Caesar and Christ

Sparta and Argos were still moderately alive, and Epidaurus grew rich on the visits of sick bodies and souls to the shrine of Asclepius. Corinth, controlling the trade across the isthmus, became, within half a century of its re-establishment by Caesar, the wealthiest city in Greece. Its heterogeneous population of Romans, Greeks, Syrians, Jews, and Egyptians, most of them uprooted from their native lands and morals, was notorious for commercialism, epicureanism, and immorality. The old Temple of Aphrodite Pandemos carried on an undiminished trade as the shrine and center of Corinthian prostitutes. Apuleius describes a gorgeous ballet that he saw in Corinth, representing the judgment of Paris. “Venus appeared all naked, save that her fine and comely middle was lightly covered with a thin silken smock; and this the wanton wind blew hither and thither.”¹⁶ Corinth had not mended her ways since Aspasia.

Passing through Megara into Attica, the rural scene was one of great poverty. Deforestation, erosion, and mineral depletion had been added to war, emigration, taxation, and race suicide to make a desert of the Roman peace. Two cities alone in Attica were prosperous: Eleusis, whose sacramental Mysteries drew lucrative crowds to her every year; and Athens, the educational and intellectual center of the classic world. Its ancient institutions—council, assembly, and archons—still functioned, and Rome had restored the Areopagus to its primeval authority as the seat of judgment and the citadel of property rights. Rulers like Antiochus IV, Herod the Great, Augustus, and Hadrian rivaled millionaires like Herodes Atticus in benefactions to the city. Herodes rebuilt the stadium in marble, almost exhausting Pentelicus, and raised an odeon, or music hall, at the foot of the Acropolis. Hadrian provided funds to complete the Olympieum, and Zeus, who now had one foot in the grave, received a home worthy of his Casanova prime.

Meanwhile the unrivaled fame of Athens in letters, philosophy, and education brought a stream of rich youths and needy scholars to her schools. The University of Athens consisted of ten professorships endowed by the city or the emperor, and a host of private lecturers and tutors. Instruction was given in literature, philology, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and law—usually in gymnasia or theaters, sometimes in temples or homes. Except in oratory or law the curriculum had no thought of equipping the student to earn a living; it sought rather to sharpen his mind, deepen his understanding, and provide him with a moral code. It produced many brilliant intellects, but also it generated thousands of cobweb-spinners who would turn both philosophy and religion into a maze of controversial theories.

As Athens depended for a considerable part of its income on the students, it put up patiently with their hilarious ways. “Freshmen” were hazed with practical jokes that sometimes injured citizens; the students of rival professors became ardent partisans and attacked one another in occasional riots like the “cane rushes” of our youth. Some students felt that they could learn more from the courtesans and gamblers of the town than from all teachers of philosophy; and we gather from Alciphron that the ladies in question looked upon the professors as dull and incompetent competitors.¹⁷ But there was often a pleasant bond of friendship between learners and teachers; many of these invited students to dinner, guided their reading, visited them in illness, and kept their parents misinformed about their progress. Most of the lecturers lived on fees paid by each disciple; a small number of professors drew a salary from the state; and the heads of the four schools of philosophy received 10,000 drachmas ($6000) a year from the imperial Treasury.

Under these stimuli the period of the “Second Sophistic” developed—a revival of the orator-philosopher passing from city to city as honorariums might beckon, delivering addresses, teaching pupils, pleading cases in the courts, living in rich homes as spiritual counselors, and sometimes acting as honored emissaries of their city-states. The movement flourished throughout the Empire, but especially in the Greek world, in the first three centuries of our era; philosophers were then, says Dio, as numerous as cobblers.¹⁸ The new sophists, like the old, had no common doctrine, phrased their teaching eloquently, drew large audiences, and attained in many cases high social status, imperial favor, or great wealth. They differed from the earlier Sophists in seldom questioning religion or morality; they were more interested in form and style, in oratorical technique and skill, than in the great questions that had shaken the beliefs and morals of the world; indeed, the new sophists were warm defenders of the ancient faith. Philostratus has preserved for us the lives of the leading sophists of this age; let one example suffice. Adrian of Tyre studied rhetoric at Athens and rose to the state chair of rhetoric there; he opened his inaugural address with the proud words, “Once again letters have come from Phoenicia.” He rode to his lectures in a carriage with silver harness, in rich attire, and gleaming with gems. When Marcus Aurelius visited Athens he tested Adrian by asking him to improvise an oration on a difficult theme; Adrian carried the matter off so well that Marcus loaded him with honors, silver and gold, houses and slaves. Promoted to the chair of rhetoric at Rome, Adrian’s lectures, though in Greek, proved so alluring that senators adjourned their sessions, and the populace deserted the pantomimes, to go and hear him.¹⁹ Such a career almost announces the death of philosophy; it had been swallowed up in an ocean of rhetoric, and had ceased to think when it learned to speak.

At the other extreme were the Cynics. We have described them elsewhere—their tattered cloak, their unkempt hair and beard, their wallet and staff, their reduction of life to simplicities, sometimes obscenities. They lived like mendicant friars, had a hierarchical organization with novices and superiors,²⁰ avoided marriage and work, scorned the conventions and artificialities of civilization, denounced all governments as thieves and superfluities, laughed at all oracles, “mysteries,” and gods. Everyone satirized them, Lucian most savagely; yet even Lucian admired Demonax, a cultured Cynic who had abandoned his wealth to live in philosophical poverty. He gave his century of life (A.D. 50-150) to helping others, reconciling hostile individuals and cities; and Athens, which ridiculed everything, respected him. Indicted before an Athenian court for refusing to offer sacrifice to the gods, he won acquittal by saying simply that the gods had no need of offerings, and that religion consisted in kindness to all. When the Athenian assembly was engaged in a quarrel of factions, his mere appearance sufficed to quiet the dispute; whereupon he left without having uttered a word. It was his custom, in old age, to enter any house uninvited and eat and sleep there; and every home in Athens sought the honor.²¹ Lucian speaks with less sympathy of Peregrinus, who tried Christianity, abandoned it for the Cynic regimen, denounced Rome, called all Greece to revolt, and astonished an assemblage at Olympia by making and lighting his own funeral pyre, leaping into it, and allowing himself to be consumed in the flames (A.D. 165).²² In such scorn of wealth and life the Cynics were paving a way for the monks of the Christian Church.

When Vespasian, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius established chairs of philosophy at Athens they ignored the Cynics and the Skeptics, and recognized only four schools of thought: the Platonic Academy, the Aristotelian Lyceum, the Stoics, and the Epicureans. The Academy had diluted Plato’s proud faith in reason into the universal doubt of Carneades; but after the latter’s death the school reacted toward orthodoxy, and Antiochus of Ascalon, who taught Cicero at the Academy (79 B.C.), returned to Plato’s conceptions of reason, immortality, and God. The Lyceum was now devoting itself to natural science in the tradition of Theophrastus, or to pious commentaries on Aristotle’s works. The school of Epicurus was declining in this religious age; few men dared profess its doctrines without diplomatic reservations. In most of Greek Asia the words Epicurean, atheist, and Christian were synonyms expressive of horror and desecration.²³

The dominant philosophy had long since been Stoicism. The rigorous perfectionism of its early forms had been softened by Panaetius and Poseidonius, both citizens of Rhodes. Returning to Athens after Scipio’s death (129 B.C.), Panaetius, now head of the Stoa, defined God as a material spirit or breath (pneuma) permeating all things, appearing in plants as the power of growth, in animals as soul (psyche), in man as reason (logos). His successors developed this vague pantheism into a more definitely religious philosophy. The Stoic theory of moral discipline moved closer to Cynic asceticism; and in the second century A.D. Cynicism, as one observer put it, differed from Stoicism only by a torn cloak. In Epictetus, as in Marcus Aurelius, we see both movements advancing toward Christianity.

III. EPICTETUS

Epictetus was born at Hierapolis in Phrygia about A.D. 50, a slave woman’s son, and therefore himself a slave. He had little chance of education, for he was passed from one owner and city to another, until he found himself the property of Epaphroditus, a powerful freedman in Nero’s court. He was of feeble health and lame, apparently through the brutality of one of his masters, but he lived the normal threescore years and ten. Epaphroditus allowed him to attend the lectures of Musonius Rufus and later freed him. Epictetus must himself have set up as a teacher in Rome, for when Domitian banished the philosophers Epictetus was among those who fled. He settled in Nicopolis and drew to his lectures there students from many parts. One was Arrian of Nicomedia, later governor of Cappadocia; Arrian took down the words of Epictetus, probably in shorthand, and published them as Diatribai—“rubbings” or copies—now on all lists of the world’s best books as the Discourses.^* It is no dull formal treatise, but a classic of simple speech and bluff humor, intimately expressing a modest and kindly, yet sharp and vigorous character. Epictetus applied his lusty sarcasms to himself and others impartially, and gaily mocked his rough-and-tumble style. He made no complaint when Demonax, hearing that the old bachelor counseled marriage, sarcastically petitioned for his daughter’s hand; he excused himself on the ground that teaching wisdom is as great a service as begetting “two or three pug-nosed children.”²⁴ In later years he took a wife to help him care for an infant that he had rescued from exposure. In those years his fame compassed the Empire, and Hadrian counted him among his friends.

Epictetus, resembling Socrates in this as in so many other ways, cared too little about physics or metaphysics to construct a system of thought; his one subject and passion was the good life. “What do I care,” he asks, “whether all existing things are composed of atoms ... or of fire and earth? Is it not enough to learn the true nature of good and evil?”²⁵ Philosophy does not mean reading books about wisdom, it means training oneself in the practice of wisdom. The essence of the matter is that a man should so mold his life and conduct that his happiness shall depend as little as possible upon external things. This does not require a hermit’s solitude; on the contrary, “Epicureans and blackguards” are to be condemned for detaching men from public service; the good man will take his part in civic affairs. But he will accept with equanimity all vicissitudes of fortune—poverty, bereavement, humiliation, pain, slavery, imprisonment, or death; he will know how to “endure and renounce.”

Never say about anything, “I have lost it,” but only “I have given it back.” Is your child dead? It has been given back. Is your wife dead? She has been returned. “I have had my farm taken away.” Very well; this, too, has been given back. So long as God gives it to you take care of it as something not your own. . . . “Alas, that I should be lame in one leg!” Slave! do you then, because of one paltry leg, blame the universe? Will you not make a free gift of it to the whole? ... I must go into exile: does anyone keep me from going with a smile, serene? ... “I will throw you into prison.” It is only my body you imprison. I must die; must I then die complaining? . . . These are the lessons that philosophy ought to rehearse, and write down daily, and practice. ... A platform or a prison are places, one high, the other low; but your moral purpose can be kept the same in either place.²⁷

The slave can be spiritually free, like Diogenes; the prisoner can be free, like Socrates; the emperor can be a slave, like Nero.²⁸ Even death is a minor incident in the good man’s life; he may advance its coming if he finds that evil too heavily outweighs good;²⁹ in any case he will receive it calmly as part of the secret wisdom of Nature.

If heads of grain had feeling, ought they to pray that they should never be harvested? ... I would have you know that it is a curse never to die. . . . The ship goes down. What, then, am I to do? Whatever I can ... I drown without fear, neither shrinking nor crying out against God, but recognizing that what is born must also perish. For I am a part of the whole, as an hour is part of a day. I must come on as the hour, and like an hour pass away.³⁰ . . . Regard yourself as but a single thread of all that go to make up the garment.³¹ . . . Seek not that the things which happen to you should happen as you wish, but wish the things that happen to be as they are, and you will find tranquillity.³²

Though he often speaks of Nature as an impersonal force, Epictetus as frequently infuses his conception with personality, intelligence, and love. The atmosphere of religion pervading his age warms his philosophy to a self-surrendering piety akin to that of the Stoic emperor who would soon read him and echo his thought. He speaks with a fine eloquence of the majestic order prevailing in time and space, and the evidences of design in nature, but he proceeds to explain that “God has created some animals to be eaten, others to serve in farming, others to produce cheese.”³³ The human mind itself, he thinks, is so marvelous an instrument that only a divine creator could have brought it into being; indeed, so far as we possess reason we are parts of the World Reason. If we could trace our ancestry back to the first man we should find him begotten by God; God is therefore literally the father of us all, and all men are brothers.³⁴

He who has once observed with understanding the administration of the world, and has learned that the greatest and most comprehensive community is the system [systema, standing together] of men and God, and that from God came the seeds whence all things, and especially rational beings, spring—why should not that man call himself a citizen of the world . . . nay, a son of God? ... If a man could only subscribe heart and soul to this doctrine ... I think he would entertain no mean or ignoble thought in himself. . . . Bear in mind, then, when you eat, who you are that eat, and whom you are nourishing; when you cohabit with women, who you are that do this. . . . You are bearing God about with you, you poor wretch, and know it not!³⁵

In a passage that Saint Paul might have written, Epictetus exhorts his students not only to submit their wills trustingly to God’s, but to be the apostles of God among mankind:

God says, “Go and bear witness for me.”³⁶ . . . Think what it is to be able to say, “God has sent me into the world to be his soldier and witness, to tell men that their sorrows and fears are vain, that to a good man no evil can befall, whether he live or die. God sends me at one time here, at another time there; he disciplines me by poverty and imprisonment, that I may be the better witness to him among men. With such a ministry committed to me, can I any longer care in what place I am, or who my companions are, or what they say about me? Nay, rather, does not my whole nature strain after God, his laws and commandments?”³⁷

As for himself, he is filled with awe and gratitude by the mystery and splendor of things, and he intones to the Creator a pagan Magnificat that is one of the supreme passages in the history of religion:

What language is adequate to praise all the works of Providence? ... If we had sense, ought we to be doing anything else, publicly or privately, than hymning and praising the Deity, and rehearsing his benefits? Ought we not, as we dig and plow and eat, to sing a hymn of praise to God? . . . What then?—since most of you have become blind, ought there not to be someone to fulfill this office for you, and in behalf of all sing hymns of praise to God? ³⁸

Though we have here no word for immortality, and can trace all these ideas back to the Stoics and the Cynics, we find in these pages remarkable parallels to many attitudes of early Christianity. Epictetus, indeed, sometimes advances beyond Christianity: he denounces slavery, condemns capital punishment, and wishes to have criminals treated as sick men.³⁹ He advocates a daily examination of conscience ⁴⁰ and announces a kind of Golden Rule: “What you shun to suffer, do not make others suffer”;⁴¹ and he adds: “If a man is reported to have spoken ill of you, make no defense, but say, “He did not know the rest of my faults, else he would not have mentioned only these.”⁴² He advises men to return good for evil,⁴³ and to “submit when reviled”;⁴⁴ to fast now and then and “abstain from the things you desire.”⁴⁵ Sometimes he speaks of the body with the blasphemous contempt of an unscoured anchorite: “The body is of all things the most unpleasant and most foul. ... It is astonishing that we should love a thing to which we perform such strange services every day. I fill this bag, and then I empty it; what is more troublesome?”⁴⁶ There are passages that breathe the piety of Augustine and the eloquence of Newman: “Use me henceforward, O God, as thou wilt; I am of one mind with thee. I am thine. I ask exemption from nothing that seems good in thy sight. Where thou wilt, lead me; in what raiment thou wilt, clothe me.”⁴⁷ And like Jesus he bids his disciples take no care of the morrow:

To have God as our maker, father, and guardian—shall not this suffice to keep us from grief and fear? And wherewithal shall I be fed, asks one, if I have nothing? But what shall we say of . . . the animals, every one of which is sufficient to itself, and lacks neither its own proper food nor that way of life which is appropriate to it, and in harmony with nature? ⁴⁸

Is it any wonder that Christians like Saint John Chrysostom and Augustine lauded him, and that his Encheiridion was adopted, with minor changes, as a rule and guide for the monastic life?⁴⁹ Who knows but that Epictetus had read in some form the sayings of Jesus and was, without knowing it, a convert to Christianity?

IV. LUCIAN AND THE SKEPTICS

Nevertheless, in this final stage of Hellenistic culture, there were skeptics who recalled all the doubts of Protagoras, and a Lucian who laughed at belief with the insolence of Aristippus and almost Plato’s charm. The school of Pyrrho was not dead; Aenesidemus of Cnossus rephrased its denials in the Alexandria of our first century, by propounding the famous “Ten Modes” (tropoi), or contradictions, that made knowledge impossible.^* Towards the end of the second century Sextus Empiricus, of unknown date or place, gave the skeptical philosophy its final formulation in several destructive volumes of which three survive. Sextus takes all the world for his enemy; he divides philosophers into diverse species and slays each breed in turn. He writes with the vigor necessary to an executioner, the good order and clarity characteristic of ancient philosophy, occasional sarcastic humor, and much dreary chopping of logic.

To every argument, says Sextus, an equal argument can be opposed, so that in the end there is nothing so superfluous as reasoning. Deduction is untrustworthy unless based upon complete induction; but complete induction is impossible, for we can never tell when a “negative instance” will turn up.⁵¹ “Cause” is merely a regular antecedent (as Hume would repeat), and all knowledge is relative.⁵² Similarly there is no objective good or evil; morality changes across every frontier,⁵³ and virtue has a different definition in every age. All the arguments of the nineteenth century against the possibility of knowing whether God exists or not are stated here, and all the contradictions between benevolent omnipotence and worldly suffering.⁵⁴ But Sextus is a more complete agnostic than the agnostics, for he affirms that we cannot know that we cannot know; agnosticism is a dogma.⁵⁵ But, he consoles us, we do not need certainty. Probability is enough for all practical purposes, and the suspension of judgment (epoché, holding back; aphasia, saying nothing) in philosophical questions, instead of disturbing the mind, brings it a careless peace (ataraxia).⁵⁶ Meanwhile, since nothing is certain, let us accept the conventions and beliefs of our time and place, and modestly worship our ancient gods.⁵⁷

Lucian would have belonged to the Skeptic school if he had been so unwise as to fetter his judgment with a label. Like Voltaire, whom he resembled in all but pity, he wrote philosophy so brilliantly that no one supposed that he was writing philosophy. As if to show the spread of Hellenism, he was born at Samosata, in distant Commagene; “I am a Syrian from the Euphrates,” he said; his native tongue was Syriac, his blood probably Semitic.⁵⁸ He was apprenticed to a sculptor, but deserted to a rhetor. After a stay in Antioch practicing law he took to the road as a “dependent scholar,” living by lecturing, especially in Rome and Gaul; then (A.D. 165) he settled down in Athens. In his later years he was rescued from poverty by the pious but tolerant Marcus Aurelius, who appointed the irreverent skeptic to an official post in Egypt. There, at a date unknown, he died.

Time has preserved seventy-six of Lucian’s little books, and many of them are as fresh and pertinent today as when he read them to friends and audiences eighteen centuries ago. He tried his hand at a variety of forms, until he found a congenial medium in the dialogue. His Dialogues of the Hetairai were free enough to win a large audience. But at least in his works he is more absorbed in the gods than in courtesans; he is never through mishandling them. “When I was a boy,” says his Menippus, “and heard the tales of Homer and Hesiod about the gods—adulterous gods, rapacious gods, violent, litigious, incestuous gods—I found it all quite proper and, indeed, was intensely interested. When, however, I came to man’s estate I observed that the laws flatly contradicted the poets, forbidding adultery and rapacity.” Perplexed, Menippus went to the philosophers for an explanation; but they were so busy refuting one another that they only confounded his confusion. So he made himself wings, flew up to heaven, and examined matters for himself. Zeus received him magnanimously and allowed him to watch Olympus functioning. Zeus himself was listening to prayers as they came up to him through “a row of openings with lids like well covers. ... Of those at sea one prayed for a north, another for a south, wind. The farmer asked for rain, the fuller for sun. . . . Zeus seemed puzzled; he did not know which prayer to grant, and experienced a truly Academic suspension of judgment, showing a reserve and equilibrium worthy of Pyrrho (himself.”⁵⁹ The great god rejects some petitions, grants others, and then arranges the day’s weather: rain for Scythia, snow for Greece, a storm in the Adriatic, and “about a thousand bushels of hail for Cappadocia.” Zeus is disturbed by the new and outlandish gods who have stolen into his pantheon; he issues a decree that, whereas Olympus is crowded with polyglot aliens, who have caused a great rise in the price of nectar, and the old and only true gods are being squeezed out, a committee of seven shall be appointed to sit on claims. In “Zeus Cross-Examined” an Epicurean philosopher asks Zeus are the gods also subject to Fate? Yes, answers the genial Jove. “Why, then, should men sacrifice to you?” asks the philosopher; and “if Fate rules men and gods, why should we be held responsible for our actions?” “I see,” says Zeus, “that you have been with that accursed race, the sophists.”⁶⁰ In “Zeus Tragoedus” the god is in a gloomy mood, for he observes a great crowd gathering in Athens to hear Damis the Epicurean deny, and Timocles the Stoic affirm, the existence and solicitude of the gods. Timocles breaks down and runs away, and Zeus despairs about his own future. Hermes comforts him: “There are plenty of believers left—a majority of Greeks, the body and dregs of the people, and the barbarians to a man.”⁶¹ That such a piece should have brought no indictment on Lucian’s head proves either the tolerance of the times or the twilight of the Greek gods.

But Lucian was as skeptical of rhetoric and philosophy as of the old religion. In one of his Dialogues of the Dead Charon commands a rhetorician, whom he is ferrying to the other world, to “strip off that boundless length of sentences that is wrapped around you, and those antitheses, and balanced clauses”—otherwise the boat will surely sink.⁶² In “Hermotimus” a student enters with enthusiasm upon the study of philosophy, hoping that it will give him some substitute for faith; but he is shocked by the vanity and greed of the rival teachers, and is left intellectually and morally naked by their mutual refutations; henceforth, he concludes, “I shall turn aside from a philosopher as from a mad dog.”⁶³ Lucian himself defines philosophy as an attempt to “get an elevation from which you may see in every direction.”⁶⁴ From such an elevation life seems to him a ridiculous confusion, a chaotic chorus in which all the dancers move and shout each at his own individual will, “until the impresario dismisses them one by one from the stage.”⁶⁵ In “Charon” he paints a dark picture of the human scene as witnessed by superhuman eyes from some celestial peak: men plowing, toiling, disputing, suing in the courts, lending at usury, cheating and being cheated, running after gold or pleasure; over their heads a cloud of hopes, fears, follies, and hates; over these the Fates spinning the web of life for each human atom; one man is lifted high from the mass and then has a resounding fall; and each in turn is drawn away by some messenger of death. Charon observes two armies fighting in the Peloponnesus; “Fools!” he comments, “not to know that though each of them should win a whole Peloponnesus he will get but a bare foot of ground in the end.”⁶⁶ Lucian is as impartial as nature; he satirizes the rich for their greed, the poor for their envy, the philosophers for their cobwebs, the gods for their nonexistence. In the end he concludes with Voltaire that one must cultivate his garden. Menippus, finding Teiresias in the lower world, asks him, What is the best life? The old prophet answers:

The life of the ordinary man is the best and most prudent choice. Cease from the folly of metaphysical speculation and inquiry into origins and ends; count all this clever logic as idle talk, and pursue one end alone—how you may do what your hand finds to do, and go your way with never a passion and always a smile.⁶⁷

If we sum up Greek thought in the first two centuries of our era, we find it, despite Lucian, overwhelmingly religious. Men had once lost faith in faith and taken to logic; now they were losing faith in logic and were flocking back to faith. Greek philosophy had completed the circuit from primitive theology through the skepticism of the early Sophists, the atheism of Democritus, the reconciliatory blandishments of Plato, the naturalism of Aristotle, and the pantheism of the Stoa back to a philosophy of mysticism, submission, and piety. The Academy had passed from the utilitarian myths of its founder through the skepticism of Carneades to the learned devotion of Plutarch; soon it would culminate in the heavenly visions of Plotinus. The scientific achievements of Pythagoras were forgotten, but his notion of reincarnation was having another life; Neo-Pythagoreans were exploring the mysticism of number, were practicing a daily examination of conscience, and were praying that after a minimum of avatars they might pass—if necessary through Purgatory—into a blessed union with God.⁶⁸ Stoicism was ceasing to be the proud and scornful philosophy of aristocrats, and had found its final and most eloquent voice in a slave; its doctrine of a final conflagration of the world, its rejection of all pleasures of the flesh, its humble surrender to the hidden will of God, were preparing for the theology and ethics of Christianity. The Oriental mood was capturing the European citadel.

CHAPTER XXIV

The Hellenistic Revival

I. ROMAN EGYPT

EGYPT should have been the happiest of lands, for not only was the earth freely nourished by the Nile, but the country was the most self-sufficient in the whole Mediterranean basin—rich in cereals and fruits, cutting three crops a year, unexcelled in its industries, exporting to a hundred nations, and seldom disturbed by foreign or civil war. And yet—perhaps for these reasons—“The Egyptians,” Josephus notes, “appear never in all their history to have enjoyed one day of freedom.”¹ Their wealth tempted, their semitropical lassitude suffered, one despot or conqueror after another through fifty centuries.

Rome classed Egypt not as a province but as the property of the emperor, and ruled it through a prefect responsible only to him. Native Greek officials administered the three divisions—Lower, Middle, and Upper Egypt, and the thirty-six “nomes” or counties; and the official language remained Greek. No attempt was made to urbanize the population, for Egypt’s imperial function was to be the granary of Rome. Large tracts of land were taken from the priests and turned over to Roman or Alexandrian capitalists to be worked as latifundia by fellaheen accustomed to merciless exploitation. The state capitalism of the Ptolemies was continued in reduced form. Every step in the agricultural process was planned and controlled by the state: proliferating bureaucrats determined what crops should be sown and in what quantities, annually allotted the requisite seed, received the product into government warehouses (thesauroi, treasuries), exported Rome’s quota, took out taxes in kind, and sold the rest to the market. Corn and flax were state monopolies from seed to sale; so, at least in the Fayum, was the production of bricks; perfumes, and sesame oil.² Private enterprise was permitted in other fields, but under ubiquitous regulation. All mineral resources were owned by the state, and the quarrying of marble and precious stones was a governmental privilege.

Domestic industry, already old in Egypt, now expanded in the towns—Ptolemaїs, Memphis, Thebes, Oxyrhynchus, Saїs, Bubastis, Naucratis, Heliopolis; in Alexandria it was half the life of the vibrant capital. Apparently the paper industry had reached the capitalist stage, for Strabo tells how the owners of the papyrus plantations limited production to lift the price.³ Priests used the temple precincts as factories and turned out fine linens for their own use and for the market. Slaves outside of domestic service were few in Egypt, since “free” workers were paid only a notch above nudity and starvation. Sometimes the workers went on strike (anachoresis, secession)—they left their tasks and took sanctuary on temple grounds, whence they were coaxed by hunger or fair words. Occasionally wages were raised, prices went up, and all was as before. Guilds were permitted, but they were mostly of tradesmen and managers; the government used them as agents for the collection of taxes and for the organization of forced labor on dikes, canals, and other public works.

Internal trade was active but slow. Roads were poor, and land transport moved on men, donkeys, or camels—which now replaced horses as draft animals in Africa. Much traffic went by inland waterways. A great canal, 150 feet wide, completed in Trajan’s reign, bound the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean through the Nile and the Red Sea, from whose ports at Arsinoë, Myos Hormos, and Berenice ships left daily for Africa or India. The banking system that financed production and trade was under full governmental control. Each nome capital had a state bank, which acted as a receiver of taxes and repository of public funds. Loans were made to farmers, industry, and business by the government, by priests from temple treasuries, and by private lending associations.⁴ Taxes were laid upon every product, process, sale, export, or import, even upon graves and burials; and additional assessments were levied from time to time, in kind from the poor, in liturgies from the rich. From Augustus to Trajan the country—or its masters—prospered; after that zenith it succumbed to the discouragement and exhaustion of endless tribute and taxation and the lethargy of a regimented economy.

Outside of Alexandria and Naucratis Egypt remained sullenly, silently Egyptian; Romanization hardly touched it beyond the mouths of the Nile; and even Alexandria, which had been the greatest of Greek cities, was assuming in our second century the character, languages, and odor of an Oriental metropolis. Of Egypt’s 8,500,000 population its capital had now some 800,000 ⁵ (in 1930, 573,000), second only to Rome; in industry and commerce it was first. Everyone in Alexandria is busy, says a letter questionably Hadrian’s; everyone has a trade; even the lame and the blind find work to do.⁶ Here, among a thousand other articles, glass, paper, and linen were produced on a large scale. Alexandria was the clothing and fashion center of the age, setting the styles and making the goods. Its great harbor had nine miles of wharves, from which its merchant fleet wove a web of commerce over many seas. It was also a tourist center, equipped with hotels, guides, and interpreters for visitors coming to see the Pyramids and the majestic temples of Thebes. The main avenue, sixty-seven feet wide, was lined for three miles with colonnades, arcades, and alluring shops displaying the fanciest products of ancient crafts. At many intersections there were spacious squares or circles named plateai, “broad” (ways)—whence the Italian piazza and our plaza and place. Imposing structures adorned the central thoroughfares—a large theater, an Emporium or exchange, temples to Poseidon, Caesar, and Saturn, a celebrated Serapeum or Temple of Serapis, and a group of university buildings known over the world as the Museum, or Home of the Muses. Of the five sections into which the city was divided, one was almost wholly given to the palaces, gardens, and administrative buildings of the Ptolemies, now used by the Roman prefect. Here, in a pretty mausoleum, lay the city’s founder, Alexander the Great, preserved in honey and encased in glass.

Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Italians, Arabs, Phoenicians, Persians, Ethiopians, Syrians, Libyans, Cilicians, Scythians, Indians, Nubians—nearly every Mediterranean people had its quota in Alexandria. They made a volatile and inflammable mixture, quarrelsome and disorderly, intellectually clever and irreverently witty, shameless in speech, skeptical and superstitious, loose in morals and gay in mood, fanatically fond of the theater, music, and public games. Dio Chrysostom describes life there as “a continuous revel ... of dancers, whistlers, and murderers.”⁸ The canals were alive with merrymakers in gondolas at night on their five-mile sail to the amusement suburb at Canopus. There were musical contests that rivaled the horse races in raising excitement and claques.

If we may believe Philo,⁹ forty per cent of the city’s population was Jewish. Most Alexandrian Jews were employed in industry and trade, and lived in great poverty;¹⁰ many were merchants, a few were moneylenders, some were rich enough to win enviable places in the government. Originally confined to one fifth of the city, they had now overflowed to occupy two fifths. They were governed by their own laws and elders, and Rome confirmed the privileges that the Ptolemies had given them to ignore any ordinance that conflicted with their religion. They gloried in their magnificent central synagogue, a colonnaded basilica so vast that a system of signals had to be used to secure proper response at proper times from worshipers too distant from the sanctuary to hear the words of the priest.¹¹ According to Josephus the moral life of the Alexandrian Jews was exemplary compared with the sexual looseness of the “pagan” population.¹² They had an active intellectual culture and contributed substantially to philosophy, historiography, and science. Racial hostility agitated the city at various times; we find in Josephus’ tract Against Apion (an anti-Semitic leader) all the causes, arguments, and legends that disturb the relations of Jew and gentile today. In A.D. 38 a mob of Greeks invaded the synagogues and insisted on placing in each of them a statue of Caligula as a god. The Roman prefect, Avillius Flaccus, annulled the Alexandrian citizenship of the Jews and ordered those of them who lived outside the original Jewish section to return to it within a few days. When these had elapsed the Greek populace burned down 400 Jewish homes, and killed or clubbed Jews, outside the ghetto; and thirty-eight members of the Jewish gerousia or senate were arrested and publicly scourged in a theater. Thousands of Jews lost their homes, their businesses, or their savings. Flaccus’ successor submitted the matter to the Emperor, and two separate delegations—five Greeks and five Jews—went to Rome (A.D. 40) to plead their causes before Caligula. He died before he could judge. Claudius restored the rights of the Jews in Alexandria, confirmed them in their municipal citizenship, and sternly bade both factions keep the peace.

II. PHILO

The leader of the Jewish delegation to Caligula was the philosopher Philo, brother of the arabarch, or manager of the Jewish export trade in Alexandria. Eusebius describes him as belonging to an ancient priestly family.¹³ We know hardly anything else of his life; but his pious and generous character stands out in the many works that he wrote to expound Judaism to the Greek world. Brought up in a sacerdotal atmosphere, intensely loyal to his people, and yet fascinated by Greek philosophy, he made it the aim of his life to reconcile the Scriptures and customs of the Jews with Greek ideas and above all with the philosophy of “the most holy” Plato. He adopted for his purpose the principle that all events, characters, doctrines, and laws in the Old Testament have an allegorical as well as a literal meaning and symbolize certain moral or psychological truths; by this method he was able to prove anything. He wrote indifferently in Hebrew, but so well in Greek that his admirers said, “Plato writes like Philo.”¹⁴

He was a theologian rather than a philosopher, a mystic whose intense piety presaged Plotinus and the medieval mind. God, in Philo, is the essential being of the world, incorporeal, eternal, indescribable; reason can know his existence, but can ascribe no quality to him, since every quality is a limitation. To conceive him as having human form is a concession to the sensuous imagination of men. God is everywhere; “what place can a man find where God is not?”¹⁵ But he is not everything: matter is also eternal and increate; however, it has no life, motion, or form until infused with the divine force. To create the world by giving form to matter, and to establish relations with man, God used a host of intermediary beings, called angels by the Jews, daimones by the Greeks, and Ideas by Plato. These, says Philo, may popularly be conceived as persons, though really they exist only in the Divine Mind, as the thoughts and powers of God.¹⁶ Together these powers constitute what the Stoics called the Logos, or Divine Reason creating and guiding the world. Fluctuating between philosophy and theology, between ideas and personifications, Philo sometimes thinks of the Logos as a person; in a poetic moment he calls the Logos “the first-begotten of God,”¹⁷ son of God by the virgin Wisdom,¹⁸ and says that through the Logos God has revealed himself to man. Since the soul is part of God, it can through reason rise to a mystic vision not quite of God, but of the Logos. Perhaps, if we could free ourselves from the taint of matter and sense, and by ascetic exercises and long contemplation become for a moment pure spirit, we might for an ecstatic moment see God himself.¹⁹

Philo’s Logos was one of the most influential ideas in the history of thought. Its antecedents in Heracleitus, Plato, and the Stoics are obvious; presumably he knew the recent Jewish literature that had made a distinct person of the Wisdom of God as creator of the world; and he must have been impressed by those lines in Proverbs (VIII, 22) where Wisdom says, “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting ... or ever the earth was.” Philo was a contemporary of Christ; he apparently never heard of him; but he shared unknowingly in forming Christian theology. The rabbis frowned upon his allegorical interpretations as likely to be used as an excuse for neglecting literal obedience to the Law; they suspected the Logos doctrine as a retreat from monotheism; and they saw in Philo’s passion for Greek philosophy a threat of cultural assimilation, racial dilution, and consequent disappearance, of the dispersed Jews. But the Fathers of the Church admired the Jew’s contemplative devotion, made abundant use of his allegorical principles to answer the critics of the Hebrew Scriptures, and joined with Gnostics and Neo-Platonists in accepting the mystical vision of God as the crown of human enterprise. Philo had tried to mediate between Hellenism and Judaism. From the Judaic point of view he had failed; from the historical point of view he had succeeded; and the result was the first chapter of the Gospel of John.

III. THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE

In science Alexandria was the unchallenged head of the Hellenistic world. Claudius Ptolemy must be ranked among the most influential astronomers of antiquity, for despite Copernicus the world is still Ptolemaic in its speech. Born at Ptolemais on the Nile (whence his name), he lived most of his life at Alexandria, where he made observations from A.D. 127 to 151. The world remembers him chiefly for his rejection of Aristarchus’ theory that the earth revolves around the sun. This immortal error was enshrined in Ptolemy’s Mathematiké Syntaxis, or “Mathematical Arrangement” of the stars. The Arabs referred to the work with a Greek superlative as Al-megisté, “The Greatest”; and the Middle Ages corrupted the phrase into Almagest, by which the book is known to history. It ruled the skies till Copernicus upset the world. And yet Ptolemy did not claim to do more than systematize the work and observation of previous astronomers, Hipparchus above all. He pictured the universe as spherical and as daily revolving around a spherical, motionless earth. Strange as this view seems to us (though there is no telling what some future Copernicus will do to our present Ptolemies), the geocentric hypothesis made it possible to compute the position of the stars and planets more accurately than the heliocentric conception could do in the state of astronomic knowledge at the time.²⁰ Ptolemy suggested further a theory of eccentrics to explain the orbits of the planets, and discovered the evection, or orbital aberration, of the moon. He measured the moon’s distance from the earth by the parallax method still in use, and calculated it as fifty-nine times the earth’s radius. This is approximately our current reckoning; but Ptolemy followed Poseidonius in underestimating the diameter of the earth.

Just as the Syntaxis gathered ancient astronomy into its final form, so Ptolemy’s Geographical Outline summarized antiquity’s knowledge of the earth’s surface. Here, too, his industrious tables of latitude and longitude for the major cities of the globe were vitiated by accepting Poseidonius’ modest estimate of the earth; but to this encouraging mistake, as transmitted by Ptolemy, Columbus owed his belief in the possibility of reaching the Indies in a practicable time by sailing west.²¹ Ptolemy was the first to use the terms parallels and meridians in geography; and in his maps he successfully projected a spherical upon a flat surface. But he was a mathematician rather than an astronomer or a geographer; his work consisted chiefly in mathematical formulations. In the Syntaxis he drew up an excellent table of chords. He divided the radius of the earth into sixty partes minutae primae (“first small parts”), which became our “minutes,” and subdivided each of these into sixty partes minutae secundae (“second small parts”), now our “seconds.”

Though he made many mistakes, Ptolemy had the temper and patience of a true scientist. He tried to rest all conclusions upon observation—too seldom his own. In one field he carried out a long series of experiments: his Optica, a study of refraction, has been acclaimed as “the most remarkable experimental research of antiquity.”²² It is significant that this greatest astronomer, geographer, and mathematician of his age wrote also a Tetrabiblios, or “Four Books,” on the control of human life by the stars.

Meanwhile a minor Archimedes was giving the classic world a second chance to stage an industrial revolution. A brilliant inventor or compiler, of whom we know only the one name, Hero, issued in this age^* at Alexandria a long succession of treatises on mathematics and physics, of which several have been preserved through Arabic translations. He warned his readers frankly that the theorems and inventions which he presented were not necessarily his own, but were the accumulations of centuries. In the Dioptra he described an instrument like the theodolite, and formulated principles for measuring, by surveying, the distances to inaccessible points. In the Mechanica he considered the uses and combinations of simple devices like the wheel, axle, lever, pulley, wedge, and screw. In the Pneumatica he studied air pressure in seventy-eight experiments, most of them playful tricks; e.g., he showed how either wine or water could be made to flow from the same small orifice in the bottom of a jug by closing one or the other of the air holes at the top of the divided container.

From these amusements he was led on to make a force pump, a fire-engine pump with piston and valves, a hydraulic clock, a water organ, and a steam engine. In this contraption the steam from heated water was passed into a globe by a tube, and escaped through curved outlets at opposite sides, causing the globe to revolve in a direction contrary to that of the expelled steam. Hero’s keen sense of humor kept him from developing this invention to industrial uses. He employed steam to support a ball in mid-air, to make a mechanical bird sing, to cause a statue to blow a horn. So in the Catoptrica he studied the reflection of light and showed how to construct mirrors that would enable a person to see his back, or appear with head downward, or with three eyes, two noses, etc. He told magicians how to perform tricks by concealed apparatus. He made water pour from a font when a coin was inserted in the slot. He constructed a hidden machine by which heated water overflowed into a bucket, whose increasing weight, by pulleys, opened temple doors. In these and a hundred other ways Hero succeeded in being a thaumaturgist, and failed to become a Watt.

Alexandria had long since been the chief center of medical education. There were famous schools of medicine at Marseilles, Lyons, Saragossa, Athens, Antioch, Cos, Ephesus, Smyrna, and Pergamum; but medical students came to the Egyptian capital from every province. Even as late as the fourth century, when Egypt was in decline, Ammianus Marcellinus wrote that “it is enough to commend a physician’s skill if he can say that he was trained at Alexandria.”²⁴ Specialization was progressing; “no one can be a universal physician,” said Philostratus (ca. A.D. 225); “there must be specialists for wounds, fevers, eyes, consumption.”²⁵ Dissection of cadavers was practiced at Alexandria, and there seem to have been cases of human vivisection.²⁶ Surgery was probably as well developed there in the first century A.D. as anywhere in Europe before the nineteenth century. Women physicians were not rare; one of them, Metrodora, wrote an extant treatise on diseases of the womb.²⁷ Great names adorned the medical history of this age: Rufus of Ephesus, who described the anatomy of the eye, distinguished between motor and sensory nerves, and improved methods for stopping the flow of blood in surgery; Marinus of Alexandria, famous for his operations on the skull; and Antyllus, the greatest ophthalmologist of the time. Dioscorides of Cilicia (A.D. 40-90) wrote a Materia Medica which scientifically described 600 medical plants so well that his book remained the chief authority on its subject until the Renaissance. He recommended medicated pessaries for contraception;²⁸ and his recipe for wine of mandragora to produce surgical anesthesia was successfully applied in 1874.²⁹

Soranus of Ephesus, about A.D. 116, published a treatise on the diseases of women and the birth and care of children; it ranks only below the Hippocratic collection and the works of Galen among the extant products of ancient medicine. He describes a vaginal speculum and an obstetric chair, gives an excellent anatomy of the uterus, offers almost modern dietetic and operative advice, such as bathing the eyes of the newborn child with oil,³⁰ suggests half a hundred contraceptive devices, mostly by vaginal medication,³¹ and (unlike Hippocrates) allows abortion where delivery would endanger the mother’s life.³² Soranus was the greatest gynecologist of antiquity; no advance was made on his work till Paré, fifteen centuries after him. If all his forty treatises were extant we should probably rank him with Galen.

The most famous physician of the period was the son of a Pergamese architect, who named him Galenus, i.e., quiet and peaceable, in the hope that he would not take after his mother.³³ At fourteen the youth found his first love in philosophy, from whose dangerous lure he was never freed. At seventeen he turned to medicine, studied in Cilicia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Cyprus, Crete, Greece, and Alexandria (a mobility typical of ancient scholars), served as a surgeon in the gladiatorial school at Pergamum, and practiced for a time in Rome (A.D. 164-68). There his successful cures brought him many rich patients, and his lectures drew distinguished audiences. His repute rose to such a point that people wrote to him from every province for medical advice; and he confidently prescribed by mail. His good father, forgetting the purpose of his name, had counseled him to join no sect or party and always to tell the truth. Galen obeyed, exposed the ignorance and venality of many physicians in Rome, and in a few years had to flee from his enemies. Marcus Aurelius called him back to care for young Commodus (169) and tried to take him on a Marcomannic campaign; but Galen was clever enough to be soon back in Rome. Thereafter we know nothing of him except his works.

He was almost as voluminous as Aristotle. Of 500 volumes ascribed to him some 118 have survived, covering in 20,000 pages all branches of medicine and several fields of philosophy. They are of little medical value today, but they abound in incidental information and in the vitality of a vigorous and controversial spirit. His fondness for philosophy had given him a bad habit of drawing large deductions from small inductions; his faith in his own knowledge and powers often betrayed him into a dogmatism impossible to a scientific mind; and his great authority prolonged for centuries the life of serious errors. Nevertheless, he was an accurate observer and the most experimental of ancient physicians. “I confess the disease from which I have suffered all my life—to trust ... no statements until, so far as possible, I have tested them for myself.”³⁴ Forbidden by the Roman government to dissect the human body alive or dead, he dissected and vivisected animals, and sometimes too readily concluded to human anatomy from a study of apes, dogs, cows, and pigs.

Despite his limitations Galen made more contributions to anatomy than any other observer in antiquity. He described accurately the bones of the cranium and the spinal column, the muscular system, the lacteal vessels, the ducts of the lingual and submaxillary glands, and the valves of the heart. He showed that an excised heart can continue to beat outside the body; he proved that the arteries contain blood, not air (as the Alexandrian school had taught for 400 years). He missed anticipating Harvey; he thought that most of the blood traveled forth as well as back in the veins, while the remainder, mixed with air from the lungs, moved to and fro in the arteries. He was the first to explain the mechanism of respiration, and brilliantly conjectured that the principal element in the air we breathe is also that which is active in combustion.³⁵ He differentiated pleurisy and pneumonia, described aneurism, cancer, and tuberculosis, and recognized the infectious nature of the last. Above all, he founded experimental neurology. He made the first experimental sections of the spinal cord, determined the sensory and motor functions of each segment, understood the sympathetic system, recognized seven of the twelve pairs of cranial nerves, and caused aphasia at will by cutting the laryngeal nerve. He showed that injuries to one side of the brain produce derangements in the opposite side of the body. He cured the sophist Pausanias of numbness in the fourth and fifth fingers of the left hand by stimulating the brachial plexus in which the ulnar nerve arises that controls those fingers.³⁶ He was so skilled in symptomatology that he preferred to diagnose without questioning the patient.³⁷ He made much use of diet, exercise, and massage, but he was also an expert on drugs and traveled widely to secure rare medicines. He condemned the prescription of offal and urine, still popular with some of his contemporaries,³⁸ recommended dried cicadas for colic, applied goat dung to a tumor, and gave a long list of illnesses that could be cured by theriac—a famous drug made as an antidote for Mithridates the Great, daily imbibed by Marcus Aurelius, and containing the flesh of snakes.³⁹

He tarnished his record as an experimentalist by a torrent of precipitate theory. He ridiculed magic and spells, accepted divination by dreams, and thought that the phases of the moon affected the condition of patients. He took up Hippocrates’ notion of the four humors (blood and phlegm, black and yellow bile),^* added a dash of Pythagoras’ doctrine of four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), and tried to reduce all diseases to derangement of these humors or these elements. He was a firm vitalist, convinced that a pneuma, a vital breath or spirit, pervaded and activated every part of the body. Mechanistic interpretations of biology had been advanced by several physicians, as for example by Asclepiades, who held that physiology should be treated as a branch of physics; Galen objected that whereas a machine is merely the sum of its parts, an organism implies the purposive control of the parts by the whole. And just as purpose alone can explain the origin, structure, and function of organs, so the universe, Galen thought, can be understood only as the expression and instrument of some divine plan. God, however, operates solely through natural laws; there are no miracles, and the best revelation is Nature herself.

Galen’s teleology and monotheism won him favor with Christians, as later with Moslems. Nearly all his writings were lost to Europe in the chaos of the barbarian invasions, but in the East they were preserved by Arab scholars, and were translated from Arabic into Latin from the eleventh century onward. Galen became then an uncriticized authority, an Aristotle for medieval medicine.

The last creative age of Greek science ended with Ptolemy and Galen. Experiment ceased, dogma ruled; mathematics relapsed into restatements of geometry, biology into Aristotle, natural science into Pliny; and medicine marked time until the Arab and Jewish physicians of the Middle Ages renewed the noblest of the sciences.

IV. POETS IN THE DESERT

Across the Red Sea from Egypt lay Arabia. Neither the Pharaohs nor the Achaemenids nor the Seleucids nor the Ptolemies nor the Romans had been able to conquer the mysterious peninsula. Arabia Deserta knew only Arab nomads, but in the southwest a mountain range and its streams gave milder temperatures and fruitful vegetation to Arabia Felix, the Yemen of today. In those recesses the little kingdom of Saba hid, the Sheba of the Bible, so rich in frankincense and myrrh, cassia and cinnamon, aloes and nard, senna and gum and precious stones that the Sabateans could build at Mariaba and elsewhere cities proud with temples, palaces, and colonnades.⁴⁰ Arab merchants not only sold Arab products at high prices, but carried on a caravan trade with northwestern Asia and an active commerce by sea with Egypt, Parthia, and India. In 25 B.C. Augustus sent Aelius Gallus to absorb the kingdom into the Empire; the legions failed to take Mariaba and returned to Egypt decimated by disease and heat. Augustus contented himself with destroying the Arab port at Adana (Aden) and thereby secured control of the trade between Egypt and India.

The main commercial route running north from Mariaba went through the northwest corner of the peninsula, known to the ancients as Arabia Petraea from its capital at Petra, some forty miles south of Jerusalem. The city had been named from the circle of steep crags within which it was strategically placed. There, in the second century B.C., the Nabatean Arabs established a kingdom that slowly grew rich on passing caravans, until its rule extended from Leuce Come on the Red Sea along the eastern border of Palestine through Gerasa and Bostra to Damascus. Under King Aretas IV (9 B.C..-A.D. 40) the country reached its zenith; Petra became a Hellenistic city, Aramaic in speech, Greek in art, Alexandrian in the splendor of its streets. To this time belong the finest of the giant tombs that were carved into the rocks outside the city—crude but powerful façades of double-tiered Greek colonnades, sometimes a hundred feet in height. After Trajan annexed Arabia Petraea into the Empire (106), Bostra became the capital of the province of Arabia, and raised in its turn the architectural symbols of wealth and power. Petra decayed as Bostra and Palmyra became the crossroads of the desert caravans, and the great tombs lapsed into “the nightstalls of nomad flocks.”⁴¹

The most striking feature of the great Empire was its numerous and populous cities. Never again till our own century has urbanization been so pronounced. Lucullus, Pompey, Caesar, Herod, Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors prided themselves on founding new cities and embellishing old ones. So, moving northward along the eastern Mediterranean coast, one could hardly go twenty miles without encountering a city—Raphia (Rafa), Gaza, Ascalon, Joppa (Jaffa) Apollonia, Samaria-Sebaste, and Caesarea (Kaisaria). These cities, though in Palestine, were half Greek in population and predominantly Greek in language, culture, and institutions; they were Hellenistic bridgeheads in the pagan invasion of Judea. Herod spent large sums making Caesarea worthy of Augustus, for whom it was named; he provided it with a fine harbor, a lofty temple, a theater, an amphitheater, “sumptuous palaces, and many edifices of white stone.”⁴² Farther inland were other Greek Palestinian cities—Livias, Philadelphia, Gerasa (Djerasch), and Gadara (Katra). At Gerasa stand a hundred columns of the colonnade that lined the main street; and the ruins of temples, theater, baths, and aqueduct proclaim the affluence of the town in the second century A.D.

Gadara, where the remains of two theaters echo with memories of Greek plays, was famous for its schools, professors, and authors. Here, in the third century B.C., had lived Menippus, the Cynic philosopher and humorist whose satires taught that everything is vain except an upright life, and gave a model to Lucilius, Varro, and Horace. Here in his “Syrian Athens,” some hundred years before Christ, Meleager, the Anacreon of the age, polished epigrams to fair ladies and handsome boys and wore out his pen with love.

Brightly the goblet smiles since rested here

Zenophila’s sweet mouth, to Love so dear.

How blest would she to mine her rose-lips place,

And drink my soul out in a long embrace.⁴³

One of these flames, too soon snuffed out, burned with especial brightness in his memory—Heliodora, whom he loved in Tyre.

I’ll twine white violets, and the myrtle green;

Narcissus will I twine, and lilies sheen;

I’ll twine sweet crocus, and the hyacinth blue;

And last I’ll twine the rose, love’s token true:

That all may form a wreath of beauty, meet

To deck my Heliodora’s tresses sweet.⁴⁴

Now “Hades has snatched her, and the dust has tarnished her flower in bloom. O Mother Earth, I pray thee, clasp her gently to thy breast.”⁴⁵

Meleager immortalized himself by gathering into a “garland” (stephanos) the elegiac verse of Greece from Sappho to Meleager; out of this and like collections grew, by merger, the Greek Anthology.^* Here is the Greek epigram at its best and worst, polished like a jewel or empty as a pose; it was unwise to pluck these 4000 “flowers” from their branches to make this fading wreath. Some of the verses commemorate forgotten great men, or famous statues, or dead relatives; some, so to speak, are autotaphs, as when a woman who died of triplets says pithily, “After this let women pray for children.”⁴⁶ Some are barbs aimed at physicians, shrews, undertakers, pedagogues, cuckolds; or the miser who, fainting, is revived by the smell of a penny; or the grammarian whose grandchild displayed successively all three genders; ⁴⁷ or the pugilist who retires, marries, and gets more blows than he ever received in the ring; or the dwarf who, carried off by a mosquito, thinks he is suffering the rape of Ganymede. A single epigram celebrates “that famous woman who slept with only one man.” Others dedicate offerings to the gods: Lais hangs up her mirror as useless now that it does not show her as she was; Nicias, after fifty years of serving men, surrenders her complaisant girdle to Venus. Some stanzas glorify the arterial dilation of wine as wiser than wisdom. One honors the unceasing monogamy of the adulterer who was buried by a wreck in the arms of his mistress. Some are pagan dirges on the brevity of life; some are Christian assurances of a happy resurrection. Most of them, of course, toast the beauty of women and boys and sing the painful ecstasy of love: everything that later literature has said about amorous itching is here said in brief and in full, with more than Elizabethan conceits. Meleager makes a mosquito his pander by charging it with a message to his lady of the hour. And his townsman Philodemus, philosophic mentor of Cicero, tunes a melancholy note to his Xantho:

White waxen cheeks, soft scented breast,

Deep eyes wherein the Muses nest,

Sweet lips that perfect pleasure bring—

Sing me your song, pale Xantho, sing. . . .

Too soon the music ends. Again,

Again repeat the sad, sweet strain,

With perfumed fingers touch the string;

O Love’s delight, pale Xantho, sing.⁴⁸

V. THE SYRIANS

Northward along the coast lay the ancient cities of Phoenicia, part, with Palestine, of the province of Syria. Their industrious workers skilled in handicrafts, their favored position as traditional ports of trade, their rich and subtle merchants sending ships and agents everywhere, had kept them alive through all the vicissitudes of a thousand years. Tyre (Sur) had taller dwellings than Rome’s⁴⁹ and worse slums; it stank with the smell of its dyeing establishments, but it consoled itself with the thought that the whole world bought its richly colored textiles, above all its purple silks. Sidon had probably discovered the art of blowing glass and now specialized in glass and bronze. Berytus (Beirut) was distinguished for its schools of medicine, rhetoric, and law; very likely from this university the great jurists Ulpian and Papinian went to Rome.

No province of the Empire surpassed Syria in industry and prosperity. Where now 3,000,000 inhabitants find a precarious existence, 10,000,000 lived in Trajan’s time.⁵⁰ Half a hundred cities here enjoyed the pure water, the public baths, the underground drainage system, the clean markets, the gymnasia and palaestras, the lectures and music, the schools and temples and basilicas, the porticoes and arches, the public statuary and picture galleries, characteristic of the Hellenistic cities in the first century after Christ.⁵¹ The oldest of them was Damascus, over the Lebanons from Sidon, fortified by the surrounding desert, and turned almost into a garden by the spreading arms and tributaries of a stream gratefully called “the river of gold.” Many caravan routes converged here, and poured into the bazaars the products of three continents.

Returning over the Anti-Lebanon hills and moving north over dusty roads, the modern traveler is astonished to find, in the tiny village of Baalbek, the ruins of two majestic temples and a propylaeum, once the pride of Heliopolis, the Greco-Roman-Syrian City of the Sun. Augustus planted a small colony there, and the town grew as the sacred seat of Baal the Sun-God and as the meeting point of roads to Damascus, Sidon, and Beirut. Under Antoninus Pius and his successors Roman, Greek, and Syrian architects and engineers raised, on the site of an old Phoenician temple to Baal, an imposing shrine to Iuppiter Heliopolitanus. It was built of huge monoliths from a quarry a mile away; one block measures sixty-two by fourteen by eleven feet, and contains enough stone for a commodious house. Fifty-one marble steps 150 feet wide lead up to the propylaeum, a Corinthian portico. Beyond a colonnaded forecourt and court rose the main temple, of which fifty-eight columns still tower sixty-two feet into the air. Near it are the remains of a smaller temple, variously attributed to Venus, Bacchus, and Demeter; nineteen of its columns survive, and a handsome portal delicately carved. Resplendent in their solitary grandeur under the unclouded sun, the columns of these temples are among the fairest extant works of man. Seeing them we feel, better than in Italy, the grandeur that was Rome, the wealth and courage, skill and taste that could build, in so many scattered cities, temples greater and more majestic than the crowded capital ever knew.

A similar sight meets the traveler who strikes eastward across the desert from Horns, the ancient Emesa, to Tadmor, which the Greeks translated into Palmyra, City of a Myriad Palms. Its fortunate position and fertile soil around two gushing springs on the roads from Emesa and Damascus to the Euphrates made it grow in affluence until it was one of the major cities of the East; and its distance from other settlements enabled it to maintain practical independence despite nominal allegiance to Seleucid kings or Roman emperors. Its wide central thoroughfare was flanked by shady porticoes containing 454 columns; and at the four main crossings were stately arches, of which one remains to let us judge the rest. The glory of the city was the Temple of the Sun, dedicated (A.D. 30) to the supreme trinity of Bel (Baal), Yarhibol (the sun), and Aglibol (the moon). Its size continued Assyrian traditions of immensity. Its court, the largest in the Empire, had an unrivaled colonnade 4000 feet long, much of it composed of Corinthian columns running four abreast. Within the court and the temple were paintings and sculptures whose extant examples reveal the approach of Palmyra to Parthia in art as in geography.

A main route eastward from Palmyra reached the Euphrates at Dura-Europus. There (A.D. 100) the merchants shared their gains with the Palmyrene trinity by rearing a temple half Greek and half Indian; and an eastern painter adorned the walls with frescoes that vividly illustrate the Oriental origin of Byzantine and early Christian art.⁵² Farther north on the great river were other important crossing towns at Thapsacus and Zeugma. Turning westward from Thapsacus the traveler passed through Beroea (Aleppo) and Apamea to the Mediterranean at Laodicea—still keeping its ancient name as Latakia, and still an active port. Between it and Apamea the river Orontes flowed north, between shores largely pre-empted by rich estates, to Antioch (Antakia), capital of Syria. The river, and a great network of roads, brought the goods of the East to Antioch, while its Mediterranean port, Seleucia Pieria, fourteen miles down the stream, brought in the products of the West. Most of the city rose on a mountain slope and had the Orontes at its feet; it was a picturesque location, that helped Antioch rival Rhodes as the most beautiful city of the Hellenic East. It had a system of street lighting that made it safe and brilliant at night. The main avenue, four and a half miles long, was paved with granite and had a covered colonnade on either side, so that people could walk from one end of the town to the other immune to rain and sun. Pure water was supplied in abundance to every home. The complex population of 600,000 Greeks, Syrians, and Jews was notoriously gay, pursuing pleasure relentlessly, laughing at the pompous Romans who came to govern them, oscillating between the circus and the amphitheater, the brothels and the baths, and taking full advantage of Daphne, their famous suburban park. Festivals were numerous, and Aphrodite had a share in all of them. During the feast of Brumalia, lasting through most of December, the whole city, says a contemporary, resembled a tavern, and the streets rang all night with song and revelry.⁵³ There were schools of rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine, but Antioch was not a center of learning. Its populace lived intensely for the day; and when it needed religion it flocked to astrologers, magicians, miracle-workers, and charlatans.

The general picture of Syria under Roman rule is one of prosperity more continuous than in any other province. Most of the workers were freemen, except in domestic service. The upper classes were Hellenized, the lower remained Oriental; in the same town Greek philosophers rubbed elbows with temple prostitutes and emasculated priests; and even till Hadrian children were now and then offered as sacrifices to the gods.⁵⁴ Sculpture and painting took on a semi-Oriental, half-medieval face and form. The Greek language prevailed in government and literature, but native tongues—chiefly Aramaic—remained the speech of the people. Scholars were plenty and made the world ring with their moment’s fame. Nicolaus of Damascus, besides mentoring Antony, Cleopatra, and Herod, undertook the weary task of writing a universal history—a labor, he tells us, that Hercules himself would have shunned.⁵⁵ Time in its tenderness has buried all his works, as at its leisure it will cover ours.

VI. ASIA MINOR

North of Syria was the client kingdom—later the province—of Commagene, with a populous capital at Samosata, Lucian’s childhood home. Across the Euphrates stood the little realm of Osrhoene; Rome fortified its capital, Edessa (Urfa), as a base against Parthia; we shall hear more of it in Christian days. Westward from Syria one passed into Cilicia (as now into Turkey) at Alexandria Issi (Alexandretta). This, Cicero’s province, was highly civilized along the southern Asia Minor coast, but still barbarous in the Taurus hills. Tarsus (Tersous), the capital, was “no mean city,” said its son Saint Paul, but was renowned for its schools and philosophers.

Over against Cilicia, in the Mediterranean, the island of Cyprus pursued its immemorial life of mining copper, cutting cypress, building ships, and bearing patiently a succession of conquerors. The lucrative mines were owned by Rome and worked by slaves. Galen describes how in his time a mine there collapsed and crushed hundreds of workers—a periodical incident in the geological basis of human comforts and powers.

North of Cilicia lay arid and mountainous Cappadocia, mining precious metals, and raising wheat, cattle, and slaves for export. West of it, Lycaonia would enter into history with the visits of Saint Paul to Derbe, Lystra, and Iconium. Again north was Galatia, settled and named by the Gauls in the third century B.C.; its most famous product was the Black Stone of Pessinus, sent to Rome as a symbol of Cybele; its chief city was Ancyra, capital of the Hittites 3500 years ago, and of Turkey today. West of Cilicia, the province of Pisidia counted fine cities within its borders, like Xanthus, now recovering from its mass suicide before Brutus, and Aspendus, whose theater is so well preserved that one easily imagines it filling again to hear Menander or Euripides.

West and north of Pisidia was the province of “Asia,” divided into Phrygia, Caria, Lydia, and Mysia. Here, where the civilization of Ionia still flourished after a thousand years, Philostratus counted 500 towns, with a total population far greater than the region supports today. The countryside was fertile, the crafts had grown in skill from age to age, and the ports profited from the development of rich markets in Italy, Africa, Spain, and Gaul. Phrygia was mountainous, but it boasted large cities like Apamea Celaenae—ranked by Strabo as second only to Ephesus in “Asia”—and Laodicea, fortunate in its philanthropic philosophers and millionaires. Cnidus was yet important enough to make an alliance with Rome; but Halicarnassus had declined from Herodotus to Dionysius—an excellent literary critic, an uncritical historian. Miletus was no longer in its prime, though still an active port; the oracle of Apollo in the temple at near-by Didyma continued to answer questions with puzzles; and the storytellers of the region were weaving those amorous picaresque “Milesian tales” that would soon develop into the Greek novel. Priene was a minor town, but its citizens vied honorably in making it fair with fine buildings. Here, in the first century B.C., a woman, Phile, was elected to the highest municipal office; the influence of wealth and Rome was raising the status of woman in Hellenic lands. Magnesia on the Maeander had what many rated as the most nearly perfect temple in Asia—dedicated to Artemis (129 B.C.), and designed by Hermogenes, the supreme architect of the age. At Mycale the koinon, or Commons, still met annually as a general council and religious union for Ionia.

Of the islands lying off the Carian coast Cos prospered with its silk industry and its medical school, rich with traditions of Hippocrates, and Rhodes (i.e., the Rose) was even in her decline the most beautiful city of the Greek world. When, after the Civil War, Augustus sought to relieve the distress of the eastern cities by allowing the cancellation of all debts, Rhodes refused to avail herself of the expedient and met all her obligations faithfully. As a result she rapidly regained her place as banker to the Aegean trade and became again a halfway port for vessels plying between Asia and Egypt. The city was celebrated for its fallen Colossus, its handsome buildings, its famous statuary, its clean and orderly streets, its competent aristocratic government, its celebrated schools of rhetoric and philosophy. Here Apollonius Molo taught Caesar and Cicero those arts of style which through them influenced all later Latin prose.

The most famous Rhodian of this period was Poseidonius, the last great synthetic mind of antiquity. Born at Syrian Apamea (135 B.C.), he first earned fame as a long-distance runner. After studying under Panaetius in Athens he made Rhodes his home, served her as magistrate and ambassador, traveled into many provinces, returned to Rhodes, and drew such men as Pompey and Cicero to his lectures on the Stoic philosophy. At 83 he went to live in Rome and died there a year later. His lost Universal History—covering Rome and its possessions from 144 to 82 B.C.—was ranked by ancient scholars as equal to the work of Polybius. His report of his travels in Gaul and his treatise On the Ocean were basic sources for Strabo. His calculation of the sun’s distance from the earth—52,000,000 miles—was closer than that of any other ancient student to our modern reckoning. He went to Cádiz to study the tides, and explained them by the joint action of the sun and the moon. He underestimated the distance across the Atlantic and predicted that one sailing from Spain would come to India after 8000 miles. Despite his wide acquaintance with natural science, he accepted many of the spiritualistic ideas of his time—daimones, divination, astrology, telepathy, and the power of the soul to rise to a mystic union with God, whom he defined as the Life-Force of the world. Cicero too generously ranked him as the greatest of the Stoics; we might also consider him a forerunner of the Neo-Platonists, a bridge from Zeno to Plotinus.

Following the coast of Asia northward from Caria, the traveler entered Lydia and its greatest city, Ephesus. It flourished under the Romans as never before. Though Pergamum was the formal capital of “Asia,” Ephesus became the seat of the Roman proconsul and his staff; it was also the main port of the province and the meeting place of the provincial assembly. Its polyglot population of 225,000 ranged from philanthropic sophists to a noisy and superstitious rabble. The streets were well paved and lighted and had miles of shady porticoes. There were the usual public buildings, some unearthed as late as 1894: a “museum” or scientific center, a medical school, a library with a strangely baroque façade, and a theater that seated 56,000 persons; here Demetrius the image-maker would arouse the populace against Saint Paul. The center (and chief bank) of the city was the Temple of Artemis, surrounded by 128 columns each the gift of a king. The eunuch priests were attended by virgin priestesses and a swarm of slaves; the rites were a mixture of Oriental and Greek; the barbarous statue that represented the goddess had two rows of supernumerary breasts, symbolizing fertility. The Festival of Artemis made all May a month of rejoicing, feasting, and games.

Smyrna, despite its fishermen, had a better atmosphere. Apollonius of Tyana, who traveled far and wide, called it “the most beautiful city under the sun.”⁵⁹ It was proud of its long, straight streets, its double-tiered colonnades, its library, and its university. One of its most famous sons, Aelius Aristides (A.D. 117-187), described it in terms that reveal the splendor of these Roman-Hellenistic cities.

Go from east to west, and you will pass from temple to temple and from hill to hill along a street fairer than its name (the Golden Way). Stand on the acropolis: the sea flows beneath you, the suburbs lie about you, the city through three lovely views fills the goblet of your soul. . . . Everything to the very shore is a shining mass of gymnasia, markets, theaters . . . baths—so many that you hardly know where to bathe . . . fountains and public walks, and running water in every home. The abundance of her spectacles, contests, and exhibitions is beyond telling, and the variety of her handicrafts. Of all cities this is best suited for those who like to live at ease and be philosophers without guile.⁶⁰

Aelius was one of many rhetors and sophists whose fame drew students to Smyrna from all Hellas. His teacher Polemo was so great (says Philostratus) “that he talked with cities as his inferiors, with emperors as not his superiors, and with the gods as his equals.”⁶¹ When he lectured in Athens Herodes Atticus, his greatest rival in opulent eloquence, attended as an admiring pupil. In payment for the privilege Herodes sent him 150,000 drachmas ($90,000); when Polemo failed to thank him a friend suggested that he felt underpaid; Herodes sent 100,000 more, which Polemo quietly accepted as his due. Polemo used his fortune to embellish his adopted city; he took part in its government, harmonized its factions, and served it as ambassador. Tradition says that finding his arthritis unbearable he shut himself up in the tomb of his ancestors at Laodicea and died of voluntary starvation at the age of fifty-six.⁶²

Sardis, Croesus’ ancient capital, was still “a great city” in Strabo’s time. Cicero was impressed by the splendor and refinement of Mytilene, and in the third century Longus described it in terms suggestive of Venice.⁶³ Pergamum shone with the great altar and costly buildings raised by the Attalid kings out of a treasury fattened by the labor of slaves in state forests, fields, mines, and factories. Attalus III anticipated Roman expansion and social revolution by bequeathing his realm to Rome in 133 B.C. Aristonicus, son of King Eumenes II by a concubine, denounced the bequest as forced, called the slaves and the free poor to revolt, defeated a Roman army (132), captured many cities, and planned a socialist state with the help of Blossius, teacher of the Gracchi. The neighboring kings of Bithynia and Pontus, and the business classes of the occupied cities, joined Rome in suppressing the rebellion, and Aristonicus died in a Roman dungeon. This uprising, and the Mithridatic Wars, interrupted the cultural life of Pergamum for half a century, and Antony despoiled its famous library to reimburse Alexandria for the volumes burned during Caesar’s stay. Pergamum must have recovered by Vespasian’s time, for the elder Pliny judged it the most brilliant city in Asia. It enjoyed a new flurry of building under the Antonines, and developed in its Asclepieum a medical school from which Galen went forth to cure the world.

Farther north Alexandria Troas was made a Roman colony by Augustus in memory of Rome’s supposed Trojan origin—which gave Rome a convenient claim to all these parts. On a near-by hill (Hissarlik) old Troy was rebuilt as new Ilium, and became a goal for tourists to whom guides pointed out the exact spot of every exploit in the Iliad, and the cave where Paris had judged Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena. On the Propontis Cyzicus built ships and sent out a ubiquitous merchant fleet rivaled only by that of Rhodes. Here Hadrian built a Temple of Persephone which was one of the glories of Asia. Its columns, says Dio Cassius, were six feet in diameter and seventy-five feet high, yet each was a single block of stone.⁶⁴ Rising from a hill, it towered so high that Aelius counted the harbor’s lighthouse superfluous.

From the Red to the Black Sea a hundred cities flourished under the Roman peace.

VII. THE GREAT MITHRIDATES

Along the northern shores of Asia Minor sprawled Bithynia and Pontus, mountainous in the interior, but rich in timber and minerals. Here a mixture of Thracians, Greeks, and Iranians overlay an antique Hittite stock. A line of Greco-Thracian kings ruled Bithynia, built a capital at Nicomedia (Is-nikmid), and major cities at Prusa and Nicaea (Is-nik). About 302 B.C. a Persian noble, piously called Mithridates, carved a kingdom for himself out of Cappadocia and Pontus, and founded a dynasty of virile Hellenizing monarchs, with capitals at Comana Pontica and Sinope. Their rule spread until it impinged upon Roman economic and political interests. The resulting Mithridatic Wars are fitly named from the redoubtable king who united western Asia and European Greece in a revolt which, if it had succeeded, would have changed the face of history.

Mithridates VI had inherited the throne of Pontus as a boy of eleven. His mother and his guardians, seeking to supplant him, tried to kill him. He fled from the palace, disguised himself, and for seven years lived in the woods as a hunter, dressed in skins. About 115 B.C.. a coup d’état deposed his mother and restored him to power. Surrounded by the conspiracies characteristic of Oriental courts, he took the precaution of drinking a little poison every day, until he had developed immunity to most of the varieties available to his intimates. In the course of his experiments he discovered many antidotes. From these his interest spread to medicine, on which he compiled data of such value that Pompey had them translated into Latin. His wild and exacting life had given him strength of body as well as of will; he grew to so large a frame that he sent his suit of armor to Delphi to amuse the worshipers. He was an expert horseman and warrior, could (we are assured) run fast enough to overtake a deer, drove a sixteen-horse chariot, and rode 120 miles in a day.⁶⁵ He prided himself on being able to outeat and outdrink any man, and he attended to a numerous harem. Roman historians tell us that he was cruel and treacherous and slew his mother, his brother, three sons, and three daughters;⁶⁶ but Rome has not transmitted his side of this tale. He was a man of some culture, could speak twenty-two languages, and never used an interpreter;⁶⁷ he studied Greek literature, was fond of Greek music, enriched Greek temples, and had Greek scholars, poets, and philosophers at his court; he collected works of art and issued coins of surpassing excellence. But he shared in the sensuality and coarseness of his half-barbarian environment and accepted the superstitions of his time. He defended himself against Rome not with the far-seeing maneuvers of a great general or statesman, but with the impromptu courage of an animal at bay.

Such a man could not be content with the reduced kingdom relinquished by his mother. With the help of Greek officers and mercenaries he conquered Armenia and the Caucasus, passed over the Kuban River and the Strait of Kerch into the Crimea, and brought under his sway all the Greek cities on the east, north, and west coast of the Black Sea. As the collapse of Greek military power had left these communities almost defenseless against the barbarians of their hinterland, they received the Greek phalanxes of Mithridates as saviors. The subject cities included Sinope (Sinob), Trapezus (Trebizond), Panticapaeum (Kerch), and Byzantium; but Bithynian control of the Hellespont (Dardanelles) left the Mediterranean commerce of Pontus at the mercy of hostile kings. When Nicomedes II of Bithynia died (94 B.C.), his two sons contested the succession. One of them sought the aid of Rome, the other, Socrates, appealed to the Pontic king. Mithridates took advantage of the factional strife in Italy to invade Bithynia and enthrone Socrates. Rome, unwilling to see the Bosporus in hostile hands, ordered Mithridates and Socrates out of Bithynia. Mithridates complied, Socrates refused. The Roman governor of Asia deposed him and crowned Nicomedes III. The new ruler, encouraged by the Roman proconsul Manius Aquilius, invaded Pontus, and the First Mithridatic War began (88-84 B.C.).

Mithridates felt that his sole chance of survival lay in arousing the Hellenic East to revolt against its Italian overlords. He announced himself as the liberator of Hellas and sent troops to free the Greek cities of Asia, if necessary by force. Opposed by the business classes of the towns, he courted the democratic parties with promises of semisocialistic reforms. Meanwhile his navy of 400 ships destroyed the Roman Black Sea fleet, and his army of 290,000 men overwhelmed the forces of Nicomedes and Aquilius. To express his scorn of Roman avarice,⁶⁸ the victorious king poured molten gold down the throat of the captured Aquilius—fresh from his triumph over the revolted slaves of Sicily. The Greek cities of Asia Minor, shorn of Roman defense, opened their gates to the armies of Mithridates and declared their allegiance to his cause. At his suggestion, on an appointed day, they slew all Italians—80,000 men, women, and children—whom they found within their walls (88 B.C.). Says Appian:

The Ephesians tore away the fugitives who had taken refuge in the Temple of Artemis and were clasping the images of the goddess, and slew them. The Pergamenes shot with arrows the Romans who had sought sanctuary in the Temple of Aesculapius. The people of Adramyttium followed into the sea those who sought to escape by swimming, and killed them and drowned their children. The inhabitants of Caunus (in Caria) pursued the Italians who had taken refuge about the statue of Vesta, killed the children before their mothers’ eyes, then the mothers, then the men. ... By which it was made plain that it was as much hatred of the Romans as fear of Mithridates that impelled these atrocities.⁶⁹

Doubtless the poorer classes, who had borne the brunt of Roman domination, took the lead in this mad massacre; the propertied classes, long protected by Rome, must have trembled at so wild an uprising of revenge. Mithridates sought to appease the well to do by exempting the Greek cities from taxes for five years and giving them complete home rule. At the same time, however, he “proclaimed the canceling of debts,” says Appian,⁷⁰ “freed the slaves, confiscated many estates, and redistributed the land.” Leading men in the communities formed a conspiracy against him; he discovered it and had 1600 of them killed. The lower classes, aided by philosophers and university professors,⁷¹ seized power in many Greek cities, even in Athens and Sparta, and declared war against both Rome and wealth. The Greeks of Delos, in an ecstasy of freedom, slaughtered 20,000 Italians in one day. The fleet of Mithridates captured the Cyclades, and his armies took possession of Euboea, Thessaly, Macedonia, and Thrace. The defection of rich “Asia” stopped the flow of tribute to the Roman treasury and of interest to Roman investors, and plunged Italy into a financial crisis that had something to do with the revolutionary movement of Saturninus and Cinna. Italy itself was divided, for the Samnites and Lucanians sent offers of alliance to the Pontic king.

Faced with war and revolution everywhere, the Senate sold the accumulated gold and silver of Rome’s temples to finance Sulla’s troops. We must not tell again how Sulla captured Athens, defeated the rebel armies, saved the Empire for Rome, and gave Mithridates a lenient peace. The King withdrew to his Pontic capital and quietly organized another army and fleet. Murena, the Roman legate in Asia, decided to attack him before he grew stronger. When, in this Second Mithridatic War (83-81), Murena was defeated, Sulla reprimanded him for violating the treaty and ordered hostilities ended. Six years later Nicomedes III bequeathed Bithynia to Rome. Mithridates realized that his own kingdom would soon be swallowed up if the Roman power, already controlling the Bosporus, should reach the borders of Paphlagonia and Pontus. In the Third Mithridatic War (75-63) he made a last effort, fought for twelve years against Lucullus and Pompey, was betrayed by his allies and aides, and fled to the Crimea. There the old warrior, now in his sixty-ninth year, tried to organize an army to cross the Balkans and invade Italy from the north. His son Pharnaces revolted against his authority, his army refused the venture, and the deserted king tried to kill himself. The poison that he took failed to work because he had inured his system to it, and his hands were too weak to press home the blade from whose point he invited death. His friends and protégés, commissioned by his son to kill him, ended his life with their swords and spears.

VIII. PROSE

It speaks well for Roman rule that the cities of Asia Minor recovered so rapidly from the intermittent fever of these wars. Nicomedia became the capital of the province of Bithynia-Pontus and later the imperial seat of Diocletian; Nicaea would be immortalized by the most important council in the history of the Christian Church. The two cities so rivaled one another in building that Trajan had to send the younger Pliny to draw them back from bankruptcy. Nicomedia made her offering to literature in Flavius Arrianus, whom we have seen recording the discourses of Epictetus. Governor of Cappadocia for six years, archon of Athens for one, Arrian yet found time to write many histories, of which only the Anabasis of Alexander remains, with an appendix of Indica. It was written in clear and simple Greek, for Arrian took Xenophon as his exemplar in style as well as life. “This work,” he says, with the bold vanity of the ancients, “is, and has been from my youth up, equivalent to native land, and family, and public office for me; and therefore I do not deem myself unworthy to rank among the greatest authors in the Greek language.”⁷²

Other cities along the Black Sea had goodly buildings and famous scholars. Myrlea had 320,000 inhabitants;⁷³ Amastris (Amasra) impressed Pliny as “a neat and lovely city,” known for its fine box trees; Sinope flourished as a fishing center and an outlet for the timber and minerals of its countryside; Amisus (Samsun) and Trapezus made a living by trading across the waters with Scythia (southern Russia); and Amasea (Amasia) gave birth and a home to antiquity’s most celebrated geographer.

Strabo came of a rich family, related, he assures us, to the Pontic kings. He suffered from a peculiar squint still known by his name.⁷⁴ He traveled extensively, apparently on diplomatic missions, and used every opportunity to gather geographical or historical information. He wrote a lost history continuing Polybius; and in 7 B.C. he issued his great Geography, of whose seventeen books time has preserved nearly all. Like Arrian he begins by proclaiming the virtues of his work:

I ask pardon of my readers, and appeal to them not to fasten the blame for the length of my discussion upon me rather than upon those who earnestly desire knowledge of things famous and ancient. . . . In this work I must leave untouched what is small, and devote my attention to what is noble and great . . . useful or memorable or entertaining. And just as, in judging the merits of colossal statues, we do not examine each individual part with minute care, but rather consider the general effect ... so should this my book be judged. For it, too, is a colossal work . . . worthy of a philosopher.⁷⁵

He borrows frankly from Polybius and Poseidonius, less frankly from Eratosthenes, brings them all sharply to account for their errors, and suggests that his own should be blamed on his sources.⁷⁶ But he acknowledges his sources with rare candor and usually selects them with discrimination. He notes that the extension of the Roman Empire has widened geographical knowledge, but believes that there are whole continents still unknown—possibly in the Atlantic. He believes that the earth is spheroidal (but the word probably meant spherical), and that if one were to sail westward from Spain he would in time come to India. He describes coastlines as always changing through erosion or eruption and conjectures that subterranean disturbances may someday sever Suez and unite the seas. His work was a brave summary of the global knowledge of his age and must be ranked as one of the major achievements of ancient science.

Far more renowned than Strabo in his time was Dio Chrysostom—Dio of the Golden Mouth (A.D. 40-120). His family had long been distinguished in Prusa; his grandfather had exhausted a fortune in gifts to the Bithynian city and then had made another; his father had gone through the same experience; and Dio followed in their steps.⁷⁷ He became an orator and a sophist, went to Rome, was converted to Stoicism by Musonius Rufus, and was banished from Italy and Bithynia by Domitian (82). Forbidden the use of his property or income, he wandered for thirteen years from country to country as a penniless philosopher, refusing money for his discourses, and earning his bread for the most part by the work of his hands. When Domitian was succeeded by Nerva, Dio’s exile was changed into honors; Nerva and Trajan befriended him and gave his city many favors at his request. He returned to Prusa and devoted most of his wealth to beautifying it. Another philosopher accused him of embezzling public funds; he was tried by Pliny and appears to have been exonerated.

Dio left behind him eighty orations. For us today they contain more wind than meat; they suffer from empty amplification, deceptive analogies, and rhetorical tricks; they stretch half an idea to half a hundred pages; no wonder a weary listener complained, “You are letting the sun go down with your interminable questions.”⁷⁸ But the man had charm and eloquence, else he could hardly have become the most celebrated orator of the century, for whose speeches men would interrupt a war. “I don’t know what you mean,” said the honest Trajan, “but I love you as myself.”⁷⁹ The barbarians on the Borysthenes (Dnieper) heard him as gladly as the Greeks gathered at Olympia, or the excitable Alexandrians; an army about to revolt against Nerva was mollified into acceptance by the impromptu address of the half-naked exile.

Probably what drew people to him was not his fine Attic Greek, but the courage of his denunciations. Almost alone in pagan antiquity he condemned prostitution; and few writers of his time so openly attacked the institution of slavery. (He was a bit vexed, however, when he found that his slaves had run away.)⁸⁰ His address to the Alexandrians was a castigation of their luxury, superstition, and vice. He chose Ilium as the scene of an oration in which he argued that Troy had never existed and that “Homer was the boldest liar in history.” In the heart of Rome he expounded the case of the countryside against the city, painted in vivid narrative a touching picture of rural poverty, and warned his audience that the land was being neglected and the agricultural basis of civilization was in decay. At Olympia, amid a multitude of fanatical worldlings, he reproved the atheists and epicureans of the day. Though popular conceptions of deity may be absurd, said Dio, the wise man will understand that the simple mind needs simple ideas and pictorial symbols. In truth no man can conceive the form of the Supreme Being, and even Pheidias’ noble statue was an anthropomorphic assumption as unwarrantable as the primitive identification of God with a star or a tree. We cannot know what God is, but we have an innate conviction that he exists, and we feel that philosophy without religion is a dark and hopeless thing. The only real freedom is wisdom—i.e., the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong; the road to freedom lies not through politics or revolution, but through philosophy; and true philosophy consists not in the speculations of books, but in the faithful practice of honor and virtue according to the dictates of that inmost voice which is, in some mystic sense, the word of God in the heart of man.⁸¹

IX. THE ORIENTAL TIDE

Religion, which had bided its time and nourished its roots through all the learned or ribald skepticism of the Periclean and Hellenistic periods, now in the second century resumed its immemorial sway as philosophy, baffled by infinity and human hope, confessed its limitations and abdicated its authority. The people themselves had never lost their faith; most of them accepted in outline the Homeric description of the afterlife,⁸² sacrificed religiously before undertaking a voyage, and still placed an obol in the mouth of the dead to pay his passage across the Styx. Roman statecraft welcomed the aid of established priesthoods and sought popular support by building costly temples to local gods. Throughout Palestine, Syria, and Asia Minor, the wealth of the clergy continued to grow. Hadad and Atargatis were still worshiped by the Syrians and had an awesome shrine at Hierapolis; the resurrection of the god Tammuz was still hailed in the towns of Syria with the cry, “Adonis [i.e., the Lord] is risen,” and his ascension into heaven was celebrated in the closing scenes of his festival.⁸³ Similar ceremonies commemorated in Greek ritual the agony, death, and resurrection of Dionysus. From Cappadocia the worship of the goddess Ma had spread into Ionia and Italy; her priests (called fanatici as belonging to the fanum, or temple) danced dizzily to the sound of trumpets and drums, slashed themselves with knives, and sprinkled the goddess and her devotees with their blood.⁸⁴ The making of new deities went on assiduously; Caesar and the emperors, Antinoüs and many local worthies, were deified (i.e., canonized) in life or death. Cross-fertilized by trade and war, pantheons were everywhere in flower, and prayers rose hopefully in a thousand tongues to a thousand gods. Paganism was not one religion; it was a jungle of rival creeds, often merging in eclectic confusion.

The worship of Cybele held its ground in Lydia and Phrygia, Italy and Africa and elsewhere, and its priests, as before, emasculated themselves in imitation of her beloved Attis. At her spring festival her worshipers fasted, prayed, and mourned the death of Attis; her priests cut their arms and drank their own blood; and a solemn procession bore the young god to his grave. But on the morrow the streets rang with exultant shouts as the people celebrated the resurrection of Attis and the renewal of the earth. “Take courage, O mystics,” cried the priests, “the god is saved; and for you also will come salvation.”⁸⁵ On the last day of the feast the image of the Great Mother was carried in triumph through crowds that hailed her, at Rome, as Nostra Domina, “Our Lady.”⁸⁶

Even more widely honored than Cybele was the Egyptian goddess Isis, the sorrowing mother, the loving comforter, the bearer of the gift of eternal life. All the Mediterranean peoples knew how her great spouse Osiris had died and had risen from the dead; in nearly every great city on that historic sea this happy resurrection was commemorated with gorgeous pageantry, and jubilant worshipers sang, “We have found Osiris again.”⁸⁷ Isis was represented in pictures and statues as holding her divine child Horus in her arms, and devout litanies hailed her as “Queen of Heaven,” “Star of the Sea,” and “Mother of God.”⁸⁸ Of all pagan cults this came nearest to Christianity in the tenderness of its story, the refinement of its ritual, the solemnity and yet joyful atmosphere of its chapels, the moving music of its vespers, the conscientious ministry of its white-robed and tonsured priests,⁸⁹ the honors and opportunities with which it charmed and comforted women, the universal welcome it gave to every nationality and every class. The religion of Isis spread from Egypt to Greece in the fourth century B.C., to Sicily in the third, to Italy in the second, and then to all parts of the Empire; her icons have been found on the Danube, the Rhine, and the Seine, and a temple to her has been unearthed in London.⁹⁰ The Mediterranean soul has never ceased to worship the divine creativeness and maternal solicitude of woman.

Meanwhile the masculine cult of Mithras was passing from Persia to the most distant Roman frontiers. In the later Zoroastrian theology Mithras was the son of Ahura-Mazda, the God of Light. He, too, was the god of light, of truth, purity, and honor; sometimes he was identified with the sun and led the cosmic war against the powers of darkness, always he mediated between his father and his followers, protecting and encouraging them in life’s struggle with evil, lies, uncleanliness, and the other works of Ahriman, Prince of Darkness. When Pompey’s soldiers brought this religion from Cappadocia to Europe a Greek artist pictured Mithras as kneeling on the back of a bull and plunging a poniard into its neck; this representation became the universal symbol of the faith. The seventh day of each week was held sacred to the sun-god; and towards the end of December his followers celebrated the birthday of Mithras “the Invincible Sun,” who, at the winter solstice, had won his annual victory over the forces of darkness, and day by day would now give longer light.⁹¹ Tertullian speaks of a Mithraic priesthood with a “high pontiff,” and of celibates and virgins serving the god; daily sacrifice was offered at his altar, worshipers partook of consecrated bread and wine, and the climax of the ceremony was signaled by the sounding of a bell.⁹² A flame was kept ever burning before the crypt in which the young god was represented felling the bull. Mithraism preached a high morality and pledged its “soldiers” to a lifelong war against evil in every form. After death, said its priests, all men must appear before the judgment seat of Mithras; then unclean souls would be handed over to Ahriman for eternal torment, while the pure would rise through seven spheres, shedding some mortal element at each stage, until they would be received into the full radiance of heaven by Ahura-Mazda himself.⁹³ This invigorating mythology spread in the second and third centuries of our era through western Asia and Europe (skipping Greece), and built its chapels as far north as Hadrian’s Wall. Christian Fathers were shocked to find so many parallels between their own religion and Mithraism; they argued that these were thefts from Christianity, or confusing stratagems of Satan (a form of Ahriman). It is difficult to say which faith borrowed from the other; perhaps both absorbed ideas current in the religious air of the East.

Each of the great cults of the Mediterranean region had “mysteries,” which were usually ceremonies of purification, sacrifice, initiation, revelation, and regeneration, centering about the death and resurrection of the god. New members were admitted into the worship of Cybele by being placed naked in a pit over which a bull was slain; the blood of the sacrificed animal, falling upon the candidate, purified him of sin and gave him a new spiritual and eternal life. The genitals of the bull, representing his sacred fertility, were placed in a consecrated vessel and were dedicated to the goddess.⁹⁴ Mithraism had a similar rite, known to the classic world as the taurobolium, or throwing of the bull. Apuleius described in ecstatic terms the degrees of initiation into the service of Isis—the long novitiate of fasting, continence, and prayer, the purifying submersion in holy water, and at last the mystic vision of the goddess offering everlasting bliss. At Eleusis the candidate was required to confess his sins (which discouraged Nero), abstain for a time from certain foods, bathe in the bay for spiritual as well as physical cleansing, and then offer sacrifice, usually of a pig. For three days, at the Feast of Demeter, the initiates mourned with her the snatching of her daughter into Hades, and meanwhile lived on consecrated cakes and a mystic mixture of flour, water, and mint. On the third night a religious drama represented the resurrection of Persephone, and the officiating priest promised a like rebirth to every purified soul.⁹⁵ Varying the theme under Hindu or Pythagorean influence, the Orphic sect throughout Greek lands taught that the soul is imprisoned in a succession of sinful bodies and can be released from this degrading reincarnation by rising to ecstatic union with Dionysus. At their gatherings the members of the Orphic brotherhood drank the blood of a bull sacrificed to—and identified with—the dying and atoning savior. Communal partaking of sacred food or drink was a frequent feature of these Mediterranean faiths. Often the food was thought to take on, by sanctification, the powers of the god, which were then magically conveyed to the communicant.⁹⁶

All sects assumed the possibility of magic. The Magi had disseminated their art through the East and had given a new name to old jugglery. The Mediterranean world was rich in magicians, miracleworkers, oracles, astrologers, ascetic saints, and scientific interpreters of dreams. Every unusual occurrence was widely hailed as a divine portent of future events. Askesis, which the Greeks had used to denote the athletic training of the body, came now to mean the spiritual taming of the flesh; men scourged themselves, mutilated themselves, starved themselves, or bound themselves to one place with chains; some of them died through self-torture or self-denial.⁹⁷ In the Egyptian desert near Lake Mareotis a group of Jews and non-Jews, male and female, lived in solitary cells, avoided sexual relations, met on the Sabbath for common prayer, and called themselves Therapeutae, healers of the soul.⁹⁸ Millions believed that the writings ascribed to Orpheus, Hermes, Pythagoras, the sibyls, etc., had been dictated or inspired by a god. Preachers claiming divine inspiration traveled from city to city, performing apparently miraculous cures. Alexander of Abonoteichus trained a serpent to hide its head under his arm and allow a half-human mask to be affixed to its tail; he announced that the serpent was the god Asclepius come to earth to serve as an oracle; and he amassed a fortune by interpreting the sounds made by reeds inserted in the false head.⁹⁹

Beside such charlatans there were probably thousands of sincere preachers of the pagan faiths. Early in the third century Philostratus painted an idealized picture of such a man in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana. At sixteen Apollonius adopted the strict rule of the Pythagorean brotherhood, renouncing marriage, meat, and wine, never shaving his beard, and keeping silence for five years.¹⁰⁰ He distributed his patrimony among his relatives and wandered as a penniless monk through Persia, India, Egypt, western Asia, Greece, and Italy. He imbibed the lore of the Magi, the Brahmans, and the Egyptian ascetics. He visited temples of any creed, implored the priests to abandon the sacrifice of animals, worshiped the sun, accepted the gods, and taught that behind them there was one supreme unknowable deity. His life of abnegation and piety led his followers to claim that he was the son of a god, but he described himself simply as the son of Apollonius. Tradition credited him with many miracles: he walked through closed doors, understood all languages, cast out demons, and raised a girl from the dead.¹⁰¹ But he was a philosopher rather than a magician. He knew and loved Greek literature and expounded a simple but exacting morality. “Grant me,” he prayed the gods, “to have little and to desire nothing.” Asked by a king to choose a gift, he answered, “Dried fruit and bread.”¹⁰² Preaching reincarnation, he bade his followers injure no living creature and eat no flesh. He exhorted them to shun enmity, slander, jealousy, and hatred; “if we are philosophers,” he told them, “we cannot hate our fellow men.”¹⁰³ “Sometimes,” says Philostratus, “he discussed communism and taught that men ought to support one another.”¹⁰⁴ He was accused of sedition and witchcraft, came of his own accord to Rome to answer these charges before Domitian, was imprisoned, and escaped. He died about A.D. 98, at an advanced age. His followers claimed that he had appeared to them after his death and had then ascended bodily into heaven.¹⁰⁵

What were the qualities that won half of Rome, half the Empire, to these new faiths? Partly their classless, raceless character; they accepted all nationalities, all freemen, and all slaves, and rode with consoling indifference over inequalities of pedigree and wealth. Their temples were made spacious to welcome the people as well as to enshrine the god. Cybele and Isis were mother-goddesses acquainted with grief, who mourned like millions of bereaved women; they could understand what the Roman deities seldom knew—the emptied hearts of the defeated. The desire to return to the mother is stronger than the impulse to depend upon the father; it is the mother name that comes spontaneously to the lips in great joy or distress; therefore men as well as women found comfort and refuge in Isis and Cybele. Even today the Mediterranean worshiper appeals more often to Mary than to the Father or the Son; and the lovely prayer that he most frequently repeats is addressed not to the Virgin but to the Mother, blessed in the fruit of her womb.

The new faiths not only entered more deeply into the heart; they appealed more colorfully to the imagination and the senses with processions and chants alternating between sorrow and rejoicing, and a ritual of impressive symbolism that brought fresh courage to spirits heavy with the prose of life. The new priesthoods were filled not by politicians occasionally donning sacerdotal garb, but by men and women of all ranks, graduating through an ascetic novitiate to continual ministration. By their help the soul conscious of wrongdoing could be purified; sometimes the body racked with illness could be healed by an inspiring word or ritual; and the mysteries at which they officiated symbolized the hope that even death might be overcome.

Once men had sublimated their longing for grandeur and continuance in the glory and survival of their family and their clan, and then of a state that was their creation and collective self. Now the old clan lines were melting away in the new mobility of peace; and the imperial state was the spiritual embodiment only of the master class, not of the powerless multitude of men. Monarchy at the top, frustrating the participation and merger of the citizen in the state, produced individualism at the bottom and through the mass. The promise of personal immortality, of an endless happiness after a life of subjection, poverty, tribulation, or toil, was the final and irresistible attraction of the Oriental faiths and of the Christianity that summarized, absorbed, and conquered them. All the world seemed conspiring to prepare the way for Christ.

CHAPTER XXV

Rome and Judea

132 B.C.-A.D. 135

I. PARTHIA

BETWEEN Pontus and the Caucasus rose the troubled mountains of Armenia, on whose crest, story told, Noah’s ark had found a mooring. Through the fertile valleys ran the roads that led from Parthia and Mesopotamia to the Black Sea; hence empires competed for Armenia. The people were Indo-European, akin to the Hittites and the Phrygians, but they had never surrendered their sweeping Anatolian nose. They were a vigorous race, patient in agriculture, skilled in handicraft, unequaled in commercial acumen; they made the best of a difficult terrain and raised enough wealth to keep their kings in luxury if not in power. Darius I, in the Behistun inscription (521 B.C.), named Armenia among the satrapies of Persia; later it gave a nominal allegiance to the Seleucids and then alternately to Parthia and Rome; but its remoteness allowed it a practical independence. Its most famous king, Tigranes the Great (94-56 B.C.), conquered Cappadocia, added a second capital, Tigranocerta, to Artaxata, and joined Mithridates’ revolt against Rome. When Pompey accepted his apologies he gave the victorious general 6000 talents ($21,600,000), 10,000 drachmas ($6000) to each centurion, and fifty to each soldier, in the Roman army.¹ Under Caesar, Augustus, and Nero Armenia acknowledged the suzerainty of Rome, and under Trajan it was for a time a Roman province; nevertheless, its culture was Iranian, and its usual orientation was toward Parthia.

The Parthians had for centuries occupied the region south of the Caspian Sea as subjects of the Achaemenid, then of the Seleucid, kings. They were of Scythian-Turanian stock—i.e., they belonged racially with the peoples of southern Russia and Turkestan. About 248 B.C. a Scythian chief, Arsaces, revolted against the Seleucid authority, made Parthia a sovereign state, and established the Arsacid dynasty. The Seleucid kings, weakened by Rome’s defeat of Antiochus III (189 B.C.), were unable to defend their territory against the reckless, half-barbarous Parthians, and by the end of the second century B.C. all Mesopotamia and Persia were absorbed into a new Parthian Empire. Three capitals, according to the season, entertained the new royalty: Hecatompylus in Parthia, Ecbatana in Media, and Ctesiphon on the lower Tigris. Across from Ctesiphon lay the former Seleucid capital Seleucia, which remained for centuries a Greek city in a Parthian realm. The Arsacid rulers kept the administrative structure built up by the Seleucids, but overlaid it with a feudalism derived from the Achaemenid kings. The mass of the population was composed of agricultural serfs and slaves; industry was backward, but the Parthian ironworkers made a fine steel, and “the brewing trade was highly profitable.”² The wealth of the state came partly from the trade that passed along the great rivers, partly from the caravans that crossed Parthia on the way between farther Asia and the West. From 53 B.C., when the Parthians defeated Crassus at Carrhae, to A.D. 217, when Macrinus bought peace from Artabanus, Rome fought war after war for the control of these routes and the Red Sea.

The Parthians were too rich or too poor to indulge in literature. The aristocrats, as in all ages, preferred the art of life to the life of art, and the serfs were too illiterate, the artisans too busy, the merchants too commercial, to produce great art or great books. The people spoke Pahlavi and wrote in Aramaic on parchment, which now replaced cuneiform; but not a line of Parthian literature has been preserved. We know that Greek plays were enjoyed in Ctesiphon as well as in Seleucia, for the head of Crassus played a part there in the Bacchae of Euripides. The paintings and sculptures discovered at Palmyra, Dura-Europus, and Ashur were probably the work of Iranian artists; their crude amalgam of Greek and Oriental styles affected later art from China to Byzantium. A vivid relief of a mounted archer has come down to us to suggest that we might have a higher opinion of Parthian art if more of it remained.^2a At Hatra, near Mosul, an Arabian feudatory of the Parthian king built (88 B.C..?) a limestone palace of seven arched and vaulted halls, in a powerful but barbarous style. Good Parthian work has survived in engraved silverware and jewelry.

The Parthians excelled in man’s favorite art—personal adornment. Both sexes curled their hair; the men nursed frizzed beards and flowing mustaches, and clothed themselves in tunic and baggy trousers, usually covered with a many-colored robe; the women swathed themselves in delicate embroideries and decked their hair with flowers. Free Parthians amused themselves with hunting, ate and drank abundantly, and never went on foot when they could ride. They were brave warriors and honorable foes, treated prisoners decently, admitted foreigners to high office, and gave asylum to refugees; sometimes, however, they mutilated dead enemies, tortured witnesses, and corrected trifling offenses with the scourge. They practiced polygamy according to their means, veiled and secluded their women, severely punished the infidelity of their wives, but permitted divorce to either sex almost at will.³ When the Parthian general Surena led an army against Crassus he took with him 200 concubines and a thousand camels for his baggage.⁴ All in all the Parthians impress us as less civilized than the Achaemenid Persians and more honorable gentlemen than the Romans. They were tolerant of religious diversities, allowing the Greeks, Jews, and Christians among them to practice their rituals unhindered. They themselves, veering from Zoroastrian orthodoxy, worshiped the sun and the moon, and preferred Mithras to Ahura-Mazda, much as the Christians preferred Christ to Yahveh. The Magi, neglected by the later Arsacid kings, abetted the overthrow of the dynasty.

On the death of Vologases IV (A.D. 209) his sons Vologases V and Artabanus IV fought for the throne. Artabanus won, and then defeated the Romans at Nisibis. Three centuries of war between the empires ended in a modified victory for Parthia; on the Mesopotamian plains the Roman legions were at a disadvantage against the Parthian cavalry. Artabanus in turn fell in civil war. His conqueror, Ardashir or Artaxerxes, feudal lord of Persia, made himself King of Kings (A.D. 227) and established the Sassanid dynasty. The Zoroastrian religion was restored, and Persia entered upon a greater age.

II. THE HASMONEANS

In 143 B.C. Simon Maccabee, taking advantage of the struggles among the Parthians, Seleucids, Egyptians, and Romans, wrested the independence of Judea from the Seleucid king. A popular assembly named him general and high priest of the Second Jewish Commonwealth (142 B.C.-A.D. 70), and made the latter office hereditary in his Hasmonean family. Judea became again a theocracy, under the Hasmonean dynasty of priest-kings. It has been a characteristic of Semitic societies that they closely associated the spiritual and temporal powers, in the family and in the state; they would have no sovereign but God.

Recognizing the weakness of the little kingdom, the Hasmoneans spent two generations widening its borders by diplomacy and force. By 78 B.C. they had conquered and absorbed Samaria, Edom, Moab, Galilee, Idumea, Transjordania, Gadara, Pella, Gerasa, Raphia, and Gaza, and had made Palestine as extensive as under Solomon. The descendants of those brave Maccabees who had fought for religious freedom enforced Judaism and circumcision upon their new Subjects at the point of the sword.⁵ At the same time the Hasmoneans lost their religious zeal and, over the bitter protests of the Pharisees, yielded more and more to the Hellenizing elements in the population. Queen Salome Alexandra (78-69 B.C.) reversed this trend and made peace with the Pharisees, but even before her death her sons Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II began a war of succession. Both parties submitted their claims to Pompey, who now (63 B.C.) stood with his victorious legions at Damascus. When Pompey decided for Hyrcanus, Aristobulus fortified himself with his army in Jerusalem. Pompey laid siege to the capital and gained its lower sections; but the followers of Aristobulus took refuge in the walled precincts of the Temple and held out for three months. Their piety, we are told, helped Pompey to overcome them; for perceiving that they would not fight on the Sabbath, he had his men prepare unhindered on each Sabbath the mounds and battering rams for the next day’s assault. Meanwhile the priests offered the usual prayers and sacrifices in the Temple. When the ramparts fell 12,000 Jews were slaughtered; few resisted, none surrendered, many leaped to death from the walls.⁶ Pompey ordered his men to leave the treasures of the Temple untouched, but he exacted an indemnity of 10,000 talents ($3,600,000) from the nation. The cities that the Hasmoneans had conquered were transferred from the Judean to the Roman power; Hyrcanus II was made high priest and nominal ruler of Judea, but as the ward of Antipater the Idumean, who had helped Rome. The independent monarchy was ended, and Judea became part of the Roman province of Syria.

In 54 B.C. Crassus, on his way to play the part of Pentheus at Ctesiphon, robbed the Temple of the treasures that Pompey had spared, amounting to some 10,000 talents. When news came that Crassus had been defeated and killed, the Jews took the opportunity to reclaim their freedom. Longinus, successor of Crassus as governor of Syria, suppressed the revolt and sold 30,000 Jews into slavery (43 B.C.).⁷ In that same year Antipater died; the Parthians swept across the desert into Judea and set up, as their puppet king, Antigonus, the last of the Hasmoneans. Antony and Octavian countered by naming Herod—son of Antipater—king of Judea and financing his Jewish army with Roman funds. Herod drove out the Parthians, protected Jerusalem from pillage, sent Antigonus to Antony for execution, slew all Jewish leaders who had supported the puppet, and so auspiciously entered upon one of the most colorful reigns in history (37-4 B.C.).

III. HEROD THE GREAT

His character was typical of an age that had produced so many men of intellect without morals, ability without scruple, and courage without honor. He was in his lesser way the Augustus of Judea: like Augustus he overlaid the chaos of freedom with dictatorial order, beautified his capital with Greek architecture and sculpture, enlarged his realm, made it prosper, achieved more by subtlety than by arms, married widely, was broken by the treachery of his offspring, and knew every good fortune but happiness. Josephus describes him as a man of great physical bravery and skill, a perfect marksman with arrow and javelin, a mighty hunter who in one day caught forty wild beasts, and “such a warrior as could not be withstood.”⁸ He must have added some charm of personality to these qualities, for he was always able to outtalk or outbribe the enemies who sought to discredit him with Antony, Cleopatra, or Octavian. From every crisis with the Triumvirs he emerged with larger powers and territory than before, until Augustus judged him “too great a soul for so small a dominion,” restored the cities of Hasmonean Palestine to his kingdom, and wished Herod might rule Syria and Egypt too.⁹ “The Idumean” was a generous as well as a ruthless man, and the benefits he conferred upon his subjects were equaled only by the injuries he did them.

He was molded in part by the hatred of those whom he had defeated or whose relatives he had slain, and by the scornful hostility of a people that resented his harsh autocracy and his alien descent. He had become king by the help and money of Rome, and remained to the end of his life a friend and vassal of the power from which the people night and day plotted to regain their liberty. The modest economy of the country bent and at last broke under the taxes imposed upon it by a luxurious court and a building program out of proportion to the national wealth. Herod sought in various ways to appease his subjects, but failed. He forgave taxes in poor years, persuaded Rome to reduce the tribute it exacted, secured privileges for Jews abroad, relieved famine and other calamities promptly, maintained internal order and external security, and developed the natural resources of the land. Brigandage was ended, trade was stimulated, the markets and ports were noisy with life. At the same time the King alienated public sentiment by the looseness of his morals, the cruelty of his punishments, and the “accidental” drowning, in the bath, of Aristobulus, grandson of Hyrcanus II and therefore the legitimate heir to the throne. The priests whose power he had ended, and whose leaders he appointed, conspired against him, and the Pharisees abominated his apparent resolution to make Judea a Hellenistic state.

Ruling many cities that were more Greek than Jewish in population and culture, and impressed with the refinement and variety of Hellenic civilization, Herod, himself not by origin or conviction a Jew, naturally sought a cultural unity for his realm, and an imposing façade for his rule, by encouraging Greek ways, dress, ideas, literature, and art. He surrounded himself with Greek scholars, entrusted to them high affairs of state, and made Nicolas of Damascus, a Greek, his official counselor and historian. He raised at great expense a theater and an amphitheater in Jerusalem, adorned them with monuments to Augustus and other pagans, and introduced Greek athletic and musical contests and Roman gladiatorial combats.¹⁰ He beautified Jerusalem with other buildings in what seemed to the people a foreign architectural style, and set up in public places Greek statuary whose nudity startled the Jews as much as the nakedness of the wrestlers in the games. He built himself a palace, doubtless on Greek models, filled it with gold and marble and costly furniture, and surrounded it with extensive gardens after the manner of his Roman friends. He shocked the people by telling them that the Temple which Zerubbabel had set up five centuries before was too small, and proposing to tear it down and erect a larger one on its site. Despite their protests and their fears he realized his plan and reared the lordly Temple that Titus would destroy.

On Mt. Moriah an area was cleared 750 feet square. Along its boundaries cloisters were built roofed with cedar “curiously graven,” and supported by multiple rows of Corinthian columns, each a marble monolith so large that three men could barely join hands around it. In this main court were the booths of the money-changers, who for the convenience of pilgrims changed foreign coins into those acceptable to the Sanctuary; here, too, were the stalls where one might buy animals to offer in sacrifice, and the rooms or porticoes where teachers and pupils met to study Hebrew and the Law, and the noisy beggars inevitable in Oriental scenes. From this “Outer Temple” a broad flight of steps led up to an inner walled space which non-Jews were forbidden to enter; here was the “Court of the Women,” where “such men as were pure came in with their wives.”¹¹ From this second enclosure the worshiper passed up another flight of steps, and through gates plated with silver and gold, into the “Court of the Priests,” where stood, in the open air, the altar upon which burnt sacrifice was offered to Yahveh. Still other steps led through bronze doors seventy-five feet high and twenty-four wide, overhung with a famous golden vine, into the temple proper, open only to priests. It was built entirely of white marble, in set-back style, and its façade was plated with gold. The interior was divided crosswise by a great embroidered veil, blue and purple and scarlet. Before the veil were the golden seven-branched candlestick, the altar of incense, and the table bearing the unleavened “shewbread” that the priests laid before Yahveh. Behind the veil was the Holy of Holies, which in the earlier temple had contained a golden censer and the Ark of the Covenant, but in this temple, says Josephus, contained “nothing whatever.” Here human foot trod only once a year, on the Day of Atonement, when the high priest entered alone. The main structures of this historic edifice were finished in eight years; the work of adornment, however, continued for eighty years, and was just completed when Titus’ legions came.¹²

The people were proud of the great shrine, which was ranked among the marvels of the Augustan world; for its splendor they almost forgave the Corinthian columns of the porticoes and the golden eagle that—defying the Jewish prohibition of graven images—symbolized at the very entrance to the Temple the power of Judea’s enemy and master, Rome. Meanwhile Jews who traveled brought back news of the completely Greek buildings with which Herod was remaking the other cities of Palestine, and told how he was spending national funds, and (rumor said) the gold that had been hidden in David’s tomb,¹³ in constructing a great harbor at Caesarea, and lavishing gifts upon such foreign cities as Damascus, Byblus, Berytus, Tyre, Sidon, Antioch, Rhodes, Pergamum, Sparta, and Athens. Herod, it became clear, wished to be the idol of the Hellenic world, not merely the King of the Jews. But the Jews lived by their religion, by their faith that Yahveh would someday rescue them from bondage and oppression; the triumph of the Hellenic over the Hebraic spirit in the person of their ruler foreboded to them a disaster as great as the persecutions of Antiochus. Plots were formed against Herod’s life; he discovered them, arrested the conspirators, tortured and killed them, and in some cases put their entire families to death.¹⁴ He set spies among the people, disguised himself to eavesdrop on his subjects, and punished every hostile word.¹⁵

He foiled all his enemies except his wives and his children. Of wives he had ten, once nine at a time; of children, fourteen. His second wife, Mariamne, was the grandaughter of Hyrcanus II and the sister of Aristobulus, both of whom Herod had slain. She was, says Josephus, “a chaste woman, but somewhat rough by nature, and treated her husband imperiously because she saw he was so fond of her as to be her slave. . . . She would also expose his mother and sister openly, on account of the meanness of their birth, and would speak unkindly of them, insomuch that there was an unpardoning hatred among the women” of the royal household. Herod’s sister persuaded him that Mariamne was plotting to poison him. He accused his wife before the members of his court; they condemned her, and she was executed. Doubtful of her guilt, Herod was for a time mad with remorse; he called out her name repeatedly, sent his servants to summon her, gave up public affairs, went into the desert, “afflicted himself bitterly,” and was brought to his palace in a state of fever and insanity. Mariamne’s mother joined with others in an attempt to depose him; he suddenly recovered his powers of mind and throne, and put the plotters to death. Soon thereafter Antipater; his son by his first wife, laid proofs before him of an attempted conspiracy by Alexander and Aristobulus, his sons by Mariamne; he submitted the matter to a council of 150 men, who sentenced the youths to die (6 B.C.). Two years later Nicolas of Damascus convicted Antipater himself of scheming to replace his father. Herod had the youth brought before him and “began to weep, lamenting the misfortunes he had suffered from his children.”¹⁶ In a moment of mercy he ordered Antipater jailed.

Meanwhile the old king was breaking down with disease and grief. He suffered from dropsy, ulcer, fever, convulsions, and loathsome breath. After frustrating so many attempts against his life he tried to kill himself, but was prevented. Hearing that Antipater had sought to bribe the guard to free him, Herod had him slain. Five days afterward he too died (4 B.C.), in the sixty-ninth year of his age, hated by all his people. It was said of him by his enemies that “he stole to the throne like a fox, ruled like a tiger, and died like a dog.”¹⁷

IV. THE LAW AND ITS PROPHETS

Herod’s will divided his kingdom among three remaining sons. To Philip went the eastern region known as Batanea, containing the cities of Bethsaida, Capitolias, Gerasa, Philadelphia, and Bostra. To Herod Antipas went Peraea (the land beyond the Jordan) and, in the north, Galilee, where lay Esdraela, Tiberias, and Nazareth. To Archelaus fell Samaritis, Idumea, and Judea. In this last were many famous cities or towns: Bethlehem, Hebron, Beersheba, Gaza, Gadara, Emmaus, Jamnia, Joppa, Caesarea, Jericho, and Jerusalem. Some Palestinian cities were predominantly Greek, some Syrian; the Gadarene swine attest the non-Jews of Gadara. The gentiles were in the majority in all the coast towns except Joppa and Jamnia, and in the “Decapolis” or ten cities of the Jordan; in the interior the villages were almost entirely Jewish. In this racial division, not unpleasing to Rome, lay the tragedy of Palestine.

We must go back to the Puritans of England to understand the repulsion aroused in pious Jews by the polytheism and immorality of pagan society. Religion was to the Jews the source of their law, their state, and their hope: to let it melt away in the swelling river of Hellenism would, they thought, be national suicide. Hence that mutual hatred of Jew and gentile which kept the little nation in a kind of undulating fever of racial strife, political turbulence, and periodic war. Moreover, the Jews of Judea scorned the people of Galilee as ignorant backsliders, and the Galileans scorned the Judeans as slaves caught in the cobwebs of the Law. Again, a perpetual feud burned between Judeans and Samaritans; for the latter claimed that their hill of Gerizim, and not Zion, had been chosen by Yahveh as his home, and they rejected all the Scriptures except the Pentateuch.¹⁸ All these factions agreed in hating the Roman power, which made them pay a heavy price for the unwelcome privilege of peace.

There were now in Palestine some 2,500,000 souls, of whom perhaps 100,000 lived in Jerusalem.¹⁹ Most of them spoke Aramaic; priests and scholars understood Hebrew; officials and foreigners and most authors used Greek. The majority of the people were peasants, tilling and irrigating the soil, tending the orchard, the vine, and the flock. In the time of Christ Palestine grew enough wheat to export a modest surplus: ²⁰ its dates, figs, grapes and olives, wine and oil were prized and bought throughout the Mediterranean. The old command was still obeyed to let the land lie fallow in each sabbatical year.²¹ Handicrafts were largely hereditary and were usually organized in guilds. Jewish opinion honored the worker, and most scholars plied their hands as well as their tongues. Slaves were fewer than in any other Mediterranean country. Petty trade flourished, but there were as yet few Jewish merchants of large means and range. “We are not a commercial people,” said Josephus; “we live in a country [eastern Judea] without a seaboard, and have no inclination to [foreign] trade.”²² Financial operations were of minor scope until Hillel, perhaps at Herod’s suggestion, abrogated the law of Deuteronomy (xv, 1-11) requiring the cancellation of debts every seventh year. The Temple itself was the national bank.

Within the Temple was the hall Gazith, meeting place of the Sanhedrin or Great Council of the Elders of Israel. Probably the institution arose in the period of Seleucid rule (ca. 200 B.C.), to replace the earlier council mentioned in Numbers (XI, 16) as advising Moses. Originally selected by the high priest from the sacerdotal aristocracy, it had come in Roman times to co-opt into its membership a rising number of Pharisees and a few professional Scribes.²³ These seventy-one men, under the presidency of the high priest, claimed supreme power over all Jews everywhere, and orthodox Jews everywhere acknowledged it; but the Hasmoneans, Herod, and Rome recognized their authority only in violations of Jewish law by a Judean Jew. They could pass sentence of death upon Jews in Judea for religious offenses, but could not execute it without confirmation by the civil power.²⁴

In this assembly, as in most, two factions fought for predominance—a conservative group led by the higher priests and the Sadducees, and a liberal group led by Pharisees and Scribes. Most of the upper clergy and upper classes belonged to the Sadducees (Zadokim), so named after their founder Zadok; they were nationalistic in politics and orthodox in religion; they stood for the enforcement of the Torah or written Law, but rejected the additional ordinances of the oral tradition and the liberalizing interpretations of the Pharisees. They doubted immortality and were content to possess the good things of the earth.

The Pharisees (Perushim, separatists) were so named by the Sadducees as meaning that they separated themselves (like good Brahmans) from those who contracted religious impurity by neglecting the requirements of ritual cleanliness.²⁵ They were a continuation of the Chasidim, or Devotees, of the Maccabean age, who had upheld the strictest application of the Law. Josephus, himself a Pharisee, defined them as “a body of Jews who profess to be more religious than the rest, and to explain the laws more precisely.”²⁶ For this purpose they added to the written Law of the Pentateuch the oral tradition of interpretations and decisions made by recognized teachers of the Law. These interpretations were necessary, in the judgment of the Pharisees, to clarify the obscurities of the Mosaic Code, to specify its application in particular cases, and to modify its letter, occasionally, in adaptation to the changed needs and conditions of life. They were at once rigorous and lenient, softening the Law here and there as in Hillel’s decree on interest, but demanding the full observation of the oral tradition as well as of the Torah. Only through this full obedience, they felt, could the Jews escape assimilation and extinction. Reconciled to Roman domination, the Pharisees sought consolation in the hope of a physical and spiritual immortality. They lived simply, condemned luxury, fasted frequently, washed sedulously, and were now and then irritatingly conscious of their virtue; but they represented the moral strength of Judaism, won the middle classes to their support, and gave their followers a faith and rule that saved them from disintegration when catastrophe came. After the Temple was destroyed (A.D. 70), the priesthood lost influence, the Sadducees disappeared, the synagogue replaced the temple, and the Pharisees, through the rabbis, became the teachers and shepherds of a scattered but undefeated people.

The most extreme of the Jewish sects was that of the Essenes. They derived their piety from the Chasidim, their name probably from the Chaldaic aschai (bather), their doctrine and practice from the stream of ascetic theory and regimen circulating through the world of the last century before Christ; possibly they were influenced by Brahmanic, Buddhist, Parsee, Pythagorean, and Cynic ideas that came to the crossroads of trade at Jerusalem. Numbering some 4000 in Palestine, they organized themselves into a distinct order, observed both the written and the oral Law with passionate exactitude, and lived together as almost monastic celibates tilling the soil in the oasis of Engadi amid the desert west of the Dead Sea. They dwelt in homes owned by their community, had their meals in common and in silence, chose their leaders by a general vote, mingled their goods and earnings in a common treasury, and obeyed the Chasidic motto, “Mine and thine belong to thee.”²⁷ Many of them, says Josephus, “lived more than a hundred years because of their simple diet and regular life.”²⁸ Each clothed himself in white linen, carried a little hoe to cover his droppings, washed himself like a Brahmin afterward, and considered it a sacrilege to evacuate on the Sabbath.²⁹ A few of them married and lived in towns, but practiced the Tolstoian rule of cohabiting with their wives only to beget children. The members of the sect avoided all sensual pleasure and sought through meditation and prayer a mystic union with God. They hoped that by piety, abstinence, and contemplation they might acquire magic powers and foresee the future. Like most people of their time they believed in angels and demons, thought of diseases as possession by evil spirits, and tried to exorcise these by magical formulas; from their “secret doctrine” came some parts of the Cabala.³⁰ They looked for the coming of a Messiah who would establish a communistic egalitarian Kingdom of Heaven (Malchuth Shamayim) on earth; into that Kingdom only those would enter who had led a spotless life.³¹ They were ardent pacifists and refused to make implements of war; but when the legions of Titus attacked Jerusalem and the Temple the Essenes joined other Jews in defending their city and its shrine and fought till nearly all of their order were dead. As Josephus describes their customs and their sufferings we enter into the atmosphere of Christianity:

Although they were tortured and racked, burnt and torn to pieces, and went through every torment to force them either to blaspheme their legislator, or to eat what was forbidden them, yet could they not be made to do either of them; no, nor once to flatter their tormentors, or to shed a tear. But they smiled in their very pains, and laughed those to scorn who tortured them, and gave up their souls in great cheerfulness, as expecting to receive them again.³²

These—Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes—were the chief religious sects of Judea in the generation before Christ. The Scribes (Hakamin, learned) whom Jesus so often bracketed with the Pharisees were not a sect but a profession; they were scholars learned in the Law, who lectured on it in synagogues, taught it in schools, debated it in public and private, and applied it in judgment on specific cases. A few of them were priests, some were Sadducees, most were Pharisees; they were in the two centuries before Hillel what the rabbis were after him. They were the iurisprudentes of Judea, whose legal opinions, selected by time and transmitted by word of mouth from teacher to pupil, became part of that oral tradition which the Pharisees honored along with the written Law. Under their influence the Code of Moses proliferated into thousands of detailed precepts designed to meet every circumstance.

The earliest definite figure among these lay teachers of the Law is that of Hillel, and even he is nearly lost in the web of legend that a fond posterity wove about his name. We are told that he was born in Babylon (75 B.C.?) of a distinguished but impoverished family. He came as a grown man to Jerusalem, where he supported his wife and children by manual labor. Half his daily wage he paid for admission to the school where two famous masters, Shemaya and Abtolim, expounded the Law. Lacking the fee one day, and denied entry, he climbed upon a window sill “that he might hear the words of the living God.” Frozen with the cold, story says, he fell into the snow and was found there half dead the next morning.³³ He became in his turn a revered rabbi or teacher, renowned for his modesty, patience, and gentleness. One account tells how a man wagered he could anger Hillel, and lost.³⁴ He laid down three principles for the guidance of life: love of man, of peace, and of the Law and the knowledge of it. When a would-be proselyte asked him to explain the Law in as little time as a man could stand on one foot, Hillel answered: “What is hateful to thyself do not do to another”;^35* it was a cautiously negative form of that Golden Rule which had long before been phrased positively in Leviticus. Again Hillel taught: “Judge not thy neighbor until thou art in his place.”³⁷ He sought to quiet the quarreling sects by laying down seven rules for interpreting the Law. His own interpretations were liberal; most notably, he facilitated the lending of money and the procurement of divorce. He was a pacifier, not a reformer; “separate not thyself from the congregation,” he advised the young rebels of his day. He accepted Herod as an inescapable evil and was appointed by him president of the Sanhedrin (30 B.C.). Its Pharisean majority loved him so well that he remained head of the Great Council until his death (A.D. 10). Out of respect for his memory the office was made hereditary in his family for 400 years.

The Council gave its second place of honor to Hillel’s rival, the conservative rabbi Shammai. He taught a much stricter interpretation of the Law, rejected divorce, and demanded the literal application of the Torah, regardless of new conditions. This division of Jewish teachers into conservative and liberal groups had existed for a century before Hillel, and continued until the destruction of the Temple.

V. THE GREAT EXPECTATION

The Jewish literature that has come down to us from this period is almost entirely religious. Just as it seemed to the orthodox Hebrew a profanation to make images of the deity, or to adorn his temples with plastic art, so it seemed to him an error to write philosophy or literature for any other ultimate purpose than to praise God and glorify the Law. There were of course many exceptions, of which the pretty story of Susannah may serve as an instance. It tells of a fair Jewess falsely accused of unchastity by two unsatisfied elders, and freed through the skillful cross-examination of witnesses by a youth named Daniel. Even this romance found its way into some editions of the Book of Daniel.

The book of Joshua son of Sirach, which we know as Ecclesiasticus, may be as late as this period; it is one of many Apocrypha—“hidden” or unauthentic compositions not accepted into the Jewish canon of the Old Testament; rich in beauty and wisdom, it did not deserve to be excluded from the company of Ecclesiastes and Job. In its twenty-fourth chapter we find again, as in the eighth chapter of Proverbs, the doctrine of the Logos or Incarnate Word: “Wisdom the first product of God, created from the beginning of the world.” Between 130 B.C. and A.D. 40 an Alexandrian Jew—or a number of Hellenistic Jews—published a Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, which sought, like Philo, to harmonize Judaism and Platonism, and called Hellenizing Jews back to the Law in prose as noble as any since Isaiah. A lesser work, the Psalms of Solomon (ca. 50 B.C.), is rich in anticipation of a Redeemer for Israel.

This hope of salvation from Rome and earthly suffering through the coming of a divine Redeemer rings through nearly all the Jewish literature of this age. Many productions took the form of apocalypses or revelations, whose aim was to make the past intelligible and forgivable by presenting it as a prelude to a triumphant future revealed to some seer by God. The Book of Daniel, written about 165 B.C. to encourage Israel against Antiochus Epiphanes, was still circulating among Jews who could not believe that Yahveh would let them long remain under pagan domination. The Book of Enoch, probably the work of several authors between 170 and 66 B.C., took the form of visions vouchsafed to the patriarch who, in Genesis (v, 24), had “walked with God.” It recounted the fall of Satan and his cohorts, the consequent intrusion of evil and suffering into human life, the redemption of mankind by a Messiah, and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. About 150 B.C. Jewish writers began to publish Sibylline Oracles, in which various sibyls or prophetesses were represented as defending Judaism against paganism and foretelling the final victory of the Jews over their enemies.

The idea of the saving god had probably come to western Asia from Persia and Babylonia.³⁸ In the Zoroastrian creed all history and life were represented as a war between the holy forces of light and the diabolical powers of darkness; in the end a savior would come—Shaosyant or Mithras—to judge all men and establish an everlasting reign of righteousness and peace. To many Jews the rule of Rome seemed part of the transient victory of evil. They denounced the greed, treachery, brutality, and idolatry of “gentile” civilization and the “atheistic” hedonism of an epicurean world. According to the Book of Wisdom

the ungodly said: Our life is short and tedious, and in the death of a man there is no remedy; neither was there any man known to return from the grave. . . . For the breath in our nostrils is as smoke, and a little spark in the moving of our heart; which being extinguished, our body shall be turned into ashes, and our spirit shall vanish as the soft air, and our name shall be forgotten, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, as a mist dispersed by the beams of the sun. . . . Come on, let us enjoy the good things that are present ... let no flower of the spring pass us by; let us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered; let us leave tokens of our joyfulness in every place.³⁹

These epicureans reason falsely, says the author; they hitch their wagon to a falling star, since pleasure is a vain and transitory thing.

For the hope of the ungodly man is as chaff swept away by the wind, and as thin hoar-frost scattered by the tempest; it passeth as the remembrance of a guest who tarrieth but a day. But the righteous shall live forever, and the care of them is with the Most High. Therefore shall they receive a glorious kingdom, and a diadem of beauty from the hand of the Lord.⁴⁰

The reign of evil will be brought to an end, according to the apocalyptic books, either by the direct intervention of God himself or the earthly coming of his son or representative, the Messiah or Anointed One.^* Had not the prophet Isaiah, a century back foretold him?

For unto us a child is born, a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called . . . the mighty God, the Prince of Peace.⁴¹

Many Jews agreed with Isaiah (XI, 1) in describing the Messiah as an earthly king who would be born of the royal house of David; others, like the authors of Enoch and Daniel, called him the Son of Man, and pictured him as coming down from heaven. The philosopher of Proverbs and the poet of the Wisdom of Solomon,⁴² perhaps influenced by Plato’s Ideas or the Stoic anima mundi, saw him as incarnate Wisdom, the first-begotten of God, the Word or Reason (logos) that would soon play so great a role in Philo’s philosophy. Nearly all the apocalyptic authors thought that the Messiah would triumph speedily; but Isaiah in a remarkable passage had conceived him as

despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. . . . Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows ... he was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities . . . and with his stripes we are healed. The Lord hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all. . . . He was taken from prison and from judgment, and was cut off out of the land of the living. . . . He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.⁴³

All, however, agreed that in the end the Messiah would subdue the heathen, free Israel,⁴⁴ make Jerusalem his capital, and win all men to accept Yahveh and the Mosaic Law.⁴⁵ Thereafter a “Good Time” would come of happiness for the whole world: all the earth would be fertile, every seed would bear a thousandfold, wine would be plentiful, poverty would disappear, all men would be healthy and virtuous, and justice, good fellowship, and peace would reign over the earth.⁴⁶ Some seers thought that this joyful age would be interrupted, that the powers of darkness and evil would make a last assault upon the happy kingdom, and that the world would be consumed in chaos and conflagration. In the final “Day of God” the dead would rise and be judged by the “Ancient of Days” (Yahveh), or by the “Son of Man,” to whom absolute and everlasting dominion would then be given over a renovated world, the Kingdom of God. The wicked would be cast down headlong and speechless “into Hell,”⁴⁷ but the good would be received into unending blessedness.

Essentially the movement of thought in Judea was parallel with that in the pagan theology of the time: a people that had once thought of the future in terms of its national destiny lost its trust in the state and thought of salvation in spiritual and individual terms. The mystery religions had brought this hope to many millions in Greece, the Hellenic East, and Italy; but nowhere was the hope so earnest, or its need so great, as in Judea. The poor or bereaved, the oppressed or scorned of the earth, looked for some divine redeemer of their subjection and their suffering. Soon, said the apocalypses, a savior would come, and in his triumph all just men would be lifted up, even out of the grave, into a paradise of eternal bliss. Old saints like Simeon, mystic women like Anna daughter of Phanuel, passed their lives about the Temple, fasting, waiting, praying that they might look upon the Redeemer before they died. A great expectation filled the hearts of men.

VI. THE REBELLION

No people in history has fought so tenaciously for liberty as the Jews, nor any people against such odds. From Judas Maccabee to Simeon Bar Cocheba, and even into our own time, the struggle of the Jews to regain their freedom has often decimated them, but has never broken their spirit or their hope.

When Herod the Great died the nationalists, spurning the pacific counsels of Hillel, declared a revolt against Herod’s successor Archelaus, and encamped in tents about the Temple. Archelaus’ troops slew 3000 of them, many of whom had come to Jerusalem for the Passover festival (4 B.C.). At the following feast of Pentecost the rebels gathered again, and once more suffered great slaughter; the Temple cloisters were burned to the ground, the treasures of the sanctuary were plundered by the legions, and many Jews killed themselves in despair. Patriot bands took form in the countryside, and made life precarious for any supporter of Rome; one such band, under Judas the Gaulonite, captured Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee. Varus, governor of Syria, entered Palestine with 20,000 men, razed hundreds of towns, crucified 2000 rebels, and sold 30,000 Jews into slavery. A delegation of leading Jews went to Rome and begged Augustus to abolish the kingship in Judea. Augustus removed Archelaus, and made Judea a Roman province of the second class, under a procurator responsible to the governor of Syria (A.D. 6).

Under Tiberius the troubled land knew a moment’s peace. Caligula, wishing to make the worship of the emperor a unifying religion throughout the Empire, ordered all cults to include a sacrifice to his image, and bade the Jerusalem officials to install his statue in the Temple. The Jews had compromised, under Augustus and Tiberius, by sacrificing to Yahveh in the name of the emperor; but they were so averse to setting up the graven image of a pagan in their Temple that thousands of them, we are told, went to the governor of Syria and asked to be slain in cold blood before the edict should be carried out.⁴⁹ Caligula eased the situation by dying. Impressed by Herod’s grandson Agrippa, Claudius made him king of nearly all Palestine (41); but Agrippa’s sudden death released another outburst of disorder, and Claudius restored the procuratorial rule (44).

The men whom his mercenary freedmen chose for this office were mostly incompetents or scoundrels. Felix, made procurator by his brother Pallas, “governed Judea,” says Tacitus, “with the powers of a king and the soul of a slave.”⁵⁰ Festus ruled more justly, but died in the attempt. Albinus, if we may believe Josephus, plundered and taxed assiduously, and made a fortune by releasing criminals from jail for a consideration; “nobody remained in prison but those who gave him nothing.”⁵¹ Florus, says the same friend and admirer of the Romans, behaved “like an executioner rather than a governor,” despoiled whole cities, and not only stole on his own account, but connived at other robberies if allowed to share the loot. These reports retain some odor of war propaganda; doubtless the procurators complained that the Jews were a very troublesome people to oppress.

Bands of “Zealots” and “Dagger-men” (Sicarii) were formed in protest against this misrule. Their members, pledged to kill any disloyal Jew, mingled in street gatherings, stabbed their appointed victims from behind, and disappeared in the chaos of the crowd.⁵² When Florus took seventeen talents ($61,200) from the Temple treasury, an angry mob collected before the shrine and cried out for his dismissal; some youths went about with baskets begging alms for him as suffering from poverty. Florus’ legions dispersed the assemblage, plundered hundreds of homes, and slew the occupants; the leading rebels were scourged and crucified; on that day, says Josephus, 3600 Jews were slain.⁵³ The old or well-to-do Hebrews counseled patience, arguing that revolt against so powerful an empire would be national suicide; the young or poor accused them of connivance and cowardice. The two factions divided the city and nearly every family; one seized the upper part of Jerusalem, the other the lower, and each attacked the other with every weapon at hand. In 68 a pitched battle was fought between the groups; the radicals won, and killed 12,000 Jews, including nearly all the rich;⁵⁴ the revolt had become a revolution. A rebel force surrounded the Roman garrison at Masada, persuaded it to disarm, and then slaughtered every man of it. On that day the gentiles of Caesarea, the Palestinian capital, rose in a pogrom that slew 20,000 Jews; other thousands were sold into slavery. In one day the gentiles of Damascus cut the throats of 10,000 Jews.⁵⁵ The enraged revolutionists laid waste many Greek cities in Palestine and Syria, burned some of them to the ground, and killed and were killed in great number. “It was then common,” says Josephus, “to see cities filled with dead bodies . . . unburied, those of old men mixed with infants, and women lying among them without any cover.”⁵⁶ By September of 66 the revolution had won Jerusalem and nearly all of Palestine. The peace party was discredited, and most of its members now joined in the revolt.

Among them was a priest named Josephus, then a young man of thirty, energetic, brilliant, and endowed with an intellect capable of transforming every desire into a virtue. Commissioned by the rebels to fortify Galilee, he defended its stronghold, Jotopata, against Vespasian’s siege, until only forty Jewish soldiers remained alive, hiding with him in a cave. Josephus wished to surrender, but his men threatened to kill him if he tried it. Since they preferred death to capture, he persuaded them to draw lots to fix the order in which each should die by the hand of the next; when all were dead but himself and one other, he induced him to join him in surrender. They were about to be sent to Rome in chains when Josephus prophesied that Vespasian would be emperor. Vespasian released him, and gradually accepted him as a useful adviser in the war against the Jews. When Vespasian left for Alexandria, Josephus accompanied Titus to the siege of Jerusalem.

The approach of the legions brought the defenders to a belated and fanatical unity. Tacitus reckons that 600,000 rebels had gathered in the city. “All who were capable of serving appeared in arms,” and the women were not less martial than the men.⁵⁷ Josephus, from the Roman lines, called upon the besieged to surrender; they branded him as a traitor, and fought to the last. Starving Jews made desperate sorties to forage for food; thousands of them were captured by the Romans, and were crucified; “the multitude of these was so great,” Josephus reports, “that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses were wanting for the bodies.” In the later stages of the five-month siege the streets of the city were clogged with corpses; ghouls wandered about despoiling and stabbing the dead; we are told that 116,000 bodies were thrown over the walls. Some Jews swallowed gold pieces and slipped out from Jerusalem; Romans or Syrians, capturing them, slit open their bellies, or searched their offal, to find the coins.⁵⁸ Having taken half the city, Titus offered what he thought were lenient terms to the rebels; they rejected them. The flaming brands of the Romans set fire to the Temple, and the great edifice, much of it of wood, was rapidly consumed. The surviving defenders fought bravely, proud, says Dio, to die on Temple grounds.⁵⁹ Some killed one another, some fell upon their own swords, some leaped into the flames. The victors gave no quarter, but slew all Jews upon whom they could lay their hands; 97,000 fugitives were caught and sold as slaves; many of them died as unwilling gladiators in the triumphal games that were celebrated at Berytus, Caesarea Philippi, and Rome. Josephus numbered at 1,197,000 the Jews killed in this siege and its aftermath; Tacitus calculated them at 600,000 (A.D. 70).⁶⁰

FIG. 33—Pont du Gard at Nîmes

FIG. 34—Temple of Iuppiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek

FIG. 35—Temple of Venus or Baachus at Baalbek

FIG. 36—Arch of Septimius Severus, Rome

FIG. 37—Reconstruction of Interior of Baths of Caracalla

FIG. 38—Mithras and the Bull British Museum

FIG. 39—Sarcophagus of the Empress Helena

Vatican, Rome

Resistance continued here and there till 73, but essentially the destruction of the Temple marked the end of the rebellion and of the Jewish state. The property of those who had shared in the revolt was confiscated and sold. Judea was almost shorn of Jews, and those that remained lived on the edge of starvation. Even the poorest Jew had now to pay to a pagan temple at Rome the half shekel that pious Hebrews had formerly paid each year for the upkeep of the Temple at Jerusalem. The high-priesthood and the Sanhedrin were abolished. Judaism took the form that it has kept till our own time: a religion without a central shrine, without a dominant priesthood, without a sacrificial service. The Sadducees disappeared, while the Pharisees and the rabbis became the leaders of a homeless people that had nothing left but its synagogues and its hope.

VII. THE DISPERSION

The flight or enslavement of a million Jews so accelerated their spread through the Mediterranean that their scholars came to date the Diaspora from the destruction of Herod’s Temple. We have seen that this Dispersion had begun six centuries before in the Babylonian Captivity, and had been renewed in the settling of Alexandria. Since fertility was commanded and infanticide sternly forbidden by Jewish piety and law, the expansion of the Jews was due to biological as well as economic causes; Hebrews still played a very minor role in the commerce of the world. Fifty years before the fall of Jerusalem, Strabo, with anti-Semitic exaggeration, reported that “it is hard to find a single place on the habitable earth that has not admitted this tribe of men, and is not possessed by it.”⁶¹ Philo, twenty years before the Dispersion, described “the continents . . . full of Jewish settlements, and likewise the . . . islands, and nearly all Babylonia.”⁶² By A.D. 70 there were thousands of Jews in Seleucia on the Tigris, and in other Parthian cities; they were numerous in Arabia, and crossed thence into Ethiopia; they abounded in Syria and Phoenicia; they had large colonies in Tarsus, Antioch, Miletus, Ephesus, Sardis, Smyrna; they were only less numerous in Delos, Corinth, Athens, Philippi, Patrae, Thessalonica. In the west there were Jewish communities in Carthage, Syracuse, Puteoli, Capua, Pompeii, Rome, even in Horace’s native Venusia. All in all we may reckon 7,000,000 Jews in the Empire—some seven per cent of the population, twice their proportion in the United States of America today.⁶³

Their number, dress, diet, circumcision, poverty, ambition, prosperity, exclusiveness, intelligence, aversion to images, and observation of an inconvenient Sabbath aroused an anti-Semitism that ranged from jokes in the theater and slurs in Juvenal and Tacitus to murders in the street and wholesale pogroms. Apion of Alexandria made himself the chief mouthpiece of these attacks, and Josephus answered him in an incisive pamphlet.^*

After the fall of Jerusalem Josephus sailed to Rome with Titus, and accompanied the conqueror of his people in a triumphal procession that exhibited captive Jews and Jewish spoils. Vespasian gave him Roman citizenship, a pension, an apartment in his palace, and profitable lands in Judea.⁶⁵ In return Josephus took Vespasian’s family name Flavius, and wrote The Wars of the Jews (ca. 75) to defend the actions of Titus in Palestine, to exonerate his own defection, and to discourage further revolt by showing forth the might of Rome. In his later years (ca. 93), feeling more keenly his isolation, he wrote The Antiquities of the Jews to regain the good will of his people by giving gentiles a more favorable view of Jewish achievements, customs, and character. His narratives are clear and forceful, and his account of Herod the Great is as engaging as Plutarch, but his bias and his aims impair his objectivity. The Antiquities required many years and exhausted the author’s strength; the last four of the twenty books were written by his secretaries from his notes.⁶⁶ Josephus was still but fifty-six when the work appeared, but he was already worn out by a life of adventure, controversy, and moral solitude.

With their characteristic resilience the Jews gradually rebuilt their economic and cultural life in Palestine. Amid the siege of Jerusalem an aged pupil of Hillel, Johanan ben Zakkai, fearful lest the carnage should destroy all teachers and transmitters of the oral tradition, escaped from the city, and set up an academy in a vineyard at Yabne, or Jamnia, near the Mediterranean coast. When Jerusalem fell Johanan organized a new Sanhedrin at Jamnia, composed not of priests, politicians, and rich men, but of Pharisees and rabbis—i.e., teachers of the Law. This Bet Din or Council had no political power, but most Palestinian Jews recognized its authority in all matters of religion and morals. The patriarch whom the Council chose as its head appointed the administrative officers of the Jewish community, and had the power to excommunicate recalcitrant Jews. The stern discipline of the Patriarch Gamaliel II (ca. 100) welded into unity first the Council, then the Jews of Jamnia, then the Jews of Palestine. Under his leadership the contradictory interpretations of the Law transmitted by Hillel and Shammai were reviewed and voted on; those of Hillel were for the most part approved, and were made binding upon all Jews.

Since the Law was now the indispensable cement of scattered and stateless Jewry, the teaching of the Law became the chief occupation of the synagogue throughout the Diaspora; the synagogue replaced the temple, prayer replaced sacrifice, the rabbi replaced the priest. Tannaim—expositors—interpreted one or another of the orally transmitted laws (Halacha) of the Jews, usually supported it with scriptural quotation, sometimes added to it, and illustrated it with stories, homilies, or other material (Haggada). The most famous of the Tannaim was Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph. At the age of forty (ca. A.D. 80) he joined his five-year-old son at school, and learned to read. Soon he could recite the whole Pentateuch by heart. After thirteen years of study he opened his own school under a fig tree in a village near Jamnia. His enthusiasm and idealism, his courage and humor, even his lusty dogmatism, brought him many students. When, in 95, word came that Domitian was planning new measures against the Jews, Akiba was chosen with Gamaliel and two others to make a personal appeal to the Emperor. While they were in Rome Domitian died. Nerva heard their plea favorably, and ended the fiscus Iudaicus—the tax laid upon Jews for rebuilding Rome. On his return to Jamnia Akiba set himself the lifelong task of codifying the Halacha; his pupil Rabbi Meir and their successor Judah the Patriarch (ca. 200) completed the undertaking. Even in this classified form the Halacha remained part of the oral tradition, handed down from generation to generation by scholars and professional memorizers—living textbooks of the Law. Akiba’s methods were as absurd as his conclusions were sound; he derived liberal principles from a weird exegesis in which every letter of the Torah, or written law, was held to have a mysterious meaning; perhaps he had observed that men will accept the rational only in the form of the mystical. From Akiba came that painstaking organization and exposition of theology and ethics which passed down through the Talmud to Maimonides, and ultimately to the methods of the Scholastic philosophers.

In his ninetieth year, when he had grown weak and reactionary, Akiba found himself, as in his youth, surrounded by revolution. In 115-16 the Jews of Cyrene, Egypt, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia rose once more against Rome; the massacre of gentiles by Jews, and of Jews by Gentiles, became the order of the day; 220,000 men, says Dio, were killed in Cyrene, 240,000 in Cyprus; the figures are incredible, but we know that Cyrene never recovered from the devastation, and that for centuries thereafter no Hebrew was allowed in Cyprus. The uprisings were suppressed, but the surviving Jews kept fiercely alive their hope of a Messiah who would rebuild the Temple and restore them in triumph to Jerusalem. Roman stupidity reanimated the revolt. In 130 Hadrian declared his intention to raise a shrine to Jupiter on the site of the Temple; in 131 he issued a decree forbidding circumcision and public instruction in the Jewish Law.⁶⁷ Under the leadership of Simeon Bar Cocheba, who claimed to be the Messiah, the Jews made their last effort in antiquity to recover their homeland and their freedom (132). Akiba, who all his life had preached peace, gave his blessing to the revolution by accepting Bar Cocheba as the promised Redeemer. For three years the rebels fought valiantly against the legions; finally they were beaten by lack of food and supplies. The Romans destroyed 985 towns in Palestine, and slew 580,000 men; a still larger number, we are told, perished through starvation, disease, and fire; nearly all Judea was laid waste. Bar Cocheba himself fell in defending Bethar. So many Jews were sold as slaves that their price fell to that of a horse. Thousands hid in underground channels rather than be captured; surrounded by the Romans, they died one by one of hunger, while the living ate the bodies of the dead.⁶⁸

Resolved to destroy the recuperative virility of Judaism, Hadrian forbade not merely circumcision, but the observance of the Sabbath or any Jewish holyday, and the public performance of any Hebrew ritual.⁶⁹ A new and heavier poll tax was placed upon all Jews. They were allowed in Jerusalem only on one fixed day each year, when they might come and weep before the ruins of their Temple. The pagan city of Aelia Capitolina rose on the site of Jerusalem, with shrines to Jupiter and Venus, and with palaestras, theaters, and baths. The Council at Jamnia was dissolved and outlawed; a minor and powerless Council was permitted at Lydda, but public instruction in the Law was prohibited on pain of death. Several rabbis were executed for disobeying this injunction. Akiba, now ninety-five, insisted on teaching his pupils; he was imprisoned for three years, but taught even in jail; he was tried and condemned, and died, we are told, with the basic tenet of Judaism on his lips: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.”⁷⁰

Though Hadrian’s decrees were softened by Antoninus Pius, the Jews did not for centuries recover from the disaster of Bar Cocheba’s revolt. From this moment they entered their Middle Ages, abandoning all secular learning except medicine, renouncing every form of Hellenism, and taking comfort and unity only from their rabbis, their mystic poets, and their Law. No other people has ever known so long an exile, or so hard a fate. Shut out from their Holy City, the Jews were compelled to surrender it first to paganism, then to Christianity. Scattered into every province and beyond, condemned to poverty and humiliation, unbefriended even by philosophers and saints, they retired from public affairs into private study and worship, passionately preserving the words of their scholars, and preparing to write them down at last in the Talmuds of Babylonia and Palestine. Judaism hid in fear and obscurity while its offspring, Christianity, went out to conquer the world.

BOOK V

THE YOUTH OF CHRISTIANITY

4 B.C.-A.D. 325

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

All dates except the first are A.D.; and all dates before 150 are uncertain.

B.C. 4:

Birth of Christ

A.D. 30:

Crucifixion; conversion of Paul

45-47:

First mission of Paul

50-53:

Second mission of Paul

51:

Paul in Athens

53-57:

Third mission of Paul

58-60:

Paul imprisoned by Felix

61-64:

Paul imprisoned in Rome

64:

Neronic persecution; d. of Peter and Paul

65:

Linus, Bishop of Rome

77:

Cletus, Bishop of Rome

60-100:

The Four Gospels

89:

Clement I, Bishop of Rome

90:

The Johannine epistles

98:

Evaristus, Bishop of Rome

106:

Alexander I, Bishop of Rome

116:

Xystus I, Bishop of Rome

126:

Telesphorus, Bishop of Rome

137:

Hyginus, Bishop of Rome

141:

Pius I, Bishop of Rome

150:

Justin’s First Apology

156:

Anicetus, Bishop of Rome

166:

Martyrdom of Polycarp

175:

Eleutherius, Bishop of Rome

177:

Martyrdoms at Lyons

178:

Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons

190:

Victor I, Bishop of Rome

193:

Pertinax and Didius Julianus, emperors

193-211:

Septimius Severus, emperor

194:

Montanus; Clement or Alexandria

200:

Tertullian’s Liber Apologeticus

202:

Zephyrinus, Bishop of Rome

203:

Arch of Sept. Severus; Origen

205-70:

Plotinus

211-17:

Caracalla

212:

Caracalla extends citizenship

215:

Baths of Caracalla; Mani

218:

Callistus I, Bishop of Rome

218-22:

Elagabalus, emperor

222:

Urban I, Bishop of Rome

222-35:

Alexander Severus, emperor 228: Murder of Ulpian

235-58:

Maximinus, emperor

236:

Fabian, Bishop of Rome

238-44:

Gordianus I, II, III, emperors

241-72:

Shapur I, King of Persia

244-49:

Philip the Arab, emperor

248:

Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage; Origen’s Contra Celsum

249-51:

Decius, emperor; Diophantus, mathematician

251:

Cornelius, Bishop of Rome

251-53:

Gallus, emperor

253-60:

Valerianus, emperor

253-68:

Gallienus, emperor

254:

Marcomanni raid north Italy

255:

Shapur invades Syria

257:

Edict of Valerian against Christians

259:

Goths overrun Asia Minor

260:

First edict of toleration

260-66:

Odenathus at Palmyra

266-73:

Zenobia and Longinus at Palmyra

268-70:

Claudius II, emperor

270-75:

Aurelian, emperor

271:

Barbarians invade Italy

275-76:

Tacitus, emperor

276-82:

Probus, emperor

282-83:

Carus, Carinus, Numerianus, emperors

284-305:

Diocletian, emperor

286-305:

Maximianus co-Augustus

292:

Galerius and Constantius, Caesars

295:

Baths of Diocletian

296:

Marcellinus, Bishop of Rome

301:

Price Edict of Diocletian

303-11:

Diocletian persecution

306:

Constantine becomes a Caesar

307:

Maxentius and Maximian, Augusti; basilica of Maxentius

307-09:

Marcellus I, Bishop of Rome

307-10:

Lactantius’ Divinae lnstitutiones

307-13:

Constantine and Licinius, Augusti

309-10:

Eusebius, Bishop of Rome

312:

Battle of the Mulvian Bridge; Edict of Milan (?)

313:

Eusebius’ Church History

313-23:

Constantine and Licinius divide the Empire

314:

Council of Arles

314-36:

Sylvester I, Bishop of Rome

315:

Arch of Constantine

323:

Licinius defeated at Adrianople

324-37:

Constantine sole emperor

325:

Council of Nicaea

326:

Constantine kills son, nephew, and wife

330:

Constantinople made the capital

337:

Death of Constantine

CHAPTER XXVI

Jesus

4 B.C..-A.D. 30

I. THE SOURCES

DID Christ exist? Is the life story of the founder of Christianity the product of human sorrow, imagination, and hope—a myth comparable to the legends of Krishna, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysus, and Mithras? Early in the eighteenth century the circle of Bolingbroke, shocking even Voltaire, privately discussed the possibility that Jesus had never lived. Volney propounded the same doubt in his Ruins of Empire in 1791. Napoleon, meeting the German scholar Wieland in 1808, asked him no petty question of politics or war, but did he believe in the historicity of Christ?¹

One of the most far-reaching activities of the modern mind has been the “Higher Criticism” of the Bible—the mounting attack upon its authenticity and veracity, countered by the heroic attempt to save the historical foundations of Christian faith; the results may in time prove as revolutionary as Christianity itself. The first engagement in this two-hundred-year war was fought in silence by Hermann Reimarus, professor of Oriental languages at Hamburg; on his death in 1768 he left, cautiously unpublished, a 1400-page manuscript on the life of Christ. Six years later Gotthold Lessing, over the protests of his friends, published portions of it as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. Reimarus argued that Jesus can only be regarded and understood not as the founder of Christianity, but as the final and dominant figure in the mystical eschatology of the Jews—i.e., Christ thought not of establishing a new religion, but of preparing men for the imminent destruction of the world, and God’s Last Judgment of all souls. In 1796 Herder pointed out the apparently irreconcilable difference between the Christ of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the Christ of the Gospel of St. John. In 1828 Heinrich Paulus, summarizing the life of Christ in 1192 pages, proposed a rationalistic interpretation of the miracles—i.e., accepted their occurrence but ascribed them to natural causes and powers. In an epoch-marking Life of Jesus (1835-36) David Strauss rejected this compromise; the supernatural elements in the Gospels, he thought, should be classed as myths, and the actual career of Christ must be reconstructed without using these elements in any form. Strauss’s massive volumes made Biblical criticism the storm center of German thought for a generation. In the same year Ferdinand Christian Baur attacked the Epistles of Paul, rejecting as unauthentic all but those to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans. In 1840 Bruno Bauer began a series of passionately controversial works aiming to show that Jesus was a myth, the personified form of a cult that evolved in the second century from a fusion of Jewish, Greek, and Roman theology. In 1863 Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus, alarming millions with its rationalism and charming millions with its prose, gathered together the results of German criticism, and brought the problem of the Gospels before the entire educated world. The French school reached its climax at the end of the century in the Abbé Loisy, who subjected the New Testament to such rigorous textual analysis that the Catholic Church felt compelled to excommunicate him and other “Modernists.” Meanwhile the Dutch school of Pierson, Naber, and Matthas carried the movement to its farthest point by laboriously denying the historical reality of Jesus. In Germany Arthur Drews gave this negative conclusion its definitive exposition (1906); and in England W. B. Smith and J. M. Robertson argued to a like denial. The result of two centuries of discussion seemed to be the annihilation of Christ.

What evidence is there for Christ’s existence? The earliest non-Christian reference occurs in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews (A.D. 93?):

At that time lived Jesus, a holy man, if man he may be called, for he performed wonderful works, and taught men, and joyfully received the truth. And he was followed by many Jews and many Greeks. He was the Messiah.²

There may be a genuine core in these strange lines; but the high praise given to Christ by a Jew uniformly anxious to please either the Romans or the Jews—both at that time in conflict with Christianity—renders the passage suspect, and Christian scholars reject it as almost certainly an interpolation.³ There are references to “Yeshu’a of Nazareth” in the Talmud, but they are too late in date to be certainly more than counterechoes of Christian thought.⁴ The oldest known mention of Christ in pagan literature is in a letter of the younger Pliny (ca. 110),⁵ asking the advice of Trajan on the treatment of Christians. Five years later Tacitus^{6 *} described Nero’s persecution of the Chrestiani in Rome, and pictured them as already (A.D. 64) numbering adherents throughout the Empire; the paragraph is so Tacitean in style, force, and prejudice that of all Biblical critics only Drews questions its authenticity.⁷ Suetonius (ca. 125) mentions the same persecution,⁸ and reports Claudius’ banishment (ca. 52) of “Jews who, stirred up by Christ [impulsore Chresto], were causing public disturbances,”⁹ the passage accords well with the Acts of the Apostles, which mentions a decree of Claudius that “the Jews should leave Rome.”¹⁰ These references prove the existence of Christians rather than of Christ; but unless we assume the latter we are driven to the improbable hypothesis that Jesus was invented in one generation; moreover, we must suppose that the Christian community in Rome had been established some years before 52, to merit the attention of an imperial decree. About the middle of this first century a pagan named Thallus, in a fragment preserved by Julius Africanus,¹¹ argued that the abnormal darkness alleged to have accompanied the death of Christ was a purely natural phenomenon and coincidence; the argument took the existence of Christ for granted. The denial of that existence seems never to have occurred even to the bitterest gentile or Jewish opponents of nascent Christianity.

The Christian evidence for Christ begins with the letters ascribed to Saint Paul. Some of these are of uncertain authorship; several, antedating A.D. 64, are almost universally accounted as substantially genuine. No one has questioned the existence of Paul, or his repeated meetings with Peter, James, and John; and Paul enviously admits that these men had known Christ in the flesh.¹² The accepted epistles frequently refer to the Last Supper ¹³ and the crucifixion.¹⁴

Matters are not so simple as regards the Gospels. The four that have come down to us are survivors from a much larger number that once circulated among the Christians of the first two centuries. Our English term gospel (Old English godspel, good news) is a rendering of the Greek euangelion, which is the opening word of Mark, and means “glad tidings”—that the Messiah had come, and the Kingdom of God was at hand. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke are “synoptic”: their contents and episodes allow of being arranged in parallel columns and “viewed together.” They were written in the Greek koine of popular speech, and were no models of grammar or literary finish; nevertheless, the directness and force of their simple style, the vivid power of their analogies and scenes, the depth of their feeling, and the profound fascination of the story they tell give even the rude originals a unique charm, immensely enhanced for the English world by the highly inaccurate but lordly version made for King James.

The oldest extant copies of the Gospels go back only to the third century. The original compositions were apparently written between A.D. 60 and 120, and were therefore exposed to two centuries of errors in transcription, and to possible alterations to suit the theology or aims of the copyist’s sect or time. Christian writers before 100 quote the Old, but never the New, Testament. The only reference to a Christian gospel before 150 is in Papias, who, about 135, reports an unidentified “John the Elder” as saying that Mark had composed his gospel from memories conveyed to him by Peter.¹⁵ Papias adds: “Matthew transcribed in Hebrew the Logia”— apparently an early Aramaic collection of the sayings of Christ. Probably Paul had some such document, for though he mentions no gospels he occasionally quotes the direct words of Jesus.^* Criticism generally agrees in giving the Gospel of Mark priority, and in dating it between 65 and 70. Since it sometimes repeats the same matter in different forms,¹⁶ it is widely believed to have been based upon the Logia, and upon another early narrative which may have been the original composition of Mark himself. Our Gospel of Mark was apparently circulated while some of the apostles, or their immediate disciples, were still alive; it seems unlikely, therefore, that it differed substantially from their recollection and interpretation of Christ.¹⁷ We may conclude, with the brilliant but judicious Schweitzer, that the Gospel of Mark is in essentials “genuine history.”¹⁸

Orthodox tradition placed Matthew’s Gospel first. Irenaeus¹⁹ describes it as originally composed in “Hebrew”—i.e., Aramaic; but it has come down to us only in Greek. Since in this form it apparently copies Mark, and probably also the Logia, criticism inclines to ascribe it to a disciple of Matthew rather than to the “publican” himself; even the most skeptical students, however, concede to it as early a date as A.D. 85-90.²⁰ Aiming to convert Jews, Matthew relies more than the other evangelists on the miracles ascribed to Jesus, and is suspiciously eager to prove that many Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in Christ. Nevertheless, it is the most moving of the four Gospels, and must be ranked among the unconscious masterpieces of the world’s literature.

The Gospel according to St. Luke, generally assigned to the last decade of the first century, announces its desire to co-ordinate and reconcile earlier accounts of Jesus, and aims to convert not Jews but gentiles. Very probably Luke was himself a gentile, the friend of Paul, and the author of the Acts of the Apostles.²¹ Like Matthew he borrows much from Mark.²² Of the 661 verses in the received text of Mark over 600 are reproduced in Matthew, and 350 in Luke, mostly word for word.²³ Many passages in Luke that are not in Mark occur in Matthew, again nearly verbatim; apparently Luke borrowed these from Matthew, or Luke and Matthew took them from a common source, now lost. Luke works up these candid borrowings with some literary skill; Renan thought this Gospel the most beautiful book ever written.²⁴

The Fourth Gospel does not pretend to be a biography of Jesus; it is a presentation of Christ from the theological point of view, as the divine Logos or Word, creator of the world and redeemer of mankind. It contradicts the synoptic gospels in a hundred details and in its general picture of Christ.²⁵ The half-Gnostic character of the work, and its emphasis on metaphysical ideas, have led many Christian scholars to doubt that its author was the apostle John.²⁶ Experience suggests, however, that an old tradition must not be too quickly rejected; our ancestors were not all fools. Recent studies tend to restore the Fourth Gospel to a date near the end of the first century. Probably tradition was correct in assigning to the same author the “Epistles of John”; they speak the same ideas in the same style.

In summary, it is clear that there are many contradictions between one gospel and another, many dubious statements of history, many suspicious resemblances to the legends told of pagan gods, many incidents apparently designed to prove the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, many passages possibly aiming to establish a historical basis for some later doctrine or ritual of the Church. The evangelists shared with Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus the conception of history as a vehicle for moral ideas. And presumably the conversations and speeches reported in the Gospels were subject to the frailties of illiterate memories, and the errors or emendations of copyists.

All this granted, much remains. The contradictions are of minutiae, not substance; in essentials the synoptic gospels agree remarkably well, and form a consistent portrait of Christ. In the enthusiasm of its discoveries the Higher Criticism has applied to the New Testament tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient worthies—e.g., Hammurabi, David, Socrates—would fade into legend.^* Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed—the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man.