ESSAYS-CLASSICAL
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 CLASSICAL 
 
 BY 
 
 F. W. H. MYERS 
 
 Hontfon 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1897 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 First printed (Crown Svo) 1883. 
 Reprinted 1888. Reprinted (Globe 8w) 1897.
 
 Stack 
 Annex 
 
 PA- 
 ft 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 GREEK ORACLES . . . . .1 
 
 VIRGIL . . . . .106 
 
 MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS 177 
 
 2035
 
 PKEFATOBY NOTE. 
 
 IN reprinting this Essay from Hellenica, I have 
 thought it needless to repeat my original list of 
 authorities consulted. Since the Essay was written 
 M. Bouche-Leclercq has published his Histoire de 
 la Divination dans VAntiquitd, where the biblio- 
 graphy of the subject is given with exhaustive 
 fulness. The chief resources to oracles in classical 
 authors have been long ago collected, and are now 
 the common property of scholars. The last con- 
 siderable addition to the list was made by G. Wolff, 
 and they have been judiciously arranged by Maury 
 and others. What is needed is a true comprehension 
 of them, towards which less progress has been 
 made than the ordinary reader may suppose. Even 
 Bouche-Leclercq, whose accuracy and completeness 
 within his self-proposed limits deserve high admira- 
 tion, expressly excludes from his purview the lessons 
 and methods of comparative ethnology, and hardly
 
 viii PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 cares to consider what those phenomena in reality 
 were whose history he is recounting. I can claim 
 little more of insight into their true nature than 
 suffices to make me conscious of ignorance, but I 
 have at least tried to indicate where the problems 
 lie, and in what general directions we must look for 
 their solution. 
 
 It is indeed true (as was remarked by several 
 critics when this Essay first appeared) that I have 
 kept but inadequately my implied promise of illus- 
 trating ancient mysteries by the light of modern 
 discovery. But my difficulty lay not in the defect 
 but in the excess of parallelism between ancient 
 and modern phenomena. I found that each explicit 
 reference of this kind would raise so many questions 
 that the sequence of the narrative would soon have 
 been destroyed. I was obliged, therefore, to content 
 myself with suggestions and allusions allusions 
 necessarily obscure to the general reader in the 
 absence of any satisfactory treatise on similar 
 phenomena to which he could be referred. I am 
 not without hope that this blank may before long 
 be filled up by a research conducted on a wider and 
 sounder basis than heretofore ; and, should the sway 
 of recognised law extend itself farther over that 
 shadowy land, I shall be well content if this Essay
 
 PREFATOKY NOTE. ix 
 
 shall be thought to have aimed, however imper- 
 fectly, at that " true interrogation " which is " the 
 half of science." 
 
 POSTSCRIPT, 1887. 
 
 Since the above words were written in 1883, 
 some beginning of the suggested inquiries has been 
 recorded in the Proceedings of the Society for 
 Psychical Eesearch. Some discussions on human 
 automatism which will there be found are not 
 without bearing on the subject of the present essay. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT, 1897. 
 
 The work of the Society for Psychical Eesearch 
 has now been pushed much further; and its 
 Proceedings (Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co.) 
 are indispensable for persons interested in the 
 inquiries above referred to.
 
 GREEK OEACLES. 
 
 Ov fJ-fv TTUS vvv tafw dirb Spv&s ovS' dirit 
 T<f! 6a.piftfj.evai, a re Trap6^vos ijiOefc re, 
 irapOtvos 7]i0e6s T dapi^erov dXX^Xouv. 
 
 I. 
 
 IT is not only in the domain of physical inquiry 
 that the advance of knowledge is self-accelerated at 
 every step, and the very excellence of any given 
 work insures its own speedier supersession. All 
 those studies which bear upon the past of mankind 
 are every year more fully satisfying this test of the 
 genuinely scientific character of the plan on which 
 they are pursued. The old conception of the world's 
 history as a collection of stories, each admitting of 
 a complete and definitive recital, is giving way to 
 a conception which would compare it rather with 
 a series of imperfectly-read inscriptions, the sense 
 of each of which is modified by the interpretations 
 which we gradually find for its predecessors. 
 
 And of no department is this truer than of the 
 comparative history of religions. The very idea of 
 
 vf VOL. I. & B
 
 2 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 such a study is of recent growth, and no sooner is 
 the attempt made to colligate by general laws the 
 enormous mass of the religious phenomena of the 
 world than we find that the growing science is in 
 danger of being choked by its own luxuriance that 
 each conflicting hypothesis in turn seems to draw 
 superabundant proof from the myriad beliefs and 
 practices of men. We may, indeed, smile at the 
 extravagances of one-sided upholders of each suc- 
 cessive system. We need not believe with Bishop 
 Huet 1 that Moses was the archetype both of Adonis 
 and of Priapus. Nor, on the other hand, need we 
 suppose with Pierson 2 that Abraham himself was 
 originally a stone god. We may leave Dozy 3 to 
 pursue his own conjecture, and deduce the strange 
 story of the Hebrew race from their worship of the 
 planet Saturn. Nor need the authority of Anony- 
 mus cle Rebus Incredibilibus* constrain us to accept 
 his view that Paris was a young man who wrote 
 essays on goddesses, and Phaethon an unsuccessful 
 astronomer. 
 
 But it is far from easy to determine the relative 
 validity of the theories of which these are exagger- 
 ated expressions, to decide (for instance) what 
 place is to be given to the direct transference of 
 
 1 Demonstr. Evang. iii. 3, viii. 5. 
 Ap. Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i. 390. 
 
 3 Ibid. i. 262. 
 * Opuscula Mythologica (Amst, 1688).
 
 r.] GREEK ORACLES. 3 
 
 beliefs from nation to nation, to fetish-worship, to 
 the worship of the heavenly bodies, to the deification 
 of dead men. In an essay like the present, dealing 
 only with a fragment of this great inquiry, it will 
 be safest to take the most general view, and to say 
 that man's fear and wonder invest every object, real 
 or imaginary, which strongly impresses him, beasts 
 or stones, or souls and spirits, or fire and the sun in 
 heaven, with an intelligence and a power darkly 
 resembling his own ; and, moreover, that certain 
 phenomena, real or supposed, dreams and epilepsy, 
 eclipse and thunder, sorceries and the uprising of 
 the dead, recur from time to time to supply him 
 with apparent proof of the validity of his beliefs, 
 and to modify those beliefs according to the nature 
 of his country and his daily life. Equally natural 
 is it that, as his social instincts develop and his 
 power of generalisation begins, he will form such 
 conceptions as those of a moral government of the 
 world, of a retributory hereafter, of a single Power 
 from which all others emanate, or into which they 
 disappear. 
 
 Avoiding, therefore, any attempt to take a side 
 among conflicting theories, I will draw from the 
 considerations which follow no further moral than 
 one which is well-nigh a truism, though too often 
 forgotten in the heat of debate, namely, that we are 
 assuredly not as yet in a position to pass a final 
 judgment on the forms which religion has assumed
 
 4 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 iii the past ; we have traversed too small a part of 
 the curve of human progress to determine its true 
 character ; even yet, in fact, " we are ancients of the 
 earth, and in the morning of the times." The diffi- 
 culty of bearing this clearly in mind, great in every 
 age, becomes greater as each age advances more 
 rapidly in knowledge and critical power. In this 
 respect the eighteenth century teaches us an obvious 
 lesson. That century witnessed a marked rise in 
 the standard of historical evidence, a marked en- 
 lightenment in dealing with the falsities and super- 
 stitions of the past. The consequence was that all 
 things seemed explicable ; that whatever could not 
 be reduced to ordinary rules seemed only worthy of 
 being brushed aside. Since that day the standard 
 of evidence in history has not declined, it has 
 become stricter still; but at the same time the 
 need of sympathy and insight, if we would compre- 
 hend the past, has become strongly felt, and has 
 modified or suspended countless judgments which 
 the philosophers of the last century delivered with- 
 out misgiving. The difference between the two 
 great critics and philosophers of France, at that day 
 and in our own, shows at a glance the whole gulf 
 between the two points of view. How little could 
 the readers of Voltaire have anticipated Eenan ! 
 How little could they have imagined that their 
 master's trenchant arguments would so soon have 
 fallen to the level of half-educated classes and half-
 
 i.] GREEK OKACLES. 5 
 
 civilised nations, would have been formidable only 
 in sixpenny editions, or when translated into Hindo- 
 stani for the confutation of missionary zeal ! 
 
 What philosophical enlightenment was in the 
 last century, science, physical or historical, is in our 
 own. Science is the power to which we make our 
 first and undoubting appeal, and we run a corre- 
 sponding risk of assuming that she can already solve 
 problems wholly, which as yet she can solve only in 
 part, of adopting under her supposed guidance 
 explanations which may hereafter be seen to have 
 the crudity and one-sidedness of Voltaire's treatment 
 of Biblical history. 
 
 The old school of theologians were apt to assume 
 that because all men or all men whom they chose 
 to count had held a certain belief, that belief must 
 be true. Our danger lies rather in being too ready 
 to take for granted that when we have explained 
 how a belief arose we have done with it altogether ; 
 that because a tenet is of savage parentage it hardly 
 needs formal disproof. In this view the wide diffu- 
 sion of a belief serves only to stamp its connection 
 with uncivilised thought, and " quod semper, quod 
 ubique, quod ab omnibus," has become to many 
 minds rather the badge of superstition than the test 
 of catholic truth. That any one but ourselves should 
 have held a creed seems to lower the average intelli- 
 gence of its adherents. 
 
 Yet, on behalf of savages, and our ancestors in
 
 6 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 genera], there may be room for some apology. If 
 we reflect how large a part of human knowledge 
 consists of human emotion, we may even say that 
 they possessed some forms of knowledge which we 
 have since lost. The mind of man (it has been 
 well said), like the earth on which he walks, under- 
 goes perpetual processes of denudation as well as of 
 deposit. We ourselves, as children, did in a sense 
 know much which we know no more ; our picture 
 of the universe, incomplete and erroneous as it was, 
 wore some true colours which we cannot now recall. 
 The child's vivid sensibility, reflected in his vivifying 
 imagination, is as veritably an inlet of truth as if 
 it were an added clearness of physical vision; and 
 though the child himself has not judgment enough 
 to use his sensibilities aright, yet if the man is to 
 discern the poetic truth about Nature, he will need 
 to recall to memory his impressions as a child. 
 
 Now, in this way too, the savage is a kind of 
 child; his beliefs are not always to be summarily 
 referred to his ignorance ; there may be something 
 in them which we must realise in imagination before 
 we venture to explain it away. Ethnologists have 
 recognised the need of this difficult self-identification 
 with the remote past, and have sometimes remarked, 
 with a kind of envy, how much nearer the poet is 
 than the philosopher to the savage habit of mind. 
 
 There is, however, one ancient people in whose 
 case much of this difficulty disappears, whose re-
 
 i.] GEEEK ORACLES. 7 
 
 ligion may be traced backwards through many 
 phases into primitive forms, while yet it is easy to 
 study its records with a fellow-feeling which grows 
 with our knowledge till it may approach almost to 
 an identity of spirit. Such is the ascendency which 
 the great works of the Greek imagination have estab- 
 lished over the mind of man, that it is no paradox 
 to say that the student's danger lies often in excess 
 rather than in defect of sympathy. He is tempted 
 to ignore the real superiority of our own religion, 
 morality, civilisation, and to re-shape in fancy an 
 adult world on an adolescent ideal. But the remedy 
 for over-estimates, as well as for under-estimates, 
 lies in an increased definiteness of knowledge, an 
 ever-clearer perception of the exact place in the 
 chain of development which Greek thought and 
 worship hold. The whole story of Greek mythology 
 must ere long be retold in a form as deeply modified 
 by comparative ethnology as our existing treatises 
 have been modified by comparative philology. Such 
 a task would be beyond my powers ; but while 
 awaiting some more comprehensive treatment of the 
 subject by a better-qualified hand, I have in this 
 Essay endeavoured to trace, by suggestion rather 
 than in detail, but with constant reference to the 
 results of recent science, the development and 
 career in Greece of one remarkable class of religious 
 phenomena which admits to some extent of separate 
 treatment.
 
 8 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 Greek oracles reflect for a thousand years l the 
 spiritual needs of a great people. They draw their 
 origin from an Animism 2 which almost all races 
 share, and in their early and inarticulate forms they 
 contain a record of most of the main currents in 
 which primitive beliefs are wont to run. After- 
 wards closely connected both with the idea of 
 supernatural possession and with the name of the 
 sun-god Apollo they exhibit a singular fusion of 
 nature-worship with Shahmanism or sorcery. Then, 
 as the non-moral and naturalistic conception of the 
 deity yields to the moral conception of him as an 
 idealised man, the oracles reflect the change, and the 
 Delphian god becomes in a certain sense the con- 
 science of Greece. 
 
 A period of decline follows ; due, as it would 
 seem, partly to the depopulation and political ruin 
 of Greece, but partly also to the indifference or 
 scepticism of her dominant schools of philosophy. 
 But this decline is followed by a revival which 
 forms one of the most singular of those apparent 
 checks which complicate the onward movement of 
 thought by ever new modifications of the beliefs of 
 the remote past. So far as this complex movement 
 
 1 Roughly speaking, from 700 B.C. to 300 A.D., but the earliest 
 oracles probably date much farther back. 
 
 2 It is hardly necessary to say that by Animism is meant a belief 
 in the existence around us of souls or spirits, whether disembodied, 
 as ghosts, or embodied in fetishes, animals, etc. Shahmanism is a 
 word derived from the title of the Siberian wizards, who procure by 
 agitated trance some manifestation from their gods.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 9 
 
 can be at present understood, it seems to have been 
 connected among the mass of the people with the 
 wide-spread religious upheaval of the first Christian 
 centuries, and to have been at last put an end to by 
 Christian baptism or sword. Among the higher 
 minds it seems to have rested partly on a perplexed 
 admission of certain phenomena, partly on the 
 strongly-felt need of a permanent and elevated re- 
 velation, which yet should draw its origin from the 
 Hellenic rather than the Hebrew past. And the 
 story reaches a typical conclusion in the ultimate 
 disengagement of the highest natures of declining 
 Greece from mythology and ceremonial, and the 
 absorption of definite dogma into an overwhelming 
 ecstasy. 
 
 II. 
 
 The attempt to define the word " oracle " con- 
 fronts us at once with the difficulties of the subject. 
 The Latin term, indeed, which we are forced to 
 employ, points specially to cases where the voice of 
 God or spirit was actually heard, whether directly 
 or through some human intermediary. But the 
 corresponding Greek term (jiavTelov) merely signifies 
 a seat of soothsaying, a place where divinations are 
 obtained by whatever means. And we must not 
 regard the oracles of Greece as rare and majestic 
 phenomena, shrines founded by a full-grown mytho- 
 logy for the direct habitation of a god. Bather they
 
 10 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 are the products of a long process of evolution, the 
 modified survivals from among countless holy places 
 of a primitive race. 
 
 Greek literature has preserved to us abundant 
 traces of the various causes which led to the ascrip- 
 tion of sanctity to some particular locality. Oftenest 
 it is some chasm or cleft in the ground, filled, 
 perhaps, with mephitic vapours, or with the mist of 
 a subterranean stream, or merely opening in its 
 dark obscurity an inlet into the mysteries of the 
 underworld. Such was the chasm of the Clarian, 1 
 the Delian, 2 the Delphian Apollo ; and such the 
 oracle of the prophesying nymphs on Citheeron. 3 
 Such was Trophonius' cave, 4 and his own name 
 perhaps is only a synonym for the Mother Earth, 
 "in many names the one identity," who nourishes 
 at once and reveals. 5 
 
 Sometimes as for instance at Megara, 6 Sicyon, 
 Orchomenus, Laodicea the sanctity gathers around 
 some ftairvKos or fetish-stone, fashioned, it may be, 
 
 1 Iambi, de Myst. p. 74. 
 
 2 Lebegue, Recherches sur Dilos, p. 89. 
 
 3 Paus. ix. 3. See also Paus. v. 14, for a legend of an oracle of 
 Earth herself at Olympia. 
 
 4 Paus. ix. 39. 
 
 B Tpo^wvios from rptQw. The visitor, who lay a long time, ov 
 /j,d\a (rvfjuppovuv tvapy&s eir' yptfyopei> etV &veipoTro\ei (Plut. de Genio 
 Socratis, 22), had doubtless been partially asphyxiated. St. Patrick's 
 Purgatory was perhaps conducted on the same plan. 
 
 6 Paus. i. 43, and for further references on baetyls see Lebegue, 
 p. 85. See also Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation, p. 225.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 11 
 
 into a column or pyramid, and probably in most 
 cases identified at first with the god himself, though, 
 after the invention of statuary, its significance might 
 be obscured or forgotten. Such stones outlast all 
 religions, and remain for us in their rude shapeless- 
 ness the oldest memorial of the aspirations or the 
 fears of man. 
 
 Sometimes the sacred place was merely some 
 favourite post of observation of the flight of birds, 
 or of lightning, like Teiresias' " ancient seat of 
 augury," 1 or the hearth 2 from which, before the 
 sacred embassy might start for Delphi, the Pythaists 
 watched above the crest of Parnes for the summons 
 of the heavenly flame. 
 
 Or it might be merely some spot where the 
 divination from burnt -offerings seemed unusually 
 true and plain, at Olympia, for instance, where, as 
 Pindar tells us, " soothsayers divining from sacrifice 
 make trial of Zeus who lightens clear." It is need- 
 less to speak at length of groves and streams and 
 mountain -summits, which in every region of the 
 world have seemed to bring the unseen close to man 
 by waving mystery, or by rushing murmur, or by 
 nearness to the height of heaven. 3 It is enough to 
 
 1 Soph. Ant. 1001 ; Pans. ix. 16 ; and cf. Eur. Phoen. 841. 
 
 2 Strabo, ix. p. 619. They watched airb 7-775 to"x.dpas TOV dtrrpa-n-aiov 
 At6$. See also Eur. Ion. 295. Even a place where lots were custom- 
 arily drawn might become a seat of oracle. Paus. vii. 25. 
 
 3 There is little trace in Greece of "weather-oracles," such as 
 the Blocksberg, hills deriving a prophetic reputation from the
 
 12 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 understand that in Greece, as in other countries over 
 which successive waves of immigration have passed, 
 the sacred places were for the most part selected for 
 primitive reasons, and in primitive times ; then as 
 more civilised races succeeded and Apollo came, 
 whence or in what guise cannot here be discussed, 
 the old shrines were dedicated to new divinities, 
 the old symbols were metamorphosed or disappeared. 
 The fetish-stones were crowned by statues, or re- 
 placed by statues and buried in the earth. 1 The 
 Sibyls died in the temples, and the sun-god's island 
 holds the sepulchre of the moon -maidens of the 
 northern sky. 2 
 
 It is impossible to arrange in quite logical order 
 phenomena which touch each other at so many 
 points, but in making our transition from these 
 impersonal or hardly personal oracles of divination 
 to the "voice-oracles" 3 of classical times, we may 
 
 indications of coming rain, etc., drawn from clouds on their 
 summits. The sanctity of Olympus, as is well known, is connected 
 with a supposed elevation above all elemental disturbances. 
 
 1 Find. 01. viii. 3, and for further references see Hermann, 
 Griech. Ant. ii. 247. Maury (ii. 447) seems to deny this localisa- 
 tion on insufficient grounds. 
 
 2 The Hyperborese, see reff. ap. Lebegue, p. 69. M. Bouche- 
 Leelercq's discussion (vol. ii.) of the Sibylline legends is more 
 satisfactory than that of Klausen (Aeneas und die Penaten, p. 107, 
 foil.) He describes the Sibylline type as "une personnification 
 gracieuse de la mantique intuitive, interinediaire entre le babil 
 inconscient de la nymphe ^cho et la sagacite inhumaine de la 
 Sphinx. " 
 
 tp&ey/j.a.Ti,KoL
 
 r.] GREEK ORACLES. 13 
 
 first mention the well-known Voice or Rumour 
 which as early as Homer runs heaven-sent through 
 the multitude of men, or sometimes prompts to 
 revolution by "the word of Zeus." 1 
 
 To this we may add the belief that words 
 spoken at some critical and culminant, or even at 
 some arbitrarily-chosen moment, have a divine sig- 
 nificance. We find some trace of this in the oracle 
 of Teiresias, 2 and it appears in a strange form in 
 an old oracle said to have been given to Homer, 
 which tells him to beware of the moment when 
 some young children shall ask him a riddle which 
 he is unable to answer. 3 Cases of omens given by 
 a chance word in classical times are too familiar 
 to need further reference. 4 What we have to 
 notice here is, that this casual method of learn- 
 ing the will of heaven was systematised into a 
 practice at certain oracular temples, where the 
 applicant made his sacrifice, stopped his ears, went 
 into the market-place, and accepted the first words 
 
 1 !], K\-r]5ui>, 6/j.(pri II. ii. 93; Herod, ix. 100 ; Od. iii. 
 215, etc. These words are probably used sometimes for regular 
 oracular communications. 
 
 2 Od. xi. 126. 
 
 8 dXXct vkuv -raiduv aii>iy/j.a <f>6\a.ai. Paus. x. 24; Anth. Pal. 
 xiv. 66. This conundrum, when it was at length put to Homer, 
 was of so vulgar a character that no real discredit is reflected on 
 the Father of Poetry by his perplexity as to its solution. (Homeri 
 et Hesiodi certamen, ad Jin.) Heraclitus, however, used the fact 
 to illustrate the limitation of even the highest human powers. 
 
 4 Herodotus ix. 91, may be selected as an example of a happy 
 chance in forcing an omen.
 
 14 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 he happened to hear as a divine intimation. We 
 hear of oracles on this pattern at Memphis, 1 and at 
 Pharae in Achsea. 2 
 
 From these voices, which, though clearly audible, 
 are, as it were, unowned and impersonal, we may 
 pass to voices which have a distinct personality, 
 but are heard only by the sleeping ear. Dreams 
 of departed friends are likely to be the first pheno- 
 menon which inspires mankind with the idea that 
 they can hold converse with a spiritual world. We 
 find dreams at the very threshold of the theology of 
 almost all nations, and accordingly it does not 
 surprise us to find Homer asserting that dreams 
 come from Zeus, 3 or painting, with a pathos which 
 later literature has never surpassed, the strange 
 vividness and agonising insufficiency of these fugi- 
 tive visions of the night. 4 
 
 And throughout Greek literature presaging 
 dreams which form, as Plutarch says, "an unfixed 
 and wandering oracle of Night and Moon" 5 are 
 
 1 Dio Chrys. ad Alex. 32, 13, TrcuSes airayy{\\ov<ri irai(,'oi>Tes rb 
 SOKOVV r<$ 6e<f. 
 
 2 Pans. vii. 22. 
 
 8 H. i. 63. Or from Hermes, or earth, or the gods below. 
 
 4 II. xxiii. 97. If we accept the theory of an older Achilleid wo 
 find the importance of augury proper decreasing, of dreams in- 
 creasing, in the Homeric poems themselves. Geddes, Horn. Probl. 
 p. 186 ; cf. Mure, Hist. Gr. Lit. i. 492. Similarly Apollo's darts 
 grow more gentle, and his visitations more benign. Geddes, 
 p. 140. 
 
 5 Plut. Ser. Num. Find. 22.
 
 i.] GREEK OEACLES. 15 
 
 abundant in every form, from the high behest laid 
 on Bellerophon " when in the dark of night stood 
 by him the shadowy-shielded maid, and from a 
 dream, suddenly, a waking vision she became," 1 
 down to the dreams in the temples of Serapis or of 
 Aesculapius which Aristides the Ehetorician has 
 embalmed for us in his Sacred Orations, the 
 dream which " seemed to indicate a bath, yet not 
 without a certain ambiguity," or the dream which 
 left him in distressing uncertainty whether he were 
 to take an emetic or no. 2 
 
 And just as we have seen that the custom of 
 observing birds, or of noting the omens of casual 
 speech, tended to fix itself permanently in certain 
 shrines, so also dream-oracles, or temples where the 
 inquirer slept in the hope of obtaining an answer 
 from the god seen in vision, or from some other 
 vision sent by him, were one of the oldest forms of 
 oracular seats. Brizo, a dream-prophetess, preceded 
 Apollo at Delos. 3 A similar legend contrasts " the 
 divination of darkness " at Delphi with Apollo's clear 
 prophetic song. 4 Night herself was believed to send 
 visions at Megara, 5 and coins of Commodus still 
 show us her erect and shrouded figure, the torches 
 that glimmer in her shade. Amphiaraus, 6 Amphilo- 
 
 1 Find. 01. xiii. 100. 
 
 2 Ar. Rhet. vol. i. p. 275 (Dind.), ?x ov P* v TWO. Ivvoiav \ovrpov, 
 
 e irtrovoias, and i. 285. 
 
 3 Athen. viii. 2, and see Lebegue, p. 218 ; comp. Aesch. Ag. 275. 
 
 4 Eur. Iph. Taur. 1234 foil. 5 Paus. i. 40. 6 Paus. i. 34.
 
 16 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 chus, 1 Charon, 2 Pasiphae, 3 Herakles, 4 Dionysus, 5 
 and above all Asklepios, 6 gave answers after this 
 fashion, mainly, but not entirely, in cases of sick- 
 ness. The prevalence of heroes, rather than gods, 
 as the givers of oracles in dreams seems still further 
 to indicate the immediate derivation of this form 
 of revelation from the accustomed appearance of 
 departed friends in sleep. 
 
 The next step takes us to the most celebrated 
 class of oracles, those in which the prophetess, or 
 more rarely the prophet, gives vent in agitated trance 
 to the words which she is inspired to utter. 7 We 
 encounter here the phenomena of possession, so 
 familiar to us in the Bible, and of which theology 
 still maintains the genuineness, while science would 
 explain them by delirium, hysteria, or epilepsy. It 
 
 1 Dio Cass. Ixxii. 7. 
 
 2 Eustath. Schol. ad Dionys. Perieg. 1153. 
 
 3 Cic. de Div. i. 43 ; Plut. Agis 9, and cf. Maury, ii. 453. 
 
 4 Paus. ix. 24, comp. inscr. ap. G. Wolff, de Noviss. p. 29, and 
 see Plut. de Malign. Herod. 31, for the dream of Leonidas in 
 Herakles' temple. 5 Paus. x. 33. 
 
 6 Ar. Rhet. passim; Iambi. Myst. 3, 3, etc. See also Val. 
 Max. i. 7 ; Diod. Sic. v. 62 ; Ar. Rhet. Sacr. Serm. iii. 311, for 
 dreams sent by Athene, the Soteres, Hemithea. Further references 
 will be found in Maury, iii. 456, and for the relation of Apollo to 
 dreams see Bouche-Leclercq, i. 204. 
 
 7 Pindar's phrase (for the prophecy of lamus), <fxava.v atcbveiv 
 \}/ev8uv Ayvuffrov, 01. vi. 66, reminds us of Socrates' inward moni- 
 tor. The expressions used about the Pythia vary from this concep- 
 tion of mere clairaudience to the idea of an absolute possession, 
 which for the time holds the individuality of the prophetess entirely 
 in abeyance.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 17 
 
 was this phenomenon, connected first, as Pausanias 
 tells us, 1 with the Apolline oracles, which gave a 
 wholly new impressiveness to oracular replies. No 
 longer confined to simple affirmation and negation, 
 or to the subjective and ill-remembered utterances 
 of a dream, they were now capable of embracing all 
 topics, and of being preserved in writing as a revela- 
 tion of general applicability. These oracles of in- 
 spiration, taken in connection with the oracles 
 uttered by visible phantoms, which become prominent 
 at a later era, may be considered as marking the 
 highest point of development to which Greek oracles 
 attained. It will be convenient to defer our con- 
 sideration of some of these phenomena till we come 
 to the great controversy between Porphyry and 
 Eusebius, in which they were for the first time fully 
 discussed. But there is one early oracle of the dead, 
 different in some respects from any that succeeded 
 it, 2 which presents so many points for notice that a 
 
 1 Paus. i. 34. We should have expected this prophetic frenzy to 
 have been connected with Bacchus or the Nymphs rather than with 
 Apollo, and it is possible that there may have been some transference 
 of the phenomena from the one worship to the other. The causes 
 which have determined the attributes of the Greek deities are often 
 too fanciful to admit of explanation now. 
 
 2 The distinction drawn by Nagelsbach between this and other 
 "Todtenorakeln" (Nachhom. Theologie, p. 189) is surely exagger- 
 ated. See Klausen, Aeneas und die Penaten, p. 129 foil., for other 
 legends connecting Odysseus with early necromancy, and on this 
 general subject see Herod, v. 92 ; Eur. Ale. 1131 ; Plat. Leg. x. 
 909 ; Plut. dm. 6, de Ser. Num. Find. 17 ; Tylor, Prim. Cult. ii. 
 41. The fact, on which Nagelsbach dwells, that Odysseus, after 
 
 VOL. I. C
 
 18 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 few reflections on the state of belief which it indi- 
 cates will assist us in comprehending the nature of 
 the elevation of Greek faith which was afterwards 
 effected under the influence of Delphi. 
 
 For this, the first oracle of which we have a 
 full account, the descent of Odysseus to the 
 underworld, "to consult the soul of the Theban 
 Teiresias," shows in a way which it would be hard 
 to parallel elsewhere the possible co-existence in the 
 same mind of the creed and practices of the lowest 
 races with a majesty, a pathos, a power, which 
 human genius has never yet overpassed. The 
 eleventh book of the Odyssey is steeped in the 
 Animism of barbarous peoples. The Cimmerian 
 entrance to the world of souls is the close parallel 
 (to take one instance among many) of the extreme 
 western cape of Yanua Levi, a calm and solemn 
 place of cliff and forest, where the souls of the 
 Fijian dead embark for the judgment - seat of 
 ISTdengei, and whither the living come on pilgrim- 
 age, thinking to see ghosts and gods. 1 Homer's 
 ghosts cheep and twitter precisely as the shadow- 
 consulting Teiresias, satisfied his affection and his curiosity by 
 interviews with other ghosts in no way alters the original injunc- 
 tion laid on him, the purport of his journey faxy xpr)<r6/j.ei>ov 
 Qi)!3alov feipefflao. Nagelsbach's other argument, that in later times 
 Ave hear only of a dream-oracle, not an apparition-oracle, of Teire- 
 sias seems to me equally weak. Eeaders of Pausanias must surely 
 feel what a chance it is which has determined the oracles of which 
 we have heard. 
 
 1 Prim. Cult. i. 408.
 
 i.] GREEK OEACLES. 19 
 
 souls of the Algonquin Indians chirp like crickets, 
 and Polynesian spirits speak in squeaking tones, and 
 the accent of the ancestral Zulu, when he reappears 
 on earth, has earned for him the name of Whistler. 1 
 The expedition of Odysseus is itself paralleled by 
 the exploit of Ojibwa, the eponymous hero of the 
 Ojibbeways, of the Finnish hero Wainamoinen, and 
 of many another savage chief. The revival of the 
 ghosts with blood, itself closely paralleled in old 
 Teutonic mythologies, 2 speaks of the time when the 
 soul is conceived as feeding on the fumes and sha- 
 dows of earthly food, as when the Chinese beat the 
 drum which summons ancestral souls to supper, and 
 provide a pail of gruel and a spoon for the greater 
 convenience of any ancestor who may unfortunately 
 have been deprived of his head. 3 
 
 Nay, even the inhabitants of that underworld are 
 only the semblances of once living men. " They them- 
 selves," in the terrible words of the opening sentence 
 of the Iliad, " have been left a prey to dogs and every 
 bird." Human thought has not yet reached a point 
 at which spirit could be conceived of as more than 
 the shadow of matter. 
 
 And if further evidence were needed, the oracle 
 of Teiresias himself opening like a chasm into 
 Hades through the sunlit soil of Greece reveals 
 unwittingly all the sadness which underlies that 
 freshness and power, the misgiving which so often 
 
 1 Prim. Cult. ii. 42. 2 Ibid. ii. 346. 3 Ibid. ii. 30.
 
 20 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i 
 
 unites the savage and the philosopher, the man who 
 comes before religions and the man who comes after 
 them, in the gloom of the same despair. Himself 
 alone in his wisdom among the ineffectual shades, 
 Teiresias offers to Odysseus, in the face of all his 
 unjust afflictions, no prevention and no cure ; " of 
 honey-sweet return thou askest, but by God's will 
 bitter shall it be;" for life's struggle he has no 
 remedy but to struggle to the end, and for the wan- 
 dering hero he has no deeper promise than the 
 serenity of a gentle death. 
 
 And yet Homer "made the theogony of the 
 Greeks." 1 And Homer, through the great ages 
 which followed him, not only retained, but deep- 
 ened his hold on the Hellenic spirit. It was no 
 mere tradition, it was the ascendency of that essen- 
 tial truth and greatness in Homer, which we still 
 so strongly feel, which was the reason why he was 
 clung to and invoked and explained and allegorised 
 by the loftiest minds of Greece in each successive 
 age; why he was transformed by Polygnotus, trans- 
 formed by Plato, transformed by Porphyry. Nay, 
 even in our own day, and this is not the least sig- 
 nificant fact in religious history, we have seen one 
 of the most dominant, one of the most religious 
 intellects of our century, falling under the same 
 spell, and extracting from Homer's almost savage 
 
 1 Herod, ii. 53, o&roi d (Homer and Hesiod) elvi ol 
 Oeoyovirjv "E\Xij(7t, K.T. X.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 21 
 
 animism the full-grown mysteries of the Christian 
 faith. 
 
 So dangerous would it be to assume such a 
 congruence throughout the whole mass of the 
 thought of any epoch, however barbarous, that the 
 baseness or falsity of some of its tenets should be 
 enough to condemn the rest unheard. So ancient, 
 so innate in man is the power of apprehending 
 by emotion and imagination aspects of reality for 
 which a deliberate culture might often look in vain. 
 To the dictum, so true though apparently so para- 
 doxical, which asserts "that the mental condition 
 of the lower races is the key to poetry," we may 
 reply with another apparent paradox that poetry is 
 the only thing which every age is certain to recog- 
 nise as truth. 
 
 Having thus briefly considered the nature of 
 each of the main classes of oracular response, it is 
 natural to go on to some inquiry into the history of 
 the leading shrines where these responses were given. 
 The scope of this essay does not admit of a detailed 
 notice of each of the very numerous oracular seats of 
 which some record has reached us. 1 But before 
 passing on to Delphi, I must dwell on two cases of 
 special interest, where recent explorations have 
 brought us nearer than elsewhere to what may be 
 
 1 The number of Greek oracular seats, with the Barbarian seats 
 known to the Greeks, has been estimated at 260, or an even larger 
 number ; but of very many of these we know no more than the
 
 22 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 called the private business of an oracle, or to the 
 actual structure of an Apolline sanctuary. 
 
 The oracle of Zeus at Dodona takes the highest 
 place among all the oracles which answered by signs 
 rather than by inspired speech. 1 It claimed to be 
 the eldest of all, and we need not therefore wonder 
 that its phenomena present an unusual confluence 
 of streams of primitive belief. The first mention of 
 Dodona, 2 in that great invocation of Achilles which 
 is one of the glimpses which Homer gives us of a 
 world far earlier than his own, seems to indicate 
 that it was then a seat of dream-oracles, where the 
 rude Selloi perhaps drew from the earth on which 
 they slept such visions as she sends among men. 
 But in the Odyssey 3 and in Hesiod 4 the oracle 
 is spoken of as having its seat among the leaves, or 
 in the hollow or base of an oak, and this is the idea 
 which prevailed in classical times. 5 The doves, 6 
 if doves there were, and not merely priestesses, whose 
 name, Peleiades, may be derived from some other 
 root, 7 introduce another element of complexity. 
 
 1 Strab. viii. Fragm. ex/MjoytySei 5' ov Sia \6ywv d\Xd did TIVUV 
 ffvf*p6\uv, &<rirep TO ev At/St/Tj 'Afj.fj.uvia.Kov. So Suid. in voc. Auddiv-rj, 
 etc. 2 II. xvi. 233. 
 
 3 Od. xiv. 327, xix. 296. 
 
 4 Hes. Fr. 39. 7, vcubv r' tv irv0/j^i>i fayou. See Plat. Phaedr. 275. 
 6 Aesch. Prom. 832 ; Soph. Track. 172 and 1167. 
 
 6 See Herod, ii. 54, and comp. Od. xii. 63. 
 
 7 See Herm. Griech. Antiq. ii. 250. Dr. Robertson Smitb suggests 
 " that the Dove-soothsayers were so named from their croon . . . and that 
 the fj^Xiffa-a (the Pythia) in like manner is the humming priestess." 
 Journal of Philology, vol. xiv. p. 120.
 
 I.] GREEK ORACLES. 23 
 
 Oracles were also given at Dodona by means of 
 lots, 1 and by the falling of water. 2 Moreover, Ger- 
 man industry has established the fact, that at 
 Dodona it thunders on more days than anywhere 
 else in Europe, and that no peals are louder anywhere 
 than those which echo among the Acrocerauniau 
 mountains. It is tempting to derive the word 
 Dodona from the sound of a thunderclap, and to 
 associate this old Pelasgic sanctuary with the pro- 
 pitiation of elemental deities in their angered hour. 3 
 But the notices of the oracle in later days are per- 
 plexingly at variance with all these views. They 
 speak mainly of oracles given by the sound of cal- 
 drons, struck, according to Strabo, 4 by knuckle- 
 
 1 Cic. de Div. ii. 32. 2 Serv. ad Aen. iii. 466. 
 
 3 I do not think that we can get beyond some such vague con- 
 jecture as this, and A. Mommsen and Schmidt's elaborate calcula- 
 tions as to months of maximum frequency of thunderclaps and 
 centres of maximum frequency of earthquakes, as determining the 
 time of festivals or the situation of oracular temples, seem to me 
 to be quite out of place. If a savage possessed the methodical 
 patience of a German observer, he would be a savage no more. 
 Savants must be content to leave Aristotle's TVXT] Kal rb avrbfj-arov, 
 chance and spontaneity, as causes of a large part of the action 
 of primitive men. 
 
 The dictum of Gotte (Delphische Orakel, p. 13) seems to me 
 equally unproveable : " Dodona, wohin die schwarzen aegyptischen 
 Tauben geflogen kamen, ist wohl unbestreitbar eine aegyptische 
 Cultstatte, die Schwesteranstalt von Ammonium, beide Thebens 
 Tochter." The geographical position of Dodona is much against 
 this view, the doves are very problematical, and the possible ex- 
 istence of a primitive priesthood in the Selloi is no proof of an 
 Egyptian influence. 
 
 4 Strab. lib. vii. Fragm. ap. Hermann, Griech. Ant. ii. 251, 
 where see further citations.
 
 24 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 bones attached to a wand held by a statue. The 
 temple is even said to have been made of caldrons, 1 
 or at least they were so arranged, as a certain Demon 
 tells us, 2 that "all in turn, when one was smitten, 
 the caldrons of Dodona rang." The perpetual sound 
 thus caused is alluded to in a triumphant tone by 
 other writers, 3 but it is the more difficult to determine 
 in what precise way the will of Zeus was understood. 
 Among such a mass of traditions, it is of course 
 easy to find analogies. The doves may be compared 
 to the hissing ducks of the Abipones, which were 
 connected with the souls of the dead, 4 or with the 
 
 1 Steph. Byz. s. voc. Awddvi), quoted by Carapanos, in whose 
 monograph on Dodona citations on all these points will be found. 
 
 2 Muller, Fragm. Hist. Gr. iii. 125. 
 
 3 Callim. Hymn, in Del. 286 ; Philostr. Imag. ii. 33 (a slightly 
 different account). 
 
 4 Prim. Cult. ii. 6. The traces of animal worship in Greece are 
 many and interesting, but are not closely enough connected with 
 our present subject to be discussed at length. Apollo's possible 
 characters, as the Wolf, the Locust, or the Fieldmouse (or the 
 Slayer of wolves, of locusts, or of fieldmice), have not perceptibly 
 affected his oracles. Still less need we be detained by the fish-tailed 
 Eurynome, or the horse-faced Demeter (Paus. viii. 41, 42). And 
 although from the time when the boy-prophet lamus lay among 
 the wall-flowers, and "the two bright-eyed serpents fed him with 
 the harmless poison of the bee " (Find. 01. vi. 28), snakes appear 
 frequently in connection with prophetic power, their worship falls 
 under the head of divination rather than of oracles. The same 
 remark may be made of ants, cats, and cows. The bull Apis occu- 
 pies a more definite position, but though he was visited by Greeks, 
 his worship was not a product of Greek thought. The nearest 
 Greek approach, perhaps, to an animal-oracle was at the fount of 
 Myrae in Cilicia (Plin. H.N. xxxii. 2), where fish swam up to eat 
 or reject the food thrown to them. "Diripere eos carnes objectas
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 25 
 
 doves in Popayan, which are spared as inspired by 
 departed souls. The tree-worship opens up lines of 
 thought too well known for repetition. We may 
 liken the Dodonsean " voiceful oak " to the tamarisks 
 of Beersheba, and the oak of Shechem, its whisper 
 to the " sound of a going in the tops of the mul- 
 berry-trees," which prompted Israel to war, 1 and so 
 on down the long train of memories to Joan of Arc 
 hanging with garlands the fairies' beech in the woods 
 of Domremy, and telling her persecutors that if they 
 would set her in a forest once more she would hear 
 the heavenly voices plain. 2 Or we may prefer, 
 with another school, to trace this tree also back to 
 the legendary Ygdrassil, "the celestial tree of the 
 Aryan family," with its spreading branches of the 
 stratified clouds of heaven. One legend at least 
 points to the former interpretation as the more 
 natural. For just as a part of the ship Argo, keel 
 or prow, was made of the Dodoneean oak, and Argo's 
 crew heard with astonishment the ship herself pro- 
 phesy to them on the sea : 
 
 laetum est consultantibus, " says Pliny, "caudis abigere dirum. " 
 The complaint of a friend of Plutarch's (Quctst. conviv. iv. 4) "that 
 it was impossible to obtain from fishes a single instructive look or 
 sound," is thus seen to have been exaggerated. And it appears 
 that live snakes were kept in the cave of Trophonius (Philostr. Vit. 
 Apoll. viii. 19), in order to inspire terror in visitors, who were 
 instructed to appease them with cakes (Suid. s. v. /ueXtToCrra). 
 
 1 2 Sam. v. 24. 
 
 2 ' ' Dixit quod si esset in uno nemore bene audiret voces venientes 
 ad earn. " On Tree-worship, see Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation, 
 p. 206 foil.
 
 26 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 " But Jason and the builder, Argus, knew 
 Whereby the prow foretold things strange and new ; 
 Nor wondered aught, but thanked the gods therefore, 
 As far astern they left the Mysian shore," 1 
 
 so do we find a close parallel to this among the 
 Siamese, 2 who believe that the inhabiting nymphs 
 of trees pass into the guardian spirits of boats built 
 with their wood, to which they continue to sacrifice. 
 Passing on to the answers which were given at 
 this shrine, we find that at Dodona, 3 as well as at 
 Delphi, 4 human sacrifice is to be discerned in the 
 background. But in the form in which the legend 
 reaches us, its horror has been sublimed into pathos. 
 Coresus, priest of Bacchus at Calydon, loved the 
 maiden Callirhoe in vain. Bacchus, indignant at 
 his servant's repulse, sent madness and death on 
 Calydon. The oracle of Dodona announced that 
 Coresus must sacrifice Callirhoe, or some one who 
 would die for her. No one was willing to die for 
 her, and she stood up beside the altar to be slain. 
 But when Coresus looked on her his love overcame 
 his anger, and he slew himself in her stead. Then 
 her heart turned to him, and beside the fountain to 
 which her name was given she died by her own 
 hand, and followed him to the underworld. 
 
 1 Morris' Life and Death of Jason, Book \v. ad fin. 
 
 2 Prim. Cult. ii. 198. 3 Paus. vii. 21. 
 
 4 Eus. Pr. Ev. v. 27, trapBtvov AtrvrlSm K\yjpos KaXeT, etc. See 
 also the romantic story of Melanippus and Comsetho, Paus. vii. 19.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 27 
 
 There is another legend of Dodona 1 to which 
 the student of oracles may turn with a certain grim 
 satisfaction at the thought that the ambiguity of 
 style which has so often baffled him did once at 
 least carry its own penalty with it. Certain Boeotian 
 envoys, so the story runs, were told by Myrtile, the 
 priestess of Dodona, " that it would be best for them 
 to do the most impious thing possible." The Boao- 
 tians immediately threw the priestess into a caldron 
 of boiling water, remarking that they could not think 
 of anything much more impious than that. 
 
 The ordinary business of Dodona, however, was 
 of a less exciting character. M. Carapanos has dis- 
 covered many tablets on which the inquiries of 
 visitors to the oracle were inscribed, and these give 
 a picture, sometimes grotesque, but oftener pathetic, 
 of the simple faith of the rude Epirots who dwelt 
 round about the shrine. The statuette of an acrobat 
 hanging to a rope shows that the " Dodonsean Pelas- 
 gian Zeus " did not disdain to lend his protection to 
 the least dignified forms of jeopardy to life and limb. 
 A certain Agis asks " whether he has lost his 
 blankets and pillows himself, or some one outside 
 has stolen them." An unknown woman asks simply 
 how she may be healed of her disease. Lysanias 
 asks if he is indeed the father of the child which 
 his wife ISTyla is soon to bear. Evandrus and his 
 
 1 Ephor. ad Strab. ix. 2 ; Heracl. Pont. Fragm. Hist. Gr. ii. 198 ; 
 Proclus, Chrcst. ii. 248, and see Carapanos.
 
 28 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 wife, in broken dialect, seek to know "by what 
 prayer or worship they may fare best now and for 
 ever." And there is something strangely pathetic 
 in finding on a broken plate of lead the imploring 
 inquiry of the fierce and factious Corcyreans, made, 
 alas ! in vain, " to what god or hero offering prayer 
 and sacrifice they might live together in unity ? " l 
 " For the men of that time," says Plato, 2 " since they 
 were not wise as ye are nowadays, it was enough in 
 their simplicity to listen to oak or rock, if only these 
 told them true." To those rude tribes, indeed, their 
 voiceful trees were the one influence which lifted 
 them above barbarism and into contact with the sur- 
 rounding world. Again and again Dodona was 
 ravaged, 3 but so long as the oak was standing the 
 temple rose anew. When at last an Illyrian bandit 
 cut down the oak 4 the presence of Zeus was gone, 
 and the desolate Thesprotian valley has known since 
 then no other sanctity, and has found no other voice. 
 I proceed to another oracular seat, of great mythical 
 celebrity, though seldom alluded to in classical times, 
 to which a recent exploration 5 has given a striking 
 interest, bringing us, as it were, into direct connec- 
 tion across so many ages with the birth and advent 
 of a god. 
 
 1 Tli> i KO. 6ewi> f) iip&uv Ouovres Kal u>x^fvoi 6/j.ovooiev tirl TayaObv. 
 
 2 Phaedr. 275. 
 
 3 Strab. vii. 6 ; Polyb. ix. 67, and cf. "Wolff, de Noviss. p. 13. 
 
 4 Serv. ad Acn. iii. 466. 
 
 5 Recherches sur Delos, par J. A. Lebegue, 1876.
 
 L] GREEK ORACLES. 29 
 
 On the slope of Cynthus, near the mid-point of 
 the Isle of Delos, ten gigantic blocks of granite, 
 covered with loose stones and the debris of ages, 
 form a rude vault, half hidden in the hill. The 
 islanders call it the " dragon's cave ;" travellers had 
 taken it for the remains of a fortress or of a reser- 
 voir. It was reserved for two French savants to 
 show how much knowledge the most familiar texts 
 have yet to yield when they are meditated on by 
 minds prepared to compare and to comprehend. A 
 familiar passage in Homer, 1 illustrated by much 
 ancient learning and by many calculations of his 
 own, suggested to M. Burnouf, Director of the French 
 School of Archseology at Athens, that near this point 
 had been a primitive post of observation of the 
 heavens ; nay, that prehistoric men had perhaps 
 measured their seasons by the aid of some rude 
 instrument in this very cave. An equally familiar 
 line of Virgil, 2 supported by some expressions in a 
 Homeric hymn, led M. Lebegue to the converging 
 conjecture that at this spot the Delian oracle had 
 its seat ; that here it was that Leto's long wander- 
 ings ended, and Apollo and Artemis were born. 
 Every schoolboy has learnt by heart the sounding 
 lines which tell how Aeneas " venerated the temple 
 built of ancient stone," and how at the god's unseen 
 coining " threshold and laurel trembled, and all the 
 
 1 Od. xv. 403. Em. Burnouf, Revue Archeologique, Aug. 8, 1873. 
 2 Aen. iii. 84 ; Horn. Hymn. Del. 15-18, and 79-81.
 
 30 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 mountain round about was moved." But M. Lebegue 
 was the first to argue hence with confidence that the 
 oracle must have been upon the mountain and not 
 on the coast, and that those ancient stones, like the 
 Cyclopean treasure-house of Mycenae, might be found 
 and venerated still. So far as a reader can judge 
 without personal survey, these expectations have 
 been amply fulfilled. 1 At each step M. Lebegue's 
 researches revealed some characteristic of an oracular 
 shrine. In a walled external space were the re- 
 mains of a marble base on which a three-legged 
 instrument had been fixed by metal claws. Then 
 came a transverse wall, shutting off the temple 
 within, which looks westward, so that the worshipper, 
 as he approaches, may face the east. The floor of 
 this temple is reft by a chasm, the continuation of 
 a ravine which runs down the hill, and across which 
 the sanctuary has been intentionally built. And in 
 the inner recess is a rough block of granite, smoothed 
 on the top, where a statue has stood. The statue 
 has probably been knocked into the chasm by a rock 
 falling through the partly-open roof. Its few frag- 
 ments show that it represented a young god. The 
 stone itself is probably a fetish, surviving, with the 
 Cyclopean stones which make the vault above it, 
 
 1 M. Homolle (Fmiilles de Dilos, 1879) gives no direct opinion 
 on the matter, but his researches indirectly confirm M. Lebegue's 
 view, in so far as that among the numerous inscriptions, etc. , which 
 he has found among the ruins of the temple of Apollo on the coast, 
 there seems to be no trace of oracular response or inquiry.
 
 I.] GREEK ORACLES. 31 
 
 from a date perhaps many centuries before the 
 Apolline religion came. This is all, but this is 
 enough. For we have here in narrow compass all 
 the elements of an oracular shrine ; the westward 
 aspect, the sacred enclosure, the tripod, the sanc- 
 tuary, the chasm, the fetish-stone, the statue of a 
 youthful god. And when the situation is taken into 
 account, the correspondence with the words both of 
 Virgil and of the Homerid becomes so close as to be 
 practically convincing. It is true that the smallness 
 of scale, the sanctuary measures some twenty feet 
 by ten, and the remote archaism of the structure, 
 from which all that was beautiful, almost all that 
 was Hellenic, has long since disappeared, cause at 
 first a shock of disappointment like that inspired by 
 the size of the citadel, and the character of the 
 remains at Hissarlik. Yet, on reflection, this seem- 
 ing incongruity is an additional element of proof. 
 There is something impressive in the thought that 
 amidst all the marble splendour which made Delos 
 like a jewel in the sea, it was this cavernous and 
 prehistoric sanctuary, as mysterious to Greek eyes 
 as to our own, which their imagination identified 
 with that earliest temple which Leto promised, in 
 her hour of trial, that Apollo's hands should build. 
 This, the one remaining seat of oracle out of the 
 hundreds which Greece contained, was the one sanc- 
 tuary which the Far-darter himself had wrought ; 
 no wonder that his mighty workmanship has out-
 
 32 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 lasted the designs of men ! All else is gone. The 
 temples, the amphitheatres, the colonnades, which 
 glittered on every crest and coign of the holy island, 
 have sunk into decay. But he who sails among the 
 isles of Greece may still watch around sea-girt Delos 
 " the dark wave welling shoreward beneath the shrill 
 and breezy air j" 1 he may still note at sunrise, as on 
 that sunrise when the god was born, " the whole 
 island abloom with shafts of gold, as a hill's crested 
 summit blooms with woodland flowers." 2 "And 
 thou thyself, lord of the silver bow," he may exclaim 
 with the Homerid in that burst of exultation in 
 which the uniting Ionian race seems to leap to the 
 consciousness of all its glory in an hour, " thou 
 walkedst here in very presence, on Cynthus' leafy 
 crown !" 
 
 " Ah, many a forest, many a peak is thine, 
 On many a promontory stands thy shrine, 
 But best and first thy love, thy home, is here ; 
 Of all thine isles thy Delian isle most dear ; 
 There the long-robed lonians, man and maid, 
 Press to thy feast in all their pomp arrayed, 
 To thee, to Artemis, to Leto pay 
 The heartfelt honour on thy natal day ; 
 Immortal would he deem them, ever young, 
 Who then should walk the Ionian folk among, 
 Should those tall men, those stately wives behold, 
 Swift ships seafaring and long-garnered gold : 
 
 i Hymn. Del. 27. 2 Ibid. 138-164.
 
 I.] GEEEK ORACLES. 33 
 
 But chiefliest far his eyes and ears would meet 
 Of sights, of sounds most marvellously sweet, 
 The Delian girls amid the thronging stir, 
 The loved hand-maidens of the Far-darter ; 
 The Delian girls, whose chorus, long and long, 
 Chants to the god his strange, his ancient song, 
 Till whoso hears it deems his own voice sent 
 Thro' the azure air that music softly blent, 
 So close it comes to each man's heart, and so 
 His own soul feels it Snd his glad tears flow." 
 
 Such was the legend of the indigenous, the Hellenic 
 Apollo. But the sun does not rise over one horizon 
 alone, and the glory of Delos was not left uncon- 
 tested or unshared. Another hymn, of inferior 
 poetical beauty, but of equal, if not greater, authority 
 among the Greeks, relates how Apollo descended 
 from the Thessalian Olympus, and sought a place 
 where he might found his temple : how he was 
 refused by Tilphussa, and selected Delphi ; and how, 
 in the guise of a dolphin, he led thither a crew of 
 Cretans to be the servants of his shrine. With this 
 hymn, so full of meaning for the comparative mytho- 
 logist, we are here only concerned as introducing us 
 to Apollo in the aspect in which we know him best, 
 "giving his answers from the laurel- wood, beneath 
 the hollows of Parnassus' hill." 1 
 
 At Delphi, as at Dodona, we seem to trace the 
 relics of many a form of worship and divination 
 which we cannot now distinctly recall. From that 
 
 1 Hymn. Pyth. 214. 
 VOL. I. D
 
 34 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 deep cleft " in rocky Pytho," Earth, the first pro- 
 phetess, gave her earliest oracle, 1 in days which were 
 already a forgotten antiquity to the heroic age of 
 Greece. The maddening vapour, which was supposed 
 to rise from the chasm, 2 belongs to nymph-inspira- 
 tion rather than to the inspiration of Apollo. At 
 Delphi, too, was the most famous of all fetish- 
 stones, believed in later times to be the centre of 
 the earth. 3 At Delphi divination from the sacrifice 
 of goats reached an immemorial antiquity. 4 Delphi, 
 too, was an ancient centre of divination by fire, a 
 tradition which survived in the name of Pyrcon, 5 
 given to Hephaestus' minister, while Hephaestus 
 shared with Earth the possession of the shrine, and 
 in the mystic title of the Flame-kindlers, 6 assigned 
 in oracular utterances to the Delphian folk. At 
 Delphi, too, in ancient days, the self-moved lots 
 
 1 Aesch. Hum. 2 ; Pans. x. 5 ; cf. Eur. Iph. Taur. 1225 sqq. 
 
 2 Strabo, ix. p. 419, etc. In a paper read before the Britisli 
 Archaeological Association, March 5, 1879, Dr. Phene has given an 
 interesting account of subterranean chambers at Delphi, which 
 seem to indicate that gases from the subterranean Castalia were 
 received in a chamber where the Pythia may have sat. But in the 
 absence of direct experiment this whole question is physiologically 
 very obscure. It is even possible, as M. Bouche-Leclercq urges, 
 that the Pythia's frenzy may be a survival from a previous 
 Dionysiac worship at Delphi, and thus originally traceable to a 
 quite orthodox intoxicant. 
 
 3 Paus. x. 16, etc. 
 
 4 Diod. Sic. xvi. 26. Pliny (Hist. Nat. vii. 56) ascribes the in- 
 vention of this mode of divination to Delphos, a son of Apollo. 
 
 6 Paus. x. 5. 
 
 6 Plut. Pyth. 24.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 35 
 
 sprang in the goblet in obedience to Apollo's will. 1 
 The waving of the Delphic laurel, 2 which in later 
 times seemed no more than a token of the wind and 
 spiritual stirring which announced the advent of 
 the god, was probably the relic of an ancient tree- 
 worship, like that of Dodona, 3 and Daphne, priestess 
 of Delphi's primeval Earth-oracle, 4 is but one more 
 of the old symbolical figures that have melted back 
 again into impersonal nature at the appearing of 
 the God of Day. Lastly, at Delphi is laid the 
 scene of the sharpest conflict between the old gods 
 and the new. Whatever may have been the mean- 
 ing of the Python, whether he were a survival of 
 snake-worship, or a winding stream which the sun's 
 rays dry into rotting marsh, or only an emblem of 
 the cloud which trails across the sunlit heaven, 
 his slaughter by Apollo was an integral part of the 
 early legend, and at the Delphian festivals the 
 changes of the " Pythian strain " commemorated for 
 many a year that perilous encounter, the god's 
 descent into the battlefield, his shout of summons, 
 
 1 Suidas, iii. p. 237; cf. Callim. Hymn, in Apoll. 45, etc. 
 
 2 Ar. Plut. 213 ; Callim. Hymn, in Apoll. 1, etc. 
 
 3 I cannot, however, follow M. Maury (Religions de la Grcce, ii. 
 442) in supposing (as he does in the case of the Delian laurel, Aen. 
 iii. 73) that such tree-movements need indicate an ancient habit of 
 divining from their sound. The idea of a wind accompanying 
 divine manifestations seems more widely diffused in Greece than 
 the Dodonaean idea of vocal trees. Cf. (for instance) Plut. De Def. 
 orac. of the Delphian adytum, evudias avairi/jiTrXaTai ical jrvedij.a.ro^. 
 
 4 Paus. x. 5.
 
 36 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 his cry of conflict, his paean of victory, and then 
 the gnashing of the dragon's teeth in his fury, the 
 hiss of his despair. 1 And the mythology of a later 
 age has connected with this struggle the first ideas 
 of moral conflict and expiation which the new 
 religion had to teach ; has told us that the victor 
 needed purification after his victory ; that he en- 
 dured and was forgiven ; and that the god himself 
 first wore his laurel- wreath as a token of supplica- 
 tion, and not of song. 2 
 
 With a similar ethical purpose the simple nar- 
 rative of the Homerid has been transformed into a 
 legend 3 of a type which meets us often in the 
 middle ages, but which wears a deeper pathos when 
 it occurs in the midst of Hellenic gladness and 
 youth, the legend of Trophonius and Agamedes, 
 the artificers who built the god's home after his 
 heart's desire, and whom he rewarded with the 
 guerdon that is above all other recompense, a speedy 
 and a gentle death. 
 
 In the new temple at any rate, as rebuilt in 
 historic times, the moral significance of the Apolline 
 religion was expressed in unmistakable imagery. 
 Even as " four great zones of sculpture " girded the 
 hall of Camelot, the centre of the faith which was 
 
 , KaTa.Kf\ev<r/d>s, ffdXiriyl;, SOKTV\OI, ddovrifffiAs, trvpiyyes. 
 See August Mommsen's Delphika on this topic. 
 
 2 Botticher, Baumcultus, p. 353 ; and see reff. ap. Herm. Griech. 
 Ant. ii. 127. Cf. Eur. Ion, 114 sqq. 
 
 3 Cic, Tusc. i. 47; cf. Plut. De Consol. ad Apollon. 14.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 37 
 
 civilising Britain, " with many a mystic symbol " of 
 the victory of man, so over the portico of the Delph- 
 ian god were painted or sculptured such scenes as 
 told of the triumph of an ideal humanity over the 
 monstrous deities which are the offspring of savage 
 fear. 1 
 
 There was " the light from the eyes of the twin 
 faces " of Leto's children ; there was Herakles with 
 golden sickle, lolaus with burning brand, withering 
 the heads of the dying Hydra, " the story," says 
 the girl in the Ion who looks thereon, "which is 
 sung beside my loom;" there was the rider of the 
 winged steed slaying the fire-breathing Chimaera ; 
 there was the tumult of the giants' war ; Pallas 
 lifting the aegis against Enceladus ; Zeus crushing 
 Mimas with the great bolt fringed with flame, and 
 Bacchus "with his unwarlike ivy -wand laying 
 another of Earth's children low." 
 
 It is important thus to dwell on some of the 
 indications, and there are many of them, which 
 point to the conviction entertained in Greece as to 
 the ethical and civilising influence of Delphi, inas- 
 much as the responses which have actually been 
 preserved to us, though sufficient, when attentively 
 considered, to support this view, are hardly such as 
 would at once have suggested it. The set collections 
 
 1 The passage in the Ion, 190-218, no doubt describes either the 
 portico which the Athenians dedicated at Delphi about 426 B.C. 
 (Paus. x. 11), or (as the words of the play, if taken strictly, would 
 indicate) the fa9ade of the temple itself.
 
 38 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 of oracles, which no doubt contained those of most 
 ethical importance, have perished ; of all the " dark- 
 written tablets, groaning with many an utterance of 
 Loxias," 1 none remain to us except such fragments 
 of Porphyry's treatise as Eusebius has embodied in 
 his refutation. And many of the oracles which we 
 do possess owe their preservation to the most trivial 
 causes, to their connection with some striking anec- 
 dote, or to something quaint in their phraseology 
 which has helped to make them proverbial. The 
 reader, therefore, who passes from the majestic 
 descriptions of the Ion or the Eumenides to the 
 actual study of the existing oracles will at first run 
 much risk of disappointment. Both style and sub- 
 ject will often seem unworthy of these lofty claims. 
 He will come, for instance, on such oracles as that 
 which orders Temenus to seek as guide of the army 
 a man with three eyes, who turns out (according to 
 different legends) to be either a one-eyed man on a 
 two-eyed horse, or a two-eyed man on a one-eyed 
 mule. 2 This oracle is composed precisely on the 
 model of the primitive riddles of the Aztec and the 
 Zulu, and is almost repeated in Scandinavian legend, 
 where Odin's single eye gives point to the enigma. 3 
 Again, the student's ear will often be offended by 
 
 1 Eur. Fr. 625. Collections of oracles continued to be referred 
 to till the Turks took Constantinople, i.e. for about 2000 years. 
 See reff. ap. "Wolff, de Noviss. p. 48. 
 
 2 Apollod. ii. 8 ; Paus. v. 3. 3 Prim. Cult. i. 85.
 
 I.] GREEK OEACLES. 39 
 
 roughnesses of rhythm which seem unworthy of the 
 divine inventor of the hexameter. 1 And the con- 
 stantly-recurring prophecies are, for the most part, 
 uninteresting and valueless, as the date of their 
 composition cannot be proved, nor their genuineness 
 in any way tested. As an illustration of the kind 
 of difficulties which we here encounter, we may 
 select one remarkable oracle, 2 of immense celebrity 
 in antiquity, which certainly suggests more questions 
 than we can readily answer. The outline of the 
 familiar story is as follows : Croesus wished to 
 make war on Cyrus, but was afraid to do so without 
 express sanction from heaven. It was therefore 
 all -important to him to test the veracity of the 
 oracles, and his character, as the most religious man 
 of his time, enabled him to do so systematically, 
 without risk of incurring the charge of impiety. 
 He sent messages to the six best-known oracles then 
 existing, to Delphi, to Dodona, to Branchidae, to 
 the oracles of Zeus Ammon, of Trophonius, of 
 Amphiaraus. On the hundredth day from leaving 
 Sardis, his envoys were to ask what Croesus was at 
 that moment doing. Four oracles failed ; Amphi- 
 
 1 Bald though the god's style may often be, he possesses at any 
 rate a sounder notion of metre than some of his German critics. 
 Lobsck (Aglaophamus, p. 852), attempting to restore a lost response, 
 suggests the line 
 
 ffTevvyprjv d'evoevv evpvydcrropa. ov Kara yaiav. 
 
 He apologises for the quantity of the first syllable of evpvydirTopa, 
 but seetns to think that no further remark is needed. 
 
 2 Herod, i. 47.
 
 40 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 araus was nearly right ; Apollo at Delphi entirely 
 succeeded. For the Pythia answered, with exact 
 truth, that Croesus was engaged in boiling a lamb 
 and a tortoise together in a copper vessel with a 
 copper lid. The messengers, who had not them- 
 selves known what Croesus was going to do, returned 
 to Sardis and reported, and were then once more 
 despatched to Delphi, with gifts so splendid that 
 in the days of Herodotus they were still the glory 
 of the sanctuary. They now asked the practically 
 important question as to going to war, and received 
 a quibbling answer which, in effect, lured on Croesus 
 to his destruction. 
 
 Now here the two things certain are that 
 Croesus did send these gifts to Delphi, and did go 
 to war with Cyrus. Beyond these facts there is no 
 sure footing. Short and pithy fragments of poetry, 
 like the oracles on which the story hangs, are 
 generally among the earliest and most enduring 
 fragments of genuine history. On the other hand, 
 they are just the utterances which later story-tellers 
 are most eager to invent. Nor must we argue from 
 their characteristic diction, for the pseudo-oracular 
 is a style which has in all ages been cultivated 
 with success. The fact which it is hardest to dis- 
 pose of is the existence of the prodigious, the 
 unrivalled offerings of Croesus at Delphi. Why 
 were they sent there, unless for some such reason 
 as Herodotus gives ? Or are they sufficiently ex-
 
 i.] GREEK OEACLES. 41 
 
 plained by a mere reference to that almost super- 
 stitious deference with which the Mermnadae seem 
 to have regarded the whole religion and civilisation 
 of Greece ? With our imperfect data, we can per- 
 haps hardly go with safety beyond the remark that, 
 granting the genuineness of the oracle about the 
 tortoise, and the substantial truth of Herodotus' 
 account, there will still be no reason to suppose 
 that the god had any foreknowledge as to the result 
 of Croesus' war. The story itself, in fact, contains 
 almost a proof to the contrary. We cannot suppose 
 that the god, in saying, " Crcesus, if he cross the 
 Halys, shall undo a mighty realm," was intention- 
 ally inciting his favoured servant to his ruin. It is 
 obvious that he was sheltering his ignorance behind 
 a calculated ambiguity. And the only intelligence 
 to which he or his priestess could, on any hypothesis, 
 fairly lay claim, would be of the kind commonly 
 described as " second-sight," a problem with which 
 ethnologists have already to deal all over the world, 
 from the Hebrides to the Coppermine Eiver. 
 
 It is obvious that the documents before us are 
 far from enabling us to prove even this hypothesis. 
 And we are farther still from any evidence for 
 actual prophecy which can stand a critical investi- 
 gation. Hundreds of such cases are indeed reported 
 to us, and it was on a conviction that Apollo did 
 indeed foretell the future that the authority of 
 Delphi mainly depended. But when we have said
 
 42 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [L 
 
 this, we have said all ; no case is so reported as to 
 enable us altogether to exclude the possibility of 
 coincidence, or of the fabrication of the prophecy 
 after the event. But, on the other hand, and this 
 is a more surprising circumstance, it is equally 
 difficult to get together any satisfactory evidence for 
 the conjecture which the parallel between Delphi 
 and the Papacy so readily suggests, that the 
 power of the oracle was due to the machinations of 
 a priestly aristocracy, with widely-scattered agents, 
 who insinuated themselves into the confidence, and 
 traded on the credulity, of mankind. We cannot 
 but suppose that, to some extent at least, this must 
 have been the case ; that when " the Pythia philip- 
 pised " she reflected the fears of a knot of Delphian 
 proprietors ; that the unerring counsel given to 
 private persons, on which Plutarch insists, must 
 have rested, in part at least, on a secret acquaint- 
 ance with their affairs, possibly acquired in some 
 cases under the seal of confession. In the paucity, 
 however, of direct evidence to this effect, our 
 estimate of the amount of pressure exercised by a 
 deliberate human agency in determining the policy 
 of Delphi must rest mainly on our antecedent view 
 of what is likely to have been the case, where the 
 interests involved were of such wide importance. 1 
 
 1 For this view of the subject, see Hiillmann, IViirdigung des 
 Delphischen Orakels ; Gotte, Das Delphische Orakel. August 
 Mommsen (Delphika) takes a somewhat similar view, and calls the 
 Pythia a "blosse Figurantin," but his erudition has added little
 
 I.] GREEK ORACLES. 43 
 
 For indeed the political influence of the Delphian 
 oracle, however inspired or guided, the value to 
 Hellas of this one unquestioned centre of national 
 counsel and national unity, has always formed 
 one of the most impressive topics with which the 
 historian of Greece has had to deal. And I shall 
 pass this part of my subject rapidly by, as already 
 familiar to most readers, and shall not repeat at 
 length the well-known stories, the god's persistent 
 command to expel the Peisistratids from Athens, his 
 partiality for Sparta, as shown both in encourage- 
 ment and warning, 1 or the attempts, successful 2 and 
 unsuccessful, 3 to bribe his priestess. Nor shall I 
 do more than allude to the encouragement of 
 colonisation, counsel of great wisdom, which the 
 god lost no opportunity of enforcing on both the 
 Dorian and the Ionian stocks. He sent the Cretans to 
 Sicily, 4 and Alcmaeon to the Echinades ; 5 he ordered 
 the foundation of Byzantium 6 " over against the 
 city of the blind ;" he sent Archias to Ortygia to 
 
 to the scanty store of texts on which Hiillmann, etc. , depend. I 
 may mention here that Hendess has collected most of the existing 
 oracles (except those quoted by Eusebius) in a tract, Oracula quae 
 supersunt, etc. , which is convenient for reference. 
 
 1 Herod, vi. 52 ; Thuc. i. 118, 123 ; ii. 54. Warnings, ap. 
 Pans. iii. 8 ; ix. 32 ; Diod. Sic. xi. 50 ; xv. 54. Plut. Lys. 22 ; 
 Ayesil. 3. 
 
 2 Gleisthenes, Herod, v. 63, 66 ; Pleistoanax, Thuc. v. 16. 
 
 3 Lysander ; Plut. Lys. 26 ; Ephor. Fr. 127 ; Nep. Lys. 3. See 
 also Herod, vi. 66. 
 
 4 Herod, vii. 170. Thuc. ii. 102. 
 6 Strab. vii. 320 ; Tac. Ann. xii. 63 ; but see Herod, iv. 144.
 
 44 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 found Syracuse, 1 the Boeotians to Heraclea at 
 Pratos, 2 and the Spartans to Heraclea in Thessaly. 
 And in the story which Herodotus 3 and Pindar 4 
 alike have made renowned, he singled out Battus, 
 anxious merely to learn a cure for his stammer, but 
 type of the man with a destiny higher than he 
 knows, to found at Gyrene " a charioteering city 
 upon the silvern bosom of the hill." And, as has 
 often been remarked, this function of colonisation 
 had a religious as well as a political import. The 
 colonists, before whose adventurous armaments 
 Apollo, graven on many a gem, still hovers over 
 the sea, carried with them the civilising maxims of 
 the " just-judging " 5 sanctuary as well as the brand 
 kindled on the world's central altar-stone from that 
 pine-fed 6 and eternal fire. Yet more distinctly 
 can we trace the response of the god to each suc- 
 cessive stage of ethical progress to which the evolu- 
 tion of Greek thought attains. 
 
 The moralising Hesiod is honoured at Delphi 
 in preference to Homer himself. The Seven Wise 
 Men, the next examples of a deliberate effort after 
 ethical rules, are connected closely with the Pythian 
 shrine. Above the portal is inscribed that first 
 condition of all moral progress, " Know Thyself"; 
 
 1 Paus. v. 7. 2 Justin, xvi. 3. 
 
 3 Herod, iv. 155. 4 Pyth. iv. 
 
 5 Pyth. xi. 9. 
 
 8 Pint, de El apud Delphos. Of. Aesch. Eum. 40 ; Choeph. 
 1036.
 
 r.] GREEK ORACLES. 45 
 
 nor does the god refuse to encourage the sages 
 whose inferior ethical elevation suggests to them 
 only such maxims as, " Most men are bad," or 
 " Never go bail." l 
 
 Solon and Lycurgus, the spiritual ancestors of 
 the Athenian and the Spartan types of virtue, re- 
 ceive the emphatic approval of Delphi, and the 
 " Theban eagle," the first great exponent of the de- 
 veloped faith of Greece, already siding with the 
 spirit against the letter, and refusing to ascribe to 
 a divinity any immoral act, already preaching the 
 rewards and punishments of a future state in strains 
 of impassioned revelation, this great poet is dear 
 above all men to Apollo during his life, and is 
 honoured for centuries after his death by the priest's 
 nightly summons, " Let Pindar the poet come in to 
 the supper of the god." 2 . It is from Delphi that 
 reverence for oaths, respect for the life of slaves, of 
 women, of suppliants, derive in great measure their 
 sanction and strength. 3 I need only allude to the 
 well-known story of Glaucus, who consulted the 
 god to know whether he should deny having re- 
 ceived the gold in deposit from his friend, and who 
 was warned in lines which sounded from end to end 
 of Greece of the nameless Avenger of the broken 
 
 1 I say nothing de El apiid Delphos, about the mystic word 
 which five of the wise men, or perhaps all seven together, put up 
 in wooden letters at Delphi, for their wisdom has in this instance 
 wholly transcended our interpretation. 
 
 ' 2 Paus. ix. 23. 3 Herod, ii. 134 ; vi. 139, etc.
 
 46 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 oath, whose wish was punished like a deed, and 
 whose family was blotted out. The numerous re- 
 sponses of which this is the type brought home to 
 men's minds the notion of right and wrong, of 
 reward and punishment, with a force and im- 
 pressiveness which was still new to the Grecian 
 world. 
 
 More surprising, perhaps, at so early a stage of 
 moral thought, is the catholicity of the Delphian 
 god, his indulgence towards ceremonial differences 
 or ceremonial offences, his reference of casuistical 
 problems to the test of the inward rightness of the 
 heart. 1 It was the Pythian Apollo who replied to 
 the inquiry, " How best are we to worship the 
 gods ?" by the philosophic answer, " After the 
 custom of your country," 2 and who, if those customs 
 varied, would only bid men choose " the best." It 
 was Apollo who rebuked the pompous sacrifice of the 
 rich Magnesian by declaring his preference for the 
 cake and frankincense which the pious Achasan 
 offered in humbleness of heart. 3 It was Apollo who 
 
 1 See, for instance, the story of the young man and the brigands, 
 Ael. Hist. Var. iii. 4. 3. 
 
 2 Xen. Mem. iv. 3. i) re yap Hvdia vd^ 7r6Xews avaupel TTOIOVVTCLS 
 eiVe/Sws &v iroiciv. The Pythia often urged the maintenance or 
 renewal of ancestral rites. Pans. viii. 24, etc. 
 
 3 Theopomp. Fr. 283 ; cf. Sopater, Prolegg. in Aristid. Panath. 
 p. 740, efiade (J.OL x^'f^s Xi/favos, K.T.\. (Wolff, de Noviss. p. 5 ; 
 Lob, Acjl. 1006), and compare the story of Poseidon (Pint, de Prof, 
 in Virt. 12), who first reproached Stilpon in a dream for the cheap- 
 ness of his offerings, but on learning that he could afford nothing
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 47 
 
 warned the Greeks not to make superstition an 
 excuse for cruelty ; who testified, by his command- 
 ing interference, his compassion for human infirmi- 
 ties, for the irresistible heaviness of sleep, 1 for the 
 thoughtlessness of childhood, 2 for the bewilderment 
 of the whirling brain. 3 
 
 Yet the impression which the Delphian oracles 
 make on the modern reader will depend less on 
 isolated anecdotes like these than on something of 
 the style and temper which appears especially in 
 those responses which Herodotus has preserved, 
 something of that delightful mingling of naivete 
 with greatness, which was the world's irrecoverable 
 bloom. What scholar has not smiled over the 
 god's answer 4 to the colonists who had gone to a 
 barren island in mistake for Libya, and came back 
 complaining that Libya was unfit to live in ? He 
 told them that " if they who had never visited the 
 
 better, smiled, and promised to send abundant anchovies. For the 
 Delphian god's respect for honest poverty, see Plin. H. N. vii. 47. 
 
 1 Evenius. Herod, ix. 93. 
 
 2 Pans. viii. 23. This is the case of the Arcadian children who 
 hung the goddess in play. 
 
 3 Pans. vi. 9 ; Plut. Romul. 28 (Cleomedes). For further in- 
 stances of the inculcation of mercy, see Thuc. ii. 102 ; Athen. xi. 
 p. 504. 
 
 4 Herod, iv. 157. There seems some analogy between this 
 story and the Norse legend of second-sight, which narrates how 
 "Mgimund shut up three Finns in a hut for three nights that 
 they might visit Iceland and inform him of the lie of the country 
 where he was to settle. Their bodies became rigid, they sent their 
 souls on the errand, and awakening after three days, they gave a 
 description of the Vatnsdael." Prim. Cult. i. 396.
 
 48 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 sheep-bearing Libya knew it better than he who 
 had, he greatly admired their cleverness." Who 
 has not felt the majesty of the lines which usher 
 in the test-oracle of Croesus with the lofty asser- 
 tion of the omniscience of heaven ? l lines which 
 deeply impressed the Greek mind, and whose graven 
 record, two thousand years afterwards, was among 
 the last relics which were found among the ruins of 
 Delphi. 2 
 
 It is Herodotus, if any one, who has caught for 
 us the expression on the living face of Hellas. It 
 is Herodotus whose pencil has perpetuated that 
 flying moment of young unconsciousness when evil 
 itself seemed as if it could leave no stain on her 
 expanding soul, when all her faults were reparable, 
 and all her wounds benign ; when we can still feel 
 that in her upward progress all these and more 
 might be forgiven and pass harmless away 
 
 " For the time 
 Was May-time, and as yet no sin was dreamed." 
 
 And through all this vivid and golden scene the 
 Pythian Apollo "the god," as he is termed with a 
 sort of familiar affection is the never-failing coun- 
 sellor and friend. His providence is all the divinity 
 which the growing nation needs. His wisdom is 
 
 1 Herod, i, 47. 
 
 2 Cyriac of Ancona, in the sixteenth century, found a slab of 
 marble with the couplet o!5a T' tyA, etc., inscribed on it. See 
 Fourart, p. 139.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 49 
 
 not inscrutable and absolute, but it is near and 
 kind ; it is like the counsel of a young father to 
 his eager boy. To strip the oracles from Hero- 
 dotus' history would be to deprive it of its deepest 
 unity and its most characteristic charm. 
 
 And in that culminating struggle with the bar- 
 barians, when the young nation rose, as it were, to 
 knightly manhood through one great ordeal, how 
 moving through all its perplexities was the 
 attitude of the god ! We may wish, indeed, that 
 he had taken a firmer tone, that he had not trembled 
 before the oncoming host, nor needed men's utmost 
 supplications before he would give a word of hope. 
 But this is a later view ; it is the view of Oenomaus 
 and Eusebius, rather than of Aeschylus or Hero- 
 dotus. 1 To the contemporary Greeks it seemed no 
 shame nor wonder that the national protector, 
 benignant but not omnipotent, should tremble with 
 the fortunes of the nation, that all his strength 
 should scarcely suffice for a conflict in which every 
 fibre of the forces of Hellas was strained, " as 
 though men fought upon the earth and gods in 
 upper air." 
 
 And seldom indeed has history shown a scene 
 so strangely dramatic, never has poetry entered so 
 deeply into human fates, as in that council at 
 Athens 2 when the question of absolute surrender 
 
 1 Herod, vii. 1 39, seems hardly meant to blame the god, though 
 it praises the Athenians for hoping against hope. 
 a Herod, vii. 143. 
 
 VOL. I. E
 
 50 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 or desperate resistance turned on the interpretation 
 which was to be given to the dark utterance of the 
 god. It was an epithet which saved civilisation ; 
 it was the one word which blessed the famous islet 
 instead of cursing it altogether, which gave courage 
 for that most fateful battle which the world has 
 known 
 
 " Thou, holy Salamis, sons of men shalt slay, 
 Or on earth's scattering or ingathering day." 
 
 After the great crisis of the Persian war Apollo 
 is at rest. 1 In the tragedians we find him risen 
 high above the attitude of a struggling tribal god. 
 Worshippers surround him, as in the Ion, in the 
 spirit of glad self-dedication and holy service ; his 
 priestess speaks as in the opening of the Eumenides, 
 where the settled majesty of godhead breathes 
 through the awful calm. And now, more magnifi- 
 cent though more transitory than the poet's song, a 
 famous symbolical picture embodies for the remain- 
 ing generations of Greeks the culminant conception 
 of the religion of Apollo's shrine. 
 
 " Not all the treasures," as Homer has it, " which 
 the stone threshold of the Far-darter holds safe 
 within " would now be so precious to us as the 
 power of looking for one hour on the greatest work 
 of the greatest painter of antiquity, the picture by 
 
 1 It is noticeable that the god three times defended his own 
 shrine, against Xerxes (Herod, viii. 36), Jason of Pherae (Xen. 
 Hell. vi. 4), Brennus (Paus. x. 23).
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 51 
 
 Polygnotus in the Hall of the Cnidians at Delphi, 
 of the descent of Odysseus among the dead. 1 For 
 as it was with the oracle of Teiresias that the roll 
 of responses began,' so it is the picture of that same 
 scene which shows us, even through the meagre 
 description of Pausanias, how great a space had 
 been traversed between the horizon and the zenith 
 of the Hellenic faith. "The ethical painter," as 
 Aristotle calls him, 2 the man on whose works it 
 ennobled a city to gaze, the painter whose figures 
 were superior to nature as the characters of Homer 
 were greater than the greatness of men, had spent 
 on this altar-piece, if I may so term it, of the 
 Hellenic race his truest devotion and his utmost 
 skill. The world to which he introduces us is 
 Homer's shadow-world, but it reminds us also of a 
 very different scene. It recalls the visions of that 
 Sacred Field on whose walls an unknown painter 
 has set down with so startling a reality the faith of 
 mediaeval Christendom as to death and the hereafter. 
 In place of Death with her vampire aspect and 
 wiry wings, we have the fiend Eurynomus, " painted 
 of the blue-black colour of flesh-flies," and battening 
 
 1 For this picture see Paus. x. 28-31 ; also "Welcker (Kleine 
 Schrifteri), and W. W. Lloyd in the Classical Museum, who both 
 give Eiepenhausen's restoration. While differing from much in 
 Wclcker's view of the picture, I have followed him in supposing 
 that a vase figured in his Alte Dcnkmaler, vol. iii. plate 29, repre- 
 sents at any rate the figure and expression of Polyguotus' Odysseus. 
 The rest of my description can, I think, be justified from Pausauias. 
 
 2 Ar. Pol. viii. 8 ; Poet. ii. 2.
 
 52 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 on the corpses of the slain. In place of the kings 
 and ladies, who tell us in the rude Pisan epigraph 
 
 how 
 
 " Ischerrno di savere e di richezza 
 Di nobiltate ancora e di prodezza 
 Vale niente ai colpi de costei," 
 
 it is Theseus and Sisyphus and Eriphyle who teach 
 us that might and wealth and wisdom " against 
 those blows are of no avail." And Tityus, whose 
 scarce imaginable outrage in the Pythian valley 
 upon the mother of Apollo herself carries back his 
 crime and his penalty into an immeasurable past, 
 Tityus lay huge and prone upon the pictured field, 
 but the image of him (and whether this were by 
 chance or art Pausanius could not say) seemed melt- 
 ing into cloud and nothingness through the infinity 
 of his woe. But there also were heroes and heroines 
 of a loftier fate, Mernnon and Sarpedon, Tyro and 
 Penthesilea, in attitudes that told that "calm pleasures 
 there abide, majestic pains ;" Achilles, with Patro- 
 clus at his right hand, and near Achilles Protesilaus, 
 fit mate in valour and in constancy for that type of 
 generous friendship and passionate woe. And there 
 was Odysseus, still a breathing man, but with no 
 trace of terror in his earnest and solemn gaze, de- 
 manding from Teiresias, as Dante from Virgil, all 
 that that strange world could show ; while near him 
 a woman's figure stood, his mother Anticleia, wait- 
 ing to call to him in those words which in Homer's
 
 I.] GREEK ORACLES. 53 
 
 song seem to strike at once to the very innermost 
 of all love and all regret. And where the mediaeval 
 painter had set hermits praying as the type of souls 
 made safe through their piety and their knowledge 
 of the divine, the Greek had told the same parable 
 after another fashion. For in Polygnotus' picture 
 it was Tellis and Cleoboia, a young man and a maid, 
 who were crossing Aoheron together with hearts at 
 peace ; and amid all those legendary heroes these 
 figures alone were real and true, and of a youth and 
 a maiden who not long since had passed away ; and 
 they were at peace because they had themselves 
 been initiated, and Cleoboia had taught the mysteries 
 of Demeter to her people and her father's house. 
 And was there, we may ask, in that great company, 
 any heathen form which we may liken, however 
 distantly, to the Figure who, throned among the 
 clouds on the glowing Pisan wall, marshals the 
 blessed to their home in light ? Almost in the 
 centre, as it would seem, of Polygnotus' picture was 
 introduced a mysterious personality who found no 
 place in Homer's poem, a name round which had 
 grown a web of hopes and emotions which no hand 
 can disentangle now, " The minstrel sire of song, 
 Orpheus the well-beloved, was there." 
 
 It may be that the myth of Orpheus was at 
 first nothing more than another version of the world- 
 old story of the Sun; that his descent and resurrec- 
 tion were but the symbols of the night and the day;
 
 54 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [L 
 
 that Eurydice .was but an emblem of the lovely 
 rose-clouds which sink back from his touch into 
 the darkness of evening only to enfold him more 
 brightly in the dawn. But be this as it may, the 
 name of Orpheus * had become the centre of the most 
 aspiring and the deepest thoughts of Greece; the 
 lyre which he held, the willow-tree on which in the 
 picture his hand was laid, were symbols of mystic 
 meaning, and he himself was the type of the man 
 " who has descended and ascended " who walks 
 the earth with a heart that turns continually towards 
 his treasure in a world unseen. 
 
 When this great picture was painted, the sanctu- 
 ary and the religion of Delphi might well seem 
 indestructible and eternal. But the name of 
 Orpheus, introduced here perhaps for the first time 
 into the centre of the Apolline faith, brings with it 
 a hint of that spirit of mysticism which has acted 
 as a solvent, sometimes more powerful even than 
 criticism, as the sun in the fable of Aesop was more 
 powerful than the wind, upon the dogmas of 
 every religion in turn. And it suggests a forward 
 glance to an oracle given at Delphi on a later day, 2 
 and cited by Porphyry to illustrate the necessary 
 evanescence and imperfection of whatsoever image 
 
 1 See, for instance, Maury, Religions de la GrZce, chap, xviii. 
 Aelius Lampridius (Alex. Sev. Vita, 29) says "!D Larario et 
 Apollonium et Christum, Abraham et Orpheum, et hujusmodi decs 
 habebat. " 
 
 2 Eus. Pr. Ev. vi. 3.
 
 I.] GREEK ORACLES. 55 
 
 of spiritual things can be made visible on earth. A 
 time shall come when even Delphi's mission shall 
 have been fulfilled ; and the god himself has pre- 
 dicted without despair the destruction of his holiest 
 shrine 
 
 " Ay, if ye bear it, if ye endure to know 
 That Delphi's self with all things gone must go, 
 Hear with strong heart the unfaltering song divine 
 Peal from the laurelled porch and shadowy shrine. 
 High in Jove's home the battling winds are torn, 
 From battling winds the bolts of Jove are born ; 
 These as he will on trees and towers he flings, 
 And quells the heart of lions or of kings ; 
 A thousand crags those flying flames confound, 
 A thousand navies in the deep are drowned, 
 And ocean's roaring billows, cloven apart, 
 Bear the bright death to Amphitrite's heart. 
 And thus, even thus, on some long-destined day, 
 Shall Delphi's beauty shrivel and burn away, 
 Shall Delphi's fame and fane from earth expire 
 At that bright bidding of celestial fire." 
 
 The ruin has been accomplished. All is gone, save 
 such cyclopean walls as date from days before 
 Apollo, such ineffaceable memories as Nature herself 
 has kept of the vanished shrine. 1 Only the Cory- 
 cian cave still shows, with its gleaming stalagmites, 
 as though the nymphs to whom it was hallowed 
 were sleeping there yet in stone ; the Phaedriacles 
 
 1 See Mr. Aubrey de Vere's Picturesque Sketches in Greece and 
 Turkey for a striking description of Delphian scenery. Other 
 details \vi\l be found in Foucart, pp. 113, 114 ; and cf. Paus. x. 33.
 
 56 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 or Shining Crags still flash the sunlight from their 
 streams that scatter into air; and dwellers at 
 Castri still swear that they have heard the rushing 
 Thyiades keep their rout upon Parnassus' brow. 
 
 III. 
 
 Even while Polygnotus was painting the Lesche 
 of the Cnidians at Delphi a man was talking in the 
 Athenian market-place, from whose powerful in- 
 dividuality, the most impressive which Greece had 
 ever known, were destined to flow streams of in- 
 fluence which should transform every department 
 of belief and thought. In tracing the history of 
 oracles we shall feel the influence of Socrates mainly 
 in two directions ; in his assertion of a personal and 
 spiritual relation between man and the unseen 
 world, an oracle not without us but within ; and in 
 his origination of the idea of science, of a habit of 
 mind which should refuse to accept any explanation 
 of phenomena which failed to confer the power of 
 predicting those phenomena or producing them anew. 
 We shall find that, instead of the old acceptance of 
 the responses as heaven-sent mysteries, and the old 
 demands for prophetic knowledge or for guidance in 
 the affairs of life, men are more and more concerned 
 with the questions : How can oracles be practically 
 produced ? and what relation between God and man 
 do they imply ? But first of all, the oracle which
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 57 
 
 concerned Socrates himself, which declared him to 
 be the wisest of mankind, is certainly one of the 
 most noticeable ever uttered at Delphi. The fact 
 that the man on whom the god had bestowed this 
 extreme laudation, a laudation paralleled only by 
 the mythical words addressed to Lycurgus, should a 
 few years afterwards have been put to death for 
 impiety, is surely one of a deeper significance than 
 has been often observed. It forms an overt and 
 impressive instance of that divergence between the 
 law and the prophets, between the letter and the 
 spirit, which is sure to occur in the history of all re- 
 ligions, and on the manner of whose settlement the 
 destiny of each religion in turn depends. In this 
 case the conditions of the conflict are striking and 
 unusual. 1 Socrates is accused of failing to honour 
 the gods of the State, and of introducing new gods 
 under the name of demons, or spirits, as we must 
 translate the word, since the title of demon has 
 acquired in the mouths of the Fathers a bad signi- 
 fication. He replies that he does honour the gods 
 of the State, as he understands them, and that the 
 spirit who speaks with him is an agency which he 
 cannot disavow. 
 
 The first count of the indictment brings into 
 prominence an obvious defect in the Greek religion, 
 
 1 On the trial of Socrates and kindred points see, besides Plato 
 (Apol.. Phacd., Euthyphr.) and Xenophon (Mem., Apol.\ Diog. 
 Laert. ii. 40. Diod. Sic. xiv. 37, Plut. De genio Socratis.
 
 58 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 the absence of any inspired text to which the 
 orthodox could refer. Homer and Hesiod, men 
 like ourselves, were the acknowledged authors of 
 the theology of Greece ; and when Homer and 
 Hesiod were respectfully received, but interpreted 
 with rationalising freedom, it was hard to know by 
 what canons to judge the interpreter. The second 
 count opens questions which go deeper still. It 
 was indeed true, though how far Anytus and 
 Meletus perceived it we cannot now know, that the 
 demon of Socrates indicated a recurrence to a wholly 
 different conception of the unseen world, a concep- 
 tion before which Zeus and Apollo, heaven-god and 
 sun -god, were one day to disappear. But who, 
 except Apollo himself, was to pronounce on such a 
 question ? It was he who was for the Hellenic 
 race the source of continuous revelation ; his utter- 
 ances were a sanction or a condemnation from which 
 there was no appeal. And in this debate his verdict 
 for the defendant had been already given. We 
 have heard of Christian theologians who are " more 
 orthodox than the Evangelists." In this case the 
 Athenian jurymen showed themselves more jealous 
 for the gods' honour than were the gods themselves. 
 To us, indeed, Socrates stands as the example of 
 the truest religious conservatism, of the temper of 
 mind which is able to cast its own original convic- 
 tions in an ancestral mould, and to find the last 
 outcome of speculation in the humility of a trustful
 
 I.] GEEEK OKACLES. 59 
 
 faith. No man, as is well known, ever professed a 
 more childlike confidence in the Delphian god than 
 he, and many a reader through many a century has 
 been moved to a smile which was not far from tears 
 at his account of his own mixture of conscientious 
 belief and blank bewilderment when the infallible 
 deity pronounced that Socrates was the wisest of 
 mankind. 
 
 A spirit balanced like that of Socrates could 
 hardly recur ; and the impulse given to philosophical 
 inquiry was certain to lead to many questionings as 
 to the true authority of the Delphic precepts. But 
 before we enter upon such controversies, let us trace 
 through some further phases the influence of the 
 oracles on public and private life. 
 
 For it does not appear that Delphi ceased to give 
 utterances on the public affairs of Greece so long as 
 Greece had public affairs worthy the notice of a god. 
 Oracles occur, with a less natural look than when 
 we met them in Herodotus, inserted as a kind of 
 unearthly evidence in the speeches of Aeschines and 
 Demosthenes. 1 Hyperides confidently recommends 
 his audience to check the account which a messenger 
 had brought of an oracle of Arnphiaraus by despatch- 
 ing another messenger with the same question to 
 Delphi. 2 Oracles, as we are informed, foretold the 
 
 1 e.g. Dem. Moid. 53 : T<# S^/j.y TWI> 'Ad^vaiuv 6 TOV AIDS arj/j-aivei, 
 etc. 
 
 2 Hyper. Euxen. p. 8.
 
 60 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [L 
 
 battle of Leuctra, 1 the battle of Chaeionea, 2 the 
 destruction of Thebes by Alexander. 3 Alexander 
 himself consulted Zeus Ammon not only on his own 
 parentage but as to the sources of the Nile, and an 
 ingenuous author regrets that, instead of seeking 
 information on this purely geographical problem, 
 which divided with Homer's birthplace the curiosity 
 of antiquity, Alexander did not employ his prestige 
 and his opportunities to get the question of the 
 origin of evil set at rest for ever. 4 We hear of 
 oracles given to Epaminondas, 5 to the orator Calli- 
 stratus, 6 and to Philip of Macedon. 7 To Cicero the 
 god gave advice which that sensitive statesman 
 would have done well to follow, to take his own 
 character and not the opinion of the multitude as 
 his guide in life. 8 
 
 Nero, too, consulted the Delphian oracle, which 
 pleased him by telling him to " beware of seventy- 
 three," 9 for he supposed that he was to reign till he 
 reached that year. The god, however, alluded to 
 the age of his successor Galba. Afterwards Nero, 
 grown to an overweening presumption which could 
 brook no rival worship, and become, as we may say, 
 Antapollo as well as Antichrist, murdered certain 
 men and cast them into the cleft of Delphi, thus 
 
 1 Paus. ix. 14. 2 Plut. Dem. 19. 3 Diod. xvii. 10. 
 
 * Max. Tyr. Diss. 25. 5 Paus. viii. 11. 6 Lycurg. Leocr. 160. 
 
 7 Diod. xvi. 91. 
 
 8 Plut. Cic. 5. 9 Suet. Nero, 38.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 61 
 
 extinguishing for a time the oracular power. 1 
 Plutarch, who was a contemporary of Nero's, 
 describes in several essays this lowest point of 
 oracular fortunes. Not Delphi alone, but the great 
 majority of Greek oracles, were at that time hushed, 
 a silence which Plutarch ascribes partly to the 
 tranquillity and depopulation of Greece, partly to a 
 casual deficiency of Demons, the immanent spirits 
 who give inspiration to the shrines, but who are 
 themselves liable to change of circumstances, or 
 even to death. 2 
 
 Whatever may have been the cause of this 
 oracular eclipse, it was of no long duration. The 
 oracle of Delphi seems to have been restored in the 
 reign of Trajan; and in Hadrian's days a characteristic 
 story shows that it had again become a centre of 
 distant inquirers. The main preoccupation of that 
 imperial scholar was the determination of Homer's 
 birthplace, and he put the question in person to the 
 Pythian priestess. The question had naturally been 
 asked before, and an old reply, purporting to have 
 been given to Homer himself, had already been 
 engraved on Homer's statue in the sacred precinct. 
 
 1 Dio Cass. Ixiii. 14. Suetonius and Dio Cassius do not know 
 why Nero destroyed Delphi ; but some such view as that given in 
 the text seems the only conceivable one. 
 
 2 Plut. de Defect, orac. 11. We may compare the way in which 
 Heliogabalus put an end to the oracle of the celestial goddess of the 
 Carthaginians, by insisting on marrying her statue, on the ground 
 that she was the Moon and he was the Sun. Herodian, v. 6.
 
 62 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 But on the inquiry of the sumptuous emperor the 
 priestess changed her tone, described Homer as " an 
 immortal siren," and very handsomely made him out 
 to be the grandson both of Nestor and of Odysseus. 1 
 It was Hadrian, too, who dropped a laurel-leaf at 
 Antioch into Daphne's stream, and when he drew it 
 out there was writ thereon a promise of his imperial 
 power. He choked up the fountain, that no man 
 might draw from its prophecy such a hope again. 2 
 But Hadrian's strangest achievement was to found 
 an oracle himself. The worshippers of Antinous 
 at Antinoe were taught to expect answers from 
 the deified boy : " They imagine," says the scornful 
 Origen, " that there breathes from Antinous a breath 
 divine." 3 
 
 For some time after Hadrian we hear little of 
 Delphi. But, on the other hand, stories of oracles 
 of varied character come to us from all parts of the 
 Eoman world. The hull Apis, " trampling the un- 
 showered grass with lowings loud," refused food from 
 the hand of Gernianicus, and thus predicted his ap- 
 proaching death. 4 Germanicus, too, drew the same 
 dark presage from the oracle at Colophon of the 
 Clarian Apollo. 5 And few oracular answers have 
 
 1 Anth. Pal. xiv. 102 : &yt>u><rTov //' epteis yeverjs KO.I irarpidos air)s 
 
 dfippoffiov Seipjjvos, etc. 
 
 2 Sozomen, Hist. Ecd. v. 19. 
 
 3 Orig. ad. Cels. ap. Wolff, de Noviss. p. 43, where see other 
 citations. 
 
 4 Plin. viii. 46. 5 Tac. Ann. ii. 54.
 
 i.] GEEEK ORACLES. 63 
 
 been more impressively recounted than that which 
 was given to Vespasian by the god Carmel, upon 
 Carmel, while the Eoman's dreams of empire were 
 still hidden in his heart. " Whatsoever it be, Ves- 
 pasian, that thou preparest now, whether to build 
 a house or to enlarge thy fields, or to get thee ser- 
 vants for thy need, there is given unto thee a mighty 
 home, and far-reaching borders, and a multitude of 
 men." 1 
 
 The same strange mingling of classic and Hebrew 
 memories, which the name of Carmel in this connec- 
 tion suggests, meets us when we find the god Bel at 
 Apamea, that same Baal " by whom the prophets 
 prophesied and walked after things that do not 
 profit " in Jeremiah's day, answering a Eoman 
 emperor in words drawn from Homer's song. For 
 it was thus that the struggling Macrinus received 
 the signal of his last and irretrievable defeat : 2 
 
 " Ah, king outworn ! young warriors press thee sore, 
 And age is on thee, and thou thyself no more." 
 
 In the private oracles, too, of these post -classical 
 times there is sometimes a touch of romance which 
 reminds us how much human emotion there has 
 
 1 Tac. Hist. ii. 78. Suetonius, Vesp. 5, speaks of Carmel's oracle, 
 though it seems that the answer was given after a simple extispi- 
 cium. 
 
 2 Dio Cass. Ixxviii. 40 ; Horn. II. viii. 103. Capitolinus, in his 
 life of Macrinus (c. 3), shows incidentally that under the Antonines 
 it was customary for the Roman proconsul of Africa to consult the 
 oracle of the Dea Caelestis Carthaginiensium.
 
 64 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 been in generations which we pass rapidly by ; how 
 earnest and great a thing many a man's mission has 
 seemed to him, which to us is merged in the dulness 
 and littleness of a declining age. There is something 
 of this pathos in the Pythia's message to the wander- 
 ing preacher, 1 "Do as thou now doest, until thou reach 
 the end of the world," and in the dream which came 
 to the weary statesman in Apollo Grannus' shrine, 2 
 and bade him write at the end of his life's long 
 labour Homer's words 
 
 " But Hector Zeus took forth and bare him far 
 From dust, and dying, and the storm of war." 
 
 And in the records of these last centuries of pagan- 
 ism we notice that the established oracles, the 
 orthodox forms of inquiry, are no longer enough to 
 satisfy the eagerness of men. In that upheaval of 
 the human spirit which bore to the surface so much 
 of falsehood and so much of truth, the religion 
 of Mithra, the religion of Serapis, the religion of 
 Christ, questions are asked from whatever source, 
 glimpses are sought through whatsoever in nature 
 has been deemed transparent to the influences of 
 an encompassing Power. It was in this age 3 that at 
 
 1 Dio Chrysostom, irepl <pvyrjs, p. 255. This message had, per- 
 haps, a political meaning. 
 
 2 Dio Cassius, ad fin. ; Horn. II. xi. 163. 
 
 3 The following examples of later oracles are not precisely syn- 
 chronous. They illustrate the character of a long period, and the 
 date at which we happen to hear of each has depended largely on 
 accident.
 
 i.] GEEEK ORACLES. 65 
 
 Hierapolis the " clear round stone of the onyx kind," 
 which Damascius describes, showed in its mirroring 
 depths letters which changed and came, or some- 
 times emitted that "thin and thrilling sound," 1 
 which was interpreted into the message of a slowly- 
 uttering Power. It was in this age that Chosroes 
 drew his divinations from the flickering of an eternal 
 fire. 2 It was in this age that the luminous meteor 
 would fall from the temple of Uranian Venus upon 
 Lebanon into her sacred lake beneath, and declare 
 her presence and promise her consenting grace. 3 It 
 was in this age that sealed letters containing num- 
 bered questions were sent to the temple of the sun 
 at Hierapolis, and answers were returned in order, 
 while the seals remained still intact. 4 It was in 
 this age that the famous oracle which predicted the 
 death of Valens was obtained by certain men who 
 sat round a table and noted letters of the alphabet 
 
 1 Damasc. ap. Phot. 348, tywvty Xe-rrrov ffipiff/j-aros. See also 
 Paus. vii. 21 , and compare Spartian, Did. Jul. 7, where a child sees 
 the images in a mirror applied to the top of his head rendered 
 abnormally sensitive by an unexplained process. 
 
 2 Procop. Bell. Pers. ii. 24. The practice of divining from 
 sacrificial flame or smoke was of course an old one, though rarely 
 connected with any regular seat of oracle. Cf. Herod, viii. 134. 
 The Trvpelov in the xupiov 'Adiappiydvuv, which Chosroes consulted, 
 was a fire worshipped in itself, and sought for oracular purposes. 
 
 3 Zosimus, ^TITI. i. 57. 
 
 4 Macrob. Sat. i. 23. Fontenelle's criticism (Histoire des Oracles) 
 on the answer given to Trajan is worth reading along with the 
 passage of Macrobius as an example of Voltairian mockery, equally 
 incisive and unjust. Cf. Amm. Marcell. xiv. 7 for a variety of 
 this form of response. 
 
 VOL. I. F
 
 66 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 which were spelt out for them by some automatic 
 agency, after a fashion which, from the description 
 of Ammianus we cannot precisely determine. 1 This 
 oracle, construed into a menace against a Christian 
 Emperor, gave rise to a persecution of paganism of 
 so severe a character that, inasmuch as philosophers 
 were believed especially to affect the forbidden 
 practice, the very repute or aspect of a philosophei, 
 as Sozomen tells us, 2 was enough to bring a man 
 under the notice of the police. This theological 
 rancour will the less surprise us, if we believe with 
 some modern criticism that St. Paul himself, under 
 the pseudonym of Simon Magus, had not escaped 
 the charge, at the hands of a polemical Father, of 
 causing the furniture of his house to move without 
 contact, in obedience to his unholy will. 3 
 
 Finally, to conclude this strange list with an 
 example which may by many minds be considered 
 as typical of the rest, it was in this age that, at the 
 Nymphaeum at Apollonia in Epirus, an Ignis Fatuus 4 
 gave by its waving approach and recession the re- 
 
 1 Amm. Marcell. xxix. 2, and xxxi. 1. 
 
 2 Sozomen. vi. 35. 
 
 3 Pseudo-Clemens, Hom.il. ii. 32. 638, T& kv oMq. tr/oetfy ws aiV6- 
 fiara (j>ep6^ieva irpbs \nr-rjpecria.v /3X^7re<r#ai iroiei. Cf. Reuan, Les 
 Apfitres, p. 153, note, etc. 
 
 4 There can, I think, be little doubt that such was the true cha- 
 rpcter of the flame which Dio Cassius (xli. 45) describes : irpbs 5e ras 
 tiri-xtiffeu TUV 6/j.ppuv tirau!;ei Kal ts fyos ^alperai, etc. Maury's ex- 
 planation (ii. 446) is slightly different. The fluctuations of the flame 
 on Etna (Paus. iii. 23) were an instance of a common volcanic 
 phenomenon.
 
 i.] GEEEK ORACLES. 67 
 
 sponses which a credulous people sought, except 
 that this Will-o'-the-Wisp, with unexpected diffi- 
 dence, refused to answer questions which had to do 
 with marriage or with death. 
 
 Further examples are not needed to prove what 
 the express statement of Tertullian and others tes- 
 tifies, 1 that the world was still " crowded with 
 oracles " in the first centuries of our era. We must 
 now retrace our steps and inquire with what eyes 
 the post-Socratic philosophers 2 regarded a pheno- 
 menon so opposed to ordinary notions of enlighten- 
 ment or progress. 
 
 Plato's theory of inspiration is too vast and far 
 reaching for discussion here. It must be enough to 
 say that, although oracles seemed to him to consti- 
 tute but a small part of the revelation offered by 
 God to man, he yet maintained to the full their 
 utility, and appeared to assume their truth. In his 
 
 1 Tertullian, de Anima, 46 : Nam et oraculis hoc genus stipatus 
 est orbis, etc. Cf. Plin. Hist. Aat. viii. 29 : Nee non et hodie mul- 
 tifariam ab oraculis medicina petitur. Pliny's oracular remedy for 
 hydrophobia (viii. 42) is not now pharmacopoeal. 
 
 2 For a good account of pre-Socratic views on this topic, see 
 Bouche-Leclerq, i. 29. But the fragments of the early sages tan- 
 talise even more than they instruct. A genuine page of Pythagoras 
 would here be beyond price. But it is the singular fate of the ori- 
 ginal Tpse of our Ipse Dixit that while the fact of his having said 
 anything is proverbially conclusive as to its truth we have no trust- 
 worthy means of knowing what he really did say. Later ages 
 depict him as the representative of continuous inward inspiration, 
 as a spirit linked with the Past, the Future, the Unseen, by a 
 vision which is presence and a commerce which is identity.
 
 68 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 ideal polity the oracles of the Delphian god were to 
 possess as high an authority, and to be as frequently 
 consulted, as in conservative Lacedsemon, and the 
 express decision of heaven was to be invoked in 
 matters of practical 1 as well as of ceremonial 2 import. 
 
 Aristotle, who possessed, and no man had a 
 better right to it, a religion all his own, and to 
 which he never converted anybody, delivered him- 
 self on the subject of oracular dreams with all his 
 sagacious ambiguity. "It is neither easy," he said, 
 "to despise such things, nor yet to believe them." 3 
 
 The schools of philosophy which were dominant 
 in Greece after the death of Aristotle occupied 
 themselves only in a secondary way with the ques- 
 tion of oracles. The Stoics and Academics were 
 disposed to uphold their validity on conservative 
 principles, utilising them as the most moral part of 
 the old creed, the point from which its junction 
 with philosophy was most easily made. Cicero's 
 treatise on divination contains a summary of the 
 conservative view, and it is to be remarked that 
 Cratippus and other Peripatetics disavowed the 
 grosser forms of divination, and believed only in 
 dreams and in the utterances of inspired frenzy. 4 
 
 1 Leges, vi. 914. 2 Leges, v. 428 ; Epinomis, 362. 
 
 3 Ar. Div. per Som. i. 1. He goes on to suggest that dreams, 
 though not 6e6Tre(j.irTa, may be SaifMvia. Elsewhere he hints that 
 the soul may draw her knowledge of the future from her own true 
 nature, which she resumes in sleep. See reff. ap. Bouche - Leclercq, 
 i. 55. * See Cic. de Div. i 3.
 
 [.] GREEK ORACLES. 69 
 
 Epicureans and Cynics, on the other hand, felt 
 no such need of maintaining connection with the 
 ancient orthodoxy, and allowed free play to their 
 wit in dealing with the oracular tradition, or even 
 considered it as a duty to disembarrass mankind of 
 this among other superstitions. The sceptic Lucian 
 is perhaps of too purely mocking a temper to allow 
 us to ascribe to him much earnestness of purpose 
 in the amusing burlesques * in which he depicts the 
 difficulty which Apollo feels in composing his 
 official hexameters, or his annoyance at being 
 obliged to hurry to his post of inspiration whenever 
 the priestess chooses " to chew the bay-leaf and 
 drink of the sacred spring." 2 
 
 The indignation of Oenomaus, a cynic of Had- 
 rian's age, is of a more genuine character, and there 
 
 1 Jupiter Tragoedus ; Bis Accusatus, etc. I need not remind 
 the reader that such scoffing treatment of oracles does not now 
 appear for the first time. The parodies in Aristophanes hit off 
 the pompous oracular obscurity as happily as Lucian's. A recent 
 German writer, on the other hand (Hoffmann, Oralcclwesen), main- 
 tains, hy precept and example, that no style can be more appro- 
 priate to serious topics. 
 
 2 Bis Acciisatus, 2. I may remark that although narcotics are 
 often used to produce abnormal utterance (Lane's Egyptians, ii. 33 ; 
 Maury, ii. 479), this mastication of a laurel-leaf or bay-leaf cannot 
 be considered as more than a symbolical survival of such a practice. 
 See, however, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 
 vol. iv. p. 152, note, for a most remarkable effect of laurel-water oil 
 a hysterical subject. The drinking of water (Iambi. Myst. Aeg. 
 72 ; Anacreon xiii.), or even of blood (Paus. ii. 24), would be 
 equally inoperative for occult purposes ; and though Pliny says 
 that the water in Apollo's cave at Colophon shortened the drinker's 
 life (Hist. Nat. ii. 106), it is difficult to imagine what natural salt 
 could produce hallucination.
 
 70 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 is much sarcastic humour in his account of his own 
 visit to the oracle of Apollo at Colophon ; how the 
 first response which he obtained might have been 
 taken at random from a book of elegant extracts, 
 and had also, to his great disgust, been delivered in 
 the self-same words to a commercial .traveller im- 
 mediately before him ; how, to his second question, 
 " Who will teach me wisdom ? " the god returned an 
 answer of almost meaningless imbecility ; and how, 
 when he finally asked, "Where shall I go now?" the 
 god told him " to draw a long bow and knock over 
 untold green -feeding ganders." 1 "And who in the 
 world," exclaims the indignant philosopher, "will 
 inform me what these untold ganders may mean ? " 
 
 Anecdotes like this may seem to warn us that 
 our subject is drawing to a close. And to students 
 of these declining schools of Greek philosophy, it 
 may well appear that the Greek spirit had burnt 
 itself out ; that all creeds and all speculations were 
 being enfeebled into an eclecticism or a scepticism, 
 both of them equally shallow and unreal. But this 
 was not to be. It was destined that every seed 
 which the great age of Greece had planted should 
 germinate and grow ; and a school was now to 
 arise which should take hold, as it were, of the 
 universe by a forgotten clew, and should give fuller 
 
 1 Eus. Pr. Ev. v. 23 
 
 K Tavva i Tp6<f>oio XSas ff(f>ev56vr)s ietj avyp
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 71 
 
 meaning and wider acceptance to some of the most 
 remarkable, though hitherto least noticed, utterances 
 of earlier men. We must go back as far as Hesiod 
 to understand the Neoplatonists. 
 
 For it is in Hesiod's celebrated story of the Ages 
 of the World 1 that we find the first Greek con- 
 ception, obscure though its details be, of a hier- 
 archy of spiritual beings who fill the unseen world, 
 and can discern and influence our own. The souls 
 of heroes, he says, become happy spirits who dwell 
 aloof from our sorrow; the souls of men of the 
 golden age become good and guardian spirits, who 
 flit over the earth and watch the just and unjust 
 deeds of men ; and the souls of men of the silver 
 age become an inferior class of spirits, themselves 
 mortal, yet deserving honour from mankind. 2 The 
 same strain of thought appears in Thales, who de- 
 fines demons as spiritual existences, heroes, as the 
 souls of men separated from the body. 3 Pythagoras 
 held much the same view, and, as we shall see below, 
 believed that in a certain sense these spirits were 
 occasionally to be seen or felt. 4 Heraclitus held 
 " that all things were full of souls and spirits," 5 and 
 
 1 Hes. Opp. 109, sqq. 
 
 2 It is uncertain where Hesiod places the abode of this class 
 of spirits ; the MSS. read tirixdbi'ioi, Gaisford (with Tzetzes) and 
 Wolff, de Daemonibus, viroxQbviot.. 
 
 3 Athenag. Legat. pro Christo, 21 ; cf. Plut. de Plac. Phil. i. 8. 
 
 4 Porph. vit. Pyth. 384 ; reff. ap. Wolff. For obsession, see 
 Pseudo-Zaleucus, ap. Stob. Flor. xliv. 20. 
 
 5 Diog. Laert. ix. 6.
 
 72 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 Empeclocles has described in lines of startling power 1 
 the wanderings through the universe of a lost and 
 homeless soul. Lastly, Plato, in the Upinomis, 2 brings 
 these theories into direct connection with our subject 
 by asserting that some of these spirits can read the 
 minds of living men, and are still liable to be grieved 
 by our wrong-doing, 3 while many of them appear to us 
 in sleep by visions, and are made known by voices 
 and oracles, in our health or sickness, and are about 
 us at our dying hour. Some are even visible occasion- 
 ally in waking reality, and then again disappear, and 
 cause perplexity by their obscure self-manifestation. 4 
 Opinions like these, existing in a corner of the 
 vast structure of Platonic thought, passed, as it 
 seems, for centuries with little notice. Almost as 
 unnoticed was the gradual development of the creed 
 known as Orphic, which seems to have begun with 
 making itself master of the ancient mysteries, and 
 
 1 Plut. de Iside, 26. 
 
 2 I believe, with Grote, etc., that the Epinomis is Plato's; at 
 any rate it was generally accepted as such in antiquity, which is 
 enough for the present purpose. 
 
 3 Epinomis, 361. fj-er^xofra 5 <ppovricreus 0av/j.aiTTTJs, are yevovs 
 6vra efyxafloOs re Kal /JLVTI/JLOVOS, yiyvwffKeiv fiev %v[jnra(rav rty rjfj.tT^pa.v 
 avra didvoiav \{yu/jiev, Kal r6v re Ka\bi> 7I/J.&V Kal dyadbv &/J.CL 
 6av/j,acrTus d<r7rdfecr0ai Kal TOV ff(p65pa Kanbv jufffiv, (Lire AI'TT^S 
 /Jierexovra ijS-ri, K.T.\. 
 
 4 Kal TOVT elvai r6re fjv bpu/j.tvov fiXXore 5 awoupvtpdev &5rj\oi> 
 yiyv&fjLevov, 6av/j.a KOLT afjLvdpav 6\fsiv Trapexfrfievov. The precise mean- 
 ing of a/j.v5pb fyis is not clear without further knowledge of the 
 phenomena which Plato had in his mind. Comp. the d\afj.ir7J Kal 
 d/jLvdpav fwV> &yTrep dvaBv/j-iaffiv, which is all that reincarnated 
 demons can look for (Plut. de Defect. 10).
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 73 
 
 only slowly spread through the profane world its 
 doctrine that this life is a purgation, that this body 
 is a sepulchre, 1 and that the Divinity, who sur- 
 rounds us like an ocean, is the hope and home of 
 the soul. But a time came when, under the im- 
 pulse of a great religious movement, these currents 
 of belief, which had so long run underground, broke 
 into sight again in an unlooked-for direction. These 
 tenets, and many more, were dwelt upon and ex- 
 panded with new conviction by that remarkable 
 series of men who furnish to the history of Greek 
 thought so singular a concluding chapter. And 
 no part, perhaps, of the Neoplatonic system shows 
 more clearly than their treatment of oracles how 
 profound a change the Greek religion has undergone 
 beneath all its apparent continuity. It so happens 
 that the Neoplatonic philosopher who has written 
 most on our present subject, was also a man whose 
 spiritual history affords a striking, perhaps an 
 unique, epitome of the several stages through which 
 the faith of Greece had up to that time passed. A 
 Syrian of noble descent, 2 powerful intelligence, and 
 
 1 See, for instance, Plato, Crat. 264. doKoucri pevroi /JLOI /iaXtoTa 
 Oe<r6ai oi a/j.(f>i 'Oprpta TOVTO 6vofMi. (<rw/m quasi ffrj/jia) tl;s diKyv 
 didotiffTjs TTJS ^i'%??s &v 5rj ZveKa. diSuffi, /c.T.X. 
 
 2 G. Wolff, Porph. de Phil, etc., has collected a mass of autho- 
 rities on Porphyry's life, and has ably discussed the sequence of his 
 writings. But beyond this tract I have found hardly anything 
 written on this part of my subject, on which I have dwelt the 
 more fully, inasmuch as it seems hitherto to have attracted so little 
 attention from scholars.
 
 74 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 upright character, Porphyry brought to the study 
 of the Greek religion little that was distinctively 
 Semitic, unless we so term the ardour of his reli- 
 gious impulses, and his profound conviction that 
 the one thing needful for man lay in the truest 
 knowledge attainable as to his relation to the divine. 
 Educated by Longinus, the last representative of 
 expiring classicism, the Syrian youth absorbed all, 
 and probably more than all, his master's faith. 
 Homer became to him what the Bible was to Luther ; 
 and he spent some years in producing the most per- 
 fect edition of the Iliad and Odyssey which had yet 
 appeared, in order that no fragment of the inspired 
 text might fail to render its full meaning. But, as 
 it seems, in the performance of this task his -faith 
 received the same shock which had been fatal to 
 the early piety of Greece. The behaviour of the gods 
 in Homer was too bad to be condoned. He dis- 
 cerned, what is probably the truth, that there must 
 be some explanation of these enormities which is 
 not visible on the surface, and that nothing short 
 of some profound mistake could claim acceptance 
 for such legends as those of Zeus and Kronos, of 
 Kronos and Uranus, amid so much else that is 
 majestic and pure. 1 Many philologists would answer 
 
 1 The impossibility of extracting a spiritual religion from 
 Homer is characteristically expressed by Proclus (ad. Tim. 20), 
 who calls Homer &ir6.Qei6.v re voepfnv Ka.1 forip> (pi\6cro(pov ovx otts re 
 ira.pa.8ovv tu.
 
 I.J GREEK ORACLES. 75 
 
 now that the mistake, the disease of language, lay 
 in the expression in terms of human appetite and 
 passion of the impersonal sequences of the great 
 phenomena of Nature ; that the most monstrous 
 tales of mythology mean nothing worse or more 
 surprising than that day follows night, and night 
 again succeeds to day. To Porphyry such explana- 
 tions were of course impossible. In default of 
 Sanskrit he betook himself to allegory. The truth 
 which must be somewhere in Homer, but which 
 plainly was not in the natural sense of the words, 
 must therefore be discoverable in a non-natural 
 sense. The cave of the nymphs, for instance, which 
 Homer describes as in Ithaca, is not in Ithaca. 
 Homer must, therefore, have meant by the cave 
 something quite other than a cave ; must have 
 meant, in fact, to signify by its inside the tem- 
 porary, by its outside the eternal world. But this 
 stage in Porphyry's development was not of long 
 duration. As his conscience had revolted from Homer 
 taken literally, so his intelligence revolted from 
 such a fashion of interpretation as this. But yet 
 he was not prepared to abandon the Greek reli- 
 gion. That religion, he thought, must possess some 
 authority, some sacred book, some standard of faith, 
 capable of being brought into harmony with the 
 philosophy which, equally with the religion itself, 
 was the tradition and inheritance of the race. And 
 such a rule of faith, if to be found anywhere, must
 
 76 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 be found in the direct communications of the gods 
 to men. Scattered and fragmentary though these 
 were, it must be possible to extract from them a 
 consistent system. 1 This is what he endeavoured 
 to do in his work, On the Philosophy to le drawn 
 from Oracles, a book of which large fragments remain 
 to us imbedded in Eusebius' treatise On the Prepa- 
 ration/or the Gospel. 
 
 Perhaps the best guarantee of the good faith in 
 which Porphyry undertook this task lies in the fact 
 that he afterwards recognised that he had been un- 
 successful. He acknowledged, in terms on which 
 his antagonist Eusebius has gladly seized, that the 
 mystery as to the authors of the responses was too 
 profound, the responses themselves were too unsatis- 
 factory, to admit of the construction from them of 
 a definite and lofty faith. Yet there is one point on 
 which, though his inferences undergo much modi- 
 fication, his testimony remains practically the same. 2 
 This testimony, based, as he implies and his bio- 
 graphers assert, on personal experience, 3 is mainly 
 concerned with the phenomena of possession or in- 
 spiration by an unseen power. These phenomena, 
 
 1 ws &v IK [ibvov fieflalov T&S eXiriSas TOV <ru9rjt>ai apv&/j.evos (Eus. 
 Pr. Ev. iv. 6) is the strong expression which Porphyry gives to his 
 sense of the importance of this inquiry. 
 
 2 There is one sentence in the epistle to Anebo which would 
 suggest a contrary view, but the later De Abstinentia, etc., seem to 
 me to justify the statement in the text. 
 
 3 See, for instance, Eus. Pr. Ev. iv. 6 : /idXiara yap 0iXo<r<5</>p 
 DITTOS T&V Ka.6' TjfjLM doKei KO.I Salfj.o<n Kal ols <j)f]<n Oeols uf
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 77 
 
 so deeply involved in the conception of oracles, and 
 which we must now discuss, are familiar to the 
 ethnologist in almost every region of the globe. 
 The savage, readily investing any unusual or strik- 
 ing object in nature with a spirit of its own, is 
 likely to suppose further that a spirit's temporary 
 presence may be the cause of any unusual act or 
 condition of a human being. Even so slight an 
 abnormality as the act of sneezing has generally 
 been held to indicate the operation or the invasion 
 of a god. And when we come to graver departures 
 from ordinary well-being nightmare, consumption, 
 epilepsy, or madness the notion that a disease- 
 spirit has entered the sufferer becomes more and 
 more obvious. Savings which possess no applica- 
 bility to surrounding facts are naturally held to be 
 the utterances of some remote intelligence. Such 
 ravings, when they have once become an object of 
 reverence, may be artificially reproduced by drugs 
 or other stimuli, and we may thus arrive at the 
 belief in inspiration by an easy road. 1 
 
 There are traces in Greece of something of this 
 reverence for disease, but they are faint and few ; 
 and the Greek ideal of soundness in mind and body, 
 the Greek reverence for beauty and strength, seem 
 to have characterised the race from a very early 
 
 1 On this subject see Prim. Cult. chap. xiv. ; Lubbock, Origin 
 of Civilisation, pp. 252-5, etc. The Homeric phrase ffrv-yepbs dt ol 
 %XP ae Sal/j,<jijv (Od. v. 396) seems to be the Greek expression which 
 comes nearest to the doctrine of disease-spirits.
 
 78 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 period. It is possible indeed that the first tradi- 
 tion of 
 
 " Blind Thamyris and blind Mseonides, 
 And Teiresias and Phineus, prophets old," 
 
 may have represented a primitive idea that the 
 " celestial light shone inward " when the orbs of 
 vision were darkened. But the legends which have 
 reached us scarcely connect Homer's blindness with 
 his song, and ascribe the three prophets' loss of 
 sight to their own vanity or imprudence. In 
 nymph -possession, which, in spite of Pausanias' 
 statement, is perhaps an older phenomenon than 
 Apolline possession, we find delirium honoured, but 
 it is a delirium proceeding rather from the inhala- 
 tion of noxious vapours than from actual disease. 1 
 And in the choice of the Pythian priestess while 
 we find that care is taken that no complication shall 
 be introduced into the process of oracular inquiry 
 by her youth or good looks, 2 there is little evi- 
 dence to show that any preference was given to 
 epileptics. 3 Still less can we trace any such reason 
 
 1 See Maury, ii. 475. Nymph-oracles were especially common 
 in Bceotia, where there were many caves and springs. Paus. ix. 
 2 , etc. The passage from Hippocrates, De Morbo Sacro, cited by 
 Maury, ii. 470, is interesting from its precise parallelism with 
 savage beliefs, but cannot be pressed as an authority for primitive 
 tradition. 
 
 2 Diod. Sic. xvi. 27. 
 
 8 Maury (ii. 514) cites Plut. de Defect, orac. 46, and Schol. Ar. 
 Plut. 39, in defence of the view that a hysterical subject was chosen 
 as Pythia. But Plutarch expressly says (de Defect. 50) that it was 
 necessary that the Pythia should be free from perturbation when
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 79 
 
 of choice in other oracular sanctuaries. We find 
 here, in fact, the same uncertainty which hangs over 
 the principle of selection of the god's mouthpiece 
 in other shahmanistic countries, where the medicine- 
 man or angekok is sometimes described as haggard 
 and nervous, sometimes as in no way distinguish- 
 able from his less gifted neighbours. 
 
 Nor, on the other hand, do we find in Greece 
 much trace of that other kind of possession of which 
 the Hebrew prophets are our great example, where 
 a peculiar loftiness of mind and character seem to 
 point the prophet out as a fitting exponent of the 
 will of heaven, and a sudden impulse gives vent in 
 words, almost unconscious, to thoughts which seem 
 no less than divine, The majestic picture of Am- 
 phiaraus in the Seven against Thebes, the tragic 
 personality of Cassandra in the Agamemnon, are 
 the nearest parallels which Greece offers to an 
 Elijah or a Jeremiah. 1 These, however, are mythi- 
 
 called on to prophesy, and the Scholion on Aristophanes is equally 
 indecent and unphysiological. Moreover, Plutarch speaks of the 
 custom of pouring cold water over the priestess in order to ascer- 
 tain by her healthy way of shuddering that she was sound in body 
 and mind. This same test was applied to goats, etc., when about 
 to be sacrificed. There is no doubt evidence (cf. Maury, ii. 461) 
 that the faculty of divination was supposed to be hereditary in 
 certain families (perhaps even in certain localities, Herod, i. 78), 
 but I cannot find that members of such families were sought for as 
 priests in oracular seats. 
 
 1 The exclamation of Helen (Od. xv. 172) 
 
 K\VT [lev, avrap 
 
 d6d.fa.Toi.
 
 80 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [L 
 
 cal characters ; and so little was the gift of pro- 
 phecy associated with moral greatness in later days, 
 that while Plato attributes it to the action of the 
 divinity, Aristotle feels at liberty to refer it to bile. 1 
 It were much to be wished that some system- 
 atic discussion of the subject had reached us from 
 classical times. But none seems to have been com- 
 posed, at any rate none has come down to us, till 
 Plutarch's inquiry as to the causes of the general 
 cessation of oracles in his age. 2 Plutarch's temper 
 is conservative and orthodox, but we find, neverthe- 
 less, that he has begun to doubt whether Apollo is 
 in every case the inspiring spirit. On the contrary, 
 he thinks that sometimes this is plainly not the 
 case, as in one instance where the Pythia, forced to 
 prophesy while under the possession of a dumb and 
 evil spirit, went into convulsions and soon afterwards 
 died. And he recurs to a doctrine, rendered ortho- 
 dox, as we have already seen, by its appearance in 
 Hesiod, but little dwelt on in classical times, a doc- 
 trine which peoples the invisible world with a hier- 
 archy of spirits of differing character and power. 
 These spirits, he believes, give oracles, whose cha- 
 
 is as it were a naive introduction to the art of prophecy. Mene- 
 laus, when appealed to as to the meaning of the portent observed, 
 is perplexed : the more confident Helen volunteers an explanation, 
 and impassioned rhetoric melts into inspired prediction. 
 
 1 Plat. Ion. 5. Ar. Probl. xxx. I cannot dwell here on Plat. 
 Phaedr. 153, and similar passages, which suggest a theory of in- 
 spiration which would carry us far beyond the present topic. 
 
 2 Plut. de Defect, orac. ; de Pyth. ; de El apud Delphos.
 
 I.] GREEK ORACLES. 81 
 
 racter therefore varies with the character and con- 
 dition of the inspiring spirit ; and of this it is hard 
 to judge except inferentially, since spirits are apt to 
 assume the names of gods on whom they in some 
 way depend, though they may by no means resemble 
 them in character or power. Nay, spirits are not 
 necessarily immortal, and the death of a resident 
 spirit may have the effect of closing an oracular 
 shrine. The death of Pan himself was announced 
 by a flying voice to Thamus, a sailor, " about the 
 isles Echinades ;" he was told to tell it at Palodes, 
 and when the ship reached Palodes there was a 
 dead calm. He cried out that Pan was dead, and 
 there was a wailing in all the air. 1 
 
 In Plutarch, too, we perceive a growing disposi- 
 tion to dwell on a class of manifestations of which 
 we have heard little since Homer's time, evocations 
 of the visible spirits of the dead. 2 Certain places, 
 it seems, were consecrated by immemorial belief to 
 this solemn ceremony. At Cumae, 3 at Phigalea, 4 at 
 Heraclea, 5 on the river Acheron, by the lake Aver- 
 
 1 This quasi-human character of Pan (Herod, ii. 146 ; Find. Fr. 
 68 ; Hyg. Fab. 224), coupled with the indefinite majesty which his 
 name suggested, seems to have been veiy impressive to the later 
 Greeks. An oracle quoted by Porphyry (ap. Eus. Pr. Ev.) eSxofj.a.i 
 /3/>or6s yeyds liavl ffii^nros Off /c.r.X., is curiously parallel to some 
 Christian hymns in its triumphant sense of human kinship with 
 the divinity. 
 
 2 Quaest. Rom. ; de Defect. Orac. ; de Scr. Num. Find. 
 
 3 Diod. Sic. iv. 22 ; Ephor. ap. Strab. v. 244. 
 
 4 Paus. iii. 17. B Plut. dm. 6. 
 
 VOL. I. G
 
 82 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 nus, 1 men strove to recall for a moment the souls 
 who had passed away, sometimes, as Periander 
 sought Melissa, 2 in need of the accustomed wifely 
 counsel ; sometimes, as Pausanias sought Cleonice, 3 
 goaded by passionate remorse ; or sometimes with 
 no care to question, with no need to confess or 
 to be forgiven, but as, in one form of the legend, 
 Orpheus sought Eurydice, 4 travelling to the Thespro- 
 tiau Aornus, in the hope that her spirit would rise 
 and look on him once again, and waiting for one 
 who came not, and dying in a vain appeal. 
 
 But on such stories as these Plutarch will not 
 dogmatically judge ; he remarks only, and the re- 
 mark was more novel then than now, that we know 
 as yet no limit to the communications of soul with 
 soul. 
 
 This transitional position of Plutarch may pre- 
 pare us for the still wider divergence from ancient 
 orthodoxy which we find in Porphyry. Porphyry 
 is indeed anxious to claim for oracular utterances as 
 high an authority as possible ; and he continues to 
 ascribe many of them to Apollo himself. But he 
 no longer restricts the phenomena of possession and 
 inspiration within the traditional limits as regards 
 either their time, their place, or their author. He 
 maintains that these phenomena may be reproduced 
 
 1 Liv. xxiv. 12, etc. The origin of this veKvopavreiov was pro- 
 bably Greek. See reff. ap. Maury, ii. 467. 
 
 2 Diod. iv. 22 ; Herod, v. 92, gives a rather different stoiy. 
 
 3 Plut. dm. 6. Pans. iii. 17. 4 Paus. ix. 30.
 
 I.] GREEK ORACLES. 83 
 
 according to certain rules at almost any place and 
 time, and that the spirits who cause them are of very 
 multifarious character. I shall give his view at 
 some length, as it forms by far the most careful in- 
 quiry into the nature of Greek oracles which has 
 come down to us from an age in which they existed 
 still; and it happens also that while the grace of 
 Plutarch's style has made his essays on the same 
 subject familiar to all, the post-classical date and 
 style of Porphyry and Eusebius have prevented their 
 more serious treatises from attracting much attention 
 from English scholars. 
 
 According to Porphyry, then, the oracular or 
 communicating demon or spirit, we must adopt 
 spirit as the word of wider meaning, manifests 
 himself in several ways. Sometimes he speaks 
 through the mouth of the entranced " recipient," 1 
 sometimes he shows himself in an immaterial, or 
 even in a material form, apparently according to 
 his own rank in the invisible world. 2 The recipient 
 
 , from S^xo/ucu, is the word generally used for the human 
 intermediary between the god or spirit and the inquirers. See Lob. 
 Agl. p. 108, on the corresponding word /cara/3oXt/cos for the spirit 
 who is thus received for a time into a human being's organism. 
 Cf. also Firmicus Maternus De errore prof, relig. 13: "Serapis 
 vocatus et iutra corpus hominis conlatus talia respondit ; " and the 
 phrase tyKa.rox'no'a-s T$ Sapdmdi (Inscr. Smyrn. 3163, ap. "Wolff, 
 de Nov. ) 
 
 2 Porphyry calls these inferior spirits 5ai/j.6via v\u<d, and Proclus 
 (ad Tim. 142) defines the distinction thus : ruv Sai/j.6vuv ol ptv ev ry 
 ffvardaei ir\0i> rb irvpiov ^xovres oparol 8vres otidtv fyovviv dvriTi/Trws, 
 ol 8 Kal 7175 /JieTei\ri<t>6Tes viroiriirTovcL ry a<j>TJ. It is only the spirits
 
 84 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 falls into a state of trance, mixed sometimes with 
 exhausting agitation or struggle, 1 as in the case of 
 the Pythia. And the importance attached to a 
 right choice of time and circumstances for the in- 
 duction of this trance reminds us of Plutarch's 
 story, already mentioned, of the death of a Pythian 
 priestess compelled to prophesy when possessed by 
 an evil spirit. Another inconvenience in choosing 
 a wrong time seems to have been that false answers 
 were then given by the spirit, who, however, would 
 warn the auditors that he could not give informa- 
 tion, 2 or even that he would certainly tell falsehoods, 3 
 on that particular occasion. Porphyry attributes 
 this occasional falsity to some defect in the surround- 
 ing conditions, 4 which confuses the spirit, and pre- 
 vents him from speaking truly. For on descending 
 into our atmosphere the spirits become subject to 
 the laws and influences which rule mankind, and 
 
 who partake of earthly nature who are capable of being touched. 
 These spirits may be of a rank inferior to mankind ; Proclus, ad 
 Tim. 24, calls them \f/vx&s airoT<sx.ov(ras ptv TOV avOpuiriKov vov, Trpos 
 5 TCI fya exowas SidOefftv. 
 
 1 ov <ptpei fie TOV Sox^os ij rdXaiva KapSLa (Procl. ad Rempubli- 
 cam, 380) is the exclamation of a spirit whose recipient can no 
 longer sustain his presence. 
 
 2 Eus. Pr. Ev. vi. 5, <ryfj.epov OVK tireoiice \tyeiv &<TTpu>v odot- 
 Ipriv. 
 
 3 Ibid. K\eie jiiyv /cdpros re \6yuv ' \f/evdr)yopa Xef w : ' ' Try no 
 longer to enchain me with your words ; I shall tell you falsehoods. " 
 
 4 i} /caraorclo-ts TOV irep^-xovros. Eus. Pr. Ev. iv. 5, Kal TO 
 irepi.tx ov ava-fKa^ov \ftev5r) ylvecrOai rot fjiavreia, ofi TOI>S irapovra.? 
 eKbvras TTpoffTiBtvcu. TO ^eCSoy. . . . irtyijvfv &pa, adds Porphyry 
 with satisfaction, irodfv iroXXct/as TO \f?evdos (riWoTarai.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 85 
 
 are not therefore entirely free agents. 1 When a 
 confusion of this kind occurs, the prudent inquirer 
 should defer his researches, a rule with which in- 
 experienced investigators fail to comply. 2 
 
 Let us suppose, however, that a favourable day 
 has been secured, and also, not less important, a 
 "guileless intermediary." 3 Some confined space 
 would then be selected for the expected manifesta- 
 tions, " so that the influence should not be too widely 
 diffused." 4 This place seems sometimes to have 
 been made dark, a circumstance which has not 
 escaped the satire of the Christian controversialist, 5 
 whose derision is still further excited by the " bar- 
 barous yells and singing " 6 with which the unseen 
 visitant was allured, a characteristic, it may be 
 noticed in passing, of shahmanistic practices, where- 
 ever they have been found to prevail. During 
 these proceedings the human agent appears to have 
 
 1 Porph. ap. Philoponum, de Mundi Great, iv. 20, with the com- 
 ments of Philoponus, whose main objection to these theories lies 
 in their interference with the freedom of the will. 
 
 2 Pr. Ev. vi. 5, ol 5 ^voi/ffi Kal \*yeu> avayKafrovcn Sib ri\v 
 d/J.a6iav. 
 
 3 Ibid. v. 8, /cdTTTrecrev dfjL<f>l K^p-qvov d/zw/^roio So^os. 
 
 4 Kal HIM. ciTrocrTTjpifbJ'Tes avro evravOa i-v TUX, orep^y X^P^V &<rre 
 fj.^ ^TTtTroXi) diaxewdcu, Iamb, de Myst. iii. 14. The maxims of 
 lamblichus in these matters are in complete conformity with those 
 of Porphyry. 
 
 6 Eus. Pr. Ev. iv. 1, Kal rb cr/c6ros 5 ov /u/cpoi ffwepyeiv TJJ Ka6' 
 tavrobs virod<rei. 
 
 6 Ibid, V. 12, dcn^ots re Kal /3ap/3dpois ^%ots re Kal (jxavais
 
 86 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 fallen into an abnormal slumber, which extinguished 
 for the time his own identity, and allowed the spirit 
 to speak through his lips, " to contrive a voice for 
 himself through a mortal instrument." 1 In such 
 speeches, of which several are preserved to us, the 
 informing spirit alludes to the human being through 
 whom he is speaking in the third person, as " the 
 mortal" or "the recipient;" of himself he speaks in 
 the first person, or occasionally in the third person, 
 as "the god" or "the king." 2 
 
 The controlling spirits do not, however, always 
 content themselves with this vicarious utterance. 
 They appear sometimes, as already indicated, in 
 visible and tangible form. Of this phase of the 
 proceedings, however, Eusebius has preserved to us 
 but scanty notices. His mind is preoccupied with 
 the presumption and bizarrerie of the spirits, who 
 sometimes profess themselves to be (for instance) 
 the sun and moon ; sometimes insist on being called 
 by barbarous names, and talking a barbarous jargon. 3 
 The precise nature of such appearances had been, it 
 seems, in dispute since the days of Pythagoras, who 
 conjectured that the apparition was an emanation from 
 the spirit, but not, strictly speaking, the spirit itself. 4 
 
 1 Ibid. v. 8 av\ov 5' K pportoio <f>i\r)v (reKvuffaro (puvriv. 
 
 2 (f&s, Pporos, Soxffa. PT. Ev. v. 9, \vere \oiirt>i> &VO.KTO., /3/Joros 
 Oeov ofatri xwpet. 
 
 3 Pr. Ev. v. 10 (quoting Porph. ad Aneb.), rl 8t ical ra da-rj/j-a 
 /SotfXerai 6v6/JMra Kal TWV dcr^fiuv T& pdpflapa wpb rdv e/cdcrry 
 oliceluv, etc. 
 
 4 Pythag. ap. Aen. Gaz. ap. Theophr. p. 61, Boisson. irbrepov
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 87 
 
 In the Ncoplatonic view, these spirits entered by 
 a process of " introduction " l into a material body 
 temporarily prepared for them ; or sometimes it was 
 said that " the pure flame was compressed into a 
 sacred Form." 2 Those spirits who had already been 
 accustomed to appear were best instructed as to how 
 to appear again ; but some of them were inclined to 
 mischief, especially if the persons present showed a 
 careless temper. 3 
 
 6eol f) dai/jLoves r) TO&TUV dTrdfyoiai, Kal Trb-repov Saifjuav els &\\os elvai 
 SOKUV rj Tro\\ol Kal ff<pdiv avT&v 5ia.<j)poi>Tes, ol fiv ij/Jiepoi, ol d' aypioi, 
 Kal ol fj^v tvioTe Ta\T)6fj XtyovTes ol d' SXws Ki/3di>]\oi .... r^Xos 
 trpoterai dalfiovos dwbfipoiav elvai TO <j>d(r/J,a. 
 
 1 dffKpLvis. See Lob. Agl. p. 730. 
 
 2 Pr. Ev. v. 8 : iepoicri TVTTOLS 
 
 <rvv6\ij3ofj.4i>ov irvpos ayvov. 
 
 I may just notice here the connection between this idea of the 
 entrance of a spirit into a quasi-human form built up for the occa- 
 sion, and that recrudescence of idol-worship which marks one phase 
 of Neoplatonism. In an age when such primitive practices as 
 "carrying the dried corpse of a parent round the fields that he 
 might see the state of the crops " (Spencer's Sociology, 154), were 
 no longer possible, this new method of giving temporary materiality 
 to disembodied intelligences suggested afresh that it might be prac- 
 ticable so to prepare an image as that a spirit would be content to 
 live there permanently. An oracle in Pausanias (ix. 38) curiously 
 illustrates this view of statues. The land of the Orchomenians was 
 infested by a spirit which sat on a stone. The Pythia ordered them 
 to make a brazen image of the spectre and fasten it with iron to 
 the stone. The spirit would still be there, but he would now be 
 permanently fixed down, and, being enclosed in a statue, he would 
 no longer form an obnoxious spectacle. 
 
 3 Pr. Ev. v. 8, e0os Troi-rjffdfjLfvoi TTJS eavr&v irapovaias ev/jLaOearepov 
 </>oiTtD<rt Kal yttciXtcrra eav Kal tftfoei dyaOol Tvyx6.vu<nv, ol 8t, KO.V HOos 
 <?XW(Ti ToD irapayiverrOai, P\dj3i)i> riva, irpoOvfJiovvTai TroteZV, Kal /idXt<rra 
 tdv d/j*\{ffTep6ii TIS SoKrj dvaffTptfacrdai ev rots Trpdy/jaai. This notion
 
 88 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 After a time the spirit becomes anxious to depart ; 
 but is not always able to quit the intermediary as 
 promptly as it desires. We possess several oracles 
 uttered under these circumstances, and giving direc- 
 tions which we can but imperfectly understand. It 
 appears that the recipient, for what reason we are left 
 to conjecture, was in some way bound with withes 
 and enveloped in fine linen, which had to be cut 
 and unwrapped at the end of the ceremony. 1 The 
 human agent had then to be set on his feet and taken 
 from the corner where he had been outstretched, and 
 a singular collaboration seems to have taken place, 
 the spirit giving his orders to the bystanders by a 
 voice issuing from the recipient's still senseless form. 2 
 At last the spirit departs, and the recipient is set free. 
 
 Eusebius, in a passage marked by strong common 
 sense, 3 has pointed out some obvious objections to 
 oracles obtained in this fashion. Some of these so- 
 
 of a congruity between the inquirer and the responding spirit is 
 curiously illustrated by a story of Caracalla (Dio Cass. Ixxvii.), who 
 fiXXas rt rivas Kal TTJV TOV Trarpbs TOV re Ko,uyu65ou 
 elire 8' ovv ovSels avrif ov5v, irXrjj' TOU Ko/j,/j.68ov. *E^>ij yap 
 aive 5ta?j affaov, 6eol ty alrouffi ^effipv. No ghost would 
 address Caracalla except the ghost of Commodus, who spoke to 
 denounce to him his doom. 
 
 1 Pr, Ev. v. 8 : ira^eo 877 irepltfrpuv ddpuv, ava.Tra.ve dt 0wra, 
 
 OafJLVUV tK\IJ<l)V TToXlOC TVTTOV, 7}$ OTTO JvidW 
 
 NeiXalrjv 666i>rjv x e pvi" ort/Sapws airaeipas. 
 
 And again, when the bystanders delay the release, the spirit 
 exclaims crivdovos a/j.-n-^Tacrov ve<f>f\r]v, \vff6v re doxfja- 
 
 2 Pr. Ev. v. 8 ; v\f/i7rpupov alpe rapffov, tcrx e P<il;u> e/c fj.vx&v. And 
 
 again, (Lpare <f>uTO, yairjdev dvaa"r^<ravTe^ frciipoi, etc. 
 
 3 Pr. Ev. iv. 2.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 89 
 
 called " recipients," it appears, had been put to the 
 torture and had made damaging confessions. Further 
 penalties had induced them to explain how their 
 fraud was carried out. The darkness and secrecy 
 of the proceedings were in any case suspicious ; and 
 the futility of many of the answers obtained, or their 
 evident adaptation to the wishes of the inquirers, 
 pointed too plainly to their human origin. The 
 actual method of producing certain phenomena has 
 exercised the ingenuity of other Fathers. Thus 
 figures could be shown in a bowl of water by using 
 a moveable bottom, or lights could be made to fly 
 about in a dark room by releasing a vulture with 
 flaming tow tied to its claws. 1 
 
 But in spite of these contemptuous criticisms 
 the Christian Fathers, as is well known, were dis- 
 posed to believe in the genuineness of some at least 
 of these communications, and showed much anxiety 
 to induce the oracles, which often admitted the great- 
 ness and wisdom, to acknowledge also the divinity, 
 of Christ. 2 
 
 Eusebius himself, in another work, 3 adduces a 
 letter of Constautine's describing an oracle said to 
 have been uttered directly by Apollo "from a 
 certain dark hole," in which the god asserted that 
 he could no longer speak the truth on account of 
 
 1 Pseudo-Origen, Philosophumena, p. 73. 
 
 2 Pr. Ev. iv. iii. 7. Aug. de Civit. Dei, xix. 23. Lact. Instil. 
 iv. 13. 
 
 3 Vit. Const, ii. 50 ; cf. Wolff, de Noviss. p. 4.
 
 90 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 the number of saints who were now on the earth. 
 But this has so little the air of an Apolline mani- 
 festation that it is suspected that a Christian man 
 had crept into a cave and delivered this unauthor- 
 ised response with a polemical object. 1 
 
 Into so obscure, so undignified a region of mingled 
 fraud and mystery does it seem that, by the admis- 
 sion of friends and foes alike, the oracles of Greece 
 had by this time fallen. Compared with what had 
 been stripped away, that which was left may seem 
 to us like the narrow vault of the Delian sanctuary 
 compared with the ruined glories of that temple- 
 covered isle. There was not, indeed, in Porphyry's 
 view anything inconsistent with the occasional pre- 
 sence and counsel of a lofty and a guardian spirit. 
 There was nothing which need make him doubt 
 that the Greeks had been led upwards through their 
 long history by some providential power. Nay, he 
 himself cites, as we shall see, recent oracles higher 
 in tone than any which have preceded them. Yet 
 as compared with the early ardour of that imagina- 
 tive belief which peopled heaven with gods and 
 earth with heroes, we feel that we are now sent 
 back to "beggarly elements;" that the task of sift- 
 ing truth from falsehood amid so much deception 
 and incompetency on the part both of visible and 
 
 1 The well-known story, Tpr)y6pio$ ry "2a.Ta.vq. E?<reX0e Greg. 
 Nyss. 548 (and to be found in all lives of Gregory Thaumaturgus), 
 illustrates this Christian rivalry with pagan oracles or apparitions.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 91 
 
 invisible agencies, 1 of erecting a consistent creed on 
 such mean and shifting foundations, might well 
 rebut even the patient ardour of this most untiring 
 of " seekers after God." And when we see him re- 
 cognising all this with painful clearness, giving vent, 
 in that letter to Anebo which is so striking an 
 example of absolute candour in an unscrupulous 
 and polemic age, to his despair at the obscurity 
 which seems to deepen as he proceeds, we cannot but 
 wonder that we do not see him turn to take refuge in 
 the new religion with its offers of certainty and peace. 
 Why, we shall often ask, should men so much 
 in earnest as the Neoplatonists have taken, with the 
 gospel before them, the side they took ? Why 
 should they have preferred to infuse another alle- 
 gory into the old myths which had endured so 
 much? to force the Pythian Apollo, so simple- 
 hearted through all his official ambiguity, to strain 
 his hexameters into the ineffable yearnings of a 
 theosophic age ? For we seem to see the issues so 
 clearly ! when we take up Augustine instead of 
 Proclus we feel so instantly that we have changed to 
 the winning side ! But to Greek minds and the glory 
 of the Syrian Porphyry was that, of all barbarians, 
 he became the most intensely Greek -the struggle 
 
 1 The disappointing falsity of the manifesting spirits who pre- 
 tended to be the souls of departed friends, etc., is often alluded to ; 
 e.g. in the ad Ancbonem : ol d eTvai fjv u6ev ridevrai rb virrjKoov 
 ytvos 6.Tro.TT]\TJs (pvireus, iravT&/j.op(j>6v re Kal iroXv-rpoirov, VT 
 Kal 6eovs Kal 5a.lfj.ovas Kal ^vxas reOt^KOTuv, etc.
 
 92 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 presented itself in a very different fashion. They 
 were fighting not for an effete mythology, but for 
 the whole Past of Greece ; nay, as it seemed in a 
 certain sense, for the civilisation of the world. The 
 repulse of Xerxes had stirred in the Greeks the con- 
 sciousness of their uniqueness as compared with the 
 barbarism on every side. And now, when Hellen- 
 ism was visibly dying away, there awoke in the 
 remaining Greeks a still more momentous concep- 
 tion, the conception of the uniqueness and precious- 
 ness of Greek life not only in space but in duration, 
 as compared not only with its barbarian compeers, 
 but with the probable future of the world. It was 
 no longer against the Great King, but against Time 
 itself, that the unequal battle must be waged. And 
 while Time's impersonal touch was slowly laid upon 
 all the glory which had been, a more personal foe 
 was seen advancing from the same East from whose 
 onset Greece had already escaped, "but so as by 
 fire." Christ, like Xerxes, came against the Greek 
 spirit 2iy>t77yei>e? ap/jia Sicotccov, driving a Syrian 
 car; the tide of conquest was rolling back again, 
 and the East was claiming an empire such as the 
 West had never won. 
 
 We, indeed, knowing all the flower of Euro- 
 pean Christianity in Dante's age, all its ripening 
 fruit in our own, may see that this time from the 
 East light came ; we may trust and claim that we 
 are living now among the scattered forerunners of
 
 i.] GKEEK OEACLES. 93 
 
 such types of beauty and of goodness as Athens 
 never knew. But if so much even of our own 
 ideal is in the future still, how must it have been to 
 those whose longest outlook could not overpass the 
 dreary centuries of barbarism and decay ? So vast 
 a spiritual revolution must needs bring to souls of 
 differing temper very different fates. Happy were 
 they who, like Augustine and Origen, could frankly 
 desert the old things and rejoice that all things 
 were become new. Happy, too, were those few 
 saintly souls an Antoninus or a Plotinus whose 
 lofty calm no spiritual revolution seemed able to 
 reach or mar. But the pathetic destiny was that 
 of men like Julian or Porphyry, men who were dis- 
 qualified from leading the race onward into a noble 
 future merely because they so well knew and loved 
 an only less noble past. 
 
 And yet it is not for long that we can take 
 Porphyry as an example of a man wandering in the 
 twilight between "dying lights and dawning," be- 
 tween an outworn and an untried faith. The last 
 chapter in the history of oracles is strangely con- 
 nected with the last stage of the spiritual history of 
 this upward-striving man. 
 
 For it was now that Porphyry was to encounter 
 an influence, a doctrine, an aim, more enchanting 
 than Homer's mythology, profounder than Apollo's 
 oracles, more Christian, I had almost written, than 
 Christianity itself. More Christian at least than
 
 94 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [r. 
 
 such Christianity as had chiefly met Porphyry's 
 eyes ; more Christian than the violence of bishops, 
 the wrangles of heretics, the fanaticism of slaves, 
 was that single-hearted and endless effort after the 
 union of the soul with God which filled every 
 moment of the life of Plotinus, and which gave to 
 his living example a potency and a charm which 
 his writings never can renew. 1 " Without father, 
 without mother, without descent," a figure appear- 
 ing solitary as Melchisedek on the scene of history, 
 charged with a single blessing and lost in the un- 
 known, we may yet see in this chief of mystics the 
 heir of Plato, and affirm that it is he who has com- 
 pleted the cycle of Greek civilisation by adding to 
 that long gallery of types of artist and warrior, 
 philosopher and poet, the stainless image of the saint. 
 
 It may be that the holiness which he aimed at 
 is not for man. It may be that ecstasy comes best 
 unsought, and that the still small voice is heard 
 seldomer in the silence of the wilderness than 
 through the thunder of human toil and amid human 
 passion's fire. 
 
 But those were days of untried capacities, of 
 unbounded hopes. In the Neoplatonist lecture- 
 
 1 Eunapius (vit . Porph. ) manages to touch the heart, in spite of 
 his affectations, when he describes the friendship between Porphyry 
 and Plotiuus. Of Porphyry's first visit to Rome he says : TTJV 
 fjueyiffrtiv 'PwfJiijv Idetv mdvfJir]ffas . . . ^n-etSr? rdxiffTa els 
 aty'iKfTo Kal r$ /jLeylarif) H\UTiv(f ffwrjXdev el$ 6/M\iav, 
 
 OfTO TWV &\\UV, K.T.X.
 
 i.J GREEK ORACLES. 95 
 
 room, as at the Christian love-feast, it seemed that 
 religion had no need to compromise, that all this 
 complex human spirit could be absorbed and trans- 
 figured in one desire. 
 
 Counsels of perfection are the aliment of strenu- 
 ous souls, and henceforth, in each successive book of 
 Porphyry's, we see him rising higher, resting more 
 confidently in those joys and aspirations which are 
 the heritage of all high religions, and the substance 
 of the communion of saints. 
 
 And gradually, as he dwells more habitually in 
 the thought of the supreme and ineffable Deity, the 
 idea of a visible or tangible communion with any 
 Being less august becomes repugnant to his mind. 
 For what purpose should he draw to him those 
 unknown intelligences from the ocean of environing 
 souls ? " For on those things which he desires to 
 know there is no prophet nor diviner who can 
 declare to him the truth, but himself only, by com- 
 munion with God, who is enshrined indeed in his 
 heart." 1 " By a sacred silence we do Him honour, 
 and by pure thoughts of what He is." 2 " Holding 
 Him fast, and being made like unto Him, let us 
 present ourselves, a holy sacrifice, for our offering 
 unto God." 3 
 
 1 De Abstin. ii. 54. 
 
 2 Ibid. ii. 34, dia d ffiyfjs Ka.0a.pas Kal TU>I> irepl avrov Ka.6a.pCiv 
 
 3 Ibid. ii. 34, Sel apa <rvi>a<f>9ti>Tas Kal ofioiuOevTas avry rty avrCiv 
 Overlay ifpai' irpoaayayetv rip Oey.
 
 96 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [L 
 
 And in his letter to the well-loved wife of his 
 old age, than which we find no higher expression 
 of the true Platonic love (so often degraded and 
 misnamed) no nobler charge and counsel of man 
 to woman in all the stores which antiquity has 
 bequeathed, in this last utterance we find him 
 risen above all doubt and controversy, and rapt in 
 the contemplation of that Being whom " no prayers 
 can move and no sacrifice honour, nor the abun- 
 dance of offerings find favour in His sight ; only 
 the inspired thought fixed firmly on Him has cog- 
 nisance of God indeed." 1 It may seem that as we 
 enter on this region we have left oracles behind. 
 But it is not so. The two last oracles which I shall 
 cite, and which are among the most remarkable of 
 all, are closely connected with this last period of 
 Porphyry's life. The first of them is found, by no 
 chance we may be sure, on a leaf of the manuscript 
 which contains his letter to Marcella. It is intro- 
 duced to us by an unknown writer as " an oracle 
 concerning the Eternal God." 2 
 
 1 TO ZvOeov <f>p6vr}fjia KaXwj ijdpafffjLevov ffwdirrerai rf Of if. See the 
 Ad Marcellam passim. 
 
 2 This oracle was very probably actually delivered in a shrine, 
 as the utterances of this period were often tinged with Neoplatonism. 
 I have followed Wolff's emendations, and must refer the reader to 
 his Porph. Fragm. p. 144, and especially his Addit. IV. de Daemon- 
 ibus, p. 225, in support of the substantial accuracy of my rendering. 
 It is impossible to reproduce all the theology which this hymn con- 
 tains ; I have tried to bring out the force of the most central and 
 weighty expressions, such as devdois b^xerolai. TiOijvwv vovv ard\a.vTov. 
 The oracle will also be found in Steuchus, de Perenni Philosophia,
 
 r.] GREEK ORACLES. 97 
 
 " God ineffable, eternal Sire, 
 
 Throned on the whirling spheres, the astral fire, 
 
 Hid in whose heart thy whole creation lies, 
 
 The whole world's wonder mirrored in thine eyes, 
 
 List thou thy children's voice, who draw anear, 
 
 Thou hast begotten us, thou too must hear ! 
 
 Each life thy life her Fount, her Ocean knows, 
 
 Fed while it fosters, filling as it flows ; 
 
 Wrapt in thy light the star-set cycles roll, 
 
 And worlds within thee stir into a soul ; 
 
 But stars and souls shall keep their watch and way, 
 
 Nor change the going of thy lonely day. 
 
 Some sons of thine, our Father, King of kings, 
 Itest in the sheen and shelter of thy wings, 
 Some to strange hearts the unspoken message bear, 
 Sped on thy strength through the haunts and homes of 
 
 air, 
 
 Some where thine honour dwelleth hope and wait, 
 Sigh for thy courts and gather at thy gate ; 
 These from afar to thee their praises bring, 
 Of thee, albeit they have not seen thee, sing ; 
 Of thee the Father wise, the Mother mild, 
 Thee in all children the eternal Child, 
 Thee the first Number and harmonious Whole, 
 Form in all forms, and of all souls the Soul." 
 
 The second oracle above alluded to, the last which 
 I shall quote, was given, as Porphyry tells us, at 
 Delphi to his friend Amelius, who inquired, " Where 
 was now Plotinus' soul ? " l 
 
 iii. 14 ; Orelli, Opusc. gr. vett. sentent. i. 319 ; and Mai's edition of 
 the Ad Marcellam. 
 
 1 Porph. mt. Plot. 22. It is seldom that the genuineness of an 
 VOL. I. H
 
 98 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 Whatever be the source of this poem, it stands 
 out to us as one of the most earnest utterances of 
 antiquity, though it has little of classical perfection 
 of form. Nowhere, indeed, is the contest more 
 apparent between the intensity of the emotions which 
 are struggling for utterance and the narrow limits 
 of human speech, which was composed to deal with 
 the things that are known and visible, and not with 
 those that are inconceivable and unseen. 
 
 Little, in truth, it is which the author of this 
 oracle could express, less which the translator can 
 render ; but there is enough to show once more the 
 potency of an elect soul, what a train of light she 
 may leave behind her as she departs on her unknown 
 way ; when for those who have lived in her presence, 
 but can scarcely mourn her translation, the rapture 
 of love fades into the rapture of worship. Plotinus 
 was " the eagle soaring above the tomb of Plato ; " 
 no wonder that the eyes which followed his flight 
 must soon be blinded with the sun. 
 
 " Pure spirit once a man pure spirits now 
 Greet thee rejoicing, and of these art thou ; 
 
 oracle can be established on grounds which would satisfy the critical 
 historian. But this oracle has better external evidence than most 
 others. Of Porphyry's own good faith there is no question, and 
 though we know less of the character of his fellow-philosopher 
 Amelius, it seems unlikely that he would have wished to deceive 
 Porphyry on an occasion so solemn as the death of their beloved 
 master, or even that he could have deceived him as to so consider- 
 able an undertaking as a journey to Delphi.
 
 I.] GREEK ORACLES. 99 
 
 Not vainly was thy whole soul alway bent 
 
 With one same battle and one the same intent 
 
 Through eddying cloud and earth's bewildering roar 
 
 To win her bright way to that stainless shore. 
 
 Ay, 'mid the salt spume of this troublous sea, 
 
 This death in life, this sick perplexity, 
 
 Oft on thy struggle through the obscure unrest 
 
 A revelation opened from the Blest 
 
 Showed close at hand the goal thy hope would win, 
 
 Heaven's kingdom round thee and thy God within. 1 
 
 So sure a help the eternal Guardians gave, 
 
 From life's confusion so were strong to save, 
 
 Upheld thy wandering steps that sought the day 
 
 And set them steadfast on the heavenly way. 
 
 Nor quite even here on thy broad brows was shed 
 
 The sleep which shrouds the living, who are dead ; 
 
 Once by God's grace was from thine eyes unfurled 
 
 This veil that screens the immense and whirling world, 
 
 Once, while the spheres around thee in music ran, 
 
 Was very Beauty manifest to man ; 
 
 Ah, once to have seen her, once to have known her there, 
 
 For speech too sweet, for earth too heavenly fair ! 
 
 But now the tomb where long thy soul had lain 
 
 Bursts, and thy tabernacle is rent in twain ; 
 
 Now from about thee, in thy new home above, 
 
 Has perished all but life, and all but love, 
 
 And on all lives and on all loves outpoured 
 
 Free grace and full, a Spirit from the Lord, 
 
 1 ttpavri youv r($ nXwrtcy ffKOirbs tyytidi valtov' r^Xos yap avrip 
 Kal ffKOTrbs ty rb evudyvai Kal ireXdaai r$ tirl Tracn 6eq, "Eru%e 5 
 rerpaKiS iron, Sre ffwrjfJLriv atrry, TOU ffKOTrov TOI/TOI/ tvepyetq, appy 
 Kal ov Swd/jLei. (Porph. vit. Plot.)
 
 100 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 High in that heaven whose windless vaults enfold 
 
 Just men made perfect, and an age all gold. 
 
 Thine own Pj'thagoras is with thee there, 
 
 And sacred Plato in that sacred air, 
 
 And whoso followed, and all high hearts that knew 
 
 In death's despite Avhat deathless Love can do. 
 
 To God's right hand they have scaled the starry way 
 
 Pure spirits these, thy spirit pure as they. 
 
 Ah saint ! how many and many an anguish past, 
 
 To how fair haven art thou come at last ! 
 
 On thy meek head what Powers their blessing pour, 
 
 Filled full with life, and rich for evermore ! " 
 
 This, so far as we know, was the last utterance 
 of the Pythian priestess. Once more, indeed, a 
 century afterwards, a voice was heard at Delphi. 
 But that voice seems rather to have heen, in 
 Plutarch's phrase, "a cry floating of itself over 
 solitary places," than the deliverance of any re- 
 cognised priestess, or from any abiding shrine. For 
 no shrine was standing more. The words which 
 answered the Emperor Julian's search were but the 
 whisper of desolation, the last and loveliest expres- 
 sion of a sanctity that had passed away. A strange 
 coincidence ! that from that Delphian valley, whence, 
 as the legend ran, had sounded the first of all hexa- 
 meters, 1 the call, as in the childhood of the world, 
 to " birds to bring their feathers and bees their 
 wax " to build by Castaly the nest-like habitation 
 
 TTTepd r' oluvol Kypbv re fj^Xirrai. Plut. de Pyth. 
 xvii. ; and reff. ap. Hendess, Orac. Grace, p. 36.
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 101 
 
 of the young new - entering god, from that same 
 ruined place where " to earth had fallen the glorious 
 dwelling," from the dry channel where " the water- 
 springs that spake were quenched and dead," 
 should issue in unknown fashion the last fragment 
 of Greek poetry which has moved the hearts of 
 men, the last Greek hexameters which retain the 
 ancient cadence, the majestic melancholy flow ! 1 
 
 Stranger still, and of deeper meaning, is the fate 
 which has ordained that Delphi, born with the 
 birth of Greece, symbolising in her teaching such 
 light and truth as the ancient world might know, 
 silenced once only in her long career, and silenced 
 not by Christ, but by Antichrist, should have pro- 
 claimed in her last triumphant oracle the canonisa- 
 tion of the last of the Greeks, should have responded 
 with her last sigh and echo to the appeal of the 
 last of the Eomans. 
 
 And here I shall leave the story of Greek 
 oracles. It may be, indeed, that some strange and 
 solitary divinities the god Jaribolus at Palmyra, 2 
 the god Mamas at Gaza, 3 the god Besa at 
 
 J fiTraTe Ty /3a<nX??i, x/*ai Tr&re Sat'SaXos avXd' 
 OVK^TI 4>or/3os ?%et KaXvpav, ov /jLdvrida Sd<j>vr]v, 
 ov irayhv \a\4ov<ra.v " airtfffieTO Kal \d\ov C5uy>. 
 
 Ge. Cedren. Hist. Camp. i. 304 ; and see Mr. Swinburne's poem, 
 
 "The Last Oracle." 
 
 2 Inscr. Gr. 4483 ap. Wolff, de Noviss. p. 27. There is, how- 
 ever, no proof of Jaribolian utterance later than A. D. 242. 
 
 3 Marc. Diac. vit. Porph. Episc. ap. Ada Sanctorum, and Wolff, 
 de Noviss. p. 26. C'irc. A.D. 400.
 
 102 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 Abydos 1 still uttered from time to time some perish- 
 ing prophecy, some despairing protest against the new 
 victorious faith. But that such oracles there still 
 were is proved rather from Christian legislation 
 than from heathen records. On these laws I will 
 not dwell, nor recount how far the Christian 
 emperors fell from their divine ideal when they 
 punished by pillage, 2 by torture, 3 and by death 4 
 the poor unlearned " villagers," whose only crime it 
 was that they still found in the faith of their fathers 
 the substance of things hoped for, and an evidence 
 of things not seen. Such stains will mar the 
 noblest revolutions, but must not blind us to the 
 fact that a spiritual revolution follows only on a 
 spiritual need. The end of the Greek oracles was 
 determined not from without, but from within. 
 They had passed through all their stages. Fetish- 
 ism, Shahmanism, Nature-worship, Polytheism, even 
 Monotheism and Mysticism, had found in turn a 
 home in their immemorial shrines. Their utter- 
 ances had reflected every method in which man has 
 
 1 Amm. Marc. xix. 12 (A.D. 359). 
 
 2 Cod. Theod. xvi. 10 (Theodosius I.) 
 
 3 Amm. Marc. xxi. 12 (Constantius). 
 
 4 Cod. Justin, ix. 18 (Constantius) ; Theod. leg. Novell, iii. 
 (Theodosius II.) These laws identify paganism as far as possible 
 with magic, and, by a singular inversion, Augustine quotes Virgil's 
 authority (Aen. iv. 492) in defence of the persecution of his own 
 faith. See Maury, Magie, etc., p. 127. The last struggle of expir- 
 ing paganism was in defence of the oracular temple of Serapis at 
 Alexandria, A.D. 389
 
 i.] GREEK ORACLES. 103 
 
 sought communion with the Unseen, from systematic 
 experiment to intuitive ecstasy. They had com- 
 pleted the cycle of their scripture from its Theogony 
 to its Apocalypse ; it was time that a stronger 
 wave of revelation should roll over the world, and 
 that what was best and truest in the old religion 
 should be absorbed into and identified with the 
 new. 1 
 
 And if there be some who feel that the youth, 
 the naivett, the unquestioning conviction, must 
 perish not from one religion only, but from all ; 
 that the more truly we conceive of God, the more 
 unimaginable He becomes to us, and the more in- 
 finite, and the more withdrawn ; that we can no 
 longer " commune with Him from oak or rock as a 
 young man communes with a maid ; " to such 
 men the story of the many pathways by which 
 mankind has striven to become cognisant of the 
 Unseen may have an aspect of hope as well as of 
 despondency. 
 
 For before we despair of a question as unanswer- 
 able we must know that it has been rightly asked. 
 And there are problems which can become clearly 
 
 1 I need hardly remind the reader that the Church continued 
 till the Renaissance to believe in the reality of the Greek oracles, 
 though condemning the "demons" who inspired them. To refer 
 them, in fact, entirely to illusion and imposture is an argument 
 not without danger for the advocate of any revealed religion. 
 " Celui," says M. Bouche-Leclercq, " qui croit a la Providence et 
 a refficacite de la priere doit se rappeler qu'il accepte tous les prin- 
 cipes sur lesquels repose la divination antique. "
 
 104 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [i. 
 
 defined to us only by the aid of premature and im- 
 perfect solutions. There are many things which 
 we should never have known had not inquiring 
 men before us so often deemed vainly that they knew. 
 
 Suspense of judgment, indeed, in matters of such 
 moment, is so irksome an attitude of mind, that we 
 need not wonder if confidence of view on the one 
 side is met by a corresponding confidence on the 
 other ; if the trust felt by the mass of mankind in 
 the adequacy of one or other of the answers to these 
 problems which have been already obtained is re- 
 butted by the decisive assertion that all these 
 answers have been proved futile and that it is idle 
 to look for more. 
 
 Yet such was not the temper of those among 
 the Greeks who felt, as profoundly perhaps as we, 
 the darkness and the mystery of human fates. To 
 them it seemed no useless or unworthy thing to 
 ponder on these chief concerns of man with that 
 patient earnestness which has unlocked so many 
 problems whose solution once seemed destined to 
 be for ever unknown. " For thus will God," as 
 Sophocles says in one of those passages (Fr. 707) 
 whose high serenity seems to answer our perplexities 
 as well as his own 
 
 " Thus then will God to wise men riddling show 
 Such hidden lore as not the wise can know ; 
 Fools in a moment deem his meaning plain, 
 His lessons lightly learn, and learn in vain."
 
 i.J GREEK ORACLES. 105 
 
 And even now, in the face of philosophies of 
 materialism and of negation so far more powerful 
 than any which Sophocles had to meet, there are 
 yet some minds into which, after all, a doubt may 
 steal, whether we have indeed so fully explained 
 away the beliefs of the world's past, whether we 
 can indeed so assuredly define the beliefs of its 
 future, or whether it may not still befit us to 
 track with fresh feet the ancient mazes, to renew 
 the world-old desire, and to set no despairing limit 
 to the knowledge or the hopes of man.
 
 VIRGIL. 
 
 "Light among the vanished ages; star that gildest yet this 
 
 phantom shore ; 
 
 Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that set to 
 rise no more." 
 
 IN literature, as in life, affection and reverence may 
 reach a point which disposes to silence rather than 
 to praise. The same ardour of worship which 
 prompts to missions or to martyrdom when a saving 
 knowledge of the beloved object can be communi- 
 cated so, will shrink from all public expression 
 when the beauty which it reveres is such as can be 
 made manifest to each man only from within. A 
 sense of desecration mingles with the sense of in- 
 capacity in describing what is so mysterious, so 
 glorious, and so dear. 
 
 Perhaps the admirer may hear the object of 
 his reverence ignorantly misapprehended, unwisely 
 judged. Still he will shrink from speech ; he will 
 be unwilling to seem to proffer his own poor and 
 disputable opinion on matters which lie so far above 
 any support which he can give. Yet, possibly, if
 
 IT.] VIRGIL. 107 
 
 his admiration has notoriously been shared for nine- 
 teen centuries by all whose admiration was best 
 worth having, he may venture to attempt to prove 
 the world right where others have attempted the 
 bolder task of proving it mistaken ; or rather, if the 
 matter in question be one by its very nature in- 
 capable of proof, he may without presumption restate 
 in terms adapted to modern readers the traditional 
 judgment of sixty generations of men. 1 
 
 The set which the German criticism of this cen- 
 tury has made against Virgil is a perfectly explicable, 
 and in one sense a perfectly justifiable thing. It is 
 one among many results which have followed from 
 the application of the historical faculty, pure and 
 simple, to the judgment of Art. Since every work 
 of art is a historical product, it can be used to illus- 
 
 i In writing on an author who has been so constantly discussed 
 for many centuries it is impossible to refer each fragment of criti- 
 cism to its original source. Most of the sounder reflections on Virgil 
 have occurred to many minds and long ago, and form an anony- 
 mous almost an oecumenical tradition. Among modern writers 
 on Virgil, I have consulted Bernhardy, Boissier, Cantu, Comparetti, 
 Conington, Gladstone, Henry, Heyne, Keble, Long, Nettleship, 
 Ribbeck, Sainte-Beuve, Sellar, Teuffel, Wagner, etc. ; some of 
 them with mere dissent and surprise, others especially Boissier and 
 Conington with great interest and profit. But next to Virgil's 
 own poems, I think that the Divina Commedia is the most important 
 aid to his right apprehension. The exquisite truth and delicacy 
 of Dante's conception of his great master become more and more 
 apparent if the works of the two are studied in connection. 
 
 Since this essay was first published, the greatest poet of our 
 times has offered to Virgil a crowning homage, in accents that 
 recall his own.
 
 108 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 trate the growth of the national life from which it 
 springs ; it can be represented as the necessary 
 result of its epoch and its environment. The several 
 arts, however, offer very different facility to the 
 scientific historian. Music, the most unmixedly 
 imaginative of the arts, has baffled all efforts to 
 correlate her growth with the general march of 
 society. Painting bears a more intimate relation to 
 life, and in much of the preference which has been 
 lately shown for early naivett over self-conscious 
 excellence we may detect a mixture of the historical 
 with the purely aesthetic instinct. The historic 
 instinct, indeed, works in admirably with the tastes 
 of an elaborate civilisation. For the impulse of 
 historic science is naturally towards the Origines or 
 sources of things ; it seeks to track styles and 
 processes to their fountain-head, and to find them 
 exhibiting themselves without self - consciousness 
 or foreign admixture; it would even wish to 
 eliminate the idiosyncrasies of individual artists 
 from its generalised estimate of the genius of a 
 nation. And in highly-cultivated societies there is 
 a somewhat similar craving a wish to escape from 
 all that speaks of effort or preparation, into the 
 refreshing simplicity of a spontaneous age. This 
 craving was strongly felt under the Roman Empire ; 
 it is potent among ourselves ; it is wholly natural 
 and innocent so long as it is not allowed to sway 
 us in our estimate of the highest art.
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 109 
 
 But if the historical spirit can thus modify the 
 judgments passed upon painting, much more is this 
 the case with regard to poetry. For poetry is the 
 most condensed and pregnant of all historical 
 phenomena ; it is a kind of crystallised deposit of 
 the human spirit. It is most necessary that the 
 historian and the philologer should be allowed free 
 range over this rich domain. And there is no 
 doubt a sense in which poems, as they become more 
 remote from us, are fuller of the rough reality of 
 things. There is a sense in which the song of the 
 Fratres Arvales is of more value than the Fourth 
 Eclogue. And there is a sense and this is a 
 point on which the' Germans have especially dwelt 
 in which the whole Latin literature of the 
 Augustan age, whose outer form, at least, is so con- 
 fessedly derived from Greek models, is of less 
 interest than those models themselves. If we wish 
 to understand the native type, the original essence 
 of epic or lyric poetry, we must go to Homer and 
 not to Virgil, to Sappho and not to Horace. Yet 
 this test, like all sweeping and a priori methods of 
 estimating works of art, requires in practice so 
 many limitations as to be almost valueless. .It is 
 impossible to judge a literature by its originality 
 alone, without condemning much that is best in our 
 modern literatures more severely than we condemn 
 the Augustan poets. Imitation is very much a 
 matter of chronology ; it may be conscious or un-
 
 110 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [a. 
 
 conscious, ostentatious or concealed, but as the 
 world goes on, it tends irresistibly to form a larger 
 and larger element in all new productions. And 
 yet each new production may be in essentials 
 superior to its type or forerunner. Its relative 
 merit can be determined by experience alone can 
 only be judged, for instance, in the case of poetry 
 by the uncertain and difficult process of comparing 
 the amount of delight and elevation received from 
 each work by the consensus of duly qualified men. 
 For, in the face of some recent German criticism, it 
 seems important to repeat that in order to judge 
 poetry it is before all things necessary to enjoy it. 
 We may all desire that historical and philological 
 science should push her dominion into every recess 
 of human action and human speech. But we must 
 utter some protest when the very heights of Par- 
 nassus are invaded by a spirit which surely is not 
 Science, but her unmeaning shadow; a spirit 
 which would degrade every masterpiece of human 
 genius into the mere pabulum of hungry professors, 
 and which values a poet's text only as a field for 
 the rivalries of sterile pedantry and arbitrary con- 
 jecture. 
 
 It is sometimes said, Apropos of the new unction 
 with which physical science has assumed the office 
 of the preacher, that men of the world must be 
 preached to either by men of the world or by saints 
 not by persons, however eminent and right-
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 1 1 1 
 
 minded, whose emotions have been confined to the 
 laboratory. There is something of a similar incon- 
 gruity in the attitude of a German commentator 
 laboriously endeavouring to throw a new light on 
 some point of delicate feeling or poetic propriety. 
 Thus one of them objects to Dido's " auburn tress " 
 on the ground that a widow's hair should be of a 
 darker colour. Another questions whether a broken 
 heart can be properly termed " a fresh wound," if a 
 lady has been suffering from it for more than a 
 week. A third bitterly accuses Virgil of exaggerat- 
 ing the felicity of the Golden Age. And Eibbeck 
 alters the text of Virgil, in defiance of all the manu- 
 scripts, because the poet's picture (A. xii. 55) of 
 Amata, " self-doomed to die, clasping for the last 
 time her impetuous son-in-law," seems to him tame 
 and unsatisfactory. By the alteration of moritura 
 into monitura he is able to represent Amata as 
 clinging to Turnus, not " with the intention of kill- 
 ing herself," but " with the intention of giving 
 advice," which he considers as the more impressive 
 and fitting attitude for a mother-in-law. 1 
 
 It seems somewhat doubtful whither this lofty 
 in priori road may lead us. And yet it is impossible 
 to criticise any form of art without the introduction 
 
 1 A single instance will give an idea of Eibbeek's fitness to deal 
 with metrical questions. In A. ix. 67, "qua temptet ratione 
 aditus, et quae via clauses, " he reads (against all the MSS.) et qua 
 vi clausos, and proves at some length the elegance of his trispondaic 
 termination.
 
 112 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [11. 
 
 of subjective impressions of some kind. It would 
 be in vain to attempt to give any such general expo- 
 sition of poetical excellence as should carry conviction 
 to all minds. Some obvious shortcomings may be 
 pointed out, some obvious merits insisted on ; but 
 when a higher region is reached we find that a 
 susceptibility to the specific power of poetry is no 
 more communicable than an ear for music. To 
 most readers the subtle, the unexpressed, the infi- 
 nite element in poetry such as Virgil's will remain 
 for ever unacknowledged and unknown. Like the 
 golden bough which unlocked the secrets of the 
 underworld 
 
 " Itself will follow, and scarce thy touch await, 
 If thou be chosen, and if this be fate ; 
 Else for no force shalt thou its coming feel, 
 Nor shear it from the stem with shattering steel." 1 
 
 1 A. vi. 146. The translations from Virgil which I have given 
 in this essay, though faithful to his meaning, as I apprehend it, 
 are not verbally exact ; while, like all my predecessors, I have 
 failed to convey any adequate notion of his music or his dignity, 
 and may well fear the fate of Salmoneus, " who thought to rival 
 with flash of lamps and tramp of horses the inimitable thunderbolt 
 and storm." But to reproduce a great poet in another language is 
 as impossible as to reproduce Nature on canvas ; and the same 
 controversy between a literal and an impressional rendering divides 
 landscape-painters and translators of poetry. In the case of an 
 author so complex and profound as Virgil, every student will 
 naturally discern a different phase of his significance, and it seems 
 almost a necessary element in any attempt to criticise him that 
 the critic should try to show the view which he takes of a few 
 well-known passages. Mr. Morris' brilliant and accurate version
 
 n.] VIRGIL. 113 
 
 A few general considerations, however, may at 
 any rate serve to indicate the kinds of achieve- 
 ment at which Virgil aimed the kinds of merit 
 which are or are not to be looked for in his poems. 
 
 The range of human thoughts and emotions 
 greatly transcends the range of such symbols as 
 man has invented to express them ; and it becomes 
 therefore, the business of Art to use these symbols 
 in a double way. They must be used for the direct 
 representation of thought and feeling ; but they 
 must also be combined by so subtle an imagination 
 as to suggest much which there is no means of 
 directly expressing. And this can be done ; for 
 experience shows that it is possible so to arrange 
 forms, colours, and sounds as to stimulate the 
 imagination in a new and inexplicable way. This 
 power makes the painter's art an imaginative as 
 well as an imitative one ; and gives birth to the 
 art of the musician, whose symbols are hardly imi- 
 tative at all, but express emotions which, till music 
 suggests them, have been not only unknown but 
 unimaginable. Poetry is both an imitative and an 
 imaginative art. As a choice and condensed form 
 of emotional speech, it possesses the reality which de- 
 pends on its directly recalling our previous thoughts 
 and feelings. But as a system of rhythmical and 
 melodious effects not indebted for their potency 
 
 represents a view so different from mine (though quite equally 
 legitimate), that it would hardly have served my present purpose. 
 VOL. I. I
 
 114 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 to their associated ideas alone it appeals also 
 to that mysterious power by which mere arrange- 
 ments of sound can convey an emotion which no 
 one could have predicted beforehand, and which no 
 known laws can explain. 
 
 It is true that the limits of melody within which 
 poetry works are very narrow. Between an ex- 
 quisite and a worthless line there is no difference 
 of sound in any way noticeable to an unintelligent 
 ear. For the mere volume of sound the actual 
 sonority of the passage is a quite subordinate 
 element in the effect, which is produced mainly by 
 relations and sequences of vowels and consonants, 
 too varying and delicate to be reproducible by rule, 
 although far more widely similar, among European 
 languages at least, than is commonly perceived. 1 
 But this limitation of the means employed, which 
 may itself be an added source of pleasure from the 
 sense which it may give of difficulty overcome, is 
 by no means without analogies in other forms of 
 art. The poet thrills us with delight by a collo- 
 cation of consonants, much as the etcher suggests 
 infinity by a scratch of the needle. 
 
 1 An interesting confirmation of this statement may be obtained 
 by reading some passage of Latin poetry first according to the 
 English and then according to the Italian or the revived Latin 
 pronunciation. The effects observed in the first case are not 
 altered are merely enriched by the transference of the vowel 
 sounds to another scale. But this natural music of language (if 
 we may so term it) is too complex a subject to be more than 
 touched on here.
 
 ii.] VIKGIL. 115 
 
 And, indeed, in poetry of the first order, almost 
 every word (to use a mathematical metaphor) is 
 raised to a higher power. It continues to be an 
 articulate sound and a logical step in the argument ; 
 "but it becomes also a musical sound and a centre 
 of emotional force. It becomes a musical sound ; 
 that is to say, its consonants and vowels are arranged 
 to bear a relation to the consonants and vowels near 
 it, a relation of which accent, quantity, rhyme, 
 assonance, and alliteration are specialised forms, but 
 which may be of a character more subtle than any 
 of these. And it becomes a centre of emotional 
 force; that is to say, the complex associations 
 which it evokes modify the associations evoked by 
 other words in the same passage in a way quite 
 distinct from grammatical or logical connection. 
 The poet, therefore, must avoid two opposite dangers. 
 If he thinks too exclusively of the music and the 
 colouring of his verse of the imaginative means 
 of suggesting thought and feeling what he writes 
 will lack reality and sense. But if he cares only to 
 communicate definite thought and feeling according 
 to the ordinary laws of eloquent speech, his verse is 
 likely to be deficient in magical and suggestive power. 
 
 And what is meant by the vague praise so often 
 bestowed on Virgil's unequalled style is practically 
 this, that he has been, perhaps, more successful 
 than any other poet in fusing together the expressed 
 and the suggested emotion ; that he has discovered 
 the hidden music which can give to every shade of
 
 116 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 feeling its distinction, its permanence, and its charm ; 
 that his thoughts seem to come to us on the wings 
 of melodies prepared for them from the foundation 
 of the world. But in treating of so airy and 
 abstract a matter it is well to have frequent 
 recourse to concrete illustration. Before we attempt 
 further description of Virgil's style, or his habitual 
 mood of mind, let us clear our conceptions by a 
 careful examination of some few passages from his 
 poems. As we turn the leaves of the book we find 
 it hard to know on what passages it were best to 
 dwell. What varied memories are stirred by one 
 line after another as we read ! What associations 
 of all dates, from Virgil's own lifetime down to the 
 political debates of to-day ! On this line l the 
 poet's own voice faltered as he read. At this 2 
 Augustus and Octavia melted into passionate weep- 
 ing. Here is the verse 3 which Augustine quotes 
 as typical in its majestic rhythm of all the pathos 
 and the glory of pagan art, from which the Christian 
 was bound to flee. This is the couplet 4 which 
 Fe*nelon could never read without admiring tears. 
 This line Filippo Strozzi scrawled on his prison- 
 wall, when he slew himself to avoid worse ill. 5 
 These are the words 6 which, like a trumpet-call, 
 
 1 Hoc solum nomen quoniam de conjuge restat. A. iv. 324. 
 
 2 Tu Marcellus eris, etc. A. vL 883. 
 
 3 Infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae. A. ii. 772. 
 
 4 Aude, hospes, contemnere opes, et te quoque dignum 
 Finge deo, rebusque veni non asper egenis. A. viii. 364. 
 
 5 Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor. A. iv. 625. 
 
 6 Heu ! fuge crudelis terras, fuge litus avarum. A. iii. 44.
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 117 
 
 roused Savonarola to seek the things that are above. 
 And this line 1 Dante heard on the lips of the 
 Church Triumphant, at the opening of the Paradise 
 of God. Here, too, are the long roll of prophecies, 
 sought tremblingly in the monk's secret cell, or echo- 
 ing in the ears of emperors 2 from Apollo's shrine, 
 which have answered the appeal made by so many 
 an eager heart to the Virgilian Lots that strange 
 invocation which lias been addressed, I believe, to 
 Homer, Virgil, and the Bible alone ; the offspring 
 of men's passionate desire to bring to bear on their 
 own lives the wisdom and the beauty which they 
 revered in the past, to make their prophets in such 
 wise as they might 
 
 " Speak from those lips of immemorial speech, 
 If but one word for each." 
 
 Such references might be multiplied indefinitely. 
 But there is not at any rate need to prove the 
 estimation in which Virgil has been held in the 
 past. The force of that tradition would only be 
 weakened by specification. " The chastest poet," 
 in Bacon's words, " and royalest, Virgilius Maro, 
 that to the memory of man is known," has lacked 
 in no age until our own the concordant testimony 
 of the civilised world. No poet has lain so close 
 to so many hearts ; no words so often as his have 
 
 1 Manibus date lilia plenis. A. vi. 884. 
 
 2 Claudius, Hadrian, Severus, etc., "in templo Apollinis 
 Cumani. "
 
 118 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n 
 
 sprung to men's lips in moments of excitement and 
 self-revelation, from the one fierce line retained and 
 chanted by the untameable boy who was to be 
 Emperor of Eome, 1 to the impassioned prophecy of 
 the great English statesman 2 as he pleaded till morn- 
 ing's light for the freedom of a continent of slaves. 
 
 And those who have followed by more secret 
 ways the influence which these utterances have 
 exercised on mankind know well, perhaps them- 
 selves have shared, the mass of emotion which has 
 slowly gathered round certain lines of Virgil's as it 
 has round certain texts of the Bible, till they come 
 to us charged with more than an individual passion 
 and with a meaning wider than their own with 
 the cry of the despair of all generations, 3 with the 
 yearning of all loves unappeased, 4 with the anguish 
 of all partings, 5 " beneath the pressure of separate 
 eternities." 
 
 Perhaps there will be no better way of forming 
 an intimate conception of the poet's own nature 
 than by analysing his treatment of two or three of 
 
 1 Clodius Albinus. Anna amens capio ; nee sat rationis in 
 armis. A ii. 314. 
 
 2 Pitt. G. i. 250. 
 
 Nosque ubi primus equis Oriens adflavit anhelis, 
 Illic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper. 
 
 3 Quo res summa loco, Panthu ? quam prendirnus arcem ? A. 
 ii. 322. 
 
 4 Illuin absens absentem auditque videtque. A. iv. 83. 
 
 5 Quern fugis ? extremum fato, quod te adloquor, hoc est. A. 
 vu 466.
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 119 
 
 his principal characters, and especially of his hero, 
 so often considered as forming the weakest element 
 in his poem. -<Eneas, no doubt, looks at once tame 
 and rigid beside the eager and spontaneous warriors 
 of the Homeric epoch, and, so far as the ^Eneid is 
 a poem of action and adventure, he is not a stirring 
 or an appropriate hero. But we must not forget 
 that there was a special difficulty in making his 
 character at once consistent and attractive. He is 
 a man who has survived his strongest passion, his 
 deepest sorrow ; who has seen his " Ilium settle into 
 flame," and from " Creusa's melancholy shade," and 
 the great ghost of Hector fallen in vain, has heard 
 the words which sum the last disaster and close 
 the tale of Troy. It is no fault of his that he is 
 left alive ; and the poem opens with the cry of his 
 regret that he too has not been able to fall dead 
 upon the Trojan plain, " where Hector lies, and huge 
 Sarpedon, and Simois rolls so many warriors' corses 
 to the sea." But it is not always at a man's 
 crowning moment that his destiny and his duty 
 close ; and for those who fain had perished with 
 what they held most dear, fate may reserve a more 
 tedious trial, and the sad triumphs of a life whose 
 sun has set. It is to this note that all the adven- 
 tures of ^Eneas respond. We find him when he 
 lands at Carthage at once absorbed in the pictures 
 which show the story of Priam and of his city's 
 fall
 
 120 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [iL 
 
 " What realm of earth, he answered, doth not know, 
 O friend, our sad pre-eminence of woe ? 
 Tears waken tears, and honour honour brings, 
 And mortal hearts are moved by mortal things." i 
 
 Then he himself tells that tale, with an intensity of 
 pathos too well known to need further allusion. 
 And when his story brings him to calmer scenes 
 to his meeting with " Hector's Andromache " on the 
 Chaonian shore those who have loved and lost 
 will recognise in their colloquy the touches that 
 paint the fond illusion of the heart which clings, 
 with a half smile at its own sad persistency, to the 
 very name and semblance of the places by love 
 made dear, 2 which seeks in the eyes or movements 
 of surviving kindred some glance or gesture of the 
 dead. 3 Take one more instance only the meeting 
 of ^neas with Deiphobus in the underworld and 
 note how the same cry breaks from him 4 as that 
 with which he greeted the vision of Hector, 5 a 
 cry of reverence heightened by compassion that 
 
 1 Quis jam locus, inquit, Achate, 
 Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ? 
 En Priamus ! sunt hie etiam sua praemia laudi ; 
 Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt. A. i. 459. 
 2 Procedo, et parvam Troiam simulataque magnis 
 Pergaina et arentem Xanthi cognomine rivum 
 Adgnosco, Scaeaeque amplector liraina portae. A. iii. 349. 
 
 3 Cape dona extrema tuorum 
 mini sola mei super Astyanactis imago ! 
 Sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat ; 
 Et nunc aequali tecum pubesceret aevo. A. iii. 488. 
 * A. vi. 502. 6 A. ii. 285.
 
 II.] VIEGIL. 121 
 
 mingling of emotions which makes the utmost 
 ardour of worship and of love a cry of indignation 
 such as rends the generous heart at the sight of an 
 exalted spirit on which vileness and treachery have 
 been allowed to work their will. How delicately 
 does the " anima cortese Mantovana " stand revealed 
 in the lofty reverence with which ^Eneas addresses 
 the maimed Deiphobus, 1 even while he " hardly 
 knows him, as he trembles and strives to hide his 
 ghastly wounds ! " How strangely sweet the cadence 
 in which the living friend laments that he could 
 not see that other, as he lay in death, 2 could only 
 invoke his spirit with a threefold salutation, and 
 rear an empty tomb ! In such sad converse ^Eneas 
 loses the brief time granted for his visit to the 
 underworld, till the Sibyl warns him that it is 
 being spent in vain 
 
 " The night is going, Trojan ; shall it go 
 Lost in an aimless memory of woe ? " 3 
 
 But he does not part from his murdered friend till 
 he has given the assurance that all that could be 
 done has been done ; that he has paid the utter- 
 most honour and satisfied the unforgetful shade. 
 
 Yet once more ; perhaps the deepest note of all 
 is struck when the old love is encountered by a 
 new, and yet both that memory and that fresh joy 
 
 1 Deiphobe armipotens, genus alto a sanguine Teucri. A. vi. 500. 
 
 2 A. vi. 507. 
 
 8 Nox ruit, Aenea, nos flendo ducimus horas. A. vi. 539.
 
 122 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 must give place to an over-ruling call. When Dido 
 implores ^Eneas to remain in Carthage, after the mes- 
 senger of Jove has bidden him depart, he answers in 
 words whose solemn movement reveals a long-un- 
 uttered pain, and shows that neither in Carthage, 
 nor yet in Italy, can his heart expect a home l 
 
 " Me had the fates allowed my woes to still, 
 Take my sad life, and shape it at my will, 
 First had I sought my buried home and joy, 
 Loves unforgotten, and the last of Troy ; 
 Ay, Priam's palace had re-risen then, 
 A ghost of Ilium for heart-broken men." 
 
 It is thus that the solemn appeal evokes the 
 unlooked-for avowal ; once and for all he makes it 
 known that the memory which to others is growing 
 dim and half -forgotten in the past, is to him ever 
 present and ever guiding, and always and unalterably 
 dear. 
 
 No doubt it is probable that Virgil would have 
 been ill able to describe a more buoyant and ad- 
 venturous hero. No doubt it is true that such a 
 nature as that of ^Eneas is ill fitted to fill the lead- 
 ing r6U in a poem of action. But granting that we 
 have him here in the wrong place, and should have 
 preferred a character whom the poet could not draw, 
 we yet surely cannot say, when we remember ^Eneas' 
 story, that the picture given of him is meaningless 
 or untrue ; we cannot call it unnatural that we 
 1 A. iv. 340.
 
 II.] VIRGIL. 123 
 
 should find in all his conduct something predeter- 
 mined, hieratic, austere ; we cannot wonder if the 
 only occasion on which he rises to passionate excite- 
 ment is where he implores the Sibyl for pity's sake 
 to bring him to the sight and presence of the soul 
 he holds so dear; 1 or if, when from that soul in 
 Paradise he has learnt the secrets of the dead, his 
 temper thenceforth is rather that of the Christian 
 saint than of the Pagan warrior, and he becomes the 
 type of those mediaeval heroes, those Galahads and 
 Percivals, whose fiercest exploits are performed with 
 a certain remoteness of spirit who look beyond 
 blood and victory to a concourse of unseen specta- 
 tors and a sanction that is not of men. 
 
 It is, however, on another character that the 
 personal interest of the ^Eneid has been generally 
 felt to turn. The story of Dido has been said to 
 mark the dawn of romance. It is no doubt the 
 case, though how far this is accidental it is hard to 
 say, that the ancients have dealt oftener with the 
 tragedies resulting from the passion of love, than 
 with the delineation of that passion itself. Sappho, 
 in her early world, had written, as it were, the epi- 
 graph over love's temple-door in letters of fire. 
 Catullus had caught the laughing glory of Septimius 
 and Acme of amorous girl and boy ; Lucretius 
 had painted, with all the mastering force of Eome, 
 the pangs of passion baffled by its own intensity and 
 * A. vi. 117
 
 124 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [11. 
 
 festering imsated in a heart at war. But once only, 
 perhaps, do we find the joy of love's appearing, the 
 desolation of his flight, sung of before Virgil's days 
 with a majesty and a pathos like his own. No one 
 who has read has forgotten how " once to Ilion's 
 towers there seemed to come the spirit of a windless 
 calm a gentle darling of wealth, soft dart of answer- 
 ing eyes, love's soul-subduing flower." Few have 
 heard unmoved of the " semblances of mournful 
 dreams " which brought to that deserted husband 
 " an empty joy ; for all in vain, when his delight he 
 seemed to see, forth gliding from his arms the vision 
 vanished far, on swift wings following the ways of 
 sleep." In ^Eschylus, as in Virgil, the story derives 
 its pathos from the severing of happy loves. In 
 ^Eschylus they are separated by the woman's mis- 
 doing; in Virgil by a higher obligation which the 
 man is bidden to fulfil, yet an obligation which the 
 woman bitterly denies, and which we are ourselves 
 half unwilling to allow. Neither of these plots is 
 quite satisfactory. For in the atmosphere of noble 
 poetry we cannot readily endure that love should 
 either be marred by sin or unreconciled with duty; 
 and no cause of lovers' separation is in harmony with 
 our highest mood, unless it be the touch of death, 
 whose power is but a momentary thing, or so high a 
 call of honour as can give to the parting death's pro- 
 mise and not only his pain. 
 
 The power with which Dido is drawn is unques-
 
 ii,] VIRGIL. 126 
 
 tionable. Her transitions of feeling, her ardent 
 soliloquies, reveal a dramatic force in Virgil of a very 
 unexpected kind an insight into the female heart 
 which is seldom gained by the exercise of imagina- 
 tion alone. But when we compare the Fourth 
 ^Eneid with later poems on the same lofty level 
 with the Vita Nuova, for instance, or with Laodamia 
 we feel how far our whole conception of woman- 
 hood has advanced since Virgil's day under the 
 influence of Christianity, chivalry, civilisation. A 
 nature like Dido's will now repel as much as it 
 attracts us. For we have learnt that a woman may 
 be childlike as well as impassioned, and soft as well 
 as strong; that she may glow with all love's fire 
 and yet be delicately obedient to the lightest whisper 
 of honour. The most characteristic factor in Dido's 
 story is of a more external kind. It is the contrast 
 between the queen's stately majesty and the sub- 
 duing power of love which is most effectively used 
 to intensify the dramatic situation. And the picture 
 suggests a few reflections as to the way in which the 
 wealth and magnificence of Eoman society affected 
 the poets of the age. 
 
 It happens that three great Latin poets, in strik- 
 ingly similar passages, 1 have drawn the contrast 
 between a simple and a splendid life. Horace, here, 
 as elsewhere, shows himself the ideal poet of society ; 
 more cultivated, sensitive, affectionate than the men 
 
 1 Lucr. ii. 24. Virg. G. ii. 468. Hor. Carm. iii. 1, 41.
 
 126 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 and women among whom he moves, yet not so far 
 above them or aloof from them but that he can 
 delight, even more keenly than they, in their luxury 
 and splendour can enjoy it without envy, as he 
 can dispense with it without regret. Lucretius is 
 the aristocrat with a mission ; to him the lamp- 
 bearing images, and the blaze of midnight banquets, 
 and the harp that echoes beneath the ceiling's fretted 
 gold all these are but a vain and bitter jest which 
 cannot drive superstition from the soul, nor kill those 
 fears of death which "mingle unabashed amongst 
 kings and kesars," awed not at all by golden glitter 
 or by purple sheen. Virgil is the rustic of genius, 
 well educated, of delicately refined nature, wholly 
 free from base admirations or desires, but "reared 
 amid the woods and copses," and retaining to the 
 last some touch of shyness in the presence of this 
 world's grandeur; ever eager to escape from the 
 palace -halls into his realm of solitude and song. 
 The well-known passage in the Georgics depicts, as 
 we may well imagine, in its vein of dignified irony, 
 his own sensations when he mixed with the society 
 which so eagerly sought him at Rome. We have 
 his embarrassment at the crowd of visitors coming 
 and going as he calls on Pollio or Maecenas at the 
 fashionable hour of 7 A.M. ; his ennui as he ac- 
 companies over the house a party of virtuosi, open- 
 mouthed at the aesthetic furniture ; and even his 
 disgust at the uncomfortable magnificence of his
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 127 
 
 bedchamber, and at the scented oil which is served 
 to him with his salad at dinner. 1 And what a 
 soaring change when from the stately metrical roll 
 which reflects the pomp and luxury of the imperial 
 city, he mounts without an effort into that airy rush 
 which blends together all " the glory of the divine 
 country," its caverns, and its living lakes, and haunts 
 of wild things in the glade, its " life that never dis- 
 appoints," its life -long affections, and its faith in 
 God! 2 
 
 Yet Virgil's familiarity with the statelier life of 
 Eome was not unfruitful. It has given to him in his 
 ^Eneid an added touch of dignity, as of one who has 
 seen face to face such greatness as earth can offer, 
 and paints without misgiving the commerce of 
 potentates and kings. And thus it is that he has 
 filled every scene of Dido's story with a sense of 
 royal scope and unchartered power ; as of an exist- 
 ence where all honours are secure already, and all 
 else that is wished for won, only the heart demands 
 an inner sanctuary, and life's magnificence still lacks 
 its crowning joy. First we have the banquet, when 
 love is as yet unacknowledged and unknown, but 
 the " signs of his coming and sounds of his feet " 
 
 1 Si non ingentem foribus domus alta supcrbis 
 Mane salntantum totis vomit aedibus undam, 
 Nee varies inhiant pulchra testudine postis, 
 Inlusasque auro vestes, Ephyreiaque sera, 
 Alba neque Assyrio fucatur lana veneno, 
 Nee casia liquidi corrmnpitur usus olivi. G. ii. 461. 
 2 G. ii. 473.
 
 128 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 have begun to raise all things to an intenser glow ; 
 when the singer's song rises more glorious, and all 
 voices ring more full and free, 1 and ancestral cere- 
 monies are kindled into life T^y the ungovernable 
 gladness of the soul. 2 Then comes the secluded 
 colloquy between queen and princess, 3 as they dis- 
 cuss the guest who made the night so strange and 
 new ; and then the rush of Dido's gathering passion 
 among the majestic symbols of her sway. 4 
 
 "With him the queen the long ways wanders down, 
 And shows him Sidon's wealth and Carthage town, 
 And oft would speak, but as the words begin 
 Fails her breath caught by mastering Love within ; 
 Once more in feast must she the night employ, 
 Must hear once more her Trojan tell of Troy, 
 Hang on his kingly voice, and shuddering see 
 The imagined scenes where every scene is he. 
 Then guests are gone and night and morn are met, 
 Far off in heaven the solemn stars have set, 
 Thro' the empty halls alone she mourns again, 
 Lies on the couch where hath her hero lain, 
 Sees in the dark his kingly face, and hears 
 His voice imagined in her amorous ears." 
 
 And through all the scenes that follow, the same 
 royal accent runs till the last words that lift our 
 imagination from the tumultuous grief around the 
 dying Dido, to the scarce more terrible tragedy of 
 a great nation's fall. 5 
 
 1 A. i. 725. 2 A. i. 738. A. \v. 10. 
 
 *. A. iv. 74. 5 A. iv. 669.
 
 n.] VIRGIL. 129 
 
 " Not else than thus, when foes have forced a way, 
 On Tyre or Carthage falls the fatal day ; 
 'Mid such wild woe crash down in roaring fire 
 Temples and towers of Carthage or of Tyre." 
 
 And assuredly the " Deeds of the Eoman People," 1 
 the title which many men gave to the ^Eneid when 
 it first appeared, would not have been complete 
 without some such chapter as this. The prophecy 
 of Anchises, the shield of Vulcan, record for us the 
 imperial city's early virtue, her world-wide sway ; 
 but it is in this tale of Carthage that the poet has 
 written in a burning parable the passion and the 
 pomp of Eome. 
 
 And yet in spite of all the force and splendour 
 with which Dido is described, we feel instinctively 
 that she is not drawn by a lover's hand. We have 
 in her no indication of the poet's own ideal and 
 inward dream. If that is to be sought at all, it 
 must be sought elsewhere. And, perhaps, if the 
 fancy be permitted, we may imagine that we discern 
 it best in the strange and yearning beauty of the 
 passages which speak of the glorious girlhood of 
 Camilla, the maid unwon ; Camilla, whose death a 
 nymph avenges, and whose tale Diana tells ; Camilla, 
 whose name leapt first of all to Virgil's lips as he 
 spoke to Dante of their Italy in the underworld. 2 
 Surely there is something more than a mere poetic fer- 
 vour in the lines which describe the love which lit on 
 
 1 " Gesta populi Romani. " 2 Inf. i. 107. 
 
 VOL. I. K
 
 130 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 the girl while yet a child, and followed her till her 
 glorious hour i 1 the silent reverence which watched 
 
 O 7 
 
 the footsteps of the maiden " whom so many mothers 
 for their sons desired in vain ; " 2 the breath caught 
 with a wistful wonder, the long and lingering gaze, 3 
 the thrill of admiration which stirs the heart with 
 the very concord of joy and pain. Where has he 
 more subtly mingled majesty with sweetness than in 
 the lines which paint her happy nurture among the 
 woodlands where her father was a banished king ? 
 her wild and supple strength enhanced by the con- 
 trasting thought of the " flowing gown and golden 
 circlet," 4 which might have weighted the free limbs 
 with royal purple or wound among the tresses that 
 were hooded with the tiger's spoil. 
 
 Thus much, at least, we may say, that while in 
 poetry the higher and truer forms of love, as distin- 
 guished both from friendship and from passion, 
 appear first in the Middle Ages, and in Dante above 
 all, yet passages like these reveal to us the early stir- 
 ring of conceptions which were hereafter to be so 
 dominant and so sublime the dawning instinct of 
 
 1 A. xi. 537. 2 A. xi. 581. 
 
 3 Illam omnis tectis agrisque effusa inventus 
 Turbaque miratur matruin et prospectat euntem, 
 Attonitis inhians animis, ut regius ostro 
 
 Velet honos levis humeros, ut fibula crinem 
 Auro iiiternectat, Lyciam ut gerat ipsa pharetrain 
 Et pastoralem praefixa cuspide myrtum. A. vii. 812. 
 
 4 Pro crinali auro, pro longae tegmine pallae 
 
 Tigridis exuviae per dorsum a vertice pendent, etc. A. xi. 576.
 
 IT.] VIRGIL. 131 
 
 a worship which should be purer and more pervad- 
 ing than any personal desire of a reverence which 
 should have power for a season to keep Love him- 
 self at bay, and to which a girl's gladness and 
 beauty should become a part " of something far 
 more deeply interfused," and touch the spirit with 
 the same sense of yearning glory which descends 
 on us from the heaven of stars. 
 
 To dwell thus on some of the passages in Virgil 
 whose full meaning escapes a hasty perusal, may 
 help us to realise one of his characteristic charms 
 his power of concentrating the strangeness and 
 fervour of the romantic spirit within the severe and 
 dignified limits of classical art. To this power in 
 great measure we must ascribe his unique position 
 as the only unbroken link between the ancient and 
 the modern world. In literary style and treatment, 
 just as in religious dogma and tendency, there has 
 been something in him which has appealed in turn 
 to ages the most discrepant and the most remote. 
 He has been cited in different centuries as an 
 authority on the worship of river-nymphs and on 
 the incarnation of Christ. And similarly the poems 
 which were accepted as soon as published as the 
 standard of Latin classicality, became afterwards 
 the direct or indirect original of half the Eenais- 
 sance epics of adventure and love. 
 
 We feel, however, that considerations like these 
 leave us still far from any actual realisation of the
 
 132 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 means by which the poet managed to produce this 
 singular complex of impressions. In dealing with 
 poetry, as with the kindred arts, criticism almost 
 necessarily ceases to be fruitful or definite at the 
 very point where the interest of the problems be- 
 comes the greatest. We must be content with such 
 narrower inquiries as may give us at least a clearer 
 conception of the nature and difficulties of the 
 achievement at which the artist has aimed. We 
 may, for instance, discuss the capabilities of the 
 particular language in which a poet writes, just as 
 we may discuss the kind of effects producible on 
 violin or pianoforte, in water-colour or oil. And 
 any estimate of the Latin, as a literary language, 
 implies at once a comparison with the speech of 
 that people from whose admirable productions Latin 
 literature was avowedly derived. 
 
 No words that men can any more set side by 
 side can ever affect the mind again like some of the 
 great 'passages of Homer. For in them it seems as 
 if all that makes life precious were in the act of 
 being created at once and together language itself, 
 and the first emotions, and the inconceivable charm 
 of song. When we hear one single sentence of 
 Anticleia's answer, 1 as she begins 
 
 ev fieyapoifriv CWKOTTOS lo 
 
 what words can express the sense which we receive 
 
 1 Od. xi. 198.
 
 II.] VIRGIL. 133 
 
 of an effortless and absolute sublimity, the feeling 
 of morning freshness and elemental power, the 
 delight which is to all other intellectual delights 
 what youth is to all other joys ? And what a 
 language ! which has written, as it were, of itself 
 those last two words for the poet, which offers them 
 as the fruit of its inmost structure and the bloom 
 of its early day ! Beside speech like this Virgil's 
 seems elaborate, and Dante's crabbed, and Shake- 
 speare's barbarous. There never has been, there 
 never will be, a language like the dead Greek. For 
 Greek had all the merits of other tongues without 
 their accompanying defects. It had the monu- 
 mental weight and brevity of the Latin without its 
 rigid unmanageability ; the copiousness and flexi- 
 bility of the German without its heavy commonness 
 and guttural superfluity ; the pellucidity of the 
 French without its jejuneness ; the force and reality 
 of the English without its structureless comminu- 
 tion. But it was an instrument beyond the control 
 of any but its creators. When the great days of 
 Greece were past, it was the language which made 
 speeches and wrote books, and not the men. Its 
 French brilliancy taught Isocrates to polish platitude 
 into epigram ; its German profundity enabled Lyco- 
 phron to pass off nonsense as oracles ; its Italian 
 flow encouraged Apollonius Ehodius to shroud in 
 long-drawn sweetness the langour of his inventive 
 soul There was nothing except the language left.
 
 134 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 Like the golden brocade in a queen's sepulchre, its 
 imperishable splendour was stretched stiffly across 
 the skeleton of a life and thought which inhabited 
 there no more. 
 
 The history of the Latin tongue was widely 
 different. We do not meet it full-grown at the 
 dawn of history ; we see it take shape and strength 
 beneath our eyes. We can watch, as it were, each 
 stage in the forging of the thunderbolt ; from the 
 day when Ennius, Naevius, Pacuvius inweave their 
 " three shafts of twisted storm," l till Lucretius 
 adds " the sound and terror," and Catullus " the 
 west wind and the fire." It grows with the growth 
 of the Eoman people ; it wins its words at the 
 sword's point ; and the " conquered nations in long 
 array " pay tribute of their thought and speech as 
 surely as of their blood and gold. 
 
 In the region of poetry this union of strenuous 
 effort with eager receptivity is conspicuously seen. 
 The barbarous Saturnian lines, hovering between an 
 accentual and a quantitative system, which were 
 the only indigenous poetical product of Latium, 
 rudely indicated the natural tendency of the Latin 
 tongue towards a trochaic rhythm. Contact with 
 Greece introduced Greek metres, and gradually 
 established a definite quantitative system. Quantity 
 and accent are equally congenial to the Latin lau- 
 
 1 Tris imbris torti radios, tris nubis aquosae 
 Addiderant, rutili tris ignis et alitis Austri. A. viii. 429.
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 135 
 
 guage, an/1 the trochaic and iambic metres of Greece 
 bore transplantation with little injury. The adapta- 
 tions of these rhythms by early Koman authors, 
 however uncouth, are at least quite easy and un- 
 constrained ; and so soon as the prestige of the 
 Augustan era had passed away, we find both Pagans 
 and Christians expressing in accentual iambic, and 
 especially in accentual trochaic metres, the thoughts 
 and feelings of the new age. Adam of S. Victor is 
 metrically nearer to Livius Andronicus than to 
 Virgil or Ovid ; and the Litany of the Arval 
 Brethren finds its true succession, not in the Secular 
 Ode of Horace, but in the Dies Tree or the Veni 
 Creator. 
 
 For Latin poetry suffered a violent breach of 
 continuity in the introduction from Greece of the 
 hexameter and the elegiac couplet. The quantita- 
 tive hexameter is in Latin a difficult and unnatural 
 metre. Its prosodial structure excludes a very large 
 proportion of Latin words from being employed at 
 all. It narrowly limits the possible grammatical 
 constructions, the modes of emphasis, the usages of 
 curtailment, the forms of narration. On the other 
 hand, when successfully managed its advantages are 
 great. All the strength and pregnancy of Latin 
 expression are brought out by the stately march of 
 a metre perhaps the most compact and majestic 
 which has ever been invented. The words take 
 their place like the organs in a living structure
 
 136 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 close packed but delicately adjusted and mutually 
 supporting. And the very sense of difficulty over- 
 come gives an additional charm to the sonorous 
 beauty of the dactylic movement, its self-retarding 
 pauses, its onward and overwhelming flow. 
 
 To the Greek the most elaborate poetical effects 
 were as easy as the simplest. In his poetic, as in 
 his glyptic art, he found all materials ready to his 
 hand; he had but to choose between the marble 
 and the sardonyx, between the ivory and the gold. 
 The Eoman hewed his conceptions out of the granite 
 rock ; oftenest its craggy forms were rudely piled 
 together, yet dignified and strong ; but there were 
 hands which could give it finish too, which could 
 commit to the centuries a work splendid as well as 
 imperishable, polished into the basalt's shimmer and 
 fervent with the porphyry's glow. 
 
 It must not, however, be supposed that even 
 the ^Eneid has wholly overcome the difficulties in- 
 separable from the Latin poetry of the classical age, 
 that it is entirely free either from the frigidities of 
 an imitation or from the constraints of a tour de 
 force. In the first place, Virgil has not escaped the 
 injury which has been done to subsequent poets by 
 the example of the length and the subject-matter of 
 Homer. An artificial dignity has been attached to 
 poems in twelve or twenty-four books, and authors 
 have been incited to tell needlessly long stories in 
 order to take rank as epic poets. And because
 
 ii.] VIEGIL. 137 
 
 Homer is full of tales of personal combat in his 
 clay an exciting and all -important thing later 
 poets have thought it necessary to introduce a large 
 element of this kind of description, which, so soon 
 as it loses reality, becomes not only frigid but dis- 
 gusting. It is as if the first novel had been written 
 by a schoolboy of genius, and all succeeding novel- 
 ists had felt bound to construct their plots mainly 
 of matches at football. It is the later books of 
 the ^neid that are most marred by this mistake. 
 In the earlier books there are, no doubt, some ill- 
 judged adaptations of Homeric incident, 1 some 
 laboured reproductions of Homeric formulae, but foi 
 the most part the events are really noble and 
 pathetic, are such as possess permanent interest 
 for civilised men. The three last books, on the 
 other hand, which have come down to us in a crude 
 and unpruned condition, contain large tracts imme- 
 diately imitated from Homer, and almost devoid of 
 independent value. 2 
 
 Besides these defects in matter, the latter part 
 of the poem illustrates the metrical dangers to 
 which Latin hexameters succumbed almost as soon 
 as Virgil was gone. The types on which they 
 could be composed were limited in number and 
 w r ere becoming exhausted. Many of the lines in 
 
 1 See especially A. v. 263-5. 
 
 2 The following passages might perhaps be omitted en bloc with 
 little injury to Virgil's reputation : A. x. 276-762 ; xi. 597-648, 
 868-908 ; xii. 266-311, 529-592.
 
 138 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 the later books are modelled upon lines in the 
 earlier ones. Many passages show that peculiar 
 form of bald artificiality into which this difficult 
 metre so readily sinks ; nay, some of the tibicines, 
 or stop-gaps, suggest a grotesque resemblance to the 
 well-known style of the fourth-form boy. 1 Other 
 more ambitious passages give the painful impression 
 of just missing the effect at which they aim. 2 
 
 We should, however, be much mistaken if we 
 inferred that this accidental want of finish due to 
 the poet's premature death indicated any decline 
 of power. On the contrary, nothing, perhaps, in 
 Latin versification is more interesting than the 
 traces of a later manner in process of formation, 
 which are to be found in the concluding books of 
 the ^Eneid. The later manner of a painter or poet 
 generally differs from his earlier manner in much 
 the same way. We observe in him a certain im- 
 patience of the rules which have guided him to 
 excellence, a certain desire to use materials more 
 freely, to obtain bolder and newer effects. A 
 tendency of this kind may be discerned in the 
 versification of the later books, especially of the 
 twelfth book, of the ^Eneid. The innovations are 
 individually hardly perceptible, but taken together 
 they alter the character of the hexameter line in a 
 way more easily felt than described. Among the 
 more definite changes we may note that there are 
 
 1 e.g. A. x. 526-9, 584-5. 2 e.g. A. x. 468-471, 557-560.
 
 ii.] VIEGIL. 139 
 
 more full stops in the middle of lines, there are 
 more elisions, there is a larger proportion of short 
 words, there are more words repeated, more asson- 
 ances, and a freer use of the emphasis gained by 
 the recurrence of verbs in the same or cognate 
 tenses. Where passages thus characterised have 
 come down to us still in the making, the effect 
 is forced and fragmentary. 1 Where they succeed 
 they combine, as it seems to me, in a novel manner 
 the rushing freedom of the old trochaics with the 
 majesty which is the distinguishing feature of 
 Virgil's style. 2 Art has concealed its art, and the 
 poet's last words suggest to us possibilities in the 
 Latin tongue which no successor has been able to 
 realise. 
 
 It is difficult to dwell long on such technical 
 points as these without appearing arbitrary or pe- 
 dantic. The important thing is to understand how 
 deliberate, forceful, weighty, Virgil's diction is ; what 
 a mass of thought and feeling was needed to give to 
 the elaborate structure of the Latin hexameter any 
 convincing power ; how markedly all those indica- 
 tions by which we instinctively judge the truth or 
 the insincerity of an author's emotion are intensified 
 by a form of composition in which " the style," not 
 only of every paragraph but of every clause, is 
 
 1 e.g. A. x. 597-600. 
 
 2 e.g. A. xii. 48, 72, 179, 429, 615-6, 632-649, 676-680, 889-893, 
 903-4.
 
 140 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 necessarily and indeed " the man." And when we 
 have learned by long familiarity to read between the 
 lines, to apportion the emphasis, to reproduce, it may 
 be, in imagination some shadow of that " marvellous 
 witchery" 1 with which, as tradition tells us, Virgil's 
 own reading of his poems brought out their beauty, 
 we shall be surprised at the amount of self-revelation 
 discernible beneath the calm of his impersonal song. 
 And here again we shall receive the same impression 
 which remained with us from the examination of the 
 hero who is thought to be in some measure the un- 
 conscious portrait of the poet himself we shall 
 wonder most of all at the abiding sadness of his soul. 
 "We might have thought to find him like the 
 steersman Palinurus, in the scene from which our 
 great English painter has taken the cadence which 
 is to tell of an infinite repose, 2 communing untroubled 
 with some heaven-descended dream, and keeping 
 through the night's tranquillity his eyes still fixed 
 upon the stars. How is it that he appears to us so 
 often, like the same Palinurus, plunged in a solitary 
 gulf of death, while the ship of human destinies drifts 
 away unguided trostlos auf weitem Meer ? How 
 knew he that gathering horror of midnight which 
 presages some unspeakable ruin and the end of all ? 3 
 Why was it left for him, above all men, to tell of the 
 anguish of irredeemable bereavement, and Eurydice's 
 
 1 "Lenociuiis miris." 
 11 Turner's Datur Hora Quieti. A. v. 844. 3 A. iv. 460-4.
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 141 
 
 appealing hands as she vanished backwards into the 
 night ? l What taught him the passion of those lines 
 whose marvellous versification seems to beat with 
 the very pulses of the heart, 2 where the one soul calls 
 upon the other in the many-peopled fields of death, 
 and asks of all that company, " not less nor more, but 
 even that word alone " ? What is it that has given 
 such a mystical intensity to every glimpse which he 
 opens of the eternity of the impassioned soul ? 
 where sometimes the wild pathetic rhythm alone 
 suggests an undefinable regret, 3 or a single epithet 
 will renew a world of mourning, and disclose a sor- 
 row unassuageable in Paradise itself. 4 Or, for one 
 moment, Sychaeus' generous shade, appealed to in 
 such varying accents as the storms of passion rose 
 or fell, deemed sometimes forgetful and distant and 
 unregarding in the grave, is seen at last in very 
 presence and faithful to the vows of earth, filled 
 with a love which has forgiven inconstancy as it has 
 outlasted death. 5 
 
 These short and pregnant passages will appeal to 
 different minds with very different power. There 
 are some whose emotion demands a fuller expression 
 than this, a more copious and ready flow who choose 
 rather, like Shelley, to pour the whole free nature 
 into a sudden and untrammelled lay. But there are 
 others who have learnt to recognise the last height 
 
 1 G. iv. 498. 2 A. vi. 670. 
 
 3 A. vi. 447. 4 A. vi. 480. 5 A. vi. 474.
 
 142 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [IT. 
 
 of heroism, the last depth of tenderness, rather in a 
 word than in a protest, and rather in a look than in a 
 word ; to whom all strong feeling comes as a purging 
 fire, a disengagement from the labyrinth of things ; 
 whose passion takes a more concentrated dignity as 
 it turns inwards and to the deep of the heart. And 
 such men will recognise in Virgil a precursor, a master, 
 and a friend ; they will call him the Magnanimo, the 
 Verace Duca ; they will enrol themselves with eager 
 loyalty among the spiritual progeny of a spirit so 
 melancholy, august, and alone. 
 
 And some, too, there will always be to whom 
 some touch of poetic gift has revealed the delight of 
 self-expression, while yet their infertile instinct of 
 melody has failed them at their need, and their 
 scanty utterance has rather mocked than assuaged for 
 them the incommunicable passion of the soul. Such 
 men will be apt to think that not only would an 
 added sanctity have been given to all sacred sorrow, 
 an added glory to all unselfish joy, but that this 
 earth's less ennobling emotions as well the sting 
 of unjust suspicions, 1 and the proud resentment of 
 stealthy injuries, 2 and the bewilderment of life's un- 
 guided way 3 even these would have been trans- 
 muted into spiritual strength if they could in such 
 manner have shaped themselves into song ; as the 
 noise of bear, and wolf, and angered lion came to the 
 Trojans with a majesty that had no touch of fear or 
 
 1 A. i. 529. 2 A. vi. 502. 3 A. xii. 917
 
 ii.] V1EGIL. 143 
 
 pain, as they heard them across the midnight waters, 
 mixed with the music of Circe's echoing isle. 1 
 
 How was it, then, with the poet himself, to whom 
 it was given to " sweep in ever-highering eagle-circles 
 up" till his words became the very term and limit of 
 human utterance in song ? Quin Decios Drusosque 
 procul ; when he was summing up in those lines 
 like bars of gold the hero-roll of the Eternal City, 
 conferring with every word an immortality, and, like 
 his own J^neas, bearing on his shoulders the fortune 
 and the fame of Rome, did he feel in that great hour 
 that he had done all that man can do ? All that 
 we know is, that he spoke of his attempt to write 
 the ^Eneid as " an act almost of insanity," and that 
 on his deathbed he urgently begged his friends to 
 bum the unfinished poem. 
 
 " dignitosa coscienza e netta, 
 Come t'6 picciol fallo amaro morso ! " 
 
 Yet we feel that Virgil's character would not have 
 stood out complete to us without the record of that 
 last desire. It was the culminating expression of a 
 lifelong temper of that yearning after perfection 
 which can never rest satisfied with the things of 
 earth which carries always with it, as Plato would 
 say, the haunting reminiscence of that perfect beauty 
 on which the soul has looked aforetime in the true, 
 which is the ideal world. And the very stillness 
 
 1 A. vii. 10.
 
 144 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 and dignity of Virgil's outward existence help to 
 make him to us an unmixed example of this mood 
 of mind. There is no trace in him of egoistic passion, 
 of tumult, of vanity, or of any jealous or eager love ; 
 all his emotions seem to have fused or melted into 
 that Welt-Schmerz that impersonal and indefinable 
 melancholy, the sound of which since his day has 
 grown so familiar in our ears, which invades the 
 sanest and the strongest spirits, and seems to yield 
 to nothing except such a love, or such a faith, as can 
 give or promise heaven. The so-called " modern air " 
 in Virgil's poems is in great measure the result of 
 the constantly -felt pressure of this obscure home- 
 sickness this infinite desire ; finding vent sometimes 
 in such appeals as forestall the sighs of Christian 
 saints in the passion of high hopes half withdrawn, 
 when the Divinity is shrouded and afar 1 oftener 
 perceptible only in that accent of brooding sorrow 
 which mourns over the fate of men, and breathes a 
 pathetic murmur into Nature's peace, 2 and touches 
 with a mysterious forlornness the felicity of the 
 underworld. 3 
 
 It is the same mood which " intenerisce il cuore " 
 in Dante's song, which looks from the unsatisfied 
 eyes of Michael Angelo and of Tintoret, a mood 
 commoner, indeed, among the nations of the North, 
 
 1 e.g. G. iv. 324-5. A. i. 407. 
 
 2 Te nemus Anguitiae, vitrea te Fucinus unda, 
 Te liquid! Severe lacus. A. vii. 760. 
 
 3 Solemque snum, sua sidera norunt. A. vi. 641.
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 145 
 
 but felt at times by Italians who have had the power 
 to see that all the glory round them does but add a 
 more mysterious awfulness to the insoluble riddle 
 of the world. 
 
 Nor is any region of Italy a fitter temple for such 
 thoughts than the Bay of Naples, which virtually was 
 Virgil's home. For it was not Mantua, but " sweet 
 Parthenope," which fostered his years of silent toil ; 
 his wanderings were on that southern shore where 
 the intense and azure scene seems to carry an unknown 
 sadness in .the convergence of heaven and sea, and 
 something of an unearthly expectancy in the still 
 magnificence of its glow. It w r as there that inwardly 
 he bled and was comforted, inwardly he suffered and 
 was strong; it was there that what others learn in 
 tempest he learnt in calm, and became in ardent 
 solitude the very voice and heart of Eome. 
 
 II. 
 
 The century which elapsed between the publica- 
 tion of the Fourth Eclogue and of the Epistle to the 
 Romans witnessed an immense expansion of the 
 human mind. So far as we can attach definite dates 
 to the gradual growth of world- wide conceptions, we 
 may say that in this century arose the ideas of the 
 civil and of the religious unity of all families of men. 
 These ideas, at first apparently hostile to one another, 
 and associated, the one with the military supremacy 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 146 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 of Borne, the other with the spiritual supremacy of 
 Jerusalem, gradually coalesced into the notion of a 
 Holy Eoman Empire, involving, as that notion does 
 in the mind, for instance, of Dante, the concentration 
 of both spiritual and temporal power in the Eternal 
 City. Again the conceptions have widened ; and we 
 now imagine a brotherhood of mankind, a universal 
 Church, without localised empire or a visible vice- 
 gerent of heaven. 
 
 Throughout all the phases which these great 
 generalisations have traversed, the authority of Virgil 
 has been freely invoked. And when we turn from 
 the personal to the public aspect of his poems, we 
 are at once obliged to discuss in what sense he may 
 be considered as the earliest and the official exponent 
 of the world- wide Empire of Borne, the last and the 
 closest precursor of the world- wide commonwealth of 
 Christ. The unanimous acceptance of Virgil in his 
 lifetime while the ^neid was yet unwritten as 
 the unique poetical representative of the Boman 
 State is a fact quite as surprising and significant as 
 the ready acceptance of Augustus as its single ruler. 
 It is not, indeed, strange that a few short but lovely 
 pieces, such as the Eclogues, should have delighted 
 literary circles and suggested to Maecenas that this 
 young poet's voice would be the fittest to preach the 
 revival of antique simplicity and rural toil. The 
 astonishing thing is the success of the Georgics, the 
 fact that an agricultural poem not twice as long as
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 147 
 
 Comus should at once have procured for its author a 
 reputation to which the literary history of the world 
 affords no parallel. Petrarch was crowned on the 
 Capitol amid the applause of the literati of Europe. 
 Voltaire was " smothered with roses " in the crowded 
 theatres of the Paris of his old age. But the triumph 
 of Petrarch was the manifesto of a humanistic clique. 
 The triumph of Voltaire was the first thunderclap 
 of a political storm. When, on the other hand, the 
 Romans rose to their feet in the theatre on the casual 
 quotation of some words of Virgil's on the stage 
 when they saluted the poet as he entered the house 
 with the same marks of reverence which they paid 
 to Augustus Csesar it was plain that some cause 
 was at work which was not of a partisan, which was 
 not even of a purely literary character. Perhaps it 
 was that the minds of men were agitated by the 
 belief that a new era was impending, that " the great 
 order of the ages was being born anew," and in the 
 majestic and catholic tranquillity of Virgil's song they 
 recognised instinctively the temper of an epoch no 
 longer of struggle but of supremacy, the first-fruits 
 of Imperial Eome. We must at least attribute some 
 such view to the cultivated classes of the time. That 
 the sublime poem of Lucretius should obtain only 
 a cold succ&s d'estime, while the Georgics, a more ex- 
 quisite work, no doubt, but a work of so much smaller 
 range, should be hailed as raising its author to an 
 equality with Homer, is a disproportion too great to
 
 148 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 be accounted for by a mere literary preference. It 
 was a deep-seated recognition of the truly national 
 character of Virgil's work, of his unique fitness to 
 reflect completely all the greatness of the advancing 
 time, which led even rival poets to predict so strenu- 
 ously that the ^3neid, of which no one had as yet 
 seen a paragraph, would be co- eternal with the 
 dominion of Kome. Stranger still it is to see how 
 tragically the event surpassed the prophecy. " Light 
 among the vanished ages," we may exclaim with no 
 exaggeration, in Lord Tennyson's words 
 
 " Star that gildest yet this phantom shore ! 
 Golden branch amid the shadows, kings and realms that 
 set to rise no more ! " 
 
 When we look at the intellectual state of Eome in 
 the fourth and fifth centuries, our complaint is not 
 that Virgil is forgotten, but that nothing else is 
 remembered ; that the last achievement of the " toga- 
 wearing race " is to extemporise centos from the 
 ^Eneid on any given theme ; that the last heads seen 
 to rise above the flood of advancing barbarism should 
 be those of grammarians calling themselves Menalcas 
 and parsing Tityre, or calling themselves Virgilius 
 and parsing Arma virum. 
 
 There is something, too, of Fate's solemn irony in 
 the way in which, as the ancient world is re-dis- 
 covered, the first words borne back to us by the 
 muffled voice of ruin or catacomb are scattered
 
 li,] VIRGIL. 149 
 
 fragments of that poem which was the last on 
 Eome's living lips. There is something tragic in 
 finding Virgil's line, " So great a work it was to 
 found the race of Eome," cut in colossal characters 
 on the monstrous ruins of the baths of Titus ; 
 Virgil's words, " Then all were silent," look strangely 
 in a half-finished scrawl from a wall of Pompeii's 
 hushed and solitary homes. 1 But the long tradition, 
 as has been already said, has not continued un- 
 broken to our own day. There have of late been 
 many critics who have denied that the ^Eneid is 
 adequately representative of the Eoman common- 
 wealth, who have been struck with the unqualified 
 support, the absolute deification bestowed on 
 Augustus, and have urged that the laureate who 
 indulged in so gratuitous an adulation must be 
 styled a court, and not a national poet. 
 
 So far as Virgil's mere support of Augustus 
 goes, this objection, however natural to the lovers 
 of free government, will hardly stand the test of 
 historical inquiry. For Virgil had not to choose 
 between Augustus and the Eepublic, but between 
 Augustus and Antony. The Eepublic was gone for 
 ever; and not Hannibal himself, we may surely 
 say, was a more dangerous foe than Antony to the 
 Eoman people. No battle which that people ever 
 fought was more thoroughly national, more decis- 
 ively important, than the battle of Actium. The 
 1 CONTICVEREOM.
 
 150 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 name of Actium, indeed, can never waken the glory 
 and the joy which spring to the heart at the name 
 of Salamis. Not " Leucate's promontory afire with 
 embattled armaments," not " Actian Apollo bending 
 from above his bow " can stir the soul like that one 
 trump, 1 that morning onset, that "small ill-har- 
 boured islet, oft-haunted of dance-loving Pan." 2 
 But the essence of each battle was in fact the same. 
 Whether it were against the hosts of Susa and 
 Ecbatana, or against " the dog Anubis " and the 
 Egyptian queen, each battle was the triumph of 
 Western discipline, religion, virtue, over the tide of 
 sensuality and superstition which swept onwards 
 from the unfathomable East. 
 
 And thus we come to the point where Virgil 
 is, in reality, closely identified with the policy of 
 the Augustan regime. Augustus was not himself 
 a moral hero. But partly fortune, partly wisdom, 
 partly a certain innate preference for order and 
 reverence for the gods, had rendered him the only 
 available representative, not only of the constitution 
 and the history, but of the morals and religion of 
 Eome. The leading pre-occupation of his official 
 life was the restoration of national virtue. It is 
 hard to trace the success or failure of an attempt 
 like this among a complex society's conflicting 
 currents of good and evil. Yet it seems that to his 
 strenuous insistance on all of morality which 
 
 1 Aesch. Pers. 395. s Psyttalea. Pers. 447.
 
 U.J VIRGIL. 151 
 
 legislation can achieve, we may in some measure 
 ascribe that moonlight of Koman virtue which 
 mingles so long its chastened gentleness with the 
 blaze of the Empire's lurid splendour, the smoke of 
 its foul decay. A reform like this, however, cannot 
 be achieved by a single ruler. And sincere co- 
 operation was hard to find. Papius and Poppaeus 
 might pass laws against celibacy. But Papius and 
 Poppaeus themselves (as Boissier reminds us) re- 
 mained obstinately unmarried. Horace might sing 
 of praying to the gods " with our wives and 
 children." But no one was ever less than Horace 
 of a church-goer or a family man. Virgil, on the 
 other hand, was one of those men whose adherence 
 seems to give reality to any project of ethical re- 
 form. The candid and serious poet, " than whom," 
 as Horace says, " earth bore no whiter soul," was 
 quickly recognised by Maecenas as the one writer 
 who could with sincerity sound the praises of 
 antique and ingenuous virtue. The Georgics came 
 to the Roman' world somewhat as the writings 
 of Eousseau came to the French ; they might have 
 little apparent influence upon conduct, but they 
 made a new element in the mind of the age, they 
 testified at least to the continued life of pure ideas, 
 to the undying conception of a contented labour, of 
 an unbought and guileless joy. 
 
 But this was not yet enough. The spirit of Roman 
 virtue needed to be evoked by a sterner spell. In
 
 152 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 the Georgics the land of Italy had for the first time 
 been impressively presented as a living and organic 
 whole. And the idea of Italy's lovely primacy 
 among all other countries was destined to subsist 
 and grow. But it was not yet towards the name of 
 Italy that the enthusiasm of Virgil's fellow-citizens 
 most readily went out. However variously expressed 
 or shrouded, the religion of the Romans was Rome. 
 The destiny of the Eternal City is without doubt 
 the conception which, throughout the long roll of 
 human history, has come nearest to the unchange- 
 able and the divine. It is an idea majestic enough 
 to inspire worship, and to be the guide of life and 
 death. This religion of Rome, in its strictest sense, 
 has formed no trifling factor in the story of the 
 Christian Church. It appears in its strongest and 
 most unquestioning form in the De Monarchia of 
 Dante. It formed a vital part of the creed of the 
 great Italian who in our own century has risen to 
 closest communion in thought and deed with the 
 heroes of his country's past. But 'nowhere, from 
 Ennius to Mazzini, has this faith found such ex- 
 pression as in Virgil's j35neid. All is there. There 
 is nothing lacking of noble reminiscence, of high 
 exhortation, of inspiring prophecy. Roman virtue 
 is appealed to through the channel by which alone 
 it could be reached and could be restored; it is 
 renewed by majestic memories and stimulated by 
 an endless hope. The Georgics had been the psalm
 
 li.] VIEGIL. 153 
 
 of Italy, the ^Eneid was the sacred book of the 
 Eeligion of Home. 
 
 It appears, then, that although Virgil doubtless 
 lent all his weight to the personal government of 
 Augustus, he neither chose that government in pre- 
 ference to any attainable form of stable freedom, 
 nor co-operated with it in an unfitting manner, nor 
 with an unworthy aim. There remains the question 
 of the deification of Augustus of the impulse 
 given by Virgil to that worship of the emperors 
 which ultimately became so degrading and so cruel 
 a farce. And here, no doubt, in one passage at 
 least, Virgil's language is such as modern taste must 
 condemn. The frigid mythology with which the 
 first Georgic opens is absolutely bad. It is bad as 
 Callimachus is bad, and as every other imitation of 
 Callimachus in Latin literature is bad too. It has, 
 indeed, little meaning; and what meaning it has 
 would need an astrologer to decipher. What are 
 we to make of Tethys and of Proserpine, of Thule 
 and of Elysium, or of the Scorpion who is willing 
 to draw in his claws to make room for Augustus in 
 heaven ? It has, indeed, been ingeniously suggested 
 that the true point of this strange passage may con- 
 sist in a veiled but emphatic warning to Augustus 
 not to assume the title of King, 1 (a title of which, 
 as in Caligula's case, the Eomans were far more 
 chary than of the less practical ascription of god- 
 1 G. i. 36-7. The suggestion is Mr. Raper's.
 
 154 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 head); and, moreover, that the poet himself sub- 
 sequently apologises x for the unreality of the flatter- 
 ing exordium in which this lesson is concealed. 
 Still, we must regret that any passage in Virgil 
 should require such apology. We cannot help 
 seeing more dignity in the tone of Lucretius, whose 
 only feeling with regard to earthly potentates was 
 vexation at their being too busy to allow him to 
 explain his philosophy to them as fully as he could 
 have wished. 2 
 
 The passages in the ^Eneid in which Augustus 
 is prospectively deified stand on a different footing. 
 In them he is more or less closely identified with 
 Eome herself ; he is represented as we see him in 
 the great allegorical statue of the Vatican, 
 " Augustus Caesar leading the Italians on to war, 
 with the Senate and the people and the tutelary 
 gods of Eome," 3 the creation of that early moment 
 in the empire's history when it seemed as if the 
 conflicting currents of the Commonwealth might 
 run at length in a single channel, and the State be 
 symbolised not unworthily in the man whom she 
 had chosen as her chief. And, indeed, when we 
 consider the proportions which the worship of 
 " Eome and the genius of Augustus " gradually 
 assumed, the earnestness with which it was pressed 
 on by the people in face of what seems to have 
 been the genuine disapproval of the cautious Emperor, 
 
 1 G. ii. 45-6. 2 Lucr. i. 43. 3 A. viii. 678.
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 155 
 
 the speed with which it became, without formal 
 change or definite installation, the practical religion 
 of the Eoman world, 1 we shall see reason to suppose 
 that this strange form of worship, to which Virgil 
 gave perhaps the earliest, though in part an uncon- 
 scious expression, was not the birth of a merely 
 meaningless servility, but represented what was in 
 fact a religious reform and a return to the oldest 
 instincts of the Roman people. 
 
 The Eoman religion, as we first hear of it, shows 
 us an Aryan tradition already strongly modified by 
 the Eoman character, by a tone of mind abstract 
 and juristic, rather than creative or joyous. Some 
 of the natural powers whose worship the earliest 
 Eomans, in common with the earliest Greeks, had 
 inherited from their Aryan ancestors had already 
 acquired a definite quasi-human personality. These 
 the Eoman necessarily accepted as persons, though 
 he added no fresh vividness to the conception of 
 them. But his feeble instinct of anthropomorphism 
 hardly went farther than this ; and such deities as 
 he himself created, such tutelary powers, I should 
 rather say, as he thought might be useful if they 
 
 1 See M. Boissier's Religion Eomaine on all this subject, and 
 especially for an account of the colleges of Augustales, which were 
 the earliest trade-guilds, the earliest representative bodies, the 
 model followed in Christian ecclesiastical organisation, and the 
 first religious bodies on a large scale which admitted all men, with- 
 out distinction of wealth or birth, to a full share in their privileges 
 and in their control.
 
 156 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [ir. 
 
 happened to exist, were individualised in the most 
 shadowy manner. They were little more than the 
 sublimated counterparts or correspondences of acts 
 or beings visible here on earth. These deified 
 abstractions were of very various magnitude and 
 dignity, ranging from Minerva, Goddess of Memory, 
 and Janus, God of Opening, down to the crowd of 
 divinities little heard of outside the Indigitamenta 
 or handy-book of the Gods, the Goddess of Going 
 Out and the Goddess of Coming In, the God of 
 Silver Money and his father the God of Copper 
 Money, and the God of Speaking Intelligibly, who 
 never made more than a single remark. 1 As the 
 Eomans came into contact with other nations, 
 especially with Greece, foreign deities were intro- 
 duced ; but these were identified as far as possible 
 with the Eoman deities of similar functions, and did 
 not overthrow the balance of the old regime. But 
 as the strange Eastern gods, with their gloomy or 
 frenzied worships, were added to the list this quiet 
 absorption was no longer possible. The Eoman 
 Olympus came to resemble a shifting and turbulent 
 Convention, in which now one and now another 
 member, Dionysus, Isis, Cybele, rises tumultu- 
 ously into predominance, and is in turn eclipsed by 
 some newer arrival. This inroad of furious and 
 conflicting superstitions had begun in Virgil's time, 
 and the battle of Actium is for him the defeat of 
 
 1 Iterduca, Domiduca, Argentinus, ^Lsculanus, Aius Locutius.
 
 ii.] VIEGIL. 157 
 
 the "monstrous forms of gods of every birth," 1 who 
 would have made their entry with Antony into 
 Eome. At the same time it was hard to suggest an 
 effective antidote for these degrading worships. The 
 gods, so to speak, of the middle period Jupiter and 
 Juno and the like, with a Greek personality super- 
 added to their more abstract significance had not 
 vitality enough to expel the intruders from their 
 domain. It was necessary to fall back upon a more 
 thoroughly national and primitive conception, and 
 to deify once more the abstraction of the one 
 earthly existence whose greatness was overwhelm- 
 ingly evident the power of Eome. The " Fortune 
 of the City," or Roma herself enthroned with the 
 insignia of a Goddess, was the only queen who 
 could overrule at once the epidemic fanaticisms of 
 Kome and the localised cults of the provinces, and 
 be the veritable mistress of heaven. 
 
 Nor was even she enough. Through the abstrac- 
 tions of the old Eoman religion there had always 
 run a thread of more intimate and personal worship. 
 Not only had each action and each object its spiritual 
 counterpart, but each man as well. The nature of 
 these Lares was somewhat vaguely and obscurely 
 conceived, but the dominant idea seems to have 
 been that they acted as the tutelary genii of men 
 during life, and after death became identical with 
 their immortal part. The Eoman worship of an- 
 
 1 A. viii. 698.
 
 158 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 cestors was indeed of a different kind from the hero- 
 worship of the Greeks. It dwelt less on the idea 
 of superhuman help than on the idea of family 
 continuity. The Eomans had not the faith which 
 bade the Locrians leave a place always open in their 
 battle-ranks for the Oilean Ajax to fill unseen ; but 
 they testified by daily offering and daily prayer to 
 their conviction of an immanent and familiar pre- 
 sence which turned the home itself into a never- 
 vacant shrine. They asked no oracle from "Am- 
 phiaraus beneath the earth ; " but the images of his 
 curule ancestors gathered round about the dead 
 Fabius in the market-place, and welcomed him in 
 silence as he joined the majority of his kin. It is 
 this spirit of piety which the plot of the ^Eneid is 
 designed to illustrate and to foster. ^Eneas has 
 no wish to conquer Latium. He enters it merely 
 because he is divinely instructed that it is in Italy, 
 the original home of his race, that he must continue 
 the worship of his own progenitor Assaracus and of 
 the tutelary gods of Troy. This point achieved he 
 asks for nothing more. He introduces the worship 
 of Assaracus; but, it must be added, Assaracus is 
 never heard of again. So remote and legendary a 
 personage could not become the binding link of the 
 Eoman people. Nor had the Eoman commonwealth 
 ever yet stood in such a relation to any single family 
 as to permit the identification of their private Lares 
 with the Lares Praestites of the city of Rome. But
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 159 
 
 the case was altered now. One family had risen to 
 an isolated pre - eminence which no Eoman had 
 attained before. And by a singular chance this 
 same family combined a legendary with an actual 
 primacy. Augustus was at once the representative 
 of Assaracus and the master of the Eoman world. 
 The Lares of Augustus were at once identical in a 
 certain sense with Augustus himself, and with the 
 public Penates worshipped immemorially in their 
 chapel in the heart of the city. And if, as is no 
 doubt the case, the worship of Eoma and the Lares 
 augusti could claim in Virgil its half-unconscious 
 prophet, we may reply that this worship, however 
 afterwards debased, was in its origin and essence 
 neither novel nor servile, but national and antique ; 
 and that until the rise of Christianity, towards which 
 Virgil stands in a yet more singular anticipatory 
 relation, it would have been hard to say what other 
 form of religion could at once have satisfied the 
 ancient instincts and bound together the remote 
 extremities of the Eoman world. 
 
 The relation of Virgil to Christianity, to which 
 we now come, is an unexpectedly complex matter. 
 To understand it clearly, we must attempt to dis- 
 entangle some of the threads of religious emotion 
 and belief which intertwine in varying proportions 
 throughout his successive poems. 
 
 "Eeared among the woods and thickets," an 
 Italian country child, the counterpart of Words-
 
 160 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 worth in the union of spiritual aspiration with rustic 
 simplicity in which his early years were spent, 
 Virgil, like Wordsworth, seemed singled out as the 
 poet and priest of nature. And directly imitated 
 as his Eclogues are from Theocritus, a closer investi- 
 gation reveals the essential differences between the 
 nature of the two poets. The idylls of Theocritus 
 are glowing descriptions of pastoral life, written by 
 a man who lives and enjoys that life, and cares for 
 no other ideal. The Eclogues of Virgil have less of 
 consistency, but they have more of purpose. They 
 are an advocacy, none the less impassioned because 
 indirect, of the charm of scenery and simple pleasures 
 addressed to a society leading a life as remote from 
 nature as the life of the French court in the days of 
 Rousseau. Theocritus, delighting in everything con- 
 nected with rural life, loves to paint with vigour 
 even its least dignified scenes. Virgil whom the 
 Neapolitans called the Maid, and who shrank aside 
 when any one looked at him is grotesquely artificial 
 when he attempts to render the coarse badinage of 
 country clowns. On the other hand, where the 
 emotion in Theocritus is pure and worthy, Virgil is 
 found at his side, with so delicate a reproduction of 
 his effects, that it is sometimes hard to say whether 
 the Greek or the Latin passage seems the more 
 spontaneous and exquisite. 1 And there is a whole 
 region of higher emotions in which the Latin poet is 
 
 1 Compare E. viii. 37, with Theocr. xi. 25.
 
 ir.] VIRGIL. 161 
 
 alone. All Virgil's own are those sudden touches 
 of exalted friendship, 1 of exquisite tenderness, 2 of the 
 sadness and the mystery of love, 3 which seem to 
 murmur amid the bright flow of his pastoral poetry 
 of the deep source from whence it springs, as his 
 own Eridanus had his fountain in Paradise and the 
 underworld. 4 All Virgil's own, too, is the compre- 
 hending vision, the inward eye which looks back 
 through all man's wars and tumult to the new- 
 created mountains 5 and the primal spring, 6 and that 
 " wise passiveness " to which nature loves to offer 
 her consolation, which fills so often the interspace 
 between faiths decayed and faiths re-risen with a 
 
 1 e.g. E. vi. 64. The whole of the tenth eclogue is an exquisite 
 example of the half-tender, half-sportive sympathy by which one 
 friend can best strengthen another in the heart's lesser troubles, 
 and the blank when light loves have flown. The delicate humour 
 of this eclogue has perplexed the German commentators, who 
 suggest (1) either that Virgil meant it as a parody on the fifth 
 eclogue, or (2) that Gallus was in fact dead when it was written, 
 and that the poem, ostensibly composed to console him for being 
 jilted by an actress, was, in reality, intended as a sort of funeral 
 psalm. I may notice here the improbability of the story that 
 Virgil altered the end of the Fourth Georgic, omitting a panegyric 
 on Gallus after Gallus' disgrace and death. The Georgics were 
 published B.C. 29, and Gallus died B.C. 26. It is hard to believe 
 that a long passage, constituting the conclusion and crown of the 
 most popular and best known poem that had ever appeared in 
 Rome, and deriving added interest from the political scandal in- 
 volved, should, after being three years before the public, have 
 perished so utterly that not a line, not a fragment of a line, not an 
 allusion to the passage, should anywhere remain. 
 
 2 e.g. E. iv. 60. 3 e.g. E. viii. 47. 4 A. vi. 658. 
 
 5 E. vi. 40. G. ii. 338. 
 
 VOL. I. M
 
 162 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 tranquillised abeyance of doubt and fear. * Pan 
 and old Silvanus and the sister nymphs ; " Silenus 
 keeping the shepherds spell-bound till twilight with 
 his cosmic song; Proteus uttering his unwilling 
 oracles upon the solitary shore ; Clymene singing of 
 love in the caverned water-world amid the rivers' 
 roaring flow ; what are all these but aspects and 
 images of that great mother who has for all her 
 children a message which sometimes seems only 
 the sweeter because its meaning can be so dimly 
 known ? 
 
 Peculiar to Virgil, too, is that tone of expecta- 
 tion which recurs again and again to the hope of 
 some approaching union of mankind beneath a juster 
 heaven, which bids the shepherd look no longer on 
 the old stars with worn-out promises, but on a star 
 new -risen and more benign; which tells in that 
 mystical poem to which scholars know no key, how 
 the pure and stainless shepherd dies and is raised 
 to heaven, and begins from thence a gentle sway 
 which forbids alike the wild beast's ravin and the 
 hunter's cruel guile. 1 
 
 " great good news thro' all the woods that ran ! 
 
 psalm and praise of shepherds and of Pan ! 
 
 The hills unshorn to heaven their voices fling ; 
 
 Desert and wilderness rejoice and sing ; 
 ' A god he is ! a god we guessed him then ! 
 
 Peace on the earth he sends and joy to men.'" 
 
 1 E. v. 58.
 
 n.] VIRGIL. 163 
 
 But it is, of course, the Fourth, or Messianic 
 Eclogue (known to the English reader in Pope's 
 paraphrase, Ye nymphs of Solyma, begin the song), 
 which has formed the principal point of union 
 between Virgil and the new faith. In every age of 
 Christianity, from Augustine to Abelard, from the 
 Christmas sermon of Pope Innocent III. to the 
 Prselectiones Academicae of the late Mr. Keble, 
 divines and fathers of the Church have asserted the 
 inspiration, and claimed the prophecies of this mar- 
 vellous poem. It was on the strength of this poem 
 that Virgil's likeness was set among the carven seers 
 in the Cathedral of Zamora. It was on the strength 
 of this poem that in the Cathedrals of Limoges and 
 Eheims the Christmas appeal was made : " Maro, 
 prophet of the Gentiles, bear thou thy witness unto 
 Christ ; " and the stately semblance of the Roman 
 gave answer in the words which tell how " the new 
 progeny has descended from heaven on high." The 
 prophecy can claim cecumenical acceptance, regenera- 
 tive efficacy. The poet Statius, the martyr Secun- 
 dianus, were said to have been made Christians 
 by its perusal. And at the supreme moment of the 
 transference and reconstruction of the civil and 
 spiritual authority of the earth, the Emperor Con- 
 stantine in his oration, "inscribed to the Assembly 
 of Saints and dedicated to the Church of God," 
 commented on this poem in a Greek version, as 
 forming a link between the old and the new faiths,
 
 164 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 as explaining the change of form, and justifying the 
 historical continuity, of the religion of the civilised 
 world. 
 
 And there is nothing in this which need either 
 surprise or shock us. 1 For, in reality, the link be- 
 tween Virgil and Christianity depended not on a 
 
 1 There is, no doubt, a startling antithesis between the real and 
 the supposed object of Virgil's prophecy. For there can surely be 
 little doubt (as Bishop Louth, Boissier, etc., have argued) that the 
 Fourth Eclogue was written in anticipation of the birth of the 
 child of Augustus (then Octavianus) and Scribonia the notorious 
 Julia, born B.C. 39, shortly after the peace of Brundusium. The 
 words "te consule" applied to Pollio make it most unlikely that he 
 was the child's father. On the other hand, it would have been 
 quite in keeping with Virgil's stately courtesy to address to Pollio, 
 Antony's representative and Virgil's friend, a congratulatory poem 
 on the birth in his consulship of a child to Augustus, with whom 
 Antony had just been reconciled. Virgil was from the first one of 
 the most ardent supporters of Augustus, and though the young heir 
 of Caesar was not as yet clearly the first man in Rome, still, the 
 prestige of the Julian family alone could make the expressions of 
 the poem seem other than extravagant. Virgil no doubt desired 
 to associate Pollio as closely as possible with the hopes of the 
 Roman commonwealth. But to speak of "a world at peace 
 through Pollio 's virtue" would have been no less than absurd. 
 Moreover, the phrase, "thy Apollo is in the ascendant now," 
 points clearly to Augustus, whose patron Apollo was. The reason 
 why the riddle was not explained is obvious. The expected child 
 turned out to be a girl and a girl who perhaps gave rise to more 
 scandal than any other member of her sex. It is singular that the 
 embarrassing failure of the prediction at the time has been the 
 source of its extraordinary reputation afterwards, when the horo- 
 scope composed for Julia was fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Like the 
 arrow of Acestes (A. v. 520), the prophecy seemed to consume away 
 in the clouds and burn itself into empty air 
 
 " Till days far off its mighty meaning knew, 
 And seers long after sang the presage true."
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 165 
 
 misapplied prediction but on a moral sequence, a 
 spiritual conformity. There was a time when both 
 the apologists and the adversaries of Christianity 
 were disposed to ignore its connection with preced- 
 ing faiths. Exaggerated pictures of its miraculous 
 diffusion were met by the sneers of Gibbon at the 
 contagious spread of superstitions among the ruins 
 of a wiser world. The tone of both parties has 
 altered as historical criticism has advanced. It is 
 recognised that it is only " in the fulness of time " 
 that a great religious change can come; that men's 
 minds must be prepared for new convictions by a 
 need which has been deeply felt, and a habit of 
 thought which has been slowly acquired. And in 
 Virgil's time, as has already been said, the old 
 dogmas were tending to disappear. But while in 
 the lower minds they were corrupting into super- 
 stition, in the higher they were evaporating into a 
 clearer air. The spiritual element was beginning 
 to assert itself over the ceremonial. Instincts of 
 catholic charity were beginning to put to shame the 
 tribal narrowness of the older faith. Philosophy 
 was issuing from the lecture-room into the forum 
 and the street. 
 
 And thus it is that Virgil's poems lie at the 
 watershed of religions. Filled as they are with 
 Eoman rites and Eoman tradition, they contain also 
 another element, gentler, holier, till then almost 
 unknown ; a change has passed over them like the
 
 166 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 change which passes over a Norwegian midnight 
 when the rose of evening becomes silently the rose 
 of dawn. 
 
 It is strange to trace the alternate attraction and 
 repulsion which the early Christians felt towards 
 Virgil. Sometimes they allegorised the .ZEneid into 
 a kind of Siege of Man-soul, in which the fall, the 
 temptations, the deliverance of man, are recorded in 
 a figure. Sometimes they compiled Christianised 
 centos from his poems, works which obtained such 
 authority that Pope Gelasius found it necessary to 
 pronounce ex cathedrd that they formed no part of 
 the canon of Scripture. Sometimes, as in Augustine, 
 we watch the conflict in a higher air ; we see the 
 ascetic absorption in the new faith at war with the 
 truer instinct, which warns him that all noble 
 emotions are in reality mutually supporting, and 
 that we debase instead of ennobling our devotion 
 to one supreme ideal if we shrink from recognising 
 the goodness and greatness of ideals which are not 
 to us so dear. But even in the wild legends which 
 in the Middle Ages cluster so thickly round the 
 name of Virgil, even in the distorted fancies of the 
 hamlet or the cloister, we can discern some glimmer- 
 ing perception of an actual truth. It is not true, 
 as the Spanish legend tells us, that " Virgil's eyes 
 first saw the star of Bethlehem ;" but it is true that 
 in none more fully than in him is found that temper 
 which offers all worldly wealth, all human learning,
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 167 
 
 at the feet of Purity, and for the knowledge of 
 Truth. It is not true that Virgil was a magician ; 
 that he clove the rock ; that he wrought a gigantic 
 figure which struck a note of warning at the far- 
 seen onset of tumult or of war ; but it is true that 
 he was one of those who "like giants stand, to 
 sentinel enchanted land," whose high thoughts have 
 caught and reflect the radiance of some mysterious 
 and unrisen day. 
 
 Although the interest which subsequent ages 
 have taken in the religion of Virgil has turned 
 mainly upon his relation to Christianity, he would 
 himself, of course, have judged in another light the 
 growth of his inward being. A celebrated passage 
 in the Georgics has revealed to us his mood of mind 
 in a decisive hour. To understand it we must refer 
 to the strongest influence which his youth was 
 destined to undergo. When Virgil was on the 
 threshold of life a poem was published which, 
 perhaps, of all single monuments of Eoman genius, 
 conveys to us the most penetrating conception of 
 the irresistible force of Eome. There is no need to 
 deck Lucretius with any attributes not his own. 
 We may grant that his poetry is often uncouth, his 
 science confused, his conception of human existence 
 steeped in a lurid gloom. But no voice like his has 
 ever proclaimed the nothingness of " momentary 
 man," no prophet so convincing has ever thundered 
 in our ears the appalling Gospel of Death. Few
 
 168 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 minds, perhaps, that were not stiffly cased in fore- 
 gone conclusions have ever met the storm of his 
 passionate eloquence without bending before the 
 blast, without doubting for an hour of their inmost 
 instincts, and half believing that " as we felt no woe 
 in times long gone, when from all the earth to battle 
 the Carthaginians came," so now it may be man's 
 best and only hope to quench in annihilation his 
 unsated longings and his deep despair. 
 
 On Virgil's nature, disposed at once to vague 
 sadness and to profound inquiry, the six books on 
 the Nature of Things produced their maximum 
 effect. Alike in his thought and language we see 
 the Lucretian influence mingling with that spirit of 
 natural religion which seems to have been his own 
 earliest bent ; and at last, in the passage above re- 
 ferred to, 1 he pauses between the two hypotheses, 
 each alike incapable of proof ; that which assumes 
 that because we see in nature an impersonal order, 
 therefore there is no more to see, and that which 
 assumes that because we feel within us a living 
 spirit, the universe, too, lives around us and breathes 
 with the divine. 
 
 " If thou thy secrets grudge me, nor assign 
 So high a lore to such a heart as mine, 
 Still, Nature, let me still thy beauty know, 
 Love the clear streams that thro' thy valleys flow, 
 
 1 G. ii. 490. The last two lines of the version here given 
 merely summarise a passage too long for quotation.
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 169 
 
 To many a forest laAvn that love proclaim, 
 Breathe the full soul, and make an end of fame ! 
 Ah me, Spercheos ! oh to watch alway 
 On Taygeta the Spartan girls at play ! 
 Or cool in Hsemus' gloom to feel me laid, 
 Deep in his branching solitudes of shade ! 
 
 Happy the man whose steadfast eye surveys 
 The whole world's truth, its hidden works and ways, 
 Happy, who thus beneath his feet has thrown 
 All fears and fates, and Hell's insatiate moan ! 
 Blest, too, were he the sister nymphs who knew, 
 Pan, and Sylvanus, and the sylvan crew ; 
 On kings and crowds his careless glance he flings, 
 And scorns the treacheries of crowds and kings ; 
 Far north the leaguered hordes are hovering dim ; 
 Danube and Dacian have no dread for him ; 
 No shock of laws can fright his steadfast home, 
 Nor realms in ruin nor all the fates of Rome. 
 Round him no glare of envied Avealth is shed, 
 From him no piteous beggar prays for bread ; 
 Earth, Earth herself the unstinted gift will give, 
 Her trustful children need but reap and live ; 
 She hath man's peace 'mid all the worldly stir, 
 One with himself he is, if one with her." 
 
 And henceforth without fanatical blindness, but 
 with a slow deliberate fervour, he elects to act upon 
 the latter opinion ; and from this time \ve find little 
 trace of the influence of Lucretius in his poems, 
 except it may be some quickening of that delight 
 in the hidden things of nature which makes the 
 world's creation lopas', 1 as it was Sileuus' 2 song ; 
 1 A. i. 743. 2 E. vi. 31
 
 170 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 some deepening of that mournful wonder with 
 which he regards the contrast between the hopes 
 and fates of men. 
 
 And is there, then, anything in Virgil's creed 
 more definite than this vague spirituality ? Is there 
 any moral government of the world of which he can 
 speak to us from the heart ? If so, it is not in 
 connection with the old gods of Eome, for they have 
 lost their individual life. They are no longer like 
 those gods of Homer's, who "sat on the brow of 
 Callicolone," awful in their mingling of aloofness 
 and reality, of terror and subduing charm. Jove's 
 frowns, Cytherea's caresses, in the ./Eneid assume 
 alike an air of frigid routine. And in the unfinished 
 later books the references to the heavenly council- 
 board are of so curt and formal a character that 
 they can deceive no one. It is as if the poet felt 
 bound to say, "that the gods had taken the matter 
 into their most serious consideration," l " that it was 
 with great regret that the gods found themselves 
 unable to concede a longer term of existence to the 
 Daunian hero," 2 while all the time he was well 
 aware that the gods had never been consulted in 
 the matter at all. 
 
 And even that more real and comprehensive 
 religion of Eome, the inspiring belief in the destinies 
 of the Eternal City, lacked that which is lacking to 
 all such religions, whether their object be one city 
 
 1 A. xii. 843. 2 A. xii. 725.
 
 n.] VIRGIL. 171 
 
 only or the whole corporate commonwealth of men. 
 There was no place in it for individual recompense ; 
 it left unanswered the imperious demand of the 
 moral sense that not one sentient soul shall be 
 created to agony that others may be blest. Such 
 faiths may inspire ceremonial, may prompt to action, 
 but they cannot justify the ways of God to man, nor 
 satisfy or control the heart. 
 
 It is well known that in the central passage of 
 the ^neid, the speech of the shade of Anchises to 
 ^Eneas in Elysium, 1 Virgil has abruptly relinquished 
 his efforts to revive or harmonise legendary beliefs, 
 and has propounded an answer to the riddle of the 
 universe in an unexpectedly definite form. It would 
 be interesting to trace the elements of Stoic, Platonic, 
 Pythagorean thought which combine in this remark- 
 able passage. But such an inquiry would be beyond 
 our present scope, and must in any case rest largely 
 upon conjecture, for Virgil, who seems to have been 
 working upon this exposition till the last, 2 and who 
 meant, as we know, to devote to philosophy the rest 
 of his life after the completion of the ^Eneid, has 
 given us no indication of the process by which he 
 reached these results results singular as contrasting 
 so widely with the official religion of which he was 
 in some sort the representative, yet which may 
 
 1 A. vi. 724-755. 
 
 2 See A. vi. 743-7, as indicating that the arrangement of this 
 passage is incomplete.
 
 172 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [11. 
 
 surprise us less when we consider their close coinci- 
 dence with the independent conclusions of many 
 thinkers of ancient and modern times. A brief 
 description of the passage referred to will fitly con- 
 clude the present essay. 
 
 JEneas, warned of Anchises in a vision, has 
 penetrated the underworld to consult his father's 
 shade. He finds Anchises surrounded by an in- 
 numerable multitude of souls, who congregate on 
 Lethe's shore. His father tells him that these souls 
 are drinking the waters of oblivion, and will then 
 return to live again on earth. ^Eneas is astonished 
 at this, and the form of the question which he 
 asks 1 is in itself highly significant. Compared, for 
 example, with the famous contrast which the 
 Homeric Achilles draws between even the poorest 
 life on happy earth and the forlorn kingship of the 
 shades, it indicates that a change has taken place 
 which of all speculative changes is perhaps the most 
 important, that the ideal has been shifted from the 
 visible to the invisible, from the material to the 
 spiritual world 
 
 " father, must I deem that souls can pray 
 Hence to turn backward to the worldly day? 
 Change for that weight of flesh these forms more fair, 
 For that sun's sheen this paradisal air ?" 
 
 The speech of Anchises in answer is in a certain 
 sense the most Virgilian passage in Virgil. All his 
 i A. vi. 719.
 
 n.l VIRGIL. 173 
 
 J 
 
 characteristics appear in it in their highest intensity; 
 the pregnant allusiveness, the oracular concentration, 
 the profound complexity, and through them all that 
 unearthly march of song, that " Elysian beauty, 
 melancholy grace," which made him the one fit 
 master for that other soul whom he " mise dentro alle 
 segrete cose" to whom in face of purgatory's fiercest 
 fire * he promised the reward of constancy, and 
 spoke of the redemptions of love. 
 
 The translator may well hesitate before such a 
 passage as this. But as a knowledge of the Theodicy 
 here unfolded is absolutely necessary to the English 
 reader who would understand Virgil aright, some 
 version shall be given here 
 
 " One Life through all the immense creation runs, 
 One Spirit is the moon's, the sea's, the sun's ; 
 All forms in the air that fly, on the earth that creep, 
 And the unknown nameless monsters of the deep, 
 Each breathing tiling obeys one Mind's control, 
 And in all substance is a single Soul. 
 First to each seed a fiery force is given ; 
 And every creature was begot in heaven ; 
 Only their flight must hateful flesh delay 
 And gross limbs moribund and cumbering clay. 
 So from that hindering prison and night forlorn 
 Thy hopes and fears, thy joys and woes are born, 
 Who only seest, till death dispart thy gloom, 
 The true world glow through crannies of a tomb. 
 
 1 Purg. xxvii. 20
 
 174 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 Nor all at once thine ancient ills decay, 
 Nor quite with death thy plagues are purged away ; 
 In wondrous wise hath the iron entered in, 
 And through and through thee is a stain of sin ; 
 Which yet again in wondrous wise must be 
 Cleansed of the fire, abolished in the sea ; 
 Ay, thro' and thro' that soul unclothed must go 
 Such spirit-winds as where they list will blow ; 
 hovering many an age ! for ages bare, 
 Void in the void and impotent in air ! 
 
 Then, since his sins unshriven the sinner wait, 
 And to each soul that soul herself is Fate, 
 Few to heaven's many mansions straight are sped 
 (Past without blame that Judgment of the dead), 
 The most shall mourn till tarrying Time hath wrought 
 The extreme deliverance of the airy thought, 
 Hath left unsoiled by fear or foul desire 
 The spirit's self, the elemental fire. 
 
 And last to Lethe's stream on the ordered day 
 These all God summoneth in great array ; 
 Who from that draught reborn, no more shall know 
 Memory of past or dread of destined woe, 
 But all shall there the ancient pain forgive, 
 Forget their life, and will again to live." 
 
 The shade of Ancliises is silent here. But let 
 us add some lines from the Georgics, 1 in which 
 Virgil carries these souls yet farther, and to the 
 term of their wondrous way 
 
 " Then since from God those lesser lives began, 
 And the eager spirits entered into man, 
 
 1 G. iv. 223.
 
 ii.] VIRGIL. 175 
 
 To God again the enfranchised soul must tend, 
 He is her home, her Author is her End ; 
 No death is hers ; when earthly eyes grow dim 
 Starlike she soars and Godlike melts in Him." 
 
 But why must we recur to an earlier poem for 
 the consummation which was most of all needed 
 here ? and why, at the end of the sixth book, has 
 the poet struck that last strange note of doubt and 
 discord, dismissing ^Eneas from the shades by the 
 deluding Ivory Gate, proclaiming, as it were, like 
 Plato, his Theodicy as " neither false nor true," as 
 a dream among dreams that wander and " visions 
 unbelievable and fair ? " We turn, like Dante, in 
 hope of the wise guide's reply. But he has left us 
 at last alone. 1 He has led us to the region " where 
 of himself he can see no more;" 2 we must expect 
 from him no longer " either word or sign." He 
 parts from us in the " antelucan splendour," and at 
 the gate of heaven, at the very moment when a 
 hundred angels sing aloud with fuller meaning his 
 own words of solemn welcome and unforgetful love. 3 
 To Dante all the glory of paradise could not avail to 
 keep his eyes from scorching tears at his " sweetest 
 father's " sad withdrawal and uncompleted way : 
 we too, perhaps, may feel mournfully the lot of man 
 as we think of him on whose yearning spirit all 
 revelation that nature, or that science, or that faith 
 
 1 Purg. xxx. 49. 2 Purg. xxvii. 129, 139. 
 
 3 Purg. xxx. 21.
 
 176 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [n. 
 
 could show, fell only as day's last glory on the 
 fading vision of the Carthaginian queen l 
 
 " For thrice she turned, and thrice had fain dispread 
 Her dying arms to lift her dying head ; 
 Thrice in high heaven, with dimmed eyes wandering 
 
 wide, 
 She sought the light, and found the light, and sighed." 
 
 So was it with those who by themselves should 
 not be made perfect ; they differed from the saints 
 of Christendom not so much in the emotion which 
 they offered as in the emotion with which they were 
 repaid ; it was elevation but it was not ecstasy ; it 
 came to them not as hope but as calm. What 
 touch of unattainable holiness was lacking for their 
 reception into Dante's Paradisal Eose ? what ardour 
 of love was still unknown to them which should 
 have been their foretaste and their pledge of heaven ? 
 "Dark night enwraps their heads with hovering 
 gloom," and from this man, their solitary rearguard, 
 and on the very confines of the day, we can part 
 only in words of such sad reverence as salute in his 
 own song that last and most divinely glorified of the 
 inhabitants of the underworld 2 
 
 " Give, give me lilies ; thick the flowers be laid 
 To greet that mighty, melancholy shade ; 
 With such poor gifts let me his praise maintain, 
 And mourn with useless tears, and crown in vain." 
 
 1 A. iv. 690. 2 A. vi. 883.
 
 MARCUS AUBELIUS ANTONINUS. 
 
 "Ayov dt fj.', w Zev, Kal ffijy 17 Heir pw/xep 77, 
 STTOI TroO'v/juv fi/j.1 SiarTay/j.vos' 
 ws ^/ofj,ai y &OKVOS' ty 5t yar; 0e\u>, 
 Kcucbs yev6fj.evos 6v5ev tfrTov \jso/j.ai. 
 
 CLEANTHES. 
 
 SOME apology may seem to be due from one who 
 ventures to treat once again of Marcus Aurelius 
 Antoninus. Few characters in history have been 
 oftener or more ably discussed during the present 
 age, an age whose high aims and uncertain creed 
 have found at once impulse and sympathy in the 
 meditations of the crowned philosopher. And, 
 finally, the most subtle and attractive of living 
 historians has closed his strange portrait -gallery 
 with this majestic figure, accounting that the sun of 
 Christianity was not fully risen till it had seen the 
 paling of the old world's last and purest star. 
 
 The subject has lost, no doubt, its literary fresh- 
 ness, but its moral and philosophical significance is 
 still unexhausted. Even an increased interest, indeed, 
 may be felt at the present time in considering 
 VOL. i. N
 
 178 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 the relations which the philosophy of Marcus bears 
 either to ancient or to modern religious thought. 
 For he has been made, as it were, the saint and 
 exemplar of Agnosticism, the type of all such vir- 
 tue and wisdom as modern criticism can allow to 
 be sound or permanent. It will be the object of 
 the following essay to suggest some reflections on 
 the position thus assigned to him, dwelling only 
 incidentally, and as briefly as may be consistent with 
 clearness, on the more familiar aspects of his opinions 
 and his career. 
 
 Character and circumstances, rather than talent or 
 originality, give to the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius 
 their especial value and charm. And although the 
 scanty notices of his life which have come down 
 to us have now been often repeated, it seems neces- 
 sary to allude to some of the more characteristic of 
 them if we would understand the spiritual outlook 
 of one who is not a closet-philosopher moralising in 
 vacuo, but the son of Pius, the father of Commodus, 
 the master of a declining world. 
 
 The earliest statue which we know of Marcus 
 represents him as a youth offering sacrifice. The 
 earliest story of him, before his adoption into the 
 Imperial family, is of his initiation, at eight years 
 old, as a Salian priest of Mars, when the crowns 
 flung by the other priests fell here and there around 
 the recumbent statue, but the crown which young 
 Marcus threw to him lit and rested on the war-
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 179 
 
 god's head. The boy-priest, we are told, could soon 
 conduct all the ceretnonies of the Salian cult without 
 the usual prompter, for he served in all its offices, 
 and knew all its hymns by heart. And it well be- 
 came him thus to begin by exhibiting the character- 
 istic piety of a child ; who passes in his growing 
 years through the forms of worship, as of thought, 
 which have satisfied his remote forefathers, and 
 ripens himself for his adult philosophies with the 
 consecrated tradition of the past. 
 
 Our next glimpse is of the boy growing into 
 manhood in the household of his adopted father, 
 Antoninus Pius, whom he is already destined to 
 succeed on the Imperial throne. One of the lessons 
 for which Marcus afterwards revered his father's 
 memory was the lesson of simplicity maintained in 
 the palace of princes, " far removed from the habits 
 of the rich." The correspondence between the Im- 
 perial boy and his tutor, Fronto, shows us how pro- 
 nounced this simplicity was, and casts a curious 
 side-light on the power of the Eoman Emperor, who 
 can impress his own individuality with so uncom- 
 promising a hand not only on the affairs of the 
 empire, but on the personal habits of his court and 
 entourage. In the modern world the more absolute 
 a monarch is in one way, the more is he in another 
 way fettered and constrained ; for his absolutism 
 relies on an artificial prestige which can dispense 
 with no means of impressii)g the vulgar mind. And
 
 180 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 in freer countries there is always a set of necessary 
 persons, an habitual tone of manners, which the 
 sovereign cannot afford to ignore. A George III. may 
 lead a frugal family life, but he is forced to conciliate 
 and consort with social leaders of habits quite opposite 
 to his own. A William IV. who fails to do this 
 adequately is pronounced to be " not in society." 
 Antoninus Pius might certainly have been said to be 
 "out of society," but that there was no society for him 
 to be in except his own. The " optimates," whose 
 opinion Cicero treats as the acknowledged standard 
 a group of notables enjoying social as well as official 
 pre-eminence had practically ceased to exist. Even 
 the Senate, whose dignity the Antonines so sedu- 
 lously cherished, consisted mainly of new and low- 
 born men. Everything depended on the individual 
 tastes of the ruler. Play-actors were at the head of 
 society under Nero, spies under Domitian, philoso- 
 phers under the Antonines. 
 
 The letters of the young Marcus to Pronto are 
 very much such letters as might be written at the pre- 
 sent day by the home-taught son of an English squire 
 to a private tutor to whom he was much attached. 
 They are, however, more effusive than an English style 
 allows, and although Marcus in his youth was a suc- 
 cessful athlete, they seldom refer to games or hunting. 
 I translate one of them as a specimen of the rest : 
 
 " I slept late this morning on account of my 
 cold, but it is better. From five iu the morning till
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 181 
 
 nine I partly read Cato on Agriculture, and partly 
 wrote, not quite such rubbish as yesterday. Then I 
 greeted my father, and then soothed my throat with 
 honey-water without absolutely gargling. Then I 
 attended my father as he offered sacrifice. Then to 
 breakfast. What do you think I ate 1 only a little 
 bread, though I saw the others devouring beans, onions, 
 and sardines ! Then we went out to the vintage, and got 
 hot and merry, but left a few grapes still hanging, as 
 the old poet says, ' atop on the topmost bough.' At 
 noon we got home again ; I worked a little, but it was 
 not much good. Then I chatted a long time with my 
 mother as she sat on her bed. My com r ersation con- 
 sisted of, ' What do you suppose my Fronto is doing at 
 this moment ?' to which she answered, ' And my Gratia, 
 what is she doing V and then I, ' And our little birdie, 
 Gratia the less 1 ?' And while we were talking and 
 quarrelling as to which of us loved all of you the best, 
 the gong sounded, which meant that my father had gone 
 across to the bath. So we bathed and dined in the oil- 
 press room. I don't mean that we bathed in the press- 
 room ; but we bathed and then dined, and amused 
 ourselves with listening to the peasants' banter. And 
 now that I am in my own room again, before I roll over 
 and snore, I am fulfilling my promise and giving an 
 account of my day to my dear tutor ; and if I could 
 love him better than I do I would consent to miss him 
 even more than I miss him now. Take care of your- 
 self, my best and dearest Fronto, wherever you are. 
 The fact is that I love you, and you are far away." 
 
 Among the few hints which the correspondence 
 contains of the pupil's rank is one curiously charac-
 
 182 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [m. 
 
 teristic of his times and his destiny. Tutor and 
 pupil, it seems, were in the habit of sending to each 
 other " hypotheses," or imaginary cases, for the sake 
 of practice in dealing with embarrassing circum- 
 stances as they arose. Marcus puts to Fronto the 
 following " hard case " : "A Eoman consul at the 
 public games changes his consular dress for a 
 gladiator's, and kills a lion in the amphitheatre 
 before the assembled people. What is to be done 
 to him ? " The puzzled Fronto contents himself 
 with replying that such a thing could not possibly 
 happen. But the boy's -prevision was true. A 
 generation later this very thing was done by a man 
 who was not only a Eoman consul, but a Roman 
 Emperor, and the son of Marcus himself. 
 
 These were Marcus' happiest days. The com- 
 panionship of Pius was a school of all the virtues. 
 His domestic life with Faustina, if we are to 
 believe contemporary letters rather than the scandal 
 of the next century, was, at first at any rate, a 
 model of happiness and peace. Marcus was already 
 forty years old when Pius died. The nineteen 
 years which remained to him were mainly occupied 
 in driving back Germanic peoples from the northern 
 frontiers of the empire. This labour was inter- 
 rupted in A.D. 1 7 5 by the revolt of Avidius Cassius, 
 an event which Marcus employed as a great occasion 
 for magnanimity. The story is one which some 
 dramatist might well seize upon, and show, with a
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 183 
 
 truer groundwork than Corneille in Cinna, how im- 
 possible is resentment to the philosophic soul. But 
 the moment in these latter years which may be 
 selected as most characteristic was perhaps that of 
 the departure of Marcus to Germany in A.D. 178 for 
 his last and sternest war. That great irruption of 
 the Marcomanni was compared by subsequent his- 
 torians to the invasion of Hannibal. It was in fact, 
 and it was dimly felt to be, the beginning of the 
 end. The terrified Komans resorted to every expedi- 
 ent which could attract the favour of heaven or 
 fortify the spirit of man. The Emperor threw a 
 blood-stained spear from the temple of Mars towards 
 the unknown North, invoking thus for the last time 
 in antique fashion the tutelary divinity of Eome. 
 The images of all the gods were laid on couches in 
 the sight of men, and that holy banquet was set 
 before them which constituted their worshippers' 
 most solemn appeal. But no sacrifices henceforth 
 were to be for long effectual, nor omens favourable 
 again ; they could only show the " Eoman peace " 
 no longer sacred, the " Eoman world " no longer 
 stretching "past the sun's year-long way," but 
 Janus' temple-doors for ever open, and Terminus 
 receding upon Eome. Many new rites were also 
 performed, many foreign gods were approached with 
 strange expiations. But the strangest feature in 
 this religious revival lay in an act of the Emperor 
 himself. He was entreated, says Vulcatius, to give
 
 184 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [m. 
 
 a parting address to his subjects before he set out 
 into the wilderness of the north ; and for three 
 days he expounded his philosophy to the people of 
 Rome. The anecdote is a strange one, but hardly in 
 itself improbable. It accords so well with Marcus' 
 trust in the power of reason, his belief in the duty 
 of laying the truth before men ! One can imagine 
 the sincere gaze, such as his coins show to us ; the 
 hand, as in the great equestrian statue of the Capi- 
 tol, uplifted, as though to bless ; the countenance 
 controlled, as his biographers tell us, to exhibit 
 neither joy nor pain ; the voice and diction, not 
 loud nor striking, but grave and clear, as he bade 
 Ms hearers " reverence the daemon within them," 
 and "pass from one unselfish action to another, 
 with memory of God." Like the fabled Arthur, 
 he was, as it were, the conscience amid the warring 
 passions of his knights ; like Arthur, he was him- 
 self going forth to meet " death, or he knew not 
 what mysterious doom." 
 
 For indeed his last years are lost in darkness. 
 A few anecdotes tell of his failing body and resolute 
 will ; a few bas-reliefs give in fragments a confused 
 story of the wilderness and of war. We see marshes 
 and forests, bridges and battles, captive Sarmatians 
 brought to judgment, and Marcus still with his hand 
 uplifted as though bestowing pardon or grace. 
 
 The region in which these last years were spent 
 is to this day one of the most melancholy in Europe.
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 185 
 
 The forces of nature run to waste without use or 
 beauty. The great Danube spreads himself languidly 
 between uncertain shores. As it was in the days of 
 Marcus so is it now; the traveller from Vienna 
 eastward still sees the white mist cling to the deso- 
 late river-terraces, the clouds of wild-fowl swoop and 
 settle among the reedy islands, and along the bays 
 and promontories of the brimming stream. 
 
 But over these years hung a shadow darker than 
 could be cast By any visible foe. Plague had be- 
 come endemic in the Roman world. The pestilence 
 brought from Asia by Verus in A.D. 166 had not 
 yet abated ; it had destroyed already (as it would 
 seem) half the population of the Empire ; it was 
 achieving its right to be considered by careful his- 
 torians as the most terrible calamity which has ever 
 fallen upon men. Destined, as it were, to sever race 
 from race and era from era, the plague struck its last 
 blow against the Eoman people upon the person of 
 the Emperor himself. He died in the camp, alone. 
 " Why weep for me," were his last words of stern 
 self-suppression, " and not think rather of the pesti- 
 lence, and of the death of all ?" 
 
 When the news of his death reached Eome few 
 tears, we are told, were shed. For it seemed to the 
 people that Marcus, like Marcellus, had been but 
 lent to the Eoman race ; it was natural that he 
 should pass back again from the wilderness to his 
 celestial home. Before the official honours had been
 
 186 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [m. 
 
 paid to him the Senate and people by acclamation 
 at his funeral saluted him as " The Propitious God." 
 No one, says the chronicler, thought of him as 
 Emperor any more ; but the young men called on 
 " Marcus, my father," the men of middle age on 
 " Marcus, my brother," the old men on " Marcus, 
 my son." Homo homini deus est, si suum officium 
 sciat and it may well be that those who thus hon- 
 oured and thus lamented him had never known a 
 truer son or brother, father or god. 
 
 It does not fall within the scope of this essay to 
 enumerate in detail the measures by which Marcus 
 had earned the gratitude of the Empire. But it is 
 important to remember that neither war nor philo- 
 sophy had impaired his activity as an administrator. 
 Politically his reign, like that of Pius, was remark- 
 able for his respectful treatment of the senatorial 
 order. Instead of regarding senators as the natural 
 objects of imperial jealousy, or prey of imperial 
 avarice, he endeavoured by all means to raise their 
 dignity and consideration. Some of them he em- 
 ployed as a kind of privy council, others as governors 
 of cities. When at Borne he attended every meeting 
 of the Senate ; and even when absent in Campania 
 he would travel back expressly to be present at any 
 important debate; nor did he ever leave the council- 
 hall till the sitting was adjourned. 
 
 While Marcus thus attempted to revive a respon- 
 sible upper class, he was far from neglecting the
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 187 
 
 interests of the poor. He developed the scheme 
 of state nurture and education for needy free-born 
 children which the Flavian emperors had begun. 
 He reformed the local government of Italy, and 
 made more careful provision against the recurring 
 danger of scarcity. He instituted the " tutelary 
 prsetorship " which was to watch over the rights of 
 orphans a class often unjustly treated at Rome. 
 And he fostered and supervised that great develop- 
 ment of civil and criminal law which, under the 
 Antonines, was steadily giving protection to the 
 minor, justice to the woman,jights to the slave, and 
 transforming the stern maxims of Eoman procedure 
 into a fit basis for the jurisprudence of the modern 
 world. 
 
 But indeed the true life and influence of Marcus 
 had scarcely yet begun. In his case, as in many 
 others, it was not the main occupation, the osten- 
 sible business of his life, which proved to have the 
 most enduring value. His most effective hours were 
 not those spent in his long adjudications, his cease- 
 less battles, his strenuous ordering of the concerns 
 of the Eoman world. Rather they were the hours 
 of solitude and sadness, when, " among the Quadi," 
 " on the Granua," " at Carnuntum," he consoled his 
 lonely spirit by jotting down in fragmentary sen- 
 tences the principles which were his guide through 
 life. The little volume was preserved by some for- 
 tunate accident. For many centuries it was acQouuted
 
 188 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 as a kind of curiosity of literature as heading the 
 brief list of the writings of kings. From time to 
 time some earnest spirit discovered that the help 
 given by the little book was of surer quality than 
 he could find in many a volume which promised 
 more. One and another student was moved to 
 translate it from old Gataker of Rotherhithe, com- 
 pleting the work in his seventy-eighth year, as his 
 best preparation for death, to " Cardinal Francis 
 Barberini the elder, who dedicated the translation 
 to his soul, in order to make it redder than his 
 purple at the sight of the virtues of this Gentile." l 
 But the complete success of the book was reserved 
 for the present century. I will quote one passage 
 only as showing the position which it has taken 
 among some schools of modern thought a passage 
 in which a writer celebrated for his nice distinctions 
 and balanced praise has spoken of the Meditations 
 in terms of more unmixed eulogy than he has ever 
 bestowed elsewhere : 
 
 " Veritable Evangile e"ternel," says M. Renan, " le 
 livre des Pense"es ne vieillira jamais, car il n'affirme 
 aucun dogme. L'Evangile a vieilli en certaines parties ; 
 la science ne permet plus d'admettre la na'ive concep- 
 tion du surnaturel qui en fait la base. Le surnaturel 
 n'est dans les Pens^es qu'une petite tache insignifiante, 
 qui n'atteint pas la merveilleuse beaute du fond. La 
 
 1 See the preface to Mr. Long's admirable translation. The 
 quotations from the Meditations in this essay are given partly in 
 Mr. Long's words.
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 189 
 
 science pourrait detruire Dieu et Fame, que-le livre des 
 Pensees resterait jeune encore de vie et de verite. La 
 religion de Marc-Aurele, comme le fut par moments celle 
 de Jesus, est la religion absolue, celle qui resulte du 
 simple fait d'une haute conscience morale placee en face 
 de 1'univers. Elle n'est ni d'une race ni d'un pays. 
 Aucune revolution, aucun progres, aucune d6couverte ne 
 pourront la changer." 
 
 What then, we may ask, and how attained to, 
 was the wisdom which is thus highly praised ? 
 How came it that a man of little original power, 
 in an age of rhetoric and commonplace, was able 
 to rise to the height of so great an argument, and 
 to make of his most secret ponderings the religious 
 manual of a far- distant world ? This question can 
 scarcely be answered without a few preliminary re- 
 flections on the historical development of religion at 
 Eome. 
 
 Among all the civilised religions of antiquity 
 the Eoman might well seem the least congenial 
 either to the beliefs or to the emotions of modern 
 times. From the very first it bears all the marks 
 of a political origin. When the antiquarian Varro 
 treats first of the state and then of the gods, " be- 
 cause in order that gods may be established states 
 must first exist," he is but retracing faithfully the 
 real genesis of the cult of Rome. Composed of 
 elements borrowed from various quarters, it dealt 
 with all in a legal, external, unimaginative spirit.
 
 190 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 The divination and ghost -religion, which it drew 
 from the Etruscans and other primitive sources, 
 survived in the state-augury and in the domestic 
 worship of the Lares, only in a formal and half- 
 hearted way. The nature-religion, which came from 
 the Aryan forefathers of Koine, grew frigid indeed 
 when it was imprisoned in the Indigitamenta, or 
 Official Handy -book of the Gods. It is not to 
 Borne, though it may often be to Italy, that the 
 anthropologist must look for instances of those 
 quaint rites which form in many countries the 
 oldest existing links between civilised and primitive 
 conceptions of the operations of an unseen Power. 
 It is not from Kome that the poet must hope for 
 fresh developments of those exquisite and uncon- 
 scious allegories, which even in their most hackneyed 
 reproduction still breathe on us the glory of the 
 early world. The most enthusiastic of pagans or 
 neo- pagans could scarcely reverence with much 
 emotion the botanical accuracy of Nodotus, the god 
 of Nodes, and Volutina, the goddess of Petioles, nor 
 tremble before the terrors of Spiniensis and Kobigus, 
 the austere Powers of Blight and Brambles, nor 
 eagerly implore the favour of Stercutius and Ster- 
 quilinus, the beneficent deities of Manure. 1 
 
 This shadowy system of divinities is a mere 
 
 1 Of some of these Powers it is hard to say whether they are to 
 be considered as celestial or the reverse. Such are Carnea, the 
 Goddess of Embonpoint, and Genius Portorii Publici, the Angel of 
 Indirect Taxation.
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 191 
 
 elaboration of the primitive notion that religion 
 consists in getting whatever can be got from the 
 gods, and that this must be done by asking the 
 right personages in the proper terms. The boast of 
 historian or poet that the old Eomans were " most 
 religious mortals," or that they " surpassed in piety 
 the gods themselves," refers entirely to punctuality 
 of outward observance, considered as a definite quid 
 pro quo for the good things desired. It is not hard 
 to be " more pious than the gods " if piety on our 
 part consists in asking decorously for what we 
 want, and piety on their part in immediately grant- 
 ing it. 
 
 It is plain that it was not in this direction that 
 the Eomans found a vent for the reverence and 
 the self-devotion in which their character was 
 assuredly not deficient. Their true worship, their 
 true piety, were reserved for a more concrete, 
 though still a vast ideal. As has been often said, 
 the religion of the Eomans was Eome. Her true 
 saints were her patriots, Curtius and Scsevola, 
 Horatius, Eegulus, Cato. Her "heaven -descended 
 maxim " was not yvwdi creavrov, but Delenda, esl 
 Carthago. But a concrete idea must necessarily 
 lose in fixedness what it gains in actuality. As 
 Eome became the Eoman Empire the temper of her 
 religion must needs change with the fortunes of its 
 object. While the fates of the city yet hung in 
 the balance the very thought of her had been
 
 192 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [m. 
 
 enough to make Eoman for all ages a synonym for 
 heroic virtue. But when a heterogeneous world- 
 wide empire seemed to derive its unity from the 
 Emperor's personality alone, men felt that the object 
 of so many deeds of piety had disappeared through 
 their very success. Devotion to Eome was trans- 
 formed into the worship of Csesar, and the one strain 
 of vital religion which had run through the Com- 
 monwealth was stiffened like all the rest into a 
 dead official routine. 
 
 Something better than this was needed for culti- 
 vated and serious men. To take one instance only, 
 what was the Emperor himself to worship ? It 
 might be very well for obsequious provinces to erect 
 statues to the IndulgeTdia Ccesaris. But Caesar 
 himself could hardly be expected to adore his 
 own Good-humour. In epochs like these, when a 
 national religion has lost its validity in thoughtful 
 minds, and the nation is pausing, as it were, for 
 further light, there is a fair field for all comers. 
 There is an opportunity for those who wish either 
 to eliminate the religious instinct, or to distort it, 
 or to rationalise it, or to vivify ; for the secularist 
 and the charlatan, for the philosopher and the pro- 
 phet. In Eome there was assuredly no lack of 
 negation and indifference, of superstition and its 
 inseparable fraud. But two streams of higher 
 tendency rushed into the spiritual vacuum, two 
 currents which represented, broadly speaking, the
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 193 
 
 main religious and the main ethical tradition of 
 mankind. The first of these, which we must pass 
 by for the present, had its origin in the legendary 
 Pythagoras and the remoter East. The second 
 took the form of a generalised and simplified 
 Stoicism. 
 
 Stoicism, of course, was no new thing in Rome. 
 It had come in with Greek culture at the time of 
 the Punic wars ; it had commended itself by its 
 proud precision to Roman habits of thought and 
 life; it had been welcomed as a support for the 
 state religion, a method of allegorising Olympus 
 which yet might be accounted orthodox. The 
 names of Cato and Brutus maintained the Stoic 
 tradition through the death-throes of the Repub- 
 lic. But the stern independence of the Porch was 
 not invoked to aid in the ceremonial revival with 
 which Augustus would fain have renewed the old 
 Roman virtue. It is among the horrors of Nero's 
 reign that we find Stoicism taking its place as a 
 main spiritual support of men. But as it becomes 
 more efficacious it becomes also less distinctive. In 
 Seneca, in Epictetus, most of all in Marcus himself, 
 we see it gradually discarding its paradoxes, its 
 controversies, its character as a specialised philo- 
 sophical sect. We hear less of its logic, its cos- 
 mogony, its portrait of the ideal Sage. It insists 
 rather on what may be termed the catholic verities 
 of all philosophers, on the sole importance of virtue, 
 
 VOL. i. o
 
 194 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [m. 
 
 the spiritual oneness of the universe, the brother- 
 hood of men. From every point of view this latter 
 Stoicism afforded unusual advantages to the soul 
 which aimed at wisdom and virtue. It was a philo- 
 sophy ; but by dint of time and trial it had run 
 itself clear of the extravagance and unreality of the 
 schools. It was a reform; but its attitude towards 
 the established religion was at once friendly and 
 independent, so that it was neither cramped by 
 deference nor embittered by reaction. Its doctrines 
 were old and true ; yet it had about it a certain 
 freshness as being in fact the first free and medi- 
 tative outlook on the universe to which the Eoman 
 people had attained. And, more than all, it had 
 ready to its hand a large remainder of the most 
 famous store of self-devotedness that the world has 
 seen. Stoicism was the heir of the old Roman 
 virtue ; happy is the philosophy which can support 
 its own larger creed on the instincts of duty in- 
 herited from many a generation of narrow upright- 
 ness, of unquestioned law. 
 
 But the opportunity for the very flower of Stoic 
 excellence was due to the caprice of a great amateur. 
 Hadrian admired both beauty and virtue ; his choice 
 of Antinous and of Marcus gave to the future world 
 the standard of the sculptor and the standard of 
 the moralist ; the completest types of physical and 
 moral perfection which Roman history has handed 
 down. And yet among the names of his bene-
 
 m.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 195 
 
 factors with which the scrupulous gratitude of 
 Marcus has opened his self-communings, the name 
 Hadrianus does not occur. The boy thus raised 
 to empire has passed by Hadrian, who gave him 
 all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of 
 them, for Severus, who taught him to disdain them 
 all. 
 
 Among all the Meditations none is at once more 
 simple and more original than this exordium of 
 thanksgiving. It is the single-hearted utterance of 
 a soul which knows neither desire nor pride, which 
 considers nothing as gain in her life's journey ex- 
 cept the love of those souls who have loved her, 
 the memory of those who have fortified her by the 
 spectacle and communication of virtue. 
 
 The thoughts that follow on this prelude are by 
 no means of an exclusively Stoic type. They are 
 both more emotional and more agnostic than would 
 have satisfied Chrysippus or Zeno. They are not 
 conceived in that tone of certainty and conviction 
 in which men lecture or preach, but with those sad 
 reserves, those varying moods of hope and despond- 
 ency, which are natural to a man's secret ponderings 
 on the riddle of the world. Even the fundamental 
 Stoic belief in God and Providence is not beyond 
 question in Marcus' eyes. The passages where he 
 repeats the alternative " either gods or atoms " are 
 too strongly expressed to allow us to think that the 
 antithesis is only a trick of style.
 
 196 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [m. 
 
 " Either confusion and entanglement and scattering 
 again : or unity, order, providence. If the first case 
 be, why do I wish to live amid the clashings of chance 
 and chaos 1 or care for aught else but to become earth 
 myself at last 1 and why am I disturbed, since this dis- 
 persion will come whatever I do ? but if the latter case 
 be the true one, I reverence and stand firm, and trust 
 in him who rules. 
 
 " Thus wags the world, up and down, from age to 
 age. And either the universal mind determines each 
 event ; and if so, accept then that which it determines ; 
 or it has ordered once for all, and the rest follows in 
 sequence ; or indivisible elements are the origin of all 
 things. In a word, if there be a god, then all is well ; 
 if all things go at random, act not at random thou." 
 
 And along with this speculative openness, so 
 much more sympathetic to the modern reader than 
 the rhetoric of Seneca or even the lofty dogmatism 
 of Epictetus, there is a total absence of the Stoic 
 pride. His self -reverence is of that truest kind 
 which is based on a man's conception not of what 
 he is, but of what he ought to be. 
 
 " Men cannot admire the sharpness of thy wits. Be 
 it so ; but many other things there are of which thou 
 canst not say, I was not formed for them. Show those 
 things which are wholly in thy power to show : sincerity, 
 dignity, laboriousness, self-denial, contentment, frugality, 
 kindliness, frankness, simplicity, seriousness, magnanim- 
 ity. Seest thou not how many things there are in which, 
 with no excuse of natural incapacity, thou voluntarily 
 fallest short 1 or art thou compelled by defect of nature
 
 HI.] MARCUS AUREL1US ANTONINUS. 197 
 
 to murmur and be stingy and flatter and complain of 
 thy poor body, and cajole and boast, and disquiet thy- 
 self in vain 1 No, by the gods ! but of all these things 
 thou mightest have been rid long ago. Nay, if indeed 
 thou be somewhat slow and dull of comprehension, thou 
 must exert thyself about this too, and not neglect it nor 
 be contented with thy dulness." 
 
 Words like these, perhaps, exalt human nature 
 in our eyes quite as highly as if we had heard Mar- 
 cus insisting, like some others of his school, that 
 " the sage is as useful to Zeus as Zeus to him," or 
 that " courage is more creditable to sages than it is 
 to gods, since gods have it by nature, but sages by 
 practice." 
 
 And having thus overheard his self-communings, 
 with what a sense of soundness and reality do we 
 turn to the steady fervour of his constantly repeated 
 ideal ! 
 
 " Let the god within thee be the guardian of a living 
 being, masculine, adult, political, and a Roman, and a 
 ruler ; who has taken up his post in life as one that 
 awaits with readiness the signal that shall summon him 
 away. . . . And such a man, who delays no longer to 
 strive to be in the number of the best, is as a priest and 
 servant of the gods, obeying that god who is in himself 
 enshrined, who renders him unsoiled of pleasure, un- 
 harmed by any pain, untouched by insult, feeling no 
 wrong, a wrestler in the noblest struggle, which is, that 
 by no passion he may be overthrown ; dyed to the depth 
 in justice, and with his whole heart welcoming whatso- 
 ever coineth to him and is ordained."
 
 198 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 The ideal is sketched on Stoic lines, but the 
 writer's temperament is not cast in the old Stoic 
 mould. He reminds us rather of modern sensitive- 
 ness, in his shrinking from the presence of coarse 
 and selfish persons, and in his desire, obvious enough 
 but constantly checked, for the sympathy and appro- 
 bation of those with whom he lived. The self- 
 sufficing aspect of Stoicism has in him lost all its 
 exclusiveness ; it is represented only by the resolute 
 recurrence to conscience as the one support against 
 the buffets of the world. 
 
 "I do my duty; other things trouble me not; for 
 either they are things without life, or things without 
 reason, or things that have wandered and know not the 
 way." 
 
 And thus, while all the dealings of Marcus with 
 his fellow-men are summed up in the two endeavours 
 to imitate their virtues, and to amend, or at least 
 patiently to endure, their defects it is pretty plain 
 which of these two efforts was most frequently 
 needed. His fragmentary thoughts present us with 
 a long series of struggles to rise from the mood 
 of disgust and depression into the mood of serene 
 benevolence, by dwelling strongly on a few guiding 
 lines of self-admonition. 
 
 " Begin the morning by saying to thyself : I shall 
 meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceit- 
 ful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them 
 by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. 
 But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 199 
 
 beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature 
 of him who sins, that it is akin to mine, and partici- 
 pates in the same divinity, I can neither be injured by 
 any of them, for no man can fix a foulness on me ; 
 nor can I be angry nor hate my brother." 
 
 There is reason, indeed, to fear that Marcus loved 
 his enemies too well ; that he was too much given 
 to blessing those that cursed him. It is to him, 
 rather than to any Christian potentate, that we must 
 look for an example of the dangers of applying the 
 gospel maxims too unreservedly to the business of 
 the turbid world. For indeed the practical danger 
 lies not in the overt adoption of those counsels of 
 an ideal mildness and mercy, but even in the mere 
 attainment of a temper so calm and lofty that the 
 promptings of vanity or anger are felt no more. 
 The task of curbing and punishing other men, of 
 humiliating their arrogance, exposing their falsity, 
 upbraiding their sloth, is in itself so distasteful, when 
 there is no personal rivalry or resentment to prompt 
 it, that it is sure to be performed too gently, or 
 neglected for more congenial duties. Avidius Cas- 
 sius, burning his disorderly soldiers alive to gain 
 himself a reputation for vigour, was more compre- 
 hensible to the mass of men, more immediately effi- 
 cacious, than Marcus representing to the selfish and 
 wayward Commodus " that even bees did not act in 
 such a manner, nor any of those creatures which live 
 in troops."
 
 200 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 But the very incongruity between the duties 
 which Marcus was called on to perform and the 
 spirit which he brought to their performance, the 
 fate which made him by nature a sage and a saint, 
 by profession a ruler and a warrior, all this gave to 
 his character a dignity and a completeness which it 
 could scarcely otherwise have attained. The master 
 of the world more than other men might feel him- 
 self bound to " live as on a mountain ; " he whose 
 look was life or death to millions might best set the 
 example of the single-heartedness which need hide 
 the thought of no waking moment from any one's 
 knowledge, till a man's eyes should reveal all that 
 passed within him, " even as there is no veil upon a 
 star." The Stoic philosophy which required that the 
 sage should be indifferent to worldly goods found its 
 crowning exemplar in a sage who possessed them all. 
 
 And, indeed, in the case of Marcus the difficulty 
 was not to disdain the things of earth, but to care 
 for them enough. The touch of Cynic crudity with 
 which he analyses such things as men desire, reminds 
 us sometimes of those scornful pictures of secular 
 life which have been penned in the cloister. For 
 that indifference to transitory things which has often 
 made the religious fanatic the worst of citizens is 
 not the danger of the fanatic alone. It is a part 
 also of the melancholy of the magnanimous ; of the 
 mood when the " joy and gladness " which the Stoics 
 promised to their sage die down in the midst of
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 201 
 
 " such darkness and dirt," as Marcus calls it, " that 
 it is hard to imagine what there is which is worthy 
 to be prized highly, or seriously pursued." 
 
 Nay, it seems to him that even if, in Plato's 
 phrase, he could become " the spectator of all time 
 and of all existence," there would be nothing in the 
 sight to stir the exultation, to change the solitude 
 of the sage. The universe is full of living creatures, 
 but there is none of them whose existence is so 
 glorious and blessed that by itself it can justify all 
 other Being ; the worlds are destroyed and re-created 
 with an endless renewal, but they are tending to no 
 world more pure than themselves ; they are not even, 
 as in Hindoo myth, ripening in a secular expectancy 
 till Buddha come ; they are but repeating the same 
 littlenesses from the depth to the height of heaven, 
 and reiterating throughout all eternity the fears and 
 follies of a day. 
 
 " If thou wert lifted on high and didst behold the 
 manifold fates of men ; and didst discern at once all 
 creatures that dwell round about him, in the ether and 
 the air ; then howso oft thou thus wert raised on high, 
 these same things thou shouldst ever see, all things alike, 
 and all things perishing. And where is, then, the 
 glory?" 
 
 Men who look out on the world with a gaze thus 
 disenchanted are apt to wrap themselves in a cynical 
 indifference or in a pessimistic despair. But char- 
 acter is stronger than creed ; and Marcus carries
 
 202 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [m. 
 
 into the midst of the saddest surroundings his 
 nature's imperious craving to reverence and to love. 
 He feels, indeed, that the one joy which could have 
 attached him to the world is wholly wanting to him. 
 
 " This is the only thing, if anything there be, which 
 could have drawn thee backwards and held thee still in 
 life, if it had been granted thee to live with men of like 
 principles with thyself. But now thou seest how great 
 a pain there is in the discordance of thy life with other 
 men's, so that thou sayest : Come quick, death ! lest 
 perchance I too should forget myself." 
 
 Nor can he take comfort from any steadfast hope 
 of future fellowship with kindred souls. 
 
 " How can it be that the gods, having ordered all 
 things rightly and with good-will towards men, have 
 overlooked this thing alone : that some men, virtuous 
 indeed, who have as it were made many a covenant with 
 heaven, and through holy deeds and worship have had 
 closest communion with the divine, that these men, when 
 once they are dead, should not live again, but be extin- 
 guished for ever ? Yet if this be so, be sure that if it 
 ought to have been otherwise the gods would have done 
 it. For were it just, it would also be possible ; were it 
 according to nature, nature would have had it so." 
 
 For thus he believes without proof and without 
 argument that all is for the best ; that everything 
 which happens is for the advantage of every con- 
 stituent life in nature, since everything is for the 
 advantage of the whole. He will not entertain the 
 idea that the Powers above him may be not all-
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 203 
 
 powerful ; or the Wisdom which rules the universe 
 less than all-wise. And this optimism comes from 
 no natural buoyancy of temper. There is scarcely 
 a trace in the Meditations of any mood of careless 
 joy. He never rises beyond the august contentment 
 of the man who accepts his fate. 
 
 "All things are harmonious to me which are har- 
 monious to thee, Universe. Nothing for me is too 
 early nor too late which is in due time for thee. All is 
 fruit to me which thy seasons, Nature, bear. From 
 thee are all things, and in thee all, and all return to 
 thee. The poet says, ' Dear city of Cecrops ; ' shall I 
 not say, ' Dear city of God ] ' " 
 
 There have been many who, with no more belief 
 than Marcus in a personal immortality, have striven, 
 like him, to accept willingly the world in which they 
 found themselves placed. But sometimes they have 
 marred the dignity of their position by attempting 
 too eagerly to find a reason for gladness ; they have 
 dwelt with exultation upon a terrene future for our 
 race from, which Marcus would still have turned 
 and asked, " Where, then, is the glory ? " It would 
 have seemed to him that a triumphant tone like 
 this can only come from the soilure of philosophy 
 with something of the modern spirit of industrial 
 materialism and facile enjoyment ; he would have 
 preferred that his own sereneness should be less near 
 to complacency than to resignation ; he would still 
 have chosen the temper of that saintly Stoic, whose
 
 204 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 rude, strong verses break in with so stern a piety 
 among the fragments of philosophic Greece : 
 
 "Lead, lead Cleanthes, Zeus and holy Fate, 
 Where'er ye place my post, to serve or wait : 
 "Willing I follow ; were it not my will, 
 A baffled rebel I must follow still." 
 
 These, however, are differences only of tone and 
 temper overlying what forms in reality a vast body 
 of practical agreement. For the scheme of thought 
 and belief which has thus been briefly sketched is 
 not only in itself a noble and a just one. It is a 
 kind of common creed of wise men, from which all 
 other views may well seem mere deflections on the 
 side of an unwarranted credulity or of an exaggerated 
 despair. Here, it may be not unreasonably urged, 
 is the moral backbone of all universal religions ; and 
 as civilisation has advanced, the practical creed of 
 all parties, whatever their speculative pretensions, 
 has approximated ever more nearly to these plain 
 principles and uncertain hopes. 
 
 This view of the tendency of religious progress 
 is undoubtedly the simplest and most plausible which 
 history presents to the philosopher who is not him- 
 self pledged to the defence of any one form of what 
 is termed supernatural belief. But it has to contend 
 with grave difficulties of historical fact ; and among 
 these difficulties the age of the Antonines presents 
 one of the most considerable. Never had the ground
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 205 
 
 been cleared on so large a scale for pure philosophy ; 
 never was there so little external pressure exerted 
 in favour of any traditional faith. The persecutions 
 of the Christians were undertaken on political and 
 moral, rather than on theological grounds ; they 
 were the expression of the feeling with which a 
 modern State might regard a set of men who were 
 at once Mormons and Nihilists refusing the legal 
 tokens of respect to constituted authorities, while 
 suspected of indulging in low immorality at the 
 bidding of an ignorant superstition. And yet the 
 result of this age of tolerance and enlightenment 
 was the gradual recrudescence, among the cultivated 
 as well as the ignorant, of the belief in a perceptible 
 interaction of the seen and the unseen world, cul- 
 minating at last in the very form of that belief 
 which had shown itself most resolute, most thorough- 
 going, and most intractable. 
 
 For the triumph of Christianity in the Eoman 
 Empire must not be looked upon as an anomalous 
 or an isolated phenomenon. It was rather the 
 triumph along the whole line, though (as is usual 
 in great triumphs) in an unlooked-for fashion, of a 
 current of tendency which had coexisted obscurely 
 with State-religion, patriotism, and philosophy, almost 
 from the first beginnings of the city. The anomaly, 
 if there were one, consisted in the fact that the hints 
 and elements of this new power, which was destined 
 to be the second life of Eome, were to be found, not
 
 206 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [m. 
 
 in the time-honoured ordinances of her Senate, or 
 the sober wisdom of her schools, but in the fanaticism 
 of ignorant enthusiasts, in the dreams of a mystic 
 poet, in the alleged, but derided, experiences of a 
 few eccentric philosophers. The introduction of 
 Christianity at Eome was the work not only of 
 Peter and Paul, but of Virgil and Varro. 
 
 For amidst the various creeds and philosophies, 
 by aid of which men have ordered their life on earth, 
 the most persistent and fundamental line of division is 
 surely this : The question whether that life is to be 
 ordered by rules drawn from its own experience alone, 
 or whether there are indications which may justly 
 modify our conduct or expectations by some influx 
 of inspiration, or some phenomena testifying to the 
 existence of an unseen world, or to our continued 
 life after the body's decay ? The instincts which 
 prompt to this latter view found, as has been already 
 implied, but little sustenance in the established cult 
 of Rome. They were forced to satisfy themselves 
 in a fitful and irregular fashion by Greek and Ori- 
 ental modes of religious excitement. What sense 
 of elevation or reality may have been present to the 
 partakers in these alien enthusiasms we are not now 
 able to say. The worships of Bacchus and Cybele 
 have been described to us by historians of the same 
 conservative temper as those who afterwards made 
 " an execrable superstition " of the worship of Christ. 
 
 Some scattered indications seem to imply a sub-
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 207 
 
 stratum of religious emotion, or of theurgic experi- 
 ment, more extensive than the ordinary authorities 
 have cared to record. The proud and gay Catullus 
 rises to his masterpiece in the description of that 
 alternation of reckless fanaticism and sick recoil 
 which formed throughout the so-called Ages of Faith 
 the standing tragedy of the cloister. More startling 
 still is the story which shows us a group of the 
 greatest personages of Rome in the last century 
 before Christ, Nigidius Figulus, Appius Claudius, 
 Publius Vatinius, Marcus Varro, subjected to police 
 supervision on account of their alleged practice of 
 summoning into visible presence the spirits of the 
 dead. " The whole system," says Professor Momm- 
 sen, " obtained its consecration political, religious, 
 and national from the name of Pythagoras, the 
 ultra -conservative statesman, whose supreme prin- 
 ciple was ' to promote order and to check disorder,' 
 the miracle-worker and necromancer, the primeval 
 sage who was a native of Italy, who was interwoven 
 even with the legendary history of Rome, and whose 
 statue was to be seen in the Roman Forum." This 
 story might seem an isolated one but for one re- 
 markable literary parallel. In Virgil perhaps the 
 only Roman writer who possessed what would now 
 be termed religious originality we observe the co- 
 existence of three separate lines of religious thought. 
 There is the conservatism which loses no opportunity 
 of enforcing the traditional worships of Rome, in
 
 208 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 accordance at once with the poet's own temper of 
 mind, and with the plan of Augustus' ethical reforms. 
 There is the new fusion of the worship of Rome 
 with the worship of the Emperor the only symbol 
 of spiritual unity between remote provincials and 
 the imperial city. But finally, in the central passage 
 of his greatest poem, we come on a Pythagorean 
 creed, expressed, indeed, with some confusion and 
 hesitancy, but with earnest conviction and power, 
 and forming, as the well-known fragment of corre- 
 spondence plainly implies, the dominant pre-occupa- 
 tion of the poet's later life. 
 
 Such a scheme, indeed, as the Pythagorean, with 
 its insistence on a personal immortality, and its 
 moral retribution adjusted by means of successive 
 existences with a greater nicety than has been em- 
 ployed by any other creed such a scheme, if once 
 established, might have satisfied the spiritual needs of 
 the Roman world more profoundly and permanently 
 than either the worship of Jove or the worship of 
 Csesar. But it was not established. The reasoning, 
 or the evidence, which had impressed Virgil, or the 
 group of philosophers, was not set forth before the 
 mass of men ; those instincts which we should now 
 term specifically religious remained unguided ; and 
 during the next three centuries we observe the love 
 of the marvellous and the supernatural dissociating 
 itself more and more from any ethical dogma. There 
 are, no doubt, remarkable instances in these centuries
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 209 
 
 of an almost modern spirit of piety associated (as for 
 instance in Apuleius) with the most bizarre religious 
 vagaries. But on the whole the two worships which, 
 until the triumph of Christianity, seemed most likely 
 to overrun the civilised world were the worship of 
 Mithra and the worship of Serapis. Now the name 
 of Mithra can hardly be connected with moral con- 
 ceptions of any kind. And the nearest that we can 
 get to the character of Serapis is the fact that he was 
 by many persons considered to be identical either with 
 the principle of good or with the principle of evil. 
 
 Among these confused and one-sided faiths 
 Christianity had an unique superiority. It was 
 the only formulated and intelligible creed which 
 united the two elements most necessary for a widely- 
 received religion, namely, a lofty moral code, and the 
 attestation of some actual intercourse between the 
 visible and the invisible worlds. 
 
 It was not the morality of the Gospels alone 
 which exercised the attractive force. Still less was 
 it the speculations of Pauline theology, the high con- 
 ceptions which a later age hardened into so immut- 
 able a system. It was the fact that this lofty teach- 
 ing was based on beliefs which almost all men held 
 already ; that exhortations, nobler than those of 
 Plutarch or Marcus, were supported by marvels 
 better attested than those of Alexander of Abono- 
 teichos, or Apollonius of Tyana. In a thousand 
 ways, and by a thousand channels, the old faiths 
 VOL. i. p
 
 210 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 melted into the new. It was not only that such 
 apologists as Justin and Minucius Felix were fond 
 of showing that Christianity was, as it were, the 
 crown of philosophy, the consummation of Platonic 
 truth. More important was the fact that the rank 
 and file of Christian converts looked on the universe 
 with the same eyes as the heathens around them. 
 All that they asked of these was to believe that the 
 dimly-realised deities, whom the heathens regarded 
 rather with fear than love, were in reality powers of 
 evil; while above the Oriental additions so often made 
 to their Pantheon was to be superposed one ultimate 
 divinity, alone beneficent, and alone to be adored. 
 
 The hierarchy of an unseen universe must needs 
 be a somewhat shadowy and arbitrary thing. To 
 those, indeed, whose imagination is already exercised 
 on such matters a new scheme of the celestial powers 
 may come with an acceptable sense of increasing 
 insight into the deep things of God. But in one 
 who, like Marcus, has learnt to believe that in such 
 matters the truest wisdom is to recognise that we 
 cannot know, in him a scheme like the Christian 
 is apt to inspire incredulity by its very promise of 
 completeness, suspicion by the very nature of the 
 evidence which is alleged in its support. 
 
 Neither the Stoic school in general, indeed, nor 
 Marcus himself, were clear of all superstitious ten- 
 dency. The early masters of the sect had pushed 
 their doctrine of the solidarity of all things to the
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 211 
 
 point of anticipating that the liver of a particular 
 bullock, itself selected from among its fellows by 
 some mysterious fitness of things, might reasonably 
 give an indication of the result of an impending 
 battle. When it was urged that on this principle 
 everything might be expected to be indicative of 
 everything else, the Stoics answered that so it was, 
 but that only when such indications lay in the liver 
 could we understand them aright. When asked 
 how we came to understand them when thus located, 
 the Stoic doctors seem to have made no sufficient 
 reply. We need not suppose that Marcus partici- 
 pated in absurdities like these. He himself makes 
 no assertion of this hazardous kind, except only 
 that remedies for his ailments " have been shown to 
 him in dreams." And this is not insisted on in 
 detail ; it rather forms part of that habitual feeling 
 or impression which, if indeed it be superstitious, is 
 yet a superstition from which no devout mind, per- 
 haps, was ever wholly free ; namely, that he is the 
 object of a special care and benevolence proceeding 
 from some holy power. Such a feeling implies no 
 belief either in merit or in privilege beyond that of 
 other men; but just as the man who is strongly 
 willing, though it be proved to him that his choice 
 is determined by his antecedents, must yet feel 
 assured that he can deflect its issue this way or that, 
 even so a man, the habit of whose soul is worship, 
 cannot but see at least a reflection of his own virtue
 
 212 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in, 
 
 in the arch of heaven, and bathe his spirit in the 
 mirage projected from the well-spring of its own love. 
 For such an instinct, for all the highest instincts 
 of his heart, Marcus would no doubt have found in 
 Christianity a new and full satisfaction. The ques- 
 tion, however, whether he ought to have become a 
 Christian is not worth serious discussion. In the 
 then state of belief in the Roman world it would 
 have been as impossible for a Eoman Emperor to 
 become a Christian as it would be at the present day 
 for a Czar of Eussia to become a Buddhist. Some 
 Christian apologists complain that Marcus was not 
 converted by the miracle of the " Thundering Legion." 
 They forget that though some obscure persons may 
 have ascribed that happy occurrence to Christian 
 prayers, the Emperor was assured on much higher 
 authority that he had performed the miracle himself. 
 Marcus, indeed, would assuredly not have insisted 
 on his own divinity. He would not have been 
 deterred by any Stoic exclusiveness from incorporat- 
 ing in his scheme of belief, already infiltrated with 
 Platonic thought, such elements as those apologists 
 who start from St. Paul's speech at Athens would 
 have urged him to introduce. But an acceptance 
 of the new faith involved much more than this. 
 It involved tenets which might well seem to be a 
 mere reversion to the world-old superstitions and 
 sorceries of barbarous tribes. Such alleged pheno- 
 mena as those of possession, inspiration, healing by
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 213 
 
 imposition of hands, luminous appearances, modifi- 
 cation and movement of material objects, formed, 
 not, as some later apologists would have it, a mere 
 accidental admixture, but an essential and loudly- 
 asserted element in the new religion. The appari- 
 tion of its Founder after death was its very raison 
 d'etre and triumphant demonstration. The Christian 
 advocate may say indeed with reason, that phenomena 
 such as these, however suspicious the associations 
 which they might invoke, however primitive the 
 stratum of belief to which they might seem at first 
 to degrade the disciple, should nevertheless have 
 been examined afresh on their own evidence, and 
 would have been found to be supported by a con- 
 sensus of testimony which has since then overcome 
 the world. Addressed to an age in which Eeason 
 was supreme, such arguments might have carried 
 convincing weight. But mankind had certainly not 
 reached a point in the age of the Antonines, if 
 indeed we have reached it yet, at which the recol- 
 lections of barbarism were cast into so remote a 
 background that the leaders of civilised thought 
 could lightly reopen questions the closing of which 
 might seem to have marked a clear advance along 
 the path of enlightenment. It is true, indeed, that 
 the path of enlightenment is not a royal road but a 
 labyrinth; and that those who have marched too 
 unhesitatingly in one direction have generally been 
 obliged to retrace their steps, to unravel some for-
 
 214 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [nr. 
 
 gotten clue, to explore some turning which they had 
 already passed by. But the practical rulers of men 
 must not take the paths which seem to point back- 
 wards until they hear in front of them the call of 
 those who have chosen that less inviting way. 
 
 An emperor who had " learnt from Diognetus not 
 to give credit to what is said by miracle-workers and 
 jugglers about incantations and the driving away of 
 demons and such things," might well feel that so 
 much as to inquire into the Gospel stories would be 
 a blasphemy against his philosophic creed. Even 
 the heroism of Christian martyrdom left him cold. In 
 words which have become proverbial as a wise man's 
 mistake, he stigmatises the Christian contempt of 
 death as " sheer party spirit." And yet it is an 
 old thought, but it is impossible not to recur to it 
 once more what might he not have learnt from 
 these despised sectaries ! the melancholy Emperor 
 from Potheinus and Blandina, smiling on the rack ! 
 
 Of the Christian virtues, it was not faith which 
 was lacking to him. His faith indeed was not that 
 bastard faith of theologians, which is nothing more 
 than a willingness to assent to historical propositions 
 on insufficient evidence. But it was faith such as 
 Christ demanded of His disciples, the steadfastness 
 of the soul in clinging, spite of doubts, of diffi- 
 culties, even of despair, to whatever she has known 
 of best ; the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest 
 hypothesis. To Marcus the alternative of " gods or
 
 in.] MARCUS AUEELIUS ANTONINUS. 215 
 
 atoms " of a universe ruled either by blind chance 
 or by an intelligent Providence was ever present 
 and ever unsolved; but in action he ignored that 
 dark possibility, and lived as a member of a sacred 
 cosmos, and co-operant with ordering gods. 
 
 Again, it might seem unjust to say that he was 
 wanting in love. No one has expressed with more 
 conviction the interdependence and kinship of men. 
 
 " We are made to work together, like feet, like hands, 
 like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth." 
 " It is peculiar to man to love even those who do wrong ; 
 and thou wilt love them if, when they err, thou bethink 
 thee that they are to thee near akin." " Men exist for 
 the sake of one another ; teach them then, or bear with 
 them." "When men blame thee, or hate thee, or revile 
 thee, pass inward to their souls ; see what they are. 
 Thou wilt see that thou needst not trouble thyself as to 
 what such men think of thee. And thou must be kindly 
 affectioned to them ; for by nature they are friends ; 
 and the gods, too, help and answer them in many Avays." 
 " Love men, and love them from the heart." " ' Earth 
 loves the shower,' and ' sacred aether loves ;' and the 
 Avhole universe loves the making of that which is to be. 
 I say then to the universe : Even I, too, love as thou." 
 
 And yet about the love of a John, a Paul, a 
 Peter, there is the ring of a note which is missing 
 here. Stoic love is but an injunction of reason and 
 a means to virtue ; Christian love is the open secret 
 of the universe, and in itself the end of all. In all 
 that wisdom can teach herein, Stoic and Christian
 
 216 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 are at one. They both know that if a man would 
 save his life he must lose it ; that the disappearance 
 of all selfish aims or pleasures in the universal life 
 is the only pathway to peace. All religions that 
 are worth the name have felt the need of this in- 
 ward change ; the difference lies rather in the light 
 under which they regard it. To the Stoic in the 
 "West, as to the Buddhist in the East, it presented 
 itself as a renunciation which became a deliverance, 
 a tranquillity which passed into an annihilation. 
 The Christian, too, recognised in the renunciation of 
 the world a deliverance from its evil. But his spirit 
 in those early days was occupied less with what he 
 was resigning than with what he gained ; the love 
 of Christ constrained him ; he died to self to find, 
 even here on earth, that he had passed not into 
 nothingness, but into heaven. In his eyes the Stoic 
 doctrine was not false, but partly rudimentary and 
 partly needless. His only objection, if objection it 
 could be called, to the Stoic manner of facing the 
 reality of the universe, was that the reality of the 
 universe was so infinitely better than the Stoic 
 supposed. 
 
 If, then, the Stoic love beside the Christian was 
 " as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto 
 wine," it was not only because the Stoic philosophy 
 prescribed the curbing and checking of those natural 
 emotions which Christianity at once guided and in- 
 tensified by her new ideal. It was because the love
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 217 
 
 of Christ which the Christian felt was not a labori- 
 ous duty, but a self-renewing, self-intensifying force ; 
 a feeling offered as to one who for ever responded 
 to it, as to one whose triumphant immortality had 
 brought his disciples' immortality to light. 
 
 So completely had the appearance of Jesus to 
 the faithful after his apparent death altered in 
 their eyes the aspect of the world. So decisive 
 was the settlement of the old alternative, " Either 
 Providence or atoms," which was effected by the 
 firm conviction of a single spirit's beneficent return 
 along that silent and shadowy way. So powerful a 
 reinforcement to Faith and Love was afforded by 
 the third of the Christian trinity of virtues by the 
 grace of Hope. 
 
 But we are treading here on controverted ground. 
 It is not only that this great prospect has not yet 
 taken its place among admitted certainties ; that 
 the hope and resurrection of the dead are still called 
 in question. Much more than this; the most ad- 
 vanced school of modern moralists tends rather to 
 deny that "a sure and certain hope" in this matter 
 is to be desired at all. Virtue, it is alleged, must 
 needs lose her disinterestedness if the solution of 
 the great problem were opened to her gaze. 
 
 " Pour nous," says M. Kenan, who draws this moral 
 especially from the noble disinterestedness of Marcus 
 himself : " pour nous, on nous annoncerait un argument 
 pe"remptoire en ce genre, que nous ferions comme Saint
 
 218 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [m. 
 
 Louis, quand on lui parla de 1'hostie miraculeuse ; nous 
 refuserions d'aller voir. Qu'avons nous besoin de ces 
 preuves brutales, qui n'ont d'application que dans 1'ordre 
 grossier des faits, et qui generaient notre liberte" ? " 
 
 This seems a strong argument ; and if it be 
 accepted it is practically decisive of the question at 
 issue, I do not say only between Stoicism and 
 Christianity, but between all those systems which 
 do not seek, and those which do seek, a spiritual 
 communion for man external to his own soul, a 
 spiritual continuance external to his own body. If 
 a proof of a beneficent Providence or of a future 
 life be a thing to be deprecated, it will be indis- 
 creet, or even immoral, to inquire whether such 
 proof has been, or can be, obtained. The world 
 must stand with Marcus ; and there will be no ex- 
 travagance in M. Eenan's estimate of the Stoic 
 morality as a sounder and more permanent system 
 than that of Jesus Himself. 
 
 But generalisations like this demand a close ex- 
 amination. Is the antithesis between interested and 
 disinterested virtue a clear and fundamental one for 
 all stages of spiritual progress ? Or may we not 
 find that the conditions of the experiment vary, as 
 it were, as virtue passes through different tempera- 
 tures ; that our formula gives a positive result at 
 one point, a negative at another, and becomes alto- 
 gether unmeaning at a third ? 
 
 It will be allowed, in the first place, that for an
 
 m.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 219 
 
 indefinite time to come, and until the mass of man- 
 kind has advanced much higher above the savage 
 level than is as yet the case, it will be premature 
 to be too fastidious as to the beliefs which prompt 
 them to virtue. The first object is to give them 
 habits of self-restraint and well-doing, and we may 
 be well content if their crude notions of an unseen 
 Power are such as to reinforce the somewhat obscure 
 indications which life on earth at present affords 
 that honesty and truth and mercy bring a real 
 reward to men. But let us pass on to the extreme 
 hypothesis on which the repudiation of any spiritual 
 help for man outside himself must ultimately rest. 
 Let us suppose that man's impulses have become 
 harmonised with his environment ; that his tendency 
 to anger has been minimised by long-standing 
 gentleness ; his tendency to covetousness by diffused 
 well-being ; his tendency to sensuality by the in- 
 creased preponderance of his intellectual nature. 
 How will the test of his disinterestedness operate 
 then ? Why, it will be no more possible then for 
 a sane man to be deliberately wicked than it is pos- 
 sible now for a civilised man to be deliberately filthy 
 in his personal habits. We do not wish now that 
 it were uncertain whether filth were unhealthy in 
 order that we might be the more meritorious in 
 preferring to be clean. And whether our remote 
 descendants have become convinced of the reality 
 of a future life or no, it will assuredly never occur
 
 220 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [ni. 
 
 to them that, without it, there might be a question 
 whether virtue was a remunerative object of pur- 
 suit. Lapses from virtue there may still be in 
 plenty; but inherited instinct will have made it 
 inconceivable that a man should voluntarily be 
 what Marcus calls a " boil or imposthume upon the 
 universe," an island of selfishness in the mid -sea 
 of sympathetic joy. 
 
 It is true, indeed, that in the present age, and 
 for certain individuals, that choice of which M. 
 Eenan speaks has a terrible, a priceless reality. 
 Many a living memory records some crisis when 
 one who had rejected as unproved the traditional 
 sanctions was forced to face the question whether 
 his virtue had any sanction which still could stand ; 
 some night when the foundations of the soul's deep 
 were broken up, and she asked herself why she still 
 should cleave to the law of other men rather than 
 to some kindlier monition of her own : 
 
 "Doch alles was dazu mich trieb, 
 Gott, war so gut ! ach, war so lieb ! " 
 
 To be the conqueror in such a contest is the 
 characteristic privilege of a time of transition like 
 our own. But it is not the only, nor even the high- 
 est conceivable, form of virtue. It is an incident 
 in the moral life of the individual ; its possibility 
 may be but an incident in the moral life of the 
 race. It is but driving the enemy off the ground
 
 in.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 221 
 
 on which we wish to build our temple ; there 
 may be far greater trials of strength, endurance, 
 courage, before we have raised its dome in air. 
 
 For after all it is only in the lower stages of 
 ethical progress that to see the right is easy and to 
 decide on doing it is hard. The time comes when 
 it is not so much conviction of the desirability of 
 virtue that is needed, as enlightenment to perceive 
 where virtue's upward pathway lies ; not so much 
 the direction of the will which needs to be con- 
 trolled, as its force and energy which need to be 
 ever vivified and renewed. It is then that the 
 moralist must needs welcome any influence, if such 
 there be, which can pour into man's narrow vessel 
 some overflowing of an infinite Power. It is then, 
 too, that he will learn to perceive that the promise 
 of a future existence might well be a source of 
 potent stimulus rather than of enervating peace. 
 For if we are to judge of the reward of virtue 
 hereafter by the rewards which we see her achiev- 
 ing here, it is manifest that the only reward which 
 always attends her is herself; that the only prize 
 which is infallibly gained by performing one duty 
 well is the power of performing yet another; the 
 only recompense for an exalted self-forgetfulness is 
 that a man forgets himself always more. Or rather, 
 the only other reward -is one whose sweetness also 
 is scarcely realisable till it is attained ; it is the 
 love of kindred souls ; but a love which recedes
 
 222 CLASSICAL ESSAYS. [in. 
 
 ever farther from the flatteries and indulgences which 
 most men desire, and tends rather to become the 
 intimate comradeship of spirits that strive towards 
 the same goal. 
 
 Why then should those who would imagine an 
 eternal reward for virtue imagine her as eternally 
 rewarded in any other way ? And what need there 
 be in a spiritual law like this to relax any soul's 
 exertion, to encourage any low content ? By an 
 unfailing physical law we know that the athlete 
 attains through painful effort that alacrity and 
 soundness which are the health of the body. And 
 if there were an unfailing spiritual law by which 
 the philosopher might attain, and ever attain in- 
 creasingly, through strenuous virtue, that energy 
 and self-devotedness which are the health of the 
 soul, would there be anything in the one law or in 
 the other to encourage either the physical or the 
 spiritual voluptuary the self-indulgence either of 
 the banquet-hall or of the cloister ? There would 
 be no need to test men by throwing an artificial 
 uncertainty round the operation of such laws as 
 these ; it would be enough if they could desire what 
 was offered to them ; the ideal would become the 
 probation. 
 
 To some minds reflections like these, rather than 
 like M. Eenan's, will be suggested by the story of 
 Marcus, of his almost uniningled sadness, his almost 
 stainless virtue. All will join, indeed, in admira-
 
 m.] MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS. 223 
 
 tion for a life so free from every unworthy, every 
 dubious incitement to well-doing. But on com- 
 paring this life with the lives of men for whom the 
 great French critic's sympathy is so much less 
 such men, for instance, as St. Paul we may surely 
 feel that if the universe be in reality so much 
 better than Marcus supposed, it would have done 
 him good, not harm, to have known it; that it 
 would have kindled his wisdom to a fervent glow, 
 such as the world can hardly hope to see, till, if 
 ever it be so, the dicta of science and the promises of 
 religion are at one ; till saints are necessarily philo- 
 sophers, and philosophers saints. And yet, what- 
 ever inspiring secrets the future may hold, the 
 lover of humanity can never regret that Marcus 
 knew but what he knew. Whatever winds of the 
 spirit may sweep over the sea of souls, the life of 
 Marcus will remain for ever as the normal high- 
 water mark of the unassisted virtue of man. No 
 one has shown more simply or more completely 
 what man at any rate must do and be. No one 
 has ever earned the right to say to himself with 
 a more tranquil assurance in the words which 
 close the Meditations " Depart thou then con- 
 tented, for he that releaseth thee is content." 
 
 END OF VOL. I.
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.
 
 WORKS BY 
 FREDERIC W. H. MYERS. 
 
 The Renewal of Youth and other Poems. Crown 
 
 8vo. 75. 6d. 
 
 DAILY NEWS. " No recent volume of verse merits, or is likely to receive, so 
 kind a reception as Mr. F. W. H. Myers's Renewal of Youth. One cannot read a 
 page of his work without recognising that ' poet ' is the name he deserves when he is 
 at his best. Among the many echoes and the few voices of the time he is one of the 
 voices." 
 
 ATHEN/EUM. "Mr. Myers uses skilfully and well, for the purpose of 
 crystallising his thoughts, experiences, and reflections, the instrument of poetry. 
 What he says will be read with attention and often with delight." 
 
 St. Paul. A Poem. New Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW. 11 It breathes throughout the spirit of St. Paul, 
 and with a singular stately melody of verse." 
 
 A THEN&UM." What is done is well done. 
 
 Science and a Future Life, and other Essays. 
 
 Globe 8vo. 55. \Eversley Series. 
 
 ACADEMY. "Mr. Myers always writes well and gracefully, and with full 
 knowledge of his subjects." 
 
 Wordsworth. Crown 8vo. is. 6d. ; sewed, is. English 
 Men of Letters Series. 
 
 SPECTATOR. " In the exquisite little, sketch which Mr. Myers has given of 
 Wordsworth, in Mr. John Morley's series of Men of Letters, as a piece of English at 
 least, the gem, we venture to say, of the whole series." 
 
 ACADEMY. " Mr. Myers gives us a picture of the man and an estimate of his 
 work, which is certainly not inferior to anything that has preceded it. ... Possibly 
 the best chapter in the book every chapter of which is excellent is that 
 on Natural Religion." 
 
 Essays. 2 Vols. I. Classical. II. Modern. Crown 8vo. 
 45. 6d. each. 
 
 SATURDAY REVIEW. " Mr. Myers's Essays were worth printing and 
 reprinting, worth reading and reading again. ... Of Mr. Myers's reading and erudition 
 we can hardly speak too highly." 
 
 BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW." These two volumes form a valuable 
 contribution to literature." 
 
 ACADEMY. " On the whole, we know of no other modern essayist who would 
 so worthily cover so wide a field or stand the test of being re-read in his entirety." 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON.
 
 A SELECTION FROM 
 
 THE EVERSLEY SERIES. 
 
 Globe 8vo. Cloth. $s. per volume. 
 The Works of Matthew Arnold. 6 Vols. 
 
 POEMS. 3 vols. 
 
 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. First Series. 
 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM. Second Series. 
 AMERICAN DISCOURSES. 
 
 Dean Church's Miscellaneous Writings. Collected Edition. 9 Vols. 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. | DANTE : and other Essays. 
 
 ST. ANSELM. | SPENSER. | BACON. 
 
 THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. Twelve Years, 1833-1845. 
 
 THE. BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES. (Included in this Series 
 
 by permission of Messrs. LONGMANS and Co.) 
 OCCASIONAL PAPERS, 1846-1890. 2 Vols. 
 
 Emerson's Collected Works. 6 Vols. With Introduction by JOHN 
 
 MORLEY. 
 
 MISCELLANIES. | ESSAYS. | POEMS. 
 ENGLISH TRAITS AND REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
 THE CONDUCT OF LIFE, AND SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE. 
 LETTERS AND SOCIAL AIMS. 
 
 R. H. Button's Collected Essays. 
 
 LITERARY ESSAYS. 
 
 ESSAYS ON SOME OF THE MODERN GUIDES OF ENGLISH 
 
 THOUGHT IN MATTERS OF FAITH. 
 THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS. 
 CRITICISMS ON CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT AND THINKERS. 
 
 2 Vols. 
 
 Charles Lamb's Collected Works. Edited, with Introduction and 
 Notes, by Canon AINGER. 6 Vols. 
 THE ESSAYS OF ELIA. 
 
 POEMS, PLAYS, AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. 
 MRS. LEICESTER'S SCHOOL, and other Writings. 
 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE. By CHARLES and MARY LAMB. 
 THE LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB. 2 Vols. 
 
 Life of Charles Lamb. By Canon AINGER. 
 
 The Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by Professor 
 KNIGHT. In 10 Vols. Each volume contains a Portrait and 
 Vignette etched by H. MANESSE. 
 
 POETICAL WORKS. 8 Vols. | PROSE WORKS, s Vols. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON.
 
 of California 
 LIBRARY 
 
 1 to the libn 
 
 from which it was borrowed 
 
 UG23 
 II 
 
 REC'D C.L JUNO 5 '95 
 
 AC NOV 012004
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIC 
 
 A 000135818 3