THE WAR OF THE GODS AND DEMONS
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the
expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists
simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal
preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like
saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he
never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings. Man cannot live
without the two props of food and drink, which support him like two
legs; but to suggest that they have been the motives of all his
movements in history is like saying that the goal of all his military
marches or religious pilgrimages must have been the Golden Leg of Miss
Kilmansegg or the ideal and perfect leg of Sir Willoughby Patterne. But
it is such movements that make up the story of mankind, and without them
there would practically be no story at all. Cows may be purely economic,
in the sense that we cannot see that they do much beyond grazing and
seeking better grazing-grounds; and that is why a history of cows in
twelve volumes would not be very lively reading. Sheep and goats may be
pure economists in their external action at least; but that is why the
sheep has hardly been a hero of epic wars and empires thought worthy of
detailed narration; and even the more active quadruped has not inspired
a book for boys called Golden Deeds of Gallant Goats or any similar
title. But so far from the movements that make up the story of man being
economic, we may say that the story only begins where the motive of the
cows and sheep leaves off. It will be hard to maintain that the
Crusaders went from their homes into a howling wilderness because cows
go from a wilderness to a more comfortable grazing-ground. It will be
hard to maintain that the Arctic explorers went north with the same
material motive that made the swallows go south. And if you leave things
like all the religious wars and all the merely adventurous explorations
out of the human story, it will not only cease to be human at all but
cease to be a story at all. The outline of history is made of these
decisive curves and angles determined by the will of man. Economic
history would not even be history.
But there is a deeper fallacy besides this obvious fact; that men need
not live for food merely because they cannot live without food. The
truth is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the
economic machinery necessary to his existence, but rather that existence
itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the
nature of his general position in it. There is something that is nearer
to him than livelihood, and that is life. For once that he remembers
exactly what work produces his wages and exactly what wages produce his
meals, he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it is a queer
world, or wonders whether life is worth living, or wonders whether
marriage is a failure, or is pleased and puzzled with his own children,
or remembers his own youth, or in any such fashion vaguely reviews the
mysterious lot of man. This is true of the majority even of the
wage-slaves of our morbid modern industrialism, which by its hideousness
and inhumanity has really forced the economic issue to the front. It is
immeasurably more true of the multitude of peasants or hunters or
fishers who make up the real mass of mankind. Even those dry pedants who
think that ethics depend on economics must admit that economics depend
on existence. And any number of normal doubts and day-dreams are about
existence; not about how we can live, but about why we do. And the proof
of it is simple; as simple as suicide. Turn the universe upside down in
the mind and you turn all the political economists upside down with it.
Suppose that a man wishes to die, and the professor of political economy
becomes rather a bore with his elaborate explanations of how he is to
live. And all the departures and decisions that make our human past into
a story have this character of diverting the direct course of pure
economics. As the economist may be excused from calculating the future
salary of a suicide, so he may be excused from providing an old-age
pension for a martyr. As he need not provide for the future of a martyr,
so he need not provide for the family of a monk. His plan is modified in
lesser and varying degrees by a man being a soldier and dying for his
own country, by a man being a peasant and specially loving his own land,
by a man being more or less affected by any religion that forbids or
allows him to do this or that. But all these come back not to an
economic calculation about livelihood but to an elemental outlook upon
life. They all come back to what a man fundamentally feels, when he
looks forth from those strange windows which we call the eyes, upon that
strange vision that we call the world.
No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world. But it
may be allowable to say that we need a new thing; which may be called
psychological history. I mean the consideration of what things meant in
the mind of a man, especially an ordinary man; as distinct from what is
defined or deduced merely from official forms or political
pronouncements. I have already touched on it in such a case as the totem
or indeed any other popular myth. It is not enough to be told that a
tom-cat was called a totem; especially when it was not called a totem.
We want to know what it felt like. Was it like Whittington’s cat or like
a witch’s cat? Was its real name Pasht or Puss-In-Boots? That is the
sort of thing we need touching the nature of political and social
relations. We want to know the real sentiment that was the social bond
of many common men, as sane and as selfish as we are. What did soldiers
feel when they saw splendid in the sky that strange totem that we call
the Golden Eagle of the Legions? What did vassals feel about those other
totems, the lions or the leopards upon the shield of their lord? So long
as we neglect this subjective side of history, which may more simply be
called the inside of history, there will always be a certain limitation
on that science which can be better transcended by art. So long as the
historian cannot do that, fiction will be truer than fact. There will be
more reality in a novel; yes, even in a historical novel.
In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology of
war. Our history is stiff with official documents, public or private,
which tell us nothing of the thing itself. At the worst we only have the
official posters, which could not have been spontaneous precisely
because they were official. At the best we have only the secret
diplomacy, which could not have been popular precisely because it was
secret. Upon one or other of these is based the historical judgment
about the real reasons that sustained the struggle. Governments fight
for colonies or commercial rights; governments fight about harbours or
high tariffs; governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery. It
seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do
the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible
and wonderful thing called a war? Nobody who knows anything of soldiers
believes the silly notion of the dons, that millions of men can be ruled
by force. If they were all to slack, it would be impossible to punish
all the slackers. And the least little touch of slacking would lose a
whole campaign in half a day. What did men really feel about the
policy? If it be said that they accepted the policy from the politician,
what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred blindly
for their prince, what did those blind men see in their prince?
There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an
appropriate language, as _realpolitik_. As a matter of fact, it is an
almost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly
repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a
moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who
fight. In any case, no man will die for practical politics, just as no
man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be
eaten by lions at a shilling an hour; for men will not be martyred for
money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics,
is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world
believe that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall
go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of
my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland.’ Can
anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed I
shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that
should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that
career is now open to me and my countrymen.’ Materialist history is the
most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances.
Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the
soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life
and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an
absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and
remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained
by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They
are generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The first
is the love of something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguely
known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thing
that threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it sounds,
though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his national
home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the
good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt
down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss.
Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is
really a house. But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well as
quite as strong. Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is at
once an old enemy and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alien
and antagonistic; as the French feel about the Prussian or the Eastern
Christians about the Turk. If we say it is a difference of religion,
people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We will
pity them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; a
difference that does really come like a dark shadow between our eyes and
the day. Men can think of this difference even at the point of death;
for it is a difference about the meaning of life.
Men are moved in these things by something far higher and holier than
policy: by hatred. When men hung on in the darkest days of the Great
War, suffering either in their bodies or in their souls for those they
loved, they were long past caring about details of diplomatic objects as
motives for their refusal to surrender. Of myself and those I knew best
I can answer for the vision that made surrender impossible. It was the
vision of the German Emperor’s face as he rode into Paris. This is not
the sentiment which some of my idealistic friends describe as Love. I am
quite content to call it hatred; the hatred of hell and all its works,
and to agree that as they do not believe in hell they need not believe
in hatred. But in the face of this prevalent prejudice, this long
introduction has been unfortunately necessary, to ensure an
understanding of what is meant by a religious war. There is a religious
war when two worlds meet; that is, when two visions of the world meet;
or in more modern language, when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the
one man’s breath is the other man’s poison; and it is vain to talk of
giving a pestilence a place in the sun. And this is what we must
understand, even at the expense of digression, if we would see what
really happened in the Mediterranean; when right athwart the rising of
the Republic on the Tiber, a thing overtopping and disdaining it, dark
with all the riddles of Asia and trailing all the tribes and
dependencies of imperialism, came Carthage riding on the sea.
The ancient religion of Italy was on the whole that mixture which we
have considered under the head of mythology; save that where the Greeks
had a natural turn for the mythology, the Latins seem to have had a real
turn for religion. Both multiplied gods, yet they sometimes seem to have
multiplied them for almost opposite reasons. It would seem sometimes as
if the Greek polytheism branched and blossomed upwards like the boughs
of a tree, while the Italian polytheism ramified downward like the
roots. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the former branches lifted
themselves lightly, bearing flowers; while the latter hung down, being
heavy with fruit. I mean that the Latins seem to multiply gods to bring
them nearer to men, while the Greek gods rose and radiated outwards into
the morning sky. What strikes us in the Italian cults is their local and
especially their domestic character. We gain the impression of
divinities swarming about the house like flies; of deities clustering
and clinging like bats about the pillars or building like birds under
the eaves. We have a vision of a god of roofs and a god of gateposts, of
a god of doors and even a god of drains. It has been suggested that all
mythology was a sort of fairy-tale; but this was a particular sort of
fairy-tale which may truly be called a fireside tale, or a nursery-tale;
because it was a tale of the interior of the home; like those which make
chairs and tables talk like elves. The old household gods of the Italian
peasants seem to have been great, clumsy, wooden images, more
featureless than the figure-head which Quilp battered with the poker.
This religion of the home was very homely. Of course there were other
less human elements in the tangle of Italian mythology. There were Greek
deities superimposed on the Roman; there were here and there uglier
things underneath, experiments in the cruel kind of paganism, like the
Arician rite of the priest slaying the slayer. But these things were
always potential in paganism; they are certainly not the peculiar
character of Latin paganism. The peculiarity of that may be roughly
covered by saying that if mythology personified the forces of nature,
this mythology personified nature as transformed by the forces of man.
It was the god of the corn and not of the grass, of the cattle and not
the wild things of the forest; in short, the cult was literally a
culture; as when we speak of it as agriculture.
With this there was a paradox which is still for many the puzzle or
riddle of the Latins. With religion running through every domestic
detail like a climbing plant, there went what seems to many the very
opposite spirit: the spirit of revolt. Imperialists and reactionaries
often invoke Rome as the very model of order and obedience; but Rome was
the very reverse. The real history of ancient Rome is much more like the
history of modern Paris. It might be called in modern language a city
built out of barricades. It is said that the gate of Janus was never
closed because there was an eternal war without; it is almost as true
that there was an eternal revolution within. From the first Plebeian
riots to the last Servile Wars, the state that imposed peace on the
world was never really at peace. The rulers were themselves rebels.
There is a real relation between this religion in private and this
revolution in public life. Stories none the less heroic for being
hackneyed remind us that the Republic was founded on a tyrannicide that
avenged an insult to a wife; that the Tribunes of the people were
re-established after another which avenged an insult to a daughter. The
truth is that only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a
standard or a status by which to criticise the state. They alone can
appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city; the gods of the
hearth. That is why men are mystified in seeing that the same nations
that are thought rigid in domesticity are also thought restless in
politics; for instance, the Irish and the French. It is worth while to
dwell on this domestic point because it is an exact example of what is
meant here by the inside of history, like the inside of houses. Merely
political histories of Rome may be right enough in saying that this or
that was a cynical or cruel act of the Roman politicians; but the spirit
that lifted Rome from beneath was the spirit of all the Romans; and it
is not a cant to call it the ideal of Cincinnatus passing from the
senate to the plough. Men of that sort had strengthened their village on
every side, had extended its victories already over Italians and even
over Greeks, when they found themselves confronted with a war that
changed the world. I have called it here the war of the gods and demons.
There was established on the opposite coast of the inland sea a city
that bore the name of the New Town. It was already much older, more
powerful, and more prosperous than the Italian town; but there still
remained about it an atmosphere that made the name not inappropriate. It
had been called new because it was a colony like New York or New
Zealand. It was an outpost or settlement of the energy and expansion of
the great commercial cities of Tyre and Sidon. There was a note of the
new countries and colonies about it; a confident and commercial outlook.
It was fond of saying things that rang with a certain metallic
assurance; as that nobody could wash his hands in the sea without the
leave of the New Town. For it depended almost entirely on the greatness
of its ships, as did the two great ports and markets from which its
people came. It brought from Tyre and Sidon a prodigious talent for
trade and considerable experience of travel. It brought other things as
well.
In a previous chapter I have hinted at something of the psychology that
lies behind a certain type of religion. There was a tendency in those
hungry for practical results, apart from poetical results, to call upon
spirits of terror and compulsion; to move Acheron in despair of bending
the gods. There is always a sort of dim idea that these darker powers
will really do things, with no nonsense about it. In the interior
psychology of the Punic peoples this strange sort of pessimistic
practicality had grown to great proportions. In the New Town, which the
Romans called Carthage, as in the parent cities of Phoenicia, the god
who got things done bore the name of Moloch, who was perhaps identical
with the other deity whom we know as Baal, the Lord. The Romans did not
at first quite know what to call him or what to make of him; they had to
go back to the grossest myth of Greek or Roman origins and compare him
to Saturn devouring his children. But the worshippers of Moloch were not
gross or primitive. They were members of a mature and polished
civilisation, abounding in refinements and luxuries; they were probably
far more civilised than the Romans. And Moloch was not a myth; or at any
rate his meal was not a myth. These highly civilised people really met
together to invoke the blessing of heaven on their empire by throwing
hundreds of their infants into a large furnace. We can only realise the
combination by imagining a number of Manchester merchants with
chimney-pot hats and mutton-chop whiskers, going to church every Sunday
at eleven o’clock to see a baby roasted.
The first stages of the political or commercial quarrel can be followed
in far too much detail, precisely because it is merely political or
commercial. The Punic Wars looked at one time as if they would never
end; and it is not easy to say when they ever began. The Greeks and the
Sicilians had already been fighting vaguely on the European side against
the African city. Carthage had defeated Greece and conquered Sicily.
Carthage had also planted herself firmly in Spain; and between Spain and
Sicily the Latin city was contained and would have been crushed; if the
Romans had been of the sort to be easily crushed. Yet the interest of
the story really consists in the fact that Rome was crushed. If there
had not been certain moral elements as well as the material elements,
the story would have ended where Carthage certainly thought it had
ended. It is common enough to blame Rome for not making peace. But it
was a true popular instinct that there could be no peace with that sort
of people. It is common enough to blame the Roman for his _Delenda est
Carthago_; Carthage must be destroyed. It is commoner to forget that, to
all appearance, Rome itself was destroyed. The sacred savour that hung
round Rome for ever, it is too often forgotten, clung to her partly
because she had risen suddenly from the dead.
Carthage was an aristocracy, as are most of such mercantile states. The
pressure of the rich on the poor was impersonal as well as irresistible.
For such aristocracies never permit personal government, which is
perhaps why this one was jealous of personal talent. But genius can turn
up anywhere, even in a governing class. As if to make the world’s
supreme test as terrible as possible, it was ordained that one of the
great houses of Carthage should produce a man who came out of those
gilded palaces with all the energy and originality of Napoleon coming
from nowhere. At the worst crisis of the war, Rome learned that Italy
itself, by a military miracle, was invaded from the north. Hannibal, the
Grace of Baal as his name ran in his own tongue, had dragged a ponderous
chain of armaments over the starry solitudes of the Alps; and pointed
southward to the city which he had been pledged by all his dreadful gods
to destroy.
Hannibal marched down the road to Rome, and the Romans who rushed to war
with him felt as if they were fighting with a magician. Two great armies
sank to right and left of him into the swamps of the Trebia; more and
more were sucked into the horrible whirlpool of Cannae; more and more
went forth only to fall in ruin at his touch. The supreme sign of all
disasters, which is treason, turned tribe after tribe against the
falling cause of Rome, and still the unconquerable enemy rolled nearer
and nearer to the city; and following their great leader the swelling
cosmopolitan army of Carthage passed like a pageant of the whole world;
the elephants shaking the earth like marching mountains and the gigantic
Gauls with their barbaric panoply and the dark Spaniards girt in gold
and the brown Numidians on their unbridled desert horses wheeling and
darting like hawks, and whole mobs of deserters and mercenaries and
miscellaneous peoples; and the Grace of Baal went before them.
The Roman augurs and scribes who said in that hour that it brought forth
unearthly prodigies, that a child was born with the head of an elephant
or that stars fell down like hailstones, had a far more philosophical
grasp of what had really happened than the modern historian who can see
nothing in it but a success of strategy concluding a rivalry in
commerce. Something far different was felt at the time and on the spot,
as it is always felt by those who experience a foreign atmosphere
entering their own like a fog or a foul savour. It was no mere military
defeat, it was certainly no mere mercantile rivalry, that filled the
Roman imagination with such hideous omens of nature herself becoming
unnatural. It was Moloch upon the mountain of the Latins, looking with
his appalling face across the plain; it was Baal who trampled the
vineyards with his feet of stone; it was the voice of Tanit the
invisible, behind her trailing veils, whispering of the love that is
more horrible than hate. The burning of the Italian cornfields, the ruin
of the Italian vines, were something more than actual; they were
allegorical. They were the destruction of domestic and fruitful things,
the withering of what was human before that inhumanity that is far
beyond the human thing called cruelty. The household gods bowed low in
darkness under their lowly roofs; and above them went the demons upon a
wind from beyond all walls, blowing the trumpet of the Tramontane. The
door of the Alps was broken down; and in no vulgar but a very solemn
sense, it was Hell let loose. The war of the gods and demons seemed
already to have ended; and the gods were dead. The eagles were lost, the
legions were broken; and in Rome nothing remained but honour and the
cold courage of despair.
In the whole world one thing still threatened Carthage, and that was
Carthage. There still remained the inner working of an element strong in
all successful commercial states, and the presence of a spirit that we
know. There was still the solid sense and shrewdness of the men who
manage big enterprises; there was still the advice of the best financial
experts; there was still business government; there was still the broad
and sane outlook of practical men of affairs; and in these things could
the Romans hope. As the war trailed on to what seemed its tragic end,
there grew gradually a faint and strange possibility that even now they
might not hope in vain. The plain business men of Carthage, thinking as
such men do in terms of living and dying races, saw clearly that Rome
was not only dying but dead. The war was over; it was obviously hopeless
for the Italian city to resist any longer, and inconceivable that
anybody should resist when it was hopeless. Under these circumstances,
another set of broad, sound business principles remained to be
considered. Wars were waged with money, and consequently cost money;
perhaps they felt in their hearts, as do so many of their kind, that
after all war must be a little wicked because it costs money. The time
had now come for peace; and still more for economy. The messages sent by
Hannibal from time to time asking for reinforcements were a ridiculous
anachronism; there were much more important things to attend to now. It
might be true that some consul or other had made a last dash to the
Metaurus, had killed Hannibal’s brother and flung his head, with Latin
fury, into Hannibal’s camp; and mad actions of that sort showed how
utterly hopeless the Latins felt about their cause. But even excitable
Latins could not be so mad as to cling to a lost cause for ever. So
argued the best financial experts; and tossed aside more and more
letters, full of rather queer alarmist reports. So argued and acted the
great Carthaginian Empire. That meaningless prejudice, the curse of
commercial states, that stupidity is in some way practical and that
genius is in some way futile, led them to starve and abandon that great
artist in the school of arms, whom the gods had given them in vain.
Why do men entertain this queer idea that what is sordid must always
overthrow what is magnanimous; that there is some dim connection between
brains and brutality, or that it does not matter if a man is dull so
long as he is also mean? Why do they vaguely think of all chivalry as
sentiment and all sentiment as weakness? They do it because they are,
like all men, primarily inspired by religion. For them, as for all men,
the first fact is their notion of the nature of things; their idea
about what world they are living in. And it is their faith that the only
ultimate thing is fear and therefore that the very heart of the world is
evil. They believe that death is stronger than life, and therefore dead
things must be stronger than living things; whether those dead things
are gold and iron and machinery or rocks and rivers and forces of
nature. It may sound fanciful to say that men we meet at tea-tables or
talk to at garden-parties are secretly worshippers of Baal or Moloch.
But this sort of commercial mind has its own cosmic vision and it is the
vision of Carthage. It has in it the brutal blunder that was the ruin of
Carthage. The Punic power fell, because there is in this materialism a
mad indifference to real thought. By disbelieving in the soul, it comes
to disbelieving in the mind. Being too practical to be moral, it denies
what every practical soldier calls the moral of an army. It fancies that
money will fight when men will no longer fight. So it was with the Punic
merchant princes. Their religion was a religion of despair, even when
their practical fortunes were hopeful. How could they understand that
the Romans could hope even when their fortunes were hopeless? Their
religion was a religion of force and fear; how could they understand
that men can still despise fear even when they submit to force? Their
philosophy of the world had weariness in its very heart; above all they
were weary of warfare; how should they understand those who still wage
war even when they are weary of it? In a word, how should they
understand the mind of Man, who had so long bowed down before mindless
things, money and brute force and gods who had the hearts of beasts?
They awoke suddenly to the news that the embers they had disdained too
much even to tread out were again breaking everywhere into flame; that
Hasdrubal was defeated, that Hannibal was outnumbered, that Scipio had
carried the war into Spain; that he had carried it into Africa. Before
the very gates of the golden city Hannibal fought his last fight for it
and lost; and Carthage fell as nothing has fallen since Satan. The name
of the New City remains only as a name. There is no stone of it left
upon the sand. Another war was indeed waged before the final
destruction: but the destruction was final. Only men digging in its deep
foundations centuries after found a heap of hundreds of little
skeletons, the holy relics of that religion. For Carthage fell because
she was faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its
logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his
children.
The gods had risen again, and the demons had been defeated after all.
But they had been defeated by the defeated, and almost defeated by the
dead. Nobody understands the romance of Rome, and why she rose
afterwards to a representative leadership that seemed almost fated and
fundamentally natural, who does not keep in mind the agony of horror and
humiliation through which she had continued to testify to the sanity
that is the soul of Europe. She came to stand alone in the midst of an
empire because she had once stood alone in the midst of a ruin and a
waste. After that all men knew in their hearts that she had been
representative of mankind, even when she was rejected of men. And there
fell on her the shadow from a shining and as yet invisible light and the
burden of things to be. It is not for us to guess in what manner or
moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it
is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have
been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of
an empire of Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic wars if,
in after ages, divine things descended at least upon human things and
not inhuman. Europe evolved into its own vices and its own impotence, as
will be suggested on another page; but the worst into which it evolved
was not like what it had escaped. Can any man in his senses compare the
great wooden doll, whom the children expected to eat a little bit of the
dinner, with the great idol who would have been expected to eat the
children? That is the measure of how far the world went astray, compared
with how far it might have gone astray. If the Romans were ruthless, it
was in a true sense to an enemy, and certainly not merely a rival. They
remembered not trade routes and regulations, but the faces of sneering
men; and hated the hateful soul of Carthage. And we owe them something
if we never needed to cut down the groves of Venus exactly as men cut
down the groves of Baal. We owe it partly to their harshness that our
thoughts of our human past are not wholly harsh. If the passage from
heathenry to Christianity was a bridge as well as a breach, we owe it to
those who kept that heathenry human. If, after all these ages, we are in
some sense at peace with paganism, and can think more kindly of our
fathers, it is well to remember the things that were and the things that
might have been. For this reason alone we can take lightly the load of
antiquity and need not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or a cupid on a
valentine. Laughter and sadness link us with things long past away and
remembered without dishonour; and we can see not altogether without
tenderness the twilight sinking around the Sabine farm and hear the
household gods rejoice when Catullus comes home to Sirmio. _Deleta est
Carthago._