Notes for Chapter XI

1. V. X. Insurrection in Alexandria

2. The affair with Laberius, told in the well-known prologue, has been quoted as an instance of Caesar's tyrannical caprices, but those who have done so have thoroughly misunderstood the irony of the situation as well as of the poet; to say nothing of the -naivete- of lamenting as a martyr the poet who readily pockets his honorarium.

3. The triumph after the battle of Munda subsequently to be mentioned probably had reference only to the Lusitanians who served in great numbers in the conquered army.

4. Any one who desires to compare the old and new hardships of authors will find opportunity of doing so in the letter of Caecina (Cicero, Aa. Fam. vi. 7).

5. V. VI. Second Coalition of Pompeius, Crassus, and Caesar

6. When this was written—in the year 1857—no one could foresee how soon the mightiest struggle and most glorious victory as yet recorded in human annals would save the United States from this fearful trial, and secure the future existence of an absolute self-governing freedom not to be permanently kept in check by any local Caesarism.

7. V. IX. Preparation for Attacks on Caesar

8. On the 26th January 710 Caesar is still called dictator IIII (triumphal table); on the 18th February of this year he was already -dictator perpetuus- (Cicero, Philip, ii. 34, 87). Comp. Staatsrecht, ii. 3 716.

9. IV. X. Executions

10. The formulation of that dictatorship appears to have expressly brought into prominence among other things the "improvement of morals"; but Caesar did not hold on his own part an office of this sort (Staatsrecht, ii. 3 705).

11. Caesar bears the designation of -imperator- always without any number indicative of iteration, and always in the first place after his name (Staatsrecht, ii. 3 767, note 1).

12. V. V. Rehabilitation of Saturninus and Marius

13. During the republican period the name Imperator, which denotes the victorious general, was laid aside with the end of the campaign; as a permanent title it first appears in the case of Caesar.

14. That in Caesar's lifetime the -imperium- as well as the supreme pontificate was rendered by a formal legislative act hereditary for his agnate descendants—of his own body or through the medium of adoption—was asserted by Caesar the Younger as his legal title to rule. As our traditional accounts stand, the existence of such a law or resolution of the senate must be decidedly called in question; but doubtless it remains possible that Caesar intended the issue of such a decree. (Comp, Staatsrecht, ii. 3 787, 1106.)

15. The widely-spread opinion, which sees in the imperial office of Imperator nothing but the dignity of general of the empire tenable for life, is not warranted either by the signification of the word or by the view taken by the old authorities. -Imperium- is the power of command, -Imperator- is the possessor of that power; in these words as in the corresponding Greek terms —kratos—, —autokrator— so little is there implied a specific military reference, that it is on the contrary the very characteristic of the Roman official power, where it appears purely and completely, to embrace in it war and process—that is, the military and the civil power of command—as one inseparable whole. Dio says quite correctly (liii. 17; comp, xliii. 44; lii. 41) that the name Imperator was assumed by the emperors "to indicate their full power instead of the title of king and dictator (—pros deilosin teis autotelous sphon exousias, anti teis basileos tou te diktatoros epikleiseos—); for these other older titles disappeared in name, but in reality the title of Imperator gives the same prerogatives (—to de dei ergon auton tei tou autokratoros proseigoria bebaiountai—), for instance the right of levying soldiers, imposing taxes, declaring war and concluding peace, exercising the supreme authority over burgess and non-burgess in and out of the city and punishing any one at any place capitally or otherwise, and in general of assuming the prerogatives connected in the earliest times with the supreme imperium." It could not well be said in plainer terms, that Imperator is nothing at all but a synonym for rex, just as imperare coincides with regere.

16. When Augustus in constituting the principate resumed the Caesarian imperium, this was done with the restriction that it should be limited as to space and in a certain sense also as to time; the proconsular power of the emperors, which was nothing but just this imperium, was not to come into application as regards Rome and Italy (Staatsrecht, ii. 8 854). On this element rests the essential distinction between the Caesarian imperium and the Augustan principate, just as on the other hand the real equality of the two institutions rests on the imperfection with which even in principle and still more in practice that limit was realized.

17. II. I. Collegiate Arrangements

18. On this question there may be difference of opinion, whereas the hypothesis that it was Caesar's intention to rule the Romans as Imperator, the non-Romans as Rex, must be simply dismissed. It is based solely on the story that in the sitting of the senate in which Caesar was assassinated a Sibylline utterance was brought forward by one of the priests in charge of the oracles, Lucius Cotta, to the effect that the Parthians could only be vanquished by a "king," and in consequence of this the resolution was adopted to commit to Caesar regal power over the Roman provinces. This story was certainly in circulation immediately after Caesar's death. But not only does it nowhere find any sort of even indirect confirmation, but it is even expressly pronounced false by the contemporary Cicero (De Div. ii. 54, 119) and reported by the later historians, especially by Suetonius (79) and Dio (xliv. 15) merely as a rumour which they are far from wishing to guarantee; and it is under such circumstances no better accredited by the fact of Plutarch (Caes. 60, 64; Brut. 10) and Appian (B. C. ii. 110) repeating it after their wont, the former by way of anecdote, the latter by way of causal explanation. But the story is not merely unattested; it is also intrinsically impossible. Even leaving out of account that Caesar had too much intellect and too much political tact to decide important questions of state after the oligarchic fashion by a stroke of the oracle-machinery, he could never think of thus formally and legally splitting up the state which he wished to reduce to a level.

19. II. III. Union of the Plebeians

20. II. I. The New Community

21. IV. X. Abolition of the Censorial Supervision of the Senate

22. According to the probable calculation formerly assumed (iv. 113), this would yield an average aggregate number of from 1000 to 1200 senators.

23. This certainly had reference merely to the elections for the years 711 and 712 (Staatsrecht, ii. a 730); but the arrangement was doubtless meant to become permanent.

24. I. V. The Senate as State-Council, II. I. Senate

25. V. X. Pacification of Alexandria

26. V. VIII. Changes in the Arrangement of Magistracies and the Jury-System

27. I. V. The King

28. Hence accordingly the cautious turns of expression on the mention of these magistracies in Caesar's laws; -cum censor aliusve quis magistratus Romae populi censum aget (L. Jul. mun. l. 144); praetor isve quei Romae iure deicundo praerit (L. Rubr. often); quaestor urbanus queive aerario praerit- (L. Jul. mun. l. 37 et al.).

29. V. III. New Arrangement as to Jurymen

30. V. VIII. And in the Courts

31. -Plura enim multo-, says Cicero in his treatise De Oratore (ii. 42, 178), primarily with reference to criminal trials, -homines iudicant odio aut amore aut cupiditate aut iracundia aut dolore aut laetitia aut spe aut timore aut errore aut aliqua permotione mentis, quam veritate aut praescripto aut iuris norma aliqua aut iudicii formula aut legibus-. On this accordingly are founded the further instructions which he gives for advocates entering, on their profession.

32. V. VIII. And in the Courts

33. V. VII. Macedonia ff.

34. V. VII. The Gallic Plan of War

35. V. III. Overthrow of the Senatorial Rule, and New Power of Pompeius

36. With the nomination of a part of the military tribunes by the burgesses (III. XI. Election of Officers in the Comitia) Caesar— in this also a democrat—did not meddle.

37. V. VII. The New Dacian Kingdom

38. IV. VI. Political Significance of the Marian Military Reform

39. IV. VI. Political Significance of the Marian Military Reform

40. V. V. Total Defeat of the Democratic Party

41. Varro attests the discontinuance of the Sicilian -decumae- in a treatise published after Cicero's death (De R. R. 2 praef.) where he names—as the corn—provinces whence Rome derives her subsistence—only Africa and Sardinia, no longer Sicily. The -Latinitas-, which Sicily obtained, must thus doubtless have included this immunity (comp. Staatsrecht, iii. 684).

42. V. X. Field of Caesar's Power

43. III. XI. Italian Subjects

44. V. VIII. Clodius

45. III. XIII. Increase of Amusements

46. In Sicily, the country of production, the -modius- was sold within a few years at two and at twenty sesterces; from this we may guess what must have been the fluctuations of price in Rome, which subsisted on transmarine corn and was the seat of speculators.

47. IV. XII. The Finances and Public Buildings

48. It is a fact not without interest that a political writer of later date but much judgment, the author of the letters addressed in the name of Sallust to Caesar, advises the latter to transfer the corn-distribution of the capital to the several -municipia-. There is good sense in the admonition; as indeed similar ideas obviously prevailed in the noble municipal provision for orphans under Trajan.

49. V. XI. The State-Hierarchy

50. III. XII. The Management of the Land and Its Capital

51. The following exposition in Cicero's treatise De officiis (i. 42) is characteristic: -Iam de artificiis et quaestibus, qui liberales habendi, qui sordidi sint, kaec fere accepimus. Primum improbantur ii quaestus, qui in odia hominum incurrunt, ut portitorum, ut feneratorum. Illiberales autem et sordidi quaestus mercenariorum omnium, quorum operae, nonaries emuntur. Est autem in illis ipsa merces auctoramentum servitutis. Sordidi etiam putandi, qui mercantur a mercatoribus quod statim vendant, nihil enim proficiant, nisi admodum mentiantur. Nec vero est quidquam turpius vanitate. Opificesque omnes in sordida arte versantur; nec enim quidquam ingenuum habere potest officina. Minimeque artes eae probandae, quae ministrae sunt voluptatum,

"Cetarii, lanii, coqui, fartores, piscatores,"

ut ait Terentius. Adde huc, si placet, unguentarios, saltatores, totumque ludum talarium. Quibus autem artibus aut prudentia maior inest, aut non mediocris utilitas quaeritur, ut medicina, ut architectura, ut doctrina rerum honestarum, eae sunt iis, quorum ordini conveniunt, honestae. Mercatura autem, si tenuis est, sordida putanda est; sin magna et copiosa, multa undique apportans, multaque sine vanitate impertiens, non est admodum vituperanda; atque etiam, si satiata quaestu, vel contenta potius; ut saepe ex alto in portum, ex ipso portu in agros se possessionesque contulerit, videtur optimo iure posse laudari. Omnium autem rerum, ex quibus aliquid acquiritur, nihil est agricultura melius, nihil uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius-. According to this the respectable man must, in strictness, be a landowner; the trade of a merchant becomes him only so far as it is a means to this ultimate end; science as a profession is suitable only for the Greeks and for Romans not belonging to the ruling classes, who by this means may purchase at all events a certain toleration of their personal presence in genteel circles. It is a thoroughly developed aristocracy of planters, with a strong infusion of mercantile speculation and a slight shading of general culture.

52. IV. IV. Administration under the Restoration

53. We have still (Macrobius, Hi, 13) the bill of fare of the banquet which Mucius Lentulus Niger gave before 691 on entering on his pontificate, and of which the pontifices—Caesar included—the Vestal Virgins, and some other priests and ladies nearly related to them partook. Before the dinner proper came sea-hedgehogs; fresh oysters as many as the guests wished; large mussels; sphondyli; fieldfares with asparagus; fattened fowls; oyster and mussel pasties; black and white sea-acorns; sphondyli again; glycimarides; sea-nettles; becaficoes; roe-ribs; boar's-ribs; fowls dressed with flour; becaficoes; purple shell-fish of two sorts. The dinner itself consisted of sow's udder; boar's-head; fish-pasties; boar- pasties; ducks; boiled teals; hares; roasted fowls; starch-pastry; Pontic pastry.

These are the college-banquets regarding which Varro (De R. R. iii. 2, 16) says that they forced up the prices of all delicacies. Varro in one of his satires enumerates the following as the most notable foreign delicacies: peacocks from Samos; grouse from Phrygia; cranes from Melos; kids from Ambracia; tunny fishes from Chalcedon; muraenas from the Straits of Gades; bleak-fishes (? -aselli-) from Pessinus; oysters and scallops from Tarentum; sturgeons (?) from Rhodes; -scarus—fishes (?) from Cilicia; nuts from Thasos; dates from Egypt; acorns from Spain.

54. IV. VII. Economic Crisis, IV. IX. Death of Cinna

55. III. X. Greek National Party

56. IV. XI. Capitalist Oligarchy

57. III. XIII. Luxury

58. IV. XII. Practical Use Made of Religion

59. III. XIII. Cato's Family Life, iv. 186 f.

60. IV. I. Achaean War

61. IV. XII. Mixture of Peoples

62. V. VI. Caesar's Agrarian Law

63. V. XI. Dolabella

64. This is not stated by our authorities, but it necessarily follows from the permission to deduct the interest paid by cash or assignation (-si quid usurae nomine numeratum aut perscriptum fuisset-; Sueton. Caes. 42), as paid contrary to law, from the capital.

65. II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes

66. V. V. Preparations of the Anarchists in Etruria

67. IV. VII. Economic Crisis

68. The Egyptian royal laws (Diodorus, i. 79) and likewise the legislation of Solon (Plutarch, Sol. 13, 15) forbade bonds in which the loss of the personal liberty of the debtor was made the penalty of non-payment; and at least the latter imposed on the debtor in the event of bankruptcy no more than the cession of his whole assets.

69. I. XI. Manumission

70. II. III. Continued Distress

71. At least the latter rule occurs in the old Egyptian royal laws (Diodorus, i. 79). On the other hand the Solonian legislation knows no restrictions on interest, but on the contrary expressly allows interest to be fixed of any amount at pleasure.

72. V. VI. Caesar's Agrarian Law

73. V. VI. Caesar's Agrarian Law

74. IV. II. Tribunate of Gracchus, IV. II. The Domain Question Viewed in Itself, IV. IV. The Domain Question under the Restoration

75. IV. XII. Carneades at Rome, V. III. Continued Subsistence of the Sullan Constitution

76. IV. X. The Roman Municipal System

77. Of both laws considerable fragments still exist.

78. V. XI. Diminution of the Proletariate

79. V. VII. Gaul Subdued

80. As according to Caesar's ordinance annually sixteen propraetors and two proconsuls divided the governorships among them, and the latter remained two years in office (p. 344), we might conclude that he intended to bring the number of provinces in all up to twenty. Certainty is, however, the less attainable as to this, seeing that Caesar perhaps designedly instituted fewer offices than candidatures.

81. This is the so-called "free embassy" (-libera legatio-), namely an embassy without any proper public commission entrusted to it.

82. V. II. Piracy

83. V. XI. In The Administration of the Capital

84. V. XI. Foreign Mercenaries

85. V. IX. In the Governorships

86. V. XI. Financial Reforms of Caesar

87. V. I. Organizations of Sertorius

88. V. XI. Robberies and Damage by War

89. V. XI. The Roman Capitalists in the Provinces

90. V. I. Transpadanes, V. VIII. Settlement of the New Monarchial Rule

91. Narbo was called the colony of the Decimani, Baeterrae of the Septimani, Forum Julii of the Octavani, Arelate of the Sextani, Arausio of the Secundani. The ninth legion is wanting, because it had disgraced its number by the mutiny of Placentia (p. 246). That the colonists of these colonies belonged to the legions from which they took their names, is not stated and is not credible; the veterans themselves were, at least the great majority of them, settled in Italy (p. 358). Cicero's complaint, that Caesar "had confiscated whole provinces and districts at a blow" (De Off. ii. 7, 27; comp. Philipp. xiii. 15, 31, 32) relates beyond doubt, as its close connection with the censure of the triumph over the Massiliots proves, to the confiscations of land made on account of these colonies in the Narbonese province and primarily to the losses of territory imposed on Massilia.

92. IV. VII. Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts

93. V. XI. Other Magistracies and Attributions

94. We are not expressly informed from whom the Latin rights of the non-colonized townships of this region and especially of Nemausus proceeded. But as Caesar himself (B. C. i. 35) virtually states that Nemausus up to 705 was a Massiliot village; as according to Livy's account (Dio, xli. 25; Flor. ii. 13; Oros. vi. 15) this very portion of territory was taken from the Massiliots by Caesar; and lastly as even on pre-Augustan coins and then in Strabo the town appears as a community of Latin rights, Caesar alone can have been the author of this bestowal of Latinity. As to Ruscino (Roussillon near Perpignan) and other communities in Narbonese Gaul which early attained a Latin urban constitution, we can only conjecture that they received it contemporarily with Nemausus.

95. V. VII. Indulgence toward Existing Arrangements

96. II. V. Crises within the Romano-Latin League

97. V. X. The Leaders of the Republicans Put to Death

98. That no community of full burgesses had more than limited jurisdiction, is certain. But the fact, which is distinctly apparent from the Caesarian municipal ordinance for Cisalpine Gaul, is a surprising one—that the processes lying beyond municipal competency from this province went not before its governor, but before the Roman praetor; for in other cases the governor is in his province quite as much representative of the praetor who administers justice between burgesses as of the praetor who administers justice between burgess and non-burgess, and is thoroughly competent to determine all processes. Beyond doubt this is a remnant of the arrangement before Sulla, under which in the whole continental territory as far as the Alps the urban magistrates alone were competent, and thus all the processes there, where they exceeded municipal competency, necessarily came before the praetors in Rome. In Narbo again, Gades, Carthage, Corinth, the processes in such a case went certainly to the governor concerned; as indeed even from practical considerations the carrying of a suit to Rome could not well be thought of.

99. It is difficult to see why the bestowal of the Roman franchise on a province collectively, and the continuance of a provincial administration for it, should be usually conceived as contrasts excluding each other. Besides, Cisalpine Gaul notoriously obtained the -civitas- by the Roscian decree of the people of the 11th March 705, while it remained a province as long as Caesar lived and was only united with Italy after his death (Dio, xlviii. 12); the governors also can be pointed out down to 711. The very fact that the Caesarian municipal ordinance never designates the country as Italy, but as Cisalpine Gaul, ought to have led to the right view.

100. IV. II. The First Sicilian Slave War

101. The continued subsistence of the municipal census-authorities speaks for the view, that the local holding of the census had already been established for Italy in consequence of the Social war (Staatsrecht, ii. 8 368); but probably the carrying out of this system was Caesar's work.

102. II. VII. Intermediate Fuctionaries, III. III. Autonomy

103. III. XI. Supervision of the Senate Over the Provinces and Their Governors

104. I. XI. Character of the Roman Law

105. IV. XIII. Philology

106. I. XI. Clients and Foreigners

107. V. XI. Usury Laws

108. V. V. Transpadanes

109. I. XIV. Italian Measures ff.

110. III. XII. Coins and Moneys

111. Weights recently brought to light at Pompeii suggest the hypothesis that at the commencement of the imperial period alongside of the Roman pound the Attic mina (presumably in the ratio of 3: 4) passed current as a second imperial weight (Hermes, xvi. 311).

112. The gold pieces, which Sulla (iv. 179) and contemporarily Pompeius caused to be struck, both in small quantity, do not invalidate this proposition; for they probably came to be taken solely by weight just like the golden Phillippei which were in circulation even down to Caesar's time. They are certainly remarkable, because they anticipate the Caesarian imperial gold just as Sulla's regency anticipated the new monarchy.

113. IV. XI. Token-Money

114. It appears, namely, that in earlier times the claims of the state-creditors payable in silver could not be paid against their will in gold according to its legal ratio to silver; whereas it admits of no doubt, that from Caesar's time the gold piece had to be taken as a valid tender for 100 silver sesterces. This was just at that time the more important, as in consequence of the great quantities of gold put into circulation by Caesar it stood for a time in the currency of trade 25 per cent below the legal ratio.

115. There is probably no inscription of the Imperial period, which specifies sums of money otherwise than in Roman coin.

116. Thus the Attic -drachma-, although sensibly heavier than the -denarius-, was yet reckoned equal to it; the -tetradrachmon- of Antioch, weighing on an average 15 grammes of silver, was made equal to 3 Roman -denarii-, which only weigh about 12 grammes; the -cistophorus- of Asia Minor was according to the value of silver above 3, according to the legal tariff =2 1/2 -denarii-; the Rhodian half -drachma- according to the value of silver=3/4, according to the legal tariff = 5/8 of a -denarius-, and so on.

117. III. III. Illyrian Piracy

118. The identity of this edict drawn up perhaps by Marcus Flavius (Macrob. Sat. i. 14, 2) and the alleged treatise of Caesar, De Stellis, is shown by the joke of Cicero (Plutarch, Caes. 59) that now the Lyre rises according to edict.

We may add that it was known even before Caesar that the solar year of 365 days 6 hours, which was the basis of the Egyptian calendar, and which he made the basis of his, was somewhat too long. the most exact calculation of the tropical year which the ancient world was acquainted with, that of Hipparchus, put it at 365 d. 5 h. 52' 12"; the true length is 365 d. 5 h. 48' 48".

119. Caesar stayed in Rome in April and Dec. 705, on each occasion for a few days; from Sept. to Dec. 707; some four months in the autumn of the year of fifteen months 708, and from Oct. 709 to March 710.



Notes for Chapter XII

1. V. VIII. Clodius

2. III. XIV. Cato's Encyclopedia

3. These form, as is well known, the so-called seven liberal arts, which, with this distinction between the three branches of discipline earlier naturalized in Italy and the four subsequently received, maintained their position throughout the middle ages.

4. IV. XII. Latin Instruction

5. Thus Varro (De R. R. i. 2) says: -ab aeditimo, ut dicere didicimus a patribus nostris; ut corrigimur ab recenlibus urbanis, ab aedituo-.

6. The dedication of the poetical description of the earth which passes under the name of Scymnus is remarkable in reference to those relations. After the poet has declared his purpose of preparing in the favourite Menandrian measure a sketch of geography intelligible for scholars and easy to be learned by heart, he dedicates—as Apollodorus dedicated his similar historical compendium to Attalus Philadelphus king of Pergamus

—athanaton aponemonta dexan Attalo teis pragmateias epigraphein eileiphoti— —

his manual to Nicomedes III king (663?-679) of Bithynia:

—ego d' akouon, dioti ton non basileon monos basilikein chreistoteita prosphereis peiran epethumeis autos ep' emautou labein kai paragenesthai kai ti basileus est' idein, dio tei prothesei sumboulon exelexamein ... ton Apollena ton Didumei... ou dei schedon malista kai pepeismenos pros sein kata logon eika (koinein gar schedon tois philomathousin anadedeichas) estian—.

7. IV. XIII. Historical Composition

8. V. XII. Greek Instruction

9. Cicero testifies that the mime in his time had taken the place of the Atellana (Ad Fam. ix. 16); with this accords the fact, that the -mimi- and -mimae- first appear about the Sullan epoch (Ad Her. i. 14, 24; ii. 13, 19; Atta Fr. 1 Ribbeck; Plin. H. N. vii. 43, 158; Plutarch, Sull. 2, 36). The designation -mimus-, however, is sometimes inaccurately applied to the comedian generally. Thus the -mimus- who appeared at the festival of Apollo in 542-543 (Festus under -salva res est-; comp. Cicero, De Orat. ii. 59, 242) was evidently nothing but an actor of the -palliata-, for there was at this period no room in the development of the Roman theatre for real mimes in the later sense.

With the mimus of the classical Greek period—prose dialogues, in which -genre- pictures, particularly of a rural kind, were presented—the Roman mimus had no especial relation.

10. With the possession of this sum, which constituted the qualification for the first voting-class and subjected the inheritance to the Voconian law, the boundary line was crossed which separated the men of slender means (-tenuiores-) from respectable people. Therefore the poor client of Catullus (xxiii. 26) beseeches the gods to help him to this fortune.

11. In the "Descensus ad Inferos" of Laberius all sorts of people come forward, who have seen wonders and signs; to one there appeared a husband with two wives, whereupon a neighbour is of opinion that this is still worse than the vision, recently seen by a soothsayer in a dream, of six aediles. Caesar forsooth desired— according to the talk of the time—to introduce polygamy in Rome (Suetonius, Caes. 82) and he nominated in reality six aediles instead of four. One sees from this that aberius understood how to exercise the fool's privilege and Caesar how to permit the fool's freedom.

12. V. VIII. Attempts of the Regents to Check It

13. V. XI. The Poor

14. IV. XIII. Dramatic Arrangements

15. He obtained from the state for every day on which he acted 1000 -denarii- (40 pounds) and besides this the pay for his company. In later years he declined the honorarium for himself.

16. Such an individual apparent exception as Panchaea the land of incense (ii. 417) is to be explained from the circumstance that this had passed from the romance of the Travels of Euhemerus already perhaps into the poetry of Ennius, at any rate into the poems of Lucius Manlius (iv. 242; Plin. H. N. x. a, 4) and thence was well known to the public for which Lucretius wrote.

17. III. XIV. Moral Effect of Tragedy

18. This naively appears in the descriptions of war, in which the seastorms that destroy armies, and the hosts of elephants that trample down those who are on their own side—pictures, that is, from the Punic wars—appear as if they belong to the immediate present. Comp. ii. 41; v. 1226, 1303, 1339.

19. "No doubt," says Cicero (Tusc. iii. 19, 45) in reference to Ennius, "the glorious poet is despised by our reciters of Euphorion." "I have safely arrived," he writes to Atticus (vii. 2 init.), "as a most favourable north wind blew for us across from Epirus. This spondaic line you may, if you choose, sell to one of the new-fashioned poets as your own" (-ita belle nobis flavit ab Epiro lenissumus Onchesmites. Hunc- —spondeiazonta— -si cui voles —ton neoteron— pro tuo vendito-).

20. V. VIII. Literature of the Opposition

21. "For me when a boy," he somewhere says, "there sufficed a single rough coat and a single under-garment, shoes without stockings, a horse without a saddle; I had no daily warm bath, and but seldom a river-bath." On account of his personal valour he obtained in the Piratic war, where he commanded a division of the fleet, the naval crown.

22. V. X. The Pompeians in Spain

23. There is hardly anything more childish than Varro's scheme of all the philosophies, which in the first place summarily declares all systems that do not propose the happiness of man as their ultimate aim to be nonexistent, and then reckons the number of philosophies conceivable under this supposition as two hundred and eighty-eight. The vigorous man was unfortunately too much a scholar to confess that he neither could nor would be a philosopher, and accordingly as such throughout life he performed a blind dance- not altogether becoming—between the Stoa, Pythagoreanism, and Diogenism.

24. On one occasion he writes, "-Quintiforis Clodii foria ac poemata ejus gargaridians dices; O fortuna, O fors fortuna-!" And elsewhere, "-Cum Quintipor Clodius tot comoedias sine ulla fecerit Musa, ego unum libellum non 'edolem' ut ait Ennius?-" This not otherwise known Clodius must have been in all probability a wretched imitator of Terence, as those words sarcastically laid at his door "O fortuna, O fors fortuna!" are found occurring in a Terentian comedy.

The following description of himself by a poet in Varro's —Onos Louras—,

-Pacuvi discipulus dicor, porro is fuit Enni, Ennius Musarum; Pompilius clueor-

might aptly parody the introduction of Lucretius (p. 474), to whom Varro as a declared enemy of the Epicurean system cannot have been well disposed, and whom he never quotes.

25. He himself once aptly says, that he had no special fondness for antiquated words, but frequently used them, and that he was very fond of poetical words, but did not use them.

26. The following description is taken from the -Marcipor- ("Slave of Marcus"):—

-Repente noctis circiter meridie Cum pictus aer fervidis late ignibus Caeli chorean astricen ostenderet, Nubes aquali, frigido velo leves Caeli cavernas aureas subduxerant, Aquam vomentes inferam mortalibus. Ventique frigido se ab axe eruperant, Phrenetici septentrionum filii, Secum ferentes tegulas, ramos, syrus. At nos caduci, naufragi, ut ciconiae Quarum bipennis fulminis plumas vapor Perussit, alte maesti in terram cecidimus-.

In the —'Anthropopolis— we find the lines:

-Non fit thesauris, non auro pectu' solutum; Non demunt animis curas ac relligiones Persarum montes, non atria diviti' Crassi-.

But the poet was successful also in a lighter vein. In the -Est Modus Matulae- there stood the following elegant commendation of wine:—

-Vino nihil iucundius quisquam bibit. Hoc aegritudinem ad medendam invenerunt, Hoc hilaritatis dulce seminarium. Hoc continet coagulum convivia-.

And in the —Kosmotonounei— the wanderer returning home thus concludes his address to the sailors:

-Delis habenas animae leni, Dum nos ventus flamine sudo Suavem ad patriam perducit-.

27. The sketches of Varro have so uncommon historical and even poetical significance, and are yet, in consequence of the fragmentary shape in which information regarding them has reached us, known to so few and so irksome to study, that we may be allowed to give in this place a resume of some of them with the few restorations indispensable for making them readable.

The satire Manius (Early Up!) describes the management of a rural household. "Manius summons his people to rise with the sun, and in person conducts them to the scene of their work. The youths make their own bed, which labour renders soft to them, and supply themselves with water-jar and lamp. Their drink is the clear fresh spring, their fare bread, and onions as relish. Everything prospers in house and field. The house is no work of art; but an architect might learn symmetry from it. Care is taken of the field, that it shall not be left disorderly and waste, or go to ruin through slovenliness and neglect; in return the grateful Ceres wards off damage from the produce, that the high-piled sheaves may gladden the heart of the husbandman. Here hospitality still holds good; every one who has but imbibed mother's milk is welcome. the bread-pantry and wine-vat and the store of sausages on the rafters, lock and key are at the service of the traveller, and piles of food are set before him; contented sits the sated guest, looking neither before nor behind, dozing by the hearth in the kitchen. the warmest double-wool sheepskin is spread as a couch for him.

"Here people still as good burgesses obey the righteous law, which neither out of envy injures the innocent, nor out of favour pardons the guilty. Here they speak no evil against their neighbours. Here they trespass not with their feet on the sacred hearth, but honour the gods with devotion and with sacrifices, throw for the house-spirit his little bit of flesh into his appointed little dish, and when the master of the household dies, accompany the bier with the same prayer with which those of his father and of his grandfather were borne forth."

In another satire there appears a "Teacher of the Old" (—Gerontodidaskalos—), of whom the degenerate age seems to stand more urgently in need than of the teacher of youth, and he explains how "once everything in Rome was chaste and pious," and now all things are so entirely changed. "Do my eyes deceive me, or do I see slaves in arms against their masters?—Formerly every one who did not present himself for the levy, was sold on the part of the state into slavery abroad; now the censor who allows cowardice and everything to pass is called [by the aristocracy, III. XI. Separation Of the Orders in the Theatre; IV. X. Shelving of the Censorship, V. III. Renewal of the Censorship; V. VIII. Humiliations of the Republicans] a great citizen, and earns praise because he does not seek to make himself a name by annoying his fellow-citizens.— Formerly the Roman husbandman had his beard shaven once every week; now the rural slave cannot have it fine enough.—Formerly one saw on the estates a corn-granary, which held ten harvests, spacious cellars for the wine-vats and corresponding wine-presses; now the master keeps flocks of peacocks, and causes his doors to be inlaid with African cypress-wood.—Formerly the housewife turned the spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot on the hearth in her eye, that the pottage might not be singed; now," it is said in another satire, "the daughter begs her father for a pound of precious stones, and the wife her husband for a bushel of pearls.—Formerly a newly-married husband was silent and bashful; now the wife surrenders herself to the first coachman that comes.— Formerly the blessing of children was woman's pride; now if her husband desires for himseli children, she replies: Knowest thou not what Ennius says?

"'-Ter sub armis malim vitam cernere Quam semel modo parere—.—'

"Formerly the wife was quite content, when the husband once or twice in the year gave her a trip to the country in the uncushioned waggon;" now, he could add (comp. Cicero, Pro Mil. 21, 55), "the wife sulks if her husband goes to his country estate without her, and the travelling lady is attended to the villa by the fashionable host of Greek menials and the choir." —In a treatise of a graver kind, "Catus or the Training of Children," Varro not only instructs the friend who had asked him for advice on that point, regarding the gods who were according to old usage to be sacrificed to for the children's welfare, but, referring to the more judicious mode of rearing children among the Persians and to his own strictly spent youth, he warns against over-feeding and over-sleeping, against sweet bread and fine fare—the whelps, the old man thinks, are now fed more judiciously than the children—and likewise against the enchantresses' charms and blessings, which in cases of sickness so often take the place of the physician's counsel. He advises to keep the girls at embroidery, that they may afterwards understand how to judge properly of embroidered and textile work, and not to allow them to put off the child's dress too early; he warns against carrying boys to the gladiatorial games, in which the heart is early hardened and cruelty learned.—In the "Man of Sixty Years" Varro appears as a Roman Epimenides who had fallen asleep when a boy of ten and waked up again after half a century. He is astonished to find instead of his smooth-shorn boy's head an old bald pate with an ugly snout and savage bristles like a hedgehog; but he is still more astonished at the change in Rome. Lucrine oysters, formerly a wedding dish, are now everyday fare; for which, accordingly, the bankrupt glutton silently prepares the incendiary torch. While formerly the father disposed of his boy, now the disposal is transferred to the latter: he disposes, forsooth, of his father by poison. The Comitium had become an exchange, the criminal trial a mine of gold for the jurymen. No law is any longer obeyed save only this one, that nothing is given for nothing. All virtues have vanished; in their stead the awakened man is saluted by impiety, perfidy, lewdness, as new denizens. "Alas for thee, Marcus, with such a sleep and such an awakening!"— The sketch resembles the Catilinarian epoch, shortly after which (about 697) the old man must have written it, and there lay a truth in the bitter turn at the close; where Marcus, properly reproved for his unseasonable accusations and antiquarian reminiscences, is— with a mock application of a primitive Roman custom—dragged as a useless old man to the bridge and thrown into the Tiber. There was certainly no longer room for such men in Rome.

28. "The innocent," so ran a speech, "thou draggest forth, trembling in every limb, and on the high margin of the river's bank in the dawn of the morning" [thou causest them to be slaughtered]. Several such phrases, that might be inserted without difficulty in a commonplace novel, occur.

29. V. XII. Poems in Prose

30. V. XII. Catullus

31. V. XII. Greek Literati in Rome

32. That the treatise on the Gallic war was published all at once, has been long conjectured; the distinct proof that it was so, is furnished by the mention of the equalization of the Boii and the Haedui already in the first book (c. 28) whereas the Boii still occur in the seventh (c. 10) as tributary subjects of the Haedui, and evidently only obtained equal rights with their former masters on account of their conduct and that of the Haedui in the war against Vercingetorix. On the other hand any one who attentively follows the history of the time will find in the expression as to the Milonian crisis (vii. 6) a proof that the treatise was published before the outbreak of the civil war; not because Pompeius is there praised, but because Caesar there approves the exceptional laws of 702.(p. 146) This he might and could not but do, so long as he sought to bring about a peaceful accommodation with Pompeius,( p. 175) but not after the rupture, when he reversed the condemnations that took place on the basis of those laws injurious for him.(p. 316) Accordingly the publication of this treatise has been quite rightly placed in 703.

The tendency of the work we discern most distinctly in the constant, often—most decidedly, doubtless, in the case of the Aquitanian expedition (III. XI. The Censorship A Prop of the Nobility)— not successful, justification of every single act of war as a defensive measure which the state of things had rendered inevitable. That the adversaries of Caesar censured his attacks on the Celts and Germans above all as unprovoked, is well known (Sueton. Caes. 24).

33. V. XI. Amnesty

34. V. XII. The New Roman Poetry

35. V. XI. Caelius and Milo

36. V. IX. Curio, V. X. Death of Curio

37. IV. XIII. Sciences

38. A remarkable example is the general exposition regarding cattle in the treatise on Husbandry (ii. 1) with the nine times nine subdivisions of the doctrine of cattle-rearing, with the "incredible but true" fact that the mares at Olisipo (Lisbon) become pregnant by the wind, and generally with its singular mixture of philosophical, historical, and agricultural notices.

39. Thus Varro derives -facere- from -facies-, because he who makes anything gives to it an appearance, -volpes-, the fox, after Stilo from -volare pedibus- as the flying-footed; Gaius Trebatius, a philosophical jurist of this age, derives -sacellum- from -sacra cella-, Figulus -frater- from -fere alter- and so forth. This practice, which appears not merely in isolated instances but as a main element of the philological literature of this age, presents a very great resemblance to the mode in which till recently comparative philology was prosecuted, before insight into the organism of language put a stop to the occupation of the empirics.

40. V. XII. Grammatical Science

41. V. XI. Sciences of General Culture at This Period

42. V. XI. Reform of the Calendar

43. V. XII. Dramatic Spectacles

44. Such "Greek entertainments" were very frequent not merely in the Greek cities of Italy, especially in Naples (Cic. pro Arch. 5, 10; Plut. Brut. 21), but even now also in Rome (iv. 192; Cic. Ad Fam. vii. 1, 3; Ad Att. xvi. 5, 1; Sueton. Caes. 39; Plut. Brut. 21). When the well-known epitaph of Licinia Eucharis fourteen years of age, which probably belongs to the end of this period, makes this "girl well instructed and taught in all arts by the Muses themselves" shine as a dancer in the private exhibitions of noble houses and appear first in public on the Greek stage (-modo nobilium ludos decoravi choro, et Graeca in scaena prima populo apparui-), this doubtless can only mean that she was the first girl that appeared on the public Greek stage in Rome; as generally indeed it was not till this epoch that women began to come forward publicly in Rome (p. 469).

These "Greek entertainments" in Rome seem not to have been properly scenic, but rather to have belonged to the category of composite exhibitions—primarily musical and declamatory—such as were not of rare occurrence in subsequent times also in Greece (Welcker, Griech. Trag., p. 1277). This view is supported by the prominence of flute-playing in Polybius (xxx. 13) and of dancing in the account of Suetonius regarding the armed dances from Asia Minor performed at Caesar's games and in the epitaph of Eucharis; the description also of the -citharoedus- (Ad Her. iv. 47, 60; comp. Vitruv. v. 5, 7) must have been derived from such "Greek entertainments." The combinations of these representations in Rome with Greek athletic combats is significant (Polyb. l. c.; Liv. xxxix. 22). Dramatic recitations were by no means excluded from these mixed entertainments, since among the players whom Lucius Anicius caused to appear in 587 in Rome, tragedians are expressly mentioned; there was however no exhibition of plays in the strict sense, but either whole dramas, or perhaps still more frequently pieces taken from them, were declaimed or sung to the flute by single artists. This must accordingly have been done also in Rome; but to all appearance for the Roman public the main matter in these Greek games was the music and dancing, and the text probably had little more significance for them than the texts of the Italian opera for the Londoners and Parisians of the present day. Those composite entertainments with their confused medley were far better suited for the Ionian public, and especially for exhibitions in private houses, than proper scenic performances in the Greek language; the view that the latter also took place in Rome cannot be refuted, but can as little be proved.

45. V. XI. Sciences of General Culture at This Period



End of Book IV



* * * * *



TABLE OF CALENDAR EQUIVALENTS

A.U.C.* B.C. B.C. A.U.C. ——————————————————————————— 000 753 753 000 025 728 750 003 050 703 725 028 075 678 700 053 100 653 675 078 125 628 650 103 150 603 625 128 175 578 600 153 200 553 575 178 225 528 550 203 250 503 525 228 275 478 500 253 300 453 475 278 325 428 450 303 350 303 425 328 375 378 400 353 400 353 375 378 425 328 350 403 450 303 325 428 475 278 300 453 500 253 275 478 525 228 250 503 550 203 225 528 575 178 200 553 600 153 175 578 625 128 150 603 650 103 125 628 675 078 100 653 700 053 075 678 725 028 050 703 750 003 025 728 753 000 000 753

*A. U. C. - Ab Urbe Condita (from the founding of the City of Rome)

THE END