UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES jUNlVEKSITY of CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES f TRttARY ROMAN SOCIETY FROM NERO TO MAKCUS AUEELIUS BY SAMUEL DILL, M.A. HON. LITT.D. DUBLIN, HON. LL.D. EDINBURGH, HON. FELLOW AND LATE TUTOR, C.C.C., OXFORD; PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN QUEEN'S COLLEGE, BELFAST ; AUTHOR OF ' ROJIAN SOCIETY IN THE LAST CENTURY OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE' MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STEEET, LONDON 1919 O i COPYRIGHT First Edition 1904. Second Edition 1905 Reprinted December 190s, 191 1, 1919 GobA PREFACE There must always be something arbitrary in the choice and isolation of a period of social history for special study. No period can, from one point of view, be broken off and isolated from the immemorial influences which have moulded it, from the succession of coming ages which it will help to fashion. And this is specially true of the history of a race at once so aggressive, yet so tenacious of the past, as the Eoman. The national fibre was so tough, and its tone and sentiment so conservative under all external changes, that when a man knows any considerable period of Eoman social history, he may almost, without paradox, be said to know a great deal of it from Komulus to Honorius. Yet, as in the artistic drama there must be a beginning and an end, although the action can only be ideally severed from what has preceded and what is to follow in actual life, so a limited space in the collective history of a people may be legitimately set apart for concentrated study. But as in the case of the drama, such a period should possess a certain unity and intensity of moral interest. It should be a crisis and turning-point in the life of humanity, a period pregnant with momentous issues, a period in which the old order and the new are contending for mastery, or in which the old is melting into the new. Above all, it should be one in which the great social and spiritual movements are incarnate in some striking personalities, who may give a human interest to dim forces of spiritual evolution. Such a period, it seems to the writer of this book, is that vi ROMAN SOCIETY which he now presents to the reader. It opens with the self-destruction of lawless and intoxicated power; it closes with the realisation of Plato's dream of a reign of the philosophers. The revolution in the ideal of the principate, which gave the world a Trajan, a Hadrian, and a Marcus Aurelius in place of a Caligula and a Nero, may not have been accompanied by any change of corresponding depth in the moral condition of the masses. But the world enjoyed for nearly a century an almost unexampled peace and prosperity, under skilful and humane government. The civic splendour and social charities of the Antonine age can be revived by the imagination from the abundant remains and records of the period. Its materialism and social vices will also sadden the thoughtful student of its literature and inscriptions. But if that age had the faults of a luxurious and highly organised civilisation, it was also dignified and elevated by a great effort for reform of conduct, and a passion, often, it is true, sadly misguided, to rise to a higher spiritual life and to win the succour of unseen Powers. To the writer of this book, this seems to give the Antonine age its great distinction and its deepest interest for the student of / the life of humanity. The influence of philosophy on the legislation of the Antonines is a commonplace of history. But its practical effort to give support and guidance to moral life, and to refashion the old paganism, so as to make it a real spiritual force, has perhaps hardly yet attracted the notice - which it deserves. It is one great object of this book to show how the later Stoicism and the new Platonism, working in eclectic harmony, strove to supply a rule of conduct and a higher vision of the Divine world. But philosophy failed, as it will probably fail till some far-off age, to find an anodyne for the spiritual distresses of the mass of men. It might hold up the loftiest ideal of conduct ; it might revive the ancient gods in new spiritual power ; it might strive to fill the interval between the remote Infinite PREFACE vii Spirit and the life of man with a host of mediating and succouring powers. But the effort was doomed to failure. It - / was an esoteric creed, and the masses remained untouched - by it. They longed for a Divine light, a clear, authoritative ' voice from the unseen world. They sought it in ever more blind and passionate devotion to their ancient deities, and in all the curiosity of superstition. But the voice came to them at last from the regions of the East. It came through the worships of Isis and Mithra, which promised a hope of immortality, and provided a sacramental system to soothe the sense of guilt and prepare the trembling soul for the great ordeal on the verge of another world. How far these eastern systems succeeded, and where they failed, it is one great purpose of this book to explain. The writer, so far as he knows himself, has had no arrttre penste in describing this great moral and spiritual movement. As M. Boissier has pointed out, the historian of the Antonine age is free to treat paganism apart from the growth of the Christian Church. The pagan world of that age seems to have had little communication with the loftier faith which, within a century and a half from the death of M. Aurelius, was destined to seize the sceptre. To Juvenal, Tacitus, and Pliny, to Plutarch, Dion Chrysostom, Lucian, and M. Aurelius, the Church is hardly known, or known as an obscure off-shoot of Judaism, a little sect, worshipping a " crucified Sophist " in somewhat suspicious retirement, 'or more favourably distin- guished by simple-minded charity. The modern theologian can hardly be content to know as little of the great move- ment in the heathen world which prepared or deferred the victory of the Church. It will be evident to any critical reader that the scope of this book is strictly limited. As in a former work on the Society of the later Empire, attention has been concentrated on the inner moral life of the time, and comparatively little space has been given to its external history and the machinery viii ROMAN SOCIETY of government. The relation of the Senate to the Emperor in the first century, and the organisation of the municipal towns have been dwelt on at some length, because they affected profoundly the moral character of the age. On the particular field which the writer has surveyed, Dean Merivale, Dr. Mahaffy, Professor Bury, and Mr. Capes have thrown much light by their learning and sympathy. But these dis- tinguished writers have approached the period from a different point of view from that of the present author, and he believes that he has not incurred the serious peril of appearing to compete with them. He has, as a first duty, devoted himself to a com- plete survey of the literature and inscriptions of the period. Eeferences to the secondary authorities and monographs which he has used will be found in the notes. But he owes a special obligation to Friedlander, Zeller, Biville, Schiller, Boissier, Martha, Peter, and Marquardt, for guidance and suggestion. He must also particularly acknowledge his debt to M. Cumont's exhaustive work on the monuments of Mithra. Once more he has to offer his warmest gratitude to his learned friend, the Iiev. Charles Plummer, Fellow of C.C.C., Oxford, for the patience and judgment with which he has revised the proof sheets. His thanks are also due to the Messrs. K. and K. Clark's reader, for the scrupulous accuracy which has saved the author much time and labour. September 19, 1904. V CONTENTS BOOK I CHAPTER I THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR How far the Antonine age is marked by a moral and spiritual revolution-*^ Light which Seneca throws on the moral condition of his class in Nero's reign Value of his testimony His pessimism Human degeneracy the result of selfish greed and luxury Picture of contemporary society Cruel selfishness and the taedium vitae The Ardelio The terror under which Seneca lived Seneca's ideal of the principate expounded to Nero in the Be dementia The character of Nero Taint in the blood of the Domitii Nero at first showed glimpses of some better qualities How he was injured by the ambition to be an artist False aestheticism and insane profusion Feeling of Tacitus as to his time His career Views as to his impartiality as a historian He was under complex influences His chief motive as a historian He is not a political doctrinaire He is avenging a moral, not a political ideal His pessimism His prejudices and limitations His ideal of education and character His hesitating religious faith His credulity and his scepticism His view of the corrupting influence of despotic power The influence of imperial example Profusion of the early Caesars, leading to murder and confiscation in order to replenish their treasury Dangers of life about the court from espionage Causes of delation Its temptations and its great rewards The secret of the imperial terror Various theories of it Was the Senate a real danger ? Its impotence in spite of its prestige and claims The philosophic opposition Was it really revolutionary ? " Scelera sceleribus tuenda " The undefined position of the principate Its working depended greatly on the character of the Emperor for the time Pliny's ideal of the principate The danger from pretenders Evil effects of astrology The degradation of the aristocracy under Nero and Domitian illustrated from the Pisonian conspiracy and the Year of the Four Emperors The reign of Domitian Its puzzling character Its strange contrasts The terrors of its close Confiscation and massacre The funereal banquet .... Pages 1-57 ix I x ROMAN SOCIETY CHAPTER II THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST Juvenal and Tacitus compared Social position and experience of Juvenal Juvenal and Martial deal with the same features of society Their motives compared Character of Martial The moral standard of Juvenal His humanity and his old Roman prejudices He unites the spirit of two different ages His rhetorical pessimism His sweeping generalisations Abnormal specimens become types Roman luxury at its height Yet similar extravagance is denounced for five centuries Such judgments need qualification The great social changes depicted by Juvenal, some of which he misunderstands Roman respect for birth The decay of the aristocracy and its causes Aristocratic poverty and servility How the early Emperors lowered senatorial dignity Aristocratic gladiators and actors Nero made bohemianism the fashion "The Legend of Bad Women " Its untrustworthiness and defects of treatment High ideals of wi5ma3hood among contemporaries of Juvenal He is influenced by old Roman prejudice Juvenal hates the " new woman " as much as the vicious woman The emancipation of women began in the second cen- tury b.c. Higher culture of women and their growing influence on public affairs Juvenal's dislike of the oriental worships and their female devotees This is another old movement The influence of Judaism at Rome, even in the Imperial household Women in Juvenal's day were exposed to serious dangers The corruptions of the theatre and the circus Intrigues with actors and slaves The invasion of Hellenism Its history The Hellenism of the Emperors The lower Hellenism which Juvenal attacks Social and economic causes of the movement Greek tutors and professors The medical profession chiefly recruited from foreigners The character of the profession in those days The astrologer and the parasite The_clien_of the early Empire His degradation and his hardships GeneraJLpaverty The contempt for trade and industry The growth of captation The worship of wealth The cry of the poor . Pages 58-99 CHAPTER III THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN The rise of the freedmen a great movement Roman prejudice against them expressed in the literature of the age Economic and social causes of the movement Trade and industry despised The freedmen occupied a vacant place Causes of the contempt for them Their many vices and vulgar taste Yet their rise was a hopeful sign The freedmen in imperial office The policy of the early Emperors to employ freedmen in their bureaux Vitellius the first Emperor to employ Equites as imperial secretaries Hadrian confined the three great ministries to men of equestrian rank The great imperial freedmen Polybius, Claudius Etruscus, and Abaseantus Their career and their immense power described by Statius The CONTENTS xi intrigues and crimes of the freedmen of Claudius The insolence of Pallas The wealth of the freedmen and its sources Their luxurious display The baths of CI. Etruscus and the gardens of Entellus Yet the freedmen were seldom admitted to equal rank with the aristocracy The Senate flattered and despised them The doubtful position of freedwomen Plebeian Aspasias The influence of Acte, Caenis, and Panthea Manu- mission It was often not a very abrupt change The better side of slave life Trusted and favourite slaves How they could obtain their freedom Slaves employed in offices of trust The growing peeulium The close tie between patron and freed man The freedman gets a start in trade His rapid rise in wealth His vulgar ostentation The Satiricon of Petronius Theories as to its motive, date, and authorship Its author probably the C. Petronius of Nero's reign His character in Tacitus His probable motive The literary character and scene of the Satiricon The character of the Greek adventurers Trimalchio's dinner, to which they are invited Sketch of Trimalchio's career The dinner Carving to music Dishes descend from the ceiling Wine 100 years old Confused recollec- tions of Homer Hannibal at the Trojan war Rope-dancers and tales of witchcraft The manners of Fortunata The conversation of some of the guests True bourgeois vulgarity Grumbling about the management of the aediles "Everything is going back It all arises from neglect of religion " The coming gladiatorial show, when there will be plenty of blood The education of a freedman's son " You learn for profit " Fast and furious The ladies get drunk, and Trimalchio gives an unflattering account of his wife's history He gives directions to his friend, the stone- cutter, for the erection of his monument He has himself laid out for dead, and the horn-blowers sound his lament . . . Pages 100-137 BOOK II CHAPTER I THE CIRCLE OF THE YOUNGER PLINY The contrast between the pictures of society in Juvenal and in Pliny They belonged to different worlds They were also of very different tempera- ments Moral contrasts side by side in every age There were puritan homes in Italy, even in the worst days Influence of old Roman tradition and country life The circle at Como Pliny's youth and early training Character of the Elder Pliny His immense industry Retreats of old Roman virtue The character and reforms of Vespasian His endowment of education The moral influence of Quintilian on Roman youth Pliny's student friends His relations with the Stoic circle His reverence for Fannia His career at the Bar He idealises the practice in the Centum- viral court Career of M. Aquilius Regulus, the great delator and advocate Pliny's passion for fame The crowd of literary amateurs in his day Pliny and Martial Pliny's relation to the literary movement of his time His xii ROMAN SOCIETY admiration for Cicero His reverence for Greece He once wrote a Greek tragedy His apology for his loose verses His ambition as an orator, and canons of oratorical style Pliny's Letters compared with Cicero's The merits and tame of the Letters Their arrangement They are a memorial of the social life and literary tone of the time The character of Silius Italicus Literary coteries Pliny's friendship with Suetonius The devotion of literary amateurs to poetic composition and its causes The influence of the great Augustan models read at school Signs of decay in literature The growing love of the archaic style Immense literary ambition of the time Attempts of Nero and Domitian to satisfy it by public literary competitions The plague of recitations Pliny believes in the duty of attending them The weariness and emptiness of life in the capital The charm of the country Roman country seats on the Anio or the Laurentine and Campanian shores The sites of these villas Their furniture and decorations Doubtful appreciation of works of art The gardens of the villa The routine of a country gentleman's day The financial management of an estate Difficulties with tenants Pliny's kindness to freedmen and slaves The darker side of slavery Murder of a master Pliny's views on suicide Tragedies in his circle Pliny's charity and optimism The solidarity of the aristocratic class Pliny thinks it a duty to assist the career of promising youth The women of his circle His love for Calpurnia and his love-letters The charity and humanitarian sentiment of the age Bene fac, hoc tecum feres The wealthy recognise the duties of wealth Charitable foundations of the emperors Pliny's lavish generosity, both private and public Yet he is only a shining example among a crowd of similar benefactors in the Autonine age Pages 141-195 CHAPTER II MUNICIPAL LIFE Little known of country town life from Roman literature Yet the love of the country was strong A relief from the strain of the capital, which, how- ever, always maintained its attraction The Empire a realm of cities Immense development of urban life in the first two centuries The rise of Thamugadi in Numidia Great tolerance of municipal freedom under the early Empire Yet there was a general drift to uniformity of organisation Influence of the capital The rage for travel Travelling became easy and luxurious Posting facilities on the great roads The speed of travelling by land and sea Growth of towns Many sprang from the canabae legionis History of Lambesi Aristocratic or timocratic character of municipal organisation Illustrated by the album Canusii The sharp demarcation of social grades Yet, in the first century, the Commons had still consider- able power Examples from Pompeii The magistracies and popular election The honorarium payable on admission to office The power of the duumvirs Position of the Curia The mode of filling its ranks Local Equites The origin and position of the Augustales Their organisation and their importance in the Roman world Municipal finance Direct taxation in the first century almost unknown Sources of municipal CONTENTS xiii revenue The objects of expenditure Municipal mismanagement, as in Bithynia Signs of decay in Trajan's reign First appointment of Cura- tores Immense private munificence Examples from Pompeii, which was only a third-rate town Other instances Pliny The Stertinii Herodes Atticus, the prince of benefactors Testimony of the Inscriptions Example of imperial liberality The public works of the Flavian and Antonine Emperors Feasts to the populace Distributions of money, graduated according to social rank The motives of this munificence were mixed Yet a high ideal of the duties of wealth The better side of municipal life Local patriotism and general kindly feeling But there is another side to the picture Immense passion for amusement, which was often debasing Games and spectacles on 135 days in the year Description of a scene in the amphitheatre in the Antonine age Passion for gladiatorial shows especially in Campania Remains of gladiatorial barracks at Pompeii Advertisements of games Pictures on tombs and on the walls The shows in small country towns Shows at Cremona a few days after the battle of Bedriacum Greece was little infected with the taste The feeling of the philosophers Statistics as to the cost of a gladiatorial show How the ranks of the profession were recruited Its attractions Organisation of the gladiatorial schools The gladiator in retirement How municipal bene- factors were honoured Municipal life begins to lose its attractions The causes of this Plutarch on municipal duty The growth of centralisation The beginning of the end .... Pages 196-250 CHAPTEE III THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE The plehs of the municipal town chiefly known from the Inscriptions Great development of a free proletariat The effects of manumission The artisan class in the Inscriptions Their pride in their callings Emblems on their tombs Early history of the Collegia Rigorous restraint of their formation by Julius and Augustus The evidence of Gaius Dangers from the colleges not imaginary Troubles in the reign of Aurelian Yet the great movement could not be checked The means of evading the law Extended liberty in reigns of M. Aurelius and Alexander Severus The social forces behind the movement of combination The wish for funeral rites and lasting remembrance Evidence of the Inscriptions The horror of loneli- ness in death The funerary colleges That of Lanuvium shows how the privilege granted to them might be extended Any college might claim it Description of the college at Lanuvium Its foundation deed The fees The grants for burial The college of Aesculapius and Hygia Its organisation for other objects than burial Any college might assume a quasi-religious character The influence of religion on all ancient social organisation The colleges of traders Wandering merchants organise themselves all over the world And old soldiers Colleges of youth for sjtorting purposes Every branch of industry was organised in these societies Evidence from Ostia, Lyons, and Rome, in the Inscriptions Clubs of slaves in great houses, and in that of the Emperor They were ROMAN SOCIETY encouraged by the masters The organisation of the college was modelled on the city Its officers bear the names of republican magistrates The number of members limited Periodical revision of the Album Even in the plebeian colleges the gradation of rank was observed Patrons carefully sought for Meeting-place of the college Description of the Schola Sacred associations gathered round it Even the poorest made presents to decorate it The poor college of Silvanus at Philippi But the colleges relied on the generosity of patrons Their varying social rank Election of a patron A man might be a patron of many colleges The college often received bequests to guard a tomb, and perform funerary rites for ever The common feasts of the colleges The division of the sportula by ranks Regulations as to decorum at college meetings The college modelled on the family Mommsen's opinion Fraternal feeling The slave in the college, for the time, treated as an equal Yet the difference of rank, even in the colleges, was probably never forgotten "Were the colleges really charitable foundations ? The military colleges Their object, not only to provide due burial, but to assist an officer throughout his career The extinction of a college The college at Alburnus in Dacia vanishes prob- ably in the Marcomannic invasion .... Pages 251-286 BOOK III CHAPTEE I THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOB The great change in the motive and character of philosophy The schools for- sook metaphysical speculation, and devoted themselves to the cultivation of character Why faith in abstract thought declined, and the conduct of life became all-important The effect of the loss of free civic life and the estab- lishment of world - empires The commonwealth of man The great art vivendi Spiritual directors before the imperial times They are found in every great family The power of Seneca as a private director of souls How his career and experience prepared him for the office He had seen the inner life of the time, its sensuality, degradation, and remorse He was himself an ascetic, living in a palace which excited Nero's envy His experi- ence excited an evangelistic passion His conception of philosophy as the art of saving souls His contempt for unpractical speculation Yet he values Physics for its moral effect in elevating the mind to the region of eternal truth Curious examples of physical study for moral ends The pessimism of Seneca Its causes in the inner secrets of his class It is a lost world which must be saved by every effort Stoicism becomes trans- figured by moral enthusiasm Yet can philosophic religion dispense with dogma ? Empirical rules of conduct are not enough There must be true theory of conduct Seneca not a rigorous dogmatist His varying con. ceptions of God Often mingles Platonic conceptions with old Stoic CONTENTS xv doctrine But all old Stoic doctrine can be found in him "The kingdom of Heaven is within " Freedom is found in renunciation, submission to the Universal Reason Whence comes the force of self-reform ? The problem of freedom and necessity How man may attain to moral freedom The struggle to recover a primeval virtue Modifications of old Stoic theory The ideal sapiens Instantaneous conversion Ideas fatal to practical moral reform For practical purposes, Stoic theory must be modified The sapiens a mythical figure There may be various stages of moral progress Aristotelian ideas Seneca himself far from the ideal of the Stoic sage The men for whom Seneca is providing counsel How their weaknesses have to be dealt with The "ars vitae" develops into casuistry in the hands of the director Obstacles in the way to the higher life Seneca's skill in dealing with different cases His precepts for reform Necessity of confession, self-examination, steadiness of purpose, self- denial Vivere militare est The real victor The mind can create its own world, and triumph even over death Seneca's not the Cynic ideal of moral isolation Competing tendencies in Stoicism Isolated renunciation and social sympathy A citizen of two cities The great commonwealth of humanity The problem of serving God and man variously solved by the Stoics Seneca's ideas of social duty Social instinct innate Duty of help, forgiveness, and kindness to others The example of the Infinite Goodness The brotherhood of man includes the slave Seneca's attitude to slavery His ideal of womanhood Women may be the equals of men in culture and virtue The greatness of Seneca as a moral teacher He belongs to the modern worlds and was claimed by the Church A pagan Thomas a Eempis ..... . Pages 289-333 CHAPTER II THE PHILOSOPHIC MISSIONARY Seneca the director of an aristocratic class The masses needed a gospel Their moral condition The Antonine age produced a great movement for their moral elevation Lucian's attitude to the Cynics His kindred with them Detached view of human life and its vanity Gloomy view of the moral state of the masses The call for popular evangelism Can philo- sophy furnish the gospel ? Lucian's Hermotimus The quarrels of the schools Yet they show real agreement on the rule of life The fashionable sophist Rhetorical philosophy despised by more earnest minds Serious preaching The sermons of Apollonius of Tyana Sudden conversions The preaching of Musonius, Plutarch, and Maximus of Tyre The mystic fervour of Maximus Dion's view of the Cynic preacher The " mendicant monks of paganism " Lucian's caricature of their vices Many vulgar impostors adopt the profession It offered a tempting field Why the charges against the Cynics must be taken with reserve S. Augustine's testimony Causes of the prejudice against Cynicism Lucian's treatment of Peregrinus The history of Peregrinus The credibility of the charges which Lucian makes against him He is about to immolate himself at Olympia when Lucian arrives Lucian treats the self-martyrdom as a piece ROMAN SOCIETY of theatrical display Yet Peregrinus may have honestly desired to teach contempt for death Stoic suicide The scene at the pyre The last words of Peregrinus Lucian creates a myth and sees it grow Testimony of A. Gellius as to Peregrinus The power of the later Cynicism The ideal Cynic in Epictetus An ambassador of God Kindred of Cynicism and Monas- ticism Cultivated Cynics The character of Demetrius, a leader of the philosophic opposition Cynic attitude to popular religion Oenomaus a pronounced rationalist Disbelief in oracles The character of Demonax His great popular influence Prosecuted for neglect of religious observances His sharp sayings Demonstrations of reverence for him at his death The career of Dion Chrysostom His conversion during his exile Becomes a preacher with a mission to the Roman world The character of his eighty orations He is the rhetorical apostle of a few great truths His idea of philosophy His pessimism about the moral state of the world A materialised civilisation Warning to the people of Tarsus Rebukes the feuds of the Bithynian cities A sermon at Olbia on the Black Sea The jealousies of the Asiatic towns Prusa and Apamea Sermon on civic harmony He assails the vices and frivolity of the Alexandrians His prose idyll Simple pastoral life in Euboea The problems and vices of city life exposed Dion on true kingship The vision of the Two Peaks The ideal king The sermon at Olympia inspired by the Zeus of Pheidias Its majesty and benignity Sources of the idea of God The place of art in religion Relative power of poetry and sculpture to express religious truth Pheidias defends his anthropomorphism His Zeus a God of mercy and peace ....... Pages 334-383 CHAPTER III THE PHILOSOPHIC THEOLOGIAN ^The pagan revival and the growth of superstition called for a theodicy Old /Roman religion was still powerful But there was an immense accretion of worships from the conquered countries And an immense growth in the belief in genii, dreams, omens, and oracles Yat amid the apparent chaos, there was a tendency, in the higher minds, to monotheism The craving for a moral God in sympathy with man The ideas of Apuleius, Epictetus, M. Aurelius The change in the conception of God among the later Stoics God no longer mere Force or Fate or impersonal Reason He is a Father and Providence, giving moral support and comfort The attitude of the later Stoics to external worship and anthropomorphic imagery How was the ancient worship to be reconciled with purer conceptions of the Divine ? God being so remote, philosophy may discover spiritual help in all the religions of the past The history of Neo-Pythagoreanism Apollonius of Tyana His attitude to mythology His mysticism and ritualism Plutarch's associations and early history His devotion to Greek tradition His social life His Lives of the great Greeks and Romans He is a moralist rather than a pure philosopher The tendency of philosophy in his day was towards the formation of character The eclecticism of the time Plutarch's attitude to Platonism and Stoicism His own moral system was drawn from various schools Precepts for the formation of character CONTENTS xvii Plutarch on freedom and necessity His contempt for rhetorical philosophy Plutarch on Tranquillity How to grow daily The pathos of life The need for a higher vision How to reconcile the God of philosophy with the ancient mythology was the great problem Plutarch's conception of God His cosmology mainly that of the Timaeus The opposition between the philosophic idea of God and the belief of the crowd was an old one Yet great political and spiritual changes had made it a more urgent question The theology of Maximus of Tyre His pure conception of God, combined with tolerance of legend and symbolism Myth not to be discarded, but interpreted by philosophy, to discover the kernel of truth which is reverently veiled The effort illustrated by the treatise of Plutarch on Isis and Osiris Its theory of Evil and daemonic powers The Platonist daemonology The history of daemons traced from Hesiod The conception of daemons justified by Maximus The daemonology of the early Greek philosophers The nature of daemons as conceived by Maximus and Plutarch The ministering spirits of Maximus The theory of bad daemons enabled Plutarch to explain the grossness of myth and ritual The bad daemons a damnosa hereditas The triumphant use made of the theory by the Christian Apologists The daemonology of Plutarch was also used to explain the inspiration or the silence of the ancient oracles "The oracles are dumb" Yet in the second century, to some extent, Delphi revived Questions as to its inspiration debated The quality of Delphic verse The theory of inspiration Concurrent causes of it The daemon of the shrine may depart The problem of inspiration illustrated by a discussion on the daemon of Socrates What was it I The result of the inquiry is that the human spirit, at its best, is open to influences from another world ...... Pages 384-440 BOOK IV CHAPTER I SUPERSTITION Superstition a term of shifting meaning Plutarch's treatise on Superstition Why it is worse than atheism Immense growth of superstition in the first century, following on a decay of old religion Forgotten rites and fallen temples The revival of Augustus The power of astrology The Emperors believed in it and dreaded it Tiberius and Thrasyllus at Capreae The attitude of Nero, Otho, and Vitellius to astrology The superstition of the Flavian Emperors And of Hadrian and M. Aurelius The superstition of the literary class The Elder Pliny Suetonius Tacitus His wavering treatment of the supernatural How it may be explained by the character of the age Epictetus on divination The superstition of Aelian of Praeneste His credulity and his anathemas on the sceptics P. Aelius Aristides His history and character His illness of thirteen years Was he a simple devotee ? The influence of i ROMAN SOCIETY rhetorical training on him The temples of healing in his time Theii organisation and routine Recipes by dreams in the temples of Asclepius, Isis, and Serapis Medical skill" combined with superstition The amuse- ments and cheerful social life of these temple -hospitals were powerful healers The ailments of Aristides and his journeys in quest of health Strange divine prescriptions astonish the medical attendants Their own heroic remedies Epiphanies of the Gods The return of his rhetorical power The debt is repaid in the Sacred Orations The treatise on dreams by Artemidorus His idea of founding a science of dreams His enormous industry in collecting materials His contempt for less scientific inter- preters His classification of dreams and methods of interpretation The new oracles The failure of the old was not so complete as it is sometimes represented The revival of Delphi The history of the oracle of Alex- ander of Abonoteichos His life and character How he played on the superstition of the Paphlagonians The business-like management of the oracle Its fees and revenue Its secret methods Its fame spreads every- where Oracles in many tongues Rutilianus, a great noble, espouses Alexander's daughter The Epicureans resist the impostor, but in vain The mysteries of Glycon Alexander, a second Endymion Immense superstition of the time Apotheosis in the air The cult of Antinous And of M. Aurelius In Croton there were more gods than men ! The growing faith in daemons and genii The evidence of inscriptions as to the adoption of local deities all over the world Revived honours of classic heroes The belief in recurring miracle Christian and pagan were equally credulous The legend of the "Thundering Legion" Sorcery in Thessaly The lawless romance of Apuleius . . . Pages 443-483 CHAPTER II BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY The conception of immortality determined by the idea of God Religion supplies the assurance denied by philosophy Vagueness of the conception natural and universal "It doth not yet appear what we shall be " Confused and various beliefs on the subject in the Early Empire The cult of the Manes in old Italian piety The guardianship of the tomb, and call for perpetual remembrance The eternal sleep The link between the living and the dead The craving for continued human sympathy with the shade in its eternal home The Lemures and the Lemuria Visitations from the other world The Mundus in every Latin town The general belief in apparitions illus- trated from the Philopseudes of Lucian, from the Younger Pliny, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and Maximus of Tyre The eschatology of Virgil a mixture of different faiths Scenes from the Inferno of the Aeneid Its Pythagorean elements How Virgil influenced later conceptions of the future state Scepticism and credulity in the first century Perpetuity of heathen beliefs The inscriptions, as to the future state, must be interpreted with care and discrimination The phrases often conventional, and springing from different orders of belief Inscriptions frankly atheistic or sensualist Ideas of immortality among the cultivated class The influence of CONTENTS xbc Lucretius The Stoic idea of coming life, and the Peripatetic The influence of Platonism In the last age of the Republic, and the first of the Empire, educated opinion was often sceptical or negative J. Caesar, the Elder Pliny, Tacitus The feeling of Hadrian Epictetus on immortality Galen His probable influence on M. Aurelius The wavering attitude of M. Aurelius on immortality How he could reconcile himself by a saintly ideal to the resignation of the hope of a future life His sadness and pessimism fully justified by the circumstances of the time " Thou hast come to shore ; quit the ship " Change in the religious character long before M. Aurelius Seneca's theology as it moulded his conception of immortality A new note in Seneca The influence of Pythagorean and Platonic conceptions in modifying Stoicism The revival of Pythagoreanism in the first century Its tenets and the secret of its power Apollonius of Tyana on immortality His meeting with the shade of Achilles Plutarch and Maximus of Tyre on immortality Plutarch's arguments for the faith in it The Delays of Divine Vengeance But, like Plato, Plutarch feels that argument on such a subject must be reinforced by poetic imagination The myths of Thespesius of Soli and Timarchus in Plutarch Mythic scenery of the eternal world .... Pages 484-528 CHAPTEK III THE OLD ROMAN RELIGION The decay of old religion in the last age of the Republic Its causes Influence of Greek philosophy and rationalism Distinction drawn between the religion of philosophy and that of the State The moral and religious results Sceptical conformity or desuetude of ancient rites The religious revival of Augustus How far a matter of policy Ancient temples and worships restored The position of Pontifex Maximus How the Emperors utilised the dignity and kept a firm hold on the old religion The religious character of the early Emperors Tht force of antiquarian sentiment in the second century The Inscriptions plainly show that the popular faith in old Latin religion was still strong The revival of the Arval brotherhood Its history and ritual described A stronghold of imperial power How the Arval College supported and flattered the Emperors How the cultivated class reconciled themselves to the rudest forms of the ancient religion The philosophic reconciliation The influence of patriotism in compelling men to support a religion which was intertwined with all social and political life The sentiment powerful down to the end of paganism But other religious ideas were in the air, preparing the triumph of the cults of the East ..... 529-546 CHAPTER IV MAGNA MATER The fascination of the worship of the Great Mother It was still powerful in the days of S. Augustine Its arrival from Pessinus in 204 b.c. The ROMAN SOCIETY history of its growing influence The taurobolium in the second century The legend and its interpretations The Megalesia in spring The priest- hood The sacred colleges of the worship Evidence of the Inscriptions The worship in country places Vagabond priests in Thessaly described by Apuleius Picture of their wild orgies The problem of these eastern cults From a gross origin, they became transmuted into a real spiritual power The elevation of Magna Mater The rite of the taurobolium Its history in Asia Minor Its immense influence in the last age of the' Empire A challenge to th e Church The history of the taurobolium in the West f rom the JL^B oriptinns Dpsr.riptinn of the scene from Prudentius The connection of Magna Mater with Mithra and other deities Pages'547-559 CHAPTER V ISIS AND SERAPIS Their long reign in Europe Established at Peiraeus in the fourth century b.o. And in Asia Minor How the Egyptian cults had been transformed under Greek influences Greek settlers, soldiers, and travellers in Egypt from the seventh century B.O. Greek and Egyptian gods identified The new propaganda of the Ptolemies Theories of the origin of Serapis The new Egyptian Trinity The influence of Greek mysticism The -worship probably established in Campanian towns before 150 B.c. The religious excitement in Italy in the early part of the second century b.g. The Bacchanalian scandal The apocryphal books of Numa Efforts of the Government in the first century B.C. to repress the worship A violent struggle with varying fortunes The triumvirs in 42 B.c. ereot a temple of Isis Persecution of eastern worships in the reign of Tiberius Thence- forth there was little opposition Attitude of the Flavian Emperors Domitian builds a temple of Isis, 92 a.d. The Egyptian worship propagated from Alexandria by slaves, officials, philosophers, and savants Votaries in the imperial household Spread of Isiac worship through Europe It reaches York The secret of its fascination The cult appealed to many kinds of mind Its mysticism Its charm for women Its pomp and ceremonial How a religion originally gros3 may be trans- formed The zoolatry of Egypt justified as symbolism by Greek philo- sophers But there is little trace of it in the Isiac worship of the West Isis becomes an all-embracing spiritual power And Serapis is regarded by Aristides as sovereign lord of life Yet the worship never broke away from the traditions of idolatry It fostered an immense superstition The Petosiris But there was undoubted spiritual power in the worship The initiation of Lucius The faith in immortality ei^&x. 61 on tombs Im- pressive ritual Separation of the priesthood from the world Description of the daily offices Matins and Vespers Silent meditation The great festivals of the Isiac calendar Ascetic preparation The blessing of the sacred ship Description of the procession in Apuleius The grades of priests The sacred guilds The place of women The priesthood an aggressive power The Isiac presbytery Priestly rule of life Tertullian holds it up as an example The popular charm of the Divine Mother 560-584 CONTENTS xxi CHAPTER VI THE RELIGION OP MITHKA The causes which in the second century a.d. prepared the triumph of Mithra Heliolatry the natural goal of heathenism Early history of Mithra in the Vedas and A vestas He is a moral power from the beginning His place in the Zoroastrian hierarchy His relation to Ormuzd The influence of Babylon on the Persian worship Mithra identified with the Sun The astral lore of Babylonia inseparable from Mithraism Yet Mithra and the Sun are distinct in the later Inscriptions How Mithra worship was modified in Asia Minor The influence of Greek mythology, philosophy, and art The group of the Tauroctonus probably first fashioned by a Pergamene artist Mithra in literature Herodotus Xenophon The Thebaid of Statius Plutarch Lucian may have heard the Mazdean litany Mithra's first coming to the West probably in the reign of Tiberius The earliest inscriptions of Mithraism belong to the Flavian age At the same time, the worship is established in Pannonia The earliest temples at Ostia and Rome The power of Mithra in the capital The secret of the propaganda Soldiers were the most effective missionaries of Mithra Slaves and imperial officials of every degree propagate the Persian faith Its progress traced around Rome and through various regions of Italy, especially to the north Mithra's chapels in the valleys of the Alps and on the roads to the Danube from Aquileia Along the line of the Danube His remains abundant in Dacia and Pannonia Chapels at Aquincum and Carnuntum The enthusiasm of certain legions The splendid remains of Mithra worship in Upper Germany in the early part of the second century a.d. Mithra passes on, through Cologne and Boulogne, to London, Chester, York, and the wall of Hadrian Mithra made least imprwsi"" ni \ W ftan^ jjfpafa, ^nd TJ. . Africa In spite of tolerance and syncretism, Mithraism never ceased to be a Persian cult The influence of astrology The share of Babylonia in moulding the worship Yet Greek mystic influences had a large part in it Tjie desc ent and ascent of the soul Yet, although Mithraism came to be a moral creed, it never ceased to be a cosmic symbolism The great elemental powers The daemonology of Mithraism Its affinity with the later Neo-Platonism The evil effect of belief in planetary influences The struggle between formal and spiritual ideals of religion The craving for mediatorial sympathy in the moral life was urgent Mithra was a mediator both in a cosmic and a moral sense He stands between Cautes and Cautopates, and between Ormuzd and Ahriman The legend of Mithra as faintly recovered from the monuments T he petra qtfwArir rri '" adoration of the shepherds The fountain gushing at the arrow-stroke The legend of the mystic bull Its chase and slaughter Its death as the source of resurgent life The mysterious reconciliation of Mithra and the Sun Their solemn agape Various interpretations of the legend Yet there was a real spiritual meaning under it all A religion of strenuous combat How it touched the Roman soldier on the Danube Its eschatology Its promise of immortality and final triumph over evil The sacramental mystery of Mithraism The daily oflices, and the annual festivals The i ROMAN SOCIETY mysteries of Mithra and the seven grades of initiation Symbolic ceremonies The colleges of Mithra Their influence in levelling social distinctions The suspicions of the Apologists Description of a chapel of Mithra The form of the cave always preserved The scene of full initiation Mithraism as an imperial cult and a support of imperial power Sketch of the history of imperial apotheosis The historic causes which aided it The influence of Egypt and Persia on the movement < The Persian attitude to kings The Fortune of the monarch How these ideas blended with old Roman conceptions The influence of Sun-worship in the third century, in stimulating theocratic ideas The Emperors appropriate the titles and insignia of the Sun The imperial house consecrate a temple to Mithra at Carnuntum, twenty years before the conversion of Constantine Could Mithra ever have become the god of western Europe ? His chances of success in the chaos of belief seemed promising His syncretism and tolerance, yet his exclusive claims His moral charm The fears of the Fathers Parallels between his legend and the Bible His sacramental system a travesty of the mysteries of the medieval church Yet there was a great gulf between the two religions The weaknesses of Mithraism It did not appeal to women It had no Mater Dolorosa It offered little human sympathy And in its tolerance of other heathen systems lay its great weakness A Mithraist might be a votary of all the ancient gods Mithraism was rooted in nature- worship, and remained the patron of the worst superstitions Mithra belonged to the order which was passing away ....... Pages 585-626 BOOK I. INFESTA VIRTUTIBUS TEMPORA CHAPTER I THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR The period of social history which we are about to study is profoundly interesting in many ways, but not least in the many contrasts between its opening and its close. It opens with the tyranny of one of the worst men who ever occupied a throne; it ends with the mild rule of a Stoic saint. It begins in massacre and the carnage of civil strife; it closes in the apparent triumph of the philosophic ideal, although before the end of the reign of the philosophers the shadows have begun to fall. The contrast of character between the two princes is generally supposed to find a correspondence in the moral character and ideals of the men over whom they ruled. The accession of Vespasian which, after a deadly struggle, seemed y to bring the orgies of a brutal despotism to a close, is regarded *^ as marking not only a political, but a moral, revolution. It was the dawn of an age of repentance and amendment, of beneficent administration, of a great moral revival. We are bound to accept the express testimony of a contemporary like Tacitus, 1 who was not prone to optimist views of human progress, that along with the exhaustion of the higher class from massacre and reckless extravagance, the sober example of the new emperor, and the introduction of fresh blood and purer manners from the provinces, had produced a great moral improvement. Even among the old noblesse, whose youth had fallen on the age of wild licence, it is probable that a better tone asserted itself at the beginning of what was recognised by all to be a new order. The crushed and servile, who had easily learnt to 1 Ann. iii. 55 ; xvi. 5 ; cf. Suet. Vesp. ix. xii. S> B 2 SOCIAL LIFE book i imitate the wasteful vices of their oppressors, would probably, with equal facility, at least affect to conform to the simpler fashions of life which Vespasian inherited from his Sabine an- cestors and the old farm-house at Eeate. 1 The better sort, repre- sented by the circles of Persius, of Pliny and Tacitus, who had nursed the ideal of Stoic or old Koman virtue in some retreat on the northern lakes or in the folds of the Apennines, emerged from seclusion and came to the front in the reign of Trajan. Yet neither the language of Tacitus nor the testimony from other sources justify the belief in any sudden moral revolution. The Antonine age was undoubtedly an age of conscientious and humane government in the interest of the subject ; it was even more an age of religious revival. But whether these were accompanied by a corresponding elevation of conduct and moral tone among the masses may well be doubted. On the other hand the pessimism of satirist and historian who had lived through the darkness of the Terror has probably exaggerated the corruption of the evil days. If society at large had been half as corrupt as it is represented by Juvenal, it would have speedily perished from mere rottenness. The Inscriptions, the Letters of the younger Pliny, even the pages of Tacitus himself, reveal to us another world from that of the satirist. On countless tombs we have the record or the ideal of a family life of sober, honest industry, and pure affection, (in the calm of rural retreats in Lombardy or Tuscany, while the capital was frenzied with vicious indulgence, or seething with conspiracy and desolated by massacre, there were many families living in almost puritan quietude, where the moral standard was in many respects as high as among ourselves. The worst period of the Eoman Empire was the most glorious age of practical Stoicism! The men of that circle were ready, at the cost of liberty or life, to brave an immoral tyranny ; their wives were eager to follow them into exile, or to die by their sideA And even in the palace of Nero there was a spotless Octavia, and slave-girls who were ready to defend"" her honour at the^Sosf of torture and death. 8 In the darkest days, the violence of the bad princes spent itself on Suet. Vesp. ii. quare princeps 2 Tac. Ann.xv. 23; xvi. 21, M;Agric. quoque et locum incnnabulorum assi- 2, 45 ; Plin. Ep. iii. 16, 10 i vii. 19, due frequentavit, maneute villa, qualis 3 ; iii. 11, 3 ; ix. 13, 3. fuerat dim, etc. 3 Tac. Ann. xiv. 60. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 3 their nobles, on those whom they feared, or whom they wished to plunder. The provinces, even under a Tiberius, a Nero, or a Domitian, enjoyed a freedom from oppression which they seldom enjoyed under the Kepublic. 1 Just and upright gover- nors were the rule and not the exception, and even an Otho or a Vitellius, tainted with every private vice, returned from their provincial governments with a reputation for integrity^- (TVlunicipal freedom and self-government were probably at their height at the very time when life and liberty in the capital were in hourly peritf The great Stoic doctrine of the brother- hood and equality of men, as members of a world-wide commonwealth, which was destined to inspire legislation in the Antonine age, was openly preached in the reigns of Caligula and Nero. A softer tone a modern note of pity for the miserable and succour for the helpless^-makes itself heard in the literature of the first century. 3 (The moral and mental equality of the sexes was being more and more recognised in theory, as the capacity of women for heroic action and self- sacrifice was displayed so often in the age of the tyranny and of the Stoic martyrs) ,The old cruelty and contempt for the slave will not give way for many a generation ; but the slave is now treated by all the great leaders of moral reform as a being of the same mould as his master, his equal, if not his superior, in capacity for virtue. The peculiar distinction of the Antonine age is not to be sought in any great difference from the age preceding it in con- duct or moral ideals among the great mass of men. Nor can it claim any literary distinction of decided originality, except in the possession of the airy grace and half-serious mockery of Lucian. Juvenal, Tacitus, and the younger Pliny, Suetonius and Quintilian, Plutarch and Dion Chrysostom, were probably all dead before Antoninus Pius came to the throne. After Hadrian's reign pure Eoman literature, in any worthy sense, is extinct ; it dies away in that Sahara of the higher intellect which stretches forward to the Fall of the Empire. There is no great 1 Tac. Ann. iv. 6 ; i. 80; xiii. 50, 51 xi. 24 ; Suet. Nero, x. ; Dom. viii. ; cf Merivale, vii. 385 ; Renan, Apotres, p. 308 sqq ; Grford, Morale de Plat. p. 200 Suet. Vitell. v. ; Otho, iii. provin 3 Sen. Ep. 47 ; De Ira, i. 5 ; iii. 24 ; De Bene/, iv. 11, 3 ; De Brev. Fit. xiii. 7 ; Plin. Ep. iv. 22 ; Juv. xiv. 15 sqq. ; xv. 131 ; D. Cass. Ixvi. 15 ; Or. Hcnz. Inscr. Lot. 7244, Bene fac. hoc ciam administravit moderatione atque tecum feres ; Denis, Hist, dcs lcties abstiuentia singulari. Morales, ii. 156, 172, 181. 4 SOCIAL LIFE book 1 historian after Tacitus ; there is no considerable poet after' Statius and Juvenal, till the meteor-like apparition of Claudian in the ominous reign of Honorius. The material splendour and municipal life of the Antonine age are externally its greatest glory. It was pre-eminently a sociable age, an age of cities. From the wall of Hadrian to the edge of the Sahara towns sprang up everywhere with as yet a free civic life. It was an age of engineers and architects, who turned villages into cities and built cities in the desert, adorned with temples and stately arches and basilicas, and feeding their fountains from the springs of distant hills. The rich were powerful and popular ; and never had they to pay so heavily for popularity and power. The cost of civic feasts and games, of forums and temples and theatres, was won by flattery, or extorted by an inexorable force of public opinion from their coffers. The poor were feasted and amused by their social superiors who received a deference and adulation ex- pressed on hundreds of inscriptions. And it must be confessed that these records of ambitious munificence and expectant gratitude do not raise our conception of either the economic or the moral condition of the age. The glory of classic art had almost vanished ; and yet, without being able to produce any works of creative genius, the inexhaustible vitality of the Hellenic spirit once more asserted itself. After a long eclipse, the rhetorical culture of Greece vigorously addressed itself in the reign of Hadrian to the conquest of the West. Her teachers and spiritual directors indeed had long been in every family of note. Her sophists were now seen haranguing crowds in every town from the Don to the Atlantic. The influence of the sophistic discipline in education will be felt in the schools of Gaul, when Visigoth and Burgundian will be preparing to assume the heritage of the falling Empire. 1 From the early years of the second century can be traced that great combined movement of the Neo-Pythagorean and Platonist philosophies and the renovated paganism which made a last stand against the conquering Church in the reigns of Julian and Theodosius. Philosophy became a religion, and devoted itself not only to the private direction of character and the preaching of a higher life, but 1 Sid. Apoll. Ep. viii. 6, 5. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 5 to the justification and unification of pagan faith. In spite of its rather bourgeois ideal of material enjoyment and splen- dour, the Antonine age, at least in its higher minds, was an age of a purified moral sense and religious intuition. It was, indeed, an age of spiritual contradictions. On the one hand, not only was the old ritual of classical polytheism scrupulously observed even by men like Plutarch and M. Aurelius, but religious imagination was appropriating the deities of every province, almost of every canton, embraced by the Eoman power. At the same time the fecundity of super- stition created hosts of new divinities and genii who peopled every scene of human life. 1 On the other hand syncretism was in the air. Amid all the confused ferment of devotion a certain principle of unity and comprehension was asserting itself, even in popular religion. The old gods were losing their sharp-cut individuality ; the provinces and attributes of Idndred deities tended to fade into one another, and melt into the conception of a single central Power. The religions of Egypt and the remoter East, with their inner monotheism, supported by the promise of sacramental grace and the hope of immor- tality, came in to give impetus to the great spiritual movement. The simple peasant might cling to his favourite god, as his Neapolitan descendant has his favourite saint. But an Apuleius, an Apollonius, or an Alexander Severus 2 sought a converging spiritual support in the gods and mysteries of every clime. Platonist philosophy strove to give rational expression to this movement, to reconcile cultivated moral sense with the worships of the past, to find a bond between the vagrant reli- gious fancies of the crowd and the remote esoteric faith of the philosophic few. On the higher minds, from whatever quarter, a spiritual vision had opened, which was strange to the ancient world, the vision of One who is no longer a mere Force, but an infinite Father, Creator, Providence and Guardian, from \ whom we come, to whom we go at death. Prayer to Him is a communion, not the means of winning mere temporal blessings; He is not gratified by bloody sacrifice ; He is dishonoured by immoral legend. 3 He cannot be imaged in gold or ivory graven 1 Or. Hem. iii. Ind. p. 27 sq. plurimos ritus . . . didici ; Lamprid. Alex. Sev. c. 29, 43. 2 Apul. Apol. c. 55, sacrorum plera- 3 Max. Tyr. Diss. viii. ; xi. 3 ; que initia in Graecia participavi, et xvii. ; D. Chrys. Or. xii. 83. 6 SOCIAL LIFE book i by the most cunning hand, although the idealised human form may be used as a secondary aid to devotion. These were some of the religious ideas current among the best men, Dion Chry- sostom, Plutarch, Maxiraus of Tyre, which the Neo-Platonic school strove to harmonise with the rites and legends of the past. The means by which they tried to do so, and the measure of their success, it is one purpose of this book to explain. The Antonine age saw for a brief space the dream of Plato realised, when kings should be philosophers, and philosophers should be kings. Philosophy had given up its detached and haughty reserve, or outspoken opposition to imperial power. In the second century it lent all its forces to an authority which in the hands of the Antonine princes seemed to answer to its ideals. 1 The votaries of the higher life, after their persecution under the last cruel despot, rose to an influence ' such as they had never wielded save in the Pythagorean aris- tocracies of southern Italy. Philosophy now began to inspire legislation and statesmanship. 2 Its professors were raised to the consulship and great prefectures. Above all, it was incarnate, as it were, in the ruler who, whatever we may think of his practical success, brought to the duties of government a loftiness of spiritual detachment which has never been equalled by any ruler of men. Whether there was any corresponding elevation of conduct or moral tone in the mass of men may well be doubted by any one who has studied the melancholy thoughts of the saintly emperor. Lucian and M. Aurelius seem to be as hopeless about the moral condition of humanity as Seneca and Petronius were in the darkest days of Nero's tyranny. 3 Such opinions, indeed, have little scientific value. They are often the result of temperament and ideals, not of trustworthy observation. But it would be rash to assume that heightened religious feeling and the efforts of philosophy had within a hundred years worked any wide-spread trans- formation of character. It was, however, a great step in advance that the idea of the principate, expounded by Seneca, and the younger Pliny, as a clement, watchful, infinitely 1 Renan, Les iSvangiles, p. 382. 3 Luc. Som. 32 ; Traj. 15 ; CJutron, 15, 20 ; Tim. 14, 36 ; M. Aurel. v. 10, 2 Friedl. SiUcngesch. iv. 4*20 ; Denis, 33 ; ix. 29 ; 34 ; x. 19 : cf. Sen. De Mies Morales, ii. 200 sqq. ; Renan, M. Ira, ii. 8 ; Ad Marc. ii. 17, 20, 22 ; Aurele, p. 24 sqq. Petron. Sat. 88. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 1 laborious earthly providence had been realised since the ac- cession of Trajan. It was easier to be virtuous in the reign of M. Aurelius than in the reign of Nero, and it was espe- cially easier for a man of the highest social grade. The example of the prince for good or evil must always powerfully influence the class who are by birth or office nearest to the throne. And bad example will be infinitely more corrupting when it is reinforced by terror. A fierce, capricious tyranny generates a class of vices which are perhaps more degrading to human dignity, and socially more dangerous, than the vices of the flesh. And the reign of such men as Caligula, Nero, and Domitian not only stimulated the grossness of self- indulgence, but superadded the treachery and servility of cowardice. In order to appreciate fully what the world had gained by the mild and temperate rule of the princes of the second century, it is necessary to revive for a moment the terrors of the Claudian Caesars. The power of Seneca as a moral teacher has, with some reservations, been recognised by all the ages since his time. But equal recognition has hardly been given to the lurid light which he throws, in random flashes, on the moral con- ditions of his class under the tyranny of Caligula and Nero. This may be due, perhaps, to a distrust of his artificial declamation, and that falsetto note which he too often strikes even in his most serious moments. Yet he must be an un- sympathetic reader who does not perceive that, behind the moral teaching of Seneca, there lies an awful experience, a life- long torture, which turns all the fair -seeming blessings of life, state and luxury and lofty rank, into dust and ashes. There is a haunting shadow over Seneca which never draws away, which sometimes deepens into a horror of dark- ness. In whatever else Seneca may have been insincere, his veiled references to the terrors of the imperial despotism come from the heart. Seneca's life almost coincides with the Julio -Claudian tyranny. He had witnessed in his early manhood the gloomy, suspicious rule of Tiberius, when no day passed without an execution, 1 when every accusation was deadly, when it might be fatal for a poet to assail Agamemnon in tragic verse, or for a 1 Ep. 108, 22 ; cf. Suet. Tib. lxi. nullus a poena hominura cessavit dies. 8 SOCIAL LIFE book i historian to praise Brutus and Cassius, 1 when the victims of delation in crowds anticipated the mockery of justice by self- inflicted death, or drank the poison even in the face of the judges. Seneca incurred the jealous hatred of Caligula by a too brilliant piece of rhetoric in the Senate, 2 and he has taken his revenge by damning the monster to eternal infamy. 3 Not even in Suetonius is there any tale more ghastly than that told by Seneca of the Roman knight whose son had paid with his life for a foppish elegance which irritated the tyrant. 4 On the evening of the cruel day, the father received an imperial com- mand to dine. With a face betraying no sign of emotion, he was compelled to drink to the Emperor, while spies were eagerly watching every expression of his face. He bore the ordeal without flinching. "Do you ask why? He had another son." Exiled to Corsica in the reign of Claudius, 5 Seneca bore the sentence with less dignity than he afterwards met death. He witnessed the reign of the freedmen, the infamies of Messalina, the intrigues of Agrippina, and the treacherous murder of Britannicus ; he knew all the secrets of that ghastly court. ^Installed as the tutor of the young Nero, he doubtless, if we may judge by the treatise on Clemency, strcve to inspire him with a high ideal of monarchy as an earthly providence) He probably at the same time discovered in the son of Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus and Agrippina the fatal heritage of a vicious blood and the omens of a ghastly reign. The young tiger was held on leash for the famous quinquennium by Burrus and Seneca. It seemed only the device of a divine tragic artist, by a brief space of calm and innocence, to deepen the horror of the catastrophe. And, for Seneca, life darkened terribly towards its close. With high purposes for the common- weal, he had probably lent himself to doubtful means of humouring his wayward pupil, perhaps even to crime. 6 His enormous wealth, whether won from imperial favour, or gained by usury and extortion, 7 his power, his literary brilliance, aroused 1 Suet. Tib. 61 ; Tac. Ann. iv. 34. s Tac. Ann. xii. 8 ; D. Cass. 60. 8 ; 2 D. Cass. lix. 19 ; Suet. Galig. 53. g- 10 . j. Sen. Ad Polyb. 13. 2 ; Ad ' ^ Helv. 15. 2. 3 Nee. Inj. xviii. ; cf. Suet. Calig. 6 j- or t h e worst charges v. D. Cass. 50 ; Sen. De Ira, i. 20 ; iii. 18 ; Be lxii. 2 ; lxi. 10 ; Tac. Ann. 13. 13. Tranq. xiv. ; Ad Polyb. xiii. xvii. ; Ad 7 j). Cass. I.e. ; Tac. Ann. 13. 42. Helv. x. 4 ; De Bene/, iv. 31. But cf. Seneca's reply, Tac. Ann. 14. * Sen. Be Ira, ii. 33. 53, and 15. 62. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 9 a host of enemies, who blackened his character and excited the fears or the jealousy of Nero. He had to bear the unenviable distinction of a possible pretender tothe principate. 1 He with- drew into almost monastic seclusion, and even offered to resign his wealth. 2 He strove to escape the evil eyes of calumny and imperial distrust by the most abject renunciation. But he could not descend from the precipice on which he hung ; his eleva- tion was a crucifixion. 3 Withdrawn to a remote corner of his palace, which was crowded with the most costly products of the East, and surrounded by gardens which moved the envy of Nero, 4 the fallen statesman sought calm in penning his counsels to Lucilius, and bracing himself to meet the stealthy stroke which might be dealt at any moment. 5 In reading many passages of Seneca, you feel that you are sitting in some palace on the Esquiline, reading the Phaedo or listening to the consolations of a Stoic director, while the centurion from the palace may at any moment appear with the last fate- ful order. Seneca, like Tacitus, has a remarkable power of moral diagnosis. He had acquired a profound, sad knowledge of the pathology of the soul. It was a power which was almost of necessity acquired in that time of terror and suspicion, when men lived in daily peril from seeming friends. ^There never was a period when men more needed the art of reading the secrets of character) Nor was there ever a time when there were greater facilities for the study. Life was sociable almost to excess. The Roman noble, unless he made himself deliberately a recluse, spent much of his time in those social meeting-places of which we hear so often, 6 where gossip and criticism dealt mercilessly with character, where keen wits were pitted against one another, sometimes in a deadly game, and where it might be a matter of life or death to pierce the armour of dissimulation. 7 Seneca had long shone in such circles. In his later years, if he became a recluse, he was also a spiritual director. And his Letters leave little doubt that many a restless or weary spirit laid bare its secret misery to him, for advice or 1 Tac. Ann. 15. 65. De Ira, iii. 15 ; Ad Helv. 5, 4. 2 Sen. Frag. 108. 8 Mart. vii. 27, 11 ; Juv. xi. 4 ; Sen. * Sen. De Tranq. x. 6. Dial. 1, 5, 4 ; De Bene/, vii. 22, 2 ; 4 Sen. Ep. i. 18; Tac. Ann. 14. 52. Friedl. Sittengesch. i. 281. Ep. 70, 14 ; 88, 17 ; Ep. 77 ; 7 Sen. De Ira, ii.83 ; De Tranq. xii.7. 10 SOCIAL LIFE book i consolation. Knowing well the wildest excesses of fantastic luxury, all the secrets of the philosophic confessional, the miseries of a position oscillating between almost princely state and monastic renunciation, the minister of Nero, with a self- imposed cure of souls, had unrivalled opportunities of ascer- taining the moral condition of his class. Seneca is too often a rhetorician, in search of striking effects and vivid phrase. And, like all rhetoricians, he is often inconsistent. At times he appears to regard his own age as having reached the very climax of insane self-indulgence. And yet, in a calmer mood, he declares his belief that the contem- poraries of Nero were not worse than the contemporaries of Olodius or Lucullus, that one age differs from another rather in the greater prominence of different vices. 1 His pessimism extends to all ages which have been allured by the charm of ingenious luxury from the simplicity of nature. In the fatal progress of society, the artificial multiplication of human wants has corrupted the idyllic innocence of the far-off Eden, where the cope of heaven or the cave was the only shelter, and the skin-clad savage made his meal on berries and slaked his thirst from the stream. 2 It is the revolutionary dream of Eousseau, revolting from the oppression and artificial luxury of the Aneien Rdgime. Seneca's state of nature is the antithesis of the selfish and materialised society in which he lived. Our early ancestors were not indeed virtuous in the strict sense. 3 For virtue is the result of struggle and philosophic guidance. But their instincts were good, because they were not tempted. They enjoyed in common the natural bounties of mother earth. 4 Their fierceness of energy spent itself on the beasts of the chase. They lived peaceably in willing obedience to the gentle paternal rule of their wisest and best, with no lust of gold or power, no jealousy and hatred, to break a contented \ and unenvious harmony. The great disturbers of this primeval peace were avarice and luxury. 5 The moment when the first nugget flashed its baleful temptations on the eyes of the roaming hunter was the beginning of all human guilt and misery. 6 Selfish greed, developing into insatiable appetite, is 1 Sen. Ep. 97, 2 ; Sen. De Bene/. 3 Ep. 90, 40. * lb. 90, 38. i. 10, 1. Cf. De Ira, ii. 8 ; Ep. 95, 5 lb. 90, 5, 36, avaritia atque 20 ; Ep. 115, 10. luxuria dissociavere mortales. 2 Sen. Ep. 90, 42. 6 lb. 90, 12. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 11 the original sin which turned the garden into wilderness. In individualist cravings men lost hold on the common wealth of nature. Luxury entered on its downward course, in the search for fresh food and stimulus for appetite, till merely super- fluous pleasures led on to those from which untainted nature i recoils. 1 Man's boasted conquests over nature, the triumphs of his perverted ingenuity, have bred an illimitable lust, ending in wearied appetite ; they have turned those who were brothers into cunning or savage beasts. Such a theory of society has, of course, no value or interest i in itself. Its interest, like that of similar & priori dreams, lies in the light which it sheds on the social conditions which gave it birth. Like the Germany of Tacitus, and the Social Contract of Rousseau, Seneca's theory of the evolution of humanity is an oblique satire on the vices of his own age. ^ And not even in Tacitus or Suetonius are to be found more ghastly revelations of a putrescent society, and the ennui and self-loathing which capricious sensualism generates in spirits born for something higher. It may be worth noting that the vices which Seneca treats as most prevalent and deadly are not so much those of sexual impurity, although they were rife enough in his day, as those of greed, gross luxury, treacherous and envious cruelty, the weariness of jaded nerves and exhausted capacities of indulgence. 2 It is not the coarse vices of the Suburra, bat the more deadly and lingering maladies of the Quirinal and the Esquiline which he is describing. There is a universal lust of gold : 3 riches are the one ornament and stay of life. And yet in those days a great fortune was only a splendid servitude. 4 It had to be guarded amid perpetual peril and envy. The universal greed and venality are worthily matched by the endless anxiety of those who have won the prize. Human life has become a scene of cruel and selfish egotism, a ferocious struggle of beasts of prey, eager for rapine, j and heedless of those who go down in the obscene struggle. 5 It is an age when men glorify the fortunate and trample on the fallen. The cunning and cruelty of the wild beast on the throne have taught a lesson of dissimulation to the subject. 1 Sen. Ep. 90, 19. 60 ; Ep. 74. 2 De Brev. Vit. xvi. tarde ire horas * Ad Polyb. vi. 5, magna servitus est quemntur ; Ep. 77 ; Ep. 104, 15. magna fortuna. Ep. 115, 10 ; De Ira, iii. 33 ; Ep. * De Ira, ii. 8. 12 SOCIAL LIFE book i At such a court it is a miracle to reach old age, and the feat can only be accomplished by accepting insult and injury with a smiling face. 1 For him who goes undefended by such armour of hypocrisy there is # always ready the rack, the poisoned cup, the order for self-murder. It is characteristic of the detachment of Seneca that he sees the origin of this hateful tyranny. No modern has more clearly discerned the far-reaching curse of slavery. 2 Every great house is a miniature of the Empire under a Caligula or Nero, a nursery of pretenders capable of the same enormities. The unchecked power of the master, which could, for the slightest faults, an ill- swept pavement, an unpolished dish, or a sullen look, inflict the most brutal torture, 3 produced those cold hearts which gloated over the agony of gallant men in the arena, and applauded in the Senate the tyrant's latest deed of blood. And the system of household slavery enervated character while it made it heartless and cruel. The Inscriptions confirm Seneca's picture of the minute division of functions among the household, to anticipate every possible need or caprice of the master. 4 Under such a system the master became a helpless dependent. There is real truth, under some ludicrous exaggeration, in the tale of a Roman noble, taking his seat in his sedan after the bath, and requiring the assurance of his slave that he was really seated. 5 It is little wonder that on such lives an utter weariness should settle, the disgust of oversated appetite, which even the most far-fetched luxuries of the orient, the most devilish ingenuity of morbid vice, could hardly arouse. Yet these jaded souls are tortured by an aimless restlessness, which frets and chafes at the slow passing of the hours, 6 or vainly hopes to find relief in change of scene. 7 The more energetic spirits, with no wholesome field for energy, developed into a class which obtained the name of " Ardeliones." Seneca, 8 Martial, 9 and the younger Pliny 10 have left us pictures of these idle 1 Be Ira, ii. 33. VAnt. ii. 146. 2 lb. iii. 35, deinde idem de re- 5 Sen. Be Brev. V. xiii. publica libertatem sublatam quereris 6 lb. xvi. transilire dies volant, quam domi sustulisti. 7 Id. Ep. 104, 15 ; 89, 20 ; Ep. 28. 3 lb. iii. 24, 32 ; Petron. Sat. 49, 8 Id. Be Tranq. xii. 7. 53 ; Sen. Ep. 47, 10 ; Juv. vi. 490 ; 9 Mart. ii. 7, 8 (v. note on the word Sen. Be Clem. i. 18. in Friedlander's ed.) ; iv. 78. 4 Boissier, Eel. Rom. ii. 353 ; Marq. 10 Sen. Ep. i. 9 ; cf. Friedl. Sitten- Priv. i. 142 ; Wallon, L'Escl. dans gesch. i. 271. c* ap. i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 13 busybodies, hurrying round the forums, theatres, and great houses, in an idle quest of some trivial object of interest, waiting on patrons who ignore their existence, following some stranger to the grave, rushing pell-mell to the wedding of a much-married lady, or to a scene in the law courts, returning at nightfall, worn out with these silly labours, to tread the same weary round next day. Less innocent were they who daily gathered in the circuit, 1 to hear and spread the wildest rumours about the army on the frontier, to kill a woman's reputation with a hint, to find a sinister meaning in some imperial order, or to gloat in whispers over the last highly-coloured tale of folly or dark guilt from the palace. It was a perilous enjoy- ment, for, with a smiling face, some seeming friend was prob- ably noting every hint which might be tortured into an accusation before the secret tribunal on the Palatine, or angling for a sneer which might cost its author a fortune, or send him to the rocks of Gyarus. In reading Seneca's writings, especially those of his last years, you are conscious of a horror which hardly ever takes definite shape, a thick stifling air, as it were, charged with lightning. Again and again, you feel a dim terror closing in silently and stealthily, with sudden glimpses of unutterable torture, of cord and rack and flaming tunic. 2 You seem to see the sage tossing on his couch of purple under richly pannelled ceilings of gold, starting at every sound in the wainscot, 3 as he awaits the messenger of death. It is not so much that Seneca fears death itself, although we may suspect that his nerves sometimes gave the lie to his principles. He often hails death as welcome at any age, as the deliverer who strikes off the chain and opens the prison door, the one harbour on a tempestuous and treacherous sea. 4 He is grateful for having always open this escape from life's long torture, and boldly claims the right to anticipate the executioner. The gloom of Seneca seems rather to spring from a sense of the terrible con- 1 Juv. xi. 4 ; Mart. vii. 97 ; Quintil. tectorum pavetis sonum et inter vi 3, 105 ; Sen. De Tranq. xii. 7 ; picturas vestras, si quid increpuit, De Ben. vii. 22, 2 ; De Prov. L 5, 4 ; fugitis attoniti. Boissier, L'Opp. p. 201 sqq. 4 Ep. 70, 14 ; Ep. 88, 17. malis Ad Marc. xx. ; De Tranq. x. ; Ep. Jratus sum ; Ep. 24, 11 ; Ad Polyb. 94 ad fin Ep 70 lx - nullus P rtus n,sl morlls > Ad * Marc. xx. mors quae efficit ut nasci non Ep. 90, 43, at vos ad omnem supplicium sit. 14 SOCIAL LIFE book i trast between wealth and state and an ignominious doom which was ever ready to fall. And to his fevered eye all stately rank seems at last but a precipice overhanging the abyss, a mark for treacherous envy or the spitefulness of Fortune. 1 "A great fortune is a great servitude," 2 which, if it has been hard to win, is harder still to guard. And all life is full of these pathetic contrasts. Pleasure is nearest neighbour to pain ; the summer sea in a moment is boiling in the tempest ; the labour of long years is scattered in a day; there is always terror lurking under our deepest peace. And so we reach the sad gospel of a universal pessimism ; " nothing is so deceitful and treacherous as the life of man." 8 No one would knowingly accept such a fatal gift, of which the best that can be said is that the torture is short, that our first moment of existence is the first stage to the grave. 4 Thus to Seneca, with all his theoretical indifference to things external to the virtuous will, with all his admiration for the invulnerable wisdom, withdrawn in the inner citadel of the soul, and defying the worst that tyrants or fortune could inflict, the taedium vitae became almost unendurable. The interest of all this lies, not in Seneca's inconsistency, but in the nightmare which brooded on such minds in the reign of Nero. Something of the gloom of Seneca was part of the evil heritage of a class, commanding inexhaustible wealth and assailed by boundless temptations to self-indulgence, which had been offered by the conquest of East and West. The weary senses failed to respond to the infinite sensual seductions which surrounded the Roman noble from his earliest years. If he did not succeed in squandering his fortune, he often exhausted too early his capacity for healthy joy in life, and the nemesis of sated appetite and disillusionment too surely cast its shadow over his later years. Prurient slander was rife in those days, and we are not bound to accept all its tales about Seneca. Yet there are passages in his writings which leave the impression that, although he may have cultivated a Pythagorean aceticism in his youth, 5 he did not 1 Ad Marc. x. Pythagorean discipline under the in- 2 Ad Polyb. vi. flueuce of Sotion, a pupil of Scxtius, 8 Ad Marc. xxii. 3. but gave it up on the proscription of * Ad Polyb. ix. ; Ep. 77 ; Ad Marc. suspected rites in the reign of Tiberius, xxi. 7. cf. Suet. Tib. 36 ; cf. Zeller, Die PhiL 6 Ep. 108, 17. He adopted the der Gr. iii. 1, 605. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 15 altogether escape the taint of his time. 1 His enormous fortune did not all come by happy chance or the bounty of the emperor. 2 His gardens and palace, with all its priceless furniture, must have been acquired because at one time he felt pleasure in such luxuries. A soul so passionate in its renunciation may, according to laws of human nature, have been once as passionate in indulgence. In his case, as so often in the history of the Church, the saint may have had a terrible repentance. It is probable, however, that this pessimism is more the result of the contrast between Seneca's ideal of the principate, and the degradation of its power in the hands of his pupil Nero. Seneca may have been regarded once as a possible candidate for the throne, but he was no conspirator or re- volutionary. 8 He would have condemned the visionaries whose rudeness provoked even the tolerant Vespasian. 4 In a letter, which must have been written during the Neronian terror, he emphatically repudiates the idea that the votaries of philosophy are refractory subjects. Their great need is quiet and security. They should surely reverence him who, by his sleepless watch, guards what they most value, just as, on a merchantman, the owner of the most precious part of the cargo will be most grateful for the protection of the god of the sea. 5 Seneca would have his philosophic brethren give no offence by loud self-assertion or a parade of superior wisdom. 6 In that deceitful dawn of his pupil's reign, Seneca had written a treatise in which he had striven to charm him by the ideal of a paternal monarchy, in the consciousness of its god-like power ever delighting in mercy and pity, tender to the afflicted, gentle even to the criminal. It is very much the ideal of Pliny and Dion Chrysostom under the strong and temperate rule of Trajan. 7 Addressed to one of the worst emperors, it seems, to one looking back, almost a satire. Yet we should remember that, strange as it may seem, Nero, with all his wild depravity, appears to have had a strange charm for many, even to the end. The men who trembled 1 D. Cass. 62. 2 ; 61. 10. Zeller, iii. 6 Sen. Ep. 73, 3. 1, 641, n. 1. 8 lb. 103, 4. 2 D. Cass. I.e. 7 Be Clem. i. 19 ; Plin. Paneg. i. 72 ; * Tac. Ann. xv. 55. D. Chrys. Or. ii. 77 ; iii. 39 ; 70 4 Suet. Vesp. 15. sqq. 16 SOCIAL LIFE book i under the sombre and hypocritical Domitian, regretted the wild gaiety and bonhomie of Nero, and each spring, for years after his death, flowers were laid by unknown hands upon his grave. 1 The charm of boyhood, with glimpses of some generous instincts, may for a time have deceived even the experienced man of the world and the brooding analyst of character. But it is more probable that the piece is rather a warning than a prophecy. Seneca had watched all the caprices of an imperial tyrant, drunk with a sense of omnipotence, having in his veins the maddening taint of ancestral vice, 2 with nerves unstrung by maniacal excesses, brooding in the vast solitudes of the Palatine till he became frenzied with terror, striking down possible rivals, at first from fear or greed, 3 in the end from the wild beast's lust for blood, and the voluptuary's delight in suffering. The prophecy of the father as to the future of Agrippina's son 4 found probably an echo in the fears of his tutor. But, in spite of his forebodings, Seneca thought the attempt to save him worth making. He first appeals to his imagination. Nero has succeeded to a vicegerency of God on earth. 5 He is the arbiter of life and death, on whose word the fortunes of citizens, the happiness or misery of whole peoples depend. His innocence raises the highest hopes. 6 But the imperial task is heavy, and its perils are appalling. The emperor is the one bond by which the world-empire is held together ; 7 he is its vital breath. Man, the hardest of all animals to govern, 8 can only be governed long by love, and love can only be won by beneficence and gentleness to the froward- ness of men. In his god-like place, the prince should imitate the mercy of the gods. 9 Wielding illimitable power, he is yet the servant of all, and cannot usurp the licence of the private subject. He is like one of the heavenly orbs, bound by in- evitable law to move onward in a fixed orbit, unswerving and unresting. If he relies on cruel force, rather than on clemency, he will sink to the level of the tyrant and meet 1 Suet. Dom. 23, Nero, 57 \ cf. Tac. 3 Suet. Calig. 38. Hist. i. 7, ipsa aetas Galbae irrisui ac 4 Id. Nero, 6. fastidio erat adsuetis juventae Neronis 6 De Clem. i. 1, 2, electusque sum et imperatores forma ac decore corporis qui in terris deorum vice fungerer. . . . comparantibus. 6 lb. i. 5. 2 Suet. Calig. 50 ; cf. Sen. Nee. Inj. 7 lb. i. 4, 1, ille vinculum per quod 18 ; De Ira, i. 20 ; ii. 33 ; iii. 18 ; De respubliea cohaeret, ille spiritus vitalis. Ben. ii. 12, 21. * lb. i. 17, 1. 9 lb. i. 7, 2. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 17 his proper fate*. 1 Cruelty in a king only multiplies his enemies and envenoms hatred. In that fatal path there is no turning back. The king, once dreaded by his people, loses his nerve and strikes out blindly in self-defence. 2 The atmosphere of treachery and suspicion thickens around him, and, in the end, wh^, to his maddened mind, seemed at first a stern necessity becomes a mere lust for blood. It has been suggested that Seneca was really, to some extent, the cause of the grotesque or tragic failure of Nero. 3 The rhetorical spirit, which breathes through all Seneca's writings, may certainly be an evil influence in the education of a ruler of men. The habit of playing with words, of aiming at momentary effect, with slight regard to truth, may inspire the excitable vanity of the artist, but is hardly the temper for dealing with the hard problems of government. And the dazzling picture of the boundless power of a Eoman emperor, which Seneca put before his pupil, in order to heighten his sense of responsibility, might intoxicate a mind naturally prone to grandiose visions, while the sober lesson would be easily forgotten. The spectacle of " the kingdoms of the world and all the glory of them " at his feet was a dangerous temptation to a temperament like Nero's. 4 Arrogance and cruelty were in the blood of the Domitii. Nero's grandfather, when only aedile, had compelled the censor to give place to him; he had produced Eoman matrons in pantomime, and given gladia- torial shows with such profusion of cruelty, as to shock that not very tender-hearted age. 5 The father of the emperor, in addition to crimes of fraud, perjury, and incest, had, in the open forum, torn out the eye of a Koman knight, and deliber- ately trampled a child under his horse's feet on the Appian Way. 6 Yet such is the strange complexity of human nature, that Nero seems by nature not to have been destitute of some generous and amiable qualities. We need not lay too much stress on the innocence ascribed to him by Seneca. 7 Nor need we attribute to Nero's initiative the sound or benevolent measures which characterised the beginning of his reign. But he showed 1 Be Clem. i. 12. bus mortalibus placui electusque sura 8 lb. i. 13, 2, scelera enim sceleribus qui in terris deorum vice fungerer ? tuenda sunt. 8 Suet. Nero, c. 4. Renan, UAnUchr. p. 125. 6 lb. c. 5. 4 Be Clem. i. 1, 2, egone ex omni- 7 Sen. De Clem. i. 1, 5. 18 SOCIAL LIFE book i at one time some industry and care in performing his judicial work. 1 He saw the necessity, in the interests of public health and safety, of remodelling the narrow streets and mean in- sanitary dwellings of Bonie. 2 His conception of the Isthmian canal, if the engineering problem could have been conquered, would have been an immense boon to traders with the Aegean. CEven his quinquennial festival, inspired by the Greek contests in music and gymnastic, 3 represented a finer ideal of such gather- ings, which was much needed by a race devoted to the coarse realism of pantomime and the butchery of the arena) Fierce and incalculably capricious as he could be, Nero, at his best, had also a softer side. ( He had a craving for love and appreciation 4 ; somex of his cruelty was probably the revenge for the denial of it) (He was singularly patient of lampoons and invective against nimself.7 Although he could be brutal in his treatment of women, he also knew how to inspire real affection, and perhaps in a few cases return it. He seems to have had something of real love for Acte, his mistress. His old nurses consoled him in his last hour of agony, and, along with the faithful Acte, laid the last of his race in the vault of the Domitii. 6 Nero must have had something of that charm which leads women in every age to forget faults, and even crimes in the men whom they have once loved. And the strange, lingering superstition, which disturbed the early Church, and which looked for his reappearance down to the eleventh century, could hardly have gathered around an utterly mean and mediocre character. 7 When Nero uttered the words " Qualis artifex pereo," 8 he gave not only his own interpretation of his life, he also revealed one great secret of its ghastly failure. It may be admitted that Nero had a certain artistic enthusiasm, a real ambition to excel. 9 He painted with some skill, he composed verses not without a certain grace. In spite of serious natural defects, he took endless pains to acquire the technique of a singer. Far into the night he would sit in rapt enthusiasm listening to 1 Suet. Nero, c. 15 ; cf. Bom. c. viii. 6 lb. c. 50. ' *} ro >?' I 6 - ^ . . 7 Renan, L'Antechr. p. 316. 3 lb. c. 12, institmt et qumquennale * " certamen primus omnium Romae more 8 Suet - Nero, c. 49 ; Kenan, L An- Graeco triplex, etc. tichr - 13 - "II- 4 lb. c. 20 ; 53 ; Renan, L'Antechr. 9 Suet. Nero, c. 24, 49, 52, 55 ; Tac. p. 132. Ann. xiv. 16 ; cf. Mace, SvAtone, p. 8 Suet. Nero, c. 39. 179 ; Boissier, L'Opp. p. 265. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 19 the effects of Terpnus, and trying to copy them. 1 \J3is artistic tour in Greece, which lowered him so much in the eyes of the West} was really inspired by the passion to find a sympathetic audience which he could not find at Eome. And, in spite of his arrogance and vanity, he had a wholesome deference for the artistic judgment of Greece. Yet it is very striking that in the records of his reign, the most damning accusation is that he disgraced the purple by exhibitions on the stage. His songs to the lyre, his impersonation of the parturient Canace or the mad Hercules, did as much to cause his overthrow as his murders of Britannicus and Agrippina. 2 The stout Eoman soldier and the Pythagorean apostle have the same scorn for the imperial charioteer and actor. A false literary ambition, born of a false system of education, was the bane of Eoman culture for many ages. The dilettante artist on the throne in the first century had many a successor in the literary arts among the grand seigneurs of the fifth. They could play with their ingenious tricks of verse in sight of the Gothic camp-fires. He could contend for the wreath at Olympia when his faithful freedman was summoning him back by the news that the West was seething with revolt. 3 Nero's mother had dissuaded him from the study of philo- sophy ; his tutor debarred him from the study of the manly oratory of the great days. 4 The world was now to learn the meaning of a false artistic ambition, divorced from a sense of reality and duty. Aesthetieism may be only a love of sensational effects, with no glimpse of the ideal. It may be a hypocritical materialism, screening itself under divine names. In this taste Nero was the true representative of his age. It was deeply tainted with that mere passion for the grandiose and startling, and for feverish intellectual effects, which a true culture spurns as a desecration of art. 6 Mere magnitude and portentousness, the realistic expression of physical agony, the coarse flush of a half-sensual pleasure, captivated a vulgar taste, to which crapulous excitement and a fever of the senses took the place of the purer ardours and visions of the 1 Snet. Nero, c. 53, c. 20, cf. c. 24. extitisti ; Suet. Nero, c. 21 ; D. Cass. 2 Philostr. A-poll. Tyau. iv. 36, 39 ; 63. 9, 10. Tac. Ann. xiv. 15, 16 ; xv. 67, odisse 3 Suet. Nero, c. 23. 4 lb. c. 32. coepi postquam parricida matris et 8 Merivale, viii. p. 70 sq. ; Schiller, nxoris, auriga et histrio et incendiarius Oesch. der Rom. Kaiserzeit, i. p. 467. 20 SOCIAL LIFE book i spirit. 1 Nero paid the penalty of outraging the conventional prejudices of the Eoman. And yet he was in soihe respects in thorough sympathy with the masses. His lavish games and spectacles atoned to some extent for his aberrations of Hellenism. He was generous and wasteful, and he encouraged waste in others, 2 and waste is always popular till the bill has to be paid. He was a " cupitor incredibilium." 3 The province of Africa was ransacked to find the fabled treasure of Dido. 4 Explorers were sent to pierce the mysterious barrier of the Caucasus, and discover the secret sources of the Nile. He had great. engineering schemes which might seem baffling even to modern skill, and which almost rivalled the wildest dreams of the lunatic brain of Caligula. 5 His Golden House, in a park stretching from the Palatine to the heights of the Esquiline, was on a scale of more than oriental magnificence. At last the master of the world was properly lodged. With colonnades three miles long, with its lakes and pastures and sylvan glades, it needed only a second Nero in Otho to dream of adding to its splendour. 6 To such a prince the astrologers might well predict another monarchy enthroned on Mount Zion, with the dominion of the East. 7 The materialist dreamer was, like Napoleon I., without a rudimentary moral sense. TStained \ with the foulest enormities himself, he had a rooted conviction that virtue was a pretence, and that all men were equally depraved. 8 His surroundings gave him some excuse for thinking so. He was born into a circle which believed chiefly in " the lust of the eye and the pride of life, j He formed a circle many of whom perished in the carnage of Bedriacum. With a treasury drained by insane profusion, Nero resorted to >rapine and judicial murder to replenish it. 9 The spendthrift seldom has scruples in repairing his extravagance. (The temples were naturally plundered by the man who, having no religion, was at least honest enough to deride all religions.) The artistic treasures of Greece were carried off by the votary of Greek art; the gold and silver images of her shrines were 1 Petron. Sect. 8, where the decay 4 lb. 16. 1 ; Suet. Nero, 31. of artistic sense is traced to the gross- 5 lb. 16, 31 ness of evil living ; at nos vino scortis- 6 lb. c. 31 ; cf. Otho, 7. que demersi ne paratas quidern artes 7 Suet. Nero, c. 40. audemus cognoscere. 8 lb. c. 29 ad fin. 2 Suet. Nero, c. 11, 12. 9 lb. c. 32 ; D. Cass. 63. 17. 8 Tac. Ann. 15. 42. 10 Suet. Nero, c. 56. chap i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 21 sent to the melting-pot. 1 Ungrateful testators paid their due penalty after death ; and delation, watching every word or gesture, skilfully supplied the needed tale of victims for plunder. It is all a hackneyed story. Yet it is perhaps necessary to revive it once more to explain the suppressed terror and lingering agony of the last days of Seneca. The impressions of the Terror which we receive from Seneca are powerful and almost oppressive. A thick atmo- sphere of gloom and foreboding seems to stifle us as we turn his pages. But Seneca deals rather in shadowy hint and veiled suggestion than in definite statement. For the minute picture of that awful scene of degradation we must turn to Tacitus. He wrote in the fresh dawn of an age of fancied freedom, when the gloom of the tyranny seemed to have suddenly vanished like an evil dream. Yet he cannot shake off the sense of horror and disgust which fifteen years of ignoble compliance or silent suffering have burnt into his soul. Even under the manly, tolerant rule of Trajan, he hardly seems to have regained his breath. 2 He can scarcely believe that the light has come at last. His attitude to the tyranny is essentially different from that of Seneca. The son of the provincial from Cordova views the scene rather as the cosmo- politan moralist, imperilled by his huge fortune and the neighbourhood of the terrible palace. Tacitus looks at it as the Eoman Senator, steeped in all old Roman tradition, caring little for philosophy, but caring intensely for old Eoman dignity ' and the prestige of that great order, which he had seen humbled and decimated. 8 The feeling of Seneca is that of a Stoic monk, isolated in a corner of his vast palace, now trembling before the imperial jealousy, which his wealth and celebrity may draw down upon him, and again seeking consolation in thoughts of God and eternity which might often seem to belong to Thomas a Kempis. The tone of Tacitus is some- times that of a man who should have lived in the age of the Samnite or the Carthaginian wars, before luxury and factious ambition had sapped the moral strength of the great aristocratic caste, while his feelings are divided between grim anger at 1 Suet. Nero, c. 32; D. Cass. 63. 11. studiaque oppresseris facilius quain revocaveris. 2 Tac. Agric. c. 3, sic ingenia * Peten Qesch. IAU. ii. 53 sqq. 22 SOCIAL LIFE book i a cruel destiny, and scornful regret for the weakness and the self-abandonment of a class which had been once so great. The feelings of Seneca express themselves rather in rhetorical self-pity. (The feelings of Tacitus find vent in words which sometimes veil a pathos too proud for effusive utterance, some- times cut like lancet points, and which, in their concentrated moral scorn, have left an eternal brand of infamy on names of historic renown/) More than forty years had passed between the date of Seneca's last letters to Lucilius and the entry of Tacitus on his career as a historian. 1 He was a child when Seneca died. 2 His life is known to us only from a few stray glimpses in the Letters of Pliny, 3 eked out by the inferences of modern erudition. As a young boy, he must have often heard the tales of the artistic follies and the orgies of Nero, and the ghastly cruelties of the end of his reign. As a lad of fifteen, he may have witnessed something of the carnival of blood and lust which appropriately closed the regime of the Julio- Claudian line. He entered on his cursus honorum in the reign of Vespasian, and attained the praetorship under Domitian. 4 A military command probably withdrew him from Rome for three years during the tyranny of the last Flavian. 5 He was consul suffectus in 9 7, and then held the proconsulship of Asia. It cannot be doubted from his own words that, as a senator, he had to witness tamely the Curia beset with soldiery, the noblest women driven into exile, and men of the highest rank and virtue condemned to death on venal testimony in the secret tribunal of the Alban Palace. His hand helped to drag Helvidius to the dungeon, and was stained with the blood of Senecio. He lived long enough under a better prince to leave an unfading picture of the tragedy of solitary and remorseless power, but not long enough to forget the horrors and degradation through which he had passed. The claim of Tacitus to have been uninfluenced by passion 1 Seneca died in 65 a.d. The 8 Plin. Ep. L 6, 20 ; iv. 13 ; vi. 9, Histories of Tacitus were published 16, 20 ; vii. 20, 33 ; viii. 7 ; ix. 10, tire. 106-107; cf. Plin. Ep. vii. 20; 14. Peter, Gesch. Litt.iL 42. EisL \, 1; An%m xi . n. This ' Tac . 1 . tus wa ? about 5 L A ;?' latter important passage fixes the date (Peter, u. 43 j Mace, SuOons, p. 35 81 ; of Ms prae torship, 88 a.d. ; cf. Teuffel, Momms. Phn.jp. 51). He was, perhaps, u f 65 n 6 p et i{ 43 fifteen years older than Suetonius, and seven years older than Pliny. 5 Agric. c. 45. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 23 or partiality 1 has been disputed by a modern school of critics. 2 Sometimes, from a love of Caesarism and strong government, sometimes from the scholarly weakness for finding a new- interpretation of history, the great historic painter of the Julio -Claudian despotism has been represented as an acrid rhetorician of the Senatorial reaction, a dreamer who looks back wistfully to the old Eepublic, belonging to one of those haughty circles of the old regime which were always in chronic revolt, which lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and poison- ous gossip, and nourished its dreams and hatreds till fiction and fact melted into one another in gloomy retrospect. 3 He is the great literary avenger of the Senate after its long sanguinary conflict with the principate, using the freedom of the new order to blacken the character of princes who had been forced, in the interests of the world-wide empire,, to fight and to crush a selfish and narrow-minded caste. 4 The weakness of all such estimates of Tacitus lies in their failure to recognise the complex nature of the man, the mingled and crossing influences of training, official experience, social environment, and lofty moral ideals 5 ; it lies even more in a misconception of his aims as a historian. Tacitus was a great orator, and the spirit of the rhetorical school, combined with the force and dexterity of style which it could com- municate, left the greatest Eoman historians with a less rigorous sense of truth than their weakest modern successors often possess. 6 No Eoman ever rose to the Thucydidean conception of history. Moreover Tacitus, although originally not of the highest social rank, 7 belonged to the aristocratic class by sympathy and associations. Like Suetonius, he necessarily drew much of his information from the memories of great houses and the tales of the elders who had lived through the evil daysi 8 He acquired thus many of the 1 Hist. i. l.sedincorruptamfidempro- on the work of Suetonius of the Sena- fessis.neque atnorequisquam et sineodio torial tradition, v. Mace, Suitone, p. 84 ; dicendus est ; Nipperdey, Einl. xxvi. Peter, Oesch. Litt. ii. 69. a Merivale, viii. 84; Schiller, Oesch. 3 Peter, Oesch. Litt. ii. 66. der R'&m. Kaiserzcit, i. 140, 586. Ac- 4 Merivale, viii. 95 sqcj. cording to Schiller, Tacitus has no re- 6 Peter, ii. 46 sqq. search, no exactness of military or 8 lb. ii. 188, 200. geographical knowledge, no true con- 7 His father was probably a Roman ception of the time. He is an embittered Eques, procurator in Belgium; Plin. aristocrat and rhetorician. Forasounder //. N. vii. 16, 76. estimate v. Peter, ii. 43, 60, 63 ; Nip- 8 Mace, Suitone, p. 83, Peter, ii. 69 perdey, Einl. xxv. For the influence sqq. 24 SOCIAL LIFE book i prejudices of a class which, from its history, and still more from its education, sought its ideals in the past rather than in the future. He mingled in those circles, which in every age disguise the meanness and bitterness of gossip by the airy artistic touch of audacious wit, polished in many social encounters. He had himself witnessed the triumph of dela- tion and the cold cruelty of Domitian. He had shared in the humiliation of the Senate which had been cowed into acquiescence in his worst excesses. And the spectacle had inspired him with a horror of unchecked power in the hands of a bad man, and a gloomy distrust of that human nature which could sink to such ignoble servility. 1 Yet on the other hand Tacitus had gained practical experience in high office, both as soldier and administrator, which has always a sobering effect on the judgment. He realised the difficulties of government and the unreasonableness of ordinary men. Hence he has no sympathy with a doctrinaire and chimerical opposition even under the worst government. 2 However much he might respect the high character of the philosophic enthusiasts of the day, he distrusted their theatrical defiance of power, and he threw his shield over a discreet reserve, which could forget that it was serving a tyrant in serving the commonwealth. 3 Tacitus may at times express himself with a stern melancholy bitterness, which might at first seem to mark him as a revolutionary dreamer, avenging an outraged political ideal. Such an interpretation would be a grave mistake, which he would himself have been the first to correct. The ideal which he is avenging is not a political, but a moral ideal. 4 The bitter sadness is that of the profound analyst of character, with a temperament of almost feverish intensity and nervous force. The interest of history to Thucydides and Polybius lies in the political lessons which it may teach posterity. Its interest to Tacitus lies in the discovery of hidden motives and the secret of character, in watching the stages of an inevitable degeneracy, the moral preparation for a dark, inglorious end. And the analyst 1 Tac. Ann. i. 7 ; xv. 71 ; Agr. 45 ; 4 Ann. iii. 65, praecipuum munua Peter, ii. 62. annalium reor, ne virtutes sileantur, 2 Ann. xiv. 12, 57 ; Hist. iv. 6 ; utque pravis dictis factisque ex posteri- Agr. 42 ; Peter, ii. 47. tate et infamia metus sit ; cf. Peter, ' Agr. 42. ii. 46 ; Nipperdey, Einl. xxvi. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 25 was a curiously vivid painter of character, the character of individuals, of periods, and of peoples. His portraits burn themselves into the imaginative memory, so that the impres- sion, once seized, can never be lost. Tiberius and Claudius and Nero, Messalina and Agrippina, in spite of the most mordant criticism, will live for ever as they have been portrayed by the fervid imagination of Tacitus. Nor is he less searching and vivid in depicting the collective feeling and character of masses of men. We watch the alternating fury and repentance of the mutinous legions of Germanicus, 1 or the mingled fierceness and sorrow with which they wandered among the bleaching bones on the lost battlefield of Varus, 2 or the passion of grief and admiration with which the praetorian cohorts kissed the self-inflicted wounds of Otho. 3 Or, again, we follow the changing moods of the Eoman populace, passing from anger and grief to short-lived joy, and then to deep silent sorrow, at the varying rumours from the East about the health of Germanicus. 4 In Tacitus events are nearly always seen in their moral setting. The misery and shame of the burning of the Capitol by the Vitellians are heightened by the thought that the catastrophe is caused by the madness of civil strife. 5 In the awful conflict which raged from street to street, the horror con- sists in the mixture of cruelty and licence. The baths and brothels and taverns are crowded at the very hour when the neighbouring ways are piled with corpses and running with blood ; the rush of indulgence paused not for a moment ; men seemed to revel in the public disasters. There was blood- shed enough in the days of Cinna and Sulla, but the world was at least spared such a carnival of lust. 6 Even in reporting or imagining the speech of Galgacus to his warriors on the Grampians, 7 even in the pictures of the German tribes, 8 the ethical interest is always foremost. The cruel terror of the prince, the effeminacy and abandoned adulation of the nobles, the grossness and fierceness of the masses, contrasted with the loyalty, chastity, and hardihood of the German clans, seem to have dimly foreshadowed to Tacitus 1 Tac. Ann. i. 39, 41. B Hist, iii. 72. 2 lb. c. 61, 62. 8 lb. iii. 83. 8 Hist. ii. 49. 7 Agr. 32. 4 Ann. ii. 82. 8 Germ. 17, 19, 20, 23, 25. 26 SOCIAL LIFE book i a danger from which all true Eomans averted their eyes till the end. 1 The key to the interpretation of Tacitus is to regard him as a moralist rather than a politician. And he is a moralist with a sad, clinging pessimism. 2 He is doomed to be the chronicler of an evil time, although he will save from oblivion the traces and relics of ancient virtue. 8 He has Seneca's pessimist theory of evolution. The early equality and peace and temperance have been lost through a steady growth of greed and egotistic ambition. 4 It is in the past we must seek our ideals ; it is from the past we derive our strength. With the same gloomy view of his contemporaries as M. Aurelius had, 5 he holds vaguely a similar view of cycles in human affairs. 6 And probably the fairest hope which ever visited the mind of Tacitus was that of a return to the simplicity of a long gone age. He hailed the accession of Vespasian and of Trajan as a happy change to purer manners and to freedom of speech. 7 But the reign of Vespasian had been followed by the gloomy suspicious despotism of Domitian. Who could be sure about the successors of Trajan ? Tacitus hardly shared the enthusiasm and exuberant hopes expressed by his friend Pliny in his Panegyric. It was a natural outbreak of joy at escaping from the dungeon, and the personal character of Trajan succeeded in partially veiling the overwhelming force of the emperor under the figment of the freely accepted rule of the first citizen. Tacitus no doubt felt as great satisfaction as his friend at the suppression of the informers, the restored freedom of speech, the recovered dignity of the Senate, the prince's respect for old republican forms and etiquette. 8 (He felt probably even keener pleasure that virtue and talent had no longer to hide them- selves from a jealous eye, and that the whole tone of society was being raised by the temperate example of the emperor} But he did not share Pliny's illusions as to the prince's altered position under the new regime. The old Eepublic was gone for ever. 9 It was still the rule of one man, on whose character I 1 Germ. 33, ad fin. 6 M. Aurel. ix. 29, 34 ; x. 19. 3 Hist. i. 3 ; ii. 38 ; iii. 72 ; Peter, 6 Tac. Ann. iii. 55 ; M. Aurel. vii. ii. 62. Yet this should be qualified by 1 ; ix. 4 ; x. 23 ; ix. 28. such passages as Ann. iii. 55 ; Agr. i. ; 7 Agr. 3. cf. Nipperdey, Einl. xxvii. 8 Plin. Paneg. 35, 53, 54, 66 ; cf. 3 Ann. iii. 65. Tac. Hist. i. 1. 4 lb. iii. 26. 9 Hist. i. 1, omnem potentiam ad chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 27 everything depended. He would never have joined Plutarch and Dion in exalting the emperor to the rank of vicegerent of God. With his experience and psychologic skill, he was bound to regard all solitary power as a terrible danger both to its holder and his subjects. 1 " Capax imperii, nisi iinperasset" condenses a whole disquisition on imperialism. In truth, Tacitus, like many thoughtful students of politics, had little faith in mere political forms and names. 2 They are often the merest imposture : they depend greatly on the spirit and social tone which lie behind them. In the abstract, perhaps, Tacitus would have given a preference to aristocracy. But he saw how easily it might pass into a selfish despotism. 3 He had no faith in the people or in popular government, with its unstable excitability. He admitted that the conquests of Eome, egotistic ambition, and the long anarchy of the Civil Wars had made the rule of one inevitable. But monarchy easily glides into tyranny, and he accepts the Empire only as a perilous necessity which may be justified by the advent of a good prince. The hereditary succession, which had been grafted on the principate of Augustus, had inflicted on the world a succession of fools or monsters. The only hope lay in elevating the standard of virtue, and in the choice of a worthy successor by the forms of adoption. 4 The one had in his own time given the world a Domitian, and was destined within three generations to give it a Commodus. The other secured to it the peace and order of the age of which Tacitus saw the dawn. 5 The motive of Tacitus was essentially ethical, and his moral standard was in many respects lofty. Yet his standard was sometimes limited by the prejudices of his class. He cherished the old Koman ideal of " virtus " rather than the Stoic gospel of a cosmopolitan brotherhood of man. 6 Like Pliny, he felt little horror at gladiatorial combats, 7 although he may have had a certain contempt for the rage for them. He had probably far less humane feelings than Pliny on the subject of slavery. 8 unum conferri pacis interfuit; cf. Hist. * Hist. i. 16 ; Peter, ii. 61. i. 16 5 ". 38. e Tac. Agr. i. 1 Ann. xiv. 47 ; Hist. iv. 8, bonos <; p e ^ er jj 43. imperatores voto expetere, quales- 7 , ' . ' '. * a , ... cumque tolerare. H ' Tac. ^n* i. 76 ; quanquam nfc Ann. xv. 46 ; vi 42 ; iv. 33 ; iii. n 8"" ie m18 JP""? 6 " 8 : . 0C Dud ' ** 27 ; Hist. Ii 38. ^ 29 ' PllD " ^ "' 34 ' h 3 Peter, ii. 53 ; Ann. vi. 42. 8 Ann. xiv. 43 ; Germ. 20. 28 SOCIAL LIFE book i While he admired many of the rude virtues of the Germans, he prayed Heaven that their tribal blood-feuds might last for ever. 1 He has all the faith of Theognis in the moral value of \ blood and breeding. He feels a proud satisfaction in recording the virtues of the scion of a noble race, and degeneracy from great traditions moves his indignant pity. 2 He sometimes throws a veil over the degenerates. 3 The great economic revolution which was raising the freedman, the petty trader, the obscure provincial, to the top, he probably regarded with something of Juvenal's suspicion and dislike. The new man would have needed a fine character, or a great record of service, to commend him to Tacitus. 4 But, with all these defects of hard and narrow prejudice, Tacitus maintains a lofty ideal of character, a severe enthusiasm for the great virtues which are the salt of every society. Of the early nurture of Tacitus nothing is directly known. But we may be permitted to imagine him tenderly yet strictly guarded from the taint of slave nurses 5 by a mother who was as unspotted as Julia Procilla, the mother of his hero Agricola. 6 What importance he attached to this jealous care of a good woman, what a horror he had of the incitements to cruelty and lust which surrounded the young Roman from his cradle, are to be traced in many a passage coming from the heart. His ideal of youthful chastity and of the pure harmony of a single wedded union, reveals to us another world from the scene of heartless, vagrant intrigue, on which Ovid wasted his brilliant gifts. His taste, if not his principles, revolted against the coarse seductions of the spectacles and the wasteful grossness of the banquets of his time. 7 He envies the Germans their freedom from these great corrupters of Roman character, from the lust for gold, and the calculating sterility which cut itself from nature's purest pleasure, to be surrounded on the deathbed by a crowd of hungry, shameless sycophants. While Tacitus had a burning contempt for the nerveless cowardice and sluggishness which degraded so many of his order, 8 he may have valued 1 Germ. 33. Cf. his contempt for * Ann. ii. 21 ; vi. 27 ; iv. 3. the Christians and devotees of Eastern 5 De Or. 29. cults, Ann. ii. 85 ; xv. 44. 6 Agr. 4. 2 Ann. i. 53 ; iv. 3 ; iii. 39 ; vi. 29 ; 7 Germ. 19, saepta pudicitia agunt, xii. 12 ; iii. 24 ; xvi. 16. Cf. Peter, nullis spectaculoram inlecebris . . . cor- ii. 51. ruptae ; De Or. 29. 8 Ann. xiv. 14. 8 Hist. iii. 37; Ann. i. 7; xv. 57, 71. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 29 even to excess, although it is hardly possible to do so, the virtues of the strenuous soldier. Proud submission to authority, proud, cold endurance in the face of cruel hardship and enormous odds, readiness to sacrifice even life at the call of the State, must always tower over the safe aspirations of an untried virtue. The soldier, though he never knows it, is the noblest of idealists. The ideal of Tacitus, although he sees his faults of temper, 1 was probably the character of his father-in-law, Agricola, grave, earnest and severe, yet with a miDgled clemency, free from all vulgar avarice or ostentation of rank, from all poisonous jealousy, an eager ambitious warrior, yet one knowing well how to temper audacious energy with prudence. 2 Tacitus would probably have sought his ideal among those grey war-worn soldiers on a dangerous frontier, half warrior and half statesman, just and clement, stern in discipline, yet possessing the secret of the Eoman soldier's love, the men who were guarding the Solway, the Ehine, and the Danube, while their brethren in the Senate were purchasing their lives or their ease by adulation and treachery. Yet, after all, Tacitus was too great for such a limited ideal. He could admire faith and courage and constancy in any rank. 3 With profound admiration and subdued pathos, he tells how the freedwoman Epicharis, racked and fainting in every limb with the extremity of torture, refused to tell the secret of the Pisonian conspiracy, and by a voluntary death shamed the knights and nobles who were ready to betray their nearest kin. 4 The slave girls of the empress, who defiantly upheld her fair fame, under the last cruel ordeal, are honoured by a like memorial. 5 The deepest feeling of Tacitus about the early Empire seems to have been that it was fatal to character both in prince and subject. This conviction he has expressed with the burning intensity of the artist. He could never have penned one of those laborious paragraphs of Suetonius which seem transcribed from a carefully kept note-book, with a lifeless catalogue oi the vices, the virtues, and the eccentricities of the subject. For Tacitus, history is a living and real thing, not a matter of* mere antiquarian interest. He has seen a single 1 Agr. 22. 2 lb. 40. Ann. xv. 60. * lb. xv. 57. B lb. xiv. 60. 30 SOCIAL LIFE hook i lawless will, unchecked by constitutional restraints or ordinary human feeling, making sport of the lives and fortunes of men. He has seen the sons of the proudest houses selling their ancestral honour for their lives, betraying their nearest and dearest, and kissing the hand which was reeking with innocent blood. 1 When he looked back, he saw that, for more than fifteen years, with brief intervals, virtue had been exiled or compelled to hide itself in impotent seclusion, and that power and wealth had been the reward of perfidy and grovelling self- abasement. 2 The brooding silence of those years of humiliating servitude did not extinguish the faith of Tacitus in human virtue, but it almost extinguished his faith in a righteous God. Tacitus is no philosopher, with either a reasoned th^odicde or a consistent repudiation of faith. 8 He uses popular language about religion, and often speaks like an old Roman in all things touching the gods. 4 He is, moreover, often as credulous as he is sceptical in his treatment of omens and oracles. 5 But, with all his intense faith in goodness, the spectacle of the world of the Caesars has profoundly shaken his trust in the Divine justice. Again and again, he attributes the long agony of the Eoman world to mere chance or fate, 6 or the anger of Heaven, as well as to the madness of men. 7 Sometimes he almost denies a ruling power which could permit the continuance of the crimes of a Nero. 8 Sometimes he grimly notes its impartial treatment of the good and the evil. 9 And again, he speaks of the Powers who visit not to protect, but only to avenge. And so, by a curse like that which haunted the Pelopidae in tragic legend, the monarchy, cradled in ambition and civil strife, has gone on corrupting and corrupted. The lust of despotic power which Tacitus regards as the fiercest and most insatiable of human passions, has been intensified by the spectacle of a monarchy commanding, with practically unlimited sway, the resources and the fortunes of a world. 1 Ann. xv. 71. B Hist. i. 22 ; ii. 78 ; i. 86. But cf. 2 Hist. i. 2. Ann. xii. 43, 64 ; xiv. 32 ; xv. 8 ; 3 Agr. 4, rnemoria teneo solitum Hist. i. 3 ; ii. 50 ; and Fabian, pp. 17 ipsum narrare se studiura philosophiae 19. acrius, ultra quam concessum Romano 6 Ann. iv. 20 ; cf. vi. 22. ac Senatori, exhausisse. Cf. Fabian, 7 Hist. ii. 38. Quid Tac. de mem. Div. judicaverit, 8 Ann. xiv. 12 ; Fabian, p. 23. p. 1. 9 Ann. xvi. 33, aequitate deum erga * Hist. v. 5 ; Nippcrdey, Einl. xiv. bona malaque documents. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 31 It was a dazzling prize, offering frightful temptations both to the holder and to possible rivals and pretenders. The day on which a Nero or a Caligula awoke to all the possibilities of power was a fateful one. And Tacitus, with the instinct of the tragic artist, has painted the steady, fatal corruption of a orince's character by the corroding influence of absolute and solitary sway. Of all the Caesars down to his time, the only one who changed for the better was the homely Vespasian. In Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, some of this deterioration of character must be set down to the morbid strain in the Julio- Claudian line, with its hard and cruel pride, and its heritage of a tainted blood, of which Nero's father knew the secret so well. Much was also due to the financial exhaustion which, in successive reigns, followed the most reckless waste. It would be difficult to say whether the emperors or their nobles were the most to blame for the example of spendthrift extrava- gance and insane luxury. Two generations before the founda- tion of the Empire, the passion for profusion had set in, which, according to Tacitus, raged unchecked till the accession of Vespasian. 1 Certainly, the man who would spend 3000 on a myrrhine vase, 4000 on a table of citrus-wood, or 40,000 on a richly wrought carpet from Babylon, had little to learn even from Nero. 2 Yet the example of an emperor must always be potent for good or evil. We have the testimony of Pliny and Claudian, 3 separated by an interval of three hundred years, that the world readily conforms its life to that of one man, if that man is head of the State. Nero's youthful enthusiasm for declamation gave an immense impulse to the passion for rhetoric. 4 His enthusiasm for acting and music spread through all ranks, and the emperor's catches were sung at wayside inns. 5 M. Aurelius made philosophy the mode, and the Stoic Emperor is responsible for some of the philosophic imposture which moved the withering scorn of Lucian. The Emperor's favourite drug grew so popular that the price of it became almost prohibitory 6 If the model of Vespasian's homely habits had such an effect in reforming society, we may be sure that 1 Ann. iii. 55 ; cf. xvi. 5. * Suet. De Clar. Rliet. c. 1. 2 Friedl. Sittengesch. iii. pp. 80, 81. . TJ T , ,., , A Plin. Paneg. 45; Ckudian, In * Id '. ^ 21 5 Phllostr - A P 11 - Cons. Hon. 299, componitur orbis Regis 1 y an ' 1V * 6V - ad exemplam. 9 Friedl. Sittengesch. i. 54. 32 SOCIAL LIFE book i the evil example of his spendthrift predecessors did at least as much to deprave it. And what an example it was ! The extravagance of the Claudian Caesars and the last Flavian has become a piece of historic commonplace. Every one has heard of the unguent baths of Caligula, his draughts of melted pearls, his galleys with jewel-studded sterns and gardens and orchards on their decks, his viaduct connecting the Palatine with the Capitoline, his bridge from Bauli to Puteoli, and many another scheme of that wild brain, which had in the end to be paid for in blood. 1 In a single year Caligula scattered in reckless waste more than 2 0,00 0,0 00. 2 Nero proclaimed that the only use of money was to squander it, and treated any prudent calcula- tion as meanness. 3 In a brief space he flung away nearly 18,000,000. The Egyptian roses for a single banquet cost 35,000. 4 He is said never to have made a progress with less than a thousand carriages ; his mules were shod with silver. 5 He would stake HS.400,000 on a single throw of the dice. The description of his Golden House is like a vision of law- less romance. 6 The successors of Galba were equally lavish during their brief term. Otho, another Nero, probably regarded death in battle as a relief from bankruptcy. 7 Within a very few months, Vitellius had flung away more than 7,000,000 in vulgar luxury. 8 Vespasian found the exhaustion of the public treasury so portentous 9 that he had to resort to un- popular economies and taxation on a great scale. Under Domitian, the spectacles and largesses lavished on the mob undid all the scrupulous finance of his father, 10 and Nerva had to liquidate the ruinous heritage by wholesale retrenchment, and the sale even of the imperial furniture and plate, 11 as M. Aurelius brought to the hammer his household treasures, and even the wardrobe and jewels of the empress, in the stress of the Marcomannic war. 12 But the great imperial spendthrifts resorted to more 1 Suet. Calig. 37 ; Sen. Ad Helv. x. 8 Id. Vitell. c. 13. 8 Suet. Calig. 37. 9 Id. Vesp. 16; D. Cass. 66. 2, 8, 10. s Suet. Nero, c. 30. 10 D. Cass. 67. 5 ; Suet. Bom. 12. 4 lb. c. 27. u D. Cass. 68. 2, ovariWwv ws olbv re 8 lb. c. 30. T&. daTrav^fiara. 8 lb. c. 31 ; Tac. Ann. xv. 42. ia Capitol. M. Aurel. c. 17, in foro 7 Suet. Otho, 5, nihilque referre, ab divi Trajani auctionem ornamentorum hoste in acie, an in foro sub creditoribus imperialium fecit vendiditque aurea caderet pocula et cristallina, etc. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 33 simple and primitive methods of replenishing their coffers. Self-indulgent waste is often seen linked with meanness and hard cruelty. The epigram of Suetonius on Domitian, inopia rapax, metu saevus, 1 sums up the sordid history of the tyranny. The cool biographer of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian, when in his methodical fashion, he has recorded their financial difficulties, immediately proceeds to describe the unblushing rapine or ingenious chicanery by which the needy tyrants annexed a coveted estate. The emperors now generally protected the provinces from plunder, 2 but they applied all the Verrine methods to their own nobles. It was not hard with the help of the sleuth hounds who always gather round the despot, to find plausible grounds of accusa- tion. The vague law of majesty, originally intended to guard the security of the commonwealth, was now used to throw its protection around the sacrosanct prince in whom all the highest powers of government were concentrated. 3 The slightest sus- / picion of disloyalty or discontent, the most insignificant act or word, which a depraved ingenuity could misinterpret, was worked up into a formidable indictment by men eager for their share of the plunder. To have written the memoir of a Stoic saint or kept the birthday of a dead emperor, to possess an imperial horoscope or a map of the world, to call a slave by the name of Hannibal or a dish by that of Lucullus, might become a fatal charge. 4 " Ungrateful testators " who had failed to remember the emperor in their wills had to pay j heavily for the indiscreet omission. 5 The materials for such accusations were easily obtained in the Home of the early Caesars. Life was eminently sociable. A great part of the day was spent at morning receptions, in the Forum, the Campus Martius, the barber's or bookseller's shops, or in the colonnades where crowds of fashionable idlers gathered to relieve the tedium of life by gossip and repartee. It was a city, says Tacitus, which knew everything and talked of everything. 6 Never was curiosity more eager or gossip more reckless. Men were almost ready to risk their lives for a bon mot. And in the 1 Suet. Dom. iii. * Suet.Z>om.x. ;cf. xii. satis eratobici 8 Suet. Otho, iii. ; Vitell. v. ; Dom. qualecunque factum dictumve adversus viii. ; Bossier, L'Opp. p. 170. majestatem principis. 8 lb. xii. * Tac. Ann. i. 72 ; ii. 50 ; xiv. 48. 8 Tac. Ann. xi. 27 ; xiii. 6, in urbe For a clear account of this v. Boissier, sermonum avida ; Hist. ii. 91 ; Mart. L'Opp. p. 165. v. 20 ; Friedl. Sittengesch. i. p. 280. D 34 SOCIAL LIFE book i reign of Nero or Domitian, the risk was a very real one. The imperial espionage, of which Maecenas in Dion Cassius recognised at . once the danger and the necessity, 1 was an organised system even under the most blameless emperors. It can be traced in the reigns of Nerva, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius. 2 But under the tyrants, voluntary in- formers sprang up in every class. Among the hundreds of slaves attached to a great household, there were in such times sure to be spies, attracted by the lure of freedom and a fortune, who might report and distort what they had observed in their master's unguarded hours. Men came to dread pos- sible traitors even among their nearest of kin, among their closest friends of the highest rank. 3 Who can forget the J ignominy of those three Senators, one of them bearing the historic name of Cato, who, to win the consulship from Sejanus, hid themselves between the ceiling and the roof, and caught, through chinks and crannies, the words artfully drawn from the victim by another member of the noble gang ? The seventh book of the Life of Apollonius by Philostratus is a revelation of the mingled caution and truculence of the methods of Domitian. Here at least we have left the world of romance behind and are on solid ground. We feel around us, as we read, the hundred eyes of an omnipresent tyranny. We meet in the prison the magistrate of Tarentum who had been guilty of a dangerous omission in the public prayers, and an Acarnanian who had been guilty of settling in one of the Echinades. 4 A spy glides into the cells, to listen to the prisoners' talk, and is merely regaled by Apollonius with a description of the wonders' he has seen in his wanderings. When we are admitted to the secret tribunal on the Palatine, after Domitian has paid his devotion to Athene, we have before us a cruel, stealthy despot, as timid as he is brutally trucu- lent. In spite of all scepticism about Philostratus, we are there at the heart of the Terror. y Compared with this base espionage, even the trade of the delator becomes almost respectable. Like everything in Eoman social organisation, delation had a long history, too 1 D. Cass. 52. 37. Sittengesch. i. p. 285 ; Epict. Diss. iy. 13, 21, 5 ; Aristid. Or. ix. 62. 2 Mart x. 48, 21 ; cf. Fried! Chrono- 3 Tac. Ann. iv. 69. logie der Epigr. Mart. p. 62 ; Friedl. 4 Philostr. Apoll. Tyan. vii. 24. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 35 long to be developed within the space of this work. The work of impeachment, which might be wholesome and necessary under the Republic, in exposing the enormities of provincial government, became the curse of the Empire. The laws of Augustus for the restoration of social morality gave the first chance to the professional delator. The jealous, secretive rule of Tiberius welcomed such sinister support, 1 and although the dark, tortuous policy of the recluse of Capreae might punish the excess of zeal in the informers, it was also ready to reward them for opportune displays of energy. 2 The open and daring tyranny of Caligula and Nero often dispensed with the hypocrisy of judicial forms of assassination. It was reserved for the last Flavian to revive the methods of Tiberius. 3 Domitian was at once timid and cruel. He was also a pedant who concealed from himself his own baseness by a scrupulous devotion to ancient forms even in religion. The obscene libertine, who chose the Virgin Goddess as his patroness, 4 could easily make the forms of old Eoman justice a cloak for confiscation and massacre. In theory the voluntary accuser, without a commission from authority, was a discredited person. And successive emperors punished or < frowned upon the delators of a previous reign. 5 Yet the profession grew in reputation and emolument. It is a melancholy proof of the degradation of that society that the delator could be proud of his craft and even envied and admired. Men of every degree, freedmen, schoolmasters, petty traders, descendants of houses as old as the Republic, men from the rank of the shoemaker Vatinius 6 to a Scaurus, a Cato, or a Regulus, flocked to atrade which might earn a fabulous fortune and the favour of the prince. There must have been many a career like that of Palfurius Sura, who had fought in the arena in the reign of Nero, who had been disgraced and stripped of his consular rank under Vespasian, who then turned Stoic and preached the gospel of popular 1 Tac. Ann. i. 72, 74, Crispinus for- Plin. Paneg. 42, 48. mam vitae iniit quam postea celebrem * Suet. Bom. xv. miseriae temporum et audaciae homi- 5 Tac. Hist. ii. 10 ; Plin. Paneg. 35 ; num fecerunt, etc. ; cf. iii. 25 ; Sen. D. Cass. 68. 1 ; Jul. CapitoL Ant. P. Be Ben. iii. 26 ; Suet. Tib. lxi. c. 7 ; id. M. Aurel. ell; Meriv. vii. 2 Tac. Ann. iv. 20. 370. 8 Suet. Bom. xx. praeter commen- 6 Tac. Ann. xv. 84 ; iii 66 ; Hist. tarios et acta Tiberii nihil lectitabat ; iv. 42. 36 SOCIAL LIFE book i government, and, in the reign of Domitian, crowned his career by becoming a delator, and attempting to found a juristic theory of absolute monarchy. 1 The system of Eoman education, which was profoundly rhetorical, became a hot-bed of this venal oratory. It nourished \ its pupils on the masterpieces of free speech ; it inflamed their imaginations with dreams of rhetorical triumph. When they went forth into the world of the Empire, they found the only arena for displaying their powers to be the dull court of the Centumviri, or the hired lecture hall, where they might dilate on some frigid or silly theme before a weary audience. It was a tempting excitement to exert the arts learnt in the school of Quintilian in a real onslaught, where the life or liberty of the accused was at stake. And the greatest orators of the past had never offered to them such a splendid material reward. One fourth of the estate of the condemned man had been the old legal fee of the accuser. 2 But this limit was left far behind in the judicial plunder of the early Caesars. Probably in no other way could a man then so easily make himself a millionaire. The leading accusers of Thrasea and Soranus in 4 the reign of Nero received each 42,000 as their reward. 3 These notorious delators, Eprius Marcellus and Vibius Crispus, accumulated gains reaching, in the end, the enormous amount of 2,400,000. The famous, or infamous, Eegulus, after the most prodigal expenditure, left a fortune of half a million. 4 His career is a striking example of the arts by which, in a debased society, men may rise to fortune, and the readiness with which such a society will always forgive anything to daring and success. Sprung from an illustrious but ruined race, 5 Eegulus possessed shameless audacity and ruthless ambition, 6 which were more valuable than birth and fortune. He had every physical defect for a speaker, yet he made himself an orator, with a weird power of strangling his victims. 7 He was poor, but he resolved to be wealthy, and he reached the fortune which he proposed to himself as his goal. He was vain, cruel, and insolent, a slave of superstition, 8 1 Schol. ad Juv. iv. 53 ; Duruy, iv. 6 Boissier, L'Opp. p. 193. 66 3 -r, o r> * T ac - r ^ w - iv - JO- Plin. Ep. ii. 11, 22. 3 lb. xvi. 33; Boissier, L'Opp. p. 186. * . ' 4 Plin. Ep. ii. 20, 13 ; iv. 2 ; tf, Tac. 7 Ib - 1V - ' 5 * 20 > 15 - Mist. iv. 42 ; Mart. via. 31, 8 lb. ii. 11, 22 ; ii. 20. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 37 stained with many a perfidious crime. He was a peculiarly skilful and perfectly shameless adept in the arts of captation. 1 Yet this cynical agent of judicial murder, who began his career in the reign of Nero, lived on in peace and wealth into the reign of Trajan. He even enjoyed a certain consideration in society. 2 The humane and refined Pliny at once detested and tolerated him. The morning receptions of Eegulus, in his distant gardens on the Tiber, were thronged by a fashionable crowd. The inner secret of the imperial Terror will probably always perplex the historian. The solution of the question depends, not only on the value which is to be attached to our authorities, but on the prepossessions and prejudices which are brought to their interpretation. To one critic Tacitus, although liable to the faults which spring from rhetorical training and fervid temperament, seems fairly impartial and trustworthy. 8 Another treats the great historian as essentially a partisan who derived his materials from the memoirs and traditions of a class inflamed with reactionary dreams and saturated with a hatred of monarchy. 4 Some regard the tragedy of the early Empire as the result of a real peril from a senatorial conspiracy which*/ perpetually surrounded the emperor. Others trace it to the diseased brains of princes, giddy with the sense of omnipotence, j and often unstrung by vicious excesses, natures at once timor- ous and arrogant, anticipating danger by a maniacal cruelty which ended in creating the peril that, they feared. Is it not possible that there may be truth in both theories? It may be admitted that there probably was never a powerful opposition, with a definitely conceived purpose of overthrowing the imperial system, as it had been organised by Augustus, and of restoiing the republican rule of the Senate. It may be admitted that, while so many of the first twelve Caesars died a violent death, the violence was used to rid the world of a monster, and not to remodel a constitution ; it was the emperor, not the Empire, that was hated. Yet these admis- sions need to be qualified by some reservations. The effect of the rhetorical character of Roman education in moulding the temper and ideals of the upper classes, down to the very end 1 Plin. Ep. ii. 20, 2. Oesch. Litt. ii. p. 65 : Teuffel, 328, 2 n : -7 15 ; Mackail, Lot. Lit. p. 215. * * Schiller, i. pp. 140, 586; Meriv. * E.g. Boissier, L'Opp. p. 296 ; Peter, viii. 89 sqq. 38 SOCIAL LIFE book i of the Western Empire, has hardly yet been fully recognised. It petrified literature by the slavish imitation of unapproach- able models. It also glorified the great ages of freedom and j republican government; it exalted Harmodius and Aristo- geiton, Brutus and Cassius, to a moral height which might suggest to generous youth the duty or the glory of imitating them. When a rhetor's class, in the reign of Caligula or of Nero, applauded the fall of a historic despot, is it not possible that some may have applied the lesson to the reigning emperor? Although it is evident that philosophic debates on the three forms of government were not unknown, yet probably few ever seriously thought of a restoration of the republic. None but a i maniac would have entrusted the nerveless, sensual mob of Rome with the destinies of the world. As a matter of fact, the mob themselves very much preferred the rule of a lavish despot, who would cater for their pleasures. 1 But the Senate was still a name of power. In the three or four generations which had passed since the death of the first Caesar, men had forgotten the weakness and perfidy which had made senatorial government impossible. They thought of the Senate as the stubborn, haughty caste which had foiled the strategy of Han- nibal, which had achieved the conquest of the world. The old families might have been more than decimated ; new men of doubtful origin might have filled their places. 2 But ancient institutions possess a prestige and power which is often inde- pendent of the men who work them. Men are governed largely through imagination and mere names. Thus the Senate re- mained an imaginative symbol of the glory of Soman power, down to the last years of the Western Empire. The accom- plished Symmachus cherishes the phantasm of its power under Honorius. And although a Caligula or Nero might conceive a feverish hatred of the assembly which they feared, 3 while they affected to despise it, the better emperors generally made almost a parade of their respect for the Senate. 4 The wisest princes had 1 Suet. Claud, x. ; Calig. lx. ; D. 8 Suet. Calig. xxx. ; xxvi. ; Nero, Cass. 60. 1. On the assassination of xxxvii. eumque ordinem sublaturum Caligula, the Senate debated the ques- quandoque e republica . . . ; cf. xliii. tion of abolishing the memory of the creditur destinasse senatum universum Caesars, and restoring the Republic ; veneno per convivia necare. . . . but the mob outside the temple of the D. Cass. 63. 15, 17. Capitoline Jupiter demanded "one ruler " of the world. 4 Flin. Paneg. 54, 62, 64 ; Spart. 2 Tac. Ann. xi. 25 ; xiii. 27 Hadrian, 6, 7, 4 ; 8, 6. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 39 a feeling that, although they might have at their back the devo- tion of the legions, and an immense material force, still it was wiser to conciliate old Eoman feeling by a politic deference to a body which was surrounded by the aureole of antiquity, which had such splendid traditions of conquest and administration. The Senate was thus the only possible rival of the Emperor. J The question is, was the Senate ever a dangerous rival? The true answer seems to be that the Senate was dangerous in theory, but not in fact. ' fThere can be little doubt that, in the reigns of Caligula and Nero, there were men who dreamed of a restored senatorial power. 1 It is equally certain that the Senate was incapable of asserting it.^ Luxury, self-indulgence, and conscription had done their work effectually. There were many pretenders to the principate in the reign of Nero, and even some in the reign of Vespasian. 2 But they had not a solid and determined Senate at their back. The world, and even the Senate, were convinced that the Eoman Empire needed the administration of one man. How to get the one\ man was the problem. Hereditary succession had placed only! fools or monsters on the throne. There remained the old prin- eiple of adoption. An emperor, feeling that his end was approaching, might, with all his vast experience of the govern- ment of a world, with all his knowledge of the senatorial class, with no fear of offence in the presence of death, 3 designate one worthy of the enormous charge. If such an one came to the principate, with a generous desire to give the Senate a share of his burdens and his glory, that was the highest ideal of the Empire, and that was the ideal which perhaps was approached in the Antonine age. Yet, outside the circle of practical statesmen, there remained a class which was long irreconcilable. It has been recently maintained with great force that the Stoic opposi- tion was only the opposition of a moral ideal, not the deliberate propaganda of a political creed. 4 This may be true of some of the philosophers: it is certainly not true of all. Thrasea was a genial man of the world, whose severest censure expressed itself in silence and absence from the Senate, 6 who could even, on occasion, speak with deference of Nero. But his son-in-law, 1 Suet. Claud, x. * Boissier, L'Opp- 102. 2 D. Cass. 66. 16 ; Snet Vesp. xxv. 8 Tac. Ann. xvi. 21 ; xv. 23 ; xiv. 48, * See the speech of the dying Ha- id egregio sub principe . . . senatui drian to the Senators, D. Cass. 69. 20. statuendum disseruit. 40 SOCIAL LIFE book i Helvidius Priscus, seemed to exult in flouting and insulting a great and worthy emperor such as Vespasian. 1 And the life of Apollonius by Philostratus leaves the distinct impression that philosophy, in the reign of Nero and Domitian, was a j revolutionary force. Apollonius, it is true, is represented by Philostratus as supporting the cause of monarchy in a debate in the presence of Vespasian. 2 But he boasted of having been privy to conspiracies against Nero, 3 and he was deeply involved with Nerva and Orfitus in a plot against Domitian. 4 He was summoned before the secret tribunal to answer for speeches against the emperor delivered to crowds at Ephesus. 5 It may be admitted that the invective or scorn of philosophy was aimed at unworthy princes, rather than at the foundations of their power. Yet Dion Cassius evidently regards Helvidius Priscus as a turbulent agitator with dangerous democratic ideals, and he contrasts his violence with the studied moderation, combined with dignified reserve, displayed by Thrasea in the reign of Nero. The tolerant Vespasian, who bore so long the wanton insults of the philosophers, must have come at length to think them not only an offence but a real danger when he banished them. In the first century there can be little doubt that there were members of the philosophic class who condemned monarchy, not only as a moral danger, but as a lamentable aberration from the traditions of republican freedom. There were probably some, who, if the chance had offered itself, might even have ventured on a republican reaction. With a gloomy recognition of the realities of life, Domitian used to say that conspiracy against an emperor was never believed till the emperor was killed. 7 Of the first twelve Caesars seven died a violent death. Every emperor from Tiberius to M. Aurelius was the mark of conspiracy. This was often provoked by the detestable character of the prince. But it sometimes sprang from other causes than moral disgust. The mild rule of Vespasian was generally popular ; yet even he had to repel the conspiracy of Aelianus and Marcellus. 8 The 1 Suet. Vesp. xv. ; cf. xiii., where 5 Philostr. Apoll. Tyan. vii. 9. Demetrius is guilty of similar rude- 6 pj. Cass. 66. 12, /Sa 37- Momms. (Morel), p. 61. Tacitus says, 4 Meriv. vii.' 354. Hist. i. 1, dignitatem a Domitiano K ,-. _, ' ---_=* (81-96) longius provectam non ab- ' D - Cass - 67 " U ' Suet Dom - X1T - nuerim. From Ann. xi. 11 it appears Mar t- . 63 ; vi. 21, crudelia that he was Praetor in 88. Cf. Peter, nullaque invisior umbra. Oesch. Litt. ii. 43. 7 Suet. Dorn. xxiii. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 55 Still the authorities are so unanimous that we are bound to believe that Domitian, with some strength and ability, had many execrable qualities. He shows the contradictions of a nature in which the force of a sturdy rural ancestry has not been altogether sapped by the temptations of luxury and power. He had a passionate desire to rival the military glory of his father and brother, yet he was too cautious and self- indulgent to attain it. He had some taste for literature, but he kept literature in leading-strings, and put one man to death for his delight in certain speeches in Livy, and another for a too warm eulogy of Thrasea and Helvidius Priscus. 1 He threw his whole strength into a moral and religious reaction, while he was the bitterest enemy of the republican pretensions and dreams of the Senate. Great historical critics have called him a hypocrite. 2 It may be doubted whether any single phrase or formula could express the truth about such a twisted and perverse character Probably his dominant passion was vanity and love of grandiose display. He assumed the consulship seventeen times, a number quite unexampled. 8 His pompous triumphs for unreal victories were a subject of common jest. He filled the Capitol with images of himself, and a colossal statue towered for a time over the temple roofs. 4 The son and brother of emperors, already exalted to divine honours, he went farther than any of his predecessors in claiming divinity for himself, and he allowed his ministers and court poets to address him as " our Lord God." 5 His lavish splendour in architecture was to some extent justified by the ravages of fire in previous reigns. But the 2,400,000 expended on the gilding of a temple on the Capitol, 6 was only one item in an extravagance which drained the treasury. Its radiance, which dazzled the eyes of Eutilius in the reign of Honorius, 7 was paid for in blood and tears. The emperor, who was the ruth- less enemy of the nobles, like all his kind, was profusely indulgent to the army and the mob. The legions had their pay increased by a fourth. The populace of Rome were pampered 1 Suet Dora. x. 5 Suet. Dom. xiii. ; Mart. v. 8, 1 (v. 2 Renan, Lea tvang. p. 291, Domitien, Friedlander's note), vii. 2 and 34 ; viii. comme toua les souverains hypocrites, 2, 6 ; Stat. Silv. v. 1, 37 ; Meriv. vii. e montrait severe conservateur. 375. inot aw, ; 8 Suet - Dom - v Gregorov. Gesch. St. Suet. Dom. xui. j^^ { 4L * Mart. viii. 65. 7 Rutil. Namat i. 93. 56 SOCIAL LIFE book i with costly and vulgar spectacles, 1 as they were to the end of the Western Empire. Domitian's indulgence of that fierce and obscene proletariat was only a little more criminal than that of other emperors, because it ended in a bankruptcy which was followed by robbery and massacre. While the rich and noble were assailed on any trivial accusation, in order to fill an empty treasury, the beasts of Numidia were tearing their victims, gladiators were prostituting a noble courage in deal- ing inglorious wounds in the arena, and fleets of armed galleys charged and crashed in mimic, yet often deadly, battle in the flooded Flavian amphitheatre. 2 To repair this waste the only resource was plunder. But Domitian was a pettifogger as well as a plunderer ; he would fleece or assassinate his victims under forms of law. The law of majesty, and the many laws for restoring old Roman morality, needed only a little ingenuity and effrontery to furnish lucrative grounds for impeachment. 8 The tribe of delators were ready to his hand. He had punished them for serving Nero; they were now to reap a richer harvest under Domitian. Every fortune which rose above mediocrity, every villa with rich pastures and woodlands in the Apennines, or on the northern lakes, was marked for plunder. 4 Donritian> was the first and only emperor who assumed the censorship for life. 5 The office made him absolute master of the lives and fortunes of his nobles. A casual word, a thoughtless gesture, might be construed into an act of treason ; and the slave households furnished an army of spies. Nay, even kindred and near friends were drawn into this vast conspiracy against domestic peace and security. It may be admitted that Domitian had to face a real peril. The rebellion of Antonius Saturninus was an attempt which no prince could treat lightly, and the destruction of the correspondence in which so many men of rank were involved, may well have heightened Domitian's alarm. 6 He struck out blindly and savagely. He compelled the Senate to bear a part in the massacre, and Tacitus has confessed, with pathetic humiliation, his silent share in the murder of the upright and innocent. 7 Yet the imperial 1 Suet. Dom. v. ad fin. ; iv. /3ou irpQiros 5fy ical ^6vos kcli ISiwtQiv ical 9 D. Cass. 67. 8. airroKparbptav ix^porovrjO-q : Momms. * Suet. Dom. xii. * Pliny, Paneg. 50. Horn. St. ii. 1012. 6 Dion Cass. 67. 4, n^TTjs di did. 6 D. Cass. 67. 11. 7 dgr. 45. chap, i THE ARISTOCRACY UNDER THE TERROR 57 inquisitor was himself racked with terror in his last hours. He walked in a corridor where the walls were lined with minors, 1 so that no unseen hand might strike him from behind. On his last morning he started in terror from his bed and called for the diviner whom he had summoned from Germany. 2 But, amid all his terror, Domitian had a deep natural love of cruelty. He was never more dangerous than when he chose to be agreeable ; 3 he loved to play with his victims. What a grim delight in exquisite torture, what a cynical contempt for the Eoman nobles, are revealed in the tale of his funereal banquet ! 4 The select company were ushered into a chamber draped from floor to ceiling in black. At the head of each couch stood a pillar like a tombstone, with the guest's name engraved upon it, while overhead swung a cresset such as men hang in vaults of the dead. A troop of naked boys, black as all around, danced an awful measure, and then set on the dismal meal which was offered, by old Eoman use, to the spirits of the departed. The guests were palsied with terror, expect- ing every moment to be their last. And the death -like silence was only broken by the voice of the Emperor as he told a gruesome tale of bloody deaths. In such cynicism of lawless power, in such meek degradation of a once proud order, did the tyranny of the first century reach its close. 1 Suet. Dom. xiv. parietes phengite lapide distinxit. 2 lb. xvi. D. Cass. 67. 9. * lb. 67. i. CHAPTER II THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST Juvenal and Tacitus, although they moved in different circles and probably never met, have much in common. Both were released from an ignominious silence by the death of Domitian. Both were then at the age which combines the ripeness of experience and reflection with a fire and energy still unflagging. 1 They were, from different causes, both filled with hatred and disgust for the vices of their time, and their ex- perience had engendered in both a pessimism which darkened their faith. Tacitus belonged to the senatorial order who had held high office, and had seen its ranks decimated and its dignity outraged under the tyranny. Juvenal sprang from the lower middle class, which hated alike the degenerate noble and the insolent parvenu far more than it hated even a Domitian. Yet both Juvenal and Tacitus are united in a passionate admiration for the old Roman character. Their standards and ideals are drawn from the half-mythical ages of the simple warriors and farmer-statesmen of the old Republic. And their estimate of their time needs to be scrutinised in the light both of their hatreds and of their ideals. The life of Juvenal is wrapt in obscurity, although nine lives of him are extant. 2 Scholars are still at variance as to the date of his birth, the date of many of his satires, and especially as to the time and circumstances of his banishment, about which there is so uniform a tradition. But, for our purpose, some facts are clear enough. Juvenal was the son of 1 Tacitus b. probably 55 a.d. Dial. Juvenal b. tire. 55 a.d. (Peter, ii. 77) ; de Or. 1, juvenis admodum in 75 decessit longosenioconfeetus exul Ant. or 76 ; cf. Agr. 9. He was betrothed Pio imp. Vit. iv. ; TeuH'el, 3_'6, 1. in 77 a.d. ; cf. Meriv. viii. 92; Peter, " Nettleship, Lectures and Essays, Gesch. Litt. ii. 43 ; Nipperdey, Mnl. iv. pp. 118 sqq. 58 chap, u THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 59 a well-to-do freedman of Aquinum, and rose to the highest magisterial office in his native town at some time of his career. 1 He carefully hides his personal history from us ; but we might gather from his Satires that he belonged to the lower middle class, 2 that he was in temper and tone an old plebeian of the times of the Republic, although vividly touched by the ideas of a new morality which had been afloat for more than two generations. But, like Tacitus, he has little sympathy with the great philosophic movement which was working a silent revolu- tion. He had the rhetorical training of the time, with all its advantages and its defects. And he is more a rhetorician than a poet. "We can well believe the report that his early literary enthusiasm found vent in declamation on those mythical or frivolous themes which exercised the youth in the Eoman schools for many centuries. Although he was hardly a poor man 3 in the sense in which Martial, his friend, was poor, yet he had stooped to bear the ignominy and hardships of client dependence. He had hurried in rain and storm in the early morning to receptions at great houses on the Esquiline, through the squalor and noises and congested traffic of the Suburra. 4 He had doubtless often been a guest at those " unequal dinners," where the host, who was himself regaled with far-fetched dainties and old crusted Alban or Setine wine, insulted his poorer friends by offering them the cheapest vintage and the meanest fare. 5 He had been com- pelled, as a matter of social duty, to sit through the recitation of those ambitious and empty Theseids and Thebaids, with which the rich amateur in literature in those days afflicted his long- suffering friends. 8 He may have been often elbowed aside by some supple, clever Greek, with versatile accomplishments and infinite audacity. He may have been patronised or insulted by a millionaire parvenu, like the Trimalchio of Petronius, tainted with the memories of a shameful servitude. He saw new vulgar wealth everywhere triumphant, while the stiff, yet, in many ways, wholesome conventionality of old Roman life was defied and trampled upon by an aggressive vulgarity. In such a world there was little room for the man whose wealth is 1 Or. Henz. 5599, IlVir. Quinq. * Mart. xii. 18. Flamen Divi VespasianL B Juv. v. 30 sqq. ; cf. Mart. iii. 49 ; Boissier, L'Opp. p. 316. iii. 60.^ * Juv. xi. 74, 150 ; cf. xiv. 322. Juv. i. 52 ; Mart. x. 4 ; iv. 49. 60 SOCIAL LIFE book i in his genius, and who clings to the traditions of ages which believed that men had a soul as well as a body. A man like Juvenal, living in such a society, almost necessarily becomes embittered. Like Johnson, in his Grub Street days, he will have his hours when bitterness passes into self-abandonment, and he will sound the depths of that world of corruption which in his better moods he loathes. Some of the associates of Juvenal were of very doubtful position, and more than doubtful morals ; x and the warmth of some of his realistic painting of dark sides of Eoman life arouses the suspicion that he may have at times forgotten his moral ideal. He certainly knows the shameful secrets of Roman life almost as well as his friend Martial does. But his knowledge, however gained, was turned to a very different purpose from that which inspired Martial's brilliant prurience. 2 The Satires of Juvenal were probably not given to the world till after the death of Domitian. 3 The date of the earliest is about 100 A.D., that of the latest probably 127. Juvenal cautiously disguises his attacks on his own time. He whets his sword against the sinners whose ashes have long reposed beside the Flaminian and the Latin ways. 4 Very few of his con- temporaries appear in his pages, 5 and the scenery is often that of the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, or Nero. But his deepest and most vivid impressions must have come to Juvenal in that period which has been photographed with such minute exactness by Martial. And there is a striking correspondence between the two writers, not only in many of the characters whom they introduce, but in their pictures of the whole state of morals and letters. 6 They both detested that frigid epic which laboriously ploughed the sands of conventional legend, and they turned with weariness from the old-world tales of Thebes or Argos to the real tragedy or comedy of Roman life around them. Although they were friends and companions, it is needless to 1 Juv. vi. 43 : v. 30 sqq.; ix. 10 sqq. ; thinks that perhaps some of the earlier xi. 186. Satires belong to the last years of 2 It has been remarked that Martial's Domitian, and that the words spes Epigrams on Juvenal all contain some ? l r c at } "tudiorum , Caesare tantum, obscenity, vii. 24 ; vii. 91 ; xii. 18. * n S f*'- ? refer t0 that Lm P er r J ' ' (p. 132). 3 Teuffel, 326, 4 ; Peter, Gesch. 4 Juv. l. 170. Litt. ii. 77 ; Nettleship, Lectures and B Marius Prisons, Isaeus, Archigenes. Essays, p. 122, brings together the in- 6 See a comparison of passages in dicationsof date from 96-127 a. D. He Nettleship, pp. 125 sqq. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 61 assume any close partnership in their studies. Starting with the same literary impulse, they deal to a large extent with the same vices and follies, some of them peculiar to their own age, others common to all ages of Eome, or even of the world of civilisation. A long list might easily be compiled of their common stock of subjects, and their common antipathies. In both writers we meet the same grumbling of the needy client against insolent or niggardly patrons, the complaints of the struggling man of letters about the extravagant rewards of low vulgar impostors. Both are bored to death, like the patient Pliny, by the readings of wealthy scribblers, or by tiresome pleadings in the courts, measured by many a turn of the clepsydra. They feel an equal disgust for the noise and squalor of the narrow streets, an equal love for the peace and freshness and rough plenty of the country farm. In both may be seen the scions of great houses reduced to mendicancy, ambitious poverty betaking itself to every mean or disreputable device, the legacy -hunter courting the childless rich with flattery or vicious compliance. You will often encounter the sham philosopher, as you meet him sixty years afterwards in the pages of Lucian, with his loud talk of virtue and illustrious names, while his cloak covers all the vices of dog and ape. Both deal rather ungently with the character of women, their intrigues with actors, gladiators, and slaves, their frequent divorces and rapid succession of husbands, their general abandonment of antique matronly reserve. Both have, in fact, with different motives, uncovered the secret shame of the ancient world ; and, more even than by that shame, was their indignation moved by the great social revolution which was confusing all ranks, and raising old slaves, cobblers, and auctioneers to the benches of the knights. Yet with this resemblance in the subjects of their choice, there is the widest difference between the two writers in their motive and mode of treatment. Martial, of course, is not a moralist at all ; the mere suggestion excites a smile. He is a keen and joyous observer of the faults and follies, the lights and shades, of a highly complex and artificial society which is "getting over- ripe." In the power of mere objective descrip- tion and minute portraiture of social life, Martial is almost unique. Through his verses, we know the society of Domitian 62 SOCIAL LIFE book i as we know hardly any other period of ancient society. But this very vividness and truthfulness is chiefly due to the fact that Martial was almost without a conscience. He was indeed personally, perhaps, not so bad as he is often painted. 1 He knows and can appreciate a good woman ; 2 he can love, with the simplest, unsophisticated love, an innocent slave-child, the poor little Erotion, 3 whom he has immortalised. He can honour a simple manly character, free from guile and pre- tence. 4 He has a genuine, exuberant love of the fresh joys of country life, sharpened, no doubt, by the experience of the client's sordid slavery, amid the mingled poverty and lavish splendour of the capital. 5 Where could one find a fresher, prettier idyll than his picture of the farm of Faustinus, with its packed granaries, and its cellars fragrant with the juice of many an old autumn vintage, the peacock spreading his jewelled plumage, and the ring-dove cooing overhead from the towers ? The elegant slaves of the great house in the city are having a holiday, and busy, under the bailiffs care, with rural toils, or fishing in the stream. The tall daughters of the neigh- bouring cottages bring in their well -stocked baskets to the villa, and all gather joyously at evening to a plenteous meal. 6 Martial has, moreover, one great virtue, which is a powerful anti- dote for many moral faults, the love of the far-off home of his childhood, the rugged Bilbilis, with its iron foundries near the sources of the Tagus, to which he retreated from the crush and din of plebeian life at Eome, and where he rests. 7 But when charity or justice has done its best for Martial, and no scholar will repudiate the debt, it still remains true that he represents, perhaps better than any other, that pagan world, naked and unabashed, and feels no breath of inspiration from the great spiritual movement which, in paganism itself, was setting towards an ideal of purity and self-conquest. Juvenal, at least in his later work, reveals a moral standard and motive apparently unknown to Martial. 8 It may 1 He says of himself, i. 5, 8, lasciva 2 i. 14 ; iv. 13, 75. est nobis pagina, vita proba est; cf. iii. 8 v. 34, 37 ; x. 61. 68 ; v. 2 ; Ausonius urges the same 4 i. 79 ; vii. 52. plea, cf. Idyll, xiii. Pliny finds a , ^ 58 L 66 ^ 38 HL 88- long series of examples to warrant nis 8 ... indulgence in loose verses, Ep. iv. m " 14 ; cf. v. 3. It was a bad tradition 7 i. 50 ; iv. 55 ; xii. 18. of literature ; cf. Nettleship, Lectures 8 Especially^*, xi. xiii. xiv. xv. ; and Essays, p. 39. cf. Munding, Uber die Sat. Juv. p. 12. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 63 be admitted, indeed, that Juvenal did not always write under the same high impulse. He had the rhetorician's love of fine, telling phrases, and startling effects. He had a rare gift of realistic painting, and he exults in using it. He has also burning within him an old plebeian pride which looked down at once on the degenerate son of an ancient house, and on the nouveaux riches, whose rise seemed to him the triumph of vulgar opulence without the restraint of traditions or ideals. Conscious of great talents, with a character almost fierce in its energy, he felt a burning hatred of a society which seemed to value only material success, or those supple and doubtful arts which could invent some fresh stimulus for exhausted appetite. In Juvenal a great silent, sunken class, whom we hardly know otherwise than from the inscriptions on their tombs, 1 finds for once a powerful voice and a terrible avenger. But, along with this note of personal or class feeling, there is in Juvenal a higher moral intuition, a vision of a higher life, which had floated before some Eoman minds long before his time, 2 and which was destined to broaden into an accepted ideal. Juvenal, indeed, was no philosopher, and he had, like Tacitus, all the old Eoman distrust of the theories of the schools. 3 He had probably little respect for such teaching as Seneca's. 4 Yet in important points he and Seneca belong to the same order of the elect. Although, perhaps, a less spotless character than Tacitus, he is far more advanced and modern in his breadth of sympathy and moral feeling. He feels acutely for the conquered provinces which have been fleeced and despoiled of their wealth and artistic treasures, and which are still exposed to the peculation and cruelty of governors and their train. 5 He denounces, like Seneca, the contempt and cruelty often shown to slaves. The man whose ideal seems often to be drawn from the hard, stern warriors who crushed the Samnites and baffled the genius of Hannibal, in his old age has come to glorify pity and tenderness for suffering as the best gift of God, the gift that separates him most widely from the brute 1 v. Bk. ii. c. 3 of this work. M. 3 xiii. 120 ; ii. 1 sqq. ; cf. Mart. Boissier has thrown a vivid light on ix. 48. this class in his Bel. Bom. iii. 3. 4 He refers, however, with respect to Seneca, viiL 212. 2 Boissier, B>L Rom. ii. 198 ; Nettle- 8 viii. 90 sqq. ; cf. Boissier, L'Opp. ship, Lectures and Essays p. 136. p. 332. 64 SOCIAL LIFE book i creation. 1 He preaches sympathy and mutual help, in an age torn by selfish individualist passions. He denounces the lust for revenge almost in the tones of a Christian preacher. 2 What heathen moralist has painted more vividly the horrors of the guilty conscience, that unseen inquisitor, with sterner more searching eyes than Ehadamanthus ? Who has taught with greater power that the root of sin is in the evil thought? 3 Juvenal realises, like Tacitus and Quintilian, the curse of a tainted ancestry, and the incalculable importance of pure example in the education of youth. 4 He, who knew so well the awful secrets of Eoman households, sets an immense value on the treasure of an untainted boyhood, like that of the plough- man's son, who waits at Juvenal's simple meal " and sighs for his mother, and the little cottage, and his playmates the kids." 5 Observation of character had also taught him the fatal law that the downward path in conduct, once entered on, is seldom re- traced. And this moral insight seems to come to Juvenal not from any consciously held philosophic doctrine, nor from a settled religious faith. His faith, like that of many of his time, was probably of the vaguest He scorns and detests the Eastern worships which were pouring in like a flood, and carrying away even loose women of the world. 6 He pillories the venal star -reader from the East and the Jewish hag who interprets dreams. But he has also scant respect for classic mythologies, and regrets the simple, long -gone age, before heaven became crowded with divinities, before Saturn had exchanged the diadem for the sickle, when Juno was still a little maid, 7 when the terrors of Tartarus, the wheel, the vulture, and the lash of the Furies had not taken the place of a simple natural conscience. 8 Juvenal's moral tone then appears to unite the spirit of two different ages. In some of his later Satires you catch the accent of the age which was just opening when Juvenal began to write, its growing sense of the equality and brotherhood of man, its cosmopolitan morality, its ideals of spiritual culture. But there are other elements in Juvenal, derived from old Eoman 1 Juv. xv. 131 ; cf. Sen. Be, Ira, i. 5 ; turn qui cogitat ullum Facti crimen ii. 10, 25 ; iii. 24. habet. , _ 4 xiv. 30 ; Tac. Be Or. 28, 29. Juv. nil. 190. s ^ 153- 6 vi. 510> 3 xiii. 208, nam scelus intra se taci- 7 xiii. 39. 8 xiii. 208. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 65 prejudice and conventionality, or the result of personal tempera- ment and experience, which are quite as prominent. Juvenal is an utter pessimist about his time, more extreme even than Tacitus. His age, if we believe him, has attained the climax of corruption, and posterity will never improve upon its finished depravity. 1 His long practice as a declaimer had given him a habit of exaggeration, and of aiming rather at rhetorical brilliancy than truth. Whole passages in his poems read like declamatory exercises turned into verse. 2 A mere hanger-on of great society, one of the obscure crowd who flocked to the rich man's levde, and knowing the life of the aristocracy only by remote observation or the voice of scandalous gossip, he hardly deserves the implicit trust which has been often accorded to his indictments of the society of his day. His generalisations are of the most sweeping kind ; the colours are all dark. He thinks that the number of decent people in his day is infinitesimally small. And yet we may reasonably suspect, from his own evidence, that he often generalised from single cases, that he treated abnormal specimens as types. His moral ideals cannot have been a monopoly of his own. In the palace of Nero in the worst days, there was a pure Octavia as well as a voluptuous Poppaea. The wife and mother of the gross Vitellius were women of spot- less fame. 8 And in reading the fierce, unmeasured declamation of Juvenal, we should never forget that he knew nothing per- sonally of Pliny or Tacitus, or of the circle which surrounded Verginius Eufus and Spurinna. He has the same pessimist theory of human declension which was held by Seneca and by Tacitus. Every form of crime and sensuality has been rampant since Eome lost the treasure of poverty, since the days when silver shone only on the Eoman's arms. 4 Juvenal's ideal lies in that mythical past when a Curius, thrice consul, strode homeward from the hills, mattock on shoulder, to a meal of home-grown herbs and bacon served on earthenware. 5 It is the luxury of the conquered lands which has relaxed the Roman fibre, which has introduced a false standard of 1 Jut. i. 87, 147 ; x. 172 ; cf. Sen. s Tac. Hist. ii. 64 ; cf. Plin. Ep. iv. Nat. Q. vii. 31 ; De Ira, ii. 8 sq. 19 ; iii. 16 ; D. Cass. 68. 5 ; Sen. ad 2 e.g. the picture of Otho, ii. 99 ; Helv. xiv. of Messalina, vL 114: Lateranus, viii. . T . inn ... .,, _ 00 146 ; Sejanus, x. 56 ; Cicero, etc viii. Juv ' Xl ' 109 ' UL 152 ' 183 ' 231. 8 xi. 78. F 66 SOCIAL LIFE book i life, degraded great houses, and flooded the city with an alien crew of astrologers and grammarians, parasites and pimps. Modern criticism has laboured hard to correct some of the harsher judgments on the luxury and self-indulgence of the period of the early Empire. Perhaps the scholarly reaction against an indictment which had degenerated sometimes into ignorant commonplace, may have been carried here and there too far. The testimony of Tacitus is explicit that the luxury of the table reached its height in the hundred years extending from the battle of Actium to the accession of Vespasian. 1 It was a period of enormous fortunes spent in enormous waste. Seneca or Pallas or Narcissus had accumulated wealth probably three or four times greater than even the fortune of a Crassus or a Lucullus. The long peace, the safety of the seas, and the freedom of trade, had made Eome the entrepot for the peculiar products and the delicacies of every land from the British Channel to the Ganges. The costly variety of these foreign dainties was vulgarly paraded at every great dinner- party. Palaces, extending almost over the area of a town, were adorned with marbles from the quarries of Paros, Laconia, Phrygia, or Numidia, 2 with gilded ceilings and curious panels changing with the courses of the banquet, 3 with hundreds of tables of citrus-wood, resting on pillars of ivory, each costing a moderate fortune, with priceless bronzes and masterpieces of ancient plate. Nearly a million each year was drained away to the remoter East, to purchase aromatics and jewels for the elaborate toilette of the Eoman lady. 4 Hundreds of household slaves, each with his minute special function, anticipated every want, or ministered to every passion of their masters. Every picturesque or sheltered site on the great lakes, on the Anio, or the Alban hills, in the Laurentine pine forests, or on the bays of Campania, was occupied by far-spreading country seats. Lavish expenditure and luxurious state was an imperious duty of rank, even without the precept of an emperor. 5 The senator who paid too low a rent, or rode along the Appian or Flaminian Way with too scanty a train, 1 Tac. Ann. iii. 55 ; Sen. Ad Helv. 4 Plin. H.N. vi. 26 : ix. 58 ; xii. x. 3 ; Ep. 89, 22. 41. Cf. FriedL iii. p. 80 ; Marq. Rom. 2 Statius, Silv. v. 36 ; ii. 85. ^A 6 * - ... -.. Suet. Nero, xxx. putabat sorchdos 3 Petron. c. 60 ; Sen. Ep. 95, 9 ; ac parcos esse quibus ratio impensarum Fried!. Sittengesch. iii. p. 67. constaret, etc. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SA TIRIST 67 became a marked man, and immediately lost caste. 1 These things are the merest commonplace of the social history of the time. Yet, in spite of the admitted facts of profusion and self- indulgence, we may decline to accept Juvenal's view of the luxury of the age without some reserve. It is indeed no apology for the sensuality of a section of the Eoman aristocracy in that . day, to point out that the very same excesses made their appearance two centuries before him, and that they will be lamented both by Pagan and Christian moralists three centuries after his death. But these facts suggest a doubt whether the cancer of luxury had struck so deep as satirists thought into the vitals of a society which remained for so many centuries erect and strong. Before the end of the third century B.C., began the long series of sumptuary laws which Tiberius treated as so futile. 2 The elder Pliny and Livy date the introduction of luxurious furniture from the return of the army in 188 B.C., after the campaign in Asia. 3 Crassus, who left, after the most prodigal expenditure, a fortune of 1,700,000, had a town house which cost over 60,000. 4 The lavish banquets of Lucullus were proverbial, and his villa at Misenum was valued at 24,000. It was an age when more than 1000 was given for a slave-cook or a pair of silver cups. 5 Macrobius has preserved the menu of a pontifical banquet, at which Julius Caesar and the Vestals were present, and which in its costly variety surpassed, as he says, any epicurism of the reign of Honorius. 6 And yet Ammianus and S. Jerome level very much the same charges against the nobles of the fourth century, 7 which satire makes against the nobles of the first. When we hear the same anathemas of luxury in the days of Lucullus and in the reign of Honorius, separated by an interval of more than five centuries, in which the Roman race stamped itself on the page of history and on the face of nature by the most splendid achievements of military virtue and of civilising energy, we are inclined to question either the report of our authorities, or the satirist's interpretation of the social facts. 1 Sen. Ep. 87, 4 ; Suet. Tib. xxxv. ; 5 lb. 418 ; cf. Plin. H.N. ix. 80, 81 ; Friedl. i. 196. x. 23 ; Plut. Luadl. c. 40 ; Macrob. 2 Liv. xxxiv. 1 ; Tac. Ann. iii. 53, 54. Sat. iii. 13, 1. * Liv. xxxix. 6, 7 ; Marq. Priv. i. 62, 6 Macrob. Sat. iii. 13, 11. 162 ; Momms. E. Hist. ii. 409. 7 Hieron. Ep. 117, 8 ; Amm. Marc. 4 Momms. R. Hist. iii. 417. xiv. 6, 7 ; xxviii. 4. 68 SOCIAL LIFE book i The good faith of the elder Pliny, of Seneca and Juvenal, need not, indeed, be called in question. But the first two were men who led by preference an almost ascetic life. The satirist was a man whose culinary tastes were satisfied by the kid and eggs and asparagus of his little farm at Tibur. 1 And the simple abstemious habits of the south, which are largely the result of climate, tended to throw into more startling contrast any indulgence of superfluous appetite. It is true that the conquests which unlocked the hoarded treasures of eastern monarchies, gave a great shock to the hardy frugality and self-restraint of the old Eoman character, just as the stern simplicity of Spartan breeding was imperilled by contact with the laxer life of the Hellespontine towns and the wealth of the Persian court. 2 The Eoman aristocracy were for two centuries exposed to the same temptations as the treasures of the Incas offered to Pizarro, 3 or the treasures of the Moguls to Clive. In the wild licence, which prevailed in certain circles for more than a century, many a fortune and many a character were wrecked. Yet the result may easily be exaggerated. Extravagant luxury and self-indulgence is at all times only possible to a comparatively small number. And luxury, after all, is a relative term. The luxuries of one age often become the necessities of the next. There are many articles of food or dress, which free-trade and science have brought to the doors of our cottagers, which would have incurred the censure of the elder Pliny or of Seneca. There are aldermanic banquets in New York or the city of London in our own day, which far surpass, in costliness and variety, the banquets of Lucullus or the pontiff's feast described by Macrobius. The wealth of Pallas, Narcissus, or Seneca, was only a fraction of many a fortune accumulated in the last thirty years in the United States. 4 The exaggerated idea of Eoman riches and waste has been further heightened by the colossal extravagance of the worst emperors and a few of their boon companions and imitators. But we are apt to forget that these were the outbreaks of morbid and eccentric character, in which the last feeble restraints were sapped and swept away by the sense of 1 Juv. xi. 69. 4 Tac. Ann. xii. 53 (Pallas) ; I). Cass. 2 Thucyd. i. 95. 60. 34 (Narcissus) ; Tac. Ann. xiii. 42 ; 3 Prescott, Conquest of Peru, i. 304. D. Cass. 61. 10 ; cf. Duruy, v. p. 598. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SA TIRIST 69 having at command the resources of a world. Nero is expressly described by the historian as a lover of the impos- sible ; 1 and both he and Caligula had floating before their disordered imaginations the dream of astounding triumphs, even over the most defiant forces and barriers of nature. There was much in the extravagance of their courtiers and imitators, springing from the same love of sensation and display. Home was a city of gossip, and the ambition to be talked about, as the inventor of some new freak of prodigality, was probably the only ambition of the blas spendthrift of the tima Yet, after all the deductions of scrupulous criticism, the profound moral sense of Juvenal has laid bare and painted with a realistic power, hardly equalled even by Tacitus, an unhealthy temper in the upper classes, which was full of peril. He has also revealed, alongside of this decline, a great social change, we may even call it a crisis, which the historian, generally more occupied with the great figures on the stage, is apt to ignore. The decay in the morale and wealth of the senatorial order, together with the growing power of a new moneyed class, the rise to opulence of the freedman and the p^.tty trader, the invasion of Greek and Oriental influences, and the perilous or* hopeful emancipation, especially of women, from old Roman conventionality, these are the great facts in the social history of the first century which, under all his rhetoric, stand out clearly to the eye of the careful student of the satirist. The famous piece, in which Juvenal describes an effeminate Fabius or Lepidus, before the mutilated statues and smoke- stained pedigree of his house, rattling the dice-box till the dawn, or sunk in the stupor of debauch at the hour when his ancestors were sounding their trumpets for the march, 2 has, for eighteen centuries, inspired many a homily on the vanity of mere birth. Its moral is now a hackneyed one. But, when the piece was written, it must have been a powerful indictment. For the respect for long descent was still deep in the true Roman, and was gratified by fabulous genealogies to the end. Pliny extols Trajan for reserving for youths of illustrious birth the honours due to their race. 8 Suetonius recounts the twenty-eight consulships, five dictatorships, seven 1 Tac. Am. xv. 42. 2 Juv. viii. 10. 8 Plin. Pameg. 69. 70 SOCIAL LIFE book i censorships, and many triumphs which were the glory of the great Claudian house, 1 and the similar honours which had been borne by the paternal ancestors of Nero. 2 Tacitus, although not himself a man of old family, has a profound belief in noble tradition, and sometimes speaks with an undisguised scorn of a low alliance. 3 As the number of the " Trojugenae " dwindled, the pride of the vanishing remnant probably grew in proportion, and a clan like the Calpurnian reluctantly yielded precedence even to Tiberius or Nero. 4 It is a sign of the social tone that the manufacture of genealogies for the new men, who came into prominence from the reign of Vespasian, went on apace. A Trojan citizen in the days of Apollonius traced himself to Priam. 5 Herodes Atticus claimed descent from the heroes of Aegina, 6 just as some of the Christian friends of S. Jerome confidently carried their pedigree back to Aeneas or Agamemnon. 7 Juvenal would certainly not have accepted such fables, but he was no leveller. He had a firm belief in moral heredity and the value of tradi- tion. Plebeian as he was, he had, like Martial, his own old Eoman pride, which poured contempt on the upstarts who, with the stains of servile birth or base trade upon them, were crowding the benches of the knights. He would, indeed, have applauded the mot of Tiberius, that a distinguished man was his own ancestor; 8 he recalls with pride that one humble son of Arpinum had annihilated the hordes of the Cimbri, and another had crushed the rising of Catiline. 9 But he had the true Eoman reverence for the Curii, Fabii, and Scipios, and would gladly salute any of their descendants who reproduced their virtues. It is a melancholy certainty that a great many of the sena- torial class in Juvenal's day had fallen very low in all things essential to the strength of a great caste. Their numbers had long been dwindling, 10 owing to vicious celibacy or the cruel proscriptions of the triumvirate and the four Claudian Caesars, or from the unwillingness or inability of many to support the 1 Suet Tib. i. Cf. the funeral 8 Philostr. Fit. Soph. ii. 1. oration of Julius Caesar over his aunt, 7 Hieron. Up. 108, 4. qU 2 0t n b ^ Sue - t Jul Caes - 6 " 8 Tac. Ann. xi. 21, Curtius Rufus a m ' , ro > ** . _ videtur mini ex se natus. 8 Tac. Ann. vi. 33. 4 lb. xv. 48. 9 ^ uv - vu i' 285 sqq. 1 Philostr. Apoll. Tyan. iv. 12. 10 Tac. Ann. xi. 25. chap, n THE WORLD OF THE SA TIRIST 71 burdens of their rank. It was a rare thing in many great houses to reach middle age. 1 Three hundred senators and two thousand knights had fallen in the proscription of the second triumvirate. 2 The massacre of old and young of both sexes, which followed the fall of Sejanus, must have extinguished many an ancient line ; not a day passed without an execution. 3 Three hundred knights and thirty-five senators perished in the reign of Claudius. 4 Very few of the most ancient patrician houses were left when Claudius revised the lists of the Senate, and introduced a fresh element from GauL 5 Who can tell the numbers of those who fell victims to the rage or greed or suspicion of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian ? The list must have been enormously swelled by the awful year of the four emperors. Vespasian found it necessary to recruit the ranks of the aristocracy from Italy and the provinces. 6 At the same time, prodigality or confiscation had rendered many of those who survived unable to maintain their rank, and to bear the social and official burdens which, down to the end of the "Western Empire were rigorously imposed on the great order. The games of the praetorship in the first century, as in the fifth, 7 constituted a tax which only a great fortune could easily bear. Aristocratic poverty became common. As early as the reign of Augustus, the emperor had found it politic to subsidise many great families. 8 The same policy had been continued by Tiberius, Nero, and Vespasian. 9 Tiberius, in- deed, had scrutinised and discouraged some of these claims on grounds which the treasury officials of every age would applaud. 10 A grandson of the great orator Hortensius once made an appeal in the Senate for the means of support- ing the dignity of his name. He had received a grant from Augustus to enable him to rear a family, and four sons were now waiting at the doors of the Curia to second his prayer. Hortensius, who was the great rival of Cicero, had possessed immense wealth. He had many splendid villas, he used to give dinners in his park, around which the deer would troop 1 Sen. Be Ira, ii. 33, 2 ; Juv. iv. 96. 6 Suet Vesp. ix. ; cf. Tac. Ann. iii. 55. s i vv l*%-?'2; iv 'i?' v 7 s y m - e p- iL 78 ; Seeck > Pro1 - xlvi - 8 Suet. Tib. 61, nullusapoena homi- q t o 7 T num cessavit dies. , u uaav - xlu * Id. Claud, xxix. 9 Id. Nero, x. ; Vesp. xvii. s Tac. Ann. xi. 25. 10 Tac. Ann. ii. 37. 38. 72 SOCIAL LIFE book i to the lute of a slave- Orpheus ; he left 10,000 casks of old Chian in his cellars. His mendicant and spiritless descendant had to go away with a cold withering refusal from Tiberius, softened by a contemptuous dole to his sons. The revision of the senatorial roll by Claudius in 48 A.D., revealed a por- tentous disappearance of old houses of the Eepublic, and the gaps had to be filled up from the provinces in the teeth of aristocratic exclusiveness. 1 Among the boon companions of Nero there must have been many loaded with debt, like Otho and Vitellius. The Corvinus in Juvenal who is keeping sheep on a Laurentine farm, and his probable kinsman who obtained a subsidy from Nero, the Fabii and Mamerci who were dancing and playing the harlequin on the comic stage, or selling their blood in the arena, must represent many a wreck of the great houses of the Eepublic. 2 Among the motley crowd who swarm in the hall of the great patron to receive the morning dole, the descendants of houses coeval with the Eoman State are pushed aside by the freedmen from the Euphrates. 3 But aristocratic poverty knew no lower depth of degradation than in the hungry adulation which it offered to the heirless rich. Captation became a regular profession in a society where trade, industry, and even professional skill, were treated as degrading to the men of gentle blood. 4 It is characteristic of Juvenal that he places on the same level the legacy-hunter, who would stoop to any menial service or vicious compliance, with the honest tradesfolk, in whose ranks, if we may judge by their funerary inscriptions, was to be found, perhaps, the wholesomest moral tone in the society of the early Empire. In a satire written after Domitian's death, 5 Juvenal has described a scene of fatuous adulation which, if not true in fact, is only too true to the character of the time. A huge mullet, too large for any private table, had been caught in a bay of the Adriatic. Its captor hastens through winter storms to lay his spoil at the emperor's feet. The kitchen of the Alban palace had no dish large enough for such a monster, and 1 Tac. Ann. xi. 25 ; D. Cass. Ix. 29. 3 Juv. i. 103. The last revision of the Senate was in Petron . SaL c . 116 124 ; Plin. JSp. the reign of Augustus ; D. Cass. lv. ii# 20 . Juv> { 37 . m 3L 2 Tac. Ann. xiii. 34 ; Juv. i. 107. 6 Juv. iv. ; i. 27. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 73 a council of trembling senators is hastily summoned to con- sult on the emergency. Thither came the gentle Crispus, that Acilius, whose son was to be the victim of the despot's jealousy, Kubrius tainted with a nameless crime, the bloated Montanus, and Crispinus, once an Egyptian slave, now a vulgar exquisite, reeking with unguents. There, too, was the informer whose whisper stabbed like a stiletto, the lustful, blind Catullus, and the arch flatterer Veiento, who had revelled at the Gargantuan feasts of Nero from noon till midnight. These are worthy brethren of the assembly who stabbed Proculus to death with their stiles at the nod of the freedman of Caligula, 1 and led Nero home in triumphal pro- cession after his mother's murder. 2 Many things had contributed to the degradation of the senatorial character. The dark and tortuous policy of Tiberius tended, indeed, to absolutism ; yet he still maintained a tone of deference to the Senate, and sometimes, with cold good sense, repelled a too eager adulation. 3 But, in the reigns of Caligula and Nero, the great order had to submit to the deepest personal degradation, and were tempted, or compelled by their masters to violate every instinct of Roman dignity. The wild epileptic frenzy of Caligula, who spared not the virtue of his sisters, 4 as he boasted of his own incestuous birth, 5 who claimed divine honours, 6 temples, and costly sacrifices, who, as another Endymion, called the Moon to his embraces, who dreamt of obliterating the memory of Homer and Virgil and Livy, was not likely to spare the remnant of self-respect still left in his nobles. 7 He gave an immense impetus to the rage for singing, dancing, and acting, 8 for chariot-driving and fighting in the arena, not unknown before, which Juvenal and Tacitus brand as the most flagrant sign of degenerate morals. There was indeed a great conflict of sentiment under the early Empire as to some of these arts. Julius Caesar had encouraged or permitted Roman senators and knights to fight in the gladiatorial combats, and a Laberius 1 D. Cass. lix. 26. 6 lb. xxiii. 2 Tac. Ann. xiv. 12. 6 lb. xxii - '> cf - Sen - De lra > * 20 } . _, . ,. 7 Suet. Calig. xxxiv. xxxv. Vetera lxvlu familiarum insignia nobilissirao cuique 4 Calig. xxiii. xxiv. ; cf. L. comitiali ademit ; xxii. morbo vexatus, which explains much 8 lb. liv. \v. quorum vero studio to a medical man. teneretur, omnibus ad insaniam favit. 74 SOCIAL LIFE book i to act in his own play. 1 But a decree of the Senate, not long afterwards, had placed a ban on these exhibitions by men of noble rank. 2 Tiberius, who was, beyond anything, a haughty aristocrat, at a later date intervened to save the dignity of the order. 3 But the rage of the rabble for these spectacles had undoubtedly caught many in the ranks of the upper class. And Caligula and Nero 4 found, only too easily, youths of birth and breeding, but ruined fortune, who were ready to exhibit themselves for a welcome douceur, or to gain the favour of the prince, or even to bring down the applause of the crowded benches of the amphitheatre or the circus. Yet the old Boman feeling must have been very persistent, when a man like Domitian, who posed as a puritan, found it politic to remove from the Senate one who had dis- graced his order by dancing in the pantomime, and even laid his interdict on all public theatrical performances. 5 The revels and massacres and wild debauchery of Nero did not so much to hasten his destruction as his singing his catches to the lute, or appearing in the parts of the incestuous Canace and the matricide Orestes. 6 From every part of the world, in all the literature of the time, there is a chorus of astounded indignation against the prince who could stoop to pit himself against Greek players and singers at Delphi or Olympia. Juvenal has been reproached for putting the chariot- driving of Damasippus in the same category with the Verrine plunder of provinces. 7 He is really the exponent of old Roman sentiment. And it may be doubted whether, from the Roman point of view, Juvenal might not justify himself to his critics. Even in our own emancipated age, we might be pardoned for feeling a shock if an English prime minister rode his own horse at the Derby, or appeared in a risky part on the boards of the Gaiety. And the collective sense of senatorial self-respect was too precious to a Roman patriot and moralist, to be flung away for mere love of sport, or in a fit of spurious artistic enthusiasm. Nero, and in an even lower fashion Caligula, were rebels against old Roman conventional restraints, 1 Suet. Jul. Caes. xxxix. senatorio ordine aurigantibus ; D. 2 D. Cass, xlviii 43 Cass. 59. 10, 13 ; Suet. Nero, xii. " ' 6 Id. Dom. viii. vii. Suet. Tiberms, xxxv. 6 i xx . xx i. 4 Id. Calig. xviii. nee ullis nisi ex 7 Juv. viii. 89, 147. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 75 and it is possible that some of the hideous tales about them, which were spread in the " circuli," may have been the venge- ance of Roman pride on shameless social revolutionaries, who paraded their contempt for old-fashioned dignity and for social tradition. Nero w^s never so happy as when he was deafened A with applause, and smothered with roses at the Greek festivals. He had once predicted for him a monarchy in those regions of the East, 1 where he would have escaped from the tradition of old Roman puritanism, and combined all the ingenious sensu- ality of Syria with the doubtful artistic taste of a decadent Hellenism. The cold haughty refinement of senatorial circles of the old regime, and the rude honest virtue of the plebeian soldiery, 2 rightly mistrusted this false sensational artist on the throne of the world. Art, divorced from moral ideals, may become a danger- ous thing. The emperor might spend the morning with his favourites in patching up lilting verses which would run well to the lute. 3 But the scene soon changed to a revel, where the roses and music hardly veiled the grossness of excess. The " noctes Neronis " made many a debauchee and scattered many a senatorial fortune. 4 And amid all this elaborate luxury and splendour of indulgence, there was a strange return to the naturalism of vice and mere blackguardism. A Messalina or a Nero or a Petronius developed a curious taste for the low life that reeks and festers in the taverns and in the stews. Bohemianism for a time became the fashion. 6 Its very gross- ness was a stimulant to appetites jaded with every diabolical refinement of vicious ingenuity. The distinguished dinner party, with the emperor at their head, sallied forth to see how the people were living in the slums. Many a scene from these midnight rambles has probably been preserved in the tainted, yet brilliant, pages of the Satiricon. Petronius had probably often plunged with Nero after night-fall into those low dens, where slave minions and sailors and the obscene priests of the Great Mother were roistering together, or sunk in the slumber 1 Suet. Nero, xl. ; v. Krause, De seen, bore all the marks of originality. Sueton. Fontibus, pp. 57, 80 ; Peter, Philostr. Apoll. l'i/an. iv. 39 ; Mace', Gesch. Utt. ii. 69. SvMone, p. 127 ; Boissier, L'Opp. p. 8 Tac. Ann. xv. 67. 248. * lb. xiv. 16; cf. Suet. Nero, Hi., 4 g uet- y^g xxv n where Suetonius distinctly says that some of Nero's verses, which he had 6 lb. xxvi. ; cf. Juv. vi. 115. 76 SOCIAL LIFE book i of debauch. 1 These elegant aristocrats found their sport in rudely assaulting quiet citizens returning from dinner, or plundering some poor huckster's stall in the Suburra, or insult- ing a lady in her chair. In the fierce faction fights of the theatre, where stones and benches were flying, the Emperor had once the distinction of breaking a praetor's head. 2 It was nobles trained in this school, experts in vice, but with no nerve for arms, who encumbered the train of Otho on his march to the sanguinary conflict on the Po. 3 The demoralisation of a section of the upper class under the bad emperors must have certainly involved the degradation of many women. And one of the most brilliant and famous of Juvenal's Satires is devoted to this unsavoury subject. The " Legend of Bad Women " is a graphic picture, and yet it suffers from a defect which spoils much of Juvenal's work. Full of realistic power, with an undoubted foundation of truth, it is too vehement and sweeping in its censures to gain full credence. It is also strangely wanting in balance and due order of idea. 4 The problem of marriage is illustrated by a series of sketches of female manners, which are very disconnected, and, indeed, sometimes inconsistent. Thorough depravity, superstition, and ignorant devotion, interest in literature and public affairs, love of gymnastic and decided opinions on Virgil in fact, vices, innocent hobbies, and laudable tastes are all thrown together in a confused indictment. The bohemian man of letters had heard many a scandal about great ladies, some of them true, others distorted and exaggerated by prurient gossip, after passing through a hundred tainted imaginations. In his own modest class, female morality, as we may infer from the Inscriptions and other sources, was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age. 5 There were aristocratic families, too, where the women were as pure as Lucretia or Cornelia, or any matron of the olden days. 6 The ideal of purity, both in men and women, in some circles was actually rising. In the families of Seneca, of Tacitus, of Pliny and Plutarch, there were, not 1 Juv. viii. 172. Sat. des Juv. p. 7. 2 Suet. Nero, xxvi. 6 Duruy, v. 673 ; Boissier, Eel. Rom. 3 Tac. Hist. i. 88. ii. 233 sqq. 4 See some admirable criticism in 6 Plin. Up. iv. 19 ; iii. 16 ; iii. 3 ; Nettleship's Lectures and Essays, 2nd Sen. Ad Helv. xiv. xix. ; D. Cass, series, p. 141 ; cf. Munding, uber die lxviii. 5 ad fin. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 77 only the most spotless and high-minded women, there were also men with a rare conception of temperance and mutual love, of reverence for a pure wedlock, to which S. Jerome and S. Augustine would have given their benediction. Even Ovid, that " debauchee of the imagination," writes to his wife, from his exile in the Scythian wilds, in the accents of the purest affection. 1 And, amid all the lubricity of his pictures of gallantry, he has not lost the ideal of a virgin heart, which repels and disarms the libertine by the spell of an im- pregnable purity. 2 Plutarch's ideal of marriage, at once severe and tender, would have satisfied S. Paul. 8 Favorinus, the friend and contemporary of Plutarch, thought it not beneath the dignity of philosophic eloquence to urge on mothers the duty of suckling and personally caring for their infants. 4 Seneca and Musonius, who lived through the reign of Nero, are equally peremptory in demanding a like continence from men and from women. And Musonius severely con- demns concubinage and vagrant amours of every kind ; the man guilty of seduction sins not only against another, but against his own soul. 5 Dion Chrysostom was probably the first of the ancients to raise a clear voice against the traffic in frail beauty which has gone on pitilessly from age to age. Nothing could exceed the vehemence with which he assails an evil which he regards as not only dishonouring to human nature, but charged with the poison of far spreading corruption. 6 Juvenal's ideal of purity, therefore, is not peculiar to himself. The great world was bad enough; but there was another world beside that whose infamy Juvenal has immortalised. It is also to be observed that Juvenal seems to be quite as much under the influence of old Eoman conventionality as of permanent moral ideals. He condemns eccentricities, or mere harmless aberrations from old-fashioned rules of propriety, as ruthlessly as he punishes lust and crime. The blue-stocking who is a purist in style, and who balances, with deafening 1 Ov. Trist. iii. 3, 15 ii. 599 ; iii. 440, 613 ; Denis, IdUes _ . , . . . Morales, ii. 124. 0m "x" VmC1S 0,nnla, 3 Hta* Comol. ad Uxor. x. ; Conj. Bt plus in nostro pectore parte tenes. Praec. iv. xliv. xlvii. Te loquor absentem; te vox mea nominat * A. Gell. xii. 1. Nulkr^lt sine te nox mini, nulla dies. . ^ & 134 5 %&**' Die *** der Qnech. iii. 1, p. 660. 2 Id. Amor. iii. 4, 3 ; of. Ars Am. 8 D. Chrys. Or. vii. 133. / 78 SOCIAL LIFE book i volubility, the merits of Homer and Virgil, 1 the eager gossip who has the very freshest news from Thrace or Parthia, or the latest secret of a tainted family, 2 the virago who, with an intolerable pride of virtue, plays the household tyrant and delivers curtain lectures to her lord, 3 seem to be almost as detestable in Juvenal's eyes as the doubtful person who has had eight husbands in five years, or one who elopes with an ugly gladiator, 4 or tosses off two pints before dinner. 5 We may share his disgust for the great ladies who fought in the arena and wrestled in the ring, 6 or who order their poor tire- women to be flogged for deranging a curl in the towering architecture of their hair. 7 But we cannot feel all his contempt for the poor penitent devotee of Isis who broke the ice to plunge thrice in the Tiber on a winter morning, and crawled on bleeding knees over the Campus Martius, or brought a phial of water from the Nile to sprinkle in the fane of the goddess. 8 Even lust, grossness, and cruelty, even poisoning and abortion, seem to lose some of their blackness when they are compared with an innocent literary vanity, or a pathetic eagerness to read the future or to soothe the pangs of a guilty conscience. The truth is that Juvenal is as much shocked by the " new woman " as he is by the vicious woman. He did not under- stand, or he could not acquiesce in the great movement for the emancipation of women, which had set in long before his time, and which, like all such movements, brought evil with it as well as good. There is perhaps nothing more striking in the social history of Eome than the inveterate conservatism of Eoman sentiment in the face of accomplished change. Such moral rigidity is almost necessarily prone to pessimism. The Golden Age lies in the past ; the onward sweep of society seems to be always moving towards the abyss. The ideal past of the Eoman woman lay more than two centuries and a half behind the time when Juvenal was born. The old Eoman matron was, by legal theory, in the power of her husband, yet assured by religion and sentiment a dignified position in the family, and treated with profound, if somewhat cold, respect ; she was busied with household cares, 1 Juv. vi. 436 2 Juv. vi. 400 sqq. Committit vates et comparat ; inde Maronem, s jj_ 268. 8 lb. 252. Atque alia parte in trutina suspendit Ho- 4 ' -inQ* en 7 jj! 400" Cedunt grammatici, vincuntur rhetores 5 lb. 427. 8 lb. 528. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 79 and wanting in the lighter graces and charms, austere, self- contained, and self- controlled. But this severe ideal had begun to fade even in the days of the elder Cato. 1 And there is hardly a fault or vice attributed by Juvenal to the women of Domitian's reign, which may not find parallel in the nine or ten generations before Juvenal penned his great indictment against the womanhood of his age. The Eoman lady's irritable pride of birth is at least as old as the rivalry of the two Fabiae in the fourth century. 2 The elder Cato dreaded a rich wife as much as Juvenal, 3 and satirised as bitterly the pride and gossip and luxury of the women of his time. Their love of gems and gold ornaments and many-coloured robes and richly adorned carriages, is attested by Plautus and the impotent legis- lation of C. Oppius. 4 Divorce and ghastly crime in the noblest families were becoming common in the days of the Second Punic War. About the same time began that emancipation of women from the jealous restraints of Eoman law, which was to be carried further in the Antonine age. 5 The strict forms of marriage, which placed the wife in the power of her husband, fell more and more into desuetude. Women attained more absolute control over their property, and so much capital became concentrated in their hands that, about the middle of the second century B.C., the Voconian law was passed to pro- hibit bequests to them, with the usual futile result of such legislation. 6 Yet the old ideal of the industrious housewife never died out, and Eoman epitaphs for ages record that the model matron was a wool -worker and a keeper at home. A senator of the reign of Honorius praises his daughter for the same homely virtues. 7 But from the second century B.C. the educa- tion of the Eoman girl of the higher classes underwent a great change. 8 Dancing, music, and the higher accomplishments were no longer under a ban, although they were still suspected by people of the old-fashioned school. Boys and girls received the same training from the grammarian, and read their Homer and Ennius together. 9 There were women in the time of 1 Momms. R. Hist. ii. 408 (Tr.). 8 Cic. in Verr. i. 42, 107. 3 Liv. vi. 34. 7 Sym. Ep. vi. 67 ; cf. Suet. Oclav. 3 Plut. Cato Maj. c. xx. ; Juv. vL lxiv. ; Or. Henz. 2677, 4629, 4629, 165, 460. lanifica, pia, pudica, casta, domiseda. 4 Val. Max. ii. 1, 5 ; Liv. xxxiv. 1,3; 8 Macrob. Sat. iii. 14, 11. Marq. i. p. 62. 9 Friedl. i. 312 ; Boissier, Rel. Rom. 6 Momms. R. Hist. ii. 408. ii. 240. 80 SOCIAL LIFE book i Lucretius, as in the time of Juvenal, who interlarded their conversation with Greek phrases. 1 Cornelia, the wife of Ponipey, was trained in literature and mathematics, and even had some tincture of philosophy. 2 The daughter of Atticus, who became the wife of Agrippa, was placed under the tuition of a freedman, who, as too often happened, seems to have abused his trust. 3 Even in the gay circle of Ovid, there were learned ladies, or ladies who wished to be thought so. 4 Even Martial reckons culture among the charms of a woman. Seneca maintained that women have an equal capacity for culti- vation with men. 5 Thus the blue-stocking of Juvenal, for whom he has so much contempt, had many an ancestress for three centuries, as she will have many a daughter till the end of the Western Empire. 6 Even in philosophy, usually the last study to attract the female mind, Eoman ladies were asserting an equal interest. Great ladies of the Augustan court, even the empress herself, had their philosophic directors, 7 and the fashion perhaps became still more general under M. Aurelius. Epictetus had met ladies who were enthusiastic admirers of the Platonic Utopia, but the philosopher rather slyly attributes their enthusiasm to the absence of rigorous conjugal relations in the Ideal Society. 8 Even in the field of authorship, women were claiming equal rights. The Memoirs of Agrippina was one of the authorities of Tacitus. 9 The poems of Sulpicia, mentioned by Martial, 10 were read in Gaul in the days of Sidonius. 11 Greek verses, of some merit in spite of a pedantic affectation, by Balbilla, a friend of the wife of Hadrian, can still be read on the Colossus of Memnon. 12 Calpurnia, the wife of Pliny, may not have been an author ; but she shared all Pliny's literary tastes ; she set his poems to music, and gave him the admiration of a good wife, if not of an impartial critic. Juvenal feels as much scorn for the woman who is inter- ested in public affairs and the events on the frontier, 13 as he feels for the woman who presumes to balance the merits of Virgil and Homer. And here he is once more at war with a 1 Lucr. iv. 1160 ; Juv. vi. 192. 7 Sen. Ad Marc 4. 2 Plut. Pomp. It. 8 Epict. Fr. liii. 3 Suet. Gram. III. 16. 9 Tac. Ann. iv. 53 ; cf. Plin. H. N. 4 Ov. Ars Am. ii. 282. vii. 8, 46. 10 Mart. x. 35 ; vii. 69. 5 Mart. xii. 98, 3 ; cf. Sen. Ad Eelv. u Sid. Apoll. Carm. ix. 261. xvii. ; Ad Marc. xvi. u C.I.G. 4725-31. Claud. Laus Serenae, 146, 13 Juv. vi. 403 ; cf. 434. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 81 great movement towards the equality of the sexes. From the days of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, to the days of Placidia, the sister of Honorius, Roman women exercised, from time to time, a powerful, and not always wholesome, influence on public affairs. Xhe_politic^A.URustus discussed -high, matters qf_state with . Liyia.^ The reign of Claudius was a reign of women and freedmen. Tacitus records, with a certain distaste for the innovation, that Agrippina sat enthroned beside Claudius, on a lofty tribunal, to receive the homage of the captive Carac- / | 4 ^ tacus. 2 Nero emancipated himself from the grasping ambition of his mother only by a ghastly crime. The influence of Caenis on Vespasian in his later days tarnished his fame. 3 The influence of women in provincial administration was also becoming a serious force. In the reign of Tiberius, Caecina Severus, with the weight of forty years' experience of camps, in a speech before the Senate, denounced the new-fangled custom of the wives of generals and governors accompanying them abroad, attending reviews of troops, mingling freely with the soldiers, and taking an active part in business, which was not always favourable to pure administration. 4 In the inscriptions of the first and second centuries, women appear in a more wholesome character as " mothers of the camp," or patronesses of municipal towns and corporations. 5 They have statues dedi- cated to them for liberality in erecting porticoes or adorning theatres or providing civic games or feasts. 6 And on one of these tablets we read of a Curia mulierum at Lanuvium. 7 We are reminded of the " chapter of matrons " who visited Agrippina with their censure, 8 and another female senate, under Elagabalus, which dealt with minute questions of precedence and graded etiquette. 9 On the walls of Pompeii female ad- mirers posted up their election placards in support of their favourite candidates. 10 Thus Juvenal was fighting a lost battle, lost long before he wrote. For good or evil, women in the first and second centuries were making themselves a power. 1 Suet. Odav. lxxxiv. B Or. Henz. 6000, 4036, 5158, 4643, 2 Tac. Ann. xii. 37, novum sane et 5134, 3774, 2417, 4055, 4056, 7207, moribus veterum insolitum, feminam 3815. signis Romanis praesidere. a lb. 3738, 3773, 6992. 8 D. Cass. lxvi. 14 ; cf. Suet. Vesp. 7 lb. 3740. xvi. ; Krause, De Suet. Fontihis, p. 75. B Suet. Galba, v. 4 Tac. Ann. iii. 33 ; cf. i. 64 ; l 69, 9 Lamprid. Heliogdb. iv. ; cf. Lam- sed femina [i. e. Agrippina] ingens animi prid. Aurelian. xlix. munia ducis per eos dies induit, etc. 10 Mau, Pompeii (Kelsey Tr.), p. 479. G 82 SOCIAL LIFE book i Although he was probably a very light believer in the old mythology, 1 and treated its greatest figures with scant respect, Juvenal had all the old Eoman prejudice against those eastern worships which captivated so many women of his day. And, here again, the satirist is assailing a movement which had set in loug before he wrote, and which was destined to gain immense impetus and popularity in the two following centuries. The eunuch priests of the Great Mother, with their cymbals and Phrygian tiaras, had appeared in Italy in the last years of the Hannibalic War. 2 The early years of the second century B.C. were con- vulsed by the scandals and horrors of the Dionysiac orgies, which fell on Eome like a pestilence. 3 The purity of women and the peace of families were in serious danger, till the mischief was stamped out in blood. The worship of Isis found its way into the capital at least as early as Sulla, and defied the hesitating exclusion of Augustus. 4 At this distance, we can see the raison d'itre of what the satirist regarded as religious aberrations, the full treatment of which must be reserved for another chapter. The world was in the throes of a religious revolution, and eagerly in quest of some fresh vision of the Divine, from whatever quarter it might dawn. The cults of the East seemed to satisfy cravings and emotions, which found no resting-place in the national religion. Their ritual appealed to the senses and imagination, while their mysteries seemed to promise a revelation of God and immor- tality. Their strange mixture of the sensuous and the ascetic was specially adapted to fascinate weak women who had deeply sinned, and yet occasionally longed to repent. The repentance indeed was often shallow enough ; the fasting and mortification were compatible with very light morals. 5 There were the gravest moral abuses connected with such worships as that of Magna Mater. It is well known that the temples of Isis often became places of assignation and guilty intrigue. 6 An in- fatuated Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius had been seduced by her lover in the pretended guise of the god Anubis. 7 The Chaldaean seer or the Jewish hag might often 1 Juv. ii. 31 ; iv. 34 ; xiii. 38 ; vi. 4 Apul. Met. xi. 817 ; Suet. Ociav. 394 ; vii. 194. xciii. ; D. Cass. liii. 2. 2 Liv. xxix. 14. 6 Catull. x. 26 ; Tibull. i. 3, 23 ; cf. 3 lb. xxxix. 8 ; cf. Lafaye, Culte des Juv. xiii. 93. 6 Ov. Ars Am. i. 77. Div. d'Alexandrie, c. iii. 7 Friedl. Sittcngcsch. i. 347. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 83 arouse dangerous hopes, or fan a guilty passion by casting a horoscope or reading a dream. 1 But Juvenal's scorn seems to fall quite as heavily on the innocent votary who was striving to appease a burdened conscience, as on one who made her superstition a screen for vice. In spite of the political extinction of the Jewish race, its numbers and influence grew in Italy. The very destruction of the Holy Place and the external symbols of Jewish worship threw a more impressive air of mystery around the dogmas of the Jewish faith, of which even the most cultivated Eomans had only vague conceptions. 2 The Jews, from the time of the first Caesar, had worked their way into every class of society. 8 A Jewish prince had inspired Caligula with an oriental ideal of monarchy. 4 There were adherents of Judaism in the household of the great freedmen of Claudius, and their growing influence and turbulence compelled that emperor to expel the race from the capital. 5 The worldly, pleasure-loving Poppaea had, perhaps, yielded to the mysterious charm of the religion of Moses. 6 But it was under the Flavians, who had such close associations with Judaea, that Jewish influences made themselves most felt. And in the reign of Domitian, two members of the imperial house, along with many others, suffered for following the Jewish mode of life. 7 Their crime is also described as "atheism," and Clemens is, in the old Roman spirit, said to have been a man of the most "con- temptible inactivity." In truth, the "Jewish life" was a description which might cover many shades of belief and practice in religion, including Christianity itself. The secret worship of a dim, mysterious Power, Who was honoured by no imposing rites, a spirit of detachment and quietism, which shrank from games and spectacles and the scenes of fashion, and nursed the dream of a coming kingdom which was not of this world, excited the suspicion and contempt of the coarse, strenuous Eoman nature. Yet, in the gloom and deep corruption of that sombre time, such a life of retreat and renunciation had a strange charm for naturally 1 Juv. vi. 547. 5 Suet. Claud, xxv. 2 Tac. Hist. v. 2, 4 ; Juv. xiv. 97. , it- , an t\ mc Sen. Fr. 42 (in Aug. De Civ. Dei, 6 Tac - HwL L 22 > Duru y lv " 505 - vi. 11), victi victorious leges dederunt. 7 Suet Dom. xv. ; D. Cass, lxvii. 4 Cf. Meriv. vi. 6. 14 ; Ren. Les jfiv. p. 228. 84 SOCIAL LIFE book i pious souls, especially among women. There were indeed many degrees of conformity to the religion of Palestine. While some were attracted by its more spiritual side, others confined themselves to an observance of the Sabbath, which became very common in some quarters of Eome under the Empire. The children, as Juvenal tells us, were sometimes trained to a complete conformity to the law of Moses. 1 But Juvenal is chiefly thinking of the mendicant population from Palestine who swarmed in the neighbourhood of the Porta Capena and the grove of the Muses, practising all the arts which have appealed in all ages to superstitious women. Thus the Judaism of the times of Nero or Domitian might cover anything from the cunning of the gipsy fortune-teller to the sad, dreaming quietism of Pomponia Graecina. 2 Yet it must be admitted that, although Juvenal, in his attacks on women, has mixed up very real vice with super- stition and mere innocent eccentricity, or the explosive energy of a new freedom, the real vices of many women of his time are a melancholy fact. The Messalinas and Poppaeas had many imitators and companions in their own class. It is true that even the licentious fancy of Ovid and Martial generally spares the character of the unmarried girl. She was, in the darkest times, as a rule, carefully guarded from the worst corruptions of the spectacles, 3 or from the reckless advances of the hardened libertine, although an intrigue with a tutor was not unknown. 4 !' Her marriage was arranged often in mere childhood, seldom later than her seventeenth year. A girl was rarely betrothed after nineteen. 5 Her temptations and danger often began on her wedding-day. That there was a high ideal of pure and happy marriage, even in the times of the greatest licence, we know from Pliny and Plutarch, and from Martial himself. 6 But there were serious perils before the child-bride, when she was launched upon the great world of Eoman society. A marriage of convenience with some member of a tainted race, Uas6 with precocious and 1 Juv. xiv. 96 ; vi. 544 ; iii. 15 ; 6 ji art> i v> j3_ Ren. Les Ev. p. 234. 2 Tac Ann xiii 32 Diligat ilia sen em quondam : sed et ipsa 8 Friedl. Sittengesch. i. p. 332; cf. Plin. Tunc quoque cum fuerit, non videatur anus. Ep. vii. 24. * Suet. III. Gram. xvi. 8 Friedl. i. 314 ; Inscr. Or. 2656, P ] ut. Conj. Praec. xhv. xxxiv. ; Phn. 2668, 4803. Ep. iv. 19 ; vi. 4 ; vii. 5. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 85 unnatural indulgence, and ready to concede the conjugal liberty which he claimed, was a perilous trial to virtue, v The bonds of old Eoman marriage had, for ages, been greatly relaxed, and the Eoman lady of independent fortune and vigorous, highly trained intellect, could easily find consolation for marital neglect. From Seneca to S. Jerome, the foppish procurator of the great lady was a dangerous and suspected person, 1 and not always without good cause. Surrounded by an army of slaves and the other obsequious dependents of a great house, treated with profound deference, and saluted with the pompous titles of domina and regina, the great lady's lightest caprice became law. 2 Costly jewels and the rarest luxuries of the toilet poured in upon her from regions which were only visited by the captains of Eed Sea merchantmen, or by some Pytha- gorean ascetic seeking the fountains of the wisdom of the East. 3 The political life of Eome had been extinguished by a jealous despotism, but social life in the higher ranks was never so intense and so seductive, and women had their full share in it. Ladies dined out regularly with their husbands, even at the emperor's table ; 4 and they were liable to be assailed by the artistic wiles of which Ovid taught the secret, or by the brutal advances of the lawless Caligula. 5 It was a time when people loved to meet anywhere, under the trees of the Cam- pus Martius, in the colonnades of the theatre, or round the seats of the public squares. Everywhere were to be seen those groups which spared no reputation, not even the em- peror's. And behind the chair of the young matron often hovered the dangerous exquisite, who could hum in a whisper the latest suggestive song from Alexandria or Gades, 6 who knew the pedigree of every racehorse and the secret of every intrigue. It is at such scenes that Tacitus is probably glancing when he says that in Germany no one makes a jest of vice, or calls the art of corruption the fashion of the world ; 7 chastity is not sapped by the seductions of the spectacles. 1 Sen. Fr. xiii. de Matrimonio, 8 Philostr. Apoll. Tyan. iii. 35 ; Luc formosus assecla et procurator calami- Alex. 44. stratus, etc., sub quibus nominibus adul- * Tac. Hist. i. 81, erat Othoni celebre teri delitescunt ; cf. S. Hieron. Ep. 54, convivium primoribus feminis virisque. 13. S. Jerome is evidently imitat- D. Cass. lx. 7. s Suet. Calig. xxxvi. ing Seneca; cf. Or. 639; Mart. v. 8 Ov. Ars Am. L 67 ; Friedl. i. 281. 61. 7 Tac. Germ. 19, nee corrumpere et 2 Juv. vi. 460 ; Sen. Fr. 51. corrumpi saeculum vocatur. 86 SOCIAL LIFE book i Augustus had, indeed, set apart the upper seats for women in the theatre and amphitheatre, 1 but on the benches of the circus the sexes freely mingled. It was there, while the factions of the red and blue were shouting themselves hoarse, Ovid pointed out to his pupil in gallantry, that he had his fairest chance of making a dangerous impression. 2 Yet even Ovid is half in- clined to be shocked at the scenes on the stage which were witnessed by women and young boys. 8 The foulest tales of the old mythology, the loves of Pasiphae or the loves of Leda, were enacted to the life, or told with a nakedness of language, compared with which even Martial might seem chaste. 4 Not less degrading were the gladiatorial shows, so lavishly provided by Augustus and Trajan, as well as by Caligula and Domitian, at which the Vestals had a place of honour. 5 It is little wonder that women accustomed to take pleasure in the suffer- ings and death of brave men, should be capable of condemning their poor slave women to torture or the lash for a sullen look, or a half-heard murmur. The grossness with which Juvenal describes the effect of the stage on the morals of women savours of the Suburra. 6 But of the poisonous character of these per- formances there can be no doubt. And actors, musicians, and gladiators became a danger to the peace of households, as well as to the peace of the streets. The artistes of the pantomime were sternly suppressed both by Tiberius and Domitian, and not without good cause. 7 One famous dancer had the fatal honour of captivating Messalina. 8 The empress of Domitian was divorced for her love of Paris. 9 And the scandals which darkened the fame of the younger Faustina, and impeached the legitimacy of Commodus, even if they were false, must have rested on a certain ground of probability 10 It is melancholy to hear that M. Aurelius had to restrain the excesses of Eoman matrons even under the reign of the philosophers. 11 To all these perils must be added the allure- ments of household slavery. While a Musonius or a Seneca 1 Suet. Octav. xliv. 6 Suet. Octav. xliv. 2 Ov. Ars Am. i. 139 Juv. vi. 62. Proximus a domina, nullo prohibente, sedeto. i a -n m-r 3 TrisL n 50 3_ 7 Suet. Dom. vn. ; Tib. xxxiv. Nee satis incestis temerari vocibus aures : ^- ^ ass - *- x - .22, 28. Adsueseunt oculi multa pudenda pati. Suet. Dom. iii. ; D. Cass. Ixvii. 3. Cf. 515. 10 Capitol. M. Anton, xix. 4 Mart. iii. 86 says of his poems u 1. xxiii. mores matronarum con- Non sunt haec mimis improbiora : lege. posuit diffluentes, etc. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 87 was demanding equal chastity in man and woman, the new woman of Juvenal boldly claims a vicious freedom equal to her husband's. 1 The testimony of Petronius is tainted by a suspicion of prurient imagination. But the student of other sources can hardly doubt that, in the first century, as in the fourth, the Eoman lady of rank sometimes degraded herself by a servile liaison. A decree of Vespasian's reign, which his biographer tells us was called for by the general licence, punished the erring matron with the loss of her rank. 2 These illustrations from other authorities may serve towards a judicial estimate of Juvenal's famous satire on women. That it is not a prurient invention is proved by the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius and the records of Roman morals for more than two centuries. On the other hand, it must be read with some reservations. Juvenal is a rhetorician with a fiery temperament, who will colour and exaggerate, if he will not invent. He is intensely prejudiced and conven- tional, a man to whom desertion of ancient usage is almost as bad as a breach of the moral law, a man incapable of seeing that the evils of a new social movement may be more than com- pensated by the good which it brings. Moreover, the graver vices which he depicts with so much realistic power were certainly not so general as he implies. It is to be suspected that single instances of abnormal depravity have swelled in his heated imagination till they have become types of whole classes of sinners. At the worst, these vices infected only a comparatively small class, idle, luxurious, enervated by the slave system, depraved by the example of a vicious court. The very scorn and indignation with which Juvenal pillories the aristocratic debauchee reveal the existence of a higher standard of virtue. Both the literature and the inscriptions of that age make us acquainted with a very different kind of woman. Over against the Hippia or Saufeia or Messalina of Juvenal we must set the pure and cultivated women whom we meet in the pages of Pliny or Tacitus, or the poor soldier's concubine in the Inscriptions, who has all the self-denying love and virtue of our own cottagers' wives. 3 1 Juv. vi. 281. junxisset ancilla haberetur ; cf. Mart. 2 Suet. Vesp. xi. auctor senatui fuit vi. 39 ; C. Th. iv. 9, 1. decernendi ut quae se alieno servo * Or. Henz. 2669, 4653, 7383. 88 SOCIAL LIFE book i Just as Juvenal misunderstood the movement of female emancipation, which was to culminate in the legislation of the Antonine age, so has he misconceived some other great social movements of his time. Two in particular, the invasion of the new Hellenism and the rise of the Freedmen, he anathematises with the scorn and old Roman prejudice of the elder Cato. There was nothing new in the invasion of Hellenism in the time of Juvenal. Nearly three hundred years before his day, the narrow conservatism of ancient Eome was assailed by the cosmopolitan culture of Hellas, which it alternately hated and admired. The knowledge of Greek was widely diffused in Italy in the time of the Hannibalic war. 1 Almost the last Eoman of the ancient breed stooped in his old age to learn Greek, in order to train his son in the culture of the world. 2 But there were two different aspects of Hellenism. There was the Hellenism represented by Homer and Plato and Chrysippus ; and there was the Hellenism of the low comic stage, of the pimp and parasite. And there were reactions against the lower Greek influences long before the days of Juvenal. Cicero, who did more than any man of his race to translate Greek thought into Eoman idiom, yet expressed as bitter a contempt as Juvenal's for the fickle, supple, histrionic Greek adventurer. 3 Juvenal is not waging war with that nobler Hellenism which had furnished models and inspiration to the great writers of the Augustan age, and which was destined to refashion Italian culture in the genera- tion following his death. The emperors, from Julius Caesar to M. Aurelius, were, with few exceptions, trained in the literature of Greece, and some of them gave a great impetus to Greek culture in the West. Augustus delighted in the Old Comedy, entertained Greek philosophers in his house, and sprinkled his private letters to Tiberius with Greek quotations. 4 Tiberius, although he had lived at Ehodes in his youth, seems to show less sympathy for the genius of Greece. 5 Caligula also can hardly be claimed as a Hellenist. Although he had once a wild dream of restoring the palace of Polycrates, and one, more sane, of a canal through the Corinthian Isthmus, he also 1 Momms. R. H. ii. 414 sqq. * Suet. Octav. 89 ; Tib. 21. J lb. 469 ; cf. Plut. Cato, xxiii. 5 Id. Tib. 71, sermone Graeco, quan- 8 Mahaffy, Greek World under quam alioquin promptus et facilis, non Roman Sway, p. 127. tamen usquequaque usus est. chap, n THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 89 thought of wiping out the memory of the poems of Homer. 1 Dr. Mahaffy is probably right in treating Claudius as the first really Hellenist emperor. 2 Like our own James I., Claudius was a learned and very ludicrous person. Yet he was perhaps not so contemptible a character as he is painted by Suetonius. He had, at any rate, the merit of being a lover of Greek litera- ture, 3 and he heaped honour on the country which gave it birth. 4 He used to quote Homer in his speeches in the Senate, and he composed histories in the Greek language, which, by an imperial ordinance, were to be read aloud regularly in the Museum of Alexandria. 5 In spite of the vices and pompous follies of Nero, his phil-Hellenism seems to have been a genuine and creditable impulse. His visits to the Greek festivals, and his share in the competitions, were not all mere vanity. He had a futile passion for fame as an artist, and he sought the applause of the race which had a real artistic tradition. 6 When we reach the plebeian Flavian race, Hellenism is still favoured. The bluff soldier, Vespasian, had an adequate com- mand of the Greek language, and was the first emperor who gave liberal endowments to Greek rhetoric. 7 His son Domitian, that puzzling enigma, the libertine who tried to revive the morality of the age of Cato, the man who was said, but most improbably, to confine his reading to the memoirs of Tiberius, founded a quinquennial festival, with competi- tions, on the Greek model, in music, gymnastic, and horseman- ship. By drawing on the inexhaustible stores of Alexandria, he also repaired the havoc which had been wrought in the Koman libraries by fire. 8 Already in Juvenal's life the brilliant sophistic movement had set in which was destined to carry the literary charm of Hellenism throughout the West. From the close of the first century there appeared in its full bloom that ingenious technique of style, that power of conquering all the difficulties of a worn-out or trifling subject, that delicate command of all varieties of rhythm, which carried the travelling sophist through a series of triumphs wherever he wandered. Classical Latin literature about the same time came 1 Suet. Caiig. xxi. xxxiv. 6 lb. xlii. 2 Mahaffy, The Greek World, p. 255. 8 Id - Nero > lv - erat mi aeternitatis c a. j tn perpetuaenue famae cupido. Cf. xxi v. Suet Claud. xIil * 7 F Id . y^ xviii . * lb. xxv. 8 Id. Dom. xx. 90 SOCIAL LIFE book i to a mysterious end. The only authors of any merit in the second century wrote in both languages indifferently. 1 And the great Emperor, who closes our period, preferred to leave his inner thoughts to posterity in Greek. Juvenal, however, was not thinking of this great literary movement. Like so many ci his literary predecessors, who had been formed by the loftier genius of the Greek past, like Plautus and Cicero, he vented his rage on a degenerate Hellenism. His shafts were levelled at the suttlers and camp- followers of the invading army from the East. The phenomena of Eoman social history are constantly repeating themselves for centuries. And one of the most curious examples of perpetuity of social sentiment is the hatred and scorn for the Greek or Levantine character, from the days of Plautus and the elder Cato to the days of the poet Claudian. 2 For more than 600 years, the Eoman who had borrowed his best culture, his polish and ideas from the Greek, was ready to sneer at the " Greekling." The conquerors of Macedon could never forgive their own conquest by Greek knowledge and versatility, by which old Eoman victories in the field had been avenged. And, as the pride of the imperial race grew with the con- sciousness of great achievements, the political degradation and economic decay of Greece and Greek-speaking lands produced a type of character which combined the old cleverness and keenness of intellect with the moral defects of an impoverished and subject race. Something of Eoman contempt for the Greek must be set down to that national prejudice and difference of temperament, which made our ancestors treat the great French nation, with all its brilliant gifts and immense contributions to European culture, as a race of posturing dancing-masters. 3 Such prejudices are generally more intense in the lower than in the upper and the cultivated classes. Juvenal, indeed, was a cultivated man, who knew Greek literature, and had been formed by Greek rhetors in the schools. But he was also a Eoman plebeian, with that pride of race which is often as deep in the plebeian as in the aristocrat. He gives voice to the 1 And many in the first century, Mackail, R. Lit. 232. Plin.^p.iv.3; viii.4, 1; Friedl.iii.360; 2 Plut. Cato, c. xxii. ; Claud. In Martha, Lea Moralistes sous I 'Empire Eutrop. ii. 137, 339. Rom. p. 267 ; Teutfel, R. Lit. 342 ; s Juv. iii. 85. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 91 feeling of his class when he indignantly laments that the true- born Eoman, whose infancy has drunk in the air of the Aventine, should have to yield place to the supple, fawning stranger, who has come with the same wind as the figs and prunes. The Orontes is pouring its pollutions into the Tiber. 1 Every trade and profession, from the master of the highest studies down to the rope-dancer and the pander, is crowded with hungry, keen-witted adventurers from the East. Every island of the Aegean, every city of Asia, is flooding Rome with its vices and its venal arts. 2 Quickness of intellect and depravity of morals, the brazen front and the ready tongue are driving into the shade the simple, unsophisticated honesty of the old Roman breed. At the morning receptions of the great patron, the poor Roman client, who has years of honest, quiet service to show, even the impoverished scion of an ancient consular line, are pushed aside by some sycophant from the Euphrates, 3 who can hardly conceal the brand of recent servitude upon him. These men, by their smooth speech, their effrontery and ready wit, their infinite capacity for assuming every mood and humouring every caprice of the patron, are creeping into the recesses of great houses, worming out their secrets, and. mastering their virtue. 4 Rome is becoming a Greek town, 5 in which there will soon be no place for Romans. Much of this indictment, as we have said, is the offspring of prejudice and temperament. But there was a foundation of truth under the declamation of Juvenal. The higher education of Roman youth had for generations been chiefly in the hands of men of Greek culture, from the days of Ennius and Crates of Mallus, before the third Punic War. 6 The tutor's old title literatus had early given place to that of grammaticus. 7 And, of the long line of famous grammatici commemorated by Suetonius, there are few who were not by origin or culture connected with the Greek east. Most of them had been freedmen of savants or great nobles. 8 Some had 1 Juv. iii. 62 sqq. Suet. III. Oram. i. ii. antiquissimi 2 lb. iii. 69-77. doctorum qui iidem et poetae et semi- * lb. i. 104. graeci erant (Livium et Ennium dico), * lb. iii. 72, viscera magnarum etc.; Strab. vL 3, 5 ; A. Gell. xvii. 17, i. domuum dominique futuri. 7 Suet. III. Oram. iv. 5 lb. iii. 60. 8 lb. xx. xix. xvi. xv. 92 SOCIAL LIFE book i actually been bought in the slave market. 1 The profession was generally ill-paid and enjoyed little consideration, and it was often the last resort of those who had failed in other and not more distinguished callings. Orbilius, the master of Horace, had been an attendant in a public office. 2 Others had been pugilists or low actors in pantomime. 8 Q. Remmius Palaemon, whose vices made him infamous in the reign of Tiberius and Claudius, had been a house -slave, and was originally a weaver. 4 He educated himself while attending his young master at school, and by readiness, versatility, and arrogant self-assertion, rose to an income of more than 4000 a year. Sometimes they attained to rank and fortune by being entrusted with the tuition of the imperial children. 5 But the grammarian, to the very end, as a rule never escaped the double stigma of doubtful origin and of poverty. The medical profession, according to the elder Pliny, was a Greek art which was seldom practised by Romans. 6 Julius Caesar, by giving civic rights to physicians from Egypt and Hellenic lands, 7 while he raised the status of the medical calling, also stimulated the immigration of foreign practitioners. The rank and fortune attained by the court physicians of the early Caesars, Antonius Musa, the Stertinii, 8 and others, which almost rivalled the medical successes of our own day, seemed to offer a splendid prize. Yet the profession was generally in low repute. 9 It was long recruited from the ranks of old slaves, and men of the meanest callings. Carpenters and smiths and undertakers flocked into it, often with only a training of six months. 10 Galen found most of his medical brethren utterly illiterate, and recommends them to pay a little attention to grammar in dealing with their patients. 11 They compounded in their own shops, and touted for practice. 12 They called in the aid of spells and witchcraft to reinforce their drugs. We need not believe all the coarse insinuations of Martial against their morality, any more than the sneers of Petronius against 1 Suet. III. Gram. xiii. Staberius ... 7 Suet. Jul. Goes. xlii. emptus de catasta. 8 D. Cass. liii. 30 ; Plin. H.N. xxix. 2 lb. xiii. 4 ; Or. Henz. 2983. Th Tviii "rrii'l ' Juv - x - 221 i Petron. 42 ; D. Cass. 4 /' * . XX1U - lxxi. 33 ; lxix. 22 ; Mart. ii. 16 ; v. 9 ; 10 xxm. vi. 31 ; vi. 53 ; Tac. Ann. xi. 31, 35. lb. xvii. ; cf. Qumtihan, iv. Prooem. io Mart. i. 31 ; i. 48 viii. 74 2 ; cf. Juv. viii. 186-97. n Yrieil.' Sittengesch. i. 231. ' Plin. H.N. xxix. 17. u Epict. iii. 23, 30, 27. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 93 their skill. But we are bound to conclude that the profession held a very different place in public esteem from that which it enjoys and deserves in our own time. Astrology, which was the aristocratic form of divination, and involved in many a dark intrigue of the early Empire, was a Greek as well as a Chaldaean art. The name of the practitioner often reveals his nationality. The Seleucus x and Ptolemaeus who affected to guide the fate of Otho, and the Ascletarion of Domitian's reign, 2 are only representatives of a nameless crowd. And their strange power is seen in that tale of a Greek diviner, Pammenes, in the last years of Nero, whose horoscopes led to the tragic end of P. Anteius and Ostorius Scapula. 3 In other countless arts of doubtful repute, which ministered to the pleasure or amusement of the crowd, the Greek was always an adept. But it was his success as a courtier and accom- plished flatterer of the great, which chiefly roused the scornful hatred of Juvenal and his fellows. The " adulandi gens pru- dentissima," would hardly have been guilty of the simple and obvious grossness of flattery which the rhetoric of Juvenal attributes to them. 4 They knew their trade better than the Eoman plebeian. It was an old and highly rewarded profes- sion in Greece, and had often been the theme of Greek moralists. Plutarch wrote an elaborate treatise on the difference between the sycophant and the true friend, in which he seems almost to exhaust the wily resources of the pretender. Lucian, with his delicate irony, seems almost to raise the Greek skill in adulation to the level of a fine art. 5 And the polished and versatile Greek, with his lively wit, his delicate command of expression, his cool audacity, and his unscrupulousness, was a formidable rival of the coarser Eoman parasite celebrated in Latin comedy. We can well imagine that the young Greek, fresh from the schools of Ionia, was a livelier companion at dinner than the proud Eoman man of letters who snatched the dole and disdained himself for receiving it. There is perhaps no phase of Eoman society in Domitian's day which we know more intimately than the life of the client. It is photographed, in all its sordid slavery, by both Juvenal and Martial. And Martial himself is perhaps the best example 1 Suet. Otho, iv. vi. 8 Tac. Ann. xvi. 14. 2 Id. Dom. xiv. xv. ; cf. Tib. xiv. ; 4 Juv. iii. 100. Nero, xxxvi. s Luc. De Merc. Cond. c. 16, 19. 94 SOCIAL LIFE book i of a man of genius submitting, with occasional intervals of proud rebellion. 1 to a degradation which in our eyes no poverty- could excuse. The client of the eai'ly Empire was a totally different person from the client of Eepublican times. In the days of freedom, the tie of patron and client was rather that of clansman and chief; it was justified by political aud social necessity, and ennobled by feelings of loyalty and mutual obligation. Under the Empire, the relation was tainted by the selfish materialism of the age ; it had seldom any trace of sentiment. The rich man was expected to have a humble train of dependents to maintain his rank and con- sequence. There was a host of needy people ready to do him such service. The hungry client rushed to his patron's morning reception, submitted to all his coldness and caprice, or to the insolence of his menials, followed his chair through the streets, and ran on his errands, for the sake of a miserable alms in money or in kind. 2 The payment was sometimes supplemented by a cast-off cloak, or an invitation at the last moment to fill a place at dinner, when perhaps it could not be accepted. 3 In the train which the great man gathered about him, to swell his importance, were to be seen, not only the starving man of letters, the loafer and mere mendicant, but the sons of ruined houses " sprung from Troy," and even senators and men of consular rank who had a clientele of their own. 4 Nothing throws a more lurid light on the economic condition of Italy in the time of the early Empire than this form of pensioned dependence. The impression which we derive from Juvenal and Martial is that of a society divided between a small class of immensely wealthy people, and an almost starving proletariat. 5 Poverty seems almost universal, except in the freedman class, who by an industrial energy and speculative daring, which were despised by the true - born Eoman, were now rapidly rising to opulence. The causes* of this plebeian indigence can only be glanced at here. The. agricultural revolution, which ruined the small freeholders and created the plantation system, 6 had driven great numbers of 1 Mart. i. 104, ii. 68. 4 Juv. i. 100 2 Juv. i. 100 ; v. 17 ; Mart. xii. 18 Jubet a praecone vocari Dum per limina te potentiorum I P S0S Trojugenas. Sudatrix toga ventilat, etc. ; B Mart. ii. 43; iii. 38, 12, pallet cetera iii. 7, 36 ; Suet. Nero, xvi ; Dom. vii. turba fame ; Juv. iii. 153, 161 ; xi. 40. Mart ii. 79 ; Juv. v. 17. 6 Momms. R. H. ii. 374 (Tr.). chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 95 once prosperous farmers to the capital, to depend on the granaries of the State, or on the charity of a wealthy patron. Such men were kept in poverty and dependence hy that general contempt for trade and industrial pursuits which always pre- vails in a slave-owning society. Many of the greatest families had been reduced to poverty by proscription and confiscation. A great noble might be keeping sheep on a Laurentine farm, if he could not win a pension from the grace of the Emperor. At the same time, from various causes, what we should call the liberal professions, with the doubtful exception of medicine, tortured those engaged in them by the contrast between ambitious hopes and the misery of squalid poverty. " Make your son an auctioneer or an undertaker rather than an advocate or a man of letters " is the advice of Martial and Juvenal, and of the shrewd vulgar guests of Trimalchio. 1 Any mean and malodorous trade will be more lucrative than the greatest knowledge and culture. The rich literary amateur, who should have been a Maecenas, in that age became an author himself, composed his own Thebaid or Codrid, and would only help the poor man of genius by the loan of an unfurnished hall for a reading. 2 The unabashed mendicancy of Martial shows the mean straits to which the genuine literary man was reduced. 3 The historian will not earn as much as the reader of the Acta Diurnal It is the same with education. What costs the father least is the train- ing of his son. The man who will expend a fortune on his baths and colonnades, can spare a Quintilian only a fraction of what he will give for a pastry cook. 5 The grammarian, who is expected to be master of all literature, will be lucky if he receives as much for the year as a charioteer gains by a single victory. 6 If the rhetor, weary of mock battles, descends into the real arena of the courts, he fares no better. 7 The bar is overcrowded by men to whom no other career of ambition is open, by old informers who find their occupation gone, by the sons of noble houses who parade the glory of their ancestors in order to attract vulgar clients. They are carried in a litter, surrounded by 1 Mart. iv. 5 ; v. 56 2 Juv. vii. 38 sqq. Artes discere vult pecuniosas ? a Mart. ii. 43; iv. 40; v. 42, quas Fac discat citharoedus aut ctaoraules. rlpdpris solas spmnpr hahfihis nnps 8i duri puer Ingeni videtur, cledens, solas semper naDeDis opes. Praeconera facias, vel architectum ; Juv. vn. 104. Jut. vii. 104 ; x. 226 ; Petron. 46, 5 lb. vii. 180. destinavi ilium artificii docere, aut 6 lb. vii. ad fin. tonstreinum aut praeconem etc. 7 lb. vii. 121 sqq. 96 SOCIAL LIFE book i slaves and dependents, down to the courts of the Centum- viri. The poor pleader must hire or borrow purple robes and jewelled rings, if he is to compete with them. And in the end, lie may find his honorarium for a day's hard pleading to be a leg of pork, a jar of tunnies, or a few flasks of cheap wine. In this materialised society all the prizes go to the coarser qualities ; there is nothing but neglect and starvation before taste and intellect. And poverty is punished by being forced to put on the show of wealth. 1 That stately person in violet robes who stalks through the forum, or reclines in a freshly decorated chair, followed by a throng of slaves, has just pawned his ring to buy a dinner 2 That matron, who has sold the last pieces of her ancestral plate, will hire splendid dress, a sedan chair, and a troop of attendants, to go in proper state to the games. 3 Thus you have the spectacle of a society divided between the idle, luxurious rich and the lazy, hungry poor, who imitate all the vices of the rich, and although too proud to work, are not ashamed to borrow or to beg. In such a society, where the paths of honest industry seemed closed to the poor, or as yet undiscovered, the great problem was how to secure without labour a share of the wealth which was monopolised by the few. The problem was solved by the obsequiousness of the client, or by the arts of the will-hunter. Owing to celibacy and vice, childlessness in that age was extra- ordinarily common in the upper class. In a society of " ambi- tious poverty," a society where poverty was unable, or where it disdained, to find the path to competence through honest toil, the wealthy, without natural heirs, offered a tempting prey to the needy adventurer. Captation by every kind of mean flattery, or vicious service, became a recognised profession. In the Croton of Petronius there are only two classes, the rich and the sycophant, the hunters and the hunted. 4 Even men of high position, with no temptation from want, would stoop to this detestable trade. 5 And the social tone which tolerated the captator, made it almost an honour to be beset on a sick bed by these rapacious sycophants. One of the darkest and most repulsive features in that putrescent society was the 1 Juv. iii. 182; Martha, Moralistes * Petron. 116, in hac urbe nemo tons VEmp. p. 400. liberos tollit . . . aut captantur aut 2 Mart. ii. 57. captant. 3 Juv. vi. 353. e.g. Regulus, Plin. Ep. ii. 20. / chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 97 social value which attached to a vicious and shameful child- lessness. A morose and unlovely old age could thus gather around it a little court of dependents and pretended friends, such as a career of great achievement would hardly attract. There have been few more loathsome characters than the polished hypocrite by the sick-bed of his prey, shedding tears of feigned sympathy, while with eager eyes he is noting every symptom of the approaching end. 1 Juvenal and Petronius, the embittered plebeian, and the cynical, fastidious epicure of Nero's court, alike treat their age as utterly corrupted and vulgarised by the passion for money; " inter nos sanctissima divitiarum Majestas." 2 No virtue, no gifts, no eminence of service, will be noticed in the poor. 8 A great fortune will conceal the want of talent, sense, or common decency. Everything is forgiven to the master of money bags, even the brand of the slave prison. 4 In Juvenal and Martial probably the most resonant note is the cry of the poor " How long." Yet, after all, it is not a fierce cry of revolt ; against that highly organised and centralised society the dis- inherited never dreamed of rebellion, even when the Goths were under the walls. It is rather an appeal, though often a bitter and angry appeal, for pity and a modest share in a wasted abundance. In the poems of Juvenal and Martial, as in the sentiment of the colleges and municipalities for generations, the one hope for the mass of helpless indigence lay in awaking the generosity and charity of the rich. The rich, as we shall see in another chapter, admitted the obligation, and responded to the claim, often in the most lavish fashion. A long line of emperors not only fed the mob of the capital, but squandered the resources of the State in providing gross and demoralising amusements for them. 5 Under the influence of the Stoic teaching of the brotherhood of man and the duty of mutual help, both private citizens and benevolent princes, from Nero to M. Aurelius, created charitable foundations for the orphan and the 1 Jut. xii. 100 ; i. 36 ; Mart. v. 39 ; B Suet. Octav. xliii.-v. ; Calig. xviiL; Plin. Ep. ii. 20 ; Petron. 140. Claud, xxi.; Nero, xi. xii.; Titus, vii.; * Jut. i. 112 ; Petron. 88, pecuniae ?"* iv " X D - n Ca * 8 - 65 ' 25 '> S P a *- cnpiditas haec tropica instituit. ^ . v ' A D / "* , 68 : 10 > c 15 J Capitol. M. Anton, vi. ; but cp. Suet. 8 Juv. iii. 164. Tib. xlvii. ; Tac. Hut. ii. 62 ; D. Cass. * lb. 131, 103 ; i. 26 ; iT. 98; Mart. 66. 15 ; Suet. Octav. xliv. ; D. Cass, ii. 29 ; iii. 29 ; t. 13, 35. 54. 2 ; 68. 2 ; Capitol. Anton. P. xii, H 98 SOCIAL LIFE book i needy. 1 Public calamities were relieved again and again by imperial aid and private charity. 2 The love of wealth was strong, but a spirit of benevolence was in the air, even in the days of Juvenal ; and the constant invectives of poet or philo- sopher against wealth and luxury are not so much the sign of a growing selfishness, as of a spreading sense of the duty of the fortunate to the miserable. Although the literary men seem never to have thought of any economic solution of the social problem, through the tapping of fresh sources of wealth from which all might draw, yet there can be no doubt that there was, at least in provincial cities, a great industrial movement in the Antonine age, which gave wealth to some, and a respectable competence to many. The opulent freedman and the contented artisan have left many a memorial in the inscriptions. Yet the movement had not solved the social problem in the days of Lucian, as it has not solved it after seventeen centuries. The cry of the poor against the selfish rich, which rings in the ears of the detached man of letters at the end of the Antonine age, will still ring in the ears of the ascetic Salvianus, when the Germans have passed the Khine. 8 The scorn and hatred of Juvenal for wealth and its vices is natural to a class which was too proud to struggle out of poverty, by engaging in the industries which it despised. And the freed- man, who occupied the vacant field, and rose to opulence, is even more an object of hatred to Juvenal and Martial than the recreant noble or the stingy patron. He was an alien of servile birth, and he had made himself wealthy by the usual method of thinking of nothing but gold. These men, who were not even free Eomans, had mastered the power which commands the allegiance of the world. The rise of this new class to wealth and importance probably irritated men of Juvenal's type more than any other sign of social injustice in their time. And the Trimalchio of Petronius, a man of low, tainted origin, the creature of economic accident, whose one faith is in the power of money, who boasts of his fortune as if it had been won by real talent or honourable 1 Victor. Epit. 12 ; Spart. Hadr. vii. Bel. Rom. ii. 208 ; cf. Plin. Ep. ix. 30. 12 .i. Q& V to h M ' i^f" * xv h.'J nL 2 Tac. Ann. xiv. 62 ; ii. 47, 48. P. vm. ; D. Cass. 68. 5 ; Orelh Hem. ' 4365, 7244 ; Friedlander, Fetron. Ein- s Salv. De Gub. Dei, v. 30 ; Ad leit. 49 ; Duruy, v.429 ; iv. 737; Boissier, Eccles. iv. 22. chap, ii THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST 99 service, who expends it with coarse ostentation and a ludicrous affectation of cultivated taste, may be tolerated in literature, if not in actual life, for the charm of a certain kindly bon- homie and honest vulgarity, which the art of Petronius has thrown around him. Yet, after all, we must concede to Juvenal and Martial, that such a person is always a some- what unpleasing social product. But the subject is so im- portant that it claims a chapter to itself. And, fortunately for us and our readers, the new freedmen were not all of the type of Trimalchio. CHAPTER III THE SOCIETY OF THE FKEEDMEN The historian, who is occupied with war and politics, and the fate of princes and nobles, is apt to lose sight of great silent movements in the dim masses of society. And, in the history of the early Empire, the deadly conflict between the Emperor and the Senate, the carnival of luxury, and the tragic close of so many reigns, have diverted attention from social changes of. immense moment. Not the least important of these was the rise of the freedmen, in the face of the most violent prejudice, both popular and aristocratic. And literature has thrown its whole weight on the side of prejudice, and given full vent alike to the scorn of the noble, and to the hate and envy of the plebeian. The movement, indeed, was so swift and far spread- ing that old conservative instincts might well be alarmed. Everywhere in the inscriptions freedmen are seen rising to wealth and consequence throughout the provinces, as well as in Italy, and winning popularity and influence by profuse benefactions to colleges and municipalities. In almost every district of the Koman Empire the order of the Augustales, which was composed to a great extent of wealthy freedmen, 1 has left its memorials. " Ereedman's wealth " in Martial's day had become a proverb. 2 Not only are they crowding all the meaner trades, from which Eoman pride shrank contemptu- ously, but, by industry, shrewdness, and speculative daring, they are becoming great capitalists and landowners on a senatorial scale. The Trimalchio of Petronius, who has not 1 On the Augustales v. Or ell. Rem. Seviris Augustalibus. ii. p. 197 ; iii. p. 427 ; Friedlander, 2 v. 13, 6, et libertinas area flagel- Cena Trim. Einl. p. 39 ; Marq. Rom. lat opes ; cf. Sen. Ep. 27, 5, patri- Staatsverw. i. 513 sqq. ; Nessling, Be monium libertini. 100 chap, in THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN 101 even seen some of his estates, 1 if we allow for some artistic exaggeration, is undoubtedly the representative of a great class. In the reign of Nero, a debate arose in the Senate on the insolence and misconduct of freedmen. 2 And it was argued by those opposed to any violent measures of repression, that the class was widely diffused ; they were found in over- whelming numbers in the city tribes, in the lower offices of the civil service, in the establishments of the magistrates and priests ; a considerable number even of the knights and Senate drew their origin from this source. If freedmen were marked off sharply as a separate grade, the scanty numbers of the freeborn would be revealed. In the reigns of Claudius and Nero especially, freedmen rose to the highest places in the imperial service, sometimes by unquestionable knowledge, tact, and ability, sometimes by less creditable arts. The promotion of a Narcissus or a Pallas was also a stroke of policy, the assertion of the prince's independence of a jealous nobility. The rule of the freedmen was a bitter memory to the Senate. 3 The scorn of Pliny for Pallas expresses the long pent-up feelings of his order; it is a belated vengeance for the humiliation they endured in the evil days when they heaped ridiculous flattery on the favourite, and voted him a fortune and a statue. 4 Some part of the joy with which the accession of Trajan was hailed by the aristo- cracy was due to the hope that the despised interlopers would be relegated to their proper obscurity. Tacitus is undoubtedly glancing at the Claudian regime when he grimly congratulates the Germans on the fact that their freedmen are little above the level of slaves, that they have seldom any power in the family, and never in the State. 6 It shows the immense force of old Koman conservatism and of social prejudice which is the same from age to age, when men so cultivated, yet of such widely different tempera- ment and associations as Pliny and Tacitus, Juvenal and Martial 6 and Petronius, denounce or ridicule an irresistible social movement. We can now see that the rise of the 1 Petron. Sat. 48. 8 Tac. Germ. 25, liberti non multuni 2 Tac. Ann. xiii. 27, si separarentur supra servos sunt, raro aliquod momen- libertini manifestam fore penuriam turn in domo, nunquam in civitate. ingenuorum. * Plin. Pwneg. 88. 8 Mart. ii. 29 ; iii. 29 ; xi. 37 ; iii. * Id. Ep. vii. 29 ; viii. 6. 82 ; v. 14. 102 SOCIAL LIFE book i emancipated slave was not only inevitable, but that it was, on the whole, salutary and rich in promise for the future. The slave class of antiquity really corresponded to our free labouring class. But, unlike the mass of our artisans, it contained many who, from accident of birth and education, had a skill and knowledge which their masters often did not possess. 1 The slaves who came from the ancient seats of civilisation in the East are not to be compared with the dark gross races who seem to be stamped by nature as of an inferior breed. This frequent mental and moral equality of the Eoman slave with his master had forced itself upon men of the detached philosophic class, like Seneca, and on kindly aristocrats, like Pliny. 2 It must have been hard to sit long hours in the library beside a cultivated slave-amanuensis, or to discuss the management of lands and mines and quarries with a shrewd, well-informed slave-agent, or to be charmed by the grace and wit of some fair, frail daughter of Ionia, without having some doubts raised as to the eternal justice of such an institution. Nay, it is certain that slaves were often treated as friends, 3 and received freedom and a liberal bequest at their master's death. Many educated slaves, as we have seen, rose to distinction and fortune as teachers and physicians. 4 But the field of trade and industry was the most open and the most tempting. The Senator was forbidden, down to the last age of the Empire, both by law and sentiment, to increase his fortune by commerce. 5 The plebeian, saturated with Eoman prejudice, looking for support to the granaries of the state or the dole of the wealthy patron, turned with disdain from occupations which are in our days thought innocent, if not honourable. Juvenal feels almost as much scorn for the auctioneer and undertaker as he has for the pander, and treats almost as a criminal the merchant who braves the wintry Aegean with a cargo of wine from Crete. 6 His friend Umbricius, worsted in the social struggle, and preparing to quit Eome for a retreat in Campania, among the other objects of his plebeian scorn, is 1 Suet. 111. Oram. xiii.,xvii., xx.; cf. humiles amici. Cf. Macrob. Sat. i. Marq. Priv. i. 158. 11, 12 ; Eurip. Ion, 854 ; Helen. 730 ; 2 Sen. Ep. 47, 1 ; Be Clem. i. 18, Wallon, L'Esdav. iii 22. 3 ; De Ben. iii. 21 ; Ep. 77, 31 ; Plin. 4 v. supra, p. 92. Ep. viii. 16, 1 ; iii 19, 7 ; ii. 17, 9 ; 6 D. Cass. 69. 16; C. Th. xiii. 1, 21 ; cf. Juv. xiv. 16. Friedl. Sittengesch. i 197. 3 Sen. Ep. 47, servi sunt, immo 6 Juv. xiv. 270. chap, in THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN 103 specially disgusted with the low tribe who contract for the building of a house, or who farm the dues of a port or under- take to cleanse a river-bed. 1 There is no room left in Eome for men who will not soil themselves with such sordid trades. Manifestly, if the satirist is not burlesquing the feeling of his class, there was plenty of room left for the vigorous freedman who could accept Vespasian's motto that no gain is unsavoury. 2 But those men had not only commercial tact and ability, the wit to see where money was to be made by seizing new open- ings and unoccupied fields for enterprise ; they had also among them men of great ambitions, men capable of great affairs. It required no common deftness, suppleness, and vigilant energy for an old slave to work his way upwards through the grades of the imperial chancery, to thread the maze of deadly intrigue, in the reigns of Claudius or Nero, and to emerge at last as master of the palace. Yet one of these freedmen ministers, when he died, had served ten emperors, six of whom had come to a violent end. 3 That a class so despised and depressed should rise to control the trade, and even the administration of the Empire, furnishes a presumption that they were needed, and that they were not unworthy of their destiny. Yet however inevitable, or even desirable, this great revolu- tion may seem to the cool critic of the twentieth century, it is possible that, had he lived in the first, he might have denounced it as vigorously as JuvenaL The literary and artistic spirit, often living in a past golden age, and remotely detached from the movements going on around it, is prone to regard them with uneasy suspicion. It is moved by sacred sentiment, by memories and distant ideals, by fastidious taste, which expresses itself often with passionate hatred for what seems to it revolutionary sacrilege. It is also apt to fasten on the more grotesque and vulgar traits of any great popular movement, and to use a finished skill in making it ridiculous. It was in this way that literature treated the freedmen. They had many gross and palpable faults ; they were old slaves and Orientals ; as they rose in the world they were eager for money, and they got it ; they were, many of them, naturally vulgar, and they paraded their new wealth with execrable taste, and 1 Jav. iii. 32. s Suet. Vesp. xxiii. nmtata ducum juga rite tuliati In- * Stat. Silv. iii. 3, 83, Tu toties teger, etc. 104 SOCIAL LIFE book i trampled on better, though poorer, men than themselves. Juvenal and Martial, by birth and associations, have little in common with that accomplished exquisite of the Neronian circle who has painted with the power of careless genius the household of the "parvenu Trimalchio. Yet they have an equal scorn or detestation for the new man who was forcing his way from the lowest debasement of servile life to fortune and power. But the embittered man of letters, humiliated by poverty, yet brimful of Eoman pride, avenges his ideals with a rougher, heavier hand than the Epicurean noble, who had joined in the " Noctes Neronis " with a delicate, scornful cynicism, who was too disillusioned, and too fastidiously con- temptuous, to waste anger on what he despised. Juvenal would blast and wither the objects of his hatred. Petronius takes the surer method of making these people supremely ridiculous. The feeling of men like Juvenal and Martial is a mixture of contempt and envy and outraged taste. The Grub Street man of letters in those days despised plodding industry because he dearly loved fits of idleness; he hated wealth because he was poor. The polished man of the world was alternately amused and disgusted by the spectacle of sudden fortune accumulated by happy chance or unscrupulous arts, with no tradition of dignity to gild its grossness, yet affecting and burlesquing the tastes of a world from which it was separated by an impassable gulf. There is more moral sentiment, more old Eoman feeling, in the declamation of Juvenal than in the cold artistic scorn of the Satiricon ; there is also more personal and class feeling. The triumph of mere money is to Juvenal a personal affront as well as a moral catastrophe. Poverty now makes a man ridiculous. 1 It blocks the path of the finest merit. The rich freedman who claims the foremost place at a levde is equally objectionable because he was born on the Euphrates, and because he is the owner of five taverns which yield HS.400,000 a year. 2 The im- poverished knight must quit his old place on the benches to make way for some auctioneer or pimp, some old slave from the Nile who stalks in with purple robes and bejewelled fingers, and hair reeking with unguents. 3 The only refuge 1 Juv. iii. 153, Nil habet infelix 2 Id. i. 104. paupertas durius in se, Quam quod 3 Id. i. 26 ; iv. 108. ridiculos homines facit ; 164. chap, in THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN 105 will soon be some half-deserted village on old-fashioned Sabine ground, where the country folk sit side by side in the same white tunics with their aediles in the grassy theatre. 1 It is evident from Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius that the popular hostility to the new men was partly the result of envy at their success, partly of disgust at their parade of it. Juvenal and Martial are often probably dressing up the rough epigrams of the crowd. We can almost hear the contemptu- ous growl as one of these people, suspected of a dark crime, sweeps by in his downy sedan. That other noble knight used to hawk the cheap fish of his native Egypt, and now possesses a palace towering over the Forum, with far-spreading colonnades and acres of shady groves. 2 A eunuch minister has reared a pile which out-tops the CapitoL 3 Fellows who used to blow the horn in the circus of country towns now give gladiatorial shows themselves. 4 Prejudice or envy may not improbably have invented some of the tales of crime and turpitude by which these fortunes had been won. Eome was a city of poisonous rumour. Yet slavery was not a nursery of virtue, and the Satiricon leaves the impression that the emancipated slave too often imitated the vices of his master. The poisoner, the perjurer, the minion, were probably to be found in the rising class. After their kind in all ages, they looked down with vulgar insolence on those less fortunate or more scrupulous. When they rose to the highest place, the imperial freedmen were often involved in peculation and criminal intrigue. 6 Yet, after all reservations, the ascent of the freedmen remains a great and beneficent revolution. The very reasons which made Juvenal hate it most are its best justification to a modern mind. It gave hope of a future to the slave ; by creating a free industrial class, it helped to break down the cramped social ideal of the slave-owner and the soldier ; it planted in every municipality a vigorous mercantile class, who were often excellent and generous citizens. Above all, it asserted the dignity of man. The vehement iteration of Juvenal is the best testimony to the sweep and force of the movement. And 1 Juv. iii. 173. * Juv. iii. 34 sqq. 2 Id. iv. 5, 23 ; viL 180. B Tac. Ann. xi. 37 ; xii. 25, 65 ; 8 Id. xiv. 91, Ut spado vincebat xi. 29 ; Suet. Odav. lxvii. ; D. Cass. Capitolia nostra Posides ; cf. Suet. lix. 29. \ Claud, xxviii. ; Plin, S.N. xxxL 2. 106 SOCIAL LIFE book i the later student of Roman society cannot afford to neglect a great social upheaval which, in an aristocratic society, domin- ated by pride of class and race, made an Oriental slave first minister of the greatest monarchy in history, while it placed men of servile origin in command of nearly all the industrial arts and commerce of the time. The reign of the freedman in public affairs began with the foundation of the Empire, when Julius Caesar installed some of his household as officers of the mint. 1 The emperor in the first century was, theoretically at least, only the first citizen, and his household was modelled on the fashion of other great houses. In the management of those vast senatorial estates, which were often scattered over three continents, there was need of an elaborate organisation, and freedmen of educa- tion and business capacity were employed to administer such private realms. And in the organisation of a great house- hold, there was a hierarchy of office which offered a career to the shrewd and trustworthy slave. Many such careers can be traced in the inscriptions, from the post of valet or groom of the bedchamber, through the offices of master of the jewels and the wardrobe, superintendent of the carriages or the vine- yards, up to the highest financial control. 2 During the first century the same system was transferred to the imperial administration. It suited the cautious policy of Augustus to disguise his vast powers under the quiet exterior of an ordinary noble; and the freedmen of his household carried on the business of the State. He sternly punished any excesses or treachery among his servants. 3 Tiberius gave them little power, until his character began to deteriorate. 4 Under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, the imperial freedmen attained their greatest ascendency. Callistus, Narcissus, and Pallas rose to the rank of great ministers, and, in the reign of Claudius, were practically masters of the world. They accumulated enormous wealth by abusing their power, and making a traffic in civic rights, in places or pardons. Polyclitus, who was sent to compose the troubles in Britain in 61 a.d., travelled with an enormous train, and gave the provinces an exhibition of the arrogance of their servile masters. 5 1 Suet. Jul. Caes. lxxvi. ; cf. Friedl. 8 Suet. Oetav. Ixvii. Sittengesch. i. 56 sqq. 4 Tac. Ann. iv. 6. 2 For such a career cf. Or. Hem. 6344. 6 lb. xiv. 39. chap, in THE SOCIETY OF THE FREE DM EN 107 Helius was left to cprry on the government during Nero's theatrical travels, and the exhibitions of his artistic skill in Greece. 1 Galba put to death two of the great freedmen of Nero's reign, but himself fell under the influence of others as corrupt and arrogant, and he showered the honours of rank on the infamous Icelus. 2 It is curious that it was left for Vitellius to break the reign of the freedmen by assigning offices in the imperial bureaux to the knights, the policy which was said to have been recommended by Maecenas, 3 and which was destined to prevail in the second century. But the change was very incomplete, and the brief tragic reign of Vitellius was dis- graced by the ascendency for a time of his minion Asiaticus, whom the Emperor raised to the highest honours, then sold into a troop of wandering gladiators, and finally received back again into freedom and favour. 4 The policy of the Flavian dynasty in the employment of freedmen is rather ambiguous. Vespasian is charged with having elevated Hormus, a dis- reputable member of the class, and with having appointed to places of trust the most rapacious agents. 5 But this is probably a calumny of the Neronian and Othonian circle who defamed their conqueror. Under Domitian, the freedmen, Entellus and Abascantus, held two of the great secretaryships. But it is distinctly recorded that Domitian distributed offices impartially between the freedmen and the knights. 6 On the accession of Trajan, Pliny, in his Panegyric, exults in the fall of the freedmen from the highest place. 7 Yet Hadrian is said to have procured his selection as emperor by carefully cultivating the favour of Trajan's freedmen. Hadrian, in reorganising the imperial administration, and founding the bureaucratic system, which was finally elaborated by Diocletian and Con- stantine, practically confined the tenure of the three great secretaryships to men of equestrian rank. Among his sec- retaries was the historian Suetonius. 8 Antoninus Pius severely repressed men of servile origin in the interest of pure 1 Suet. Nero, xxiii. 4 Suet. Vitell. xii. 5 Id. Vesp. xvi. 2 D. Cass. lxiv. 3 ; Suet. Galba, xiv. ; 6 Id. Dom. vii. quaedam ex maximis Plut. Galba, c. 17. officiis inter libertinos equitesque com- * D. Cass. lii. 25 ; Tac. Hist. i. 58, municavit. Vitellius ministeria principatus per 7 Plin. Paneg. 88. libertos agi solita in equites Romanos 8 Spart. Hadr. iv., xxi. ; Mac6, disponit. Suttone, p. 91. 108 SOCIAL LIFE book i administration ; 1 but they regained some influence for a time under M. Aurelius, and rose still higher under his infamous son. The position of freedmen in the imperial administration was partly, as we have seen, a tradition of aristocratic house- holds. The emperor employed his freedmen to write his despatches and administer the finances of the Empire, as he would have used them to write his private letters or to manage his private estates. But, in the long conflict between the prince and the Senate, the employment of trusted freedmen in imperial affairs was also a measure of policy. It was meant to teach the nobles that the Empire could be administered without their aid. 2 Nor was the confidence of the Emperor in his humble subordinates unjustified. The eulogies of the great freedmen in Seneca and Statius, even if they be ex- aggerated, leave the impression that a Polybius, a Claudius Etruscus, or an Abascantus were, in many respects, worthy of their high place. The provinces were, on the whole, well governed and happy in the very years when the capital was seething with conspiracy, and racked with the horrors of con- fiscation and massacre. This must have been chiefly due to the knowledge, tact, and ability of the great officials of the palace. Although of servile origin, they must have belonged to that considerable class of educated slaves who, along with the versatility and tact of the Hellenic East, brought to their task also a knowledge and a literary and linguistic skill which were not common among Roman knights. The three imperial secretaryships, a rationibus, a libellis, and db epistulis, covered a vast field of administration, and the duties of these great ministries could only have been performed by men of great industry, talent, and diplomatic adroitness. 3 The Polybius to whom Seneca, from his exile in Sardinia, wrote a con- solatory letter on the death of his brother, was the successor of Callistus, as secretary of petitions, in the reign of Claudius, and also the emperor's adviser of studies. Seneca magnifies the dignity, and also the burden, of his great rank, which demands an abnegation of all the ordinary pleasures of life. 4 A man has no time to indulge a private grief who has to study and arrange for the Emperor's decision thousands of appeals, 1 Capitol. Ant. P. vi., xi. 8 lb. i. p. 83. 2 Friedl. Sittengesck. i. 56. 4 Sen. Ad Polyb. vi. vii. chap, in THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN 109 coming from every quarter of the world. Yet this busy man could find time for literary work, and his translations from the Greek are lauded by the philosopher with an enthusiasm of which the cruelty of time does not allow us to estimate the value. 1 The panegyric on Claudius Etruscus, composed by Statius, records an even more remarkable career. 2 Claudius Etruscus died at the age of eighty, in the reign of Domitian, having served in various capacities under ten emperors, 3 six of whom had died by a violent death. It was a strangely romantic life, to which we could hardly find a parallel in the most democratic community in modern times. Claudius, a Smyrniote slave, 4 in the household of Tiberius, was eman- cipated and promoted by that Emperor. He followed the train of Caligula to Gaul, 5 rose to higher rank under Claudius, and, probably in Nero's reign, on the retirement of Pallas, was appointed to that financial office of which the world-wide cares are pompously described by the poet biographer. 6 The gold of Iberian mines, the harvests of Egypt, the fleeces of Tarentine flocks, pearls from the depths of Eastern seas, the ivory tribute of the Indies, all the wealth wafted to Rome by every wind, are committed to his keeping. He had also the task of disbursing a vast revenue for the support of the populace, for roads and bulwarks against the sea, for the splendour of temples and palaces. 7 Such cares left space only for brief slumber and hasty meals ; there was none for pleasure. Yet Claudius had the supreme satisfaction of wielding enormous power, and he occasionally shared in its splendour. The poor slave from the Hermus had a place in the " Idumaean triumph " of Vespasian, which his quiet labours had prepared, and he was raised by that emperor to the benches of the knights. 8 The only check in that prosperous course seems to have been a brief exile to the shores of Campania in the reign of Domitian. 9 Abascantus, 10 the secretary ah epistulis of Domitian's reign, has also been commemorated by Statius. That great office which controlled the imperial correspondence with all parts of 1 Sen. Ad Polyb. xi. B lb. 70. 6 lb. 86. 2 Statius, Silv. iii. 3. 7 lb. 100. 8 lb. 145. 8 lb. 66, Tibereia primum Aula tibi 9 Mart. vi. 83 ; Stat. Silv. iii. 160. Panditur. 10 As to the form of his name v. * lb. 60. Markland's Statius, p. 238. 110 SOCIAL LIFE book i the world, was generally held by freedmen in the first century. Narcissus, in the reign of Claudius, first made it a great ministry. 1 Down to the reign of Hadrian the despatches both in Greek and Latin were under a single superintendence. But. in the reorganisation of the service in the second century, it was found necessary, from the growing complication of business, to create two departments of imperial correspondence. 2 Men of rank held the secretaryship from the end of the first cen- tury. Titinius Capito, one of Pliny's circle, filled the office under Domitian ; Suetonius was appointed by Hadrian. 3 And during the Antonine age, the secretaries were often men of literary distinction. 4 Abascantus, the freedman secretary in the Silvae, had upon his shoulders, according to the poet, the whole weight of the correspondence with both East and West. 5 He received the laurelled despatches from the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Ehine ; he had to watch the distribution of military grades and commands. He must keep himself in- formed of a thousand things affecting the fortunes of the subject peoples. Yet this powerful minister retained his native modesty with his growing fortune. His household was distinguished by all the sobriety and frugality of an Apulian or Sabine home. 6 He could be lavish, however, at the call of love or loyalty. He gave his wife Priscilla an almost royal burial. 7 Embalmed with all the spices and fragrant odours of the East, and canopied with purple, her body was borne to her last stately home of marble on the Appian Way. 8 Some of the great imperial freedmen were of less un- exceptionable character than Claudius Etruscus and Abascantus, and had a more troubled career. Callistus, Narcissus, and Pallas, were deeply involved in the intrigues and crimes connected with the history of Messalina and Agrippina. Callistus had a part in the murder of Caligula, and prolonged his power in the following reign. Narcissus revealed the shameless marriage of Messalina with Silius, and, forestalling the vacillation of Claudius, had the imperial harlot ruthlessly struck down as she lay grovelling in the gardens of Lucullus. 9 1 Mac<5, SvMone, p. 91 ; cf. Tac. Ann. 4 Mace", pp. 90, 116. xi. 33. s Stat. Silv. v. 1, 80. 2 Mac<5, 92, 93 ; Friedl. Sittengesch. 6 lb. v. 118 sqq. i. 86, 87. 7 lb. v. 210. 8 Plin. Ep. viii. 12 ; C.I.L. vi. 798 ; 8 Friedl. Sittengesch. i. 88. Maci libertos foenerare. 4 Mart. v. 70 ; cf. vii. 64. 8 Id. 77, assem habeas, assem valeas. 8 Liv. xxi. 63, quaes tua omnis patri- * Id. 43. paratus fuit quadrantem de bns indecorua visus ; D. Cass. 69. 16; stercore mordicus tollere : in manu cf. C. Th. xiii. 1, 4; v. Godefroy's note. illius plumbum aurum fiebat 120 SOCIAL LIFE book i had one goal, and they worked towards it with infinite industry and unfailing courage and self-confidence. Nothing daunts or dismays them. If a fleet of merchantmen, worth a large fortune, is lost in a storm, the freedman speculator will at once sell his wife's clothes and jewels, and start cheerfully on a fresh venture. 1 When his great ambition has been achieved, he enjoys its fruits after his kind in all ages. Excluded from the great world of hereditary culture, these people caricature its tastes, and imitate all its vices, without catching even a reflection of its charm and refinement. The selfish egotism of the dissipated noble might be bad enough, but it was sometimes veiled by a careless grace, or an occasional deference to lofty tradition. The selfish- ness and grossness of the upstart is naked and not ashamed, or we might almost say, it glories in its shame. Its luxury is a tasteless attempt to vie with the splendour of aristocratic banquets. The carver and the waiter perform their tasks to the beat of a deafening music. Art and literature are prosti- tuted to the service of this vulgar parade of new wealth, and the divine Homer is profaned by a man who thinks that Hannibal fought in the Trojan War. 2 The conversation is of the true bourgeois tone, with all its emphasis on the obvious, its unctuous moralising, its platitudes consecrated by their antiquity. It is this society which is drawn for us with such a sure, masterly hand, and with such graceful ease, by Petronius. The Satiricon is well known to be one of the great puzzles and mysteries in Eoman literature. Scholars have held the most widely different opinions as to its date, its author, and its pur- pose. The scene has been laid in the reign of Augustus or of Tiberius, and, on the strength of a misinterpreted inscription, even as late as the reign of Alexander Severus. 8 Those who have attributed it to the friend and victim of Nero have been confronted with the silence of Quintilian, Juvenal, and Martial, with the silence of Tacitus as to any literary work by Petronius, whose character and end he has described with a curious sympathy and care. 4 It is only late critics of the lower empire, such as Macrobius, 5 and a dilettante aristocrat like Sidonius Apollinaris, 6 who pay any attention to this re- 1 Petron. 76. * Tac. Ann. xvL 18, 19. s 5?' i^k f m ffl r v 5 Macrob. Som. Scip. i. 2, 8. 3 Or. 1175 ; cf. Teuffel, Mom. Lxt. u. . l"~ . ' 300 n. 4. Sidon. Apoll. Carm. rx. 268. chap, in THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN 121 markable work of genius. And Sidonius seems to make its author a citizen of Marseilles. 1 Yet silence in such cases may be very deceptive. Martial and Statius never mention one another, and both might seem unknown to Tacitus. And Tacitus, after the fashion of the Eoman aristocrat, in painting the character of Petronius, may not have thought it relevant or important to notice a light work such as the Satiricon, even if he had ever seen it. He does not think it worth while to mention the histories of the Emperor Claudius, the tragedies of Seneca, or the Punica of Silius Italicus. 2 Tacitus, like Thucy- dides, is too much absorbed in the social tragedy of his time to have any thought to spare for its artistic efforts. The rather shallow, easy-going Pliny has told us far more of social life in the reigns of Domitian and Trajan, its rural pleasures and its futile literary ambitions, than the great, gloomy historian who was absorbed in the vicissitudes of the deadly duel between the Senate and the Emperors. One thing is certain about the author of this famous piece he was not a plebeian man about town, although it may be doubted whether M. Boissier is safe in maintaining that such a writer would not have chosen his own environment of the Suburra as the field for his imagination. 8 It is safer to seek for light on the social status of the author in the tone of his work. The Satiricon is emphatically the production of a cultivated aristocrat, who looks down with serene and amused scorn on the vulgar bourgeois world which he is painting. He is interested in it, but it is the interest of the detached, artistic observer, whose own world is very far off. Encolpius and Trimalchio and his coarse freedman friends are people with whom the author would never have dined, but whom, at a safe social distance, he found infinitely amusing as well as disgusting. He saw that a great social revolution was going on before his eyes, that the old slave minion, with estates in three continents, was becoming the rival of the great noble in wealth, that the new-sprung class were presenting to the world a vulgar caricature of the luxury in the palaces on the Esquiline. Probably he thought it all bad, 4 but the bad 1 Sidon. Apoll. Carm. xxiii. 155, ette 8 Boissier, L'Opp. p. 257, ce n'est Massiliensium per hortos sacri stipitis, pas la coutume qu'on mette son ideal Arbiter, colonum Hellespontiaco parem pres de sou Priapo, etc. * Petron. 88, at nos vino scortisque 2 Tac. Ann. xii. 8 ; xiii. 2 ; xv. 45, demersi ne paratas quidem artes aude- 60, 65 ; Tac. Hist. iii. 65. mus cognoscere, sed accusatores anti- 122 SOCIAL LIFE book i became worse when it was coarse and vulgar. The ignorant assumption of literary and artistic taste in Trimalchio must have been contrasted in the author's mind with many an evening at the palace, when Nero, in his better moods, would recite his far from contemptible verses, or his favourite passages from Euripides, and when the new style of Lucan would be balanced against that of the great old masters. 1 And the man who had been charmed with the sprightly grace of the stately and charming Poppaea may be forgiven for showing his hard contempt for Eortunata, who, in the middle of dinner, runs off to count the silver and deal out the slaves' share of the leavings, and returns to get drunk and fight with one of her guests. 2 The motive of the work has been much debated. It has been thought a satire on the Neronian circle, and again an effort to gratify it, by a revelation of the corruptions of the plebeian world, the same impulse which drove Messalina to the brothel, and Nero to range the taverns at midnight. 3 It has been thought a satire on the insolence and grossness of Pallas and the freedmen of the Claudian regime which Nero detested, to amuse him with all their vulgar absurdities. Is it not possible that the writer was merely pleasing himself that he was simply following the impulse of genius ? Since the seventh century the work has only existed in fragments. 4 Who can tell how much the lost portions, if we possessed them, might affect our judgment of the object of the work? One thing is certain, its author was a very complex character, and would probably have smiled at some of the lumbering efforts to read his secret. Even though he may have had no lofty purpose, a weary man of pleasure may have wished to display, in its grossest, vulgarest form, the life of which he had tasted the pleasures, and which he had seen turning into Dead Sea fruit. He was probably a bad man in his conduct, worse perhaps in his imagination ; and yet, by a strange contradiction, which is not unexampled in the history of character, he may have had dreams of a refined purity and temperance which tortured and embittered him by their contrast with actual life. quitatis vitia tantnm docemus et dis- * Petron. 118 ; cf. Boissier, VOpp. cimus. This rs^'ier applies to the 213. 2 Petron. 70, 67. higher cultivated class. 3 Juv. vi. 115 ; Suet. Nero, xxvi. 4 TeuffeL Rom. Lit. 300, n. 1. chap, in THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN 123 Out of the smoke of controversy, the conclusion seems to have emerged that the Satiricon is a work of Nero's reign, and that its author was in all probability that Caius Petronius who was Nero's close companion, and who fell a victim to the jealousy of Tigellinus. Not the least cogent proof of this is the literary criticism of the work. It is well known that Lucan, belonging to the Spanish family of the Senecas, had thrown off many of the conventions of Roman literature, and discarded the machinery of epic mythology in his Pharsalia. He had also incurred the literary jealousy of Nero. The attack in the Satiricon on Lucan's literary aberrations can hardly be mistaken. The old poet Eumolpus is introduced to defend the traditions of the past. And he gives a not very successful demonstration, in 285 verses, of the manner in which the subject should have been treated, with all the scenery and machinery of orthodox epic. 1 This specimen of conservative taste is the least happy part of the work. Such evidence is reinforced by the harmony of the whole tone of the Satiricon with the clear-cut character of Petronius in Tacitus. There was evidently a singular fascination about this man, which, in spite of his wasted, self-indulgent life, was keenly felt by the severe historian. Petronius was capable of great things, but in an age of wild licence he deliberately devoted his brilliant talent to making sensuality a fine art. Like Otho, who belonged to the same circle, he showed, as consul and in the government of Bithynia, that a man of pleasure could be equal to great affairs. 2 After this single digression from the scheme of the voluptuary, he returned to his pleasures, and became an arbiter in all ques- tions of sensual taste, from whose decision there was no appeal. His ascendency over the Emperor drew upon him the fatal enmity of Tigellinus. Petronius was doomed. It was a time when not even the form of justice was used to veil the caprices of tyranny, and Petronius determined not to endure a long suspense when the issue was certain. He had gone as far as 1 Petron. 118, 119 ; cf. Boissier, 1 ; cf. Tac. Dial. Or. c. 35 ; the L'Opp. p. 239. Other proofs of the invention of a peculiar glass, which date of the Satiricon are the occurrence belongs to the reign of Tiberius, cf. of names like Apelles and Menecrates, Plin. II. N. xxxvi. 66 ; D. Cass. 57. c. 64, 73 ; cf. Suet. Calig. 33 ; Nero, 21 ad fin. 30 ; Friedl. Cena Trim. Einl. 9 ; the 2 Tac. Ann. xvi. 18, Tigentem Be reflections on decline of oratory, Sat. ac parem negotiis ostendit. 124 SOCIAL LIFE book i Cumae to attend the Emperor. There he was stopped. He retired to his chamber and had his veins alternately opened and rebound, meanwhile conversing with his friends or listening to light verses, not, as the fashion then was, seeking consolation from a Stoic director on the issues of life and death. He rewarded some of his slaves; others he had flogged before his eyes. After a banquet he fell calmly into his last sleep. In his will there was none of the craven adulation by which the victim often strove to save his heirs from imperial rapacity. He broke his most precious myrrhine vase, to prevent its being added to Nero's treasures. 1 His only bequest to the Emperor was a stinging catalogue of his secret and nameless sins. 2 The Satiricon, as we have it, is only a fragment, containing parts of two books, out of a total of sixteen. It is full of humorous exaggeration and wild Aristophanic fun, along with, here and there, very subtle and refined delineation of character. But, except in the famous dinner of Trimalchio, there are few signs of regular construction or closeness of texture in plot and incident. Even if we had the whole, it might have been difficult to decipher its motive or to unlock the secret of the author's character. We can only be sure that he was a man of genius, and that he was interested in the intellectual pur- suits and tendencies of his time, as well as in its vices and follies. We may perhaps surmise that he was at once per- verted and disillusioned, alternately fascinated and disgusted by the worship of the flesh and its lusts in that evil time. He is not, as has been sometimes said, utterly devoid of a moral sense. Occasionally he shows a gleam of nobler feeling, a sense of the lacrimae rerum, as in that passage where the corpse of the shipwrecked Lichas is washed ashore. " Somewhere a wife is quietly awaiting him, or a father or a son, with no thought of storm; some one whom he kissed on leaving. ... He had examined the accounts of his estates, he had pictured to himself the day of his return to his home. And now he lies, ye gods, how far from the goal of his hopes. But the sea is not the only mocker of the hopes of men. If you reckon well, there is 1 Plin. H. N. xxxvii. 7 (20), T. Pe- * Tac. Ann. xvi. 19, sed flagitia prin- tronius consularis moriturus invidia cipis et novitatem cujusque stupri per- Neronis, . . . trullam myrrhinam scripsit atque obsignata misit Neroni. HS.ccc emptam fregit. chap, in THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN 125 shipwreck everywhere." l There is also a curious note of con- tempt for his own age in a passage on the decay of the fine arts. The tone is, for the moment, almost that of Euskin. The glories of the golden age of art were the result of simple virtue. An age like the Neronian, an age abandoned to wine and harlotry, which dreams only of making money by any sordid means, cannot even appreciate what the great masters have left behind, much less itself produce anything worthy. Even the gods of the Capitol are now honoured by an offering of crude bullion, not by the masterpieces of a Pheidias or an Apelles. And the race which created them are now for us, forsooth, silly GreekliDgs ! 2 Yet side by side with a passage like this, there are descrip- tions of abnormal depravity so coarsely realistic that it has often been assumed, and not unnaturally, that the writer rioted in mere filth. It should be remembered, however, that there was a tradition of immorality about the ancient romance, 3 and Petronius, had he cared to do so, might have made the same apology as Martial, that he provided what his readers demanded. 4 That Petronius was deeply tainted is only too probable from his associations, although Tacitus implies that he was rather a fastidious voluptuary than a gross debauchee. Yet a sensualist of the intellectual range of Petronius may have occasionally visions of a better world than that to which he has sunk. Is it not possible that the gay elegant trifier may sometimes have scorned himself as he scorned his time ? Is it not possible that, along with other illusions, he had parted with the illusions of vice, and that in the "noctes Neronis " he had seen the adder among the roses ? He has written one of the keenest satires ever penned on the vulgarity of mere wealth, its absurd affectations, its vanity, its grossness. May he not also have wished, without moralising in a fashion which so cultivated a trifier would have scorned, to reveal the abyss towards which a society lost to all the finer passions of the spirit was hurrying ? In the half comic, half ghastly scene in which Trimalchio, in a fit of maudlin sentiment, 1 Petron. 115, si bene calculum 8 See Boissier's remarks, L'Opp. p. ponas, ubique naufragium est. 228. 8 Id. 88. For a favourable esti- 4 Mart. v. 2 ; iii. 68 ; cf. Mahaffy, mate of the Satiriam, cf. Schiller's Greek World under Boman Sway, p. Gesch. rom. KaiserzeU, i. 469, 470. 298. 126 SOCIAL LIFE book i has himself laid out for dead, while the horns blare out his funeral lament, we seem to hear the knell of a society which was the slave of gold and gross pleasure, and seemed to be rotting before its death. But it need hardly be said that the prevailing note of the Satiricon is anything but melancholy. The author is intensely amused with his subject, and the piece is full of the most riotous fun and humour. It belongs formally to the medley of prose and verse which Varro introduced into "Soman literature on the model of Menippus of Gadara. 1 It contains disquisitions on literary tendencies of the day in poetry and oratory, anecdotes and desultory talk. But Petronius has given a new character to the old " Satura," more in the manner of the Greek romance. There probably was no regular plot in the complete work, no central motive, such as the wrath of Priapus, 2 to bind it together. Yet there is a certain bond of union in the narrative of lively, and often question- able, adventures through which Petronius carries his very dis- reputable characters. In this life and movement, this human interest, the Satiricon is the distant ancestor of Gil Bias, Roderick Random, and Tom Jones. The scene of the earlier part, long since lost, may have been laid at Massilia. 8 In the two books partially preserved to us, it lies in southern Italy, at Cumae or Croton, in those Greek towns which had plenty of Greek vice, without much Greek refine- ment. 4 The three strangers, whose adventures are related, Encolpius, Ascyltus, and Giton, if we may judge by their names, are also Greek, with the literary culture of their time, and deeply tainted with its worst vices. At the opening of our fragment, Encolpius, a beggarly, wandering sophist, is declaiming in a portico on the decay of oratory. 5 He is expressing what was probably Petronius's own judgment, as it was that of Tacitus, 6 as to the evil effects of school declamation on musty or frivolous subjects. He is met by a 1 Teuffel, Rom. Lit. i. p. 239 ; Friedl. by the complaints of municipal decay Cena Trim. Einl. 5. in c. 44 : Naples, by the fact that 2 jo p 5 ^he town is a Roman colony (44, 57) ; n - 1 ' n ... Cumae was the only town in this region 3 Sidon. ApolL Carm. ix. 268 ; xxin. w hi c h had Praetors. Cf. Or. Henz. 155 - 1498, 2263 ; Petron. 65. * Petron. 81, cf. Friedl. Cena 5 Petron. Sat. 1, 2. Trim. Einl. 6. Puteoli is excluded 6 Tac. De Or. c. 31, 35. chap, in THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN 127 rival lecturer, Agamemnon, who urges, on behalf of the unfortunate teachers of this conventional rhetoric, that the fault lies not with them, but with the parents and the public, the same excuse, in fact, which Plato had long before made for the maligned sophist of the fifth century B.C. 1 But Encolpius and his companions, in spite of these literary- interests, are the most disreputable adventurers, educated yet hopelessly depraved. They are even more at home in the reeking slums than in the lecture hall. Encolpius has been guilty of murder, theft, seduction. The party are alternately plunderers and plundered. They riot for the moment in foul excesses, and are tortured by jealousy and the miseries of squalid vice. Only those who have a taste for pornography will care to follow them in these dark paths. Eeduced io the last pinch of poverty, they are invited to dine at the all- welcoming table of Trimalchio, and this is for us the most interesting passage in their adventures. But, on leaving the rich freedman's halls they once more pass into scenes where a modern pen cannot venture to follow them. Yet soon afterwards, Encolpius is found in a picture gallery discussing the fate of literature and art with Eumolpus, 2 an inveterate poet, as vicious as himself. Presently the party are on shipboard off the south Italian coast. They are shipwrecked and cast ashore in a storm near the town of Croton. 3 A friendly peasant informs them that, if they are honest merchants, that is no place for their craft. But if they belong to the more distinguished world of intrigue, they may make their fortune. It is a society which has no care for letters or virtue, which thinks only of unearned gain. There are only two classes, the deceivers and their victims. Children are an expensive luxury, for only the childless ever receive an invitation or any social attention. It is like a city ravaged by the plague ; there are only left the corpses and the vultures. 4 The adventurers resolve to seize the rare opportunity; they will turn the tables on the social birds of prey. The pauper poet is easily translated into a millionaire with enormous estates in Africa. 6 A portion of his wealth has been engulfed 1 Rep. vi p. 492 A. * lb. 116, nihil aliud est nisi ~ A . cadavera quae lacerantur aut corvi ' Petron. Sat. 83. j laceran |. 8 lb. 114. 5 lb. 117. 128 SOCIAL LIFE book i in the storm, but a solid HS.300,000,000, with much besides, still remains. He has a cough, moreover, with other signs of debility. There is no more idiotic person, as our Stock Exchange records show, than a man eager for an unearned fortune. The poor fools nocked around Eumolpus, drinking in every fresh rumour about his will. He was loaded with gifts; 1 great ladies made an easy offer of their virtue and even that of their children. 2 Meanwhile he, or Petronius, plays with their follies or tortures their avidity. In one of his many wills, the heirs of the pretended Croesus are required not to touch their booty till they have devoured his remains before the people ! 3 The tales of barbarian tribes in Herodotus, the memories of the siege of Saguntum and Numantia, are invoked in brutal irony to justify the reasonableness of the demand. " Close your eyes," the cynic enjoins, "and fancy that instead of devouring human flesh, you are swallowing a million of money." Petronius could be very brutal as well as very refined in his raillery. The combined stupidity and greed of the fortune-hunter of all ages are perhaps best met by such brutality of contempt. The really interesting part of their adventure is the dinner at the house of Trimalchio, a rich freedman, to which these rascals were invited. Trimalchio is probably in many traits drawn from life, but the picture of himself, of his wife and his associates, is a work of genius worthy of Fielding or Smollett or Le Sage. Petronius, it is clear, enjoyed his work, and, in spite of his contempt for the vulgar ambition and the coarseness and commonness of Trimalchio's class, he has a liking for a certain simplicity and honest good nature in Trimalchio. The freedman tells the story of his own career 4 without reserve, and with a certain pride in the virtue and frugality, according to his standards, which have made him what he is. He also exults in his shrewdness and business capacity. His motto has always been, " You are worth just what you have." " Buy cheap and sell dear." Coming as a little slave boy from Asia, probably in the reign of Augustus, 5 1 Petron. Scut. 124. who died 8 b.c. Trimalchio would 2 lb. 140. s lb. 141. therefore be born circ. 18 b.c. (Sat. 71, 4 lb. 75, 76. 29, 75). He was perhaps over seventy B v. Friedl. Cena Trim. Eiril. p. 7. at the time of the dinner (Sat. 27, 77), His cognomen Maecenatianus marks which may therefore be placed about him as a slave of the friend of Augustus 57 a.d. chap, in THE SOCIETY OF THE FREED MEN 129 he became the favourite of his master, and more than the favourite of his mistress. He found himself in the end the real master of the household, and, on his patron's death, he was left joint-heir to his property with the emperor. But he had ambitions beyond even such a fortune. He became a ship- owner on a great scale. He lost a quarter of a million in a single storm, and at once proceeded to build more and larger ships. Money poured in; all his ventures prospered. He bought estates in Italy, Sicily, and Africa. Some of his purchases he had never seen. 1 He built himself a stately house, with marble porticoes, four great banqueting-halls, and twenty sleeping-rooms. 2 Every- thing to satisfy human wants was produced upon his lands. He was a man of infinite enterprise. He had improved the breed of his flocks by importing rams from Tarentum. He had bees from Hymettus in his hives. He sent to India for mushroom spawn. 8 A gazette was regularly brought out, full of statistics, and all the daily incidents on his estates ; 4 the number of slave births and deaths ; a slave crucified for blaspheming the genius of the master ; a fire in the bailiff's house ; the divorce of a watch- man's wife, who had been caught in adultery with the bathman; a sum of HS. 10 0,0 00 paid into the chest, and waiting for invest- ment these are some of the items of news. Trimalchio, who bears now, after the fashion of his class, the good Eoman name of Caius Pompeius, has risen to the dignity of Sevir Augustalis in his municipality ; 5 he is one of the foremost persons in it, with an overwhelming sense of the dignity of wealth, and with a ridiculous affectation of 'artistic and literary culture, which he parades with a delightful unconsciousness of his blunders. When the wandering adventurers arrive for dinner, 6 they find a bald old man in a red tunic playing at ball, with eunuchs in attendance. While he is afterwards being rubbed down with unguents in the bath, his servants refresh themselves with old Falernian. Then, with four richly dressed runners preceding him, and wrapped in a scarlet mantle, he is borne to the house in his sedan along with his ugly minion. On the wall of the vestibule, as you entered, there were frescoes, one of which represented the young Trimalchio, under the leadership 1 Petron. Sat. 48. 4 lb. 53. lb. 77. 8 lb. 71 ; cf. Friedl. Cena Trim. p. 3 lb. 38, scripsit ut illi ex India 308. semen boletorum mitteretur. 6 Petron. Sat. 27. K 130 SOCIAL LIFE Bi,m of Minerva, making his entry into Rome, with other striking incidents of his illustrious career, while Fortune empties her flowing horn, and the Fates spin the golden thread of his destiny. 1 The banquet begins; Alexandrian boys bring iced water and delicately attend to the guests' feet, singing all the while. 2 Indeed, the whole service is accompanied by singing, and the blare of instruments. To a great, deafening burst of music, the host is at last borne in buried in cushions, his bare shaven head protruding from a scarlet cloak, with a stole around his neck, and lappets falling on each side ; his hands and arms loaded with rings. 3 Not being just then quite ready for dinner, he, with a kindly apology, has a game of draughts, until he feels inclined to eat, the pieces on the terebinthine board being, appropriately to such a player, gold and silver coins. 4 The dinner is a long series of surprises, on the artistic ingenuity of which Trimalchio plumes himself vastly. One course represents the twelve signs of the Zodiac, of which the host expounds at length the fateful significance. 5 Another dish was a large boar, with baskets of sweetmeats hanging from its tusks. A huge bearded hunter pierced its sides with a hunting knife, and forthwith from the wound there issued a flight of thrushes which were dexterously cap- tured in nets as they flew about the room. 6 Towards the end of the meal the guests were startled by strange sounds in the ceiling, and a quaking of the whole apartment. As they raised their eyes, the ceiling suddenly opened, and a great circular tray descended, with a figure of Priapus, bearing all sorts of fruit and bon-bons. 7 It may be readily assumed that in such a scene the wine was not stinted. Huge flagons, coated with gypsum, were brought in shoulder high, each with a label attesting that it was the great Falernian vintage of Opimius, one hundred years old. 8 As the wine appeared, the genial host remarked with admirable frankness, " I did not give as good wine yesterday, although I had a more distinguished company ! " The amusements of the banquet were as various, and some of them as coarse or fantastic, as the dishes. They are gross 1 Petron. Sat. 29. 2 lb. 31. luquearia ita coagmentat ... ut totiens 5 lb. 32. 4 lb. 33. tecta quotiens fercula mutentur. 5 lb. 35. 6 lb. 40. 8 Sat. 34 ; Cic. Brut, lxxxiii. The 7 lb. 60; cf. Sen. Ep. 90, 15, Consulship of Opim. was b.c. 121. ch48ci THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN 131 and tasteless exaggerations of the prevailing fashion. In a literary age, a man of Trimalchio's position must affect some knowledge of letters and art. He is a ludicrous example of the dogmatism of pretentious ignorance in all ages. He has a Greek and Latin library, 1 and pretends to have once read Homer, although his recollections are rather confused. He makes, for instance, Daedalus shut Niobe into the Trojan horse; Iphigenia becomes the wife of Achilles ; Helen is the sister of Diomede and Ganymede. 2 One of the more refined entertain- ments which are provided is the performance of scenes from the Homeric poems, which Trimalchio accompanied by reading in a sonorous voice from a Latin version. 3 He is him- self an author, and has his poems recited by a boy personating the Bacchic god. 4 As a connoisseur of plate he will yield to no one, 5 although he slyly confesses that his " real Corinthian " got their name from the dealer Corinthus. The metal came from the fused bronze and gold and silver which Hannibal flung into the flames of captured Troy. But Trimalchio's most genuine taste, as he naively confesses, is for acrobatic feats and loud horn- blowing. And so, a company of rope-dancers bore the guests with their monotonous performances. 6 Blood-curdling tales of the wer-wolf, and corpses carried off by witches, are provided for another kind of taste. 7 A base product of Alexandria imitates the notes of the nightingale, and another, apparently of Jewish race, equally base, in torturing dissonant tones spouted passages from the Aeneid, profaned to scholarly ears by a mixture of Atellan verses. 8 Trimalchio, who was anxious that his wife should display her old powers of dancing a cancan, is also going to give an exhibition of his own gifts in the pantomimic line, 9 when the shrewd lady in a whisper warned him to maintain his dignity. How far she preserved her own we shall see presently. 1 Petron. 48 ; on private and public * Id. 41 ; cf. Epict iii. 28 ; Plin. Ep. libraries, cf. Sen.De Tranq. c. ix. ; Plin. i. 13 ; iii. 18, 4 ; vi. 15 ; Mart. iii. 44, Ep. i. 8, 2 ; il 17, 8 ; iii. 7, 7 ; 45 ; 50. iv. 28, 1 ; Suet Fit. Pers. ; Luc. Adv. Sen. Brev. Fit. xii. 2 ; Or. Hem. Indoct. 1, 16 ; Mart. vii. 17, 1 ; Suet. 3338 ; Mart. iv. 39 : Marq. Priv. ii. J. Caes. xliv. ; Octav. xxix. ; Marq. 688 ; Friedl. Sittengesch. iii. 84. Priv. i. 114 ; Gregorov. Hadr. (Tr.) p. ,-. p e t ron 53 Ah.iL a 9 C *' SU4t D - Cass, lxvii. 10 ; cf. Momma, p. 59, 3 lb. i. 10 ; cf. Philostr. Apoll. where the date of Pliny's praetorship Tyan. v. 37, 40 ; vi. 8. is fixed. 152 SOCIAL LIFE book ii sopher to wipe out a heavy debt which he had contracted. One of Pliny's dearest friends was Junius Mauricus, the brother of Arulenus Kusticus, who had been put to death by Domitian for writing a eulogy on Thrasea the Stoic saint, the champion of the higher life in Nero's reign. 1 Junius Mauricus afterwards suffered exile himself in the same cause. He had charged himself with the care of his martyred brother's children, and Pliny helped him to find a worthy husband for the daughter of Eusticus. 2 With Fannia the widow of Helvidius, and the daughter of Thrasea, Pliny's intimacy seems to have been of the closest kind. From her he heard the tales, now too well worn, of the fierce firmness of the elder Arria in nerving her husband Paetus for death, and of her own determined self-immolation. 3 The mother of Fannia, the younger Arria, when Thrasea her husband was condemned to die in the reign of Nero, was only prevented from sharing his fate by the most earnest entreaties of her friends. 4 Fannia had followed Helvidius into exile in Nero's reign, 5 and again under Vespasian, when the philosopher, with a petulance very unlike the reserve of Thrasea, brought his fate upon himself by an insulting disregard of the emperor's dignity as first magistrate of the State, if not by revolutionaiy tendencies. 6 Fannia seems to have inherited many of the great qualities of her father Thrasea, the noblest and the wisest member of the Stoic opposition. He sprang from a district in Lombardy which was noted for its soundness and gravity of character. Unlike Paetus 7 and Helvidius, he never defied or intrigued against the emperor, even when the emperor was a Nero. And, though he belonged to the austere circle of Persius, he did not disdain to sing in tragic costume, at a festival of immemorial antiquity, in his native Patavium. 8 He performed his duties as senator with firm dignity, and yet with cautious tact. His worst political crime, and that which proved his ruin, was a severe reserve and a refusal to join in the shameful adulation of the matricide prince. He would not stoop to vote divine honours to the 1 Suet. Bom. x. of Helvidius Priscus, cf.Tac. Hist. iv. 5. 3 Plin. Ep. i. 14 ; cf. iii. 11, 3. 6 Suet. Vesp. xv. ; I). Cass. lxvi. 12 ; 3 lb. iii. 16 ; cf. vii. 19 ; ix. 13. cf. Peter, Gesch. Litt. ii. 98. 4 Tac. Ann. xvi. 34. 7 Plin. Ep. iii. 16, 7. 5 Plin> Ep. vii. 19, 4; for the character 8 Tac. Ann. xvi. 21 ; D. Cass. lxii. 26. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 153 adulteress Poppaea, and for three years he absented himself from the Senate-house. 1 Yet, when the end came, he would not allow the fiery Arulenus Eusticus to imperil his future, by interposing his veto as tribune. 2 His daughter Fannia was worthy of her illustrious descent. She showed all the fearless defiance of the elder Arria, when she boldly admitted that she had asked Senecio to write her husband's life, and she uttered no word to deprecate her doom. When all her property was confiscated, she carried the dangerous volume with her to her place of exile. 3 Yet this stern heroine had also the tenderer virtues. She nursed her kinswoman Junia, one of the Vestals, through a dangerous fever, and caught the seeds of her own death from her charge. With all her masculine firmness and courage, she had a sweetness and charm which made her not less loved than venerated. With her may be said to have expired the peculiar tradition of a circle which, for three generations, and during the reigns of eight emperors, guarded, sometimes with dangerous defiance, the old ideal of uncompromising virtue in the face of a brutal and vulgar materialism. It was the tradition which inspired the austere detachment of the poetry of Persius, with its dim solemnity and obscure depths, as of a sacred grove. These people were hard and stern to vicious power, 4 like our own Puritans of the seventeenth century. Like them too, they were exclusive and defiant, with the cold hauteur of a moral aristocracy, a company of the elect, who would not even parley with evil, for whom the issues of life and death were the only realities in a world hypnotised by the cult of the senses and the spell of tyranny. Their intense seriousness was a religion, although they had only the vaguest and most arid conception of God, and the dimmest and least comforting conception of any future life. They seemed to perish as a little sect of troublesome visionaries; and yet their spirit lived on, softened and sweetened, and passed into the great rulers of the Antonine age. Before his formal period of military service as tribune of the 3rd Gallic legion in Syria, Pliny had, in his nineteenth year, entered on that forensic career which was perhaps the greatest 1 Tac. Ann. xiv. 12 ; xvi. 21, 22 ; cf. the philosophic opposition as a mere D. Cass. 61. 15. 2 Tac. Ann. xvi. 26. aristocratic reaction ; cf. pp. 287, 382. 3 Plin. Ep. vii. 19. Boissier, L'Opp. p. 103 ; Schiller, 4 Renan, Lea vangiles, p. 142, treats Gesch. d. rom. Kaiserz. pp. 509, 536. 154 SOCIAL LIFE book ii pride of his life. 1 He practised in the Centumviral court, which was chiefly occupied with questions of property and succession. Occasionally he speaks with a certain weariness of the trivial character of the cases in which he was engaged. But his general estimate is very different. The court is to him an arena worthy of the greatest talent and industry, 2 and the successful pleader may win a fame which may entitle him to take rank with the great orators of the past. Pliny, inspired by memories of Quintilian's lectures, has always floating before him the glory of Cicero. 8 He will prepare for publication a speech delivered in an obscure case about a disputed will. 4 He is immensely proud of its subtlety and point, and the sweep of its indignant or pathetic declamation, and he is not unwilling to believe his legal friends who compared it with the Be, Corona I The suppression of free political life, the absence of public interests, and the extinction of the trade of the delator, left young men with a passion for distinction few chances of gratifying it. The law courts at any rate provided an audience, and the chance of momentary prominence. In the Letters of Pliny, we can see the young advocate pushing his way through the dense masses of the crowded court, arriving at his place with torn tunic, holding the attention of his audience for seven long hours, and sitting down amid the applause even of the judges themselves. 5 Calpurnia often arranged relays of messengers to bring her news of the success, from point to point, of one of her husband's speeches. 6 Youths of the highest social rank a Salinator, or a Ummidius Quadratus threw themselves eagerly into the drudgery which might make an ephemeral name. 7 Ambitious pretenders, with no talent or learning, and arrayed perhaps in hired purple and jewels, like Juvenal's needy lawyer, forced themselves on to the benches of the advocates, and engaged a body of claqueurs whose applause was purchased for a few denarii. 8 Pliny has such a pride in this profession, he so idealises what must have been often rather humdrum work, that he feels a personal pain at anything which seems to detract from the 1 Plin. Ep. v. 8, 8 ; Momms. p. 52. 6 lb. iv. 19, 3, disponit qui nuntient a Plin. Ep. vi. 1 ; iv. 16 ; vi. 23, 2. sibi quem assensum, quos clamores ex- 8 lb. i. 20, 7. citarim, quem eventum judicii tulerim. 4 lb. vi. 33, 8-11. 7 lb. vi. 11. 8 lb. iv. 16. 8 lb. ii. 14, 4. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 155 old-fashioned, leisurely dignity of the court. In his day the judges seem to have been becoming more rapid and business- like in their procedure, and less inclined to allow the many clepsydrae which men of Pliny's school demanded for the gradual development of all their rhetorical artifices. He regrets the good old times, when adjournments were freely granted, 1 and days would be spent on a case which was now despatched in as many hours. It is for this reason that he cannot conceal a certain admiration for Eegulus, in other respects, " the most detestable of bipeds " but who redeemed his infamy by an enthusiasm and energy as an advocate which rivalled even that of Pliny. M. Aquilius Eegulus, the prince of delators, and one of the great glories of the Eoman bar in Domitian's reign, is a singular figure. His career and character are a curious illus- tration of the social history of the times. Eegulus was the son of a man who, in Nero's reign, had been driven into exile and ruined. 2 Bold, able, recklessly eager for wealth and notoriety at any cost, as a mere youth he resolved to raise himself from obscure indigence, and soon became one of the most capable and dreaded agents of the tyranny. He gained an evil fame by the ruin of the great houses of the Crassi and Orfiti. Lust of blood and greed of gain drove him on to the wholesale destruction of innocent boys, noble matrons, and men of the most illustrious race. The cruelty of Nero was not swift enough to satisfy him, and he called for the annihilation of the Senate at a stroke. He rose rapidly to great wealth, honours were showered upon him, and, after a prudent retirement in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, he reached the pinnacle of his depraved ambition under Vespasian's cruel son. He figures more than once in the poems of Martial, and always in the most favourable light. His talent and eloquence, according to the poet, were only equalled by his piety, and the special care of the gods had saved him from being buried under the ruins of a cloister which had suddenly fallen in. 3 He had estates at Tusculum, in Umbria and 1 Plin. Ep. vi. 2, 6. 20 ; iv. 2 ; vi. 2 ; and Boissier, L'Opp. p. 193. 2 For the career and character of M. 8 Mart. i. 13, 83, 112, Cum tibi Aquilius Regulus, v. Tac. Hist. iv. 42 ; sit sophiae par fama et cura deorum, Phn. Ep. i. 5; i. 20, 15 ; ii. 11 ; ii. etc. 156 SOCIAL LIFE book ii Etruria. 1 The courts were packed when he rose to plead. 2 Unfortunately, the needy poet furnishes a certain key to all this flattery, when he thanks Eegulus for his presents, and then begs him to buy them back. 8 It is after Domitian's death that we meet Eegulus in Pliny's pages. The times are changed, the delator's day is over, and Eegulus is a humbler man. But he is still rich, courted, and feared ; he is still a great power in the law courts. With a weak voice, a bad memory, and hesitating utterance, 4 by sheer industry and determination he had made himself a powerful speaker, with a style of his own, sharp, pungent, brutally incisive, ruthlessly sacrificing elegance to point. 6 He belonged to the new school, and sometimes sneered at Pliny's affectation of the grand Ciceronian manner. 6 Yet to Pliny's eyes, his earnest strenuousness in his profession redeems some of his vices. He insists on having ample time to develop his case. 7 He appears in the morning pale with study, wearing a white patch on his forehead. He has consulted the diviners as to the success of his pleadings. 8 It is a curious sign of the times that this great advocate, who already possessed an enormous fortune, was a legacy-hunter of the meanest sort. He actually visited, on her death-bed, Verania, the widow of that Piso, the adopted son of Galba, over whose murder Eegulus had savagely gloated, and by telling her that the stars promised a hope of recovery, he obtained a place in her will. His mourning for his son dis- played all the feverish extravagance and grandiose eccentricity of a true child of the Neronian age. 9 The boy's ponies and dogs and pet birds were slaughtered over his pyre. Countless pictures and statues of him were ordered. His memoir was read by the father to a crowded audience, and a thousand copies of it were sent broadcast over the provinces. 10 In Eegulus we seem to see the type of character which, had fortune raised him to the throne, would have made perhaps a saner Caligula, and an even more eccentric Nero. 1 Mart. vii. 31. 6 Plin. Ep. v. 12. 2 lb. vi. 38 ; vi. 64, 11. 7 & vi - 2 > 5 - lb. vii. 16. # P 2 9 - 9 lb. iv. 2. 4 Plin. Ep. iv. 7, 4. io For the light which this throws on 5 lb. i. 20, 15 ; cf. references to the the production of books in that age, v. archaic literary taste of the day in Haenny, Sehriftsteller n. Buchhandler, Mart. v. 10. pp. 39-41. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 157 The struggles of the law courts were idealised by Pliny, and their transient triumphs seemed to him to match the glory of the Philippics or the Verrines. Yet, to do him justice, Pliny had sometimes a truer idea of the foundations of lasting fame. The secret of immortality, the one chance of escaping oblivion, is to leave your thought embalmed in choice and distinguished literary form, which coming ages will not willingly let die. 1 This, probably the only form of immortality in which Pliny believed, is the great motive for literary labour. The longing to be remembered was the most ardent passion of the Eoman mind in all ages and in all ranks, from the author of the Agricola to the petty artisan, who commemorated the homely virtues of his wife for the eyes of a distant age, and made pro- vision for the annual feast and the tribute of roses to the tomb. Of that immense literary ambition which Pliny represented, and which he considered it a duty to foster, only a small part has reached its goal. The great mass of these eager litterateurs have altogether vanished, or remain as mere shadowy names in Martial or Statius or Pliny. The poems of Martial and Statius leave the impression that, in the reign of Domitian, the interest in poetical literature was keen and widely diffused, and that, besides the poets by profession, there were crowds of amateurs who dabbled in verse. The Silvae transport us into a charming, if rather luxurious world, where men like Atedius Melior or Pollius amuse themselves with dilettante composition among their gardens and marbles on the bays of Campania. 2 Martial has a host of friends similarly engaged, and the versatility of some of them is suspiciously wide. An old Ardelio is twitted by Martial with his showy and super- ficial displays in declamation and history, in plays and epigrams, in grammar and astronomy. 8 Canius Eufus, his countryman from Gades, Varro, Bassus, Brutianus, Cirinius, have all an extraordinary dexterity in almost every branch of poetical composition. Martial is too keen a critic not to see the fugitive character of much of this amateur literature. Like 1 Plin. Ep. ii. 10, 4; iii. 7, 14, quatenus * Mart. ii. 7 ; v. 30 ; iii. 20 ; iv. 23 ; nobis denegatnr diu vivere, relin- v. 23. For the same breadth of quamus aliquid quo iios vixis.se teste- accomplishment in the fifth century, mur ; v. 5, 4 ; v. 8, 2, me autem nihil cf. Sidon. Apoll. Carm. v. 97 ; ii. 156 ; aeque ac diuturnitatis amor sollicitat ; xxiii. 101 ; Rom. Soc. in the Last cf. vii. 20. Cent, of the Western Empire (1st ed.)i 2 Stat. Silv. ii. 2. p. 375. 158 SOCIAL LIFE book n Juvenal, he scoffs at the thin talent which concealed its feeble- ness behind the pomp and faded splendour of epic or tragic tradition. 1 He roughly tells the whole versifying crowd that genius alone will live in coming ages. The purchased applause of the recitation hall merely gratifies for an hour the vanity of the literary trifler. It is a pity for his fame that Martial did not always maintain this tone of sincerity. He can at times sell his flattery to the basest and most stupid. He is capable of implying a comparison of the frigid pedantry of Silius Italicus to the majesty of Virgil. 2 Pliny was a friend and admirer of Martial, and, with his usual generous hand, he made the poet a. present when he left Kome for ever to pass his last years at Bilbilis. 3 The needy epigrammatist was only a distant observer, or hanger-on of that world of wealth and refinement in which Pliny was a conspicuous figure. But from both Pliny and Martial we get very much the same impression of the literary movement in the reign of Domitian. Pliny himself is perhaps its best representative. He is a true son of the Eoman schools, as they had been revived and strengthened by Vespasian, for a life of many generations. Pliny does not think slightly of the literary efforts of his own day : some of them he even overrates. But already the Eoman mind had bent its neck to that thral- dom to the past, to that routine of rhetorical discipline, which, along with other causes, produced the combination of ambitious effort and mediocre performance that, for the last three centuries of the Empire, is the characteristic of all literary culture. From his great teacher Quintilian Pliny had imbibed a pro- found reverence for Cicero. 4 Alike in his career of honours and his literary pursuits, he loves to think that he is treading in the great orator's footsteps. In answer to a taunt of Eegulus, he once boldly avowed his preference for the Ciceronian oratory to that of his own day. Demosthenes is also some- times his model, though he feels keenly the difference that separates them. 5 Indeed his reverence for Greece as the mother of letters, art, and civic life was one of Pliny's sincerest 1 Mart. vi. 60. lander's Martial, " Chronologic der 2 lb. iv. 14. Epigr. Mart." p. 66. 3 Plin. Ep. iii. 21. This book is 4 Plin. Ep. iv. 8, 4 ; v. 12, est mihi dated by Mornmsen 101 a.d. {Plin. p. cum Cicerone aemulatio. 14, Morel ; v. App. C, p. 95) ; cf. Fried- 5 lb. vii. 30. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 159 and most honourable feelings. To a man who had been appointed to high office in Greece he preaches, in earnest tones, the duty of reverence for that gifted race whose age was con- secrated by the memories of its glorious prime. 1 Pliny's Greek studies must have begun very early. At the age of fourteen he had written a Greek tragedy, for which, however, he modestly does not claim much merit. 2 He had always a certain taste for poetry, but it seems to have been merely the taste created or enforced by the constant study of the poets under the grammarian. Once, while detained by bad weather on his way back from military service in Asia, he amused himself with composing in elegiac and heroic verse. 3 Later in his career, he published a volume of poems in hendecasyllabic metre, written on various occasions. But there was no inspiration behind these conventional exercises. He was chiefly moved to write in verse, as he naively confesses, by the example of the great orators who beguiled their leisure in this way. Among his published poems there were some with a flavour of Catullan lubricity, which offended or astonished some of his severer friends, who thought such doubtful lightness unworthy of a grave character and a great position. 4 No better illustration could be found of Pliny's incorrigible conventionality in such things than the defence which he makes of his suspected verses to Titius Ariston. 6 It is to Pliny not a question of morals or propriety. The ancient models are to be followed, not only in their elevated, but in their looser moods. The case seems to be closed when Pliny can point to similar literary aberrations in a long line of great men from Varro and Virgil and Cicero to Verginius Eufus and the divine Nerva. 6 Pliny, however, though vain of his dexterity in these trifles, probably did not rate them very highly. It was to oratorical fame that his ambition was directed. He was dissatisfied with the eloquence of his own day, which, to use the words of Regulus, sprang at the throat of its subject, and he avowed himself an imitator of Cicero. His speeches, even for the centumviral court, were worked up with infinite care, although 1 Plin. Ep. viii. 24, reverere gloriam * lb. iv. 14 ; cf. Ov. Trist. ii. 365, veterem et hanc ipsara senectutem quae who makes pretty much the same in homine venerabilis, in urbibus sacra. excuse to Augustus. 2 lb. vii. 4, 2, Qualem ? inquis. 8 Plin. Ep. v. 3. Nescio ; tragoedia vocabatur. * Cf. TXettleshij), Lectures and Essays, 3 lb. vii. 4, 3. 2nd Series, p. 39. 160 SOCIAL LIFE book 11 with too self-conscious an aim to impress an audience. We can hardly imagine Cicero or Demosthenes coldly balancing their tropes and figures after the fashion of Pliny. When the great oratorical effort was over, the labour was renewed, in order to make the speech worthy of the eyes of posterity. It was revised and polished, and submitted to the scrutiny of critical readers for suggestions of emendation. 1 Pliny was probably the first to give readings of speeches to long-suffering friends. We hear with a shudder that the recital of the Panegyric was spread over three days ! 2 The other speeches on which Pliny lavished so much labour and thought, have perished, as they probably deserved to perish. The Panegyric was preserved, and became the parent and model of the prostituted rhetoric of the Gallic renaissance in the fourth century. 3 Pliny was by no means a despicable literary critic, when he was not paying the tribute of friendly flattery which social tyranny then exacted. He could sometimes be honestly reserved in his appreciation of a friend's dull literary efforts. 4 But in his ideals of oratory, he seems to be hopelessly wrong. There are some terse and epigrammatic sentences in the Panegyric, which redeem it by their strong sincerity. But Pliny's canons of oratorical style would have excited the ridicule of his great models, who were thinking of their goal, and not measuring every pace as they strained towards it. Pliny's theory that the mere length of a speech is a great element in its excellence, that swift directness is inartistic, that lingering diffuseness is an oratorical charm, that laboured manufacture of turgid phrases may produce the effect of the impetuous rush of Demosthenes and Cicero in their moments of inspiration, makes us rather glad, who love him, that we have not more of Pliny's oratory. 5 It is by his letters that Pliny has lived, and will live on, so long as men care to know the inner life of the great ages that have gone before. The criticism, which is so quick to seize the obvious weaknesses of the author of a priceless picture of ancient society, seems to be a little ungrateful. We could for- give almost any failing or affectation in one who had left us a 1 Ep. iii. 13, 5 ; vii. 17. 4 Plin. Ep. iii. 15. 2 Ep. iii. 18 ; cf. ii. 19. 8 lb. 1, 20. It is curious that this s Teuffel, R. Lit. <3S7 ^ Mackail, praise of amplitude should be addressed Lat. Lit. p. 264 ; Rom. Soc. in t/ie Last to Tacitus ; cf. Nipperdey, Einleit. Ceid. of the W. Empire (1st ed.), p. 357. xxxiv. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 161 similar revelation of society when M. Aurelius was holding back the Germans on the Danube, or when Probus was shatter- ing the invaders of the third century. The letters of Cicero offer an apparently obvious comparison, which may be used to the detriment of Pliny. Yet the comparison is rather inept. Cicero was a man of affairs in the thick of a great revolution, and his letters are invaluable to the student of politics at a great crisis in history. But in the calm of Trajan's reign, a letter -writer had to seek other subjects of interest than the fortunes of the state. Literature, criticism, the beauties of nature, the simple charm of country life, the thousand trivial incidents and eccentricities of an over- ripe society in the capital of the world, furnished a ready pen and a genial imagination, which could idealise its surround- ings, with ample materials. Pliny is by some treated as a mediocrity ; but, like our own Horace Walpole, he had the keen sense to see that social routine could be made interesting, and that the man who had the skill to do so might make himself famous. He was genuinely interested in his social environ- ment. And intense interest in one's subject is one great secret of literary success. Pliny had also the instinct that, if a work is to live, it must have a select distinction of style, which may be criticised, but which cannot be ignored. He had the laudable ambition to put his thoughts in a form of artistic grace which may make even commonplace attractive. So good a judge as the late Mr. Paley did not hesitate to put the Latinity of Pliny on the level of that of Cicero. Pliny's Letters, perhaps even more than the masterpieces of the Augustine age, fascinated the taste of the fourth and fifth centuries. They were the models of Symmachus and Sidonius, who tried, but in very different fashion, to do for their age what Pliny did for his. 1 Like his imitators, Sidonius and Symmachus, Pliny intended his Letters to go down to the future as a masterpiece of style, and as a picture of his age. We know that the letters of Sym- machus were carefully preserved in duplicate by his scribes, probably by his own instructions, although they were edited and published by his son only after his death. 2 Pliny, like 1 Mas rob. Sat. v. 1, 7 ; Sidon. Apoll. disoipulns assurgo. i. 1, ]; iv. 22, 2, ego Plinio ut 2 Sym. Up. v. 85. Seeck, Prol. xlv. If 162 SOCIAL LIFE book ii Sidonius, gave his Letters to the public in successive portions during his life. 1 Like Sidonius too, he felt that he had not the sustained power to write a consecutive history of his time, and the Letters of both are probably far more valuable. Pliny's first book opens with a kind of dedication to Septicius Clarus, who was the patron of Suetonius, and who rose to be prae- torian prefect under Hadrian. 2 Pliny appears to disclaim any order or principle of arrangement in these books, but this is the device of an artistic negligence. Yet it has been proved by the prince of European scholars in our day that both as to date and subject matter, Pliny's Letters reveal signs of the most careful arrangement. The books were published separately, a common practice down to the end of Roman literary history. The same subject reappears in the same book or the next. 3 Groups of letters dealing with the same matter are found in their natural order in successive books. The proof is made even clearer by the silence or the express references to Pliny's family relations. Finally, the older men, who fill the stage in the earlier Letters, disappear towards the end ; while a younger generation, a Salinator or a Ummidius Quadratus, are only heard of in the later. Men of Pliny's own age, like Tacitus or Cornutus Tertullus, meet us from first to last. The dates at which the various books were published have been fixed with tolerable certainty. It is enough for our present purpose to say that the earliest letter belongs to the reign of Nerva, and the ninth book was probably given to the world a year or two before the writer was ap- pointed by Trajan to the office of imperial legate of Bithynia. 4 It is easy, as we have said, and apparently congenial to some writers, to dwell on the vanity and self-complacency of the writer of these letters. By some he seems to be regarded chiefly as a "poseur. To discover the weaknesses of Pliny is no great feat of criticism : they are on the surface. But "securus judicat orbis terrarum," and Pliny has borne the scrutiny of the great judge. Men of his own race and age, who spoke and wrote the most finished Latin, awarded him the palm of exquisite style. But Pliny has many qualities of 1 Momms. Plin. (Tr.) p. 2 ; cf. 1; Mace, Suitone, p. 87. HaeDny, Schriftsteller, etc. p. %. 3 Monims. Plin. p. 4. 8 Plin. Ep. i. 1 ; vii. 28 ; i. 15 ; viii. 4 lb. pp. 7, 24 ; Teuffel, 335, 1. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 163 the heart, which should cover a multitude of sins, even more serious than any with which he is charged. He had the great gift of loyal friendship, and he had its usual reward in. a multitude of friends. It has been regretted that Pliny does not deal with serious questions of politics and philosophy, that his Letters rather skim the surface of social life, and leave its deeper problems untouched. Pliny himself would probably have accepted this criticism as a compliment. The mass of men are little occupied with insoluble questions. And Pliny has probably deserved better of posterity by leaving us a vivid picture of the ordinary life of his time or of his class, rather than an analysis of its spiritual distresses and maladies. We have enough of that in Seneca, in M. Aurelius, and in Lucian. Of the variety and vividness of Pliny's sketches of social life there can never be any question. But our gratitude will be increased if we compare his Letters with the collections of his imitators, Symmachus and Sidonius, whose arid pages are seldom turned by any but a few curious and weary students. Martial, in his way, is perhaps even more clear-cut and minute in his portraiture. But Martial is essen- tially a wit of the town, viewing its vices, follies, and fashions with the eye of a keen, but rather detached observer. In reading Pliny's Letters, we feel ourselves introduced into the heart of that society in its better hours ; and, above all, we seem to be transported to those quiet provincial towns and secluded country seats where, if life was duller and tamer than it was in the capital, the days passed in a quiet content, unsolicited by the stormier passions, in orderly refinement, in kindly relations with country neighbours, and amid the unfading charm of old-world pieties and the witchery of nature. Pliny has also done a great service in preserving a memorial of the literary tone and habits of his time. Even in that age of fertile production and too enthusiastic appreciation, Pliny, like Seneca and Statius, has a feeling that the love for things of the mind was waning. 1 And he deemed it an almost religious duty, as Symmachus and Sidonius did more than three centuries after him, to arouse the flagging interest in letters, and to reward even third-rate literary 1 Plin. Ep. iii. 18, 5 ; viii. 12, litera- i. Prooem. ; Petron.%% ; cf. Sidon. Apoll. rum senescentium reductor; Stat. Silv. Ep. viii. 8 ; ii. 14 ; vii. 15 ; ii. 10, 1. 164 SOCIAL LIFE book n effort with exuberant praise. He avows that it is a matter of duty to admire and venerate any performance in a field so difficult as that of letters. 1 Yet Pliny was not by any means devoid of critical honesty and acumen. He could be a severe judge of his own style. He expects candid criticism from his friends, and receives it with gratitude and good temper. 2 This is to him, indeed, the practical purpose of readings before final publication. He made emendations and excisions in the Histories of Tacitus, which the great author had submitted for his revision. 3 In his correspondence with Tacitus, there is a curious mixture of vanity along with a clear recognition of his friend's immense superiority of genius, and a sure prescience of his immortal fame. He is proud to hear their names coupled as chiefs of contemporary literature, 4 and he cherishes the hope that, united by loyal friendship in life, they will go down together to a remote future. When, in the year 106, Tacitus had asked him for an account of the elder Pliny's death, in the great eruption of Vesuvius, Pliny expressed a firm belief that the book on which Tacitus was then engaged was destined to an enduring fame. 5 He was not quite so confident as to the immortality of Martial's work, 6 although he appreciates to the full Martial's brilliant and pungent wit. On the other hand, writing to a friend about the death of Silius Italicus, he frankly recognises that the Epic of the Punic War is a work of industry rather than of genius. 7 Yet he cannot allow the author of this dull mechanical poem to pass away without some record of his career. 8 The death at seventy -five of the last surviving consular of the Neronian age, of the consul in whose year of office the tyranny of Nero closed, inspired a feeling of pathos which was probably genuine, in spite of the rather pompous and pedantic expression of it. And although he wrote the Punica, a work which was almost buried till the fifteenth century, 9 Silius was probably a not uninteresting person. He had been a delator under Nero, and 1 Plin. Ep. vi. 17, 5. tamen scripsit tanquam essent futura. lb. vii. 17 ; v. 12. i lb. iii. 7. scribebat carmina majore 3 lb. vii. 20 ; viii. 7. cura quam ingenio. 4 lb. vii. 20; ix. 23, ad hoc'illum ,, , .. - .. . ... ._ " Tacitus es an Plinius '?" Mart vu " 6 ? ' Tac - H%sL 1U " 65 ' 8 lb. vi. 16, 2. 9 v. Teuffel, R. lit. 315, n. 5, and 6 lb. iii. 21, 6, at non erunt aeterna the opinions collected by Mayor, Plin. ii. p. 24 sqq. ' 2 Epict. iii. 23, 11. 8 Tlin. Ep. i. 13; ii. 19; iv. 5; 8 Mart. iii. 44, 45 ; iv. 81. 27 ; v. 12 ; vi. 17, 21 ; viii. 21. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 173 added to the endless round of other social obligations, was evidently becoming repulsive and wearisome. 1 Pliny could listen with delight and admiration to Sentius Augurinus reciting his poems for three long days. 2 He would calmly expect his own friends to listen for as many days to a whole volume of his poems, or to his Panegyric on Trajan. 3 Such was his high breeding, his kindliness, and such was his passion for literature in any form or of any quality, that he could hardly understand how what to him seemed at once a pleasure and duty should be regarded by others as an intolerable nuisance. The conduct of such people is treated with some disdain in one or two of the rare passages in which he writes of his circle with any severity. Some of these fashionable folk, after lingering in some place of gossip until the reading was well advanced, would enter the hall with ostentatious reluct- ance, and then leave before the end. Others, with an air of superiority, would sit in stolid silence and disguise the slightest expression of interest. This seemed to Pliny, not only grossly bad manners, but also neglect of a literary duty. 4 The audience should not only encourage honest effort ; they should contribute their judgment to the improvement of style. Pliny, like Aristotle, has an immense faith in the collective opinion of numbers, even in matters of artistic taste. 5 He used to read his own pieces to successively wider circles, each time receiving suggestions for amendment. Many of Pliny's Letters, like the dialogue De Oratoribus, reveal the keenness with which in those days questions of style were debated. But, as in the circle of Sidonius, this very energy of criticism was perhaps due to a dim consciousness of waning force. 6 Pliny, with all his kindly optimism, lets fall a phrase here and there which betrays an uneasiness about the future of letters. 7 Enthusiasm is failing. Nay, there is a hardly veiled contempt for that eager mediocrity which Pliny and Titinius Capito made it a point of honour to encourage. We feel that we are on the edge of that arid desert of cultivated 1 Plin. Ep. vL 17. 5i6 /cat Kplvovaiv Apeivov d iroWol xal 2 lb. iv. 27. rb. ttjs fiovffiKrjs fpya Kal ri. tCiv iroirp-Qv. * lb. iii. 18 ; iv. 5. 6 Sidon. Apoll. Ep. ii. 14 ; vii. 15 ; 4 lb. i. 13, 2 ; vi. 17 ; viii. 12, 1. i. 6. 5 lb. vi". 17, 7, quia in numero 7 Plin. Ep. viii. 12. Seneca was even ipso est quoddam magnum eonlatumqne more pessimist, cf. Ep. 95, 23 ; 100; consilium. Cf. Arist. Pol. iii. 11, De Brev. V. xiii. 1. 174 SOCIAL LIFE book n impotence in which the freshness and vigour of Eoman literature was soon mysteriously to disappear. Great as were the attractions of the capital, its gay social circles with their multifarious engagements, its games and spectacles, and literary novelties, yet the most devoted " Ardelio," in the end, felt the strain and the monotony to be oppressive. 1 Seneca and Pliny, Martial and Juvenal, 2 from various points of view, lament or ridicule the inanity and the slavery of city life. Eoman etiquette was perhaps the most imperious and exacting that ever existed. Morning receptions, punctilious attendance at the assumption of the toga, at betrothals, or the sealing of wills, or the reading of some tedious epic, advice or support in the law courts, congratulations to friends on every official success, these duties, and many others, left men, who had a large circle of acquaintance, hardly a moment of repose. Hence the rapture with which Pliny escapes to the stillness of the Laurentine pine woods, or the pure cold breezes that blew from the Apennines over his Tuscan seat. 3 In these calm solitudes the weary advocate and man of letters became for a little while his own master, and forgot the din and crush of the streets, the paltry ambitions, the malevolent gossip and silly rumours of the great world, in some long- suspended literary task. There can be no doubt that an in- tense enjoyment was becoming more and more felt in country life. Its unbought, home-grown luxuries, its common sights and sounds, its antique simplicity, have a strange charm even for a hardened bohemian like Martial. 4 But Pliny, besides this commoner form of enjoyment, has a keen and exquisite feeling for beauty of scenery. He loves the amphitheatre of hills, crowned with immemorial forest that looks down on rich pastoral slope, or vineyard or meadow, bright with the flowers of spring, and watered by the winding Tiber ; he loves the scenery of Como, where you watch the fishermen at his toils from some retreat on the terraced banks. 5 Where in ancient literature can you find a more sharp and clear-cut picture of a romantic scene than 1 Plin. Ep. i. 9 ; quot dies quam 2 Sen. Be Tranq. xii. ; Juv. iii. xi. frigidis rebus absumpsi ! cf. the social Mart. xii. 18. life of Symmachus, Roman Society in 3 Plin. Ep. i. 9 ; iv. 1. the Last Century of the Western Empire, 4 Mart. iii. 58. p. 128 sq. (1st ed.). 5 Plin. Ep. v. 6, 7, 8 ; i. 3 ; ix. 7 4. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 175 in his description of the Clitumnus ? x The famous stream rises under a low hill, shaded by ancient cypresses, and broadens into a basin in whose glassy ice-cold waters you may count the pebbles. Soon the current grows broader and swifter, and the barges are swept along under groves of ash and poplar, which, so vivid is their reflection, seem to be growing in the river-bed. Hard by, is a temple of the river-god, with many other chapels, and a seat of ancient augury ; the magic charm of antique re- ligious awe blends with the witchery of nature, and many a villa is planted on fair spots along the banks. There was plenty of sport to be had in the Apennines or the Lauren tine woods. But Pliny was plainly not a real sportsman. He once tells his friend Tacitus, who seems to have rallied him on this failing, that although he has killed three boars, he much prefers to sit, tablets in hand beside the nets, meditating in the silent glade. 2 The country is charming to Pliny, but its greatest charm lies in the long tranquil hours which can be given to literary musing. Part of the well-regulated day of Spurinna, a man who had com- manded armies and governed provinces, and who had reached his seventy-seventh year, is devoted to lyric composition both in Greek and Latin. 3 Pliny once or twice laments the mass of literary talent which, from diffidence or love of ease, was buried in these rural retreats. 4 There must have been many a country squire, like that Terentius, who, apparently lost in bucolic pursuits, surprised his guest by the purity of his taste and his breadth of culture. We often meet the same buried talent after nearly four centuries in the pages of Sidonius. 5 The literature of the Flavian age has preserved for us many pictures of Roman villas. They occupied every variety of site. They were planted on rocks where the sea-foam flecked their walls, 6 or on inland lakes and rivers, embowered in woods, or on the spurs of the Apennines, between the ancient forest and the wealthy plain. 7 Some of these mansions were remote and secluded. But on the Bay of Naples, on the Laurentine shore or the banks of Lake Como, 8 they clustered thickly. 1 Ep. viii. 8 ; cf. Virg. Georg. ii. 146 ; * lb. vil 25. once visited by Caligula, Suet. Calig. 5 Sidon. Apoll. Ep. i. 6 ; ii. 14 ; vii. 43. 15. 2 Plin. Ep. i. 6, solitudo ipsumque 8 Stat. SUv. ii. 2, 22, spumant illnd silentium quod venationi datur templa salo. magna cogitationis incitamenta sunt. 7 Plin. Ep. v. 6. 3 lb. iii. 1, 7. 8 lb. ii. 17, 27. 176 SOCIAL LIFE book ii Building in the days of Domitian was as much the rage as it was in the days of Horace, and, just as then, all natural obstacles were defied in preparing a site to the builder's taste. In the grounds of Pollius Felix in the Silvae, whole hills had been levelled, and rocks had been cleared away to make a space for the house with its gardens and woodlands. 1 Manlius Vopiscus had built two luxurious seats on opposite banks of the Anio, where the stream glides silently under overarching boughs. 2 The villas pressed so close to the water that you could converse, and almost touch hands, across the interval between them. The love of variety, or the obligation imposed on senators to invest a third of their fortune in Italian land, 8 may account for the number of country seats possessed even by men who were not of the wealthiest class. 4 Pliny had villas at Laurentum, at Tifernum Tiberinum, at Beneventum, and more than two on Lake Como. 6 The orator Eegulus had at least five country seats. 6 Silius Italicus had several stately abodes in the same district of Campania, and, with capricious facility, transferred his affections to each new acquisition. 7 It is by no means an easy task, and perhaps not a very profitable one, to trace minutely the arrangement of one of these great houses. Indeed there seems to have been a good deal of caprice and little care for symmetry in their architecture. The builder appears to have given no thought to external effect. To catch a romantic view from the windows, to escape the sultry heat of midsummer, or woo the brief sunshine of December, above all to obtain perfect stillDess, were the objects which seem to have dictated the plans of the Roman architect. 8 The Laurentine villa of Pliny and the Surrentine of Pollius Felix from their windows or colonnades gave glimpses of forest or mountain, or sea, or fat herds browsing on the meadow grass, or a view seaward to the islands off the Cam- 1 Stat. Silv. ii. 2, 53 ; cf. iii. 1, 124. rising ; Ep. vi. 19 ; but cf. iii. 19 (a.d. 2 lb. i. 3, 20-37. 101) ; see Friedl. L p. 197. 3 Imposed by Trajan on candidates 4 g en De ^enef. vii. 10, 5 ; Ep. 89, for office, Plin. Ep. vi. 19. This was 20 ; Mart. v. 13, 7 ; Petron. Sat. a repetition of former enactments, e.g. 7g > 77 . gtat. Silv. ii. 6, 62. Suet Tib 48. It was revived again by 8 p;in> E iL 17 ; v. 6 ; ix. 7 ; iv. M. Aurehus, Capitol xi. Exclusion l - iv 13 from commerce necessitated investments '. ' ' .. in land. Plin. Ep. iii. 19, sum prope Mart * vu ' *}' totusin praediis, aliquid tamen foenero. Plin. Ep. iii. 7. Jn a.d. 106 the price of land was 8 Fried!. Sittengesch. iii. 64. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 177 panian shore. 1 One room admits the morning sun, another is brightened by the glow of evening. Here is a colonnade where in winter you can pace up and down with shutters closed on the weather side, or in spring-time enjoy the scent of violets and the temperate sunshine. 2 In the mansions on the Anio, there is, according to Statius, an air of everlasting quietness, never broken even by wandering wind, or ripple of the stream. 3 Pliny has a distant room at Laurentum, to which even the licensed din of the Saturnalia never penetrates. 4 Thus these villas threw out their chambers far and wide, meandering in all directions, according to the fancy of the master, or the charms of the neighbouring scenery. The luxury of the Eoman villa consisted rather in the spaciousness and variety of building, to suit the changing seasons, than in furniture for comfort or splendour. There were, indeed, in many houses some costly articles, tables of citrus and ivory, and antique vases, of priceless worth. 5 But the chambers of the most stately houses would probably, to modern taste, seem scantily furnished. It was on the walls and ceiling and columns that the Eoman of taste lavished his wealth. The houses of Pliny, indeed, seem to have been little adorned by this sort of costly display. 6 But the villa of Pollius Felix, like the baths of Claudius Etruscus, shone with all the glory of variegated marbles on plaque and pillar, drawn from the quarries of Phrygia, Laconia, and Syene, Carystus and Numidia. 7 Pliny confesses that he is not a connoisseur in art. He speaks with hesitation of the merit of a Corinthian bronze which he has acquired. 8 But he was surrounded in his own class by artistic enthusiasm, much of it, it is to be feared, pretentious and ignorant. The dispersion of the artistic wealth of Greek lands had flooded Italy with the works of the great masters. Collectors of them, like Silius Italicus, abounded. The fashion became so general and so imperious, that it penetrated even into the vulgar circle of people like Trimalchio, who, in interpreting the subject of the chasing on a cup, could con- fuse the Punic and the Trojan wars. In the villas described 1 Plin. Ep. ii. 17 ; Stat. Silv. ii. 2, 8 Plin. Ep. v. 6. 76. 7 Stat. Silv. ii. 2, 85 ; i. 5, 36 ; 2 Plin. ii. 17, 16. Friedl. Sittengesch. iii. 65. 3 Stat. Silv. L 3, 29. 8 Plin.JSp.ilL6; cf. the taste of Silius 4 Plin. Ep. ii. 17, 24. Italicus, iii. 7, 8 ; Petron. Sat. 50, 88 ; 5 Friedl. Sittengesch. iii. 87. Mahaffy, Greek World, etc., p. 139 sq. N 178 SOCIAL LIFE book 11 by Statius, it would seem that the art of Apelles, Pheidias, Myron, and Polycletus adorned the saloons and colonnades. 1 It may be doubted, however, whether many of these works could claim such illustrious parentage. There was plenty of facile technique in those days which might easily deceive the vulgar collector by more or less successful reproduction. 2 The confident claim to artistic discrimination was not less common in the Flavian age than in later days, and it was probably as fallible. It is rather suspicious that, in the attempts at artistic appreciation in this period, attention seems to be concentrated on the supposed antiquity, rarity, or costliness of material. There is little in the glowing descriptions in the Silvae to indicate a genuine appreciation of real art. It is possible that the great Eoman country seat, in its vast extent, although not in the stateliness of its exterior, may have surpassed the corresponding mansions of our time. It was the expression in stone of the dominant passion of an enormously wealthy class, intoxicated with the splendour of imperial power, and ambitious to create monuments worthy of an im- perial race. Moreover, the Eoman's energy always exulted in triumphing over natural difficulties. Just as he drove his roads unswerving over mountain and swamp, so he took a pride in rearing his piles of masonry on the most obstinate and defiant sites, or even in the middle of the waves. But, in the extent of their parks, and the variety of floral display, the Eomans of the most luxurious age seldom reached the modern English standard. The grounds of the villas which, in thick succession, lined the Laurentine or Campanian shore, cannot have been very extensive. Pliny has splendid views from his windows of forest, mountain, and meadow, but the scene lies plainly beyond the bounds of his demesne. 3 The gardens and shrubberies are very artificial, arranged in terraces or labyrinths close to the house, or with hedges of box clipped into shapes of animals along an open colonnade. The hippodrome at his Tuscan seat, for riding exercise, is formed by lines of box and laurel and cypress and plane tree. The fig and mulberry form a garden at the Laurentine villa. 4 The cultivated 1 Stat. Silv. i. 3, 50 ; ii. 2, 63 sq. ; c. ix. p. 265 ; Marq. Priv. ii. 611. Mart. iv. 39. 3 Plin. Ep. v. 6, 7 ; cf. ii. 17, 3. 2 Friedl. iii. 196 ; cf. Croiset, Lucien, * lb. ii. 17, 15 ; v. 6, 33. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 179 flowers are few, only roses and violets. But the Komans made up for variety by lavish profusion. In the Neronian orgies a fortune was sometimes spent on Egyptian roses for a single banquet. 1 We might almost conjecture how the days passed amid such scenes, even without any formal diary. But Pliny has left us two descriptions of a gentleman's day in the country. 2 Pliny himself, as we might expect, awoke early, about six o'clock, and in one of those sleeping-rooms, so carefully shut off from the voices of nature or from household noise, with shutters still closed, he meditated some literary piece. Then, calling for his amanuensis, he dictated what he had composed. About ten or eleven, he passed into a shady cloister, opening on a bed of violets, or a grove of plane trees, where he continued his literary work. Then followed a drive, during which, according to his uncle's precept and example, his studies were still continued. 3 A short siesta, a walk, declama- tion in Greek and Latin, after the habit of Cicero, gymnastic exercise, and the bath, filled the space till dinner time arrived. During this meal, a book was read aloud, and the evening hours were enlivened by acting or music and the society of friends. Occasional hunting and the cares of a rural estate came in to vary this routine. The round of Spurinna's day, which excited Pliny's admiration by its rigid regularity, is pretty much the same as his own, except that Spurinna seems to have talked more and read less. 4 To the ordinary English squire Pliny's studious life in the country would not seem very attractive. And his pretence of sport was probably ridiculed even in his own day. 5 But his Letters give glimpses of a rural society which, both in its pleasures and its cares, has probably been always much the same from one age to another in Europe. On his way to Como, Pliny once turned aside for a couple of days to his Tuscan estate, to join in the dedication of a temple which he had built for the people of Tifernum Tiberinum. The consecra- tion was to be followed by a dinner to his good neighbours, who had elected him patron of their township, who were very proud of his career, and greeted him warmly whenever 1 Suet. Nero, xx vii.; Friedl. iii. 77 sqq. 3 lb. iii. 5, 15. 8 Plin. Ep. ix. 36 ; iii. 1. * lb. iii. 1. s lb. ix. 36, 6. 180 SOCIAL LIFE book ii he came among them. 1 There is also the record of the restora- tion, in obedience to the warning of a diviner, of an ancient temple of Ceres on his lands, with colonnades to shelter the worshippers who frequented the shrine. And the venerable wooden statue of the goddess, which was much decayed, had to be replaced by a more artistic image. But the life of a Eoman proprietor, of course, had its prosaic and troublesome side which Pliny does not conceal. There is an interesting letter in which he consults a friend on the question of the purchase of an estate. 2 It adjoined, or rather cut into his own lands. It could be managed by the same bailiff, and the same staff of labourers and artisans would serve for both estates. On the other hand, Pliny thinks, it is better not to put too many eggs into one basket. It is more prudent to have estates widely dispersed, and thus less exposed to a single stroke of calamity. Moreover this estate, however tempting, with its fertile, well-watered meadows, its vineyards and woods, is burdened by an insolvent tenantry, who, through faulty management, have been allowed to fall into arrear. Pliny, however, is tempted to buy at a greatly reduced price, 8 and, in order to meet the payment, although his wealth is nearly all in land, he can call in some loans at interest, and the balance can be borrowed from his father-in-law, whose purse is always at his disposal. Pliny was sometimes worried by the complaints of the people on his estates, and finds it very difficult to secure solvent tenants on a five years lease. He made liberal remissions of rent, but arrears went on accumulating, until the tenant in despair gave up any attempt to repay his debt. In this extremity, Pliny resolved to adopt a different system of letting. He substituted for a fixed rent a certain proportion of the produce, 4 in fact the metayer system, and employed some of his people to see that the returns were not fraudulently diminished. At another time he is embarrassed by finding that, owing to a bad vintage, 1 Plin. Ep. iv. 1. the price of land was rising, owing to 2 lb. iii. 19. competition, and Pliny advises Nepos 3 lb. 7. This estate was once to sell his Italian estates and buy worth HS. 5, 000,000; it was now offered others in the provinces ; cf. vi. 3, 1. for HS.3,000,000, i.e. 25,000; cf. Ep. 4 Ep. ix. 37, medendi una ratio, si iv. 6 ; ii. 4, 3. The letter iii. 19 non nummo sed partibus locem ; cf. belongs to the year 101 a.d. ; but in J. S. Mill, Pol. Econ. bk. ii. c. 8, 1 ; Ep. vi. 19 (106 a.d.) it appears that A. Young, Travels in France, p. 18. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 181 the men who have bought his grapes in advance are going to be heavy losers. He makes a uniform remission to all of about twelve per cent. But he gives an additional advantage to the large buyers, and to those who had been prompt in their payments. 1 It is characteristic of the man that he says, quite naturally, that the landlord should share with his tenant such risks from the fickleness of nature. So good a man was sure to be far more afflicted by the troubles of his dependents than by any pecuniary losses of his own. One year, there were many deaths among his slaves. Pliny feels this acutely, but he consoles himself by the reflection that he has been liberal in manumission, and still more liberalin allowing his slaves to make their wills, the validity of which he maintains as if they were legal instruments. 2 If Pliny shows a little too much self-complacency in this human sympathy, there can be no doubt that, like Seneca, he felt that slaves were humble friends, men of the same flesh and blood as the master, and that the master has a moral duty towards them, quite apart from the legal conventions of Home. 3 When his wife's grandfather proposed to make numerous manumissions, Pliny rejoiced greatly at the accession of so many new citizens to the municipality. 4 When his favourite reader, Encolpius, was seized with hemorrhage, Pliny displayed a genuine and most affectionate concern for the humble partner of his studies. 5 Another member of his household, a freedman named Zosimus, suffered from the same malady. Zosimus seems to have been a most excellent, loyal, and accomplished man. He was very versatile, a comedian, a musician, a tasteful reader of every kind of literature. 6 His patron sent him to Egypt to recruit his health. But, from putting too great a strain upon his voice, he had a return of his dangerous illness, and once more needed change of air. Pliny determined to send him to the Riviera, and begs a friend, Paulinus, to let Zosimus have the use of his villa and all necessary attention, for which Pliny will 1 Plin. Ep. viii. 2 ; ix. 37, 3. Boissier, Pel. Rom. ii. 358 ; Denis, des 2 lb. viii. 16; cf. the Lex Coll. Idtes Morales, etc., ii. 208 sq. ; Wallon, Cultorum Dianae et Antinoi, Or. Henz. L'Esclav. i. c. 11 ; Marq. L 189. 6086. The slave member is permitted 4 Ep. vii. 32. Fabatus seems to have to dispose of his funeraticium by will. been a model country squire ; cf. Ep. Marq. Priv. i. 189. iv. 1 ; v. 11 ; vi. 12 ; vii. 11 ; viii. 10. 8 Sen. Ep. 31 ; 47 ; 77 ; De Clem. i. B lb. viii. 1. 18, 3 ; De Ben. Hi. 21 ; Juv. xiv. 16 ; 8 lb. v. 19 ; cf. Sen. Ep. 27, 6 ; D. Chr. Or. x. ; Spart. Hadr. 18, 7 ; Friedl. SG. iii. 89 ; Marq. Priv. i. 158. 182 SOCIAL LIFE book ii bear the cost. 1 In his social relations with his freedmen Pliny always shows himself the perfect, kindly gentleman. Juvenal and Martial poured their scorn on those unequal dinners, where the guests were graduated, and where poorer wine and coarser viands were served out to those of humble degree. 2 Pliny was present at one of these entertainments, and he expresses his contempt for the vulgar host in terms of unwonted energy. 3 His own freedmen, as he tells a fellow-guest, are entertained as equals at his table. If a man fears the expense, he can find a remedy by restraining his own luxury, and sharing the plain fare which he imposes on his company. Pliny's relations with his slaves and freedmen were very like those which the kindly English squire cultivates towards his household and dependents. The affectionate regret for a good master or mistress, recorded on many an inscription of that age, 4 shows that Pliny's household was by no means a rare exception. Yet the Letters of Pliny, with all their charity and tranquil optimism, reveal now and then a darker side of household slavery. A man of praetorian rank named Largius Macedo, who forgot, or perhaps too vividly remembered, his own servile origin, was known as a cruel and haughty master. "While he was enjoying the bath in his Formian villa, he was suddenly surrounded by a throng of angry slaves who, with every expression of hatred and loathing, inflicted on him such injuries that he was left for dead on the glowing pavement. He seemed, or pretended for a while, to be dead. A few who remained faithful took up the apparently lifeless corpse, amid the shrieks of his concubines, and bore him into the Frigi- darium. The coolness and the clamour recalled him from his swoon. The would-be murderers meanwhile had fled, but many of them were caught in the end, and the outrage was sternly avenged. 5 In another letter, Pliny tells the tale of the mysterious disappearance of one Metilius Crispus, a citizen of Como, for whom Pliny had obtained equestrian rank, and made him a gift of the required HS.400,000. Metilius set out on a journey and was never heard of again. 6 It is 1 Plin. Ep. v. 19. 5 Plin. Ep. iii. 14. 2 Mart. i. 44 ; iii. 49 ; Juv. v. 25 sqq. ; 6 lb. vi. 25 ; cf. the similar fate of cf. Sen. De Ben. vi. 33, 4. Lampridius, at the close of the Western 3 Plin. Ep. ii. 6. Empire in Gaul, Sid. Apoll. Ep. viii. * Or. Henz. 2862, 2874, 6389. 11. 10. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 183 significant that of the slaves who attended him no one ever reappeared. Amid such perils, says Pliny, do we masters live, and no kindness can relieve us from alarm. Seneca remarks that the master's life is continually at the mercy of his slaves. 1 And the cruel stringency of legislation shows how real was the peril. Pliny was only an infant in the evil days when suicide was the one refuge from tyranny, when the lancet so often opened the way to "eternal freedom." Yet, even in his later years, men not unfrequently escaped from intolerable calamity or incurable disease by a voluntary death. 2 The morality of suicide was long a debated question. There were strict moralists who maintained that it was never lawful to quit one's post before the final signal to retreat. Men like Seneca regarded it as a question to be determined by circumstances and motives. 3 He would not palliate wild, impetuous self- murder, without a justifying cause. On the other hand, there might be, especially under a monster like Nero, cases in which it were mere folly not to choose an easy emancipation rather than a certain death of torture and ignominy. Eternal law, which has assigned a single entrance to this life, has mercifully allowed us many exits. Any death is preferable to servitude. 4 So, in the case of disease and old age, it is merely a question whether the remainder of life is worth living. If the mental powers are falling into irreparable decay, if the malady is tormenting and incurable, Seneca would permit the rational soul to quit abruptly its crumbling tenement, not to escape pain or weakness, but to shake off the slavery of a worthless life. 5 Pliny was not a philosopher, and had no elaborate theory of suicide or of anything else. But his opinion on the question may be gathered from his remarks on the case of Titius Aristo, the learned jurist. To rush on death, he says, is a vulgar, 1 Sen. Ep. 4, 8 ; 107, 5. * Sen. Ep. 70, 21, dum hoc constat 8 See a great mass of instances and praeferendam esse spurcissimam mortem authorities collected, with his unique servituti mundissimae. learning, by Mayor, Plin. iii. pp. 114, 6 lb. 58, 36, non adferam mihi 115 ; cf! Boissier, VOpp. p. 212. manus propter dolorem : hunc tamen si 8 Sen. Ei>. 24. 11 ; 58, 36 ; 70, sciero perpetuo mihi esse patiendum, 8 ; 117, 22 ; De Prov. ii. 10 ; vL 7 ; exibo ; non propter ipsum, sed quia De Ira, iii. 15 ; Epict. i. 24 ; cf. ii. 15 ; impedimento mini futurus est ad omne iii. 24 ; M. Aurel. x. 8 ; x. 32 ; cf. propter quod vivitur . . . prosiliam ex Mommsen, De Coll. p. 100. aedificio putri ac ruenti. 184 SOCIAL LIFE boqk ii commonplace act. But to balance the various motives, and make a deliberate and rational choice may, in certain circumstances, be the proof of a lofty mind. 1 The cases of suicide described in the Letters are nearly always cases of incurable or prolonged disease. The best known is that of the luxurious Silius Italicus, who starved himself to death in his seventy-fifth year. 2 He was afflicted with an incurable tumour, almost the only trouble in his long and happy life. Corellius Eufus, who had watched over Pliny's career with almost parental care, 3 chose to end his life in a similar manner. Pliny was immensely saddened by the close of a life which seemed to enjoy so many blessings, high character, great reputation and influence, family love and friendship. Yet he does not question the last resolve of Corellius. In his thirty-third year he had been seized with hereditary gout. During the period of vigorous manhood, he had warded off its onsets by an extreme abstinence. But as old age crept on, its tortures, wracking every limb, became unendurable, and Corellius determined to put an end to the hopeless struggle. His obstinacy was proof against all the entreaties of his wife and friends, and Pliny, who was called in as a last resource, came only to hear the physician repelled for the last time with a single energetic word. 4 Sailing once on Lake Como, Pliny heard from an old friend the tragic tale of a double suicide from a verandah overhanging the lake. The husband had long suffered from a loathsome and hopeless malady. His wife insisted on knowing the truth, and, when it was revealed to her, she nerved him to end the cruel ordeal, and promised to bear him company. Bound together, the pair took the fatal leap. 5 In spite of his charity and optimism, 6 it would not be alto- gether true to say that Pliny was blind to the faults and vices of his time. He speaks, with almost Tacitean scorn, of the rewards which awaited a calculating childlessness, and of the 1 Plin. Ep. L 22, 10 ; Aristo was a 4 lb. i. 12, 10. It is characteristic fine type of the puritan pagan, an of the time that his last word was "imago priscae frugalitatis. " K^Kpaca. 2 lb. iii. 7, 1. For similar instances, 6 lb. vi. 24. v. Sen. Ep. 70, 6 ; Tac. Ann. xi. 3 ; 6 Pliny boasts of idealising his Suet. Tib. 53 ; Petron. Ill ; Epict. ii. friends ; vii. 28, agnosco crimen. . . . 15. TJt enim non sint tales quales a me 3 Plin. Ep. ix. 13, 6 ; cf. iv. 17, 4 ; praedicantur, ego tamen beatus quod vii. mini videntur. chap, i PLINY'S SOCIETY 185 eager servility of the will-hunter. 1 In recommending a tutor for the son of Corellia Hispulla, he regards the teacher's stainless character as of paramount importance in an age of dangerous licence, when youth was beset with manifold seductions. 2 He blushes for the degradation of senatorial character displayed in the scurrilous or obscene entries which were sometimes found on the voting tablets of the august body. 3 The decline of modesty and courteous deference in the young towards their elders greatly afflicted so courteous a gentleman. There seemed to be no respect left for age or authority. With their fancied omni- science and intuitive wisdom, young men disdain to learn from any one or to imitate any example ; they are their own models. 4 Among the many spotless and charming women of Pliny's circle, there is one curious exception, one, we may venture to surmise, who had been formed in the Neronian age. Ummidia Quadratilla was a lady of the highest rank, who died at the age of eighty in the middle of the reign of Trajan. 5 She preserved to the end an extraordinary health and vigour, and evidently enjoyed the external side of life with all the zest of the old days of licence in her youth. Her grandson, who lived under her roof, was one of Pliny's dearest friends, a spotless and almost puritanical character. Ummidia, even in her old age, kept a troop of pantomimic artistes, and continued to enjoy their doubtful exhibitions. But her grandson would never witness them, and, it must be said, Ummidia respected and even encouraged a virtue superior to her own. i It has been remarked that, in nearly all these cases, where Pliny has any fault to find with his generation, the evil seems to be only a foil for the virtue of some of his friends. Even in his own day, there were those who criticised him for his extrava- gant praise of the people he loved. He takes the censure as a compliment, preferring the kind-heartedness which is occasionally deceived, to the cold critical habit which has lost all illusions. 6 Pliny belonged to a caste who were linked 1 Plin. Ep. viii. 18; iv. 21; viii. 10, atque etiam foeda dictu . . . inventa 11, neque enim ardentius tu pronepotes sunt. ?[uam ego liberos cupio ; cf. iv. 15, 3, 4 lb. viii. 23,3, ipsi sibi exempla sunt, ecunditate uxoris firm voluit eo saeculo 5 lb. vii. 24, she was born about quo plerisque etiam singulos filios orbi- A.D. 27, in the reign of Tiberius. Urn- tatis praemia graves faciunt. midia had the virtue of liberality ; sbe 2 lb. iii. 3, in hac licentia temporum. built an ampbitb ^7rwj in sumus e municipiis, id est, omnes KaXKiarri ical i]8iffTV iKdartj a, diSaaKdXuv. foedabat. 200 SOCIAL LIFE book 11 Sandy wastes, trackless mountains, and broad rivers present no barriers to the traveller, who finds his home and country everywhere. The earth has become a vast pleasure garden. 1 This glowing description of the Eoman world of the Antonine age is not perhaps strengthened by the appeal to the doubtful statistics of other contemporaries, such as Aelian and Josephus. We may hesitate to accept the statement that Italy had once 1197 cities, or that Gaul possessed 1200. 2 In these estimates, if they have any solid foundation, the term " city " must be taken in a very elastic sense. But there are other more trustworthy reckonings which sufficiently support the glowing description of Aristides. When the Eomans con- quered Spain and Gaul, they found a system of pagi or cantons, with very few considerable towns. The 800 towns which are said to have been taken by Julius Caesar can have been little more than villages. But the Eomanisation of both countries meant centralisation. Where the Eomans did not find towns they created them. 3 Gradually, but rapidly, the isolated rural life became more social and urban. In the north-eastern province of Spain, out of 293 communities in the time of the elder Pliny, 179 were in some sense urban, 114 were still purely rustic ; 4 and we may be sure that this is an immense advance on the condition of the country at the time of the conquest. In the reign of Antoninus Pius, only 27 of these rural districts remained without an organised civic centre. 6 In Gaul, Julius Caesar impressed the stamp of Eome on the province of Narbo, by founding cities of the Eoman type, and his policy was continued by Augustus. The loose cantonal system almost disappeared from the province in the south, although it lingered long in the northern regions of Gaul. Yet even in the north, on the borders of Germany, Cologne, from the reign of Claudius, became the envy of the barbarians across the Rhine, 6 and Treves, from the days of Augustus, already anticipated its glory as a seat of empire from Diocletian to Gratian and Valentinian. 7 In the Agri Decumates, between 1 Aristid. Or. xiv. (225), 393-4, r) 777 tion, p. 203. 7r iwi iv- 65 Strab> xii 578 Baden and his wife and daughter ; Or. 8 R ^ v 6Q . ^^ SQ . m 3 Marq. i. 155, in keiner andern 9 Aristid. Or. xiv. 223 (392), ir6\ts Provinz lasst sich die Entwickelnng iyKaWAmfffui rrjt vfiertpat yi-yovev der romischen Stadteanlagen so genan fiyefiovlas. verfolgen als in Dacien. Arnold, E. 10 Cf. Victor, Fit. i. 7 ; v. 9 ; Friedl. Prov. Admin, p. 205. SO. iii. 110 ; v. Migne, Patrol. Lai. * Or. Henz. 5287. t. lviii. 270, notitia Africae. 202 SOCIAL LIFE book ii those capitols, forums, aqueducts, and temples in what are now sandy solitudes, not even occupied by a native village. In the province of Numidia, within a few leagues of the Sahara, the Kornan colony of Thamugadi (Timgad) was founded, as an inscription tells, by Trajan in the year 100. 1 There, in what is now a scene of utter loneliness and desolation, the remains of a busy and well-organised community have been brought to light by French explorers. The town was built by the third legion, which for generations, almost as a hereditary caste, protected Eoman civilisation against the restless tribes of the desert. The chief buildings were probably completed in 117. The preservation of so much, after eighteen centuries, is a proof that the work was well and thoroughly done. The ruts of carriage wheels can still be seen in the main street, which js spanned by a triumphal arch, adorned with marble columns. Porticoes and colonnades gave shelter from the heat to the passers-by, and two fountains played at the further end. Water, which is now invisible on the spot, was then brought in channels from the hills, and distributed at a fixed rate among private houses. 2 The forum was in the usual style, with raised side walks and porticoes, a basilica, a seriate-house and rostrum, a shrine of Fortuna Augusta, and a crowd of statues to the emperors from M. Aurelius to Julian. 3 This petty place had its theatre, where the seats can still be seen rising in their due gradation of rank. An imposing capitol, in which, as at home, the Eoman Trinity, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, were duly worshipped, was restored in the reign of Valentinian I., and dedicated by that Publius Caeionius Albinus who was one of the last of the pagan aristocracy, and who figures in the Letters of Symmachus and the Saturnalia of Macrobius. 4 The inscriptions on the site reveal the regular municipal constitu- tion, with the names of .seventy decurions, each of whom prob- ably paid his honorarium of 13 or more when he entered on his office. 5 The honours of the duumvirate and the aedileship cost respectively 32 and 24. 6 And here, as elsewhere, the 1 C.I.L. viii. 2355 ; Cagnat, LArmie 6 C.I.L. viii. 2403 ; Suppl. ii. 17903 ; Rom. d'Afrique, p. 582 ; Boissier, Suppl. i. 12058. This inscription, from L'Afr. Rom. p. 180. an obscure place, shows how an original 2 Or. Henz. 5326. honorarium of HS.1600 was finally 3 Boissier, L'Afr. Rom. p. 187. increased by voluntary generosity to 4 C.I.L. viii. 2388 ; Hieron. Ep. 107, HS.12,000. 1 ; Macrob. Sat. i. 2, 15. 6 lb. 2341, 17838. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 203 public monuments and buildings were generally erected by private ambition or munificence. A statue and little shrine of Fortuna Augusta were given by two ladies, at a cost of over 200, in the days of Hadrian. 1 The greatest glory of the imperial administration for nearly two centuries was the skilful and politic tolerance with which it reconciled a central despotism with a remarkable range of local liberty. It did not attempt to impose a uniform organisation or a bureaucratic control on the vast mass of races and peoples whom the fortune of Eome had brought under her sway, Eather, for ages its guiding principle was, as far as possible, to leave ancient landmarks undisturbed, and to give as much free play to local liberties as was compatible with the safety and efficiency of the imperial guardian of order and peace. Hence those many diversities in the relation between provincial towns and Eome, represented by the names of free, federate, or stipendiary cities, municipium and colonia. Many retained their old laws, constitution, and judicial system. 2 They retained in some cases the names of magistracies, which recalled the days of independence: there were still archons at Athens, suffetes in African towns, demarchs at Naples. The title of medixtuticus still lingered here and there in old Oscan communities. 3 "When she had crushed the national spirit, and averted the danger of armed revolt, Eome tolerated, and even fostered, municipal freedom, for more than a hundred years after the last shadowy pretence of popular government had disappeared from her own forum. 4 Central control and uniformity were established in those departments which affected the peace and welfare of the whole vast common- wealth. Although the interference of the provincial governor in local administration was theoretically possible in varying degrees, yet it may well be doubted whether a citizen of Lyons or Marseilles, of Antioch or Alexandria, was often made conscious of any limitation of his freedom by imperial 1 C.I.L. viii. ; Suppl. ii. 17831. 4 Tac. Ann. i. 15 ; Momms. Rom. _. _, . jr _ St. ii. 1002; Duruy, v. pp. 336-346; Marq. Rom. St. i 45 ; Bury, Rom. Gr&rd Plut 221 237 piut Rei Ger If'- P ' oi/l ' Pr - c - 17 > 19 ' The first curatores Admin, p. 210. civitatum are heard of in the reigns * Or. Henz. 3720, 3800, 3801, 3056, of Nerva and Trajan ; cf. Marq. i. 510, 3057, 3804. n. 10 204 SOCIAL LIFE book ii power. "While delation and confiscation and massacre were working havoc on the banks of the Tiber, the provinces were generally tranquil and prosperous. The people elected their magistrates, who administered municipal affairs with little interference from government. The provincial administration of a Nero, an Otho, a Vitellius, or a Domitian was often no less prudent and considerate than that of a Vespasian or a Trajan. 1 And the worst of the emperors share with the best in the universal gratitude of the provinces for the blessings of the " Eoman peace." 2 But although for generations there was a settled abstinence from centralisation on the part of the imperial government, the many varieties of civic constitution in the provinces tended by an irresistible drift to a uniform type of organisation. Free and federate communities voluntarily sought the position of a colony or a municipium. 3 Just as the provincial town must have its capitol, with the cult of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, or imported the street names Velabrum or Vicus Tuscus, so the little community called itself respublica, its commons the populus, its curia the senate or the amplissimus et splendidissimus ordo ; its magistrates sometimes bore the majestic names of praetor, dictator, or censor, in a few cases even of consul. 4 This almost ludicrous imitation of the great city is an example of the magical power which Eome always exercised on her most distant subjects, and even on the outer world of barbarism, down to the last days when her forces were ebbing away. The ease and rapidity of communication along the great routes, the frequent visits of proconsuls and procurators and generals, with the numerous train which attended them, the presence of the ubiquitous Eoman merchant and traveller, kept even remote places in touch with the 1 Suet. Tib. 32 ; Tac. Ann. iv. 6 ; 2 See a crowd of inscriptions to Suet. Nero, x. ; Otho, iii. provinciam Domitian and Commodus in remote administravit moderatione singulari ; places in Africa ; cf. C.I.L. viii. 1016, Vitell. v. Vespasian had to increase 1019 ; 10570, 8702, in which Corn- burdens, Suet. xvi. ; Tac. Hist. ii. 84 ; modus is described as indulgentissimus as to Trajan, cf. Plin. Paneg. 20 ; Suet. princeps, etc. Dom. 8. Nero, it is true, is said to 3 Marq. Mom. St. i. 517 sq. ; Arnold, have encouraged plunder (Suet. Nero, p. 212. 32; Plin. H. N. 18, 6). Yet the 4 Henz. iii. Ind. p. 1 56 ; Inscr. 2322, general prosperity was undisturbed, 6980, 4983 ; Marq. Bom. St. i. 477. Boissier, L'Opp. 170 ; Arnold, Rom. There were consuls at Tusculum and Prov. Admin. 135 ; Greard, Pint. Beneventum. But the grand style was 199. ridiculed by Cicero, In Pis. xi. 24. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 205 capital. The acta diurna, with official news and bits of scandal and gossip, regularly arrived in distant provincial towns and frontier camps. 1 The last speech of Pliny, or the freshest epigrams of Martial, were within a short time selling on the bookstalls of Lyons or Vienne. 2 Until the appearance of railways and steamboats, it may be doubted whether there was any age in history in which travelling was easier or more general. Apart from the immense stimulus which was given to trade and commerce by the pacification of the world, liberal curiosity, or restless ennui, or the passion to preach and propagate ideas, carried immense numbers to the most distant lands. 3 The travelling sophist found his way to towns on the edge of the Scythian steppes, to the home of the Brahmans, or to the depths of the Soudan. 4 The tour up the Nile was part of a liberal culture in the days of Lucian as it was in the days of Herodotus. The romantic charm of travel in Greece was probably heightened for many by the tales of Thessalian brigands and sorceresses which meet us in the novel of Apuleius. The Emperor Hadrian, who visited almost every interesting scene in his dominions, from the Solway to the Euphrates, often trudging for days at the head of his soldiers, is a true representative of the migratory tastes of his time. Seneca, indeed, finds in this rage for change of scene only a symptom of the universal unrest. Epictetus, on the other hand, and Aristides expatiate with rapture on the universal security and wellbeing, due to the disappearance of brigan- dage, piracy, and war. The seas are alive with merchant- men ; deserts have become populous scenes of industry ; the great roads are carried over the broadest rivers and the most defiant mountain barriers. The earth has become the common possession of all. Nor is this mere rhetoric. Travelling to all parts of the known world had become expeditious, and even luxurious. From the Second Punic War, traders, couriers, and travellers had moved freely along the great roads. 6 The 1 Tac. Ann. xiii. 31 ; xvi. 22, diurna 8 Sen. Ep. 28, 104 ; Luc. Tax. 27 ; {>er provincias, per exercitus curatius De Dips. 6 ; Philops. 33 ; Alex. 44 ; eguntur. Peter, Gesch. Litt. i. 212 ; Epict. Dis. iii. 13. Mac4 Sudtone, p. 191 ; Marq. Priv. i. * Philostr. Apoll. Tyan. iii. 50, vi. ; 88 ; cf. C.I.L. viil 11813 ; Lamprid. D. Chrys. Or. 36. Com. 15. 5 Hudemann, Gesch. des r'&rn. Post- 8 Plin. Ep. ix. 11, 2 ; Mart. vii. 88. wesens, p. 8 sq. Marq. Horn. St. L 417 ; Friedl. SG. ii. 8. 206 SOCIAL LIFE H book n government post, which was first organised by Augustus on the model of the Persian, provided at regular intervals the means of conveyance for officials, or for those furnished with the requisite diploma. Private enterprise had also organised facilities of travel, and at the gates of country towns such as Pompeii, Praeneste, or Tibur, there were stations of the posting corporations (the cisiarii or jumentarii) where carriages could be hired, with change of horses at each stage. 1 The speed with which great distances were traversed in those days is at first sight rather startling. Caesar once travelled 100 miles a day in a journey from Eome to the Ehone. 2 The freedman Icelus in seven days carried the news of Nero's death to Galba in Spain, 3 the journey of 332 miles from Tarraco to Clunia having been made at the rate of nearly ten miles an hour. This of course was express speed. The ordinary rate of travelling is probably better represented by the leisurely journey of Horace and Maecenas to Brundisium, or that of Martial's book from Tarraco to Bilbilis. 4 About 130 miles a day was the average distance accomplished by sea. Vessels put out from Ostia or Puteoli for every port in the Mediterranean. From Puteoli to Corinth was a voyage of five days. About the same time was needed to reach Tarraco from Ostia. A ship might arrive at Alexandria from the Palus Maeotis in a fortnight. 5 Many a wandering sophist, like Dion Chrysostom or Apollonius of Tyana, traversed great distances on foot, or with a modest wallet on a mule. The rhetor Aristides once spent a hundred days in a journey at mid-winter from Mysia to Eome. 6 But there was hardly any limit to the luxury and ostentatious splendour with which the great and opulent made their progresses, attended or preceded by troops of footmen and runners, and carrying with them costly plate and myrrhine vases. 7 The thousand carriages which Nero took with him on a progress, the silver-shod mules of Poppaea, the paraphernalia of luxury described by Seneca, if they are not mythical, were probably the exceptional displays of a self-indulgence bordering on lunacy. 8 But practical and sensible comfort in travelling 1 Or. Henz. 4093, 2413, 5163, 6983. 6 Aristid. Or. xxiv. 537 ; cf. Hor. & 8 Suet. Jul. Goes. 57. i. 6, 105. 3 Pint. Galba, 7. 7 Sen. Ep. 123, 7. 4 Mart. x. 104 ; cf. Hor. S. i. 5, 104. 8 Cf. Suet. Nero, xliv. xxx. ; Sen. 5 Friedl. SG. ii. 12 sqq. Ep. 87, 9 ; 123. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 207 was perhaps then commoner than it was, until quite recently, among ourselves. The carriages in which the two indefatigable Plinies used to ride, enabled them to read at their ease, or dictate to an amanuensis. 1 The inns, from the time of Horace to the time of Sidonius, were as a rule bad, and frequently disreput- able, and even dangerous, places of resort. 2 And vehicles were often arranged for sleeping on a journey. We may be sure that many an imperial officer after the time of Julius Caesar passed nights in his carriage, while hurrying to join the forces on the Ehine or the Danube. With all this rapid circulation of officials and travellers, the far -stretching limits of the Koman world must, to the general eye, have contracted, the remotest places were drawn more and more towards the centre, and the inexhaustible vitality of the imperial city diffused itself with a magical power of silent transformation. The modes in which the fully developed municipalities of the Antonine age had originated and were organised were very various. Wherever, as in the Greek East or Carthaginian Africa, towns already existed, the Romans, of course, used them in their organisation of a province, although they added liberally to the number, as in Syria, Pontus, and Cappadocia. 8 Where a country was still in the cantonal state, the villages or markets were grouped around a civic centre, and a municipal town, such as Nimes or Lyons, would thus become the metropolis of a considerable tract of territory. The colony of Vienne was the civic centre of the Allobroges. 4 In the settlement of the Alps many of the remote mountain cantons were attached to towns such as Tridentum, Verona, or Brixia. 5 Sometimes, as in Dacia, the civic organisation was created at a stroke. 6 But it is well known that, especially towards the frontiers of the 1 Empire, in Britain, on the Rhine, and in North Africa, the ] towns of the second century had often grown out of the castra )stativa of the legions. The great reorganisation of Augustus had made each legion v a permanent corps, with a history and identity of its own. To ensure the tranquillity of the Empire the legions were 1 Plin. Ep. Hi. 5, 15 ; cf. Suet. Claud. * Marq. Rem. St. i. 17, 199, 214, 317 ; xxxiii. ; Friedl. SG. ii. 19. Arnold, Prov. Adm. 203. 2 ApnL Met. i. 7 ; i. 17 ; Sidon. 4 ^ 205, 208 ; Marq. L 114, 118. Apoll. Ep. vin. 11. Cf. Rom. Soe. %n the Last Century of the Western Empire, Marq. l. 14. p. 172 (lat ed.) ; Friedl. u. 20. 6 Id. L 155. 208 SOCIAL LIFE book 11 distributed in permanent camps along the frontier, the only- inland cities with a regular military garrison being Lyons and Carthage. 1 'Many legions never changed their quarters for generations. The Tertia Augusta, which has left so many memorials of itself in the inscriptions of Lambaesis, remained, with only a single break, iu the same district from the time of Augustus to that of Diocletian. 2 There, for two genera- tions, it kept sleepless watch against the robber tribes of the Sahara. The legion was also peacefully employed in erecting fortifications and making roads and bridges, when the camp was visited by Hadrian in the year 130. 3 Gradually soldiers were allowed to form family relations, more or less regular, until, (/ under Septimius Severus, the legionary was permitted to live in his household like any other citizen. 4 From the remains at Lambaesis, it is now considered certain that, in the third century, the camp had ceased to be the soldier's home. The suttlers and camp-followers had long gathered in the neighbour- hood of the camp, in huts which were called Canabae legionis. There, for a long time, the soldier, when off duty, sought his pleasures and amusements, and there, after the changes of Septimius Severus, he took up his abode. At first the Canabae of Lambaesis was only a view; it became, under Marcus Aurelius, a municipivm the Respublica Lambaesitan- orum, with the civic constitution which is rendered familiar to us by so many inscriptions. 6 The Legionaries seem to have been happy and contented at Lambaesis ; their sons were trained to arms and followed their fathers in the ranks ; 6 the legion became to some extent a hereditary caste. Old veterans remained on the scene of their service, after receiving their discharge with a pension from the chest. 7 The town de- veloped in the regular fashion, and dignified itself by a capitol, an amphitheatre, two forums, a triumphal arch ; and the many monuments of public and private life found on the site reveal a highly organised society, moulded out of barbarous and alien 1 Boissier, L'A/r. Bom. p. 104. date of this visit, v. Cagnat, p. 154. 2 See the history of this legion in Vit. Hadr. 12, 13. Cagnat, L'Armfe Bom. d'Afrique, p. , Herodian, iii. 8 ; cf. Cagnat, p. 451. 148 sqq. C. 1. L. vni., Momms. Praef. . T T ... _.' n rr , xix. sq! The legion was first stationed * C ' LL - vm - 2611 > 0r - Henz - ^8. at Thevesta. Cagnat, 365, 453 ; cf. C.I. L. viii. 3 Or. Hem. 5319 ; G.I.L. viii. 2532, 3015. ,10048 ; v. Mommsen, p. 21. For the 7 Cagnat, 481-87 ; Marq. ii. 544. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 209 elements, and stamped with the inimitable and enduring impress of Eome. Out of such casual and unpromising materials sprang numbers of urban communities, which repro- duced, in their outline and in their social tone, the forms and spirit of the free Eepublic of Eome. The capitol and the forum are merely the external symbols of a closer bond of parentage. The Eoman military discipline did not more completely master and transform the Numidian or Celtic recruit, than the inspiration of her civil polity diffused among races imbruted by servitude, or instinct with the love of a lawless, nomadic freedom, the sober attachment to an ordered civic life which was obedient to a long tradition, yet vividly interested in its own affairs. On hardly any side of ancient life is the information furnished by the inscriptions so rich as on the spirit and organisation of municipalities. Here one may learn details of communal life which are never alluded to in Eoman literature. From this source, also, we must seek the only authentic materials for the reconstruction of a municipality of the first century. The Album Canusii and the tablets containing the laws of Malaga and Salpensa have not only settled more than one question as to the municipal organisation of the early Empire, but have enabled us to form almost as clear-cut a conception of it as we have of the corporate organisation of our own great towns. But, unlike our civic republics, the Eoman municipal town was distinctly aristocratic, or rather timocratic, in its constitution. A man's place in the community, as a rule, was fixed by his ancestry, his official grade, or his capacity to spend. The dictum of Trimalchio was too literally true in the municipal \) life of that age " a man is what he is worth." Provincial society was already parted and graduated, though less decidedly, by those rigid lines of materialistic demarcation which became gaping fissures in the society of the Theodosian code. The Curia or Senate was open only to the possessor of a certain fortune ; at Como, for instance, HS. 10 0,0 00, elsewhere perhaps even more. On the other hand, the richest freedman could not become a member of the Curia or hold any civic magistracy, 1 1 Marq. B&m. St. i. 499 ; Friedl. Cena Trim, EM. 29 ; Plin. Ep. i. 19 ; Boissier, L'A/r. Rorn. p. 195. P 210 SOCIAL LIFE book ii although he might be decorated with their insignia. His ambition had to be satisfied with admission to the order of the Augustales, which ranked socially after the members of the Curia. In the list of the Curia, which was revised every five years, the order of official and social precedence was most scrupulously observed. In the Album Canusii of the year A.D. 223, 1 the first rank is assigned to thirty -nine patrons, who have held imperial office, or who are senators or knights. Next come the local magnates who have been dignified by election to any of the four great municipal magistracies. Last in order are the pedant, that is, the citizens possessing the requisite qualification, who have not yet held any muni- cipal office. At the bottom of the list stand twenty-five prae- textati, who were probably the sons of the more distinguished citizens, and who, like the sons of senators of the Eepublic, were silent witnesses of the proceedings in the Curia. From this body, and from all the magistracies, all persons engaged in certain mean or disgraceful occupations were expressly excluded, along with the great mass of the poorer citizens, the tenuiores. \j The taint of servile birth, the possession of libertinae opes, was an indelible blot. In countless inscriptions this gradation of rank is sharply accentuated. If a man leaves a bequest for an annual feast, with a distribution of money, the rich patron or the decurio will receive perhaps five times the amount which is doled out to the simple plebeian. 2 The dis- tinction of rank, even in punishment for crime, which meets us everywhere in the Theodosian Code, has already appeared. The honestior is not to be degraded by the punishment of crucifixion or by the stroke of the rod. 3 But it is on their tombs that the passion of the Eomans for some sort of distinction, however shadowy, shows itself most strikingly. On these slabs every grade of dignity in a long career is enumerated with minute care. The exact value of a man's public benefactions or his official salary will be recorded with pride. 4 Even the dealer in aromatics or in rags will make a boast of some petty office in the college of his trade. 5 But, although rank and office 1 Or. Henz. 3721 ; Friedl. Cena Trim. 3 Hartmann, Be Exilio, pp. 58 sq. ; Einl. 30. Duruv, Hist. Rom. vi. 643. 2 Or. Henz. 6989, 7001, 7199, ob 4 Q _ nfi duplam sportulam collatam sibi, 4020, 0r - He - 946 > 3 ' 08 - 3703. 5 lb. 7192. MUNICIPAL LIFE ^ 211 were extravagantly valued in these societies, wealth was after all the great distinction. The cities were in the hands of the rich, and, in return for social deference and official power, the rich were expected to give lavishly to all public objects. The worship of wealth, the monumental flattery of rich patrons and benefactors, was very interested and servile. On the other hand, there probably never was a time when the duties of wealth were so powerfully enforced by opinion, or so cheerfully, and even recklessly, performed. Yet, although these communities were essentially aristocratic in tone and constitution, the commonalty still retained some power in the Antonine age. On many inscriptions they appear side by side with the Curial " ordo " and the Augustales. 1 They had still in the reign of Domitian the right to elect their magistrates. It was long believed that, with the suppression of popular elections at Eome in the reign of Tiberius, the popular choice of their great magistrates must also have been withdrawn from municipal towns. 2 This has now been dis- proved by the discovery of the laws of Malaga and Salpensa, in which the most elaborate provisions are made for a free and uncontaminated election by the whole people. 3 And we can still almost hear the noise of election days among the ruins of Pompeii 4 Many of the inscriptions of Pompeii are election placards, recommending particular candidates. There, in red letters painted on the walls, we can read that " the barbers wish to have Trebius as aedile," or that " the fruit-sellers, with one accord, support the candidature of Holconius Priscus for the duumvirate." The porters, muleteers, and garlic dealers have each their favourite. The master fuller, Vesonius Primus, backs Cn. Helvius as a worthy man. Even ladies took part in the contest and made their separate appeals. " His little sweetheart" records that she is working for Claudius. 5 Personal popularity no doubt then, as always, attracted such electoral support. But the student of the inscriptions may be inclined to think that the free and independent electors had also a keen eye for the man who was likely to build a new colonnade for the forum, or a new schola for the guild, or, best 1 Or. Henz. 3703, 3706, 4009, 3937, z Or. Henz, 7421 ; Lex Mai. 53, 55. 3704, 3725, 4020 ; Plin. Ep. x. Ill ; cf. * Mau, 376, 388-89 (Tr.). Ohnesseit, DeJure Municip. 41. 6 Claudium iivir. auimula i'acit, 2 Marq. Mm. St. L 472. C.I.L. iv. 425, 677, 644. 212 SOCIAL LIFE book n of all, to send down thirty pairs of gladiators into the arena " with plenty of blood." l The laws of Malaga and Salpensa prescribe, in the fullest detail, all the forms to be observed in the election of magistrates. These were generally six in number two duumvirs, 2 who were the highest officers, two aediles, and two quaestors, for each year. Every fifth year, instead of the duumvirs, two quinquennales were elected, with the extraordinary duty of conducting the municipal census. 8 The candidates for all these offices were required to be free born, of the age of twenty-five at least, of irreproachable character, and the possessors of a certain fortune. The qualifications were the same as those prescribed by the lex Julia for admission to the municipal Senate, which expressly excluded persons engaged in certain disreputable callings gladiators, actors, pimps, auctioneers, and undertakers. 4 In the best days the competition for office was undoubtedly keen, and the candidates were numerous. In the year A.D. 4, the year of the death of C. Csesar, the grandson of Augustus, so hot was the rivalry that the town of Pisa was left without magistrates owing to serious disturbances at the elections. 5 But it is an ominous fact that the law of Malaga, in the reign of Domitian, makes provision for the contingency of a failure of candidates. In such a case the presiding duumvir was to nominate the re- quired number, they in turn an equal number, and the combined nominees had to designate a third set equal in number to them- selves. The choice of the people was then restricted to these involuntary candidates. The city has evidently advanced a stage towards the times of the Lower Empire, when the magistrates were appointed by the Curia from among themselves, with no reference to the people. 6 A man might, indeed, well hesitate \ before offering himself for an office which imposed a heavy ex- ; penditure on the holder of it. The honorarium payable on admission amounted, in an obscure place like Thamugadi, to about 32 for the duumvirate, and 24 for the aedileship. 7 In 1 Petroii. Sat. 45, ferrum optimum or iivir censoria potestate quinq. etc., daturas est, sine fuga, carnarium in or shortly quinquennalis ; cf. Or. Henz. medio, etc. 3882, 3721. 2 The title of the highest magistracy * Arnold, Prov. Adm. pp. 225, 226. varied a good deal : cf. Marq. R'&m. St. 5 Or. Henz. 643. i. 475, 89 ; Or. Henz. iii. 2nd. 154. 6 LexMalag. 51 ; Or. 7421 ; Marq. 3 Marq. i. 485 ; Henz. Ind. p. 157. i. 475 ; C. Th. xii. 5, 1. Often described as iivir quinquennalis, 7 C.I.L. viii. 2341 ; 17838. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 213 / the greater Italian cities it probably would be much more ; at \ Pompeii the newly elected duumvir paid more than 80. 1 But the man chosen by the people ofteD felt bound to outstrip the bare demands of law or custom by a prodigal liberality. He must build or repair some public work, to signalise his year of office, and, at the dedication of it, good taste required him to exhibit costly games, or to give a banquet to the citizens, with a largess to all of every rank small or great. 2 if But in return for its liabilities, the position of a duumvir gave undoubted power and distinction. The office was the image or shadow of the ancient consulship, and occasionally, as the inscriptions attest, a Hadrian or an Antoninus Pius did not disdain to accept it. 3 The duumvirs commanded the local militia, when it was, on emergency, called out. 4 They presided at meetings of the people and the Curia, they pro- posed questions for their deliberation, and carried the decrees into effect. They had civil jurisdiction up to a certain amount, and their criminal jurisdiction, which, in the third century, had been transferred to imperial functionaries, was, according to the most probable opinion, undiminished at least down to the end of the first century. 5 This judicial power, however, was limited by the intercessio of colleagues and the right of appeal. They had extensive responsibilities in finance, for the collection of dues and taxes, and the recovery of all moneys owing to the municipality. 6 After the fall of the free Eepublic, when so many avenues of ambition were closed, many an able man might well satisfy his desire for power and distinction by the duumvirate of a provincial town. The Curia, or local senate, is peculiarly interesting to the his- torical student, because it was to the conversion of the curiales into a hereditary caste, loaded with incalculable liabilities, that the decay of the Western Empire was to a large extent due. 7 But, in the reign of Domitian, the Curia is still erect and dignified. Although the individual decurio seldom or never assumes the title senator in the inscriptions, 8 the Curia as a 1 Marq. i. 499 n. 18. 5 FriedL Cena Trim. EimZ. 28 ; __ Duruy, v. 849 sqq. 2 Or. Hem. 7080, 7082, 8811, 8817, lx Malag. 60 sq. 3882. 7 See Roman Society in the Last 8 lb. 3817 ; cf. Spart. Hadr. c. 19. Century of the Western Empire, bk. hi. c. 2. * Ijex Urson. 103. 8 There is one case in Or. Hem. 2279. 214 SOCIAL LIFE book ii whole often bears the august name and titles of the majestic Koman Senate. 1 And assuredly down to the middle of the second century there was no lack of candidates for admission. Every five years the roll of the Curia was revised and drawn up afresh by the quinquennales. The conditions were those for holding a magistracy, including a property qualification, which varied in different places. 2 The number of ordinary members was generally 100. 3 But it was swelled by patrons and other extraordinary members. The quinquennales, in framing the list, took first the members on the roll of the previous term, and then those who had been elected to magistracies since the last census. If any vacancies were still left, they were filled up from the ranks of those who, not having yet held any municipal office, were otherwise qualified by the possession of a sufficient fortune. 4 In the Album Canusii, the men who had held official rank constitute at least two-thirds of the Curia. In the composition of such a body there would appear to be ample security for administrative skill and experience. And yet we shall find that it was precisely through want of prudence or skill that the door was opened for that bureaucratic interference which, in the second century, began, with momentous results, to sap the freedom and independence of municipal life. The honours and powers of the provincial council were long sufficient to compensate the decurio for the heavy demands made upon his generosity. To all but comparatively few the career of imperial office and distinction was closed. His own town became each man's " patria," as Como was even to a man like Pliny, who played so great a part in the life of the capital. 5 There is the ring of a very genuine public spirit and a love for the local commonwealth in a host of the inscriptions of that age. 6 The vastness and overwhelming grandeur of a world-wide Empire, in which the individual citizen was a mere atom, made men crave for any distinction which seemed to raise them above the grey flat level which surrounds a democratic despotism. And even the ordinary 1 v. Or. Henz. vol. iii. Ind. p. 152. Or., however, interprets CV. as Civium 2 Plin. Ep. i. 19 ; at Como the census universorum in 764. was HS. 100,000; of. Petron. Sat. 44. cc Ohnesseit De Jure Municip. p. ' ' 55 ; Marq. Rom. St. l. 504. 3 The Curia is sometimes designated 6 Plin. Ep. iv. 13, 9. as Cviri, Or. Hem. 764, 3737, 1552. 8 e.g. Or. Henz. 3703, 7190. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 215 decurio had some badges to mark him off from the crowd. The pompous honorific titles of the Lower Empire, indeed, had not come into vogue. But the Curial had a place of honour at games and festivals, a claim to a larger share in the distributions of money by private benefactors, exemption, as one of the honestiores, from the more degrading forms of punishment, the free supply of water from the public sources, 1 and other perquisites and honours, which varied in different localities. The powers of the Curia were also very consider- able. The duumvirs indeed possessed extensive prerogatives which strong men may have sometimes strained. 2 But there was a right of appeal to the Curia from judicial decisions of the duumvirs in certain cases. And their control of games and festivals, and of the finances of the community, was limited by the necessity of consulting the Curia and of carrying out its orders. 3 In the lex Ursonensis we find a long list of matters on which the duumvirs were obliged to take their in- structions from the Curia. 4 The quorum needed for a valid decision varied in different places. In the election of a patron a quorum of two-thirds of the decurions was legally required. 5 The names of the duoviri appeared at the head of every curial decree, as those of the consuls in every senatusconsultum. After the local aristocracy of curial rank came, in order of social precedence, members of the knightly class and the order of the Augustales. In the latter half of the first century eques- trian rank had been conferred with perhaps too lavish a hand. And satire was never tired of ridiculing these sham aristocrats, Bithynian knights as they were called, often of the lowest origin, who on public occasions vulgarly asserted their mush- room rank. 8 In particular, the army contributed many new knights to the society of the provincial towns. A veteran, often of humble birth, who had risen to the first place among the sixty centurions of a legion, was, on his discharge with a good pension, sometimes raised to equestrian rank. He frequently returned to his native place, where he became a personage of some mark. Such men, along with old officers of 1 Friedl. Cena Trim. Einl. 31. 4 lb. 99 ; Ohnesseit, Be Jure Plin Ep. iv .22. This autocratic ? 'jJJ'^M ;' Lex Urson. 96, 97, act was the abolition of the games at jjq Vienne by a duumvir. 'ila.rt. iii. 29 ; r. 14 ; v. 23 ; Juv. * Lex Urson. 129. i. 28 ; iii. 131, 159. 216 SOCIAL LIFE book 11 higher grade, frequently appear in the inscriptions invested with priesthoods and high magistracies, 1 and were sometimes chosen as patrons of the community. 2 Many of them were undoubtedly good and public-spirited men, with the peculiar virtues which the life of the Eoman camp engendered. But some of their class also displayed that coarse and brutal self- assertion, and that ignorant contempt for the refinement of culture, on which Persius and Juvenal poured their scorn. 8 The Augustales, ranking next to the curial order, are pecu- liarly interesting, both as representing the wide diffusion of the cult of the emperors, and as a class composed of men of low, or even servile origin, who had made their fortunes in trade, yet whose ambition society found the means of satisfying, without breaking down the barriers of aristocratic exclusiveness. 4 The origin of the order of the Augustales was long a subject of debate. But it has now been placed beyond doubt that in the provincial towns it was a plebeian institution for the cult of Augustus, and succeeding emperors, modelled on the aristo- cratic order of the Sodales Augustales, which was established by Tiberius in the capital. 5 The Augustales were elected by vote of the local curia, without regard to social rank, although probably with due respect to wealth, and they included the leaders of the great freedman class, whose emergence is one of the most striking facts in the social history of the time. Figuring on scores of inscriptions, the Augustales are mentioned only once in extant Roman literature, in the novel of Petronius, where the class has been immortalised, and probably caricatured. 6 The inscription, for which Trimalchio gives an order to his brother Augustal, the stone-cutter, is to record his election in absence to the Sevirate, his many virtues and his millions. Actual monuments at Assisi and Brescia show that Trimalchio was not an altogether imaginary person. 7 1 Or. Henz. 7002, 7018, 3785, 3789, Marq. says, scheinen die Augustales 3798, 3733, 3747. ' als lebenslangliche Mitglieder des 2 lb. 2287, 3714, 3851. Collegiums, die Seviri als jahrlich 3 Pers. iii. 77 ; Juv. xvi. wechselude Beamte desselben zu be- 4 In the Inscr. they are mentioned trachten zu sein. after the decurions and before the 8 ft{ ar q # j. 513 ; Ohnesseit, p. 46 ; cf. plebs; cf. Or. Henz. 4009, 3807, 1167. Or. Henz. 3959, 7089; Tac. Ann. i. On the distinction between the Au- 5^ 73, gustales and the Seviri Aug. v. Marq. ' 6 p . fi ~ 7 , Horn. St. i. 514 ; Ohnesseit, Be Jure i'etron. b&, /1. Munic. 46 ; Nessling, Be Seviris Aug. 7 Or. 2983; C.l.L. v. 4482. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 217 Yet the Augustales, in spite of the vulgar ostentation and self-assertion, which have characterised similar classes of the nouveaux riches in all ages, were a very important and useful order. They overspread the whole Eoman world in the West. Their monuments have been traced, not only in almost every town in Italy, and in great provincial capitals, like Lyons or Tarraco, but in Alpine valleys and lonely outposts of civilisa- tion on the edge of the Sahara. 1 Their special religious duties involved considerable expense, from which no doubt the more aristocratic class were glad to be relieved. They had to bear the cost of sacrifices and festivities on certain days in honour of dead emperors. They had to pay an entrance fee on admission to the college, which the ambitious among them would often lavishly exceed. 2 They were organised on the lines of other colleges, with patrons, quinquennales, and other officials. They had their club-houses where their banquets were regularly held, they possessed landed property, and had their common places of burial. 3 But their expenditure and their interests were by no means limited to their own imme- diate society. They regarded themselves, and were generally treated as public officials, ranking next to the magistrates of the Curia. They had the right to wear the purple-bordered toga, and to have lictors attending them in the streets. 4 Places of honour were reserved for them at the games and festivals. Although as a class they were not eligible for a seat in the Curia, or for the municipal magistracies, yet the ornamenta, the external badges and honours attached to these offices, were sometimes granted even to freedmen who had done service to the community. Thus an Augustal who had paved a road at Cales received the ornamenta of a decurio. 5 And another, for his munificence to Pompeii, by a decree of the Curia, was awarded the use of the oisellium, a seat of honour which was usually reserved for the highest dignitaries. 8 But the orna- ments and dignities of their own particular college became objects of pride and ambition. Thus a man boasts of having been made 'primus Augustcdis perpetuus, by a decree of the Curia. 7 A worthy of Brundisium received from the Curia a 1 Or. ITr-nz. 3917, 3924, 1561, 7092, * Petron. Sat. 65. 4077, 3127, 4020, 5655, 2374. 6 Or. Hem. 6983. 2 Friedl. Cena Trim. EM. 37. 6 lb. 4044, 7094. 8 Or. Henz. 3787-8 ; 7103. 7 lb. 7112. 218 SOCIAL LIFE book ii public funeral, with the oruaments and insignia of an Augustal. 1 In this way, in a society highly conventional, and dominated by caste feeling, the order of the Augustales provided both a stimulus and a reward for the public spirit of a new class, powerful in its wealth and numbers, but generally encumbered by the heritage of a doubtful origin. It was a great elevation for a man, who, perhaps, had been sold as a boy in some Syrian slave market into the degradation of a minion, and who had emerged, by petty savings or base services, into the comparative freedom of a tainted or despised trade, to find himself at last holding a conspicuous rank in his municipality, and able to purchase honour and deference from those who had trampled on him in his youth. The Augustales shared with the members of the Curia the heavy burdens which public sentiment then imposed upon the rich. Direct taxation for municipal purposes was in the first century almost unknown. The municipalities often possessed landed property, mines, or quarries. Capua is said to have had distant possessions in the island of Crete. 2 The towns also derived an income from the public baths, 8 from the rent of shops and stalls in the public places, from the supply of water to private houses or estates, and from port dues and tolls. A very considerable item of revenue must have been found in the fee which all decurions, Augustales, and magistrates paid on entering on their office or dignity. Since the reign of Nerva, the towDS had the right of receiving legacies and bequests. 4 And, on the occurrence of any desolat- ing calamity, an earthquake or a fire, the emperor was never slow or niggardly in giving relief. In the year 53 a.d. the town of Bologna received an imperial subsidy of about 83,000. 5 The cities of Asia were again and again relieved after desolating earthquakes. 6 With regard to municipal expenditure, the budget was free from many public charges which burden our modern towns. The higher offices were unpaid, and in fact demanded large generosity from their holders. The lower functions were dis- 1 C.I.L. ix. 58. s Tac. Ann. xii. 58. 2 Friedl. Cmia Trim. Einl. 42. 6 Sueton. Vesp. 13; Tac. Ann. ii. 47; 3 pr .. cf. Nipperdey's note referring to the run. Jip. vin. 8, b. monument erected to Tiberius in a.d. 4 Friedl. Cena Trim. Einl. 43. 30, at Puteoli. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 219 charged, to a great extent, by communal slaves. The care or construction of streets, markets, and public buildings, although theoretically devolving on the community through their aediles, was, as a matter of fact, to an enormous extent undertaken by private persons. The city treasury must have often incurred a loss in striving to provide corn and oil for the citizens at a limited price, and the authorities were often reviled, as at Trim- alchio's banquet, for not doing more to cheapen the necessaries of life. 1 Although our information as to municipal expenditure on education and medical treatment is scanty, it is pretty clear that the community was, in the Antonine age, beginning to recognise a duty in making provision for both. Vespasian first gave a public endowment to professors of rhetoric in the capital. 2 The case of Como, described in Pliny's Letters, was probably not an isolated one. Finding that the youth of that town were compelled to resort to Milan for higher instruction, Pliny, as we have seen, proposed to the parents to establish by general subscription a public school, and he offered himself to contribute one-third of the sum required for the foundation, the rest to be provided by the townsfolk, who were to have the management and selection of teachers in their hands. 8 The Greek cities had public physicians 500 years before Christ, 4 and Marseilles and some of the Gallic towns in Strabo's day employed both teachers and doctors at the public expense. 6 The regular organisation of public medical attend- ance in the provinces dates from Antoninus Pius, who required the towns of Asia to have a certain number of physicians among their salaried officers. 6 The title Archiater, which in the Theodosian Code designates an official class in the provinces as well as at Eome, is found in inscriptions of Beneventum and Pisaurum belonging to an earlier date. 7 But these departments of municipal expenditure were hardly yet fully organised in the age of the Antonines, and were probably not burdensome. The great field of expenditure lay in the basilicas, temples, amphitheatres, baths, and pavements, whose 1 Petron. 44. 8 Strab. iv. c. i. 5 (181), ffo^tor&s 2 Suet. Vesp. xviii. Latinis Graecis- yovv i/TroS^x " xoivy fuLei>ot que rhetoribus annua centena con- Kad&irep koX tarpons. Btituit. t, Plin. Ep. iv. 13. Ma l- *** 777 - * Herodot. iii. 131. 7 Or. Hetiz. 3994, 4017. 220 SOCIAL LIFE book ii vanishing remains give us a glimpse of one of the most brilliant ages in history. * The municipal towns relied largely on the voluntary muni^^ ficence of their wealthy members for great works of public utility or splendour. But we have many records of such enterprises carried out at the common expense, and the name of a special magistracy (curator operum publicorum) to superintend them meets us often in the inscriptions. 1 These undertakings were frequently on a great scale. The famous bridge of Alcantara was erected in the reign of Trajan by the combined efforts of eleven municipalities in Portugal. 2 In Bithynia the finances of some of the great towns had been so seriously disorganised by expensive and ill-managed undertakings that the younger Pliny was in the year 111 a.d. sent as imperial legate by Trajan to re- pair the misgovernment of the province. 8 Pliny's correspondence throws a flood of light on many points of municipal adminis- tration, and foreshadows its coming decay. The cities appear to have ample funds, but they are grossly mismanaged. There is plenty of public money seeking investment, but borrowers cannot be found at the current rate of 12 per cent. Pliny would have been inclined to compel the decurions to become debtors of the state, but Trajan orders the rate of interest to be put low enough to attract voluntary borrowers. 4 Apamea, although it had the ancient privilege of managing its own affairs, requested Pliny to examine the public accounts. 5 He did the same for Prusa, and found many signs of loose and reckless finance, and probable malversation. 6 Mcaea had spent 80,000 on a theatre, which, from some faults either in the materials or the foundation, was settling, with great fissures in the walls. 7 The city had also expended a large sum in rebuilding its gymnasium on a sumptuous scale, but the fabric had been condemned by a new architect for radical defects of structure. Mcomedia has squandered 40,000 on two aqueducts which have either fallen or been abandoned. 8 In authorising the con- struction of a third the emperor might well emphatically order the responsibility for such blunders to be fastened on the proper 1 Or. Rem. 3716, 6709, 7146. 2 Friedl. Sittengesch. iii. 116 ; C.I.L. ii. pp. 89-96. 8 Plin. Ad Traj. 17. * lb. 54, 55, 23. 8 lb. 47. lb 17. 7 lb. 39. * lb. 37. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 221 persons. 1 In the same city, when a fire of a most devastating kind had recently occurred, there was no engine, not even a bucket ready, and the inhabitants stood idly by as spectators. 2 Pliny was most assiduous in devising or promoting engineering improvements for the health and convenience of the province, and often called for expert assistance from Rome. Irregu- larities in the working of the civic constitutions also gave him much trouble. The ecdicios or defensor has demanded repay- ment of a largess made to one Julius Piso from the treasury of Amisus, which the decrees of Trajan now forbade. 3 Just as Pliny had suggested that members of a curia should be forced to accept loans from the State, so we can see ominous signs of a wish to compel men to accept the curial dignity beyond the legal number, in order to secure the honorarium of from 35 to 70 on their admission. 4 The Lex Pompeia, which forbade a Bithynian municipality to admit to citizenship men from other Bithynian states, had long been ignored, and in numbers of cities there were many sitting in the senate in violation of the law. The Pompeian law also required that a man should be thirty years of age when he was elected to a magistracy or took his place in the Curia, but a law of Augustus had reduced the limit for the minor magistracies to twenty-two. Here was a chance of adding to the strength of the Curia which was seized by the municipal censors. And if a minor magistrate might enter the Curia as a matter of course at twenty-two, why not others equally fit ? 5 In another typical case the legate was disturbed by the lavish hospitality of leading citizens. On the assumption of the toga, at a wedding, or an election to civic office, or the dedication of a public work, not only the whole of the Curia, but a large number of the common people, were often invited to a banquet and received from their host one or two denarii apiece. 6 Pliny was probably unnecessarily alarmed. The inscriptions show us the same scenes all over the Empire, 7 and the emperor with calm dignity leaves the ques- tion of such entertainments to the prudence of his lieutenant. 1 Plin. Ad Traj. 88. 6 lb. 116. 2 lb, 33. 7 Or. Henz. 7001 ; Friedl. Cena lb. 110 ; cf. Mara. Horn. St. i. 522. l rirn " -EW- 58 J corruption, however, 4 Hi- j j m iic -,-,. nfl by means of hospitality is expressly * Plin. Ad Iraj. 112, 114, 116. forbidden by the Lex Urson. 182 ; 8 /ft- 7- G. I. L. ii. Suppl. p. 852. 222 SOCIAL LIFE book ii There are many religious questions submitted to the emperor in these celebrated despatches, especially those relating to the toleration of Christians. 1 But, however profoundly interesting, they lie beyond the scope of this chapter. We are occupied with the secular life of the provincial town. And the Letters of Pliny place some things in a clear light. In the first place, the state has begun in the reign of Trajan to control the municipality, especially in the management of its finances ; but the control is rather invited than imposed. At any rate, it has become necessary, owing to malversation or incompetence. 2 Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the civic bungling exposed by Pliny, and the clear, patient wisdom of the distant emperor. And in another point we can see that the municipalities have entered on that disastrous decline which was to end in the ruin of the fifth century. Wasteful finance is already making its pressure felt on the members of the Curia, and membership is beginning to be thought a burden rather than an honour. From the reign of Trajan we begin to hear of the Curatores, who were imperial officers, appointed at first to meet a special emergency, but who became permanent magistrates, with immense powers, especially over finance. 3 The free civic life of the first century is being quietly drawn under the fatal spell of a bureaucratic despotism. The cities did much for themselves out of the public revenues. 4 But there are many signs that private ambition or munificence did even more. The stone records of Pompeii confirm these indications in a remarkable way. Pompeii, in spite of the prominence given to it by its tragic fate, was only a third-rate town, with a population probably of not more than 20,000. 5 Its remains, indeed, leave the impression that a considerable class were in easy circumstances; but it may be doubted whether Pompeii could boast of any great capitalists among its citizens. Its harbour, at the mouth of the Sarno, was the outlet for the trade of Nola and Nuceria. 1 Plin. Ad Traj. 96. Admin. 236. Of. Or. Henz. 3899, - Friedl. Cena Trim. Einl. 33; 3902,3989. For a good example of the Greard, Plut. pp. 246-7. function of the Curator, cf. Or. 3787. 3 The different classes of Curatores, 4 For the sources of these, cf. Marq. which must be carefully distinguished, Mom. St. ii. p. 96. are clearly given by Arnold, Prov. 6 Mau, Pompeii (Eng. Tr.), p. 16. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 223 There were salt works in a suburb near the sea. The fish sauces of Umbricius Scaurus had a great celebrity. 1 The vine and the olive were cultivated on the volcanic offshoot from Vesuvius ; but the wine of Pompeii was said by the elder Pliny to leave a lingering headache. Mill-stones were made from the lava of the volcano. The market gardeners drove a flourishing trade, and the cabbage of Pompeii was celebrated. On the high ground towards Vesuvius many wealthy Komans, Cicero, and Drusus, the son of Claudius, built country seats, in that delicious climate where the winters are so short, and the summer heats are tempered by unfailing breezes from the mountains or the western sea. All these things made Pompeii a thriving and attractive place ; yet its trade hardly offered the chance of the huge fortunes which could be accumulated in those days at Puteoli or Ostia. 2 Nevertheless, a large number of the public buildings of Pompeii were the gift of private citizens. The Holconii were a great family of the place in the reign of Augustus. M. Holconius Eufus had been ordinary duumvir five times, and twice quinquennial duumvir ; he was priest of Augustus, and finally was elected patron of the town. 3 Such dignities in those days imposed a corresponding burden. And an inscrip- tion tells that, on the rebuilding of the great theatre, probably about 3 B.C., Holconius Rufus and Holconius Celer defrayed the expense of the crypt, the tribunals, and the whole space for the spectators. Women did not fall behind men in their public benefactions. On the eastern side of the forum of Pompeii there is a building and enclosure, with the remains of porticoes, colonnades, and fountains, which are supposed to have been a cloth market. In a niche stood a marble statue, dedicated by the fullers of Pompeii to Eumachia, a priestess of the city. And Eumachia herself has left a record that she and her son had erected the building at their own expense. 4 The dedication probably belongs to the reign of Tiberius. The visitor who leaves the forum by the arch, at the north-east corner, and turns into the broadest thoroughfare of the town, soon reaches the small temple of Fortuna Augusta, erected in the reign of Augustus. Both the site and the building were 1 Man, rompeii (Eng. Tr.), p. 15. 8 Mau, p. 143. ' Petnm. Sut. 38. 4 Id. p. 111. 224 SOCIAL LIFE book n the gift of one M. Tullius, who had, like M. Holconius, borne all the honours which the city could bestow. 1 The amphitheatre in the south-east corner of the town, the scene of so many gladiatorial combats recorded in the inscriptions, was erected by two men of the highest official rank, C. Quinctius Valgus and M. Porcius, probably the same men who bore at least part of the cost of the smaller theatre of Pompeii. 2 The last instance of this generous public spirit which we shall mention is of interest in many ways. It is well known that in the year 63 A.D. an earthquake overthrew many buildings, and wrought great havoc in Pompeii. Among other edifices, the temple of Isis was thrown down. The temple, of which we can now study the remains, had been built by a boy of six years of age, Numerius Popidius Celsinus, who, in acknowledg- ment of his own, or rather of his father's liberality, was at that unripe age co-opted a member of " the splendid order." 3 This mode of rewarding a father by advancing his infant son to premature honours is not unknown in other inscriptions. 4 The literature of the age contains many records of profuse private liberality of the same kind. The circle and family of Pliny were, as we have seen in this, as in other respects, models of the best sentiment of the time. Pliny was not a very rich man, according to the standard of an age of colossal fortunes ; yet his benefactions, both to private friends and to the communities in which he was interested, were on the scale of the largest wealth It has been calculated that he must have altogether given to his early home and fatherland, as he calls it, a sum of more than 80,000 ; and the gifts were of a thoroughly practical kind a library, a school endowment, a foundation for the nurture of poor children, a temple of Ceres, with spacious colonnades to shelter the traders who came for the great fair. 5 A great lady, Ummidia Quadratilla, known to us not altogether favourably in Pliny's letters, built a temple and amphitheatre for Casinum. 6 From the elder Pliny we learn that the dis- tinguished court physicians, the two Stertinii, whose professional income is said to have ranged from 2000 to 5000 a year, exhausted their ample fortune in their benefactions to 1 Mau, p. 124. 4 Or. Henz. 7008, 7010. 2 Id. pp. 147, 206. 6 Duruy, v. 396. 3 Id. p. 164. Or. 781. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 225 the city of Naples. 1 A private citizen bore the cost of an aque- duct for Bordeaux, at an expenditure of 160,000. 2 Another benefactor, one Crinas, spent perhaps 80,000 on the walls of Marseilles. 3 The grandfather of Dion Chrysostom devoted his entire ancestral fortune to public objects. 4 Dion, himself, according to his means, followed the example of his ancestor. The site alone of a colonnade, with shops and booths, which he presented to Prusa, cost about 1800. When Cremona was destroyed by the troops of Vespasian in a.d. 69, its temples and forums were restored by the generous zeal of private citizens, after all the horror and exhaustion of that awful conflict. 5 But the prince of public benefactors in the Antonine age was the great sophist Herodes Atticus, the tutor of M. Aurelius, who died in the same year as his pupil, 180 a.d. He acted up to his theory of the uses of wealth on a scale of unexampled munificence. 6 His family was of high rank, and claimed descent from the Aeacidae of Aegina. They had also apparently in- exhaustible resources. His father spent a sum of nearly 40,000 in supplementing an imperial grant for the supply of water to the Troad. The munificence of the son was extended to cities in Italy, as well as to Corinth, Thessaly, Euboea, Boeotia, Elis, and pre-eminently to Athens. He gave an aqueduct to Canusium and Olympia, a racecourse to Delphi, a roofed theatre to Corinth. 7 He provided sulphur baths at Thermopylae for the visitors from Thessaly and the shores of the Malidc gulf. He aided in the restoration of Oricum in Epirus, and liberally recruited the resources of many another decaying town in Greece. He was certainly benevolent, but he had also a passion for splendid fame, and cherished an ambition to realise the dream of Nero, by cutting a canal across the Corinthian Isthmus. 8 But Attica, where he was born, and where he had a princely house on the Ilissus, was the supreme object of his bounty. In his will he left each Athenian citizen an annual gift of a mina. He would offer to the Virgin Goddess a sacrifice of a hundred oxen on a single day ; and, when the great festivals came round, he used to 1 Plin. H. N. xxix. 5. templaque munificentia municipum. 2 Duruy, v. 396. 8 Philostr. Vit. Soph. ii. 1 ; Friedl. 8 l'lin. I.e. Sitlengesch. ii. p. 120. 4 D. Chrys. Or. 46 (519). 7 Philoitr. Fit. Soph. ii. 5. 8 Tac. Mist. iii. 34, reposita fora 8 lb. ii. 6. 226 SOCIAL LIFE book ii feast the people by their tribes, as well as the resident strangers, on couches in the Ceramicus. He restored the ancient shrines and stadia with costly marbles. And, in memory of Ehegilla, his wife, he built at the foot of the acropolis a theatre for 6000 spectators, roofed in with cedar wood, which, to the eye of Pausanias, surpassed all similar structures in its splendour. 1 The liberality of Herodes Atticus, however astonishing it may seem, was only exceptional in its scale. The same spirit prevailed among the leading citizens or the great patroni of hundreds of communities, many of them only known to us from a brief inscription or two ; and we have great reason to be grateful on this score to the imperial legislation of later days, which did its best to preserve these stone records for the eyes of posterity. 2 But in forming an estimate of the splendid public spirit evoked by municipal life, it is well to remind ourselves that much has necessarily been lost in the wreck of time, and also that what we have left represents the civic life of a comparatively brief period. Yet the remains are so numerous that it is almost impossible to give any adequate idea of their profusion to those who are unacquainted with the inscriptions. The objects of this liberality are as various as the needs of the community temples, theatres, bridges, markets, a portico or a colonnade, the relaying of a road or pavement from the forum to the port, the repair of an aque- duct, above all the erection of new baths or the restoration of old ones, with perhaps a permanent foundation to provide for the free enjoyment of this greatest luxury of the south. The boon was extended to all citizens of both sexes, and in some cases, even to strangers and to slaves. 3 There is an almost monotonous sameness in the stiff, conventional record of this vast mass of lavish generosity. It all seems a spon- taneous growth of the social system. One monument is erected by the senate and people of Tibur to a man who had borne all its honours, and had left the town his sole heir. 4 On another, an Augustal of Cales, who had received the insignia of the duumvirate, tells posterity that he had laid down a broad road through the town. 6 Another bene- 1 Philostr. Fit. Soph. ii. 3. Or. Eenz. 6993, 7013, 7190, 6622, 2 C. Theod. ix. 17, 5 ; Nov. Falent. 2287, 6985, 3325. 5. 4 lb. 6994. 6 lb. 6983. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 227 factor bore the chief cost of a new meat market at Aesernia, the authorities of the town supplying the pillars and the tiles. 1 A priestess of Calama in Numidia expended a sum of 3400 on a new theatre. 2 Perhaps the commonest object of private liberality was the erection or maintenance of public baths. An old officer of the fourth legion provided free bathing at Suessa Senonum for every one, even down to the slave girls. 3 At Bononia, a sum of 4350 was bequeathed for the same liberal purpose. 4 A magnate of Misenum bequeathed 400 loads of hard wood annually for the furnaces of the baths, but with the stipulation that his son should be made patron of the town, and that his successors should receive all the magis- tracies. 6 These are only a few specimens taken at random from the countless records of similar liberality to the parent city. The example of the emperors must have stimulated the creation of splendid public works in the provinces. It has been remarked by M. Boissier that the imperial government at all times displayed the politic or instinctive love of monarchy for splendour and magnificence. 6 The Eoman Code, down to the end of the Western Empire, gives evidence of a jealous care for the preservation of the monuments and historic buildings of the past, and denounces with very unconventional energy the " foul and shameful " traffic in the relics of ancient glory which prevailed in the last age of the Empire. 7 After great fires and desolating wars, the first thought of the most frugal or the most lavish prince was to restore in greater grandeur what had been destroyed. After the great confla- gration of a.d. 64, which laid in ashes ten out of the fourteen regions of Bome, Nero immediately set to work to rebuild the city in a more orderly fashion, with broader streets and open spaces. 8 Vespasian, on his accession, found the treasury loaded with a debt of 320,000,000. Yet the frugal emperor did not hesitate to begin at once the restoration of the Capitol, and all the other ruins left by the great struggle of a.d. 69 from which his dynasty arose. 9 He even undertook some new 1 Or. Hem. 7013. 8 Boissier, L'Opp. p. 44. * C.I.L. viii. 5366 ; she received the 7 See Mom. Soc. in the Last Century of honour of five statues in return. the Western Umpire (1st ed.), p. 202. Or. Henz. 2287. . - . ,. . V 4 Ih 3325. 8 Suet. Aero, xvi. 8 lb. 3772. Suet. Vesp. ix. ; D. Cass. lxvi. 10. 228 SOCIAL LIFE book ii works on a great scale, the temple of Peace and the amphi- theatre, on the plans projected by Augustus. Titus completed the Colosseum, and erected the famous baths. 1 Domitian once more restored the Capitol, and added many new buildings, temples to his " divine " father and brother, with many shrines of his special patroness Minerva; a stone stadium for 30,000 people, and an Odeum for an audience of 10,000. 2 Trajan was lauded by Pliny for his frugal administration of the treasury, combined with magnificence in his public works. 3 Nor was the encomium undeserved. He made docks and erected warehouses at Ostia ; he ran a new road through the Pomptine marshes ; he lavished money on aqueducts and baths. 4 His most imposing construction was a new forum between the Capitoline and the Quirinal, with stately memorials of the achievements of his reign. But the prince of imperial builders and engineers was Hadrian. Wherever he went he took with him in his journeys a troop of architects to add something to the splendour or convenience of the cities through which he passed. " In almost every city," says his biographer, " he erected some building." 5 But the capital was not neglected by Hadrian. He restored historic structures such as the Pantheon and the temple of Neptune, the forum of Augustus, and Agrippa's baths, with no ostentatious intrusion of his own name. 6 In his own name he built the temples of Venus and Boma, the bridge across the Tiber, and that stately mausoleum, which, as the castle of S. Angelo, links the memory of the pagan Empire with the mediaeval Papacy and the modern world. The example of the imperial masters of the world undoubtedly reinforced the various impulses which inspired the dedication of so much wealth to the public service or enjoyment through all the cities of the Empire. But the wealthy and public -spirited citizen was also expected to cater for the immediate pleasure or amusement of his neighbours in games and feasts. We have seen that Pliny, during his administration of Bithynia, seems to have regarded the public feasts given to a whole commune on occasions of 1 Suet. Tit. vii. nemine ante se 4 D. Cass, lxviii. 7, 15 ; Plin. Paneg. munificentia minor. 29, 51. a A _ , A 5 Ael. Spart. Hadr. c. 29. Suet. Domit. v. 6 i&- c. 19, 10, eaque omnia pro- 3 Plin. Paneg. 51. priis auctorum nominibus consecravit. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 229 private rejoicing, as dangerous to the general tranquillity. Yet the usage meets us everywhere in the inscriptions, and even in the literary history of the time. This spacious hospitality was long demanded from the rich and powerful, from the general at his triumph, from the great noble on his birthday or his daughter's marriage, from the rich burgher at the dedication of a temple or a forum which he had given to the city, from the man who had been chosen patron of a town in expectation of such largesses, not to speak of the many private patrons whose morning receptions were thronged by a hungry crowd, eager for an invitation to dinner, or its equivalent in the sportula. 1 Julius Caesar on his triumph in 46 B.C. had feasted the people at 22,000 tables. 2 Great houses, like the sumptuous seat of Caninius Kufus at Como, had enormous banquet halls for such popular repasts. 3 The Trimalchio of Petronius desires himself to be sculptured on his tomb in the character of such a lavish host. 4 There was in that age no more popular and effective way of testifying gratitude for the honours bestowed by the popular voice, or of winning them, than by a great feast to the whole commune, generally accompanied by a distribution of money, according to social or official grade. It was also the most popular means of prolonging one's memory to bequeath a foundation for the perpetual maintenance of such repasts in honour of the dead. 5 One P. Lucilius of Ostia had held all the great offices of his town, and had rewarded his admirers with a munificence apparently more than equivalent to the official honours they had bestowed. He had paved a long road from the forum to the arch, restored a temple of Vulcan, of which he was the curator, and the temples of Venus, Spes, and Fortuna ; he had provided standard weights for the meat market, and a tribunal of marble for the forum. But probably his most popular benefaction was a great banquet to the citizens, where 217 couches were arrayed for them. 6 The same munificent person had twice entertained the whole of the citizens at luncheon. Elsewhere a veteran, with a long and varied service, had settled at Auximum where he 1 On the sportula at this time, cf. , n_ on t r> 8urgere,Tarpoiumpropedespectantiaculmen_ ^ lnt - JMipubl. iHr. fr. c. 2; Luc. Dem. Sic undique fulgor C. 57. 236 SOCIAL LIFE book ii defend his conduct before the emperor, and Junius Mauricus had the courage to express before the council a wish that they could be abolished also at Rome. 1 Augustus had, by an imperial edict, restrained the cruel exhibitions of the father of Nero. 2 Ves- pasian, according to Dion Cassius, 3 had little pleasure in the shows of the arena. But the emperors generally, and not least Vespasian's sons, encouraged and pandered to the lust for blood. 4 The imperial gladiators were organised elaborately in four great schools by Domitian, 5 with a regular administra- tion, presided over by officers of high rank. The gentle Pliny, who had personally no liking for such spectacles, applauded his friend Maximus for giving a gladiatorial show to the people of Verona, to do honour to his dead wife, in the true spirit of the old Bruti and Lepidi of the age of the Punic Wars. 6 He found in the shows of Trajan a splendid incentive of con- tempt for death. It is little wonder that, with such examples and such approval, the masses gloated unrestrained over these inhuman sports. The rag -dealer at Trimalchio's dinner is certainly drawn to the life. 7 They are going to have a three days' carnival of blood. There is to be no escape ; the butcher is to do his work thoroughly in full view of the crowded tiers of the amphitheatre. It was in Etruria, and in Campania, where Trimalchio had his home, that the gladiatorial combats took their rise. Campanian hosts used to entertain their guests at dinner with them in the days before the second Punic War. 8 And it was in Campanian towns that in the first century was displayed most glaringly the not unusual combination of cruelty and voluptuousness. The remains of Pompeii furnish us with the most vivid and authentic materials for a study of the sporting tastes of a provincial town. It is significant that the amphitheatre of Pompeii, which was capable of holding 20,000 people, was built fifty years before the first stone amphitheatre erected by Statilius Taurus at Rome. 9 It is also remarkable that, although Pompeii is mentioned only twice by Tacitus, one of the references is to a bloody riot 1 Plin. Up. iv. 22. 5 D. Cass. 67. 1 ; cf. Friedl. ii. 202. 2 Suet. Nero, iv. 6 Plin. Ep. vi. 34 ; Paneg. 33. 3 D. Cass. 66. 15 ; cf. M. Aur. vi. 46. 7 Petron. 45. 4 D. Cass. 68. 10 and 15, 66. 25 ; 8 Strabo, v. c. 4, 13. Suet. Nero, xi. ; Suet. Bom. iv. 9 Mau, 206, 207. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 237 arising out of the games of the amphitheatre. 1 In the year 5 9 a.d. a Roman senator in disgrace, named Livineius Eegulus, gave a great gladiatorial show at Pompeii, which attracted many spectators from the neighbouring town of Nuceria. The scenes of the arena were soon reproduced in a fierce street fight between the people of the two towns, in which many Nucerians were left dead or wounded. The catastrophe was brought before the emperor, and referred by him to the Senate, with the result that Pompeii was sternly deprived of its favourite amusement for a period of ten years. But when the interdict was removed, the Pompeians had the enjoyment of their accustomed pleasure for ten years more, till it was finally interrupted by the ashes of Vesuvius. A building at Pompeii, which was originally a colonnade connected with the theatre, 2 had been converted into barracks for a school of gladiators in the time of the early Empire. 3 Behind the colonnade of more than seventy Doric columns had been built a long row of small cells, with no opening except on the central enclosure. There was a mess room, and the exedra on the southern side served as a retiring room for the trainers and the men in the intervals of exercise. The open area was used for practice. These buildings have yielded many specimens of gladiators' arms, helmets, and greaves richly embossed in relief, scores of mail- coats, shields, and horse-trappings. In one room there were found the stocks, and four skeletons with irons on their legs. In another, eighteen persons had taken refuge in the last catastrophe, and, among them, a woman wearing costly jewels. The walls and columns were covered with inscriptions and rude sketches of gladiatorial life. Indeed the graffiti relating to it are perhaps the most interesting in Pompeii. On some of the tombs outside the city we can still read the notices of coming games, painted on the walls by a professional advertiser, one Aemilius Celer, " by the light of the moon." 4 They announce that a duumvir or aedile or flamen will exhibit twenty or thirty pairs of combatants on the calends of May or the ides of ApriL There will also be a hunt, athletic 1 Tac. Ann. xiv. 17. 4 Mau, 216, 217. The words in one a Mau, 152. of these, flaminis Neronis Caesaris Aug. * FriedL SUtengesch. ii. 206. ' fili, fix the date between 50 and 54 a.d. 238 SOCIAL LIFE book ii games, a distribution of gifts, and awnings will be provided. Programmes were for sale in advance, with a list of the events. The contents of one can still be read scratched on a wall, with marginal notes of the results of the competition. In one conflict, Pugnax, in the Thracian arms, had beaten Murranus the Myrmillo, fighting in the arms of Gaul, with the fish upon his helmet ; and the fate of Murranus is chronicled in one tragic letter p. {periit). Two others fought in chariots in old British fashion. And the Publius Ostorius who won was, as his name may suggest, a freedman, now fighting as a voluntary combatant, according to the inscription, in his fifty-first conflict 1 The tomb of Umbricius Scaurus, on the highway outside the Herculaneum gate, was adorned in stucco relief with animated scenes from the arena of hunting and battle. Hunters with sword and cloak, like a modern toreador, are engaging lions or tigers. Two gladiators are charging one another on horseback. Here, a vanquished combatant, with upturned hand, is imploring the pity of the spectators, while another is sinking in the agony of death upon the sand. The name, the school, and the fighting history of each combatant are painted beside the figure. 2 The universal enthusiasm for the shows is expressed in many a rude sketch which has been traced by boyish hands upon the walls. The record of the heroes of the arena was evi- dently then as familiar as that of a champion footballer or cricketer is now to our own sporting youth. In the peristyle of a house in Nola Street, the names of some thirty gladiators can be read, with the character of their arms and the number of their conflicts. Portraits of gladiators are figured on lamps and rings and vases of the period. The charm of their manly strength, according to Juvenal, was fatal to the peace of many a Eoman matron of the great world. And the humbler girls of Pompeii have left the memorial of their weakness in more than one frank outburst of rather unmaidenly admiration. 3 It is a grave deduction from the admiring judgment of the glory of the Antonine age, that its most splendid remains are the stately buildings within whose enclosure, for centuries, the populace were regaled with the sufferings and the blood of 1 Mau, 217, 218. 2 lb. 411. 8 lb. 220 ; Juv. vi. 82 sqq. ; cf. Mart. v. 24. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 239 the noblest creatures of the wild animal world and of gallant men. The deserts and forests of Africa and the remotest East contributed their elephants and panthers and lions to these scenes. And every province of the Empire sent its contingent of recruits for the arena, Gaul, Germany, and Thrace, Britain and Dacia, the villages of the Atlas, and the deserts of the Soudan. 1 Just in proportion to the depth of the impress made by Eoman civilisation, was the amphitheatre more or less popular in the provinces. In Italy itself the passion was naturally strongest. Quiet little places, buried in the Apennines, or in the mountains of Samnium, had their regular spectacles, and record their gratitude for the pleasure to some magistrate or patron. 2 The little town of Fidenae, in the reign of Tiberius, gained for a moment a sinister fame by the collapse of its amphi- theatre, involving the death or mutilation of 50,000 spectators. 8 An augustal of Praeneste endowed his town with a school of gladiators, and received a statue for this contribution to the pleasures of the populace. 4 A. Clodius Flaccus of Pompeii, in his first duumvirate, on the Apollinaria, gave an exhibition in the forum of bull- fighting, pugilism, and pantomime. He signalised his second tenure of the office by a show of thirty-five pairs of gladiators, with a hunting scene of bulls k boars, and bears. 6 At Minturnae, a monument reminds " the excellent citizens " that, in a show lasting for four days, eleven of .the foremost of Campanian gladiators had died before their eyes, along with ten ferocious bears. 6 At Compsa in Samnium, a place hardly ever heard of, the common people erected a statue to a priest of Magna Mater, who had given them a splendid show, and he in turn rewarded their gratitude by a feast to both sexes, which lasted over two days. 7 Similar records of misplaced munificence might be produced from Bovianum and Beneventum, from Tibur and Perusia, and many another obscure Italian town. But the brutal insensibility of the age is perhaps no- where so glaringly paraded as in the days following the short- lived victory of the Vitellian arms at Bedriacum. There, on that ghastly plain, on which his rival had been crushed and had closed a tainted life by a not inglorious death, Vitellius 1 Friedl. ii. 189. 9 lb. 6148; C.I.L. x. 1074, 6012. * lb. ii. 92. This was given postulante populo. * Tac. Ann. iv. 62. 7 Or. Henz. 5963, 5972, 2531 ; C.I.L. * Or. Henz. 2532. s lb. 2530. x. 228. 240 SOCIAL LIFE book ii gloated over the wreck of the great struggle. The trees were cut down, the crops trampled into mire ; the soil was soaked and festering with blood, while mangled forms of men and horses still lay rotting till the vultures should complete their obsequies. Within forty days of the battle, the emperor attended great gladiatorial combats given by his generals at Cremona and Bononia, as if to revive the memory of the carnage by a cruel mimicry. 1 The grim literary avenger of that carnival of blood has pictured the imperial monster's end, within a short space, in colours that will never fade, deserted by his meanest servants, shuddering at the ghastly terrors of the vast, silent solitudes of the palace, dragged forth from his hiding, and flung with insults and execrations down the Gemonian Stairs. The dying gladiator of Cremona was more than avenged. 2 The western provinces bordering on the Mediterranean, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, drank deepest of the spirit which created the great amphitheatres of Aries, Treves, and Carthage, Placentia and Verona, of Puteoli, Pompeii, and Capua. But the East caught the infection, and gladiatorial combats were held at Antioch in Pisidia, at Nysa in Caria, and at Laodicea ; Alexandria had its amphitheatre from the days of Augustus, and a school of gladiators, presided over by a high imperial officer. 3 The Teutonic regions of the north and Greece were almost the only provinces in which the bloody games were not popular. The one Greek town where the taste for them was fully developed was the mongrel city of Corinth, which was a Boman colony. In the novel of Apuleius we meet a high Corinthian magistrate travelling through Thessaly to collect the most famous gladiators for his shows. 4 Yet even in Greece, even at Athens, which had been the home of kindly pity from the days of Theseus, the cruel passion was spreading in the days of the Antonines. Plutarch urges public men to banish or to restrain these exhibitions in their cities. 5 When the Athenians, from an ambition to rival the splendour of Corinth, were meditating the establishment of a gladiatorial show, the gentle Demonax bade them first to overturn their altar of Pity. 6 The apostles of Hellenism, Dion, Plutarch, 1 Tac. Hist. ii. 70-72. 4 Apul. Met. x. 18 ; cf. iv. 13. 2 j^ j g^ s Plut. Reipubl. Ger. Pr. 30; Philostr. Apoll. Tyan. iv. 21. 8 Or. Hertz. 3725, 6156 ; Strab, 6 Luc. Bern. 57 ; cf. Mahaffy, Greek xvii. 1, 10 ; Friedl. ii. 204, 378 sqq. World under Roman Sway, p. 271. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 241 and Lucian, were unanimous in condemning an institution which sacrificed the bravest men to the brutal passions of the mob. The games of the arena were sometimes held at the expense of the municipality on great festivals, with a public officer, bearing the title of curator} to direct them. But, perhaps more frequently, they were given by great magistrates or priests at their own expense ; or some rich parvenu, like the cobbler of Bologna or the fuller of Modena, who have been ridiculed by Martial, would try by such a display to force an entrance into the guarded enclosure of Roman rank. 2 There were also fre- quent bequests to create a permanent agonistic foundation. The most striking example of such a legacy is to be found on an inscription in honour of a munificent duumvir of Pisaurum. He left a capital sum of more than 10,000 to the community. The interest on two-fifths of this bequest, perhaps amounting to 500, was to be spent in giving a general feast on the birthday of the founder's son. The accumulated interest of the remaining three -fifths, amounting, perhaps, to 4000, was to be devoted to a quinquennial exhibition of gladiators. 3 An aedile in Petronius is going to spend between 3000 and 4000 on a three days' show. 4 The cost of these exhibitions, however, must have widely varied. We hear of one in the second century B.C. which cost over 7000. 5 The number of pairs engaged appears from the inscriptions to have ranged from five to thirty. The shows lasted from one to as many as eight days. 6 And the quality of the combatants was also very various. Tiberius once recalled some finished veterans from their retirement at a fee of .about 800 each. 7 On the other hand, a grumbler at Trimalchio's dinner sneers at a stingy aedile, whose gladiators were " two-penny men," whom you might knock over with a breath. 8 Besides the great imperial schools at Praeneste, Capua, or Alexandria, and the " families " maintained at all times by some of the great nobles, there 1 Or. Hervz. 2373, 7037, 148, 2532. dung, mit der die Schanspiele in der 2 Mart. iii. 59, 16. letzten Zeit der Republik gegeben s Qj. Hcnz. 81. wurden ; cf. C.I.L. ii. 6278 {Suppl. p. * Petron. 45. 6 q\. Henz ^ 2530) 2533 . Fried] 6 Friedl. Siiiengesch. ii. 137, Docli Cena Trim. p. 58 ; Cic. Ad Ait. 12, 2. diese Summe erscheint gering irn Ver- 7 Suet. Tib. vii. gleich mit der kolossalen Verschwen- 8 Petron. 45. 242 SOCIAL LIFE book ii were vagrant troops, kept up by speculative trainers for hire, such as that gang into which Vitellius sold his troublesome minion Asiaticus. 1 The profession of gladiator was long regarded as a tainted one, on which social sentiment and law alike placed their ban. It was a calling which included the vilest or the most unfortunate of mankind. Slaves, captives in war, or criminals condemned for serious offences, recruited its ranks. 2 The death in the arena was thus often, really, a deferred punishment for crime. But even from the later days of the Republic, men of free birth were sometimes attracted by the false glory or the solid rewards of the profession. Freedmen sometimes fought at the call of their patrons. 8 And, when Septimius Severus began to recruit the Pretorian guard from the provinces, the youth of Italy, who had long enjoyed the monopoly of that pampered corps, satisfied their combative or predatory instincts by joining the ranks either of the gladiators or of the brigands. 4 The gladiator had, indeed, to submit to fearful perils and a cruel discipline. His oath bound him to endure unflinchingly scourging, burning, or death. 6 His barracks were a closely guarded prison, and, although his fare was necessarily good, his training was entirely directed to the production of a fine fighting animal, who would give good sport in the arena. Yet the profession must have had some powerful attractions. Some of the emperors, 6 Titus and Hadrian, themselves took a pleasure in the gladiatorial exercises. Commodus, as if to confirm the scandal about his parentage, actually descended into the arena, 7 and imperial example was followed by men of high rank, and even, according to the satirist, by matronly viragoes. 8 The splendour of the arms, the ostentatious pomp of the scene of combat, the applause of thousands of spectators on the crowded benches, the fascination of danger, all this invested the cruel craft with a false glory. 9 The mob of all ages are ready to make a hero of the man who can perform rare feats of physical strength or agility. And the 1 Friedl. Sittengesch. ii. 202 ; Suet. 8 D. Cass. 66. 15 ; Spart. Hadr. 14 ; Vudl. xii. circumforaneo lanistae cf. Suet. Calig. xxxiv. veudidit. 7 Lamprid. Com. xi. ; cf. viii. ; 2 Friedl. Sittengesch. ii. 192. Friedl. Sittengesch. ii. 150. 3 Petron. 45 ; D. Cass. 60. 30. 8 Suet. Jul. Caes. xxxix. ; Juv. vi. 4 D. Cass. 74. 2. 252. 5 Friedl. Sittengesch. ii. 196. 9 Friedl. Sittengesch. ii. 198. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 243 skilful gladiator evidently became a hero under the early Empire, like his colleague of the red or green. His profes- sional record was of public interest; the number of his combats and his victories was inscribed upon his tomb. 1 His name and his features were scratched by boys on the street walls. He attracted the unconcealed, and not always discreet, admiration of women, 2 and his praise was sung in classic verse, as his pathetic dignity in death has been immortalised in marble. The memories of a nobler life of freedom sometimes drove the slave of the arena to suicide or mutiny. 3 But he was oftener proud of his skill and courage, and eager to display them. When shows were rare in the reign of Tiberius, a Myrmillo was heard to lament that the years of his glorious prime were running to waste.* Epictetus says that the imperial gladiators were often heard praying for the hour of conflict. 5 Great imperial schools were organised on the strictest military principles, and were under the command of a procurator who had often held high office in the provinces or the army. 6 Each school had attached to it a staff of masseurs, surgeon -dressers, and physicians to attend to the general health of the members. There were various grades according to skill or length of service, and a man might rise in the end to be trainer of a troop. Gladiators, like all other callings in the second century, had their colleges. We have the roll of one of these, in the year 177 A.D., a college of Silvanus. 7 The members are divided into three decuries, evidently according to professional rank, and their names and arms are also given. Their comrades often erected monuments to them with a list of their achievements. Thus a dear companion-in-arms commemorates a young Secutor at Paroimus, who died in his thirtieth year, who had fought in thirty-four combats, and in twenty-one came off victorious. 8 Our authorities do not often permit us to follow the gladiator into retirement. The stern discipline of the Ludus no doubt made better men even of those condemned to it for grievous crimes. The inscriptions contain a few brief records 1 Or. Henz. 2571, 2572 ; C.I.L. x. gesch. ii. 211. 7364 ; xii. 5836. * Sen. De Prov. iv. a Mau, Pompeii, p. 219 sq. 6 Epict. Diss. i. 29, 37. 8 Sen. Ep. 70, 20 ; Tac. Arm. xv. Friedl. Sittengesch. ii. 204. 46 ; Sym. Ep. ii. 46 ; cf. Friedl. Sitten- 7 Or. Hertz. 2566. 8 lb. 2571. 244 SOCIAL LIFE book ii of their family life, which seems to have been as natural and affectionate as that of any other class ; wives and daughters lamenting good husbands and fathers in the usual phrases, and fathers in turn mourning innocent young lives, cut short by the cruelty of the gods. 1 Sometimes the veteran gladiator might be tempted to return to the old scenes for a high fee, or he might become a trainer in one of the schools. 2 His son might rise even to knightly rank ; 3 but the career of ambition was closed to himself by the taint of a profession which the people found indispensable to their pleasures, and which they loaded with contempt. The inscriptions pay all honour to the voluntary, single- minded generosity with which men bore costly charges, and gave time and effort to the business of the city. But there was a tendency to treat public benefactions as the acknowledg- ment of a debt, a return for civic honours. We can sometimes even see that the gift was extorted by the urgency of the people, in some cases even by menaces and force. 4 The cities took advantage of the general passion for place and social precedence, and, often from sordid motives, crowded their curial lists with patroni and persons decorated with other honorary distinctions. On the famous roll of the council of Canusium, out of a total of 164 members, there are 39 patroni of senatorial or knightly rank, and 25 praetextati, mere boys, who were almost certainly of the same aristocratic class, and were probably destined to be future patrons of the town. 5 In the desire to secure the support of wealth and social prestige, the municipal law as to the age for magisterial office was frequently disregarded, and even mere infants were sometimes raised to the highest civic honours. 6 The position of patron seems to have been greatly prized, as it was heavily paid for. A great man with a liberal soul might be patron of several towns, 7 and sometimes women of rank had the honour conferred on them. 8 The ornamenta or external badges of official rank were frequently bestowed on people who were not eligible by law for the magistracy. A resident alien (incola), 1 Or. Henz. 2572-9 ; C.I.L. xii. 3329. youth of twenty had been iivir quin- 2 Or. Henz. 2573-5 ; D. Cass. 72. 22. quennalis, and had given a gladiatorial 3 Juv. iii. 158. show. Cf. 3714, quaestor designatus 4 C.I.L. x. 1074. est annorum xxiiii., 3745, 3246, 3768. 8 Or. Henz. 3721. 7 lb. 3764. 6 lb. 7008, 7010 ; cf 7082, where a 8 lb. 3773, 4036, 82, 5134 ; cf. 3744. chap. ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 245 or an augustal, might be co-opted into the " splendid order " of the Curia, or he might be allowed to wear its badges, or those of some office which he could not actually hold. 1 But it is plain that such distinctions had to be purchased or repaid. The city seldom made any other return for generous devotion, unless it were the space for a grave or the pageant of a public funeral. It is true that a generous benefactor or magistrate is frequently honoured with a statue and memorial tablet. Indeed, the honour is so frequently bestowed that it seems to dwindle to an infinitesimal value. 2 And it is to our eyes still further reduced by the agreeable convention which seems to have made it a matter of good taste that the person so distinguished by his fellow-citizens should bear the expense of the record himself ! 3 Nor did the expectations of the grateful public end even there ; for, at the dedication of the monument, it was seemingly imperative to give a feast to the generous com- munity which allowed or required its benefactor to bear the cost of the memorial of his own munificence. 4 It is only fair, however, to say that this civic meanness was not universal, and that there are records to show that even the poorest class sometimes subscribed among themselves to pay for the honour which they proposed to confer. 6 The Antonine age was an age of splendid public spirit and great material achievement. But truth compels us to recognise that even in the age of the Antonines, there were ominous signs of moral and administrative decay. Municipal benefactors were rewarded with local fame and lavish flattery ; but the demands of the populace, together with the force of example and emulation, contributed to make the load which the rich had to bear more and more heavy. Many must have ruined themselves in their effort to hold their place, and to satisfy an exacting public sentiment. Men actually went into debt to do so ; 6 and as municipal life became less attractive or more burdensome, the career of imperial office opened out and offered far higher distinction. The reorganisation of the 1 Or. ffenz. 3709, 3750 ; C.I.L. xii. 7190, 4100. 8203. 3219. lb. 3865, ex aere collate ; 6996. a Plut. Reipubl. Ger. Pr. c. 27. 8 This seems clear from Plut. Beip. ' Or. Henz. 6992. Ger. Pr. c. 31, Kal M Savei&fierov * lb. 3811, 3722, 6999, 7007, 7004 oUrpbu &/xa Kal Karay^Xaarov elvai ircpl (honore usus inpensam remiait), 7011, tA$ Xeirovpylas. 246 SOCIAL LIFE book ii imperial service by Hadrian had immense effects in diverting ambition from old channels. It created a great hierarchy of office, which absorbed the best ability from the provinces. Provincials of means and position were constantly visiting the capital for purposes of private business or pleasure, or to represent their city as envoys to the emperor. They often made powerful friends during their stay, and their sons, if not they themselves, were easily tempted to abandon a municipal career for the prospect of a high place in the imperial army or the civil service. 1 It is true that the local tie often re- mained unbroken. The country town, of course, was proud of the distinction to which its sons rose in the great world ; and many a one who had gained a knighthood or some mili- tary rank, returned to his birthplace in later years, and was enrolled among its patrons. We may be sure that many a successful man, like the Stertinii of Naples, paid "nurture fees " in the most generous way. But already in the reign of Domitian, as we have seen, legal provision had to be made for the contingency of an insufficient number of candidates for the municipal magistracies. Already, in the reign of Trajan, the cities of Bithynia are compelling men to become members of the Curia, and lowering the age of admission to official rank. 2 Plutarch laments that many provincials are turning their backs on their native cities and suing for lucrative offices at the doors of great Eoman patrons. 8 Apollonius of Tyana was indignant to find citizens of Ionia, at one of their great festivals, masquerading in Eoman names. 4 The illus- trious son of Chaeronea, with a wistful backward glance at the freedom and the glories of the Periclean age, frankly recognises that, under the shadow of the Eoman power, the civic horizon has drawn in. 6 It is a very different thing to hold even the highest magistracy at Thebes or Athens from what it was in the great days of Salamis or Leuctra. But Plutarch accepts the Empire as inevitable. He appreciates its blessings as much as Aristides or Dion Chrysostom. He has none of the revolutionary rage which led Apollonius to cast reproaches at Vespasian, or to boast of his complicity 1 Plut. Reip. Ger. Pr. c. 18 ; cf. c. 10. * Philostr. Apott. T. iv. 5. 2 Plin. Ep. x. 113; 79. 8 Plut. Reip. Ger. Pr. c. 32; cf. Plut. Reip. Ger. Pr. c. 18. Gr&rd, Morale de Plut. p. 230. chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 247 in the overthrow of Nero. 1 He has little sympathy with philosophers like Epictetus, who would sink the interests of everyday politics in the larger life of the universal com- monwealth of humanity. The Empire has extinguished much of civic glory and freedom, but let us recognise its compen- sating blessings of an ordered peace. Spartam nacttts es, hanc exorna, might be the motto of Plutarch's political counsels. He himself, with a range of gifts and culture, which has made his name immortal, did not disdain to hold a humble office in the poor little place which was his home. And he appeals to the example of Epameinondas, who gave dignity to the magistracy which was concerned with the duty of the cleansing of the sewers and streets of Thebes. 2 He tells his young pupil that, although we have now no wars to wage, no alliances to con- clude, we may wage war on some evil custom, revive some charitable institution, repair an aqueduct, or preside at a sacri- fice. Yet Plutarch has a keen insight into the municipal vices of his age, the passion for place and office, the hot unscrupulous rivalry which will stoop to any demagogic arts, the venality of the crowd, and the readiness of the rich to pamper them with largesses and shows, the insane passion for pompous decrees of thanks and memorial statues ; above all, the eager servility which abandoned even the poor remnant of municipal liberty, and was always inviting the interference of the prince on the most trivial occasions. 3 Such appeals paralyse civic energy and hasten the inevitable drift of despotism. He exhorts men to strive by every means to raise the tone of their own community, instead of forsaking it in fastidious scorn, or ambition for a more spacious and splendid life. The growing distaste for municipal honours was to some extent caused by bureaucratic encroachments on the independ- ence of the Curia. As early as the reign of Trajan there are unmistakable signs, as we have seen, of financial mismanage- ment and decay. The case of Bithynia, in Trajan's reign, is sometimes treated as an exceptional one. It may be doubted whether it is not a conspicuous example of general dis- organisation. The Bithynian towns were probably not alone in their ill-considered expenditure on faultily planned aqueducts 1 Philostr. Apoll. T. v. 41, 10 ; cfc a Plut. Reip. Oer. Pr. c 16. Gr6ard, p. 227. . lb. c. 27, 29, 30, 20. 248 SOCIAL LIFE book ii and theatres. Apamea was certainly not the only city which called for an imperial auditor of its accounts. In- scriptions of the reign of Trajan show that many towns in Italy, Como, Canusium, Praeneste, Pisa, Bergamum, and Caere, had curators of their administration appointed, some as early as the reigns of Hadrian or Trajan. 1 These officers, who were always unconnected with the municipality, took over the financial control, which had previously belonged to the duumvirs and quaestors. They were often senators or equites of high rank, and a single curator sometimes had the supervision of several municipalities. The case of Caere is peculiarly instructive and interesting. 2 There, an imperial freed- man, named Vesbinus, proposed to erect at his own cost a club-house (phretrium), for the augustales, and asked the municipal authorities for a site close to the basilica. At a formal meeting of the Curia, the ground was granted to him, subject to the approval of Curiatius Cosanus, the curator, with a vote of thanks for his liberality. A letter to that official was drawn up, stating the whole case, and asking for his sanction. The curator, writing from Ameria, granted it in the most cordial terms. It is noteworthy that at the very time when Caere was consulting its curator about the proposal of Vesbinus, 3 the Bithynian cities were laying bare their financial and engineering difficulties to Pliny and Trajan. The glory of free civic life is already on the wane. The municipality has invited or submitted to imperial control. The burdens of office have begun to outweigh its glory and distinction. In a generation or two the people will have lost their elective power, and the Curia will appoint the municipal officers from its own ranks. It will end by becoming a mere administrative machine for levying the imperial taxes ; men will fly from its crushing obligations to any refuge ; and the flight of the curiales will be as momentous as the coming of the Goths. 4 The judgment on that externally splendid city life of the 1 Or. Rem. 4007 (Canusium), 2391 - Or. Henz. 3787, placuit tibi scribi (Praeneste), 4491 (Pi*a), 3898 (Ber- an in hoc quoque et tu consensurus gamum), 3787 (Caere). For places out of Italy, cf. C.I.L. xii. 3212 (datus 3 a.d. 113, as the names of the a Trajano) ; viii. 2403, 2660 (Timgad consuls show. and Lambesi ; iii. 3485 (Aquincum) ; * See Roman Society in the Last ii. 484 (Emerita) ; 4112 (Tarraco) ; cf. Century of the Western Emjrire, p. 208 x. ; ii. p. 1158 ; Capitol. M. Ant. c. 11. sqq.(lst ed.). chap, ii MUNICIPAL LIFE 249 Antonine age will be determined by the ideals of the inquirer. There was a genuine love of the common home, a general pride in its splendour and distinction. And the duty, firmly imposed by public sentiment on the well-endowed to contribute out of their abundance to its material comfort and its glory, was freely accepted and lavishly performed. Nor was this expenditure all devoted to mere selfish gratification. The helplessness of orphanhood and age, the penury and monotonous dulness of the lives of great sunken classes, the education of the young, were drawing forth the pity of the charitable. Muni- ficence was often indeed, in obedience to the sentiment of the time, wasted on objects which were unworthy, or even to our minds base and corrupting. Men seemed to think too much of feasting and the cruel amusement of an hour. Yet when a whole commune was regaled at the dedication of a bath or a temple, there was a healthy social sympathy diffused for the moment through all ranks, which softened the hard lines by which that ancient society was parted. Yet, in looking back, we cannot help feeling that over all this scene of kindliness and generosity and social goodwill, there broods a shadow. It is not merely the doom of free civic life, which is so clearly written on the walls of every curial hall of assembly from the days of Trajan, to be fulfilled in the long-drawn tragedy of the fourth and fifth centuries ; three hundred years have still to run before the inevitable catastrophe. It is rather the feeling which seems to lurk under many a sentence, half pitiful, half contemptuous, of M. Aurelius, penned, perhaps, as he looked down on" some gorgeous show in the amphitheatre, when the Numidian lion was laid low by a deft stroke of the hunting-spear, or a gallant Myrmillo from the Thames or the Danube sank upon the sand in his last conflict. 1 It is the feeling of Dion, when he watched the Alexandrians palpitating with excitement over a race in the circus, or the cities of Bithynia convulsed by some question of shadowy precedence or the claim to a line of sandhills. It is the swiftly stealing shadow of that mysterious eclipse which was to rest on intellect and literature till the end of the Western Empire. It is the burden of all religious philosophy from Seneca to Epictetus, 1 M. Aurel. vi. 46 ; vii. 3 ; ix. 30. 260 SOCIAL LIFE book ii which was one long warning against the perils of a material- ised civilisation. The warning of the pagan preacher was little heeded; the lesson was not learnt in time. Is it possible that a loftier spiritual force may find itself equally helpless to arrest a strangely similar decline ? CHAPTEE III THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE The Pvpvlus or Plebs of a municipal town of the early Empire is often mentioned in the inscriptions along with the Ordo and the Augustales, generally in demanding some benefaction, or in doing honour to some benevolent patron. 1 They also appear as recipients of a smaller share at public feasts and distributions. They occasionally engage in a fierce conflict with the higher orders, as at Puteoli in the reign of Nero, when the discord was so menacing as to call for the presence of a praetorian cohort. 2 The election placards of Pompeii also disclose a keen popular interest in the municipal elections. 3 But the common people are now as a rule chiefly known to us from the inscriptions on their tombs. Fortunately there is an immense profusion, in all the provinces as well as in Italy, of these brief memorials of obscure lives. And although Roman literature, which was the product of the aristocratic class or of their dependents, generally pays but little attention to the despised mass engaged in menial services or petty trades, we have seen that the novel of Petronius flashes a brilliant light upon it in the reign of Nero. The immense development of the free proletariat, in the time of the early Empire, is one of the most striking social phenomena which the study of the inscriptions has brought to light. It has sometimes been the custom to speak of that society as depending for the supply of its wants entirely on slave labour. And undoubtedly at one time slave labour occupied the largest part of the field of industry. A household in the 1 Or. Henz. Ind. 151 ; C.I.L. xii. p. 2 Tac. Ann. xiii. 48 ; Hi (i.e. plebs) 940 ; Or. Henz. 3763, 7170 (consensus magistratuum et primi cujusque avari- plebis) ; C.I.L. xii. 3185 (ex postula- tiam increpantes. tionepopuli) ; x. 5067, 1030,8215,3704. C.I.L. iv. 202, 710, 787. 251 252 SOCIAL LIFE book ii time of the Eepublic, of even moderate wealth, might have 400 slaves, while a Crassus would have as many as 20,000, whom he hired out in various industries. 1 But several causes conspired gradually to work a great industrial revolution. From the days of Augustus, the wars beyond the frontier, which added fresh territory and yielded crowds of captives to the slave-markets, had become less frequent. And it is prob- able that births among the slave class hardly sufficed to maintain its numbers against the depletion caused by mortality and manumission. The practice of emancipating slaves of the more intelligent class went on so rapidly that it had even to be restrained by law. 2 Masters found it economically profitable to give skilful slaves an interest in the profits of their industry, and the peculium, which was thus accumulated, soon provided the means of purchasing emancipation. At the same time, the dispersion of colossal fortunes, gained in the age of rapine and conquest, and squandered in luxury and excess, together with the exploitation of the resources of favoured regions, which were now enjoying the blessings of unimpeded commerce, rapid intercommunication, and perfect security, must have given an immense stimulus to free industry. A very casual glance at the inscriptions, under the heading Artes et Opificia, 3 will show the enormous and flourishing development of skilled handicrafts, with all the minutest specialisation of the arts that wait on a highly-organised and luxurious society. The epitaphs of these obscure toilers have been brought to light in every part of the Eoman world, in remote towns in Spain, Gaul, Noricum, Dacia, and North Africa, as well as in the ancient centres of refinement in Italy or the Greek East. On a single page or two you can read the simple record of the bridle-maker or flask-maker of Narbonne, the cabriolet- driver of Senegallia, the cooper of Treves, the stone-cutter of Nimes, the purple-dealer of Augsburg, beside those of the wool-comber of Brescia, the oculist of Bologna, the plumber of Naples, or the vendors of unguents in the Via Sacra, and the humble fruiterer of the Circus Maximus. 4 Many of these people had risen from 1 Marq. Priv. i. 159, 160 ; Duruy, * Or. Hem. 4148, 4143, 4268, 4154. Hist, des Rom. v. 631 ; Athen. vi. 272 d. For the provinces cf. C.I.L. ii. Suppl. 2 Suet. Octav. 40 ; D. Cass. 55. 13. p. 1171 ; viii. p. 1102 ; x. 1163 ; xii. * Or. Hem. iii. Ind. p. 180. p. 943. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBELAN LIFE 253 slavery into the freedman class. Most of them are evidently humble folk, although, like a certain female pearl-dealer of the Via Sacra, they may have freedmen and freed women of their own, for whom they provide a last resting-place beside them- selves. 1 The barber, or auctioneer, or leather-seller, who had become the owner of lands and houses, and who could even give gladiatorial shows, excited the contempt of Juvenal and Martial. 2 But these insignificant people, although despised by the old world of aristocratic tradition, were proud of their crafts. They tell posterity who and what they were, without any vulgar concealment; nay, they have left expensive tombs, with the emblems or instruments of their petty trades proudly blazoned upon them like the armorial devices of our families of gentle birth. In the museum of S. Germain may be seen the effigy of the apple-seller commending his fruit to the attention of the ladies of the quarter ; the cooper, with a cask upon his shoulder; the smith, hammer in hand, at the forge ; the fuller, treading out and dressing the cloth. 3 This pride in honest industry is a new and healthy sign, as a reaction from the contempt for it which was engrained in old Eoman society, and which is always congenial to an aristocratic caste supported by slave labour. In spite of the grossness and base vulgarity of sudden wealth, portrayed by Petronius and Juvenal, the new class of free artisans and traders had often, so far as we can judge by stone records, a sound and healthy life, sobered and dignified by honest toil, and the pride of skill and independence. Individu- ally weak and despised, they were finding the means of developing an organisation, which at once cultivated social feeling, heightened their self-respect, and guarded their collective interests. While the old aristocracy were being rapidly thinned by vice and extravagance, or by confiscation, the leaders of the new industrial movement probably founded many a senatorial house, which, in the fourth and fifth centuries, in an ever-recurring fashion, came to regard manual industry with sublime contempt, and traced themselves to Aemilius Paullus or Scipio, or even to Aeneas or Agamemnon. 4 The organisation of industry through the colleges attained 1 Or. Henz. 4148, Marcia margari- 2 Juv. i.24; x. 224; Mart. in. 16, 59. taria de Via Sacra legavit . . . libertis 3 Duruy, v. 637. libertabusque suis ... * S. Hieron. Ep. 108, 3 254 SOCIAL LIFE book ii an immense development in the Antonine age, and still more in the third century, after the definite sanction and encourage- ment given to these societies by Alexander Severus. The records of the movement are numerous, and we can, after the scholarly sifting of recent years, now form a tolerably complete and vivid conception of these corporations which, springing up at first spontaneously, in defiance of government, or with its reluctant connivance, were destined, under imperial control, to petrify into an intolerable system of caste servitude in the last century of the Empire of the West. 1 The sodalitia and collegia were of immemorial antiquity. Certain industrial colleges and sacred sodalities were traced back to Numa, and even to the foundation of Eome. 2 In the flourishing days of the Eepublic they multiplied without restraint or suspicion, the only associations at which the law looked askance being those which met secretly or by night. It was only in the last century of the Eepublic that the colleges came to be regarded as dangerous to the public peace, and they were, with some necessary exceptions, suppressed by a decree of the Senate in 64 B.C. They were revived again for factious or revolutionary purposes in 58 B.C. by Clodius. 3 The emperors Julius and Augustus abolished the free right of association, except in the case of a few consecrated by their antiquity or their religious character. 4 And it was enacted that new colleges could not be created without special authorisation. In the middle of the second century, the jurist Gaius lays it down that the formation of new colleges was restrained by laws, decrees of the Senate, and imperial constitutions, although a certain number of societies, both in Rome and the provinces, such as those of the miners, salt workers, bakers, and boatmen, were authorised. 5 And down to the time of Justinian, the right of free association was jealously watched as a possible menace to the public peace. The refusal of Trajan to sanction the formation of a company of firemen in Nicomedia, with the reasons which he gave to Pliny for his decision, furnishes the best concrete illustration 1 Roman Society in the Last Century Numa, c. 17, ty 5k Siavofitj Kara rots of the Western Empire (1st. ed.), p. rtyvas aiXijTQv, xP wo xt>uv, kt\. 193. 3 Morams. De Coll. p. 76. 2 Momms. De Coll. (Morel) p. 28 sq. ; * Suet. Caes. 42 ; Ociav. 32. Boissier, Eel. Rom. ii. 278 ; Plut. 5 Momms. De Coll. p. 84. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 255 of the imperial policy towards the colleges. 1 That the danger from the colleges to the public order was not an imaginary one, is clear from the passage in Tacitus describing the bloody riots between the people of Nuceria and Pompeii in the reign of Nero, which had evidently been fomented by " illicit " clubs. 2 It is seen even more strikingly in the serious troubles of the reign of Aurelian, when 7000 people were killed in the organised outbreak of the workmen of the mint. 3 Yet it is pretty clear that, in spite of legislation, and imperial distrust, the colleges were multiplying, not only in Eome, but in remote, insignificant places, and even in the camps, from which the legislator was specially determined to avert their temptations. In the blank wilderness, created by a universal despotism, the craving for sympathy and mutual succour inspired a great social movement, which legislation was power- less to check. Just as in the reigns of Theodosius and Honorius, imperial edicts and rescripts were paralysed by the impalpable, quietly irresistible force of a universal social need or sentiment. One simple means of evasion was pro- vided by the government itself, probably as early as the first century. In an inscription of Lanuvium, of the year 136 A.D., there is a recital of a decree of the Senate according the right of association to those who wish to form a funerary college, provided the members did not meet more than once a month to make their contributions. 4 It appears from Marcian's reference to this law that other meetings for purposes of- religious observance might be held, the pro- visions of the senatusconsultum against illicit colleges being carefully observed. 5 Mommsen has shown that many other pious and charitable purposes could be easily brought within the scope of the funerary association. And it was not difficult for a society which desired to make a monthly contribution for any purpose to take the particular form recognised by the law. In the reign of M. Aurelius, although membership of two colleges is still prohibited, the colleges obtained the legal right to receive bequests, and to emancipate 1 Plin. Ep. x. 34. * Or. Eenz. 6086 ; cf. Momma. 2 Tac. Ann. xiv. 17, re ad patrea De Coll. p. 98 ; Boissier, Rel. Rom. ii. relata . . . collegia quae contra leges 313 ; Duruy, v. 408. instituerant dissoluta. 8 Vop. Awrel. c. 38. 5 Momma. Be Coll. p. 87. 256 SOCIAL LIFE book ii their slaves. And finally, Alexander Severus organised all the industrial colleges and assigned them defensores. 1 The law against illicit associations, with all its serious penalties, remained in the imperial armoury. But the Empire, which had striven to prevent combination, really furnished the greatest incentive to combine. In the face of that world- wide and all-powerful system, the individual subject felt, ever more and more, his loneliness and helplessness. The imperial power might be well-meaning and beneficent, but it was so terrible and levelling in the immense sweep of its forces, that the isolated man seemed, in its presence, reduced to the insig- nificance of an insect or a grain of sand. Moreover, the aristocratic constitution of municipal society became steadily more and more exclusive. If the rich decurions catered for the pleasures of the people, it was on the condition that they retained their monopoly of political power and social precedence. The plebeian crowd, recruited from the ranks of slavery, and ever growing in numbers and, in their higher ranks, in wealth, did not indeed dream of breaking down these barriers of exclusive- ness ; but they claimed, and quietly asserted, the right to organise a society of their own, for protection against oppression, for mutual sympathy and support, for relief from the deadly dulness of an obscure and sordid life. Individually weak and despised, they might, by union, gain a sense of collective dignity and strength. To our eyes, as perhaps to the eyes of the Eoman aristocrat, the dignity might seem far from imposing. But these things are greatly a matter of imagination, and depend on the breadth of the mental horizon. When the brotherhood, many of them of servile grade, met in full con- clave, in the temple of their patron deity, to pass a formal decree of thanks to a benefactor, and regale themselves with a modest repast, or when they passed through the streets and the forum with banners flying, and all the emblems of their guild, the meanest member felt himself lifted for the moment above the dim, hopeless obscurity of plebeian life. No small part of old Eoman piety consisted in a scrupulous reverence for the dead, and a care to prolong their memory by solid memorial and solemn ritual, it might be to maintain some faint tie of sympathy with the shade which had passed 1 Lamprid. Alex. Sev. c. 33 ; cf. Duruy, v. 408. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 257 into a dim and rather cheerless world. The conception of that other state was always vague, often purely negative. It is not often that a spirit is sped on its way to join a loved one in the Elysian fields, and we may fear that such phrases, when they do occur, are rather literary and conventional. 1 The hope of blessed reunion after death seldom meets us till we come to some monument of a Christian freedman. 2 But two of the deepest feelings in the Eoman mind did duty for a clear faith in the life beyond the tomb: one was family piety, the other the passionate desire of the parting spirit to escape neglect and oblivion. Whoever will cast his eyes over some pages of the sepulchral inscriptions will be struck with the intensity and warmth of affection, the bitterness of loss and grief, which have been committed to the stone. The expressions, of course, are often conventional, like obituary memorials in every age. The model wife appears again and again, loving, chaste, pious, a woman of the antique model, a keeper at home, who spun among her maids and suckled her own children, who never gave her husband a moment's vexation, except when she died. 3 Good husbands seem to have been not less common. And the wife's grief sometimes far outruns the regular forms of eulogy or regret. In one pathetic memorial of a union formed in earliest youth, the lonely wife begs the unseen Powers to let her have the vision of her spouse in the hours of night, and bring her quickly to his side. 4 There is just the same pure affection in the less regular, but often as stable, unions of the slaves and soldiers, and the contubernalis is lamented with the same honourable affection as the great lady, although the faulty Latin sometimes betrays the class to which the author belongs. The slave world must always have its shame and tragedy ; yet many an inscription shows, by a welcome gleam of light, that even there human love and ties of family were not always desecrated. 8 The slave nurse erects a monument to her little foster child ; or a master and mistress raise an affectionate memorial to two young vernae 1 Or. Hertz. 4841, Elysiis campis 2 lb. 4662, Qutia Silvana Uxor virum floreat umbra tibi ; but cf. 4793, manus expecto meum. levo contra deum qui me innocentem * lb. 2677, 2655, 4626, 4639, 4848, sustulit ; 4796, Dii irati aeterno somno Domum servavit, lanam fecit. Dixi, abei. dederunt. * lb. 4775. 8 lb. 2669, 4653, 2413, 2414. S 258 SOCIAL LIFE book ii who died on one day. A freedman bewails, with warm sincerity, a friendship begun in the slave market, and never interrupted till the last fatal hour. 1 The common tragedies of affection meet us on these slabs, as they are reproduced from age to age with little variation. The prevalent note is, Vale vale in aeternvm, with thoughts of the ghostly ferryman and the infernal stream and hopeless separation. Now and then, but seldom, a soul passes cheerfully from the light which it has loved, happy to escape the burden of old age. 2 And sometimes, too, but seldom, we meet with a cold, hard gross- ness, which looks back with perfect content upon a full life of the flesh and takes the prospect of nothingness with a cheerful acquiescence. 3 The true Eoman had a horror of the loneliness of death, of the day when no kindly eye would read his name and style upon the slab, when no hand for evermore would bring the annual offering of wine and flowers. It is pathetic to see how universal is the craving to be remembered felt even by slaves, by men plying the most despised or unsavoury crafts. The infant Julius Diadumenus, who has only drawn breath for four hours, receives an enduring memorial. A wife consoles her grief with the thought that her husband's name and fame will be forever prolonged by the slab which she dedicates. 4 On another monument the traveller along the Flaminian Way is begged to stop and read again the epitaph on a boy of nine. 5 Many are tortured by the fear of the desertion or the violation of their " eternal home." An old veteran bequeaths from his savings a sum of about 80, to provide a supply of oil for the lamp above his tomb. 6 An unguent seller of Montferrat leaves a fine garden to afford to the guardians of his grave an annual feast upon his birthday, and the roses which are to be laid upon it for ever. 7 Many a prayer, by the gods of the upper and the lower worlds, appeals to the passing wayfarer not to disturb the eternal rest. 8 The alienation or desecration of a tomb is forbidden with curses or the threat of heavy 1 Or. Hem. 2815, 2817, 4687, 4777, tantum meum est. Non fui, fui ; non 4653. sum, non euro ; 4807, 7407, 7387. a lb. 4852, effugi crimen longasenecta 4 lb. 4795, 7406. tuum. 6 lb. 4836. 3 lb. 4816, balnea, vina, Venus cor- 6 lb. 4416. rumpunt corpora nostra, sed vitam 7 lb. 4417. faciunt. Vixi; quod comedi et ebibi 8 lb. 4781, 4783, 4. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 259 penalties. 1 A place of burial was a coveted possession, which was not easily attainable by the poor and friendless, and practical persons guarded their repose against lawless intrusion by requiring the delinquent to pay a heavy fine to the municipal or to the imperial treasury, or to the pontifical college. It was the most effectual way of securing the peace of the dead. For the public authorities had a direct pecuniary interest in enforcing the penalty for the desecration. But it would be interesting to know how long these provisions to protect for ever the peace of the departed fulfilled the hopes of the testator. The primary object of a multitude of colleges, like that of the worshippers of Diana and Antinous at Lanuvium, was undoubtedly, after the reign of Nerva, the care of the memory of their members after death. In the remarkable inscription of Lanuvium, as we have seen, the formal permission by decree of the Senate, to meet once a month for the purpose of a funerary contribution is recorded. 2 It was a momentous concession, and carried consequences which the legislator may or may not have intended. 3 The jurist Marcian, who gives an imperfect citation of this part of the decree, goes on to add, that meetings for a religious purpose were not prohibited, provided that the previous legislation against illicit societies was observed. 4 And the law of the Lanuvian College shows how often such meetings might take place. It did not need much ingenuity to multiply occasions for reunion. The anniversary of the foundation, the birthday of founders or benefactors, the feast of the patron deity, the birthday of the emperor, these and the like occasions furnished legal pretexts for meetings of the society, when the members might have a meal together, and when the conversation would not always be confined to the funerary business of the college. At a time when, according to juristic theory, a special permission was needed for each new foundation, and when the authority was grudgingly accorded, the whole vast plebeian mass of petty traders, artisans, freedmen, and slaves were at one stroke 1 Or. Hem. 4386, 4357, 4360, 4362, volent in funera, in id collegium coeant 4388, 4396, 4423, 4425, 4427. neque sub specie ejus collegii nisi 2 lb. 6086. Ex S.C.P.R. quibns seinel in mense coeant, etc. coire convenirc collegiumque habere 8 Boissier, Bel. Rom. ii. 313. liceat qui stipem menstruam conferee 4 Morams. De Coll. p. 87. 260 SOCIAL LIFE book ii allowed to organise their societies for burial. We may fairly assume that, liberally interpreted, the new law was allowed to cover with its sanction many a college of which funeral rites were not the sole, or even the primary object. And this would be made all the easier because many of the industrial colleges, and perhaps still more of the strictly religious colleges, had a common burial-place, and often received bequests for funerary purposes. This is the case, for example, with a college of worshippers of Hercules at Interamna, and a similar college at Keate. 1 A young Belgian, belonging to the guild of armourers of the 20 th legion, was buried by his college at Bath. 2 One C. Valgius Fuscus gave a burial-ground at Forum Sempronii, in Umbria, to a college of muleteers of the Porta Gallica, for their wives or concubines, and their posterity. 3 There is even a burial-place, duly denned by exact measurement, for those " who are in the habit of dining together," a description which, as time went on, would have applied as accurately as any other to many of these clubs. 4 We are, by a rare piece of good fortune, admitted to the interior of one of the purely funerary colleges. In the reign of Hadrian there was at Lanuvium a college which, by a curious fancy, combined the worship of the pure Diana with that of the deified minion of the emperor. It was founded in A.D. 133, three years after the tragic death of the young favourite. And in 136, the patron of the society, who was also a magnate of the town, caused it to be con- vened in the temple of Antinous. There he announced the gift of a sum of money, the interest of which was to be spent at the festivals of the patron deities ; and he directed that the deed of foundation should be inscribed on the inner walls of the portico of the temple, so that newly admitted members might be informed of their rights and their obliga- tions. This document, discovered among the ruins of the ancient Lanuvium in 1816, reveals many important facts in the constitution and working of funerary colleges. 5 It recites, as we have seen, a part of the senatusconsultum, which 1 Or. Henz. 2399, 2400. una epulo vesci soleut 2 lb. 4079. B lb. 6086 ; Momms. Be Coll. p. 98 ; 3 lb. 4093. Boissier, Bel. Rom. ii. p. 309 sqq. ; * lb. 4073, Loc. sep. convictor. qui JDuruy, v. 412. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 261 authorised the existence of such colleges, and after loyal wishes for the prosperity of the emperor and his house, it prays for an honest energy in contributing to the due inter- ment of the dead, that by regular payments the society may prolong its existence. The entrance fee of the college is to be 100 sesterces (16s. 8d.), together with a flagon of good wine. A monthly subscription of five asses is appointed. It is evident that the members are of the humblest class, and one clause shows that they have even a sprinkling of slaves among them, who, with the permission of their masters, might connect them- selves with these burial clubs. 1 The brethren could not aspire to the erection even of a columbarium, still less to the pos- session of a common burial-ground. They confined themselves to making a funeral grant of HS.300 to the appointed heir of each member who had not intermitted his payments to the common fund. 2 Out of this sum, HS.50 are to be paid to members present at the funeral. The member dying intestate will be buried by the society, and no claim upon his remain- ing interest in it will be recognised. The slave, whose body was retained by his master after death, was to have a funus imaginarium, and probably a cenotaph. In the case of a member dying within a radius of twenty miles from Lanuvium, three members, on timely notice, were deputed to arrange for the funeral, and required to render an account of the expenses so incurred. A fee of HS.20 was granted to each. But if any fraud were discovered in their accounts, a fine of quadruple the amount was imposed. Lastly, when a member died beyond the prescribed limit, the person who had arranged his funeral, on due attestation by seven Koman citizens, and security given against any further claims, received the burial grant, with certain deductions. 8 In such precise and orderly fashion, with all the cautious forms of Koman law, did this poor little society order its performance of duty to the dead. Our knowledge of the funerary colleges is still further amplified by an inscription of a date twenty years later than 1 Or. ffenz. 6086 ; Col. ii., placuit 2 Momms. Be Coll. p. 99 ; Boissier, ut quisquis servus ex hoc collegio liber Rel. Eom. ii. p. 309. factUB fuerit etc. 8 Momms. I)e Coll. p. 104. 262 SOCIAL LIFE book ii that of Lanuvium. 1 In the reign of Antoninus Pius a lady named Salvia Marcellina resolved to commemorate her husband by a gift to the college of Aesculapius and Hygia. She presented to it the site for a shrine close to the Appian Way, a marble statue of Aesculapius, and a hall opening on a terrace, where the banquets of the brotherhood should be held. To this benefaction Marcellina, along with one P. Aelius Zeno, who apparently was her brother, added two donations of HS.15,000 and HS.10,000 respectively, the interest of which was to be distributed in money, or food and wine, at six different festivals. The proportions assignable to each rank in the college were determined at a full meeting, held in the shrine of the "Divine Titus." Marcellina attaches certain conditions to her gift. The society is to be limited to sixty members, and the place of each member, on his decease, is to be filled by the co-optation of his son. If any member chooses to bequeath his place and interest, his choice is confined to his son, his brother, or his freedman, and he is required to pay for this limited freedom of selection by re- funding one-half of his burial grant to the chest of the college. 2 The college of Aesculapius is nominally a religious and funerary corporation, yet there is only a single reference, in a long document, to the subject of burial. No information is given as to the amount of the funeraticium or burial grant, the sources from which it is derived, or the conditions on which it is to be paid. The chief object of Marcellina seems to have been to connect the memory of her husband with a number of festivals, for the perpetuity of which she makes provision, to promote social intercourse, and to prevent the intrusion of strangers by making membership practically hereditary. The colleges, of whose inner working we have tried to give a picture, are classed as religious corporations in the collec- tions of the inscriptions. They bear the name of a god, and they provide a solemn interment for their members. But in these respects they do not differ from many other colleges which are regarded as purely secular. The truth is, that any attempt to make a sharp division of these societies on such lines seems futile. Sepulture and religion being admitted by the 1 Or. Henz. 2417 ; Junio Rufino Cos. i.e. a.p. 153 ; Momms. p. 73. 2 Momms. De Coll. p. 93. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 263 government as legitimate objects for association, any college, however secular in its tone, might, and probably would, screen itself under sacred names. Nor would this be merely a hypocritical pretence. It is clear that many of the purely industrial colleges, composed as they were of poor people who found it impossible to purchase a separate burial-place, and not easy, unaided, to bear the expense of the last rites, at once consulted their convenience, and gratified the sentiment of fraternity, by arranging for a common place of interment. And with regard to religion, it is a commonplace to point out that all Graeco-Eoman societies, great or small, rested on religion. The state, the clan, the family, found their ideal and firmest bond in reverence for divine or heroic ancestors, a reverent piety towards the spirits who had passed into the unseen world. The colleges, as we shall see presently, were formed on the lines of the city which they almost slavishly imitated. 1 It would be strange and anomalous if they should desert their model in that which was its most original and striking characteristic. And just as Cleisthenes found divine and heroic patrons for his new tribes and demes, 2 so would a Eoman college naturally place itself under the protection of one of the great names of the Eoman pantheon. Sometimes, no doubt, there may not have been much sincerity in this conformity to ancient pieties. But do we need to remind ourselves how long a life the form of ancient pieties may have, even when the faith which gave birth to them has become dim and faint? The usual fashion of writing Eoman history has concen- trated attention on the doings of the emperor, the life of the noble class in the capital, or on the stations of the legions and the political organisation of the provinces. It is a stately and magnificent panorama. But it is apt to throw the life of the masses into even deeper shadow than that in which time has generally enwrapped them. We are prone to forget that, behind all this stately life, there was a quiet yet extra- ordinarily busy industrial activity which was its necessary basis and which catered for all its caprices. In the most cursory way Tacitus tells us that a great part of Italy 1 They have their ordo, plebs, de- honorati, patroni, quaestores, etc.; v. curiones, quinquennales, curatores, Hem. Ind. p. 176 sqq. 2 Herodot.v. G6. 264 SOCIAL LIFE book ii was gathered for the great fair at Cremona, on the fateful days when the town was stormed by the army of Vespasian. 1 Yet what a gathering it must have been ! There were laid out in the booths the fine woollens of Parma and Mutina, the mantles of Canusium, the purples of Tarentum, the carpets of Patavium. Traders from Ilva brought their iron wares, Pompeii sent its fish sauces, and Lucania its famous sausages. Nor would there be missing in the display the oil of Venafrum, and the famous Setine and Falernian vintages. 2 The improve- ment of the great roads in the reign of Trajan must have given a vast stimulus to inland commerce. And we may be sure that many a petty merchant with his pack was to be seen along the Aemilian or Flaminian ways, like the travelling vendor of honey and cheese, whom Lucius, in the tale of Apuleius, meets hurrying to Hypata. 3 The great roads of Spain, since the days of Augustus, carried an immense traffic, which made even the distant Gades a magnificent emporium and one of the richest places in the Eoman world. 4 The wandering traders in Germany, Spain, or Syria, by a natural instinct drew together in their exile. In the revolt of Julius Civilis, they are found settled among the Batavians, and a collegium peregrinorum has left its memorial on the lower Rhine. 5 The sodalicium urbanum at Bracara Augusta is a similar society. 6 Another mercantile college meets us at Apulum in Dacia. 7 The Syrians of Berytus had a club at Puteoli, and there were at least two clubs of Syrian traders at Malaga. 8 The graves of Syrian traders have been found at Sirmium in " Pannonia, and, on the other hand, there are memorials of Eoman merchants at Apamea and Tralles, at Salamis and Mitylene. 9 Immense stimulus to this transmarine trade must have been given by the Emperor Claudius, who provided insurance against loss by storms, and a liberal system of bounties and rewards for shipping enterprise. 10 Apollonius of Tyana once expostulated with a young Spartan, who claimed descent from Callicratidas, for having forsaken the true career 1 Tac. Hist. iii. 32, tempus quoque 6 C.I.L. ii. 2423. mercatus ditem alioqui coloniam majore 7 n jjj i^qq opum specie complebat. 8 a ] x . " 1634 1579< - Fnedl. Cena Trim. Eval. p. 63. 9 ... ' ... , c - rtC1 1 Apul. Met. i. 5. R - m - 365 > 444 > 45o > 605L 4 Momms. Rom. Prov. i. 74. 10 Suet. Claud, xviii. ; cf. Merivale, 5 Or. Hem. 178 ; Tac. Hist. iv. 5. vi. 126 sq. chap, hi THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 265 of a man of his race, to soil himself with the trade of Carthage and Sicily. It is the sentiment of Juvenal who treats as a lunatic the man who will venture his life with a cargo on the wintry Aegean. 1 But the antiquarian rhetoric attributed to Apollonius embalms the fact that at the opening of a springtime in the reign of Domitian, a great merchant fleet was lying at Malea, ready to sail to the western seas. 2 These wandering merchants, wherever they went, banded them- selves in colleges for mutual protection and for society. In the same way, old soldiers, on their return from long service on the frontiers, gathered in military brotherhoods at such places as Ostia or Misenum. 3 The veterans of Augustus seem to have become a distinct and recognised class, like the Augustales. 4 Colleges of youth sprang up everywhere from the days of Nero, at Beneventum, Cremona, and Ameria, or at Moguntiacum, Lauriacum, and Poetovio. 5 They were formed, like our own sporting clubs, for exercise and healthy rivalry, often under the patronage of the divine hero who, to all the moralists of that age, had become the mythic type of the continent vigour of early manhood. There is one sodality at least devoted to the preservation of chastity. 6 But it is balanced by the clubs of the " late sleepers " and " late drinkers " of Pompeii. 7 The colleges in which the artisans and traders of the Antonine age grouped themselves are almost innumerable, even in the records which time has spared. They represent almost every conceivable branch of industry or special skill or social service, from the men who laid the fine sand in the arena, to the rich wine merchants of Lyons or Ostia. 8 The mere catalogue of these associations in an index will give an enlarged conception of the immense range and minute special- isation of Eoman industry. It may be doubted whether a similar enumeration of our English crafts would be longer or more varied. The great trades, which minister to the first necessities of human life, occupy of course the largest space, the bakers, the cloth-makers, the smiths, carpenters, and wood- 1 Juv. xiv. 276. 8 lb. 6414, 2211, 4095, 4100, 4096 ; 2 Philostr. Apoll. Tyan. iv. 34. C.I.L. x. 5928, 1493 ; iii. 4045, 5678. s ru. ir ,i, aQ ** " Or. Hertz. 2401. * Or. Ilenz. 6111, 6835. 7 aLLt iv . 575) 581 . * lb. 4109. 8 Or. Hem. 4063, 4072, 4087, 7007. 266 SOCIAL LIFE book ii merchants, trades often grouped together, the shoemakers and fullers and carders of wool. The mechanics, who made the arms and engines for the legions, naturally hold a prominent place. Nor less prominent are the boatmen of Ostia, and of the Ehone and the Saone. 1 The sailors of these great rivers had several powerful corporations at Lyons, and, on many an inscription, 2 claim the wealthiest citizens, men who have gained the whole series of municipal honours, as their chiefs and patrons. Aries, which was then a great sea-port, had its five corporations of sailor-folk, and Ostia an equal number, charged with the momentous task of taking up the cargoes of the African corn-ships for the bakeries of Eome. 3 Transport by land is represented by colleges of muleteers and ass drivers in the Alps and Apen- nines. 4 All the many trades and services which ministered to the wants or pleasures of the capital were similarly banded together, the actors and horn-blowers, the porters and paviors, down to the humble dealers in pastils and salt fish. 5 We have seen that even the gladiators, in their barrack-prisons, were allowed to form their clubs. Although traces of these combinations are found in remote and obscure places all over the Eoman world, it is at great commercial centres, at Ostia, Puteoli, Lyons, and Eome itself, that they have left the most numerous remains. They had probably for one of their objects the protection of their members against encroachments or fiscal oppression. Strabo once came across a deputation of fishermen on their way to plead with the Emperor for a reduction of their dues. 6 Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that these trades unions were always organised for trade objects, or that the separate colleges were composed of people engaged in the same occupation. They had many honorary members from among the richer classes, and, even in the lower ranks, in defiance of the law, 7 a dealer in salt might be enrolled among the boatmen of the Ehone, and member of a college of builders. 8 In truth, the great object of association among these humble people appears to have been not so much the protection of their trade, as the cheer- 1 Or. Eervz. 4243, 7205, 6950. 8 lb. 4105, 2619, 4113, 4112, 2625. 2 lb. 7007, 7254, 4110, 6950. 6 Boissier, Eel. Bom. ii. p. 286. 3 26. 3655, 6029, 3178. ' Dig. L. 7. 4 lb. 4093, 7206. 8 Boissier, Eel. Eom. ii. 287. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 267 fulness of intercourse, the promotion of fellowship and good- will, the relief of the dulness of humdrum lives. Probably no age, not even our own, ever felt a greater craving for some form of social life, wider than the family, and narrower than the State. It was a movement at which, as we have seen, even the greatest and strongest of the emperors had to connive. It penetrated society down to its lowest layers. Even the slaves and freedmen of great houses organised themselves in colleges. There were colleges in the imperial household. 1 T. Aelius Primitivus, chief of the imperial kitchen, being a man of great posthumous ambition, left the care of his own and his wife's monument to the college of the palatine cooks. 2 In the inscriptions of Moesia there is the album of a Bacchic club of household slaves containing 80 names, with apparently different grades among them, designated by such titles as archimysta, houleuta, frater and Jilius. 3 A similar club of the servile class, devoted to the worship of Isis, existed at Tarraco. 4 The officers of another bear the pompous titles of tribune, quaestor, and triumvir, and the slab records the thanks of one Hilara, that her ashes have been allowed to mingle in the same urn with those of Mida the chamberlain. 5 A provincial treasurer at Ephesus, who was a verna Augusti, commits the custody of his wife's monument to five colleges of slaves and freedmen in the emperor's household. One of the colleges bears the name of Faustina. Another college is devoted to the cult of the Lares and images of Antoninus Pius. 6 Private masters seem to have encouraged the formation of such associations among their dependents, and sometimes to have endowed them with a perpetual foundation. 7 It was probably politic, as well as kind, to provide for slaves social pleasures within the circle of the household, and thus to forestall the attrac- tions of the numerous clubs outside, which freely offered their hospitality. 8 We may be sure that the college "which was in the house of Sergia Paulina " was not encouraged by the mistress without good reason. 1 Or. Henz. 6302. ut ossa sua in olla Midaes coicerentur 2 lb. cum mort. esset. * C.I.L. iii. 2, 6150. 8 C.I.L. iii. 6077, v. note. * lb. ii. 600-1. 7 Or. Henz. 2386, 4938, 4123. 3 Or. Henz. 28C3, Hilara viva rogavit 8 Such as that in Or. Henz. 6086. 268 SOCIAL LIFE book ii Thus it appears that in every part of the lloman world, in the decaying little country town, and in the great trading centres, the same great movement of association is going on apace. It swept into its current almost every social grade, and every trade, handicraft or profession, the pastil-makers, the green-grocers and unguent sellers of Eome, the muleteers of the Alps, the fullers of Pompeii, the doctors at Beneventum, the boatmen of the Seine, the wine merchants of Lyons. Men formed themselves into these groups for the most trivial or whimsical reasons, or for no reason at all, except that they lived in the same quarter, and often met. 1 From the view which the inscriptions give us of the interior of some of these clubs, it is clear that their main purpose was social pleasure. And this is especially true of the clubs of the humblest class. M. Boissier has well remarked that the poor workman, the poor freedman, with the brand of recent slavery upon him, who was often engaged in some mean or disgusting occupation, amidst a society which from tradition regarded any industry soiled by servile touch with distant scorn, must have felt themselves solitary exiles in the desert of a great town, the most awful desert in the world. The remote splendour of the court and aristocratic life must have deepened the gloom of isolation and helplessness. Shut out for ever from that brilliant world of fashion and pleasure and power, whose social life seemed so charming and gay and friendly, the despised and lonely toiler sought a refuge in little gatherings of people as lonely as himself. At some chance meeting, some one, more energetic than the rest, would throw out the suggestion to form a club, on the model of some of the old trade societies which had always been authorised by the State from the days of Numa, or of those newer associations which were now tacitly permitted under the guise of religion. A small entrance fee would meet, for the time, their modest expenses. In that age of generous or ambitious profusion, it was not hard to find some influential patron, a kindly gracious noble, or an aspiring or generous parvenu, to give the infant society his countenance, along with a substantial donation for the building of a club- house, and for simple convivial pleasures on his birthday, and other festivals which could easily be multiplied. Then the 1 Or. Rem. 6010, Colleg. Capitolinorum, etc. ; of. Cic. Ad Quint. Fratr. ii. 5. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 269 brethren met in solemn form to frame their constitution and commemorate their benefactor, on one of those many monu- ments which illuminate a social life on which the literature of the age is generally silent. The continuity and repetition of proved political organisa- tion is a notable characteristic of the great races which have left, or are destined to leave, their mark on history. The British settlers on the prairies of Oregon or Manitoba immedi- ately order themselves into communities, which are modelled on a social system as old as the Heptarchy. The Latin race had perhaps an even more stubborn conservatism than the English. Under the most various circumstances, the Eoman instinctively clung to forms and institutions of tested strength and elasticity, and consecrated by the immemorial usage of his race. The most distant and most humble muni- cipality was fashioned after the pattern of the great " city which had become a world." 1 It had its senate, the ordo splendi- dissimus et amplissimus, and the popular assembly which elected the magistrates. The municipal magistrates, if they do not always bear the ancient names, reproduce in shadowy form the dictators, the praetors, the aediles, quaestors, and censors of the old republic. 2 The same continuity of form is seen in the colleges. As the municipal town was modelled on the constitu- tion of the State, so we may say that the college was modelled on the municipal town. The college, indeed, became a city for the brotherhood, at once a city and a home. They apply to it such terms as respublica collegii.* The meetings often took place in a temple, whether of a patron deity or of an emperor, as those of the Roman Senate were held in the temple of Concord or of Bellona. There they elected their administrative officers, generally for a period of one year ; in some cases, by way of special distinction, for life. The heads of these little societies bear various names, magistri, curatores, quinguennales, praefecti, or praesides.* They have also quaestors, 5 who managed their financial affairs, which, although perhaps on no great scale, still involved the investment of trust moneys to yield the prescribed amounts which had to be distributed either as burial 1 Rutil. Namat. i. 63. 4 lb. 6127, 7181, 7182, 3217, 4138 (v. 2 Or. Hens. Ind. p. 154 sqq. Orelli's note to this Inscription) 4071 ; r ^* C.I.L. x. p. 1163 ; m. (2) p. 1180. lb. 4068, 4107. 8 Or. Henz. 2863, 7183, 5372. 270 SOCIAL LIFE book ii payments, or in food and money on the high festivals. The number of the members was generally limited, either by the government in the interests of public order, or by the will of a benefactor, to prevent the progressive diminution in the value of the divisible shares of the income. 1 A periodical revision of the roll of members was therefore conducted every five years, as it was in the municipality, by the chief officers, exercising for the time censorial powers in miniature. Fortu- nately the albums of three or four colleges have been preserved. The lists throw a vivid light on their constitution and social tone. We have drawn attention in a former chapter to the strict gradation of social rank in the city polity. The same characteristic is repeated in the collegiate organisation. In these humble plebeian coteries, composed of " men without a grand- father," of men, perhaps, whose father was a slave, or of men who were slaves themselves, there emerges, to our astonishment, a punctilious observance of shadowy social distinctions, which is an inheritance from the exclusive aristocratic pride of the old republic. This characteristic has excited in some French critics and historians a certain admiration, 2 in which it is not altogether easy to join. Gradation of rank to ensure devotion and order in public service is a precious and admirable thing. But artificial and unreal distinctions, invented and conferred to flatter wealth, to stimulate or reward the largesses of the rich patron, to gratify the vulgar self-complacency of the parvenu, are only a degrading form of mendicancy. Some indulgence is no doubt due to men who were still under the yoke of slavery, or only just released from it ; the iron had entered into their souls. But both the college and the municipality of the Antonine age cannot be relieved of the charge of purchased or expectant deference to mere wealth. Hence we cannot altogether share the pleasure of M. Boissier in these pale and vulgar reproductions of the hierarchy of a real aristocracy. But the image of the hierarchy is there, and it is very instructive. In a college of smiths in Tarraconensis, there were fifteen patrons at the head of the roll, followed by twelve decurions, including two doctors and a soothsayer, one 1 Or. 2417, ut ne plures adlegantur the coll. fabroram is to be limited to quam numerus s. s. etc. ; C.I.L. ii. 150. 1167, collegio hominum centum dum- taxet constituto. Cf. Plin. x. 33, where 2 Boissier, Eel Rom. ii. 295. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 271 man isolated by the honours of the bisellium, two honorary members, twenty-eight plain plebeians. There were also several " mothers " and " daughters " of the society. 1 The album of another club at Ostia shows a list of nine patrons, two holders of quinquennial rank, and one hundred and twenty -three plebeians. 2 The plebs of many colleges included slaves, and in more than one inscription the men of ingenuous and those of servile birth are carefully distinguished, the slaves being sometimes placed at the bottom of the roll. 3 Yet it was surely a great advance when slaves and freemen could meet together for the time, on a certain footing of equality, for business or convivial intercourse. The rigid lines of old pagan society are indeed still marked on the face of these clubs. And yet many an inscription leaves the impression that these little societies of the old pagan world are nurseries, in an imperfect way, of the gentle charities and brotherliness which, in shy retire- ment, the young Church was cultivating in her disciples to be the ideal of the world. These colleges became homes for the homeless, a little fatherland, or patria, for those without a country. Some- times they may have met in low taverns, which were on that account jealously watched by some of the emperors. 4 But they generally attained to the possession of a club-room or schola, a name which had been previously given to the lounging -room of the public baths. Sometimes the schola was erected at their own cost, the site being perhaps granted by some rich patron, or by the town council, on a vacant spot close to the basilica or the theatre. 6 But frequently a hall was built for them by some generous friend. A like generosity often provided for them a little chapel of their patron deity, with a shaded court, or a balcony open to the air and sun, where the brethren took their common meals. 6 Or a rich patron, anxious to secure some care and religious observance of his last resting-place, would bequeath to a college a pleasant garden adjoining the tomb, with a house in which to hold their meetings. 7 And, as a further security 1 Or. Henz. 4055. 5 Or. Hem. 4088, 3298, 2279, 3787, 3 lb. 4054, 2417, 4056. 4085. . ' e k % Tt " in ^ h0W6Ver ' " *>- 2417 > solarium tectxm junctum cwibvTts iirivov KarfKvae, kt\. 7 lb. 4070. 272 SOCIAL LIFE book ii against neglect and oblivion, a sum of 10,000 or 15,000 sesterces would be invested to provide a dinner for the college on their benefactor's birthday. 1 As years went on, the scene of many a pleasant gathering became a centre round which clustered a great deal of sentiment, and even pride. We may imagine that, allowing for differences of time and faith, the little school or shrine would, in the course of years, attract something of the feeling which consecrates an ancient village church in England, or a little Bethel which was built in the year of the visit of John Wesley. It became a point of honour to make gifts to the schola, to add to its comfort or beauty. One benefactor would redeem a right of ancient lights, or build a boundary wall. 2 Another would make a present of bronze candelabra on a marble stand, with the device of a Cupid holding baskets in his hands. 8 Or a college would receive from its curator a gift of some silver statues of the gods, on the dedication of the schola, with a brass tablet, no doubt recording the event. 4 The gift of a place where the brethren of the club might be buried beside their wives or concubines, was probably, to these poor people, not the least valued benefaction. 5 Many a humble dona- tion was probably made, which was too slight for a memorial. But it happens that we have one record of gifts evidently offered by poor, insignificant people. It is contained in a very interesting inscription found upon a rock near the theatre at Philippi in Macedonia. 6 It records that P. Hostilius Phila- delphus, in recognition of the aedileship of the college, which had been conferred upon him, bore the expense of polishing the rock, and inscribing upon it the names of the members of a college of Silvanus, sixty-nine in number, together with a list of those who had presented gifts to their temple. The college was a religious one, with a priest who is named in the first place. It is also a funerary society, and seems to be com- posed of freedmen and of slaves, either belonging to the colony or private masters. They had just erected a temple of their patron god, to which some had given subscriptions in money, while others made various offerings for its adornment. One 1 Or. Henz. 65,900, 4088 ; cf. 4107, * lb. 4068. * lb. 2502. 4366. 6 lb. 2400, 4093. 2 lb. 2416, 4057. 6 C.I.I, iii. 1, 633. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 273 brother presents an image of the god in a little shrine, another statuettes of Hercules and Mercury. There is another donation of some stone -work in front of the temple, and Hostilius, at his own expense, cut away the rock to smooth the approach to the shrine. Most of the gifts are of trifling value, a poor little picture worth 15 denarii, a marble image of Bacchus costing not much more. But they were the offerings of an enthusiastic brotherhood, and the good Hostilius has given them an immortality of which they never dreamed. The contributions of the members would generally have been but a sorry provision for the social and religious life of a college. Eeproducing, as it did, the constitution and the tone of the city in so many traits, the college in nothing follows its model so closely as in its reliance on the generosity of patronage. At the head of the album of the society there is a list, sometimes disproportionately long, of its patroni. Countless inscriptions leave us in no doubt as to the reason why the patron was elected. His raison d'itre in the club is the same as in the city ; it is to provide luxuries or amusements for the society, which the society could not generally obtain for itself. The relation of patron and client is, of all the features of ancient life, the one which, being so remote from the spirit of our democratic society, is perhaps most difficult for us to understand. The mutual obligations, enforced by a powerful traditional sentiment, were of the most binding, and sometimes burdensome character. And in that form of relation, between former master and freedman, which became so common in the first age of the Empire, the old master was bound to continue his support and protection to the emancipated slave. 1 Although there was much that was sordid and repulsive in the position of the client in Juvenal's and Martial's days, we must still recognise the fact that the fortune of the rich patron had to pay a heavy price for social deference. Not less heavy was the demand made on the patrons of municipalities and colleges. There must have been wide distinctions of dignity and importance among the industrial colleges of the Empire. The centonarii, the fabri, and dendrophori of the more important centres, such as Aquileia, Lyons and Milan, the 1 Marq. Priv. L 203. T 274 SOCIAL LIFE book ii boatmen of Aries or Ostia, would probably have looked down with scorn on the flute-players of the Via Sacra, the hunters of Corfinium, or the muleteers of the Porta Gallica. 1 And there was a corresponding variety in the rank of the patrons. Some are high officials of the Empire, procurators of provinces, curators of great public works, or distinguished officers of the legions. Or they are men evidently of high position and commanding influence in their province, priests of the altar of Augustus, augurs of the colony, magistrates or decurions of two or three cities. 2 Sometimes the patron is a great merchant, with warehouses of oil or wine at Lyons or Tarragona or Ostia. 3 Yet in spite of his wealth, the patron's social position in those days might be rather uncertain, and we may without difficulty, from modern analogies, believe that a new man might find his vanity soothed, or his position made less obscure, by being known as the titular head of an ancient corporation of the cloth- workers, or dendrophori, or of the boatmen on the Saone. Probably in obscure country towns, remote from the seat of Empire, these bourgeois dignities were even more valued. 4 The humbler colleges would have to be content with one of the new freedmen, such as the vulgar friends of Trimalchio, who, after a youth of shameful servitude, had leapt into fortune by some happy chance or stroke of shrewdness, and who sought a compensation for the contempt of the great world in the deference and adulation of those who waited for their largesses. The election of a patron was an event of great moment, especially to a poor college. And it was conducted with a formal preciseness, and an assumption of dignity, which, at this distance of time, are sometimes rather ludicrous. In a little town of Cisalpine Gaul in the year 190, the college of smiths and clothworkers met in solemn session in their temple. Their quaestors, who may have had the financial condition of the college in view, made a formal proposal that the college should set an example of the judicious reward of merit, by electing one Tutilius Julianus, a man distinguished by his modesty and liberality, as the patron of their society The meeting 1 Or. Hcnz. 4082, 4118. 3 Or. Henz. 7007, 4109. 2 lb. 4082, 194, 73, 4077, 6654, 4109, 4069 ; O.I.L. iii. 1, 1209, 1497, 1051 ; 4 C.I.L. iii. 1968 ; Or. Henz. 3927, x. 228 ; 1696 ; 3910. 3321, 6275. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 275 commended the sage proposal of the quaestors, and formally resolved that the honourable Julianus should be requested to accept the distinction, with an apology for so tardy a recognition of his merits, and that a brass plate, containing a copy of this decree, should be placed above his door. 1 It is significant that the patrons were, in very many cases, Seviri and Augustales, a body which in the provinces, as we have seen, was generally composed of new men of the freedman class. Although they were steadily rising in importance and in strength of organisation, the provincial Augustales always ranked after the decurions of a town. They often displayed boundless liberality to their city and to their own order. 2 But the leading Augustales seem to have been quite as generous to the other corporations who placed themselves under their patronage. And they were not unfrequently patrons of several colleges. 3 It is no long task to find men who were the titular protectors of two or three, of eight, or even of as many as twelve or fifteen colleges. One inscription to Cn. Sentius of Ostia would seem to include among his dependents almost every industrial college in that busy port. 4 Sentius must have been a very wealthy and a very generous man to accept the patronage of so many societies, which in those days expected or demanded that their honours should be paid for in solid cash. The crowning distinction of a statue, or a durable inscription, was often solemnly decreed with all seemly forms of deference or unstinted flattery in a full meeting of the society. But in a great majority of cases we are amused or disgusted to read that, after all his other liberalities, the benefactor or his heir is permitted to pay for the record of popular gratitude. 5 This fact may explain the extraordinary abundance of these honours, if it somewhat lowers their value in the eyes of posterity. But, besides the benefactions which sprang either from ambition or real generosity, a vast number were inspired by the Eoman passion for long remembrance, and for the continuity of funerary ritual. The very position of so many tombs by the side of the great roads beyond the city gates, was a silent 1 Or. Henz. 4133. * lb. 4109. 8 lb. 7116, 3914, 3923, 4080, qui facilitates suas coll. reliq. 5 lb. 3724, honore usus impensam a lb. 4109 ; 194, 4069, 4071, 4094, remisit ; cf. 7011, 6992, 7190, so 7194. passim. 276 SOCIAL LIFE book ii appeal to the passing traveller not to forget the departed. The appeal is also often expressly made on the stone by those who had no other means of prolonging their own memory or thstt of some one they loved. It is impossible to read without some emotion the prayer of an old Spanish soldier, that his brethren of the college may never suffer grief like his, if they will only keep the lamp burning for ever over the tomb of his child. 1 The more opulent took more elaborate measures to provide for the guardianship of their "last home." 2 They often attached to the tomb a field or gardens of considerable extent, to be culti- vated for profit, or to bear the roses for the annual offering. The whole area, the dimensions of which, in many inscriptions, are defined with mathematical precision, would be surrounded by a wall. Within the enclosure there would be a little shrine containing statues of the dead, an arbour and a well, and a hall in which the kindred of coming generations might hold their annual banquet, till the tie was dissolved by the cruel obli- vion of time. 3 There will be a cottage (taberna) in which a freed- man or dependent of the house may be lodged, to watch over the repose of the dead. 4 But all these precautions, as the testator feels, were likely to be defeated in the end by the vicissitudes of human fortunes. 5 He had, indeed, before his eyes the fate of many a forsaken and forgotten tomb of old worthies of the Eepublic. Families die out ; faithful freedmen and their children cannot keep their watch for ever. The garden will grow wild, a time may come when no kindly hand will pour the libation or scatter the roses on the natal day. Families will die out, but a college may go on for ever by the perpetual renewal of its members. Inspired with this idea, a worthy of Nimes created a funerary college to dine regularly in his honour. 6 It was to consist of thirty persons, and the number was to be maintained by co-optation into the places of deceased members. Members of the college who were obliged to be absent might send one of their friends to join in the repast. Thus the dead man, who had taken such care to prolong his 1 C.I.L. ii. 2102. xliix., lat. p. xxxix., 7365, 4337, 4070, 2 Or. Hem. 4371, 4070, 4400, 7365; 40 f 5 ' ._.. . , . . cf. Marq. Pr. i. 370. *' 4366 ejusque mausolei claves "' ' ' duae penes aliquem libertorum meorura 3 Or. Henz. 4456 aediculae in quibus . . . sint, 4637, 4353. simulacra, etc., 4510, 4400 area quae 6 lb. 6206. ante ae est maceria cincta long. p. 6 lb. 4366. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 277 memory, would at no distant date be festively celebrated by people who barely knew his name. Many another left a bequest to a college to be spent in a feast on the testator's memorial day. 1 A freedman of Mevania leaves a tiny legacy of HS.1000 to the guild of cloth workers, of whom he is patron, with the condition that not less than twelve of their number shall feast once a year in memory of him. 2 A more liberal provision for convivial enjoyment was left to a college of Silvanus in honour of Domitian. It consisted of the rents of four estates, with their appurtenances, which were to be spent on the birthdays of the emperor and his wife, "for all time to come," with the sacrifices proper to such a holy season. 3 Due provision is often made for the seemly and impressive performance of a rite which was at once a religious duty and a convivial pleasure. There is a curious letter of the time of Antoninus Pius containing a deed of gift to the college of the fdbri at Narbo, in return for their constant favours to the donor. One Sextus Fadius presents them with the sum of 16,000 sesterces, the interest of which is to be divided every year at the end of April for ever, at a banquet on his birthday ; the guests on this festive occasion are to be habited in their handsomest attire. 4 But the fullest and minutest arrangements for these modest meals are to be found in the document relating to the foundation of the poor college of Diana and Antinous, to which reference has already been made. The master of the feast was taken in regular order from the roll of the society. Each brother had to accept this office in his turn, or pay a fine of five shillings of our money. The regular festivals of the club were six in the year, on the natal days of Diana and Antinous, and those of the founder and some of his relatives. There is some obscurity in the regulations for these common feasts, and at first sight they are a ludicrous contrast to the pontiff's famous banquet in the days of Julius Caesar, described by Macrobius. 5 M. Boissier naturally refuses to imagine that even the poor brethren of the club of Diana and Antinous would be contented with bread, four sardines, a bottle of good wine, with hot water and the 1 Or. Henz. 3999, 4076, 4107, 4088. * lb. 7215 (A.D. 149). 2 lb. 3999. 8 Macrob. Sat. iii. 13, 11-13. 3 lb. 6085. 278 SOCIAL LIFE book ii proper table service. The slave steward of Horace probably found much better fare in his popina. 1 Dr. Mommsen has resolved the mystery. It is evident, from several inscriptions, that sportulae were sharply distinguished from distributions of bread and wine. 2 The sportvla was a gift of richer food or dainties, which in public distributions might be carried home ; it was sometimes an equivalent in money. If those who received the sportvla preferred to enjoy it at a common table, an appointed member of the college would have the food prepared, or convert the money into dishes for the feast. The bread and wine he might add from his own pocket, if they were not provided by the foundation. How much for these meals came from the club funds, and how much out of the pocket of the magister coenae, is not always clearly stated. But we may be sure, from the tone of the times, that additions to a modest menu were often made by the generosity of patrons and officers of the club. It would be futile and uninteresting to pursue into all its minute details throughout the inscriptions, the system of sportulae founded by so many patrons and benefactors. Any one who wishes can temperately regale himself for hours at these shadowy club -feasts of the second century. Perhaps the clearest example of such distributions is the donation of Marcellina and Aelius Zeno to the little college of Aesculapius, to which reference has been made for another purpose. 3 On seven different anniversaries and festivals, sums of money, with bread and wine, were distributed to the brethren of the college in due proportions, according to their official dignity and social rank. Thus, in the division on the 4th of November, the fete- day of the society, the shares in money, according to the various grades, from the father of the college downwards, are six, four, and two. The division of the wine, according to social rank, follows the proportion of nine, six, and three. A slightly different scale is followed on the birthday of the Emperor Antoninus Pius in September, and on the day for New Year's gifts in January. But in these benefactions the difference of grade is always observed, the patron and the chief magistrates and 1 Boissier, Bel. Horn. ii. 319 ; Marq. 2385 (panem vinnm et sportulas dedit), Pr. i. 208 ; Hor. Ep. i. 14, 21. 3949. 2 Momma. De Colleg. p. 109 ; cf. Or. 3 Or. Hem. 2417. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 279 magnates of the society always receiving a larger share than the obscure brethren at the bottom of the list. In the college of Aesculapius, Marcellina herself, and Aelius Zeno, the two great benefactors of the society, along with the highest of its dignitaries, are allotted three times as much as the plebeian brother. The excellent Marcellina, who, in the fourth century might perhaps have followed S. Jerome and Paula to Bethlehem, was the widow of a good and tender husband, who had been curator of the imperial picture galleries. 1 Had she been drawn into the ranks of that hidden society, who were beginning to lay their dead in the winding vaults beneath the Appian Way, she would certainly have dealt out her bounty on a different scale and on different principles. Her bequest to the college of Aesculapius reveals how deep in the soul of a charitable pagan woman, who was probably sprung from servile stock, lay that aristocratic instinct of the Koman world which survived the advent of the Divine Peasant and the preaching of the fishermen of Galilee, for far more than four hundred years. The most curious and interesting among the regulations for these club entertainments are those relating to order and decorum. The club of Diana and Antinous was not very select, being probably composed of poor freedmen and slaves. 2 The manners of this class, if we may judge by the picture given by Petronius, were, to say the least, wanting in reserve and self-restraint. The great object of such reunions was, as the founder tells us, that the brethren might dine together cheerfully and quietly. 3 Hence he most wisely orders that all serious proposals and complaints shall be reserved for business meetings. If any member quits his place or makes a disturbance, he is to pay a fine of four sesterces. Twelve sesterces is the penalty for insulting a fellow -guest. The man who, under the influence of good wine, so far forgot himself as to insult the chief officer of the society, was to be punished by a forfeit of twenty sesterces, which would probably be a powerful discouragement of bad manners to most of the brotherhood of Antinous. Many another gift or bequest, of the same character as 1 Fl. Apolloni Proc. Aug. qui fuit a cf. the composition of the club in Or. pinacothecis . . Optimi piissimi, etc. 2394. 2 Or, Henz. 6086, quisquis ex hoc 3 lb. ut quieti et hilares diebus collegio servus defunctus merit, etc. ; solemnibus epulemur, etc. 280 SOCIAL LIFE book ii Marcellina's, meets the eye of the student of the inscriptions. The motives are singularly uniform to repay the honours con- ferred by a college, to celebrate the dedication of a statue, to save from forgetfulness a name which to us is only a bit of the wreckage of time. Everything is conventional about these be- quests. The money is nearly always left for the same purpose, an anniversary repast in honour of the humble dead, of the emperor, or of the patron gods. Sometimes the burial fee is refunded to the college, with the prayer that on the natal day the poor pittance derived from the gift be spent on pious rites, with roses strewn upon the grave. 1 Another will beg only that the lamp in the humble vault may be kept for ever burn- ing. These pieties and longings, which have their roots in a rude pagan past before the dawn of history, were destined to prolong their existence far into Christian times. The lamp will be kept burning over many a tomb of saint or martyr in the fourth or fifth century. And the simple feasts which the clothworkers of Brescia, or the boatmen of Ostia or Lyons, observed to do honour to some departed patron, will be celebrated, often in riotous fashion, over the Christian dead in the days of S. Augustine and S. Paulinus of Nola. 2 Dr. Mommsen believes that the collegiate life which blos- somed forth so luxuriantly in the early Empire, was modelled on the sacred union of the Roman family. 3 And the instinct of the Eoman nature for continuity in institutions prepossesses us in favour of the theory. In the college endowed by Marcellina and Zeno, there are a father and a mother, and else- where we read of daughters of a college. The members some- times call themselves brethren and sisters. 4 One of the feasts of the brotherhood is on the day sacred to " dear kinship," when relations gathered round a common table, to forget in kindly intercourse any disturbance of affection. 5 They also met in the early days of January, when presents were exchanged. Above all, like the primal society, they gathered on the birthdays of the revered dead to whom they owed duty and remembrance. And in many cases the members of the society reposed beside 1 Or. Henz. 4107. 4 Or. Henz. 2417, 4055, 2392, 3774, 2 S. Paul. Nol. Cam. xxvii. 547- ^'J^'JHi v vr * 4, 585 ; S. Aug. Ep. 32 ; Serm. v. v ' *> 2417, Item vm K. Mart die * Karae cognatioms eodem loco divi- s De Coll. p. 3. derent sportulas, etc. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 281 one another in death. 1 The college was a home of fraternal equality in one sense. As M. Boissier has pointed out, the members had equal rights in the full assembly of the club. A quorum was needed to pass decrees and to elect the officers. And, in the full conclave, the slave member had an equal voice with the freeman, and might, perchance, himself even be elected to a place of dignity. 2 He might thus, in a very humble realm, wield authority for the time over those who were accustomed to despise him. It is true that he needed his master's leave to join a college, and his master had the legal power to deny to him the last boon of burial by the hands of his collegiate brethren. 3 Yet it was undoubtedly a great stride in advance when a slave could sit at table or in council on equal terms with free-born men, and might receive pious Eoman burial, instead of being tossed like a piece of carrion into a nameless grave. The society of one of these humble colleges must have often for the moment relieved the weariness and misery of the servile life, and awakened, or kept alive, some sense of self-respect and dignity. The slave may have now and then felt himself even on the edge of political influence, as when his college placarded its sympathies in an election contest on the walls of Pompeii. Yet we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by words and appearances. In spite of legislative reform, in spite of a growing humane sentiment, whether in the Porch or the Christian Church, the lot of the slave and of the poor plebeian will be in many respects as hopeless and degraded in the reign of Honorius as it was in the reign of Trajan. 4 Even in the reign of Trajan, it is true, perhaps even in the reign of Nero, there were great houses like the younger Pliny's, where the slaves were treated as humble friends, where their weddings were honoured by the presence of the master, where, in spite of legal disabilities, they were allowed to dispose of their savings by wilL 5 And the inscriptions record the gratitude 1 Or. Hem. 2399, 4073, 4093. Sat. i. 11, 12 sqq. ; C. Theod. ix. 6, 2, 2 C.I.L. i. 1406 ; ii. 5927. 3 ; vii. 13, 8 ; ix. 7, 4 ; ix. 9, 1 ; ix. 12, Momms. De Coll. p. 102 ; Plin. Ep. ' pn n . Ep. viiL 16, 1 ; on the moro V1 ' K 16. humane feeling to slaves, cf. Sen. Ep. * For the contempt for slaves in the 47 ; De Ira, iii. 24, 32 ; De Clem. i. fourth and fifth centuries, v. S. Hieron. 18 ; De Ben. iii. 18, 19, 20 ; Juv. xiv. Ep. 54, 5 ; Salv. De Oub. Dei, iv. 26. 16 ; Spart. Hadr. c. 18 ; Wallon, For humaner sentiment, cf. Macrob. L'Esclav. i. c. 11 ; Marq. Pr. i. 177, 282 SOCIAL LIFE book ii and affection to their masters and mistresses of many who were in actual slavery, or who had but just emerged from it. But these instances cannot make us forget the cruel contempt and barbarity of which the slave was still the victim, and which was to be his lot for many generations yet to run. And therefore the improvement in the condition of the slave or of his poor plebeian brother by the theoretical equality in the colleges, may be easily exaggerated. In the humblest of these clubs, the distribution of good fare and money is not according to the needs of the members, but regulated by their social and official rank. "We cannot feel confident that in social intercourse the same distinction may not have been coldly observed. In modern times we often see a readiness to accord an equality of material enjoyment, along with a stiff guardian- ship of social distinctions which are often microscopic to the detached observer. And it would not be surprising to discover that the " master " or the " mother " of the college of Antinous protected their dignity by an icy reserve at its festive meetings. The question has been raised whether the ordinary colleges were in any sense charitable institutions for mutual help. And certainly the inscriptions are singularly wanting in records of bequests made directly for the relief of poverty, for widows and orphans or the sick. The donations or bequests of rich patrons seem to have had chiefly two objects in view, the commemoration of the dead and the provision for social and convivial enjoyment. It is true that, just as in municipal feasts, there is often a dis- tribution of money among the members of colleges. But this appears to be deprived of an eleemosynary character by the fact that by far the largest shares are assigned to those who were presumably the least in need of them. Yet it is to be recollected that we probably have left to us the memorial of only a small proportion of these gifts, and that, if we had a full list of all the benefactions bequeathed to some of the colleges, the total amount received by each member in the year might be very considerable, if judged by the standard of ordinary plebeian incomes. To the ambitious slave any addition, how- ever small, to his growing jpeculium, which might enable him to buy his freedom, would certainly be grateful. There is one class of colleges, however, which were un- chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 283 doubtedly formed to meet various exigencies in the course of life, as well as to make a provision for decent burial. These are the military clubs, on the objects and constitution of which a flood of light has been thrown by the study of the inscrip- tions in the great legionary camps of North Africa. 1 A passage of Vegetius shows us the provident arrangement made by government for the future of the ordinary legionary. 2 It is well known that, on the accession of each new emperor, or on the occurrence of some interesting event in the history of the prince's family, or of some great military success, and often without any particular justification, a donative was distributed throughout the army. It sometimes reached a considerable amount, ranging from the 25 denarii granted by Vespasian, to the 5000 of M. Aurelius. 3 One half of this largess was by orders set aside, and retained under the custody of the standard-bearers, to provide a pension on the soldier's retire- ment from the service. Another fund, entirely different, was formed by the soldiers' own contributions, to furnish a decent burial for those who died on service. But the law against the formation of colleges fell with peculiar severity on the soldier. 4 Not even for a religious purpose was he permitted to join such a society. This prohibition, however, seems to have been relaxed in the case of the officers, and some of the more highly skilled corps. 5 And we have among the inscrip- tions of Lambaesis a few instructive records of these military colleges. 6 Lambaesis, as we have seen, was one of those camps which developed into a regular municipality, after the recognition of soldiers' marriages by Septimius Severus. Henceforth the camp became only a place of drill and exercise, and ceased to be the soldier's home. And on the ground where the soldiers' huts used to stand, there are left the remains of a number of buildings of the basilica shape, erected probably in the third century, which were the club-houses of the officers of the Tertia Augusta. The interior was adorned with statues of imperial personages, and on the wall was inscribed the law of the college, 1 Cagnat, L'Armie Rom. pp. 457 sqq. 4 Cf. Marcian ap. Momma. De Coll. 2 Vegct. ii. 20. p. 87, neve milites collegia in castris * D. Cass. 65. 22 ; Capitol. M. Ant. habeant. c. 7 ; D. Cass. 73. 8 ; Cagnat, p. 459 ; 6 Cagnat, p. 463. Marq. Rmn. St. ii. pp. 13G, 543. 8 C.l.L. viii. 2552-7. 284 SOCIAL LIFE book ii commencing with an expression of gratitude for the very liberal pay which enabled the college to make provision for the future of its members. 1 The provision was made in various ways. An ambitious young officer was allowed a liberal viaticum for a journey across the sea to seek promotion. If promotion came, he received another grant to equip him. One half the amount granted in these cases was mercifully paid to him in the unpleasant contingency of his losing his grade. If he died on active service, his heir received a payment on the larger scale. And, when a man, in due course, retired from the army, he received the same sum under the name of anularium, which has puzzled the antiquary. 2 It has been maintained that these military clubs were really and primarily funerary societies. 8 And provision for burial was certainly one of their objects. Yet, on a reading of the law of the society of the Cornicines, it may be doubted whether the subject of burial is more prominent than the other contingencies of the officer's life, and in some of the inscriptions, burial is not even alluded to. The grant on retirement or promotion, and the grant to his heir on the death of a member, are the same. But probably the majority of officers had the good fortune to carry the money with them into peaceful retirement, if not into higher rank in another corps. In this case they would probably join another college, whether of soldiers or veterans, and secure once more the all -important object of a decent and pious interment. The military clubs seem rather intended to furnish an insur- ance against the principal risks and occasions of expenditure in a soldier's career. A calculation shows that, after providing for all these liabilities, the military college must have had a considerable surplus. 4 How it was spent, it is not hazardous to conjecture. If the poor freedmen and slaves at Ostia or Lanuvium could afford their modest meals, with a fair allowance of good wine, drunk to the memory of a generous 1 Cagnat, pp. 467, 540 ; cf. Boissier s Cagnat, p. 474. L'Afr. Rom. p. 111. C.I.L. viii. 2554, 4 The Cornicines of the 3rd Legion optiones scholam suam cum statuis et at Lambesi paid an entrance fee of 750 iniaginibus domus div. ex largissinris denarii (Scamnari nomine). The anu- stipendiis . . . fecerunt, etc. larium on retirement, and the funera- 2 C.I.L. viii. 2552, 3, 4; 2557, iii. ticium, were each 500 denarii. It would 3524 ; Henz. 6790 ; Cagnat, p. 472 ; seem that there must have been a con- Marq. Rom. St. ii. 544. siderable surplus. C.I.L. viii. 2557. chap, in THE COLLEGES AND PLEBEIAN LIFE 285 benefactor, we may be sure that the college of the Carnitines at Lambesi would relieve the tedium of the camp by many a pleasant mess dinner, and that they would have been astonished and amused on such occasions to hear themselves described merely as a burial society. The foundation law of the college of Diana and Antinous betrays some anxiety lest the continuity of the society should be broken. And in many a bequest, the greatest care is taken to prevent malversation or the diversion of the funds from their original purpose. 1 We feel a certain pathetic curiosity, in reading these records of a futile effort to prolong the memory of obscure lives, to know how long the brotherhoods continued their meetings, or when the stated offerings of wine and flowers ceased to be made. In one case the curiosity is satisfied and we have before our eyes the formal record of the extinction of a college. It is contained in a pair of wooden tablets found in some quarry pits near Alburnus, a remote village of Dacia. The document was drawn up, as the names of the consuls show, in the year 167, the year following the fierce irruption of the Quadi and Marcomanni into Dacia, Pannonia, and Noricum, in which Alburnus was given to the flames. 2 Artemidorus the slave of Apollonius, and Master of the college of Jupiter Cernenius, along with the two quaestors, places it on record, with the attestation of seven witnesses, that the college has ceased to exist. Out of a membership of fifty -four, only seventeen remain. The colleague of Artemi- dorus in the mastership has never set foot in Alburnus since his election. The accounts have been wound up, and no balance is left in the chest. For a long time no member has attended on the days fixed for meetings, and, as a matter of course, no subscriptions have been paid. All this is expressed in the rudest, most ungrammatical Latin, and Artemidorus quaintly concludes by saying, that, if a member has just died, he must not imagine that he has any longer a college or any claim to funeral payments ! The humble brothers of the society, whom 1 Or. Henz. 6086, universi consentire mine or quarry about 1780, along with debemus ut longo tempore inveterescere some other private documents of a possimus ; cf. 4357, 4360, 4366, 4386, commercial character ; v. G.I.L. iii. 4395. p. 213, and 921. The dates range from 131 to 167 a.d. Cf. Or. Henz. 6087 ; a The diptych, which has been singu- Schiller, Gesch. der rom. Kaiserzeit, i. larly preserved, was found in a deserted 2, p. 643. 286 SOCIAL LIFE book ii Artemidorus reproaches for their faithless negligence, may probably have fled to some refuge when their masters' lands were devastated by the Marcomanni, or been swept on in the fierce torrent of invaders which finally broke upon the walls of Aquileia. BOOK ni. NEC PHILOSOPHIA SINE VIBTUTE EST NEC SINE PHILOSOPHIA VIRTUS CHAPTER I THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR Philosophy in the time of Seneca was a very different thing from the great cosmic systems of Ionia and Magna Graecia, or even from the system of the older Stoicism. Speculative interest had long before his time given way to the study of_ moral problems with a definite practical aim. If the stimulus ~of the searching method of Socrates gave an impetus for a century to abstract speculation, it had an even more decided and long-lived influence in diverting thought to moral questions from the old ambitious paths. His disciples Antisthenes and Aristippus prepared the way for the Stoic and Epicurean schools which dominated the Roman world in the last century of the Republic and the first of the Empire. And even Plato and Aristotle indirectly helped forward the movement. It is not merely that, for both these great spirits, the cultivation of character and the reform of society have a profound interest. But even in their metaphysics, they were paving the way for the more introspective and practical turn which was taken by post -Aristotelian philosophy, by giving to what were mere conceptions of the mind a more real existence than to the things of sense. 1 The " ideas " or " forms " which they contrast with the world of concrete things, are really creations of the individual mind of which the reality must be sought in the 1 See Zeller, Phil, der Griech. iii. 1, standlichen Welt. . . . Es war nur ein 13, 14, Jener dualistische Idealismus, Schritt weiter in dieser Richtung, wenn welchen Plato begriindet, unci audi die nacharistotelische Philosophic den Aristoteles nicht grundsatzlich uber- Menschen in grundsatzlicher Abkehr wunden hattc, fuhrt in letzter Bezie- von der Aussenwelt auf sich selbst hung auf nichts anderes zuriick, als wies, am in seinem Innern die Befrie- anf den Gegensatz des Inneren und digung zu suclien, etc. AensKi ren des Denkens und der gegen- 290 THE GOSPEL OF PHILOSOPHY book hi depths of consciousness, however they may be divinised and elevated to some transcendental region beyond the limits of sense and time. With Aristotle, as with Plato, in the last resort, the higher reason is the true essence of man, coming into the body from a diviner world, and capable of lifting itself to the ideal from the cramping limitations of sensuous life. The philosopher in the Phaedo who turns his gaze persistently from the confusing phantasmagoria of the senses to that realm of real existence, eternal and immutable, of which he has once had a vision, is really the distant progenitor of the sage of Stoicism, who cuts himself off from the external objects of desire, to find within a higher law, and the peace which springs from a life in harmony with the Eeason of the world. The ancient schools, if they maintained a formal individu- ality even to the days of Justinian, 1 had worked themselves out. A host of scholarchs, from all the cities of the Greek East, failed to break fresh ground, and were content to guard the most precious or the least vulnerable parts of an ancient tradition. Moreover, the scrutiny of the long course of specu- lation, issuing in such various conclusions, with no criterion to decide between their claims, gave birth to a scepticism which sheltered itself even under the great name of the Academy. And as the faith in the truth of systems dwindled, the marks of demarcation between them faded ; men were less inclined to dogmatise, and began to select and combine elements from long discordant schools. In this movement the eclectic and the sceptic had very much the same object in view the support and culture of the individual moral life. 2 The sceptic sought his ideal in restrained suspense of judgment and in moral calm. The eclectic, without regard to speculative consistency, and with only a secondary interest in speculation, sought for doctrines from any quarter which provided a basis for the moral life, and, in the conflict of systems on the deeper questions, would fall back, like Cicero, on intuition and the consent of consciousness. 3 Creative power in philosophy was no more. Speculative curiosity, as pictured in the Phaedo or 1 See Luc. JEun. c. 3, ffwriraKrai 4k Apoll. T. i. 7, .8. 2 Zeller, iii. 1, 16. f3ad>. EC, vy tovs discordia frueretur ; Spart. Hadr. 15. e eo ^ rpoxtwreu &r9ptmn. Tlolav irpo- * Sen. Be Tranq. xiv. 7. Koirfy ; chap, i THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR 295 condemned him in the eyes of an age which professes to believe in the teaching of the Mount, and idolises grandiose wealth and power. His rhetoric offends a taste that can tolerate and applaud verbose banalities, with little trace of redeeming art. He cannot always win the hearing accorded to the repentant sinner, whose dark experience may make his message more real and pungent. The historian, however, must put aside these rather pharisaic prejudices, and give Seneca the position as a moral teacher which his writings have won in ages not less earnest than ours. Nor need we fear to recognise a power which led the early Fathers to trace the spiritual vision of Seneca to an intercourse with S. Paul, 1 supported by a feigned correspondence which imposed on S. Augustine and S. Jerome. 2 The man who approaches Seneca thinking only of scandals gleaned from Tacitus and Dion Cassius, 3 and frozen by a criticism which cannot feel the power of genius, spiritual imagination, and a profound moral experience, behind a rhetoric sometimes forced and extravagant, had better leave him alone. The Christianity of the twentieth century might well hail with delight the advent of such a preacher, and would certainly forget all the accusations of prurient gossip in the accession of an immense and fascinating spiritual force. The man with any historical imagination must be struck with amazement that such spiritual detachment, such lofty moral ideals, so pure an enthusiasm for the salvation of souls, should emerge from a palace reeking with all the crimes of the haunted races of Greek legend. That the courtier of the reigns of Caligula and Claudius, the tutor and minister of Nero, should not have escaped some stains may be probable : that such a man should have composed the Letters and the Be, Ira of Seneca is almost a miracle. Yet the glow of earnestness and conviction, the intimate knowledge of the last secrets of guilty souls, may well have been the reward of such an ordeaL Seneca's career, given a latent fund of moral enthusiasm, was really a splendid preparation for his mission, as an analyst of a corrupt society and a guide to moral reform. He lived 1 Tertull. Be An. c. 20, Seneca saepe etiam ad Paulum apostolum leguntur noster ; S. Hieron. Adv. Jovin. i. epistolae. 49. 3 The worst about Seneca is collected in D. Cass. 61. 10. But cf. the attack * S. Hieron. Adv. Jovin. i. 29 ; De of P. Suillius, Tac. Ann. xiii. 42 and Scrip. Eccl. 12 ; S. Aug. Ep. 153, en jot xiv. 52. 296 THE GOSPEL OF PHILOSOPHY kook hi through the gloomiest years of the imperial tyranny; he had been in the thick of its intrigues, and privy to its darkest secrets ; he had enjoyed its favour, and knew the perils of its jealousy and suspicion. He came as an infant from Cordova to Eome in the last years of Augustus. 1 In spite of weak health, he was an ardent student of all the science and philosophy of the time, and he fell under the influence of Sotion, a member of the Sextian School, which combined a rigorous Stoicism with Pythagorean rules of life. 2 As a young advocate and prosperous official, he passed unharmed through the terror and ghastly rumours of the closing years of Tiberius. 3 His eloquence in the Senate excited the jealousy of Caligula, and he narrowly escaped the penalty. 4 In the reign of Claudius he must have been one of the inner circle of the court, for his banishment, at the instance of Messalina, for eight years to Corsica was the penalty of a supposed intrigue with Julia, the niece of the emperor. 5 Seneca knew how to bend to the storm, and, by the influence of Agrippina, he was recalled to be the tutor of the young Nero, and on his accession four years after- wards, became his first minister by the side of Burrus. 6 The famous quinquennium, an oasis in the desert of despotism, was probably the happiest period of Seneca's life. In spite of some misgivings, the dream of an earthly Providence, as merciful as it was strong, seemed to be realised. 7 But it was, after all, a giddy and anxious elevation, and the influence of Seneca was only maintained by politic concessions, and was constantly threatened by the daemonic ambition of Agrippina. 8 And Seneca had enemies like P. Suillius, jealous of his power and his millions, and eagerly pointing to the hypocrisy of the Stoic preacher, whom gossip branded as an adulterer and a usurer. 9 The death of Burrus gave the last shock to his power. 10 His enemies poured in to the assault. The emperor had long wished to shake off the incubus of a superior spirit ; and the 1 Sen. Ad Helv. xix. 2. 6 D. Cass. 61. 4 ; Tac. Ann. xiii. 2. 2 Sen. JSp. 108, 13-17. D . ion suggest intrigue with Agrip- *Bp. 108, | 22. He abandoned V Tk!n. De Clem, i. 5, 8. Pythagorean abstinence, as suspicions, 8 Tac> Aniu xiij 2 facilius during the persecution of eastern cults ; _ _ yoluptatibus concessit retinerent, cf. Suet. Tib. 36. etc r * D. Cass. 59. 19. 9' ^ xiii- 42 . D. Cass. 61. 10. lb. 60. 8 ; 61. 10 ; Tac. Ann. xiii. 10 Tac. Ann. xiv. 52, mors Burri 42, schol. Juv. v. 109. infregit Senecae potentiam, etc. chap, i THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR 297 riches, the pointed eloquence, and more pointed sarcasms", the gardens and villas and lordly state of the great minister, sug- gested a possible aspirant to the principate. Seneca acted on his principles and offered to give up everything. 1 But his torture was to he prolonged, and his doom deferred for about two years. His release came in the fierce vengeance for the Pisonian conspiracy. 2 Seneca was an ideal director for the upper class of such an age. He had risen to the highest office in 'a world-wide monarchy, and he had spent years in hourly fear of death. He had enjoyed the society of the most brilliant circles, and exchanged epigrams and repartees with the best ; he had also seen them steeped in debauchery and treachery, and terror- stricken in base compliance. He had witnessed their fantastic efforts of luxury and self-indulgence, and heard the tale of wearied sensualism and disordered ambition and ineffectual lives. 3 His disciples were drawn, if not from the noblest class, at any rate from the class which had felt the disillusionment of wealth and fashion and power. And the vicissitudes in his own fate and character made him a powerful and sympathetic adviser. He had long to endure the torturing contrast of splendid rank and wealth, with the brooding terror of a doom which might sweep down at any moment. He was also tortured by other contrasts, some drawn by the fierceness of envious hatred, others perhaps acknowledged by conscience. Steeped in the doctrines of Chrysippus and Pythagoras, he had subdued the ebullient passions of youth by a more than monastic asceti- cism. 4 He had passionately adopted an ethical creed which aimed at a radical reform of human nature, at the triumph of cultivated and moralised reason and social sympathy over the brutal materialism and selfishness of the age. He had pondered on its doctrines of the higher life, of the nothingness of the things of sense, on death, and the indwelling God assisting the struggling soul, on the final happy release from all the sordid misery and terror, until every earthly pleasure and ambition faded away in the presence of a glorious moral ideal. 5 And yet this pagan monk, this idealist, who would have been at home with S. Jerome or Thomas a Kempis, had accumulated 1 Tac.^nn.xiv.54. 2 /fc.xv.56sqq. * Sen. Ep. 108, 17-22. 3 Sen. Ep. 55 ; De Tranq. 1 and 2. s Cf. Baur, Ch. Hist. i. p. 16 (Tr.). / 298 THE GOSPEL OF PHILOSOPHY book in a vast fortune, and lived in a palace which excited the envy of a Nero. He was suspected of having been the lover of two princesses of the imperial house. 1 He was charged with having connived at, or encouraged the excesses of Nero, and even of havirig been an accomplice in the murder of Agrippina, or its apologist. 2 Some of these rumours are probably false, the work of prurient imaginations in the most abandoned age in history. Yet there are traces in Seneca's writings that he had not passed unscathed through the terrible ordeal to which character was exposed in that age. There are pictures of voluptuous ease and jaded satiety which may be the work of a keen sym- pathetic observation, but which may also be the expression of repentant memory. 8 In any case, he had sounded the very depths of the moral abysses of his time. He had no illusions about the actual condition of human nature. The mass of men, all but a few naturally saintly souls, were abandoned to lust or greed or selfish ambition. Human life was an obscene and cruel struggle of wild beasts for the doles flung by fortune into the arena. 4 The peace and happiness of the early Eden have departed for ever, leaving men to the restlessness of exhausted appetite, or to the half-repentant sense of impotent lives, spent in pursuing the phantoms of imaginary pleasure, with broken glimpses now and then of a world for ever lost. 5 With such a scene about him in his declining years, whatever his own practice may have been, Seneca came to feel an evangelistic passion, almost approaching S. Paul's, to open to these sick perishing souls the vision of a higher life through the practical discipline of philosophy. The tendency to regard the true function of philosophy as purely ethical, reforming, guiding and sustaining character and conduct, finds its most emphatic expression in Seneca. He is far more a preacher, a spiritual director, than a thinker, and he would have proudly owned it. His highest, nay, one may almost say his only aim, is, in our modern phrase, to which his own sometimes approaches, to save souls. Philosophy 1 D. Cass. 61. 10. quae te morantur consumpsisti. . . , 2 Tac. Ann. xiii. 13 ; xiv. 7 ; and Nihil tibi luxuria tua iu futuros annos 11, sed Seneca adverse- ruraore erat, reservavit intactum : cf. Ep. 89, 21 ; quod oratione tali confessionem scrip- 90, 42. sissct * Sen. Ep. 77, 16, ecquid habes * De Ira > iL 8 ' propter quod expectes ? Voluptatesipsas 5 Ep. 90, 38-41. chap, i THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR 299 in its highest and best sense is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, nor the disinterested play of intellect, regardless of intellectual consequences, as in a Platonic dialogue. 1 It is pre-eminently the science or the art of right living, that is of a life conformed to right reason. 2 Its great end is the production of the sapiens, the man who sees, in the light of Eternal Eeason, the true proportions of things, whose affections have been trained to obey the higher law, whose will has hardened into an unswerving conformity to it, in all the difficulties of conduct. 3 And the true philosopher is no longer the cold, detached student of intellectual problems, far removed from the struggles and the miseries of human life. He has become the generis humani paedagogus* the schoolmaster to bring men to the Ideal Man. In comparison with that mission, all the sublimity or subtlety of the great masters of dialectic becomes mere contemptible trifling, as if a man should lose himself in some game, or in the rapture of sweet music, with a great conflagration raging before his eyes. In the universal moral shipwreck, how can one toy with these old world trifles, while the perishing are stretching out their hands for help ? 5 Not that Seneca despises the inheritance of ancient wisdom, so far as it has any gospel for humanity. 6 He will accept good moral teaching from any quarter, from Plato or Epicurus, as readily as from Chrysippus or Panaetius. 7 He is ready to give almost divine honours to the great teachers of the human race. But he also feels that no moral teaching can be final. After a thousand ages, there will still be room for making some addition to the message of the past. There will always be a need for fresh adjustments and applications of the remedies which past wisdom has handed down. 8 It is almost needless to say that Seneca has almost a con- tempt for the so-called liberal studies of his day. 9 There is only one truly liberal study, that which aims at liberating the will from the bondage of desire. Granted that it is necessary as a 1 Ep. 49, 5, non vaco ad istas * Ep. 66, 12. ineptias: ingens negotium in manibus * Ep. 89, 13 ; 117, 30, 31. est ; Ep. 75, 5, non delectent, verba Ep. 48, 8 ; 75, 6. nostra, sed prosint . . . non quaerit e j? v qa 8 3 58 S. 26 aeger medicum eloquentem ; Ep. 88, _ _f ' .' ' ...' , " , , , , 36? plus scire quam sit satis, intern- _, \ De Vlta B ' X1U > where he defends perantiae genus est. Cf. Ep. 71, 6. Epicurus. 1 Ep. 89, 8, nee philosophia sine 8 &P- 64 > 8 - virtute est, nee sine philosophia virtus. * Ep. 88, 37, 20. 300 THE GOSPEL OF PHILOSOPHY book hi mental discipline to submit to the grammarian in youth ; yet experience shows that this training does nothing to form the virtuous character. 1 Who can respect a man who wastes his mature years, like Didymus, in inquiries as to the relative ages of Hecuba or Helen, or the name of the mother of iEneas, or the character o.f Anacreon or Sappho ? 2 The man of serious purpose will rather try to forget these trifles than continue the study of them. And Seneca treats in the same fashion the hair-splitting and verbal subtleties of some of the older Stoics. He acquiesces indeed, in their threefold division of Philosophy into Logic, Physics, and Ethics ; but for the first department he seems to have but scant respect, though once or twice he amuses his pupil Lucilius by a disquisition on Genus and Species, or the Platonic and Aristotelian " Causes," in the style of the Stoic scholasticism. 3 Seneca was writing for posterity ; he has his intellectual vanity ; and he probably wished to show that, while he set but little store by such studies, this was not due to an imperfect knowledge of them. It is because life is too short, and its great problems are too urgent, to permit a serious man to spend his precious years in fruitless intellectual play. He calls on Lucilius to leave such barren subtleties, which bring the greatest of all themes down to the level of intellectual jugglery. 4 For the department of Physics Seneca has much more respect, and he evidently devoted much attention to it. We have traces of some lost works of his on scientific subjects, and there is still extant a treatise in seven books on Natural Questions, which became a handbook of science in the Middle Ages. 5 It deals with such subjects as we meet with in the poem of Lucretius, thunder and lightning, winds and earth- quakes, and rising and failing springs. But it has perhaps less of the scientific spirit than Lucretius, according to our modern standards. We have abundant reference to old physical authorities, to Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Diogenes of Apollonia, to Caecina and Attalus. But the conception of any scientific method beyond more or 1 Ep. 88, 2, unum studium vere istum ludum literarium philosophoruiu liberale est quod liberum facit, etc. qui rem magnificam ad syllabas vocant, 2 lb. 39 ; cf. Ep. 88. etc. 3 Ep. 89 ; 66, 33 ; 58, 8. 6 Teuffel, ii. 284, n. 6 ; cf. Zeller, 4 lb. 71, 6, erige te et relinque Phil, der Griech. iii. 1, p. 623. chap, i THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR 301 less ingenious hypothesis, or of any scientific verification of hypothesis, is utterly absent. This is of course a general characteristic of most of the scientific effort of antiquity. The truth is that, although Seneca probably had some interest in natural phenomena, he had a far more profound interest in human nature and human destiny. The older Stoics, with some variations, subordinated Physics to Ethics, as of inferior and only subsidiary importance. 1 Seneca carries this subordination almost to extremes, although he also is sometimes inconsistent. 2 He thinks it significant that while the World-Spirit has hidden gold, the great tempter and corruptor, far beneath our feet, it has displayed, in mysterious yet pompous splendour, in the asure canopy above us, the heavenly orbs which are popularly believed to control our destiny in the material sense, and which may really govern it, by raising our minds to the contemplation of an infinite mystery and a marvellous order. 3 To Seneca, as to Kant, there seems a mystic tie between the starry heavens above and the moral law within. In the prologue to the Natural Questions, indeed, carried away for the moment by the grandeur of his theme, Seneca seems to exalt the contemplation of the infinite distances and mysterious depths and majestic order of the stellar world far above the moral struggles of our mundane life. The earth shrinks to a mere point in infinitude, an ant-hill where the human insects mark out their Lilliputian territories and make their wars and voyages for their lifetime of an hour. 4 This, however, is rather a piece of rhetoric than a careful statement of Seneca's real view. In the Letters, again and again, we are told that virtue is the one important thing, that the conquest of passion raises man to be equal to God, 5 and that in the release of the rational or divine part of us from bondage to the flesh, man recovers a lost liberty, a primeval dignity. But in this struggle the spirit may re- fresh and elevate itself by looking up to the divine world from which it draws its origin, and to which it may, perchance, return. To Seneca's mind the so-called physics really involve 1 Zeller, iii. 1, p. 56. tiura. . . . Punctum est istud in quo 2 Ep. 117, 19 ; Nat. Quaest. Prol. ; agatis, in quo bellatis ; Sursum in- Ep. 65, 15 ; cf. Zeller, iii. 1, 622. g entia 8 P atia 8Unt > etc - > cf - Macrob. e ' * ' ' Som. Scip. i. 16, 6. 8 Nat. Quaest. v. 15 ; cf. Ep. 88, 15 s en . Ep. 73, 13, sic deus non vin- 4 Nat. Quaest. Prol. 11, formicaruni cit sapientem felicitate etiamsi vincit iste discursus est in anfmsto laboran- aetate. 302 THE GOSPEL OF PHILOSOPHY book in theology and metaphysics. In the contemplation of the vast- ness of the material universe, the mind may be aroused to the urgency and interest of the great questions touching God, His relation to fate, to the world, and man. 1 The scientific in- terest in Seneca is evidently not the strongest. There are still indeed the echoes of the old philosophies which sought man's true greatness and final beatitude in the clear vision of abstract truth. But Seneca is travelling rapidly on the way which leads to another vision of the celestial city, in which emotion, the passionate yearning for holiness as well as truth, blends with and tends to overpower the ideal of a passionless eternity of intellectual intuition. In Seneca's rapturous outburst on the gate of deliverance opened by death, making allowance for difference of associations and beliefs, there is surely a strange note of kindred sympathy, across the gulf of thirteen centuries, with Thomas a Kempis. 2 The Natural Questions were, as he tells us, the work of his old age. 8 He has a lofty conception of his task, of the im- portance of the subject to the right culture of the spirit, and he summons up all his remaining energy to do it justice. But the work falls far short, in interest and executive skill, of a treatise like the De Beneficiis, and the principle of edification omnibus sermonibus aliquid salutare miscendum 4 is too obtrusive, and sometimes leads to incongruous and almost ludicrous effects. A reference to the mullet launches him on a discourse on luxury. 5 A discourse on mirrors would hardly seem to lend itself to moralising. Yet the invention furnishes to Seneca impressive lessons on self-knowledge, and a chance of glorifying the simple age when the unkempt daughter of a Scipio, who received her scanty dowry in uncoined metal, had never had her vanity aroused by the reflected image of her charms. 6 The subject of lightning 1 Cf. PI. Phaed. 79 d ; Arist. Eth. petua claritate splendida, sed non nisi ix. 8, 7. a longe et per speculum peregrinantibus 2 Ep. 102, 26, dies iste, quem in terra. tanquam extremum reformidas aeterni 3 NaL Quagst ^ ^ p raef n0Q natalis est . . discutietur ista cahgo terit me m magnarum rerum fvmda . et lux undique clara percutiet . menta M nam ^^ nulla serenum umbra turbabit. Or. 4 ,, .. _ Q De Imit. iii. 48, 1, supernae i. a. W, JSS. civitatis mansio beatissima ! O dies 76. iii., 18. aeternitatis elarissima, quani nox non 6 lb. i. 17, 8, An tu existimas auro obscurat, sed summa Veritas semper inditum habuisse Seipionis filias specu- irradiat ! Lucet quideni Sanctis per- lum cum illis dos fuisset aes grave ? chap, i THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR 303 naturally gives occasion to a homily against the fear of death. 1 A prologue, on the conflict to be waged with passion and luxury and chance and change, winds up abruptly with the invitation quaeramus ergo de aquis . . . qua ratione fiant? The investigation closes with an imaginative description of the great cataclysm which is destined to overwhelm in ruin the present order. The earthquakes in Campania in 66 A.D. naturally furnish many moral lessons. 3 The closing passage of the Natural Questions is perhaps the best, and the most worthy of Seneca. In all these inquiries, he says, into the secrets of nature, we should proceed with reverent caution and self- distrust, as men veil their faces and bend in humbleness before a sacrifice. 4 How many an orb, moving in the depths of space, has never yet risen upon the eyes of man. 5 The Great Author Himself is only dimly visible to the inner eye, and there are vast regions of His universe which are still beyond our ken, which dazzle us by their effulgence, or elude our gross senses by their subtle secrecy. We are halting on the threshold of the great mysteries. There are many things destined to be revealed to far-distant ages, when our memory shall have passed away, 6 of which our time does not deserve the revelation. Our energies are spent in discovering fresh ingenuities of luxury and monstrous vice. No one gives a thought to philosophy ; the schools of ancient wisdom are deserted and left without a head. 7 It is in this spirit that Seneca under- took his mission as a saviour of souls. Seneca, in the epilogue to the Natural Questions, remarks sarcastically that, as all human progress is slow, so, even with all our efforts of self-indulgence, we have not yet reached the finished perfection of depravity; we are still making discoveries in vice. In another passage he maintains that his own age is no worse than others. 8 But this is only because at all times the mass of men are bad. Such pessimism in the first and second centuries was a prevalent tone We meet it alike in Persius, Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal, and in Seneca, Tacitus, Pliny, Epictetus, 1 Nat. Quaest. ii. 59, 3. 8 lb. 5, multa venientis aevi popu- 2 lb. iii. 1, 1. lus ignota nobis sciet, multa saeculis 3 lb. vi. 32. tunc futuris, cum memoria nostra ex- 4 lb. vii. 30, 1. oleverit, reservantur. 9 lb. vii. 30, 3, quam multa praeter 7 j. .. .. hos per secretuin eunt nutiquam hu- . vu. $ . manis oculis orientia ? 8 De Bene/, i. 10. 304 THE GOSPEL OF PHILOSOPHY book Ml and Marcus Aurelius. 1 The rage for wealth and luxury, the frenzy of vice which perverted natural healthy instincts and violated the last retreats of modesty, the combination of ostentation and meanness in social life, the cowardice and the cruelty which are twin offspring of pampered self-indulgence, the vanity of culture and the vanishing of ideals, the vague restless ennui, hovering between satiety and passion, between faint glimpses of goodness and ignominious failure, between fits of ambition and self-abandoned languor, all these and more had come under the eye of Seneca as an observer or a director of souls. 2 It is a lost world that he has before him, trying fruit- less anodynes for its misery, holding out its hands for help from any quarter. 3 The consuming earnestness of Seneca, about which, in spite of his rhetoric, there can be no mistake, and his endless iteration are the measure of his feeling as to the gravity of the case. Seneca is the earliest and most powerful apostle of a great moral revival. His studied phrase, his epigrammatic point seem often out of place; his occasionally tinsel rhetoric sometimes offends a modern taste. We often miss the austere and simple seriousness of Epictetus, the cultivated serenity and the calm clear-sighted resignation of Marcus Aurelius. Still let us admit that here is a man, with all his moral faults which he freely confesses, with all his rhetoric -which was a part of his very nature, who felt he had a mission, and meant to fulfil it with all the resources of his mind. He is one of the few heathen moralists who warm moral teaching with the emotion of modern religion, and touch it with the sadness and the yearning which spring from a consciousness of man's infinite capacities and his actual degradation ; one in whose eyes can be seen the amor ulterioris rvpae, in whose teaching there are searching precepts which go to the roots of conduct, and are true for all ages of our race. He adheres formally to the lines of the old Stoic system in his moments of calm logical consistency. But when the enthusiasm of humanity, the passion to win souls to goodness and moral truth is upon him, all the old philosophical differences fade, the new wine bursts the old bottles ; the Platonic dualism, the eternal conflict of 1 Sen. De Ira, ii. 8, 9 ; Ad Mare. ii. 2 Sen. Ep. 77, 6 ; 24, 25 ; 89, 21 ; 11, 17, 20 ; Tac. Hist. ii. 37 ; Petron, 95, 16 ; De Tranq. c. i. Sat. 88 ; M. Aurel. v. 33 ; v. 10. s Ep. 48, 8. chap. I THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR 305 flesh and spirit, 1 the Platonic vision of God, nay, a higher vision of the Creator, the pitiful and loving Guardian, the Giver of all good, the Power which draws us to Himself, who receives us at death, and in whom is our eternal beatitude, these ideas, so alien to the older Stoicism, transfigure its hardness, and its cold, repellent moral idealism becomes a religion. 2 Seneca's system is really a religion ; it is morality inspired by belief in a spiritual world and " touched by emotion." In a remarkable letter, he discusses the question whether, for the conduct of life, precept is sufficient without dogma, whether a man can govern his life by empirical rules, without a foundation of general principles. Can a religion dispense with dogma ? s Seneca, as a casuist and spiritual director, was not likely to undervalue the importance of definite precept, adapted to the circumstances of the case. The philosopher, who was a regular official in great families, probably dealt chiefly in precept, on a basis of authority concealed and rarely scrutinised. But Seneca is not an ordinary professional director. He has a serious purpose ; he feels that he is dealing with the most momentous of all problems how to form or reform a life, with a view to its true end, how the final good of man is to be realised only in virtuous action. But action will not be right and virtuous unless the will be also right, and Tightness of will depends on ordered habit of the soul, 4 and that again springs from right general principles or dogmas. In other words, a true theory of conduct is necessary to virtue in the highest sense. Mere imperative precept and rule cannot give steadiness and continuity to conduct. The motive, the clear perception of the guiding principle, can alone dignify an act with a peculiar moral distinction. In order to possess that character, the external act must be rooted in a faith in the rational law of conduct. Particular precepts may produce an external obedience to 1 Ep. 71, 27 ; 94, 50 ; Ad Marc. different view, Burgmann. Seneca's 24, 5 ; Ep. 79, 12, tunc animus Theologie in ihrem Verhaltn. mm noster habebit quod gratuletur sibi, Staicismus, etc. , pp. 20-32. That Burg- cum emissus his tenebris, in quibus mann's is the truer view appears from volutatur, non tenui visu clara per- Sen. Ep. 95, 49 ; 65, 9 ; De Clem. spexerit . . . et caelo redditus suo i. 5, 7 ; De- Bevef. ii. 29, 4 ; De Prav. fuerit ; Zell.r, iii. i. 637. v. 10 ; De Ira, ii. 28, 1 ; Ep. 41, 2 Ep. 79, 12 ; 102, 22, per has , mortalis aevi moras illi melioii vitae *' ' s longiorique proluditur, 26, 28 ; Ep. * lb. 57, rursus voluntas non erit 73, 15, Deus ad homines venit, etc. ' recta nisi habitus animi rectus fuerit, But cf. Zeller, iii. 1, 650 ; and, for a etc, X 306 THE GOSPEL OF PHILOSOPHY book hi that law, but they cannot give the uniformity and certainty of the inner light and the regulated will. Seneca is not a sectarian dogmatist, although he lays so much stress on the necessity of dogma to virtuous conduct. He boldly declares that he does not follow absolutely any of the Stoic doctors. He defends Epicurus against the vulgar misunderstanding of his theory of pleasure, and the more vulgar practical deductions from it. He often quotes his maxims with admiration to Lucilius. 1 In his views of the nature of God and His relation to the external world and to the human soul, Seneca often seems to follow the old Stoic tradition. There are other passages where he seems to waver between different conceptions of God, the Creator of the universe, the incorporeal Eeason, the divine breath diffused through all things, great and small, Fate, or the immutable chain of inter- linked causation. 2 It is also clear that, from the tone of his mind, and the fact that the centre of philosophical interest for him is the moral life of man, he tends towards a more ethical conception of the Deity, as the Being who loves and cares for man. All this may be admitted and will be further noticed on a later page. Yet Seneca, in strict theory, probably never became a dissenter from the physical or ontological creed of his school. He adhered, in the last resort, to the Stoic pan- theism, which represented God and the universe, force and formless matter, as ultimately issuing from the one substratum of the ethereal fire of Heraclitus, and in the great cataclysm, returning again to their source. 3 He also held theoretically the Stoic materialism, and the Stoic principle, that only corporeal natures can act on one another. 4 The force which moulds indeterminate matter into concrete form is spirit, breath, in the literal sense, interfused in rude matter, and by its tension, outward and again inward upon itself, producing form and quality and energy. Mere matter could never mould itself, or develop from within a power of movement and action. But 1 De Vii. Beat. xii. 4, nee aesti- potens omnium, sive incorporalis ratio mant, voluptas ilia Epicuri quam sobria ingentium operum artifex, sive divinus et sicca sit, sed ad nomen ipsum advo- spiritus per omnia aequali intentione lant quaerentes libidinibus suis patro- diffusus, sive latum et immutabilis cinium aliquod ac velamentum. Cf. causarum inter se cohaerentium series. Ep. 18, 14 ; 16, 7 ; 22, 13 ; 28, Cf. N. Quaest. ii. 45, 2. 9. a Ad Helv. viii. 3, quisquis forma- ^' '*' tor universi fait, sivo ille deus est 4 Ep. 57, 8 ; 66, 12; 117, 2. chap, i THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR 307 this material force which shapes the universe from within is also rational, and the universe is a rational being, guided by the indwelling reason to predestined ends, and obedient to a universal law. The God of the Stoics is thus a very elastic or comprehensive conception. He may be viewed as the ubiquitous, impalpable force, which may, in the lack of more accurate expression, be called air, ether, fire. He is the soul, the breath, the Anima Mundi. He is also the universal law, the rational principle, underlying all the apparently casual and fitful phenomena of physical nature and human life. God may also surely be regarded as the eternal Fate, the power in the ruthless, yet merciful sequence of inevitable causation. 1 And, in milder and more optimistic moods, we may view Him as a watchful Providence, caring for men more than they seem to care for themselves, saving them from the consequences of their own errors and misdeeds. In Seneca, He develops into a moral and spiritual Being, the source of all spiritual intuition and virtuous emotion, the secret power within us making for righteousness, as He is the secret force in all nature making for order. 2 It seems a little crude and superficial to contrast the materialist and idealist conceptions of God in the later Stoic creed. What human conception of Him is free from similar contradictions ? How can any conception of Him, expressed in human language, avoid them ? And in Seneca's conception of soul, even as material, there is something so thin, so subtle, and elusive, that the bounds of matter and spirit seem to melt away and disappear. 8 However loyal he may be in form to Stoic materialism, Seneca in the end regards God as no mere material force, however refined and etherealised, but a spiritual power; not perhaps limited by the bounds of personality, but instinct with moral tendencies, nay, a moral impetus, which no mere physical force could ever develop. 4 The growing dualism in Seneca's metaphysics is the result of the growing dualism of his psychology. In accord* with the old Stoic doctors, he sometimes formulates the material nature of the soul, and its essential unity. It is, like the Anima Mundi, 1 Zeller, Phil, der Oriech. iii. 1, 122 ; * Ep. 57, 8, animus qui ex tenuissimo cf. Nat. Quaes/., ii. 45, 2. constat, deprehendi non potest, etc. a De Prov. i. ii. 6 ; De Ira, ii. 27 ; * Burgmann, Seneca's Theologie, p. Be Bene/, ii. 29 ; Ep. 73, 16. 41. 308 THE GOSPEL OF PHILOSOPHY book hi warm breath or subtle fire, penetrating all parts of the body, discharging currents from the central heart to the several organs. It is primarily rational, and all the lower powers of passion are derived from the controlling and unifying reason. It is a spark of the universal Spirit, holding the same place in the human organism as the Divine Spirit does in the universe. 1 But experience and reflection drove Seneca more and more into an acceptance of the Platonic opposition of reason and passion, an unceasing struggle of the flesh and spirit, in which the old Stoic theory of the oneness of the rational soul tended to disappear. 2 This is only one, but it is the most important, modification of ancient theory forced on Seneca by a closer application of theory to the facts of human life, and a completer analysis of them. The individual consciousness, and the spectacle of human life, alike witness to the inevitable tendency of human nature to corruption. Even after the great cataclysm, when a new earth shall arise from the waters of the deluge, and a new man, in perfect innocence, shall enter on this fair inheritance, the clouds will soon gather again, and darken the fair deceitful dawn. 3 The weary struggle of flesh and spirit will begin once more, in which the flesh is so often the victor. For to Seneca, as to the Orphic mystics and to Plato, the body is a prison, and life one long punishment. 4 Such is the misery of this mortal life, such the danger of hopeless corruption, that no one would accept the gift of existence if he could foresee the evil in store for him. 5 And death, the object of dread to the blind masses, is really the one compen- sation for the calamity of birth, either as a happy return to antenatal tranquillity, or as the gateway to a glorious freedom and vision of the Divine. 6 Seneca, indeed, does not always express himself in this strain. He is often the consistent, orthodox Stoic, who glories in the rounded perfection of the 1 Ep. 65, 24, qtiem in hoc mundo est, etc. Ad Polyb. ix. 6, omnis vita deus obtinet, hunc in homine animus. supplicium est ; Ad Marc, xx, 2. 2 PI. Phaed. 83 c, D ; 79 B ; D ; cf. 8 ,, _ R Zeller, Phil, der Griech. iii. 183; iii. I0 ' zz > s 6 ' 2, p. 634 ; Sen. Ep. 71, 27. 6 Ep. 24, 18, mors nos aut con- 3 Nat. Quaest. iii. 30, 8, sed illis sumit aut eximit ; Ep. 36. 10 ; quoque innocentia non durabit cito 102, 23 ; DeProv. vi. 6 ; Ad Marc. nequitia subrepit. 25, 1 ; ib. 19, 5 ; 20, 2, quae efficit * Ep. 120, 14 ; 65, 16, nam corpus ut nasci non sit supplicium ; cf. Epict. hoc animi pondus ac poena est ; ii. 1 ; iii. 10 ; iii. 13 ; iv. 1 ; M. Aurel. premente illo urgetur, in vinculis viii. 18 ; vi. 28 ; iii. 3 ; ix. 3. chap, i THE PHILOSOPHIC DIRECTOR 309 sapiens-, triumphing, even in this life, over all the seductions of sense and the fallacies of perverted reason, and, in virtue of the divine strength within him, making himself, even here below, equal with God in moral purity and freedom. 1 In such moods, he will adhere to the Stoic psychology : reason will be all in all ; virtue will be uniform, complete, attained by one supreme victorious effort. But the vision is constantly crossed and darkened by doubts which are raised by the terrible facts of life. The moral problem becomes more difficult and com- plicated ; the vision of perfection recedes to an infinite distance, and the glorious deliverance is reserved for an immortal life of which the older Stoics did not often dream. Still, we can find in Seneca all the Stoic gospel, and moral idealism. " Nil bonum nisi verum " is the fundamental principle. The failures, aberrations, and sins of men arise from a false conception of what is good, produced by the warping effect of external things upon the higher principle. The avaricious, the ambitious, the sensual, live in a vain show. They are pursuing unreal objects of desire, which cheat and befool the reason, and turn to ashes when they are won. The " kingdom of Heaven is within." It is the freedom, the peace, the tranquil sense of power over all that is fortuitous and external and fleeting, which alone can realise the highest good of man. 2 It is attained only by virtue, that is, by living in obedience to the law of reason, which has its voice and representative in each human souL The summons to yield ourselves to the law of nature and reason simply calls us to obey our highest part (to rjjefioviicov), which is a steadfast witness to the eternal truth of things, and, if unbribed and unperverted, will discern infallibly the right line of conduct amid all the clamorous or seductive temptations of the flesh or of the world. Nothing is a real good which has not the stamp and ball-mark of reason, which is not within the soul itself, that is within our own power. Everything worth having or wishing for is within. External things, wealth, power, high place, the pleasures of sense, are transitory, de- ceptive, unstable, the gifts of Fortune, and equally at her 1 Ep. 53, 11, est aliquid quo sapiens est ; 72, 8. antecedat deum ; cf. Ep. 59, 16, 2 Ep. 74, 1 ; 62, 3, brevissima ad talis est sapientis animus, qualis mun- divitias per contemptum divitiarum dus super lunam ; semper illic serenum via est ; 59, 14. 310 THE GOSPEL OF PHILOSOPHY book hi mercy. In the mad struggle for these ephemeral pleasures, the wise man retires unobserved from the scene of cruel and sordid rapacity, having secretly within him the greatest prize of all, which Fortune cannot give or take away. 1 If these things were really good, then God would be less happy than the slave of lust and ambition, than the sensualist who is fasci- nated by a mistress or a minion, the trader who may be ruined by a storm, the wealthy minister who may at any moment be ordered to death by a Nero. 2 The only real liberty and human dignity are to be found in renunciation. If we jealously guard and reverence the divine reason within us, and obey its monitions, which are in truth the voice of God, the Universal Keason, then we have an impregnable fortress which cannot be stormed by any adverse fortune. The peace and freedom so won may be called, although Seneca does not so call it, the " peace of God." For it is in fact the restored harmony between the human spirit and the Reason of the world, and the cessation of the weary conflict between the " law in the members " and " the law of the mind," which ends so often in that other peace of a "mare mortuum," a stillness of moral death. 3 The gospel of Seneca, with all its searching power, seems wanting in some of the essentials of an effective religion which can work on character. Where, it may be asked, is the force to come from which shall nerve the repentant one to essay the steep ascent to the calm of indefectible virtue ? And what is the reward which can more than compensate for the great renunciation? With regard to the first question, the Stoic answer is clear. The reforming force is the divine reason, indwelling in every human soul, 4 which, if it is able, or is permitted, to emancipate itself from bondage to the things of sense, will inevitably gravitate to the divine world, from which it sprang. The question of necessity and freedom of the will has not much interest for Seneca, as a practical moralist. He believes theoretically in the old Stoic dogmas on the subject. 1 Ep. 74, 6-12 ; cf. M. Aurel. v. ista bona non sunt, quae vocantur, aut 15, vvv bi 8 vep rrXe/co rtj aaipG>v homo felicior deo est, etc. eavrov Tofowv ?) kolI d