j LIBRARY)

UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA

{ SAN DIEGO

LIFE AND LETTERS

IN THE

FOURTH CENTURY

C. J. CLAY AND SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AVE MAEIA LANE.

50, WELLINGTON STREET.

letpjtfl: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
gorfe: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
E. SEYMOUR HALE.

LIFE AND LETTERS

THE FOURTH CENTURY

TERROT REAVELEY GLOVER M.A.

CLASSICAL LECTURER AND FORMERLY FELLOW OF ST JOHN'S COLLEGE CAMBRIDGE
LATE PROFESSOR OF LATIN IN QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY CANADA

CAMBRIDGE

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

1901

Cambridge :

PRINTED BY J. & C. F. CLAY
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

JOHN WATSON
JOHN MACNAUGHTON

AND

JAMES CAPPON

IN MEMORY OF

FIVE WINTERS IN CANADA

PREFACE

WHEN studying the history of the early Roman Empire
the reader has at call a thousand impressions of the
writers of the day, whom he has read from boyhood, and
who have helped to form the mind and the temper with
which he reads. But the same does not hold of the period
of the Gothic invasions and the fall of Paganism. The litera-
ture is extensive, but it is not known, it is hardly read. No
one who has given it a sympathetic study can call it wanting
in pathos or power, but the traditions of scholarship point
in another direction. An age that can boast an Augustine
and a Syuesius in prose, a Claudian and a Prudentius in
poetry, is nevertheless in general ignored, except by scholars
engaged in some special research, who use them as sources.

My endeavour has been, by reading (if I may use the
expression) across the period, to gain a truer knowledge be-
cause a wider. Then, bearing in rniud its general air and
character, I have tried to give the period to my reader, not
in a series of generalizations but in a group of portraits. I
have tried to present the men in their own way, carefully
and sympathetically ; to shew their several attempts, successful
or unsuccessful, to realize and solve the problems common
to them all ; and to illustrate these attempts from their
environment, literary, religious and political. As far as pos-
sible, I have tried to let them tell their own tale, to display
themselves in their weakness and their strength.

viii Preface

I have deliberately avoided the writers, whose work may
be strictly called technical or special, for those whose concern
was more with what is fitly called literature, but I have
at the same time not forgotten the former. For instance,
to have treated the theological writings of Athanasius or
Augustine at all adequately would have gone far beyond my
present limits. And indeed it was less necessary to attempt
this, as it has been done fully and ably by others. Rather
my concern has been with the world in which the philosopher
and the theologian found themselves, and I trust that some
who study them may find help in my effort to picture this
world. For such students I am only supplying background.
Still I hope this background may have for those who are
interested in the refraction of light as well as in light itself,
a value and an interest as a presentment of an important
and even pathetic moment in the history of our race.

As my course has been across the period, I have had
again and again to explore a fresh stream upward and toward
its source. Every writer has his own antecedents, and some
consideration of these has been in every case necessary. No
stream however lacks tributaries, and some have many. I
suppose that of all of these I should have had some personal
knowledge, but as this would have meant a constantly widening
and never-ending series of independent researches, I have
done the human thing in accepting the work of other men
in outlying regions, while surveying as far as I could myself
the lands adjacent to my particular subject in each instance.
In such cases I have generally given my authority. It may
very well occur that specialists will find blunders in detail
in my work. I have found them myself in places where I
felt secure. But I trust that no blunders will be found of
such dimensions as to un-focus any of my portraits or at least
to affect at all materially my general picture.

I have made constant use of the works of Gibbon, of
M. Boissier, of Dr Hodgkin and Professor Bury. Other books

Preface ix

which I have consulted are mentioned in the various notes.
Professor Dill's interesting book, Roman Society in the last
Century of the Western Empire, I did not see till some seven
of my chapters were written. As in one or two places his work
and mine have overlapped, I felt I had less freedom to use
his book, but in general it. will be found that our periods and
provinces have been quite distinct. My table of dates is based
chiefly on Goyau, Chronologie de I'Empire Romain. Dr Sandys
has been kind enough to read some of my proofs.

Most of my work on this volume has been done in Canada.
Those who know the difficulties with which young Universities
have to contend in " all the British dominions beyond the
seas," difficulties incident to young countries and as a rule
bravely faced and overcome, will not be surprised that the
Library at my disposal was small. But any one who knows
Queen's University will understand what compensations I have
had for a limited number of books in the friendship, the
criticism and the encouragement of the colleagues to whom
I have dedicated my work.

ST JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
September, 1901.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Table of Dates xii

Chapter I. Introduction 1

II. Ammianus Marcellinus 20

III. Julian 47

IV. Quintus of Smyrna 77

V. Ausonius 102

VI. Women Pilgrims 125

VII. Symmachus 148

VIII. Macrobius 171

IX. St Augustine's Confessions 194

X. Claudian 216

XI. Prudentius 249

XII. Sulpicius Severus 278

XIII. Palladas 303

XIV. Synesius 320

XV. Greek and Early Christian Novels . . . 357

NOTE. Summaries of the contents of the chapters may be found by
reference to the index under the names of the authors treated.

TABLE OF DATES

310 ?Ausonius born at Bordeaux.

325 Council of Nicaea.

Gallus, brother of Julian, born.

? Ammianus Marcellinus born (or later).

? St Silvia of Aquitaine born.

326 Helena goes to Palestine.

328 Athanasius bishop of Alexandria.

Death of Helena on her return from Palestine.

330 Consecration of Constantinople.

331 Julian born.

332 Monnica born.

333 The "Bordeaux pilgrim" goes to Palestine.

337 Death of Constantine. Succession of Constantius and his brothers

Constans and Constantine.
Murder of eight members of the Imperial family.

338 Sapor besieges Nisibis for sixty-three days, but cannot take it.
Eusebius of Nicomedeia, bishop of Constantinople.

339 Death of Eusebius of Caesarea, the historian.

340 Constantine the younger invades Italy and is killed. His share of

the Empire passes to Constans.
?St Ambrose born.
? St Jerome born.
? Symmachus born (or later).

341 Incursions of Franks into Gaul.

342 Death of Eusebius of Nicomedeia.
Peace made with the Franks.

343 Councils of Sardica and Philippopolis.

Table of Dates xiii

346 Sapor again besieges Nisibis, but after seventy-eight days abandons

the siege.

347 ?John Chrysostom born.

348 War with Persia.
Prudentius born.

349 Sapor for the third time besieges Nisibis in vain.

350 Magnentius, a German, declared Emperor in Gaul.
Death of Constans.

Vetranio proclaimed Emperor at Sirmium (1 March).
Magnentius master of Rome.

Conference of Constantius with Vetranio (25 Dec.). Vetranio's sol-
diers desert him. He is pardoned by Constantius.
Gallus recalled to Constantius' court, and made Caesar next year.

351 War between Constantius and Magnentius.

352 Magnentius loses Italy and falls back on Gaul.
Liberius bishop of Rome.

353 Constantius marries Eusebia.

Magnentius, defeated and deserted, kills himself.
Paulinus (afterwards bishop of Nola) born at Bordeaux.

354 Constantius at war against the Alamanni.
Fall of Gallus.

Augustine born (13 Nov.) at Thagaste.

355 Campaign of Constantius against Alamanni.
Julian at Milan, and afterwards at Athens.
Revolt of Silvanus.

Franks, Alamanni and Saxons invade Gaul.

Julian declared Caesar, and married to Helena. He pronounces his
first panegyric on Constantius and goes to Gaul.

356 Julian retakes Cologne, held by Germans 10 months.

357 Julian, in supreme command in Gaul, crosses the Rhine and defeats

the Germans.
Constantius visits Rome.

359 Gratian born.

Sapor crosses the Euphrates.
Siege and fall of Amid.

360 Julian's second panegyric to Constantius.

Further operations of Sapor. Constantius prepares to meet him.
Soldiers proclaim Julian Emperor.
The Empress Eusebia dies.
? Stilicho born (or earlier).

xiv Table of Dates

361 Constantius marries Faustina.

Julian crosses the Rhine and Constantius the Euphrates ; both suc-
cessful in their foreign campaigns and march against each other.

Death of Constantius (Nov.).

Julian enters Constantinople (Dec.), and orders re-opening of
temples, and proclaims toleration.

Bishop George murdered in Alexandria.

362 Julian goes to Antioch (midsummer).
Heathen revival.

363 Julian's Persian campaign.
Death of Julian (June).

Jovian, Emperor, surrenders Nisibis and five provinces to Sapor.

364 Death of Jovian (Feb.).

Valentinian and Valens, Emperors, in West and East respectively.
Saxons, Picts and Scots ravage Britain. Alamanni in Gaul.

365 Avianius Symmachus prefect of Rome.
Revolt of Procopius.

? Sulpicius Severus born.
? Synesius born (Volkmann).

366 Fall of Procopius.

Death of Liberius bishop of Rome. Fight of Ursinus and Damasus
for see of Rome. Damasus bishop.

367 Valens crosses the Danube to meet the Goths.

368 The Count Theodosius in Britain. He takes London.

369 Campaign of Valentinian against Alamanni across the Rhine.

Symmachus and Ausonius follow the expedition.

370 Ausonius writes the Mosella.

371 Rising of Firmus in Africa.

Death of Patricius, Augustine's father.

372 Adeodatus, son of Augustine, born.

373 Death of Athanasius.

374 Ambrose bishop of Milan.

375 Death of Valentinian. Gratian succeeds him and refuses the title

Pontifex Maximus. Valentinian II also Emperor, aged 5 years.

376 Count Theodosius beheaded at Carthage.

377 Arcadius born.

378 Paulinus consul.

Gothic war. Defeat and death of Valens at Adrianople.
The younger Theodosius (I) succeeds him as Emperor in the East
(379).

Table of Dates xv

379 Ausonius consul.

381 Council of Constantinople.

383 Maximus proclaimed Emperor by his soldiers in Britain. He crosses

to Gaul. War with Gratian.

Murder of Gratian. Peace between Maximus and Valentinian II.
Augustine goes to Rome.

384 Honorius born.

Death of bishop Damasus, who is succeeded by Siricius.

385 Stilicho's campaign in Britain against Picts, Scots and Saxons.
Theophilus bishop of Alexandria.

387 Affair of the Statues at Antioch.
Baptism of Augustine.
Maximus invades Italy.

388 Defeat and death of Maximus.

390 Massacre at Thessalonica by Theodosius' orders. Ambrose forbids

him the church.

391 Symmachus consul.

Anti-pagan legislation by Theodosius.

392 Valentinian II murdered by order of Arbogast, who makes Eugenius

Emperor, in Gaul.

393 Eugenius comes to Italy and issues decrees in favour of paganism.

394 Flavian reestablishes pagan rites in Italy. His soldiers desert

him on approach of Theodosius, and he commits suicide.
Battle of the Frigidus between Theodosius and Eugenius (5 Sept.).
Theodosius defeats and kills Eugenius (6 Sept.).
Theodosius visits Rome.

395 Death of Theodosius at Milan. The Empire is divided between his

sons Honorius (West) and Arcadius (East).
Probinus and Olybrius consuls.
Alaric invades Greece.

Fall of Rufinus, minister at Constantinople.
Augustine bishop of Hippo.

396 Stilicho blockades Alaric at Pholoe. Alaric escapes somehow.

397 Synesius goes to Constantinople.

Gildo the Moor transfers his allegiance from Rome to Constantinople,

and stops the corn supply of Rome.
Chrysostom bishop of Constantinople.

398 War with Gildo, who is defeated and killed.

xvi Table of Dates

399 Revolt of Tribigild the Goth in Phrygia.

Fall of Eutropius. Affair of Gainas in Constantinople.

400 Stilicho and Aurelian consuls.
I Death of St Martin.

402 Battle of Pollentia (Hodgkin).

403 Honorius visits Rome.

404 Deposition of Chrysostom.

405 Cerealis governor of Pentapolis.

407 Death of Chrysostom.

408 Murder of Stilicho.

First siege of Rome by Alaric.

Death of Arcadius. Succeeded by Theodosius II.

409 Second siege of Rome by Alaric.

410 Third siege of Rome and its capture by Alaric (24 Aug.).
Synesius bishop of Ptolemais.

412 Death of Theophilus bishop of Alexandria. Succeeded by Cyril.

413 ? Death of Synesius.

415 Murder of Hypatia.

416 Return of Rutilius Namatianus to Gaul.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

BEFORE proceeding to the study of the fourth century in the
lives and writings of a series of typical men, it will be well to take a
general survey of the period as a whole. Such a course, without
the further study, is apt to be unfruitful and unsatisfactory, yet as
a preface to it, it may help the student to a right orientation. The
different phases of the century's life will be dealt with at more
length in the various essays, in which many things set here will find
fuller illustration. Here however in the meantime our concern is
with general outlines and broad statements. For the sake of clear-
ness certain main lines will be followed, a plan which has the
drawback, incidental to all such dissection, of failing to shew in the
fullest way the interlacing of forces and tendencies which con-
stantly react on one another. I shall try to shew something of
this in my summary, but it is best felt when we read the period in
flesh and blood.

Let us begin with the Roman Empire difficult indeed to grasp
in all its meanings, and apart from the Church the
greatest factor in history. What it first meant to / T ^ e 7jin ~
mankind was peace and law. We may be shocked to 9trfe
read here of a Roman governor in Spain or there of
one in Asia burning men alive in the days of Cicero and Virgil, of
endless crucifixions, of the extortions of a Verres, of venal rulers
and infamous publicans. Yet there is another side to all this, for
in the first place we know of all these things chiefly because they
shocked the Roman conscience. There was a great deal more that
should have shocked it but did not, because the world was not yet

G. 1

2 Life and Letters in tlie Fourth Ccutnri/

educated. In the next place, what did the Empire replace ? We
do not know this so well, but where we have any light we see that
it was generally a change for the better. The sentimentalist may
sigh for Greek freedom and for the national independence of other
races, but in the great age of Greece liberty had meant the right
of single cities to rule themselves, and what was now left of it was
worse than worthless, while the other peoples had never (with one
exception) been very clearly conscious of their nationality. The
peoples of the East had reached high levels of civilization and
organization, but through all the centuries of their intellectual and
commercial development they had been under the sway of the
foreigner. In the West there was even less national conscious-
ness 1 , for there Rome had faced not nations, but clans, never
united except by accident and always ready to quarrel. When at
last the peoples of Gaul and Spain began to feel conscious of their
race, they voiced their feelings in Latin. Rome thus had not to
extinguish nationalities, but rather she replaced here despotism
and there anarchy with the solid advantages of a steady govern-
ment, if severe, at least conscientious.

If Rome's yoke was heavy (and at times it weighed very heavily
on some unlucky province), still hardly any attempt was made to
throw it off. Rome had not as a rule to dread rebellion when
once the charm of a hereditary dynasty was broken. Almost the
sole exception is the Jewish people, a race made self-conscious by
its own prophets, by its Babylonian captivity and by the tyranny of
Antiochus Epiphanes and his like. Here the Roman met his
match, and here was the one people to impose its will upon him.
While everywhere the Roman government was sensitive to local
peculiarities of administration and religion and careful to respect
them where it was possible not to alter them, with the Jew special
terms had to be made wherever he was. His Sabbath, his syna-
gogue, his temple dues, the jurisdiction of his elders were all
conceded to him; but even so Rome had to face rebellion after
rebellion, and when that stage was past there still survived the
Jewish riot in Alexandria. Here alone Rome failed, but with
every other race once mistress she was mistress for ever, making all
peoples equal and members one of another under her sway.

The Roman roads bound the Empire together. They were kept

1 Cf. Seeck, Gesch. des Untergangs der antiken Welt i. (second edition),
pp. 207 212, on " diese Schwaehe des Staatsbewusstseins und des National-
gefiihls " among the early Germans.

Introduction 3

in order and they were safe, and freedom of travel and trade
prevailed as never before. In the West the schoolmaster was the
sturdy ally of the government, and Latin culture bound Gaul and
Spaniard to Rome till any other form of rule became inconceivable.
Roman law found one of its most famous seats at the university of
Berytus in Syria, while in the West it shaped the thoughts and
conceptions of men to such an extent that it imposed itself at last
upon the Church and its theology, from which it is not yet eradi-
cated nor likely to be. East and West agreed in the belief that
Rome's rule was eternal. Afrahat the Syrian and Tertullian the
first great Latin father alike inculcate that the fall of the Roman
Empire will not come till the Day of Judgment and the world's
end. In a certain sense they are no doubt right, but their prophecy
was of the formal government of Rome. The distress caused by
the Gothic invasions is partly to be traced to the feeling that, if
Rome fell, there was no possible power to take her place. Thus
she stood for law, for peace and quiet, and for the general order of
the universe. She was a necessary part of the universe, and her
rule was a postulate for all rational thought on society.

Yet there was a bad side to all this. All power was cen-
tralized in the Emperor, more and more so as the

.. , , i P ,1-1 / ,1 Its weakness.

generations passed, partly from the jealousy ot the
ruler and partly from the habits of obedience and reliance induced
by long dependence. The faculty for self-government was paralysed
by long disuse. Men were at first afraid and afterwards unable to
think and move for themselves 1 . The consequences of such a
decline are hard to compute, but the general helplessness of the
Roman provinces in the face of invaders, numerically inferior but
strong in the self-reliance of a free people without much govern-
ment, is perhaps the most striking evidence of decay.

Another source of mischief was bad finance. From very early
days the prejudice that trade is an unworthy occupation for a noble
and high-spirited man had survived. No great industries were
developed, and the world was poorer for want of the ingenuity they
stimulate and the wealth they bring. The slave system was no doubt
in part responsible for this, but not altogether. Industries depend

1 Tacitus already remarks an inscitia reipublicae ut alienae a striking
phrase (Hist. i. 1). Seeck, op. cit. pp. 287 8, calls attention to the effect of
the proscriptions in removing the brave and independent, and leaving only the
weaker to be the fathers of a new generation themselves and their children
alike cowed by these examples of the results of independence. See p. 343.

4 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

on intelligence and observation, and these were depressed by the
conditions of absolute government, and there was no foreign society
to quicken them by competition and correspondence. As if this
were not enough, taxation was arranged on fatal principles. The
middle classes paid all the taxes, and, the towns being taxed as
units, with every loss to the circle of tax-payers the burden was
more and more intolerable for the rest. The lower classes, at least
in Rome, were fed, amused and bathed for nothing. Free grain,
free wine, free pork and free oil may trace their descent from the
laws of Gaius Gracchus. The extravagant beast-shows and gladia-
torial games were another legacy from senatorial Rome, and these
were a tax on the rich all over the Empire. Symmachus spent
.80,000, equivalent I suppose to four times the sum to-day, on one
set of shows. Beast-catching was indeed a flourishing, if an unpro-
ductive, industry. Money was wasted in other ways, especially
after Diocletian's remodelling of the imperial system and his
establishment of two Emperors and two Caesars, each of the four
with an extravagant court. Presents to the Emperor were another
form of extortion.

Beside these elements of decay, and connected with them, was
the terrible legacy left by the Republic in debased morals. The
Roman character had its fine side, as we see in the qualities a
Roman loved gravitas and modestia, and in the ideals to which he
aspired honores and auctoritas, and while this is written for good
all over the face of the Roman Empire and Roman institutions,
there was another side. It may seem fanciful to go back to
Hannibal for the beginning of Rome's decline, but he began the
decay of Italian agriculture, and from his day Italian yeomanry
died away. Following immediately on the Hannibalic war came
the conquests of Greece and Western Asia, and the simultaneous
flooding of Rome with Greek philosophy and Asiatic wealth. The
one taught the Roman to despise the rustic gods of his fathers,
and the other their thrifty, farm-bred ideals. Sudden wealth joined
forces with a flippant scepticism to sap the Roman character, just
as a successful rebellion and an enormous and rapid accumulation
of wealth in the hands of persons without traditions have given
a modern people a bad repute for lawlessness and want of taste.
Neither in the one case nor in the other are redeeming features
wanting, as we have seen, but the Roman aristocracy and the
middle class were almost entirely corrupted. The last century of
the Republic is marked by reckless and tasteless selfishness of the

Introduction 5

most violent type and by its fruits in chaos, massacre and paralysis.
Over all this rose the Empire, heir to a weakened manhood and
lowered ideals. It stopped in some measure the rapid progress of
the disease, but the germs of Rome's decay it could not reach. It
could not touch the essential scepticism of Roman society ; it might
try to revive a discredited religion and restore a forgotten ritual,
but the profound unbelief underlying all the ideas of the upper
classes was beyond its power to cure. Slavery was too deeply
rooted in the social scheme to be meddled with, and indeed it
seems to have occurred to no one to meddle with it. Marriage
fell into disuse, as was natural when the sceptical and self-
indulgent had the slave-system in their homes. And in spite of
wars and proscriptions there was still the great wealth and still the
tradition of replenishing it more or less honestly by the spoliation
of the provinces. There was still the passion for the gladiatorial
games and for the theatre the schools of murder and of lust whose
lessons were only too faithfully learned.

The wars of the year 69 A.D. mark a stage in Roman history.
It is as though the world now definitely accepted the fact of the
Empire. The restlessness that marks its first century is past.
Then the sons of men, who, if not statesmen, had played great parts
on the world's stage, were settling sullenly down to splendid and
caged insignificance in Rome, eating, drinking, conspiring, raging
and failing. Now, a quieter mood comes over the world. There
is less rage and less extravagance, and the fruits of a quiet move-
ment of thought begin to appear. Scepticism is yielding place to
Stoicism, the philosophy of endurance. It was followed by a
genuine revival of religion, genuine in that men believed in their
convictions of its truth, but after all a sentimental revival.
Scepticism and despair had yielded to philosophy, but the human
heart wanted more 1 . Still sceptical it turned to religion, and of
this mood of faith and unfaith, of this wish to believe and this
doubt of the possibility of belief, came the revival. It was not of
the best or the strongest, but it did good. It had an air of
asceticism about it, and decency revived and society grew purer.
But it could not check the decline.

1 Cf. Strauss, der Romantiker auf dem Throne p. 20, " In such times of
transition in the world's history, men in whom feeling and imagination out-
weigh clear thinking, souls of more warmth than clearness, will ever turn
backward toward the old." This is written of Julian, but it applies to the
whole revival in question.

6 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

At the end of the third century Diocletian orientalized the
The Empire Empire * borrow an expression of Synesius'. I
in the 4th cen- give the story in the words of a hostile critic,
tur 'J- Lactantius (if he wrote the De Mortibus Perse-

cutorum). " This man ruined the world by his avarice and
cowardice. For he set up three to share his kingdom [remark the
word at last, regnurn], and divided the world into four parts. This
meant the multiplication of armies, since every one of them strove
to have a far larger number of soldiers, than former princes had
had, when they governed the state single-handed. So much greater
did the number of those who received begin to be than of those
who gave, that the strength of the farmers was exhausted by the
enormity of taxation, the fields were deserted and cultivated lauds
returned to forest. And, that everything might be full of terror,
the provinces also were cut into scraps, many rulers and more
officials swooped down on the various regions and almost one might
say on the several cities... [He enlarges on their number and greed.]
...He was also a man of insatiable avarice, and wished his reserves
never to be lessened ; but he was always gathering in extraordinary
sums of money and ' presents,' in order to keep what he was
storing intact and inviolate ...... To this was added his boundless

passion for building, no less a tax on the provinces in supplying
workmen and artificers and waggons and every sort of thing neces-
sary for building. Here basilicas, there a circus, here a mint, there
an armoury, here a palace for his wife and there for his daughter ......

Such was his constant madness, his passion to make Nicomedeia
equal to the city of Rome " (de Mort. Pers. 7).

This is the bad side of the story. There was, however, another.
The division of the imperial power, it is fair to assume, was to
secure the world against being left without a head, as it had so
often been in the third century, when the murder of an Emperor
again and again plunged society into anarchy and civil war. The
removal of the capital from Rome was a necessary and wise step 2 .

1 de Regno 10 : rty irepi rb ^affiXiKov ffw/j.a GKT\VT\V K.o.1 6 e pair {lav, rjv uxrirep
iepovpyovvres 7]fj.iv tv airopp-^ry iroiovvrai Kal TO papfiapiKus fKTfOflffOai TO. KO.&'
vfuis. Lactantius, M. P. 21, had already said Galerius deliberately copied
the Persian court. See Seeck, Untergang der antiken Welt (opening pages), for
a brilliant portrait of Diocletian, an Emperor with a Badical M.P.'s love of
reforming everything with one fresh plan after another. In his reign of twenty
years the Empire was more fundamentally changed than in all the preceding
three centuries.

2 Rome personified says in a poem of Claudian's His unnis qui lustra
mihi bis dena recensent \ nostra ter Augustos intra pomoeria vidi (vi. Cons.

Introduction 7

The populace of Rome were no longer masters of the world, and
their opinions not now being needed, there was no reason, but
that of sentiment, for the seat of government remaining in a town
remote from all important points. Nicomedeia was convenient, for
it allowed the Emperor to be so much nearer both Danube and
Euphrates. Thirty years later Constantino further developed the
new system, making the Emperor the splendid head of a hierarchy
of officials and transferring the capital across the sea to Europe.
The foundation of Constantinople is no unimportant moment in the
world's history 1 .

Constantine was succeeded by his three sons, of whom Con-
stantius became sole ruler. He was followed by Julian, who reigned
some two years; and when, on Jovian's death (following speedily
that of Julian), Valentinian became Emperor, he was bidden by his
soldiers to name a colleague. He chose his brother Valens, and
they divided the Empire. Valens became Emperor at Constanti-
nople, and Valentinian in the West. Theodosius succeeded Valens,
and in 395 left the world to his two sons, Arcadius, Emperor in the
East, and Honorius in the West. From this point East and West
begin to fall more conspicuously apart.

I have said nothing so far of the Goths. For some generations
German barbarians had been menacing the Empire. Sometimes
they were driven off or killed; sometimes they were given lands
in the Empire and admitted to service in the army ; but still they
pressed on and on. The Goths' first really great victory was at
Adrianople in 378, where they killed Valens. It seemed then as
though they would at once finally overflow the Eastern half of the
Empire, but they were beaten back, and it was not for thirty
uneasy years that they had their will of the Roman world, and
then it was not Constantinople but Rome they captured (410).
They had little mind to destroy what they found; rather they
wished to share and to control.

With bad finance, cruel taxation, civil wars, slavery and Gothic
inroads the Roman Empire suffered terribly, but its most serious
danger was the steady loss of population resulting from these
causes, or at least speeded by them. The army was sterile; for

Hon. 392). These Emperors were Constantine, Constantius, Theodosius (twice).
Diocletian may be added a little before (Lactantius, M. P. 17), but in any
case this habitual absence of the Emperor is noteworthy.

1 For one thing it gave the Bishop of Kome a much freer hand than
he could otherwise have had, for uow the only serious competing world-
power was hundreds of miles away.

8 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

till the reign of Severus soldiers were forbidden to marry during
service 1 , and did not care to afterwards 2 . The Christian apologists
never fail to bring home to the heathen their exposure of their
new-born children. At the same time the tendency to asceticism
and celibacy which went with the general revival of religion did
not help the world, the finer natures leaving no children. The
same unhappy result followed the persecutions of the Christians.
The great plague, which lasted for twenty years in the latter half
of the second century, also contributed to the depopulation, which
had long ago begun to be marked, in Greece for example 3 . German
immigration to some extent re-peopled the Empire, and greatly
modified its character. The army and the peasant class became
predominatingly German ; and when the great inroads of the fifth
century came, the Empire in the West was half German already.
In the East the Persians and in Africa mere barbarians, neither
easy to assimilate, wrought havoc with the Roman world, plunder-
ing, murdering and kidnapping.

This then is the Roman world, a society splendidly organized ;
training in laws and arms the Goths who were to overthrow it;
giving its character and strength to the Catholic Church which
was to check, to tame and to civilize these conquerors; and all
the while gradually decaying, yet never quite losing all power of
staying for a little its decline, as the wonderful history of Con-
stantinople shews. We can see in some measure why the Empire
fell, but how it was able to endure so long in the East is a harder
question, which is not to be solved here. There its story is some-
what different, but there too it shaped a church and made nations,
and held barbarism at bay for a thousand years after Rome had
been taken by the Goths. Even the victorious Turks but adopted
the traditions of government which they found.

Virgil had seen aright the genius of his countrymen, when he
apostrophized the Roman ;

Thou, do thou control
The nations far and wide:
Be this thy genius to impose
The rule of peace on vanquished foes,
Show pity to the humbled soul
And crush the sons of pride.

1 Diolx. 24,3.

2 Neqneconjiigiis suscipiendis neqne alendis liberis siietiorbassine posterisdomos
relinquebant, Tac. Ann. xiv. 27. See also Boissier Eoiuan Africa (tr.) p. 120 f.

3 See Seeck's excellent chapter on " die Entvolkerung des Reiches " ioi his
Untergawj der ant i ken Wdt. In the next essay (die Barbareu im Reich), p. 398,

Introduction 9

Under the Empire there was a general decline in nearly all
the activities of the human mind, art, literature // Art
and philosophy alike falling away. Not all the Education, and
blame for this is to be laid upon Rome or her Literature.
government, for the impulse in all these things came from Greece
and was already well-nigh exhausted with the general exhaustion
of the Greek world. Faction, with its retaliatory massacres,
had in Greece steadily eliminated eminence and capacity. In
Rome much the same thing had befallen in the last century
of the Republic and in the years of. usurping and suspicious
Emperors. The level therefore of Greek and Roman genius steadily
fell 1 .

By the fourth century, says Gregorovius, "the creative art,
like the poetry and learning of the ancients, was taking its leave
of mankind ; the date of its disappearance being manifested in the
Triumphal Arch of Constautine, the border of two epochs. This
arch the Roman Senate adorned with sculptures robbed from
another arch dedicated to Trajan. As these were not sufficient,
the artists of the time, to whom some of the reliefs were entrusted,
were obliged to confess that the ideals of their forefathers had
vanished and that the day of the barbarians had dawned. The
Triumphal Arch of Constantino may thus be described as the
gravestone of the arts of Greece and Rome 2 ." The Christians
borrowed the form of the court of justice, the Basilica, for their
churches. St Peter's, the foundation of Constantino, like many
later churches, was built in some measure of relics and fragments
of paganism. The so-called chair of Peter, set in the church by
Pope Damasus, is typical of much. It is an ancient sedan-chair
decorated with minute carvings in ivory heathen pictures of beasts
and centaurs and the labours of Hercules, some fastened on upside
down. Statues were still made and so were pictures, but the great
arts of the day, as we learn from Claudian and Prudentius, were
embroidery and mosaic, and where all else failed a lavish profusion
of gold and jewels did instead of art.

he alludes to the plague, which he estimates cost the Empire half its popula-
tion, and goes on to shew the influence of German settlers on the Empire from
the days of Marcus Aurelius.

1 See Seeck, Gesch. des Untergangs der antiken Welt, pp. 280 ff. Seeck
holds that in the fourth century thought and literature throve only where there
was some Semitic element in the people Syria, Egypt, Africa. Certainly one
Semitic stock has not even yet declined if we may trust a Disraeli and a
Heine. Seeck's chapter Die Ausrottung der Besten is well worth study.

2 Home in the Middle Ages, vol. i. p. 85 and following pages.

10 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

In literature we find the same sterility. Latin literature had
from the first been imitative, but imitation is one thing in strong
hands and another in weak, and the surest road to decline is to
copy the copy. Virgil and Horace had drawn their inspiration from
Greek poets ; Lucan and Statius from them ; and these last almost
as much as the former were the models of later poetry. It was no
better in the Greek world. East and west, education and litera-
ture were infected with rhetoric, and the chief task of culture was
to echo and distort in echoing the ideas of the past. Here and
there a poet has something of his own to say, and then the old
language has something of the old power. Claudian's poetry is
quickened by the thought of Rome, Prudentius' by the victory of
the Church and the unity of mankind in her, and both poets rise
conspicuous above their age. In Greek the best is Quintus, the
quiet amiable imitator and completer of Homer, the longest is
Nonnus, whose poetry is like nothing so much as the playing of a
prismatic fountain, the waters of which on analysis in a cold light
prove to be dirty and full of infection.

Serious prose, apart from the church and technical writers, was
almost unknown. History was a dying art, but for Eusebius and
Ammianus a very large reservation it is true. Letter-writing on
the other hand was never so flourishing or so sterile ; as a few
pages of Symmachus will shew. Yet Neo-Platonism, if it could not
re-create, could revive literature, and the fourth century has much
more to shew than the third more books and books worthy of
study for the light they throw on a great change taking place
under the cover of old forms. It was an age of schools and uni-
versities, but all of a conservative type. Education flourished, but
it was rhetorical. Chassaug remarks that there was no chair of
history in any of the foundations, but a certain amount would be
involved in the study of literature, which was a branch of grammar 1 .
Philosophy still lived, but it was not satisfactory. It was concerned
more with the tradition of dogmata than with the independent
investigation of reality, and magic followed it like a shadow.
There was some astronomy and a little other natural science, but
these too were traditional. But all these studies were overshadowed

1 Chassang, le Roman datis I'antiquite, p. 98. Among the Professorcs
commemorated by Ausonius is a rhetorician, Staphylius (20), who besides
being a consummate grammarian is described as historiam callens Livii et
Herodoti. Chassang is however right in his main contention that the subject
was held of minor importance. There had always been a tendency in Borne to
regard history from the point of view of style almost exclusively.

Introduction 11

by the baleful rhetoric, infecting everything with pretentious un-
reality, as every system of education will that teaches style first and
forgets nature.

One of the most striking facts about the education of the day
is the undeniable charm it exercised over men, partly no doubt
because in sterile ages men most prize correctness, but partly
because it introduced them to masterpieces which they must have
felt beyond them, however much they called one another Ciceros
and Virgils. The Christians are as much captivated as the pagans,
as we see in Augustine's enthusiasm for the Aeneid and Jerome's
studies of Cicero and Plautus, and above all in the intense passion
roused by Julian's decree excluding Christians from the teaching
profession. This enthusiasm was not always healthful, as it limited
the range of interests with the most cramping effects. Macrobius
for example devotes himself to Virgil (whom he does not really
understand) and only touches his own day in Neo-Platonism. He
knows something of Christianity, but his culture forbids his men-
tioning it. When all is weighed, perhaps Ammianus, with all his
naive " readings of Antiquity " and " sayings of Tully " and his
wonderful style, is as honest and wholesome a man as any who
wrote in the century. And he had seen life and death as they are,
before he began his studies. It is this contact with reality that
lifts Augustine and, in his own way, Sulpicius into a spirit that
speaks to the heart.

Literature was one of the great strongholds of paganism and
the other was philosophy. It was not the philosophy
of the great days of Greece, and indeed it could not so )hl '
be expected to be. The fall of Greek civic independ-
ence, the breaking down of barriers of tribal, communal and
religious tradition, and the levelling of mankind under the weight
of the immense empires that followed Alexander's conquest of
Asia, affected philosophy profoundly. It is hardly saying too much
to assert that the philosophers "despaired of the republic" and
turned to the individual instead. There were no doubt still
Utopias, but kings and armies made them look even more foolish
than demagogues and assemblies had done, and the main concern of
thought was the sad adaptation of oneself to the new world without
landmarks. The schools of Epicurus and the Porch, both appealing
directly to the individual man, carried all before them. The Stoics
had no disreputable following to give them a bad name and they
appealed more to the serious and manly with their doctrine of

12 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

living according to nature. Thus while Epicurus made disciples of
honest Romans like Lucretius and Horace, Stoicism had more
influence on Rome, particularly affecting the development of
Roman law. This is not very surprising when we consider what
the Roman character was.

As in the Greek world, so in the Roman, philosophy became a
more important factor in life with the fall of the Republic and the
rise of the Empire. There had been many Romans before this
interested in philosophy, but now there was no alternative for
serious people, except perhaps literature, and that also shews the
influence of philosophic teaching. Stoicism had its popular
preacher in Seneca, a more genuine exponent in Epictetus, and
in Marcus Aurelius its last great example, and he indeed gives us
a hint of the change that was coming.

Mr Pater in his Marias seizes this singularly interesting
moment of the world's history, and exhibits to us this great Stoic
Emperor with his assiduous sacrifices standing as it were between
the two extremes represented by Lucian, the most distressing
advocate of the blankest unbelief, and Apuleius the philosopher,
the disciple of Plato and the magician, while in the background,
as yet without prominence, is the new school gently bringing home
to man that his soul is " naturally Christian." The great African
who coined this phrase was a younger contemporary of the other
three. With Tertullian and with Apuleius lay the future. Lucian
might shew his age the rottenness of all its beliefs and mock it
for their vanity, and Sextus Empiricus might give a philosophic
account of Pyrrho's doctrine of scepticism, but the world swung
violently away from them and beyond the cautious and melancholy
Marcus. It would believe and it must believe, and a new spirit
filled the third century.

The New Pythagoreanism found its literary exponent in
a sophist Philostratus, and its patroness in an

Aeo-Platonism. . r

Empress of Syrian extraction. It led the way to
the New Platonism, a form of thought that had more and longer
influence. Plotinus is its great thinker, Porphyry and larnbli-
chus brought it into common life ; nearly all the pagan writers
of the fourth century are touched by it, and still later Proclus
taught it in Athens and Boethius found it his consolation in
prison.

It owed its popularity to the fact that while retaining for the
simple-minded all the gods of all the creeds as legitimate objects

of worship, supporting their service and defending them against
attack, it allowed more cultured minds to transcend them 1 and
soar unfettered by literalism into an ecstatic communion with the
divine beyond all gods. It justified every heathen religion, for all
things were emanations from the one divine, and the gods were
intermediaries between it and man and deserved man's worship by
their larger measure of divinity or real being, and by their benevolent
care for men, their weaker brethren or children. Every heathen
god had thus his place in a splendid fabric, that reached from
Absolute Being down to "the lowest dregs of the universe." Man
was not left alone in a godless world to face riddles he could
not guess. The world swarmed with gods as it did with demons,
divine and beneficent powers contending against the demons
of matter. The riddles were now beautiful mysteries man might
see into, if he could overcome the divine reticence by a holy
abstinence, an even more potent ritual and, more awful still, the
strange powers of magic. By all of these man might learn how he
could rise from one plane of being to another, ever growing more
clear of matter, which was not-being, and ascending gradually into
heights of purer and purer existence. It will be readily remarked
what freedom this gave the wandering fancy a pantheon wide as
the world ; a creed broad enough to include everybody, except
Epicureans, for, if Christians would but permit it, Christ might be
an emanation as well as Dionysus ; a theory of the universe,
superior to reason, far above proof, and remote from the grimy
touch of experience. Everybody might believe anything and every-
thing, and practise all rituals at once, and thus storm by a holy
violence the secrets of all the gods. Naturally then we find very
different types of Neo-Platonists, as they incline to this or that
side of the general teaching of their school.

Loose and fanciful thinkers like Julian, pagan antiquarians like
Macrobius, conjurers like Maximus, pious and beautiful natures
like Praetextatus and Hermes Trismegistus (whoever he was), were
all captured and held by this wonderful mixture of philosophy and
religion. Stronger men too than they were attracted by it, and it
left permanent traces of itself on Augustine's theology. It was
the greatest of all heathen systems, recognizing and satisfying

1 St Augustine (de Vera Religione v. 8) makes the point that in the Church
philosophy and religion are entirely at one, while pagan philosophy is really
at issue with popular religion. It was at least the aim of the Neo-Platonists
to avoid this.

14 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

every impulse and energy of the human mind, except inquiry. It
felt the unity of nature, the divinity of man as God's kinsman, the
beauty of a morality modelled after God, the appetite of the
human heart for God, and something of man's hunger for redemp-
tion. It had an explanation for everything, but it was not con-
cerned to verify its explanations. Happy in imagination, it had no
interest in observation. It was in one way essentially claustral.
The common people it left to worship their gods unintelligently.
For them it had no communion with the divine, no salvation from
sin, no consolation for sorrow. Celsus had long ago sneered at
Christianity as a faith for fullers and bakers. Porphyry calmly
warns off athletes, soldiers and business men he is not writing for
them. The Neo-Platonist thus has the Greek temper still, pre-
ferring the life with advantages, and inculcating the old Greek
ideal of self-rule, and progress toward a goal to be reached by
contemplation. All things are divine in so far as they really exist,
so the Neo-Platonist is not properly ascetic. But they are not
always quite consistent, and some of them have an Oriental tinge
about their views. Evil, they say, is not-being, but here a negative
term covers a force felt to be positive, and they have not clearly
explained their attitude toward matter. They say that it is
failure-to-be, that it is nothing ; but their " flight " from it and
their general conduct with regard to it seem to imply that they feel
sometimes it is something more. They make guesses at it, but
they do not inquire.

The general effect of Neo-Platonism was, I think, for good.
Any belief is better than none, and a great faith, however con-
fused, is apt to raise the moral tone. The literature of the fourth
century has not the swing and surge of that of the first, but it is
gentler and graver and purer. The general mind of man is not
so robust, but it feels elements in the problem, which escaped it in
its younger and more impetuous days. It cannot solve them, it
can hardly state them, but in a confused way it recognizes them as
affecting the general solution, and, where once it was dogmatic
even to arrogance on the one side, now it instinctively takes the
other, feeling it is nearer the truth but not realizing why. So
though human nature was the same and people loved pleasures,
they sought them after all with more restraint. In no previous
century could a historian, without meaning to sneer, have coined
the phrase imperialis verecundia. Most of these Emperors were
Christian, but Julian morally the peer of the best was a Neo-

Introdiiction 15

Platonist, and Jovian, the one licentious Emperor, said he was a
Christian '.

Neo-Platonism with its acceptance of dogmata was essentially a
religion of disciples. It will be remarked how it fits in with the
literary tendencies of the century philosophy and literature ex-
plaining each other, both content with transmission, and happy in
imitation, neither fertile in fresh discoveries or new ideas. They
were alike exhausted.

So far we have discussed the heathen world, picking up the
main threads separately for clearness' sake, and one
has been omitted, which now calls for attention.

Uhurcn.

The old Jewish prayer, "I thank thee, God,
who hast made me a Jew and not a Gentile, a man and not a
woman, a free man and not a slave," was repudiated by St Paul
in an utterance which expresses a fundamental doctrine of Christi-
anity a doctrine to which the Roman Empire with its gradual
levelling must have helped thoughtful men. Yet it should be
noted that Paul proclaimed all human beings equal in the kingdom
of God a century and a half before Caracalla made them equal in
the world, and Paul included the slave whom Caracalla did not.
The Stoic had already reached the dogma of the equality of all
men, and Roman law was slowly working towards it. Thus the
tendency of Greek philosophy and Roman imperialism co-operated
with the new religion 2 .

Again, the revival of paganism, of which I have spoken as a
reaction against scepticism and despair, may or may not have been
affected by the spreading of the Gospel. If not at first it was so at
a later time. But here too there was common ground. Both the
new paganism and the new gospel were helped by that pressure of
circumstances, which drove men to seek in their own hearts for a
stronger comfort to meet a more searching need than their fathers
had known. This relation between the state of the Empire and

1 Seeck, it should be said, believes the improved tone of morals to be due
largely to the intermixture of German blood and German ideals. Like
Gregorovius, he has a high opinion of the German invaders, and they can
both present a good case, though when one learns elsewhere that Virgil must
be semi- Celtic and Tertullian semi- Semitic, one accepts racial panegyrics with
reserve. The English seem to be the only race "whom there are none to
praise, And very few to love."

2 When Tertullian (Apol. 38) said unam omnium rempublicam agnoscimus
mimdum, it was at once an expression of the unity of mankind and in some
degree of revolt from the narrower conception involved in the Roman
Empire.

16 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

the Church should not be forgotten, for it will also help to explain
the rapid spread of monachism.

The Church was thus in contact with the whole life of the
Empire, and though it was some time before she could much affect
it, it helped to mould her. Her earliest organization was on secular
models. She first held property under the law of burial associa-
tions. Her bishops were developed out of the presidents of these,
and her architecture was in some degree influenced for ever by
memories of her catacombs. But more significant were other con-
tacts. She soon caught the ear of the philosophical world, some
members of which merely sneered, some borrowed from her and
some joined her. She had to reckon with all three, and first by
the necessity of apologetic against heathen and heretic, and thence
by that of a clear presentation to herself of her vital doctrines, she
became philosophic. Then by the interaction of thought and
organization the office of the bishop gained a new importance,
when he became the repository of true doctrine, the test by which
doubtful views were to be tried. But the world was wide and there
were many churches ; the world was one, and the churches needed
some common base and found it in a united episcopate which held
truth in solidum, as the converted lawyer said as a corporation.
Episcopatus unus est cujus a singulis in solidum pars tenetur 1 .
These examples may serve for many that might be brought to shew
how not only Greek philosophy, but Roman law, influenced the
Church, shaping her theories of government and moulding her
theology 2 .

The State came first into collision with the Church by accident,
and merely added a new form of crime to be suppressed to those it
knew already. The Christian, according to the statesman, divided
families and spoiled trades, and from both causes public disorder
resulted. In the next place the Christian by asserting the supre-
macy of a higher power than the Emperor's introduced a disturbing
element into society, and an" imperium in imperio was not to be
tolerated. So efforts were made to extinguish the Church non
licet esse ws. Persecution failed because the persecutors were
less in earnest about it than the persecuted and had other interests.
The last persecution inaugurated by Diocletian and his circle
shewed by its failure the solidity of the Church, and it was the real
instinct of a statesman that led Constantine to make peace with it.

1 Cyprian, de Eccl. Cath. Unitate, c. 5.

2 See Sir Henry Maine, Ancient Law, ch. ix.

Introduction 17

" By doing so," says Seeley ', " he may be said to have purchased an
indefeasible title by a charter. He gave certain liberties and he
received in turn passive obedience. He gained a sanction for the
Oriental theory of government ; in return he accepted the law of
the Church. He became irresponsible to his subjects on condition
of becoming responsible to Christ."

The Nicene Council in 325 was a revolution. The bishops were
here recognized by the State as constituting the Church, and as the
Church they met to decide what was its faith. Constantine
awaited their decision and then made his pronouncement. This
was the Christian faith and no other ; consequently all bishops
must accept it. A number of new principles were involved here,
and many consequences followed. First there was a series of fresh
councils to re-try the question, which continued through the cen-
tury. And it had to be settled by move and counter-move how
far the Emperor was bound to accept the ruling of the Church
which he had recognized.

The battle of the councils was about a diphthong according to
one account ; it was a fight between Christianity and paganism
according to another. If the Son was 6/x.oovo-ios, he was God while
still man that is, the antithesis of God and man is superficial, the
ideal man being at the same time God's best expression of himself ;
but if the Son was o/xoiowtos, he was not God but a creature, a
demigod perhaps or a Neo-Platonist emanation, and neither on the
other hand was he man. It is no wonder that the conflict raged.

There were other results of the peace between the State and
the Church. It was no longer dangerous to be a Christian, but it
was even profitable, and the stalwart Christians Diocletian had
killed were replaced by time-servers and half-converted pagans. I
do not say there was less Christian life at once, but at least the
average Christian was of a lower type. This soon meant the
general lowering of ideals, and was followed by the inevitable
reaction, just as in former days the succession of easy times
to difficult had meant first a lower tone in the Catholic
Church, and then a Montanist and a Novatian revolt. Now
the revolt took another form. Novatianism was conceived by an
essentially Roman mind which worked from a new point of view
to a new organization. The new revolt was more Oriental in
character.

1 Lectures and Essays, iii.
G. 2

18 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

We have seen how Neo-Platonism had, like most serious forms
of faith, a leaning to self-discipline which might fall into asceticism.
Every eastern worship which the Roman world knew, except
Judaism and Christianity, laid stress on asceticism. Celibacy had
early invaded the Church, and Montanism had brought in asceticism.
But monachism was a combination of both which was new to the
Church in the fourth century, and its entrance coincides with the
conversion of the monasteries of Serapis. It must not be lightly
supposed that this was the source of the monastic movement in the
Church, but rather it gave a new idea which fitted well with tend-
encies long since at work. The Life of Antony is a Greek novel
telling about a Coptic monk, a simple tale but on fire for those
prepared for it. It offered in the desert a holy life, dependent on
grace alone, victorious over all devils, Neo-Platonist or otherwise,
free from all the cares and sorrows of a sinful world and unvexed by
the worldliness of a sinful church. For though Antony is habit-
ually respectful to clergy and bishops, other monks, e.g. Sulpicius
Severus, thought and spoke less well of them. The feelings that
moved the unknown author of Antony and Sulpicius were shared
by thousands. In a world of distress and despotism, in a church
engaged in perennial debates about a question the simple-minded
could not fathom, the ascetic ideal, preached by Neo-Platouist and
Christian, triumphed and carried mouachism with it. Neither was
a part of primitive Christianity any more than the passion for relics
and pilgrimages and the building of martyries, which invaded the
Church from much the same quarters at the same time.

In the essays that follow I shall try to shew how the threads
here separated interlace in the lives and thoughts of men and
women. In this man one influence overweighs the rest ; in that,
another, but none wholly escape them all, while in some men all
the influences of their time seem to meet and require expression.
In Augustine, for example, we have the rhetorician, the man of
letters, the Neo-Platonist, the admirer of Antony, the Christian
believer in grace, the Christian bishop, the Christian statesman and
the thoroughly Roman constitutionalist of the Church.

It is hard to form a completely unprejudiced judgment, but the
conclusion is forced upon me when I survey the fourth century, its
interests and its energies, that the Church had absorbed all that
was then vital in the civilized world. It had not assimilated all of
the beauty and wisdom of the great Classical period, for much of

Introduction 19

them was lost to that age and was not to be recovered for cen-
turies. The Church of that day had her weaknesses, she made
grave mistakes and she was not without sins that bore bitter fruit,
but she rose superior to all the world around her, and to whatever
sphere of work and thought we turn, literature, philosophy, ad-
ministration, we find her marked off from all her environment by
one characteristic it had not and she had life and the promise of
life.

CHAPTER II

AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS

I have at last begun my historical labours.... The materials for an
amusing narrative are immense. I shall not be satisfied unless I produce
something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel
on the tables of young ladies.

MACAULAY Letter to Macvey Napier

A MAN must have fine qualities so to write the history of his
own times that his judgments on his contemporaries shall be sus-
tained on appeal to the court of History, and posterity, after fifteen
centuries, accept them still. He must be cool and dispassionate in
his survey, and yet sympathetic. He should be alive to every
aspect of the problems that beset his fellows, and take into account
every advantage or disadvantage arising from age and environment.
Commonly to attain the true perspective one must stand a century
or at least a generation away. But in the fourth century, in the
midst of the quarrels of Arian and Nicene, through all the turmoils
of civil strife and barbarian war, lived and wrote a man, whose
verdict on most of the men of his time is with some reservations
substantially our own.

Ammianus Marcellinus 1 was born of Greek parents at Antioch 2 ,

1 The Abbe Gimazane, not finding " fifteen consecutive pages " on
Ammianus, has written 400 in his A . M. sa vie et son ceuvre (Toulouse 1889),
a work of some interest with some rather improbable theories. Max Biidinger's
A. M. u. die Eigenart seines Geschichtswerkes is careful but too severe. The
various historians of the period, and writers on Julian, generally refer to him
more gratefully and, I think, more truly.

2 We are curiously reminded of his birthplace when he speaks of Julian's
invective against the Antiochenes (the Misopogon), which he wrote " in a
rage. ..adding a good deal to the truth." Socrates, the fairest of Church
historians as became a lawyer of Constantinople, lets the book pass with the

Ammianus Marcellinus 21

somewhere about the date of the Nicene Council, 325 A.D. It is
not possible, nor is it necessary, to name the exact year. More we
cannot say than that he was of noble birth. Sooner or later he
was as well read a man as any of his day, but we cannot say what
his early education was. We first find him in the army among the
Protectores Domestici, for admission to whose ranks personal beauty
and noble birth were necessary '. He tells us himself incidentally
that at one critical moment he found it not pure gain to be
ingenuus*.

We first find him in 353 at Nisibis, in Mesopotamia, on the
staff of Ursicinus 3 , to which position the Emperor Constantius had
appointed him. Ursicinus had been in the East for ten years 4 , we
learn, without disaster, in spite of the rawness and inefficiency of
his troops. Four years after we first see him, Ammianus includes
himself among the adulescentes* who were sent back to the East
with Ursicinus, while the older men were promoted. Men vary so
much in their ideas of what is young and what is old, that it would
be hard to guess his exact age in 357.

He saw a good deal of travel and warfare first and last. How
long he was with Ursicinus during his first period of Eastern service
we cannot say. However, in 353 whisperers round the Court
suggested to the greedy ears of Constantius that it might be
dangerous to leave Ursicinus in the East after the recall of Gallus
Caesar, and he was summoned with all speed to Milan to " discuss
urgent business." All conveniences for rapid travel were supplied 6 ,
and with long stages they made all haste to Milan to find they
had come for nothing. Perhaps they were not greatly surprised.
It was Constantius' method. Gallus had been hurried home in the
same way to have his head cut off.

The next thing was the trial of Ursicinus for treason. Con-
stantius was jealous 7 , and the creatures of the Court whispered.
His friends at once deserted him for men in the ascendant, "just
as when the magistrates in due course succeed one another, the

remark that "it left indelible stigmata on Antioch. " Sozomen says it was
" excellent and very witty." Zosimus, a heathen, says it was " most witty,
and blended such bitterness with its irony as to make the Antiochenes
infamous everywhere." After twice reading the Misopogon, I must say my
estimate is nearest that of Ammianus.

1 Procopius, Hist. Arcana, 24. 2 xix. 8, 11.

3 xiv. 9, 1. 4 xviii. 6, 2.

6 xvi. 10, 21. 6 xiv. 11, 5.

7 Cf. Julian's comment on him; Or. vii. 233 c ^ irpbs TOI>J <f>i\ovs dirurria
ruined him.

22 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

lictors pass to the new from the old '." Ammianus could hardly
express his contempt more significantly. A plot was actually
made to kidnap and kill Ursicinus untried. It seems the Emperor
was cognizant of it ; a defect in our text may be used to defend
him, but he was quite capable of the treachery. Delay prevented
its execution.

In 355 they left Milan 2 under circumstances which seem
strange perhaps, but are characteristic of the age. There was an
officer in Gaul, Silvanus by name, loyal enough to the Emperor, but
he had enemies, and they went to work in the usual way. They
babbled to Constantius of treason till the wretched Silvanus found
his only hope of life lay in treason a desperate card to play, but
his only one and he boldly proclaimed himself Emperor. This
was a thunderbolt indeed. But Constantius was not at a loss. He
despatched Ursicinus (with Ammianus in his train) to quell the
rebel, prepared to be glad to hear of the death of either of his
generals. A mere handful of men went with Ursicinus, for craft or
treachery was to be the tool employed. Ammianus felt, and they
all felt, that they were in the position of gladiators condemned to
fight beasts in the arena. They had to make haste to keep the
rebellion from spreading to Italy, and so successful were they that
Silvanus' reign was one of only four weeks 3 . They went, with a
keen sense of their risk, to Silvanus as friends; they heard his
complaints of unworthy men being promoted over his head and
theirs ; and after much discussion in private, and many nervous
changes of plan, they managed to tamper with the troops. In a
day or two at daybreak a body of armed men burst out, slew
Silvanus' guards, and cut down himself as he fled to a church for
safety. Thus fell at Cologne " an officer of no mean merits, done
to death by slanderous tongues, so immeshed in his absence that
he could protect himself only by going to the extremest measures."
Such is Ammianus' comment on a wretched affair which gave him
nothing but disgust. Constantius, however, was so delighted as to
feel himself " sky high and superior to all human risks now 4 ."

Ursicinus and Ammianus remained in Gaul for a year perhaps 5 .
In 356 they saw at Rheims the Caesar Julian, who had been sent to
Gaul, as they had been themselves, to crush Constantius' enemies,

1 xv. 2, 3. 2 xv. 5.

3 Julian, Or. ii. 98 c YeXotos dX^flws rtipavvos KO.I rpayixos. Julian says
Constantius spared Silvanus' son afterwards.

4 xv. 5, 37. 5 xvi. 2, 8.

Ammianus Marcellinus 23

and if possible meet his death in doing it. Towards the end of the
year came a welcome despatch summoning them to Sirmium 1 ,
whence the Emperor sent Ursicinus once more to the East and
Ammianus with him.

They were two years in the East, and meanwhile plots thickened.
" The Court, hammering as they say the same anvil day and night
at the bidding of the eunuchs, held Ursicinus before the gaze of
the suspicious and timid Emperor as it were a Gorgon's head 2 /'
assuring him that his general "aspired higher." Chief among the
enemies was the rascal chamberlain, Eusebius, "with whom," says
Ammianus bitterly, " Constantius had considerable influence"; and
the "piping voice of the eunuch" and the "too open ears of the
prince" meant ruin for the brave soldier. But a good deal was
to come first.

War with the Persians was imminent. A Roman subject of
rank and some knowledge, harassed as Silvanus had been, though
by smaller enemies, found life impossible within Roman frontiers,
and fled to the Persians, and there he and his knowledge were
welcome. A Persian invasion followed. Meanwhile the order had
reached Ursicinus at Samosata to yield his command to one
Sabinianus and come West 3 . The Syrians heard with consterna-
tion, and all but laid violent hands on him to keep him 4 . But
Ursicinus and his staff had to go, and they crossed the Taurus,
and after a short delay had travelled through Asia Minor, and were
already in Europe when fresh orders turned them back whence
they came. Sabinianus was recognized by the Emperor to stand in
need of a soldier at his side. Back they went to Nisibis, and there
they found their "little fellow gaping" (oscitante homunculo} 6 .
Throughout the campaign this seems to have been Sabinianus'
attitude. He visited Edessa and spent time among the "tombs,"
"as if, once he had made his peace with the dead, nothing were
to be feared 6 ." I suppose Ammianus means shrines and martyr-
ies 7 . Abgar, king of Edessa, so a very old story goes, wrote to
our Lord and had a letter from Him, both letters being preserved
for us by Eusebius. In the Doctrine of Addai we have the whole
story of our Lord's sending Addai to Edessa, the healing of Abgar

1 xvi. 10, 21. 2 xviii. 4, 2.

3 xviii. 4, 7. 4 xviii. 6, 2.

5 xviii. 6, 8. 6 xviii. 7, 7.

7 It was believed by some that Julian, on his Anabasis, avoided the place
for the very fact of its early Christian associations. (Sozoraen, vi. 1.) It
also happened to be out of his way.

24 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

and the conversion of the whole place with such success and speed
that they read the Diatessaron in the churches nearly a century
before it was made. As our Lord's reputed letter or a copy of it
was shewn to St Silvia twenty years later than this, it is just
possible this relic occupied Sabinianus' attention.

Leaving Sabinianus to his devotions, Ursicinus had to take
what steps he might without hindrance. And now we are in the
thick of the campaign. It was reported at Nisibis that the enemy
had crossed the Tigris and that plundering bands were scouring the
country 1 . "So," says Ammianus (and I translate his account of an
incident commonplace enough perhaps, but illustrative of the times
and the region), " to secure the roads we set out at a trot, and at
the second milestone from the city we saw a child of gentle appear-
ance, wearing a necklace, and about eight years old we supposed,
sitting crying on the middle of a bank. He was the son of a free
man, he said, and his mother, as she fled in hot haste for fear of
the enemy who was hard upon them, had found herself burdened
with him in her panic and left him there alone. The general was
moved to pity, and at his bidding I took him up in front of me on
my horse and returned to the city, and meanwhile swarms of
marauders were surrounding the walls far and wide. Alarmed at
the idea of an ambush, I set the boy within a half-closed postern,
and rode hard to rejoin our troop in some terror; and I was all
but caught; for a hostile squad of horse in pursuit of a certain
Abdigidus, a tribune, and his groom, caught the slave while the
master escaped, and, as I galloped by, they had just heard in reply
to their question, "Who was the officer who had ridden out?" that
Ursicinus had a little before reached the city, and was now making
for Mount Izala. They slew their informant, gathered together in
some numbers, and, without taking rein, made after us.

" Thanks to the speed of my animal, I outrode them and at
Amudis, a weak fort, I found my comrades carelessly lying about
with their horses grazing. I flung out my arm, and waving the
ends of my cloak on high (the usual signal) I let them know the
enemy was at hand. Joining them I rode off" with them, my horse
already in distress. What terrified us was the full moon and the
dead level of the country, which offered no hiding place in case of
pressing need, as no trees or bushes or anything but short grass was
to be seen. We therefore devised this plan. A lighted torch was

1 xviii. 6, 1016.

Ammianus Marcellinus 25

set on a single horse and tied so as not to fall. The animal without
a rider was sent off toward the left, while we made for the foot of
the mountains on the right, so that the Persians, in the belief that
it was the torch to light the general as he quietly rode along, might
go in that direction. But for this device we should have been
surrounded and captured and come into the enemy's hands.

"Escaped from this peril we came to a wooded spot planted
with vines and apple trees, Meiacarire by name, so called from its
cold springs. Its inhabitants had fled and we found but one man
hid away in a corner a soldier. He was brought to the general,
and in his terror gave confused answers which made us suspect
him. In fear of our threats, he sets forth the real state of affairs,
and tells us he was born at Paris in Gaul and had served in the
cavalry, but to escape punishment for some offence he had deserted
to the Persians. On his character being established he had married
and had a family, and had often been sent as a spy among us and
brought back true information. He had now been sent by Tamsapor
and Nohodar, the nobles at the head of the marauding forces, and
was on his way back to tell what he had learnt. On hearing this
and what he knew of what was going on elsewhere, we slew him."

I pass over a reconnoitring expedition made by Ammianus, and
the disgraceful loss of an important bridge through the carelessness
of a force of cavalry fresh from Illyricum, and the rout which
followed, in which Ursicinus' party got separated, Ammianus escap-
ing to Amid 1 . The path up to the gate was narrow, and he spent
a curious night jammed in a crowd of living and dead, with a
soldier in front of him held erect by the press though his head was
halved to the neck. Then followed the siege of Amid, the story of
which told in his nineteenth book may rank for vividness and
interest with the sieges of Quebec or Louisbourg. Remember that
the story is told by a soldier, an eye-witness and the man of all
men then living most fitted to tell such a tale.

The Persian army moved on to Amid 2 , "and when next dawn

1 xviii. 8, 1114.

2 Amid (now Diarbekr) on the Tigris was one of the most important places
strategically and commercially in the country, though less so than Nisibis,
which was the key of the situation. This should be borne in mind when we
come to Jovian's surrender. That Diarbekr is still the seat of the patriarch
of the Jacobites shews its ancient importance (Stanley, Eastern Church, i.).
It is now a town of 70,000 to 80,000 people, Turks, Kurds and Armenians,
but not many Greeks, a great centre for trade, and capital of the vilayet of
the same name (Diar, land; Bekr, Abu Bekr, the early caliph). It is sur-
rounded by ancient walls which stand some seventy feet high, and make it
the most remarkable place of the kind in Turkey.

26 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

gleamed, all that could be seeii glittered with starry arms, and iron
cavalry filled plains and hills." The phrase is curious, as many of
his phrases are. The sunlight caught a thousand bright surfaces
and the reflexions suggested the starry heavens. The iron cavalry
are the cataphracts or men in armour mounted on horses in armour.
We hear a good deal of them in Ammianus and Julian, who com-
pares them to equestrian statues. " Riding his horse, and towering
over all, the King himself (magnificently if tersely described as ipse
without another word) rode down his lines, wearing as a diadem
a golden rani's head set with gems, exalted with every kind of
dignity and the attendance of divers races." He was intent on a
siege, and, though the renegade advised against it, the " divinity of
heaven " (caeleste numen) ruled that all his force should be concen-
trated on this corner of the Roman world and the rest should escape.
Sapor the king in a lordly way advanced to the walls, called
for a surrender, and nearly lost his life for his pains, and retired
raging as if sacrilege had been committed. Next day a subject
king, Grumbates, came near losing his life on the same errand, his
son falling at his side. Over the prince's body there was a fight,
which recalled the death of Patroclus. The Persians at last bore
him off and for seven days he lay in state while they held his
funeral, feasting and dancing and singing sad dirges in lamentation
for the royal youth, much as women wail for Adonis. At last they
burnt the corpse and gathered his bones to send home to his own
people, and after a rest of two days war began again with a great
display of Sapor's troops, cataphracts, elephants and all 1 . Next
day Grumbates, in the character of a fetialis, hurled a blood-
stained spear at the city, and fighting began. Catapults, "scor-
pions" (for hurling great stones) and engines of all kinds 2 came
into play, and many were the deaths on both sides. The night
fell and both armies kept watch under arms, while the hills rang as
"our men extolled the prowess of Constantius Caesar as lord of the
world and the universe, and the Persians hailed Sapor as saansaan
(king of kings) and pirosen (conqueror in war) 3 ."

1 This proceeding, strange as it may seem, occurs again at Daras, 530 A.D.
On the second day fighting began and Belisarius won a great victory.

8 Elsewhere (xxiii. 4) Ammianua gives a description of these various
machines.

3 Mr E. G. Browne informs me that this is a locus classicus with Orientalists,
which some have tried very needlessly to emend. The passage is historical
proof that the official language of the Sasanian kings was not pronounced
as it is written, but for Aramaic words in the script their Persian equivalents
were read. Saansaan is Shahin-Shah, pirosen Firuz.

Ammianus Marcellinus 27

Before dawn fighting began again. "So many evils stood
around us, that it was not to win deliverance but with a passionate
desire to die bravely we burned." At last night put an end to the
slaughter, but brought little help for the wounded. There were
seven legions in the city and a great crowd of country people
beside the citizens, and there was no room or leisure for the burial
of the dead.

Meanwhile Ursicinus was chafing to go to the rescue, but
Sabinianus " sticking to the tombs " would neither let him go nor
go himself. It was believed Coustantius was to blame for this in
his anxiety " that, even though it ruined the provinces, this man of
war should not be reported as the author of any memorable deed
nor the partner in one either."

Now came pestilence from the bodies of the slain, and for ten
days it raged till rain fell and stopped it. All the time the siege
was pushed on, and the defenders' difficulties were increased by the
presence of two Celtic legions fresh from Gaul and itching to be
"up and at them." It took a good deal to hold them inside the
walls at all. A deserter betrayed a secret passage leading to a
tower, and, while engaged with foes without, the defenders suddenly
found some seventy archers shooting at them from a post of
vantage within the walls, and with difficulty dislodged them. A
half day's rest, and then " with the dawn we see a countless throng,
taken on the capture of the fort Ziata, being led away to the
enemy's land, thousands of men going into captivity, many among
them frail with age, and aged women ; and if weary with their
long march they failed, all love of life now gone, they were left
hamstrung." The sight was too much for the Celtic legions who
raged like beasts of prey in their cages, and drew their swords on
the gates which had been barred to keep them in 1 . They were
afraid " lest the city should fall and they should be blotted out
without a single brilliant exploit, or if it escaped it should be said
that the Gauls did nothing worth while to shew their spirit. We
were quite at a loss how to face them in their rage but at last
decided (and got a reluctant consent to it from them)" that they
should make a sortie on a dark night. The dark night came and

1 Cf. Silius, Punica viii. 17, on Hannibal's Gauls :

vaniloquum Celtae genus ac mutabile mentis
rcspectare domes : maerebant caede sine ulla
insolitum sibi ~be.Ua geri, siccasque cruore
inter tela siti Mavortis hebescere dextras.

28 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

with a prayer for heavenly protection the Gauls sallied out to the
Persian camp, and but for some accident of a step heard or a
dying man's groan caught they would have killed Sapor ; but Sapor
had twenty years of mischief before him yet.

Towers and elephants in turn were brought against the city,
but the "scorpions" were too much for both; and the siege
dragged on so that Sapor created a precedent and rushed into the
fray in person. At last banks were raised, and the counter work
put up by the besieged came crashing down as if there had been an
earthquake ; and the end had come. After a siege of seventy-three
days the Persians had their way open, and now it was every man
for himself, and all day long the streets were shambles.

" So at eventide, lurking with two others in an out-of-the-way
part of the city under the cover of night's darkness, I escaped by
a postern ; and, thanks to an acquaintance with the country, now
all dark, and the speed of my companions, I at last reached the
tenth mile-stone. Here we halted and rested a little ; and just as
we were starting again, and I was giving out under the fatigue of
walking, for as a noble I was unused to it, I saw a dreadful sight,
but to me in my weary state it was to be a relief exceedingly
timely." It was a runaway horse trailing its groom behind it, and
as the dead body checked its speed, it was quickly caught, and
Ammianus mounted. After a journey through the desert they
reached the Euphrates to see Roman cavalry in flight with Persians
in hot pursuit. "All hope of escape lay in speed, and through
thickets and woods we made for the higher hills, and so we came
to Melitina, a town of lesser Armenia, and there we found the
general and his staff setting out for Antioch."

After these adventures Ammianus probably went West again
with Ursicinus, who, as magister peditum, was kept near Constantius
till slander prevailed and drove him into private life, and we hear
no more of him, though his faithful follower tells us that a son of
his was slain at Adrianople in 378 '.

Ammianus had by no means seen his last of war in the East.
In some capacity he went with his hero, the Emperor Julian, on
the fatal expedition against Sapor in 363. From point to point
we can follow their Anabasis in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth
books, and ever and again we find the verb in the first person,
vidimus, venimus. It is, however, needless to trace their march, as

1 xxxi. 13, 18.

Ammicmus Marcellinm 29

Ammianus records practically nothing done by himself, though we
may well believe he was not the least interested of the men who
gazed .on the wall paintings of battle and the chase at Coche 1 .
Wherever he went we seem to see him with eyes open, quietly
taking note of men and things.

When Julian was brought wounded to his tent, is it hazarding
too much to suppose that Ammianus was at his side, and heard
the manly farewell he made to his officers ? Ammianus, unlike
other Latin historians we have read, does not make speeches for
his characters to deliver. With very few exceptions, if any, the
speeches he reports are formal, set harangues delivered by emperors
at coronations the sort of utterance which is read from paper
and preserved after delivery; and though he may very properly
have condensed Julian's words, he is not the man to have invented
them 2 . At all events he says nothing about Vicisti Galilaee, which
is almost enough of itself to stamp that story a legend 3 .

Whether he had a share in the deliberations which led to
Jovian's election as emperor he does not say 4 . If he had he was
certainly not proud of it, for he tacitly apologises for the choice
made " when things were at the last gasp 5 ." He shared the
privations and the shame of the retreat, and a burning indignation
betrays itself in the calm historian. Jovian accepted Sapor's terms
and surrendered five provinces, including the all-important city of
Nisibis, "when ten times over the thing to do was to fight 6 ." The
surrender was made " without any hesitation," and we may picture
the feelings of the old soldier, whose own two leaders had been men
indeed, when he penned the words sine cunctatione tradidit 7 . It
was indeed a pudenda pax*. He witnessed the rage and grief of
the betrayed Nisibis, when Jovian to save his soul respected his
oath so far as to forbid the inhabitants to stand up for themselves,

1 xxiv. 6, 3. Coche was practically a suburb of Ctesiphon the Persian
capital, lying across the Tigris.

2 Gibbon believes the speech to be authentic, but wickedly suggests that
Julian must have prepared it in case of an emergency. Vollert, K. Julian's
relig. u. phil. Ueberz. p. 94, says Reville and Eanke do not accept this speech.

3 Theodoret (c. 430) tells the story. Socrates and Sozomen, historians of
a higher type and about the same date, do not hint at it. Vollert (p. 95)
accepts it as very like Julian.

4 It has been conjectured that he was himself the honoratior aliquis miles
who urged postponement. Gibbon (c. 24) and Hodgkin (i. 119).

5 xxv. 5, 7.

6 xxv. 7, 10. Cum pugnari decies expediret. Joshua the Stylite, c. 7,
says Nisibis was surrendered for 120 years, but at the end of this period the
Persians would not restore it a local tradition perhaps.

7 xxv. 7, 11. 8 xxvii. 12, 1.

30 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

as they were quite capable of doing, independently of Roman
support 1 , and looked on, Roman Emperor as he was, while a Persian
noble "hung out from the citadel the standard of his people."

He tells us of his return to Antioch, and then we are left to
conjecture where he went and what he did. He was writing
history, and personal details would have been biography; and he
more than once protests that history cannot mention everybody's
name, nor record what everybody did. Minutiae ignobiles are
outside its sphere. Where he has mentioned himself it has always
been because he was an eye-witness 2 . At some time or other he
visited Egypt, to which visit he twice alludes, once with a quiet
vidimus 3 , once visa pleraque narrantes*. He also saw Sparta, and
took note of the effects of an earthquake which had stranded a
ship two miles inland 5 .

Though he does not say so himself, we know at once from a
letter Libanius 6 wrote him in 390 or 391, and from the vivid and
satirical pictures he draws, that he lived in Rome, and wrote and
read his history there. Seemingly he did not like Rome, and it
has been suggested that Libanius' letter was meant to encourage
him. At any rate the great orator says that the honour Rome
does the historian, and the delight she takes in his work, do credit
to Antioch and his fellow-citizens.

In 371 he had the ill luck to be back in Antioch 7 at the time
when the affair of Theodorus was at its height. The story may be
told quickly he tells it us in full himself. Some men, speculating
as to who was to be Emperor after Valens, tried a sort of plan-
chette to find out, and learning that his name began with the four
letters EOA, they leapt to the conclusion that it was their friend
Theodorus, a man of high rank 8 . Theodorus heard it, and perhaps
was half inclined to accept a manifest destiny quo fata trahunt
retrakuntque sequamur but the day planchette was tried was an
evil day for him and for all concerned, and many more beside who
were innocent. Attempts had been made on Valens' life before,
and this time at least he left nothing undone to discourage them

1 They were quite equal to this as Sapor could testify, for they beat him
off in 340, though he had got so far as to make a breach in their wall.

2 Gimazane (p. 54) is quite right in saying, " C'est un des rares ecrivains qui
savent parler du moi sans le rendre haissable."

3 xvii. 4, 6. 4 xxii. 15, 1.

5 xxvi. 10, 19. A ship suffered this at Galveston, Texas, in Sept. 1900.

6 Ep. 983. 7 xxix. 1.

8 The man of fate was Theodosius, not Theodorus; so after all the prophecy
came true. He was co-opted as Emperor by Gratian in 378.

Ammianus Marcellinus 31

for the future. A reign of terror followed. " We all at that time
crept about as it were in Cimmerian darkness, as frightened as the
guests of Dionysius who saw the swords hanging each by a horse
hair over their heads 1 ." There was probably no man with so little
taste for rebellion in the empire. Writing of treason trials under
Constantius he says 2 : "No sensible person condemns a vigorous
inquiry into these matters; for we do not deny that the safety
of a legitimate Emperor, the champion and defender of good
citizens, to which others are indebted for their safety, ought to be
protected by the associated enthusiasm of all men. To uphold this
the more strongly the Cornelian laws allow in treason cases no
exemption of rank from torture even if it cost blood." This is
loyal enough, "but unbridled exultation in suffering is not
befitting." He knew, and few better, what it meant to the empire
to have no Emperor. That lesson was learnt in the desert and at
Nisibis ; and when after some months of tarnished glory Jovian
died, the Roman soldiers were right when they forced Valentinian
on his election at once to name a colleague.

While Ammianus lived in Rome he wrote his great history 3 . It
consisted of thirty-one books, of which the first thirteen are lost.
His work began with the reign of Nerva, 96 A.D., where Tacitus
stopped; but in book xiv. we are in the year 353, and book xxxi.
ends with the death of Valens at Adrianople in 378. It has been
suggested 4 that there was not room in thirteen books on this scale
for 250 years, and that perhaps, like Tacitus, he wrote two
historical works, and that the history, eighteen books of which
we still have, was that of his own times, while another is lost.
This is a large supposition, and, I think, not very necessary 5 . At
the beginning of book xv. he announces that what follows will be
done limatius, which may refer as much to the matter as to the
style, and would then imply greater detail. As I believe there
is no external evidence of any kind, every one may freely form his

1 xxix. 2, 4.

2 xix. 12, 17.

3 An English version was brought out by Philemon Holland, of the Citie
of Coventrie, in 1609, in a flowing, if free, style. Pope sets Holland's trans-
lations (many and mainly historical) in "the library of Dulness," but Abp
Trench thinks very highly of them, and his is probably the more serious
judgment.

4 By Hugo Michael. Biidinger, p. 4, rejects the theory.

5 Zosiinus, in his history of Home's decline and fall, devotes -one book,
his first, to the first three hundred years of the empire, and gradually gives
more space to events as he approaches his subject proper.

32 Life and Letters in tlie Fourth Century

own opinion from that passage, and the little epilogue at the end
of book xxxi. 1

We do not know anything of his death. If his reference in
book xxix to a young officer, Theodosius, princeps postea perspec-
tissimus, implies that Theodosius' reign and life are done (as it
may), then Ammianus died in 395 or later. The latest date to
which an event he mentions can be assigned is Aurelius Victor's
Praefecture of the City in 391. In speaking of the Serapeum he
says nothing of its destruction in 391 by a mob, but he deals with
the Serapeum in book xxii., and we have nine books on later
history, so this gives us no further help. However it is quite
unimportant when he died. He lived long enough to leave man-
kind a legacy, for which we cannot be too grateful.

As all we know of him is gathered from his history, we may
consider his work and himself together. Let us begin with his
epilogue, as good an account of him as there is: "All this from
the principate of Nerva Caesar to the death of Valens, I, a soldier
in my day and a Greek, have set forth according to the measure of
my powers. Truth being the boast of my work, never, I think, when
1 knew it, have I dared to corrupt it by silence or falsehood. What
follows, let better men write, in the flower of life and learning ; and
when, if they so choose, they undertake it, I bid them sharpen their
tongues for a higher style." Elsewhere too he promises truth to
his readers siqui erunt unquam, as he modestly says.

He was a man of very wide reading, as his constant references
to literature shew. They are so many in fact that it has been
surmised he did his learning late in life. He is evidently proud
of it, and the value he put upon it may be read in his apology
for Valens, who had " a countrified intelligence, unpolished by any
readings of antiquity 2 ." Valens again shewed "a very unbridled
exultation in various tortures (of supposed criminals), being
unaware of that saying of Tully's, which teaches that they are
unbappy men who think everything permitted them 3 ." It is quite
surprising how many Imperial and other crimes are sins of ignorance.
Sometimes it is that the Emperor forgot or had not read his
Aristotle, but we hear most of Tully. He is rarely at a loss for a
historical parallel in the annals of Rome or Greece.

When he sums up the character of a good Emperor, he first of

1 It is also believed by some that one book is missing before book xxxi.

2 xxx. 4, 2 Subagreste ingenium nullis vetustatis lectionibus expolitum.

3 xxvi. 10, 12 Sententiae illius Tullianae ignarus.

Ammianus Marcellinus 33

all tells us his faults and quite freely too and then sets forth his
good points that they may leave the stronger impression, while
with a bad Emperor he reverses the process. Let us follow his
example and pay him the compliment implied by first giving an
account of his foibles.

Critics almost without exception abuse his style, some even
finding fault with him for trying to write in Latin at all 1 , and
certainly his style is curious and peculiar to him. It reminds one
somehow of Apuleius, though it is less successful 2 . His vocabulary
is good in itself, but his composition and grouping have a very odd
effect. Partly it may be, as is suggested, the disturbing influence
of Greek. Partly it is because he aims a little too much at rhe-
toric. The manner is more suited to the novel than to the history.
In fact his style is rather more modern 3 than classical, so modern
as to be nearly journalistic at times. It abounds in metaphor
"The trumpets of internal disaster were sounding 4 "; "the horrify-
ing gang of furies lighted on the necks of all Asia 5 "; "he left the
provinces waltzing 6 "; "the destiny of the East blared on the dread
shawms of peril, mingling her plans with the shades of Tartarus 7 ."
He does not, in describing the situation of a town, care to say
North, South, East and West simply, but "facing the arctoan
stars," "whence the dawning sunbeam rises 8 ." (Of course these
phrases are more unnatural when translated.) Once or twice he

1 It is remarkable in view of the fact that the Greeks had always been
studiously ignorant of Latin (e.g. Plutarch), and that a century later than
this we find but few in the East who knew it at all, that the two great men
of letters of this age, Ammianus and Claudian, a Greek-speaking Egyptian,
should write in Latin. The Emperor Julian seems guiltless of the most rudi-
mentary acquaintance with Latin literature. Latin was still, however, the
official language. Libanius (Sievers, p. 13) needed an interpreter to read a
Latin letter, and was indignant at young Antiochenes going to Italy to learn
Latin (ib. p. 162). Trench (Plutarch, p. 10) cites one quotation of Horace in
Plutarch against Gibbon's assertion that there is no allusion to Virgil or
Horace in Greek literature from Dionysius of Halicarnassus to Libanius. Is
the statement or the exception more striking?

2 E. W. Watson, Studia Biblica, iii. 241, compares Ammianus' style with
Cyprian's, finding them "closely akin in their literary aspect."

3 E.g. in the purely picturesque use of the adjective, xiv. 3, 4 Aboraeque
amnis herbidas ripas, balancing solitudines.

4 xxix. 1, 14 interri'irum cladium litui sonabant.

5 xxix. 2, 21 coetus furiarum horrificus...cervicibus Asiae totius insedit.
This rather curious phraseology is not unlike Apuleius, e.g. Metam. v. 12
sed jam pestes illae taeterrimae furiae anhelantes vipereum virus et festinantes
impla celeritate navigabant the description of Psyche's two sisters.

6 xxviii. 3, 9 tripudiantes relinquens provincias. Others use this verb in the
same way.

7 xviii. 4, 1 Orientis fortuna periculorum terribiles tubas inflabat...consilia
tartareis manibus miscens.

8 xxvii. 4, 6 arctois obnoxiam stellis. 7 unde eoumjubar exsurgit.

G. 3

34 Life atid Letters in the Fourth Century

breaks out in a declamatory apostrophe, which comes oddly enough
in a history. In fact we may borrow a phrase of his own, used of
Phrynichus, to illustrate and describe his own style cum cothitr-
natius stilus procederet '. Cothurnus is strictly the buskin worn by
the tragic actor to give dignity to his stature, and is commonly
enough used in Latin as equivalent to Tragedy itself, just as soccus
represents Comedy. Cothurnatus is "wearing the buskin" and
may be employed of a man in a "tragic" humour. To turn this
into an adverb, and use it to describe the march of a style, is a
somewhat unusual manner of writing, but characteristic of Am-
mianus. It also hits him off admirably, for there is very often " a
hint of the buskin in the strut of his style." At the same time a
good deal too much may be made of this, and has been made, for, as
I hope the extract above translated will shew, he can write straight-
forwardly and simply when he pleases 2 . When his diction and his
rather obtrusive learning are forgiven, I think we have exhausted
the list of his sins, which must be admitted not to be very great.

When we come to his virtues, we find that his severe truth-
fulness and his dispassionate impartiality might set him in the
very front rank of historians. But a man may be fair and truthful
without having the other necessary qualities of a historian, and
these Ammianus has in a strongly marked degree. He realizes the
perspective of the picture he sees, and he selects and groups his
matter with the eye of a master. A modern author has this advan-
tage over an ancient, that he can by grace of the printing press
pack his digressions into footnotes and appendices, while so long-
as manuscripts held the field, everything had to go into the text.
But for this the light reader would have a higher opinion of
Ammianus. Setting apart his geographical excursuses which really
recall Herodotus 3 , and those on scientific subjects such as earth -

1 xxviii. 1, 4. So Mr Bury describes the style of Cassiodorus, "each epistle
posing as it were in tragic cothurni and trailing a sweeping train." Later
Roman Empire, ii. p. 187.

2 One must be careful of speaking of oneself after the Abbe's dictum, but I
may be allowed to say I once read Ammianus steadily and almost exclusively
for a fortnight and found him fascinating. Quot homines, of course.

3 Sievers, Libanius, p. 17, n. 2, says Geography was a Lieblingswissenschaft
of the day. Claudian stops the course of an epic to tell about Sicily and
its volcanoes in 36 lines (R. P. i. 142 178). While Peter (die gesch. Litter atiir
fiber die R. Kaiaerzeit bis Theod. I. it. ihre Quellen) characterizes these excursions
of Ammianus as Dilettantismus, Gimazane on the other hand (p. 207) says
that after the French conquest of Algeria a French officer, Nau de Champlouis,
took Ammianus' story of Theodosius' campaign in Africa, went over the ground
and found the historian exact. I have referred to de Broglie, whom the Abbe
cites, but he is not quite so explicit.

Ammianus Marcellinus 35

(quakes, the rainbow, comets, and so forth, which are generally
borrowed, and naturally fall short of modern accuracy 1 all of
which would to-day be relegated from the main body of the work
we may say that he knows the use of light and shade, and shifts
his scene so skilfully that the various parts of his work set off and
relieve one another. No part of the Roman world is left out, and
he gives us a vivid panorama of that world, borrowing no doubt at
times from earlier writers. Huns, Goths, Egyptians and Persians
are all surveyed, and though we may be surprised at an omission
or a slip here and there, such as his neglect to notice the change
from the Arsacid to the Sassanid dynasty in Persia 2 , which from
other sources we find meant much to Rome and her Eastern
provinces, we really learn a great deal.

Then he has a keen eye for colour, and in a touch, a hint,
an incidental phrase, lets us have glimpses that make the life
of his time real and living to us to-day 3 . We are seeing his
world for ourselves, almost with our own eyes. For instance,
we learn thus that the Germans dyed their hair. Jovinus 4
"hidden in a valley dark through the thickness of the trees"
surprises them, " some washing, some of them staining their hair
red after their custom, and drinking some of them." In the
same way we mingle with the Roman soldiers (too many of them
barbarians), and see the way they do things. They are anxious to
fight, and they let their commander know it by banging their spears
on their shields 5 . To wish him good luck they make a din with
the shields on their knees 6 . Here is a man who cuts off his thumb

1 Gibbon, who had a high opinion of him, magnificently rebukes him on
one occasion. "Ammianus, in a long, because unseasonable, digression, rashly
supposes that he understands an astronomical question, of which his readers
are ignorant." Nemesis overtakes him at once, for Dr Smith has remarked
an error of a preposition in Gibbon's account of Ammianus' mistake.

2 The Arsacids yielded place to Artaxerxes in 226 A.D., and the new dynasty
which was supposed to derive from the Achaemenids (the family of Cyrus and
Darius) lasted till 651 A.D. They restored the religion of Zoroaster and the
authority of the Magi, persecuting Christians and Manichaeans alike. The long
wearisome wars between them and the Eomans (to be read of in the vivid if
very unadorned history of Joshua the Stylite) left both an easy prey to Islam.
We hear now and then of the Saracens already in Ammianus.

3 Biidinger (per quern non licet esse negligentem), pp. 27 30, is very severe
on some of Ammianus' picturesque touches especially the scene where the
Persians are crossing the bridge (xviii. 7, 1), asking, could he see so far and did
Sapor really sacrifice at all ? A little lower (p. 31) he laments that Ammianus
did not know "Eusebios Pamphilos' Sohn." Ramsay, Impressions of Turkey,
p. 193, mentions one or two odd little slips of Mr Hogarth into inaccuracy
about small matters a bolt on a door and a woman's petticoat and asks
what would be said of such blunders in St Luke.

4 xxvii. 2, 2. 5 xvi. 12, 13. xv. 8, 15.

36 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

to shirk service 1 . Julian makes a speech, and in delight the troops
stand waving their shields in the air 2 , or in anger they brandish
their spears at him 3 . In the troops of Constantius 4 are soldiers who
lie on feather-beds and have a pretty taste in gems. Alas! for
Julian's heathen revival ! his soldiers had too many sacrificial
feasts, too much to eat and too much to drink, and rode home
through the streets of Antioch to their quarters, mounted on the
necks of passers-by 5 . Now they all but mutiny because Julian has
only a donative for them of a hundred pieces of silver a man 6 .
Again we find them marching into battle, while they raise the
barritus 7 , "so called in their native tongue, a martial note that
began low and swelled louder." Mr Keary 8 very reasonably finds
the origin of this in the German forests, where the wind sweeping
over and through leagues of trees roared like the sea, and hence
through barbarian recruits, of whom we hear a good deal, it came
into the Roman army.

All these are small points, perhaps, but they add variety to the
work; and though a history may be great without them, or dull
with them, they are in their right place in Ammianus, and brighten
his canvas without lessening the effect of the great outlines of his
picture.

Ammianus was a soldier, but he saw that the army was not
the State, and ever and again we find him intent on the provinces
and the troubles of the tax-payer. He recognizes the merit of
Constantius, whom he did not like, in keeping the army in its
proper place 9 , "never exalting the horns of the military"; and he
tells us with a proud satisfaction in his hero that Julian reduced
the land tax in Gaul from twenty-five to seven aurei per caput,
and in his financial arrangements would not countenance one
particular practice because it was merely a relief to the rich without
helping the poor at all. It is not the picture of Julian we are
generally shewn, and we must bear in mind that the man, whom the
ecclesiastics abuse for "pillaging" them, was careful for finance and
had the interests of the empire at heart. A burning question of
the time was the shirking of "curial" duties by men who tried to

1 xv. 12, 3. 2 xxiii. 5, 24.

3 xxi. 13, 16. 4 xxii. 4, 6.

5 xxii. 12, 6. * xxiv. 3, 3.

7 xxxi. 7, 11. Cf. Tac. Germ. 3.

8 Vikings and Western Christendom, p. 43.

9 xxi. 16, 1.

10 xvi. 5, 14. Cf. Marquardt, Rom. Staatsverwaltung 1 , ii. p. 222.

Ammianm Marcellimts 37

evade paying their share of the heavy taxes exacted from the curia
of each town as a body. It is clear that every evasion made the
burden heavier for the rest of the body, but Julian is severely
criticized by Ammianus for being too sharp with men whom the
curiae accused of such dereliction 1 . The system was vicious, and
in fact was one of the main elements in the decay of the empire 2 .

Another such element was officialdom. He tells us how when
Julian was quartered at last in the palace of Constantinople, and
sent for a barber, there entered a gorgeous official, who proved to be
the court barber, and, as such, had a splendid income 3 . This roused
Julian, who at once made a sweeping clearance of barbers and cooks
and eunuchs, and till Valens became Emperor their regime was at
an end. Other official nuisances were less easy to get rid of, and
again and again we find Ammianus telling of tumult and war and
disaster brought on by the cruelty and insolence of civil and mili-
tary authorities. Valentinian, he complains, did nothing to check
the irregularities of his officers, while he was very severe on the
private soldiers. Finally, the terrible Gothic war, which culminated
in the defeat and death of Valens at Adrianople, was occasioned, if
not caused, by the rapacity and cruelty of a magistrate charged
with the transport of the Goths over the Danube.

Here it may be remarked that while Ammianus has no political
or economical views to set forth, and accepts the fact of the empire
as part of the world's fabric, as everybody else then did, without
criticism, he does permit himself to criticize and complain of the
administration. Though he laments that his contemporaries have
not the recuperative power which "sober antiquity, unstained by
the effeminacy of an ungirt life," possessed in its unanimity and

1 Rode, p. 58, refers this criticism to Julian's edict (Ep. 14) putting back
Christian clergy into the curiae from which they had heen released on ordi-
nation. Amm. Marc. xxv. 4, 21 ; and xxi. 12, 23.

2 Priscus in his account of his interesting journey among the Huns in
448 A.D. (p. 59 B in the Bonn Corpus of Byzantine History, a translation of
which is to be found in Mr Bury's Later Roman Empire, i. 213 223) tells
us of a renegade Greek he met who had turned Hun and pled that he was
better off; "for the condition of the subjects [of the empire] in time of peace
is far more grievous than the evils of war, for the exaction of the taxes is
very severe, and unprincipled men inflict injuries on others because the laws
are practically not valid against all classes," and so forth. Priscus upheld the
empire, and " my interlocutor shed tears and confessed that the laws and
constitution of the Romans were fair, but deplored that the governors, not
possessing the spirit of former generations, were ruining the State." It might
be difficult to identify those "former generations," but the whole story is very
significant.

3 xxii. 4, 9.

38 Life and Letters in tlie Fourth Century

patriotism', he has no regrets for the republic, no sorrow for the
Senate of Rome in its glorious effacement, none of the narrow
Roman feeling of the city-state days. Three hundred years had
brought a good many changes, and all the world was Roman now
together, apart from Germans, Goths, and Persians beyond the pale.
The Greek of Antioch is as much a Roman as any one. The result
is a striking difference of tone in the historian a change for the
better. We are rid of the jingoism of Livy, and the gloom of
Tacitus 2 . Ammianus himself is tenderer and has larger sympathies
than the historians of old. He can value human life even if it is
not a Roman life, and pity the child though a Syrian who begins
his experience by being taken captive.* The Roman in Ammianus
poses no more. He is far more frankly human. As a result we
feel more with him. In fighting German '' and Persian he is battling
for light and civilization, and Christianity itself ; and if in the last
great fight in book xxxi. we incline to the Gothic side in some
degree, it is the fault of a criminal official, and not because our
historian alienates our sympathy by a narrow and offensive little
patriotism. Things are more fairly and squarely judged on their
merits now when the cramping caste distinction of civitas is gone.
Even the line between Roman and barbarian was growing faint,
when the Frank Nevitta was made consul by Julian, bitter as he
was against Constantino for his barbarian consuls.

But I have said nothing so far of one great change that had
come over the world in the triumph of the Church. We hear of it
of course from Ammianus, but less than we might have expected.
This is easily accounted for. One of our chief interests in the
fourth century is the Arian controversy, and Ammianus was a
heathen. A heathen of the latter-day type, that is, a rather
confused, because so very open-minded a heathen. We hear little
about the gods and a great deal about the vaguely-named cneleste
nwnen, which shews its interest in mankind again and again.

In particular he digresses on the occasion of the downfall of
Gallus, which he considered a well-deserved catastrophe, to give us
his view of Nemesis or divine justice. The passage is characteristic
in several ways. "Such things and many more like them are

1 xxxi. 5. 14.

2 Mr Bury (L. R. E., ii. 179) characterizes Tacitus very justly as " out
of touch with his own age."

3 Biidinger (p. 21) discovers an "unusual bitterness against Germans" in
Ammianus though he notices it less in the later books. If this is true it can
hardly be surprising (compare Synesius), but it had not occurred to me.

Ammianus Marcellinus 39

often wrought (and would they were always!) by the avenger of
evil acts and the rewarder of good, Adrastia, whom we also call by
a second name Nemesis, a certain sublime Justice with divine
power, set, if human minds may judge, above the orbit of the
moon, or, as others hold, a guardian being, with universal sway
over our several destinies, whom the theologians of old in their
myth call the daughter of Justice, saying that from an unknown
eternity she looks down on all earthly things. She, as queen of
causes, arbiter and disposer of events, holds the urn of fate, varying
the lot that befals us ; and by bringing what our free wills begin
at times to a very different end from that intended, she utterly
changes and involves the manifold actions of men. With the
indissoluble clamp of necessity she fetters the empty pride of
mortality, and disposing as she will of the hours of growth and
decline, now she brings down the neck of pride and cuts its sinews,
now she lifts the good from the depths into prosperity. Antiquity,
in its love of myth, gave her wings, that men might realize with
what flying speed she is everywhere present ; it gave her to hold
the helm and set the wheel beneath her, that men might know she
courses through all the elements and rules the universe" (xiv. 11,
2526).

Here, while aiming at expressing his view in the style he loves,
he gives us the conclusion of a man of affairs. Men propose this
and that; powers above them "shape their ends," and the world
presents a great appearance of confusion. Yet his experience and
observation lead him to believe that in general it is possible to
recognize some higher power (to-day we might say law or principle)
which is acting towards justice. We do not always see justice
entirely triumphant, but we often do, so often as to be justified in
believing that above the play of "changeful and inconstant fortune"
is a divine justice, however we may define it. He is not a philo-
sopher, but he leans on the whole to Neo-Platonic theology/ from
which he derived " the orbit of the moon," the lowest of the seven
heavenly planes.

Auguries and auspices are still to the fore, not that the mere
birds can tell the future, but a kindly numen 1 guides their flight
to allow us by it to see what is coming. Omens are very real

1 xxi. 1, 9. Amat enim benignitas numinis, sen quod merentur homines, sen
quod tangitur eorum adfectione, his quoque artibus prodere quae inpendunt.
Surely there is something pathetic in this, if only in the quoque. This too
is Neo-Platonic; see footnote 2 on p. 187.

40 Life and Letters in tJie Fourth Century

things an idea mankind still cherishes in a confused and half
ashamed way. Prodigies still occur, but "nobody heeds them
now." Amniianus has great respect for the philosophers and the
theologi of old, though he draws a curious picture of Julian's camp
with its Etruscan soothsayers and Greek philosophers'. Some sort
of portent occurred on Julian's march into Persia, and the sooth-
sayers declared that it meant disaster if the advance were con-
tinued. But they were slighted by the philosophers, "who had
much respect just then, though they do make mistakes sometimes,
and are stubborn enough in things they know nothing about."
This time the event justified the soothsayers, we know.

But a historian of the fourth century, whatever his creed, has
to deal with Christians. Ammianus is quite free from bias ; Chris-
tian or heathen is much the same to him Tros Tyriu&que mihi
nullo discrimine agetur. He has no animus whatever, and is so far
unique among his contemporaries. He finds grave fault with Julian
for forbidding Christian professors to teach ancient literature, stig-
matizing the decree as one obruendum perenni silentio 2 , "to be
overwhelmed in eternal silence" strong words to use of a man he
loved and honoured, and speaking volumes for the fairness of the
writer. As an outsider, however, who will have other outsiders
among his readers, he will often half apologize for a technical term
"a deacon as it is called," " synods as they call them." A bishop
is Christianae legis antistes, though he slips into episcopus now
and then. A church is Christiani ritus sacrarium, or Christian i
ritus conventiculum, or frankly eccle&ia. These roundabout phrases
are largely due to his environment ; for the traditions of literature
and good society ignored the new religion 3 .

1 xxiii. 5, 8 11. He was disgusted with the quacks and pretenders who
swarmed round Julian. Augury and so forth were degraded when practised in
irregular ways and by the inexpert. Cf. xxii. 12, 7, and Socrates, iii. 1, 55.

2 xxii. 10, 7.

3 This might of itself, I think, dispose of Gutschmid's ingenious attempt
to correct a defective passage in xxii. 16, 22. Ammianus is enumerating
the great men whose teaching has been influenced by Egypt (Pythagoras,
Anaxagoras and Solon) and his last name is lost. Ex his fontibus per sublimia
gradient sermonum amplitiidine Jovis aemulus non visa Aegypto militavit
sapientia gloriosa. Gutschmid wants to read, after his, ihs, i.e. Jesus ; Valesius
would prefer correcting non into PI u ton. When one remembers that even
Christians of the type of Augustine and Jerome found the style of the Bible
bad and unreadable at first ; that heathen writers habitually ignore the Church,
its doctrines and usages as far as possible; that the use of the name Jesus
alone is unusual, coming on one with a surprise in Jerome, while Tacitus
says Christu* and Suetonius Chrestus and dismiss the matter; that Ammianus,
who was an admirer of Julian and generally in literary matters wishful to be
correct, would have been a revolutionary among educated pagans if he had

Ammianus Marcellinus 41

But Ammianus was no pedant, and can speak in terms of
admiration of the men 1 "who, to hold their faith inviolate, faced
a glorious death and are now called martyrs." In another passage,
speaking of the sufferings inflicted on the followers of the pre-
tender Procopius which were very much those undergone by the
martyrs of Palestine according to Eusebius he says 2 "he had
rather die in battle ten times over than face them.

Side by side with this stand his startling words on the warring
of the sects. Julian, on the principle of Divide ut imperes, recalled
the Nicene exiles with a view to fresh theological quarrels 3 ; " for he
knew that there are no wild beasts so hostile to mankind as most
of the Christians are to one another." It was only two centuries
since Tertullian heard the heathen remarking ut sese invicem
diligunt. He records the terrible fight in a church at Rome 4
between the followers of Damasus and Ursinus, the rival candi-
dates for the See, when one hundred and thirty-seven dead bodies
were found on the victory of Damasus. Here is his comment
" I do not deny, when I consider the ostentation of Roman society,
that those who are ambitious for this thing (the See) ought to
spare no effort in the fray to secure what they want, for, if they
get it, they will be sure of being enriched by the offerings of
matrons, of riding about in carriages, dressed in clothes the
cynosure of every eye, and of giving banquets so profuse, that their
entertainments shall surpass the tables of kings 5 . They might be
happy indeed, if they could despise the magnificence of Rome,
which they count a set-off to the crimes involved, and live in
imitation of certain bishops of the provinces, whom their sparing
diet, the cheapness of their clothes, and their eyes fixed upon the
ground, commend as pure and holy men, to the eternal deity and
his true worshippers."

Once he seems to express a preference, when he complains of
Constantius "confounding the pure and simple Christian religion
with old- wife superstition 6 ." Probably anilis superstitio is his

found "sublime eloquence" or "glorious wisdom" in Christianity; and finally
that he nowhere shews any acquaintance with any Christian literature what-
ever, and fails to realize what Arian and Nicene were disputing about around
him ; the brilliance of Gutschmid becomes more and more impossible.

1 xxii. 11, 10. * xxvi. 10, 13.

3 xxii. 5, 4. 4 xxvii. 3, 12.

5 Cf. Augustine's early judgment on Ambrose, Cow/, vi. 3, 3.

6 xxi. 16, 18. Christianam religionem absolutam et simplicem anili super-
stitione con/lindens in qua scrutanda perplexius quam componenda gravius
excitavit discidia plurima, quae progresna fusius ahiit concertatione verborum,

42 Ifife and Letters in the Fourth Century

summary criticism of all theological speculation. Constantine took
the same view and wrote to Arius and Alexander remonstrating
about their quarrel which he called "childish folly" they were
"too precise" (axpipoXoyelo-dt, exactly Ammianus' in qua scrutanda
perplexlus) about these " entirely trifling questions." Constantine
complained that these clergy caused disorder and discord ; and
Ammianus says the same of Constantius (quarn componenda gra-
vius) 1 . In any case, in view of his treatment of Athanasius and
the curt dismissal of the Athanasian question 2 , it is hardly clear
that he censures Arianism, which in fact was less likely to seem
anilis superstitio to a heathen than Nicene Christianity. At all
events Constantius was too "curious about the Christian religion,"
and ruined the State's arrangements for the quick travelling of
genuine officials by giving free passes to swarms of bishops who did
little but go from one synod to another.

I think we may surmise Ammianus' own feelings from his
remark about Valentinian 3 . Valentinian was rather a savage ruler
on Ammianus' own shewing, but "this reign was glorious for the
moderation with which he stood among the different religions and
troubled no one, nor gave orders that this should be worshipped or
that ; nor did he try by threatening rescripts to bend the neck of
his subjects to what he worshipped himself, but he left the parties
untouched as he found them." Surveying all his references to
Christianity, I am afraid we must admit that he did not realize
what it meant, nor understand how vital was the issue between
Arian and Nicene. How should he, when there were hundreds in
the church who did neither ? We must also always remember that,
beside being a man who kept himself in the background, he was
writing for a society which avowedly had no interest at all in
Christian affairs 4 .

Ammianus did not lack for dry humour ; witness the soldiers
who would have won a certain battle " if only they had displayed
the vigour in standing which they shewed in running away"; and
"Epigonus, a philosopher so far as clothes went"; or Mercurius
"who was like a savage dog that wags his tail the more sub-

ut eatervis antistitum jumentis publicis ultroque citroque discurrentibus per
synodos quas appellant dum ritum omnem ad suum trahere conantur arbitrium,
rei vehiculariae succideret nerves.

1 See Constantino's letter apud Euseb. F. C. ii. 69 71 and Socr. i. 7.

2 xv. 7, 610. 3 xxx. 9, 5.

4 The Abbe Gimazane is very anxious to make Ammianus a Cbristian, at
least so far as to have been baptized, though he admits that his supposed faith
is lukewarm. I see neither the gain nor the grounds.

Ammianus Marcellinus 43

missively for being a brute inside"; or the would-be Emperor
Procopius, " about whom the wonder was that his life through he
shed no man's blood"; or that governor of Africa "who was in
a hurry to outstrip the enemy in plundering his province"; or
finally, those lawyers of Antioch who, if you mentioned in their
presence the name of some worthy of old, took it to be some
foreign term for a fish or other eatable 1 . But what would have
been in Tacitus one of the bitterest of epigrams, is in Ammianus
no epigram at all. Imperialis verecundia, the chastity of an
emperor, was the great phenomenon of the fourth and fifth cen-
turies, whose emperors, whatever else they may have been, were in
this matter above scandal.

There is a beautiful picture of the triumphal entry of Con-
stantius into Rome 2 . He was a little man, long in the body and
short and rather bandy in the legs, but

He nothing common did nor mean
Upon that memorable scene.

He rode in a golden chariot, and for all the noise and applause
never flinched, but stood immovable ; but "on passing through lofty
gateways he would bow his little person ; and as if his neck were
fortified, he kept his gaze straight in front of him, and looked
neither right nor left, as if he had been a dummy ; the shaking of
the wheels did not make him nod, and he was not seen to spit, or
wipe his mouth or his nose, or move his hand throughout."

A grim humour hangs about the coronation of Procopius 3 , who,
after months in hiding, blossomed out as an Emperor. He appeared
before the soldiers without a cloak, and so emaciated as to look as
if he had risen from the dead, and all the purple he could muster
was his boots and a rag he waved in his left hand : "you would
have thought him some figure on the stage, or some ridiculous
burlesque that had popped through the curtain." His procession
was hardly a success ; for the soldiers were afraid of being assailed
with tiles from the roofs, and marched along holding their shields
over their heads.

Of Ammianus' residence in Rome we have many reminders, some
of very great interest, some very amusing. His description of the
city on the occasion of Constantius' visit shews the hold Rome still

1 The same doubt has arisen in our own day as to whether Botticelli is a
cheese or a wine, if we may trust Mr Punch. /

2 xvi. 10. 3 xxvi. 6, 15.

44 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

had on the world's imagination. "Whatever he saw first he
thought supreme above all." There was the temple of Tarpeian
Jove, the baths as big as provinces, the solid mass of the amphi-
theatre built of Tiburtine stone, to whose top the human eye could
hardly reach, and so forth. "But when he came to Trajan's forum
a structure, I suppose, unique under heaven, which even the
gods would agree with us in admiring he stood in amazement 1 ."
Rome was the one thing in the world about which exaggeration
was impossible. The Emperor was so much impressed that he
determined to add his item to the ornaments of the Eternal City,
and sent an obelisk from Egypt. Of this and the inscription it
bore, and its journey and arrival, Ammianus gives us a most
interesting account 2 .

But more entertaining are his digressions on Roman manners,
which abound in sketches as good as Juvenal's 3 . The snobbery and
extravagance of the great men of Rome may not have been more
excessive than such things are elsewhere; but the giandee who with
the greatest dignity (though no one has asked) extols to the skies
his patrimony and the income it yields, how fertile it is, how far it
reaches ; the noble gentleman who welcomes you, though an utter
stranger, as if he had been yearning for you, asks you endless
questions till you have to lie, and makes you regret that you did
not settle in Rome ten years earlier, but next day has no idea who
or what or whence you are ; the fashionable people, who loathed
sensible and well-educated men like the plague, and learning like
poison all these impressed Ammianus so much that he has left
them gibbeted for ever in his pages. The troops of slaves and
eunuchs (his particular abhorrence), the luxury of the banquets, the
Roman preference for the musician rather than the philosopher, the
organs and lyres as big as waggons, the libraries closed like the
tomb, the absurd fear of infection that has the slave washed after
he has been to inquire about a sick friend before he is allowed into
the house again, the gambling and horse racing, the effeminacy and
the slang 4 of Rome, waken disgust in this old soldier, as well they
might. The rabble that will fight for Damasus or Ursinus, and

1 xvi. 10, 15. Cf. Symmachus, Eel. 3, 7, on Constantius' toleration of the
temples.

2 xviii. 4.

3 xiv. 6; xxviii. 4. Boissier, F. P. ii. 187, says: "Daus ces passages qui ne
ressemblent pas tout a fait au reste il est plus satirique et rheteur qu'historien."

4 E.g. Per te ille discat. Cf. Jerome, Ep. 55, 5, When they see a Christian,
statiui illud de trivia 6 ypa.ii<6s, 6 tindery*.

Ammianus Marcellinus 45

riot if the corn ships are late or wine is not forthcoming, are no
better than the nobles. The most absurd figure of all, perhaps, is
Lampadius, who was at one time prefect " a man who would be
indignant if he should so much as spit without being complimented
on being adept at it above the rest of mankind." But even in
Rome there were good men and true, such as Symmachus " who is
to be named among the most illustrious examples of learning and
decorum."

If this is comedy there is tragedy enough in book xiv. Gallus
Caesar is in the midst of a career of tyranny and bloodshed in the
East 1 , when he is summoned to Italy. To disarm his suspicion he
is bidden to bring his wife Constantina 2 a helpmeet indeed for him,
"a death-dealing Megaera, the constant inflamer of his rage, as
greedy of human blood as her spouse" a lady who listens from
behind a curtain to keep him from weakening. She did not feel
easy about the invitation, yet thought she would risk it, but she
died of fever in Bithynia on her journey, and Gallus felt more
nervous than ever, for he knew Constantius and "his particular
tendency to destroy his kin." He knew his own staff hated him,
and were afraid of Constantius, for wherever civil strife was in-
volved the "luck" of Constantius was proverbial. A tribune was
sent to lure him to his ruin ; " and as the senses of men are dulled
and blunted when Destiny lays a hand on them, with quickened
hopes he left Antioch, under the guidance of an unpropitious power,
to jump as they say from the frying pan into the fire." On his
journey he gave horse races at Constantinople, and the Emperor's
rage was more than human. A guard of honour (and espionage)
accompanied him. From Adrianople he was hurried on with fewer
attendants, and now he saw how he stood and " cursed his rashness
with tears." The ghosts of his victims haunted his dreams. At
Petobio he was made a prisoner, and at Histria he was beheaded,
and all of him that reached Constantius was his boots, which a
creature of the Court hauled off to post away to the Emperor
with this glorious spoil.

What is the general impression left on the mind by the history
of Ammianus ? One cannot read him through without a growing
conviction of his absolute truthfulness and a growing admiration of

1 Even his brother Julian admits "fierce and savage" elements in his
character. Ep. ad Athen. 271 D.

2 Honoured since the 13th century as S. Constanza. Gregorovius, Rome. i.
106.

46 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

his power, and the two together present the Roman Empire to the
mind exactly as it was. He makes no predictions, he expresses no
regrets, and apart from observations on the characters he draws,
he leaves the reader to form his own opinions on the Empire.
Nobody foresaw that in twenty years after his death Rome would
have fallen to the Goth, that the Empire as an effective power in
the West was nearing. its end, but yet, wise after the event, we
can see in his pages that it is all coming. There were, we learn,
strong men and honest men to stave it off and delay it, who, if
they could not save Rome, did save Europe in virtue of those ideals
of law and order which the younger peoples of the North found in
the majestic fabric of Roman administration. Ammianus lets us see
the exhaustion of the Roman world, the ruin of the middle classes
under an oppressive system, "and often still more oppressive agents,
of taxation, the weakness all along the frontier, Rhine, Danube,
Euphrates, and African desert, caused by bad principles of govern-
ment within as much as by attacks from without, and the crying
need of men which led to the army being filled with barbarians,
who did not quite lose all their barbarism and brutality at once,
and were often as terrible to those they protected as to the enemy
they were supposed to keep off ; and at the same time we read in
him the grandeur and the glory of Rome, who had welded the
world into one and made the nations members one of another, had
humanized and civilized them with law and culture in her train
wherever she went, and was even now training in her armies the
men who should overthrow her, and then, as it were in horror at
their own work, should set her on high once more, and keep her in
her place as the world's Queen for a thousand years.

CHAPTER III

JULIAN

Perjidus ille Deo, quamvis non perjidus orbi.

PRUDENTIUS Apotli. 454

ONE of the amiable traits in man's nature is to love what is old
for its own sake. Our affection for progress is not always utterly
disinterested, but the love of the past is the purest of passions.
And we are so made, or many of us are, that we love the old the
more because it is the lost cause. It may be a weakness, but it is
a gentle weakness. Yet it is apt to mislead us, and we sometimes
allow age and defeat to obscure in our lost cause or our fallen hero
features that would repel us in a triumph. Thus in some measure
has it come about that there is a kindly feeling for Julian beyond
what his worth really merits, and it is reinforced by the malignity
and hatred with which ecclesiastical writers have, or are supposed
to have, pursued his memory. The tradition grew that he was
a champion of reason and enlightenment against the crudity and
darkness of Christianity, and indeed these words are practically
Julian's own. But the reason and enlightenment of which he
thought and wrote would have seemed to many, who have admired
him for their sake, as crude and foolish as the dogmas of the
Church against which he protested. After all he owes something
to the spiteful nickname he bears.

The Julian of sentimental atheism is really as far from
the truth as the Julian drawn by over-zealous ecclesiastics. The
real Julian is more interesting than either, because a more compli-
cated character. He found fault with Old and New Testaments
very much in the style of Voltaire, but he was not a sceptic. He
was hated as a persecutor, though again and again he declares his

48 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

wish and his intention to maintain religious freedom. Many rulers
have upheld religion, very few have felt so deeply conscious of
divine guidance or so utterly dependent upon it as he. For most
men the religion of Christ seems to supply the closest, the most
vital and the most absorptive communion with the divine ; to some
it has seemed to draw too much upon faith. But Julian decided it
was a cold sectarianism that cut a man away from heaven and left
him godless in a godless world. For some it has been a divine
alchemy transmuting everything it touched to gold. For Julian
it did the reverse, and for the gold of Homer and Plato offered the
lead of Matthew and Luke. It was a blight upon the Greek spirit
which had given life to the world for a thousand years. We can
now see that this Greek spirit had died long since a natural death,
but the Greeks of Julian's day fondly hoped it was living in them
still, and Julian voices the horror with which they began to feel
the chill of death and the natural, if rather irrational, hatred they
felt for what they supposed to be its cause 1 .

"Draw me as you have seen me," wrote Julian to a painter. In
one way this is easy to do, for few men have ever let mankind see
into their inmost feelings as he did ; but it is difficult, too, for the
atmosphere in which he lived was not ours, and many things look
strange to-day which were not felt to be unnatural then. Zeus and
Athena are not now, and we can only with difficulty conceive them
ever to have been for thinking men, even with all the generous
allowances philosophers might make, a possible alternative to Christ.
Yet are they stranger than Krishnu and Kali ? Is it not possible
to-day for a man to halt between two opinions in India, and find
in the philosophy or theosophy of thirty centuries of Hinduism an
attraction which may outweigh Christianity ? When we think of
the age of Julian we must not forget that the Brahmo-Somaj
exists to-day. Even Christians of his day believed his gods to be
real beings, of course demons.

1 Perhaps the best thing is to quote a Latin view to supplement this.
Eutilius (i. 383 396) attacks the Jews and involves Christians with them.

atque utinam nnnquam Judaea subacta fuisset

Pompeii bellis imperiisque Titi;
latins excisae pestis contagia serpunt

victoresque suos natio victa premit.

Further on he assails the monks, and concludes

non, rogo, deterior Circaeis secta venenis ?
tune mutabantur corpora, mine animi.

Julian 49

The fourth century saw the last great persecution of the Church
end in failure, and the new religion recognized and honoured by
Constantine With him a new spirit came into the Roman Empire.
Hitherto so long as a man did a loyal citizen's duty, the State did
not intervene to regulate his belief. But now Constantine, weary
of the civil disorder the Arian quarrel made at Alexandria and
then communicated to other places as the infection spread, called
a council of the Church and invited the bishops to decide what the
Christian faith was, and he would then see to it himself that there
should be no more quarrelling about it. He was, however, dis-
appointed, for the quarrels went on, and when he died in 337 they
were still unsettled. Whatever might have been Constantine's own
religious position, his son's was clear. Constantius carried to the
inevitable halting-place the theory that a man's belief is the
State's concern. He did not aim at reconciling the factions for the
sake of concord, but at converting them all to his belief. His aim
was that of Justinian or Henry VIII. to dictate to his realm what
it was to believe. This affected Christians at once, and signs were
not lacking that the heathen ere long must in their turn be Arian,
Semi- Arian or Nicene, as the ruler might require.

Constantine left behind three sons and a number of nephews
and other relatives, but, whether the deed was the army's, done to
secure " the seed of Constantine " a phrase a man might conjure
with at this time or whether it was the work of Constantius, this
great family was thinned down, and the sons of Constantine were
left to rule the world alone 1 . Two of their cousins survived, the
sons of their father's half-brother, Gallus and Julian. Gallus was
thought to be so ill as to render murder unnecessary, and Julian
was so small six years old as to be overlooked. It was a dark
beginning for a life, like "the unspeakable tale from some tragedy"
rather than the record of a Christian house, and Julian lays the
guilt on Constantius, "the kindest of men." (Ep. Ath. 270 C.)
In later days Constantius, who, too, had a conscience, looked upon
his childlessness as Heaven's criticism of his deed. Had he lived a
month or two longer, to see his daughter, he might have had to

1 Licinius had thirty years before set the precedent by clearing away as far
as he could all persons who by marriage or descent were connected with any
previous Emperor. This was to exclude the possibility of a pretender. Such
as it is, this is the justification of Constantius "the sixth commandment,"
says Seeck, writing of Constantine killing the younger Licinius, " must yield to
the safety of the empire."

G. 4

50 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

revise this opinion. The heathen world, if Libanius 1 voices a
general feeling, saw in the extinction of the whole of Constantino's
family the vengeance of the injured gods.

Julian was left to the care of his kinsman, the great Semi-Arian
Bishop of Constantinople, Eusebius of Nicomedeia 2 , and of a faithful
eunuch Mardonius, who had been his mother's tutor. Some have
tried to lay the blame of Julian's apostasy on the theology of
Eusebius and his party. It would be nearer the truth to lay it on
their unsecured morals as exhibited in the court of Constantius.
Eusebius himself we may acquit of direct influence on Julian.
Great ecclesiastical statesmen have rarely, perhaps, the leisure to
teach little boys, and whatever leisure and inclination Eusebius
may have had to teach Julian, he died when his charge was still
a child. Mardonius had been reared by Julian's grandfather and
was a faithful servant who watched well over the boy. He had a
passion for Homer and Greek literature 3 , and wten the lad would
ask leave to go to races or anything of the kind, the old man would
refer him to the 23rd of the Iliad and bid him find his races there.
Two things resulted from this training. Julian's moral character
was thoroughly sound throughout life. He never entered the
theatre till his beard was grown, and as a man he hated the races
(Misop. 351, and 340 A). On the other hand Mardonius does not
seem to have spent much time with his pupil on the Christian
scriptures, and Julian's earliest and happiest associations were with
Homer, whose poetry he always loved.

1 See Sievers, Das Leben des Libanius, p. 192.

2 Amm. Marc. xxii. 9, 4. A pedigree of the maternal connexions of Julian
may be found in Seeck's great edition of Symmachus, p. clxxv. It is not
quite complete, as the bishop is omitted.

3 For Mardonius see Misopogon, 352 A. He was a Hellenized Scythian,
and perhaps it was in some measure due to him that Julian was so entirely
out of touch with Latin literature, but the Greek sophists with whom he
consorted were of one mind in neglecting Latin. E.g. Libanius (Sievers,
op. cit. p. 13) needed an interpreter for a Latin letter. See Bohde, der
griechische Roman, p. 298, on this preference felt by the later Greeks for them-
selves a preference which Julian shared but which did not gain him support
in the Latin world. If Epistle 55 be written from Gaul or the West, as I think,
we have Julian's views on the tongue half his Empire used playful no doubt :
TO. 5e t/J-d, el Kal <f>0eyyoifj.-r)v 'EXX^vicrW, davfj-a^fiv d^iov OUTWJ eo>ec ttcpefiap-
fiaptafitvoi dia TO, xupia- Elsewhere (Or. ii. 72 A) he speaks of what they (the
Latins) do with the letter V. Eutropius (x. 16, 3) remarks his one-sided
education liberalibus discijrtinis adprime eruditus, Graecis doctior atque adeo
ut Latina eruditio nequaquam cum Graeca scientia conveniret. Constantine, on
the other hand, addressed the Nicene Council (mainly Eastern and Greek-
speaking Bishops) in Latin, but when presiding over the debates he intervened
in Greek. (Euseb. Vita Constantini, iii. 13.)

Julian 51

A sudden edict from Constantius removed his two cousins to a
rather remote place in Cappadocia. Macellum has been described
as a castle or a palace. Very probably it was both. Julian, when
he is attacking Constantius' memory, asserts that there he and
his brother were shut off from schools, companions and training
suitable to their age and rank (Ep. Ath. 271), but from another
source we learn it was a place with a magnificent palace, baths,
gardens and perpetual springs, where he enjoyed the attention and
dignity his rank deserved, and had the literary and gymnastic
training usual for youths of his age. (Sozomen v. 2, 9.) His
teachers, it is suggested, were Christian clergy, who probably had the
less influence for seeming to be the creatures of Constantius 1 .
Consequently their instructions had not the charm of Mardonius',
and it may be to them that he owes his repugnance for the Bible.
It was not admired as a rule by the educated of the day a
terrible reflexion on the system that left them incapable of appre-
ciating it. Longinus (ix. 9), it is true, quotes the passage "Let
there be light : and there was light " as an instance of the sublime,
and Porphyry occasionally cites the Old Testament in a friendly
spirit, but they are exceptions. Wherever he may first have read
the Scriptures, Julian never understood them. He had a good
superficial knowledge of them, but no idea of their spirit and
significance. The anthropomorphisms of the old Hebrew stories he
found less wise and more crude than those of Greek legend ; while,
for the New Testament, little is to be expected of a critic who
can pronounce that Paul "outdid all the quacks and cheats that
ever existed anywhere 2 ."

Of course he would have no noble companions save his
brother, but this was inevitable. Constantius seems to have meant
to keep them in reserve, out of his way and safe from plotters who
might make tools of them, but still available and properly trained
in case of his needing them himself. Later on it was easy to repre-
sent these years at Macellum as bleak exile.

As to Gallus, Julian says that " if there were anything savage
and rough that afterwards appeared in his character" (and it
seems generally agreed that there was a good deal) " it developed
from this long residence in the mountains." Whether Gallus
would have done better in Constantinople is very doubtful. Nero,
Domitian and Commodus do not seem to have derived much benefit

1 So Rode, p. 27, and Vollert, p. 15.

2 See Neumann's reconstruction of his book against the Christians, p. 176.

4-2

52 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

from the atmosphere of Rome. For himself, "the gods kept him
pure by means of philosophy." Some of this "philosophy" was no
doubt previously learnt, but some, it is possible, was acquired from
the books " many philosophical and many rhetorical " which George
(afterwards bishop of Alexandria) "gave him to copy when in Cappa-
docia 1 ." There is nothing very original about any of his philo-
sophical ideas.

From Macellum Gallus was summoned to be made Caesar by
Constantius, to govern Syria in true tyrant fashion, to rouse the
Emperor's ill-will, to be recalled and put to death. Julian later
on tried to make political capital out of his being put to death
untried, but from the pages of Ammianus Marcellinus we learn
that whether tried or not (and those were not days when political
offenders were over-nicely tried), Gallus richly deserved his fate.

The suspicions of Constantius extended to Julian, and for some
time he was kept at court under his cousin's eye or within reach.
But the Empress Eusebia was his friend, reconciled her husband to
him, and obtained leave for him to live in Athens. For this Julian
was always grateful to her memory 2 .

Julian had spent six years at Macellum, and since then had
attended at Constantinople and Nicomedeia the lectures of some
of the great teachers of the day. He was made to promise he
would not hear Libanius, and he kept his promise but obtained
written reports of the lectures 3 . He was still nominally a Christian
and a "reader," though really at heart a heathen already, when he
went to Athens in 355, to meet there men whose acquaintance he
counted among the best gifts of his life 4 .

We have a picture of him drawn by his fellow-student, Gregory

1 Ep. Ath. 272 A and Ep. 9 (on the rescue of George's books). I owe this
suggestion to Vollert, p. 15, and Kode, p. 26.

2 Oration iii. p. 118 D.

3 Sievers, op. cit. p. 54 and Eode, p. 29.

4 An interesting study of students and professors in the Athens of Julian's
day will be found in Mr Capes' Unii-ersiti/ Life in Ancient Athens (Longmans).
He brings out the connexion between the city government and the "University,"
which explains Julian's addressing his manifesto in 360 " to the Council and
People of the Athenians." It was a little pedantic in any case to send it to
Athens at all, but the act is characteristic of Julian.

See also Sievers, op. cit. ch. iii. on universities, rhetoricians and scholars,
and ch. iv. on Athens; and Wachsmuth, Die Stadt Athen im Alterthitm,
pp. 709 711, who emphasizes that Athens was purely a university town now
and quotes Eunapius (v. Prohaeresii, p. 492) for Constantius' endowment of
the university with some islands O{/K 6\iyas ovd /juxpds. The two letters of
Synesius, 54 and 136, quoted on p. 337, are of great interest in this connexion
though of a later date.

Julian 53

of Nazianzus 1 , which has been described as "a coarse caricature,"
but which, nevertheless, seems to me not unlikely to be fairly true
if a man's nature does reveal itself in look and gesture. Julian's
own writings give us the impression of a fidgety, nervous tem-
perament, and his admirer, Ammianus, tells us a number of stories
which betray a want of repose. Gregory in Athens remarked (or
says he remarked) a certain chaDgeableness and excitability in
him, beside a rather loose-hung neck, twitching shoulders, a rolling
eye, a laugh uncontrollable and spasmodic, a spluttering speech,
and an inability to stand or sit without fidgeting with his feet 2 .
All these signs seem to point one way, and if we realize that his
temperament was restless, and that his training had not been of a
kind to correct his natural tendency to be nervous and emotional,
we may find less difficulty in explaining the variety of his religious
opinions.

He enjoyed the student's life, but he was to be called away
from it. The exigencies of the Empire had compelled Constantius
to associate Gallus with himself as Caesar, and the fact that Gallus
had been a failure did not alter the situation. Julian was the
only available person to fill his place, and Constantius, with some
constitutional hesitation and reluctance, made him Caesar and sent
him to Gaul to free the country from German invaders. It was an
honour Julian could have done without, and as he drove back to
the palace in his purple robe he kept muttering to himself the
line of Homer (II v. 83) :

eXXa/3e Trop(f)vpfos davaros <a\ p.oipa uparairf.
Him purple death laid hold on and stern fate.

The story is told by Ammianus (xv. 8), and it sums up the situation.
The scholar is dragged from his study to be invested with the purple,
which had been his brother's ruin and may be his own as easily, if a
eunuch whisper it at the right moment to the suspicious Constantius ;
and he cannot draw back, for stern fate wills it so, and all that the
purple means is that he will die with less leisure for the development
of his inner life 3 .

So "torn from the shades of academic calm," Julian was plunged
"into the dust of Mars 4 " in Gaul, at first with but little direct

1 Cited by Socrates, E. H. iii. 23, 18.

2 Sir William Fraser tells us Disraeli's one mark of nervousness as he sat
in Parliament was a restless crossing, uncrossing and re-orossing of his legs.

3 Amm. Marc. xv. 8, 20: nihil se plus adsecutum quam ut occupatior interpret.

4 Amm. Marc. xvi. 1, 5.

54 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

responsibility. For this he was very angry with Constantius, though
at the time he could say nothing, and he believed (or it was said so)
that it was a matter of indifference to the Emperor whether he slew
the Germans or the Germans slew him, for in either case the Empire
would be freed from menace 1 . But, as Sozomen points out, if
Constantius had merely wanted to kill Julian, he could have done it
without marrying his own sister 2 to him and putting him in so
conspicuous a position. Constantius indeed loved to keep things
in such a way as to be able to have both of two mutually exclusive
alternatives, but it was surely not strange or outrageous of him to
entrust only a little power to begin with to an untried man. As
Julian proved himself worthy of more power, and his colleagues
shewed themselves unfit for it, Constantius gave him more, till
he had supreme command in Gaul. After his wont, however, he
surrounded Julian with creatures of his own and withdrew from him
almost his only friend in the provinces, the trusty Sallust.

It was- not to be expected that Julian would be successful as
a soldier, but he was. Indeed a modern critic has said that it was
only as a soldier that he was great 3 . 1 He was popular with the
soldiers, for he would share their privations and he led them to
victory. He won the regard of the Gauls by ridding them of the
Germans, and by reducing the land tax about 70 per cent., and he
had the respect of the Germans 4 , for he could beat them in battle
and keep his word with them when his victory was secure. His
ambition was to be like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius 5 , and though
a different man, and a weaker, he may be said to have resembled
him at least in honourable devotion to duty and the cultivation of
the higher life.

1 Zosimus (iii. 1) puts this very amiable suggestion into Eusebia's mouth!

2 It is curious that Julian only twice refers to her in his extant remains
Or. ii. 123 D, Ep. Ath. 284 B.

3 Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme, i. 138. I do not know enough of military
matters to be able to criticize this statement or to give any account of his
campaigns that could have an independent value. The reader may be referred
to J. F. A. Mucke (Flavins Claudius Julianus, part i. Julian's Kriegsthaten,
Gotha 1867) who is however criticized as generally too friendly to Julian, and
to W. Koch (Kaiser Julian, Leipzig 1899). Mucke, op. cit. p. 50, calls the
German wars "ein grosses Werk, werth der Unsterblichkeit."

4 He seems to have respected the Germans, remarking their charac-
teristics TO <j>i\e\fu0ep6i' re Kal avviroTCLK-rov Tep/jLavuv (Neumann, p. 184).
He did not so much admire their beer, disliking its smell, if we may judge
from his epigram on it.

5 Amm. Marc. xxii. 5, 4. Amm. Marc. xvi. 1, 4 rectae perfectaeque rationis
indagine congruens Marco ad cujus aemulationem actus suos effingebat et mores.
Eutropius x. 16 M. Antonino non absimilis erat quern etiam aemulari studebat.
This ambition was avowed likewise by Diocletian (Hist. Aug. M. Antonin. 19).

Julian 55

He was too successful in Gaul to retain the good-will of
Constantius, and the wits of the court amused themselves with
jokes about the "goat" (in allusion to his beard), the "purpled
monkey," and the " Greek professor 1 /' and with darker insinuations
that must ultimately mean death for him. Constantius grew
nervous, and, as war with Persia was imminent, he sent to Julian to
demand a considerable number of Gallic troops. Whether they
were really wanted for the war, or the order was sent merely to
weaken Julian, it was a blunder. He could reply that Gaul could
not safely be left without them in view of the Germans, and the
troops could say, and did say, that the terms of their enlistment
exempted them from service so far from home 2 . Julian wrote and
the troops mutinied, and exactly what Constantius was trying to
prevent occurred. The soldiers hailed Julian Emperor. He was
reluctant, but without avail. They raised him aloft on a shield,
and crown him they must and would 3 . It is interesting to note
that, a crown not unnaturally not being forthcoming, Julian rejected
the first two substitutes proposed, a woman's gold chain and some
part of a horse's trappings, but submitted to be crowned with a
soldier's bracelet (360 A.D.) 4 .

The fatal step was taken, but it is characteristic of the Eoman
Empire, though neither of the men was strictly Roman, that though
civil war was inevitable, each should go on with the work he had in
hand for the State 5 . Sulla had not returned to deal with his enemies
in Italy till he had crushed Mithradates. Negotiations, if such they
can be called, went on for a while, till in 361 the two Emperors
marched against each other. They never met. Happily for every-
body, Constantius died on his march, and all Julian had to do was
to have him buried.

Julian was now sole Emperor, and could at last freely avow the
faith he had held in secret for some ten years and openly proceed

1 Amm. Marc. xvii. 11, 1 Capella non homo loquax talpa purpurata
simia litterio Graecus. xx. 4, 1 Constantium urebant Juliani virtutes.
Julian himself (Ep. 68) says his relations with Constantius might be summed
up as Xu/co0tAi'a.

2 Amm. Marc. xx. 4, 4.

3 Cf. Sulpicius Severus Dial. ii. ( = i.) 6, 2 magnum imperium nee sine periculo
renui nee sine armis potuit retineri.

4 Amm. Marc. xx. 4, 17 primis auspiciis non congruere aptari muliebri
mundo. The whole affair shews a German rather than a Roman tone prevalent
in the army. We may compare Julian's sneer at the usurper Silvanus and his
purple robe IK rrjs yvvaiKwiTidos (Oration ii. 98 D a work written some years
earlier than this).

5 Mr Bury, Later Roman Empire, i. 127, n. 4, remarks that Julian, though
Greek in sympathies, was in many ways more Roman than Greek.

56 Life and Letters in tJie Fourth Century

with the religious reformation he intended to effect 1 . He could
plead the precedents of Constantine and Constant! us for his attempts
to remould the belief of his subjects, and his first step was to recall
the Nicene bishops his predecessor had banished and to proclaim
toleration for all religions.

Before following out the steps of his reformation, it will be well
to study his own mind and learn if possible how he came to change
his faith, and what he found in Hellenism that Christianity could
not offer 2 .

The first thing we have to realize clearly is that Julian was
essentially a weak man, by nature inclined to a sentimentalism and
a conceit which an evil environment developed. He was not an
original thinker at all, but a born disciple, readily amenable to the
mysterious and to flattery.

When the Antiochenes made a watchword of the letters "Chi
and Kappa" the initials of Christ and Constantius 3 , it was not a
random shot, but a deliberate combination of two names, which
were already connected in Julian's mind. Constantius was above all
things a Christian Emperor, and a Christian who could not content
himself with the popular view of his religion, but kept restlessly
intruding into the discussion of theological subtleties, better left to
bishops, till he excited the disgust of honest, practical men like
Ammianus 4 . And this man, the nervous student of creeds, ever on
the alert for a diphthong too many or too few, was also the
murderer, who had executed the "tragic curse 5 " on his family, as
ready to add Julian to his list of victims as to take part in a battle
of bishops. A Christian and a murderer, he was for years the
baleful figure in the background of Julian's thoughts. His friends
and satellites were no better than he men as unscrupulous in
currying favour at court as in maintaining their faith at a council.

1 He writes to Maximus in triumph (Ep. 38) <f>avepus (3ov9vTov/j.ev. There
is a pervert's excess of devotion about him. Ammianus, a pagan born and
bred, felt this, and called him superstitiosus magis quam sacrorum legitimus
observator (xxv. 4, 17).

2 On this Wilhelm Vollert's Kaiser Julian's religiose und philosophische
Ueberzeugung (Giitersloh 1899) will be found most useful and suggestive.

Socrates, E. H. iii. 1, has a long chapter devoted to Julian, and a large part of
the book (iii.) concerns him. Similarly Sozomen's book v. comprises the story
of Julian, and though not perhaps equal to Socrates, contains some important
original matter. Theodoret (iii. 28) is a lighter weight.

In what follows I have generally of set purpose avoided the testimony of the
more hostile authorities, not that it is necessarily unreliable.

3 Misopogon 357 A.

4 Amm. Marc. xxi. 16, 18. See p. 41.

5 Or. vii. 228 B ^ rpayiKTi Kardpa.

Julian 57

On the other side stood the gentle and loyal eunuch Mardonius,
as sympathetic a companion for his old master's grandson as he was
an interpreter of Homer. Homer was their common study and
inspiration, their daily reading, and from him they passed to Plato
and perhaps Aristotle. Thus all that was horrible in the life of this
sensitive, lonely orphan boy was Christian ; while all that was
helpful and delightful was drawn from Greek literature. When
this period ended and the boy was sent to Macellum, the Christian
clergy and the Christian Scriptures must have been equally repugnant
to him, but he was alone (for Gallus could hardly be very congenial)
and he allowed himself to be led along Christian paths and to make
professions which he did not feel. It was here that he became a
" reader."

Released from Macellum, he began to frequent the company of
philosophers and rhetoricians ; and though he was prevented from
hearing Libanius 1 , the prohibition did not save him from the
influence of this man, the greatest pagan teacher of the day, and
perhaps even inclined him to be so influenced. These men were
dangerous companions for him, as vain as peacocks (to adapt
Synesius' description of Dio) and, as far as men so entirely self-
centred could be religious, utterly pagan.

They read the young prince quickly, they praised him and they
encouraged him in his classical studies, they made themselves
agreeable to him and they shewed him the beauty and the breadth
of Neo-Platonism. Here was a faith, whose scriptures were the
beautiful books from which he had learnt his earliest lessons with
Mardonius ; a faith which had no persecuting bishops but was
quietly upheld by suffering scholars, men of rare genius, the
successors of Plato himself; a faith with a range and sweep far
beyond the Church's, embracing all the truth and charm of the
ancient poetry and philosophy of Hellas and all the passion and
revelation of the religions of the East. It was a wider faith than
Christianity, including all that was true in Judaism, of which
Christianity was after all only a perversion and a misunderstanding.
They would not be slow to shew him- the absurdities and contra-
dictions of the Old Testament, the difference between the New
Testament and Nicene Christianity, and the sublime morality of a
Plato and a Plotinus as contrasted with Constantius and his bishops.
Surely the truth could not be with the barbarous, dull and incon-

1 Sievers, Libanius, p. 54. Rode, Gesch. der Reaction Kaiser Julians, p. 29.

58 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

sistent authors of the Christian books rather than with Homer and
Plato.

We can see in his later writings the general trend of the
arguments which influenced him against Christianity and the
Scriptures and brought him nearer Neo-Platonism. But there
was more. He was young and sentimental, and the sufferings
of the old religion and its adherents, which, as we can read in
Hermes Trismegistus, were keenly felt, would be emphasized and
the hope held out that on some future day he might himself be
the restorer of the faith, to which Constantine and Constantius
had done such injury. He might indeed be himself the chosen
messenger of heaven, for it was a Neo-Platonic doctrine that the
gods stoop to give mankind a saviour and a regenerator whenever
the divine impulse in the world is in danger of being exhausted '.
It might be that his name would be thus added to those of Dionysus
and Herakles. This thought, whoever may have inspired it, was
never lost by Julian, and its fatal consequences may be seen in the
ever-increasing arrogance and self-conceit which mark his career.

To crown all, Julian came under the influence of "a certain
Maximus, who at that time wore the outward look of a philosopher
but was a magician and boasted he could foretell the future 2 ." In
these words of a Christian historian we have a true description of
the man who did most to ruin Julian's character. Neo-Platonism
made communion with the Supreme one of its cardinal doctrines,
but while Plotinus and his followers pronounced this communion to
be dependent on contemplation and a matter of consecrated intelli-
gence, another school took the easier and more imposing route of
theurgy. By theurgy, which Augustine says is merely a more
splendid name for magic, by charm and ritual, by fast and offering,
heaven could be stormed. .The gods could be "compelled" (dvay-
Kd&tv) to speak, and more, to appear in bodily form before their
worshipper. The theurgist held secrets which enabled him to
command the attention and the presence of the gods at will, and
of this school Maximus "was at this time the most eminent. The
mind of Julian was prepared for him. They met, and, though

1 Synesius, de Prov. i. 10, 11.

2 Theodoret in. 28, 2. Hellenism did not produce many martyrs, and an
attempt has been made to beatify Maximus to fill the gap, but the true charge
on which he was put to death, on which Christians also were often enough
put to death, was magic. Magic may seem to us a harmless thing if foolish,
but to the Roman government it generally connoted political disaffection, as it
does in modern China. The context of Amm. Marc. xxix. 1, 42 implies that
this was a political case. Vollert pp. 18 23 is excellent on Maximus.

Julian 59

circumstances for a while parted them, Julian never shook off the
influence of this quack, but to the end of his days had for him a
deep affection and respect, almost awe 1 .

But for some ten years, however much he might fancy himself a
new Dionysus, and whatever delight he might draw from intercourse
with the gods 2 , he had to practise deceit, to hide his powers of
commanding heaven, to cloak his own godhead. It was not a good
training a conscious godhead, the control of gods and constant
hypocrisy. It weakened Julian and accentuated his natural de-
ficiencies. The marvel is that he suffered so little, and the reason
perhaps lay in the steadying fear of Constantius, for when that was
removed Julian rapidly lost in sense and self-control.

It will hardly be necessary to attempt a systematic exposition of
his theology, which is neither original nor clear, but it may be of
interest to see what Neo-Platonism as a religion offered him for the
daily affairs of life. He had gone to Athens already a heathen in
heart, and thence he was summoned to Milan, to be made Caesar
eventually, though this was not quite clear at first. " What floods
of tears and what wailings I poured forth," he writes to the
Athenians, "how I lifted up my hands to your Acropolis, when
this summons came to me, and besought Athena 3 to save her
suppliant and not forsake me, many of you saw and can testify ;
and above all the goddess herself, how I asked that I might die
there in Athens rather than face that journey. That the goddess
did not betray nor forsake her suppliant, she shewed by what she
did. For she led the way for me everywhere and set around me on
every side angels (or messengers) from the Sun and Moon to guard
me. And it befel thus. I went to Milan and lived in a suburb.
Thither Eusebia used often to send to me in a kindly spirit and bid
me boldly write for whatever I would. I wrote her a letter, or
rather a supplication, with language of this nature, 'So may you

1 His public attentions to Maximus annoyed Ammianus, who sums them
up as ostentatio intempestiva. xxii. 7, 3. The historian was perhaps more
genuinely Roman than his hero.

2 Or. v. 180 B evdai/JLoviav ijs rb Kf(f>d\aioi> ij r&v 6edv yv&ffis <TTI.

3 The hymn of Proclus to Athena is an interesting parallel. He prays
Athena of the Athenian Acropolis for mental light, forgiveness of sin, freedom
from disease, a fair gale on the voyage of life, children, wife and wealth, oratory
and eminence (irpoe5peit)v d' evl Xaotj). Proclus, it may be added, was the
philosopher of the fifth century A.D., who won the proud title of 6 Stddoxos
the successor, i.e. of Plato! The prayers of Synesius, both as a Neo-Platonist
and as a Christian, were mainly for freedom from anxieties, from attacks of
demons and from the influence of matter. He also prays that he may be
enabled to act worthily of Sparta and Cyrene.

60 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

have heirs, so may God give you such and such, send me home as
soon as possible' ; but then I thought it might not be safe to send
such a letter to the palace to the Emperor's wife. So I besought
the gods by night to shew me whether I ought to send the document
to the Empress. And they threatened me with a shameful death
if I sent it. And that this is true I call all the gods to witness.
So I refrained from sending the letter. From that night a reflexion
came to me which it is, perhaps, worth while you should hear.
Now, said I, I am thinking of resisting the gods, and I have thought
I could better plan for myself than they who know all things. Yet
human reason looking only at what is present is lucky if it can just

avoid error for a little but the thought of the gods looks afar,

nay, surveys all, and gives the right bidding and does what is
better ; for as they are authors of what is, so are they of what will
be. They must then have knowledge to deal with the present.
For the while, my change of mind seemed wiser on that score, but
when I looked at the justice of the matter I said, So you are angry,
are you ? if one of your animals rob you of your use of itself,
or run away when called a horse, perhaps, or a sheep or a cow
and yet you yourself who would be a man, and not one of the
many or the baser sort either, rob the gods of yourself and do not
let them use you for what they would. Look to it that, in addition
to being very foolish, you are not also sinning against the gods.
And your courage, where is it ? Absurd ! You are ready to toady
and cringe for fear of death, though you might cast all aside and
trust the gods to do as they will and divide with them the care for
yourself, as Socrates bade, and do what concerns you as best you
can and leave the whole to them, hold nothing, catch at nothing,
but accept what they offer in peace. This I considered not merely
a safe but a fitting line of conduct for a wise man... and I obeyed
and was made Caesar 1 ." (Ep. Ath. 275 7.)

Ever thereafter he walks by faith, trusting the gods to look after
him 2 . While in Gaul he wrote two panegyrics on Constantius,

1 We may add his expression of acceptance of the Divine Will Or. vii.
232 D xP^vQt f- 01 ^po* ^ ri @o6\faOe. Similar views will be found in other
Neo-Platonists, e.g. Hermes Trism. (Bipontine edition of Apuleius, vol. ii.
p. 313) Justo homini in Dei religione et in summa pietate praesidium est.
Deus enim tales ab omnibus tutatur mails ; and Porphyry to Marcella, esp. c. 16
xal TifA-f)(Tfis fj.v apiffTa TOV dfbv i)Tav TQ 6f<^ TT\v ffavTrjs Sidvoiav 6/ioiu><T77s...ei' 5e
Xd/pei T(f> dpxofJ.ti'iji rb apxov KCLI #eoj ffo<f>ov K^derai KO.I TrpovoeT. KO.L Sid TOUTO
/xa/cdptos 6 cr6005 OTI eTrir/jOTretfercu inrb Oeov.

2 See his myth in Or. vii. 233 D ^uets yap aoi (the gods say) w
avve<r6fj.f6a.

Julian 61

which does not seem an entirely honest performance. But perhaps,
as Vollert (p. 86) suggests, he is ironical, and he is certainly not
exuberant, though a reader, who did not well know their relations,
might feel more kindly to Constantius from what he says of him.
But I refer to them because, beside doing his duty as a citizen by
his ruler, he yields to his besetting temptation which clung to him
through life, and preaches. In the second panegyric he says, " The
man, and still more the ruler, all whose hopes of happiness depend
on God and are not blown about by other men, he has made the
best disposal of his life 1 ." (Or. ii. 118c.) In a very undisguised
homily he wrote in Gaul on the Mother of the Gods, he gives thanks
that, whereas he was once in Christian darkness, he is not now 2 .
When Constantius recalled Sallust, Julian consoled himself with
another homily : "Perhaps the god," he says, "will devise something
good ; for it is not likely that a man, who has entrusted himself
to the higher power, will be altogether neglected or left utterly
alone." (Or. viii. 249.) (We do not always allow enough for the
awful loneliness of a monarch or of one in Julian's position, yet
it must be considered in estimating them.) " It is not right,"
he goes on, "to praise the great men of old without imitating
them, nor to suppose that God eagerly (TT/DO^/AWS) helped them but
will disregard those who to-day lay hold on virtue, for whose sake
God rejoiced in them 3 ."

He feels that in a very special sense he is the chosen vessel of
heaven. In his myth 4 in his seventh oration the conclusion of a
very easily-read riddle is that he, the least and last of his house, is
directly chosen by the gods to restore the old faith, and to this end
is particularly entrusted by Zeus to the care of Helios the Sun.
In his letter to Themistius he accepts the r6le of a Herakles or a
Dionysus, king and prophet at once ; he feels the burden more than
man can bear, but neither desire to avoid toil, nor quest of pleasure,
nor love of ease, shall turn him away from the life of duty. He fears
he may fail in his great task, but he counts on aid from the
philosophers and above all commits everything to the gods 5 .

In the moment, perhaps the supreme moment of his life, when
the soldiers sought him to hail him Emperor, he tells us he was in

1 Cf. Dio Chrys. de Regno, Or. i. 15.

2 Or. v. 174 B; so also Or. iv. 131 A. 3 Compare also Or. vii. 212s.

4 " Dans toute cette allegoric Jujien ne fait que se repeter a lui-meme, Tu
Marcellus eris." Chassang, Hist, du Roman, p. 194.

5 Notice in the concluding prayer to Cybele in Or. v. an entreaty that
she will aid T< 'Pufj.aiwv Sri/jUf. /udXierra yuep a.TroTpi\//acr6ai Trjs a.6f6Tt)TOS Kr]\iSa.

62 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

his chamber "and thence I prayed to Zeus. And as the noise
grew louder and louder, and all was in confusion in the palace,
I besought the god to send a token, and forthwith he sent a token
[he quotes a word or two from the Odyssey] ' and bade obey and not
resist the will of the army. Yet, though these signs were given
me, I did not readily yield, but held out as long as I could, and
would accept neither the title nor the crown. But as one man
I could not prevail over so many, and the gods, who willed this to
be, urged them on and worked upon my will. So about the third
hour, some soldier tendering his bracelet, I put it on with reluctance
and went into the palace, groaning from my heart within as the
gods know. And yet I ought, I suppose, to have been of good
courage and trusted to the god who gave the token, but I was
terribly ashamed and wanted to escape, in case I should seem not to
have been faithful to Constantius 2 ." (Ep. Ath. 284 c.)

Elsewhere, in the Misopogon (352 D), which is not, like the letter
just quoted, a manifesto of the date of his revolt, he uses the same
language. " This office the gods gave me, using great violence,
believe me, both with the giver (Constantius presumably) and the
receiver. For neither of us seemed to wish it, neither he who gave
me the honour or favour, or whatever you like to call it and he
who received it, as all the gods know, refused it in all sincerity."
Again, writing to his uncle Julian (Ep. 13) he says, "Why did I march
(against Constantius) ? Because the gods expressly bade me, pro-
mising me safety if 1 obeyed, but if I stayed what I would have no

god do So I marched, trusting all to fortune and the gods, and

content to abide by whatever pleased their goodness." Before he
started he "referred all to the gods who see and hear all things,
and then sacrificed, and the omens were favourable." (Ep. Ath.
286 D.) In this feeling of dependence on heaven and the constant
reference of everything to the divine he is very like Constantine, his
uncle.

The preceding Emperors had left him precedents for the imperial
control of religion, and when Julian found himself at last sole

1 But he does not say what the token was the line of Homer (Od. iii. 173)
merely illustrates his request and its gratification. It was believed at the time
that the philosophers by the aid of magic and theurgic rites had not unfrequently
such manifestations.

2 The same kind of plea, however, was made twenty years later by the
tyrant Maximus to St Martin. (Sulp. Sev., vita Mart., 20.) se non sponte
sumpsisse imperium sed impositam sibi a militibus diviuo until regni necessi-
tatem defendisse et non alienam ab eo Dei voluntatem videri, penes quern tarn
incredibili eventu victoria fuisset.

Julian 63

Emperor, with power to carry out in act the restoration which he
had long felt was laid upon him by Heaven, he had to consider
practical measures for the maintenance and propagation of his
religion. He saw at once its weakness. The old faith, which he
re-christened Hellenism, fell short of the new both in creed and
conduct. Three centuries of Christian experience and thought had
built up a body of doctrine, point by point tried and proved, and
the Christian could rest on the rock of the Church. The heathen
had no dogma, no certainty. This philosopher said one thing, and
that another, and every man could choose for himself and be
uncertain, solitary, a lonely speculator, when he had chosen 1 .
Hence the Church was stronger than her adversaries. To meet
this difficulty Julian revived Maximin Daja's great idea of the
Holy Catholic Church of Hellenism 2 . All the great philosophers
conspired to witness to the truth ; all said, if rightly understood,
one thing 3 . By dint of a little confusion, a little judicious blind-
ness, one might believe this. Thus the teachings of the Neo-
Platonists were not mere "hypotheses" but genuine "dogmata,"
and rested on a solid basis (Or. iv. 148). As substitutes for the
Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost he set the usual group of
Neo-Platonic conceptions, to which he linked the gods, proceeding
from the great original TO 6V, oAos or oXy t o\ov. The Sun played
a great part in all these speculations, " for whom and by whom are
all things 4 ." The Jews were built into the wondrous fabric, for
they, too, worshipped the great Supreme, though clannish narrow-
ness made them exclude the other gods 5 . What were the relative
places of these other gods, whether separate beings or merely
different names for one being, it is a little difficult severally to

1 Cf. Lucian's Hermotimus, a great part of which may be read in Mr Pater's
English in Marius the Epicurean. A good criticism of this piece of Lucian's
is given by Chassang, Hist, du Roman, pp. 191 2.

2 Eusebius, E. H., ix. 4, and Lactantius, M. P. 36.

3 Or. vi. 185 A TOI)S Trpwreiycracras 5 iv exdcrrr; TUV alpeffew ffKoireiru Kal
iravra. fup^ffei ffufj.<pd}va.

4 For the adoration of the Sun compare the hymn of Proclus (412 485 A.D.),
e.g. 1. 34 :

fiKuv Trayyevtrao ffeov, \^vxCjv dvaywyev,

K^K\vOi Kal fji.e KaO-rjpov a/J-aprddos alev awdtrris, Kre.

5 Julian seems always to have been very friendly toward the Jews, and
endeavoured at one time to rebuild the Temple for them, but the design fell
through, baffled by the accident or miracle of fire and earthquake. See Ep. 25,
a striking letter, and Ep. 63.

Elsewhere (Neumann, op. cit., p. 185) he says the Jewish god is in charge
of the Jewish race just as there is icad' ZKOLVTOV Zdvos iffvdpxris TIS 0e6s ; (p. 178)
irpoa"r]KL TOV ru>v 'Efipaiwv 6ebv oi)%i 5rj iravrbs Kbff/nov yeveffiovpybv virap^eLV (AtaOai.
Kal KaTf^ovcnd^eiv T&V oXcav.

64 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

determine, but his system of Divinity had but a very few years
to grow in and must not be inspected too closely, as at best it
was but patchwork. His homilies were generally "knocked off"
in two or perhaps three nights, "as the Muses can testify 1 ." They
ramble and digress and leave us confused. But the great thing
was that Hellenism had a system of Divinity and that all the
philosophers bore witness to it. If it were a little abstract, it was
not after all for the common people 2 . This was a fatal weakness,
but it could hardly be helped.

In the second place there was no doubt in Julian's mind that his
new Catholic Church suffered from disorder, and from the careless
lives of its adherents. He tried to organize his priesthood and to
improve their morals. He is most emphatic on their sacred character,
which he means to make others respect, and which the priests would
do well to respect themselves. He writes them charges like a
bishop 3 , lecturing them on their social deportment and on their
sacred duties. They must not frequent theatres or wine-shops, nor
read erotic novels 4 or infidel books like the works of Epicurus 5
("most of which the gods, I am glad to say, have allowed to
perish"); they must speak and think no unseemly thing. Their
families must be orderly and go regularly to the temples 6 . Their
sacred robes are for temple use, for the honour of the gods, not to
flaunt in the streets. Decencies must be observed in temple service 7 .
The magistrate or officer within temple walls is as any other man.
He is annoyed when men applaud him in a temple 8 ; there they
must adore the gods and not the Emperor. Again, the Galilaeans
(for so he calls the Christians) beside influencing people by their

1 Cf. Or. vi. 203 c.

2 Or. vi. 196 D, robs /JLV oSv ?roXXoi;s ovdtv KwXtfei rats KOIVCUS i-irtffOai 56cus
a common feeling of Neo-Platonists.

3 E.g. Ep. 49 from which I have taken some of what follows. Harnack
(Histoi~y of Dogma, tr. vol. i. p. 336) remarks that "the ethical temper
which Neo-Platonism sought to beget and confirm was the highest and purest
which the culture of the ancient world produced."

4 Kohde, der gr. Roman, p. 349, calls attention to this prohibition as a
striking proof of the wide and general popularity of such novels in Julian's day.

5 Epicurus and his school were hated by all the adherents of the pagan
revival from the days of Lucian. Cf. Macrobius, Comm. i. 2, 3. Lucian's sham
prophet Alexander had coupled them with the Christians, Alex. 38.

6 He was highly annoyed to find that the wives and families of some of his
priests preferred the churches. Sozomen v. 16.

7 In Ep. 56 he directs that attention be paid to sacred music in Alexandria,
T^J ie/oaj firifMf\-i]6fji'ai fj.ov<riKr)s, and that choir boys of good birth (eB yeyovbres)
be chosen for their voices CK Quvrjs KaraXcyfoduo-av, trained and maintained
at the public charges.

8 Ep. 64.

Julian 65

sober lives gain great influence by their hospitality to the poor and
the wayfarer, and to counteract this Julian ordains great guest-
houses and provision for their maintenance, that Hellenism, too,
may win men by its charities. Above all things he preaches holiness.
All service done in holiness to the gods is alike acceptable 1 .

One thing was wanting. When this life is done, the Christian
Church offers a sure and certain hope of a joyful resurrection.
What had the Catholic Church of Hellenism to bid against this ?
Neo-Platonism, as we can see in Macrobius, in Hermes and else-
where, inclined to a belief in reward and punishment beyond the
grave. Even Plotinus holds that a man's position in the next life
is determined by what he has reached in this. Julian no doubt
went with his teachers here as elsewhere, but he does not speak so
clearly of the other life as we might have expected of him. In one
place (Fragm. Epist. 300) he writes hopefully: "Consider the
goodness of God, who says he rejoices as much in the mind of the
godly as in purest Olympus. Surely we may expect that he (TraWws
TJIMV OUTOS) will bring up from darkness and Tartarus the souls of us
who draw near to him in godliness ? For he knows them also who
are shut up in Tartarus, for even that is not outside the realm of
the gods, but he promises to the godly Olympus instead of Tartarus."
In another place (Or. iv. 136 A, B) he says that the souls of those
who have lived well and righteously will go upward to Serapis
not the dread Serapis of the myths, but the kind and gentle god
who sets the souls utterly free from becoming or birth
and does not, when once they are free, nail them down
to other bodies by way of punishment, but bears them upward and
brings them into the intelligible world the region next to Absolute
Being, according to the Neo-Platonists.

There is however another passage, where one feels it odd that he
says nothing of all this. In Letter 37 he writes to a friend to say
he wept to hear of the death of the friend's wife, but here is
nepenthes for him as good as Helen's. Democritus of Abdera told
King Darius, who was sorrowing for his queen, that he could raise
her from the dead, if he would write on her grave the names of three
that never were in mourning. " But if you cannot, why weep as if
you alone know such a sorrow ? " The same story, or one very like
it, is told of Buddha, but its comfort is a little cold.

1 Some of his ideas are cnrious : e.g. funerals by day dishonour the Sun
(Ep. 77) eis ov Trdvra. KO.I f ov iravra.

o. 5

66 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Julian's relations with the Christian Church remain to be
discussed 1 . To an erring priest he wrote (Ep. 62) that he would
not curse him, as he does not think it right, for he remarks that
the gods never do it. It was only consistent with such a temper
not to persecute, and he sedulously maintained that he did not and
would not. But, says Ammianus 2 , on the bench he sometimes
asked litigants their religion, though it never affected his decisions.
While all creeds were lawful, he felt it only right to give higher
honour to the true faith and its adherents. Any other course
would be dishonouring to the gods 3 . But, of course, this was not
persecution. When he recalled the exiled bishops, when he made
the Catholic restore Novatian churches, when he coquetted with
Donatists, he was only carrying out a liberal measure of toleration.
No doubt, but English Nonconformists have never felt specially
indebted to James II. Heathen men said Julian recalled the exiles
to kindle anew the flames of discord in the Churches 4 . But it was
bad policy. Niceue and Arian were at least unanimous in opposing
a heathen. Moreover when the two parties were thus left on an
equal footing, and the Nicenes had their leaders again, the Nicene
party gained ground steadily, and they after all were the more
serious opponents 5 . When he forced bishops to rebuild heathen
temples they had destroyed, they called out on persecution ; they,
too, had consciences and might destroy but could not build up
heathenism. So far, perhaps, no one could say Julian was strictly
unjust. But when the mob of Alexandria rose and slew George the
bishop, all he did was to write a letter of gentle rebuke they ought
not to have broken the law ; they should have trusted to him and
justice ; but for Serapis' sake and his uncle Julian's he would
forgive them (Ep. 10). Indeed he seems to have been less anxious
that no more bishops should be killed than that none of George's
books should be lost (Epp. 9, 36). When bishop Titus of Bostra 6
wrote to inform him of his efforts and his clergy's to preserve the
peace, he wrote to the people of Bostra and put an unpleasant

1 In addition to the books dealing specifically with this (to which I have
already referred) Sievers, Leben des Libanius, c. xi., may be consulted.

2 Amrn. Marc. xxii. 10, 2.

3 Ep. 1 irpoTifj.a.ffda.1 /JLCVTOI TOI>S Ofoatfiels /cat ird.vv <}>r)/j.l delv.
* Amm. Marc. xxii. 5, 4 is very explicit about this.

5 See Gwatkin's Studies in Arianism, ch. vi. p. 201 (first edition). I am
afraid I do not take so high a view of Julian as my former teacher does,
though I once inclined to take a higher.

6 Famous otherwise as the author of three books against Mani extant
partly in Greek and partly or wholly in Syriac.

Julian 67

construction on the bishop's letter, and invited them to rid them-
selves of him. (Ep. 52, August 362.) The Emesenes burnt the
tombs of the Christians, and were held up in consequence as an
example to easy-going Antioch (Misopogon, 357 c). But of all men
Julian hated Athanasius most, the man who seemed, as Vollert says,
to unite in himself all the force of Christendom. The bishop in
virtue of the decree of recall had returned to his see of Alexandria.
Julian wrote to the Alexandrians in March, 362, to say he had
never meant to recall the bishops to their sees ; it was enough for
them not to be in exile ; Athanasius, who has been banished by so
many decrees of so many Emperors, might have had the decency to
wait for one restoring him to his so-called episcopal throne before
boldly claiming it to the annoyance of pious Alexandrians ; he must
now depart (Ep. 26). When, instead of going into exile, Athanasius
dared to baptize some Greek ladies, Julian wrote in October of the
same year peremptorily ordering his removal (Ep. 6). A month or
so later he had to write again, for he had miscalculated Athanasius'
influence in Alexandria. He is surprised and shocked at the
Alexandrians, but they may trust him, for he knows all about
Christianity after twenty years of it, and now he has been following
the gods twelve years. Still, if they will not be converted, there are
other possible bishops beside Athanasius, whom he banishes from
the whole of Egypt (Ep. 51)'. The great bishop was not concerned.
" It is but a little cloud and will pass," he said 2 , and went into
hiding in Alexandria itself, and in less than a year the little cloud
had passed away and he was free again.

Gregory of Nazianzus said Julian veiled his persecution under a
show of reasonableness 3 , and it may be held that nothing very
terrible has been mentioned as yet. Perhaps it was not going too
far when he cancelled all the immunities and exemptions granted to
the clergy by Constantine and Constantius, though if he did (as
alleged 4 ) compel widows and virgins to refund grants made to them
in past years, he would seem to have been a little too exacting.
But a zealot, whose principle is the equality of all sects and the
preference of one, stands in slippery places. The Syrian historian
is highly indignant about this robbing of the Churches. Western
indignation was greater on another score, as we shall see. The

1 He concludes with a flout at Athanasius' person /n?5 dvrip, d\X' avdpu-
iriffKos eirreXrfc which, if a little unnecessary, still reveals one side of his
own character.

2 So,zomen, v. 15, 3.

3 x. p. 166 : ap. Sievers, op. cit., p. 118. 4 Sozomen, v. 5.

68 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

great old centre of Christianity in Syria was Edessa, and the Arian
Church there, by its attack on the Valentinians, gave Julian an
opportunity which he gladly seized. He confiscated the Church
property by an edict, assigning as one of his grounds "Blessed
are ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of heaven 1 ." This may have
been rough and ready justice, but the next step to which I refer was
oppression of a most irritating kind.

It is a strange thing, perhaps, in view of the general carelessness
about education, that a government has only to incur suspicion of
playing with it in the interests of one or another religion to arouse
ill-will. Of all acts passed to worry the English Nonconformists,
few angered and alarmed them so much as that of Queen Anne's
reign, which checked their educational freedom. In the same way
Julian roused the Church to fury through the western world by a
rescript forbidding to Christians the teaching of ancient literature.
It was in more ways than one an unhappy thing for his new
Catholic Church that the real Catholic Church was devoted to
the old literature. In the east Christians read Homer and Plato,
and in the west they steeped themselves in Virgil and Cicero, and
in both east and west they were a match for the heathen in all
things pertaining to a liberal education, more than a match, for
there is a marked difference in general between heathen and
Christian writing of the day. This was unfortunate for Julian,
for it disproved one of his theories that the Galilaeans were
illiterate and barbarous and divorced from that ancient world
which meant so much to all educated people. If his theory had
been right, his policy was absurd and unnecessary; but he bore
witness against himself, that Christians were not without a share
in the old culture. He realized in fact that they valued it so
highly that they would not give it up. Accordingly he enacted 2
in June 362 that whereas a man cannot teach aright what he
believes to be wrong, and whereas it is highly desirable that
those who teach the young should be honest men, and it is
incompatible with honesty for a Christian to expound the poets,
orators and historians of old, who held themselves (Thucydides 3

1 Ep. 43 &' els TTJV paffiXetav rCiv ovpavdjv evodurepov iropevduiffi.

2 See Ep. 42. Without citing Christian testimony, it is enough to quote
the opinion of an honourable heathen, Ammianus, who pronounces this
decree obruendum perenni silentio (xxii. 10, 7). Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle
Ages (tr.), p. 80, gives a good account of this decree, its meaning and results.

3 On the other hand, Dean Stanley (Eastern Church, Lect. i. p. 123) says,
"Along the porticos of Eastern Churches are to be seen portrayed on the

Julian 69

among them, it seems) sacred to the gods, while he himself believes
in no gods, henceforth it is forbidden to Christians to teach ancient
literature, unless they first prove in deed their honesty and piety by
sacrificing to the gods. This edict was to produce one or both of
two results, either young Christians must grow up without classical
education, which was not likely to be their choice, or they must go
to the schools of heathen, who would if they did their duty give
them a bias toward Hellenism. Probably Julian was thinking of
his own youthful studies, but heathen teachers were not all alike
and were not in general propagandists.

The immediate result of the decree was that some of the
most famous teachers of the day threw up their profession. Then
came a strange phenomenon 1 . A father and son, both called
Apollinaris, set to work and made a new Homer out of the
Pentateuch, and a Plato out of the Gospels. It has been suggested
that the Christian people admired these works, but from the
synchronism of their disappearance with the death of Julian it
seems that Socrates, the most admirable of Church historians,
is representing the common view when he applauds them rather
as products of enthusiasm than as literature. If the Apollinares
failed of fame as authors, the younger, the Gospel Platonist,
made his mark in Church History as an independent thinker,
though the Church did not finally accept his views. Another
result of this decree was that Valentinian and Valens two years
later began anti-pagan legislation with an edict forbidding the
performance by night of heathen rites and sacrifices. Julian had
made the declaration of war and Christian Emperors accepted it.
In yet another way the decree had a great effect, for it emphasized
the distinction between Christianity and pagan philosophy, and
while, as Prof. Gwatkin 2 says, this told heavily against Arianism
at once, it was not in the long run a good thing for the Church
to doubt the value of ancient wisdom and poetry. " In the
triumph of Christianity," writes a recent biographer of Julian 3 ,
"he foresaw the Dark Ages." This is a most extravagant state-
walls the figures of Homer, Solon, Thucydides, Pythagoras and Plato, as
pioneers preparing the way for Christianity. " We may wonder which character
would have most surprised Thucydides.

1 Socrates, iii. 16, 1.

2 Studies in Arianism, p. 199.

3 See Julian the Philosopher (p. 174), in the Heroes of the Nations Series, a
careful work but marred by the writer's admiration for Julian and a mis
understanding of his opponents. It would perhaps hardly be going too far to
call the book an apology for Julian.

70 Life and Letters in Hie Fourth Century

ment, but, if Christianity and the "Dark Ages" are connected at
all, it is in some measure the result of this prescient pagan's decree.
Christianity is really no more responsible for the "Dark Ages"
than is Neo-Platonism.

Such, then, was Julian's religious policy, but what was its
success ? Was society with him ? It might be expected that the
hour for a reaction had come, and there were certainly a good many
heathen left. The philosophers, whose spirit he had caught, and
the nobility of the city of Rome, with whom he had no relations,
were ready to welcome a return to the old ways. But Julian was
at heart a Greek, leaning eastwards, and had not much support in
Italy, while the philosophers, after all, were out of touch with the
world at large. It must be confessed that the reaction was not
very spontaneous ; it was an attempt to galvanize a revival by the
fiat of a ruler, and though there was an appearance of life about it,
it was not living. Julian has to admit (Ep. 49) that Hellenism
does not yet thrive as he would wish, but the fault does not
lie with the gods, but with their worshippers. The heathen were
past revival. They might resent being forced into the background
by the Christians, but they only wished to live in quiet as they
pleased. They had no mind for martyrdom, and almost as little for
Julian's violent revivalism. They would not be regular in attendance
at temples, they did not care to sacrifice very much, and in short
they would make no efforts for their religion. The women, as
Julian himself complained, were against him (Misop. 363 A). The
mob enjoyed breaking Christian heads 1 , and creatures of the court
affected conversion and a quickened life, but Julian was hardly
pleased with either. He had practically no converts from among
the Christians none of any weight. Hecebolius, a rhetorician,
came over, to return to the Church promptly on Julian's death. A
bishop, Pegasius, who seems to have been a pagan at heart under
his episcopal robes, now avowed his faith or un faith 2 .

Julian had a measure of support in the army, which had a
large non-Roman element, which was not Christian 3 , but such
officers as Jovian and Valentinian were probably not alone in being
loyal to the Christian faith. In fact, from whatever point of view,

1 Theodoret (iii. 6) gives a lively picture of heathen processions "Cory-
banting" through the streets (\vrrwvTfs /cat KopvfiavTi&vTts) and abusing the
saints. He adds the information that they got as good as they gave, without
much advantage to public order.

2 See Ep. 78, a very interesting letter, for this curious person.

3 Sievers, Libanius, ch. xi. p. 109.

Julian 71

the revival was a failure from the beginning, and the final proof of
this was given by its complete collapse on Julian's death.

Julian's reign was short (361-363), and the most interesting
part of its history is the period he spent at Antioch 1 . He reached
there in 362, and personally conducted his pagan campaign. There
was a considerable number of pagans in the city, but, though he
was well received and made bids for their good-will, the pleasure-
loving populace was no more to be influenced by Julian's exhorta-
tions to a godly, righteous and sober life than by Chrysostom's
twenty years later. His attempt to transform Daphne from a
pleasure resort to a shrine again was a ludicrous miscarriage. A
martyr, Babylas, had been buried there by none other than the
Emperor's own brother, Gallus 2 , and before a martyr Apollo was
mute. Julian ordered the "dead body 3 " to be removed, and it was
removed by a great procession singing, "Confounded be all they
that serve graven images 4 ." One of the singers was arrested and
tortured, so angry was Julian, but only one ; for his constancy
shewed what might be expected from others, and Julian resolved to
"grudge the honour of martyrdom 5 ."

His failure as a revivalist was supplemented in Antioch by his
blunders as an economist B . He was massing forces there and prices
rose in consequence. The mob however did not understand how
prices were so high, and greeted the Emperor with the cry, " Every-
thing plentiful, everything dear." Anxious to win applause, for
his admirer Ammianus says he ran too much after cheap glory 7 , he
summoned the leading citizens and gave them three months to find
a remedy. When none was forthcoming, he lowered the price of
grain by an edict, which had the surprising effect of driving it out

1 See Amm. Marc. xxi. 9, 4. Videre properans Antiochiam orientis apicem
pulcrum (here speaks the Antiochene)...Mi speciem alicujus numinis votis
excipitur publicis, miratus voces multitudinis magnae, salutare sidus illuxisse
eois partibus adclamantis. But was it a good omen that he should arrive
just when the women were wailing for Adonis ? Claudian on the Antiochenes,
In Rufin. ii. 34, adsuetumque charts et laeta plebe canorum...imbellem...0rontem.

2 Sozomen, v. 19.

3 Misopogon, 361 B.

4 Theodoret, iii. 10.

5 Eutropius (a heathen) says Julian was religionis Christianae nimius
insectator perinde tamen ut cruore abstineret (x. 16, 3). This is a considerable
admission for a writer who never elsewhere mentions Christianity, not even
in writing of Constantino. Whether by Julian's orders or not, blood seems to
have been shed none the less.

6 For this story see Misopogon, 368 c ; Amm. Marc. xxii. 14, 1 ; Socr.
iii. 17, 2; Soz. v. 19, 1.

7 Amm. Marc. xxii. 14, 1 popularitatis amore ; xxii. 7, 1 nimius captator
inanis gloriae.

72 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

of the market. Then he fetched grain himself from the Imperial
granaries and sold it at his own price, and the dealers reappeared as
buyers. Altogether he effected nothing but the irritation of every
class, and jokes about making ropes of his beard were bandied round
the city 1 . He had made himself ridiculous at once with his corn
laws, his sacrifices, his mob of court philosophers (instead of
Constantius' court bishops), his homilies and his pietism. He was
not always very tactful 2 , he lacked ballast, and his virtues won
him as much ill-will as his foibles. With the best intentions, the
purest motives, and the highest character, he had made Antioch
thoroughly hostile, and, the world over, his reformation was producing
disorder and ill-will. He now wrote a " satire " on Antioch, which
he called The Beard-Hater (Misopogon), perhaps as undignified a
production as was ever penned by a monarch 3 . Under cover of
shewing up his own faults, he lets out all his spleen at the Antio-
chenes, till one is really sorry to see the man giving way to such
littleness. The final jest of Antioch was superb. Felix, an officer
of high rank, and Julian, the Emperor's uncle, had recently died,
and the populace went about shouting Felix Julianus Augustus 4
a double entendre, which must have been doubly exasperating for
being strictly loyal. Julian finally left the city, vowing he would
never see them again a vow which was grimly fulfilled and taking
a cruel revenge on his enemies by setting over them a governor well
known to be oppressive 5 .

Julian was now once more in the camp, where his earliest
successes had been won, and where he was less likely to be brought
into humiliating conflicts. He meant to end the long-standing
Persian quarrel which Constantius had left unsettled. That the
expedition had any close connexion with his pagan reformation,

1 Amm. Marc. xxii. 14, 2, gives some other jokes none very brilliant.
Julian, it seems, was a " monkey-face," with a goat's beard and the walk of
Otus and Ephialtes.

2 He confesses to being \a\lffrepos. Ep. 68.

3 Socrates, iii. 58, complains not unjustly TO d Siafftipeiv T) ffKwirTeii> OVK^TI
<j>i\off6<pov dXXo, fjLijv ovdt paffiXtus. Ammianus, an Antiochene, is not at all
pleased with this production of his hero. (xxii. 14, 2.) A keen, almost acrid,
humour ran in the family, Constantine being noted for his fi/juveia, etc.
(Socr. i. 9.) The best instance of Coustantine's humour is his retort to the
Novatian bishop that, if he was so exclusive, he had better take a ladder and
go to heaven by himself.

4 Amm. Marc, xxiii. 1, 4.

5 Ammianus (xxiii. 2, 3) actually says Julian remarked non ilium meruisse
sed Antiochensibus avaris et contumeliosis hujus modi judicem convenire. On
any other authority the story might seem doubtful. Libanius had a great
deal to do to keep this man's energies for paganism within moderately decent
bounds. See Sievers, Libanius, pp. 118 121.

Julian 73

as has been suggested 1 , is, I think, not at all certain. His paganism
seems to have been a hindrance to him here, in shaking the loyalty
of the Christian Armenians' 2 .

Julian set out on a punitive expedition. One or two letters
written by the way survive one telling of a little address on
Hellenism he gave at Beroea to the city council, convincing, he
regretfully adds, but very few, and they were converted already
(Ep. 27). If the expedition was not very richly blessed with
triumphs for Hellenism, it was in other ways more of a success 3 .
The Persians were thoroughly cowed and their land laid waste, till
an unfortunate act of rashness altered the look of things. When he
had gone as far as he meant and was outside Ctesiphon, the capital,
Julian was induced to believe that the fleet of vessels which had
escorted him down the Euphrates was of no further use, and, to
avoid its falling into Persian hands, he gave the fatal order to burn
the ships, only to realize at once, but too late to save them, that it
was a blunder. Even so the retreat might have been free from
disaster but for an accident. The Persian cavalry harassed the
army on its march, and in one of the frequent skirmishes Julian
was fatally wounded. He was carried to his tent, and there he
died after some final words to the friends about him 4 . He surveyed
the principles that had guided him in life, care for his subjects'
good and trust in the wisdom of Providence. He had sought peace,
but when duty called to war he had gone to war, though he had
long well known he was "to die by iron." His life had been
innocent, his conscience was at rest, he had only thanks to the
eternal divinity for the manner of his departure. So he died, and
the Empire had immediate cause to regret his death in the shameful
surrender of Jovian to the Persians. For himself his early death
was probably a good thing, for had he returned victorious, he must
inevitably have been carried into a war without truce against
Christianity, and have stained his name with tyranny and perse-
cution.

As I have already quoted passages at length from his writings, a
word or two will suffice for them in conclusion. They reflect his
personality in a striking way. His style is very fairly good. The

1 Vollert, op. cit., p. 90.

2 See Gwatkin, Studies in Arianism, pp. 209, 210, on the Persian War
an interesting account of it.

3 Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, vol. ii. p. 538.

4 Amm. Marc. xxv. 3, 15.

74 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

effect is marred, however, by a tendency to digression and after-
thought, and an unnecessary concern for side issues 1 . It was not
to be expected that he could help being didactic ; he had a mission,
and in season, and sometimes out of season, he is pleading and
exhorting. His three panegyrics, two on Constantius, the third on
Eusebia, roam off into discussions on education, true kingliuess,
books and so forth. His other five so-called orations are really
treatises. Two are theological, dealing with the Sun and the
Mother of the Gods, but far from clear. Of the other three, which
are concerned with morals, two deal with the Cynics and are a little
wearisome in their fault-finding. The eighth is addressed to himself
a series of reflections to console him for the loss of Sallust.

His letters fall into two classes, those of the elaborate polite type
consisting of a quotation, a compliment, and perhaps an invitation,
many of them addressed to philosophers, and those of a practical
character, some of them edicts, some letters on religious thought
and life, some friendly and intimate. Three long letters stand
apart, those to Themistius and the Athenians, and one which is
fragmentary, and these shew him at his best and most serious.
They give the clearest picture of his manliness, his purity and piety
of the intense earnestness and dutifulness of his nature.

His elaborate work against Christianity has been pieced together
by Neumann so far as possible from the citations of Cyril, who
wrote a book to refute it, as he found it did harm. Like the
Manichaeans he emphasized the readily assailable parts of the
Old Testament in what language did the serpent speak with
Eve ? If all the earth had been made into bricks, could the tower
of Babel have been a success ? Why did Jehovah, if the Universal
God, choose the Jews and neglect the Greeks? What is good in
Moses' law is common to all peoples. Jehovah's character as " a
jealous God" and "an angry God" is really unworthy. The effect
of the Christian books is not (like that of Greek literature) to make
men better it makes them no better than slaves. Old Testament
monotheism cannot be reconciled with the Christian account of
Christ. John first called Jesus God, when he found a mass of
converts in Greek and Italian cities worshipping the tombs of
Peter and Paul. Since then " many fresh corpses have been added
to the old one," and so forth. The difficulties he raised were after

1 Cyril (Neumann, p. 195) complains of his ir\a.Ti> 5ii}f r )l J -- TUV
a very fair criticism.

Julian 75

all obvious, and were felt already. The Church however explained
many of them by the allegorical method, which it seems was legiti-
mate enough for Porphyry. This was no doubt an unscientific
and unsatisfactory treatment of Scripture, but it had this merit
that it enabled the Church to reach a deeper truth and one more
vital than the literal meaning gave ; to escape an obvious interpre-
tation involving an outgrown position ; and to gain for Scripture a
higher value in a spiritual significance, which, if it did not strictly
answer to the view of the original writers, at least corresponded
with Christian experience. Thus Julian's polemic was really beside
the mark. Though he says he knew Christianity, he really did not
know it, and the Christians were right in their allegation that he
did not understand.

Two other books remain, the Misopogon and The Caesars. Of
the former I have spoken. The latter is humorous with an
underlying seriousness. There is a banquet of the gods at which
the Caesars are in turn subjected to criticism, and a select few
are bidden set forth their ideals. While Julius and Constantine
might, perhaps, complain of their treatment (the latter particularly,
as self-indulgence does not seem to have been his aim 1 ), Marcus
Aurelius carries the day, for his theory of life was " the imitation of
the gods." The piece concludes with a burlesque view of Christian
baptism. Constantine rejected by the gods turns to Luxury, who
welcomes him, clothes him with fine robes and takes him to
Profligacy, and " there he found Jesus proclaiming to all, ' Whoever
is a seducer, whoever is a murderer, whoever is accurst and filthy,
let him come boldly ; for I will make him clean at once by washing
him in this water ; and if Jje again fall into the same state, I will
grant to him that, by beating his breast and smiting his head, he
may be cleansed'." So to Jesus Constantine goes, but the avenging
demons overtake him, while Julian is made the special child and
charge of Mithras the Sun-God. I need not, I think, repeat that
Julian did not understand Christianity. As for the rest, let me
quote M. Chassang : " The book of the Caesars is a work of great

1 Julian is always unfair to Constantine, cf. Or. vii. 227 c. Though
Constantino's conduct was not above reproach, his conscience on the question
of chastity was keener than might fairly have been expected, and he at least
contributed to the growth of that tradition of verecundia imperialis which
Ammianus records. See Gwatkin, Studies in Arianism, p. 106, for a wise and
sympathetic judgment on him ; also Seeck, TJntergang der Ant. Welt 2 , i. pp.
65 67. In short, Constantine displays, though with fluctuations, a gradual
development of high character from his accession to empire onwards through
life ; Julian on the other hand degenerated.

76 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

originality. Yet is there not more pride than sureness, more caprice
than justice, in this general reprobation of his predecessors? And
when we reflect that Marcus Aurelius alone is excepted, are we
not led to suppose that Julian a fortiori excepts himself, and that,
in making those who went before him thus stand their trial, he
means to glorify himself at their expense 1 ?"

The general effect of Julian's life was to prove how dead a thing
heathenism was. His Hellenism was not the old religion, it was a
blend of various philosophies with some admixture of Christianity
and more of magic. It testified at once against Greek philosophy,
Greek religion and Greek morals. The philosophy led from nowhere
to nowhere and was a confusion of everything, with nothing in the long
run to rest a life on. The religion was worse, a vacuous and external
thing of ritual, trance and superstition. The morals were, in spite
of Neo-Platonism, essentially uninspired. To reinforce all, Julian
borrowed from the faith he hated borrowed partly consciously, as
when he conceived of the Catholic Church of Hellenism, but largely
unconsciously, and there, perhaps, he shews more conspicuously the
strength of the Church. Of all attempts made by Roman Emperors
to crush the Church, his was the best conceived he alone realizing
that to crush without offering an alternative was impossible, and
the alternative he did offer was the best then conceivable. He saw,
as others had not seen, that it would be easier and more satisfactory
to convince than to force men, and though events seemed trending
to the use of more force as time went on, the fact remains to his
credit that he at all events began by repudiating it. His life was a
failure, and for this his religion is to blame. He had not a strong
nature, and his religion nmde him weaker in the same measure as it
inflamed his conceit by teaching him to fancy himself a god. But
even this is of minor importance. He took the wrong way, and
turning back to a creed and a philosophy outworn he suffered the
fate of all who, from whatever cause, prefer a lower to a higher
truth.

1 Chassang, Hist, du Roman, p. 197.

CHAPTER IV

QUINTUS OF SMYRNA

My songs are now of the sunset ;

Their brows are touched with light,
But their feet are lost in the shadows

And wet with the dews of night.

HENLEY

NOT the least remarkable figure in the history of Greek literature
is Quintus of Smyrna. Not that he is in any great sense of the
word a poet ; not that he has any special gifts of insight and
interpretation, of narrative or style ; but that such a work as his
should be produced at such a time must ever remain a marvel.
The Iliad and the Odyssey belong to the dawn of Greek letters ;
the poem of Quintus was written to complete the story of the Iliad
and to connect it with the Odyssey, and it was written a thousand
years or more after them. The age of Homer, if the name may
be used with perhaps something of a collective sense, may be re-
constructed from his poems. The age of Quintus was removed from
it in every aspect of man's life that can be affected by progress. It
would be difficult to say whether in politics or in economics, in
social, intellectual or religious life, the gulf between the two poets is
widest. There had intervened thirty generations of mankind, who
had seen the rise and fall of the Empires of Athens, of Alexander,
and of the Ptolemies, the growth and decline of the Roman Republic,
the development of the Roman Empire from the veiled monarchy of
Augustus to the open sultanism of Diocletian ; and associated with
these political changes were the names of poets and philosophers,
who had summed and had interpreted in the literatures of Athens,
of Alexandria and of Rome the life and thought of the ages. From
the vivid anthropomorphism of Homer men had climbed to concep-
tions of loftier and purer deity, till the Zeus and Athena of the poet

78 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

were names outworn, and if they still survived they served but to
cloak philosophical abstractions beyond the reach and outside the
needs of the men who first enjoyed the Homeric poems. Strange
and barbarous gods from Egypt and Persia had supplanted the gods
of Greece and Italy with those who were not philosophers. And
slowly Zeus and Athena had joined forces with Isis and Mithras,
enlisting philosopher and devotee, to do battle with another faith,
which had taught men to look death in the face and had risen by
being cut down to rule the world. The labarum ' with its cross and
monogram had proclaimed for half a century to Roman, Persian and
German that the world was Christian, when Quintus wrote his poem
to link the Iliad to the Odyssey. Constantinople had been for
almost as long the seat of the Roman government, when he gave
the world the rest of the story of Troy. And here is the marvel of
his work. There is scarcely a hint that the world has moved since
Homer sang. One allusion is made, and one only, to history, and
apart from this, which is introduced as a prophecy, there are but
two or three slight anachronisms which betray a society later than
Homer's. With the literature of the intervening ages, it has been
maintained with much show of reason that Quintus was unac-
quainted, but for his study of Hesiod and Apollonius Rhodius.
And it was Quintus' endeavour to let it appear that in thought
and faith he stood where Homer had stood, though here it was
harder to deceive posterity, and we shall find evidence against him
in the confusion of his ideas. Yet the illusion is wonderfully
successful, and so far as form and fashion are concerned, the work
of Quintus might at times pass for that of Homer himself. But,
however Homeric, Quintus is not Homer, and as we read we realize
the feeling of the Trojan hero, who sought his wife and found, not
herself, but

infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae.

Still there is an interest, though it may not be a keen one, in the
study of this pale Homer of the fourth century.

Cardinal Bessarion first discovered Quintus in the monastery
of St Nicholas near Otranto, and because this town, once called
Hydruntum, lay in the aneient Calabria, the poet long bore the
surname Calaber, a title as suitable, says his editor Tychsen, as
Sangallensis would be for Quintilian in view of the fact that he was

1 Prud. c. Symm. i. 487 Christus purpureum gemmanti textus in auro Signabat
labarum. The institution of this change is told by Lactantius, M. P. 44.

Quintus of Smyrna 79

first found by Poggio at St Gall. The manuscript bore no name
but Quintus, and there has been much speculation to account for
it. One scholar maintained it was rather the name of the owner of
the manuscript than that of the author of the poem. Another would
have corrected Cointos to Corintos, in order to attribute the author-
ship to a grammarian Corinthos, who unfortunately proved to have
lived in the twelfth century A.D., when such work would have been
flatly impossible. Then who was Quintus ? Was he Aemilius
Macer, who according to Ovid filled in what Homer left out? or
was he Alcibiades ? or perhaps Quintus Ennius, the favourite of
Cicero 1 ? Strange as it may seem, no one has suggested Quintus
Cicero, a most energetic and productive poet, nor the greatest
Quintus of them all, who certainly tells us he thought of writing
in Greek and would have written but for the miraculous intervention
of Quirinus why not as well then as any, Quintus of Venusia?
Time has however settled the question, and a number of references
and quotations in later grammarians make it clear that his name
was Quintus and give no indication that he ever had another. And
as he takes pains to inform us himself, whether he means it or not,
that Smyrna was the home of his youth, he is by common agreement
styled Quintus of Smyrna.

It will readily be supposed that when his name is a matter of
discussion, many questions may be raised about the man himself,
the answers to which must be largely conjectural. As regards his
date all serious critics are very much at one, some putting it toward
the beginning of the fifth century, most however toward the end of
the fourth and roughly about the time of the Emperor Julian. The
evidence for this is almost entirely internal, and the conclusion rests
on the relations of his versification to that of Nonnus and his school,
on the confused character of his paganism and on one or two faint
references to the contemporary world. Arguments dealing with
style have necessarily a subjective element about them, and the
rather large mass of Epic poetry and other poetry in hexameters
produced under the late Roman Empire is little studied to-day.
Yet on the whole it seems agreed that Quintus is earlier than
Nonnus, and this is an aid towards fixing his date. He has one
clear reference to the Roman Empire, which might refer almost
equally well to any Imperial family from Julius to Julian.

The scene is that of the fall of Troy, and Aeneas, like a crafty

1 A new sense for Persius vi. 10 : cor jubet hoc Enni postquam destertuit esse
Maeonides Quintus.

80 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

steersman taking to the boat when the ship is doomed, is leaving
Troy under his mother's guidance. He is remarked by the Greek
seer Calchas, who bids the Greeks to spare him, "for it is decreed
by the glorious counsel of the gods that from the Xanthus he shall
come to the Tiber's broad waters and build an holy city, famous
with posterity, and himself shall reign over mortals of many seeds,
and his race after him shall be kings to the rising and to the setting
of the tireless sun ; yea, and it is granted to him to be with the
immortals, because he is the son of Aphrodite of the glorious locks.
...So spake Calchas and the Greeks obeyed and looked upon Aeneas
as a god, all of them ; and he gat him quickly from his city, whither
his feet bore him in his haste 1 ." This is not Virgil's story, nor
Homer's, and I am sure Quintus never learnt of Juppiter Indiges
from Livy, but he clearly implies a well-established Empire.

A simile from the arena, not unlike one of Claud ian's, has been
used to give a nearer date. The two sons of Atreus find themselves
surrounded, " and, hemmed in on every side, they turned this way
and that, even as boars or lions in the enclosure, on a day when
kings gather men together, and with cruel mind shut them in,
devising an evil destruction for them by great beasts, and they
within the ring tear in pieces the slaves, whosoever cometh near
them ; even so they in the midst did slaughter with a will 2 ." The
Greek word he uses (/Sao-iAev's) served for the Homeric King and was
the usual term for the Roman Emperor. It has been pointed
out that an end was put to the beast-fights about the beginning
of the fifth century, and though games were still held they were
not bloody after that day.

It may be complained that the evidence for his date is not very
strong, but on the whole it must be admitted when everything is
weighed that the margin of error is slight, and while recognizing
that absolute certainty is out of the question we may accept the
general verdict that puts Quintus in the age of Julian.

Sainte-Beuve, in his very interesting study of Quintus, to which
I shall have to refer more than once, remarks that the only
biography we can form of Quintus must deal with his ideas and

1 xiii. 336 343, 350 52. Homer hints at a royal destiny for Aeneas (II. xx.
302 308), but does not particularize. Quintus lacks Virgil's power, as be well
may, but even Dionysius of Halicarnassus (i. 46 47) is more spirited in his tale
of Aeneas holding first the citadel and then Ida, and making terms for an
honourable departure all this from Hellanicus he says. There was yet a fourth
story, that Aeneas was a traitor; and Servius says Virgil knew of it; so
Chassang, Histoire du Roman, p. 364. This last is followed by Gower, Confessio
Amantis, bk i. Hypocrisy. 2 vi. 531 7.

Quintus of Smyrna 81

his character, and this part of the French critic's work is admirable.
The Posthomerica contains one solitary reference to the poet's life,
but for the rest his character and his mind reveal themselves clearly
in the course of the poem. His poverty precludes the possibility of
mistake.

He waits till, in his twelfth book, the Greek heroes are preparing
to enter the Wooden Horse, and then he invokes the aid of the
Muses in dealing with their names. A list rarely lends itself to
poetic treatment and perhaps his invocation was timely, though the
reader will regret that it was unavailing. At all events it gives us
our one piece of knowledge about Quintus. He says : " Tell me,
Muses, in response to my asking of them each and all, who went
down into the capacious Horse. For ye filled my soul with all song,
or ever the down was spread upon my cheeks, when I fed the
splendid sheep in the plains of Smyrna, thrice so far from Hermos
as a shout will carry, by the temple of Artemis, in the free garden,
on a hill not very low nor yet very high '. " Nothing could well be
plainer, and yet Lorenz Rhodoman in the sixteenth century turned
the shepherd into a professor and was sure the splendid sheep were
pupils. If such a theory needs attention at all, it may be said
Bernhardy pronounces that Quintus' grammar and constructions
stamp him as anything but a grammarian or teacher. Sainte-Beuve
reaches a higher plane of criticism, when he says of this passage
that " all is drawn with the precision of reminiscence inspired by
the heart ; every circumstance is given with love." The curious
details were to define the exact region, and one would need to know
the topography of Smyrna to pronounce upon them. I have, I
should say, no confidence at all in my rendering of 'EAeu0epiu> eVt
KIJTTW ; it is a point that requires local knowledge.

Why the poet introduced this personal touch, it is easy to see.
He had before him Hesiod's account of his inspiration by the Muses,
and it encouraged him to tell of his own. Hesiod says he will begin
his Theogony with the Muses "who taught Hesiod a beautiful song,
as he fed his lambs under divine Helicon," for they came to him and
gave him a staff and bade him sing of the race of the blessed who
live for ever, and of themselves first and last and always 2 . There is
the source of Quintus' courage, and while there may be something,
there is probably not very much, in the suggestion that he dwells on
his own Smyrnaean origin because Smyrna was one of the seven or

1 xii. 304311. 2 Theogony 2234.

G. 6

82 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

more birthplaces of Homer. No doubt the city's claim to have
given Homer to the world moved him as it would not have moved
him to remember Polycarp, but to hint that he claimed to be from
Smyrna because he was a second Homer is extravagance. Let us
take him at his word, especially as everything tends to confirm the
literal interpretation of it.

It is when he speaks of his own country, of Lycia, Caria, Lydia,
Phrygia, the Hellespont and so forth, that this second Homer nods
least. He knew the ground and he loved it and dwelt with pleasure
on one and another striking scene. For example, Dresaios is a
person of no consequence, killed on his first appearance in the
story, but he was born near " snowy Sipylus, where the gods turned
Niobe to stone, and her tears still freely flow from the great crag on
high, and with her wail the streams of loud-roaring Hermus and the
long heights of Sipylus, on which ever hangs the mist, the shepherd's
foe ; and she, she is a great marvel to them that pass by, so like is
she to a woman of many sorrows, who mourns a bitter woe and
sheds a thousand tears ; and this thou wouldst say she was of a
truth, when thou sawest her from afar ; but when thou comest near
thereto, it is seen to be the craggy rock, a spur of Sipylus. But
she, fulfilling the baleful wrath of the gods, wails among the rocks,
like unto one in sore grief 1 ." His interest is clearly not in Dresaios
but in Niobe. Now compare the account given about 180 A.D. by
the traveller Pausanias, himself said to be a native of Lydia. " This
Niobe I myself saw when I went up Mount Sipylus. Close at hand
it is a rock, a precipice with no sort of resemblance to a woman,
weeping or otherwise ; but if you go further away, you will think
you see a woman downcast and in tears 2 ."

Again another unimportant warrior, killed at once, had pre-
viously " dwelt in sheep-bearing Phrygia, under the divine cave of
the fair-tressed Nymphs, where once as Endymion slept among
his kine the fair Moon saw him from on high and descended from
heaven ; for keen longing for the youth seized her, immortal virgin
as she was, and to this day is the token of her couch under the
oaks ; for all about it in the glade is the milk of the kine ; and
men see it there still. Looking from afar thou wouldst say it was
white milk, and white water sent it forth, but when it cometh near
it is dried up in its channels and is but rocky ground 3 ." It would

1 i. 294306.

2 Pausanias i. 21, 3: Sophocles, Antigone 823 832; Nonnus ii. 160.

3 x. 126 137. There is some doubt as to the integrity of the passage.

Quintus of Smyrna 83

seem to have been some white marble or an incrustation of some
sort, but I have found no other allusion to it, though Pausanias and
Strabo speak of the shrine and tomb of Endymion being on Mount
Latmos, by the Maeander and just above Heraclea.

There are other similar references to scenery, but let us take the
voyage of Neoptolemus as a stepping-stone to something further.
" And the divine dawn came to the sky ; and to them appeared the
heights of the mountains of Ida, and Chrysa [an island to their left],
and the shrine of Smintheus, and the headland of Sigeum and the
tomb of the prudent son of Aeacus [Achilles], but the wise son of
Laertes shewed it not to Neoptolemus, lest his spirit in his breast
should be troubled. And they passed the Calydnaean islands, and
Tenedos was left behind, and they saw the place of Eleus 1 , where
is the tomb of Protesilaus overshadowed by tall elms, whose tops
wither away so soon as they have seen Ilion, as they shoot upward
from the plain. And the wind bore the boat as they rowed onward
nearer Troy, and they came where by the beach were other ships
of the Argives, who then were being sore bestead as they fought
about the wall they had builded aforetime to be a safeguard for
the ships 2 ."

This is a good passage, but it is hardly Homeric. When
Odysseus sails home from Scheria, he sleeps and is landed asleep.
No points of interest are remarked. But when Aeneas voyages
westward 3 , he cannot do so without Virgil remembering Odysseus'
description of his native islands to Alcinous (Od. ix. 21 24) :

Jam media apparet fluetu nemorosa Zacynthos
Dulichiumque Sameque, et Neritos ardua saxis.
effugimus scopulos Ithacae.

We have Homer's epithet (vA^eo-ora Za*w0os) ; and before very long
another and a different reminiscence follows :

Actiaque Iliads celebramus litora India*.
And then we remember Homer again :

Protinus oerias Phaeacum abscondimus arces.

Koechly marks a lacuna in the middle. I have here followed Zimmermann,
whose remedies for Koechly's lacunae are sometimes heroic, but often helpful.
See Pausanias v. 1, 5; and Strabo c. 636.

1 Eleus, on the Chersonnese, cf. Pliny, N. H. 4, 11 (18), 49; Pausanias i. 34,
2; Arrian i. 11, 5, who all mention Protesilaus. Herodotus ix. 116 has a story
about the stealing of Protesilaus' treasures by a Persian governor. For the
elms, see Pliny, N. H. 16, 44 (88), 238, and Wordsworth's Laodamia.

2 vii. 400416. 3 See the passage in Aen. iii. 270293.

4 Virgil, it seems, followed Varro in letting Aeneas visit Actiuin, but the
memories the name awakened were of an event after Varro's day.

84 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Virgil, in fact, and Quintus would seem to have sailed through
scenes they had read of, and their books were in their minds, just
as the modern traveller sails up the St Lawrence and picks out with
Parkman's aid the positions held by Wolfe as they appear, the
heights of Levis, the Point of Orleans, the East cliffs of the
Montmorency, and then marks the citadel and the plains of
Abraham, and, as the steamer leaves the quays, watches anxiously
for Wolfe's cove, "the little bay with the tall chimney 1 ."

Quintus tells us he was or had been a shepherd, and in agree-
ment with this statement is the remarkable number of similes
drawn by him from country-life and from the calling of the
shepherd in particular. No doubt many of these are imitated from
Homer ; at all events I know of no evidence for the existence of
lions in Western Asia Minor in Quintus' day, and one in ten of his
similes boasts a lion. It may also be noticed how large a pro-
portion of the similes deal with mountain scenery, the sphere of a
shepherd's life. Bush-fires, landslips, storms in the hillside forests,
hunting episodes, rivers in flood, the melting of the snow in the
mountains, the swarming of bees, the flight of locusts, the migration
of cranes, and the frolicking of a calf in a garden, all supply him
with similes. And these have a warmth and a truth about them
and speak of observation rather than of other men's books An
example or two may serve.

As when amid rain the mist hangs upon the mountains, when
the brawling channels are filled with rushing water, and every
torrent roars aloud, and all the shepherds tremble at the floods and
at the mist, dear to the savage wolves and the other beasts, bred in
the depths of the forest 2 ....

As when starlings and jackdaws, on outspread wings, swarm upon
the olive-berries, for desire of the sweet food, nor can the lads for all
their shouting turn them to flight before they eat, for hunger stirs
their soul to shamelessness 3 . ...

1 Conington however, on Aen. iii. 76, and 275, seems to question the accuracy
of some of Virgil's island geography and quotes Clark (Peloponnesus, pp. 20, 21)
who doubts Virgil's "personal acquaintance" with the scenery Aeneas saw
before reaching Italy. In any case Virgil wrote in an age of tours and me-
mories more akin to Quintus' than Homer's. Lechevalier, whose Voyage en
Troade (1829) is referred to by Sainte-Beuve, confirms the truth of Quintus'
topography, praises him with enthusiasm, and wishes his work were really
Homer's own. The first part of this criticism is probably of more value than
the rest.

2 ii. 471.

3 viii. 387. A simile which recalls the most beautiful scene in the Daphnis
and Chloe of Longus (iii. 5, 6), quoted on p. 374.

Quintus of Smyrna 85

As when, upon the shore of the deep-voiced sea, men take the
long ropes from the well-wrought pegs and scatter the long baulks
and timber of a towering raft, and all the broad beach is filled with
them and the black water splashes amidst them '. . . .

It may be said that there is not here perhaps the most perfect
finish in the language, yet there is at least the note of observation
and experience, which tells of country life. One point I have
noticed which is not, I think, to be observed in Homer. Quintus
has a curious habit of watching the horses in his battles. The
plunging of the horse in death, tangled with the chariot and
another horse on top of him, affects him as it does the soldier
in Kipling's ballad Snarleyow. One of the few really living touches
in his account of Troy's capture is his description of how " when the
houses fell, horses and dogs stampeded through the city in terror at
the cruel flames, and with their feet they trod down the dead, and
kept galloping about, a danger to the living." It is the same story
that Zola tells of the horses after the battle of Sedan, and it is
startling to find so vivid and unexpected an episode in Quintus.

On the other hand there is scarcely a trace in Quintus of the
magic that brings the unconscious environment into a real sympathy
with the mind of man. Musaeus, a somewhat later and greater
poet, in his epic-idyll of Hero and Leander, gives the last touch to
the description of the loneliness of Hero's tower with the words :

afi va VVK.TO. KOI ]>
TipfjLfi ovacriv 1

But this is perhaps modern after all. Tennyson, for example, in his
Death of Oenone, a tale avowedly taken from Quintus, puts a
different atmosphere into his scene by telling how the branches of
the vines that covered the mouth of Oenone's cavern

were wither'd long ago,
And thro' the sunless winter morning-mist
In silence wept upon the flowerless earth.

Such treatment is quite beyond Quintus.

Whether Quintus went to the school of rhetoric at Smyrna,
it is impossible, and indeed needless, to say. His education was

1 xi. 309. Allusions to "rafting" in classical literature are rare; but from
what I have seen of it on Lake Ontario his picture seems true. To-day for
ropes, saplings twisted by machinery are used; and "towering" (^X^aros)
would be rather a large word for the rafts I have been on, which rise not more
than a few feet above the water. See Torr, Ancient Ships, p. 122, though the
authors he quotes refer mainly to rafts as used in war.

86 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Homer and little else, and though he has some few of the foibles of
the rhetorical school his taste was really moulded by Homer and
almost by Homer alone. After a careful study of his metre, which
is wonderfully Homeric and varies from Homer's in but a few
insignificant features, Koechly pronounces that Quintus wrote by
ear rather than by written rule, and this means a freedom, an ease,
and a naturalness quite foreign to the school and its artifices. The
difference may be perhaps most readily felt by reading a page of
Quintus and a page of Colluthus, who is a weaker member of the
family of Nonnus.

Homer dominated him, and it was not very strange that it
should be so. Witness is borne to Homer's power at this very time
by the writings of Julian, who was steeped in him, and by the
marvellous tour de force of Apollinaris of Laodicea, who, when
Julian forbade Homer to Christian teachers, made a new Homer out
of the Pentateuch. This work does not survive, and if it did the
student of the Posthomerica would hardly wish to read it.

The great work of Quintus was to bridge the gulf between the
Iliad and the Odyssey. This had perhaps been done long before by
the Cyclic poets, and the question has been raised as to how far
Quintus used them. Schow believed that his work was a mere
cento made from them, in which case one would be surprised to
remark that he never stole a line from Homer not a KCU TTOTC ns

tlirfjo-i ; not an avrap CTTCI TTOO-IOS ; perhaps not even a TOV 8' a.ira/j.fL-

/3o/ievos. As a matter of fact however, the right view of the case
has been put by Tychsen, who on reading and re-reading the book
found the same quality throughout which is fatal to the theory
that half of it was Arctinus and half Lesches. Koechly also shews
that in a large number of cases Quintus did not follow the versions
given by the Cyclici of famous episodes, that he owed far more to
the handbooks of mythology, and finally that in all likelihood he
never so much as saw the Cyclici. To this one may add that, while
the manner of writing is the same, there is a great change at book
xii., where the fighting stops, and the Wooden Horse is built. Here
and in the story of the capture of Troy and the departure of the
Greeks, there was no Homer for him to follow, and one realizes
then how very dependent on the Iliad he has been throughout. A
fight between Eurypylus and Neoptolemus can be modelled quite
well on one in Homer, but when Homer will no longer serve and the
poet is left to his own devices, he flounders terribly and has to fall
back on a storm at sea to finish his book. His task in the actual

Quintus of Smyrna 87

taking of Troy was a hard one. Virgil's was easier, for he had to
tell the story of one man's part in it. Napoleon found even Virgil's
account deficient from a military point of view, but it has a unity
and a completeness as the tale of Aeneas' experience. Quintus
gives us nothing but a string of second-hand horrors, without
movement or connexion, neither Greek nor Trojan having any plan
of action.

Of course he has a few anachronisms, but he falls far short of
Virgil in this. His heroes ride on horseback; they torture Sinon
to get the truth out of him J ; and Odysseus suggests and tries the
formation known as the testudo. More noticeable are series of
portents which he intermittently gives. Omen and portent are rare
if they occur at all in the Iliad, and though they are found in the
Odyssey they are not so awful as in Quintus, who piles them up after
the manner of Lucan, some of them curiously like thosfe familiar to
the reader of Livy. We may also remark a difference from Homer
in the gentler character of the warriors when not engaged in actual
fighting, who "have respect unto the slain," "for there is no wrath
against the dead, for they are to be pitied and are foemen no longer
when once their life is gone 2 ." The most remarkable example of
this new feeling is the sudden love of Achilles for the maiden-
warrior Penthesilea, whom he has just slain. The episode is hardly
Homeric, but it has justly won the warm praise of Sainte-Beuve.

This last feature appears in the story of Ajax and the arms of
Achilles, to which we may give some further consideration There
is an allusion to the quarrel of Ajax and Odysseus in the Odyssey,
but no hint that Ajax thought of murdering the Greek captains.
The arms were awarded on the decision of the Trojan captives
and Athena 3 . Pindar lets the Greek chiefs decide "by secret
votes." Sophocles, in taking the theme for a tragedy, was bound
to adopt a less simple version of the story, which would allow
more variety of character and motive, but was in consequence less
epic in its movement. Quintus however was writing an epic, and
realized that Sophocles' rendering was not for him, and his work has
a simplicity, and his characters a nobility, in striking contrast with
the play.

1 Even the gentle Synesius countenanced this method of examination. Ep.
44, 1373 A.

2 ix. 38; i. 809. Compare Virgil, Aen. xi. 304. We must not however forget
Od. xxii. 412 oi>x oaitj Kra^voiffiv tir' &v8pcuTii> tvxera,a.ffOai..

3 Od. xi. 547. Aristarchus however rejects the line, but W. Christ and others
maintain that it is the oldest form of the story. Probably Quintus had no
doubts.

88 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

When the arms were first set out by Thetis and claimed by the
two heroes, Nestor, with some pertinent remarks on the wisdom of
age, suggested that the decision should rest with some Trojan
captives, and Agamemnon accepted the proposal. Then the two
heroes rose and pled. Here Quintus was going outside Homer, but,
as their pleadings had long been themes for declamation in the
schools, he had little to do but to go along the lines laid down. There
are in fact close resemblances between the speeches in Quintus and
in Ovid's Metamorphoses, but Ovid is three times as long as Quintus.
More than that, Ovid, as might have been expected, puts into the
mouths of the Homeric warriors speeches too full of quirks and
conceits for the Roman bar. There is no difference between Ajax
and Odysseus ; both make neat little points and both are practised
rhetoricians, veised in every artifice and prettiness The warriors
in Quintus are true to Homer Quintus never has the strength of
Homer, but he has at least the manner, and the speeches are not
the terrible anachronisms of Ovid. Each says his say and
emphasizes his own good points, and each makes a short rejoinder
in conclusion, and the arms are given to Odysseus.

But here Quintus broke down and described how the madness
came on Ajax, giving a list of symptoms', which betrays that he too
had studied rhetoric, and had forgotten the wisdom of Hesiod that
the half is more than the whole. In this state Ajax was led away.
Then, fearing he would do mischief, Athena allowed the madness to
fall heavily upon him, and with a series of similes Quintus lets us
see him kill the sheep. Raging like a storm at sea, or a wild beast
robbed of her whelps, or a bush-fire, or Orion, or a lion falling upon
sheep, Ajax, his heart seething like a cauldron, threw himself upon
the sheep and scattered them as the North wind scatters the leaves.
Then he regained his senses, made a short soliloquy, debating on
the courses open to him and cursing the Greek chiefs, and plunged
Hector's sword into his neck. His speech shews, I think, points of
contact with the two speeches of Sophocles, but this is implicitly
denied by good critics.

The most marked divergence from the tragedy follows. The
play dealt, according to Professor Jebb, with the death and burial
of Ajax, the latter being as important as the former. But there is

1 A similar deluge of pathology overtakes us, when Quintus tells of Laoeoon,
who was not, though his sons were, devoured by the snakes, but suffered blind-
ness. Many and grievous were his symptoms, ical tdpaice Snr\6a Travra. (xii.
411).

Quintus of Smyrna 89

no such question in Quintus. Tecmessa mourns her widowhood
and looks forward to slavery, but Agamemnon reassures her,
promising that, on the contrary, the Greeks will honour her as if
she were a goddess, as if Ajax yet lived ; while Odysseus, if a little
prosy, expresses his regret at what has occurred and wishes he
could have foreseen it, for then he would himself have given the
arms to Ajax (For this Quintus seems indebted to the Odyssey,
where Odysseus makes the remark to Alcinous.) Ajax is then
buried with all pomp, "for they honoured him as much as
Achilles," and the burning of his body was as the burning of
Herakles.

It cannot be said that Quintus generally reaches the measure of
success he attained in the episode of Ajax He had before him a
large mass of traditions, many inconsistent with one another. It
was difficult to deal with them without modifications, but though
Quintus might select, he did not dare to modify. The story of
Ajax permitted a reasonable treatment, but that of Philoctetes
was harder. No valid explanation is given of the desertion of the
suffering hero. He was healed too easily "swifter than thought"
by Podalirius on his arrival at the camp, and, though it is ex-
plained that Athena aided in this marvellous recovery, it seems odd
still that some attempt had not been made at first. Nor is it very
clear why he should have consented to come to Troy. The ex-
planation of his abandonment, given on the island by Odysseus, is
that no one was responsible for it but Fate, and so says Agamemnon
later on. Men are driven by Fate as leaves by the winds, so a wise
man must endure what comes his way. To this Philoctetes merely
says briefly that he understands all this and suggests going to bed
if they mean to fight next day. I do not think Quintus intended
any humour here, but it would help the situation. Assuming then
that for some inscrutable reason Philoctetes allows that no one is
responsible for the wrong done him, and that he is willing to come
to Troy, it cannot be seen in Quintus that he effects anything of
the slightest consequence. The slaying of Paris cannot be con-
sidered a heavy loss to the Trojans, though he is a respectable
warrior in the Posthomerica. Yet we were told how, before his
coming, battle raged, " till, bidden by Calchas, the Greeks withdrew
to their ships, and forgot their toils, for it was not fated that Ilion
should be conquered before the mighty Philoctetes, skilled in
tearful war, came to the throng of the Greeks 1 ." The idea of some

1 ix. 325329.

90 Ldfe and Letters in the Fourth Century

kind of moral satisfaction being the cause is precluded by the
Greeks' conviction that they were guiltless of any sin against him.

Again, there is a strange passage in book x. Hera is greatly
cheered by the death of Paris, and the four Seasons tell her of the
future course of the war, outlining with some precision events,
which may have occurred but which are entirely omitted by Quintus in
the remainder of his narrative. The capture of the Palladium is to
be the turning point of the war, and no allusion is made to it. It
has been suggested that the poem wanted the poet's final revision 1 ,
but the last three books, as I have said, are beyond revision. To
be mended they must have been re-written. In view of this it is
going too far tb suggest that Quintus wanted time. What he
needed was something very different.

Yet Quintus was not without some of the gifts of the poet. He
had the instinct to keep to the Homeric simplicity and to avoid
the rhetoricians et dona ferentes*. Though, as we have seen, he
owes them a little here and there, he is not a rhetorical poet. His
verse is singularly Homeric in tone, though in no servile way. He
abjures Homeric " tags," as he does the dainty but monotonous
rhythm of Nonnus, which is more suited to the idyll than to the
epic. There is a good deal of variety and freedom in his rhythm,
and its excellence is remarked by all the critics. Here perhaps he
is at his strongest.

He suffers from length, from copia rather than in&pia to quote
Tychsen. Pauw goes even further and declares that a third of
him might have been removed with advantage, and perhaps he is
right, but we must take the poet's work as he left it, redundant
and iterative as it is. He has to express a Homeric idea, and
Homer has done it in the directest way, so Quintus has to try
another with the result that he is longer and less effective. For
example, when Patroclus' body is burnt, Achilles says " let us
gather up the bones of Patroclus, Menoetius' son, singling theni
well, and easy are they to discern, for he lay in the middle of the
pyre, while the rest apart at the edge burnt confusedly, horses and
men 3 ." When Quintus describes the same being done for Achilles,

1 Tychsen, p. li ; Eohde (der gr. Roman, p. 110, n. 5) believes this little
batch of prophecies to have been carelessly copied from the Hellenistic poet
whom he supposes Quintus followed in the story of Oenoue.

2 What the rhetoricians had made of the actual story of Troy may be read in
Chassang, Histoire du Roman, part iii. c. 5, on Philostratus' Heroicus, Dares
and Dictys.

3 II. xxiii. 239242.

Quintus of Smyrna 91

he says, " And his bones were clear to behold, for they were not
like unto the others, but as it were the bones of a mighty giant, nor
indeed were others mixed with them, since the kine and the horses
and the sons of the Trojans, confusedly with other slain also, lay a
little apart round about the corse, and he in the midst, overcome by
the breath of Hephaestus, lay alone 1 ." He has tried to say a little
more than Homer but has achieved less.

He is chiefly praised for his similes, to which I have alluded,
but here again he suffers from excess. When Homer adds simile
to simile, each illustrates some new point, but it cannot be said that
Quintus' comparisons always effect their purpose. Too often they
block the narrative. We have seen how they tumble over one another
when he describes the madness of Ajax. Yet it is in his similes
that he is after all most successful, which implies unhappily that his
general work is not successful. It is one of the marks of the
rhetorical school, that it endeavours to storm the reader's admira-
tion by a rapid series of brilliant attacks, blow upon blow, and
sometimes it succeeds as in the case of Lucan, and perhaps of
Claudian, though his case is rather different. Quintus, either from
judgment or want of strength, avoids the manners of the school,
antithesis, mythology, obscurity and other Alexandrine arts, but he
is not strong enough or wise enough to resist the temptation to
carry the reader by a brilliant use of simile. It is a half measure, a
compromise between the rhetorician and the poet, and it fails. Still
we must admit that if his similes, as too often his epithets, are not
always wholly appropriate, they are at least very often happy in the
sympathy they shew with wild nature and country life. Some of
them, to quote Sainte-Beuve, are "refreshing, exact and un-
common."

But more than rhythm and taste and the power to describe ex-
ternal scenes is required of a poet, and it may be asked if Quintus has
the higher gifts. It may seem from what I have already said that I
have already given judgment. But first let us take the judgments
of scholars and critics. Tychsen found passages in the Postho-
merica "worthy of a great poet," while the faults were in some
measure due to a " great and fertile nature." Koechly brushes aside
such estimates as "the fond imaginations of lovers and not the
judgments of critics," pronouncing Quintus to be without any really
poetic faculty, his characters devoid of flesh and blood and his

92 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

poem of unity. Bernhardy is still more savage and declares that
Quintus " registers his material without the slightest psychological
consideration." On the whole the scholars are against Quintus.

Turning to another school, we find Sainte-Beuve has a remark-
ably high opinion of Quintus, whom he finds simple and easy in
style, possessed of affection and sensibility, able to describe striking
scenes with exactness and truth, and, in short, well worthy of study.
Of the story of the death of Paris he writes, " Ceci est de la
grande et vraie passion, de la pure et sincere nature; je donne
entier tout ce morceau, admirable selon moi et le plus beau du livre
de Quintus. ...II me semble qu'il ne se peut rencontrer dans un rdcit
dpique, de scene plus profonde'ment naturelle et plus moralement
einouvante. . . . II avait certes un grand talent, celui qui h une e'poque
de decadence savait ainsi choisir, dlaguer les circonstances frivoles
et vaines, et rendre ou conserver a ses re'cits un cachet de re'alite'
qui les fait paraitre inte'ressants encore aujourd'hui et si e'mouvants
par endroits."

And yet Sainte-Beuve had read Koechly's introduction to the
poet 1 . Whether Tennyson referred to any of these editors and
critics or formed his views on independent study alone, his judg-
ment is as clear and, I think, as true here as in the cases of Virgil
and Catullus. In his dedication of The Death of Oenone he bids the
Master of Balliol lay down his Plato for one minute,

And read a 'Grecian tale re-told,
Which, cast in later Grecian mould,

Quiutus Calaber
Somewhat lazily handled of old.

Has Quintus indeed that realization of life, that feeling for
humanity, which Virgil sums up in such lines as

Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tanguntl

Do his men and women suffer real anguish, feel a real smart, or
know " infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn " as
Virgil's do ? Sainte-Beuve admits he is not a Virgil. Few episodes
in the Aeneid are so terribly true as the story of Mezentius and
Lausus. Quintus has a somewhat similar opportunity in the story
of Nestor and Antilochus. But he does little more than remark
that " no more cruel sorrow comes on mortal men than when sons

1 Mr Andrew Lang (Contemporary Review, Aug. 1882) says "The Argonautica
of Apollonius Ehodius seems to me a much less moving poem, much less
Homeric in spirit, than the Posthomerica."

Quintus of Smyrna 93

are slain before a parent's eyes." (Virgil omitted to say this.) He
continues ; Nestor was grieved in his heart and called to his other
son, "Rise Thrasymedes, glorious of renown, that we may drive the
slayer of thy brother and my son away from the poor corse, or
ourselves upon him complete the tearful sorrow. But if there is
fear in thy breast, thou art not my son nor of the stock of Pericly-
menos, who dared to stand even against Herakles. But come let us
toil, for necessity ofttimes gives great strength to men doing battle,
though they be of little worth." Memnon warns him to go away
and he goes, remarking that he had once been a better man, but
now retired like an old lion before a sheep-dog. At the beginning
of the next book the Greeks wail for Antilochus, " but Nestor was
not greatly overcome in mind, for it is the part of a wise man to
bear a grief bravely, and not abjectly to give way to grief." So, very
soon (a day or two later) we find him chanting a hymn in honour of
Thetis and Achilles, when the sea-nymph was giving the funeral
games for her son. Of course we may remember Virgil's at pius
Aeneas after the last scene with Dido, but there is a difference.

Quintus delivers himself of two reflexions in this story and they
may serve to shew his manner. Where Homer and Virgil draw a
man and let us see him suffering, doing battle, working, and leave us
to feel with him, Quintus explains his feelings. It may be an
affectation, an attempt to reproduce the epic simplicity, but it is a
false simplicity simplesse. Homer could hardly have shewn us
Andromache a widow and explained that " great grief springs up for
honourable women when a husband dies 1 ." Priam asks the young
Neoptolemus to kill him that he may die and forget his sorrows, and
he replies, " Old man, ready and willing am I whom thou biddest.
For I will not leave thee, being a foeman, among the living;
for there is nothing dearer to men than life 2 ." When the Trojans
fall into a drunken slumber after their feast of triumph, we are
informed that darkness covered their sight, " for the eyes and mind
of young men are darkened by strong drink, when it cometh into
their heart in plenty 3 ."

Perhaps his best episode is that of Deidamia. It is quiet and,
it may be, a little obvious, a theme, therefore, well suited to the
gentle mind of the poet. A mother's emotions, when her son goes to
battle, are intense but not complicated. Hence Quintus can treat
them with truth and feeling. In one or two points his treatment

i i. 116. a xiii. 23840. 3 xiii. 11.

94 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

recalls Claudian's picture of the sorrow of Ceres for the lost
Proserpine. Once before Quintus makes a touching reference to
such a theme, when he tells how Thetis " bethought her of her own
son, as she looked on Ajax ; and sorrow fell upon her soul 1 ."

Odysseus and Diomedes went to Scyros to fetch Neoptolemus,
and that night "sweet sleep came not to Deidamia as she remembered
the name of the wily Odysseus and of the godlike Diomedes, the
twain who widowed her of war-loving Achilles, prevailing upon his
brave soul that he should come to the war; and the Fate that
turneth not away met him and cut off his return and brought
infinite sorrow to his father Peleus and to her, Deidamia. Therefore
fear unspeakable held her heart lest, if her son went to the war,
sorrow should be added to bitter sorrow." She asks her son, " Why
is thy stout heart set on going with the strangers to tearful Ilion
("!\LOV es Tro\v8a.Kpv), where many fall in the cruel fight, though
they know war and battle ? And now thou art young and knowest
not yet the works of war, that ward off from men the evil day.
But hearken thou unto me and abide in thy home, lest an ill report
come to me from Troy that thou art fallen in the battle."

Neoptolemus however was a fatalist and would go. " And he
with a bright smile was eager to hasten to the ship. But his
mother's tearful whispers (Sa/cpvdeis oaptoyxo's) stayed him yet in the
hall... and she, grieved to her heart, was yet proud of her son."
When he had gone, she lamented like a bird over an empty nest,
" and now she threw herself on her son's bed and wept aloud, and
now by the posts of the door ; and she put in her bosom any toy
that there was in the house, wherewith when a tiny child he had
delighted his tender heart. And for his sake, if perchance she saw
some javelin left behind, oft and again she kissed it, and aught of
her son's that she saw through her tears. But he heard no more
the ceaseless weeping of his mother, but went unto the swift ship 2 ."

The story of Oenone's death is well known. Paris was at last
wounded by a poisoned arrow of Philoctetes, and knew none could
cure him but Oenone. She would not and he died. Too late she
repented and threw herself on his funeral pyre. Erwin Rohde 3 , who
speaks of the narrative as one of real feeling which stands out " in
the wilderness of Quintus," believes the tale to be of Alexandrine
origin. Quintus' treatment displays once more an epic simplicity.

1 iv. 498.

2 vii. 240345.

3 Der griechische Roman, p. 110, n. 5, and generally pp. 109 112.

Quintus of Smyrna 95

He omits the additional feature used by William Morris in The
Earthly Paradise, and does not tell how Oenone brought Paris
back to life and how, when with returning consciousness his first
word was " Helen," she let him die.

Paris, says Quintus, went to Oenone " against his will, but dire
necessity led him to his wife's face " while birds of ill omen hung
and screamed around him. "And thus he spake with his faint
strength : lady wife, hate me not in mine anguish, that of old
I left thee a widow in thy house, not of mine own will, but the
Fates that none may escape led me to Helen, and would that before
I had known her bed I had died in thy embrace ! But come ! by
the gods who dwell in heaven, and by thy bed and our wedlock,
have a gentle heart, and - stay my cruel pain, putting upon the
deadly wound drugs that shall avail, that are fated to drive grief
from the heart, if thou wilt. For it rests with thee to save
me from grim death or not ; but take pity quickly and stay the
strength of the swift-slaying arrows, while still my force and my
limbs abide ; nor remembering baleful jealousy leave me to die
unpitied at thy feet. It were a deed displeasing to the Litai
(Prayers) who are the daughters of thundering Zeus and in anger at
such as are overweening stir up against them the dread Fury and
wrath ; but do thou, lady, ward off the Fates and quickly, even if
I have sinned at all in folly."

There are wasted words in this, otiose epithets and draggling
clauses, but that is not all. There is a suggestion of the sensualist,
selfish and peevish, who has hardly a word of regret, hardly a
thought of his baseness, and is in more hurry to be healed than to
offer any amends for his treachery. If this were, as may be said,
Paris' true character, why allude so terribly directly to Helen?
Tennyson has borrowed a good deal from Quintus here, but the
speech as a whole is very different.

' Oenone, my Oenone, while we dwelt
Together in this valley happy then
Too happy had I died within thine arms,
Before the feud of Gods had marr'd our peace,
And sunder'd each from each. I am dying now
Pierced by a poison'd dart. Save me. Thou knowest,
Taught by some God, whatever herb or balm
May clear the blood from poison, and thy fame
v Is blown thro' all the Troad, and to thee
The shepherd brings his adder-bitten lamb,
The wounded warrior climbs from Troy to thee.

96 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

My life and death are in thy hand. The Gods
Avenge on stony hearts a fruitless prayer
For pity. Let me owe my life to thee.
I wrought thee bitter wrong, but thou forgive,
Forget it. Man is but the slave of Fate.
Oenone, by thy love which once was mine,
Help, heal me. I am poison'd to the heart.'
'And I to mine' she said 'Adulterer,
Go back to thine adulteress and die ! '

So writes Tennyson, and every line is a criticism. Of course it
was not to be expected that Quintus should look at the story in the
same way. Some of his plain-spokenness is an endeavour after epic
simplicity and directness, yet it may be doubted if Homer would
have told the same tale as his imitator.

Oenone's reply is long (20 lines) and sarcastic, but on a sudden
another strain appears. " "Would that I had at my heart the great
strength of a wild beast, to rend thy flesh and then to lap thy
blood, for the woes thou hast given me in thy wickedness." She
bids him go "a curse, a grievous curse to gods and men; for
because of thee, wretch, mourning has befallen the immortals too,
some for sons and some for grandsons slain. But go from my house
and betake thee to Helen, by whose bed it befits thee to whimper
night and day in dudgeon, pierced with bitter grief, till she heal
thee of thy sore pains." Hecuba breaks out in a similarly savage
strain in the Iliad, and Zeus taunts Hera with a readiness to eat
Priam raw and Priam's sons, but after all Paris was a suppliant and
in distress, and the coarse vein in Oenone, though not alien from
the Greek character, gives an unpleasant impression. The reference
to the gods, who lost some their sons and some their grandsons, may
be primitive in its exactness, but hardly seems probable.

As in the case of Philoctetes' abandonment, no guilt seems to
attach to those who have done the cruel deed. They are merely
automata in the hands of Fate, a point to be remembered in view
of what follows.

For if there is one thing Quintus takes pains to assert, it is the
supremacy of Fate. Of course he has the Homeric gods, but they
are dull and bloodless, ornaments more than agents. The con-
ception of Fate however appears in three forms ; there are the
Keres, there is Aisa, and there is Moira. The first chiefly appear
with death Odvarov KO.L Krjpa //.e'Aeuvav. Yet the functions of them
all overlap and nice distinctions are hardly to be drawn ; but Aisa
and Moira have perhaps a wider range of activity.

Quintus of Smyrna 97

The Keres hang about the doomed man, pitiless, robbing him of
his senses, deceiving him and exulting in his doom. The gods
cannot check them, and though Quintus follows Homer in the
occasional use of a phrase virlp xr/pas where people narrowly make
lucky escapes, yet the Keres are normally and properly inevitable

Aisa and Moira similarly dog the doomed, deceive him and
cannot be escaped, but Quintus has a little more to say of them.
Of Aisa, Calliope says to Thetis " Dost thou not know that about
all men upon earth, about them all, the baleful Aisa, the invincible,
hangs, recking not even of the gods, such strength has she alone ?
And she shall sack Priam's rich city, slaying of Trojans and of
Greeks whomsoever she will, and there is no god that shall stay
her 1 ." When in battle a Trojan prayer rose for deliverance, "the
gods heeded not at all, for other was the mind of Aisa, giver of
mourning ; and she regarded not mighty Zeus, nor any of the other
immortals ; for her dire mind is not to be changed, whatsoever be
the lot she spin with inevitable thread for men at their birth, for
men and for cities ; but under her, this will fall and that rise*."
Again, "not even Zeus himself can easily put aside Aisa beyond
what is fated, Zeus who excels all the immortals in power, and of
Zeus are all things 3 ." Aisa made Ajax to sin and before her men
are like leaves before the wind 4 .

Moira sometimes appears in the plural. The Moirai are
daughters of holy Chaos (tcpov Xaos iii. 756) and Zeus yields to
them. They control the varying destinies of men. The most
curious passage is where Nestor is comforting Podalirius for the
death of his brother. First he tries one line the fatalist's.

" On high, good things and bad lie on the knees of the gods, a
myriad all mingled; and of the immortals none seeth them, for
they may not be foreseen and are covered in thick darkness. And
on them Moira alone layeth her hands, and without looking she
flingeth them from Olympus to earth; and they fly hither and
thither as on the breath of the wind. And often great sorrow
overwhelms a good man, and to a bad cometh wealth unmerited.
Man's life is blind, therefore he walketh not in safety but stumbleth
oft with his feet, and his changing steps turn now to sorrow and

1 iii. 649 654. The gods themselves might not care to stay her, if we may
trust Thetis (xii. 206) "It befits not, when Zeus is angry, that for men, mere
men ([uvwdadluv), the eternal ones should fight."

2 xi. 2717. 3 xiv. 98100. 4 v. 594 and ix. 502.

G. 7

98 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

now to good ; and none among mortals was ever wholly happy."
The moral is endurance, but a world governed by pure chance has
small consolation for the bereaved, and as Podalirius will not so be
comforted, Nestor drops fatalism and tries another approach before
he ceases to speak. So in one speech we have two distinct theories
of the universe not to say three.

" Hope ever for the better ; for there is a saying (<cms) among
men that the good go to heaven that fadeth not, but the bad man
to hateful darkness. And thy brother was both kind to mortals
and the son of a god, and I think that he will ascend to the race
of the gods by the bidding of his sire 1 ."

" II ne faut pas trop presser la the'ologie du vieillard de Pylos,"
says Sainte-Beuve, who justly describes the general philosophy of
Quintus as "the paganism of the second or third period." It
blends certain elements of fatalism, a hint of a Neo-Platonic
heaven, and a preference for the salvation of the well-born which
is neither one thing nor the other, but is perhaps a good deal
nearer Homer than either.

The other world offers great uncertainties to Quintus, for which
he may be forgiven 2 . We have seen Nestor's views, and there are
other cases, which add to the confusion. Memnou after his death
is, we learn, "in the house of Hades, or else with the blessed on the
Elysian plain 3 ." Paris is uncertain about Hector's lot, but proposes
a course of action to please him "if indeed there be for men in
Hades either mind or law 4 ." When Achilles dies, Poseidon
tells his mother of his future shrine at Leuce and his glory as
Pontarches, Lord of the Euxine, a position he actually held till
displaced by St Phocas of Sinope after Quintus' day 5 . Agamemnon
speaks of him as with the immortals, and when he appears to his
son in a vision he says the same. Homer had him a ghost with
other ghosts below, and ignorant alike of the story of his own
burial and of his son's prowess. The bitter cry of Achilles to
Odysseus in the Nekyia, is famous " Rather would I live on ground

1 vii. 70 92. This happy destination of the "good" is the theme of
Macrobius' long Commentary on Scipio's Dream. So Hermes Trismegistus
(Ed. Bipont. Apuleius ii. p. 312), but he, like Claudian, says nothing of rank
counting, and anticipates a strict examination of merits by the summits daemon.

2 It may be pled that Virgil handles the next world with some uncertainty,
but after all his fluctuations are distinctly within narrower limits, and his
greatness, lying in another direction, is unaffected.

3 ii. 650.

4 iii. 197.

5 On the worship of Achilles at Borysthenis, a Greek town on the Dnieper,
see Dio Chrysostom, Borystheniticug, 9, 14, 25.

Quintus of Smyrna 99

as the hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great
livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead that be departed."
A similar divergence may be remarked between Homer and his
imitator, when the one speaks of the dead at Troy and the other of
Herakles. The wrath of Achilles "sent to Hades many strong
souls of heroes and gave themselves (avrovs i.e. their bodies) to be a
prey to dogs and all winged fowls." But when Herakles was burnt
on Oeta " his soul left the goodly man and mingled with the air,
and himself (auro's) was enrolled among the gods, when earth had
received his long-suffering body 1 ." Here a man's selfhabS travelled
from meaning his body to be his soul.

Now there falls to be added to the confusion another element.
We have seen the pleas advanced to Philoctetes and Oenone, that
the wrong-doer is the victim of fate, which implies that there is
no such thing as guilt or sin. Even so we saw that prayers
rejected become avengers, which implies that there is guilt. Is
there such a thing or not ? No blame is to be attached to Helen,
says Agamemnon, for the fault was all Paris', and therefore has he
been requited. Quintus accepts this view, and though Helen feels
some shame, as Aphrodite might in the lay of Demodocus, the Greeks
look on her as a goddess, as of course they had to in view of the
Odyssey. This distinction between guilt and freedom from guilt is
frail and will not stand rough usage. Quintus however manages to
put it immediately side by side with some reflexions on the fall of
Troy. "Justice, chief among the gods, brought much evil on the
Trojans, for they first wrought evil deeds in Helen's case, and first
did despite to oaths, hard men, when in the wickedness of their
heart they trampled under foot the dark blood and the sacrifices of
the gods ; wherefore the Erinnyes wrought woe for them thereafter
and so they perished, some before the wall and some in the city as
they feasted with their fair- tressed wives 2 ."

1 v. 6479. It may be objected that in the Odyssey (xi. 601604) Herakles'
image is with the dead -etdu\ov airrbs 5e per' adavaroun Oeoiffi T^p-n-erai but the
distinction is probably post-Homeric and an addition while the antithesis is not
the same as in Quintus. Herakles at all events met the common fate of man,
without achieving divinity, in the Iliad (xviii. 117 9). Quintus may be illus-
trated by the words of Hermes Trismegistus (the Latin translation printed with
Apuleius' works but not his, Ed. Bipont. Apul. vol. ii. p. 321) on Asclepius,
in quo ejus jacet mundanus homo, id est, corpus, reliquus enim vel potius totus, si
est homo totus in sensu vitae melior, remeauit in caelum. See Geddes, Problem of
Homeric Poems, p. 149.

2 xiii. 377 384. There immediately follow- the recovery of Helen and
Agamemnon's plea, helped out by the special intervention of Aphrodite who
gives her fresh beauty.

100 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

That nothing may be wanting, the ghost of Achilles appears to
his son in the character of Polonius and all but quotes Hesiod to
him '. He explains that he is now with the gods, " forbear then to
be troubled for me, but put might into thy heart. Ever stand first
among the Greeks, yielding place to none in courage ; but in debate
hearken unto older men, and all will call thee wise. Honour such as
are blameless and have wisdom abiding with them, for the good is a
friend to the good, and the grievous man to the froward. But if
thou think what is good, good shall befall thee. But that man
never reached the goal of Virtue, who had not a righteous mind ;
for the stem of her is hard to climb and her shoots reach unto the
sky, but such as strength and toil attend, win from their labour
pleasant fruit, when they have ascended the goodly tree of Virtue
of the fair garland. But come, be valiant, nor in thy wisdom vex
thy mind overmuch for sorrow, nor delight greatly in good fortune,
but let thy heart be gentle to thy friends and thy sons and to
women. Men are like the flowers of the grass, withering and
blooming. Therefore be tender, and tell the Greeks, and most of
all Agamemnon, Atreus' son, if they remember all my travail about
the city of Priam, and the prey I took ere we came to Troy, to grant
me according to my desire, from among the booty of Priam, the
well-clad Polyxena 2 , that they sacrifice her with speed, for I am yet
angry and more than aforetime for Briseis," and, as ruler of Pontus
no doubt, he will raise a storm against them if they do not. So
Polyxena is sacrificed, and if Achilles does not raise a storm,
Athena does, in alarm lest, if Ajax the son of Oileus go un-
punished, men will not heed the gods and justice and shame perish
utterly. And with the elaborate drowning of Ajax, Quintus ends
his poem.

Our study has been long and tiresome, and what is the con-
clusion ? " The gods give not all things at once unto men, but by
some destiny evil standeth hard by good. So for Nireus, the king,
along with fair loveliness was ordained impotence 3 ." Quintus tells us
of the weariness and exhaustion of his age which could admire but not
create, which could echo the words of the thinker but not realize his
thought, and which clung to the past because it did not believe in the

1 xiv. 180222.

2 Chassang, op. cit. 368, remarks how utterly Quintus ignores the romance
that had, since classical times but long before his day, been woven round Achilles
and Polyxena (see Philostratus, Heroicus 323). This romance was one of the
most popular in the middle ages.

3 vii. 11.

Quint/us of Smyrna 101

future. It may be said they felt, as the Church did not yet feel, the
value of beauty, but the beauty they loved wanted life, and the life
within the Church was in time to give birth to richer and fuller
beauty than they knew, to beauty embodying more of truth and
containing more elements of permanence.

Quintus with many another stood midway between the fervent
Julian and the bitter Palladas. He loved the Homer Julian loved,
but had he been able to understand his own mind, he would have
realized that his thought was as godless and as hopeless as that of
Palladas. But he did not understand, and the sense of life's hollow-
ness only came on his gentle soul now and then, and was lost again
in the dreamy pleasantness of living in the country and completing
Homer.

CHAPTER V

AUSONIUS

Possem absolute dicere,
sed dulcius circumLoquar
diuque fando perfruar.

Ep. xii. (xvi.) 79

THE amiable Gibbon 1 remarks that the "poetical fame of
Ausonius condemns the taste of his age." So cultured a man
as Symmachus, the Pliny of his time and the mouthpiece of Roman
paganism, declares on his honour that he ranks Ausonius' poem
on the Moselle with the works of Virgil 2 . If corroboration be
needed for the statement of a heathen, St Paulinus of Nola supplies
it. He gently deprecates being called a yokefellow of Ausonius ;
"scarce Tully and Maro with thee could bear the yoke 3 ." The
Emperor Theodosius writes a most friendly letter begging the poet
to favour him with copies of his poems, as the greatest authors of
olden days, " whose peer your merits make you," did by Augustus 4 .
He and the Emperor Valentinian gave the poet commissions for
epigrams and so forth on the sources of the Danube, their favourite
horses and Easter, in which he was neither remarkably above nor
below the average of Poets Laureate. Finally it was to Ausonius
that Valentinian entrusted the education of his son Gratian, who
himself, when Emperor, raised his teacher to the very highest
dignities. It is clear then that by Ausonius we may in measure
judge his age.

1 Gibbon vol. iii. p. 356 (Milman and Smith).

2 Symm. Ep. i. 14, 5 ita dii me probabilem praestent ut ego hoc tuum carmen
libris Maronis adjungo.

3 Ep. 11, 38.

4 Praef. 3. Note illius privatae inter nos caritatis.

Ausonius 103

In the works of Ausonius, whatever else may be wanting, there
is no lack of interesting detail about himself, his family and his
friends, and on the whole it is here that the chief interest lies.
He had no theories about poetry, no thought-out criticism of life,
to give mankind ; but sometimes trivial, always kindly, and in-
corrigibly and invariably leisurely, he strings together verses to
please himself, to amuse his friends or to do honour to those he loved.
I shall follow in the main the order of chronology in dealing
with himself and his writings, and if any one blame me for
occasional digressions of some length, I am sure the amiable poet
himself would have to defend me.

There is probably no poet of antiquity, and few of modern days,
of whose birth and connexions we know so much. The father of
Symmachus amused his old age by writing a series of memorial
verses for his old friends, and Ausonius did the same for his
family and the professors he had known from his youth at Bor-
deaux, His verses, I need hardly say, are much better than those
for which Avianius won such praise from his dutiful son 1 . Ausonius
tells us all about his father, and not only him, but his grandparents,
his sons, sons-in-law and grandsons, and, in a word and literally,
"his sisters and his cousins and his aunts," regretfully owning
that he does not know much about his wife's sister and knows
still less of her husband, but he cannot leave them out in the
cold 2 . It will hardly be necessary to enumerate them all here.

The poet's maternal grandfather, Arborius 3 , came of old Aeduan
stock and lived to ninety, leaving among his papers a forecast of
his grandson's greatness which came true. He was an astrologer,
though he preferred to conceal the fact. The maternal grand-
mother is described in language curiously near the account the
Barrack Room Balladist gives of Gunga Din

For all 'is dirty 'ide

'E was white, clear white, inside.

The poor lady was of dark complexion and was nicknamed Maura
(the Moor), " but she was not black in her soul, which was brighter
than a swan and whiter than untrodden snow." She was an austere
old lady, and kept her family " on the straight " (ad perpendiculum
seque suosque habuit 4 ).

1 Symmachus, Epp. i. 2 and 3. 2 Parentalia 21.

3 Parentalia 4. 4 ib. 5.

104 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Ausonius' father 1 was the leading physician of Burdigala (Bor-
deaux) and apparently a fine man. With all his foibles Ausonius
was a good son, and time and again he tells us of his father's
qualities. He preferred " rather to live than to talk by the rule
of the wise" ; he was moderate in his ambitions, kindly, modest, a
good neighbour ; and he hated gossip and scandal.

Famam quae posset vitam lacerare bonorum
non finxi et veram si scierim tacui.

In his son's wake he too rose to glory and was Prefect of Illyricum
and lived to ninety, a hale and hearty old man. The poet's mother,
like a Roman lady of the good old days, had a reputation for
modesty, wool-making, conjugal fidelity and good discipline.

Ausonius was born at Bordeaux about 310 A.D. He was still
living in 390 according to Seeck, and as late as the end of 393
according to Peiper. Seeck however fixes no limit for his life, as
he came of stock so remarkable on both sides for longevity 2 .

His life, roughly, began with the reign of Constantine and ended
with that of Theodosius, and covered the period of the victory
of the Church over the Empire, of its struggle with Arianism and
its victory there, of the reaction of Julian and the final establish-
ment of well-defined orthodoxy. Nor are these eighty years with-
out interest in what is called secular history. Yet his life, as
mirrored in his poetry, is unruffled and serene, and this, though
he lived to see his imperial pupil murdered, a tyrant established
in his country, and religious persecution in learned circles. He
was undisturbed by the Arian controversy. He displays indeed
a certain carefulness to establish a good character as became one
of rank so high, but it gives the impression that the poet was not
interested in the dispute and contented himself by adopting at
second-hand the resultant and victorious creed. To his religion,
which though null in itself is important as a sign of the times, we
shall have to recur.

He was educated at Toulouse and Bordeaux. He had, to
begin with, eight years of training at Toulouse under his uncle
Arborius (c. 320-328), who was called about 328 to Constan-
tinople to bring up a son of Constantine (perhaps Constantius

1 Parentalia 1, and Epicedion. Notice especially the preface to this latter
piece post Deum semper patrem colui...alia omnia mea displicent mihi ; hoc
relegisse amo, not an unworthy feeling.

2 Seeck's Symmachus, Intr. p. Ixxxi. Peiper's edition of Ausonius is one of
the most helpful of the Teubner series.

Ausonius 105

himself)- Then he returned to Bordeaux to finish his education,
and after some six years he became himself a professor of " Grammar "
and married Attusia Lucana Sabina.

As the life-work of Ausonius was education, and as his poems
are full of reminders of it, a discussion of the subject may not
be out of place 1 . Education had by his day been reduced to
something like system, but in Rome's greater days it was not so.
Then every man brought up his son after his own method, and
the result, if not precisely culture, was generally manhood. In
92 B.C. an innovation crept in and was promptly stopped for the
time' 2 . A Latin school of rhetoric was opened in Rome, but forth-
with closed by order of the Censors as contrary to Roman tradition
(mores majorum). The Greeks had been and continued to be in
private families the educators of Rome. They had introduced the
usual subjects of study in Greece, but had not been uniformly
successful with them. Philosophy the Roman reckoned to be
verbiage. Geometry was useless. About Rhetoric he was doubtful.
Grammar was obviously above suspicion. Grammar started by
meaning "the art of speaking correctly," and then fell to illus-
trating itself from the poets, whom it bodily annexed, finally ex-
tending its borders beyond prose to scansion, music and even
astronomy, philosophy and geometry. In fact, Grammar meant a
liberal education. One regrets therefore to see the old name
Grammar school dying out. Rhetoric was the art of setting forth
what one knew and concealing what one did not, and was therefore
more important than Grammar. It was generally agreed that the
two together made an education, though men complained that the
rhetorician poached on the grammarian's preserve and gradually
drove him out.

At first, as I have said, the teachers were private adventurers,
and some succeeded and some failed. Remmius Palaemon, we are
told, made 3200 a year 3 , and Orbilius, the famous teacher who
flogged Horace, lived to see a long old age of penury 4 .

1 I am indebted to M. Boissier's La Fin du Paganisme for a good deal of
what follows a charming book from which I have derived much advantage
in many matters.

2 Cf. Cic. de Or. iii. 24, 93.

3 Suetonius, de illustribus Grammaticis 23. This man was a freedman of
vicious habits but of ability. He used to maintain that Virgil's use of his name
in the Third Eclogue was a prophecy. He was one of Persius' teachers (Vita
Persii).

4 Suet, de ill. Gramm. 9.

106 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Hence there was a tendency to accept positions under a scheme
which, if it meant no more Palaemons, at least excluded the grosser
forms of starvation. Julius Caesar recognized teachers of the liberal
arts and gave them exemptions from public service. Quiutilian
was a professor in Rome for twenty years and rescued Roman taste
by preaching Cicero 1 . Vespasian fixed the salaries in Rome at
800 a year (a very respectable minimum for a professor) 2 . Marcus
Aurelius founded chairs in Athens at 380 a year in Plato, Aris-
totle, Epicurus and Zeno (a catholic selection of subjects), and
wisely left the choice of professors to a scholarly friend Herodes
Atticus. Theodosius II. in 425 established a university at Con-
stantinople, with thirteen professors in Latin (three Rhetoric, ten
Grammar), fifteen in Greek (five Rhetoric, ten Grammar), and two
in Law. One in Philosophy seemed enough in a Christian uni-
versity 3 . They were forbidden private teaching, but could retire
after twenty years' service.

Turning to less advanced education, we find two grades of
school the village school and what we may call perhaps the
Grammar school, verging now and then into a college. These
schools were widely spread. We have an interesting letter of Pliny
(iv. 13) to Tacitus telling him about an arrangement for a school-
master at Como. Hitherto the boys had gone to school at Milan,
which Pliny thought a pity, so he offered the Como people part
of the salary of a teacher. This, he shrewdly remarks, was to
make them take an interest in the investment of their own money
in the other part of the salary. The village schoolmasters may
have been prodigies of learning compared with the villagers, but
they were not so regarded in the higher walks of letters. Litterator
has not a very honourable connotation 4 . The poor man had to teach
unwilling children their lessons, and St Augustine speaks feelingly
of the odiosa cantio unum et unum duo; duo et duo quattuor 5 .

1 x. 1, 112; Ille se profecisse sciat cui Cicero valde placebit.

2 Suet. Vesp. 18, primus e fisco Latinis Graecisquz rhetoribus annua centena
constituit.

3 Chassang remarks the absence of History (Hist, du Roman, p. 98), but it
might be included under Grammar or Khetoric. Staphylius, a rhetorician at
Bordeaux (Auson. Prof. 20), knew Livy and Herodotus at any rate. The
rhetorical conception of history was held by very respectable people.

4 Suet, de ill. Gramm. 4; Gellius, N. ^.xvi. 6, an amusing story. Macrobius
is particularly contemptuous, Sat. v. 19, 31. The word is applied to sciolists in
general.

5 Con/, i. 13, 22. In 13, 20, he says even Latin, as taught by these primi
magistri, was tiresome.

Ausonius * 107

Ausonius writes an interesting poem to his grandson who is
going to school, and writes with a good deal of sense 1 . He begins
by hinting at holidays

The due vicissitudes of rest and toil

Make labour easy and renew the soil.

(Sed requie studiique vices rata tempora servant

Et satis est puero memori legisse libenter

Et cessare licet.}

But the gist is that little Ausonius (qui nomen am geris) must
not be afraid. It is pretty clear that the discipline in some
of the schools did not fall far short of being ferocious. The
grandfather urges that a master should never be a sight of
terror, even if he is stern with age and rough of tongue, and
his wrinkled brow bodes trouble. Let the little boy think of
Achilles and Chiron who was half horse truly a terrible school-
master. " So fear not you, though the school resound with much
thwacking and the old man your master wear a truculent frown.
' Fear proves a soul degenerate ' [a half line of Virgil from his
lesson book to encourage the boy]. Be yourself and be bold, and
let not the noise and the sounding rods, nor terror in the morning,
make you afraid. The ferule, the birch and the tawse, and the
nervous fidgeting of the benches of boys, are the pomp and show
of the place. All this in their day your father and mother went
through. You too will be a man some day, and I hope a great
man." From this he passes on to tell him what they (grandfather
and grandson) will read together at some future time. After this
he speaks of his own methods of teaching, which seem much milder.
"Your grandfather knows about it all, after making trial of a
thousand natures in his teaching. Many in their years of infancy
have I nurtured myself. ..With soft bidding and gentle terror I
woo'd them to seek the pleasant profit at cost of trouble, to pluck
the sweet fruit of a bitter root." No one can read the affectionate
words Paulinus addressed to his old teacher without feeling there
must have been a charm about his teaching. He calls him "a
father, to whom God has willed I should owe all sacred rights and
all dear names 2 ."

The "grammar schools" managed by municipalities were apt
to be badly and unpunctually paid. Constantine legislated in the

1 Ep. 22. The boy was the son of Ausonius' daughter and his father was
dead.

2 Paulinus, Ep. xi. 91 (=xxx. in Peiper's edition of Ausonius).

108 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

teacher's interests in this matter, and Gratian, Ausonius' pupil,
fixed a scale of salaries to be paid by the cities according to their
size and importance. It would seem to have been the aim of the
Emperors to control the schools a very significant fact. Some of
the positions were directly filled by the Emperor, some by the
Decurions (the long-suffering upper class). As these men probably
had to pay the teacher, this seems just ; but they needed looking
after. Sometimes they would ask advice from a man of eminence,
and in this way, on the recommendation of Symmachus, Augustine
(not yet a saint) was sent to Milan to the great advantage of
Christendom. Julian, who had particular reasons for wishing to
direct education, enacted that the choice of the Decurions should
be submitted to the Emperor. His more famous " schools " decree
forbade Christians to teach heathen liteiature.

This brings us (for I have said grammar schools and colleges
ran into one another) to the subjects of education in Ausonius'
day. That "idolatry which is midwife to us all 1 " still ruled the
schools despite Tertullian, and was still to rule them despite
Jerome. It was an incalculable boon to the Church that she could
not control the education of the young. They were still taught
Virgil and Cicero, Horace and Terence, and gained a wider outlook
on life, a larger range, and (not the least) a purer and more nervous
style in consequence. Virgil haunted the minds of such men as
Tertullian, Jerome and Augustine to their dying day. So we find
a Christian world full of schools and colleges where Christian men
trained the youth in heathen things. Literature was still heathen.
The exquisites still affected to sneer at Tertullian and Cyprian,
the strongest and the suavest of Latin prose writers since Tacitus
and Pliny 2 . Nay more, it was unbecoming to know anything
about Christianity. Dio Cassius never mentioned the word
" Jewish superstitions " served instead. So it went on. Panegyrics
were addressed to Christian Emperors without a hint that the
world's worship had undergone a change. Where allusions must
be made to higher powers, it is numen divinum " Divinity "-
a colourless word 3 . Roman writers of learning and intelligence like

1 Tertullian, dt Anima 39.

2 Lactantius, Instit. v. 1 of Cyprian, denique a doctis hujus seculi quibus
forte scripta ejus innotuerunt derideri solet. He had himself heard Cyprian
called Coprian.

3 So St Cyprian, whose training was rhetorical too, uses divina protectio,
majestas, pietas, benignitas, etc. He at all events was not "hedging," and his
use of the abstract shews it was a point of style as well as a most convenient
ambiguity.

Ausonius 109

Macrobius and Eutropius manage to ignore the new faith entirely,
the latter mentioning it only once, the former never alluding to
it even indirectly. Claudian is even more triumphantly pagan
and flaunts the old gods and the altar of Victory in poems written
to celebrate that family of Christian Emperors who did most to
stamp out paganism, but he never -alludes to Christianity except
in one flippant epigram. Rutilius does not mention the name
though he attacks the thing, bitterly mocking the folly of mona-
chism and sighing over that conquest of Judaea, which had spread
the Jews and their infectious superstition over the world 1 .

While dealing with the relations of the schools and of literature
to Christianity, we may return to Ausonius and inquire where he
stood. His position is interesting, not because it is thought out, but
because it is typical of a class which must have been very numerous.

Ausonius, as we have seen, was a Christian, but he does not
proclaim it on the housetops. He has a group of little poems which
he calls the Ephemeris the day's work. He begins in bed with
elaborate Sapphics to waken his slave, but when "the rhythm of
Lesbian calm " fails, he gets him up at last with iambic dimeters
and concludes with an intimation that he will say his prayers.
This he does in dactylic hexameters, which have been pronounced
to be "nervously orthodox." The Father lacks beginning and
end and is older than time past or to be. The Son sits at the
Father's right hand, the Maker of all things, the word of God,
God the word, begotten in the time when time was not, God born
of Father unborn. This is to give the lie direct to the Arian ?/v
TTOTC ore OVK rjv there was when the Son was not though he shews
he is not a professional theologian by inserting the word "time"
in the first half of the phrase, which the Arians were exceedingly
careful to avoid. Point after point in his prayer may be illustrated
from the creeds of the Nicenes. He prays for the longed-for ray
of eternal light, " if he does not swear by gods of stone, and does
recognize Thee, the Father of the Only Begotten Lord and God,
and One with both the Spirit that brooded on the watery waves."
Elsewhere he is as careful. Dr Hodgkin sees more in his prayer,
and certainly he offers up some petitions for a manly moral life
to which Horace might have said Amen, but which I think St Paul

1 Atque utinam nunquam Judaea subacta fuisset

Pompeii bellis imperiisque Titi !
latins excisae pestis contagia serpunt
victoresque suos natio victa premit. i. 389.

110 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

would have considered not very far-going, if quite unexceptionable
so far as they go. To my mind the significant thing is the outburst
following the Amen : satis precum datum Deo. " Enough of
prayers, though of course guilty mortals can never pray enough.
Give me my outdoor things, boy, I have to call on some friends."
This may be very natural, but it is hardly suggestive of a specially
deep piety. Contrast it with Prudentius' Daily Round, where
every part of life is touched by religion

Christus et influat in pateras;
seria ludicra verba jocos
denique quod sumus aut agimus
trina superne regat pietas.

Thus much for the system and the subjects of study, but we
can go further. Ausonius has been admirably summed up by
M. Boissier as "an incorrigible versifier 1 /' but we may readily
pardon him, for the little obituary tributes, in which, as I have
mentioned above, he commemorated his Professors, let us see a
little of the life of a professor in those days, with hints of student
life too which we can supplement from elsewhere.

He begins with a man called Miuervius, a teacher of rhetoric,
who gave a thousand pupils to the bar and two thousand to the
Senate (probably round numbers). Minervius was a second Quin-
tilian, with a torrent of language, which rolled gold and never mud.
His memory would have made him a good whist player, for after a
game at backgammon (or some game of the kind) he could repeat
the throws in order from beginning to end. He was very witty, lived
to sixty, and would have been an ideal man for a combination room,
and " if there is a future life, he is still living on his reminiscences :
and if there is not, he lived for himself and enjoyed life here 2 ."

It is hardly necessary to detail them all. Two call for notice,
a father and a son, of Druid descent, Attius Patera and Attius
Delphidius by name. It is interesting to remark that where Roman
arms went, Roman culture followed, and often effected as much in
securing Roman domination 3 . At an early stage we learn that
eloquent Gaul has taught the Britons oratory, and Thule at the
world's end is thinking of engaging a rhetorician 4 . This mission of

1 F. P. i. 175.

2 He may very well, it is suggested, have been the senex Garumnae alumnus
who taught Symmachus, Ep. ix. 88.

3 Cf. Tacitus, Agricola 21.

4 So Juvenal vii. 148. We might add that Spain, in Quintilian of Calagurris,
taught Borne herself.

Ausonius 111

education, for which Rome does not always receive credit, is one of
her noblest works. In Ausonius' day the best of Roman literature
came from Gaul, Spain and Africa. The elder Attius was a
cultured kindly rhetorician, who had the old age of an eagle or a
horse. The younger soared higher and fared worse

Felix quietis si maneres litteris
opus Camenarum colens

but even he had alleviations in his lot, for he did not live beyond
middle age and so did not see his wife and daughter turn Pris-
cillianists and meet a sad end at the hands of a persecuting
usurper. This murder, prompted by bishops and executed by
Maximus to gain the support of the Church, shocked the conscience
of the world, Christian or otherwise 1 .

Ausonius writes a Sapphic ode to his Greek professors, con-
fessing that he got very little from them, but generously owning
it was his own fault, "because I suppose a certain dulness of
perception stood in my way, and some baleful mistake of boyhood
kept me from applying myself to iny studies." Too true, for, though
he amused himself in translating Greek epigrams, I have caught
him in a false quantity here and there This perhaps served him
right for writing a barbarous jargon of Greek and Latin words
mixed. He only did it once, but that was once too often. Such
plays of humour as Kouaio-TwSea lucrov and omvoio fiovoio have
little to recommend their being written, nothing their publication.
I am afraid Ausonius was in good company, when he did badly
at the Greek. St Augustine asks, " Why did I hate Greek litera-
ture ? I greatly loved Latin not indeed what I learnt from the
man who taught me the elements, but what the Grammarians
teach." (He is no doubt thinking of Virgil.) Even Homer was
bitter to him as a boy. The Professors of Bordeaux and Toulouse
seem to have been on the whole a genial and agreeable set of men,
not very great perhaps nor always very good. One had to flee
to Spain owing to a damaged name (saucia fama), but there he
took a new one and a rich wife, and let bygones be bygones. They
moved from chair to chair from Bordeaux to Constantinople, and
back again looking out for heiresses and not unfrequently finding
them, for they were cultivated men and above all good company.

1 See chapter xii. pp. 292 293. Cf. Pacatus, Panegyric to Theodosiw 29 ...ut
unco ad poenum clari vatis matrona raperetnr. Obiciebatur enirn atque etiam
probabatur mulieri viduae nimia religio et diligentius culta divinitas.

112 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Of one we are told that he did not know much, but quite enough
for the poor chair he held. In general, they were all that could
be expected. Paulinus complains that all they could do was to
"train the tongue and fill men's hearts with falsehood and
vanity" by which he means heathen literature. They lacked,
and Ausonius lacked, the root of the matter, and those who knew
them best and loved them best had to admit it. Style, polish,
grace, neatness were there, but not life, and its absence vitiates
all the excellence they attain.

The students were much like other students, but treated their
professors much worse or much better. Sometimes they would pay
no fees, or would desert a teacher just before they fell due, or
would leave him for one less strict. Here and there the teachers
had absolutely to form a sort of " union " (vvvO^Ktj) to safeguard
themselves 1 .

At Rome Theodosius had to make regulations for the students,
including the production of certificates of origin, registration, police
control and finally departure at the age of twenty. The students
from Africa in particular were so disorderly in Rome that Valen-
tinian ordered that if they went too much to the theatre and
festivals at night, or did not generally conduct themselves according
to the dignity of liberal studies, they were to be deported home 2 .
At home, in their own Carthage, they made the streets terrible
with their eversiones, interrupted classes, and in their "foul and
reckless licence " did things which were punishable by law nisi
consuetude patrona sit, says Augustine 3 . Freshmen seem to have
divided with professors the attentions of the energetic. But on
the other hand students would now and then as a mark of respect
escort their professor home, or do battle hand to hand with the
students of another professor to maintain the reputation of their
teacher, or to kidnap a freshman for their own class. Thus
Libanius went to Athens to study under a certain Aristodemus
apparently, but one evening he fell into the hands of the students
of Diophantus, who arrested him and kept him in durance till he
would swear allegiance, when they let him go, now one of them-
selves 4 .

Ausonius then became a professor in the university of Bordeaux

1 See Sievers, Libanius, p. 30.

2 Boissier, L'Afrique Romaine, c. vi. 1, p. 224.

3 Con/, v. 8, 14 on students at Carthage; v. 12, 22 Eome.

4 Sievers, Libanius, p. 46.

Ausonius 113

about the age of twenty-four (334), and there he married Attusia
Sabina, and very proud of her he was. Among his epigrams, which
are many, some neat, some nasty, the best are addressed to her.
One is an apology, for which there is some need. Catullus apolo-
gised on the ground that, while the poet ought to be pure, his
verses need not be, in fact were better not to be 1 . Ausonius pleads
variety as his excuse, but as his dirtiness is purely conventional
and imitative it is the harder to pardon. However to his wife
he pleads thus

Lais and Thais, neither name
Of very specially good fame,

My wife reads in my song :
'"Tis nothing but his way to jest,
He makes pretence," she doth protest,

"He could not do me wrong." (Epigr. 39.)

Probably this was the case. Another epigram bears witness to
their happy relations.

Be life what it has been, and let us hold,
Dear wife, the names we each gave each of old ;
And let not time work change upon us two,
I still your boy, and still my sweetheart you,
What though I outlive Nestor? and what though
You in your turn a Sibyl's years should know?
Ne'er let us know old age or late or soon ;
Count not the years, but take of each its boon.

(Epigr. 40.)

This tender hope was not fulfilled. She died after some nine
years of married life at the age of twenty-seven, leaving two chil-
dren, a boy and a girl, their first little son having died when about
a year and a half old and learning to speak (Parent. 9).

At seventy, when he wrote his lines to his relatives (Parentalia),
Ausonius addressed her again. Her loss is still after thirty-six
years nee contrectabile vulnus, a wound he cannot bear touched.
"Old age permits him not to soothe his grief: it is ever sore and
ever new. Other sufferers find consolation in time's flight. Time
but the impression deeper makes... It makes his wound more cruel

1 Catullus 16, 5 f. Tennyson alludes to this, saying "I don't agree with
him ; his verses fly much further than he does. There is hardly any crime
greater than for a man with genius to propagate vice by his written words "
(Life, vol. ii. 400). See also Boissier on Martial's apology: Revue des deux
Mondes, 15 July, 1900.

G. 8

114 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

that he has none to whom to confide his sorrows or his joys"
(Parent. 9). His elevation and distinction, much as he enjoyed
them, had still this amari aliquid.

To his father he wrote a pleasing letter in elegiacs on the birth
of his son. " I thought that nothing could be added to my
affection, that you my honoured father should be loved the more

What I owe as a son, a parent's care for your grandson tells

me. We must give my father the extra honour of a grandfather."
This must be the elder son, who died, and to whom he gave his
own and his father's name, Ausonius. To the younger, who lived,
he gave the name Hesperius, in which Seeck finds a variant for
Ausonius, the words being synonyms in Virgil. In the same way
the old grandmother's name Maura reappears in Melania, and
Arborius in Dryadia. Thus he called both his sons after himself.
The idea seems pretty, but, as Seeck points out, the ingenuity and
the easy invention of a new name betray that the family was not
of really high station, for then old names of the paternal and
maternal houses would have almost inevitably prevailed 1 .

Years passed while Ausonius still taught at Bordeaux, missing
his wife and attaching himself instead to his children and pupils ;
and in 359, when he was already forty-nine, a child was born who
was to raise him to glory. Valentinian, an officer in the army
under Constantius, had a son whom he called after his grandfather
Gratiau. Nothing specially remarkable seemed to be destined for
him, and yet this child was to be an Emperor and meet a cruel
death at the hand of the usurper Maximus at twenty-four (383 A.D.).
Constantius had no son, and, beside the heir presumptive Julian,
there were none of Constantino's family living. But in four years
Julian was dead in Mesopotamia, and the wretched Jovian had
succeeded him to the shame of the Roman world. Luckily this
person soon died (Feb. 17, 364), and a month later Valentinian
was made Emperor by the soldiers.

But before we touch further on Valentinian, an interesting point
may be raised about the reign of Julian. Julian forbade the
teaching of Classics by Christians in his famous schools decree of
362. Did this affect Ausonius ? His correspondence with Pauliuus
seems to shew that literature came before religion in his affections,
nor does he otherwise seem to have been the stuff of which martyrs
or even confessors are made. What did he do? Victorinus, one

1 See Seeck, Symmachus, Intr. p. clxxiv., n. 885.

Ausonius 115

of the most famous Latin professors of the day, at once resigned
his position. I can hardly imagine Ausonius doing the same, and
yet I cannot well account for his subsequent history if he apostatized.
Rode, in his book on Julian, opens a way out of the difficulty by
pointing out that in the West little effect was given to the pagan
reaction. Probably then Ausonius was not questioned at all about
his religion a happy thing for him.

Valentinian, established as Emperor in the West, now called
Ausonius to undertake the education of Gratian an action bearing
witness to the repute of the poet, or rather the professor, after his
thirty years of teaching. In his capacity as tutor he was attached to
the court, accompanying the Emperor on his expeditions against the
Alamanni, there making the acquaintance of Symmachus (369), and
writing poems at the Imperial bidding, amongst others the famous
cento from Virgil. In it by ingeniously connecting a series of lines
and half-lines and phrases from Virgil he constructed a series of
hexameters on the subject allotted him I will not say a poem.
The method was at best trivial, and the production a disgrace to
its author as a scholar and a man.

Before we speak of his Moselle, it may be well to survey his
other attempts at literature. To his letters I shall return. He
was essentially a man of learning, of more learning than taste, and
like many Latin poets he liked to air it. He loved list-making
and trick-versifying, weaving into rhyme everything that went
by threes ' or by fours or by thirties, collecting all the monosyllabic
nouns in the language, and making 130 lines of verse each ending
in a monosyllable. " He has been at a great feast of languages
and stolen the scraps," and cooks them up into odd little messes
of his own, very ingenious but hopelessly trifling. The rhythm
of our Latin grammars

a abs absque coram de
palam clam cum ex et e

might have been his model. It is quite as poetical and every whit
as valuable. " Thirty days hath September," or a Latin variety of
it, is one of its gems. A line a-piece to each of the Roman
Emperors makes an historical poem. A catalogue of the cities of

1 In this "poem" (Griphus xvi.) there is a sort of accidental confession of
faith. After Cerberus' heads, the three Punic wars, the threefold nature of
Scylla (dog, woman and fish) he magnificently concludes ter bibe : tris numerus
super omnia, tris Deus unus. "With three sips the Arian frustrate" represents
surely a higher piety than this.

116 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

the Empire, a series of epitaphs for the heroes of the Trojan war,
and a jingle about the Zodiac, five lines here on the Greek games, a
summary there of the twelve labours of Hercules, are things he
loves. Very many of his single lines are forceful or epigrammatic
as may be. Claudius non faciendo nocens sed patiendo fuit : Titus
was felix imperio felix brevitate regendi: admirable as historic
summary, even as neat verse, but hardly poetry. So in his
Moselle he cannot resist a list of the fishes found in the river, and
we have the names of fifteen varieties. In the same spirit we have
a hexameter letter cataloguing all the oysters he can remember,
but a humorous letter and a poem are different.

The Moselle was written in 370 or 371, when he was about
sixty years of age. It is his best work one might almost say his
only good work, were it not for the kindliness and feeling of some
parts of his Parentalia. It is a leisurely poem descriptive of the
river and its waters, its transparent shallows, its pebble beds and
swarms of fish, its banks with their vine-clad slopes and farm-
crowned heights, the rustic rivalry of the peasants, the merry
nonsense of boatman and wayfarer, the reflexion of everything in
the water till the river seems in leaf, the boys in their boats playing
at sea-fights or fishing, and so forth. The remarkable thing is his
escape from the conventional view of nature common in his day.
He does not exclusively contemplate the river as an adjunct to
man's environment, but takes a pleasure in it for itself. Take this
picture and contrast it with similar scenes in the Greek novelists

cum vada lene meant, liquidarum et lapsus aquarum

prodit caerulea dispersas luce figuras :

quod sulcata levi crispatur harena meatu,

inclinata tremunt viridi quod gramma fundo ;

usque sub ingenuis agitatae fontibus herbae

vibrantes patiuntur aquas lucetque latetque

calculus et viridem distingitit glarea museum. (61 7.)

Or again

quis color ille vadis, seras cum propulit umbras

Hesperus et viridi perfundit monte Mosellam!

tota natant crispis juga motibus, et tremit absens

pampinus et vitreis vindemia turget in undis. (192 5.)

These last two lines were particularly admired by Edward
FitzGerald. The two passages shew the poet at his best. He is
looking at nature at last, and, as he realizes her in his thought,

Ausonius 117

his language rises with his conception. His stream is a real
stream, the water flows and the weeds are waving, we can see
the ribbed sand and the gleam of the pebble ; and, as so often
in Virgil, the verse and the picture explain each other.

Again, the lines are happy in which he describes "the village
Hampdens " the stream has known

quin etiam mores et laetum fronte serena

ingenium natura tuis concessit alumnis.

nee sola antiques ostentat Roma Catones

aut unus tantum justi spectator et aequi

pallet Aristides veteresque illustrat Athenas. (384 8.)

Such passages by their music, their dignity, and their graciousness
might warrant Syminachus in his daring comparison of their author
with Virgil. But Ausonius pleased his friends, or at least himself,
almost as much with that itch of his for petty scribbling (nostra ilia
poetica scabies) and the lists of triplets if one may judge from the
amount of such matter, though in justice to Symmachus it must be
added that he gently quizzes his old friend about his fish.

In 375 Valentinian died and was succeeded by Gratian,
and Ausonius rose to glory and his house with him 1 . Between
this date and 380 all the highest offices in the West were held
among the family, and the laws of the time betray the genius of
Ausonius. Laws were passed in favour of the literary and medical
professions and in defence of monuments of ancient art. Sym-
machus calls the poet consilii regii particeps, precum arbiter, legum
conditor (Ep. i. 23), and indeed Ausonius' very style has been
recognized in the wording of some of the laws. His son and son-
in-law were given high office, and his father too became in extreme
old age honorary prefect of Illyricum. Later on Ausonius was
himself made prefect of the Gauls, and with this prefecture Italy
was for a while united. Towards the end of 379 he gave up his
prefectures, but he had climbed still higher if possible, for he
had given his name as consul to the year 379. As he managed
in the years remaining to him to make a good many allusions to
these distinctions, and obviously felt them to be the crown of his
life, we may look into them.

It was Diocletian who introduced the system of prefectures
to secure the better administration of the Empire and maintain

1 In what follows I have used Seeck'a Introduction to his Symmachus
(pp. Ixxix., Ixxx.) a wonderfully thorough piece of work (Monumenta Germaniae
Historica).

118 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

peace. The Roman world was divided into four prefectures the
East, Illyricum, Gaul, and Italy. The last two more closely concern
us. Italy comprised the dioceses of Italy (in modern nomenclature
Italy, the Tyrol, the Orisons, and South Bavaria), Illyricum proper
(Austria between the Danube and the Adriatic, and Bosnia) and
Africa (Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli). Gaul included Spain (Spain and
Morocco), the "Seven Provinces" (France up to the Rhine) and
Britain (south of the Forth) 1 . It is thus seen that either prefecture
was more than a modern Empire. Each was ruled by a praetorian
prefect. This official in early days was a military officer in com-
mand of the praetorian guard, but with time he had developed into
a civilian from whose sphere the army was jealously kept. He
stood in the highest grade of senatorial rank, and was an Illustris.
It was not generally a cheap thing to hold this rank ; for though
it gave immunity from local taxation, which was heavy enough,
it involved other burdens, but from these retired civil servants,
court physicians., and professors and a few others were relieved.
This covered Ausonius. It may seem odd that professors should
attain rank so high, but there was a reason, and to it we shall
return.

The praetorian prefect within his prefecture was a little Em-
peror, responsible only to the Emperor himself, and the Emperor,
by a law of Constantino, would hear no appeal against his decisions.
Justice, finance, the coinage, the highways, the posts and the
public granaries were under the prefect's direct control. He could
appoint or dismiss at will the governors of the provinces in his
prefecture. These were not the old provinces of the Republic by
any means. We have seen that each of the western prefectures
had three dioceses (a word the Church has borrowed from the State
amongst much else), and these again were subdivided into provinces.
In the prefecture of Italy there were thirty provinces, and twenty-
nine in that of Gaul. Well might Lactantius growl that the
provinces were "snipped to scraps 2 ." Ausonius would thus have
the appointment of fifty-nine provincial governors. While all other
offices were annual it is easy to see why the Emperors should have
preferred the prefect's tenure to be very irregular, when the prefect

1 Claudian curiously gives us a metrical account of both Ausonius' prefectures
in his poem on the Consulship of Manlius Theodorus; Gaul in lines 50 57,
and Italy in lines 198 205. Neither is very poetical. See Gibbon, vol. iii.
p. 315; Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, i. 600 ff. ; Bury, Later Roman Empire,
L 37.

2 See p. C.

Ausonius 119

was, as Dr Hodgkin sums it up, " a Prime Minister plus a Supreme
Court of Appeal." Eusebius puts it, that as he is to the Emperor,
so is the Eternal Son to the Eternal Father'. (One hesitates to
say which way the Bishop's illustration is the more tremendous.)

Apart from all this real power the trappings of office were mag-
nificent. The prefect wore a purple cloak reaching to his knee
(the Emperor's went to his feet). He rode in a lofty chariot with
four horses caparisoned in silver. He took precedence of every-
body, and even the officers of the army bowed the knee to
him.

No doubt in an administration like that of the Empire which
imprinted itself upon Europe, in many matters a prefect would
only have to follow a routine, to approve what was done by the
officials under him. It must also be remembered that the prefect's
work was not complicated by the necessity for any foreign policy,
and that Rome's idea was to allow the magistrate room to work, but
not opportunity for excessive individuality. Yet it has been elicited
by careful study of the Theodosian Code that a special arrangement
was made to relieve Ausonius. His son Hesperius was in 377 prefect
of Italy. In 378 Ausonius received the prefecture of the Gauls.
Very soon both prefectures were united in the hands of Ausonius
nominally, while really the burden of both fell on Hesperius, willing
enough, doubtless, to bear it for his father's sake. When in the
autumn of 379 Ausonius resigned the double duty, the prefectures
were separated, Hesperius retaining his own 2 .

The consulship however was Ausonius' special joy. To have
one's name added to a list nearly nine hundred years old, and to
know that through eternity the year will be officially dated Ausonio
Olybrio coss., must have quickened the dullest imagination. Of
course it could be foreseen by no one how soon a new reckoning
was to replace the old, and every Roman citizen believed in the
eternity of Rome, even if Juvencus did say that like the rest of the
world " golden Rome " would know an end some day. The consul-
ship was by now a name and no more, involving social preeminence
without practical power, but it was an object of ambition none the
less. Who would refuse a dukedom without a pang ? Julian tells
us there is no one who would not consider it a prize (^Xwrov) to
be named consul, for the honour of it per se reft of all else was

1 Quoted by Bury, L. R. E. i. 43.

2 See Seeck, Int. to Symi/uichus, p. Ixxx. From Symm. Ep. i. 42, 2 it would
seem Ausonius had felt his greatness a burden or had said so.

120 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

as much as any power. It was a high title for an Emperor
Kai KOO-/U.OS), so for a subject what must it have been 1 ? At his
inauguration the consul gave great games and festivals, after which
he retired, as Gibbon says, "to enjoy during the rest of the year
the undisturbed contemplation of his own dignity."

Ausonius was so much overwhelmed by his own glory that he
thought of little else for long. He wrote a sort of panegyric, a
Gratiarum Actio, to Gratian. He had panegyrised the Emperors
before, but that speech is, I believe, lost. This one is senile and
very grovelling. His consulship, thanks to Gratian, involved no
canvass with awkward episodes of names forgotten ; no voting, no
election, no bribery. The Roman people, the Campus Martius, the
knights, the rostrum, the booths, the Senate, the Senate-house all
were summed up in Gratian. Nay, more, the Emperor had written
a letter honour above honours ! and had actually said he was
paying a debt in making Ausonius consul " gilded saying of
a golden mind !" (0 mentis aureae dictum bratteatum). He con-
trasts himself with other Imperial tutors, is very unfair to Seneca,
and remarks that Fronto was consul merely for two months in
somebody else's year; and in any case he "prefers a Gratian to
an Antonine." He rapturously analyses the Emperor's letter its
style and its kindness, and when he comes to Gratiau's instructions
that he is to wear Constantine's robes, his joy knows no bounds. He
was an old man, and had bred the Emperor from a child of five ;
so we must try to forgive him.

It is a little Jiard to-day to understand why the Emperors
attached so much importance to so obviously inflated and ex-
travagant panegyrics, and consequently to the rhetoricians and
professors who made them. The explanation lies in the fact that,
as Julian and others who discoursed on monarchy put it, the
goodwill of his subjects is the strongest buttress for a monarch.
In the absence of a press subsidized by government, the panegyric
conciliated public opinion, toned down awkward facts, emphasized
the advantages the Emperor daily conferred on his people, extolled
his character, his kindliness, his prowess, his glory, and, above all,
brought out the fact that there never had been an Emperor like
him 2 . (Also we may be sure there were Emperors who were able
to accept the most tasteless flattery, the supply creating a demand.)

1 Cod. Theod. ix. 40, 17 (xvi. Kal. Febr. Theodore Cons.), the edict on Eutro-
pius, speaks of divinum praemium comulatus.

2 So Schiller, Gesch. der r, Kaiserzeit, ii. 447.

Ausonius 121

Such a panegyric would circulate as a pamphlet, and as the public
taste was for rhetoric, and here it was at its most rhetorical, we can
see how valuable the rhetorician was to an Emperor. This explains
in part 1 the deference paid by Julian and others to Libanius, and
the high regard the class had in general. In 392 a professor,
Eugenius, was actually made Emperor by Arbogast the Frank,
who modestly thought the world was not ripe for a Prankish
Emperor. Even to-day we see millionaires testifying to the in-
fluence of professors by removing them if they hold by free trade
or free silver or any other uncongenial heresy, but as a rule the
money goes to-day to buying the press 2 . How much exactly man-
kind has gained by having the press instead of the professor to
mould its views, we may leave optimists to compute.

The rest of the life of Ausonius need not detain us long. Gratian
passed under the influence of a much stronger man Ambrose of
Milan and met his tragic death in 383 at Lyons. Maximus 3 ,
his murderer, held his court awhile at Treves, where Ausonius was.
The poet may have witnessed the sufferings of Priscillian and his
followers, among them the widow and daughter of a former professor
of Bordeaux. One wonders whether he met St Martin, and if they
did meet what the rather lukewarm professor and the very militant
saint thought of each other. But Ausonius may have got safely
back to Bordeaux before Maximus had to deal with either Priscillian
or Martin. At all events at Bordeaux he spent his declining years,
versifying as ever. Theodosius demanded verse of him, and he
wrote it not that he had anything to say, but Caesar's bidding
was inspiration enough. (Theodosius was not a man to be trifled

1 Symm. i. 20 (to Ausonius), iter ad capessendos magistratus saepe litteris
promovetur. At the same time there seems to have been some genuine respect
for learning, in spite of Ammianus' gloomy views.

2 The position of a professor does not seem to be as secure in the United
States as in England. The millionaire founder is too fond at times of having
his own views taught.

3 See Sulpicius, Dial. ii. 6; iii. 11 on Maximus, p. 291 f. Ausonius only
alludes to him in congratulating Aquileia on having seen his end :

solveret exacto cui sera piacula lustra
Maximus, armigeri quondam sub nomine lixa.
felix quae tanti speculatrix laeta triumphi
punisti Ausonio Rutupinum Marie latronem.

Ordo Urbium 9.

Eutupiae, Maximus' native place, is Eichborough, near Sandwich, in Kent.
If he had succeeded, Ausonius might have accepted him as Symmachus un-
happily had already.

122 Lfife and Letters in the Fourth Century

with blando vis latet imperio.) His profession is at least in-
genuous

non Jiabeo ingenium: Caesar sed jussit, habebo.

He was still busy with extracts, tours de force, " April, June, and
dull November," but we shall find it more interesting to turn to
his correspondence.

I am afraid the letters of Ausonius can hardly be called very
interesting Some are better than others, but as a rule he has
little to say and spends all his energies on his phraseology. Pliny's
was the first great series of letters written for publication, which
has reached us. After his day letter-writing became a regular
branch of rhetoric, and letters are no longer so much letters as a
form of literary parade. The nine hundred letters of Symmachus
are characterized according to Gibbon by a " luxuriancy, consisting
in barren leaves without fruits and even without flowers." Such
a criticism would no doubt have shocked their amiable author, but
it is just and applies to most of the surviving collections of the
day, apart from the theologians' epistles which are often in reality
treatises.

The correspondence of Ausonius (if I may borrow an epigram
of the combination room) is "like Hollandaise sauce a lot of
butter and no flavour." Ausonius compliments Symmachus, and
is very modest : and Symmachus is very modest and compliments
Ausonius, till the reader feels that Symmachus for once has, in one
of his apologies, hit the nail on the head Videbor mutuum scabere.
" Come and see me and bring a cart load of Pierian furniture (list
herewith) " is the burden of a number of these letters the
characters figuring as " Cadmus' brunettes" (Cadmi nigellae filiae,
Cadmi filiolis atricoloribus). We must except from this condem-
nation the letters above-mentioned to his father on his son's birth
and to his grandson. To these may be added the letter to Paulinus
about the steward who, after failing in his proper duties, has gone
off trading, " enriching himself and impoverishing me " (se ditat
et me pauperai), and has got into trouble at Hebromagum. Here
at all events Ausonius had something to say at last.

But most interesting after all is the group which ends the
volume the correspondence with Paulinus. Paulinus was a
favourite pupil of Ausonius, on which M. Boissier cruelly remarks
" On n'est guere disposd aujourd'hui a Ten fe'liciter," but he himself

Ausonius 123

thought it had been his making 1 . Certainly he owed his consulship
to Ausonius' influence. He was a distinguished literary man as
things went ; his only fault was, according to Boissier, to be
" eternal " ; and in every way all promised well for his future.
Whether it were his Spanish wife Therasia, or the influence of
St Martin that was to blame, he suddenly forsook the world. He
withdrew first to Spain and then to Italy, where he settled by
the tomb of St Felix at Nola and wrote a birthday ode to the saint
every year. Ausonius was puzzled to imagine what could have
induced a man who had drawn so much from him thus to abandon
all that during nearly eighty years had been to himself the interest
and the worth of life 2 . He had left the Muses for what ? Ausonius
wrote him letter after letter in a rambling, senile, affectionate way
to win him back : picturing agreeably enough his own joy when
his prodigal returns, and rather querulously asking why he was
treated so. Well he might, for no answer came for some years,
as his letters had gone astray (a curious illustration of the rather
haphazard postal service of the day for private people) 3 .

At last we hear from Paulinus, who explains the mishap to
Ausonius' letters, and then sets forth why he has forsaken the
world mens nova mi, fateor, mens non mea. He writes kindly
but clearly and at enormous length. He has found something
Ausonius' Muses could not give. He has learnt that life means
more than an opportunity to versify Suetonius, as he had been
doing in a desultory way. He owes Ausonius more than he can
say let Ausonius then be glad he has trained a servant for Christ.
Rhetoric and rhyming have their place, but they cannot save the
soul : that lies beyond a professor's power, and still it is life's end.
So long as he lives, he must live for Christ, and prepare for the
great day of the coming of the Lord. For " He who sits on the
eternal Father's throne at His right hand, is set as a King over
all, and, when the years have passed, He shall come to judge all
nations with equal justice." This thought, he says, haunts him,
as we know it did Sulpicius, his friend and correspondent, who

1 It was a friendship of the second generation, as their fathers had been
friends before them. Ep. 27, 106.

2 The Christian leaders of the day understood Paulinus better and heralded
him as a great example; see Ambrose, Ep. 58, etc.

3 Synesius' correspondence may also illustrate this, Ep. 123 : Syn. was for
two years away from home and the letters of Troilus were not forwarded to him
but awaited his return. Ep. 129, Syn.'s letters to Pylaemenes (in Constanti-
nople) went to Alexandria (probably the proper way) and after being held there
or sent astray for a year came hack to their writer in Cyrene.

124 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

fell into millenarism, and the poet Prudentius, who again and
again tells of the Last Judgment. He fears lest his soul,

si forte recluso

increpitet tuba vasta polo, non possit in auras
regis ad occursum levibus se tollere pinnis
inter honora volans sanctorum milia caelo.

If his course pleases Ausonius, let him congratulate his pupil ; if
not, Christo tantum me linque probari.

What Ausonius may have thought of this response, we are not
told. I doubt if he could have really understood the mind of his
friend at all. Paulinus was not a great man by any means a dull,
wordy, worthy creature. Yet the weight in the correspondence
lies with him, and one feels at once the contrast between the
amiable inanity of the old poet and the glowing devotion of the
younger man. Ausonius stood for the past, so far as he understood
himself. But a new spirit was at work in the world, and a new
age was beginning. Prudentius represents this new age best among
his contemporaries ; and whether one weigh them as makers of
music, as poets, as thinkers, or as men, Prudentius is greater than
Ausonius every way. Hippocrene was exhausted, and the poets, if
they are to serve mankind, must go to Jordan 1 .

Yet, with all his amiable doggerel and list-making, Ausonius
has been set down as the first of French poets, as Sulpicius is of
French prose-writers, for after all he wrote the Moselle.

1 I may be allowed to adapt Fuller's happy epigram on Sternhold and
Hopkins, who had "drunk more deep of Jordan than of Helicon." Juvencus
had already prayed that his mind might be sprinkled with the pure waters of
dulcis Jordanis, but, as all his readers know, he had drunk almost as deep of
Mincius.

CHAPTER VI

WOMEN PILGRIMS

Non Hierosolymis fuisse sed Hierosolymis bene vixisse laudandum est.

JEROME, Ep. Iviii. 1

THE pilgrim movement of the fourth century was not un-
heralded. From the days of the earliest Greek mariners, who explored
the new world of Italy and Sicily and voyaged to the old world of
the Nile, a never-ceasing series of travellers had given their tales to
mankind. The conquests of Alexander had thrown open fresh
regions for adventure, and when the Romans with the widening of
their empire came more and more under the influence of Greek
literature, travel was at once safe and suggestive. The scenes of
the Trojan war, and of the great wars of historical Greece, the spots
hallowed by memories of Socrates, of Euripides and the famous
names of the past, the monuments of ancient art and not least the
holy places, where for generations men had by the mysteries found
access to the unseen, all drew to themselves the more thoughtful
and cultured among the Romans. Nor were the motives that took
men abroad only those of the sight-seer, the scholar and the pious
antiquary. New cults, which had not the associations of ancient
Greece, now and again prescribed the penitential pilgrimage.
Germanicus and Hadrian wandered in the course of their official
progresses to one and another famous place, and from time to time
were initiated into the ancient mysteries of Eleusis or Samothrace.
Against this nothing could be justly said, but it was another thing
when the priests of Isis bade Roman ladies go to the far bounds of
Egypt and fetch waters from burning Meroe to sprinkle in the
goddess' shrine in Rome 1 .

1 Juvenal vi. 527.

126 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

The novels of the early centuries of our era, if they do not aim
at presenting the life of their time, at least betray some of its
interests. Their scenes and dates are vague, but their adventures
and travels are vivid. Pirates and Ethiopians and hair-breadth
'scapes crowd one another in quick succession. It is a poor heroine
who is never kidnapped. So we range from Tyre to Alexandria and
far beyond, and meet strange men with black hearts and black faces,
and the heroine comes home unscathed. And every here and there
the divine is introduced with a lavish hand, and thunders and
lightnings and inspired dreams avert many an awful crisis. Stories
like that of Apuleius are less common, good novels perhaps being a
small minority in every age. The popular taste demands a certain
style of fiction, and so it leaves behind it evidence on which posterity
will condemn it. The novels are poor but they prove the interest
felt in travel.

How easy, as compared with former days, travel was under the
early Empire, is shewn by the rapid spread of Christianity 1 . There
was universal peace, the great roads were kept in repair and free
from brigands, one rule and two languages were universal instead of
the many formerly prevailing, and Christians passed quietly in their
obscurity from shore to shore. Their story was new and for the
present, for the end of the world was at hand ; and though, as time
went on, it included more of the future, it had hardly as yet a past
to waken historic sentiment. And quite apart from this, the
Christian world had scant leisure for retrospect. Men and women
had ever to be ready for sudden travel, but it was to escape perse-
cution, and wherever it scattered them they were more prompted
to preach than to dream. Still as early as 212 a man, Alexander
by name, is recorded to have made a journey from Cappadocia to
Jerusalem to pray and to study the geography of "the places 2 ."
A little later (about 216) Origen, commenting on St John i. 28,
remarks that "he is convinced the right reading is not Bethany but
Bethabara, for he has visited the places to follow out the footsteps
of Jesus and His disciples and the prophets 3 ." In his reply to
Celsus, he appeals to the evidence of the cave and manger of
Bethlehem, which would seem to imply that he had seen them 4 .

1 See Eamsay, St Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, p. 352, for an
interesting account of Eoman Imperial policy in promoting ease of communica-
tion within the Empire.

2 Eusebius, Eccles. Hist. vi. 11.

3 Origen, Comm. Joh. torn. vi. 24 (40).

4 Origen, in Celsum, i. 51.

Women Pilgrims 127

With the victory of Constantine a new age began, an age of more
freedom and also in general of less spirituality. Foreign ideas had
filtered already into the Church, now they streamed in, and the
Christian was almost directed (in spite of such men as Augustine)
to the external.

Christianity had given women a new honour in the world and a
new outlook on life. From the first it was asserted that in Christ
was neither male nor female, and though the Church in deference
to old prejudice frowned on her performing some of the more exalted
Christian duties, forbidding her the priestly office and trying to
discredit the story of Thecla's baptisms ', woman took her place with
man in the maintenance and the extension of the faith by martyr-
dom and Christian living. The Church delighted to contrast the
swarms of Christian virgins with the reluctant though well-paid
Vestals 2 , and it was in virginity that woman's great opportunity
seemed to lie. It had taken asceticism some three centuries to
capture the Church, a clear proof in a world, which could con-
ceive of no other type of holiness, that it was not the original con-
ception of the Church's Founder and His immediate followers.

While more than one of the great Fathers found it desirable to
write treatises on the dress, the veils and the general deportment
of Christian women devoted to the celibate life 3 , it was not till the
fourth century that there appeared so ardent a pleader for the
convent and the extreme rigour of asceticism as St Jerome. The
saint was a great scholar but a greater rhetorician. Rhetoric indeed
formed a large part of the training of all the fathers of this century,
but Jerome's rhetoric has neither the idle wordiness of Paulinus
nor the spiritual intensity of Augustine. He has no lack of ideas,
but they are generally apt to be superficial. He was rhetorician
rather than scholar, and scholar rather than thinker.

Jerome is never so copious or so coloured as when he dilates on
the glory of celibacy and the poverty, the pettiness and the ignominy
of married life. There can be little doubt that the life of Pagan
society in Rome was a dull round of splendour. It had culture, it
had wealth, it had splendid lineages, but it lacked inspiration, life
and perhaps intelligence 4 . But it is of Christian society that

1 Cf. Tertullian, de Bapt. 17.

2 E.g. Prudeutius, adv. Symm. ii. 1063 and following.

3 See Benson, Cyprian i. xii. p. 51 f.

4 In Ammianus Marcellinus we read an indictment of Roman society, as
scathing as anything of St Jerome's and more amusing (xiv. 6; xxviii. 4). The
letters of Symmachus shew us Rome from within, a weary spectacle.

128 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Jerome speaks so harshly. "I would not have you consort with
matrons," he writes to Eustochium, aged seventeen 1 , "I would not
have you approach the houses of nobles ; I would not have you often
see what in contempt you renounced to remain a virgin... Will you,
the spouse of God, hasten to the wife of a man ? Learn here a holy
pride; know you are better than they. Nor do I desire you to
avoid those alone, who are puffed up by their husbands' glories,
whom flocks of eunuchs surround, and in whose clothes mines of
gold beaten to thread are woven; but avoid those too, whom
necessity, and not their choice, has made widows not that they
should have wished their husbands to die, but that they did not
gladly catch at the chance of a life of purity. Though they have
changed their garb, their pride is unchanged. Before their litters
march the ranks of eunuchs ; their rouged cheeks and their plump-
ness suggest, not that they have lost, but that they are looking for
husbands Their houses are full of flatterers, full of banquets..."
and he goes on to say the flatterers are clergy kept by a retaining
fee. He sums up his position toward marriage, a little below;
"I praise marriage, I praise wedlock, but because they bear me
virgins ; I gather from the thorn the rose, from the earth the gold,
from the shell the pearl 2 ." A married woman may thus rise to be
"mother-in-law of God" (socr-us Dei).

The woman then who would live the perfect life must be a
virgin, and more, a nun secluded from the world and knowing only
the cloister and the church. In one of his letters (cvii.) Jerome
sketches the education he would wish given to a little girl dedicated
by her parents to the nunnery from her birth. The little Paula
must not learn worldly songs (probably nursery jingles) but the
Psalms. Her only play is to be with wooden or ivory letters of the
alphabet. She is to be gently taught to read and love books, but
she must not use baby- words (dimidiata verba) 3 or wear gold or
purple. A grave nurse must teach her to chant Alleluia to her
grandfather 4 . Her ears are not to be pierced for ear-rings, her face
must know no white lead or rouge or any other cosmetic, her
neck no gold or pearls, her head no gem, her hair no red dye all

1 Jerome, Ep. xxii. 16.

2 Id. ib. 20.

3 A celibate view, with which contrast Minucius Felix 2. 1 et quod est in
Liberia amabilius adhuc annis innocentibus et adhuc dimidiata verba tempt ant ibux,
loqutllam ipso o/ensantis linguae fracimine dulciorem.

4 He was a pagan, a friend of Symmachus, Publilius Caeionius Caecina
Albinus by name, and he appears in Macrobius' Saturnalia. See Seeck, Sym-
machus, pp. clxxv. clxxx.

Women Pilgrims 129

which things savour of hell. Her only walk is to be to church.
She is not to eat before strangers, and she should drink no wine.
Musical instruments she must not touch. Latin and Greek, reading
and praying, psalm-learning and wool-work (not silk or embroidery)
should afford her day variety. Perhaps she had better not have
baths at all, for it is not pleasant for her to see herself unrobed 1 .
How can all this be managed ? It would be hard in Rome, so the
little maid had better be despatched to her grandmother and aunt in
Bethlehem, Paula and Eustochiutn.

The life here pictured might in time be tedious for a scholar.
The monks of the middle ages found it so. What must it have
been for a child, for a young girl ? There is pleasure in the healthy
exercise of a natural function, and beings created to be active must
have chafed under such a vegetable life. One woman, of whom
St Jerome tells us 2 , could not face it. Her name was Fabiola and
she was twice married. On the death of the second husband she
sold all and " was the first of women to found a hospital (voo-oKo//.etov),
in which to gather the sick from the streets and cherish poor folks'
bodies wasted by sickness and hunger." She nursed them herself
awhile and then suddenly astonished people by going off to Jeru-
salem. Another, Paulina, daughter of the more famous Paula, built
a ei'oSo'xioi/ or guest-house in Portus 3 .

But a more frequent resource to escape the dulness of secular
or religious life in Rome was the pilgrimage. Movement, change of
scene, novel situations and fresh society must have been salvation
to many a weary soul from stagnation at least and perhaps from
loss of reason or character. It may be permissible to say that the
pilgrimage involved a certain amount of masculine society, if it were
only that of Egyptian monks. At times it would mean adventure
and real danger and a military guard. Beyond such motives,
however, there were higher ones, a genuine interest in following
intelligently the life of our Lord in the land where He had lived,
and in marking every spot associated with any episode of His
history ; a desire to meditate and to pray with the impress on one's
mind of the holy places, where so many great ones of the past had
prayed and had been heard ; a feeling that "it was part of the faith
to worship where the feet of the Lord had stood, and to see as if in
all their freshness the traces of the nativity, the Cross and the

1 A monkish fancy shared by Antony and Amun according to the novelist
(V. Ant. 47. 60).

2 Ep. Ixxvii. 6. 3 Ep. Ixvi. 11.

G. 9

130 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

passion 1 ." Thus were combined the student's hope to understand
and the mystic's to enter more fully into the life of the Lord. Over
and above all this, we must remember that honour was being
directed more and more to saints and martyrs everywhere, that
prayer was paid at their shrines and martyries, and that their aid
was reckoned a factor in the spiritual life 2 . And further a
suspicious importance began to attach to relics of the saints, and
the pilgrim to the East was often able to collect them. For
example, Cyril of Jerusalem 3 and Paulinus of Nola both testify
to the practice of pilgrims taking away fragments of the Holy Cross,
the latter assuring us that the wood miraculously replenishes itself.
St Silvia tells us incidentally of one covetous man who made a
pretext of kissing the cross and surreptitiously bit out a mouthful
as a relic 4 .

Of St Jerome's own residence in Palestine and of the visit paid
to him at Bethlehem by Sulpicius' friend Postumian, I do not here
speak. My subject is rather the pilgrimages of women, and I have
to deal with Melania, with Paula and her daughter Eustochium,
and especially with St Silvia of Aquitaine. All these were in
Palestine between 381 and 388, and by comparing their stories we
may get a clearer idea of the spirit of their times.

Melania 5 was a Roman lady of noble origin, the daughter and
granddaughter of Consuls. She early "suffered marriage" and was
soon a mother. After a few years of married life, she lost her
husband, and before he was cold or, at least, buried, two of three
sons also died. "I am going," says St Jerome, "to tell a thing
incredible, but, before Christ, true. Not a tear-drop fell ; she
stood immovable, and falling at Christ's feet, as she were laying hold
on Him Himself, she smiled. 'More easily,' said she, 'can I serve
thee now, Lord, in that thou hast relieved me of so great a
burden'." She came to Rome with one surviving infant boy, whom

1 Jerome, Ep. xlvii. 2.

2 Cf. Prudentius, irepl <rTe<f>. xii. 59, on pilgrims to St Peter and St Paul in
Rome; and Sulpicius Severus, Dial. i. 3 loca visitare sanctoi-um et praecipue ad
sepulcrum Cypriani martyris adorare.

3 Cyril Jer. Catech. III. x. 19; xiii. 4; and Paulinus, Ep. xxxi. 6.

4 Dio Cassius 51. 16 says that at Alexandria Augustus saw the body of
Alexander the Great and broke off a piece of the nose. This story, most
probably untrue, yet shews the early prevalence of the passion for keepsakes.
Jerome, In c. 23 Matth. I. iv. says such things as fragments of the Cross or
little gospels were worn as amulets by superstitiosae mulierculae after the
manner of the ancient Pharisees. (Neander.)

5 Her name is variously given as Melauius, Melania and Melauium. See
Paulinus, Ep. xxix. ; Jerome, Epp. xxxix. 4; xlv. 4; and Chron. ad an. Christi
377 for her story.

Women Pilgrims 131

"she flung into the bosom of Christ," says Paulinus. Jerome" more
prosaically says she left him to the Praetor Urbanus, after trans-
ferring her property to him 1 . Then, though friends opposed and it
was the middle of winter, she set sail for the East, taking Egypt
on her way to Jerusalem, and there she stayed for some five and
twenty years (374 399). Her virtues, of which humility was the
chief, won her the name of a new Thecla. She lived through the
Arian persecution of Valens, who fell at Adrianople in 378; she
was arrested but dismissed from the court, and fed large numbers
of monks through the troublous days 2 . When Jerome came to the
East, she lived in close friendship with him and Paula, avoiding baths
and unguents, and practising fasting and filthiness. At the end of
. the century she returned to Italy, and after landing at Naples went
to Nola, where Paulinus says her arrival caused a great sensation, a
great throng of people in purple and silk escorting her in her rags.
She gave Paulinus a tunic of lamb's wool, and he read to her
Sulpicius' life of St Martin, from which she might have learned that
even at home life might be lived well. The tunic and part of a
fragment of the true cross, given her by John bishop of Jerusalem,
were passed on to Sulpicius. This "woman, if so manly a Christian
may be called a woman 3 ," lived some twenty years longer, probably
in Palestine.

Melania's departure to Palestine attracted much attention in
Rome, but perhaps even more was excited by Paula who left there
in 382 3. Paula 4 was the daughter of Rogatus, who claimed a
proud descent from Agamemnon, and of Blaesilla, as proudly
descended from Scipios and Gracchi. She was married at sixteen
to Julius Toxotius, a descendant of Aeneas and the Julii, who, as
became one sprung from Venus, was true to paganism. She bore
him five children, four girls and a boy, and then he died, leaving
her for a while inconsolable, till she turned to the religious life. In

1 Antony (Vita Ant. 36) represented /twij/cn? " oiKflwv as actually a temptation
of the devil. Sulpicius (Dial. i. 22) has a tale confirming this, how the devil
tempted a monk to return and convert his wife and son.

2 A footnote of Gibbon's may be transcribed (vol. iv. p. 316): "The monk
Pambo made a sublime answer to Melania who wished to specify the value of
her gift : Do you offer it to me, or to God? If to God, HE who suspends the
mountains iu a balance need not be informed of the weight of your plate.
(Pallad. h. Laus. 10.)"

3 The phrase is borrowed from Paulinus. Cf. Porphyry, ad Marcellam c. 33,
fjt,r]d^ yvvaiKO. idrjs ffairijc.

4 Jerome, Ep. cviii. 3 and following. Also xlv. 4 Nullae aliae Romanae
urbi fabulam praebuerunt nisi Paula et Melanium, quae contemptis facultatibus,
pignoribusque desertis, crucem Domini quasi quoddam pietatis levavere vexillum.

132 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

382 a synod of bishops from East and West was held in Rome
under Pope Damasus, and intercourse with some of these gave
Paula new ideas, and "she yearned to go to the desert of the Pauls
and the Antonies." Her eldest daughter was dead, the second
married, and the third Eustochium practically dedicated to virginity,
but the fourth was of marriageable age and had no mi ad for celibacy
and joined with the son, the little Toxotius, in imploring their
mother to stay, at least for a while. "Yet she raised dry eyes to
heaven and overcame love of children with love of God. She knew
not she was a mother, that she might prove herself Christ's hand-
maid."

Before following her on her journey, we may learn her feelings
from a letter she wrote 1 . She was obeying, so she said, the teaching
of Scripture, wherein God had said to Abraham, "Get thee out from
thy country." Had Christ not loved Jerusalem, He had never wept
over it. The Ark of the Covenant has indeed passed from it, but
the Lord's sepulchre is there ; "and as often as we enter it, we see
the Saviour there, lying in the linen ; and if we wait a while, we
see the Angel sitting at His feet, and at His head the napkin rolled
together." "In every place we venerate the tombs of the martyrs,
and put the sacred ashes to our eyes, and if we may we touch them
with our lips too." How many holy men have felt they had not
received "the finishing touch in virtue, unless they had adored
Christ in those places, whence first the Gospel had gleamed from the
cross" ? And what can be said of the place of the Nativity?

So to the Holy Land she went and left her son behind in Rome
to grow up a staunch heathen. If in later life he became a
Christian (a point not certain), he did not owe his conversion to
his mother. Paula sailed away, passed between Scylla and
Chary bdis, and threaded Virgil's Cyclades

sparsasque per aequor
Cycladas, et crebris...freta consita terns 2 .

At last she reached Antioch, and "the noble lady, who had
once been borne on the hands of eunuchs, set out on a donkey."

1 This is printed among St Jerome's letters, Ep. xlvi.

2 Jerome quotes the Aeneid iii. 126. When the Angel with the scourge told
him " Ciceroniamis es, non Christianus," nothing luckily was said about Virgil
(Ep. xxii. 30). See Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, tr. pp. 823 for the
saint's fluctuation in his feelings about the poet. In the short account of the
travels which follows, I have made a mosaic of pieces from Ep. cviii. especially
7, 8, 9, 14, 15.

Women Pilgrims 133

Sarepta and Elijah's tower, the sands of Tyre where Paul had knelt,
Megiddo, Caesarea and the house of Cornelius and the rooms where
Philip's four daughters slept, Joppa whence Jonah sailed and where
(though this is another story 1 ) Andromeda was tied to the rock,
Beth-horon, Aijalon, Gibeon, all these and other places she saw,
and came to Jerusalem, where "prostrating herself before the cross,
she worshipped as though she saw the Lord hanging there." "She
entered the tomb of resurrection, and kissed the stone the angel
rolled away ; and the actual place where the Lord had lain, as one
thirsty coming to waters long prayed for, she licked with a believer's
mouth." She ranged over Palestine, passed through Egypt to the
Nitrian desert and threw herself at the feet of the monks, to whom
she gave gifts as to the Lord. Though she would have liked to
stay with them, she returned to Bethlehem to build cells and
lodgings for pilgrims by the road where Mary and Joseph found
no shelter. This was her rest because it was the birthplace of
her Lord. Here she continued till her death, reading the Bible in
Hebrew and Greek, afflicting herself with various austerities, and
doing despite to the face which, against God's precept, she had
formerly decorated with all sorts of cosmetics. It was her prayer
that she might die a beggar, and at last she attained what she
wished and left her daughter deeply in debt, "as she still is, though
she hopes, not by her own strength, but of Christ's mercy, to be
able to pay."

When we pass from Paula to Silvia, there is a marked relaxation
of tension. We are out of the region of extravagance and hysterics,
and in the company of a lady who is quiet and has no rhetoric. It
must be premised, however, that we are on less certain ground, for
it may be that we are dealing not with a single person but with two.
The case stands thus. There exists a considerable part of a narrative
of three years' residence and travel in and about Palestine. It is
avowedly written by a woman, seemingly from Gaul, for she comes
"from the ends of the earth," she compares the Euphrates and the
wash of its waters with the Rhone, the Red Sea with the Ocean, and
its fish with those of the "Italic sea." She held some office in a
monastery, to the sisters of which she wrote ; her journey ended in
Constantinople where she was detained for some unspecified reason ;

1 Ut aliquid perstringam de fabulis poetarum says Jerome. See Dr G. A.
Smith, Hist. Geography of the Holy Land, pp. 162 4, on the linking of Andro-
meda's dragon to St George, and of St George to England, the whole story
centring at Lydda a little way up the country.

134 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

and the courtesy and attention shewn her by military authorities in
Egypt suggest that she was a person of some consideration. In view
of all these facts Gamurrini, who discovered the manuscript in 1884,
identified her with St Silvia of Aquitaine, who was in the East at
the very same time as our pilgrim shews that she was, and whose
brother was Rufinus, minister of the Emperors Theodosius and
Arcadius at Constantinople from 384 to 396. When this man was
murdered in 396, his widow and daughter were despatched to
Jerusalem. Such a connexion would explain the ease of our
pilgrim's travels and her lingering at the capital. The identification
has been generally accepted, though Dr Bernard points out a curious
little divergency. The pilgrim of the manuscript remarks that
because it was impossible to ride up Mt Sinai, she had to go up on
foot (MS p. 32), but the St Silvia of PaHadius boasted she never was
carried. Again, this Silvia, he says, never bathed, but our pilgrim
does not betray personal asceticism. We may also remark that
while the Silvia of Palladius was "a most learned lady," and read
Origen and Basil and so forth, and while for her Rufinus of Aquileia 1
made a translation into Latin of the Clementine Recognitions, our
pilgrim, though very well read in Scripture 2 and well informed in
sacred geography and much interested in ritual, wrote a Latin so
barbarous and so ungainly as to suggest that her literary attain-
ments were slight indeed. Accordingly, if we agree that our pilgrim
is St Silvia, we must bear in mind that her own narrative deals only
with her travels in the East where we find her first at the foot of
Sinai, and that all other knowledge of her connexions and subsequent
history comes from outside sources.

Aquitaine was in the fourth century, and indeed later, one of
the most cultured and most Roman of all lands of the Empire.
The names of Ausonius and Sulpicius Severus stand for much in
the history of the century's literature, and a brightness and a clear
air hang over their country. From Elusa (Eauze), the poet Claudian
tells us, came Rufinus and therefore presumably his sister. Of her
early life we know nothing, but if we trust Palladius she was born
somewhere about the date of the Nicene Council 325, for she says
(according to him) that she was in her sixtieth year when travelling
in Egypt. She herself tells us why she took her pilgrimage to

1 Not her brother, but a man set over a convent of fifty virgins established
by Melania in Jerusalem.

2 It may be remarked that she shews no trace of Jerome's revision of the
Latin Bible. So Dr Bernard on St Silvia, p. 34.

Women Pilgrims 135

Palestine. She went to pray (orationis gratia, pp. 44, 47, 55) at
the bidding of God (jubente deo, p. 40), and also to learn for herself
(tune ergo ego, ut sum satis curiosa, requirere cepi, p. 46). She
regarded it as a mark of divine grace that she was able to go so far
and see so much "though I ought ever to give thanks to God in
all things, I will not say how much in the case of all that He has
bestowed on me in counting me worthy, unworthy and undeserving
as I am, to travel through all these places far beyond my merit"
(p. 36). On the way home, she says, "I crossed the sea to
Constantinople thanking Christ our God that to me unworthy and
undeserving He had deigned to give such grace, that is, not only
the will to go, but had deigned to give the power to traverse what
I would and to return again to Constantinople" (p. 55).

The record of her outward journey is lost, if it ever existed, but
our last reference may give us a hint. There were various possible
routes from Aquitaine to Palestine. Sulpicius Severus' friend,
Postumian, sailed from Narbonne to Africa, visiting Cyprian's grave
at Carthage, and from there to Alexandria. The first sail took him
four to five days, the second longer, for they had to land somewhere
on the coast under stress of weather, and from there they had a
voyage of seven days. Thence to Jerome at Bethlehem and back,
and then to the Nitria and Sinai. But Silvia's expressions 1 and her
account of her visits to all the churches and shrines of Constanti-
nople on her return, shew that it had been her starting-point for
her eastern journey.

While of course she could have gone to Constantinople by sea,
it is interesting to note that another pilgrim from her country has
left us a record of his long overland route from Bordeaux to Jeru-
salem. Who he was is not known, but he dates his pilgrimage by
the consuls of 333, and gives the name of every stopping-place on
his way and occasional summaries of distances in miles in leagues
from Bordeaux to Toulouse 2 . He passed through Silvia's town of
Elusa, and she may have followed his route this of course is mere
conjecture. Picking out the points at which he adds up his miles,
we find he went by Aries, Milan, Aquileia, Sirmium (Mitrowitza),
Serdica (Sophia) and so to Constantinople, and he reckons that so
far he travelled 2221 miles, and made 112 halts.

The route from Constantinople was by Libyssa (where, confusing

1 Of. pp. 47, 55.

2 An interesting survival. In parts of French Canada the habitants still
reckon by lieues.

136 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Rome's greatest foe and the Emperor's brother, he notes " Here lies
King Annibalianus who once was King of the Africans"), Nico-
medeia, Nicaea (no word of the Council of eight years before), the
farm of Pampatus ("whence come the horses for the magistrates"),
Tyana ("hence was Appollonius (sic) the Magician"), Tarsus ("hence
was the apostle Paul"), through Cilicia to Antioch, and so by Tyre
and Caesarea to Jerusalem. He travelled, according to Professor
Ramsay 1 , mainly along the military road used by the Byzantine
armies to reach Syria from Constantinople. Silvia tells us (p. 55)
that she returned to Constantinople faciens iter jam notum either
a route already "described to you" or "familiar to me" through
the provinces of Cilicia, Cappadocia, Galatia and Bithynia, and the
towns she mentions are Antioch, Tarsus, Mopsucrene (which with
the Bordeaux pilgrim she calls Mansocrenae) and Chalcedon. All
these names occur in reverse order in the Itinerary .* It is therefore
likely that she followed in the main the older pilgrim's course.
On her way back she made a deviation to see St Thecla's martyry
a three days' journey from Tarsus by Pompeiopolis (Soli) and
Corycus to Seleucia in Isauria, so that she may have made similar
excursions on her way out. The Bordeaux pilgrim reckons 1159
miles and 58 stopping-places between Constantinople and Jerusalem.
The journey there and back took him seven months in all. He
left Chalcedon on May 30 and was back in Constantinople on
December 26.

Her journal (if one may so call it) was written apparently for
sister nuns in Aquitaine, whom she addressed in affectionate terms
"ladies of my soul," "ladies, my light," "your affection 2 /'
"venerable lady sisters." It would seem to have been put into its
present form after her return to Constantinople, but from records
previously made by her. Sir Charles Wilson, who describes her
geography of Sinai as minute and correct, concludes " I have been
much struck by the accuracy of St Silvia's topographical descrip-
tions; they are evidently those of a person who has seen the places
described, and have apparently been compiled from notes written on
the ground." If her geography is accurate, her grammar is not,
and her style abounds in repetitions and awkward constructions, to

1 See note to Bordeaux Itinerary, in the Palestine Pilgrims Society's texts.

2 Cf. p. 56, domnae lumen meum cum haec ad vest-ram qffectionem darem.
This is partly convention. Symmachus addresses his son as aiitabilitax rentra
(Epp, vii. 3, 6, etc.) and his daughter as domna filia (vi. 80); Ausonius, his old
friend, the professor and prefect, as eruditio ttia (i. 31).

Women Pilgrims 137

say nothing of peculiar spellings, which shew a Latin wearing down
towards French.

After so long a preface, it will be best to transcribe at length a
passage, illustrative at once of the Saint's methods of grammar and
travel and thought. It comes from the opening of what is left of
her narrative and describes her visit to Sinai.

" We then entered the Mount late on the Sabbath (= Saturday),
and coming to certain cells the monks who dwelt there received us
there quite kindly, shewing us every kindness. For there is also a
church there with a presbyter. There then we abode that night,
and thence rather early on the Lord's day, with the presbyter
himself and the monks, who dwelt there, we undertook the ascent
of the several mountains, which mountains are climbed with infinite
toil ; since you do not go up slowly and slowly in a circle, spirally
as we say, but you go up straight as if up a wall, and it is necessary
that the descent of the several mountains be made straight down,
until you come to the real foot of the middle (mountain), which is
Syna in particular. Accordingly therefore, at the bidding of Christ
our God, and helped by the prayers of the holy men who accom-
panied me, and even so with great toil, because I had to go up on
foot (because the ascent cannot be made at all on saddle) yet the
toil itself was not felt. The toil was not felt for the reason that
I saw the desire, which at God's bidding I had, being fulfilled. At
the fourth hour then we reached the summit of Syna, God's holy
mount, where the law was given, in the place, that is, where the
majesty of the Lord descended on the day when the mount smoked.
In that place then there is now a church, not large, since the place
itself, i.e. the summit of the mount, is not sufficiently large, a church
however which of itself has great grace. When then at God's
bidding we had got up to the very summit and had reached the
door of the church itself, lo! there met us the presbyter coming
[p. 33] from his cell, a man set apart to that very church, a sound
old man and a monk from earliest life, and, as they say here, an
ascetic, and in a word such a man as is worthy to be in such a place.
There also met us other presbyters, and in fact all the monks who
dwelt there by the mount, that is, all who were not prevented by
weakness or age. But indeed on the very summit of that middle
mountain no one lives. For there is nothing else there save only
the church and the cave, where the holy Moses was. When the
passage in the book of Moses had been read and the oblation had
been duly made, ourselves too communicating, as we were now

138 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

leaving the church, the presbyters gave us the blessings of the spot
itself, that is of apples which grow on the mount itself. For
although the holy mount Syna itself is all of rock so as to have no
herbage, yet below at the foot of the mountains themselves, i.e. either
round the foot of that which is in the middle, or round about that
of those in the circle, there is a little soil. At once the holy monks
of their diligence plant little trees and arrange little orchards or
fields and hard by cells for themselves, just as if they were deriving
fruit from the earth of the mount itself ; which however they seem
to have wrought with their own hands. And so after we had
communicated and the holy men had given us blessings and we had
gone outside the door of the church, then I began to ask them to
shew us the several places. Then at once those holy men conde-
scended to shew us the places. For they shewed us the cave where
the holy Moses was, when for the second time he had ascended up
into the mount of God in order to receive the tables anew, after he
had broken the former in consequence of the people's sin ; and all
the other spots we wished, or they themselves were better acquainted
with, they condescended to shew us. I wish you to know, venerable
lady sisters, that from the spot where we stood, that is around the
walls of the church, i.e. from the summit of the middle mountain, so
far below us did those mountains, which we had climbed at first,
seem beside that middle one, on which we stood, as if they were
hillocks. Yet they were so unending, that I thought I had never
seen higher, except that this middle one far excelled them. Egypt
and Palestine and the Red Sea and that Parthenic Sea which leads
to Alexandria, and moreover the endless frontiers of the Saracens
we saw thence, so far below as to be hardly credible. All these
several things those holy men pointed out to us.

" When then all our desire, for which we had hastened [p. 34]
to ascend, was satisfied, we now began to descend from the actual
summit of the mountain of God, unto which we had ascended, into
another mountain which is joined to it ; which place is called
Horeb ; for there is a church there. For this is the place Horeb
where the holy prophet Elias was, when he fled from the face of
Ahab, when God spoke to him saying "What doest thou here Elias?"
as is written in the Book of the Kingdoms. For the cave too, where
the holy Elias lay hid, is shewn there to this day before the door of
the church which is there. There is also shewn there the altar of
stone, which the holy Elias placed to offer to God, as those holy
men too deigned to shew us the several things. We therefore made

Women Pilgrims 139

the oblation and a very earnest prayer, and the passage itself from
the Book of the Kingdoms was read : for that had been my chief
desire for us always, that wherever we came, the very passage should
always be read from the book. When therefore our offering was
made there too, we came afresh to another spot, the presbyters and
monks shewing it to us not far away from there, that is to the spot
where the holy Aaron had stood with the seventy elders, when the
holy Moses received from the Lord the law for the children of Israel.
In that place then although there is not a house, there is yet a great
rock with level ground around it above, on which the holy men
themselves are said to have stood: for it has also there in the
middle as it were an altar made of stones. There too accordingly
the passage itself from the book of Moses was read and one psalm
said, suitable to the place ; and so after prayer we descended
thence.

" And behold now it began to be about the eighth hour, and still
there were three miles for us to quit the mountains themselves,
which we had entered at evening on the previous day : but we had
not to go out by the same part as we had entered by (as I said
above), because it was necessary for us both to walk round all the
holy places and to see whatever cells there were there, and so to
come out to the end of the valley that lies below the mountain of
God. It was necessary for us to go out to the end of the valley
itself, since there were there very many cells of holy men and a
church in that place where the bush is : which bush lives till this
day and sends forth twigs. Accordingly therefore when we had
descended the mount of God, we reached the bush at perhaps the
tenth hour. This is the bush, which I mentioned above, from which
the Lord spoke to Moses in fire, and it is in this place, where there
are many cells and a church at the end of the valley itself. In
front of the church itself there is a very pleasant garden [p. 35]
with an excellent and plenteous spring, in which garden the bush
itself is. The place too is shewn hard by there, where the holy
Moses stood, when God said to him "Loose the latchet of thy shoe"
and so forth. When then we had come to this place, it was already
the tenth hour, and because it was evening we could not make the
oblation. But prayer was made in the church, and in the garden
too at the bush. Moreover the passage itself from the book of
Moses was read according to custom, and so because it was evening
we supped there before the bush with the holy men themselves.
Accordingly therefore we abode there. And on the next day

140 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

waking rather early we asked the presbyters that the oblation might
be made there too, as was also done."

No one after all this will be surprised to learn that Silvia saw
a monolith with figures of Moses and Aaron, gratefully erected by
the Israelites as they left Egypt. Yet not a word do we hear of the
hardships and peril of the journey. It is only incidentally we learn
that she had been outside the frontier of the Empire and needed a
guard. Officers with soldiers escorted her from fort to fort till she
reached a place called Arabia. "Here we sent back the soldiers,
who had according to the Roman military system given us protection
as long as we walked through suspected places." She lightly
sketches the rest of the journey, and the stages by which she
returned "to Aelia, that is, to Jerusalem 1 ."

This was not her first visit there, as indeed we should have
judged from her route. She made it for three years a centre for
her archaeological expeditions, and though she gives us a very long
and full account of the Christian year, as there celebrated, she does
not (in the part of her story surviving) tell us much about the
famous places and churches and relics of the city, except as they
concern church practice. The special point that most pleased her
in this was the appropriateness of the service and lessons of each
day to the day. This was a novelty to a Christian from Gaul, and
was only introduced into the Gallican churches in the fifth century
by Musaeus, a presbyter of Marseilles 2 .

Many wonderful relics she saw the column at which our Lord
was scourged and the horn used in anointing the Jewish kings
but many more she did not see, for the marvels were not all dis-
covered at once. Two centuries later, pilgrims had the privilege
of seeing the crown of thorns, the spear, the sponge and reed, the
cup used at the last supper and the charger that received John the
Baptist's head. But she saw what the Bordeaux pilgrim did not
see the Cross.

Now this is a wonderful story and a digression may be forgiven.
Everybody knows Helena found the Cross. It was found, says Cyril
of Jerusalem, in Constantine's reign 3 , and Constantine died in 337.

1 To find Jerusalem still called Aelia after three hundred years is very
interesting. Ammianus Marcellinus about this time alludes to another town
far in the West "Augusta, formerly known as London."

2 So Dr Bernard on St Silvia, p. 73, in the Palestine Pilgrims Society's text.

3 Cyril Jer. Ep. 3. Cyril died in 38fr. This letter is said to be early, and a
sermon (Catech. iv. 10) quoted in the same connexion is set down to 347. If
this date is right, the silence of Eusebius is the more impressive.

Women Pilgrims 141

Helena died in 328, so, if she found it, why did not the Bordeaux
pilgrim know of it ? He knows a great deal and saw a great deal,
but is silent about the most remarkable thing of all And why is
Eusebius silent? He only says that "the solemn and all-holy
martyrion (token?) of the saving resurrection appeared, though
beyond all expectation 1 ." These two authorities are of great im-
portance, and not at all outweighed by any unanimity of post-
Cyrillian writers. But there is a curious cross-current to be
considered. One of the most interesting of Syriac documents
relative to the early church is The Doctrine of Addai. Its date or
dates scholars fix differently, but Dr Wright puts it down in its
present form to the second half of the fourth century 2 . Its main
theme is Addai, the apostle Thaddaeus, sent by our Lord to heal
King Abgar of Edessa. Incidentally Addai tells the story of the
Invention of the Cross, not by Helena, but by "Protonice, the wife
of the Emperor Claudius, whom Tiberius made second in his
kingdom, when he went to make war with the Spaniards who had
rebelled against him." Need it be said that each new fact makes
the story more astounding ? Protonice with two sons and a daughter
stayed with Herod in Jerusalem, and at the request of the apostle
James commanded the Jews to inform her where the cross was. It
was in the grave with the crosses of the two thieves. Happily, her
daughter fell down dead, and the brilliant thought of her elder son
at once restored his sister to life and discovered the True Cross. We
shall probably never know who the real discoverer was, and perhaps
it is better that Helena should not be robbed of such renown as the
story gives her 3 . At all events Silvia had no doubt she had seen
the True Cross.

Another of her excursions was to Mt Nebo 4 , and on her way she
saw Moses' traditional tomb his sepulchre having been discovered,
though "no man knoweth his sepulture." More interesting still,
she saw the place that bore the name of Lot's wife (where of course
they read the passage in Scripture); "but believe me, venerable
ladies, the pillar itself is not to be seen, bat the place alone is
shewn; but the pillar itself is said to have been covered by the

1 Eusebius, Vita Constantini iii. 28. 'Token' is Dr Bright's rendering, and
he refers it to the Holy Sepulchre. Eusebius lived in intimacy with Constantine
and must have known it, if the Cross had really been found.

2 Syriac Literature, p. 43.

3 See Dr Abbott's Philomythus, c. vii. 30, 31 for an interesting discussion
of the Invention of the Cross and Cardinal Newman's handling of the evidence.

4 Peregrinatio Silviae, pp. 40 44.

142 Life and Letters in tJie Fourth Century

Dead Sea. Certainly though we saw the place, we saw no pillar,
so I cannot deceive you about this. For the bishop of the place, that
is, of Segor [Zoar], said to us that it was now some years since the
pillar had been seen. For Segor is about six miles from the place
where the pillar stood, which is now entirely covered by water." This
was a distinct loss. However Theodosius (about 530 A.D.) says it is
there and it waxes and wanes with the moon, and Antoninus (about
570) says it is not true that it is being wasted away by cattle
licking it, but it stands as it was. A pillar about five feet high is
still shewn.

After one more expedition to see Job's tomb, she tells us her
mind turned toward home, but on her way she wished to see Edessa,
where were the martyry of St Thomas and the authentic letter our
Lord wrote to King Abgar. This story of Abgar is one of the most
firmly asserted of early traditions. Abgar was the name of the
princes of Edessa from the days of Pompey till the end of the second
century, and the tale of our Lord's letter is given by Eusebius, who
translates from the Syriac a part of the Doctrine of Addai, in a
form however differing from the present Syriac text, which expressly
says that our Lord sent a verbal message, and that Hannan, the keeper
of the archives, afterwards wrote it down. Still our Lord's reputed
autograph and His promise that Edessa should be inviolable had
already, so Edessan historians declared, saved the city at least once
from capture by the Persians 1 . As to St Thomas, it was he who
had actually given Addai his orders to go to Edessa, and St Ephraem
in one of his hymns tells us that St Thomas' bones had recently
been brought from India to Mesopotamia by a merchant, " who was
in truth a merchant 2 ."

So to Mesopotamia Silvia went and saw the martyry and read
there the Acts of Thomas, that most wonderful collection of the
Apocrypha or at least some of them, aliquanta ipsitis sancti
Thomae 3 . She was kindly received by the bishops of Mesopotamia,

1 See Phillips, Doctrine of Addai, pp. Jl and 5 ; W. Wright, Chronicle of
Joshua the Stylite, chapter 60, where Joshua (writing about 507 A.D.) speaks of
our Lord's promise that Edessa should never be captured being once more
fulfilled when Kawad was driven off in 502 3 (814 of the Greeks) ; and Cureton,
Ancient Syriac Documents, p. 152, and the authorities there quoted, Procopius,
Evagrius, etc. Cureton alludes finally to the existence in England down to his
own memory of a practice of keeping a copy of this letter of our Lord as a
phylactery.

2 Carm. Nisibena, 42.

3 "The tale of Thomas the Apostle is a sea that cannot be exhausted," said
Jacob of Serug. A better authority is Mr Burkitt's interesting book on Early
Christianity outside the Roman Empire.

Women Pilgrims 143

as her long journey "from the ends of the earth" deserved, and she
was shewn perhaps the very letter of our Lord, or at least a true
copy of it. (It depends on the pronoun ipse, which has hardly its
classical meaning in Silvia.) She writes that on her return her
correspondents shall see her copy of it. She says nothing about the
picture of Christ, which Abgar was supposed to have had.

She went on to Carrhae (Haran), and as Nisibis was inaccessible,
having been held since 363 by the Persians, she had the happy inspira-
tion to go and see the place where Jacob kissed Rachel, or rather,
to quote her correctly, where he watered Rachel's flocks. They read
there the passage from Genesis and a suitable psalm (was it the
forty-fifth ?) and saw the well and the great stone and the inevitable
church And so to Antioch and across Asia Minor to Constantinople,
where her story ends with the anticipation of visiting Ephesus "on
account of the martyry of the holy and blessed John and to pray."

We hear of her again a year or two after 400 from a letter of
Paulinus to Sulpicius. He cannot himself spare "a grain of sacred
ash" to Sulpicius' envoy Victor, who is in search of relics, "but
Victor says he has abundant hopes of such a favour from the holy
Silvia, who has promised him some relics of many martyrs of the
East 1 ." Elsewhere we learn she died at Brixia (Brescia) and left
her sacred treasures to the bishop of the town, Gaudentius. Her
memory is still celebrated there on Dec. 15.

So far we have followed the course of three women pilgrims, and
it will easily be believed in what numbers both men and women
flocked to Palestine. As Paula says, "The chief men in Gaul hasten
hither; the Briton, remote from our world, if he advance in the
faith, forsakes the setting sun and seeks the spot he knows by fame
and from the Scriptures. What shall we say of Armenians, of
Persians, of the tribes of India and Ethiopia, of Egypt herself hard
by, so rich in monks, of Pontus and Cappadocia, of Coele-Syria and
Mesopotamia and all the swarms (examina) of the East ? They all
hasten to these places and shew divers types of virtues 2 ." Chrysostom
more than once speaks of the world coming together to the manger,
and tells of many taking a long journey over the sea from the ends
of the earth to Arabia to see Job's dunghill 3 . It seems however

1 Paulinus, Ep. 31. 1.

2 Among Jerome's letters, Ep. xlvi. 10.

3 Homily 5 De Statuis, p. 69 Migne, diet TOVTO iro\\ol vvv /j-axpav riva xal
diaTrbvTiov diro8i)[ji.iai> (TrAXcwTcu diro TUV weparuv rr/s yrjs 's TTJV 'Apafiiav rp^xovres
Iva. TT)I> Ko-n-piav eKeivrjv idwffi, and they derive from the sight iratrav &<t>t\eiai> Kal

144 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

that this concourse of strange races in Jerusalem and Bethlehem
was not free from those attendant evils which mark similar mixtures
in other places. Gregory of Nyssa visited Jerusalem about 380,
that is just about the same time as our pilgrims, and his conclusion
was that the effect of the pilgrimages was evil and not good. He
was disturbed by the dangers to the fame and character of women,
pilgrims though they might be, in the profligate cities of the East.
Of Jerusalem itself he writes: "There is no species of impurity
that is not dared therein flagitious actions and adulteries and
thefts, idolatries and witchcrafts and envyings and murders ; and
this last evil, above others, is so common in that place, that nowhere
else is there such a readiness to commit murder as in those places 1 ."
Even Jerome, the great advocate of pilgrimage, has to confess (about
394) that "if the sites of the Cross and Resurrection were not in a
crowded city, where is a curia, a garrison, harlots, actors, jesters and
everything there is in any other city; or if its only crowds were
monks, then indeed it were a desirable abode for all monks 2 ."
Quite apart from the fact that many of the pilgrims attributed more
value to the actual pilgrimage than to any spiritual impulse or
impression connected with it, even for the more spiritually minded
there was (and is always) a danger in religious excitement, as tending
to supersede the moral standard. That contemporary criticism was
not wanting is seen from Jerome's ferocious and filthy attack on
Vigilantius, who had dared "to call us who stand for relics, ash-men
and idolaters, worshippers of dead men's bones 3 ." There were also
bishops, who gently deprecated pilgrimages, but on the whole
without much success.

But was there not, in spite of Jerome, an alternative type of
Christian life for woman? Though ecclesiastics do not as a rule
emphasize it, we find there was. Two instances may fitly close this
essay.

There exists a curious little poem, dating from the middle of the
fourth century, which generally bears the name of Faltonia Proba,
and is therefore attributed to the granddaughter of the Roman lady
who, it seems, actually wrote it. Proba, the real authoress, was the
wife of Clodius Celsinus Adelphius, who was Prefect of Rome for

1 Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. ad Eustathium, 6 13.

2 Jerome, Ep. Iviii. 4. Letter cxlviii. deals with a scandal, which occurred at
Bethlehem almost under his own eyes. Even the gatherings on a smaller scale
at Nola were marked by drunkenness and disorder, see Paulinus, Natal. 9. 546 f.
Also Augustine, Con/, vi. 2, 2.

3 Jerome, Ep. cix. 1 cinerarias et idololatras, qui mortuorum hominum ossa
veneremur.

Women Pilgrims 145

half the year 35 1 1 . Her grandfather, her father, her brother, her
son and many more of her male relatives held the office of consul,
and her nephew Petronius Probus, who married her granddaughter
Faltonia, was one of the greatest and richest men of his day. So
Proba belonged to a family of the very highest repute and dignity.
She had at least two sons, and was able to combine with her duties
as wife and mother a close study of Virgil. Her surviving poem is
a sort of epitome of Old Testament and Gospel history composed
of lines and half lines from her poet, and very ingenious it is.
Comparetti is no doubt right in pronouncing such work childish
after all, though it was then regarded as glorifying the poet who
was used as a quarry.

Proba's prologue tells of former attempts on a different theme,
though she does not say whether they were in the same style.
"Long since of chiefs who brake the gentle bonds of peace, moved,
unhappy men ! by dire lust to reign, of mutual slaughter and the
cruel wars of kings, of armies of one race and fair shields stained
with parents' blood, and trophies won but not from foemen, of blood-
besprinkled triumphs that fame proclaims, and of cities so oft
widowed of so many a citizen, I have written, I confess." But now
"I will shew that Virgil sang the gentle gifts of Christ." And
so forth for nearly seven hundred lines, one half dealing with
Genesis and Exodus, and the second a harmony of the Gospels and
of Virgil. She concludes with a gentle address to her husband, from
which some have supposed he was not at first a Christian. "Of
your grace, my friends, keep this way of worship: hold this thyself,
my sweet spouse, and if our piety deserve, may all our grandsons
hold the faith." At times she is hard put to it to match Virgil
with Scripture 2 , but the passages I have translated run smoothly
enough, patchwork as they are.

Perhaps Proba was in his mind, when Jerome angrily wrote
"The art of interpreting Scripture is the one all claim. Scribimus
indocti doctique poemata passim. This the garrulous old woman,
the drivelling dotard etc. lay claim to, mutilate, and teach before
they learn... As if we have not read the centos from Homer and

1 Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme, ii. 244; Gregorovius, Rome in the Middle
Ages, tr. i. 97, and Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, tr. p. 54, give the
poem to Faltonia, the two latter avowedly following Aschbach. But Seeck,
Symmachus, Intr. p. xc. , and Schenkl on Proba in the Vienna Corpus of Latin
Ecclesiastical Writers, vol. xvi. p. 514, make it clear that this is wrong and that
the grandmother is the authoress.

2 Cf. the creation of Eve; Quaeritur hide alius; nee quisquam ex agmine
tanto | audet adire virum (Aen. v. 378 the boxing match).

G. 10

146 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Virgil, and could not say Virgil was a Christian before Christ,
when he wrote Jam redit et mrgo etc.... This is puerile 1 ." Yet
Proba found a place by her poem in at least one list of the Church's
famous men, a solitary woman among them, because, as Isidore says,
she sang the praise of Christ, "and if we do not admire her conception,
we praise her ingenuity, and her work is still read among the
apocryphal writings 3 ." Thither Pope Gelasius relegated it by a
decree between 492 and 496, and so it continued to be read through
the Middle Ages.

But if to-day we do not read her poem, we have another and
perhaps a tenderer memorial of her, which may well seem to outweigh
the rhetorical laudation Jerome lavished on a Paula or a Eustochium.
Among the Latin inscriptions is one, which at her death her husband
had inscribed upon her tomb, which was also to be his.

CLODIVS ADELFIVS V C EX PRAEFECTIS VRBIS VXORI INCOMPARABILI
ET SIBI.

(Clodius Adelphius Vir Clarissimus [his rank] Ex- Prefect of the
City, to his incomparable wife and himself 3 .)

Of Monnica, the mother of St Augustine, much has been written
and but few words need be given to her here. From her son's
writings we can piece her life together. A German critic has
suggested that perhaps she was not throughout an ideal mother
in every way, but at least she was always motherly. She, like
her son, grew in grace and knowledge and rose with time to higher
planes of thought and vision. She was early trained to sobriety
and piety by an old Christian slave 4 . When it fell to her lot to be
married, she was given to a husband, who if kindly was very quick-
tempered, yet such was her tact that she never had a blow from
him and they never quarrelled. Over her son she watched and
prayed and wept to win him for Christ. At times she would have
despaired, but now a vision told her she should "see him standing
where she stood," and now a bishop with a splendid instinct told
her "it was impossible that the son of those tears could be lost"
and the words came to her as a voice from heaven. When the son
deceived her by going away from her to Rome, "after accusing my
treachery and cruelty she turned once more to pray for me." She
followed him to Milan and underwent a storm on her voyage, but in

1 Ep. liii. 7. Tertullian, Praescr. Haeret. 39 on earlier centos.

2 Isidore, de Vir. ill. 22 (18).

3 Corpus Inscr. Latin, vi. 1712.

4 Cow/, ix. 89, 1720, etc.

Women Pilgrims 147

inversion of the natural order she comforted the sailors by telling of a
vision, in which she had learnt they would arrive safely. It was, she
told her son, her firm faith in Christ that she should not leave this
life till she saw him a faithful Catholic. And when her dream was
realized and he went with the small circle of friends to Cassisiacum
to spend the few months before baptism in thought and discussion,
she went with him, and her part in the dialogues held there is
no mean one. From time to time she joins in aptly, with a happy
anticipation of some philosophical conclusion, with a witty phrase
that caps a process of reasoning, or a line from a hymn of Ambrose
which is the conclusion of the whole matter 1 . The wonderful
scene at Ostia, where mother and son held spiritual communion and
in swift thought touched on that Eternal Wisdom, which abideth
over all, and had reached for a moment the contemplation of God
which is "the joy of the Lord," must be read in Augustine's own
words 2 .

Neither Monnica nor (so far as we know) Proba ever went on a
pilgrimage. The common duties of domestic cheerfulness, peace-
making and love sufficed them. We may contrast with Melania's
relinquishment of her son to the Praetor and Paula's neglect which
left Toxotius to grow up a pagan, the mother's feeling which glows
through Proba's quaint mosaic and still more the very significant
words of Augustine 3 . He is telling of the spiritual awakening
he felt for the first time in his life when he read Cicero's
Hortensius.

"And since at that time (Thou knowest, light of my heart)
the apostolic writings were not known to me, I was delighted with
that exhortation so far only as to seek and pursue and hold and
embrace not this or that sect but Wisdom herself, whatever she
were ; I was wakened and kindled and enflamed by the dialogue ;
and yet this alone checked me in aD my enthusiasm, that the
name of Christ was not there ; for this name, according to Thy
mercy, Lord, the name of my Saviour, Thy Son, even with my
mother's milk my heart devoutly drank in and deeply treasured ;
and whatever lacked this name, however learned, exquisite or true
it might be, it took not entire hold of me."

1 See dialogue de Beata Vita. Note his high opinion of woman: Con/, xiii.
32, 47 feminam quae haberet quidem in mente rationalis intelligentiae parem
natnram.

2 Con/, ix. 1011, 2328.

3 Confessions iii. 4, 8; cf. also i. 11, 17 on the contest between maternal and
paternal influence. Also de B. V. 6 nostra mater cujus meriti credo esse omne
quod vivo.

102

CHAPTEE VII

SYMMACHUS

...Et in vetustatem perducens superbos et nesciunt...

AUGUSTINE, Conf. i. 4, 4

TWICE in the course of his history Ammianus pauses to describe
the Roman society of his day, and his pictures are lacking neither
in colour nor liveliness. But whether these portions of his history
were as popular as other sections which he read in public at Rome,
we are not told. St Jerome's account of the luxury of Rome,
like Cicero's story of his own consulship, may be said to have
"exhausted the cabinet of Isocrates, all the paint-boxes of his
disciples and a good deal of the pigments of Aristotle 1 ." On the
other side Claudian is lavish of admiration, so lavish as to praise
much that Jerome attacked. More moderate is Macrobius in his
picture of the amiable and learned circle of Praetextatus, which
shews us that society at its best.

But Fortune has preserved for us other means of judging the
Roman nobility, for one of its number added to his great repute
as an orator the fame of a great letter- writer. We have some
nine hundred letters of Symmachus written to a large number of
the best people in the Rome of his day. It might be expected
that from these we could test the validity of the impeachment
of Ammianus and Jerome and the defence of Claudian and Macro-
bius. To a certain extent we can. But the reader who hopes
to obtain from the letters of Symmachus anything like the bright
and varied impression of life he may gain from the accumulations
of Sir Edmund Verney and his family, will be disappointed. The
reason is not far to seek. The Verney papers remained untouched

1 ad Alt. ii. 1.

Symmachus 149

for some two centuries and they offered Parthenope Lady Verney
a boundless variety of documents bearing on the daily life and
private interests of a large and active family with a wide circle
of relatives and acquaintances. The correspondence of Symmachus
was edited by his son not long after his death, and Fabius Sym-
machus was, I am afraid, a dull man, thoroughly in subjection
to the notions of propriety held by his class, which was not a very
intelligent class. He carefully removed anything unsafe, anything
beneath the dignity of a great man, anything relating to common
life or business or passing events. Perhaps he should not have
all the blame, for he was apparently a good son and only did what
his father would after all have wished. Symmachus himself more
than once speaks of subjoining in an index or indiculus or brevi-
arium some account of what is occurring, and it is impossible for us
to say whether his son cut these away, when he edited the collec-
tion, or whether he did it himself, when he filed his letters for
preservation. For it has to be confessed that Symmachus kept copies
of his letters from a genuine admiration of them, which of course he
would have denied or put otherwise. Sometimes he used them
again intact, and sometimes he culled a phrase from an old letter
to weave into a new. Once, perhaps by mistake, he took a sonorous
cluster of words from a letter of Ausonius he had by him 1 . At
all events he wrote his letters to his noble friends with a keen
sense of their value and dignity, and a strong impression of the
likelihood of their being published. Here is at once a difference
between such letters and those of Cicero. All is studied, all is
for the public. Ubique vitam agimus consularem he wrote of
himself a few years after his consulship (Ep. viii. 23), and the same
spirit filled him throughout. He never forgot, as even Cicero so
frequently did in writing to his friends, that he might be, or was,
or had been a consul. Neither did he ever forget that he had
a reputation to maintain as a stylist. Indeed it may be said he
is most natural and most human when he is thinking about his
health or that of his family.

This edition of his letters was not the only task Fabius under-
took for his father. A monument erected by him was found on
the Caelian hill in 1617. The inscription is straightforward and
not without dignity. " To Q. Aurelius Symmachus, Vir Clarissimus,
Quaestor, Praetor, Pontifex Major, Corrector (Governor) of Lucania
and the Bruttii, Count of the third order, Proconsul of Africa,

1 Ep. iii. 6, quoting Ausonius ap. Ep. i. 32 (delenifica et suada facundia).

150 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Prefect of the City, Consul of his year, a most eloquent orator
Q. Fabius Memmius Symmachus, Vir Clarissimus, to the best of
fathers 1 ." Symmachus' career was thus very typical of his class
in his day, splendid but not very important.

We may then take this man as a representative of the Roman
nobility. In nothing else is he of real importance to the historian.
He contributed no ideas to mankind and he left no mark on society.
He was a good son, a good father, a good friend, a gentleman in
a good sense of the word, but in no sense was he great. His
reputation for his speeches and his letters is not sustained by
posterity. It has become one of the strongest proofs of the de-
cadence of Roman taste. In fact, strange as it may seem, the
most important act of his life in its bearing on history was his
recommendation of St Augustine as a professor of rhetoric to the
people of Milan.

Symmachus came of a distinguished family, and he believed
that "good blood tells and never fails to recognize itself" (im-
pulsu boni sanguinis, qui se semper agnoscit ; Or. viii. 3). His
grandfather, Aurelius Julianus Symmachus, had been consul in
the year 330, about ten years before his birth which is generally
placed about 340. His father, Lucius Aurelius Avianius Sym-
machus, to whom we shall return, was Prefect of the City in 364
and won the praise of Ammianus (who is chary of praise) as " one
of the most conspicuous examples of learning and modesty 2 ."
Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, our subject, was consul in 391. His
son Fabius was never more than praetor, but his grandson was
consul in 446, his great-grandson, the father-in-law of Boethius,
in 485, and that man's grandsons, the sons of Boethius, in 522.

The education Symmachus received was that of his day the
traditional education of a Roman gentleman for centuries rhetoric
and literature. How much Greek he learnt, it would be hard to
say. It made very little impression on him, but this is not sur-
prising in view of the decline of Greek studies 3 . Let an extract
from a letter to Ausonius tell of his philosophy 4 . "I pay no

1 Corp. Inscr. Lat. vi. 1699. Consul ordinarius is the consul who gave his
name to the year as opposed to the sujfectus who took his place during the year.

2 Amrn. Marc, xxvii. 3, 3.

3 Boissier, F. P. i. 175 6, remarks this decliue.

4 Perhaps it is not for nothing that in the Saturnalia (vii. 1, 2) Macrobius
makes Symmachus deprecate the introduction of Philosophy at the banquet ;
rather, he says, tanquam censoria quaedam et plus nimio verecunda materfamilias
penetralibus suis contineatur. The passage (including the simile) is modelled
from Plutarch's Convivial Questions i. 1, a work much used as a quarry by
Macrobius.

Symmachus 151

attention to others, the ignoble mob, who feign philosophy by
air and garb. A few our age has produced, and among these in
particular my friend Barachus, whose native wisdom approaches
antiquity. ' But do you,' I hear you say, ' presume to judge of
philosophers ? ' " (Ep. i. 29). Possibly it was enough for a gentle-
man to know the names of the philosophers and an anecdote or
two about them. Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander ; for the
rest, " Plato taught us there are gods, and Aristotle reduced the
nature of rhetoric to an art" (Ep. i. 4).

When Avianius Symmachus met Libanius the great Greek
rhetorician of Antioch, " he saw," writes Libanius to Symmachus,
"that I was not at all a contemptible person, and telling me
much about your natural endowment, he asked the gods to grant
something that might allow you to partake my studies." The
prayer was not granted, and Symmachus was trained by "an old
man, the child of the Garonne," who "dropped the precepts of
rhetoric into his breast" (Ep. ix. 88). Gaul was famous for her
rhetoricians, and this man has been identified with Tiberius Victor
Minervius, in earlier days the teacher of Ausonius and com-
memorated by him in an interesting little poem 1 '. A friend of
St Jerome's was sent to Rome " that Roman gravitas might season
the richness and resplendency of his Gallic oratory 2 ," and it may
not be fanciful to attribute to his teacher from the Garonne the
permanently " rich and florid " character of Symmachus' rhetoric, for
so Macrobius describes it 3 .

He entered on the usual career of office for a young Roman
noble, as is set forth on his monument, and began to acquire some
repute as an orator. In fact his oratory won him his selection
by the Senate to bear its offering of gold and voice its sentiments
in a panegyric at the Quinquennalia of Valentinian, the festival
to celebrate his five years of empire in 369. This panegyric,
another to Valentiuian and one delivered at the same time to
Gratian, survive, though they are not complete. They are like
other panegyrics, but have some additional interest in dealing
with the German campaigns of the Emperor, to whose court the
young orator was attached at the time. Interfui, he says, ipse

1 Professores 1. See p. 110. 2 Jerome, Ep. 125, 6.

3 It may be well to give Macrobius in full, Sat. v. 1, 7 pingue et floridum in
quo Plinius Secundus quondam et nunc nullo veterum minor noster Symmachus
luxuriatur. This verb, picking up a previous lascivit, is very well chosen to
represent Symmachus' style. Whether following Macrobius or not, Gibbon uses
the same word "the luxuriancy of Symmachus."

152 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

deprehendi. He is able to emphasize real merit in Valentinian's
activity and his preference for active service at the front, but the
glory of the ten-year-old Gratian rings false. Of course the Roman
Empire is made much of ; the Rhine flows " from our Alps to our
Ocean " and mirrors Roman forts on either bank ; " from the
couch of the rising Aurora to the goal of the setting sun thou
seest nought that is not thine own," and the Neckar, before un-
heard of, is now for the first time made known to the world by
the Emperor's victories'. This last flourish was, however, a triumph
of loyalty over geography. It should be noted to what sources he
ascribes the Emperor's prosperity "I said, venerable Augustus,
that the gods were thy helpers. It is easy to prove this with the
Rhine for a witness, etc." The plural dei was the regular form
in panegyrics and its importance maylbe exaggerated. Still it is
significant. It was while he was with Valentinian that he made
the acquaintance of the poet Ausoiiius, then tutor of Gratian and
destined to rise higher.

In 373 Symmachus became proconsul of Africa, and cooperated
with Theodosius, the father of the future Emperor, in crushing
Firmus, whose revolt exhibited in the political world those am-
bitions of the Moors, which found their religious expression in
Donatism. He seems to have won the praise of Theodosius (Or. i.).

Either just before or just after his two and a half years in
Africa, he married Rusticiana the daughter of Orfitus. He received
with her a fine dowry, though in later years he was involved
in legal troubles by this connexion with Orfitus' estate. Orfitus,
according to Ammianus (xiv. 6, 1), was a man who conducted
himself with insolence as Prefect of the City, his elevation turning
his head, but otherwise he was sensible and a good business man,
though alas ! not so well equipped in liberal studies as a nobleman
should be. He was exiled on a charge of peculation but afterwards
recalled. Symmachus had by this marriage two children, a son
and a daughter, who seem to have been born about 384 5.

Meanwhile Avianius had had an interesting experience of the
Roman populace, for, says Ammianus (xxvii. 3, 4), "they burnt
his house, the most beautiful across the Tiber, for they had been
excited by some vile plebeian saying that Avianius had said
(though no one had heard him) that he would rather slake lime

1 Ausonius says the same of the sources of the Danube, referring to this
campaign, Mosella 424, Et fontem Latiis ignotum annalibus Histri, \ haec
profligati venit modo laurea belli.

Symmachus 153

with his wine than sell it at the prices expected. Ammianus
abounds in stories of rioting in Rome, when free corn and wine etc.
were not forthcoming for the populace. There are hints of this
in Symmachus' letters, and the reader will understand his pleasure
in watching from his seaside house the corn-ships on their way
to Ostia 1 .

Avianius withdrew to the country and stayed there till the
Senate sent a deputation to ask him to return. An oration of
Symmachus' on this joyous occasion, and one on behalf of Trygetius
delivered about the same time (376), survive in fragments. The
latter has some significant flattery addressed to Gratian, in which
one may trace some side-references to Valentinian, of a nature
to diminish the faith one might place in the previous panegyrics.

All this is characteristic of the day. One might read the letters
of Symmachus without forming any clear idea of the dangers, in-
ternal and external, of the Empire, just as it is almost impossible
to gather from Miss Austen's pages that England was at war with
Napoleon. Yet here are stirring incidents in his family circle,
perils that might have broken his fortunes for ever, and he himself
was to face and escape even greater dangers. How much more
interesting his correspondence would be, if it had not been so
carefully edited !

Symmachus was now at the height of his glory. He was famous
as an orator ; he had represented the Senate before the Emperor ;
the Emperors "entrusted to his human voice their divine despatch,
and the Senate learned their victories from his mouth " (i. 95).
His correspondence now begins to be more extensive.

In 382 the Emperor Gratian, who had passed from the hands
of Ausonius into those of Ambrose, a much more aggressive Chris-
tian, began a campaign against paganism. He withdrew public
authority and money from the ancestral sacra of the gentes ;
cancelled the grants and immunities of the Vestals and limited
their right to receive property by will ; and removed the statue
of Victory and her altar from the Senate. A remonstrance was
addressed to him by the pagan members of the Senate, but (to
quote St Ambrose, Ep. xvii. 10), "the holy Damasus, bishop
of the Roman church, chosen by God, sent to me a statement

1 Seneca, Ep. 77 (beg.), gives a pleasant picture of the excitement at Puteoli
on the approach of corn-ships, which are recognised from their rigging to be
Alexandrian. (See Torr, Ancient Ships, p. 90.) The sight must have meant
more to Symmachus with his experience of the Eoman mob.

154 Life and Letters in ttie Fourth Century

which Christian Senators beyond counting had given him, to the
effect that they had directed no such thing to be done, did not
agree with such petitions made by the heathen, and withheld their
consent ; and they stated publicly and privately that they would
not come to the Senate if any concession were made." This state-
ment (libellus) was given to Gratian by Ambrose, and the pagans,
says Symmachus, "were refused an audience, thanks to unprin-
cipled men (improbi), because justice could not have failed them"
(Eel. iii. 1).

A year later Gratian was murdered, and Valentinian II. suc-
ceeded him. The pagan party regained some strength and Sym-
machus became Prefect of the City. In this capacity he had
constant communication with the Emperor on all sorts of business,
legal points, civil service disputes, compliments and so forth. Who
was responsible for such and such a bridge ? Puteoli and Tarracina
quarrel over an imperial grant of grain, and it goes to the Emperor.
Certain city guilds wish exemption from a new tax. The people
are anxious about some games promised by the Emperor. Honorary
senatorial rank is asked for a philosopher, brought according to
precedent from Athens to instruct the young nobility. His name
is Celsus, and men of letters generally agree in pronouncing him
nearly equal (subpar) to Aristotle. Some novelties have been
introduced into the processions of Roman magistrates, and Sym-
machus asks for their abolition. "Remove the chariot, which
boasts greater magnificence ; we prefer that which can claim greater
antiquity."

Two most interesting relationes refer to the duel between
Christians and pagans. The pagans made a move to recover from
Valentinian II. the altar of Victory, which Gratian would not
restore, and the Christians hatched a plot to ruin Symmachus.
Both parties failed in the offensive.

As a good deal of literature rose round the relatio (Rel. 3)
about Victory, an abstract of it may be given. Symmachus begins
by a reference to the former deputation, which was not received
through the machinations of evil men. However he now appears
in a twofold capacity, as Prefect of the City and envoy of the
Senate. There is no conflict of interests. All are concerned in
the glory of the age and the maintenance of ancestral usage. So
it is asked that the state of things which long blessed the republic
may be restored. Earlier princes maintained and later ones allowed
the old ceremonies, and what is so familiar as the altar of Victory ?

Symmachus 155

Let the name (nomen), if not the goddess (numen), have its dignity.
The Emperors owe much to Victory. It has long been an orna-
ment of the curia, and the pledge of the honour of the Senate
who swore truth on it. Constantius may have interfered with
this, but he respected the Vestals. He came, he saw, he tolerated
and preserved Roman usages. Different nations have different
faiths. That is best which is most helpful to the State, so ex-
perience may decide where reason wavers. Rome personified asks
leave to live in her own way. The great secret can hardly be
reached by one only path, and it is only fair to suppose that what-
ever men worship is one after all. However, to turn from dis-
cussion to entreaty. What does the Treasury gain by robbing the
Vestals ? Rather let it grow rich on the spoils of the foe than the
pillage of the priests. It is especially invidious to take money
without the plea of need. The Treasury will not allow the
Vestals to inherit land, though freedmen may. Thus it is better
to be the slave of man than the servant of the gods. Is not this
also to interfere with liberty of testation ? It never was to the
State's advantage to be ungrateful. In fact disaster and famine
have even now followed in the steps of sacrilege. Let it not be
said this is to be given to a strange religion. It is not a gift, it
is a debt made so by long usage. It is not the Emperor who gives
this, as he may be told [as Ambrose did tell him], for it was given
long ago. The deputation only ask the continuance of the state
of things which gave the Emperor's father empire and heirs [a
tacit contrast with Gratian, perhaps]. That deified sire from the
starry zenith now looks down on the tears of the priests, and finds
himself condemned when the use he maintained is violated.

Ambrose was again too strong for the pagans. Now for the
Christian plot. Symmachus had been charged to recover temple
property, and the tale was invented that he had in doing so been
guilty of torturing Christian priests. It brought down on him
an imperial censure, but he triumphantly cleared himself by pro-
ducing evidence to shew he had so far taken no steps at all, and
procuring a letter in his favour from Pope Damasus (Rel. 21).

Symmachus however had a real loss in this year in the death
of his friend Praetextatus, and he was subjected to a good deal
of annoyance in the matter of the property of Orfitus. So in
autumn 385 he gave up office He was still a person of conse-
quence and was regarded as the leading man of the Senate. It
was in this year he was asked, while still Prefect, to recommend

156 Life mid Letters in the Fourth Century

a teacher of rhetoric for Milan, who should travel at the public cost
to take up his duties. Augustine tells us how he set his Manichaean
friends to canvass for him, and how after giving an exhibition of
his powers to Syrnmachus he was appointed, and on reaching Milan
was kindly received by Ambrose, who was, notwithstanding con-
troversy, a friend and correspondent of Symmachus 1 .

In his despatches to Valentinian II. Symmachus had used
some striking expressions of loyalty. " Believe me, you (the
Emperors) possess the secrets of all hearts " (Rel. 9). He commits
the gratitude which he feels, but cannot fulfil, to the powers of
heaven (Rel. 7). "0 city accepted of heaven and the stars, on
which you have so freely lavished the good things of every land "
(Rel. 9). The year 387 shewed (if it was necessary) the value of
such phrases. The usurper Maximus, who had killed Gratian, now
drove Valentinian from the West, and Rome made her submission.
Symmachus delivered a panegyric in his honour and in the fol-
lowing year did so again. In 388 Maximus fell before Theodosius
at the battle of Aquileia, and everyone had to make haste to
change sides. Symmachus' adventures are not recorded by himself,
but the tale survives in Socrates the Church historian (v. 14).

" This Symmachus was an eminent man in the Roman Senate,
and was admired for his mastery of Roman eloquence, and there
are in fact many speeches written by him in the Roman tongue.
While Maximus then still lived, he wrote and recited a panegyric
to him, and so became liable to the charge of treason. Accordingly
in fear of death he fled to the church. Now the Emperor was
so careful of the Christian religion that he not only exceedingly
honoured the priests of his own faith, but he also gladly received
Novatians who held the Homoousion (the Nicene symbol). At
the request of Leontius, bishop of the church of the Novatians
in Rome, he yielded and pardoned Symmachus. On obtaining
forgiveness Symmachus wrote a speech of apology to the Emperor
Theodosius."

It must have been an interesting speech, but it is lost. Theo-
dosius became friendly with him and made him consul for the
year 391. Once more the altar of Victory came up, and Ambrose
again iatervened and refused for some days to see the Emperor,
whom he supposed to be wavering (Ep. Ivii. 4). Symmachus intro-

1 Con/, v. 13, 23. I believe Augustine was studying rhetoric and reading
Cicero's Hortensius at Carthage while Symmachus was proconsul (Conf. iii. 4),
but there is no suggestion of their meeting.

Symmachus 157

duced the matter into a complimentary oration he was making to
the Emperor at Milan. Theodosius blazed into passion and had
the orator seized, put on a carriage without cushions and driven
posthaste to the hundredth milestone 1 . Even so the matter was
again brought before the Emperor next year in Gaul, far away from
Ambrose, as the saint points out, and he was still obdurate.

In 392 Eugenius was Emperor, the puppet of Arbogast the
Frank. Symmachus, wise by experience, was careful, but still Fabius
Symmachus was made quaestor. This was a mistake, and Fabius
took pains to eliminate from his father's letters as far as possible
all references to the usurper, though one or two escaped him.
Flavian, Symmachus' friend, lost his life for Eugenius in the defeat
on the river Frigidus, and the younger Flavian, Symmachus'
son-in-law, had apparently to turn Christian to conciliate the victo-
rious Theodosius a fact worth remembering in view of Claudian's
panegyric. Augustine (C. D. v. 26) curiously quotes Claudian's
poem and refers to this laudable clemency in the same chapter.
The young man was forgiven and became a little later Prefect of
the City, but he had great trouble relative to the money matters
of the department his father had filled under the usurper.

Once more in 397 Symmachus had to face danger. Gildo, the
brother of Firmus, rebelled in Africa, and had the corn supplies
for Rome at his mercy. To declare war on him meant to stop
the corn-ships at once, and this meant riot at Rome. To make
sure that the odium of this should fall not on the Emperors but
on the Senate, and to save the former from any trouble with the
latter in consequence of popular disturbance, Stilicho consulted
the Senate and made it vote for war 2 . It was many years since
the Senate had had such a compliment, but it was costly. The
corn failed, there were riots, and Symmachus was for a little time
the object of popular ill-will and had to withdraw, but all was
soon tranquil.

His last years were devoted to his son, his son's marriage,
the games Fabius was to give as praetor, and his health. It is
not certain when he died. Seeck says the year is 402, but it
seems clear he was living when Prudentius wrote his reply to the
great Relatio, and that was just after the so-called victory of

1 Prosper, de promiss. Dei, iii. 38, 2.

2 Claudian (Cons. Stil. i. 325 f.) soars on this occasion; Romuleas leges
rediisse fatemur \ cum procerum jussin fainulantia cernimus ariiia a good phrase
representing no doubt what Stilicho wished the Senate to think for the
moment.

158 Life and Letters in tlie Fourth Century

Pollentia in 403, so soon after it, apparently, that the doubts
which Claudian found it so hard to lay, had not yet been raised
about the result of the battle.

We may now turn to Symmachus in his relations with his
family and his friends. The first thing that will strike the English
reader is the extraordinary formality with which he addresses his
correspondents. A very large number of the letters a strangely
large number contain elaborate excuses for not writing, and as
elaborate requests for letters, with studied admiration of the cor-
respondent's style and profound humility on Symmachus' part on
account of his poverty in composition 1 . "I am poor in speech,"
he writes (iv. 27), "and economical of paper." "I have always,
like rivers in drought, shrunk from wide banks, that an affectation
of brevity may conceal my poverty...! could wish that like the
Aborigines we might exchange our greetings on a bit of stick or
cork ; and let Egypt have devised her rolls of papyrus for the
libraries and the forum" (iv. 28). Still he has to keep writing
every day, though he has little to say. " How long shall we
babble (blaterabimus) the words of mutual salutation, without other
matter for the pen? In days of old our fathers would fill their
friendly pages with business of state but of this there is little or
nothing to-day. Of this resource the peace of our times has de-
prived us, so we have to hunt for untried seeds of correspondence
(semina scribendi) to wipe away the weariness of commonplace
letters" (Ep. ii. 35). It was after all the artificial style which
appealed to his correspondents, as we may see in Fabius' method
of editing. He sorted out the letters into groups, putting by
themselves all addressed to the same person, and published them
without any further effort at arrangement, and with no consideration
for chronology. Indeed in one case at least he confused a father
and son and left their letters mixed. After some time spent on this
arduous work, he let it drop altogether and made his secretaries
copy off his father's letters as they stood in his portfolios without
attempting any order at all books viii. and ix. are the result.
The relationes, like Pliny's letters to Trajan, stand by themselves.
Seeck has been at enormous pains to date as far as possible all
the letters.

1 All these are the constant characteristics of the epistolary style taught by
the rhetoricians. There are letters enough of Julian and Synesius, both men of
higher type, which shew the same features. See Volkmann, Synesius v. Cyrene,
p. 116, and especially Bohde, der griechische Roman, pp. 341 ff., on letter-writing
as a regular branch of sophistic composition.

Symmachus 159

If then the collection offers little aid toward an ordered life
of Symmachus, we may still find in it abundant evidence of his
character. His letters to his father speak the admiration and
affection of a dutiful son. He submits verses to his father's
criticism with much nervousness, though he knows his father can-
not resist paying the most lavish compliments. "What could
be neater than your letter, just received ? what more delightful
than its intermixture of verses ?" writes Avianius, and he proceeds
to tell his son he is writing poetical tributes to some eighty great
men of his time, and he sends five samples. They consist of six
tolerable hexameters each and are all very pretty and polite and
nothing more. Their chief value is to shew how much better and
more lively are Ausonius' similar productions

Rusticiana, Symmachus' wife, is hardly mentioned in the letters.
Once or twice reference is made to her estates, once to her birthday,
and once to her not being very well. Nearly all Symmachus'
relatives cause him anxiety on this score.

There is a large number of letters addressed to his son-in-law
and his daughter. One gathers the impression that the orator was
a little in dread of the lady's temper sometimes. ' She must not be
annoyed, he says on one occasion, at his delaying the horses she
needs for some journey (vi. 12). He is very anxious about her
health is she taking care of it ? Here is a letter (vi. 4) 1 .

"The suffering I have to bear from the pain in my right hand
your bad news has doubled. The keener anxiety racks me, that I
know my daughter cannot be persuaded to be moderate in eating
and drinking. Worried therefore by distress of mind and disease of
body, I could not wait till I could write myself ; but by a hurried
dictation I have satisfied my alarm, if I have broken my rule. And
first, I implore you to relieve my fears by a reply : and then, lady
daughter (domina filia), I pray you in particular to avoid what does
not suit your well-being and to mend your health, so often broken,
by the aid of temperance. Because it not only promotes health-
fulness, but is a testimony of our good sense, to abstain from what
is dangerous. Farewell."

Then she needs rest and quiet (vi. 15). Is she really better or
not ? (vi. 20). By and by, she has overdone the abstinence and her
health suffers again, and he is very anxious, beside being gouty (vi.

1 There is a lively little note written by Synesius to a physician on 6\iyo<n.Tia,
to whom he quotes Hippocrates as his authority for its being the "mother of
health," Ep. 115.

160 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

29). He is happy to hear a purge has given her relief and has also
reduced the inflammation of her eyes was it necessary to bleed her
as well? he anxiously asks (vi. 64). His daughter's bad health
requires the solace of her husband's presence, and the weakness of
his stomach forbids him to go to her, so with other difficulties
coinciding Symmachus hardly knows what to advise (vi. 59).
Another source of anxiety is his little granddaughter Galla, who is
ill at the same time as her mother, but by the gods' blessing
(opitulatio divind) he hopes for good news. He will take it as a
mark of true affection if his daughter will take care of herself and
let him have better reports of their progress (vi. 22).

We have one or two letters acknowledging her birthday gifts.
He is delighted with her lanificium ; it shews her love as daughter
and her diligence as a matron ; it is quite like the famous women
of old, but that they lived in a dull age which was congenial to the
distaff, while she lived at Baiae (vi. 67). Another year, he says it
was a tradition of many years for him to receive the gifts, and he is
the more grateful for being brief in his thanks, but urges it on her
as a filial duty to take care of her health (vi. 48).

To his son he was even more devoted. He personally took
charge of his health, his education, and his future renown. Pignus
meum and unicus meus, "my only son," come over and over in the
letters. He writes to a friend; "While my son is being initiated
into Greek, I have once more taken part in his studies as if a
schoolfellow. A father's feelings (pietas) bid one become a boy
again, that the sharing of the toil may make the lessons pleasant to
one's children. For you however things are not in the budding
stage, but at harvest time ; for I find your son is most eloquent
and pressing hard on the heels of his father's proficiency. happy
man, my friend, if you are surpassed ! My care is still to encourage
the blossom, and I cannot exact hard work from my only boy.
Still between my fears and my persistence my dear one's progress
is sure if slow " (iv. 20).

Fabius was made quaestor by Eugenius the usurper, an episode
the family tried to forget, and later on the praetorship was given
him by Honorius for 400, the date being changed however to 401.
The only duty attached to these offices was to give on each occasion
a great show in Rome. Symmachus felt this to be most important.
He strongly disapproved of the neglect with which some Roman
nobles treated this part of their duty, and emphasized with how
little expense after all it might be done (ix. 126). Yet he got a

Symmachns 161

law to limit extravagance in displays of the kind, and broke it for
Fabius' glory.

Some half dozen letters refer to the quaestorship contemporary
letters. He writes to Paternus, who was a Christian, about hunters
for the arena (v. 59), to some one else about ornaments and especi-
ally robes which he describes in a very modern way as partly silk
(subsericas, v. 20). Flavian sent him seven Scottish dogs which
were greatly admired (ii. 77), and Symmachus writes to him to ask
his kindly offices with one Domitiiis, who has promised bears which
are desperately needed and not to hand. Some few cubs have
indeed arrived, but worn out by starvation and travel, and he can
hear nothing of his lions (ii. 76). But there was a more cruel blow
yet, and he had need to remind himself of Socrates' way of
supposing all to be for the best, however disappointing, when he
found that some twenty-nine Saxons (desperate race !) had laid
impious hands on themselves and strangled themselves or one
another to escape the arena and death before the populace (ii. 46).
For Symmachus stood for gladiatorial shows and had as Prefect
congratulated the Emperor after a victory over the Sarmatians on
" reserving some of the prisoners for the pleasure of the people of
Mars" (Eel. 47). They had been marched through the streets and
" we saw the shackled column of the conquered race in procession,
and those faces once so warlike altered to a wretched pallor."

On Fabius' praetorian games he is said to have spent 80,000,
and we have a large number of letters appealing to his friends to
aid him in purchasing Spanish horses 1 and to hasten their delivery.
Bears, leopards, antelopes, charioteers, stage-carpenters, trappings
fill his letters. This time the robes are to be all silk (holosericae,
iv. 8). He had some crocodiles, which he exhibited, and he wanted
to save them for his daughter and her husband to see, but for fifty
days they would not eat and they had to be killed at the second
show (vi. 42). In this connexion a couple of letters on the custom-
house are interesting. An attempt was made to charge a friend of
Symmachus a duty of 2 per cent, on some bears imported by him
for the arena. Traders in beasts had to pay this, but candidates
who gave shows for the people's amusement were usually and not

1 So many letters relating to Spanish horses have been preserved, that one
feels tempted to suppose Ammianus was not far wrong when he grumbled at the
passion for horse-flesh among "grave men, and maintainers of the virtues, as
they think" (xxviii. 4, 11). An interesting account of an African magnate's stud
and the magical devices of the jockeys is given by Boissier, VAfrique Romaine,
ch. rv. 3. (Engl. tr. p. 173.)

G. 11

162 Life and Letters in the Fourth Cerituri/

improperly freed from the impost (v. 62). Very soon Symmachus
has to intercede for another friend, on whom an attempt has been
made to levy 2i per cent., also on bears. One burden is enough, he
says (v. 65).

The business of capturing and transporting wild beasts had been
for centuries an enormous one, and one of the most wasteful
methods of exhausting the Empire. Claudian twice sets the minor
powers of heaven to collect beasts for the circus, and his descrip-
tions are contemporary with the letters of Symmachus. They are
elaborate and have some interest as history, but as poetry they fail 1 .

In 401 Symmachus married his son to the granddaughter of
Flavian, and we have a number of polite little letters sending little
gifts to friends in celebration of the occasion. The same had been
done when Fabius was quaestor and praetor.

Symmachus had a wide circle of friends, and though it may be
said that his views on friendship are by no means original, yet it is
clear that friendships were a large part of his life. " My feeling is
that my friends' prosperity is part of my own good fortune. And,
in truth, how many happy days can a man have who only reckons
his own advantages ? He has a wider joy who can enjoy another's
happiness" (iii. 24). "Is there any one so hard-hearted as to see
the sorrow of many without feeling pain?" (v. 12). "Favours
seem to me to confer more on him who gives them" (vii. 46).
"The mind finds its own sorrow lightened, when it directs itself
to kindly offices" (ii. 32). "True friendship feels such security,
that it finds in its own loyalty an assurance of mutual affection"
(iv. 30).

Full accounts of his friends, their fames and families, are given
by Seeck in his great Introduction. To one or two of them I have
already alluded. One however calls for special notice. Vettius
Agorius Praetextatus (b. 330 or earlier, d. 384) was the most
eminent of the heathen in Rome. He was a scholar, an antiquarian,
something of a philosopher and a mystic. In his house Macrobius
laid the opening scene of his Saturnalia, and he is a leading
character in the discussions. He held a number of priesthoods and
made a point of being initiated into all possible mysteries a
privilege he extended to his wife. He won high praise from
Ammianus for his integrity and sense in his government of Rome

1 See Paneg. Manl. TJieod. 280332 and Cons. Stil. iii. 237369. Cf. too
Amra. Marc, xxviii. 4, 28 31 on the races.

Symmaclms 1 03

when he was Prefect 1 . He had the distinction of settling the
quarrel of Ursinus and Damasus for the Roman See, by expelling
the former from the city 2 . In this connexion a story of St Jerome's
is interesting " The wretched Praetextatus," he says, " who died
when consul designate, a sacrilegious person and a worshipper of
idols, used laughingly to say to the blessed Pope Damasus, 'Make
me bishop of the Roman Church, and I will be a Christian at once ' "
Damasus might forgive this jest to the man who rid him of Ursinus.
Some eight inscriptions to his memory have been found in Rome
and one in Crete. To one of these I must refer.

His sepulchral monument 3 bears after his name a list of his
priesthoods, Roman and non-Roman, and the last two titles call
for attention tawoboliatus, pater patrum. The pater was the
seventh grade in the priesthood of Mithras, and the taurobolium
was the baptism of that religion 4 . The participant stood in a
pit, the throat of a bull was cut over him, and he was drenched
with the blood. The bull was the sacred animal of Mithras and
its blood meant new life and regeneration for eternity taurobolio
in aeternum renatus, says one man in an inscription (C. I. L. vi. 510).
Women had usually no place in Mithraism, but the name of
Praetextatus' wife, with her priesthoods and tattroboliata, follows
his own.

On the same monument are two inscriptions addressed by
Praetextatus to his wife, and one by her to him, which I translate,
as it seems to me to exhibit the better side of Roman society in a
tender and beautiful way. They were married for forty years, and
she says :

" The splendour of my parents gave me nought better than that
I seemed worthy of my husband ; but all my light and glory is my
lord's name, thine, Agorius, who, sprung of proud lineage, dost
illume thy country, the senate and thy wife, by thine honesty of
heart, thy character and thy studies, whereby thou hast attained
the highest pinnacle of virtue. For, whatever is set forth in either
tongue by the thought of the wise to whom heaven's gate stands
open, and all the songs the learned have written and all things set

1 Amm. Marc, xxvii. 9, 8 10.

2 The famous fight for the bishopric and the historian's comment, xxvii. 3,
12 15, which may have been suggested by Jerome's story, contr. Joliann.
Hierosol. 8.

3 C. I. L. vi. 1779. I have taken it from Seeck, who quotes it in full.

4 See an excellent article by A. Gasquet in Revue des Deux Mondes, April 1st,
1899, on Le culte et les mysteres de Mithra. Also Prudentius, artfy. x. 1010
1050 a most vivid and realistic account of the taurobolium.

112

164 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

forth in prose, thou givest forth, but better than thou didst find
them in the books. But this is of light account ; thou, holy and
initiate, dost lay up in the secret of thy heart what thou hast
learnt in holy rites, and well-skilled dost adore the manifold
divinity of the gods, of thy goodness admitting thy wife to the
sacred things of men and gods, a faithful partner. Why now
should I tell of office or of power, the joys men seek in prayer ? for
thou, ever reckoning these to be but light and for a season, dost
boast to be the priest of the gods and wear the fillet. Thou,
purifying and cleansing me by the blessing of thy teaching, dost
save me from the lot of death, lead me to the temples and dedicate
me to the service of the gods ; in thy presence I am initiated into
all the mysteries. Priestess of Cybele and Attis, thou my holy
spouse dost honour me with the rites of the bull. The handmaid
of Hecate, thou teachest me the three secrets; thou makest me
worthy the mysteries of the Greek Ceres. It is because of thee
that all call me blessed and holy, for thou dost spread my fame
through the world. Though unknown, I am known to all. For
how should I fail to please, when thou art my husband? The
matrons of Rome take an example from me, and count their
offspring fair if it be like thine. Men and women alike covet and
approve the glories thou hast given me by thy teaching. Now that
all this is taken away, I am a sad wife and in sorrow, who had been
happy had the gods let my husband survive me, yet happy still in
this that thine I am and have been and thine shall ere long be after
death."

Such a man was Symmachus' friend Praetextatus, and there were
others like him, but he also counted among his friends men who
were neither so pious nor so learned as Praetextatus. Stilicho and
Bauto (father-in-law of the Emperor Arcadius) were soldiers and
barbarians, a Vandal and a Frank. Petronius Probus was neither
saint nor soldier. Ausonius was a poet and said he was a Christian.
Ambrose was a Christian and a bishop, and not the only one of
Symmachus' acquaintance, for beside Damasus who defended him
against Christian calumny, we find two bishops receiving letters of
recommendation from him. To his brother he wrote ; " You may
wonder at my recommending a bishop to you, but it is his cause
and not his sect that has induced me." It was a bishop Clemens,
whose Mauretanian diocese had been plundered, apparently by
Firmus. Moneys belonging to the treasury had been taken, and
now the treasury was trying to collect its taxes a second time to

Symmachus 165

replace what was lost, and the bishop appealed to Symmachus and
he sent him to his brother (i. 64). Another bishop he introduces as
"my brother Severus, a bishop whom all the sects [i.e. including
pagans] agree in calling praiseworthy" (vii. 51).

People in all sorts of need appealed to him. Here and there are
letters recommending sons-in-law (ix. 7, 49). A betrothal has been
cancelled and Symmachus writes on behalf of the incensed suitor.
He thinks the lady's father had been unhandsome (devenustare), and
that it will be a little rude of him to reject the intercession of
Symmachus, when the young man's character and standing are, as
he knows, excellent (ix. 43). A professor is in distress, and
Symmachus writes to Flavian:

" His dress and his hair proclaim Serapammon a man of letters,
for if he had felt he had no share in such things, he would never
have adopted the -philosopher's garb. But about this I leave you to
judge, who profess to understand such things. I felt I could not
properly refuse an introduction at his request. It will be consistent
with your character, if you aid the fortunes of the stranger with
your resources and your kindness " (ii. 61).

Again, he intercedes for a professor, whose salary is in some
danger (i. 79), and he lays down the principle that it is the mark
of a flourishing State that good salaries be paid to professors. It
is one of the pleasant features of Roman society, or at least of that
part of it which Symmachus represents, that literature or learning
is as good a passport into it as wealth or military glory. Ausonius
and even Eugenius himself had begun as teachers of rhetoric.

Far too many letters of mere compliment are included in the
collection letters in which pretty nothings are " over-curiously
trimmed," till the modern reader is apt to suppose both writer and
recipient entirely frivolous. The language is certainly extravagant
and the tone of mutual admiration unhealthy, but we must re-
member that the contemporaries of Drake and Shakespeare used the
most extraordinary phraseology of their Queen. We have to go
deeper than the form, and Symmachus apart from literature seems
to have been a very sensible and kindly man.

I quote as an example of his happier style a letter to the young
Olybrius and Probinus, the sons of Petronius Probus, who were
consuls in 396, and for whom Claudian wrote his first great Latin
poem not nearly so sensible a production.

" Your hunting bears witness to your fulness of strength and
vigour. So this is my first reason for pleasure about you, that you

160 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

are benefiting your health by rustic pleasures. The second stage
of my happiness is that I should have deserved what you took in
the chase. For as we are permitted to dedicate the horns of stags
to the honour of the gods and to fix the tusks of the boar at our
thresholds, so the fruits of the woods are devoted to friendship.
Meantime I repudiate the idea that hunting is a business for slaves.
Granted that a writer [Sallust, Cat. iv. 1] laid this down, who is
only to be praised for his style for the damage his character
sustained disqualifies him as a guide for life I prefer you to enjoy
country life with Atilius and follow the sport of strength than to
be led aside by fair phrases into habits of idleness. At all events
this exercise suits your years. Youths should be tested not by
gaming-board or ball or Attic hoop and Greek palaestra, but by
the ready endurance of fatigue and delight in innocent hardihood.
It is to this I shall encourage my Symmachus, when he grows old
enough, though he will have no brother to go with him (quamcis
unicum). A day will come when, burdened with years, you will have
to renounce this employment. Then hunting will rightly be called
a servile business. For it is a sort of slavery, if, when our strength
fails, we refuse to use the respite from toil which old age grants us "
(v. 68).

That the reader may be able to judge from a specimen, I quote
one of the too many letters of compliment with which Symmachus
found himself bound to honour his friends. Some of the terms are
a little hard to translate into rational English.

"Decency [the word is religio] demanded that I should write,
especially when an opportunity coming from your own household
encouraged me. For your man offered himself as letter-carrier, and
I saw clearly that not to give him a letter would be monstrous guilt.
So I hope you are well, I inform you that I am, and I hope in
return that you will reward me with news of your good health"
(v. 61).

The French scholar M. Morin, who published an interesting
monograph on Symmachus in 1847, remarks on the value of the
letters of Symmachus to the historian, while he gently complains
that Gibbon made little use of him. Gibbon has however a
footnote on him, which is very characteristic: "The luxuriaucy
of Symmachus consists in barren leaves without fruit and even
without flowers. Few facts and few sentiments can be extracted
from his verbose correspondence'." It is certainly true that if

1 Gibbon iii. 410, u. 16.

Symmachus 107

Symmachus were our only authority for his period, its history
would be all but a blank. It is only as a tributary to another
source of information that he is of the least value. One might
learn from him the names of the Emperors, but hardly another fact
but that Valentinian was a soldier. Maximus and Eugenius are of
course obscured. Apart from the affair of the altar of Victory and
the accidental allusions to a bishop or two, one hears nothing of
Christianity 1 . To the barbarians he makes no allusion in his
letters 2 . Now and then he speaks of the country districts being in
distress. "It has come to be the practice in our days," he says,
"that the country which used to feed us has to be fed" (i. 5). We
hear of brigandage (ii. 22), and there is an end of it.

He hardly refers to the Empire, except in the panegyrics already
quoted. The Emperor is always spoken of in the language of
worship. His words are oracles, his person sacred, himself actually
royal " all men love him as the god who feeds mankind " (iii. 82).
(This phrase "was meant for the sacred ears, though in a private
letter.) Once however he says to an Emperor that "the Empire
has grown because you rule over free men" (Or. iv. 13) a sentiment
much elaborated by Claudian.

Of official tyranny and mismanagement, of the severity and
cruelty to which subjects were submitted with little consideration of
guilt or innocence, we hear a good deal. Take an example (v. 63).
The treasury officials of Italy have started a new trick (stropha).
They forge claims against persons as debtors to the treasury and
exact them. The weak give way because they are bullied; the
strong, because to resist may be made into treason. In this at all
events Symmachus confirms the impression we get from Ammianus.

The Senate is of course the centre of Symmachus' immediate
political life, and his friends are mainly of the nobility. Many of
them still had enormous wealth. Possibly Petronius Probus was
the richest, though Ammianus (xxvii. 11, 1) amiably says it is not
for his poor judgment to decide whether he came by all his estates
justly or unjustly. Symmachus himself had a surprising number
of country villas, residences and lodges at various places near and

1 Eutropius, the historian, a friend of Symmachus, managed in the same
way to write of Constantine without a reference to his conversion, and concludes
atque inter Divos meruit referri (x. 2, 8).

2 In his panegyric on Gratian, it was impossible not to allude to them when
the orator had followed a campaign against them on the Ehine and Neckar, but
he has found a prophecy "Thus far aud no farther" Hactenus nomen stetisse
barbaricum (Or. iii. 12).

168 Life and Letters in tlie Fourth Century

about Rome and in Campania, and estates in Samnium, Apulia,
Sicily and Mauretania. Seeck has collected a great list from the
letters 1 .

Yet the manners of these great men were not always nice.
Symmachus hints at one brawl in the Senate, and " is ashamed to
tell what charges and bad language the best men threw at one
another " (vi. 22). He had however been absent. The times were,
no doubt, improving in some ways, as we can see in Macrobius, but
slavery still tainted society with cruelty. Apart from the gladia-
torial shows, to which I have referred, we find once or twice in
the letters allusions to slavery ; e.g. the punishment of a slave, who
went off without waiting for an answer to a letter, and " it lies in
your hands whether you allow this to go unavenged [iiiultum,
rather more than unpunished, but not quite so much as un-
avenged] " (vi. 8) 2 ; and again a request to a magistrate, which may
be quoted at length.

" My first reason for writing is to pay you the compliment of a
greeting, my second to present a petition to the magistrate whose
love of law I know so well (probatam mihi modest lam}. For a
good many slaves of my establishment have run away and lie hid in
the region under your care. I should like you to hear my agent's
allegations and restore these persons ; for it is only consistent with
your character to consider our friendship and deny a refuge to the
iniquity of slaves (servili nequitiae). Farewell" (ix. 140).

The letter leaves an uneasy feeling. It is too suggestive of
Fugitive Slaves Bills. No doubt many masters shared the feelings
Macrobius puts into Praetextatus' mouth in the Saturnalia, that
slaves were men "slaves no doubt, but still men; they are slaves;
rather, say fellow-slaves, if you reflect that Fortune has equal power
over both.... He may be slave of stern necessity, but perhaps he is a
slave whose mind is free (like Epictetus)" (Saturn, i. 11, 7). Yet
Praetextatus in the same speech says, "We masters put on the
minds of tyrants, and we wish to be limited in our treatment of our
slaves not by what is fitting but by what is lawful" (ib. i. 11, 14).
However gentle slavery may be, it still is slavery 3 .

1 Symmachus "had three villas in the immediate neighbourhood of Borne,
seven in other parts of Latium, five on the bay of Naples and probably several
others of which we do not know." Seeck, Gesch. des Untergangs der Antiken
Welt, p. 379. See also his Introduction to the Letters.

2 Ammianus (xxviii. 4, 16) speaks of 300 lashes being ordered by a Eoman
master for a slave, who was slow in bringing warm water an ominous parallel,
I am afraid.

3 Both passages are from Seneca, Ep. 47, but as Macrobius considered the

Symmachus 169

It may be fairly urged that Syminaclms was not writing history
and that broad views were not required of him. Yet the narrow
range of his interests is significant. He lived in a very narrow
world. It was no longer the Rome of Cicero or Augustus. The
seats of government were Constantinople and Milan; and Rome
was a provincial town with a history. On that history Symmachus
and his friends lived. They were subjects now and not rulers', and
had little chance of making history except by accident or by
attaching themselves to the court and leaving Rome. Symmachus
had great difficulty in prevailing on Flavianus to go East to become
secretary to the Emperor "to utter in oracles the mind of the
august prince" (ii. 8). Except in the case of men of learning and
physicians, they had no concern with their fellow-subjects abroad' 2 .
Even for the "fellows without grandfathers" (terrae filios) and
"plebeian society" Symmachus betrays his contempt (i. 3). In
literature it was the same. They read the recognized Latin classics 3
and imitated them as carefully as they could. Pliny the younger
was Symmachus' especial model. The writers of the day who can
boast any life, are not Italian. Ammianus and Macrobius were
Greek, Augustine a Latin of Africa, Prudentius a Spaniard,
Sulpicius a Gaul, Claudian some kind of Egyptian, whether Greek
or Latin. It is from such men and not from Symmachus that one
obtains the truest picture of the Roman world.

Symmachus missed the meaning of Rome through his narrow
conservatism. So in religion he held fast by paganism more from a
sense of its traditional propriety than from faith. No doubt he
constantly refers to the gods in such phrases as " by the divine
blessing," "by the peace of the gods" and so forth 4 , and he was
in his dignified way a pious person, but without much religious
enthusiasm or reflexion. He stood for the altar of Victory stoutly,

letter worth quoting in this way and re-iiiforcing with examples from Gellius,
we may still consider it not without value as evidence for his own day.

1 Lact. de M. P. 26, Galerius, devouring the world with taxation, ad hatic
usque prosiluit insaniam ut ab hoc captivitate ne populum quidem Roinanum fieri
vellet immunem.

2 Ammianus (xiv. 6, 12 13) says even these distinguished strangers were
only welcome once.

3 Ammianus (xxviii. 4, 14) says the Roman gentry confined themselves to
Juvenal and Marius Maximus, who are not in Seeck's list of Symmachus' authors.
Lucretius seems not to have been read. His verse repelled the taste of the age,
his philosophy its faith. Augustine refers to him once, de Util. Cred. 4, 10.

4 That he should use such phrases at all marks the change of Roman feeling
since the days of Cicero, whose mind is revealed by such passages as this to his
wife (ad Fam. xiv. 4, 1) : ncque di, quos tu castistsime coluisti, nequc homines,
quibus eijo semper servivi, nobis gratiam retulerunt.

170 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

and he stood for the traditional rather than the modern chariot in
the procession. He was careful about the expiation of a portent at
Spoletium (i. 49). He was opposed to the erection by the Vestals
of a monument to his friend Praetextatus it was an innovation.
But if he had been forced to state his ultimate belief about the
divine, it must have been a general impression that it or they
had a benevolent nature, or, if this be too strong, a preference for
hoping it were true. Many ways might lead to the great secret,
but it was a Roman's part to be content with the way his fathers
took, and if necessary console himself with the thought that, if these
things were obscure, antiquity was more likely to be right. His
passion was for antiquity and for religion as part of its inheritance.

Is it any marvel that Julian was disappointed with a pagan
community, of which Symmachus was a truer type than himself,
which was content with lazy generalities and ready to turn Christian
to oblige Theodosius or to -soothe him, which in a word had no
convictions ?

Still, we must be just to Symmachus. The traditions of his
family and of his city, his education and his environment made it
difficult for a man of no great mental power to take a wide outlook,
and if he preferred to spend his days "patching up his health,
avoiding disturbance and always loving literature " (iv. 44), if his
ideals were not strenuous, he passed through life with the respect of
Christian as well as pagan, the type of an honourable and cultured
Roman gentleman.

CHAPTER VIII

MACROBIUS

Vetustas quidem nobis semper, si sapimus, adoranda est.

Sat. iii. 14, 2

THE work of a commentator may be of interest in either or both
of two ways. He may win attention for what he contributes to the
explanation and interpretation of the author with whom he deals,
or he may be interesting for what he reveals of himself or his age.
In the case of a great commentator it is sometimes hard to say for
which reason he is read. Do the majority of his readers study
Calvin for the sake of St Paul or for Calvin's own sake? But there
are men of far less nate, men who cannot claim genius, originality
or even insight, whose commentaries are of value for the light they
throw upon the feelings and the tastes of their day. Among these
we may place Macrobius. He preserves, no doubt, a great deal of
matter, of which the student of Virgil would be sorry to be deprived,
though it certainly could not be called indispensable, but it is
mainly as an exponent of the mind of Roman society at the end
of the fourth century that he merits attention. Claudian was a man
of genius; Symmachus and Macrobius were not, but their remains
help to complete his picture of the times. It is mainly to this part
of Macrobius' work that I shall devote the following pages.

One point however demands notice first of all. One aspect of
Roman life is carefully ignored by Macrobius as by Claudian, and is
but accidentally mentioned by Symmachus. No reference is made
to Christianity, or to any thing or any person connected with it.
Yet it touched at many points the lives of the men Macrobius
presents to us. Praetextatus, Symmachus and Flavian are chiefly
conspicuous because they were its last great opponents, Flavian even
falling in battle against it. Of the others Caecina Albinus, pontifex

172 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

as he was, had a Christian wife ; his daughter Laeta was a corre-
spondent of St Jerome's ; and his little granddaughter Paula, who
was dedicated to the nunnery from her birth, is pictured by the
Saint (Ep. 107, 1) singing her childish Alleluia to her pagan grand-
father, as she sat on his knee. The other Albinus is variously called
Furius and Kufius in the manuscripts, and if Rufius was his name,
as Seeck believes, he was a Christian himself. Macrobius then was
not silent about Christianity because he knew nothing of it. His
silence is, on the contrary, as significant as anything he could say.
A contemporary of Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Chrysostom and
Theodosius, he chooses to know nothing of their faith. It was
victorious, and his revenge is silence.

Apart from his books little can be said of the man. The books
are dedicated to his son Eustachius, and he hopes his son will find
his language correct and a good model, though he was "born under
another sky" (nos sub olio ortos caelo, Sat. Praef. 11). We might,
from his knowledge of Greek literature, suppose this other sky to
have been that of Greece, or, if not of the Greece of geography, of
that wider Greece which embraced the Eastern World. But it is
suggested he may have been born in Africa '. We have really no
evidence. A priori probabilities are quite valueless here. Augustine
was an African and knew Greek literature chiefly in translations ;
Apuleius read Greek before he read Latin. Nor can we say with
van Jan, his great editor, that, if a Greek, Macrobius would hardly
have written in Latin. Ammianus and Hierius, and perhaps
Claudian, were Greeks. Attempts have been made to identify
Macrobius with one or other of several contemporary officials, who
bore the name, and in one case we should have to suppose he
became in later life a Christian, but there is no probability, or at
least no certainty, in any of these identifications. We are thus
left to what he says of himself. If we cannot learn his history, we
can at least form some idea of his mind.

Three works remain which bear his name. One, to which
I shall not further refer, is grammatical and deals with the differences
of the Greek and the Latin verb. The Saturnalia and the

1 Van Jan inclines this way. Petit (de Macrobio Ciceronis interprete, Paris,
1866) holds to the Greek origin. Macrobius in the MSS has also the name
Ambrosius, on the strength of which Petit identifies him with Ambrosius, a
correspondent of Libanius. The evidence he cites from the letters is quite
inconclusive : Ambrosius is an official ; he is interested in reading ; and a
rhetorician, by name Eusebius, is introduced to him. Sixty persons named
Ensebius are enumerated by Fabricius (v. Jan, i. p. xxx).

Macrobim 173

Commentary on Scipio's Dream, in spite of an elaborate fulness which
betrays the professional teacher, are really interesting books and not
unworthy of study. I shall not attempt a close analysis of them,
but content myself with remarking the salient points which make
themselves felt on a general survey of the books, and first of the
Saturnalia.

That the book owes something to the Nodes Atticae of Gellius
is very evident. Apart from material freely borrowed (without
acknowledgment) the name Macrobius gave his book and the lan-
guage of his preface suggest Gellius. Gellius tells us there were many
books like his, with all sorts of fanciful titles to indicate the variety
of their contents, books of extracts and notes and criticisms set down
in any order or no order Amaltheas Horn, for instance, Muses,
Honeycombs, Lamps, Quilts, Manuals and so forth. He himself,
in memory of the place and time of his studies' beginning, calls
his book Attic Nights 1 . Macrobius avows the same design. His
book is to gather together the fruits of his reading, but (and we are to
understand the advance made here) it will present them in an ordered
and digested form, for the mind, like the stomach, will not bear un-
digested matter ; it may load the memory, but it will not help the
intelligence (ingenium). He chooses the form of a dialogue.

He would hardly do so to-day perhaps 2 , but to say nothing
of Plato and Cicero, whose dialogues have really something of
discussion about them, there is abundant precedent for the use of
this style of composition for matter frankly more suitable for the
dictionary or the encyclopedia. The Deipnosophists of Athenaeus
is the most terrible monument of energy turned in this direction.
Again, the Convivial Questions or Symposiacs of Plutarch, a work
from which Macrobius borrowed most of his seventh book, may also
have suggested this method. The Questions, however, Archbishop
Trench says 3 , are no fancy pieces, but brief records of conversations
which actually sprang up at entertainments in which Plutarch took
part, and at the request of a friend they were cast into their present
shape from notes taken at the time. Gellius too has chapters
professing to be from life, and there was also the precedent of Varro.

1 For Gellius, see Prof. Nettleship's essay in his Essays in Latin Literature, i.
Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, pt. i. c. 4, and Boissier, La Fin du
Paganisme, vol. i. pp. 178 180, will also be found interesting.

2 Yet a Hebrew Grammar, widely used, consisted in its first edition of
"Letters to a Duchess," and a much reprinted work on the Mystics was cast
in the form of a series of conversations "over wine and walnuts."

3 Lectures on Plutarch, 2nd ed. p. 20, an interesting work.

174 Life and Letters in the Fourth Ccntnrji

Nor indeed was the deliberate dialogue yet dead, as readers of
St Augustine will remember. More than one of the discussions at
Cassisiacum were reported there and then by notarii, though doubtless
Augustine remembered Cicero, when he drew up the De Beata Vita
and the rest for publication. Even points of grammar and etymology
were sometimes discussed at the dinner-table. It was a favourite
diversion of the Emperor Tiberius. No doubt, before Philology
became scientific, it was a game at which all could play, who had a
little fancy and a slight knowledge of Greek, a language from which
Latin was largely derived 1 .

With all these precedents, whatever may have been his special
reason, Macrobius chose to make a dialogue of his material, and
like Plato and Athenaeus put the whole thing into the mouth of a
man with a memory, who had been present at the supposed gathering.
We are apt to forget at times that we are reading the story of a
conversation, though now and again Macrobius remembers to remind
us of the fact. Servius, for example, in a discourse obviously tran-
scribed from a note-book, speaks of "his memory serving him at the
moment." Here and there we have some by-play, which we
generally owe to the outspokenness of Evangelus, the "villain" of
the piece. After some forty consecutive Teubner pages of theology,
the author apologizes, we may perhaps say, by letting the guests
express their admiration of Praetextatus by a wide-eyed stare in
silence, broken at last by rapturous praise of his knowledge and his
memory (i. 24. I) 2 .

Macrobius frankly avows that the conversation never took place,
and he even says he is not sure that all his characters could very well
have met for such a purpose. For they are all, so far as we know,
real people, most of them undoubtedly so. And in this, in spite of
passages where we forget it is dialogue, lies some of the value of the
book. The characters were deliberately chosen for their parts, and
we may thus use Macrobius to supplement what we learn elsewhere.
So the book, with all its faults, illustrates the age, its tastes and
feelings, social, literary, philosophical and religious.

The supposed gathering may, M. Emile Thomas says :i , be dated
380. To some of the characters I have already alluded. Two
remain to be considered. One is the grammarian Servius, who is

1 Nettleship, Essays, i. p. 213, on Verrius Flaccus.

2 Yet we should remember that even grammarians like rhetoricians would
sometimes improvise in the theatre addresses in comment on some passage
supplied at the moment; see Rohde, der Gr. Roman, p. 309, n. 1.

3 Scoliastes de Virgile, p. 135.

Macrobius 175

introduced as a young but very learned man. He is loth to speak
among a company so eminent for learning and divine lore, and has to
be pressed to conquer his blushes. It is curious to note that when the
modest scholar does open his mouth, Macrobius puts some passages
of Gellius into it. One of these may be taken as a fair illustration
of Macrobius' method. Gellius says : " Some grammarians of former
times, men of learning and of note, among them Cornutus Annaeus
[the teacher of Persius], criticize the word vexasse in the following
passage as carelessly used and without distinction" and so forth, to
which he replies at some length. Macrobius lets Avienus make the
criticism in the terms used by Gellius, and Servius the reply,
sticking as closely to the Noctes. It is much as if one introduced
a living scholar into a dialogue to-day and gave him some pages of
Bentley or Ussher to recite without more ado. There are also
coincidences between Macrobius and the Commentary of Servius,
but opinions vary as to whether Macrobius quotes that work, or
whether it at a later date was enriched or enlarged by an editor
adding matter from the Saturnalia.

But perhaps the most interesting character in the book, though
not in life, is Evangelus. His introduction like so much else is due
to Gellius. In the Noctes, says Professor Nettleship 1 , "as a foil to
the instructed scholar or philosopher, there appears a conceited or
affected or generally unseasonable individual, whose delusions are
exposed by the light of superior wisdom." This person is generally
young and often a schoolmaster. In Macrobius the part is played
by Evangelus, in whose name some have found a reference to the
Gospel quite unnecessarily. Evangelus is fully as unconscious of
Christianity as the rest, and indeed displays some recondite acquain-
tance with pagan ritual in his attempt to reply to Praetextatus'
praise of Virgil. But he is not merely the holder of shocking and
even impossible opinions about Virgil, for his manners are monstrous.
About the others there is a prodigious politeness quite in the style
of Symmachus' letters. He is frankly rude, even to the point of
brutality. The repugnance, involuntarily displayed by the guests
when he enters, warns the reader what to expect. And, most curious
of all, he too seems to be a real person, to whom Symmachus in one
of his letters attributes an incautus animus 2 .

1 Essays, i. p. 238.

2 Ep. vi. 7. This quality is getting Evangelus into danger in his wild
attempt, despite the roads, to attend Honorius' fourth installation as consul.
Is he or another the homo won amicus there mentioned?

Life and Letters in the Fourth Cenhirif

The scene of the dialogue is the feast of the Saturnalia, and the
guests meet in succession during the three days at the houses of
Praetextatus, Flavian and Symmachus. The conversations, or
dissertations, range over literature (which is summed up in Virgil),
science, manners, morals and religion. Without attempting to keep
to the order of proceedings, we may deal with the book as a whole
with reference to these points.

The work may be regarded as a sort of Institutio of the Roman
gentleman a presentment of what he should be and what he should
know. Yet it is surprising how little is said or thought of Rome, of
political life, or duty to State and Empire, or even of the significance
of Rome. It is away from such things that attention is directed
they were not safe subjects perhaps for Roman society. Praetextatus
is represented (i. 7, 5) as disturbed at the suggestion that they were
discussing anything the world might not hear. The complete
gentleman is to live rather in the past than the present, and he is
not to take part in public life 1 . It may of course be said that
after all literature and not statecraft was Macrobius' theme, but
with all the ebb and flow of the conversation it never touches
matters of public concern. Some slight reference is made in the
commentary on Scipio's dream to a life of action in the public
interest, but that is involved by the text and but lightly treated. In
Symmachus' letters, in like manner, politics are avoided. In fact
they were dangerous.

The complete gentleman's education is developed along two
lines antiquarianism and Neo-Platonism, generally with Virgil as
a text-book. The whole is slavish and mechanical. " The fruit of
reading is to emulate what you find good in others, and by dexterous
borrowing to turn to your own use what you most admire in other
people's utterances" (vi. 1, 2). What did this mean in literature?
An extraordinary devotion to the superficial, phrase-hunting,
grammatical and lexicographical pedantry of the most unfmitful
type. One of the earliest discussions turns on the expressions
noctu futura and die crastini (i. 4). When one of the
party makes a stand for modern speech and old manners, his
utterance is from Gellius, and where the unacknowledged quotation
ends, in comes another archaism, which has likewise to be discussed
(milk verborum est, i. 5, 3).

1 Not so Synesius, though a Neo-Platonist too. See his spirited letter to his
brother (Ep. 107) on his duty to fight the barbarian invaders at the risk of
incurring the Government's displeasure.

Macrobins 177

From this it is but a step to etymology, and if ever and again
we are amazed, we must remember that we are not ourselves so
very long emancipated from the Philology that is not comparative.
Nigidius is twice quoted on the letter D. Janus and Diana are the
same, we are told, " with the addition of D which is often added to
the letter I by way of adorning it (causa decoris) as in reditur
redhibetur etc." (i. 8. 8). Bidentes means sheep two years old, repre-
senting bidennes, D being superfluously introduced to avoid hiatus,
as in redamare, redire etc. (vi. 9. 6). April is from Aphrilis, from
the Greek d<po9, with a reference by Romulus to the mother of
Aeneas (i. 12. 8). The Ides are so called because we see the full
moon (videre, compare the Greek tSetv, i. 15, 16). Artemis cuts
the air and is properly Aerotemis (i. 15, 20), an old derivation
quoted by Clement of Alexandria (668 P) '.

Meantime what of literature, that we may vindicate the name
from grammarians ? With his treatment of Virgil I shall deal later.
For the rest, the ordinary student need only turn to van Jan's
index or Eyssenhardt's (which I think is the same, abridged to the
reader's loss) to find himself in a new world, and, amid a multitude
of obscure names which he does not know, he looks in wonder for
those he does. Apart from Virgil and Cicero, where are the other
familiar names? Where are Livy, Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius? They
are not mentioned. Catullus and Horace have two references each.
Of the "silver age," Silius, Statius, Valerius Flaccus and Tacitus do
not occur ; Persius only once, Juvenal three times, and Lucan once
(to correct him). Hosts of forgotten grammarians and teachers are
found but not Quintilian. Professor Nettleship explains this 2 . In
the second century and onward interest in the Latin schools was
lost for all literature after Virgil's day, and diverted to the prae-
Augustan writers, and Macrobius is heir to this conservative or
reactionary feeling. Ausonius has a pleasant little poem addressed
to one of his professors, whose bent was in this direction. Victorius
was assiduous in forgotten books and never read anything but what
was obscure ; worm-eaten, ancient parchments, prehistoric pontifical
lore, anything and everything rather than Tully or Virgil 3 . For

1 Etymology broke out in the epics of the day. Nonnus in his Dionysiaca,
the longest of all Greek epics, explains that the Nile is so called from the new
mud it brought with it (vfa l\fa, iii. 275) ; he derives Dionysus from Zeus and
vuaos OTL 7\itKT(777 2vpa.KOffffidi xwXos dKovei (ix. 20). Porphyry also uses etymology
to elicit hidden truths from most unlikely quarters.

2 Essays, i. p. 284 f. (on Nonius Marcellus).

3 Professores 22.

G. 12

178 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Macrobius however all centres in Virgil. There is no attempt to
appreciate or even to explain the other authors. They with Homer
merely serve to illustrate Virgil. This word is from one author,
that passage is copied from another.

The reader is surprised to find in the last book a good deal of
what, for want of a better word, we may call science. It is certainly
not systematic. Various guests propound to Disarms the physician
questions prompted by their own fancy or some casual experience.
In reality most of them come straight from Plutarch, who is of
course not named. Is a simple or a varied diet better for the
digestion ? Disarms is for the former with a special caution against
"mixing drinks" (vii. 4, 7), while Eustathius stands up stoutly for
the latter. Why do women rarely get drunk and old men easily ' ?
Is it because women's systems are moister or because they are
warmer? Why do you become giddy if you spin round? Why is
honey best when fresh and wine when old? Why is the ring worn
on the finger next the little finger of the left hand? Egyptian
anatomists say a sinew comes direct there from the heart (vii. 13, 8),
but Ateius Capito, following the Etruscans, says the left hand is less
used, and the particular finger neither too large nor too small, so
the jewel is safer there than elsewhere. Why does game decay
more quickly in moonlight than sunlight, and why does a brass
knife stuck in it stop decay 2 ? The answers to these and similar
questions are astounding, but they come largely from Plutarch, and
the scientists of the dialogue have a confidence about them, which
reminds the modern reader of his own day.

There is a long discourse on the Roman calendar, but that was
rather an antiquarian than a scientific subject, so Macrobius handles
it fully and freely. He seems to have been much interested in
Astronomy, of which we have a good deal in the Commentary, and
here he is as clear and lucid as (apart from Physiology) he generally
is. His system was that of his day and he really appears to have
understood the subject, and what he has to say he sets forth easily
and ably.

Macrobius and sometimes the guests lay down rules of manners,

1 Petit, op. cit. c. ix. p. 98, mentions that this discussion was copied oat by
Abelard for Heloise. Macrobius took it from Plutarch (Convivial Questions,
iii. 3), who implies that the question was asked by Aristotle but not answered.
A splendid history for a triviality.

2 I am told that the first part of this is a fact in dry hot Southern climates,
but probably not in Italy nor in Greece. Hence it may be asked whence
Plutarch got it. For the brass knife I have found no advocate.

Macrobius 179

which after all have a more permanent value than much of their
science. "Conversation at a banquet should be as pure in its
moral tone as attractive by its charm" (i. 1, 4). The narrator is
particular to emphasize that this is not a record " of meat and drink,
though they too were there in abundance and propriety" (i. 2, 12).
This point is repeated. Society has so far advanced that when it
reads the old sumptuary laws of the republic it does not know what
dish is meant by this or that term (iii. 17, 12), and is lost in
astonishment at "the slavish gluttony of that age" (iiu 16, 11).
"Peacocks' eggs, which used to sell at five denarii apiece, I will not
say they are sold cheaper to-day, they are not on the market at all"
(iii. 13, 2).

"Those centuries, which by their blood or their sweat won the
Empire," had no doubt their virtues, but their vices shock their
posterity. Times have improved at whose banquet do you find
dancer or dancing-girl? Yet in those evil days sons of senators
and noble ladies danced and used castanets, and Macrobius cites
his authorities, and the unfortunate Sallust has his usual rebuke
"a weighty critic and censor of other people's luxury" (iii. 13, 9) 1 .

After all this, the "jokes" of book ii. strike the reader oddly.
"When moderation had put an end to the reasonable succession of
dishes (castimoniam ferculorum) and convivial mirth sprang up from
the tiny cups," Symmachus proposed "humour without impro-
priety" (alacritatem lascivia carentem). They are in turn to
produce the best jokes of famous men which they have found in
their reading "a lettered lightness and learned quips." His own
first contribution and some of the others would certainly be relegated
to the smoke-room to-day. We have, after a series of miscellaneous
jokes, collections of witticisms of Cicero, Augustus and Julia an
odd mixture of indecency and the handbook.

In the seventh book, however, the whole subject of tact at table
is discussed on the lines of Plutarch, who is closely followed 2 . The
first thing is to know your company, and then draw them out.
Men like to talk of themselves, but not wishing to seem vain prefer
to be asked to speak of their brilliant deeds in battle, their travels
in unknown lands, their afflictions in days gone by, "how they

1 Against Macrobius the hostile critic will be able to cite Ammianus and
Jerome, while Claudian will furnish instances of enormous and tasteless
expenditure.

2 Quaest. Conviv. ii. 1. It is interesting to note Macrobius' insertion of an
apposite line from Virgil (forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit) after Plutarch's
quotation from Euripides (ws i)S6 rot audtvra, (j.e/j.vijff6ai ir6vuv),

122

180 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

successfully discharged the embassy, how they were presented to
the Emperor and most courteously received, and how, when the whole
fleet was boarded by pirates 1 , they alone by their cunning or their
valour escaped" (vii. 2, 11). Never ask a man a question before
people, unless you know he can answer it and answer it well, for
men do not like to confess ignorance (ib. 5). But ask the hunter
about hunting, and if a religious person (relief iosus) is there, let him
have a chance to tell "by what observances he has won help from
the gods, what results his ceremonies brought him, for they count
it a religious duty not to be silent about the benefits the gods give
them, beside liking to be thought favourites of heaven" (vii. 2, 13).
The reason given is Macrobius' own and suggests that his feeling
is not quite the same as Plutarch's, but if commentary is needed,
the inscriptions on the monument of Praetextatus and his wife
suffice 2 .

One must be careful, we learn, in badinage not to hit too hard
and to beware of sore subjects. On minor misfortunes such as
baldness or a head shaped like Socrates' a man may be quizzed,
but not on such grave ones as the loss of an eye. The man who
jokes must not even in play charge a man with vices he has. That
is "bad form," but it will not be amiss to tax a man of stainless
character with his immoralities, or to remind a wealthy man of his
creditors. Above all the company and time and place must be
considered. One may safely make game of a man in his wife's
presence for being uxorious, but some jokes one had better reserve.

As a model of bad manners Evangelus is exhibited. He inter-
rupts conversation recklessly, and contradicts grave and learned
gentlemen who reply with a smile which should serve as a correction
but does not. He sneers at slaves and calls for wine and plenty of
it (indulgere, flagrare vino ii. 8, 4). He insults the Greek guests
on the score of their race, their national loquacity and love of
display (vii. 5, 1 and 16, 1). Contrasted with his conduct is the
uniform suavity and graciousness of the other guests toward him
a silent lesson to Eustachius.

Morals and religion are touched on here and there. Evangelus'
ridicule of the idea that the gods could stoop to care for slaves calls
forth from Praetextatus a speech in the slaves' behalf. He pleads
in eloquent language (borrowed from Seneca, Ep. 47) their common

1 Apart from the novels, which swarm with pirates, and one simile in
Claudian, I do not remember any other reference to them in the works of this
period, and these pirates are borrowed from Plutarch (Qu. Conviv. ii. 1, 3).

2 See essay on Symmachus, pp. 1G3, 164.

Macrobius 181

humanity, their possible freedom and greatness of mind, their faith-
fulness and goodness; and supports his statements with historical
illustrations (from Gellius and elsewhere) '. Praetextatus also gives
a long discourse on the gods, shewing in turn how Apollo, Bacchus,
Mars, Mercury, Hercules, Serapis, Osiris, Pan, Saturn, Jove, the
Assyrian Adad and others are all equivalents of the Sun and of one
another. This was one part of the faith of later Paganism 2 . More
is said about it in the Commentary. It may be noted however
that in both works Macrobius writes rather from the point of view
of philosophy than of devotion. He has not the moral enthusiasm
of Plutarch, the fervent pietism of Julian or the mysticism of Hermes
Trismegistus. There is the chill of the pedagogue about him. The
equations of heaven are interesting to him and so are the rites of
old Rome. To judge from his treatment of the old religion, the
new was quite beyond his comprehension.

Almost all that a man needs to know he will find, according to
Macrobius, in Virgil explicitly or by implication. This brings us
to a consideration of his work as a critic of Virgil work for which
he is in large measure disqualified by his want of discrimination
by what Gibbon calls "the blind superstition of a commentator 3 ."
Like many before him and many more after his day, he found in
Virgil a pedant, an encyclopaedist. Virgil knew all learning (i. 16,
12), never went wrong (Gomm. ii. 8, 1), was a master in priestly
lore (S. i. 24, 16) and delighted to introduce it into his poetry along
with astronomy, philosophy, and all sorts of gleanings from Greek
and Latin literature and oratory. It is Virgil's learning that appeals
to him rather than his poetry, and while there is much truth in
what he says of Virgil's felicity in using his knowledge of antiquity
and literature, it is absurd to make it, as he does, Virgil's chief
claim to distinction. Still he does not stand alone in tliis ; he is
following a tradition. The excessive attention given to rhetoric in
the schools had so far perverted Roman taste that perfection of
language linked to wide information was all that was asked of a
poet. It is enough to read a book of Lucan to see this. How

1 The equality before God of slave and freeman was a Neo-Platonic doctrine.
Synesius says (Drcaiits, c. 8, 1301 D) it matters nothing to God, which is the
Eteobutades and which the new-bought drudge Manes. Cf. his relations with
his own slaves (Ep. 145) who are treated as equals and love him as an elected
chief.

2 So Gasquet in his interesting essay on Mithras (Revue des deux Mondes,
1st April, 189!l), calls Macrobius "le thSoricien par excellence du syncretisme
paien. Ses Saturnales en sont le manifeste."

3 Gibbon, ch. xxxii. n. 3.

182 Life and Letters m the Fourth Century

many Roman poets find their highest eulogy in the word doctusl
To prove Virgil doctus, grammarians had for centuries busied them-
selves with the letter till they had forgotten the spirit. The
popularity of Statius, says Comparetti 1 , proved the want of real
poetic feeling in Rome ; and in the three centuries between Statius
and Macrobius there had been nothing to quicken it. Here as else-
where Macrobius held he was best serving the present by echoing
the past 2 .

Of course Virgil is compared with Homer, but the criticism hardly
rises so high as Dry den's contrast of "majesty" and "loftiness of
thought." It is rather that Virgil, carried away, and sometimes
too far, by a desire to emulate Homer, imitates this, that and the
other passage or line ; and here he is superior, there equal and in a
third place inferior to his model. It is very systematically done,
for the Aeneid is taken book by book, and the parallels are pointed
out. There are no doubt flashes of light here and there, and good
points are brought out 3 , but in the end the reader is not a whit
nearer a general judgment on the work of the two poets.

Virgil's knowledge of pontifical law is illustrated by the citation
of passages containing priestly word and phrase used in their just
and proper senses. Here Evangelus protests and cites instances to
prove Virgil was not universally careful in these matters. The
attempt is made to rebut the charge, but, though there is an un-
happy break in the MSS, one has the impression that Virgil's
advocate is dealing with him as old-fashioned apologists did with
the Old Testament. The answers are too subtle, too clever. For
example, Evangelus quotes Aeneid iii. 21

caelicolum regi mactabam in litore taurum,

and cites Ateius Capito to shew that a bull is not sacrificed to Jove.
"Quite so," rejoins Praetextatus, "Virgil in view of the horror to
follow (the blood of Polydore) introduced the bull a blunder, which
according to Ateius is expiable, and which is here deliberately
committed to lead up to the marvel" (iii. 10, 3 7).

1 I may generally refer the reader to the first five chapters of Comparetti's
most interesting book on Vergil in the Middle Ages. Part n. c. 1 may be
consulted for the medieval view of Virgil as an outcome of that held by
Macrobius and his school.

- Perhaps he was, when men ranked Ausonius as equal to Virgil. How is it
that both Macrobius and Syinmachus ignore Claudian ?

3 He remarks, e.g. (v. 16, 8) that Fortuna or TAxn is a power unknown to
Homer. (See Kohde, der Griechisclie Roman, ii. 4, p. 276, on the progress of
this " junge Gottin.") Macrobius following the " philosophers " takes a diametri-
cally opposite view of her to that of Quiutus.

Macrobius 183

An illustration may serve to shew his method of displaying
Virgil's correctness. He twice quotes with the same explanation

the line

interea magnum sol circumvolvitur annum

(Aen. iii. 284; Sat. i. 14, 5; Comm. ii. 11, 6). It refers to the
period of Aeneas' wanderings and his arrival at Actium. Conington
finds in magnum an ornamental epithet ; Wakefield (cited by him)
a reference to the feeling of an exile, which I think not unlikely in
view of Virgil's constant recurrence to thoughts of exile. Macrobius
explains annus as a revolution, brevis annus being that of the moon,
i.e. a month, magnus annus that of the sun, i.e. so many lunar
months plus some days. Thus magnus has no reference to Aeneas'
exile, but is a technical term of Astronomy.

He prefers the Catalogue in the second book of the Iliad to
Virgil's in the seventh Aeneid, because it is systematic, while
Virgil forgets the map and mentions places as they occur to him,
introducing elaborately warriors who never appear again, and for-
getting others whose names should be there (v. 15, 16). Thus
what is to modern readers the charm of the passage, Virgil's
affectionate and intimate knowledge of Italy displayed as he lingers
over this place and that, each with its memories of ancient glories
of his people, of happy days he himself has known amid streams
and woods and vineyards all this goes for nothing ; his geography
is poor.

So much for Italy, and what of Rome?

Romanos rerum dominos gentemque togatum

What has he to say about such a line? "Virgil appropriately used
the epithet gens togata for the Romans, for Laberius used it in his
Ephebus: togatae stirpis; and lower down dilatatum est dominium
togatae gentis." He is not concerned to speak of Virgil's conception
of Rome giving 'peace and order to the world. He reads his poet
carefully and comments on a thousand passages, but the great
fundamental thought that fills and animates the work tantae molis
erat Romanam condcre gentem utterly escapes him. It was not
so with all Virgil's readers of the day. This thought is caught by
Prudentius and Claudian, and each in his own way developes it,
but these men were poets and Macrobius was a commentator. The
scribe is tithing mint and anise and cummin, and the greater matters
of the law escape him.

Again, the Aeneid has been called the epic of human life.

184 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

More than in any Roman poet or indeed any poet of antiquity we
find in Virgil the sense of human limitations "the pain of finite
hearts that yearn " coupled with admiration for those who do their
proper work faithfully and manfully. Tennyson gives the truth of
the matter in his description of Virgil :

"Thou majestic in thy sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind."
Macrobius, in illustrating Virgil's faithfulness to the canons of
rhetoric, picks out a series of passages to illustrate pathos, as he
does with the other emotions 1 . This is easy to do, but one might
almost say he is more conscious of the successful artifice than of the
depth of feeling. He judges the expression more as a telling appeal
addressed to an audience than as a poet's interpretation of human
life. The exquisite language charms him, but he is not greatly
moved by the sorrow and the love which animate it.

It may be doubted whether Macrobius really appreciated Virgil
as Augustine did. Thus Macrobius writes: "Virgil so far improved
on his model [Apollonius] (elegant ins auctore), that the story of the
wantoning Dido, which everybody knows to be false, has passed for
true through all these centuries, and it is still popularly accounted
true, so that painters and sculptors and workers in embroidery employ
this theme as if there were no other. So greatly has the beauty of
the telling prevailed that all men, knowing as they do the chastity of
the Phoenician queen and well aware that she laid hands on herself
to save her fair fame 2 , yet let the story pass and prefer to suppress
the truth, and allow that to be believed which the sweetness of the
poet has implanted in people's breasts" (pectoribus humanis dulcedo
fingentis infudit, Sat. v. 17, 5 6). St Augustine is not writing
about Virgil heaven forbid! but he remembers his introduction
to him. How he had hated the jingle of the school " Two and two
make four" ; and how he had loved the literature the grammarian
taught him the tale of the wooden horse, the burning of Troy and
ipsius umbra Creusae! (Conf. i. 13, 22 and 20). And he had
"wept for Dido dead, because she slew herself for love, though
meanwhile I saw myself in all this dying away from Thee, God
my life, and my eyes were dry unhappy man ! What could be
more pitiable than an unhappy man not pitying himself, and
weeping Dido's death which came of loving Aeneas, but not weeping

1 See Comparetti, op. cit. p. 69 : " While the rhetoricians in forming their
laws had quoted Virgil as their chief authority, Macrobius now praises Virgil for
having observed the laws of rhetoric."

2 Cf. Aug. Conf. i. 13, 22, and Ausonius' epigram from the Greek, Anth.
Plan. iv. 151.

Macrobius 185

his own death which came of not loving Thee, God?" (Conf.
i. 13, 21). Both men know the tale is untrue, and one asks Why
did I weep ? the other, Why is it such a favourite with artists ?

On the other hand, though Macrobius lacks the highest gifts of
insight and inspiration, his work must be pronounced useful and
interesting. On the lower plane which is more to his mind he has
done good service in diligently collecting and gracefully presenting
much valuable matter in illustration of Virgil. He shews us at
once the tastes of the cultivated society of his day and the traditions
of the best scholarship of the Empire. The weapons of the stone
age are not perhaps very serviceable to-day but they have their
importance, and so in other things a man, who will, even at the cost
of the expression of himself, let us see vividly and clearly some
former stage in the history of culture, is doing us good service.
The faults we find in his work are largely those of his day and of
his profession. If we to-day judge the grammarian almost as hardly
as he judged the litteratores, those schoolmasters who won the
scholar's contempt by trying to pass off their ignorance as omni-
science ; if even the higher work of the better teachers as shewn by
Macrobius and Ausonius seems to us wanting in soul and feeling,
we must remember Augustine's gratitude to the grammaticus who
taught him Virgil. No doubt the great man thanks his teacher
for much which he owes to himself, still there must have been
quickening elements in the teaching. Augustine was surely not the
only student, who wept for Dido, who was stirred to higher life and
thought by such books as the Hortensius. We shall see that
Macrobius in his own way believed in the things that are more
excellent.

He had not Augustine's endowment, his interest in everything,
his delicate sensibility to impressions, his feeling and imagination,
his passionate and emotional temperament, any more than his
strength of mind, his spiritual nature and his determination to reach
reality. Yet Macrobius was a man of feeling too, a good and
affectionate father, as we can see from his address to Eustachius,
and a conscientious teacher. There is, he says, no claim so great
as a child's upon a parent, and no pleasure or pain so keen as the
parent's according as he sees his labour of love for his child prosper
or fail (Sat. i. 1, 1). He has read and studied for his son, and
"all that I have" of history, literature, Greek and Latin, "is thine."
We can read his feelings on friendship in the pictures he draws of
the friends gathered at the Saturnalia. He has that mixture of

186 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

amiability and a limitless readiness to take pains for those with
whom he has been brought in contact, with the want of sympathy
and even contempt for the unenlightened, the "outsider," which is
too apt to be found in the professional teacher in every age.

To Macrobius' Commentary we owe the preservation of Cicero's
Dream of Scipio, a part of the work De Kejmblica. It is in some
degree analogous to Plato's story of Er the Armenian. Scipio sees
in a dream his father Paulus and his (adoptive) grandfather Scipio
Africanus. He finds himself with them in the Milky Way, looking
down upon the earth, which he thence realizes to be but a tiny portion
of space, and the Roman part of it still more insignificant. The
sense of infinite time is brought home to him, and he is asked,
What is earthly glory ' ? A thing of narrow range and short duration.
What then is man's work and end ? The soul is divine and eternal,
and his soul is the man mem cujusque is est quisyue. A good
man's soul ascends from the prison house and chains of the body
to the galaxy there to enjoy eternal life, but he must not hasten his
departure, nor, without leave of him who assigned the station and
the duty, abandon them. The soul must contemplate what is
without and, while not cutting its connexion, must withdraw itself
from the body in meditation. The best work a man can undertake
is the welfare of his country. "That you may be the keener to
guard the state, Africanus, know this : that for all who have saved,
helped or increased their country, there is a fixed and definite place
in heaven, where in happiness they may enjoy eternal life. For to
that supreme God who rules the universe, there is nothing of all
that is on earth more grateful than those gatherings and ordered
societies of men (coetus hominum jure sociati) which are called states.
Their rulers and saviours proceed hence and return again hither"
(Somnium 3, 1).

This work Macrobius took as his text, and as sometimes happens
the commentary is out of all proportion. It is here sixteen or
seventeen times the length of the text. It is heavily weighted with
digressions on every conceivable excuse. Without them it would be
a better proportioned book, but certainly less interesting. So many
subjects are handled and with such fulness of detail that the work
has a substantive value of its own as a repository of popularized

1 This line of reflexion recurs in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, ii. 7,
in a passage recalling Cicero's story; and in a very different work, the Life of
Antony, cc. 16, 17, it may he found again, pointing another moral ascetic
monachism, which is perhaps only an alternative route to the same goal in
eternal life.

Macrobius 187

Neo-Platonism. As such indeed it had considerable use in the
Middle Ages 1 . Myths (dealt with by Julian in his seventh Oration},
dreams (the subject of a work of Synesius), numbers and their
spiritual significances, the Milky Way, the horizon, eclipses, the
moon, the motions of the celestial spheres, the stars, the origin of
their names and the possibilities of their influencing or predicting
the course of human life (a subject that much interested Augustine
in his Platonist days) 2 , the sizes of the sun and of the earth, and
their distance from each other, the mapping of the Zodiac, the
distribution of matter, the music of the spheres with incidental
reference to the influence of music generally, the zones of the world
and the antipodes, tides and their origin all these themes are
treated at length by Macrobius on pretexts arising from Cicero's
little story. "Truly therefore we must pronounce that there is
nothing more complete than this work, in which is comprised the
whole range of philosophy " (universa philosophiae integritas, Comm.
ii. 17, 17). In plain terms he is treating Cicero here as he did
Virgil, though the Dream really does give him openings more strictly
legitimate for the propagation of knowledge, which is usually bor-
rowed but not always accurate".

I shall not follow him into his digressions, nor give in detail
his discussions even of more vital matters, but I shall endeavour to
sketch in outline the general results of his philosophy or, to give it
the name it better deserves at this period of heathenism, his theology.
Though a good deal of it is present in germ in Cicero, taken of

1 St Thomas Aquinas cites it as his authority on Neo-Platonic teaching
about the primum ens, and Abelard often refers to Macrobius "no mean
philosopher" finding, e.g. an exposition of the Trinity in his God, vovs and
anima. See Petit, op. cit. c. ix. and pp. 72, 79. Interest iu Macrobius declined
with the revival of the study of Greek, as befel with another Neo-Platonist, an
even greater favourite in the Middle Ages, Boethius.

2 Macrobius (C. i. 19, 20 27) seems to incline to the view of Plotinus (to
whom he refers, Enn. ii. 3) that the stars like birds enable us to foresee, but do
not themselves affect, our future. So Ammianus (xx. 1, 9) expounds augury,
finding its ultimate cause in beniyititas numinis and the divine interest in man.
Porphyry (de Abntinentia iii. 5) says the gods if silent yet give warnings, which
birds understand more quickly than men and then tell us as well as they can.
"All things " says Synesius (Dreams, c. 2, 1285 i>) "prophesy through all, since
all are kin, that are in the one living creature, the universe." There are
responses as between the chords of a lyre, and so conversely men can influence
the gods by certain means, i.e. magic a view Synesius later on renounced, as
Augustine did all astrology (Con/, vii. 6, 8 and G. D. v. 1 f.). How great a feat
it was to do this is shewn by Ammianus (xxviii. 4, 24) "Many in Rome, who
deny that there are higher powers in heaven, will not go out of doors, nor dine,
nor indeed think it quite safe even to bathe, until they have carefully consulted
an almanack and learnt where e.g. Mercury is, etc."

3 The reader may be referred to Petit, c. v.

188 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

course from Greek thinkers, its development is Neo-Platonic, and it
constantly points to its origin in the general teacliing of Plotinus
and his school 1 .

How far Neo-Platonism by process of borrowing or of original
reflexion reached its degree of likeness to Oriental modes of thought,
this is hardly the place to discuss. But one thing at least in the
Commentary stands out in marked contrast with the text. The
heaven of which Cicero speaks is pre-eminently for patriots, servants
of their country, for men of action in virtue of their life of political
well-doing ; with Macrobius the influence of Neo-Platonism is so
strong that, though such men have a share in his heaven, they
hardly enter it and in spite of their taking part in public life. It is
no longer a help, it is a hindrance. We find this in other Neo-
Platonists 2 . The hymns of Synesius, which are really prayers, ask
for nothing so much as for freedom from anxieties and disturbing
cares. "When pressure is put upon him to become a bishop, his
great dread is that this will drag him into the world, into affairs,
and lessen and destroy the leisure and calm of mind essential to his
spiritual life. It is playing with his own soul for other people's
political and social necessities. He made the sacrifice, however, like
the Spartan he was (Ep. 113).

The object of Macrobius' Commentary is to reinforce the
doctrine of Plato and Cicero that there is a life beyond the grave
a doctrine in which he finds the very foundations of all morality
and of society itself. The story of Scipio's Dream, like the myth
of Er, is ridiculed, he knows, by the Epicureans, a flippant, loud-
voiced and perverse school ; but none the less it has "inexpugnable
reason" behind it. Less emphasized perhaps but not less real is
his aim to maintain the sufficiency of Neo-Platonism against
Christianity as well as against Epicureanism, both being hated by his
party 3 .

In outline Macrobius' system is as follows. The universe is one
vast whole, to be regarded in some sort as a temple (C. i. 14, 2) and

1 Petit c. vi. discusses Macrobius' philosophy, finding that here, as in
literary criticism, his work is second-hand. He gives other men's results as
dogmata, without much insight of his own. It should be remembered that he
is quite open about his dependence on "right thinkers," "Platonists," Plotinus,
etc. ; e.g. especially C. ii. 15, 2. "I do not forget myself so far, nor am I so ill
inspired as of my own ability either to oppose Aristotle or defend Plato."

2 Porphyry, de Abstin. i. 27, says he writes not for artisans, nor athletes,
nor soldiers, nor sailors, nor rhetoricians, nor rots rbv irpay^ariKov (llov tirave\o-

3 Cf. Lucian's Alexander 25 and 38, an interesting anticipation of Julian's
twin hatreds.

Macrobins 189

eternal (C. ii. 10, 9). God is the first and the origin of all things
that are. By reason of the superabundant fertility of his majesty
he created Mind (mem or vovs) from himself. From Mind came
Soul (ammo) ; thence bodies, stars animated by divine intelligences,
and earthly bodies, human, animal and vegetable. Thus from the
supreme god down to the lowest dregs of the universe (ad- ultimam
rerum faecem) runs a connexion, holding itself together by mutual
links and never broken. This is Homer's golden chain, which he
says God bade hang from heaven to earth. There is a real kinship
between man and the stars 1 (C. i. 14, 6, 7, and 15). The aim of
his work is to shew that man is not only immortal but is god, the
real man not being what is seen, but that by which the seen is ruled,
his soul or anima in fact (C. ii. 12, 5 and 9).

Souls before they are ensnared by the desire for a body (necdum
desiderio corporis irretitae) dwell in the starry region of the universe
and thence sink down into bodies (C, i. 9, 10). I am not sure
whether this is to be lamented or not. By Synesius and to some
extent by Macrobius it is implied that this fall is not a happy thing
altogether. Yet nature to continue animal life has put such love
of the body into the soul that it loves its fetter and dislikes to leave
it (C. ii. 16, 19). It is however in reality a fall 2 , a death of the
soul (C. i. 10, 17 : 11, 1), but after all a temporary death (ad tempus
obruitur, C. i. 12, 17) 3 . Much has been said by the ancients and
many poetical descriptions put forth about things below, in/era, hell
or the grave. The body is the in/era of the soul, o-w/xa a body and
a-tjfjia a tomb meaning much the same thing (C. i. 10, 9 ff. and 11, 3).
There is yet another sense for in/era as we shall see.

So the soul passes through the Tropics as through gates into
this world (C. i. 12, 1 2), losing as it goes some of its memory of
things above 4 , "for if souls bore down into their bodies the memory

1 Thus Synesius (Ep. 100) playfully says he thinks the stars must look down
on him with kindly feelings as the only man in Cyrene who contemplates them
with understanding. In Hymn i. 80 100, he sets the same doctrine forth in
poetry of some beauty.

2 Porphyry (ad Marcellam 5) calls it a fall, rb els TTJJ/ ytveviv irru/j-a offov ical
olov TIIUV Tijr ^i>X'7 s trepiiffrij, though the gods do not forget us but are <rwr%>ej.
Naville (Saint-Augustin, p. 92) warns us that the analogy between this Ti-rw/xa
and Augustine's fall of man is much more apparent than real. The Neo-
Platonist does not or should not attach the idea T>f sin to it.

3 So Porphyry, de A ntro Nymphamm 10, cites Heraclitus, ffiv rjfias rdv tuelvw
(sc. \f/vx&v) OO.VO.TOV KO.I i)v (Kflvas rbv i)/j^Ttpov 8a.va.Tov. Plotinus, Enn. iv. 83
17 (sc. v^xi?) xal Stfffj.os TO ffwfta Kal Ta<f>os.

4 So Synesius (Dreams, 1296 B) teaches that the soul is led to choose slavery
by the gifts of matter (cf. i/Xa /*e /teryois iirtdriffe r^ais, Hymn. 3, 574), as if
contracting to be a slave for a term, and on entering bodily life it has to quaff a

190 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

of the divine matters of which they were conscious in heaven, there
would he no difference of opinion among men about these things,
but all drink oblivion in their descent, some in a greater and others
in a less measure" (C. i. 12, 9). The soul then finds itself below,
with some memory of heavenly things and a strong love of the body,
and as it is ruled by the one or the other it rises or falls (C. i. 11, 11).
Contempt for the world and a heavenward aspiration help it upward.
Those alone are happy who live in the contemplation of things above
(superna) and diligently seek after them and as far as may be imitate
them 1 (C. i. 8, 3). Those who can escape public affairs, and purging
themselves of the contagion of the body strive by flight from human
things 2 to find their place among divine, have really advanced
(C. i. 8, 8). For these may die to the world "we use the word
dying too, when the soul still domiciled in the body is taught by
philosophy and spurns the allurements of the body and rids itself
of the pleasant treachery of desires and all other passions 3 " (C. i.
13, 6). In such cases "conversation in heaven" may be reached,
"for souls, who in this life free themselves from the fetters of the
body by the death philosophy teaches, may, though the body yet
lives, take their place (inserantur) in heaven and among the stars"
(C. i. 13, 10) 4 . The universe is a temple of god ; all the visible is
his temple who is conceived by mind alone ; to him as its founder

cup of Lethe. Pleasure (D/o, 1129 B) is the brooch (irepbvrf) that binds soul to
body by divine arrangement. Cf. Porphyry, de Antr. Nymph. 16 5i' rj5oi>rj<;
SefffJififfOai KOLt KarayeffGai TO. 0eia ei's ytveffiv... 22 dvo o$v rcu/ras ZOevro TruXas
KapKivov Ka.1 aiyoKtpwv ol 6eo\6yoi...TOijT<i}i> 5 Kapidvov fj,fv eivai 5t' 08 Kariacnv at
\f/vxai, aiyoicp<j)i> St 3t' 08 avtacriv.

1 Synesius (Ep. 139) cites with approval this teaching of Plotinus, phrasing
it thus: rb ev ffavry 6elov &i>aye eirl rb irpwr&yovov delov. So far do they go that
Synesius (Ep. 137) maintains that right living, opOus PI.OVV, is useful merely as a
prelude to wisdom, irpooi/juov rov (fipoveiv.

2 Cf. Plotinus, Enn. i. 6, 8; Porphyry, ad Marc. 10 rrj /ieXerwo-T? (i.e. Marcella)
<f>etiyeit> airb TOV crw/iaros.

3 Porphyry, ad Marc. 7, on rising superior to pleasures. Cc. 12 if. present
a far loftier picture of right living than anything Macrobius says on the subject.

4 He uses a phrase curiously recalling Christian hymnody when he speaks of
the soul, after it has deserved to be purged from contagion, returning fully
restored to the fountain of eternal life ad perennis vitae fontem restituta in
integrum (C. i. 12, 17). Boethius, Cons. Phil. iv. metre 1, has a beautiful little
poem on the rising of the soul to the "dear lost land " (James 5 translation):

hue te si reducem referat via,

quam nunc requiris immeinor ;
haec dices, memini, patria est viihi,

hinc ortus hie sistam gradum.

Julian, Or. iv. 136 A, speaks of good men's souls ascending after death to
Serapis, who saves them from ytveffts thereafter, and brings them to the
intelligible world, ^60-^05 voyTfa.

Macrobius 191

the highest worship is due, and whoever comes into this temple
must realize he has to live the priest's life (C. i. 14, 2) 1 .

The fruit of virtue lies in a good conscience (C. ii. 10, 2) but for
the wicked there is the more awful meaning of hell, the in/era. All
that the poets have said is but parable; Phlegethon and Acheron
mean but anger and sorrow, Styx whatever plunges men among
themselves into the whirlpool of hate. The vulture is but the
torture of conscience as it tears the guilty flesh, and with reminder
of past sin lacerates the vital parts without ceasing, ever waking
remorse anew should it seek to rest, never by any pity sparing
itself all in accordance with the law that no guilty man is ever
acquitted by himself [Juvenal xiii. 3], nor can escape his own sentence
on himself. So with the other penalties the guilty ever seem to
themselves on the brink of being overtaken by the ruin they deserve 2 .
No, the insight of the theologi is not in vain (C. i. 10, 12 15).

This is the view of the Neo-Platonists. Synesius makes a
somewhat playful allusion to it in a letter (32) about a bad slave
whom he does not punish "for his wickedness is sufficient punish-
ment for the wicked." More seriously elsewhere he represents
insensibility to evil, the absence of a desire to rise, as the last and
worst state of evil 3 . So too says Augustine, with that note of
experience which marks his theology, "Tnou hast ordained, and so
it is, that every disordered spirit is itself its own punishment" (Conf.
i. 12, 19). The direct way in which he makes this law the law of
God will strike the reader. It puts a different complexion on the
doctrine at once. Later on he sums it up more briefly, though hardly
more tellingly, peccatum poena, peccati. (See op. imp. c. Jul. i. 44 f.)

Suicide Macrobius, avowedly following Plotinus 4 , forbids on the

1 Porphyry, de Abstin. ii. 49 6 <j>t\6(ro<f>os /ecu Oeov TOV eirl irafftv iepevs: ii. 46
tv T(> vea) TOV TrcLTpbs r$ Kofffj-if TovTy. Synesius, Ep. 57, 1388 c $fav . . .uffirep ev
iepui Trept/36Xy ry KoafJUf.

2 The reader will remember the powerful lines of Persius iii. 35 43, his
picture of the last stage of damnation virtutem videant intabescantque relicta,
and the exclamation of the guilty imits, imus praecipites a passage to which
Augustine (C. D. ii. 7) refers with approval though he declares it was unproduc-
tive of effect in view of pagan stories of divine lust. Cf. Boethius, Cons. Phil.
iii. m. 8.

3 Dreams, 1293 D ; cf . Ep. 44, 1372 A, an important letter on the whole ques-
tion of retribution. Cf. the discussion of this in Boethius, Cons. Phil. iv. 4.

4 Porphyry, vita Plotini 11, says he thought of suicide but Plotinus came to
him and forbade him. Plotinus, Enn. i. 9 ' 5 olos ^Kaaros crt, ToiavTrjv fo^ei
e/cei ra^Lv, els rb irpoK^irreiv otfcrr/s e7rt56<rews OVK e^aKT^ov. Petit, op. cit. p. 75,
shews that Macrobius cites Porphyry's view (de Abstin. ii. 47) on the spirits of
suicides as Plotinus', a slip he attributes to memory, though in view of
Macrobius' methods one might suppose it due to an intermediary source.
This whole passage on suicide is quoted by Abelard (Petit, p. 79).

192 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

ground that "since in the other life souls are to be rewarded for
the measure of perfection which they have attained in this, one
must not hasten the end of life while there is still a possibility of
further improvement. Nor is this idly said. For in the esoteric
discourses on the soul's return, it is said that those who sin
(delinquentes) in this life are like those who stumble upon level
ground, who can rise without difficulty ; but souls that leave this
life with the stains of sins upon them are to be compared to those
who fall sheer down from a great and precipitous height, where
there is no power to rise again" (C. i. 13, 15 16). Link to this his
doctrine of the eternity of the universe and of the soul (C. i. 1, 7 ;
14, 20), and his picture is not unlike Prudentius' description of the
horrors of eternal hell 1 . On the other hand, heaven, he says, is
closed to all but perfect purity (C. i. 13, 19).

Such is Macrobius' presentment of the doctrines of the Neo-
Platonists. It is a creed of great moral elevation with many
elements of value. Definite and explicit he escapes the vagueness
that so often vitiates the teaching of his school, of Trismegistus, for
instance ; while by skimming over the surface of things, as is his
wont, he seems to avoid the difficulties which a Plotinus presents.
Here at least Neo-Platonism is given in a form a plain man can
surely understand and readily put into action. What is wanting ?

I will only ask the reader to consider two contemporary criti-
cisms, if I may so call them both. On the funeral monument of
Praetextatus is given a list of his priesthoods and with it a more
impressive list of the mysteries into which he was initiated. What
had he to do with the rites of Bacchus and Eleusis, with Mithras
and the taivrobolium, when such a simple faith as this was before
him ? Or, to put it generally, why did theurgy so persistently dog
the steps of Neo-Platonism? Why was magic necessary to supple-
ment philosophy ? What is the meaning of the wistful prayerfulness
of Trismegistus, his desire for and belief in communion with a
personal God? Macrobius does not seem conscious of such things,
or, if he is, he rather inclines to disdain them (Sat. vii. 2, 13).

Augustine tells us how he read "certain books of the Platonists

1 Prudentius, Hamart. 825 839. A little lower Prudentius describes the
upward flight of the purified soul after death, unhampered by the body, in
language which recalls these doctrines set forth by Macrobius. See too Syne-
sius, Ep. 44, on punishment after death. Hermes Trismegistus (Ed. Bipont.
Apul. ii. p. 312) says guilty souls are condemned on an examination held by the
summits daemon ; ut in hoc obsit anhnae aeternitas, quod sit immortali sententia
aeterno supplicio subjugata. This he says is more to be feared than physical
death.

Macrobius 193

translated from Greek into Latin," and was greatly helped by them.
From them he gained the first hint for his solution of the problem
of evil, with his doctrines of being and of order. Much that he
there learned abode with him for ever, but he was not satisfied.
The language in which he phrases his criticism is full of scriptural
metaphors, and may strike the Classical student as oddly as the
Scriptures did Augustine himself at first; yet in his own way
Augustine has felt and is expressing the real weakness of Neo-
Platonism.

"Those pages present not the image of this piety: the tears
of confession, Thy sacrifice, the troubled spirit, the contrite and
humbled heart, the salvation of the people, the Bride, the City, the
earnest of the Holy Spirit, the cup of our redemption. No one
there sings: 'Shall not my soul be submitted to God? From Him
is my salvation. For He is my God and my salvation, my guardian ;
I shall not be moved more' [Ps. Ixii. 1 2, Septuagint]. No one
there hears Him calling 'Come unto Me, ye who labour.' They
disdain to learn of Him for He is meek and humble of heart. For
Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent and hast
revealed them unto babes" (Conf. vii. 21, 27).

CHAPTEE IX

ST AUGUSTINE S CONFESSIONS

\
Foetus eram ipse mihi magna quaestio.

Conf. iv. 4, 9

OF all men of the fourth century St Augustine is the most
conspicuous 1 . It is not merely that in intellectual and spiritual
endowment he eclipses his contemporaries, but Harnack is un-
questionably right when he says that between St Paul and Luther
there is none that can be measured with Augustine. He gave
to Christian thought on God and man, on sin and grace, on
the world and the church, an impulse and a direction, the force
of which is still unspent. He shaped the Catholic theory of the
Church, he gave the great Popes the idea of the City of God,
of God's Empire, he was the father of the mystics, the founder
of the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, and above all
the hero and master of the Renaissance and the Reformation.
He gave the Catholic Church the baleful doctrine " Compel them
to come in" ; he gave Calvin the doctrine of Predestination and he
was the only father from whom Luther really learnt.

1 The literature on St Augustine is immense. I have used for the purposes
of this essay Harnack, History of Dogma, section on St Augustine, and appendix
on Neo-Platonism ; also Harnack's separate lecture on the Confessions of
St Augustine; J. Keinkens, die Geschichtsphilosophie des hi. Aug.; Boissier, La
Fin du Paganisme, bk in. c. 3 on the Conversion of St Aug. (also in the Rerue
des Deux Mondes, 1 Jan. 1888, vol. 85, pp. 4369); E. Feuerlein, Ueber die
Stellung A.'s in der Kirchen- u. Culturgeschichte in Histor. Zeitschrift, vol. xxii.
(1869), pp. 270 313 ; Loofs, Art. on St Augustine in Herzog's Realencyklopfidie
(last ed.), vol. n. ; H. A. Naville, St Aug., jEtude sur le devehppement de sa pensee
jusqu'a Vepoque de son ordination, Geneve 1872; Mozley, Aiigustinian Doctrine
of Predestination; and some other books which I have used incidentally. Last,
but not least, I would mention the lectures (as yet unpublished) of my former
colleague, Dr John Watson, of Queen's University, Canada, from whom I have
had very great help.

St Augustine's Confessions 195

But it is not with his theology or his philosophy or his influence
on the Church that we have here to deal. For the present we are
concerned with him as a man of letters, who with his wonderfully
full and various nature entered into all the life of his time, and
read the world and the heart of man as they had not been read
before ; who after much hesitation became convinced that in the
Church was truth and so to the Church made his submission, there
to learn the way to God, in Whom at last he found rest for his soul.
All this story is told in his Confessions, a book which among all
books written in Latin stands next to the Aeneid for the width of
its popularity and the hold it has upon mankind. It does not
perhaps appeal to the same audience, it is not strictly a work of art,
but it is as full of life and touches the heart as truly, though from a
different quarter. It was a new departure in literature and stands
at the head of a new school. It was in his own day the most widely
read and liked of Augustine's works, and it is still printed and
re-printed, translated and re-translated.

Its chief marks are truthfulness, observation and experience.
Here is a man whom nothing escapes. Everything interests him,
everything raises questions for him, and he must get to the root of
everything. He studies himself, and relentlessly analyses his moods,
his fancies, his ambitions, his feelings, his aspirations after God and
his attempts to escape Him. He is not merely curious, for all these
enquiries are related to one another, and all tend to the great
questions : Who am I ? "Why am I ? For whom am I ? What is the
meaning and purpose of this complicated and even self-contradictory
nature of man, of this disordered and confusing world ? At one time
he tells us that he came near abandoning the search for the answers to
these questions, so difficult were they, but he found its abandonment
more impossible than its prosecution and persevered till he found
what he sought. This inability of his to be content with no answer
or a make-believe answer would have been remarkable in any age,
but how much more in his own age, an age when the spirit of
inquiry seemed to be saying farewell to mankind ? It was an age,
too, when after centuries of rhetoric and tyranny mankind seemed
almost as incapable of speaking the truth as of seeking it '.

1 The reader of the Confessions is every now and then reminded that
Augustine was once a rhetorician. Such plays as that on peritus and periturus
are far-away echoes from the school. This makes more significant the fact
brought out by Mr E. W. Watson (Classical Review, Feb. 1901, p. 65),
"Ehetorician as Augustine was, and master of several styles, he had a curious
power of dropping his rhetoric when he undertook in homilies and com-

132

196 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Told by another, the history of Augustine's development, of his
complex life, his experiments (his own word) and observations in
manners, morals and religion would have been interesting. Told
by himself it has a unique value, as the record of a peculiarly rich
life, a story of real experience, the drama of a soul's progress from
error to truth, from uncertainty to rest in the love of God, in which
every stage is won by struggle, where nothing is done by guesswork
and everything has been tested in actual living, all set forth by the
man who has been through it all and who can tell it with a charm,
a power and an honesty rarely to be found together in any writer of
any age.

He is observant, he is truthful, and he is affectionate. His
nature was a large and genial one. He seems to have liked, to have
loved, the men and women he met. He certainly won their love
and kept it. His pupils in rhetoric became his disciples in thought
and faith, following him over land and sea to be with him and to
share his spiritual and intellectual life. It is this that makes his
book what it is. The keen intellect is not quicker than the warm
heart to detect the weakness of a wrong view of God and man.
Intellect and instinct have each their strength and their weakness,
and in Augustine they correct each other. Emotion cannot lead him
where reflexion will not approve, nor can thought rest where heart
is dissatisfied. He must be clear and he must be in contact with
flesh and blood, so in turn he rises above Manichaeanism and Neo-
Platonism. He must have a rational view of God, a God supreme
and free from any taint of responsibility for evil, and yet a God
Who knows and feels a man's inability to overcome evil by his own
effort, a God Who knows the human heart at least as sympathetic-
ally as he does himself and does not love it less, in fact the God of
grace. God is the origin of his life, and his life, properly understood,
consists in returning to God, living in Him and enjoying Him 1 , but
here he rejects or supplements Neo-Platonism, for his experience
has taught him that such life is impossible under the Neo-Platonic
scheme of things with a remote God ; his heart cries out for a self-
revealing God, Who will Himself come directly into relation with
the heart of man and lift man into Himself. Thus his book is not

mentaries to interpret Scripture." I do not think it fanciful to find the same
passion for reality underlying another fact which Mr Watson mentions. He
quotes Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, to the effect that Augustine was the first to
form his rhythms by accent instead of quantity.

1 Con/, x. 22, 32 Ipsa est beata vita gaudere ad te, de te, propter te; ipsa est
et non est altera. Cf. de Beata Vita, 35.

St AiMjustine's Confessions 197

at all abstract, it touches life on the quick, and in the story of
Augustine it mirrors the inarticulate movement of the old world
from heathenism to Christianity, that moral, intellectual and spiritual
dissatisfaction with other cults and philosophies which drew mankind
to the Church.

He tells us the story of his career. He was born at Thagaste ;
he studied there, at Madaura and Carthage ; he taught rhetoric at
Thagaste and Carthage, at Rome and Milan, and then returned to
Africa. A life more uneventful could hardly be conceived no
striking episodes, no great perils, a little illness, commonplace
pleasures. Yet the story gives us vastly more insight into the society
of the time than all the letters of Symmachus, with his splendid
friends and his dangerous intimacies with Emperor and usurper. In
the Confessions we are in the heart of a family, we see them as they
see one another, we know their ideas and their aspirations, and we
learn what they are reading and what they are thinking about.

Augustine was born at Thagaste on the 13th of November, 354.
His father Patricias was on the whole a heathen, a man of a very
kindly nature, but very quick-tempered 1 . His ideals were not
perhaps very high, he enjoyed life 2 and he was anxious for his
son to get on in the world. Monnica, Augustine's mother, was a
well-trained, tactful, Christian woman. She had the sense, her son
tells us, to recognize her husband's various humours, and so care-
fully avoided provoking him by word or deed when he was angry
that she never had a blow from him, as certain of her acquaintance
did from their own more amiable husbands. She was essentially a
peace-maker and exercised a good influence on the "acid conversa-
tions " of the women of Thagaste. Monnica was the more positive
influence in the home, and while Patricius by his good nature and
love of. pleasure set his son an example of taking the world comfort-
ably and enjoying all it offers, her more strenuous and intelligent
nature left a deeper and more lasting stamp on Augustine, though
as usual the lighter ideal won the prompter response to its appeals.
The early impressions of his mother's Christian faith and life were
never effaced through all his years of moral and intellectual wander-
ing. When he once began to reflect, nothing satisfied him that did
not somehow bear "the name of Christ 3 ," neither Cicero's Hortensius

1 Con/, ix. 9, 19 sicut benevolentia praecipuus ita ira fervidus. People knew
quam ferocem conjugem sustineret Monnica.

2 Conf. ii. 3, 6 gaudens vinolentia.

3 Cf. Conf. iii. 4, 8 on the Hortensius (cited on p. 193); v. 14, 25 quibus
tamen philosophis, quod sine nomine salutari Christi essent, curationem languoris
animae meae committere omnino recusabam. Cf. too vi. 4, 5,

198 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

nor the philosophy of the Academics. We get a glimpse of the
family relations again, when Augustine tells us of his gratification
when Monnica on her death-bed told him that he had been a good
son (plus) and that she had never heard from his mouth a harsh or
rude word directed against her (Conf. ix. 12, 30). At the same
time, he confesses that much of his conduct greatly troubled her.

Of his school-days Augustine has left us an interesting picture '
the lessons, especially the Greek, which he found as tiresome as
other boys do, the rod, from which he prayed to be delivered,
and his general preference for play. Sometimes he did not stick
to the truth, he pilfered from his parents' cellar either to eat
himself or to have something for his playmates 2 , and sometimes
he did not play fairly. Yet he had no mind to be imposed
on himself, and he was a bright, intelligent boy (bonae spei
puer, i. 16, 26), who waked the interest and hopes of those who
knew him. For more advanced instruction he was sent to Madaura,
and after a year's interval he went to Carthage, "thanks more to the
spirit than the wealth of my father" (ii. 3, 6), who was however
aided by a rich fellow-townsman, Romanianus, for long Augustine's
steady friend. There were many parents much richer than Patricius
who did no such thing for their boys, and people admired him for
it. Of course it was not every father whose son was an Augustine.

Augustine was now sixteen years old when he went, as we
should say, to the university at Carthage 3 . It was a great
port with a famous history, a beautiful city with a great inter-
mixture of population largely heathen, "a city of noise and
pleasure," says Boissier. The boy had been captured by Virgil
and was an eager and quick student and did well in his studies.
But the same ardent nature that had felt the passion of Dido, and
the ambition that had once led him to take unfair advantages in
play, now led him astray. His fellow-students were given to sensual

1 See Conf. bk i. generally.

2 One very interesting discussion in the Confessions (ii. 6, 12 9, 17) turns
on the question why he went with some boy friends to rob an orchard, though
his father had a pear-tree which bore better fruit, though he might freely have
taken from his father's tree, and though he did not want and did not eat
the stolen pears after all. Ilia autem decerpsi tantinn ut furarer...An libuit
facere contra legem, saltern fallacia quia potentatu non poteram, ut iiiancam
libertatem captivus imitarer facieiido impune quod non liceret? ..Et tamen solus
id non fecissem...Sed qnoniam in illis pomis voluptas mi hi non erat, ea erat
in ipso facinore, quam faciebat consortium simul peccantium...llisus erat quasi
titillato corde, quod fallebamus eos qui haec a nobis fieri non putabant et
veliementer nolebant.

3 Conf. ii. 3, 6; and iii. 1.

St Augustine's Confessions 199

pleasures, and Augustine went with them. He heard them boast
and boasted to excel them, though he confesses he did not do all
he told them he did. The brutal amusements of the eversores, who
overturned people in the streets, never appealed to him. His
temptation lay another way. He "wandered in the streets of
Babylonia and wallowed in the mud." Even before he came to
Carthage his mother had thought it would be well to check his
irregularities by marrying him to some one, but this was not pressed
as it might spoil his career. Licentiousness, the theatre and pride
all these he deplores in later life, yet no one except his mother
seems to have regarded his conduct as noticeably bad.

It has been pointed out that the wild period of Augustine's life
cannot have been very long. He went to Carthage at sixteen, in
the year 370, and he soon took to himself the woman with whom he
lived in strict fidelity till they parted about 385. Their son was
born in 372 and they called him Adeodatus, a significant name 1 for
such a child. Augustine was obviously very fond of him, and, when
he grew up a bright boy, not less proud. Even the Church at that
time recognized monogamous concubinage, and this woman may
have been a freedwoman or some one who could not be legally
married to him. At all events Monnica received her and her child
with Augustine 2 . Patricius had died in 371.

At the age of nineteen his mind was diverted to more serious
things than the life of pleasure. Hitherto he had hardly thought.
As a boy, on the occasion of some passing illness, he had asked for
baptism, but when he very quickly recovered, it was deferred. It
was generally believed that baptism washed away all previous sins
and consequently that it was best administered, if possible, on the
death-bed. People used to say, Augustine tells us, "Let him alone;
let him do as he likes; he is not yet baptized." This course was
followed in his own case and he regretted it 3 . However at nineteen
he came upon a book of Cicero's, now lost, the Hortensius, and it

1 Names such as Deogratias, Deus dedit, were not uncommon in Africa, being
apparently translations of Semitic names like Mattathiah, Nathaniel and so forth.
Augustine's words are worth quoting (Conf. iv. 2, 2) : servans tori fidem, in qua
sane expenrer exemplo meo, quid distaret inter conjugalis placiti modum, quod
foederatuvi esset generandi gratia, et pactum libidinosi amoris, ubi proles etiam
contra votnm nascitnr ; qiiamvis jam nata cogat se diligi. The last clause is
remarkable and shews the man's character.

2 See Loot's, art. Augustinus in Herzog's Realencyklopadie fiir Protestantische
Theolotjie, 1897 edition, p. 261, and Council of Toledo (A.D. 400), canon 17 there
cited. Diet. Antt. i. 526, art. concubina. Compare the somewhat similar case
of Libanius and his son by a concubine, Ep. 983 (to Ammianus Marcellinus).

3 Conf. i. 11, 17.

200 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

changed his life 1 . He now burned with incredible ardour for
philosophy, as Cicero had intended his readers should 2 . His prayers
and desires were changed. He longed to rise above the earthly and
reach God. It was not this or that school, but wisdom herself that
was the object of his aspiration a disinterested passion for truth
awakened at last and conscious of itself. One thing gave him
pause ; the name of Christ was not there. So he turned to the
Scriptures to see what they were like and not unnaturally he was
disappointed. They seemed to him quite unworthy of comparison
with the dignified style of Cicero. In reviewing his life he explains
this. He at this time took a merely external view of the Scriptures
acies mea non penetralmt interiora ejus 3 . Yet a new life had really
begun for him the quest of truth. He had begun to be really
interested in religion, and to examine his own. He was dissatisfied
and now he fell in with the Manichaeans.

There are forms of religion which take a strong hold of the
popular mind, but are not so strongly represented in literature
as others which are less generally accepted. Stoicism for example
has far more literature than the popular cults of the early Empire.
Manichaeanism in like manner is much less accessible to the western
reader than Neo-Platonism, side by side with which it disputed the
field with Catholic Christianity in the fourth century. Of widely
different origin these religions had drawn nearer one another with
time. Manichaeanism had Christian elements, and Neo-Platonism
and Christianity had Oriental. All three had doctrines in common,
all three dealt with revelation, salvation and immortality.

Mani, who died about 277 A.D., blended in his religion elements
drawn from Persian Zoroastrianism, from Syrian Gnosticism, from
Christianity and perhaps from Buddhism. His system turns on the
origin of evil, which he thus explained 4 . There are two eternal

1 Con/, iii. 4, 7 librum quendam Ciceronis. The fashionable reading seems
now to be cujusdam for quendam. I have not gone into the MS. evidence, but
the genitive seems to me a foppishness of which Augustine surely ought to have
been incapable. His Aeneae nescio cujns (i. 13, 20) is not very happy, but this
is worse, to say nothing of the ingratitude. He quite honestly says Virgilius in
i. 14, 23.

2 Cic. de Div. 2. 1, 1 cohortati sumus ut maxime potuimus ad philosophiae
studium eo libro, qui est inscriptus Hortensnis.

3 Con/, iii. 5, 9.

4 See Gustav Fliigel, Mani, seine Lehre u. seine Schriften, aus dem Fihrist
des Abfflfaradsch Muhammad ben Ishak al-Warrak, Leipzig 1862 especially
pp. 86 to 105 for a translation of the surviving fragments of Mani's original
teaching. Naville, op. cit. ch. n. pp. 19 28, has also a very good and clear
account of Manichaeanism and its appeal to Augustine. I am indebted here as
elsewhere to Dr John Watson.

St Augustine's Confessions 201

principles or substances, the one good and light, the other evil and
dark, and the universe is the result of their mixture. Light and
dark are here not symbols but actual descriptions. Each of these
principles involves the same confusion of spiritual and material, of
the physical phenomena of nature and the facts of the moral order.
Each has five elements the world of light falling into gentleness,
knowledge, understanding, mystery and insight corresponding with
the gentle breeze, the wind, light, water and fire and contrasted
with the elements of the kingdom of darkness, viz. mist, burning,
the hot wind, poison and darkness. The world of light overlay the
world of darkness, and out of the latter came Satan to storm the
former'. The King of the Paradises of Light produced the Primal
Man (Christ, not Jesus), and arming him with the gentle breeze, the
wind etc , sent him to fight Satan, who was armed with mist and
burning and the rest. Satan triumphed over the Primal Man, who
was however rescued by the King of the Paradises of Light, but not
without a certain confusion of the elements. Thus fire and burning
are involved in each other, mist and water, good and bad mingled.
Of these mingled elements the visible universe was made by com-
mand of the King of the World of Light, in order to their separation.
The moon and sun were created to take part in this work, the moon
drawing to herself elements of light (e.g. from a body at the time of
death) and passing them to the sun 2 , who in turn passes them
onward and upward, till at last good shall be separated from evil,
the latter massed below in a pit covered by a stone as large as the
earth. The blooming of a plant and the aspiration of a soul are
alike the disentangling of particles of light, while the eating of a
plant 3 or the generation of a new life 4 means their re-imprisonment.
Hence asceticism is necessarily a part of the Manichaean religion.
Mankind are apparently descended from Adam and Eve, whose family

1 Fliigel, op. cit. p. 87. Aug. Con/, vii. 2, 3 refers to this war of the powers.
Cf. v. 10, 20 cited below.

2 When the moon is waxing, she is gathering light, and when waning she is
transmitting it to the sun.

3 Mani's followers were grouped into two main classes, the higher and the
ordinary (auditorca). If vegetable food were eaten by the latter, light was
imprisoned in the process, but not if eaten by the former. To obviate starva-
tion a portion might be given to a man of the higher grade and the hearer
might eat the rest. Cf. Aug. Conf. iii. 10, 18 quae particulae summi et veri Dei
liyatae fuissent in illo porno nisi electi sancti dente ac ventre solverentur; and
iv. 1, 1 escas de quibus nobis in ojficina aqualiculi sui fabricarent angelos et deos
per quos liberaremur.

4 See Aug. de Mor. Munich, ii. 18, 65, the reason of the boasted Manichaean
chastity (which had once impressed Augustine) was ne carni anima implicaretur.
See Naville, p. 83.

202 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

history is terribly complicated by mythology and the intervention
of archons and Cain's two daughters by Eve, Worldly- Wisdom
and the "daughter of Avarice." Man is of Satan's creation, but
owing to the imprisoned particles of light he too is of mixed nature,
not wholly evil nor wholly good.

Mani rejected the Old Testament as the work of the devil.
With his view of chastity he could not approve of the patriarchs on
any terms. Jesus he set among the prophets, though His flesh was
only a phantom and His crucifixion only apparent a type of the
general crucifixion of a portion of the Primal Man upon matter.
Jesus had foretold the coming of the Paraclete who should clear His
teaching of Jewish interpolations, and Mani was himself the Para-
clete. In this case, as Augustine thought later on, it was a pity
that his astronomy was incorrect 1 .

The question of evil was Very much before the minds of men in
Augustine's day. Synesius, for example, wrote a book on Providence
to explain that the triumph of evil is only temporary. Here then
was a system which, it might be said, looked the facts well in the
face and gave a plausible explanation of them. It recognized man's
dual nature, and relieved man of the responsibility for his own
sinfulness 2 , while it relieved God of the responsibility for the general
existence of evil in man and in nature 3 . Here was a system which
made the most magnificent promises of knowledge 4 , and rescued a
thoughtful man from the necessity of accepting the immoralities
and anthropomorphisms of the Old Testament serious difficulties

1 Conf. v. 5, 8 Spiritum sanctum consolatorem et ditatoremfidelium... persona-
liter in se esse persuadere conatus est. Itaque cum de coelo ac stellis, et de solis
ac lunae motibus falsa dixisse deprehenderetur...cum ea non solum ignorata sed
etiam falsa tarn vesana superbiae vanitate dicer et ut ea tanquam divinae personae
tribuere sibi niteretur.

2 Conf. v. 10, 8 Adhuc enim (he is speaking of his life in Borne while still
more or less a Manichaean) mihi videbatur non esse nos qui peccamus sed nescio
quam aliam in nobis peccare naturam. Et delectabat su2)erbiam meam extra
culpam esse; et cum aliquid mali fecissem non confiteri mefecisse.

3 Conf. vii. 14, 20 Et quia non aitdebat anima mea, ut ei displiceret Deus
meus, nolebat esse tuum quidquid ei displicebat. Et inde ierat in opinionem
duarum snbstantiarum. Cf. v. 10, 20 Et quia Deum bonum nullam malam
naturam creasse qualiscumque pietas me credere cogebat, constituebam ex adverso
sibi duas moles, utramque injinitam, sed malam angustius, bonam grandius. He
feels Omar's difficulty but he would have repudiated Omar's explanation as
blasphemy :

O thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake :

For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd Man's forgiveness give and take.

4 Conf. vi. 5, 7 ittic temeraria pollicitatione scientiae credulitatem irrideri.
Cf. De Utilitate credendi i. 2 quis non liis pollicitutionibus illiceretur, praesertim
adolescentis animus cupidus veri.

St Augustine s Confessions -203

which Augustine greatly felt 1 . It saved him from bowing to the
authority of the Church and from believing what he could not
understand 2 , by appealing to his reason, his love of truth and his
common sense. At the same time it professed and could exhibit a
certain ascetic holiness if asceticism is holiness.

Augustine, as we have seen, had been quickened to the search
for truth by the Hortensius. He had found the Old Testament
morally unsatisfactory besides being deficient in style and charm.
The Church was committed to it, he thought, teaching that God
had hands and feet, and holding up the patriarchs as virtuous men.
Anxious to be free and to be right intellectually, he was also
beginning to be conscious of his own moral failures, which he would
not attribute to God but for which he did not wish to blame
himself. But here was a door of escape. Manichaeanism recognized
the facts he had himself been feeling, and gave an explanation so
far acceptable to his reason and, he says, to his vanity. And it did
more. He was already revolting from the self-indulgent and sensual
life he had been leading and recognized the contrast between his
own conduct and character and the chastity and holiness of the
Manichaean ascetics. He also found among them the "name of
Christ 3 ," for Mani accepted Christianity, and after purging it of its
errors, exhibited the true faith of the Gospel, or at least he said so.
Here then were Christ's name, holiness and philosophy. So he
joined the Manichaeans and though he was never more than a
" hearer " he was an ardent adherent and a proselytiser". He was
required not to worship idols, not to use magic and not to kill
animals, b\it he was not required to break with his mistress.

It is interesting to find that Monnica, who had been distressed
before about his irregular life, now debated with herself whether she

1 Conf. iii. 7, 12. The Manichaeans asked him utrum forma corporea Deus
finiretur et haberet capillos et ungues; et utrum justi existimandi essent qui

haberent uxores multas simul et occiderent homines et sacrificarent de animalibus.
Quibus reruin ignarus perturbabar. iii. 10, 18 irridebam illos sanctos servos et
prophetas tuos.

2 Julian (ap. Greg. Naz. Or. iii. p. 97 B) sneers at the Christians on this
score ; V/J.MV i] d\oyia /ecu ^ aypoiKia, KO.I ovdev virtp rb iriffrevcrov rijs vfj-frtpas fffrl
cro<t>ias.

3 Conf. iii. 6, 10. He speaks of the Manichaean use of Christ's name :
viscum confectum commixtione sijllabarum nominis tui et Domini Jesu Christi
et paracleti consolatoris nostri Spiritus Sancti : the syllables merely, not the
real thing.

4 Conf. iii. 12, 21 quod...nonnullis quuestiunculis jam multos imperitos exagi-
tassem. iv. 15, 26 dicebam parvulis fidelibus tuis...garruhis et ineptus ; cur ergo
errat anima quam fecit Deus. Later on (Conf. v. 10, 19) he speaks of his
pristina animositas in maintaining Manichaeanism.

204 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

ought to allow her heretic son to continue in the house with her.
She was reassured by a dream in which an angel told her she
should yet see her son "standing where she did"; nor was she
disturbed by Augustine's endeavour to shew that it meant she too
would be a Manichaean 1 . She tried to induce a bishop to reason
with him, but the bishop, who had been brought up as a Manichaean
and knew all about the system and who seems also to have known
Augustine, refused to engage him. "Let him alone," he said, "he
will find out by reading 2 ." When Monnica wept and was impor-
tunate, he bade her " believe it impossible that the child of those
tears should be lost."

Augustine was at the time professor of rhetoric in Thagaste, but
a friend's death upset him so much that he left his native place
and went to Carthage in or about 376. This friend had followed
Augustine into Manichaeanism, but had been baptized while ill and
unconscious. When, on his rallying, Augustine had laughed about
this baptism, expecting him to be as ready to laugh himself, he
suddenly fired up and bade him cease such talk. It had a great
effect on Augustine, which was probably heightened by the friend's
death of a recurrence of the fever. " My heart," he writes, " was
darkened by this sorrow; and everything I saw was death... I became
a great question to myself and I asked my soul why it was sad and
why it troubled me so much ; and it knew nothing to answer me...
Weeping only was pleasant to me, and had succeeded my friend in
my affection 3 ." When he bade himself hope in God, his God was "a
vain phantasm, his own idle imagining." For he tells us several
times that while he was a Manichaean he thought of God as "an
infinite, luminous body" (iv. 16, 31), "surrounding and pervading
creation, infinite in every direction," as a vast sea might hold a vast
sponge (vii. 5, 7), "a bright mass of material substance 4 ." Life was
painful to him, and death was terrible 5 , so he left his native place
where everything suggested his friend, and went to Carthage.

He was very busy reading and thinking. At twenty years of
age, he tells us, he read Aristotle's Categories and understood the
book without a teacher. The exercise was no doubt useful, but

1 Con/. Hi. 11, 1920.

2 Gonf. iii. 12, 21 ipse legendo reperiet.

3 Conf. iv. 4, 8 9. "Grief fills the room up of my absent child."

4 Conf. v. 10, 19 cum de Deo meo coyitare vellem, cogitare nisi moles corporum
non noveram (neque enim videbatur mihi esse quidquam quod tale non esset)...
20 massa litcidissimae molis tuae.

5 Conf. iv. 6, 11 taedium vivendi et moriendi metiis.

St Augustine's Confessions 205

after all his chief energies were not directed to Aristotle. " His
remarks on this work," says Dr Watson, "shew that he was not
able, in his pre-occupation with new problems, to appreciate the
aim of Aristotle in this analysis of the main elements by which
being is characterized. The use he made of it was to apply to his
Manichaean conception of God, as an infinitely extended substance,
the categories which for Aristotle were simply the most general
modes of determining things. In this external application to a
foreign matter of predicates accepted on authority we have the
beginning of a false method, which afterwards played so large a
part in Scholasticism." It is well to notice what weight Authority
carried universally in this age. The reader may for example be
referred to Julian and Macrobius as instances of men who lived by
Authority and dogmata.

Augustine was also exercised in another line of inquiry which
would seem less likely to have been profitable but perhaps really
aided him more. Manichaeanism was fatalistic and it boasted an
astronomy of its own. It set the primal man in the sun, the mother
of life in the moon, and the primal elements of life in the twelve
stars. While, like a good Manichaean, Augustine would have
nothing to do with magic, the case was different with astrology
and he became very much interested in it, in its " mathematicians "
and "books of generations." His friends, especially an eminent
physician, Vindicianus, and the young Nebridius, argued against
all this divination, urging that it rested on deceit and its occasional
successes were the result of accident (iv. 3, 4 6). He was at last
cured of this passing interest by an experiment. A rich and
eminent man, Firminus, had been born at the same moment as
a slave of his father's, and their horoscopes were carefully taken,
and though these entirely coincided, the freeman and the slave had
had a very different experience of life (vii. 6, 8).

But the matter did not rest here, for Augustine had been
making considerable researches for himself into Astronomy 1 and
found that "secular science" gave an accurate account of solstices,
equinoxes and eclipses and so forth. He laments that the astrono-
mers had too often not found the Lord of the universe, but he was
none the less impressed with the fact that they had discovered much
and could predict to an hour an eclipse many years beforehand, while
on comparison the voluminous writings of Mani proved full of fables

1 Con/, v. 3, 36.

206 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

and gave no account of the science which he could understand. He
was uneasy about this, but he waited till he could be clear 1 , and he
had long to wait, for it was not for nine years that he met the great
Manichaean preacher Faustus 2 . Faustus at last came and Augustine
found him charming, but alas! "it was exactly what they always
say, that he prattled, only more agreeably." He had learnt by now,
he says, and had learnt it, though unconsciously, from God, that a
thing is not necessarily true because eloquently said, nor false
because the sounds the lips utter are harsh, nor on the other hand
is rongh speech always truth nor eloquence always falsehood. He
came to closer quarters with the preacher, and found that his
training had been quite ordinary and his reading slight, and that
he could not solve Augustine's difficulties. However Faustus was
honest "he knew he did not know these things and was not
ashamed to own it ; he was not one of those many chatter-boxes
I had suffered under, who tried to teach me and said nothing. He
had some sense (ecu- kabebat)...so I liked him better" (v. 7, 12). So
Faustus "without wishing it or knowing it" began to release him
from the snares of Manichaeanism, for he now despaired of ever
disentangling Mani's doctrines.

All the argument was not on the Manichaean side. A certain
Helpidius declaimed against them in Carthage with some effect on
Augustine, for he brought them matter from the Scriptures which
was hard to meet and "their answer struck me as weak." All they
could say and even that only secretly was that the New Testa-
ment had been falsified in the interests of the Jewish law (v. 11, 21).
Nebridius too used to propound a difficulty. Supposing, he said,
that when the darkness attacked the light, the God of light had
refused to fight, could the darkness have injured the light or not ?
If it could, then the God of light was subject to violation and
corruption an intolerable position, for Augustine, as we saw,
became a Manichaean to maintain the integrity of God. If on
the other hand the darkness . could not hurt the light, the Mani-
chaean system was absurd, for why should there have been a war at
all ? or the defeat of the Primal Man ? or the consequent intermixture
of some of God's substance with natures not made by Him ? or the
need of any redemption at all 3 ?

1 Conf. v. 5, 9: note his reservation of judgment nonditm liquido com-
pereram whether Mani's astronomy could be explained.

2 Harnack remarks that the story of Faustus is the one touch of humour
in the Confessions.

3 Conf. vii. 2, 3. Jam diu ab usque Carthagine gives us a useful date.

St Augustine's Confessions 207

But Augustine was testing Manichaeanism in another way, for
he was finding out by experience that it had little aid to offer
toward living aright. For with Augustine the moral side of things
was as important as the intellectual. The problem of the origin of
evil was always with him ; he must explain why it was he did what
was evil. In other words he was conscious of sin, and could not
escape the thought of his own guilt. He had upon him the fear of
death and future judgment, a fear which haunted him through all
his changes of opinion (vi. 16, 26). His doctrine that sin is its own
punishment, like others of his doctrines, rested on experience. He
had been drawn towards the Manichaeans by their chastity, but
Manichaeanism failed to make him pure.

Thus Manichaeanism had proved to have little comfort for him
in the hour of bereavement ; it had lost credit with the exposure of
the folly of astrology ; its astronomy had been demonstrated to be
nonsense ; its whole foundation was imperilled by the dilemma of
NebriHius ; and it had failed to give him the moral strength he had
hoped from it to rise above the life of sense.

All this was not reached quickly. He was for years a Mani-
chaean, and meanwhile he taught at Carthage. He took part in a
poetic contest in the theatre (iv. 2, 2) and was crowned as victor by
the proconsul (iv. 3, 5). He read assiduously, and wrote his first
book, De Pulcro et Apto, a book he was highly pleased with at the
time, but after twenty years he was content to have lost sight of it 1 .
But he did not care for Carthage now. He was older and a professor.
Even as a student he had not liked the eversiones, and now he hated
the reckless violence with which students not his own would invade
his classes. Discipline there was none. Even in Rome students
from Africa had a bad name. At home they committed outrages
with an insensibility that astounded Augustine, and rendered them-
selves liable to correction by the law. But " custom was their
patron," and allowed them to fancy they escaped unpunished because
their only punishment was the " blindness of their action," whereby
" they suffer far more than they inflict 2 ." To escape this atmosphere
of disorder Augustine resolved to go to Rome, and to Rome he
went, though it cost him a lie to get away from his mother (383).
She came to him later on at Milan. At Rome he was at once

1 Conf. iv. 14, 23 libenter animo versabam...et nullo collaiidatore mirabar;
and 13, 20.

2 Conf. v. 8, 14 cum ipsa faciendi caecitate puniantur in consonance with
his general view : Jussisti enim, et sic est, ut poena sua sibi sit omnis inordinatus
animus, i. 12, 19.

208 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

overtaken by illness and was befriended by another Manichaean
auditor. But university life in Rome had its own drawbacks. The
students cheated him of his fees', and he was glad to obtain an
official post as teacher of rhetoric at Milan, on the recommendation
of Symmachus (385).

Here we may pause. He was still friendly with the Mani-
chaeans, but really in revolt against their religion on the grounds
which we have seen. For the moment he despaired of reaching
truth and leant to the scepticism of the Academics. He had
revolted from the Church and now Manichaeanism failed him.
Each stage had left its mark on him. Even his wild life at
Carthage had not been without its use, for he had learnt painfully
and in himself how real a thing is evil. He had been wakened by
Cicero to be serious. The Scriptures had repelled him, and though
he deplored his long years in Manichaeanism, even there he was on
a higher plane than before. He had found real weaknesses in what
he believed to be the Christian position, and he had to escape or
transcend them. When Monnica wept over him, he was not in so
perilous a case as she supposed. His mind saw more while it saw
less than hers, and when he came back to the Christian faith he
retained the real gains of his years of separation. He had become
a Manichaean because he believed in the real goodness and greatness
of God, in the value of truth for itself and in purity of life. The
pursuit of these ideals had brought him through Manichaeanism, a
stronger man for his years of experiment and perseverance, and
though now for the moment he despaired of ever achieving truth
and the knowledge of God, and indeed believed them to be un-
attainable, he yet did not doubt their value. Happiness was to con-
sist in these ; that they could not be reached did not alter the fact.
Even this mood contributed to his growth, for, since his mind was
essentially positive, he could not rest here, and the double convic-
tion (for his scepticism was dogmatic) that God really exists and
that man cannot of himself know Him, led him to attach the more
importance to the Christian doctrine of the self-revelation of God.
There were however intervening stages, which we must consider.

When Augustine reached Milan, he was very kindly received by
Ambrose. It may be a fair inference from the text that Symmachus
had written to Ambrose, as we know he occasionally did, or it may
be that Ambrose naturally gave a kindly welcome to a new professor

1 Con/, v. 12, 22.

St Augustine's Confessions 209

of marked ability. Augustine in return liked him, and went to hear
him preach, chiefly out of curiosity to see if his eloquence were equal
to his reputation. The subject-matter he disregarded, but he wao
delighted by the style, which, while it had not so much liveliness or
charm as Faustus', shewed more education 1 . But he could not help
incidentally noticing what Ambrose said, and in spite of himself
remarked how truly as well as how eloquently he spoke, and then
how well he managed to maintain positions Augustine had thought
indefensible, solving one difficulty after another out of the Old
Testament. Augustine realized that there was more to be said for
the Church than he had supposed, and now the balance stood even
between Christianity and Manichaeanism, and he began to look for
something by which to prove the latter false. It was against the
system of Mani that its doctrines about nature were wrong. It
stood in the way of the Church that Augustine had not yet con-
ceived of the spiritual nature of God, nor satisfied himself on the
origin of evil. It was against the Academics that they knew nothing
of the name of Christ. So till he found some certain goal Augustine
resolved to become and remain a cateohumen in the Church of his
parents 2 .

The difficulties of the Old Testament vanished under Ambrose's
application of the allegoric method. "The letter killeth, but
the spirit maketh alive" was a favourite text with the bishop.
The method was not his own, but had long been used by the Church
in the interpretation of the Bible, just as the Greeks used it with
Homer. Porphyry's explanation of the Cave of the Nymphs is
perhaps a fair example. It may be remarked that Augustine thus
owed his next step to an unsound method, and no doubt this is
true. The historical method is modern and is sounder, but the
allegoric method for all its immediate unsoundness really enabled
an earlier generation to reach, as conveniently for its particular
mental habits, the same fundamentally sound conclusion that the
real value of the Old Testament is after all its spiritual content and
that all else is in the long run immaterial. Augustine's estimate of
Scripture was completely changed. He now found in it wonderful
mysteries which he had never suspected, and he began to accept its
authority. As man is unable to find truth by pure reason and
needs such authority (this was the outcome of his scepticism), he
reflected that God would never have given so excellent a guide had

1 Conf. v. 13, 23. 2 Con f, Vt 14, 2425.

G. 14

210 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

He not meant men to seek Him and to believe in Him through
its agency. If certain things had to be taken on trust, he reflected
that in ordinary life the things so taken are innumerable, and that
if none of these were so accepted, we should do nothing whatever in
life (vi. 5, 8).

Meantime Augustine still had worldly ambitions office, gain,
marriage. He had to deliver a panegyric to Valentinian II. most
of which he says was false, though of course the falsity would be
applauded by the listeners who knew as well as he did that it was
false. That day he saw on a Milan street a beggar, drunk, jocular
and happy, and he compared himself with him. Both sought one
goal temporal happiness. A few small coins secured it for the
beggar not the true joy, however, but Augustine felt he himself
reached neither the one nor the other with all his toils and ambi-
tions. The beggar was free from care ; he was not, and yet he
would not change with him 1 . He was thoroughly dissatisfied with
himself and in the dark. "How long will this go on?" was a
question he and his friends often asked (vi. 10, 17). Life was
wretched, death uncertain. " If it steal suddenly upon us, how
shall we go hence ? and where must we learn what we have neglected
here? Or will it not rather be that we must pay the penalty for
our negligence?" Would death end all? This was against the
authority of the Christian faith. " Never would so much be done
for us by God if the life of the soul were ended with the body."
Then why not seek God and the truly happy life ? But the world
and its honours and pleasures were sweet He disliked the idea of
the celibate life, which holiness then implied ; he felt it would be
beyond his strength and he knew of no other strength (vi. 11,
18 20). His mother urged him to marry and he arranged to do
so. He said farewell to the mother of Adeodatus, but only to
replace her with another. The fear of future judgment was heavy
upon him. " I grew more wretched, and Thou drewest nearer. Thy
right hand was near me ready to lift me from the mire and wash
me, and I knew it not."

He still was troubled by his materialistic conception of God,
"and my heart vehemently cried out against all these phantasms of
mine." He felt forced to believe he was really a free agent, that
when he wished or did not wish a thing, it was himself and not
another who had the feeling and that there lay the reason of his sin.

1 Con/, vi. 6, 9.

St Augustine 's Confessions 211

But who had made him so ? How should he be responsible ? Who
set this root of bitterness in him ? If the devil, whence was the
devil ? If the devil were an angel once good, whence had the devil
the evil will that changed him ? Nebridius' dilemma made it hard
to suppose evil came from matter, for that seemed to limit God's
omnipotence (Conf. vii. 3, 4 5). The question tortured him. "Thou
with a goad in my heart wast pricking me on to be impatient till
Thou shouldst be a certainty to me by inward vision."

Help came to him from Neo-Platonism '. Some one gave him
Victorinus' Latin translation of some Platonic works, either Plato
or Plotinus. Here Augustine found a way of escape from both his
intellectual difficulties. In Absolute Being he found a better account
of God than in the infinitely diffused luminous body he had always
hitherto imagined. But of Absolute Being the human mind cannot
properly conceive, and Neo-Platonism bridged the gulf by a series
of emanations. First came Intelligence, the *ooy/,os vo^ro? or intelli-
gible world, the perfect image of the Absolute. From this came the
World-Soul, the image of Intelligence, and like it immaterial,
deriving its illumination from Intelligence which interpenetrates it,
while it is in contact with the phenomenal, all souls being part of it.
From the World-Soul is the corporeal or phenomenal world, further
still from Absolute Being, yet not evil, but rather absolutely good so
far as it actually is, though of course defective in being in proportion
as it is removed from Absolute Being' 2 . Where then is the material-
istic God ? He at least has disappeared as a contradiction and an
absurdity, and with him has gone a burden from Augustine's mind 3 .
Evil too is now less perplexing. He sees now that evil is not really
anything, it is not-being, failure to be 4 . It is not therefore the
creation of God. It lies in will and inclination, since everything is
good so far as it is capable of being, so far as it is 5 . Evil is turning
away from God and the intelligible world which comes next Him.

1 See Conf. vii. c. 9 to the end of the book generally. Harnack refers to these
chapters as the best account of Neo-Platonism in the Fathers.

2 Conf. vii. 11, 17 et inspexi cetera infra te, et vidi nee omnino esse nee
omnino non esse; esse quidem quoniam abs te sunt; non esse autem quoniam id
quod es non sunt. Id enim rere est quod incommutabiliter manet.

a Conf. vii. 10 on God as supra mentem meam lux incommutabilis, iii. 7, 10
(of his Manichaean days) et non noveram Denm esse spiritum.

4 Conf. vii. 12, 18 ergo quaecumque sunt, bona sunt; malumque Mud quod
quaerebam unde esset, non est substantia, quia si substantia esset, bonum esset.

5 Conf. vii. 16, 22 et quaesivi quid esset iniquitas, et non inveni substantiam;
sed a sumina substantia te Deo detortae in inftma voluntatis perversitatem. Note
here that substantia is not the equivalent of the English substance but the usual
Latin rendering of the Greek oi)<rt'a, essence.

142

212 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Hence, as he says, the soul that disregards the divine order of the
universe, the disordered soul, is its own punishment by its loss of
real being in the very turning away from God. This appealed to his
experience, for he had himself found evil-doing prove its own
punishment 1 . God's nature and the question of evil thus grew
clear to him in Neo-Platonism.

But there was more to be done. Augustine had found the
inadequacy of human effort to achieve holiness, to turn to God and
rise into His nature, and he realized that nothing else will lead to
happiness. The questions now came, how was man to come into
contact with God, and how did God reveal Himself to man? Plotinus
answered the second question by pointing to the emanations, the
first by a virtual abandonment of philosophy and recourse to ecstasy.
Man, by entering into his own mind and abstracting himself from
all else, can obtain under happy circumstances an immediate in-
tuition of the Absolute Being, can leap by a bound into mystical
unity with it. Porphyry tells us in his life of Plotinus how often
his master achieved this happy vision. This latter doctrine appealed
very strongly to Augustine as the language of his Confessions shews 2 .

Augustine now, as he says, saw the " fatherland of peace " from
the summit of a forest-clad mountain afar, but it was another thing
to find the road there (vii. 21, 27). " I saw a way of gathering
strength adequate to enjoy Thee, but I did not find it till
I embraced the mediator between God and men, the man Christ
Jesus" (vii. 18, 24). So far he only thought of Christ as a man
of excellent and incomparable wisdom, one miraculously born of
a virgin, to shew thereby that the temporal should be despised,
and one who by his divine interest in us seemed to have merited
the authority of a teacher (vii. 19, 25). The Divine Word he had
found in the Neo- Platonic Intelligence, which was in the beginning
with God, by which all things were made, which darkness could not
comprehend, but the Incarnation and all it involved he had not
found (vii. 9, 13). So, though the divine beauty attracted him
upward, his own weight, the carnal habit, pulled him back (vii. 17,
23). He began to read St Paul and found in him, as was not
unlikely, a great deal of coincidence with Neo-Platonism, and some-
thing of his own experience. " miserable man that I am ! who
shall free me from the body of this death?" was an utterance of

1 Con/, i. 12, 19.

2 E.g. Con/, vii. 10, 16 admonitus redire ad memet ipsitm intravi in intima
mea, ix. 10, 23 renimus in mentes nostras et transcendimtis cas. A fuller account
of this is given in vii. 17, 23. Cf. Plotinus, Enn. iv. 8, 1.

St Augustine's Confessions 213

the heart, for which the Apostle had an answer, but hardly the
Neo-Platonist (vii. 21, 27).

He was at last certain of God's eternal and incorruptible essence,
and longed now to be " not more certain of Thee but more stable in
Thee" (viii. 1, 1). Yet though he had found the good pearl and
should have sold all he had and bought it, he hesitated (viii. 1, 2).
In fact, he found he did not want to break with the life he saw to
be lower. The new will to live in God and enjoy Him was not
strong enough to overcome the old and perverse will. From the
perverse will had risen lust ; from the service of lust came habit ;
from the failure to resist habit, it had become necessity. Not only
so, but he found he liked the necessity more than he had supposed.
He wished to be saved from himself, but his prayer, if put honestly,
would have been, " Give me chastity and continence, but not now."
He was afraid his prayer should be quickly heard and he should be
healed from his disease, which he wished to be sated rather than
extinguished. He knew himself at last. His difficulty had not
been so entirely intellectual as he had supposed ; it was really a
moral failure.

It was in the doctrine of the Incarnation that he at last found
strength to rise above this conflict of wills, to break " the violence
of habit." The Neo-Platonic God did not after all reveal himself;
he was remote and the series of emanations did not bring him
nearer. The Word of the Neo-Platonists was not the Christian
Word, but one emanation in a series of others, and it did not
declare God's inner being. If man wished to reach God, he had to
do it for himself. The supreme God did not apparently care for
the individual man, he did not really love man, he did not forgive
sins nor give the power to rise above sin. But the Church, incul-
cating a doctrine utterly repellent to heathen philosophy, preached
the Incarnation and the Love of God. For the colourless and
indefinable Absolute Being it set forth a God, who Himself cared
for the individual (iii. 11, 9), loved him and gave His Son for him
to the death of the cross (vii. 9, 14). The Church taught that in
that Son God forgave sin and dissolved man's hostility to Himself
(v. 9, 16), and that to those who would receive that Son God gave
the power to become the sons of God, through belief in His name
(vii. 9, 13)'.

1 He finally crystallizes the thought of the Christian's dependence on God
in the expression Da quodjubes et jube quod viii (x. 29, 40). It was this phrase
which attracted the attention and criticism of Pelagius, thus leading to the

214 Life ami Letters in the Fourth Century

To believe all this was a great tax on the philosophic mind, but
here came in the authority of the Church with that of the Scriptures.
It offered a doctrine without explanation, without reconciling it
with current philosophy, and demanded its acceptance. Human
pride might rebel, but in the long run the heart must make the
surrender, when after long "tossing in experiments" (nos vohimur
in experimentis) it found nowhere else the power to overcome sin.
The Church was thus the voucher for the Gospel as a result of its
long years of experience. For so long as it had been in the world,
it had uniformly been solving the problem of holy living. It
accounted for this by the doctrine of the Incarnation, which was
to the philosophic thought of heathendom blasphemous and un-
intelligible, inconsistent in a word with the whole trend of ancient
philosophy and with all its conceptions of God. There was appar-
ently no common basis for discussion, until experience was consulted.
Augustine accepted the experience of the Church as confirmed by
his own. He believed without understanding, and of course at once
began anew to reconstruct his philosophy to accommodate his new
experience. No wonder it lays so much stress on sin and grace.

At the last it was the story of Antony that completed Augus-
tine's conversion. A tale of an unlettered Copt, triumphing by
divine grace over evil in forms which Augustine had found irresist-
ible, because attractive, this little book had stirred mankind, and
the scholar saw how " the unlearned rise and seize heaven, while we
with our learning without sense wallow in flesh and blood." Torn
this way and that, ashamed and aspiring, he heard from behind him
the mutterings of the flesh, and before him he saw the Church,
" serene and gay with an honest happiness," surrounded by pure
men and pure women of every age. He seemed to hear the Church
saying to him : " And can you not do what these do and these ?
Or do they do it of themselves and not in the Lord their God ?
The Lord their God gave them to me. Why do you stand in your-
self and yet do not stand ? Cast yourself on Him ; fear not, He
will not withdraw Himself and let you fall. Cast yourself on Him
without a care; He will receive you and heal you" (viii. 11, 27).
As in great perturbation he lay under a tree in the garden, he heard
a child crooning " Tolle, lege; tolle, lege." We get an indication of
the man's temperament in the process of thought through which

great controversy between Augustine and Pelagius. The strength of Augustine's
position in the controversy was that he had experience behind him and spoke
from a knowledge of man's nature and of sin, which Pelagius entirely lacked,
while on the other hand he had proved the inadequacy of Pelagius' theory.
The doctrine of Grace follows naturally on the story unfolded in the Confessions.

St Augustine's Confessions 215

he at once went. The words were unusual ; he had never noticed
a child's game in which the refrain occurred, and the childish jingle
impressed him the more. Not all men would have caught the words
at such a time or have had Augustine's store of observation of
childhood '. He remembered then how Antony had found an oracle
in a chance verse of Scripture, and he thereupon opened the epistles
of Paul at a venture and lit on the words " Not in riotings and
drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and
envying ; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no pro-
vision for the flesh in concupiscence" (fiomans xiii. 13, 14). He
accepted this as a divine message to himself, and took the course
the Church had seemed to urge and surrendered himself to God
(viii. 12, 2830).

He very soon gave up his work at Milan, and withdrew for a
while to a country house at Cassisiacum with a group of friends,
including his mother and his son 2 . Apart from studies of Virgil
and other literary subjects, their time was chiefly occupied by
discussions, which were taken down by a shorthand reporter, and
are still extant. In these his language is not so avowedly Christian
as in the Confessions, for he is still trying to couch the new thought
in the old terms, but the new thought is there and if not yet fully
developed it is still Christian. From Cassisiacum he returned to
Milan and was there baptized by Ambrose at Easter (387). His
mother had seen him "standing where she did," and when shortly
afterwards she died at Ostia she died content.

Augustine's return to Africa and the great work he did there as
bishop of Hippo lie beyond our present concern. I have tried here
to follow the course of Augustine's thought up to his conversion, to
the exclusion of nearly everything else. This is perhaps an injustice
to the Confessions, which, as I said above, give a vivid picture of the
external as well as the spiritual conditions of his life and are
enriched by reflexions gathered from ten years of Christian experi-
ence. The sum of this experience is given in the first chapter, and
is as it were the keynote of the book ; " Thou hast made us for
Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rest in Thee."

1 Similarly I feel there is something significant in the confession he makes
that a lizard (stellio) catching flies, or a spider throwing its net round them,
will absorb him (x. 35, 57). In quam multis minutissimis et coitteinptibilibus
rebus curiositas quotidie nostra tentatur ? Everything however, as I said,
points in one direction. Num quia parva sunt animalia idea non res eadem
geritur? Pergo inde ad laudandum te creatorem mirificum atque ordinatorem
rerum omnium.

2 The best account of the conversations at Cassisiacum is given by Boissier,
op. cit.

CHAPTER X

CLAUDIAN

We've drunk to our English brother
(And we hope he'll understand).

KIPLING

IT seems that both Virgil and Horace were invited to write a
great epic on the deeds of Augustus, and both declined the task.
Virgil, as we read in the third Georgic, thought of it, but he gave
up the theme as unsuited to poetic treatment. Horace instead
wrote the Emperor an epistle on literary criticism, though he would
have preferred, he alleges, to have told of lands afar, of rivers, of
tower-crowned peaks and barbarian realms, of wars waged the world
over, >nd of peace with honour thence resulting. Probably he
would not, and his true reason was as in Virgil's case the perception
that the historian's task and the poet's are different. The poet's
function is the interpretation of life and is ill fulfilled when he is
fettered to historical narration, and especially ill when he is forced
to play the panegyrist. And we may be sure that if Augustus
asked for history, he wished for panegyric.

But on one occasion Horace wrote as he was asked to write, and
the first six odes of his third book were the result a splendid
series of poems dedicated to the reformation of Roman society.
We find in them as it were incidentally the deification of Augustus,
but the work owes little to Imperial direction, for it is the outcome
of the poet's life and thought. The minor interest, the Imperial
purpose, sinks into its proper place and is lost in the genuine
inspiration that the poet drew from sources beyond an Emperor's
sway. Virgil in the same way though with more enthusiasm
introduces Augustus into his epic of the life of man, but the
interest of the Aeneid does not lie in the foreshado wings of the
Emperor, nor perhaps in the adventures of his forerunner and
archetype, but in the poet's treatment of human sorrow and human
quest, of all that is heroic and pathetic in the common lot of all

Claudian 217

men. Thus round the name of Augustus grew a literature, of
which, whatever he may have thought, he is really not the centre.
The patron may prompt, he may suggest and he may pay, but
the poet creates, and there is hardly any relation between their
activities.

When a Virgil and a Horace found scant inspiration in Augustus,
what could a poet find in an Emperor like Honorius ? in a soldier,
whether patriot or adventurer, like Stilicho ? Yet the poetry of
Claudian, flecked though it be by much that is unworthy, is still
poetry. There is about it much to fascinate and charm the reader,
who will take the trouble to learn the poet's mind. Stilicho is after
all not very interesting, a striking figure perhaps and a great man,
but not so unique that Roman history cannot shew a score like him.
As for Honorius, a more uninteresting character is hardly con-
ceivable, unless it be his brother Arcadius, but perhaps even he
is not such a complete nonentity 1 . To discover the source of Clau-
dian's charm and the force which, in spite of Stilicho and Honorius,
has made his work immortal, is the object of this essay.

First, however, a word or two must be given to his own story.
He suddenly appears a ripened poet in 395 and after nine years
of great fertility as suddenly disappears in 404. Dismissing the
question whether he is the Claudian of whom Evagrius speaks 2 , we
find a certain reference to him in Apollinaris Sidonius 3 .

Pelusiaco satus Canopo

qui ferruginei toros mariti

et Musa canit inferos superna

Here, beside emphasizing what I cannot but feel to be his greatest
work, the later poet confirms the Egyptian birth of Claudian, which
is clear from one or two passages in his poems, passages in which it
is hard not to find something of that affection for a distant birth-
place which no prosperity in another land can quite overcome.
Whatever be the real purpose of the Deprecatio, there is this note
in the last lines :

Audiat haec commune solum longeque carinis
nota Pharos, flentemque attollens gurgite vultum
nostra gemat Nilus numerosis funera ripis*.

1 Zosimus, v. 12, says Eutropius the eunuch owned Arcadius as if he had
been an ox, Kvpievwv Ka.9a.irfp ^oaK-q^aro^.

2 Hixt. Eccles. i. 19, p. 274.

3 ix. 271. Suidas, too, speaks of KXavdiavos ' A\tavdpfi/s ewoiroibs vturepos, a
contemporary of Arcadius and Honorius.

4 Minor Poems, 22 (39), 5659.

218 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Pharos, known afar of ships, and the Nile and Alexandria may
seem strange substitutes for Sirmio or Mantua, but for Claudian
they have the same power. Elsewhere in a little idyll on the Nile,
he writes,

Felix qui Pharias proscindit vomere terras 1 ,

a line Virgilian in sound and sentiment I have dwelt on this
Egyptian origin, for it gives added significance to his love of Rome.
Neither Catullus nor Virgil was less a Roman for loving Sirmio and
Mantua, nor was Claudian for remembering Pharos.

His name, Claudius Claudianus, is hardly an index of his race.
It need not imply Latin stock, for Ammianus was Greek and his
name was Latin 2 . On the other hand Gaul was full of Celts with
Greek names, Aetherius, Pelagius, Potamius, Evagrius, Euanthius.
His extraordinary mastery of the Latin hexameter, which would
have been remarkable at any date and seems a miracle in the days
of Ausonius and Paulinus, has led some to suppose him the son of
Latin speaking parents, and his father, it is suggested, may have
been a government official in Egypt. But I doubt if this theory be
necessary. St Augustine 3 tells us of a man of his own day, who
though a Syrian and bred to Greek rhetoric had become eventually
a famous teacher of Latin eloquence, so brilliant that to him, though
a stranger, Augustine dedicated his first work. Hierius' writings, if
he left any, have not reached us, but the most splendid Latin
history after Tacitus was the work of the Greek soldier Ammiamis.

Whatever his origin, Claudian's first attempts in poetry were in
Greek, and it is debated whether the two extant fragments of a
Greek War of the Giants be his. He treated the theme in an
independent Latin poem and has more than one allusion to it
beside. The Greek piece is not unworthy of these, but it opens
questions into which I cannot here go. The Greek epigrams
attributed to him are slight and one implies acquaintance with
Nonnus, every line being decorated with a borrowed plume. They,
too, may be dismissed, and we must content ourselves for the
present with his own statement that he first wrote, or perhaps
published, Latin poetry in the year of Theodosius' death and
Probinus' Consulship, 395 A.D.

1 Minor Poems, 28 (47); Nilus 1. Another reminiscence is his account of
the electric fish in 49 (46).

2 Apollonius of Tyana was very indignant to find Greeks decorating them-
selves with Latin names Lucullus and Fabiicius for example. See Philostr.
V. Apoll. iv. 5, and Apollonius' 71st letter.

3 Confessions, iv. 14.

Claudian 219

Romanos bibimus primum te consule fontes
et Latiae accessit Graia Thalia togae 1 .

He refers to his Panegyric on the brother consuls Probinus and
Olybrius, which however has none of the marks of a first attempt.
The beauty and purity of his diction and metre tell of long
acquaintance with the greatest of the Latins, and M. Boissier may
be right when he suggests that his youth, spent far from lands
where Latin as the vulgar tongue had lost something of its earlier
grace, may by throwing him back on the writers of the older days
have contributed to his mastery of the language of Virgil and
Lucan. In the same way, he says, the French of the emigres, who
returned from the solitudes of America, had the ring of the old
literary style of the previous century 2 .

He soon became one of the circle of Stilicho's dependents, an
event happy perhaps for his fortunes bat lamentable for his genius.
(Non enim uno modo sacrificatur transgressoribus angelis.) In 400
he writes of having been away from Rome on his staff for some five
years 3 . Possibly there is a rueful tone in his insistence on the
self-denial of Stilicho, which makes his visits to the capital so rare
and so short 4 . He had consolation however, for, apart from other
rewards, which he must have received though he says little of them,
a letter from Serena 5 , the wife of Stilicho, won him a bride, a lady
of North Africa, presumably rich, for the letter served him instead
of "herds and fields and a palace." Whatever were the date of
this marriage, he seems to have had throughout an interest in
African affairs, which may imply some connexion with the country.

In a society where Ausonius had passed for a poet, Claudian
became more deservedly popular. He is in many ways a lively
exponent of the views of the Roman nobility, political, social and
religious. As early as 396, in the preface to his Panegyric on the
Third Consulate of Honorius, he speaks of being in some sort
delegated by mighty Rome to address the Emperor . Three years
later, " Behold " he says to himself " the glory and majesty of the
Roman Senate and the men in whom Gaul rejoices. In every land

1 Minor Poems, 41 (42), 13.

2 La Fin du Paganisme, ii. 238.

3 Praef. Cons. Stil. iii.

4 Cons. Stil. i. 116 adsiduus castris aderat, rarissimus urbi.

5 Minor Poems, 31, 43 tua littera nob is \ et pecus et segetes et domus ampla
fuit. Iiiflexit soceros.

6 Praef. iii. Cons. Hon. 15 :

me quoque Pieriis temptatum saepius antris
audet magiia *uo mittere Roma deo.

220 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

I am heard and the ears of the world listen 1 ." In 402-3, in the
preface to his Gothic War, he announces that his earlier triumphs
have won him a statue of bronze, granted by the Emperor at the
request of the Senate, so that he is at once read and seen in the
midst of the forum 2 . The same honour was afterwards given to
Sidonius Apollinaris. It may perhaps have meant less in Rome
than it would in London, for we learn that in the fifth century, even
after Alaric's capture of the city, it could boast 3,785 bronze statues 3 .
The inscription for Claudian's statue may be found in the Corpus of
Latin Inscriptions, and it does not fail in extravagant eulogy.
Some doubt has been cast on this inscription and on the reliability
of Pomponius Laetus who first copied it, but Orelli and Mommsen
accept it, and Gesner gives the testimonies of two more scholars
who saw it. It is now said to be at Naples 4 .

No poem of Claudian's can be dated with any certainty later
than the year 404, and after that date we know nothing whatever of
him He may have retired to Africa, free, in virtue of his wife's
dowry, from the necessity of composition. Stilicho fell in 408, and
by an ingenious combination of two of the minor poems a pretty
legend has been created 5 . An epigram turning on Manlius Theo-
dorus and an unnamed " man of Pharos," who is identified with one
Hadrianuo, may be thus rendered :

Day and night will Theodore

Snore and sleep and sleep and snore;

Egypt's son, the other way,

Plunders sleepless night and day.

Romans, your supplications make

That this may sleep and that may wake 6 .

A longer poem bears the title Deprecatio ad Hadrianum 1 and it is

1 Praef. Paneg. Manlio Theod. 1 :

culmina Roman i majestatemque Senatus

et, quibus exultat Gallia, cerne viros.
omnibus audimur terris mundique per aures

ibimus.

2 Praef. B. Goth. 7 :

sed prior ejfigiem tribuit successus aenam,

oraque patricius nostril dicavit lianos ;
adnuit hie princeps titulum poscente senatu...

...legimur media conspiciinurque foro.

3 See Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (trans-
lation), i. 79.

4 I am indebted to Dr Hodgkin for this correction.

5 See Gibbon, iv. 64, but compare Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders 2 , i. 730.

6 Minor Poems, 21 (80). t Minor Poems, 22 (39).

Claudian 221

thence supposed that on the death of Stilicho Hadrianus proceeded
to avenge himself on the poet. But some manuscripts give ad
Stilichonem for ad Hadrianum, which address, though obviously
absurd, for Stilicho was not an Egyptian, leads one to suppose that
both names are mere conjectures, the insertions of copyists. A
good case may moreover be made for the view that the poem is not
strictly serious. Another Deprecatio is clearly playful. Claudian
(shall we say?) has criticized the poetry of a great man well,
Homer and Virgil are both criticized, but neither of them was a
quaestor, so Claudian will henceforth applaud everything, and every
line shall have its 'sophos!' 1

Claudian is chiefly famous as a panegyrist, though for myself
I feel that he has stronger claims to fame. Still among the Roman
panegyrists he stands foremost. We have a number of panegyrics
in prose addressed to various Emperors from Trajan to Theodosius
works graceful in language and elegant in execution, but not
literature. They have a certain value for the historian in the facts
they display or conceal, and for the student of Roman society in
the light they cast on the relations of the ruler and the ruled, but
no one, I imagine, would ever read them for pleasure. Adulation
may be less unpleasant in verse than in prose ("the truest poetry
is the most feigning"), but a poet who attaches a serious value to
poetry is reluctant to hymn Augustus or any other monarch.
Claudian had his reasons for doing it. And however it may have
seemed to his first readers, to-day the mythical element in his
poems lessens still further the risk of our assuming that everything
he says is literally felt by him. As it is, there is far too much that
to us seems utterly insincere : yet while no doubt much of it really
is so, we must allow for the difference time has made. With the
progress of centuries the divinity that hedges a king has grown less
and less, but in Claudian's day many factors tended to shroud the
Emperor in a shining mist of glory. For three hundred years the
Imperial tradition had grown stronger and stronger. Emperors
might be madmen or savages, they might be set up and overthrown
by armies or murdered by slaves, but none the less the sacred
omnipotence of the Emperor became more and more an object of
awe. Diocletian enhanced this by transforming the court and the
monarch at once. The Emperor became a Sultan, whose person
was kept from the vulgar gaze, and the court a hierarchy of splendid

1 Minor Poems, 23 (74).

222 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

officials. The conception of sovereignty had been orientalized.
The awful power and hardly less awful mystery of the Emperor may
well have dazzled the mind of the subject, and perhaps it was really
the world's interest to keep up the illusion. There had been far
too many insurrections. So Claudian may have felt more than we
suppose, though, as I have said, there is much in his work that he
could not have felt and much that he ought not to have felt.

Let us take one or two of Claudian's panegyrics for closer study,
and first one not addressed to an Emperor. One of the greatest of
Roman nobles, one of the wealthiest and most successful of them,
was Petronius Probus. He is typical of many of the officials
of his times, and Ammianus 1 gives an amusing account of him.
" He was a man known to the Roman world at once for his high
birth, his influence and his enormous wealth, and throughout nearly
the whole extent of that world he owned estates, whether justly or
not is no matter for my poor judgment 2 ... And just as the finny
tribe driven from their native element cannot long breathe upon
earth, so he would waste away if he held no prefecture." In 373 he
proved himself quite incapable of meeting a serious emergency at
Sirmium and incurred the rage of Valentinian, but he recovered 3 ;
and outlasting Valentinian and his family, he was in 395 a man of
such importance as to make Theodosius wish to attach him to his
interests. Never before had the two consulships been held simul-
taneously by brothers, not members of the reigning family, but in
395 Probinus and Olybrius, the sons of Probus, were consuls
together. It was a great event and had to be celebrated 4 .

Claudian was able to oifer something congenial to the occasion,
and though he is hardly as explicit as Pindar in such matters, we
may find his inspiration in his praise of Probus : " Not his to hide
his wealth away in caves of night nor doom his riches to darkness ;
but more bounteous than the rain, it was his wont to enrich count-
less throngs of men Nay, one could ever see his gifts streaming as
from a cloud The nations swarmed to his house in throngs ; poor
they entered, rich they came away. That lavish hand outdid the

1 xxvii. 11. Probiis was a Christian and was buried in St Peter's, where his
tomb stood till the fifteenth century when Pope Nicholas V. removed it. Gibbon,
iv. p. 73, n. 20; Seeck, Symm. p. civ.

2 Juste an secus non judicioli est nostri a favourite phrase of his. (xxviii.
4, 14.)

3 See Amm. Marc. xxix. 6, 9, and xxx. 5, 4 10.

4 Ausonius (Ep. 12 = 16) had volunteered to play Choerilus to Probus' Alex-
ander, and his verses may be said to have attained the standard he proposed.
In all probability, however, he was dead by this time.

Claudian 223

streams of Spain in its flood of golden gifts." The same thing is
said about him by Ammianus, but there is a difference. Claudian
does not mention the source of this river of gold, but we may gather
from Ammianus that such streams rose in the provinces and con-
tributed to the Empire's decay. But we must not mar a splendid
scene with such reflexions, for does not Theodosius say : " Under
his rule we saw the western land rise with all her weary tribes to
new life 1 "?

So much for Probus. Proba might be Modesty itself come from
heaven, or Juno turning to Argos to receive gifts of incense ;
Greek and Latin records alike fail to shew her peer in a word, she
is a worthy wife for Probus. The sexes strove to produce their
best and behold ! Probus and Proba, the perfection of each 2 , and
their sons alone outdo them. As the Roman matron of old made
garments of wool, Proba prepares the trabea, the consular robe, for
each of her consul-sons, " and shining vestments of the thread the
Seres shave from the slender twigs, gathering the leafy fleeces of the
wool-clad forest" in other words, of silk 3 . The frequent mention
by Claudian of silk and of exquisite and elaborate embroidery is one
indication of the change that has come over Roman taste in art and
poetry.

This, then, is the subject of the poem to oblige a rich and
noble place-hunter Theodosius makes his two sons consuls, not an
event of any permanent import, for the consulship was an office
involving much glory and no duties whatever, it was a mere
courtesy title. What does Claudian make of it? When Theo-
dosius had overcome Arbogast and Eugenius, Rome, personified as
a goddess 4 , seizes the moment to shew her gratitude to Probus.
Impetus and Panic yoke her winged chariot of war and she leaps on
it habited like Minerva. " For she brooks not to bind her flowing
hair with bands, nor wear on her neck the woman's twisted chain.

1 163. 2 177204.

3 Compare Amm. Marc, xxiii. 6, 67. "Working the product of the trees with
constant application of water, as it were fleeces of a sort, from the down and
the moisture they comb out a substance of the most delicate fineness, and
spinning this they make silk, for the use hitherto of nobles but nowadays of
the meanest without any distinction." Prudentius, Ham. 288, says much the
same. Their common sources may be Virgil, Georgics, ii. 121, and Pliny, N. H.
6, 17.

4 Claudian is fond of personifying Kome; cf. b. Gild. 16; vi. Cons. Hon.
356, etc. The same is done by his contemporary Prudentius, adv. Symm.
ii. 648, where Symmachus led the way. The Christian poet's Kome is as
complimentary to the Emperors, but has certain things to say of more im-
portance.

224 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Her right side is bare, her snowy arms uncovered, and one bold
breast appears ; a gem holds fast her flowing garb, the knot that
bears her sword shews gleaming purple on her white bosom. Valour
and beauty meet, and fair modesty is armed with stern terror, and
over her threatening helmet falls the tawny shade of blood- red
plumes. Her shield with its dread light challenges the sun, that
shield whereon Mulciber had shewn all his various art might do
here is set the paternal love of Mars, and Romulus and his brother ;
here the kindly river and the strange nurse ; the Tiber is wrought
in amber and the boys in gold ; the wolf is of brass and the gleaming
Mars is adamant."

I have given this picture at length, for it is significant in many
ways. To his love of Rome I shall return, but for the moment I
speak of his method. There is a notable difference between Virgil
and Claudian in their view of poetry. Virgil's method is that of
suggestion ; it is that of appeal to the heart, and it requires some-
thing from the reader, as music does from the listener. Claudian
on the other hand leans more to painting than to music, appealing
rather to the eye. Thus he lingers fondly over his work, seeking to
bring before the eye the presentment of his conception by massing
colour upon colour, making his picture splendid as one of Honorius'
toilets. The reader sees in Claudian's case and feels in Virgil's.
Throughout, it would appear that the Roman's weakness had been
to seek beauty through decoration, and Claudian is decorative as
Virgil is not. Yet it must be understood that his hand is that of a
master. His standard is lower than Virgil's, and his work must be
judged from a different point of view. It is not equal to Virgil's in
execution, even allowing for difference of conception, but of its kind
it is successful that is, of course, when it is not injured (as this
poem is) by the things for whose insertion his patrons paid him

Rome then, in the poem, seeks Theodosius and finds him by
the river Frigid us, resting after his victory. He addresses her as
" kindly goddess, Mother of Laws, whose sway is wide as the sky,
who art the Thunderer's bride '," and asks why she has come. She
tells him of the two youths she has bred, peers of Decii and Metelli,

1 Pan. Prob. 01. 126 :

o numen amicum,

dux ait, et legum genetrix longeque regendo
circumfusa polo consors et dicta Tonantis.

It is interesting to see throughout that Claudian's pride in Borne rests on her
laws and her eternity. So too Prudentius, c. Symm. i. 455 domitis leges ac jura
dedisti gentibus.

Claudian 225

of Scipios and Camilli ; learned and eloquent, and grave beyond
their years, and asks that they may be consuls, " so may the
Scythian Araxes own our rule, and the Rhine on either bank ; so
may the towers of Semiramis 1 , their Median defenders fallen, dread
our standards ; so may Ganges in wonder flow on from Roman town
to Roman town." Theodosius consents, the city rejoices and Proba
sets to work at her son's finery. The poem closes with another
picture. From the island in the Tiber, where stood a palace of the
family, the river god himself watches the triumphal procession of
the new consuls awhile in the silence of joy, and then he speaks.
He challenges the Spartan Eurotas to shew such a pair of brothers,
predicts a year of peace that recalls the promised bounties of
Nature as foretold in some eclogue of Virgil, and summons all the
rivers of Italy to rejoice with him. A few final lines follow, ad-
dressed to the new year by the poet and laden with the delights of
the several seasons, and the poem ends

te variis scribent in floribus Horae
longaqtte perpetui ducent in saecula fasti.

All this divine machinery is set in motion Rome, Theodosius
and the Tiber all take action for the sake of two obscure young
nobles. Parturiunt monies.

Take now the panegyric addressed to Honorius on his fourth
consulship. This is a greater event surely, and yet a year later
Synesius writes to a friend and, speaking of this date, says
Aristaenetus was consul, " for I do not know who was his col-
league 2 ." The poet begins with the pomp of the consular procession,
and passes thence to tell of Honorius' family, of his grandfather
Theodosius, who pitched his camp amid the frosts of Caledonia, and
the Orkneys were drenched with Saxon blood and Thule was warm
with Pictish gore, while glacial Ireland mourned heaps of Scottish
slain 3 of his father Theodosius, to whom the suppliant purple
came 4 , and who alone of men at once deserved and was invited to
rule, of his wars against barbarian and tyrant, and of his victories,

1 May we not compare "planting the banner of St George on the mountains
of Rasselas"?

2 Ep. 133. After 400 or so, one consul was named in the West, another in
the East. But here is a proof of the division of the world.

3 Compare Cons. Stil. ii. 247 for these three curses of Britain Scot, Saxon
and Pict. Populi bestiales Pictorum is long afterwards the phrase of Eddi,
St Wilfrid's biographer.

4 Ultra se purpura supplex obtulit, 47.

o. 15

226 Life arid Letters in the Fourth Century

which taught men that there are gods and gods ready to help,
praesentes docuere deos. (He does not say, however, that the last
usurper Eugenius had pointedly favoured paganism, and that
Theodosius' victory was a crushing blow for the del of the old
religion.) They were victories, to win which was to prove the
existence of divine justice ; and the use Theodosius made of them
was blessing to the conquered profuit hoc vincente capi 1 love and
loyalty sprang up in response. "Glorious in such lineage wast
thou born, at once into life and majesty, no stain of private station
upon thee. ...Thy mother laid her down on gold; with gems bedight
she brought thee forth on a bed of Tyrian dye 2 ; it was a palace

that shrilled with the cries of august childbed One day gave

thee life and gave thee empire; a consul in thy cradle, the year
that bore thee bears thy name."

So after a babyhood of greatness we come to Theodosius' advice
to his son, a passage of great interest. It can hardly be supposed
that Claudian was favoured with the confidence of Theodosius, and
Honorius, a dull boy of fourteen, was not likely to have remembered
the long speech his father is said to have delivered. We must give
the credit to the poet for a lesson "that might," says Gibbon,
" compose a fine institution for the future prince of a great and free
nation. It was far above Honorius and his degenerate subjects 8 ."
It may seem strange that the poet should use such freedom, yet
contemporary parallels may be found. Julian wrote two Greek
panegyrics on Constantius, in which he set forth views on true
kingliness very like Claudian's. Synesius addressed some advice
to Arcadius on the right policy for the empire at the moment,
which of course was not taken. His speech too shews a number of
points of contact with Claudian's work. It is not to be supposed
that these men have influenced each other, but rather that all three
are presenting anew the results of philosophic or quasi-philosophic
speculation on monarchy gathered from the past. Much of their
exhortations is inapplicable to the ruler of so large a state.
Claudian is perhaps after all the most practical of the three for
once. He shewed considerable delicacy and tact in putting his
advice into Theodosius' lips. Elsewhere too he has preferred this
indirect method.

1 A line Rutilius seems to have imitated or recollected, when in addressing
Borne he says of the conquered peoples profuit invitis te dominante capi (i. 64).

2 Of. Synesius, de Regno, 11 A, quoted on p. 326.

3 Gibbon, iv. 22.

Clandian 227

Much of the passage, it may be said, recalls the platitudes of
Polonius, yet these parts no less than the rest have their value.
Under all the sycophancy of the age there still lived something of
Roman dignity, and the Roman character of the Empire is more
than once quietly emphasized 1 .

" If the tiara of the Persian rose on thy brow, thy high birth
were enough for thee ; but far other is the lot of the rulers of the
Roman court On worth, not birth, must thou lean, worth that is
mightier and more useful linked to a mighty destiny. Learn thou
then for mankind what each must learn for himself. Prometheus
formed man's nature of three elements, one divine (mens) 2 , the
others mortal, and they are ever at strife, and man's work is to keep
them in harmony. Rule far and wide through farthest India ; let
the Mede, let the soft Arab, let the Seres (Chinese) adore thee ; if
thou fear, if thou cherish base desire, if thou art led by anger, thou
art a slave 3 . Thou canst not be lawful ruler of the world till thou
art monarch of thyself 4 . Think not of what is lawful, but of what
will be becoming, and let the thought of honour reign in thy heart.
Remember thou dost live before the gaze of the whole earth, thy
deeds lie open to all men, for the fierce light that beats upon a
throne suffers naught to remain hidden (nam lux altissima fati
occultum nihil esse sinit} ; rumour enters every secret place and lays
bare the inmost corner. Above all things be kind (pius), for while
in all else we are outdone, clemency of itself makes us equal to the
gods. Be not suspicious, nor false to thy friends, nor greedy of
praise. Not men at arms, nor a hedge of spears, are such a rampart
as love 5 . Dost thou not see how all this fair universe itself is held
together of love, and the elements unbound of force conspire to-
gether for ever 6 ? Do thou play the citizen's part and the father's ;
love thyself last (tu consuls cunctis rton tibt} 1 ; be thy prayers for
the State and not thyself. First do thyself what thou biddest

1 iv. Cons. Hon. 213 351. I have condensed the passage.

2 Cf. Synesius, de Regno, 6 B, vovs to be king, and all within affTaalaarov
Sidyeiv, etc.

3 Syn. Regn. 6 6x\oKpa.rla. rQiv traO&v. Boethius too (Cons. Phil. iv. m. 2)
has a little poem on this.

4 Syn. Regn. 6 eavrov fia<n\ewLv. Cf. Dio Chrys. de Regno, Or. i. 14.

5 Syn. Regn. 9 /cat TIJ iixvportpa /SacnXeia TTJS Hpuri Tereixia nevtjs ; 14 B etfvoia...
/SacriX^ws e<rriv Ivxypbv <t>v\a.KT-f)piov . Julian, Or. i. 48 A ffivoia.v...T$ fiaai\vjovTi
ifivpAruv acr<pa.\tffTa.Tov. Dio Chrys. Or. i. 3 ris 8 (ppovpd. KT...KpelrTW TTJJ airb TWV
evvoovvrwv (pv\a.Krjs;

8 Boethius, Cons. Phil. ii. m. 8, 13 htmc rcrum seriemligat | terras ac pelagus
regens | et caelo imperitans amor; and iv. m. 6.

7 Syn. Regn. 14. The king to be \eirovpybv rrjs /3a(n\eas. Cf. Dio Chrys.
Or. iii. 55, 56, 62.

15- -2

228 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

others ; the people will hearken when they see the ruler obey him-
self, for the world forms itself after the pattern of its king and
naught moulds it so much as his life 1 . No scorn, no pride; I have
not given thee Sabaeans long taught to be slaves ; I have not made
thee lord of Armenia, nor do I yield thee the Assyrian race, ruled
by a woman. Romans, who long have ruled the world, hast thou to
rule 2 , Romans, who brooked not Tarquin's pride nor Caesar's laws
(jura). Long will the glory of Trajan live, not by his conquests,
but because he was kind to his own country."

Instructions somewhat in the style of Nestor follow on war, but
when the lad asks to accompany his father on his march against
Eugenius, he is bidden stay at home and read history, and a list of
thirteen great examples is given him.

Claudian now calls on Theodosius, who had risen to heaven to
become a star, to look down and see his hopes for his son fulfilled,
thanks to Stilicho, for Stilicho is almost inevitable whatever the
subject. He gives a list of Stilicho's German triumphs and then
turns to the Greek campaign of 396, and here we may well pause
to consider another aspect of Claudian's poetry the defence of
Stilicho.

The story of the Greek campaign may be thus summarized. In
395 Alaric was laying waste Thrace and Macedonia, and Arcadius
summoned Stilicho to protect Constantinople and the East. Almost
as soon as Stilicho reached Thessaly, he was bidden to return with
the western troops, but to send back to their proper headquarters the
eastern forces which Theodosius had led westward against Eugenius.
He obeyed. Alaric unhampered marched into Greece and ravaged
the country, but Stilicho reappeared and blockaded him on the
plain of Pholoe (396). And then, already at Stilicho's mercy, he
escaped, went on plundering and was bought off by the govern-
ment of Constantinople with the military command of Illyricum.

Two great questions arise. How came Stilicho so readily to
obey the order to return to Italy? How came Alaric to escape
from Pholoe ? The same happened again at Pollentia in 402. On
the answer to these questions depends our estimate of Stilicho.
Zosimus (v. 7) says he was so busy with dissipation that Alaric
eluded him at Pholoe. " I say nothing," writes Orosius 3 , " of King
Alaric with his Goths, often conquered, often hemmed in, and

1 Julian, Or. ii. 88 C tl-ofj.oiov<rda.i irpbs rbv dpxovra ra TWI> vTrrjKbuv.

2 Tacitus puts a similar sentence in Galba's mouth, Hist. i. 16.

3 Orosius, vii. 37, 2 saepe victo saepe concluso semperque dimisso.

Claudian 229

always allowed to escape" Heathen 1 and Christian alike seem to
have mistrusted him, and the controversy about Pholoe and
Pollentia has lasted to our day, Dr Hodgkin acquitting him 2 and
Mr Bury bringing him in guilty.

But our concern is with Claudian. These are the facts to be
explained for his patron ; what does Claudian do ? Gibbon 3 charac-
terizes his account as "carious circumstantial flattery"; "as the
event was not glorious it is artfully thrown into the shade." Mr
Bury 4 commits himself and calls it "an absolutely false and mis-
leading account, which no allowance for poetical exaggeration can
defend." The act of obedience is glorified with a fine phrase 5 . The
Greek affairs he alludes to once or twice, always rapidly and without
condescending to particulars, once hinting at a supposed treaty
made from Constantinople. To Pollentia he gives more space, and a
vast flood of declamation about historical parallels, which are not
parallel, covers or tries to cover the fact that, for whatever reason,
Alaric had not been crushed. One seems to see that there was
hostile criticism in Rome, which the poet is trying to silence by
special pleading. Mr Bury holds that on this and on other oc-
casions the utterances of Claudian were direct manifestoes suggested
by his patron, while M. Boissier 6 shrewdly doubts whether Stilicho
always meant quite so much to be said as is said. Men thought
Stilicho wanted to make his sou Eucherius Emperor, beginning by
marrying him to Honorius' sister 7 . Now Claudian says nothing
about the ultimate design, but he does hint at the possible marriage.
The union never took place, and M. Boissier thinks that Claudian
has here exceeded his instructions.

To return to our poem. The Greek affair is vaguely got rid of
in fourteen lines, and we resume the blessings of Honorius' reign,
which are very significant If the recommendations we have seen
addressed to him seem to hint at the violence of Valentinian, the
uneasy suspicion of Valens and the savage temper of Theodosius,
what are we to say when we read this ? " We are ruled by judges

1 The most ferocious attack is made by Butilius (ii. 41 f.), who accuses
Stilicho of burning the Sibylline books, and calls him worse than Nero : hie
immortalem mortalem perculit Hie, \ Me mundi matrem perculit ille suam.

2 Perhaps a Scots verdict of "Not proven" is nearer Dr Hodgkin's view.
Can it be his troops would not push their kinsmen on the other side to extremi-
ties? Cf. Syn. Regn. 14.

3 iv. 27 n.

4 L. E. E. i. 74.

5 In Ruf. ii. 249 non est victoria tanti ut videar vicisse mihi.

6 F. P. ii. I.e.

7 Orosius says this and the idea probably did not originate with him.

230 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

we know, and enjoy the blessings of peace and of war. No sword
hangs over us ; there are no butcheries of the nobility ; no accusa-
tions are forged against the common folk ; the exile is not thrust in
sadness from his native land; the wicked additions to continuous
taxation cease. Thy treasury does not grow rich on the losses of
thy subjects'." Yet how like his father the Emperor grows!
Quantus in ore pater radiat! He can wear his father's helmet
(jam patrias imples galeas) and is very athletic and warlike.
Historians have remarked that later on he forsook riding for feeding
poultry, and life through had a profound sense of the value of the
sacred life of an Emperor. The poem closes with pomp, procession
and splendour 2 , with a brilliant spectacle and a prophecy of an
extended frontier.

What does the poet mean by this poem ? He means no doubt
to flatter the Emperor and defend Stilicho, for doing which he was
paid ; but when he glorifies Rome's victories over the Goths, when
he magnifies the true Roman character in language that should
remind his readers of their great past, of a day when the Roman
faced and overthrew greater foes than Alaric, is he noc doing more ?
And does he not so atone for his hireling work and rise into real
significance ?

Beside panegyrics and panegyrical histories Claudian wrote in-
vectives. These were directed against the two successive ministers
of Arcadius, Rufinus and the eunuch Eutropius, the enemies of
Stilicho and therefore of the true Rome on the Tiber. The world
was too happy, and a council in Hell was called to deal with the
matter. Various plans were discussed, but on the proposal of
Megaera (rhetorically described) it was decided not to make war on
heaven, but to send among men Rufinus, a nursling of the Fury, so
well trained by her that he can outdo her in her own arts. She
hailed him from his native Elusa in Aquitaine to Constantinople,
where, insatiate as the sea, by extortion of every kind he amassed
infinite riches. Here let me leave Claudian to quote Zosimus, who,
while confirming his story, makes an interesting addition: "Every
kind of villainy throve in the cities, and ah! the wealth of all the

1 11. 491 ff.

2 "Eoyalty, followed by the imperial presence of ambassadors, and escorted
by a group of dazzling duchesses and paladins of high degree, was ushered with
courteous pomp by the host and hostess into a choice saloon, hung with rose-
coloured tapestry and illuminated by chandeliers of crystal, where they were
served from gold plate." There is more than a little common to Claudian and
the author of Lothair.

Claudian 231

world flowed into the houses of Rufinus and Stilicho, while poverty
in every place invaded the houses of those who had but lately been
rich. Yet the Emperors saw nothing of what was going on, but
only decreed whatever Rufinus bade and Stilicho 1 ."

Rufinus of course came to a bad end. It was believed he had
inspired the order which sent Stilicho so precipitately home in 395.
Stilicho's speech to his soldiers on that occasion is well done by
Claudian

flectite signa duces. redeat jam miles eous.
parendum est. taceant litui, prohibete sagittas.
partite contiguo Rufinus praecipit hosti z .

The eastern troops bade Stilicho farewell after the manner of Lucan,
marched off, were reviewed by Arcadius and concluded the review
by tearing Rufinus in pieces. " The dissection of Rufinus, which
Claudian performs with the savage coolness of an anatomist 3 /' may
be paralleled by some of the martyrdoms of Prudentius. Detail is
not spared. It was horrible and it permitted a list of members, and
both of these features lent themselves to rhetoric. Such was the
evil legacy of Lucan and his school 4 .

The irony, the rhetoric and the swing of this poem impress
every reader, but there are other points of interest in it. It begins
with a debate as to whether or no there is evidence for believing in
Providence 5 . "For when I saw the laws of the ordered universe,
bounds fixed for the seas and paths for the rivers, the alternation of
light and darkness, then I inclined to think that all is decreed by
the council of God, who has bid the stars move by rule, the crops
grow in their seasons, Phoebe in her changes shine with the borrowed
light and the Sun with his own, who has set shores for the waves
and poised the earth in mid air. But when I saw mankind wrapped
in such darkness, the guilty long enjoying gladness, and the good
afflicted, religion in its turn was shaken and like to fall." The
punishment of Rufinus however, he continues, has settled his doubts
for ever. In the same way Synesius demonstrates at greater length
the truth of an effective Providence by his "Egyptian story" of
Aurelian and Gainas' revolt, and actually says that the rule of
" Typhos " had driven belief in Providence from the minds of men 6 .

1 v. 1. 2 In Ruf. ii. 217.

3 Gibbon, iv. 13. It is not an invention of Claudian's. Cf. Zosimus, v. 7.

4 Quintilian, x. 1, 90 Lucanus . . .magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus.

5 An exordium pronounced beautiful by Gibbon, vol. iv. p. 14, n. 33.

6 See esp. de Prov. ii. 1 r)8ij TT?J avOpuiruv yvwfjL-rjs f^fppvrjKe 56a irpovoias.

232 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

The descent of Rufinus into hell, at the close of the second book,
is drawn with vigour. The ghosts of his victims swarm about him
like the wild bees round the shepherd who is robbing their nest.
It is a hell where the distinctions of earth are lost, no dignity
survives and the king stripped of his empty title rubs shoulders
with the beggar. The guilty are condemned to bear the forms of
beasts for three thousand years, but Rufinus is too bad for hell.
" Cleanse the home of Pluto. Whip him across Styx, across
Erebus ; give him to the void abyss, below the night of the Titans,
below the furthest Tartarus, below Chaos itself, where lie hid the
foundations of Night : there, plunged headlong, let him pant, while
the stars wheel through heaven and the winds lash the shores of
the sea 1 ."

The invective against Eutropius, the eunuch made consul, is in
much the same style the tone very often recalling Juvenal

omnia eesserunt eunucho consule monstra.

This old slave, set free because worthless contempt u jam liber erat
his aides-de-camp, the fuller and the cook, his council of war,
eaters of peacocks and parrots, and the Senate of New Rome, the
" Greek Quirites," who fondle and kiss the creased cheeks of the
"old woman," are all drawn with the perfection of hatred and of
skill.

Once more we have an indirect contribution to Imperial policy
in the words of the Fury to Tribigild, urging him to imitate Alaric :
"To-day, who breaks treaties, is enriched; who keeps them is a
beggar. He, who laid waste Achaea and but lately ravaged Epirus
unavenged, rules Illyricum...Thee too let them fear; let them
admire thee guilty, whom they have spurned while loyal. Sated
with spoils and prey, when it is thy pleasure thou shalt be a
Roman" (ii. 213).

This was a criticism of the helpless government, not undeserved
and certainly well and guardedly delivered. Claudian however as a
statesman was as ineffectual as Synesius, and his homilies aad his
ironies despite his art achieved nothing. But I need not linger
over the poem, as I think its general character will be clear.

Here let me pause before discussing matters of deeper interest to
consider Claudian's style and manner. Something of his spirit may,
I hope, have survived translation in the passages I have quoted.

1 Thus in Syn. de Prov. ii. 3, 1269 c, Typhos is to be ev KUKVT$ as a
fj.va'iov leal Taprdpiov dai/jLova along with the Titans and Giants.

Claudian 233

His handling of the hexameter is brilliant and powerful, in some
points very different from Virgil's, but different too from Lucan's.
He avoids with a curious sensitiveness those minor licenses Virgil
uses 1 ; and though he goes further than Lucan in his use of the
hephthemimeral pause, on the whole his verse is not so monotonous,
though rhetorical

His debt to earlier poets is great and manifold. Words, phrases
and ideas are often borrowed, and very often manner. Yet his
indebtedness does not affect his independence. As an example of
Lucan's manner one citation will suffice. He is speaking of Rufinus'
mutilation

jacet en! qui possidet orbem
exiguae telluris inops et pulvere raro
per paries tegitur nusquam totiensque sepultus 2 .

Of Juvenal's,

exterret cunabula discolor infans 3 .

The opinion has been held that his use of Virgil is different from
that made by Prudentius, and in some respects this is true. He
never, for example, approaches such annexation as

Christe graves hominum semper miser ate labores*,

but his language constantly recalls Virgil in word and phrase and
rhythm 5 .

1 A few details may be given. Spondaic hexameters, 5; Leonine, C; double
disyllabic ending, 6; double monosyllabic ending, 7; monosyllabic ending, 4;
quadrisyllable ending, 5; hiatus, 1 (heu ubi); irregular quantities, 2 (hie and
conubiale) ; rhyming couplets, 1 ; a very short list for some seven or eight
thousand lines. The spurious poems attributed to him may be condemned
at a glance for their false quantities and roughness. How they came to be
called Claudian's I cannot understand. One further small point may be
mentioned in this connexion. A heavy ending of a particular type the pen-
ultimate word four long syllables and one short is much affected by him.
The form tempestatumque potentem occurs some twelve times in the Aeneid,
perhaps oftener but not very much oftener. It is not much used by Lucan.
I have counted ninety-eight examples in Claudian. I believe it is due to the
influence of rhetoric, though the long roll of the movement is better fitted
for prose.

2 Ruf. ii. 452. For a passage inspired by Lucan, see the story of the
"Thundering Legion" in vi. Cons. Hon. 335350.

3 B. Gildon. 193.

4 Prud. Psych. 1. Cf. Aen. vi. 56.

5 A short passage may shew how much he can borrow. In the poem on the
War of Gildo the two Theodosii leave heaven to visit the dreams of Arcadius
and Honorius and the passage shews Claudian's study of the Aeneid, particularly
(here) of the fifth book. A table will make this clear.

306 dum vita maneret. Aen. v. 724 dum vita manebat.

309 respice fratris conubium. Aen. iv. 275 spes surgentis lull respice.

234 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

While many of these coincidences may seem accidental, and
some the inevitable diction of the epic poet, still it is clear that
Claudian has assimilated Virgil. If likeness of form be not enough,
clear kinship is shewn by such passages as the hell of In Riifinum
ii. and the sixth Aeneid, and by the treatment of country life.
Still it may, I think, be admitted that in tone he is nearer Lucan or
Juvenal.

He can never resist the opportunity to make a list, and on
several occasions he digresses into strange paths of geography
e.g., the situation, boundaries and aspect of Phrygia (In Eutrop. ii.
238273), of Sicily (R. P. i. 142178), of the prefectures of the
Gauls and of Italy (Paneg. Manl Theod. 4157 and 198204).
Even his list of the forces sent against Gildo is not as bad as
Lucan's list of Pompey's legions (Pkars. vii). Other lists are:
Thirteen Roman worthies (iv. Cons. Hon. 400), the philosophical
schools (Paneg. M. Theod. 70 83), Victory's five possible abodes
in heaven (Cons. Stil. iii. 202), and many more.

He is apt to fall into exaggeration and other forms of false taste.
Venus addresses Maria, the daughter of Stilicho and the wife of
Honorius, and, after specific mention of nine several charms, con-
cludes, " If Bacchus in love could adorn heaven with his bride's
wreath, why are there no sfars for a garland for a fairer maid ?
Nay, already Bootes frames thee starry crowns, and for Maria's
honour heaven brings forth new constellations 1 ." Theodosius
addresses his last words to Stilicho, commending to him the young
Honorius ; " then with no further word, even as he was, he left a
path of light upon the clouds and entered the orb of the Moon,"

315 ille licet (beginning a line). Aen. xi. 440 (the same).

315 praetentis Syrtibus. Aen. vi. 60 praetentaque Syrtibus arva.

318-9 in omnes aequalem casus animum. Aen. ix. 277 comitem casus complector

in omnes.

320 inveniet virtute viam. Aen. x. 113 fata viam invenient.

323-4 commissa profanus ille luet. Georg. iv. 454 magna luis commissa.

325 lon(jo...sermone. Aen. i. 217 longo...sermone.

326 castumque cubile. Aen. viii. 412 castum servare cubile.

327 Tyrio...ostro. Georg. iii. 17 Tyrio... astro.

328 carpebat.-.somnos. Aen. vii. 414 carpebat nocte quietem.

329 per somnia, a ghost speaks. Aen. v. 636 per sommim.

330 tantane...fiducia (also b. Get. 380). Aen. i. 132 tantane...Jiducia.

331 care nepos. Aen. vi. 682 carosque nepotes,

and the ghost vanishes in the Virgilian style.
348 adftatus vicino sole refugit. Aen. v. 739 me saevus equis Oriens ad-

flavit anhelis.

Add a number of single words used in Virgil's way 321 ultra, 326 fusus (of
sleep).

1 Epithalamium, 271.

Clcmdian 235

and so on his way past star after star, each quarter of heaven
contending for the honour of his presence" glory of the sky as
once of earth, thee thine Ocean welcomes when weary to thy native
flood, and Spain doth bathe thee in the waves thou knowest so
well 1 ." When Honorius hunts, "gladly will the beasts fall to thy
spear, and the lion rejoicing in his sacred wounds will welcome the
shaft, prouder in his death 2 ." When Honorius marries Maria, the
poet says to Stilicho, "More, even more, we all admit we owe to our
lord, that he is thy son-in-law, unconquered hero 3 !" Some of his
utterances on the same marriage pass belief. Again, when, at a
length of 130 lines, he sets Diana and her nymphs to collect wild
beasts (elephants it seems excepted) to be shipped to Rome for
Stilicho's triumph 4 , one feels to-day a certain disproportion between
means and end. Still there is a value in the passage as shewing the
mind of the time, attested likewise by Prudentius. Lastly, when
Aethon, the steed of Aurora who (qui) puts the stars to flight, longs
to be ridden by Honorius 5 , one feels that Lucan's famous appeal to
Nero not to overbalance the universe when he takes his seat among
the gods, has been very nearly equalled.

On the other hand his descriptions are strong and his pictures
striking. His similes (some ninety-seven in number) are often
happy. Rufinus, among the soldiers, "shut in on right and left,
stood spell-bound by the shouts of the armed ring around him, even
as a wild beast, that has but lately lost its mountain home, an
exile from the towering forests, and condemned to the games of the
arena, bounds wildly in. The man shouts to it and awaits with
poised spear. But the beast trembles at the din, and head in air
looks round upon the benches of the amphitheatre and marvels at
the hissing of the throng 6 ." Another interesting simile describes
Alaric after Pollentia; "even as a pirate bark, that has long
cruised the seas and laid waste the ships, falls full of guilty wealth
upon a great trireme of war, which she has mistaken for a prey ;
and oarless, her wings of canvas torn, her helm and rigging broken,
she is tossed by wind and wave the plaything of the sea, till at last
she pay her penalty to the deep she has wronged 7 ." Alaric, deserted

1 Hi. Cons. Hon. 162, 175. A magnificent way of saying the star sets in the
West. Theodosius was a Spaniard. Dr Hodgkin should be read on this.

2 Fescen. i. 13. The lion reminds one of the wounded pigeon in Lothair
that fluttered over a paling from a terrier, that it might die by a ducal hand.

3 Epithul. 335. 4 Cons. Stil. iii. 237369.
5 iv. Cons. Hon. 561. 6 Ruf. ii. 394.

7 vi. Cons. Hon. 132.

236 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

by some of his Goths, is compared to an old man of Hybla, whose
bees have swarmed ; he clangs cymbals all in vain, and, wearied by
the bootless noise, gives over and laments the faithless swarms and
empty hives'. Again, in view of the story of the Rape of Proser-
pine, there is an impressiveuess in the simile of the path of Venus.
"The path shone as the goddess trod, even as a comet of dire augury
crosses the heaven in fire and blood, ruddy with ominous import ;
the mariner sees it to his sorrow, and the folk to their hurt, for the
menace of its streaming light speaks of storm for ships and foemen
for cities." Another simile, no new one, tells of the starry sky,
where the moon outshines the stars, but an added touch makes it
new. The point turns on brightness, but the poet adds the silence
of night.

tacitam Luna regnante per aethram.

It is clear that a poet, whatever he be told or paid to write, can
write nothing of any value that does not come from the heart
dettii as muss von Herzen gehen, was auf Herzen wirken soil what-
ever moreover the subject assigned him, he will write what he must
write. The poet, like the Hebrew prophet, has a burden, he can do
nothing but what is given him. It has nothing to do with
patronage. In the poetry of Claudian we find two noble concep-
tions, overlaid and marred, it is true, in some measure by uninspired
work, by rhetoric and adulation, yet noble still the eternal
grandeur of Rome and the beauty and sufficiency of the old
religion. Both of these call for study.

To begin with Rome. In the brilliant apologetic of Tertullian
and the sober homilies of Afrahat we find the opinion, that Rome
is to last as long as the world lasts. But as yet to Christians
Rome was not an object of love; they had not seen beyond the
" scarlet woman " the majestic queen of the Church. It was the
heathen who at this time felt for her the passionate enthusiasm of
the Christian of the middle ages, though already a Prudentius has
visions of a Christian Rome, and the pilgrims cross the bridge of
Hadrian 2 . To the heathen, however, she was dear not so much for
what she was to be as for what she was and had been. The associa-
tions of ten centuries were about her ; the wealth, the culture, the

1 vi. Cons. Hon. 259.

2 Boissier, F. P. ii. 253, remarks that Claudian and his friends, by main-
taining the imperial destiny and sacred character of Rome, were really con-
tributing to the growth of a papal Rome. I feel however that their influence
may easily be over-estimated.

Claudian 237

art and the faith of the world had gathered to her. She summed
up the history of mankind. She had been and was still " mother
of laws" and giver of peace. Justice between man and man and
amity between nations were her gifts to the world, and her visible
splendour and prosperity were the seal of the world's happiness.
She was the chosen city of the gods ; god after god had forsaken his
native home for Rome, had brought his people under her sway and
made it clear that Rome and heaven stood together. And now a
new faith had risen, and the first Emperor to forsake the old gods
had also forsaken the old Rome, and had made at once a new
heaven and a new earth, a new heaven that knew not the gods of
his fathers, and a new Rome that flouted the old. The cause a
man loves he loves the more when it is attacked. So the heathen
loved Rome the more for the menace of Christian Constantinople,
and in Claudian's poetry we read this love. Honorius is the
Emperor of the true Rome (though alas! he did indeed live at
Ravenna) ; he had begged Rome of his father rather than Constan-
tinople, says Claudian. Stilicho was the saviour of Rome. Thus
the extravagant eulogy of these men means more than might appear
at first sight. The pageantry and pomp he delights to describe are
Rome's, they are the symbols of her greatness.

Let us take as our starting-point the greatest word spoken in
Stilicho's praise :

nihil in tanto circum terrore locutus
indignum Latio 1 .

" Amid all the terror that stood around he said no word unworthy
of Latium " this was written by an Alexandrian Greek and written
of a Vandal. The situation was very different, but the spirit is that
of the men who thanked the defeated Varro that he had not
despaired of the Republic.

" Look," he cries to Stilicho, "look around upon the seven hills,
that challenge the sun's rays with their gleam of gold, upon the
arches hung with spoils, upon the temples that tower to the clouds
and all the fabric of so many triumphs. What thou hast wrought,
what a city thou hast saved, measure thou with eyes of wonder 2 ."
The seat of the Empire is as peerless as itself.

When Stilicho had won the victory of Pollentia and Alaric at all
events withdrew, Claudian apostrophizes Rome. "Rise, venerable

1 Cons. Stil. i. 294. 2 Cons. Stil. iii. 65.

238 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

mother, and free from care trust the favour of the gods. Away
with craven fears of old age. City eternal as the sky, iron fate
shall touch thee then and only then, when nature makes new laws
for the stars'." Into the lips of a Gothic counsellor of Alaric, he
puts the words : " If it be truth our fathers tell, none who was so
mad as to attack this city in war, returned triumphant in his guilt.
The gods fail not thfeir home ; thunderbolts, men say, are hurled on
the foe afar, and the fires of heaven guard the walls, whether it be
the gods or Rome herself that thunders 2 ." The poem closes with
the words posterity shall read at Pollentia. " Here laid in Italian
soil are the Cimbri and the valiant Goths, slain by the great
captains Stilicho and Marius. Learn, foolish peoples, not to
despise Rome."

From the city we pass to the Empire

tanto quaesitum sanguine, tanto
servatum, quod mille ducum peperere labores,
quod tantis Romana manus contexuit annis 3 .

These are the words of a " provincial," of one of the conquered
perhaps. What did the Empire mean to him ? There is in the
third book of Stilicko's Consulship a passage which, in spite of one
or two weak spots, really reaches a high level of patriotism and
inspiration a stirring appeal to his countrymen to be worthy of
their past. Note in particular the reference to Hannibal with whom
he elsewhere compares Alaric. In this tacit contrast of present and
past we can surely read what Rome was to this poet of her later
days 4 .

" Nought grander on earth does the sky embrace. The eye
cannot comprehend her extent, the heart her beauty, nor the voice
her praise. With the lustre of her gold she rivals the stars she
touches. Her seven hills recall the zones of Olympus. Mother of
arms and laws, she spreads her rule over all mankind, the first to
give them law. She it is who from narrow bounds spread to either
pole, and starting from a little home reached forth her hands with
the sun. Battling with destiny, while she waged countless wars at
once, laid hold on the towns of Spain, besieged the towns of Sicily,

1 b. Get. 54. Urbs aequaeva polo.

2 b. Get. 506511.

3 In Ruf. ii. 50. Compare Prudentius, Symm. ii. 550:

non fero Romanum nonwn sudataque bella
et titulos tanto quaesitos sanguine carpi.

4 Cons. Stil. iii. 131170.

Claudian 239

brought low the Gaul on land, the Carthaginian on the sea, she
never bowed to blow; no whit was she affrighted by wound, but her
voice rose stronger after Cannae and the Trebia 1 , and when the
flames girt her round about and the foe was at the wall, she sent
her armies to the distant Iberians, nor was she stayed by Ocean,
but embarked upon the deep and sought the Britons in a world
remote for a fresh triumph. This is she who alone took the
conquered to her bosom and cherished all mankind alike, as mother
not as queen, and called them her sons whom she had conquered,
and bound them to her afar by bonds of love. To her rule of peace
we owe it that the stranger is at home in every land, that men may
dwell in every clime, that it is but sport to visit Thule and the
furthest shores; that we may range from Rhone to Orontes; that
we are all one people. Nor shall there ever be an end to Rome's
sway. Other realms luxury with its crimes and pride with its
hatreds brought low. So the proud Spartan overthrew Athens and
fell in turn to Thebes; so the Mede from the Assyrian, and the
Persian from the Mede took the power. The Macedonian crushed
the Persian, himself to yield to the Romans. She stands grounded
on the Sibyl's oracles, inspired by the rites of Nutna. For her
Jupiter wields the thunderbolt ; her Pallas shields with the Gorgon ;
hither brought Vesta her secret flame, and the tower-crowned
Mother of the Gods her mysteries and her Phrygian lions."

And yet there are ominous signs of what is coming. The
Empire is weaker, the Goths grow stronger and do more and more
mischief, and with loss of territory the number and the rapacity of
the officials grow 2 . More ominous still, his "gods" have said to
Alaric (who by the way was Christian, if Arian)

penetrabis ad Urbem.

Claudian may make merry over this prophecy fulfilled at the river
Urbis (the Borbo) 3 , but the divine pressure was still on Alaric, as he
told the hermit, and to the City (Urbs) he came 4 .

And Constantinople? "Look," he says, "at the Senate applaud-
ing (Eutropius), those nobles of Byzantium, those Greek Quirites!

1 I may be permitted to quote these lines, which after the battle of Colenso
I felt represented English sentiment as truly as they do the Koman feeling
of 216 B.C.:

nunquam succubuit damnis et territa nullo
vulnere post C annas major Trebiamque fremebat.

2 In Eutrop. ii. 590 rectorurn numerum terris pereuntibus augent.

3 b. Get. 555. 4 Sozomen, ix. 6.

240 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

people worthy of its Senate ! Senate worthy of its Consul 1 !"
" The ruler of the East, the destined consul, combed a mistress'
locks 2 ." " Nobles," he says, " wont to scorn Rome and admire their
own abode which may the Bosporus overwhelm 3 ." His crowning
insult is the enumeration of the " founders " of New Rome Byzas,
Constantine and Eutropius 4 . From many of his expressions we can
clearly see the growing severance between East and West. Apart
from bis Roman sympathies, his Alexandrian origin would con-
tribute to his dislike of Constantinople. Alexandria hated Constan-
tinople, and to such an extent that Egypt did not care to battle
against the Saracens, but surrendered to them at once. The hatred
was racial and afterwards religious.

We come now to the question of religion. " An exquisite poet
but a most (stubborn heathen 5 " says Orosius of Claudiau, when
he quotes a line or two from which he carefully eliminates the
heathenism. Augustine gives the same account of him " the poet
Claudian, though a stranger to Christ's name 6 ." One likes to think
that Christians read and enjoyed him in spite of a difference of
view. For Claudian was pronounced in his adherence to the old
religion. No doubt it may be said, and it has been said at least
often enough, that the gods in his poems are even more avowedly
ornamental than in the Aeneid. Yet while Orosius and Augustine
made a strong point of the bloodlessness and completeness of
Theodosius' victories because they were God-given, it is surely not
merely for decorative purposes that Claudian gives all the glory to
the gods of old Rome. It has been remarked 7 that there is also a
significance in his invocation of Victory (Cons. Stil. iii. 205), in view
of the battles that had been fought about the statue of the goddess
and its removal from the Senate House.

His direct allusions to Christianity are as scant as might have
been expected from a man of culture of the old faith. It was a
point of style to ignore the new religion. He has one or two sneers
for the "Egyptian oracles" on which Eutropius rested, oracles

1 Eutrop. ii. 135. 2 Eutrop. i. 105.

3 Eutrop. ii. 339. 4 Eutrop. ii. 83.

8 Orosius, vii. 35 poeta quidem eximius sed paganus pervicacissimus.

6 Augustine, C. D. v. 26 poeta Claudiamis quamvis a Christi nomine
alienus.

7 Boissier, F. P. ii. 244. I believe this critic is nearer the truth when he
says of Claudian's attitude to Christianity, "il y songe toujours," than
M. Beuguot (cited by Milman on Gibbon) who talks of "his extraordinary
indifference." As to Victory, see the famous relatio of Symmachus and
Ambrose's reply (Epp. i. 18), and the two thoughtful and courteous books
of Prudentius adversus Symmachum.

Clcmdian 241

supposed to be those of the Egyptian hermit John, whom Augustine
tells us Theodosius consulted 1 . But the epigram addressed to the
military commander (duke) Jacob is his only direct mention of saint
and scripture, and surely suffices to shew his mind.

By the threshold of Peter, the ashes of Paul,

My verses, duke Jacob, misquote not at all ;

So the saints from the Alps the invaders repel ;

So Susanna the chaste lend her forces as well ;

So Thomas be with you instead of a shield ;

So Bartholomew go as your squire to the field ;

So whoever shall swim the chill Danube to fight,

Like the horses of Pharaoh be lost to your sight ;

So the sword of your vengeance lay Gothic hordes low ;

So the blessing of Thecla add strength to your blow ;

So your guest by his death yield the glory to you;

While the bottles outpoured shall your dryness subdue ;

So your hand ne'er be stained by the blood of a foe ;

Those verses, duke Jacob, I pray you, let go.

Point is added to the opening of this little piece by the fact
that the basilica of St Paul had been begun by Theodosius and was
finished by Honorius, and bore the inscription

Theodosius coepit perfecit Honorius aulam
Doctoris mundi sacratam corpore Pauli 2 .

No wonder Orosius says paganus pervicacissimus, when Claudian
wrote as he did under the shade of this church, newly dedicated by
his Emperor 3 .

As men are influenced by their environment, I had the curiosity
to note all passages in which I could find anything that looked at
all like specific knowledge of the scriptures. Had he any know-
ledge of them ? " Pharaoh's horses " answer yes. But did they
make any impression on him ? I give a list of these passages,
which, liberally interpreted, might be referred to some scriptural
parallel.

1 Augustine, C. D. v. 26. Praef. Eutrop. ii. 39 and Eutrop. i. 312. Soz.
vii. 22.

3 See Gregorovius, City of Rome, i. 100, and the famous poem of Prudentius
on the churches of Saints Peter and Paul and their pilgrims. (Peri Steph-
anon, 12.)

3 In triumphing over Eutropius he speaks of the pias aras (the Christian
church) where the eunuch took sanctuary.

G. 16

242 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Ruf. ii. 442 54. The fall of Eu- Isaiah xiv. 12. How art thou

finus and the movement of hell fallen from heaven, Lucifer

to meet him. Hell from beneath is moved

for thee.
Ruf. ii. 474. A hell without class Rev. xx. 12, 13. (More probably

distinctions and an examination Neo-Platonic, cf. Hermes Trism.

of lives. (ed. Bipont.) p. 312.)

Cons. Stil. i. 84. Tune exultasse Job xxxviii. 7.

ckoreis astra ferunt.
vi. Cons. Hon. 523. Simile of Isaiah Ixi. 10.

mother preparing bride for her

husband.
Laus Serenae 94. Omina non audet Luke ii. 19.

genetrix tarn magna fateri \ sue-

cessusque suos arcani conscia

voti | spe trepidante fovet.
R. P. ii. 94 of flowers : Parthica Matthew vi. 29. Solomon in all

quae tantis variantur cingula his glory.

gemmis \ regales vinctura sinus.

To these let me add parallels Dr Hodgkiu suggests :

b. Get. 625632. Alaric's mother Judges v. 2830. The mother of

wanted Roman ladies as slave Sisera.

girls.

Exordium to In Rufinum i. Psalm Ixxiii.

In Ruf. ii. 249 50. Non est victoria Prov. xvi. 32.

tanti, etc.

None of these is very convincing. Claudian may have known
something of the Christian scriptures, but I doubt if it was very
much. One striking coincidence with Christian language I believe
to be accidental. In one of his pieces of embroidery he intro-
duces the child it was hoped the Empress Maria might bear a
child, however, never born. Sacri Mariae partus 1 is bis phrase,
and it has a strange suggestion to our ears, which I do not think it
had at the time. The Christian thought of the day had not reached
that point of view, and it would not occur to Claudian, and perhaps
hardly to his Christian readers, that the words might be taken in
another sense than that meant.

1 Cons. Stil. ii. 342. Almost everything connected with an Emperor is
sacred, even the wounds his hunting spear makes. Even in business prose
Symmachus, reserving cases for the Emperor's decision, refers to it as sacrum
oraculum. Brockhaus, Prudentius, pp. 252, 294, brings out the fact that, in
spite of the stress laid by Catholic archaeologists on representations of the
Virgin in Christian art, the language and tone of Prudentius are decidedly
against the theory that she yet received any special honours ; she is still a
Nebenfigur. So Gregorovius, Rome in the Middle Ages, i. 103. The cult of the
Virgin was as yet not officially recoguized in the 4th century.

Claudian 243

But whatever heathens may have thought or wished, it was
inevitable that their beliefs must be affected by the presence of
Christianity. The Reformation caused the Counter Reformation
and thus affected the Papacy. The Disruption in Scotland in 1843,
by creating the Free Church, gave new life to the Established
Church. So heathenism is not the same after as before the dis-
semination of Christianity. Too much stress may be laid on this,
it is true, for there was a general revival of religion contempo-
raneously with the spread of the Gospel, which aided it but is
hardly to be traced to it. Marcus Aurelius doubted but sacrificed.
In Apuleius we may first read the general drift of this revival.
Juvenal has indeed a curious hint of the future faith of heathenism,
when he writes of the gods Carior est illis homo quam sibi, but the
acceptance of this as the great feature of the old religion comes
later.

At the end of the fourth century heathen thought in the West
has reached a genial if rather shallow optimism, whose cardinal
doctrine is what Ammianus calls benignitas numinis 1 , the kindliness
of the divine. It is the philosophy of Omar Khayyam's pot, whose
conclusion to the debate on the potter is

"He's a good fellow, and 't will all be well."

We have seen how Claudian held that the universe rests on
love 2 , and that mercy makes us like the gods while in all else we are
inferior 3 . Elsewhere he dilates further on Mercy, the eldest of the
gods, the guardian of the universe, who ended chaos and brought
the world into light, who chooses man for her temple, and teaches
peace, forgiveness, gentleness, " after the example of the heavenly
Father (aetherii patris exemplo), who, though he shakes the world
with his thunder, directs his shafts upon the rocks and sea monsters,
and sparing of our blood uses his bolts upon the woods of Oeta 4 ."
Thus the problem of the seeming aimlessness of heaven's judgments
is solved. The warm springs of the Aponus are a witness to
heaven's goodness. " Who dare ascribe such services to Chance ?
Who denies that the gods ordained all this? The great Father
(ille pater rerum), who allots the aeons to the stars, when he gave

1 Amm. Marc. xxi. 1, 9.

2 iv. Cons. Hon. 284 Nonne vides operum quod se pulcherrimus ipse mundus
amore liyet.

3 iv. Cons. Hon. 277 sola deos aequat dementia nobis. It sounds like a
correction of Lucretius if he really was still read.

4 Cons. Stil. ii. 628. Cf. Synesius, Ep. 31.

162

244 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

the sacred first beginnings of heaven gave thee, and pitying our frail
tenure of our form bade earth give forth streams of healing, and the
waters that should stay the stern distaffs of the fates gushed forth
upon the hills 1 ." Retribution is the lesson of Rufinus' fall, while on
the other hand heaven rewards the good, for he tells the story of
the so-called Thundering Legion "whether Chaldean strains with
magic rite thus armed the gods, or, as I think, the character of
Marcus won all the care of the Thunderer 2 ." The sum of his
criticism of the Universe may perhaps be given in these words
of his, "Nature has given to all to be happy if a man but know
how to use the gift 3 ."

In the Rape of Proserpine*, Claudian is telling again the story
that had charmed mankind for a thousand years, but I seem to find
even in the fragment of it, the three books which are all we have,
elements of the poet's own. His tale is incomplete but it is yet
instinct with beauty and sorrow. The atmosphere is not that of
the Homeric hymn to Demeter. It could not be. It more nearly
recalls Apuleius' story of Cupid and Psyche in its richness of colour
and prettiness, the humanity of its gods and its suggestions of some
deeper meaning. The whole story seems re-conceived, and the new
treatment differs from the old, much as a fairy tale of Andersen's
differs from one of Grimm's collection. The wistful imagination
of the modern has read something of himself and his day into the
legend of divine sorrow.

It opens not very well. Pluto's rhetorical rage at being without
a wife seems ludicrous, when the Fates at once intervene with the
words, "Ask Jove and thou shalt have a wife." But when we come
to Ceres and Proserpine it is very different. Fearful of losing her
child, Ceres hides her in Sicily and then goes to visit Cybele in
Phrygia. Venus is sent by Jove to Proserpine, and to disarm
suspicion takes with her the virgin goddesses Pallas and Diana;
yet her path gleams like a comet's trail of boding, for Venus in
Claudian, as in Apuleius, is a somewhat malign figure. They find

1 Minor Poems, 26. Aponus a medicinal spring near Padua, cf. Lucan vii.
193. Cf. Amm. Marc, xxi. 1, 9, on augury, which benignitas numinis grants to
mankind to help them through the world.

2 vi. Cons. Hon. 349 sen, quod reor, omue Tenant is \ obsequium Marci
mores potuere mereri. Is this a quiet correction of the common Christian
legend ?

3 In Ruf. i. 215 Natura beatis \ omnibus esse dtdit si quis cognorcrit itti.

4 The reader may be at once referred to Mr Pater's essay on The Myth of
Demeter and Persephone in his Greek Studies for a genuinely sympathetic
account of this poem. On one point I differ from him, for I cannot prefer
Ovid's story of the two goddesses.

Olaudian 245

her at her embroidery "the description of which" says Mr Pater
"is the most brilliant of his pictures, and, in its quaint confusion of
images of philosophy with those of mythology, anticipates something
of the fancy of the Italian Renaissance." Let me give it in
Mr Pater's translation.

" Proserpina, filling the house soothingly with her low song, was
working a gift against the return of her mother, with labour all to
be in vain. In it, she marked out with her needle the house of the
gods and the series of the elements, showing by what law, nature,
the parent of all, settled the strife of ancient times, and the seeds
of things disparted to their places ; the lighter elements are borne
aloft, the heavier fall to the centre ; the air grows bright with heat,
a blazing light whirls round the firmament; the sea flows; the
earth hangs suspended in its place. And there were divers colours
in it; she illuminated the stars with gold, infused a purple shade
into the water and heightened the shore with gems of flowers, and,
under her skilful hand, the threads, with their inwrought lustre,
swell up in momentary counterfeit of the waves ; you might think
that the seaweed 1 flapped against the rocks, and that a hollow
murmur came creeping over the thirsty sands. She puts in the five
zones, marking with a red ground the midmost zone, possessed by
burning heat ; its outline was parched and stiff ; the threads
seemed thirsty with the constant sunshine, on either side lay the
two zones proper for human life, where a gentle temperature reigns ;
and at the extremes she drew the twin zones of numbing cold,
making her work dun and sad with the hues of perpetual frost.
She paints in, too, the sacred places of Dis, her father's brother,
and the Manes, so fatal to her ; and an omen of her doom was not
wanting ; for, as she worked, as if with foreknowledge of the future,
her face became wet with a sudden burst of tears. And now in the
utmost border of the tissue she had begun to wind in the wavy line
of the river Oceanus, with its glassy shallows ; but the door sounds
on its hinges and she perceives the goddesses coming."

Next day the three goddesses go forth with many nymphs to
gather flowers which Zephyr has made grow to greet her in a lovely
scene. It should be noticed here, as Mr Mackail has remarked,
that Claudian's treatment of nature leans to the old method, the
rhetorical, the Alexandrine, and is very different from Ausonius'
work in the Moselle. Here once more Claudian is essentially

1 Mr Pater's " sea- wind " seems a misprint of his editor's in view of Claudian's
algam.

246 Life and. Letters in the Fourth Century

decorative. Proserpine, interested beyond her comrades, plucks
and twines, and " crowns herself without thought a fatal augury
of her wedlock." The ground rocks and Pluto appears and bears
her off, his horses plunging at the light. The goddesses Diana
and Pallas would rescue her, but a pacific clap of thunder forbids.
As he drives, Pluto tries to console his bride, but not quite as he
does in the Homeric hymn when her return to earth is threatened.
" Count not the daylight lost. We have other stars, and thou shalt

see a clearer light and marvel yet more at the sun of Elysium

Nor shalt thou lack grassy meadows, where lapped by gentler

Zephyrs fadeless flowers breathe Thou shalt rule rich Autumn

and ever be blest with yellow fruits Purpled kings shall come

to thy feet, mingling with the throng of poor folk. Thou shalt
condemn the guilty; thou shalt give rest to the good." (Tu
requiem latura piis.) Not so the Homeric hymn, but " Thou shalt
have vengeance of such as do thee wrong, whosoever shall not all
their days do thee honour with sacrifices." The conception is very
different. It is not merely the contrast between the vindictive and
juridical spirit of Greek and Roman, but between the earlier and
the later days. " Rest for the good " had perhaps never been such
an object of desire.

Again, the descent of Proserpine into hell is new and strange.
The souls gather to meet her, thick as autumn leaves, many as the
waves or the sands, as the god drives home his bride, " suffering a
smile to play on his lips, and unlike his wonted self." The pale
region rejoices and the nations of the buried triumph. The eternal
night permits less palpable darkness. The penalties of the damned
are relaxed, and death keeps holiday. One has seen something like
this before, though it was not in the classics, but in the apocryphal
gospel, which tells of another descent into hell and the rejoicing of
the dead. Did Claudian think of it, or is it the same instinct which
gave rise to the apocryphal story asserting itself again ?

With the third book we come to Ceres, the Mater Doloroxa, as
she has been called, of heathenism. Jove summons the gods and
explains the design behind his action. To waken mankind from
the sloth and lethargy of the golden age, he has let it pass away
not that he envies man, for gods may not feel ill-will nor do hurt
but want must be nurse and breeder of all good. Yet under the
change Earth complains of her sterility. So he has brought this
grief upon Ceres, and it is decreed that she wander over sea and
land in yearning sorrow, till in joy for learning how to find her

Claudian 247

daughter she give corn to men, but none of the gods must help her.
Thus a moral purpose is given to the old story it hardly knew
before. Aeschylus has shewn us the divine sufferer for mankind,
who paid a cruel penalty for the blessings he had given them, but
here is one whose sufferings are the very means towards the
blessings to be given. They are involuntary, but underlying them
is a great divine design.

Ceres, moved by strange dreams, returns to Sicily and finds the
empty house, and as she crosses the desolate hall she lights on the
web her daughter was embroidering, over which the spider is
weaving his web. Yet she wept not nor mourned ; only she prints
kisses on the fabric, and gathers up the work-things her daughter's
hands had touched and presses them to her bosom for her. This
episode is Claudian's own. The introduction of the spider busy at
what had been the daughter's labour of love, and the contrast,
suggested but not pictured with its "sorrow's crown of sorrow,"
mark Claudian's highest level of poetic feeling 1 .

The old nurse (like the nurses in the tragedies) tells her tale,
which is a little too pretty perhaps for epic ; and we hear Ceres call
out on the gods, angry and distraught ; and then when they answer
not, sad and downcast, she prays at least, as a mother would, to
know her daughter's fate :

hoc tantum liceat certos habuisse dolores.

The poem closes with a striking picture of her standing at night
upon Etna, torch in hand, while the light falls upon the waters far
and wide.

So much we have of a poem, in which I think it is not hard to see
a deeper vein of thought than we find in the poet's panegyrics. He is
not playing with his theme as Ovid played with it, but he reads in it a
moral significance. How he would have worked this out we cannot

1 It may seem harsh to be critical at this point, but though the idea be
beautiful, the expression of it seems to me to fail. Granted that the whole
poem is left unfinished and that this passage may be unrevised, it still shews
the marks of Claudian's habitual haste. There is a want of meditation about
the verses. They are not a final expression, but seem more like a rough note
for future use :

Divinus peril ille labor, spatiumque relictum

audax sacrilego supplebat aranea textu.

The spatium relictum differs little from conversational prose of shop or work-
room, and the adjectives audax and sacrilego are by no means inevitable. They
are weak in fact. Put alongside this almost any similar passage of Virgil
ignarum Laurens habet ora Mimanta and Claudian's weakness will be felt.
I have emphasized this, because this is a sort of crucial passage where a poet
must rise if he can.

248 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

say, for like Proserpine's embroidery it is for ever unfinished. Still
we may not be far astray in holding that he means to justify the
ways of God to men. Of course his work here is not free from
the defects it shews elsewhere. It bears marks of haste and
cleverness and rhetoric, but still the poem has undeniable dignity
and beauty.

Liceat certos habuisse dolores ! This later Paganism was amiable
~and on the whole cheerful. It had left behind the essential hope-
lessness and sadness of Virgil, and was happy and contented in
makeshift truth. It did not go below the surface very much. It
was not vitally concerned with realities, but dealt with dreams and
memories and hopes. Thus it wanted that depth of feeling and
conviction which come from contact with life, and the robuster
minds turned away. For those who really thought, who really
felt the weariness and darkness of the world, paganism, even though
reinforced by Neo-Platonism, had neither consolation nor hope. It
was not solid enough. Augustine, speaking of his sorrow as a young
man at his friend's death, writes : " The burden should have been laid
on Thee to be healed; I knew this, yet I would not and I could
not, for when I thought of Thee, Thou vast not to me anything
firm or solid" The dreams of Claudian, like those of Julian, were
beautiful, and some perhaps were true, but they lacked the cerium
Augustine sought and mankind with him. Volebam enim eorum
quae non viderem ita me cerium fieri ut certus essem quod septem et
tria decem sint.

Historians may debate the value of this or that statement of
Claudian's, and with reason. But they must admit his evidence on
the general conditions of the life of his day. Its pageants and
circuses and splendours, its magnificence and flunkeyism, its deso-
lation and wretchedness, he brings vividly before us. The Goths in
Greece and in Phrygia seem to haunt us, even when we are most
confidently assured that the Empire is saved and that its frontiers
will be wider than ever 1 . For his pictures of Gothic devastation
seem not to be so overdrawn as those are which shew us the smiling
and glorious Rome under Stilicho's wing. If he suffered, and he
certainly did suffer, as a poet by undertaking the literary defence of
Stilicho, it was not all loss, for Rome the Rome he loved in her
glitter and her misery, stands before us in his gorgeous series of
panegyrics as she could scarcely else have done.

1 Here for example is a tell-tale phrase solo poterit Stilichone medente \
crescere Romanum vultius tectura cicatrix, Cons. Stil. ii. 204.

CHAPTER XI

PRUDENTIUS

Die tropaeum passionis, die triumphalem crucem.

Cath. ix. 83

EVERY man is influenced to a greater or less extent by his age
and his contemporaries, and we must understand these if we would
understand the man. His thoughts will be guided by those of
his time, for whether he agree or disagree, whether he lead or
follow he will think of what other people are thinking around him.

Prudentius was born in the middle of the fourth century, in
the midst of a cluster of great men. Jerome and Ambrose were
born in 340, Chrysostom in 347, Prudentius in 348, and Augustine
in 354. Prudentius was thirteen when Julian ascended the throne
and made the last attempt to galvanize heathenism into life, and by
his failure shewed the world that its day had passed. Athanasius,
a household name in every Christian land, died when Prudentius
was between twenty and thirty. He was thirty when the Goths
won their first great victory in 378 at Adrianople. He lived to
see Rome herself the Christian centre of a Christian world,
and perhaps died felix opportunitate mortis before she too fell
to the conquering Goth when Alaric sacked Rome in 410. It was
a century of great movements and great men interesting from
its dark beginning with the persecutions of Diocletian, Galerius
and Maximin to its end. It was the century when, triumphant
over foes without, as Prudentius loves to emphasize, the Church
had her first great world-wide fight with foes within to secure that
victorious Christianity should not prove after all another form of
heathenism. The councils from Nicaea onward mark the progress
of the struggle. And all the time there was this dark cloud of

250 Life and Letters in tlie Fourth Century

barbarism threatening in the North a terrible background for all
this carnal and spiritual warfare.

Christianity, as we have seen, had won the day and had won
the world. It was no longer perilous to be a Christian and the
world rushed into the Church. We picture to ourselves an Athan-
asius and an Augustine as types of the age, but a far more typical
man is the great semi-Arian ecclesiastical diplomatist and politician
Eusebius of Nicomedeia. The world had swarmed into the Church
and taken the sacraments, but the result could have been pro-
phesied. The tone of Christian living and thinking grew lower and
lower. Even before now heathen influences had deeply coloured
much of the best Christian thought, but now the dye is un-
mistakable. The priesthood had grown great, thanks to St Cyprian
and his followers ; it now grew greater still. Saints and martyrs
took the place of eponymous heroes and demi-gods a change for
the better perhaps, for they were less immoral, but scarcely an
improvement on primitive Christianity. Eastern and Western
alike" had elevated the Supreme God to such a height that He was
out of reach of the universe, and now they began to introduce
the martyrs to bridge the gulf. And with the martyrs came their
relics, the tales of their passions, their tombs and their images,
pilgrimages to see all these wonders, and prayers at the shrines.
We shall find all this in Prudentius, and we must remember that
he was a Spaniard and in Spain began the worship of pictures 1 .
Simultaneously came in from outside heathen notions which turned
the simple rites of the early Church into mysteries. Let any one
read St Ambrose on baptism and contrast him with St Paul, and the
change in Christian thought will be felt. And with all this came a
lower tone of Christian living, and the gladiatorial games (not ended
till after Prudentius' death, and the subject of more than one
honourable appeal made by him) and the races and the theatres
(privatum consistoi'ium impudicitiae) divided with the churches
and the martyrs' shrines the interests of mankind, and as is usual
in such cases took more than their share.

Of all this and of the heresies with which the Church, especially
the Western Church, had to contend, we find abundant evidence
in Prudentius. Like most Western Christians he had little aptitude

1 See Dale, Synod of Elvira, pp. 292, 295. This Council met about 306 A.D.
and already found it necessary to forbid the use of images and pictures in the
churches. Pope Damasus, whose energy in this direction was epoch-making,
was also a Spaniard.

Prudentius 251

for theological speculation and was intensely practical. Accordingly
with the rest he adopted the Nicene Creed as the final statement
of Christian truth, and except by accident turned neither to the
right hand nor to the left.

Prudentius was born in 348, probably in the Spanish town of
Caesaraugusta or Saragossa 1 . "His early age wept under the
cracking rods 2 ," he tells us, and leaves us to infer what other elements
there had been in his education. Probably, like most other boys,
he studied the two great subjects of the day grammar and rhetoric.
Ausonius, his contemporary (310 393), the poet of Bordeaux,
wrote a series of poems on his professors and it appears that most
of them were grammarians or rhetoricians. Both would use the
same text-bookVirgil. In every school of the Latin world
haerebat nigrofuligo Maroni, and as the grime gathered on Maro's
page the grammarian drew from it all the lessons letters can give-
grammar, prosody, style, archaeology, philosophy, history, religion,
and what not ? Bui while the rhetorician taught the youth to
write replies for Dido, he did not teach them the real meaning and
value of Virgil, as Macrobius' works plainly shew. Still Virgil
left his mark on this age of Latin literature too. They wept for
Virgil's Dido if not for the rhetorician's, and echoes of his music
passed into their verse. World and Church alike loved him and
canonized him in their own ways.

Juvencus, an elder Spanish contemporary of Prudentius, alludes
in the preface of his Evangelic History to Minciadae dulcedo
Maronis, and the same sweetness shaped Prudentius as a hundred
passages in his poems shew. Over and above his Virgil, he learnt
his Bible to such an extent, that M. Boissier finds rather more of
it in his poems than he thinks will be readily intelligible to modern

1 Tarraco and Calagurris have also been named as the poet's birthplace, but
opinion is generally in favour of Caesaraugusta. See Sixt, die Lyrischen Gedichte
des A. Prud. Clemens, p. 3, n. 1, where it is discussed at length. Brockhaus,
Aur. Prud. Clem. p. 15.

2 It is curious to find both that St Augustine (Conf. i. 9, 14) should have a
good deal to say about the rod, a subject to which he devoted much ineffectual
prayer in his boyhood to his parents' amusement ; and that Ausonius (Ep. 22,
29), in a letter designed to encourage his grandson, should give him a positively
tingling list of a whole armoury of scholastic implements, memories perhaps of
more active days. Elsewhere Prudentius gives a more particular account of
the hatefulness of school-life in the crowning martyrdom of the schoolmaster
Cassianus. It is not written, like Ausonius' description, from the teacher's
point of view, and the general conclusion seems to be in 11. 27, 28 :

doctor amarus enim discenti semper ephebo,
nee dulcis ulli disciplina infantiae est.

252 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

readers 1 . At a later period in life he seems also to have studied
the apologists and perhaps others of the fathers. The influence
of Tertullian is particularly conspicuous in his works 2 .

On boyhood followed the toga of manhood, and taught him to
lie, he tells us, and wanton lust and selfish indulgence denied his
youth. This may be poetical license. His language reminds one
of St Augustine's Confessions, yet the question may fairly be
raised whether the poet had really a loose and ill-governed youth
to deplore like the saint (though injustice has been done to
Augustine here, as Loofs shews), or whether a highly sensitive
conscience, like Bunyan's, led him to over-estimate his youthful
depravity. When he speaks of learning to lie, falsa loqui, it should
be remarked that he is only using the common Christian description
of the study of rhetoric 3 .

Though he speaks of militia he was probably not in the army,
but in the civil service, of which the word is sometimes used 4 . He
rose to be twice a magistrate of noble cities,' dealt out Roman
law to the good, and was a terror to evildoers, and was finally
honoured by the Emperor and awoke to find a snowy head convicting
him of old age. He was fifty-seven, he tells us, and his tone has
suggested premature age. He looks back on his past life with
regret, honourable as it had clearly been, and asks in sadness,
" What useful thing have I done in all these years ? " He then
says he will now begin life in earnest. He will, he tells us, write
hymns day and night, war against heresies and unravel the catholic
faith, trample under foot the sacred things of heathenry, do despite
to Rome's idols, hymn the martyrs and praise the Apostles.

Accordingly some have supposed his poetical work to belong
to the latter years of his life, untouched till he was fifty-seven !
But apart from the fact that he knows nothing of Stilicho's fall
in 408, which would seem to limit his activity to a short period,

1 Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme, ii. 115 "ces recits nous etant devenus moins
familiers."

2 See Brockbaus, Aurelius Prudentius Clemens in seiner Bedeutung fitr die
Klrche seiner Zeit, c. 8. I shall bave to refer again to this excellent mono-
graph.

3 Of. Paulinus to Ausonius (Ep. x.), God's light is obscured :

quam vis sophorum callida arsque rhetorum et

figmenta vatum nnbilant,
qui cor da falsis atque vanis ivibitunt
tantumque linguas instruunt.

Similarly St Augustine in his Confessions, e.g. iv. 2, 2.

4 E.g. Aug. Con/, viii. 6, 15, of an Ageus in Rebus. Sixt however (p. 5)
believes he was in the army, against Brockhaus and Puech.

Prudentius 253

we can certainly date his second book against Symmachus 403 A.D.
ie, two years earlier than the date he himself gives for his
preface. It is surely more reasonable to assume he wrote this
preface on the completion rather than the inception of his book
of collected poems.

First, however, let us see what had been achieved by his
predecessors in Christian verse. The extraordinary poems of
Commodian, written in hexameters which suggest Evangeline quite
as much as the Aeneid, would hardly have been counted as
literature at all by cultured people. In fact it seems it was not for
such readers that they were intended J . We are told that Tertullian
wrote poems and Cyprian too, but the best editors group their
several poems as spurious works, and in three cases the same
piece appears amongst the pseudonyma of both fathers. More
genuine works are those of some men roughly contemporaries of
Prudentius. Damasus, Pope 366 A.D., wrote neat Ovidian verse
on Jerusalem, some hymns on the saints, a couple of acrostics
on our Lord's name, and a large number of poetical inscriptions
for the Catacombs, which under his care were becoming great
centres for pilgrimages. There are moreover some dull and rather
halting hexameters on Genesis (a fatally attractive theme at this
period), which have been attributed to Hilary of Poitiers, though it
is now believed they are not his work. I come now to two more
important poets. "Juvencus the presbyter," says St Jerome (Ep.
Ixx. 5), "in the reign of Constantine, set forth the history of our
Lord and Saviour in verse, and was not afraid to submit the
majesty of the Gospel to the laws of metre." Juvencus was a
Spaniard, a fellow-countryman of Damasus and Prudentius. His
harmony of the Gospels is a quiet and very neat piece of work,
holding to the original with extraordinary closeness. His metre
is most monotonous if correct. But such works have little interest,
however successful. St Ambrose of Milan wrote hymns for the
Christian day in iambic dimeters, one of them noble in its sim-
plicity, the others simple but hardly noble. These hymns were an
epoch-making innovation ; but Ambrose, if more serviceable as a
hymn-writer, is by no means equal to Prudentius as a poet.

Prudentius is after all the first really great Christian poet,

1 What pleasure was there for ears trained in Virgil in two such lines as
these ? (Carm. Apol. 942) :

nee mortuos plangunt nee lugunt more de nostro,
exspectantque vitam resurrectionemque futuram.

254 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

towering over his fellow-Christians as Claudian did over the
heathen. It is not easy to-day to realize his significance, so
familiar are we with the union of Christian thought and poetry.
Prudentius lived in a day when men clung to old ways and old
themes, and he displays a certain independence and even originality
in daring to strike out a new path in literature. He broke away
from tradition, took an unfamiliar subject, and triumphantly shewed
mankind that it was capable of poetic treatment.

He is as strongly Roman in feeling and instinct as Claudian
himself, if possible more Roman than Claudian. He is as proud
of Rome's history, her victories and her lawgiving, her heroes and
patriots. He too has stood in the long succession and has had
his share, as Claudian never had, in the ruling of the Empire, and
the temper of the man of affairs clung to him. All he does has
the Roman mark upon it it is all directed to some practical end 1 .
But he is a Christian, and if possible he is a Christian before he
is a Roman. Ausonius passed for a Christian, but Prudentius,
in every line of his work, proclaims his faith and serves his Church
with all the energy of his being. It was the age of the victorious
Church, mistress of the Roman world, and not yet seriously dreading
the heathenism and savagery of the German. Prudentius writes
with the consciousness of victory. The cross is the triumphal
emblem of the labarum and has very little suggestion of suffering
about it. Yet the victory was not quite complete. Heathenism
lived on in a stubborn minority, and was ready to reclaim many
from among the Christian majority on slight provocation 2 .

Prudentius must from a child have heard many a tale of
martyrdom. The five edicts of persecution from 303 to 308 must
have fallen in his grandfather's, if not in his father's time, and
Prudentius had at the most receptive time of boyhood lived through
the reign of Julian (Apoth. 449), for whom it is interesting to
find he had like St Augustine a not unkindly feeling 3 . Conse-

1 Cf. his question when he reviews his life; quid nos utile tanti spatio
temporis egimus ? This is the old Eoman ideal of utile. Cf. Horace, Epp.
ii. 1, 163, the Roman inquired quid Sophocles et Thespis et Aeschylus utile
ferrent.

2 Augustine, Enarr, in Psalm, xcviii. 2 magis remanserunt idola in cordibus
paganorum, quam in locis templorum.

3 Cf. Apoth. 450 me puero, meinini, ductor fortissimus armis \ conditor et
legum, celeberrimus ore manuque \ consultor patriae . . .perfidus ille Deo, quamvis
non perfidus orbi. Julian as a man of action, a soldier, a lawgiver, appealed to
Prudentius, who would have cared little for his philosophy.

Augustine, C. D. v. 21 apostatae Juliani...egregiam indolem. For Augustine,
never a civil servant (unless as professor at Milan, perhaps), and writing after

Prudentius 255

quently he has a good deal to say about idolatry, and if much
that he says was said before by Tertullian and others, still we
must not think it did not need to be repeated, or that our poet
was fighting a dead issue. And again, heresy called for attention.

We do our thinking so much in compartments that we do not
always realize to what extent things are mixed in this world. We
read of Julian, Valentinian, Stilicho, and we read of Athanasius,
Jerome and Augustine, but we do not always properly correlate
the spheres in which they moved. Prudentius was the contem-
porary of them all, and in a measure entered into the life of
them all. He saw the Roman world as a whole still, though
there were already signs of the ultimate cleavage of East and
West. Various questions rose in his mind. Why had God so
markedly throughout all these centuries subdued people after
people to Rome, and welded the world into one 1 ? Long ago
Virgil had seen mankind under Roman sway, and in Prudentius'
own day Claudian was writing nobly of Rome's imperial destiny,
for he saw the Roman world a world of Romans, and he was
himself the symbol of his age, a Roman poet of Egyptian birth and
Greek education.

Haec est in gremio victos quae sola recepit,
humanumque genus communi nomine fovit,
matris non dominae ritu ; tivesque vocavit
quos domuit nexuque pio longinqua revinxit.

Cons. Stil. iii. 150.

But Claudian's reason would not satisfy Prudentius. The true reason
lay outside Claudian's range.

Prudentius rises to the problem in the very spirit of St Paul.
He sees that the object of the unification of mankind under the
sway of Rome was the unification of mankind under the sway of
Christ. There was to be one earthly and one heavenly empire,
the one in order to the other ; mankind was to be one in Rome
that it might be one in Christ. Christ was the author of Rome's
greatness for Himself. This was a new idea.

Alaric's capture of Home, it was impossible to have Prudentius' feeling for Home
and the Empire. He had to find God's ideal state elsewhere.

1 Not everybody asked such questions. Cyprian, for example (Quod idola
dei non sunt, 5), is content to say reyna autem non merito accidunt sed sorte
variantur.

256 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Felices, si cuncta Deo sua prospera Christo
principe disposita scissent ! qui currere regna
certis ducta modis Romanorumque triumphos
crescere et impletis voluit se infundere saeclis.

Adv. Symm. i. 287.

Vis dicam quae causa tuos Romane labores
in tantum extulerit ? quis gloria fotibus aucta
sic cluat, impositis ut mundum frenet habenis ?
Discordes linguis populos et dissona cultu
regna volens sociare Deus, subjungier uni
imperio quidquid tractabile moribus esset,
concordique jugo retinacula mollia ferre
constitute, quo corda hominum conjuncta teneret
religionis amor : nee enim jit copula Christo
digna nisi implicitas societ metis unica gentes.

Adv. Symm. ii. 582.

Christe numen unicum,
splendor, virtus Patris,
factor orbis et poll
atque auctor horum moenium:

qui sceptra Romae in vertice
rerum locasti, sanciens
mundum Quirinali togae
servire et armis cedere :

ut discrepantum gentium
mores et observantiam,
linguasque et ingenia et sacra
unis domares legibus.

Steph. ii. 413.

Hoc actum est tantis successibus atque triumphis
Romani imperil ; Christo jam tune venienti,
crede, parata via est.

Adv. Symm. ii. 618.

It follows then that heathenism is an obstacle to God's designs,
but not the only one. When the fighting is at an end in the
Psychomachia and every vice is vanquished, a new enemy is
discovered within the ranks of the victors Discord or Heresy,
and the names of Photinus and Arius occur immanes feritate lupi 1 .

1 Curiously enough this is Prudentius' only reference to Arius. The West
was as yet little troubled about Arianism. Justina and the Germans were
the only Western Arians of any importance. As a general rule the heretics
Prudentius attacks are those against whom Tertullian has supplied him with
ammunition.

Prudentius 257

Heresy has to share the fate of Idolatry, Lust, and other enemies,
and then the temple of God is built within the soul. So in the
case of the world Heresy mars God's intended unity, and must
be done away. To what this led we see in the case of a younger
contemporary, Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, who asked
the Emperor to give him earth clear of heretics and he would
assure him of heaven in return. Fate's revenges are interesting.
Nestorius was an arch-heretic ere he died. Prudentius is very
far from such violence, and would use no force with heretic or
heathen. In fact he would not use violence even with idols, but
cites with evident approval the decree of Theodosius that as works
of art they are to be preserved the workmanship of great artists,
fairest ornaments of our land 1 .

We may now turn to the works of Prudentius and pass them
in rapid review. All of them are practical. His theological poems
are directed to the end of presenting the true faith to his fellow
Christians in an attractive form and at the same time clear of
error. The Daily Round (or Cathemerinon) displays the same
ethical tendency employing abundant Scripture to make all aspects
of our life conform with our Lord's, each action recalling His, for
as He redeemed us by sharing our life, we rise by associating His
own with ours.

Beginning then with the two theological poems, the Hamar-
tigenia and the Apotheosis, we find Prudentius displays remarkable
ease and grace in handling well and poetically subjects which
appear difficult and unpromising. He shews great skill in the
vivid illustration of abstruse doctrines, and by glowing language,
range and insight he achieves passages of distinction and elevation.
His theology, if not original, is at least intelligent, though as I
have said he occasionally slips a little one way or the other from
the true Athanasian position. These poems have been pronounced
to be his best, and the poet has been compared with Lucretius for
the enthusiasm and the poetic feeling with which he presents his
views 2 .

The Hamartigenia deals with the origin of evil and with

1 c. Symm. i. 502 ; cf. Steph. ii. 481. See Gregorovius, Rome in the Middle
Ages (translation), i. 61, 76 7. Cod. Theod. 16, 10, 8 aedem in qua simulacra
feruntur posita, artis pretio quam divinitate metienda, jugiter patere publici
consilii auctoritate decernimus.

2 See Brockhaus, op. cit. p. 165, who prefers these Hexameter poems; and
Boissier, P. P. ii. who gives the higher praise to the lyrical poems (p. 107), but
compares the others with Lucretius ( 3).

G. 17

258 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Marcion and his two gods, following mainly the lines of Tertullian's
first two books against Marcion. If Marcion will maintain dividuum
regnare Deum, Nature at least knows but one God. If two Gods,
why not more? Si duo sunt igitur, cur non sunt multa Deorum
millia? One of Marcion's gods is author of evil and of the
Old Testament, and maker of man and the universe, but he is
more a devil than a god. Inventor vitii non est d#us. And then
we have the story of Satan's revolt and his envy of man, of man's
fall, and nature's corruption, the consequence of that fall. It is a
striking passage of some length, tracing the painful and shameful
results of man's first sin, and exhibiting the general depravation
of the senses, though at the beginning it was otherwise, for God
saw His work that it was good (214 251). Then after a good
deal of further discussion, and a prodigious parable from nature
turning on the life-history of the viper 1 which illustrates sin being
its own eventual punishment, we have the great question, Why
does God permit evil?

si non wit Deus esse malum cur non vetat? (641)

And the familiar and perhaps only answer :

non fit sponte bonus cut non est prompta potestas

velle aliud * * (691)

probitate coacta
gloria nulla venit sordetque ingloria virtus. (694)

Man has a free choice, and so we come to lines which recall
Browning.

Nunc inter vitae dominum mortisque magistrum
consistit medius: vocat hinc Deus inde tyrannus
ambiguum atque suis se motibus altemantem. (721)

No, when the fight begins within himself

A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head

Satan looks up between his feet both tug

He's left himself i' the

There follow illustrations from Lot and Naomi's daughters-
in-law and bird catching, with an allusion to the Two Ways
that wonderful parable, popular from the days of Hercules' choice,
and in Prudentius' hands reminding one of Bunyan's Hill Difficulty

1 This may be found in part in Pliny, N. H. x. 62. The young vipers eat
their way out of their mother, so killing her. Thus 'sin, having conceived,
bringeth forth death.' Plutarch (Ser. Num. Vind. end) quotes this viper as
Pindar's.

Prudentim 259

and its alternatives. And so to pictures of Heaven and Hell, which
may be rendered into English as follows :

Then, of foreknowledge, did the Father set

Murk Tartarus to burn with streams of lead.

Pitch and bitumen fill the infernal sluice,

Sunk deep in darkling hell. Beneath he bade,

Deep under Phlegethon's malignant wave,

The greedy worm to live and prey on guilt

Perpetual. For He knew Whose breath had given

Immortal life to this our bodily frame,

A soul from His own lips, that cannot die,

Nor climb again the sphere, from whence it came,

Once sin-stained, but must sink within th' abyss

That burns for ever. Like immortal years

To worm and flame and punishment He gave,

That, as the soul should never die, the pang

Should know no death. The tortures waste and feed

Their food eternal. Death itself forsakes

Their ceaseless groanings, and bids live and weep.

But, far remote, in fields of Paradise,
The prescient Majesty to spirits pure
Assigned rewards, to them that know not guilt,
That look not back upon Gomorrha's fall,
But fled with eyes averted from the gloom,
The wrath to fall upon a wretched world.
And first with easy flight they reach the stars,
Whence came God's breath to move the new-made man.
For since the downward weight of life no more
Burdens, nor any bond of iron clogs,
The glowing spark with speed reclimbs the air,
And scales the sky anew, glad to forsake
The limits of the alien prison-house.
Her child, new come from exile, Faith receives
To her maternal breasts, and bids enjoy
Heaven's pleasures, and recount the many toils
Known in this caravanserai of flesh. ,
There on a couch of purple, soft reclined,
It tastes the sweetness of eternal flowers
And quaffs the nectar on its bed of rose.
While for the rich, whose smoke goes up afar,
Who thirst for water and the rains of heaven,
For all their prayers, it cannot put a hand
To the parched palate to allay the flame.
But marvel not, the blessed and the damned
Far, far apart are held, and th' interspace
Spreads vast between the spheres of bad and good.

(824866)
172

260 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Here are elements from different sources, never mingled before,
but at least a new realm has been found for Christian art. The
poem ends with the prayer for a mild sentence upon the poet at
the last.

In the Apotheosis we have to do with a series of heretics who
misrepresent our Lord's nature. First of all the Patripassian is
confounded with references to the manifestations of Christ in the
Old Testament the common property of the defender of the faith
from Justin Martyr's days though as usual Tertullian is Pru-
dentius' more immediate inspiration. Then comes Sabellius, who
despoils God of Fatherhood by not allowing the Son. Gods are
many, but does any idolater really believe Jove or dog-faced
Anubis occupies the supreme throne ? Consult barbati deliramenta
Platonis, and despite cocks owed to Aesculapius, the philosophers
conclude their arguments with one god 1 . Christ was at once
God and man. It is only in Christ we understand Rome's
history.

Then the Jew has his turn and is confronted with legis in
effigie scriptum per enigmata Christum, and our poet grows eloquent
as he demands to know in what literature Christ is not now
famous : all the languages of Pilate's inscription proclaim Him ;

Hebraeus pangit stilus, Attica copia pangit,

pangit et Ausoniae facundia tertia linguae; (379)

and he rehearses the triumphs of the cross among Scythians, Goths,
Moors, and the world over, and the silencing of the world's oracles,
Delphi, Dodona, Ammon and so forth, at the birth of Christ, adding
a tale of his boyhood, how the heathen rites of Julian were baulked
by a German page who wore a cross 2 . The exiled Jew is being
punished for the death of Christ. With this he turns to the
Psilanthropists Homuncionites or Mannikinists as he calls them
and confronts them with our Lord's miracles, for which he goes
by preference to St John's Gospel, as that one of the four which
most clearly sets forth the deity of Christ. He discusses the nature
of the soul, which is made and not begotten by God, yet is not
corporeal (in corpore discos rem non corpoream) as was supposed

1 This flout at the philosopher is in Tertullian's vein, who mocked but
studied. Prudentius perhaps had no Greek. Neither had Augustine nor
Ausonius very much. The Greek titles of the books may be a fanciful imita-
tion of Virgil.

2 Brockhaus, p. 23, ingeniously makes the boy a German on account of his
hair e cuneo puerorum flavicomantum.

Prudentius 261

by many in his day, e.g. by Augustine in earlier life. In this
connexion he drops at least one memorable line,

sed speculum deitatis homo esl. (834)

Lastly he deals with the Docetists who held Christ was a
phantasm, and really strikes out a fresh thought and a noble one.

Et quid agit Christus si me non susdpit? aut quern

liberat infirmum si dedignatur adire

carnis onus, manuumque horret monumenta suarum? (1020)

These lines may be paralleled by Browning's

I never realized God's birth before
How he grew likest God in being born.

Tantus amor terrae, he continues, tanta est dilectio nostri. So much
for the purely theological works of Prudentius.

We now come to his book Peri Stephanon or The Crowns
a set of fourteen hymns to martyrs, of very various metres and
merits. Many of the Saints are Spanish, so many as to give confir-
mation to the statement of his own Spanish origin. Others he had
found on his travels painted in sacred pictures in churches, com-
memorated by local usage, or told of in Damasus' inscriptions.
Thus he chiefly depends on verbal as against written traditions,
and a curious confusion hangs about his stories here and there.
Notably this is the case with Romanus and more strangely still
with Cyprian, for he has patched together incongruous legends
to the exclusion of real facts, actually confusing the great Cyprian
of Carthage with the converted magician Cyprian of Antioch. In
those hymns specially describing martyrdoms the general scheme
is a confession, torture and a miracle, but after all it must be
confessed that martyrology is generally a dull subject, and the
poet who deals with it is destined to repeat himself like a Poet
Laureate who makes birthday odes, and to charm as little. Pru-
dentius however did his best, for he had a Spaniard's love of the
Saints and a great enthusiasm for them, and he introduced some
new features not all of which are successful. In places his rhetorical
training shews itself very clearly.

The best of the hymns is perhaps the second, to St Lawrence,
a Spaniard and an archdeacon, who suffered at Rome under Decius.

262 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

The complaint is made by the Praefectus Urbi that the Church
is hoarding wealth and hunting legacies :

et summa pietas creditur
nudare dulces lib&ros:

charges if not already true soon to be so. Lawrence has three
days to produce this wealth, and then brings forward a crowd of
pensioners, ne pauperem Christum putes. He is then committed to
the "gridiron," and thence utters a remarkable hymn from which
I have already quoted. He foresees (no doubt with the aid of the
poet's retrospect) a Christian Rome and a Christian Emperor who
will close the temples and keep as works of art what now are idols.
The hymn ends with a picture of the lights of the Senate, sometime
Luperci and Flamens, kissing the thresholds of martyrs' shrines,
while afar beyond Alps and Pyrenees the Spanish poet sees the
saint in heaven and implores his grace.

Audi benignus supplicem
Christi reum Prudentium.

One or two of the hymns border on the grotesque through the
exaggeration of the poet, who has, as M. Boissier says, le gout de
Vhorrible. He is apt too to be carried away by admiration for the
un-Christian mania for martyrdom which led many early Christians
to insult their neighbours and provoke authority to the great peril
of the Church, which condemned this unnecessary and dangerous
zeal 1 . The story of St Eulalia, a child martyr of Emerita, is told
trippingly in a dactylic metre, roughly the first half a Virgiliau
hexameter, which we also find in Ausonius 2 . G ermine nobilis
-Eulalia was a sadly precocious child who would be martyred, in
very truth a torva puellula. She insulted the praetor, declaimed
at large on idolatry, spat at the unhappy magistrate who was
really very gentle with her, kicked over the idols and thuribles,
and so achieved a martyrdom, the details of which a Spanish and
rhetorical poet could hardly be expected to spare us 3 . The story

1 See Dale, Synod of Elvira, p. 30. This Spanish Council (about 306)
forbade voluntary and aggressive martyrdom within a decade (say) of Eulalia's
exploit. It is interesting, in this connexion, to note first, that St Theresa in
1522, while still a little girl, had a similar childish ambition to be martyred by
the Moors, which was happily frustrated, for she grew to be one of the most
useful and sensible women in Spain ; and second, that Eulalia's name is still
familiar in Spain, being borne to-day by one of the King's sisters.

2 Sixt (p. 30) finds in the metre (as well as in the story) "etwas schwarmer-
isches" and a certain "stiirmisches Ungestiim."

3 Compare Claudian's "dissection of Rufinus" as Gibbon calls it. Boissier,
F. P. ii. 122, compares the Tragedies of the Spaniard Seneca.

Prudentius 263

of St Cassianus the schoolmaster, delivered over for death to his
schoolboys, is amusing ; but while Prudentius took a pleasure in
a rhetorical elaboration of it he also felt it seriously, for when
he saw a picture of it all at Forum Cornelii on his way to Rome,
he was moved to prayer. His prayer was granted, and he wrote
this poem in grateful memory of it. One of the poems (iv.) is
a tour de force, perhaps in imitation of Martial's little epigram
(i. 62), on the towns of Italy and Spain and their literary glories,
but for poets Prudentius puts saints. The cities appear before
Christ on the Judgment- day bringing their saints, and Caesar-
augusta, the poet's own town, surpasses them all with no less than
eighteen martyrs crowded into sapphic verse a great achievement,
but scarcely poetry. The worst poem of the collection, as a work
of art, is the martyrdom of St Romanus. The poet has made the
mistake of developing the usual confession of a martyr into an
elaborate polemic against heathenism along with an exposition of
Christianity. These are drawn mainly from Tertullian, and are
witty and effective in their way, but forensic rather than philo-
sophic. They are also quite out of place and terribly delay the
action. The saint in a speech of two hundred and sixty lines
denounces heathenism, and even when his tongue is cut out, he talks
on for hundreds of lines more. A ridiculous episode in this poem
is that of another lamentably precocious child, who knows a good
deal too much Theology and Physiology for his seven years, and
who, when a familiar remedy fails

(pusionem praedpit
sublime tollant et manu pulsent nates'),

is put to death, while his mother sings a psalm to encourage him.
Romanus was a real historic character, but Eusebius' account of
his martyrdom (M. P. 2) is more reasonable. A poem on St
Hippolytus 1 gives an interesting account of the Catacombs, which
had become under Damasus' care a centre of interest for Christian
pilgrims, and with their traditions and pictures greatly influenced
Prudentius. The hymn to St Peter and St Paul, with descriptions
of their churches in Rome, is interesting and valuable as con-
temporary evidence on these famous places then recently built.

It is quite clear that the poet shares the popular view of the
Christian church of his day as to the saints. He had not the

1 The catacomb of Hippolytus was found by de Rossi in 1881, but the picture
which inspired Prudentius' poem has not survived. Sixt, p. 35.

264 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

uneasiness of Augustine, but after all the Christian faith meant
more to Augustine in spiritual and intellectual implication than
to any of his contemporaries 1 .

The Psychomachia, which perhaps in view of the likenesses
it presents to Bunyan we may translate Holy War, has been
pronounced the richest of his works in colour and brilliance.
It was the most widely read of them all in the Middle Ages, which
means a good deal, for Prudentius was then one of the most
popular authors. No one was more universally read and imitated,
and no books, with the exception of the Bible, were so abundantly
provided with Old High German glosses as the Daily Round and
the Peri Stephanon. This book however has also great significance
from its influence on medieval art 2 .

The book may be considered from two points of view. It may
represent the progress and victory of virtue in the individual soul,
and no doubt it does, but it also suggests the victory of the faith
in the Roman world. The vices described are especially those
characteristic of Rome. Pride, for example, plumes itself on
military glory, and has the greatest scorn for the various unwarlike
and unmanly virtues of peaceful Christianity (11. 237 9). Luxury
"coming from the West" (clearly Rome) has all the air of that
Roman luxury and licence described by Jerome and Ammianus
Marcellinus (11. 310 ff.). Avarice "doffs the arms of hell and
transforms herself to fairness ; she becomes a Virtue, stern of mien
and garb, whom they call thrift (frugi), who loves to live carefully
...and calls theft and covetousness by a sweet name, forethought
for the family " (11. 551 563) i.e. Avarice is the crowning virtue
of the Sabine farmer of the good old days.

The War is a series of single conflicts between Virtues and
Vices, in which the former invariably win. Lust is overcome by
Modesty by the virtue of the Virgin birth of our Lord :

inde omnis jam diva caro est quae concipit ilium ; (76)

majestate quidem non degenerante per ^lsum

carnis sed miseros ad nobiliora trahente. (80)

Patience waits for Anger to fall of itself. Pride stumbles into

1 Aug. de moribus eccl. cath. 34, 75 Novi multos esse sepulchrorum et pictura-
rum adoratores ; novi multos esse qui luxuriosissime super mortuos bibant et epulas
cadaveribus exhibentes super sepultos seipsos sepeliant et voracitates ebrietatesque
suas deputent religioni . . .nee mirum est in tanta copia populorum.

2 See Brockhaus, pp. 36, 165 n., and Schmitz, Die Gedichte des P. und ihre
Entetehungszeit, p. 9.

Prudentius 265

a pit (which had been dug by Deceit), after reviling Humility and
her sister graces ; %

Justitia est ubi semper egens, et pauper Honestas.

Luxury, gorgeously described as she rides to the fray, comes nearer
winning the day, but is overthrown by Sobriety, who displays the
Vexillum sublime crucis, a favourite theme with Prudentius, who
has a pride in referring to the Cross, especially as a symbol of the
victory of Christianity. It is the triumphant cross of the labarum,
the monogram >|< which Constantine made Rome's standard, to
which the dragon-flags, so often to be found in Claudian and
Ammianus and elsewhere, have had to bow 1 . It may seem strange
to us that he has so little to say of the cross in its relation to
Christ's death, in its theological significance, or as an emblem of
Christian suffering.

Lastly, as I have said, Heresy is slain by Faith and torn in
pieces as the soldiers tore Rufinus in Claudian's poem. Then,
after eulogies on peace, recalling St Paul's chapter on Charity
(11. 769787), a temple is built to the design of the Apocalypse,
with gates and jewels as there described. Altogether it is a bright
and interesting work, though one is startled to find how Homerically
the Virtues treat the fallen Vices.

The Oathemermon or Daily Round is a collection of hymns
for the Christian's day, made more various and instructive by
long but acceptable and often impressive digressions into Christian
doctrine and Scripture story, which are often only very loosely,
if at all, connected with the immediate theme, and are further
developed in the same way themselves. Thus the hymns are not
adapted for singing in church, like those of Ambrose, which were
clearly their original inspiration, and the influence of which is
visible in them, especially in the first two. Prudentius however
does not seem to have meant his poems to be sung in church by
common worshippers, but to be read by persons of more or less
education. Yet while none of them has apparently ever been sung
at length, most of them have contributed to Christian hymnology,
for passages have been taken from them and used as hymns. The
Roman breviary contains about a dozen of these abbreviated hymns,
three for example being carved out of Prudentius' twelfth. The

1 See Claudian, In Ruf. ii. 363 f.; Amm. Marc. xvi. 10, 7 (an elaborate
description) and compare Prud. ar<f>. i. 35, 6. For the labarum see Prud.
Symm. i. 487, and Lactantius, M. P. 44. See Brockhaus, 73 n. On the cross
Neander, Church History, iii. 405 (Bohn).

266 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

famous hymn to the Holy Innocents, Sahete flares martyrum, and
the equally famous Jam maesta quiesce querella have thus been
taken from Prudentius' poems for Epiphany (xii.) and for the Burial
of the Dead (x.).

For poetic touch and thought, for delicacy and brightness, the
Daily Round ranks with the best of Prudentius' work. Quotations
and abstracts never do a poet full justice, but they must suffice.
The hour of lighting the lamps would hardly seem a promising
theme for a hymn. But Prudentius strays very happily to the
burning bush, and thence in Moses' company to the Red Sea and
the desert and the fiery pillar, and draws from it all very skilfully
a parable of Heaven. There are one or two odd little touches in
the piece, e.g. even spirits sub Styge have holiday on Easter Eve 1 ;
candles and lamps are described with some detail and grace, and
classed as God's gifts a pretty thought for artificial lights are
given us

ne nesdret homo spem sibi luminis

in Christi solido cor pore conditam. (Cath. v. 9, 10)

When he writes a hymn (vi.) for sleep-time, he tells of Joseph
interpreting dreams in prison and of St John on Patmos. The
sign of the cross on brow and heart before going to bed will keep
one safe from evil dreams and evil demons.

The hymn "for all hours" is a remarkably graceful poem in
trochaic tetrameters, setting forth Christ's glory as shewn by the
fulfilment of prophecy in His earthly life. Sprung from the Father's
heart before the world was, He is Alpha and Omega, creator,
redeemer and judge. His birth of the Virgin, His Miracles, told
briefly one by one and with vigour, and lastly and chiefly His
Descent into Hell are sung in turn. It is not the suffering so
much as the triumph of the Cross which the poet emphasizes.
While sun and stars in our sky hide themselves, He bursts the
bars of Hell and with yellow light floods the caves of death. The
wiles of the Serpent have been in vain, his poison fails him, he
drops his hissing neck. The fathers and the holy ones rise with
joy, leave the tombs, and follow Christ as He rises a victor to
the tribunal of the Father, bearing back the peerless glory of

1 This hymn has been held to refer specially to the Easter vigil, a view not
without some plausibility, but the poet makes no definite reference to it, and
some antiquarians maintain it was not a practice of his day; Brockhaus,
pp. 87 8. Sixt, p. 11, holds that the hymn was not written for the vigil but
that the poet after his digressive manner touches on it in verses 137 140.

Prudentius 267

His passion to heaven, from whence He shall come yet again as
Judge. This Second Coming still held the minds of men, and
Prudentius tells of it in the hymn for sleep-time (v. 81 100), and
yet again in that for the Nativity (xi.), with something of the
majesty of the Dies Irae itself.

Peccator, intueberis
celsum coruscis nubibus,
dejectus ipse et irritis
plangens reatum Jletibus.

Cum vasta signum biicina
terris cremandis miserit,
et scissus axis cardinem
mundi mentis solvent;

Insignis ipse et praeminens
mentis rependet congrua,
his lucis usum perpetis,
illis gehennam et tartarum.

(Cath. xi. 101112)

The descent into Hell is the subject of a striking hymn
of Synesius, and is told in still more impressive prose by an
unknown Greek writer, whose work is now imbedded in the
so-called Gospel of Nicodemus 1 . But the Last Judgment seems
to have appealed far more to the Latin than to the Greek mind,
as no one need be told who has read the terrible last chapter
of Tertullian's de Spectaculis. And Tertullian, one might almost
say, was as much Prudentius' " master " as he was Cyprian's.

A few stanzas from the hymn "Before Meat" (iii.), translated
into English as closely as adherence to the original metre will
allow (the original is of course not rhymed), may give some im-
pression of the poet's manner of treating his subjects in his various
lyrical poems, though this one is not his strongest. The grace
of the Latin must not be expected.

Cross-bearer, kindly one, giver of light,
Maker of all things, and friend of most worth,
Born of the Word, of immaculate birth,
Equal of old with the Father in might,
Ere there was heaven or ocean or earth.

1 See the abstract on pp. 378381.

268 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Come, for salvation is found in Thy smile,

Come and behold with beneficent gaze,

Giving us peace, as the bountiful rays

Stream from Thy face, that our banquet the while

Lit by Thy presence may be to Thy praise.

Come, Lord, for nothing without Thee is sweet,
Pleasure is none, there is nothing save gall,
If Thy good favour, O Christ ! Thou recall,
Savoureth nought of our drink or our meat
Faith be the sanctification of all.

God be it still that we taste in each dish,
Christ in the cup may our spirits descry :
Matter or mirth the light jests as they fly
All that we are, every act, every wish,
Be by the Trinity ruled from on high.

What would I now with the spoils of the rose?
Wherefore the fragrance of odours outpoured ?
Ours the true wine, the ambrosia, flows ;
Faith is the nectar the Christian heart knows,
Borne to us straight from the heart of the Lord.

Not for light ivy, sweet Muse, calls the time,
Erewhile the garland thou wontest to wear ;
Thread with the dactyl a coronet fair,
Weaving a mystical chaplet of rhyme,
Bind with the praise of the Saviour thy hair 1 .

What shall a soul of such origin ask,
Born to the aether and child of the light ?
Where shall it find it so worthy a task,
Praising its Maker, His gifts to recite
All the soul's music the theme shall unite.

He, it is He, to us all things doth yield,
Rulers of all He hath framed us to be ;
All that the earth or the sky or the sea
Bears in the flood or the air or the field,
These He made mine ; for Himself He made me.

Birds the dark craft of the fowler ensnares,
Whether the gin be his wile or the net,
Or the limed twigs for his quarry be set ;
Once the winged creatures alight unawares,
Caught in the tangle no freedom they get.

1 This stanza has been cited as evidence for the supposition, a priori most
probable, that Prudentius had served his apprenticeship in poetry on themes
which were not distinctively sacred. Sixt, p. 21.

Prudentius 269

Lo ! through the waters with fold upon fold
Nets sweep the wandering swarms of the main ;
Whipped from the stream the fish struggles in vain,
Ne'er shall it make the fell hook loose its hold ;
Pleasure the silly mouth sought and found pain.

Lavish the bounty the rich acres bring ;
Ours the full ears of the cornland's increase,
Ours the luxuriant vineyards that fling
Tendril and twig forth to cluster and cling :
Ours the green olive the nurseling of peace.

God of His bounty in Christ giveth all,

All things are ours, all our wants he supplies ;

Far be from us the fell hunger that cries

Asking the death of the ox of the stall,

Lusting for flesh though the life-blood should fall.

Be the fierce banquet for races untamed !
They may eat flesh, who in savagery live ;
Never 'mid us be such cruelty named !
Lettuce and bean for our feeding were framed,
Guileless the banquet the garden shall give.

From the banquet of innocence the poet passes to the garden
of man's innocence, and tells of Adam and Eve and the serpent ;
of the fall of man and the virgin birth of Christ. Let it be enough
that man has once fallen ; now let temperance preserve him, for
there is another life and we shall rise again because Christ has risen.

The Dittochaeon is a series of quatrains designed to explain
sacred pictures in some church or churches. They have some
importance in the history of Christian art but not of literature.

We come lastly to the great work Against Symmachus. From
Augustus' day onward a statue of Victory had stood in the
Senate House, and at every meeting of the Senate an offering was
made to it. But on his visit to Rome in 357 Constantius had
image and altar removed. Julian restored them. Twenty years
later Gratian removed them again in 382. The heathen members
of the Senate presented to him a petition for the restoration of
the altar and the goddess, but were refused admission to his
presence. This rejection was due to the Christian Senators, who
through Pope Damasus communicated with St Ambrose. When
Gratian was killed by Maximus, they made a further appeal in
384 to Valentinian II. Symmachus presented their case in a
speech which survived and was so greatly and so generally admired,
that Ambrose, after prevailing on the Emperor to decline to take

270 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

action, felt obliged to write a reply. Victory once more took her
place during the rebellion of Arbogast and Eugenius (393) and
was removed by Theodosius on his overthrowing the usurpers
(394). This altar was thus the standard of paganism, which could
hardly indeed hope to recapture the world but had a sentimental
feeling for retaining this last emblem. Even in 400 and again
in 404 Claudian was at special pains in his poetry to emphasize
that Victory was a goddess and one to whom Rome was deeply
indebted. So vital was the controversy. Symmachus' petition was
still read and admired, and offered a fair opportunity for attack.
Even later than this, beginning in 410 after the fall of Rome,
Augustine thought it worth while to spend years on the last
great refutation of heathenism, the De Civitate Dei, and to com-
mission Orosius to compile his history of the world's calamities
to shew that the effect of Christianity had been to lessen them.

Symmachus' petition may be very briefly analysed. He pled
for the restoration of the altar to the goddess, even though she
were but a name (numen and nomen), and of various immunities
to priests and vestals, which had just been taken away. It was
not a question between this and that religion. Everyone to his
taste and custom in religion. Every nation had its tutelary genius,
and Rome had hers. Let not antiquity go for nothing. The great
mystery of life could hardly be discovered by one line of search.
Rome personified pled for her old usages, for the Vestals and their
due, out of gratitude if for no other reason. In fact, famine and
disaster marked heaven's disapproval not, of course, of the Em-
peror's new religion, but of the neglect of the old religion.

To this St Ambrose made a vigorous reply. The old rites
had not, as alleged, defended Rome from Hannibal and the Gauls,
for example. Rome personified resents her victories being put
down to aught but her valour. She is not ashamed to be converted
in her old age. As for the great mystery God's voice reveals it
to us. Contrast seven Vestals with the multitude of Christian
virgins. Heavy burdens lay on Christian priests who must sur-
render their taxable property on ordination, while the wealth of
the Church was the revenues of the indigent. Why had the famine
been so slow in following its cause ? As for antiquity everything
advanced ; agricultural methods were bettered ; man himself grew ;
even Rome had adopted foreign rites. The temples never helped
Pompey, Cyrus or Julian, victory being more a matter of legions
than religions the bishop here anticipating Napoleon.

Prudentius 271

In 404 Prudentius published his two books of hexameters on
the same theme. Boissier is right in saying the world was not
fully converted and men of letters were still heathen in their
libraries, and that a literary presentment of Christianity was still
sighed for by Christians of education 1 . Ambrose's reply was not
after all a match for the eloquence of Symmachus in the eyes
of people of taste, though he had out-mano3uvred the orator with
the Emperor.

Prudentius begins by saying Plato's dream of philosophers for
kings is realized in Christian Emperors, and proceeds to exhibit the
heathen Pantheon, as Tertullian had done before. Heathenism is
so long-lived because of early training, and he has a fine passage
on the heathen associations of childhood and growing years opening
out with further initiation into pagan rites. For a thousand genera-
tions Superstition was unchecked, and the tiny heir of the house
trembled and worshipped whatever his hoary grandsires displayed
for his veneration. He drank in error with his mother's milk ; his
first food was the sacred meal, his earliest sight the sacred candles
and the family gods growing black with holy oil. As a little child,
he saw the image of Fortune with her horn, and his mother pale
at her prayers before the sacred stone ; and he too would be lifted
by his nurse to kiss it in his turn. To it he made his baby prayers.
Without the house he saw the gods laurel-crowned on days of
festival and gala-days, and above all he was taught to worship
Rome (c. Symm. i. 197214).

He assails the gladiatorial games, and narrates the story of
Theodosius' homily to the Senate after the fall of Arbogast and
of the Senate's conversion 2 , and how sua secula Roma erttbuit, and
finally tells Symmachus that to a Christian Emperor he owes his
rise in the world. So much for the first book. It is interesting
throughout to remark the kindly and respectful way in which
Prudentius always speaks of Symmachus. Courtesy is not always
the mark of Christian controversy in the fathers.

In the second book he repeats Ambrose's points about victory
won by labor impiger, aspera virtus, about progress and other

1 At the beginning of the century Lactantius made the same complaint,
Instil, v. 1 Haec inprimis causa est cur apud sapientes et doctos et principes
liujus seculi scriptura sancta fide careat, quod prophetae communi ac simplici
sermone ut ad populum sunt locuti . . .adeo nihil verum put ant nisi quod auditu
suave est; nihil credibile nisi quod potest incutcre voluptatem. nemo rem veritate
ponderat sed ornatu. non credunt ergo divinis quiafuco carent.

' 2 Zosimus, iv. 58, says none of the senators was converted, but then Zosimus
did not wish them to be and Prudentius did.

272 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

things, but adds much of his own which is better and undreamt
of by Ambrose. Once more he approximates to Browning :

nonne hominem et pecudem distantia separat una ?

quod bona quadrupedum ante oculos sita sunt: ego contra,

spero.

Progress, man's distinctive mark alone,
Not God's, and not the beasts' : God is, they are,
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.

If there is no future, he continues in fine declamation, let us eat
and drink and break every law at once. Where Symmachus intro-
duced Rome as speaking, Prudentius introduces God Himself telling
of man's creation, end and resurrection, and pleading for a temple
of mind not marble. Curiously enough, here as elsewhere, Pru-
dentius does not mention truth as belonging to the spiritual
temple. He makes great game of the genius of Rome, and of
immigrant gods some of whom Claudian had recently held up
as Rome's guardians (p. 239).

Non divum degener ordo
et patriot, extorris Romania adfuit armis. (535 6)

To allow this was treason to Rome it diminished her glory.

Non fero Romanum nomen sudataque bella

et titulos tanto quaesitos sanguine carpi. (550 1)

Rather it was God who had made Rome for His own ends, that
Rome might make mankind one, and so prepare the way for Christ.
Rome too is personified, congratulating herself on having sloughed
off her former taints, on being free from danger from the Goths,
through Christ and His servants, the Emperor and Stilicho, who
had just won the victory over the Goths at Pollentia 1 (402). The
Gauls had once captured Rome despite her gods, but now she
knows the Goths only by the hearing of the ear, and (vividly
drawn by the poet) she bids the Emperor climb the triumphal car
and come to Rome with Christ beside him.

As for the many ways to the great mystery, one is right if
rough and hard, and the others are wrong if pleasant, and his
language recalls Hesiod. The famine! nobody goes to the Circus

1 Was Pollentia a victory? Claudian's contemporary explanations to prove
that it was have made it seem doubtful. That it was a Roman defeat, as the
Goths have claimed, Prudentius' words prohibit our supposing.

Prudentius 273

hungry ! and he concludes with an entreaty for the abolition of
the gladiatorial shows

nullus in urbe cadat cujus sit poena voluptas 1 . (1125)

It is interesting to compare the panegyric written almost at
the same time by Claudian for Honorius' sixth consulship. There
we have a splendid procession with cataphracts (armoured cavalry)
and dragon-standards and all that is gorgeous. But for hue Christo
comitante veni we read of " winged Victory, guardian of the Roman
toga, coming herself to her shrines " a tacit defiance to those who
had driven the goddess from the Senate. We find a grand eques-
trian display in the Circus, but no such plea for mercy for the
wretched as that with which the Christian poet crowns his poem.

This rapid sketch must suffice for the works of Prudentius, but
a few points of style remain to be considered. He has been harshly
criticized for the characteristic faults of his training, and of his
age. He has confessed that he received a training in rhetoric
and that he had been an advocate. He had the resultant weak-
nesses. In his polemics against heathenism, the poet is sometimes
subordinated to the advocate, who has taken his brief from Ter-
tullian and drives home his points with the same keen, but hardly
poetic, energy. He urges as it were the conviction of the gods
on charges which involve heavy penalties under Roman law. The
immorality and sensuality attributed by legend to the gods rather
than the fundamental weaknesses of the Pantheon are attacked.
Again, he still suffers, like Claudian and others of his contempo-
raries, from rhetoric. All the rhetoric-bred poets declaim from
Lucan onward. They cannot break loose from the school. They
lack imagination and balance, and are carried away by language.
Prudentius does not always know when to leave off. One, or two
examples will serve. A common taunt against the heathen gods
is that they betrayed their own lands to Rome. This is how
Prudentius sets it.

Jappiter ut Cretae domineris, Pallas ut Argis,
Cynthius ut Delphis, tribuerunt omine dextro.
his JVilicolas, Rhodios Cytherea reliquit,
venatrix Ephesum virgo. Mars dedidit Hebrum ;
destitute Thebas Bromius, concessit et ipsa
Juno suos Phrygiis servire nepotibus Afros.

Adv. Symm. ii. 489.
1 Compare Wordsworth :

Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

G. 18

274 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

When speaking of the way which does not lead to the great
mystery and of its ramifications, he spends seventeen lines in
detailing some thirteen forms of heathenism the worship of
Bacchus, Cybele, etc. Again the Star in the East outshone the
Zodiac, and we have some twelve lines describing how each of
nine signs was affected, and the sun too. Contrast Horace's
moderation when Astrology tempted him to prolixity. The jewel
gates of the New Jerusalem at the end of the Holy War take
fifteen lines, as jewel after jewel is invoiced. He actually adds
the price of one of them, which had cost Faith a thousand talents.

But this is not all. For besides what may be called relevant
overloading, we have overloading which is irrelevant. Prudentius
could tell a story and could not refrain. So we have plentiful
digressions into stories, interesting and well told, but aside from
the main theme. They are generally Biblical. Brockhaus finds an
excuse for the Biblical digressions in the plea that Prudentius
wrote for the instruction of educated Christian people and under
the influence of Christian art, selecting for poetic treatment espe-
cially those stories which were painted in catacomb and church.
These were in his own mind and he knew they would be familiar
to his readers. " 'Tis the taught already that profits by teaching."

Though his sententiae are often crisp and clear, he has a
tendency at times to draggle whether from exuberance or from
impatience of correction. Claudian is superior to him in precision
and edge.

While in hexameters Prudentius seems fairly strong, in argu-
mentative passages, like Lucretius and Juvenal, he is almost
bound to drop into ending lines with quadrisyllables or pairs of
disyllables especially when he expounds the Trinity and the
effect is not happy. His quantities, though generally, are not
always classical Greek diphthongs and long vowels being often
shortened, e.g. rhompka,Qalis, k&eresis, Paraclitum ; and short vowels
lengthened, e.g. ch&risma, c&tholicus (too tempting a word metri-
cally), sophia.

His spondaic hexameters are fairly numerous and not very
impressive. They are more like Juvenal's than Virgil's. His pen-
tameters are weak. I do not find his alliterations very dignified
or always very musical.

On the other hand, he is a master of narrative clear-cut and
effective. His language is often graceful and pointed, and he brings
out his thoughts well. His prologues, for example, are excellent.

Prudentius 275

Metrically he has some redeeming qualities, which it is well to
recognize. His hexameters are varied and easy, and his elisions
frequent enough to relieve monotony without producing roughness.
He is in this respect a wonderful contrast to Juvencus, whose lines
are all alike and all lacking in elision. In fine, if Prudentius'
hexameters lack the highest finish (as it must be confessed they
do), they are still telling and vigorous and hang well together.
He employs, besides, a considerable number of lyrical metres and
handles them like a master. Many of them are Horatian, and
the rest may be paralleled in contemporary poets.

I have already remarked that the critics are divided in their
preferences, some preferring his work in the style of Virgil and
Lucretius, others his lyrical poetry, and both parties can say a
good deal for their views. In other words, the poet has been
successful in both styles. The more one studies his contemporaries
the more one admires him. Spiritually and intellectually he far
outstrips the heathen poets, and in poetic insight, grace and
mastery of his material he is far above the Christians.

Of his indebtedness to previous poets, particularly to Virgil,
much might be written. I will content myself with remarking that
I have found a number of direct imitations, or perhaps echoes,
of Juvenal ; one or two cases of the influence of Propertius and
Lucan ; some of Lucretius ; and rather more of indebtedness to
Horace. To Virgil his debt is naturally very much greater. He
knew him well as scores of passages shew. Some are cases of
undisguised pilfering 1 : e.g.

Ckriste graves hominum semper miserate labores. Psych. 1.

Phoebe graves Trojae semper miserate labores. Aen. vi. 56.

Others are more honest reminiscences or echoes :

Martis congressibus impar. Psych. 549.

impar congressus Achilli. Aen. i. 475.

ad astra doloribus itur. Cath. x. 92.

sic itur ad astra. Aen. ix. 641.

Others again would be less marked if not so numerous, e.g. such
phrases as Psych. 40 gramineo in campo, 41 fidget in armis, 49
adacto transadigit gladio, which are Virgil's : others less con-
spicuous are metrical parallels if the phrase may be allowed : e.g.

funalis machina. Psych. 866. fatalis machina. Aen. ii. 237.
femina provocat arma virum. Steph. iii. 36.

1 Sixt however goes too far, I think, when he calls the Psychomachia " almost
a cento." Compare Aen. vi. 640 with Catullus Ixiv. 39, for a loan as patent.

182

276 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Again there are instances of what I may call deliberate quotation :
e.g. when Theodosius comes to Rome as a Christian victor and
the Empire becomes Christian:

denique nee metas statuit, nee tempora ponit ;

imperium sine fine docet, etc. Adv. Symm. i. 542.

This same Virgilian influence is found in very many Latin poets,
and is not at all extraordinary when we remember that Virgil is
the one book which has never yet been out of the schools since
Tucca and Varius published the Aeneid.

One source of inspiration, from which we might have expected
him to draw, he ignores. The poetry of the Psalter was lost to
him. From the historical books of the Old and the New Testament,
from Paul and the Apocalypse he borrowed incidents, ideas and
pictures, but the Psalms and generally the Prophets he ignored.
The Prophets were unintelligible, the Psalms were uncouth, and
persons of education shrank from them. Even Ambrose's recom-
mendation of Isaiah failed to make Augustine read him through.
For the Psalms, Augustine tells us of his enjoyment of them as
a marked proof of his change of feeling.

"In what accents did I speak to Thee, my God, as I read
the psalms of David, those faithful songs and sounds of piety
that exclude the proud spirit... What accents did I utter to
Thee in those psalms, and how was I inflamed toward Thee by
them, and kindled to recite them, if possible, the world over,
against the pride of mankind" (Conf. ix. 4, 8).

Jerome says much the same (Ep. xxii. 30). " So with a mind
to read Tully, I used to fast. After a long night of watching,
after tears which the memory of my former sins brought from my
inmost being, I would take up Plautus. If ever I came to myself
and began to read the Prophets, the rough language grated on
me." It took an angel with a scourge, he says, to correct his too
classical taste. So that we need not be surprised if Prudentius
ignored the Psalms and studied Virgil, as even Jerome did after
his celestial flagellation. But surely it was a bad sign that the
education of the day should prevent men of culture from recognizing
the real worth through the rough translation.

We have seen something of the Spaniard with his national
love of and pride in the Spanish saints, his interest in martyrdoms
and his devotion ; of the Roman proud of his Roman citizenship,
jealous of his country's honour lest it be usurped by false gods,

Prudentius 277

and above all bound up in a Christian Rome and its mission ;
of the man of letters, the poet, the artist ; one side of him remains
and that may best be set forth in his own words, in the poem which
may be taken as the epilogue to his whole collection. When we
have seen the whole man, and have studied him all round, and
in relation to his times, we cease to think of the points strange
and even grotesque to-day, but feel that here is a true man.

Gifts for God the Father wrought
To Him true, pure, and holy spirits offer ;

Gifts of honest mind and thought,
The riches of a heav'n-blest life they proffer.

Wealth another man may bring,
The needs and sorrows of the poor relieving ;

I, alack, can only sing,
Swift Trochee and Iambus interweaving.

Scanty holiness is mine,
Nor can I help the needy, rich alms flinging ;

Yet will deign my Lord Divine
To lend a Father's ear to my poor singing.

In the mansion of the great
Stand needful furnishments in rack and trestle ;

Gleams the gold and silver plate,
The bowl of polished brass and earthen vessel.

Wrought of precious ivory
Or carved of oak or simple elmwood platters

What their nature, so each be
Meet for the Master's use, it nothing matters.

There are uses for them all,
Great cost or small is not of use the token.

Me within my father's hall
Christ found : He came and found me old and broken.

Yet has Christ a need of me,
Though but a moment's space I have my station ;

Earthen vessel though I be,
I pass into the Palace of Salvation.

Be the service ne'er so slight
God owns it. Then whatever Time is bringing,

This shall still be my delight
That Christ has had the tribute of my singing.

CHAPTER XII

SULPICIUS SEVERUS

Caelestem quodammodo laetitiam vultu praeferens.

Vita Martini 27

When the priest sees himself vanquished by the prophet, he suddenly
changes his method. He takes him under his protection, he introduces
his harangues into the sacred canon, he throws over his shoulders the
priestly chasuble. The days pass on, the years roll by, and the moment
comes when the heedless crowd no longer distinguishes between them, and
it ends by believing the prophet to be an emanation of the clergy.

This is one of the bitterest ironies of history.

PAUL SABATIER, St Francis of Assisi, p. xv 1

IN the Christian movement as in most other movements of
mankind two tendencies display themselves in constant reaction
and interaction, the tendencies to make the group and the individual
the unit of life. Great conceptions underlie them both. The one
is that of a society ordered and organized, part answering to part,
and all parts of one majestic whole, a great imperial system
embracing mankind, every man in his proper sphere, star differing
from star in glory but all moving harmoniously on their several
orbits. The other is that of a life resting on communion with God,
a life each man must live for himself (for in this relation no inter-
mediary is tolerable or possible), a life dependent on no system or
organization but above and beyond the reach and scope of systems
and their makers, for the wind bloweth where it listeth and so is
every one that is born of the spirit. Both conceptions, it may be
said, can be held by the same mind at once, and perhaps under
ideal circumstances they are not incompatible, but where the

1 [References are made to the translation by Louise Seymour Houghton.

Sulpicius Severus 279

circumstances are not ideal there is apt to be a preference given
to one as against the other, and the result is often extravagance
and reaction.

The story of the Church is full of these alternate reactions.
St Paul, if any man, stood for the freedom of the individual to
live his own spiritual life, and St Paul wrote the Epistles to the
Corinthians, for he could not approve an individualism run mad
and unshackled. Ignatius to correct the disorders of Docetism
laid stress on episcopal order, and thence came the Catholic Church,
and within a century reaction came under Montanus who pled for
the emancipation of the Holy Spirit from the yoke of the bishop.
Half a century later, when the Roman bishops had denounced
Montanism and the Church system was crystallizing, the persecution
of Decius started the same conflict over again between the order of
the Church and the purity of Christian life, and Novatianus made a
stand for holiness, though here the Catholic principle asserted itself
and he organized the great Puritan Church of the Novatians. With
the triumph of Constantine came the triumph of the Church, the
Nicene and the following Councils, and the age of Court bishops
and metropolitans, when the Church was deluged by a secular
society, when bishops fought for creeds and richer sees, when
spiritual arms were reinforced by material and the victories of faith
were changed for those of George and Damasus, whose followers
made him Pope at the cost of one hundred and thirty-seven lives.
Reaction might have been expected and it duly came. It was at
this time, we are told, that the monastic communities of the
Egyptian god Serapis were converted to Christianity, and simul-
taneously there appeared in the same regions and among men of
the same race, the Coptic race, the earliest Christian monachism.
Antony and Paul are nowadays dismissed very properly from
history to the realm of fiction. But at all events now was the day
when Christians began to take to the desert to seek there that
perfection and holy living they found impossible in the Church life
of the cities. If the movement began with the Copts, it did not
end with them. It spread the world over. And then reaction,
for the monks, the individualists of the Church of the day, and
wild and extreme ones too, began very soon to organize, and we
read that in the Egyptian deserts the first of virtues was obedience
to the Abbot under any and every circumstance a virtue, experi-
ence would shew, of somewhat doubtful worth. Later on St Benedict
organized the monks of the West. With each fresh outburst of

280 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

spiritual life there followed a new order. Friars were the sign of a
revolt against the monasteries, as they had been and were against
the bishops, for the religious orders were subject to the Pope and
independent of the local episcopate '. The Reformation was a great
revolt of the individual against bishop and monk and friar, and
when it imposed English prelate and Scotch presbyter on the
Church, George Fox led a great revolt against both, as later on
John Wesley did likewise in spite of himself. Both organized fresh
societies, with very different degrees of individual freedom in thought
and worship. Here it would be well to halt, though it should be
remarked in the case of all these movements that, while they
represent the desire for higher life, there are rarely wanting men
whose character might give ground for believing that revolts and
secessions are unnecessary for the maintenance of Christian piety,
or, at all events, that nowhere is there a monopoly in holy living.

The fourth century witnessed a great change, startling and
almost dramatic, but yet neither so astonishing nor so great as
might seem at first sight. It was, at least to those who can look
back upon it and what preceded it, inevitable. Persecution is a
clumsy method, and it had failed to crush Christianity, which, it
was also clear, was proof against all the social, moral and intel-
lectual attacks the old world could bring against it, and possessed
too of an assimilative force which drew to it steadily, if slowly,
the best minds and hearts. The change was inevitable, and yet
it was by no means so great or complete as it looked. A great
many among the millions of the Empire were not keenly interested
in the question of cult, where conduct was free from interference,
and a conventional and occasional settlement of accounts might
be made as conveniently with the God of the Christians as with
any other, provided He, like the other gods, would leave his
worshipper free in the intervals. When all is said, the religions
of the ancient world were largely, were chiefly, external sacrifices,
lustrations, purifications and other magical rites, and to change
from them to a magical Christianity meant not very much after
all. The change to spiritual Christianity was a very different
matter, but that was not always consequent upon the other.
Beside these nominal Christians, there were many more honest

1 Cf. A. V. G. Allen, Christian Institutions, "Monasticism never lost its
inner mood of antagonism to the episcopate; its history is a record of conflicts
with bishops, of rivalries and jealousies, of defeats and victories, till the Refor-
mation."

Sulpicius Severus 281

heathen who went their quiet way, bowing to the storm and content
if allowed to walk in the old paths without let or hindrance.

If the world was more Christian, the Church was certainly more
heathen. It had lost many of its best spirits in the persecution
of Diocletian, and the new recruits by no means made good the loss.
The laity were more pagan, and the clergy and bishops were pagan
too in heart, more worldly and less spiritual. While the Church,
particularly in the East, was busying itself about the definition of
its fundamental truth, less attention was paid to the common
virtues, and the bishops rivalled the eunuchs and the freedmen of
the palace in love of power and wealth and in the questionable
means they took to secure them. The episcopal office suffered for
not being the post of peril. The protest of the laity was monach-
ism. While their guides in things spiritual fought for pomp and
place, they looked after their own spiritual interests, and found,
as we read in Sulpicius Severus, that in general they had most to
fear (after the Devil and his more invisible legions) from the
bishops. Ammianus, the fairest of historians, had hard things to
say of the great bishops, yet his charges are more than confirmed
by the devout Churchman. One Athanasius, one Ambrose, and
one Augustine mark the century, while there were many of the type
of Damasus, Ursacius and George 1 .

Beside the desire to satisfy spiritual cravings, there was perhaps
another inducement to embrace the monastic life in that praesentium
fastidium we find in Sulpicius. The Roman power in the West
was nearing its end. Taxation, war, rebellion, extravagance and
slavery had exhausted the Empire, and men turned from the City
of Destruction to realize the City of God in the desert and the cell.
In such times of stress the common expressions of the religious
instinct are felt to fail and men crave for closer access to the
divine.

St Martin (c. 336 c. 400) was a Pannonian who entered the
army at the early age of fifteen, was baptized at eighteen, and
at twenty got his discharge from Julian, then Caesar, and betook
himself to the monastic life. He was not an educated man, and,
as we may see, he was terribly credulous and superstitious, but
he was a great force in Gaul, his adopted country. His kindness,
his dignity, enhanced rather than lessened by his mean garb and

1 Even these men had their excellences. George was a scholar, or at least
had amassed a library which Julian coveted, and Damasus was the antiquarian
who opened the Catacombs to the pilgrims.

282 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

humble ways, his shrewdness, his language, his seriousness, and
the awful gravity and the quiet joy 1 he drew from communion
with Christ in a life of prayer and imitation, gave him an influence
and a charm which drew to him the suffering and the sinful, and
a power that on more than one occasion proved more imperial
than an Emperor's. He became bishop of Tours, though against
his will, for it had not been his purpose to be ordained 2 . But
Hilary of Poictiers, to whom he at first attached himself, failing
to make him a deacon, made him an exorcist, and later on he was
captured by a stratagem and consecrated whether he would or no.
The bishops were unwilling to do it, but the laity would not be
denied and an accidental sors Biblica clinched the matter. The
most strenuous of the bishops was one Defensor, and a mistake was
made in the lesson whereby the words were read, "Out of the
mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise, because of
thine enemies, that thou mayest destroy the enemy et defensorem"
Martin was "un saint un peu ddmocratique " as M. Boissier says,
and he ended, as he began, the poor man's bishop, just as St Francis
long afterwards led a spiritual movement rising from the common
people and recognized by them as their own 3 . And Francis also
refused to become a priest.

Such a man was magnetic, and amongst others he drew to him
Sulpicius Severus, the subject of this essay. We do not know
much of Sulpicius' life, probably because there is little to know.
Gennadius, who includes him in his list of ninety-nine famous men
which he made to supplement St Jerome's, only gives us one fact
which we could not gather from his own writings and the thirteen
letters addressed to him by Paulinus of Nola, and to that fact
I shall have to return.

Sulpicius was born in Aquitaine about the year 363 (according
to Reinkens), probably of good family, for he had at Bordeaux the
best education his times could give, he became a pleader and he
made a great marriage 4 . His wife was of a wealthy family which

1 Nemo unquam ilium ridit...mae.rentem, nemo ridentem; unus idemque fuit
semper caelestem quodammodo laetitiam vultu praeferem (Vita Mart. 27). We
read a somewhat similar account of Marcus Aurelius: Erat enim ipse tantae
tranquillitatis lit rultum nunquam mutai'erit maerore vel yaudio, philosophiae
deditus Stoicae (Hist. August. M. Antonin. 16) the difference will be noted
however.

2 For an interesting account of this reluctance to be ordained, still a for-
mality in the Coptic Church, see Stanley, Eastern Church, Lect. vn.

3 Sabatier, St Francis, p. xvi.

4 See Paulinus, Ep. \. 5 (to Severus) in ipso adhuc niundi theatro, id est, fori
celebritate diversans, et facundi nominis palmam tenens . . .divitiae de matrimonio

Sulpicius Severus 283

could boast a consul. Of her we know nothing, unless from his
grief at her early death and his lifelong affection for her mother
Bassula, evidently a woman of fine character and kindly nature,
we may conjecture, "like mother, like daughter." His wife's death,
while he was still a young man with a father living, altered the
current of his life '. He had given signs of rising in his profession,
but "from his Tullian letters," to borrow the phrase of Paulinus 2 ,
he turned to "the preachings of the fishermen," and "the silence of
piety." In less extraordinary language, he turned to St Martin for
advice, and the Saint advised him to quit the world 3 . This he did,
as Paulinus also had done, cheerfully, gladly, and without regret,
though it would seem his father resented his action. He settled down
(about 393) to the life of a monk on some land of his at Toulouse,
selling all else 3 . We need not expect much incident in such a life,
but one or two little details appear. As M. Boissier remarks, ' ' dans
le d^vot et le moine le lettr^ survivait." The man of letters had
necessities the illiterate among the monks knew not, and we read
of amanuenses, whom he owed to the kindness of his mother-in-
law 4 , and who, he playfully insinuates, as if in private duty bound,
supplied her with advance copies of whatever he wrote. His phrase
implies that these men were slaves, and, in the Dialogue 5 , Gallus who
has been "teased" (fatigare) by him on "Gallic edacity" retorts
with some good-humoured banter about "somebody" whose un-
grateful freedman ran off without however making his master very
angry, and Sulpicius replies that but for so and so "I should be
very angry." It is an interesting sidelight on monastic life, but no

familiae consularis aggestae...post conjugium peccandi libertas et caelebs juventas.
So ib. 6, 7, references to eloquence. All of which may illuminate his comparison
of his friend to the Queen of Sheba ( 2).

' * Paulinus, Ep. v. 6 respuens patrimoniorum onera ceu stercorum, merito
socrum sanctam omni liberaliorem parent e in matrem sortitus aeternam, quia
caelestem patrem anteverteras terreno parenti, exemplo apostolorum relicto patre
in navicula fluctuante, scilicet in hujus vitae incerto cum retibus rerum suarunt et
implicatione patrimonii derelicto Christum secutus . . .Piscatorum praedicationes
Tullianis omnibus [e~\ tuis litteris praetulisti. Confugisti ad pietatis silentium,
ut evader es iniquitatis tumultum. (7) O vere Israelita!

2 Was it a case of sudden conversion? Paulinus, Ep. v. 5, says repentino
irnpetu discussisti servile peccati jugum, and if this is what he means, it fits in
with much else we know of Severus, but Paulinus loves to shroud his meaning
(when he has a meaning) in words; -juvat indulgere sermoni, he says. He was
Ausonius' pupil.

3 Paulinus, Ep. xxiv. 3 nee in reservatis praediis possessor et perfectus in
venditis.

4 Ep. iii. 2 notaries meos...qui in jus nostrum ex tua potissimum liberalitate
venerunt. Cf. Paulinus, Ep. v. 6, for Bassula's generosity socrum sanctam omni
liberaliorem parente.

8 Dial. i. 12.

284 Life and Letters in tJie Fourth Century

one who has read his delightful works will grudge Sulpicius his
amanuenses'.

He was the literary exponent of the movement of which
St Martin was the prophet, and he shared in the ill-will that
attended his master. More than once we hear of episcopal dislike
and perhaps a little mild persecution. At the beginning of the
Dialogue, Postumian asks after some years of absence whether the
bishops are still the men they were when he went away 2 . Sulpicius
bids him not ask, for they are no better, and his one friend among
them, who was his one relief from their vexatiousness, is rougher
than he should be. We get another glimpse at this unpopularity
of Sulpicius in one of Paulinus' letters, where the writer presses
Sulpicius to come and visit him, for one reason urging that by
being absent for a while he will still the voice of jealousy 3 .

The same letters cast some little light on Sulpicius' life. The
earlier ones repeatedly invite him to Nola, but he never went.
Twice, he writes to Paulinus, he meant to come but was stopped
by illness 4 . By and by it is pretty clear he does not intend to visit
his friend at all. He jokingly wrote that he was afraid Paulinus'
generosity would soon leave him too poor to repeat the invitation 5
a jest which plunged Paulinus into a flood of declamation about
faith, ending in the happy thought that perhaps after all Sulpicius
had been playful rather than faithless. Sulpicius did a good deal
of travelling, it would appear, in Gaul 6 , but he was content to be
represented in Italy by his servants and his annual letters 7 .

When engaged on his Chronicle, Sulpicius wrote in 403 to
Paulinus for aid, particularly on some points of doubtful chrono-
logy 8 , but Paulinus had to confess he was unable to help him.
History was seemingly too solid a study for the pupil of Ausonius,
but he did the best he could and passed on his friend's letter to
Rutinus. In place of information he sends a declamation on the
Emperor Theodosius and some hymns he had written to St Felix.

1 From the letters of Pauliuus, it is clear Sulpicius had still pueri to carry
letters, etc., e.g. Ep. v. 1 pueris tuis sancta in Domino tibi servitute conexis;
xxvii. 3 famulis conservus. Paulinus was rapturous about the loan of a cook,
an expert in vegetarian cuisine and an adept at the razor (Ep. xxiii.), a lad
therefore very like Samson.

2 Dial. i. 2, 3 an isti omnes quos hie reliqueram sacerdotes tales sint quales
eos antequam proficiscerer noveramus?

3 Paulinus, Ep. v. 13 zeli fuga qui maxime conspectu aut vicinia aemulae
conversations accenditur.

4 Paulinus, Ep. v. 8. 6 Paulinus, Ep. xi. 12.

8 Paulinus, Ep. xvii. 4. 7 Paulinus, Ep. xxiii. 2, xxviii. 1.

8 Paulinus, Ep. xxviii.

Sulpicius Severus 285

Over and above the letters, other courtesies passed between
them. Sulpicius sends a camel's hair cloth to Paulinus, who
acknowledges it in a rambling letter 1 about camels and the analogy
of the camel and the needle's eye to salvation by the cross of Christ,
and returns a tunic of lamb's wool made by a saintly lady, Melania,
and presented to Paulinus by her on her return from a twenty-five
years' residence at Jerusalem. He hoped Sulpicius would value it
the more for his having worn it a little first. By and by 2 Sulpicius
asks for a portrait of Paulinus, who is very reluctant (or would have
it seem so) to send it, but we may surmise it was sent, for a little
later we read that in a baptistery Sulpicius has been building he has
painted on the walls St Martin and Paulinus 3 . His correspondent
is obviously highly pleased, but feels it his duty to make a long and
rhetorical protest. At Sulpicius' request he sends him a series of
verses to inscribe on the walls and something far more precious
part of a fragment of the True Cross brought home by St Silvia
of Aquitaine 4 . The Cross, he explains, permitted these souvenirs
to be taken from it without suffering a loss of bulk. Melania ap-
pears again as sending a choice selection of ashes and other relics.

Paulinus' letters are insufferably long and trivial, with one or
two exceptions. While here and there amid his endless moralizings
we find a stray fact of interest, the correspondence has this value
that, beside showing the respect men had for Sulpicius' character,
it brings out by contrast his brilliance and worth as a man of
letters. The two men had had much the same training, had made
the same surrender and lived the same life ; but there the likeness
ends.

Now and then Sulpicius speaks of himself. Writing to one
Aurelius, a deacon 5 , he speaks of himself sitting alone in his little
cell, "and the line of thought came to me which so often occupies
me, the hope of things to come and disgust for the present, the fear
of judgment and the terror of punishment ; and what follows these
thoughts and is their cause, the recollection of my sins, made me
sad and weary." His story of Martin's discourse and his obvious
approval of it shew his own temper. "His talk was ever, how
we should leave the seductions of the world and the burdens of the
age to follow the Lord Jesus free and unhampered : he would

1 Ep. xxix. 2 Paulinus, Ep. xxx.

3 Paulinus, Ep. xxxii. 4 Paulinus, Ep. xxxi. 1.

5 Sulp. Sev. Ep. ii. 1. For the thought cf. Paulinus, cited on p. 124; and
Prudentius, p. 267.

286 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

instance the most splendid example of the present day set by the
famous Paulinus, who by abandoning great wealth and following
Christ had been almost unique in these times in fulfilling the gospel
precepts. He was the man we should follow! he was the man to
imitate ! he would exclaim ; and the present age was happy in
possessing such a pattern of faith and virtue, since, as the Lord
advised, he, though rich and possessing much, had by selling all
and giving to the poor, made possible by his example what was
impossible 1 ." We have seen Sulpicius did as much, and most
people will prefer him at once as a robust character and a pleasant
writer.

For this brings us to his literary work, and throughout it runs
the glad note. Sin might sadden him, and bishops worry him, but
the dominant character of his work is its joyousness and brightness.
A gentle humour plays about it ever and again, and grace and
delicacy are its constant marks. For it seems established that the
cheerfullest and sunniest of men are those who for a great cause
make a great renunciation. So through Sulpicius, as through
Prudentius, we find a vein of quiet happiness, whatever their subject,
in striking contrast with the unhappiuess and violence of so much
of the heathen literature of the Empire. In the pages of Montalem-
bert's Monks of the West we find very much the same glowing
joyousness, for the author, if he had not the critical qualities that
make a historian, was in love with his subject and caught the
spirit of the early Gallic monasticism. The same note, but with the
historical gift, marks Sabatier's Francis of Assisi.

Sulpicius' prose style is admirable for its ease and fibre 2 . The
schools had taught him Cicero and Virgil, and he had assimilated
more than their roll and cadence. Ausonius, Paulinus and
Symmachus had had the same training, had learnt and loved the
same authors, and they wrote smoothly and fluently enough, but
their work is very bloodless they say nothing, and they say it
with infinite meandering. Sulpicius is the well-girt writer ; his
style follows his theme, is earnest, playful or impassioned with his

1 V. Mart. 25. It was polite of Sulpicius to write this of his friend, who
returns the compliment by perpetually professing to be a very poor creature by
comparison. E.g. Ep. v. 7 : Sulpicius blazes septena Domini candelabra, while
Paulinus is sub modio peccatorum. The jumble of scripture is characteristic of
Paulinus.

2 Jerome (Ep. 125, 6) speaks of the high state of education in Gaul. His
correspondent, Busticus, was, however, sent on to Rome ut ubertatem Gallici
nitoremque sermonis gravitas Romana condiret. Cf. Claudian, iv. Cons. Hon.
582 Gallia doctis civibus.

Sulpicius Severus 287

thought, never draggles, never wearies. Here and there slips in a
happy phrase from Virgil, with the utmost aptness and naturalness
the snake charmed by the lads of an Egyptian monastery quasi
incantata carminibus caerula colla deposuit (Dial. i. 10, cf. Aeneid
ii. 381). Of Martin's preaching we read that he groaned in spirit,
infremuit nee mortale sonans praedicabat (Dial. ii. 4, cf. Aeneid vi.
50). Once more, he bids Postumian on his return to Egypt to find
somewhere on the shore the grave of Pomponius, ac licet inani
munere solum ipsum flore purpureo et suave redolentibus sparge
graminibus (Dial. iii. 18, cf. Aeneid vi. 885) '. Once he quotes a
line of Statius without precisely naming him utimur enim versu
scholastico, quia inter scholasticos fabulamur^ much as a modern
might in conversation quote a line of Shakespeare more for play-
fulness than because of a rigid relevance. Remarkable too, as
instancing his care for the purity of his vocabulary, is his apology
for the verb exsufflare, which he must use though parum Latinum
to express his thought 3 .

The excellence of his style is remarked by most of his critics,
M. Boissier finding in him the typical charm of French literature,
but the criticism of Gibbon will help us best to the next point for
consideration. He alludes to the narration of "facts adapted to
the grossest barbarism in a style not unworthy of the Augustan
age. So natural," he continues, "is the alliance between good
taste and good sense that I am always astonished by the contrast 4 ."
Sulpicius has indeed an almost unbounded credulity. It must be
recognized, before we judge him, that modern science is, after all,
very modern, and that while we are emancipated from much crude
superstition to-day, much still remains in odd corners of minds by
no means uncultured, and that after all it is possible to pay too
high a price for the extinction of superstition. At all events we
must judge Sulpicius by the standard of his time, and, not to go
back to Tacitus and his phoenix and Vespasian's miracle, so sane a
man as Ammianus has a wistful regret for portents "which occur
still but are not noted," while a century or so later Zosimus, the
bitter critic of Christianity, can seriously attribute the decay and

1 Cf. also V. Mart. 22 and Aeneid vii. 338.

2 Dial. ii. 10. Does he mean an "example" from a grammar?

In one of his letters (xxii.) Paulinus rallies him about Virgil, citing a letter
of his ending with a Virgilian quotation (Aen. iii.) and giving at length another,
a very racy one about a cook for the monastery, where he uses the Plautine lar
for "home."

3 Dial. iii. 8.

4 Decline and Fall, iii. p. 376 n.

288 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

decrepitude of the Empire to the neglect of Constantino to hold the
secular games. These men were heathens.

There are not wanting signs that men of his day found some
of Sulpicius' stories hard to believe. We have one notice of a
man who told St Martin himself that "what with empty super-
stitions and ridiculous delusions he had come to dotage and
madness," but as a brace of devils were seen chuckling and ejacu-
lating "Go it! Brictio!" to encourage him, we may discount this
critic's views 1 . More important is another passage in the third
book of the Dialogue" 1 ', where Sulpicius interrupts his narrative with
a little piece of apologia, which, if it somewhat mars the art and
verisimilitude of the piece, illuminates the character of the author.
A good many (plurimi) are said to shake their heads (nutare) about
what has been said in the second book. "Let them accept the
evidence of men still living and believe them, seeing they doubt my
good faith. But if they are so very sceptical, I protest they will
not even believe them. Yet I am astonished that any one who has
even a faint idea of religion would be willing to commit such a sin
as to think any one could lie about Martin. Far be such a suspicion
from any who lives under God ; for Martin does not need the support
of falsehood. But the truth of the whole story, Christ !
I pledge with thee, that I have not said nor will say anything but
what I have either seen myself or learnt on good authority,
generally from Martin himself. But even if I have adopted the
form of a dialogue, that variety in my story may prevent monotony,
I profess I am religiously making truth the foundation of my
history. I have been obliged at the cost of some pain to make this

insertion on account of the incredulity of some people Believe

me, I am quite unstrung and beside myself for pain will not
Christians believe in those powers of Martin which devils acknow-
ledged?" This inset makes the conclusion of the piece remind us a
little of Virgil's wounded snake in its rather unsuccessful attempt to
proceed as if nothing had happened, but it has its value. With
other passages it establishes Sulpicius' honesty. It is therefore
worth while to consider how it is he can believe so much that is
incredible to us.

I have said, we must allow for his living in a very unscientific
age, an age, too, when the refined scepticism of Roman society
in Cicero's day and the blatant atheism of Lucian and his kind

1 Dial. iii. 15. 2 Dial. iii. 5.

Sulpicius Severus 289

had been made well-nigh impossible by that reaction toward faith,
which is seen in Neo-Platonism, in the rapid spread of Christianity
and in the general revival of religion which began in the second
century and was so pronounced in the third. Men were ready to
believe much, and where this is the case, there is actually less tax
upon credulity. For there is a certain amount of evidence that some
diseases, mainly of the mental or hysterical order, may be cured by
the exercise of faith in the sufferer. Nothing helps a patient very
much who firmly believes he is going to die, whose mind is made up
to it, and the converse is true too. Let the sick man conceive the
belief that the practitioner or the saint can cure him and is doing
it, and in some cases this belief will cure him. But for this Notre
Dame de Lourdes and Ste Anne de Beauprd in Quebec might earn
less gratitude. Now Martin was an ignorant man, though a man who
had great power with men in virtue of his character and personality,
and he believed he could heal disease by prayer and faith, and that
this faculty was but the fulfilment of Christ's promises. Sulpicius
says, and it is not improbable he is presenting Martin's view, as well
as his own, that to doubt these miracles of healing, etc., is to
diminish the credibility of the gospel, "for when the Lord himself
testified that such works as Martin did were to be done by all the
faithful, he who does not believe Martin did them, does not believe
Christ said so 1 ." Perhaps the logic is not above suspicion, but it is
clear that it was held Martin's miracles were proven no less by the
words of the gospel than by ocular evidence. Thus Martin believed
he could work miracles, and no doubt he did effect cures, and he
had a strange influence over men and animals, which to-day might
be called hypnotism, or some such fine name, and was then called
miracle. If Martin's evidence was not enough, there was the witness
of the people healed. While we may admit they were the better
for his treatment, we have no kind of guarantee that their diagnosis
of their own maladies was at all more likely to be sound than the
pronouncements of ignorant people on their complaints to-day. To
an untrained observer, however, the evidence of the worker of the
miracle and the subject of it, supported by the inherent probability
of its happening in view of what the gospel said and the reflexion
that it might very well happen in any case, would be overwhelming.
We may then pronounce some of the miracles to be actual instances
of cures effected, and some to be cures of imaginary diseases,

1 Dial. i. 26.
G. 19

290 Life and Letters in tJie Fourth Century

some the results of mere coincidence, some the ordinary everyday
order of events, and all greatly coloured by ignorance and childlike
faith 1 .

Visions 2 are more easily explained as they depend on the
evidence of an individual and neither require nor obtain corrobora-
tion. Ignorance again will explain some, and overstrung nerves
others, while emotion and a touch of poetry or a tendency to
imagery will help in nearly every case. In many of Martin's
visions a certain spiritual insight is implied. For example, on one
occasion the devil appeared to Martin at prayer, attired in purple
with diadem of gold and gems, and boots wrought with gold, with
serene countenance and glad mien, and proclaimed himself to be
Christ descended from heaven and rewarding Martin with the first
sight of himself. The Saint was silent. "Martin, why hesitate to
believe when you see? I am Christ." "No," said Martin, "the
Lord Jesus did not say he would come with purple or diadem.
I will not believe Christ has come, unless it be in the garb and
form under which he suffered, unless he bear upon him the marks
of the cross (stigmata crucis}" Thereupon the devil vanished.
Here his asceticism helped him ; but at the same time it should be
remembered that the millennium and the second advent were much
in the thoughts of Martin and his school To this, however, we
must recur.

It may be regretted that Sulpicius on turning to the religious
life should have taken as his guide so rude and untrained a thinker
as Martin, rather than some more cultured man like Augustine.
But we must realize that it is by no means unusual for men of
refinement and education to be fascinated by the unpolished
directness and rough vigour of a leader, a prophet, from among
the people. Apart from this however, there is little doubt that
Martin with all his limitations was the best and most spiritual,

1 George Fox (1649) at Mansfield-Woodhouse quieted an insane woman by
speaking to her. "The Lord's power settled her mind and she mended," when
a doctor and many people about her, "holding her by violence," had failed.
"Many great and wonderful things were wrought by the heavenly power in
those days; for the Lord made bare his omnipotent arm, and manifested his
power to the astonishment of many, by the healing virtue whereof many have
been delivered from great infirmities, and the devils Were made subject through
his name; of which particular instances might be given, beyond what this
unbelieving age is able to receive or hear." It may be added that America
swarms with groups of "Christian Scientists," "mind-healers," "faith-healers,"
and the like, who achieve cures of disease now and then by means they only
partly understand, and then generalize with an extraordinary and pathetic
courage.

2 Vita Martini, 24.

Sulpicius Severus 291

the most practically and consistently holy, of the Christian leaders
of Gaul; and manliness and godliness are perhaps after all not
outweighed by ignorance of physical science 1 .

If Sulpicius is not to be followed in his opinions on medicine
and nature, in his judgments of men he is sterling and sound.
He saw the great man under the uncouthness of Martin, and he
realized how terribly lacking were others among the bishops of
Gaul. Like his master, he is fair-minded and fearless. Let us
take three examples. Into the great controversy about Origen
and his orthodoxy, we need not go. It was in the East one of
the burning questions of the day, utilized for political ends by
the unscrupulous Theophilus, a successor to Athanasius in the
see of Alexandria. It crops up in Postumian's account of his
Eastern travels in the Dialogue, and whether we say Sulpicius is
putting his own views into Postumian's mouth or publishing
Postumian's idea in his own work, the conclusion, which is reached
after independent study of the books in question, is that, whatever
the authorities may say, while there is some doubtful teaching in
them, there is undoubtedly much that is good and useful.

Again, when he reviews the life and character of Maximus the
British usurper who slew Gratian, and after some five years of
Empire (383-388) was overthrown by Theodosius, Sulpicius is
remarkably careful to give him credit for good qualities which
men were not concerned to discover in a fallen rebel. He was "a
man whose whole life deserved honour, had it been possible for him
to refuse the diadem set upon his head by the soldiers in mutiny,
or to abstain from civil war; but Imperial power (magnum imperium)
cannot be refused without danger nor upheld without arms 2 ." This
is a most just criticism, and in it is the explanation of much of the
history of the third and fourth centuries. Many a man had in self-
defence to embark on civil war. It was a necessity of military
despotism.

Elsewhere 3 he says, that while Maximus "had done many fine
acts he was not enough on his guard against avarice, except that

1 Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana has marvels and miracles far
beyond Martin's, and Macrobius' wonders of science (Sat. vii.) reveal what men
educated in the physics of the day could and did believe. I do not know that
either falls much short of St Alphonso Liguori's Glories of Mary, published in
English not so long ago with the commendation of Cardinal Manning.

2 Dial. ii. 6. This judgment curiously coincides with that of Orosius vii.
34, 9 Maximus vir quidem strenuus et probus et Augusta dignus nisi contra sacra-
mentum per tyrannidem emersisset. Contrast Ausonius, p. 121, n. 3.

3 Dial. iii. 11.

192

292 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

the necessities of monarchy, in the exhaustion of the treasury by
former rulers and his own immediate expectation of civil war ever
impending, afford an easy excuse for his providing support for his
power in any and every way."

Maximus had a great regard for Martin, and his queen was
really extravagant in her admiration of him This was seen in
the strange affair of Priscillian, where once more the fairness and
reasonableness of Sulpicius appear. Priscillian was the founder
of a small sect, of a Gnostic type, Sulpicius says. In 1885 the
German scholar Schepss discovered a manuscript of the fifth or
sixth century, containing some treatises and other matter, which,
though anonymous, he and other scholars attribute to Priscillian
himself. For the first time the heretic has been heard on his own
account, and the reader may be referred to his works in the Vienna
Corpus, vol xviii., and to the monograph of Friedrich Paret. Our
present concern is rather with the civil than the theological signifi-
cance of the story, and with the attitude of Martin and Sulpicius
toward the heretics 1 .

Two bishops had joined Priscillian and had consecrated him.
But the bishops of Spain and Gaul set themselves to bring about
the extinction of the sect by persecution and the sword. The
matter was brought to the Emperor Gratian who issued an edict
against the new sect. Priscillian made overtures for an interview
with Damasus and Ambrose, but when neither of them woiild see
him he got a court official, Macedonius, to use his influence and
have the edict withdrawn. The death of Gratian followed in 383,
and in 384 a synod of Burdigala (Bordeaux) condemned Priscillian,
who took the unusual step of appealing to the new Emperor. The
case came to Maximus and the bishops cried for the surety of blood.
Here Martin intervened it was enough, he said, and more than

1 St Augustine, Ep. 237, deals with the sect's false scriptures, and especially
with a hymn supposed to have been spoken by Christ. This hymn is to be
found entire in the Acts of St John; see M. R. James, Apocrypha Anecdota,
2nd series. I quote the fragments Augustine cites :

salvare volo et salvari volo:
solvers volo et solvi volo:

generari volo:

saltate cuncti.

plangere volo, tundite ros omnes :

ornare volo et ornari volo:

lucerna sum tibi, ille qui me vides:

janua sum tibi quicumque me pulsas:

qui vides quod ago tace opera mea:

verbo illusi ciincta et non sum iHusus in totum.

Sulpicim Severus 293

enough that they had been pronounced heretics by the bishops and
driven from the churches : it was a cruel and unheard of sin that a
secular judge should hear an ecclesiastical case 1 . He won a promise
from Maximus that no blood should be shed, "but afterwards the
Emperor was depraved by the bishops and turned away from milder
counsels," and Priscillian and others were put to death. That
some of these people, the earliest examples of Christians slain by
Christians for opinion's sake, were women, a professor's widow and
daughter from Bordeaux, excited great indignation 2 . It would seem
that Maximus, like another usurper in France, was bidding for the
support of the Church 3 .

The bishops were successful and now thought of going further
and having a commission sent to Spain to arrest and try heretics.
The assize would have been a bloody one, for their leader Ithacius
was a man, says Sulpicius, with no moderation and nothing of the
saint about him, extravagant, talkative and gluttonous. "He had
reached such a pitch of folly as to be ready to include under the
charge of Priscillian ism all holy men, who had either a love of
reading or a habit of fasting." The studium lectionis as a mark of
heresy might pass for a phrase of Erasmus. Elsewhere he says it
was clear that scant distinctions would be made, as the eye was
a good enough judge in such cases, for a man was proved a
heretic rather by his pale cheeks and his poor raiment than by his
belief 4 .

Martin once more appeared deeply grieved for the crime
committed, anxious about the crime preparing. He would not at
first communicate with the bishops, whom he not unjustly regarded
as guilty of Priscillian's murder, but when Maximus made his
communion the price of the stoppage of persecution he gave way.
But he felt he had lost spiritual power by so doing, as he had
previously done by being consecrated bishop, and thereafter he kept
studiously away from every gathering of bishops. Ambrose also
broke off all connexion with Ithacius and Ursacius.

Now throughout this strange story it is remarkable how clear
and definite is Sulpicius' judgment. He has no sympathy with
Priscillian's views, far from it, but he is moved to horror and indig-
nation by the conduct of the bishops. Maximus in some measure

1 Chron. ii. 50.

2 Cf. Pacatus, Paneg. Theod. 29, cited on p. 111.

3 Richter writing in 1865 drew an elaborate parallel between Maximus and
the eldest son of the Church. (See Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders, i. 443.)

4 Dial. ii. 4.

294 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

he excuses, and he points out that "not only was the heresy not
crushed by the killing of Priscillian, but strengthened and spread
further. For his followers, who had formerly honoured him as a
saint, afterwards began to worship (colere) him as a martyr. The
bodies of the slain were taken back to Spain, and their burial
celebrated with great pomp, and to swear ' by Priscillian ' was
counted the most binding of oaths. But amongst the orthodox
(nostros) there blazed a ceaseless war of quarrels, which after fifteen
years of dissensions could not yet be ended." All, he says, is
confusion as a result of the quarrelling, the lust and the greed of
the bishops, and "meanwhile the people of God and every good
man are treated with shame and mockery l ." So in the thirteenth
century "the priest," says Sabatier, "is the antithesis of the saint,
he is almost always his enemy."

We may now pass to a short review of the works of Sulpicius,
which fall into two divisions his writings on St Martin and his
Chronicle.

The Chronicle 2 is an epitome of Scripture history, supplemented
by a rapid survey of the ten persecutions of the Church (a
numeration for which he is one of the earliest authorities), a
glance over the Arian controversy and a rather fuller account of
the Priscillianist troubles. It is plain that the interest of the work
grows greater toward the end, for an epitome will generally lack
freshness. But in this case there are one or two things to be said.
First of all, the epitome is written in Sulpicius' usual style. It is
clear and lucid, and though short and concise does not give too
strong an impression of scrappiness. There is something of a
classical flavour here and there, and it strikes one as odd to read
of Jacob's burial, fun us magnifice curatum, or of Moses', dt> sepulcri
loco parum compertum. The phrases somehow do not suggest the
Pentateuch. He has a keen eye for chronology, on which he is at
issue with Archbishop Ussher to the extent of some sixteen
centuries 3 . After repeated difficulties with one figure after another
in his authorities he concludes: "I am sure that it is more likely

1 Chron. ii. 51.

2 This is the only work of Sulpicius precisely dated. He brings his work to
a conclusion in Stilicho's consulship, 400 A.D. (ii. 9 omne fnim tempus in Stili-
conem direxi.) Martin's life and the first letter seem to have been written before
Martin's death, which was sixteen years after his second visit to Maximus.
Maximus reigned from 383 388, but must have left Gaul about 386. Beinkens
puts the publication of the Life after Martin's death, that of the Dialogue in
the year 405, supposing Sulpicius to have died shortly after the year 406.

3 Chron. i. 40.

Sulpicius Severus 295

that the truth has been lost by the carelessness of copyists,
especially when so many centuries have intervened, than that the
prophet should have erred. Just as in the case of my own little
book I expect it will befall that, by the carelessness of those who
transcribe it, things will be spoiled about which I have not been
careless." He keeps his story wonderfully clear of typology, only
once, I think, going so far as to remark a type, Deborah, it seems,
being a prefigurement of the Church. Where necessary, he reinforces
his story with material from secular historians, though he is careful
to explain that he regards their standing as very different. In this
way he has preserved for us a passage of Tacitus, otherwise lost, on the
destruction of the temple by Titus. He makes some shrewd remarks
on the effect on Christianity of the destruction of Jerusalem by
Hadrian, and the resultant removal of the servitude of the Law
from the freedom of the faith and of the Church.

It is remarkable how abruptly he passes from Isaiah 1 , merely
mentioning his name, while he recommends the careful study of
Ezekiel, whose prophecy is "magnificent, for the mystery of things
to come and of the resurrection was revealed to him 2 ." But when
he comes to Daniel he devotes to him a number of chapters and
gives an interesting interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. In
the feet of iron and clay was foretold the Roman Empire which is
to be divided (dividend-urn) so as never to cohere again. "This has
even so come to pass, for the Roman world is not administered by
one Emperor, but by several who are always quarrelling by war or
faction. Finally the mixture of clay and iron, whose substances
can never cohere, signifies the destined incompatible intermixtures
of mankind, for the Roman territory is held by foreign tribes or
rebels, or is handed over to them when they surrender and make
what passes for peace, and we see in our armies, our cities and
provinces admixtures of barbarous nations, chiefly Jews 3 , who dwell
among us but do not however adopt our ways. And the prophets
tell us that this is the end." He complains that men will not

1 St Augustine confesses that he too, at least before his baptism, found
Isaiah too hard, Con/, ix. 5, 13. Verum tamen ego primam hujus lectionem non
intelligent, totumque talem arbitrans, distuli repetendum exercitatior in dominico
eloquio.

2 Chron. ii. 3.

3 See authorities quoted by Seeck in an interesting note in his Gesch. des
Untergangs der Antiken Welt, p. 328, 11. 30, 31 ; note Salvian, de gub. Dei, iv.
14, 69, there cited, for an attitude toward Syrians in Gaul closely like that taken
in America toward the Jews. Add Butil. Namat. i. 383 396. It is one of the
most astonishing things to realize how many Syrians and Armenians, apart from
Jews, go to the New World to make money by peddling and return to Asia.

296 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

believe in those parts of the vision which still remain to be fulfilled,
in spite of the fulfilment of it all so far. I have spoken before
of the millenarism of the school of Martin and this is one more
instance of it.

The Chronicle had a curious fate, for after the invention of
printing it was used as a manual of history in schools for a century
and a half, and at one time incurred the ignorant suspicions of the
authorities of the Index l .

His other writings deal mainly with St Martin. His Life of
Martin is a model of biography though it has too many marvels
for the taste of to-day 2 . He supplemented it with three letters
on his great leader, and from these we learn that it was written
before Martin's death, which comes upon us as a surprise ; for one
would never judge from its style that its subject was living. It
may indeed have been revised, but this is mere conjecture.

In the Dialogue he continues the same subject, though he
prefixes to it an account of the monks of Upper Egypt. The
interlocutors are three himself, Gallus, a Gaul from the North,
and Postumian, like himself an Aquitanian. Postumian begins
with the story of his travels, how he sailed to Carthage and wor-
shipped at St Cyprian's tomb, how bad weather gave him a glimpse
of a curious little Christian community of shepherds in the desert,
how he went to Alexandria when the famous quarrel about the Tall
Brothers was at its height, and thence how he went to Bethlehem
and stayed with St Jerome, and to the deserts of the Thebaid and
saw all manner of holy men. Some of his tales are a little sadden-
ing. When obedience is carried to such a pitch that one foolish
man at the bidding of another will spend two years in carrying
water a mile to water a walking-stick, one feels there is some
fundamental error in the system. The holy man, who lived alone
on Mt Sinai for years and years, and by God's blessing did not
know he was naked, who ran from his fellow men, and when at last

)

1 Symonds, The Renaissance in Italy, vol. vi. p. 221, "Sigonius, a Vatican
student, was instructed to prepare certain text-books by Cardinal Paleotti.
These were an ecclesiastical history, a treatise on the Hebrew commonwealth
and an edition of Sulpicius Severus. The manuscripts were returned to him,
accused of unsound doctrine and scrawled over with such remarks as 'false,'
'absurd.' "

2 Even Paulinus deviates into relevance (Ep. xi. 11) to say of this Life:
historiam tarn digno sennone qiiam justo affectu percensuisti. Beatus et ille pro
mentis qui dignum fide et vita sua meruit historicum. The Life was done into
hexameters in the 5th century by Paulinus of Perigueux, and in the 7th by
Venantius Fortunatus. Probably the original prose will be preferred by most
readers.

Sulpicius Severus 297

he deigned a word to one explained that angels will not visit him
who dwells with other men, might, I am afraid, to-day be counted
as merely insane. The pleasanter tales tell of wild beasts tamed
and making friends with solitary hermits, though one fears that
the tale of the grateful lioness who sought a holy man's aid to give
sight to her blind cubs, and presented him a day or two later
with the skin of some rare ' animal, may seem to fall short of
probability.

When Postumian's travels are told, Gallus tells of St Martin
and manages to eclipse point by point the marvels of the desert
with the miracles of Gaul. It has been remarked that these stories
are put by Sulpicius into the mouth of his Celtic friend as if with
the intention of suggesting that they are not to be taken quite
literally, but his digression in the third book (to which I have
alluded) seems to make this view impossible.

One of the most interesting things in the Dialogue is the naive
account of the wonderful success of the Life of Martin 1 . It was
Postumian's "companion by land and sea, his fellow and comforter
in all his pilgrimage," and he found it before him wherever he went.
Paulinus had introduced it to Rome, where it sold like wildfire
to the vast delight of the booksellers. It was already the talk of
Carthage when Postumian got there. At Alexandria nearly every-
body knew it better than Sulpicius himself. It was spread all over
Egypt, and Postumian brought a request from the desert for a
sequel. Sulpicius hopes that the Dialogue may do as well as the
Life*.

Several general features remain to be remarked in the works
of Sulpicius. To his belief in miracles and visions I have already
referred. With this, I think, we should associate his millenarian
views. They too seem to be due to St Martin. It is a curious
thing how often a belief in the speedy return of Christ goes with
a revival of the religious life, a Nemesis one might perhaps say of
literalism, almost of materialism, shadowing the development of the
spiritual.

His earliest reference tq the subject is in the Life of Martin.
A false prophet, Anatolius by name, appeared in Gaul 3 , and another
simultaneously in Spain. The latter began by being Elias and then

1 Dial. i. 23. Paulinus in one of his letters (xxix. 14) tells how he read the
Life to the very saintly lady Melania and others. The lady was much interested
in lives of holy men.

2 Dial. Hi. 17. 3 V. Mart. 23.

298 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

proceeded to be Christ, and actually got a Spanish bishop to admit
his claim and worship him as God 1 . Sulpicius continues, "A good
many brethren also told us that at the same time there had risen in
the East a person who proclaimed that he was John. From all this
we may conjecture, when so many false prophets appear, that the
coming of Antichrist is at hand, and that he is already working in
them the mystery of iniquity."

The whole of this line of thought betrays at this early date
as ever since the influence of the books of Daniel and Revelation,
and in point of fact Martin and Sulpicius were nearer the original
than their successors, for they realized that Nero was portended
by the latter book 2 . Martin said that Nero would subdue ten kings
and become Emperor in the West, Antichrist in the East. Each
would start persecution, Nero in the interests of idolatry, Antichrist
seemingly of Judaism, for he was to rebuild the Temple 3 , enjoin
circumcision and claim worship as Christ. There was to be civil
war between them, as so often between West and East, and Nero
should fall and Antichrist reign, till the man of sin should be
crushed by Christ's coming. Antichrist was in fact already born,
had reached boyhood even, at the time of Martin's speaking, eight
years before Sulpicius wrote his Dialogue, "so take thought how
near at hand are the things men dread as still in the future 4 ."

In the Chronicle, Sulpicius says less, perhaps because more was
unfitting in hoc tarn praeciso opere. All he says is that Nero was
"a very fitting person to inaugurate the persecution of Christians 5 ,
and perhaps he will yet be the last to carry it out, for it is believed
by many that he will come in person before Antichrist 6 ." But we
need not go further into the subject, for the dangers of the inter-
pretation of prophecy are obvious, and there is little pleasure to be
derived from the contemplation of the errors and eccentricities of
good men.

1 V. Mart. 24.

2 For stories of false Neros see Tacitus, Hist. i. 2 ; ii. 8, a pretender about
the year 70; and Suetonius, Nero, 57, apparently another twenty years later.
Dio Chrysostom, Or. xxi. 10 (de Pulchritudine) oi dt irXewrot xal olovrai (that
Nero lives), Kalirep rpoirov riva ovx a?ra avrov TedvijKbros, d\\a TroXXawj /xera
TUV ff(f>6Spa ol^BlvT(i)v avrbv rjv.

3 Is this a far away memory of the Emperor Julian's attempt to rebuild it?

4 Dial. ii. 14. Jerome on Ezekiel xxxvi. (Migne, col. 339 B) alludes to these
views devTfpdxreis, a Jerusalem of gold, the restoration of the Jews etc., as
lately upheld by Severus noster in dialogo cui Gallo nomen imposuit.

5 Cf. Tertullian on Nero, Apology 5. Sed tali dedicatore damnationis nostrae
etiam gloriamur, etc.

8 Chron. ii. 28.

Sulpicius Severus 299

I have alluded more than once to the ill-will between the monks
and the bishops which was not lessened with time, though ever and
again a monk was made a bishop. Sometimes like St Martin he
would remember his calling, but not always, for Sulpicius has much
to say about monks losing their heads on being ordained or conse-
crated, and conceiving passions for building, for maintaining great
establishments and travelling with ease and magnificence with
multitudes of horses and servants 1 . Again and again he protests
against luxury and display and more serious vices among the
bishops and clergy. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, that
Levi received no share in the land of Canaan ; at least one would
suppose so from their eagerness for acquiring property in land 2 .
Prudentius says much the same, only more ingeniously, for by a
little anachronism, involving a century and a half, he puts into the
mouth of a dead and gone persecutor the words

et summa pietas creditur
nudare dulces liberos 3 .

But worse still was their habit of consorting with spiritual
sisters 4 . This was no new story, and perhaps it will never be old.
Cyprian long ago had written against the practice, and Jerome
fulminated against it still. He was himself the friend and adviser
of many women, and many of his letters to the nun Eustochium
and other ladies survive 5 . There seems to be a perennial fascina-
tion about the clergy for spiritually- minded women, but surely,
Sulpicius felt, monks have renounced feminine society and nuns
masculine. Scandals occurred oftener than so strait a school cared
to see them, and we find it told with pride how Martin but once in
his life allowed a woman to minister to him. But "as the grammarians
do, we must consider place, time and person 6 ," and it was the queen
of Maximus and her husband was present. One very scrupulous

1 Dial. i. 21.

2 Chron. i. 23. Non solum immemores sed etiam ignari. Note his conclusion
as to the meaning of their rapacity; quasi venalem praeferunt sanctitatem.

3 Steph. ii. 834.

4 Two Councils at least in the 4th century condemned this consorting with
syneisaktoi and agapetae. The 3rd Canon of the Council of Nicaea, and the
27th of Elvira both forbid it. "Spiritual brothers" and "sons" are mentioned
by Gregory of Nazianzus and Jerome. See Dale, Council of Elvira, p. 200. On
the better aspects of this matter the reader may consult Sabatier's interesting
elwptcr on St Clara in his work on St Francis of Assisi.

5 Xnsti /iiiclliires (ininwx his rebus plcrumque solidari, si se intelligant curae
esse major ibus, he says (Ep. 7, 4) a very worthy reason for very extraordinary
letters to be written to a girl of seventeen or eighteen.

6 Dial. ii. 7.

300 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

virgin point-blank refused to see Martin himself, for though thau-
maturge and bishop it could not be disguised that he was after
all a man ' ; and Martin praised her for her modesty. Well
indeed might Gallus say that if we were all like Martin, we should
not so much discuss the caitsas de osculo: "But after all we are
Gauls 2 ."

One mark of the monastic movement was its new relation with
nature, a new interest in birds and beasts, a new love for them.
Pet birds and dogs the old heathen world had known, but now man
and animal met on more equal terms of freedom, and we read
already of wolves and lions who were friends of the Egyptian monks.
Martin, himself, does not seem to have been intimate with any
animal, still we hear of him saving a hare from some hounds, and
there is a curious parable from nature recorded, not, it must be
said, a very happy one. The seagulls that flew up the Loire and
caught the fish were, he said, a type of the powers of evil seeking
the human soul. It reminds one of Bunyan's Book for Boys and
Girls, and its odd expositions of natural things. On the sacred
trees of the heathen Gauls Martin waged relentless war, hewing
them down by grace of miracle in spite of protest.

We now come to the last story told of Sulpicius, which, I should
say, I find strong reason for doubting. Sulpicius, as we have seen,
renounced the world and its allurements to become a monk, to live
the life best adapted, as men thought then, to the quest of holiness.
The thought of sin was often in his mind, his life in fact was a hand
to hand battle with sin. Now in the west, among men of his own
blood, rose a teacher with a new doctrine of sin Pelagius. It may
seem odd to find a Celt, a British Celt, with a Greek name, but we
find quite a number of Greek names among the Gallic and Spanish
monks in Sulpicius' pages 3 Eucherius, Euanthius, Aetherius and
Potamius, and a Briton Pelagius was. Into Pelagianism we need
not enter, but certain features should be remarked. Faith is not
enough to save a man ; it must be reinforced by works, by conduct,
by watchfulness ; and a man's will-power, aided by grace (which is

1 On the other hand when Martin slept in a vestry of the church at Claudio-
magus, on his departure there was a rush (inruerunt) of virgins into the room,
to kiss the spots where he had sat or stood, and to divide up the straw on which
he had lain. Dial. ii. 8.

2 Dial. ii. 8.

3 The Celt carried his fancy for a little Greek so far, that in Irish uss. we
are apt to find stray Latin words written in Greek character. The Greek names
may, perhaps, be illustrated hy the habit native converts in India have of giving
their children English names.

Sulpicius Severus 301

won by his good inclinations), and supported by good works, may
secure him a pure life, not indeed free from temptation, but from
sin. Underlying all this there was to begin with a protest against
the worldliness and evil living of professing Christians, though the
logical outcome of the system was really to underestimate sin. But
for the time it was urged that a low standard was not inevitable ;
the highest was attainable, if proper means were taken. The proper
means meant the monastic life generally.

This view of the possibilities of Christian living was a monk's,
a Celtic monk's, and from what we have seen of Sulpicius, it will
not be altogether siirprising to read in Gennadius that he adopted
Pelagius' position '. Millenarism and an over-hasty idea of achieving
sinlessness not uncommonly go together and it may be that Sulpicius
became a Pelagian. Gennadius wrote a refutation of the heresy,
which is lost, and he might be supposed to know who were its leading
adherents. He adds, however, that Sulpicius ultimately realized he
had made a mistake and renounced his error, and in his repentance
abjured speech for ever, "to expiate by silence the sin he had
contracted by speech." Whether we believe all this to be true or
not 2 depends on whether we accept Gennadius' story, but it must be
admitted it is not inherently impossible. It would be sad to think
of this most genial and gentle of men ending his days in the agony
of remorse and silence, but even if he did, it does not lessen the
value of his delightful works. Probably, however, the story is a
mistake, the invention of stupidity.

Reviewing the life of Sulpicius, it may seem to us strange that
a man of good family and culture should so surrender himself to the
guidance of a man his inferior in everything society valued, should
surrender above all his judgment and accept so much that would
appear contrary to reason, to sense and to experience. Yet, after
all, it is not a very rare phenomenon. Our own day has seen a

1 Gennadius, Vir. III. 19.

2 More and more I incline to think that this siorysilentium usque ad
mortem tenuit is, after all, a mere misunderstanding of Paulinus' phrases
confugisti ad pietatis silentium ut evaderes iniquitatis tumultum. Mutescere
voluisti mortalibus ut ore puro "divina loquereris et pollutant canina facundia
linguam Christi laudibus et comme.moratione ipsa pii nominis expiares (Ep. v. 6).
Gennadius mentions (c. 49) that Paulinus wrote ad Severum plitres epistulas,
nor is this his only allusion, and he obviously depends for all his other state-
ments on these letters and on Sulpicius himself. List-making is a poor trade,
and such a blunder is not very improbable. Paulinus Petricordius (of Perigueux)
a contemporary of Gennadius (469 490) who did Severus' Martin into an epic
of six books, speaks of him with admiration, but no hint of this story. See
Book v. (1052 c, Migne). Eeinkens, without discussing the origin of Gennadius'
story, dismisses it as untrue.

302 Life and Letters in tJie Fourth Century

similar renunciation of everything by a man of letters, a member of
the English House of Commons, who at the word of one he believed
inspired of God, left all to work on a farm and sell strawberries on a
train, still retaining a buoyant cheerfulness. Whatever we may
make of his teaching, we cannot but respect the spirit of Laurence
Oliphant.

It may, however, be said, that while Sulpicius' problem is the
constant problem of mankind, his solution is not satisfactory.
Though many things in his day made it attractive to men of a
religious temper, it none the less rested eventually on a funda-
mentally false philosophy, a wrong explanation of the world, the old
Oriental mistrust of matter and of the body. Over and over again
since Sulpicius' day this mistake has been exposed, error, as Augustine
says, proving in all sorts and kinds of strange ways its own punish-
ment, revolting against its own consequences and exposing itself.
But if the monastic solution of the problem of holy living will not
satisfy mankind in the long run, it must not be forgotten that a
debt of gratitude is due to the men who had the nobility of character
to venture all on the experiment. That it failed proves their judg-
ment was unsound, but it does not affect the fact that they thought
such an experiment worth while.

CHAPTER XIII

PALLADAS

O wedding-guest ! this soul hath been

Alone on a wide, wide sea;
So lonely 't was that God himself

Scarce seemed there to be.

THE great note that distinguishes Christian from heathen
literature is its fundamental gladness. On the surface it may
seem sad at times ;

hora novissima, tempora pessima;

but there is a deep-rooted consolation in the thought, terrible
though it be, that follows ;

imminet arbiter ille supremus.

This at least implies distinctions drawn between what is good and
what is bad, a moral supremacy in the world of One who is of
purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and therein the value of life and
of holy life. The absence of any certainty that life has a permanent
value is the canker at the heart of heathenism.

It is hard to understand aright the heathenism of the Roman
world. It calls for sympathetic treatment, if we are to read its
spirit as well as its words. Underneath its varying moods is the
same weariness, the same restlessness, that shews itself to-day under
moods very similar. There is the quest for certainty which is
not to be found. In reason some men sought it and their con-
clusion was an uncertainty that grew more and more uncertain and
unhappy. Others turned to religious revival and looked to Cybele,
to Isis, to Mithras, to any god and every god, and found perhaps
more comfort than the others, but hardly, if they thought, more

304 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

certainty. It is worth while to study these lines of inquiry in some
typical minds, until in Palladas at the end of the fourth century we
reach the final conclusion to which Greek thought came.

The Latin poets of the last century B c. are so largely influenced
by Greek thought, and the Latin habit was so commonly to look to
results rather than to follow methods, that we can gauge by the
words of the Roman much of the thought of the world.

Lucretius preaches with fervour the wisdom of Epicurus. The
gods have no existence, except as shadowy beings who live afar,
as little concerned with us as men in an undiscovered island.
There is no hell, no hereafter. No man need shudder at death,
since in death he will not feel the loss of wife or children, for he
will be resolved into elements, which will immediately recompose
into something else, something quite distinct from the man they
lately formed. Hence with no higher powers above him, and no
future world before him, man can rid himself of that religious dread,
which spoils and poisons all his happiness. He can dismiss the idle
terrors of death and enjoy life. This was on the whole a dangerous
theory. It was one thing in the mind of Lucretius, but quite
another in the more commonplace minds around him. If it was
not to lead to mere self-indulgence, more self-control and more
thought were required than were possible for ordinary people.
But there were other considerations of perhaps even more import-
ance.

For there is another side to all this. If a man die, he is free
from desire to see his dear ones, but what of them ? Theirs is
"the pain of finite hearts that yearn." Tennyson remarks that no
poem of farewell to the dead written to-day can have the terrible
pathos of Catullus'

atque IN PERPETVUM frater ave otque vale.

In pei-petuum! If we are to be merry, we must have no brothers,
then, or not feel it if they die. Yet who would not rather choose
"the poet's hopeless woe"?

In Horace we find the thought of death as constantly introduced
as in The Earthly Paradise. How far Lucretius directly influenced
him, this is not the place to discuss, but it was upon the Epicurean
theory that Horace lived on the whole. He is not consistent.
He is for enjoying the present, but his views of enjoyment undergo
a change, and as he grows older and his pleasures purer, he seems to
grow less satisfied with himself and his theory of life. He betrays a

Palladas 305

sense of failure ; effort and all a man can do for himself are not
enough, and placid and clean Epicureanism proves inadequate.

Contemporary with these men were Virgil and Tibullus, who
have a good deal in common. Tibullus harks back to the gods of
the countryside. Speculation may have its charms for others, they
are not for him. He will stand quietly and gladly in the old ways,
very largely insensible to the currents of philosophic thought. But
Virgil is a greater mind. His is a greatness that grows on the
reader who will read him much and with love. He had been caught
by the spell of Lucretius, by the glory and majesty of the knowledge
of Nature and her ways

felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere caussas

he too loved the quiet life that Horace sang, but he knew the
sorrows of the human heart even better than Catullus knew them.
Ever and again we hear the note of sorrow in his music, of sorrow
that will not be assuaged though Pallas or Lausus, Creusa or Dido
be resolved into insensate atoms, each instinctively swerving in
search of others to combine with to form another fortuitous con-
currence, which shall have to learn the same gamut of woe to as
little purpose. Life after all involves more than atoms. It carries
with it deep seated affections and tender yearnings, which must
either imply the reunion of Dido and Sychaeus, of Anchises and
Aeneas, or else wrap man's existence in deeper and blacker sorrow.
Before the eyes of Love hovers

ipsius umbra Creusae,

and the poet turns from the cold and really, if not superficially,
loveless life Lucretius required, and exclaims

fortunatus et ille, deos qui novit agrestes.

It is the revolt of the feelings of the man against the logic of the
thinker significant as coming from a disciple, who was also a
sufferer and a poet. This testimony of heathenism (one can hardly
write the word of Virgil) to* the unsatisfactoriness of Epicurus'
godless atoms is remarkable.

It is not surprising to find, when a Virgil revolts, that for
common people atheism was inadequate. It appeals indeed to man
at his lowest Ovid was probably an atheist but let the recollec-
tion of better things come to the voluptuary and he casts his
atheism aside for devotion. Sacrifice, lustration, initiation and all

G. 20

306 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

kinds of ritual flourished alongside of the atheism of the early
Empire.

As time went on, the sadness of heathenism deepened. Lucan
may be glib enough and prove by an epigram that the fall of the
Koman republic means the non-existence of gods', and Persius may
be quite happy in a young and innocent life with the view that all
that is needed is effort and purity follows, without much reference
to heaven. But the second century saw the pendulum swing away
from atheism into superstition. The world was growing too un-
happy to be atheist, and the gods came back from exile and brought
strange friends with them^. Their votaries had cast them out, and
now recalled them and "kissed again with tears." Some might
mock, but most worshipped, and among the doubters were devotees.
Three great names stand out in literature at the century's end,
Lucian, Marcus Aurelius and Apuleius.

Lucian, a Syrian Greek of Samosata, was a scoffer in grain. He
might be serious at times, but never reverent. His position was
sceptical. There were riddles of life, but no man could ever guess
them why try? The gods were excellent butts for flippant wits,
and nearly as good were the philosophers, the preachers and teachers
who would not practise what they taught others. His humour is of a
type not unfamiliar to-day. To jest at the scriptures and wittily to
insinuate that a teacher of Christianity is probably a hypocrite,
possibly a rogue or certainly a fool, may still please some minds.
It is not very fresh by now, but perhaps in Lucian's day it was more
novel; perhaps, too, such mirth had a shade more truth about it.
Still I feel that they exaggerate who attribute much weight to
Lucian and his school in the downfall of paganism. Flippancy is
not so fatal to a Pantheon as moral dissatisfaction, and in so
religious an age Christianity grew because it offered men a higher
ideal itself, and not because scoffers laughed at the ideas of God
and Truth and every other thing that made for righteousness.

Perhaps the most read book of the age is the diary of Marcus
Aurelius in many ways the saddest of all books. Its manliness
and purity, its high ideals and earnestness, make more pathetic that
haunting uncertainty and want of rest, which one feels throughout
it. The theory of life is so obviously only a working hypothesis,

1 See vii. 454.

2 Chassang, Histoire du Roman, p. 400: "Vers le premier siecle de 1'ere
chre'tienne, la fureur de la magie s'empara de tout le monde paien." Compare
the works of Philostratus, especially his Apollonius of Tyana, and Lucian's
Lover of Falsehood and Alexander.

Palladas 307

unverifiable at best. Whenever doubt clouds religion, men will turn
to Marcus and see in him perhaps the highest level reached by the
religious temper that seeks truth but cannot be sure of finding it.
He is no atheist, no sceptic perhaps, but he looks for heavenly
guidance and is not conscious of receiving it, and so he makes his
own way sadly as well as he can. Yet from the story of his life we
learn that this thinker, this speculator, emancipated as we might
suppose him from common weakness, sacrificed perhaps more than
any other Roman Emperor. If he was not to attain light from the
gods, it was not to be for want of asking it. So doubt and devotion
went hand in hand in sadness.

Apuleius in after days passed for a magician; indeed men
accused him of magic while he lived, but I mention him in order to
compare his immortal book with one of Lucian's, one at least at-
tributed to Lucian by many people. The Golden Ass (a much better
title than the Metamorphoses and one which has St Augustine's
sanction) is either modelled on Lucian's Lucius, or the Ass 1 , or more
probably both are drawn from a common source. Both deal with
witchcraft, and introduce us to a hero, Lucius, who by meddling with
a sorceress' boxes transforms himself into a donkey and in this form
has a series of wonderful adventures. The Golden Ass follows one
by one the episodes of Lucian, enlarging and digressing very
admirably, and giving us a wonderful panorama of provincial life,
its humours, comedies, tragedies, and above all its perils. There
are woven into it stories after the manner of Boccaccio 2 , and of
the Hundred Mery Tales, adventures with brigands and soldiers
alike dangerous to honest folk, the exquisite tale of Cupid and
Psyche, and in a word quidquid agunt homines Asini farrago libelli.
But the significant thing is that at the end Apuleius entirely departs
from Lucian. In Lucian the human donkey runs into a procession
by accident and, finding a priest carrying roses, eats them and is a
man again. In Apuleius he escapes to the sea-shore and delivers
himself of a long and careful prayer to a goddess of many names and
prays her for release. She comes to him in a dream, and acknow-
ledges his prayer, telling him that the many names are indeed all
her own, but her truest name is Isis, and she directs him to meet the
procession, when the priest, instructed by her in a similar dream,

1 See Cbassang, Histoire du Roman, pp. 401, 402.

3 The tale of the cooper, for example, is common to Apnleius and Boccaccio.
How far does such a fact affect the value of such tales as evidence of the
manners and morals of an age?

202

308 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

will tender him the roses. So it befalls, but while Lucian ends his
story with one more obscene incident to cap all, Apuleius shews us
Lucius a converted character, intent on nothing but initiation and
undergoing no less than three special introductions to the Mysteries
as a mark of divine favour. And what did he learn by it all ? "I
approached the confine of death ; I trod the threshold of Proserpine ;
I was borne through all the elements and returned. At midnight
I saw the sun flashing with fair light. The gods of the lower world
and the gods of the world above I drew near unto, and I adored
them from close at hand 1 ." So ends in initiation and divine
revelation the most amusing, the most brilliant and the most
Aristophanic of all books in Latin.

This is significant. There were instincts in man too strong and
too profound to accept a negative conclusion or no conclusion at all
to the great quest. Lucian might mock, and Marcus hesitate ; the
mass of men must believe something. The pity of it was that they
found nothing better to believe in than I sis and Mithras.

We are apt to forget how much paganism was left in the fourth
century. It was not clamorous but quiet and content as a rule to
be left alone. There were some writers, honest heathens, who said
nothing one way or another about their tenets. Others found their
interest in gentle retrospect and old association, their faith a
sentimental cherishing of ancestral tradition. But the stronger
spirits went further, and were absorbed and illumined by a
revived, or rather perhaps a new, heathenism, different in many
ways from the old heathenism of Greek and Roman, different too
from that of Phrygian and Egyptian. It appealed to the individual
as did the latter, but otherwise, for it went deeper than lustration
and sacrament. It was a faith that appealed to reason, emotion
and imagination, a blend of everything congruous or incongruous,
philosophy, theosophy, mysticism, magic, ritual, trance, asceticism,
what not. One of the most conspicuous of the adherents of this
new religion is Julian, the more faithful an exponent of it for not
being an original thinker. He betrays clearly what we feel must
have had a great deal to do with the revival from long before the
influence of Christianity. His grand scheme of the Catholic Church
of Hellenism has been discussed elsewhere. Its failure was the
death-knell of heathenism. The latest and grandest of all attacks
on Christianity was a fiasco, and thinking men must have realized
it. And so they did ; and in the unhappy Palladas we have one
1 Apuleius, Met. xi. 23.

Palladas 309

who saw the old order pass away giving place to none, and his
bitter hopelessness is the last dark mood of dying heathenism. Its
consolations were gone. The exhilarating atheism of Lucretius,
weighed and found wanting by Virgil, was impossible. The moral
enthusiasm of Persius, unconscious of weakness, and the moral
purpose of Marcus, painfully aware that he is not sure of anything,
were out of the question for the Alexandrian scholar, who could find
no base to build on and would not build without a base. Apuleius
and Julian might draw comfort from Isis and from Mithras, but
Palladas could not find support in gods who could not support
themselves. As for Lucian's flippant scepticism, the times forbade
it. Sceptical a man might be, but the burden of life was too heavy
for flippancy. So it may repay us to study for a little the work of
Palladas.

In the Greek Anthology, that wonderful garland of the flowers
and weeds of fifteen centuries of literature, his is one of the most
frequent names, so frequent indeed as perhaps really to affect the
colour of the whole. An epigram among the Greeks was at first
an inscription, and, as almost anything might be inscribed, it came
to designate roughly anything written in verse, whether in one line
or a dozen, dealing with any and every conceivable subject. Hence
in the Anthology, beside inscriptions for tombs, for statues and
paintings, and dedicatory verses for shrines, we have a highly
miscellaneous collection of criticisms of life and literature, remarks
on Providence, Chance and the vagaries of Destiny, "quips and
cranks and wanton wiles," jibes, flouts and sneers of every type of
humour and sometimes of no humour at all. The earlier epigrams
have the calm equipoise of all Greek art, rhythm and thought in
harmony ; but as we come to later writers, the epigrams tend more
and more to resemble those of the Romans, who set the fashion for
ourselves, and held that an epigram like the apocalyptic scorpion
should wear its sting in its tail. Naturally a degeneration set in,
when poetry yielded place to point and pun, and the epigram was
gradually abandoned by the poet to the versifier.

Palladas ' has been called/ rather cruelly, versifaator insulsissi-

1 I only know of one allusion to Palladas in ancient literature. An epigram
of a conventional character exists, in which the writer gently deprecates being
compared with Palladas (or Palladius, as the exigencies of verse require).
I think it will be seen from the epigrams to be quoted that neither in virtue of
his inspiration nor his music was Palladas the man to found a school. Is it
impossible that Claudian, a fellow-citizen and contemporary of his, means
Palladas, when he writes Sic non Tartareo furiai~um verbere pulsus \ irati
relegam carmina grammatici?

310 Life and Letters in the Fourth Centura

mus. He is partly to blame for this, even if it is a little hard. On
the same subject he will make epigram after epigram, though his
theme be at best as trivial as his lines. His verse is apt to be
lumbering, and he will repeat the same thought without adding
materially to the force of its expression. Somewhat lacking in
grace, he does not always achieve point, and sometimes when he
does the point is poor. Yet Palladas must and will be heard. We
have one hundred and fifty of his epigrams, and we have no reason
to believe that these were all he wrote, yet of them we might
sacrifice a half or two-thirds without any substantial loss.

The greater number of these little poems deal with one subject,
and the spirit in which he writes of it, his savage insistence, and
the terrible humour with which he clothes and reclothes his one
idea in one startling garb and another, gloomy and grim, command
attention for him. The melancholy and the misery of life, the
vanity and vexatiousness of things are his constant burden. Of all
Greek writers he is most like Theognis. We must bear in mind
however that it is not always easy to say for how much of the work
that bears his name Theognis was responsible. And at all events
Theognis, whatever he may have disbelieved, had a saving faith in
gentlemen, in birth and breeding, which may not be so satisfying a
faith as some, but has fine elements nevertheless. Palladas had not
that faith; possibly there were not many Greek gentlemen left in
the fourth century. Over and above his atheism he has a highly
developed disbelief in man.

Society in Alexandria in Palladas' day is perhaps best known
to the English reader in Kingsley's novel Hypatia. If heathenism
was exhausted and had nothing to offer the weary soul, Chris-
tianity as a spiritual system could hardly have been attractive
when presented by such men as the bishops Theophilus and Cyril.
When honest heathen thought ill of Athanasius, what can they have
thought of his successors ? and if the rulers of the Church were such,
what was to be expected from officials like Orestes ? and there were
worse men than Orestes, as we may read in the pages of Ammianus
Marcellinus.

Hence we need not be surprised at the tone of Palladas about
society, about great men and their toadies. Rulers with pleasant
manners, he says, are generally thieves; and honest rulers generally
have nasty manners 1 . Gold is a terror to possess, and anguish not

1 Ajith. P. ix. 393.

Palladas 311

to possess 1 . The rich are insolent, and if they deviate into polite-
ness their compliments dinners 3 , presents or what not are usually
the refinement of insult. Zeus himself, if he were poor, would be
treated with outrage. There is just a possibility that Palladas may
have been soured by waiting in vain for promotion. At any rate an
epigram speaks of years of wretchedness and literature, and the
final descent into Hades of a Councillor of the Dead. Did
promotion come too late to be enjoyable ? the point is a small one and
does not greatly matter. The main thing is, that society was rotten.
Palladas was a grammarian, a student and a teacher of the
ancient literature of Greece, still every whit as precious and
absorbing as it had ever been. It is astonishing to us to realize
what delight men took in the form, quite apart from the spirit, of
Greek literature. Now Palladas does not seem to take delight in it
at all. A man may many men do lament the miseries of a
profession freely chosen and not really distasteful; it is a form of
humour, perhaps of modesty ; but at all events the scholar and the
artist are apt to take a joy in their work, to feel enthusiasm for
what they are doing, and what other men have done before them.
In no republic is there so much loyalty as in that of letters, but it
is difficult to discover in Palladas a line that implies delight in his
work. One or another of his epigrams about it may well be ironic,
but the general impression is of a yoke borne without much love.
Here and there he speaks of selling his books 3 , for Syntax is the
death of him not an unpardonable feeling surely but we find him
out when he deals with Homer. Even here he displays no feeling
for the greatest of Greek poets. He uses him freely, and abuses
him as freely. His great discovery is that Homer was a misogynist.
Circe points a moral to keep good company 4 , and the general gist of
both Iliad and Odyssey is that woman is a failure.

All women, good or bad, are snares,
All deadly, Homer's self declares :
Men die for Helen's sin : like waste
Attends Penelope the chaste.
Thus springs from woman, good or bad,
An Odyssey, an Iliad 5 .

1 Anth. P. ix. 394. 2 Anth. P. ix. 377, 484, 487.

3 Anth. P. ix. 171, 175. 4 Anth. P. x. 50.

5 \\.a.<rav "Q/jnjpos 5eie KO-nrfv <r<f>a.\epi]v re yvvaiKa,

fftlxftpova Kal Tr6pvr)v d/u^or^pas oXeOpov.
tK yap TTJS 'EX^CT/s fj.oixevffa.fju-j'ris <p6vos a.v5pCiv,

Kal Sia ff<t)(f)poff)jvr)v HyveXbiTTis 8a.va.Toi.
"IXtas ovv TO TTovrjua /J.ias x.o.piv fffTi jwatK6s'

atrap 'Odvffffel-ri nr/j/eXim? wp6(f>affis. Anth. P. ix. 166.

312 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Women provoke Palladas, or perhaps he is only jesting. Still
one feels he jests too much and with tools of too sharp an edge.
The married grammarian comes in for several epigrams, generally as
the husband of a shrew. Perhaps this is the best of them :

An Iliad of wrath I read;

An Iliad of wrath I wed ;

Too much of wrath for one poor life,

Wrath of Achilles, wrath of wife 1 .

Woman is the anger of Zeus 2 given to man in wrath, to
balance the blessing of fire 3 . Zeus himself has a sad life of it
with Hera, and has had to kick her out of heaven more than once ;
Homer tells us that.

One more epigram and we can leave that wearisome Iliad-.

Achilles' wrath, to me the direful spring
Of beggary, I a poor grammarian sing.
Ah! would that wrath, ere I starvation knew
Had with those other Danaans slain me too:
That Helen and Briseis both might be
Rapt from their lords, I came to beggaiy 4 .

A non sequitur, but what of that? There is many a non sequitur in
misery.

Before passing on to his more general reflexions on life, it may
be well to give a few instances of his humour when he is in a lighter
mood. Even here he does not lack a certain pungency, nearer
perhaps to Martial than to the Greeks of the earlier days when
epigrams were at their best.

1 ~M.rjvi.v ov\ofdv7)v yafJLerrjv 6 rclXas

Kal irapa. rrjs rt^y'")* nfyiSos dpdyitej>os.
U/JLOI eyit) TroXifytTjcis, ?x wv Tpix6\uTov dvdyKtjv,

Anth. P. ix. 168.

2 Anth. P. ix. 165.

3 Anth. P. ix. 167. Of. also x. 55 and 56 on the woman question and note
the almost brutal bitterness of the line ei ffJxppuv ecrrt yvv-t) rts oXw?.

4 M.TJVIS 'AxtXX-Jjoj Kal e/jioi irpb<pa<ns

(We Se ffvv AavaoTs ^e Karfarave /uijm eKfivi),

irplv xtt^fros Xtyuds ypafj./j.ariKrjs oXe'trei.
dXX' lv' d<f>ap-ird^r) Epiffrjtda irplv 'Aya/jL^/jtvuv

TTIV 'EX^'iyi' 5' 6 Ildpis irruxbs tyu yev6ni)v.

Anth. P. ix. 169.

Palladas 313

I chid my belly for foul treason,
And made it list to words of reason ;
Belly below and mind atop
Why can't their foolish wrestling stop 1 ?

A happy thought, not ill put perhaps, but very far from the high-
water-mark of Greek poetry. It lacks grace and shews the heavy
hand of the versifier. Here is another rather neater.

Daphne the snub-nosed Memphis danced,

And Niobe danced he;
A stock indeed his Daphne was,

A stone his Niobe 2 .

The joke was however common property, such as it was. The
following has a little more originality.

So lazy is Pantaenetus that he

In fever prayed he never more might rise;

He bettered, though, and "Thence we all may see
"In Heaven's deaf ears," he vows, "no succour lies 3 ."

He looks out on life, takes a broad survey of it its starving
teachers, rich churls, villain rulers, successful murderers 4 and
quarrelsome wives its freaks, its topsy-turveydoms and general
irrationality, and his conclusion is irritation, disgust and un-
happiness. The only power worth considering is Chance or
Fortune, a feminine personification with every feminine vice as
he loves to emphasize.

yrjSiiv a.va.iff'xyvTov ffTt/Sapois ^ff'xyv
fftoMppofftivy KoXdffas frrepov dpya\toi>.

et yap x w "rbv v v v fTiKel/jLevov vif/bOi yaffrp6s,
TrtSs fjii) viKTr)ff(i) Tr]v vTroTaffffo/j.vr)i> ;

Anth. P. ix. 170.

(pvr]i> /ecu io/iji' wpxri
ws ti\ti>os Ad<f>vr)t>, ws

ib. xi. 255.

3 OCrws lar dpybs HavTalveTos, ware irvptl-as

/j.T)Ktr' dvaffrffvai Travrbs (Seiro 0eov.
Kal vvv OVK iOeKwv fj.kv eyeiperai, ec d oi avrtij
K(i)(f>a. dtdv ddlKuv oUara /ie/x06/tfj'os.

ib. xi. 311.

4 Anth. P. x. 53, If murderers thrive well ! Zeus rules, and he would have
murdered Kronos, had Kronos beqn a mortal. But cf. ix. 378, a murderer saved
by Serapis from a falling wall for the gibbet.

314 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Nor rhyme nor reason tyrant Fortune knows;

Mere random whims dispose her vagrant course;
Bad men she leans to and the good o'erthrows

The more to flaunt the might of senseless force 1 .

Our life's a slave that runs away,

And Fortune is a courtesan ;
We needs must laugh to see their play,
Or else must weep to mark alway

The worthless is the happier man 2 .

Life is the toy of Fortune, and can tell

Of piteous change; now all goes ill, now well;

Some like a ball come down and then go up,
And some have fallen from the clouds to hell 3 .

Life is a dangerous voyage; storm-winds fling us
Where worse than shipwrecked mariners we lie;

Chance, the one pilot of man's life, will bring us
Chance knoweth where as o'er the seas we fly.

Some meet good weather ; others ill have found ;

All make the common anchorage underground 4 .

And if all these cheerful statements are true ? What can a man
do in a world where forethought is waste of time ?

Get riches, and what then? the coffin's lid
The company of thy coffer will forbid ;

Oi> \6yov ov v6/j.ov ol8f Ti^x 7

TO?S iOiois dX6">ws pevfJMai ffvpofj^vi].

IM\\OV rails ddiKOifft ptirei, fj-ifffi ot oiKaiovs,
us fTriSeiKisvfdvT) TTJV &\oyov dvvafj.iv.

Anth. P. x. 62.

2 *A.v jj.7] ye\ufjLev rbv j3iov TOV
Ti^x 7 ? 1 ' T ir6pvi)s pevu.aff(.v Kivov/J^vr
6dvv7]v eavrols irpo^fvovfjiev iravrorf
dvaiovs op&VTes evrvxcTTtpovs.

ib. 87.

3 Haiyviov tart Ti/x^s fj.cp6Tr<i)v fiios, oiKTp6s, dX-^

irXoi/roi> Kai irevirjs fj.fffff66i pe/Mfiofjifvos.
Kal TOUS IJL^I> Kardyovaa ird\iv ff(paiprjSov deipei,
roi/s 5' diro TU>V ve^eXwf et's 'Aidijv Kardyei.

ib. 80.

nXoOs ff<f>a\tpos -rb rjv' x f 'M a ^A te ' /0 ' 7p ev airr<j>
TroXXdKi vavqy&v Trraio/uec olxTpdrepa'

TT)V dt Ti/x 7 ? 1 ' fiibTOto Kvftfpvf}Teipav ^x VTt ^<
wj tvl TOV irf\dyovs dfJuftifiaiXoi Tr\eoft,fv'

ol fjv ^TT' finr\oir]v, ol 5' l/j.ira\iv dXX' d'/ia Trdvr
els tva. rbv /card yijs opfj.ov direpx6/j.e6a.

ib. 65.

Palladas 315

Add wealth and time subtract; and what remains?
Life not an hour the longer for thy pains 1 .

Is it not the same lesson that we learn from Omar ?

Some for the glories of this world and some
Sigh for the prophet's Paradise to come ;

Ah ! take the cash and let the credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of the distant drum.

Taking the cash and letting the credit go commonly means eating
and drinking, especially drinking, and so Palladas teaches.

Eat thou and drink, and shut thine eyes to woe;
Belike the dead no stomach-ache will know;
Twelve children buried, Homer lets us see,
Her appetite was left to Niobe 2 .

Why toil in vain and strive against the star

That marked your birth with its controlling presence;

Give way and quarrel not with things that are
Accept your fate in silent acquiescence

Or rather catch at joy ; be your employment

To steal a march on Fate and taste enjoyment 3 .

If this course of life is a failure, there is always death to fall
back on, and once death is passed there is no sorrow left 4 .

Living in Alexandria Palladas must have been in constant
contact with Christians and such Christians ! Riotous monks and
courtier bishops were not the best preachers of the faith, but one

1 HXovreis, Kal ri TO \OLTTOV; aTrepx&/J.evos, fiera ffavrov

rbv TT\OVTOV fftipeis, els ffop&v e\K6fJ.fvos ;
rbv TT\OVTOV ffvvdyets 8a.ira.vQiv xp^ "' ov dvvaffcu 5e
fays crupevffai /j^rpa irepifffforepa.

Anth. P. 60.
The triple pun of the Greek I am afraid I have failed to represent.

2 "Effete Trive fjLfiaas tirl trevdecnv ov yap

yaffrepl irevdrjffai veKpbv "Q/j.r)pos %<pT).
Kal yap 6/j.ov 6dif/a<rai> 6\wX6rct 5t65e/ca reKva
ffirov /jLvriffafM^VTrjv TT]v Ni6j37jv irapdyei.

ib. 47.
The reference is to the Iliad xxiv. G02 ^16^77 tariff O.TO ffirov.

3 TtVre /j.aTt]v avOpuire Travels Kal wdvra rapdaffets

8ov\ev<i)v rip Kara, TTJV yveau> ;
aavrbv &(f>es, rip 8aifj.ovi (J.TJ <f>i\ot>e[Kei'
CTTJV Se TVXf)v crrepyuv, r)crvxiav dydtra.
/j.a\\ov eV etLKfipofftivrjv d /3tafeo, Kal irapa.
et Svvarbv ^VXTI" T^f/wop/bnff fj.fr6.yeiv.

ib. 77.
4 Anth. P. x. 59.

316 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

feels here and there in his work a hint of some knowledge of
Christianity. For example; everything that lives can feel anger,
and may not I with an angry word requite him who does me
an ill deed 1 ? Again, he hints at possibilities after death, and
his language, though it may be called vague, seems to recall
Christian eschatology. Body, suffering of soul, Hades, burden,
destiny, fetters and tortures ; and then freed from the body to face
an eternal God <eiryei Trpos Otov aOdvarov 2 . God he takes to be a
philosopher, not promptly angered by blasphemy, but taking his
time to prepare punishment for bad and tiresome men. What again
does this mean?

Weep not, nor faint: how short a life we know!

Short beside that to be, there's no denial;
Till the worm breed and to the grave you go,

Break not your spirit, while as yet on trial 3 .

Add to these indications his very plain-spoken epigram on the
monks. We read of communities of them in the Thebaid two or
three thousand strong. Well may he ask, "If solitaries (ftova^ot),
why so many? So many, how solitaries 4 ?"

In 391 the Christians led by the Archbishop and the Governor
destroyed the Serapeum at Alexandria, the most famous and sacred
of temples 5 . The tables were turned. Palladas has one or two
mysterious epigrams on the superlative folly of not being friendly
with the favourites of God, which of course may be taken in more
ways than one, but this on seeing an image of Hercules thrown out
somewhere is noteworthy and unmistakable.

On the cross-roads I saw Jove's brazen son,
That once had worship but his day seems done;
"Ah! guardian god!" in bitter rage I say,
"So long unconquered thou art fall'n to-day!"

1 Anth. P. x. 49. 2 Anth. P. x. 88.

3 'Piirre yhovs, ftrj Kd/ju>f, irbaov xpbvov (V0d5e /MfjLi>ui>,

(is irpbs eKfivov o\ov TOV fjierd TO.VTO. fiiov.
irplv roivw ffK<J}\7)Ka paXetv Ttfyi/3ois re pi<(>iji>ai,
fj.i} Sa/udffjs ij'i'XT)'' & v ^ Tt Kpivo/J.^vt]v.

Anth. P. x. 78.

4 Anth. P. xi. 384. The references to Judgment to come might be Neo-
Platonic.

5 See Eufinus, E. H. ii. 2224 ; Socr. v. 16, 17. On the threatening fall of
paganism in Egypt, the Latin translation of Hermes Trismegistus (ed. Bipont.
Apul. vol. ii. pp. 307 309) may be consulted.

Palladas 317

By night he Ccime to me and smiled, "My friend!
"Know, to the tempest ev'n a god must bend 1 ."

Enough commentary is supplied by the epigram on the Olympian
dwellers at Marina's house who have turned Christian and need
fear no melting-pot or bellows 2 . Gods were melted down and
became very common articles in those days, as an epigram shews,
the sense of which is clear though the text is corrupt.

A smith, a most discerning man,
Turns Love into a frying-pan.
Why 'most discerning,' you inquire?
How close are frying-pan and fire !

With gods turning into pots and pans, men may well bow to the
tempest, but it will hardly make them happy to do so. When
Palladas sees the muddle of life, his conclusion is "hatred of every-
thing," fuo-w TO. Travra, and, whether he refer to a Greek or a
Christian Providence, he sums all up so:

If care will avail you, then care and prepare ;
But why care for yourself though, if Providence care?
Yet 'tis Providence makes you or care or forbear,
For Providence cares that you've cares and to spare 3 .

His one enthusiasm was oddly enough for a woman. Hypatia,
the more famous daughter of the philosopher Theon, was one of the
most conspicuous figures in Alexandria. A Platonist of the school
of Plotinus, she lectured publicly, and pupils gathered from every
quarter. She mingled freely with the rulers, and for her splendid
dignity all men respected and feared her. She was a great friend
of Orestes the prefect, and in Church circles they said she kept him
from making friends with Cyril the bishop. Some hot-heads, led
by one Peter, a reader, conspired, watched for her, tore her from her
chariot and dragged her into the Church called the Caesareum. They

1 T6v At6s tv -TpioSouriv e0a.6fjia.ira. x a ^ Kfov via,

rbv irplv ev etf^wXats vvv irapapnrT6/j,evoi>.
oxO'no'as 5' ap' Henrov 'AXet'/caKe
/j.-r]5eTro6' ijTrriGeis, ffrj/J.fpov ^fer

Anth. P. ix. 441.

i rb fj.e\eii> Svvarai n, pepi/tva. Kal /ueA^rw ffoi.
fi 8 /Ji4\ei Trfpi ffov Sai/j.ovi, crol T'L yuAet ;
re fjitpiftv/ifffis Slx.a dai/movos, oflr' aft,{\riffeis'
dXX' tva, ffoi TI /uA?7, flcu'/xoft TOVTO /xeXei.

ib. x. 34.

318 Life and Letters in the Fourth

stripped her of her raiment, and did her to death with potsherds,
and then after tearing her limb from limb they picked up the
fragments and burnt them. This, says the historian whom I have
been paraphrasing, brought no small shame on Cyril and the
Church of Alexandria, for murders and fights and the like are
utterly alien to such as have the mind of Christ 1 . This was in
415 and this is the only fixed date we have in Palladas' life.
"When I see thee," he says to her, "I worship thee and thy
discourses, seeing that the home of the maiden is with the stars.
For thy practice is with heaven, holy Hypatia, beauty of language,
pure star of philosophy' 2 ."

Deaths like this shocked the Christian conscience and may well
have deepened in men like Palladas the feeling that Chance and
brute Unreason ruled the world. One is tempted to wonder whether
she was in his mind when he wrote

We are but fattened as men fatten swine,
Death the one guest that on us all shall dine :
Now this, now that, as he may list, he slays,
And never recks of reason or design 3 .

Hypatia's death however was not needed to shew mankind that
the old order was dead. Palladas knew it and it added to his load
of bitterness. We Greeks, he says, are men already burnt upon the
funeral pyre: ours are the buried hopes of dead men, for all the
world is upside down to-day 4 . Elsewhere he laments

O men of Hellas, but that men still deem
Us living, we are dead. Alive we seem,
But, lit on such misfortune, if we live,
Or seem, life dead, to live 'tis but a dream 5 .

1 Socrates vii. 15.

* "Orav /SX^irw ere irpoffKwCi Kal rovs \6yovs,
TTJS irapOevov TOV olKov dffrpt^ov fi\eiruv.
efs ovpavbv yap fffri <rov TO. trpdy/JLara,
'Yiraria ae/j.vrj, TWV \6ywv ev/j.op<f>ia,
S-xpo-vrov affrpov rrjs ffoQrjs TraiSe&rews.

Anth. P. ix. 400.
I sometimes wonder whether ix. 508 may not also be addressed to Hypatia.

3 Ilaj'res rtf Oavdrtf) Trjpov/j.e8a Kal rp06/ueo'#a
us dyt\r) -)(oipuv a<pa.'fo[j.tv<i)v dXdyws.

ib. x. 85.
4 Anth. P. x. 90.

5 t'Apa /trjt Bavorres T SOKCIV u>/J.ev /JLOVOV
"EXXiyves avSpej avp.<pop^. ireirruKOTes'
ovfipov eiKafrovTcs elvai rbv [3iov,
fl wfJiev rjfjLets TOV fiiov TtOvrjKoros.

ib. x. 82.

Palladas 319

Palladas in spirit is the last of the heathen. He had ceased to
take joy in the old, he hated the new. Life was all wrong and the
Greek world was infinitely weary. Heathen literature might throw
out branches still here and there, as a tree will throw out branches
though its roots are not healthy. Literature was at its last. The
old religion was worse than dead; it was discovered for an idle
thing. Philosophy 1 , scepticism and atheism gave no comfort but
proved an apple of Sodom, and heathenism was in a word death in
life 2 . There were, as Palladas says, those who kept up a semblance
of life, pretended to be alive, dreamt they lived, but men who
thought and men who saw knew they were dead. The day of old
Hellas was done. Her inheritance passed to the Church, and part
was incorporated in the common life of Europe and part wrapped up
in a napkin till the Renaissance. Nothing of value is permanently
lost, and it is not very necessary to bewail the lost Hellenism. The
attempt to revive it, without heeding the ten centuries that had
passed, was unhappy, for the world can never be heathen again, and
all that was essential and permanent in the mind of the Greek still
lives. But none the less, if we need not sorrow over Hellenism,
they at least may claim compassion who could conceive of no other
light of life, and when it failed found themselves in the horror of
thick darkness.

1 Even before he became a Christian, Synesius admitted that Philosophy
was in danger of dying out, unless supported by the Emperor's example; tirei
vvv ye, wj r)/Jit\r)TCU, iciriwos airoa'^fivai, Kal fjLera, fMKpbv oi)5' /JL.irvpfVfjia \eiirecr6cu
flov\ofj.evois evavffai, though, of course, Philosophy will always nourish in heaven
(de Refino, 22).

2 Probably the acme of bitterness and horror is reached in the epigram
A nth. P. x. 45. " It is good to know the truth for the truth " perhaps, but is it
all the truth ?

CHAPTER XIV

SYNESIUS

oiKtlov aXijdfia 0eo>, w 8ia irdvTdov dvciLTios flvat /3ouAo/Aeu.

Ep. 105, 1488 A

EVERY reader of Pindar and Herodotus remembers Battus the
stammerer, and how he founded the Dorian colony Gyrene, and
established there a dynasty to grow rich on the products of a land
with three seasons and to win chariot-races at the Pythian games.
Already we can see the characteristic features of the land which are
permanent in its history. A land of flocks and herds, of wheat and
wine, of roses and silphium, a land of hunting, and above all a land
of horses. Pindar shews us the nymph Gyrene "as she struggled
alone, without spear, with a terrible lion," and Nonnus, the last
great poet of the Greeks, once more calls her ''the slayer of lions."
As for the horses, Herodotus says, rightly or wrongly, that it was
from the Libyans of this region that the Greeks adopted the four-
horse chariot, and Callimachus, her great poet (cited by Strabo),
calls his country "blest in her steeds" (emWou Trarpt'Sos). "Gyrene
grew great," says Strabo (c. 837), writing about the beginning of our
era, "by the virtue of her land; for it is the best of all lands in
breeding horses and is blest in its fruits." Again in Synesius it is
the same. In his youth he was scolded for "being mad for arms
and mad for horses beyond what was fitting," and when he is to be
made bishop he sighs to think that ""his dear dogs will never go
a-hunting more." Modern travellers tell us of pictures of hunting
scenes still preserved in the monuments of Gyrene and of the
abundant opportunities for the chase the country still offers.

The dynasty of Battus and Arkesilas passed away, and Greek
democracy ran its course in Gyrene. Wars with Carthaginians and
Persians ended with Persian control. Taught by experience, the

Synesius 321

Cyrenians yielded without a blow to Alexander, and under his
successors Gyrene belonged to Egypt a doubtful blessing to the
Ptolemies, for it was too far away to become one with Egypt and so
near as to be a splendid vantage-ground for rebel and" pretender.
Prof. Mahaffy says it was a sort of Ireland to Egypt. Ptolemy
Apion left the land by will to the Romans in 96 B.C. Under
Augustus it was a senatorial province a sure sign of its peace-
fulness.

Now another aspect of Cyrenian life comes before us. As in
Egypt, so in Gyrene, the Ptolemies had deliberately encouraged the
settlement of large numbers of Jews who might develope commerce
and begin denationalization In the New Testament we find the
Cyrenian Jews no inconsiderable element of the Dispersion and
strongly represented at Jerusalem, where they shared a synagogue
with the Alexandrians. It was "a man of Gyrene" who carried the
Cross. Josephus now and again refers to his countrymen at Gyrene,
recording among other things how they got a charter permitting
them to send freely their "sacred money" to the Temple. But the
most striking episode in the Roman history of Gyrene was the
rising of the Jews against Trajan, when they killed, it is said, two
hundred thousand Gentiles. As the Roman forces would probably
exact ample vengeance for those thus butchered, the loss in popu-
lation to Gyrene must have been enormous. Whether the land
suffered with the rest of the Roman Empire from the great plague,
which "filled the world" under Marcus Aurelius, we are not told.
In any case the depopulation from which the Empire was universally
suffering (Jews excepted) was probably helped forward by this out-
break, and all hope of recovery lost.

Ammianus, speaking of the province in his day, mentions Gyrene
first in his list of towns "an ancient city though now deserted,
which the Spartan Battus founded." The last blow to the town
had been dealt when Apollonia, in Strabo's times its port, was made
independent. The haven Phycus, of which Synesius often speaks,
and where his brother lived, was insignificant, and with the trade
the prosperity passed away. "Gyrene," says Synesius, "a Greek
city, with an ancient and honourable name, hymned a hundred
times by the wise of old; but now she is poor and downcast, a
great ruin in need of the Emperor's aid, if her fortune is to be at
all worthy of her ancient history" (de Regno c. 2).

That ancient history, ap^aioXoyt'a, and the hymns of the wise
were part of the consciousness of this last great Cyrenian. Pindar's
a 21

322 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

poetry was only part of the retrospect. Callimachus and his
successor at the Museum, the great geographer Eratosthenes, were
both Cyrenians, and among philosophers Carneades, the founder of
the Third Academy, and Aristippus, who gave his country's name
to the Cyrenaic school 1 . The last two, curiously enough, alone are
mentioned by Synesius "the famous land of Gyrene was once
inhabited by a Carneades and an Aristippus, but now by a John
and a Julius " (Ep. 50). But the peculiar pride of Synesius was in
his ancestry "from Eurysthenes who led the Dorians to Sparta
down to my father my pedigree is carved on the public monuments"
(xvpfieo-iv Ep. 57, 1393 B). Elsewhere he goes still further back
"the public monuments of Gyrene shew the succession from Herakles
to me" (Catastasis i. 1572 B). It was no empty boast. On the
eve of battle he writes to his brother, "I am a Laconian by descent
and I know the message the magistrates sent Leonidas, 'Let them
fight as if to die and they will not die'" (Ep. 113). Elsewhere he
prays that such glory (KW$OS) may be given to his deeds as will befit
the ancient fame of Gyrene and of Sparta (Hymn 5).

Two hundred and fifty years intervene between the Jewish
revolt and Synesius' birth, during which we hear but little of
Gyrene. Then for some fifteen years we know the land as never
before, and after that we only hear now and again of its gradual
downfall 2 . In 616 Chosroes invaded it and in 647 the Arabs. Its
conquest by the latter followed that of Egypt as an immediate
consequence, and to secure it the Greek race and Greek civilization
were blotted out in accordance with Saracen policy. To-day it is
occupied by strolling Arabs.

The writings of Synesius are extremely interesting. "A man
of many and wandering thoughts," to use Mrs Browning's description
of him 3 , whatever he may be thinking alxmt at the moment, he can
express with ease and with charm. It will hardly be expected that
such a man can be original or profound, but after all it is a great
deal if a writer is delightful. Yet he is more than that. To

1 We may also count Sabellius here. Socrates (i. 5, 2) calls him a "Libyan."
On the other side, diametrically opposed to him, we may reckon Arius' two loyal
bishops, Theonas of Marmarica, and Secundus of Ptolemais, Synesius' future
see (Socr. i. 9, 4).

2 Procopius tells of Justinian's attempts at restoration. He repaired the
aqueducts of Ptolemais and fortified two monasteries to the south (the expres-
sion recalls Synesius' statement of his home's situation) to check the barbarian
inroads.

3 Is it Sophocles in her mind, 0. T. 67 jroXXds 65oi>s eX0<Wa <j>pot>Ti6os

Synesius 323

the historical student he is valuable on several grounds for the
picture he gives of the Empire battling with its Goths within and
more savage barbarians without 1 , for the insight his letters allow
into the daily life of a Roman province, its pleasures, scandals,
anxieties and dangers, travel, sea-faring, business and agriculture,
for his illustration of the process by which Neo-Platonism and
Christianity ran into each other, for hints on the difficulties of a
modest bishop and for one more example, the happiest of all, of the
education and literary taste of his age. On all of these points a
good deal might be said, but I shall in general confine myself to the
first three, grouping what I shall have to say mainly, but not
rigorously, according to the chronology of his life.

Synesius was born somewhere between or near the years 365
and 370. As neither father nor mother is mentioned as alive in
any of his writings, it is assumed that they died when he was still
young, leaving him and his sister Stratonice perhaps to the care
of an elder brother Euoptius, for whom Synesius had always the
deepest regard and affection. His boyhood, as we have seen, was a
thoroughly healthy one, given over to arms and horses to hunting
in fact, the Macedonian ideal as opposed to Greek athletics.
Athletes were in poor repute now, and Porphyry set them down
among the stupid classes. Leisure and a "waveless" calm of dis-
position were Synesius' ideals from boyhood (Ep. 57, 1388 A), but
never mere laziness or unprofitable inertia. A life without disturb-
ance was needful for the intercourse of the soul with God. It
should be distinctly understood from the outset that this was
throughout his idea of religion or philosophy, for with him they
are one. Confusion will be avoided if we remember that both
before and after becoming a Christian he uses the language of
Neo-Platonism almost invariably in speaking of serious things.

He went to Alexandria to study philosophy under Hypatia, to
whom he was devoted ever after. Nor was she the only friend he
made there, for to others of her pupils and the members of her
circle he became warmly attached. To Herculian he writes that
there is a special bond in the fact that "we both saw with our own
eyes and heard with our own ears the true exponent of the mysteries

1 It should be remarked how little he is conscious of the Western half of the
Empire few Greeks indeed were e.g. he did not know that the Emperor
Honoring was consul in 404 (Ep. 133), and though he outlived the event he gives
no hint of having heard of the capture of Borne by the Goths in 410. He must
however have known of it.

212

324 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

of philosophy" (Ep. 137). He also made the acquaintance of
another circle, which was Christian and with which his relations
were eventually to be closer. But perhaps Hypatia still came first.
To her he sent his books, to have her approval before they were
published (Ep. 154), and she alone could tempt him to leave his
native Libya, where he was born and where his fathers' graves were
still in honour (Ep. 124), though he did not leave it even for her.

From Alexandria he returned home, and very soon (about 397)
was sent to Constantinople on an embassy to the Emperor to procure
some remission of taxation for the "poor and downcast" Cyrene.
His birth, his position as a country gentleman, and his brilliance
would explain the selection of so young a man. A greater contrast
than that between Cyrene and Constantinople could hardly be
imagined. Here, if anywhere, leisure of mind should have been
impossible.

In 330 Constantino had founded his new Rome on the Bosporus
with the enforced aid of "the wealth, the labour and all that yet
remained of the genius of obedient millions." Where the art of the
day failed, antiquity supplied its place, and works of art were
removed from the cities of Greece and Asia to adorn the capital
and the magnificent buildings that studded its two thousand acres.
But it did not depend on ancient art alone ; it was a city of blazing
splendours, splendours of Emperor and bishop and minister. But
more interesting to a man of Synesius' quick mind must have been
the great personages of the city the eunuch Prime Minister
Eutropius, whose picture has been drawn for ever by Claudian ; the
Gothic captain Gainas, sometime the agent of Stilicho in the murder
of Rufinus ; the Frank or half-Frank Empress Eudoxia, gorgeous in
her toilets and violent in her hatreds ; Aurelian, the leader of the
patriot or at least anti-Gothic party, a man unlike some of his
rivals in being able to mention a father who had merited and
attained distinction ; the new metropolitan (398), the saintly and
ascetic Chrysostom, greatest of preachers and most honourable
of bishops ; the infamous opponent of Aurelian, whoever the man
may have been whom Synesius calls "Typhos"; and last and least
significant of all the Emperor, the dull, heavy-eyed and "bovine"
Arcadius.

Synesius attached himself to the party of Aurelian, but three
years elapsed before he secured the end for which he came "three
evil years lost to my life!" In the meantime he saw and bore his

Synesius 325

part in a series of strange movements the fall of Eutropius 1 before
the hatred of Gainas and Eudoxia, the revolt of Tribigild sustained
if not suggested by his countryman Gainas, the subsequent attempt
of Gainas on the capital, the exile of Aurelian brought about by
Gainas and his restoration after the expulsion, defeat and death of
the Goth, and perhaps the overture of the ruin of Chrysostom begun
by Theophilus the bishop of Alexandria. Into all these events we
need not go, but Synesius' famous speech and his mysterious book
on Providence in history call for our attention.

The speech was delivered in 399 before the Emperor, when
Aurelian was Praetorian Prefect. Tribigild had already revolted
in Phrygia or was on the point of doing so, while Gainas was still
supposed to be acting against him for the Government.

The speech itself is pronounced by Volkmann to rank with the
best public speeches of the orators and rhetoricians of the period,
and another critic, Krabinger, calls it his best work. But what
most impresses the reader is not its ease or its grace, but its extra-
ordinary courage. Synesius himself said of it some years later that
he had harangued the Emperor with more boldness than any Greek
had ever done before, and even if the speech was touched up in
places by him before publication, it is clear that, if it at all represents
what he said his boast is well founded 2 .

Is there a hearing, he asks, for philosophy, for plain, honest
speech without flattery? If there is, he will discuss kingship.
Who is the true king? (The Greek word used for Emperor is
ySao-tXevs, and odd as it may seem is echoed in the rex and regius
of Symmachus 3 . This of itself shews how times had changed.)
The true king is he who lives for his people's good, who realizes his
responsibility as the representative, in some sort, of Divine pro-
vidence, who grounds his character on piety and bids mind overthrow
"the democracy of the passions" and be king within him, who will

1 This and the revolt of Tribigild may also be read in Claudian's two books
against Eutropius, "a very elegant and spirited satire, which would be more
valuable in an historical light if the invective were less vague and more tem-
perate" says Gibbon. But at least some of the actors are named.

2 A number of points of contact with Claudian \iv. Cons. Hon.) and Julian
(Or. ii. 86, etc.) may be noted in this speech. Perhaps something is owed by
them all, directly or indirectly, to the Cyropaedeia, and by Synesius a little to
Dio's Orations on Kingship. Julian more than the others bids the Emperor
live in close relations with the divine.

3 Claudian goes further nunc Brutus amaret vivere sub regno (Paneg. Manl.
Theod. 163, Justice herself is speaking), and nunquam libertas gratior extat quam
sub rege pio (Cons. Stil. iii. 114), the last a sentiment anyone may endorse who
has lived on the borders of a great republic.

326 Life and Letters in tJie Fourth Century

be a man among men and count love the surest foundation for a
kingdom. From the ideal he turns to the actual and finds it
wanting. In many directions the Empire is threatened.

The conceptions of kingship have been orientalized (c. 10) 1 .
"Nothing has done the Empire so much harm as the pomp and
circumstance with which they surround the king as if with hierurgy
and mystery." "The fear, that you may become men if you are
frequently seen, keeps you close prisoners, besieged by yourselves,
neither seeing nor hearing anything that may develop practical
sense, with no pleasures but those of the body and of those the
most sensual, such as touch and taste give, living in fact the life
of a mollusc. So long as you disdain manhood, you can never
reach the perfection of manhood." The courtiers are "micro-
cephalous," and the stupider, the better courtiers. The Emperors
"are all purple and all gold, covered with gems from barbarian
mountain and sea, shod with them, girt with them, hung with them,
brooched with them, couched on them 2 ." They are made a spectacle
of all hues and colours, like peacocks, and have brought on them-
selves "the Homeric curse a coat of stone." The common earth
must be sprinkled with gold dust for their tread. Like lizards which
will only peep out now and then in the sunshine, "you keep to
your chambers for fear men should find you out to be men." The
contrast between the real and the ideal is at least vivid enough.

The second great danger to the Empire is the enormous number
of Goths in the army. They are untrustworthy and cannot be
expected to be Roman in feeling. "Themis herself, the goddess of
counsel, and the god of war I think must veil their faces, when the
man in skins leads the men in cloaks, and when one of them doffs
the fleece, dons the toga and takes counsel with the Roman magis-
trates about affairs, sitting conspicuously beside the consul perhaps,
while the proper people sit below him. And when they are outside
the council-chamber, it is not long before they are back into the
sheepskins 3 and laughing at the toga among their clansmen, because,
they say, it does not let you handle your sword easily" (c. 15).
Gothic soldiers and generals in the army, Gothic slaves in the
houses how long will it be before there is an uprising another
Spartacus? No, let none but Romans serve in the army, turn out

1 So Lactantius, M. P. 21.

2 So Claudian, iv. Cons. Hon. 585 S. asperat Indus velamenta lapis and so
forth, but in admiration.

3 Cf. Claudian on Alaric's council, b. Get. 481 crinigeri sedere patres, pellita
Getarum curia.

Synesius 327

the Goths and make them helots. He alone can have peace who is
strong enough to injure the man who would harm him 1 .

Soldiers and money-lenders oppress the people. Taxes wear
them out, and who can help them but the king? The provincial
governors are chosen not for their merits but for their wealth. A
man raises money somehow, buys a governorship, and looks to repay
himself. Hence the governor's residence is a shop for the selling of

justice (TO ap^eiov BLKOJV TraiXrjTijpiov C. 21) 2 .

The remedy for everything lies with poor Arcadius. He must
develop his soul with philosophy, his body with martial exercises.
His troops must know him in person and not merely from his
picture. He must remit taxation in response to embassies from his
cities. He must get rid of flatterers and choose wise and experienced
advisers (Aurelian and his friends no doubt), and with their aid rise
to be an incarnate Providence.

Synesius had recognized the bad symptoms no difficult task
but the disease was deeper than he saw. The fault did not lie with
Arcadius, who was the creature of his environment. The easy
remedy of Synesius was therefore inadequate. Charming and fresh
as his speech was, it was too old-fashioned. It shews the old Greek
disdain for business and trade, and a thoroughly claustral ignorance
of the strength of human passions and the terrible vitality which
the parasites of a state always possess. Arcadius with a wave of
the hand is to do with the political world what Julian tried to do

with the religious iravra 8' IvaXXa. yevoiTO.

Events moved on, in spite of the speech. The prophecy about
the Goths came true. Gainas joined hands with Tribigild and came
near being master of Constantinople, but his plans mysteriously
miscarried. The story of it all is told by Synesius in his book on
Providence.

This is a strange work. "It is a tale of ancient Egypt. But

1 One may compare the last episode of Ammianus (xxxi. 16, 8) the
treacherous murder of all the Goths in Roman employ beyond the Taurus
by orders of a commander who had early news of the disaster of Adrianople
(378). "By this prudent plan being carried out without noise or delay, the
eastern provinces were rescued from great dangers," says the historian, with
a coolness that astonishes some of his readers. See Seeck, Untergang der Ant.
Welt, c. vi. "die Barbaren im Reich," esp. p. 407 notes. Hist. Aug. Claud. 9, 4
impletae barbaris servis Scythicisque cultoribus liomanae provinciae...nec ulla
fuit regio qnae Gotham servnm triumphali quodam servitio non haberet this
a century before Synesius was born.

2 Claudian in praising Stilicho is carried away and makes a strange revela-
tion; nee te gurgex corruptior aevi \ traxit ad exemplum, qui jam Jirmaverat
annis \ crimen et in legem rapiendi verterat usum (Cons. Stil. ii. 116).

328 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

the Egyptians are a subtle people. So perhaps, tale as it is, it may
riddle something more than a tale, seeing it is Egyptian. But if it
is not a tale, but a sacred discourse, it may be better worth reading
and writing." It is at once a philosophic romance, a demonstration
of Providence, and an allegoric picture of the present. Taurus
king of Egypt has two sons, the good Osiris and the bad Typhos.
These represent Aurelian and his opponent, whom we only know
from here and so cannot name, and the story tells in effect the
events of 397-400 in Constantinople. Synesius himself appears in
it as a certain person with a "rustic" breeding in philosophy, an
admirer of Osiris and more "rustic" than ever when he fell, for he
held by his fallen friend. The first book was written at the time of
the events, and the second after the happy ending, and the whole,
the narrative of the fall and restoration of a minister, is to prove
the doctrine of Providence.

There is a providence in the fall of a sparrow, but it seems
strange to a modern reader that a matter of a minister is so
important as this. Yet Claudian avows he felt doubtful of
Providence till Rufinus' fall re-established his faith. A similar joy
shines in Symmachus' pages on the death of Maximinus "it is a
pleasure to live, one does not regret having been born" (Ep. x. 2).
All these discussions may be taken as indications of the deep im-
portance which the question of the origin of evil had in the thought
of the day. It is not, why has this bad minister been allowed such
power? but why have the many, of whom he is but one, been
tolerated by the Gods ? and, in fine, why is there evil at all in the
world ? Synesius explains things much as Porphyry does (de Abstin.
ii. 39, 40). Evil demons, says Porphyry, besides bringing plague
and drought, work through men's passions and produce wars and
factions, till (worst of all) men really believe all this misery and
confusion is due to the Best God a mistake actually shared by
some philosophers. As a matter of fact, Synesius explains, the
great and good Gods endow man with a certain amount of power
and set him to battle for himself, "a divine soul among demons,"
and when his power is exhausted and a fresh start required by the
confusion of the whole fabric, they will intervene in due time, but
they must not be disturbed by man on petty pretexts. If men will
but accept this view, they will not think that the visitation of God
and the exercise of energy (ape-nys) conflict.

Gainas met a miserable end, and Aurelian returned and was
made consul, so Providence justified itself. One wonders where the

Synesius 329

Emperor was throughout this story, for he is not mentioned.
Volkmann sees in this the author's prudence, Chassang (Histoire du
Roman, p. 295) the Emperor's insignificance, and to this latter view
I incline. In any case the conspicuous absence of Arcadius is some-
thing of a comment on the speech on kingship. There is no place
for him whatever in a story of his reign. There was hardly more
in the events themselves.

At last a happy decision was given to the case of Gyrene, and
Synesius was able to leave Constantinople, where he had made
many friends and found admirers for his prose and his verse. Their
opinion of him may be inferred from the great speech, which was
clearly the manifesto of the party. He with them had to face
serious risks in the evil days, and so acute was his peril at one time
that he found himself praying in the Christian churches, Neo-
Platonist as he was '. However his dreams brought him warnings,
which enabled him to come safely through all. From Constanti-
nople he went to Alexandria and the story of his departure is
characteristic. He writes to his friend Pylaemenes thus (Ep. 61):

" Here is a big rug of Egyptian make, not the thing to be spread
under a bed, but to be a bed all by itself. Asterius the steno-
grapher 8 saw it and asked it of me, when I had to sleep in front
of the great offices. I promised I would leave it behind for him
as a parting gift. For I could not give such presents while I still
had to battle with the snow of Thrace. So I send it now, for I did
not leave it then. Please give it to him with my apologies, which
you can support with your own testimony, if you remember the
time when I left. We were having earthquakes many in the day,
and the people were falling to prayer, many of them flat on their
faces, for the ground was rocking. At that, I thought the sea safer
than the land the open sea. So I started at a run for the harbour,
without a word to any one, except poor Photius and to him I only
gave a shout from afar and a wave of the hand to say 'I'm off.'
And he said never a word to my friend Aurelian, consul as he was,
though to the assistant 3 Asterius he did make my apology. That
was what befell then."

1 He tells us so in Hymn. 3, 448; he prayed "in the temples to the acting
gods whom thou hast crowned with angelic rays." A/MjorTjpes 6eoi, active or
labouring gods, i.e. agents of the supreme God, who, himself remote like an
Emperor, entrusts activities to subordinates. Synesius is thought to mean the
saints. In any case his action and his description are remarkable.

2 The stenographers were made part of the civil service by Constantino, and
grouped as we see from this letter (lower) in symmories. See Diet. Ant. s.v.
notarius.

3 Beading and translation are here alike doubtful.

330 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

The letter concludes with directions for finding the stenographer,
"a Syrian, with a dark complexion and a lean face, and of average
height." From Alexandria Synesius returned home to Gyrene.
His brother he left in Alexandria, where perhaps he had lived since
first the two of them came to study. His voyage homeward was
adventurous and he has left us a lively account of it in a letter
(Ep. 4) written to his brother on the way. It is a long letter, but
I will quote part of it, as it illustrates Synesius in some of his
various minds and moods as The White Squall does Thackeray.
It shews his vivacity and his habit of playful exaggeration, but
also betrays the curious influence of the sophistic training of the
day in some traces of artificial simplicity and in the scholastic
interpretation of the line of Homer. How far superior he is to the
school can be seen by anyone who will read a page of Achilles
Tatius or a so-called letter of Aristaenetus.

"We loosed from Bendideion in the early morning and barely
by the afternoon passed Myrmex Pharios ; and twice or perhaps
three times the ship touched bottom in the harbour. That to begin
with seemed a bad omen, and the wise thing would have been to
leave a ship that was unlucky from the very start. But I was afraid
that, if I deserted, you would all call me a coward. So

'not yet was it the hour for quaking or shrinking 1 .'

Consequently, if anything happens, you will have been the death
of me. And yet what was there dreadful in your laughing, if
I were only out of danger? As with Epimetheus in the story

'Forethought he would none, so had afterthought'

so with me. I might have escaped then, but now encamped on a
desert strand we sit lamenting, and turn our eyes as best we may
to Alexandria and to our mother-land Gyrene the one we had but
we left it, the other we cannot reach, and we have seen and suffered
what we should never have dreamed of.

"For, listen, so that you may not think it all fun either, and
hear first what sort of a crew we had. The captain wished to die,
he was so deep in debt. Of the crew who were twelve in all the
steersman made thirteen more than half, and the steersman too,

1 Homer, Iliad vii. 217, but not quite the usual text otiirw ?T' tcricev for
otorws In flxf. People said Synesius had poor MSS. a charge he admitted,
pleading that they exercise the brain more than correct ones. Mr Halcomb, in
his admirable article on Synesius in the Diet, of Christian Biography, has
anticipated me in this apology for Migne's text of our author.

Synesim 331

were Jews, a desperate race, firmly convinced it is piety to bring
about the deaths of as many Gentiles as possible. The rest
herdsmen, ploughmen, who a year ago had never touched an oar.
And all of them, these as well as those, were crippled, every man
of them in one limb at least. As long as we were in no danger,
they joked, and called one another not by their names but by their
infirmities Limper, Truss, Left-hander, Squint-eye. Each of them
had at least one distinction. All this gave us no slight amuse-
ment, but in the hour of need there was no more laughter about it
but wailing. We are more than fifty passengers about a third of
us women ; most of them young and pretty. But don't be jealous.
A curtain walled us off, and this of the stoutest, a fragment of a
sail that tore a little while ago, to modest men a wall of Semiramis.
And perhaps even Priapus would have been modest, if he had been
sailing on Amarantus' ship to such an extent did he never give
our fears of extreme peril a chance to rest.

"As soon as we were past your temple of Poseidon, he hoisted
all sail and made for Taphosiris 1 and tried for Scylla, which even
in pictures we abhor 2 . When we saw this and cried out, though
not before we were within a hair's-breadth of danger, at last and then
only under compulsion he reluctantly gave up the idea of a naval
engagement with the shoals. So turning the ship about, as if
repenting, he heads her for the open sea ; and as long as he could
he battled with the waves. Then the south wind springs up fresh,
under which we soon lost sight of land, and by and by fell in with
some merchantmen with two masts, who had no concern with our
land of Libya but were on a different course. We protested and
made a fuss about being so far from shore, but Amarantus in the
role of a Titan stood on his deck and rolled out curses in the most
tragic style. 'We can't fly,' says he, 'and what is a man to do with
you people who are afraid of the land and afraid of the sea?' 'Not
a bit of it, my dear Amarantus,' said I, 'if a man were reasonable
with them. But we had nothing to do with Taphosiris we only
wanted to live and now what do we want with the open sea? But
let us sail straight for Pentapolis (said I) keeping a moderate
distance out from land, so that if any accident the chances of the
sea, you know I suppose it is always uncertain, as you sailors

1 Not Taphosiris (Tomb of Osiris, Abusir) in Marmarica but a smaller one
in Egypt, Volkmann says. It is about thirty miles S.W. from Alexandria.
Strabo, c. 799, says the shore there is rocky.

2 The reading, or the geography perhaps, is obscure. Failing to fathom
Migne's wonderful text, I have translated Petavius' Latin rendering.

332 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

say there might be a haven near at hand to receive us.' My
words failed to convince him and the rascal was stone-deaf, until a
strong north wind came upon us, rolling the waves up, high and
rough This fell on us quite suddenly, and took the sail on the
other quarter, making concave what had been convex 1 . We came
near being taken aback and it was with difficulty we came up to
the wind. And the groanful Amarantus says, 'There's scientific
sailing for you ! ' for he had been expecting, he said, a wind from
the sea for some time and that was why he was keeping out, and
now he could make a tack as the distance from the shore gave him
room. That would be our course now, but it could not have been
if we had hugged the shore, for we should have been driven on to
the land. Well, we accepted his story as long as it was day, and
there was as yet no danger, for that only began with the night, and
the waves kept mounting more and more.

"It was however the day which the Jews call the Preparation
[Friday] and they reckon the night to the next day, on which they
are not allowed to do any work, but they pay it especial honour and
rest on it. So the steersman let go the helm from his hands, when
he thought the sun would have set on the land, and threw himself
down, and

'What mariner should choose might trample him 2 .'

We did not at first understand the real reason, but took it for
despair, and went to him and besought him not to give up all hope
yet. For in plain fact the big rollers still kept on and the sea was
at issue with itself. It does this when the wind falls and the waves
it has set going do not fall with it, but, still retaining in full force
the impulse that started them, meet the onset of the gale and to
its front oppose their own. (I had to use fine words, not to give a
mean description of mighty evils.) Well, when people are sailing
under such circumstances, life hangs as they say by a slender thread.
But if the steersman is a rabbi (vo/xoStSao-KaXo?) into the bargain,
what will your feelings be ?

"When then we understood what he meant in leaving the helm
for when we begged him to save the ship from danger, he went on
reading his book we despaired of persuasion and tried force. And

1 This phrase is one of several so very strongly suggestive of the landsman
as to give me confidence that if the translation contain blunders in navigation,
as it well may, it will at least give a fair impression of Synesius" seamanship.

* A memory of Sophocles, Ajax 1146.

Synesiw 333

a gallant soldier (for we have with us a good few Arabians, who
belong to the cavalry) drew his sword and threatened to cut his
head off, if he would not steer the ship. But in a moment he was
a genuine Maccabee, and would stick to his dogma. Yet when it
was now midnight he took his place of his own accord, 'for now,'
says he, 'the law allows me, as we are clearly in danger of our
lives.' At that, the tumult begins again, moaning of men and
screaming of women. Everybody began calling on heaven, and
wailing and remembering their dear ones. Amarantus alone was
cheerful, thinking he was on the point of ruling out his creditors.

"For myself amidst the dangers, I swear to you by the God
philosophy counts supreme, that line of Homer kept troubling me,
for fear it were true after all that death by drowning involved the
destruction of the soul too. For he says somewhere in the poems 1

'Ajax drank of the salt sea wave and utterly perished,'

meaning that death in the sea is absolute destruction. For he says
of no one else that he 'utterly perished,' but, as each dies

'so went he to Hades.'

Moreover in neither Nekyia is the lesser Ajax brought on the scene,
as if his soul were not in Hades. Achilles too, bravest of men and
most daring, plays the coward about death by water, which he calls
'baleful.'

"As I kept turning these thoughts over in my mind, I saw the
soldiers all with their swords drawn, and on inquiry I was told by
them it was better to breathe out one's soul in the air on deck, than
into the waters gasping. So I counted them of the school of Homer
by instinct, and I inclined to the dogma.

"Then someone bids all who had any gold hang it to their
necks, and those did so who had any gold or its equivalent. The
women did it for themselves and gave threads to any who needed
them. This is an ancient practice and here is the reason of it.
The dead washed up from a wreck must bring the price of his
burial. For the man who lights on him and gets gain by him will
be afraid of the laws of Nemesis, if he does not give a little back to
him who has given him many times more. That was what they
were doing. But I sat by and wept to think of the accursed purse,

1 Odyssey iv. 511, but not exactly, for the editions at least read ZvO' dir6\<a\e
for the eair6\wXe Synesius had in his mind. Some bracket the line because
(says Merry) "they fail to see the grim humour of it." Achilles in It. xxi. 281.

334 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

the loan of my friend 1 . The God of strangers knows my fear was
not of death but about the money, in case the Thracian should lose
by me, for even in death I would be ashamed of that. In that case
to 'perish utterly' and lose consciousness would be a gain.

"What made the danger so urgent was nothing but that the
ship was under full sail. To reduce it was impossible. We tried
the ropes again and again, but gave it up, as they were tight in the
rings ; and the fear came on us (and it was not a lesser fear) that
if we escaped the waves we might in such a plight run ashore in the
dark.

"Day came and we saw the sun, I don't know if ever with more
pleasure. The wind began to fall as the day grew warmer, and the
dew rose and let us use the ropes and manage the sail. We could
not shift it and put up the 'bastard' it had been pawned but we
took in some of it, like girding up a tunic. And before four hours
were over we, who had expected to die, disembarked on an utterly
desolate shore without town or farm near by, and about a hundred
and thirty stades down from a farm. The ship was tossing in the
open, for the spot was not a harbour, and she was tossing on one
anchor. The second had been sold, and Amarantus never had a
third.

"As for us, as soon as we reached the land we longed for, we
embraced it as if it had been a living mother. Offering as usual a
hymn of gratitude to God, I added to it the recent misadventure
from which we had unexpectedly been saved."

This was not the end of the adventures of the voyage, but for
our purposes so much may suffice and we may turn to his pictures
of country life in the Cyrenaica. Let us take as our starting-point
Letter 148 "a gossiping letter" as he calls it. It will not be
necessary to render it in full.

He is not a near neighbour of the sea, he says, for he lives up
country toward the south wind, the last of all the Cyrenians, in a place
where oars are as strange as to the people in the Odyssey who took
the oar for a winnowing fan. His neighbours had no salt but "the
salts of Ammon," and were very sceptical about lands over the sea
and the sea itself. As to fish how could salt water produce any-
thing edible, when their fresh streams had nothing better than frogs
and leeches? It is a plain country life they live, the sounds they

1 Ep. 129 explains this. Proclus had lent him 60 gold pieces, which he
entered as 70 and for which Synesius was to repay him 80. He paid it on his
return to Gyrene, in spite of difficulties of communication.

Synesim 335

hear are all of the farm, and if the products of their lands are not
severally the best of their kinds, yet collectively few countries can
rival them ; they supply all their own wants with a little over for
the tax-gatherer. Their songs are simple strains of the country-
side "the praise of a good ram perhaps; or a stump-tailed dog
gets a eulogy because he is not afraid of hyaenas and takes the
wolves by the throat. And not least, the huntsman is made into a
song, for he makes peace for the pastures and gives us good cheer
by bringing all kind of game... but nothing so often as certain
prayers, still in song, petitions for blessing on man and crop and
beast." "The Emperor and the court and the dance of fortune are
mere names, kindled like flames and quenched ; here our ears get a
rest from such talk. That there is an Emperor always in existence,
I suppose they know quite well, but we are only reminded of him
once a year by the tax-gatherers. But who he is, is not so clear.
Some of us think Agamemnon is still king, the son of Atreus that
went against Troy, the brave and good 1 . For that is the king's
name we hear about from childhood. And there is a friend of his,
Odysseus, the good herdsmen talk of a bald man but a rare hand
for doing things and finding a way in a scrape. Don't they laugh,
as they tell of him, thinking it only a year or so since the Cyclops
was blinded ; and how the old boy was dragged along under the
ram, and how the villain sat by the door and thought the leader of
the flock was in the rear, not because he was feeling the weight,
but because he was feeling for his master's bad luck. My
letter, you see, has let you be with us a little while in spirit.
You have seen the country, and the simplicity of our ways.
Life in Noah's age, you will call it, before law and order ended in
slavery."

Praise of country life and the joys and beauties of the field are
common themes of the later sophists, a ad wearisome and frosty
many of their eulogies and descriptions are. Except perhaps in
Daphnis and Ckloe, even if there, it would be hard to find anything
as natural as Synesius' work, though his education is to be plainly
read in this as in everything he wrote 2 .

1 Compare Dio Chrysostom's Borystheniticus 9 and 14, on the popularity of
Homer among the Greek settlers on the Borysthenes (Dnieper) their only poet.
He writes about 100 A.D.

2 Dio Chrysostom's oration Euboicus, with its highly ideal picture of the
"settled low content" of the hunters in the desert country, may have given
Synesius a suggestion, but his description is independent and no doubt represents
a real life, though it omits the barbarians and the locusts and other drawbacks.

336 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

He says in the letter just quoted, "We have leisure to philo-
sophize, but none to do wrong," and elsewhere (Ep. 57, 1388 c)
speaking of these days he says, "I lived with good hopes, regarding
the universe in which I was as a sacred precinct, and myself like a
sacred animal free and unshackled in it, and I divided my life
between prayer and book and chase; for that soul and body may.be
healthy, we need at once to work and pray to God." His brother
came to live at the little port of Phycus, and we have letters that
tell of their happy relations, of visits to each other and sometimes
of business.

"So you are surprised," he writes (Ep. 114), "when you live in
dirty Phycus, that you have shivering fits and have got your blood
into a bad state ? On the contrary you should be surprised if your
system can endure the heat there. But if you come up to us, you
may with God's blessing get better, once you are quit of the air
corrupted by the marshy exhalations, quit of the water, brackish,
warm and, generally, stagnant which is to say, dead. What is
there fine in lying on the sand of the beach the only amusement
you have ? for where can you go ? But up here ! what a thing it is
to come under the shadow of a tree ! and if you aren't comfortable
to change that tree for another one grove for another. What a
thing it is to cross the rivulet by the roadside ! How pleasant the
zephyr is, gently playing with the branches ! and the various songs
of the birds, and the colours of the flowers, and the bushes of the
meadow some the works of the farmer, some the gifts of nature,
all fragrant, the output of a healthy earth. The cave of the
Nymphs I won't praise, for it wants a Theocritus. And there's more
too."

We hear a good deal about horses. His brother is raising a
pair "for tribute" (Ep. 132). Now a soldier steals one of Synesius'
own, "because, he says, a soldier should have a horse. He offers an
absurdly small sum, and won't give it back when I refuse to sell "
(Ep. 6). Now he sends one to a friend (Ep. 40) "a horse excellent
for every equine virtue; you can use him in racing, when you go
hunting, in a cavalry battle or a procession, for I don't know which
to call him a hunter, a racehorse, a horse for parade, or a war-
horse. And if he isn't as pretty as the Nisaean horses being
lumpish in the head and lean in the flank perhaps not even to
horses, any more than to men, does God give everything at once...
Horses with you run to flesh, but ours to bone." And now we find
him, like a good Cyrenian, importing an Italian stallion, who, it is

Synesius 337

promised, will "leave good foals behind him," but who is left at
Seleucia "as the captain on account of the weather did not want
such freight" (Ep. 133). He also speaks of breeding dogs for the
chase (Calv. Enc. c. 4).

Now and again he went abroad. It seems he paid several visits
to Alexandria, on one of which (? 403) he married a Christian lady
to whose influence some have attributed a share in his conversion.
We do not hear much of her. Possibly Synesius held the view he
attributes to the virtuous Osiris in the book on Providence. "That
Osiris had women's apartments in his house, his child was the only
reminder, and he too was rarely seen. For Osiris thought it was
the one virtue of a woman that neither her person nor her name
should pass the curtain" (de Prov. i. 13). He has a severe letter
on the airs and graces of a lady married into his family, who was
annoyed at someone dying at the time of her marriage She
appeared at the funeral an unusual thing for brides to do but, to
avoid an unlucky omen for her husband, she came in red, wearing a
transparent veil, and gold and jewels in abundance (Ep. 3). On
the other hand, he had an intense admiration for Hypatia, who
transgressed his Periclean canon to good purpose.

Once he visited Athens. We have two letters, one written
beforehand, the other from the place. He gives his reason for going
(Ep. 54). "I shall gain not only this advantage from my journey
to Athens to be rid of the present troubles but also I shall no
longer have to adore those who come thence for their learning.
They don't differ from us mortals at least not as regards under-
standing Aristotle and Plato but move amongst us, like demi-gods
among demi-donkeys, because they have seen the Academy and the
Lyceum etc." Then he writes to his brother again after seeing the
sights (Ep. 136) :

"I hope I may profit as much from Athens as you wish. Indeed
I seem more than a hand and a finger wiser already, and I can give
you a proof of my divine wisdom on the spot. I am actually
writing to you from Anagyrus, and I have been at Sphettos, Thria,
Cephisia and Phalerum. But ill befall the ill man who brought me
here, the captain. For the Athens of to-day has nothing splendid
to shew but the famous names of the places. And just as when a
sacrifice has been offered the skin is left to shew what the animal
once was ; so, since philosophy has gone away from here, it is only
left one to go round and admire the Academy and the Lyceum, yes !
and the Painted Stoa, which gave its name to Chrysippus' philosophy
G. 22

338 Life and' Letters in the Fourth Century

but is not painted (^01x1X77) any longer, for the proconsul has taken
away the pictures in which Polygnotus of Thasos displayed his art 1 .
But in our day it is Egypt that nourishes the seeds of wisdom, which
it receives from Hypatia. As for Athens, the city was once the
home of the wise, but nowadays it is the bee-keepers who make her
famous. You can add the pair of Plutarchian sages, who gather the
young men in the theatres, not by the fame of their discourses but
with honeycombs from Hymettus."

Too much attention may be paid to this criticism of Athens and
too little. There had been seven hundred years of rivalry between
Athens and Alexandria, and Synesius belonged to the latter uni-
versity, and had, as we have seen, a habit of taking humorous views
of things. On the other hand, Dean Merivale describes Athens as
already in Hadrian's time "a dirty city in decay" in spite of its
monuments. Curtius and Rohde however do not think the case was
as bad as Synesius says, though the city was going down-. The
story about the proconsul should be noticed. Alaric had been
ravaging Greece in 395 but he seems to have spared Athens, and
now as often before (for Wachsmuth thinks the robbery was recent)
it was the Roman official whom she had to dread. At any rate
intellectually, in spite of Proclus, Athens' day was done and she had
no longer anything to give to mankind.

The fruits of Synesius' "leisure to philosophize" are to be found
in his three books the Dio, Concerning Dreams and The Praise of
Baldness. They cannot be taken as a very serious contribution to
thought. "A man of many and wandering thoughts" he was not
really serious enough to do any very profound thinking. To under-
stand this at once, it is only necessary to compare him with
Augustine, who will be satisfied with nothing short of reality and
certainty 3 . Manichaean science he tests and finds untrue to actual
fact. Neo-Platonist theology fascinates him, but cannot hold him,
because it fails in motive power, because it fails to meet the need
of common people, and because when all is done it fails to bring
God within reach. Synesius is different. Like Julian he is essen-
tially a disciple, and he accepts without afterthought the ''dogmata"

1 Julian, ad Themist. 259 B, implies that the gardens of Epicurus, the myrtles
and the little house of Socrates were among the "show-places"' of Athens.

2 Merivale, Romans under Empire, c. 66. See Curtius, Stadtgesch. der Athen,
c. 8, and Wachsmuth, Die Stadt Athen im Alterthitm, p. 717, who discounts
Claudian's inclusion of Athens among the places ravaged by Alaric (in Rufin.
ii. 191).

3 Compare Augustine, Con/, iii. 6, 10 veritas, veritas, quam intime etiam
turn medullae animi mei suspirabant tibi; and v. 3, 3 6 on Manichaean science.

Synesius 339

of the school which gave him his first quickening. True, he left
Neo-Platonism for Christianity, but his Christianity where it is at
all thought out is a superstructure on a Neo-Platonic base, though
in reality it is perhaps more a matter of feeling than of thought.
As a Christian he inquires as little as he did when a Neo-Pktonist.
Whether his tenets correspond with reality is not his most vital
concern, as it was Augustine's, but whether they satisfy the
immediate spiritual craving of his own heart. He is content with
an easy solution if he can be rid of the question. There is nothing
approaching dishonesty about him, it is merely an unspeculative
habit of mind. Yet "the heart," Pascal says, "has its reasons as
well as the head," and Synesius' instincts and strong human
affections generally lead him to some sound working principle, even
though he does not realize in all its relations the truth under-
lying it.

The most important of the three books of this period is the
Dio. In a letter to Hypatia (Ep. 154), accompanying it and the
book on Dreams, he explains how he came to write it. He has been
criticized from two quarters, by the men in white, and the men in
black. The former were " philosophers," sophists and rhetoricians ;
the latter, monks and clergy 1 , were the more serious.

The philosophers, in effect, accused him of trifling, "of sinning
against philosophy, heeding charm and rhythm in diction, pretending
to opinions on Homer." "They attained to a view of the intelligible
world, but he might not, because he gave some of his leisure to
rhetoric and was only fit for amusement." A lost poem or two of
his had got abroad, he says, and were "eagerly received by some
young men, who cared for Hellenism and grace." So he holds
up Dio as an example of a rhetorician who turned philosopher
a Stoic, not speculative but mainly practical and yet retained
his charm of classic style. And indeed a partially educated man is
not educated, for the Muses all go together (Movo-as = o'/xov ovo-as by
etymology), and the philosopher, worthy of the name, must fail in
no learning of the Graces nor lack knowledge of any notable litera-
ture, but must be a genuine "Hellen" able to associate with any
one. Knowledge of one thing makes a craftsman or a specialist,
but a philosopher is made by a harmony of all knowledge. These
stiff gentlemen, who despise rhetoric and poetry, are so, he expects,

1 See the amusing account given by Socrates (vi. 22) of the Novatian bishop
Sisinnius, who preferred to wear white, and the scriptural reasons he playfully
gave for it (e.g. Eccles. ix. 8).

222

340 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

not of their own choice but by poverty of nature. Beauty of words
is not an idle thing, it is a pure pleasure that looks away from
matter to real existence If you reject this pleasure, what will you
take instead? for you must have some pleasure. A man may be
well-equipped in speech and master of philosophy at the same time.
But what do the grammarians do, these critics of syllables, the
teachers ? They are sterile. There is a child-birth of letters as of
beings, and the man who gives forth habitually what is immature
falls into a habit of miscarriage and never produces anything that is
perfect, anything that can live. Your ready speaker has always a
"cheap finish 1 ." Synesius therefore feels justified in living his own
life quietly among his books, developing his style and his mind
together, as against the raw philosopher, and content to be called a
trifler by the busy and didactic grammarian.

But he is more irritated by the gentlemen in black. Ignorance,
he writes to Hypatia, gives them courage, and they are everlastingly
ready to debate about God. Give them a chance and you are
deluged. It pays them, for from their ranks come the city preachers,
and to be that is to hold Amaltheia's horn (cornu copiae). " They
want me to be their disciple and promise to make me in a twinkling
a ready talker on the things of God, and able to harangue days and
nights together." No doubt they did, for, as he says elsewhere
(Ep. 57, 1389 B), "a philosopher's ordination attracts attention."
Synesius' wife was a Christian, and he was doubtless kiudly disposed
to Christians as he was to everybody, though not inclined to be
converted in a hurry. Neo-Platonism, we may perhaps say, had
two wings, the Left composed of adherents who leant to theiirgy,
magic and enchantments, and were like Julian more or less bitterly
opposed to Christians, and the Right consisting of the animae
candidiores, who counted it "bad manners to hustle God (oJ0r/>s)"
by magic, piety to wait on him and the ideal life one of natural
and willing communion with him 2 . These men, and Synesius with

1 This phrase of Stevenson's ("Journalism," he said, "is the school of cheap
finish") answers to dSiWros ffK^/j./j.a irapaXafiuv ucnrep dvSptavra ^cras es rb aKpipts

' 2 Cf. Augustine's indignation, while he was yet a Manichaean, at an enchanter's
overtures: recolo...me autem foeda ilia sacramenta detestatum et abominatum
respondisse, Conf. iv. 1, 3. The proposal had been to secure by sacrifice of
some animals the aid of daemonia, and Augustine declared he would not sacrifice
a fly for an eternal crown of gold. The poem Lithica of the so-called Orpheus,
really a work of about the fourth century A. D. as its references to the unpopularity
of religion and magic shew, deals with the qualities special stones possess of
"compelling" the gods. See also de Civ. Dei x. 9 and 10, for Augustine's
general criticism of Porphyry and the art quam vel magiam, vel detestabiliore
nomine goetiam, vel honor abiliore theurgiam vacant,

Synesius 341

them, would not wish to "hustle" others who differed from them,
though they might pity and despise them.

The monks, then, according to Synesius, were on wrong lines.
Disregarding pretenders among them, he says the rest do not realize
man's nature. God can do without pleasure, the beasts have bodily
pleasures. Man standing between cannot do without pleasure but
need not choose the pleasures of matter. The monks try to be
more than human; and "now they are in God and now in the
world and the body," and from contemplation they have to seek
relaxation in basket-makiag, while the Greek developes his mind
and his perception in his very amusements rhetoric and poetry.
They aim, no doubt, at the same thing as the philosopher, the sight
of God, but, though it may be granted that some few of them reach
it by happy endowment, they do not travel thither by road but their
progress is more like a Bacchic frenzy, a long jump taken in madness
and excitement 1 . Nor do they understand very often what they
are doing. They must be chaste, but why? They abstain from
marriage as if such abstinence were an end in itself. The prepara-
tion they count the goal. But to the philosopher the virtues are
stages toward philosophy, they are to it as the letters are to a book.
They are not everything, but after all merely mean the removal of
obstacles to attaining the real end. The monk receives a command
to be virtuous, and he obeys, but it is external to him. He does
not know why he should be so. His virtue is therefore unintelligent
and in consequence unmeaning, and perhaps not even virtue at all
in the highest sense. In other words, Synesius finds monastic virtue
mechanical and uninspired, and Neander says he is right and finds
his judgment remarkable for moderation and truth 2 .

Synesius was in earnest about communion with God, but some
of his ways of attaining it seem to us as strange as those of the
monks. In his book On Dreams he pleads for intercourse with God
in sleep. Chaste living and moderation in all things are the means
to obtain good dreams of God, who will often communicate in this
way warnings against threatening danger, guidance and so forth.
This doctrine was one of the Neo-Platonists', of whose teaching at
large the book is full. Julian communed so with heaven. Porphyry
says good demons bring messages to the virtuous in their dreams.

1 Curiously the author of Ae vita contemplativa c. 2 uses much the same ex-
pression of his Therapeutae; "seized by heavenly love KaOdirep ol pa.Kxev6/j.fi><H.
KO.I KopvpavTiuvres fpffovffiifovffi."

- Church History, vol. iii. p. 360, Bohn.

342 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Macrobius classifies dreams from oracles down to nightmares and
Prudentius discusses the question in his poem for sleep-time. Even
Ammianus pleads that divination by dreams is not more necessarily
futile because it blunders than medicine. Augustine believed in his
mother's dreams, and says she told him "she could distinguish by
some strange savour, which she could not explain in words, between
a revelation from God and an idle dream of her own mind."
Synesius' own work was written at a divine command, which came
in a dream, and the whole of it in a single night or rather in the
remainder of that night on which he had the dream. " Whenever
I take it up, I have a strange feeling, and a divine voice, as poetry
says, is shed about me." Hypatia was to be the first reader.

The Praise of Baldness is frankly a humorous work, written
after the other two. " Adoxography " was a recognized branch of
sophistic composition 1 . Unpromising, ugly or inglorious subjects
were chosen and the rhetorician did his best for them. It was
"making the worse appear the better reason." One of the most
accessible examples of the kind is Lucian's Praise of a Fly, which
adequately exhibits its possibilities of neatness and triviality.
Synesius wrote his piece in imitation of Dio's Praise of Hair, part
or all of which he quotes. The work is not elsewhere preserved.

Synesius professes that he is growing bald, but reflects that hair
is the mark of the beast, while man is in the main bald, though
partially hairy to remind him of his midway position in the universe.
But with dogs, for example, the more hair, the less sense. So the
balder a man is, the wiser and the more divine we may take him to
be. Hair like the adornment of growing corn withers when the
fruit, here the brain, is ripe. Of all shapes the sphere is most
perfect and that is the shape of the bald head. The soul naturally
aims at the imitation of God and yearns to inhabit a sphere, but
whether this be a star or a bald head is immaterial. Our head is
our most heavenward part, and its baldness is heaven for us.
Though the vulgar admire hair, as they do everything external,

1 Erwin Eohde, Der Griechische Roman, p. 308. The author of the Clemen-
tine homilies sets an imaginary opponent of Christianity to compose a /toix'o?
tyKu/Mov (Clem. Horn. v. 10 19) with abundant illustration from mythology
a by no means extravagant performance for a rhetorician, which most adroitly
exhibits the bad side of Olympus. Gellius, N. A. xvii. 12, speaks of these
themes and their uses, to rouse the wit, to practise cleverness, to overcome
difficulties, and says that they were favourite exercises of philosophers as well
as sophists, e.g. his teacher Favorinus praised Thersites and quartan fever.
There is another Praise of Hair in Philostratus (Ep. 16). Claudian's poems on
the electric eel (or fish) of the Nile, the porcupine and the magnet may come
under this class.

Synesius 343

the spheric is the blessed form. (So says Macrobius more gravely,
Comm. i. 14. 8, 9.) Just as the moon waxes to the full, so does
baldness, till it exhibits the head "shining back with full-orbed circle
to the lights of heaven." Hair and the vices flourish and pass
together. Even Achilles was bald in front or at least Athene took
him by the hair from behind. The best of men, priests and philo-
sophers, are all painted as bald. This work is for philosophers and,
if it be published, he hopes the "lovers of hair" (<(.AOKO/AOI) will be
ashamed and adopt the reasonable and honourable practice of
shaving, but always pay special honour to those who do not need
the barber. The fooling is exquisite but perhaps a little long. It
should be noted that the ideas he parodies are Neo-Platonic.

" But to this idyllic country life that only wanted a Theocritus
there was another side. Cyrene was for the civilized world
practically an island, but in reality it was unhappily not so. The
barbarian tribes of the interior, Macetae arid Ausurians, were in
the habit of raiding the land, and in general little effective opposi-
tion was offered to them. There were troops to meet them, if only
the governors and officials could be trusted, but they could not.
They were as a rule not there because they were fit for their work.
The barbarians, like the Iroquois in Canada, came and went as they
would with suddenness and swiftness. Accordingly one responsible
official sells the soldiers' horses and pockets the money, and nothing
can be done with infantry. Another scatters the troops about in such
a way that they are useless. Now and again a capable man is sent
and the savages are taught a lesson. He is recalled and they return
actually to besiege fortresses and towns. Yet bad as this was,
there was a worse symptom. The Cyrenians would do nothing for
themselves, and when Synesius tried to rouse them and raise a
troop of farm people, his brother wrote to warn him that such
activity was dangerous in a private person. For centuries the
Roman government had discouraged energy and initiative among
the provincials, and they had acquired the habit of having everything
done for them. Public spirit had been suspected and killed, and
now an enemy, whose weakness was seen whenever any determined
action was taken against him, plundered and burnt, drove off cattle
and horses and camels and carried away children to bring them up
to ravage as men the lands they played on in childhood another
Iroquois trait all this for want of public spirit. The army itself
was composed of foreigners Synesius speaks of corps of Marco-
manni, Arabians, Unnigardae and the native-born Romans were

344 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

kept in civil life to be taxed. He had not gone an inch beyond
what he had warrant for, when in his speech on Kingship he had
pled for citizen soldiers. And now neither the citizens nor the
soldiers nor the officials were of any use. "The enemy are burning,
slaying and kidnapping," he writes, "and not one of us is troubled ;
we sit and wait for the useless help of the soldiers. Shall we never
stop talking nonsense? never come to our senses and gather the
farmers and labourers and march out together against the enemy,
for our children, for our wives, for our land yes ! and if you like
for the soldiers too?" (Ep. 125).

A letter of Synesius to Hypatia, written apparently a short time
after his return home from Constantinople, illustrates the situation
and his own temper.

"'Yea though in Hades' realm the dead by the dead are forgotten,
Yet even there will I 1 '

remember my dear Hypatia. As for me, on all hands I am sur-
rounded by the sufferings of my native land, and my heart is sad
for her. For every day I see the foemen's arms and the butchery
of men like beasts for sacrifice, and I breathe air tainted with
corrupting corpses, and I look to suffer the like myself. For who
could be of good hope surrounded by all that is humiliating and
overshadowed by carnivorous birds 2 ? Yet for all that I love my
land. What should I else, who am a Libyan and was born here and
still see the tombs of my ancestors held in honour ? For you alone
I think I can forget my land and return if I have the leisure "
(Ep. 124).

This last was a mere compliment, Volkmann says, but it is not
impossible that it is only a promise of a visit and not of a per-
manent change of abode. Visits, as we have seen, he did make to
Alexandria, but he loved his land too well to quit it for ever.
Letter 130 shews further stages of trouble.

"To Simplicius. Your greeting me through Cerealis gave him
live days' grace ; for so long we did not find him out for the knave
he is. For the cities hoped for something good from a man whom
Simplicius did not disdain to know. But he very quickly brought
shame not on you (for Heaven grant your reputation may never

1 Iliad xxii. 389.

2 See Lord Roberts, Forty -one years in India, c. 15, for 'the innumerable
birds of prey which instinct had brought to Delhi from the remotest parts of
India' in 1857.

Synesim 345

depend on another) but on himself and his office, and, not to hesitate,
on the Roman empire a man to be bought for a trifle, careless of
his fame, unwarlike and in peace oppressive though he had not a
long enjoyment of peace. For as if there were a law that what is
the soldiers' is the general's, he took from everyone what they had
and in exchange released them from service and discipline and let
them go where they might think they could pick up a living. This
he did to the native troops, but as he could not get money out of
the mercenaries he did out of their towns, marching and moving
about, not where it was most profitable but where it was most
lucrative. The towns found their presence a burden and paid down
their gold. The Macetae soon saw this, and from the half-
barbarians to the barbarians the report spread.

'Thick as the leaves they came and thick as the flowers of spring-time.'

"Alas! for the youth that are lost to us! for the harvests we
hoped for in vain ! We sowed for the enemy's fire. Most of us had
our wealth in beasts, in brood camels and horses out at grass. All
is gone, all driven off. I know it too well, as I am beside myself
with annoyance. But forgive me. For I am behind walls, and
I write under siege, seeing beacons often in the hour, lighting them
myself and passing on signals to others. The long hunting expedi-
tions I once enjoyed securely and most of all for your sake they
are all past. And I groan

'as I bethink me
Of that past youth, that temper and that mind.'

"But now everything swarms with horsemen and the enemy hold
the country. And I at my station between two towers am battling
with sleep.

'Under my spear I munch my barley-cake,
Under my spear a soldier's thirst I slake,
Drain the Ismaric, leaning on my spear.'

I don't know if Archilochus had any better right to say this. Evil
befall the evil Cerealis, if he has not anticipated my curse, for he
deserved to perish in the recent storm. For when he saw in what
plight the country was, he lost confidence at once in land, and put
his gold on some merchant schooners, and is tossing on the sea. A
skifif brings us his despatches, which bid us do what we are doing
keep within the walls, not advance outside the trenches, not come
to close quarters with these invincible men, or else, he protests, he

346 Life and, Letters in the Fourth Century

washes his hands of us. He tells us to set four watches through
the night, as if our hopes lay in not sleeping. For he seems skilled
in such things, like a man born to disaster. Yet he did not want
even a share in oiir misfortunes. For not by a battlement like me,
Synesius the philosopher 1 , but by an oar our general takes his
stand.

"If you really like the poems for which you asked though I am
not aware of anything good about them except their subject pray
with the Cyrenians that they may have a little respite from arms.
For as we are now, there is not leisure to take the books from the
boxes."

There are other letters in like strain, which, with those describing
the country and its people, give us a bright and living picture of
the life of the province. The books and hymns reveal in some
measure what was passing in Synesius' mind. The earlier hymns
are frankly Neo-Platonic, but a change appears, for the fifth begins :

"The offspring of the Virgin,
The Virgin never wedded
In human wedlock, sing we."

The remaining five are all more or less Christian. The eighth may
be dated 405 or 406, and we may ask whether it is later or earlier
than the three preceding. In any case, perhaps as much as three
years before the bishopric is mentioned, Synesius was hymning the
Virgin-born. This was an advance on Neo-Platonism. How had
he reached this point ?

He does not tell us what made him a Christian, his apologia
about the bishopric turning on the reasons which led him to sur-
render the quiet life he loved for one of office and worry and
business. Only a few hints occur from which we may gather some
of his motives. In such matters it is always hard to be explicit.
The reasons which a man will give for holding the deepest religious
truths must generally seem more or less inadequate, because they
can never be completely stated. Such truths are held by a man, or
rather perhaps he would say, hold him, because they are to him a
spiritual necessity, which he feels as the result of experience, and no
one who has not had this or a similar experience can understand
why he should so feel.

1 Is he thinking of Dio, bidden by the Borysthenites to take arms and fight
like Achilles against the barbarian raiders? (Dio, Borysth. 28).

Synesius 347

Synesius under the stress of great danger had prayed in the
churches of Constantinople, and this of itself shews a certain friend-
liness to Christianity. Julian, for example, would not have done so ;
his visits to church were only dictated by policy. Synesius again
had a Christian wife, who had been given to him by bishop
Theophilus of Alexandria a man who has not a good name in
history 1 . However, Chrysostom had been in Constantinople when
Synesius was there, and must have impressed him, as we find him
speaking warmly of Chrysostom to Theophilus, the man who had
hounded him to his death. We also see that the clergy and the monks
tried to capture him, and while in the Dio he accuses them of being
on wrong lines he admits that their aim is the right one. His own
Neo-Platonic Trinity bears a close likeness to the Christian one.
There were thus many things leading him to the Church. The
difficulty was probably the Incarnation, the belief that God could
stoop to contact with the material world.

To a belief in this he was helped, if my deductions are right,
mainly by two things a deepening sense of his own difficulty in
keeping "clean from matter," and a growing feeling for the needs
and sorrows of common people. Neo-Platonism was not clear as to
how far a man, striving to be pure and godlike, received divine
assistance. Did God leave man to work out his own salvation by
himself, as Macrobius implies, or lend aid at every turn as Julian
hopes (though Julian rested for this on magic), or intervene occasion-
ally at great crises, as Synesius' book on Providence teaches ? The
Christian account was much more explicit, even before Augustine
developed the doctrine of grace. Synesius later on says incidentally
that he cannot himself mingle with the material world and remain
pure. "And if it had been possible even for an angel to become a
man and for more than thirty years suffer nothing from contact
with matter, why need the Son of God have descended?" (Ep. 57,
1396 c). Elsewhere he laments, "I have no strength; what is
within is not pure, and I cannot avail for what is without ; and
I am far from being able to bear the pain of conscience" (Ep. 104,
1484 c). His case had been with differences like Augustine's, who
says of his Neo-Platonist days: "I thought continence a matter

1 One example of outside opinion of Tbeophilus may suffice. In Sulpicius'
Dialogue (i. 7) Postumian says of him me quidem episcopwt illius civitatis benigne
admodum et melius quam opinabar excepit et secum tenere temptavit, xed nonfuit
cmimuit ibi consiatfire ubi recenn fraternae cladis fervebat invidia. This was
written even before tbe fall of Cbrysostom.

348 Life and Letters in tJie Fourth Century

of my own strength, which I did not really know, since I was so
foolish as not to be aware (as it is written) that ' none can be
continent unless Thou give it' (Wisdom viii. 21)" (Conf. vi. 11, 20).
Experience had taught Synesius better. "It was necessary (ISei)
that Christ should be crucified for the sins of all men" (Ep. 57,
1385 B).

Again, the suffering his country had to undergo fell on him no
more than on his poorer neighbours. He had always been the poor
man's friend, though as a Neo-Platonist he could not expect much
philosophy from the poor and therefore must set them on a lower
plane. But suffering seems to have put him and them on one level.
They all suffered alike from savages and bad governors ; alike they
risked life and property, and together they fought and did sentry
duty for their country. Though Synesius' own three children had
not been carried off, he could as a father feel what such a loss was.
What was to help these poor people, for whom Neo-Platonism was
too fine and too hard? All this is, of course, inference, but it seems
to me legitimate when I contrast a typical Neo-Platonic utterance
with an expression wrung from Synesius, when bishop, by an outrage
of the Governor Andronicus.

Hermes Trismegistus, voicing the pride that went with the
magical wing of Neo-Platonism, the pride of being able to force the
gods (dvaynd^iv is lamblichus' word), writes thus: "Marvellous
beyond all marvels is it that man could discover the divine nature
and make it... .Calling forth the souls of demons and angels they
have installed them in holy images and divine mysteries, whereby
the idols have the power of doing good and doing harm " (Ed. Bipont.
Apul. ii. p. 32 1) 1 .

Synesius is humbler. " Precious among creatures is man ;
precious in that for him Christ was crucified" (Ep. 57, 1388 c).
It is not an idle question of Augustine when he is writing of the
Neo-Platonists. "Where," he demands, "where is that charity
that edifieth on the foundation of humility, which is Christ Jesus ? "
(Conf. vii. 20, 26).

It is here that the Christian Church and the Neo-Platonists
most fundamentally differ, and this must be realized if we are to
appreciate Synesius. Otherwise we shall be liable to error, for his

1 On this remarkable utterance, see Augustine, C. D. viii. 23, 24 quasi quid-
quam sit infelicius homine, cui sua figmenta dominantur! The confusion of the
Bipontine text dates from the days of St Augustine, who avails himself of it to
make a point one feels would have been impossible but for the Latin translator
from Hermes' original Greek.

Synesius 349

terminology is always Neo-Platonic, and many of his views too are
not yet re-adjusted to the new position. Some have thought that
because in an hour of trouble he sought comfort in "philosophy," he
was harking back to Neo-Platonism, but this is a mistake. He
merely means reflexion '.

In 409 the bishopric of Ptolemais, now and for some time pre-
viously the chief town of the Cyrenaica, became vacant by the death
of the bishop. In electing bishops the laity still had a voice which
was often very effective They did not necessarily confine them-
selves to men already ordained, but looked about for some man of
proved capability, who by wealth, birth, position, influence or
experience would be likely to make a good administrator and a
protector of the people. It was thus that in Milan Ambrose was
most unexpectedly consecrated, and that in Constantinople Nectarius,
Chrysostom's predecessor, was forcibly seized by the people and
made bishop. Nothing need be said of Ambrose, but Nectarius
was a worldly-minded man who liked to enjoy life. Ordination
cannot have been regarded with much respect, when it was beginning
already to be used as a method of punishing and reducing to
obscurity men who had been politically troublesome. How secular
might be the considerations which led to the choice of a bishop,
we can see in Synesius' letters. In one see under his charge, the
people revolted from a gentle old bishop because he was ineffectual,
and set up a more drastic person, as they needed a man of energy
and resource. But when the laity chose Synesius for Ptolemais,
beside the reflexion that he was able, active and brilliant and had
strong connexions in Constantinople and Egypt, we may surely
credit them with some appreciation of his kindness, his honour and
his piety.

The proposal was most unwelcome to him, but he had to con-
sider it. A short abstract of a letter (Ep. 105) which he wrote to
his brother will shew his feelings.

"The episcopate is a compliment, but am I fit for it? I think,
very unfit. I will tell you, for I have no one else. I know you will
be anxious for my good. Philosophy is all I am equal to. In
serious things I go my own way, but I also like amusement. Now
a bishop should be as able to do without amusement as God is.
And in serious and sacred things he cannot go his own way and be
independent, but must belong to everybody and teach what is

1 It may be noted that in the earlier works written after his conversion,
Augustine as a rule uses philosophic rather than Christian terminology.

350 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

recognized. He must be a man of affairs, able at once to undertake
endless business and maintain his spiritual life. For myself, I feel
it pollution even to go into the town 1 . A bishop should be stainless
as he has to wash others of their sins, but my own sins are too
much for me.

"As I know you will shew this letter to others, I will be explicit,
that I may be clear of guilt before God and man, and before Theo-
philus. I am married. God and the law and the sacred hand of
Theophilus gave me my wife, and I do not wish to part from her at
all*. Further, philosophy is opposed to many current dogmata.
(a) I do not think the soul is made after the body, (b) nor that the world
and all its parts will be destroyed, (c) The resurrection as preached
I count a sacred mystery and am far from accepting the general idea.
(d) To conceal the truth is philosophically sound. Too much truth
and too much light are dangerous at times 3 . I cannot obscure these
opinions now, as I cannot be ordained to God's service and fail in
truthfulness by concealing my real thoughts.

"I shall be sorry to give up sports. (My poor dogs!) But
I will; and I will endure business, as a means of doing service to
God. But my mind and my tongue must not be at variance.
Theophilus must know all, so that he may either leave me in peace
as a philosopher or, if he chooses to ordain me, may be unable
to rule me out ,of the choir of bishops. If he accepts my terms,
I will be bishop, for one must be ready to obey God with a good
will."

The weight in this letter falls on the tenets which Syuesius says
are contrary to the usual faith of Christians. They certainly lean
toward Neo-Platonism. The eternity of the universe is strongly
insisted on by Macrobius, Hermes Trismegistus and Julian for
example. The resurrection was repugnant to the school in conse-
quence of their views on matter. If the essence of the higher life,
the divine life, is to escape matter, how should matter be raised
hereafter to be again a fetter on the soul ? On the Neo-Platonist
hypothesis the resurrection of the body was an absurdity. But

1 Cf. Augustine, Ep. x. 2 Nisi proveniat quacdam manna cessatio, sinccrum
illud bonum gustare atque amare non possum. Magna secessione a tumultu rerum
labentium, mihi crede, opus est. Like Synesius, Augustine had to surrender this
life for that of activity.

2 We are not told the decision about his wife, but it is thought she may have
solved the difficulty by withdrawing from him voluntarily. This separation
may have contributed to his depression when bishop.

3 This line is taken by Augustine, de Mor. Eccl. Cath. vii. 11, who remedies
the excessive light of divine things by the opacitas auctoritatis.

Synesius 351

Volkmann brings out that these views, which Synesius professes, he
does not emphasize so much because they were Neo-Platonic as
because they were the views of Origen, against which Theophilus
had started a terrible campaign involving the downfall and exile of
Chrysostom. Synesius does not want that fate and does want to be
open.

In the light of all this we must interpret the last of the four
points reasonably. VfvBfo-Oat. "to lie" is a strong word and is
stronger in our English than in Synesius' Greek. With other Neo-
Platonists he believed in retaining certain things, making mysteries
and esoteric doctrines of them, and he lavishes a good deal of
admiration on the Homeric Proteus', who put on any and every
sort of form to evade all but the true philosopher, Menelaus, whose
concern was to know the truth. Dr Hatch has shewn that this
temper was not unknown in the Church, where the simple rites of
the early Church were under its influence developed into awful
mysteries.

The case was referred to Theophilus, and Synesius spent seven
or eight months at Alexandria. What happened there we are not
told. He mentions incidentally that "old men" told him "God
would be his shepherd"; that "the Holy Spirit is joyous and gives
joy to those who partake of Him 2 "; that "God and the demons
fight for us, and that he by being consecrated would wound the
demons"; and that "a philosopher's consecration meant much to
the world V

It is clear he did not wish to be a bishop and that he anticipated
great trouble in the discharge of the office. His fears were amply
realized. Cyrene received as Governor "a man from the tunny-
fisheries," Andronicus by name, an extortionate, rapacious and
vicious man. The people turned for help to their bishop. He had
just lost a child and was crushed with sorrow. If he says "he
could have done himself a mischief," we need not suppose he really
contemplated suicide, as some have surprisingly concluded. Here
as elsewhere he merely uses a rather vivid style of speech. He now

1 Augustine similarly makes Proteus a parable of truth. Contra Academicos,
iii. 6, 13 Veritatis, inquam, Proteus in carminibus ostentat swstinetque pcrsonam,
quam obtinere nemo potest, sifalsis imaginibus deceptus comprehensionis nodos vel
laxaverit vel diminerit.

- Cf. Augustine, Con/, viii. 11, 27, on the gladness of Christianity, non
dissolute hilaris.

3 Thus Augustine on the conversion of the great rhetorician Victorinus
speaks of the importance of winning men of note, quod multis noti multis sunt
auctoritati ad salutem et multis praeeunt secuturis (Conf, viii. 4, 9).

352 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

tried to do something to mitigate the Governor's violence, but only
met insult. He found himself powerless and felt that others realized
it and regretted their election of him. Overwhelmed with pain at
his bereavement and mortification at his failure, he had recourse to
prayer, but "here was the worst of his misfortunes which made his
life seem hopeless; in the past he had always found God in prayer,
but now he felt he prayed in vain." Once again, I think, his
language has been forced to mean too much. He was essentially
a man influenced by feelings, and whatever he feels he says freely
very much resembling Cicero in his sensibility and outspokenness
and it seems to me unfair to infer from such an utterance that his
Christianity broke down. Andronicus went further. He nailed a
notice to the church door that he would not recognize the asylum
of the church, and when Synesius ran in the full heat of noon to sit
by a man he was torturing, he raged at the sight of the bishop and
crowned his madness with the boast, that none should escape
Andronicus' hands though he clung to the feet of Christ Himself.
Now Synesius called a synod together and excommunicated him,
and in an address (printed among his letters as no. 57) makes an
apologia pro vita sua, an honourable and affecting defence. To it
he appended the sentence of excommunication to be forwarded to
all bishops with an account of Andronicus' guilt. The villain gave
way, begged for a second chance, received it and abused it, and the
bolt was launched, and before long Synesius had to come forward to
rescue him from injustice.

The barbarians, Macetae and Ausurians, continued their inroads.
On two occasions effective generals were sent against them on short
campaigns, but in the interval they grew so bold as to besiege
Ptolemais.

Within two years Synesius lost his two remaining children. He
writes to Hypatia about them in deep depression. "The memory of
my departed children is wasting me away. . . . Might I cease either to
live or to remember my boys' grave!" (Ep. 16).

Yet I think the Cyrenians must have counted him a good and
a wise bishop. As one reads his letters telling Theophilus of his
procedure, one feels that R. L. Stevenson's praise of his missionary
friend, Mr Clarke, might be applied to him "a man I esteem and
like to the soles of his boots ; I prefer him to anyone in Samoa and
to most people in the world; a real good missionary with the in-
estimable advantage of having grown up a layman." Tact, courtesy,
common sense and a remarkable absence of any feeling of his own

Synesiuz 353

importance mark his actions. It looks as if the sense of his own
weakness and sinfulness made him more sympathetic with weak and
tempted men, with wrong-doers and with men of doubtful opinions.
One example may suffice. Two bishops had a quarrel about a little
fort. It was the personal property of the one, and the other stole a
march on him, consecrated it, and claimed it for his diocese. Some
held that the consecration was irrevocable and nothing could be
done. Synesius boldly upset it altogether. There was a proper
balance to be kept between the sacred laws and the rights of the
state. He drew a clear line between piety and superstition, the
vice that aped it, and held it intolerable that by the most sacred
things the most execrable wrong should be done and that the prayer,
the table and the mystical curtain sjiould be made the implements
of violent aggression. It was no Christian teaching [as it was Neo-
Platonic] that the Divine is subject to ritual word and substance, as
if by some physical attraction. Where anger, passion and strife
lead the way in an action, how can the Holy Spirit be there ? He
restored the fort, which he would not allow to be a church, to its
owner, who, now that his own rights were maintained and his
adversary had apologized, freely gave him the fort and the hill.

Synesius' ordination cost him some friendships, and what that
meant we may read iu one of his latest letters. He gently rebukes
Auxentius for having dragged him into a quarrel in which he was
not concerned. "Advancing ye'ars, I am glad to say, are dulling
my quick temper ; and the sacred laws, they say, forbid. At the
same time I remember our common upbringing and education and
the life in Gyrene. All this we must suppose to outweigh the suit
of Sabbatius. Begin then the good work of friendship, and accept
my good will ; for I count the time of my silence as so much loss
and do you realize how even then I suffered? But I bore it as well
as I could such is the evil of having a quick temper" (Ep. 60).

And here our story ends. The 12th letter seems to imply that
Theophilus is dead. He died in 412, and this is the latest date
that can with any certainty be assigned to any work of Synesius'.
Hence it has been plausibly conjectured his own death must have
shortly followed. There is a wild theory that Euoptius, bishop of
Ptolemais in 431, may have been his brother, in which case we gain
the information that Synesius was dead before 431.

With his death darkness falls on the history of Gyrene.

I have so far only casually alluded to his hymns, with one of which,
the 9th, in Mrs Browning's rendering, I close my essay. Volkmann
G. 23

354 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

says their poetic worth is slight, and this is certainly true of some
of them, for their metre is very monotonous and their thought
abstract.

Some of the hymns are little more than metrical expositions
of the common doctrines of Neo-Platonism. There is a Trinity,
which is a Unity, a Father and a Son, linked by the "mediating
light of the Holy Spirit," through whom the Father is Father and
the Son is Son. The Son is the Wisdom that made the world.
Thence the choir of immortal rulers, the deathless army of angels,
and all the descending succession of beings. The soul has come
down to be on earth a servant, but enchanted by the magic arts of
matter it has become a slave instead of a servant, yet is not without
some gleam of hidden light, which even in its fallen state may help
it to rise. His prayer is for divine aid, particularly against distrac-
tion and disturbance and the confusions of the material world "let
the winged snake go underground, the demon of matter, the cloud
of the soul, that loves phantoms and hounds on its dogs against
prayer" "the demons that leap up from the abysses of earth and
breathe into mortals godless impulses." Gradually he identifies the
Son with the Virgin-born Christ, and finally calls him Jesus, still
keeping the Spirit as the "centre" of the Trinity, and still praying
for rest and quietness and salvation from matter and all that dis-
orders the soul. At times he rises to flights that seem to justify the
very high praise bestowed upon him by Mrs Browning, to whose
brilliant essay on the Greek Christian poets I would refer the
reader.

"He was a poet," she writes, "the chief poet, we do not hesitate
to record our opinion the chief, for all true and natural gifts, of all
our Greek Christian poets.... These odes have, in fact, a wonderful
rapture and ecstasy. And if we find in them the phraseology of
Plato or Plotinus, for he leant lovingly to the later Platonists,
nay, if we find in them oblique references to the out-worn mythology
of paganism, even so have we beheld the mixed multitude of un-
connected motes wheeling, rising in a great sunshine, as the sunshine
were a motive energy, and even so the burning, adoring poet-spirit
sweeps upward the motes of world-fancies (as if, being in the world,
their tendency was Godward), upward in a strong stream of sunny
light, while she rushes into the presence of 'the Alone.' We say the
spirit significantly in speaking of this poet's aspiration. His is an
ecstasy of abstract intellect, of pure spirit, cold though impetuous ;
the heart does not beat in it, nor is the human voice heard ; the

Synesius 355

poet is true to the ecclesiastic, and there is no resurrection of the
body."

Well-beloved and glory-laden,

Born of Solyma's pure maiden !

I would hymn Thee, blessed Warden,

Driving from thy Father's garden

Blinking serpent's crafty lust,

With his bruised head in the dust !

Down Thou earnest, low as earth,

Bound to those of mortal birth ;

Down Thou earnest, low as hell,

Where shepherd-Death did tend and keep

A thousand nations like to sheep,

While weak with age old Hades fell

Shivering through his dark to view Thee,

And the Dog did backward yell

With jaws all gory to let through Thee!

So, redeeming from their pain

Choirs of disembodied ones,

Thou didst lead whom Thou didst gather,

Upward in ascent again,

With a great hymn to the Father,

Upward to the pure white thrones !

King, the daemon tribes of air

Shuddered back to feel Thee there!

And the holy stars stood breathless,

Trembling in their chorus deathless ;

A low laughter filled aether

Harmony's most subtle sire

From the seven strings of his lyre

Stroked a measured music hither

lo paean ! victory !

Smiled the star of morning he

Who smileth to foreshow the day !

Smiled Hesperus the golden,

Who smileth soft for Venus gay!

While that horned glory holden

Brimful from the fount of fire,

The white moon, was leading higher

In a gentle pastoral wise

All the nightly deities!

Yea, and Titan threw abroad

The far shining of his hair

'Neath Thy footsteps holy-fair,

Owning Thee the Son of God;

The Mind artificer of all,

And his own fire's original.

232

356 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

And THOU upon Thy wing of will

Mounting, Thy God-foot uptill

The neck of the blue firmament,

Soaring, didst alight content

Where the spirit-spheres were singing,

And the fount of good was springing,

In the silent heaven!

Where Time is not with his tide

Ever running, never weary,

Drawing earth-born things aside

Against the rocks : nor yet are given

The plagues death-bold that ride the dreary

Tost matter-depths. Eternity

Assumes the places which they yield!

Not aged, howsoe'er she held

Her crown from everlastingly

At once of youth, at once of eld,

While in that mansion which is hers

To God and gods she ministers ! 1

1 See Mrs Browning's poetical works, 1 vol. edition, 1898, pp. 602 605.
The work of Volkmann, which I have quoted, is Synesius von Gyrene, by
B. Volkmann, Berlin, 1869, an excellent and most useful book.

CHAPTER XV

GREEK AND EARLY CHRISTIAN NOVELS

dXX' aye /not roSe eiire nal arpeKeeo?

OTVITT] airfTr\ay^6r]s re KOI a? rivas iKeo ^<apas.

Odyssey viii. 572

No study of the fourth century would be complete which did
not in some degree take account of its fiction. Yet to deal with
it all and with precision would be an extremely difficult task. To
begin, a good story and every reader has his own idea of what
is a good story a story then that appeals to a large number of
readers will probably be spread abroad not merely in abundance
of copies but in various languages. It will be translated from one
tongue to another, and as it travels it will undergo alterations.
Passages will be added and others will be omitted. Eventually
when criticism takes the much travelled story into consideration,
widely differing recensions of it are found, and it is sometimes no
easy matter to say which is the original form has it been expanded
by a Syrian translator or cut down by a Greek ? Many of the tales
with which we have to deal describe an almost entirely artificial
world, and offer nothing beyond their style as a guide to the critic
who will date them, and in some cases this is hardly any help at
all, so that a novel like that of Longus is loosely dated as of the
second to the fourth century. Others conceal the date of their
creation of set purpose and flaunt a false one, and though the
falsehood may be readily detected, the true date can often only be
determined by long and tiresome critical processes, with the result
that critics come to very different conclusions.

If however we bear in mind that, while the dates of the first
appearances of the particular books to which we have to refer are
in many cases highly conjectural, these works yet represent the
popular taste for long after as well as before the period with which

358 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

we are dealing, and that their kind, if not themselves, has profoundly
influenced actual productions of our period, we may without material
error draw some real advantage from our study. We may begin
by a short survey of the general lines of development of Greek
fiction, for though a literary pedigree may be as hard to prove
as a canine, no work of art of any sort can help in some measure
betraying the environment in which it was produced, and something
of the processes by which that stage has been reached. At the
same time the author's individuality must be recognized. To take
a modem example, it is quite clear that Paid and Virginia owes
much to Daphnis and Ckloe, and it is also clear that it owes a
good deal to Robinson Crusoe, the book which of all books most
influenced Bernardin de St Pierre from youth to age. Yet Paul
is agitated by questions that Daphnis never dreamt of, and which
he himself could hardly have dreamt of, if he had not been created
in the age of Rousseau, to say nothing of his creator's friendship
with Rousseau. Again, though the work has been pronounced to
be in some degree even anti-Christian in its quiet ignoring of such
matters as original sin and any necessity for redemption, and its
implication that man is born good, if only society will not corrupt
him, yet the difference between Paul and Daphnis, between Virginia
and Chloe, is not to be explained without Christianity. We thus
see that Longus, Defoe, Rousseau and the Catholic Church have
all contributed to this book, but perhaps after all we must recognize
that Bernardin de St Pierre contributed to it, or else we may have
to pronounce Shakespeare a second-hand dramatist.

We need not however write the history of literature to interpret
Xanthippe and Polyxena or the Life of Antony and their con-
temporary rivals. I would refer the reader to the admirable work
of Chassang, Histoire du Roman, which has been highly praised by
Sainte-Beuve but not too highly, and the more special monograph
of Erwin Rohde, Der Griechische Roman. At the same time
clearness will be gained by giving a very short sketch of the course
of development that Greek fiction has followed 1 .

We may then classify our material very roughly in some five
groups, premising that in many cases it will be difficult to say
under which heading this or that work should more properly come,
as the same book may share the characteristics of more than one

1 A. Chassang, Histoire du Roman dans I'Antiquite Grecque et Latine, Paris,
Didier, 1862; (Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis, vol. ii.). Erwin Rohde, Der
Griechische Roman u. seine Vorldufer, Leipzig; Breitkopf and Hartel, 1876.

Greek and Early Cliristian Novels 359

class. Our five classes may then be taken as (a) the tale of Troy
and cognate legends of early Greece, (b) the literary offspring of
Plato in two families the descendants of Atlantis and of Er the
Armenian, (c) the history, degenerating into the romance, of
Alexander, with two great subdivisions, the tale of the hero, and
the tale of travel, (d) the avowed love-tale, and (e) the fiction
with an immediate national or religious purpose.

Our first group need not detain us long, important as it is.
The tale of Troy and the other tales of early Greece were first
worked over by the tragic poets ; they were systematized by
collectors of mythology, and violently rationalized into history by
historians of the lower type, who "tortured mythology to the
detriment of poetry and without profit to history 1 "; they were
altered and abused by rhetoricians and sophists like Philostratus
(in his Heroicus) and the fabricators of Dares and Dictys ; they
were turned into pantomimes and danced all over the Roman world
and perhaps even outside it ; they recaptured Europe in the middle
ages, when Achilles and Hector disputed the popularity of Roland
and Arthur 2 : and finally at the revival of learning they took with
new life a still deeper hold on a wider world, which they yet retain.

Our second group we associate for -convenience with the name
of Plato. While some took Atlantis for a real country, others saw
more clearly that, as Strabo wittily says, "its creator destroyed
it just as the poet did the wall of the Greeks " (c. 102). Real
or imaginary, it was a fruitful example, and the seas of the world,
or rather the parts outside the world, were dotted with ideal
communities on happy islands, which alas ! fled further and further
away with the growth of Geography. As might be expected,
these lands appeared most often when the existing countries were
labouring under unhappy conditions. At a later day, and this is
more important for our present purpose, when the centre of gravity
in philosophy had shifted from the state to the individual, a new
type of Utopia displaces the old, the Utopia of happy thinkers who
live an ideal life of contemplation without any government at all,
without a state or social questions, and free from all disquieting
foreign or domestic policies. The book On the Contemplative

1 Chassang's phrase. See Boissier, Country of Horace and Virgil, c. iii. 1,
a good chapter dealing with the legend of Aeneas "falling into the hands of the
chroniclers and scholiasts. It had no reason to rejoice.... The learned are not
light-handed."

2 See Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, pt. n. c. 1, who shews Virgil's
share in the popularity of the story of Troy.

360 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Life, attributed, though wrongly, to Philo the Jew, is an example
of this. It describes the Therapeutae, who lived an ascetic
life together in large numbers a little way out of Alexandria, so
successfully avoiding attention that no geographer, traveller or
philosopher ever found them except in the novel

The story of Er the Armenian was much derided by the
Epicureans, but it had a great influence. Cicero imitated it in
his dream of Scipio, which in its turn produced Macrobius' com-
mentary, a book much used in the middle ages. Plutarch twice
copied it in his vision of Timarchus (in the de genio Socratis)
and his story of the trance of Thespesius (de sera numinum vin-
dicta), the latter, according to Archbishop Trench, being not
altogether unworthy to stand beside Plato's Er 1 . How far these
and similar works may have influenced the authors of such Christian
apocalypses as those that bear the names of Peter and of Paul,
or whether their inspiration is to be found exclusively in the
Jewish thought that gave birth to such works as The Secrets
of Enoch and the apocalypse of Baruch, it is not for me to de-
termine.

Our third group is perhaps more popular. The imagination
of the Greek world seized on Alexander and his wars and his travels,
embellished the tale with the marvels of mythology and the wonders
of India, and in the end left very little of the real Alexander.
Travellers' tales confused by far-away memories of the Mahabharata
and the Ramayana, by misunderstood monuments of Indian art or
worship, by Brahmanical fables of all sorts, attached themselves
to Alexander, and the marvellous tale grew with every generation 2 .
The false Callisthenes' story of Alexander exists in some twenty
manuscripts with corruptions and additions of every age. Now it
was the Huns and now the Turks that the hero repelled. The
book was done into Latin, into Armenian, into Arabic and thence
into Syriac and Persian, into Hebrew from the Latin, into Turkish,
into Ethiopic from the Arabic version of the Greek, and so forth 3 .
Elements were borrowed from it for other tales as freely as they
were added to it, and it has recently been pointed out that Scottish
history has been enriched from this source, for it seems that Bruce's
speech at Baunockburn and his slaying of Bohun are " practically

1 Trench, Plutarch, p. 143.

2 Chassang, op. cit. 140. Sainte-Beuve's comment on the influence of
Alexander on Greek letters deserves quotation : "Le gout attique avait e"te lui
aussi vaincu a Cheronee" (Xouveaux Lundis, ii. p. 423).

3 E. A. Wallis Budge, Intr. to the Syriac Hist, of Alexander the Great.

Greek and Early Christian Novels 361

identical, even in language, with portions of an early Scots trans-
lation of the old French romance of Alexander the Great." It is
comforting that this discovery has been made by a Scotsman 1 . -

The romance of the hero is of course older than Alexander.
Mankind did not wait till his day for tales of adventure, witness
the Odyssey, " die alteste Robinsonade." Again, the Cyropaedia is
a romance of a hero's education, and it is only in comparatively
modern times that it began to pass for history 2 . Romances por-
traying ideal types of character multiply with time. Cato was
hardly dead before his party began to canonize him. Brutus, Cicero
and Fadius Gallus at once wrote Catos, and Caesar had to reply
with an anti-Cato and set Hirtius to make another 3 . But it was
later and in philosophy that most of this work was done. Philo-
stratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana was undertaken at the
command of an Empress, Julia Augusta, because the Life which
she had wanted literary merit. Philostratus sends Apollonius
everywhere, with some errors of Geography, and sets him to perform
miracles and expose devjls, with no regard for sense or fact. Now
he catches a satyr asleep 4 , now he shews a young man that his
sweetheart is an Empusa intent on sucking his blood. It has been
supposed that this work was meant to counteract the gospels, but
it soars away from them into a rarefied atmosphere of New Pytha-
goreanism, of mystic asceticism. The real contrast is with Socrates,
Chassang says, and not with Christ. Porphyry in a somewhat
similar spirit wrote a life of Pythagoras, and even in the life of
his own master, Plotinus, sees fit, alongside of lists of his works,
to introduce interviews with demons and gods called up by magic 5 .
This characteristic introduction of the magical into biography must
be remembered when we are dealing with the lives of the saints,
for it is not peculiar to them ; indeed it is often less noticeable
there than in pagan works. In some measure we may take Lucian's
story of the ingenious false prophet Alexander and his god re-
incarnated in a snake as a reaction at once against magic and
prophet.

1 I owe the fact to Mr Andrew Lang's review of Mr Neilson's John Barbour,
Poet and Translator.

~ See Chassang's excellent chapter on this work, pp. 45 70.

3 Cicero, ad Att. xii. 45, ad Fam. vii. 24.

4 St Jerome has a satyr awake in his Life of Paul a surprisingly pious
one and he declares that all the world knows another was exhibited alive
at Alexandria in Constantius' reign (c. 8).

5 See St Augustine's criticism on Porphyry in this matter, C. D. x. 9 11.

362 Life and Letters in tlie Fourth Century

The romance of travel was pushed beyond all reason till " things
beyond Thule " (a reference to the romance of Antonius Diogenes)
was a by-word for an impossible story. Ethiopians and Indians
and especially Brahmans were the stock-in-trade of this kind of
writing, along with big-eared men, dog-headed and one-eyed men,
who reappear in Sir John Mandeville. Lucian in his True History
parodies this class of fiction, naming as his great models Ctesias
and lambuliis, and above all "Homer's Odysseus, who is their leader
and teacher in this nonsense." Anticipating Jules Verne he goes
from the earth to the moon, and travels probably ten thousand
leagues under the sea, perhaps with more comfort than the French-
man's heroes, for he finds a large island inside a big fish. Inci-
dentally he reaches the Islands of the Blessed, and meets Homer
who writes him a poem, and Odysseus who gives him a message
for Calypso. There is not, as in Gulliver, any special satire against
society in this piece, except the general satire against " the estab-
lished practice of lying that marks philosophers " no doubt a fling
at the Utopia-makers.

Our fourth class is the love-tale. Rohde has traced its ante-
cedents to local legends and popular tales, treated and modified
by the writers of Alexandria, and preserving much of their style,
not without traces of oriental influences. Such " tales of Miletus "
were early popular and early won a bad name. It is notorious
how many of them were found in the loot of Crassus' camp by
the Parthians in 53 B.C. They continued to be written anew for
many centuries, sometimes in the form of letters. One of them
is readily accessible to the English reader in Pericles, Prince of
Tyre. This was originally a Greek romance', written perhaps in
the third century, worked over by a Latin, perhaps in the seventh,
who confused it, adding the story of King Antiochus which has
singularly little connexion with the rest, some more or less Christian
reflexions and some Latin riddles. It passed into the Gesta Roma-
iwrum, and was done into English verse by Gower and incurred the
censure of Chaucer :

But certainly no word ne wryteth he
Of thilke wikke ensample of Canace
That lovede hir owne brother sinfully ;
Of swiche cursed stories I sey " fy " ;

1 See Rohde, op. cit. iv. 3, pp. 408424.

Greek and Early Christian Novels 363

Or elles of Tyro Apollonius...

Of swiche unkinde abominaciouns

Ne I wol noon reherse, if that I may 1 .

Shakespeare turns Apollonius into Pericles, but holds fairly closely
to the old tale's incidents.

It is a strange feature about this class of tale that, while the
episodes are often extremely indecent, the character of the heroine,
sometimes by accident only, but generally of her set design, is kept
stainlessly pure. She is invariably a beautiful doll, who wakens
the most unfortunate passions by her beauty. It may be that
this preservation of her chastity survives from older days before
the sophists and stylists took the romance in hand, days when
it was a tale told among the common people, with a preference
for bourgeois virtue, which was foreign to the goddesses and prin-
cesses of legend. None the less, serious people frowned on this
class of books, and Julian forbade his priests to read them.

Our fifth class, while still fiction, is of rather a different
character. I group here anecdotes, which swell into imaginary
episodes of history for a purpose. Josephus quotes an old tale
of a most friendly interview between Alexander the Great and
the Jewish High Priest, invented as a document to support national
claims. Such devices were not unknown to the Romans, and later
on were revived with great effects in the Donation of Constantine
and the False Decretals. Of course these are forgeries, but there
are other productions surely meriting a less severe name. There
is a great deal of Jewish apocalyptic writing, every book bearing
the name of some great worthy of the past who did not write it.
Their object was to justify the ways of God to men, and to explain
why good and evil fall to men as it seems without distinction of
vice and virtue, and above all why the nation, God's chosen people,
the righteous people, fared so ill. Enoch is made to prophesy and
see into things invisible in order, to encourage the writer's con-
temporaries to faith and courage. Antiquity was not very severe
as a rule in the domain of criticism, and saw nothing morally
questionable in attributing a document to a great name to secure
its reaching its goal. The book of Enoch had a wide influence
not only on other similar literature but on some of the New
Testament writers. Among the heathen, poems reputed to be by
Orpheus were circulated at a late date, and abundance of oracles

1 Prologue to the Man of Lawe's Tale.

364 Life and Letters in tJie Fourth Century

were invented by Jew and Christian for the Sibyl, but as these are
in verse we perhaps need not further consider them.

These then are our five classes. They are not mutually exclusive,
for the Greek romance of love, as we have it to-day, has elements
of the romance of travel and perhaps even of the Utopia.
Nor are they quite comprehensive enough, for it would be hard
to set down in any one of them the Latin Golden Ass of Apuleius,
and still harder the book of Petronius Arbiter. But after all these
are both avowedly medleys, and parts of his work Apuleius drew,
he says, from Milesian tales. What of Cupid and Psyche ? Where
does it come ? Myth, parable or fairy tale, which is it ?

Eventually Greek romance and literature generally fell into the
hands of sophists and rhetoricians. We may say, this happened
under Roman rule, recent discoveries shewing that the erotic novel
as we know it was already in full bloom in the first century.
Rhetoric pervaded everything. Romancers, poets, emperors and
fathers of the Church, all are tinged with it. The sermon of the
Christian preacher was called by the same name as the declamation
of the rhetorician (komilia, logos), and indeed was modelled after
it 1 . East and West, Roman and Greek, felt the effects of the
rhetorical school.

Synesius was a great admirer of Dio Chrysostom, the prince of
rhetorical sophists, but he draws a distinction between his rhetorical
and his political declamations. In the former, he says, Dio " holds
his head high and gives himself airs, like the peacock turning round
to look at itself; he seems delighted with the charms of his discourse,
as if this were his only aim, as if his end were grace of expression."
This attitude of the peacock, acute self-consciousness, tends to spoil
every production of the rhetorical schools, including the novels.
Style is the first thing and often the last, style so overdone that
in the end it is deplorable. Fine phrases are stolen, pretty words
hunted up, scraps of poetry culled from every age of poets, and
all are woven together into a patchwork of preciousness 2 . The

1 See Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, no. iv. on Greek and Christian rhetoric.

2 None of the Greeks is half so successful in this style as Apuleius. Here
genius has lifted a style of most doubtful antecedents into a region far above
anything of the kind in Greek. The Golden Ax* is a triumph. Sainte-Beuve
is right on this against whatever odds, Nouveaux I.undis, vol. ii. p. 442. For
strange judgments on the school, cf. Monceaux (cited by Boissier, L'Afrique
Romaine, p. 246) who thinks Ap. has "the air of a Bedouin at a congress of
classics." Koziol, der Stil des L. Apuleius, may be consulted, especially the
section B (on figures). Socrates (vi. 22) says of Bp Sisinnius, \(t0t)pfi nal
ironjTiKas irapa/j.iyi'vffi X^eu a good description of the school and goes on to
say he was better to listen to than to read.

GreeJc and Early Christian Novels 365

main thing is to display the author's cleverness, and he tries to
do this by descriptions of every kind.

Yet while they were pilfering from Homer's vocabulary, the
sophists never learnt why he did not describe Helen, for example,
though her beauty was the base of his whole story 1 . Physical
beauty is the outcome of a combination of a large number of
elements all taking effect at once. The painter can therefore repro-
duce it but not the poet. The poet can make a list of some or
all of these elements but he cannot coordinate them, nor can the
rhetorician do more. His list can no more produce the effect of
beauty, than a series of labelled and stoppered bottles, full of
simple chemical substances, ranged along a laboratory shelf, can
be said to represent some highly complicated compound of them all.

If it is not a human being, it is a scene, a landscape, that is
described, or the picture of one. Thus Achilles Tatius begins his
novel with a description of a picture of Europa and the bull.
"Europa's the picture ; the Phoenicians' the sea ; Sidon's the land.
On the land a meadow and a troop of maidens. In the sea a bull
was swimming, and on his back a fair maiden sat, sailing to Crete
on the bull. With many flowers bloomed the meadow ; with them
was mingled an array (phalanx) of trees and shrubs ; close together
the trees ; intermingled their leaves ; the branches joined their
leaves, and thus the thickness of the leaves was to the flowers a
roof. The artist had painted under the leaves the shade also ;
and the sun gently strayed down the meadow in patches, so far
as the painter opened the over-arching of the leafy foliage. The
whole meadow an enclosure walled about. The beds of flowers
grew in rows under the leaves of the shrubs, narcissus and roses
and myrtles. And water ran through the midst of the meadow
in the picture, some springing up from the earth below, some
poured about the flowers and the shrubs. And a field-waterer
had been painted with a mattock in his hand, bending over one
ditch and opening a way for the water." This figure is borrowed
from Homer (Iliad xxi. 257) as a number of verbal coincidences
plainly shew, and he adds the one touch of life to the picture.
For the rest it is conventional, and so it always is. The criticism
Bernardin de St Pierre passed on travellers' descriptions will do
for those of the sophists "they are as barren as a geographical
map : Hindostan resembles Europe ; there is no character in it*."

1 See Lessing, Laocoon, c. 20.

2 Arvede Barine, Bernardin de St Pierre (Engl. ed.), p. 51.

366 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Compare Atalanta's cave in the Arcadian bush. There is of course
ivy about it, and ivy in the trees ; crocuses in the soft and deep
grass, and hyacinth and many other hues of flowers, not only as
a feast for the vision, but their fragrance seized the air around, etc.
Laurels there were many, and vines growing before the cave shewed
the labour of Atalanta ; continuous and never-failing waters, fair
to see and cold, to judge by touch and learn by taste, flowed
plenteous and ungrudging, convenient for the watering of the trees ;
and the spot was full of charms, making an austere and modest
chamber for the maiden 1 . Compare again a livelier document,
Synesius' letter to his brother (Ep. 114), for another scene of
flower and tree 2 .

Sometimes the novelists will adorn their stories with descriptions
of natural marvels Here is Achilles Tatius on the hippopotamus, a
most appropriate animal for a love-tale, but it comes in very grace-
fully. Charmides, a military officer, invites hero and heroine, who
have just been rescued by him, to inspect the beast newly killed
by his men. "The horse of the Nile the Egyptians call it, and
it is a horse (as its name implies) in regard to belly and feet,
except that it splits the hoof : in size about the biggest ox ; its
tail short and bare of hair, as the rest of its body is also : its
head round, not small : its cheeks like a horse's ; its nostril gaping
wide and breathing fiery smoke, as from a fount of fire ; its chin
broad as its cheek ; its mouth opens back to its eyebrows. Its
canine teeth are curved, in shape and place like a horse's but three
times the size " (iv. 2). The reader should now have no difficulty in
recognizing the beast. From the hippopotamus it is but a step
to the elephant (cc. 4, 5) and not very far to the crocodile (c. 19).
It will be seen that the luckless lovers are in Egypt, an almost
inevitable country for lovers.

Sometimes the novelist prefers magic to nature. In the love-
tales the magic is generally slight, an oracle perhaps at most,
but in lives of holy men there is plenty of it demons, enchant-
ments, transportations and so forth. How far Apuleius' Golden
Ass begins by being gently satirical only, I cannot say, but it does
not so end. The whole basis of the tale is magic, and if in some
of the episodes the author is making fun of it, he certainly had
to stand his trial on a charge of using magic. The heathen revival
of the second and third centuries was in fact largely based on

1 Aelian, V. H. xiii. 1. 2 Cited on p. 336.

Greek and Early Christian Novels 367

magic a point not always realized. If comment be needed,
Lucian's amusing dialogue called The Lover of Falsehood may be
read, a beautiful collection of ghost stories and enchantments. If
Lucian scoffed, and the devout trembled, the rhetorician was cool,
and added magic to his other themes for decoration.

Descriptions of emotions delight the school. Achilles in par-
ticular enjoys describing their psychology explaining tears, or the
effect of anger on the feelings. Longus is less clever, but more
successful (if still rhetorical), and traces the gradual growth of love
in Daphnis and Chloe with great delicacy according to Sainte-
Beuve, but perhaps to say this one must be devoted to Paul
and Virginia.

Summing up then we may say that the rhetorical novelist tries
to capture us by his exhibitions of cleverness, his descriptions, his
general brilliance, but he does not move us or convince us. The
reason is that after all he is out of touch with life and reality.
His scenes are unreal and conventional, never drawn from nature,
but from books. His figures are unreal too dolls, puppets,
automata. The hero and the heroine, the gentlemanly brigand 1 ,
the too susceptible captain, the pirate, are all lifeless, none realized.
They have no individuality, no distinctive character. Their only
motive is what their creator calls love, which is too good a name
for it. With every newcomer to the scene, the heroine is in fresh
danger. But even with this one motive or incentive, no legitimate
action ever takes place. There are no real consequences of any-
thing. Everything is chance. Sometimes an oracle, sometimes a
dream starts things, and then begins a wild series of mechanical
adventures, pirates, storms, robbers, slavery, separation, murder
(never real murder) and everything to harass hero, heroine and
reader. One thing is always certain what will happen next is
beyond conjecture, but in the end it will not matter, for nothing
ever comes of threatening danger except delay. It should not be
so, but " the fortuitous interference of Providence " (to quote Prof.
Mahaffy's Irish judge) is invariable, and hero and heroine are
rescued for the next mishap. " Once more," cries Xenophon's
heroine, "once more pirates and sea! once more am I a captive!"
Of course she is, and she may expect to lose her lover and follow
him or be pursued by him over land and sea, coming within a

1 One must however respect the best of all possible brigands those of
Apuleius in the Golden Ass, bk. iv. "C'est a donner envie de se faire brigand,
si Ton a du coeur," says Sainte-Beuve of the story of Lamachus there told.

368 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

hair's-breadth of meeting him, but never achieving it till the last
book, when, as Rohde says, one is glad to find them accidentally
meeting, so that the marionettes can be laid back in the box 1 .

One consequence in literature of this general failure to be true
to reality is the decline of history. True, we have in Eusebius,
Ammianus and Socrates three admirable historians, judicious,
thoughtful and truthful, but perhaps the bad name of Rutinus is
a better index of the feeling of the day. It is very interesting
to see how Socrates from the first emphatically disclaims rhetoric
he will "give no thought to pomp of diction" (i. 1, 3) and
when by and by he finds out that Rufinus instead of consulting
evidence has been guessing (/caTao-To^a^eo-^at), he goes back over
his work and remodels his own first two books to bring them into
harmony with truth (ii. 1, 3). Jerome himself accuses Rufinus of
lying of saying whatever comes into his mouth (quidquid in buccam
venerit a much better phrase). This is exactly the mark of
rhetorical history, carelessness of everything but effect. The
anecdote triumphs over everything but the speech, for every great
man in history becomes a declaimer. The great defect of the
rhetoricians, says Chassang, is to make their heroes in their own
image*. Alexander the Great, Apollonius of Tyana, Pythagoras
are drawn as the rhetorician thinks they should have been, very
like himself. He inserts in their story anything that interests
himself or that he thinks telling. I have already alluded to
Porphyry's life of his teacher Plotinus, which shews history
degenerating into romance. The effects of this style of writing
are far-reaching.

That Christian writers should be influenced by their environment
is not surprising. They are harshly judged sometimes in our days
for faults they shared with heathen contemporaries : rather unjustly
so, for the really remarkable thing is that they are on the whole
so free comparatively from them, and after all they are known and
read because they were so free. Everybody knows Tertullian's faults,
and as they are not those of to-day they attract attention. How
many critics of Tertullian could give as good an account of Philo-
stratus or Porphyry or even Apuleius ? There is no comparison
between the men. Tertullian has many faults of style which they
have, but he is clean, he is serious and he is truthful. There is no one

1 Rohde, op. cit. p. 400.

2 Of. Comparetti, op. cit. pt. n.'c. 1, on the medieval transformation of Virgil
into a magician.

Greek and Early Christian Novels 369

so terribly in earnest as he with his seriousness born of penitence,
but he flashes with assonance, antithesis and epigram to match
the most flippant. But the writers with whom we are dealing are
smaller men and more obscure. Yet they too, while reflecting their
age, are marked by the seriousness of the new view of life.

In the first place the Christian novelists, if I may so call them,
while they often shew the same faults as the heathen, do not shew
them in such excess. Their pictures of life and society are still
very apt to be conventional, and, if not conventional, at least
unreal. Their characters are often wooden and their history is
sadly to seek. But, whether the reader count this for better or
for worse, they have less of the rhetorical style, they are less self-
conscious in their writing, less clever. They have fewer arts and
do not attempt to fly so high. Secondly, they are more alive and
more serious. They are conscious of new motives in life, of new
inspiration, and it is these that as a rule have led them to write,
and their writing reflects the quickened spirit.

In almost every kind of literature they challenged the heathen
world. They had no new story of Troy, but they had a new tale
of truth, and Juvencus wrote about 330 his four books of Evangelic
History a marvellous feat. He made a harmony of the gospels
in Latin hexameters, in a plain honest style, wonderfully faithful
to the original and yet not without some poetic quality, though
the metre is a little monotonous Apollinaris tried the same in
Greek but his work did not survive. But our theme is fiction.

The romance of the hero is represented by a long list of false
gospels, some more or less dependent on the canonical four, but
all tending to embellish and decorate them with fanciful incidents
and other rhetorical devices. Acts of the apostles are perhaps even
more numerous, and these permit the interweaving of the romance
of travel. Not many of them but some have elements of the
love-tale.

I do not know the date of " the wondrous and marvellous
history of the glorious acts of Philip the Apostle and Evangelist."
It is only extant in Syriac, and was probably first written in that
tongue. It certainly deserves its name. Philip, in answer to his
sea-captain's despair, prays for a wind that shall take them from
Caesarea to Carthage in a day, and it comes and incidentally
hangs head-downward from the mast a blaspheming Jewish pas-
senger. "The ship was flying and going over the water like an
eagle in the air," and the Jew hanging by his great toes was very

G. 24

370 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

uncomfortable. Philip inquires, " Now how dost thou view the
matter?" and the Jew's confession is so extensive that we feel
either he or the historian has read the apologists on the Old
Testament. Philip rejoiced at this conversion, and the penitent
is released. Arrived at Carthage Philip proceeds to find Satan,
" an Indian man " (i.e. a black man) on a throne, with a belt of
two snakes and a garland of vipers, with eyes like coals of fire,
and belching flame from his mouth. He is overthrown by the
sign of the cross, and Philip sets forth to preach.

The Acts of Thomas is a very different work, having a clear
purpose in its insistence on virginity and asceticism a Gnostic
book also written by a Syrian and therefore perhaps outside our
scope, though it is found in a Greek translation. We shall give
more attention to an original composition in Greek on Greek models
and of undisputed orthodoxy the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena.

Another group of Christian romances, while connected with
the tale of the hero, is perhaps rather to be classed with the Utopias.
The romance of hermit life begins perhaps with Antony and goes
on with Paul and others, and there is this distinction between it
and an Alexander the Great that it exhibits an ideal life which
all men may follow. We may all be Antonies, and the writer
indicates that we should if we knew what is good for us, but
Alexander lies beyond us.

Lastly, we may set down the apocalypses with their pictures of
the other world in the same class with Er the Armenian, though,
as I have indicated, their descent from him is very doubtful. Here
too we often find a special purpose beside the general moral drift
which marks such works.

Now that we have made our survey of Pagan and Christian fiction,
it will be well to concentrate our attention on one or two examples
of each class. The pagans will be represented by Achilles Tatius
because he is like most of the pagan novelists, and Longus because
he is unlike them. The Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena is a
clear imitation of these by a Christian hand. The latter part of
the Gospel of Nicodemus will illustrate romance attaching itself
to the Gospel. The Apocalypse of Paul will shew us a link in
a great series of visions of hell and give us a hint of a great
movement, which was not merely pictured in the Life of Antony
but immensely promoted by it.

The story of Clitophon and Leucippe is told by Achilles Tatius
in eight books. The date of its composition is uncertain. Rohde

Greek and Early Christian Novels 371

puts it after the beginning of the third century and before the
middle of the fourth. The tale is told by the hero to the author
whom he meets in front of the picture of Europa and the bull,
part of the description of which I have quoted. Clitophon, a young
man of Tyre, it was designed by his father, should marry his half-
sister, but he did not want to, and instead fell in love with his
cousin Leucippe from Byzantium. He wins her love by sighs and
other pretty manoeuvres, and a little chapter is devoted to their
drinking from each other's cups turn about by way of signalling
kisses. Ere long of course, for lovers must have adventures, they
fly together and take ship at Berytus for Alexandria. They meet
a storm, a rhetorician's storm, and are shipwrecked, reaching safety
at Pelusium, where they see some works of art (carefully described)
in a temple. They are caught by robbers and separated. Clito-
phon's rescue comes first, and he has to look on helplessly while
Leucippe is made a human sacrifice, but he finds very soon it was
a mere pantomime done with a collapsible dagger from a theatre.
Then Charmides, the commander of the soldiers who rescued them,
falls in love with Leucippe, who resists him, but is rendered dra-
matically insane by a potion given by another lover. After some
fighting between soldiers and natives, Clitophon gets her safely
away, cured by another charm. She is kidnapped again, and from
the deck of his ship in pursuit Clitophon sees her head cut off
this time it is not a theatrical dagger, and a head is cut off, though
of course not Leucippe's, as it turns out afterwards. He now returns
to Alexandria arid a rich widow falls in love with him, and carries
him back to Ephesus. There he finds Leucippe a slave, and
terrible complications follow. The widow's husband re-appears, for
he had not after all been drowned, and he strongly disapproves of
Clitophon. Melite (the lady no longer a widow) finds out about
Leucippe, who is assailed first by a fellow-slave and then by
Melite's husband but is saved from both. Prison and process,
escapes and entanglements now jostle one another in quick suc-
cession for hero and heroine, but all characters are cleared by the
ordeal of a miraculous fountain, which always drowns the perjurer.
Melite distinctly gets the better of heaven by an ingeniously
worded oath 1 . Clitophon and Leucippe go to Byzantium and are
married, and the half-sister at Tyre is also married to a man who

1 This is later on a favourite device of story-tellers. Cf. Comparetti, Vergil
in the Middle Ages, p. 337.

242

3/2 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

early in the story had kidnapped her under the impression that she
was Leucippe. What more ?

Descriptions of nature, as we have seen, and discussions of
psychology, excursions into mythology, geography and antiquarian-
ism, an account of the Nile, a picture of Alexandria, speeches,
letters and all sorts of things embellish the tale, but hardly save
it from being tiresome. Achilles does not trouble heaven very
much, but trusts to Fortune giving him all the confusion he wants.
Yet at one time he has recourse to a dream to stop Clitophon's
marriage. And after all, when once the half-sister was kidnapped,
everything was clear and there need have been no elopement, but
in that case there would have been no tale.

Suidas says this man Achilles became a Christian and was
made a bishop, but critics find in this a mere imitation of the
similar tale about Heliodorus. Socrates says, people said that
Heliodorus, bishop of Tricca, was the author of the romance Aethio-
pica it was a mere story which he quoted. Heliodorus says of
himself that he was a Phoenician of Emesa, a descendant of the
Sun, and Rohde rather associates him with the revival of Neo-
Pythagoreanism and the Syrian dynasty in the early years of the
third century. Neither he nor Achilles is to be credited with
a bishopric.

The romance of Longus 1 depends for its charm on quiet country
life with no foreign adventures. True there are one or two raids
upon the peaceful scene, but heaven interposes some miracles and
all is restored to be as it was. I do not know that the story
would be affected, except perhaps in length, by the complete omis-
sion of these episodes.

It is a tale of two children, a boy and a girl, exposed as infants
by their parents and miraculously preserved. This does not seem
a very probable beginning for a tale, but it is more probable than
it seems. One of the things that distinguished Christians from
pagans was, according to the apologists, that they did not expose
their children. Tertullian tells a horrible story of one actual case
among heathens. The reason in Longus' case for using this artifice
was to give a conclusion of wealth and splendour to his tale, and
to introduce a momentary doubt as to whether Daphnis, recognized

1 See Sainte-Beuve's essay in Nouveaux Lundis, vol. iv. He quotes Villemain
and Goethe as types of the severe and the appreciative critics of Longus, leaning
himself to admiration, as he is perhaps apt to do, but not failing to remark
some necessary deductions.

Greek and Early Christian Novels 373

as a rich man's son, would still care to marry Chloe. Dio Chry-
sostom, in his Euboicus, draws a picture of the happy life and
contented poverty of two families of hunters in the wild lands of
Euboea, but for a romance one wants a more triumphant ending
than for a political or social parable.

The chief interest of Longus' novel lies in the idealization of the
love of a boy and girl growing up together among goats and sheep
in the happy worship of Pan and the nymphs. There are points
that strike a modern reader oddly, as for instance Chloe's failure
to remark the existence of such a thing as an echo till she was
about fourteen. They both are too surprisingly innocent to be
convincing, and here it is that Longus shews himself unmistakably
of the family of Priapus by an exaggerated and impossible naivete.
Longus is at last disgusting, where Saint-Pierre is beautiful. But
if we take episodes out of the story and concentrate attention on
them as some of its admirers have done, we get a more happy
impression. For like the other Greek novels this one breaks up
easily into a series of more or less independent scenes, which could
be rearranged, added to or lessened without material import. These
better scenes then, taken by themselves, are pleasing, but they
are not simple, and though nearer nature than anything else in
Greek fiction, it is nature drawn by a rhetorician, a man of more
taste than his class but still a rhetorician.

Chloe is first to fall in love, as is Virginia in the French novel.
She sees Daphnis bathing. " What it was she suffered, she knew
not, being but a young maid, bred in the country and one that
had never heard tell of the name of love. Sickness seized her
soul, and she was not mistress of her eyes, and much she talked
of Daphnis. Her meat she neglected ; by night she waked ; her
flock she despised ; now she would laugh ; now she would weep ;
then she would sleep ; then she would start up ; her face was pale,
and again it flamed with a blush ; nor would a cow stung by a
gadfly behave as Chloe did."

Daphnis and a shepherd boy called Dorco dispute as to their
comparative charms, and Chloe awards the prize, a kiss, to Daphnis,
who falls in love with her and does not understand it. Here is
his soliloquy.

"What can it be that Chloe's kiss does to me? Lips softer
than roses and a mouth sweeter than honey-combs ; but the kiss
than the sting of a bee more painful. Oft have I kissed kids, oft
have I kissed puppies newly born and the calf Dorco gave me.

374 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

But this kiss is strange ; my breath leaps, my heart pants, my
soul melts, and yet I would kiss again. evil victory ! strange
disease ! whose very name I know not. Then did Cliloe taste
of drugs ere she kissed me ? how then did she not die ? How do
the nightingales sing, and my pipe is silent ! How do the kids
leap, and I sit still ! how do the flowers bloom, and I weave no
garlands ! but the violets and the hyacinth flower, and Daphnis
withers. Then will Dorco seem more comely than I ?"

All this is artificial in the highest degree, thoroughly rhetorical
in every way. It is literary rather than spontaneous. The writer
has read Theocritus and thinks of him, but his work is not Theo-
critean, for he has been infected with the arts of the school. Here
is the series of little sentences, word by word exactly balancing ;
antithesis ; apostrophe and abundance of echoes and false conceits.
Let us try something better.

Winter came on and there was no more pasture in the open,
but all the country folk were kept about their homes and farm
buildings, so Daphnis and Chloe could not meet. Chloe was being
taught to dress wool and use the spindle, but Daphnis had no such
work to do and devised a plan to see her.

" Before the farmhouse of Dryas [her foster-father] and just
under it were two tall myrtles and ivy upon them. The myrtles
were near each other, the ivy between them, so that reaching its
tendrils to both like a vine, it made an appearance of a cave with
the alternating leaves ; and clusters of ivy berries, many and big
as grapes, hung from the branches. Round about them was a
great swarm of winter birds, for food without failed many a
blackbird, many a thrush, and wood-pigeons, and starlings, and all
other birds that eat ivy-berries. On pretence of catching these
birds Daphnis set forth after filling his wallet with honey-cakes
and taking bird-lime and snares as a pledge of his purpose. The
distance was not more than ten stades, but the snow not yet
melted gave him much trouble. But to love after all everything
is an open way, fire and water and Scythian snow.

"He comes then at a run to the farm, and shaking the snow
from his legs he set his snares, and the bird-lime he smeared on
many twigs, and then sat down thinking of the birds and of Chloe.
But birds came in large numbers and were caught in plenty, so
that he had no end of trouble in gathering them, killing them and
plucking their feathers. But from the farm no one came out, not
man, not woman, not domestic fowl, but all abode lying by the fire

Greek and Early Christian Novels 375

within, so that Daphnis was in sore straits, thinking they were
not lucky birds that gave him the omen to come (a pun, OVK lir
alo-tots opnai). And he tried to gather courage to enter the doors
with some excuse and sought in himself what would be most
plausible. ' I came to get fire ; but were there not neighbours but
a stade away ? I came to ask loaves ; but the wallet is full of
food. I need wine ; but it was yesterday or the day before you
gathered the vintage. A wolf was chasing me ; but where are the
wolf's footprints ? I came to catch birds ; why then, when you
have caught them, do you not go away ? I wish to see Chloe ;
but who confesses this to the father and mother of a maiden ?
Every approach is vain ; none of these but is suspicious. Better
then be silent. I shall see Chloe in the spring, since it is
not fated, so it seems, I should see her in the winter.' With
some such thought in his mind he gathered up what he had
caught and started to go ; and, as if Love pitied him, this
befell.

"Dryas and his household were sitting at table; meat had
been divided, loaves were set before them, wine was being mixed.
One of the sheep-dogs, watching for an unguarded moment, snatched
a piece of meat and fled through the doors. In vexation Dryas
(for it was his portion) caught up a stick and ran after him,
tracking him like another dog ; and as he pursued and came to
the ivy, he sees Daphnis with his booty on his shoulders and ready
to depart. Meat and dog at once he forgot, and with a great
shout, 'Welcome, my boy/ he began to embrace and kiss him
and took him by the hand and led him in. When they saw each
other they all but fell to the earth, but making an effort to
stand upright they greeted and kissed each other, and this was
as it were a prop that they should not fall.

" So Daphnis, after giving up hope, had a kiss and had Chloe,
and sat near the fire and put from his shoulders on to the table
his burden of wood-pigeons and blackbirds, and told how he grew
weary of staying at home and went out to catch them, and how
he took some of them with snares and some with bird-lime in their
greed for the myrtles and the ivy. And they praised his energy
and bade him eat of what the dog had left them. And they
bade Chloe pour wine to drink. And she in gladness gave to
the others and to Daphuis after the others ; for she pretended to
be angry, because he came and was about to go without seeing
her. However before giving it to him she took a sip, and then

376 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

gave to him. And he though thirsty drank slowly, to have a
longer pleasure by delay."

The author's failure is a moral one. At the end comes the
general recognition and no one seems to attach much blame to
the parents, who cast out their children because they had too many
or were ill off for money. The general ignoring of evil of a gross
kind shews how the rhetorician had fallen into that stage where
evil results in insensibility.

Let us now turn to Xanthippe and Polyxena, a book I incline
to attribute to the fourth century, though the first scholar to print
it, Dr M. R James, says it may belong to the third. The story of
the victory by the cross' aid seems to suggest Constantine. It is
the insigne lignum of triumph. The careful adhesion to "the
straight and true faith " and the various theological expressions of
it, though they do not refer to Arianism and its distinctive
doctrines, yet suggest the great council. Some of the phrases
describing other things also point to the later date

The tale, as Dr James shews, borrows hints from a number of
others, but it hangs together very well, if we once grant that each
of the heroines has her own story. We do not hear of Polyxena
till chapter 22 and then we hear little more of Xanthippe. There
is about both parts a bright air, a spirit of cheerfulness and faith.
The author cannot forget the goodness of God, His mercy and
His eagerness for the redemption of the sinful, His providence
and care for those who serve Him. This last quite replaces the
Fortune of the heathen novelists. At every stage the right man
appears not by accident but by divine instruction and guidance.
The writer is like his heroine Xanthippe. " I wish to be silent,
but I am compelled to speak, for one within me is fire and sweetness
to me 1 ." And now a short sketch of the book.

Probus is an official in Spain, a friend of Nero (though his
name suggests the 4th century), an honourable man, very fond
of his wife Xanthippe, though apt to be irritated by her abstraction
and her sometimes rather hysterical piety. His wife, an anima
naturctliter Christiana, hears of Paul's preaching in Rome and
longs for more knowledge of the Gospel. She is much disturbed,
to her husband's alarm, but after uttering some prayers, a little too
nearly Christian for a heathen, she sees and hears Paul. The
apostle is their guest and is heard joyfully by his hostess, who

1 c. 14 (pXtyei yap (^ TIS evuOev /cat y\vKa.lvei.

Greek and Early Christian Novels 377

has already "the sun of righteousness in her heart." The host
after a while is worried by the crowds who come to hear Paul,
and, indignant at "my house being made an inn," turns him out,
and locks up his wife. She bribes the porter, visits Paul and is
baptized, and on her return home has a vision of Christ preceded
by a cross on the east wall of the room. But when she saw His
face, she hid her own, crying, " Hide thyself, Master, from my
bodily eyes and enlighten my understanding." He vanishes, and
overcome by a speechless gratitude she faints the result of her
fasting and watching and the vision. Meantime Probus has had
a dream which turns him toward the faith, and he and his wife
visit Paul, Probus being greatly impressed by her humility, which
was rather a new virtue in her. He is baptized, and after a
curious incident in which Xanthippe iu a rage stabs a supposed
dancer (really a devil) in the face, their story gives place to that
of her sister Polyxena.

The story of Polyxena much more closely resembles those of
the Greek novels. Probus' house is entered by a man by means of
magical arts, and Polyxena is kidnapped. The captor puts her on
shipboard to sail to Babylonia. On the way they pass a ship taking
St Peter to Rome to overthrow Simon Magus (a fragment of an old
story), and Peter by divine warning is bidden pray for a soul in
distress on the ship from the west, i.e. Polyxena. They land in
Greece and meet Philip the evangelist, who rescues Polyxena and
entrusts her to a disciple. The kidnapper gets an army of 8000-
men from a friend of his, a Count (KO^S), to recapture her. She
flies, and her late host's thirty servants raising the sign of the cross
slay 5000 of the Count's army and return hymning God. Polyxena
takes refuge in a lioness' den a hollow tree in a dense forest. The
lioness however is friendly and guides her to a high road, where
St Andrew finds her. She asks for baptism, and at the water they
meet a Jewish girl Rebecca, and both maidens are at once baptized,
for the lioness reappears and in a human voice bids instruct them
in the true faith. Andrew leaves them, for it was not revealed to
him that he should go with them. A man driving asses, who has
sold his property and makes a mission of feeding the poor, of course
a Christian, undertakes to bring the two girls to the sea-shore and
aid them to escape to Spain. But they are carried off by a magis-
trate. The ass-driver tells Philip, who trusts that heaven will
preserve them. Once more Rebecca is seized and laments, like
Xenophon's heroine, "Again am I a captive." The magistrate's son

378 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

is a Christian, converted by Paul and Thecla at Antioch, and he
befriends Polyxena. In a rage his father exposes him and her to a
lioness, who proves to be the old friend. This causes a great
sensation and the magistrate is converted. Onesimus (the teller of
the tale) appears and preaches, and everybody there is converted.
Polyxena and Rebecca are sent safely back to Spain, where they are
welcomed warmly by Xanthippe, Probus and Paul. The kidnapper
reappears also, but he too is converted. So all ends happily.

It will be recognized that there is much here very like the
Greek novel kidnappings, surprising deliverances, magic and the
wonderful lioness. The last suggests Androcles, but is probably a
combination of the beasts that will not destroy Thecla (in the Acts
of Paul and Thecla} and the speaking ass "descended from
Balaam's" (in the Acts of Thomas). There is however a clear
difference between this Christian work and the heathen models, for
the heroine's virginity is the expression of a definite faith and
service, and also there is nothing in the tale that could be called
foul, as there is in every (or nearly every) Greek novel. In all
probability the book was designed to supplant such stories. It was
not the first Christian novel to borrow a framework from the enemy.
The Clementine Homilies lie outside our present scope, but a word or
two may be given them. They form one of the most interesting
books of early Christianity, for they are in reality an early attack on
Paulinism, and Baur and his school have tried to find in them a
true presentation of Christianity properly so called. Peter is their
hero and Clement is (one may say) his squire, and together they
hunt down Simon Magus and other heathen antagonists. To give
the story a flavour of life, Clement is represented as in search of his
family, who are all scattered by a series of accidents recalling the
Greek novel, and who are all found again by the help of Peter and
Providence.

From Xanthippe and Polyxena we pass to a work of more
importance a work of genius. It is now embedded in the so-called
Gospel of Nicodemus, a 13th century title for a combination of two
much older books, the Acts of Pilate and the Descent into Hell.
The former is a rather tiresome expansion of the Gospel narrative of
the Crucifixion, resulting in the "whitewashing" of Pilate to some
extent, and the latter is attached to it by a very simple device.
Two of the dead, who were raised from their graves in the com-
motion following the Crucifixion, are called on to give an account
of what happened. "They said to the chief priests, Give us paper

Greek and Early Christian Novels 379

and ink and pen. They brought them, and sitting down one of
them wrote as follows." Here is given the second work, which
I will quote in part, taking the Greek text of Thilo. This story is
dated somewhere about or a little after the year 400; Maury,
followed by Renan, placing it between 405 and 420. Tischendorf
puts it a good deal earlier. Chassang compares its opening to
Virgil's

Di quibus imperium est animarum umbraeque silentes,
et Chaos et Phlegethon, loca node tacentia late,
sit mihi fas audita loqui, sit numine vestro
pandere res alta terra et caligine mersas.

(Aen. vi. 264 1)

"Lord Jesus Christ, the resurrection and the life of the world,
give us grace that we may tell of thy resurrection and the marvels
thou didst work in Hades. We then were in Hades with all that
have slept from the beginning, and in the hour of midnight into
that darkness dawned as it were the light of the sun and shone,
and we were all enlightened and saw one another." Adam and
Isaiah recognize the light as prophesied, and then comes John,
"an ascetic from the desert," once more to be forerunner of Christ.
Adam and Seth contribute their testimony, and "the patriarchs
and the prophets rejoiced greatly."

"And while they thus rejoiced, came Satan, heir of darkness,
and saith to Hades, 'All-devouring and insatiate, hear my words.
A certain man of the race of the Jews, called Jesus, naming himself
Son of God, he being in fact a man, through my aid the Jews
crucified him. And now that he is dead, be thou ready that we
may hold him fast. For I know that he is a man, and I heard him
say 'My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death.' He did me
much evil in the world above when he lived among men ; for where-
ever he found my servants he drove them out, and as many men as
I made maimed, blind, lame, leprous or any such thing, by a word
alone he healed them. And when I had made many ready to be
buried, these too he brought to life by a word.' Then Hades saith,
'And is he so mighty as to do all this by a word? And how canst
thou resist him if he is such?'" Hades doubts the wisdom of

1 An almost contemporary parallel would be Claudian's overture to his Rape
of Proserpine (R. P. i. 20) di quibus innumerum vacui famulatur Averni \ vulgus
iners vos mihi sacrarum penetralia pandite rerum, etc. His account of Pros-
erpine's descent into hell (ii. 326 f.) has one or two coincidences with this book
pallida laetatur regio rumpunt insoliti tenebrosa silentia cantus aeternam
patitur rarescere noctem, but with a few such phrases the likeness ends.

380 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

Satan's bringing him. '"And this I say to thee, by the darkness we
have, that if thou bring him here, none of the dead will be left me.'

" As thus Satan and Hades talked one with the other, there was
a great voice as thunder that said, 'Open your gates, ye rulers, and
be ye lifted up, ye everlasting gates, and the king of glory shall
come in.' And when Hades heard, he saith to Satan, 'Go forth, if
thou canst, and withstand him.' So Satan went out. Then saith
Hades to his demons, 'Make fast well and strongly the gates of
brass and the bars of iron, and hold my barriers, and watch, standing
all of you erect; for if he enter here, woe shall overtake us.' When
they heard this the forefathers all began to mock him ; ' All-
devouring and insatiate Hades, open, that the king of glory may
come in '...And when Hades heard the voice the second time, as if
he knew not, he answered and said, 'Who is this king of glory?'
The angels of the Lord say, 'A Lord strong and mighty, a Lord
mighty in war.' And immediately at this word the gates of brass
were broken, and the iron bars were shattered, and all the bounden
dead were loosed from their bonds and we with them. And the
king of glory came in, as it were a man, and all the dark places of
Hades were enlightened."

Hades recognizes in the conqueror the Jesus who was nailed to
the cross, and the arch-satrap Satan is bound in iron and delivered
to Hades to be kept till the second coming not without the taunts
of Hades himself.

"The king of glory stretched forth his right hand, and laid hold
of our forefather Adam, and raised him up. Then he turned and to
the rest he said, ' Come ye with me, all ye who have been slain by
the tree of wood this man touched, for behold! again by the wood
of the cross I raise you all up.' And with this he put them forth.
And our forefather Adam was filled with sweetness and he said,
'I give thanks unto thy majesty, Lord, that thou hast brought
me up from the lowest Hades.' So did all the prophets and the
saints, and said, ' We give thee thanks, Christ, the Saviour of the
universe, that thou hast brought up our life from destruction.'
While thus they spake, the Saviour blessed Adam on the brow with
the sign of the cross, and this he did to the patriarchs and prophets
and martyrs and forefathers, and he took them and leapt forth from
Hades. And as he went, the holy fathers followed and sang,
'Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Alleluia! this
is the glory of all the saints.'

" And as he entered into Paradise, holding our forefather Adam

Greek and Early Christian Novels 381

by the hand, he gave him and all the righteous to the archangel
Michael. As they entered in at the door of Paradise, there met them
two old men, to whom the holy fathers said, ' Who are ye, who saw
not death nor descended into Hades, but in your bodies and souls
inhabit Paradise?' And one of them answered and said, 'I am
Enoch, who pleased God and was translated by him, and this is
Elijah the Tishbite ; and we shall live till the end of the world, and
then shall we be sent of God to resist Antichrist, and be slain by
him, and after three days rise and be caught up to the clouds to
meet the Lord.'

"And as thus they spake, there came another, a mean man,
bearing upon his shoulders a cross, to whom the holy fathers said,
' Who art thou, that hast the look of a thief, and what the cross thou
bearest on thy shoulders?' He answered, 'I was, as ye see, a thief
and a robber in the world, and therefore for this the Jews delivered
me to the death of the cross with our Lord Jesus Christ. As he
hung on the cross, I saw the signs that befell, and I cried to him and
said; Lord, when thou art king, forget not me. And immediately
he said to me ; Verily, verily, to-day, I say unto thee, with me shalt
thou be in Paradise. So bearing my cross I came to Paradise and
found the archangel Michael and said to him ; Our Lord Jesus the
crucified sent me hither; bring me in at the gate of Eden. And
when the fiery sword saw the sign of the cross, it opened to me, and
I came in. Then said the Archangel to me : Wait a little, for there
cometh Adam the forefather of the race with the just, that they too
may enter in. And when I saw you 1 came to meet you.' When
they heard this, the saints cried with a loud voice, 'Great is our
Lord and great is his might.'

"All this we two brothers saw and heard."

This story is not the creation of the fourth century, and perhaps
even this rendering of it is older, but that it was in the minds of
men is shewn by the hymns of Ephraem the Syrian, of Prudentius
and of Synesius 1 , if by nothing else. There is a vigour about this
piece and an imagination, which rise to higher levels than the Greek
world dared now to attempt. And yet there is still to be felt in it
that quiet happiness, which Augustine recognized as the mark of the
Church 2 . There is no exaggeration, no rhetoric, but the work is as
simple as it is sublime.

1 Prudentius, Cath. ix. 70 105; Synesius, Hymn ix. the translation of
which by Mrs Browning is quoted on p. 355; Ephraem, Carmina Nisibena,
xxxvi. 11, 12.

2 Con/, viii. 11, 27 non dissolute hilaris.

382 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

We pass now to a book intrinsically of less interest but yet
one which, Dr James says 1 , has left traces of its influence in nearly
all the medieval apocalypses and even in Dante's Divina Commedia.
Its own account of itself is this. "A certain man of repute dwelt
in Tarsus in the house of the holy Paul in the consulship of the
pious king Theodosius and Gratian the clarissimus [in the Latin he
is Cynegius], and to him an angel of the Lord appeared saying,
'Break down the foundation of this house and take up what thou
shalt find.' And he thought it was a dream. But when the angel
continued till a third vision, the man of repute was compelled to
break down the foundation, and he dug and found a marble chest
containing this apocalypse, etc."

The historian Sozomen (vii. 19, 34) can add to this. "The
apocalypse of Paul the Apostle, as nowadays circulated, though none
of the ancients ever saw it, a great many monks praise. Some
maintain this book was found in the present reign. For they say
that by divine revelation in Tarsus of Cilicia, at the house of Paul,
a marble chest was found under the earth and the book was in it.
When I asked about it, a Cilician priest of the church in Tarsus
said it was a lie he was an old man too as his white hair shewed,
and he said he knew of nothing of the kind occurring among them,
and he would be astonished if it were not the invention of heretics.
So much about that."

Two things should be noted. A new discovery, especially if led
to by some miracle, is a fairly safe index of a forgery. Sozomen's
reference to the monks fits in well with the tone of the book.
We may therefore conclude it was written in the reign of the
younger Theodosius and one of its objects was to help mo-
nachism.

The feigned Paul then tells how sun, moon and sea appeal for
leave to destroy sinful man, but God's patience protects the race,
for which he is to be praised, and especially at sunset. For then
the angels come before God to report the works of mankind, and of
them all those are most joyful and most bright, who say, "We come
from those who have renounced the world and the things of the
world for thy holy name's sake, who spend their lives in deserts and
mountains and caves and dens of the earth, sleeping on the ground
and fasting Bid us be with them." Some come with sorrow "from
those who are called by thy name and serve sinful matter." By

1 Lecture on Apocalypse of Peter, Dec. 1892.

Greek and Early Christian Novels 383

every man's death-bed stand angels, good and bad 1 , and to the
sinner the bad say " Unhappy soul, look to thy flesh ; know whence
thou comest out ; for thou must return to thy flesh on the day of
resurrection, to receive the reward of thy sins." An appalling
picture of the soul's trial follows, when, after being confronted with
the souls it has wronged, it is cast into outer darkness.

Paul is now taken to the city of the just, meeting Enoch and
other patriarchs and prophets, and seeing rivers of honey, milk, oil
and wine for the just who in this world abjured the use of them
and humbled themselves for God's sake. David too is seen, his face
shining as the sun, while he holds in his hand psaltery and harp
and sweetly sings Alleluia till his voice fills the city. And what
means Alleluia? In Hebrew it is thebel marematha [in the Latin
version : tecel cat marith macho], 'let us glorify him together.'

Paul now visits hell, and sees the various torments of various
sinners. There seems to be no descending scale of misery, but the
tortures exist side by side. Let us only notice those who talked in
church, and (for the sake of Longus) women who destroyed their
children, and lastly the priest "who ate and drank and then served
God," the bishop who judged unjustly and pitied neither widow nor
orphan, and the deacon "who ate and drank and then ministered to
God." Paul weeps, and then, in response to his entreaty and
Gabriel's, respite on Sundays is granted to the wicked in hell.

Now Paul visits Paradise and receives the blessing of the Virgin
and the lament of Moses for the people of Israel. He meets the
three great prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and Noah, who
was a model of asceticism while he was building the ark. Then
with the appearance of Elijah and Enoch the apocalypse abruptly
ends in the middle of Elijah's address to Paul.

This apocalypse is modelled in part on the much earlier apocalypse
of Peter, with which it shews some close coincidences. It no doubt
impressed the minds of some of its readers, for this kind of revelation
seems always to be more or less popular, succeeding better in, its
descriptions of hell than of heaven and thereby emphasizing some
obvious morals. Dr James says indeed that we may owe some even
of the present-day ideas of heaven and hell to the apocalypse of
Peter, and in this case Paul has perhaps contributed too. But the

1 A somewhat similar scene according to the Manichaeans, with a god of light
and the devil of greed and lust, each with his attendants. See Fliigel, Hani,
seine Lehre u. Leben, p. 100.

S84 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

book is in any case far inferior to the one we treated before it and
to the one that follows. "So much about that."

It has been demonstrated in recent years that the Life of
Antony is a work of fiction. I need not here go over Weingarten's
arguments 1 , but when once his result is accepted the book becomes
much more intelligible. Of all books of the fourth century it had
the most immediate and widespread influence, which, though out-
grown by now, lasted on to the Renaissance. It was fiction as
Uncle Tom's Cabin was fiction, and just as this American book,
though perhaps not a work of the highest art and certainly denounced
in no measured terms by people of the slave-holding States as a
fabric of lies, yet swept America and England and, wakening the
public conscience, contributed to the freedom of the negro, so the
Life of Antony came at the right moment, and roused the hearts
of good men and women to a sense of the possibilities of a life
surrendered to God and dependent on His grace.

There was in the fourth century a great feeling of dissatisfaction
with the world and even with the Church 2 . Life was difficult and
the churches were not of the greatest possible aid. Then monachism.
began to suggest itself to the minds of Christians as a way of
escape from an evil world and of approach to God. The movement
was immensely helped by this Life of Antony, a book which displays
the triumphs which a simple unlettered monk, trusting in the grace
of God, wins over evil in every form. It is hardly a work of art,
it is in some places a little tedious, it is often very impossible and
sometimes even absurd. Yet it succeeded and deserved to succeed.
It was constructed with some thought, if not of the finest. More
than one Puritan movement had been unfortunately wrecked,
because its leaders quarrelled with the authorities of the Church.
Our author is careful to make Antony most respectful to bishop and
presbyter (c. 67), yielding precedence to every cleric. Again, he
wrote in the thick of the fight with Arianism, and between this
heresy and monachism there was mutual hatred 3 . So Antony is
exhibited to us as going to Alexandria and there, though an un-
educated Copt who could not speak Greek, frustrating the Arian with
tremendous effect. And more, the battle was not yet over and

1 See Herzog's Realencykloptidie, vol. x. on Monasticism, A. m., and Prof.
Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, Note B. p. 98.

2 See Jerome, Ep. vii. 5, on his discontent with the bishop of his native place
ut perforatam navem debilis gubernator regat , and above all the writings of
Sulpicius Severus.

3 See Hatch's Bampton Lectures, vi. p. 162.

Greek and Early Christian Novels 385

Antony is represented as already dead, yet before he died he
prophesied the troubles which the Church is even now enduring, and
from which he foresaw her triumphant emergence.

The book is Puritan. Antony was a mere layman, and for long
years he neither went to Church nor saw priest nor took sacrament,
and yet lived in close contact with heaven. His ambition was, like
that of Francis of Assisi, to follow the Saviour and live a life of
evangelic poverty (Mt. xix. 21). Indeed to understand him one
must understand Francis the real Francis as M. Sabatier draws
him. He had no need of books ; to him as to Francis "it was given
to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but unto others in
parables."

Like nearly every one else our author believed in devils, but not
as they did. For one great part of Antony's work is to prove finally
that the devil is the most futile of beings. The troops of hell may
play all their pranks as they please, but at the sign of the cross
they vanish. "For the Lord worked with him, He who wore flesh
for us and gave to the body the victory over the devil, so that of
those who strive in deed every one may say 'Yet not I, but the
grace of God that is in me'" (c. 5). Once the devils flogged him
but he prayed. "After his prayer he said with a loud voice, 'Here
am I, Antony ; I fly not your blows. For though add ye more also,
nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ.' And then he
sang, 'Though an host should encamp against me, my heart will
not fear.'" So the enemy for the time left him. Thus the effect
of the book was distinctly to lessen and not to increase the attention
paid to devils and demons, Antony is made to deliver a long
homily (cc. 16 43) about them, explaining what they seem to do
on the lines followed long ago by Apuleius and Tertullian, and
emphasizing their insignificance.

Of course he wrought miracles and was generally benevolent and
helpful. Not even the notice of the Emperor elated him. In fact
every virtue the writer could think of he gave him. To one point
I should like to call attention. The author gives Antony that
peculiar and happy expression we associate to-day with a strong
and active belief in the doctrine of grace. "From the joy of his
soul, his face too was bright... he was never disturbed, for his soul
was at peace; he was never gloomy, for his mind rejoiced" (c. 67)'.

1 Sulpicius says the same of St Martin caelestem quodamnwdo laetitiam
vultu praefcrens ; v. Mart. 27 and I have no doubt this expression did mark off
many of the brighter spirits of monachism from a world, which the thought of
the present must have made gloomy.

G. 25

386 Life and Letters in the Fourth Century

It should not be hard to understand the influence of the book.
It was widely read and imitated. Jerome's Life of Paul is a copy
of it a wretched, rhetorical, soulless imitation of a great book.
Very soon it was actually attributed to Athanasius, who had the
credit of it till Weingarten reclaimed it for its anonymous author.

Of its effect on thoughtful people we have a striking illustration
in St Augustine. He tells us he had reached a more or less
satisfactory solution of his doubts, and now "desired to be not
more certain about Thee, but more stable in Thee" (Conf. viii. 1, 1),
and while he hesitated to commit himself to the Christian life as he
now saw it should be, he heard the story of Antony for the first
time. He was profoundly moved by the contrast between this
ignorant man's achievement of holiness and the low level with which
he himself for all his learning was content. Then resolving to try a
sors Biblica, suggested by the episode of Antony hearing the text
"If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all that thou hast and give to
the poor, and come, follow me," he opened at the text in Romans
which struck home 1 . The great point to notice here is that the
essence of the book is that doctrine which Augustine, by his own
experience, was being led to make the centre of his faith and
teaching the doctrine of grace.

Here ends our study of the novels. In their own way they
reflect their age, the over-elaboration and sterility of style, the
failure of civic ideals, the growing individualism, and something of
the new life still struggling for expression in the Church.

1 Conf. viii. 6, 14 ff. and 12, 29. See pp. 2145.

INDEX

Abgar of Edessa, 23, 141, 142; his

correspondence with our Lord, 24,

142 n. 1, 143.
Achilles in romance, 359, and Peuthe-

silea, 87, and Polyxena, 100.
Achilles Tatius, 330, 365, 370-372.
Acts of Paul and Thecla, 378.
Acts of Philip, 369.
Acts of Pilate, 378.
Acts of Thomas, 142, 370, 378.
Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena, 370,

376-8.

Added, Doctrine of, 23, 141, 142.
Adeodatus, 199, 215.
Adoxography, 342.
Adrianople, battle of, 7, 37, 249, 327

n. 1.

Afrahat, 3, 236.
Agape tae, 299.

Ajax in Quintus, 87, 88 ; in Ovid, 88.
Alaric, 228, 238, 239.
Alexander the Great, effect of his con-
quests, 11 ; in novels, 360, 368, 370;

his nose, 130 n. 4.
Alexander, an early pilgrim, 126.
Allegory, 75, 209.
Amarantus, Jewish sea-captain, 330-

334.
Ambrose, 121, 153-155, 164, 208, 209,

215, 249, 253, 270, 271, 292, 293.
Amid, 25 n. 2 ; siege of, 25-28.
Ammianus, see chapter ii. passim.

an Antiochene, 20, 71 n. 1, 72 n. 3;

his character, 11, 45 ;

his truthfulness, 32, 34 ;

his birth, 20 ;

his education, 32 ; admiration for
Cicero, 32 ;

in the army under Ursicinus, 21 ;

in affair of Silvanus, 22;

adventures in campaign of 359,
24, 25;

at siege of Amid, 25-28;

Ammianus :

his escape, 28 ;

campaign with Julian in East, 28 ;

with Julian at his death, 29 ;

his indignation at Jovian, 29 ;

his travels, 30 ;

in Borne, 30, 43, 148;

in Antioch, 30, 371 ;

his views on treason, 31 ;

his History, 31, 218 ; its excellence,
34 ; its variety, 35, 36 ;

his death uncertain, 32 ;

his style, 33;

the danger of correcting him, 35 n. 1,
n. 3;

his attitude toward Empire, 31, 37 ;

his sympathies, 38 ;

his antipathies, 38 n. 3, 44 ;

his religion, 38, 42 n. 4 ; he finds
Julian religious overmuch, 56,
n. 1;

his view of Nemesis, 38, 39 ;

his attitude toward Christianity,
40-42 ;

his view of martyrs, 41 ; of bishops,
41 ; of theological controversy,
41, 42, 56;

his preference for toleration, 42 ;

his humour, 42, 43 ;

on the murder of the Goths, 327

n. 1;

Andromeda, 133.
Andronicus, governor of Cyrenaica,

351, 352.

Anthology, Greek, 309.
Anthropomorphism, 202.
Antichrists, etc., 297, 298.
Antioch, 71.

Antiochus Epiphanes, 2.
Anti-pagan legislation, 69.
Antiquarianism, 177.
Antony, Life of, 18, 214, 370, 384-6.
Apocalypse of Gaul, 370.

252

388

Index

Apollinaris, father and son, 69, 86.
Apollonius of Tyana, 136, 162 n. 2, 361.
Apuleius, 12, 243, 244, 306-9, 364 n. 2,

385.

Aquitaine, 134.
Arbogast, Frankish general, 121, 157,

270, 271.

Arcadius, 217, 324-327, 329.
Archilochus, 345.
Architecture, 9.
Arianism, 17, 42, 109.
Aristotle, 32, 151, 154, 204, 337.
Army and marriage, 8.
Art, 9, 257.
Asceticism,

not properly a doctrine of Neo-
Platonism, 14, but often went
with it, 14, 18;

Christian asceticism, 18, 127, 382,
383;

Manichaean, 201, 203;

monks of Serapis, 279 ;

Synesius on, 341.
Astrology, 187 n. 2, 205, 206.
Astronomy, 187, 205.
Athanasius, 42, 67.
Athens, 52 n. 4, 337, 338.
Attusia Sabina, wife of Ausonius, 105,

113.

Auguries, 39, 87, 187 n. 2.
Augustine, see chapter ix. passim.

sums up his age in himself, 18;

his influence in history, 194;

his openness to impression, 185,
195;

his truthfulness, 195 ;

his philosophy tested by experience,
195, 196, 213 n. 1 ;

his search for truth and certainty,
195, 248, 338, 339;

his self-analysis, 195;

his affectionate nature, 196, 199 n. 1 ;

his birth, 197 ;

his parents and their influence on
him, 146, 147, 197-199, 203, 204,
215 ; see also Monnica ;

his education, 198 ;

his love of Virgil, 108, 184, 198;

student at Carthage, 198 ;

his irregular life, 199 ; not so bad
as supposed, 199, 252 ;

his son, 199, 215;

reads Cicero's Hortensius, 185, 199 ;

becomes interested in philosophy,
200;

his materialism, 204, 210, 261;

becomes a Manichaean, 200 ;

his reasons for so doing, 202, 203 ;

teacher of rhetoric in Thagaste,
204;

death of a friend, 204 ;

teacher in Carthage, 204 ;

Augustine :

reads Aristotle, 204 ;

repudiates use of magic, 205, 340 n. 2 ;

studies astronomy, 205 ;

finds Manichaeanism unsatisfactory

in its science, 205 ; and in its

morals, 207 ;

his conviction of sin, 207 ;
his fear of future judgment, 207,

210;

his first book, 207, 218;
goes to Borne, 207 ; and thence to

Milan, recommended by Sym-

machus, 108, 156, 208;
effect of his years in Manichaeanism,

208;
his scepticism of short duration,

195, 208;
meets Ambrose and hears him

preach, 209;
impressed by Ambrose's allegoric

method, 209;

becomes a catechumen, 209 ;
episode of the drunken beggar, 210 ;
dismisses his mistress, 210 ;
gets rid of his materialistic view of

God by means of Neo-Platonism

and begins to understand nature

of evil, 193, 211, 212 ;
finds out his moral weakness, 213 ;
his criticism of Neo-Platonism, 192,

212, 213, 348 ;
accepts doctrine of Incarnation, 213,

214;

accepts authority of Church, 214 ;
effect of Life of Antony on him,

214, 215;

leaves Milan, 215 ;
the discussions at Cassisiacum, 147,

174, 215 ;

his baptism, 215 ;
keynote of his Confessions, 215 ;
on Scriptures, 195 n. 1, 200, 276 ;
uneasy about celebration of martyrs,

264;

criticism of Trismegistus, 348 n. 1 ;
his use of philosophical language,

349 n. 1 ;

his love of quiet life, 350 n. 1 ;
doctrine ofopacitas auctoritatis, 350,

n. 3, 351 n. 1 ;

on gladness of Christianity, 351 n. 2.
Aurelian, 231, 324, 327, 328.
Ausonius, see chapter v. passim.
Gibbon's judgment on him, 102 ;
judgment of his friends, 102, 117 ;
nature of his poetry, 103 ;
his family and his tributes to them,

103, 113 ;

his father, 104, 114 ;
born at Bordeaux, 310 A.D. 104 ;
his education, 104 ;

Index

389

Ausonius :

his letter to grandson on going to

school, 107 ;
his relations with his pupils, 107,

114;

his Ephemeris, 109 ;
his attitude towards Christianity,

109, 114-115, 254;
contrasted with Prudentius, 110 ;
his teachers, 110-112, 177;
his epigrams, 113 ;
his wife, 113; her death, 113;
his children and their names, 114 ;
what did he do in Julian's reign?

114;
Valentinian makes him tutor to

Gratian, 102, 115;
his Moselle, 115-117 ;
his Cento, 115 ;
his "itch for scribbling" and its

products, 115, 117 ;
his lists, 116;

his treatment of nature, 116 ;
his advancement by Gratian, 117;
his influence on legislation, 117 ;
part of his work fell to his son

Hesperius, 118 ;
consul, 119 ;

his gratiarum actio, 120;
his letters, 122 ;
his correspondence with Paulinus,

122-124.
Authority in philosophy and religion,

205, 214.
avr6s, 99.

Baldness, praise of, 342.

"Banting," 159.

Baptism, 75, 199.

Barritus, 36.

Battus, 320.

Bauto, 164.

Bears, 161.

Beasts and beast-catching, 4, 161, 162,

235 ; duty on beasts, 161.
Bessarion, Cardinal, 78.
Bethlehem, 126, 129, 133, 135.
Bible, not appreciated by literary men,
48, 51, 200, 271 n. 1, 276.

quoted by Longinus, 51.

Sortes Biblicae, 215, 282, 386.
Bishops in the 4th century, 41, 281,

299, 349, 383.
Boethius, 12, 150, see notes on pp.

186, 1$7, 190, 227.
Bordeaux, University of, see Educa-
tion.
Bordeaux pilgrim,

his date and route, 135, 136.

why did he not see the Cross ? 140,

141.
Brigands, 167.

Britain, 121 n. 3, 143, 239, 300.
Bruce, Robt. and Alexander the Great,

360.

Buddha, 65.
Burning bush, 139.

Calaber, origin of name as applied to

Quintus, 78.
Calendar, 178.
Callisthenes, the false, 360.
Caracalla, 15.

Cassisiacum, 147, 174, 215.
Catacombs, 263.
Cataphracts, 26, 273.
Catullus, 113, 304.

Celibacy, 8, 18, 127, 128, 201, 210, 341.
Celts and Greek, 218, 300.
Centos, 115, 144-146.
Chi and Kappa, 56.
Christianity, its gladness, 282, 286,

303, 351, 376, 381, 385.
Christians and heathen literature, 68,

86, 251, 287.
Chrysostom, 324, 325, 347, 351.

on pilgrimages, 143.
Church : its relations to Empire, 16 ;

effect of toleration on, 17, 250, 280,
316 ; its quarrels, 41 ;

dissatisfaction of Christians with,

18, 281, 293, 294, 299, 384.
Cicero, his Dream of Scipio, 186.

his Hortensius, 185, 199 ; his letters,
149.

his poem, 148.

much cited by Ammianus, 32.
Claudian, see chapter x. passim.

his Egyptian origin, 217, 218 ;

was he Greek or Latin ? 218 ;

his Greek poetry, 218 ;

first published Latin poetry in 395
A.D., 218-9;

excellence of his language, 219;

attaches himself to Stilicho, 219,
229;

his marriage, 219 ;

an exponent of views of Roman
society, 219 ;

receives compliment of a statue,
220;

the story of " Hadrian," 220 ;

as panegyrist, 221-230;

his panegyric to sons of Probus,
222-225 ;

his personification of Rome, 223 ;

his method in poetry, 224, 245 ;

panegyric to Honorius, 225 ;

address on kingship, 227 ;

his invectives, 230-232 ;

his views on Roman policy, 226-8,
232;

his rhetoric, 231; his lists, 234;

his views on Providence, 231, 328 ;

390

Index

Claudian :

his pictures of Hell, 232, 246 ;

his treatment of Latin hexameter,
233, 234 ;

influence of earlier poets on him,
233, 234;

exaggeration, 234, 235 ;

his similes, 235 ;

his love of Rome, 230, 236-240, 255 ;

his dislike of Constantinople, 232,
239, 240;

his adherence to old religion, 240-
244, 248;

his use of the gods in poetry, 240 ;

his attitude toward Christianity not
indifference but hostility, 240,
241;

did he know Scripture ? 241, 242 ;

his Rape of Proserpine, 244-248 ;

his treatment of nature, 245 ;

conclusion, 248 ;

contrasted with Prudentius, 255,
273;

his use of Virgil, 233.
Clementine Recognitions, 134, 342 n. 1,

378.

Colluthus, 86.
Commodian, 253.
Concubinage, 199.
Constantina, wife of Gallus, and saint,

45.

Constantine, 7, 324 ; his character,
62, 75 n. 1 ; his humour, 72 n. 3 ;
and the Church, 16, 17, 42, 49.

legislates for schools, 107.

the " seed of Constantine," 49.
Constantinople, 7, 232, 237, 239, 240,

324, 329.
Constantius, 21, and the chamberlain

Eusebius, 23.

- his visit to Rome, 43, 155, 269 ; his
theology, 41, 49, 56 ;

his murder of his family, 45, 49, 56;

endows University at Athens, 52 n. 4.
Consulship, 119, 120, 223.
Cosmetics, 128, 133.
Cross, its invention, 140, 141 ; frag-
ments of it, 130, 285.
Cross, in Prudentius, 254, 265, 266.
Cross, sign of the, 266, 370, 377.
Cyprian, 16, 108, 250, 253, 255 n. 1,

261, 267, 296.

Cyrene, see chapter xiv. : esp. 320-322.
Cyril, bp of Alexandria, 317, 318.
Cyril, bp of Jerusalem, 140.

Damasus, 9, 41, 132, 153, 155, 279,
292, and Praetextatus, 163, 250 n. 1,
and the Catacombs, 253, 261, 263,
281 n. 1.

Daphnis and Chloe, 84 n. 3, 335, 357,
358, 372-376.

Decline in morals, 4.

Deidamia, 93, 94.

Descent into Hell, 246, 266, 267, 355,

378-381.

Dialogues, 173, 288.
Diatensaron, 24.
Dido, 184, 198, 251.
Dio Cassius, 108, 130 n. 4.
Dio Chrysostom, 325 n. 2, 335 n. 1,

n. 2, 339, 342, 346 n. 1, 364, 373.
Diocletian moulds himself on Marcus,
54 n. 5 ;

his character, 6 n. 1 ;

his policy, 6, 117, 221 ;

his persecution of the Church, 16 ;

effect of his reforms of Empire,

221.
Disraeli and Claudian, 225 n. 1, 230

n. 2, 235 n. 2.

Dogs, 320, 342, 350; Scottish, 161.
Donatism, 66; and the Moors, 152.
Dreams, Neo-Platonists on, 187, 341,
342.

Monnica's dreams, 146, 204, 342.
Dream of Scipio, 186.
Drowning, 333.
Druids, 110.

Edessa, 23, 142.

Education in Roman Empire (see esp.
chapters on Ausonius, Macrobius,
and Augustine, v. viii. ix.).

old-time education at Rome, 105 ;

subjects of study in schools of
Empire, 108, 251 ;

philosophy, 105, 150 ;

rhetoric, 105, 151 ;

Christian view of rhetoric, 252 ;

grammar, 105 ;

Virgil in schools, 107, 251, 276;

Greek, 111, 150, 160, 260 n. 1 ;

position of teachers, 105, 106 ; legis-
lated for by Government, 107 ;

schools, 106-108;

school discipline, 107, 198, 251, 251
n. 2;

schoolmasters, 106, 185 ; how ap-
pointed, 108 ;

universities, 106 ;

professors, 106, 110-112, 165;

position of professors in society,
121, 165;

their salaries, 106, 165;

students, 112, 198, 207, 208;

university of Alexandria, 323, 338 ;

university of Athens, 52, 106, 112,
338;

university of Berytus, 3 ;

university of Bordeaux, 110-112 ;

university of Carthage, 198, 207 ;

university of Constantinople, 106 ;

university of Rome, 106, 112, 208;

Index

391

Education in Roman Empire :

heathen character of education, 68,
108, 112;

practical joking in universities, 112,
199, 207 ;

teachers' " union," 112 ;

Julian's schools decree, 68, 69, 86,

108, 114.
Egypt, where lovers always go, 126,

366.

Elephants, 26, 28, 235.
Elvira, Synod of, 250 n. 1, 262 n. 1,

299 n. 4.

Embroidery, 9, 129, 184.
Enoch, 360, 363.
Ephraem, the Syrian, 142, 381.
Epicureans, 11 : hated by Neo-Plato-

nists, 64, 188.

Er the Armenian, 186, 188, 360.
Etymology, 177, 339.
Eucherius, son of Stilicho, 229.
Eudoxia, Empress, 324.
Eugenius, Professor and Emperor, 121,

157, 165, 226, 270.
Eulalia, 262.

Eunuchs, 44, 50, 128, 132, 232.
Euripides, 125.

Eusebia, wife of Constantius, 52, 59.
Eusebius, bp of Nicomedeia, 50, 250.
Eustochium, correspondent of Jerome,

128, 132, 133.
Eutropius, the eunuch, 230, 232, 240,

324.

Eutropius, historian, 71 n. 5, 109.
Evangelus (in Saturnalia), 174, 175,

180.

Evil, origin of, 202, 203, 211, 258, 328.
Exposure of children, 8, 372.

Fabiola founds a hospital, 129.
Faltonia Proba, prob. not authoress of

Cento, 144, 223.
Faustus, the Manichaean, 200.
Finance bad in Roman Empire, 3.
Firmus, 152, 157.
Flavian, 157, 161, 171, 176.
Flavian, the younger, son-in-law of

Symmachus, 157, 159, 160.
Fortuna, 182 n. 3.
Fox, George, 280, 290 n. 1.
Free corn, etc. in Rome, 4, 153.

Gainas, 231, 324, 327, 328.

Gallic character, 27.

Gallic "edacity," 283.

Gallic monasticism, 286; see chapter

xii.

Gallic oratory, 110, 151, 286 n. 2.
Gallic soldiers in East, 25, 27.
Gallus, Caesar, 21, 38, 45, 49, 51, 52,

71.
Gellius, 173, 175, 176.

Geography, 34, 152.

George, bp of Alexandria, 66, 281 ;

his library, 52, 66, 281 n. 1.
George, St, 133 n. 1.
Germans in army, 8, 35, 36, 55 n. 4,

326.

German settlements, 8.
Gildo, 157.

Gladiators, 22, 80, 161, 250, 273.
Golden Ass, 307, 367 n. 1.
Gospel of Nicodemus, 378.
Goths, 7, 228, 324, 326, 327.
Gratian, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 151,

153, 154.
Greeks and Latin language, 33 n. 1,

50 n. 3.

Greek freedom, 2.
Greek philosophy, its influence on

Rome, 4.

Gregory of Nazianzus, 53, 67.
Gregory of Nyssa on pilgrimages, 144.

Hebrew studied, 133 ; sham Hebrew,

383.

Heliodorus, 372.
Hermes Trismegistus, 13, 65, 181, 192,

348.

Hesiod, 78, 81, 100, 272.
Hippopotamus (rhetorical), 366.
History, 10, 368.
Homer, see chapter iv. 48, 50, 53, 57,

111, 182, 311, 333, 335, 365.
Honoring, 217, 226, 230, 235, 241.
Horace, 304 ; neglected by Macrobius,

177; his relations with Augustus,

216.
Horses from Spain, 161; at Gyrene,

320, 336.
Hypatia, 317, 318, 323, 324, 337, 338,

339, 344.

lamblichus, 12, 348.

Ignatius, 279.

Incarnation, 213, 260, 261, 264, 347,

348.
Isis, 78, 125, 307.

Jerome,

his rhetoric, 127, 148;

on marriage, 128;

on Roman manners, 128, 148;

on scriptures, 276 ;

his letters to Eustochium, 128, 299
n. 5;

on Rufinus, 368;

his Life of Paul the Hermit, 361
n. 4, 386;

on Jerusalem and its dangers, 144;

on Centos, 145.

Jerusalem, 295; relics at, 140, 141;
. its disorders, 144 ; called Aelia, 140 ;

the temple, 63 n. 5.

392

Index

Jews, 2;

hated, 48 n. 1, 109;
Jewish exclusiveness, 15 ;
befrieuded by Julian, 63 n. 5;
refuted by Prudentius, 260;
scattered through Empire, 48 n. 1,

109, 295;
in Cyrenaica, 321 ;
sailors, 331;

sabbath at sea, 332, 333;
Jewish novels, 360, 363;
a Jew converted by miracle, 369.
Job's tomb, 142; his dunghill, 143.
Joshua the Stylite, 29 n. 6, 35 n. 2,

142 n. 1.

Jovian, 29, 73, 114.
Judgment to come, 124, 191, 192 n. 1,

210, 267, 285, 316.
Julian, see chapter iii. passim.

false views of, 47; difficulty of

understanding, 48;
escapes murder as a child, 49;
in care of Eusebius of Nicomedeia,

50;
educated by Mardonius in Greek,

esp. Homer, 50, 57;
his fondness for Homer, 53, 62;
leans to Greek, 50 n. 3, 70 ;
but Roman elements in his charac-
ter, 55 n. 5;

removed to Macellum, 51 ;
dislike of Bible, 51, 57;
never understood Christianity, 51,

75;

early interest in philosophy, 52;
attendance on lectures of philoso-
phers, 57;
at Athens, 52, 59;
kept from hearing Libanius, 52;
portrait by Gregory, 53;
at Milan, 53, 59;
made Caesar, 53 ; married to Helena,

54;
sent to Gaul, 53 ; panegyrics on

Constantius, 60, 74, 226;
his military successes in Gaul, 54 ;
his success as administrator in Gaul,

54, 254 n. 3.

imitates Marcus Aurelius, 54, 76;
his revolt, 55;
sole Emperor, 55;
his attempt to revive paganism, 56,

308;
influences that made him a heathen,

56-62;
fancies himself a demi-god, 58, 59,

61;
comes under influence of Maximus,

58;

his years of hypocrisy, 52, 59, 347;
character of his paganism, 59-62,
'56 n. 1.

Julian:

his Catholic Church of Hellenism, 63;

tries to organize and purify priest-
hoods, 64;

hurried character of his writings, 64;

attitude to life hereafter uncertain,
65;

his relations with Christian Church,
66-71 ;

his recall of Christian exiles, 41, 66;

his schools decree, 68, 86, 114;

results of his attack on Church, 69-

71;

at Antioch, 71, 72;

his interference with corn trade, 71 ;

makes war on Persians, 72 ;

his death, 73;

his last words, 29, 73;

his writings, 73 f. ;

his book against the Christians, 74 ;

his literary style and Cyril's criti-
cism, 74;

his parody of baptism, 75 ;

his hatred of Constantine, 75 ;

his Caesares, 75 ;

general effect of his life, 76;

feeling of Christians toward him,

68, 254.

Juvenal, 169, n. 3, 177, 232, 233, 243.
Juvencus, 119, 124 n. 1, 251, 253, 275,

369.

"King, r> as applied to Emperor, 6,

325 f.
Kingship, 74, 226, 325-7.

Labarum, 78, 254.

Lactantius, 6, 118.

Laurentius, St, 261.

Lessons in Church service, 140.

Libanius, 30, 52, 57, 112, 151, 199 n. 2.

Literary men and Christianity, 40, 57,

108.
London, called Augusta by Ammianus,

140 n. 1.
Longinus, 51.

Longus, see Daphnis and Chloe.
Lot's wife, 141, 142; cf. ref. on 259.
Lucan, 87, 181, 231, 30fi.
Lucian, 12, 63 n. 1, 306-8, 361, 362, 367.
Lucretius, 169 n. 3, 243 n. 3, 304, 305.
Luxury, 326.

Macrobius, see chapter viii. passim.
little known of his life, 172;
writes for his son, 172, 180, 185;
illustrates Roman society, 171;
ignores Christianity, 171;
his character, 184, 185; his religion,

181;

his Saturnalia, 173-185;
nature of the Sat., 173, 176;

Index

393

Macrobius :

sources of Sat., 173, 175, 178, 180;

method and style of the Sat., 174, 175 ;

characters of Sat., 175;

scene of Sat., 176;

range of discussion in Sat., 176;

his antiquarianism, 176

avoids politics, 176 ; ignores the
Empire, 183;

on grammar, etc., 176, 177;

on literature, 177;

on " science," 178;

on the Calendar, 178;

on manners and tact, 178-180;

on morals, 180, 181;

on Virgil, 181-185;

defects and values of his work, 171,
185;

his Commentary on Scipio's Dream,
186-192 ;

his excursuses in Comm., 186, 187;

outline of his Neo-Platonism, 189-
192;

on suicide, 192;

contemporary criticisms of his doc-
trines, 192, 193.

Magic, 10, 30, 58, 203, 205, 340, 377.
Mani, 200 f., 205.
Manichaeanism,

its origin and general character,
200-203;

its adherents in classes, 201, 203;

persecuted by Magi, 35 n. 2;

its astronomy, 202, 205, 206.
Manners in 4th century, 168, 178-180.
Marcion, 258.
Marcus Aurelius, 306, 307; imitated

by Diocletian , 54 n. 5 ; and by Julian,

54, 76.

Mardonius, tutor of Julian, 50.
Marriage, 5 ; Jerome on marriage, 128.
Martin, St, see ch. xii. passim, 121,

281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 292-4, 298-

300; his miracles, 288-290; his Life

by Sulpicius, 131, 296, 297.
Martyries, 18, 23, 27, 123, 130, 136,

142, 143, 250, 262, 264 n. 1.
Maximin Daja, 63.
Maximus, the magician, 13, 58.
Maximus, the usurper, 111, 114, 121,

156, 291-3.

Melania, pilgrim, 130, 131.
Military engines, 26.
Minervius, 110, 151.
Miracles, 288-291.
Miscellanies, 173.
Misopogon, 20 n. 2, 72.
Mithras, 75, 78, 163, 181 n. 2.
Monachism, 16, 18, 109, 279, 301,
302, 316, 382 :

criticisms of Synesius on, 341 ;

criticism of Butilius, 48 n. 1.

Monnica, mother of Augustine,

her training and marriage, 146, 197;

her influence on Aug., 146, 147;

impresses Aug. with the "name of
Christ," 147, 197, 203;

her anxiety about Aug.'s opinions,
146, 203;

follows Aug. to Milan, 146, 207;

at Cassisiacum, 147, 215 ;

her intelligence, 147;

her talk with Aug. at Ostia, 147 ;

dies and is buried at Ostia, 147.
Montanism, 17, 279.
Musaeus, 85.

Natural science, 34, 35, 178, 187.
Nature and man, 85; and monks, 300.
Nebo, Mt, 141.

Nebridius, 205, 206, 207, 211.
Neckar, river, 152.
Nectarius, Bp of Constantinople, 349.
Neo-Platonism; see especially chapters
iii. viii. ix. xiv.

outline of Neo-Platonic philosophy,
188-192, 211, 212;

as presented to Julian, 57 ;

its general character, 12;

not properly ascetic, 14;

leans to asceticism, 18;

its doctrine of communion with God,
58, 212;

its acceptance of Divine will, 60 n. 1 ;

had it a doctrine of "grace"? 59-
61, 192, 213, 347;

its doctrine of punishment of sin,
191, 212;

of life hereafter, 65, 189-192;

rejects resurrection of body, 350;

its relations with theurgy and magic,
58, 192, 340;

its influence for good, 14, 64 n. 3;

its defects, 13, 14, 192, 193, 213, 347 ;

a religion of disciples, 15, 338;

its adherents, 13, 340;

not a religion for common people,
14, 64, 348;

its influence on Augustine, 13, 211 ;

Augustine's criticism of it, 193; cf.

212, 213, 348.
Neoptolemus, voyage of, 83 ;

murders Priam, 93.
Neo-Pythagoreanism, 12.
Nero, pretenders to name, 298.
Nestorius, 257.
Nicene Council, 17.
Nicomedeia, 6, 7, 136.
Niobe, 82, 315.

Nisibis, 21, 23; surrendered to Per-
sians by Jovian, 29, 143; tradition

cited by Joshua the Stylite, 29 n. 6.
Nitria, 133, 135.
Nonnus, 10, 86, 90.

394

Index

Novatianism, 17, 66, 72 n. 3, 156, 279,

339 n. 1.
Novels, see chapter xv. passim, 64, 126.

difficulty of dating novels, 357;

their translations, 357, 360;

contributing sources to a successful
novel, 358;

their classification, 359 ;

novels of Troy, 359;

Utopian novels, 359 ;

apocalyptic novels (Er), 360;

novels about Alexander, 360 ;

these coloured by Indian tales, 360;

versions of false Callisthenes, 360;

novels of idealized heroes, 361;

novels of travel, 362;

love-tales, 362, 363; their charac-
ter, 64, 362;

chastity of heroine in love-tale, 363;

novels with a purpose, 363;

novels written by sophists, 364 ;

style of sophists' novels, 364, 365,
'368;

descriptions in novels, 365 ;

descriptions of pictures, 365;

descriptions of marvels, 366;

magic in novels, 126, 366;

mechanical adventures, 126, 367;

no individuality in Greek novels,
367;

automaton heroes, 367;

"the fortuitous interference of
Providence," 367;

differences of Christian from heathen
novels, 368, 369, 376, 378;

typical Christian novels, 369, 370;

analysis of Achilles Tatius, 370-2;

the novel of Longus, 372-376;

Xanthippe and Polyxena, 376-8;

the Descent into Hell, 378-381;

the Apocalypse of Paul, 382, 383 ;

the Life of Antony, 384-6;

Jerome's Life of Paid, 386.

(Enone, 94-6.

Oliphant, Laurence, 301, 302.

ojKootfcnos, 17, 156.

Orbilius, 105.

Ordination as a punishment, 349.

Orfitus, father-in-law of Symmachus,

152, 155.

Origen, 126, 291, 351.
Orosius, 228, 270.
"Orpheus," 363.
Ovid, 88, 305.

Paganism, change in, 5, 78, 243,

305-9.
Palladas, see chapter xiii. passim.

little known of him, 309 n. 1;

character of his work, 309, 310, 313 ;

his insistence on one note, 310;

Palladas :

a pessimist, 310, 317;

his attitude to society, 310, 311;

to literature, 311 ;

his feeling toward Homer, 311, 312 ;

a misogynist, 311, 312;

his humour, 312, 313;

his view of fortune, 313, 314;

his philosophy, 315 ;

his relations with Christianity,
315-317;

his despair of Greek world, 318, 319.
Panegyrics, 60, 74, 120, 121, 151, 156,

210, 221-230.

Pater's Marius, 12, 63 n. 1; transla-
tion from Claudian, 245.
Paul, 15, 279; Julian's view of, 51.
Paul and Virginia, 358, 373.
Paula, pilgrim, 131-3; her motives,

132; on pilgrims, 143.
Paula, grand-daughter of Paula the

pilgrim, 172; her education, 128,

129.
Paulinus of Nola,

pupil of Ausonius and very fond of
him, 107, 123, 284;

his correspondence with Ausonius,
122-124 ;

his correspondence with Bulpicius,
284, 285;

his rhetoric, 127, 283 n. 2;

settles at Nola, 123;

his view of world and religion, 123 ;

and Melania, 131 ; and Silvia, 143,

285.

Pausanias, 82, 83.
Pelagius, 213 n. 1, 300, 301.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 362.
Persecution of heretics, 292-4.
Persius, 191 n. 2, 306.
Petronius Probus, 145, 164, 167, 222,
223;

his sons, 165, 166, 222-5.
Philoctetes in Quintus, 89, 96.
Philosophy, influenced by Alexander's
conquest, 11;

thereafter makes individual the
centre, 11, 359;

works for equality of mankind, 15.
Philostratus, 12, 100 n. 2, 162 n. 2,

359, 361, 368.
Phycus, 321, 336.
Physiology, 178.
Picts, 225.
Pictures in churches, 250, 261, 264 n. 1,

285.
Pilgrimages, see chapter vi. passim.

heathen pilgrimages, 125;

Christian pilgrimages from 4th cen-
tury on, 127;

motives for a pilgrimage, 129, 135;

pilgrims swarm to Palestine, 143;

Index

395

Pilgrimages:

effects of pilgrimages on morals

doubtful, 144;

opinions of Gregory of Nyssa, Je-
rome and Vigilantius, 144;
scandals attached to, 144;
pilgrimages to Borne and the Cata-
combs, 236, 263.
Pirates, 126, 180, 235.
Plague, the great, 8, 321.
Plato, 151, 260; see Neo-Platonism.
Pliny and the School at Como, 106.
Plotinus, 12, 212; see notes to pp.

189-191.

Plutarch, 173, 181, 360.
Pollentia, battle of, 158, 228, 229, 272.
Population, doctrine of, 7, 321.
Porphyry, 12, 14, 209, 212, 328, 361;

see notes on pp. 189-191.
Postal arrangements, 123.
Postumian's journey to the East, 130,

135. 296, 297, 347 n. 1.
Praetextatus, 13, 148, 155, 162-4; in
the Saturnalia, 168, 171, 174, 176,
180-182;

relations with Damasus, 163;
his character and learning, 162;
his religion, 162, 192 ; his wife's

monument to him, 163, 164.
Praetorian prefects, 117-119.
Priscillianism, 111, 121, 292-4.
Proba, her cento, 144-6; read through

Middle Ages, 146;
not Faltonia, 144;
her monument, 146.
Proclus, 12, 59 n. 3, 338.
Procopius, historian, 322 n. 2.
Procopius, pretender, 43.
Proteus, sea-god, 351.
Protonice, 141.

Providence, 202, 231, 243, 317, 328.
Prudentius, see chapter xi. passim.
born at Caesaraugusta in 348 A.D.,

249, 251, 263;
his age, 249, 250;
his education, 251; studied rhetoric,

251, 261;

studies Virgil and Bible, 25 1,274, 275;
his youth and manhood, 252;
an official of Empire, 252, 254 n. 3;
his poetical career, 252, 253;
his originality in literature, 254;
his attitude toward Boman Empire,

254;

his Christianity, 254;
his view of heathenism, 254 ;
of heresy, 255, 256, 265 ;
discusses purpose of Empire, 255,

251);

his tolerance, 254 n. 3, 257;
his writings all have practical aim,
254, 257;

Prudentius :

holds Nicene Creed, 251, 257;

his handling of doctrine, 257;

his Hamartigenia, 257-260;

on evil, 258; heaven and hell, 259;

his Apotheosis on the nature of
Christ, 260, 261;

Peri Stephanon, 261-4;

on conversion of Senate, 262, 271;

his love of the horrible, 262 ;

his polemics after Tertullian, 263,273;

his Psycfiomachia and its signifi-
cance, 264, 265;

on the Cross, 254, 265;

his Cathemerinon, 265-9;

Cath. used in breviary, 265;

character of his work in Cath., 266;

his reply to Symmachus, 269-273 ;

on early heathen training, 271 ;

his courtesy, 271 ;

contrasted with Claudian, 255, 273;

his plea for abolition of gladiatorial
games, 273;

his weak points, 273 ;

his rhetoric and list-making, 273;

his treatment of metre, 274;

his neglect of Psalter, 276;

his popularity in Middle Ages, 264.

passages translated, 259, 267, 277.

Quebec, city, 84 ; Ste Anne de Beaupr6,

289.
Quintus of Smyrna, see chapter iv.

passim.

position of, in literature, 77;
who was he? 79;
his probable date, 79;
Sainte-Beuve on, 80, 81, 87, 92, 98;
his reference to Smyrna, 81;
his interest in scenery of Asia Minor,

82-84;

his knowledge of country life, 84, 85 ;
his interest in horses, 85 ;
wrote by ear, 86; excellence of his

rhythm, 90;
dominated by Homer, but not a

cento, 86;

is he a patchwork of Cyclici ? 86 ;
indications that he studied Hesiod,

78, 81, 100;
his anachronisms, 87;
gentler character of his heroes, 87 ;
compared with Ovid, 88;
his occasional rhetorical passages,

86, 88, 91;

his doctrine of Fate, 89, 96, 97;
inconsistencies in his poem, 89, 90;
his excessive length, 90;
his similes, 88, 91;
various estimates of Quintus, 91 ;
compared with Virgil, 83, 92;
his simplesse, 93, 96;

396

Index

Quintus of Smyrna:

confusion of his ideas, 97, 98, 99, 100 ;
his conception of sin or guilt, 89,

96, 99;
conclusion, 100, 101.

Eachel and Jacob, 143.

Eafting, 85.

Relics, 18, 24, 130, 131, 143, 250, 285.

Remmius Palaemon, 105.

Revival of literature in 4th century, 10.

Revival of paganism, 5, 15, 181, 243,

289, 305-9.
Rhetoric, 11, 88, 91, 105, 110, 184,

195, 231, 251, 273, 330, 335, 359,

364 f.
Rhetoric and letter-writing, 158 n. 1,

372

Roads, 2, 126, 135.
Roman Empire, meant peace and
order, 1;

its union of mankind, 238, 239,
255, 256;

its weakness, 3 ;

its oppression, 229, 230;

its relation to nationalism, 2;

impression it made on mankind,
236, 237, 238;

eternity of, 3, 119, 238;

its purpose, 255, 256;

finance bad, 3 ;

maladministration of justice, 327;

loss of population, 7, 321 ;

decline in art, etc., 9;

German settlements in, 8;

and Church, 16;

runaways, 23, 25, 37 n. 2 ;

and education, 3, 110; (see Educa-
tion) ;

its re-organization by Diocletian,
6, 117, 118;

development of Sultanism, 17, 221,
326, cf. 329 n. 1 ;

its paralysing effect, 343.
Romans, see chapters vii. viii.

gentlemen, 44;

luxury of, 44 ;

their eunuchs, 44;

their horses, 44;

their slang, 44;

their brawls for corn, etc., 45;

society in Rome, 44, 127, 165;

Jerome on Christians of Rome, 128 ;

their reading, 44, 169; see ch. viii.
Rome, city of,

not much visited by Emperors, 6;

taxed by Galerius, 169 n. 1 ;

visit of Constantius, 43, 155, 269 ;

capture by Goths, 7, 249;

Ammianus on Rome, 43, 44;

its impressiveness, 44, 237;

its insignificance, 6;

Rome, city of:

Senate consulted by Stilicho, 157;

Rome personified, 223, 270, 272;

Rome and the gods, 237, 238, 239,
272, 273;

tradition of freedom, 167, 228; its

free food, 4, 153.
Rufinus (minister of Arcadius), 134,

230-232, 324; his "dissection," 231.
Rufinus, theologian, 134, 368.
Rusticiana, wife of Symmachus, 152,

159.
Rutilius, 48 n. 1, 109, 226 n. 1.

Saansaan, 26.

Sabinianus, 23.

Saint- worship, 250, 261, 329 n. 1; see

Martyries.

St Pierre, Bernardin de, 358, 365, 373.
Sallust, 166, 179.
Sapor II., 26-28.
Saracens, 35 n. 2, 138, 240.
Sassanian kings, their official language,
26 n. 3;

their relations with Roman Empire

and Christianity, 35.
Saturnalia; see Macrobius.
Satyrs, 361.
Saxons, 161, 225.
Scepticism, 4, 12.
Scots, 225; Scottish dogs, 161.
Semiramis, 225, 228, 331.
Serapeum, 32, 316.
Serapis, 65 ; his monks, 279.
Sextus Empiricus, 12.
Silk, 129, 161, 223.
Silvanus, 22.
Silvia,

who is she? 133, 134;

Palladius' Silvia, 134;

"Silvia" of the Pilgrimage, 134;

her motives, 135.

her possible routes from Gaul to
Palestine, 135, 136;

her accuracy of observation, 136 ;

her style, 136;

her visit to Sinai quoted, 137-140;

her account of usages of Church at
Jerusalem, 140 ;

sees Mt Nebo, 141 ;

does not see Lot's wife, 141 ;

sees Job's tomb, 142;

visits Edessa and martyry of St
Thomas, 142;

reads Ada Thoinae, 142;

sees our Lord's letter to Abgar, 143 ;

visits Haran, 143;

returns to Constantinople, 143 ;

her subsequent story, 143.
Sinai, 137-140.
Sipylus, 82.
Slang, 44.

Index

397

Slavery, 3, 5, 168, 180.

Smyrna, 81.

Socrates, historian, 20 n. 2, 56 n. 2,

69, 156, 368.

Socrates, philosopher, 60, 125, 161.
Soldiers, 333, 343.
Soldiers' habits, 35; marriages, 7, 8.
Soothsayers, 40.
Sophocles Ajax, 88, 89, 332.
Series Biblicae, 215, 282, 386.
Sozomen, historian, 56 n. 2, 382.
Stevenson, K. L., 340 n. 1, 352.
Stilicho, 164, 217, 229, 230, 231, 237;

patron of Claudian, 218 ff., 229 ; and

Alaric, 228, 229.
Stoicism, 5, 11.
Strabo, 83, 320.

Sulpicius Severus, see chapter xii.
passim.

his birth and early years, 282, 283;

loses his wife, 283;

forsakes the world, 283;

does not forsake literature, 283 ;

literary exponent of St Martin, 284 ;

his correspondence with Paulinus,
284, 285;

his humour, 284;

builds a baptistery, 285;

his brilliance, 285;

his religious temper, 281, 285;

character of his writings, 286, 287 ;

his use of Virgil, 287;

his credulity, 287-291;

his good faith, 288;

a sound judge of character, 291-4;

and Maximus, 291, 292, 294;

and Priscillianism, 292-4;

his writings, 294-7;

his Chronicle, 284, 294-6;

and the Prophets, 295;

his Life of Martin, 131, 296 f. ; its
success, 297 ;

his Dialogue, 296 f.;

his millenarism, 295, 297, 298;

and ill-will of bishops, 299;

did he become a Pelagian? 300, 301.
Symmachus, L. Avianius, Praef. Urbi,
364A.D., 150;

praised by AmmianusMtS^loO ; met
Libanius, 151;

his house burnt by mob, 152;

his verses, 103, 159.
Symmachus, Q. Aurelius, a representa-
tive of Eoman society, 150 ;

character of his correspondence, as
edited by his son, 149, 158;

his own opinion of his letters, 149,
158;

his monument, 149;

his high birth, 150, 169 ; a gentle-
man, 170;

his education, 150;

Symmachus, Q. Aurelius:

not a philosopher, 150; not very

intelligent, 170;

narrow range of his interests, 169;
perhaps a pupil of Minervius, 151;
his style, 151, 158, 165;
his panegyrics, 151, 156;
with Valentinian on campaign a-

gainst Germans, 151;
his friendship with Ausonius, 102,

115, 152;

pro-consul of Africa, 152;
marries Kusticiana, 152, 159;
his speeches, 153; his Relationes,

154;

and the altar of Victory, 153-155 ;
sends Augustine to Milan, 108, 156,

208;

episode of Maximus, 156;
episode of Eugenius, 157 ;
affair of Gildo, 157;
his letters, 158-162, 164-168;
as son, 159;
as father, 159-162;
his valetudinarianism, 159;
his daughter, 159, 160;
gives games for his son, 160-162;
his views on friendship, 162;
and bishops, 164; and professors,

165;

Gibbon's opinion of him, 166;
he ignores Christianity, 167, 171;
a champion of paganism, 169, 171 ;
scarcely alludes to Empire, 167;
but evidence for state of Empire, 167 ;
and the Senate, 167, 168;
his villas, 167;
on slaves, 168;
and the chariot, 154, 169;
his death, 157;
in the Saturnalia, 176, 179.
Symmachus, Q. Fabius,
edited his father's letters, 149 ;
made Quaestor by Eugenius, 157,

160;

made Praetor by Honorius, 160;
his marriage, 162.
Syncretism, 181.

Synesius, see chapter xiv. passim.
his ancestry, 322; his brother, 323,

336, 343; .
birth, 323;
boyhood, 320, 323;
his dogs, 320, 337, 342, 350;
his horses, 320, 336;
his slaves, 181 n. 1, 191 ;
his love of Gyrene and its history,

321, 322, 324, 344;
his mind and nature, 322, 338, 339,

352*

his style, 322, 330, 335, 340, 351 ;
his love of quiet, 323, 336;

398

Index

Synesius:

his use of philosophic terms, 323, 349;
his friendship with Hypatia, 323,

337, 339, 342, 344;
his visits to Alexandria, 323, 330,

337, 351;

goes to Constantinople, 324;
his adventures there, 329;
his friends there, 324, 329, 334;
his speech de Regno, 325-327 ;
his book on Providence, 327, 328, 337 ;
leaves Constantinople, 329;
returns to Gyrene, 330;
voyage from Alexandria to Cyrene,

330-4;

his MSS., 330 n. 1;
his thoughts on Homer, 333 ;
his life in Cyrenaica, 334, 335 ;
his marriage, 337;
his views on women, 337;
his visit to Athens, 337, 338;
his book Dio, 339;
his philosophy, 338, 340, 341, 354;
his movement toward Christianity,

329, 340, 346-8;
on Dreams, 341, 342;
his Praise of Baldness, 342, 343;
his vigour against barbarian in-
vaders, 343-6;
his hymns, 346, 353-6;
elected bp of Ptolemais, 349 ;
his hesitation about accepting

bishopric, 349-351;
had he as bp to part with his wife?

350;

his difficulties as bp, 351-353;
loses his children, 351, 352;
his conduct as bp, 352, 353;
Mrs Browning's judgment on him,

322, 354;
Mrs Browning's rendering of Hymn

ix., 355.

Table-talk, 179, 180.

Tacitus, 38, 287.

Taurobolium, 163, 192.

Taxation of middle class, 4, 36, 37;

methods, 164, 167, 230.
Tennyson on Quintus, 92 ; Death of

CEnone, 85, 95; on Catullus, 113

n. 1, 304; on Virgil, 184.
Tertullian, 3, 108, 236, 252, 253, 255,

260 n. 1, 263, 267, 368, 385.
Thecla, 127, 131, 136, 241, 378.
Theodorus, affair of, 30, 31.
Theodosius, father of Theodosius I.,

152, 225.
Theodosius I., 32, 102, 121, 156, 157,

224, 225, 229, 241; as a star, 228,

234, 235.

Theodosius II., 106, 382.

Theognis, 310.

Theophilus, bp of Alexandria, 291,

325, 347, 350, 351, 353.
Therapeutae, 360.
Theresa, 262 n. 1.
Theurgy, 58, 192, 340.
Thomas, St, his bones brought to

Edessa, 142; his Acts, 142, 370.
Thucydides and Christianity, 68.
Tibullus, 305.
Titus of Bostra, 66.
Travel in Roman world, 125 f.
Tribigild, 232, 325, 327.
Trismegistus, see Hermes.
Troy, its capture in Quintus and in

Virgil, 86, 87; romance of Troy,

359.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, 384.
Ursicinus, 21, 22, 23, 24, 28.
Utopias, 359.

Valens, Emperor, 30, 31, 131, 229.
Valentinian I., 42, 102, 114, 115, 151,

152, 229.

Valentinian II., 154, 156, 210.
Verecundia imperialis, 14, 43.
Verney papers, 148.
Vestal virgins, 127, 153, 155, 170, 270.
Vicisti Galilaie, 29.
Victory, altar of, 153-155, 156, 157,

240, 269-273.
Virgil, see chapter viii.

on Roman Empire, 8;

and Augustus, 216;

on Italy, 183;

charm of Aeneid, 11, 108, 111;

Lucretius and Virgil, 305;

voyage of Aeneas, 83, 84.

Augustine and Virgil, 108, 184, 198 ;

Jerome and Virgil, 132;

Macrobius and Virgil, 181-185 ;

Virgil the embodiment of all know-
ledge, 181;

Virgil, a magician, 368 n. 2.

passages discussed

Aen. iii. 270-293, 83, 84;
iii. 21, 182:
iii. 284, 183.
Virgin Mary, 242.
Virgins, Christian, 127, 300;

education of a nun, 128, 129.

Woman and the Church, see ch. vi.,
127 f.

Zosimus, 31 n. 5, 217 n. 1, 228, 230,
287.

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