This plan produced one of the firmest dynasties which ever held the imperial throne, namely, the Antonines, Marcus Aurelius, Titus, Antoninus Pius, and Commodus, who ruled from Hadrian’s death in 138 to 192. The age of the first two Antonines is considered by Gibbon and many others to be the culmination of the Roman imperial system.

Two facts of very great importance stand out from this hasty review of the principate during its first two centuries. In the first place, it is still, in the strict constitutional sense, a compromise. The theory of the constitution had not changed since Augustus, if, indeed, it had ever changed. It is still a Republic—Respublica Romana—governed by senate, consuls, tribunes, and an intermittent public assembly. There is, as there nearly always had been, a princeps, that is, leading citizen, a man raised by personal eminence and prestige far above his colleagues. Certain powers are delegated to him by the state. Above all he is master of the legions because he has consular or proconsular authority over all the provinces where troops are stationed. There still remained certain theoretical limitations to his power. He could not, for example, impose a tax on Rome or Italy by his own authority. But the feebleness and sycophancy of the senate and magistracy made him actually omnipotent. When a certain senator was pointed out by Cæsar’s freedman as an enemy to Cæsar the doomed man was set upon by his colleagues and stabbed to death with their pens in the senate-house. It is true that this sycophancy was not altogether the fault of the senate. Under the tyrannical emperors like Tiberius, Nero, and Domitian, emperors who encouraged the “delator,” no senator’s life was secure. At a frown from Cæsar it was customary to go home and open one’s veins after writing a complimentary will in which one bequeathed everything to that best of rulers. This sort of behaviour led inevitably to the growth of the monarchy. The emperor was the one person who dared to act, and the more capable and well-intentioned the ruler, the more closely were the fetters riveted around the necks of the Roman People. The silent growth of bureaucracy, of which the historians have little to tell us, but which we can gather from the inscriptions of the period, is both the symptom and the cause of this increasing power of the principate.

In the second place, it is important to notice that although the city of Rome was growing marvellously in riches and splendour, she was losing her old domination in the world, and becoming the capital instead of the mistress of the Empire. The magistracies of the city had almost ceased to have any importance except as inferior grades on the road to proconsulships. Italy herself was sinking into the position of one among the provinces of the Empire, and with the growth of Hadrian’s centralised system of imperial administration even the provinces were losing their significance as units of government. It seems impossible that almost the whole of Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa could ever have been governed by one man or even one bureau. Yet it was almost achieved by the Roman Empire. The world-state was almost a fact, and a few more Trajans and Hadrians would have accomplished it. The city-state idea, as a unit of patriotism, still flourished. But with the great roads stretching like railways to the four corners of the earth, and the imperial officers travelling along them, with the legions massed along the frontiers and men recruited in Spain sent to serve in Britain, the sense of territory, from which the modern state was to arise, began to develop itself.

Imperial Rome

If the external history of the Empire has suffered by being so largely in the hands of the opposition, the intimate life of the city has been still more distorted through being written for us by satirists. The humorous or venomous descriptions of Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius form our principal source of information, and Pliny, who gives us a very different picture of tranquil and cultivated leisure or of useful activity carried on in refined and elegant surroundings, has commonly been regarded as a remarkable exception. Yet the material remains are on

the side of Pliny; and we owe a great debt to modern writers, like Dr. Dill, who have been able to emphasise this point. Romances such as those of Lytton, Melville, and Sienckewicz have embroidered the theme of Juvenal, and everybody nowadays has his vision of Imperial Rome based upon such fairy-tales. It is probably vain to attempt a refutation of the popular view which pictures the Roman of the Empire as exclusively spending his time in the amphitheatre watching the lions devour the Christians, except when he was supping on nightingales’ tongues from plates of gold. Moreover these things are a not unimportant part of the truth. Imperial Rome remained as bloody and brutal in its amusements as Republican Rome. In fact, as the emperors were not only richer than the old senators, but also much more carefully watched and bitterly lampooned, so the number of wild beasts slain at a venatio of Trajan exceeded the slaughters exhibited by Pompeius. Doubtless the imperial epicure Apicius excelled the republican glutton Lucullus in the variety of his menu, and the lascivious entertainments of Petronius Arbiter and his master Nero certainly dwarfed the attempts of Sulla. At heart it was the same Roman People, enjoying the same stupid pleasures and violent sensations under circumstances of greater magnificence and refinement. It was a society founded on slavery, acknowledging no limits to the free indulgence of pleasure. But one misconception must be combated. The whole imperial period of five centuries should not be regarded as one slippery Gadarene slope down which the Romans were hurrying to destruction. Fashions came and went. Extravagance was at its height under Nero: there was a reaction towards greater simplicity under Vespasian. Under Trajan and Hadrian life was orderly and refined. Under M. Aurelius philosophy was even more fashionable than vice. Nor was bloodshed the only form of public enjoyment; the amphitheatres often presented spectacles quite as inoffensive and much more splendid than our modern hippodromes and circuses. Chariot-racing, in particular, though a good deal more dangerous than the modern steeplechase, took its place along with gladiators and beast-baiting as the popular sport, and the Romans showed as much enthusiasm for Coryphæus and Hirpinus as we do for our Ormondes and Persimmons. The charioteer Lacerna had as much vogue with them as had Fred Archer with our fathers, and they took sides with the Prasina Factio even more seriously than we do with Light or Dark Blue oarsmen. The Romans had an inherited taste for blood. There were philosophers who condemned gladiatorial shows, but the defence of the ancient sportsman was similar to and perhaps not less true than the modern fox-hunter’s excuse: the gladiators themselves enjoyed the fun almost as much as the spectators.

On the whole, apart from its follies, material civilisation was steadily advancing during the whole period at present under review. In such matters as transit, public health, police, water-supply, engineering, building, and so forth, Rome of the second century left off pretty much where the reign of Queen Victoria was to resume. The modern city of Rome is obtaining its drinking-water out of about three of the nine great aqueducts which ministered to the imperial city. The hot-air system which warms the hotels of modern Europe and America was in general use in every comfortable villa of the first century A.D. Education was more general and more accessible to the poor in A.D. 200 than in A.D. 1850. The siege artillery employed by Trajan was as effective, probably, as the cannon of Vauban.

The city of Rome must have been a wonderful spectacle under the emperors. One of our modern international exhibitions might faintly recall a little of its splendours, with gilt and stucco for gold and marble. Northward from the slope of the Aventine Hill there was a succession of majestic public buildings, temple beyond temple, forum beyond forum, as each of the great emperors had added to the work of his predecessor and endeavoured to eclipse it. At your feet would be the Circus Maximus, where the chariot-races were held, and behind it the Palatine Hill crowded with palaces. To the east of it ran the Triumphal Road passing through the Arch of

Constantine to the Colossus of Nero and the mighty Flavian Amphitheatre known to us as the Colosseum. From there the Sacred Way led north-west through the Arch of Titus past the Temple of Venus and Rome and the Basilica of Constantine to a series of stately fora, opening one from the other and containing altars, columns, arches, statues, and temples surrounded with shady colonnades, whose cloisters served for business and pleasure. Above them on the west rose the ancient Capitoline Hill crowned with its great Temple of Jupiter and immemorial citadel. Picture these magnificent spaces filled with grave citizens in their flowing white togas, hurrying slaves in their bright tunics, visitors and barbarians from all corners of the earth, trousered Gauls, skin-clad Sarmatians, mitred Parthians. Every now and then the burly gladiators swagger through the crowd admired by every one, or a procession of the shaven begging priests of Isis passes by with strange cries and gestures. Perhaps the lictors come swinging down the hill bidding every one make way for the slaves who carry the litter of the emperor who is on his way to sacrifice. Or fancy the crowd in the Great Amphitheatre, which held more than eighty thousand spectators, with the purple and gold awnings spread to protect them from the blazing sunshine, the auditorium perfumed with scents and cooled by fountains, and the arena at their feet flooded with water to present a naval combat. It is a city wrapped in profound peace, still dreaming amid its splendours that it is the mistress of the world.

And these signs of magnificent material riches were not confined to Rome. Alexandria would almost rival her. Asiatic towns like Ephesus and Antioch presented a similar appearance of luxury and opulence. In the north Lugudunum and even Londinium had a splendour of their own. In Gades Spain had a handsome and highly civilised capital. The Roman remains at Trier utterly dwarf the comfortable erections of a prosperous modern town. Out in the desert at Palmyra[67] and Ba’albek[68] there were rising into existence those huge buildings

which testify to the industry fostered by the provincial government of the emperors. Along the sea-coast of Campania there were sea-fronts of continuous villas whose marble fragments are still washed up in the Bay of Naples. It tasks the imagination of genius to conjure up that glowing world of the past out of the ruined foundations which remain. Turner’s famous picture of Baiæ represents a successful attempt to do so. Pompeii, wonderful as it is, was only a very small and obscure country town. Yet it was lavishly provided with temples, baths, theatre, and amphitheatre.

On the coast of North Africa, where nothing but man’s labour organised under a good government is required to make the desert blossom as a rose, there was a teeming population which prospered on agriculture. Timgad (Thamugadi) was founded in the year 100 as a colony by Trajan, and it was the head-quarters of the Third Legion. Here, in the blank desert of to-day, the French explorers have revealed porticoes and colonnades, a forum, a municipal senate-house, a theatre, a capitol, rostra, a triumphal arch, baths, shrines, and temples, together with the aqueduct and fountains which alone made all this splendour possible.[69] For public munificence this age is unequalled in history. It must have been a very powerful sense of patriotism which compelled every rich man to devote so large a part of his fortune to the embellishment of his native town. The benefactions of the modern millionaire seem miserly in comparison. Pliny, who was not a very rich man as wealth was accounted in his day, presented his native town of Como with a library at a cost of nearly £9000, and maintained it with an annual endowment of more than £800. He offered to contribute one-third to the cost of a secondary school, and made the wise provision that the parents of the boys should contribute the rest, in order that they might feel an interest in the school and take pains in the choice of suitable teachers. He gave nearly £5000 more for the support of poor children. He bequeathed more than £4000 for public baths and nearly £16,000 to his freedmen and for public feasts. And, as Dr. Dill has pointed out, the inscriptions of every municipal town prove that this princely generosity and patriotism were by no means the exception. “There was in those days an immense civic ardour, an almost passionate rivalry, to make the mother city a more pleasant and a more splendid home.” Among the most princely of these benefactors was the Athenian Professor of Rhetoric, Herodes Atticus, who added a new quarter to Athens in the reign of Hadrian.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of life in the Roman Empire under the good emperors of the second century is the growth of a lower class with occupations and ideals of its own. We have already remarked that the poor free Roman of republican days scarcely emerges into the light except as a soldier. But now the inscriptions show us a happy and industrious class of artisans and humble tradesmen, grading down through the freedmen to the slaves, many of whom now lived and worked under quite tolerable conditions of life. Especially noteworthy is the social tendency of the day. Every occupation and craft was forming its guilds or “collegia” about which the inscriptions give us full and most interesting details. The collegia were not quite Friendly Societies, and still less Trade Unions, though they undoubtedly claimed political privileges and perhaps even made some attempt at collective bargaining with the public. Sometimes they obtained exemption from taxation. They dined together, they had their chapels and festivals, their colours and processions. They had officers modelled on the old Roman magistracy, with senators as committee and a quæstor as treasurer. They had their list of patrons who were expected to earn the honour by generosity. In the main they were burial clubs. Even slaves, and even gladiators, the most despised of slaves, had their guilds and fraternities: of course they were regulated by the state.

As yet, in spite of its growing centralisation and spirit of paternal despotism, the Roman government was true to its ancient principle of allowing full local autonomy. The municipal

life of a small Campanian town like Pompeii afforded scope for local ambition and a political ardour to which the election posters and the inscriptions scratched or scribbled on the walls bear eloquent witness.[70] Sometimes the name of the candidate is written with the laconic addition v. b., “a good man,” or it may be “Please make P. Furius duumvir, he’s a good man.” But occasionally the commendations are more explicit: “a most modest young man,” “he will look after the treasury,” “worthy of public office,” and so forth. Sometimes a trade-guild supports its candidate. Thus the liquor interest in politics is already noticeable in A.D. 70. The humour of the opposition is seen in such a poster as “the pickpockets request the election of Vatia as ædile.” And the intrusion of the feminine element is to be observed in “Claudium IIvir. animula facit” (“His little darling is working for Claudius as duumvir”). The wit of the Pompeian wall-scribe was brighter, though not always cleaner, than that of his modern counterpart. There is the proud inscription “Restitutus has often deceived many girls,” but there are also testimonies of conjugal affection like “Hirtia, the Dewdrop, always and everywhere sends hearty greeting to C. Hostilius, the Gnat, her husband, shepherd and gentle counsellor.” There is also an interesting account from a bakery:

We find advertisements like “Scaurus’s tunny jelly, Blossom Brand, put up by Eutyches, slave of Scaurus.”

Education and Literature

A noticeable feature of the times was the wide diffusion of education. Every one, it seems, could read and write, even the slaves, even the humble British workman. Many a Pompeian schoolboy has scribbled a line from Vergil, or Ovid, or Propertius. Many an adult has added his or her original compositions. We have seen in the case of Pliny how the rich men interested themselves in the foundation of schools, both primary and secondary, for their native towns. In the Greek world, as may be expected, education was most highly developed and thoroughly graded from the elementary to the university stage. For elementary schools the voluntary system was in vogue, but it was under careful public supervision, and, as we have seen, the state undertook the maintenance of poor children, girls as well as boys. In contrast to the present day, the teachers were often held in high honour, and many a public inscription testifies to the gratitude of a town towards its schoolmasters. That they also received more substantial recognition is proved by the fact that they were often able to leave handsome benefactions themselves. They were elected, sometimes after an examination or after giving specimen lessons, by the local education committees, with religious ceremonies, and they took an oath of office on entering upon their duties. They had their unions and associations like other professions. In one inscription found in Callipolis, “The young men and the lads and the boys and their teachers” unite to confer a wreath of honour upon one of the mathematical masters. The teachers seem to have been subject to annual election or re-election. There were also visiting masters of special subjects. The Greek secondary school tended to lay much stress upon athletics, but it gave more attention to music and religion than similar institutions of to-day. Reading, writing, and arithmetic together with music, dancing, and drill were the staple subjects of the elementary school. “Rhetoric,” which meant the study of literature on the technical side, as well as the practice of declamations, was the main occupation in the high schools and the universities. But philosophy, moral and physical, was also carefully studied. University professors often rose to real affluence.

In the polite world of Rome, literature was extremely fashionable. Everybody was writing and insisting upon reading his compositions to his friends. These literary labours were often pursued with amazing diligence. Both Pliny and his uncle devoted themselves to reading and writing almost from morning to night, and Pliny the Younger tells how he was laughed at for carrying his notebooks with him even when he was out boar-hunting. By the time he was fourteen he had written a Greek tragedy. His sketch of a day’s doings at his country villa shows the literary perseverance of a Roman gentleman. He rose at six and began to compose in his bedroom. Then he would summon his secretary to take down the result from dictation. At ten or eleven he would continue his work in some shady colonnade, or under the trees in the garden, after which he drove out, still reading. “A short siesta, a walk, declamation in Greek and Latin, after the habit of Cicero, gymnastic exercise, and the bath, filled the space until dinner-time arrived.” Even during dinner a book was read aloud and the evening was enlivened by acting or music or conversation. Many of Pliny’s friends, such as Suetonius and Silius Italicus, emulated this studious existence, and his uncle even excelled it. The elder Pliny consulted two thousand volumes in the writing of his Natural History alone, and he left one hundred and sixty volumes of closely written notes and excerpts. Nor was this an unimportant circle of literary bookworms. On the contrary, it was the highest society of the day. The elder Pliny was on terms of daily intercourse with the Emperor Vespasian, and the younger Pliny besides being governor of Bithynia was intimate with Trajan.

At first sight we may find it strange that all this strenuous devotion to study produced so little in the way of first-rate original literature. It is of course customary to ascribe the decline—assuming that it was a decline—of the Golden Age of Augustan literature into the Silver Latin of Tacitus and Juvenal to the tyranny of emperors like Tiberius and Nero. It is perfectly true that Tiberius made it dangerous for senatorial historians to praise the murderers of a Cæsar. But that is a ludicrously inadequate explanation for the eclipse of literature. The experience of Vergil showed that it was possible for a great loyalist to win fortune and glory amounting to idolisation. The senators who wanted to continue their school declamations against tyranny were certainly discouraged, but there was still plenty of room for literary activity. The truth is, as we have seen, that Augustan literature was not the work of a young Rome, but of an old and perhaps already declining Græco-Roman culture. Again it was literary, not political, causes which led to literary decline. Tacitus, who had for his themes the conquest of Britain and the wars in Germany and the East, the Siege of Jerusalem, the burning of Rome, the tragic Year of the Four Emperors, the crimes and follies of Nero, and the development of the great imperial system, complains of the lack of interest in the history of his own times compared with those of the heroic past. The tyranny that depressed literature was of its own making, the tyranny of convention, classicism and erudition. To take poetry, though so many noble writers were toying with the epic, they only produced the pedantic Thebaid of Statius, the weary Argonauticon of Silius Italicus, an imitation of an imitation of Homer, and the Pharsalia of Lucan, which, though it contains many a brilliant epigram and memorable phrase, is to the majority of mankind almost unreadable. This is simply because Lucan was consciously pursuing the path which Vergil had pointed out and producing work which was the logical succession to the style of the Æneid. The Pharsalia is unmixed declamation, rhetoric shouting at top pitch on page after page. Vergil had accomplished the literary epic to perfection: to carry it any further in the same direction was to incur tediousness. Above all, both Lucan and Silius lacked the greatest of all Vergil’s gifts, his wonderful ear for verbal music. Vergil, like Milton, presented his epic diluted for mortal ears with music and human nature. It was not in the spirit that Lucan failed. He admired the republican cause and Pompeius, its champion, quite as sincerely as Vergil admired Augustus or Milton Cromwell. Thus it was not politics, but the literary gift which caused his failure, at least his failure to hold the ear of to-day. Past generations have esteemed him high among the world’s poets. Dante owed not a little to Lucan and Statius as well as to Vergil.

It was only in its lighter forms that poetry continued to make progress. The Silvæ of Statius, which were shorter occasional poems in elegiac or lyric measures thrown off at odd moments with ease and rapidity, are far more interesting than his frigid epic. Martial, the Spanish writer of vers de société, has a pretty wit that is often surprisingly modern in its tone. Certainly Juvenal towers over all others who have attempted satire. Horace had been content with an easy familiarity of tone which might wheedle a friend into the path of good sense by poking fun at his follies. Juvenal thunders his denunciations of wickedness with a moral heat which is surprising in an age often accused of feebleness. He does, however, resemble Lucan in spoiling some of his effects by want of light and shade, by a too-persistent flow of rhetoric. He seems unable to distinguish between harmless follies like playing the flute and real delinquencies like murdering one’s mother. He clearly draws far too black a picture of the men and morals of his day. But the pulpit from which he preaches is a high one.

If Juvenal is supreme over the poets of his time, Tacitus is as clearly monarch of the prose-writers. He was continuing the work of Livy and writing from the same republican standpoint. But for history-writing he had certainly discovered a finer style of rhetoric. Both are rhetoricians first and historians a long way after, but the packed epigrams of Tacitus say more in a line than Livy is capable of thinking in a chapter. In describing a battle, a riot, or a panic, or in painting some tragic scene, such as the death of Vitellius, Tacitus is unequalled. The freedom that was permitted to him and Suetonius in depicting the crimes and follies of the earlier Cæsars affords remarkable evidence of the freedom of letters under Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian. Here, again, it is necessary, as in the case of Juvenal, to beware of accepting too literally the severity of his criticisms upon the preceding generation. To praise the past at the expense of the present was one of the traditions of Roman literature. But Tacitus was the last of Rome’s great historians and his loss was irreparable.

All the erudition of the age added little to the real advance of learning except in the domain of law. Industrious compilers like Pliny the elder have preserved a great deal of ancient lore for our study, but they are for the most part utterly uncritical and unscientific. There were no scientific thinkers like Aristotle in the Roman world. Still, some text-books which served the Middle Ages for instruction were produced under the principate, such as Vitruvius on architecture, Strabo and Pomponius Mela on geography, Columella on agriculture, Quintilian on rhetoric, and Galen on medicine. The latter was state-physician to Marcus Aurelius and was employed by him to study and combat the terrible plague which the Roman army brought back from the East. But for medical science he added little to his Greek master Hippocrates. In just the same way, the philosophers came no nearer to the core of reality than their masters of the fourth and third centuries before Christ, hard though they toiled and much as they spoke and wrote. They were indeed learning, what the old Greeks had failed or scorned to learn, how to apply doctrines to life, but in depth of thought they were so far behind that they ceased even to be able to comprehend Aristotle. Even Philo, the profound and learned Jewish philosopher, is doing little more than to attempt an application of Platonic and other Greek ideas to the teaching of Moses. Such originality as there was in the world of letters still proceeded mainly from the provinces. Greece was still putting forth original contributors to literature like the novelist Lucian, the biographer and moralist Plutarch, Pausanias the guide-book writer, Dio Chrysostom and Apollonius the preachers. Africa produced a novelist in the mysterious quack-magician Apuleius. Spain sent forth a whole galaxy of talent in the two Senecas, Martial, Lucan, and Quintilian. The younger Seneca, Nero’s complacent tutor, is

perhaps the most typical figure in the literature of the principate. Trained as a rhetorician, like all the men of his day, his literary work consists of rhetorical drama and rhetorical philosophy, including some rhetorical science. No writer has ever attained to such a position of wealth and honour by the exercise of his pen. It cannot be said that Seneca’s position was gained without defilement, or that it brought him happiness. He was largely responsible by his weak compliance for the deterioration of character in his imperial pupil. If so, it brought its own retribution, for Nero drove him to suicide. Though Seneca’s tragedies are neglected to-day, they formed the connecting-link between Euripides and the stage of the Renaissance.

It will be seen that the principal defect of thought and literature under the Empire was its lack of originality. But, after all, that had always been the deficiency of Roman writers. It was due very largely to the overwhelming incubus of Greek civilisation, from whose leading-strings the Romans, to the end of time, never escaped. That in its turn arose chiefly through the nature of their education which turned all their attention to style as the end of literary endeavour. Any one who would argue against a classical education could find no better argument than the relations between the two “classical” peoples.

Art

With art it is much the same story; for the decoration of their villas and colonnades the Romans of the Empire continued to prefer their statues imported from Greece. Pausanias shows us that Greece, even in the second century A.D., was still teeming with works of art of every kind. Impoverished and shrunken as the old Greek cities were at this period, it shows some high-mindedness that they still retained treasures which would have fetched millions in the Trans-Adriatic markets. There was, however, a brisk trade in copies and imitations of the masterpieces. For statues, then, the Greek work of the fifth and fourth centuries almost destroyed any attempt at originality by the Romans. Only in portraiture was there much progress, and here work of great power and vigour was produced. It reaches the zenith perhaps under the Flavian emperors, but their successors of the Antonine period and later are often depicted on their busts with triumphant but unsparing realism. The bust of Philip the Arabian in the Vatican is one of the most striking. Sometimes it almost seems as if there was a malicious spirit of caricature in these too faithful portraits. Can Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher prince, have presented to the world a visage so weak and so tonsorially perfect?[71] Can Caracalla have borne his bloody mind so visibly written on his face?[72] In portraiture, there is certainly progress and not decay.

Otherwise, to judge by the remains, sculptors were almost confined to bas-relief. This was the medium chosen by emperor after emperor for the narration of his exploits, and advances were unquestionably made in the art of pictorial or narrative sculpture. That this is a high art in itself may, I think, be contested. One cannot escape from a sense of the practical futility of telling the history of the Dacian Wars on a serpentine band of ornament which soared away out of sight. It is rather characteristic of the plodding Roman, who so often lost sight of the wood in his faithful contemplation of the trees. If we look for the end to which this art of narrative relief was tending, we shall find it on the basis of the column of Antoninus Pius preserved in the Vatican garden.[73] These cavalrymen placidly gyrating round the group of standard-bearers, each on his own little shelf, are so extremely life-like as to recall nothing in the world so much as pieces of gingerbreads. We begin to perceive that Madame Tussaud would have been hailed as a great creative artist in Imperial Rome. Nevertheless, without subscribing to all the superlatives of Mrs. Strong, we may admit that Art was still alive and vigorous and still scoring fresh technical triumphs in the Antonine period and even later.

Roman archæologists have recently worked out the history of Imperial Art with some precision. The reign of Tiberius continued the classical tendencies of Augustus. Under Claudius there was great constructional activity, mainly of a utilitarian character. The Claudian aqueduct, whose immense arches in brick still break the level horizon of the Campagna, is one of the greatest works of this period.[74] Nero’s was an age of Greek curio-hunting; much of Rome was rebuilt after the great fire in his reign and the Golden House must have been a stupendous sight. But on his death the Romans made haste to obliterate all traces of his work. The Flavian epoch was the culminating-point of Roman art. Vespasian destroyed Nero’s Golden House and restored the Capitol. He and his sons built the baths of Titus, the Arch of Titus[75] with the celebrated Jewish relief, and the mighty Flavian Amphitheatre, the Colosseum.[76] This was built in the style already noticed in the theatre of Marcellus, namely, with the three Greek orders of architecture, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, adorning the three stories of the façade; but here, as so often, the Greek façade is a mere shell to hide the solid Roman masonry of which the building is really constructed. It is noteworthy that the monuments of this age refute the historians who allege among Domitian’s other sins that he tried to destroy the works and the memory of Titus, his more popular brother. In the technical language of Wickhoff, this Flavian Age shows us “illusionism” at its height in art. Under Trajan, and in his famous column, the art of continuous narration in low relief is fully developed.[77] Hadrian, the cultured, travelling Philhellene, encouraged a reversion to the classical traditions of Greek art. The art of his period was profoundly influenced by the type of Antinous, a beautiful youth beloved by the emperor, whose romantic death by drowning in the Nile made a powerful impression upon the whole Roman world, because he was believed to have sacrificed his life for his emperor’s in obedience to an oracle. This type is preserved for us in many forms, but most notably in the colossal Mondragore bust in the Louvre[78] and the bas-relief in the Villa Albani.[79] His features were utilised to represent all the young male gods on Olympus. In their tragic beauty we see a mirror of Greece tinged by the Orient, as if Dionysus had wedded Isis and this were the offspring. The Antonine period, as exhibited on the panels in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, is gifted with immense technical fluency and, as Mrs. Strong remarks, a new spiritual seriousness. As compositions they are superb, but the weakness of expression in the face of Marcus Aurelius himself quite spoils their effect for some spectators.[80]

Architecture was still mainly designed in the three Greek modes variously combined, in spite of the fact that Rome had progressed far beyond Greek limits in constructional ability. Roman builders could manage a roof-span far in excess of the Greeks. The Roman arch gave a strength in concrete vaulting which expensive marble was unable to attain. Roman brickwork denuded of the marble incrustations which generally covered it of old is probably more impressive in its ruins than it was when it was draped with Hellenism, and, to me at least, remains like the aqueduct at Pont du Gard[81] and the Bridge of Alcantara[82] seem truer witnesses of the grandeur of Rome than all the marbles in all the museums. The celebrated Castle of St. Angelo, which still keeps watch and ward over the Tiber, is nothing but the core of Hadrian’s tomb—the Moles Hadriani—once clad in a vestment of Greek marbles and covered with Greek ornament.[83] The Pantheon, in spite of the inscription which ascribes it to Agrippa, is proved by the marks on its bricks to be a restoration of Hadrian’s time. It is indeed a superb example of vaulting and a miracle of construction. The plan is that of a dome so constructed that if the sphere were complete it would rest upon the earth. The magnificent interior has lost little of its ancient splendour.[84]

For temple architecture, although the Romans had adopted the forms of Greek art they had wholly deserted the spirit of austere self-restraint upon which that art had rested. Thus they readily adopted the luxuriance of the East when it came to hand. In the splendid ruins of Heliopolis (Ba’albek) and Palmyra we see a riotous luxuriance of ornament which would have shocked the religious sense of Ictinus, but which fitly enshrined the ritual and mysteries of the Sungod. This craze for the colossal would have made the reverential Greeks tremble in fear of provoking the Nemesis of a jealous Heaven, but in its ruins it has left us superb and awful reminders of the riches and grandeur of its authors, and of the end of all riches and grandeur.

In domestic building the Romans had almost as little regard as the Greeks for the exterior elevation of their villas and palaces. The Roman gentleman still made it his favourite hobby to collect villas, and Pliny had almost as many as Cicero. But the main idea of the villa was comfort, and the main idea of Roman comfort was coolness, quiet, and beautiful scenery. Thus the wealthy man’s house consisted of a series of marble courts and cloisters spread over the ground regardless of space. Landscape and landscape-gardening were the most charming features. The Roman appreciated the scenery of Como or Sirmione, Tivoli or Naples quite as keenly as the tourist of to-day. He thought much of fresh air and good water. Nearly all Roman gentlemen were agreed in considering Rome itself, with its smells, its noise, and its perils by fire, as a pestilent place of abode, and they gladly fled to their country estates at Præneste or Baiæ. Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli[85] included reproductions of many famous buildings which he had seen and admired on his travels. The decoration of these villas encouraged two minor arts which figure prominently among their remains. The floors were commonly adorned with marble mosaic, of which we still have some charming examples.[86] The interior walls were incrusted either with marble, in the wealthier houses, or stuccoed and painted. Hence, it results that the Art of Painting is represented to us almost solely by mosaics, wall-frescoes,[87] and a few portraits on Egyptian mummy-cases. Nothing remains of the great masters of antiquity, Polygnotus, Zeuxis, and Apelles. But there may be faint echoes of their work on the frescoes of Pompeii executed by unnamed decorators. Even so there is great charm in much of this work. Professor Mau, the great authority on Pompeii, has distinguished four successive phases of painting in that city. At first the aim was to imitate the marble slabs used to cover the walls of the rich man’s house. Then growing bolder the painter imitates various forms of architectural treatment dividing up his wall space into panels and portraying cornices, columns, pilasters, and so forth. This is roughly the style of the first century B.C., and it is found in the so-called house of Livia on the Palatine Hill at Rome.[88] The third style, which Mau terms the “ornate,” was prevalent until about A.D. 50.

The architectural features now make no pretence at illusion. The columns have become mere bands of colour, and there is profuse ornament everywhere. The colours are somewhat cold. The fourth or “intricate” style once more emphasises the architectural character of the decoration, but the patterns are too intricate to present any appearance of reality. The whole wall space shows a riot of fantastic ornament often extremely graceful and effective. Flying goddesses and cupids impart a sense of airy lightness, and floral forms festoon themselves in charming curves. The pictures are smaller and the spaces wider. No more pleasing treatment of the interior walls of a house has ever been devised, at any rate for warm climates. The destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79 brings the history of ancient painting to a premature close.[89] The subjects of the pictures are almost exclusively mythological.

The minor arts of the jeweller, the gem-engraver, the goldsmith reach a high state of technical perfection, but they do not improve in spirit or artistic feeling with the progress of the ages. Much of the furniture found at Pompeii and Herculaneum, especially the bronze-work,[90] exhibits most graceful forms, always Greek in inspiration.

Law

The greatest intellectual achievement of the Roman people was in the domain of law. The spiritual endowment of the typical Roman included all the qualities of the lawyer—a sense of equity that was quite devoid of sentimentalism, an instinct for order, discipline, and business, a language of great clarity and precision, and above all, a devotion to ceremonies and formulæ which sternly rejected abstract casuistry. Their law took its rise in a series of religious formulæ known only to priests and to the king as chief priest. The Twelve Tables put some of the most ancient principles into words, and partly from their use as a text-book of education, were regarded almost with as much veneration as the Two Tables of Moses. They were, in fact, sometimes considered as the sole fountain of jurisprudence, or at any rate as the sole code of written law. The legislative enactments of the State were on a far lower plane and no ancient people ever considered its legislature capable of turning out a daily quota of legislation as modern parliaments are supposed to do. In the main the fabric of Roman jurisprudence consisted of “case law” made by the judges on the tribunals. The Prætor Urbanus made the Civil Law of Rome, and this became permanent by means of the system of Perpetual Edicts. Religion continued to control the international law of the Roman world, an affair of ceremonies in the hands of the priestly college of heralds—the jus fetiale. But, meanwhile, the prætor peregrinus who had to decide cases between non-citizens was gradually accumulating a body of law, wrongly termed international, in the jus gentium. It was observed that there was a great deal in common between the various codes of the Italian and other Mediterranean States, and this was put together in the foreign prætor’s edict. The more philosophical jurists, inspired with the Stoic doctrines about following nature, evolved the theory that this common element of various nations was nothing but the Natural Law, jus naturæ. It was a fruitful error, and it lies at the base of much of the modern “international law” as expounded by Grotius and other seventeenth-century jurists.

The Civil Law of Rome was in the main, then, a series of precedents handed down by prætor to prætor from times beyond record. To it was added a large body of “counsel’s opinions” which drew their validity largely from the eminence of their authors. It was Hadrian who set about the systematisation of these. He organised the jurisprudentes into a regular profession. He appointed his “counsellors” from the leading barristers of the day, and he gave to the whole body of responsa prudentium, “the opinions of the learned,” the validity of statutory law. The justice and precision of the civil law was the most attractive feature of Roman civilisation to the barbarian world. Gallic and British communities made haste to learn Latin in order that they might gain the “Latin right” which admitted them to the privilege of enjoying Roman law. In A.D. 212, Caracalla, who did little else to deserve the gratitude of posterity, uttered a single edict called the “Antonine Constitution” which admitted the whole empire to the privileges of Roman citizenship. Now a single code ran throughout the whole Western world. Hadrian had set his most distinguished lawyers, under the leadership of Salvius Julianus, to codify the “perpetual edict” of the prætors. It was under the Antonines that some citizen from the East, who is only known to us by the common prænomen of Gaius, wrote those learned “Institutes of Roman Law” which are still the nursery of our lawyers. But it was the great Eastern emperor Justinian (A.D. 527-565) who codified the whole body of civil law in a series of immense documents. Roman law had already conquered its barbarian conquerors, the Goths, and almost every European legal system except our own is based upon that ancient law which arose from the Twelve Tables and the prætor’s edict. The canon law of the Church was Roman law in its essence.

Philosophy and Religion

Much attention has been paid in recent years to the religious development of the Romans under the Empire, and to the momentous conflict of religions which was going on from the age of Hadrian until the final triumph of Christianity. Humanly speaking, it was “touch and go” between several religions competing for the vacant place in the faith of the Empire, and at the last the strife was practically narrowed down to a duel between two oriental monotheistic systems, Mithraism[91] and Christianity. The subject is too vast for anything like adequate treatment here. But I would emphasise one point of view which is often overlooked.

The Roman state is too often regarded merely as the enemy and persecutor of the Christian religion. It is forgotten how large a share Rome may claim in its establishment. Not only did the Romans discover Christianity, but they organised it and sent it forth conquering and to conquer in the wake of the legions. It is not a case of a wicked and corrupt people suddenly converted in the midst of its sins. On the contrary it is easy to show that the thinkers of the Roman Empire were tending towards philosophic and religious ideas which made them ready to accept with astonishing rapidity both the ethical teaching and the theological revelations of the Son of God. It is unnecessary to remind the modern reader how large a part the Greek philosophy of Stoicism with its Roman modifications had played in shaping the thoughts of one Roman citizen, Paul of Tarsus. Philo, the Alexandrian Platonist, had developed a doctrine of the Divine Logos, which profoundly influenced the philosophy of the fourth Evangelist, and through him the whole course of Christian teaching.

The Romans may have added little to abstract philosophy or to metaphysics, but they made the somewhat barren abstractions of Zeno the Stoic into something more than a philosophy, into a faith which had a power to influence conduct far beyond the power of the State system of half-Greek Olympian Gods. If the power and the sincerity of a religion may be tested rather by its martyrs than by its proselytes, Stoicism had a worthy record. Men like Thrasea Pætus, Helvidius Priscus, and Barea Soranus were facing the tyrant’s frown for the sake of their Stoic sense of duty, just as truly as Peter and Polycarp.

The attitude of the Roman Government towards Christianity has been too often explained to need more than a brief recapitulation. At first Christianity was confounded with Judaism, which had already begun to make converts at Rome without seeking for them. The Roman government was extraordinarily tolerant towards creed, but it demanded an external compliance with the Cæsar-worship, which it was imposing on the provinces as a test of loyalty. But the Christians did not take the divine command “render unto