unable to comprehend the Infinite God, had parcelled
+out and detached his various powers and virtues, which it
+adored under material forms according to its varying needs.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> ii. 7, 5, fragilis et
+laboriosa mortalitas in partes ista
+digessit infirmitatis suae memor, ut
+portionibus coleret quisque quo maxime
+indigeret.</note>
+Or it found a place for all the gods of heathendom, as
+ministering or mediating spirits in the vast abyss which
+separates us from the unapproachable and Infinite Spirit.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> supra, p. 425 sqq.</note> If
+the legends which had gathered around the popular gods
+offended a tender moral sense, men were taught that the
+apparent grossness was an allegorical husk, or a freak of poetic
+fancy which concealed a wholesome truth. Thus a pantheist
+or monotheist, who would never have created such a religious
+system for himself, was trained to cultivate a double self in
+matters of religion, to worship reverently with the crowd, and
+to believe with Zeno or with Plato.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The heathen champion in the dialogue of Minucius Felix
+maintains that, in the dimness and uncertainty of things,
+the safest course is to hold fast to the gods of our fathers.<note place="foot">Min. Fel. <hi rend="italic">Octav.</hi> c. 6, quanto
+venerabilius ac melius antistitem veritatis
+majorum excipere disciplinam,
+religiones traditas colere, deos, quos a
+parentibus ante imbutus es timere
+quam nosse familiarius, adorare, etc.</note>
+The inclination of the sceptic was fortified by the conservative
+instinct of the Latin race and its love of precedent and
+precision of form. Moreover the religion of Numa was
+probably more than any other involved and intertwined with
+the whole life of the people. It penetrated the whole fabric
+of society; it consecrated and dignified every public function,
+and every act or incident of private life. To desert the
+ancient gods was to cut oneself off from Roman society, as the
+Christians were sternly made to feel. No established Church
+in modern Christendom has probably ever so succeeded in
+identifying itself with the national life in all its aspects.
+Alike under the Republic and under the Empire, religion was
+inseparable from patriotism. The imperial pontiff was bound
+to watch over the purity and continuity of the Latin rites. He
+might be a scoffer like Nero, or a spiritually-minded Stoic like
+M. Aurelius, an Isiac devotee like Commodus, or devoted to the
+Syrian worships like the Oriental princes of the third century.
+But he took his duties seriously. He would dance with the Salii,
+<pb n="546"/><anchor id="Pg546"/>or accept with gratitude the mastership of the Arval brotherhood,
+or order a <hi rend="italic">lectisternium</hi> to ward off a pestilence or a menacing
+invasion. The imperial colleges still held their meetings on
+the eve of the revolution of Theodosius. Antiquarian nobles
+still discussed nice questions of ritual in the reign of Honorius.
+At the end of the fifth century the Lupercalia were still
+celebrated with coarse, half-savage rites which went back to the
+prehistoric times.<note place="foot">Virg. <hi rend="italic">Aen.</hi> viii. 343; Ov. <hi rend="italic">Fasti</hi>,
+ii. 267; Baronius, <hi rend="italic">Ann. Eccl.</hi> viii. 60;
+Gibbon, c. 36; Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Fest.</hi> p. 310.</note> The imperial policy, founded by Augustus,
+no doubt inspired much of this conformity. But old Roman
+sentiment, the passion expressed with such moving eloquence
+by Symmachus, to feel himself in touch with a distant past<note place="foot">Sym. <hi rend="italic">Relat.</hi> 3.</note>
+through a chain of unbroken continuity, was the great support
+of the State religion in the fourth century as in the first. Yet,
+among the great nobles who were its last champions—Flavianus,
+Praetextatus, or Volusianus—there was a spiritual craving for
+which the religion provided little satisfaction. They sought it
+in the rites and mysteries of Eastern lands which had little in
+common with the old Roman religious sentiment. In these
+alien rites they found a new religious atmosphere. The priest,
+set apart from the world, with his life-long obligations and the
+daily offices in the shrine, becomes in some way a minister
+to the spiritual life of his flock. Instead of cold ceremonial
+observance, ecstatic emotion is aroused, often to a degree which
+was perilous to character. Through a series of sacraments, with
+ascetic preparation for them, the votary rose under priestly
+guidance to some vision of the eternal world, with a new
+conception of sin; this life and the next were linked in a moral
+sequence, with tremendous issues of endless beatitude or endless
+degradation. In a temple of Magna Mater, Isis, or Mithra in
+the reign of Julian, we are far away from the worship of the
+Lares and the offering of a heifer to Dea Dia in the grove on
+the Tiber. We are travelling towards the spiritual mystery
+and sacramental consolations of the mediaeval Church.
+</p>
+</div><div type="chapter" n="4" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="547"/><anchor id="Pg547"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="IV. Magna Mater"/><index index="pdf" level1="IV. Magna Mater"/>
+<head>CHAPTER IV</head>
+
+<head type="sub">MAGNA MATER</head>
+
+<p>
+The earliest invader from the East of the sober decorum of
+old Roman religion, and almost the last to succumb, was
+Magna Mater of Pessinus. There is no pagan cult which S.
+Augustine, and many of the Fathers before him, assail with
+such indignant contempt as hers.<note place="foot">Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>, ii. 4; Tertull.
+<hi rend="italic">Apol.</hi> 13; <hi rend="italic">Adv. Marc.</hi> i. 13.</note> And indeed it was long
+regarded with suspicion by old Romans of the cultivated class.
+For generations after her reception on the Palatine, no Roman
+was permitted to enter her official service. But there was
+something in that noisy and bloody ritual, and in the cruel,
+ascetic sacrifice of its devotees, which exercised an irresistible
+power over the imagination of the vulgar; and even Lucretius
+felt a certain imaginative awe of the tower-crowned figure
+drawn by lions and adored by the cities of many lands.<note place="foot">Lucret. ii. 600.</note>
+Varro, who probably had no great love for the un-Roman
+ritual, found a place for the Phrygian goddess in his théodicée.<note place="foot">Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>, ii. 8, vii. 24.</note>
+Her baptism of blood in the taurobolium was a rite of such
+strange enthralling influence that it needed all the force of the
+Christian Empire to abolish it. And on many of the last
+inscriptions of the fourth century the greatest names in the
+Roman aristocracy leave the record of their cleansing in the
+curious phrase <hi rend="italic">renatus in aeternum</hi>.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 499, 504, 509, 510,
+511, 512; xii. 1782, 1567; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1899,
+1890, 2335.</note> In his youth S. Augustine
+had seen processions of effeminate figures with dripping locks,
+painted faces, and soft womanish bearing, passing along the
+streets of Carthage, and begging alms of the crowd. His
+horror at the memory of the scene probably springs almost
+<pb n="548"/><anchor id="Pg548"/>as much from the manly instincts of the Roman as from
+the detestation of the Christian moralist for a debasing
+superstition.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>, ii. 4, 7, 8; vi. 7; vii.
+24.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But S. Augustine knew well the power of the superstition.
+For more than 600 years the Great Mother had been enthroned
+on the Palatine; for more than 300 years she had captivated
+the remotest provinces of the West.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. 179 (Spain, 108 p. Chr.);
+iii. 1100, 1443 (Dacia, p. Chr. 110);
+<hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 5839 (Portugal).</note> In the terror of the
+Second Punic War, 204 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, she had been summoned by
+solemn embassy from her original home at Pessinus in Galatia.
+In obedience to a sibylline command, the Roman youth
+with purest hands, together with the Roman matrons, had
+welcomed her at Ostia.<note place="foot">Liv. 29, 10.</note> The ship which bore her up the
+Tiber,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1906, Navisalviae et matri D.
+(<hi rend="italic">v.</hi> note).</note> when it grounded on a shoal, had been sent forward
+on its way, to vindicate her calumniated virtue, by the touch
+of a virgin of the Claudian house.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Fasti</hi>, iv. 305; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Frag.</hi> 80;
+Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> c. 2.</note> A decree of the Senate
+in 191 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> had given the strange goddess a home on the
+Palatine, hard by the shrine of Apollo; and the great
+Megalesian festival in April was founded.<note place="foot">Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Fest.</hi> p. 70.</note> But the foreign
+character of the cult was long maintained. It was a time
+when the passion for religious excitement was in the air, and
+when its excesses had to be restrained by all the forces of the
+State. No Roman was permitted to accept the Phrygian
+priesthood for a century after the coming of the Great
+Mother.<note place="foot">Val. Max. vii. 7, 6; Goehler, <hi rend="italic">De
+Matr. Magn. Cultu</hi>, p. 10.</note> But towards the end of the Republic, the goddess
+had captured all imaginations, and her priests and symbols
+meet us in all the poets of the great age.<note place="foot">Lucret. ii. 600; Virg. <hi rend="italic">Aen.</hi> ix.
+620; x. 220; Ov. <hi rend="italic">A. Am.</hi> i. 507;
+Prop. iii. 17, 35; cf. Preller, p. 484.</note> Augustus restored
+her temple; some of his freedmen were among her priests;<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 496.</note>
+Livia is pictured with the crown of towers upon her brow.<note place="foot">Goehler, p. 12.</note>
+Then came a long interval, till the death of Nero, during
+which the Phrygian goddess is hardly heard of.<note place="foot">Yet cf. D. Cass. lxi. 20,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἐκιθαρῴδεσέ τε Ἄττιν ὁ Αὔγουστος</foreign>.</note> With the
+accession of the Flavians the eastern cults finally entered on
+a long and unchallenged reign. Vespasian restored the temple
+of the Great Mother at Herculaneum, which had been thrown
+<pb n="549"/><anchor id="Pg549"/>down by an earthquake.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. 1406. Imp. Vesp. templum
+M. M. terrae motu conlapsum
+restituit.</note> In the reign of Trajan her worship
+had penetrated to the Spanish peninsula,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> ii. 179 (108 p. Chr.); cf. <hi rend="italic">Or.
+Henz.</hi> 5839.</note> and she is found,
+along with other Eastern deities, in the towns of the new
+province of Dacia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 1100, 1443.</note> The first glimpses of the taurobolium
+appear before the middle of the second century, and the goddess
+figures on the coins of Antoninus Pius.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> x. 1596 (Naples, p. Chr. 134).</note> A taurobolium
+for that emperor was offered <q>with intention</q> at Lyons in
+160 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2322.</note> and there are several dedications to Magna Mater
+in the same reign made by colleges of the <hi rend="italic">Dendrophori</hi> at Ostia.<note place="foot">Goehler, p. 15.</note>
+Tertullian tells how a high priest of Cybele vainly offered his
+blood for the safety of M. Aurelius, seven days after the Emperor
+had died in his quarters on the Danube.<note place="foot">Tertull. <hi rend="italic">Apol.</hi> 25; D. Cass. lxxi. 33.</note> It does not fall
+within the scope of our present inquiry to trace the immense
+popularity of the worship under the princes of the third
+century. That was the period of the great triumph of the
+spiritual powers of the East. At the end of the fourth century
+the Great Mother and Mithra were in the van of the pagan
+resistance to the religious revolution of Theodosius and his
+sons.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 501 (p. Chr. 383); 509,
+511, 510, 500.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The worship of Cybele, coming from the same regions as the
+Trojan ancestors of Rome, was at first a patrician cult.<note place="foot">Réville, p. 60; Ov. <hi rend="italic">Fasti</hi>, iv. 251,
+
+<lg>
+<l>Cum Trojam Aeneas Italos portaret in agros,</l>
+<l rend="margin-left: 2">Est dea sacriferas paene secuta rates.</l>
+</lg></note>
+Members of the proudest houses bore a part in welcoming her
+to a place in the Roman pantheon.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">l.c.</hi> 293.</note> Yet, as we have seen,
+Romans were for generations forbidden to enrol themselves
+among her effeminate priesthood. By a curious contradiction
+of sentiment, people were fascinated by the ritual, while they
+despised the celebrants. The legend which was interpreted by
+Stoic and Neoplatonist as full of physical or metaphysical
+meanings,<note place="foot">Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>, vi. 8; vii. 25;
+Jul. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> v. p. 161 <hi rend="small">D</hi>.</note> had also elements of human interest which appealed
+to the masses, always eager for emotional excitement. The love
+of the Great Mother for a fair youth, his unfaithfulness, and
+penitential self-mutilation under the pine-tree; the passionate
+mourning for lost love, and then the restoration of the self-made
+victim, attended by a choir of priests for ever, who had made
+<pb n="550"/><anchor id="Pg550"/>the same cruel sacrifice<note place="foot">There were many variations of the
+myth; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Goehler, pp. 2, 3; <anchor id="corr550"/><corr sic="Foucart">Foucart,</corr>
+<hi rend="italic">Assoc. Rel.</hi> p. 89; Ov. <hi rend="italic">Fasti</hi>, iv. 223.</note>—all this, so alien to old Roman
+religious sentiment, triumphed over it in the end by novelty
+and tragic interest. The legend was developed into a drama,
+which, at the vernal festival of the goddess, was produced
+with striking, if not artistic, effect. On the first day the
+Dendrophori bore the sacred tree, wreathed with violets, to
+the temple. There was then a pause for a day, and, on the
+third, the priests, with frantic gestures and dishevelled hair,
+abandoned themselves to the wildest mourning, lacerating their
+arms and shoulders with wounds, from which the blood flowed
+in torrents. Severe fasting accompanied these self-inflicted
+tortures. Then came a complete change of sensation. On the
+day called Hilaria the votaries gave themselves up to ecstasies
+of joy, to celebrate the restoration of Attis. On the last day
+of the festival a solemn procession took its way to the brook
+Almon, to bathe the goddess in its waters.<note place="foot">Réville, p. 64; Preller, p. 485.</note> The sacred stone,
+brought originally from her home in Asia, and the most sacred
+symbol of the worship, wrapped in robes, was borne upon a
+car with chants and music, and that gross, unabashed
+naturalism which so often shocks and surprises us in pagan
+ritual till we trace it to its source.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The government long treated the cult of Cybele as a foreign
+worship.<note place="foot">Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Festivals</hi>, p. 70; cf.
+Foucart, <hi rend="italic">Assoc. Rel.</hi> p. 88, for similar
+treatment at Athens.</note> The title of its great festival is Greek. Yet before
+the close of the Republic, Romans are found enrolled in its
+priesthoods and sacred colleges, and long lists of these official
+votaries can be gathered from the inscriptions of the imperial
+period. The archigallus, or high priest, appears often on the
+Italian and provincial monuments. He is found at Merida,
+Capua, Ostia, and Lyons, in Numidia and Portugal.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. 3810; viii. 8203; xii.
+1782; ii. 5260.</note> He must
+have performed his part at many a taurobolium, crowned with
+laurel wreaths, wearing his mitre and ear-rings and armlets, with
+the image of Attis on his breast.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xii. 1782; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2325,
+6031; Goehler, p. 40.</note> The names of the ordinary
+priests abound, from the freedman of the house of Augustus to
+the great nobles of the reign of Theodosius and Honorius.<note place="foot">Goehler, p. 12; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 511,
+504, 500.</note> The
+priesthood was sometimes held for life, or for a long term of years.
+<pb n="551"/><anchor id="Pg551"/>A priest at Salonae in Dalmatia had punctually performed the
+sacred offices for seventeen years.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 2920; xii. 1567.</note> Women were naturally
+admitted to the priesthood of a cult whose central interest was
+a woman’s love and grief. Sometimes they are lowly freedwomen
+with Greek names, sometimes they bear the proudest
+names in the Roman aristocracy.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> x. 6074; vi. 502, 508; <hi rend="italic">Or.
+Henz.</hi> 7200 (Acte), 2330, 1902, 2371,
+2319, 2325; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 4322, 4326.</note> The Dendrophori, who on
+festive days bore the sacred tree, formed a religious college, and
+their record appears on many monuments of Italian and provincial
+towns—Como, Ostia, and Cumae, Caesarea (Afr.), Valentia,
+and Lyons.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 7336, 2322, 6031, 4109,
+7197; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 9401.</note> Other colleges were the Cannophori and Cernophori,
+the keepers of the mystic symbols.<note place="foot">Goehler, p. 45.</note> The chanters,
+drummers, and cymbal players were indispensable at great ceremonial
+scenes, such as the taurobolium,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 1782.</note> and were arranged in
+graded ranks. Of a lower degree were the vergers and apparitors,
+who watched over the chapels of the goddess.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2325, 2984.</note> And, lastly, there
+were the simple worshippers, who also formed themselves into
+guilds, with all the usual officers of such corporations. This
+cult, like so many others, existed not only for ceremonial rite,
+but for fellowship and social exhilaration, and, through its
+many gradations of religious privilege, it must have drawn vast
+numbers into the sacred service in the times of the Empire.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the pages of Apuleius, and other authorities, show us
+that, beside the official clergy and collegiate members, there
+were, as happens to all popular religions, a mass of unlicensed
+camp followers and mere disreputable vagrants, who used the
+name of the Great Mother to exploit the ignorant devotion
+and religious excitability of the rustic folk. The romance of
+Apuleius, as Dr. Mahaffy has suggested, is probably derived
+from earlier sources, and dressed up to titillate the prurient
+tastes of a degraded society.<note place="foot">Mahaffy, <hi rend="italic">The Greek World under
+Roman Sway</hi>, p. 295 sqq.</note> Yet its pictures of country life
+in Thessaly, although they may not be always locally accurate,
+can hardly be purely imaginative. The scenes may not be
+always Thessalian, but that they are in the main true pictures
+of country life in the Antonine age may be proved from other
+authorities. Apuleius was too careful an artist to sever himself
+<pb n="552"/><anchor id="Pg552"/>altogether from the actual life of his time. And what a picture
+it is! The air positively thrills with daemonic terror and
+power. Witches and lewd sorceresses abound; the solitary
+inn has its weird seductions; the lonely country cottage has
+its tragedy of lawless love or of chaste devotion to the dead.
+Brigands in mountain fastnesses divide their far-gathered spoil,
+and hold debate on plans of future lawless adventure. Mountain
+solitudes, and lonely villages or castles among the woods, are
+aroused by the yelping hounds, who start the boar from his
+lair, while the faithless traitor places his friend at its mercy.
+We meet the travelling cheese merchant, and the noble exile
+on his way to Zacynthus. We watch the raid on the banker’s
+house at Thebes, and the peasants setting their dogs on the
+passing traveller; the insolence of the wandering legionary;
+the horrors of the slave prison, with its wasted, starved, and
+branded forms; the amours of buxom wives, and the comic concealment
+or discovery of lovers, in the manner of Boccaccio.
+It is only too certain that the vileness and superstition which
+Apuleius has depicted may easily find a parallel on the Roman
+stage, or in the pages of Martial.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In all this social panorama, romantic, amusing, or disgusting,
+there is no more repulsive, and probably no truer scene
+than that in which the wandering priests of the Syrian goddess
+appear. That deity, like many others of Eastern origin, was
+often identified with the Great Mother. Apuleius probably
+confounded them; the rites of their worships were often the
+same, and the picture in Apuleius may be taken to represent
+the orgies of many a wandering troop of professed devotees of
+the Great Mother in the age of the Antonines.<note place="foot">Réville, <hi rend="italic">Rel. unter den Sev.</hi> p. 65; Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> viii. 24 (<hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Hildenbrand’s notes.)</note> The leader
+is an old eunuch, with wild straggling locks—a man of the
+foulest morals, carrying about with him an image of the goddess,
+and levying alms from the superstition of the rustics. He is
+attended by a crew worthy of him, wretches defiled with all
+the worst vices of the ancient world, and shamelessly parading
+their degradation. But they combine a shrewd eye to business
+with this wild licence. They know all the arts to catch the
+fancy of the mob of clowns, whose grey dull lives and inbred
+superstition make them eager for any display which will
+intoxicate them with the novelty of a violent sensation. These
+<pb n="553"/><anchor id="Pg553"/>people are on that level where lust and the passion for blood
+and suffering readily league themselves with religious excitement.
+After a night of moral horrors, the foul brotherhood go
+forth in various costume to win the largesses of the countryside.
+With painted cheeks and robes of white or yellow,
+crossed with purple stripes, their arms bared to the shoulder,
+and carrying swords or axes, they dance along wildly to the
+sound of the flute.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> viii. c. 27 (580); cf.
+Aug. <hi rend="italic">De Civ. Dei</hi>, ii. 4.</note> With obscene gesticulation and discordant
+shrieks they madly bite their arms or lacerate them
+with knives. One of the band, as if seized with special
+inspiration, heaving and panting under the foul afflatus, shrieks
+out the confession of some sin against the holy rites, and claims
+the penalty from his own hands.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> viii. c. 28 (583).</note> With hard knotted scourge
+he belabours himself, while the blood flows in torrents. At
+last the cruel frenzy exhausts itself, and obtains its reward in
+the offerings of the spectators. Fine flour and cheese, milk
+and wine, coins of copper and silver, are eagerly showered upon
+the impostors, and as eagerly gathered in.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 28 (585).</note> Surprised in
+frightful orgies of vice, the scoundrels have at last to retreat
+before the outraged moral sense of the villagers. They decamp
+during the night, and on the morrow once more find comfortable
+quarters in the house of a leading citizen who is devoted to
+the service of the gods, and blind to the imposture of their
+professing ministers.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 30 (589).</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The episode in Apuleius suggests some curious questions as
+to the moral effect of these emotional cults. That in their
+early stages they had no elevating moral influence,—nay, that
+their votaries might combine a strict conformity to rite with
+great looseness of life,—is only too certain. The Delias and
+Cynthias of the poets, who kept the fasts of Isis, were assuredly
+not models of virtue. The assumption of the tonsure and
+linen habit by a debauchee like Commodus does not reassure
+us. Yet princes of high character in the second and the
+third centuries lent the countenance of imperial power to the
+worships of the East.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. 1406; Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Alex.
+Sev.</hi> c. 37.</note> And the Mother of the Gods found
+her last and most gallant defenders among great nobles of
+high repute and sincere pagan piety in the last years of
+<pb n="554"/><anchor id="Pg554"/>heathenism in the West. It was a strange transformation.
+Yet the problem is not perhaps insoluble. A religion may
+deteriorate as its authority over society becomes more assured
+with age. But, in times of moral renovation, and in the face
+of powerful spiritual rivalries, a religion may purge itself of
+the impurities of youth. Religious systems may also be
+elevated by the growing moral refinement of the society to
+which they minister. It is only thus that we can explain the
+undoubted fact that the Phrygian and Egyptian worships,
+originally tainted with the grossness of naturalism, became
+vehicles of a warm religious emotion, and provided a stimulus
+to a higher life. The idealism of humanity, by a strange
+alchemy, can marvellously transform the most unpromising
+materials. And he would make a grave mistake who should
+treat the Isis and Osiris, the Mater Deum or the Attis, of
+the reign of Augustus as representing the same ideals in the
+reign of Gratian. But these Eastern cults contained a germ,
+even in their earliest days, of their great future development
+and power. The old religion of Latium, along with much
+that was sound and grave and fortifying to character, was also
+hard and cold and ceremonial. It could mould and consecrate
+a militant and conquering state; it did little to satisfy the
+craving for moral regeneration or communion with a Higher
+Power. It could not appease the sense of error and frailty
+by ghostly comfort and sacramental absolution. It was, moreover,
+wanting in that warmth of interest and sympathy, linking
+the human and Divine, which has helped to make Christianity
+the religion of Western civilisation, and which in a feeble adumbration
+made the paganism of the East a momentary rival of
+the Church. These Eastern cults, often originating in gross
+symbolism of the alternations and recurring processes of
+nature,<note place="foot">Firm. Matern. <hi rend="italic">De Err. Prof. Rel.</hi> c. 2, 3.</note> often arousing a dangerous excitability and an unregulated
+emotion, yet contained the germ of a religious spirit
+far more akin to ours than the old austere Latin creed. A
+divine death and restoration, the alternation of joy and sorrow
+at a divine event, instinct with human interest, calming
+expiation and cleansing from the sins which burdened the
+conscience,—above all, the hope of a coming life, stamped on
+the imagination by symbol and spectacle,—these were the
+<pb n="555"/><anchor id="Pg555"/>elements which, operating on imperious religious yearnings,
+gave a fresh life to paganism, and prepared or deferred the
+victory of the Church. The religion of the Great Mother
+seems at first sight to offer the poorest promise of any moral
+message or spiritual support. It expressed at first the feelings
+of rude rustics at the recurring mortality and resurrection of
+material life in the order of the seasons. The element of human
+feeling which it contained was grossly expressed in bloody
+rites of mutilation. This cult was often defiled and disgraced
+by a crew of effeminate and lustful impostors. Yet the Thessalian
+villagers in Apuleius, who chased these vagabonds from
+their fields, evidently expected something better from them.
+They despised the foul hypocrites, but they did not cease to
+believe in their religion. The spiritual instinct of humanity
+triumphed, as it has so often done, over the vices of a historical
+system, extracted the good in it, rejected the evil, and
+made it an organ of some sort of spiritual life. Thus the Great
+Mother became the Mother of all, enthroned beside the Father
+of gods and men. She wears the chaste honours of the Virgin
+Goddess. Attis and her love for Attis are similarly transformed.
+In the syncretism of the age, which strove to gather
+up all the forces of heathenism and make them converge
+towards a spiritual unity, Magna Mater and Attis leagued
+their forces with the conquering Mithra.<note place="foot">Réville, p. 66; Goehler, p. 29;
+Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon. figurés de Mithra</hi>,
+Introd. p. 333; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2329, 2330, 1900;
+<hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 497, 500, 511; cf. <hi rend="italic">ib.</hi> x.
+1596, where the taurobolium is connected
+with Venus Coelesta (<hi rend="italic">sic</hi>);
+Preller, p. 486.</note> In the taurobolium
+there was developed a ritual, in which, coarse and materialistic
+as it was, paganism made, in however imperfect form, its
+nearest approach to the religion of the Cross.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The greatest and most impressive rite in the worship of
+Cybele was the taurobolium. There was none which so
+excited the suspicion and indignation of the Christian apologists,
+from Tertullian to Prudentius, because in its ceremony of the
+cleansing blood, and in its supposed effects in moral regeneration
+and remission of sins, it seemed invented by the ingenuity
+of daemons to be a travesty of the sacrifice on Calvary.<note place="foot">Tertull. <hi rend="italic">De Praescrip. Haeret.</hi> 40;
+Firm. Matern. <hi rend="italic">De Err. Prof. Relig.</hi> c. 27,
+neminem aput idola profusus sanguis
+munit ... polluit sanguis iste, non
+redimit.... Tauribolium quid vel
+criobolium scelerata te sanguinis labe
+perfundit? S. Paulin. Nol. <hi rend="italic">Poem.
+Ult.</hi> 112-117.</note> It is
+<pb n="556"/><anchor id="Pg556"/>possible that the last champions of the ancient cults may
+have had some such defiant purpose when they inscribed, in
+the record of their cleansing, the words <q><hi rend="italic">in aeternum renatus</hi>.</q>
+But in its origin there can be no doubt that the rite was
+purely heathen. Its appearance in the Phrygian ceremonial
+is comparatively late. The worship of Magna Mater was
+essentially an orgiastic cult, and theologically arid. But the
+syncretism of the second and third centuries came to its
+support. And the worships of Persia, Syria, and Phrygia were
+ready to coalesce, and to borrow from one another symbols and
+doctrines which gave satisfaction to the spiritual wants of
+the time. The taurobolium, with its ideas of cleansing and
+immortality, passed in the Antonine age from the worship of
+Anaitis of Cappadocia to the worship of Magna Mater, and
+gave the Great Mother a new hold upon the religious consciousness.
+In the earlier votive tablets the name of the rite is
+<hi rend="italic">tauropolium</hi>. Anaitis had been identified with the Artemis
+Tauropolus of Brauron, whose legend, by popular etymology,
+came to be identified, as Milesian exploration spread in the
+Euxine, with the cult of the cruel goddess of the Tauric
+Chersonese.<note place="foot">Cumont, Introd. pp. 236, 333;
+Herodot. iv. 103; Eur. <hi rend="italic">Iph. T.</hi> 1455;
+Strab. v. 3, § 12, p. 240.</note> And by another etymological freak and the
+change of a letter, we arrive at the bull-slaughtering rite of
+the later Empire. Whether the taurobolium ever became
+part of the service of Mithra is a disputed point.<note place="foot">Cumont, p. 334; Gasquet, <hi rend="italic">Culte de
+Mithra</hi>, p. 75; Cumont, Introd. p. 334,
+n. 5; Réville, <hi rend="italic">Rel. unter den Sev.</hi> p.
+93, takes an opposite view.</note> Certainly
+the syncretistic tendency of the age, the fact that the most
+popular Mithraist symbol was the slaying of the mystic bull,
+and the record of the taurobolium on so many inscriptions
+dedicated to Mithra, would prepare us for the conclusion that
+the rite was in the end common to the Persian and the
+Phrygian deities. Whatever may be the truth on this point,
+the two worships, in the last ages of heathenism in the West,
+were close allies. Attis tended more and more to become a
+solar deity in the age which culminated in the sun-worship
+of Julian.<note place="foot">Donsbach, <hi rend="italic">Die
+    <anchor id="corr556"/><corr sic="raümliche">räumliche</corr> Verbreitung
+des Mithrasdienstes</hi>, pp. 8, 9.</note> Heliolatry, the last refuge of monotheism in
+heathendom, which refused to accept the religion of Galilee,
+swept all the great worships of strong vitality into its system,
+<pb n="557"/><anchor id="Pg557"/>softened their differences, accentuated their similarities, by
+every effort of fancy, false science, or reckless etymology, and
+in the end, <q>Sol invictus</q> and Mithra were left masters of
+the field. But Magna Mater, however originally unworthy,
+shared in the victory. If she could lend the support of an
+accredited clergy, recognised for ages by the State, and the
+impressive rite of the bloody baptism, Mithra, on the other
+hand, had a moral and spiritual message, an assurance of a
+future life, and an enthralling force of mystic and sacramental
+communion, which made his alliance even more valuable. The
+Great Mother, indeed, admitted women to the ranks of her clergy,
+while the rites of Mithra probably excluded them.<note place="foot">This is rendered doubtful by
+Porphyr. <hi rend="italic">De Abstin.</hi> iv. 16,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὡς τοὺς μὲν μετέχοντας τῶν αὐτῶν ὀργίων μύστας
+    λέοντας καλεῖν (εἰώθασιν). τὰς δὲ γυναῖκας ὑαίνας</foreign>
+    (altered by Felicianus to <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">λεαίνας</foreign>);
+cf. Gasquet, p. 98.</note> And thus
+a Fabia Aconia Paulina, while her husband, Vettius Agorius
+Praetextatus, could inscribe himself <q>pater patrum,</q> had no
+Mithraist grade which she could place beside her consecration
+to Hecate and the Eleusinian goddesses.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 1778, 9.</note> But the pair were
+united in the sacrament of the taurobolium. And the Great
+Mother probably never had purer or sincerer devotees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the taurobolium was first introduced into the West
+is uncertain.<note place="foot">Goehler, p. 55; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. 1596;
+<anchor id="corr557"/><corr sic="(Puteoli">Puteoli</corr>, p. Chr. 134; taurobol.
+Veneris Caelestae (<hi rend="italic">sic</hi>).</note> The earliest monument belongs to <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 134 in
+the reign of Hadrian, when the ceremony seems to be connected
+with the Celestial Venus. The most famous inscription, which
+connects the rite with the Great Mother, is of the year 160
+<hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, when one L. Aemilius Carpus, an Augustalis, and a member
+of the college of the Dendrophori at Lyons, had the ceremony
+performed <q>for the safety</q> of Antoninus Pius and the imperial
+house.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2382; Goehler, p. 55; cf. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi>
+viii. 8203.</note> The rite was celebrated at the command of the goddess,
+or on the inspired advice of the priest.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2327, ex jussu ipsius; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi>
+xii. 1782, ex vaticinatione Archigalli;
+cf. xii. 4321, 4323.</note> It took place generally
+in early spring, and was often prolonged over three or four days.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 1782.</note>
+It was a costly rite, and the expense was sometimes borne by
+the community, who made an offertory for the purpose.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xii. 4321 (<hi rend="italic">stipe collata</hi>); at
+private expense, xii. 1568.</note> The
+ceremony was superintended by the xvviri, and attended by a
+great concourse of the people, with the magistrates at their
+<pb n="558"/><anchor id="Pg558"/>head. It is needless to describe again the scene, so well known
+from the verses of Prudentius, in which the consecrated bull
+is with solemn forms slaughtered on a high-raised platform, and
+bathes with the streams of his blood the votary placed in a
+trench below.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Peristeph.</hi> x. 1011; cf. Duruy, v.
+p. 743.</note> The rite was believed to impart some sort of
+strength and purification, the effect of which lasted for twenty
+years, when the sacrament was often renewed. It was, as we
+have seen, sometimes performed <q>with intention,</q> for the reigning
+emperor and his house,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 1311, 251, 1822, 4332;
+<hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2332.</note> and furnishes another example of
+the manner in which religion was employed to buttress the
+power of the Caesars. A considerable number of monuments
+in Italy and the provinces commemorate, in a phrase perhaps
+borrowed from the Church, the gratitude of one <q>born again
+to eternal life.</q> It is probable that the coarse ritual often
+expressed only an external and materialistic conception of
+religious influence. On the other hand, following upon, or
+closely connected with initiation into the mysteries of Mithra,
+it may easily have become a symbol of moral and spiritual
+truth, or at any rate a record of moral aspiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, indeed, in the syncretism and monotheistic drift of the
+age, the more powerful worships lost the hardness of their
+original lines and tended to absorption and assimilation.
+There was little strife or repulsion among these cults; they
+borrowed freely legends and ritual practice from one another;
+even characteristic insignia were interchanged. The legend
+and tone of the Cybele worship naturally linked her with
+others sprung from the same region, such as the Syrian goddess,
+Celestial Venus, and Bellona.<note place="foot">Goehler, p. 34; Réville, p. 66;
+Preller, p. 488; Cumont, Introd. p.
+333.</note> Fanaticism, self-mutilation,
+expiation by blood, were the common bond between them.
+The fierce goddess of Cappadocia, who had visited Sulla in a
+dream, was probably first introduced to Roman devotion in his
+time. Her dark-robed priests and priestesses were familiar
+figures in the Augustan age, gashing themselves like the Galli of
+Magna Mater, catching the blood in shields, and dashing it
+over their train of followers who believed in its powers of
+expiation. But Magna Mater, as her name promises, assumed
+a milder character, and was identified sometimes with Maia,
+<pb n="559"/><anchor id="Pg559"/>Ops, and Minerva; sometimes with Demeter, Bona Dea, and
+Fauna, as Attis was identified with Hercules.<note place="foot">Goehler, p. 29.</note> In the last age
+the great goddess became the universal Mother, full of tenderness
+and grace, and giving peace through her cleansing rites.
+Hers is, along with the cults of Isis and Mithra, which will
+next claim our attention, an example of the process of Divine
+evolution, by which, in the painful progress of humanity, the
+crude efforts of religious symbolism are purged and elevated.
+It is an example of the way in which the human spirit, refusing
+to break with its past, sometimes succeeds, if only for a
+time, in putting new wine into old bottles.
+</p>
+
+</div><div type="chapter" n="5" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="560"/><anchor id="Pg560"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="V. Isis and Serapis"/><index index="pdf" level1="V. Isis and Serapis"/>
+<head>CHAPTER V</head>
+
+<head type="sub">ISIS AND SERAPIS</head>
+
+<p>
+The worship of Isis and Serapis, reckoning from the day when
+it established itself in the port of Athens, had a reign of more
+than seven centuries over the peoples of Europe. Its influence
+in the western provinces of the Empire and in the capital may
+be roughly said to cover a period of 500 years. It was not,
+indeed, the old native worship of the valley of the Nile which
+won such an empire over cultivated intellects from Chaeronea
+to the Thames. The ancient Egyptian worship underwent vast
+transformations in the crucible of all creeds at Alexandria.
+It was captured and utilised for political purposes by the
+Ptolemies.<note place="foot">Lafaye, <hi rend="italic">Culte des divinités d’Alexandrie</hi>,
+p. 15; Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. 28.</note> It was linked with the most spiritual forces of
+Hellenic piety at Eleusis and Delphi;<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. 35, addressed
+to Clea, who was high in the
+worship of Dionysus, and <q>hereditarily
+devoted to Osiris.</q></note> it was transformed by
+the subtle syncretism of later Greek philosophy; and, through
+the secretaries of embassies, and the Egyptian slaves and
+merchants who poured into the ports of southern Italy in the
+second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, it stole or forced itself into the chapels of
+great houses at Rome, till, in the end, emperors were proud to
+receive its tonsure, to walk in the processions, and to build
+and adorn Egyptian temples.<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Com. Ant.</hi> c. 9; Spart.
+<hi rend="italic">Sev.</hi> c. 17; Réville, <hi rend="italic">Rel. unter den Sev.</hi> p. 58.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Isiac worship had conquered the Greek world before it
+became a power in Italy. In the fourth century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> traders
+from the Nile had their temple of Isis at the Peiraeus;<note place="foot">Foucart, <hi rend="italic">Assoc. Religieuses</hi>, p. 83.</note> in the
+third century the worship had been admitted within the walls
+of Athens.<note place="foot">Lafaye, pp. 27-32; Paus. i. 18, § 4.</note> About the same time the goddess had found a
+<pb n="561"/><anchor id="Pg561"/>home at Ceos, and Delos, at Smyrna and Halicarnassus, and
+on the coasts of Thrace.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 38.</note> She was a familiar deity at
+Orchomenus and Chaeronea for generations before Plutarch
+found in her legends a congenial field for the exposition of
+his concordat between philosophy and myth. Nor need we
+wonder at his choice of the Egyptian cults. For the Isis and
+Osiris of Greek and Italian lands were very different objects
+of devotion from the gods who bore those names in Egyptian
+legend.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. 53,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὸ τῆς φύσεως θῆλυ</foreign>, c. 52,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὐχ ἑτέραν τῆς σελήνης</foreign>: c. 38,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὕτος Ἴσιδος σῶμα γῆν ἔχουσι καὶ νομίζουσιν, οὐ πάσαν,
+    ἀλλ’ ἧς ὁ Νεῖλος ἐπιβαίνει σπερμαίνων</foreign>: cf. c. 32;
+c. 56,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Ὄσιριν ὡς ἀρχήν, τὴν δὲ Ἴσιν ὡς ὑποδοχήν, τὸν δὲ Ὥρον ὁς ἀποτέλεσμα</foreign>:
+cf. Herodot. ii. 156; Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi.
+c. 7, matrem siderum, parentem temporum,
+orbisque totius dominam
+blando mulcentes affamine.</note> From the seventh century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> Greeks from the
+Asiatic coast had been securely settled at the mouth of the
+Nile.<note place="foot">Herodot. ii. 154.</note> Greek mercenaries had served in the Egyptian armies
+in the southern deserts; and Greek half-breeds had long
+amused and cajoled travellers from Miletus or Halicarnassus,
+as interpreters and guides to the scenes of immemorial interest.
+When Herodotus visited the country, the identity of Greek
+and Egyptian gods was a long accepted fact.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 156; cf. Plew, <hi rend="italic">De Sarapide</hi>,
+p. 23 sqq.</note> From the fifth
+century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> the Egyptian Trinity of Isis, Osiris, and Horus had
+found counterparts in Demeter, Dionysus, and Apollo. The
+campaign of the Athenian fleet in 460 probably hastened and
+confirmed the process of syncretism,<note place="foot">Thuc. i. 104.</note> and crowds of travellers,
+steeped in Orphic and Pythagorean mysticism, returned from
+the valley of the Nile to spread the doctrine of a common
+faith. After the foundation of Alexandria the theory became
+a propaganda. The first Ptolemy strove to unite the two
+races under his sway by an eclecticism of which Alexandria
+was the focus for seven centuries. He found skilful allies
+in Manetho, the Egyptian priest who had written a treatise
+on the inner meaning of the myths, and in Timotheus, a
+scion of the Eumolpidae of Eleusis.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 15 sqq.</note> The Orphic and Dionysiac
+mysticism was leagued with the Isiac worship. The legend
+of Egypt was recast. A new deity was introduced, who
+was destined to have a great future in all lands under the
+Roman sway. The origin of Serapis is still a mystery<note place="foot">Plew, <hi rend="italic">De Sarapide</hi>, p. 10 sqq.</note> and
+the latest critic may have to acquiesce in the confused or
+<pb n="562"/><anchor id="Pg562"/>balanced judgment of Tacitus.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 84.</note> Egyptian archaeologists
+claimed him as indigenous at Rhacotis or Memphis, and
+construed his name as a compound of Osiris and that of his
+earthly incarnation, the bull Apis.<note place="foot">Plew, <hi rend="italic">De Sarapide</hi>, p. 15; Preller, p. 478.</note> The more popular tale
+was that the first Ptolemy, after repeated visions of the night,
+sent envoys to bring him from Sinope, where he was identified
+with Pluto, god of the under world. Other traditions connected
+him with Seleucia in Cappadocia, or with Babylon.<note place="foot">Plew, <hi rend="italic">De Sarapide</hi>, p. 6.</note>
+It may be that a false etymology, confounding a hill near
+Memphis with the name of Sinope, was the source of the tale
+in Tacitus.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 17.</note> However this may be, Serapis takes the place of
+Osiris; they never appear together in inscriptions. The infant
+Horus received the Greek sounding name Harpocrates, and
+Serapis, Isis, and Harpocrates became the Egyptian Trinity for
+Graeco-Roman Society. Anubis, the minister of the Trinity,
+was easily identified with Hermes, <q>the conductor of souls</q> in
+Greek legend.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Syncretism and mysticism were great forces at Eleusis, from
+which Ptolemy’s adviser Timotheus came. And there all
+interest centred in the future life, and in preparation for it
+by sacerdotal ritual and moral discipline. The Orphic and
+Pythagorean mysticism which traced itself to Egypt or the
+remoter East, returned to its sources, to aid in moulding the
+cults of Egypt into a worship for the world. A crowd of
+ingenious theologians set to work, by means of physical explanation,
+wild etymology, and fanciful analogies, to complete
+the syncretism. And the final results of their efforts, preserved
+in the famous treatise of Plutarch on Isis, is a trinitarian
+monotheism, with an original dualism of the good and evil
+principles.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. 45, 49.</note> But the idea of God, although limited in one
+sense by the recognition of a co-ordinate evil power, tends on
+the other to become more all-embracing. Serapis is constantly
+linked with Jupiter and Sol Invictus in the inscriptions.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1890 sqq.; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 1005; iii. 4560, 3.</note> In
+the orations of Aristides he becomes the centre of the universe.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or. Sac.</hi> viii. 53,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ ταμίας ὢν τοῦ βιωσίμου κατὰ τοῦτ’ ἃν δικαίως ἅπαντα
+περιειληφέναι νομίζοιτο ... ὁ δὲ ὥσπερ κορυφαῖος πάντων
+ἀρχὰς καὶ πέρατα ἔχει</foreign>. Cf. Baumgar.
+<hi rend="italic">Aristides als Repräsentant der Soph.
+Rhet.</hi> p. 90 sqq.</note>
+Isis of the <q>myriad names</q> tends to absorb all other deities,
+<pb n="563"/><anchor id="Pg563"/>and was addressed by her votaries as <q>Thou who art all.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1871, tibi quae es omnia.</note>
+The Isis of the dream of Lucius in Apuleius is the universal
+mother, creator of all things, queen of the world of shades, first
+of the inhabitants of heaven, in whom all gods have their
+unchanging type.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. 7.</note> She is also pre-eminently the power who
+can cleanse and comfort, and impart the hope of the life everlasting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Isiac worship arrived in Italy probably through the
+ports of Campania. Puteoli, in particular, was the great
+entrepôt for the trade with Alexandria. Foreign merchants,
+sailors, and slaves were arriving there every day, and, in the century
+between 204 and 100 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, more than ten embassies passed
+between the Ptolemies and the Roman Senate, with a crowd of
+secretaries and servants attached to them.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 43.</note> There was probably
+a temple of Serapis at Puteoli as early as 150 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, and the
+old temple of Isis at Pompeii, which was thrown down by the
+earthquake of 63 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, may probably be referred to the year
+105 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi><note place="foot">Id. p. 40; Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi>, p. 163.</note> But the erection of temples must have been preceded
+by a period of less formal and more obscure worship, and we
+may perhaps conclude that Isis had established herself in
+Southern Italy, at all events early in the second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>
+Thus, although it was generations before the worship won its
+way, in the face of fierce persecution, to an assured place at
+Rome, its first appearance coincides with the decay of the
+old religion, the religious excitement in the beginning of the
+second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, and the immense popular craving for a
+more emotional form of worship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The years at the end of the third and the beginning of
+the second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> were in Italy years of strange religious
+excitement. In 204 the great goddess was brought from
+Pessinus.<note place="foot">Liv. xxix. 10; Goehler, <hi rend="italic">De Matris Magnae Cultu</hi>, p. 7.</note> In 186 the decree for the suppression of the
+Bacchanalian scandal was passed.<note place="foot">Liv. xxxix. 19.</note> Magna Graecia and Etruria
+were the first points assailed by the invasion of the orgiastic
+rites. But they soon crept into the capital, with results which
+alarmed and shocked old Roman sentiment. At first, an
+appearance of asceticism disguised the danger. But the
+rites soon gave an opportunity for the wildest licence and for
+<pb n="564"/><anchor id="Pg564"/>political intrigue. 7000 men and women were found to be
+implicated, in one way or another, in the movement.<note place="foot">Preller, <hi rend="italic">Myth. Rom.</hi> p. 473.</note> Within
+five years after the great scandal, the apocryphal books of
+Numa were unearthed in the grounds of Cn. Terentius on the
+Janiculum. The forgery was soon detected, and they were
+burnt publicly in the Comitium by the praetor L. Petilius.<note place="foot">Plin. <hi rend="italic">H. N.</hi> xiii. 27; Liv. xl.
+29; Momms. <hi rend="italic">Rom. Hist.</hi> ii. p. 402;
+Lafaye, p. 41.</note>
+But it was a suspicious circumstance that the rolls were of
+Egyptian papyrus, which had been till then unknown to the
+Roman world, and that they contained the dogmas of a
+Pythagorean lore which was equally strange. It is almost
+certain that, in the same years in which the Dionysiac fanaticism
+arrived at Ostia, the Egyptian cults had been brought by
+merchants and sailors to Puteoli. Osiris and Dionysus had
+long been identified by the Alexandrian theologians; both were
+the patrons of mystic rites which, in their form and essence,
+had much in common, and the Pythagorean system, combining
+so many influences of philosophy and religion in the East and
+West, was the natural sponsor of the new worships. It
+was perhaps some eclectic Alexandrian, half Platonist, half
+Buddhist, devoted to the Isiac worship, yet ready to connect it
+with the Dionysiac legends of Delphi, Cithaeron, and Eleusis,
+who penned the secret scrolls, and buried them in the garden
+on the Janiculum. The movement was setting in which, so
+often repulsed by the force of government and conservative
+feeling, was destined to have enormous influence over the last
+three centuries of paganism in the West.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It has been plausibly suggested that the ease and completeness
+with which the Bacchanalian movement was suppressed
+in 186 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> was due to the diversion of religious interest to the
+Egyptian mysteries. The cult of Isis had indeed very various
+attractions for different minds. But for the masses, slaves,
+freedmen, and poor working people, its great fascination lay in
+the pomp of its ritual, and the passionate emotion aroused by
+the mourning for the dead Osiris, and his joyful restoration.
+It is this aspect of the worship which is assailed and ridiculed
+by the Christian apologists of the reign of Alexander Severus
+and of the reign of Constantine.<note place="foot">Tertull. <hi rend="italic">Adv. Marc.</hi> i. 13; Firm.
+Mat. <hi rend="italic">De Err. Prof. Rel.</hi> 2, § 7, cur
+plangitis fruges terrae et crescentia
+lugetis semina?</note> The goddess, one of whose
+<pb n="565"/><anchor id="Pg565"/>special functions was the care of mothers in childbirth, appealed
+especially to female sensibility. As in the cult of Magna
+Mater, women had a prominent place in her services and processions,
+and records of these sacred dignities appear on the
+monuments of great Roman ladies down to the end of the
+Western Empire. The history of the Isiac cult at Rome from
+Sulla to Nero is really the history of a great popular religious
+movement in conflict with a reactionary conservatism, of
+cosmopolitan feeling arrayed against old Roman sentiment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is significant of the popularity of Isis that the reactionary
+Sulla, who restored the election of chief pontiff to the sacred
+college, was forced to recognise the Isiac guild of the Pastophori
+in 80 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi><note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 30, Collegii
+vetustissimi et sub illis Sullae temporibus
+conditi, etc.</note> Four times in the decade 58-48 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, the
+fierce struggle was renewed between the government and those
+who wished to place Isis beside the ancient gods; and in
+the year 50 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi> the consul, when unable to find a workman
+to lay hands upon her shrine, had to unrobe and use
+the axe himself.<note place="foot">Tertull. <hi rend="italic">Apol.</hi> 6; <hi rend="italic">Ad Nat.</hi> i. 10;
+prohibitos Capitolio Varro commemorat
+eorumque aras a senatu dejectas nonnisi
+per vim popularium restructas,
+Val. Max. i. 3, 4; cf. Lewald, <hi rend="italic">De Peregr.
+Rel. ap. Rom.</hi> p. 10.</note> The victory of conservatism was only
+temporary and apparent. Within five years from the renewed
+fierce demolition of 48 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>,<note place="foot">D. Cass. xlii. 26.</note> the white robe and tonsure and the
+mask of Anubis must have been a common sight in the streets,
+when the aedile M. Volusius, one of those proscribed by the
+triumvirs, was able to make his escape easily in this disguise.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 47; Val. Max. vii. 3, 8;
+cf. App. <hi rend="italic">B. C.</hi> iv. 47.</note>
+The influence of Cleopatra over Julius Caesar overcame his
+own prejudices and probably hastened the triumph of the
+popular cult. The triumvirs had to conciliate public feeling
+by erecting a temple of Isis in 42 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi><note place="foot">D. Cass. xliii. 27; xlvii. 15.</note> Priestesses
+and devotees of Isis are henceforth found among the freedwomen
+of great houses and the mistresses of men of letters of
+the Augustan age.<note place="foot">Catull. x. 26; Tibull. i. 3, 23;
+Propert. ii. 33.</note> And, although the reaction following upon
+the battle of Actium, in which the gods of Latium and the
+Nile were arrayed against one another,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Aen.</hi> viii. 698.</note> banished Isis for a
+time beyond the pomoerium,<note place="foot">D. Cass. liii. 2,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὰ μὲν ἱερὰ τὰ Αἰγύπτια οὐκ ἐσεδέξατο εἴσω τοῦ πωμηρίου</foreign>;
+cf. liv. 6.</note> the devotion of the masses to
+<pb n="566"/><anchor id="Pg566"/>her seems never to have slackened, and her tonsured, white
+stoled priests were to be seen everywhere. In the reign
+of Tiberius a serious blow fell on the Eastern worships.
+According to Josephus, a great lady named Paulina, was, with
+the collusion of the priest, seduced in an Isiac temple by a
+libertine lover in the guise of Anubis, and the crime was
+sternly punished by the emperor.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 55, discredits the tale
+of the seduction, which is given by
+Josephus alone, <hi rend="italic">B. Jud.</hi> xviii. 3; cf.
+Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> ii. 85; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Tib.</hi> 36.</note> Tacitus and Suetonius
+seem to be ignorant of this particular scandal, but they record
+the wholesale banishment to Sardinia of persons of the freedmen
+class, who were infected with Judaic or Egyptian
+superstition. In the grotto of Cagliari there is to be seen the
+record of an obscure romance and tragedy which may have
+been connected with this persecution. Atilia Pomptilla, who
+bore also the significant name of Benedicta, in some great
+calamity had followed her husband Cassius Philippus into
+exile. Their union had lasted for two-and-forty years
+when the husband was stricken with disease in that deadly
+climate. Like another Alcestis, Atilia by her vows and
+devotion offered her life for his. The husband repaid the
+debt in these inscriptions, and the pair lie united in death
+under the sculptured serpent of the goddess whom they
+probably worshipped.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x. 2, 7563 sqq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thenceforth under the emperors Isis met with but little
+opposition. Claudius struck hard at the Jewish and Druidic
+rites, but on the other hand he was ready to transport those
+of Eleusis to Rome.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Claud.</hi> 25; cf. D. Cass. lx. 6.</note> He was probably equally tolerant to
+the rites of Egypt. And in his reign dedications were made to
+Isis by freedmen of great consular houses.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 353.</note> Nero despised all
+religions except that of the Syrian goddess; yet Isis had
+probably little to fear from a prince who had been touched by
+the charm and mystery of the East, and who at the last would
+have accepted the prefecture of Egypt.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xv. 36; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Nero</hi>,
+40, 47, varia agitavit, an vel Aegypti
+praefecturam concedi sibi oraret, etc.</note> Otho was, however,
+the first Roman emperor who openly took part in the Egyptian
+rites.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, 12.</note> The Flavians had all come under the spell of Eastern
+superstition. Vespasian had had a solitary vigil in the
+<pb n="567"/><anchor id="Pg567"/>temple of Serapis; in obedience to a dream from the god he
+had consented to perform miracles of healing.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> iv. v. vii.; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi>
+iv. 81.</note> In the fierce
+civil strife of 69 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, when the Capitol was stormed and burnt
+by the Vitellians, the service of Isis was actually going on, and
+Domitian, disguised in her sacred vestments, escaped among
+the crowd of priests and acolytes.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iii. 74; cf. Suet. <hi rend="italic">Domit.</hi> i.</note> He repaid the debt by
+rebuilding the temple of Isis in the Campus Martius, in 92
+<hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, on a magnificent scale.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 61, n. 8.</note> The sarcasms of Juvenal on the
+<q>shaven, linen-clad herd,</q> and the pious austerities of female
+worshippers of Isis, reveal the powerful hold which the goddess
+had obtained in his day, even on the frivolous and self-indulgent.
+Hadrian, of course, had the gods of the Nile in the
+Canopus of his cosmopolitan villa at Tibur.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Prom. <anchor id="corr567"/><corr sic="Archaeol.">Archæol.</corr></hi> p. 238;
+Spart. <hi rend="italic">Hadr.</hi> c. 26.</note> Commodus walked
+in procession with shaven head and an image of Anubis in his
+arms.<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Commod.</hi> 9.</note> The triumph of Isis in the Antonine age was complete.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Serapeum at Alexandria was to the Egyptian cult what
+the Temple was to the religion of Israel.<note place="foot">Gibbon, c. 28; Amm. Marc. xxii. 16.</note> And the world-wide
+trade and far-spreading influence of what was then the
+second city in the Empire might have given a wide diffusion
+even to a religion less adapted to satisfy the spiritual wants of
+the time. Slaves and freedmen were always the most ardent
+adherents and apostles of foreign rites. Names of persons of
+this class appear on many monuments as holders of Isiac
+office or liberal benefactors. A little brotherhood of household
+slaves at Valentia in Spain were united in the worship.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. 6004.</note>
+Petty traders from Alexandria swarmed in the ports of the
+Mediterranean, and especially in those of Campania, and near
+the Nolan gate of Pompeii the humble tombs of a little
+colony of these emigrants have been discovered.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 157.</note> The sailors
+and officers of the corn fleets from Africa also helped to spread
+the fame of Isis and Osiris. In the reign of Septimius Severus,
+their chief officer, C. Valerius Serenus, was neocorus of
+Serapis.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 158.</note> Alexandria also sent forth a crowd of artists,
+philosophers, and savants to the West. Several men of
+Egyptian origin filled high places in the imperial household,
+<pb n="568"/><anchor id="Pg568"/>as librarians or secretaries in the first and second centuries.
+Chaeremon, who had been librarian at Alexandria, and who
+had composed a theological treatise on Isis and Osiris, became
+Nero’s tutor.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 157.</note> Chaeremon’s pupil, Dionysius, was librarian
+and imperial secretary in the reign of Trajan. And Julius
+Vestinus, who held these offices under Hadrian, is described
+in an inscription as chief pontiff of Egypt and Alexandria,—a
+combination of dignities which probably enabled him to
+throw his powerful protection around the Isiac rites at
+Rome.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.G.</hi> 5900,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Ἀρχιερεῖ Ἀλεξανδρεῖας καὶ Αἰγύπτου πάσης καὶ ἐπιστάτῃ
+τοῦ Μουσείου καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν ἐν Ῥώμῃ βιβλιοθηκῶν ...
+ἐπιστολεῖ τοῦ αὐτοῦ αὐτοκράτορος</foreign>:
+cf. Macé, <hi rend="italic">Suétone</hi>, pp. 92, 116.</note> An influence so securely seated on the Palatine was
+sure to extend to the remotest parts of the Empire. If Isis
+could defy all the force of the Republican Government, what
+might she not do when emperors were enrolled in her priesthood,
+and imperial ministers, in correspondence with every
+prefecture from Britain to the Euphrates, were steeped in her
+mystic lore?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Already in Nero’s reign, Lucan could speak of Isis and
+Osiris as not only welcomed in the shrines of Rome, but as
+deities of all the world.<note place="foot">Lucan, <hi rend="italic">Phars.</hi> viii. 831, nos in
+templa tuam Romana accepimus Isin;
+ix. 158, jam numen gentibus Isin.</note> Plutarch and Lucian, from very
+different points of view, are witnesses to the same world-wide
+movement. The judgment will be confirmed by even a
+casual inspection of the religious records of the inscriptions.
+Although Isis and Serapis were not peculiarly soldiers’ gods,
+like Mithra and Bellona, yet they had many votaries among the
+legions on distant frontiers. A legate of the Legion Tertia
+Augusta, who was probably of Egyptian birth, introduced
+the rites into the camp of Lambaesis, and a temple to Isis and
+Serapis was built by the labour of many pious hands among his
+soldiers.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2630; cf. Cagnat,
+<hi rend="italic">L’Armée Rom. d’Afr.</hi> p. 423. See
+other dedications by officers in <hi rend="italic">Or.
+Henz.</hi> 5836, 7.</note> Serapis appears often on the African monuments,
+sometimes leagued or identified with Jupiter or Pluto.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2629, 1002, 4, 5.</note> In
+Dacia and Pannonia the cults of Egypt were probably not as
+popular as that of Mithra, but they have left traces in all the
+great centres of population.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> iii. 881, 2, 1428, 1590, 1342,
+4015; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 5838.</note> In several inscriptions<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 4809; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2035,
+5833.</note> Isis is called
+<pb n="569"/><anchor id="Pg569"/>by a native name such as Noreia, and we find on others the
+instructive blending of the strata of four mythologies. Tacitus
+thought he had discovered the counterpart of Isis in the forests of
+Germany.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Germ.</hi> 9.</note> She is certainly found in Holland, and at Cologne.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 1897.</note>
+Officers of the sixth Legion worshipped her at York.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 5836.</note> French
+antiquaries have followed the traces of the Egyptian gods in
+nearly all the old places of importance in their own country,
+at Fréjus, Nîmes, and Arles, at Lyons, Clermont, and Soissons.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 162. For an interesting
+dedication for the support of the worship
+at Nîmes <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 3058.</note>
+Shrines of Isis have been explored in Switzerland and at the
+German spas.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 457; cf. Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 67,
+in modum municipii exstructus locus,
+amoeno salubrium aquarum usu frequens.</note> The scenes which were so common at Rome
+or Pompeii or Corinth, the procession of shaven, white-robed
+priests and acolytes, marching to the sound of chants and
+barbaric music, with the sacred images and symbols of a worship
+which had been cradled on the Nile ages before the time
+of Romulus, and transmuted by the eclectic subtlety of Platonic
+theologians into a cosmopolitan religion, were reproduced in
+remote villages on the edge of the Sahara and the Atlantic,
+in the valleys of the Alps or the Yorkshire dales.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What was the secret of this power and fascination in the
+religion of a race whose cult of the dog and cat had so often
+moved the ridicule of the satirist and comic poet? No single
+answer can be given to that question. The great power of
+Isis <q>of myriad names</q> was that, transfigured by Greek
+influences, she appealed to many orders of intellect, and
+satisfied many religious needs or fancies. To the philosopher
+her legends furnished abundant material for the conciliation of
+religion and pseudo-science, for the translation of myth into
+ancient cosmic theory, or for the absorption of troublesome
+mythologies into a system which perhaps tended more than
+any other, except that of Mithra, to the Platonic idea of the
+unity of God. The mystic who dreamt of an ecstasy of divine
+communion, in which the limits of sense and personality might
+be left behind in a vague rapture of imaginative emotion,
+found in the spectacle of her inner shrine a strange power far
+surpassing the most transporting effects of Eleusis. Women
+especially saw in the divine mother and mourner a glorified
+<pb n="570"/><anchor id="Pg570"/>type of their sex, in all its troubles and its tenderness, such as
+their daughters in coming ages were destined to find in the
+Virgin Mother.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 160; Réville, <hi rend="italic">Rel. unter
+den Sev.</hi> p. 53; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> ii. 3386, Isis
+puellaris.</note> The ascetic impulse, which has seldom been
+far from the deepest religious feeling, derived comfort and
+the sense of atonement in penitential abstinence and preparation
+for the holy mysteries. The common mass, who are affected
+chiefly by the externals of a religion, had their wants amply
+gratified in the pomp and solemnity of morning sacrifice and
+vespers, in those many-coloured processions, such as that which
+bore in spring-time the sacred vessel to the shore, with the sound
+of hymn and litany.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 11.</note> And in an age when men were everywhere
+banding themselves together in clubs and colleges for
+mutual help and comfort, the sacred guilds of Isis had
+evidently an immense influence. That evil, as in nearly all
+heathen worships, often lurked under her solemn forms cannot
+be denied, though there was also groundless calumny.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 160, 1.</note> Yet
+there must have been some strange power in a religion which
+could for a moment lift a sensualist imagination like that of
+Apuleius almost to the height and purity of Eckhart and
+Tauler.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 24.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The triumph of Isis and Serapis in the Western world is
+an instructive episode in the history of religion. It is, like
+that of Mithra, a curious example of the union of conservative
+feeling with a purifying and transforming influence
+of the growing moral sense. A religion has a double strength
+and fascination which has a venerable past behind it. The
+ancient symbolism may be the creation of an age of gross
+conceptions of the Divine, it may be even grotesque and
+repulsive, at first sight, to the more refined spiritual sense of
+an advanced moral culture. Yet the religious instinct will
+always strive to maintain its continuity with the past, however
+it may transfigure the legacy of ruder ages. Just as Christian
+theologians long found anticipations of the Gospel among
+patriarchs and warrior kings of Israel, so pagan theologians
+like Plutarch or Aristides could discover in the cults of Egypt
+all their highest cosmic theories, and satisfaction for all their
+spiritual wants.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. 78; Aristid.
+<hi rend="italic">Or. Sac.</hi> viii. 52, 53.</note> With unwavering faith, Plutarch and his
+<pb n="571"/><anchor id="Pg571"/>kind believed that under all the coarse mythic fancy of early
+ages there was veiled a profound insight into the secrets of
+nature and the spiritual needs of humanity. The land of
+the Nile, with its charm of immemorial antiquity, was long
+believed to have been the cradle of all that was best and deepest
+in the philosophic or religious thought of Hellas. The gods of
+the classic pantheon were identified with the gods of Egypt.<note place="foot">Herodot. ii. c. 50.</note>
+Pythagoras and the Orphic mystics had derived their inspiration
+from the same source.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 81; Iambl. <hi rend="italic">De Pythag. Vit.</hi>
+§ 151, cf. § 14; Porph. <hi rend="italic">Pythag.</hi> § 6;
+Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. 10.</note> The conquests of Alexander
+and the foundation of Alexandria had drawn to a focus the
+philosophical or the religious ideas of East and West, of India,
+Palestine, Persia, and Greece. At Alexandria were blended
+and transformed all the philosophies and mythologies by the
+subtle dialectic of Greece. The animal cult of Egypt, indeed,
+was always a stumbling-block to Greek and Roman.<note place="foot">Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apollon. Tyan.</hi> vi. 19;
+D. Chrys. <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> xii. § 68.</note> It moved
+the contempt and ridicule of comedian and satirist.<note place="foot">Juv. xv. 3; cf. Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Nat. Deor.</hi>
+iii. 15; <hi rend="italic">Tuscul.</hi> v. 27.</note> It was
+an easy mark for the sneers of the crowd. Yet even the
+divinised dog or ibis could find skilful, if not convinced,
+defenders among the Greek eclectics, who lent all the forces of
+Hellenic ingenuity to the cause of antiquarianism in religion.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> cc. 72-74.</note>
+Their native mythology was not without traces of zoolatry.
+Their own god of healing, who became so popular in all lands,
+was always connected in art and legend with the serpent. The
+serpent of the Acropolis, which daily ate the holy wafer, was
+the immemorial companion of the tutelary goddess of Athens.<note place="foot">Herodot. viii. c. 41.</note>
+Had not Zeus, in his many amours, found an easy access to
+the fair victims of his love in animal forms? The Divine
+virtues are only faintly imaged in animals which have their
+uses in the world. If all religion is only symbolism, why
+should not the multiform beneficence of the unseen Powers
+be expressed in the form of creatures who give their service
+and companionship to man, as fitly as in lifeless bronze or
+marble?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But although men might try to reconcile theology even
+to a worship of animal forms, it was by very different spiritual
+influences that Isis and Serapis won the devotion of the
+<pb n="572"/><anchor id="Pg572"/>rustics of remote villages in Spain and Britain. The dog-headed
+Anubis might perhaps be borne in processions.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 11, attollens canis
+cervices arduas Anubis; cf. Juv. vi.
+534; Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. 44; Tertull.
+<hi rend="italic">Apol.</hi> 6; <hi rend="italic">Ad Nat.</hi> ii. 8.</note> The
+forms of sacred animals might be portrayed, along with those of
+Io and Andromeda, on the frescoes of Herculaneum or Pompeii.<note place="foot">Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi>, p. 175.</note>
+But the monuments of the Western provinces are, as a rule,
+singularly free from the grossness of early Egyptian zoolatry.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 106, 7.</note>
+And there is hardly a hint of it in the famous picture of the
+initiation of Lucius in the <hi rend="italic">Metamorphoses</hi> of Apuleius. In
+that fascinating scene, Isis is the universal mother, Nature,
+queen of the worlds of light and darkness, the eternal type
+of all lesser divinities. And on inscriptions she appears as
+the Power who <q>is all in all.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1871.</note> Whatever her special functions
+may be, goddess of the spring, or of the sailor on the sea,
+guardian of women in the pangs of motherhood, the <q>Queen
+of peace,</q><note place="foot">On a Dacian inscription, <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi>
+iii. 1590, Placidae Reginae.</note> guide and saviour of souls in the passage to the
+world beyond the tomb, she remains the Supreme Power,
+invoked by many names, with virtues and graces as various
+as her names. And Serapis, in the later theology, is not the
+president of any provincial territory in the universe. He is
+not the lord of sea or earth or air only; he is lord of all the
+elements, the dispenser of all good, the master of human life.
+It is thus that Aristides hails him after his rescue from the
+perils of the sea.<note place="foot">Baumgart, <hi rend="italic">Ael. Aristides Repräsent.
+der Soph. Rhet. des zweit. Jahr.</hi>
+p. 91; cf. Hadrian’s letter to Servianus,
+Vopisc. <hi rend="italic">Vit. Saturn.</hi> c. 8.</note> But although Serapis in many a monument
+is enthroned beside Jupiter, Queen Isis is also supreme in
+the world both of the living and the dead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet, although there is a very decided tendency to monotheism
+in the Alexandrian religion, a tendency which appealed
+strongly to minds like Plutarch, it did not succeed in altogether
+breaking with polytheism and its attendant superstitions. The
+attempted alliance of religion and philosophy was far from
+complete. Philosophy, indeed, had substituted abstract theory
+for the poetry of legend. It struggled hard to assert the
+essential unity of the Divine nature. And Plutarch, in his
+treatise on Isis, declares that God is one and the same in all
+lands under whatever names He may be worshipped.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. 66, 79.</note> But the
+<pb n="573"/><anchor id="Pg573"/>treatise shows at the same time how vague and unsettled still
+was the theology of Alexandria, and how hard it found the task
+of wedding Platonism to the haunting tradition of old idolatry.
+Physics, metaphysics, etymology, are all employed with infinite
+ingenuity to recover the secret meaning which it is assumed
+that ancient wisdom had veiled under the forms of legend.
+But arbitrary fancy plays far too large a part in these random
+guesses, and system there is none, to bridge the gulf between
+the Platonist eclectic and the superstitious masses. Isis
+worship was in practice linked with all the reigning superstitions,
+with divination, magic, astrology, oneiromancy.
+Manetho, who was one of the founders of the worship of
+Serapis, wrote a treatise for the Greek world on the influence
+of the stars on human destiny.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 101.</note> Egyptian astrologists were
+always in great demand. The emperors Otho and M. Aurelius
+carried them in their train.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> i. 23; D. Cass. lxxi. 8,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ γάρ τοι λόγος ἔχει Ἀρνοῦφιν τινα μάγον Αἰγύπτιον
+συνόντα τῷ Μάρκῳ κτλ.</foreign></note> Many Roman ladies in sickness
+would not take food or medicine till the safe hour had been
+determined by inspecting the Petosiris.<note place="foot">Juv. vi. 581.</note> The Isiac devotee
+was an enthusiastic believer in dreams sent by his favourite
+deities. On many inscriptions the record may be read of
+these warnings of the night.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1882, ex visu; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 346,
+572; v. 484.</note> In the syncretism of the time,
+Serapis came to be identified with the Greek god of healing,
+and patients sleeping in Egyptian temples received in dreams
+inspired prescriptions for their maladies.<note place="foot">Cic. <hi rend="italic">De Div.</hi> i. 58, 132; Diod.
+i. 25; Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or. Sacr.</hi> iii. p. 319
+(Jebb).</note> Sometimes the deity
+vouchsafed to confer miraculous powers of cure on a worshipper.
+The sceptical good sense of Vespasian was persuaded by medical
+courtiers at Alexandria to try the effect of his touch on the
+blind and paralytic, who had a divine monition to seek the
+aid of the emperor.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Hist.</hi> iv. 81, monitu Serapidis,
+etc.</note> The cultivated Aristides had a firm
+faith in these heaven-sent messages. He even believed that
+Serapis could call back the dead to life.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 104; Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or. Sacr.</hi>
+viii. 55.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet Aristides, in his prose hymn to Serapis, gives us a
+glimpse of the better side of that religion. After all, the
+superstitions which clustered round it were the universal
+<pb n="574"/><anchor id="Pg574"/>beliefs of the age, prevalent among the most cultivated and
+the most ignorant. The question for the modern student is
+whether these Alexandrian worships provided real spiritual
+sustenance for their devotees. And, in spite of many appearances
+to the contrary, the impartial inquirer must come to
+the conclusion that the cult of the Egyptian deities, through
+its inner monotheism, its ideal of ascetic purity, its vision of a
+great judgment and a life to come, was a real advance on
+the popular religion of old Greece and Rome. Isis and Serapis,
+along with Mithra, were preparing the Western world for
+the religion which was to appease the long travail of humanity
+by a more perfect vision of the Divine. It is impossible for a
+modern man to realise the emotion which might be excited by
+a symbolism like that of Demeter, or Mithra, or Isis, with
+its roots in a gross heathen past. But no reader of Apuleius,
+Plutarch, or Philostratus should fail to realise the surging
+spiritual energy which, in the second and third centuries, was
+seeking for expression and appeasement. It struck into
+strange devious tracks, and often was deluded by phantasms of
+old superstition glorified by a new spirit. But let us remember
+the enduring strength of hereditary piety and ancient association,
+and, under its influence, the magical skill of the religious
+consciousness to maintain the link between widely severed
+generations, by purifying the grossness of the past and
+transforming things absurd and offensive into consecrated
+vehicles of high spiritual sentiment. No one, who has read
+in Apuleius the initiation of Lucius in the Isiac mysteries,
+can doubt that the effect on the votary was profound and
+elevating. Pious artistic skill was not wanting to heighten
+emotion in Isis worship, as it is not disdained in our Christian
+churches. But the prayer of thanksgiving offered by Lucius
+might, <hi rend="italic">mutatis mutandis</hi>, be uttered by a new convert at a
+camp-meeting, or a Breton peasant after her first communion.
+It is the devout expression of the deep elementary religious
+feelings of awe and gratitude, humility and joy, boundless
+hope and trust. In the same tone, Aristides sings his prose
+canticle to Serapis. There is not a memory of the brute
+gods of the Nile. The Alexandrian god is now the equal or
+counterpart of Zeus, the lord of life and death, who cares
+for mortal men, who comforts, relieves, sustains. He is
+<pb n="575"/><anchor id="Pg575"/>indeed a most awful power, yet one full of loving-kindness,
+tenderness, and mercy.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or. Sacr.</hi> viii. 54,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">φιλανθρωπότατος γὰρ θεῶν καὶ φοβερώτατος αὐτός, κτλ.</foreign></note> In Plutarch we reach perhaps an even
+more spiritual height. Osiris, who in old legend represented the
+Nile, or the coarse fructifying powers of nature, passes into
+the Eternal Love and Beauty, pure, passionless, remote from
+any region of change or death, unapproachable in His ethereal
+splendour, save, as in moments of inspired musing, we may
+faintly touch Him as in a dream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the <hi rend="italic">Metamorphoses</hi> of Apuleius, the goddess who appears
+in a vision to Lucius promises that, when his mortal course
+is run, he shall find her illumining the Stygian gloom.
+And, next to the maternal love with which she embraced her
+votaries in this life, the great attraction of her cult was the
+promise of a blessed future, through sacramental grace, which
+she offered for the world to come. Serapis, too, is from the
+beginning a god of the under world, a <q>guide of souls,</q> as
+he is also their judge at the Great Assize.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> viii. 54,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">σωτὴρ αὐτὸς καὶ ψυχοπομπός, ἄγων εἰς φῶς καὶ πάλιν δεχόμενος κτλ.</foreign>; Plew, <hi rend="italic">De Sarapide</hi>,
+p. 30.</note> The Orphic lore, the
+mysteries of the Eleusinian goddesses and Dionysus, had for ages
+taught a dim doctrine of immortality, under the veil of legend,
+through the scenic effects of their dramatic mysteries. They
+first revealed to the Greek race that the life to come was
+the true life, for which the present was only a purgatorial
+preparation. They taught, in whatever rude fashion, that
+future beatitude could only be secured by a purification from
+the stains of time.<note place="foot">Rohde, <hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. p. 126; cf. i. 286;
+Lobeck, <hi rend="italic">Aglaoph.</hi> i. p. 239; Hardie, <hi rend="italic">Lectures
+on Classical Subjects</hi>, pp. 56, 57.
+The Orphici laid more stress on the
+moral aspect of immortality than the
+priests of Eleusis did.</note> The doctrine may have been drawn from
+Egypt, and Egypt once more gave it fresh meaning and force.
+The Alexandrian worship came with a deeper faith and more
+impressive ritual, with dreams and monitory visions, with a
+mystic lore, and the ascetic preparation for the holy mysteries,
+with the final scene in the inner sanctuary, when the
+votary seemed borne far beyond the limits of space and
+time into ethereal distances.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 22.</note> The soul might, indeed,
+have to pass through many bodies and mortal lives before
+it reached the life eternal. But the motto of the Isiac faith,
+inscribed on many tombs, was <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">εὐψύχει</foreign>, <q>be of good courage,</q>
+<pb n="576"/><anchor id="Pg576"/><q>may Osiris give the water of refreshment.</q><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.G.</hi> 6562,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">δοίη σοι ὁ Ὄσιρις τὸ ψυχρὸν ὕδωρ</foreign>: cf. Plew, <hi rend="italic">De Sarap.</hi> p. 31.</note> Everywhere
+the lotus, image of immortality, in its calix opening at
+every dawn, appears on symbols of the worship. And Harpocrates,
+the god who has triumphed over death, appears
+as the child issuing from the mystic flower. The Roman
+practice of burning the dead might seem to separate for ever
+the fate of the body from the spirit, although it is really a
+question of more or less rapid resolution of the mortal frame
+into its original elements. But, as we have seen, the man of
+the early Empire became more and more anxious to preserve
+undisturbed the <q>handful of white dust</q> rescued from the pyre,
+and would invoke the wrath of Isis against the desecrator.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 1879.</note> The
+great object of many of the colleges was to secure their humble
+members a niche in the <hi rend="italic">columbarium</hi>. The Alexandrine faith in
+immortality, by the grace of Isis and Serapis, probably did not
+inquire too curiously into the manner of the resurrection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Undoubtedly another secret of the popularity of the
+Egyptian worships lay in their impressive ritual, the separation
+of their clergy from the world, and in the comradeship of
+the guilds in which their votaries were enrolled. Apuleius
+has left us, in the initiation of Lucius at Cenchreae, and
+again at Rome, a priceless picture of the Isiac ritual. Everything
+in the ceremonial tends to kindle pious enthusiasm.
+Sophocles and Pindar had extolled the blessedness of those
+who had seen the mystic vision.<note place="foot">Pind. <hi rend="italic">Fr.</hi> 137 (Christ); Soph. <hi rend="italic">Fr.</hi> 753—
+<lg>
+<l rend="margin-left: 10"><foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ὡς τρὶς ὄλβιοι</foreign></l>
+<l><foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">κεῖνοι βροτῶν οἳ ταῦτα δερχένθες τέλη</foreign></l>
+<l><foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">μόλωσ’ ἐς Ἅιδου.</foreign></l>
+</lg>
+
+Cf. <hi rend="italic">O.C.</hi> 1051.</note> The experience of Lucius
+would seem to confirm the testimony of the Greek poets.
+When the goddess has promised him deliverance from
+brutish form, and pledged him to strict obedience, Lucius is
+inspired with the utmost ardour to join in <q>the holy warfare.</q>
+He takes up his abode in the sacred precincts, he begs to be
+admitted to full communion. But the venerable pontiff
+requires him to await the sign of the divine will. Lucius
+continues in fasting and prayer till the sign at last comes;
+when it comes he hastens to the morning sacrifice. The
+scrolls, covered with symbols of ancient Egypt, are brought in,
+and then, before a crowd of the faithful, he is plunged in the
+sacred font. Returning to the temple, as he lies prostrate
+<pb n="577"/><anchor id="Pg577"/>before the image of the goddess in prayer, he has whispered to
+him <q>the unutterable words.</q> Ten days more are spent in
+strictest retreat and abstinence from pleasures of the flesh;
+and then came the crowning rite, the solemn vigil in the inner
+sanctuary. There, as at Eleusis, a vivid drama of a divine
+death and resurrection probably passed before his eyes, in
+flashing radiance and awful visions, amid gloom and the
+tones of weird music. But the tale of what he saw and heard
+could never be fully unfolded to mortal ear.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There indeed are some sordid and suspicious traits in the
+history of this worship. As in the case of the taurobolium,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 4321, ex stipe collata.</note>
+the mysteries of Isis and Serapis could not be enjoyed without
+a considerable outlay. And Lucius found a difficulty in meeting
+the expense.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 28 (813), veste
+ipsa mea quamvis parvula distracta
+sufficientem corrasi summulum; cf.
+Tertull. <hi rend="italic">Apol.</hi> 13.</note> But, whether in heathendom or Christendom,
+a regular priesthood and an elaborate ritual cannot be
+supported without the offerings of the faithful. There has
+probably never been a religion in which the charge of venality
+has not been levelled against the priests. But Lucius finds
+here no stumbling-block. No material offering can repay the
+goodness and love of the goddess. He feels towards her not
+only reverence and gratitude, but the love of a son to a
+Divine mother. Ascetic isolation has produced the natural
+result of imaginative ecstasy and mystic exaltation. The long,
+quiet hours of rapt devotion before the sacred figure in the
+stillness of the shrine, the spectral visions of the supreme
+hour of revelation, made a profound impression on a soul
+which was deeply tainted by other visions of old-world sin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The daily ritual of Isis, which seems to have been as
+regular and complicated as that of the Catholic Church, produced
+an immense effect on the Roman mind. Every day
+there were two solemn offices, at which white-robed, tonsured
+priests, with acolytes and assistants of every degree, officiated.<note place="foot">Tibull. i. 3, 31, bisque die, resoluta
+comas, tibi dicere laudes Insignis
+turba debeat in Pharia.</note>
+The morning litany and sacrifice was an impressive service.
+The crowd of worshippers thronged the space before the chapel
+at the early dawn. The priest, ascending by a hidden stair,
+drew apart the veil of the sanctuary,<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 20 (795), velis
+candentibus reductis.</note> and offered the holy image
+<pb n="578"/><anchor id="Pg578"/>to their adoration. He then made the round of the altars,
+reciting the litany, and sprinkling the holy water <q>from the
+secret spring.</q> At two o’clock in the afternoon the passers by
+could hear from the temple in the Campus Martius the chant
+of vespers.<note place="foot">Mart. x. 48, 1, nunciat octavam
+Phariae sua turba juvencae.</note> A fresco of Herculaneum gives us a picture of the
+service. It is the adoration of the holy water, representing
+in symbol the fructifying and deathless power of Osiris. A
+priest, standing before the holy place, raises breast high a
+sacred urn for the adoration of the crowd. The sacrifice is
+smoking on the altar, and two choirs are chanting to the
+accompaniment of the seistron and the flute.<note place="foot">Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi>, pp. 171, 172.</note> Another fresco
+from Herculaneum exhibits a bearded, dark-skinned figure,
+crowned with the lotus, in the attitude of dancing before a
+throng of spectators to the sound of music. It is plausibly
+conjectured that we have here a pantomimic representation of
+the passion of Osiris and its joyful close.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 115; <hi rend="italic">Catal.</hi> No. 222.</note> There was much
+solemn pomp and striking scenic effect in this public ceremonial.
+But it is clear from Apuleius, that an important part of
+worship was also long silent meditation before the image of
+the goddess. The poets speak of devotees seated thus before
+the altar, and in the temple at Pompeii a bench has been
+found which, from its position, was probably occupied by such
+silent worshippers.<note place="foot">Mau, p. 171; Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 17
+(791), intuitans deae specimen pristinos
+casus meos recordabar; Mart. ii. 14, 8.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The great festivals of the Egyptian worship were the
+blessing of the sacred vessel on the fifth of March, and the
+celebration of the quest and finding of Osiris in November.
+The anniversary of the death and rising again of the god was
+strictly observed by large numbers, especially among women.
+Pagan and Christian writers have alike ridiculed the theatrical
+grief and joy for a god so often found, so often lost.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 126; Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi>
+c. 39,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">διὸ μηνὸς Ἀθὺρ ἀφανισθῆναι τὸν Ὄσιριν λέγουσιν,
+    <anchor id="corr578"/><corr sic="κτλ">κτλ.</corr></foreign>: Juv. viii. 29;
+vi. 534; Ov. <hi rend="italic">Metam.</hi> ix. 692, nunquamque
+satis quaesitus Osiris; Lucan, viii.
+831, et quem tu plangens hominem
+testaris Osirim; Min. Fel. c. 21.</note> The
+death of Osiris at the hands of Typhon, the rending of the
+divine form, and the dispersion of the lacerated remains, were
+passionately lamented in sympathy with the mourning Isis.
+With effusive grief the devotees beat their breasts and lacerated
+their arms, and followed in eager search. When on the
+<pb n="579"/><anchor id="Pg579"/>third day the god had been found and restored, the joyful
+event was hailed with extravagant gladness, and celebrated
+by a banquet of the initiated. For some of these holy
+days the rubrics prescribed a long preparation of fasting and
+ascetic restraint. But that a general strictness of life was not
+required of the Isiac votary, at least under the early Empire,
+may be inferred from the fact that the frail Cynthias and
+Delias in Propertius and Tibullus were among the most regular
+in ritual observance.<note place="foot">Ov. <hi rend="italic">Am.</hi> i. 8, 74; iii. 9, 30; Prop.
+ii. 33, 3; Tibull. i. 3, 23.</note> The festival of the holy vessel of Isis,
+which marked the opening of navigation, and received the
+benediction of the goddess, was, in the early Empire, observed
+with solemn pomp and enthusiasm by the coast towns of the
+Mediterranean. A brilliantly vivid description of such a
+scene at Cenchreae has been left by Apuleius. It was a
+great popular carnival, in which a long procession, masquerading
+in the most fantastic and various costumes, conducted the
+sacred ship to the shore. Women in white robes scattered
+flowers and perfumes along the way. A throng of both
+sexes bore torches and tapers, to symbolise the reign of
+the Mother of the stars. The music of flute and pipe
+meanwhile filled the air with sacred symphonies, and a
+band of youths in snow-white vestments chanted a hymn.
+Wave upon wave came the throng of those who had been
+admitted to full communion, all clad in linen, and the men
+marked with the tonsure. They were followed by the priests,
+each bearing some symbol of the many powers and virtues
+of the goddess, the boat-shaped lamp, the <q>altars of succour,</q>
+the palm of gold, the wand of Mercury. In a pix were
+borne the holy mysteries, and, last of all, the most venerable
+symbol, a small urn of shining gold and adorned in
+subtle workmanship with figures of Egyptian legend.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 11 (774-78);
+Réville, <hi rend="italic">Rel. unter den Sev.</hi> p. 56.</note> This
+holy vase, containing the water of the sacred river, which was
+an emanation from Osiris,<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. 38,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Νεῖλον Ὀσίριδος ἀπορροὴν ... ἔχουσιν</foreign>.</note> closed the procession. Arrived at
+the margin of the sea, the chief priest consecrated the sacred
+vessel with solemn form and litany, and named it with the holy
+name. Adorned with gold and citrus wood and pictures of
+old legend, it spread its white sails to the breeze, and bore
+<pb n="580"/><anchor id="Pg580"/>into the distance the vows and offerings of the faithful for the
+safety of those upon the deep.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The oriental religions of the imperial period were distinguished
+from the native religion of Latium by the possession
+of a numerous and highly organised priesthood, and an
+intensely sacerdotal spirit.<note place="foot">Réville, p. 54; Lafaye, p. 130 sqq.</note> In an age of growing religious
+faith, this characteristic gave them enormous power. The
+priest became a necessary medium of intercourse with God.
+It is also one of the many traits in the later paganism,
+which prepared and softened the transition to the reign of
+the mediaeval Church. It would be tedious and unprofitable
+to enumerate the various grades of the Isiac priesthood.
+There were high priests of conspicuous dignity, who were
+also called <hi rend="italic">prophetae</hi>.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.G.</hi> 6006; Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> ii. c. 28
+(159), propheta primarius, xi. c. 17
+(788), sacerdos maximus. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi>
+2305, C. Ruf. Volusianus pater ierofanta
+profata Isidos; 1878, 6666; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> x.
+6445; xii. 410.</note> But ordinary priests could perform
+many of their functions.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 133.</note> There were interpreters of
+dreams, dressers and keepers of the sacred wardrobe of the
+goddess,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xii. 3061, Ornatrix fani Nemausi.</note> whose duties must have been onerous, if we may
+judge from the list of robes and jewels and sacred furniture
+preserved in inscriptions or recovered from the ruins of Isiac
+shrines.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 135.</note> It has been remarked that the roaming Visigoths
+in southern Gaul must have had a rare spoil if they had the
+fortune to light on one of the great temples of Isis. The
+scribe of the Pastophori, in Apuleius, is also an important
+officer. He summons the sacred convocation, and recites the
+<q>bidding prayer</q> for the Emperor and all subjects, in their
+several places and stations.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 17 (789).</note> Music took a large part in the
+ritual; there was hymn-singing to the sound of flutes, harp,
+and cymbal; and the chanters and paeanists of Serapis
+formed an order by themselves.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> c. 9 (772), dicati Serapi tibicines.</note> The prayer which Lucius
+offers to the goddess, in Apuleius, has been arranged as a
+metrical litany.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 138, n. 4.</note> Women often appear in inscriptions and in
+our texts as priestesses, and had a prominent place in all
+solemn ritual.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2355, 6385, 2309.</note> And it is evident that, with all its sacerdotalism,
+the worship gave full recognition to devout wor<pb n="581"/><anchor id="Pg581"/>shippers of every degree and sex. All who are devoted to
+the service have their place and function. The initiated might
+even wear the tonsure in the ordinary lay life. To do this,
+indeed, needed some courage, in the face of Roman ridicule.
+But the religious were, from the earliest times in Greece and
+Italy, associated for mutual support in sacred guilds, designated
+by various names, Isiaci or Pastophori or Anubiaci.
+In the third century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, such societies are found in Ceos
+and Peiraeus.<note place="foot">Foucart, <hi rend="italic">Assoc. Religieuses</hi>, p. 117;
+<hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi> 66, 240.</note> On the walls of Pompeii they have left their
+appeals to the electors to vote on behalf of candidates for
+the aedileship.<note place="foot">Mau, p. 478, Cn. Helv. Sabinum
+aed. Isiaci rogant.</note> They were organised on the usual lines of
+the ancient colleges, divided into decuries, with a director and
+a treasurer, a <q>father</q> or a <q>mother,</q> or a patron at their
+head.<note place="foot">Foucart, pp. 25-30; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi>
+6029, 2313, mater sacrorum; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi>
+vi. 2277; <hi rend="italic">Or.</hi> 2308, patrono Sacr.
+Isidis; Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 30 (817).</note> The Isiac guilds must have had a powerful influence
+in the diffusion of the religion of Alexandria. But they
+also were probably one cause of the suspicion so long entertained
+for that worship by the Republican government, and
+they only asserted their full strength in the second century,
+when the colleges in general received the tacit sanction of the
+emperors. That the emperors felt little fear of these foreign
+sacred corporations became clear when an emperor actually
+took the tonsure of Isis.<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Commod.</hi> c. 9.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Isiac system was energetic and self-assertive, but it
+can hardly be called dangerous or revolutionary. It threw
+many of the old gods into the shade, but its syncretism also
+found a place for many of them. Its inner monotheism, after
+the fashion of those days, had open arms of charity for all the
+ancient gods. One of the priests of Isis might be called
+Iacchagogus or Mithra;<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 22 (800).</note> statues of Dionysus and Venus and
+Priapus stood in the court of the Isium at Pompeii.<note place="foot">Lafaye, pp. 189, 190; Mau, p. 169.</note> The
+Isis of Apuleius proclaims her identity with nearly all the
+great powers of classical legend, and gathers them into herself.
+But Isis identifies only to conquer and absorb. And her
+priesthood formed an aggressive and powerful caste. The
+sacerdotal colleges of the Latin religion were never, except in
+<pb n="582"/><anchor id="Pg582"/>the case of the Vestals, separated from ordinary life. The
+highest pontificate was held by busy laymen, by consuls or
+emperors or great soldiers. After the performance of his part
+in some great rite, the Roman priest returned to his civic
+place and duties. And in Greece, in the third and second
+centuries <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, even the Isiac priesthood was held only for a
+year, or even for a month; and the sacred processions at
+one time needed the authorisation of the local council at
+Samos.<note place="foot">Lafaye, p. 149.</note> But when we come to the days of Apuleius, all
+this is changed. The chief priest at Cenchreae is evidently
+a great ecclesiastic, bearing the sacred Eastern name of
+Mithra.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 22 (800), Mithram
+illum suum sacerdotem praecipuum,
+divino quodam stellarum consortio ut
+aiebat mihi conjunctum, sacrorum
+ministrum decernit.</note> He has given up ordinary civic life, and has
+probably abandoned his Greek name to take a new name
+<q>in religion.</q> Every day two solemn services at least
+have to be performed in the temple, besides the private
+direction of souls, which had evidently become a regular
+part of the priestly functions. Attached to the great
+temples, and close to the altar, there is a <q>clergy house</q>
+where the ministers are lodged. It is called the Pastophorion,
+and its chambers have been traced in the débris
+of the temple at Pompeii.<note place="foot">Lafaye, pp. 151, 186; Mau, <hi rend="italic">Pompeii</hi>,
+p. 174.</note> One of these presbyteries was
+the scene of the seduction which convulsed the religious
+world in the reign of Tiberius, and which sent so many pious
+exiles to the solitudes of Sardinia. The ministers of Isis and
+Serapis are marked off by the tonsure and the Isiac habit,
+which meet us in the pages of poets from Tibullus to Juvenal,<note place="foot">Tibull. i. 3, 30; Mart. xii. 29;
+Juv. vi. 526; Suet. <hi rend="italic">Otho</hi>, 12.</note>
+and in the frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The
+abstinence, which was required as a preparation for communion
+in ordinary votaries, was a lifelong obligation on the priest.
+The use of woollen garments, of wine, pork, fish, and certain
+vegetables, was absolutely forbidden to them.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is.</hi> c. 4, 8, 32.</note> Chastity was
+essential in the celebrant of the holy mysteries, and even
+Tertullian holds up the priests of Isis as a reproachful example
+of continence to professing followers of Christ. The priesthood
+is no longer a secondary concern; it absorbs a man’s
+<pb n="583"/><anchor id="Pg583"/>whole life, sets him apart within the sanctuary as the dispenser
+of sacred privileges, with the awful power of revealing the
+mystery of eternity, and preparing souls to meet the great
+ordeal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It does not need much imagination to understand the
+fascination of Isis and Serapis for a people who had outgrown
+a severe and sober, but an uninspiring faith. They came to
+the West at the crisis of a great spiritual and political
+revolution, with the charm of foreign mystery and the
+immemorial antiquity of a land whose annals ran back to
+ages long before Rome and Athens were even villages. But
+with antique charm, the religion combined the moral and
+spiritual ideas of generations which had outgrown the gross
+symbolism of Nature worship. The annual festivals might
+preserve the memory of the myth, which in its grossness and
+brutal tragedy once pictured the fructifying influence of the
+mysterious river on the lands which awaited his visitations,
+or the waning force of vegetative power and solar warmth.
+But Serapis, the new god of the Ptolemies, became the lord of
+life and death, the guide and saviour of souls, the great judge
+of all in the other world, an awful power, yet more inclined to
+mercy than to judgment.<note place="foot">Aristid. <hi rend="italic">Or. Sacr.</hi> xiii. p. 54.</note> And Isis rose to equally boundless
+sway, and one of greater tenderness. Powers above and powers
+below alike wait on her will: she treads Tartarus under her
+feet, and yet she embraces all, and specially the weak and
+miserable, in the arms of her charity.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 24.</note> Above all, she has the
+secret of the unseen world, and can lighten for her worshipper
+the Stygian gloom. But the Isiac, like the Orphic revelation,
+while it gave a blessed promise for the life to come, attached
+grave conditions to the pledge. In this brief time of probation,
+the soul must prepare itself under ghostly guidance for
+the great trial. Sacrament and mystery lent their aid to
+fortify the worshipper in the face of death, but, to derive their
+full virtue, he must exercise himself in temperance, abjure the
+pleasures of the senses, and purify himself for the vision of
+God.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi></note> The sacred ritual of the Egyptian might captivate the
+senses and imagination by its pomp and music, its steaming
+altars, and many-coloured symbolism. But in the stillness of
+the sanctuary the worshipper was trained to find his moments
+<pb n="584"/><anchor id="Pg584"/>of purest and most exalted devotion in silent meditation
+before the Queen of heaven and the shades. The <anchor id="corr584"/><corr sic="lonely">lonely,</corr>
+the weak, and the desolate found in the holy guilds succour
+and consolation, with a place in the ritual of her solemn
+seasons, which bound each to each in the love of a Divine
+Mother.
+</p>
+
+</div><div type="chapter" n="6" rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="585"/><anchor id="Pg585"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="VI. The religion of Mithra"/><index index="pdf" level1="VI. The religion of Mithra"/>
+<head>CHAPTER VI</head>
+
+<head type="sub">THE RELIGION OF MITHRA</head>
+
+<p>
+Of all the oriental religions which attracted the devotion of
+the West in the last three centuries of the Empire, that of
+Mithra was the most powerful. It is also the system which
+for various reasons has the greatest interest for the modern
+student. It is perhaps the highest and most striking example
+of the last efforts of paganism to reconcile itself to the great
+moral and spiritual movement which was setting steadily, and
+with growing momentum, towards purer conceptions of God, of
+man’s relations to Him, and of the life to come. It is also the
+greatest effort of syncretism to absorb, without extinguishing,
+the gods of the classic pantheon in a cult which was almost
+monotheistic, to transform old forms of nature worship and
+cosmic symbolism into a system which should provide at once
+some form of moral discipline and real satisfaction for spiritual
+wants. In this effort, Mithraism was not so much impeded
+by a heritage of coarse legend as the worships of Pessinus
+and Alexandria. It was indeed sprung from the same order
+of religious thought as they. It could never detach itself
+from its source as a cult of the powers of nature.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Monuments Relatifs aux Mystères de Mithra</hi>, Intr. pp. 309, 310.</note> But the
+worship of the Sun, with which Mithra was inseparably connected,
+was the purest and most natural form of devotion,
+if elemental powers were to be worshipped at all. And heathendom
+tended more and more under the Empire to fix its
+devotion on the source of all light and life. The Sun was to
+Plato the highest material symbol of the Infinite Good. Neo-Pythagoreanism
+and Neo-Platonism regarded him as the sacred
+<pb n="586"/><anchor id="Pg586"/>image of the power beyond human ken.<note place="foot">Zeller, <hi rend="italic">Phil. der Griech.</hi> iii. 2, p.
+101; cf. Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i. 17; Philostr.
+<hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> ii. 38; vi. 10, § 1; M.
+Aurel. xi. 27.</note> <q>Before religion,</q>
+it has been said, <q>had reached the point of proclaiming that
+God must be sought in the realm of the ideal and the absolute
+outside the world of sense, the one rational and scientific cult
+was that of the Sun.</q><note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 336; Dieterich,
+<hi rend="italic">Eine Mithrasliturgie</hi>, p. 197.</note> Heliolatry also harmonised with
+absolutism in the State, as the old Persian kings and their
+imitators, the emperors of the third century, clearly perceived.
+The great temple of the Sun, which Aurelian, the son of a
+priestess of the deity, founded in the Campus Martius, with its
+high pontiffs and stately ritual, did honour not only to the
+great lord of the heavenly spheres, but to the monarch who
+was the august image of his power upon earth and who was
+endued with his special grace.<note place="foot">Flav. Vop. <hi rend="italic">Aurelian</hi>, c. 36, 39.</note> The power of Mithra in the
+fourth century lay in the fact that, while it was tender and
+tolerant to the old national worships, and never broke with the
+inner spirit of heathenism, it created an all-embracing system
+which rose above all national barriers, which satisfied the
+philosophic thought of the age in its mysticism, and gave
+comfort and a hope of immortality through its sacraments.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mithra was one of the most ancient and venerable objects
+of pagan devotion, as he was one of the last to be dethroned.
+In faint outline he can be traced to the cradle of the Aryan
+race.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 223 sq.; Gasquet,
+<hi rend="italic">Le Culte de Mithra</hi>, p. 16 sq.</note> In the Vedas he is a god of light, and, as the god of
+truth, who hates all falsehood, he has the germ of that moral
+character which grew into a great force in the last age of his
+worship in the West. In the Avestas, the sacred books of the
+religion of Iran, which, however late their redaction, still enshrine
+a very ancient creed, Mithra has the same well-defined
+personality. He is the radiant god who seems to emerge
+from the rocky summits of eastern mountains at dawn, who
+careers through heaven with a team of four white horses; yet
+he is not sun or moon or any star, but a spirit of light, ever
+wakeful, watching with a thousand eyes, whom nothing can
+escape and nothing deceive.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 225.</note> And so, while he gives warmth
+and increase to the earth, and health and wealth to men, he is
+also from the beginning a moral power. He confers wisdom
+<pb n="587"/><anchor id="Pg587"/>and honour and a clear conscience and concord. He wages a
+truceless war with the evil powers of darkness, and guards his
+faithful soldiers against the craft of the enemy. He is the
+friend and consoler of the poor; he is the mediator between
+earth and heaven; he is the lord of the world to come.<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 20.</note> But
+his place in the Zoroastrian hierarchy was not always equally
+high. At one time he was only one of the <hi rend="italic">yazatas</hi>, who were
+created by the supreme Ormuzd.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 226 sqq.</note> But Mithra has still the
+attributes of guardian and saviour; he is approached with
+sacrifice, libation, ablution, and litany, as in the latest days of
+his power in the West. And again a higher place is given to
+him; he is the vicegerent of the remote, ineffable Ormuzd, the
+mediator through whom the supreme power crushes evil
+demons, and wages war with Ahriman; he is invoked in the
+same prayers side by side with the Supreme. The Great
+Kings, especially the later, regard Mithra as their special
+guardian, swear by him in their most solemn oaths,<note place="foot">Xen. <hi rend="italic">Cyrop.</hi> vii. 5, 53; <hi rend="italic">Oecon.</hi> iv.
+§ 24.</note> and call
+upon him in the hour of battle. If he was the god of the
+humble and afflicted, he was also the god of the prince and
+warrior noble, and so we shall find him at the end.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Persian conquest of Babylon had lasting effects on
+the religion of Mithra. There he encountered a sacerdotal
+system which had its roots in an immemorial civilisation. The
+conquerors, as so often happens, were to some extent subdued
+by the vanquished.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 231; Gasquet, p.
+21 sqq.</note> Syncretism set in; the deities of the
+two races were reconciled and identified. The magical arts
+and the astrolatry of the valley of the Euphrates imposed
+themselves on the purer Mazdean faith, and never relaxed
+their hold, although they failed to check its development as a
+moral system. Ormuzd was confounded with Bel, Mithra
+with Shamash or the Sun-god. The astral and solar lore,
+the faith in mystic numbers, which had been cultivated in
+Babylonia through many generations, took its place in the
+theology of Mithra, and they have left their mark in many a
+chapel on the Danube and the Rhine. Yet Mithra, identified
+with the Sun at Babylon, was never absorbed in the cult
+of the solar deity in the West.<note place="foot">Donsbach, <hi rend="italic">Die räumliche Verbreitung
+des <anchor id="corr587"/><corr sic="Mithrasdientes">Mithrasdienstes</corr></hi>, p. 5.</note> On many of the later
+<pb n="588"/><anchor id="Pg588"/>inscriptions Mithra and the Sun are mentioned side by side as
+equals and allies. Yet the connection of Mithra with Babylon
+is never forgotten either by Greeks or Romans. Claudian
+connects him with the mysteries of Bel.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Laud. Stilich.</hi> i. 62.</note> The priest who,
+with many weird rites, in a waste sunless spot beside the
+Tigris, conducts Menippus to the underworld, wears the dress
+of Media, and bears the name Mithrobarzanes.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Menippus</hi>, cc. 6-9.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With the destruction of the Persian empire and the diffusion
+of Magian influence in Asia Minor, the worship arrived at its
+last stage before entering on the conquest of the West.
+The monarchs of Pontus, Armenia, Cappadocia, and Commagene,
+who claimed descent from the Achaemenids, were
+politic or enthusiastic votaries of the religious traditions of
+Iran.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 232.</note> While they reverenced Ormuzd and Anaitis, Mithra
+was their special patron, as he was to Artaxerxes.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Inscr. Orient.</hi> i. 2, 3.</note> Mithra’s
+name appears constantly in the names of royal houses, such as
+Mithradates and Mithrobarzanes. The inscription on the tomb
+of Antiochus of Commagene, who boasted of his descent from
+Darius the son of Hystaspes, records the endowment of solemn
+Persian rites, and combines the names of Ormuzd and Zeus, of
+Apollo and Mithra.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Inscr. Grecques</hi>, i.</note> In the submergence of national barriers
+which followed the fall of the Persian monarchy, and under
+the influence of Greek philosophy, that process of syncretism
+began in Asia Minor which was destined to produce such
+momentous results in the third and fourth centuries. But the
+Mazdean faith, strong in its associations with the ancient
+sources of spiritual enlightenment in the East, never succumbed
+to the western paganism. The classical gods might be admitted
+to the Mazdean heaven; Zeus might be confounded with
+Ormuzd; Anaitis might find an analogue in Artemis Tauropolus.
+But the ancient name of Mithra was never profaned
+in the liturgy by any translation.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 236.</note> It was chiefly perhaps in
+Phrygia and Lydia that alien worships produced a lasting
+effect in modifying the Persian theology. The pure morality
+of the Mithraist creed might seem to have little in common
+with the orgies of the devotees of Attis and the Great Mother.
+But religious sentiment has a miraculous power both to
+<pb n="589"/><anchor id="Pg589"/>reject and to transmute. The costume and Phrygian cap of
+Attis appear on all the monuments of Mithra to the end.
+And, although it is a subject of debate, the taurobolium, that
+baptism of blood which was the most impressive rite of the
+later paganism, was, in all probability, early borrowed by
+Mithra from the ritual of Phrygia.<note place="foot">Gasquet, pp. 31 and 75; Réville,
+<hi rend="italic">Rel. unter den Sev.</hi> p. 93; Goehler,
+<hi rend="italic">De Matris Mag. Cultu</hi>, p. 55; but cf.
+Cumont, Intr. pp. 334-5.</note> The pine, the emblem of
+immortality, which is so prominent in the scenes of mourning
+for Attis,<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 31.</note> also has a place in the sculptured remains of the
+Persian chapels. And the title Menotyrannus, a title of Attis,
+which is given to the Persian god on many slabs, recalls his
+passage through the same region.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 508, 511; cf. Cumont,
+Intr. p. 235.</note> But Greek art had a more
+powerful and enduring effect on the future of Mithra than
+any of these accretions. Probably the ancient Persian faith
+recoiled from any material image of its divine powers,<note place="foot">Strab. xv. 3, § 13 (732),
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">Πέρσαι τοίνυν ἀγάλματα μὲν καὶ βωμοὺς οὐχ ἱδρύονται ...
+τιμῶσι δὲ καὶ Ἥλιον ὃν καλοῦσι Μίθραν, κτλ.</foreign></note> although
+here also Assyria may have corrupted its purity. But when
+Hellenic imagination began to play around the Mazdean gods,
+the result was certain. The victorious Mithra was clothed
+with human form, and his legend was fixed for ever by some
+nameless Pergamene artist, who drew his inspiration from the
+<q>steer-slaying Victory</q> of Athens.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. pp. 181, 237.</note> The group in which the
+youthful hero, his mantle blown back by the wind, with a
+Phrygian cap upon his head, kneels on the shoulder of the
+bull, as he buries his poniard in its throat, was for four
+centuries reproduced in countless chapels from the mouth of
+the Danube to the Solway. That symbolic scene, conveying
+so many meanings in its hieratic rigidity, became to the pious
+Mithraist what the image of the Divine Figure on the Cross
+has been for so many centuries to the devout Catholic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The revelation of the spread of Mithra worship in the
+Roman Empire is one of the greatest triumphs of modern
+archaeology. Only faint notices of the cult are found in
+Herodotus, Xenophon, and Strabo.<note place="foot">Herod. i. 131; Xen. <hi rend="italic">Cyrop.</hi> vii.
+5, 53; Strab. <hi rend="italic">l.c.</hi></note> Quintus Curtius knew the
+Persian god as the soldier’s special patron, inspiring courage
+in battle.<note place="foot">Q. Curt. iv. 13, § 48.</note> From the verses in the <hi rend="italic">Thebaid</hi> of Statius we
+<pb n="590"/><anchor id="Pg590"/>may conclude that he knew something of the service in Mithra’s
+grottoes, and that he had seen the figure of the <q>bull slaying</q>
+god.<note place="foot">Stat. <hi rend="italic">Theb.</hi> i. 717; cf. Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Textes</hi>, p. 47.</note> Plutarch knows Mithra as the mediator between Ormuzd
+and Ahriman.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. 46.</note> Lucian had probably seen the rites in his
+native Samosata; he knew the figure with the candys and
+tiara, and, from the sneer at the god’s ignorance of Greek, he
+may perhaps have heard the old Mazdean litany.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Deor. Concil.</hi> c. 9; <hi rend="italic">Menippus</hi>,
+c. 6 sqq.; <hi rend="italic">Jup. Trag.</hi> c. 8.</note> But he had
+probably little notion of the hold which Mithra had already
+obtained on the farthest regions of the West. Still less had
+he any prevision of his great destiny in the third and fourth
+centuries. Literature, down to the Antonine age, teaches us
+little of the character and strength of the worship. Without
+votive inscriptions and the many ruins of his chapels, along
+with the indignant, yet anxious, invective of the Christian
+apologists, we should never have known how near the Persian
+god came to justifying his title of the <q>Unconquered.</q>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It is impossible to fix the precise date when the worship
+of Mithra first crossed the Aegean. The silence of inscriptions
+must not indeed be taken as proving that he had no devotees
+in Italy before the Flavian age. A famous passage in
+Plutarch’s life of Pompey would seem to refer the first
+appearance of the worship in the West to the conquest of the
+pirates of Cilicia by Pompey, in 70 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi><note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Pomp.</hi> c. 24.</note> A religion of the
+alien and the slave may well have been long domiciled in
+Italy before it attracted general notice. And there may have
+been humble worshippers of Mithra at Rome or Puteoli even in
+the days of Julius Caesar. The Mithraist inscription of the
+time of Tiberius is now admitted to be a forgery.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 5844.</note> But from
+his reign may probably be dated the first serious inroads of the
+cult. Under Tiberius, Cappadocia was incorporated in the
+Empire, and Pontus under Nero; Commagene, the home of
+Jupiter Dolichenus, who was a firm ally of Mithra, was
+finally absorbed in the reign of Vespasian.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 243, n. 3; Tac.
+<hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> ii. 42; D. Cass. lvii. 17; Suet.
+<hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> c. 8.</note> The official
+organisation of these districts, and the constant intercourse
+established between central Asia Minor and the capital, must
+have opened many channels for the importation of new forms
+<pb n="591"/><anchor id="Pg591"/>of devotion from the East. Almost in the very year in which
+Statius was penning his verses about Mithra in the <hi rend="italic">Thebaid</hi>, a
+freedman of the Flavian house erected a tablet to the god on
+the Esquiline,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 732. On the date of the
+<hi rend="italic">Thebaid</hi>, cf. Teuffel, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Lit.</hi> § 316, n. 3.</note> and soldiers of the East carried his mysteries to
+the camps on the Danube. The 15th Legion, which had
+fought under Corbulo against the Parthians, and taken part
+in the conquest of Palestine in 70 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, in the first years of
+the reign of Vespasian, established the worship of Mithra at
+Carnuntum in Pannonia, which became henceforth the sacred
+city of Mithra in the West.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 253; cf. Tac.
+<hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> xiii. 35.</note> In 102 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> a marble group
+was dedicated by the slave of a praetorian prefect of Trajan.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 718, <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 102.</note>
+It is probable that at Ostia we have records of the cult from
+the year 162.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 265, <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi> No.
+133.</note> The Mithraeum, found under the church of
+S. Clement at Rome, has yielded an inscription of the last
+years of Antoninus Pius. That emperor erected a temple to
+Mithra at Ostia.<note place="foot">Réville, p. 81.</note> Rome and Ostia were probably the
+earliest points in Italy invaded by the Persian worship.
+All the conditions were favourable to an early and rapid
+propagation of the cult in the capital of the world.
+Soldiers from the East would be serving in the garrison,
+or settled after their release from service. Eastern slaves
+swarmed in all the great houses, including that of the emperor.
+A large proportion of the dedications are made by men of
+servile origin, and the very name of the dedicator would often
+be enough to indicate his nationality. More than 100 inscriptions,
+more than 75 pieces of Mithraist sculpture, with the
+ruins of many chapels of the god, attest his powerful influence
+at Rome.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 274, n. 6.</note> Ostia which, since the reconstruction of Trajan, had
+overshadowed Puteoli, was hospitable to all alien rites.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 275; Donsbach, pp. 15-17.</note> The
+port had at least four temples of Mithra in the second century,
+and it is significant of the alliance between the two worships,
+that a Mithraeum there was built close to a shrine of the
+Great Mother,<note place="foot">Cumont, p. 265, n. 4; cf. p. 333.</note> and that members of the college of the Dendrophori
+sometimes made offerings and dedications to Mithra.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi>; <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 510; <hi rend="italic">Or.
+Henz.</hi> 6040.</note>
+<pb n="592"/><anchor id="Pg592"/>The remains at Ostia disclose some other indications of the
+prevailing syncretism. The Roman Sylvanus has a niche in
+one Mithraeum, and, in another, Saturn and Jupiter, Mars,
+Mercury and Venus, are figured beside the purely Eastern
+symbols of the planets and the signs of the zodiac.<note place="foot">Donsbach, p. 17.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inner secret of that rapid propaganda we shall never
+fully know. But we can discover with tolerable certainty the
+kind of people who carried the gospel of Mithra to the most
+remote parts of the western world. The soldiers were his most
+zealous missionaries.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 246 sq.</note> Drafted from Cappadocia or Commagene,
+and quartered, far from his home, in a camp on the Danube or
+in the Black Forest, the legionary clung to the worship of his
+native East, and was eager to admit his comrades to fellowship
+in its rites. The appearance of Mithraism in certain places can
+be traced directly to the quartering of a legion which had been
+recruited from the countries which were the original home of
+the worship. Officers of eastern birth on promotion passed into
+other corps, and extended the influence of the East.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 258, n. 8; cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 5855,
+1916, 1917, 1922.</note> Centurions
+retiring from active service became apostles of the movement
+in the places where they settled. Syrian merchants, who were
+still found at Orleans in the time of the Merovingians, with all
+the fanaticism of their race popularised their native worships
+in the ports of Italy, Gaul, along the coasts of the Adriatic,
+and among the centres of commerce on the Danube or the
+Rhine.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 263.</note> The civil servants of the emperor, clerks and commissaries
+of every degree, procurators and agents of great
+estates, who were often men of servile origin, have left many
+traces of their zeal in spreading the Persian worship both
+throughout Italy and in countries north of the Alps.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 3960, 4797, 5620, 4802;
+vi. 721.</note> The
+slave class probably did as much for the glory of Mithra as
+any other.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 265.</note> It was largely drawn from Cappadocia, Pontus,
+and Phrygia, those regions where the religion of Mithra had
+taken deep root before it passed into Europe. And, like the
+Christian, the religion of Mithra was, at the outset of its
+career, a religion of the poor and humble. It was only in
+the second century that it achieved the conquest of the court
+and the educated classes. It was probably through slaves that
+<pb n="593"/><anchor id="Pg593"/>it found its way into remote corners of Apulia, Lucania, or
+Etruria.<note place="foot">Cf. Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi> 150, sagaris actor;
+cf. the list of the Cultores Mithrae,
+<hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> xi. 5737.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The stages in the spread of the Mithraist rites throughout
+Italy cannot be clearly traced. But in the second century the
+cult was established not only in Campania, Capreae, and Ischia,
+but in lonely country places in Southern Italy.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p 268; Donsbach,
+p. 19.</note> It had
+spread to a circle of towns around Rome—Lanuvium, Alba,
+Velitrae, Labici, and Praeneste.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 268.</note> Borne by traders, imperial
+officers or slaves, it followed the line of the great roads to
+the north. Thus we can trace its march along the Via Cassia
+through Etruria, at Volsinii, Arretium, and Florence.<note place="foot">Donsbach, p. 19.</note> It
+arrived at Pisa probably by sea. Along the Flaminian Way, it
+may be followed through Interamna, Spoletium, and Sentinum
+to Bononia. At Nersae, in the Aequian territory, the cult must
+have been of some antiquity in 172 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi><note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L</hi> ix. 4109, 4110.</note> For, in that year
+the treasurer of the town, a man probably of the slave class,
+restored a chapel which had fallen into ruins. The roll of
+the patrons of a Mithraist society at Sentinum has come
+down to us, with the names of slaves or freedmen among its
+members.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> xi. 5737.</note> In Gallia Cisalpina the traces of Mithra are less
+frequent. Milan, already growing to its great destiny in the
+fourth century, and Aquileia, are the chief seats of the Persian
+cult. Aquileia has yielded a large number of inscriptions.
+From its situation at the mouth of the Po, as the great
+<hi rend="italic">entrepôt</hi> for the trade between the Adriatic and the Danubian
+provinces, it must have powerfully stimulated the diffusion of
+the worship.<note place="foot">Donsbach, p. 20; Cumont, Intr.
+p. 266.</note> It is curious, however, that the passes of the
+Alps have yielded richer booty to the investigator in this field
+than the plains of Lombardy. In the mountain valleys leading
+to Rhaetia and Noricum, as well as in those above the
+Italian lakes, many relics of this far-spreading religion have been
+given to the light.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 269.</note> A temple of Mithra has been discovered
+near Trent, in the valley of the Adige. In the Tyrol and
+Carinthia sacred grottoes, buried among woods and rocks, have
+disclosed bas-reliefs, sculptured with the traditionary figures of
+<pb n="594"/><anchor id="Pg594"/>Persian legend. They were probably frequented by the faithful
+down to the reign of Valentinian.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 237, 239; <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi>
+408.</note> Throughout Noricum and
+Pannonia imperial functionaries or agents of private enterprise,
+procurators, clerks of the treasury, custom-house officers, or
+eastern freedmen and slaves, have left many traces of their
+devotion to the Persian god.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 3480, 3479, 4796, 4797,
+5121.</note> Thus, everywhere along the
+great roads which radiated from Aquileia to the markets or
+strong places upon the Danube, the votary of Mithra would
+find in the days of the Antonines many a shrine, stately or
+humble, where he could refresh his piety by the way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Greek provinces have yielded but few memorials of the
+worship of Mithra. But, from the mouth of the Danube to
+the north of England his triumphant march can be traced, with
+only a break here and there. He follows the line of the rivers
+or the great roads, through the frontier camps or the centres
+of Roman commerce. Firmly seated at Tomi and the ports of
+the Black Sea, Mithra has not left many traces, so far as
+exploration has gone, in Thrace and Macedonia.<note place="foot">Donsbach, p. 21.</note> Nor have the
+Moesias as yet contributed many monuments, although at
+Troesmis and Oescus, along the great military road, bas-reliefs
+and inscriptions have been brought to light.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 249; Donsbach,
+p. 22.</note> Next to Pannonia
+and the territory of the Upper Rhine, Dacia was the province
+where Mithraism seems to have reached its greatest popularity
+in Europe.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 250.</note> In the year 107, after six desolating and often
+doubtful campaigns, Dacia was resettled and organised by
+Trajan.<note place="foot">Eutrop. viii. 6.</note> Its depopulated fields were colonised with immense
+masses of men from all parts of the Roman world. Probably
+there has seldom been such a <hi rend="italic">colluvies gentium</hi> assembled.
+And, among these alien settlers, there were many from Edessa,
+Palmyra, and those regions of the East where Mithra or his
+kindred deities had their earliest and most fervent worshippers.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 247, n. 6.</note>
+In the capital of the province, Sarmizegetusa, an excavated
+Mithraeum has afforded fifty bas-reliefs and inscriptions.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 251, n. 3.</note>
+The colony of Apulum can show the remains of at least four
+temples. And Potaissa and other places, with names strange
+to English ears, have enriched the museums.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="595"/><anchor id="Pg595"/>
+
+<p>
+Pannonia abounds with interesting remains of Mithra, not
+only in the great seats of Roman power on the Danube, but in
+places far in the interior.  And in this province can be
+distinctly traced not only the progress of the military propaganda,
+but the dates, with approximate accuracy, when the
+mysteries of Mithra were first introduced.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. pp. 252, 3.</note> Aquincum and
+Carnuntum were the chief seats of the Persian worship on
+the Danube. In the former town, the god had at least five
+chapels in the third century. There were at least four in the
+territory of Carnuntum, one of them being closely connected
+with that of the allied deity, Jupiter Dolichenus of Commagene.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> No. 228; Intr. p. 253.</note>
+The original votaries of the reign of Vespasian had
+been contented with a rude grotto, partially formed by the
+configuration of the rocks, the intervals being filled in with
+masonry.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> No. 225; Intr. p. 253.</note> This structure in the third century was replaced
+by a more stately edifice at the expense of a Roman knight.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi> No. 368.</note>
+There can be little doubt that the spread of Mithraism in
+Pannonia was chiefly the work of two Legions, the II. Adjutrix
+and XV. Apollinaris, both largely recruited from Commagene
+or Cappadocia.<note place="foot">Mommsen, <hi rend="italic">Rom. Prov.</hi> ii. p. 63, n.</note> The bricks of a Mithraeum at Carnuntum
+bear the stamp of the 15th Legion, and the inscriptions
+contain several dedications by soldiers of the two corps.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 4418, 4416; Donsbach,
+p. 25.</note> The
+15th Legion, which was quartered on the Danube in 71 or 72,
+had fought under Corbulo against the Parthians, and had
+borne a part in suppressing the Jewish revolt of 70 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> We
+may be sure that the gaps in its ranks were filled by eastern
+recruits.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> 13, 35, habiti per
+Galatiam Cappadociamque dilectus.</note> The soldiers of other corps, such as the Legions
+XIII and XIV, Geminae Martiae, caught the religious enthusiasm,
+and took part in the erection of buildings and in monumental
+offerings.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> No. 225.</note> It was probably through officers, transferred from
+the Danube, that the worship was introduced into the camp of
+Lambaesis in Numidia. There is a tablet of the third century to
+Mithra in that camp, dedicated by a prefect of the 3rd Legion,
+who was born at Carnuntum.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> viii. 2675; Cagnat, p. 189.</note> In Noricum and Rhaetia, the
+military propaganda seems to have been less vigorous than in
+<pb n="596"/><anchor id="Pg596"/>Pannonia. But a corner of the former province was once
+guarded by a corps from Commagene, which has left traces of
+its presence in the name of a town on the Danube and in
+some monuments to Mithra.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> iii. 5650; Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi>
+No. 416; <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> No. 238; cf. Donsbach,
+p. 26.</note> In Rhaetia his remains are
+singularly scanty.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 255; Donsbach,
+ p. 27.</note> But when we come to the <hi rend="italic">Agri Decumates</hi>
+and the region of the Upper Rhine, we find ourselves in a
+district once more teeming with relics of Mithra. Not only has
+this region given to the light the largest number of his chapels,<note place="foot">For the number and the sites <hi rend="italic">v.</hi>
+Donsbach, p. 27.</note>
+but the bas-reliefs found in their ruins surpass all others in
+their dimensions and the completeness of their symbolism.
+The tauroctonus group of Osterburken is regarded as the
+masterpiece of Mithraist art in its complex variety and the
+vivid and masterly skill of the execution.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> No. 351.</note> Many of the
+German inscriptions to Mithra are offered by simple citizens.
+But, from the number dedicated by soldiers also, Cumont may
+be right in tracing the diffusion of the worship once more to
+military zeal. It is true, the legions quartered in Germany
+did not contain any considerable number of recruits from the
+East. But they were in constant communication with the
+camps upon the Danube, where oriental influences were strong.
+It is significant that the earliest inscription to Mithra yet
+found in Germany, of the year <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi> 148, is that of a centurion
+of the 8th Legion, which was quartered in Moesia from
+47 till 69, and which during that time had frequent communications
+with the East. The legion was in 70 removed
+from Moesia to Upper Germany.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi> No. 423; Intr. p. 256,
+n. 2.</note> It is probable that, however
+it was introduced, the worship of Mithra may have found its
+way into the valley of the Neckar, and even to the Lower
+Rhine, before the end of the first century. Coins of Trajan
+have been found in the temple at Friedberg;<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> No. 248 (p. 359).</note> a series of coins
+from Vespasian to M. Aurelius has been recovered from a
+temple in the neighbourhood of Cologne.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> No. 265 (p. 388).</note> From Cologne the
+line of conquest may be followed to Boulogne, the station of
+the British fleet. Thence the cult passed easily to London,
+which, in the time of Tacitus, was a centre of great commercial
+<pb n="597"/><anchor id="Pg597"/>activity.<note place="foot">Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> 14, 33, Londinium ...
+copia negotiatorum maxime celebre.</note> The legions probably carried the worship to the
+great camps of Caerleon, Chester and York. At all the guardposts
+of the great rampart of Hadrian, there were chapels of
+the eastern god, and the inscriptions show that the officers at
+this remote outpost of the Empire maintained a warm devotion
+to the religion of their native East.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi> Nos. 471-490;
+Donsbach, p. 29.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The regions of the western world on which Mithra, from
+whatever causes, seems to have made least impression were
+Western Gaul, Spain, and North Africa.<note place="foot">Id. Intr. p. 259 n.</note> Syrian merchants,
+slaves, or soldiers, had established the worship at Lyons, Arles,
+and Narbonne. But Elusa is the only place in Aquitaine
+where traces of it have been found. In Spain, the legionaries
+carried it only to a few remote frontier posts in Asturia or
+Gallicia.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 260; Donsbach, p. 30.</note> The African garrisons, recruited largely from the
+surrounding country, remained true to their native deities, and
+the few inscriptions to Mithra at great military strongholds,
+like Lambesi, are probably due to the devotion of some of the
+higher officers, who had been transferred to these distant
+quarters from Syria or the Danube.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">l.c.</hi>; cf. Cagnat, <hi rend="italic">L’Arm.
+rom. d’Afr.</hi> p. 353, on the history and
+composition of the Legio III. Augusta.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If we try to explain the fascination of this religion of
+central Asia for western minds, we must seek it partly in
+its theological system, partly in its ritual and clerical organisation,
+still more in its clear promise of a life beyond the grave.
+In these characteristics, Mithraism differed profoundly from
+Graeco-Roman paganism, and seemed, in the eyes of the
+Christian apologists, to be a deceptive imitation of the rites
+and doctrines of the Christian Church. Inspired with the
+tendency or ambition to gather many races into its fold,
+Mithraism was a compound of the influences of very different
+ages, and offered many footholds for the faith or superstition
+of the lands which it traversed in its march. It drew, from
+points widely severed in time and place, doctrine or symbolism
+or rite, from the ancient lands of the Aryan race, from the
+mountain homes of the Persians, from Babylon and Phrygia
+and Commagene, from the philosophy of Greece, and the
+mythologies of all the peoples among whom it came. Yet it
+<pb n="598"/><anchor id="Pg598"/>never to the end ceased to be a Persian cult. In the Divine
+Comedy of Lucian, as it may be called, Mithra, even when he
+is admitted to Olympus, cannot speak in Greek.<note place="foot">Luc. <hi rend="italic">Deor. Concil.</hi> c. 9.</note> His name
+is never disguised or translated. On many of his inscriptions
+the names of the old Mazdean pantheon, such as Ahriman, the
+power of evil, still figure.<note place="foot">Réville, p. 87.</note> The mystic beasts which are always
+present in the sacred scene of the tauroctonus, the lion, the
+dog, the snake, the scorpion, had all a hieratic meaning in
+Persian theology.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 190; Gasquet,
+p. 70.</note> The cave, which was the immemorial
+sanctuary of the worship, amid all the mystic meanings attached
+to it by later Neo-Platonist speculation, carried the mind
+back to Zoroastrian symbolism.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 56;   Gasquet,
+p. 36.</note> The <hi rend="italic">petra genetrix</hi>, which
+is figured on so many sacred slabs on the Danube and in
+Upper Germany, goes back to the very cradle of the worship.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi> 441, 444; <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi>
+213, 245, 252.</note>
+The young god, emerging from the spires of rock, round which
+a serpent coils itself, is the first radiance of the upspringing
+sun, as on high, lonely peaks it flashes and broadens to
+the dawn. The great elemental powers, sun and moon,
+ocean, the winds and seasons, are generally grouped around
+the central piece, in forms borrowed from classic art.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 251 (p. 365); Intr. p. 92;
+cf. Herod. i. 131.</note> Fire
+and water are always present; no chapel was without its
+fountain.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 246 (p. 348).</note> And the tradition of the astral lore of the
+Euphrates can be seen in the signs of the zodiac which
+encompass the sacred scene of mystic sacrifice in the chapels
+on the Upper Rhine.<note place="foot">Id. Intr. p. 109; <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 246, 247,
+248, 251, 273.</note> The very letters of the name of
+Mithra, expanded into Meithras, according to S. Jerome, like
+the mystic word Abraxas, yielded to ingenious calculation
+the exact number of days in the year.<note place="foot">Donsbach, p. 6; Gasquet, p. 24;
+Dieterich, <hi rend="italic">Mithrasliturgie</hi>, p. 146;
+S. Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Com. in Amos</hi>, v. 9, 10.</note> It is difficult for us
+to conceive how these frigid astronomical fancies should form
+a part in a religious system which undoubtedly from the
+beginning had a profound moral effect on its adherents. Yet
+it is well to remember that there was a time when the mystery
+of the stellar spaces, and the grandeur and beneficence of the
+sun, were the most awful and impressive things in human
+<pb n="599"/><anchor id="Pg599"/>experience. The cold scrutiny of the telescope has long since
+robbed the heavenly orbs of their mystic power over human
+destiny. Yet even now, a man who has not been imbued
+with the influence of modern science, may, on some calm,
+starlit summer night, travel back in imagination to the dreams
+of the early star-gazers on the Ganges or the Euphrates, and
+fancy that, in the far solitary splendour and ordered movement
+of those eternal fires, which shine so serene and pitiless on this
+small point in the universe, there may be forces to guide or
+signs to predict the course of mortal destiny. Nor was it an
+altogether unworthy dream, which floated before the minds
+of so many generations, that in those liquid depths of space,
+where, in the infinite distance, the radiance of widely-severed
+constellations blends into a luminous haze, might be the eternal
+abode of spirits who, after their sojourn in the flesh, have
+purged themselves of earthly taint.<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Som. Scip.</hi> i. 15, § 10
+sqq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The relative influence of Babylon and ancient Iran in
+moulding the theology of Mithraism, has long been a subject
+of controversy. The opposing schools, represented by Lajard
+and Windischmann,<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. pp. 71, 72.</note> have been discredited or reconciled by
+saner methods of criticism, and wider archaeological knowledge.
+It is now seen that while Babylonia has left a deep impress
+on the creed of Mithra, yet the original Aryan or Persian
+elements still maintained their ascendency. Mithra, in his long
+journey, came under many influences; and he absorbed many
+alien ideas from the cults and art of the many lands through
+which he travelled. His tolerance, indeed, was one great
+secret of his power. But, while he absorbed, he assimilated
+and transmuted. He remained the god of Persia, while he
+gathered into his creed mystic elements that might appease the
+spiritual cravings of the western world.<note place="foot">Cf. Dieterich, <hi rend="italic">Mithrasliturgie</hi>, pp.
+150, 165, 202; Cumont, Intr. pp. 331,
+336.</note> His system came to
+represent the best theological expression of the long movement
+of pagan mysticism, which, beginning with the mythic names
+of Orpheus and Pythagoras, organised in the classic mysteries,
+elevated and glorified by the genius of Plato, ended, if it has
+ended, in the Neo-Platonic movement which offered a last
+resistance to the Christian church. The central ideas of that
+<pb n="600"/><anchor id="Pg600"/>theory of life and death were presented to the neophyte in the
+mysteries of Mithra, and one of the last expounders of the
+Platonic creed, in the reign of Theodosius, had probably
+been initiated in one of the last chapels of the worship.<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 104; cf. Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Som.
+Scip.</hi> i. 12; Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i. 17; cf.
+Lobeck, <hi rend="italic">Aglaoph.</hi> ii. 933; Rohde,
+<hi rend="italic">Psyche</hi>, ii. pp. 121, 402.</note> In
+that vision of human destiny, of the descent and ascent
+of the human soul, the old Orphic doctrine is united with the
+star-lore of the Euphrates. Travelling towards its future
+prison-house in the flesh, the spirit which leaves the presence
+of Ormuzd descends by the gate of Cancer, through the
+spheres of the seven planets, and in each acquires a new
+faculty appropriate to its earthly state. The Mithraist
+discipline and sacraments prepare it for the ascent after death.
+When the soul at last leaves its mortal prison, it has to submit
+to a great judgment in the presence of Mithra, and if it pass
+the ordeal, it may then return through the seven spheres, at
+each stage divesting itself of those passions or earthly powers,
+which it had taken on for a time in its downward journey.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. pp. 308, 309; cf.
+Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Som. Scip.</hi> i. 12.</note>
+Finally, through the remote gate of Capricorn, its sublimated
+essence will pass back again to ecstatic union with the
+Supreme. It is thus that the East and West, Orphic mysteries
+and Chaldaean astrology, combined to satisfy the craving for a
+moral faith and the vision of another world.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The religion of Mithra probably achieved its highest
+victory through an ethical theology, typified and made
+concrete to the average worshipper by an elaborate symbolism
+in rite and sculptured scene. But it had also a cosmic
+theology. Mithra, in virtue of his moral power, became in
+the end the central figure. But in nearly all his chapels can
+be discovered a divine hierarchy, in which, for ages, he did
+not hold the foremost rank. The highest place is given to
+Infinite Time, without sex or passions, or properly without
+even a name, although in order to bring him within the
+vulgar ken, he may be called Cronus or Saturn and imaged in
+stone as a lion, wrapped in the coils of a snake.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 294; <hi rend="italic">ib.</hi> p. 75.
+But cf. Gasquet, p. 41.</note> He is the
+author of life and death; he carries the keys of heaven, and
+in his limitless sway, he is identified with the unbending
+power of Fate. Like other cosmic systems of the East
+<pb n="601"/><anchor id="Pg601"/>the Mazdean explained the universe by a succession of
+emanations from the Infinite First Cause.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 295.</note> From his own
+essence, Cronus engendered Earth and Heaven, whom mythologers
+may call Jupiter and Juno, and they in turn give
+life to Ocean. Jupiter, as in classical mythology, succeeded
+to the power of Cronus, and gave to the world the Olympian
+deities, along with Fortune, Themis, and the Fates. In the
+hemisphere of gloom and evil, another order was engendered
+by Infinite Time, which is represented by Ahriman, or, in the
+fancy of more western lands, by Pluto and Hecate. The evil
+spirits, who are their progeny, like the Titans of Greek legend,
+have tried to storm Olympus, and been hurled back to the
+under world.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 296.</note> There they still retain their power to plague and
+corrupt the race of men; but, by means of incantation, and
+sacrifice, their malice may be turned aside. In this daemonology
+Mithraism joined hands with the new Platonism, of which
+Plutarch, as we have seen, was one of the earliest apostles, and
+the affinity between them continued to the last age of paganism.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 301.</note>
+But it was in its divinisation of the elemental powers and
+heavenly bodies that this religion probably obtained its most
+powerful hold on an age profoundly fatalist and superstitious.
+The strife of the four elements figures under animal symbolism
+on innumerable sculptures of the chapels of Mithra, around
+the image of the bull-slaying God.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 251 (p. 365).</note> The divine fire which
+sparkles in the stars, and diffuses the warmth of life in animal
+or plant, blazed perpetually on the altar of the crypt.<note place="foot">Id. Intr. p. 297.</note> The
+sun and moon are seldom missing from these slabs. In the
+great masterpiece of Mithraic art at Osterburken, the two
+deities occupy opposite corners of the tablet.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 246 (p. 349).</note> The sun-god,
+with a cloak floating from his right shoulder, is urging his four-horse
+team up the steep of heaven, and over the car floats
+Phosphorus, as a naked boy, bearing a torch in each hand.
+On the opposite side, Selene, crowned with the crescent and
+erect in her car, is urging her team of oxen downwards towards
+the gloom. On another piece, also found in the heart of
+Germany, there is an impressive scene, in which Mithra and
+the Sun, arrayed in eastern costume, stand side by side over a
+<pb n="602"/><anchor id="Pg602"/>huge slaughtered bull. The sun god is handing to Mithra a
+bunch of grapes, which he receives with a gesture of admiration.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 251 (p. 365).</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The most popular, and the least wholesome, element, which
+Mithraism borrowed from Babylon, was the belief in planetary
+influence. The seven planets became the arbiters of human
+destiny, and their number acquired a hieratic significance.<note place="foot">Id. Intr. p. 300; Gasquet, p.
+62.</note>
+The days of the week and the seven principal metals were
+consecrated to them. The various grades of initiation into the
+mysteries of Mithra found a correspondence in the intervals of
+the seven spheres.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 316; cf. Gasquet,
+pp. 94, 95.</note> The soul, in descending to its earthly
+tenement for a season, passes through their successive realms,
+and assumes appropriate faculties in each, just as, on its
+release and ascension, it divests itself of them, one by one,
+as it returns to the region of ethereal purity. But the
+astral doctrine, introduced into the system of Iran from
+Chaldaea, was a dangerous addition to the creed. It was
+a fatal heritage from ages of benumbing superstition, and,
+while it gave an immense impetus to the progress of the solar
+cult, it counterbalanced, and, to some extent, neutralised its
+more spiritual and salutary doctrines.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 301.</note> A co-ordinate evil
+power, side by side with the beneficent Creator and Preserver,
+and his revealer and mediator, a host of daemons, tempting to
+sin, as well as visiting men with calamity, an iron Fate at the
+centre of the Universe, whose inevitable decrees are at once
+indicated and executed by the position and motions of the
+planets—all this gloomy doctrine lay like a nightmare on the
+human mind for many ages, and gave birth to all sorts of evil
+arts to discover or avert or direct the pitiless forces which
+controlled the fate of man. This is the dark side of Mithra
+worship, and, in this evil tradition from Babylon, which
+partially overlaid the purer creed of Persia, we may find some
+explanation of the strange blending of dark superstition with
+moral earnestness which characterised the reaction of Julian,
+the votary of the Sun, and the patron of Maximus.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But, although the deification of the great elemental powers
+and the mingled charm and terror of astrology gave the
+religion of Mithra a powerful hold on the West, there were
+<pb n="603"/><anchor id="Pg603"/>other and nobler elements in his system which cannot escape
+the candid enquirer. The old unmoral, external paganism no
+longer satisfied the spiritual wants of all men in the second
+century. It is true the day will probably never come when
+the religion of many will not begin and end in solemn, stately
+rite, consecrated to the imagination by ancient use, and
+captivating the sense by scrupulously ordered ceremonial.
+The ritualist and the puritan conception of worship will
+probably always exist side by side, for they represent two
+opposite conceptions of religion which can never entirely blend.
+And certainly in the days of M. Aurelius the placid satisfaction
+in a sumptuous sacrifice, at which every word of the ancient
+litany was rendered to the letter, was still profoundly felt by
+many, even by the philosophic emperor himself. But there
+were other ideas in the air. Men heard from wandering
+preachers that God required other offerings than the <q>blood of
+bulls and the ashes of a heifer,</q> that the true worship was in
+the sacrifice of a purified spirit.<note place="foot">Cf. Denis, <hi rend="italic">Idées Morales</hi>, etc. ii. p.
+248 sq.; cf. Burgmann, <hi rend="italic">Seneca’s Theologie</hi>,
+p. 37; Sen. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 95, 50; 31,
+§ 11; Philostr. <hi rend="italic">Apoll. Tyan.</hi> v. 25;
+Max. Tyr. <hi rend="italic">Diss.</hi> viii.; xiv. § 7, 8;
+xvi. § 9.</note> Platonist and Pythagorean,
+even when they might reverently handle the ancient symbolism
+of ritual, were teaching that communion with the Infinite
+Father was only possible to a soul emancipated from the
+tyranny of sense. Moreover, as we have seen, the new
+Platonism was striving to create some mediatorial power between
+the world of sense and the Infinite Spirit, transcending all old
+materialistic fancies of the Divine.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> supra, <ref target="Pg426">p. 426</ref>.</note> This Platonic daemonology,
+indeed, from the Christian point of view, was a very crude and
+imperfect attempt to bridge the gulf. And it had the graver
+fault that it was really a revival of the old mythology. Yet
+it was also an attempted reformation. It was an effort to
+introduce a moral influence into paganism. It was an effort
+to substitute for physical and naturalistic conceptions a moral
+theory of the government of the world. That was surely an
+immense advance in religious history, and foreshadowed the
+great revolution which was to launch the western world on a
+new spiritual career. The hosts of sister spirits, whom
+Maximus of Tyre imagines as surrounding and sustaining the
+life of men, involved in the darkness and sorrow of time, are
+<pb n="604"/><anchor id="Pg604"/>a conception strange to the old paganism. And the need of
+mediatorial sympathy, of a sympathetic link, however slight,
+with the dim, awful Power, ever receding into more remote and
+mysterious distances, was also connected with the need of some
+assurance, or fainter hope, of a life beyond the tomb. To that
+hope the old classical paganism afforded only slight and
+shadowy nutriment. Yet, from hundreds of sepulchral inscriptions
+the yearning, often darkened by a doubt, appeals
+with pathetic force. Apart, in fact, from the crowd of mere
+antiquarian formalists and lovers of spectacle, there were, we
+believe, a great mass who longed for some channel through
+which they might have the faintest touch of sympathy with
+the Infinite Spirit; for some promise, however veiled in
+enigmatic symbolism, that this poor, puzzling, ineffectual life
+should not close impotently at death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In all the Mazdean pantheon, it has been remarked, Mithra
+was the only divine figure that profoundly affected the religious
+imagination of Europe. Who can dare at this distance to
+pierce the mystery? But we may conjecture that the ascendency
+is partly due to his place as mediator in the Persian
+hierarchy, partly to the legends, emblazoned on so many slabs,
+of his miraculous and Herculean triumphs; but still more to
+the moral and sacramental support, and the sure hope of
+immortal life which he offered to his faithful worshippers.
+Mithra came as a deliverer from powers of evil and as a
+mediator between man and the remote Ormuzd. He bears
+the latter office in a double sense. In the cosmic system, as
+lord of light, he is also lord of the space between the heavenly
+ether and the mists of earth. As a solar deity, he is the
+central point among the planetary orbs.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 303.</note> In the ubiquitous
+group of the slaughtered bull, Mithra stands between the two
+Dadophori, Cautes and Cautopates, who form with him a sort
+of Trinity, and are said to be incarnations of him.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> pp. 207, 208.</note> One of these
+figures in Mithraic sculpture always bears a torch erect, the
+other a torch turned downwards to the earth. They may have
+a double significance. They may figure the ascending light of
+dawn, and the last radiance of day as it sinks below the horizon.
+They may be taken to image the growth of solar strength to
+its midsummer triumphs, and its slow decline towards fading
+<pb n="605"/><anchor id="Pg605"/>autumn and the cold of winter. Or again, they may shadow
+forth the wider and more momentous processes of universal
+death and resurgent life. But Mithra also became a mediator
+in the moral sense, standing between Ormuzd and Ahriman,
+the powers of good and evil, as Plutarch conceives him.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Is. et Osir.</hi> c. 46.</note> He
+is the ever victorious champion, who defies and overthrows the
+malignant demons that beset the life of man; who, above all,
+gives the victory over the last foe of humanity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The legend of Mithra in hymn or litany is almost entirely
+lost. But antiquarian ingenuity and cultivated sympathy have
+plausibly recovered some of its meanings from the many
+sculptural remains of his chapels. On the great monuments
+of Virunum, Mauls, Neuenheim, and Osterburken, can be
+seen the successive scenes of the hero’s career. They begin
+with his miraculous birth from the <q>mother rock,</q> which was
+familiar to Justin Martyr, S. Jerome, and many of the Fathers.<note place="foot">Firm. Matern. c. 20, alterius
+profani sacramenti signum est
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">θεός ἐκ πέτρας</foreign>, etc. Cf. S. Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Adv. Jov.</hi>
+i. § 7; Just. Mart. <hi rend="italic">Dial. c. Tryph.</hi>
+c. 70; Prud. <hi rend="italic">Cathem.</hi> v. 9; Cumont,
+<hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 199, 207.</note>
+The dedications <hi rend="italic">petrae genetrici</hi> abound along the Danube, and
+the sacred stone was an object of adoration in many chapels.<note place="foot">Id. Intr. p. 160.</note>
+A youthful form, his head crowned with a Phrygian cap, a
+dagger in one hand, and a torch in the other, is pictured
+emerging from an opening rock, around which sometimes a
+serpent is coiled. Shepherds from the neighbouring mountain
+gaze in wonder at the divine birth, and presently come nearer
+to adore the youthful hero, and offer him the firstlings of their
+flocks and fields.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 162; <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 204.</note> And again, a naked boy is seen screening
+himself from the violence of the wind in the shelter of a fig
+tree; he eats of its fruit and makes himself a garment from
+the leaves.<note place="foot">Id. Intr. p. 164.</note> In another scene, the sacred figure appears in full
+eastern costume, armed with a bow from which he launches
+an arrow against a rock rising in front of him.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 165;
+    <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 204 (p. 318), 235
+(p. 338).</note> From the
+spot where the arrow strikes the stone, a fountain gushes forth,
+and the water is eagerly caught in his upturned palms by a
+form kneeling below. Then follow the famous scenes of the
+chase and slaughter of the mystic bull. At first the beast is seen
+borne in a skiff over an expanse of waters. Soon afterwards
+<pb n="606"/><anchor id="Pg606"/>he is grazing quietly in a meadow, when Mithra comes upon
+the scene. In one monument the hero is carrying the bull
+upon his shoulders; in others he is borne upon the animal’s
+back, grasping it by the horns. Or again, the bull is seen in full
+career with the hero’s arms thrown around his neck. At last
+the bull succumbs to his rider’s courage, and is dragged by
+the hind-legs, which are drawn over his captor’s shoulders, into
+a cavern where the famous slaughter was enacted.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 167 sq.; <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi>
+253, 192, 204, 221.</note> The
+young god, his mantle floating on the wind, kneels on the
+shoulder of the fallen beast, draws back its head with his left
+hand, while with the other he buries his dagger in its neck.<note place="foot">See the finest extant specimen from
+Osterburken; Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 246; cf.
+the one at Heddernheim, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 251.</note>
+Below this scene are invariably sculptured the scorpion, the
+faithful dog, and the serpent lapping the flowing blood.
+The two Dadophori, silent representatives of the worlds of light
+and gloom, one on each side, are always calm watchers of the
+mystic scene. But the destruction of the bull was not a mere
+spectacle of death. It was followed by a miracle of fresh
+springing life and fertility, and, here and there, on the slabs
+are seen ears of corn shooting from the tail of the dying
+beast, or young plants and flowers springing up around.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 186 sq.; <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi>
+104, 246.</note> His
+blood gives birth to the vine which yields the sacred juice
+consecrated in the mysteries. Thus, in spite of the scorpion
+and the serpent, symbols of the evil powers, who seek to
+wither and sterilise the sources of vitality, life is ever rising
+again from the body of death.<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 70.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mithra’s mysterious reconciliation with the Sun is figured
+in other groups.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 191 (p. 312); 203
+(p. 317); 242 (p. 342); 246 (p. 350);
+Intr. p. 172.</note> Mithra, as usual, in eastern costume, has,
+kneeling before him, a youthful figure either naked or lightly
+clad. The god touches the head of the suppliant with some
+mysterious symbol, and the subject of the rite raises his hands
+in prayer. The mystic symbol is removed, and Mithra sets a
+radiant crown on the suppliant’s head. This reconciliation of
+the two deities is a favourite subject. In the sculpture of
+Osterburken, they ratify their pact with solemn gestures before
+an altar. Their restored harmony is commemorated in even
+<pb n="607"/><anchor id="Pg607"/>more solemn fashion. In one monument the two are reclining
+on a couch at a solemn agape, with a table before them bearing
+the sacred bread, which is marked with the cross, and both are
+in the act of raising the cup in their right hands.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 175.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The legend of Mithra, thus faintly and doubtfully reconstructed
+from the sacred sculptures, in the absence of express
+tradition, must probably for ever remain somewhat of an
+enigma. It has been, since the third century, the battle-ground
+of ingenious interpreters. To enumerate and discuss
+these theories, many of them now discredited by archaeological
+research, is far beyond the scope of this work. It is
+clear that from the early Chaldaean magi, who, to some
+extent, imposed their system on Iranian legend, down to the
+Neo-Platonists, the god and his attendants were treated as
+the symbols of cosmic theory. The birth from the rock
+was the light of dawn breaking over serrated crests of
+eastern hills.<note place="foot">Réville, p. 83.</note> The cave, which was always piously perpetuated
+in the latest Mithraist architecture, was the solid
+vault of heaven, and the openings pierced in its roof were
+the stars shining through the celestial dome.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 89.</note> The fountain
+which rose in every chapel, the fire on the altar, the animals
+surrounding the bull, represent the powers of nature in their
+changes and conflict. The young archer, causing water to
+spring from the rock by a shot from his bow, marks the
+miraculous cessation of prehistoric dearth, as the bull leaping
+from a skiff perhaps commemorates a primaeval deluge. The
+slaying of the bull, the central scene of all, may go back to
+the exploits of the heroic pioneers of settled life, a Hercules
+or a Theseus, who tamed the savage wilderness to the uses
+of man. It had many meanings to different ages. To one
+occupied with the processes of nature, it may have symbolised
+the withering of the vegetative freshness of the world in midsummer
+heats, yet with a promise of a coming spring. To
+another it may have meant a victory over evil spirits and
+powers of darkness.<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 77.</note> Or it may, in the last days, have been
+the prototype of that sacramental cleansing which gave assurance
+of immortal life, and which seemed to the Fathers the
+mockery of a Diviner Sacrifice.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="608"/><anchor id="Pg608"/>
+
+<p>
+There can be no doubt that Mithra and his exploits, in
+response to a great need, came to have a moral and spiritual
+meaning. From the earliest times, he is the mediator between
+good and evil powers; ever young, vigorous, and victorious in
+his struggles, the champion of truth and purity, the protector
+of the weak, the ever vigilant foe of the hosts of daemons
+who swarm round the life of man, the conqueror of death.
+His religion, in spite of its astrology, was not one of fatalist
+reverie; it was a religion of struggle and combat. In this
+aspect it was congenial to the virile Roman temperament,
+and, above all, to the temperament of the Roman soldier,
+at once the most superstitious and the most strenuous of
+men.<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 108.</note> Who can tell what inspiration the young heroic
+figure, wearing an air of triumphant vigour even on the rudest
+slabs,<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 31, 35, 43.</note> may have breathed into a worn old veteran, who kept
+ceaseless watch against the Germans in some lonely post on
+the Danube, when he spent a brief hour in the splendour of
+the brilliantly lighted crypt, and joined in the old Mazdean
+litany? Before him was the sacred group of the Tauroctonus,
+full of so many meanings to many lands and ages, but which,
+to his eyes, probably shed the light of victory over the perilous
+combats of time, and gave assurance of a larger hope.
+Suddenly, by the touch of an unseen hand, the plaque revolved,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> 251 (p. 364).</note>
+and he had before him the solemn agape of the two
+deities in which they celebrated the peaceful close of their
+mystic conflict. And he went away, assured that his hero
+god was now enthroned on high, and watching over his faithful
+soldiers upon earth.<note place="foot">Id. Intr. pp. 308, 309.</note> At the same time, he had seen around
+him the sacred symbols or images of all the great forces of
+nature, and of the fires of heaven which, in their motions
+and their effluences, could bring bane or happiness to men
+below. In the chapels of Mithra, all nature became divine
+and sacred, the bubbling spring, the fire on the cottage hearth,
+the wind that levelled the pine tree or bore the sailor on his
+voyage, the great eternal lights that brought seed-time and
+harvest and parted day from night, the ever-welling vital
+force in opening leaf and springing corn-ear, and birth of
+young creatures, triumphing in regular round over the
+<pb n="609"/><anchor id="Pg609"/>malignant forces which seem for a time to threaten decay
+and corruption. The <q>Unconquered Mithra</q> is thus the god
+of light and hope in this world and the next.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 297.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ancient world was craving for a promise of immortality.
+Mithraism strove to nurse the hope, but, like the contemporaneous
+Platonism and the more ancient Orphic lore, it
+linked it with moral responsibility and grave consequences.
+Votaries were taught that the soul descended by graduated fall
+from the Most High to dwell for a season in the prison of the
+flesh.<note place="foot">Dieterich, <hi rend="italic">Mithrasliturgie</hi>, p. 197;
+Cumont, Intr. p. 309.</note> After death there is a great judgment, to decide the
+future destiny of each soul, according to the life which had
+been led on earth.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 308 sqq.</note> Spirits which have defiled themselves
+during life are dragged down by Ahriman and his evil angels,
+and may be consigned to torture, or may sink into endless
+debasement. The pure, who have been fortified by the holy
+mysteries, will mount upwards through the seven spheres, at
+each stage parting with some of their lower elements, till, at
+last, the subtilised essential spirit reaches the empyrean, and is
+received by Mithra into the eternal light.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the conflict between good and evil, even on this earth,
+will not last for ever. There will be a second coming of Mithra,
+which is to be presaged by great plagues. The dead will
+arise from their tombs to meet him. The mystic bull will
+again be slain, and his blood, mingled with the juice of the
+sacred Haoma, will be drunk by the just, and impart to them
+the gift of eternal life.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 310.</note> Fire from heaven will finally devour
+all that is evil. Thus the slaughter of the bull, which is the
+image of the succession of decay and fructifying power in
+physical nature, is also the symbol and guarantee of a final
+victory over evil and death. And, typifying such lofty and
+consolatory truths, it naturally met the eye of the worshipper
+in every chapel. It was also natural that the taurobolium,
+which was originally a rite of the Great Mother, should be
+absorbed, like so many alien rites and ideas, by the religion
+which was the great triumph of syncretism. The baptism of
+blood was, indeed, a formal cleansing from impurity of the
+flesh; but it was also cleansing in a higher sense. The
+inscrip<pb n="610"/><anchor id="Pg610"/>tions of the fourth century, which commemorate the blessing
+of the holy rite, often close with the words <hi rend="italic">in aeternum
+renatus</hi>.<note place="foot">Réville, p. 150; cf. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 510;
+<hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 2352.</note> How far the phrase expressed a moral resurrection,
+how far it records the sure hope of another life, we cannot
+presume to say. Whether borrowed from Christian sources
+or not, it breathes an aspiration strangely different from the
+tone of old Roman religion, even at its best. There may have
+been a good deal of ritualism in the cleansing of Mithra.
+Yet Mithra was, from the beginning, a distinctly moral power,
+and his worship was apparently untainted by the licence which
+made other heathen worships schools of cruelty and lust. His
+connection, indeed, with some of them, must at times have led
+his votaries into more than doubtful company; Sabazius and
+Magna Mater were dangerous allies.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6042; Gasquet, p. 112,
+on the inscription of Vincentius, priest
+of Sabazius, who was buried by the side
+of Aurelius, a priest of Mithra; cf.
+Réville, p. 92; Renan, <hi rend="italic">M. Aurèle</hi>, pp.
+578-9, n. 1.</note> Yet, on the whole, it
+has been concluded that Mithraism was a gospel of truth and
+purity, although the purity was often a matter of merely ceremonial
+purification and abstinence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The day is far distant when the mass of men will be
+capable of the austere mystic vision, which relies little on
+external ceremonies of worship. Certainly the last ages of
+paganism in the West were not ripe for any such reserved
+spirituality. And the religions which captivated the ages
+that preceded the triumph of the Catholic Church, while they
+strove to satisfy the deeper needs of the spirit, were more
+intensely sacerdotal, and more highly organised than the old
+religions of Greece and Rome. Probably no small part of
+their strength lay in sacramental mystery, and an occult
+sacred lore which was the monopoly of a class set apart
+from the world.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. pp. 299, 323.</note> Our knowledge of the Mithraic priesthood
+is unfortunately scanty, and the ancient liturgy has perished.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 313; cf. Dieterich, <hi rend="italic">Mithrasliturgie</hi>,
+pp. 25, 26.</note>
+But inscriptions mention an <hi rend="italic">ordo sacerdotum</hi>; and Tertullian
+speaks of a <q>high pontiff of Mithra</q> and of holy virgins and
+persons vowed to continence in his service.<note place="foot">Tert. <hi rend="italic">De Praescrip. Haeret.</hi> c. 40;
+cf. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 2151, Ordo sacerdotum
+Mag. suo; xiv. 403; xiv. 65.</note> The priestly
+functions were certainly more constant and exacting than those
+of the old priestly colleges of Greece and Rome. There were
+<pb n="611"/><anchor id="Pg611"/>solemn sacraments and complicated rites of initiation to be
+performed. Three times a day, at dawn, noon, and evening,
+the litany to the Sun was recited.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 325.</note> Daily sacrifice was offered
+at the altars of various gods, with chanting and music. The
+climax of the solemn office was probably marked by the
+sounding of a bell.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 325; cf. Lafaye, <hi rend="italic">Div.
+d’Alexandrie</hi>, p. 138; flutes and bells
+have been found among débris of
+chapels, Cum. <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 253 (p. 380); Intr.
+p. 68.</note> And turning on a pivot, the sacred slab
+in the apse displayed, for the adoration of the faithful, the
+scene of the holy feast of Mithra and the Sun after their
+reconciliation. The seventh day of the week was sacred to
+the Sun, the sixteenth of each month to Mithra, and the 25th
+of December, as marking the sun’s entrance on a new course
+of triumph, was the great festival of Mithra’s sacred year.<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 125.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Initiation in the mysteries, after many rites of cleansing
+and trial, was the crowning privilege of the Mithraist believer.
+The gradation of spiritual rank, and the secrecy which bound
+the votaries to one another in a sacred freemasonry, were a
+certain source of power. S. Jerome alone has preserved for
+us the seven grades through which the neophyte rose to full
+communion. They were Corax, Cryphius, Miles, Leo, Perses,
+Heliodromus, and Pater.<note place="foot">S. Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 107, § 2; Gasquet,
+pp. 91, 2; 96; Cumont, Intr. p. 315;
+Réville, p. 97.</note> What their origin was who shall
+say? They may correspond to the seven planets, and mark
+the various stages of the descent of the soul into flesh, and
+its rise again to the presence of God. According to Porphyry,
+the first three stages were merely preliminary to complete
+initiation. Only the Lions were full and real communicants,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">De Abstin.</hi> iv. 16. Porphyry connects
+the degrees with ideas of metempsychosis,
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τὴν κοινότητα ἡμῶν τὴν πρὸς τὰ ζῷα αἰνιττόμενοι, κτλ.</foreign></note>
+and the title Leo certainly appears oftenest on inscriptions.
+The dignity Pater Patrum, or Pater Patratus, was much coveted,
+and conferred a real authority over the brethren, with an
+official title to their reverence.<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 101; Réville, p. 97.</note> The admission to each successive
+grade was accompanied by symbolic ceremonies, as
+when the Miles put aside the crown twice tendered to him,
+saying that Mithra was his only crown.<note place="foot">Tert. <hi rend="italic">De Corona</hi>, xv.</note> The veil of
+the Cryphius, and the Phrygian bonnet of the Perses, have a
+significance or a history which needs no comment. Admission
+<pb n="612"/><anchor id="Pg612"/>to full communion was preceded by austerities and ordeals
+which were made the subject of exaggeration and slander.
+The neophyte, blindfold and bound, was obliged to pass
+through flame. It was said that he had to take part in a
+simulated murder with a blood-dripping sword. On the
+sculpture of Heddernheim a figure is seen standing deep in
+snow. These ceremonies probably went back to the scenes
+and ages in which mutilations in honour of Bellona and Magna
+Mater took their rise. They may also have been a lesson, or a
+test of apathy and moral courage.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 322.</note> But the tales of murder
+and torture connected with these rites have probably no better
+foundation than similar slanders about the early Christian
+mysteries.<note place="foot">Lamprid. <hi rend="italic">Commodus Ant.</hi> c. 9, sacra
+Mithriaca homicidio vero polluit, cum
+illic aliquid ad speciem timoris, vel dici
+vel fingi soleat; Gasquet, p. 90.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The votaries of Mithra, like those of Isis and other eastern
+deities, formed themselves into guilds which were organised on
+the model of ordinary sodalities and colleges. As funerary
+societies, or under the shelter of Magna Mater, they escaped
+persecution. They had their roll of members, their council of
+decurions, their masters and curators.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 326. For the
+organisation of the societies of Magna
+Mater <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Foucart, <hi rend="italic">Associations Religieuses</hi>,
+p. 20 sqq. Cf <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 717;
+vi. 734; vi. 3728; xiv. 286; <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi>
+6042 (Sentinum).</note> And, like the secular
+colleges, they depended to a great extent, for the erection of
+chapels and the endowment of their services, on the generosity
+of their wealthier members and patrons.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6042; on the doubt, however,
+as to the meaning of <hi rend="italic">patroni</hi> in
+this inscription <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> <hi rend="italic">Henz.</hi> note; and
+Cumont, Intr. p. 327, n. 4.</note> One man might give
+the site of a chapel, another a marble altar; a poor slave might
+contribute out of his <hi rend="italic">peculium</hi> a lamp or little image to adorn
+the walls of the crypt.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">l.c.</hi></note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One undoubted cause of the success of Mithra in the West
+was the spirit of fraternity and charity which was fostered
+in his guilds. The hopeless obscurity and depression of the
+plebeian and servile classes had some alleviation in companies
+where, for the moment, the poor and lowly-born found himself
+on an equality with his social superiors. Plebeians and the
+slaves had a great part in the propagation of the eastern
+worships, and especially that of the God of Light.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 264. Cf. dedications by
+slaves or liberti, <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi> 67, 245, 175,
+53, 410, 47, 178, 292.</note> In his
+<pb n="613"/><anchor id="Pg613"/>mysteries and guilds the highest dignities were open to them.<note place="foot">Cf. <hi rend="italic">Or. Henz.</hi> 6042; Cumont, Intr.
+p. 327, n. 4.</note>
+Moreover, from the size of the chapels it is clear that the
+congregations were generally small, so that the members of
+lower social importance were not lost in a crowd.<note place="foot">For the dimensions of one at Rome
+<hi rend="italic">v.</hi> Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 19 (p. 205).</note> Growing
+numbers were accommodated, not by enlarging, but by multiplying
+the shrines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the sacraments of Mithra, Tertullian and other Apologists
+perceived a diabolic parody of the usages of the Church.<note place="foot">Tert. <hi rend="italic">De Pr. Haeret.</hi> c. 40.</note>
+The <hi rend="italic">acceptio</hi> of the neophytes, the <hi rend="italic">sacramentum</hi>, in which
+they were pledged to secrecy and holy service, the sign or
+brand made on the brow of the Miles, the ablutions or
+baptism with holy water, as in the rites of Isis, whatever their
+origin, could not fail, in an age of death-struggle for supremacy,
+to arouse the suspicions and fears of the champions of the
+Church.<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 84; Cumont, Intr.
+p. 318.</note> Finally, the consecrated bread and mingled water
+and wine, which were only offered to the higher grades, may
+well have seemed the last and worst profanation of the most
+solemn Christian rite. The draught from the mystic cup,
+originally the juice of Haoma, was supposed to have supernatural
+effects. It imparted not only health and prosperity
+and wisdom, but also the power to conquer the spirits of evil
+and darkness, and a secret virtue which might elude the grasp
+of death.<note place="foot">Gasquet, pp. 81, 82; Cumont, Intr.
+p. 320.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The temples in which these rites took place repeated for ages
+the same original type. Mithra and his cave are inseparable
+ideas, and the name <hi rend="italic">spelaeum</hi>, <hi rend="italic">antrum</hi>, or <hi rend="italic">specus</hi>, remained
+to the end the regular designation of his chapels.<note place="foot">Just. Mart, c. 78; Porphyr. <hi rend="italic">De
+Antro Nymph.</hi> c. 5; Tertull. <hi rend="italic">De Cor.</hi>
+xv.; S. Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 57, 107.</note> In country
+places, grottoes or recesses on the side of a rocky hill might
+supply a natural oratory of the ancient type.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 57; <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 237.</note> But, in the
+centre of great towns, the skill of the architect had to simulate
+the rude structure of the original cavern. Entering through
+an open portico, the worshipper found himself in an antechapel,
+through which he passed into another chamber which
+was called the <hi rend="italic">apparatorium</hi>, where the priests and neophytes
+arrayed themselves in their robes or masques before the holy
+<pb n="614"/><anchor id="Pg614"/>rites.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 59. Cf. <hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi>
+iii. 1096, cryptam cum porticibus et
+apparatorio et exedra, etc.; iii. 3960.</note> Thence they descended by stairs to the level of the
+cave-like crypt, which was the true sanctuary. On each side
+there ran a bench of stone, on which was ranged the company
+of the initiated.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 61; <hi rend="italic">v.</hi> the sketch
+of the Mithraeum under the Church of
+S. Clement, at Rome, Cumont, <hi rend="italic"><anchor id="corr614"/><corr sic="(italics added)">Mon.</corr></hi> 19.</note> The central aisle led up to the apse, against
+the walls of which was set the sculptured scene of the slaying
+of the bull, surrounded by the symbolic figures and emblems
+of Chaldaean star-lore, with altars in front.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 19.</note> This was the
+holiest place, and, from some remains, it would seem to have
+been railed in, like the chancel of one of our churches.<note place="foot">Id. Intr. p. 64.</note>
+The neophyte, as he approached, must have been impressed by
+a dazzling scene. On either side the congregation knelt in
+prayer. Countless lamps shed their brilliant light on the
+forms of ancient Hellenic gods, or on the images of the mighty
+powers of earth or ether<note place="foot">Twenty-six lamps were found in one
+Mithraeum, Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 250 (p. 362).
+For the classical gods, cf. <hi rend="italic">Mon.</hi> 221
+(p. 326), 235, 246 (p. 349).</note>—above all, on the sacred scene which
+was the memorial of the might of the <q>unconquered.</q> The
+ancient rhythmic litany was chanted to the sound of music;
+the lights came and went in startling alternations of splendour
+and gloom. The draught of the sacred cup seemed to ravish
+the sense. And the votary, as in the Isiac vision in Apuleius,
+for a moment seemed borne beyond the bounds of space and
+time into mystic distances.<note place="foot">Apul. <hi rend="italic">Met.</hi> xi. c. 22.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Persian cult owed much of its success to imperial and
+aristocratic favour. The last pagan emperor of the West,
+the last generation of the pagan aristocracy, were devotees of
+the Sun-god. It is a curious thing that even under the early
+Empire Mithraism seems never to have suffered from the
+suspicion and persecution with which other alien worships had
+to contend.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 279 sqq.</note> Its close league with the cult of the Great Mother,
+which, since the second century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, had been an established
+institution, may have saved Mithra from official mistrust. He
+also emerged into prominence in the age in which imperial
+jealousy of guilds and colleges was visibly relaxing its precautions.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">v.</hi> supra, <ref target="Pg254">p. 254</ref>.</note>
+A more satisfying explanation may perhaps be
+found in the sympathy of the Flavian dynasty<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> iv. v. vii.; <hi rend="italic">Tit.</hi> v.;
+<hi rend="italic">Domit.</hi> i. xiv.; cf. Renan, <hi rend="italic">Les Évangiles</hi>,
+p. 226 sq.; <hi rend="italic">L’Antéchrist</hi>, p. 491.</note> and the
+<pb n="615"/><anchor id="Pg615"/>princes of the third century for the religious ideas of the East,
+and in the manifest support which heliolatry lent to growing
+absolutism and the worship of the Caesars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The apotheosis of the emperors began even in the time
+of the first Caesar, who rose to the highest divine honours
+before his death. But it was long a fluctuating and hesitating
+creed. The provinces, and particularly the cities of Asia
+Minor,<note place="foot">D. Cass. xliii. 14; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Ann.</hi> iv. 15;
+vi. 18.</note> were more eager to decree temples and divine honours
+to the lord of the world than even the common people of Italy.
+The superstitious masses and the soldiery, indeed, were equal to
+any enthusiasm of flattery and superstition. But the cultivated
+upper class, in spite of the effusive compliance of court
+poets,<note place="foot">Mart. ix. 4.</note> having but little belief in any Divine Powers, were not
+likely to yield an easy faith to the godhead of a Claudius or
+a Nero.<note place="foot">Sen. <hi rend="italic">Lud. De Morte Claud.</hi> c. 12;
+cf. Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. p. 193.</note> The emperors themselves, belonging to this class, and
+often sharing its fastidious scepticism, for a time judiciously
+restrained a too exuberant devotion to their person.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Aug.</hi> c. lii.</note> The
+influence of Herod may have filled the lunatic imagination of
+Caligula with dreams of an eastern despotism and the superhuman
+dignity of kings.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Calig.</hi> c. xxii.; Meriv. vi. pp.
+4-9.</note> Nero, who had visions of a new
+monarchy with its seat on eastern hills, may have rejoiced in
+being adored by Tiridates as the equal of Mithra.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxiii. 5,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">ἦλθον πρός σε τὸν ἐμὸν θεὸν προσκυνήσων σε ὡς καὶ τὸν Μίθραν</foreign>.</note> But the
+politic Augustus, while he permitted the foundation of temples
+and priestly orders in his honour throughout the provinces,
+and even in Italian towns, along with the divinity of Rome,
+obstinately refused to have shrines erected to him in the
+capital.<note place="foot">Suet. <hi rend="italic">Aug.</hi> lii.; D. Cass. li. 20;
+lxvii. 13; Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. p. 163.</note> Tiberius pursued the same policy, which was congenial
+to his cold, realistic temperament. Vespasian, although
+eastern superstition had a certain charm for him, jested on his
+death-bed about his own claims to divinity.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Vesp.</hi> c. xxiii. vae, inquit, puto,
+deus fio.</note> It was reserved
+for his son Domitian to be the first emperor who claimed the
+salutation of <q>Dominus et Deus</q> in his lifetime.<note place="foot">Id. <hi rend="italic">Domit.</hi> c. xiii.</note> The best
+of the early emperors aspired to full divine honours only when
+their career on earth had closed.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="616"/><anchor id="Pg616"/>
+
+<p>
+Many historic causes made their posthumous elevation to
+divine rank seem not unnatural. The cult of the Manes,
+or good spirits of departed friends and ancestors, prepared the
+Roman mind to adore the memory of the father of the State.
+The legendary kings of the Latin race—Saturnus, Faunus, Picus,
+Latinus—were worshipped as <hi rend="italic">Di indigetes</hi>;<note place="foot">Virg. <hi rend="italic">Georg.</hi> i. 498; Warde Fowler,
+<hi rend="italic">Rom. Festivals</hi>, p. 258.</note> Romulus had
+vanished in a tempest and been carried up to heaven to join
+the company of the gods. The hero-worship of the Greeks,
+which raised to semi-divine state after death those who had done
+great deeds of service to mankind, who had founded cities,
+or manifested splendid gifts of mind or body, influenced the
+imagination of a people who had long sat at the feet of Greece.
+Greek cities raised altars to Rome and to Roman generals who
+had enslaved them.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">Flamin.</hi> c. 16; cf. Herod. v.
+47; Thuc. v. 11.</note> When the Senate decreed divine honours
+to a dead emperor, he became <hi rend="italic">divus</hi>, not <hi rend="italic">deus</hi>, at least to the
+cultivated class, and <hi rend="italic">divus</hi> is a title which even modern
+sentiment might accord to men who have borne a great and
+shining part in a world-wide system of administration. The
+Spartan women were said to call great warriors, men who won
+their admiration by gallantry, <q>divine.</q><note place="foot">Plato, <hi rend="italic">Meno</hi>, 99 <hi rend="small">D</hi>.</note> To the masses the
+dead emperor no doubt became a veritable god, as the image
+of M. Aurelius two centuries after his death was found among
+the <hi rend="italic">penates</hi> of every pious family in the West.<note place="foot">Capitol. <hi rend="italic">M. Aurel.</hi> c. 18.</note> But the
+philosophic man of the world might also honestly accept the imperial
+apotheosis by the decree of the Senate, in the sense that
+another figure had been added to the rare company of those
+who have been lifted by fortune or merit far above their
+fellows, and have filled a great space in the life of humanity.
+People, who for generations erected shrines to the minion of
+Hadrian, might easily believe in the claims of the Antonine
+emperors to a place among the gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The influence of Egypt and Persia lent its force to stimulate
+native and original tendencies to king-worship, and to develop
+the principate of Augustus into the theocratic despotism of
+Aurelian and Diocletian. The eastern peoples were always
+eager to lavish on the emperors the adoration which they had
+been used to offer to their native princes. The ancient
+<pb n="617"/><anchor id="Pg617"/>Pharaohs had been revered as incarnations of the deity and
+gods upon earth.<note place="foot">Boissier, <hi rend="italic">Rel. Rom.</hi> i. 125; Cumont,
+Intr. p. 283 sqq.</note> The Ptolemies inherited and utilised so
+useful a superstition. These ideas spread into Italy with
+the diffusion of the Isiac cult among the upper class, and
+through the influence of travellers and envoys who kept up
+a fruitful intercourse between Alexandria and Rome. But
+Egypt went rather too far for the western mind in its apotheosis
+of kings.<note place="foot">Amm. Marc. xv. 1, 3.</note> A more potent and congenial influence came from
+the lands of the remoter East. The Persians prostrated themselves
+before their monarchs, but they did not actually adore
+them as gods. They reverenced the daemon, or, in Roman
+phrase, the <q>genius Caesaris,</q> without worshipping the monarch
+himself.<note place="foot">Athen. vi. 252,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τράπεζαν παρετίθει χωρὶς ὀνομάζων τῷ δαίμωνι τῷ βασιλέως</foreign>.</note> The king was supposed to be enlightened, inspired,
+and guarded by a heavenly grace; his brow was crowned by a
+divine aureole. Yet he was not the equal of God. But the
+majesty and fortune of kings was something divine and supernatural;
+they reigned by special grace and had a divine protection.
+The dynasties who succeeded to the great heritage of
+the East exploited these ideas to the full, and the most solemn
+oath was by the Fortune of the King.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 286.</note> The superstition of
+Chaldaea, which connected all human destiny with the orbs of
+heaven, exercised a profound influence for many centuries both
+in the East and West. And the Sun, the monarch of the
+heavens, often identified with Mithra, was regarded as the
+special patron of kings, enduing them with irresistible power,
+and guarding their lofty destiny. These ideas spread easily
+from Pontus and Commagene into the western world. In
+eastern cities, Caligula and Nero had altars raised to them as
+solar deities,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 290, n. 2.</note> and Tiridates offered to Nero the adoration due
+to Mithra.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxiii. 5,
+    <foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">καὶ ἦλθον πρός σε τὸν ἐμὸν θεόν,
+        προσκυνήσων σε ὡς καὶ τὸν Μίθραν</foreign>.</note> The enigmatical goddess Fortuna, who seems
+to have had early associations with the Sun,<note place="foot">W. Fowler, <hi rend="italic">Roman Festivals</hi>, p. 169.</note> gained fresh
+strength from the ideas of the divinised destiny of eastern
+monarchs. According to Plutarch, Tyche left the regions of
+Assyria and Persia to make her home on the Palatine.<note place="foot">Plut. <hi rend="italic">De Fort. Rom.</hi> iv.
+<foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">οὕτως ἡ τύχη καταλιποῦσα Πέρσας καὶ Ἀσσυρίους ...
+τῷ δὲ Παλατίῳ προσερχομένη, κτλ.</foreign></note> The
+<pb n="618"/><anchor id="Pg618"/>republican <q>Fortune of the Roman People</q> naturally passed
+into the <q>Fortuna Augusti,</q> which appears on the imperial
+coins from the reign of Vespasian. In the age of the
+Antonines, the image of the goddess in gold always stood in
+the prince’s bed-chamber, and was transferred at the hour of
+his death to his successor.<note place="foot">Capitol. <hi rend="italic">Ant. P.</hi> c. 12.</note> With the reign of Commodus, who
+was himself initiated both in the Isiac and Mithraic mysteries,
+begins the temporary triumph of the oriental cults, which was
+to reach its height in the reign of Julian. The absence of full
+materials for the history of the third century,<note place="foot">Cf. Vop. <hi rend="italic">Prob.</hi> c. i. § 3.</note> a century crowded
+with great events, and pregnant with great spiritual movements,
+should perhaps impose greater caution in tracing the development
+of imperial power than some writers have always observed.
+Yet there can be little doubt that the monarchy of the West
+tended to become a theocratic despotism, and that Persian Sun-worship
+had a large share in this development. There was
+always a sober sense in the West which rebelled against
+the oriental apotheosis of the prince.<note place="foot">Cf. Amm. Marc. xv. 1, 3.</note> Yet the iterated
+adulation, so often recorded faithfully in the Augustan
+History, reveals an extraordinary abasement of the upper
+class before the person of the emperor.<note place="foot">Cf. Amm. Marc. xv. 1, 3.</note> The emperors never,
+indeed, claimed like the Sassanids to be <q>brothers or sons of
+the Sun and Moon.</q><note place="foot">Amm. Marc. xxiii. 6, 5, unde reges
+ejusdem gentis praetumidi appellari se
+patiuntur Solis fratres et Lunae.</note> But in their official style and insignia
+there were many approaches to the divine claims of the
+monarchs of the East. The title <hi rend="italic">invictus</hi>, sacred to Mithra
+and the Sun, was assumed by Commodus, and borne by his
+successors.<note place="foot">D. Cass. lxxii. 15, 5.</note> The still more imposing title of <q>eternal,</q> springing
+from the same origin, came into vogue in the third century,
+and appears in the edicts of the last shadowy emperors of the
+fifth. From the reign of Nero, the imperial crown with
+darting rays, symbolised the solar ancestry of the prince.
+Gallienus used to go forth crowned in this manner, and with
+gold dust in his hair, and raised a colossal statue of himself in
+the garb of the Sun.<note place="foot">Treb. Poll. <hi rend="italic">Gallien.</hi> 16, 18, crinibus
+suis auri scobem aspersit, etc.</note> The coins of Aurelian, who built the
+great temple of the Sun from the spoils of Palmyra, bear the
+legend <q>deo et domino nato.</q><note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 291, n. 5.</note> The West probably never took
+<pb n="619"/><anchor id="Pg619"/>these assumptions so literally as the East. But metaphor
+and imagery tended to become a real faith. The centre of
+the great religion which was to be the last stronghold of
+paganism, was the prototype of the emperor in the starry
+world, and his protector on earth. And the solar grace which
+surrounded the prince found an easy explanation in the mystic
+philosophy of the soul’s descent which had been absorbed by
+Mithraism. In coming to earth from the empyrean, the
+future lord of the world received a special gift of grace and
+power from the great luminary which is the source of light
+and life. The religion of the Sun thus tended to become a
+great spiritual support of an absolutism which was more and
+more modelling itself on the royalty of the East. The cult of
+the Sun, which was established in such splendour in 273 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>
+by Aurelian, must have had a great effect in preparing for
+the oriental claims of monarchy from the reign of Diocletian.
+Thirty years after the foundation of the stately shrine on
+the Esquiline, and only twenty years before the conversion
+of Constantine, all the princes of the imperial house, Jovii
+Herculii, Augusti, Caesares, as an inscription tells, united to
+restore a temple of Mithra at Carnuntum, his holy city on the
+Danube.<note place="foot">Cumont, <hi rend="italic">Inscr.</hi> No. 367.</note> But the days of Mithra as the god of kings were
+numbered. After the establishment of the Christian Empire, he
+had a brief illusory triumph in the reign of Julian, and again in
+the short-lived effort of reaction led by Eugenius and Nicomachus
+Flavianus, which had a tragic close in the battle on the Frigidus.
+Yet his mystic theology was the theme of debate among Roman
+nobles, trained in the philosophy of Alexandria, long after his
+last chapels had been buried in ruins; and his worship lingered
+in secluded valleys of the Alps or the Vosges into the fifth
+century.<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i. 17; Cumont, Intr.
+p. 348. The Mithraeum of Sarreburg
+seems to have been frequented till
+395 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi></note> The theocratic claim of monarchy, to which Mithra
+lent his support for so many generations, was destined, in its
+symbols and phrases, to have a long reign.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+M. Renan has hazarded the opinion that, if the Christian
+Church had been stricken with some mortal weakness, Mithraism
+might have become the religion of the western world.
+And, indeed, its marvellously rapid diffusion in Italy and the
+<pb n="620"/><anchor id="Pg620"/>provinces along the Danube and the Rhine, in the second and
+third centuries, might well have inspired the hope of such a
+splendid destiny. Although it was primarily a kingly and
+military creed, it appealed in the end to all classes, by many
+various attractions. Springing from remote regions of the East,
+it seemed instinctively to seize the opportunity offered by a
+marvellous political unity, along with anarchy in morals and
+religion, to satisfy the imperious needs of a world eager for
+spiritual light and hope, but distracted among the endless
+claimants for its devotion. Philosophy had long tried and was
+still trying to find a spiritual synthesis, and to draw from old
+mythologies a support for life and conduct. Might not
+religion succeed where philosophy had failed? Or rather,
+might not religion gather up into itself the forces of philosophy,
+and transmute and glorify them in a great concrete symbol?
+Might not the claims of the past be harmonised with the higher
+intuitions of a more instructed age, and the countless cults
+embraced within the circuit of the Roman power be reconciled
+with the supreme reverence for one central divine figure, as the
+liberties of an Alpine canton, like those of a great city of Asia,
+were sheltered under the unchallenged supremacy of Rome?
+Mithra made the effort, and for the time he succeeded. In his
+progress to what seemed an almost assured victory, he swept into
+his orbit the Greek and Latin and Phrygian gods—nay, even the
+gods of Celtic cantons.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 332, n. 3.</note> They all found a place in his crypts,
+beside his own sacred image and the Persian deities of his
+original home. Their altars were ranged around his chapels, and
+were duly visited by his priests. Yet, though the Persian deity
+might seem very cosmopolitan and liberal in his indulgence to
+parochial devotion, he never abated his own lofty claims, and
+he never forgot his ancestry. While he might ally himself
+with Magna Mater and Jupiter Dolichenus, he coldly repulsed
+any association with Isis and Serapis, who were his rivals for
+oecumenical sway. The old hostility between the worships of
+Persia and Egypt was only softened in the internecine conflict
+of both with a more powerful foe. It is only in the last stone
+records that a votary of Mithra is found combining a devotion
+to Isis.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 504, 846; C. Volusianus
+was perhaps Praef. Urb. in 365 or
+Consul in 314.</note> The claims of the Sun-god to spiritual primacy are
+<pb n="621"/><anchor id="Pg621"/>expounded in the orations of Julian and the dissertations of
+Praetextatus in the <hi rend="italic">Saturnalia</hi> of Macrobius. Monotheism in
+the pagan world was not, indeed, a new thing. It goes back
+to the philosophers of Ionia and Elea, to Aeschylus and Plato.
+Nor was syncretism unknown to earlier ages. The Greeks of
+the days of Herodotus identified the gods of Egypt with their
+own, as Julius Caesar and Tacitus identified Gallic and German
+deities with those of the Roman pantheon.<note place="foot">Herod, ii. 48, 50; Caes. <hi rend="italic">B.G.</hi> vi. 17; Tac. <hi rend="italic">Germ.</hi> c. 9.</note> But the monotheistic
+syncretism of Mithra was a broader and more sweeping
+movement. Local and national gods represented single
+aspects of nature. Mithra was seated at the centre on which
+all nature depends. If nature-worship was to justify itself in
+the eyes of philosophic reason, men must rise to the adoration
+of the Sun-king, the head of a great hierarchy of divine forces,
+by means of which he acts and diffuses his inexhaustible energy
+throughout the universe. And such is the claim made for him
+by Praetextatus, in the <hi rend="italic">Saturnalia</hi> of Macrobius, who was a
+high adept in the mysteries of Mithra.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the world needed more than a great physical force to
+assuage its cravings; it demanded a moral God, Who could raise
+before the eyes of men a moral ideal, and support them in striving
+to attain it; One Who could guide and comfort in the struggles
+of life, and in the darkness of its close, Who could prepare the
+trembling soul for the great ordeal, in which the deeds done in
+the body are sifted on the verge of the eternal world. In fulfilling
+his part, Mithra could rely on his own early character as a
+god of truth and righteousness, a mediator between the powers
+of good and evil: he had also the experience of the classic
+mysteries, stretching back to the legendary Orpheus, which, in
+whatever crude, shadowy symbolism, had taught for ten
+centuries the doctrine of a moral sequence between this life
+and the next. The descent of the soul into gross material
+form, and its possible ascent again, if duly fortified, to ethereal
+worlds, was common to Mithra and the Orphic and Pythagorean
+systems. Such a system on one side sad and pessimist, on
+another was full of the energy of hope. And Mithraism
+combined the two. It was a religion of strenuous effort and
+warfare, with the prospect of high rewards in some far-off
+eternal life.
+</p>
+
+<pb n="622"/><anchor id="Pg622"/>
+
+<p>
+It is little wonder that the Fathers, from the second century,
+saw in Mithra the most formidable foe of Christ. Indeed, the
+resemblances between the two religions, some of them superficial,
+others of a deeper kind, were very striking. How far
+some of these were due to a common stock of ideas in East and
+West, how far they were the result of conscious borrowing
+and mutual imitation, seems to be an insoluble problem. The
+most learned student of the cult of Mithra is the most cautious
+in his conclusions on the subject.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. pp. 341, 2.</note> On the one hand, the
+two religions, in outlying regions of the Empire, long followed
+different lines of dispersion. Christianity from its origin in
+the religion of Israel, spread at first among the cities on the
+Mediterranean, chiefly where there were colonies of Jews.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 339.</note> On
+the other hand, outside Italy, Mithraism, which was propagated
+by soldiers and imperial officers, followed the line of the
+camps and centres of commerce chiefly along the great rivers
+of the northern frontier. Yet at Ostia and Rome and elsewhere,
+the two eastern religions must have been early brought face
+to face. In the syncretism of that age, the age of Gnosticism,
+rites and doctrines passed easily from one system to another.
+Mithra certainly absorbed much from kindred worships of
+Asia Minor, from Hellenic mysteries, and from Alexandrian
+philosophy. It is equally certain that the Church did not
+disdain a policy of accommodation, along with the consecration
+of altars of Christ in the old shrines of paganism. The cult
+of local heroes was transferred to saints and martyrs. Converts
+found it hard to part with consecrated phrases and forms of
+devotion, and might address Jesus in epithets sacred to the
+Sun. Some Christians in the fifth century still saluted the
+rising sun with a prayer.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 341; cf. Gasquet, p. 118 sqq.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Futile attempts have been made to find parallels to Biblical
+narrative or symbolism in the faint and faded legend of Mithra
+recovered from his monuments, the miraculous birth, the
+sacred rock, the adoration of the shepherds, the grotto,—above
+all, in the mystic sacrifice of the bull, which seemed to occupy
+the same space in Mithraic devotion as the Sacrifice on
+Calvary. But one great weakness of Mithraism lay precisely
+here—that, in place of the narrative of a Divine life, instinct
+<pb n="623"/><anchor id="Pg623"/>with human sympathy, it had only to offer the cold symbolism
+of a cosmic legend. In their offices and sacramental system
+the two religions had a more real affinity. Mithra had his
+baptism and confirmation of new disciples, his ablutions, ascetic
+preparation for the sacred mysteries, and holy feasts of the consecrated
+bread and wine, where the mystic draught gave purity
+and life to soul and body, and was the passport to a life in God.
+The sacerdotal and liturgical character of his worship, with its
+striking symbolism, using to the full the emotional effects of
+lights and music and sacred pomp, offered to souls, who were
+ripe for a diviner faith, some of that magical charm which was
+to be exerted over so many ages by the Catholic Church. There
+are, however, deeper and more fundamental resemblances between
+the faiths of Mithra and of Christ, and it was to these that the
+Persian cult owed its great superiority to classical mythology
+and the official Roman paganism. It responded to a great
+spiritual movement, of which it is one great object of this book
+to show the sweep and direction. Formal devotion and ascetic
+discipline were linked with lofty doctrines as to the origin of the
+human spirit and an immortal destiny, depending on conduct,
+as well as sacramental grace, through Mithra the mediator.
+While the vulgar may have rested in the external charm and
+power of the worship, there were others who drank in a more
+spiritual creed expounded to us by one of the last Neo-Platonic
+votaries of the Sun-God. It told of a fall of the soul into the
+duress of the body, for a brief period of probation, of a
+resurrection and great judgment, of a final ascent and beatitude
+in the life in God, or of endless exile from His presence.<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Som. Scip.</hi> i. 13.</note>
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet the two systems were separated by an impassable
+gulf, and Mithra had associations which could not save him
+from the fate of Jupiter and Demeter, of Hecate and Isis.
+It is true that his fate was hastened by hostile forces and
+causes external to religion. Many of his shrines in the
+Danubian provinces, and along the upper Rhine, were desolated
+and buried in ruins by the hordes of invaders in the third
+century.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 344.</note> And in the fourth century, the fiercest assaults of
+the Christian Empire were directed against the worship which
+was thought to be the patron of magic arts, and a device
+of the Evil One to travesty and defy the Religion of the
+<pb n="624"/><anchor id="Pg624"/>Cross.<note place="foot">S. Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 107 (Ad Laetam).</note> But material force, however fiercely and decisively
+exerted, although it hastened the doom of the Persian god,
+only anticipated an inevitable defeat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A certain severity in Mithraism, which marked it off honourably
+from other worships of the East, also weakened it as a
+popular and enduring force. The absence of the feminine
+charm in its legend, while it saved it from the sensual taint
+of other heathen systems, deprived it of a fascination for the
+softer and more emotional side of human nature.<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 134.</note> Although
+women may, perhaps, have not been altogether excluded from
+his mysteries,<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 329; Porphyr. <hi rend="italic">De
+Abstin.</hi> iv. 36; cf. Gasquet, p. 98.</note> still Mithra did not welcome them with the
+warm sympathy which gave Demeter and Magna Mater and
+Isis so firm a hold on the imagination of women for many
+generations. The Mater Dolorosa has in all ages been an
+enthralling power. The legend of the Tauroctonus was a
+religion for strenuous men. And even its symbolism, with all
+its strange spell, seems to lack depth and warmth for human
+nature as a whole. It would indeed be rash to set limits to
+the power of pious sentiment to transfigure and vivify the most
+unspiritual materials. And the slaughtered bull in the apse
+of every chapel of Mithra may have aroused in the end visions
+and mystic emotion which had passed far beyond the sphere
+of astral symbolism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yet such spiritual interpretation of ancient myth is only
+for the few, who find in a worship what they bring. For
+the gross masses, the symbolism of natural processes, however
+majestic, could never have won that marvellous power which
+has made a single Divine, yet human, life the inexhaustible
+source of spiritual strength for all the future. With all his
+heroic effort to make himself a moral and spiritual force,
+Mithra remained inextricably linked with the nature-worships
+of the past. And, with such associations, even the God of
+light could not be lord of the spiritual future of humanity.
+Mithraism, with all its strange moral force, with all its charm of
+antiquity and sacramental rite, with all its charity and tolerance,
+had within it the germs of a sure mortality. In its tolerance lay
+precisely its great weakness. The Christian Church might,
+in S. Augustine’s phrase, <q>spoil the Egyptians,</q> it might borrow
+<pb n="625"/><anchor id="Pg625"/>and adapt rites and symbols from pagan temples, or ideas from
+Greek philosophy.<note place="foot">Hatch, <hi rend="italic">Hibbert Lectures</hi>, pp. 49,
+135, 292.</note> But in borrowing, it transfigured them.
+In all that was essential, the Church would hold no truce with
+paganism. <q>Break the idols and consecrate the temples</q>
+was the motto of the great Pontiff. But Mithra was ready to
+shelter the idols under his purer faith. The images of Jupiter
+and Venus, of Mars and Hecate, of the local deities of Dacia
+and Upper Germany, find a place in his chapels beside the
+antique symbols of the Persian faith.<note place="foot">Cumont, Intr. p. 334.</note> And thus, in spite
+of a lofty moral mysticism, Mithra was loaded with the
+heritage of the heathen past. A man admitted to his highest
+ministry might also worship at the old altars of Greece
+and Rome. The last hierophant of Eleusis was a high-priest
+of Mithra.<note place="foot">Gasquet, p. 137.</note> Human nature and religious sentiment are so
+complex that men of the sincere monotheistic faith of
+Symmachus, Praetextatus, and Macrobius, have left the almost
+boastful record of an all-embracing laxity of tolerance on their
+tombs.<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">C.I.L.</hi> vi. 500, 504, 511, 1779.</note> On many of these slabs you may read that the man
+who has been a <q>father</q> in the mysteries of Mithra, who has
+been <q>born again</q> in the taurobolium, is also a priest of
+Hecate, the goddess of dark arts and baleful spirits of the
+night.<note place="foot">Maury, <hi rend="italic">La Magie</hi>, p. 54.</note> Through the astral fatalism of Babylon, Mithra was
+inseparably connected with the darkest superstitions of East
+or West,<note place="foot"><hi rend="italic">Ib.</hi> p. 146.</note> which covered all sorts of secret crime and perfidy,
+which lent themselves to seduction, conspiracy, and murder,
+which involved the denial of a moral Providence of the world.
+Many a pious devotee of Mithra and Hecate would have
+recoiled, as much as we do, from the last results of his
+superstition. Such people probably wished only to gain
+another ally in facing the terrors of the unseen world. Yet
+there can be little doubt that the majestic supremacy of
+Mithra, through its old connection with Babylon, sheltered
+some of the most degrading impostures of superstition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So rooted is religious sentiment in reverence for the past,
+for what our fathers have loved and venerated, that men will
+long tolerate, or even wistfully cherish, sacred forms and ideas
+which their moral sense has outgrown. Down to the last years
+<pb n="626"/><anchor id="Pg626"/>of the fourth century, the Persian worship was defended with
+defiant zeal by members of the proudest Roman houses. In
+their philosophic gatherings in the reign of Honorius, they found
+in Sun-worship the sum and climax of the pagan devotion of
+the past.<note place="foot">Macrob. <hi rend="italic">Sat.</hi> i. 17, § 4.</note> Many a pious old priest of Mithra, in the reign of
+Gratian, was probably filled with wonder and sorrow when he
+saw a Gracchus and his retinue break into the sanctuary
+and tear down the venerable symbols from the wall of the
+apse.<note place="foot">S. Hieron. <hi rend="italic">Ep.</hi> 107, § 2.</note> He deemed himself the prophet of a pure immemorial
+faith, as pure as that of Galilee. He was probably a man of
+irreproachable morals, with even a certain ascetic sanctity,
+unspotted by the world. He treasured the secret lore of the
+mysterious East, which sped the departing soul with the last
+comforting sacraments on its flight to ethereal worlds. But he
+could not see, or he could not regret, that every day when he
+said his liturgy, as he made the round of the altars, he was
+lending the authority of a purer faith to other worships which
+had affrighted or debauched and enervated the Roman world
+for forty generations. He could not see that the attempt to wed
+a high spiritual ideal with nature-worship was doomed to failure.
+The masses around him remained in their grossness and darkness.
+And on that very day, it may be, one of his aristocratic
+disciples, high in the ranks of Mithra’s sacred guilds, was
+attending a priestly college which was charged with the
+guardianship of gross and savage rites running back to Evander,
+or he was consulting a Jewish witch, or a Babylonian diviner,
+on the meaning of some sinister omen, or he may have been
+sending down into the arena, with cold proud satisfaction, a
+band of gallant fighters from the Thames or the Danube, to
+butcher one another for the pleasure of the rabble of Rome.
+Mithra, the Unconquered, the god of many lands and dynasties
+from the dawn of history, was a fascinating power. But, at his
+best, he belonged to the order which was vanishing.
+</p>
+
+        </div></div></body>
+        <back>
+            <div rend="page-break-before: always">
+<pb n="627"/><anchor id="Pg627"/>
+<index index="toc" level1="Index"/><index index="pdf" level1="Index"/>
+<head>INDEX</head>
+
+<list>
+<item>Abascantus, secretary <hi rend="italic">ab epistulis</hi>, career of, described in the <hi rend="italic">Silvae</hi>, <ref target="Pg110">110</ref></item>
+
+<item><hi rend="italic">Acta diurna</hi>,
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item>regular arrival of, in the provinces, <ref target="Pg205">205</ref>;</item>
+    <item>reader of, <ref target="Pg95">95</ref></item>
+</list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Acte, mistress of Nero, cares for his burial, <ref target="Pg115">115</ref></item>
+
+<item>Aelian of Praeneste,
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item>account of his work on Providence, <ref target="Pg456">456</ref>;</item>
+    <item>immense credulity, and hatred of rationalism, <ref target="Pg456"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>the pious cock of Tanagra, <ref target="Pg457">457</ref>;</item>
+<item>last dream of Philemon, <ref target="Pg457"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item>
+</list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Africa,
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item>the development of its city life, organisation of Thamugadi, <ref target="Pg202">202</ref>;</item>
+    <item>of Lambesi, <ref target="Pg208">208</ref>;</item>
+<item>amphitheatres in, <ref target="Pg201">201</ref>;</item>
+<item>and bishoprics, <ref target="Pg201"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>little touched by Mithraism, <ref target="Pg597">597</ref></item>
+</list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Agrippina, mother of Nero,
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item>memoirs by, used by Tacitus, <ref target="Pg80">80</ref>;</item>
+    <item>sits on the tribunal with Claudius, <ref target="Pg81">81</ref>;</item>
+<item>shade propitiated by Nero, <ref target="Pg491">491</ref></item>
+</list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Albinus, P. <anchor id="corr627"/><corr sic="Caeonius">Caeionius</corr>, restores a temple at Thamugadi, <ref target="Pg202">202</ref></item>
+
+<item>Alcantara, the bridge of, <ref target="Pg220">220</ref></item>
+
+<item>Alexander of Abonoteichos, 
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item>oracle on the Marcomannic war, <ref target="Pg451">451</ref>, <ref target="Pg476">476</ref>;</item>
+    <item>physical and mental gifts of, <ref target="Pg473">473</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>skilful charlatanry, <ref target="Pg474">474</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>war with the Epicureans, <ref target="Pg476">476</ref>;</item>
+<item>Lucian’s treatment of, <ref target="Pg477">477</ref>;</item>
+<item>establishes new Mysteries, <ref target="Pg476">476</ref> sq.</item>
+</list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Alexandria,
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item>roses from, for Nero’s dinners, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+    <item>singing boys from, at Trimalchio’s dinner, <ref target="Pg130">130</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>character of its populace, <ref target="Pg374">374</ref>;</item>
+<item>Dion Chrysostom rebukes their passion for games, <ref target="Pg374"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>a great focus of religious feeling, <ref target="Pg397">397</ref>;</item>
+<item>and eclecticism, <ref target="Pg561">561</ref></item>
+</list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Animal-worship,
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item>excites ridicule, <ref target="Pg571">571</ref>;</item>
+    <item>philosophy justified it, <ref target="Pg571"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>, <ref target="Pg395">395</ref>;</item>
+<item>little noticed in Apuleius, <ref target="Pg572">572</ref></item>
+</list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Annaeus Serenus, Seneca’s <hi rend="italic">De Tranquillitate</hi> addressed to, character of, <ref target="Pg319">319</ref></item>
+
+<item>Antinous, death and apotheosis of, <ref target="Pg450">450</ref>, <ref target="Pg477">477</ref>, <ref target="Pg478">478</ref></item>
+
+<item>Antium, temple of Fortuna Primigenia at, <ref target="Pg456">456</ref></item>
+
+<item>Antoninus Pius,
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item> builds a temple to Juno Sospita of Lanuvium, <ref target="Pg538">538</ref>;</item>
+    <item>to Mithra at Ostia, <ref target="Pg591">591</ref>;</item>
+<item>his country pleasures at Lorium, <ref target="Pg537">537</ref>;</item>
+<item>flattered by the Arval Brothers, <ref target="Pg542">542</ref>;</item>
+<item>Magna Mater on his coins, <ref target="Pg549">549</ref>;</item>
+<item>taurobolium for, in 160, <ref target="Pg549"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>, <ref target="Pg557">557</ref></item>
+</list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Apollonius of Tyana,
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item>involved in political conspiracy, <ref target="Pg40">40</ref>;</item>
+    <item>a great preacher, effect of his sermons, <ref target="Pg347">347</ref>;</item>
+<item>early life, Pythagorean asceticism, Sun worship, and catholic ritualism, <ref target="Pg399">399</ref>;</item>
+<item>reconciled myth with a purer faith, <ref target="Pg400">400</ref>;</item>
+<item>visits all the oracles, <ref target="Pg472">472</ref>;</item>
+<item>his ideas of a future state, <ref target="Pg518">518</ref> sqq.</item>
+</list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Apotheosis,
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item>in the Antonine age, <ref target="Pg386">386</ref>, <ref target="Pg537">537</ref>;</item>
+    <item>of Antinous, <ref target="Pg477">477</ref>;</item>
+<item>of Peregrinus, <ref target="Pg478">478</ref>;</item>
+<item>of M. Aurelius, <ref target="Pg478"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>of the Emperors, its history, <ref target="Pg615">615</ref> sqq.</item>
+</list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Apuleius,
+<list rend="nested">
+    <item>sensual imagination and mysticism of, <ref target="Pg389">389</ref>;</item>
+    <item>weird scenes of miracle in Thessaly, <ref target="Pg483">483</ref>;</item>
+<item>lofty conception of God, <ref target="Pg389">389</ref>;</item>
+<item>description of the revels of the wandering priests of the Syrian goddess, <ref target="Pg551">551</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>of other scenes in Thessaly, <ref target="Pg552">552</ref>;</item>
+<item>conception of Isis in the Metamorphoses, <ref target="Pg563">563</ref>;</item>
+<item>mystic raptures, <ref target="Pg570">570</ref>, <ref target="Pg574">574</ref>, <ref target="Pg576">576</ref></item>
+</list></item>
+
+<item>Aquileia, a great seat of Mithraism, <ref target="Pg593">593</ref></item>
+
+<item>Ardeliones, the, life of, described, <ref target="Pg12">12</ref>, <ref target="Pg174">174</ref></item>
+
+<item>Aristides, P. Aelius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>picture of the Roman Empire in, <ref target="Pg199">199</ref>;</item>
+<item>general security, <ref target="Pg205">205</ref>;</item>
+<item>journey from Mysia to Rome, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref>, <ref target="Pg464">464</ref>;</item>
+<item>early history and travels, <ref target="Pg457">457</ref>;</item>
+<item>long ill health and resort to temples of healing, <ref target="Pg458">458</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>his rhetorical training affected his religious attitude, <ref target="Pg458">458</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>diseases of, lasting for thirteen years, <ref target="Pg463">463</ref>;</item>
+<item>his ordeals and vitality, <ref target="Pg465">465</ref>;</item>
+<item>visited by the gods, <ref target="Pg466">466</ref>;</item>
+<item>recovers his rhetorical power, <ref target="Pg466"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>mingled vanity and piety of, <ref target="Pg467">467</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Aristotle, influence of,
+<list rend="nested"><item>on Plutarch, <ref target="Pg412">412</ref>;</item>
+<item>on Seneca, <ref target="Pg314">314</ref>;</item>
+<item>on Maximus of Tyre, <ref target="Pg421">421</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Army, the, 
+<list rend="nested"><item>honesty and courage in, <ref target="Pg49">49</ref>;</item>
+<item><hi rend="italic">castra stativa</hi> grow into towns, <ref target="Pg207">207</ref>;</item>
+<item>Septimius Severus allows the soldier <pb n="628"/><anchor id="Pg628"/>to live with his family, <ref target="Pg208">208</ref>;</item>
+<item>how pensions provided for, <ref target="Pg283">283</ref>;</item>
+<item>military colleges, their objects, <ref target="Pg283">283</ref>;</item>
+<item>the worship of Mithra propagated by, <ref target="Pg591">591</ref>;</item>
+<item>the legions which were most active, <ref target="Pg595">595</ref>, <ref target="Pg596">596</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Arrius Antoninus, grandfather of Ant. Pius, Greek verses of, <ref target="Pg166">166</ref></item>
+
+    <item>Art, 
+    <list rend="nested"><item>pretence of taste for, <ref target="Pg131">131</ref>, <ref target="Pg178">178</ref>;</item>
+    <item>influence of, in religion discussed by Dion Chrysostom, <ref target="Pg382">382</ref>;</item>
+<item>decay of, lamented by Petronius, <ref target="Pg125">125</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Artemidorus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>work on Dreams by, <ref target="Pg468">468</ref>;</item>
+<item>immense industry, collections, and faith in the science, <ref target="Pg468"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>contempt for impostors, <ref target="Pg469">469</ref>;</item>
+<item>quasi scientific method, <ref target="Pg469"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>its absurdities, <ref target="Pg470">470</ref></item></list>
+</item>
+
+<item>Arvales Fratres, the College of,
+<list rend="nested"><item>revived by Augustus, <ref target="Pg534">534</ref>;</item>
+<item>early history, meetings and ritual of, <ref target="Pg540">540</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>servility to the Emperors, <ref target="Pg541">541</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Asclepius, 
+<list rend="nested"><item>immense popularity of his worship, <ref target="Pg459">459</ref>, <ref target="Pg539">539</ref>;</item>
+<item>temples of, and their routine and organisation, <ref target="Pg460">460</ref>;</item>
+<item>new oracle of, at Abonoteichos, <ref target="Pg474">474</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Asiaticus, freedman of Vitellius, history of, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref></item>
+
+<item>Astrology, 
+<list rend="nested"><item>influence of, in the early empire, a political danger, <ref target="Pg45">45</ref>, <ref target="Pg447">447</ref>;</item>
+<item>astrologers banished by Claudius, Vitellius and Vespasian, <ref target="Pg45">45</ref>, <ref target="Pg448">448</ref>;</item>
+<item>a Greek trade, <ref target="Pg93">93</ref>;</item>
+<item>Augustus burns books of, <ref target="Pg446">446</ref>;</item>
+<item>Tiberius believes in, <ref target="Pg448">448</ref>;</item>
+<item>Otho, <ref target="Pg45">45</ref>, <ref target="Pg448">448</ref>;</item>
+<item>Titus, <ref target="Pg449">449</ref>;</item>
+<item>and M. <anchor id="corr628"/><corr sic="Aurelius">Aurelius,</corr> <ref target="Pg450">450</ref>;</item>
+<item>Domitian, <ref target="Pg450"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item><anchor id="corr628-2"/><corr sic="Hadrian">Hadrian,</corr> <ref target="Pg450"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>in Mithraism, <ref target="Pg598">598</ref>, <ref target="Pg602">602</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Attis, 
+<list rend="nested"><item>legend of, <ref target="Pg549">549</ref>;</item>
+<item>becomes a solar deity, <ref target="Pg556">556</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Augury, 
+<list rend="nested"><item>decay of, <ref target="Pg445">445</ref>;</item>
+<item>abuse of, <ref target="Pg532">532</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Augustales, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Trimalchio one of, <ref target="Pg136">136</ref>;</item>
+<item>importance, organisation, social rank, and insignia in municipal towns, <ref target="Pg216">216</ref>, <ref target="Pg217">217</ref>;</item>
+<item>generosity of, as patrons of colleges, <ref target="Pg275">275</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Augustine, S.,
+<list rend="nested"><item>defends the Cynics of his time, <ref target="Pg352">352</ref>;</item>
+<item>contempt for rites of Magna Mater, <ref target="Pg547">547</ref>;</item>
+<item>on Varro’s theology, <ref target="Pg417">417</ref>, <ref target="Note531-3">531 n.</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the cult of martyrs, <ref target="Pg488">488</ref>;</item>
+<item>on Plato, <ref target="Pg523">523</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Augustus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his disguised power, <ref target="Pg41">41</ref>;</item>
+<item>destroys 2000 books of divination, <ref target="Pg446">446</ref>;</item>
+<item>his horoscope cast, <ref target="Pg447">447</ref>;</item>
+<item>his religious restoration, and its motive, <ref target="Pg533">533</ref>;</item>
+<item>attitude to foreign religions, <ref target="Pg533">533</ref>;</item>
+<item>restores a temple of Magna Mater, <ref target="Pg548">548</ref>;</item>
+<item>cautious acceptance of divine honours, <ref target="Pg615">615</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Aurelian,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his temple of the Sun, <ref target="Pg586">586</ref>;</item>
+<item>outbreak of the workmen of the Mint in his reign, <ref target="Pg255">255</ref>;</item>
+<item>legend <hi rend="italic">deo et domino nato</hi> on his coins, <ref target="Pg618">618</ref>;</item>
+<item>effect of his Sun-worship on the development of imperial power, <ref target="Pg619">619</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Aurelius, M.,
+<list rend="nested"><item>slight interest of, in speculation, <ref target="Pg339">339</ref>;</item>
+<item>his tutors of various schools, <ref target="Pg343">343</ref>;</item>
+<item>as a boy recites the Salian litany, <ref target="Pg385">385</ref>;</item>
+<item>his gospel of renunciation, <ref target="Pg393">393</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>his conformity, <ref target="Pg394">394</ref>;</item>
+<item>employs diviners, <ref target="Pg450">450</ref>;</item>
+<item>relations of, with Galen, <ref target="Pg506">506</ref>;</item>
+<item>views of, about immortality, <ref target="Pg507">507</ref>;</item>
+<item>his Stoic ideal of life, <ref target="Pg509">509</ref>;</item>
+<item>his sadness and its causes, <ref target="Pg510">510</ref>;</item>
+<item>one of the Salii in his 8th year, <ref target="Pg535">535</ref>;</item>
+<item>his religious conservatism, <ref target="Pg537">537</ref>;</item>
+<item>images of, in every family in the West, <ref target="Pg616">616</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Balbilla, Greek verses by, <ref target="Pg80">80</ref></item>
+
+<item>Birth,
+<list rend="nested"><item>respect for, in Juvenal, <ref target="Pg69">69</ref>;</item>
+<item>in D. Cassius, Suetonius, and Pliny, <ref target="Pg70">70</ref>;</item>
+<item>manufacture of genealogies, in Vit. Apollonius of Tyana, and S. Jerome, <ref target="Pg70"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>Herodes Atticus traced his descent from the Aeacidae, <ref target="Pg225">225</ref>;</item>
+<item>Tiberius on, <ref target="Pg70">70</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Bithynia,
+<list rend="nested"><item>civic mismanagement in, <ref target="Pg220">220</ref>;</item>
+<item>literary distinction of, <ref target="Pg372">372</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Boeotia, the oracles of, <ref target="Pg471">471</ref></item>
+
+<item>Brescia, high moral tone of, <ref target="Pg147">147</ref></item>
+</list><list>
+<item>Caenis, concubine of Vespasian, influence and intrigues of, <ref target="Pg52">52</ref>, <ref target="Pg115">115</ref></item>
+
+<item>Caligula,
+<list rend="nested"><item>wild schemes and profusion of, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+<item>his cruelty and insolence to Senators, <ref target="Pg51">51</ref>;</item>
+<item>depraving example, <ref target="Pg73">73</ref>;</item>
+<item>consults the oracle of Fortune at Antium, <ref target="Pg472">472</ref>;</item>
+<item>apparitions at his burial, <ref target="Pg490">490</ref>;</item>
+<item>claims of divinity, <ref target="Pg615">615</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Calpurnia, Pliny’s wife,
+<list rend="nested"><item>character of, and his love for her, <ref target="Pg188">188</ref>, <ref target="Pg189">189</ref>;</item>
+<item>literary taste of, <ref target="Pg80">80</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item><hi rend="italic">Canabae legionis</hi>, at Lambesi, <ref target="Pg208">208</ref></item>
+
+<item>Canusium,
+<list rend="nested"><item><hi rend="italic">Album</hi> of, <ref target="Pg210">210</ref>;</item>
+<item>Herodes Atticus gave an aqueduct to, <ref target="Pg225">225</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Captation,
+<list rend="nested"><item>a regular profession, <ref target="Pg72">72</ref>;</item>
+<item>result of plebeian poverty and aristocratic vice, <ref target="Pg96">96</ref>;</item>
+<item>at Croton, in Petronius, <ref target="Pg127">127</ref>;</item>
+<item>Regulus a captator, <ref target="Pg156">156</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Carnuntum, in Pannonia,
+<list rend="nested"><item>a seat of Mithraism from 70 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, <ref target="Pg591">591</ref>;</item>
+<item>its temples, <ref target="Pg595">595</ref>;</item>
+<item>temple restored at, by the imperial house, in the fourth century, <ref target="Pg619">619</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Centumviral court, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>picture of, in Pliny’s Letters, <ref target="Pg154">154</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>he welcomes young aristocrats to, <ref target="Pg187">187</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Chaeremon, Alexandrian librarian, wrote a treatise on Isis, <ref target="Pg568">568</ref></item>
+
+<item>Charity, and munificence,
+<list rend="nested"><item>provision for poor children by Trajan and later Emperors, <ref target="Pg192">192</ref>, <ref target="Pg193">193</ref>;</item>
+<item>private benevolence exemplified by Pliny, <ref target="Pg193">193</ref>;</item>
+<item>his benefactions, <ref target="Pg193">193</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>other examples in the inscriptions, <ref target="Pg193">193</ref>, <ref target="Pg224">224</ref>;</item>
+<item>the Stertinii, <ref target="Pg224">224</ref>;</item>
+<item>Dion Chrysostom and <pb n="629"/><anchor id="Pg629"/>his father, <ref target="Pg225">225</ref>;</item>
+<item>Herodes Atticus, enormous benefactions of, <ref target="Pg225"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>munificence of the Emperors, Vespasian, Titus, Hadrian, <ref target="Pg227">227</ref>, <ref target="Pg228">228</ref>;</item>
+<item>private examples from inscriptions, <ref target="Pg223">223</ref>, <ref target="Pg229">229</ref>;</item>
+<item>ideals of the uses of wealth, <ref target="Pg232">232</ref>;</item>
+<item>men ruin themselves by generosity, <ref target="Pg245">245</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Cicero,
+<list rend="nested"><item>adorned by Pliny, <ref target="Pg158">158</ref>;</item>
+<item>on augury, <ref target="Pg445">445</ref>;</item>
+<item>on beneficence, <ref target="Pg190">190</ref>;</item>
+<item>on superstition, <ref target="Pg443">443</ref>;</item>
+<item>on legend, <ref target="Pg495">495</ref>;</item>
+<item>on Delphi, <ref target="Pg471">471</ref>;</item>
+<item>on immortality, <ref target="Pg488">488</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>City life,
+<list rend="nested"><item>splendour of, in the Antonine age, <ref target="Pg4">4</ref>;</item>
+<item>weariness of life in the capital, <ref target="Pg174">174</ref>;</item>
+<item>growth of, in Gaul, Spain, Dacia, and Asia, <ref target="Pg200">200</ref> sqq.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Claudian,
+<list rend="nested"><item>connects Mithra with Bel, <ref target="Pg588">588</ref>;</item>
+<item>contempt for Greeks, <ref target="Pg90">90</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Claudius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>recruits the Senate from the provinces, <ref target="Pg71">71</ref>, <ref target="Pg72">72</ref>;</item>
+<item>Hellenism of, <ref target="Pg89">89</ref>;</item>
+<item>his encouragement of trade, <ref target="Pg264">264</ref>;</item>
+<item>his effort to revive the art of augury, <ref target="Pg445">445</ref>;</item>
+<item>banishes the astrologers, <ref target="Pg418">418</ref>;</item>
+<item>conservative in religion, <ref target="Pg536">536</ref>;</item>
+<item>persecutes the Jewish and Druidic religions, <ref target="Pg566">566</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Claudius Etruscus, career of, and duties as minister, <ref target="Pg109">109</ref></item>
+
+<item>Clea, a priestess of Osiris at Delphi, <ref target="Pg424">424</ref></item>
+
+<item>Client, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>in Juvenal, <ref target="Pg93">93</ref>, <ref target="Pg94">94</ref>;</item>
+<item>change of the relation under the Empire, <ref target="Pg94"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>the relation in the colleges, <ref target="Pg273">273</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Clients,
+<list rend="nested"><item>position in the time of Juvenal, <ref target="Pg93">93</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>and Martial, <ref target="Pg61">61</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Clodius, P., uses the colleges, <ref target="Pg254">254</ref></item>
+
+<item>Colleges, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>plebeian class in towns, <ref target="Pg251">251</ref>;</item>
+<item>pride of free artisan class, <ref target="Pg253">253</ref>;</item>
+<item>early history of <hi rend="italic">Collegia</hi>, <ref target="Pg254">254</ref>;</item>
+<item>danger from, <ref target="Pg255">255</ref>;</item>
+<item>restrained by law, <ref target="Pg255"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>an irresistible movement, <ref target="Pg256">256</ref>;</item>
+<item>wish for pious burial, <ref target="Pg257">257</ref>;</item>
+<item>evidence on, from inscriptions, <ref target="Pg258">258</ref>;</item>
+<item>funerary colleges authorised, <ref target="Pg259">259</ref>;</item>
+<item>consequences of the concession, <ref target="Pg260">260</ref>;</item>
+<item>College of Diana and Antinous, its organisation, fees, etc. <ref target="Pg260">260</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>College of Aesculapius and Hygia, its regulations, <ref target="Pg262">262</ref>;</item>
+<item>colleges founded on religion, <ref target="Pg263">263</ref>;</item>
+<item>industrial colleges, great fair at Cremona, <ref target="Pg264">264</ref>;</item>
+<item>wandering traders, <hi rend="italic">collegia peregrinorum</hi>, <ref target="Pg265">265</ref>;</item>
+<item>colleges at Lyons, Ostia, Arles, etc. <ref target="Pg265">265</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>objects of association, <ref target="Pg266">266</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>favoured by masters, <ref target="Pg267">267</ref>;</item>
+<item>colleges moulded on the model of the city, names of offices, etc. <ref target="Pg269">269</ref>;</item>
+<item>gradation of rank in, its object, <ref target="Pg270">270</ref>;</item>
+<item>how the <hi rend="italic">schola</hi> was provided, <ref target="Pg271">271</ref>;</item>
+<item>associations gather round it, gifts made to it, <ref target="Pg272">272</ref>;</item>
+<item>College of Silvanus at Philippi, <ref target="Pg272"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>patrons of, and their <hi rend="italic">raison d’être</hi>, <ref target="Pg273">273</ref>;</item>
+<item>colleges and their patrons of very different rank, <ref target="Pg274">274</ref>;</item>
+<item>election of a patron, <ref target="Pg274"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>colleges founded to guard a tomb, <ref target="Pg276">276</ref>;</item>
+<item>provisions for permanent observances, <ref target="Pg277">277</ref>;</item>
+<item>college feasts and <hi rend="italic">sportulae</hi>, <ref target="Pg277">277</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>regulations for decorum in, fines, <ref target="Pg279">279</ref>;</item>
+<item>the college a family, in which the slave is an equal, <ref target="Pg281">281</ref>;</item>
+<item>were colleges eleemosynary institutions? <ref target="Pg282">282</ref>;</item>
+<item>military colleges of Lambesi, their organisation and objects, <ref target="Pg283">283</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>extinction of a college, <ref target="Pg285">285</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Commodus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>takes the tonsure of Isis and walks in an Isiac procession, <ref target="Pg553">553</ref>;</item>
+<item>assumes the <anchor id="corr629"/><corr sic="Mithriac">Mithraic</corr> title of <hi rend="italic">Invictus</hi>, <ref target="Pg618">618</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Como,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Pliny’s estates at, <ref target="Pg145">145</ref>;</item>
+<item>his gifts to, <ref target="Pg194">194</ref>;</item>
+<item>a suicide at, <ref target="Pg184">184</ref>;</item>
+<item><hi rend="italic">honorarium</hi> of its curia, <ref target="Pg209">209</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Conversion,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Seneca on, <ref target="Pg34">34</ref>;</item>
+<item>result of the preaching of Apollonius, <ref target="Pg347">347</ref>;</item>
+<item>conversion of Polemon, <ref target="Pg347"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>of D. Chrysostom, <ref target="Pg368">368</ref>;</item>
+<item>in Plutarch, <ref target="Pg413">413</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Corellius Rufus, suicide of, <ref target="Pg184">184</ref></item>
+
+<item>Cornelia, wife of Pompey, culture of, <ref target="Pg80">80</ref></item>
+
+<item>Cotta, M. Aurelius, liberality of, to a freedman, <ref target="Pg119">119</ref></item>
+
+<item>Country life,
+<list rend="nested"><item>growing love of, <ref target="Pg174">174</ref>;</item>
+<item>Roman country seats, their sites and architecture, <ref target="Pg176">176</ref>;</item>
+<item>extent and grounds, <ref target="Pg178">178</ref>;</item>
+<item>routine of life, <ref target="Pg179">179</ref>;</item>
+<item>purchase and management of estates, <ref target="Pg180">180</ref>;</item>
+<item>charm of the country in Roman literature, <ref target="Pg197">197</ref>;</item>
+<item>yet contempt for it, <ref target="Pg199">199</ref>;</item>
+<item>moral tone of, <ref target="Pg2">2</ref>, <ref target="Pg144">144</ref>, <ref target="Pg147">147</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Cremona,
+<list rend="nested"><item>great fair at, <ref target="Pg263">263</ref>;</item>
+<item>sack of, <ref target="Pg264">264</ref>;</item>
+<item>colleges of youth at, <ref target="Pg265">265</ref>;</item>
+<item>munificence of its citizens, <ref target="Pg225">225</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Curatores,
+<list rend="nested"><item>heard of first in the reign of Trajan, <ref target="Pg222">222</ref>;</item>
+<item>control of municipal finance by, <ref target="Pg248">248</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Curia, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>composition of, illustrated by the roll of Canusium, <ref target="Pg210">210</ref>;</item>
+<item>numbers, and qualification of, <ref target="Pg214">214</ref>;</item>
+<item>its fate, <ref target="Pg248">248</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Cynics, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>met a general demand for moral guidance, <ref target="Pg340">340</ref>;</item>
+<item>description of, in Dion Chrysostom, <ref target="Pg349">349</ref>;</item>
+<item>and in the literature of the age, <ref target="Pg350">350</ref> n.;</item>
+<item>the Cynic in Lucian’s <hi rend="italic">Banquet</hi>, <ref target="Pg350"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>attractions of the life of, <ref target="Pg351">351</ref>;</item>
+<item>gross charges against; S. Augustine’s testimony, <ref target="Pg352">352</ref>;</item>
+<item>causes of prejudice against, <ref target="Pg352"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>death of Peregrinus as treated by Lucian, <ref target="Pg355">355</ref>;</item>
+<item>affinity of, with Christian asceticism, <ref target="Pg355">355</ref>, <ref target="Pg361">361</ref>;</item>
+<item>evidently a great popular force, <ref target="Pg358">358</ref>;</item>
+<item>a one-sided Stoicism, <ref target="Pg359">359</ref>;</item>
+<item>Cynic ideal, <ref target="Pg359">359</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>attitude to the Empire, <ref target="Pg362">362</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>and to popular religion, <ref target="Pg363">363</ref>;</item>
+<item>cultivated Cynics, <ref target="Pg364">364</ref> sqq.</item></list></item>
+</list><list>
+<item>Dacia,
+<list rend="nested"><item>organisation and town life of, <ref target="Pg201">201</ref>;</item>
+<item>worship of Magna Mater in, <ref target="Pg549">549</ref>;</item>
+<item>of Isis, <ref target="Pg568">568</ref>;</item>
+<item>settlement of, by Trajan, a <pb n="630"/><anchor id="Pg630"/>seat of Mithraism, <ref target="Pg594">594</ref>;</item>
+<item>of the worship of Isis and Magna Mater, <ref target="Pg549">549</ref>, <ref target="Pg568">568</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Daemons,
+<list rend="nested"><item>conception of, in Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre, <ref target="Pg426">426</ref>;</item>
+<item>history of, in Greek literature from Hesiod, <ref target="Pg427">427</ref>;</item>
+<item>use of the idea by Platonists, <ref target="Pg425">425</ref>;</item>
+<item>Xenocrates first taught the existence of evil daemons, <ref target="Pg431">431</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>employed by Plutarch to rehabilitate myth, <ref target="Pg432">432</ref>;</item>
+<item>believed in by the Fathers, <ref target="Pg433">433</ref>;</item>
+<item>a cause of oracular inspiration, <ref target="Pg437">437</ref>;</item>
+<item>mortality of, <ref target="Pg426">426</ref>;</item>
+<item>daemon of Socrates, <ref target="Pg438">438</ref>;</item>
+<item>daemon a higher self, <ref target="Pg439">439</ref>;</item>
+<item>daemonology an attempt to bridge the gulf between man and the Infinite Spirit, <ref target="Pg603">603</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Dea Dia, worship of, <ref target="Pg540">540</ref></item>
+
+<item>Delation,
+<list rend="nested"><item>history and causes of, <ref target="Pg35">35</ref>;</item>
+<item>delators of every rank, <ref target="Pg35"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>attractions of, wealth gained by, <ref target="Pg36">36</ref>;</item>
+<item>Regulus a delator, <ref target="Pg37">37</ref>, <ref target="Pg155">155</ref>;</item>
+<item>Silius Italicus, <ref target="Pg164">164</ref>;</item>
+<item>under Domitian, <ref target="Pg35">35</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Delphi,
+<list rend="nested"><item>temple of Osiris at, <ref target="Pg424">424</ref>;</item>
+<item>Plutarch’s love of, <ref target="Pg403">403</ref>, <ref target="Pg435">435</ref>;</item>
+<item>decay of, in first century, <ref target="Pg434">434</ref>;</item>
+<item>revival of, <ref target="Pg435">435</ref>;</item>
+<item>why oracles were given in prose, <ref target="Pg436">436</ref>;</item>
+<item>sources of its inspiration, <ref target="Pg437">437</ref>;</item>
+<item>Nero’s violence to, <ref target="Pg472">472</ref>;</item>
+<item>Hadrian tested, <ref target="Pg472"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Demetrius, the Cynic,
+<list rend="nested"><item>life of, <ref target="Pg361">361</ref>;</item>
+<item>a cultivated ascetic, <ref target="Pg362">362</ref>;</item>
+<item>knew Apollonius of Tyana, <ref target="Pg362"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>attitude to the Empire, beards Nero and Vespasian, <ref target="Pg362"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Demonax,
+<list rend="nested"><item>attitude to popular religion, <ref target="Pg363">363</ref>;</item>
+<item>origin, education, and philosophic tone of, <ref target="Pg364">364</ref>;</item>
+<item>fashion of his life and teaching, <ref target="Pg365">365</ref>;</item>
+<item>epigrams and sarcasms, <ref target="Pg365">365</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>his personal magnetism, and reverence for him after his death, <ref target="Pg366">366</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Dendrophori,
+<list rend="nested"><item>dedications by, to Magna Mater, <ref target="Pg549">549</ref>;</item>
+<item>in the inscriptions, <ref target="Pg551">551</ref>;</item>
+<item>at Lyons, <ref target="Pg557">557</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Dion Chrysostom,
+<list rend="nested"><item>view of the Cynics, <ref target="Pg349">349</ref>;</item>
+<item>early history, exile, conversion, and preaching of, <ref target="Pg367">367</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>orations of, <ref target="Pg368">368</ref>;</item>
+<item>simple philosophy, and view of the time, <ref target="Pg369">369</ref>, <ref target="Pg370">370</ref>;</item>
+<item>warning to Tarsus, <ref target="Pg370">370</ref>;</item>
+<item>sermon at Olbia, <ref target="Pg371">371</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>picture of city life in Asia Minor, its vices and jealousies, <ref target="Pg372">372</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>gospel of social charity, <ref target="Pg373">373</ref>;</item>
+<item>scorn for the Alexandrian character, <ref target="Pg374">374</ref>;</item>
+<item>his prose idyll on virtuous rural life in Euboea, <ref target="Pg375">375</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>view of prostitution and slavery, <ref target="Pg376">376</ref>;</item>
+<item>ideal of monarchy, parable of the Two Peaks, <ref target="Pg377">377</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>oration at Olympia, <ref target="Pg379">379</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>suggested by Olympian Zeus of Pheidias, <ref target="Pg380">380</ref>;</item>
+<item>Dion’s discussion on natural theology and anthropomorphism, <ref target="Pg381">381</ref>;</item>
+<item>makes Pheidias defend representation of the Infinite in human form, <ref target="Pg382">382</ref>;</item>
+<item>his Zeus a moral ideal and spiritual power, <ref target="Pg383">383</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Domitian,
+<list rend="nested"><item>delators under, <ref target="Pg35">35</ref>;</item>
+<item>his belief in astrology, <ref target="Pg45">45</ref>;</item>
+<item>secret of his reign, <ref target="Pg52">52</ref>;</item>
+<item>value of the authorities on, <ref target="Note52">52 n.</ref>;</item>
+<item>good traits in his character, <ref target="Pg53">53</ref>;</item>
+<item>his encouragement of literature and political merit, <ref target="Pg53"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>his Hellenism, <ref target="Pg89">89</ref>;</item>
+<item>a moral reformer, <ref target="Pg54">54</ref>, <ref target="Pg74">74</ref>;</item>
+<item>causes of his unpopularity, <ref target="Pg54">54</ref>;</item>
+<item>contradictions in his character, <ref target="Pg55">55</ref>;</item>
+<item>replenishes the treasury by confiscation, <ref target="Pg56">56</ref>;</item>
+<item>his terror at the end, <ref target="Pg56">56</ref>, <ref target="Pg57">57</ref>, <ref target="Pg450">450</ref>;</item>
+<item>his funereal banquet, <ref target="Pg57">57</ref>;</item>
+<item>founds a quinquennial competition in literature, <ref target="Pg171">171</ref>;</item>
+<item>his superstition, <ref target="Pg450">450</ref>;</item>
+<item>a conservative in religion, <ref target="Pg536">536</ref>;</item>
+<item>celebrated the Quinquatria of Minerva, <ref target="Pg538">538</ref>;</item>
+<item>his victories, <ref target="Pg542">542</ref>;</item>
+<item>escaped from the capital in the vestments of Isis in 69 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, <ref target="Pg567">567</ref>;</item>
+<item>built a temple to Isis, <ref target="Pg567"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>first called <hi rend="italic">Dominus et Deus</hi>, <ref target="Pg615">615</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Dreams,
+<list rend="nested"><item>in temples of healing, <ref target="Pg460">460</ref>;</item>
+<item>dream-oracles, <ref target="Pg461">461</ref>;</item>
+<item>prescriptions in, <ref target="Pg463">463</ref>, <ref target="Pg464">464</ref>;</item>
+<item>treatise of Artemidorus on, <ref target="Pg467">467</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>his faith in, <ref target="Pg468">468</ref>;</item>
+<item>his absurdities, <ref target="Pg470">470</ref>;</item>
+<item>Pliny on, <ref target="Pg452">452</ref>, <ref target="Pg490">490</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Education,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Vespasian endows, <ref target="Pg148">148</ref>;</item>
+<item>influence of Quintilian on, <ref target="Pg149">149</ref>;</item>
+<item>Pliny helps to endow a school at Como, <ref target="Pg193">193</ref>;</item>
+<item>culture in Asia Minor, <ref target="Pg372">372</ref>;</item>
+<item>among freedmen, <ref target="Pg131">131</ref>, <ref target="Pg134">134</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Empire, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>its temptations, <ref target="Pg31">31</ref>;</item>
+<item>the influence of the Emperor’s example illustrated, <ref target="Pg31">31</ref>;</item>
+<item>how waste led to cruelty and confiscation, <ref target="Pg33">33</ref>;</item>
+<item>the secret of the imperial terror, various theories, <ref target="Pg37">37</ref>;</item>
+<item>the ideal of the Empire, <ref target="Pg39">39</ref>, <ref target="Pg43">43</ref>;</item>
+<item>constant danger from pretenders, <ref target="Pg40">40</ref>, <ref target="Pg41">41</ref>, <ref target="Pg44">44</ref>;</item>
+<item>the fiction of Augustus, the Emperor’s real power, <ref target="Pg41">41</ref>;</item>
+<item>checks upon it, <ref target="Pg42">42</ref>;</item>
+<item>its tolerance of municipal liberty, <ref target="Pg203">203</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Entellus, gardens of, <ref target="Pg112">112</ref></item>
+
+<item>Epicharis, freedwoman, refuses to betray the Pisonian conspirators, <ref target="Pg47">47</ref></item>
+
+<item>Epictetus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his ideal of the Cynic philosopher, <ref target="Pg359">359</ref>;</item>
+<item>men the soldiers of God, <ref target="Pg393">393</ref>;</item>
+<item>gospel of renunciation in, <ref target="Note393-5"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi> n. 5</ref>;</item>
+<item>on augury and divination, <ref target="Pg455">455</ref>;</item>
+<item>early history of, <ref target="Pg503">503</ref>;</item>
+<item>attitude to belief in immortality, <ref target="Pg504">504</ref>;</item>
+<item>reference to female Platonists, <ref target="Pg80">80</ref>;</item>
+<item>preaching of gratitude and resignation, <ref target="Pg393">393</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Epicurus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Seneca quotes, and defends to Lucilius, <ref target="Pg306">306</ref>;</item>
+<item>Aelian anathematises, <ref target="Pg456">456</ref>;</item>
+<item>Epicureans at Abonoteichos oppose Alexander, <ref target="Pg476">476</ref>;</item>
+<item>orders banquets to his shade, <ref target="Pg456">456</ref>;</item>
+<item>influence of, in last age of Republic, <ref target="Pg530">530</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Epidaurus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>temple of Asclepius at, <ref target="Pg462">462</ref>, <ref target="Pg539">539</ref>;</item>
+<item>social life of the patients, <ref target="Pg463">463</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Equites,
+<list rend="nested"><item>in provincial towns, <ref target="Pg215">215</ref>;</item>
+<item>freedmen raised to the rank of, <ref target="Pg113">113</ref>;</item>
+<item>Juvenal’s <pb n="631"/><anchor id="Pg631"/>contempt for, <ref target="Pg70">70</ref>;</item>
+<item>general low estimate of, <ref target="Pg113">113</ref>;</item>
+<item>displace freedmen as imperial secretaries, <ref target="Pg107">107</ref>;</item>
+<item>employment by Vitellius, Domitian, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius, <ref target="Pg107"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Espionage,
+<list rend="nested"><item>under the Empire, <ref target="Pg34">34</ref>;</item>
+<item>under Domitian, <ref target="Pg56">56</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Euboea, D. Chrysostom’s description of rural life in, <ref target="Pg375">375</ref></item>
+
+<item>Euhemerus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>translated by Ennius, <ref target="Pg530">530</ref>;</item>
+<item>Plutarch on, <ref target="Pg425">425</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Euphrates,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Pliny’s sketch of, <ref target="Pg151">151</ref>;</item>
+<item>suicide of, <ref target="Pg356">356</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Evil, Plutarch’s theory of, <ref target="Pg430">430</ref></item>
+
+<item>Extravagance,
+<list rend="nested"><item>of Nero, <ref target="Pg20">20</ref>, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+<item>of Domitian, <ref target="Pg55">55</ref>, <ref target="Pg56">56</ref>;</item>
+<item>of Vitellius, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+<item>of Caligula, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+<item>under the Republic, <ref target="Pg67">67</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Fannia, widow of Helvidius Priscus, Pliny’s admiration for, <ref target="Pg152">152</ref></item>
+
+<item>Finance,
+<list rend="nested"><item>profusion of Caligula, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+<item>straits of Domitian, <ref target="Pg56">56</ref>;</item>
+<item>economy of Vespasian, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>, <ref target="Pg148">148</ref>;</item>
+<item>Nero’s waste and plunder, <ref target="Pg20">20</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>Nerva’s retrenchment, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+<item>waste of Vitellius, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+<item>finance of provincial towns, <ref target="Pg220">220</ref>, <ref target="Pg248">248</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Fortuna Augusti, <ref target="Pg618">618</ref></item>
+
+<item>Freedmen, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>their rise a great movement, <ref target="Pg100">100</ref>;</item>
+<item>prejudice against, <ref target="Pg101">101</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>why it was natural, <ref target="Pg103">103</ref>;</item>
+<item>contempt of literary men for vulgar wealth, <ref target="Pg104">104</ref>;</item>
+<item>yet the rise of the freedmen a promising movement, <ref target="Pg105">105</ref>;</item>
+<item>rise of, in the imperial household, <ref target="Pg106">106</ref>;</item>
+<item>become great ministers, <ref target="Pg107">107</ref>;</item>
+<item>replaced gradually by Equites, <ref target="Pg107">107</ref>;</item>
+<item>early freedmen ministers worthy of their place, <ref target="Pg108">108</ref>;</item>
+<item>career of Claudius Etruscus and Abascantus, <ref target="Pg109">109</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>of Narcissus and Pallas, <ref target="Pg110">110</ref>, <ref target="Pg111">111</ref>;</item>
+<item>how their wealth was gained, <ref target="Pg112">112</ref>, <ref target="Pg129">129</ref>;</item>
+<item>their politic splendour, <ref target="Pg112">112</ref>;</item>
+<item>romantic career of a freedman, <ref target="Pg113">113</ref>;</item>
+<item>yet freedmen despised and ostracised, <ref target="Pg113"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>sometimes made great marriages, <ref target="Pg114">114</ref>;</item>
+<item>doubtful position of women of this class, <ref target="Pg114">114</ref>;</item>
+<item>yet some had great influence, <ref target="Pg115">115</ref>;</item>
+<item>Panthea, mistress of L. Verus, picture of, by Lucian, <ref target="Pg115"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>lower freedmen in the imperial service, <ref target="Pg116">116</ref>;</item>
+<item>transition from slavery to freedom, how freedmen rose, <ref target="Pg118">118</ref>-<ref target="Pg120">120</ref>;</item>
+<item>grossness and ostentation of their wealthy class, <ref target="Pg129">129</ref> sqq.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Freedom and Necessity,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Plutarch’s views of, <ref target="Pg412">412</ref>;</item>
+<item>Seneca’s, <ref target="Pg311">311</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Gaius, on the law of Colleges, <ref target="Pg254">254</ref></item>
+
+<item>Galen,
+<list rend="nested"><item>early history and training of, <ref target="Pg505">505</ref>;</item>
+<item>eclecticism of, <ref target="Pg505"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>views of immortality, <ref target="Pg505"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>relations with M. Aurelius, <ref target="Pg506">506</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Genii,
+<list rend="nested"><item>invented for every corporation and scene in Roman life, <ref target="Pg386">386</ref>;</item>
+<item>tales of, in Britain and on the Indian Ocean, <ref target="Pg420">420</ref>, <ref target="Pg426">426</ref>;</item>
+<item>wide-spread cult of, <ref target="Pg479">479</ref> sq.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Gladiators,
+<list rend="nested"><item>municipal shows of, in Petronius, <ref target="Pg134">134</ref>;</item>
+<item>Trajan provides 10,000 on his Dacian triumph, <ref target="Pg234">234</ref>;</item>
+<item>protests against, by Seneca and Demonax, <ref target="Pg235">235</ref>;</item>
+<item>schools of, <ref target="Pg236">236</ref>, <ref target="Pg241">241</ref>;</item>
+<item>shows began in Campania, <ref target="Pg241"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>school of, at Pompeii, <ref target="Pg237">237</ref>;</item>
+<item>notices in the inscriptions, <ref target="Pg238">238</ref>;</item>
+<item>enthusiasm for, <ref target="Pg238"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>shows in remote places, <ref target="Pg239">239</ref>;</item>
+<item>after battle of Bedriacum, <ref target="Pg240">240</ref>;</item>
+<item>less popular in Greece, except at Corinth, <ref target="Pg241">241</ref>;</item>
+<item>various cost of, <ref target="Pg241">241</ref>;</item>
+<item>classes who furnished gladiators, attractions of the profession, <ref target="Pg242">242</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>organisation of a school; a college of gladiators, <ref target="Pg243">243</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>God,
+<list rend="nested"><item>new conceptions of, <ref target="Pg5">5</ref>;</item>
+<item>in Seneca, <ref target="Pg305">305</ref>;</item>
+<item>God of the Stoics, varying conceptions of, <ref target="Pg307">307</ref>;</item>
+<item>demand for a moral God, <ref target="Pg389">389</ref>;</item>
+<item>Stoicism fades into Platonism, <ref target="Pg391">391</ref>;</item>
+<item>the Stoic god has no claim to worship, <ref target="Pg391"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>vague higher conceptions of, <ref target="Pg396">396</ref>, <ref target="Pg603">603</ref>;</item>
+<item>a transcendent Deity, <ref target="Pg397">397</ref>;</item>
+<item>Plutarch’s highest idea of, <ref target="Pg418">418</ref>;</item>
+<item>man’s relation to, according to Maximus of Tyre, <ref target="Pg421">421</ref>;</item>
+<item>relation of, to daemons, <ref target="Pg425">425</ref> sqq.</item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Hadrian,
+<list rend="nested"><item>letter of, to Servianus, <ref target="Pg397">397</ref>;</item>
+<item>tests the omniscience of Delphi, <ref target="Pg435">435</ref>;</item>
+<item>dabbled in astrology, and other dark arts, <ref target="Pg450">450</ref>, <ref target="Pg503">503</ref>;</item>
+<item>his love of travel, <ref target="Pg503">503</ref>;</item>
+<item>his faint belief in immortality, <ref target="Pg503">503</ref>;</item>
+<item>a sceptic, <ref target="Pg536">536</ref>;</item>
+<item>the Canopus of, at his villa at Tibur, <ref target="Pg567">567</ref>;</item>
+<item>conspiracy against, <ref target="Pg41">41</ref>;</item>
+<item>character of, <ref target="Pg503">503</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Hellenism,
+<list rend="nested"><item>various aspects of, reaction against, from the times of the elder Cato, <ref target="Pg88">88</ref>;</item>
+<item>Hellenism of early Emperors, <ref target="Pg88">88</ref>, <ref target="Pg89">89</ref>;</item>
+<item>Roman prejudice against Greeks, <ref target="Pg90">90</ref>;</item>
+<item>why Greeks succeeded under the Empire, <ref target="Pg91">91</ref>;</item>
+<item>Greek <hi rend="italic">grammatici</hi>, <ref target="Pg91">91</ref>;</item>
+<item>Greeks as doctors, <ref target="Pg92">92</ref>;</item>
+<item>Greek parasites, <ref target="Pg93">93</ref>;</item>
+<item>love of Greek in Pliny’s days, <ref target="Pg166">166</ref> sq.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Helvidius Priscus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>violence of, <ref target="Pg40">40</ref>;</item>
+<item>flouts Vespasian, <ref target="Pg40"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Herculaneum,
+<list rend="nested"><item>temple of Magna Mater at, <ref target="Pg548">548</ref>;</item>
+<item>frescoes of, illustrating the worship of Isis, <ref target="Pg578">578</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Herodes Atticus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>gifts of, to many communities, <ref target="Pg225">225</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>friend of Demonax and Plutarch, <ref target="Pg364">364</ref>, <ref target="Pg403">403</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the uses of wealth, <ref target="Pg232">232</ref>;</item>
+<item>claimed descent from the Aeacidae, <ref target="Pg225">225</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Herodotus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>identifies Greek and Egyptian deities, <ref target="Pg561">561</ref>;</item>
+<item>on Mithra, <ref target="Pg589">589</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Hesiod, on daemons, <ref target="Pg427">427</ref></item>
+
+<item>Holconii, the, of Pompeii, public honours and benefactions of, <ref target="Pg223">223</ref></item>
+
+<pb n="632"/><anchor id="Pg632"/>
+
+<item>Horace,
+<list rend="nested"><item>love of the country, and memories of Mount Vultur in, <ref target="Pg196">196</ref>, <ref target="Pg198">198</ref>;</item>
+<item>journey to Brundisium, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref>;</item>
+<item>on beneficence, <ref target="Pg190">190</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Hortensius, Q.,
+<list rend="nested"><item>luxury of, <ref target="Pg71">71</ref>;</item>
+<item>poverty of his descendants, <ref target="Pg71"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Icelus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>raised to rank by Galba, <ref target="Pg107">107</ref>;</item>
+<item>journey of, to Spain, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Immortality,
+<list rend="nested"><item>ideas of, depend on ideas of God, <ref target="Pg484">484</ref>;</item>
+<item><q>We know not what we shall be,</q> <ref target="Pg485">485</ref>;</item>
+<item>faith in the <hi rend="italic">Manes</hi>, <ref target="Pg486">486</ref>;</item>
+<item>evidence of epitaphs on, <ref target="Pg487">487</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>Lemures, <ref target="Pg488">488</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>the <hi rend="italic">Mundus</hi>, <ref target="Pg489">489</ref>;</item>
+<item>mingled elements in Virgil’s Inferno, <ref target="Pg491">491</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>Roman longing for posthumous sympathy, <ref target="Pg488">488</ref>;</item>
+<item>Orphic and Pythagorean influences on Virgil, <ref target="Pg494">494</ref>;</item>
+<item>evidence of inscriptions on belief in, <ref target="Pg496">496</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>Epicurean negation of, <ref target="Pg498">498</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>philosophic opinion on, <ref target="Pg449">449</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>Lucretius and Julius Caesar on, <ref target="Pg500">500</ref>, <ref target="Pg501">501</ref>;</item>
+<item>attitude of Epictetus, <ref target="Pg504">504</ref>;</item>
+<item>Galen’s ideas of, <ref target="Pg505">505</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>M. Aurelius on, <ref target="Pg507">507</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>Seneca on, <ref target="Pg514">514</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>Apollonius of Tyana on, <ref target="Pg518">518</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>Plutarch on, <ref target="Pg521">521</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>Platonic imagery of the future world, and its influence on Plutarch, <ref target="Pg523">523</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>belief in, fostered by Isiac worship, <ref target="Pg575">575</ref>, <ref target="Pg583">583</ref>;</item>
+<item>and by Mithraism, <ref target="Pg609">609</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Inns, poor and disreputable, <ref target="Pg207">207</ref></item>
+
+<item>Isis,
+<list rend="nested"><item>prescriptions of, in dreams, <ref target="Pg461">461</ref>;</item>
+<item>transformation of her worship by the Ptolemies, <ref target="Pg560">560</ref>;</item>
+<item>at the Peiraeus, <ref target="Pg560"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>influence of Greek settlers in Egypt, and of Greek mysticism, <ref target="Pg561">561</ref>, <ref target="Pg563">563</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>lofty conception of, in Apuleius, <ref target="Pg563">563</ref>;</item>
+<item>date of her introduction in Italy, <ref target="Pg563"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>power over women, <ref target="Pg565">565</ref>;</item>
+<item>repeated persecution of her worshippers, first century, <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, <ref target="Pg565">565</ref>;</item>
+<item>in the reign of Tiberius, <ref target="Pg566">566</ref>;</item>
+<item>favoured by Otho and the Flavians, <ref target="Pg567">567</ref>;</item>
+<item>Domitian builds a temple to, in 92 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, classes who propagated the worship of, <ref target="Pg567">567</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>spread through all Western Europe, <ref target="Pg568">568</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>secret of her fascination, <ref target="Pg569">569</ref>;</item>
+<item>highest conception of, <ref target="Pg572">572</ref>;</item>
+<item>a real spiritual power, <ref target="Pg574">574</ref>;</item>
+<item>gives the hope of immortality, <ref target="Pg575">575</ref>;</item>
+<item>impressive ritual of, <ref target="Pg576">576</ref>;</item>
+<item>daily offices, <ref target="Pg577">577</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>her rites in frescoes of Herculaneum, <ref target="Pg578">578</ref>;</item>
+<item>great festivals of, the procession to the shore described, <ref target="Pg578">578</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>her priesthood, including women, <ref target="Pg580">580</ref>, <ref target="Pg582">582</ref>;</item>
+<item>sacred guilds, Isiaci, Pastophori, etc., <ref target="Pg581">581</ref>;</item>
+<item>syncretism of her worship, <ref target="Pg581"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>her priesthood a separate caste, their presbyteries, and ascetic life, <ref target="Pg582">582</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Jerome, S.,
+<list rend="nested"><item>account of the grades of initiation in Mithraism by, <ref target="Pg611">611</ref>;</item>
+<item>genealogies in, <ref target="Pg70">70</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Jews,
+<list rend="nested"><item>growing influence of, in the first century <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>;</item>
+<item>especially under the Flavian dynasty, <ref target="Pg83">83</ref>;</item>
+<item>spread of Jewish observances, <ref target="Pg84">84</ref>;</item>
+<item>foster superstition, <ref target="Pg84">84</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Julian, his hatred of Oenomaus of Gadara, <ref target="Pg364">364</ref></item>
+
+<item><hi rend="italic">Jumentarii</hi>, at the gates of towns, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref></item>
+
+<item>Juvenal,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his views of society compared with Tacitus, <ref target="Pg58">58</ref>;</item>
+<item>social rank and early training of, <ref target="Pg59">59</ref>;</item>
+<item>experience as a client, <ref target="Pg59"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>bitterness of, <ref target="Pg60">60</ref>;</item>
+<item>dates of his <hi rend="italic">Satires</hi>, <ref target="Pg60">60</ref>;</item>
+<item>he and Martial have a common stock of subjects, <ref target="Pg60">60</ref>, <ref target="Pg61">61</ref>;</item>
+<item>plebeian pride, and old Roman prejudice, combined with the moral feeling of a later age, <ref target="Pg63">63</ref>;</item>
+<item>attitude to religion, <ref target="Pg64">64</ref>;</item>
+<item>extravagant pessimism, his ideal in the past, <ref target="Pg65">65</ref>;</item>
+<item>great movements of society described by, and sometimes misunderstood, <ref target="Pg69">69</ref>;</item>
+<item>decay of the noble class described by, <ref target="Pg69">69</ref>;</item>
+<item>contempt for new men, <ref target="Pg70">70</ref>;</item>
+<item>signs of aristocratic poverty, <ref target="Pg72">72</ref>;</item>
+<item>his ideal of senatorial dignity, <ref target="Pg74">74</ref>;</item>
+<item>treatment of women in the Sixth Satire, its faults, <ref target="Pg76">76</ref>;</item>
+<item>condemns mere eccentricities and even laudable tastes, <ref target="Pg77">77</ref>;</item>
+<item>distrusts growing culture of women, <ref target="Pg79">79</ref>, <ref target="Pg80">80</ref>;</item>
+<item>fighting a lost battle, <ref target="Pg81">81</ref>;</item>
+<item>scorn for women’s devotion to eastern cults, <ref target="Pg82">82</ref>;</item>
+<item>pessimism about women had some justification, <ref target="Pg84">84</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>his judgments must be taken with some reserve, <ref target="Pg87">87</ref>;</item>
+<item>indignation at the invasion of the Greeks, <ref target="Pg88">88</ref>;</item>
+<item>humiliation of the client, <ref target="Pg93">93</ref>;</item>
+<item>general poverty, <ref target="Pg95">95</ref>;</item>
+<item>the cry of the poor, and Roman contempt for industry and trade, <ref target="Pg98">98</ref>;</item>
+<item>Juvenal compared with Pliny, as a painter of society, <ref target="Pg141">141</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Lambaesis,
+<list rend="nested"><item>the camp at, how it grew into a <hi rend="italic">municipium</hi>, <ref target="Pg208">208</ref>;</item>
+<item>military colleges at, <ref target="Pg283">283</ref>;</item>
+<item>temple of Isis at, <ref target="Pg568">568</ref>;</item>
+<item>worship of Mithra at, <ref target="Pg595">595</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Lanuvium, college at, <ref target="Pg260">260</ref></item>
+
+<item>Lemuria, the, described, <ref target="Pg489">489</ref></item>
+
+<item>Libraries,
+<list rend="nested"><item>restocked with MSS. by Domitian, <ref target="Pg53">53</ref>;</item>
+<item>Trimalchio’s Greek and Latin libraries, <ref target="Pg131">131</ref>;</item>
+<item>rapid production of books, <ref target="Pg156">156</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Literature,
+<list rend="nested"><item>in the Antonine age, <ref target="Pg3">3</ref>;</item>
+<item>in Pliny’s days, <ref target="Pg157">157</ref>;</item>
+<item>literary amateurs abound, <ref target="Pg157"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>Pliny’s poetry, <ref target="Pg159">159</ref>;</item>
+<item>love of Cicero, <ref target="Pg158">158</ref>;</item>
+<item>the plague of readings, <ref target="Pg160">160</ref>, <ref target="Pg172">172</ref>;</item>
+<item>decadence of, <ref target="Pg163">163</ref>, <ref target="Pg173">173</ref>;</item>
+<item>Silius Italicus, <ref target="Pg164">164</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>composition in Greek, <ref target="Pg166">166</ref>;</item>
+<item>Titinius Capito, a historian, <ref target="Pg167">167</ref>;</item>
+<item>devotion to poetry, and its causes, influence of the Augustan tradition,
+<pb n="633"/><anchor id="Pg633"/><ref target="Pg169">169</ref>;</item>
+<item>fashion of the archaic style, <ref target="Pg170">170</ref>;</item>
+<item>Domitian founds a literary competition, its influence, <ref target="Pg171">171</ref>;</item>
+<item>literary men generally born in provincial places, <ref target="Pg196">196</ref>;</item>
+<item>Demonax rebukes literary archaism, <ref target="Pg367">367</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Livy,
+<list rend="nested"><item>on decay of augury, <ref target="Pg445">445</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the Bacchanalian scandal, <ref target="Pg563">563</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the apocryphal books of Numa, <ref target="Pg564">564</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Lucan,
+<list rend="nested"><item>on the worship of Isis, <ref target="Pg568">568</ref>;</item>
+<item>betrays his mother, his death, <ref target="Pg471">471</ref>;</item>
+<item>style of, referred to in the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> of Petronius, <ref target="Pg123">123</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Lucian,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his war against the Cynics, <ref target="Pg337">337</ref>;</item>
+<item>yet sometimes approaches their view of life, <ref target="Pg337">337</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>the <hi rend="italic">Charon</hi> of, <ref target="Pg338">338</ref>;</item>
+<item>the <hi rend="italic">Hermotimus</hi> of, witnesses to a moral movement, <ref target="Pg341">341</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>the Cynic in his <hi rend="italic">Banquet</hi>, and <hi rend="italic">Fugitives</hi>, <ref target="Pg350">350</ref>;</item>
+<item>his treatment of the character of Peregrinus, <ref target="Pg354">354</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>visit to Olympia at the time of the Cynic’s suicide, <ref target="Pg355">355</ref>;</item>
+<item>how he regarded it, and watched the growth of a myth, <ref target="Pg357">357</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>description of the new oracle of Abonoteichos, <ref target="Pg474">474</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>ridicule of superstition in the <hi rend="italic">Philopseudes</hi>, <ref target="Pg490">490</ref>;</item>
+<item>reference to Mithra, <ref target="Pg590">590</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Lucretius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>on immortality, <ref target="Pg500">500</ref>, <ref target="Pg501">501</ref>;</item>
+<item>on Magna Mater, <ref target="Pg547">547</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Luxury,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Juvenal’s view of, <ref target="Pg65">65</ref>;</item>
+<item>Roman luxury in Republican times, <ref target="Pg67">67</ref>;</item>
+<item>luxury a relative term, <ref target="Pg68">68</ref>;</item>
+<item>luxury of the Roman villa, chiefly in marbles, <ref target="Pg177">177</ref>;</item>
+<item>the luxury of travelling, progresses of Nero, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Maecenas,
+<list rend="nested"><item>counsels of, to Augustus in Dion Cassius, <ref target="Pg446">446</ref>, <ref target="Pg533">533</ref>;</item>
+<item>Trimalchio, a freedman of, <ref target="Pg128">128</ref> n.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Magna Mater,
+<list rend="nested"><item>brought from Pessinus, 204 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, <ref target="Pg548">548</ref>;</item>
+<item>no Roman priest of, for 100 years, <ref target="Pg548"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>growing popularity of, at Rome, in Spain and Dacia, <ref target="Pg549">549</ref>;</item>
+<item>legend of, <ref target="Pg549"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>her festival in spring, <ref target="Pg550">550</ref>;</item>
+<item>her priests in the inscriptions, <ref target="Pg550">550</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>her sacred colleges, <ref target="Pg551">551</ref>;</item>
+<item>her disreputable followers in Apuleius, <ref target="Pg551"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>her worship transmuted, <ref target="Pg554">554</ref>;</item>
+<item>the taurobolium and its history, <ref target="Pg556">556</ref>;</item>
+<item>alliance of, with Mithra, and Attis, <ref target="Pg556">556</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>women admitted to sacred rank, <ref target="Pg557">557</ref>;</item>
+<item>identified with Maia, Demeter, Bona Dea, etc., <ref target="Pg559">559</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Majesty, the law of, under the Empire, <ref target="Pg33">33</ref></item>
+
+<item>Malaga, inscriptions of, <ref target="Pg209">209</ref></item>
+
+<item>Manetho,
+<list rend="nested"><item>treatise of, on myths, <ref target="Pg561">561</ref>;</item>
+<item>assists the first Ptolemy in recasting Isiac worship, <ref target="Pg561"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Marcian, on Colleges, <ref target="Pg255">255</ref></item>
+
+<item>Martial,
+<list rend="nested"><item>deals with the same social subjects as Juvenal, <ref target="Pg61">61</ref>;</item>
+<item>his graphic picture of the age, <ref target="Pg61">61</ref>, <ref target="Pg62">62</ref>;</item>
+<item>better side of, love of country life, picture of the farm of Faustinus, love of Bilbilis, <ref target="Pg62">62</ref>;</item>
+<item>on Regulus, <ref target="Pg156">156</ref>;</item>
+<item>on literary amateurs, <ref target="Pg157">157</ref>;</item>
+<item>on Silius Italicus, <ref target="Pg158">158</ref>;</item>
+<item>relations of, with Pliny, <ref target="Pg158">158</ref>;</item>
+<item>regret for the capital, <ref target="Pg198">198</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Maximus of Tyre,
+<list rend="nested"><item>character of his Discourses, <ref target="Pg349">349</ref>;</item>
+<item>conciliation of anthropomorphism with a higher vision of God by, <ref target="Pg395">395</ref>;</item>
+<item>ethical theory of, <ref target="Pg421">421</ref>;</item>
+<item>daemonology of, <ref target="Pg429">429</ref>;</item>
+<item>fortified by tales of apparitions, <ref target="Pg491">491</ref>;</item>
+<item>influenced by Aristotle, <ref target="Pg421">421</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Medicine,
+<list rend="nested"><item>profession of, filled by Greeks, <ref target="Pg92">92</ref>;</item>
+<item>great physicians, Antonius Musa, the Stertinii, etc., <ref target="Pg92"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>sneers against, <ref target="Pg92"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>public physicians in municipal towns, <ref target="Pg219">219</ref>;</item>
+<item>income and munificence of the Stertinii, <ref target="Pg224">224</ref>;</item>
+<item>science of, in the second century, superstitious elements, <ref target="Pg459">459</ref>;</item>
+<item>how blended with real skill, <ref target="Pg462">462</ref>;</item>
+<item>skilled physicians in temples of Asclepius, <ref target="Pg465">465</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item><hi rend="italic">Medixtuticus</hi>, title of, still preserved in Oscan towns, <ref target="Pg203">203</ref></item>
+
+<item>Minucius Felix,
+<list rend="nested"><item>quoted, <ref target="Pg545">545</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the festivals of Isis, <ref target="Pg578">578</ref> n.;</item>
+<item>on daemons, <ref target="Pg433">433</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Miracles,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Origen and Celsus on, <ref target="Pg481">481</ref>;</item>
+<item>universal belief in, <ref target="Pg482">482</ref>;</item>
+<item>miracles in temples of Serapis, <ref target="Pg573">573</ref>;</item>
+<item>Vespasian consents to work, <ref target="Pg573"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Mithra,
+<list rend="nested"><item>growing power of, <ref target="Pg386">386</ref>;</item>
+<item>the taurobolium a part of his worship, <ref target="Pg556">556</ref>;</item>
+<item>alliance of, with Magna Mater and Attis, <anchor id="corr633"/><ref target="Pg556"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref><corr sic="(missing)">,</corr> <ref target="Pg589">589</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>in the Vedas and Avestas, <ref target="Pg586">586</ref>;</item>
+<item>in the Zoroastrian system, <ref target="Pg587">587</ref>;</item>
+<item>the God of kings, <ref target="Pg587"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>influence of Babylon on the worship of, <ref target="Pg587">587</ref>;</item>
+<item>influence of syncretism in Asia Minor on, <ref target="Pg588">588</ref>;</item>
+<item>the taurobolium probably borrowed, <ref target="Pg588"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>origin of the Tauroctonus group, date of the introduction of the</item>
+<item>cult into Europe, <ref target="Pg590">590</ref>;</item>
+<item>Plutarch’s statement in the Life of Pompey, <ref target="Pg590"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>worship of, in the Flavian age, <ref target="Pg590"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>syncretism of, <ref target="Pg592">592</ref>;</item>
+<item>worship of, propagated by soldiers, civil servants, etc., <ref target="Pg592"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>stages of its diffusion through Italy, <ref target="Pg593">593</ref>;</item>
+<item>and north of the Alps, <ref target="Pg594">594</ref>;</item>
+<item>progress of the worship along the Danube, <ref target="Pg594">594</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>legions which propagated it in Pannonia, <ref target="Pg595">595</ref>;</item>
+<item>remains of, in Upper Germany, <ref target="Pg596">596</ref>;</item>
+<item>in England, <ref target="Pg597">597</ref>;</item>
+<item>in Gaul, <ref target="Pg597"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>its many attractions, <ref target="Pg597"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>Persian symbolism, <ref target="Pg598">598</ref>;</item>
+<item>Babylonian elements in, astrology, <ref target="Pg598">598</ref>, <ref target="Pg602">602</ref>, sq.;</item>
+<item>relative influence of Iran and Babylon, different views of, <ref target="Pg599">599</ref>;</item>
+<item>influence of Platonism and Pythagoreanism on, <ref target="Pg600">600</ref>;</item>
+<item>doctrine of the soul’s descent, <ref target="Pg600"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>cosmic theory, doctrine of emanation, and deification of elemental powers,
+<anchor id="Pg634"/><ref target="Pg601">601</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>Mithra as mediator in two senses, <ref target="Pg604">604</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>the Dadophori, <ref target="Pg604"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>, <ref target="Pg606">606</ref>;</item>
+<item>the legend recovered from monuments, <ref target="Pg605">605</ref>;</item>
+<item>the <hi rend="italic">petra genetrix</hi>, <ref target="Pg605"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>symbolism of the slaughtered bull, <ref target="Pg606">606</ref>;</item>
+<item>agape of Mithra and Sun, <ref target="Pg607">607</ref>;</item>
+<item>various interpretations of the legend, <ref target="Pg607">607</ref>;</item>
+<item>Mithraism a religion of combat, <ref target="Pg608">608</ref>;</item>
+<item>its consolations, <ref target="Pg608"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>its eschatology, <ref target="Pg609">609</ref>;</item>
+<item>effect of the taurobolium, <ref target="Pg609"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>ritual and sacraments of, <ref target="Pg610">610</ref>;</item>
+<item>daily offices, and festivals of, <ref target="Pg611">611</ref>;</item>
+<item>seven grades of the initiated, <ref target="Pg611">611</ref>;</item>
+<item>ordeals of, <ref target="Pg612">612</ref>;</item>
+<item>guilds of, <ref target="Pg612">612</ref>;</item>
+<item>rites regarded as a diabolic parody of the Church, <ref target="Pg613">613</ref>;</item>
+<item>description of the chapels of, <ref target="Pg613"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>how Mithraism escaped persecution, <ref target="Pg614">614</ref>;</item>
+<item>how it fostered theocratic ideas at Rome, <ref target="Pg617">617</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>a great imperial cult, <ref target="Pg619">619</ref>;</item>
+<item>last days of, <ref target="Pg619"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>worship of, a great effort of syncretism, <ref target="Pg620">620</ref>;</item>
+<item>moral and mystic strength of, <ref target="Pg621">621</ref>;</item>
+<item>relations to Christianity, <ref target="Pg622">622</ref>;</item>
+<item>similarities between them, <ref target="Pg623">623</ref>;</item>
+<item>weaknesses of Mithraism, <ref target="Pg624">624</ref>;</item>
+<item>inseparably involved with Nature-worship, <ref target="Pg626">626</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Monarchy,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Seneca’s conception of, <ref target="Pg16">16</ref>;</item>
+<item>hereditary succession and adoption, <ref target="Pg27">27</ref>;</item>
+<item>ideal of, in Dion Chrysostom, <ref target="Pg377">377</ref>, sqq.;</item>
+<item>apotheosis of, in third century, <ref target="Pg615">615</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>attitude of Tacitus to, <ref target="Pg21">21</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Morals,
+<list rend="nested"><item>divorced from politics and speculation, <ref target="Pg290">290</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>became a religion in Seneca, <ref target="Pg305">305</ref>;</item>
+<item>relation of precept and dogma, <ref target="Pg305"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>freedom and necessity, <ref target="Pg311">311</ref>;</item>
+<item>the fall of man, <ref target="Pg312">312</ref>;</item>
+<item>Plutarch’s theory of, <ref target="Pg410">410</ref> sqq.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Municipal life,
+<list rend="nested"><item>picture of, in Petronius, <ref target="Pg133">133</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>rapid organisation of, in Spain, Gaul, Dacia, etc., immense growth of towns, <ref target="Pg200">200</ref>;</item>
+<item>Baden in 69 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, <ref target="Pg201">201</ref>;</item>
+<item>Thamugadi in Numidia, <ref target="Pg202">202</ref>;</item>
+<item>policy of government towards provincial towns, <ref target="Pg203">203</ref>;</item>
+<item>drift towards uniformity of civic organisation, influence of the capital, <ref target="Pg204">204</ref>;</item>
+<item>how towns were formed, <ref target="Pg207">207</ref>;</item>
+<item>development from <hi rend="italic">castra stativa</hi>, <ref target="Pg207">207</ref>, sq.;</item>
+<item>soldiers allowed to live with their families in the third century, <ref target="Pg208">208</ref>;</item>
+<item>municipal town aristocratic in constitution, <ref target="Pg209">209</ref>, <ref target="Pg231">231</ref>;</item>
+<item><hi rend="italic">Album Canusii</hi>, <ref target="Pg210">210</ref>;</item>
+<item>the <hi rend="italic">honestiores</hi>, <ref target="Pg210"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>popular election the rule in the first century, <ref target="Pg211">211</ref>;</item>
+<item>magistracies, <ref target="Pg212">212</ref>;</item>
+<item>their burdens, signs of decay, <ref target="Pg212">212</ref>;</item>
+<item>powers of the duumvirs, <ref target="Pg213">213</ref>;</item>
+<item>the Curia, its numbers, qualification, and privileges, <ref target="Pg214">214</ref>, <ref target="Pg215">215</ref>;</item>
+<item>local <hi rend="italic">Equites</hi>, <ref target="Pg215">215</ref>;</item>
+<item>Augustales, their importance, organisation, insignia, etc., <ref target="Pg216">216</ref>, <ref target="Pg217">217</ref>;</item>
+<item>municipal finance, <ref target="Pg218">218</ref>;</item>
+<item>public charges, food, education, medical attendance, <ref target="Pg219">219</ref>;</item>
+<item>public works, <ref target="Pg220">220</ref>;</item>
+<item>finances, and maladministration of Bithynian towns in Trajan’s reign, <ref target="Pg220">220</ref>, <ref target="Pg221">221</ref>;</item>
+<item>municipal life of Pompeii, <ref target="Pg222">222</ref>, sqq.;</item>
+<item>generous gifts to towns, <ref target="Pg223">223</ref>, <ref target="Pg225">225</ref>;</item>
+<item>examples from the inscriptions, <ref target="Pg226">226</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>public feasts on a great scale, <ref target="Pg229">229</ref>;</item>
+<item>gifts of money according to social rank, <ref target="Pg230">230</ref>;</item>
+<item>tone of town life, <ref target="Pg231">231</ref>;</item>
+<item>pleasures of, <ref target="Pg233">233</ref>;</item>
+<item>gladiatorial shows, <ref target="Pg236">236</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>how the community rewarded benefactors, <ref target="Pg244">244</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>municipal meanness, <ref target="Pg245">245</ref>;</item>
+<item>decaying local patriotism, <ref target="Pg246">246</ref>;</item>
+<item>Plutarch on, <ref target="Pg247">247</ref>;</item>
+<item>growing centralisation and interference, <ref target="Pg248">248</ref>;</item>
+<item>shadows of the end, <ref target="Pg249">249</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Musonius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his ideal of chastity, <ref target="Pg77">77</ref>;</item>
+<item>condemns the Sophists, <ref target="Pg344">344</ref>;</item>
+<item>exile of, under Nero; character of his teaching; preaches to the soldiery in 69 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, <ref target="Pg348">348</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Nature,
+<list rend="nested"><item>love of, in Virgil, <ref target="Pg197">197</ref>;</item>
+<item>in Pliny, <ref target="Pg174">174</ref>;</item>
+<item>in Martial, <ref target="Pg174"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>, <ref target="Pg62">62</ref>, <ref target="Pg198">198</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Nero,
+<list rend="nested"><item>hereditary taint of, <ref target="Pg17">17</ref>;</item>
+<item>not without some good qualities, <ref target="Pg17">17</ref>;</item>
+<item>could inspire affection, <ref target="Pg18">18</ref>;</item>
+<item>his devotion to art, and its evil results, <ref target="Pg19">19</ref>;</item>
+<item>a <hi rend="italic">cupitor incredibilium</hi>, <ref target="Pg20">20</ref>;</item>
+<item>his waste leads to cruel oppression, <ref target="Pg20">20</ref>, <ref target="Pg21">21</ref>;</item>
+<item>examples of wild profusion, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+<item>his superstition, <ref target="Pg45">45</ref>, <ref target="Pg536">536</ref>;</item>
+<item>compelled by the mob to recall Octavia, <ref target="Pg49">49</ref>;</item>
+<item>popular indignation at his appearance on the stage, <ref target="Pg74">74</ref>;</item>
+<item>the <q>Noctes Neronis,</q> <ref target="Pg75">75</ref>;</item>
+<item>his phil-Hellenism, <ref target="Pg89">89</ref>;</item>
+<item>silences Delphi, <ref target="Pg434">434</ref>;</item>
+<item>belief in astrology, <ref target="Pg448">448</ref>;</item>
+<item>propitiates his mother’s shade, <ref target="Pg491">491</ref>;</item>
+<item>flattery of, by the Arval Brothers, <ref target="Pg542">542</ref>;</item>
+<item>worshipped by Tiridates, <ref target="Pg617">617</ref>;</item>
+<item>violence to Delphi, <ref target="Pg472">472</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Nerva,
+<list rend="nested"><item>retrenchments of, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+<item>first provided for poor children, <ref target="Pg192">192</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Nicomedia, D. Chrysostom on its public vices, <ref target="Pg373">373</ref></item>
+
+<item>Numa, apocryphal books of, <ref target="Pg564">564</ref></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Octavia, divorced on false charge, and recalled by Nero at the bidding of the mob, <ref target="Pg49">49</ref></item>
+
+<item>Oenomaus of Gadara,
+<list rend="nested"><item>rejection of myth and oracles by, <ref target="Pg363">363</ref>;</item>
+<item>theory of oracles, <ref target="Pg364">364</ref>;</item>
+<item>Julian’s denunciation of, <ref target="Pg364"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Olbia, D. Chrysostom’s visit to, <ref target="Pg371">371</ref> sq.</item>
+
+<item>Oracles,
+<list rend="nested"><item>decay of, <ref target="Pg434">434</ref>;</item>
+<item>revival of, <ref target="Pg386">386</ref>;</item>
+<item>theory of their inspiration, <ref target="Pg437">437</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>and of their cessation, <ref target="Pg437">437</ref>, <ref target="Pg471">471</ref>;</item>
+<item>that of Abonoteichos defers to the older, <ref target="Pg472">472</ref>;</item>
+<item>many oracles not silenced till the reign of Constantine, <ref target="Pg473">473</ref>;</item>
+<item>how an oracle was worked, <ref target="Pg474">474</ref>;</item>
+<item>oracles in Boeotia, <ref target="Pg471">471</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Orphic mysticism, the, <ref target="Pg427">427</ref>;
+<list rend="nested">
+<item>influence of, on Virgil, <ref target="Pg494">494</ref>;</item>
+<item>on Mithraism, <ref target="Pg600">600</ref>;</item>
+<item>on belief in immortality, <ref target="Pg516">516</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<pb n="635"/><anchor id="Pg635"/>
+
+<item>Osterburken, remains of Mithra worship at, <ref target="Pg596">596</ref></item>
+
+<item>Ostia,
+<list rend="nested"><item>colleges at, <ref target="Pg215">215</ref>;</item>
+<item>cult of Mithra at, <ref target="Pg591">591</ref>;</item>
+<item>temple of Magna Mater at, <ref target="Pg591"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Otho,
+<list rend="nested"><item>extravagance of, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+<item>his belief in astrology, <ref target="Pg45">45</ref>, <ref target="Pg448">448</ref>;</item>
+<item>devotion of soldiers to, <ref target="Pg50">50</ref>;</item>
+<item>his end, <ref target="Pg449">449</ref>;</item>
+<item>flattered by the Arval Brotherhood, <ref target="Pg541">541</ref>;</item>
+<item>the first Emperor who took part in Isiac worship, <ref target="Pg566">566</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Ovid,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his ideal of womanhood, <ref target="Pg77">77</ref>, <ref target="Pg142">142</ref>;</item>
+<item>shocked by the influence of the theatre on women, <ref target="Pg86">86</ref>;</item>
+<item>attitude to religion, <ref target="Pg532">532</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Pallas, power and insolence of, receives the adulation of the Senate, his wealth, and his end, <ref target="Pg111">111</ref></item>
+
+<item>Panaetius and the Scipionic circle, <ref target="Pg293">293</ref>;
+<list rend="nested">
+<item>modification of Stoicism by, <ref target="Pg408">408</ref>;</item>
+<item>abandons belief in immortality, <ref target="Pg500">500</ref>;</item>
+<item>rejects divination, <ref target="Pg530">530</ref>;</item>
+<item>little sympathy with popular religion, <ref target="Pg531">531</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Panthea, mistress of L. Verus, charms of, described by Lucian, <ref target="Pg115">115</ref></item>
+
+<item>Paphlagonia, superstition of, <ref target="Pg474">474</ref></item>
+
+<item>Pastophori of Isis, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>recognised by Sulla, <ref target="Pg565">565</ref>;</item>
+<item>scribe of, <ref target="Pg570">570</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Peregrinus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>early history of, connection with the Christians, and self-immolation, <ref target="Pg354">354</ref>;</item>
+<item>Lucian’s attacks on his character, <ref target="Pg354">354</ref>;</item>
+<item>assumes that the motive of Peregrinus was notoriety, <ref target="Pg356">356</ref>;</item>
+<item>Peregrinus influenced by eastern mysticism, <ref target="Pg355">355</ref>;</item>
+<item>character of, in Aulus Gellius, <ref target="Pg358">358</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Pessimism,
+<list rend="nested"><item>of Seneca, <ref target="Pg10">10</ref>, <ref target="Pg11">11</ref>, <ref target="Pg14">14</ref>, <ref target="Pg303">303</ref>, <ref target="Pg313">313</ref>;</item>
+<item>of Tacitus, <ref target="Pg30">30</ref>, <ref target="Pg46">46</ref>;</item>
+<item>Juvenal, <ref target="Pg65">65</ref>;</item>
+<item>M. Aurelius, <ref target="Pg304">304</ref>, <ref target="Pg335">335</ref>;</item>
+<item>of the Greek poets, <ref target="Pg416">416</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Petronius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>shared in the <q>Noctes Neronis,</q> <ref target="Pg75">75</ref>;</item>
+<item>various opinions as to the date and object of his <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi>, <ref target="Pg120">120</ref>;</item>
+<item>motive of the work, <ref target="Pg122">122</ref>;</item>
+<item>the Petronius of Tacitus, his character and his end; the <hi rend="italic">Satiricon</hi> only a fragment, <ref target="Pg124">124</ref>;</item>
+<item>not without a higher moral tone, <ref target="Pg125">125</ref>;</item>
+<item>originality of Petronius, <ref target="Pg126">126</ref>;</item>
+<item>the scene and the characters, <ref target="Pg127">127</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Philosophy,
+<list rend="nested"><item>power of, in government, <ref target="Pg6">6</ref>;</item>
+<item>Stoic opposition in the first century, <ref target="Pg39">39</ref>, <ref target="Pg151">151</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>was it ever a dangerous force? <ref target="Pg40">40</ref>;</item>
+<item>new ideals of humanity, <ref target="Pg63">63</ref>;</item>
+<item>elevating influence of, <ref target="Pg190">190</ref>;</item>
+<item>change in the conception of, in the first century, <ref target="Pg289">289</ref>;</item>
+<item>practical interest in predominant, causes of the change, <ref target="Pg339">339</ref>, <ref target="Pg290">290</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>eclecticism and scepticism in, <ref target="Pg290"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>, <ref target="Pg408">408</ref>, <ref target="Pg412">412</ref>;</item>
+<item>necessity for moral reform, <ref target="Pg292">292</ref>;</item>
+<item>private direction of souls, <ref target="Pg293">293</ref>;</item>
+<item>directors in great houses, <ref target="Pg294">294</ref>;</item>
+<item>the philosopher a <hi rend="italic">generis humani paedagogus</hi>, <ref target="Pg299">299</ref>;</item>
+<item>modifications of Stoicism in Seneca, <ref target="Pg314">314</ref> sqq., <ref target="Pg306">306</ref>;</item>
+<item><q>nulla virtus sine philosophia,</q> <ref target="Pg341">341</ref>;</item>
+<item>eclecticism, <ref target="Pg343">343</ref>;</item>
+<item>the Cynic opposition, <ref target="Pg362">362</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>eclecticism of Dion Chrysostom, <ref target="Pg368">368</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>need of a philosophic théodicée, <ref target="Pg384">384</ref>;</item>
+<item>effort of, to rehabilitate myth, <ref target="Pg432">432</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Pheidias,
+<list rend="nested"><item>the Olympian Zeus of, <ref target="Pg380">380</ref>;</item>
+<item>his defence of anthropomorphism in D. Chrysostom, <ref target="Pg382">382</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Pisa, disturbance at elections in, <ref target="Pg212">212</ref></item>
+
+<item>Piso, the conspiracy of, <ref target="Pg47">47</ref> sq.</item>
+
+<item>Platonism,
+<list rend="nested"><item>few adherents of, in the first century, <ref target="Pg408">408</ref>;</item>
+<item>affected Panaetius, <ref target="Pg408"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>and Seneca, <ref target="Pg308">308</ref>;</item>
+<item>and Plutarch, <ref target="Pg409">409</ref>;</item>
+<item>its daemonology, <ref target="Pg430">430</ref>;</item>
+<item>encouraged belief in immortality, <ref target="Pg501">501</ref>;</item>
+<item>visionary power of the great Master, <ref target="Pg523">523</ref>;</item>
+<item>influence on Mithraism, <ref target="Pg600">600</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Plebeian life,
+<list rend="nested"><item>picture of, in Petronius, <ref target="Pg132">132</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>in the inscriptions, <ref target="Pg252">252</ref> sq., <ref target="Pg271">271</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Pliny, the elder,
+<list rend="nested"><item>on Roman luxury, <ref target="Pg67">67</ref>, <ref target="Pg68">68</ref>;</item>
+<item>care of his nephew, <ref target="Pg145">145</ref>;</item>
+<item>life, character, and prodigious industry of, <ref target="Pg146">146</ref>;</item>
+<item>scorn for popular religion, <ref target="Pg535">535</ref>;</item>
+<item>superstition of, <ref target="Pg451">451</ref>;</item>
+<item>rejection of immortality, <ref target="Pg502">502</ref>;</item>
+<item>on town life in Spain and Gaul, <ref target="Pg201">201</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>description of baths of Posides, <ref target="Pg112">112</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the Stertinii, <ref target="Pg224">224</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Pliny, the younger,
+<list rend="nested"><item>ideal of the principate in the <hi rend="italic">Panegyric</hi>, <ref target="Pg43">43</ref>;</item>
+<item>compared with Juvenal as a painter of society, <ref target="Pg141">141</ref>;</item>
+<item>idealised his circle, <ref target="Pg142">142</ref>, <ref target="Pg185">185</ref>;</item>
+<item>his blameless aristocrats, <ref target="Pg144">144</ref>;</item>
+<item>early life of, influence of Quintilian on, <ref target="Pg149">149</ref>;</item>
+<item>student friends, <ref target="Pg150">150</ref>;</item>
+<item>admiration of the Stoic circle, <ref target="Pg151">151</ref>;</item>
+<item>military service, and entrance on forensic work, <ref target="Pg153">153</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>the Centumviral court, <ref target="Pg154">154</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>sketch of Regulus, <ref target="Pg155">155</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>passion for fame, <ref target="Pg157">157</ref>;</item>
+<item>literary amateurs, <ref target="Pg157">157</ref>;</item>
+<item>befriends Martial, <ref target="Pg158">158</ref>;</item>
+<item>admiration for Cicero, and for Greece, <ref target="Pg158">158</ref>;</item>
+<item>his loose verses, <ref target="Pg159">159</ref>;</item>
+<item>ideas of oratory, <ref target="Pg160">160</ref>;</item>
+<item>value of his Letters, <ref target="Pg161">161</ref>, <ref target="Pg163">163</ref>;</item>
+<item>imitated in fourth century, <ref target="Pg163"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>their principle of arrangement, and date, <ref target="Pg162">162</ref>;</item>
+<item>his devotion to literature, <ref target="Pg164">164</ref>;</item>
+<item>admiration for Tacitus, <ref target="Pg164"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>his judgment of Silius Italicus, <ref target="Pg164"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>theory of life, <ref target="Pg165">165</ref>;</item>
+<item>literary coteries, Greek verse writing, <ref target="Pg166">166</ref>;</item>
+<item>writers of history, <ref target="Pg167">167</ref>;</item>
+<item>literary competitions, <ref target="Pg171">171</ref>;</item>
+<item>the plague of recitations; Pliny gives readings himself, and punctually attends them: his estimate of their value, <ref target="Pg173">173</ref>;</item>
+<item>weariness of the capital and love of the country, <ref target="Pg174">174</ref>;</item>
+<item>not a sportsman, <ref target="Pg175">175</ref>;</item>
+<item>pictures of Roman country seats, <ref target="Pg175">175</ref>;</item>
+<item>routine of country life, <ref target="Pg179">179</ref>;</item>
+<item>management of
+<pb n="636"/><anchor id="Pg636"/>rural estates, <ref target="Pg180">180</ref>;</item>
+<item>Pliny’s kindness to slaves and dependents, <ref target="Pg181">181</ref>;</item>
+<item>view of suicide, <ref target="Pg183">183</ref>;</item>
+<item>Corellius Rufus, <ref target="Pg184">184</ref>;</item>
+<item>Pliny’s belief in the solidarity of rank, and the duty of mutual support, <ref target="Pg186">186</ref>;</item>
+<item>his superstition, <ref target="Pg452">452</ref>, <ref target="Pg490">490</ref>;</item>
+<item>delight in helping young men of the upper class, <ref target="Pg187">187</ref>;</item>
+<item>love for Calpurnia, and ideal of girlhood, <ref target="Pg188">188</ref>, <ref target="Pg189">189</ref>;</item>
+<item>last glimpse of Pliny and Calpurnia, <ref target="Pg189">189</ref>;</item>
+<item>he represents the finest moral tone of the age, <ref target="Pg190">190</ref>;</item>
+<item>his many benefactions and their amount, <ref target="Pg193">193</ref>, <ref target="Pg224">224</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Plutarch,
+<list rend="nested"><item>on the duties of municipal life, <ref target="Pg247">247</ref>;</item>
+<item>early history of, <ref target="Pg401">401</ref>;</item>
+<item>friends of, at Rome, <ref target="Pg402">402</ref>;</item>
+<item>love of Chaeronea, and Delphi, <ref target="Pg403">403</ref>;</item>
+<item>visits to other parts of Greece, <ref target="Pg403">403</ref>;</item>
+<item>table talk of, <ref target="Pg404">404</ref>;</item>
+<item>his historic power, <ref target="Pg406">406</ref>;</item>
+<item>ethical motive in, predominant, <ref target="Pg405">405</ref>;</item>
+<item>admiration for Plato, <ref target="Pg409">409</ref>;</item>
+<item>eclecticism, <ref target="Pg409"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>attacks Stoic psychology, <ref target="Pg410">410</ref>;</item>
+<item>adopts some Aristotelian principles, <ref target="Pg412">412</ref>;</item>
+<item>yet has many Stoic elements, <ref target="Pg414">414</ref>;</item>
+<item>his treatment of Fate and free-will, <ref target="Pg412">412</ref>;</item>
+<item>ideal of moral teaching, <ref target="Pg413">413</ref>;</item>
+<item>conception of theology, <ref target="Pg417">417</ref>;</item>
+<item>idea of God, <ref target="Pg418">418</ref>;</item>
+<item>of matter and evil, <ref target="Pg419">419</ref>;</item>
+<item>treatment of myth and religious symbol, <ref target="Pg423">423</ref>;</item>
+<item>daemonology, <ref target="Pg430">430</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>used to rehabilitate myth, <ref target="Pg432">432</ref>;</item>
+<item>interest in Delphi, <ref target="Pg435">435</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>theory of inspiration, <ref target="Pg439">439</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the future state, <ref target="Pg496">496</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>on comfort in the Mysteries, <ref target="Pg516">516</ref>;</item>
+<item>Consolation to his wife on the death of their daughter, <ref target="Pg520">520</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>arguments for immortality, <ref target="Pg521">521</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>visions of the future world, <ref target="Pg523">523</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>reference to Mithra as a mediator, <ref target="Pg590">590</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the first appearance of Mithraism in Europe, <ref target="Pg590">590</ref>;</item>
+<item>tales of ghosts at Chaeronea, <ref target="Pg490">490</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Politta, wife of Rubellius Plautus, courage and devotion of, <ref target="Pg49">49</ref></item>
+
+<item>Polybius, freedman minister of Claudius, life of, described by Seneca, <ref target="Pg108">108</ref></item>
+
+<item>Polybius, the historian, his attitude to Roman religion, <ref target="Pg531">531</ref></item>
+
+<item>Pompeii,
+<list rend="nested"><item>situation and various industries of, <ref target="Pg223">223</ref>;</item>
+<item>family of the Holconii, Eumachia, their gifts to the town, <ref target="Pg223">223</ref>;</item>
+<item>amphitheatre and temple of Isis at, <ref target="Pg224">224</ref>, <ref target="Pg563">563</ref>;</item>
+<item>election placards at, <ref target="Pg211">211</ref>;</item>
+<item>tombs of Alexandrian traders at, <ref target="Pg567">567</ref>;</item>
+<item>colleges of <q>late sleepers</q> and <q>late drinkers</q> at, <ref target="Pg265">265</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Pontifex Maximus, the, <ref target="Pg534">534</ref>;
+<list rend="nested">
+<item>office held by the Emperors, its power, <ref target="Pg535">535</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Poppaea, her sympathy with Judaism, <ref target="Pg83">83</ref></item>
+
+<item>Post, the public,
+<list rend="nested"><item>organisation of, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref>;</item>
+<item>Pliny’s use of, for Calpurnia, <ref target="Pg189">189</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Poverty,
+<list rend="nested"><item>contempt for, <ref target="Pg104">104</ref>;</item>
+<item>common in Juvenal’s time, <ref target="Pg94">94</ref>;</item>
+<item>D. Chrysostom on, <ref target="Pg375">375</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Prayer,
+<list rend="nested"><item>an effort of adoration, <ref target="Pg394">394</ref>;</item>
+<item>a colloquy with God, <ref target="Pg420">420</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Preachers, the philosophic,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Apollonius, <ref target="Pg347">347</ref>;</item>
+<item>Musonius, <ref target="Pg348">348</ref>;</item>
+<item>Maximus of Tyre, <ref target="Pg349">349</ref>;</item>
+<item>Dion Chrysostom, <ref target="Pg370">370</ref> sqq.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Prudentius, description of the taurobolium by, <ref target="Pg558">558</ref></item>
+
+<item>Public works,
+<list rend="nested"><item>mismanagement of, in Bithynia, <ref target="Pg220">220</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>curator of, <ref target="Pg220"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>undertaken by private persons, evidence of inscriptions on, <ref target="Pg225">225</ref> sq.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Pythagoreanism,
+<list rend="nested"><item>not extinct in the first century <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, <ref target="Pg398">398</ref>;</item>
+<item>daemonology of, <ref target="Pg428">428</ref>;</item>
+<item>influence of, on Virgil, <ref target="Pg493">493</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>on Seneca, <ref target="Pg515">515</ref>;</item>
+<item>connection with the Mysteries, <ref target="Pg516">516</ref>;</item>
+<item>spiritual influence of, <ref target="Pg517">517</ref>;</item>
+<item>influence on the mythology of Egypt, <ref target="Pg562">562</ref>;</item>
+<item>and on Mithraism, <ref target="Pg600">600</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Quintilian,
+<list rend="nested"><item>career of, as a teacher, and high moral influence, <ref target="Pg149">149</ref>;</item>
+<item>treats immortality as an open question, <ref target="Pg502">502</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Readings,
+<list rend="nested"><item>the plague of, in Juvenal, <ref target="Pg59">59</ref>, <ref target="Pg95">95</ref>;</item>
+<item>in Pliny, <ref target="Pg160">160</ref>, <ref target="Pg173">173</ref>;</item>
+<item>in Martial, <ref target="Pg61">61</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Regulus, M. Aquilius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>career of, as delator, <ref target="Pg37">37</ref>;</item>
+<item>as pleader, his wealth, and eccentricities, <ref target="Pg155">155</ref>, <ref target="Pg156">156</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Religion, old Roman,
+<list rend="nested"><item>decay of, from the second Punic War, <ref target="Pg529">529</ref>;</item>
+<item>its causes, <ref target="Pg530">530</ref>;</item>
+<item>attitude to, of Varro, Panaetius, Polybius, <ref target="Pg531">531</ref>;</item>
+<item>Augustan restoration of, <ref target="Pg533">533</ref>;</item>
+<item>conservative influence of the chief pontificate, <ref target="Pg535">535</ref>;</item>
+<item>early emperors continue the Augustan policy, <ref target="Pg536">536</ref>;</item>
+<item>reverence for the oldest Latin deities in the inscriptions, <ref target="Pg538">538</ref>;</item>
+<item>Jupiter, <ref target="Pg543">543</ref>;</item>
+<item>Hercules, Silvanus, and the Nymphs, <ref target="Pg539">539</ref>;</item>
+<item>revival of the Arval Brotherhood, <ref target="Pg540">540</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>feeling of the educated to, <ref target="Pg544">544</ref>;</item>
+<item>real strength of, <ref target="Pg545">545</ref>;</item>
+<item>last champions of, in the fourth century, <ref target="Pg546">546</ref>;</item>
+<item>its formalism compared with the eastern worships, <ref target="Pg554">554</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Scepticism,
+<list rend="nested"><item>from the second Punic War, <ref target="Pg530">530</ref>;</item>
+<item>the scepticism of the elder Pliny, Seneca, Juvenal, etc., <ref target="Pg535">535</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Seleucus, an astrologer of Otho, <ref target="Pg448">448</ref></item>
+
+<item>Senate, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>prestige and ancient claims of, <ref target="Pg38">38</ref>;</item>
+<item>hated and feared by bad princes, <ref target="Pg38">38</ref>, <ref target="Pg39">39</ref>;</item>
+<item>respect for, under good Emperors, <ref target="Pg39">39</ref>;</item>
+<item>theoretical position of, under the Empire, <ref target="Pg41">41</ref>, <ref target="Pg42">42</ref>;</item>
+<item>Pliny’s <hi rend="italic">Panegyric</hi> throws light on, <ref target="Pg44">44</ref>;</item>
+<item>moral degradation of, shown in 69 <hi rend="small">A.D.</hi>, <ref target="Pg50">50</ref>;</item>
+<item>poverty of many great houses, <ref target="Pg51">51</ref>, <ref target="Pg71">71</ref>;</item>
+<item>insults heaped on, by Emperors, <ref target="Pg51">51</ref>;</item>
+<item>reduction of its numbers by massacre
+<pb n="637"/><anchor id="Pg637"/>etc., <ref target="Pg71">71</ref>;</item>
+<item>great families pensioned by Emperors, <ref target="Pg71">71</ref>;</item>
+<item>Senators compelled to act and fight as gladiators, <ref target="Pg73">73</ref>, <ref target="Pg74">74</ref>;</item>
+<item>scorn of, for freedmen, <ref target="Pg113">113</ref>;</item>
+<item>frivolity of, in Pliny’s time, <ref target="Pg185">185</ref>;</item>
+<item>senatorial life in the country, <ref target="Pg174">174</ref> sqq.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Seneca,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his experience of the tyranny, <ref target="Pg7">7</ref>, <ref target="Pg8">8</ref>;</item>
+<item>sad close of his life, <ref target="Pg9">9</ref>;</item>
+<item>knowledge of character, how acquired, <ref target="Pg9">9</ref>;</item>
+<item>conception of the state of nature, and pessimism of, <ref target="Pg10">10</ref>, <ref target="Pg11">11</ref>, <ref target="Pg14">14</ref>, <ref target="Pg304">304</ref>, <ref target="Pg313">313</ref>;</item>
+<item>ghastly picture of high society, <ref target="Pg11">11</ref>;</item>
+<item>of slavery, <ref target="Pg12">12</ref>, <ref target="Pg329">329</ref>;</item>
+<item>his terrors, <ref target="Pg13">13</ref>;</item>
+<item>attitude to philosophic revolutionaries, <ref target="Pg15">15</ref>;</item>
+<item>conception of imperial power, <ref target="Pg16">16</ref>;</item>
+<item>ideal of female character and capacity, <ref target="Pg188">188</ref>;</item>
+<item>anticipates the movement of the Antonine age, <ref target="Pg190">190</ref>;</item>
+<item>as a spiritual director, <ref target="Pg294">294</ref>;</item>
+<item>his undoubted power, <ref target="Pg295">295</ref>;</item>
+<item>his experience prepared him for the work, <ref target="Pg296">296</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>his court-life and wealth, <ref target="Pg296"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>contrasts in, <ref target="Pg297">297</ref>;</item>
+<item>calumnies against, <ref target="Pg298">298</ref>;</item>
+<item>conception of the great office of philosophy, <ref target="Pg299">299</ref>;</item>
+<item>attitude to liberal studies, <ref target="Pg300">300</ref>;</item>
+<item>treatment of Physics, the moral effects and lessons of the study, <ref target="Pg301">301</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>intense earnestness of, <ref target="Pg304">304</ref>;</item>
+<item>defends and quotes Epicurus, <ref target="Pg306">306</ref>;</item>
+<item>yet often a Stoic dogmatist, <ref target="Pg306"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>conception of God, <ref target="Pg307">307</ref>, <ref target="Pg390">390</ref>;</item>
+<item>influenced by Platonism, <ref target="Pg308">308</ref>;</item>
+<item>his psychology, <ref target="Pg308">308</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>necessity and conversion, <ref target="Pg311">311</ref>;</item>
+<item>the fall of man, <ref target="Pg312">312</ref>;</item>
+<item>Aristotelian elements in, <ref target="Pg314">314</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>humility of, <ref target="Pg316">316</ref>;</item>
+<item>his disciples of the upper class, <ref target="Pg317">317</ref>;</item>
+<item>on philosophic retreat, <ref target="Pg318">318</ref>;</item>
+<item>his precepts for moral growth, <ref target="Pg320">320</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>death a mere bugbear, <ref target="Pg322">322</ref>;</item>
+<item>attitude to myth, <ref target="Pg322"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>on public duty, <ref target="Pg325">325</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the social instinct, kindness, forgiveness, etc., <ref target="Pg327">327</ref>;</item>
+<item>his ideal of womanhood, <ref target="Pg329">329</ref>;</item>
+<item>Seneca and Thomas à Kempis, <ref target="Pg331">331</ref>;</item>
+<item>his view of immortality approaches the Christian, <ref target="Pg5">5</ref>, <ref target="Pg13">13</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>Pythagorean influences on, <ref target="Pg515">515</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Sentinum, college of Mithra at, <ref target="Pg593">593</ref></item>
+
+<item>Serapis,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his temple of healing at Canopus, <ref target="Pg461">461</ref>;</item>
+<item>his origin, various theories of, <ref target="Pg561">561</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>linked with Jupiter in the inscriptions, <ref target="Pg562">562</ref>;</item>
+<item>lofty conception of, in Aristides, <ref target="Pg572">572</ref>, <ref target="Pg574">574</ref>;</item>
+<item>miracles in his temples, <ref target="Pg573">573</ref>;</item>
+<item>a guide and judge of souls, <ref target="Pg575">575</ref>;</item>
+<item>his boundless sway, <ref target="Pg583">583</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Sidonius Apollinaris,
+<list rend="nested"><item>imitation of Pliny’s Letters in, <ref target="Pg162">162</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>refers to Sulpicia, <ref target="Pg80">80</ref>;</item>
+<item>to Petronius, <ref target="Pg121">121</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Silius Italicus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Pliny’s estimate of, <ref target="Pg164">164</ref>;</item>
+<item>career and tastes of, <ref target="Pg165">165</ref>;</item>
+<item>a connoisseur, <ref target="Pg177">177</ref>;</item>
+<item>suicide of, <ref target="Pg184">184</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Slavery,
+<list rend="nested"><item>moral and political effects of, according to Seneca, <ref target="Pg12">12</ref>;</item>
+<item>courage of Octavia’s slave girls, <ref target="Pg48">48</ref>;</item>
+<item>transition from slavery to freedom, <ref target="Pg116">116</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>kindly feeling, <ref target="Pg117">117</ref>, <ref target="Pg257">257</ref>;</item>
+<item>manumission, how obtained, <ref target="Pg118">118</ref>;</item>
+<item>growing <hi rend="italic">peculium</hi> of trusted slaves, <ref target="Pg118">118</ref>;</item>
+<item>tie between patron and freedman, <ref target="Pg119">119</ref>;</item>
+<item>duties and generosity of patrons, <ref target="Pg119"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>rise of the freedmen, <ref target="Pg119"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>Pliny’s kindness to slaves, <ref target="Pg181">181</ref>;</item>
+<item>harsh masters and their perils, <ref target="Pg182">182</ref>;</item>
+<item>slave class dwindling, <ref target="Pg252">252</ref>;</item>
+<item>slaves in the colleges, <ref target="Pg281">281</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Society,
+<list rend="nested"><item><hi rend="italic">circuli</hi>, <ref target="Pg13">13</ref>;</item>
+<item>gossip, <ref target="Pg33">33</ref>;</item>
+<item>extravagant luxury, <ref target="Pg66">66</ref>;</item>
+<item>respect for birth and manufacture of genealogies, <ref target="Pg69">69</ref>, <ref target="Pg70">70</ref>;</item>
+<item>poverty and mendicancy of great houses, <ref target="Pg71">71</ref>, <ref target="Pg72">72</ref>;</item>
+<item>wider interests among women <ref target="Pg78">78</ref>;</item>
+<item>culture of Roman women from Cornelia to Serena, wife of Stilicho, <ref target="Pg80">80</ref>;</item>
+<item>dangerous temptations of women’s life, <ref target="Pg85">85</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>general poverty under the Empire, <ref target="Pg94">94</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>mean trades more lucrative than cultivated professions, <ref target="Pg95">95</ref>;</item>
+<item>society materialised, <ref target="Pg95"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>contempt for poverty, <ref target="Pg97">97</ref>;</item>
+<item>grossness of freedmen, <ref target="Pg132">132</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>a sounder class in the worst days, <ref target="Pg143">143</ref>;</item>
+<item>wholesome force of Roman tradition, and country life, <ref target="Pg144">144</ref>;</item>
+<item>old-fashioned retreats of virtue, <ref target="Pg147">147</ref>;</item>
+<item>love of country life, <ref target="Pg174">174</ref>;</item>
+<item>suicide, <ref target="Pg183">183</ref>;</item>
+<item>wedded life of Calpurnia and Pliny, <ref target="Pg188">188</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>new moral ideals in Seneca, Juvenal, and Pliny, <ref target="Pg190">190</ref>;</item>
+<item>duties of wealth, <ref target="Pg191">191</ref>;</item>
+<item>public spirit of the age, <ref target="Pg193">193</ref>;</item>
+<item>rage for amusement, <ref target="Pg234">234</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>municipal gratitude and meanness, <ref target="Pg245">245</ref>;</item>
+<item>need of association in clubs, etc., <ref target="Pg256">256</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>immense force of the movement, <ref target="Pg266">266</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>ennui and self-abandonment of upper class, <ref target="Pg304">304</ref>, <ref target="Pg319">319</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>need for popular evangelism, how the Cynics supplied it, <ref target="Pg335">335</ref>, <ref target="Pg360">360</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Socrates, theories of his daemon, <ref target="Pg438">438</ref></item>
+
+<item>Sophists, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>influence of, <ref target="Pg4">4</ref>;</item>
+<item>frivolous subjects and showy style of, condemned by philosophers, <ref target="Pg344">344</ref>;</item>
+<item>Plutarch’s opinion of, <ref target="Pg413">413</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Sotion, trains Seneca in Pythagorean asceticism, <ref target="Pg296">296</ref></item>
+
+<item>Spain,
+<list rend="nested"><item>growth of towns in, <ref target="Pg200">200</ref>;</item>
+<item>journey of Icelus in, to reach Galba, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref>;</item>
+<item>little affected by Mithraism, <ref target="Pg597">597</ref>;</item>
+<item>worship of Isis in, <ref target="Pg567">567</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Spectacles, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Senators descend into the arena, <ref target="Pg73">73</ref>;</item>
+<item>women present at, mingling with men at the Circus, <ref target="Pg86">86</ref>;</item>
+<item>obscenities of the theatre, <ref target="Pg86"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>number of days in the year given to, <ref target="Pg234">234</ref>;</item>
+<item>scene in Flavian Amphitheatre, <ref target="Pg235">235</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Spurinna, Vestricius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>a verse writer, <ref target="Pg166">166</ref>;</item>
+<item>his orderly life a type, <ref target="Pg175">175</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Statius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his sketches of the great imperial freedmen, <ref target="Pg109">109</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>of the villas of
+<pb n="638"/><anchor id="Pg638"/>Manlius Vopiscus, and Pollius Felix, <ref target="Pg176">176</ref>;</item>
+<item>reference to Mithra in the <hi rend="italic">Thebaid</hi>, <ref target="Pg589">589</ref> sq.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Stoicism,
+<list rend="nested"><item>the God of, <ref target="Pg307">307</ref>;</item>
+<item>gospel of, in Seneca, <ref target="Pg309">309</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>freedom and necessity, <ref target="Pg311">311</ref>;</item>
+<item>weakness of its moral theory, <ref target="Pg313">313</ref>;</item>
+<item>instantaneous conversion, <ref target="Pg313"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>no intermediate states of character, <ref target="Pg313"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>modifications of, <ref target="Pg314">314</ref>;</item>
+<item>relation to Cynicism, <ref target="Pg323">323</ref>, <ref target="Pg359">359</ref>;</item>
+<item>competing tendencies in, <ref target="Pg324">324</ref>;</item>
+<item>the two cities, Zeno on civic duty, <ref target="Pg325">325</ref>;</item>
+<item>the brotherhood of man, <ref target="Pg328">328</ref>;</item>
+<item>the religion of Stoicism breaks down, <ref target="Pg391">391</ref>, <ref target="Pg512">512</ref>;</item>
+<item>later Stoic mysticism, <ref target="Pg392">392</ref>;</item>
+<item>influence of Panaetius, <ref target="Pg408">408</ref>, <ref target="Pg530">530</ref>;</item>
+<item>its theory of human nature assailed by Plutarch, <ref target="Pg410">410</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>older Stoic belief in a limited immortality, <ref target="Pg500">500</ref>;</item>
+<item>ideal of life in M. Aurelius, <ref target="Pg509">509</ref>;</item>
+<item>Stoic attitude to augury, etc., <ref target="Pg530">530</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Strabo,
+<list rend="nested"><item>on oracles and augury, <ref target="Pg471">471</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the temple of Serapis at Canopus, <ref target="Pg461">461</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Suetonius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>career of, <ref target="Pg168">168</ref>;</item>
+<item>Pliny’s friendship for, <ref target="Pg168"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>a dilatory author, <ref target="Pg168">168</ref>;</item>
+<item>superstition of, <ref target="Pg452">452</ref>, <ref target="Pg535">535</ref>;</item>
+<item>secretary of Hadrian, <ref target="Pg169">169</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Suffetes, title of, preserved in Africa under the Empire, <ref target="Pg203">203</ref></item>
+
+<item>Suicide,
+<list rend="nested"><item>Pliny’s view of, <ref target="Pg183">183</ref>;</item>
+<item>suicide of Euphrates, <ref target="Pg356">356</ref>;</item>
+<item>Stoic view of, <ref target="Pg356">356</ref>;</item>
+<item>suicide of Peregrinus, <ref target="Pg357">357</ref>;</item>
+<item>of Silius Italicus, <ref target="Pg184">184</ref>;</item>
+<item>of Corellius Rufus, <ref target="Pg184">184</ref>;</item>
+<item>Hadrian’s wish for, <ref target="Pg356">356</ref>;</item>
+<item>a suicide on Lake Como, <ref target="Pg184">184</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Sulla, recognises the Isiac cult in 80 <hi rend="small">B.C.</hi>, <ref target="Pg565">565</ref></item>
+
+<item>Sulpicia, verses of, mentioned by Martial and Sidonius, <ref target="Pg80">80</ref></item>
+
+<item>Sun worship,
+<list rend="nested"><item>the highest form of nature-worship, <ref target="Pg585">585</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>Aurelian’s temple, <ref target="Pg586">586</ref>;</item>
+<item>Mithra identified with the Sun at Babylon, <ref target="Pg587">587</ref>;</item>
+<item>influence of, in fostering theocratic ideas in the Empire, <ref target="Pg617">617</ref> sq.</item></list></item>
+
+<item>Superstition,
+<list rend="nested"><item>tales of, at Trimalchio’s table, <ref target="Pg131">131</ref>, <ref target="Pg136">136</ref>;</item>
+<item>of Regulus, <ref target="Pg156">156</ref>;</item>
+<item>of Suetonius and Pliny, <ref target="Pg168">168</ref>;</item>
+<item>various conceptions of, <ref target="Pg443">443</ref>;</item>
+<item>Plutarch on, <ref target="Pg443">443</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>astrology, <ref target="Pg446">446</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>superstition of the Emperors, <ref target="Pg447">447</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>of the great writers of the age, <ref target="Pg451">451</ref> sqq.;</item>
+<item>its connection with medicine in the temples, <ref target="Pg459">459</ref>;</item>
+<item>dream oracles, <ref target="Pg461">461</ref>;</item>
+<item>Aristides has visits from the gods, <ref target="Pg466">466</ref>;</item>
+<item>superstition of Rutilianus and the Roman nobles in the reign of M. Aurelius, <ref target="Pg475">475</ref>;</item>
+<item>rampant in Paphlagonia, <ref target="Pg476">476</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>cult of <hi rend="italic">Genii</hi>, <ref target="Pg479">479</ref>;</item>
+<item>universal belief in miracles, <ref target="Pg482">482</ref>;</item>
+<item>apparitions in the <hi rend="italic">Philopseudes</hi> of Lucian, <ref target="Pg490">490</ref>;</item>
+<item>encouraged by Mithraism, <ref target="Pg602">602</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Symmachus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>religious conservatism of, <ref target="Pg546">546</ref>;</item>
+<item>Letters of, <ref target="Pg161">161</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Syncretism,
+<list rend="nested"><item>in Aristides, <ref target="Pg388">388</ref>;</item>
+<item>in Apuleius, <ref target="Pg388"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>in Plutarch, <ref target="Pg424">424</ref>;</item>
+<item>of the oriental worships, <ref target="Pg558">558</ref>;</item>
+<item>in the worship of Isis, <ref target="Pg581">581</ref>;</item>
+<item>and of Serapis, <ref target="Pg583">583</ref>;</item>
+<item>Mithraism the greatest effort of, <ref target="Pg585">585</ref>, <ref target="Pg592">592</ref>;</item>
+<item>at Babylon, <ref target="Pg587">587</ref>;</item>
+<item>in Asia Minor, <ref target="Pg588">588</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Tacitus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his attitude to the tyranny of the early Caesars, <ref target="Pg21">21</ref>;</item>
+<item>early history and experience of, <ref target="Pg22">22</ref>;</item>
+<item>various views of, <ref target="Pg23">23</ref>;</item>
+<item>the key to his tone as a historian, <ref target="Pg24">24</ref>;</item>
+<item>a moralist, rather than a politician, <ref target="Pg25">25</ref>, <ref target="Pg26">26</ref>;</item>
+<item>views of the future, <ref target="Pg26">26</ref>, <ref target="Pg27">27</ref>;</item>
+<item>belief in birth and traditions, <ref target="Pg28">28</ref>;</item>
+<item>early training, and ideal of family life, <ref target="Pg28">28</ref>, <ref target="Pg29">29</ref>;</item>
+<item>admiration for Agricola, <ref target="Pg29">29</ref>;</item>
+<item>his experience had affected his ideas of human nature and of the Divine government, <ref target="Pg30">30</ref>;</item>
+<item>gloomy view of the time, <ref target="Pg46">46</ref>;</item>
+<item>wavering attitude to superstition, <ref target="Pg453">453</ref>, <ref target="Pg535">535</ref>;</item>
+<item>faint hope of immortality, <ref target="Pg502">502</ref>;</item>
+<item>account of Serapis, <ref target="Pg562">562</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Tarsus, D. Chrysostom on its vices, <ref target="Pg370">370</ref></item>
+
+<item>Taurobolium, the,
+<list rend="nested"><item>enthralling power of, <ref target="Pg547">547</ref>;</item>
+<item>first glimpse of, <ref target="Pg549">549</ref>;</item>
+<item>offered for Ant. Pius in 160, <ref target="Pg549"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>suspected by the Fathers, <ref target="Pg555">555</ref>;</item>
+<item>history of, <ref target="Pg556">556</ref>;</item>
+<item>Anaitis and Artemis Tauropolus, <ref target="Pg556"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>question whether it became part of the worship of Mithra, <ref target="Pg556"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>, <ref target="Pg609">609</ref>;</item>
+<item>its ceremonial and cost, <ref target="Pg557">557</ref> sq.;</item>
+<item>its meaning and effects, <ref target="Pg609">609</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Tertullian,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his tale of a priest of Cybele, <ref target="Pg549">549</ref>;</item>
+<item>on the taurobolium, <ref target="Pg555">555</ref>;</item>
+<item>holds up priests of Isis as an example, <ref target="Pg582">582</ref>;</item>
+<item>his view of the sacraments of Mithra, <ref target="Pg613">613</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Theagenes,
+<list rend="nested"><item>pupil of Peregrinus, <ref target="Pg354">354</ref>;</item>
+<item>lectures in Rome, <ref target="Pg354"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Theatre, the, a great corruptor, <ref target="Pg86">86</ref></item>
+
+<item>Thespesius of Soli, his vision of the unseen world, <ref target="Pg524">524</ref></item>
+
+<item>Thrasea, his character, compared with Paetus and Helvidius Priscus, <ref target="Pg152">152</ref></item>
+
+<item>Thrasyllus, an astrologer of Tiberius, <ref target="Pg448">448</ref></item>
+
+<item>Tiberius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>conservatism of, in religion, <ref target="Pg536">536</ref>;</item>
+<item>little sympathy with Hellenism, <ref target="Pg88">88</ref>;</item>
+<item>cost of his gladiators, <ref target="Pg241">241</ref>;</item>
+<item>belief in astrology, <ref target="Pg448">448</ref>;</item>
+<item>tried the lottery at Padua, <ref target="Pg472">472</ref>;</item>
+<item>persecutes the eastern cults, <ref target="Pg566">566</ref>;</item>
+<item>treatment of descendants of Hortensius, <ref target="Pg71">71</ref>;</item>
+<item>his <hi rend="italic">mot</hi> on birth, <ref target="Pg70">70</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Timarchus, his visit to the other world, <ref target="Pg526">526</ref> sq.</item>
+
+<item>Titinius Capito, writes a history of the victims of the Terror, <ref target="Pg167">167</ref></item>
+
+<item>Titus,
+<list rend="nested"><item>his love of the East and superstition, <ref target="Pg449">449</ref>;</item>
+<item>visit to shrine of the Paphian Venus, <ref target="Pg472">472</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Trade,
+<list rend="nested"><item>great fair at Cremona, <ref target="Pg264">264</ref>;</item>
+<item><pb n="639"/><anchor id="Pg639"/>wandering traders, their colleges, <ref target="Pg264"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+<item>immense development of, <ref target="Pg253">253</ref>, <ref target="Pg265">265</ref>;</item>
+<item>Juvenal’s contempt for, <ref target="Pg98">98</ref>;</item>
+<item>encouragement of, by Claudius, <ref target="Pg264">264</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Trajan,
+<list rend="nested"><item>provision of, for poor children, <ref target="Pg192">192</ref>;</item>
+  <item>his friendship with Dion Chrysostom, <ref target="Pg369">369</ref> sq.;</item>
+  <item>vows of the Arval Brotherhood for, <ref target="Pg542">542</ref>;</item>
+  <item>Pliny’s <hi rend="italic">Panegyric</hi> on, <ref target="Pg43">43</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Travel,
+<list rend="nested"><item>became general, <ref target="Pg205">205</ref>;</item>
+  <item>example of Hadrian, <ref target="Pg205"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+  <item>easy and luxurious, <ref target="Pg205"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+  <item>facilities of posting, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref>;</item>
+  <item>speed of, by land and sea, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref>;</item>
+  <item>passion for change of scene, <ref target="Pg330">330</ref> sqq.;</item>
+  <item>travels of Aristides, <ref target="Pg464">464</ref>;</item>
+  <item>of Dion Chrysostom, <ref target="Pg368">368</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Trimalchio, the, of Petronius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>sketches his own career, <ref target="Pg129">129</ref>;</item>
+  <item>his estates, <ref target="Pg129"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+  <item>description of, <ref target="Pg129"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+  <item>surprises of his dinner, <ref target="Pg130">130</ref>;</item>
+  <item>his libraries and his ignorance, <ref target="Pg131">131</ref>;</item>
+  <item>treatment of his wife, <ref target="Pg137">137</ref>;</item>
+  <item>gives an order for his monument, <ref target="Pg136">136</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Trophonius, the oracle of, <ref target="Pg461">461</ref></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Ummidia Quadratilla,
+<list rend="nested"><item>character in Pliny’s Letters, <ref target="Pg185">185</ref>;</item>
+  <item>builds a temple and amphitheatre for Casinum, <ref target="Pg224">224</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Varro,
+<list rend="nested"><item>theology of, <ref target="Pg417">417</ref>, <ref target="Pg531">531</ref> sq.;</item>
+  <item>on Magna Mater, <ref target="Pg547">547</ref>;</item>
+  <item>Saturae Menippeae of, <ref target="Pg126">126</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Veleia, tablet of, <ref target="Pg192">192</ref></item>
+
+<item>Verginius, Rufus, guardian of Pliny, <ref target="Pg145">145</ref></item>
+
+<item>Vespasian,
+<list rend="nested"><item>accession of, a moral revolution, <ref target="Pg1">1</ref>;</item>
+  <item>his economies, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>, <ref target="Pg227">227</ref>;</item>
+  <item>tolerance of the Stoic opposition by, <ref target="Pg40">40</ref>;</item>
+  <item>treatment of astrologers, <ref target="Pg45">45</ref>;</item>
+  <item>defamed by men of the Neronian circle, <ref target="Pg52">52</ref>;</item>
+  <item>Hellenism of, <ref target="Pg89">89</ref>;</item>
+  <item>love of old associations, <ref target="Pg148">148</ref>;</item>
+  <item>his immense task; combined economy and liberality, <ref target="Pg148">148</ref>;</item>
+  <item>banishes the astrologers, yet believes in them, <ref target="Pg449">449</ref>;</item>
+  <item>consults the oracle on Mount Carmel, <ref target="Pg472">472</ref>;</item>
+  <item>conservative in religion, <ref target="Pg536">536</ref>;</item>
+  <item>restores the shrine of Magna Mater at Herculaneum, <ref target="Pg548">548</ref>;</item>
+  <item>consents to work miracles at Alexandria, <ref target="Pg573">573</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Vestinus, Atticus, suicide of, under Nero, <ref target="Pg48">48</ref></item>
+
+<item>Vestinus, Julius, chief pontiff of Egypt, a secretary of Hadrian, <ref target="Pg568">568</ref></item>
+
+<item>Virgil,
+<list rend="nested"><item>immense popularity of, his verses in the Graffiti of Pompeii, <ref target="Pg170">170</ref>;</item>
+  <item>pictures of rural scenery by, <ref target="Pg197">197</ref>;</item>
+  <item><hi rend="italic">Sortes Virgilianae</hi> consulted by Hadrian, <ref target="Pg450">450</ref>;</item>
+  <item>Inferno of, its discordant conceptions, <ref target="Pg491">491</ref> sqq.;</item>
+  <item>recitation of the Aeneid at Trimalchio’s table, <ref target="Pg131">131</ref></item></list></item>
+
+<item>Vitellius,
+<list rend="nested"><item>cruelty and ghastly end of, <ref target="Pg240">240</ref>;</item>
+  <item>superstition of, <ref target="Pg449">449</ref>;</item>
+  <item>profusion of, <ref target="Pg32">32</ref>;</item>
+  <item>treatment of his freedman, Asiaticus, <ref target="Pg206">206</ref>;</item>
+  <item>employs <hi rend="italic">Equites</hi> as imperial secretaries, <ref target="Pg107">107</ref>;</item>
+  <item>his horoscope, <ref target="Pg449">449</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Women,
+<list rend="nested"><item>high ideal of, in the first century, <ref target="Pg77">77</ref>;</item>
+  <item>growth of wider interests in, <ref target="Pg78">78</ref>;</item>
+  <item>superstition among, <ref target="Pg78"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+  <item>emancipation of, began long before the Empire, <ref target="Pg79">79</ref>;</item>
+  <item>vices of, in the time of the elder Cato, <ref target="Pg79"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+  <item>Roman ideal of, lasted to the end, <ref target="Pg79"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+  <item>cultivated women from Cornelia to Serena, <ref target="Pg80">80</ref>;</item>
+  <item>growing influence of, in public life, <ref target="Pg81">81</ref>;</item>
+  <item><q>Mothers of the camp, <hi rend="italic">patronae</hi>,</q> <hi rend="italic">Curia mulierum</hi> at Lanuvium, <ref target="Pg81">81</ref>;</item>
+  <item>attractions of eastern cults for, <ref target="Pg82">82</ref>;</item>
+  <item>Roman girls carefully guarded till marriage, when their perils began, <ref target="Pg84">84</ref>;</item>
+  <item>temptations of Roman matrons, <ref target="Pg84"><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></ref>;</item>
+  <item>dangers of the Circus, theatre, and gladiatorial shows, <ref target="Pg86">86</ref>;</item>
+  <item>manners in the freedwomen class, <ref target="Pg135">135</ref>;</item>
+  <item>good women of Pliny’s circle, <ref target="Pg145">145</ref>;</item>
+  <item>others of doubtful character, <ref target="Pg185">185</ref>;</item>
+  <item>Calpurnia, wife of Pliny; their ideal married life, <ref target="Pg188">188</ref> sq.;</item>
+  <item>beautiful character of a girl, <ref target="Pg189">189</ref>;</item>
+  <item>ideal of, in Seneca, <ref target="Pg329">329</ref>;</item>
+  <item>light women keep fasts of Isis, <ref target="Pg553">553</ref>, <ref target="Pg565">565</ref>, <ref target="Pg570">570</ref>;</item>
+  <item>female worshippers of Magna Mater, <ref target="Pg557">557</ref></item></list></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Xenocrates, on bad daemons, <ref target="Pg431">431</ref>, <ref target="Pg433">433</ref></item>
+
+<item>Xenophanes, on legend, <ref target="Pg544">544</ref></item>
+
+</list><list>
+
+<item>Zoticus, freedman of Elagabalus, sources of his wealth, <ref target="Pg112">112</ref></item>
+
+</list>
+
+<p rend="margin-top: 3em; center">THE END</p>
+
+<p rend="margin-top: 3em; center"><hi rend="italic; font-size: small">Printed in Great Britain by</hi> <hi rend="smallcaps">R. &amp; R. Clark, Limited</hi>, <hi rend="italic">Edinburgh</hi>.</p>
+                
+            </div>
+            <div>
+            <pgIf output="pdf">
+                <then/>
+                <else>
+                    <div id="footnotes" rend="page-break-before: right">
+                        <head>Footnotes</head>
+                        <divGen type="footnotes"/>
+                    </div>
+                </else>
+            </pgIf>
+            </div>
+            <div rend="page-break-before:right; x-class: boxed">
+                <index index="pdf" level1="Transcriber's Note"/><index index="toc" level1="Transcriber’s Note"/>
+                <head>Transcriber’s Note</head>
+                
+                <p>The following changes have been made to the text:</p>
+            <list>
+                <item><ref target="corrxx">page xx</ref>, <q>Pages</q> added before <q>560-584</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr13">page 13</ref>, <q>pannelled</q> changed to <q>panelled</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr14">page 14</ref>, <q>aceticism</q> changed to <q>asceticism</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr16">page 16</ref>, comma changed to semicolon after <q>23</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr30">page 30</ref>, comma added after <q>17</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr33">page 33</ref>, <q>Bossier</q> changed to <q>Boissier</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr53">page 53</ref>, <q>proem.</q> changed to <q>prooem.</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr55">page 55</ref>, period added after <q>character</q> and
+<ref target="corr55-2">after <q>v</q></ref></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr96">page 96</ref>, <q>sick bed</q> changed to <q>sick-bed</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr176">page 176</ref>, period added after <q>Capitol</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr205">page 205</ref>, semicolon added after <q>sq.</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr211">page 211</ref>, comma changed to period after <q>Henz</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr212">page 212</ref>, <q>Cæsar</q> changed to <q>Caesar</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr216">page 216</ref>, italics removed from <q>Marq.</q>, 
+                <q>wechselude</q> changed to <ref target="corr216a"><q>wechselnde</q></ref></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr224">page 224</ref>, period added after <q>wealth</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr228">page 228</ref>, <q>mediæval</q> changed to <q>mediaeval</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr229">page 229</ref>, <q>1</q> changed to <q>i.</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr284">page 284</ref>, comma added after <q>Boissier</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr289">page 289</ref>, <q>fuhrt</q> changed to <q>führt</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr300">page 300</ref>, <q>Æneas</q> changed to <q>Aeneas</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr305">page 305</ref>, period changed to comma after <q>Burgmann</q>.
+                <ref target="corr305-2">period added</ref> after <q>2</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr312">page 312</ref>, <q>fastidiodosi</q> changed to <q>fastidiosi</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr320">page 320</ref>, <q>intelliges</q> changed to <q>intelleges</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr325">page 325</ref>, italics removed from <q>Laert.</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr332">page 332</ref>, comma added after <q>female</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr338">page 338</ref>, <q><foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">τά</foreign></q>
+                    changed to <q><foreign lang="el" rend="Greek">τὰ</foreign></q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr348">page 348</ref>, <q>Greich.</q> changed to <q>Griech.</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr359">page 359</ref>, <q>Phil der.</q> changed to <q>Phil. der</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr397">page 397</ref>, comma changed to period after <q>Saturn</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr405">page 405</ref>, period added after <q><foreign rend="Greek" lang="el">παραδιδούς</foreign></q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr407">page 407</ref>, period added after <q>64</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr415">page 415</ref>, <q>xv;</q> changed to <q>xv.;</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr437">page 437</ref>, period added after <q>Diss</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr457">page 457</ref>, p. added before <q>1051</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr459">page 459</ref>, period added after <q>piece</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr464">page 464</ref>, period added after <q><foreign lang="el" rend="Greek">κτλ</foreign></q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr475">page 475</ref>, comma added after <q>23</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr480">page 480</ref>, <q>Aesclepius</q> changed to <q>Asclepius</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr513">page 513</ref>, period removed after <q>Ad</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr517">page 517</ref>, comma added after <q>2</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr524">page 524</ref>, <q>mythopœic</q> changed to <q>mythopoeic</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr550">page 550</ref>, comma added after <q>Foucart</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr556">page 556</ref>, <q>raümliche</q> changed to <q>räumliche</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr557">page 557</ref>, parenthesis removed before <q>Puteoli</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr567">page 567</ref>, <q>Archaeol.</q> changed to <q>Archæol.</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr578">page 578</ref>, period added after <q><foreign lang="el" rend="Greek">κτλ</foreign></q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr584">page 584</ref>, comma added after <q>lonely</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr587">page 587</ref>, <q>Mithrasdientes</q> changed to <q>Mithrasdienstes</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr614">page 614</ref>, italics added to <q>Mon.</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr627">page 627</ref>, <q>Caeonius</q> changed to <q>Caeionius</q></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr628">page 628</ref>, comma added after <q>Aurelius</q> and <ref target="corr628-2"><q>Hadrian</q></ref></item>
+                <item><ref target="corr629">page 629</ref>, <q>Mithriac</q> changed to <q>Mithraic</q></item>
+                
+                <item><ref target="corr633">page 633</ref>, comma added after <q><hi rend="italic">ib.</hi></q></item>
+            </list>
+                <p>Variations in hyphenation (e.g. <q>springtime</q>, <q>spring-time</q>), capitalisation
+                    (<q>inscription</q>, <q>Inscription</q>) and spelling (<q>under world</q>, <q>underworld</q>;
+                    <q>mediaeval</q>, <q>medieval</q>; <q>praetorian</q>, <q>pretorian</q>) have not been changed.</p>
+            </div>
+            <div rend="page-break-before: right">
+      <divGen type="pgfooter"/>
+    </div>
+        </back>
+    </text>
+</TEI.2>