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HARVARD ESSAYS 
 
 ON 
 
 CLASSICAL SUBJECTS 
 
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 Fig. i. The Ara Pacts Auguslae: Restoration by M. E. Cannizzaro. 
 (.Bollelino d'Arle, October, 1907.) 
 
 / 
 
 Fig. 2. The Ara Pacts Augusiae : Part of the Processional Reliefs. 
 (Brunn-Bruckmann, Denkmdler gr. und rom. Sculpiur, pi. 401.) 
 
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HARVARD ESSAYS 
 
 ON CLASSICAL SUBJECTS 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 HERBERT WEIR SMYTH, Ph.D. 
 
 Bitot Professor of Greek Literature 
 
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 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
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COPYRIGHT, I9I2, BY HERBBUT WEIR SMYTH 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published February tqiz 
 
 m 
 
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TO 
 WILLIAM WATSON GOODWIN 
 
 ELIOT PROFESSOR OF GREEK LITERATURE, EMERITUS 
 
 Ei/uWidS Si^ai riSe cifi^oKa rois tre (piKovirtp 
 (iXXos S' ly <p8tii4voit fuii! iJir a' 4(til'Sti) 
 
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 d^f Tt Kiaimv irrSm &ix<t>l re (ra(j>po(rivii¥. 
 
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 iri/8wKoyra4Ta «'o\X& fUTi, criipia. 
 
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PREFACE 
 
 Such unity as these Essays aim to secure is of neces- 
 sity the larger unity of sympathetic interpretation of 
 certain aspects of the life and thought of classical an- 
 tiquity. Nor was a closer coherence desirable if the 
 truest independence of the contributors was to be pre- 
 served. Two of the Essays touch at a common point, 
 though but for a moment; and this coincidence was not 
 to be avoided, as it is not to be deprecated, since ascet- 
 icism with its passion to subdue the turbulent senses, 
 is inevitably linked with the yearning after immor- 
 tality which possessed some of the most earnest minds 
 of the ancient world. 
 
 Regard for a more intimate association of parts 
 might have made a book of essays on things Greek or 
 on things Roman. But the less severe unity of the 
 present volume is designed to bear witness, however 
 inadequately, to the Harvard conviction that, for the 
 purpose for which the ancient classics have their per- 
 manent and inalienable value, the literature and art 
 of Greece and the literature and art of Rome are so 
 intimately bound together that they may not suffer 
 divorcement. We are all of us Greeks, we are all Ro- 
 mans. The Greeks are the creators of the one original 
 literature of Europe. Roman literature takes over 
 
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viii PREFACE 
 
 and carries on Greek literature, tempers it with a 
 moral impulse, endows it with an emotional quality; 
 and withal has the consciousness that it is the voice 
 of the nation that conquered and ruled the world. The 
 Romans are the transmitters of the Hellenic ideal to 
 the modem world; and their literature alone insures 
 the continuity of ancient and modern culture. 
 
 The ancient world still speaks to the changing pre- 
 sent, and with an undivided voice. The literature, the 
 philosophy, and the art of the last four centuries have 
 been fostered by the literature, philosophy, and art of 
 Greece and Rome. An ineradicable influence that pene- 
 trates all modern societies, whose interdependence is 
 marked by this common possession, is negligible only 
 by those in whom the historical sense is enfeebled or 
 absent. But, apart from this, and largely because of the 
 very fact that our own modern world may be too much 
 with us, it conduces to intellectual health to scrutinize 
 ourselves and our works by the standard of an age, 
 long over-past indeed, but an age whose aspirations are 
 not alien to us and whose thought possesses an inde- 
 feasible power to clarify our own. 
 
 The contributors to this volume are all present 
 members of the Department of the Classips at Harvard, 
 with the exception of Professor Morgan, whose essay on 
 "Some Aspects of an Ancient Roman City" is one of 
 the last pieces of work he completed before his earnest 
 and active life came to an end. 
 
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PREFACE ix 
 
 The Editor gladly acknowledges the assistance he 
 has received from the friendly coSperation and generous 
 support of many friends of classical letters and of 
 Harvard, and in particular Messrs. Lane, Sexton, 
 Ladd, Brandegee, Gray, Cummings, and Gardner, 
 members of the Committee appointed by the Board of 
 Overseers to visit the Department of the Classics. 
 
 Herbert Weir Smyth. 
 
 Cambridge, September i, 1911. 
 
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CONTENTS 
 I 
 
 THE NEW CRITJCISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 George H; Chase, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Class- 
 ical Archaeology i 
 
 II 
 NOTIONS OF HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 Charles Burton Gulick, Ph.D., Professor of Greek . 33 
 
 III 
 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER — ALCIPHRON 
 
 Carl Newell Jackson, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of 
 Greek 67 
 
 IV 
 
 GREEK AND ROMAN ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 Clifford Herschel Moore, Ph.D., Professor of Latin 97 
 
 V 
 SOME ASPECTS OF AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 Morris Hicky Morgan, Ph.D., LL,D., late Professor of 
 Classical Philology 141 
 
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xii CONTENTS 
 
 VI 
 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 Charles P. Parker, A.B., Professor of Greek and Latin 173 
 
 VII 
 OVID AND THE SPIRIT OF METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 Edward Kennard Rand, Ph.D., Professor of Latin . . 207 
 
 VIII 
 
 GREEK CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM 
 HOMER TO PLATO 
 Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph.D., Eliot Professor of Greek 
 Literature . 239 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF 
 ROMAN ART 
 
 By GEORGE H. CHASE 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 In the history of classical studies, one of the most 
 curious chapters is that which concerns the study of 
 Roman sculpture and the estimates of its importance 
 and value at different periods since the Renaissance. 
 To the exponents of that scienza antiguaria, out of 
 which was gradually evolved the modern study of 
 classical archaeology, the Roman statues and reliefs 
 found in Italy seemed not only to represent the highest 
 attainment of the sculptors of antiquity, but almost to 
 exceed the possibilities of human achievement. Even 
 the late Roman sarcophagi, of which considerable num- 
 bers were known as early as the thirteenth and four- 
 teenth centuries, were eagerly studied and discussed, 
 and the praises bestowed on the great monuments of 
 Rome itself were extravagant in the extreme. This 
 general admiration for the relics of Roman sculpture 
 was shared by the artists of the Renaissance. Raphael 
 and his pupils are said to have sketched the reliefs of 
 the Column of Trajan not once, but many times, and 
 imitation of Roman models can be seen in the work of 
 many of the Renaissance sculptors and painters. Even 
 the belief that back of these Roman works, and only 
 dimly reflected by them, lay the more perfect creations 
 of the Greeks, — a belief which gradually grew stronger 
 
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4 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 and was definitely formulated by Winckelmann, — did 
 nor materially detract from the admiration excited by 
 the Roman works; as late as the beginning of the last 
 century, Roman statues and reliefs were eagerly sought 
 by collectors and constantly studied and admired 
 by writers on ancient art. In the eighteenth century, 
 especially, no man, or at least no Englishman, who made 
 the grand tour and visited Rome felt that he had fully 
 improved his opportunity unless he brought with him 
 on his return some relic of Roman sculpture, largely re- 
 stored perhaps and more than half modern, but never- 
 theless an example of that "classic" art, which was re- 
 garded as the visible embodiment of all that was best 
 in ancient life and thought. 
 
 With the earlier years of the nineteenth century, we 
 mark a change. The removal of the Elgin marbles to 
 England and the purchase of the sculptures from Aegina 
 by Ludwig of Bavaria, above all, the opening of 
 Greece to travel and exploration as a result of the 
 Greek War of Independence, revealed to the Western 
 world the glory of Greek sculpture at its best, in works 
 unmarred by the modifications of the copyist and un- 
 corrupted by the restorer. The result was precisely 
 what was to be expected. Here at last men felt that they 
 had come upon the source from which the artists of the 
 Roman period drew their inspiration, that here, and 
 here only, were to be found the supreme manifestations 
 of the ancient spirit, beside which the products of the 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 5 
 
 Roman age could occupy only a subordinate and un- 
 important position. During the nineteenth century, 
 therefore, most students and critics of ancient art de- 
 voted themselves almost exclusively to the Greek devel- 
 opment, and the Roman monuments were more and 
 more left to the historian and the antiquary. It is a 
 significant fact that in the nineteenth century, though 
 many large and elaborate histories of Greek sculpture 
 were written, not a single book devoted to Roman 
 sculpture appeared. The histories of Greek sculpture 
 usually contain a concluding chapter on Roman art, 
 in which the productions of the Roman period are sum- 
 marily discussed, but the discussion usually consists of 
 little more than disparaging comparisons. 
 
 Towards the end of the last century, however, we 
 find traces of a new, and in some ways a saner view of 
 Roman sculpture and of Roman art in general. In 1893, 
 Riegl published his famous Stilfragen, in which he ad- 
 vanced the opinion that development can be traced in 
 the imperial art of Rome, "and that, too, in an ascend- 
 ing line, not simply a decline, as is most commonly 
 held." Two years later, Professor Wickhoff, in publish- 
 ing a series of miniatures from a Vienna manuscript 
 of the Book of Genesis, took occasion in his preface 
 to call attention to some neglected aspects of Roman 
 art, especially to certain methods of representation, 
 in which, he also argued, the products of the Roman 
 time mark an adVlince over all that preceded them. 
 
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6 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 Wickhoff laid especial emphasis on what he called "il- 
 lusionism," that is, the treatment of wall-paintings and 
 reliefs in such a way as to suggest depth as well as 
 height and width, thus producing the illusion of actu- 
 ality, and on the "continuous method of narration," 
 the use of a succession of scenes, without definite lines 
 of demarcation, to suggest a succession of events. The 
 preface to the Wiener Genesis attracted very general at- 
 tention, especially after it was translated into English 
 by Mrs. Strong and attractively published, under the 
 title Roman Art, in 1900. In the next year, Riegl re- 
 turned to the attack, in his Spdtrdmische Kunstindus- 
 trie, and argued that, even in the neglected monuments 
 of the third and fourth centuries, the sculptors of the 
 Roman period made important innovations, particu- 
 larly in the management of light and shade in relief 
 work. And in 1907, Mrs. Strong, in her Roman Sculp- 
 ture from Augustus to Constantino, undertook to discuss 
 the whole development of Roman sculpture with special 
 reference to the contentions of Wickhoff and Riegl. 
 
 In this attempt to "rehabilitate" Roman art, one 
 fact is noticeable: the protagonists in the discussion 
 were men who approached Roman art from a different 
 point of view from that of most writers of the nineteenth 
 century. Their interest was primarily in mediaeval and 
 modem art, and their inquiries were directed toward 
 determining what Rome contributed to the development 
 of art as a whole, not simply what she borrowed from 
 
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Fig. 3. The Ara Pacts Auguslae : The " Tellus " Rehef. 
 (Schreiber, Die hellenistischen Reliefbilder , pi. 32.) 
 
 Fig. 4. The Ara Pacts Auguslae : Sacrifice to the Penates. 
 Uahreshefled.oest. arch. Insliluls, 1907, p. 187.) 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 7 
 
 Greece. Naturally their views have been vigorously 
 opposed, and it is still too early to say just how much 
 of the "new criticism" will stand the test of time. But 
 the discussion has, at all events, called attention to a 
 number of qualities in Roman art, and especially in 
 Roman sculpture, which have not been sufficiently 
 emphasized before, and has raised many new and inter- 
 esting problems. 
 
 The monuments to which appeal is most insistently 
 made by the new school of critics, to prove the original- 
 ity and importance of Roman art, are the great histori* 
 cal reliefs, which are at once the best pr^erved and the 
 most typical products of the Romart^eriod, and their 
 theories can best be expounded and criticised by con- 
 sidering four of the most conspicuous monuments, the 
 Ara Pacis Augustae, the central reliefs on the Arch of 
 Titus, the reliefs of the Column of Trajan, and certain 
 of the reliefs on the Arch of Constantine. Each of these 
 has its own claim to consideration, each illustrates one 
 or more points in the new criticism of Roman art. 
 
 The Ara Pacis AUgustae, voted by the Senate in honor 
 of Augustus on his return from Spain and Gaul in 
 13 B.C., and dedicated early in the year 9, was one of 
 the most splendid monuments of the ruler who boasted 
 that he found a city of brick and left it of marble. 
 It was erected in the Campus Martius, close to the 
 Via Flaminia, on the site now occupied in part by 
 the Palazzo Ottoboni-Fiano. At three different times. 
 
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8 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 beginning in the sixteenth century, workmen engaged in 
 enlarging or repairing the modem palace recovered very 
 considerable fragments of the structure, from which 
 the plan and elevation could be roughly determined, 
 and quite lately more careful exploration brought to 
 light several new fragments and cleared up a number 
 of doubtful points. The fragments are, unfortunately, 
 widely scattered, — in the Museo delle Terme, the 
 Villa Medici, the Vaticcm, in Florence, Paris, Vienna, 
 and England, — so that the decoration of the Ara 
 Pacis is almost as difficult to study in the originals as 
 that of the Parthenon. Several of the slabs have been 
 mutilated and restored, and owing to the fragmentary 
 condition of the marbles, there are several pieces whose 
 connection with the structure is in dispute. Neverthe- 
 less, enough remains to make the form and the general 
 arrangment of the decoration certain, and to afford 
 an idea of the style of the reliefs. 
 
 The altar itself stood in the centre of a paved square, 
 surrounded by a wall about twenty feet high. The out- 
 side measurements were about thirty-seven by thirty- 
 four feet, and all the visible parts were apparently of 
 marble. The wall was solid on the north and south sides, 
 but there were openings on the east and west, possibly 
 two doors, possibly a door at the west and a large win- 
 dow at the east. Both inside and out, the wall was 
 broken by pilasters at the corners and about the door- 
 ways, and decorated in two bands divided by a moulding. 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 9 
 
 The inner ornamentation was simple. The lower part of 
 the wall was carved in plain panels (perhaps in imitation 
 of a primitive enclosure of boards), the upper part was 
 decorated with heavy garlands of fruit and flowers, 
 attached by broad ribbons to bucrania, with a ritual 
 saucer, or patera, carved above the centre of each gar- 
 land. The decoration of the outer surface was more 
 elaborate. The pilasters and the lower parts of the wall 
 were decorated with vigorous floral scrolls, based on 
 the acanthus, but enlivened with flowers and with 
 figures of birds and other animals. In the upper por- 
 tions, on the north and south sides, were carved two 
 long processions moving toward the western end, and 
 about the openings at the east and west were smaller 
 reliefs, one of which represents Tellus, Mother Earth, 
 another a sacrifice to the Penates. The subjects of the 
 other two panels and the exact arrangement of all four 
 are uncertain and of no importance for our present pur- 
 pose. But the three sorts of reliefs, the processional 
 friezes, the panels with Tellus and the sacrifice, and the 
 floral patterns (including the garlands), are important, 
 since each, according to the new school, illustrates a 
 prominent characteristic of Roman art. 
 
 The processional reliefs are the most Roman part 
 of the decoration. In both friezes, the subject is the 
 same, a procession of dignitaries, heavily draped in 
 tunica and toga, marching solemnly in pairs and evi- 
 dently prepared for some religious ceremony. Among 
 
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10 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 them we can distinguish Hctors with their fasces, priests 
 wearing the cap with disc and apex, camilli with in- 
 cense-box, pitcher, and sacrificial patera. One youthful 
 figure shoulders the sacena, or ceremonial axe. Most of 
 the figures wear wreaths of laurel, and several carry 
 laurel branches in their hands. Several are charac- 
 terized as senators by the ring which they wear on the 
 fourth finger of the left hand. Towards the end of each 
 group appear several figures of women and children. 
 The interpretation which most readily suggests itself is 
 that it is the procession at the foundation or the dedi- 
 cation of the Ara Pacis itself that the sculptor has 
 tried to represent, and this impression is confirmed by 
 the distinctly portrait-like character of the heads, so 
 far as the original heads are preserved. Several critics, 
 indeed, have attempted to identify the most prominent 
 figures in the northern frieze, where the presence of the 
 priests and a greater number of lictors suggests that the 
 principal persons are grouped, as members of the im- 
 perial family and the officials of the year 13 or the year 
 9. The idea which inspires such an attempt is probably 
 correct ; it is probable that the northern frieze represents 
 the head of the procession and contains the figures of 
 the most important participants, but it must be ad- 
 mitted that the portraiture is not exact enough to en- 
 able us to recognize even Augustus himself with cer- 
 tainty. It is generally agreed, however, that the two 
 friezes represent parts of the same procession, and that 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART ii 
 
 the division into two parts was due to the exigencies 
 of the space to be filled. 
 
 The subject is analogous to that of the Parthenon 
 frieze, and challenges comparison with it; and such a 
 comparison brings out several striking differences be- 
 tween Greek and Roman relief. The most obvious of 
 these is the realism of the Roman work, which is in 
 marked contrast to the idealism of the Greek. The Par- 
 thenon frieze represents the Panathenaic procession, but 
 not as it actually appeared at any one time ; it is the ideal 
 of the procession, not the procession itself, that the sculp- 
 tor has tried to place before us. This is evident not 
 only in the heads and the bodily types of the participants, 
 which the sculptor has obviously idealized, but in the 
 dress, which only in a general way reproduces that of 
 daily life, and falls in sweeping folds unattainable with 
 any known material. Of the setting in which the proces- 
 sion moves there is scarcely a hint, hardly more than the 
 marshals, who at intervals seem to urge on the laggards 
 or check the speed of an overzealous charioteer. The 
 figures move in an ideal atmosphere, far removed from 
 actuality, just as in form they are more perfect than the 
 actual participants in the Panathenaic celebration. How 
 different is the Roman frieze ! Here every detail that can 
 help to convey the impression of reality is emphasized. 
 The heads are carefully differentiated and suggest por- 
 traits, though we cannot surely identify the subjects. 
 The dress is that of everyday life, represented in the 
 
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12 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 heavy masses and confused cross-lines into which the 
 Roman toga naturally fell. Details of dress, such as 
 shoes and finger-rings, are carefully elaborated, and the 
 sculptor even takes care to reproduce the reliefs upon 
 the incense-boxes carried by the camilli. Several of the 
 figures in the background seem to take no part in the 
 procession and are doubtless to be interpreted as specta- 
 tors, representatives of the crowd of onlookers through 
 the midst of whom the procession moves. Everywhere 
 the artist's endeavor seems to be to call up actuality, to 
 represent the procession precisely as it appeared. In 
 this contrast between idealism and realism we touch 
 upon a fundamental difference between Greek and Ro- 
 man art, which has often been commented upon. Wick- 
 hoff goes further still, and urges that the difference 
 exists not merely between Greek and Roman art, but 
 between the art of the East and the art of the West. 
 Eastern art, he argues, — and in this category he would 
 place the art of Greece, — tends always from the indi- 
 vidual and particular to the general and ideal; Western 
 art tends rather from the general and ideal to the partic- 
 ular and individual. To this general law there are ad- 
 mittedly exceptions, and it does not hold so strictly for 
 Greek art after the time of Alexander as for the art of the 
 "great period," the fifth and fourth centuries. But as a 
 broad and general distinction it holds,true, and serves to 
 emphasize what is perhaps the most striking quality in 
 Roman art throughout its whole development. 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 13 
 
 Another marked difference between the processional 
 friezes and those of the Greek period appears in the 
 management of the relief itself. The Greeks used both 
 high and low relief, but rarely attempted to combine 
 them. The sculptor of the Roman relief, in his desire to 
 suggest reality, attempts to combine the two. Some 
 figures are carved in comparatively high relief, others 
 are hardly more than sketched on the background. In 
 this we see the beginnings of that "illusionist" manner 
 on which the new school of critics lay so much emphasis 
 and of which so many examples are found in later reliefs. 
 The shadows of the front row of figures fall on the fig- 
 ures of the back row, while these cast no shadow. Thus 
 the illusion is created that their shadows fall on the 
 earth, and the background seems to disappear behind 
 them. The artist of the Ara Pacis has not gone very far 
 in the direction of illusionism. His relief for the most 
 part is in two planes only, though there are figures that 
 are not exactly in one plane or the other and nowhere is a 
 very high relief employed. Of such a treatment of relief 
 there are sporadic instances in Greek monuments. The 
 water-carrier who stoops to lift his water- jar on the 
 north frieze of the Parthenon is in somewhat lower relief 
 than the other figures, and in the grave-monuments, 
 from the fourth century on, figures in the background 
 are often not brought out to the front plane of the relief. 
 But such figures are exceptional in Greek work, where 
 the artist clearly preferred to work in a single plane. 
 
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14 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 The small panels from the ends of the Ara Pads exem- 
 plify another marked tendency in Roman relief, — the 
 attempt to suggest a setting by the introduction of elab- 
 orate backgrounds. In the Tellus relief, the background 
 is simple. Tellus herself, a matronly figure, sits upon a 
 rocky seat; her lap is filled with fruits and flowers, at her 
 feet are an ox and a sheep. At either side of the goddess 
 is a symbolic figure, — the genius of the water mounted 
 on a sea-monster and the genius of the air mounted on a 
 swan. Or are they rather the Aurae, the favoring breezes 
 of land and sea whose kindly ministrations mean so 
 much to growing crops? At all events, they are minis- 
 ters of Mother Earth, like the Jovis aurae of the Carmen 
 Saeculare, published only four years before the founda- 
 tion of the Ara Pacis: — 
 
 fertilis frugum pecorisque Tellus 
 spicea donet Cererem corona; 
 nutriant fetus et aquae salubres 
 et Jovis aurae. 
 
 But the figures alone are not enough to convey the 
 sculptor's meaning. Behind Tellus he carves growing 
 poppies and ears of wheat, and below the swan at the 
 left he suggests a swamp with growing reeds, in the 
 midst of ^hich a heron perches on an overturned am- 
 phora with water flowing from its mouth. Between the 
 swan and Tellus a long stalk rises and spreads over 
 the background. All these details are naturalistically 
 treated. 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 15 
 
 The Sacrifice to the Penates shows a fuller develop- 
 ment of the naturalistic background. In the centre is an 
 altar of natural stone, decked with a garland and heaped 
 with fruits, approached from the left by two camilli. 
 One leads a sow for the sacrifice, the other carries in his 
 right hand a pitcher and in his left a dish filled with 
 fruit and branches; apples, pineapples, and a branch of 
 laurel can easily be recognized. On the opposite side of 
 the altar stands a bearded man, his hair bound with a 
 laurel wreath, his robe drawn over his head, but draped 
 so as to leave the right side and breast bare. His right 
 arm is extended above the altar and in his right hand 
 (which is lost) he doubtless held a patera for pouring the 
 libation. Behind him a pjirt of a second figure, leaning 
 on a knotted staff, is preserved. The interpretation of 
 these figures is not e;asy. The un-Roman arrangement 
 of the robe of the bearded figure, the partial nudity, and 
 the treatment of the head suggest that the types are 
 ideal, and the most plausible explanation is, perhaps, 
 that they represent the personified Senatus and Populus 
 Romanus. 
 
 But it is after all the treatment of the background 
 which is the most interesting part of the relief. Behind 
 the altar the sculptor hag placed a slender oak, which 
 rises to the top of the slab, and above the second camil- 
 lus he has tried to suggest a rocky eminence, crowned by 
 the shrine of the Penates to whom the sacrifice is offered. 
 The shrine is worked put with the utmost care; the 
 
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i6 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 blocks of the side walls are carefully marked, the Corinth- 
 ian capitals of the comer pilasters are accurately copied, 
 even the arrangement of the tiles on the roof and their 
 antefixes are conscientiously reproduced, and through the 
 open door, which occupies the full width of the building, 
 the figures of the gods themselves are to be seen. The 
 whole is worked out in the same spirit as the background 
 of the Tellus relief, but with greater boldness. 
 
 This development of the background in relief was not 
 a new tendency in Roman times. Its beginnings can be 
 seen in the art of the Hellenistic age. In the reliefs of the 
 fifth and fourth centuries, such as the Parthenon frieze, 
 the balustrade of Athena Nik6, and the decorative friezes 
 of the Mausoleum, the figures, as we have already noted, 
 are placed in a sort of ideal atmosphere and there is no 
 attempt to suggest a background or setting. But in works 
 of the Hellenistic period, such as the smaller frieze from 
 the great altar at Pergamum, and in products of minor 
 art, such as the famous Tazza Farnese in Naples, we 
 have very evident attempts to suggest a background by 
 the introduction of trees and flowers and stalks of grain, 
 precisely in the manner of the Sacrifice to the Penates 
 and the Tellus relief. Moreover, the so-called "picto- 
 rial" or "pastoral" reliefs, which probably go back to 
 Hellenistic originals, exhibit the same fondness for elab- 
 orate backgrounds as a setting for mythological compo- 
 sitions or scenes from country life. No doubt many of 
 these reliefs, as Wickhoff heis pointed out, were carved 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 17 
 
 in Roman times and so present analogies in style and 
 workmanship, — in the management of light and shade, 
 for instance, — to the Roman historical reliefs. But the 
 fondness for country life and the attention to details 
 which are so marked in this group of monuments surely 
 reflect the spirit of the Hellenistic age, as it is reflected in 
 literature in the poems of Theocritus. Wickhoff , indeed, 
 regards the whole group as products of the Roman pe- 
 riod, basing his argument principally on the Tellus re- 
 lief. But there is some evidence to show that this itself 
 was copied from an earlier, Hellenistic work, and the bal- 
 ance of evidence is still in favor of the older hypothesis, 
 which regards the "pictorial " reliefs as based on Hellen- 
 istic originals and the development of the background 
 in relief work as one which took place in the Hellenistic 
 age. The device evidently appealed strongly to Roman 
 taste. It is much used in later reliefs, in several of which 
 the background is carved to represent, in summary fash- 
 ion, the fagades of temples and other buildings at Rome, 
 -'-another evidence of that love of what is real and tan- 
 gible which we have already noted in the processional 
 friezes of the Ara Pacis. 
 
 The purely decorative portions of the Ara Pacis illus- 
 trate still a third tendency of Roman art, much vaunted 
 by the new critics, — the great development of plant 
 and floral ornament. On the Ara, two types of such 
 ornament occur, on the outside acanthus scrolls on the 
 lower parts of the wall and the pilasters, and inside, on 
 
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i8 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 the upper parts of the wall, elaborate garlands. Both 
 these forms of decoration have prototypes in Greek orna- 
 ment. The acanthus is a common decorative motive in 
 Greek art from the fifth century on, most familiar, per- 
 haps, in the Corinthian capital, but used also for many 
 other purposes. The forms adopted by the Greeks are 
 regularly conventional, following the recognized tendency 
 of Greek ornament. In later examples, such as those 
 that appear on the South Italian veises, there is an at- 
 tempt to enliven the conventional form by the introduc- 
 tion of winged figures, human heads, birds, and other 
 animals; but this development never goes very far, and 
 the Greek acanthus scroll remains essentially simple 
 throughout its whole development. On the Ara Pacis, 
 on the other hand, the variety of the design is perhaps 
 its most remarkable feature. The basis of the design is 
 the conventional acanthus, springing in graceful scrolls 
 from a central stalk. But the scrolls often end, not in 
 the conventional palmettes which are regularly asso- 
 ciated with the acanthus in Greek design, but in flowers 
 of different sorts, conventionalized and made regular, to 
 be sure, but so varied in arrangement as to produce some- 
 thing like the effect of a growing vine. This effect is en- 
 hanced by the small shoots and tendrils which twine 
 about the larger stalks, and by the great swans with out- 
 spread wings that recur at regular intervals at the top 
 of the design. Even more remarkable are the small ani- 
 mals which are introduced in the midst of the foliage, — 
 
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Fig. 7. The Arch of Titus. 
 
 Fig. 8. The Arch of Titus: Relief from Central Passageway. 
 (Brunn-Bruckmann, Denkmiler gr. und rim. Sndplur, pi. 497.) 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 19 
 lizards and scorpions, snakes and birds, — and, on the 
 pilasters, more elaborate types, a bird feeding its young, 
 an owl with a snake in its claws, an eagle which has seized 
 a hare. In all this, we recognize again the realistic Ro- 
 man spirit. The artist bases his decoration on Greek 
 models, but goes further than his predecessors in the en- 
 deavor to suggest life, varying the conventional acan- 
 thus scroll with many sorts of figures drawn directly 
 from nature, and trying in every way to suggest a grow- 
 ing vine. 
 
 Even more striking, perhaps, are the differences be- 
 tween the garlands of the Ara Pads and their prede- 
 cessors in Greek design. Garlands of fruit and flowers 
 appear not infrequently in works of the Hellenistic age, 
 especially for the decoration of altars. But such gar- 
 lands are regularly simple in character, composed of 
 few elements, and the component parts are rarely 
 worked out in any detail. In the Roman period, the gar- 
 land motive, like the acanthus scroll, was developed in 
 the direction of greater complexity and variety. In the 
 garlands of the Ara Pads we find a truly marvellous 
 range of fruits and flowers, faithfully imitated and skil- 
 fully combined. Apples, pears, plums, cherries, grapes, 
 figs, pineapples, ears of wheat, olives, acorns, ivy-berries, 
 poppy-heads, and sprays of laurel can all be distinguished 
 in the heavy garlands with which the wall of the enclosure 
 was adorned. Originally, no doubt, the effect was further 
 enhanced by color, and the garlands must have resem- 
 
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20 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 bled very closely the splendid terra-cotta work of the 
 Delia Robbias, which, even in their uncolored condition, 
 they strongly suggest. There is, of course, a direct con- 
 nection between this type of Roman decoration and the 
 work of the Delia Robbias ; the later artists undoubtedly 
 drew their inspiration largely from Roman relief work, 
 especially from the reliefs on Roman sarcophagi. But 
 back of the historical connection lies a more fundamen- 
 tal reason for the similarity, in that each is an expression 
 of the "Western " attitude toward art, of the love for the 
 particular and individual, in contrast to the " Eastern" 
 fondness for the general and the ideal. 
 
 The Ara Pads might well be called the comer-stone of 
 the new criticism of Roman sculpture, and in a broader 
 sense, of Roman art in general. In it we have a datable 
 monument by which we can estimate the strength of 
 Greek influence in Rome in the early years of the Em- 
 pire, and the importance of the innovations which were 
 being made in accordance with Roman taste. It is evid- 
 ent that the whole basis of this art is Greek. Every fea- 
 ture of the decoration of the Ara Pads has its prototype 
 in Greek monuments. It is highly probable that the art- 
 ists were Greeks. What little we know of conditions in 
 Rome during the first century B.C. points in that direc- 
 tion. Yet in many ways, as I have tried to suggest, 
 there are differences between this sculpture and its pro- 
 totypes, and these, it is fair to argue, are due to the pub- 
 lic for whom the work was executed, and are to be traced 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 21 
 
 back ultimately to Roman feeling and Roman concep- 
 tions. In this sense, it is quite correct to speak of the 
 Ara Pads and other monuments of the Empire as pro- 
 ducts of Roman art, though many of them probably are 
 not the work of Roman artists. The point is of import- 
 ance because it is so often maintained that the monu- 
 ments of the Empire represent, after all, only a later, 
 degenerate form of Greek art, because the artists were 
 in most cases Greeks. But surely the Graeculus esuriens 
 of the period of the Empire, if his character is at all 
 correctly drawn by Roman writers, would have done his 
 best to please his Roman patrons, in art, as in all else, 
 and the differences which we can see between the monu- 
 ments of the Greek period and those of the Roman Em- 
 pire must be due to the influence of Roman ideas, even 
 though the sculptors in many cases, or even in all cases, 
 were Greeks. Wickhoff, indeed, maintains that "it was 
 only when Roman amateurs gave up their exclusive pa- 
 tronage of Greek artists and began to give commissions 
 to people of their own race that a change of style could 
 take plate." This, he believes, happened after the time 
 of Augustus, since the Greeks of the Augustan time 
 had failed to create a style which satisfied their Roman 
 patrons. But it may equally well be argued that the 
 post- Augustan monuments represent the work of Greek 
 artists who had been trained in Rome and had studied 
 more successfully the demands of Roman taste. In any 
 case, the important point is that the Imperial monu- 
 
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22 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 ments, whether made by Greek or by Roman workmen, 
 were made to express Roman ideas, and so are properly 
 regarded as Roman art. 
 
 Among the monuments of the first century after Christ 
 the new criticism assigns the most prominent place to 
 the Arch of Titus. This structure, erected to commemo- 
 rate the capture of Jerusalem in 70 a.d. and dedicated, 
 probably, in the year 81, is interesting from several 
 points of view. It is the earliest and simplest of the 
 many triumphal arches, and the earliest datable monu- 
 ment in which the composite capital is used. For the 
 new critics, however, its principal importance lies in 
 the fact that in the two panels which are placed at 
 either side of the central passageway, we find the "illu- 
 sionist" manner in its most complete expression. The 
 panels represent two scenes from the triumphal proces- 
 sion which celebrated the capture of Jerusalem. In one 
 we see the Emperor in his chariot, conducted by the 
 goddess Roma and crowned by Victory. About the 
 chariot are ranged lictors and citizens, and two ideal 
 figures apparently represent the Senatus and the Popu- 
 lus Romanus. In the other panel is portrayed another 
 part of the triumphal procession carrying the most im- 
 portant of the spoils from Jerusalem, the table of the 
 show-bread, the trumpets, and the seven-branched 
 candlestick. In the representation of these subjects 
 there is a marked advance over the timid attempt at 
 spatial effect which we noted in the processional friezes 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 23 
 
 of the Ara Pads. The relief, says Wickhofif, "exhibits a 
 subtle variiatibn of depth from the figures of the front 
 plane to the flatly worked heads of the lowest layer on 
 their vanishing background. The common statement 
 that the artist worked in three planes is not quite accur- 
 ate, because the swellings and sinkings of the surface 
 are very subtle and depend on the variety of effect to be 
 gained, but not on definite levels. All relation of the 
 separate groups and figures to the architecture, such as 
 is maintained in the Pergamene sculptures, is here ig- 
 nored or, more exactly, purposely avoided. A frame is 
 simply thrown open and through it we look at the march 
 of the triumphal procession. We are to believe that 
 the people are moving there before our eyes; we are no 
 longer to be reminded of pictures; rather the plastic art 
 tries to attain by its own methods the same effect as 
 would a highly developed art of painting — the impres- 
 sion of complete illusion. Beauty of line, symmetry of 
 parts, such as a conventional art demands, are no longer 
 sought for. Everything is concentrated on the one aim 
 of producing an impression of continuous motion. Air, 
 light, and shade are all pressed into the service and must 
 help to conjure up reality. The relief has 'Respirazion,' 
 like the pictures of Velasquez. But as it is the real and 
 not painted air that filters in between the figures, it fol- 
 lows that all the master's art is brought to bear on such 
 a skilful arrangement of groups as, in spite of the com- 
 pression, may allow air to pass between, above, and 
 
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24 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 around the figures, thus helping to supplement the 
 modelling even as the sunlight, which, when it breaks 
 in, awakens these figures to magic life. To allow natural 
 illumination to contribute to the perfecting of the art- 
 istic effect was one of the boldest innovations. On the 
 success of this startling experiment depends the whole 
 marvellous eflfect of this relief, unequalled except in the 
 Spinning Girls in Madrid. The task which Egypt and 
 the East had in olden times set themselves, of reproduc- 
 ing extracts from real life with all possible truth to na- 
 ture by the simplest means, had been interrupted for a 
 while by the noble drama of Hellenism, with its ideal 
 representations of spiritual and physical powers ; but now 
 that the interlude was over, the old task was resumed 
 and brought to satisfying completeness by the most 
 refined methods of a style aiming at illusionism." 
 
 Few, perhaps, will be inclined to go as far as this in 
 praise of these reliefs. Indeed, other critics, less enthus- 
 iastic than Wickhoff , have not been slow to point out de- 
 fects, some of which the protagonist of the new school 
 himself admitted. It is obvious, for instance, that the 
 designer of the reliefs had no proper knowledge of per- 
 spective; the drawing of the horses in the relief repre- 
 senting the Emperor is incorrect, and their relation to 
 the chariot is obscure; and, in the opposite relief, though 
 the soldiers are evidently conceived as marching through 
 the gateway at the right, they seem rather to be passing 
 in front of it. There is also a certain inappropriateness 
 
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Fig. 9. The Column of Trajan, 
 
 Fig. 10. The Column of Trajan: Detail of the Decoration. 
 (Cichorius, Die Reliefs dcr Trajanssdule, pi. 83.) 
 
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' THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 25 
 
 in the suggestion of an open window, occupying practi- 
 cally the whole width of a pier which serves to support 
 a heavy superstructure. Yet in spite of these obvious de- 
 ficiencies, one is forced to admit Wickhofif's main con- 
 tention, that the sculptors of the Roman age saw and 
 attempted to realize possibilities in relief sculpture which 
 the Greeks had not seen or had consciously rejected, and 
 that it was along lines suggested by the reliefs of the 
 Arch of Titus that the sculptors of the Renaissance 
 advanced. It was the "illusionist" method, combined 
 with a correct knowledge of perspective, that produced 
 such masterpieces as the Ghiberti Gates in Florence. 
 
 In the Column of Trajan, erected early in the second 
 century, we have another monument which, like the 
 Arch of Titus, has gained a new importance through the 
 criticism of Wickhoff and his followers. The principal 
 decoration of the column consists of a band of sculptured 
 relief in which are commemorated the events of the 
 Emperor's two campaigns against the Dacians. The 
 reliefs have long been recognized as important historical 
 documents, interesting especially to students of eth- 
 nology and of Roman military antiquities. To Wick- 
 hoff belongs the credit of emphasizing the importance of 
 the method by which these events are portrayed. This 
 is, to use Wickhoff 's own expression, "the continuous 
 method 'of narration." In depicting the events of the 
 two campaigns, the sculptor has simply given up all at- 
 tempt at unity of time and place and has represented the 
 
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26 THE NEW CRITICISM OF HOMAN ART 
 
 progress of the army in a series of scenes which follow 
 one another in quick succession, with no clearly marked 
 divisions between the different episodes. Within the 
 space of a few feet, we see the troops cross a river, 
 engage the enemy, defeat him, and press on to the siege 
 of a stronghold or the building of a camp. The same 
 figures recur again and again, especially the figure of 
 Trajan, who is represented more than ninety times. The 
 result of this constant recurrence of the principal person, 
 as Wickhoff well pointed out, is that in every scene we 
 look first for the Emperor, and such unity as exists is a 
 unity of idea. Such a method of representation is com- 
 mon in early and primitive art. It appears frequently in 
 Egyptian and Assyrian reliefs and even occasionally in 
 the work of the Greek painters and sculptors. A cylix in 
 the British Museum is decorated with six of the exploits 
 of Theseus placed side by side, and in the smaller sculp- 
 tured frieze from the great altar at Pergamum, the his- 
 tory of the Mysian king, Telephus, was represented in a 
 series of successive scenes. Such cases are rare and spo- 
 radic in Greek art, where, with very few exceptions, 
 unity of time and place are strictly observed and within 
 the frame of a single composition, only one event is de- 
 picted, but there are enough of them to show that the 
 continuous method cannot be regarded as something 
 absolutely new in the Imperial period, but rather as a 
 reversion to an earlier practice. On the other hand, it 
 must be admitted that in the Column of Trajan this 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 27 
 
 method was developed more completely and more logic- 
 jlUy than it had ever been before. 
 
 The importance and the value of the new develop- 
 ment have been variously estimated. For Wickhoff it 
 marks the culminating point in the history of ancient 
 .art. "With the establishment of this principle," he 
 declares, "the development of art, that had begun in 
 Egypt and passed through so many different phases 
 among the peoples of the Mediterranean basin, is com- 
 pleted and closed. An incessantly active imagination 
 had allied itself to the realistic tendencies of this Western 
 art, and out of the materials that deceptive iltustonism 
 offered had created a new kind of narrative, the co«- 
 Mnuous. This was the bright, waving flower that grew 
 on the strong root of realism. " By others the continuous 
 method is regarded as a step backwards, a proof, not of 
 the creative power of the artists of the Roman period, but 
 of the weakening of the best traditions of ancient eirt, 
 of which the conventional background adopted through- 
 out' this series of reliefs is but another evidence. To 
 quote a prominent English critic, it is "a revival of a 
 primitive manner, which the empire of Greek art had 
 almost civilized off the face of the earth." Between 
 these divergent points of view, there is room for many 
 shades of opinion, but in any case it cannot be denied 
 that the innovation was one that had a marked effect 
 on the later development of art. The continuous 
 method of narration is found on many Roman monu- 
 
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28 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 ments of the second and third centuries, notably on the 
 sculptured .sarcophagi, it was taken up by the early 
 Christians for the representation of the stories embodied 
 in Biblical tradition, and profoundly influenced the art 
 of the Middle Ages. From the point of view of the his- 
 tory of art, it is undoubtedly the most important devel- 
 opment of the Imperial period. 
 
 Finally, the Arch of Constantine, built by that Em- 
 peror to commemorate his victory over Maxentius in 
 the year 312, may serve to illustrate a principle which 
 has been especially emphasized by Riegl. Of the elabor- 
 ate sculptured decoration of this monument, by far the 
 larger part was taken from earlier buildings. Only a few 
 of the reliefs are contemporary with the arch, and some 
 of these were probably carved originally for a monument 
 erected by Diocletian a few years before the accession of 
 Constantine, — a sad commentary on the decline of the 
 sculptor's art in the fourth century. Yet even here, if we 
 follow Riegl, evidences of originality are not entirely 
 lacking. The most important of the "contemporary" 
 reliefs are the narrow friezes which are placed just below 
 the large medallions on the sides and the ends of the 
 monument. They represent the battle and siege of 
 Verona, the battle of the Milvian Bridge, the Emperor 
 and his staff upon the Rostra, a congiarium, or distribu- 
 tion of gifts, and two scenes from a triumphal proces- 
 sion. In them all, the most striking feature is the tend- 
 ency to isolate the separate figures and groups, and by 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 29 
 
 deep undercutting to outline each with heavy shadow. 
 It is not a question of working in many planes, as in the 
 reliefs on the Arch of Titus. All the figures are brought 
 out to the front face of the relief, but so framed in shad' 
 ow that they seem to stand freely in space, and the 
 background, in several instances, practically disappears. 
 The tendency is not a new one in the fourth century, for 
 its beginnings can be seen in sarcophagi as early as the 
 time of Hadrian. But the age of Constantine marks its 
 fullest development. In the narrow friezes on the arch 
 the principle is carried to its logical conclusion, and 
 truthful representation is sacrificed to decorative effect. 
 Separated by deep shadows, the individual figures and 
 groups, even in the fighting scenes, appear stiff and form- 
 al, more Hke puppets moved by strings than like living 
 human beings. This suggestion is strengthened by the 
 summary and unskilful rendering of the figures them- 
 selves, with their squat and heavy forms, and by the 
 tendency to return to the " frontal " position which char- 
 acterizes early and primitive art. But these details are 
 of secondary importance. The stiffness and formality 
 are due primarily, to quote Riegl's own words, to^the 
 positive artistic intention clearly to differentiate figures 
 and partsof figures from one another, while calling forth 
 at the same time the optic impression of a rhythmical 
 alternation of light and shade." 
 
 That this method of obtaining an effect of light-on- 
 dark design by heavy undercutting is a new develop- 
 
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30 THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 
 
 ment in the Imperial period must ,be conceded. It differs 
 both from the frank recognition of the background in 
 Greek reliefs of the great age and from the illusionist 
 methods of Flavian sculpture. That it is an important 
 development is evident from the great number of Chris- 
 tian sarcophagi and Christian and pagan ivories in 
 which it is employed. Indeed, it is largely because of the 
 constant use of deep undercutting and the consequent 
 isolation of the figures in early Christian art that the 
 narrow friezes of the Arch of Constantine have so often 
 been characterized as mediaeval or Byzantine in char- 
 acter. The method, therefore, whatever be its intrinsic 
 merits, cannot be denied an important influence on the 
 later development. 
 
 Such are some of the merits which these recent critics 
 see in the Roman monuments of the Empire. The inno- 
 vations on which most of their arguments for the orig- 
 inality of Roman art are based are those which I have 
 emphasized, — the illusionist manner, the development 
 of the background, the elaboration of naturaUstic plant 
 and floral ornament, the continuous method of narra- 
 tion, and the production of novel optic effects by deep 
 undercutting and isolation of the figure. Like all plead- 
 ers, they frequently overstate their case and try to prove 
 too much, and they sometimes fall into the error of try- 
 ing to emphasize the importance of Roman art by dis- 
 paraging the earlier attainments of the Greeks. This Is 
 surely a mistake, for there can be no doubt that in the 
 
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THE NEW CRITICISM OF ROMAN ART 31 
 
 somewhat restricted field in which they worked and with 
 the limitations which they voluntarily imposed upon 
 themselves, the artists of the Greek period produced 
 works never equalled in later times. The originality, 
 too, which the new critics see in Roman art, is not, I 
 think, so great as some of them maintain. For most of 
 the innovations which they praise so insistently, certain 
 prototypes, or at least certain suggestions can be found 
 in Greek monuments, especially in the monuments of 
 the Hellenistic age, and it is highly probable that as our 
 knowledge of Hellenistic art becomes clearer, especially 
 of the art which flourished in the great cities of the East- 
 ern' Greek world, an even closer relation between the 
 works of the Imperial age and those that preceded them 
 will be made evident. Granting all this, however, we 
 must admit that the critics of the new school have proved 
 their main contention, — that in the development of art 
 as a whole the Roman episode marks a distinct stage, 
 and that Roman art can no longer be treated merely as a 
 later and degenerate phase of the art of the Greeks. If 
 they had accomplished nothing else, they would deserve 
 our gratitude for calling attention to this neglected 
 aspect of that Roman civilization which so profoundly 
 influenced all later civilizations of the Western world. 
 
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II 
 
 NOTIONS OF HUMANITY AMONG 
 THE GREEKS 
 
 Bv CHARLES BURTON GULICK 
 
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NOTIONS OF HUMANITY AMONG THE 
 GREEKS 
 
 Pausanias was one day wandering among the monu- 
 ments of Athens, still standing in composite complete- 
 ness in the second century after Christ, when he came 
 upon an altar to Pity in the market-place. The sight of 
 it caused him to stop and reflect that ' ' this God , although 
 his functions are of special interest to human beings amid 
 the vicissitudes of fortune, receives honor from none of 
 the Greek states except Athens." Kindliness toward 
 men, he goes on to explain, is a national characteristic 
 of the Athenians. 
 
 We need not lose ourselves in the narrow streets of 
 Athens, or in the still narrower back alleys of German 
 speculation, in trying to keep up with those interpreters 
 of this passage who seek to locate the altar in some other 
 quarter than that mentioned by Pausanias; and we need 
 not take very seriously the sentimentality of Statius, who 
 tsrrote of this same Athenian divinity, lacrimis altaria 
 iudant — "its altars sweat tears." There can be no 
 doubt that the altar was somewhere in the city, that it 
 Symbolized a spirit of humanity which distinguished the 
 Athenians above their contemporaries, and that this 
 spirit found conscious expression in public ritual. 
 
 How early does the conscious exercise of the spirit 
 
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36 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 show itself? In Homer, to be sure, we have many scenes 
 where compassion is the ruling motive. The Iliad leaves 
 us, near the end of its story, with the picture, fresh in 
 mind, of the aged Friam winning back from the relenting 
 Achilles the body of Hector; a scene singularly direct in 
 its appeal to elementary emotions of pity, and constantly 
 quoted by lovers of poetry for the ethical contrast it af- 
 fords to the ferocity of Achilles revealed in the earlier 
 part of the story. In the Odyssey we mark an advance, 
 — "it is not holy to exult over slain foemen." Here a 
 religious motive, marking the deeper responsibility of a 
 whole community, makes clearer the irresponsibility of 
 Achilles' position, so far as a feeling of duty is concerned. 
 These two examples, thus slightly differing in kind, are 
 witnesses to a milder feeling which was beginning to 
 supersede the savage notions and ideals wherewith the 
 earliest Ionic civilization must have been beset. They are 
 of interest here only because they show the germ of what 
 was later to become normal. A new ethical order is in 
 conflict with the prejudices of the old, whereas by the 
 fifth century the spiritual heirs of Ionia have come to 
 recognize clemency and generosity as accepted ideals. 
 Thus Pindar, idealizing the Lydian Croesus, benefactor 
 of Delphi, as was the fashion in the early fifth century, 
 says of him: "The kindliness of Croesus fadeth not away, 
 whereas men tell everywhere with hate of him who 
 burned men within a brazen bull, Phalaris of pitiless 
 heart." 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 37 
 
 Against the inhuman and savage details of ancient 
 myth the fifth century, as is well known, made effective 
 revolt, which might take the form of aesthetic repug- 
 nance on the part of a poet, of indifference or temporizing 
 on the part of the statesmen, of indignant protest from 
 the philosopher. Pindar declines to accept the story 
 that the blessed gods had ever eaten of the shoulder of 
 Pelops, and, with more positive disgust, Euripides tells 
 how the sun turned his face away rather than behold the 
 cannibalism of the "Thyestean meal"; and Socrates 
 denies outright the credibility of such stories of cruelty 
 as that of the mutilation of Uranos by Kronos. 
 
 On the other hand, the reader of Herodotus cannot 
 help fancying that he, true to his aim of glorifying 
 Athens, is fond of holding up before his Athenian hear- 
 ers, by way of complacent contrast, pictures of Oriental 
 or Egyptian cruelty which will fascinate and horrify. 
 The very refinement of cruelty is realized in characteris- 
 tic Oriental fashion in the punishment meted out to one 
 Sisamnes. He, Herodotus tells us, was a Persian judge 
 whom Cambyses caused to be killed and flayed for a 
 corrupt decision. His son Otanes was promoted to the 
 judgment-seat, which was upholstered with his father's 
 skin. The historian vouchsafes no moralizing comment, 
 but it is plain that here, as also in his narrative of the 
 cannibal atrocities of Astyages, the Mede, toward Har- 
 pagus, or of Psammetichus the Egyptian cutting out the 
 tongues of women, that he is reproducing for the enter- 
 
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38 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 tainment of his hearers what he believes to be the true 
 and necessary conception of an inhuman Eastern mon- 
 arch. 
 
 Of the contrast of all this with himself, at home and 
 in Athens, the Greek had a thorough understanding. A 
 poor old cripple, pleading before the Council for the con- 
 tinuance of his annual pension, says, in a speech writ- 
 ten by Lysias: "Do not take away from me, who am 
 growing older and feebler, what you gave to me when I 
 was younger and stronger, especially when you have the 
 reputation of being the most merciful people in the 
 world." This, it may be said, is only the cajolery and 
 flattery of a special pleader — the "Sweet Sir " or " Kind 
 Sir" of all beggars. But it means more than that. Pau- 
 sanias, whose corroborative words we read at the outset, 
 had no ulterior reason for his dictum; he stands at an 
 impartial distance of six centuries from the cripple. 
 Nevertheless, it may be well to recall other traits of the 
 Athenian character which are allied to pity, and which 
 make the Athenians the most humane folk of the an- 
 cient world. 
 
 There was, then, first, an unusual tenderness toward 
 children. It is true that the exposure of infants, espe- 
 cially girls, cannot be proved to have existed to a less 
 degree in Athens than elsewhere in the ancient world. 
 On the contrary, at certain periods of economic pressure, 
 amid the heterogeneous and cosmopolitan elements of 
 the Athenian population, infanticide may have been 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 39 
 
 commoner there than elsewhere. And yet it is none the 
 less true that there, for the first time, we begin to hear 
 something of the problems and responsibilities of parent- 
 hood. The Athenians listened with sympathy to Euri- 
 pides when he makes a character in the Danae say: 
 "Dear is yonder light of the sun, fair the unruffled sur- 
 face of the sea, fair too the earth in spring-time bloom- 
 ing, and the teeming wealth of rivers . . . but no sight is 
 so radiant and fair to see as little children in the house." 
 They listened, too, as we should listen to-day, to Herod- 
 otus' story of how an oracle delivered to the oligarchical 
 ruling class in Corinth had predicted destruction to their 
 rule if the child of Aetion lived to grow up. "So they 
 sent ten of their own number to the quarter where 
 Aetion dwelt to kill the child, • . . and passing into the 
 court of the house they asked to see it. The mother, 
 knowing of course nothing of their errand, and thinking 
 they were asking for the child out of friendliness to the 
 father, brought it and placed it in the arms of one of 
 them. Now it seems they had decided, while on their 
 way, that the first man to receive it should dash it on the 
 ground. But when she gave it to him, the baby hap- 
 pened, by divine providence, to smile up at him; and 
 seeing this he was moved by pity to refrain from killing 
 it, and in his compassion handed it to the next man, and 
 he to the next. So it passed through all ten ; the last gave 
 it back to the mother, and they went out." The simple 
 human quality of this narrative is as refreshing as any- 
 
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40 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 thing which Herodotus, a singularly human writer, has 
 left us. One cannot help remembering, by contrast, how 
 the tender lyrics of the Hebrew psalm of captivity are 
 marred by the closing words: "Happy shall he be that 
 taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." 
 From Euripides we might extract abundant evidence 
 to show that the Greek in general and the Athenian in 
 particular was a child-loving race. Indeed, outside the 
 vase-paintings, I know of no better spokesman for the 
 child than Euripides, "the human." To be sure, in one 
 passage in the Medea, we have a somewhat tasteless ex- 
 pression of doubt as to the wisdom of having children — 
 doubt born, of course, of the sophistic questioning of all 
 the facts of life which was the tendency of the time. 
 "They who have no children, who have not yet begot 
 them because they could not tell whether children are a 
 blessing or a curse, are free from many troubles; where- 
 as I see those in whose houses the sweet bloom of child- 
 hood flowers wasted with many cares." But the passage 
 is saved from banality by the anguish of a parent whose 
 children are torn from him just as their true promise be- 
 gins to reveal itself: "Here is the grief that comes to all 
 mortals. Suppose the children have reached their ma- 
 turity, and are good; if it so befall, there comes that 
 power, Death, who snatches them up and is away with 
 them to the underworld." Beside the pang felt at the 
 transitoriness of all things human — that pang which 
 causes the melancholy in all Greek expression from the 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 41 
 
 Homeric poems down to the last gleam of Hellenic genius 
 in the Anthology — we can mark here the outpouring of 
 a personal parental experience. We are told that among 
 the Persians a boy did not come into his father's pre- 
 sence, but lived only with the women, until he was five 
 years old, so that if he died, his death could cause his 
 father no grief. Herodotus cites the custom with ap- 
 proval. By the end of the fourth century a considerable 
 literature had grown up dealing with the death of child- 
 ren and the consolation which philosophy might bring 
 to the relief of the bereaved. From this literature the 
 Academician Grantor culled the best in behalf of a father 
 who had lost his children, compiling what Cicero calls a 
 "golden book that should be learned by heart." 
 
 Compassion toward the crippled was generally in- 
 spired by fear of Nemesis, the retribution that levels the 
 proud. Greeks seldom forgot her power. Demosthenes, 
 in a rebuke administered to his opponent Aeschines, 
 nobly says: "For myself , when one who is but human 
 reproaches another for his ill fortune, I can only regard 
 him as lacking sense. For though a man may think he is 
 prosperous, believing that he enjoys the best of fortune, 
 he cannot be sure that it will abide unchanged until the 
 evening. How then can he talk about it or reproach 
 others for his lack of it?" Of course the compassionate 
 attitude might be strained, and pity might be marred by 
 condescension. " 'T is better to be envied than be pit- 
 ied," said a Greek proverb. But in general the Greek, 
 
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42 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 ever mindful of the possible envy of the gods, felt that 
 it was unsafe to exult over his neighbor's misfortune. 
 
 But though the thought of Nemesis, like any other 
 self-interest, may have stood too near to the Greek in 
 many a transaction, and her shadow may have darkened 
 the natural lustre of a good deed toward a cripple, it 
 could hardly have been Nemesis that tempered the 
 Athenian masters' treatment of their slaves. Nothing 
 but native kindliness explains the freedom generally ac- 
 corded to a slave's coming and going, the toleration of 
 his garrulity and frankness, which the Spartans, less 
 gracious and graceful masters, observed with aversion in 
 their northern neighbors. The Romans of an earlier 
 time knew something of the free and intimate inter- 
 course between master and slave which marked Athenian 
 urban life; Cato worked and even ate with them. But 
 the later Roman found, as the Spartan always had, this 
 freedom irksome, and it is significant that we first read 
 of a slave uprising in Attica under the Roman domina- 
 tion of the country. 
 
 In the conception of what we should call humane, the 
 Greek would have included his four cardinal virtues, — 
 wisdom, courage, justice, and self-control. These, at 
 least, lay within the clear range of his ideals when sum- 
 ming up human virtue, and with them he would have 
 put, as less virile, perhaps, but none the less essential, 
 the virtues of urbanity, delicacy, modesty, resignation. 
 The last is declared by Schopenhauer to constitute the 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 43 
 
 essence of tragedy; and imagining that he cannot find it 
 among the Greeks, he denies to them, in the field of dra- 
 matic art, the production of a perfect tragedy. Yet one 
 need only recall Alcestis, patiently resigned to meet 
 death that her impossible husband may live; or Maca- 
 ria and Iphigenia, sacrificed to save their city and people; 
 or the wandering Oedipus, blind and homeless in Attica, 
 saying less in complaint than in sadness, "Little can I 
 ask, and less than little do I get, yet am I content. For 
 patience is the lesson I have learnt from suffering and 
 the long years." Surely Greek literature, and Greek 
 drama at its best, is fully alive to both the ethical and 
 the theatrical qualities of resignation as a human mo- 
 tive. There is a curious story told of the orator An tiphon, 
 that he retired from Athens to Corinth and devoted his 
 art of persuasion to giving spiritual consolation to the 
 distressed, like a physician who undertakes confidently 
 to provide relief for physical ills. One of the functions of 
 that late humanitas, with which we associate Cicero es- 
 pecially, was to afford consolation in trouble. It is not 
 quite correct, as has so often been done, altogether to 
 deny to the Greek even of the radiant fifth century, that 
 spiritual stuff out of which are made the martyr, the her- 
 mit, and shall we add, with Antiphon in mind, the faith- 
 healer. The Greek sense of humor, it is true, sometimes 
 intervened in situations which the Christian Fathers 
 would have regarded too serious to justify levity. The 
 meekness of Socrates becomes his well-known irony. 
 
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44 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 But even this is called humanitas by Cicero, who surely 
 ought to have known whether or not that was an appro- 
 priate term. 
 
 One need not seek far to find the humanitarian motive 
 actively influencing Greek conduct. It would, of course, 
 be absurd to deny that the Greek, with his tendency to 
 overreaching, did not recognize the profit to be occa- 
 sionally derived from a good action. He would have ac- 
 cepted the dictum of the Roman philosopher, est enim 
 non modo liberate paulum nonnunquam de suo iure dece- 
 dere, sed interdum etiam fructuosum — "Sometimes it is 
 not only generous to renounce one's right, but actually 
 profitable." One may even concede that the average com- 
 mercial Greek might not even see his advantage here, 
 but be eager to reap his immediate profit at all costs to 
 his future character and customers. But it is clear that 
 however sordid the motives were that controlled the 
 daily market and official actions of the Athenian, he 
 had to listen on festival days to precepts of ideal disin- 
 terestedness. "To help any man," says Sophocles, "with 
 all the resources at one's command, is the noblest of 
 labors." Menander's lost play on the miser, imitated 
 longo intervallo by Plautus and Moliere, inculcated the 
 positive duty of rightly employing wealth for human 
 service, and was not a merely negative picture of the 
 comic aspects of hoarding. The lesson taught by 
 the Greek has been quite obscured by the Roman and 
 the Frenchman. 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 45 
 
 Regarding alms — a Greek word, by the way, in which 
 compassion was originally connoted — it was a well- 
 recognized axiom that kindness should extend beyond 
 the mere dole handed to the beggar to be rid of his impor- 
 tunity. "If you give alms, but heap abuse on the re- 
 ceiver, you therewith sprinkle wormwood on Attic 
 honey." It is a common mistake in these days, due, if 
 not specifically to Lessing, at least to the general mis- 
 prision of antiquity for which the eighteenth century is 
 responsible, to assume that courtesy, in the sense in 
 which we use the term, was not known or practised by 
 the Greeks. It would, of course, be an anachronism to 
 impute to the Greeks anything approaching the galan- 
 terie of the French courtier of the seventeenth century; 
 that would be to read away the civilization of the inter- 
 vening Middle Ages, with its elevation of womanhood, 
 for example. And ancient Greek courtesy, in the small 
 fraction of Hellenic literature that has come down to us, 
 offers only a few examples of the conventional phrase 
 which in English and other modern languages has sprung 
 from court life, and which, in English at least, has led to 
 the indiscriminate use of you in place of thou, whether 
 we are talking to a child, a dog, a friend, or a servant. 
 Conventionality — that which is agreed upon as proper 
 in any given community — is of course a relative quan- 
 tity. It is a truism that ideas of conventionality will 
 differ with the community. As the Greek put it " Custom 
 is King," and illustrated it by pointing to certain Indian 
 
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46 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 folk who felt no compunction about eating their old 
 men, but recoiled in horror at the thought of burning 
 their remains. It would have been just as discourteous 
 to an Athenian to address him abruptly by name, with- 
 out prefixing "Thou " or its equivalent as it is to-day to 
 address a superior abruptly by "You" without adding 
 his name. The simpler "O King" of the Old Testament 
 and of Herodotus may convey more courtesy than 
 "Your Majesty," according to circumstances. But ad- 
 mitting that the language of the classical Greek was more 
 deficient in this regard than that of the Byzantine Greek, 
 it is possible to detect increasing instances of a quality 
 related to modern politeness from the end of the fifth 
 century. A speaker in Lysias requires of his opponent 
 courtesy in address on the plea of a common humanity. 
 And it is not so long afterward when "philanthropy in 
 words" becomes a common phrase. Even Socrates ad- 
 dressing the judges, uncompromising as he is in his bear- 
 ing toward them, is nevertheless prompted to qualify his 
 defiance with the words, "Were it not too rude to say 
 so." Plato also bears witness to that courtesy, rare in 
 any day or clime, which listens with tolerance to the 
 mis-handling of one's own language by a foreigner. 
 The comic poets thoroughly understood the fun-making 
 possibilities in a foreigner talking broken Greek, and 
 even Plato's testimony is given not without irony. But 
 courtesy remains one of the most conspicuous of Plato's 
 qualities; and even before Plato, Euripides, the spirit 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 47 
 
 most endued with sympathy and sensibility of all fifth- 
 century writers, makes the defiant Hippolytus say, "Aye, 
 there is great charm in sweet address, and gain won with 
 little labor." Beyond, then, the exigencies of political 
 invective or personal hatred or comic purpose, we find 
 courtesy as an element of that humanitas which may 
 without distortion of the historical perspective be as- 
 cribed to such spirits as Socrates, Euripides, Plato, and 
 Demosthenes. Here we may notice the contrast between 
 the growing delicacy of the fourth-century and the 
 rough-shod sarcasm and scurrility of the fifth-century 
 comedians inherited from the Ionian satirists. Their as- 
 saults ranged from the harmlesss mockery of peculiari- 
 ties in pronunciation and diction levelled against the up- 
 start demagogue Hyperbolus, to the harmful denuncia- 
 tion of the originators of beneficent public policies. A 
 jest is often the expression of stupid conservatism; and 
 Socrates in The Apology is made to voice his sense of its 
 injustice, although he does not dwell on it with self-pity. 
 These outbreaks of comic license, reflecting popular 
 ignorance and suspicion, are comparable to the recru- 
 descence of savage atrocity, which occasionally marred 
 Athenian mihtary pohcy in the fifth century. We recall 
 the cruel treatment of the inhabitants of Melos when 
 that island was taken after a long and embittering siege 
 in 416 B.C. The worst counsels of demagoguery here pre- 
 vailed. On the other hand, we read with the same thrill 
 of emotion, which can be detected even in the impas- 
 
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48 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 sive Thucydides, who tells the story of the eager race of 
 the triremes to deliver, before it is too late, the reprieve 
 of the Mitylenaeans, who had been condemned to the 
 sword by an earlier despatch ; and we catch our breath in 
 grateful relief when the trireme arrives in time. Such 
 occasions as the Melian disgrace were happily rare in this 
 period of widening humanity, and when a detachment 
 of the Thracian allies of Athens, turned loose to shift for 
 themselves, landed in a Boetian town and massacred the 
 entire population, including the boys in school, the in- 
 cident is described by Thucydides as the greatest calam- 
 ity that could have befallen the city. It is a question 
 whether, in the doubtful state of his text here, the his- 
 torian does not mean by "the city" Athens itself, so 
 horrifying was the effect on the people there and on their 
 esteem abroad. Her opponents could not fail to hold her 
 responsible. Such excesses, which have too frequent 
 analogies in America even in time of peace, do not dis- 
 prove, rather they emphasize, the existence of a humane 
 consciousness which worked to the surface through their 
 power. 
 
 Again we must insist that the Athenians were con- 
 scious of their preeminence in the humanitarian virtues. 
 Whether we take the Funeral Oration of Pericles, pro- 
 nounced at the end of the first year's campaign in the 
 Peloponnesian War, as his own production or as the rhe- 
 torical exercise of the historian, the document remains, 
 unimpeachable and convincing, as the creed of a think- 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 49 
 
 ing Athenian. "A spirit of reverence," it says, "per- 
 vades our public acts; we are kept from doing wrong by 
 respect for the authorities and for the laws, having an 
 especial regard for those which are ordained for the pro- 
 tection of the injured as well as to those unwritten laws 
 which bring upon the transgressor the reprobation of 
 public opinion." Nor does it matter, for our purpose, 
 whether this is the utterance of realized fact. The Eu- 
 boeans, the Samiems, the Thebans, the Melians, all might 
 have denied it; but the ideal was there. 
 
 These virtues, then, of compassion, clemency, and 
 courtesy, which distinguish cultivated man from the 
 savage, which, in fact, make the substance of civilization, 
 are readily observed in the course of Greek and, more 
 specifically, Athenian history in the fifth and fourth cen- 
 turies before Christ — virtues which Cicero sums up in 
 the word humanitas, and which are connoted in the Eng- 
 lish word humane. Other concepts included in its wide 
 range are those of benevolence and generosity, affability, 
 love of family and children, and devotion to friends; and 
 since the perfect virtue to a Greek was that which made 
 him a perfect citizen and member of society, he would 
 include elegance, cheerfulness, wit, and tact. The atti- 
 tude here implied is opposed alike to the austerity of 
 officialdom and the rigidity of professional and technical 
 aims and methods. Further, within ^:he limits of the idea 
 of the humane, as we trace its expression among the dif- 
 ferent figures of Athenian society, we may include the 
 
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50 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 notions of leisure and leisurely reflection, culture and 
 learning, appreciation of art and of the artistic and the 
 beautiful everywhere, and the impulse to literary and 
 artistic creation. Here "humanity" touches closely on 
 the border of "humanism." 
 
 We are at once brought to the question whether the 
 Greeks had any word which described this large concep- 
 tion. This has been denied by at least two German au- 
 thorities of weight, who in their own writings have given 
 abundant and tasteful evidence of the influence on them 
 of Greek and Roman humanism — Schneidewin and 
 Reitzenstein. The latter is undoubtedly right in regard- 
 ing the conception of humanity, as we have reviewed it 
 above, as of relatively late origin ; but it is questionable 
 whether it required, as he thinks, that the narrower 
 ideals of the nations should be superseded by the larger 
 conception of culture extending into extra-national, or, 
 more specifically, Latin regions. The processes of true 
 humanism, Reitzenstein believes, could work out only 
 through the operation of two forces — the ancient cul- 
 ture of Greece moving in cooperation with, but also in a 
 sense in opposition to, the newer elements provided by 
 Rome. In order to make a humanist out of a Roman, 
 perhaps this was true. But, because the homo Romanus, 
 Cato's earlier ideal, needed to learn Greek in order to 
 become a homo humanus, does it follow that the Greek 
 must die and rise again in the later Roman, that he may 
 show the qualities which make the humane man and 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 51 
 
 the humanist ? We have already examined the ethical 
 ground, and we may add that the antithesis expressed 
 in the words humanus, "merciful," and ferus, "cruel," 
 (the same as inhumanus), &nds early utterance in Sopho- 
 cles, in the word apanthropos. For this the older English 
 ab-hominahle is an exact equivalent. In the next century 
 we find Demosthenes using the word anthropinoteron 
 ("more human" = "more humane") to describe the 
 proper attitude of a man toward misfortune. This is 
 quite in the spirit of a passage in Plautus, where we read 
 that not to allude to a worried man's trouble is humani 
 ingeni, "in keeping with a humane spirit." Perhaps the 
 avoidance of the word barbarus by the Romans to express 
 the notion of inhumanus was caused by the uncomforta- 
 ble suspicion that they would not be excluded from that 
 category themselves in the eyes of the Greeks. Of the 
 two Greek words barbaros and apanthropos, they pre- 
 ferred for their purposes the translation of the latter. 
 However that may be, apanthropos is the Greek expres- 
 sion for the narrow provincialism of the uncultivated. 
 Plato uses it of one who isolates himself from the wisdom 
 and judgment of his fellow men. It is surely a proof of 
 the variety of the Greek vocabulary, not of the absence 
 of the conception, that in the fifth century we come on 
 another word, monotropos, to express this kind of isola- 
 tion. 
 
 Was there, now, a corresponding word in the field of 
 intellect? Before we answer the question directly, a brief 
 
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52 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 historical retrospect will make clearer the evolution of 
 the humane consciousness. 
 
 The Persian wars, begun under the leadership of 
 Sparta, but carried through to victorious completion 
 with the youthful energy and intelligence of Athens as 
 the real motive force, issued finally in an exalted feeling 
 of nationalism, in the first clear consciousness of antithe- 
 sis to the non-Hellenic world. Athens felt herself to be 
 invincible; the democracy set itself to the winning of new 
 worlds, political, commercial, intellectual. In politics 
 this led to her fall; but meantime her commerce and 
 trade, her language and literature, had accomplished a 
 greater victory. Hellas had now a new standard in 
 Athens. Attic speech and Attic letters had become Pan- 
 hellenic. This is the significance of the fourth century. 
 With all its incompetence in political and military move- 
 ments, this period of Greek experience was the period of 
 readjustment, whereby the essential predominance of 
 Athens in all that was vital for succeeding generations 
 was confirmed. Her culture lost its local and provincial 
 character, and armed with it, the forces of Alexander 
 conquered the world. 
 
 Only to a limited extent, of course, could even the best- 
 informed Greeks appreciate the meaning of the times. 
 Socrates had little notion of the splendid awakening of 
 which the Sophists,''whom he contemned, were the rigor- 
 ous agents, and of which he himself, with all his ironical 
 self-depreciation, was the prophet. Much less could 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 53 
 
 Aristophanes, with that slowness to perceive what the 
 future had in store which seems to be the peculiar defect 
 of the comedian, — witness Moli^re, — measure the im- 
 portance of the new forces and ideas which he set himself 
 to oppose. 
 
 Before it can arrive at the point of view denoted in the 
 term "humane," a nation must first have won for itself 
 its own esteem, as Athens did in the fifth century, as 
 Rome did in the first. It must then see those elements 
 on which her own greatness and pride are based ab- 
 sorbed by other communities, which in their turn react 
 upon it. This happened to Athens in the fourth century. 
 We then discover the consciousness of the first stage, 
 when we hear Socrates saying to a heedless man, " Can 
 you be an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city in the 
 world in point of culture and power, and yet feel no shame 
 in caring for money more than for wisdom? " The germ 
 of this we find already in Pericles' speech: "Because of 
 the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole world 
 flow in upon us, so that we enjoy the goods of other coun- 
 tries as freely as our own." This is on the material side. 
 Again, "We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our 
 tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manly 
 vigor. . . . Athens is the school of Hellas." Almost in 
 this very year a chorus of Euripides had been singing in 
 this strain: "Blessed of old are the sons of Erechtheus 
 . . . who feed upon the glories of art, moving luminously 
 through brightest air, where once, they say, golden- 
 
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54 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 haired Harmony brought forth the nine chaste muses of 
 Pieria." Even Aristophanes, whose obtuseness in some 
 matters pertaining to the great achievements of Athens 
 we have noted, was not altogether bUnd, and says of 
 Aeschylus, "He thought the rest of the world — outside 
 of Athens — the veriest rubbish when it came to judging 
 the genius of poets." 
 
 The next step in the progress of the idea of humanity 
 is taken when the qualities of culture are conceded to 
 others outside the narrower circle of fifth-century vision, 
 and when, especially after military and political humili- 
 ation, new standards of merit are sought and recognized. 
 Precisely this happened to the Athenian people after the 
 middle of the fourth century. Still convinced that there 
 is a great gulf fixed between him and other Hellenes — 
 so much so, in fact, that with the retirement of Athenian 
 power the opposite notion of Hellenistic power and 
 Hellenism inevitably arises — he nevertheless has come 
 through bitter but salutary lessons to the conception of 
 a world which now knows only two fundamental dis- 
 tinctions, those of culture and ignorance. 
 
 This being the evolution, it goes without saying that 
 there can be no idea of humanity in Homer. Likewise 
 the purely individual or local interests of the lyric poets 
 exclude them from the idea. Euripides, whose fine 
 insight into the whole range of human emotional and in- 
 tellectual interests brings him closer than any other 
 fifth-century poet to the idea we are seeking, is not a 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 55 
 
 humanist, any more than a humanitarian necessarily is. 
 The tragic poets in general set before us, to be sure, 
 ideal human personalities as types, and are sometimes 
 moved to do this through speculations of widely human 
 range; but they are, nevertheless, too much engrossed 
 with the national spirit of the society in which they 
 lived and for which they wrote to emerge upon the larger 
 plane of a view which starts from the individual solely, 
 and embraces the whole denationalized world. 
 
 The fourth century writers discover to us more clearly 
 the germs of humanism, and we find it inspired chiefly by 
 the awakening and enlightening influences of which the 
 Sophistic movement is the outward expression. Socrates 
 is the first humanist when he says, "The fields and the 
 woods have nothing to teach me ; I learn my lessons from 
 men." 
 
 Now the word which expresses all this, and which we 
 constantly find in the writers of the last century of 
 Athenian productivity, is the word which we translate 
 "culture" — paideia. There are earlier adjectives ap- 
 proaching the conception, as where Euripides says "not 
 unversed in the Muses" for "imbued with literature." 
 Even Cicero, "that mirror of all the humanities in the 
 ancient world," is anticipated by Plato in one expression 
 which is quoted by Schneidewin to prove his humanistic 
 bent — the phrase in the speech for the poet Archias, 
 hoc concur su hominum litteratissimorum, " this assembly 
 of cultivated men." For almost identical terms Socrates 
 
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56 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 in the Apology had appealed to his judges against the 
 confusion of mind in his accuser Meletus. 
 
 In the fourth century paideia — Culture — is a catch- 
 word of the orators, especially Aeschines and Isocrates. 
 It is frequent in Plato, and we meet its derivatives con- 
 stantly in the fragments of the New Comedy. The 
 kindly temperament is opposed to that of the man who 
 is rough and uncultivated (apaideutos) . Throughout 
 Aeschines' speech against Timarchus paideia occurs in 
 its double reference to moral and intellectual cultiva- 
 tion. In Aeschines, of course, it does not attain to the 
 real notion of intellectualism which we get in Plato, and 
 again in Cicero' shumanitas. Euripides, too, had long be- 
 fore Aeschines associated forgiveness and wisdom. The 
 old attendant of Hippolytus, fearful that his master's 
 aversion to Aphrodite may bring down upon him the 
 wrath of the goddess, prays her thus: "Cypris, queen! 
 Forgive, if moved by the heedlessness of youth he utters 
 words of foolishness. Seem not to hear him. Surely gods 
 ought to be wiser than men." Here is clearly the inti- 
 mation that the larger wisdom exercises greater clemency. 
 Sagesse oblige. The notion may be earlier than Euripides, 
 but nowhere, so far as the gods are concerned, is it so 
 positively maintained. We are told that the tyrant Pit- 
 tacus, on becoming reconciled to some of the leaders of 
 faction in the island of Lesbos, including the poet Al- 
 caeus, remarked that "forgiveness is better than ven- 
 geance." But the remark is attributed to him by a late 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 57 
 
 writer who is notoriously untrustworthy, and expressed 
 a sentiment hardly likely to have had much weight in 
 early factional strife. 
 
 Some of the qualities of the "cultivated" man, as re- 
 flected in Plato and in Menander, may be here instanced. 
 It is insisted, for example, that the humanely and liber- 
 ally educated man differs entirely from the man who may 
 be trained in the same curriculum, but for professional 
 ends. Socrates' young friend, the ardent and ambitious 
 Hippocrates, confesses his eagerness to hear the lectures 
 of Protagoras. Socrates at once assumes that Hippo- 
 crates intends to become a professional sophist. "You 
 must of course know," he says, "that what you get from 
 Protagoras will be very different from what you learnt 
 of [your schoolmaster, your music-teacher, and your 
 gymnasium instructor. Their instruction was not for 
 any professional purpose, or given with the idea that you 
 yourself would become a practising expert in the sub- 
 jects taught, but for the general culture which befits a 
 man of the free class {eleutheros, liberaUs) — a gentle- 
 
 man's son." 
 
 But meantime, in non-philosophical circles, it would 
 seem — certainly Plato is little concerned with it — 
 there is emerging the idea of man as a category. " What 
 a fine thing is man, when he is man!" says Menander. 
 So in this comment on a mercenary soldier: "You are a 
 soldier, not a man! You're fed like any beast to be sac- 
 rificed when your turn comes." 
 
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58 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 It was the Greek of the fifth century who all uncon- 
 sciously had been working toward this idea. Out of na- 
 tive sympathies thoroughly human, out of his earlier (if 
 later it became hesitant) belief in the potency of human 
 reason, out of his abounding intellectual and spiritual 
 curiosity, he was evolving a new and effective idea of 
 mankind. The Greek of the Periclean age, if as yet he 
 remained literally "unsophisticated," would have re- 
 proved any act that violated his sense of right or dis- 
 turbed his notion of good taste, by saying, "You could 
 not have done that had you been a true Greek." When 
 Medea, to punish Jason for his desertion, has cast aside 
 her natural feelings as a mother, and stifling her own 
 cries has killed her children, Jason says to her: " No wo- 
 man of Hellas could ever have brought herself to do this 
 deed." Here we have the older, elementary division of 
 the world into two irreconcilable parts — the antithesis 
 of Hellene and Barbarian with which Thucydides dates 
 the beginning of the national consciousness, and on 
 which Herodotus has based his work as a governing 
 principle in the interpretation of history. Provincial 
 this feeling may seem to be and no doubt is, especially 
 when it assumes the tone of arrogance. Agamemnon 
 says to the Trojan Teucer — evidently with the ap- 
 plause of the audience who heard the lines in the thea- 
 tre — " Bring an interpreter to speak for you; the bar- 
 barian tongue I understand not." In this particular, in 
 the comparative indifference to foreign languages, the 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 59 
 
 ordinary Greek never progressed beyond the stage re- 
 presented in Agamemnon's remark. Themistocles is per- 
 haps the most conspicuous example of a Greek who set 
 himself the task of learning the language and customs 
 of a foreign people. Respect for a foreign tongue was in 
 the Greek concomitant only with a respect for the for- 
 eigner. This the two "intellectuals" of the fifth cen- 
 tury, Pericles and Euripides, possessed to the practical 
 exclusion of their countrymen. Roman humanism could 
 advance further toward a more universal compass since 
 it prided itself on the possession utriusgue linguae — of 
 Greek as well as of Latin. Atticus, Lucius Crassus, and 
 Catulus, we are told, spoke Greek like any Athenian, 
 and when Cicero wishes to place his own political duty 
 clecU"ly before him, reflecting on its intricacies and un- 
 biassed by the vernacular catchwords of party feeling, he 
 does it in Greek — a trait admirably, if sarcastically, 
 caught by Shakspere in Julius Caesar. 
 
 To us of to-day, whose experience of course has car- 
 ried us further even than Roman cosmopolitanism ever 
 dreamed, the Greek separation of himself and his race 
 from the rest of the world may appear narrow. We are 
 too apt to forget the superior gifts of the Greek when 
 measured with his contemporaries beyond the border; 
 we forget that to him, as was said of the Jew, were "en- 
 trusted the oracles of God," and that his own ideals of 
 life were preeminently original, authoritative, final, 
 to be referred to no external stemdard. A Greek of the 
 
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6o HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 fifth century, then, would be entirely sincere and unas- 
 suming when he objected to any course of conduct be- 
 cause it was un-Greek. On the other hand, in the fourth 
 century his position was modified. This modified posi- 
 tion we are fast approaching in Euripides, whose posthu- 
 mous play, the Bacchae — last and most puzzling utter- 
 ance of his genius — is clear at least in this particular, 
 that in its wide perspective all barriers between Greek 
 and barbarian are broken down. By the fourth century, 
 whose intellectualism owes so much to Euripides, the 
 Greek could now say, "You would not have done that, 
 had you been human." He has come to see dimly, if not 
 to realize as vividly as the later Stoics, the futility of 
 his national aspirations. This does not lead him to 
 "apathy," the Stoic position, but to the notion of a 
 common humanity of which Cicero first speaks in de- 
 finite terms. The Greek has seen the great Emathian 
 Conqueror crushing the last hopes of racial, or rather 
 cantonal, ambition. Henceforth Greek life must move 
 in new channels of social endeavor, and the Greek spirit 
 of the past, so long as it survives, must project itself 
 into the life of other nations. 
 
 Now, what assimilates the Greek idea of humanism to 
 the Roman and the modern is, of course, the emphasis 
 on man as the centre and the end of it all. We have seen 
 that it is man, as opposed to aniriials or gods, from whom 
 come the humane virtues of mercy, courtesy, forgiveness, 
 and the like. That this is a necessary consequence or 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 6i 
 
 coordinate of culture — paideia — is constantly exem- 
 plified in fourth-century writers, and nowhere more 
 plainly than in a fragment from a lost play of Apollo- 
 dorus of Carystus, where a woman complains of the 
 stupid cruelty of war in these words: "Surely the fate 
 that governs our lives is a boor, knowing no culture, 
 ignorant of good and evil alike, rolling us mortals about 
 helter-skelter." 
 
 With the loss of national prestige the centre of interest 
 and study shifted more definitely toward the individual; 
 man as the proper study of mankind was increasingly 
 recognized, after Socrates, by the expounders of his doc- 
 trine. Each of them might have said, with Rasselas, 
 "my curiosity does not very strongly lead me to survey 
 piles of stone, or mounds of earth ; my business is with 
 man." Socrates himself, we saw, was in accord with this, 
 in expounding the relation of technical to "humanistic" 
 aims to the young Hippocrates. The worth of the indi- 
 vidual apart from his advantages of birth and fortune is 
 now more cheerfully conceded, perhaps nowhere more 
 remarkably than in Menander. "Speak not to me of my 
 family. Those whose own natures have no individual 
 worth to show take refuge in family and in the memorials 
 of their sires, counting up how many generations of 
 ancestors they had. Yet are they no better off, for who 
 has'n't had ancestors ? Whoever has a nature tending 
 toward the good, though he be an Aethiopian, is well- 
 born." Similar passages may easily be found in the writ- 
 
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62 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 ers of the New Comedy, exponents as they were of a less 
 rampant democracy than that of the fifth century, but 
 even more liberal in its theory of what a democratic con- 
 stituency embraces. It must not be forgotten that, as 
 Aristotle points out, there were numbers of persons who 
 questioned the right of that sacred institution of the 
 Periclean age, human slavery. Menander is in fact the 
 originator of the much-abused nihil humani a me 
 alienum. We are not concerned here^with the sincerity 
 of such sentiments. It is enough for us that they were 
 commonly uttered, so that by Cicero's time, and amid a 
 thoroughly aristocratic environment, we find him writing 
 to Appius Claudius Pulcher in this curious way: ullam 
 Appietatem aut LentuUtatem valere apud me plus quam 
 ornamenta virtutis existimas, i.e., do you think that any 
 "Appiusness" or "Lentulity" can have more considera- 
 tion in my eyes than the real worth of a man's personal 
 gifts? 
 
 It has been denied that Greek culture included an ap- 
 preciation of art. The Greeks, it is said, lived in an at- 
 mosphere of art which they breathed as unconsciously 
 as the air. The comparison is apt; for that they did not 
 always breathe the Attic air unconsciously the choruses 
 of Medea and Oedipus Coloneus attest. The criticism of 
 art, to be sure, appears only in rudimentary form prior 
 to Aristotle. But the introduction of drawing into the 
 school curriculum of his day shows that already the sense 
 of the artistic environment surrounding the child had 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 63 
 
 been keenly alive, to be finally crystallized and embed- 
 ded, as so many other things have been, in the peda- 
 gogical scheme. From this time on we have the connois- 
 seur and collector, the explorer and archaeologist, or the 
 enthusiast with a clamoring exegete at his heels, jour- 
 neyinglnto remote regions to see a statue by Praxiteles. 
 A certain amount of wealth, or its equivalent, leisure, 
 is of course the Greek concomitant of paideia. A learned 
 proletariat was happily not one of the economic para- 
 doxes that puzzled antiquity. The cultivated man is the 
 antithesis of the peasant — agroikos — and whereas in 
 the closer association of the classes which distinguishes 
 ancient from modern society there is little that can be 
 called snobbery, one may still sense the gentle exclusive- 
 ness of the dictum, "evil communications corrupt good 
 manners," which Paul borrowed from Menander, as he 
 in turn had borrowed it from Euripides. This is the mo- 
 tive which leads the man of the fourth century away from 
 the agora to the country-seat. The solitude of the fields, 
 according to Menander, is the best teacher of virtue; 
 the city crowds mean strife and envy ; city luxury may 
 dazzle, but cannot comfort for long. Xenophon illus- 
 trates this Petrarchan kind of humanism in a little 
 tract too much neglected to-day, the Oeconomicus, and 
 in his own example of retiring to a large estate in Elis to 
 entertain his friends and write his books. This is another 
 sign of the growing emancipation from state and nafional 
 ties, of incipient cosmopolitanism, which as yet, how- 
 
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64 HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 
 
 ever, does not exclude patriotism or nostalgia. The old, 
 fifth-century dread of living beyond the home border was 
 not entirely overcome. Epicurus might strive to comfort 
 the exile with the reflection that all men are citizens of 
 the world. "Wherever I go, shall I not find a sky, a sun, 
 a moon, and the stars? " But the exile still answers : "The 
 moon of Athens is more beautiful than that of Corinth." 
 Atticus, Quintus Cicero, Germanicus, and Marcus Cicero 
 inherited this nostalgia by right of intellectual sympathy 
 — the sentiment for locality provided that personality 
 were linked with it. This is the source of Herodotus' 
 fascination for the places he visited. It lies at the root of 
 Euripides' studied searching after remote cult-localities, 
 to reach, as in Iphigenia, new discoveries in personality, 
 human and divine. This is why Thucydides, intent on 
 men as the measure and means of universal force, is con- 
 tent to overlook the splendid works of art produced in 
 the period he specially treats. And this, finally, is the 
 reason why nature, mere nature apart from man, has a 
 properly subordinate place in Greek art and literature. 
 In tracing the manifestations of the idea of the human 
 and humane, it may seem as if too much stress had been 
 laid on the moral virtues rather than the intellectual — 
 as if philanthropy and humanism were one. On the con- 
 trary, an age or people given over to philanthropic vir- 
 tues may be singularly deficient in humanistic achieve- 
 ment. But with the Greeks the spirit of the one is the 
 manifestation of the tendency toward the other. In 
 
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HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS 65 
 
 Euripides we see the spirit and the ideal of intellectual- 
 ism, coincident with a new conception of human kin- 
 ship. In him we pass from philanthropy, in the Greek, 
 not the modern sense, to anthropism, — an ugly but 
 conveniently antithetic word, — to humanitas as it mo- 
 tived the studies and intellectual intercourse of the 
 Scipionic circle and its successors in the Renaissance. 
 Whatever elements of grace and beauty the Greek dis- 
 covered in the world about him took their rise in man as 
 such. The gods — human forms with only slightly larger 
 scope — were the coadjutors of man in the scheme of 
 things, not the originators of progress. The best that 
 had been achieved in history was due to elements 
 purely humAn, and humanity remains for the enlight- 
 ened Greek the ideal and norm governing his attitude 
 toward life. 
 
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Ill 
 
 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 ALCIPHRON 
 
 By carl NEWELL JACKSON 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 ALCIPHRON 
 
 The subject of this essay is a Greek author seldom 
 read and of minor importance, whom the historians of 
 Greek literature deem worthy of only passing notice, if 
 they deign to mention him at all. His is not a command- 
 ing figure and the influence that he exerted on the subse- 
 quent course of literature is slight. Yet he is the fore- 
 most representative of a literary form, the imaginary 
 letter, which like many others owed its origin and de- 
 velopment to the Greek genius, and the eminence that 
 he achieved won for him the tribute of imitation by men 
 better known to us than himself. 
 
 Alciphron is to us but a name; beyond the name and 
 the titles. Rhetor and Atticist, nothing is known of him. 
 There is ascribed to him a collection of letters, one hun- 
 dred and twenty-two in number, which profess to be 
 written by representatives of four classes of Athenian 
 society, fishermen, country-folk, parasites, and courte- 
 sans. But these Letters, being thoroughly objective in 
 treatment, may be searched in vain for a record of his 
 personal experiences and jfeelings. History furnishes us 
 with no facts as to the precise period in which he lived 
 and wrote. Tradition has no story, no scandal even, to 
 connect with the man's name. Like Longus, the author 
 
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70 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 of Daphnis and Chloe, the best of Greek romances, he is 
 enveloped in mystery. It is a singular coincidence that 
 these chief exponents of two allied literary forms, the 
 Letter and the Romance, should have suffered a similar 
 fate. 
 
 But if history and tradition are silent, the imagina- 
 tion may be allowed to draw the outlines of this shad- 
 owy figure. Rhetorician or sophist that he undoubt- 
 edly was, he must have passed through a career not un- 
 like that of others of this class, concerning whose life and 
 activity we are better informed. If not a native Greek, 
 he may have been bom, like a Dio Chrysostom or a 
 Lucian, in one of the cities of Asia Minor or in more 
 distant Syria, perhaps in the third century of our era. 
 In the silver age of the Greek world, philosophy and 
 literature flourished more luxuriantly in the outlying 
 lands than in Greece itself. It has even been conjec- 
 tured from indications in his Letters, which however 
 are very slight, that his nationality was Syrian. But 
 wherever his birthplace may have been, whether he was 
 Greek or barbarian, Jew or Gentile, after he had received 
 his primary education and had reached the threshold 
 of young manhood, his steps would naturally turn to 
 Athens, the intellectual centre of the Hellenistic world. 
 Her philosophical schools were thronged with students 
 of all ages and nationalities, drawn thither by the fame 
 of some great rhetorician or philosopher, and by the 
 desire to complete their education. In these schools of 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 71 
 
 rhetoric the effort of teacher and pupil alike was devoted 
 to the purely formal side of literary study, to the acqui- 
 sition of a style embellished with poetic diction and 
 tricked out with rhetorical figures. Style for style's sake 
 became the shibboleth of these schools of sophistry, and 
 the models which the student was directed to follow 
 were the classic authors of the fifth and fourth centu- 
 ries before Christ. 
 
 This cult of style was a result of a revival of interest 
 in the great literary works that Greece had produced. 
 The historians and the orators in particular were re- 
 garded with veneration and were meticulously imitated. 
 There was an earnest endeavor, as at the present time in 
 modern Greece, to recall into active use Attic words, 
 phrases, and idioms, and a school of purists, Atticists as 
 they were called, arose who strove in their works to 
 reproduce the charm and the grace of the literature of 
 the golden age. Such ideals as these were held out to 
 Alciphron, and in his Letters there is abundant evidence 
 that he deserves the titles of Rhetor and Atticist, by 
 which he was designated in antiquity. 
 
 Such at least was the nature of the education that 
 others of Alciphron's class received. Later he may have 
 become a professional teacher of rhetoric, wandering 
 like many others from city to city up and down the high- 
 ways of the Roman world, or he may have been estab- 
 lished in a chair of rhetoric in some provincial town. 
 
 This sort of training is surely manifest in his Letters. 
 
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72 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 Indeed the prose letter itself is, we know, a product of 
 the decadent art of these sophistic schools. It probably 
 was evolved from certain exercises on which the pupil 
 used his ingenuity in presenting or interpreting charac- 
 ter in given situations. The characters as well as the in- 
 cidents might be either fictitious or historical. Only a 
 few names associated with this literary form need be 
 mentioned. One comes down to us from an early period, 
 that of Lesbonax, a rhetorician of Mitylene, who is said 
 to have written letters of this sort in the first century 
 before Christ. Two others, Philostratus and Aelian, 
 were perhaps contemporaneous with Alciphron, and 
 still two others, Aristaenetus and Theophylactus, were 
 surely later. 
 
 Alciphron then can lay no claim to originality as the 
 founder of a new literary form. In his use of the letter, 
 however, he is preeminent. He employed both the types 
 in vogue in the sophistic schools, the fictitious and the 
 historical. One, picturing the life of his time amongst 
 fishermen, country-folk, and the lower classes of the city, 
 constitutes the bulk of his work. The other includes 
 letters ascribed to well-known men and women who 
 lived in Athens in the time of Epicurus and Menander. 
 
 Most of these Letters are, to be sure, artificial. There 
 is insincerity of sentiment, conventionality, and often- 
 times frigidity of manner. A fisherman proclaims his 
 love in stilted language, calling himself a devotee of the 
 god who bears the torch and the bow, and comparing 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 73 
 
 the object of his affections with the fairest of the 
 Nereids. Another, on being refused a favor by his 
 neighbor, writes a quibbling letter, which, though it is 
 an extreme example, is a case in point. 
 
 Encymon to HaUctypus 
 
 I did not ask you for what you own, but for what you do 
 not own. Since you are not willing that another should own 
 what you do not own, own what you do not own. 
 
 A fisherman's daughter, when she describes her lover's 
 beauty, uses the labored and erudite manner affected 
 by the AlexandriEin poets. 
 
 The Letters, then, lack those qualities of vision and 
 individuality that give distinction. This is not surpris- 
 ing when one considers'that they were not actual letters 
 but the expression of a literary form, and that all lit- 
 erary types are apt to be in a measure artificial. In Ald- 
 phron's case, it must have been particularly difficult to 
 approach realism owing to the amount of rhetoric that 
 was expected to be expended on composition. Even in 
 private letters among the Greeks, such as are preserved 
 in the Egyptian papyri, there is oftentimes a note of 
 conventionality. 
 
 Another reason for this lack of genuine sentiment is 
 that Alciphron does not always draw from life itself, but 
 from a copy of life. His sketches of the daily life in the 
 middle and lower classes of Athenian society are apt to 
 be but pale reflections of the truth that others had ob- 
 
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74 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 served more or less directly, mere closet-studies inspired 
 by the perusal of the writers of the great period. Of 
 these none exerted a more powerful influence over him 
 than the comic poets, especially those of the New Com- 
 edy. So close is the relationship that exists between the 
 comedies and the letters of the parasites and courtesans 
 that the latter may be regarded as a continuation in 
 spirit of the Athenian comedy of manners. Some of these 
 letters are so flat and jejune that they seem like ex- 
 hausted echoes. Many of the characters, as might be 
 surmised, are not vividly conceived and individualized ; 
 they fail to impress the reader with a sense of reality 
 and reasonableness. There is a tendency on Alciphron's 
 part to look upon them as types rather than as individu- 
 als, to portray the salient traits rather than the idiosyn- 
 crasies. Thes6 fishermen, country-folk, and parasites 
 do not speak in character but in an idealized conversa- 
 tional manner, befitting a cultivated Athenian of the 
 better classes. They write in a certain uniform tone that 
 makes it impossible to distinguish the writer of one letter 
 from another by any marked individual characteristics. 
 Being devitalized creations of a rhetorician, doubly 
 removed from nature, and not creatures of flesh and 
 blood, they cannot feel the emotions which they try to 
 express. Indeed, it may be questioned whether Alci- 
 phron had an intimate knowledge of two of these classes 
 at least, namely, the fishermen and the rural folk. He 
 does not exhibit so accurate an understanding of rustic 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 75 
 
 life as Longus, nor does he describe the toilsome life of 
 the fishermen with the same sympathy as is displayed 
 by some of the epigrams in the Greek Anthology and 
 the twenty-first idyl of Theocritus. 
 
 Again, there is noticeable an annoying disposition 
 on Alciphron's part to allow his characters to moralize 
 in and out of season. The use of banalities and shallow 
 ethical reflections to point a moral or adorn a tale was 
 strictly in keeping with the ideals of sophistic training. 
 Compilations of proverbs and gnomic sayings were made 
 to serve as store-houses for those who wished to deco- 
 rate their compositions. Themes of ethical interest would 
 be chosen and expanded and the suitable moral drawn, 
 or, if the moral was given, a story would be constructed 
 upon it. Thus in Alciphron there are many stories ob- 
 viously invented with an eye to the moral. He rings the 
 changes on such trite sentiments as the honest acquisi- 
 tion of riches, virtue being its own reward, friendships 
 implying a community of goods, idleness breeding 
 trouble, fortune being all powerful in human affairs, 
 and hasty words causing mischief. He shows everywhere 
 a fondness for moral precepts, gleaning them doubtless 
 from such collections as have been mentioned and from 
 other writers. As an illustration one of the fishermen's 
 letters will suffice. The theme, seemingly a favorite of 
 the sophists, for it was treated by Himerius in a later 
 age, is that of a poor man accusing a rich man of having 
 destroyed his happiness. 
 
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76 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 Naubates to Ehoihius 
 
 You think you are the only rich man because you can en- 
 tice my hands into your employ by the bait of better wages. 
 This you can naturally do, for a cast of your net lately brought 
 up some golden darics, relics of the sea-fight at Salamis, when 
 a Persian vessel, I suppose, sank with her crew and stores, and 
 when Themistocles, the son of Neocles, raised that great 
 trophy over the Medes in the time of our ancestors. As for 
 me, I am content to provide for my necessities by the daily 
 labor of my hands. But if you are rich, use your riches justly. 
 Let your wealth serve honor and virtue, not wickedness. 
 
 Excessive borrowing, whether of moral or of other 
 themes, never makes for realism. And this habit is part 
 and parcel of Alciphron's style. His Letters reveal an 
 intimate acquaintance on his part with the poets and 
 prose-writers from Homer to Lucian. The sentiment, 
 with which the letter quoted above ends, is drawn from 
 an oration of Isocrates. The description of the philoso- 
 phers given in one of the countrymen's letters as "bare- 
 footed, pale-faced impostors " has its warrant in a line 
 of Aristophanes' Clouds. A significant line from Aratus, 
 "a single plank of wood wards off death," warns a 
 fisherman of the dangers of the deep and induces him to 
 seek safety by embracing the life of a farmer. 
 
 Alciphron's style is in fact a composite of heterogene- 
 ous elements. The pure Attic may be found side by side 
 with the vulgar tongue. Words distinctly poetic are 
 mingled with the prosaic. Current forms of speech, 
 neologisms, and words of the Ionic dialect, — from all of 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 77 
 
 which, purist as he was, he aimed to keep his style free, — 
 creep in and assert themselves. The very manner of his 
 expression is also self-conscious. The evenly balanced 
 clauses, often provided with rhymed endings, the ex- 
 travagant metaphors, the abnormal position of words 
 betray the art of the rhetorician. 
 
 In spite of such trite devices Alciphron nevertheless 
 was a real artist. His borrowings, whether of mere 
 words or more elaborate ideas, are woven closely into 
 the warp and woof of his own thought. When he de- 
 scribes a thief who had been caught pilfering a country- 
 house as "stem of looks, with arched eyebrows, possess- 
 ing brawny shoulders and stout thighs," he has made 
 use of Homeric and Aristophanic expressions in the same 
 sentence. A rustic who moralizes on the certainty of 
 death and declares that it is impossible for a man to 
 escape this fate, "no matter how closely he shuts him- 
 self up in his room," repeats a sentiment that Demos- 
 thenes had used in his oration On the Crown. So deftly 
 does he select and combine that no incongruity results. 
 
 Within the limits of such art Alciphron shows no little 
 ability. Indeed, he often becomes a clear-sighted sym- 
 pathetic observer of the manifold life that was displayed 
 about him, portraying in letters that assume the char- 
 acter of short essays in fiction the pleasures and the 
 miseries of the rich and the poor, and satirizing gently 
 the foibles of his age. He draws aside the curtain and 
 permits his reader to behold the varied scenes that were 
 
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78 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 being enacted daily in the houses, the streets, and the 
 market-place of Athens. If a sordid side of life is pre- 
 sented for the most part, his Letters, though sometimes 
 libertine, are never gross. 
 
 In these transcripts of life appear veracious types 
 sketched with felicity and with rare power of observa- 
 tion. Here is the money-lender, "a shrivelled, frowning 
 old fellow, holding in his hand old musty documents 
 rotted by time and half-eaten by insects and moths," 
 the vain-glorious soldier bragging of his exploits in for- 
 eign lands, the rich merchant from the Orient with an 
 inexhaustible purse. Here is the gossiping barber stand- 
 ing by his shop-door, and the juggler with his three-shell 
 game that mystifies the countryman. The physician is 
 seen making his calls accompanied by his apprentices. 
 Here are also tragic actors, comic poets, interpreters 
 of dreams, tavern-keepers, and the philosophers of the 
 various schools — all forming the pageant of life that 
 moved through the streets of Athens. 
 
 We may look at one or two of these figures at closer 
 range. Let us take first the philosophers. Academic, 
 Stoic, Peripatetic, and Cynic, they are all uniformly 
 described as long-bearded, barefooted, pale of face, sol- 
 emn and austere. Outwardly they were the very pre- 
 sentment of virtue, but in their private life they were 
 generally regarded as dissolute. Philosophy frequently 
 served as a mask for vice, and the glaring discrepancy 
 between the preaching of virtue and its practice is con- 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 79 
 
 stantly dwelt on in the Letters. Following a fashion set 
 in comedy and perhaps indulging his professional jeal- 
 ousy, Alciphron consistently holds them up to ridicule. 
 They all alike are visited with his satire, but one sect 
 in particular is the object of his thorough dislike. The 
 Cynics in Alciphron's time had gained a new lease of 
 life and the immoralities of which many of them were 
 guilty gave philosophy a bad name. Into his mention 
 of them he injects a bit of animus. At the banquet, 
 described in one of the parasites' letters, at which the 
 philosophers of the various schools were present, the 
 Cynic surpasses all in the indecency of his actions. In 
 another letter a countryman tells of the transformation, 
 the physical and moral degradation, wrought in his son 
 on his becoming a Cynic. In personal appearance the 
 youth is filthy and offensive: his hair is uncombed; his 
 old cloak leaves him half-naked ; he is bare-footed, carries 
 a wallet and a staff of olive-wood in his hands. He has 
 lost his sense of shame, hates his old manner of life in the 
 country, and even disowns his parents. Some deity has 
 driven him mad. 
 
 In his description of these figures Alciphron repro- 
 duces only the striking traits that are obvious to the 
 eye, seldom going beneath the surface and interpreting 
 character. His method is essentially different from that 
 of Theophrastus, who likewise drew types of men in his 
 Moral Characters. Both found their originals to a great 
 extent in ordinary life, but Theophrastus sought the 
 
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80 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 weaknesses of human nature and the offences against 
 good taste which would go to illustrate his definition of 
 a foible. He gathers these manifold traits common to 
 many individuals of various classes and combines them, 
 producing a composite picture. Realistic as the constit- 
 uent elements are, the figure bodied forth lacks unity 
 and cohesion. Alciphron on the other hand attempts the 
 portrait of a single individual, the representative of one 
 class of society, selecting the characteristics common to 
 members of this class. Though his figures conceived as 
 a whole gain in vitality, they are not so plausible as some 
 of the types of Theophrastus. They are not drawn with 
 that particularity of treatment that is a mark of Theo- 
 phrastus' style. Alciphron, in short, is not so keenly 
 analytic and observant as his predecessor. The follow- 
 ing letter is typical of his method. 
 
 I decided [writes a fisherman] to go to Chremes, the money- 
 lender, and staking my boat as a pledge get four pieces of gold, 
 that I might be able to mend my net. No sooner said than 
 done. Chremes, that half-starved man, who knits his eye- 
 brows and looks fiercely under them at you, relaxed his sever- 
 ity and gloom (he wanted my boat, I guess), raised his eyes, 
 smiled at me a little, and said he was ready to help me in 
 every way. It was n't long after losing his sullen looks that he 
 showed he did n't mean well by me. His kindness was only 
 skin deep. For when the time was up, and he asked me for 
 both principal and interest, without giving me an hour's grace, 
 I saw he was the fellow who I knew used to sit at the Diomeian 
 gate, with a crooked cane, Chremes of Phlya, everybody's 
 enemy. When I saw into what a mess I had got, I ran home, 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 8l 
 
 and taking from my wife's neck the gold chain I had given 
 her as an ornament in the days of my prosperity, made for 
 Pasion the banker and sold it. And with the money I paid my 
 debt, interest and all, and I swore, calling down destruction 
 on myself, never to go near one of these city money-lenders, 
 not even if I were to die of hunger first. It is better to die 
 decently than to live a slave to an avaricious old miser. 
 
 Here is a type, but a type well-described. Broadly 
 speaking, the types in Alciphron are grouped, as has 
 been said, in four categories, fishermen, country-folk, 
 parasites, and courtesans; though certain other figures, 
 to be sure, enter into relation with these classes, as the 
 philosophers and the money-lender just mentioned. We 
 may consider together the first two classes, the fisher- 
 men and the country-folk. 
 
 These, it cannot be said, Alciphron was the first to 
 create. They made their appearance in literature as 
 types in the Attic comedy. In the Acharnians of Aris- 
 tophanes, for example, Dicaeopolis, cooped up within 
 the walls of Athens by reason of the Spartan blockade, 
 expresses his hatred of the city and his longing for his 
 country home. In a fragment of a lost play, the Islands, 
 by the same author, the speaker narrates the joys inci- 
 dent to rural life, "to live in the country on a little farm, 
 free from the worries of the city, to own a yoke of cattle, 
 to hear the bleating of the sheep," and so on. Both 
 Aristophanes and Menander wrote plays entitled the 
 Farmer, and to Antiphanes and other poets of the 
 Middle Comedy are ascribed dramas bearing the name 
 
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 of the Rustic. Furthermore, there are extant fragments 
 of a play by Menander called the Fisherman. But how 
 these poets treated such characters, it is impossible to 
 discover because of the scantiness of the material pre- 
 served. In bucolic poetry Theocritus in his twenty-first 
 idyl sets forth with sympathetic insight the laborious life 
 of two aged fishermen, and Moschus in one of his idyls 
 repeats a motive common to some of the epigrams in 
 the Greek Anthology that to a fisherman earth is dearer 
 than the gray sea. And in general it was a commonplace 
 that the attractions offered by the country were superior 
 to those of the city or the sea. Whatever Alciphron may 
 have added to such preexistent pictures, it is impossible 
 to say. In any case we have in him the fullest treat- 
 ment of these two types in extant Greek literature. 
 
 On the whole he presents his country-folk and fisher- 
 men as simple, unaffected beings, whom an isolated life 
 kept ingenuous and unsophisticated. "I knew you," 
 writes a farmer to his neighbor, "to be a simple man, a 
 thoroughgoing farmer, smelling of raisins and breathing 
 dust." Being conventionalized and idealized as well to 
 a great extent, they lack the marks of boorishness that 
 Theophrastus associates with rusticity. In letters that 
 are simple, brief, and direct they tell of their experiences, 
 their joys, and their sorrows. One fisherman describes 
 the launching of the boats, the successful draught of 
 fishes, and the profitable sale to the buyers. Another, 
 unable to make his living on the sea, appeals to his 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 83 
 
 wife for advice as to whether he should follow the more 
 promising trade of piracy. A third shares his love-secret 
 with his friend. Still another reproaches his neighbor 
 for falling into the hands of a courtesan. The amorous 
 fisherman is a figure not appearing in Greek nor in Latin 
 comedy and may be original with Alciphron. A daugh- 
 ter writes to her mother protesting against marrying 
 her father's choice, and receives in return her mother's 
 unsympathetic answer that she had better obey or else 
 become food for fishes. Another writer asks his friend 
 for a disused net; another frightened by the proclama- 
 tion of war resolves to avoid service by taking flight; 
 still another describes an outing held on his yacht by 
 a rich young man and his friends. 
 
 This same diversity of subject-matter is found in the 
 letters of the countrymen. Here is an invitation to a 
 family, which includes the dog, to come to a birthday 
 feast. Here is a plea for loan of corn in times of distress. 
 A father exhorts his son to desert the philosophers and 
 come back to the farm. A mother begs her son, who 
 hankers to become a soldier, to return and choose a life 
 of security. A daughter invites her mother to visit her 
 in the city and see the sights. A young peasant, who has 
 never seen the city, requests his more experienced friend 
 to act as guide. This desire that possesses a man to 
 change his environment for another is the theme of sev- 
 eral letters. The fisherman tossed by the turbulent 
 waves longs for the peace and the security of the coun- 
 
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84 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 try. The estranging sea on the other hand tempts the 
 poverty-stricken farmer with the lure of riches in a 
 foreign land. The busy life of the city with its spectacles, 
 its festivals, and its pleasures, draws fisherman and 
 countryman alike from their dull, secluded existence on 
 shore and farm. The following letter gives the experi- 
 ence that befell a peasant in the city. 
 
 You remember I loaded my donkey with figs and cakes 
 and went to the city? Well, after I had sold them to an ac- 
 quaintance of mine, I was taken to the theatre, given a good 
 seat, and enjoyed the sight of different shows. I can't remem- 
 ber all of them. I 'm a poor hand at remembering and telling 
 such things. But one thing I saw made me almost speechless 
 and open my mouth in surprise. A man came forward and set 
 up a three-legged table, and placed on it three small dishes. 
 Under these he would hide three small, white, round pebbles 
 like those we find on the banks of rivers. Sometimes he would 
 hide them one by one under a different dish, and sometimes 
 all under one. I don't know how he did it. And then again 
 they would n't be under the dishes.at all but would come out 
 in his mouth. Then he would swallow them, and gathering 
 the people who stood nearest him, he would pick a pebble 
 from his nose, and another from his ear, and a third from his 
 head. After that, he would make them disappear. He 's a 
 knave, worse than even Eurybates of Oechalia, of whom we 
 hear so much. I hope such a creature as this never gets into 
 the country. No one could ever catch him ; he would steal 
 everything I have on my farm and make off with it. 
 
 It is noticeable that in these letters of the fishermen 
 and the rural folk Alciphron chose to emphasize their 
 narrow circumstances, their hardships, and their sor- 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 85 
 
 rows. There is in fact an undercurrent of pessimism. 
 Faith in the gods seems well-nigh dead. "It is vain to 
 sacrifice to Zeus," writes a farmer plaintively, "he is 
 with other peoples and does not care for us." Man is 
 subject to Fate and Fortune. Nature is fickle and cruel 
 and in her sterner moods portends disaster. Storms at 
 sea mean destruction of men ; on land, the inundation of 
 fields and the ruin of crops. As sea Jind land constitute 
 to fishermen and countrymen their main source of in- 
 come, they look upon Nature as a hostile, intractable 
 force, whose depredations are fearful and lamentable. 
 They bewail the burning heat of the sun, the bitter- 
 ness of the cold. The wolf devours the flock, the fox 
 destroys the grapes. The harvest fails and hunger im- 
 pends. The farmer in his despair is resolved to abjure 
 the land for the sea. The fisherman wearied by unpro- 
 ductive labor looks with longing eyes on the security and 
 the advantages of country-life. Family life is easily dis- 
 rupted. The faithless husband who spends his substance 
 on a foreign woman is entreated by the injured wife to 
 forsake his evil ways. A fisherman warns his wife, who 
 deserts him for the pleasures of the city, either to re- 
 turn home or to go her way. The son, the maintenance 
 of the family, is easily enticed away from home by the 
 wiles of a courtesan or by the preaching of a philosopher. 
 There is then a note of complaint pervading these let- 
 ters that sounds elegiac. 
 " When we turn to the letters of the parasites, we find 
 
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 Alciphron in a different mood. These letters are the 
 scherzo of his composition. In a series of vivacious 
 sketches, marked by severe realism, he presents the 
 seamy side of life in a cosmopolitan city. Against a drab 
 background move gamblers, parasites, rakes, paramours, 
 and prostitutes. Though the parasite has no exact 
 counterpart in modern civilization, he was a recognized 
 element in Athenian society. By his coarse jokes and 
 grotesque actions he played the part of a buffoon at the 
 banquets of the rich, receiving in return permission to 
 dine at table with his patron and the guests. In Lucian's 
 dialogue, the Parasite, one of this class defines his voca- 
 tion as "the art of eating and drinking, and of the talk 
 by which these may be secured," and its end as "getting 
 one's dinner at some one else's expense." Painfully 
 true to type are the parasites of Alciphron. They are 
 for the most part conceived in a spirit of boisterous 
 humor, and the scenes in which they appear resemble 
 in nature those of an uproarious farce. The picturesque 
 names with which Alciphron dubs them are quite in 
 keeping with this conception and bear witness to his 
 playful fancy. They are chosen with the purpose not 
 only of depicting characteristics peculiar to a class as 
 a whole, but also of bestowing on individuals the names 
 apposite to their character. So in this gallery of rogues 
 may be found, amongst others. Wine-lover, Run-to- 
 dinner, Ready-for-breakfast, Pot-licker, Table-lover, 
 and Self-invited. They are like their prototypes in the 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 87 
 
 New Comedy impudent and gluttonous, with no sense 
 of shame, driven by hunger to endure humiliating ex- 
 periences and revolting indignities. They are the butts 
 for practical jokes of every kind; the abasement and 
 confusion into which they are thrown contribute to the 
 merriment of their patrons. It is this aspect of their life 
 that their letters oftenest present. The following letter 
 serves as an example. 
 
 Did you see what that cursed barber, the fellow who has 
 a shop by the road-side, did to me? I mean that prating, 
 garrulous fellow who has mirrors from Brindisi for sale, tames 
 ravens, and plays a fine tune on his razors. When I went to 
 him for a shave, he was glad to see me; he placed me on a 
 high chair, tied a new cloth about my neck, and then very 
 gently began shaving my beard, taking off the thick growth. 
 But there he played the mischief with me. For without my 
 knowing it, he shaved me only partially, and not all over, so 
 that one side of my jaw was thick with hair, the other side 
 quite clear. Ignorant of the man's villany, I went as usual 
 without an invitation to Pasion's. When the guests saw me, 
 they nearly died with laughter. All the time I did n't know 
 what they were laughing at, until one of them, coming for- 
 ward into the middle of the group, took hold of the hair that 
 was left. I managed to root it out with a knife, though with 
 great pain to myself, and now I 'm ready with a big club to 
 smash the scoundrel's skull. For he 's had the impudence 
 to play a trick such as even my patrons would not attempt. 
 Yet he 's never given me a meal. 
 
 But these pleasantries may take a more violent turn. 
 One parasite thanks his stars that he escapes a kettle of 
 boiling-water which the merry feasters have in readiness 
 
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88 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 for him. Another's success at the gaming-table provokes 
 the disgruntled players to assault and rob him of his 
 gains. One more venturesome than usual, who has vis- 
 ited Sparta and Corinth, tells of unwonted experiences. 
 His rude hosts force him to swallow his wine red-hot, 
 throw at him as at the dogs the refuse from the table, 
 and strike him with whip and thongs. 
 
 The outrages which they endure form the burden of 
 their complaints. " I can't bear," writes one, "the blows 
 and the insults of these drunken feasters. The devil take 
 them . . . My face won't stand these repeated boxings, 
 and I 'm in danger of losing one of my eyes because of 
 their blows." To escape this abuse, one resolves to go to 
 Piraeus, to earn his living by removing the cargoes of 
 ships to the warehouses; another, attracted by the 
 tranquillity of the country, turns farmer; another, on 
 being assured by a comic poet that he possesses talent, 
 is minded to go on the stage. In retaliation for his mis- 
 treatment, or to provide himself with money, the para- 
 site has no scruples about stealing the food, or the linen 
 or the silver on the table, and brazenly admitting his 
 theft. When he is reduced to extremities, and hope is 
 gone, he meditates self-destruction. "So long as my body 
 was in the flower of youth," says one, "and able to en- 
 dure harsh treatment, an insult might be borne; but 
 now that my hair is streaked with gray, and the re- 
 mainder of my life verges on old age, what remedy is 
 there for my ills?" 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 89 
 
 In general, towards his patron, the attitude of the 
 parasite is marked by a spirit of loyalty. He apprises 
 him of the gossip below stairs and of his wife's peccadil- 
 los, and he abets his master in the pursuit of his dishon- 
 est pleasures. To be repaid for his pains with kindness 
 and material benefits is a fond hope that he ever cher- 
 ishes ; but his highest ambition is to come into the pos- 
 session of means and maintain parasites himself, or else 
 to be raised for his services from the status of parasite 
 to that of friend. In this vein one writes to his friend. 
 
 If Therippides learns that this has been done successfully 
 through our activity, we shall get many gold coins of the 
 latest stamp, and rich clothes, and besides the right to enter 
 his house without fear and enjoy its luxuries unhindered. 
 Perhaps he will consider us not as parasites but as friends. 
 
 In the letters of the courtesans, the last class, Alci- 
 phron still pursues his characteristic method. He deals 
 chiefly with types rather than individuals. That he is 
 still under the spell of Attic comedy is very evident. His 
 characters are drawn along the conventional lines. As a 
 tjTJe the courtesans are the embodiment of avarice and 
 venality. "They are," as the writer of one letter says, 
 "in popular belief wicked and faithless, having an eye 
 only to gain. They are ever at the service of him who has 
 anything to give, and the cause of all evil to those who 
 have dealings with them." Their greed constitutes a 
 motive that is a commonplace in literature. Their 
 shamelessness and infidelity are among their common 
 
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90 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 traits. So Philumena writes to her lover Crito, "Why 
 do you trouble yourself to write so much? I want fifty 
 pieces of gold, and not your letters. If you love me, give 
 me money. If you love money, do not bother me." So 
 Petala writes to Simalion, " I want money, clothes, orna- 
 ments, and servants. Upon these depends the whole 
 management of life. . „ . Have you no plate in your 
 house? Has your mother no money, your father no 
 bonds that you can bring me." 
 
 This Attic type with its usual variations may be seen 
 in several of the characters. Petala, as has been noticed, 
 typifies avarice ; she ruthlessly answers the protestations 
 of her disconsolate and niggardly lover by brutal de- 
 mands for money. The cynical Thais seeks revenge for 
 the slight done her self-esteem by Euxippa, whom she 
 had once befriended, and in another letter berates her 
 lover Euthydemus for deserting her for the schools of 
 philosophy. The jealous Leaena tries to abash her lover 
 by scornfully disparaging his bride's beauty. The plain- 
 tive Myrrhina has recourse to witchcraft to win back 
 her errant lover. The wicked Megara is an example of 
 the class at its worst; intemperate and rapacious, she is 
 endowed with no redeeming traits. 
 
 In some instances a similarity of theme may be traced 
 between their letters and Lucian's Dialogues of the Cour- 
 tesans. In the latter, Drosis is abandoned by her lover 
 for the study of philosophy, just as Thais in Alciphron 
 is deserted by Euthydemus. In Lucian, Musarium's 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 91 
 
 calculating mother, urging her daughter to renounce her 
 lover who has nothing but promises to give, is actuated 
 by the same impulses that govern Alciphron's Petala. 
 Melitta in Lucian, like Myrrhina in Alciphron, employs 
 a witch in her efforts to retain her lover's affections. 
 Such motives as these are so stereotyped that they can 
 furnish no evidence of the dependence of one writer on 
 another. Indeed Lucian as well as Alciphron is indebted 
 to Comedy for many personal traits and certain situa- 
 tions, and both make independent use of their material. 
 Of the two Lucian is the greater artist. The dialogue in 
 his hands is endued with a spirit and a flexibility but 
 rarely found in the Letters. The naturalness and the 
 vivacity of the conversation are in marked contrast with 
 the mannered style of Alciphron. In one respect, how- 
 ever, Alciphron's treatment is superior to that of Lucian. 
 His Letters are for the most part free from the coarseness 
 which disfigures some of the dialogues. For Lucian in a 
 manner sometimes grossly realistic and offensive has 
 dwelt on the sordid aspect of his subject. Hence in Alci- 
 phron the atmosphere is more wholesome, the lapses 
 from good taste less grave. 
 
 Apart from these imaginary figures stand the grandes 
 amoureuses, Phryne, Leontium, Lamia, Bacchis, and Gly- 
 cera, historical personages, who lived in the latter part 
 of the fourth century before Christ. With them are asso- 
 ciated some of the foremost Athenians of the time, Prax- 
 iteles, Epicurus, Demetrius Poliorcetes, Hyperides, and 
 
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 Menander. Their historic reality enables Alciphron to 
 visualize them with greater clearness, and his reconstruc- 
 tion of their age adds a footnote at least to the history of 
 Athenian society. These letters deal with well-known 
 facts in history. Phryne praises Praxiteles for the skill 
 with which he has modelled a statue of herself. The 
 cause celbbre, in which this courtesan was involved, gives 
 Bacchis occasion to send congratulatory letters to Hy- 
 perides for his successful defence and to Phryne for her 
 acquittal. Leontium, annoyed by the unwelcome ad- 
 vances of Epicurus, which she sets forth at length, 
 makes Lamia her confidante, and begs for the protec- 
 tion of her house. The letters are in essence psycholog- 
 ical studies of the feminine mind, and though they bear 
 traces of rhetoric, they have a naturalness, a lightness of 
 touch, and a truth to nature that make them modern 
 in spirit and sentiment. Lamia, Bacchis, and Glycera 
 are the most attractive of all the characters that Alci- 
 phron has drawn. Into the analysis of their emotions 
 he has put his best work. They are portrayed as beings 
 capable of sincere passion, undivided affection, and deli- 
 cate sentiments. Lamia's expression of her abiding love 
 for the general Demetrius reveals her disinterested loy- 
 alty. Awed by the attentions of a man so powerful, she 
 declares her own disbelief in her great happiness, and in 
 the fulness of her love, admits her readiness to give up 
 life itself to further his happiness. Bacchis is extolled by 
 her rival Glycera for possessing a character nobler than 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 93 
 
 her calling, and is mourned at her death by Meneclides 
 as the best of women. To Glycera Menander writes in a 
 lyric outburst: 
 
 , What happiness can be mine without you? What can exalt 
 me more than the possession of your love? Through the influ- 
 ence of your character and manners, my old age will ever 
 wear the appearance of youth. May we then be young to- 
 gether, may we grow old together, yes, may we meet death 
 together. 
 
 Glycera's reply to this letter, Alciphron's most pre- 
 tentious effort, merits our attention. The occasion of her 
 letter is the receipt of news from Menander that he had 
 been invited by Ptolemy to reside at the Egyptian court. 
 The letter presents a dramatic situation in which the 
 conflict of emotions aroused in a woman's heart by the 
 bestowal of high honors on the one she loves, and by the 
 prospect of his leaving her forever, is skilfully indicated. 
 The lively satisfaction that permeates her whole being 
 moves her friends to ask — 
 
 "What great, good fortune has happened to you, dear 
 Glycera, that you seem now so changed in soul and body and 
 in every way? Your whole being seems aglow with joy and 
 pleasure." "Oh," said I.inavoice loud enough for all present 
 to hear, " Ptolemy, king of Egypt, has sent for my Menander, 
 promising him just about half of his kingdom." And as I 
 spoke, I shook and brandished in my hand the letter with the 
 royal seal. "Do you find any pleasure in being left behind," 
 they said. I had not thought of that, Menander. I couldn't 
 beUeve, — no, by no manner of means could I beUeve that 
 Menander would or could ever leave his Glycera behind in 
 
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94 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 Athens, and enjoy alone in Egypt regal honors and all the 
 treasures of the earth. 
 
 The trust that she reposes in Menander forbids her to 
 dream of the possibility that he could ever do without 
 her. If the Egyptians wish to behold Menander, they 
 must come to Athens to Glycera's. 
 
 For what is Menander without Glycera, who arranges the 
 masks for him, puts on the robes, stands in the wings squeezing 
 her fingers and all a-tremble until the theatre bursts out into 
 applause. That is the moment when I recover myself and 
 embrace you and hold that sacred head within my arms. The 
 reason, Menander, that I told my friends of my joy at that 
 time was this — not Glycera alone but even kings across the 
 sea are in love with you, and fame has spread your virtues 
 abroad in foreign lands. 
 
 Then there rises immediately within her the thought 
 that her own selfishness may deter the object of her love 
 from his own enjoyment. She determines then to efface 
 herself and bid him god-speed. But she cannot let him 
 go. 
 
 I will not leave you. Don't think that I merely say this. I 
 could not leave you if I would. No. I will leave my mother 
 and my sisters, and will sail with you. I am a good sailor, I 
 know, and if you become sick when the oars break, and the 
 waves run high, I will comfort you. Like an Ariadne, though 
 without a thread, I will guide you, not Dionysus but the 
 servant and prophet of Dionysus. 
 
 In the next moment, however, a mood of uncertainty 
 settles upon her. Menander's happiness, she believes, 
 
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AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 95 
 
 is staked on her and on his plays, and is not conditioned 
 by abundance of treasures or riches. She fluctuates be- 
 tween urging him to go and begging him to remain. 
 Their happiness is more secure in Athens. Yet the 
 thought of the hatred with which she would be visited by 
 his relatives and fellow-citizens for her undue influence 
 in retaining him in Athens, prompts her to leave the 
 question to arbitration. She first proposes leaving the 
 matter to friends to decide. Then distrusting human 
 counsel, she suggests sending to the oracle at Delphi to 
 learn whether it is wiser for them both to go or to stay. 
 Finally her superstition gets the better of her and she 
 proposes recourse to witchcraft. Meanwhile her moods 
 follow one another with great rapidity. At one moment 
 she writes: 
 
 If you are earnestly trying to banish from your thoughts 
 me and the Piraeus, your country seat, Munychia, and every- 
 thing else, little by little, — no, I cannot do it, nor can you 
 who are so closely joined to me, — 
 
 And the next moment with rapid alternation of feeling 
 
 she adds: 
 
 So then, my love, try to come with all speed to the city, so 
 that if you should change your mind about your visit to the 
 king, you may get ready the comedies which will most please 
 Ptolemy. ... I do beg you, Menander, by all means to pre- 
 pare that play in which you have portrayed me, so that even 
 if I am not present there with you, I may through you com- 
 plete the voyage to Ptolemy. 
 
 But this intention not to accompany Menander is 
 
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g6 AN ANCIENT LETTER-WRITER 
 
 merely a passing fancy. She cannot stifle her love for 
 him, and she closes her letter by saying : 
 
 You shall not leave your true love behind. Until you come 
 to me from the Piraeus, I shall be learning how to steer a boat 
 and keep the watch, that with my own hands I may guide 
 you across quiet seas, if you think it wise to go. May Heaven 
 grant that what we do be for the best. 
 
 The letter shows a careful and delicate portrayal of a 
 character dramatically conceived and well sustained 
 throughout. It affords such a genuine insight into the 
 intricacies, the faint alarms, and the fluctuations of a 
 woman's emotions as to indicate that Alciphron could 
 break loose at times from the trammels that rhetoric 
 imposed, and envisage his characters. Had he thrown 
 such a spirit and manner into the rest of his work, he 
 would occupy a much higher position in literature. 
 
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IV 
 
 GREEK AND ROMAN ASCETIC 
 TENDENCIES 
 
 By CLIFFORD HERSCHEL MOORE 
 
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GREEK AND ROMAN ASCETIC 
 TENDENCIES 
 
 Self-discipline and self-denial for religious ends are 
 practices which we do not ordinarily associate with the 
 Greeks and Romans. It is indeed true that the Greeks 
 more than most peoples ancient or modern, long found 
 satisfaction in the enjoyment of living, unhampered by 
 severe restrictions; self-restraint they prized chiefly for 
 its practical value ; in the teachings of Socrates, temper- 
 ance, "preeminent of virtues," had an immediate eth- 
 ical aim. But the later philosophic schools, in which 
 philosophy became more and more the hand-maid of 
 religion, consciously endeavored to uproot the innate 
 passions and affections, that the soul of man might grow 
 unhampered toward the divine. The firmness of char- 
 acter, the even balance (constantia), which was one of 
 the chief virtues of the Romans, was due to that people's 
 inborn genius for control and orderly rule, and did not 
 have its origin in any religious impulse. Yet at a com- 
 paratively early period the Greeks became familiar with 
 certain ascetic practices intended to serve religious ends ; 
 and if among the earlier Romans asceticism had no place 
 apart from a few prohibitions of a primitive sort, none 
 
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100 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 the less the western part of the Roman world was des- 
 tined in due season to prove itself a ready pupil of Greece 
 and the nearer East. It is my purpose in the present 
 paper to sketch the chief lines of the development of 
 ascetic tendencies among the Greeks and Romans from 
 the time when these tendencies first appeared down to 
 the period when an extreme asceticism manifested itself 
 in the Christian church. In this study no sharp distinc- 
 tion will be made between philosophic and religious 
 thought, for apart from the truism that philosophy and 
 religion can never long be separated, it is a fact that 
 classical antiquity made no serious attempt to divorce 
 them. 
 
 It is important at the outset to have clearly before our 
 miinds what we mean by asceticism and ascetic prac- 
 tices. To-day these expressions always have primarily 
 a negative signification : an ascetic is one who practise 
 unusual or excessive abstinence, self-denial, or self- 
 mortification. But although it is true that in every form 
 of religious asceticism the negative or prohibitive ele- 
 ments have always had a considerable place, we must 
 still remember that the Greek word ascesis {aa-K7]<ns) for 
 many centuries had a positive rather than a negative 
 connotation, meaning as it does nothing but " prac- 
 tice," "training," "exercise." It was applied espe- 
 cially to the training of the athlete, but was naturally 
 transferred in course of time from the training of the 
 body to the training of the soul, so that the Greeks 
 
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ASCETIC TENDENCIES loi 
 
 spoke of a spiritual as well as a physical ascesis. Yet 
 since the athlete to develope his body must not only 
 practise certain exercises but also refrain from what- 
 ever may hinder his physical development, the word 
 came to carry with it those negative ideas which are 
 most prominent to our modern minds. It must be re- 
 peated, however, that to the Greeks the word ascesis 
 signified a positive fully as much as a negative exercise, 
 at least until the latest period; and this must here be 
 emphasized since we shall be obliged in the course of our 
 discussion to say much of the prohibitions and absten- 
 tions which were taught and practised, because these 
 are the manifestations of asceticism which are most 
 easily apprehended. 
 
 Among the Greeks and Romans, as among other 
 peoples, prohibitions are of two classes, which however 
 cannot always be clearly distinguished. The first in- 
 cludes all those prohibitions against specific persons, 
 things, or acts, the origin of which is often lost in an- 
 tiquity. Later times frequently attributed these taboos, 
 as we now usually denominate them, to some expe- 
 rience real or imagined, or sought to explain them by 
 myth or by rationalization. The second class of prohib- 
 itions comprises those which are due to reflection of a 
 higher order, to a consideration of the nature of man, 
 of his relation to divinity, and frequently of a future 
 life. Many of the restrictions which belong to this second 
 class are nothing but primitive taboos, employed with a 
 
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102 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 conscious religious purpose. The significant fact is that 
 they belong to a rule of conduct, being operative over a 
 considerable period or throughout life, and that they are 
 believed to promote the spiritual life of the individual, 
 rather than simply to secure him from injury at the 
 hands of some baneful or angry divinity. This second 
 class of prohibitions will occupy most of our attention, 
 but both Greece and Rome show many restrictions of 
 a primitive sort. These are generally common taboos, 
 like those associated with birth and death. The priests 
 naturally were most subject to restrictions; our oldest 
 example is furnished by the ancient interpreters of the 
 oracle at Dodona, the Selloi, who were apparently for- 
 bidden to sleep in beds or to wash their feet. But the 
 specific taboos in Greece vary so much from place to 
 place that it is impossible to give any general account of 
 them.r Among the Romans, the Fetials were forbidden 
 to kill their victim with a metal knife, but must use the 
 flint of the stone age; often vessels made on the potter's 
 wheel were taboo in ritual, as were mills in the Vestal's 
 preparation of the flour for their sacred cakes. The fire of 
 Vesta could be renewed only by the primitive method of 
 rubbing two pieces of wood together. Of all the Roman 
 sacred officials the priest of Jupiter was most subject to 
 restrictions; with his wife he was bound by a complex 
 of taboos too large to be enumerated here. Taboos 
 against foods also existed in many places in Greece, but 
 fasting was by no means common. Yet it was required 
 
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 in the worship of Demeter at the Thesmophoria and in 
 the mysteries. It was wholly absent from the older Ro- 
 man ritual, but was introduced in the worship of the 
 Greek Ceres, and was required by many Oriental Vults. 
 Chastity was occasionally imposed: among the Greeks 
 for instance on the matrons at the Thesmophoria; the 
 most notable Roman example is the familiar case of the 
 Vestals, who were bound by their vows for thirty years. 
 Yet in spite of the fact that all these cases are concerned 
 with religion, none of the taboos mentioned were im- 
 posed with the intent to secure thereby spiritual edifica- 
 tion. We must turn therefore to that other class of pro- 
 hibitions which had such aims. 
 
 The earliest ascetic practices properly so called which 
 we shall consider were those connected with a great 
 religious and an important philosophic development — 
 I mean the rise of the Orphic Sect and of Pythagoreanism. 
 Both belong to the sixth century B.C. ; both were insep- 
 arably connected with that growth of reflective thought 
 which was the most striking and fruitful development 
 of the seventh and sixth centuries before our era. Re- 
 flective thought first shows itself clearly in the poems 
 of Hesiod; it gave rise to elegiac poetry, whose distich 
 was in its very essence the sententious record of reflec- 
 tion, and to those forms of lyric poetry which expressed 
 the personal sentiments of the individual; it produced 
 philosophy, man's attempt to solve the universe; and 
 finally it stimulated a new religious movement. By the 
 
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 seventh century B.C. men had come to believe in a system 
 of divine punishments and rewards, and to conceive of 
 right and wrong in a way unknown to the Homeric 
 poems. A new stress was laid on ceremonial purity; 
 a longing for future happiness had come to the surface 
 of Greek thought and with it a belief that such immor- 
 tality was attainable. The outlet for this religious long- 
 ing was found in the religion of Dionysus as incorporated 
 in the tenets of the Orphic Sect. 
 
 Dionysus came comparatively late into Greek relig- 
 ion. In the Homeric epics he is not a member of the 
 Olympic circle. Tradition has preserved many stories 
 which bear witness to the opposition which his rites en- 
 countered, the most notable of which are those of the 
 Thracian king Lycurgus, of the daughters of Minyas at 
 Orchomenus, of Pentheus at Thebes, and of the Proe- 
 tides at Tiryns. The newcomer, like Ares and the Muses, 
 was a Thracian; his cult spread slowly to the south in 
 the period following that represented in the Homeric 
 poems. Now we learn from competent testimony that 
 certain Thracian peoples not only held to a kind of mo- 
 notheism, but also believed that at death men went to 
 live with their god, not in a shadowy and cheerless exist- 
 ence as in Homeric thought, but in a conscious and a 
 happier life than they had known in the flesh ; further- 
 more a foretaste of that immortality could be obtained 
 in this life when the individual, possessed by a divine 
 madness, in ecstasy, had freed his soul from the bonds 
 
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 of the body so that for the time it saw divine visions and 
 gained unity with God, with Dionysus. This divine mad- 
 ness was stimulated by wine, by the mystic dance, and 
 by wild music. We can easily understand the horror with 
 which the Greeks first regarded the extravagances of the 
 Bacchanal rout, which the excited participants pursued 
 all unconscious of time or place, superior to the usual 
 limitations of mortal powers and sensibilities, until at 
 last they sank exhausted to the ground. This and the 
 horrible rending of wild beasts, whose raw flesh was 
 devoured by the devotees, must have shocked the earli- 
 est Hellenic spectators. Yet they realized sooner or 
 later that there were noble possibilities in this mad- 
 ness, that the bacchant seemed for the time to gain new 
 and superhuman powers, that the reveller was freed 
 from the complex tangle of daily life and rose to 
 unity with all nature which joined in the worship of 
 its one supreme lord, Dionysus, in union with whom 
 the devotee received a foretaste of immortality. This 
 common worship is described by Euripides in his 
 
 Bacchae: 
 
 "There 
 Through the appointed hour, they made their prayer 
 And worship of the Wand, with one accord 
 Of heart, and cry 'lacchos, Bromios, Lord, 
 God of god born!' And all the mountain felt 
 And worshipped with them; and the wild things knelt, 
 And ramped and gloried, and the wilderness 
 . Was filled with moving voices and dim stress." * 
 
 1 Gilbert Murray's translation. 
 
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 Intelligible as this joy of relezise and this delight in 
 kinship with nature are to us to-day, we cannot help 
 feeling that the bacchanal revel is as far as possible 
 removed from anything ascetic. Yet the germ of ascetic 
 practice lay precisely here in the notion of the double 
 ego, soul and body, on which was based the idea that the 
 soul might be temporarily made superior to its home in 
 the flesh. This dualistic conception of man's nature 
 was foreign apparently to early Greek thought, but once 
 implanted in the Greek mind by the religion of Diony- 
 sus, it became a most productive concept; without it 
 ascetic practices could hardly have arisen; and the his- 
 tory of such practices is largely the history of this con- 
 cept. 
 
 It was held that the soul, when exalted by the Bacchic 
 rites, united itself with divinity, became indeed itself 
 a god, so that the orgiastic devotee was given the di- 
 vine name Bakchos. This ecstatic temporary experience 
 showed the path which man must follow to secure im- 
 mortality, permanent union with God : he must free the 
 divine soul from the body, must purify it, that it might 
 enjoy its natural divine life unhampered by earthly 
 dross. Thus Dionysiac religion brought a new religious 
 inspiration to those who werejendeavoring to solve the 
 question of their relation to the divine, and gave them a 
 satisfaction which the older gods could not give. 
 
 In the sacred myth Dionysus, to whom Zeus had 
 already given the rule of the world, was tricked and 
 
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 attacked by the Titans, the powers opposed to Zeus; in 
 his distress the god changed himself into various forms, 
 finally assuming that of a bull, in which guise he was 
 torn to pieces and devoured by his pursuers; Athena, 
 however, saved his heart and gave it to Zeus, who swal- 
 lowed it; hence sprang the new Dionysus. The Titans 
 were ultimately destroyed by Zeus. It will be seen at 
 once that this crude myth, like those of Attis, Osiris, 
 and Adonis, was capable of a spiritual interpretation. 
 And such it received: the reborn Dionysus became the 
 god of resurrection and immortality. Thus interpreted 
 the myth was made the basis of belief and of mystic 
 ceremonial; it became the centre of Orphism. Who 
 Orpheus was we cannot say; the ancients called him a 
 Thracian, a magical musician, a priest of Bacchus and 
 founder of the Bacchic rites. Whether he ever actually 
 existed, as has been lately urged, we may well doubt; 
 but we cannot doubt that during the sixth century"B.c., 
 there was developed a considerable movement which 
 spiritualized and ennobled the Dionysiac religion, a 
 movement which aimed to secure a purity in this life, 
 from which immortality would follow. 
 
 The religion of the Orphics was distinguished from the 
 popular forms of religion in two points: it had a set body 
 of belief — modified unquestionably by time and place 
 — and it also prescribed a method of life, an ascesis. 
 To explain the origin of evil and of multiplicity in the 
 world the sect employed the myth which I have given 
 
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 above. According to their doctrine the Titans are the 
 original powers of evil who by tearing in pieces the di- 
 vine One produce a multiple world ; the rebirth of Diony- 
 sus is reunion into unity. Man sprang from the ashes 
 of the Titans who had devoured Dionysus, hence he is 
 evil from his birth, his body representing the Titanic 
 elements of his being; his soul however is divine, being of 
 Dionysiac origin, in fact the image of the god (o if ^M'" 
 vous Afowo-taKO? ia-ri Kal ayaXfia ovtw tov Aioiwcrov). In 
 this concept of body and soul as the dual ego, each 
 opposed to the other, the Orphics found naturally the 
 source of man's moral obligation : he must free himself 
 from the evil Titanic element that the Dionysiac part, 
 the soul, may be untrammelled. The body {a&iJ,a) was 
 thought of as the grave (o-rjfia) of the spirit, which there 
 imprisoned suffers until the penalty of sin be paid — 
 an idea which was taken up by Plato and used by the 
 later religious philosophies. Yet the Orphic might not 
 of his own act cast off his body, for a round was prescribed 
 by necessity, through which the soul must pass by suc- 
 cessive rebirths, either into other human bodies or into 
 the forms of lower creatures, as a fragment preserved 
 by Proclus says: "Therefore the soul of man changing 
 in the cycles of time enters into various creatures; now 
 it enters a horse, again it becomes a sheep, or a bird 
 dread to see, or again the form of a dog with heavy 
 voice, or as one of the tribe of chill serpents creeps on 
 the sacred ground." 
 
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 The whole purpose of the Orphic teaching and mys- 
 teries was to enable the devotee to hasten the comple- 
 tion of the prescribed cycle and to obtain respite from 
 evil {kvkXov Te Xfj^ai Kal avairvevcrai kukottitos:) ; to this end 
 was imposed a course of life, the requirements of which 
 seem trivial to us, for they consisted not in the practice of 
 public or private morality as we understand it, but in the 
 avoidance so far as possible of all that was mortal. The 
 proscriptions were simple. Abstinence from flesh was 
 the severest. Eggs also and beans were forbidden, since 
 they were used in the ritual of the dead ; nor might a 
 woollen garment be used to wrap a corpse, for even in 
 the grave man must be free from mortal contagion. 
 Birth and death alike were thought to bring pollution. 
 The words of Euripides' chorus in his Cretans might 
 have been sung by the Orphic: 
 
 "Robed in pure white I have borne me clean 
 From man's vile birth and coffined clay, 
 And exiled from my lips alway 
 Touch of all meat where life hath been." ^ 
 
 It will be observed that here, as we shall see presently 
 in Pythagoreanism, taboos of a primitive sort were 
 given by symbolism a spiritual value. To the uninitiate 
 they would seem of little worth, but to the devotee their 
 observance meant the ultimate purification and release 
 of his soul from the prison of the body. 
 
 1 This translation is taken from Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to 
 Greek Religion, p. 508. 
 
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 Pythagoreanism was almost contemporaneous with 
 Orphism, and their tenets at many points cannot be 
 distinguished; their most notable agreement is in the 
 doctrine of metempsychosis. The sect which Pytha- 
 goras founded at Croton in southern Italy soon after 
 529 B.C. was like the Orphics a close body to which the 
 applicant was admitted only after his worth had been 
 tested. But the two bodies also differed fundamentally: 
 the Orphics were primarily a religious company of 
 mystics, conscious of the need of spiritual aid, doing 
 penance to purge away their sinful nature, and thus to 
 secure spiritual happiness; the Pythagoreans on the 
 other hand constituted a semi-political order, planned 
 to meet the requirements of organized society, confident 
 of the value of ethical discipline, and devoted to scientific 
 and rationalistic pursuits. Yet no less than the Orphics 
 the Pythagoreans followed an ascetic course. They re- 
 garded life as the path of the soul's purification, so that 
 man must strive unceasingly to purify and perfect him- 
 self; to "follow God," to become like God, was their 
 first precept. To this end all the discipline of the sect 
 was directed. When an applicant had been adjudged 
 worthy and been admitted to the brotherhood, he was 
 bound to silent obedience, became wholly subject to the 
 established authority. "The master said it" was to be 
 alike his jmswer and his assurance. The care of the soul 
 was especially enjoined by the founder, who was him- 
 self accustomed to sing at dawn, to the accompaniment 
 
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 of the lyre, ancient paeans and such parts of Homer and 
 Hesiod as he judged suited to attune his spirit to the 
 day's task. Reflection and self-examination were re- 
 quired twice daily : on waking the disciple was to ponder 
 on all that the day might bring forth; before sleeping he 
 was to review with care all that he had said and done, 
 testing with himself each word and act. Pythagoras incul- 
 cated especially the habit of truth, "for this alone could 
 make men like to God." This regimen of the soul was 
 aided and supplemented by that of the body. Temper- 
 ance in food and simplicity in dress were required of all ; 
 the use of meat was allowed only under fixed conditions, 
 and many seem to have refrained from it entirely. 
 Certain other foods were tabooed, especially beans; and 
 burial in woollen garments was forbidden' for the same 
 reason as among the Orphics. How much Pythagorean- 
 ism derived from Orphism, how much either or both 
 owed to the East, are questions which cannot be an- 
 swered to-day. But it is striking that in the sixth century 
 B.C. there arose two sects, one primarily religious, the 
 other of a politico-religious character, both of which 
 employed ascetic practices to train and purify the soul. 
 So far as our knowledge goes, they introduced asceti- 
 cism to the European world. 
 
 Neither Orphics nor Pythagoreans doubted the 
 efiicacy of their holy life. Inscribed tablets found in 
 graves of Italy and Crete bear witness to the confidence 
 of the former. "I am a child of Earth and of Starry 
 
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112 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 Heaven, but my race is of Heaven alone," is a common 
 expression found on them; in one the soul is assured: 
 "Thou art become God from Man"; and in others the 
 soul confidently declares: "I avow that I am of your 
 blessed race. I have paid the penalty for deeds unright- 
 eous ... I have escaped from the sorrowful weary wheel." 
 A fragment of an Orphic "Descent to Hades" says: 
 "They who are holy in their life beneath the rays of the 
 sun, in death have a gentler lot in the fair meadow by 
 deep-flowing Acheron; but those who have worked evil 
 in insolent pride on earth, are led down under the plain 
 of Cocytus into chill Tartarus." It was only by succes- 
 sive sojourns in Hades, where the soul was purified, and 
 by many lives on earth that the striving spirit attained 
 at last to purity and happiness. The belief of the Py- 
 thagoreans is shown by fragments of the Sicilian poet 
 Epicharmus: 
 
 " If thou hast been pious in thy soul, 
 No harm at death can befall thee; 
 Above in the heavens thy spirit abides." 
 
 Again : 
 
 "Holy living is mortal's chief aid on his course." 
 
 Many verses from Empedocles also might be quoted in 
 illustration of the Pythagorean and Orphic doctrines of 
 sin and purification. 
 
 If we cannot trace the history of Orphism and Pytha- 
 goreanism as things apart from the general course of 
 Greek thought, our inability is somewhat due we may 
 
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 be sure to the fact that their fundamental ideas were 
 absorbed and became familiar to the Hellenic world. 
 Probably their communities continued, especially in 
 southern Italy where their existence down to a late 
 period is attested by the tablets from which I have 
 quoted. Under the Roman Empire Pythagoreanism 
 enjoyed a revival, while Orphism was recalled and 
 played an important part in Neoplatonism. 
 
 It is not surprising that in the period following directly 
 on the Persian Wars we hear practically nothing of 
 ascetic doctrine or practice at Athens. The enormous 
 stimulus to national pride given by the victory over the 
 Persians, the high confidence in their own powers roused 
 by their growing empire, and the satisfaction with life 
 provided by their increasing wealth, left no class of 
 Athenians in the middle of the fifth century desire or 
 occasion to resort to asceticism ; and besides the Eleusin- 
 ian overshadowed all other mysteries. But when their 
 wealth and empire had wasted away in the disasters of 
 the Peloponnesian War, the rising philosophic move- 
 ment at Athens gained a new significance. Possibly 
 also the failure of the Orphics to secure a high posi- 
 tion among the Athenians was in part due to quackery 
 and superstition, which brought the whole movement 
 into disrepute. 
 
 Whatever extravagances Orphism fell to, it must be 
 kept in mind that it had introduced into the European 
 world certain doctrines pregnant with spiritual fruit. 
 
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 The dualism of sinful body and divine soul, with the 
 consequent obligation on the individual to strive by a 
 holy mode of life, an ascesis, to realize his divinity; and 
 the moral use made of belief in the immortality of the 
 soul, spurring man to cleanse his soul, "to fast from 
 sin" (vrjareva-ai KaxoTrjTos) — these doctrines, entangled 
 though they were in myth and ritual, were of great ser- 
 vice to the world. It remained for Plato to bring the 
 Orphic seed to fruit by giving an intellectual basis to the 
 doctrine of the divine nature of the soul, which he thus 
 raised out of the plane of mere emotional belief. 
 
 II 
 
 In the many-sided Plato there is a strong separatist 
 strain. Although he rejected the external and symboli- 
 cal purifications of the Orphics, he held a doctrine of 
 ascesis for spiritual ends which is not without kinship 
 with theirs. This is set forth most clearly in the Phaedo, 
 with which parts of the Republic and of other dialogues 
 must be read. Like the Orphics Plato attributes evil to 
 the prison-house of the soul, the body — sometimes to 
 the body and the lower part of man's spirit. The soul's 
 rational element, which he calls now "the sovereign 
 part of the soul" or again "the eye of the soul," is for 
 him divine, and it is exactly the possession of this divine 
 element which makes man most human; therefore, he 
 urges, if we yield to ambition and passion, we shall bind 
 fast the chains which hold the soul in ward ; if we cherish 
 
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 our mortal nature, we shall destroy our divine, immortal 
 element, which to live must by force of reason move up- 
 ward and escape from its dungeon. Furthermore, since 
 our very humanity consists in the possession of the divine 
 element in our souls, if we give way to the senses and 
 passions, we shall be false to our true selves. We must 
 rather be true, and by following the life of reason begin 
 an immortality'now, so far as we may (#' Sa-ov ivSexeTot, 
 adavaTi^etv). Here we have a nobler ascesis than any pro- 
 scription of food and dress; but none the less an ascesis 
 cogent and necessary. For, as Socrates says in the 
 Phaedo, "the soul of the true philosopher thinks that 
 she ought not to resist this deliverance (by philosophy 
 from the passions), and therefore abstains from pleas- 
 ures and desires and pains and fears so far as she is 
 able; . . . each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which 
 nails and rivets the soul to the body, until she becomes 
 the body; . . . and from agreeing with the body and 
 having the same delights she is obliged to have the same 
 habits and haunts, and is not likely ever to be pure at 
 her departure."^ The body therefore is to be mortified 
 for the sake of the soul; all life is to be a " practice of 
 death" (fieXerr] davdrov) . This last, however, is no negative 
 doctrine, for if the body be the prison in which the en- 
 fettered soul is in danger of death, then what we call 
 death is only the release of the soul into life; the'prac- 
 tice of death is actually the practice of life. Plato, no 
 ' Jowett's translation. 
 
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 less than St. Paul, would have men seek to deliver them- 
 selves from the body of death by mortifying their earthly 
 members and the deeds of the body that the soul may 
 live. Man's chief good lies in escape from this world 
 into similarity with God; as Socrates in the Theaetetus 
 replies to Theodorus: "Since evils have no place among 
 the gods of heaven, they are forced to hover around the 
 earthly nature and this mortal sphere. Therefore we 
 should try to escape with all speed from this world; but 
 escape is likeness to God so far as possible, and likeness 
 to God consists in becoming just and holy under the 
 guidance of reason" {irecpaa-ffcu xPV evffevSe eicelae <f)evyeiv 
 OTi Tdj(i,aTa, (pvyijSe 6/wiaxni Beat Karh to BvvaTov ofiouaxrK Be 
 BiKMOv Koi oaiov fiera ^povqaecK yeveadai.) 
 
 If the founder of the Academy thus gave to Greek 
 ethics an ascetic impulse, the same cannot be said of the 
 great teacher in the Lyceum. Aristotle's doctrine of the 
 mean as the path of virtue and piety, the place given in 
 his system to passion and desire, excluded all strenuous 
 ascesis: the passions were not to be crushed out, but 
 curbed and brought into subjection to the reasoning 
 will. Of the later philosophic schools none requires long 
 consideration here save that of the Stoics; for in spite of 
 Epicurus' contention that happiness was inseparably 
 linked with reason, so that man might endure bodily 
 torture and yet be happy, his doctrine of hedonism, like 
 that of his predecessor the Cyrenaic Aristippus, was 
 incapable of becoming a practical teacher of severe self- 
 
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 restraint; and among the Sceptics and those attached 
 to the Later Academy common sense following the 
 course of probability and experience led to no extremes 
 of doctrine or of practice. 
 
 But at the same time that Plato was establishing the 
 Academy, another pupil of Socrates, a certain Antis- 
 thenes, brought into life a sect which was destined to 
 have much influence on later practical morals. Antis- 
 thenes and his followers in the Cynic School, especially 
 Diogenes, by laying excessive emphasis on the virtue of 
 the individual soul to the neglect of all external obliga- 
 tions and conventions, led the way logically to separa- 
 tism; in practice their sectaries often displayed that 
 absurd ostentation in neglect of person and disregard of 
 all obligations toward the world which drew on itself the 
 merited scorn of the satirists, but which nevertheless 
 fitted the pessimism of the period of decay. But since 
 their doctrine of virtue as the chief good did not include 
 the life-giving principle of moral activity, it came to 
 nought within the sect. Stoicism, however, adopted the 
 doctrine, gave it vigor by insisting on the exercise of 
 the will in the practice of virtue, and thereby contrib- 
 uted to the spiritual life of fully five centuries. 
 
 The Stoic system made large demand for the subjuga- 
 tion to reason of the individual's will and desire: by 
 conceiving man's highest duty and chief good to be the 
 adaptation of his life to the rational order of nature, by 
 calling on man to live in accordance with nature, i.e. in 
 
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 agreement with the rational cosmos of which man him- 
 self is a rational part, the disciples of Zeno opened the 
 way for a rigoirous self-discipline, and tended to force 
 men to resist their natural affections and passions. It is 
 also true that Stoicism was always a practical philoso- 
 phy which intentionally squared itself with. society and 
 everyday life; yet its large resistant and disciplinary 
 elements constantly reasserted themselves so that in the 
 first two centuries of the Roman Empire they had be- 
 come its dominant features. In the developed system 
 virtue was held to consist in absolute mastery over pain, 
 passion, and desire, and in the complete independence 
 of the philosopher (sapiens), who possessing true know- 
 ledge of the relations of things and complete moral per- 
 ception, is thereby himself endowed with perfection. It 
 is this perfection which secures him from want, fear, 
 passion, or weakness; it assures him alone possession of 
 all goods and freedom. The extreme doctrinaire char- 
 acter of this teaching led to many absurdities, at which 
 the common-sense onlookers like Horace had many a 
 gibe. Nevertheless, Stoicism's insistence on moral integ- 
 rity as the one qualification for useful action and for 
 happiness, logically bound its sectaries to a self-disci- 
 pline which was rigorous in proportion to their fidelity 
 to the ideal. 
 
 Now of all the philosophies which Hellenism passed on 
 to Rome, that of the Porch was most akin to the Roman 
 genius and attracted the largest number of followers. As 
 
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 has just been said, under the Empire, when men, espe- 
 cially the members of the intellectual class, were turned 
 in on themselves by the loss of political freedom, and 
 during no small part of the first century lived in terror 
 of the imperial power, the resistant elements of Stoicism 
 were cherished and developed until the system ended as 
 a moral philosophy. In practice it was by no means ex- 
 treme; it rather aimed at a practical process of moral 
 edification; it became a religion. When Seneca's detrac- 
 tors charged that his life did not correspond with his 
 teachings, he made the sensible and noble reply: *' This is 
 enough for me, to take away each day something from 
 my faults, to rebuke my errors. I have not attained 
 complete moral health, nor shall I ever attain it." The 
 endurance, the self-repression which the later teachers, 
 Seneca, Musonius, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius 
 inculcate, does not concern itself so much with particular 
 prohibitions as with abstention in general from entangle- 
 ment with whatever is external to the real man, with the 
 avoidance of everything which may hamper the freedom 
 of the soul. Seneca, it is true, in his youth was led by his 
 teacher, the Pythagorean Sotion, to refrain from meat 
 for an entire year, until his father's arguments in favor 
 of his health and safety induced him to return to a more 
 normal diet; years later he wrote that at the time he had 
 thought that the v^etarian diet made his mind the 
 quicker, and even then he was not ready to deny that 
 this was so. From another master. Attains, Seneca 
 
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 learned to accustom himself to a hard mattress, which 
 he continued to use in old age. The same teacher taught 
 him to scorn riches, all pleasures of the senses, in fact 
 everything that was not useful to the philosopher. If the 
 pupil when old was obliged to confess that he had not 
 observed all these prohibitions, he still could claim that 
 he had practised certain abstentions: he had always re- 
 frained from luxuries of the table, such as oysters and 
 mushrooms, from wine, hot baths, and unguents — 
 trifling and insignificant matters to our minds perhaps, 
 but not insignificant when we remember the character 
 of Seneca and his high position in a dissolute and luxu- 
 rious court. That his daily fare was frugal was proved 
 by his own body, which, according to Tacitus, was found 
 at his death to be wasted by the meagre sustenance he 
 had given it. These particular abstentions were, how- 
 ever, only by-products, so to speak, of the Stoic doctrine 
 which is repeated again and again by the great represen- 
 tatives whom I have named above. "Endure and ab- 
 stain" {avexpv Koi airexov), thus Epictetus gives the key- 
 note of later Stoicism. In the exercise of endurance 
 and abstention lay the whole art of living; spiritual exer- 
 cise, ascesis, is to be the constant occupation of the 
 individual. Epictetus has indeed a special chapter 
 entitled "On Exercise," in which he declares that we 
 must limit our exercise to those things which fall within 
 the power of our will, since on these alone can we prac- 
 tise desire and aversion, and thus train ourselves to live 
 
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 free from all restraint. Now freedom, which is itself 
 happiness and peace, is the whole object of man's self- 
 exercise; and freedom consists solely in the knowledge 
 how to live and in the exercise of that knowledge. Man 
 therefore must not desire or exercise himself in the pur- 
 suit of health, honor, riches, or anything which may 
 depend on the will of another; he must feel an aversion 
 for, and exercise himself against, all passions, sense of 
 wrong, fear of men or gods, and the dread of death. Only 
 thus may one attain to freedom and live in the liberty of 
 the will. In this sense man must attach himself to God, 
 and being of the same mind with God, accept the divine 
 will with tranquillity and joy. 
 
 In this practical and noble doctrine of edification, of 
 which I have given only an imperfect sketch, we see a 
 positive and a negative side: man must train his soul in 
 the exercise of virtue within the sphere which lies under 
 the control of his will; he must cut himself off from all 
 that lies outside such control. Yet ostentation was to be 
 avoided ; one was not to exhibit his proficiency. An inter- 
 esting glimpse of the practice of the great is given us by 
 Seneca who reminds Lucilius that many have in their 
 palaces cells to which they secretly retire, and on a diet 
 of coarse bread, dressed in a poor garment, and sleeping 
 on a humble cot, train themselves to meet misfortune 
 bravely, even as a soldier trains himself to meet the 
 foe. The teacher urges his friend to train himself by 
 similar means that he may learn to be satisfied with little 
 
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 and to know that happiness does not depend on great 
 estate. 
 
 It was inevitable that with this emphasis on the oppo- 
 sition of the spirit and the flesh which lies behind the 
 Stoic doctrine, there should arise a scorn of the body 
 which finds its strongest expression in Marcus Aurelius. 
 "What am I?" the Emperor asks himself, and answers 
 with a quotation from Epictetus: "A poor soul, bur- 
 dened with a corpse"; again, "I am of body and soul. 
 To the body all things are indifferent; it has no power to 
 differentiate. To the intellect all things are indifferent, 
 save its own activities; and its own activities are all 
 within its own control " ; and again the Emperor exhorts 
 himself : " Flesh, Breath, and the Inner Self — that is all. 
 Good-bye, my books! strain after them no more; they 
 are not your portion. As in the near presence of death, 
 despise poor flesh — this refuse of blood and bones, this 
 web and tissue of nerves and veins and arteries. Breath 
 too! What is it? A puff of wind never the same, but 
 every moment exhaling and again inhaled. Last comes 
 the Inner Self — on that stake all." ^ 
 
 Although Stoicism was the most important of the 
 religious philosophies in the western half of the Empire 
 at this period, it was not alone in asserting that edifica- 
 tion of the soul was the aim of all philosophy, nor was it 
 alone in coming through the ancient opposition of flesh 
 and spirit to despise the body. The extraordinary relig- 
 * Kendall's translation. 
 
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ASCETIC TENDENCIES 123 
 
 ious movement which had been growing during the last 
 two centuries before the beginning of the Christian era 
 — a movement filled with eager longing for the assurance 
 of spiritual salvation — had revived the mystic tendency 
 which was always strong among the Greeks, and had 
 communicated it to the Romans. The result in popular 
 religion we shall consider later; in philosophy it called 
 men away from the resort to reason or to the senses 
 which had distinguished the schools immediately after 
 Aristotle. In the case of Stoicism it led to a practical 
 morality; at Alexandria, the meeting place of Oriental 
 and Western thought, it led to new philosophic move- 
 ments which combined religion and mysticism in a way 
 unknown before. One of the sects, the Neopythagoreans, 
 returning to the mystic symbolism of the earlier school, 
 endeavored to unite this with the teachings of Plato into 
 a scientific system. Judeo-Alexandrian philosophy, of 
 which Philo is the chief representative, tried to combine 
 the religious doctrines of Judaism with Platonism. Both 
 schools adopted in different degrees the Platonic doc- 
 trine of a transcendental god; both emphasized the 
 opposition of flesh and spirit, the spirit by nature pure 
 and divine, the flesh base and defiling. For both also the 
 aim of philosophy was to attain to association with God ; 
 but to draw near to God in his remote transcendence, 
 every means was to be taken to free the spirit from the 
 hampering body in which it dwells. 
 The Neopythagoreans observed the prohibitions im- 
 
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124 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 posed by the earlier school: much stress was laid on 
 purificatory baths, baptisms, and white garments; all 
 contact with the dead or with an impure person was to 
 be avoided ; and certain foods were forbidden. Celibacy 
 was approved, although not imposed. Fidelity to the 
 marriage bond was required, and sexual indulgence with- 
 in this bond allowed only for the begetting of children. 
 Of more importance, however, than these prescriptions 
 and prohibitions was the emphasis laid on sanctity. 
 The saint became the ideal. To this position Pythagoras 
 had naturally been raised in the course of centuries; the 
 model in later time was furnished by ApoUonius of Ty- 
 ana, who lived in the first century of our era and may 
 have come under the influence of Eastern asceticism. 
 The historical ApoUonius is lost to us in the cloud of 
 marvellous legend with which he was invested in the 
 century following his death; yet our loss is more than 
 recompensed by the knowledge we gain of the ideal of 
 later Pythagoreanism. ApoUonius was regarded as one 
 filled with divine inspiration, who by virtue of the reve- 
 lation given to him stood far above ordinary mortals, a 
 worker of miracles. His life was most simple: his food 
 was bread, fruits, and ordinary herbs; water was his 
 only drink; he practised silence, and neglected his per- 
 son. His mission, according to his biographer, was to 
 free men through true philosophy from the prison of the 
 body; he demanded a righteousness far above the ordin- 
 ary morality of correct actions; he apparently taught 
 
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ASCETIC TENDENCIES 125 
 
 that purity of life and true wisdom, in which lay the 
 proper worship of the divine, could raise man to super- 
 natural power and sanctity. Thus Neopythagoreanism 
 not only gave an added emphasis to asceticism but also 
 fixed in the religious life a new ideal, that of the saint 
 who receives direct revelation from God. 
 
 Judeo- Alexandrian philosophy went even farther than 
 Neopythagoreanism. According to Philo, its chief ex- 
 ponent, man is wholly sunk in sin from which his un- 
 aided efforts can never free him. This sinful condition 
 is due to the voluntary descent of the soul from the 
 super-sensuous sphere to this world of the senses where 
 it has entered into union with the body, its horrible 
 prison, which it is doomed to drag with it on earth. 
 Unreasoning passion and lust belong to the body, but 
 divinity to the reasoning soul. As a practical guide the 
 ethical teachings of the Stoics were adopted, at least 
 externally. But Philo would go further than the Stoics. 
 Virtue for him as for them consists in pure morality: all 
 passions and desires are to be crushed out that man may 
 attain to complete dispassionateness (airddeta), not to 
 that middle state of moderate freedom from the passions 
 which was the balance struck by the Stoic between his 
 ideal and the practice of the ignorant. It is true that 
 Philo also made concessions to the actual world. He 
 seems to have recognized that political life was a neces- 
 sity, in which however the'wise man would not lose him- 
 self ; rather he should wash away the defilements of the 
 
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126 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 soul and prove his virtue in affairs before he could pass on 
 to the contemplative life, which is the highest activity. 
 Yet Philo would not have wholly rejected the descrip- 
 tion of the lovers of virtue, i.e. the true philosophers, 
 which he puts into the mouths of those who defend the 
 care of the person and worldly ambition : ' ' Those who are 
 called lovers of virtue are usually without reputation, 
 despised of men, humble, needy, more dishonored than 
 slaves, dirty, pale and emaciated, always facing hunger, 
 sick, practitioners of death (/ieXerwi'Tes InrodvyaKeiv)" 
 The irony of this description is shown by the last phrase 
 which he borrows from Plato, and which we have dis- 
 cussed above. Such poor creatures philosophers may 
 seem, Philo would answer, but in reality, in their pur- 
 suit of a noble ideal, they know that joy which every 
 wise man feels, "for he rejoices in himself, not in his 
 surroundings." Logically Philo should have favored a 
 withdrawal from the world into separatist communities, 
 such as the Essenes had already established, but like the 
 Neopythagoreans and Stoics, he was held back by the 
 inherited bonds of society from taking that step. 
 
 It will be felt that between Philo's doctrine of man's 
 helplessness in sin and the Stoic doctrine of obligation to 
 free the soul by subduing the sinful body, there is a se- 
 rious gap. Man, because he is sinner, cannot fulfil his 
 obligation to free himself from sin. The only possible 
 bridge across the gap was found in the activity of a higher 
 power which may lend man the strength to free himself. 
 
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ASCETIC TENDENCIES 127 
 
 Salvation then is an act of grace, a revelation from 
 God. 
 
 So Neopythagoreanism, Judeo-Alexandrian philo- 
 sophy, and we may add Platonism in the first two cen- 
 turies of our era, all had a strong mystical character. 
 In every school the older belief in the self-sufficiency 
 of man in his warfare against the passions had been re- 
 placed by faith in divine revelation as a means of sal- 
 vation. Even the Stoic had come to look for external 
 aid. All systems inculcated scorn of the flesh, despite 
 of the world with its vanities and temptations; all in- 
 sisted on a constant exercise in crushing out the passions 
 and thus freeing the soul. In short the dominant philo- 
 sophies of this period gave a new emphasis to asceticism. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But at this point the question may reasonably be asked 
 how far this scorn and mortification of the flesh, these 
 rigorous exercises of the soul were confined to a select 
 few whose noble aspirations lifted them above the mass. 
 It must be granted that the ideal and the practice of the 
 devout philosopher may well seem to be poor evidence 
 of the sentiments of the common people. But, on the 
 other hand, we must remember that before the second 
 century of our era philosophy had ceased to be primarily 
 speculative, had become indeed the art of life, so that it 
 might be embraced even by the unlettered. Epictetus 
 in fact warns against the study of written precepts, and 
 
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128 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 Marcus Aurelius, in a passage quoted above, exhorts his 
 soul to bid farewell to books. We have direct evidence, 
 however, in the popular religions of the period, and to 
 these we must now turn. 
 
 Her geographical situation and commercial relations 
 exposed Greece to the religious influences of Asia Minor 
 and of Egypt. In the earlier period she was able to ab- 
 sorb and hellenize all cults from abroad, but by the fourth 
 century B.C. her vitality was weakening and the gods of 
 the Orient and Egypt came in too great numbers to be 
 nationalized. Before 333-32 B.C. a shrine of Isis had 
 been established in Attica by state permission; after 
 the conquests of Alexander a crowd of foreign divinities 
 poured into Greek lands. The island of Delos, owing to 
 its commercial position, became a great centre for these 
 cults and played an important part in transmitting them 
 to the West. As early as the second century B.C. Isis and 
 her attendant divinities were worshipped in southern 
 Italy; in Cicero's day she was established on the very 
 Capitol, from which no official efforts could permanently 
 dislodge her. Already in 204 B.C. the Great Mother of 
 the Gods had been brought from Asia Minor by the 
 state's official action. In fact by the close of the first 
 century of the Empire a large number of Oriental and 
 Egyptian gods were domiciled in Italy, where they 
 claimed a multitude of devotees among the Italian, as 
 well as foreign, population. Most of these cults had 
 certain common characteristics which marked them 
 
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 off from the official religion of the state: they were cos- 
 mopolitan, open to all; each had its priests, eager propa- 
 gandists devoted to the divine service; the followers of 
 each formed a body which had been set apart from the 
 rest of the world, consecrated by a mystic initiation to 
 which they had been admitted only after they had ob- 
 served for a fixed period certain prohibitions. 
 
 Through the fortunate circumstance that Apuleius of 
 Madaura has left us an account of his initiation into the 
 rites of Isis we know these in considerable detail. The 
 prospective initiate was obliged to wait until the goddess 
 through her priest had made known her willingness to 
 receive him. When the divine consent had been granted, 
 the novice was given a purificatory bath, which was fol- 
 lowed by prayer and baptism ; he was then brought to the 
 temple where, before the image of the goddess, he was 
 charged to refrain from wine, meat, and all luxuries of 
 the table for ten days. When these prohibitions had been 
 faithfully observed, the initiation proper began. The 
 same requirements were made at each of the two suc- 
 ceeding degrees. The shaven head, the mark branded 
 on the forehead of the priests at least, the linen dress, 
 participation in daily matins and vespers at the shrines 
 of the goddess, all marked the initiates as a separate 
 body apart; the devotees had indeed entered on the 
 Isiac life which gave them happiness here and assurance 
 of salvation hereafter. The purpose of the bath, bap- 
 tism, and fasting before initiation, as of the sexual con- 
 
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130 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 tinence imposed on women during the annual festival of 
 the goddess, was to purify the body that the soul might 
 be free to receive the divine influence. There is opera- 
 tive here then that same dualism of flesh and spirit 
 which we have found in all our previous considerations. 
 Nowhere does this dualism appear more clearly than 
 in the religion of Mithras, which adds to it as an effect- 
 ive element the doctrine of the active presence in the 
 world of contending powers of good and evil; the serv- 
 ants of Ahriman, defeated by Mithras in their original 
 effort to destroy the progenitors of man, continually 
 endeavor to drag mortals down while Mithras helps his 
 faithful followers on to victory. Life in the Mithraic 
 system is a continual struggle against the powers of evil 
 toward the goal of purity that the soul, the divine es- 
 sence in man, may finally rise to the celestial regions. 
 Mithraism therefore called not for a life of contempla- 
 tion but for one of constant effort; it was suited to men 
 of action, to a soldiery, and therein lies in part the ex- 
 planation of its popularity among the armies of the Em- 
 pire. In the Mithraic community there were no less 
 than seven grades of initiation ; in the passage from one 
 degree to another, purificatory baths, prayers, abstin- 
 ence from certain foods, and continence were required ; 
 the courage and endurance of the initiate were also 
 tested; an oath was exacted of him; and there is some 
 reason to believe that on reaching the third grade he was 
 branded on the forehead like the priests of Isis. The 
 
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ASCETIC TENDENCIES 131 
 
 beginnings at least of religious communities were made. 
 TertuUian speaks of "continents" and "virgins" among 
 the Mithraists, which may point to an incipient monasti- 
 cism, such as was found among the priests of Isis and 
 Sarapis. The Mithraic devotee was encouraged in his 
 fidelity, given wisdom and strength for his struggle 
 against the minions of Ahriman by reunions with his 
 fellows in the Mithraic chapel and by a holy communion 
 which with consecrated loaf and cup recalled the banquet 
 instituted by Mithras before his ascension. 
 
 We can hardly doubt that similar obligations were 
 laid on the devotees in many, if not most, of the Oriental 
 cults of the Empire. In moral value they varied of 
 course all the way from the extravagances of a debased 
 superstition to the noble practices of an enlightened 
 religion. But self-mutilation and flagellation, as prac- 
 tised in the worship of the Great Mother, of Bellona, 
 and of the Syrian Goddess; baptisms in the blood of the 
 sacred victim; abstinence from proscribed foods, con- 
 tinence, lustral baths, and all the prerequisites of initia- 
 tion ; the avoidance of everything in dress which might 
 defile the wearer; the loftiest exercise of the soul — 
 all aimed at the same end: the subjugation of the sin- 
 ful body and the freeing of the soul in its effort to at- 
 tain to an ideal of purity, whatever that ideal might be. 
 The aim of religion had been vastly changed ; formerly it 
 had not clearly raised the question of moral worth, but 
 now, recognizing the presence of good and evil in man's 
 
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132 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 environment as well as in the constitution of man him- 
 self, conscious of the endless conflict of the divine against 
 the powers of darkness, and influenced by the vast 
 changes which had taken place in the social and politi- 
 cal organism, religion had come to set moral worth above 
 all things. The ideal for man, or for God, was no longer 
 power or dominion apart from moral excellence, but for 
 both alike purity and sanctity. It cannot be denied that 
 childish superstitions and debased practices often ex- 
 isted side by side with the nobler forms of religious 
 effort and that the ideal of sanctity was by no means 
 always such as we cherish to-day, but nevertheless it is 
 true that by the second century of our era we find the 
 religious devotee and the philosopher at one: both alike 
 stake all on the Inner Self. 
 
 We have now seen that both popular religion and 
 philosophy had come to depend in no small degree on 
 asceticism to purify and free the soul; and those schools 
 which had introduced the belief that divine help was 
 necessary to assist man in his ascesis, diminished no 
 whit the obligation on the individual to strive unceas- 
 ingly to overcome the evil within him. We have also 
 recognized that after Alexander the tendency to require 
 a severer asceticism had grown until sanctity was the 
 ideal of the nobler part of paganism. I have spoken of the 
 canonization of Pythagoras. Plato also was early re- 
 garded as more than human by his followers; among the 
 Neoplatonists his regular epithet was "the divine " — an 
 
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ASCETIC TENDENCIES 133 
 
 epithet more than merely honorific. I have mentioned 
 also ApoUonius of Tyana who was made by the Neopy- 
 thagoreans the incarnation of a religious ideal. The readi- 
 ness with which men in the second century attributed 
 to individuals a superhuman position and power is also 
 shown by the divine honors paid to Alexander of Abonu- 
 teichus, that founder of shrines and oracles. The habit 
 of worshipping the saints in the third century is well 
 illustrated by the much quoted case of the Emperor 
 Alexander Severus, who placed in his private chapel the 
 images of his ancestors, of his better predecessors in the 
 imperial office, and also of "the noblest spirits of the 
 past." Among these were ApoUonius, Christ, Abraham, 
 Orpheus, and Alexander the Great. The last had his 
 place neither as the conqueror of the world nor as the 
 founder of a new world-order, but as the powerful sage, 
 the perfect prince, the model of virtue and courage, 
 which myth and legend had made him. Before this 
 strange company of the benefactors of mankind the Em- 
 peror in secret found spiritual inspiration. We need not 
 suppose that the veneration of such a fantastic collec- 
 tion of saints was common; but the devotion of the 
 Emperor to this strange company after all does testify 
 to the spirit of his age, which believed that by'discipline, 
 self-imposed and divinely aided, man could raise him- 
 self into the ranks of the divine. 
 
 The last great philosophic system to employ asceti- 
 dsm in the Greco-Roman world was early Neoplaton- 
 
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134 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 ism. In the teaching of Plotinus, the founder of the 
 school, it occupied a secondary position. Yet his own 
 practice shows that the ascetic regimen was the natural 
 one for the philosopher at this period, for Porphyry tells 
 us that his master remained unmarried, abstained from 
 animal food, lived in the simplest way, and so despised 
 his body that he seemed to be ashamed of its possession. 
 When one of his disciples, a senator Rogantianus, freed 
 his slaves, gave away his property, laid down his pretor- 
 ship, took to a wandering life of fasting and dependence, 
 and finally reduced himself by his self-imposed priva- 
 tions to a state of semi-helplessness, Plotinus not only 
 approved but praised him. If it had not been for the 
 opposition of the envious, with the help of the Emperor 
 Gallienus and his consort he would have founded a 
 Platonopolis in Campania, where with his disciples he 
 would have formed a separate community, living accord- 
 ing to Plato's Laws and devoted to the philosophic life. 
 Porphyry, however, the pupil and successor of Plo- 
 tinus, emphasized almost exclusively the practical life; 
 for him man's proper care was anxiety for the safety of 
 his own soul. He taught that men must regard their 
 bodies as garments, which not only burden but actually 
 defile them, and which they like athletes must lay aside 
 that naked and unclothed they may enter the stadium to 
 contend in the Olympia of the soul (yv/ivol Be ical axiTtovei 
 iirl TO a-rdScov ava^aivcofiev tA t^s "^uj^ij? 'OXv/iTTta aycopiao/ie- 
 voi). He held that man's approach to God is directly 
 
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ASCETIC TENDENCIES 135 
 
 proportioned to the freedom which man obtains from 
 the clogging association with the body. "The more we 
 turn toward that which is mortal," he says, " the 
 more we unfit our minds for the infinite grandeur, 
 and the more we withdraw from attachment to the 
 body, in just that measure we approach the divine." 
 Love of body and love of God cannot exist together 
 according to Porphyry's view, but the former must 
 be eradicated. Like Plato, he aims at the death of all 
 sensuous pleasures or rather at the death of all desire 
 for such pleasures, that by such death the soul may be 
 liberated. Naturally the ascetic means by which Por- 
 phyry would secure this liberation are the same that we 
 have constantly met; he differs from his predecessors 
 only in the emphasis which he lays on abstention. 
 Everything was to be avoided which can excite the 
 senses : complete abstention from sexual indulgence was 
 most desirable; horse-races, exhibitions of athletes, and 
 similar shows were to be shunned ; and since meat feeds 
 the passions, a vegetarian diet was to be adopted. The 
 fact that the treatise. On Abstinence from Animal Food, 
 was addressed as an argument to a brother Firmus who 
 had fallen away from vegetarianism, tends to show that 
 such was the accustomed regimen of the school. 
 
 With Porphyry ascesis as a moral discipline reaches 
 its height. His successor lamblichus turned his atten- 
 tion to the development of a theological system for 
 paganism ; and the later Neoplatonists spent their efforts 
 in other directions. 
 
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136 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 IV 
 
 We have thus surveyed in outline the growth of as- 
 cetic tendencies among the Greeks and Romans for fully 
 nine hundred years. We have seen these begin among 
 Orphics and Pythagoreans, the first sects to grasp the 
 meaning of the dualism of flesh and spirit, gain signifi- 
 cance in Plato and the later philosophic schools, until 
 during the last three centuries of the period we have 
 considered, asceticism was the normal regimen for the 
 philosopher of nearly every sect. This development in 
 philosophy was paralleled by the course of popular re- 
 ligion from the time when Oriental cults spread to the 
 West. Although the extremer forms of asceticism were 
 never practised by large numbers in Greco-Roman pa- 
 ganism, nevertheless it has been made evident, I trust, 
 that the practice of subjugating the flesh by the repres- 
 sion of the passions, by fasts, and by varied means of 
 discipline that the soul might be free to live and ap- 
 proach the divine, was widely established by the third 
 century of our era. 
 
 But at the same time that the later philosophies were 
 developing and Eastern pagan cults were establishing 
 themselves in the West, Christianity also was spreading 
 throughout the Roman Empire. At first it stood apart 
 from the political and social worlds, or rather main- 
 tained a passive attitude toward them; but it was inev- 
 itable that as soon as this attitude was abandoned, two 
 
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ASCETIC TENDENCIES 137 
 
 opposite tendencies should appear: the one due to an 
 eflEort to come into relation with pagan society, resulted 
 in the secularization of the church; the other, stimu- 
 lated by the desire to withdraw from the world, found 
 its expression in Christian asceticism. Now asceticism 
 was on the whole foreign to primitive Christianity as it 
 was to Judaism until after the capture of Jerusalem by 
 Titus. It is true that a Jewish sect, the Essenes, had 
 formed separatist communities as early as the second 
 century B.C., but the Essenes were not strictly speak- 
 ing a national development so much as the product of 
 Hellenistic influences, especially Orphic and Pythago- 
 rean, acting on Jewish stock. The same is apparently 
 true of the Therapeutae, who are described by Philo as 
 following an ascetic life in Egypt. But neither of these 
 sects seems to have influenced Judaism or early Christi- 
 anity to any great extent. In the teachings of Jesus there 
 is little that points toward asceticism: his command 
 to the rich young man to sell all that he had and give to 
 the poor, his exhortation to his disciples to sell their 
 possessions and give alms, to lay up treasures in heaven, 
 and a single saying in which he seems to regard celibacy 
 as a higher state than marriage, are practically all his 
 recorded teachings which can be interpreted as favoring 
 asceticism. Certain passages in the Pauline epistles 
 contain more pronounced doctrine. In the Epistle to 
 the Romans the sinful body is opposed to the "inward 
 man," the "will," more than once, a doctrine which, as 
 
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138 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 our previous considerations have shown, was nothing 
 new to the writer of the epistle or to those to whom it 
 was addressed. In his letter to the Corinthians Paul 
 expresses his approval of virginity, yet at the same time 
 emphatically declares that the marriage state is not sin- 
 ful; and in the Epistle to Timothy celibacy and vege- 
 tarianism are distinctly combatted. In general, there- 
 fore, we may maintain that the teaching of primitive 
 Christianity did not favor asceticism; it rather incul- 
 cated purity of life, deeds of kindliness, the unselfish 
 fulfillment of social duties, and similar virtues, which 
 are fundamentally at variance with a life isolated from 
 the active world and given to self-contemplation and to 
 self-abasement. Yet Christianity could not escape the 
 environment into which it had come. The individual 
 Christian felt the same anxiety and distress as the pagan 
 over economic and social decay, the same alarm over the 
 pressure of the barbarians on the weakened Roman 
 Empire; he was liable also to be the victim of persecu- 
 tion ; in joining the Christian community he had not laid 
 aside the belief that by checking and subduing the pas- 
 sions of the body he could free his soul. Furthermore, 
 the belief in the speedy return of Christ and the immi- 
 nent approach of the end of the world soon had a mighty 
 influence on Christian thought and practice. It is not 
 surprising then that we find as early as the second cen- 
 tury a new value laid by Christians on poverty, fasts, 
 and chastity. During this century also the custom of 
 
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ASCETIC TENDENCIES 139 
 
 fasting on Wednesday and Friday, the dies stationum, 
 was established; many bound themselves to perpetual 
 virginity so that an order was almost formed within the 
 church; and riches were regarded as incompatible with 
 the highest Christian character. Furthermore, certain 
 sects arose which laid extravagant stress on asceticism. 
 Such were the Gnostics, Montanists, and Encratites, 
 who became dangerous to the church before the end of 
 the second century; in the third Manicheism added its 
 threats from the East. Although the church was able 
 formally to free itself from these heresies, it could not 
 escape their influence. And besides, the disasters of the 
 latter half of the third century inevitably stimulated a 
 radical asceticism. Men felt a desire to turn away from 
 the evidences of political and moral decay around them 
 toward self-contemplation, from the cares of the external 
 world to the peace of inward experience. It was in the 
 intellectual centre of the Empire, in Egypt, at once the 
 oldest part of the Empire and the place where the decay 
 of the ancient order was most keenly felt, that extreme 
 asceticism showed itself most strongly. The catechistic 
 schools of Alexandria were filled with those who sought 
 to escape from the world, while at the same time the 
 number of those who endeavored to find peace in soli- 
 tude rapidly increased. The earliest gathering of Chris- 
 tian ascetics was that which formed about Hieracas at 
 Leontopolis in the Nile delta at the close of the third 
 century. When a considerable number had associated 
 
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140 ASCETIC TENDENCIES 
 
 themselves with some eminent anchoret, as many did 
 with St. Antony a generation later, the beginning of 
 monasticism was at hand ; this was definitely established 
 when Pachomius brought such a gathering of individu- 
 als into a community and gave them rules for admission 
 and for conduct. Within a hundred years monasticism 
 had spread to Western Europe. 
 
 The intellectual basis, however, of Christian asceti- 
 cism had been already given by the great theologians of 
 the Alexandrian schools, Clement and Origen, who es- 
 tablished as a Christian ideal that life which, free from 
 earthly passion and desire, withdrawn from the world, 
 finds its rest in God. But it was pagan teaching which 
 had given the theologians this ideal of the ascetic saint. 
 The warrant of Christian asceticism, therefore, came 
 primarily neither from Judaism nor from the teachings 
 of Christ and the apostles, but from Hellenistic philo- 
 sophy, from the tenets of the later Pythagoreans and 
 Platonists, even as the Christian practice of asceticism 
 .had arisen out of the religious practice of Greco- Roman 
 paganism. 
 
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V 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF AN ANCIENT 
 ROMAN CITY 
 
 By morris HICKY MORGAN 
 
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SOME ASPECTS OF AN ANCIENT 
 ROMAN CITY 
 
 It is related that Sir Walter Scott, during his visit 
 to Pompei, was frequently heard to exclaim, "The 
 City of the Dead," with no other remark. So difficult 
 was it even for his marvellous imagination to conjure 
 up the activities of living men and all the bustle of a 
 city in that abandoned spot. Many another traveller 
 and many professed antiquarians have found them- 
 selves unable to escape from the shadow of death which, 
 in spite of all that the skilful methods of modern ex- 
 cavation and restoration have accomplished, still hangs 
 over these desolated walls. Yet if one turns to ancient 
 sites where human habitation has never been so rudely 
 interrupted — to Naples, for instance, or to Rome her- 
 self — and strives to picture what kind of life was lived 
 in such places in the ancient times, one's purpose may 
 be thwarted, perhaps even more completely, by mod- 
 em changes which have utterly destroyed what existed 
 in the past or altered it almost beyond recognition. The 
 fact of course is that the material remains of Roman 
 antiquity can never by themselves suffice for a recon- 
 struction of the life of the ancient Romans, Fortunately, 
 however, the Romans have left us a literature as well, 
 and one who can combine the literary with the material 
 
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144 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 monuments need not despair of reaching some pretty 
 definite conclusions regarding many sides of that van- 
 ished life. Even of the outer aspects of city life, about 
 which we might not hope for much from a literature 
 written when guide books were unknown, more than a 
 little is thus to be learned, so that one may speak with 
 some confidence about them. What, then, were the as- 
 pects of a Roman city during the late Republic and the 
 early Empire, and how did cities in those days differ 
 in appearance from the cities of modern times? 
 
 When one approaches a modern city, one observes 
 that the skyline is broken by the spires and domes of 
 churches, by tall chimneys, and often in recent years 
 by the tops of those lofty buildings which we term 
 "sky-scrapers." One sees streamers of black smoke 
 rising here and there, or a great pall of it overhanging 
 the whole. Though the ancients sometimes grumbled 
 about the smoke in their cities, yet they knew nothing 
 of the real nuisance that has come from soft coal. There 
 were no spires or tall chimneys in those days. As for 
 "sky-scrapers," Rome itself had them, but in other 
 cities the buildings were comparatively low, with flat 
 or low-peaked roofs. If the practical Vitruvius, the 
 Augustan architect, congratulated Rome on its ability 
 to provide for an indefinitely large population by means 
 of its many floors "high in the air," yet the refined and 
 luxurious Capuans scoffed at a city, which, unlike 
 theirs, was "hoisted up and suspended on upper 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 145 
 
 stories." The skyline of an ancient city was therefore 
 generally unbroken, except that near the centre of the 
 town there would probably be a hill with temples or 
 fortifications on top of it, because the oldest cities 
 were usually founded upon some small hill for purposes 
 of defence. 
 
 When one comes near to an American or English 
 city, there is no obstacle to prevent immediate entrance, 
 and even continental cities are sometimes pierced to the 
 very centre by a railway. But in antiquity travellers 
 were stopped at the city wall. This was because the 
 ancient city was twofold, comprising a tract of land 
 which was inhabited and cultivated in times of peace, 
 and a stronghold or walled town into which all the 
 citizens would withdraw for protection in time of war. 
 Exactly the same method of settlement was followed by 
 our ancestors in the diflEerent parts of this country, who 
 had their clearings and cultivated fields surrounding 
 the stockade in which they took refuge from the In- 
 dians or from each other. The walled town in antiquity 
 was the centre of civic and business life; there the mar- 
 kets were held and public and private business was trans- 
 acted. Some of the citizens had their houses within, 
 others without, the wall. On approaching an ancient 
 city, therefore, by a well paved Roman road, we should 
 first observe the country houses of the rich and the farm- 
 houses of the lower orders, constituting the suburbs; 
 descending from some hill or crossing a plain there would 
 
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146 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 be one or more aqueducts carrying the water supply 
 from some pure source at a distance from the walls. To- 
 day as we approach Rome by the Appian Way, we see 
 no country houses, for all were destroyed long ago and 
 the Campagna is a great waste; but we do see the ruins 
 of the Claudian aqueduct, one of those enormous stone 
 structures the remains of which are to be seen almost 
 everywhere that Romans built cities, and some of which 
 are still so perfect as to be in use at the present time. 
 
 Coming nearer to the city, we should see lines of 
 tombs and family burial lots abutting on each side of 
 the road, as we see them still standing along the road 
 which leads to the Herculaneum gate of Pompei. For 
 the Romans hardly ever allowed burial within the city 
 walls; it took place, whether of bodies, or of ashes after 
 cremation, just outside, and consequently the road for 
 miles from an important city — for eight or nine miles 
 in the case of the Appian Way, the great south road 
 from Rome — was lined with many handsome tombs and 
 monuments. Nearly all of them are gone now; the 
 famous round tomb of Caecilia Metella, its top sadly 
 altered by battlements from its ancient shape, is the 
 most perfect that remains; but in antiquity it stood in 
 no such isolation, for it was only one among many family 
 memorials. 
 
 Next, the traveller would reach the wall itself. City 
 walls in antiquity were very high, and continued to be 
 high until the days of gunpowder, before the advent of 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 147 
 
 which the defenders feared not so much that walls would 
 be battered down as that assailants would climb over 
 them. The earliest city walls, like those of Roman camps, 
 were earthworks; then huge blocks of stone were used, 
 as in the Servian wall of Rome and in the walls of many- 
 other cities. A portion of the Servian wall, about 
 forty feet in height, is still to be seen. Frequently there 
 were towers along a wall, projecting forward from its 
 general line, so that the defenders could assail the flanks 
 of an attacking force with various kinds of missiles. 
 Such towers appear to-day in the ancient wall of Pom- 
 pei £md in the Aurelian wall of Rome, though this was 
 of course built much later than the period of which I 
 am now writing. There would be a few gates in the 
 wall, probably rather small if we may judge from the 
 silence of Vitruvius, who says nothing about gates as 
 ornamental structures, and from the only specimen 
 remaining of the Servian gates of Rome. This gate is 
 often unseen by travellers because it is built into a 
 modern building, the Antonelli palace, where it forms 
 the doorway to the principal staircase. The arched 
 opening is not much more than six feet high, but the 
 stones of which it is built are huge, some being five feet 
 long. As time went on, however, the Pax Romana ex- 
 tended over the civilized parts of the world and city 
 gates grew to be large, wide, and ornamental structures, 
 such as, for Instance, the Roman gate of Thessalonica, 
 though they were still built thick and strong so as to 
 
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148 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 withstand the possible attack of battering rams. It is 
 not very easy for an American to imagine the appear- 
 ance of a walled town, — either the look of the ob- 
 stacle itself or the crowding of buildings and the nar- 
 rowing of streets which were results of the limitation 
 of space within it. We may get some idea of the con- 
 ditions from old engravings of birdseye views of Rome 
 and other cities, and we have on our continent at Que- 
 bec some remains of the old wall; but the first entirely 
 walled city which an American is likely to see, is Ches- 
 ter in England. There one can walk all round the city 
 on top of the wall, which stands much as it stood in the 
 time of King Charles the First. 
 
 Having passed through the gates of an ancient city, 
 most Americans (but perhaps not Bostonians) would be 
 struck by the narrowness of the streets, just as people 
 who come from the newer cities of the West are as- 
 tonished at the narrow streets in the older parts of 
 Boston. The streets themselves were well paved — and 
 paved to last for centuries — with smooth blocks of 
 lava or of the hardest stone that the neighboring quarries 
 could supply. Earthen or gravel streets must have been 
 rare in Roman cities. Often, as in many Roman and 
 other Italian streets to-day, there was no sidewalk for 
 pedestrians; but when there was a sidewalk, it was ex- 
 tremely narrow. Strangers think that the sidewalks 
 in the shopping district of Boston are narrow enough, 
 in all conscience ; but they are broad compared to those 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 149 
 
 which we find in Pompei and in other excavated 
 ancient cities. Stepping stones were often provided at 
 the street corners on which to cross the pavement, when 
 it was being flushed with water to clean it or during a 
 rain. We still find such stepping stones in at least one 
 of our American cities, Baltimore. Very few trees were 
 to be seen in the narrow streets and only occasionally 
 a park, but there were many fountains; for the Roman 
 cities usually had excellent water supplies and the 
 climate led people to make great use of water. It was 
 brought from public reservoirs into the better class of 
 houses by a regular system of lead pipes, but the poor 
 went to the public fountains in the streets in order to 
 obtain it, as the poor in Italy do to-day. These public 
 fountains, running day and night, were provided in 
 great numbers throughout a Roman city, and from them 
 people who did not take city water by pipes into their 
 own houses could help themselves at will. When Agrippa, 
 the son-in-law of Augustus, was water commissioner 
 of Rome, he constructed for public use no less than 
 seven hundred basins into which water ran from below, 
 and five hundred fountains from which it spouted freely 
 into the air. That such fountains were in constant use 
 is proved by the well-known example in" Pompei, 
 made of travertine, where the whole side of the cheek 
 of the little human head from the mouth of which the 
 water flowed, is worn away by the pressure of the myriad 
 faces which have leaned against it while drinking from 
 
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150 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 its stream. Many of the public fountains were decora- 
 tive as well as useful objects, made of colored marbles or 
 mosaics and adorned with statues. In some instances 
 the water spouted from a shell or a vase or from the 
 mouth of a bird; occasionally the fountain took the 
 form of a niche, lined with mosaic work, a basin being 
 placed below, into which the water poured from a jar 
 held in the arms of a statue standing in the niche. Ex- 
 amples of all these and many other kinds of fountains 
 have been discovered in Pompei. 
 
 Besides these fountains, great bathing establishments 
 were also provided for the people, but these were of course 
 under cover in buildings, and I am now sketching merely 
 the out-of-door aspects of an ancient city. And so next 
 must be mentioned the public squares or forums, ori- 
 ginally intended for markets or political assemblies; but 
 with the passing of popular government into the im- 
 perial system these spaces became the most ornamental 
 parts of a city, surrounded with the finest temples and 
 public buildings. We all, either from photographs or 
 from an 'actual visit, know the Roman forum as a 
 grand but [pitiable ruin; ruinous, too, is the forum of 
 Pompei, an array of broken columns with only the 
 ground floors of the public buildings ranged behind them, 
 and the great destroyer Vesuvius looming in the back- 
 ground over all. But in antiquity such public places 
 were embellished with statues and other works of art 
 — not rude and hideous objects, as are such things too 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 151 
 
 often in our munldpalities, but copies or adaptations 
 of Greek masterpieces, or even those masterpieces 
 themselves, brought by some Roman general or governor 
 from Greek lands to adorn his native town. It is too 
 much the fashion in our times to speak of the Romans 
 as an inartistic people — a fashion perhaps led by the 
 pretended contempt which Cicero, himself really an 
 enthusiastic connoisseur, sometimes expressed when 
 he wished to bring himself down to the level of an igno- 
 rant jury, or by the famous words of Virgil: "Others 
 may mould the bronze to breathe more like nature, 
 and may better hew the marble into forms that live, 
 but, Roman, thou hast the ruling of men, — this shall 
 be thy art, and to impose the habits of peace, to spare 
 the vanquished and to trample on the proud." Perhaps 
 indeed no real Roman ever became a great artist, but 
 certainly the Romans as a people were great lovers of 
 art and collectors of artistic work. Though they had no 
 actual museums of fine arts and no permanent exhibi- 
 tions in our sense of the word, yet many private houses 
 were all but museums and, to a certain extent, were open 
 to the public. Temporary exhibitions were held out of 
 doors on the occasions of public festivals, and the offi- 
 cial who presided over the festival would often borrow 
 works of art from his friends to swell his own collec- 
 tion. Collections such as we find mentioned in Cicero's 
 letters and in Pliny's Natural History are not made ex- 
 cept in a country where there is real love of art. And we 
 
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152 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 find evidence of this love in small towns as well as in 
 Rome. It has been observed that the large number of 
 artistic objects found in little Pompei alone would 
 be perhaps impossible to parallel in any such small and 
 unimportant community at the present day. And when 
 we enter a modem gallery of antiquities, as for in- 
 stance the Capitoline Museum in Rome, let us not for- 
 get how little we should know to-day about the history 
 of Greek art if it were not for Latin writers, or of the 
 actual appearance of Greek masterpieces if it were not 
 for Roman copyists and collectors. 
 
 Walking about in a Roman city one would pass under 
 numerous triumphal arches, stroll through colonnades 
 built for protection against the sun or for shelter in 
 rainy weather, note the shrines of divinities at comers 
 and elsewhere along the streets, and see certainly as 
 many temples as there are churches in a modern city. 
 One might pass a theatre or two, and perhaps an amphi- 
 theatre for gladiatorial shows or a circus for horse races, 
 though these latter buildings would probably lie outside 
 the city wall. Finally, one would observe that the 
 houses were built in blocks and were set flush with the 
 streets, that is, without intervening grass plots or veran- 
 das, and generally without flights of front steps, — 
 never with high flights of steps leading up to the doors, 
 as in some of our city blocks. Some few houses would 
 display columned vestibules, but these were the houses 
 of the great men of the city. The material of which the 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 153 
 
 houses were built was perhaps never wood, but either 
 stone or concrete faced with brick, and the outer sur- 
 face of the walls was usually covered with stucco. On 
 the ground floor there were ordinarily no windows; 
 Roman ideas of privacy within one's own walls forbade 
 such openings. Sometimes the ground floor in the front 
 part of the house was rented out for shops, as it so often 
 is in the old Italian palaces to-day; in this case, the 
 whole front of the shop lay open in the daytime and 
 was closed by huge shutters at night. The principal 
 street in Herculaneum, so far as that city has been ex- 
 cavated, and many of the Pompeian streets, afford us 
 examples of such shops in the fore parts of private dwell- 
 ings. If there were no shop on the ground floor, the wall 
 would probably be blank except for the front door. In 
 the upper stories a few small and narrow windows might 
 be seen, — mere slits for the admission of light and air ; 
 window glass did not begin to come into use until 
 towards the end of the period which I have in mind. The 
 real openings of the rooms of a Roman house were not 
 upon the street, but upon the central court round which 
 the house was built. Houses had usually two stories, 
 and occasionally a balcony with small windows in it 
 overhung the street. Every visitor to Pompei will re- 
 call the "house of the balcony" there. The elaborate 
 frescoes discovered in a villa at Boscoreale on the slope 
 of Vesuvius and now exhibited in the Metropolitan 
 Museum in New York, show us houses with such bal- 
 
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154 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 conies and apparently with more than two stories, but 
 it is possible that the artist meant to represent several 
 houses rising above one another on the side of a hill. 
 We know, however, from Cicero and from Vitruvius 
 that there were apartment or lodging houses of consid- 
 erable height and many stories in the city of Rome; 
 where the large population and the comparatively 
 limited space made such devices necessary. And various 
 laws to limit the height of these buildings were passed 
 under the early emperors. 
 
 As one looked about him in the streets of a Roman 
 city, undoubtedly the number of people visible there 
 would be great. It is probable that no artery of trade 
 in our largest cities is more crowded with people than 
 were the streets of ancient Rome. This was because 
 the Romans lived their life — even their private and 
 social life — so much more out of doors than is the case 
 in our country. To this day, the street in Rome called 
 the Corso is spoken of as the only real club in town, 
 and as many calls are paid at the doors of carriages on 
 the Pincian Hill as at the doors of palaces beneath it. 
 But in antiquity very few carriages or vehicles of any 
 sort were to be seen in the daytime in the streets of a 
 city. In Rome itself no private vehicles were allowed 
 in the streets during the first ten hours of daylight. 
 Almost the only vehicles permitted to use the streets 
 by day were those which were driven in State proces- 
 sions or employed to carry material needed in the con- 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 155 
 
 struction of public buildings, or for other public pur- 
 poses; private transport had to be done at night, and 
 of driving for pleasure there was none within city 
 walls. One might see highborn ladies or infirm old men 
 going about in litters borne by slaves, but as a rule 
 people walked ; they had not lost the use of their legs, 
 they were not in the hurry in which we live, and they 
 had no problems of "rapid transit" to solve. The 
 streets, however, were crowded with people on foot, 
 engaged in the manifold occupations or pursuits of plea- 
 sure in which a Roman spent his day, and noise and con- 
 fusion reigned in them. The shopkeepers and peddlers 
 were among the chief causes of the din. The former 
 pushed their counters, as the poet Martial complains, 
 far beyond the proper limits of their shops in order to 
 attract the attention of the passer-by, while the latter 
 cried their wares incessantly from sunrise until long 
 after darkness had come. There were the sausage men, 
 the cake sellers, the sweetmeat venders, the hawkers of 
 hot peasoup and cold fresh water, the old rags and rugs 
 and bedclothes men, the figman, the man who peddled 
 sulphur-tipped sticks as slowmatches, exchanging them 
 for broken glass, — all these and others of the same class 
 bawling their wares each in his own peculiar chant,the 
 actual words as unintelligible as are the words of our 
 old rag-and-bottle man to-day, but the intonation mak- 
 ing the cry intelligible to the elect. Besides those who 
 carried their wares on their backs and the shopkeepers 
 
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156 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 who sold their goods over counters, there was a third 
 class of dealers who set up tables temporarily here and 
 there in convenient spots. Such, for instance, were the 
 money changers, and the gold and bronze beaters of 
 whom Martial speaks. These were like the men who 
 sold and bought doves and changed money in the en- 
 closure of the temple in Jerusalem, or like the retailers 
 who are represented in a well-known series of pictures 
 found in Pompei, which represent scenes in the forum 
 of that little city. Here we see a baker, selling bread 
 and cakes, dealers in pottery for household purposes, 
 and ladies bargaining with other dealers for gowns. 
 There sits an old fellowwho has fallen asleep at his table, 
 on which birds and fish seem to be exposed for sale; 
 a gentleman behind him is poking him to wake him up 
 to attend to customers. Next comes a man selling shoes 
 to four ladies, one of whom carries her child. And 
 farther on is a group of men who are perhaps taking 
 their morning drink from a wine-seller. In Rome, many 
 such dealers had stalls in the arches of the great Circus, 
 or set up booths in open squares wherever their presence 
 was tolerated. We can get a good idea of the character 
 of such booths from details in the foreground of another 
 well-known Pompeian picture, — that which represents 
 the fatal riot which arose on one occasion during an 
 exhibition in the amphitheatre of Pompei. This is but 
 a rough sketch of the building itself with only hints of 
 what took place, — mere samples of the crowd and the 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 157 
 
 surrounding objects, and so the booths in the fore- 
 ground are doubtless only specimens of those which 
 filled the open space about the amphitheatre, like the 
 "sideshows" surrounding the tent of a modem circus. 
 We see two distinct types: a shed, and a much simpler 
 structure consisting of a huge square of cloth supported 
 at the four corners by poles. Such booths were not con- 
 fined to the vicinity of amphitheatres, but were to be 
 seen throughout the streets of ancient Roman cities. 
 And in front of them, as well as in front of the more 
 permanent shops, another element of noise was to be 
 seen and heard, — a man employed like the modern 
 "barker" in front of cheap stores on the Bowery, to cry 
 the wares that were for sale and to lure customers to 
 enter and purchase. Such a man would pretty certainly 
 be employed by the jugglers and other vaudeville per- 
 formers who seem to have plied their trades in the streets, 
 at least in early days. Thus we are told that one of the 
 comedies of Terence was a failure because the audience 
 rushed out of the theatre to see a rope dancer in the 
 street. At a later time the jugglers, tightrope walkers, 
 tumblers, and balancers, often gave their exhibitions 
 in theatres or at private dinner-parties; but still there 
 were many who had no permanent place of business, 
 such as snake charmers, exhibitors of trained animals or 
 birds, and various sorts of athletes. 
 
 Beggars, also, swarmed in the streets of ancient cities, 
 just as until recently they swarmed in modern Rome. 
 
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158 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 The kind of beggar most frequently mentioned by the 
 satiric poets is the whining victim of shipwreck, — 
 Martial's naufragus loquax, — who carried about with 
 him, in support of his claims, a bit of board on which the 
 scene of the wreck was rudely painted. The same sort 
 of emblem still survives with us in the pictures which we 
 sometimes see on the top of wheezy little hand-organs, 
 ground in our streets by self-styled victims of war or 
 accident. The typical Roman beggar had a long beard, 
 wore only a single garment, carried a staff, a scrip, 
 and a scrap of matting on which to crouch, and was 
 attended by a cross dog. His favorite haunts were the 
 bridges, the city gates, the steps of public buildings, 
 the forums, and the slopes of hills where people moved 
 only slowly and were thus more exposed to his importun- 
 ity. As the American traveller to-day whizzes in his 
 motor-car up or down the hill between Albano and 
 Ariccia, he passes unannoyed (butnotuncursed) through 
 the spot to which Juvenal alludes when he speaks of the 
 "horrid blind flatterer that begs beside carriage wheels 
 on the Ariccian hill and throws kisses after the car- 
 riage on its way down." 
 
 But we are getting outside of our city streets. Chil- 
 dren abounded in them in the old days as now, playing 
 their games with one another or tormenting the stran- 
 ger. Here Horace saw a troop of urchins following and 
 tormenting a half-crazy poet; there a gang of impudent 
 street Arabs hustling a poor philosopher and pulling 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 159 
 
 his beard; there again a coin stuck fast to the ground, 
 with a group of grinning youngsters half-hidden some- 
 where near, hoping to see an unwary passer stoop and 
 try to pick it up — the same old trick that is still played 
 in modem times. 
 
 Among the more serious obstructions in the streets 
 were the numerous processions, which were often very 
 long and accompanied by a tremendous din from mu- 
 sical instruments, or by the shouts of frenzied worship- 
 pers or the screams of hired mourners. "These funerals 
 with their horns and trumpets meeting in the forum" 
 is Horace's notion of a great noise; it seems a strange 
 one to us who have come to associate silence with such 
 functions. Other processions were composed of fanati- 
 cal priests, or generals in triumph, or trade guilds, like 
 the guild of carpenters which is marching in a Pompeian 
 painting. Then there was the long array of chariots, 
 horses, riders, and strange zmimals which passed through 
 the streets on days when shows were to be held in the 
 circus — the forebear of that which we still see when ' ' the 
 circus" comes to town. An everyday sight was some 
 eminent man or popular politician parading down from 
 his house to the forum, attended by a train of supporters 
 and slaves which formed a little procession in itself, 
 with sneak thieves plying their trade among the crowd 
 that gathered as it went along. Towards nightfall one 
 might meet a merry wedding party escorting the bride on 
 foot to her new home, or a band of gay young fellows bent 
 
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i6o AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 upon a lark. Crowds were also attracted by the public 
 bulletin boards, the only means by which city ordinances 
 and notices of approaching public events could be dis- 
 seminated in the days before bell-ringers and printed 
 newspapers. A good example of the nature and situ- 
 ation of such bulletin boards is still to be seen to-day 
 in what is called the album at Pompei. Here, at the en- 
 trance of one of the streets leading out of the forum, was 
 a public building on the sides of which were twenty-six 
 blank panels set between columns, and on these panels 
 were discovered painted advertisements of public ex- 
 hibitions, houses to let, sales, and other matters of com- 
 mon interest. In one of the Pompeian forum-scenes 
 which I have mentioned, we see men reading notices 
 on boards which ran from column to column of the 
 portico which surrounded the forums. These may have 
 contained edicts of magistrates and new laws. 
 
 Under such conditions with houses built in blocks, 
 and narrow streets filled with shops and thronging with 
 people of every sort, only the excellent system of sewers 
 and waterworks that prevailed in Roman cities pre- 
 vented an indecent and dangerous accumulation of filth 
 in the streets. The lower classes, however, were not 
 always scrupulous regarding the pollution of walls and 
 street corners, and appeals of various kinds had to be 
 made to them. Thus, one might see an inscription upon 
 a temple invoking curses upon the defilers of its walls, 
 and from such defilement, as well as from the scrawling 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY i6i 
 
 of trivial or obscene remarks, the usual method of 
 escape was the painting of the familiar picture of the 
 sacred snake, which made the spot where it was painted 
 sacred to the genius or divine counterpart of it. As 
 for the pavements, streets that sloped were often and 
 easily flushed with water from the city pipes, but level 
 streets or less important lanes frequently suffered from 
 neglect, and the complaints of too much mud is a com- 
 mon one in the Latin authors. We are familiar with it 
 in our own cities, and sometimes one feels tempted to 
 try the Emperor Caligula's method with careless street 
 commissioners. When Vespasian, who later became 
 emperor himself, was only a street commissioner under 
 the Emperor Caligula, the latter, on finding a quantity 
 of mud in a side street, picked up a handful of it and 
 threw it into Vespasian's lap as a reminder in kind of his 
 neglect of duty. 
 
 The pushing crowds in the narrow streets must have 
 been very distasteful to the higher classes of Romans, 
 whose sense of personal dignity was always acute. In 
 fact, allusions in Latin writers show that such person- 
 ages considered themselves rather out of place there. 
 They met each other rather in the great assembly- 
 rooms of the baths, at temples, in libraries, in forums, 
 or in porticoes. In the public porticoes, which often 
 enclosed gardens, there was room for hundreds to walk 
 in freedom from the confusion of the streets. Here were 
 paintings, maps cut in stone, statues, beautiful shrub- 
 
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162 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 bery, shade from the sun in summer and protection 
 from the wind in winter, cool fountains and fragrant 
 flowers. In such places one would see more of the pur- 
 ple and crimson and brilliant white used in the clothing 
 of the higher classes and of officialdom; but in the ordi- 
 nary streets, color was as lacking as it is with us, — the 
 dirty togas of the poor and the dingy or brownish cloaks 
 and tunics of the working classes predominating there. 
 But what would be the appearance of the people 
 themselves whom we should meet in a Roman city? 
 Slaves of course would be there, brought from every 
 outer nation and of every variety of mien and complexion . 
 The citizens, however, would be more of one type, — 
 spare and short, most of them, except in the north of 
 Italy;- for the average height of Romans was probably 
 about five feet and five inches; — their hair black and 
 crisp, usually merely combed forward over the head 
 so that the forehead looked narrow; for a narrow fore- 
 head was to the Greeks and Romans a mark of beauty ; 
 — with their faces closely shaven during the whole of the 
 period of which I am thinking, though in the earlier 
 time they wore full beards. And so in the famous 
 bronze head of Brutus, the expeller of the kings, we see 
 him barhatus, "bearded." Of course this is not a con- 
 temporary portrait, for no such work could have been 
 done in Rome when that Brutus was alive; but it was 
 executed at least two centuries and a half before the 
 Christian era, and it represented what people in those 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 163 
 
 days thought that this ancient Roman looked like. It 
 is an attempt to represent a definite individual, not a 
 conventionalized type; none of the sternness and 
 harshness associated in story with his character is 
 smoothed away; no unimpassioned blandness is foisted 
 upon this father of his country; he is distinctly ugly 
 even to his disproportionately large ears. And as one 
 examines other portraits of Romans, one sees that big 
 ears must have been a characteristic of the race. One 
 sees, also, how the individuality in these portraits 
 stamps them in their realism as something quite apart 
 from the work done by the Greeks, who do not seem to 
 have cared for realism in this department of art. But 
 to return to shaven faces: the earliest Roman of whom 
 it is recorded that he shaved every day was Scipio 
 Africanus, who flourished about two hundred years 
 before the birth of Christ. From that time and through- 
 out the period of which I write, it was the Roman cus- 
 tom to wear no beard at all. The youth let the hair 
 grow on his face till his first shaving, which was a sort 
 of solemnity, the beard being cut off and dedicated to 
 some god. There was no special year for this formality. 
 Augustus postponed it until he was twenty-four years 
 of age, when he was already married and a member of 
 the Second Triumvirate. The famous bust in the Vati- 
 can, called "the Young Augustus," may therefore re- 
 present his appearance just after this time; for good 
 judges have remarked that this beautiful portrait has in 
 
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i64 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 it little of the real freshness of youth; it is not Augustus 
 as a boy, if he ever was a real boy, but it shows how 
 early he began to do the work of a man in the world ; 
 for he was only twenty when he joined Antony and 
 Lepidus in the Triumvirate, euid therefore had not yet 
 begun to shave. Still, it is probable that the usual time 
 for the first shaving was between the ages of eighteen 
 and twenty, after which no Roman of standing wore 
 any hair on his face, except that young men of fashion 
 sometimes wore short whiskers on their cheeks. No 
 Roman ever wore the moustache alone; this was a 
 Celtic custom. Of course, however, we must remember 
 that the lower and poorer orders of the people were 
 not always able to follow the fashion of shaving; they 
 could not always afford to pay the barber, and so 
 Agrippa, son-in-law and minister of Augustus, when 
 he gave his first public spectacles, hired all the barbers 
 in Rome for the occasion to shave the poor, free of 
 charge, for several days. Hadrian, the first emperor 
 after our period ends, revived the custom of wearing 
 the beard, led to it, we are told, on account of scars upon 
 his face. The courtiers first and society afterwards natur- 
 ally followed the emperor, and the full beard held sway 
 once more for nearly two centuries, until Constantino 
 the Great brought smooth faces into vogue again. Im- 
 perial fashions of this sort seem to have a strange attrac- 
 tion ; thus, forty years ago the long waxed moustache and 
 "imperial" of Napoleon III led the fashion on the con- 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 165 
 
 tinent, and within recent times the upturned moustache 
 of the German Emperor finds many to imitate it. But 
 with us and in Englemd to-day the smooth face is in 
 favor, especially with the younger generation; the 
 youth no longer yearns for a moustache, and to wear one 
 is coming to be the mark of an old-fashioned man. Such 
 details are not altogether trivial matters, undeserving 
 of the attention of the antiquarian; for a knowledge of 
 these fashions at different periods helps him in the iden- 
 tification of portraits which have come down from an- 
 tiquity. And in other unexpected ways it may help 
 him. Thus, the modem investigators of the history of 
 horseshoes, who believed that a Roman relief at Avig- 
 non, representing a carriage and horses, was executed 
 in the time of Julius Caesar, did not know that the 
 bearded bust at the top of the monument (which he, 
 omitted in publishing his sketch) showed that the work 
 was at least as late as the time of Hadrian. A gentle- 
 man with a beard would have been as surprising a pheno- 
 menon in Julius Caesar's day as in the day of George 
 Washington. The long procession which passed through 
 the streets of Rome on the occasion of the dedication of 
 the A ra Pacts by Augustus was composed of smooth-faced 
 men ; not one of the many personages in it, whom we may 
 still see represented in the reliefs which adorned the 
 altar, has a beard or moustache. 
 
 But we must not be so ungallant as to forget the 
 women whom we should meet in the streets of a Roman 
 
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i66 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 city, for the Roman women were not confined to their 
 homes nor closely veiled in Oriental fashion when they 
 walked abroad. They went^out freely, those of the 
 higher classes attended by one or more slaves ; and fres- 
 coes show that they were as fond of shopping as are their 
 sisters to-day. Their figures were often noble, and they 
 had been taught in youth to move with grace and dig- 
 nity; we should see, therefore, none of the tottering 
 which is due to modem tight boots and high heels, or of 
 that awkward dash, accompanied by masculine swinging 
 of the arms which is affected by the present school of 
 athletic women. We are all familiar, from works of 
 art, with the simple, classic fashion of their dress; but 
 we know also that all the fabrics of Italian, Greek, and 
 Oriental looms were employed in it, and that in vari- 
 ety of colors, even in the streets by day, it could not 
 be surpassed by any that we now see women wear at 
 evening parties. In jewelry, too, nothing is produced 
 by modem artists that exceeds in beauty or mere intrin- 
 sic value that which Roman women loved and wore. 
 And no modern belle has greater skill in the more myste- 
 rious arts of the toilet, particularly in what concerns the 
 "make-up " of the face. A whole street in Capua was 
 given up to dealers who were as famous for their 
 "beautifiers" as is any Parisian house of to-day. When 
 out of doors, women generally drew a small covering 
 over the top of the head, but not so as to hide the face 
 or altogether to conceal the fashion in which the hair 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 167 
 
 was dressed. The antiquarian or collector can no more 
 afford to overlook changes of style in the hair of women 
 than in the beard of men. Here, naturally, no one 
 fashion lasted very long and there was a greater variety 
 in fashions, but we hear nothing of "short-haired" 
 women at any time among the Romans, nor do we see 
 any such creatures in their works of art. And the dia- 
 dem-like arrangement over the brow, called the orbis, 
 was a wondrous structure, as little known under the 
 Roman Republic or the first half-century of the Em- 
 pire, as the "pompadour" and "rat" of to-day were 
 known twenty years ago. The orbis is excellently repre- 
 sented on a gem containing a portrait of the daughter 
 of the Emperor Titus, towards the end of our period. 
 It is that "broidered hair" and that "outward adorning 
 of plaiting of the hair" against which St. Paul and 
 St. Peter, who saw the fashion coming in, warned the 
 Christian women of their day. 
 
 But to go back into the reign of Augustus, the con- 
 temporary poet Ovid says that there were in his time 
 as many ways in which ladies arranged their hair as 
 there were acorns on the oak tree or bees on Mount 
 Hybla. The whole passage in the third book of his 
 Art of Love is worth reading, as showing how, in the 
 opinion of this connoisseur, the hair should be dressed 
 to suit the shape of the face, and not so as to follow any 
 fashion blindly. Ovid, however, was writing for the 
 gayer element in society, rather for those who depended 
 
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i68 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 upon personal adornment for their powers of attraction 
 than upon rank and family. Women of rank, if we may 
 judge from their portraits, dressed their hair simply in the 
 times of the Republic and of the early emperors. Some- 
 times we see the hair parted in the middle, waving nat- 
 urally at the sides, and gathered up into a short plait 
 at the back of the head. Then a little later appears a 
 "twist" of hair extending from the forehead back to 
 the crown and thence down the back of the head to the 
 nape of the neck, where there was a small knot. We 
 have portraits of the Empress Livia, wife of Augustus, 
 with her hair done in this fashion, and of Octavia, sister 
 of Augustus and wife of Mark Antony, as well as of 
 his earlier wife, the bloodthirsty Fulvia, whom perhaps 
 we think of most often as responsible for the killing 
 of Cicero. Gradually the arrangement became more and 
 more artificial, with curls and ringlets in front and plaits 
 behind, until it reaches the elaborate orbis which I have 
 already described. Such a structure must have been 
 exceedingly uncomfortable, but what will women not 
 endure for fashion's sake? Almost as much as men, the 
 discomfort of whose present costumes in our summers 
 and "beaver" hats in winter has probably never been 
 surpassed in the history of dress. 
 
 But to return to the faces which one might see in 
 the streets of a Roman city, — among them might 
 be those of the princes and princesses, of the great 
 literary men, or of eminent statesmen and famous gen- 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 169 
 
 erals of those days, — of Caesar, for instance, whose 
 portrait upon a certain contemporary coin I confess I 
 prefer to any of the marble busts of him that are now ex- 
 tant. If there is anything in the study of physiognomy, 
 who would not prophesy victory to that strong, nervous 
 face when the man came into competition with Pompey, 
 — with Pompey as we know him now from the bust 
 in Copenhagen, and not from the Spada statue in Rome 
 which a mistaken tradition so long asserted to be that 
 at whose feet ' ' great Caesar fell . " But everybody knows 
 the features of men like these, for our museums abound 
 in casts and photographs of them; with the ordinary, 
 everyday citizens all are not so familiar, yet I admit 
 that I am interested at least as much in their portrait- 
 ure as in that of the great men. For instance, in the 
 museum of Naples one sees Jucundus, the Pompeian; 
 the bronze bust of him, which once stood in his own house, 
 is one's ideal of the luxurious and prosperous broker and 
 small banker, and the account books found in his house 
 show that such indeed was his station in life. Near 
 Jucundus is another bronze head, thought to be that of 
 the Pompeian actor Norbanus Sorex, who also held 
 a municipal office; even without our knowledge that 
 tragedy was as dead in his day as in ours, we might 
 safely wager that his part was not "through pity and 
 fear to purge the soul of those emotions." And in 
 the Louvre is a nameless face, the detachable ornament 
 of a silver plate found among the Boscoreale treasure 
 
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170 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 just outside of Pompei, a bust less than four inches in 
 height, but excellent in its details and obviously a por- 
 trait. One notes the wrenched features, the result, per- 
 haps, of some disease, which produce the semblance of 
 an everlasting mocking smile, the close cropped hair, 
 and the huge ears which were typical of Romans. Then 
 there is the old fellow who was found in the house at 
 Boscoreale, lying not far from the treasure itself; per- 
 haps he was the owner of it ; but he is forever nameless, 
 and what one sees now is only a cast made from the 
 cavity left in the ashes where his body wasted away. 
 In its poor remains, the head bears a curious resemblance 
 to that of the street commissioner into whose lap 
 Caligula threw the mud, and who himself became the 
 Emperor Vespasian, — the honest and upright Sabine 
 whose social reforms made as great a change for a 
 time in court circles as was made in England by Queen 
 Victoria and Prince Albert. The square-headed Ves- 
 pasian reigned towards the end of our period. Going 
 back into the time of the Republic, we find in the Vatican 
 the portrait of one Septumius, — just who and what he 
 was, we know not at all, but his portrait recalls all that 
 we associate with the strenuousness, keenness and nar- 
 rowness of a Cato or of a genuine New England Yankee 
 of the old type. On the other hand, we have a unique 
 terra cotta in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts than 
 which, as regards mere workmanship, nothing better 
 in the way of ancient portraiture is to be found any- 
 
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AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 171 
 
 where in the world nor anything which can help us to 
 a better conception of the face of an enlightened Roman 
 of the higher classes in the Augustan age. Finally, a 
 tombstone in the Vatican exhibits a husband and wife 
 of the early imperial period. Helbig, one of the greatest 
 authorities on ancient art, believes that this work repre- 
 sents a typical Roman couple of the middle classes and 
 of native stock. The husband, he says, with his clear- 
 cut and wrinkled face looks like an industrious and pru- 
 dent head of a household; one would hardly ascribe 
 either poetic impulses or artistic tastes to such a man. 
 In contrast with his distinctly marked individuality, 
 the wife, who looks much younger, seems quite insig- 
 nificant; one might guess that she was a virtuous wife 
 and a diligent housekeeper, but some would interpret 
 her expression as denoting shy reserve, others as down- 
 right dulness. Nobody, however, would fancy that she 
 was an entertaining woman, or likely to be stimulative 
 in her ideas. These two different characters in man and 
 wife, Helbig goes on to say, are not peculiar to this one 
 pair, but appear in many other nameless portraits of 
 the early Empire, so that it seems that the primitive 
 Roman characteristics often maintained themselves 
 in the middle classes in spite of all the influences of 
 Greek culture upon Rome. 
 
 Such, then, were some of the outer aspects of an 
 ancient Roman city, and such were some of the faces 
 that we might have met in its streets. Different in 
 
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172 AN ANCIENT ROMAN CITY 
 
 many particulars from what is found in modern cities, 
 yet in many others surprisingly like what one finds in 
 them to-day, together they teach of the changes that 
 come with advance in civilization and of the sameness 
 which, in spite of what we call progress, is still to be 
 observed in all that human beings do and suffer. 
 
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VI 
 
 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 By CHARLES P. PARKER 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 Plato does not find favor with pragmatists. His 
 genius they may admire; but the harm he has done 
 to philosophic thought makes that genius simply bane- 
 ful in their eyes. Just when the influence of Protagoras 
 was guiding the young men of Hellas into sciehce and 
 humanism, just when the early investigators of scien- 
 tific truth were finding in the martyred Protagoras a 
 prophet, who inspired them to progressive study, and 
 taught them to verify theories by human experience, — 
 Plato's star appeared, and drew to itself the eyes and 
 minds of men, away from the experience of life to an 
 unreal region of thought. [General ideas, the concepts 
 formed by men to assist their inquiries, were canonized 
 by Plato and were looked on as unchangeable truths^ 
 Meantime Protagoras, who always fashioned and fresh- 
 ened his thinking out of human life, had been misun- 
 derstood by contemporaries, driven from Athens, and 
 drowned in the restless sea; and now, being misre- 
 presented by Plato, when the world was just ready to 
 understand him, was ruined as an influence for centuries. 
 Plato thus appears to have been a fascinating leader 
 of the unwary, drawing them by his magic music away 
 from home-truths into mountains of perplexity and 
 vicious intellectualism. Obviously a magician so potent 
 
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176 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 as this deserves study, that we may learn the secret of 
 his error, and save men at last from their long mistake. 
 
 The pragmatists have explained very clearly the 
 nature of the mistake. They tell us that [Plato sup- 
 poses the concept to be itself the reality, and thinks 
 that by handling concepts alone, without verifying 
 and correcting them by constant reference to particular 
 facts, we can attain truth. The right use of concepts, 
 they say, is instrumental; their truth and value lie in 
 their being instruments, by which we control the world 
 and save ourselves from being lost in the rushing stream 
 of our individual sensationsj "Any idea," says Pro- 
 fessor James, "upon which we can ride so to speak; 
 any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one 
 part of our experience to any other part, linking things 
 satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving 
 labor, is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true 
 instrumentally." 
 
 This instrumental view of an idea, as something on 
 which we can ride, may oddly enough be very prettily 
 paralleled and illustrated out of Plato's Phaedo. In 
 that dialogue Simmias suggests that to know the clear 
 truth about the soul is in this life something impossible 
 or utterly difficult; but that if one cannot learn or 
 discover the way of it he ought to take the best of human 
 reasons, the hardest to refute, and riding on this as on 
 an extemporized boat, sail through life at his own risk, 
 unless one should be able to make the voyage by the 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 177 
 
 securer vehicle of a divine reason. And the illustration 
 is all the prettier, when one remembers how Plato uses 
 in this dialogue the word "Koym, here translated "reason." 
 He tells us that he was perplexed by looking at the 
 things, tA irpdyfiara (the pragmatist's world of experi- 
 ence), and therefore decided that he must take refuge 
 in reasons, looking in these reasons for the truth of 
 realities. Now to Plato reasons consist largely in the 
 handling of general concepts; and indeed in this im- 
 mediate context of the Phaedo he proceeds to develop 
 some aspects of his doctrine of ideas. For this discus- 
 sion he might seem to have prepared us in the earlier 
 words of Simmias, by the suggestion that reasoning 
 with general ideas may be a practical method of sail- 
 ing through the perplexities of life, saving us from death 
 by drowning in the swirling sea of sensations, even 
 though the idea may not be known to be eternally true, 
 Plato himself may perhaps think that he has found the 
 safe divine reason; but to us he seems to say, "Try my 
 ideas pragmatically, even if you cannot see your way to 
 accepting them as the ultimate truth. They will carry 
 you through the confusion of the world ; they are at 
 least true in so far forth, true instrumentally." So 
 aptly does the illustration harmonize with our modern 
 pragmatic view that one might be tempted to suspect 
 that Plato had here utilized a passage out of the now 
 lost book of Protagoras on truth. In such a suspicion 
 we should simply, like other modems, be building up 
 
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178 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 our view of Protagoras out of hints in Plato, aided by 
 a cautious use of our own imagination. But at any 
 rate Plato realizes that there may be human reasonings 
 of great practical value, even when they are not abso- 
 lutely coercive. He encourages us to search for such 
 reasons; he warns us not to become misological when 
 logic fails us, as men may become misanthropical when 
 often betrayed by men. Thanking Plato then (or pos- 
 sibly his source Protagoras) for the excellent simile of 
 riding in safety on an idea, the simile which Professor 
 James afterwards thought out for himself and used so 
 aptly in his own way, we feel drawn to explore the Phaedo 
 and other dialogues a little further, that we may dis- 
 cover if possible the real danger of the restless sea of 
 sensations from which both Plato and pragmatism, in 
 unexpected temporary alliance, desire to save us. 
 
 In the Phaedo the difficulty seems to be bewilderment 
 about causation. The experiences of the physical world 
 come trooping along, pleasant and painful, beautiful and 
 ugly, good and bad, great and little, single and double, 
 hot and cold, odd and even, living and dead. They 
 seem bound up together by strange laws of alternation ; 
 but the mind cannot conceive how in any way they 
 cause each other, or how a world of such change and 
 alternation can be caused at all. Yet we do at least 
 find amid the confusion certain thoughts that are 
 clearly distinguished from every other thought; each 
 kind of thought is present from time to time in the pro- 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 179 
 
 cess of the world. Beauty, goodness, greatness, unity, 
 heat, life are ideas distinct from ugliness, badness, 
 littleness, duality, cold, death. We may say that a 
 thing is now hot and now cold, now good and now bad, 
 great in one way and little in another, two in one re- 
 spect and one in another. But however the individual 
 things may change, the ideas are distinct, — and by 
 having the idea of heat in it a thing seems hot, by hav- 
 ing the idea of greatness it seems great, by having the 
 idea of beauty it is beautiful. So too there are some 
 things that require a certain idea in them for their very 
 existence; a fire is not a fire without heat, seven is not 
 seven without unevenness, a soul is not a soul without 
 life. "Clear up your ideas," Plato seems to say to us, 
 "if you want to handle this perplexing world. Do not 
 say heat is cold, beauty is ugly, goodness is bad. The 
 world of sensations will drown you, if you cannot tell 
 one kind of experience from another, if you have no 
 general ideas." 
 
 Plato had tried to contemplate the processes of the 
 world directly, and had found them utterly bewildering. 
 "I became wearied out," he says, "in looking at reali- 
 ties (tA ovto) ; and I thought I must take care not to 
 be dazzled and blinded by looking directly at the sun 
 of truth. I thought my soul might lose its sight by try- 
 ing to use eyes and other organs of sense in gazing at 
 the things (t^ •n-pdyfiara) . I judged that I must take re- 
 fuge in rational thoughts Q^oi), and consider in them 
 
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i8o PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 the truth of realities." Ideas therefore were his refuge, 
 his second best means of voyaging. The passage is 
 thoroughly pragmatic. His ideas keep his thoughts 
 clear, and enable him somehow to handle the world. 
 In particular in this dialogue he comes through with 
 the thought of the soul as a thing whose essence is life, 
 a most practical thought which gives us the soul as the 
 centre of our very being, and which sends us into life 
 determined to keep this source and spring of all our 
 life pure and free, a pragmatic belief which carries us 
 into the world as conquerors, and changes the course 
 of events. Protagoras himself could have asked nothing 
 better and truer for the world. Plato almost seems to 
 be under the influence of Protagoras, were it not that 
 one element in the dialogue points in another direction. 
 We must look sharply in this direction, to see if Plato's 
 error may not be here. In the very passage in which 
 Plato tells of his second best way of voyaging to seek 
 the cause of the universe, in the very context where he 
 says that he takes refuge in rational thoughts, and seems 
 to imply that reasons are a mere reflection of reality, 
 he adds: "Perhaps in one way my parable is unlike that 
 of which it is a parable. I do not at all admit that a man 
 who studies realities in rational thoughts sees them in 
 an imaged likeness any more than he who studies them 
 in the facts." The facts and works of the world, he 
 seems to say, may be a mere reflection of realities as 
 much as reasonings are. He even seems to suggest that 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM i8i 
 
 the realities may prove to be rational. If such a doc- 
 trine be contrary to pragmatism, the line of diver- 
 gence between Protagoras and Plato may be here. But 
 one would hesitate to say that pragmatism denies the 
 rationality of the universe; it merely puts us on our 
 guard against thinking that our general ideas are the 
 reality. They must be in some sense at least a mirrored 
 image of reality when they guide us safely through the 
 real world ; and this is all that Plato claims for them. 
 He does suggest that the working world of eyes and 
 Ccurs may also be a mere likeness of the real ; but surely 
 pragmatism does not insist on the valid truth of the 
 sensational report. Schiller's Protagoras will not admit 
 that, in saying "Man is the measure of all things," he 
 means that truth is individual sensation. Of course such 
 sensation is in one sense true; but objective truth is 
 only that individual perception which has established 
 its claim to validity by working. Let a man try to find 
 his way through' the world by trusting his immediate 
 sensations without criticism, and he will come to grief. 
 What Schiller distinguishes as claim and validity, 
 Plato may intend by speaking of image and reality. 
 There is a difference of tone somehow, but not enough 
 to show a clear line of distinction between Plato and 
 pragmatism. Surely this is puzzling and perplexing, 
 that on pur first approach to Plato we find such an 
 appearance of partial agreement with Protagoras and 
 Neo-Protagoreans. But Plato may have written the 
 
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l82 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 Phaedo when partly under the influence of Protagoras 
 and therefore unwilling to speak with too dogmatic a 
 tone. We shall do wisely if we turn to another dialogue 
 where the presence of such influence cannot be expected. 
 Disconcerted by finding so modest and provisional a 
 tone in the Phaedo we take in hand the Republic, hoping 
 to find there a clearer line of demarcation from prag- 
 matism. That difference of tone which we felt in the 
 Phaedo, that greater trust in ideas than in sensations 
 may take in the Republic more definite form, and reveal 
 Plato's error. 
 
 But there is one characteristic of the Republic which 
 we must notice before allowing ourselves to rely too 
 much on any one section of it as Plato's final statement 
 of truth. In it Plato the magician gives us a series of 
 pictures which fade and vanish one into the other, 
 each new picture retaining something of the old scene, 
 but in such new connection that the whole effect is 
 different. At any one stage you find the Platonic 
 Socrates discussing quite seriously the commonwealth 
 as if it were stable in its present form. But the city of 
 cheerful animal-like men gathered round their perpetual 
 picnic fire, baking great cakes, roasting their nuts at 
 the fire, and drinking their wine, as they rest from their 
 weaving and cobbling and farming, — soon changes 
 under criticism into a city fevered with luxury, loving 
 art, making war, and restlessly seeking happiness 
 amid "diseases and accomplishments and sins." Soon 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 183 
 
 again, however, the luxurious city in developing its 
 trained warriors and equipping them for their work of 
 guarding the city, casts out as baneful all dissolute 
 art, even all unrestrained thinking, and finds itself 
 under the control of an educator who fills it with an 
 austere Doric beauty, making it a kind of glorified 
 Sparta. And this third city changes somehow into a 
 great communistic family where women are honored 
 and educated as no Greek city ever honored or educated 
 them, but where all the strength and charm of family 
 life as real men have known it is unsuccessfully merged 
 in a vain attempt to make all nobler citizens feel like 
 brothers and sisters to their equals in age, like children 
 to their elders. This communistic city in turn develops 
 a class of philosophers who color the whole picture with 
 a tone of high thinking and soon present to us a new 
 town, which depends wholly on the search for ideas and 
 the verification of them. Finally the external city, 
 failing to realize itself in this work-a-day world, is ab- 
 sorbed into the soul of the philosopher, and becomes a 
 spiritual city, an ideal in him and in us. With such a 
 shifting growing presentation of theories in this work 
 of Plato, we may not dare to detain our attention with 
 the theories of the fifth book on the nature of ideas. 
 
 In that book we do have the ideas presented as the 
 reality, the object of knowledge; while there is a world 
 of opinion which rolls between reality and unreality. 
 The particular things, which we suppose we see and 
 
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i84 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 hear, at one time have a given idea in them, at another 
 time have not. Shifting glimpses now of this real idea 
 and now of that we do get. We are not mistaken when 
 we feel that there is a kind of reaUty in the world of eyes 
 and ears; but the real thought escapes the eye which 
 tries to seize it, and a contrary thought appears in its . 
 place, itself soon to fade. All this line of thought is of 
 course far enough away from Protagoras and his friends, 
 
 iivho are constantly refreshing themselves from the 
 iivorld of sensation and testing their ideas thereby. In 
 
 ■jkhis book the idea does seem to be canonized and 
 treated as the real permanent essence. But presto! 
 change! behold in ithe sixth book these ideas as held 
 by us and by most men are seen to be mere hy- 
 potheses which require verification. Indeed if one 
 reflects upon the matter Plato seems in many dia- 
 logues to build up his general ideas out of the facts of 
 this world with which our senses deal ; and the general 
 idea, suggested by the soul which looks at the world, 
 is often tested by comparison with new facts and re- 
 jected because it does not explain them. Nothing is 
 commoner in Plato than the rejection of one definition 
 after another, and the ending of a talk with an unsatis- 
 fied longing for some rational account of a whole class 
 of phenomena, such an account as shall explain and 
 include them all; and the purpose of the search is prac- 
 tical, to wit, the guidance of life in days to come. It 
 is the true Socratic method, gathering practical help 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 185 
 
 out of the discussion as it runs through its imperfect 
 definitions, but not attaining a permanent and un- 
 changing truth. Even Schiller admits, under the influ- 
 ence of Stewart, that Plato may not be a complete intel- 
 lectualist. But letting alone the Socratic dialogues, here 
 in the Republic, in the stronghold of dogmatic treat- 
 ment so-called, far away from the Socratic first book, 
 the need of verification for our ideas is insisted upon. 
 They are in themselves mere hypotheses. Whewell 
 himself could not state the matter more clearly. Our 
 understanding does indeed assume and handle the 
 hypotheses with a feeling that it really knows them, 
 but it gives to itself and to others no reason for the as- 
 sumption. It treats them as self-evident, and proceeds 
 with its demonstrations as if they were sure. It has 
 a feeling that we cannot rise higher than these hypo- 
 theses; but this lower section of intellectual life seems 
 to Plato's deeper thought unsatisfactory. No pragma- 
 tist could say more decidedly than he that we have no 
 right to assume the universal validity of the concepts 
 thus grasped by the help of sensation and unverified. 
 
 And the curious thing about Plato's proposed test 
 of the truth of ideas is that he decides on their validity 
 by examining the goodness of them. " If you can find 
 what goodness is," he seems to say, "you will find that 
 every true idea is a good one. Compare it with essen- 
 tial goodness, and if you can demonstrate it to be good 
 you will see that it is thereby true. The presence of 
 
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1 86 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 goodness in the general thought is what makes it true." 
 This is not the method of a logician. One might almost 
 think that he was studying a modem pragmatist, except 
 for a transcendental flavor to the style in those passages 
 of Plato which we have reduced to commonplace. 
 But setting the transcendental flavor aside, what does 
 Plato really say and mean in the sixth book of the 
 Republic unless it be this, — that goodness is the cause, 
 the essence, the test of the validity of ideas? There is 
 no mere logic here. Plato is feeling his way out towards 
 truth, and is pervaded somehow by a conviction that 
 goodness is the final justification of everything. Reason 
 occupies itself, he claims, with seeing that things must 
 be true because they are good. Possibly the pragmatist 
 says rather that things shall be true because they are 
 good; but when he has declared they shall be, he goes 
 on to say that they are; and Plato when sure that a 
 thought is true in itself, proceeds to declare that in our 
 world it shall be. Here is at least some wonderful sym- 
 pathy between Platonic and Protagorean thought. 
 The ultimate appeal to goodness is strong in each of 
 them. But what has the wizard Plato done with this 
 Protagorean doctrine, preventing the world frQm_§eeing_ 
 its real bearing , and substituting his own erroneous 
 point of view for the scientific attitude of Protagoras? 
 Perhaps his transcendental doctrine is the cause of the 
 mischief. He represents ideas as tested not by their 
 goodness in sensation and the world of sensation, but 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 187 
 
 by comparison with a mere thought of goodness, or] 
 by something which is higher than thought or reasoni 
 which refuses to play with sensations but will manifest/ 
 itself only in general ideas as we compare them on* 
 with another. Plato thinks it hard to find reality in thel 
 flux and flow of sights and sounds, of tastes and smellsl 
 and touches. James refers us to the flux and flow for 
 our ultimate instruction. Plunge into the stream of life, 
 the pragmatistsaysto us; there you will find real motion, 
 sensations fading into sensations, life burning and chang- 
 ing, progressing with vital energy, flinging itself with 
 creative power into new and ever new forms. Thought 
 cannot detain or limit it. Conceptual thinking is merely' 
 a way of trying to handle it. l-iyg^nd you shalljrgally^ 
 knoaz^ Thuswise the pragmatist; but what says Plato? 
 Rise above the changing sensations into thoughts that 
 are clear; rise above your own thoughts, for they are 
 inadequate, rise into a world of essential goodness and / 
 beauty, where the sunlight of goodness pervades the 
 bright universe, causing and revealing thoughts be- 
 yond all your present thinking, overflowing with its 
 radiance even into the world of eyes and ears, giving 
 to sights and sounds and fragrances such reality and 
 beauty as they can catch in their passing. 
 
 One must say that here by either path, following 
 James or Plato, one comes into a mystical region, where 
 rational thinking seems to fail us, where life is given 
 as the cause and ground of knowledge. Dive into the 
 
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i88 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 stream of life, says one; fly into the heaven of life says 
 the other. In either case you plunge or you soar (what 
 difference is there anyway between up and down for 
 a metaphysician?) into a region of mystical reality 
 where reason cannot fully follow, but which vivifies 
 reason, and which reason tries to describe. In either 
 case it seems to you splendid and refreshing, and you 
 try to get other people to dive or fly with you ; and you 
 do make the venture seem attractive, though you find 
 it hard to say clearly just why. Is it not possible that 
 Plato and James mean the same thing approached from 
 different points of view? A turbid wild thing the world 
 seems to some ; to Plato its ultimate reality seems beau- 
 tiful and full of peace and a great calm. Are we quite 
 clear in our minds that reality must be essentially 
 restless? Suppose I take the pragmatist-Heraclitean 
 metaphor, and say that when I plunge into the river 
 of life, it takes me up in its great peaceful arms, and 
 bears me along, strongly, quietly, while the trees of 
 life grow on either side of the river, and birds of hea- 
 venly beauty sing glad songs to the rising sun. Am I 
 then no longer a pragmatist? The question is a vital 
 one. Does pragmatism always lead to turmoil, or may 
 it lead to peace? Does Plato's error lie in his deep 
 persuasion that the essence of life is peaceful and perma- 
 nent, that goodness when attained is quiet and restful 
 as well as strong? Pragmatism ought to mean a cer- 
 tain openness of mind; pragmatism ought to use general 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 189 
 
 ideas as helps to life rather than as masters of life; prag- 
 matism ought to be always testing its ideas by the value 
 of them as working instruments of life, that is by the 
 goodness of them; pragmatism ought to be progressive; 
 but pragmatism can hardly deny an instrumental value 
 to ideas which set the soul at peace. If all this is true, 
 Plato begins to look like one of the princes of prag- 
 matism. 
 
 But the impression must be one of Plato's magic il- 
 lusions, to the end that, by seeming to agree with Pro- 
 tagoras in many ways, he may entice the pragmatically 
 minded to leave the great teacher of humanism, and may 
 at last undermine their principles. Pragmatism is, as 
 has been said, progressive; it is a movement, not a 
 frozen dogma; and Plato puts no trust in motion. 
 
 He may not trust motion, but he seems to love it. 
 Full of variety, warmth, and life are the quick-moving 
 thoughts of the dialogues, by which he tries to suggest 
 to us what he conceives reality to be. They are a very 
 inartistic background for his thought if they are par- 
 ables of a real world which is supposed to be frozen 
 forever in mere sculptural and architectural beauty. 
 But Plato's world of reality is no mere abstraction from 
 earth; it is a great idea shining in what he calls "the 
 multitudinous sea of beauty," which a true lover of 
 wisdom learns to contemplate. Sparkling with the energy 
 of some eternal motion the universe must be. Plato 
 approaches its essence in the Phaedo through the idea 
 
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190 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 of life, in the Republic and Timaeus through the motion 
 of stars, in the Symposium and Phaedrus through the 
 idea of love; — a love which in the Phaedrus is mad- 
 dening, bewildering, full of intense activity. A reality 
 which is approached through thoughts of star motion, 
 life, love, and radiant beauty cannot be conceived as 
 a dead thing. And indeed Plato tells us himself clearly 
 in the Republic that there is real motion. "The bright 
 manifold beauties of the sky," he says, "in the visible 
 world, must be considered as the most beautiful and 
 exact of all visible things; but we must believe that they 
 fall far short of the true movements ((f>opd<;) wherewith 
 real swiftness (to ov rdxo<!) and real slowness {v "^o"" 
 ^paSvTr]<;) move in real number and in all true forms, 
 relatively to one another, carrying with them all that 
 they contain. Those movements are to be grasped by 
 reason and understanding, not by sight. We must use 
 the bright manifold beauties of the sky as though they 
 were diagrams drawn by an ancient artist of heroic 
 days, just as a geometrician uses his figures, to lead to 
 thought." Clearly true motion is to Plato's mind an 
 element of thought; the pragmatist cannot claim a 
 monopoly of it if he expels Plato from partnership with 
 pragmatism. And indeed in the Sophist, that great 
 dialogue in which Plato clearly prepares the way for the 
 more fully developed metaphysics of the Timaeus, Plato 
 arguing with Eleatic logic overturns some of the great 
 dogmas of Eleaticism and shows motion, as he shows also 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 191 
 
 otherness, to be essential parts of the universe. One 
 can see the deep feeling wherewith he almost pragmatic- 
 ally insists that logic shall give us a world of life and 
 activity. "Ah, Zeus! Shall we really ever persuade our- 
 selves easily that motion, and life, and soul, and thought 
 are not present with absolute being, that it does not 
 live nor think, but stands solemn and sacred, without 
 thought, immovable? That would be a terrible piece 
 of reasoning to admit. Are we to say it has thought, 
 but not life? Are we to say that thought and life are in 
 it, but that it has them not in soul? In what other 
 manner could it have them? Shall we say it has thought 
 and life and soul but stands altogether unmoved, with 
 a soul in it? All this seems to me irrational. We must 
 admit that motion and the thing moved are realities." 
 Plato will believe in motion. But what is true motion, 
 in his view? What is its relation to those bewildering 
 movements in space, which seem to confuse his mind, 
 which even a modem pragmatism with difficulty can 
 explain? 
 
 The relation of any idea to space is a puzzling thing. 
 In the dialogue Parmenides we can see clearly that the 
 criticism of Plato's doctrine of ideas is made from the 
 point of view of one who cannot conceive of anything 
 except as extended in space. Indeed one suspects that 
 the notion of space is an axiom of the Eleatic philosophy, 
 and that we must conceive of the great Unity of Par- 
 menides as A. W. Benn thinks of it in his book, The 
 
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192 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 Philosophy of Greece, "as something like the dreamy 
 space enclosed between that unislanded sea and that 
 unclouded sky on which the low-lying shore of Elea's 
 neighbour Paestum still looks out." Nearly all Greek 
 philosophers, except perhaps Pythagoreans, seem to take 
 space for granted as a prerequisite or a part of the es- 
 sence of being. At any rate in that vivid dialogue in 
 which Plato admits and emphasizes the criticisms 
 made upon his doctrine of ideas, the thought of space 
 is implied and is used to overthrow the ideas. "If the 
 whole idea is in each particular thing of its kind, then 
 it will be separate from itself " ; as if it would lie extended 
 in space with each particular thing that shared its na- 
 ture. "If it covers a multitude of particulars it will 
 touch each of them with a paft of it, like a sail spread 
 over a number of men." "If the particular thing has 
 in it only a part of the idea, then the idea is divided; 
 can it be one?" "If you cut off a part of the idea of 
 greatness and put it in a particular thing, can the part 
 of greatness, being less than greatness, make the par- 
 ticular thing great?" "If you take a part of the idea 
 of littleness, and add it to a particular thing, will not 
 even the tiniest bit of littleness make the thing greater 
 than it was before? " ' " If you say that the idea of great- 
 ness makes a thing great, is not the idea itself simply 
 another great thing alongside of the other particular 
 great things?" All through the discussion, wherever 
 the young Socrates tries to suggest that the idea is a 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 193 
 
 thought, or anything like a thought, the veteran Par- 
 menides takes it and spreads it out in space, and makes 
 it look ridiculous. But Plato felt that he could not give 
 up his belief in the ideas, for they seemed necessary 
 to clearness of thought, in fact to any thought and phil- 
 osophic discussion at all. As a result probably of the 
 criticisms on the doctrine, admitted in the Parmenides 
 to have a certain force, Plato decided at last that space 
 is an illegitimate product of reason which darkens the 
 understanding of an idea. The Timaeus contains his 
 solution. All this world with which our senses deal pre- 
 supposes the notion of space or place. Space is cut up 
 into tiny geometrical forms in which ideas are present 
 somehow, but so that they easily vanish and give place 
 to others. In this world of space the confused illusive 
 motions glimpsed by sensation take place. But what 
 IS the cause of this confused and changing space-world? 
 Plato has a suggestion to make. The suggestion, if we 
 may venture to interpret it, in our own words, out of the 
 Timaeus, seems to be this : God is good, and an essential 
 characteristic of goodness is that one cannot be satis- 
 fied with being good, but must give goodness and happi- 
 ness to others. Therefore God has In his essential 
 thought the idea of souls of lower gods (like Hebrew 
 angels), of men and of animals; and his goodness must 
 overflow in and into these souls, creating a universe 
 full of his goodness. But the very idea of a soul, es- 
 pecially of a human soul, is of a being which has spatial 
 
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194 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 relations, which provides itself with a body, which sees 
 and hears events as if they were in space. Thus the 
 soul must try to figure ideas to itself in space; but the 
 divine ideas cannot be limited to space or understood 
 in space, which is an illegitimate offspring of reason; 
 the soul therefore becomes perplexed and cannot be 
 happy. Now let us add the Phaedrus to the Timaeus. 
 The soul, deep sunken in the spatial changing world, 
 catches a gleam of the divine beauty of the ideas, even 
 in those faint fleeting glimpses of them which its eyes see 
 in space and its ears hear. This is the divine attraction, 
 drawing the soul away from the imperfect space re- 
 velation back to the source of all goodness and happiness. 
 Helped by a friend, or better still by a city of friends, 
 it turns away from merely spatial things and rises to 
 the heaven of ideas as the gods see them. So the divine 
 motion works in a circuit through the life and love and 
 social activity of souls, putting souls forth, and drawing 
 souls back to itself, in a divine circuit of intense activity 
 and varied beauty, which is faintly imaged by the 
 revolutions of stars in the visible sky, and of which the 
 shifting, changing, perplexing world of space gives only 
 a troubled dream. 
 
 Surely Plato believes in motion. But one says, this is 
 very transcendental. Yes. But does pragmatism forbid 
 one to hold a transcendentalism which works, which 
 changes actual life, which makes the world different? 
 " Ah ! but, ' ' you say, ' ' Plato is so dogmatic and so sure ! ' ' 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 195 
 
 Not at all. He distinctly says in the Timaeus, "If we 
 give reasons as probable as any, we must be content, 
 remembering that I who speak and you who criticise 
 have human nature; so that it becomes us to accept the 
 probable account of those things, and not to seek any- 
 thing further." The Timaeus is thoroughly modest and 
 pragmatic; unless pragmatism always insists that we 
 shall approach reality by the path of sensation. Do you 
 answer that Protagoras would never have travelled by 
 Plato's visionary path? Visions like Plato's can change 
 life. True, you reply, but Protagoras would have pro- 
 moted a movement like our modem science; and Plato 
 killed the movement by ;;^Tus distrust of sensatia HTandr 
 by his insistence on his doctrine of ideas. 
 
 Pragmatism, then, must be scientific; that is the 
 position. And Plato js not scientific; th at is the error. 
 At last we are tracking the wizard to his innermost 
 castle and home. So with redoubled attention we give 
 our minds to the state of science in Plato's time. The 
 Greek philosophers had grasped the idea of the three 
 states of matter, solid, liquid and gaseous, and of their 
 changes into one another. They called them, it is true, 
 earth, water and air, but the essential notion was the 
 modem one. If they added to these a fourth state of 
 matter, fire, this was not unlike the modem speculations 
 which resolve all matter ultimately into electric units. 
 They had also some idea of the relations of heavenly 
 bodies to one another and to earth, and began to have 
 
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196 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 some understanding of eclipses, with some power to 
 predict them. The apparent celestial sphere with its 
 zones and the ecliptic were understood; possibly even 
 the spherical shape of sun and earth, and the zones of 
 earth. Thus elementary astronomy was developed as 
 well as elementary physics. Physiology also had re- 
 ceived much attention ; the processes of nature were care- 
 fully observed and ways of assisting nature to heal were 
 studied. Some idea even of the relation of the brain 
 to thought had been gained, and at least some element- 
 £iry suspicions as to the nervous system in connection 
 with sensation. Guesses had been made about atoms 
 which curiously anticipated modern doctrines of mole- 
 cules. Anaximander had perhaps guessed at the de- 
 velopment of man from animals. Empedocles may have 
 guessed the survival of the fittest. Xenophanes had 
 argued that mountains and islands were once under 
 the sea, arguing from sea-shells and fossils found there. 
 Many guesses less successful had been made about light- 
 ning and earthquakes by reasoning from analogy. 
 Many queer ideas about stars had been broached by men 
 in the infancy of scientific investigation. But the 
 principle of watching nature had been introduced ; and 
 men had learned to infer what will be from what is and 
 has been. There was a real beginning of physiology, 
 physics and astronomy; there was also some elementary 
 study of problems in logic and psychology, in ethics and 
 politics, though the study of rhetoric had a tendency 
 to overshadow them. ■* 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 197 
 
 But the solemn truth is that these scientific activities 
 were far removed from modem sciences of the same 
 subject-matter. (^ex.^ad_ iiiuch--a£aite_.observatiQn.^ 
 lejr had"ciever hypotheses; bat -^theylacke d-verifica--^ 
 ["more careful classification, they lacked 
 precision and exactness. Physiology would seem to 
 have been as careful as any, as able to predict the future, 
 as capable to anticipate and prevent. But in astronomy, 
 meteorology and physics there were wild desultory 
 guesses; in ethics and politics and psychology there 
 was a surface study of conditions but no penetration to 
 the depths of the matter. More^hservatuMLwas-neededj — 
 more classification^- less vague generalizing, less fol- 
 lowiag^ef-stirface arralogiesT ahdalways careful measure- 
 ment. Into this world of crude science Protagoras had 
 come with his famous aphorism " Man is the measure of 
 all things, of realities that they are, of unrealities that 
 they are not." Obviously he was in sympathy with all 
 movements which encouraged individual human activ- 
 ity ; certainly he must have valued individual sensations 
 and perceptions; clearly his philosophy might have 
 worked well with the observations of Ionic physical 
 philosophers or with the atomic theories of Leucippus, 
 destined to be developed by Democritus, the towns- 
 man of Protagoras; nor would the developments of 
 medical study as they came along have been out of har- 
 mony with his principles. Moreover to the theories of 
 the time he might have contributed a valuable criterion 
 
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198 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 of truth. "Take careful note of what you perceive," 
 he might have said; "the sights seen by your eyes, the 
 sounds heard by your ears have great truth and value. 
 Build your theories first on what you see and hear and 
 touch; but remember that the senses of other men, if 
 they are as careful as yourself, have equal value with 
 ^our own. Your theories therefore should be built 
 not only on your own experience, but on that of other 
 men. Remember also that they will build theories as 
 naturally as you. Manjs the mea sure of all thi ngs,, but 
 itlakea^l-of-H«-t-o-inafee-Man,.The teaching of a whole 
 / city has more value than that of any one citizen, unless 
 Cthe citizen has taken unusual means to inform himself. 
 A leading professor of wisdom, for instance, may have 
 a better truth than that which other men have; and the 
 test and proof of the greater excellence of his truth is 
 that it works good results . Working power i sthe best 
 proof -oijtbe_ validity of a theory. Good truths, whicIT 
 work well for men, get combined in a body of truth 
 which we may recognize as valid and objective." A 
 movement of philosophy and science, based on such prin- 
 ciples as these, Protagoras might have started. There 
 seems to be no proof that he begem to do so; but 
 to do it would have been in harmony with his known 
 lines of thought as they are indicated, though per- 
 haps half concealed, in Flato's Protagoras and Theaetetus. 
 And even if Protagoras himself had not gone so far, 
 some disciple of genius, some ancient Schiller, might 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 199 
 
 have arisen to consecrate the master's memory in Pro- 
 tagorean dialogues and to develop his humanism and 
 scientific interest along these lines. Under such influence 
 the atomism of Democritus might have found a freer, 
 more humanistic development than afterwards the 
 dogmatic Epicurus and his school gave it. Under such 
 a teacher the impulse to research in a mind like that of 
 Aristotle might have taken a direction more like mod- 
 em science, and shown results even more striking than 
 those which interest us much later in the Roman Lu- 
 cretius. 
 
 But how would classification and measurement have 
 fared at the hands of such a Protagorean school? 
 Socrates was the man who realized the importance of 
 having a clear idea as to kinds of things. Plato, following 
 Socrates, was the man who dwelt on classification, 
 and said to the world, " Clear up the meaning of your 
 general concepts." By such attention to general ideas 
 his thoughts were indeed drawn away from trust in 
 particular sensations. These shifted and changed so 
 quickly that when he had caught a general idea from 
 them he easily let them fly away. But the general 
 ideas which he loved are of the utmost importance for 
 practical guidance in this world. Doubtless he exag- 
 gerated their value, and perhaps pragmatic methods 
 would have prospered better if some man of less genius 
 than Plato had undertaken to develop the teaching of 
 Socrates, and had kept general concepts within more 
 
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200 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 modest limits, allowing more for the value of sensations. 
 But even as things stood Aristotle did qualify the doc- 
 trine of ideas immensely by respect for individual ob- 
 servations. Therefore Plato, followed as he was by 
 Aristotle, may be said to have contributed to science 
 the idea of classification without really overmuch 
 transcendentalism. Certainly in and after Aristotle's 
 time the Greeks went on with what we call their scien- 
 tific study. Plato does not seem to have killed it en- 
 tirely. 
 
 But though science went on, perhaps pragmatism 
 did not. The Greeks were still vague and speculative; 
 and the guilt of this is laid at the door of Plato. " Man 
 is the measure of all things," said Protagoras; but Plato 
 had somehow discredited both Protagoras and Man. 
 What Plato objected to, even in such a high-minded 
 professor as the great teacher from Abdera, is not very 
 difficult to see. He feared that .human opinion_ wniilH 
 
 bejmadfijlJie-standard of truth; even in that attractive 
 picture which he draws of him, in the dialogue called 
 by his name, he makes Protagoras undertake to show 
 that Society teaches political science. Plato h imself 
 
 ihnught that wp. must finr| ffnrnpJhgft-Pr teacher, if OUr 
 
 .beliefs^are toiie-surely-good. But this reference ^to^a~ 
 better standard than Man is what seems to trouble the 
 modem pragmatists. Their idea is that before the better 
 standard can be made effe ctive Manj nust-grasp.it: and 
 they believe that Protagoras would have interpreted 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 201 
 
 his measuring Man as including far-sighted prophets 
 who see workable valid truths before the multitude 
 grasps them. 
 
 Truly a beautiful vague phrase is that "measure of 
 all things." What does it mean? It might mean almost 
 anything. The great need of Greek science in the days 
 of Protagoras was the application of exact measurement 
 to phenomena. We may imagine that he hinted at this, 
 if we like. But there seems not a shred of evidence that 
 he cared about having instruments of precision, or about 
 applying mathematics in scientific inquiry. Schiller 
 suggests that when Protagoras had said "Man is the 
 measure of all things" the next natural question was 
 "Then how do we manage to measure? " Any thorough 
 answer to this question would include the statement, 
 "Man measures phenomena by mathematics." Plato 
 has twice thrown before us in his dialogues the thought 
 of the importance of the measuring art. Once in the 
 Protagoras he dwells on it, inspired perhaps by the fa- 
 mous aphorism of the great Sophist with whom he is 
 dealing. He shows that to find our way safely through 
 the world we need to measure things and find their true 
 relative value. This is a thoroughly pragmatic position. 
 Again in the Politicus he explains how important in art 
 work of all kinds, with a view to finding the true pro- 
 portion of every element, is the measuring art. These 
 hints might well have led to showing the importance of 
 precise measuring instruments, if Plato had cared to 
 
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202 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 dwell more steadily on the world of material things. 
 But at any rate he did more than most men of his time 
 to encourage mathematical study of all kinds. The value 
 of mathematics and the interest of the work is one of the 
 thoughts most markedly found in Plato. Arithmetic, 
 plane geometry, solid geometry, the mathematics of 
 star motion, the mathematical theory of music, — all 
 these studies he urged in his Republic. The Greeks 
 studied such subjects for the absolute interest of them, 
 and so handed on to the world the instrument which 
 later scientific men have used to measure realities. The 
 scientific speculators of ancient times did not see their 
 way to a wide application of mathematics except in 
 astronomy and music. Perhaps they loved their vague 
 guesses at truth, and their qualitative observations. 
 Perhaps they did not care to measure except in art 
 work. Perhaps it simply never occurred to them to 
 do so much measuring of shifting phenomena. Yet to 
 develop the sciences which measure was a good practical 
 piece of work, even though they knew it not. Plato might 
 seem to have done no mean service to science, not only 
 by promoting classification but by encouraging the 
 study of mathematics. If he had been caught young 
 by Protagoras instead of by Socrates, and had been 
 turned into an advocate of pragmatism, he might have 
 seen more clearly the ^gl ue oTindlvidual percen Eons. 
 and might have been drawn by his natural tendencies 
 to combine with their study some application of mathe- 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 203 
 
 matics. Yet if Plato had died young, and had been no 
 man's disciple, we may well doubt whether any one 
 else would have arisen with genius sufficient to impress 
 the worfd in this way. Regretting, if we choose to do 
 so, that he followed Socrates rather than Protagoras, we 
 shall perhaps, as things are, do better to give him 
 credit for what he has done for science, rather than 
 blame him for preventing the growth of a somewhat 
 shadowy earlier pragmatism. Perhaps a real pragma- 
 tic movement could not have flourished except as a 
 protest against the over-dogmatism of the human mind. 
 At any rate there does seem rather imaghiativeevidence 
 that the philosophy of Protagoras would have developed 
 into an anticipation of the movement of Schiller, Dewey, 
 and James. 
 
 Meantime Plato has been shown to have advanced 
 his views with much modesty, and not to have claimed 
 that he personally had made the absolute verification 
 whose need he felt so deeply. And his school after him, 
 when a brief period of dogmatism had gone by, became 
 for two centuries a centre of open-minded inquiry, whose 
 aim was to discredit dogmatism, and itself to find the 
 best and most probable good counsel for practical life. 
 The spirit of Plato, the lover of an unattained wisdom, 
 the seeker for practical good, was surely alive in the 
 New Academy. This New Academy throws a curious 
 light on the claim that Plato loved dogmatic philosophy, 
 and killed free scientific inquiry. The progress of mathe- 
 
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204 PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 
 
 matics, and researches such as those of Archimedes, 
 throw another curious light on the claim that Greek 
 science was killed at all. 
 
 And so where have we arrived in our inquiry ? We 
 were grieved to find that Plato had checked and killed 
 the growth of an early Greek pragmatism; and we de- 
 termined to find the secret of his error. We thought we 
 should find it in his view of the general concept as a fixed 
 and final reality ; but we soon saw that he used his con- 
 cepts instrumen tally like a good pragmatist. We thought 
 the deception might be found in his transcendental en- 
 deavour to fly higher than thought; but we soon saw that 
 pragmatists would dive out of thought into the stream of 
 life, and we perceived that mysticism was not contrary 
 to pragmatism. We thought it unpragmatic to talk 
 of testing ideas by the presence of the idea of goodness 
 in them; but immediately this appeared to be simply 
 a queer way of declaring the essentially pragmatic 
 doctrine that the test of the truth of an idea is its value. 
 We thought that Plato's endeavor to escape from the 
 turbid stream of life was an unpragmatic endeavor 
 to avoid the living fiery creative reality; but we hesi- 
 tated to commit pragmatism to saying that the reality 
 of life could not be a heavenly peace. We thought that 
 Plato's distrust of motion must be the centre of his er- 
 ror; but we have heard him say himself that he does 
 not believe in an immovable world, that motion has 
 in it the essence of being. We thought that the real 
 
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PLATO AND PRAGMATISM 205 
 
 trouble must lie in Plato's dogmatism; but we have 
 found him modest and provisional in his philosophy, 
 and the animating spirit of the open-minded New 
 Academy. We thought that the difficulty lay in his 
 unscientific attitude; but we found that he gave to 
 science classification, and did all in his power to urge 
 men to the study of mathematics, without which modem 
 science could never have done its work. 
 
 The greatest difference between Plato and pragma- 
 tists all through the inquiry has seemed to be, on his 
 part, a certain distrust of sensation. It is true that 
 Plato loves to use his eyes, and that his eager spirit 
 searches out the immediate facts of the Greek world 
 emd sets them before us in living colors. It is true that 
 he claims for the fleeting impressions of the moment 
 a presence of eternal realities which in that swift passing 
 they reveal ; he does not deny all reality to sensations. 
 But he does distrust the world of eyes and ears and 
 touch ; he finds no rest for himself on the tossing chang- 
 ing sea of phenomena. Pragmatism seems at home on 
 the sea, and does not distrust sensation. Whatever 
 other likeness to pragmatism Plato may show, he can- 
 not simulate this. He has taken refuge from our search 
 in one disguise after another, as believing in the instru- 
 mental character of concepts, as testing the truth of 
 ideas ultimately by their goodness, as being modest and 
 open-minded, as loving scientific inquiry. Unless there 
 is something else than all this in pragmatism, we shall 
 
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206 PLATO AND PPIAGMATISM 
 
 find difficulty in expelling him from our company, and 
 in aiming rightly our blows against his philosophy. But 
 there is one disguise impossible for him. ^f an essen- 
 tial part of the method of pragmatism is to treat sen- 
 sations as the great reality, and to find matter more 
 solid than thought, Plato stands revealed as the enemy 
 of the pragmatic movement; we have tracked the wiz- 
 ard to his last hiding-place, and know where to strike 
 if we wish to destroy his power.^ 
 
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VII 
 
 OVID AND THE SPIRIT OF 
 METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 By EDWARD KENNARD RAND 
 
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OVID AND THE SPIRIT OF 
 METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 Had Mr. Palgrave compiled an anthology of Latin 
 verse besides that treasury of gold for which every 
 lover of English poetry is thankful, he would have 
 found no place in it for Ovid. In his admirable little 
 volume on Landscape from Homer to Tennyson, he dis- 
 poses of Ovid as "amongst world famous poets, per- 
 haps the least true to the soul of poetry," and finds 
 the Metamorphoses "of all over-praised poems, over- 
 praised the most." Ovid has been little read since the 
 Romantic invasion, and is hardly more than the shadow 
 of a name, though not a great name, to the general 
 reader of to-day; in any five-foot compendium of uni- 
 versal culture, few would spare Ovid an inch. And yet, 
 after a somewhat chequered career in the late Empire 
 and early Middle Ages, Ovid became, from the eleventh 
 century on, one of the absolute and indispensable poets. 
 He fascinated not only the mediaeval imagination, but 
 also, perhaps even in greater measure, the Renaissance, 
 with its homesickness for antiquity. No fame seemed 
 more secure than his, and nothing occurred to damage 
 it, until Romanticism came. A poet who influenced — 
 I am thinking not of arrays of parallel passages, but 
 of the penetrating effect of temperament on tempera- 
 
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210 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 ment — a poet who profoundly influenced Chaucer, 
 Spenser, Shakespeare, deserves consideration at least 
 from the chronicler of literary developments, and even, 
 it may be, has something of immediate value for our 
 own generation. 
 
 Nor has Ovid been utterly without witnesses during 
 the past century. Not to dwell on various appreciative 
 observations in the volumes of Sellar and Mackail, 
 Landor declared for Ovid in no uncertain tones. In 
 one of his imaginary conversations, he makes Messala 
 remark to Tibullus: 
 
 In every department of eloquence and particularly in 
 poetry, we look for depth and clearness ; a clearness that shows 
 the depths; here [in Ovid] we find it. 
 
 Perhaps we should not hold Landor responsible for 
 an opinion dramatically assigned to someone else, — 
 indeed he has given us warning on that point, — but in 
 another of the conversations it is Landor himself who 
 says to the Abb6 Delille: 
 
 Virgil is not so vigorous as Lucretius, so elegant and grace- 
 ful as Catullus, so imaginative and diversified as Ovid. All 
 their powers united could not have composed the Aeneid, but 
 in the Aeneid there is nothing so epic as the contest of Ulysses 
 and Ajax in the Metamorphoses. This in my opinion is the 
 most wonderful thing in the whole range of Latin poetry, for 
 it unites (what appears incompatible) two pieces of pleading 
 never excelled by Roman or Athenian orator, with exquisitely 
 discriminated characters and unparalleled heroic composition. 
 The lUad itself has nothing in the contentional so interesting 
 and so animated. 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 211 
 
 This is rather extraordinary from Landor, who was not 
 given to exaggerating Roman excellence at the expense 
 of the Greeks; on the contrary, he was somewhat fond 
 of showing the Romans their place. His criticism here 
 may not be particularly nice — few would select "deep" 
 and "epic" as appropriate epithets for Ovid — but 
 one may appeal to the passage as a counter-blast to 
 Palgrave. 
 
 What are the abiding qualities in Ovid's greatest 
 work, his Metamorphoses? I believe it his greatest, 
 though remembering how Macaulay regarded the Art 
 of Love. The school-boy to-day, sometimes his teacher, 
 too, thinks of the Metamorphoses as primarily a store- 
 house of the myths in which Greeks and Romans be- 
 lieved; he reads from selections which give no idea of 
 the whole. True, the poem has always had a subsidiary 
 use ever since the days of the later Roman Empire, when 
 for pedagogical purposes it was turned into prose. It is 
 a serviceable guide to the illustrious fables of antiquity, 
 which some of us still consider an essential part of a 
 liberal education; moreover, it has been a Bible of Poets, 
 and, in the Renaissance, a Bible of Painters as well. 
 But if Ovid suspected that we saw in his work a summa 
 mythologica, he would turn as uncomfortably in his 
 grave as when the mediaeval pilgrims said prayers there, 
 in the hope of his conversion, and heard a voice in 
 answer: 
 
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212 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 Nolo pater noster; 
 Carpe, viator, iter.' 
 
 If we would reach the inmost meaning of the Meta- 
 morphoses, we should first follow the clue given in 
 Ovid's previous works and his career. I can do no more 
 in the present paper than make this approach. Of 
 Ovid's career, we have information vouchsafed by 
 himself. One of his poems of exile, the poem which he 
 perhaps thought would be his last, is a brief autobio- 
 graphy. He tells us there of his early inclination to 
 poetry, and the vain endeavor of his father, an honest 
 merchant of the equestrian order, to start him on a po- 
 litical career and the pursuit of the denarius. While a 
 member of one of the inferior courts, the young man 
 spent less time with his colleagues than with the poets 
 about town; the latter he calls gods on earth. Poetry 
 came so easily to him that it was actually a bother 
 when he attempted commonplace prose: 
 
 Et quod temptabam dicere, versus erat.' 
 The opposite experience, alas, is more common. Ovid, 
 with Pope £md Lamartine, 
 
 " Lisped in numbers for the numbers came." 
 
 Among the men of letters with whom Ovid was fa- 
 miliar were Propertius, Ponticus, Bassus. He knew 
 
 * " No Paternosters, I pray; 
 Traveller, go on your way." 
 
 * "And what in prose I tried to say, proved verse." 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 213 
 
 Horace and heard him read his poems; he pays Horace 
 the compliment of not infrequent imitation in his own 
 poetry, and Horace returned^ that kind of compliment 
 in the opening poem of his final volume of lyrics — 
 the reason why we shall see later. Virgil, Ovid "only 
 saw." TibuUus, too, had died before he could claim real 
 friendship with him, a fact that he deeply regretted, 
 since TibuUus was the master of both Propertius and 
 himself. For the first poems of Ovid of which he gives 
 us definite information were love-elegies in honor of the 
 imaginary Corinna: 
 
 " When to the world my earliest songs I gave, 
 My cheeks had known their first or second shave. 
 AmbttiBn stirred me when the whole town rang 
 With that feign'd name Corinna, whom I sang." 
 
 It was a time of romantic Sturm und Drang with Ovid, 
 if we may take him at his word: 
 
 " Soft was my heart, for Cupid's shaft fair prey, 
 Ever to trivial impulse giving way. 
 Though such was I, kindled by slightest flame. 
 No tale of scandal ever breathed my name." 
 
 My subject does not call for further reference to 
 
 Ovid's autobiography, entertaining though it is. I 
 
 wish only to make clear Ovid's interest in his earliest 
 
 poetry, his love-poetry. He calls himself in the opening 
 
 verse 
 
 tenerorum lusor Amorum * 
 
 and he does not refer to the Metamorphoses. This is 
 
 * "Playful singer of the gentle loves." 
 
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214 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 no sign that he thought the later poem an inferior affair; 
 simply, his immediate purpose calls for no mention of 
 it. He is writing, at what he thinks the end of his ca- 
 reer, not merely an autobiography, but, in a way, an 
 apologia pro vita sua. He does not, in the fashion of his 
 previous letter to the Emperor, which forms the second 
 book of the Tristia, seek to palliate each detail or en- 
 large on his later and more sober poetry; on the con- 
 trary, he singles out for reminiscence his earlier work, 
 the cause of his disgrace. There is something of a chal- 
 lenge in the title "playful singer of the gentle loves," 
 as though he preferred that to any other. The phrase 
 and the cadence of the line take us back to the opening 
 verse of the last poem of the Amores,^ and though he 
 doubtless has in mind his love-poetry in general, he thus 
 emphasizes his earliest work. Unlike many another 
 poet, Ovid did not regard his youthful verse as futile; 
 all the more reason for turning first to that, in our en- 
 deavor to apprehend the secret of the Metamorphoses. 
 Though by no means his greatest achievement, the 
 Amores is immensely significant and typical; it contains 
 the elements of all his later interests. 
 
 The love-elegy had already had a history at Rome 
 before Ovid turned to it; in fact, if a recent theory is 
 true, we may accredit the Romans with the invention 
 of the personal elegy, a type not developed by the 
 Greeks. Ovid mentions himself as fourth in the line 
 * Quaere novum vatem tenerorum mater Amorum. 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 215 
 
 of succession, Gallus, TibuUus, and Propertius having 
 preceded him. Catullus, too, cannot be neglected, for 
 the full comprehension of the matter; he is not men- 
 tioned by Ovid, because according to the rules of an- 
 cient literary criticism he is strictly not a writer of 
 elegy at all. Including him, as the modem reader 
 must, we see the more clearly a development, or rather 
 retrogradation, in the elegy, from intensely real and 
 personal feeling to the artificial, the imaginary, the 
 didactic. TibuUus and Propertius were in love with real 
 beings, but the mistresses of their poems were often the 
 mere personifications of traditional devices and situa- 
 tions. For Ovid, if we accept a too prevalent opinion, N 
 there was nothing left but to make his love entirely) 
 fictitious and spice his episodes with pruriency. Conven- 
 tionalized lewdness is the sum and substance of the 
 Amores, according to a recent German critic. But here 
 we wonder what Horace saw in these poems to call 
 forth from him his notable tribute of imitation, and if 
 we turn to the eleventh of Horace's epodes, we shall 
 discover why. 
 
 " I care not now, oh Pettius, as of yore, 
 Verselets to write when Love is smiting sore, 
 Love, that selects me most of all the age 
 For tender boys and tender girls to rage. 
 Thrice has December laid the forests bare 
 Since for Inachia I 've ceased to care. 
 T is mortifying, now, to write me down 
 An ass, dear me! the fable of the town. 
 How I detest these banquets to recall 
 
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2i6 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 When the fond lover was exposed to all, 
 By speechlessness and stupor now depressed. 
 Now blowing sighs out from his inmost chest. 
 
 'Aye, think of it! The poor man's brilliant wit 
 To cope with gold is utterly unfit,' 
 I 'd moan to thee, when the immodest bowl 
 Opened at last the secrets of my soul. 
 
 'Had I a spark of righteous indignation 
 In this poor breast, I 'd tear off my vexation, — 
 This poultice of false shame that heals no sore — 
 And free, I 'd wage the unequal fight no more.' 
 When so I spake, severe in virtue's praise. 
 Told to go home, I 'd totter by strange ways 
 To hostile doors, alas, thresholds of stone. 
 That racked my legs and loins in every bone. 
 And now a lad, who boasts himself the peer 
 Of any little luscious damsel here. 
 The lad Lycisctis has made slave of me. 
 From whom nor kind advice of friends can free 
 Nor pointed insult, but some fresh affair, 
 Radiant girl or slim boy debonair 
 Tossing from out its knot his flowing hair." 
 
 How much of this poem reflects Horace's personal 
 experience it were hazardous to state; very little, I 
 fancy. What most forcibly impresses the reader is the 
 quiet satire at the expense of the lover, whose r&le the 
 poet assumes here and in various of his odes; in one, 
 in particular, we find him singing what the ancients 
 called a "closed-door serenade," out in the rain, on 
 the uncomfortable sill. Now the overwhelming grief 
 of love and the consequent inability to versify, a gloomy 
 demeanor at banquets, despite of the wealthy and suc- 
 cessful lover, appeals before the cruel portal — these 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 217 
 
 are moods and episodes treated with all seriousness in 
 the elegy of TibuUus and Propertius. Horace's love- 
 poetry is not all satire; far from it. But its delicate 
 and delightful quality is due mainly to his irresistible 
 sense of humor, which plays on the surface of some- 
 times deep emotion, dispelling the mists of the morbid 
 and sentimental. Did he invent his device of gently 
 laughing at the third person in the guise of the first? It 
 is at any rate an admirably protective and effective 
 device. 
 
 Now Ovid took this hint from Horace, and developed 
 it into a system ; we may note, in passing, that the first 
 poem in the Amores contains an obvious reminiscence 
 of the eleventh epode. Ovid speaks in the Tristia, we 
 have seen, of his tender and vulnerable heart, but, 
 truly, it was a heart encased in triple brass. The lines 
 are about as applicable to Ovid as the eleventh epode 
 is to Horace. Incidentally it is worth observing that 
 the solemn protestation in the Tristia 
 
 nomine sub nostro fabula nulla fuit * 
 
 is flatly contradicted by one of the Amores. In that 
 poem he tells of bystanders pointing him out — as 
 Dante was pointed out in the streets of Florence, for a 
 different reason — and exclaiming 
 
 hie, hie est, quem ferus urit Amor.* 
 
 * "No tale of seandal ever breathed my name." 
 
 * "There, there's the man whom mad love burns." 
 
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2i8 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 Then he adds the reflection 
 
 Fabula, nee sentis, tota iactaris in Urbe.* 
 Now is not this melting swain, the slave of ruthless 
 Love and the talk of the town, is he not the same ridicu- 
 lous character that Horace for the same purpose chose 
 to assume? Fabula quanta fuil Proceeding in this 
 spirit, Ovid elaborates the woes of this poor lover with 
 all possible detail. He, like Horace, attempts a closed- 
 door serenade. 
 
 "Porter, fast-bound — what outrage! — with hard chain, 
 Fling wide the unrelenting door again! 
 I ask but little, and if that won't do, 
 Open half way; I'll squeeze in side-end to. 
 Long love has thinned my body purposely; 
 Subtracting flesh, it adds agility. 
 Love steals me gently past the wakeful guard; 
 I cannot stumble, though the way be hard. 
 I used to dread grim phantoms of the night, 
 And wondered who dared roam without a light. 
 Laughed Love, a laugh Love's gentle mother gave 
 And lightly said — I heard them! — 'He'll be brave.' 
 Love came a-sudden: I have no dismay 
 For flying shades of night or traps by day. 
 You, torpid one, I fear; you I cajole, 
 You have a thunderbolt to blast my soul. 
 Look — drop the bar, 't is easier so to peep — 
 Look at the sill all dripping where I weep. 
 When once you stripped in terror for the blow 
 'T was L faith, begged your mistress grace to show. 
 What, shall the gift that your salvation brought — 
 Oh infamy! — avail the giver naught ? 
 Show gratitude; you'll find it not in vain. 
 
 ' "Thou art the talk of town, and knowest it not." 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 219 
 
 Night's hours fly ; oh slip the holt again! 
 
 Come, slip it back. Then live from fetters free, 
 
 Nor taste for aye the cup of slavery. 
 
 You hear, hard heart, while vainly I implore, 
 
 Yet bars of oak still hold the rigid door. 
 
 'T is well to man the walls in war's alarms 
 
 And bar the gates, but why in peace fear arms? 
 
 How shut you foemen out, if so the swain? 
 
 Night's hours fly ; oh slip the bolt again! 
 
 I come escorted by no armed band, 
 
 I was alone, were Cupid not at hand. 
 
 Not though I wished it could I banish him; 
 
 Easier were to tear me limb from limb. 
 
 Love, then, and on my brows a dash of wine, 
 
 And wreath from wet locks slipping — these are mine. 
 
 Such harmless weapons who would not disdain ? 
 
 Night's hours fly; oh slip the bolt again! 
 
 Art numb? Or stands Sleep — curse you! — at your ear 
 
 This lover's words into the wind to veer? 
 
 Once I recall, when out I sought to glide. 
 
 Till midnight's star you waited, open-eyed. 
 
 Perchance your love is sleeping with you now; 
 
 Better to you than me the fates allow. 
 
 Were such my luck, I 'd don your iron chain. 
 
 Night's hours fly ; oh slip the bolt again! 
 
 Can I be wrong, or did the hinges creak? 
 
 I judge the door is moving, by that squeak. 
 
 I 'm wrong. A puff of wind, in straying by 
 
 Rattled the door — and blew my hopes on high." 
 
 So much of the poem will suffice to show Ovid's in- 
 tention. Can we imagine that he takes seriously 
 the woes of this flouted gallant and the anti-climax of 
 his disappointment after the smooth Tibullan serenade 
 with its ludicrously formal strophes and refrain? A 
 lover who has time to observe in his shrunken body the 
 
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220 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 workings of the Darwinian law of natural selection is 
 not suffering from a broken heart ; we doubt if he has lost 
 much flesh. Ovid delights in exposing him to embarrass- 
 ing and ridiculous situations. I will not stop for other 
 illustrations from the Amoves, but add merely that the 
 fair maiden is not infrequently served the same treat- 
 ment. In brief, Horace is Ovid's master and model in 
 this new species of elegy, far more so than are the ele- 
 giac poets themselves. To appreciate the Amores, read 
 Horace for its animating spirit ; for the sources of its 
 originality read TibuUus, though he deals with the 
 same material, for contrast, not comparisoii. If ever the 
 
 gentle TibuUus is hunlorous, it is from no fault of in- 
 tent. 
 I am far from meaning that the only interest in the 
 
 ^'Amores is the amusing parody of what Ovid's prede- 
 cessors in elegy had treated seriously; Ovid also takes 
 a genuine delight in intrigue as a fine art. It is absurd, 
 however, to call the Amores or the Art of Love sensual 
 — "the most frankly sensual poems ever written." 
 With his incorrigible sense of the ludicrous, Ovid is at 
 times indecent to the point of blasphemy, but he is 
 not filthy like Swift or prurient like Sterne; and he 
 was no more affected by any of the "perturbations" 
 
 \^/ than is the Stoic sage. Hi s supreme quality is wit, as 
 Shakespeare saw; Ovid calls his muse genic/w. It is not 
 sensuality but mental audacity that leads him to treat 
 with an exuberance of detail and an evident relish of 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 221 
 
 the task, matters that Horace would not have touched. 
 What Horace was delighted to see in Ovid was exactly 
 the same attitude to romantic elegy that he had; this 
 accounts amply for the compliment that he paid the 
 younger poet, and we need not inquire what he thought 
 of other elements in the Amores, or what he would have 
 thought of the Art of Love. Tibullus, in that imaginary 
 conversation of Landor's, remarks: "Before I leftOvidius 
 he read to me the commencement of some amatory 
 pieces, at which, if I smiled, it was in courtesy, not 
 approbation." There is another cause from which he 
 might have^smiled, namely, a sense of humor. 
 
 A recent German critic does not smile for any reason ; 
 he scowls and sighs, missing the lyric impulse in the 
 Amores, "das Herzens auf-und abwogende Stimmung- 
 en." But in like manner one might be dissatisfied with 
 Rabelais for his noticeable lack of religious emotion. 
 Ovid must be judged by the standards he professes, and 
 really he is writing not lyric, but partly dramatic, partly 
 expository or didactic poetry. The tendency to didactic 
 had become prominent in Tibullus and in Propertius, as 
 Ovid, anticipating modem critics, pointed out; for in 
 apologizing to Augustus for his Art of Love, he cites the 
 authority of Propertius's "enticing precepts."^ Now 
 it is this very element that Ovid himself exalted into 
 the guiding motive of his elegy. There is no funda- 
 mental difference between the Amores and the Art of 
 1 Invenies eadem blandi praecepta Properti. 
 
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222 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 Love; in fact, as every reader knows, there are striking 
 coincidences in episodes and details. The Amores is 
 nearer to the drama, giving in its separate elegies little 
 episodes of comedy, like the mime, but it is no nearer 
 to lyric. That Ovid felt the kinship between his two 
 works is shown by his use of the same metre for both. 
 Starting as an ostensible follower of Tibullus, he wrote 
 short poems in elegiac metre, startlingly different in 
 spirit and mainly didactic in contents. Planning a new 
 work, one entirely didactic, a mock-didactic, he adhered 
 to the metre of the Amores because the undertaking 
 was essentially the same; this was decidedly an innova- 
 tion, as didactic poems of the type which Ovid was fol- 
 lowing normally required the hexameter. Now the Art 
 of Love, though one of the supreme parodies in all liter- 
 ature, may be criticized for various defects, of which 
 a breach of courtesy against good taste is one; Landor's 
 remark, "from the mysteries of religion the veil is seldom 
 to be drawn, from the mysteries of love never," con- 
 tains deep truth. But not even the German critic in 
 question would censure the Art of Love for lacking the 
 lyric impulse. 
 
 After thus finding wit a dominant element in Ovid's 
 temperament, wit irrepressible, ready for display at most 
 inappropriate times and places, we may next examine 
 a matter important for the understanding of the Meta- 
 morphoses, namely, the glimpses of mythology that 
 appear in the Amores, and the spirit in which Ovid treats 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 223 
 
 it. In one of the poems, which presents another of 
 those unfortunate situations that true love confronts 
 in Ovid's elegies, a lover makes a passionate appeal to 
 a plebeian little brook, which, thanks to a freshet, has 
 suddenly swollen to a river and is interrupting the 
 lover's morning call. The latter, after much suppli- 
 cation, wishes that he had tl^e wings of Perseus or the 
 self-impelling car of Triptolemus, adding immediately, 
 however, 
 
 " I prate of ancient poetry's monstrous lies 
 Ne'er seen or now or then by human eyes." 
 
 Sentiment like this from the author of the Bible of 
 Myths is at first sight surprising. Ovid treats the gods, 
 moreover, most cavalierly, for instance in a discourse 
 on their grossly partial treatment of maiden's oaths: 
 
 "Believe that gods exist! She broke her vow; 
 Her face, though, beauteous then, is beauteous now." 
 
 As with Horace's maid of Barium, perjury brings no 
 penalty to fair woman. With mere man, the poet 
 finds, it is difi^erent: 
 
 " By her own eyes my darling lately swore, 
 And then by mine; and mine are aching sore!" 
 
 He therefore proposes the irreverent dilemma: 
 
 "Either gods are mere names, an empty fear, 
 And stupid crowds believe whate'er they hear, 
 Or if a god there be, the amorous thrall 
 Lets pretty damsels lord it over all." 
 
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224 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 Yes, over gods as well as men. Men serve as targets for 
 the martial deities, but 
 
 "Offended gods fair women fear to offend," 
 
 as the poet proves by various "olde ensaumples" of 
 divine amours. And yet, with a generous burst of com- 
 passion, 
 
 " But why reproach high heaven, why scandals tell? 
 Have not gods eyes, have not gods hearts as well? 
 Were I a god, I 'd see no damage came 
 To pretty maid foreswearing by my name. 
 Yes, I'd swear maids swear truth at any odds! 
 You would not class me with the gloomy gods. 
 But thou, fair damsel, use the great god's prize 
 More moderately; or spare, at least, mine eyes." 
 
 Oyid's aptitude for treating the gods as lightly as 
 
 *-^e does the lover does not speak for much interest in 
 
 mythology on his part. Yet he is powerfully fascinated 
 
 by myth-making of a certain kind. In the poem that 
 
 contains his first declaration of imaginary love, the oath 
 
 of eternal fidelity to Corinna, he remarks, after ringing 
 
 the changes on this note : 
 
 "Oh give me for my song a joyous theme. 
 And worthy of its source, songs forth shall stream. 
 To song the horned lo owes her name, 
 And she to whom the River-bird brought shame. 
 And she who by the Bull o'er ocean borne 
 With maiden hand held tight the crumpled horn. 
 So we alike shall make the whole town ring ; 
 My name to thine conjoined all time shall sing." 
 
 Here is mythology in which Ovid can believe — the 
 immortality which the bard and the bard alone can 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 225 
 
 give* to great men and deeds, an idea that Theocritus 
 and Horace had set forth finely. Ovid goes farther; 
 he takes pleasure in assisting at the process of immor- 
 talization. He gives his Corinna — need we say she 
 is a fictitious being? — the reality of lo, Leda, Europa; 
 and they are as real as she. Here is at once a thorough- 
 going scepticism as to the truth of ancient myths, and 
 a lively faith in the creative imagination. 
 
 Then Ovid proceeds to play with this idea, as he 
 plays with most ideas. In a subsequent poem, he 
 laments that he himself is responsible for Corinna's in- 
 fidelity, not only because he had given her complete 
 instruction in the art of love, but because by his clever 
 portraiture he had invested her with a fatal charm. The 
 Muses, he cries, should have shown him less favor, 
 Phoebus should have left him in the lurch. 
 
 "Now courts accept not poet's evidence; 
 I would my words were credited less sense." 
 
 Poets are responsible for such legends as those of Scylla, 
 Perseus, Enceladus, the Sirens ; he names a dozen others, 
 including several metamorphoses in the list of poetical 
 transgressions: 
 
 "Thus runs on poets' license without end. 
 Nor doth historic truth their words attend. 
 You should have known my love was praised by me 
 Falsely; I'm lost through your credulity." 
 
 So, besides wit, an essential quality in Ovid's tem- 
 -^rament is the joy in creating myth, in proving un- 
 
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226 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 realities real. In this art, few poets are more imagina- 
 tive than Ovid, though his imagnation often descends 
 to what Wordsworth would call fancy. Without a trace 
 of romantic wistfulness, without a sigh over the present, 
 which he adores, he delights to project himself into the 
 unknown and build his habitation there. This power, 
 that he shared with Goethe, 
 
 "in der grossen Welt eine kleine zu machen," 
 served him in good stead during his exile, a tolerably 
 unpleasant experience, which he took not too seriously, 
 rather, perhaps, not seriously enough. In one of his 
 poems of exile he pictures himself at Rome with his 
 friend Macer, and then by the magic of fancy sum- 
 mons Macer to his side. Likewise in his brief auto- 
 biography he declares: 
 
 " In that I live, then, and these hardships fight 
 Nor am aweary of the daily light 
 Thanks, Muse, to thee! Thou solace dost supply. 
 Thou rest from cares, thou balm for misery. 
 I call thee, guide and mate, and Gothland 's gone; 
 Thou givest me abode on Helicon." 
 
 With Ovid as with Milton, the mind is its own place. 
 
 /Wit, the faculty of mythologizing, of building an 
 Imaginary world — these are traits that are obvious in 
 Ovid's earliest and latest works. Another which imme- 
 diately concerns us, on which, in fact, I would make 
 the present discussion converge, is his fondness for the 
 metamorphosis. I mean not merely the metamorphosis 
 of legend, but the idea itself; Ovid delights in his own 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 227 
 
 power mythologically to transform as well as mytho- 
 logically to create. Nothing pleases him so much as sud- 
 denly to shift his point of view, and after declaring his 
 allegiance to one aspect of a situation, immediately to 
 present the exact reverse with an equally convincing so- 
 briety. We have seen his first declaration of love, in 
 which he pledges loyalty to a single mistress. Follow- 
 ing farther the series of his imaginary experiences, we 
 turn with something of a shock to a poem which de- 
 scribes his embarrassment at having two sweethearts 
 at the same time. He consoles himself with the reflec- 
 tion: 
 
 " Better to have double love, than never love at all." 
 And what shall we say of that humiliating confession 
 of his, in which he explains with exuberant detail just 
 why he has to love every maiden that he sees? Simi- 
 larly, in one poem, the lover gives elaborate instruc- 
 tion to his mistress how to deceive her husband at a 
 banquet to which all three are invited; in another, he 
 describes his bitter pangs at finding that she has ap- 
 plied the lesson to deceiving her lover instead. Now the 
 identical material of the latter poem we have in an elegy 
 of TibuUus, and a comparison is instructive. TibuUus's 
 woe is genuine, relieved only by one of his rare flashes of 
 unintentional humor; as an instance of his sufferings for 
 his mistress, he recalls the time when he was chased all 
 night by her dog. Ovid takes as much relish in describ- 
 ing how his mistress deceives him as in formulating a 
 
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228 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 code of deception for her use in his favor. The details 
 are exactly the same as in his previous poem; he likes 
 to manipulate and readjust them. He is not absolutely 
 angry at his love when he can stop to set forth in an 
 elaborate series of similes, the different blushes which 
 his reproofs evoke; he is not so indignant at finding that 
 with a new master she has made even further progress 
 in the art of love, as he is interested in making this 
 observation. Again, as we have seen, he first exalts his 
 creative power which places Corinna among the mytho- 
 logically famous, but later, he laments that his art has 
 been taken seriously; the r61e of sartor resartus Ovid 
 immensely enjoys. To continue these illustrations, we 
 find in one poem an entreaty to a husband to guard his 
 wife well, that Ovid may find the intrigue exciting. It 
 is possible that this is ironic advice, given to an ultra- 
 cautious husband, in the hope that he will overreach 
 himself by guarding his wife less closely and thus give 
 the gallant the chance for which he is waiting. However 
 this may be, equally earnest counsel is elsewhere given 
 the husband, not to watch her too strictly. 
 
 I will not follow further the workings of this spirit of 
 metamorphosis in the Amores, but will turn for a mo- 
 ment to the Art of Love and the Remedies. In these 
 poems, which should be considered as forming a whole, 
 we have a veritable triumph of wit. In the main plan, 
 they form a mock-didactic; the title ars amatoria is 
 meant to suggest the ars grammatica, ars rhetorica, that 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 229 
 
 the schoolboy knew. We cannot translate this title 
 Manual of Love, but Art of Love is just as one-sided; 
 Ovid's contemporaries knew the double meaning of the 
 word. I must repeat my opinion that there is no pruri- 
 ency in the poem. Its eminent qualities are audacity 
 and satire; the satire on the TibuUan elegy that we 
 have seen in the Amores is universalized here. The 
 poem is also a triumph of the metamorphosis, satirical 
 metamorphosis, at the expense of the lover 'and the 
 poet. Books I and il of the Art of Love form a learned 
 manual for the lover, whereby he can overcome the 
 wiles of his enemy — fallite fallentes. Thisjnuch formed 
 a little work by itself, circulated about for a short time, 
 and then Ovid, undergoing a metamorphosis, came out 
 with Book III, a manual for mistresses, with exactly 
 the same purpose as the first instalment — fallite fal- 
 lentes. To these distressing text-books he finally, in 
 response to his critics, added the Remedies as an ironi- 
 cal apologia, turning the tables on both the preceding 
 works. This palinode is likewise a satire on his critics. 
 Instead of humbly repenting, as they desired, and in- 
 stead of pointing out what a ludicrous figure he has 
 made of the lover, he falls back on the argument from 
 authority and the appropriateness of his material to 
 his theme. He left it for those who could detect his 
 satire to find, as Dryden found in the fourth book of 
 Lucretius, that ridicule is a most potent remedy of 
 love. But the Puritans of Ovid's day drew one false 
 
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230 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 conclusion from his works, and the entourage of Julia 
 drew another. 
 
 To appreciate in a striking detail what I have said 
 of this general spirit of metamorphosis in the Art and 
 Remedies of Love, consider the counsel given the lover 
 courteously to apply to faults the names of contiguous 
 virtues and thus enjoy them as such, Plato, Lucretius 
 and Horace had preceded Ovid with similar remarks; 
 his words have the tinge of parody of a well-known 
 theme. 
 
 "Names can tone ugliness; call her brunette 
 Though her complexion be as black as jet. 
 She squints? So Venus. Glares? Minerva's look. 
 
 'Lithe' let her be, if skinnier than a spook. 
 Call puny, 'trim'; for turgid, 'buxom' say. 
 And thus with bordering good, defects allay." 
 
 This is from the Art of Love. In the Remedies, naturally, 
 the prescription is reversed, Ovid first applying the 
 cure, in an extravagant form, to himself. 
 
 '"How lean my darling's ankle!' I would say; 
 
 And yet, truth tell, 't was not at all that way. 
 'My darling's arm, how ugly!' Truth to tell. 
 
 My darling's arm became her very well. 
 'How puny!' She was not. 'What bills she sends!' 
 
 Ah, that is why my love in rancour ends." 
 
 Then, speaking generally, and treating the words of his 
 
 former counsel to a kaleidoscopic change : 
 
 "'Turgid' the buxom, 'black' the brunette call. 
 And swear the lithe lass has no flesh at all. 
 If she 's not rustic, call her saucy -faced;- 
 And 'rustic' call her, if perchance she's chaste." 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 231 
 
 Really, the nimble Ovid is turning so many metamor- 
 phoses, that were the last verse quoted apart, even an 
 expert would imagine it came from the Art of Love, not 
 from the Remedies of the same, 
 
 Ovid's most obvious gift, conspicuous even in selec- 
 tions from the Metamorphoses, is his narraQve Jaciltty;^ 
 this trait of his, doubtless, was a formative influence on 
 two admirers of his, equally "great raconteufsTX^xxcer 
 and "Bo^^ciOj, And though the situation might not 
 demand it, the call to narrative was heard, and answered, 
 even in his earliest work. There are more chances, 
 naturally, in the Art of Love, and the narratives there, 
 such as the story of the rape of the Sabines, show greatly 
 increased powers. But even in the Amores glimpses 
 appear, in particular the legend of Ilia, with which 
 the thwarted lover regales the insolent brook; for the 
 moment, the reader forgets the setting of the story, 
 lost, as its author lost himself, in the sheer exuberance 
 of narrating. 
 
 For once, therefore, we have caught the audacious 
 teacher of amorosity in a serious mood, or something 
 that approaches it. We should remember, likewise, 
 that while writing Amores, he was planning a tragedy. 
 In the first poem of Book in there is a debate, suggest- 
 ing somewhat the allegorical conftictus of the Middle 
 Ages, between Elegy and^Tragedy. The palm of vic- 
 tory is given temporarily to the former, but in the last 
 poem of the book, the customary metamorphosis 
 
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232 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 occurs; it is now farewell to the loves, and welcome the 
 new and more venturesome emprise. Moreover, for 
 another sign that Ovid was not giving his entire atten- 
 tion to his little world of satire and intrigue, we may 
 turn to the thirteenth poem of the same book. This 
 is a description of a festival of Juno at Falerii — this 
 and nothing more. The revelation of Ovid as a sober 
 family-man going some distance through a hilly coun- 
 try with his wife to attend a religious ceremony is 
 startling at first, but not when we know our poet 
 better. The rites are described with patent sincerity 
 and interest; indeed a Roman poet cannot go for long 
 without displaying the national passion for liturgy. 
 The idea of including a poem like this in the Amores 
 may well have been suggested by the archaic and na- 
 tional pieces in the later books of Propertius, which are 
 recognized by everybody as precursor of the Fasti, but 
 it has a higher value in unmasking the real character 
 of the poet of the Amores for the benefit of those who 
 take some of these poems too literally. While, once 
 more, I should be the first to admit that Ovid can let 
 his wit run too far — nimium amator ingenii sui says 
 the wise Quintilian of him — and that he descended to 
 most questionable taste and something worse, still, a 
 reading of the Amores can hurt nobody with a sense 
 of humor, and as those without this sense will find the 
 poems dull, they too will be immune. 
 Nor has Ovid failed to make a similar revelation of 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 233 
 
 seriousness in his Art of Love. Toward the end of Book 
 III, the story of Cephalus etnd Procris, a story of pure ^ 
 conjugal affection, which he repeats in tiie MetamorpJio- 
 je5_wilh-touches of genuine tragedy, shows the reader 
 that background of feeling and character without which 
 satire becomes both harsh and ineffective. This is his 
 real "apology" for the Art of Love — not the so-called 
 Remedies. This is why the story is set conspicuously at 
 the close of the earlier poem; Ovid had anticipated his 
 Puritan critics. But he was too subtle to reply in exactly 
 the language which they demanded. If they could not 
 taste the fine flavor of his wit, that was their look-out, 
 not his. 
 
 The preceding argument has shown, I hope, that the 
 Amores, apart from its own merit, is biographically sig- 
 nificant in that it presents in the germ all the vital 
 interests to which Ovid later turned. Though his na- ^ 
 ture was subtle and complex, its development was beau- 
 tifully simple; like Plato's metaphysics according to 
 Schleiermacher, or Christian theology according to 
 Newman, it was all present at the beginning of the 
 course. One mood only, the product of externals, of an 
 unkindly blow of fate, does not appear — the mood that 
 found expression in Tristia. This aside, we can see why 
 Ovid was temperamentally impelled to metamorphoses 
 for a subject. 
 
 It is interesting to know that Ovid heard the elder 
 Macer read from his poem of metamorphosis, the Orni- 
 
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234 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 thogonia; it is well to gather what we can of parallels be- 
 tween Ovid's poem and various works of the Alexan- 
 drines; and even, if truth really demands it, we must 
 accept the unpleasant hypothesis that he drew from 
 no more sparkling a source than a mythologies hand- 
 book. The quest of models and influences is valid and 
 important, provided the seeker knows the real object 
 of his search; an unfortunate delusion, however, has 
 too often appeared in our generation, the delusion that 
 if the poet has by his magic converted dross into gold, 
 the careful analysis of the pedant can prove the gold 
 mere dross after all. Pope knew the process, but little 
 guessed the triumphant minuteness with which critics 
 of our day can humble the strains of ancient poets: 
 
 Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain, , 
 Critics like me shall make it prose again. 
 
 It is only when the study of the sources of a great poet 
 discovers the secret of his originality that it deserves 
 encouragement, since it immediately involves the analy^ 
 sis of the poetic temperament. That is the quest to 
 which the critic first should turn; for the poet's chief 
 sources are himself and the Muse. 
 
 In brief, then, as we have found, Ovid was first and 
 last fascinated with the world of mythology, which 
 stretches into the beginning of time but is accessible 
 to the present as well, a free country, wherein the crea- 
 tive imagination can roam, forming and transforming 
 to suit its pleasure. Ovid was interested in causes. 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 235 
 
 in the process of making the irrational plausible. The 
 theological doctrine of creatio ex mMlo would have 
 given him no difficulty, for the reason that his is a most 
 startlingly monistic universe; all miracles are fictitious, 
 but all are natural and real. His power to tell of what he 
 fancied, apparent in his earliest work, increased with 
 practice; an easy plausibleness is its distinguishing 
 virtue, which sometimes slips into the contiguous device 
 of artificial dexterity. Turning to the historic and pre- 
 historic past, away from Corinna and the world he had 
 built about her, he is involved necessarily in matters 
 more solemn than the art of love ; his own nature, too, as 
 even the Amores tells us,, was imbued with the Roman 
 lo:yej)nituigy: aad tradition. But there is no cleavage 
 of his life into halves, as with Boccaccio. A comparison 
 of the Amores and the Amorosa Visione, the Metamor^ 
 phases and the De Genealogia Deorum is tempting, but 
 appears ridiculous the moment it is made. Ovid's life 
 is of one piece. His earlier work leads naturally to the 
 later; in a word, the reason why he devoted a long poem 
 to metamorphoses was not because any number of pre- 
 decessors had done the same thing, and not because 
 he saw the utility of a Bible of Mydis, but because 
 his temperament felt most at home in a world of meta- 
 morphosis. Change and transformation in the realm of 
 ancient legend allured him now, because^ that little 
 world of contemporary mylSioIogy which he had built, 
 change and transformation had played a sovereign part. 
 
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236 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 My paper must'end here; it has pointed the approach 
 but refrains from entering that pleasant country which 
 Ovid discloses for us in his greatest poem. But to con- 
 firm the preceding analysis, I must briefly refer to the 
 most important passage in the poem, the most import- 
 ant, that is, in the way of formal declaration of what 
 is implicit in every line; I mean the description of Py- 
 thagoreanism in the last book. In following the course 
 of metamorphoses from "Nature's birth to Caesar's 
 times," Ovid has come to the reign of the good king 
 Numa, and accepting the dubious tradition that Numa 
 acquired some of his lore from Pythagoras, expounds, 
 in part, the latter's supposed tenets. This is essen- 
 tially germane to his plan; he selects that one of the 
 little s^tems of philosophers which insists most clearly 
 on the process of transformation which he has been 
 tracing in all history human and "divine. We cannot 
 safely assume such Pythagoreanism as Ovid's own 
 belief, any more than we can assume as Virgil's own 
 belief the lofty metaphysics which makes possible the 
 vision of Roman history in' the sixth Aeneid; in either 
 case the doctrine is explained by liie dramatic necessities 
 of the poem. But in either case, the doctrine is an in- 
 dex to the poet's temp erament, setting that forth with 
 something of tiie directness of dogma. Ovid declares 
 his allegJ Mice, to a diverse of fixix_andjflpw, which he 
 has been describing in e very conceivab leway. Lucretius, 
 though not blind to the impressiveness of change, de- 
 
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OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 237 
 
 pended for his soul's serenity upon the vision of atoms 
 indivisible and indestructible, which guaranteed the 
 permanence of things. Ovid could complacently remark, 
 and thereby anticipate the conclusions of our New 
 Physics: 
 
 Haec quoque non perstant quae nos eleraenta vocamus.* 
 
 The whole passage is notable for its imaginative bril- 
 liance and its sombre, almost mediaeval mood of re- 
 flectiveness, in which, however, no touch of romantic 
 yearning is appreciable. Not in vain did Shakespeare 
 remember the lines in one of his best-known Sonnets: 
 
 " Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore , _,- 
 So do our minutes hasten to their end ; 
 E^ch changing place with that which goes before, 
 In sequent toil all forwards do contend." 
 
 He must have known the following verses from the Meta- 
 morphoses. I give them in the version of Golding, which 
 Shakespeare knew, as well as in the original, which he 
 knew also. 
 
 Things eb and flow, and every shape is made too passe away. 
 The tyme itself continually is fleeting like a brooke, 
 For neyther brooke nor lyghtsome time can tarrye still. But looke 
 As every wave dryves other foorth, and that that commes behynd 
 Bothe thrusteth and is thrust itself, even so the tymes by kynd 
 Doo fly and follow bothe at once, and evermore renew. 
 
 Cuncta fluunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago. 
 Ipsa quoque assiduo labuntur tempora motu; 
 Non secus ac flumen; neque enim consistere flumen 
 
 * " These, too, last not, which we call elements." 
 
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238 OVID AND METAMORPHOSIS 
 
 Nee levis hora potest; sed ut unda impellitur unda 
 Urgueturque eadem veniens urguetque priorem, 
 Tempora sic fugiunt pariter, pariterque sequuntur. 
 
 Cuncta fiuunt; irdvra pel. A world of flux and flow, 
 but the victorious imagination its own centre, shaping 
 the plastic mass as it will — that is Ovid, and that in a 
 way is Shakespeare. Perhaps this explains why we find 
 more of Ovid in Shakespeare than of any other ancient 
 poet. 
 
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VIII 
 
 GREEK CONCEPTIONS OF 
 
 IMMORTALITY FROM HOMER 
 
 TO PLATO 
 
 By HERBERT WEIR SMYTH 
 
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GREEK CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 FROM HOMER TO PLATO 
 
 To the primitive thought of most peoples the con- 
 tinued existence of the soul after death is an imperative 
 consequence of the recognition of the presence of the 
 soul in the living man. Uncivilized man cannot well 
 conceive the annihilation of the spirit that dwells within 
 him; and even the savage that has not attained to the 
 conception of ' ' soul " refuses to believe that what is shall 
 utterly cease to be. The Greek race has left only a faint 
 record of the early stages of its culture. Its earliest liter- 
 ature testifies to a great civilization long over-past, and 
 assumes as self-evident the future life of the soul. It is my 
 purpose to trace the Greek conception of immortality 
 as it advances from the cruder faith of Homer to Plato's 
 triumphant proclamation of the divine nature of the 
 soul and its eternal union with God. Superstition in 
 its nobler and coarser forms, poetry, theology, mysticism, 
 and philosophy mould that conception in different de- 
 grees. The lower psychology recognizes mere continued 
 existence of the soul; the higher psychology attains to 
 the idea of personal immortality; grosser conceptions 
 refuse to surrender to higher forms of faith; more 
 highly developed notions coexist in the same age and 
 even in the same individual \dth notions derived from 
 
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242 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 an animistic stage of the evolution of religion; and 
 while Greek thought in general accepts unquestioningly 
 a life beyond the grave, agnosticism is not unknown 
 in the later and complexer stages of thought and cul- 
 ture. 
 
 The Greek whose activity and thought are set forth 
 in the Homeric poems regards the world as beautiful 
 and just, controlled by higher powers, whose regulative 
 action on life he accepts as inevitable, and whose favor 
 alone enables him to secure the removal of his sense of 
 human helplessness. But his modest demands are easily 
 satisfied and he is too much engaged in action, he lives 
 too much in the risks of adventure and the satisfaction 
 of achievement, to give even unanalytic expression to a 
 conscious joy in living; he is too unreflective even to 
 mark the disproportionate share of good things that 
 fall to the great, for whom alone the world, as his poetry, 
 seems to exist. The epic poet too in his own degree has 
 the constitutional aversion of his race to a "worship of 
 sorrow," as Goethe called it; he keeps himself on the 
 high and bright levels of the heroic world and its ideal- 
 ized figures, and rarely directs his glance to those sombre 
 regions of actuality, where, with all its zest, life is beset 
 by penury, weariness, and despair. 
 
 If pessimism is alien to Homer, he is still not altogether 
 untroubled ; but his gloomy utterances on the wretched- 
 ness of man's estate are scarcely the expression of dis- 
 engaged reflection. Rather they are evoked by the situ- 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 243 
 
 ation he has in mind, as when he says "there is nothing 
 more pitiful than man among all things that breathe 
 and creep upon the earth"; or again, "few are the chil- 
 dren Uke unto their sire, most are worse, and few are 
 better." The early Hellene gains his buoyancy of spirit, 
 his serenity, nay even (despite Plato) his very impulse 
 to heroic endeavor, not only from his realization of 
 the inevitableness of sorrow and of the cruelty of death, 
 which awakens in him no thought of relief from suffer- 
 ing, but also, and perhaps in no small measure, from his 
 cheerless view of the destination of his soul when once 
 it has left its fleshly tenement. 
 
 To the ancient Greeks, as to other early peoples, the 
 beginning of human life awakens no surprise. But death 
 is of insistent interest. With the problem of life and 
 death Homer deals as a poet, not as a psychologist. To 
 his thinking man is dualistic or rather he exists in a 
 double form; but Homer does not answer unequivocally 
 the question: which is man's real self — his body, or 
 his psyche, the "breath" in him, that quits the dying 
 man from out of the barrier of his teeth, or through the 
 stricken wound, and flits to Hades like a wreath of vapor. 
 Primitive psychology may have deduced its belief in the 
 conservation of the soul from the analogy of deathlike 
 conditions which deprive man temporarily of conscious- 
 ness. When sleep, the twin-brother of death, or swoon, 
 or trance, has passed, an incorporeal element seems to 
 return to the body which again becomes sentient. So in 
 
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244 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 the permanent state of death, if the visible man perishes 
 his soul is not destroyed because it does not return. The 
 word for the "shade" of the dead {eidolon) is used also 
 of the form that appears in dreams and of the wraith of 
 the living man; but of any belief in the "dream-soul" 
 that quits the body during sleep (a form of the astral 
 body of the theosophists) Homer is ignorant. The an- 
 alogy of the dream-state is to many primitive beliefs 
 sufficient proof of the after-life of the soul ; at any rate to 
 the early Greek the content of dreams was not a mere 
 illusive image, but a vivid, objective reality. The ap- 
 parition in sleep of the dead to the living is warrant of 
 their continued existence. Achilles knows that Patroclus 
 has not been utterly destroyed: "all night long the soul 
 of hapless Patroclus stood over me, wailing and lament- 
 ing, and wondrous like it was unto himself." For the 
 dead are the disembodied counterparts of the living: 
 
 Eternal form shall still divide 
 The eternal soul from all beside; 
 And I shall know him when we meet. 
 
 But there is no direct evidence that in the popular 
 belief of the Homeric age the soul, which after death 
 wears the form and feature of the living man, was thought 
 to dwell within the body as his second-self, his alter ego, 
 manifesting itself, when the activity of the body is 
 suspended, only in dreams that foretell the future, and 
 unnoticed in the waking hours when its functions are 
 resumed. This is a conception that does not appear in 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 245 
 
 definite form in Greece until the sixth century B.C. and 
 as a tenet of Orphic faith. 
 
 When once the soul has passed the confines of the 
 body, the eschatology of the Homeric age formulated 
 for it a destiny that exceeds in gloom all visions of the 
 other world ever evoked by the imagination of man, a 
 future shaped into a profound and purposed contrast to 
 a conception which equated life with the power to be- 
 hold the radiant light of the sun. "Wherefore," says 
 the shade of Teiresias to Odysseus in Hades, "where- 
 fore hast thou left the light of the sun and come to be- 
 hold the dead and a land alien to joy?" As Gruppe has 
 said: " behind the misery in which he deems himself to 
 live, the Homeric Greek beholds a greater, never-ending 
 woe to come," a woe for all mankind without distinc- 
 tion of moral worth. For the good and the evil inhabit 
 after death the same dread region. The implacable equity 
 of retributive justice in another world is the product of 
 later speculation, which has'forced its way into Homer 
 only in such passages as the prayer of Agamemnon: 
 
 Father Zeus, thou who rulest from Ida, most glorious and 
 great, and thou Sun, who seest all things and hearest all 
 things, and rivers and earth, and ye who beneath the earth 
 punish the dead who have sworn falsely, be ye my witnesses. 
 
 The triad of great sinners, Tityus, Tantalus and Sisy- 
 phus, whose conscious torments in Hades are beheld by 
 Odysseus, is not introduced as typical of the punish- 
 ment of ordinary transgressors. Their offences, as their 
 
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246 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 punishment, are exceptional. Homer knows of no hell, 
 for Tartarus has not yet become the abode of suffering. 
 Nor did the Greeks, as many other peoples, conceive of 
 a hell until they had imagined a heaven. 
 
 If Homer had the constitutional tendency of his race 
 to feel himself at home in this world, his view of the 
 hereafter proves (as Napoleon said) that it is especially 
 in the sphere of the imagination that the power of the 
 unknown is immeasurable. Homeric imagination passes 
 the uttermost margins of man's world and explores the 
 awful demesnes of eternal dusk. Homer's view of the 
 estate of the dead is not consistent; nor is that of his 
 great successor whose apocalyptic vision beheld the 
 regions of the dolorosa regno. 
 
 Wearing the semblance of its bodily appearance either 
 in normal life or as it was last seen upon the earth — the 
 slain heroes clad in their gory armor — the soul passes 
 across the river (either Oceanus or Styx) and enters 
 Erebus, its destined abode, from which there is no re- 
 turn; though the poet does not expressly say that it 
 abides there forever. A phantom prisoner in the dolor- 
 ous mansions of the implacable Hades, in "a land of 
 darkness, and where the light is of darkness, " the soul 
 lacks flesh, bones, and sinews; the power of motion it 
 has, but it is motion devoid of purpose; it has voice, but 
 only that of a squeak and gibber; it is of a filmy, vapor- 
 ous nature, of no greater substantiality than a dream 
 or an image mirrored in a glass. Some souls there are 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 247 
 
 that possess intelligence and are affected by emotion; 
 but most souls, unlike those of the great chieftains, 
 have lost consciousness, memory, and will; they are de- 
 void of intelligence because they do not know they are 
 impalpable ; they do not know what takes place in the 
 upper world nor do they normally have any thought of 
 the living; they are powerless to affect the living for 
 good or for evil, as the living in turn cannot influence 
 them for weal or woe ; they cannot, as ghostly visitants, 
 haunt the world above, and so helpless are they to 
 avenge themselves, if murder has brought them to 
 their loathed dwelling-place, that their kinsmen accept 
 blood-money because they have no terror of their venge- 
 ful apparition. 
 
 In the gloom of Hades the shades live on in an un- 
 substantial reflection of their life in the "white world," 
 a Russian phrase with a Greek ring to it. The phantom 
 Orion still pursues his quarry, the phantom Minos still 
 pronounces judgment; Achilles still is lord of all the 
 dead, though he would fain exchange his shadowy do- 
 minion to be a bondsman of the glebe in the world of 
 reality. Kingship does not die, and eternal serfdom 
 awaits the slave. 
 
 It is rather continued existence than immortal life 
 that the Homeric man expects will be the portion of his 
 soul. To this belief the exceptions are only the expres- 
 sions of the Homeric fancy resting upon some "halb 
 verklungne Sage," which seeks to discover an exemption 
 
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248 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 from the common doom of mankind. Homer has pre- 
 served a trace of the belief that certain privileged classes 
 have superior expectations as to future happiness, a be- 
 lief that still exists among some undeveloped peoples, as 
 the Peruvians and the inhabitants of the Tonga Islands, 
 and which, in a higher state of society, prompted the re- 
 mark of the lady of quality that "they will think twice 
 before they refuse a person of my condition." But in 
 Homer's unconscious reminiscence of hero-worship, it is 
 not signal merit, or exceeding virtue, or even superior 
 earthly station, but the autocratic will of the gods, that 
 unexpectedly frees a chosen few (and these only men of 
 the far-off past) from the necessity of passing through 
 the gates of death; and thus ensures them a perpetua- 
 tion of that complete existence, which, in the belief of 
 his age, lay in the undissevered coexistence of soul and 
 body. It is surpassing beauty, as in the case of Ganymede 
 or Tithonus, or privileged estate as the husband of a 
 mortal woman beloved by a god or sprung from a god, 
 as in the case of Menelaos, the son-in-law of Zeus, that 
 justifies translation to Olympus, to exclusive divine 
 companionship in the miraculous island of Aea, or to 
 the Elysian Fields at the end of the earth by the shore 
 of Ocean, where the recipients of the miraculous favor 
 of the gods pass their days in eternal joy. In the Islands 
 of the Blest, Hesiod's designation of the Elysian Fields, 
 the same felicity awaits the race of heroes, the demi- 
 gods; and so in Assyrian and Babylonian myths a few 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 249 
 
 heroes escape death by removal to islands of the blessed. 
 In the primitive Greek conception this immortality is 
 alone the gift of the gods: to live forever with soul and 
 body undivorced is to become a god; though the divinity 
 clothing the elect is in so far incomplete that it does not 
 confer the power to revisit the land of the living. Nor 
 do the translated enjoy any cult on the part of the 
 living because they are powerless to affect men on earth 
 either for good or for evil. 
 
 Translation to Elysium or the Blessed Isles, the fabric 
 of the poet's imagination, did indeed in a later period of 
 Greek life continue to appeal to the popular fancy: 
 
 Harmodius, our darling, thou art not dead! 
 Thou liv'st In the isles of the blest, 't is said, 
 
 With Achilles first in speed 
 
 And Tydides Diomede. 
 
 CONINGTON. 
 
 But this poetic fiction had no appreciable result in 
 modifying the actual faith of the ordinary man in the 
 classical period; nor indeed in a much later age did it 
 do more than supply the imagery of the hereafter. 
 
 Thou art not dead, my Protfe! Thou art flown 
 To a far country better than our own; 
 Thy home is now an Island of the Blest; 
 There 'mid Elysian meadows take thy rest. 
 
 Symonds. 
 
 It awakened no general hope and in Homer is simply a 
 gleam of light cast upon the dark background of man's 
 destiny. 
 
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250 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 What reason is there that the Greeks of the Homeric 
 age should have a conception of the other life colored 
 to so profound a sadness? It cannot be that it is a trans- 
 ference to Hades of any sadness with which they viewed 
 their life upon the earth and deepened by the shadows of 
 approaching doom. The sorrow of this world is indeed 
 due to the direct agency of the aristocratic gods who live 
 at ease and are careless of mankind, who have two urns 
 of evil and only one of good, whose arbitrary will is the 
 cause of actions and motives in men that otherwise re- 
 main inexplicable. The sorrow of this world is only an 
 undercurrent of belief never depressing the joy of life 
 to a lower level than serene gravity. 
 
 It is the absence of all cult of the spirits of the dead 
 that conditions the Homeric eschatology. Homer's con- 
 ception of the dead represents a rationalistic interrup- 
 tion of ancestor-worship, a cult existing in the age an- 
 terior to the epic, and reappearing in Greece proper 
 when the period of the epic had passed. 
 
 In the Mycenaean age, which lasted till about the 
 twelfth century, soul-cult is attested by the entombed 
 arms and utensils, by the traces of sacrifice of ani- 
 mals and of human beings, by the round altar open at 
 the bottom for the passage of sacrificial blood, which 
 the graves excavated by Schliemann at Mycenae it- 
 self have disclosed, and by similar discoveries at the 
 Dipylon in Athens and in Crete. It is a reasonable 
 inference that the Greeks of the Mycenaean period 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 251 
 
 had the consolation that personality would at least be 
 continued in the family or dan, that the regular observ- 
 ance of sacrifices to the dead was a symbol of the unin- 
 terrupted life of the soul. To the people which has left 
 such testimony to the cult of their dead these dead 
 must have been not mere shades but sentient ghosts, 
 taking delight in offerings made at their tombs near 
 which they lingered, rejoicing in funeral games in their 
 honor, ghosts who dispensed good to the living, who 
 defended their kin from evil ; but who, if the sacrifices 
 in their honor were omitted, would be compelled to 
 leave their graves as vampires (for the sacrifice of 
 blood points to vampirism) and become endowed with 
 the dread power of haunting their enemies; nevertheless 
 capable of conciliation and appeasement by pious min- 
 istrations. 
 
 And yet Homer has not altogether lost trace of this 
 cult of souls; though such recollections as are embedded 
 in Iliad and Odyssey are no indication of contemporary 
 acceptance of the religious beliefs of which they were 
 originally the expression. A funeral feast is held in honor 
 of Patroclus before the cremation of his body, human 
 beings and animals are sacrificed upon his pyre, jars 
 of honey and oil, recalling the embalming (and inhuma- 
 tion) of the dead, are placed beside the pyre, and funeral 
 games follow the burning of the corpse; again, the arms 
 of Eetion and Elpenor are burned; Odysseus pours liba- 
 tions to the dead and makes sacrifices of the blood of 
 
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252 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 victims to reanimate for a brief space of time the faint 
 spirits of the querulous shades in Hades. 
 
 To these indications of the submergence of soul-cult 
 in the age of Homer, others may be added of still slighter 
 cogency. But the fact remains — the proper belief of 
 that age rejects the worship of dead souls. The tend- 
 ance of the spirits of the departed that marked the 
 Mycenaean age has given place to utter neglect. 
 
 In the causes of this interruption of the earlier belief 
 the student of Greek religion and of ethnology is alike 
 interested. The interruption will not have been sudden 
 according to all well-understood analogies; and there 
 is ample time for the subsidence of one faith and the 
 rise of another between the fall of the Mycenaean civili- 
 zation and the civilization limned in Homer, who pic- 
 tures the earlier society as already verging towards its 
 decline. Can the neglect of the cult of the dead in 
 Homer be the result of the substitution of incineration 
 for inhumation? 
 
 In Homer all the dead, heroes and commonalty alike, 
 are burned. No shade may reach its abode in Hades 
 until its body has been consumed by fire. When the 
 shade of Patroclus appears to Achilles asleep during 
 the night after Hector has been slain, it says to him : 
 
 So thou dost sleep, Achilles, but me thou hast forgotten. 
 Not when I lived wast thou unmindful of me, but now that I 
 am dead. Make haste and bury me that I pass the gates of 
 Hades. The spirits keep me far aloof, the phantoms of the 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 253 
 
 weary dead, nor suffer me yet to mingle with them beyond the 
 River; and vainly do I roam around the wide-gated house of 
 Hades. Nay give me thy hand, I pitifully entreat thee, for 
 never more again sheill I return from Hades when ye have 
 given me my due of fire. 
 
 As with Patroclus so with Elpenor — so long as the 
 body of the dead was unburnt it still was sentient. 
 Cicero says that to his thinking Hector's body before it 
 was consumed by fire could still feel the outrage done 
 to it by Achilles. 
 
 Of the welfare of the souls of the dead the Homeric 
 age seems to have no other thought except to secure to 
 them absolute separation from earth and eternal sojourn 
 in Hades, and even this thought of them seems to be 
 dictated by the desire to remove from the survivors the 
 malign suggestion that their spirits will, if endowed with 
 partial consdousness through failure to destroy the body 
 by fire, be forced to undergo a fate more awful than 
 Hades itself — to hover eternally in unrest between 
 the world of the living jmd the world of the dead. 
 
 There are no ghosts in Homer — de non apparentibus 
 et non existentibus eadem est ratio. The total destruction 
 of the body by fire and the absence of remains near 
 which the spirit of the dead might linger removes from 
 the living the dread that their dreams may be haunted 
 by apparitions of departed friends and foes (the 
 Homeric man dreams only of those he knows.) If the 
 address of the shade of Patroclus to Achilles is inter- 
 
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254 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 preted to imply the capacity of the dead soul to injure 
 the living it must be regarded as a survival of the ear- 
 lier belief though it is found in one of the latest books of 
 the Iliad — not as the opinion of the Homeric age; 
 and Elpenor's warning to Odysseus not to leave his 
 body unbumed does not imply that that age feared 
 the visitation of a neglected spirit. 
 
 The coexistence in Homer of the custom of cremating 
 the dead with the disappesirance of the older belief in 
 the puissance of departed souls has been explained by 
 many scholars as due to the substitution of cremation 
 for inhumation because of the dread of the Greeks, in 
 the period of the pre-historic migrations in the last quar- 
 ter of the second millennium before Christ, that their 
 kin if interred in their homes in the Greek mainland 
 which they were abandoning for a new dwelling place 
 across the Aegean, might become the prey of enemies, 
 dogs, and birds. But this suggestion is no more tenable 
 than the other that the migrating peoples feared lest 
 the remains of their dead kin should be used for magical 
 charms against the surviving members of the clan. Or 
 did the new rite arise in Asia Minor among the colonists, 
 the ancestors of the Homeric Greeks, who feared that 
 enemies would desecrate the graves of their dead while 
 they were winning a foothold in an alien country and 
 had no fixed abode? Or were the dead regarded as vam- 
 pires to be put to rest by burning — a belief that has 
 scant support from Homer? Dr. DSrpfeld would have 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 255 
 
 us believe (on slight evidence) that the processes of in^- 
 humation and incineration were closely connected, that 
 while the dead in early times were always buried, their 
 bodies were embalmed or scorched, and that the latter 
 process might be carried so far as complete burning, es- 
 pecially in the cases of those who died on foreign soil 
 and wished to be interred at home. 
 
 Many theories, little certainty. The connection of 
 the practice of cremation with the ultimate destination 
 of the soul is a problem that must be surrendered by 
 the Hellenist to the anthropologist. It is ill-advised to 
 isolate the substitution of cremation for interment among 
 the Greeks of the Homeric age from the like phenome- 
 non among the Celts and the worshippers of Odin, who 
 shared the belief of the Homeric Greeks that with the 
 burning of the body the soul departs to another world. 
 Professor Ridgeway indeed claims that the appearance 
 of the doctrine of the soul's passage to a spirit-world 
 is coincident with the intrusion into Greece of the 
 Achaeans, a northern people, who brought with them 
 the practice of cremation and the belief that there 
 was a separate habitation for departed spirits, and 
 that this practice and belief was superimposed upon 
 that of the indigenous population of Greece which 
 thought that the spirit lingered in or near the place 
 where its carnal tenement was buried in the earth. 
 
 Whatever their ultimate connection, the two facts 
 of the burning of the dead and the atrophy of the cult 
 
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256 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 of their souls are established for the civilization depicted 
 in Homer. From the eleventh to the ninth or eighth cen- 
 tury, so far as we can discover from his epics, men were 
 concerned with the question of the future life of the soul 
 from the point of view of the living; and in the absence 
 of any service to the dead the result was inevitable 
 that their spirits should be regarded as ineffective, 
 and that the thought men take of the departed should 
 gradually fade away with personal memory. There 
 was "no resurrection in the minds of men." Only the 
 phantom solace remained for the great that their 
 deeds should live immortal through the poet's art. For 
 the common man there was no solace whatever. 
 
 But the horizon of Greek faith was not everywhere 
 nor for all time bounded by the doctrine of Homer. 
 The older worship of souls still survived in Greece 
 proper. It is attested in Hesiod. It is attested by the 
 beehive tomb at Menidi in Attica in which six skeletons 
 were discovered surrounded by funeral offerings, while 
 in the approach to the sepulchre fragments of pottery, 
 showing an uninterrupted series of Mycenaean, Dipy- 
 lon, and black and red figured Attic vases, prove that 
 the tomb had been visited by successive generations to 
 whom we must attribute the belief that the spirits of 
 the dead were still conscious and potent, not forever 
 removed from participation in the life of their kindred. 
 This belief may well have continued throughout the 
 Homeric age in undetected localities, even of the Asiatic 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 257 
 
 littoral, among classes of society untouched by the 
 creed of the epic minstrels. It is certain that when we 
 enter upon the historic age we have evidence of the 
 repristination, if not the continuance, of the pre-Homeric 
 eschatology. 
 
 For the earliest part of the historic age our evidence 
 indeed is scant. But for the classical period, thanks to 
 the testimony of the late lyric, Attic literature, and 
 sepulchral monuments, we can form a tolerably definite 
 conception of the actual belief of the Greeks of the fifth 
 and fourth centuries. Eliminating such superstitious 
 beliefs as that recorded by Plato to the effect that if 
 there was a gale of wind when a man was dying it might 
 blow his soul away altogether, let us endeavor to dis- 
 cover what the average Athenian thought would be- 
 come of his disembodied spirit, if he was neither a 
 member of a mystical sect nor tinged with philosophy. 
 
 In the first place it made no difference to that spirit 
 whether its body was interred or burned. Both methods 
 were in vogue, but inhumation was the commoner. The 
 soul survived, possessing consciousness; it could use the 
 various utensils and other objects deposited by the re- 
 mains; it had the appetites and the grosser passions of 
 the body; it partook of the funeral baked meats pre- 
 pared by the family on its return from the grave ; and 
 it had a special meal for itself served at the tomb on 
 the third and ninth day after the burial. On the thirti- 
 eth of the month there was a "service," and each year 
 
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258 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 the birthday of the deceased was celebrated with sacri- 
 fices. Oiferings and observances alike aimed to secure 
 contentment in death for the souls in their abode in the 
 tomb, from which in springtime (and ordinarily only at 
 the "festival of flowers") they were all thought to as- 
 cend into the habitation of their living kin, who ac- 
 cordingly decreed in their honor the festival of "all 
 souls," thus anticipating the celebration of that name 
 instituted by the Abbot of Cluny in the tenth century. 
 The spirit-visitors swarmed into the houses of their kin, 
 there they were entertained, and thence they were finally 
 driven out with a cry much like that in vogue in Rome 
 — manes exite paterni — , or in Slavonic lands — "ye 
 have eaten and drunken, souls, now go, now go." 
 
 The offices of the cult of the dead, as the spirit itself, 
 were intimately attached to the tomb where the remains 
 reposed. The dead became earth-spirits (chthonioi), and 
 dwelt in the demesne of the earth-gods; they hovered 
 round their tombs, alike whether they were good or evil 
 spirits; they were conscious of what happened on earth 
 and knew whether the passer-by was friend or foe; they 
 might assume visible form, especially that of snakes. 
 Usually however they remained invisible, though en- 
 dowed with the sense of hearing and, when they were 
 near, de mortuis nil nisi honum, the original meaning of 
 which saying derived its significance from the fact that 
 any one who spoke evil of a deceased person was liable 
 to prosecution by his descendants, who would otherwise 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 259 
 
 be visited with the wrath of the dead. In very late times 
 we hear of souls conjured up by necromancers (as the 
 ghost of Samuel by the witch of Endor), who, so Plu- 
 tarch tells, made use of phantoms to cheat the credu- 
 lous. The ordinary method of converse with the spirit- 
 world was by incubation, the dead appearing in dreams 
 to the visitors at "soul-conjuring" places. 
 
 In common belief the dead became invisible powers 
 called "the higher and the better," or more generally 
 "the blessed," like the German "die Seligen." Popular 
 eschatology did not dogmatize about their estate. It ex- 
 pressed itself in terms of the relation of the dead to their 
 descendants, for the well-being of the soul was con- 
 ditioned, not by its deeds in this life, but by the worship 
 paid it by its kin. The solidarity of the family was in 
 turn supported by the cult of the dead. What concerned 
 their living kinsmen, actual or adopted, was, apart 
 from natural piety, the attitude that the spirits would 
 take toward themselves. Were they to bring fruitful- 
 ness to fields and to marriage, were they to be helpers 
 in time of trouble, and especially when their kin or coun- 
 trymen in whose territory their remains reposed were 
 hard pressed in battle? In the Libation-Bearers of 
 Aeschylus and the Electra of Sophocles the shade of the 
 murdered Agamemnon is implored to aid his children in 
 their purpose to requite his foul murder upon the faith- 
 less Clytaemnestra and her paramour Aegisthus; and at 
 the same time the deprivation of accustomed sacrifices 
 
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260 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 is held over him in terrorem. So in the first named play, 
 from Campbell's version: — 
 
 Orestes. My father, king in all but in thy death, 
 I pray for power to rule thine ancient hall. 
 
 Electra. I too, my father, 'with a daughter's voice, 
 ' Pray thee for power to work Aegisthus woe. 
 
 Orestes. So men shall honour thee with sacrifice 
 And righteous banquets; else the savoury smoke 
 That streams on earth for souls more fortunate, 
 Shall leave thee comfortless. 
 
 Or, on the other hand, were the souls of the dead to 
 become workers of ill who would visit their enemies 
 with terrifying dreams, who would become spirits of 
 curse and, with "memory as their ally," bring epilepsy, 
 apoplexy, sudden death and distress of every kind even 
 upon the unborn descendants of those who had injured 
 them in life or who had neglected to minister to their 
 ghostly welfare? "Have you never remarked," says 
 Xenophon in the Cyropaedia, "what terrors the souls of 
 those who have suffered an unjust death strike into 
 those who are stained with their blood, and what aveng- 
 ing deities they send upon impious offenders? Do you 
 imagine, too, that the honors offered to the dead would 
 still continue, if their souls possessed no power?" 
 
 If the Attic cult of the dead looks largely to the bene- 
 fit to accrue to the living in accordance with the do ut 
 des doctrine of undeveloped Greek ethics, we must 
 not underestimate, as is too often done by students of 
 Hellenic folk-lore, the large part played by the im- 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 261 
 
 pulses of natural affection. "The dust does not hide 
 the noble grace of their living kinsmen," says Pindar; 
 Orestes and Electra demand the punishment of Cly- 
 taemnestra and Aegisthus less for their own sakes than 
 for their murdered father's; Antigone's love for her 
 unburied brother to whom she gives the rites of sepulture 
 costs her her own Ufe; and in the face of threats and in 
 the expectation of exile Teucer demands the burial of 
 Ajax. 
 
 The family alone preserved the cult of its dead. In 
 the family the souls of the departed were worshipped as 
 puissant ghosts and became in time akin to the spirits 
 of the heroes, a special class of men either actually an- 
 cestors, or fictitiously regarded as ancestors, of tribes 
 or clans. Primarily the heroes were the legendary 
 princes of the tales of Troy and Thebes, in later times 
 founders of cities, kings, famous athletes, and, by a 
 gradual extension of the term, men in general distin- 
 guished for great ability and for virtues, in which, how- 
 ever, morality was not necessarily included. In the 
 latest times any deceased person might be called a hero. 
 In the classical period, however, the heroes who had 
 been men of distinction were thought to enjoy after 
 death a higher form of existence and thus received spedal 
 reverence from the living because of their signal power 
 to avert calamity and to render help in time of danger 
 to the district sanctified by the possession of their tombs. 
 The cult of heroes is often not to be distinguished from 
 
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262 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 that of the common dead ; but the bodies of the former 
 were often buried in the market-place or under an altar 
 to some god or by the hearth, but only the common dead 
 (who might not be buried within the city) enjoyed the 
 ministrations of the family, the primal social unit. 
 
 In later times the line of demarcation between hero 
 and god was often obliterated in popular consciousness 
 though language differentiated between their cult; of 
 a god the proper words for altar and sacrifice were ^(ofwii 
 and dveiv ; while ea-xdpa and ivayi^eiv were applied in the 
 case of heroes. The souls not merely of the heroes 
 but of the ordinary dead came in course of time to be 
 regarded as gods. But the Greeks did not develop the 
 idea of family gods. The nearest approach on Greek 
 soil to the lar familiaris is the " good spirit, " the ayadm 
 haifiav, originally the spirit of an ancestor and the ob- 
 ject of reverence to the family. 
 
 The popular faith in the continued potency of the 
 soul was perhaps stronger in the eighth and seventh cen- 
 turies than in the later classical period which I have, in 
 general, been describing. And yet though that faith 
 was prevailingly held in most classes of society in the 
 Periclean age and a century later in the age of Demos- 
 thenes, as is attested by theeAadence of literature and the 
 funereal vases; though it afforded the living at least the 
 consolation of the belief that the spirits of their dear 
 ones were not cast into the cavernous darkness of Hades 
 but tarried in or near the place of their interment, that 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 263 
 
 faith does not indicate any profound conviction of the 
 happiness of the departed, nor, through its vagueness of 
 outline, did it possess an authority potent enough to 
 displace the old-time concrete associations engrafted 
 upon religious belief by the power of the sovereign poet 
 who controlled in large measure the imagination of pos- 
 terity. As Homer conceived the greater gods, so they 
 were incorporated into the public faith of Hellas; as 
 Homer pictured the abode of souls in the realm of Hades, 
 so successive generations in the most enlightened age 
 gazed into a world beyond. In part, and especially in 
 literature, men expressed their belief in terms of con- 
 scious recourse to Homer (for Homer colored even the 
 form of thought), in part also Homer's eschatology still 
 actually survived, though properly irreconcilable with 
 the dominant conceptions which gave a higher evalua- 
 tion to the dignity of life. 
 
 A reconciliation was however affected and with a 
 disdain of logic that marks a religion resisting the 
 oppression of a theology that systematically casts aside 
 the more primitive lineaments of popular conception. 
 Upon the current belief that the souls of all the dead, 
 whether buried or burned, were free and hovered in or 
 near their tombs, possessing potency for good or evil, 
 was superimposed the Homeric doctrine of a separate 
 and common abode for those whose bodies had been 
 consumed by fire, impotent souls, confined to the house 
 of Hades. The mourner at the tomb, accepting uncon- 
 
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264 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 sciously a compromise, believed (it seems) that his ap- 
 peal would gradually reach the dull cold ear of death, 
 and that the soul of the departed in its subterranean 
 abode in Hades would respond to his call, and, ascend- 
 ing to the grave, be near at hand to receive the minis- 
 trations of those it loved. The coalescence of the 
 Homeric and the later belief enables us to understand 
 the equation of the grave with Hades, as in Sophocles* 
 expression "to lie in Hades." Whatever the faith of the 
 unlettered, literature proves that the Homeric vision 
 of the other world had not suffered supersession. The 
 tragic poets and Plato retain to a large extent the places 
 and persons of the Homeric Hades — Styx, Acheron, 
 Pyriphlegethon, Cocytus, Minos and Rhadamanthys,; 
 but Tartarus is changed and is now a place of torture. 
 At times too the dead is regarded sometimes as dwell- 
 ing in Hades among the good (in accordance with Pin- 
 dar's more cheerful view of the hereafter), or among the 
 pious in Elysium, or even as transferred, like Harmo- 
 dius and Aristogeiton, to the Islands of the Blest. 
 Aeschylus' conception of the future life is largely Hom- 
 eric; though his persistent religious and ethical purpose 
 leads him to accentuate the un- Homeric idea of future 
 punishment that had been developed in the sixth cen- 
 tury, and to dwell on the torments of the guilty in the 
 hands of the avenging Furies. Sophocles, the "most 
 Homeric" of the tragic poets, often represents Homer's 
 view of the dead; he rarely touches the doctrine of re- 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 265 
 
 tribution, and (except where he reproduces Orphic con- 
 ceptions) makes only a slight advance beyond Aeschylus 
 in regard to future happiness. Euripides is familiar with 
 the fear of punishment and the hope of reward; as 
 in a fragment where he says "whoever honors his pa- 
 rents in life, both in life and in death is dear unto the 
 gods." But the doctrine of retributive punishment 
 expressed in terms of the Homeric Hades filled men with 
 terror from which the current faith based on the cult of 
 the dead, had it been absolute, might have delivered them, 
 and from which they were delivered by Epicurus, ac- 
 cording to his passionate Roman disciple. ' ' When a man " 
 says the aged Cephalus in the Republic, "when a man 
 faces the thought that he is going to die, he becomes 
 afraid and concerned about things for which he did not 
 care before. For the stories (which he laughed at be- 
 fore) about those In Hades, that the man who has done 
 wrong here must pay the penalty for it in the other 
 world, these stories torment his soul lest they may prove 
 to be true." 
 
 In the brilliant period of Athens' history men hoped, 
 and feared, vacillated, and doubted. Riper culture 
 was affecting a cleavage of classes. The more enlightened 
 may have got some notion of theological and philosoph- 
 ical speculation, but until Plato developed his doctrines 
 the adherents of the traditionary theology did not con- 
 ceive the soul to be eternal and indestructible. As for 
 the masses, Aristotle expressly says they were uncer- 
 
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266 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 tain whether the soul perished or was immortal. What 
 
 answer then could the Hellene make to the obstinate 
 
 questioning 
 
 Cease they to love, and move, and breathe, and speak. 
 Who die? 
 
 Tragedy is strangely silent, strangely inconsistent. 
 Aeschylus offers little, and Sophocles only slightly more, 
 evidence of the belief that the dead had feeling and 
 consciousness. In one of his plays the former poet 
 makes one of his characters utter the sentiment "if 
 thou wishest to do good or ill to the dead, it is indifferent 
 because they have neither joy nor pain." And yet, in 
 the Agamemnon, the demon of the race of Tantalus, the 
 fanatical murderess of the king, declares with savage 
 frenzy that her child whom he had slain, " Iphigenia, his 
 daughter, as is her right, will gladly meet her father by 
 the swift-flowing stream of woes and throw her arms 
 about him and kiss him." Nor is the expectation of a 
 reunion in the world below foreign to Sophocles, whose 
 self- blinded Oedipus declares "had I sight, I know not 
 with what eyes I could ever have gazed upon my father, 
 when I had come to Hades, or upon my wretched 
 mother, since I have sinned against both such sins as 
 deserve punishment more severe than strangling." 
 Antigone's love for her brother is not to be limited to the 
 world where she dares and suffers for him. She will love 
 him, for love she must, even among the dead, where she 
 will also share the home of her unfortunate parents : " B ut 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 267 
 
 I feed myself with good hope that my coming will be 
 welcome to my father, and pleasant to thee, my mother, 
 and welcome to thee, my darling brother." 
 
 To the searching mind of Euripides, the poet of Greece's 
 great Age of Doubt, thought in all its aspects made 
 effective appeal. At all cost to artistic propriety he 
 would give voice to the jangling of beliefs: he had his 
 heroic personages at hand, imposed upon him by his 
 conventional art; their august mouths should bear the 
 message of his self-contentions and the hesitations of 
 the time's decaying faith. He hallows the sanctities 
 of the faith of his fathers in the Alcestis, fairly a ro- 
 mantic play, but rooted in popular doctrine: here Death 
 himself battles for the life of that "blessed spirit" of 
 measureless self-surrender; Megara calls upon the soul 
 of her husband to hear her from the tomb and to come 
 to her aid. But it is not a real faith that he enstages : 
 it is the faith of a literary opportunist, conscious of 
 the pressure of tradition and of the convenience of 
 recourse to accredited forms of expression, but in still 
 greater degree conscious of the exigencies of dramatic 
 interest. But behind even this conventionalized ortho- 
 doxy there lurks the rationalist. "We prove ourselves," 
 says the poet of the Hippolytus, "in truth mad lovers of 
 this, whate'er this be, that glitters on the earth, because 
 we know no other life and things beneath the earth are 
 not revealed. We are borne along at random by illu- 
 sions." And in darker mood: "The dead are earth and 
 
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268 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 shadow, void of feeling " ; "not to be born and to be dead 
 are one." If the mobile affinities of Euripides rested for 
 a moment upon the doctrines of the Orphics and the 
 Pythagoreans, they found a larger sympathy with a be- 
 lief, unassailed by the poet, as are his other beliefs, that 
 proves him not to have been utterly unstable in his con- 
 ception of the destiny of the soul. Popular fancy, theo- 
 logy, philosophy, and poetry have all contributed some- 
 thing to the idea that the spirit ascends to the aether, 
 the "heaven" of an age to whom the gods had long since 
 ceased to dwell on Olympus. " Earth to earth, the spirit 
 to the region above," Epicharmus had said, not without 
 some reference to the popular identification of the soul 
 with the air or aether. It is difficult to determine how 
 far such ideas were influenced by the dualistic conception 
 that the universe consisted of "earth" and of "aether" 
 as the active intelligent element. With Diogenes of Apol- 
 lonia's equation of aether with soul Euripides is famil- 
 iar, and in the Helen says that "albeit the mind of 
 the dead does not live, it still has deathless conscious- 
 ness when merged in deathless aether." Pantheistic 
 absorption into the All leaves no place for the persist- 
 ence of individuality, the essence of true immortality. 
 The orators do not scruple to doubt whether the 
 spirits of the dead possess consciousness; in all the 
 orations delivered on state occasions in honor of those 
 who gave their lives for their country there is heard 
 no note of the recognition of kindred in the other life. 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 269 
 
 Even Socrates, a confirmed optimist, had no fixed belief 
 whether he will become as naught and have no con- 
 sciousness of anything, or whether there is a removal 
 of the soul from this place to some other, where, they 
 say, the great men of old enjoy immortality — both 
 are alike good, the one will be like a dreamless sleep,, 
 the other will afford him the happiness of conversing 
 with Homer and Agamemnon and Odysseus. Where 
 all are ignorant how can he know? Socrates' vision of 
 the future life is more akin to Homer's than it is to that 
 of the theological poets of Greece ; and it is in the main 
 that of the average man of intelligence of his day. 
 
 It is naturally alien to that of the philosophers with 
 whose physical researches Socrates had scant sympathy. 
 From the Ionic philosophy men could derive no con- 
 firmation of a hope in the continued existence or the 
 immortality of the individual soul. To that philosophy 
 the soul is merely a part of nature, a form of the univer- 
 sal force animating the primal substance out of which 
 the world was formed and energizing in all things. On 
 such a view the soul is indeed divine by reason of the 
 fact that it is a portion of that cosmic force which 
 formed and guides the universe; but it does not exist for 
 itself and has no individual existence. As has been well 
 said, the Ionian philosophy almost lost sight of man in 
 its endeavor to fathom the nature of the universe and 
 the phenomena of life. Heraclitus admits' only the im- 
 mortality of the principle pervading the universe; to 
 
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270 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 him the soul is fire, the type of all-pervasive motion; 
 for the statements ascribing to him the belief that the 
 individual soul continued to exist after death are de- 
 rived from Platonizing thinkers. His proper teaching 
 denies the absolute death of the soul, for death is birth 
 as birth is death. If in general the Eleatics, maintain- 
 ing Being to be an indissoluble One, regard the soul as 
 a condition of activity of associated elements, Par- 
 menides shows traces of the belief that the soul had 
 perished before it entered the body and lives on after 
 its dissolution. But herein he, and to a still greater de- 
 gree Empedocles and Pythagoras, show the influence of 
 Orphism. Democritus lets the atoms, which unite to 
 form the soul, disappear with the death of the body into 
 the constituent parts of the universe. The dualist Anax- 
 agoras regards W0M5, which "arranges all things," as in- 
 corporeal, possessed of the power of will and thought, 
 all-wise, transcendent, though it may inhere in certain 
 things as men, animals, and plants. But individuality 
 is only a form of the universal. Separation of the body 
 is the death of the soul. At death only the nous survives, 
 while the soul disappears since it is only a manifestation 
 of the nous. Personality is only a form of something 
 more general which vitalizes the body; a single form, 
 possessing no independence of itself, cannot continue 
 forever. 
 
 But any philosophy which regarded as impersonal 
 the only true reality and left no room for human per- 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 271 
 
 sonality cannot well be the cause of the general silence, 
 before Plato, as to any hope of true immortality. The 
 figuration of souls on works of art in the form of doves, 
 bees, serpents, or as tiny creatures often with human 
 heads, testifies merely to the popular belief in their con- 
 tinued existence, not to any true immortality; a belief 
 which, at different times, had created out of dead souls 
 the mythological conceptions of the Keres, Moerae, 
 Harpies, and Sirens. Even the reliefs supposed to de- 
 pict the feast of the dead in Elysium are more safely in- 
 terpreted as referring to the funeral banquet of the liv- 
 ing. In the funereal stelae and lecythi, expressions of 
 love of kin, of piety and tenderness toward the dead, 
 the clasped hands, the incomparable salutation and fare- 
 well (x"'ipe) that binds life and death so closely together, 
 do not have regard to a world beyond the life in which 
 love with all its griefs clings to love only through re- 
 membrance: 
 
 I am not lost when Love remembers me. 
 This silence is all the more strange because that age 
 was not unfamiliar with the hope of a higher, a personal 
 immortality. It may be that love needed no deeper ex- 
 pression than the monument intended to serve as a 
 lasting memorial of piety and to symbolize life continued 
 after death; it may be that men were reticent because 
 of a certain delicacy of reserve and held themselves so 
 aloof from the profession of their hope that it could not 
 be reflected in literature or art. Certain it is, however, 
 
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272 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 that in at least one of the two Mysteries a fixed hope of 
 personal immortality was bom. 
 
 Both the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries reflect 
 in terms of a quickened religious impulse and a pro- 
 founder and less external faith, that upheaval in the old 
 order of things in society, in politics, in j ustice, in the man- 
 ifold relations of life, which marks the period of transi- 
 tion from the Homeric age to the middle of the seventh 
 century B.C. The ends and aims of Ufe had grown more 
 complex; love and hate were not such simple passions, 
 the naive beliefs in things divine and human were 
 changing their old-time aspects. Forms of belief that 
 had remained quiescent were now seen to be changed 
 with a fructifying power to minister to the claims of an 
 individualism that sought satisfaction for its deeper 
 needs and visible evidence, in religious rites, of the real- 
 ization of those needs. Ecstacy of religious fervor, ex- 
 altation of soul, brought men into nearer communion 
 with the divine, and with it a large consolation that res- 
 cued them alike from the traditional belief imposed by 
 the authority of Homer and from the unsubstantial con- 
 ceptions of their future estate inherent in the popular 
 worship of souls ; perhaps also from the newer doctrines 
 of philosophy that left no room for personal solace. It 
 was in and through the Mysteries that men sought to 
 find an anodyne for the misery of this world and a 
 greater hope as regards the world to come. Sectaries 
 gjone could assault the public religion of Hellas at its 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 273 
 
 strongest point — the perfect freedom of its faith and 
 its universal appeal to every Hellene. Both the Eleusi- 
 nian and the Orphic Mysteries are sectarian — they 
 promised salvation to their devotees alone ; they granted 
 no hope to the unregenerate. 
 
 From the narrow circle of believers at Eleusis the 
 faith spread to all who accepted the mysterious teach- 
 ing inculcated in connection with the worship of De- 
 meter, Kore, and Triptolemus, divinities of the earth 
 alike the source of life and the place of the dead. Puri- 
 fication, according to ritual, of all who could speak 
 Greek and who had not shed human blood, was the only 
 preliminary requisite for initiation into the mysteries of 
 Eleusis. These, we know, comprised dramatic spectacles^ 
 which probably envisaged the seizure of Persephone, 
 the distress of her mother, and the passion of Dionysus 
 — lacchus; secondly, the display of sacred objects; and, 
 thirdly, the utterance of certain words by the hiero- 
 phant. Whatever may have been the nature of these 
 aspects of the ritual, whatever the character of the sym- 
 bolism (the planting of the seed and the birth of vege- 
 tation is surely not an analogy to the death of the body 
 and the continued existence of the soul), the essential 
 feature of the cult is not a mystery : it was the reverential 
 and unquestioning acceptance of the word of the god*- 
 dess of Earth, who, when her daughter was saved to her 
 for two parts of the year from her dread lord, had first re- 
 vealed the "manner of her rites" and taught her "holy 
 
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274 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 mysteries" to Eleusis' king. "Happy," said she, " is he 
 among mortal men who hath gazed upon these things. 
 And he that is uninitiate and hath no lot in them, hath 
 never equal lot in death beneath the murky gloom." 
 
 Though the Eleusinian Mysteries may have ministered 
 solace to the individual (death is a blessing, not an 
 evil, is the utterance of a hierophant), they did not 
 possess the vital force for spiritual regeneration that 
 marks the Mysteries of the narrower sect of the devotees 
 of Orpheus. It was the function of the Mysteries of 
 Eleusis not to prove a future life, but to define the state 
 of existence after death; and even that lacks precision 
 of outline. A system of positive doctrine was not set 
 forth at Eleusis. The initiates, Aristotle expressly tells 
 us, did not have to learn anything; they were to be "af- 
 fected and put into a frame of mind." It is therefore 
 doubtful whether they received the assurance of personal 
 immortality. 
 
 It was the Orphic Mysteries that gave birth to the 
 most profound ideas in Greek religion, — the divine 
 origin of the soul, its eternal nature, and personal im- 
 mortality, — doctrines reproduced by Pindar along with 
 the traditionary theology; professed with passion by 
 Empedocles, at once poet, physicist, and mystic; es- 
 tablished as the rule of life by the Pythagorean order, 
 but not touching the general profession of belief; and 
 finally intellectualized when they were taken over by 
 Plato, who fused metaphysics with theology. With 
 
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'CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 275 
 
 Plato the great spiritualistic movement of Hellas reached 
 its culmination. 
 
 Great movements in religion are paradoxes to current 
 belief or conduct. Orphism regarded the world, not as 
 beautiful and regulated by the justice of the old-time 
 gods, but as evil because of the implication in man of 
 impulses that are the spring of unhappiness. The rise 
 of Orphism came at a moment of religious readjustment 
 when men were not merely returning to an unrealized 
 or half-realized doctrine, as in a modern "revival"; 
 men had come to the realization that the moral order 
 of the world did not fulfill itself completely in this Ufe; 
 they were endeavoring to find, through emotional ex- 
 pansion rather than through a sustained effort of the 
 reasoning intelligence, a new faith that should satisfy 
 the craving of the soul by pointing to redemption from 
 sin, and how, through its own conscious effort in puri- 
 fication, the soul might reunite with God. The continua- 
 tion of the life of the individual after death had become 
 an imperative ethical postulate. 
 
 Of the influences that worked to awaken this faith 
 the most potent was the worship of Dionysus, a new- 
 comer in the Olympian hierarchy. Other localities be- 
 ades Thrace adopted his cult, but it was from Thrace 
 especially that, as early as the seventh century, there 
 was diffused throughout Greece the worship of the god 
 of spiritual regeneration. In the enthusiastic exalta- 
 tion of the cult of the god of dying and reviving ve- 
 
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276 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 gelation lay the germ of the Greek belief in true im- 
 mortality. It is to Dionysus that the poet Melanippides 
 cries: "Hear me, oh father, wonder of mortal men, thou 
 that carest for my ever-living soul"; and it is in the 
 spirit of the Orphic faith that Euripides asks 
 
 Who knows but death may be what men call life, 
 And life be dying? 
 
 The devotees of the mythical Thracian priest Orpheus 
 stood outside the formal religion of the State, which 
 never admitted a system of strict dogmatic doctrine. 
 Their teaching united theology and ethics in its con- 
 ception that faith in immortality was a motive force 
 for moral regeneration. The soul before it came to re- 
 side in man was godlike and endowed with heavenly 
 purity ; and of its divine nature it was forever conscious. 
 To the guards that stand before the pool of Memory in 
 the lower world, the soul must say, when it comes 
 thither, in the words prescribed by the Book of the 
 Dead: "I am the child of earth and the starry heaven; 
 but I (that is, my soul) am of celestial descent." So 
 too when it appears before Persephone, the supreme 
 judge, it says: " Pure and bom of the pure I come before 
 you, Queen of those who dwell in the lower world, 
 Eucles, Eubuleus, and ye other immortal gods — for 
 I claim that I, too, am of your immortal race." 
 
 It would be of interest to deal at close range with the 
 physiological element in the Orphic doctrine that the 
 soul is divine. But I must leave to others the deter- 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 277 
 
 mination of the question whether the phenomenon of 
 mystic exaltation or the phenomenon of sleep contrib- 
 uted to the formation of that belief. On the one hand 
 there are the tumultuous dance, the frenzied shouts, the 
 rending of the victim, the devouring of its raw flesh, 
 the drinking of its blood, — all the spiritual intoxica- 
 tion (eKaraaif, fiavia) of the "sleepless bacchants" of the 
 rites of Dionysus. In moments of such ecstatic excite- 
 ment it may be held that the "possessed" soul departs 
 from the body, and that its return indicates that a tem- 
 porary union with the god of the mystic rite has taken 
 place; but there is also reason for the thought that in 
 such abnormal states it is in reality the body that has 
 been "possessed" and that the god is in the bacchant. 
 Perhaps in the lethargy of ej^haustion ensuing upon 
 frenzy the apparent absence of the soul might suggest 
 the idea of its sojourn with the gods. 
 
 Be this as it may, we have actual testimony to the 
 notion that while we are awake the soul is asleep, and 
 that when we are sunk in sleep (the counterfeit present- 
 ment of death) the soul is awake and manifests a power 
 of which it is incapable when the body is active. This 
 belief is explicitly set forth by Pindar, one of our early 
 authorities for Orphism : 
 
 The body of all men is subject to all-powerful death, but 
 there still remains alive the image (etSwXoi/) of life; for that 
 alone is from the gods. It sleeps while the limbs are active, but 
 to those in sleep it reveals in many dreams a coming award of 
 joy and sorrow. 
 
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278 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 This idea appears in Aeschylus, Plato, and Aristotle ; 
 but here is the first occurrence of the argument that the 
 soul survives the death of the body because it is of di- 
 vine origin. 
 
 But to return to the doctrines of the Orphics, which 
 were modified in part by the teachings of Pythagoras. 
 When the soul, which as a god had dwelt with the gods, 
 reaches the earth having passed the gates of the seven 
 planetary spheres, it is immured in the body, its grave 
 or prison-house. An "exile and wanderer from God," 
 it is now bound in the fatal "circle" or "wheel of genera- 
 tion," and must undergo a series of births and deaths, 
 assuming the form even of animals, fish, or plants if it 
 has not purified itself sufficiently in a former life to war- 
 rant a higher state. Metempsychosis is thus indissolubly 
 associated with purification. At each death the soul 
 passes into Hades, where it enters upon an intermediate 
 condition of reward or punishment. It was in the ex- 
 clusive circle of the Orphic sectaries that there came into 
 existence, for the first time in the history of European 
 thought, the doctrine of future retributive justice. If 
 the soul has purified itself to a certain degree, Elysium is 
 its appointed residence, and there, in the sunlight of that 
 nether paradise, in the "beautiful meadow around fair- 
 flowing Acheron," it enjoys an existence representing 
 all the delights of its terrene state. The joys of this 
 heaven are depicted by Pindar in a fashion that recalls 
 certain modern hymns: 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 279 
 
 For them shineth below the strength of the sun while in 
 our world it is night, and the space of crimson-flowered 
 meadows before their city is full of the shade of frankincense- 
 trees, and of fruits of gold. And some in horses, and in bodily 
 feats, and some in dice, and some in harp-playing have de- 
 light; and among them thriveth fair-flowering bliss; and 
 fragrance streameth ever through the lovely land, as they 
 mingle incense of every kind upon the altars of the gods. — 
 Myers' translation, frag. 129. 
 
 After ten rebirths and ten periods of sojourn below, 
 if the soul has expiated its "ancient guilt" by living 
 in purity, it is finally freed from the prison-house of 
 the body, and returns to its celestial home. If it proves 
 itself incapable of expiation and atonement it is cast 
 into Tartarus. With a heaven has come a hell. 
 
 The cardinal doctrine of Orphism is, in a word, that 
 man cannot save himself except by submission; only 
 through purification and " fasting from evil " can the 
 soul regain its original purity and divine nature. The 
 soul preserves in the hereafter its personality unim- 
 paired, a doctrine upon which some modern philoso- 
 phers have laid much stress as a necessary sequel to 
 the affirmation of individuality in this life. 
 
 Plato is at once theologian and metaphysician. With 
 his own theory of Ideas he has (imperfectly in part) cor- 
 related the doctrine of the future state of the soul that 
 he received from Orphism and Pythagoreanism. To him 
 philosophy has become a sort of initiation into the 
 mysteries, a release and purification from the senses. 
 
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280 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 ^The soul, or more strictiy its sovereign rational part, 
 comes from God. It is independent of the body, the 
 source of its power of motion, it is spiritual, individual, 
 and immortal. Reason is the "eye of the soul," and is 
 "akin to the divine, and immortal, and ever-existent." 
 The eternal nature of the soul is manifested in its power 
 of knowing the eternal. But the soul is not simple. Its 
 mortal part is not the work of the supreme creator, but 
 of the "younger gods"; and it therefore does not have 
 the same high destiny as its loftier part. The soul that 
 in our bodies is a temporary visitant "hath elsewhere 
 had its setting and cometh from afar," even from the 
 supercelestial world of the Ideas. As the Ideas are eter- 
 nal, so it is eternal. Like the Ideas, it is uncreated; 
 but, unlike them, it is not unchangeable and cannot 
 remain in that world of pure Being; for though of all 
 things it is nearest akin to the Ideas, it is not itself an 
 Idea. Through its power of thought, by which it makes 
 itself conscious to man, it can infallibly attain to a 
 knowledge of the Ideas, the only true realities, of which 
 sensuous phenomena are only the imperfect pictures. 
 Upon the existence of the Ideas depends the immortality 
 of the soul. 
 
 The fall of the soul from the transcendent sphere of 
 Ideal Beauty and Goodness, and its consequent en- 
 forced entrance Into the region of matter and Becoming, 
 is the result, according to certain of the dialogues, not 
 of a strictly moral transgression but of the rebellion 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 281 
 
 waged by its preexistent inferior parts, the spirited and 
 the concupiscent, against the rational element. The 
 "fall" is intellectual because it is due to the enfeeble- 
 ment of this rational part. In a more developed stage 
 of his teaching Plato makes the soul uniform but re- 
 gards it as assuming certain temporary phases due to its 
 implication in the body. In its proper nature it is the 
 pure power of thought and cognition, possessed of a de- 
 sire to attain to the world beyond. But it is soiled by 
 the passions of its fleshly tabernacle — a doctrine taken 
 over by Plato from Pythagoras, and reiterated with 
 such splendid insistence that it has never ceased to 
 maintain its hold on the thoughts of men. 
 
 With the death of its contaminating associate the 
 soul departs to receive either reward or punishment in 
 a nether purgatory. It has not ceased to retain some 
 remembrance of its celestial abode where it had once seen 
 Pure Beauty and Pure Truth; and if its recollection of 
 that divine home is but little impaired, when the moment 
 comes for it to reenter the life of the body, it will choose 
 an existence corresponding to the nobler associations of 
 its previous sojourn in the world of sense. If it has drunk 
 deep of the waters of Lethe and feels only a faint stirring 
 for the world beyond, because it has not waged war suc- 
 cessfully against the impulses and passions of the body, 
 it will elect a baser lot and may be reembodied in the 
 form of an animal or a plant. All souls are condemned 
 alike to the circuit through the great cosmic cycle. 
 
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282 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 Birth and death follow each other in succession. But 
 death is not merely release from the body; for, as the 
 late Dr. Adam has well said, palinoenesis is opportu- 
 nity for evolutionary conversion; with each new stage of 
 existence we are "assimilated to God," and grow from 
 flesh unto spirit by the systematic exercise of reason, 
 which effects the purgation of the soul from ignorance 
 and the arrogance of false knowledge. 
 
 The souls of the philosophers require only three periods 
 of reincarnation of a thousand years each, the grosser 
 souls ten thousand years, before they can return to the 
 place whence they came. Then at last, freed from the 
 delusions of sense and the penitentiary punishment of 
 reincorporation, they ascend to their true home, the 
 realm of Pure Being, where they can again contemplate 
 the eternal Ideas, above all the sovereign Idea, the cause 
 and reason of all Being, the Good, which is God; and 
 there even in that supercelestial world, where space is 
 not, nor time, nor anything that changes, they retain 
 (strange mystery) their conscious personality unim- 
 paired to all eternity and are not lost in the Universe. 
 But the souls that admit of no cure are consigned to a 
 life of eternal misery in Tartarus to serve as awful 
 warnings of the consequence of unhallowed deeds. 
 
 Plato is both a visionary and the first thinker to deal 
 scientifically with the problem of immortality. He has 
 absorbed, transformed, intellectuallzed the faith that 
 had quickened the spiritual life of the sixth century. He 
 
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CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 283 
 
 has radically emancipated religion from nature-cult. 
 If he has given the soul an intermediate place, in the 
 dichotomy of mind and matter, between unchangeable, 
 imperishable Being and fluctuating phenomena, he has 
 attributed to it alone — in its rational aspect (for the 
 Greek thinks spiritual things in terms of the intellect) — 
 the power to discern the Eternal Ideas in their purity. 
 "The thinking part of the soul elevates us from earth 
 to our kinship in heaven, because in truth we are crea- 
 tures not of earth but of heaven." Plato has kept the 
 religious value of Orphism, for he has shown that the 
 soul is the divine part of man and that it is the presence 
 of this divine indweller In us that makes us truly human ; 
 for "man is most truly man when he most resembles 
 God." The divine inhabitant in each of us is an exile 
 from its true home; it longs with a great passion to be 
 free from the wild desires of the senses with all their joy 
 in deception. The beauty of this world reflects only afar 
 off the divine Beauty of the other world; it stirs our 
 sluggish memories; it is a challenge to regain the sight 
 of the undeflected Beauty. Of itself the world is evil. Our 
 heavenly nature calls inexorably to us to reject it and to 
 flee hence with all speed. "Our flight brings us nearer 
 to God." We are strangers here, and human things are 
 after all not worthy of life's struggles, life's ambitions 
 and splendors. It is by "the study of death" (fieXeTrj 
 davuTov) that we realize our immortal nature; only by 
 the contemplation of Ideal Beauty does life really be- 
 
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284 CONCEPTIONS OF IMMORTALITY 
 
 come worth the living ; by our progression through various 
 lives the thraldom of the senses loses its insistence and 
 the power of reason is quickened in its " chase " after the 
 eternal verities, so that at last we grow into perfect 
 knowledge. As the immortal part of us, the soul can 
 gain through purification, through moral asceticism, the 
 beatific vision which is its ultimate goal. Since man in 
 his essential nature is divine his highest purpose is to 
 become like unto God. To pass through the gates of 
 death is to attain to the Supreme Good. 
 
 THE END 
 
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;E . MASSAC 
 U • S . A 
 
 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 
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