ENGLISH DOOR

THE DIVINE HISTORY OF JESUS CHRIST

CHAPTER VI.

PAGAN LITERATURE.—I. POETRY.

The deeper we penetrate Roman society of the fifth century the more obvious appears its necessary, but not total dissolution. In religion and law we have already seen the mixture of perishable elements and the immortal principles which were to survive gaining, rather than losing, from the destruction of the former. Literature would seem to afford a different spectacle; that if the idea of holiness was veiled from antiquity by carnal and bloody thoughts, that of justice troubled by the arrogance of the strong and their oppression of the weak, it at least had nothing to correct, nothing to lose, without irreparable loss for the future, and that in respect to art, those men of the North, Celts, Germans, Slavs, just coming from their forests, could do nothing better than learn at the feet of Latin masters their eloquence and poetry. But it was not so; the fifth century preserved the traditions of art, but overlaid by all the defects and vices of the Decline, and we shall see what forces had to be overcome in order to set her free.

The Latin decline in literature began with the reign of Augustus, simultaneously with the end of liberty. The historical commonplace, that inspiration can only flourish with freedom, seems, indeed, contestable, and expressly belied by facts, as in the case of this very age of Augustus, that of the Medicis, and of Louis XIV and every other in which a huge despotism, covered with a shadow, deadly to liberty, beneficial to genius, the whole aspect of things. But the defenders of this position forget that the great princes who have given name to these golden ages of letters have not opened, but closed them, and, therefore, left, as it were, their inscription on their sepulchres. Augustus began by sell­ing to Antony the head of Cicero; and so calming, as, according to his contemporaries, he calmed everything—even eloquence—he rather extinguished it, and though surrounded forthwith by poets, they had received their training in the midst of the civil war, within hearing of Philippi and Actium. Later, the Medicis embraced Italian literature, still quivering with Guelph or Ghibeline passion and the breath of Dante, to leave it to slumber for three centuries at the feet of women. Louis XIV was heir to a century still seething with the tempest of the League and the generous errors of the Fronde, but entered upon another destined to waste itself in the antechambers of courtesans and courtiers; so that all these Maecenas patrons of literature’s golden age did but raise a common though splendid sepulchre for both liberty and genius.

Advancing into the ages of the Empire, servitude becomes heavier, and its shadows more obscure. Yet the reigns of Christian emperors, often accused of hastening the Decline, in giving some liberty to men’s minds, restored a particle of inspiration to literature. Symmachus, an unsuspected witness, tells us that Valentinian, after Julian’s philosophic reign, restored public judicial debates, and as a pagan author, praises him for putting an end to the silence. If eloquence could revive at all,it would have been at  these Roman tribunals, haunted by such great memories, still instinct with the genius of Cicero: but it was not destined to gain recognition beyond their precincts.

Poetry, favoured by Constantine’s liberality, regained an inspiration to which she had been a stranger nearly three hundred years. The fifth century offering to our view at first sight only palace intrigues, and the quarrels of eunuchs, was of all centuries the most capable of inspiring a great epic poem. Rome had always loved the heroic songs which brought back to life the glory of her great men and military achievement; but she required a form of poetry known to, but not preferred by, Greece—the historic form, rather than the mythical epopee, and from the “Annals” of Ennius to the “Pharsalia” of Lucan and the “Punic War” of Silius Italicus claimed as especially her own the poets who followed the course of her history, and expressed it in language worthy of its glory. The scene was now enlarged, the struggle grown more terrible. The barbarians were at her gates. Though always conquered and repulsed by the prowess of Constantine, the sense of Julian, the genius and firmness of Theodosius, no one could tell which way the balance held by Fate would incline. And another mightier and more lasting conflict was proceeding; and as the poet showed us from Trojan ramparts the pha­lanxes of heaven joined in battle far above, so we see far over these earthly contests the great duel between Paganism and Christianity being fought out; no one unenlightened by Christian principle being on the morrow of Julian’s death able to predict the issue. Here, as in the “ Iliad,” a world-struggle was in progress, not between East and West alone, but between two halves of the human race, and it was again as if the immortals had descended from the clouds to fight under the light of day in the thickest of the battle. But the poet was wanting to describe it, or rather he was there, but mistook its meaning.

The poet of the fifth century was Claudian, a native of the learned city of Alexandria, and of that Egypt under whose vaunted sky the labourer, served by the waters of Nile, need never call the clouds to his help. He sang passionately of his city, wherein the whole learning of ancient time was stored—parent of Calli­machus and Apollonius, at whose schools Virgil and Horace had not disdained to study, and the poet him­self had been formed and trained. In 395 he appeared in still pagan Rome amidst universal homage from the partisans of the old cult, who were overjoyed at hearing the brilliant youth belaud their gods at the moment when their fall had been proclaimed. Public admiration bore him to the highest honours, and leave was obtained from Christian emperors to erect him a statue in Trajan’s forum beside the great poets of anti­quity, bearing on the base an inscription ascribing to him Virgil’s intelligence and Homer’s muse.

In obtaining such favours for him a more powerful protector was joined with the senate in the person of Stilicho, to whose suite the poet was attached. He sang of his victories, combats, repose, pleasures, vices, and crimes, and accompanied the tutor of Honorius, the conqueror of the Goths, to the end of his career, and when he perished at the assassin’s hand was sprinkled with his blood. Claudian thereupon, in disgrace and persecuted, addressed a poem to Adrian, the praetorian prefect, to implore him to show pity, to stay his hand, and suffer him to breathe freely in retirement, and, with the deplorable license of flattery, comparing the prefect to Achilles, reminded him that he did not show fury over the remains of Hector.

Manibus Hectoreis atrox ignovit Achilles.

This man’s genius lay precisely in his errors. Born in a Christian age, he lived by power of an intense imagi­nation, surrounded by the associations of pagan antiquity, and like the gods who walk the earth in mist, so he could only speak in an atmosphere of fable which hid the truth. At this epoch temples were everywhere being closed, except at Rome, where, however, the Galilaean Fisherman had conquered Jupiter Olympu; yet he began a Gigantomachia, to celebrate Jove’s victory over the giants. As the time was approaching for the temple of Ceres at Catania to receive the image of the Blessed Virgin on its altar, he was composing a poem in three books on the Rape of Proserpine. The genii of the levelled temples, the inspiration of the Delphic tripod, had passed on to his lips to bring forth no eloquent defence or apology of his menaced gods that would link his fame to that of Symmachus, and confute those of the most glorious confessors, but only to teach us, with great noise and parade, how the infernal god carried Ceres’ lovely daughter from the meadows of Enna:

My mind, swollen (with poetry), bids me set forth in bold verse the horses of the hellish ravisher, the stars, the Tsenarian chariot, and profound Juno’s misty couch.

But it was not mere fancy; in Claudian’s errors and forgetfulness there was plenty of political significance. The pagan society that had received the new comer with transport and loaded him with favours, in making him the poet of its predilection, and which consisted chiefly of the senatorial families, had embraced the policy, according to the speech of Sallust the rhetorician to Julian, of treating Christianity as a passing whim of some infatuated minds, which would soon fade and leave them to return to the religion of their ancestors. Pagans, formerly so disturbed at these Christians, whom they had treated to menace, to the arenas, execu­tioners, or lions, whom they had accused of treason and a desire to undermine the Empire, contented themselves now with the calmer method of ignoring them as of little account at present, and to be non-existent to posterity. Claudian passed without recognition amidst the Christian glories of the century, in ignorance of St. Augustine and St. Ambrose, who did him on the contrary the honour of quoting from his writings, never attacking Christianity directly but once in his private life, when he hurled the following epigram at Jacobus, a military prefect, for the great crime of disapproving his poetry:

By the ashes of Paul, by hoary Peters shrine, hurt not,

O Jacob, my verses. If, instead of shield,

Thomas protect thy breast and Bartholomew goes

with thee to battle as companion ;

if by the aid of the saints the barbarian may not cross the Alps;

so may also holy Susanna give thee her strength.—

So the use of sarcasm against Christianity is not modern, and in writing a history of Voltairianism we have to go back long before Voltaire.

But the Roman aristocracy rarely allowed its poet such compromising liberties, for it had other services to extract from him. Claudian had been made the poet laureate of its solemnities, of its interests, and of its passions. He was its spokesman; not, indeed, in prose, which might have incurred blame through excess, but in the language of the gods, which could be accused of no liberty, and in which he might recall, from time to time, expressions of Virgil or of Homer. He was spokesman in those great events which were stirring every mind, the war against Gildo or Alaric, the fall of Rufinus or Eutropius; and then it was that he appeared at Rome, Milan, or Ravenna before Honorius, Stilicho, and the high dignitaries of the Empire, to speak in the name of the great senatorial assembly and the aristocracy of Rome; to treat these Christian poten­tates as he would have treated Augustus and his court ; to envelop them in a cloud of words breathing, as it were, idolatrous incense and the perfume of sacrifice; and entangle them in a sort of complicity with the Paganism which they were not strong enough to disperse. Had he to praise Theodosius, he represented him, after giving his last advice to Stilicho, as taking flight for heaven, like Romulus of old, traversing the milky way, cleaving to right and left the shadows which pressed respectingly on his course, leaving far behind him Apollo, Mercury, and Jupiter, and taking his place on the highest summit of the empyrean, whilst his star rose in the east, to take another loving glance at his son Arcadius, and set regretfully on the dominions of Honorius, in the Western Empire. Thus did the poet of this century sing of the apotheosis of the greatest defenders and crowned servants of Christianity. Still bolder and freer was Ids tone in addressing the young Honorius, not hesitating on the occasion of his marriage to Mary to picture Love and Cupid coming to pierce the heart of the prince with their darts, and departing to boast of his exploits to Venus in her Cyprian palace, of which he gave a sounding description. The goddess, borne by a triton, crossed the seas, arrived at Ravenna, and entering the palace of the espoused, found them reading the ancient poets. The odes of Sappho (the reading of which pagans forbade to their children) was what Claudian placed in the hands of the young bride of Honorius.

But there was a greater solemnity for him. In the year 404, when Honorius had reigned nine years, preferring the Christian city of Ravenna to Rome, which was still bound to the false gods, and having issued three edicts against Paganism, he decided, after long hesitation, to go to Rome, to celebrate his sixth consu­late. He took possession of the old palace of Augustus, on the Palatine, and gathered around  him that divided Senate, the majority of which was still deploring the overthrow of the altar of Victory. In that great assembly, wherein the Christians preponderated by influence, if not by number, Claudian came forward charged to make known the wishes of the Senate and people, and from a parchment on which his verses were written in letters of gold related a dream:—“Balmy sleep gives back to our calmed hearts all the thoughts that during the day have troubled our souls. The hunter dreams of the woods, the judge of his tribunal, and the skilful rider thinks in sleep to pass a fancied goal. Me, also, does the worship of the muses pursue in the silence of night, and brings me back to an accus­tomed task. I dreamt that in the midst of heaven’s starry vault I was bringing my songs to the feet of mighty Jove, and, as sleep has its sweet illusions, thought I saw the hallowed choir of the gods applaud­ing my words. I sang of the vanquished giants, Enceladus and Typhoeus, and of the joy with which heaven received Jupiter, all radiant with triumph. But no vain image deceived me. No ivory gate sent me forth a deceitful vision. Here is the prince, the world’s master, high as Olympus. There in truth that assembly which I saw, an assembly of gods. Sleep could show me nothing more excellent, and the Court has rivalled heaven.”* Nothing at once more polished or more pagan could be said. After this brilliant exordium he continued. First he vowed a temple to Fortune (Fortuna redux), since Rome and the consulate had recovered their majesty. When Apollo abandoned for a moment his splendid home at Delphi the laurel became but a common shrub, the oracles were dumb; but as the god’s return gave voice to caves and forests, so did Mount Palatine revive at the presence of the new deity and remembered the Caesars who for so many ages had dwelt therein. “Truly no other home suits as well the masters of the world, no other mount exalt so highly the imperial power or more dominion to the supreme law,- turning as it does over the forum and the vanquished rostra. Behold the sacred palace everywhere environed by temples. How the gods guard it round ! Before me I behold Jove’s sanc­tuary, the mighty steeps of the Tarpeian rock, sculp­tured porticoes, statues that rise toward heaven, holy buildings whose crowded roofs darken the sky. I perceive the columns studded with many a ship-beak in iron and numberless arches charged with spoils. Respected Prince, dost thou not recognize thy house­hold gods?”

There was more than imagination or empty pomp in such verses. They read a bold lesson to the prince who had deserted Rome to hide himself in Ravenna, and it was not without temerity that Claudian called him back to his pagan penates, to Mount Palatine as a place still defended by the divine sentinels which are standing around.

But a fine sentiment of Roman patriotism pushed to a singular degree in a native of Alexandria explains and gives a reason for the poet’s unusual audacity. It was a proof of the deep feeling of unity with which Rome had infected all the*' nations under her sway. Claudian had digested the whole of Roman antiquity, and was penetrated with the spirit of Latin heroism. He filled his verse with the names of the Fabricii, Decii, and Scipios ; not as mere verbiage to stock the edifice of an empty poetry, but as living thoughts restoring, if but for a moment, the faded past. Not Jupiter, in whom he only half believed, nor Ceres, nor Proserpine, but Rome was the true divinity of Clau­dian ; Rome as she was pictured on her monuments and seen in the public places or in the temples which even in Asian cities had been dedicated to her name. “Rushing forth on a chariot, followed in breathless course by her two. outriders, Terror and Impetuosity, with helmeted head and bare shoulder, in her hand the sword of victory, turned now against Parthian, now against German.” Such was the deity of his dreams, and in admiration of her stern beauty he was never weary.

At other times, quitting his rich and florid mytho­logy, he seized the very idea of Rome in her career of conquest and legislation, expressing it with an accuracy worthy of a historian or a lawyer. “She is the mother of arms and of law; she has stretched her empire over the world, and given to law her earliest cradle; she alone received the vanquished to her bosom, and gave her name as consolation to the human race, treating it not as its queen, but its mother. She made citizens of those she had conquered, and bound earth’s extremities by a chain of love. By her peaceful genius, we find all of us our country under foreign skies, and change ourd welling with impunity. Through her it is but play to visit the frozen shores of Thule and penetrate regions whose very name caused our fathers horror. Through her we drink at will of the Rhine or Orontes; through her we are but one people, and her empire will know no end. The Sibyl has given her promise, Jupiter thunders but for her, and Pallas covers her with her whole aegis.”

I have treated of Claudian in detail, as being the next in the rank of poets to Lucan, and do not shrink from putting him above Statius and all subsequent poets, on account of a singular brilliancy of imagery, an astonish­ing richness of metaphor, and a warmth of tone which often called forth the true light of poetic diction. But I cannot veil his faults, in devoting such great qualities to the service of a religion which no longer inspired any mind ; for Paganism had its time of inspiration in days when it was sustained by a kind of faith, as when Homer pictured a Jupiter the movement of whose eye­brow made the world tremble, with such deep religious truth that the poet himself seemed awed by the mighty image he had just evoked. Virgil, too, in less degree, lighted upon some measure of the same inspiration, when he called us to assist at the foundation of the Roman Destiny, at that assembly of gods wherein it was decided that the stones of the Capitol should never be displaced. But Claudian scarcely believed in these gods; he used them as so many actors to pour forth school harangues, and only brought forward Jupiter, Juno, and Pluto to treat of some common­place about glory or pardon, farewell or despair. It was worse when he disposed them as so many slaves in the train of his protectors; made them march behind the chariot of Stilicho, or hurled them in pursuit of such of his enemies as Rufinus; and in this all the badness and servility of that pagan society, whose disorders we have glanced at, was at once betrayed. Like his friends, the Roman senators, he offered vows in secret for the triumph of Arbogastes or Eugenius, whom he disowned on their fall—finding, when one had died on the battle-field; and the other had, like Brutus at Philippi, fallen on his own sword, nothing but poetic insults for their memory. When Rufinus, again sur­rounded by his enemies, was torn in pieces, his head carried one way, his arms another, and the fragments' of his body a third, Claudian showed a savage joy, and could not gloat sufficiently over the blood which he saw flow with the same pleasure as Diana felt when her dogs tore Actaeon limb from limb, and exclaimed, “Happy was the hand which first was plunged into such blood as that.”

Mankind could scarcely inspire the poets of this time more than the gods. The familiarity of Augustus, the elegant and prudent commerce he sustained with his poets, was efficient to encourage the muses of Virgil and Horace; he wished for flattery, but the more delicate it was, the more did it please him. Far dif­ferent was the courtiership of the Lower Empire to which our poet cringed. Stilicho was a Vandal, and Eutropius an eunuch, but Claudian was their hired servant, owing them verses in return for every benefit they conferred. All antiquity then was sacrificed to Stilicho; he was compared to the Scipios, who had patronized poetry, but he was raised to a higher place. Serena, his wife, was invited to give her auspices to the poet’s marriage, and in an invitatory epistle in verse, by which he announced it to the great princess, he reminded her that Juno assisted at those of Orpheus, and hints that the queen of earth will not suffer herself to be excelled in generosity by the queen of heaven.

In such phrases he addressed a Christian guilty of the unpardonable crimes in his pagan eyes of burning the Sibylline books, and of snatching from the goddess in the temple of Ceres her necklace, whilst repulsing with a kick the ancient vestal who reproached her with the sacrilege.

Thus all the poet’s Paganism was incapable of ex­tracting from him a word of ill-will towards the enemies of his religion, and he includes them all in a generous forgiveness. This leaning towards panegyric was a sign of a degradation of morality; not only did it take from the poet all moral dignity, but was inimical to the spirit of poetry. The panegyrist, in fact, cannot take the truly great and heroic as the object of his verse. He must praise and immortalize everything—take his hero at his birth, and follow him through his childish games; and when Honorius could not lead his armies in person, find a reason for his inaction in declaring the boy of nine to be busied in philosophic study at the moment when he was sought for that he might be made Augustus. Such is the law of panegyric.

The publicity with which these compositions were declaimed, and the custom of public readings of them, brought the poets of the Decline to the oblivion which was their destiny. It has been ingeniously shown how this custom, unknown to the time of Virgil—the self­conceited habit introduced by Pollio, and encouraged later by Nero, of bringing a multitude together at the recital of a poem—contributed profoundly to stifle genius by degrading it to a mere literary game and pastime for men of culture. When a whole people is addressed, there must be some common thoughts, which must be eloquent to gain hearers—simple to gain appreciation. But when only a cloyed and captious handful of so-called fine spirits, who boast of never admiring, because that faculty seems redolent of simplicity, is in question, then, instead of mere emo­tion, there must be astonishment. It is the principle of periods of decline to strain every nerve to astound by the deep science of the matter and the excessive refinement of the form. As to the former, it is at such times that we meet with those myth-loving poets, astronomers, geographers, naturalists, who will put into their Latin verse everything—whether the pheno­mena of Aratus, the astronomy of Ptolemy, or descrip­tions of the earth by some other ancient—except poetry itself. As to the latter, everything is sacrificed to minute detail—to culture, refinement—to the budding of a happy phrase, hid in some word as in a germ, which is developed, enlarged, watered, cherished, till at last it displays its whole foliage to some delighted assembly.

This was the method of Claudian, whereby he struggled to show himself the most learned man of antiquity. His whole art lay in detaching phrases, in rounding periods, refining and polishing the points which were to hold the memory and be learnt by rote, for whereas few knew separate scraps of the “ Aeneid” or ‘‘ Iliad,” of which the whole or none must be known, no one who had ever heard it forgot the opening of Claudian’s poem against Rufinus:—

Saepe mihi dubiam traxit sententia mentem,

Curarent superi terras, an nullus inesset

Rector, et incerto fluerent mortalia casu.

I pass over the stirring lines which follow, in which he developes at length the Stoic thesis, and which ended in these verses, to which he was bound to come at any price :—

Abstulit himc primum Rufini poena tumultum,

Absolvitque deus.

One of the chief secrets of the literature of the Decline was this cutting the line and arresting the sentence after the first hemistich, instead of finishing together the poetic period and the idea; another pro­cess to excite surprise was hit upon, the finishing the idea before the line, which was thought an achieve­ment. Herein lay all Claudian’s defects. He was great in promises, as in beginning his invective against Rufinus by invoking heaven and earth. His works were full of that flourish, that passion for erudition and exaggeration of form, as well as the hidden un­belief suddenly revealed in his pretension of judging and absolving the gods, of whose justice he was not sure. The faults of Claudian himself, and of the Decline, lay in that master-vice of scepticism which had strangled faith, and with it inspiration. We might still after Claudian treat of poets animated by the breath of heathenism, were it good to lengthen the history of a death-struggle.

Some fire still burned in the breast of Rutilius Numantianus, who also honoured in Rome the mistress of law and arms, the uniter of the world into a single faith. Many a feature might be added to our sketch of pagan society from the bold heathenism of this poet’s writings. Claudian had scarcely ventured on one stealthy epigram against Jacobus, but Rutilius, on his return voyage from Rome to Marseilles, having passed the island of Capraria, which he found tenanted by monks, shows us what he thought of these men of black robe and stern countenance, whom he qualified as hating the light:—“ Called from a Greek word monks, as wishing to live without witnesses; flying the gifts of fortune to avoid the blows, making themselves wretched that they may not know misery. What can that fury of the troubled brain be which carries so far the terror of evil as not to undergo what is good?” These words of Rutilius were to be repeated later by the Proven9al poets, by the calumnious minstrels of the langue d’oil in their perpetual strife with the clergy, and so to be banded from age to age, to our fathers, to ourselves, who, perhaps, may think them new.

It would be more interesting to follow this pagan poetry at the moment in which it fell in some manner under Christian influence, in the writings of Ausonius in the fourth and Sidonius Apollinaris in the fifth century. The latter followed his master Claudian; like him framing epithalamia, panegyrics, and sonnets on pagan models, evoking with his pen Thetis and Peleus, Venus and Cupid, and composing pieces to be learnt by heart. In one of these he shows Rome appearing helmetless, dragging painfully her lance and buckler in the assembly of the gods, and complaining that she, the former mistress of the world, should now be under the domination of the Caesars, but at least, she exclaimed, if I must serve, let heaven send me a Trajan! Jupiter accordingly sent her Avitus, who reigned but one year, and amid thorough disorder, but he was the father-in-law of Sidonius. The poet excused the imperfection of his verse by the presence of the barbarians—those men of six feet high, with hair greased with rancid butter, who surrounded him importunately, stunned him with rude songs wild as their own forests, and took from him the liberty of mind necessary to inspiration. Fortunatus was not so sensitive, but though he lived at the court of these terrible patrons, he had not forgotten his Claudian. In leaving Italy he had brought carefully under his mantle the roll of his master’s poetry, had studied and assimilated it, and when the great event of a marriage between Sigebert and the beautiful Brunehaut came to pass, was happy in finding an occasion for his recollections, in bringing Cupid from Cyprus to the wedding, to affiance these barbarians, in making Love sing the praise of the prince and Venus of the princess, another Venus, fairer than the Nereids, to whom the river gods were happy to offer their nymphs.

                 Ipsa sua subdunt tibi flumina nymphas.

Venus and Amor little knew that the lovely Spaniard, the young princess of the barbarians, the world’s delight, would one day be dragged by the hair at the tail of a wild charger, amidst the yells of a barbarian army. As the pagan divinities and Jupiter himself had lost their power of foretelling such a future, so also had¹ the epopee left these undiscerning deities for the camp of the once despised barbarian; and was to be found then, as ever, to her shame, on the side of the victors. As with Greek against Trojan, as with the Roman against the world, so now with the barbarian against Rome. It lurked in those songs of the people which told of the beautiful Sigurd, conqueror of the dragon, and grouped around his myth the heroes of the invasion; in those which pictured Attila, the world’s subduer, dying of hunger, a despairing captive in the depths of a cavern, gold-surrounded but shut in by iron doors, while his enemy bade him “ Surfeit thyself with gold—take thy fill of money.” It was with Theodoric hunting wild beasts in the forest, and then having become Christian in his old age, appearing on earth from time to time, in the belief of the Swabian peasantry, to announce to men the disasters of the Empire. Such was the destiny of the poetry which Rome had thought all her own.

The theatre had not fallen before the vices of the de­generate Romans of the Decline, or the scandal of the gladiatorial and mimetic shows, or before the rivalry from the readings, or an exhausted treasury. It had not suc­cumbed to the decrees of Christian emperors, for though they had at first expressly suspended theatrical repre­sentations, a law of Arcadius in 399, levelled against certain impurities therein, disclaimed any intention of suppressing them, lest the people should be dispirited. It remained, and Claudian reckoned among the inaugurators of the consulate of Mallius, actors of the sock and of the buskin, devoted respectively to tragedy and comedy: thus at the end of the fourth century we find two contemporary comedies: one the “ Game of the Seven Sages,” from the pen of Ausonius, a subject dear to the Middle Age, and often repeated, consisted of monologue in which each of the seven successively enunciated his wise maxims with all fit dramatic surroundings; the other, “Querolus,” was also a work of the fourth century, and has been brought forward in the skilful comments of M. Magnin as a strong proof of the con­tinuity of theatrical tradition.

The prologue commences by asking silence and a hearing from the audience for a barbarian who wished to revive the learned games of Greece and Latin anti­quity, for he followed the steps of Plautus in imitating the “Aulularius.” The first who entered on the scene was an entirely pagan personage in the shape of the family Lar, and he appeared, as will be seen, before a society in full decay. The plot was as follows:—An old miser named Euclion, having hidden his money in an urn, filled it for better concealment with ashes, and inscribed upon it that it contained the remains of his father; he then departed with light heart on a long journey. On the way he died, having made one of his parasites co-heir with his son, and charged him to tell the latter that all the gold the old man had amassed was to be found in a certain urn. The parasite arrived and, fully resolved to reap the sole profit of the legacy, passed himself off as a magician, and was introduced by Querolus, the miser’s son, into his house. There he was left alone, and having ransacked the premises and found only one urn, the inscription of which told him that it held ashes, in a rage threw it out of window: it broke at the feet of Querolus, and thus betrayed the secret. The parasite was imprudent enough to claim his share, and brought forward the will, but Querolus replied, “Either you knew what the urn held, in which case I shall treat you as a thief, or you did not, in which case I shall have you punished as a violator of tombs.” And so the comedy ended. But it affords another page to add to those already cited, and complete what our classic education often slurs over—the reverse side of that splendid Roman antiquity; for not only does Querolus lash with his satire everything public, official, and solemn in the old society, and expose the perfidy and cupidity of the pagan priests by showing, for instance, how they denounced all the offerings and other impostures which were essential to the system of worship; not only does he ridicule the whole crew of divines, augurs, and astrologers who fattened on public credulity, but he shows us the honest man of Paganism one to be honoured by mortals and protected by the gods.

The Lar set forth the plot in these terms :—“I am,” he said, “the guardian and inhabitant of this my assigned house; I temper Fate’s decrees for it; if any good luck is promised I press it on, if bad, I soften the blow. I rule the affairs of this Querolus, who is neither agreeable nor the reverse. At present he is in want of nothing; soon we shall make him very rich, and he will deserve it, for if you think that we don’t treat worthy people according to their worth you are mistaken.”

Knowing Querolus’ bad temper, he promises himself a laugh at his expense. Soon Querolus enters, and asks why the bad are always happy and the good un­fortunate, and the Lar tells them he will explain it. Querolus declares that he does not count himself among the unhappy, whereupon he puts this question to him,—

The Lar. “ Have you never stolen, Querolus ?”

Querolus. “ Never since I have lost the habit of doing so. When I was young I admit that I did play some young man’s tricks.”

Lar. “Why then give up such a laudable crime? and what shall we say as to lying ?”

Querolus. “ Well, who does tell the truth ? That little sin belongs to every one. Pass on to the next thing.”

Lar. “ Certainly, as there is no harm in lying; but how about adultery?”

Querolus. “Oh; but that’s no crime.”

Lar. “ When did they begin to permit it, then ? Tell me how often you have sworn, and be quick about it.”

Querolus. “All in good time. That’s a thing I’ve never been guilty of.”

Lar. “I allow for a thousand perjuries. Tell me the rest, or at least how often you have sworn love to people you hated.”

Querolus. “ What a wretch I am to have such a pitiless judge. I confess I have often sworn and given my word without giving my faith.”

The Lar, content with this confession, tries to re­assure Querolus by proving once more that the gods overlook the peccadilloes of good fellows. And this, be it remarked, shows us the more innocent side of that society, so we can judge of the dangers which must have surrounded it. The Lar, wishing to reward Querolus for his candour, promises to grant his wishes but to warn him of their peril. His wish was the glory of battle but not the blows. He longed for Titus’s cash-box but not for his gout. He wanted to be a decemvir, but not to pay the fee for the honour ; to be lastly a simple citizen, but powerful enough to rob his neighbours without any one gainsaying it. To which the Lar answers, “It is not influence, but sheer rob­bery, that you are hankering for.”

Such was the visible and glaring disorder ranged at the gates of that wealthy and learned society. But we must examine what lay beneath and within it amongst the redoubtable and implacable slave-caste. One of them named Pantomalus appears in “Querolus,” and shows us of what sort they were, and in what their wishes and thoughts consisted in the fifth century. “ It is acknowledged,” he says, “ the slave-masters are bad, but I have found none worse than mine; not that he is actually cruel, but so exacting and cross. If there’s any theft in the establishment he flies out as if it was a crime. If one happens to throw a table, chair, or bed on the fire, see how he scolds ; he calls it hastiness. He keeps the accounts from end to end with his own hands, and if anything is wrong pretends that we must make it up. How unjust masters are ! They find us taking our nap in the daytime, the secret of which is that we are up all night. I don’t know what nature has made better than the night. It is our day. Then we go to the baths with the pretty female slaves. That is free­dom in life. We shut our masters up at home, and are sure of their being out of the way. We have no jealousies; there is but one family among slaves; for us it is one long festival, wedding games and baccha­nals, and therefore few of us want to be freed. What freedman could stand such expense or be sure of such impunity? ”

We see then that family life at this time was menaced as well as property; deep-seated perils were shaking that world with its thin crust of marble and gold; domestic danger was besieging those haughty patricians who owned the world, in the very days which they passed on the benches of the Circus applauding the course of the chariot.

One of two things—either the poet wished to crush the slave with his own vices, and answer the complaint of Christianity by showing him to be unworthy of en­franchisement, which would be an eternal proof of the pitiless cruelty of Paganism towards the portion of mankind which it held in fetters, or to show the peril society was running, in which case we must admire the boldness of the Fathers in reading, whilst tolerating slavery, such severe lessons on the equality of all men before God; and even now may ask ourselves whether the fears of those are well-founded who wish to relegate to times of security such dangerous truths, as if the truths of the Gospel were not made for a period in which suffering and sacrifice alike are frequent.

The dramatic shows lasted through the following cen­turies. In 510 Theodoric rebuilt the theatre of Marcellus at Rome, and' the Senate undertook the expense of providing actors. In Gaul Chilperic repaired the stage at Soissons, and Terence was acted there in the seventh and eighth centuries. Of this we have proof in a fragment which has been preserved to us. It opens with a prologue, in which Jerome, the manager of the theatre, announces to the audience the perform­ance of a comedy by Terence. A buffoon (delusor) then appears, who expresses disgust at the idea, and wishes them to pack off such a broken-down poet. Terence thereupon enters in person, and encounters the young man who had insulted him, whereupon there is a dialogue and the commencement of a new and bar­barous comedy. The clown replies to Terence, “ I am worth more than you. You are old, I am young. You are only a dry old stick; I am a green tree.” The latter asks where his fruit is, and the two begin to use strong language, then threats, and the pageant breaks off just as they are coming to blows.

A council held at Rome in 680 forbade bishops to attend at the shows of mimes, and a letter of Alcuin a little later exhorts certain abbots, priests like himself, to abstain from theatrical amusements. In the eleventh century, at the marriage of Beatrix, mother of the Countess Matilda,, mimes were still playing after the old method. Later Vitalis of Blois composed two comedies; one called “Geta,” the other “Amphitryon.” Thus “Amphitryon” was played for the men of the twelfth century, as Moliere was to bring it again under the eyes of the staid and learned court of Louis XIV. So hard was it to subdue that lusty spirit of antiquity, which was to reappear in every age, not only in the centuries of the Revival, but in those of purer and severer character, which seemed farthest removed from the taste of the ancients.

In fact, mythology was not, as has been supposed, a posthumous resurrection, a wonder of the Revival, an effort to bring back a departed element into literature. Tasso, Camoens, and Milton are not open to the accusa­tion of having revived the pagan muses; it was rather Paganism perpetuating itself in literature, as in religion by superstition, in law by the oppression of the weak, by slavery, and by divorce ; and as astrologers con­tinued the science, so did mythologists continue the literature, of heathendom.

Mythology had entered deep into the manners of anti­quity. Rome, disputed for by Belisarius and Totila, still kept the vessel in which Caesar was fabled to have touched the shores of Italy. The teeth of the Erymanthian Boar were still shown at Beneventum, and upon the ornaments borne by the Emperor at Rome on days of feasting were embroidered the Labyrinth and the Minotaur, to signify that his thoughts should be im­penetrable to his subjects. In the mosaics which beautify the churches of Ravenna and Venice a number of subjects borrowed from the old fables are to be found. Thus, in the baptism of Christ, the Jordan is depicted as an old man, nude, crowned with rushes, pouring from an urn the waters of the river. The earth was represented as a female, sometimes nude, sometimes covered with flowers; the sea under the features of a man vomiting forth water. The Caroline books alluded to these abuses, and condemned them in vain, so that under Charles the Great artists employed all their time in painting Actaeon, Atys, and Bellerophon, until mythology triumphed everywhere. Later, in describing the palaces of the time and their mosaics, they inform us that the principal group represented Amor dis­charging his arrows, and around him were the beautiful women of old whom he had struck. At Florence, during festivals, bands of youths paraded the city, the handsomest at their head, who was called Love. At marriages during the Middle Age it was customary to play little pastoral dramas, in which Cupid appeared levelling his shafts at the ladies present. The first Spanish dramatic poem by Rodrigo de Cota (1470) was a simple dialogue between an old man and Love. It cannot be supposed that, since mythology still held the manners and the arts, that it would relax its hold on poetry, and we find the barbarians composing works of entirely pagan character, and revelling, in the seventh and eighth centuries, in all the impurity of Catullus. The fables of Ovid were translated in verse, and I have seen at St. Gall a complaint of Oedipus, rhymed like the chants of the Church, and so noted that the music was joined to the text, which proves it to have been the work of a man who laboured for the public. Mythology even returned in the works which came from the pen of men of heroic courage and virtue, as St. Columba and St. Boniface. The mythology of Dante’s Hell has been condemned as a pedantic contrivance to bring science into his art, fit only to astonish the mind; but he did but follow in this the inspiration, tastes, and prejudices of the men of his time, and, far from being pedantic, he obeyed the feelings of a people which still believed in such things as the hidden virtue of the statue of Mars, the geese of the Capitol, and the ancilia. The ancient deities had but changed their form and become daemons or fallen angels; in this sense the poet used them, according to his belief in them; and it is not till we come to his Purgatory and Paradise that we feel that poetry was entering its true destiny.

We must traverse the Middle Age, the Revival, the quarrels of the Jansenists and Molinists, of ancients and modems, to find the end of mythology; and can we say even now that we have found it ? All this time had to elapse that, in religion, faith might rise in triumph above the creed, in law the spirit of equity might conquer the arbitrary and changeful letter, that in literature thought might become mistress of form and independent of tradition.

The literature of the fifth century then preserved the tradition of its art, as treasure in a vase which must ultimately be broken; but we must confess that the receptacle was sculptured with art, and its fair exterior was calculated to excite the desire of many. When it had been shattered, and its contents were in dispute, the majority thought themselves rich in having picked up a morsel of the painted clay, but few were found to grasp the treasure which had been hidden within.