Apotheosis of the Emperor.—As long as the emperor lived he was sole master of the empire, since the Roman people had conveyed all its power to him. But at his death the Senate in the name of the people reviewed his life and passed judgment upon it. If he were condemned, all the acts which he had made were nullified, his statues thrown down, and his name effaced from the monuments.[145] If, on the contrary, his acts were ratified (which almost always occurred), the Senate at the same time decreed that the deceased emperor should be elevated to the rank of the gods. The majority of the emperors, therefore, became gods after their death. Temples were raised to them and priests appointed to render them worship. Throughout the empire there were temples dedicated to the god Augustus and to the goddess Roma, and persons are known who performed the functions of flamen (priest) of the divine Claudius, or of the divine Vespasian. This practice of deifying the dead emperor was called Apotheosis. The word is Greek; the custom probably came from the Greeks of the Orient.

The Senate and the People.—The Roman Senate remained what it had always been—the assembly of the richest and most eminent personages of the empire. To be a senator was still an eagerly desired honor; in speaking of a great family one would say, "a senatorial family." But the Senate, respected as it was, was now powerless, because the emperor could dispense with it. It was still the most distinguished body in the state, but it was no longer the master of the government. The emperor often pretended to consult it, but he was not bound by its advice.

The people had lost all its power since the assemblies (the Comitia) were suppressed in the reign of Tiberius. The population of 2,000,000 souls crowded into Rome was composed only of some thousands of great lords with their slaves and a mob of paupers. Already the state had assumed the burden of feeding the latter; the emperors continued to distribute grain to them, and supplemented this with donations of money (the congiarium). Augustus thus donated $140 apiece in nine different distributions, and Nero $50 in three. At the same time to amuse this populace shows were presented. The number of days regularly appointed for the shows under the republic had already amounted to 66 in the year; it had increased in a century and a half, under Marcus Aurelius, to 135, and in the fourth century to 175 (without counting supplementary days). These spectacles continued each day from sunrise to sunset; the spectators ate their lunch in their places. This was a means used by the emperors for the occupation of the crowd. "It is for your advantage, Caesar," said an actor to Augustus, "that the people engage itself with us." It was also a means for securing popularity. The worst emperors were among the most popular; Nero was adored for his magnificent spectacles; the people refused to believe that he was dead, and for thirty years they awaited his return.[146]

The multitude of Rome no longer sought to govern; it required only to be amused and fed: in the forceful expression of Juvenal—to be provided with bread and the games of the circus (panem et circenses).

The Praetorians.—Under the republic a general was prohibited from leading his army into the city of Rome. The emperor, chief of all the armies, had at Rome his military escort (praetorium), a body of about 10,000 men quartered in the interior of the city. The praetorians, recruited among the veterans, received high pay and frequent donatives. Relying on these soldiers, the emperor had nothing to fear from malcontents in Rome. But the danger came from the praetorians themselves; as they had the power they believed they had free rein, and their chief, the praetorian prefect, was sometimes stronger than the emperor.

The Freedmen of the Emperor.—Ever since the monarchy had superseded the republic, there was no other magistrate than the emperor. All the business of the empire of 80,000,000 people originated with him. For this crushing task he required assistants. He found them, not among the men of great family whom he mistrusted, but among the slaves of whom he felt sure. The secretaries, the men of trust, the ministers of the emperor were his freedmen, the majority of them foreigners from Greece or the Orient, pliant people, adepts in flattery, inventiveness, and loquacity. Often the emperor, wearied with serious matters, gave the government into their hands, and, as occurs in absolute monarchies, instead of aiding their master, they supplemented him. Pallas and Narcissus, the freedmen of Claudius, distributed offices and pronounced judgments; Helius, Nero's freedman, had knights and senators executed without even consulting his master. Of all the freedmen Pallas was the most powerful, the richest, and the most insolent; he gave his orders to his underlings only by signs or in writing. Nothing so outraged the old noble families of Rome as this. "The princes," said a Roman writer, "are the masters of citizens and the slaves of their freedmen." Among the scandals with which the emperors were reproached, one of the gravest was governing Roman citizens by former slaves.

Despotism and Disorder.—This regime had two great vices:

1. Despotism.—The emperor was invested for life with a power unlimited, extravagant, and hardly conceivable; according to his fancy he disposed of persons and their property, condemned, confiscated, and executed without restraint. No institution, no law fettered his will. "The decree of the emperor has the force of law," say the jurisconsults themselves. Rome recognized then the unlimited despotism that the tyrants had exercised in the Greek cities, no longer circumscribed within the borders of a single city, but gigantic as the empire itself. As in Greece some honorable tyrants had presented themselves, one sees in Rome some wise and honest monarchs (Augustus, Vespasian, Titus). But few men had a head strong enough to resist vertigo when they saw themselves so elevated above other men. The majority of the emperors profited by their tremendous power only to make their names proverbial: Tiberius, Nero, Domitian by their cruelty, Vitellius by his gluttony, Claudius by his imbecility. One of them, Caligula, was a veritable fool; he had his horse made consul and himself worshipped as a god. The emperors persecuted the nobles especially to keep them from conspiring against them, and the rich to confiscate their goods.

2. Disorder.—This overweening authority was, moreover, very ill regulated; it resided entirely in the person of the emperor. When he was dead, everything was in question. It was well known that the world could not continue without a master, but no law nor usage determined who was to be this master. The Senate alone had the right of nominating the emperor, but almost always it would elect under pressure the one whom the preceding emperor had designated or the man who was pleasing to the soldiers.

After the death of Caligula, some praetorians who were sacking the palace discovered, concealed behind the tapestry, a poor man trembling with fear. This was a relative of Caligula; the praetorians made him emperor (it was the emperor Claudius). After the death of Nero, the Senate had elected Galba; the praetorians did not find him liberal enough and so they massacred him to set up in his place Otho, a favorite of Nero. In their turn the soldiers on the frontier wished to make an emperor: the legions of the Rhine entered Italy, met the praetorians at Bedriac near Cremona, and overthrew them in so furious a battle that it lasted all night; then they compelled the Senate to elect Vitellius, their general, as emperor. During this time the army of Syria had elected its chief Vespasian, who in turn defeated Vitellius and was named in his place; thus in two years three emperors had been created and three overthrown by the soldiers. The new emperor often undid what his predecessor had done; imperial despotism had not even the advantage of being stable.

The Twelve Caesars.—This regime of oppression interrupted by violence endured for more than a century (31 B.C. to 96 A.D.).

The twelve emperors who came to the throne during this time are called the Twelve Caesars, although only the first six were of the family of Augustus. It is difficult to judge them equitably. Almost all of them persecuted the noble families of Rome of whom they were afraid, and it is the writers of these families that have made their reputation. But it is quite possible that in the provinces their government was mild and just, superior to that of the senators of the republic.

THE CENTURY OF THE ANTONINES

The Antonines.—The five emperors succeeding the twelve Caesars, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius (96-180), have left a reputation for justice and wisdom. They were called the Antonines, though this name properly belongs only to the last two. They were not descended from the old families of Rome; Trajan and Hadrian were Spaniards, Antoninus was born at Nimes in Gaul. They were not princes of imperial family, destined from their birth to rule. Four emperors came to the throne without sons and so the empire could not be transmitted by inheritance. On each occasion the prince chose among his generals and his governors the man most capable of succeeding him; he adopted him as his son and sought his confirmation by the Senate. Thus there came to the empire only experienced men, who without confusion assumed the throne of their adoptive fathers.

Government of the Antonines.—This century of the Antonines was the calmest that the ancient world had ever known. Wars were relegated to the frontier of the empire. In the interior there were still military seditions, tyranny, and arbitrary condemnations. The Antonines held the army in check, organized a council of state of jurisconsults, established tribunals, and replaced the freedmen who had so long irritated the Romans under the twelve Caesars by regular functionaries taken from among the men of the second class—that is, the knights. The emperor was no longer a tyrant served by the soldiers; he was truly the first magistrate of the republic, using his authority only for the good of the citizens. The last two Antonines especially, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius, honored the empire by their integrity. Both lived simply, like ordinary men, although they were very rich, without anything that resembled a court or a palace, never giving the impression that they were masters. Marcus Aurelius consulted the Senate on all state business and regularly attended its sessions.

Marcus Aurelius.—Marcus Aurelius has been termed the Philosopher on the Throne. He governed from a sense of duty, against his disposition, for he loved solitude; and yet he spent his life in administration and the command of armies. His private journal (his "Thoughts") exhibits the character of the Stoic—virtuous, austere, separated from the world, and yet mild and good. "The best form of vengeance on the wicked is not to imitate them; the gods themselves do good to evil men; it is your privilege to act like the gods."

Conquests of the Antonines.—The emperors of the first century had continued the course of conquest; they had subjected the Britons of England, the Germans on the left bank of the Rhine, and in the provinces had reduced several countries which till then had retained their kings—Mauretania, Thrace, Cappadocia. The Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates were the limits of the empire.

The emperors of the second century were almost all generals; they had the opportunity of waging numerous wars to repel the hostile peoples who sought to invade the empire. The enemies were in two quarters especially:

1. On the Danube were the Dacians, barbarous people, who occupied the country of mountains and forests now called Transylvania.

2. On the Euphrates was the great military monarchy of the Parthians which had its capital at Ctesiphon, near the ruins of Babylon, and which extended over all Persia.

Trajan made several expeditions against the Dacians, crossed the Danube, won three great battles, and took the capital of the Dacians (101-102). He offered them peace, but when they reopened the war he resolved to end matters with them: he had a stone bridge built over the Danube, invaded Dacia and reduced it to a Roman province (106). Colonies were transferred thither, cities were built, and Dacia became a Roman province where Latin was spoken and Roman customs were assimilated. When the Roman armies withdrew at the end of the third century, the Latin language remained and continued throughout the Middle Ages, notwithstanding the invasions of the barbarian Slavs. It is from Transylvania (ancient Dacia) that the peoples came from the twelfth to the fourteenth century who now inhabit the plains to the north of the Danube. It has preserved the name of Rome (Roumania) and speaks a language derived from the Latin, like the French or Spanish. Trajan made war on the Parthians also. He crossed the Euphrates, took Ctesiphon, the capital, and advanced into Persia, even to Susa, whence he took away the massive gold throne of the kings of Persia. He constructed a fleet on the Tigris, descended the stream to its mouth and sailed into the Persian Gulf; he would have delighted, like Alexander, in the conquest of India. He took from the Parthians the country between the Euphrates and the Tigris—Assyria and Mesopotamia—and erected there two Roman provinces.

To commemorate his conquests Trajan erected monuments which still remain. The Column of Trajan on the Roman Forum is a shaft whose bas-reliefs represent the war against the Dacians. The arch of triumph of Benevento recalls the victories over the Parthians.

Of these two conquests one alone was permanent, that of Dacia. The provinces conquered from the Parthians revolted after the departure of the Roman army. The emperor Hadrian retained Dacia, but returned their provinces to the Parthians, and the Roman empire again made the Euphrates its eastern frontier. To escape further warfare with the highlanders of Scotland, Hadrian built a wall in the north of England (the Wall of Hadrian) extending across the whole island. There was no need of other wars save against the revolting Jews; these people were overthrown and expelled from Jerusalem, the name of which was changed to obliterate the memory of the old Jewish kingdom.

Marcus Aurelius, the last of the Antonines, had to resist the invasion of several barbarous peoples of Germany who had crossed the Danube on the ice and had penetrated even to Aquileia, in the north of Italy. In order to enroll a sufficient army he had to enlist slaves and barbarians (172). The Germans retreated, but while Marcus was occupied with a general uprising in Syria, they renewed their attacks on the empire, and the emperor died on the banks of the Danube (180). This was the end of conquest.

IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION

Extent of the Empire in the Second Century.—The Roman emperors were but little bent on conquest. But to occupy their army and to secure frontiers which might be easily defended, they continued to conquer barbarian peoples for more than a century. When the course of conquest was finally arrested after Trajan, the empire extended over all the south of Europe, all the north of Africa and the west of Asia; it was limited only by natural frontiers—the ocean to the west; the mountains of Scotland, the Rhine, the Danube, and the Caucasus to the north; the deserts of the Euphrates and of Arabia to the east; the cataracts of the Nile and the great desert to the south. The empire, therefore, embraced the countries which now constitute England, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, European Turkey, Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Asiatic Turkey. It was more than double the extent of the empire of Alexander.

This immense territory was subdivided into forty-eight provinces,[147] unequal in size, but the majority of them very large. Thus Gaul from the Pyrenees to the Rhine formed but seven provinces.

The Permanent Army.—In the provinces of the interior there was no Roman army, for the peoples of the empire had no desire to revolt. It was on the frontier that the empire had its enemies, foreigners always ready to invade: behind the Rhine and the Danube the barbarian Germans; behind the sands of Africa the nomads of the desert; behind the Euphrates the Persian army. On this frontier which was constantly threatened it was necessary to have soldiers always in readiness. Augustus had understood this, and so created a permanent army. The soldiers of the empire were no longer proprietors transferred from their fields to serve during a few campaigns, but poor men who made war a profession. They enlisted for sixteen or twenty years and often reenlisted. There were, then, thirty legions of citizens—that is, 180,000 legionaries, and, according to Roman usage, a slightly larger number of auxiliaries—in all about 400,000 men. This number was small for so large a territory.

Each frontier province had its little army, garrisoned in a permanent camp similar to a fortress. Merchants came to establish themselves in the vicinity, and the camp was transformed into a city; but still the soldiers, encamped in the face of the enemy, preserved their valor and their discipline. There were for three centuries severe wars, especially on the banks of the Rhine and of the Danube, where Romans fought fierce barbarians in a swampy country, uncultivated, covered with forests and bogs. The imperial army exhibited, perhaps, as much bravery and energy in these obscure wars as the ancient Romans in the conquest of the world.

Deputies and Agents of the Emperor.—All the provinces belonged to the emperor[148] as the representative of the Roman people. He is there the general of all the soldiers, master of all persons, and proprietor of all lands.[149] But as the emperor could not be everywhere at once, he sent deputies appointed by himself. To each province went a lieutenant (called a deputy of Augustus with the function of praetor); this official governed the country, commanded the army, and went on circuit through his province to judge important cases, for he, like the emperor, had the right of life and death.

The emperor sent also a financial agent to levy the taxes and return the money to the imperial chest. This official was called the "procurator of Augustus." These two men represented the emperor, governing his subjects, commanding his soldiers, and exploiting his domain. The emperor always chose them among the two nobilities of Rome, the praetors from the senators, the procurators from the knights. For them, as for the magistrates of old Rome, there was a succession of offices: they passed from one province to another, from one end of the empire to the other,[150] from Syria to Spain, from Britain to Africa. In the epitaphs of officials of this time we always find carefully inscribed all the posts which they have occupied; inscriptions on their tombs are sufficient to construct their biographies.

Municipal life.—Under these omnipotent representatives of the emperor the smaller subject peoples continued to administer their own government. The emperor had the right of interfering in their local affairs, but ordinarily he did not exercise this right. He only demanded of them that they keep the peace, pay their taxes regularly, and appear before the tribunal of the governor. There were in every province several of these little subordinate governments; they were called, just as at other times the Roman state was called, "cities," and sometimes municipalities. A city in the empire was copied after the Roman city: it also had its assembly of the people, its magistrates elected for a year and grouped into colleges of two members, its senate called a curia, formed of the great proprietors, people rich and of old family. There, as at Rome, the assembly of the people was hardly more than a form; it is the senate—that is to say, the nobility, that governs.

The centre of the provincial city was always a town, a Rome in miniature, with its temples, its triumphal arches, its public baths, its fountains, its theatres, and its arenas for the combats. The life led there was that of Rome on a small scale: distributions of grain and money, public banquets, grand religious ceremonies, and bloody spectacles. Only, in Rome, it was the money of the provinces that paid the expenses; in the municipalities the nobility itself defrayed the costs of government and fetes. The tax levied for the treasury of the emperor went entirely to the imperial chest; it was necessary, then, that the rich of the city should at their own charges celebrate the games, heat the baths, pave the streets, construct the bridges, aqueducts, and circuses. They did this for more than two centuries, and did it generously; monuments scattered over the whole of the empire and thousands of inscriptions are a witness to this.

The Imperial Regime.—After the conquest three or four hundred families of the nobility of Rome governed and exploited the rest of the world. The emperor deprived them of the government and subjected them to his tyranny. The Roman writers could groan over their lost liberty. The inhabitants of the provinces had nothing to regret; they remained subject, but in place of several hundreds of masters, ceaselessly renewed and determined to enrich themselves, they had now a single sovereign, the emperor, interested to spare them. Tiberius stated the imperial policy in the following words: "A good shepherd shears his sheep, but does not flay them." For more than two centuries the emperors contented themselves with shearing the people of the empire; they took much of their money, but they protected them from the enemy without, and even against their own agents. When the provincials had grounds of complaint on account of the violence or the robbery of their governor, they could appeal to the emperor and secure justice. It was known that the emperor received complaints against his subordinates; this was sufficient to frighten bad governors and reassure subjects. Some emperors, like Marcus Aurelius, came to recognize that they had duties to their subjects. The other emperors at least left their subjects to govern themselves when they had no interest to prevent this.

The imperial regime was a loss for the Romans, but a deliverance for their subjects: it abased the conquerors and raised the vanquished, reconciling them and preparing them for assimilation in the empire.

SOCIAL LIFE UNDER THE EMPIRE

Moral Decay Continues at Rome.—Seneca in his Letters and Juvenal in his Satires have presented portraits of the men and women of their time so striking that the corruption of the Rome of the Caesars has remained proverbial. They were not only the disorders left over from the republic—the gross extravagance of the rich, the ferocity of masters against their slaves, the unbridled frivolity of women. The evil did not arise with the imperial regime, but resulted from the excessive accumulation of the riches of the world in the hands of some thousands of nobles or upstarts, under whom lived some hundreds of free men in poverty, and slaves by millions subjected to an unrestrained oppression. Each of these great proprietors lived in the midst of his slaves like a petty prince, indolent and capricious. His house at Rome was like a palace; every morning the hall of honor (the atrium) was filled with clients, citizens who came for a meagre salary to salute the master[151] and escort him in the street. For fashion required that a rich man should never appear in public unless surrounded by a crowd; Horace ridicules a praetor who traversed the streets of Tibur with only five slaves in his following. Outside Rome the great possessed magnificent villas at the sea-shore or in the mountains; they went from one to the other, idle and bored.

These great families were rapidly extinguished. Alarmed at the diminishing number of free men, Augustus had made laws to encourage marriage and to punish celibacy. As one might expect, his laws did not remedy the evil. There were so many rich men who had not married that it had become a lucrative trade to flatter them in order to be mentioned in their will; by having no children one could surround himself with a crowd of flatterers. "In the city," says a Roman story-teller, "all men divide themselves into two classes, those who fish, and those who are angled for." "Losing his children augments the influence of a man."

The Shows.—In the life of this idle people of Rome the spectacles held a place that we are now hardly able to conceive. They were, as in Greece, games, that is to say, religious ceremonies. The games proceeded throughout the day and again on the following day, and this for a week at least. The amphitheatre was, as it were, the rendezvous of the whole free population; it was there that they manifested themselves. Thus in 196, during the civil wars, all the spectators cried with one voice, "Peace!" The spectacle was the passion of the time. Three emperors appeared in public, Caligula as a driver, Nero as an actor, Commodus as a gladiator.

The Theatre.—There were three sorts of spectacles: the theatre, the circus, and the amphitheatre.

The theatre was organized on Greek models. The actors were masked and presented plays imitated from the Greek. The Romans had little taste for this recreation which was too delicate for them. They preferred the mimes, comedies of gross character, and especially the pantomimes in which the actor without speaking expressed by his attitudes the sentiments of the character.

The Circus.—Between the two hills of the Aventine and the Palatine extended a field filled with race courses surrounded by arcades and tiers of seats rising above them. This was the Circus Maximus. After Nero enlarged it it could accommodate 250,000 spectators; in the fourth century its size was increased to provide sittings for 385,000 people.

Here was presented the favorite spectacle of the Roman people, the four-horse chariot race (quadrigae); in each race the chariot made a triple circuit of the circus and there were twenty-five races in a single day. The drivers belonged to rival companies whose colors they wore; there were at first four of these colors, but they were later reduced to two—the Blue and the Green, notorious in the history of riots. At Rome there was the same passion for chariot-races that there is now for horse-races; women and even children talked of them. Often the emperor participated and the quarrel between the Blues and the Greens became an affair of state.

The Amphitheatre.—At the gates of Rome the emperor Vespasian had built the Colosseum, an enormous structure of two stories, accommodating 87,000 spectators. It was a circus surrounding an arena where hunts and combats were represented.

For the hunts the arena was transformed into a forest where wild beasts were released and men armed with spears came into combat with them. Variety was sought in this spectacle by employing the rarest animals—lions, panthers, elephants, bears, buffaloes, rhinoceroses, giraffes, tigers, and crocodiles. In the games presented by Pompey had already appeared seventeen elephants and five hundred lions; some of the emperors maintained a large menagerie.

Sometimes instead of placing armed men before the beasts, it was found more dramatic to let loose the animals on men who were naked and bound. The custom spread into all cities of the empire of compelling those condemned to death to furnish this form of entertainment for the people. Thousands of persons of both sexes and of every age, and among them Christian martyrs, were thus devoured by beasts under the eyes of the multitude.

The Gladiators.—But the national spectacle of the Romans was the fight of gladiators (men armed with swords). Armed men descended into the arena and fought a duel to the death. From the time of Caesar[152] as many as 320 pairs of gladiators were fought at once; Augustus in his whole life fought 10,000 of them, Trajan the same number in four months. The vanquished was slain on the field unless the people wished to show him grace.

Sometimes the condemned were compelled to fight, but more often slaves and prisoners of war. Each victory thus brought to the amphitheatre bands of barbarians who exterminated one another for the delight of the spectators.[153] Gladiators were furnished by all countries—Gauls, Germans, Thracians, and sometimes negroes. These peoples fought with various weapons, usually with their national arms. The Romans loved to behold these battles in miniature.

There were also, among these contestants in the circus, some who fought from their own choice, free men who from a taste for danger submitted to the terrible discipline of the gladiator, and swore to their chief "to allow themselves to be beaten with rods, be burned with hot iron, and even be killed." Many senators enrolled themselves in these bands of slaves and adventurers, and even an emperor, Commodus, descended into the arena.

These bloody games were practised not only at Rome, but in all the cities of Italy, Gaul, and Africa. The Greeks always opposed their adoption. An inscription on a statue raised to one of the notables in the little city of Minturnae runs as follows: "He presented in four days eleven pairs of gladiators who ceased to fight only when half of them had fallen in the arena. He gave a hunt of ten terrible bears. Treasure this in memory, noble fellow-citizens." The people, therefore, had the passion for blood,[154] which still manifests itself in Spain in bull-fights. The emperor, like the modern king of Spain, must be present at these butcheries. Marcus Aurelius became unpopular in Rome because he exhibited his weariness at the spectacles of the amphitheatre by reading, speaking, or giving audiences instead of regarding the games. When he enlisted gladiators to serve against the barbarians who invaded Italy, the populace was about to revolt. "He would deprive us of our amusements," cried one, "to compel us to become philosophers."

The Roman Peace.—But there was in the empire something else than the populace of Rome. To be just to the empire as a whole one must consider events in the provinces. By subjecting all peoples, the Romans had suppressed war in the interior of their empire. Thus was established the Roman Peace which a Greek author describes in the following language: "Every man can go where he will; the harbors are full of ships, the mountains are safe for travellers just as the towns for their inhabitants. Fear has everywhere ceased. The land has put off its old armor of iron and put on festal garments. You have realized the word of Homer, 'the earth is common to all.'" For the first time, indeed, men of the Occident could build their houses, cultivate their fields, enjoy their property and their leisure without fearing at every moment being robbed, massacred, or thrown into slavery—a security which we can hardly appreciate since we have enjoyed it from infancy, but which seemed very sweet to the men of antiquity.

The Fusion of Peoples.—In this empire now at peace travel became easy. The Romans had built roads in every direction with stations and relays; they had also made road-maps of the empire. Many people, artisans, traders, journeyed from one end of the empire to the other.[155] Rhetors and philosophers penetrated all Europe, going from one city to another giving lectures. In every province could be found men from the most remote provinces. Inscriptions show us in Spain professors, painters, Greek sculptors; in Gaul, goldsmiths and Asiatic workmen. Everybody transported and mingled customs, arts, and religion. Little by little they accustomed themselves to speak the language of the Romans. From the third century the Latin had become the common language of the West, as the Greek since the successors of Alexander had been the language of the Orient. Thus, as in Alexandria, a common civilization was developed. This has been called by the name Roman, though it was this hardly more than in name and in language. In reality, it was the civilization of the ancient world united under the emperor's authority.

Superstitions.—Religious beliefs were everywhere blended. As the ancients did not believe in a single God, it was easy for them to adopt new gods. All peoples, each of whom had its own religion, far from rejecting the religions of others, adopted the gods of their neighbors and fused them with their own. The Romans set the example by raising the Pantheon, a temple to "all the gods," where each deity had his sanctuary.

Everywhere there was much credulity. Men believed in the divinity of the dead emperors; it was believed that Vespasian had in Egypt healed a blind man and a paralytic. During the war with the Dacians the Roman army was perishing of thirst; all at once it began to rain, and the sudden storm appeared to all as a miracle; some said that an Egyptian magician had conjured Hermes, others believed that Jupiter had taken pity on the soldiers; and on the column of Marcus Aurelius Jupiter was represented, thunderbolt in hand, sending the rain which the soldiers caught in their bucklers.

When the apostles Barnabas and Paul came to the city of Lystra in Asia Minor, the inhabitants invoked Barnabas as Jupiter and Paul as Mercury; they were met by a procession, with priests at the head leading a bull which they were about to sacrifice.

Cultured people were none the less credulous.[156] The Stoic philosophers admitted omens. The emperor Augustus regarded it as a bad sign when he put on the wrong shoe. Suetonius wrote to Pliny the Younger, begging him to transfer his case to another day on account of a dream which he had had. Pliny the Younger believed in ghosts.

Among peoples ready to admit everything, different religions, instead of going to pieces, fused into a common religion. This religion, at once Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Asiatic, dominated the world at the second century of our era; and so the Christians called it the religion of the nations; down to the fourth century they gave the pagans the name of "gentiles" (men of the nations); at the same time the common law was called the Law of Nations.

FOOTNOTES:

[145] Inscriptions have been found where the name of Domitian has thus been cut away.

[146] Suetonius ("Lives of the Twelve Caesars," Nero, ch. lvii.) relates, that the king of the Parthians, when he sent ambassadors to the Senate to renew his alliance with the Roman people, earnestly requested that due honor should be paid to the memory of Nero. The historian continues, "When, twenty years afterwards, at which time I was a young man, some person of obscure birth gave himself out for Nero, that name secured him so favorable a reception from the Parthians that he was very zealously supported, and it was with much difficulty that they were persuaded to give him up."—ED.

[147] Italy was not included among the provinces.

[148] A few provinces, the less important, remained to the Senate, but the emperor was almost always master in these as well.

[149] The jurisconsult Gaius says, "On provincial soil we can have possession only; the emperor owns the property."

[150] "Great personages," says Epictetus, "cannot root themselves like plants; they must be much on the move in obedience to the commands of the emperor."

[151] A client's task was a hard one; the poet Martial, who had served thus, groans about it. He had to rise before day, put on his toga which was an inconvenient and cumbersome garment, and wait a long time in the ante-room.

[152] Caesar gave also a combat between two troops, each composed of 500 archers, 300 knights (30 knights according to Suetonius; Julius, ch. 39), and 20 elephants.

[153] In an official discourse an orator thanks the emperor Constantine who had given to the amphitheatre an entire army of barbarian captives, "to bring about the destruction of these men for the amusement of the people. What triumph," he cried, "could have been more glorious?"

[154] St. Augustine in his "Confessions" describes the irresistible attraction of these sanguinary spectacles.

[155] A Phrygian relates in an inscription that he had made seventy-two voyages from Asia to Italy.

[156] There were some sceptical writers, like Lucian, but they were isolated.



CHAPTER XXV

THE ARTS AND SCIENCES IN ROME

LETTERS

Imitation of the Greeks.—The Romans were not artists naturally. They became so very late and by imitating the Greeks. From Greece they took their models of tragedy, comedy, the epic, the ode, the didactic poem, pastoral poetry, and history. Some writers limited themselves to the free translation of a Greek original (as Horace in his Odes). All borrowed from the Greeks at least their ideas and their forms. But they carried into this work of adaptation their qualities of patience and vigor, and many came to a true originality.

The Age of Augustus.—There is common agreement in regarding the fifty years of the government of Augustus as the most brilliant period in Latin literature. It is the time of Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Tibullus, Propertius, and Livy. The emperor, or rather his friend Maecenas, personally patronized some of these poets, especially Horace and Vergil, who sang the glory of Augustus and of his time. But this Augustan Age was preceded and followed by two centuries that perhaps equalled it. It was in the preceding century,[157] the first before Christ, that the most original Roman poet[158] appeared, Caesar the most elegant prose-writer, and Cicero the greatest orator. It was in the following age that Seneca, Lucan, Tacitus, Pliny, and Juvenal wrote. Between Lucretius and Tacitus there were for three centuries many great writers in Rome. One might also add another century by recurring to the time of Plautus, the second century before Christ.

Of these great authors a few had their origin in Roman families; but the majority of them were Italians. Many came from the provinces, Vergil from Mantua, Livy from Padua (in Cisalpine Gaul), while Seneca was a Spaniard.

Orators and Rhetors.—The true national art at Rome was eloquence. Like the Italians of our day, the Romans loved to speak in public. In the forum where they held the assemblies of the people was the rostrum, the platform for addressing the people, so named from the prows of captured ships that ornamented it like trophies of war. Thither the orators came in the last epoch of the republic to declaim and to gesticulate before a tumultuous crowd.

The tribunals, often composed of a hundred judges, furnished another occasion for eloquent advocates. The Roman law permitted the accused to have an advocate speak in his place.

There were orators in Rome from the second century. Here, as in Athens, the older orators, such as Cato and the Gracchi, spoke simply, too simply for the taste of Cicero. Those who followed them in the first century learned in the schools of the Greek rhetors the long oratorical periods and pompous style. The greatest of all was Cicero, the only one whose works have come down to us in anything but fragments; and yet we have his speeches as they were left by him and not as they were delivered.[159]

With the fall of the republic the assemblies and the great political trials ceased. Eloquence perished for the want of matter, and the Roman writers remarked this with bitterness.[160] Then the rhetors commenced to multiply, who taught the art of speaking well.[161] Some of these teachers had their pupils compose as exercises pleas on imaginary rhetorical subjects. The rhetor Seneca has left us many of these oratorical themes; they discuss stolen children, brigands, and romantic adventures.

Then came the mania for public lectures. Pollio, a favorite of Augustus, had set the example. For a century it was the fashion to read poems, panegyrics, even tragedies before an audience of friends assembled to applaud them. The taste for eloquence that had once produced great orators exhibited in the later centuries only finished declaimers.

Importance of the Latin Literature and Language.—Latin literature profited by the conquests of Rome; the Romans carried it with their language to their barbarian subjects of the West. All the peoples of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa, and the Danubian lands discarded their language and took the Latin. Having no national literature, they adopted that of their masters. The empire was thus divided between the two languages of the two great peoples of antiquity: the Orient continued to speak Greek; almost the entire Occident acquired the Latin. Latin was not only the official language of the state functionaries and of great men, like the English of our day in India; the people themselves spoke it with greater or less correctness—in fact, so well that today eighteen centuries after the conquest five languages of Europe are derived from the Latin—the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Roumanian.

With the Latin language the Latin literature extended itself over all the West. In the schools of Bordeaux and Autun in the fifth century only Latin poets and orators were studied. After the coming of the barbarians, bishops and monks continued to write in Latin and they carried this practice among the peoples of England and Germany who were still speaking their native languages. Throughout almost the whole mediaeval period, acts, laws, histories, and books of science were written in Latin. In the convents and the schools they read, copied, and appreciated only works written in Latin; beside books of piety only the Latin authors were known—Vergil, Horace, Cicero, and Pliny the Younger. The renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries consisted partly in reviving the forgotten Latin writers. More than ever it was the fashion to know and to imitate them.

As the Romans constructed a literature in imitation of the Greeks, the moderns have taken the Latin writers for their models. Was this good or bad? Who would venture to say? But the fact is indisputable. Our romance languages are daughters of the Latin, our literatures are full of the ideas and of the literary methods of the Romans. The whole western world is impregnated with the Latin literature.

THE ARTS

Sculpture and Painting.—Great numbers of Roman statues and bas-reliefs of the time of the empire have come to light. Some are reproductions and almost all are imitations of Greek works, but less elegant and less delicate than the models. The most original productions of this form of art are the bas-reliefs and the busts.

Bas-reliefs adorned the monuments (temples, columns, and triumphal arches), tombs, and sarcophagi. They represent with scrupulous fidelity real scenes, such as processions, sacrifices, combats, and funeral ceremonies and so give us information about ancient life. The bas-reliefs which surround the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius bring us into the presence of the great scenes of their wars. One may see the soldiers fighting against the barbarians, besieging their fortresses, leading away the captives; the solemn sacrifices, and the emperor haranguing the troops.

The busts are especially those of the emperors, of their wives and their children. As they were scattered in profusion throughout the empire, so many have been found that today all the great museums of Europe have collections of imperial busts. They are real portraits, probably very close resemblances, for each emperor had a well-marked physiognomy, often of a striking ugliness that no one attempted to disguise.

In general, Roman sculpture holds itself much more close to reality than does the Greek; it may be said that the artist is less concerned with representing things beautifully than exactly.

Of Roman painting we know only the frescoes painted on the walls of the rich houses of Pompeii and of the house of Livy at Rome. We do not know but these were the work of Greek painters; they bear a close resemblance to the paintings on Greek vases, having the same simple and elegant grace.

Architecture.—The true Roman art, because it operated to satisfy a practical need, is architecture. In this too the Romans imitated the Greeks, borrowing the column from them. But they had a form that the Greeks never employed—the arch, that is to say, the art of arranging cut stones in the arc of a circle so that they supported one another. The arch allowed them to erect buildings much larger and more varied than those of the Greeks. The following are the principal varieties of Roman monuments:

1. The Temple was sometimes similar to a Greek temple with a broad vestibule, sometimes vaster and surmounted with a dome. Of this sort is the Pantheon built in Rome under Augustus.

2. The Basilica was a long low edifice, covered with a roof and surrounded with porticos. There sat the judge with his assistants about him; traders discussed the price of goods; the place was at once a bourse and a tribunal. It was in the basilicas that the assemblies of the Christians were later held, and for several centuries the Christian churches preserved the name and form of basilicas.

3. The Amphitheatre and the Circus were constructed of several stories of arcades surrounding an arena; each range of arcades supported many rows of seats. Such were the Colosseum at Rome and the arenas at Arles and Nimes.

4. The Arch of Triumph was a gate of honor wide enough for the passage of a chariot, adorned with columns and surmounted with a group of sculpture. The Arch of Titus is an example.

5. The Sepulchral Vault was an arched edifice provided with many rows of niches, in each of which were laid the ashes of a corpse. It was called a Columbarium (pigeon-house) from its shape.

6. The Thermae were composed of bathing-halls furnished with basins. The heat was provided by a furnace placed in an underground chamber. The Thermae in a Roman city were what the gymnasium was in a Greek city—a rendezvous for the idle. Much more than the gymnasium it was a labyrinth of halls of every sort: there were a cool hall, warm apartments, a robing-room, a hall where the body was anointed with oil, parlors, halls for exercise, gardens, and the whole surrounded by an enormous wall. Thus the Thermae of Caracalla covered an immense area.

7. The Bridge and the Aqueduct were supported by a range of arches thrown over a river or over a valley. Examples are the bridge of Alcantara and the Pont du Gard.

8. The House of a rich Roman was a work of art. Unlike our modern houses, the ancient house had no facade; the house was turned entirely toward the interior; on the outside it showed only bare walls.

The rooms were small, ill furnished, and dark; they were lighted only through the atrium. In the centre was the great hall of honor (the atrium) where the statues of the ancestors were erected and where visitors were received. It was illuminated by an opening in the roof.

Behind the atrium was the peristyle, a garden surrounded by colonnades, in which were the dining halls, richly ornamented and provided with couches, for among the rich Romans, as among the Asiatic Greeks, guests reclined on couches at the banquets. The pavement was often made of mosaic.

Character of the Roman Architecture.—The Romans,[162] unlike the Greeks, did not always build in marble. Ordinarily they used the stone that they found in the country, binding this together with an indestructible mortar which has resisted even dampness for eighteen hundred years. Their monuments have not the wonderful grace of the Greek monuments, but they are large, strong, and solid—like the Roman power. The soil of the empire is still covered with their debris. We are astonished to find monuments almost intact as remote as the deserts of Africa. When it was planned to furnish a water-system for the city of Tunis, all that had to be done was to repair a Roman aqueduct.

Rome and Its Monuments.—Rome at the time of the emperors was a city of 2,000,000 inhabitants.[163] This population was herded in houses of five and six stories, poorly built and crowded together. The populous quarters were a labyrinth of tortuous paths, steep, and ill paved. Juvenal who frequented them leaves us a picture of them which has little attractiveness. At Pompeii, a city of luxury, it may be seen how narrow were the streets of a Roman city. In the midst of hovels monuments by the hundred would be erected. The emperor Augustus boasted of having restored more than eighty temples. "I found a city of bricks," said he; "I leave a city of marble." His successors all worked to embellish Rome. It was especially about the Forum that the monuments accumulated. The Capitol with its temple of Jupiter became almost like the Acropolis at Athens. In the same quarter many monumental areas were constructed—the forum of Caesar, the forum of Augustus, the forum of Nerva, and, most brilliant of all, the forum of Trajan. Two villas surrounded by a park were situated in the midst of the city; the most noted was the Golden House, built for Nero.

THE LAW

The Twelve Tables.—The Romans, like all other ancient peoples, had at first no written laws. They followed the customs of the ancestors—that is to say, each generation did in everything just as the preceding generation did.

In 450 ten specially elected magistrates, the decemvirs, made a series of laws that they wrote on twelve tables of stone. This was the Law of the Twelve Tables, codified in short, rude, and trenchant sentences—a legislation severe and rude like the semi-barbarous people for whom it was made. It punished the sorcerer who by magical words blasted the crop of his neighbor. It pronounced against the insolvent debtor, "If he does not pay, he shall be cited before the court; if sickness or age deter him, a horse shall be furnished him, but no litter; he may have thirty days' delay, but if he does not satisfy the debt in this time, the creditor may bind him with straps or chains of fifteen pounds weight; at the end of sixty days he may be sold beyond the Tiber; if there are many creditors, they may cut him in parts, and if they cut more or less, there is no wrong in the act." According to the word of Cicero, the Law of the Twelve Tables was "the source of all the Roman law." Four centuries after it was written down the children had to learn it in the schools.

The Symbolic Process.—In the ancient Roman law it was not enough in buying, selling, or inheriting that this was the intention of the actor; to obtain justice in the Roman tribunal it was not sufficient to present the case; one had to pronounce certain words and use certain gestures. Consider, for example, the manner of purchasing. In the presence of five citizens who represent an assembly and of a sixth who holds a balance in his hand, the buyer places in the balance a piece of brass which represents the price of the thing sold. If it be an animal or a slave that is sold, the purchaser touches it with his hand saying, "This is mine by the law of the Romans, I have bought it with this brass duly weighed." Before the tribunal every process is a pantomime: to reclaim an object one seizes it with the hand; to protest against a neighbor who has erected a wall, a stone is thrown against the wall. When two men claim proprietorship in a field, the following takes place at the tribunal: the two adversaries grasp hands and appear to fight; then they separate and each says, "I declare this field is mine by the law of the Romans; I cite you before the tribunal of the praetor to debate our right at the place in question." The judge orders them to go to the place. "Before these witnesses here present, this is your road to the place; go!" The litigants take a few steps as if to go thither, and this is the symbol of the journey. A witness says to them, "Return," and the journey is regarded as completed. Each of the two presents a clod of earth, the symbol of the field. Thus the trial commences;[164] then the judge alone hears the case. Like all primitive peoples, the Romans comprehended well only what they actually saw; the material acts served to represent to them the right that could not be seen.

The Formalism of Roman Law.—The Romans scrupulously respected their ancient forms. In justice, as in religion, they obeyed the letter of the law, caring nothing for its sense. For them every form was sacred and ought to be strictly applied. In cases before the courts their maxim was: "What has already been pronounced ought to be the law." If an advocate made a mistake in one word in reciting the formula, his case was lost. A man entered a case against his neighbor for having cut down his vines: the formula that he ought to use contained the word "arbor," he replaced it with the word "vinea," and could not win his case.

This absolute reverence for the form allowed the Romans some strange accommodations. The law said that if a father sold his son three times, the son should be freed from the power of the father; when, therefore, a Roman wished to emancipate his son, he sold him three times in succession, and this comedy of sale sufficed to emancipate him.

The law required that before beginning war a herald should be sent to declare it at the frontier of the enemy. When Rome wished to make war on Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, who had his kingdom on the other side of the Adriatic, they were much embarrassed to execute this formality. They hit on the following: a subject of Pyrrhus, perhaps a deserter, bought a field in Rome; they then assumed that this territory had become territory of Epirus, and the herald threw his javelin on this land and made his solemn declaration. Like all other immature peoples, the Romans believed that consecrated formulas had a magical virtue.

Jurisprudence.—The Law of the Twelve Tables and the laws made after them were brief and incomplete. But many questions presented themselves that had no law for their solution. In these embarrassing cases it was the custom at Rome to consult certain persons who were of high reputation for their knowledge of questions of law. These were men of eminence, often old consuls or pontiffs; they gave their advice in writing, and their replies were called the Responses of the Wise. Usually these responses were authoritative according to the respect had for the sages. The emperor Augustus went further: he named some of them whose responses should have the force of law. Thus Law began to be a science and the men versed in law formulated new rules which became obligatory. This was Jurisprudence.

The Praetor's Edict.—To apply the sacred rules of law a supreme magistrate was needed at Rome. Only a consul or a praetor could direct a tribunal and, according to the Roman expression, "say the law." The consuls engaged especially with the army ordinarily left this care to the praetors.

There were always at Rome at least two praetors as judges: one adjudicated matters between citizens and was called the praetor of the city (praetor urbanus); the other judged cases between citizens and aliens and was called praetor of the aliens (praetor peregrinus), or, more exactly, praetor between aliens and citizens. There was need of at least two tribunals, since an alien could not be admitted to the tribunal of the citizens. These praetors, thanks to their absolute power, adjusted cases according to their sense of equity; the praetor of the aliens was bound by no law, for the Roman laws were made only for Roman citizens. And yet, since each praetor was to sit and judge for a year, on entering upon his office he promulgated a decree in which he indicated the rules that he expected to follow in his tribunal; this was the Praetor's Edict. At the end of the year, when the praeter left his office, his ordinance was no longer in force, and his successor had the right to make an entirely different one. But it came to be the custom for each praetor to preserve the edicts of his predecessors, making a few changes and some additions. Thus accumulated for centuries the ordinances of the magistrates. At last the emperor Hadrian in the second century had the Praetorian Edict codified and gave it the force of law.

Civil Law and the Law of Nations.—As there were two separate tribunals, there developed two systems of rules, two different laws. The rules applied to the affairs of citizens by the praetor of the city formed the Civil Law—that is to say, the law of the city. The rules followed by the praetor of aliens constituted the Law of Nations—that is to say, of the peoples (alien to Rome). It was then perceived that of these two laws the more human, the more sensible, the simpler—in a word, the better, was the law of aliens. The law of citizens, derived from the superstitious and strict rules of the old Romans, had preserved from this rude origin troublesome formulas and barbarous regulations. The Law of Nations, on the contrary, had for its foundation the dealings of merchants and of men established in Rome, dealings that were free from every formula, from every national prejudice, and were slowly developed and tried by the experience of several centuries. And so it may be seen how contrary to reason the ancient law was. "Strict law is the highest injustice," is a Roman proverb. The praetors of the city set themselves to correct the ancient law and to judge according to equity or justice. They came gradually to apply to citizens the same rules that the praetor of the aliens followed in his tribunal. For example, the Roman law ordained that only relatives on the male side should be heirs; the praetor summoned the relatives on the female side also to participate in the succession.

The old law required that a man to become a proprietor must perform a complicated ceremony of sale; the praetor recognized that it was sufficient to have paid the price of the sale and to be in possession of the property. Thus the Law of Nations invaded and gradually superseded the Civil Law.

"Written Reason."—It was especially under the emperors that the new Roman law took its form. The Antonines issued many ordinances (edicts) and re-scripts (letters in which the emperor replied to those who consulted him). Jurisconsults who surrounded them assisted them in their reforms. Later, at the beginning of the third century, under the bad emperors as under the good, others continued to state new rules and to rectify the old. Papinian, Ulpian, Modestinus, and Paullus were the most noted of these lawyers; their works definitively fixed the Roman law.

This law of the third century has little resemblance to the old Roman law, so severe on the weak. The jurisconsults adopt the ideas of the Greek philosophers, especially of the Stoics. They consider that all men have the right of liberty: "By the law of nature all men are born free," which is to say that slavery is contrary to nature. They also admit that a slave could claim redress even against his master, and that the master, if he killed his slave, should be punished as a murderer. Likewise they protect the child against the tyranny of the father.

It is this new law that was in later times called Written Reason. In fact, it is a philosophical law such as reason can conceive for all men. And so there remains no longer an atom of the strict and gross law of the Twelve Tables. The Roman law which has for a long time governed all Europe, and which today is preserved in part in the laws of several European states is not the law of the old Romans. It is constructed, on the contrary, of the customs of all the peoples of antiquity and the maxims of Greek philosophers fused together and codified in the course of centuries by Roman magistrates and jurisconsults.

FOOTNOTES:

[157] Sometimes called the Age of Cicero.

[158] Lucretius.—ED.

[159] One of the most noted, the plea for Milo, was written much later. Cicero at the time of the delivery was distracted and said almost nothing.

[160] See the "Dialogue of the Orators," attributed to Tacitus.

[161] The word "rhetor" signified in Greek simply orator; the Romans used the word in a mistaken sense to designate the men who made a profession of speaking.

[162] The same reserve must be maintained with regard to the arts as to the literature. The builders of the Roman monuments were not Romans, but provincials, often slaves; the only Roman would be the master for whom the slaves worked.

[163] This estimate is too liberal. 1,500,00 is probably nearer the truth. See Friedlaender, Sittengeschichte Roms, i. 25.—ED.

[164] Cicero describes this juridical comedy which was still in force in his time.



CHAPTER XXVI

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY

The Christ.—He whom the Jews were expecting as their liberator and king, the Messiah, appeared in Galilee, a small province of the North, hardly regarded as Jewish, and in a humble family of carpenters. He was called Jesus, but his Greek disciples called him the Christ (the anointed), that is to say, the king consecrated by the holy oil. He was also called the Master, the Lord, and the Saviour. The religion that he came to found is that we now possess. We all know his life: it is the model of every Christian. We know his instructions by heart; they form our moral law. It is sufficient, then, to indicate what new doctrines he disseminated in the world.

Charity.—Before all, Christ commended love. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy mind and thy neighbor as thyself.... On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." The first duty is to love others and to benefit them. When God will judge men, he will set on his right hand those who have fed the hungry, given drink to those who were thirsty, and have clad those that were naked. To those who would follow him the Christ said at the beginning: "Go, ... sell all that ye have and give to the poor."

For the ancients the good man was the noble, the rich, the brave. Since the time of Christ the word has changed its sense: the good man is he who loves others. Doing good is loving others and seeking to be of service to them. Charity (the Latin name of love) from that time has been the cardinal virtue. Charitable becomes synonymous with beneficent. To the old doctrine of vengeance the Christ formally opposes his doctrine of charity. "Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; but I say unto you ... whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.... Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy; but I say unto you love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute you, ... that ye may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust." He himself on the cross prayed for his executioners, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Equality.—The Christ loved all men; he died not for one people only, but for all humanity. He never made a difference between men; all are equal before God. The ancient religions, even the Jewish, were religions of peoples who kept them with jealous care, as a treasure, without wishing to communicate them to other peoples. Christ said to his disciples, "Go, and teach all nations." And the apostle Paul thus formulated the doctrine of Christian equality: "There is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, bond nor free." Two centuries later Tertullian, a Christian writer, said, "The world is a republic, the common land of the human race."

Poverty and Humility.—The ancients thought that riches ennobled a man and they regarded pride as a worthy sentiment. "Blessed are the poor," said Christ, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." He that would not renounce all that he had could not be his disciple. He himself went from city to city, possessing nothing, and when his disciples were preoccupied with the future, he said, "Be not anxious for what ye shall eat, nor for what ye shall put on. Behold the birds of the heaven, they sow not neither do they reap, yet your heavenly Father feedeth them."

The Christian was to disdain riches, and more yet, worldly honors. One day when his disciples were disputing who should have the highest rank in heaven, he said, "He that is greatest among you shall be your servant." "Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." Till our day the successor of Saint Peter calls himself "Servant of the servants of God." Christ drew to himself by preference the poor, the sick, women, children,—in a word, the weak and the helpless. He took all his disciples from among the populace and bade them be "meek and lowly of heart."

The Kingdom of God.—Christ said that he had come to the earth to found the kingdom of God. His enemies believed that he wished to be a king, and when he was crucified, they placed this inscription on his cross, "Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews." This was a gross mistake. Christ himself had declared, "My kingdom is not of this world." He did not come to overturn governments nor to reform society. To him who asked if he should pay the Roman tax, he replied, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." And so the Christian accepted what he found established and himself worked to perfect it, not to remodel society. To make himself pleasing to God and worthy of his kingdom it was not necessary to offer him sacrifices or to observe minute formulas as the pagans did: "True worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth." Their moral law is contained in this word of Christ: "Be ye therefore perfect even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."

THE FIRST CENTURIES OF THE CHURCH

Disciples and Apostles.—The twelve disciples who associated with Christ received from him the mission to preach his doctrine to all peoples. From that time they were called Apostles. The majority of them lived in Jerusalem and preached in Judaea; the first Christians were still Jews. It was Saul, a new convert, who carried Christianity to the other peoples of the Orient. Paul (for he took this name) spent his life visiting the Greek cities of Asia, Greece, and Macedonia, inviting to the new religion not only the Jews, but also and especially the Gentiles: "You were once without Christ," said he to them, "strangers to the covenant and to the promises; but you have been brought nigh by the blood of Christ, for it is he who of two peoples hath made both one." From this time it was no longer necessary to be a Jew if one would become a Christian. The other nations, disregarded by the law of Moses, are brought near by the law of Christ. This fusion was the work of St. Paul, also called the Apostle to the Gentiles.

The religion of Christ spread very slowly, as he himself had announced: "The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard-seed ... which is the least of all seeds; but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs ... and the birds of the air lodge under its branches."

The Church.—In every city where Christians were found they assembled to pray together, to sing the praises of God, and to celebrate the mystery of the Lord's Supper. Their meeting was called Ecclesia (assembly). Usually the Christians of the same assembly regarded themselves as brothers; they contributed of their property to support the widows, the poor, and the sick. The most eminent directed the community and celebrated the religious ceremonies. These were the Priests (their name signifies "elders"). Others were charged with the administration of the goods of the community, and were called Deacons (servants). Besides these officers, there was in each city a supreme head—the Bishop (overseer).

Later the functions of the church became so exacting that the body of Christians was divided into two classes of people: the clergy, who were the officials of the community; the rest, the faithful, who were termed the laity.

Each city had its independent church; thus they spoke of the church of Antioch, of Corinth, of Rome; and yet they all formed but one church, the church of Christ, in which all were united in one faith. The universal or Catholic faith was regarded as the only correct body of belief; all conflicting opinions (the heresies) were condemned as errors.

The Sacred Books.—The sacred scripture of the Jews, the Old Testament, remained sacred for the Christians, but they had other sacred books which the church had brought into one structure (the New Testament). The four Gospels recount the life of Christ and the "good news" of salvation which he brought. The Acts of the Apostles describes how the gospel was disseminated in the world. The Epistles are the letters addressed by the apostles to the Christians of the first century. The Apocalypse (Revelation) is the revelation made through St. John to the seven churches of Asia. Many other pseudo-sacred books were current among the Christians, but the church has rejected all of these, and has termed them apocryphal.

The Persecutions.—The Christian religion was persecuted from its birth. Its first enemies were the Jews, who forced the Roman governor of Judaea to crucify Christ; who stoned St. Stephen, the first martyr, and so set themselves against St. Paul that they almost compassed his death.

Then came the persecution by the Pagans. The Romans tolerated all the religions of the East because the devotees of Osiris, of Mithra, and of the Good Goddess recognized at the same time the Roman gods. But the Christians, worshippers of the living God, scorned the petty divinities of antiquity. More serious still in the eyes of the Romans, they refused to adore the emperor as a god and to burn incense on the altar of the goddess Roma. Several emperors promulgated edicts against the Christians, bidding the governors arrest them and put them to death. A letter of Pliny the Younger, then governor in Asia, to the emperor Trajan, shows the procedure against them. "Up to this time, regarding the people who have been denounced as Christians, I have always operated as follows: I asked them if they were Christians; if they confessed it, I put the question to them a second time, and then a third time, threatening them with the penalty of death. When they persisted, I had them put to death, convinced that, whatever their fault that they avowed, their disobedience and their resolute obstinacy merited punishment. Many who have been denounced in anonymous writings have denied that they were Christians, have repeated a prayer that I pronounced before them, have offered wine and incense to your statue, which I had set forth for this purpose together with the statues of the gods, and have even reviled the name of Christ. All these are things which it is not possible to compel any true Christians to do. Others have confessed that they were Christians, but they affirm that their crime and their error consisted only in assembling on certain days before sunrise to adore Christ as God, to sing together in his honor, and to bind themselves by oath to commit no crime, to perpetrate no theft, murder, adultery, nor to violate their word. I have believed it necessary in order to secure the truth to put to the torture two female slaves whom they called deaconesses; but I have discovered only an absurd and exaggerated superstition."

The Roman government was a persecutor,[165] but the populace were severer yet. They could not endure these people who worshipped another god than theirs and contemned their deities. Whenever famine or epidemic occurred, the well-known cry was heard, "To the lions with the Christians!" The people forced the magistrates to hunt and persecute the Christians.

The Martyrs.—For the two centuries and a half that the Christians were persecuted, throughout the empire there were thousands of victims, of every age, sex, and condition. Roman citizens, like St. Paul, were beheaded; the others were crucified, burned, most often sent to the beasts in the amphitheatre. If they were allowed to escape with their lives, they were set at forced labor in the mines. Sometimes torture was aggravated by every sort of invention. In the great execution at Lyons, in 177, the Christians, after being tortured and confined in narrow prison quarters, were brought to the arena. The beasts mutilated without killing them. They were then seated in iron chairs heated red by fire. Blandina, a young slave, who survived all these torments was bound with cords and exposed to the fury of a bull. The Christians joyfully suffered these persecutions which gave them entrance to heaven. The occasion presented an opportunity for rendering public testimony to Christ. And so they did not call themselves victims, but martyrs (witnesses); their torture was a testimony. They compared it to the combat of the Olympian games; like the victor in the athletic contests, they spoke of the palm or the crown. Even now the festal day of a martyr is the day of his death.

Frequently a Christian who was present at the persecution would draft a written account of the martyrdom—he related the arrest, the examination, the tortures, and the death. These brief accounts, filled with edifying details, were called The Acts of the Martyrs. They were circulated in the remotest communities; from one end of the empire to the other they published the glory of the martyrs and excited a desire to imitate them. Thousands of the faithful, seized by a thirst for martyrdom, pressed forward to incriminate themselves and to demand condemnation. One day a governor of Asia had decreed persecutions against some Christians: all the Christians of the city presented themselves in his tribunal and demanded to be persecuted. The governor, exasperated, had some of them executed and sent away the others. "Begone, you wretches! If you are so bent on death, you have precipices and ropes." Some of the faithful, to be surer of torture, entered the temples and threw down the idols of the gods. It was several times necessary for even the church to prohibit the solicitation of martyrdom.

The Catacombs.—The ancient custom of burning the dead was repugnant to the Christians. Like the Jews, they interred their dead wrapped with a shroud in a sarcophagus. Cemeteries[166] were therefore required. At Rome where land was very high in price the Christians went below ground, and in the brittle tufa on which Rome was built may be seen long galleries and subterranean chambers. There, in niches excavated along the passages, they laid the bodies of their dead. As each generation excavated new galleries, there was formed at length a subterranean city, called the Catacombs ("to the tombs"). There were similar catacombs in several cities—Naples, Milan, Alexandria, but the most celebrated were those in Rome. These have been investigated in our day and thousands of Christian tombs and inscriptions recovered. The discovery of this subterranean world gave birth to a new department of historical science—Christian Epigraphy and Archaeology.

The sepulchral halls of the catacombs do not resemble those of the Egyptians or those of the Etruscans; they are bare and severe. The Christians knew that a corpse had no bodily wants and so they did not adorn the tombs. The most important halls are decorated with very simple ornaments and paintings which almost always represent the same scenes. The most common subjects are the faithful in prayer, and the Good Shepherd, symbolical of Christ. Some of these halls were like chapels. In them were interred the bodies of the holy martyrs and the faithful who wished to lie near them; every year Christians came here to celebrate the mysteries. During the persecutions of the third century the Christians of Rome often took refuge in these subterranean chapels to hold their services of worship, or to escape from pursuit. The Christians could feel safe in this bewildering labyrinth of galleries whose entrance was usually marked by a pagan tomb.

THE MONKS OF THE THIRD CENTURY

The Solitaries.—It was an idea current among Christians, especially in the East, that one could not become a perfect Christian by remaining in the midst of other men. Christ himself had said, "If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters ... he cannot be my disciple." The faithful man or woman who thus withdrew from the world to work out his salvation the more surely, was termed an Anchorite (the man who is set apart), or a Monk (solitary). This custom began in the East in the middle of the third century. The first anchorites established themselves in the deserts and the ruins of the district of Thebes in Upper Egypt, which remained the holy land of the solitaries.

Paul (235-340), the oldest of the monks, lived to his ninetieth year in a grotto near a spring and a palm-tree which furnished him with food and clothing. The model of the monks was St Anthony.[167] At the age of twenty he heard read one day the text of the gospel, "If thou wilt be perfect, sell all thy goods and give to the poor." He was fine looking, noble, and rich, having received an inheritance from his parents. He sold all his property, distributed it in alms and buried himself in the desert of Egypt. He first betook himself to an empty tomb, then to the ruins of a fortress; he was clad in a hair-shirt, had for food only the bread that was brought to him every six months, fasted, starved himself, prayed day and night. Often sunrise found him still in prayer. "O sun," cried he, "why hast thou risen and prevented my contemplating the true light?" He felt himself surrounded by demons, who, under every form, sought to distract him from his religious thoughts. When he became old and revered by all Egypt, he returned to Alexandria for a day to preach against the Arian heretics, but soon repaired to the desert again. They besought him to remain: he replied, "The fishes die on land, the monks waste away in the city; we return to our mountains like the fish to the water."

Women also became solitaries. Alexandra, one of these, shut herself in an empty tomb and lived there for ten years without leaving it to see anybody.

Asceticism.—These men who had withdrawn to the desert to escape the world thought that everything that came from the world turned the soul from God and placed it in the peril of losing salvation. The Christian ought to belong entirely to God; he should forget everything behind him. "Do you not know," said St. Nilus later, "that it is a trap of Satan to be too much attached to one's family?" The monk Poemen had withdrawn to the desert with his brothers, and their mother came to visit them. As they refused to appear, she waited a little until they were going to the church; but on seeing her, they fled and would not consent to speak to her unless they were concealed. She asked to see them, but they consoled her by saying, "You will see us in the other world."

But the world is not the only danger for the monk. Every man carried about with himself an enemy from whom he could not deliver himself as he had delivered himself from the world—that is, his own body. The body prevented the soul from rising to God and drew it to worldly pleasures that came from the devil. And so the solitaries applied themselves to overcoming the body by refusing to it everything that it loved. They subsisted only on bread and water; many ate but twice a week, some went to the mountains to cut herbs which they ate raw. They dwelt in grottoes, ruins, and tombs, lying on the earth or on a mat of rushes. The most zealous of them added other tortures to mortify, or kill, the body. St. Pachomius for fifteen years slept only in an erect position, leaning against a wall. Macarius remained six months in a morass, the prey of mosquitoes "whose stings would have penetrated the hide of a wild boar." The most noted of these monks was St. Simeon, surnamed Stylites (the man of the column). For forty years he lived in the desert of Arabia on the summit of a column, exposed to the sun and the rain, compelling himself to stay in one position for a whole day; the faithful flocked from afar to behold him; he gave them audience from the top of his column, bidding creditors free their debtors, and masters liberate their slaves; he even sent reproaches to ministers and counsellors of the emperor. This form of life was called Asceticism (exercise).

The Cenobites.—The solitaries who lived in the same desert drew together and adopted a common life for the practice of their austerities. About St. Anthony were already assembled many anchorites who gave him their obedience. St. Pachomius (272-348) in this way assembled 3,000. Their establishment was at Tabenna, near the first cataract of the Nile. He founded many other similar communities, either of men or women. In 256 a traveller said he had seen in a single city of Egypt 10,000 monks and 20,000 vowed to a religious life. There were more of them in Syria, in Palestine, in all the Orient. The monks thus united in communities became Cenobites (people who live in common). They chose a chief, the abbot (the word signifies in Syriac "father"), and they implicitly obeyed him. Cassian relates that in one community in Egypt he had seen the abbot before the whole refectory give a cenobite a violent blow on the head to try his obedience.

The primitive monks renounced all property and family relations; the cenobites surrendered also their will. On entering the community they engaged to possess nothing, not to marry, and to obey. "The monks," says St. Basil, "live a spiritual life like the angels." The first union among the cenobites was the construction of houses in close proximity. Later each community built a monastery, a great edifice, where each monk had his cell. A Christian compares these cells "to a hive of bees where each has in his hands the wax of work, in his mouth the honey of psalms and prayers." These great houses needed a written constitution; this was the Monastic Rule. St. Pachomius was the first to prepare one. St. Basil wrote another that was adopted by almost all the monasteries of the Orient.

FOOTNOTES:

[165] The church counted ten persecutions, the first under Nero, the last under Diocletian.

[166] The word is Greek and signifies place of repose.

[167] See his biography in the "Lives of the Fathers of the Desert," by Rufinus.



CHAPTER XXVII

THE LATER EMPIRE

THE REVOLUTIONS OF THE THIRD CENTURY

Military Anarchy.—After the reigns of the Antonines the civil wars commenced. There were in the empire, beside the praetorian guard in Rome, several great armies on the Rhine, on the Danube, in the East, and in England. Each aimed to make its general emperor. Ordinarily the rivals fought it out until there was but one left; this one then governed for a few years, after which he was assassinated,[168] or if, by chance, he could transmit his power to his son, the soldiers revolted against the son and the war recommenced. The following, for example, is what occurred in 193. The praetorians had massacred the emperor Pertinax, and the army conceived the notion of putting up the empire at auction; two purchasers presented themselves, Sulpicius offering each soldier $1,000 and Didius more than $1,200. The praetorians brought the latter to the Senate and had him named emperor; later, when he did not pay them, they murdered him. At the same time the great armies of Britain, Illyricum, and Syria proclaimed each its own general as emperor and the three rivals marched on Rome. The Illyrian legions arrived first, and their general Septimius Severus was named emperor by the Senate. Then commenced two sanguinary wars, the one against the legions of Syria, and the other against the legions of Britain. At the end of two years the emperor was victorious. It is he who states his policy as follows, "My son, content the soldiers and you may despise the rest." For a century there was no other form of government than the will of the soldiers. They killed the emperors who displeased them and replaced them by their favorites.