Caesar and Christ

FIG. 22—“Spring” A Mural from Stabiae

FIG. 23—Details of Mural From the House of the Vettii, Pompeii

FIG. 24—Mural from the Villa Farnesina Museo delle Terme, Rome

FIG. 25—“Sappho” Museo Nazionale, Naples

FIG. 26—The Colosseum

FIG. 27—Interior of the Colosseum

FIG. 28—Roman Soldier and Dacian Relief from the Column of Trajan

FIG. 29—Antinoüs Museo Nazionale, Naples

FIG. 30—Altar Found at Ostia Museo delle Terme, Rome

FIG. 31—Arch of Trajan at Benevento

FIG. 32—Ruins of Timgad

2. The Wanderer

Unlike his predecessors Hadrian was as interested in the Empire as in the capital. Following the wholesome precedent of Augustus, he decided to visit every province, examining its conditions and needs and alleviating them with the expedition and resources available to an emperor. He was curious, too, about the ways and arts, dress and beliefs, of the diverse peoples in his realm; he wished to see the famous places of Greek history, to steep himself in that Hellenic culture which was the background and adornment of his mind. “He loved,” says Fronto, “not only to govern, but to perambulate, the world.”²³ In 121 he set out from Rome, accompanied not by the pomp and trappings of royalty, but by experts, architects, builders, engineers, and artists. He went first to Gaul and “came to the relief of all the communities with various acts of generosity.”²⁴ He passed into Germany and astonished everyone by the thoroughness with which he inspected the defenses of the Empiretagainst its future destroyers. He reorganized, extended and improved the limes between the Rhine and the Danube. A man of peace, he knew the arts of war and was resolved that his pacific temper should neither weaken his armies nor misguide his enemies. He issued severe regulations to maintain military discipline and obeyed these rules while visiting the camps; there he lived the life of the soldiers, eating their fare, never using a vehicle, walking with full equipment twenty miles on a march, and showing such endurance that no one could have guessed that he was at heart a scholar and a philosopher. At the same time he rewarded excellence, raised the legal and economic status of the legionaries, gave them better weapons and ample supplies, and relaxed the discipline of their free hours, merely insisting that their amusements should not unfit them for their tasks. The Roman army was never in better condition than in his reign.

He now traveled down the Rhine to its mouth and sailed across to Britain (122). We are not informed of his activities there, except that he ordered a wall built from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne “to divide the barbarians from the Romans.” Returning to Gaul he passed leisurely through Avignon, Nimes, and other towns of the provincia, and settled down for the winter at Tarragona in northern Spain. While he was strolling alone in the gardens of his host a slave rushed upon him with drawn sword and tried to kill him. Hadrian overpowered him and quietly handed him over to the servants, who found that he was insane.

In the spring of 123 he led some legions against the Moors of northwest Africa, who had been raiding the Roman towns of Mauretania. Having defeated them and driven them back into their hills, he took ship for Ephesus. After wintering there he visited the cities of Asia Minor, listening to petitions and complaints, punishing malfeasance, rewarding competence, and providing money, designs, and workmen for municipal temples, baths, and theaters. Cyzicus, Nicaea, and Nicomedia had suffered a severe earthquake; Hadrian had the damage made good by imperial funds, and built at Cyzicus a temple that was at once ranked among the seven wonders of the world.²⁵ He pushed eastward along the Euxine to Trapezus, ordered the governor of Cappadocia—the historian Arrian—to examine and report to him the condition of all the ports on the Black Sea, moved southwest through Paphlagonia, and spent a winter at Pergamum. In the fall of 125 he sailed to Rhodes and thence to Athens. He passed a happy winter there and then turned homeward. Still curious at fifty, he stopped in Sicily, and climbed Mt. Etna to see the sunrise from a perch 11,000 feet above the sea.

It is worthy of note that he could leave his capital for five years and trust to his subordinates to carry on; like a good manager, he had organized and trained an almost automatic government. He stayed in Rome something more than a year. But the lust for travel was in his blood, and so much of the world remained to rebuild! In 128 he set out again, this time to Utica, Carthage, and the flourishing new cities of northern Africa. Returning to Rome in the fall, he left soon afterward and spent another winter in Athens (128-29). He was made archon, presided happily at games and festivals, and enjoyed being called Liberator, Helios, Zeus, and Savior of the World. He mingled with philosophers and artists, imitating the graces, without the follies, of Nero and Antony. Distressed by the free chaos of Athens’ laws, he commissioned a corps of jurists to codify them. Always skeptically interested in religion, he had himself initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries. Finding Athens beset with unemployment, and resolved to restore the city to the splendor of Periclean days, he summoned architects, engineers, and skilled artisans, and began a building program more extensive than his public works in Rome. In a square enclosed by an extensive colonnade his workmen raised a library with marble walls, 120 columns, a gilded roof, and spacious rooms sparkling with alabaster, paintings, and statuary. They built a gymnasium, an aqueduct, a temple to Hera, and another to Zeus Panhellenicos—god “of all the Greeks.” The most ambitious of these architectural undertakings was the completion (131) of the Olympieum—that lordly temple to Zeus the Olympian which Peisistratus had begun six centuries before and Antiochus Epiphanes had failed to finish. When Hadrian left Athens it was a cleaner, more prosperous, and more beautiful city than ever before in its history.²⁶

In the spring of 129 he sailed to Ephesus and traveled again in Asia Minor, spawning buildings and cities as he went. He sallied into Cappadocia and reviewed the garrisons there. At Antioch he provided funds for an aqueduct, a temple, a theater, and public baths. In the fall he visited Palmyra and Arabia, and in 130 he journeyed to Jerusalem. The Holy City was still in ruins, almost as Titus had left it sixty years before; a handful of destitute Jews lived in lairs and hovels amid the rocks. Hadrian’s heart was touched by the desolation; and his imagination was moved by the empty site. He had hoped, by his restoration of Greece and the Hellenistic East, to raise higher than before the barriers between Greco-Roman civilization and the Oriental world; now he dreamed of transforming Zion itself into a pagan citadel. He ordered that Jerusalem should be rebuilt as a Roman colony and renamed Aelia Capitolina in memory of Hadrian’s gens and Jupiter’s Capitol in Rome. It was an astonishing error of psychology and statesmanship in one of the wisest statesmen in history.

He passed on to Alexandria (130), smiled tolerantly at its disputatious populace, enriched the Museum, rebuilt Pompey’s tomb, and then, surpassing Caesar, abandoned himself to a leisurely sail up the Nile with his wife Sabina and his beloved Antinoüs. He had come upon the young Greek some years before in Bithynia; he had been stirred by the youth’s rounded beauty, soft eyes, and curly head; he had made him his favored page and had formed for him a tender and passionate attachment. Sabina made no protest that has come down to us, but the gossip of the cities assumed that the boy played Ganymede to the new Zeus; possibly, however, the childless Emperor loved him as a heaven-sent son. Now, at the height of Hadrian’s happiness, Antinoüs, still but eighteen, died—apparently by drowning in the Nile. The monarch of the world “wept like a woman,” says Spartianus; he ordered a temple to be raised on the shore, buried the lad there, and offered him to the world as a god. Around the shrine he built a city, Antinoöpolis, destined to be a Byzantine capital. While Hadrian returned sadly to Rome, legend began to remold the story: the Emperor, it said, had learned by magic divination that his greatest plans would succeed only if that which he loved most should die; Antinoüs had heard of the prophecy and had gone voluntarily to his death. Perhaps the legend formed soon enough to embitter Hadrian’s declining years.

Back in Rome (131), he could feel that he had made the Empire better than he had found it. Never before, not even under Augustus, had it been so prosperous, and never has the Mediterranean world reached that fullness of life again; never has it again been the home of so advanced a civilization so widely spread and so deeply shared. And no man had so beneficently ruled it as Hadrian. Augustus had thought of the provinces as a lucrative appendage to Italy, to be husbanded for Italy’s sake; now for the first time the ideas of Caesar and Claudius reached fulfillment, and Rome became not a tax collector for Italy, but the responsible administrator of a realm in which all parts alike received the care of the government, and in which the Greek spirit ruled the East and the mind as openly as the Roman spirit ruled the state and the West. Hadrian had seen it all and had made it one. He had promised that he “would manage the commonwealth as conscious that it was the people’s property, not his own”;²⁷ and he had kept his promise.

3. The Builder

Only one thing remained—to make Rome, too, more beautiful than before. The artist in Hadrian was ever competing with the governor; he rebuilt the Pantheon while reorganizing Roman law. No other man ever built so plentifully, no other ruler so directly. The structures erected for him were sometimes designed by him, and were always subject to his expert inspection as they progressed. He had a hundred edifices repaired or restored and inscribed his name on none of them. Rome in all quarters benefited from his rare union of wisdom with power. Si jeunesse savait et vieillesse pouvait was in him a riddle solved.

His most famous reconstruction was the Pantheon—the best-preserved building of the ancient world. The rectangular temple reared by Agrippa had been destroyed by fire; apparently only the frontal Corinthian portico remained. North of this remnant Hadrian had his architects and engineers raise a circular temple, in the most indigenous of Roman styles. His Hellenic tastes inclined him to prefer Greek to Roman forms in the architecture of his capital. The new temple did not form with the portico a harmonious whole; but the interior—a circle 132 feet in diameter, with no impeding supports-gave a sense of space and freedom equaled only by the Gothic cathedrals. The walls were twenty feet thick, of brick externally faced in the lower section with marble, in the rest with stucco relieved by pilasters. The ceiling of the portico was of bronze plates so thick that when they were removed by Pope Urban VIII they sufficed to cast 110 cannon and to form the baldachin over the high altar in St. Peter’s.²⁹ The massive bronze doors were originally covered with gold. Seven niches were cut into the lower section of the windowless interior wall and were adorned with lofty marble columns and entablatures; once these niches served as alcoves for statuary, now they are modest chapels in a magnificent church. A higher section of the wall was plated with panels of costly stone, separated by pillars of porphyry. The coffered dome, rising inward from the top of the walls, was the supreme triumph of Roman engineering. It was erected by pouring concrete into ribbed sections and letting the whole congeal into one solid mass. Its monolithic character did away with lateral thrust, but to make security doubly sure the architect built buttresses into the walls. At the top of the dome an opening (the oculus, or “eye”), twenty-six feet in diameter, gave the interior its sole and sufficient illumination. From this majestic dome, the largest in history, an architectural lineage descends through Byzantine and Romanesque variations to the dome of St. Peter’s, and to that of the Capitol in Washington.

Probably Hadrian himself designed the double-apsed temple to Venus and Roma which rose opposite the Colosseum, for legend tells how he sent his plans for it to Apollodorus and had the old architect put to death for returning a scornful comment.³⁰ The temple was notable in several particulars: it was the largest in Rome; it had two cellas, one for each of its gods, who sat back to back on incommunicative thrones; and its vaulted roof of gold-plated bronze tiles was among the most brilliant sights of the city. For himself the Emperor built a yet ampler home—the villa whose remains still draw visitors to the pleasant suburb known to him as Tibur, to us as Tivoli. There, in an estate seven miles in circumference, rose a palace with every variety of room, and gardens so crowded with famous works of art that every major museum in Europe has enriched itself from the ruins. The designer showed here the usual Roman indifference to symmetry; he added building to building as need or fancy prompted, and made no greater attempt at harmony than we find in the architectural chaos of the Forum; perhaps the Romans, like the Japanese, were tired of symmetry and pleased with the surprises of irregularity. Besides porticoes, libraries, temples, a theater, a music hall, and a hippodrome, the profuse architect added small replicas of Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and Zeno’s Stoa—as if the Emperor, amid all this vain wealth, would make some amends to philosophy.

The villa was finished in the last years of Hadrian’s life. We do not know that he found happiness there. The revolt of the Jews in 135 embittered him; he put it down without mercy and fretted that he could not end his reign without war. In that same year, still only fifty-nine, he was stricken with a painful and wasting illness—akin to tuberculosis and dropsy—which slowly crushed his body, his spirit, and his mind. His temper became sharper, his manner querulous; he suspected his oldest friends of conspiring to kill and replace him; at last—perhaps in an illucid interval, and how justly we cannot say—he ordered that several of them should be put to death.

To end the war of succession that was forming in his court, he adopted as heir his friend Lucius Verus. When, soon after, Lucius died, Hadrian called to his bedside at Tibur a man with an unblemished reputation for integrity and wisdom, Titus Aurelius Antoninus, and adopted him as his son and successor. Looking far ahead, he advised Antoninus to adopt in turn, and educate for government, two youths then growing up at the court: Marcus Annius Verus, then seventeen, and Lucius Aelius Verus, then eleven, respectively the nephew of Antoninus and the son of Lucius Verus. The title of Caesar, heretofore borne by the emperors and their agnatic descendants, was conferred by Hadrian upon Antoninus; and thereafter, while the emperors kept for themselves the title of Augustus, they granted the name Caesar to each heir presumptive to the throne.

Hadrian’s sickness and sufferings had now increased; blood often gushed from his nostrils; and in his distress he began to long for death. He had already prepared his own tomb beyond the Tiber—that huge mausoleum whose gloomy remains are today the Castel Sant’ Angelo, still reached by the Pons Aelius that Hadrian built. He was impressed by the example of the Stoic philosopher Euphrates, then in Rome, who, weary with illness and old age, asked Hadrian’s permission to kill himself and, receiving it, drank hemlock.³¹ The Emperor begged for poison or a sword, but no attendant would accommodate him. He bade a Danubian slave stab him, but the slave fled; he commanded his physician to poison him, but the physician committed suicide.³² He found a dagger and was about to kill himself when it was taken from him. He mourned that he, who had the power to put anyone to death, was not himself permitted to die. Dismissing his doctors, he withdrew to Baiae and deliberately fed on foods and drinks that would hasten his end. At last, exhausted and maddened with pain, he died (138), after sixty-two years of life and twenty-one of rule. He left behind him a little poem that expressed like Dante the sadness of recalling in grief the days of our happiness:

Animula vagula, blandula,

Hospes comesque corporis,

Quae nunc abibis in loca,

Pallidula, rigida, nudula,

Nee ut soles dabis iocos?

Soul of mine, pretty one, flitting one,

Guest and partner of my clay,

Whither wilt thou hie away—

Pallid one, rigid one, naked one,

Never to play again, never to play?³³

IV. ANTONINUS PIUS

Of Antoninus there is no history, for he had almost no faults and committed no crimes. His ancestors had come from Nimes two generations before, and his family was one of the wealthiest in Rome. Reaching the throne at fifty-one, he gave the Empire the most equitable, and not the least efficient, government it would ever have.

He was the most fortunate man that ever wore a crown. We are told that he was tall and handsome, healthy and serene, gentle and resolute, modest and omnipotent, eloquent and a despiser of rhetoric, popular and immune to flattery. If we are to believe his adopted son Marcus we should have to reject him as “that faultless monster whom the world ne’er knew.” The Senate called him Pius as a model of the milder Roman virtues, and Optimus Princeps as the best of princes. He had no enemies and hundreds of friends. But he was not unacquainted with grief. His elder daughter died as he was setting out as proconsul to Asia; his younger daughter proved a dubious wife to Aurelius; and scandal accused his own wife of being as faithless as she was beautiful. Antoninus bore these rumors silently; and after Faustina’s death he established in her name and honor a fund for the support and education of girls and raised to her memory one of the loveliest temples in the Forum. He did not marry again, lest he mar the happiness and inheritance of his children, but contented himself with a concubine.

He was not a man of intellect in the narrower sense of that term. He had no learning and looked with an aristocrat’s indulgence upon men of letters, philosophy, or art; nevertheless, he helped such men richly and invited them often to his home. He preferred religion to philosophy, worshiped the old gods with apparent sincerity, and gave his adopted sons an example of piety that Marcus never forgot. “Do everything as a disciple of Antoninus,” Marcus bade himself; “remember his constancy in every reasonable act, his evenness in all things, his piety, and the serenity of his countenance, and his disregard of empty fame ... with how little he was satisfied; how laborious and patient, how religious without superstition.”³⁴ Yet he was tolerant of non-Roman creeds, moderated Hadrian’s measures against the Jews, and continued his predecessor’s lenience toward the Christians. He was no killjoy; he loved a jest and made many a good one; he played, fished, and hunted with his friends, and from his behavior none could have guessed that he was emperor. He preferred the quiet of his villa at Lanuvium to the luxury of his official palace and nearly always spent the evenings in the intimacy of his family. When he inherited the throne he put aside all thought of that careless ease to which he had looked forward as the consolation of old age. Perceiving that his wife anticipated increased splendor he reproved her: “Do you not understand that we have now lost what we had before?”³⁵ He knew that he had succeeded to the cares of the world.

He began his reign by pouring his immense personal fortune into the imperial treasury. He canceled arrears of taxes, made gifts of money to the citizens, paid for many festival games, and relieved scarcities of wine, oil, and wheat by buying these and distributing them free. He carried on, but with moderation, the building program of Hadrian in Italy and the provinces. Yet he managed the national finances so ably that at his death the combined treasuries of the state had 2,700,000,000 sesterces. He gave a public accounting of all his receipts and expenditures. He behaved toward the Senate as merely one of it and never took important measures without consulting its leaders. He devoted himself to the chores of administration as well as to problems of policy; “he cared for all men and all things as his own.”³⁶ He continued Hadrian’s liberalization of the law, equalized the penalties of adultery for men and women, deprived ruthless masters of their slaves, restricted the torture of slaves in trials, and decreed severe punishment for any owner who killed a slave. He encouraged education with state funds, provided for the education of poor children, and extended to recognized teachers and philosophers many privileges of the Senatorial class.

He ruled the provinces as well as he could without traveling. In all his long reign he was never absent for a day from Rome or its environs. He was content to appoint to provincial governorships men of tried competence and honor. He was anxious to keep the Empire safe without war; “he was continually quoting the saying of Scipio, that he would rather save a single citizen than slay a thousand foes.”³⁷ He had to wage some minor wars in order to suppress revolts in Dacia, Achaea, and Egypt, but he left these tasks to subordinates and was satisfied with Hadrian’s cautious frontiers. Some tribes in Germany interpreted his mildness as weakness and perhaps were encouraged by it to prepare those invasions which rocked the Empire after his death; this is the one flaw in his statesmanship. For the rest the provinces were happy under him and accepted the Empire as the only alternative to chaos and strife. They showered him with petitions, which he almost always granted; and they could rely upon him to repair the ravages of any public calamity. Provincial authors—Strabo, Philo, Plutarch, Appian, Epictetus, Aelius Aristides—sang the praises of the pax Romana; and Appian assures us that he had seen at Rome the envoys of foreign states vainly asking admission for their countries to the boons of the Roman yoke.³⁸ Never had monarchy left men so free, or so respected the rights of its subjects.³⁹ “The world’s ideal seemed to have been attained. Wisdom reigned, and for twenty-three years the world was governed by a father.”⁴⁰

It only remained for Antoninus to crown a good life with a peaceful death. In his seventy-fourth year he fell sick of a stomach disturbance and was seized with a high fever. He called Marcus Aurelius to his bedside and committed to him the care of the state. He instructed his servants to transfer to Marcus’ room the golden statue of Fortuna that had for many years stood in the bedchamber of the Prince. To the officer of the day he gave as watchword aequanimitas; soon afterward he turned as if to sleep, and died (161). All classes and cities vied with one another in honoring his memory.

V. THE PHILOSOPHER AS EMPEROR

Antoninus, said Renan, “would have been without competition for the reputation of being the best of sovereigns, had he not designated Marcus Aurelius as his heir.”⁴¹ “If,” said Gibbon, “a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Aurelius. Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.”⁴²

Marcus Annius Verus was born in Rome in 121. The Annii had come a century before from Succubo, near Cordova; there, it seems, their honesty had won them the cognomen Verus, “true.” Three months after the boy’s birth his father died, and he was taken into the home of his rich grandfather, then consul. Hadrian was a frequent visitor there; he took a fancy to the boy and saw in him the stuff of kings. Seldom has any lad had so propitious a youth, or so keenly appreciated his good fortune. “To the gods,” he wrote fifty years later, “I am indebted for having good grandparents, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good”;⁴³ time struck a balance by giving him a questionable wife and a worthless son. His Meditations lists the virtues these people had, and the lessons he received from them in modesty, patience, manliness, abstemiousness, piety, benevolence, and “a simplicity of life far removed from the habits of the rich”⁴⁴—though wealth surrounded him on every side.

Never was a boy so persistently educated. He was attached in boyhood to the service of temples and priests; he committed to memory every word of the ancient and unintelligible liturgy; and though philosophy later shook his faith, it never diminished his sedulous performance of the old exacting ritual. Marcus liked games and sports, even bird snaring and hunting, and some efforts were made to train his body as well as his mind and character. But seventeen tutors in childhood are a heavy handicap. Four grammarians, four rhetors, one jurist, and eight philosophers divided his soul among them. The most famous of these teachers was M. Cornelius Fronto, who taught him rhetoric. Though Marcus loved him, lavished upon him all the kindnesses of an affectionate and royal pupil, and exchanged with him letters of intimate charm, the youth turned his back upon oratory as a vain and dishonest art, and abandoned himself to philosophy.

He thanks his instructors for sparing him logic and astrology, thanks Diognetus the Stoic for freeing him from superstition, Junius Rusticus for acquainting him with Epictetus, and Sextus of Chaeronea for teaching him to live in conformity with nature. He is grateful to his brother Severus for telling him about Brutus, Cato of Utica, Thrasea, and Helvidius; “from him I received the idea of a state in which there is the same law for all, a polity of equal rights and freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government that most of all respects the freedom of the governed”;⁴⁵ here the Stoic ideal of monarchy takes possession of the throne. He thanks Maximus for teaching him “self-government, and not to be led aside by anything; cheerfulness in all circumstances, and a just admixture of gentleness and dignity, and to do appointed tasks without complaining.”⁴⁶ It is clear that the leading philosophers of the time were priests without religion rather than metaphysicians without life. Marcus took them so seriously that for a time he almost ruined a naturally weak constitution with ascetic devotions. At the age of twelve he took on the rude cloak of a philosopher, slept on a little straw strewn over the floor, and long resisted the entreaties of his mother to use a couch. He was a Stoic before he became a man. He offers thanks “that I preserved the flower of my youth; that I took not upon me to be a man before my time, but rather put it off longer than I needed . . . that I never had to do with Benedicta . . . and afterwards, when I fell into some fits of love, I was soon cured.”⁴⁷

Two influences diverted him from professional philosophy and sancity. One was the succession of minor political offices to which he was appointed; the realism of an administrator was crossed with the idealism of a meditative youth. The other was his close association with Antoninus Pius. He did not fret at Antoninus’ longevity, but continued his life of stoic simplicity, philosophical study, and official duties, while living in the palace and serving his protracted apprenticeship; and the example of his adoptive father’s devotion and honesty in government became a powerful influence in his development. The name by which we know him, Aurelius, was the clan name of Antoninus, which both Marcus and Lucius, on their adoption, had taken as their own. Lucius became a gay man of the world, 2 graceful adept in the pleasures of life. When, in 146, Pius desired a colleague to share the government with him, he named Marcus only and left to Lucius the empire of love. On the death of Antoninus, Marcus became sole emperor; but remembering Hadrian’s wish, he at once made Lucius Verus his full colleague and gave him his daughter Lucilla in marriage. At the outset of his reign, as at the end, the philosopher erred through kindness. The division of rule was a bad precedent, which, in the heirs of Diocletian and Constantine, would divide and weaken the realm.

Marcus asked the Senate to vote Pius divine honors, completed with perfect taste the temple that Pius had raised to his wife, and rededicated it to Antoninus and Faustina both.^* He paid the Senate every courtesy and rejoiced to see that many of his philosopher friends had found their way into its membership. All Italy and all the provinces acclaimed him as Plato’s dream come true: the philosopher was king. But he had no thought of attempting a Utopia. Like Antoninus he was a conservative; radicals do not grow up in palaces. He was a philosopher-king in the Stoic rather than the Platonic sense. “Never hope,” he admonished himself, “to realize Plato’s Republic. Let it be sufficient that you have in some degree ameliorated mankind, and do not think such improvement a matter of small importance. Who can change the opinions of men? And without a change of sentiments what can you make but reluctant slaves and hypocrites?” He had discovered that not all men wished to be saints; and he sadly reconciled himself to a world of corruption and wickedness. “The immortal gods consent for countless ages to endure without anger, and even to surround with blessings, so many and such evil men; but thou, who hast so short a time to live, art thou already weary?”⁴⁸ He decided to rely on example rather than law. He made himself in fact a public servant; he carried all the burdens of administration and judgment, even that part which Lucius had agreed to take but was neglecting; he allowed himself no luxury, treated all men with simple fellowship, and wore himself out by being easy of access. He was not a great statesman: he spent too much of the public funds in cash gifts to the people and the army, gave each member of the Praetorian Guard 20,000 sesterces, increased the number of those who could apply for free corn, provided frequent and costly games, and remitted large sums in unpaid taxes and tribute; it was generosity with many precedents, but unwise at a time when rebellion or war visibly threatened, or was breaking out, in several provinces and on far-spread frontiers.

Marcus continued sedulously that reform of law which Hadrian had begun. He increased the number of court days and reduced the length of trials. He himself often sat as judge, inflexible against grave offenses, but usually merciful. He devised legal protection for wards against dishonest guardians, for debtors against creditors, for provinces against governors. He connived at the rejuvenation of the forbidden collegia, legalized those associations which were chiefly burial societies, made them legal persons eligible for bequests, and established a fund for the interment of poor citizens. He gave the alimenta the widest extension in their history. After the death of his wife he created an endowment for the aid of young women; a pretty bas-relief shows us such girls crowding around the younger Faustina, who pours wheat into their laps. He abolished mixed bathing, forbade extravagant remuneration to actors and gladiators, restricted according to their wealth the expenditures of the cities on games, required the use of foiled weapons in gladiatorial contests, and did all that sanguinary custom would allow to banish death from the arena. The people loved him but not his laws. When he enlisted gladiators in his army for the Marcomannic Wars the populace cried out in good-humored anger: “He is taking our amusement from us; he wants to force us to be philosophers.”⁴⁹ Rome was preparing, but not quite ready, to be puritan.

It was his misfortune that his fame as a philosopher, and the long peace under Hadrian and Antoninus, encouraged rebels within and barbarians without. In 162 revolt broke out in Britain, the Chatti invaded Roman Germany, and the Parthian king Vologases III declared war upon Rome. Marcus chose able generals to put down the revolt in the north, but he delegated to Lucius Verus the major task of fighting Parthia. Lucius got no farther than Antioch. For there lived Panthea, so beautiful and accomplished that Lucian thought all the perfections of all sculptural masterpieces had come together in her; to which were added a voice of intoxicating melody, fingers skilled on the lyre, and a mind enriched with literature and philosophy. Lucius saw her, and, like Gilgamesh, forgot when he was born. He abandoned himself to pleasure, to hunting, at last to debauchery, while the Parthians rode into terror-stricken Syria. Marcus made no comment on Lucius but sent to Avidius Cassius, second in charge in Lucius’ army, a plan of campaign whose military excellence helped the general’s own ability not only to drive the Parthians back across Mesopotamia, but to plant the Roman standards once more in Seleucia and Ctesiphon. This time the two cities were burned to the ground lest they serve again as bases for Parthian campaigns. Lucius returned from Antioch to Rome and was awarded a triumph, which he magnanimously insisted that Marcus should share.

Lucius brought with him the invisible victor of the war—pestilence. It had appeared first among the troops of Avidius in captured Seleucia; it spread so rapidly that he withdrew his army into Mesopotamia, while the Parthians rejoiced at the vengeance of their gods. The retreating legions carried the plague with them to Syria; Lucius took some of these soldiers to Rome to march in his triumph; they infected every city through which they passed and every region of the Empire to which they were later assigned. The ancient historians tell us more of its ravages than of its nature; their descriptions suggest exanthematous typhus or possibly bubonic plague.⁵² Galen thought it similar to the disease that had wasted the Athenians under Pericles: in both cases black pustules almost covered the body, the victim was racked with a hoarse cough, and his “breath stank.”⁵³ Rapidly it swept through Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and Gaul; within a year (166-67) it had killed more men than had been lost in the war. In Rome 2000 died of it in one day, including many of the aristocracy;⁵⁴ corpses were carried out of the city in heaps. Marcus, helpless before this intangible enemy, did all he could to mitigate the evil; but the medical science of his day could offer him no guidance, and the epidemic ran its course until it had established an immunity or had killed all its carriers. The effects were endless. Many localities were so despoiled of population that they reverted to jungle or desert;, food production fell, transport was disorganized, floods destroyed great quantities of grain, and famine succeeded plague. The happy hilaritas that had marked the beginning of Marcus’ reign vanished; men yielded to a bewildered pessimism, flocked to soothsayers and oracles, clouded the altars with incense and sacrifice, and sought consolation where alone it was offered them—in the new religions of personal immortality and heavenly peace.

Amid these domestic difficulties news came (167) that the tribes along the Danube—Chatti, Quadi, Marcomanni, Iazyges—had crossed the river, overwhelmed a Roman garrison of 20,000 men, and were pouring unhindered into Dacia, Raetia, Pannonia, Noricum; that some had made their way over the Alps, had defeated every army sent against them, were besieging Aquileia (near Venice), were threatening Verona, and were laying waste the rich fields of northern Italy. Never before had the German tribes moved with such unity or so closely threatened Rome. Marcus acted with surprising decisiveness. He put away the pleasures of philosophy and determined to take the field in what he foresaw would be the most momentous of Roman wars since Hannibal. He shocked Italy by enrolling policemen, gladiators, slaves, brigands, and barbarous mercenaries into legions depleted by war and pestilence. Even the gods were conscripted to his purpose: he bade the priests of alien faiths to offer sacrifice for Rome according to their various rites; and he himself burned such hecatombs at the altars that a wit circulated a message sent him by white oxen, begging him not to be too victorious; “if thou shouldst conquer, we are lost.”⁵⁵ To raise war funds without levying special taxes he auctioned off in the Forum the wardrobes, art objects, and jewels of the imperial palaces. He took careful measures of defense—fortified the border towns from Gaul to the Aegean, blocked the passes into Italy, and bribed German and Scythian tribes to attack the invaders in the rear. With energy and courage all the more admirable in a man who hated war, he trained his army into disciplined strength, led them through a hard campaign mapped out with strategic skill, drove the besiegers from Aquileia, and routed them even to the Danube, until nearly all were captured or dead.

He understood that this action had not ended the German danger; but thinking the situation safe for a time, he returned with his colleague to Rome. On the way Lucius died of an apoplectic stroke, and gossip, which, like politics, has no bowels of mercy, whispered that Marcus had poisoned him. From January to September, 169, the Emperor rested at home from efforts that had strained his frail body close to the breaking point. He suffered from a stomach ailment that often left him too weak to talk; he controlled it by eating sparingly, one light meal a day. Those who knew his condition and his diet marveled at his labors in the palace and the field and could only say that he made up in resolution what he lacked in strength. On several occasions he called in the most famous physician of the age, Galen of Pergamum, and praised him for the unpretentious remedies he prescribed.⁵⁶

Perhaps a succession of domestic disappointments co-operated with political and military crises to aggravate his illness and make him old at forty-eight. His wife Faustina, whose pretty face has come down to us in many a sculptured portrait, may not have relished sharing bed and board with incarnate philosophy; she was a lively creature, who longed for a gayer life than his sober nature could give her. The talk of the town assumed her infidelity; the mimes satirized him as a cuckold and even named his rivals.⁵⁷ Like Antoninus with Faustina the mother, Marcus said nothing; instead, he promoted the supposed paramours to high office, gave Faustina every sign of tenderness and respect, had her deified when she died (175), and thanked the gods, in his Meditations, for “so obedient and affectionate a wife.”⁵⁸ No evidence exists upon which to condemn her.⁵⁹ Of the four children that she gave him—and whom he loved with a passion still warm in his letters to Fronto—one girl died in childhood; the surviving daughter was saddened by Lucius’ life, and widowed by his death. Twin sons came in 161; one died at birth, the other was Commodus. Scandalmongers called him a gladiator’s gift to Faustina,⁶⁰ and he strove all his life long to confirm the tale. But he was a handsome and vigorous lad; Marcus forgivably doted on him, presented him to the legions in a manner symbolic of naming a successor, and engaged the best teachers in Rome to fit him for rule. The youth preferred to model cups, dance, sing, hunt, and fence; he developed an understandable aversion to books, scholars, and philosophers, but enjoyed the company of gladiators and athletes. Soon he surpassed all comrades in lying, cruelty, and coarse speech. Marcus was too good to be great enough to discipline him or renounce him; he kept on hoping that education and responsibility would sober him and make him grow into a king. The lonely Emperor, emaciated, beard untended, eyes weary with anxiety and sleeplessness, turned back from his wife and son to the tasks of government and war.

The assaults of the central European tribes against the frontier had stopped only for a breathing spell; in this struggle to destroy an Empire and make barbarism free, peace was but an armistice. In 169 the Chatti invaded the Roman regions of the upper Rhine. In 170 the Chauci attacked Belgica, and another force besieged Sarmizegetusa; the Costoboii crossed the Balkans into Greece and plundered the Temple of the Mysteries at Eleusis, fourteen miles from Athens; the Mauri or Moors invaded Spain from Africa, and a new tribe, the Longobardi or Lombards, made its first appearance on the Rhine. Despite a hundred defeats, the fertile barbarians were growing stronger, the barren Romans weaker. Marcus saw that it was now a war to the death, that one side must destroy the other or go under. Only a man schooled in the Roman and Stoic sense of duty could have transformed himself so completely from a mystic philosopher into a competent and successful general. The philosopher remained, hidden under the imperator’s armor; in the very tumult of this Second Marcomannic War (169-75), in his camp facing the Quadi on the river Granna,^* Marcus wrote that little book of Meditations by which the world chiefly remembers him. This glimpse of a frail and fallible saint, pondering the problems of morality and destiny while leading a great army in a conflict on which the fate of the Empire turned, is one of the most intimate pictures that time has preserved of its great men. Pursuing the Sarmatians by day he could write with sympathy of them at night: “A spider, when it has caught a fly, thinks it has done a great deed. So does one who has run down a hare ... or who has captured Sarmatians. . . . Are they not all alike robbers?”⁶¹

Nevertheless, he fought the Sarmatians, the Marcomanni, the Quadi, the Iazyges, through six hard years, defeated them, and marched his legions as far north as Bohemia. It was apparently his plan to use the Hercynian and Carpathian ranges as a new frontier; if he had succeeded, Roman civilization might have made Germany, like Gaul, Latin in speech and classical in heritage. But at the height of his successes he was shocked to learn that Avidius Cassius, after putting down a revolt in Egypt, had declared himself emperor. Marcus surprised the barbarians with a hasty peace, merely annexing a ten-mile strip on the north bank of the Danube and leaving strong garrisons on the southern side. He summoned his soldiers, told them that he would gladly yield his place to Avidius if Rome wished it, promised to pardon the rebel, and marched into Asia to encounter him. Meanwhile a centurion killed Cassius, and the rebellion collapsed. Marcus passed through Asia Minor and Syria to Alexandria, mourning like Caesar that he had been cheated of a chance for clemency. At Smyrna, Alexandria, and Athens he walked the streets without a guard, wore the mantle of a philosopher, attended the lectures of the leading teachers, and joined with them in discussion, speaking Greek. During his stay at Athens he endowed professorships in each of the great schools of doctrine—Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean.

In the fall of 176, after almost seven years of war, Aurelius reached Rome and was accorded a triumph as the savior of the Empire. The Emperor associated Commodus with himself in the victory and now made him, a lad of fifteen, his colleague on the throne. For the first time in nearly a century the principle of adoption was put aside and the hereditary principate was resumed. Marcus knew what perils he was inviting for the Empire; he chose them as a lesser evil than the civil war that Commodus and his friends would wage if he were denied the throne. We must not judge him with hindsight; neither did Rome anticipate the consequences of this love. There the plague had burned itself out, and men were beginning to be happy again. The capital had suffered little from the wars, which had been financed with remarkable economy and little extra taxation; while battle raged on the frontiers trade flourished within, and money jingled everywhere. It was the height of Rome’s tide and of its Emperor’s popularity; all the world acclaimed him as at once a soldier, a sage, and a saint.

But his triumph did not deceive him; he knew that the problem of Germany had not been solved. Convinced that further invasions could be prevented only by an active policy of extending the frontier to the mountains of Bohemia, he set forth with Commodus, in 178, on the Third Marcomannic War. Crossing the Danube, he again defeated the Quadi after a long and arduous campaign. No resistance remained, and he was about to annex the lands of the Quadi, the Marcomanni, and the Sarmatians (roughly Bohemia and Danubian Galicia) as new provinces, when sickness struck him down in his camp at Vindobona (Vienna). Feeling death’s hand, he called Commodus to his side and warned him to carry through the policy which was now so near fulfillment, and realize the dream of Augustus by pushing the boundary of the Empire to the Elbe.^* Then he refused all further food or drink. On the sixth day he rose with his last strength and presented Commodus to the army as the new emperor. Returning to his couch he covered his head with the sheet and soon afterward died. When his body reached Rome the people had already begun to worship him as a god who for a while had consented to live on the earth.

CHAPTER XX

Life and Thought in the Second Century

A.D. 96-192

I. TACITUS

THE policies of Nerva and Trajan liberated the suppressed mind of Rome, and gave to the literature of their reigns a note of fierce resentment against a despotism that had gone but might come again. Pliny’s Panegyric voiced it in welcoming the first of three great Spaniards to the throne; Juvenal seldom sang any other note; and Tacitus, the most brilliant of historians, became a delator temporis acti, an accuser of times past, and excoriated a century with his pen.

We do not know the date or place of Tacitus’ birth, nor even his given name. Probably he was the son of Cornelius Tacitus, procurator of imperial revenue in Belgic Gaul; through this man’s advancement the family was raised from the equestrian class into the new aristocracy.¹ Our first definite fact about the historian is his own statement: “Agricola, during his consulship (78) . . . agreed to a marriage between myself and his daughter, who might certainly have looked for a prouder connection.”² He had received the usual education, and had learned to the full those oratorical arts which enliven his style, that skill in pros and cons which marks the speeches in his histories. The younger Pliny often heard him in the courts, admired his “stately eloquence,” and acclaimed him as the greatest orator in Rome.³ In 88 Tacitus was praetor; thereafter he sat in the Senate and confesses with shame ⁴ that he failed to speak out against tyranny, and joined in the Senatorial condemnation of Domitian’s Senatorial victims. Nerva made him consul (97), and Trajan appointed him proconsul of Asia. He was evidently a man of affairs and practical experience; his books were the afterthought of a full life, the product of a leisurely old age, and of a mature and profound mind.

One theme unites them—hatred of autocracy. His Dialogue on Orators (if it is his) attributes the decline of eloquence to the suppression of liberty. His Agricola—the most perfect of those brief monographs to which the ancients confined biography—proudly recounts the achievements of his father-in-law as general and governor, and then bitterly records Domitian’s dismissal and neglect of him. The little essay On the Situation and Origin of the Germans contrasts the virile virtues of a free people with the degeneration and cowardice of Romans under the despots. When Tacitus praises the Germans for considering infanticide an infamy, and giving no advantage to childlessness, he is not describing Germans but denouncing Romans. The philosophical purpose destroys the objectivity of the study, but allows a remarkable breadth of view in a Roman official praising the German power of resisting Rome.^{5 *}

The success of these essays induced Tacitus to illustrate the evils of tyranny by indicting the record of the despots in ruthless detail. He began with what was freshest in his memory and in the testimony of his older friends—the period from Galba to the death of Domitian; and when these Historiae were acclaimed by a grateful aristocracy as the best historical writing since Livy, he continued his story a fronte by describing, in the Annales, the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Of the fourteen (some say thirty) “books” of the Histories four and a half remain, all devoted to the years 69 and 70; of the Annals twelve books survive from an original sixteen or eighteen. Even in this mutilated form they are the most powerful works in extant Roman prose; we may vaguely imagine the grandeur and impress of the whole. Tacitus had hoped to chronicle also the reigns of Augustus, Nerva, and Trajan, mitigating the gloom of his published works with some commemoration of constructive statesmanship. But the years were not given him; and posterity has judged him, as he judged the past, from a somber aspect alone.

“The chief duty of the historian,” he thought, “is to judge the actions of men, so that the good may meet with the reward due to virtue, and pernicious citizens may be deterred by the condemnation that awaits evil deeds at the tribunal of posterity.”⁶ It is a strange conception, which turns history into a Last Judgment and the historian into God. So conceived, history is a sermon—ethics teaching by horrible examples—and falls, as Tacitus assumed, under the rubric of rhetoric. It is easy for indignation to be eloquent but hard for it to be fair; no moralist should write history. Tacitus remembered tyranny too intimately to view tyrants calmly; he saw nothing in Augustus but the destruction of freedom and supposed that all Roman genius had ended with Actium.⁷ He seems never to have thought of tempering his indictments by recording the excellent administration and growing prosperity of the provinces under the imperial monsters; no one would suspect, from reading him, that Rome was an empire as well as a city. Perhaps the lost “books” viewed the provincial world; those that remain make Tacitus a deceptive guide, who never lies but never reveals the truth. He often cites, and sometimes critically examines, his sources—histories, speeches, letters, Acta Diurna, Acta Senatus, and the traditions of old families; but for the most part he has heard only the stories of the persecuted nobility, and never imagines that the executions of senators and the assassinations of emperors were incidents in a long contest between vicious, cruel, and competent monarchs and a decadent, cruel, and incompetent aristocracy. He is fascinated by striking personalities and events rather than by forces, causes, ideas, and processes; he draws the most brilliant and unjust character portraits in history, but he has no conception of economic influences upon political events, no interest in the life and industry of the people, the stream of trade, the conditions of science, the status of woman, the vicissitudes of belief, the achievements of poetry, philosophy, or art. In Tacitus Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius die, but they do not write; the emperors kill, but they do not build. Perhaps the great historian was limited by his audience; probably he read parts of his work—following the custom of the time—to the aristocratic friends whom Pliny describes as crowding to his receptions; he would have told us that these men and women knew Roman life, industry, literature, and art, and did not have to be reminded of them; what they wanted to hear, again and again, was the exciting story of the evil emperors, the heroic deeds of stoic senators, the long war of their noble class against tyrannical power. We cannot condemn Tacitus for not succeeding in what he did not attempt; we can only regret the narrowness of his great purpose and the limitations of his powerful mind.

He does not pretend to be a philosopher. He praises Agricola’s mother for dissuading her son, who “had acquired a keener zest for philosophy than became a Roman and a senator.”⁸ His imagination and art, like Shakespeare’s, were too creatively active to let him ponder quietly the meaning and possibilities of life. He is as rich in illuminating comment as in unverified scandal; but it is difficult to find in him any consistent view of God, or man, or the state. He is cautiously ambiguous on matters of faith, and suggests⁹ that it is wiser to accept one’s native religion than to try to replace it with knowledge. He rejects most astrologers, auguries, portents, and miracles, but accepts some; he is too much of a gentleman to deny the possibility of what so many have affirmed. In general, events seem to prove “the indifference of the gods to good and bad alike,”¹⁰ and the existence of some unknown, perhaps capricious, force that drives men and states fatally onward to their destiny¹¹—urgentibus imperii fatis.¹² He hopes that Agricola has departed to a happy life, but he obviously doubts it, and contents himself with the last delusion of great minds—an immortality of fame.¹³

Nor does any Utopian aspiration console him. “Most plans of reformation are at first embraced with ardor; but soon the novelty ceases, and the scheme ends in nothing.”¹⁴ Matters are temporarily better in his time, he reluctantly admits; but not even the genius of Trajan will prevent renewed deterioration.¹⁵ Rome is rotten literally to the core, in the hearts of men, of a populace whose disorder of soul has made an anarchy of freedom,¹⁶ a rabble “fond of innovation and change, and ever ready to shift to the side of the strongest.”¹⁷ He mourns the “malignity of the human mind,”¹⁸ and scorns like Juvenal the alien stocks in Rome. After blackening the Empire he does not dream of returning to the Republic, but hopes that the adoptive emperors will reconcile the Principate with liberty.¹⁹ In the end, he thinks, character is more important than government; what makes a people great is not its laws but its men.

If, despite our surprise in finding a sermon and a drama where we had looked for history, we must nevertheless rank Tacitus among the greatest of historians, it is because the power of his art redeems the limitations of his view. Above all he sees intensely, sometimes deeply, always vividly. The portraits he draws stand out more clearly, stride the stage more livingly, than any others in historical literature. Here, too, however, there are blemishes. Tacitus composes speeches for his varied personages, all in his own fashion and majestic prose; he describes Galba as a simpleton and makes him talk like a sage.²⁰ And he does not rise to the difficult art of making his characters develop in time. Tiberius is the same at the beginning of his reign as at the end; and if he appeared to be human at the outset it was, Tacitus thinks, pure dissimulation.

First and last in Tacitus is the splendor of his style. No other author has ever said so much so compactly. This does not mean that he is brief; on the contrary, he is desultory and diffuse and takes 400 pages of the Histories to chronicle two years of time. Sometimes the condensation is extreme to the point of affectation or obscurity; every second word then requires a sentence to translate it; verbs and conjunctions are disdained as crutches for crippled minds. This is the culmination of Sallust’s concise rapidity, of Seneca’s pithy epigrams, of the balanced clauses taught in the schools of rhetoric. In a long work such a style, unrelieved with passages of a more even tenor, becomes an exhausting excitement to the reader, who nevertheless returns to it with mounting fascination. This martial brusqueness, more economical of words than of men, this scorn of the props of syntax, this passion of feeling and clearness of visualization, this tang of a novel vocabulary and murderous pungency of unhackneyed phrase, give to the writing of Tacitus a swiftness, color, and force which no ancient author has equaled. The color is dark, the mood is gloomy, the sarcasm stings, and the tone of the whole is that of a Dante without tenderness; but the cumulative effect is overwhelming. Along this black river of relentless exposure we are carried, despite our reservations and objections, by a narrative at once dignified and turbulent, stately and impetuous. Character after character rises upon the stage and is struck down; scene after scene rushes on until all Rome seems ruined and all the participants are dead. We can hardly believe, when we emerge from this chamber of horrors, that this period of despotism, cowardice, and immorality flowed into the zenith of monarchy under Hadrian and the Antonines, and the quiet decency of Pliny’s friends.

Tacitus was wrong in scorning philosophy—that is, perspective; all his faults were due to lack of it. If he could have disciplined his pen to the service of an open mind, he would have placed his name first on the list of those who have labored to give form and permanence to the memory and heritage of mankind.

II. JUVENAL

Unfortunately, Juvenal corroborates Tacitus. What the one writes in mordant prose about princes and senators, the other chants in bitter verse about women and men.

Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis, son of a rich freedman, was born at Aquinum in Latium (59). He came to Rome for his education and practiced law there “for his own amusement.” His satires betray the shock of rural tastes struck by the loose turmoil of city life; yet he appears to have been friends with Martial, whose epigrams show no prejudice in favor of morality. Shortly before Domitian’s death, says an uncertain tradition, Juvenal composed, and circulated among his friends, a satire on the influence of dancers at court; the pantomime actor Paris, we are told, took offense and had him exiled to Egypt. We cannot say if the story is true, nor when Juvenal returned; in any case he published nothing till after Domitian’s death. The first volume of his sixteen satires appeared in 101, the remainder in four volumes at intervals in a long life. Probably they were unforgiving memories of Domitian’s time; but the indignation that makes them so vivid and unreliable suggests that a few years of “the good emperors” had not cured the evils he denounced. Perhaps, again, he chose the satire as a characteristic Roman form, found models and some material in Lucilius, Horace, and Persius, and molded his fulminations and his wrath on the rhetorical principles that he had learned in the schools. We shall never know how darkly our picture of imperial Rome has been colored by the pleasures of denunciation.

Juvenal takes everything for his subject, and has no trouble in finding in everything some aspect that can bear condemning. “We are arrived at the zenith of vice,” he thinks, “and posterity will never be able to surpass us”;²¹ so far, so true. The root of the evil is the unscrupulous pursuit of wealth. He scorns the plebs that once ruled armies and unmade kings but can now be bought with panem et circenses, bread and circuses;²³ this is one of a hundred phrases to which Juvenal’s vitality gave lasting life. He resents the influx of Oriental faces, dress, ways, smells, and gods; protests against the clannishness of the Jew, and likes least of all the “greedy little Greek” (Graeculus esuriens)—the degenerate descendant of a people once great but never honest. He loathes the informers who, like Pliny’s Regulus, get rich by reporting “unpatriotic” remarks; the legacy hunters who flutter around childless old men; the proconsul living in lifelong luxury on the profits of a term in the provinces; the clever lawyers who spin out lawsuits like an excreted web. He is disgusted above all by sexual excesses and perversions: by the roué who on marrying finds that his lechery has left him impotent; by the dandies whose manners, perfumes, and desires make them indistinguishable from women; and by the women who think that emancipation means that they should be indistinguishable from men.

His sixth and bitterest satire is devoted to the gentler sex. Postumus is thinking 01 marriage; don’t do it, Juvenal warns him; and then the poet portrays the women of Rome as selfish, shrewish, superstitious, extravagant, quarrelsome, haughty, vain, litigious, adulterous, equaling every marriage with a divorce, substituting lapdogs for children,²⁴ going in for athletics, worse yet for literature, quoting Virgil at you, spouting rhetoric and philosophy ²⁵—“oh, may the gods save us from a learned wife!”²⁶ He concludes that there is hardly a woman in the city worth marrying. A good wife is a rare bird (rara avis), stranger than a white crow. He marvels that Postumus should think of marriage when “there are so many halters to be had, so many high and dizzy windows are accessible, and the Aemilian Bridge is close at hand.” No; stay single. And get out of this nerve-wearying bedlam called Rome and live in some quiet Italian town where you will meet honest men and be safe from criminals, poets, collapsing tenements, and Greeks.²⁷ Put ambition behind you; the goal is not worth the striving, so long is labor and so brief is fame. Live simply, cultivate your garden, desire only so much as hunger and thirst, cold and heat demand;²⁸ learn pity, be kind to children, keep a sane mind in a healthy body (mens sana in corpore sano²⁹). But only a fool will pray for a long life.

We can understand such a mood; it is pleasant to contemplate the imperfections of our neighbors and the despicable inferiority of the world as compared with our dreams. Our enjoyment in this case is sharpened by Juvenal’s street-corner vocabulary, his easy-moving colloquial hexameters, his grim humor, and his lusty style. But we must not take him literally. He was angry; he had not made his way in Rome as rapidly as he had hoped; it was sweet revenge to lay about him with the bludgeon of a hatred that never feigned to be fair. His moral standard was high and sound, though tinged with conservative prejudices and delusions about the virtuous past; by those standards, used without mercy or modesty, we could indict any generation anywhere. Seneca knew how old a pastime this is. “Our forefathers,” he wrote, “complained, we complain, and our descendants will complain, that morals are corrupt, that wickedness holds sway, that men are sinking deeper and deeper into sinfulness, that the condition of mankind is going from bad to worse.”³⁰ Around the immoral hub of any society is a spreading wheel of wholesome life, in which the threads of tradition, the moral imperatives of religion, the economic compulsions of the family, the instinctive love and care of children, the watchfulness of women and policemen, suffice to keep us publicly decent and moderately sane. Juvenal is the greatest of Roman satirists, as Tacitus is the greatest of Roman historians; but we should err as much in taking their picture as accurate as we should were we to accept without scrutiny the pleasant and civilized scene that rises before us as we read the letters of Pliny.

III. A ROMAN GENTLEMAN

When he was born at Como in 61 he was named Publius Caecilius Secundus. His father owned a farm and villa near the lake and held high office in the town. Orphaned early, Publius was adopted and educated first by Virginius Rufus, governor of Upper Germany, and then by his uncle Caius Plinius Secundus, author of the Natural History. This busy scholar made the boy his son and heir and died soon afterward. According to custom, the youth took his adoptive father’s name, causing confusion for 2000 years. At Rome he studied under Quintilian, who formed his taste on Cicero and must receive some of the credit for the Ciceronian fluency of Pliny’s style. At 18 he was admitted to the bar; at 39 he was chosen to deliver an address of welcome to Trajan. In the same year he was made consul; in 103, augur; in 105, “Curator of the Bed and Banks of the Tiber and the City Sewers.” He took no fees or gifts for his legal services, but he was a rich man and could afford to be magnanimous. He had properties in Etruria, at Beneventum, Como, and Laurentum, and offered 3,000,000 sesterces for another.³¹

Like many aristocrats of his time, he amused himself by writing: at first a Greek tragedy, then some poems, lighthearted and occasionally obscene. Reproved by some, he confessed his fault impenitently, and proposed again “to indulge in mirth, wit, and gaiety, and enter into the spirit of the most wanton muse.”³² Hearing his letters praised, he composed some for publication and issued them at intervals from 97 to 109. Intended not only for the public but for the pleasure of the circles he described, they avoided the darker aspects of Roman life and passed by as too serious for his purpose the larger problems of philosophy and statesmanship. Their worth is in their graceful intimacy, and in the rosy light they shed upon Roman character and patrician ways.

Pliny reveals himself with half the candor and all the felicity of Montaigne. He has an author’s inevitable vanity, but so openly that it hardly offends. “Nothing, I confess, so strongly affects me as the desire of a lasting name.”³³ He speaks appreciatively of others as well as of himself, adding that “one may be sure a man has many virtues if he admires those of others”; ³⁴ in any case it is a relief, coming from Juvenal and Tacitus, to hear an author speak well of his fellow men. He was as generous in act as in words, ever ready with favors, loans, or gifts, from finding a husband for a friend’s niece to enriching his native town. Finding that Quintilian could not give his daughter a dowry befitting the high station of the man she was marrying, he sent her 50,000 sesterces, excusing the smallness of the gift.³⁵ He gave an old schoolmate 300,000 to make him eligible for the equestrian class; when the daughter of a friend inherited a legacy of debts he paid them off; and at some risk he lent a considerable sum to a philosopher banished by Domitian. To Como he gave a temple, a secondary school, an institute for poor children, a municipal bath, and 11,000,000 sesterces for a public library.

What is especially pleasing in him is his love for his home, or his homes. He does not denounce Rome, but he is happier in Como or Laurentum, near the lake or the sea. There his chief enterprises are reading and doing nothing. He loves his gardens, and the mountain scenery behind them; he did not have to wait for Rousseau to make him enjoy nature. He speaks with the greatest tenderness of his third wife, Calpurnia, her sweet temper and pure mind, her fond delight in his success and his books. She read them all (he believed) and learned many of his pages by heart; she set his poems to music and sang them, and had a private corps of couriers to keep her informed of every development when he was trying an important case. She was but one of many good women in his circle. He tells of the modesty, patience, and courage of a fourteen-year-old girl who, just betrothed, learned that she had an incurable illness, and cheerfully awaited death;³⁶ of Pompeius Saturninus’ wife, whose letters to her husband were lyrics of affection and fine Latin;³⁷ of Thrasea’s daughter Fannia, who uncomplainingly bore exile for defending her husband Helvidius, nursed a relative through a dangerous illness, caught it, and died of it; “How complete,” he exclaims, “is her virtue, her sanctity, her sobriety, her courage!”³⁸

He had a hundred friends, some great, many good. He joined with Tacitus in prosecuting Marius Priscus for dishonesty and cruelty as proconsul in Africa; the two orators corrected each other’s speeches and invested in mutual compliments; Tacitus lifted Pliny to heaven by reporting that the literary world was pairing them as the leading writers of the age.³⁹ He knew Martial, but from an aristocratic distance. He took Suetonius with him to Bithynia and helped him to get the “right of three children” without having any. His circle buzzed with literary and musical amateurs, with public recitals of poetry and speeches. “I do not believe,” says the learned Boissier, “that in any other period has literature been so greatly loved.”⁴⁰ Homer and Virgil were being studied on the banks of the Danube and the Rhine, and the Thames was trembling with rhetoric.⁴¹ It was, in its upper half, an elegant and amiable society, rich in loving marriages, parental affection, humane masters, sincere friendships, and fine courtesies. “I accept your invitation to supper,” reads one letter, “but I must make this agreement beforehand, that you dismiss me soon, and treat me frugally. Let our table abound only in philosophical conversation, and let us enjoy even that within limits.”⁴²

Most of the men whom Pliny describes were members of the new aristocracy stemming from the provinces; they were not idlers, for nearly every one of them held public office and shared in the admirable administration of the Empire under Trajan. Pliny himself was sent as propraetor to Bithynia to restore the solvency of some cities there. His letters include some inquiries addressed to the Prince, and Trajan’s pithy replies; they show Pliny accomplishing his mission with ability and honor, though with a strangely detailed dependence upon the Emperor’s advice. His final letter begs forgiveness for sending his sick wife home by the coaches of the imperial post. Thereafter Pliny disappears from literature and history, leaving behind him a redeeming picture of a Roman gentleman, and of Italy in her happiest age.

IV. THE CULTURAL DECLINE

We should obscure these outstanding figures if we were to surround them with lesser lights. After them there were no giants in pagan Latin letters. Reason had made its great effort from Ennius to Tacitus and had spent itself. It is a shock to pass from the grandeur of the Histories and the Annals to the scandalous chronicle of Suetonius’ Lives of Illustrious Men (110); history is here degenerating into biography, and biography into anecdote; portents and miracles and superstitions crowd the pages, and only the Elizabethan English of Philemon Holland’s translation (1606) has raised the book to the level of literature. Less disturbing is the descent from Pliny to the letters of Fronto. Perhaps these were not meant for publication, and cannot be fairly compared with Pliny’s; some were spoiled by a search for archaic phraseology, but many are touched by real affection of the teacher for his pupil. Aulus Gellius supported the archaizing movement in his Attic Nights (169)—the largest collection of worthless trifles in ancient literature; and Apuleius brought it to a climax in The Golden Ass. Apuleius and Fronto came from Africa, and the fad may have had partial source in the fact that written Latin there had departed less than in Rome from the language of the people and the Republic. Fronto rightly believed in strengthening literature with popular speech, as one freshens a plant by turning over the earth at its roots. But youth does not come twice to a man, a nation, a literature, or a language. Orientalization had set in and could not be stopped. The common Greek tongue of the Hellenistic East and Oriental Rome was becoming the language of literature as well as of life; Fronto’s pupil chose it for his Meditations. Appian, an Alexandrian Greek living at Rome, chose Greek for his vivid Histories of Rome’s wars (ca. 160); so did Claudius Aelian, a Roman by birth and blood; a half century later Dio Cassius, a Roman senator, would write his history of Rome in Greek. Leadership in literature was passing back from Rome to the Greek East; not to the Greek spirit, but to the Oriental soul using Hellenic speech. There would be giants again in Latin; but they would be Christian saints.

Roman art declined more slowly than Roman letters. Technical ability lingered on and produced good architecture, sculpture, painting, and mosaic. The head of Nerva, in the Vatican, carries on the vivid realism of Flavian portraits, and the Column of Trajan is an impressive relief despite much crudity. Hadrian labored to revive Hellenic classicism, but found no one to play Pheidias to his Pericles; the inspiration that had stirred Greece after Marathon, and Rome after Actium, was missing in an age of self-limitation, contentment, and peace. The busts of Hadrian lose character by their smooth Hellenistic lines; the heads of Plotina and Sabina are pretty; but the portraits of Antinoüs repel us by their sleek effeminate insipidity. Probably Hadrian’s classical reaction was a mistake: it ended the forceful naturalism and individuation of Flavian and Trajanic sculpture, which had had indigenous roots in Italian tradition and character. Nothing reaches maturity except through the fulfillment of its own nature.

Under the Antonines Roman sculpture had its penultimate fling. Once at least it achieved perfection, in the figure of a young woman whose veiled head and modest robes are molded with a bewitching delicacy and firmness of line.⁴³ Almost as good is the portrait of Marcus’ Faustina, aristocratically refined, and sensuous enough to accord with the innuendoes of history. Aurelius himself was carved or cast in a thousand forms, from the meditative and guileless yet eagerly sensitive youth of the Capitoline bust to the curly-headed professor in armor of that same collection. Every tourist knows the stately bronze of Aurelius Imperator on horseback, which, since Michelangelo restored it, has dominated the piazza of Rome’s Capitol.

Relief remained to the end a favorite Roman art. The Etruscan and Hellenistic custom of carving mythological or historical scenes upon sarcophagi returned in Hadrian’s time as the hope of immortality took more personal and even physical form, and burial replaced cremation. Eleven panels surviving from triumphal arches erected to commemorate the campaigns of Aurelius ^* show the naturalistic style in perfection: no one is idealized, every participant is individualized; Marcus, receiving without pride the submission of a fallen enemy, is an appealingly human figure; and the defeated are shown not as barbarians but as men worthy of their long struggle for freedom. In 174 the Senate and people of Rome raised that Column of Aurelius which still adorns the Piazza Colonna; inspired by Trajan’s Column, it pictured the Marcomannic Wars with a sympathetic art that honored conquerors and conquered alike.

The spirit of the Emperor had helped to form the art and morals of his time. The games were less cruel, the laws more considerate of the weak; marriage was apparently more lasting and content. Immorality continued, openly in a minority, clandestinely in the majority, as at all times; but it had passed its peak with Nero and had ceased to be fashionable. Men as well as women were returning to the old religion or devoting themselves to new ones; and the philosophers approved. Rome was now teeming with them, invited, welcomed, or tolerated by Aurelius; they took full advantage of his generosity and his power, crowded his court, received appointments and emoluments, delivered countless lectures, and opened many schools. In their imperial pupil they gave the world the culmination and disintegration of ancient philosophy.

V. THE EMPEROR AS PHILOSOPHER

Six years before his death Marcus Aurelius sat down in his tent to formulate his thoughts on human life and destiny. We cannot be sure that the Ta eis heauton—“to himself”—was intended for the public eye; probably so, for even saints are vain, and the greatest man of action has moments of weakness in which he aspires to write a book. Marcus was not an expert author; most of the training that Fronto had given him in Latin was wasted now, since he wrote in Greek; besides, these “Golden Thoughts” were penned in the intervals of travel, battles, revolts, and many tribulations; we must forgive them for being disconnected and formless, often repetitious, sometimes dull. The book is precious only for its contents—its tenderness and candor, its half-conscious revelations of a pagan-Christian, ancient-medieval soul.

Like most thinkers of his time, Aurelius conceived philosophy not as a speculative description of infinity, but as a school of virtue and a way of life. He hardly bothers to make up his mind about God; sometimes he talks like an agnostic, acknowledging that he does not know; but having made that admission, he accepts the traditional faith with a simple piety. “Of what worth is it to me,” he asks, “to live in a universe without gods or Providence?”⁴⁴ He speaks of deity now in the singular, now in the plural, with all the indifference of Genesis. He offers public prayer and sacrifice to the old divinities, but in his private thought he is a pantheist, deeply impressed with the order of the cosmos and the wisdom of God. He has a Hindu’s sense of the interdependence of the world and man. He marvels at the growth of the child out of a little seed, the miraculous formation of organs, strength, mind, and aspiration out of a little food.⁴⁵ He believes that if we could understand we should find in the universe the same order and creative power as in man. “All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy. . . . There is a common reason in all intelligent beings; one god pervades all things, one substance, one law, one truth. . . . Can a clear order subsist in thee, and disorder in the All?”⁴⁶

He admits the difficulty of reconciling evil, suffering, apparently unmerited misfortune, with a good Providence; but we cannot judge the place of any element or event in the scheme of things unless we see the whole; and who shall pretend to such total perspective? It is therefore insolent and ridiculous for us to judge the world; wisdom lies in recognizing our limitations, in seeking to be harmonious parts of the universal order, in trying to sense the Mind behind the body of the world, and co-operating with it willingly. To one who has reached this view “everything that happens happens justly”—i.e., as in the course of nature;⁴⁷ nothing that is according to nature can be evil;⁴⁸ everything natural is beautiful to him who understands.⁴⁹ All things are determined by the universal reason, the inherent logic of the whole; and every part must welcome cheerfully its modest role and fate. “Equanimity” (the watchword of the dying Antoninus) “is the voluntary acceptance of the things that are assigned to thee by the nature of the whole.”⁵⁰

Everything harmonizes with me that harmonizes with thee, O universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me that thy seasons bring, O Nature. From thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return.⁵¹

Knowledge is of value only as a tool of the good life. “What, then, can direct a man? One thing only—philosophy”⁵²—not as logic or learning, but as a persistent training in moral excellence. “Be thou erect, or be made erect.”⁵³ God has given every man a guiding daimon, or inner spirit—his reason. Virtue is the life of reason.

These are the principles of the rational soul. It traverses the whole universe, and surveys its form, and extends itself into the infinity of time, and embraces the cyclical renewal of all things, and comprehends that those who come after us will see nothing new, nor have those before us seen anything more; but in a manner he who is forty years old, if he has any understanding at all, has seen, by virtue of this uniformity, all things that have been or will be.⁵⁴

Marcus thinks his premises compel him to puritanism. “Pleasure is neither good nor useful.”⁵⁵ He renounces the flesh and all its works, and talks at times like some Anthony in the Thebaid:

Observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are, and what was yesterday a little mucus, tomorrow will be a mummy or ashes. . . . The whole space of man’s life is but little, and yet with what troubles it is filled . . . and with what a wretched body it must be passed! . . . Turn it inside out, and see what kind of thing it is.⁵⁶

The mind must be a citadel free from bodily desires, passions, anger, or hate. It must be so absorbed in its work as hardly to notice the adversities of fortune or the barbs of enmity. “Every man is worth just so much as the things about which he busies himself.”⁵⁷ He reluctantly concedes that there are bad men in this world. The way to deal with them is to remember that they, too, are men, the helpless victims of their own faults by the determinism of circumstance.⁵⁸ “If any man has done thee wrong, the harm is his own; it is thy duty to forgive him.”⁵⁹ If the existence of evil men saddens you, think of the many fine persons you have met, and the many virtues that are mingled in imperfect, characters.⁶⁰ Good or bad, all men are brothers, kinsmen in one God; even the ugliest barbarian is a citizen of the fatherland to which we all belong. “As Aurelius I have Rome for my country; as a man, the world.”⁶¹ Does this seem an impracticable philosophy? On the contrary, nothing is so invincible as a good disposition, if it be sincere.⁶² A really good man is immune to misfortune, for whatever evil befalls him leaves him still his own soul.

Will this [evil] that has happened prevent thee from being just, magnanimous, temperate, prudent . . . modest, free? . . . Suppose that men curse thee, kill thee, cut thee in pieces: what can these things do to prevent thy mind from remaining pure, wise, sober, and just? If a man stand by a limpid, pure spring and curse it, the spring never ceases to send up clean water; if he cast dirt into it, or filth, it will speedily wash them out and be unpolluted again. . . . On every occasion that brings thee trouble, remember to apply this principle: that this is not a misfortune, but that to bear it nobly is good fortune. . . . Thou seest how few the things are to which if a man lays hold of, he is able to live a life that flows on quietly and is like the existence of the gods.⁶³

Marcus’ life, however, did not flow on quietly; he had to kill Germans while writing this Fifth Gospel, and in the end he faced death with no consolation in the son who would succeed him, and no hope of happiness beyond the grave. Soul and body alike return to their original elements.

For as the mutation and dissolution of bodies make room for other bodies doomed to die, so the souls that are removed into the air, after life’s existence, are transmuted and diffused . . . into the seminal intelligence of the universe, and make room for new souls.⁶⁴ . . . Thou hast existed as a part; thou shalt disappear in that which produced thee. . . . This, too, nature wills. . . . Pass, then, through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journeys in content, just as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the nature that produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.⁶⁵

VI. COMMODUS

When the officer of the guard asked the dying Marcus for the watchword of the day he answered: “Go to the rising sun; my sun is setting.” The rising sun was then nineteen, a robust and dashing youth without inhibitions, morals, or fear. One would have expected of him, rather than of Marcus the ailing saint, a policy of war to victory or death; instead, he offered the enemy immediate peace. They were to withdraw from the vicinity of the Danube, to surrender most of their arms, return all Roman prisoners and deserters, pay Rome an annual tribute of corn, and persuade 13,000 of their soldiers to enlist in the Roman legions.⁶⁶ All Rome condemned him except the people; his generals fumed at allowing the trapped prey to escape and fight again another day. During the reign of Commodus, however, no trouble came from the Danubian tribes.

The young prince, though no coward, had seen enough of war; he needed peace to enjoy Rome. Back in the capital, he snubbed the Senate and loaded the plebs with unprecedented gifts—725 denarii to each citizen. Finding no field in politics for his exuberant strength, he hunted beasts on the imperial estates and developed such skill with sword and bow that he decided to perform publicly. For a time he left the palace and lived in the gladiators’ school; he drove chariots in the races, and fought in the arena against animals and men.⁶⁷ Presumably the men who opposed him took care to let him win; but he thought nothing of fighting, unaided and before breakfast, a hippopotamus, an elephant, and a tiger, which made no distinctions for royalty.⁶⁸ He was so perfect a bowman that with a hundred arrows he killed a hundred tigers in one exhibition. He would let a panther leap upon some condemned criminal and then slay the animal with one arrow, leaving the man unhurt to die again.⁶⁹ He had his exploits recorded in the Acta Diurna and insisted on being paid, out of the Treasury, for each of his thousand combats as a gladiator.

The historians upon whom we must here depend wrote, like Tacitus, from the viewpoint and traditions of the offended aristocracy; we cannot tell how much of the marvels they relate are history, how much are revenge. We are assured that Commodus drank and gambled, wasted the public funds, kept a harem of 300 women and 300 boys, and liked to vary his sex occasionally, at least by using a woman’s garb, even at the public games. Tales of unbelievable cruelty are transmitted to us: Commodus ordered a votary of Bellona to amputate an arm in proof of piety; forced some women devotees of Isis to beat their breasts with pine cones till they died; killed men indiscriminately with his club of Hercules; gathered cripples together and slew them one by one with arrows. . . .⁷⁰ One of his mistresses, Marcia, was apparently a Christian; for her sake, we are told, he pardoned some Christians who had been condemned to the Sardinian mines. Her devotion to him suggests that in this man, described as more bestial than any beast, there was some lovable element unrecorded by history.

Like his predecessors, he was aroused to the wildest ferocity by fear of assassination. His aunt Lucilla formed a conspiracy to kill him; he discovered it, had her executed, and on proof or suspicion of participation put so many men of rank to death that soon hardly any survived who had been prominent in Marcus’ reign. Delators, who had almost disappeared for a century, returned to activity and favor, and a new terror raged in Rome. Appointing Perennis as praetorian prefect, Commodus yielded the reins of government to him, and (the tradition says) abandoned himself to sexual dissipation. Perennis ruled efficiently but mercilessly; he organized his own terror and had all his opponents slain. The Emperor, suspecting that Perennis planned to replace him, surrendered this second Sejanus to the Senate, which reenacted its role of glowing revenge. Cleander, a former slave, succeeded Perennis (185) and surpassed him in corruption and cruelty; any office might be had for a proper bribe, any decision of any court could be reversed. Under his orders senators and knights were put to death for treason or criticism. In 190 a mob besieged the villa where Commodus was staying and demanded Cleander’s death. The Emperor accommodated them. Cleander’s successor, Laetus, after holding power for three years, judged that his time had come. One day he chanced upon a proscription list that contained the names of his supporters and friends, and of Marcia. On the last day of 192 Marcia gave Commodus a cup of poison; and when it worked too slowly the athlete whom he had kept to wrestle with strangled him in his bath. He was a youth of thirty-one.

When Marcus died Rome had reached the apex of her curve and was already touched with decay. Her boundaries had been extended beyond the Danube, into Scotland and the Sahara, into the Caucasus and Russia, and to the gates of Parthia. She had accomplished for that confusion of peoples and faiths a unity not of language and culture, but at least of economy and law. She had woven it into a majestic commonwealth, within which the exchange of goods moved in unprecedented plenty and freedom; and for two centuries she had guarded the great realm from barbarian inroads and had given it security and peace. All the white man’s world looked to her as the center of the universe, the omnipotent and eternal city. Never had there been such wealth, such splendor, or such power.

Nevertheless, amid the prosperity that made Rome brilliant in this second century, all the seeds were germinating of the crisis that would ruin Italy in the third. Marcus had contributed heavily to the debacle by naming Commodus his heir and by wars that centralized ever more authority in the hands of the Emperor. Commodus kept in peace the prerogatives assumed by Aurelius in war. Private and local independence, initiative, and pride withered as the power and functions of the state increased; and the wealth of nations was drained away by ever-rising taxation to support a self-multiplying bureaucracy and the endless offensives of defense. The mineral wealth of Italy was diminishing,⁷¹ pestilence and famine had taken bitter toll, the system of tillage by slaves was failing, governmental expenditures and doles had exhausted the Treasury and debased the currency. Italian industry was losing its markets in the provinces through provincial competition, and no economic statesmanship appeared to make up for a languishing foreign trade by a wider distribution of buying power at home. Meanwhile the provinces had recovered from the exactions of Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, and Antony; their ancient skills had revived, their industries were flourishing, their new wealth was financing science, philosophy, and art. Their sons replenished the legions, their generals led them; soon their armies would hold Italy at their mercy and make their generals emperors. The process of conquest was finished and was to be reversed; henceforth the conquered would absorb the conquerors.

As if conscious of these omens and problems, the mind of Rome, at the close of the Antonine age, sank into a cultural and spiritual fatigue. The practical disfranchisement of first the assemblies and then the Senate had removed the mental stimulus that comes from free political activity and a widespread sense of liberty and power. Since the prince had almost all authority, the citizens left him almost all responsibility. More and more of them, even in the aristocracy, retired into their families and their private affairs; citizens became atoms, and society began to fall to pieces internally precisely when unity seemed most complete. Disillusionment with democracy was followed by disillusionment with monarchy. The “Golden Thoughts” of Aurelius were often leaden thoughts, weighted down with the suspicion that Rome’s problems could not be solved, that the multiplying barbarians could not long be held back by a sterile and pacific breed. Stoicism, which had begun by preaching strength, was ending by preaching resignation. Almost all the philosophers had made their peace with religion. For 400 years Stoicism had been to the upper classes a substitute for religion; now the substitute was put aside, and the ruling orders turned back from the books of the philosophers to the altars of the gods. And yet paganism, too, was dying. Like Italy, it was flushed only with governmental aid and was nearing exhaustion. It had conquered philosophy; but already its temple precincts heard reverently the names of invading deities. The age was heavy with the resurrection of the provinces and the incredible victory of Christ.

BOOK IV

THE EMPIRE

146 B.C.–A.D. 192

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

B.C.

1200:

Goidelic Celts invade England

900:

Brythonic and Belgic Celts invade England

350:

Pytheas of Marseilles explores the North Sea

248:

Arsacid Dynasty begins in Parthia

241-10:

Sicily becomes a province

238:

Sardinia and Corsica acquired

211-190:

Arsaces II of Parthia

197:

Spain acquired

170-38:

Mithridates I of Parthia

168:

Macedonia acquired

167:

Illyricum

146:

Achaea, “Africa,” Epirus

145-130:

Ptolemy VII

135-105:

John Hyrcanus, King of Judea

135-51:

Poseidonius

133:

Attalus III bequeaths Pergamum

124-88:

Mithridates II of Parthia

121:

Gallia Narbonensis

112-05:

The Jugurthine War

110:

Philo of Byzantium, physicist

104-78:

Alexander Jannaeus, King of Judea

102:

Cilicia; Pamphylia

88-4:

First Mithridatic War

88:

Massacre of Romans in Near East

83-1:

Second Mithridatic War

78-69:

Alexandra, Queen of Judea

76:

Timomachus of Byzantium, painter

75-63:

Third Mithridatic War

74:

Bithynia

74-67:

Cyrene and Crete

69-63:

Aristobulus II, King of Judea

64:

Syria

63:

Pontus and Judea become Roman provinces

63-40:

Hyrcanus II, King of Judea

58:

Cyprus

58-50:

Caesar conquers Gaul

55,54:

Caesar in Britain

50:

Hero of Alexandria; Meleager of Gadara

46:

Numidia

40:

Parthians invade Syria

37-4:

Herod the Great

30:

Egypt

25:

Galatia

B.C.

25-4:

Aelius Gallus’ expedition into Arabia Felix

17:

Upper and Lower Germany acquired

15:

Noricum; Raetia

14:

Maritime Alps

11:

Moesia

7:

Fl. Strabo, geographer

4(?):

Birth of Christ

B.C.. 4-6 A.D.:

Archelaus, King of Judea; Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee

A.D 17:

Cappadocia

40:

Mauretania

43:

Britain

47:

Revolt of Caractacus

50:

Dioscorides, pharmacologist

51-63:

War between Parthia and Rome

55-60:

Corbulo subjugates Armenia

61.

Revolt of Boudicca

64:

Cottian Alps

70-80:

Roman conquest of Wales

77-84:

Agricola, governor of Britain

72:

Extinction of Seleucid Dynasty

89:

Plutarch in Rome

90:

Epictetus

95:

Dio Chrysostom

100:

Apollodorus of Damascus, architect

105:

Arabia Petrea

107:

Dacia

114:

Armenia, Assyria, Mesopotamia

115:

Soranus of Ephesus, physician

117:

Hadrian relinquishes Armenia and Assyria

120:

Marinus of Tyre, geographer

122:

Hadrian’s Wall in England

130:

Aelia Capitolina founded on site of Jerusalem; Theon of Smyrna, mathematician; Arrian of Nicomedia, historian; Claudius Ptolemy, astronomer

142:

Wall of Antoninus Pius in England

147-91:

Vologeses III of Parthia

150:

Lucian; Aelius Aristides

160:

Galen, physician; Pausanias, geographer

190:

Sextus Empiricus, philosopher

227:

End of the Arsacid Dynasty

CHAPTER XXI

Italy

I. A ROSTER OF CITIES

LET us stop at this precarious zenith and try to realize that the Empire was greater than Rome.We have lingered unduly at this brilliant center, which hypnotizes historians as it fascinated provincials. In truth the vitality of the great realm no longer dwelt in the corrupt and dying capital; its surviving health and strength, much of its beauty, most of its mental life lay in the provinces and in Italy. We can have no just idea of what Rome meant, nor of its astonishing achievement in organization and pacification, until we leave it and surrender ourselves to a tour of the thousand cities that made up the Roman world.^*

“How shall I commence this undertaking?” the elder Pliny asked as he began his description of Italy, “so vast is the number of places—what man could enumerate them all?—and so great is their individual renown!”¹ Around and south of Rome lay Latium, once her mother, then her enemy, then her granary, then a paradise of suburbs and villas for Romans who had both money and taste. South and west from the capital fine roads and the Tiber led to the rival harbors of Portus and Ostia on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Ostia had its great age in the second and third centuries of our era. Merchants and longshoremen crowded its streets and filled its theaters; its homes and apartment houses were remarkably like those of Rome today; as late as the fifteenth century a Florentine traveler marveled at the wealth of the town and its sumptuous adornment. Some surviving columns, and an altar elegantly designed and carved with delicate floral reliefs, show that even this commercial population had absorbed the classic conception of the beautiful.

Southward on the coast rose Antium (Anzio), where the richest Romans, many emperors, and favored gods had palaces or temples reaching out into the Mediterranean to catch any passing breeze; in its three miles of ruins were found such master sculptures as the Borghese Gladiator and the Apollo Belvedere. Near by an extant monument reminds “excellent citizens,” now nineteen centuries dead, that they have recently had the pleasure of seeing eleven gladiators die in combat with ten ferocious bears.² To the north, beyond the coastal hills, Aquinum gave birth to Juvenal, and Arpinum plumed itself on Marius and Cicero. Twenty miles from Rome was the old town of Praeneste (Palestrina), its pretty homes built upon terraces in the mountain slopes, its gardens famous for their roses, its peak crowned with a celebrated temple to the goddess Fortuna Primigenia, who gave good luck to women in childbirth, and exchanged oracles for cash. Tusculum, ten miles from Rome, was similarly rich in gardens and villas; here old Cato was born, and Cicero placed his Tusculan Disputations.^* Most renowned of Rome’s suburbs was Tibur (Tivoli), where Hadrian spread his country house and Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, spent her captive years.

North of Rome, Etruria experienced under the Principate a modest resurrection. Perusia was largely destroyed and partly restored by Augustus, whose artists beautified there an old Etruscan arch. Arretium gave Maecenas to Rome and pottery to the world. Pisae was already hoar with age: it traced its name and origin to a colony of Greeks from Pisa in the Peloponnesus, and made a living by organizing the lumber business along the Arnus River. Farther up the same stream was a young Roman colony, Florentia, rare among cities because it probably underestimated its future. At the northwestern extremity of Etruria were the quarries of Carrara; Rome’s finest marble was conveyed thence to the port of Luna, and went by ship to the capital. Genua had long served as an outlet for the goods of northwestern Italy; as far back as 209 B.C. we hear of the Carthaginians destroying it in a ruthless commercial war; it has been destroyed many times since, and has always achieved a fairer reincarnation.

Under the Alps lay Augusta Taurinorum, founded by the Taurini Gauls and made a Roman colony by Augustus; its ancient pavements and drains can still be seen under the streets of Turin; and a massive gate survives from Augustan days to remind us that the city was once a fortress against invaders from the north. Here the lazy Padus (Po), rising in the Cottian Alps, turns eastward 250 miles to divide north Italy into what the early Republic knew as Transpadane and Cispadane Gaul. In all the peninsula the valley of the Po was the region most fertile, populous, and prosperous. At the foot of the Alps were those lakes—Verbanus (Maggiore), Larius (Como), and Benacus (Garda)—whose splendor feasted the eye and soul of those generations as well as ours. From the younger Pliny’s Comum a main trade route led south to Mediolanum (Milan). Settled by the Gauls in the fifth century B.C., it was already a metropolis and educational center in the days of Virgil; by A.D. 286 it would replace Rome as the capital of the Western Empire. Verona controlled the trade over the Brenner Pass and was rich enough to have an amphitheater (recently restored) seating 25,000 spectators. Along the winding Po rose Placentia (Piacenza), Cremona, Mantua, and Ferrara—originally frontier towns designed to hold the Gauls at bay.

North of the Po and east of the Adige lay Venetia. The district took its name from the Veneti, early immigrants from Illyria. Herodotus tells how the leaders of these tribes annually brought together the marriageable lasses in their villages, put a price upon each according to her beauty, wed her to the man who paid the price, and used the money to provide alluring dowries for the less alluring girls.⁴ Venice itself was not yet born, but at Pola on the Istrian peninsula, at Tergeste (Trieste), Aquileia, and Patavium (Padua), substantial cities crowned the head of the Adriatic. Pola still has from Roman days a stately arch, a pretty temple, and an amphitheater only less impressive than its model, the Colosseum. South of the Po a line of important cities ran from Placentia through Parma, Mutina (Modena), Bononia (Bologna), and Faventia (Faenze) to Ariminum. Here, at Rimini, is one of the most perfectly preserved of the countless bridges built by Roman engineers; it carried the Flaminian Way into the city through an arch as strong and dominating as the Roman character. A branch road led from Bononia to Ravenna, the Venice of Roman days, built upon piles in marshes made by several rivers emptying into the Adriatic; Strabo describes it as “provided with thoroughfares by means of bridges and ferries.”⁵ Augustus stationed there his Adriatic fleet, and several emperors in the fifth century made the city their official residence. The superior fertility of northern Italy, its healthier and more stimulating climate, its mineral resources, varied industries, and cheaply-borne river trade, raised the region to economic supremacy over central Italy in the first century of our era and to political leadership in the third.

South of Ariminum the eastern coast, rocky, stormy, and harborless, developed few cities of moment north of Brundisium. And yet there were in Umbria, Picenum, Samnium, and Apulia many small towns whose wealth and art can be judged only by studying Pompeii. Asisium gave birth to Propertius as well as Saint Francis; Sarsina to Plautus, Amiternum to Sallust, Sulmo to Ovid, Venusia to Horace. Beneventum was famous not only for a Pyrrhic defeat but for the great arch erected there by Trajan and Hadrian; on its virile reliefs Trajan told the story of his achievements in war and peace. On the southeastern coast Brundisium commanded traffic with Dalmatia, Greece, and the East. Within the “heel” Tarentum, once a proud city-state, was now a declining winter resort for Roman magnates and aristocrats. In southern Italy large estates had absorbed most of the land and turned it to pasture; the cities lost their peasant patronage, and their business classes waned. The Greek communities that had sported their sybaritic wealth in earlier times had been ruined by barbarian infiltration and the Second Punic War, and were now reduced to small towns in which Latin was slowly replacing Greek. On the “toe” Rhegium (Reggio) had a good harbor and flourished on the trade with Sicily and Africa. Up the west coast Velia could hardly remember the days when Parmenides and Zeno had made it, as Elea, ring with metaphysical poetry and impish paradox. Poseidonia, which still amazes visitors with its majestic temples, had been renamed Paestum by its Roman colony, and its Greek stock was melting in a flux of “barbarian”—here Italian—blood from the countryside. Only in Campania was Greek civilization alive in Italy.

Geographically Campania—the mountains and coast around Naples—was part of Samnium; economically and culturally it was a world by itself, industrially more advanced than Rome, financially powerful, and crowding into a little space an intense life of political turmoil, literary competition, artistic exuberance, epicurean luxury, and exciting public games. The land was fertile and produced the finest olives and grapes in Italy; hence came the famous Surrentine and Falernian wines. Probably Varro was thinking of Campania when he challenged the world: “You who have wandered over many lands, have you ever seen any better cultivated than Italy? . . . Is not Italy so stocked with fruit trees as to seem one great orchard?”⁶ At the southern end of Campania a precipitous peninsula ran out from Salernum to Surrentum. Villas nestled among the vines and orchards on the hills and garlanded the shore. Surrentum was as beautiful as Sorrento is now; the elder Pliny called it “Nature’s own delight,” upon which she had poured out all her gifts.⁷ Hardly anything seems to have changed there in two thousand years; the people and their customs are probably the same, almost the same their gods; and the cliffs still stand the sea’s unending siege.

Facing this promontory lay the buffeted isle of Capreae (Capri). On the southern side of the gulf Vesuvius smoked, while Pompeii and Herculaneum slept under their lava coat. Then came Neapolis, “Newtown,” the most Greek of Italian cities in Trajan’s day; in Naples’ laziness we watch an echo of its ancient addiction to love and sport and art. The people were Italian; the culture, customs, games, were Greek. Here were fine temples, palaces, and theaters; here, every fifth year, were held those contests in music and poetry at which Statius had won a prize. In the western corner of the gulf was the port of Puteoli (Pozzuoli), named from the stench of its sulphur pools;⁸ It throve on Rome’s trade and on manufactures of iron, pottery, and glass; an amphitheater here shows us, by its well-preserved underground passages, how gladiators and beasts were introduced into the arena. Across the harbor of Puteoli sparkled the villas of Baiae, doubly attractive in their setting between mountains and sea; here Caesar, Caligula, and Nero played and rheumatic Romans came to bathe in mineral springs. The place profited from its reputation for gambling and immorality; Varro reports that maidens there were common property, and many boys were girls;⁹ Claudius thought Cicero irremediably disgraced for having gone there once.¹⁰ “Do you suppose,” asks Seneca, “that Cato would ever have dwelt in a pleasure palace, so that he might count the lewd women as they sailed past, the many kinds of barges painted in all sorts of colors, the roses wafted about the lake?”¹¹

A few miles north of Baiae, in the crater of a dead volcano, Lake Avernus emitted sulphurous fumes of such potency that legend said no bird could fly above it and live. Near it was the cave through which Aeneas, in Virgil’s epic, had made his facilis descensus Averni into Tartarus. North of the lake was the old city of Cumae, now slowly dying through the superior attractions of her daughter-city Neapolis, the better harbors of Puteoli and Ostia, and the industries of Capua. Capua lay thirty miles inland, in a fertile region that sometimes harvested .four crops in a year;¹² and its bronze and iron works were unrivaled in Italy. Rome had so severely punished it for helping Hannibal that for two centuries it failed to recover, and Cicero spoke of it as the “abode of the politically dead.”¹³ Caesar restored it with thousands of new colonists, and in Trajan’s time it was prospering again.

Listed so rapidly, these major cities of classic Italy are merely names; we mistake them for words on a map and hardly feel that they were the noisy abodes of sensitive men eagerly pursuing food and drink, women and gold. Let us turn over the ashes of one Roman habitation, and from its strangely preserved vestiges try to recapture some movement of the life that ran in those ancient streets.

II. POMPEII

Pompeii was one of the minor towns of Italy, hardly noticed in Latin literature except for its fish sauces, its cabbage, and its burial. Founded by Oscans perhaps as early as Rome, peopled by Greek immigrants, captured by Sulla and turned into a Roman colony, it was partly destroyed by an earthquake in A.D. 63 and was being rebuilt when Vesuvius destroyed it again. On August 24, A.D. 79, the volcano exploded and hurled dust and rock high into the air amid clouds of smoke and flashes of flame. A heavy rainfall turned the erupted matter into a torrent of mud and stone, which in six hours covered Pompeii and Herculaneum to a depth of eight or ten feet. All that day and the next the earth shook and buildings fell. Audiences were buried in the ruins of theaters,¹⁴ hundreds were choked by dust or fumes, and tidal waves shut off escape by sea. The elder Pliny was at that time commanding the western fleet at Misenum, near Puteoli. Moved by appeals for help and by curiosity to observe the phenomenon at closer range, he boarded a small vessel, landed on the southern shore of the gulf, and rescued several persons; but as the party ran from the advancing hail and smoke, the old scientist was overcome, fell in his tracks, and died.¹⁵ The next morning his wife and his nephew joined the desperate crowd that fled down the coast, while from Naples to Sorrento the continuing eruption blackened the day into night. Many refugees, separated in the darkness from their husbands, wives, or children, made the terror worse with their laments and shrieks. Some prayed to divers gods for help; some cried out that all gods were dead and that the long-predicted end of the world had come.¹⁶ When, on the third day, the sky cleared at last, lava and mud had covered everything of Pompeii but the rooftops, and Herculaneum had completely disappeared.

Of approximately 20,000 population in Pompeii, probably some 2000 lost their lives. Several of the dead were preserved by a volcanic embalmment: the rain and pumice stone that fell upon them made a cement that hardened as it dried; and the filling of these impromptu molds has made some gruesome plaster casts. A few of the survivors dug into the ruins to recover valuables; thereafter the site was abandoned and was slowly covered by the detritus of time. In 1709 an Austrian general sank a shaft at Herculaneum, but the tufa layer was so thick (in some places sixty-five feet) that excavations had to proceed by slow and costly tunneling. The exhuming of Pompeii began in 1749 and has gone on at intervals since. Today most of the ancient town has been uncovered and has revealed so many houses, objects, and inscriptions that in some ways we know ancient Pompeii better than ancient Rome.

The center of its life, as in every Italian city, was the forum. Once, doubtless, it had been the gathering point for farmers and their produce on market days; games were held there, and dramas were performed. There the citizens had raised shrines to their gods; at one end to Jupiter, at the other to Apollo, and near by to Venus Pompeiana, the patron goddess of the town. But they were not a religious people; they were too busy with industry and politics, games and venery, to have much time for worship; and even in worship they honored the phallus as the crown of their Dionysian ritual.¹⁷ When economic and state affairs swelled in volume and dignity, great buildings rose around the forum for administration, negotiation, and exchange.

We may judge from modern Italian towns how the adjoining streets throbbed with the hawking of peddlers, the disputes of buyers and sellers, the noise of crafts by day and revelry by night. In the ruins of the shops excavators found some of the charred and petrified nuts, loaves, and fruits that so narrowly escaped a purchaser. Farther down the streets were the taverns, gambling houses, and brothels, each zealous to be all in one.

We might not have guessed the keenness of Pompeii’s life had not its people scratched their sentiments upon public walls. Three thousand such graffiti have been copied there, and presumably there were thousands more. Sometimes the authors merely inscribed their names or obscene audacities, as men still love to do; sometimes they gave hopeful instructions to enemies, as Samius Cornelio, suspendere—“Samius to Cornelius: go hang yourself.” Many of the inscriptions are love messages, often in verse: Romula notes that she “tarried here with Stephylus”; and a devoted youth writes, Victoria vale, et ubique es, suaviter sternutas—“Good-by, Victoria, and wherever you are may you sneeze pleasantly.”¹⁸

Quite as numerous as these messages are the carved or painted announcements of public events or private offerings. Landlords advertised vacancies, losers described missing articles; guilds and other groups declared themselves for promising candidates in the municipal campaigns. So “the fishermen have named Popidius Rufus for aedile”; “the lumbermen and the charcoal sellers ask you to elect Marcellinus.”¹⁹ Some graffiti announced gladiatorial games, others proclaimed the valor of famous gladiators like Celadus, suspirium puellarum, “the maidens’ sigh,” or breathed devotion to a favorite actor—“Actius, darling of the people, come back soon!”²⁰ Pompeii lived to be amused. It had three public baths, a palaestra, a small theater seating 2500, a larger one accommodating 5000, and an amphitheater where 20,000 persons could enjoy by proxy the agony of death. One inscription reads: “Thirty pairs of gladiators furnished by the duumvir . . . will fight at Pompeii on November 24, 25, and 26. There will be a hunt [venatio]. Hurrah for Maius! Bravo, Paris!” Maius was duumvir or city magistrate; Paris was the leading gladiator.

The remains of the domestic interiors suggest a life of solid comfort and varied art. Windows were exceptional, central heating was rare; bathrooms appear in the richer homes, and a few houses had an outdoor pool in a peristyled garden. Floors were of cement or stone, sometimes of mosaic. One frank moneymaker had the words Salve lucrum—“Hail, gain!” lettered in his floor; another inscribed his with Lucrum gandium—“Gain is joy.”²¹ Little has been found of the ancient furniture; nearly all was of wood, and perished; but a few tables, couches, chairs, and lamps of marble or bronze have survived. In the museums at Pompeii and Naples may be seen the miscellanea of domestic life: pens, inkstands, scales, kitchen utensils, toilet articles, and musical instruments.

The art recovered from Pompeii or near it suggests that not only the aristocrats of the villas, but the merchants of the city enjoyed the cultural accessories of life. A private library unearthed at Herculaneum had 1756 volumes or rolls. We must not repeat what we have said of the Boscoreale cups, or the rich vistas and graceful women painted upon the walls of Pompeian homes. Many dwellings had excellent sculptures, and the forum contained 150 statues. In the Temple of Jupiter a head of the god was found which Pheidias himself might have carved—strength and justice framed in the curls of abounding hair and beard. In the Temple of Apollo was a statue of Diana, equipped with a hole in the back of the head through which a hidden ministrant might utter oracles. In one Herculanean villa enough first-class bronzes were found to fill a famous room at the Naples Museum. Presumably the masterpieces in this collection—the Resting Mercury, the Narcissus or Dionysus, the Drunken Satyr, and the Dancing Faun—were of Greek origin or workmanship; they reveal the skillful technique, and the shameless joy in the healthy body, characteristic of Praxitelean art. One of them, however, a bravely realistic bust in bronze, shows the bald head and sharp but not unkindly face of L. Caecilius Iucundus, a Pompeian auctioneer whose accounts, inscribed upon 154 wax tablets, were found in his house at Pompeii. Supremely human in its mixture of coarseness and intelligence, wisdom and warts, this work of a contemporary—perhaps Italian—sculptor is a welcome foil to the unwrinkled gods and goddesses who surround it in the Naples Museum, and who confess by their smooth and placid features that they never lived.

III. MUNICIPAL LIFE

Life, private and public, individual and corporate, has never been lived more intensely than in ancient Italy. But the events of our own time are too vital and absorbing to let us spare interest for the details of municipal organization under the Caesars; the confusing diversities of constitution and the jealous gradations of franchise are no longer a part of that living past which is our matrix and our theme.

It was a basic feature of the Roman Empire that though divided into provinces it was organized into an assemblage of relatively self-governed city-states each owning an extensive hinterland. Patriotism meant love of one’s city rather than of the Empire. Normally the freemen of each community were content to exercise a purely local franchise; and those non-Romans who had won Roman citizenship rarely went to Rome to vote. As the example of Pompeii shows, the decay of the assemblies in the capital was not accompanied by a similar debasement in the cities of the Empire. Most Italian municipalities had a senate (curia)—and most Eastern cities had a council (boulé)—that formulated ordinances, and an assembly (comitia, ekklesia) that chose the magistrates. Each magistrate was expected to give his city a substantial sum (summa honoraria, from honos, office) for the privilege of serving it, and custom required him also to make incidental donations for public benefits or games. As no pay attached to office, the democracy—or aristocracy—of freemen issued almost everywhere in an oligarchy of wealth and power.

For two hundred years, from Augustus to Aurelius, the municipalities of Italy prospered. There was a majority of poor in them, of course; nature and privilege had seen to this; but never before or since, so far as history tells, have the rich done so much for the poor. Practically all the expenses of operating the city, of financing dramas, spectacles, and games, of building temples, theaters, stadiums, palaestras, libraries, basilicas, aqueducts, bridges; and baths, and adorning these with arches, porticoes, painting, and statuary, fell upon men of means; and in the first two centuries of the Empire these philanthropies were carried out with a competitive patriotism that in some cases bankrupted the families that contributed, or the cities that maintained, the benefactions. In time of famine it was usual for the wealthy to buy food and distribute it gratis among the poor; on occasion they furnished free oil or wine, or a public banquet, or a gift of money, to all citizens, sometimes to all inhabitants. Extant inscriptions abound in commemorations of such generosity. A millionaire gave Altinum, in Venetia, 1,600,000 sesterces for public baths; a rich lady built a temple and an amphitheater for Casinum; Desumius Tullus gave Tarquinii baths costing 5,000,000 sesterces; Cremona, destroyed by Vespasian’s troops, was rapidly rebuilt by the contributions of private citizens; and two physicians exhausted their fortunes in gifts to Naples. At populous Ostia, Lucilius Gemala invited all the inhabitants to dinner, paved a long and spacious avenue, repaired or restored seven temples, rebuilt the municipal baths, and donated 3,000,000 sesterces to the city treasury.²² It was the custom of many rich men to invite a considerable portion of the citizenry to a feast on the occasion of their birthday, their election to office, their daughter’s marriage, their son’s assumption of the toga virilis of manhood, or the dedication of a building which they had presented to the community. In return for such favors the city voted the giver an office, a statue, a panegyric, or an inscription. The poor were not overwhelmed with all these gifts; they accused the rich of deriving the means of philanthropy from exploitation, and they demanded less ornate buildings and cheaper corn, less statuary and more games.²³

When we add to private munificence the donations of the emperors to the towns, the buildings erected, and the catastrophes mitigated, in them by imperial funds, and the public works and functions financed by the municipal treasury, we begin to feel the splendor and pride of the Italian cities under the Principate. Streets were paved, drained, policed, and adorned, free medical service was maintained for the poor, clean water was piped into private homes for a small fee, food was offered to the poor at a low price, public baths were often free through private subsidies, alimenta were paid to straitened families to help them rear their children, schools and libraries were built, plays were presented, concerts were given, games were arranged in reckless emulation of Rome. Civilization in the Italian towns was not so materialistic as in the capital. They rivaled one another in erecting amphitheaters, but also they raised noble temples, sometimes equaling Rome’s best,²⁴ and made the months gay with picturesque religious festivals. They spent freely on works of art and provided halls for lecturers, poets, sophists, rhetors, philosophers, and musicians. They supplied their citizens with facilities for health, cleanliness, recreation, and a vigorous cultural life. From them, not from Rome, came most of the great Latin authors, and some of the finest sculptural masterpieces in our museums, like the Nike of Naples, the Eros of Centumcellae, the Zeus of Otricoli. They supported as large a population as their modern successors before our century, and gave it an unparalleled security from war. The first two hundred years of our era saw the zenith of the great peninsula.

CHAPTER XXII

Civilizing the West

I. ROME AND THE PROVINCES

THE blot on Italian prosperity—aside from a system of slavery common to ancient states—was its partial dependence upon provincial exploitation. Italy was free of taxation because the provinces had yielded so much in plunder and tribute; and to them could be traced some of the wealth that came to flower in the Italian towns. Rome, before Caesar, frankly classed the provinces as conquered territory; all their inhabitants were Roman subjects, only a few were Roman citizens; all their land was the property of the Roman state and was held by the possessors on revocable grants from the imperial government. To lessen the likelihood of revolt Rome cut conquered regions into smaller states, forbade any province to have direct political dealings with another, and favored the business classes against the lower classes everywhere. Divide et impera was the secret of Roman rule.

Cicero perhaps exaggerated when, in excoriating Verres, he pictured the Mediterranean nations as desolate under the Republic: “All the provinces mourn, all free peoples cry out, all kingdoms protest against our cruelty and greed; from one ocean to another there is no place, however hidden or remote, that has not felt our lust and our iniquity.”¹ The Principate dealt more liberally with the provinces, not from generosity so much as from husbandry. Taxation was made bearable, local religions, languages, and customs were respected, freedom of speech was allowed except for attacks against the sovereign power, and local laws were retained so far as they did not conflict with Roman profit and mastery. A wise flexibility created a useful diversity of rank and privilege among and within the subject states. Certain municipalities, like Athens and Rhodes, were “free cities”; they paid no tribute, were not subject to the provincial governor, and managed their domestic affairs without Roman interference so long as they maintained social order and peace. Some old kingdoms, like Numidia and Cappadocia, were allowed to keep their kings, but these were “clients” of Rome—dependent upon her protection and her policy and required to aid her with men and materials at her call. In the provinces the governor (proconsul or propraetor) combined in himself the power to legislate, to administer, and to judge; his power was limited only by the free cities, by a Roman citizen’s right of appeal to the emperor, and by the financial supervision exercised by the provincial quaestor or procurator. Such near-omnipotence invited abuse; and though the lengthening of the governor’s term under the Principate, his ample salary and allowance, and his financial responsibility to the emperor considerably lessened malfeasance, we may see from the letters of Pliny and some passages in Tacitus ² that extortion and corruption were still no rarities at the end of the first century.

Taxation was a primary industry of the governor and his aides. Under the Empire a census was taken of every province for the purpose of assessing the tax on land and the tax on property—which included animals and slaves. To stimulate production a fixed tribute was substituted for the tithe. “Publicans” no longer gathered these taxes, but they collected port duties and managed some state forests, mines, and public works. The provinces were expected to contribute towards a golden crown for each new emperor, pay the cost of provincial administration, and in some cases send heavy shipments of grain to Rome. The old custom of liturgies was maintained in the East, and spread through the West, by which the local or the Roman government might “ask” rich men to provide Joans for war, ships for the navy, buildings for public purposes, food for famine victims, or choruses for festivals and plays.

Cicero, having joined the Ins, contended that the taxes paid by the provinces barely covered the cost of administration and defense; ³ “defense” included the suppression of revolts, and “administration” presumably embraced the perquisites that made so many Roman millionaires. We must reconcile ourselves to the probability that whatever power establishes security and order will send taxgatherers to collect something more than the cost. Despite all levies the provinces prospered under the Principate. The emperor and the Senate exercised a more careful supervision over provincial staffs and severely punished those who stole beyond their station. Ultimately the excess taken from the provinces flowed back to them in payment for their goods; and in the end the industries so supported made the provinces stronger than a precariously parasitic Italy. A government, said Plutarch, ought to give a people two boons above all: liberty and peace. “As to peace,” he wrote, “there is no need to occupy ourselves, for all war has ceased. As to liberty, we have that which the government [Rome] leaves us; and perhaps it would not be good if we had any more.”⁴

II. AFRICA

Corsica and Sardinia were classed together as a province, not as parts of Italy. Corsica was for the most part a mountainous wilderness, in which Romans hunted the natives with dogs to sell them as slaves.⁵ Sardinia provided slaves, silver, copper, iron, and grain; it had a thousand miles of road and one excellent harbor, Carales (Cagliari). Sicily had been reduced to an almost purely agricultural province as one of the “frumentary supports” of Rome; its arable soil was largely taken up with latifundia devoted to cattle raising, and manned by slaves so poorly clothed and fed that they periodically revolted and escaped to form robber bands. The island had in Augustus’ days some 750,000 souls. (In 1930 it had 3,972,000.) Of its sixty-five cities the most flourishing were Catania, Syracuse, Tauromenium (Taormina), Messana, Agrigentum, and Panormus (Palermo). Syracuse and Tauromenium had magnificent Greek theaters, still in use today. Despite Verres’ depredations Syracuse was so full of impressive architecture, famous sculptures, and historic sites that professional guides prospered on the tourist trade,⁶ and Cicero considered it the finest city in the world. Most well-to-do urban families had farms or orchards in the suburbs, and the whole Sicilian countryside was fragrant with fruit trees and vineyards, as it is today.

All that Sicily lost through Roman domination Africa gained. It gradually replaced Sicily as an unwilling granary for Rome; but in return Roman soldiers, colonists, businessmen, and engineers made it blossom into a hardly credible affluence. Doubtless the new conquerors had found certain regions thriving when they came; between the mountains that frowned upon the Mediterranean, and the Atlas range that kept out the Sahara, ran a semitropical valley sufficiently watered by the Bagradas (Medjerda) River, and two months of rain, to repay the patient husbandry that Mago had taught and Masinissa had enforced. But Rome improved and expanded what she found. Her engineers built dams across the rivers that flowed down from the southern hills; they gathered the surplus water in reservoirs in the rainy season, and poured it into irrigation canals in the hot months when the streams ran dry.⁷ Rome asked no heavier taxes than native chiefs had levied, but her legion and fortifications gave better protection against nomad raiders from the mountains; mile by mile new soil was won from desert or savagery for cultivation and settlement. The valley produced so much olive oil that when in our seventh century the Arabs came, they were amazed to find that they could ride from Tripoli to Tangier without ever moving from the shade of olive trees.⁸ Towns and cities multiplied, architecture exalted them, and literature found new voice. The ruins of Roman forums, temples, aqueducts, and theaters on now arid wastes reveal the reach and wealth of Roman Africa. Those fields decayed and became dead sand not through a change in climate but through a change in government—from a state that gave economic security, order, and discipline to one that allowed chaos and negligence to ruin the roads, reservoirs, and canals.

At the head of this restored prosperity was the resurrected city of Carthage. After the battle of Actium Augustus took up the frustrated project of Caius Gracchus and Caesar and sent to Carthage as colonists some of the soldiers whose fidelity and victories he wished to reward with land. The geographical advantages of the site, the perfect harbor, the fertile Bagradaa delta, the excellent roads opened or reopened by Roman engineers, soon enabled Carthage to recapture from Utica the export and import trade of the region; within a century of its refounding it had become the largest city in the western provinces. Rich merchants and landowners built mansions on the historic Byrsa, or villas in the flowering suburbs, while peasants driven from the soil by the competition of latifundia joined prolétaires and slaves in slums whose fetid poverty would welcome the egalitarian gospel of Christianity. Houses rose to six or seven stories, public buildings gleamed with marble, and statuary of good Greek style abounded in the streets and squares. Temples were built again to the old Carthaginian gods, and Melkart enjoyed till our second century the sacrifice of living children.⁹ The people rivaled the Romans in their passion for luxuries, cosmetics, jewelry, dyed hair, chariot races, and gladiatorial games. Among the sights of the city were the great public baths presented by Marcus Aurelius. There were lecture halls, schools of rhetoric, philosophy, medicine, and law; Carthage ranked only after Athens and Alexandria as a university town. Here Apuleius and Tertullian came to study everything, and Saint Augustine marveled at the pranks and immorality of the students, whose favorite philanthropy was to break into a lecture room and dismiss both the professor and his class.¹⁰

Carthage was the capital of the province called “Africa,” now eastern Tunisia. South of it commerce bedecked the eastern coast with cities whose ancient wealth was reviving after twelve centuries when war struck them in our time: Hadrumetum (Sousse), Leptis Minor, Thapsus, and Tacapae (Gabes). Farther east on the Mediterranean lay a district named Tripolis from its federation of three cities: Oea (Tripoli), founded by the Phoenicians in 900 B.C.., Sabrata, and Leptis Magna (Lebda). In this last city the Emperor Septimius Severus was born (A.D. 146); he rewarded it with a basilica and municipal bath whose ruins astonish the traveler or warrior today. Paved roads busy with camel caravans connected these ports with the towns of the interior: Sufetula, now a tiny village with the remains of a great Roman temple; Thysdrus (El Djem), which had an amphitheater seating 60,000; and Thugga (Dougga), whose ruined theater attests, by its graceful Corinthian columns, the wealth and taste of its citizens.

North of Carthage was her ancient mother and implacable rival, Utica (Utique). We catch a hint of its Roman opulence when we learn that in 46 B.C.. 300 Roman bankers and wholesalers had branch offices there.¹¹ Its territory reached northward to Hippo Diarrhytus, now Bizerte; thence a road led along the coast westward to Hippo Regius (Bone), soon to be Augustine’s episcopal see. South and inland lay Cirta (Constantine), capital of the province of Numidia. Westward lay Thamugadi (Timgad), almost as well preserved as Pompeii, with paved and colonnaded streets, covered drains, an elegant arch, a forum, senate house, basilica, temples, baths, theater, library, and many private homes. On the pavement of the forum is a checkerboard engraved with the words, Venari, lavari, ludere, ridere, hoc est vivere—“to hunt, bathe, play, and laugh, this is to live.”¹² Thamugadi was founded about A.D. 117 by the Third Legion, sole guard of the African provinces. About 123 the legion took up more permanent headquarters a few miles to the west, and raised the city of Lambaesis (Lambèse). The soldiers married and settled there, and lived in their homes more than in the camp; but even their praetorium was a stately and ornate edifice, whose baths were as fine as any in Africa. Outside the camp they helped to build a capitol, temples, triumphal arches, and an amphitheater where struggle and death might mitigate the monotony of their peaceful lives.

That a single legion could protect all north Africa from the marauding tribes of the interior was made possible by a network of roads, military in purpose but commercial in result, binding Carthage with the Atlantic, and the Sahara with the Mediterranean. The main road went westward through Cirta to Caesarea, capital of Mauretania (Morocco). Here King Juba II taught civilization to the Mauri or Moors from whom the province took its ancient and modern names. Son of the Juba who had died at Thapsus, he had been taken as a child to grace Caesar’s triumph in Rome; he was spared, remained as a student, and became one of the most learned scholars of his time. Augustus made him client king of Mauretania and bade him spread among his people the classic culture he had so zealously acquired. He succeeded, being favored with a long reign of forty-eight years; his subjects marveled that a man could write books and yet rule so well. His son and heir was brought to Rome and starved to death by Caligula. Claudius annexed the kingdom and divided it into two provinces: Mauretania Caesariensis and Mauretania Tingitana, named from its capital Tingis—our Tangier.

In these African cities there were many schools, open to the poor as well as to the rich. We hear of courses in stenography,¹³ and Juvenal calls Africa nutricula causidicorum—the nurse of barristers.¹⁴ It produced in this period one minor and one major author—Fronto and Apuleius; only in its Christian heyday would African literature lead the world. Lucius Apuleius was a strange and picturesque character, far more than Montaigne “undulant and diverse.” Born at Madaura of high family (A.D. 124), he studied there, at Carthage, and in Athens, spent a large inheritance recklessly, wandered from city to city and from faith to faith, had himself initiated into various religious mysteries, played with magic, wrote many works on subjects ranging from theology to tooth powder, lectured at Rome and elsewhere on philosophy and religion, returned to Africa, and married at Tripoli a lady considerably richer than himself in both purse and years. Her friends and heirs-apparent sued to annul the marriage, charging that he had persuaded the widow by magic arts; he defended himself before the court in an Apologia that has come down to us in refurbished form. He won his case and bride, but the people persisted in believing him a magician, and their pagan posterity sought to belittle Christ by recounting the miracles of Apuleius. He spent the remainder of his days at Madaura and Carthage, practicing law and medicine, letters and rhetoric. Most of his writings were on scientific and philosophical subjects; his native city raised a monument to him labeled Philosophus Platonicus; and he would be chagrined, if he could return, to find himself remembered only for his Golden Ass.

It is a work akin to the Satyricon of Petronius and even more bizarre. Originally entitled Metamorphoseon Libri XI—Eleven Books of Transformations—it expanded fantastically a story that Lucius of Patras had told of a man changed into an ass. It is a loose concatenation of adventures, descriptions, and extraneous episodes, seasoned with magic, horror, ribaldry, and deferred piety. The Lucius of the tale tells how he wandered into Thessaly, amused himself with various maidens, and sensed everywhere around him an atmosphere of sorcery.

As soon as night was past and a new day began to spring, I fortuned to awake, and rose out of my bed as half amazed, and indeed desirous to know and see some strange and marvelous things. . . . Neither was there anything which I saw that I did believe to be the same which it was indeed, but everything seemed to me transformed into other shapes by the wicked power of enchantment, in so much that I thought the stones against which I might stumble were indurate and turned from men into that figure, and that the birds which I heard chirping, and the trees and the running waters were changed into such feathers and leaves and fountains. And further I thought that the statues and images would by and by move, and that the walls would talk, and the kine and other brute beasts would speak and tell strange news, and that immediately I should hear some oracle from heaven and from the ray of the sun.¹⁵

Ready now for any adventure, Lucius rubs himself with a magic ointment, meanwhile mightily wishing to be changed into a bird; but as he rubs he becomes a perfect ass. Thenceforth the story records the tribulations of an ass with “the sense and understanding of a man.” His single consolation lies in his “long ears, whereby I might hear all things that were even afar off.” He will be restored to human shape, he is told, if he can find and eat a rose. He achieves this consummation after a long Asineid of vicissitudes. Disenamored of life, he turns first to philosophy, then to religion, and composes a prayer of thanksgiving to Isis astonishingly like a Christian apostrophe to the Mother of God.¹⁶ He shaves his head, is received into the third order of Isiac initiates, and paves a road back to earth by revealing a dream in which Osiris, “greatest of the gods,” bids him go home and practice law.

Few books embrace so much nonsense, but fewer still have phrased it so pleasantly. Apuleius tries every manner of style and manages each successfully; he loves most a rich and fanciful verbiage ornate with alliteration and assonance, picturesque slang and archaic speech, sentimental diminutives, rhythmic and sometimes poetic prose. An Oriental warmth of coloring accompanies here an Oriental mysticism and sensuality. Perhaps Apuleius wished to suggest, from the background of his experience, that sensual indulgence is an intoxicating ferment which changes us into beasts, and that we can become human again only through the rose of wisdom and piety. He is at his best in the incidental stories caught by his powerful and perambulating ears; so an old woman comforts a kidnaped maiden by recounting the romance of Cupid and Psyche—¹⁷ how the son of Venus fell in love with a pretty maid, gave her every joy but that of seeing him, aroused his mother to cruel jealousy, and came to a happy ending in the skies. No artist’s brush in many an effort, has bettered the hoar shrew’s tongue in telling the ancient tale.

III. SPAIN

Crossing the straits from Tangier, we pass from one of the newest to one of the oldest provinces of Rome. Standing strategically at the door of the Mediterranean, blessed and cursed with precious minerals that soaked her soil with the blood of greed, crossed with mountain ranges that hindered communications, assimilation, and unity, Spain has felt the full fever of life from the days when Old Stone Age artists painted bisons on the cave walls of Altamira down to our own disordered time. For thirty centuries the Spaniards have been a proud and warlike people, lean and tough, stoically brave, passionate and obstinate, sober and melancholy, frugal and hospitable, courteous and chivalrous, easily provoked to hatred, more easily to love. When the Romans came they found a population even then inextricably diverse: Iberians from Africa (?), Ligurians from Italy, Celts from Gaul, and a layer of Carthaginians at the top. If we may believe their conquerors, the pre-Roman Spaniards were close to barbarism, some living in towns and houses, some in hamlets and huts and caves, sleeping on the floor or the earth, and washing their teeth with urine carefully aged.¹⁸ The men wore black cloaks, the women “long mantles and gay-colored gowns.” In some parts, Strabo reprovingly adds, “the women dance promiscuously with men, taking hold of their hands.”¹⁹

As early as 2000 B.C.. the inhabitants of southeastern Spain—Tartessus, the Phoenician “Tarshish”—had developed a bronze industry whose products were sold throughout the Mediterranean. On this basis Tartessus evolved in the sixth century B.C.. a literature and art that claimed an antiquity of 6000 years. Little remains of it except a few crude statues and a strange polychrome bust in sandstone, The Lady of Elche, carved on Greek models in a strong and flowing Celtic style. About 1000 B.C.. the Phoenicians began to tap the mineral wealth of Spain, and by 800 they had taken Cádiz and Malaga, and built great temples there. Towards 500 B.C.. Greek colonists settled along the northeastern coast. About the same time the Carthaginians, summoned by their Phoenician kin to help suppress a revolt, conquered Tartessus and all south and eastern Spain. The rapid exploitation of the peninsula by Carthage between the First and Second Punic Wars opened the eyes of the Romans to the resources of what they then called “Iberia,” and the passage of Hannibal into Italy was finally outweighed by the movement of the Scipios into Spain. The disunited tribes fought fiercely for their independence; women killed their children rather than let them fall into Roman hands, and captive natives sang their war songs while dying on the cross.²⁰ The conquest took two centuries, but once completed it proved more fundamental than in most other provinces. The Gracchi, Caesar, and Augustus changed the Republic’s policy of ruthlessness to one of courtesy and consideration, with good and lasting results. Romanization proceeded rapidly; Latin was adopted and adapted, the economy expanded and prospered, and soon Spain was contributing poets, philosophers, senators, and emperors to Rome.

From Seneca to Aurelius Spain was the economic mainstay of the Empire. Having enriched Tyre and then Carthage, Spanish minerals now enriched Rome; Spain became to Italy what Mexico and Peru would be to Spain. Gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, lead were mined with modern thoroughness; at Rio Tinto one may still see Roman shafts sunk to great depths through solid quartz, and Roman slag with an astonishingly low percentage of copper left in it.²¹ In these mines slaves and prisoners worked day after day, in many cases never seeing the light of the sun for months.²² Great metallurgical industries rose near the mines. Meanwhile the soil of Spain, despite mountains and arid wastes, produced esparto grass for cord, rope, baskets, bedding, and sandals, nourished prize sheep and a renowned woolen industry, and gave to the Empire the best olives, oil, and wine that antiquity knew. The Guadalquivir, the Tagus, the Ebro, and lesser streams helped a web of Roman roads to carry the products of Spain to her ports and innumerable towns.

Indeed, the most remarkable and characteristic result of Roman rule, here as elsewhere, was the multiplication or expansion of cities. In the province of Baetica (Andalusia) were Carteia (Algeciras), Munda, Malaca, Italica (birthplace of Trajan and Hadrian), Corduba, Hispalis (Seville), and Gades (Cádiz). Corduba, founded 152 B.C.. was a literary center famous for its schools of rhetoric; here were born Lucan, the Senecas, and Saint Paul’s Gallio; this tradition of scholarship would last through the Dark Ages and make Cordova the most learned city in Europe. Gades was the most populous of Spanish towns, and notoriously rich; situated at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, it commanded the Atlantic trade with western Africa, Spain, Gaul, and Britain. Its sensuous dancing girls (puellae Gaditanae) contributed modestly to its fame.

Rome knew Portugal as the province of Lusitania, and Lisbon as Olisipo. At Norba Caesarina, to which the Arabs gave its present name of Alcantara (The Bridge), Trajan’s engineers threw across the Tagus the most perfect of existing Roman bridges; its majestic arches, 100 feet wide and 180 above the stream, still carry a busy four-lane road. The capital of Lusitania was Emerita (Mérida), which boasted many temples, three aqueducts, a circus, a theater, a naumachia, and a bridge 2500 feet long. Farther east, in the province of Tarraconensis, Segovia still enjoys the pure water brought in by an aqueduct built in Trajan’s reign. South of it was Toletum (Toledo), known in Roman times for its ironworks. On the eastern coast rose the great city of Nova Carthago (Cartagena), rich with mining, fisheries, and trade. Out in the Mediterranean lay the Baleares, where Palma and Pollentia were already old and flourishing cities. Northward on the coast were Valentia, Tarraco (Tarragona), Barcino (Barcelona), and, just below the Pyrenees, the old Greek town of Emporiae. A short sail around the eastern end of the mountains, and the traveler found himself in Gaul.

IV. GAUL

In those days, when all ships were of moderate draught, even ocean-going vessels could navigate the Rhone from Marseilles to Lyons; smaller boats could continue to within thirty miles of the upper Rhine; after-a short haul over level land goods could sail by a hundred cities and a thousand villas into the North Sea. Similar overland leaps led from the Rhone and the Saône to the Loire and the Atlantic, from the Aude to the Garonne and Bordeaux, from the Saone to the Seine and the English Channel. Trade followed these waterways and created cities at their meeting points. France, like Egypt, was the gift of her streams.

In a sense French civilization began with “Aurignacian man” 30,000 years before Christ; for even then, as the caves of Montignac attest, there were artists capable of rich color and vivid line. From that Old Stone Age of hunting and herding, France passed, about 12,000 B.C., to the settled life and tillage of the Neolithic Age, and, after ten long millenniums, to the Age of Bronze. About 900 B.C.. a new race, “Alpine” and roundheaded, began to filter in from Germany and spread across France to Britain and Ireland and down into Spain. These “Celts” brought with them the Halstatt iron culture of Austria, and about 550 B.C.. they imported from Switzerland the more developed iron technology of La Tene. When Rome became conscious of France she named it Celtica; only in Caesar’s time was this changed to Gallia, Gaul.

The immigrants displaced some native groups and settled down in independent tribes whose names still lurk in the cities they built.^* The Gauls, said Caesar, were tall, muscular, and strong;²³ they combed their rich blond hair back over their heads and down the nape of their necks; some had beards, many had powerful mustaches curling around their mouths. They had brought from the East, perhaps from the ancient Iranians, the custom of wearing breeches; to these they added tunics dyed in many colors and embroidered with flowers, and striped cloaks fastened at the shoulders. They loved jewelry and wore gold ornaments—even if nothing else—in war.²⁴ They liked abundant meat, beer, and undiluted wine, being “intemperate by nature” if we may believe Appian.²⁵ Strabo calls them “simple and high-spirited, boastful . . . insufferable when victorious, scared out of their wits when defeated”; ²⁶ but it is not always a boon that our enemies should write a book. Poseidonius was shocked to find that they hung the severed heads of their foes from the necks of their horses.²⁷ They were easily aroused to argument and combat, and sometimes, to amuse themselves at banquets, they fought duels to the death. “They were,” says Caesar, “our equals in valor and warlike zeal.”²⁸ Ammianus Marcellinus describes them as

at all ages fit for military service. The old man marches out on a campaign with courage equal to that of the man in the prime of life. ... In fact a whole band of foreigners will be unable to cope with one Gaul if he call in his wife, who is usually far stronger and fiercer than he, above all when she swells her neck, gnashes her teeth, and poising her huge arms, begins to rain down blows and kicks like shots from a catapult.²⁹

The Gauls believed in a variety of gods, now too dead to mind anonymity. Belief in a pleasant life after death was so keen as to be in Caesar’s judgment an important source of Gallic bravery. On the strength of it, says Valerius Maximus, men lent money to be repaid in heaven; and Poseidonius claimed to have seen Gauls at a funeral write letters to their friends in the other world and throw them upon the pyre so that the dead man might deliver them;³⁰ we should enjoy a Gaul’s opinion of these Roman tales. A priestly class, the Druids, controlled all education and vigorously inculcated religious belief. They conducted a colorful ritual, in sacred groves more often than in temples; and to appease the gods they offered human sacrifice of men condemned to death for crime; the custom will appear barbarous to those who have not seen an electrocution. The Druids were the only learned, perhaps the only literate, part of the community. They composed hymns, poems, and historical records; they studied “the stars and their movements, the size of the universe and the earth, and the order of nature,”³¹ and formulated a practicable calendar. They served as judges and had great influence at the courts of the tribal kings. Pre-Roman, like medieval, Gaul was a political feudalism clothed in theocracy.

Under these kings and priests Celtic Gaul reached its zenith in the fourth century B.C. Population expanded with the productivity of the La Tène techniques, and the result was a series of wars for land. About 400 B.C. the Celts, who already held most of central Europe as well as Gaul, conquered Britain, Spain, and north Italy. In 390 they pushed south to Rome; in 278 they pillaged Delphi and conquered Phrygia. A century later their vigor began to wane, partly through the softening influence of wealth and Greek ways, partly through the political atomism of feudal barons. Just as in medieval France the kings broke the power of the barons and established a unified state, conversely, in the century before Caesar, the lords of the manors broke the power of the kings and left Gaul more fragmentary than before. The Celtic front was pushed back everywhere except in Ireland; the Carthaginians subdued the Celts in Spain, the Romans drove them out of Italy, the Cimbri and Teutones overran them in Germany and southern Gaul. In 125 B.C.. the Romans, eager to control the road to Spain, conquered southern Gaul and made it a Roman province. In 58 B.C. the Gallic leaders begged Caesar to help them repel a German invasion. Caesar complied and named his own reward.

Caesar and Augustus reorganized Gaul into four provinces: Gallia Narbonensis in the south, known to the Romans as provincia, and to us as Provence, then largely Hellenized through the Greek settlements on the Mediterranean coast; Aquitania in the southwest, chiefly Iberian in population; in the center Gallia Lugdunensis, overwhelmingly Celtic; and in the northeast Belgica, predominantly German. Rome recognized and abetted these ethnic divisions to forestall united revolt. The tribal cantons were retained as administrative areas; the magistrates were chosen by owners of property, whose allegiance was secured by Rome’s support of them against the lower classes; and Roman citizenship was granted as a prize to loyal and useful Gauls. A provincial assembly of representatives chosen from every canton met each year in Lyons; at first it limited itself cautiously to the ritual of Augustan worship, but soon it passed on to sending requests to the Roman governors, then recommendations,.then demands. The administration of justice was taken out of the hands of the Druids, who were suppressed, and France received Roman law. For almost a century Gaul submitted peacefully to the new yoke; for a moment in A.D. 68, and again in 71, revolt flared under Vindex and Civilis; but the people gave scant support to these movements, and the love of liberty yielded to the enjoyment of prosperity, security, and peace.

Under the Pax Romana Gaul became one of the richest parts of the Empire. Rome marveled at the wealth of the Gallic nobles who entered the Senate under Claudius, and a century later Florus contrasted the flourishing economy of Gaul with the decline of Italy.³³ Forests were cleared, swamps were drained, agriculture was improved even to the introduction of a mechanical reaper,³⁴ and the grape and the olive spread into every canton of Gaul. Already in the first century Pliny and Columella praised the wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. There were large estates tilled by serfs and slaves and owned by the forerunners of medieval feudal lords; but there were also many small proprietors, and wealth was more evenly distributed in ancient Gaul, as in modern France, than in almost any other civilized state. Progress was especially rapid in industry. By A.D. 200 Gallic potters and ironworkers were stealing the markets of Germany and the West from Italy, Gallic weavers were doing the largest textile business in the Empire, and the factories of Lyons were turning out not only commercial glass, but wares of artistic excellence.³⁵ Industrial techniques were handed down from father to son and formed a precious part of the classical heritage. Over 13,000 miles of road, built or improved by Roman engineers, teemed with transport and trade.

Enriched with this expanded economic life, the towns of ancient Celtica became the cities of Roman Gaul. In Aquitania the capital, Burdigala (Bordeaux), was one of the busiest of Atlantic ports; Limonum (Limoges), Avaricum (Bourges), and Augustonemetum (Clermont-Ferrand) were already rich; the last paid Zenodotus 400,000 sesterces for a colossus of Mercury.³⁶ In Gallia Narbonensis there were so many cities that Pliny described it as “more like Italy than a province.”³⁷ Farthest west was Tolosa (Toulouse), famous for its schools. Narbo (Narbonne), capital of the province, was in our first century the greatest city of Gaul, the chief port of exit for Gallic goods to Italy and Spain; “here,” Sidonius Apollinaris would say, “are walls, promenades, taverns, arches, porticoes, a forum, a theater, temples, baths, markets, meadows, lakes, a bridge, and the sea.”³⁸ Farther east, on the great Via Domitia from Spain to Italy, lay Nemausus (Nîmes). Its pretty Maison Carrée was raised by Augustus and the town to commemorate his grandsons Lucius and Caius Caesar; its inner colonnade is lamentably sunk into the cella wall, but its free Corinthian columns are as lovely as any in Rome. The amphitheater, which seated 20,000, is still the scene of periodical pageantry. The Roman aqueduct that brought Nîmes fresh water became in time the Pont du Gard, or Bridge of the Gard River; standing today as a gigantic ruin in the rugged countryside beyond the city, its massive lower arches contrast to fine effect with the smaller arches above them to make the structure a revealing witness of Rome’s engineering art.

Eastward on the Mediterranean, at the mouth of the Rhone, Caesar founded Arelate (Aries), in the hope that it would replace rebellious Massalia as a shipbuilding center and port. Massalia (Marseilles), already old when Caesar was born, remained Greek in language and culture until his death. Through its harbor Hellenic agriculture, arboriculture, viticulture, and culture had entered Gaul; here, above all, western Europe exchanged its goods for those of the classic world. It was one of the great university centers of the Empire, especially renowned for its school of law. It declined after Caesar, but maintained its ancient status as a free city, independent of the provincial governor. Farther east were Forum Iulii (Fréjus), Antipolis (Antibes), and Nicaea (Nice)—this in the little province of the Maritime Alps. Sailing up the Rhone from Arelate the traveler came to Avenio (Avignon) and Arausio (Orange); here a powerful arch survives from Augustus’ days, and an immense Roman theater still hears ancient plays.

The largest of the Gallic provinces was Gallia Lugdunensis, named from Lugdunum (Lyons), its capital. Situated at the confluence of the Rhone and the Saône, and at the crossing of great highways built by Agrippa, the city became the trading center of a rich region and the capital of all Gaul. Iron, glass, and ceramic industries helped to sustain a population of 200,000 in our first century.⁴⁰ Northward lay Cabillonum (Chalon-sur-Saône), Caesarodunum (Tours), Augustodunum (Autun), Cenabum (Orléans), and Lutetia (Paris). “I have spent the winter” (357-58), writes the Emperor Julian, “in our beloved Lutetia, for so the Gauls term the little town of the Parisii, a small island in the river. . . . Good wine is grown here.”⁴¹

Belgica, which included parts of France and Switzerland, was almost entirely agricultural; its industry was for the most part attached to the villas whose numerous remains suggest a baronial life of comfort and luxury. Here Augustus founded the cities now known as Soissons, St. Quentin, Senlis, Beauvais, and Trèves. The last, Augusta Trevirorum, rose to prominence as the headquarters of the army defending the Rhine; under Diocletian it replaced Lyons as the capital of Gaul, and in the fifth century it was the greatest city north of the Alps. It is still rich in classic remains—the Porta Nigra in its Roman wall, the Baths of St. Barbara, the Tomb of the Secundini family at nearby Igel, and the crude reliefs on the fortress blocks of neighboring Neumagen.

In and around these towns life slowly changed its surface and obstinately renewed its elements. The Gauls kept their character, their breeches, and for three centuries their language. Latin triumphed in the sixth century, chiefly through its use by the Roman Church, but it was already being clipped and nosed into French. In Gaul Rome achieved her greatest triumph in the transmission of civilization. Great French historians like Jullian and Funck-Brentano ⁴³ have thought that France would have fared better without the Roman conquest, but a still greater historian believed that the Roman conquest was the sole alternative to a German conquest of Gaul. If Caesar had not won there, says Mommsen,

the migration of peoples would have occurred 400 years sooner than it did, and would have come at a time when Italian civilization had not become naturalized either in Gaul, or on the Danube, or in Africa and Spain. Inasmuch as the great Roman general and statesman with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the rival antagonists of the Romano-Greek world; inasmuch as with firm hand he established the new system of aggressive defense, down even to its details, and taught men to protect the frontiers of the Empire by rivers and artificial ramparts ... he gained for the Greco-Roman culture the interval necessary to civilize the West.⁴⁴

The Rhine was the frontier between classic and primitive civilization. Gaul could not defend that frontier; Rome did; and that fact determined the history of Europe to this day.

V. BRITAIN

About 1200 B.C.. a branch of the Celts crossed over from Gaul and settled in England. They found there a mingled population of dark-haired people, possibly Iberian, and light-haired Scandinavians. They conquered these natives, married them, and spread through England and Wales. About 100 B.C.. (for so the egocentric foreshortening of history telescopes eventful centuries, and erases vital generations from a crowded memory) another branch of Celts came from the Continent and dispossessed their kinsmen of southern and eastern Britain. When Caesar came he found the island peopled by several independent tribes, each with its expansive king. He gave to all the population the name Britami, from a Gallic tribe, so called, just south of the Channel, in the belief that the same tribe inhabited both shores.

Celtic Britain was in customs, language, and religion essentially like Celtic Gaul, but its civilization was less advanced. It passed from bronze to iron some six centuries before Christ, three centuries after Gaul. Pytheas, the Massiliot explorer, sailing the Atlantic to England about 350 B.C., found the Cantii of Kent already prosperous with agriculture and trade. The soil was fertile from abundant rain and contained rich ores of copper, iron, tin, and lead. By Caesar’s time domestic industry was able to supply an active commerce among the tribes and with the Continent, and coins were minted in bronze and gold.⁴⁵ His invasions were reconnaissance raids; he brought back the double assurance that the tribes were incapable of united resistance and that the crops were adequate to feed an invading army coming at the proper time. A century later (A.D. 43) Claudius crossed the Channel with 40,000 men whose discipline, armament, and skill proved too much for the natives; Britain in her turn became a Roman province. In 61 a British tribal queen, Boudicca or Boadicea, led a furious revolt, alleging that Roman officers had ravished both her daughters, plundered her realm, and sold many of its freemen into slavery. While the Roman governor Paulinus was busy conquering the Isle of Man, Boudicca’s army overcame the single legion that opposed it and marched upon Londinium—already, says Tacitus, “the chief residence of merchants, and a great mart of trade.”⁴⁶ Every Roman found there or in Verulamium (St. Albans) was killed; 70,000 Romans and their allies were slain before Paulinus and his legions caught up with the rebel force. Boudicca, standing with her daughters in a chariot, fought heroically in defeat. She drank poison, and 80,000 Britons were put to the sword.

Tacitus tells how his father-in-law Agricola, as governor of Britain (A.D. 78-84), brought civilization to a “rude, scattered, and warlike people” by establishing schools, spreading the use of Latin, and encouraging cities and rich men to build temples, basilicas, and public baths. “By degrees,” says the caustic historian, “the charms of vice gained admission to British hearts; baths, porticoes, and elegant banquets grew into vogue; and the new manners, which in reality only served to sweeten slavery, were by the unsuspecting Britons called the arts of polished humanity.”⁴⁷ In swift campaigns Agricola carried these arts, and Roman rule, to the Clyde and the Forth, defeated an army of 30,000 Scots, and wished to go farther when Domitian recalled him. Hadrian built a wall (122-27) seventy miles across the island from Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne as a defense against not-unsuspecting Scots; and twenty years later Lollius raised farther north the thirty-three-mile Wall of Antoninus between the firths of Clyde and Forth. For over two centuries these fortifications kept Britain safe for Rome.

As Rome’s rule achieved stability it became more lenient. The cities were managed by native senates, assemblies, and magistrates, and the countryside was left, as in Gaul, to tribal chieftains amenable to Roman surveillance. It was not so urban a civilization as Italy’s, nor so rich as Gaul’s; but it was under Roman stimulus and protection that most British cities now took form. Four of them were Roman “colonies,” whose freemen enjoyed Roman citizenship: Camulodunum (Colchester), the first Roman capital of Britain, and the seat of the provincial council; Lindum, whose modern name Lincoln declares its ancient privilege; Eboracum (York), an important military post; and Glevum, whose name Gloucester merges Glevum with Chester, the Anglo-Saxon word for town.^* Chester, Winchester, Dorchester, Chichester, Leicester, Silchester, and Manchester appear to have had their beginnings in the first two centuries of Roman rule. These were small towns, each with some 6000 souls; but they had paved and drained streets, forums, basilicas, temples, and houses with stone foundations and tiled roofs. Viroconium (Wroxeter) had a basilica accommodating 6000 persons, and public baths where hundreds could bathe at once. The hot springs of Aquae Salis (“Salt Waters”), now Bath, made it a fashionable resort in ancient days, as its surviving thermae show. Londinium rose to economic and military importance because of its position on the Thames and its radiating roads. It grew to a population of 60,000 and soon replaced Camulodunum as Britain’s capital.⁴⁹

Most of the homes in Roman London were of brick and stucco, in smaller towns, of wood. Climate determined their architecture: a gable roof to shed rain and snow, and many windows to let in whatever sun might shine; for even “on clear days,” said Strabo, “the sun is to be seen only for three or four hours.”⁵⁰ But interiors followed the Roman style—mosaic floors, large bathrooms, muraled walls, and (far more than in Italian homes) central heating by hot-air conduits in walls and floors. Coal—mined from surface veins—was used not only for warming houses but for industrial processes like smelting lead. Apparently the mines of ancient Britain were owned by the state, but were leased to private entrepreneurs.⁵¹ There was a factory (fabrica) at Bath for the manufacture of iron weapons,⁵² and probably the making of pottery, bricks, and tiles had reached the factory stage; but most industries were carried on in homes, small shops, and villas. Five thousand miles of Roman roads, and innumerable waterways, were the arteries of a brisk internal trade. A modest foreign commerce, inverting the custom of Britain today, exported raw materials for manufactured goods.

How deeply did Roman civilization, in its four centuries of domination, penetrate the life and soul of Britain? Latin became the language of politics, law, literature, and the educated minority, but in the countryside and among many workers in the towns the Celtic tongue survived; even now, in Wales and the Isle of Man, it holds its own. Roman schools in Britain spread literacy and determined the Roman form of the English alphabet; and a stream of Latin words poured into English speech. Temples were built to Roman gods, but the common man cherished his Celtic deities and feasts. Even in the cities Rome sank no lasting roots. The people submitted apathetically to a rule that brought them a fructifying peace and such prosperity as the island would not experience again until the Industrial Revolution.

VI. THE BARBARIANS

The decisions of Augustus and Tiberius not to attempt the conquest of Germany were among the pivotal events of European history. Had Germany been conquered and Romanized like Gaul, nearly all Europe west of Russia would have had one organization, one government, one classic culture, perhaps one tongue; and central Europe might have served as a buffer against those eastern hordes whose pressure upon the Germans caused the Germanic invasions of Italy.

We call them Germans, but they themselves have never used this name, and no one knows when it came.^* They were in classic days a medley of independent tribes occupying Europe between the Rhine and the Vistula, between the Danube and the North and Baltic Seas. Gradually, in the two centuries from Augustus to Aurelius, they passed from migratory hunting and herding to agriculture and village life; but they were still so far nomadic that they rapidly exhausted the land they tilled and then moved on to conquer new acres by the sword. If we may believe Tacitus, war was the German’s meat and drink:

To cultivate the earth, and wait the regular produce of the seasons, is not the maxim of a German; you will more readily persuade him to attack the enemy and provoke honorable wounds on the field of battle. To earn by the sweat of your brow what you might gain at the price of your blood is in the opinion of a German a sluggish principle, unworthy of a soldier.⁵³

The Roman historian, lamenting the deterioration of his own people under luxury and peace, described with the exaggeration of a moralist the martial qualities of the Germans, and the ardor with which the women spurred them into battle, often fighting by their side. Flight from the enemy meant lifelong disgrace, in many cases suicide. Strabo described the Germans as “wilder and taller than the Gauls,”⁵⁴ and Seneca, as if he had read Tacitus, drew ominous conclusions: “To those vigorous bodies, to those souls unwitting of pleasures, luxury, and wealth, add but a little more tactical skill and discipline—I say no more; you [Romans] will only be able to hold your own against them by returning to the virtues of your sires.”⁵⁵

In peace, Tacitus reports, these warriors were correspondingly indolent. The men spent their time (presumably after hunting or harvesting) in eating heavy meals of meat and drinking rivers of beer, while the women and children did the work of the home.⁵⁶ The German bought his wife from her father by a gift of cattle or weapons; he had the power of life and death over her and their children, subject to the approval of the tribal assembly; nevertheless, women were held in high honor, were often asked to decide tribal disputes, and were as free to divorce their husbands as these were to divorce them.⁵⁷ Some chieftains had several wives, but the usual German family was monogamous and maintained (we are assured) a lofty level of marital morality. Adultery was “seldom heard of” and was punished in the woman by cutting off her hair and driving her naked through the streets to be flogged as she fled. The wife was allowed to practice abortion if she wished,⁵⁸ but normally she bore many children. A man without children was so rare that wills were not made; it was assumed that the property of the family would go down from father to son, generation after generation.⁵⁹

Four classes composed the population: (1) bondsmen, some of them slaves, most of them serfs bound to the soil and obliged to pay the landowner in produce; (2) freedmen—unfranchised renters; (3) freemen—landowners and warriors; and (4) nobles—landowners who traced their pedigrees to the gods, but based their power upon substantial patrimonies and armed bodyguards (comites, companions, “counts”). The tribal assembly was composed of nobles, guards, and freemen; they came in arms, chose the chief or king, approved the proposals submitted to them by clashing their spears, or rejected them by a majority of grunts. The second and third classes were partly engaged in handicrafts and the metallurgical industries, in which the Germans excelled; the fourth provided the lords and knights and chivalry of feudal Germany.

Very little cultural superstructure was added to this simple social organization. Religion had at this time barely emerged from nature worship into the cult of anthropomorphic deities. Tacitus calls them Mars, Mercury, and Hercules—probably Tiu (Tyr), Wodin (Odin), and Donar (Tor); we still unwittingly commemorate them, and Freya, the goddess of love, on four days of every week. There was a virgin goddess Hertha (Mother Earth), impregnated by a sky-god; and every imagination and need was supplied by a varied population of fairies, elves, cobolds, nixes, giants, and dwarfs. Human sacrifice was offered to Wodin, perhaps tastier animals to other gods. Worship was conducted in the open air in forests and groves, for the Germans thought it absurd to confine a nature spirit in an abode built by human hands. There was no powerful sacerdotal class like the Druids of Gaul or Britain, but there were priests and priestesses who presided over religious ceremonies, sat as judges in criminal cases, and divined the future by studying the motions and neighings of white horses. As in Gaul, there were bards who sang in rude verse the legends and history of their tribes. A small minority could read and write, and adapted the Latin characters to form the “runes” that serve for their alphabet. Art was primitive, but skillful work was done in gold.

When Rome withdrew her legions from Germany she retained control of the Rhine from source to mouths and divided the majestic valley into two provinces—Upper and Lower Germany. The latter included Holland and the Rhineland south to Cologne. This once lovely city, known to the Romans as Colonia Agrippinensis, had been made a colony (A.D. 50) in honor of Nero’s mother, who had been born there; half a century later it was the most opulent settlement on the Rhine. The province of Upper Germany followed the Rhine southward through Moguntiacum (Mayence), Aquae Aureliae (Baden-Baden), Argentoratum (Strasbourg), and Augusta Rauricorum (Augst) to Vindonissa (Windisch). Nearly all these towns had the usual array of temples, basilicas, theaters, baths, and public statuary. Many of the legionaries sent by Rome to guard the Rhine lived outside their camps, married German girls, and remained as citizens when their term of service was complete. The Rhineland was probably as thickly settled and affluent in Roman days as at any time before the nineteenth century.

Between the Rhine and the Danube, as we have seen, Rome’s military engineers built a fortified road (limes), with a fortress every nine miles, and 300 miles of wall. It served Rome for a century, but availed little when the Roman birth rate fell too far below the German. Still weaker as a frontier was the Danube, which the ancients considered the longest river in the world. South of it lay the half-barbarous provinces of Raetia, Noricum, and Pannonia, approximately composing what our youth knew as Austria-Hungary and Serbia. On the site of modern Augsburg (i.e., Augustus’ town) the Romans established a colony, Augusta Vindelicorum, as a main station on the road from Italy over the Brenner Pass to the Danube. On the river they built two fortress cities—at Vindobona, now Vienna, and at Aquincum on the heights from which Buda looks down upon Pesth. In southeastern Pannonia, on the Save River west of the modern Belgrade, the city of Sirmium (Mitrovica) rose to be in Diocletian’s time one of the four imperial capitals. South of Pannonia, in the province of Dalmatia, the commercial energy of Greeks, Romans, and natives had developed the Adriatic ports of Salona (Spalato), Apollonia (near Valona), and Dyrrhachium (Durazzo). From these provinces below the Danube came imperial Rome’s sturdiest soldiers and, in the third century, the martial emperors who would for 200 years hold back the barbarian avalanche. East of Pannonia lay Dacia (Rumania), with its now vanished capital of Sarmizegetusa. South and east of this Moesia (parts of Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Bulgaria) boasted two cities on the Danube—Singidunum (Belgrade) and Troesmis (Iglitza); one near the Isker—Sardica (Sofia); and three major towns on the Black Sea—Istrus, Tomi (Constanta), and Odessus (Varna). In these harassed settlements Greek civilization and Roman arms struggled in vain to maintain themselves against the Goths, Sarmatians, Huns, and other barbarian tribes breeding and wandering north of the great stream.

It was Rome’s inability to civilize these provinces south of the Danube that led to her fall. The task was too great for a people suffering from old age; the vitality of the master race was ebbing in sterile comfort while the tribes of the north were advancing in reckless health. When Trajan subsidized the Sarmatians to keep the peace it was the beginning of the end; when Marcus Aurelius brought thousands of Germans into the Empire as settlers, the dikes were down. German soldiers were welcomed into the Roman army and rose to positions of command; German families multiplied in Italy while Italian families died. In this process the movement of Romanization was reversed: the barbarians were barbarizing Rome.

Nevertheless, it was a magnificent and precious achievement that the West, if not the North, had been won for the classical heritage. There, at least, the arts of peace had emerged from the travail of war, and men could turn their swords into plowshares without decaying in urban ease and slums. Out of the earthy vigor of Spain and Gaul a new civilization would rise when the barbarian flood would fall; and the seed of despot centuries would come to fruit and pardon in the lands where the merciless legions had brought the law of Rome and the enkindling light of Greece.

CHAPTER XXIII

Roman Greece

I. PLUTARCH

ROME tried hard to be generous to Greece and did not quite fail. No garrisons were placed in the new province of Achaea; less was exacted from it than its own taxgatherers had claimed before; the city-states were allowed to govern themselves by their old constitutions and laws; and many of them—Athens, Sparta, Plataea, Delphi, and others—were “free cities” exempt from all restrictions except the right to wage foreign or class war.

Nevertheless, hungry for its ancient liberties, and bled by Roman generals, moneylenders, and businessmen skilled in buying cheap and selling dear, Greece joined in Mithridates’ revolt and paid the heaviest penalty. Athens suffered a devastating siege, and Delphi, Elis, and Epidaurus were pillaged of their sanctuary hoards. A generation later Caesar and Pompey, then Antony and Brutus, fought their duels on Greek territory, conscripted Greek men, requisitioned Greek crops and gold, levied twenty years’ taxes in two, and left the cities destitute. Under Augustus Greek Asia recovered, but Greece herself remained poor, ruined not so much by the Roman conquest as by a stifling despotism in Sparta, a chaotic freedom in Athens, a blighting sterility in soil and men. Her most enterprising sons deserted her for younger and richer lands. The rise of new powers in Egypt, Carthage, and Rome, and the development of industry in the Hellenistic East, left the homeland of the classic spirit outmoded and forlorn. Rome loaded Greece with compliments and ravaged her art: Scaurus took 3000 statues for his theater, Caligula ordered the husband of his mistress to comb Greece for statuary, and Nero alone took half the sculptures of Delphi. Not till Hadrian would Athens smile again.

Epirus bore the brunt of Rome’s anger in the Macedonian Wars; the Senate delivered it to the rapine of the soldiers, and 150,000 Epirots were sold as slaves. Augustus built a new capital for Epirus at Nicopolis to celebrate his triumph at near-by Actium; civilization must have had some homage there, since the City of Victory gave Epictetus an audience and a home. Macedonia fared better than its loyal neighbor; it was rich in minerals and timber, and its commercial life was quickened by the Via Egnatia that spanned it and Thrace from Apollonia and Dyrrhachium to Byzantium. On this great highway, still in part preserved, lay the chief cities of the province—Edessa, Pella, and Thessalonica. This last—known to us as Salonika, but to modern Greeks by its ancient name (Victory of Thessaly)—was the capital of the province, seat of the provincial council, and one of the great ports of trade between the Balkans and Asia. Thrace, farther east, devoted itself to agriculture, herding, and mining; but it had considerable cities at Serdica (Sofia), Philippopolis its capital, Adrianople, Perinthus, and Byzantium (Istanbul). Here at the Golden Horn the merchants and fishmongers grew rich while the Greek settlers of the hinterland gave way to the encroaching barbarians; all the grain of the interior came down to its docks, all the commerce of Scythia and the Black Sea paid toll as it passed by, and the fish almost leaped into the net as they poured through the narrow Bosporus. Soon Constantine would recognize this site as the key city of the classic world.

Thessaly, south of Macedonia, specialized in wheat and fine horses. Euboea, the great island named of old (like Boeotia) for its fine cattle, was described by Dio Chrysostom¹ as reverting to barbarism in our second century; here, above all, the discouragement of the poor by the concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a few families, the discouragement of the rich by ever-rising taxes and liturgies, and the discouragement of parentage by selfish wealth and desperate poverty had almost wiped out a once thriving agricultural population, and cattle grazed within the walls of Chalcis and Eretria. Boeotia had not recovered from the death and taxes laid upon it by Sulla’s campaigns; “Thebes,” said Strabo, “is only a village,” huddled into what had once been merely its Cadmea or citadel. A century of peace, however, brought some prosperity to Plataea; and Chaeronea, on whose plains Philip and Sulla had won empires, retained enough charm to keep its most famous citizen; it had become so small, said Plutarch, that he would not make it smaller by leaving it.² In his calm career and genial thought we find a fairer side of a somber scene, a decent middle class clinging to ancient virtues, capable of civic devotion, warm friendship, and parental love. There is no more pleasant character in our tale than Plutarch of Chaeronea.

He was born there about A.D. 46, and died there about 126. He was a student at Athens when Nero collected triumphs in Greece. He must have had a fair income, for he traveled in Egypt and Asia Minor and twice in Italy; he lectured in Greek at Rome and seems to have served his country in some diplomatic role. He liked the great capital and the good manners and honorable life of its new aristocracy; he admired their stoic code, and agreed with Ennius that Rome had been made by morality and character. As he contemplated these living nobles and the noble dead, the thought came to him of comparing the heroes of Rome with those of Greece. He proposed not merely to write history or even biography, but to teach virtue and heroism by historic exemplars; even his Parallel Lives were in his mind Moralia. He was always a teacher and never lost a chance to tie a moral to a tale; but who has ever done it more gracefully? He warns us, in his “Alexander,” that he is more interested in character than in history; he hopes that by pairing and comparing great Romans with great Greeks he will pass on some moral stimulus, some heroic impulse, to his readers. With disarming candor he confesses that he himself has become a better man through keeping company so long with distinguished men.³

We must not expect to find in him the conscience and accuracy of a proper historian; he is rich in errors of name and place and date and occasionally (if we may judge) misunderstands events; he even fails in two major tasks of the biographer—to show the derivation of his subject’s character and work from heredity, environment, and circumstance, and the development of character through growth, responsibility, and crisis; in Plutarch, as in Heracleitus, a man’s character is his fate. But no one who has read the Lives can feel their shortcomings; these are lost in the vivid narrative, the exciting episodes, the fascinating anecdotes, the wise comments, the noble style. In all these 1500 pages there is not a line of padding; every sentence counts. A hundred eminent men—generals, poets, and philosophers—have borne witness to the book; “it is,” said Mme Roland, “the pasture of great souls.”⁴ “I can hardly do without Plutarch,” wrote Montaigne; “it is my breviary.”⁵ Shakespeare takes many stories here, and his view of Brutus goes back through Plutarch to Roman aristocrats. Napoleon carried the Lives with him almost everywhere; and Heine, reading them, could hardly restrain himself from leaping upon a horse and riding forth to conquer France. Greece has not left us a more precious book.

Having seen the Mediterranean world Plutarch returned to Chaeronea, raised four sons and a daughter, lectured and wrote, journeyed now and then to Athens, but for the most part shared to the end of his days the simple life of his native town. He thought it an obligation to combine public office with his scholarly pursuits. His fellow citizens elected him building inspector, then chief magistrate, then Boeotarch—member of the national council. He presided over municipal ceremonies and festivals, and became in his spare moments a priest of the revived oracle at Delphi. He thought it unwise to reject the old faith because of its intellectual incredibility; the vital thing was not the creed but the support it gave to man’s weak morality, the reinforcing bond it wove among the members and generations of a family and a state. The thrill of religious emotion was in his judgment the most deepening experience of life. Tolerant as well as pious, he almost founded the study of comparative religion by his treatises on Roman and Egyptian cults.⁶ All deities, he argued, are aspects of one supreme being, timeless, indescribable, so far removed from earthly and temporal affairs that intermediary spirits (daimones) must create and regulate the world. There are also evil spirits, marshaled by some master demon who is the source and soul of all the chaos, irrationality, and viciousness in nature and man. It is good, Plutarch thought, to believe in personal immortality—a rewarding Heaven, a cleansing Purgatory, a punishing Hell; he was comforted by the possibility that a stay in Purgatory might purify even Nero, and that only a few would suffer eternal damnation.⁷ He denounced the terrors of superstition as worse than atheism, but he accepted divination, oracles, necromancy, and the prophetic power of dreams. He did not pretend to be an original philosopher; like Apuleius and so many others of that age, he described himself as an adapter of Plato. He condemned the Epicureans for replacing the fear of Hell with the gloom of annihilation, and criticized the “repugnances” of Stoicism; but he held, like a Stoic, that “to follow God and to obey reason are the same thing.”⁸

His lectures and essays have properly been collected under the title Moralia, for most of them are simple and genial preachments on the wisdom of life. They discuss everything, from the advisability of keeping old men in public office to the priority of the chicken or the egg. Plutarch is fond of his library, but confesses that good health is more precious than good books:

Some men, led by gluttony, rush off to join in drinking bouts, as if they were laying in provisions for a siege. . . . The less expensive foods are always more helpful. . . . When, in a precipitate retreat, Artaxerxes Memnon had nothing to eat but barley-bread and figs, he exclaimed, “What a pleasure is this, which has never been mine before!” . . . Wine is the most beneficial of beverages, provided there is a happy combination of it with the occasion as well as with water. . . . Especially to be feared are indigestions arising from meats, for they are depressing at the outset, and a pernicious residue from them remains behind. It is best to accustom the body not to require meat in addition to other food. For the earth yields in abundance many things not only for nourishment but for comfort and enjoyment. But since custom has become a sort of unnatural second nature, our use of meat should be ... as a prop and support of our diet; we should use other foods . . . more in accord with nature, and less dulling to the reasoning faculty, which, as it were, is kindled from plain and light substances.⁹

He follows Plato in advocating equal opportunity for women, and gives many examples of cultured ladies in antiquity (there were some in his own circle); but he views adultery by the man with all the lenience of a pagan male:

If a man in private life, who is incontinent and dissolute in regard to his pleasures, commit some peccadillo with a paramour or maidservant, his wedded wife ought not to be indignant or angry, but she should reason that it is respect for her that leads him to share his licentiousness with another woman.¹⁰

Nevertheless, we rise from these charming essays warmed by the fellowship of a man humane, essentially wholesome, and complete. We are not offended by the commonness of his ideas; his moderation is a welcome antidote to the ideological hysteria of our time; his good sense, his kindly humor, and his engaging illustrations carry us on unresisting, even over the shoals of his platitudes. It is refreshing to find a philosopher who is wise enough to be happy. Let us be thankful, he counsels us, for the common boons and graces of life, and feel them none the less gladly for their permanence:

We must not forget those blessings and comforts which we share with many more, but must . . . joy in this, that we live, that we have our health, that we behold the light of the sun. . . . Will not the good man consider every day a festival? . . . For the world is the most august of temples, and most worthy of its Lord. Into this temple man is introduced at his birth, into the presence not of statues made with hands and motionless, but such as the Divine Mind has manifested to our senses . . . even the sun, moon, and stars, and the rivers ever pouring forth fresh water, and the earth producing food.... As this life is the most perfect of initiations into the most exalted of mysteries, we should ever be filled with good cheer and rejoicing.¹¹

II. INDIAN SUMMER

Plutarch exemplifies two movements of his time: the return to religion and the passing renaissance of Greek literature and philosophy. The former was universal, the latter was confined to Athens and the Greek East. Six cities of the Peloponnesus prospered, but contributed little to Greek thought. Western commerce and a busy textile industry kept Patrae alive through Roman and medieval history even to our day. Olympia throve on the leavings of tourists coming to see Pheidias’ Zeus or the Olympic games. It is one of the pleasantest aspects of Greek history that these quadrennial contests continued from 776 B.C. to A.D. 394, when Theodosius ended them. As in the days of Prodicus and Herodotus, philosophers and historians came to harangue the crowd assembling for the festival. Dio Chrysostom describes authors reading “their stupid compositions” to transient listeners, poets reciting their verses, rhetoricians thumping the air, and “sophists in great number, like gorgeous peacocks,” coming to blow their wind over the multitude;¹² he proved no more silent than the rest. Epictetus pictures the spectators cramped and sweltering in the unshaded stands, burned by the sun or drenched by the rain, but forgetting everything in the tumult and the shouting that marked the final moments of each bout or race.¹³ The old Nemean, Isthmian, Pythian, and Panathenaic games continued; new ones were added like the Panhellenia of Hadrian; and many of them included competitions in poetry, oratory, or music. “Can you not hear classical music at the great festivals?” asks a character in Lucian.¹⁴ Gladiatorial combats were introduced to Greece by the Roman colony at Corinth; thence they spread to other cities until even the Theater of Dionysus was befouled with butchery. Many Greeks—Dio Chrysostom, Lucian, Plutarch—protested against the desecration; Demonax, the Cynic philosopher, begged the Athenians not to allow the innovation until they had thrown down the altar of Pity at Athens;¹⁵ but the Roman games continued in Greece till predominantly Christian times.