"The people protested mutely by throwing down the statues that Nero had raised to Poppaea and crowning those of Octavia with flowers. The angry Poppaea confinced her lover that Octavia was planning to remarry and that a revolution was being organized to replace him in power with Octavia's new mate.

"Nero invited Anicetus, who had killed Agrippina, to confess adultery with Octavia and implicate her in a plot to overthrow the Prince. Anicetus played his part as commanded, was banished to Sardinia, and lived out his life in ease and wealth. Octavia was exiled to Panadateria.

"There, a few days after her arrival, imperial agents came to murder her. She was still but wenty-two, and could not believe that life must end so soon for one so guiltless. She pleaded with her slayers, saying that she was now only Nero's sister and could do him no harm. They cut off her head and brought it to Poppaea for their reward.

"Actually he was now, at twenty-five, a degenerate with swollen paunch, weak and slender linmbs, fat face, blotched skin, curly yellow hair and dull gray eyes.

"As a god and artist he fretted over the flaws of the palaces he had inherited, and planned to build his own. But the Palatine was crowded, and at its base were on one side the Circus Maximus, on another the Forum, and on the others slums. He mourned that Rome had grown so haphazardly, instead of being scientifically designed like Alexandria or Antioch.

"He dreamed of rebuilding Rome, of being its second founder, and renaming it Neropolis."

"The Forum and the Capitol escaped, and the region west of the Tiber. Throughout the remainder of the city countless homes, temples, precious manuscripts, and works of art were destroyed. Thousands of people lost their lives amid falling tenements in the crowded streets. Hundreds of thousands wandered shelterless throug the nights, crazed with horror, and listening to rumors that Nero had ordered the fire, was scattering indendiaries to renew it, and was watching it from the tower of Maccenas while singing his lines on the sack of Troy and accompanying himself on the lyre.

"He energetically guided attempts to control or localize the flames and to provide relief. He ordered all public buildings and the imperial gardens to be thrown open to the destitute. He raised a city of tents on the Field of Mars, requisitioned food from the surrounding country, and arranged for the feeding of the people. He bore without remonstrance the accusatory lampoons and inscriptions of the infuriated populace.

"He cast about for some scapegoat, and found one in a race of men detested for their evil practices, and commonly called Christians. The name was derived from Chrestus who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered under Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judea. By that event the sect of which he was the founder received a blow which for a time checked the growth of a dangerous superstition.

"But it revived soon after and spread with recruited vigor not only in Judea but even in the city of Rome, the common sink into which everything infamous and abominable flows like a torrent from all quarters of the world.

"Nero proceeded with his usual artifice. He found a set of proflgate and abandoned wretches who were induced to confess themselves guilty. On the evidence of such men a number of Christians were conficted, not indeed on their evidence of having set the city on fire, but rather on account of their sullen hatred of the whole human race.

"They were put to death with exquisite cruelty, and to the sufferings Nero added mockery and derision. Some were covered with skins of wild beasts, and left to be devoured by dogs. Others were nailed to crosses. Numbers of them were burned alive. Many, covered with inflammable matter, were set on fire to serve as torches during the night.

"The new streets were made wide and straight, the new houses were required to have their facades and first stories of stone, and had to be sufficiently separated from other buildings to oppose a protective gap to the spread of fire.

"The springs that flowed beneath the city were channeled into a reserve water supply in case of future conflagrations.

"Out of the imperial Treasury Nero built porticoes along the main thoroughfares, providing a shaded porch for thousands of homes. Antiquarians and old men missed the picturesque, time-hallowed sights of the old city. But soon all agreed that a healthier, safer and fairer Rome had risen from the fire.

"Nero might have earned forgiveness for his crimes had he now molded his life as he had remade his capital. But Poppaea died in 65, in advanced pregnancy, allegedly from a kick in the stomach. Rumor said this had been Nero's answer to her reproaches for having come home late from the races.

"He grieved bitterly over her passing, for he had eagerly awaited an heir. He had her body embalmed with rare spices, gave her a pompous funeral, and delivered a eulogy over the corpse.

"Having found a youth, Sporus, who closely resembled Poppaea, he had him castrated, married him by a formal ceremony, and 'used him in every way like a woman.' Whereupon a wit expressed the wish that Nero's father had had such a wife.

"The judges, however, knew an emperor from an athlete and awarded him the crown of victory.

"Overcome with happiness when the crowd applauded him, he announced that thereafter not only Athens and Sparta but all Greece should be free -- i.e. exempt from any tribute to Rome. The Greek cities accommodated him by running the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games in one year. He responded by taking part in all of them as singer, harpist, actor, or athlete. He obeyed the rules of the various competitions carefully, was all courtesy to his opponents, and gave them Roman citizenship as consolation for his invariable victories.

"Amid his tour he received news that Judea was in revolt and that all the West was hot with rebellion. He sighed and continued his itinerary. When he sang in a theater, 'no one was allowed to leave, even for the most urgent reasons. And so it was that some women gave birth there, while some feigned death to be carried out.' At Corinth he ordered work started on a canal to cut the Isthmus as Caesar had planned. The task was begun but was laid aside during the turmoil of the following year.

"Alarmed by further reports of uprisings and plots, Nero returned to Italy (67), entered Rome in a formal triumph, and showed, as trophies, the 1808 prizes he had won in Greece."

The King can do no wrong.

"When he ruled tht those who had received gifts or pensions from Nero must return nine tenths to the Treasury, a thousand new enemies arose, and Galba's days ran out.

"A bankrupt senator, Marcus Otho, announced that he could pay his debts only by becoming emperor. The Guards declared for him, marched into the Forum, and met Galba riding in a litter. Galba offered his neck unresisting to their swords. They cut off his head, his arms, his lips. One of them carried the head to Otho, but as he could not hold it well by the sparse and blood-wet hair, he thrust his thumb into the mouth.

"The Senate hastened to accept Otho, just as Roman armies in Germany and Egypt were hailing as emperors their respective generals -- Aulus Vitellius and Titus Flavius Vespasianus. Vitellius invaded Italy with his hardy legions, and swept away the weak resistance of the northern garrisons and the Praetorian Guard.

"When Vitellius learned that Vespasian's general Antonius was leading an army into Italy to dethrone him, he delegated his defense to subordinates and continue to feast. In October of 69 the troops of Antonius defeated the defenders of Vitellius at Cremona in one of the bloodiest battles of ancient times. They marched into Rome, where the remnants of Vitellius' legions fought bravely for him whle he took refuge in his palace.

"The populace, 'flocked in crowds to behold the conflict, as if a scene of carnage were no more than a public spectacle exhibited for their amusement.' While the battle raged some of them plundered shops and homes, and prostitutes plied their trade.

"The soldiers of Antonius triumphed, killed without quarter, and pillaged without stint. The mob, as ready as history to applaud the victors, helped them to ferret out their enemies. Vitellius, dragged from his concealment, was led half naked through the city with a noose around his neck, was pelted with dung, was tortured without haste, and at last, in a moment of mercy, was slain (December, 69).

"When a Roman whom he had nominated for office came to him smelling of perfume, he said, 'I would rather you smelled of garlic' and withdrew the nomination. He made himself easily accessible, talked and lived on a footing of equality with the people, enjoyed jokes at his own expense, and allowed everyone great freedom in criticizing his conduct and his character. Having discovered a conspiracy against him he forgave the plotters, saying that they were fools not to realize what a burden of cares a ruler wore.

"He lost his good temper in one case only. Helvidius Priscus, restored to the Senate from the exile into which Nero had sent him, demanded the restoration of the Republic, and reviled Vespasian without concealment of restraint. Vespasian asked him not to attend the Senate if he proposed to continue such abuse. Helvidius refused. Vespasian banished him and tarnished an excellent reign by ordering him put to death. He regretted the action later, and for the rest, says Suetonius, showed 'the greatest patience under the frank language of his friends and the impudence of philosophers.

"These latter were not so much Stoics as Cynics, philosphical anarchists who felt that all government was an imposition and attacked every emperor."

"The new aristocracy, under the stimulus of his example, improved Roman morals and society. It was not spoiled yet by idle wealth, nor yet so removed from labor and the soil as to disdain the routine tasks of life and administration. It had something of the emperor's order and decency of life.

"Out of it came those rulers who, after Domitian, gave Rome good government for a century. Conscious of the evils that had flowed from the use of freedmen as imperial executives, Vespasian replaced most of them with men from this provincial infilration and from Rome's expanding business class.

"A tax was placed even upon the use of the public urinals that adorned ancient like modern Rome. His son Titus protested against such undignified revenue, but the old Emperor held some coins of it to the youth's nose and said, 'See, my chld, if they smell.' Suetonious accuses him of adding to the imperial income by selling offices, and by promoting the most rapacious of his provincial appointees so that they might be swollen with spoils when he suddently summoned thenm, examined their transactions, and confiscated their gains.

"The crafty financier, however, used none of the proceeds for himslf, but poured them all into the economic recovery, architectural adornment, and cultural advancement of Rome.

"It remained for this blunt soldier to establish the first system of state education in classical antiquity. He ordered that certain qualified teachers of Latin and Greek literature and rhetoric should thereafter be paid out of public funds and should receive a pension after twenty years of service. Perhaps the old skeptic felt that teachers had some share in forming public opinion and would speak better of a government that paid their way.

"Probably for like reasons he restored many of the ancient temples, even in rural districts. He rebuilt the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minrva, which had been burned down by the Vitellians over his soldiers' heads -- raised a majestic shrine to Pax, the goddess of peace -- and began the most renowned of Roman buildings, the Colosseum.

"The upper classes mourned as they saw their fortunes taxed to provide public works for the state and wages for proletaires. And the workers were not particularly grateful. He roused the people to an energetic campaign for cleaning away the debris left by the recent war, and he himself carried the first load.

"When an inventor showed him plans for a hoisting machine that would greatly reduce the need for human labor in these enterprises of removal and construction, he refused to use it, saying, 'I must feed my poor.'

"A spectacular triumph led a long procession of captives and spoils through the streets, and a famous arch was raised to commemorate the victory. Vespasian was proud of his son's success but disturbed by the fact that Titus had brought home a pretty Jewish princess, Berenice, as his mistress, and wished to marry her. Again capta ferum victorem cepit.

"The Emperor could not see why one should marry a mistress. He himself, after the death of his wife, lived with a freedwoman without troubling to wed her. When this Caenis died, he distributed his love among several concubines.

"He was convinced that the succession to his power must be settled before his death, as the alternative to anarchy. The Senate agreed, but demanded that he should name and adopt 'the best of the best' -- presumably a senator. Vespasian answered that he reckoned that Titus was the best. To ease the situation the young conqueror dismissed Berenice, and sought consolation in promiscuity.

"The Emperor thereupon associated Titus with himself on the throne and delegated to him an increasing share in the government.

"In 79 Vespasian again visited Reate. While in the Sabine country he drank copiously the purgative waters of Lake Cutilia and was seized with severe diarrhea. Though confined to his bed he continued to receive embassies and perform the other duties of his office. Feeling the hand of death upon him he nevertheless kept his bluff humor. Vae! puto deus fio, he remarked -- 'Alas, I think I am becoming a god.' Almost fainting, he struggled to his feet with the help of attendants, saying, 'An emperor should die standing.'

"As a youth he had distinguished himself in ruthless war and tarnished his name with loose living. Now, instead of letting omnipotence intoxicate him, he reformed his morals and made his government a model of wisdom and honor.

"His greatest fault was uncontrollable generosity. He counted that day lost on which he had not made someone happy with a gift. He spent too much on shows and games, and he left the replenished Treasury almost as low as his father had found it. He completed the Colosseum and built another municipal bath. No one suffered capital punishment during his brief reign. On the contrary, he had informers flogged and banaished.

"He swore that he would rather be killed than kill. When two patricians were detected in a conspiracy to depose him, he contented himself with sending them a warning. Then he dispatched a courier to relieve the anxiety of a conspirator's mother by telling her that her son was safe.

"His misfortunes were disasters over which he could have little control. A three-day fire in the year 79 destroyed many important buildings, including again the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. In the same year Vesuvius buried Pompeii and thousands of Italians. A year later Rome was stricken with a plague more deadly than any her history had yet recorded.

"Titus did all he could to lessen the sufferings caused by these calamities. 'He showed not merely the concern of an emperor, but a father's surpassing love.' He died of a fever in 81 in the same farmhouse in which his father had recently passed away.

"Perhaps all four were right, for the last of the Flavians, like many of the Julio-Claudians, began like Gabriel and ended like Lucifer. In this respect Domitian's soul walked with his body. In youth he was modest, graceful, handsome, tall. In later years he had 'a protruding belly, spindle legs, and a bald head' -- though he had written a book On the Care of the Hair.

"In adolescence he composed poetry. In obsolescence he distrusted his own prose and let others write his speeches and proclamations. He might have been happier had not Titus been his brother. Only the noblest spirits can bear with equanimity the success of their friends. Domitian's jealousy soured into a taciturn gloom, then into secret machinations against his brother. Titus had to beg his father to forgive the younger son.

"When Vespasian died, Domitian claimed that he had been left partner in the imperial power but that the Emperor's will had been tampered with. Titus replied by asking him to be his partner and successor. Domitian refused, and continued to plot. When Titus fell ill, says Dio Cassius, Domitian hastened his death by packing him about with snow.

"We cannot assess the truth of these stories, nor of those tales of sexual license that have come down to us -- that Domitian swam with prostitues, made the daughter of Titus one of his concubines, and 'was most profligate and lewd toward women and boys alike.'

"He raised the Temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva once more, and spent $21,000,000 on its gold-plated doors and gilded roof. Rome admired the result and mourned the extravagance. When Domitian built for himself and his administrative staff an enormous palace, the Domus Flavia, the citizens reasonably complained of the cost. But they raised no voice against the expensive games with which he sought to moderate his Tiberian unpopularity.

"He dedicated a temple to his father and his brother. He restored the Baths and Pantheon of Agrippa, the Portico of Octavia, the temples of Isis and Serapis. He added to the Colosseum, finished the Baths of Titus, and began those that were completd by Trajan.

"At the same time he did his dour best to encourage arts and letters. Flavian portrait sculpture reached its zenith in his principate. His coins are of outstanding excellence.

"To stimulate poetry he established in 86 the Capitoline games, which included contests in literature and music. For these he built a stadium and a music hall in the Field of Mars. He gave modest help to the modest talent of Statius and the immodest talent of Martial.

"The recall was attributed to jealousy, and the Emperor paid a heavy price for it when the history of his reign was written by Agricola's son-in-law. He was equally unfortunate in war. In 86 the Dacians crossed the Danube, invaded the Roman province of Moesia, and defeated Domitian's generals. The Prince took command, planned his campaign well, and was about to enter Dacia when Antoninus Saturninus, Roman governor of Upper Germany, persiaded two legions at Mainz to proclaim him emperor.

"The revolt was suppressed by Domitian's aides, but it disconcerted his strategy by allowing the enemy time to prepare. He crossed the Danube, met the Dacians, and apparently suffered a reverse. He made peace with Decebalus, the Dacian king, sent him an annual douceur, and returned to Rome to celebrate a double triumph over the Chatti and the Dacians.

"Like Tiberius he listened more readily to informers as he grew older. As the delatores multiplied, no citizen of any prominence could feel safe from spies, even in his home. After Saturninus' revolt indictments and convictions rapily increased. Aristocarats were exiled or killed, suspected men were toruured, even by having 'fire inserted into their private parts.' The terrified Senate, including the Tacitus who recounts these events most bitt3ely, was the agent of trial and condemnation. At each execution it thanked the gods for the salvation of the Prince.

"Domitian made the mistake of frightening his own household. In 96 he ordered the death of his secretry Epaphroditus because, twenty-seven years before, he had helped Nero to commit suicide.

"The other freedmen of the imperial household felt themselves threatened. To protect themselves they resolved to kill Domitian, and the Emperor's wife Domitia joined in the plot. On the night before his last, he leaped from his bed in fright. When the appointed moment came, Domitia's servant struck the first blow, four others took part in the assault. Domitian, struggling madly, met death in the forty-fifth year of his age and the fifteenth of his reign (96).

"There was something good in the worst of these rulers -- devoted statesmanship in Tiberius -- a charming gaiety in Caligula -- a plodding wisdom in Claudius -- an exuberant aestheticism in Nero -- a stern competence in Domitian. Behind the adulteries and the murders an administrative organization had formed which provided, through all this period, a high order of provincial government.

"The emperors themselves were the chief victims of their power. Some disease in the blood, fired by the heat of loosed desire, had pursued the Julio-Claudians as fatally as the children of Atreus. Some flaw in the system had debased the Flavians in one generation from patient statesmanship to terrified cruelty.

"Seven of these ten men met a violent end. Nearly all of them were unhappy, surrounded by conspiracy, dishonesty, and intrigue, trying to govern a world from the anarchy of a home. They indulged their appetites because they knew how brief was their omnipotence. They lived in the daily horror of men condemned to an early and sudden death.

"They went under because they were above the law. They became less than men because power had made them gods.

"But we must not absolve the age or the principate of its ignominy and its crimes. It had given peace to the Empire, but terror to Rome. It had injured morals by the high example of cruelty and lust. It had torn Italy with a civil war more ferocious than that of Caesar and Pompey.

"It had filled the islands with exiles and had killed off the best and bravest men. It had suborned the treachery of relatives and friends by rewarding avaricious spies. It had, in Rome, replaced a government of laws with a tyranny of men. It had raised gigantic edifices by accumulating tribute, but it had dwarfed the soul by frightening talented or creative minds into servility or silence.

"Above all, it had made the army supreme. The power of the prince over the Senate lay not in his superior genius, nor in custom, nor in prestige. It rested upon the pikes of the Guard. When provincial armies saw how emperors were made, how rich were the donatives and spoils of the capital, they deposed the Praetorians and themselves entered upon the business of making kings.

"For a century yet the wisdom of great rulers chosen by adoption rather than by heredity, violence, or wealth would hold the legions in check and keep the frontiers safe.

"The Latin language was preparing to mother Italian, Spanish, and French.

"It must be admitted that rhetoric had now grown at the expense of eloquence, grammar at the expense of poetry. Able men devoted themselves beyond precedent to studying the form, evolution, and niceties of the language -- editing already 'classical' texts -- formulating the august rules of literary composition, forensic oratory, poetic meter, and prose rhythm.

"Claudius tried to reform the alphabet. Nero made poetry fashionable by his almost Japanese example. The elder Seneca wrote manuals of rhetoric on the ground that eloquenc gives to every power a double power.

"Without eloquence only generals could rise in Rome. Even generals had to be orators. The mania for rhetoric seized all forms of literature. Poetry became rhetorical, prose became poetical, and Pliny himself wrote an eloquent page in the six volumes of his Natural History.

"Men began to worry about the balance of their phrases and the melody of their clauses. Historians wrote declamations. Philosophers itched for epigrams, and every one wrote sententiae -- concentratd pills of wisdom.

"All the polite world was writing poetry, and reading it to friends in hired halls or theaters, at table, even in the bath. Poets engaged in public competitions, won prizes, were feted by municipalities and crowned by emperors. Aristocrats and princes welcomed dedications or tributes and paid for them with dinners or denarii.

"At twenty-one he competed in the Neronian Games with a poem 'In Praise of Nero' and won a prize. Seneca introduced him at court, and soon the poet and the Emperor were bandying epics. Lucan made the mistake of winning first prize in a poetic contest with the Prince.

"Nero ordered him to publish no more, and Lucan withdrew to avenge himself in private with a vigorous but rhetorical epic, Pharsalia, which viewed the Civil War from the standpoint of the Pompeian aristocracy. Lucan is fair to Caesar, and writes of him an illuminating phrase:-'nil actum credens cum quid superesset agendum -- 'thinking nothing done while anything remained to do.'

"But the real hero of the book is the younger Cato, whom Lucan equals with the gods in a famous line:-victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni -- 'the winning cause pleased the gods, but the lost one pleased Cato.' Lucan too loved a lost cause and died for it. He joined in the conspiracy to replace Nero with Piso, was arrestd, broke down (he was only twenty-six), and revealed the names of other conspirators even, we are told, of his mother.

"He begs his guests to drink. 'If the wine doesn't please you, I'll change it. I don't have to buy it.' Forty pages describe the dinner. It is a powerful and savage satire. Realistic only in its details, and probably true of only a small segment of roman life.

"When Drusus died Livia called in 'her husband's philosopher' -- so Seneca phrases it -- 'to help her bear her grief.' Nero, Trajan, and of course Aurelius had philosophers residing with them at court, as kings have chaplains now. In their last moments men would summon philosphers to chart their passing, as centuries later they would ask for a priest.

"The public never forgave these teachers of wisdom for taking salaries or fees. Philosophy was esteemed a sufficient substitute for food and drink, and philosophers who had a less exalted opinion of their profession were the butt of popular jokes, of Quintilian's criticism, of Lucian's satire, and of imperial hostility. Many of them deserved it, for they put on the philosher's coarse cloak, and grew a profound beard, to give a learned front to gluttony, avarice, and vanity.

"The essence of his code was self-control. He would subordinate passion to reason, and train his will to desire nothing that would make his peace of soul contingent upon external goods. In politics he would recognize the universal brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God. At the same time he would love his country and hold himself ready to die at any time to avert its disgrace or his own.

"Life itself was always to remain within his choice. He was free to leave it whenever it should become an evil rather than a boon. A man's conscience was to be higher than any law.

"Monarchy was a sad necessity for the rule of wide and diverse realms, but to kill a despot was an excellent thing.

"Roman Stocism had at first profited from the Principate. The limitations on political freedom had driven men from the forum to the study, and had inclined the finest of them to a philosophy that made the self-controlled subject more sovereign than the impassioned king. The government did not check freedom of thought or speech so long as these made no public attack upon the emperor, his family, or the official gods. But when the professors and their Senatorial patrons began to denounce tyranny, there arose between philosophy and autocracy a war that lasted until the adoptive emperors united them on the throne.

"When Nero ordered Thrasea to die (65), he at the same time exiled Thrasea's friend, Musonius Rufus, the most sincere and consistent of the Stoic philosphers in first-century Rome. Rufus had defined philosophy as inquiry into right conduct, and had taken his quest seriously. He denounced concubinage despite its legality, and demanded of men the same standard of sexual morality that they required of women. Sexual relations, said this ancient Tolstoian, were permissible only in marriage and for the procreation. He believed in equal educational opportunities for both sexes and welcomed women to his lectures. But he bade them seek from education and philosophy the means of perfecting themselves as women.

"Slaves, too, attended his classes. One of them -- Epicerus -- honored his teacher by surpassing him. When civil war flared in Rome after Nero's death, Musonius went out to the attacking army and lectured it on the blessings of peace and the horrors of war. Antonius' troops laughed at him and resumed the ultimate arbitrament.

"There are few books in Roman literature more pleasant than these urbane attempts to adapt Stoicism to the needs of a millionaire. Here begins the informal essay, which would be the favorite medium of Plutarch and Lucian, Montaigne and Voltaire, Bacon and Addison and Steele. To read these letters is to be in correspondence with an enlightened, humane, and tolerant Roman who has reached the heights and known the depths of literature, statesmanship, and philosophy.

"They are Zeno speaking with Epicurus' lenience and Plato's charm. Seneca apologizes to Lucilius for the carelessness of his style. 'I want my letters to you to be just what my converesation would be if you and I were sitting or walking together. I write this not for the many but for you. Each of us is sufficient audience to the other.' -- though the old diplomat doubtless hoped that posterity would eavesdrop on his talk.

"He describes his asthma vividly but without self-pity. He cheerfully calls it 'practicing how to die' by taking 'last gasps' for an hour. He is sixty-seven now, but only in body. 'My mind is strong and alert. It takes issue with me on the subject of old age. It declares that old age is its period of bloom.' He rejoices that he has time at last to read the good books he has had so long to put aside. Apparently he now reread Epicurus, for he quotes him with a frequency and an enthusiasm scandalous in a Stoic. He is frightened by the excesses of individualism and self-indulgence in Caligula, Nero, and thousands more. He wishes to offer some counterweight to the temptations that beset minds liberated before moral maturity.

"We are fragments in infinity and moments in eternity. For such forked atoms to describe the universe, or the Supreme Being, must make the planets tremble with mirth.

"Therefore Seneca has little use for metaphysics or theology. One may prove out of his writings that he was a monotheist, a polytheist, a pantheist, a materialist, a Platonist, a monist, a dualist. Sometimes God is to him a personal Providence who watches over all, 'loves good men,' answers their prayers, and helps them by divine grace. In other passages God is the First Cause in an unbroken chain of causes and effects, and the ultimate force is Fate, 'an irrevocable cause which carries along human and divine affairs equally leading the willing and dragging the unwilling along.'

"A like indecision obscures his conception of the soul. It is a finely material breath animating the body, but it is also 'a god dwelling as a guest' in the human frame. He speaks hopefully of a life beyond death, where knowledge and virtue will be perfected. And again he calls immortality 'a beautiful dream'

"In truth Seneca has never thought these matters out to a consistent (or public) conclusion. He talks of them with the cautious inconsistency of a politician who agrees with everybody.

"He has followed too successfully his father's oratorical lessons, and expresses every point of view with irresistable eloquence.

"The same hesitations mar and grace his moral philsophy. He is too Stoic to be practical, and too lenient to be Stoic. He sees about him an immorality that exhausts the body and debases the soul, never satisfying either. Avarice and luxury have destroyed peace and health, and power has made man only an abler brute.

"Nero sent a tribune to seek his answer to the charge that he had plotted to make Piso emperor. Seneca replied that he was no longer interested in politics, and sought nothing but peace and the opportunity to attend to 'a weak and crazy constitution.' Reported the tribune, 'He showed no symptom of fear, no sign of sorrow, his words and looks bespoke a mind serene, erect, and firm.' Said Nero, 'Return and tell him to die.' Says Tacitus, 'Seneca heard the message with calm composure.'

"He embraced his wife, and bade her be comforted by the honorableness of his life and the lessons of philosophy. But Paulina refused to outlive him. When his veins were opened she had hers opened too. He called for a secretary and dictated a letter of farewell to the Roman people.

"He asked and received a drink of hemlock, as if resolved to die like Socrates. As the physician placed him in a warm bath to ease his pain, he sprinkled the nearest servants with the water, saying 'a libation to Jove the Deliverer' and after much suffering he passed away (65).

"At Nero's command the physician forcibly bound Paulina's wrists and stopped the flow of her blood. She survived her husband a few years but her perpetual pallor recalled her stoic resolution.

"To the end of antiquity and through the Middle Ages he remained popular. Montaigne's brother-in-law translated him into French. Emerson read him again and again and became an American Seneca.

"In his drama Medea he had suggested the existence of another continent beyond the Atlantic. With similar intuition, contemplating the overwhelming multitude of stars, he wrote, 'How many an orb, moving in the depths of space, has never yet reached the eyes of men!' And he adds, clairvoyantly, 'How many things our sons will learn that we cannot now suspect -- what others await centuries when our names will be forgotten! Our descendants will marvel at our ignorance.' We do.

"Seneca, though always eloquent, adds little to Aristotle and Aratus, and borrows abundantly from Poseidonius. He believes in divination despite Cicero, lapses into ludicrous teleology despite Lucretius, and interrupts his science at every turn to inculcate morality. He passes skillfully from mussels to luxury, and from comets to degeneration.

"It is well known that in Lusitania the mares become impregnated by the west wind. Pliny condemns magic. But 'on the approach of a menstruating woman,' he informs us, 'must will sour and seeds touched by her will become sterile and fruit will fall from the tree under which she sits. Her look will blunt the edge of steel and take the polish from ivory. If it falls upon a swarm of bees they will die at once.'

"Pliny rejects astrology and then fills pages with 'prognostics' derived from the behavior of the sun and the moon.

"When we reflect that this book, and Seneca's Quaestiones, were the chief legacy of Roman natural science to the Middle Ages, and compare them with the corresponding works and temper of Aristotle and Theophrastus four hundred years earlier, we begin to feel the slow tragedy of a dying culture. The Romans had conquered the Greek world, but they had already lost the most precious part of its heritage.

"They did better in medicine. Medical science too they borrowed from the Greeks, but they formulated it well, and applied it ably to personal and public hygiene. Rome, almost surrounded by marshes, and subject to mephitic floods, had particular need of public sanitation.

"About the second century B.C. we hear of malaria in Rome. the anopheles mosquito had settled down in the Pontine swamps. Gout spread as luxury increased. The youngerPliny tells how his friend Corellius Rufus suffered its pains from his thirty-third to his sixty-seventh year before committing suicide, just to have the pleasure of outliving by one day 'that brigand Domitian.'

"But in the first century B.C. they turned more and more to secular medicine. There was as yet no state regulation of medical practice. Shoemakers, barbers, carpenters, added it to their operations as they pleased, called in magic to their aid, and compounded, touted, and sold their own drugs. There were the usual satires and complaints. Pliny repeated old Cato's imprecations upon Greek physicians who 'seduce our wives, grow rich by feeding us poisons, learn by our suffering, and experiment by putting us to death.'

"Petronius, Martial, and Juvenal joined in the assault. A century later Lucian would score incompetent practitioners who hide their incapacity under the elegance of their apparatus.

"Nevertheless, medicine, as we shall see, had made great progress in Alexandria, Cos, Tralles, Miletus, Ephesus, and Peregamum. From these centers came Greek physicians who so raised the level of Roman practice that Caesar enfranchised the profession in Rome, and Augustus exempted it from taxation.

"Asclepiades of Prusa won the friendship of Caesar, Crassus, and Antony. He declared that the heart pumps blood and air through the body. He rarely prescribed drugs or drastic purges. He accomplished impressive cures by hydrotherapy (baths, fomentations, enemas), massage, sunshine, exercise (walking, horseback riding), diet, fasting, and abstinence from meat. He was distinguished for his treatment of malaria, his operations on the throat, and his humane handling of the insane. He gathered pupils about him, and took some of them with him on his rounds.

"Graduates of these state schools received the title of medicus a republica, and after Vespasian they alone could legally practice medicine in Rome. The lex Aquilia provided for state supervision of physicians, and held them responsible for negligence. The lex Cornelia severely punished practitioners whose carelessness or culpable ignorance caused the death of a patient. Quacks continued, but sound practice increased. Midwives saw most Romans into the world, but many of these women were well trained.

"About A.D. 100 military medicine reached its ancient zenith. Every legion had twenty-four surgeons. First-aid and field ambulance service were well organized, and hospitals were maintained near every important encampment. Private hospitals (valetudinaria) were opened by physicians. From these evolved the public hospitals of the Middle Ages.

"Doctors were appointed and paid by the state to give free treatment to the poor. Rich men kept their own physicians, and well-paid archiatri ('chief healers') took care of the emperor, his family, his servants, and his aides. Sometimes families would contract with a doctor to attend to their health and illnesses for a period of time. In this way Quintus Stertinius made 600,000 sesterces a year.

"There were many women physicians. Some of them wrote manuals of abortion, which were popular among great ladies and prostitutes. Surgeons were divided into further specialities and seldom engaged in general practice. Mandragora juice or atropin was used as an anesthetic. Over 200 different surgical instruments have been found in the ruins of Pompeii.

"Dissection was illegal, but the examination of wounded or dying gladiators offered a frequent substitute. Hydrotherapy was popular. In a measure the great thermae were hydrotherapeutic institutes. Charmis of Marseilles made a fortune by administering cold baths. Consumptives were sent to Egypt or north Africa.

"Sulphur was used as a skin specific and to fumigate rooms after an infectious disease. Drugs were a final but frequent resort. Physicians made them by processes kept secret from the public and charged for them all that patients could be persuaded to pay.

"Repulsive drugs were held in high honor. The offal of lizards was used as a purgative. Human entrails were sometimes prescribed. Antonius Musa recommended the excreta of dogs for angina. Galen applied a boy's dung to swellings of the throat.

"Publius Papinius Statius was the son of a Neapolitan poet and grammarian. His environment and his education gave him everything but money and genius. He lisped in numbers, startled salons with poetical improvisations, and wrote an epic, the Thebaid, on the war of the Seven against Thebes.

"We cannot read it today, for its movement is obstructed with dead gods, and its smooth verses have an overpowering virtus dormitiva. But his contemporaries liked it. Crowds gathered to hear him recite it in a Naples theater. They understood his mythological machinery, welcomed the delicacy of his sentiment, and found that his lines ran trippingly on the tongue. The judges in the Alban poetry contest gave him the first prize. Rich men became his friends and helped him stave off penury.

"He lived in a third-floor garret, probably alone. For though he indites two poems to a woman whom he calls his wife, they are so foul that she must have been an invention or a bawd.

"His poems, he lets us know, were read throughout the Empire, even among the Goths. He rejoices to learn that he was almost as famous as a racehorse, but he fretted to see his publisher enriched while he himself received nothing from the sale of his books. He descended to suggesting, in an epigram, that he badly needed a toga. The Emperor's rich freedman Parthenius sent him one. He replied in two stanzas, one of which celebrated the newness of the garment, the other its cheap worthlessness.

"In time he found some more generous patrons. One gave him a little farm at Nomentum, and somehow he raised funds to buy a simple home on the Quirinal hill. He became a 'client' or retainer to one rich man after another, waited upon them in the morning, and received an occasional gift. But he felt the shame of his situation and mourned that he did not have the courage to be contentedly poor and therefore free.

"He could not afford to be poor, for he had to mingle in the society of men who could reward his verse. He showered Domitian with lauds and announced that if Jupiter and Domitian were to invite him to dinner on the same day he would turn down the god. But the Emperor preferred Statius.

"At last he tired of purveying compliments and insults as a source of food. He began to long for a quieter, wholesomer life, and the haunts of his native Spain. He was now fifty-seven, with gray head and bushy beard, so swarthy that anyone, he tells us, could see at a glance that he had been born near the Tagus.

"He addressed a poetical bouquet to the younger Pliny and received in return a sum that paid his fare to Bilbilis. The little town welcomed him, forgiving his morals for his fame. He found simpler patrons there, but more open-handed than those at Rome. A kindly lady presented him with a modest villa, and there he spent his few remaining years.

"The best lands, he found, were taken up by the villas and grounds of the rich. The next best by olive orchards and vineyards. Only inferior soils were left for tillage. 'We have abandoned the husbanding of our soil to our lowest slaves, and they treat it like barbarians.'

"The freemen of Italy, he thought, were degenerating in cities when they should hava been hardening themselves by working the earth. 'We ply our hands in circuses and theaters rather than among crops and vines.' Columella loved the soil, and felt that the physical culture of the earth is saner than the literary culture of the town. Farming 'is a blood relative of wisdom' (consanguinea sapientiae).

"Pliny mentions an estate with 4117 slaves, 7200 oxen, and 257,000 other animals. Land distributions by the Gracchi, Caesar, and Augustus had raised the number of small holdings, but many of these had been abandoned during the wars and bought in by the rich.

"When imperial administration reduced plunder in the provinces, much patrician wealth went into large farms. The latifundia spread because greater profits flowed from producing cattle, oil, and wine than from growing cereals and vegetables, and the discovery that ranching, to be most profitable, required the operation of large areas under one management.

"By the close of the first Christian century these advantages were being offset by the rising cost of slaves and their slow and uninventive work.

"The long transition now began from slavery to serfdom. As peace diminished the flow of war captives into bondage, some owners of large estates, instead of operating them with slaves, divided them into small holdings and leased these to free tenants (coloni, cultivators) who paid in rent and labor. Most of the ager publicus belonging to the government was now worked in this way.

"There the woods were turned into shelter, fuel, and furniture, cattle were slain and dressed, grain was milled and baked, oil and wine were pressed, food was prepared and preserved, wool and flax were cleaned and woven, someteimes clay was fired into vessels, bricks, and tiles, and metal was beaten into tools.

"Life there had an educative fullness and variety that come to few of us in our time of wider movement and narrowing specialities. Nor was this diversity of occupation the sign of a poor and primitive economy. The wealthiest households were the most self-sufficient, and prided themselves on making the largest part of what they needed.

"A family was an organization of economic helpmates engaged in the united agriculture and industry of a home.

"When an artisan undertook to do a certain task for several families, and set up his shop at some center within reach of them all, village economy supplemented, but did ot supersede, domestic industry. So the miller took and ground the grain of many fields. Later he baked the bread, and finally he delivered it.

"Forty bakeries were unearthed at Pompeii, and at Rome the pastrymakers were a separate guild. There were likewise contractors who bought an olive crop on the trees and gathered the fruit. More estates, however, continued to process their own oil and bake their own bread. The clothing of peasants and philosophers was homespun, but the well-to-do were garments that, though woven at home, were carded, cleaned, bleached, and cut in a fullery. Some delicate woolen fabrics were woven in factories. Such flax as was not made into sails or nets was turned by factoriess into fine garments for women and handkerchiefs for men.

"Travel by public stagecoach averaged some sixty miles a day. Caesar once rode by carriage 800 miles in eight days. Messengers bearing the news of Nero's death to Galba in Spain covered 332 miles in 36 hours. Tiberius, hurrying day and night, rode in three days 600 miles to stand beside his dying brother. The public post, by carrige or horse at all hours, averaged one hundred miles a day.

"Augustus had modeled it on the Persian system, as indispensable to imperial administration. It was called cursus publicus as serving the rex publica, or commonwealth, by carrying official correspondence. Private individuals could use it only by rare and special permission through a government diploma ('double-folded') or passport entitling the bearer to certain privilegs and introducing him en route to persons of diplomatic importance.

"A more rapid means of communication was sometimes arranged by semaphores flashing signals from point to point. By this primitive telegraph the arrival of the grain ships at Puteoli was quickly made known to worried Rome.

"Nonofficial correspondence went by special courier or merchants or traveling friends. Some traces suggest the existence, under the Empire, of private companies arranging to transmit private mail. Fewer letters were written than now, and better. Nevertheless, the movement of intelligence over western and southern Europe was as rapid in Caesar's day as at any time before the railway.

"Educated Romans flocked to Greece and Egypt and Greek Asia, scratched their names on historic monuments, sought healing waters or climates, ambled by art collections in the temples, studied under famous philosophers, rhetors, or physicians, and doubtless used Pausanias as their Baedeker.

"These 'grand tours' usually involved a voyage on one or more of the merchant vessels that cut the Mediterranean with a hundred routes of trade. Rome's rival ports, Puteoli, Portus, and Ostia, were alive with fabri navales building ships, stuppatores caulking them, saburarii loading sand into them as ballast, sacrarii unloading grain in sacks, mensores weighing it, lenuncularii operating tenders between large ships and the shore, and urinatores diving for goods fallen into the sea.

"From distant springs fourteen aqueducts, totaling 1,300 miles, brought through tunnels and over majestic arches into Rome some 300,000,000 gallons of water daily -- as large a quantity per capita as in any modern city. These structures had their faults. Leaks developed in the lead pipes and required frequent repair. By the end of the Western Empire all the aqueducts had gone out of use.

"But when we consider that they fed ample water to homes, tenements, palaces, foundtains, gardens, parks, and public baths where thousands bathed at once, and that enough remained to create artificial lakes for naval battles, we begin to see that depite terror and corruption, Rome was the best managed capital of antiquity and one of the best equipped cities of all time.

"At the head of the water department at the close of the first century was Sextus Julius Frontinus, whose books have made him the most famous of Roman engineers. He had already served as praetor, as governor of Britain, and several terms as consul.

"Like modern British statesmen, he found time to write books as well as to govern states. He published a work on military science, of which the concluding portion, Stratagemata, remains, and left us his personal account of the water system of Rome (De aquis urbis Romae).

"He describes the corruption and malfeasance that he found in his department on taking office, and how palaces and brothels secretly tapped the water mains, and so greedily that once Rome ran out of water. He dsscribes his resolute reforms. Tells in proud detail the sources, length, and function of each aqueduct. And concludes like Pliny 'Who will venture to compare with these mighty conduits the idle Pyramids, or the famous but useless works of the Greeks?

"We sense here the frankly utilitarian Roman with little taste for beauty apart from use. We can understand him and admit that a city should have clean water before it has Parthenons.

"From Sicily came corn, cattle, hides, wine, wool, fine woodwork, statuary, jewelry.

"From north Africa corn and oil.

"From Cyrenaica silphium.

"From central Africa wild beasts for the arena.

"From Ethiopia and east Africa ivory, apes, tortoise shell, rare marbles, obsidian, spices, and Negro slaves.

"From west Africa oil, beasts, citron, wood, pearls, dyes, copper.

"From Spain fish, cattle, wool, gold, silver, lead, tin, copper, iron, cinnabar, wheat, linen, cork, horses, ham, bacon, and the finest olives and olive oil.

"From Gaul clothing, wine, wheat, timber, vegetables, cattle, poultry, pottery, cheese.

"From Britain tin, lead, silver, hides, wheat cattle, slaves, oysters, dogs, pearls, and wooden goods.

"From Belgium flocks of geese were driven all the way to Italy to supply goose livers for aristocratic bellies.

"From Germany came amber, slaves, and furs.

"From the Danube wheat, cattle, iron, silver, and gold.

"From Greece and the Greek isles cheap silk, linen, wine, oil, honey, timber, marble, emeralds, drugs, artworks, perfumes, diamonds, and gold.

"From the Black Sea came corn, fish, furs, hides, slaves.

"From Asia Minor fine linen and woolen fabrics, parchment, wine, Smyrna and other figs, honey, cheese, oysters, carpets, oil, wood.

"From Syria wine, silk, linen, glass, oil, apples, pears, plums, figs, dates, pomegranates, nuts, nard, balsam, Tyrian purple, and the cedar of Lebanon.

"From Palmyra textiles, perfumes, drugs.

"From Arabia incense, gums, aloes, myrrh, laudanum, ginger, cinnamon, and precious stones.

"From Egypt corn, paper, linen, glass, jewelry, granite, basalt, alabaster, and porphyry.

Finished products came to Rome and the West from Alexandria, Sidon, Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Rhodes, Miletus, and Ephesus while the East received raw materials and money from the West.

"This immense trade produced prosperity for two centuries, but its unsound basis ruined Roman economy in the end. Italy made no attempt at equaling imports with exports.

"The provinces recovered not only prosperity but economic initiative. Italian merchants, in this first century A.D., almost disappeared from Eastern ports, while Syrian and Greek traders established themselves at Delos and Puteoli and multiplied in Spain and Gaul.

"To the end of the Empire, Roman law forbade the Senatorial class to invest in commerce or industry. And though they evaded the prohibition by letting their freedmen invest for them, they despised their proxies and upheld rule by birth as the sole alternative to rule by money, or myths, or the sword.

"Most of them found employment in the shops, factories, and commerce of the city at an average wage of a denarius (forty cents) a day. This rose in later centuries, but not faster than prices.

"Exploitation of the weak by the strong is as natural as eating and differs from it only in rapidity. We must expect to find it in every age and under every form of society and government. But rarely has it been so thorough and unsentimental as in ancient Rome. Once all men had been poor, and had not known their poverty. Now penury rubbed elbows with wealth, and suffered from consciousness.

"Absolute destitution, however, was prevented by the dole, the occasional gifts of patrons to clients, and the lordly legacies of rich men like Balbus, who left twenty-five denarii to every citizen of Rome. Class divisions verged upon caste. Yet an able man might free himself from slavery, make a fortune, and rise to high office in the service of the prince.

"The condition of the workers, and even of the slaves, was in some measure relieved by the collegia, or workers' organizations. By this period we hear of these in great number and in proud specialization. There were separate guilds of trumpeters, horn players, clarion blowers, tuba players, flutists, bagpipers, etc.

"In the last century of the Republic demagogues of all orders discovered that many collegia could be persuaded to vote almost to a man for any giving candidate. In this way the associations became political instruments of patricians, plutocrats, and radicals. Their competitive corruption helped to destroy Roman democracy. Caesar outlawed them, but they revived. Augustus dissolved all but a few useful ones. Trajan again forbade them. Aurelius tolerated them. Obviously they persisted throughout, within or beyond the law.

"Only law and politics and, of manual arts, only agriculture (by proxy), seemed honorable ways of life. Barring the architects, most artists in Rome were Greek slaves or freedmen or hirelings. Nearly all worked with their hands and were classed as artisans.

"Latin authors seldom thought of recording their lives or their names. Hence Roman art is almost wholly anonymous. No vivid personalities humanize its history as Myron, Pheidias, Praxiteles, and Protogenes light up the aesthetic story of Greece.

"Here the historian is constrained to speak of things, not men, to catalogue coins, vases, statues, reliefs, pictures, and buildings in the desperate hope that their accumulation may laboriously convey the crowded majesty of Rome. The products of art appeal to the soul through eye or ear or hand rather than through the intellect. Their beauty fades when it is diluted into ideas and words.

"The universe of thought is only one of many worlds. Each sense has its own. Each art has therefore its characteristic medium, which cannot be translated into speech.

"Few houses rose to more than two stories. Cellars were rare. Roofs sparkled with red tiles. Windows were fitted with shutters or, occasionally, panes of glass. The entrance was usually a double door, each half turning on metal pivots. Floors were of concrete or tile, often of mosaic squares. There were no carpets.

"Around the central atrium were grouped the main rooms of the house. This is the architectural origin of the cloister and the college quadrangle. In the richer houses one or more rooms would be used for bathing, usually in tubs much like our own. Plumbing was carried by the Romans to an excellence unmatched before the twentieth century. Lead pipes brought water from the aqueducts and mains into most tenements and homes. Fittings and stopcocks were of bronze, and some were molded into highly ornamental designs. Leaders and gutters of lead carried rain from the roof.

"Once the Romans had been precipitated into parentage by the impetus of sex, and lured to it by anxiety for the post-mortem care of their graves. Now the upper and middle classes had learned to separate sex from parentage, and were skeptical about the afterworld.

"Once the rearing of children had been an obligation of honor to the state, enforced by public opinion. Now it seemed absurd to demand more births in a city crowded to the point of redolence. On the contrary, wealthy bachelors and childless husbands continued to be courted by sycophants longing for legacies.

"Seneca consoled a mother who had lost her only child by reminding her how popular she would now be. For 'with us childlessness gives more power than it takes away.' The Gracchi had been a family of twelve children. Probably not five families of such abundance could be found in Nero's age in patrician or equestrian Rome.

"Marriage, which had once been a lifelong economic union, was now among a hundred thousand Romans a passing adventure of no great spiritual significance, a loose contract for the mutual provision of physiological conveniences or political aid.

"To escape the testatory disabilities of the unmarried some women took eunuchs as contraceptive husbands. Some entered into sham wedlock with poor men on the understanding that the wife need bear no children and might have as may lovers as she pleased.

"Seneca and Plutarch spoke to the same effect, which was slight indeed. Wet-nursing was the rule in all families that could afford it, with no evident tragedies ensuing.

"Early education came from the nurse, who was usually Greek. There were fairy tales beginning:-'Once upon a time a king and a queen ...' Primary schooling was still entrusted to private enterprise. Rich men often hired tutors for their children but Quintillian, like Emerson, warned against this as depriving the child of formative friendships and stimulating rivalries.

"Ordinarily the boy and girl of the free classes entered at the age of seven an elementary school, accompanied each way by a paedagugus ('child-leader') to guard his safety and his morals. Such school existed everywhere in the Empire, even in small country towns. The wall scribblings at Pompeii suggest a general literacy, and probably education was then as widespread in the Mediterranean world as at any time before of since. Both the paedagogus and the teacher (ludi magister, 'school master') were usually Greek freedmen or slaves.

"About the age of thirteen the successful student, of either sex, was graduated into a secondary or high school. Rome had twenty of these in A.D. 130. Here the scholars studied more grammar, the Greek languge, Latin and Greek literature, music, astronomy, history, mythology, and philosophy, generally through lecture-commentaries on the classic poets.

"Up to this point the girls seem to have taken the same courses as the boys, but they often sought additional instruction in music and dancing. Since the secondary teachers (grammatici) were nearly always Greek freedmen, they naturally emphasized Greek literature and history. Roman culture took on a Greek tint, until by the end of the second century almost all higher education was given in Greek, and Latin literature was swallowed up in the general Hellenic kaine and culture of the age.

"The Roman equivalent of our college and university education was provided in the schools of the rhetors. The Empire bristled with rhetoricians who spoke for their clients in court, or wrote speeches for them, or gave public lectures, or taught their art to pupils, or did all four. Many of them traveled from city to city, speaking on literature, philosophy, or politics, and giving exhibitions of how to handle any subject with oratorical skill.

"The profession was legalized and restricted. Brothels (lupanaria) were by law kept outside the city walls and could open only at night. Prostitutes (meretrices) were registered by the aediles and were required to wear the toga instead of the stola. Some women enrolled as prostitutes to avoid the legal penalties of detected adultery. Fees were adjusted to bring promiscuity within the reach of every pocketbook.

"But there was now a rising number of educated courtesans who sought to win patrons by poetry, singing, music, dancing, and cultured conversation. One did not have to go outside the walls to find these or other ladies of easy persuasion. Ovid assures us that they could be met under the porticoes, at the circus, in the theater, 'as numerous as stars in the sky.' Juvenal found them in the precincts of temples, particularly that of Isis, a goddess lenient to love.

"Christian authors charged that prostitution was practiced within the cellas and between the altars of Roman temples.

"Male prostitutes were also available. Condemned by law, tolerated by custom, homosexualism flourished with Oriental abandon. 'I am stricken with the heavy dart of love,' sings Horace -- and for whom? -- 'for Lyciscus, who claims in tenderness to outdo any woman.' From this passion he can be freed 'only by another flame for some fair maid or slender youth.' Martial's choicest epigrams turn upon pederasty. One of Juvenal's least publishable satires represents the complaint of a woman against this outrageous competition.

"In winter it was the ambition of every caste-conscious Roman to go south, if possible to Rhegium or Tarentum, and return with a coat of tan as a certificate of class. But those who stayed in Rome found entertainment plentiful and cheap. Recitations -- lectures -- concerts -- mimes -- plays -- athletic contests -- prize fights -- horse races -- chariot races -- mortal combats of men with men or beasts -- not-quite-sham naval battles on artificial lakes -- never was a city more bountifully amused.

"In the early Empire there were in the Roman year seventy-six festival days on which ludi were performed. Of these, fifty-five were ludi scenici, devoted to plays or mimes. Twenty-two were games in the circus, the stadium, or the amphitheater. The number of ludi increased until by A.D. 354 they were presented on 175 days in the year.

"This meant no growth in the Roman drama. On the contrary, the drama decayed while the stage prospered. Original dramas were now written to be read rather than played. The theater contented itself with old Roman and Greek tragedies, old roman comedies, and mimes. Stars dominated the stage and made huge fortunes.

"Aesopus the tragedian, after a life of assiduous extravagance, left 20,000,000 sesterces. Roscius the comic actor made 500,000 sesterces a year and became so rich that for several seasons he acted without pay -- a scorn of money that made this ex-slave the lion of aristocratic gatherings.

"Freedom of speech, having disappeared from the assemblies and the Forum, survived for a moment in these brief farces, when a mime would risk his head to earn applause by a double-entendre aimed at an emperor or his favorites.

"Caligula had an actor burned alive in the amphitheater for such an allusion. On the day when the parsimonious Vespasian was buried a mime imitated the obsequies. During the procession the corpse sat up and asked how much this funeral was costing the state. 'Ten million sesterces,' was the answer. Said the imperial cadaver, 'Give me 100,000 and throw me into the Tiber.

"The mime alone admitted women as actors. As these were thereby automatically classed as prostitutes, they had nothing to lose by obscenity. On special occasions like the Floralia the audience called upon these performers to remove every garment.

"Such a triumph was made possible by the high development of music and the dance. Under the Republic dancing had been looked upon as disgraceful. The younger Scipio had compelled the closing of schools that taught music and dancing, and Cicero had remarked that 'only a lunatic would dance when sober.'

"But the pantomimes made dancing a fashion, then a passion. Nearly every private home, says Seneca, had a dancing platform, echoing to the feet of men and women. Rich households now had a dancing master, as well as a chef and a philosopher, as part of their equipment. As practiced in Rome the dance involved the rhythmical movement of the hands and the upper body even more than of legs and feet.

"Finally the rich and sensuous Greek modes and instruments won the day over Roman awkwardness and simplicity, and music became a regular element in the education of women, and frequently of men. By A.D. 50 it had captured all classes and sexes. Men as well as women spent whole days in hearing, composing, or singing airs. At last even emperors climbed and descended scales, and the philosophic Hadrian, as well as the effeminate Nero, was proud of his skill on the lyre.

"The basic instruments were the flute and the lyre. Our wind and string orchestras are still variations of these forms. The most heroic symphony is a judicious combination of puffing, plucking, scraping, and beating. The flute accompanied drama and was supposed to arouse emotion. The lyre attended song and was expected to elevate the soul.

"Formal concerts were given, and musical contests played a part in some public games. Even modest dinners requird a bit of music. Martial promises his guest at least a flute player. As for Trimalchio's feast, the tables are wiped in rhythm with song. Caligula had an orchestra and a chorus on his pleasure boat.

"At the pantomimes symphoniae were performed -- i.e. a chorus sang and danced to the accompaniment of an orchestra. Sometimes the actor would sing the solo parts, sometimes a professional singer (cantor) sang the words while the actor gestured or danced. The orchestra was led by flutes, aided by lyres, cymbals, pipes, trumpets, 'syringes,' and scabella -- boards fastened to the players' feet and capable of producing a pandemonium even more frightful than that of a modern orchestra at the height of its powers. Seneca mentions harmony in the playing of individuals, but there is no sign tht ancient orchestras used harmony contrapuntally.

"Like the games of Achilles in honor of Patroclus, those of Italy had originally been offered as a sacrifice to dead men. At the funeral of Brutus Pera in 264 B.C. his sons gave a 'spectacle' of three duels. At the funeral of Marcus Lepidus in 216 B.C. twenty-two combats were fought. And in 174 B.C. Tirus Flaminius celebrated his father's death with gladiatorial games in which seventy-four men fought.

"At home, in school, at lectures, in the forums, half the talk was about favorite jockeys and charioteers. Their pictures were everywhere, their victories were announced in the Acta Diurna. Some of them made great fortunes, some had statues raised to them in public squares.

"On the appointed day 180,000 men and women moved in festive colors to the enormous hippodrome. Enthusiasm rose to a mania. Excited partisans smelled the dung of the animals to assure themselves that the horses of their favorite drivers had been properly fed. The spectators passed by the shops and brothels that lined the outer walls. They filed through hundreds of entrances and sorted themselves with the sweat of anxiety into the great horseshoe of seats.

"Vendors sold them cushions, for the seats were mostly of hard wood, and the program would last all day. Senators and other dignitaries had special seats of marble, ornamented with bronze. Behind the imperial box was a suite of luxurious rooms, where the emperor and his family might eat, drink, rest, bathe, and sleep. Gambling was feverish, and fortunes passed from hand to hand as the day advanced.

"From openings under the stands emerged the horses, the jockeys and drivers, and the chariots, and each faction shook the stands with applause as its favorite color appeared. The charioteers, mostly slaves, wore bright tunics and shining helmets. In one hand was a whip, and in their belts a knife to cut, in accident, the traces tied to their waits.

"Along the middle of the elliptical area ran the spina ('thorn,' 'spine'), an island a thousand feet long, adorned with statues and obelisks. At one end were the metae ('measures'), circular pillars that served as goals. The usual length of a chariot race was seven circuits, about five miles. The test of skill lay in making the turns at the goals as swiftly and sharply as safety would allow. Collisions were frequent there, and men, chariots, and animals mingled in fascinating tragedy. As the horses or chariots clattered to the final post the hypnotized audience rose like a swelling sea, gesticulatd, waved handkershiefs, shouted and prayed, groaned and cursed, or exulted in almost supernatural ecstasy.

"Lucretius had not been without effect. Men did not mention him, but merely because it was easier to prctice epicureanism than to study Epicurus or his passionate expositor. The rich youths who went to Athens, Alexandria, and Rhodes for higher education found no sustenance there for the Roman creed. Greek poets made fun of the Roman pantheon, and Roman poets leaped to imitate them. The poems of Ovid assumed that the gods were fables. The epigrams of Martial assumed that they were jokes. No one seems to have complained.

"Many of the mimes riduculed the gods. One whipped Diana off the stage, another showed Jove making his will in expectation of death. Juvenal, like Plato five centures before him and ourselves eighteen centuries after him, noted that the fear of a watchful deity had lost its power to discourage perjury.

"Even on the tombstones of the poor we note increasing skepticism, and some candid sensuality. Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo -- 'I was not, I was, I am not, I care not.' And another Non fueram, non sum, nescio -- 'I had not been, I am not, I know not.' And another: 'What I have eaten and drunk is my own. I have had my life.' Says one tombstone 'There is nothing beyond the grave.'

"But doubt, however honest, cannot long take the place of belief. Amid all its pleasures this society had not found happiness. Its refinements wearied it, its debaucheries exhausted it. Rich and poor were still subject to pain and grief and death.

"Philosophy -- least of all so coldly superior a doctrine as Stoicism -- could never give the common man a faith to grace his poverty, encourage his decency, solace his sorrows, and inspire his hopes. The old religion had fulfilled the first of these functions. It had failed in the rest.

"Men wanted revelation, and it gave them ritual. They wanted immortality, and it gave them games. Men who had come, enslaved or free, from other states felt excluded from this nationalistic worship. Therefore they brought their own gods with them, built their own temples, praciced their own rites. In the very heart of the West they planted the religions of the East.

"To unite these diverse legacies, to attune their stimulating opposition into harmony, is the elemental task of statesmanship.

"Since law is the essence of Roman history, it has been impossible to keep them separate, and this chapter can only be a structural and synoptic supplement to preceding and subsequent details. The Roman constitution was like the British -- no set of permanently binding rules, but a stream of precedent giving direction without preventing change. As wealth increased, and life became more complex, new legislation issued from assemblies, Senate, magistrates, and princes. The body of the law grew as rapidly as the Empire and reached out to ever new frontiers.

"The education of lawyers, the guidance of judges, and the protection of the citizen from illegal judgments demanded the organization and formulation of the law into some orderly and accessible form.

"The contradictory enactments of Marius and Sulla, the unprecedented powers of Pompey, the revolutionary legislation of Caesar, and the new constitution of Augustus created fresh problems for minds that struggled to make a logic of the law. Not until the Principate had established itself, first by the use of force and then by the force of use, could the new legislation win acceptance in the minds of men as well as in the courts of power.

"Jurisprudence -- wisdom in the law -- was defined in the Digest of Justinian (A.D. 533) as both a science and an art. The 'science of the just and the unjust,' and the 'art (i.e. administration) of the good and the equitable.'

"Ius included unwritten law, or custom, as well as written law. The latter was composed of ius civile -- the 'law of (Roman) citizens' -- and ius gentium -- 'the law of the nations.'

"Civil law was 'public law' when it related to the state or the official worship, and 'private law' when it dealt with the legal interrelations of the citizens.

"Roman law as a whole flowed from five sources.

"The need for minor or more specific laws was met by the edicta of the municipal officials. Each new urban praetor (our 'chief city magistrate') issued an edictum praetorium, announced by a herald in the Forum and inscibed upon a wall, and stating the legal principles on which the praetor proposed to act and judge during his year's term. Similar edicts could be put forth by circuit judges (praetores peregrini) and provincial praetors.

"Through their power of imperium, or rule, the praetors were allowed not only to interpret existing laws, but to make new ones. In this way Roman law combined the stability of its basic legislation with the flexibility of praetorian judgments. When a law or clause was carried down from one praetorian edict to the next for many years, it became a definite part of the ius honorarium. By the time of Cicero this 'law of the offices' had displaced the Twelve Tables as the main text of legal instruction in Rome.

"It was an act of courage intelligible only when we remember that the vigor of the Flavian family was exhausted in that same generation which had seen the vitality of the Senate renewed by Italian and provincial blood.

"Marcus Cocceius Nerva was sixty-six when supremacy surprised him. The colossal Nerva of the Vatican shows a handsome and virile face. No one would suppose tht this was a respectable jurist with a bad stomach, a mild and amiable poet who had once been hailed as 'the Tibullus of our time.' Perhaps the Senate had chosen him for his gray harmlessness.

"He consulted it on all policies, and kept his pledge never to be the cause of death to any of its members. He recalled Domitian's exiles, restored their property, and moderated their revenge. He distributed 60,000,000 sesterces' worth of lands among the poor, and established the alimenta -- a state fund to encourage and finance parentage among the peasantry.

"He annulled many taxes, lowered the inheritance dues, and freed the Jews from the tribute that Vespasian had laid upon them. At the same time he repaired the finances of the state by economy in his household and the government. With reason he thought that he had been just to all classes, and remarked that 'I have done nothing that could prevent me from laying down the imperial office and returning to private life in safety.'

"But a year after his accession the Praetorian Guard, which had been forestalled in his nomination and resented his economy, besieged his palace, demanded the surrender of Domitian's assassins, and killed several of Nerva's councilors. He offered his throat to the swords of the soldiers, but they spared him. Humiliated, he wished to abdicate, but his friends persuaded him, instead, to return to Augustus' example and adopt as his son and successor a man acceptable to the Senate and capable of ruling not only the empire, but the Guard as well.

"The greatest debt that Rome owed Nerva was that he chose Marcus Ulpius Traianus to succeed him. Three months later, after a reign of sixteen months, he passed away.

"The principle of adoption thus accidentally restored meant that each emperor, as he felt his powers decline, would associate with himself in rule the ablest and fittest man he could find, so that when death came there would be neither the absurdity of a Praetorian elevation, nor the risk of a natural but worthless heir, nor a civil war among competitors for the throne. It was a lucky chance that no son was born to Trajan, Hadrian, or Antoninus Pius, and that each could apply the adoptive plan without slighting his offspring or his own parental love.

"He wrote several volumes -- a grammar, an autobiography, poems decent and indecent, in Latin and Greek. He preferred Greek to Latin literature. He organized the state-paid professors into a university, paid them well, and built for them a magnificent Athenaeum to rival the Museum of Alexandria. It delighted him to gather scholars and thinkers about him.

"Along with these multiple intellectual interests went an unerring sense for the practical. Following Domitian's lead, Hadrian reduced his freedmen to subordinate functions, chose businessmen of tried ability to administer the government, and formed from them and senators and jurists a concilium to meet in regular sessions for the consideration of policies. He appointed an advocatus fisci, or Attorney for the Treasury, to detect corruption or deceit in the payment of taxes, with the illuminating result that while taxes remained as before, revenues were decidedly increased.

"He acted as a supreme court both in Rome and on his journeys, and earned the reputation of a fair and learned judge, always as lenient as the reign of law would permit. He issued innumerable decrees, usually in favor of the weak against the strong -- the slave against the master -- the small farmer against the large estate -- the tenant against the landlord -- the consumer against the deceptions of retailers and the multiplicaton of middlemen.

"He rejected accusations for maiestas, refused bequests from parents, or persons unknown to him, and ordered a tolerant application of the laws against Christians. By his own example on state lands he encouraged the practice of emphyteusis ('implanting'), by which owners rented rough acres to tenants to be planted with orchards and remain rent-free until fruit grew.

"He was not a radical reformer. He was only a superlative administrator seeking, within the limits and inequalities of human nature, the greatest good of the whole. He preserved old forms, but he quietly poured new content into them according to the needs of the time.

"He now traveled down the Rhine to its mouth and sailed across to Britain (122). We are not informed of his activites there, except that he ordered a wall built from the Solway Firth to the mouth of the Tyne 'to divide the barbarians from the Romans.' Returning to Gaul he passed leisurely through Avignon, Nimes, and other towns of the provincia, and settled down for the winter at Tarragona in northern Spain.

"In the spring of 123 he led some legions against the Moors of northwest Africa, who had been raiding the Roman towns of Mauretania. Having defeated them and driven them back into the hills, he took ship for Ephesus. After wintering there he visited the cities of Asia Minor, listening to petitions and complaints, punishing malfeasance, rewarding competence, and providing money, designs, and workmen for municipal temples, baths, and theaters.

"He pushed eastwrd along the Euxine to Trapezus, ordered the governor of Cappadocia -- the historian Arrian -- to examine and report to him the condition of all the ports on the Black Sea. In the fall of 125 he sailed to Rhodes and thence to Athens.

"The artist in Hadrian was ever competing with the governor. He rebuilt the Pantheon while reorganizing Roman law. No other man ever built so plentifully, no other ruler so directly. The structures erected for him were sometimes designed by him, and were always subject to his expert inspection as they progressed.

"The villa was finished in the last years of Hadrian's life. We do not know that he found happiness there. The revolt of the Jews in 135 embittered him. He put it down without mercy and fretted that he could not end his reign without war.

"In that same year, still only fifty-nine, he was stricken with a painful and wasting illness -- akin to tuberculosis and dropsy -- which slowly crushed hs body, his spirit, and his mind. His temper became sharper, his manner querulous. He suspected his oldest friends of conspiring to kill and replace him. At last -- perhaps in an illucid interval, and how justly we cannot say -- he ordered that several of them should be put to death.

"To end the war of succession that was forming in his court, he adopted as heir his friend Lucius Verus. When soon after, Lucius died, Hadrian called to his bedside at Tibur a man with an unblemished reputation for integrity and wisdom, Titus Aurelius Antoninus, and adopted him as his son and successor. Looking far ahead, he advised Antoninus to adopt in turn, and educate for government, two youths then growing up at the court -- Marcus Annius Verus, then seventeen, and Lucius Aelius Verus, then eleven -- respectively the nephew of Antoninus and the son of Licus Verus.

"The title of Caesar, heretofore borne by the emperors and their agnatic descendants, was conferred by Hadrian upon Antoninus. Thereafter, while the emperors kept for themselves the title of Augustus, they granted the name Caesar to each heir presumptive to the throne.

"He was not a man of intellect in the narrower sense of that term. He had no learning and looked with an aristocrat's indulgence upon men of letters, philosohy, or art. Nevertheless, he helped such men richly and invited them often to his home. He preferred religion to philosophy, worshiped the old gods with apparent sincerity, and gave his adopted sons an example of piety that Marcus never forgot.

"He began his reign by pouring his immense personal fortune into the imperial treasury. He canceled arrears of taxes, made gifts of money to the citizens, paid for many festival games, and relieved scarcities of wine, oil, and wheat by buying these and distributing them free.

"He ruled the provinces as well as he could without traveling. In all his long reign he was never absent for a day from Rome or its environs. He was content to appoint to provincial governorships men of tried competence and honor. He was anxious to keep the Empire safe without war.

"It only remained for Antoninus to crown a good life with a peaceful death. In his seventy-fourth year he fell sick of a stomach disturbance and was seized with a high fever. He called Marcus Aurelius to his bedside and committed to him the care of the state. To the officer of the day he gave as watchword aequanimitas. Soon afterward he turnd as if to sleep and died (161).

"Lucius got no farther than Antioch. For there lived Panthea, so beautiful and accomplished that Lucius thought all the perfections of all sculptural masterpieces had come together in her. To which were added a voice of intoxicating melody, fingers skilled on the lyre, and a mind enriched with literature and philosophy. Lucius saw her and, like Gilgamesh, forgot when he was born.

"He abandoned himself to pleasure, to hunting, at last to debauchery, while the Parthians rode into terror-stricken Syria. Marcus made no comment on Lucius but sent to Avidius Cassius, second in charge in Lucius' army, a plan of campaign whose military excellence helped the general's own ability not only to drive the Parthians back across Mesopotamia, but to plant the Roman standards once more in Seleucia and Cresphon. This time the two cities were burned to the ground lest they serve again as bases for Parthian campaigns.

"Lucius returned from Antioch to Rome and was awarded a triumph, which he magnanimously insisted that Marcus should share.

"Lucius brought with him the invisible victor of the war -- pestilence. It had appeared first among the troops of Avidius in captured Seleucia. It spread so rapidly that he withdrew his army into Mesopotamia, while the Parthians rejoiced at the vengeance of their gods. The retreating legions carried the plague with them to Syria. Lucius took some of these soldiers to Rome to march in his triumph. They infected every city through which they passed and every region of the empire to which they were later assigned.

"The ancient historians tell us more of its ravages than of its nature. Their descriptions suggest exanthematous typhus or possibly bubonic plague. Galen thought it similar to the disease that had wasted the Athenians under Pericles. In both cases black pustules almost covered the body, the victim was racked with a hoarse cough, and his 'breath stank.'

"Rapidly it swept through Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and Gaul. Within a year (166-67) it had killed more men than had been lost in the war. In Rome 2000 died of it in one day, including many of the aristocracy. Corpses were carried out of the city in heaps. Marcus, helpless before this intangible enemy, did all he could to mitigate the evil. But the medical science of his day could ofer him no guidance, and the epidemic ran its course until it had established an immunity or had killed all its carriers.

"In 169 the Chatti invaded the Roman regions of the upper Rhine.

"In 170 the Chauci attacked Belgica, and another force besieged Sarmizegerusa.

"The Costoboii crossed the Balkans into Greece and plundered the Temple of the Mysteries at Eleusis, fourteen miles from Athens.

"The Mauri or Moors invaded Spain from Africa, and a new tribe the Longobardi or Lombards, made its first appearance on the Rhine.

"Despite a hundred defeats, the fertile barbarians were growing stronger, the barren Romans weaker. Marcus saw that it was now a war to the death, that one side must destroy the other or go under. Only a man schooled in the Roman and Stoic sense of duty could have transformed himself so competely from a mystic philosopher into a competent and successful general.

"The philosopher remained, hidden under the imperator's armor. In the very tumult of this Second Marcomannic War (169-75), in his camp facing the Quadi on the river Granna, a tributary of the Danube, Marcus wrote that little book of Meditations by which the world chiefly remembers him.

"This glimpse of a frail and fallible saint, pondering the problems of morality and destiny while leading a great army in a conflict on which the fate of an Empire turned, is one of the most intimate pictures that time has preserved of its great men. Pursuing the Sarmatians by day he could write with sympathy of them at night:-'A spider, when it has caught a fly, thinks it has done a great deed. So does one who has run down a hare or who has captured Sarmatians. Are they not all like robbers?'

"Marcus surprised the barbarians with a hasty peace,merely annexing a ten-mile strip on the north bank of the Danube and leaving strong garrisons on the southern side. He summoned his soldiers, told them that he would gladly yield his place to Avidius if Rome wished it, promised to pardon the rebel, and marched into Asia to encounter him.

"Meanwhile a centurion killed Cassius, and the rebellion collapsed. Marcus passed through Asia Minor and Syria to Alexandria, mourning like Caesar that he had been cheated of a chance for clemency. At Smyrna, Alexandria, and Athens he walked the streets without a guard, wore the mantle of a philosopher, attended the lectures of the leading teachers, and joined with them in discussion, speaking Greek.

"In the fall of 176, after almost seven years of war, Aurelius reached Rome and was accorded a triumph as the savior of the Empire. The emperor associated Commodus with himself in the victory and now made him, a lad of fifteen, his colleague on the throne. For the first time in nearly a century the principle of adoption was put aside and the hereditary principate was resumed.

"Marcus knew what perils he was inviting for the Empire. He chose them as a lesser evil than the civil war that Commodus and his friends would wage if he were denied the throne. The plague had burned itself out, and men were beginning to be happy again. The capital had suffered little from the wars, which had been financed with remarkable economy and little extra taxation. Money jingled everywhere.

"It was the height of Rome's tide and of its Emperor's popularity. All the world acclaimed him as at once a soldier, a sage, and a saint.

"His triumph did not deceive him. He knew that the problem of Germany had not been solved. Convinced that further invasions could be prevented only by an active policy of extending the frontier to the mountains of Bohemia, he set forth with Commodus, in 178, on the Third Marcomannic War. Crossing the Danube, he again depeated the Quadi after a long and arduous campaign.

"No resistance remained, and he was about to annex the lands of the Quadi, the Marcomanni, and the Sarmartians (roughly Bohemia and Danubian Galicia) as new provinces, when sickness struck him down in his camp at Vindobona (Vienna). Feeling death's hand, he called Commodus to his side and warned him to carry through the policy which was now so near fulf8illment, and realize the dream of Augustus by pushing the boundary of the Empire to the Elbe. Then he refused all further food or drink. On the sixth day he rose with his last strength and presented Commodus to the army as the new emperor. Returning to his couch he covered his head with the sheet and soon afterward died.

"The success of these essays induced Tacitus to illustrate the evils of tyranny by indicting the record of the despots in ruthless detail. He thought:-'The chief duty of the historian is to judge the actions of men, so that the good may meet with the reward due to virtue, and pernicious citizens may be deterred by the condemnation that awaits evil deeds at the tribunal of posterity.' It is a strange conception, which turns history into a Last Judgment and the historian into God.

"He does not pretend to be a philosopher. His imagination and art, like Shakespeare's, were too creatively active to let him ponder quietly the meaning and possibilities of life. He rejects most astrologers, auguries, portents, and miracles, but accepts some. He is too much of a gentleman to deny the possibility of what so many have affirmed.

"Shortly before Domitian's death, says an uncertain trdition, Juvenal composed, and circulated among his friends, a satire on the influence of dancers at court. The pantomime actor Paris, we are told, took offense and had him exiled to Egypt. We cannot say if the story is true, nor when Juvenal returned. In any case he published nothing until after Domitian's death.

"The first volume of his sixteen satires appeared in 101, the remainder in four volumes at intervals in a long life. Probably they were unforgiving memories of Domitian's time. The indignation that makes them so vivid and unreliable suggests that a few years of 'the good emperors' had not cured the evils he denounced. Perhaps, again, he chose the satire as a charcteristic Roman form, found models and some material in Lucilius, Horace, and Persius, and molded his fulminations and his wrath on the rhetorical principles that he had learned in the schools.

"Juvenal takes everything for his subject, and has no trouble in finding in everything some aspect that can bear condemning. He thinks:-'We are arrived at the zenith of vice and posterity will never be able to surpass us.' So far, so true. The root of the evil is the unscrupulous pursuit of wealth. He scorns the plebs that once ruled armies and unmade kings but can now be bought with panem et circenses, bread and circuses. That is one of a hundred phrases to which Juvenal's vitality gave lasting life.

"He resents the influx of Oriental faces, dress, ways, smells, and gods -- protests against the clannishmess of the Jew -- and likes least of all the 'greedy little Greek' (Graeculus esuriens) -- the degenerate descendant of a people once great but never honest.

"He loathes the informers who, like Pliny's Regulus, get rich by reporting 'unpatriotic' remarks -- the legacy hunters who flutter around childless old men -- the proconsul living in lifelong luxury on the profits of a term in the provinces -- the clever lawyers who spin out lawsuits like an excreted web.

"According to custom, the youth took his adoptive father's name, causing confusion for 2000 years. At Rome he studied under Quintilian, who formed his taste on Cicero and must receive some of the credit for the Ciceronian fluency of Pliny's style. At 18 he was admitted to the bar. At 39 he ws chosen to deliver an address of welcome to Trajan. In the same year he ws made consul -- in 103, augur -- in 105, 'Curator of the Bed and Banks of the Tiber and the City Sewers.'

"He took no fees or gifts for his legal services, but he was a rich man and could afford to be magnanimous. He had properties in Etruria, at Beneventum, Como, and Laurentum, and offered 3,000,000 sesterces for another.

"Most of the men whom Pliny describes were members of the new aristocracy stemming from the provinces. They were not idlers, for nearly every one of them held public office and shared in the admirable administration of the Empire under Trajan.

"Men as well as women were returning to the old religion or devoting themselves to new ones. The philosophers approved. Rome was now teeming with them, invited welcomed, or tolerated by Aurelius. They took full advantage of his generosity and his power -- crowded his court -- received appointments and emoluments -- delivered countless lectures -- and opened many schools.

"They were to withdrw from the vicinity of the Danube, to surrender most of their armms, return all Roman prisoners and deserters, pay Rome an annual tribute of corn, and persuade 13,000 of their soldiers to enlist in the Roman legins. All Rome condemned him except the people. His generals fumed at allowing the trapped prey to escape and fight again another day. During the reign of Commodus, however, no trouble came from the Danubian tribes.

"The young prince, though no coward, had seen enough of war. He needed peace to enjoy Rome. Back in the capital, he snubbed the Senate and loaded the plebs with unprecedented gifts -- 725 denarii to each citizen. Finding no field in politics for his exuberant strength, he hunted beasts on the imperial estates and developed such skill with sword and bow that he decided to perform publicly.

"For a time he left the palace and lived in the gladiators' school. He drove chariots in the races, and fought in the arena against animals and men. Presumably the men who opposed him took care to let him win. But he thought nothing of fighting, unaided and before breakfast, a hippopotamus, an elephant, and a tiger, which made no distinctions for royalty.

"He was so perfect a bowman that with a hundred arrows he killed a hundred tigers in one exhibition. He would let a panther leap upon some condemned criminal and then slay the animal with one arrow, leaving the man unhurt to die again.

"She had woven it into a majestic commonwealth within which the exchange of goods moved in unprecedented plenty and freedoms. For two centuries she had guarded the great realm from barbarian inroads and had given it security and peace. All the white man's world looked to her as the center of the universe, the imnipotent and eternal city.

"Never had there been such wealth, such splendor, or such power.

"Nevertheless amid the prosperity that made Rome brilliant in this second century, all the seeds were germinating of the crisis that would ruin Italy in the third. Marcus had contributed heavily to the debacle by naming Commodus his heir and by wars that centralized ever more authority in the hands of the Emperor. Commodus kept in peace the prerogatives assumed by Aurelius in war. Private and local independence, initiative, and pride withered as the power and functions of the state increased. The wealth of nations was drained away by ever-rising taxation to support a self-multiplying bureaucracy and the endless offensivees of defense.

"The mineral wealth of Italy was diminishing. Pestilence and famine had taken bitter toll, the system of tillage by slaves was failing, governmental expenditures and doles had exhaustedd the Treasury and debased the currency. Italian industry was losing its markets in the provinces through provincial competition, and no economic statesmanship appeared to make up for a languishing foreign trade by a wider distribution of buying power at home.

"Meanwhile the provinces had recovered from the exactions of Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Cassius, Brutus, and Antony. Their ancient skills had revived, their industries were flourishing, their new wealth was financing science, philosophy, and art. Their sons replenished the legions, their generals led them. Soon their armies would hold Italy at their mercy and make their generals emperors.

"Since the prince had almost all authority, the citizens left him almost all responsibility. More and more of them, even in the aristocracy, retired into their families and their private affairs,. Citizens became atoms, and society began to fall to pieces internally precisely when unity seemed more complete. Disillusionment with democracy was followed by disillusionment with monarchy.

"The 'Golden Thoughts' of Aurelius were often leaden thoughts, weighed down with the suspicion that Rome's problems could not be solved, that the multiplying barbarians could not long be held back by a sterile and pacific greed.

"Stocism, which had begun by preaching strength, was ending by preaching resignation. Almost all the philosphers had made their peace with religion. For 400 years Stocism had been to the upper classes a sustitute for religion. Now the substitute was put aside, and the ruling orders turned back from the books of the philosphers to the altars of the gods.

"And yet paganism, too, was dying. Like Italy, it was flushed only with governmental aid and was nearing exhaustion. It had conquered philosophy, but already its temple precincts heard reverently the names of invading deities.

"The elder Pliny asked:-'How shall I commence this undertaking? So vast is the number of places -- what man could enumerate them all -- and so great is their individual renown!'

"Around and south of Rome lay Latium, once her mother, then her enemy, then her granary, then a paradise of suburbs and villas for Romans who had both money and taste.

"South and west from the capital fine roads and the Tiber led to the rival harbors of Portus and Ostia on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Ostia had its great age in the second and third centuries of our era.

"Merchants and longshoremen crowded like those of Rome today. As late as the fifteenth century a Florentine traveler marveled at the wealth of the town and its sumptous adornment. Some surviving columns, and an altar elegantly designed and carved with delicate floral reliefs, show that even this commercial population had absorbed the classic conception of the beautiful.

"Southward on the coast rose Antium (Anzio) where the richest Romans, many emperors, and favored gods had palaces or temples reaching out into the Mediterranean to catch any passing breeze. In its three miles of ruins were found such master sculptures as the Borghese Gladiator and the Apollo Belvedere.

"Near by an extant monument reminds 'excellent citizens,' now nineteen centuries dead, that they have recently had the pleasure of seeing eleven gladiators die in combat with ten ferocious bears.

"To the north, beyond the coastal hills, Aquinum gave birth to Juvenal, and Arpinum plumed itself on Marius and Cicero. Twenty miles from Rome was the old town of Praeneste (Palestrina), its pretty homes built upon terraces in the mountain slopes, its gardens Fortuna Primigenia, who gave good luck to women in childbirth, and exchanged oracles for cash.

"Tusculum, ten miles from Rome, was similarly rich in gardens and villas. Here old Cato was born, and Cicero placed his Tusculan Disputations.

"Pisae was already hoar with age. It traced its name and origin to a colony of Greeks from Pisa in the Peloponnesus, and made a living by organizing the lumber business along the Arnus River.

"Farther up the same stream was a young Roman colony, Florentia, rare among cities because it probably underestimated its fuure. At the northwestern extremity of Etruria were the quarries of Carrara. Rome's finest marble was conveyed thence to the port of Luna, and went by ship to the capital.

"Genus had long served as an outlet for the goods of northwestern Italy. As far back as 209 B.C. we hear of the Carthaginian destroying it in a ruthless commercial war.

"Here the lazy Padus (Po), rising in the Cottian Alps, turns eastward 250 miles to divide north Italy into what the early republic knew as Transpadane and Cispadane Gaul. In all the peninsula the valley of the Po was the region most fertile, populous and prosperous. At the foot of the Alps were those lakes -- Verbanus (Maggiore), Larius (Como), and Benacus (Garda) --whose splendor feasted the eye and soul of those generations as well as ours.

"From the younger Pliny's Comum a main trade route led south to Mediolanum (Milan). Settled by the Gauls in the fifth century B.C., it was already a metropolis and educational center in the days of Virgil. By A.D. 286 it would replace Rome as the capital of the Western Empire.

"Verona controlled the trade over the Brenner Pass and was rich enough to have an amphitheater recently restored) seating 25,000 spectators.

"Along the winding Po rose Placentia (Piacenza), Cremona, Mantua, and Ferrara -- originally frontier towns designed to hold the Gauls at bay.

"North of the Po and east of the Adige lay Venetia. The district took its name from the Veneti, early immigrants from Illyria. Herodotus tells how the leaders of these tribes annually brought together the marriageable lasses in their villages, put a price upon each according to her beauty, wed her to the man who paid the price, and used the money to provide alluring dowries for the less alluring girls. Venice itself was not yet born, but at Pola on the Istrian peninsula, at Tergeste (Trieste), Aquileia, and Patavium (Padua), substantial cities crowned the head of the Adriatic. Pola still has from Roman days a stately arch, a pretty temple, and an amphitheater only less impressive than its model, the Colosseum.

"South of the Po a line of important cities ran from Placentia through Parma, Mutina (Modena), Bononia (Bologna), and Faventia (Faenze) to Ariminum. Here, at Rimini, is one of the most perfectly preserved of the countless bridges built by Roman engineers. It carried the Flaminian Way into the city through an arch as strong and dominating as the Roman character.

"A branch road led from Bononia to Ravenna, the Venice of Roman days, built upon piles in marshes made by several rivers emptying into the Adriatic. Strabo describes it as 'provided with thoroughfares by means of bridges and ferries.' Augustus stationed there his Adriatic fleet, and several emperors in the fifth century made the city their official residence.