CHAPTER VII

"GODS OR ATOMS?"

In the first two centuries of our era a great change came over the

ancient world. A despised and traditional religion, under the stimulus

of new cults coming from the East, revived and re-asserted its power

over the minds of men. Philosophy, grown practical in its old age,

forsook its youthful enthusiasm for the quest of truth, and turned

aside to the regulation of conduct, by means of maxims now instead of

inspiration, and finally, as we have seen, to apology for the ancient

faith of the fathers. Its business now was to reconcile its own

monotheistic dogma with popular polytheistic practice. It was perhaps

this very reconciliation that threw open the door for the glowing

monotheism of the disciples of Jesus; but, whatever the cause,

Christianity quickly spread over the whole Roman Empire. We are apt to

wonder to-day at the great political and national developments that

have altered the whole aspect of Europe since the French Revolution,

and to reflect rather idly on their rapidity. Yet the past has its own

stories of rapid change, and not the least striking of them is the

disappearance of that world of thought which we call Classical. By 180

A.D. nearly every distinctive mark of classical antiquity is gone--the

old political ideas, the old philosophies, the old literatures, and

much else with them. Old forms and names remain--there are still

consuls and archons, poets and philosophers, but the atmosphere is

another, and the names have a new meaning, if they have any at all.

But the mere survival of the names hid for many the fact that they were

living in a new era.

[Sidenote: Marcus Aurelius]

In the reign of Marcus Aurelius, however, the signs of change became

more evident, and men grew conscious that some transformation of the

world was in progress. A great plague, the scanty records of which

only allow us to speak in {197} vague terms of an immense reduction in

population[1]--barbarism active upon the frontier of an Empire not so

well able as it had fancied to defend itself--superstitions, Egyptian

and Jewish, diverting men from the ordinary ways of civic duty--such

were some of the symptoms that men marked. Under the weight of

absurdity, quietism and individualism, the state seemed to be sinking,

and all that freedom of mind which was the distinctive boast of

Hellenism was rapidly being lost.

It happens that, while the historical literature of the period has

largely perished, a number of authors survive, who from their various

points of view deal with what is our most immediate subject--the

conflict of religions. Faith, doubt, irritation and fatalism are all

represented. The most conspicuous men of letters of the age are

undoubtedly the Emperor Marcus Aurelius himself and his two brilliant

contemporaries, Lucian of Samosata, and Apuleius of Madaura.[2]

Celsus, a man of mind as powerful as any of the three, survives in

fragments, but fragments ample enough to permit of re-construction.

Among the Christians too there was increased literary activity, but

Tertullian and Clement will suffice for our purpose.

Though not in his day regarded as a man of letters, it is yet in virtue

of his writing that Marcus Aurelius survives. His journal, with the

title that tells its nature--"To Himself," is to-day perhaps the most

popular book of antiquity with those whose first concern is not

literature. It is translated again and again, and it is studied. The

peculiar mind of the solitary Emperor has made him, as Mr F. W. H.

Myers put it, "the saint and exemplar of Agnosticism." Meditative,

tender and candid, yet hesitant and so far ineffectual, he is sensitive

to so much that is positive and to so much that is negative, that the

diary, in which his character is most intimately revealed, gives him a

place of his own in the hearts of men perplext in the extreme. He is a

man who neither believes, nor disbelieves,--"either gods or atoms"[3]

seems to be the necessary antithesis, and there is so much to be said

both for {198} and against each of the alternatives that decision is

impossible. He is attracted by the conception of Providence, but he

hesitates to commit himself. There are arguments--at least of the kind

that rest on probability--in favour of immortality, but they are

insufficient to determine the matter. In his public capacity he became

famous for the number and magnificence of his sacrifices to the gods of

the state; he owns in his journal his debt to the gods for warnings

given in dreams, but he suspects at times that they may not exist.

Meanwhile he persecutes the Christians for their disloyalty to the

state. Their stubborn convictions were so markedly in contrast with

his own wavering mind that he could not understand them--perhaps their

motive was bravado, he thought; they were too theatrical altogether;

their pose recalled the tragedies composed by the pupils of the

rhetoricians--large language with nothing behind it.[4]

In the absence of any possibility of intellectual certainty, Marcus

fell back upon conduct. Here his want of originality and of spiritual

force was less felt, for conduct has tolerably well-established rules

of neighbourliness, purity, good temper, public duty and the like. His

Stoic guides, too, might in this region help him to follow with more

confidence the voice of his own pure and delicate conscience--the

conscience of a saint and a quietist rather than that of a man of

action. Yet even in the realm of conduct he is on the whole

ineffectual. Pure, truthful, kind, and brave he is, but he does not

believe enough to be great. He is called to be a statesman and an

administrator; he does not expect much outcome from all his energies,

and he preaches to himself the necessity of patience with his

prospective failure to achieve anything beyond the infinitesimal.

"Ever the same are the cycles of the universe, up and down, for ever

and for ever. Either the intelligence of the Whole puts itself in

motion for each separate effect--in which case accept the result it

gives; or else it did so once for all, and everything is sequence, one

thing in another ... [The text is doubtful for a line] ... In a word,

either God, and all goes well; or all at random--live not thou at

random.

"A moment, and earth will cover us all; then it too in its turn will

change; and what it changes to, will change again {199} and again for

ever; and again change after change to infinity. The waves of change

and transformation--if a man think of them and of their speed, he will

despise everything mortal.

"The universal cause is like a winter torrent; it carries all before

it. How cheap then these poor statesmen, these who carry philosophy

into practical affairs, as they fancy--poor diminutive creatures.

Drivellers. Man, what then? Do what now Nature demands. Start, if it

be given thee, and look not round to see if any will know. Hope not

for Plato's Republic;[5] but be content if the smallest thing advance;

to compass that one issue count no little feat.

"Who shall change one of their dogmata [the regular word of Epictetus]?

And without a change of dogmata, what is there but the slavery of men

groaning and pretending to obey? Go now, and talk of Alexander, and

Philip and Demetrius of Phalerum; whether they saw the will of Nature

and schooled themselves, is their affair; if they played the tragic

actor, no one has condemned me to copy them. Simplicity and modesty

are the work of philosophy; do not lead me astray into vanity.

"Look down from above on the countless swarms of men, their countless

initiations, and their varied voyage in storm and calm, their changing

combinations, as they come into being, meet, and pass out of being.

Think too of the life lived by others of old, of the life that shall be

lived by others after thee, of the life now lived among the barbarian

nations; and, of how many have never heard thy name, and how many will

at once forget it, and how many may praise thee now perhaps but will

very soon blame thee; and how neither memory is of any account, nor

glory, nor anything else at all....

"The rottenness of the material substance of every individual

thing--water, dust, bones, stench.... And this breathing element is

another of the same, changing from this to that....

"Either the gods have no power, or they have power. If they have not,

why pray? If they have, why not pray for deliverance from the fear, or

the desire, or the pain, which the thing causes, rather than for the

withholding or the giving of the particular thing? For certainly, if

they can co-operate with men, it is for these purposes they can

co-operate. But perhaps {200} thou wilt say, The gods have put all

these in my own power. Then is it not better to use what is in thine

own power and be free, than to be set on what is not in thy power--a

slave and contemptible? And who told thee that the gods do not help us

even to what is in our own power?"[6]

This handful of short passages all from the same place, with a few

omitted, may be taken as representing very fairly the mind of Marcus

Aurelius. The world was his to rule, and he felt it a duty to remember

how slight a thing it was. This was not the temper of Alexander or of

Caesar,--of men who make mankind, and who, by their belief in men and in

the power of their own ideas to lift men to higher planes of life,

actually do secure that advance is made,--and that advance not the

smallest. Yet he speaks of Alexander as a "tragic actor."[7] For a

statesman, the attitude of Marcus is little short of betrayal. He

worked, he ruled, he endowed, he fought--he was pure, he was

conscientious, he was unselfish--but he did not believe, and he was

ineffectual. The Germans it might have been beyond any man's power to

repel at that day, but even at home Marcus was ineffectual. His wife

and his son were by-words. He had almost a morbid horror of defilement

from men and women of coarse minds,--a craving too for peace and

sympathy; he shrank into himself, condoned, ignored. Among his

benefactors he does not mention Hadrian, who really gave him the

Empire--and it is easy to see why. In everything the two are a

contrast. Hadrian's personal vices and his greatness as a ruler, as a

man handling men and moving among ideas[8]--these were impossible for

Marcus.

Nor was the personal religion of this pure and candid spirit a possible

one for mankind. "A genuine eternal Gospel," wrote Renan of this diary

of Marcus, "the book of the _Thoughts_ will never grow old, for it

affirms no dogma. The Gospel has grown old in certain parts; Science

no longer allows us to admit the naive conception of the supernatural

which is its base.... Yet Science might destroy God and the soul, and

the book of the _Thoughts_ would remain young in its life and truth."

{201} Renan is right; when Science, or anything else, "destroys God and

the soul," there is no Gospel but that of Marcus; and yet for men it is

impossible; and it is not young--it is senile. Duty without

enthusiasm, hope or belief--belief in man, of course, for "God and the

soul" are by hypothesis "destroyed"--duty, that is, without object,

reason or result, it is a magnificent fancy, and yet one recurs to the

criticism that Marcus passed upon the Christians. Is there not a hint

of the school about this? Is it not possible that the simpler

instincts of men,--instincts with a history as ludicrous as

Anthropologists sometimes sketch for us,--may after all come nearer the

truth of things than semi-Stoic reflexion? At all events the instincts

have ruled the world so far with the co-operation of Reason, and are as

yet little inclined to yield their rights to their colleague. They

have never done so without disaster.

The world did not accept Marcus as a teacher. Men readily recognized

his high character, but for a thousand years and more nobody dreamed of

taking him as a guide--nobody, that is, outside the schools. For the

world it was faith or unbelief, and the two contemporaries already

mentioned represent the two poles to which the thoughts of men

gravitated, who were not yet ready for a cleavage with the past.

[Sidenote: Lucian]

"I am a Syrian from the Euphrates,"[9] wrote Lucian of himself; and

elsewhere he has a playful protest against a historian of his day,

magnificently ignorant of Eastern geography, who "has taken up my

native Samosata, and shifted it, citadel, walls and all, into

Mesopotamia," and by this new feat of colonization has apparently

turned him into a Parthian or Mesopotamian.[10] Samosata lay actually

in Commagene, and there Lucian spent his boyhood talking Syriac, his

native language.[11] He was born about 125 A.D. His family were poor,

and as soon as he left school, the question of a trade was at once

raised, for even a boy's earnings would be welcome. At school he had

had a trick of scraping the wax from his tablets and making little

figures of animals and men, so his father handed him over to his

mother's brother, who was one of a family of statuaries. But a blunder

and a breakage resulted in his uncle thrashing him, and he ran home to

his mother. It was his first and last day in the sculptor's shop, and

he went to {202} bed with tears upon his face. In later life he told

the story of a dream which he had that night--a long and somewhat

literary dream modelled on Prodicus' fable of the _Choice of Herakles_.

He dreamed that two women appeared to him, one dusty and workmanlike,

the other neat, charming and noble. They were Sculpture and Culture,

and he chose the latter. He tells the dream, he says, that the young

may be helped by his example to pursue the best and devote themselves

to Culture, regardless of immediate poverty.[12] He was launched

somehow on the career of his choice and became a rhetorician. It may

be noted however that an instinctive interest in art remained with him,

and he is reckoned one of the best art-critics of antiquity.

Rhetoric, he says, "made a Greek of him," went with him from city to

city in Greece and Ionia, "sailed the Ionian sea with him and attended

him even as far as Gaul, scattering plenty in his path."[13] For, as

he explains elsewhere, he was among the teachers who could command high

fees, and he made a good income in Gaul.[14] But, about the age of

forty, he resolved "to let the gentlemen of the jury rest in

peace--tyrants enough having been arraigned and princes enough

eulogized."[15] From now onward he wrote dialogues--he had at last

found his proper work.

[Sidenote: Lucian's Dialogues]

Dialogue in former days had been the vehicle of speculation--"had

trodden those aerial plains on high above the clouds, where the great

Zeus in heaven is borne along on winged car." But it was to do so no

more, and in an amusing piece Lucian represents Dialogue personified as

bringing a suit against him for outrage. Had Lucian debased Dialogue,

by reducing him to the common level of humanity and making him

associate with such persons as Aristophanes and Menippus, one a

light-hearted mocker at things sacred, the other a barking, snarling

dog of a Cynic,--thus turning Dialogue into a literary Centaur, neither

fit to walk nor able to soar? Or was Dialogue really a musty, fusty,

superannuated creature, and greatly improved now for having a bath and

being taught to smile and to go genially in the company of Comedy?

Between the attack and the defence, the case is fairly stated.[16]

Lucian created a new {203} mode in writing--or perhaps he revived it,

for it is not very clear how much he owes to his favourite Menippus,

the Gadarene Cynic and satirist of four centuries before.

Menippus however has perished and Lucian remains and is read; for,

whatever else is to be said of him, he is readable. He has not lost

all the traces of the years during which he consorted with Rhetoric; at

times he amplifies and exaggerates, and will strain for more point and

piquancy than a taste more sure would approve. Yet he has the instinct

to avoid travesty, and his style is in general natural and simple,

despite occasional literary reminiscences. His characters talk,--as

men may talk of their affairs, when they are not conscious of being

overheard,--with a naive frankness not always very wise, with a freedom

and common sense, and sometimes with a folly, that together reveal the

speaker. They rarely declaim, and they certainly never reach any high

level of thought or feeling. The talk is slight and easy--it flickers

about from one idea to another, and gives a strong impression of being

real. If it is gods who are talking, they become surprisingly

human--and even _bourgeois_, they are so very much at home among

themselves. Lucian's skill is amazing. He will take some episode from

Homer and change no single detail, and yet, as we listen to the

off-hand talk of the gods as they recount the occurrence, we are

startled at the effect--the irony is everywhere and nowhere; the

surprises are irresistible. Zeus, for instance, turns out to have more

literary interests than we suppose; he will quote Homer and make a

Demosthenic oration to the gods, though alas! his memory fails him in

the middle of a sentence;[17] he laments that his altars are as cold as

Plato's _Laws_ or the syllogisms of Chrysippus. He is the frankest

gentleman of heaven, and so infinitely obliging!

In short, for sheer cleverness Lucian has no rival but Aristophanes in

extant Greek literature. His originality, his wit, his humour (not at

all equal, it may be said, to his wit), his gifts of invention and

fancy, his light touch, and his genius for lively narrative, mark him

out distinctively in an age when literature was all rhetoric, length

and reminiscence. But as we read him, we become sensible of defects as

extraordinary as his gifts. For all his Attic style, he belongs to his

age. He {204} may renounce Rhetoric, but no man can easily escape from

his past. The education had intensified the cardinal faults of his

character, impatience, superficiality, a great lack of sympathy for the

more tender attachments and the more profound interests of

men--essential unbelief in human grandeur. An expatriated adventurer,

living for twenty years on his eloquence, with the merest smattering of

philosophy and no interest whatever in nature and natural science or

mathematics, with little feeling and no poetry,--it was hardly to be

expected that he should understand the depths of the human soul,

lynx-eyed as he is for the surface of things. He had a very frank

admiration for his own character, and he drew himself over and over

again under various names. Lykinos, for example, is hardly a disguise

at all. "Free-Speech, son of True-man, son of Examiner," he calls

himself in one of his mock trials, "hater of shams, hater of impostors,

hater of liars, hater of the pompous, hater of every such variety of

hateful men--and there are plenty of them"; conversely, he loves the

opposites, when he meets them, which, he owns, is not very often.[18]

[Sidenote: Lucian and philosophy]

With such a profession, it is not surprising that a man of more wit

than sympathy, found abundance of material in the follies of his age.

Men were taking themselves desperately seriously,--preaching

interminable Philosophy, saving their souls, and communing with gods

and daemons in the most exasperating ways. Shams, impostures, and

liars--so Lucian summed them up, and he did not conceal his opinion.

Granted that the age had aspects quite beyond his comprehension, he

gives a very vivid picture of it from the outside. This is what men

were doing and saying around him--but why? Why, but from vanity and

folly? Gods, philosophers, and all who take human life seriously, are

deluged with one stream of badinage, always clever but not always in

good taste. He has no purpose, religious or philosophic. If he

attacks the gods, it is not as a Sceptic--the Sceptics are ridiculed as

much as any one else in the _Sale of Lives_--men who know nothing,

doubt of their own experience, and avow the end of their knowledge to

be ignorance.[19] If he is what we nowadays loosely call sceptical, it

is not on philosophic grounds. We should hardly expect him in his

satirical pamphlets really to {205} grapple with the question of

Philosophy, but he seems not to understand in the least why there

should be Philosophy at all. He is master of no single system, though

he has the catch-words of them all at his finger-ends.

His most serious dialogue on Philosophy is the _Hermotimus_. "Lykinos"

meets Hermotimus on his way to a lecture--a man of sixty who for many

years has attended the Stoics. Into their argument we need not go, but

one or two points may be noted. Hermotimus is a disciple, simple and

persevering, who owns that he has not reached the goal of Happiness and

hardly expects to reach it, but he presses bravely on, full of faith in

his teachers. Under the adroit questions of Lykinos, he is forced to

admit that he had chosen the Stoics rather than any other school by

sheer intuition--or because of general notions acquired more or less

unconsciously--like a man buying wine, he knew a good thing when he

tasted it, and looked no further. Yes, says Lykinos, take the first

step and the rest is easy--Philosophy depends on a first

assumption--take the Briareus of the poets with three heads and six

hands, and then work him out,--six eyes, six ears, three voices talking

at once, thirty fingers--you cannot quarrel with the details as they

come; once grant the beginning, and the rest comes flooding in,

irresistible, hardly now susceptible of doubt. So in Philosophy, your

passion, like the longing of a lover, blinded you to the first

assumptions, and the structure followed.[20] "Do not think that I

speak against the Stoics, through any special dislike of the school; my

arguments hold against all the schools."[21] The end is that

Hermotimus abandons all Philosophy for ever--not a very dramatic or

probable end, as Plato and Justin Martyr could have told Lucian.

The other point to notice is the picture of Virtue under the image of a

Celestial City, and here one cannot help wondering whether the irony

has any element of personal reminiscence. Virtue Lykinos pictures as a

City, whose citizens are happy, wise and good, little short of gods, as

the Stoics say. All there is peace, unity, liberty, equality. The

citizens are all aliens and foreigners, not a native among

them--barbarians, slaves, misformed, dwarfs, poor; for wealth and birth

and beauty are not reckoned there. "In good truth, we {206} should

devote all our efforts to this, and let all else go. We should take no

heed of our native-land, nor of the clinging and weeping of children or

parents, if one has any, but call on them to take the same journey, and

then, if they will not or cannot go with us, shake them off, and march

straight for the city of all bliss, leaving one's coat in their hands,

if they won't let go,--for there is no fear of your being shut out

there, even if you come without a coat." Fifteen years ago an old man

had urged Lykinos to go there with him. "If the city had been near at

hand and plain for all to see, long ago, you may be sure, with never a

doubt I would have gone there, and had my franchise long since. But as

you tell us, it lieth far away"----and there are so many professed

guides and so many roads, that there is no telling whether one is

travelling to Babylon or to Corinth.[22] "So for the future you had

better reconcile yourself to living like an ordinary man, without

fantastic and vain hopes."[23]

Lucian never ceases to banter the philosophers. When he visits the

Islands of the Blest, he remarks that, while Diogenes and the

Epicureans are there, Plato prefers his own Republic and Laws, the

Stoics are away climbing their steep hill of Virtue, and the Academics,

though wishful to come, are still suspending their judgment, uncertain

whether there really is such an island at all and not sure that

Rhadamanthus himself is qualified to give judgment.[24] Diogenes in

the shades, Pan in his grotto, Zeus in heaven, and the common man in

the streets, are unanimous that they have had too much Philosophy

altogether. The philosophers have indeed embarked on an impossible

quest, for they will never find Truth. Once Lucian represents Truth in

person, and his portrait is characteristic. She is pointed out to

him--a female figure, dim and indistinct of complexion; "I do not see

which one you mean," he says, and the answer is, "Don't you see the

unadorned one there, the naked one, ever eluding the sight and slipping

away?"[25]

[Sidenote: Lucian's _Lover of Lies_]

But still more absurd than Philosophy was the growth of belief in the

supernatural. Lucian's _Lover of Lies_ is a most illuminating book.

Here are gathered specimens of the various {207} types of contemporary

superstition--one would suspect the author of the wildest parody, if it

were not that point by point we may find parallels in the other writers

of the day. Tychiades (who is very like Lucian himself) tells how he

has been visiting Eucrates and has dropped into a nest of absurdities.

Eucrates is sixty and wears the solemn beard of a student of

philosophy. He has a ring made of iron from gibbets and is prepared to

believe everything incredible. His house is full of professed

philosophers, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Platonic, advising him how to

cure the pain in his legs, by wrapping round them a lion's skin with

the tooth of a field mouse folded within it.[26] Tychiades asks if

they really believe that a charm hung on outside can cure the mischief

within, and they laugh at his ignorance. The Platonist tells a number

of stories to prove the reasonableness of the treatment,--how a

vine-dresser of his father's had died of snake-bite and been recovered

by a Chaldaean, and how the same Chaldaean charmed (like the Pied Piper)

all the snakes off their farm. The Stoic narrates how he once saw a

Hyperborean flying and walking on water--"with those brogues on his

feet that his countrymen habitually wear"--a man whose more ordinary

feats were raising spirits, calling the dead from their graves, and

fetching down the moon. Ion, the Platonist, confirms all this with an

account of another miracle-worker--"everybody knows the Syrian of

Palestine" who drives daemons out of men; "he would stand by the patient

lying on the ground and ask whence they have come into the body; and,

though the sick person does not speak, the daemon answers in Greek, or

in some barbarian tongue, or whatever his own dialect may be, and

explains how he entered into the man and whence he came. Then the

Syrian would solemnly adjure him, or threaten him if he were obstinate,

and so drive him out. I can only say I saw one, of a black smoky hue,

in the act of coming out."[27] The Syrian's treatment was expensive,

it appears. Celsus, as we shall see later on, has some evidence on

this matter. The nationality of the magicians quoted in the book may

be remarked--they are Libyan, Syrian, Arab, Chaldaean, Egyptian, and

"Hyperborean."

Other tales of magical statues, a wife's apparition, an {208} uneasy

ghost,[28] a charm for bringing an absent lover, and the familiar one

of the man who learns the spell of three syllables to make a pestle

fetch water, but unhappily not that which will make it stop, and who

finds on cutting it in two that there are now two inanimate

water-carriers and a double deluge--these we may pass over. We may

note that this water-fetching spell came originally from a sacred

scribe of Memphis, learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, who

lived underground in the temple for three and twenty years and was

taught his magic there by Isis herself.[29] Interviews with daemons are

so common that instances are not given.[30]

More significant are the stories of the other world, for here we come

again, from a different point of approach, into a region familiar to

the reader of Plutarch. Eucrates himself, out in the woods, heard a

noise of barking dogs; an earthquake followed and a voice of thunder,

and then came a woman more than six hundred feet high, bearing sword

and torch, and followed by dogs "taller than Indian elephants, black in

colour." Her feet were snakes--here we may observe that Pausanias the

traveller pauses to dismiss "the silly story that giants have serpents

instead of feet," for a coffin more than eleven ells long was found

near Antioch and "the whole body was that of a man."[31] So the

snake-feet are not a mere fancy of Lucian's. The woman then tapped the

earth with one of these feet of hers, and disappeared into the chasm

she made. Eucrates, peeping over the edge, "saw everything in Hades,

the river of fire and the lake, Cerberus and the dead"--what is more,

he recognized some of the dead. "Did you see Socrates and Plato?" asks

Ion. Socrates he thought he saw, "but Plato I did not recognize; I

suppose one is bound to stick to the exact truth in talking to one's

friends." Pyrrhias the slave confirms the story as an eye-witness.[32]

Another follows with a story of his trance in illness, and how he saw

the world below, Fates, Furies, and all, and was brought before Pluto,

who {209} dismissed him with some irritation, as not amenable yet to

his Court, and called for the smith Demylos; he came back to life and

announced that Demylos would shortly die, and Demylos did die. "Where

is the wonder?" says another--the physician, "I know a man raised from

the dead twenty days after his burial, for I attended him both before

his death and after his resurrection."[33]

In all this, it is clear that there is a strong element of mockery.

Mockery was Lucian's object, but he probably kept in all these stories

a great deal nearer to what his neighbours would believe than we may

imagine. AElian, for example, has a story of a pious cock, which made a

point of walking gratefully in the processions that took place in

honour of AEsculapius; and he does not tell it in the spirit of the

author of the _Jackdaw of Rheims_.

[Sidenote: Lucian and the gods]

As one of the main preoccupations of his age was with the gods, Lucian

of course could not leave them alone. His usual method is to accept

them as being exactly what tradition made them, and then to set them in

new and impossible situations. The philosopher Menippus takes "the

right wing of an eagle and the left of a vulture," and, after some

careful practice, flies up to heaven to interview Zeus. He has been so

terribly distracted by the arguments of the schools, that he wants to

see for himself--"I dared not disbelieve men of such thundering voices

and such imposing beards." Zeus most amiably allows him to stand by

and watch him at work, hearing prayers as they come up through tubes,

and granting or rejecting them, then settling some auguries, and

finally arranging the weather--"rain in Scythia, snow in Greece, a

storm in the Adriatic, and about a thousand bushels of hail in

Cappadocia."[34] Zeus asks; rather nervously what men are saying about

him nowadays--mankind is so fond of novelty. "There was a time," he

says, "when I was everything to them--

Each street, each market-place was full of Zeus--

and I could hardly see for the smoke of sacrifice"; but other gods,

Asklepios, Bendis, Anubis and others, have set up shrines and the

altars of Zeus are cold--cold as Chrysippus.[35] Altogether the

dialogue is a masterpiece of humour and irony.

In another piece, we find Zeus and the other gods in {210} assembly

listening to an argument going on at Athens. An Epicurean, Damis, and

a singularly feeble Stoic are debating whether gods exist, and whether

they exercise any providence for men. Poseidon recommends the prompt

use of a thunderbolt "to let them see," but Zeus reminds him that it is

Destiny that really controls the thunderbolts--and, besides, "it would

look as if we were frightened." So the argument goes on, and all the

familiar proofs from divine judgments, regularity of sun and season,

from Homer and the poets, from the consensus of mankind and oracles,

are produced and refuted there and then, while the gods listen, till it

becomes doubtful whether they do exist. The Stoic breaks down and runs

away. "What are we to do?" asks Zeus. Hermes quotes a comic poet in

Hamlet's vein--"there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes

it so"--and what does it matter, if a few men are persuaded by Damis?

we still have the majority--"most of the Greeks and all the

barbarians."[36]

In _Zeus Cross-examined_ the process is carried further. Cyniscus

questions Zeus, who is only too good-natured and falls into all the

questioner's traps. He admits Destiny to be supreme, and gets

entangled in a terrible net of problems about fore-knowledge, the value

of sacrifice and of divination, divine wrath, sin and so forth, till he

cries "You leave us nothing!--you seem to me to despise me, for sitting

here and listening to you with a thunderbolt on my arm." "Hit me with

it," says Cyniscus, "if it is so destined,--I shall have no quarrel

with you for it, but with Clotho." At last Zeus rises and goes away

and will answer no more. But perhaps, reflects Cyniscus, he has said

enough, and it was "not destined for me to hear any more."[37] The

reader feels that Zeus has said more than enough.

From the old gods of Greece, we naturally turn to the newcomers. When

Zeus summoned the gods to discuss the question of atheism at Athens, a

good many more came than understood Greek, and it was they who had the

best seats as they were made of solid gold--Bendis, Anubis, Attis and

Mithras for example. Elsewhere Momus (who is a divine Lucian)

complains to Zeus about them--"that Mithras with his Persian robe and

tiara, who can't talk Greek, nor even understand when one drinks {211}

to him"--what is he doing in heaven? And then the dog-faced Egyptian

in linen--who is he to bark at the gods? "Of course,", says Zeus,

"Egyptian religion--yes! but all the same there are hidden meanings,

and the uninitiated must not laugh at them." Still Zeus is provoked

into issuing a decree--on second thoughts, he would not put it to the

vote of the divine assembly, for he felt sure he would be outvoted.

The decree enacts that, whereas heaven is crowded with polyglot aliens,

till there is a great rise in the price of nectar, and the old and true

gods are being crowded out of their supremacy, a committee of seven

gods shall be appointed to sit on claims; further, that each god shall

attend to his own function, Athene shall not heal nor Asklepios give

oracles, etc.; that philosophers shall talk no more nonsense; and that

the statues of deified men shall be replaced by those of Zeus, Hera,

etc., the said men to be buried in the usual way.[38]

[Sidenote: Lucian's _Alexander_]

More than one reference has been made to new gods and new oracles.

Lucian in his _Alexander_ gives a merciless account of how such shrines

were started. He came into personal contact--indeed into

conflict--with Alexander, the founder of the oracle of Abonoteichos,

and his story is full of detail. The man was a quack of the vulgarest

type, and, yet by means of a tame snake and some other simple

contrivances, he imposed himself upon the faith of a community. His

renown spread far and wide. By recognizing other oracles he secured

their support. Men came to him even from Rome. Through one of these

devotees, he actually sent an oracle to Marcus Aurelius among the

Marcomanni and Quadi, bidding him throw two lions with spices into the

Danube, and there should be a great victory. This was done, Lucian

says; the lions swam ashore on the farther side, and the victory fell

to the Germans.[39] Lucian himself trapped the prophet with some

cunningly devised inquiries, which quite baffled god, prophet, snake

and all. He also tried to detach an eminent adherent. Alexander

realized what was going on, and Lucian got a guard of two soldiers from

the governor of Cappadocia. Under their protection he went to see the

prophet who had sent for him. The prophet, as he usually did with his

followers, offered him {212} his hand to kiss, and Lucian records with

satisfaction that he bit the proffered hand and nearly lamed it.

Thanks to his guard, he came away uninjured. Alexander, however, after

this tried still more to compass his death, which is not

surprising.[40] There is other evidence than Lucian's, though it is

not unnaturally slight, for the existence of this remarkable impostor.

[Sidenote: Lucian and Peregrinus]

Lucian has one or two incidental references to Christians.[41]

Alexander warned them, in company with the Epicureans, to keep away

from his shrine. But we hear more of them in connexion with Proteus

Peregrinus. Lucian is not greatly interested in them; he ridicules

them as fools for being taken in by the impostor; for Peregrinus, he

tells us, duped them with the greatest success. He became a prophet

among them, a thiasarch, a ruler of the synagogue, everything in fact;

he interpreted their books for them, and indeed wrote them a lot more;

and they counted him a god and a lawgiver. "You know," Lucian

explains, "they still worship that great man of theirs, who was put on

a gibbet in Palestine, because he added this new mystery (_teleten_) to

human life." In his mocking way he gives some interesting evidence on

the attention and care bestowed by Christians on those of their members

who were thrown into prison. He details what was done by the foolish

community for "their new Socrates" when Peregrinus was a prisoner.

When he was released, Peregrinus started wandering again, living on

Christian charity, till "he got into trouble with them, too,--he was

caught eating forbidden meats."[42]

Lucian differs from Voltaire in having less purpose and no definite

principles. He had no design to overthrow religion in favour of

something else; it is merely that the absurdity of it provoked him, and

he enjoyed saying aloud, and with all the vigour of reckless wit, that

religious belief was silly. If the effect was scepticism, it was a

scepticism founded, not on {213} philosophy, but on the off-hand

judgment of what is called common-sense. Hidden meanings and mysteries

were to him nonsense. How little he was qualified to understand

mysticism and religious enthusiasm, can be seen in his account of the

self-immolation of Peregrinus on his pyre at the Olympian

games[43]--perhaps the most insufficient thing he ever wrote, full of

value as it is. Peregrinus was a wanderer among the religions of the

age. Gellius--who often heard him at Athens, calls him a man _gravis

atque constans_, and says he spoke much that was useful and honest. He

quotes in his way a paragraph of a discourse on sin, which does not

lack moral elevation.[44] To Lucian the man was a quack, an advertiser,

a mountebank, who burnt himself to death merely to attract notice.

Lucian says he witnessed the affair, and tells gaily how, among other

jests, he imposed a pretty miracle of his own invention upon the

credulous. He had taken no pains to understand the man--nor did he to

understand either the religious temper in general, or the philosophic,

or anything else. His habit of handling things easily and lightly did

not help him to see what could not be taken in at a glance.

What then does Lucian make of human life? On this he says a great

deal. His most characteristic invention perhaps is the visit that

Charon pays to the upper world to see what it really is that the dead

regret so much. It is indeed, as M. Croiset points out, a fine stroke

of irony to take the opinion of a minister of Death upon Life. Charon

has left his ferry boat and comes up to light. Hermes meets him and

they pile up some mountains--Pelion on Ossa, and Parnassus on top, from

the two summits of which they survey mankind--a charm from Homer

removing Charon's difficulty of vision. He sees many famous people,

such as Milo, Polycrates and Cyrus; and he overhears Croesus and Solon

discussing happiness, while Hermes foretells their fates. He sees a

varied scene, life full of confusion, cities like swarms of bees, where

each has a sting and stings his neighbour, and some, like wasps, harass

and plunder the rest; over them, like a cloud, hang hopes and fears

{214} and follies, pleasures and passions and hatreds. He sees the

Fates spinning slender threads, soon cut, from which men hang with

never a thought of how quickly death ends their dreams; and he compares

them to bubbles, big and little inevitably broken. He would like to

shout to them "to live with Death ever before their eyes"--why be so

earnest about what they can never take away?--but Hermes tells him it

would be useless. He is amazed at the absurdity of their burial rites,

and he astonishes Hermes by quoting Homer on the subject. Last of all

he witnesses a battle and cries out at the folly of it. "Such," he

concludes, "is the life of miserable men--and not a word about

Charon."[45]

In the same way and in the same spirit Menippus visits the Lower World,

where he sees Minos judging the dead. Minos too seems to have been

interested in literature, for he reduced the sentence upon Dionysius,

the tyrant of Syracuse, on the very proper ground of his generosity to

authors. But the general picture has less humour. "We entered the

Acherusian plain, and there we found the demi-gods, and the heroines,

and the general throng of the dead in nations and tribes, some ancient

and mouldering, 'strengthless heads' as Homer says, others fresh and

holding together--Egyptians these in the main, so thoroughly good is

their embalming. But to know one from another was no easy task; all

become so much alike when the bones are bared; yet with pains and long

scrutiny we began to recognize them. They lay pell-mell in

undistinguishable heaps, with none of their earthly beauties left.

With so many skeletons piled together, all as like as could be, eyes

glaring ghastly and vacant, teeth gleaming bare, I knew not to tell

Thersites from Nireus the fair.... For none of their ancient marks

remained, and their bones were alike, uncertain, unlabelled,

undistinguishable. When I saw all this, the life of man came before me

under the likeness of a great pageant, arranged and marshalled by

Chance," who assigns the parts and reassigns them as she pleases; and

then the pageant ends, every one disrobes and all are alike. "Such is

human life, as it seemed to me while I gazed."[46] Over and over again

with every accent of irony the one moral is enforced--sometimes with

sheer brutality as in the tract on _Mourning_.

{215}

Menippus asked Teiresias in the shades what was the best life. "He was

a blind little old man, and pale, and had a weak voice." He said: "The

life of ordinary people is best, and, wiser; cease from the folly of

metaphysics, of inquiry into origins and purposes; spit upon those

clever syllogisms and count all these things idle talk; and pursue one

end alone, how you may well arrange the present and go on your way with

a laugh for most things and no enthusiasms."[47] In fact, "the

unexamined life" is the only one, as many a weary thinker has felt--if

it were but possible.

[Sidenote: Criticism of Lucian]

Goethe's criticism on Heine may perhaps be applied to Lucian--"We

cannot deny that he has many brilliant qualities, but he is wanting in

love ... and thus he will never produce the effect which he ought."[48]

Various views have been held of Lucian's contribution to the religious

movement of the age; it has even been suggested that his Dialogues

advanced the cause of Christianity. But when one reflects upon the

tender hearts to be found in the literature of the century, it is

difficult to think that Lucian can have had any effect on the mass of

serious people, unless to quicken in them by repulsion the desire for

something less terrible than a godless world of mockery and death, and

the impulse to seek it in the ancestral faith of their fathers. He did

not love men enough to understand their inmost mind. The instincts

that drove men back upon the old religion were among the deepest in

human nature, and of their strength Lucian had no idea. His admirers

to-day speak of him as one whose question was always "Is it true?" We

have seen that it was a question lightly asked and quickly answered.

It is evident enough that his mockery of religion has some warrant in

the follies and superstitions of his day. But such criticism as his,

based upon knowledge incomplete and sympathy imperfect, is of little

value. If a man's judgment upon religion is not to be external, he

must have felt the need of a religion,--he must have had at some time

the consciousness of imperative cravings and instincts which only a

religion can satisfy. Such cravings are open to criticism, but men can

neither be laughed out of them, nor indeed reasoned out of them; and

however absurd a religion may seem, and however defective it may be, if

it is {216} still the only available satisfaction of the deepest needs

of which men are conscious, it will hold its own, despite mockery and

despite philosophy--as we shall see in the course of the chapter,

though two more critics of religion remain to be noticed.

[Sidenote: Sextus Empiricus]

Lucian was not the only man who sought to bring the age back to sound

and untroubled thinking. There was a physician, Sextus--known from the

school of medicine to which he belonged as Sextus Empiricus--who wrote

a number of books about the end of the second century or the beginning

of the third in defence of Scepticism. A medical work of his, and a

treatise on the Soul are lost, but his _Pyrrhonean Sketches_ and his

books _Against the Dogmatists_ remain--written in a Greek which

suggests that he was himself a Greek and not a foreigner using the

language. Physicists, mathematicians, grammarians, moralists,

astrologers, come under his survey, and the particular attention which

he gives to the Stoics is a material fact in fixing his date, for after

about 200 A.D. they cease to be of importance. His own point of view a

short extract from his sketches will exhibit fully enough for our

present purpose.

"The aim of the Sceptic is ataraxia [freedom from mental perturbation

or excitement] in matters which depend on opinion, and in things which

are inevitable restraint of the feelings (_metriopatheian_). For he

began to philosophise in order to judge his impressions (_phantasias_)

and to discover which of them are true and which false, so as to be

free from perturbation. But he came to a point where the arguments

were at once diametrically opposite and of equal weight; and then, as

he could not decide, he suspended judgment (_epeschen_), and as soon as

he had done so, there followed as if by accident this very freedom from

perturbation in the region of opinion. For if a man opines anything to

be good or bad in its essential nature, he is always in perturbation.

When he has not the things that appear to him to be good, he considers

himself tortured by the things evil by nature, and he pursues the good

(as he supposes them to be); but, as soon as he has them, he falls into

even more perturbations, through being uplifted out of all reason and

measure, and from fear of change he does everything not to lose the

things that seem to him to be good. But the man, who makes no

definitions as to what is good or bad by {217} nature, neither avoids

nor pursues anything with eagerness, and is therefore unperturbed.

What is related of Apelles the painter has in fact befallen the

Sceptic. The story goes that he was painting a horse and wished to

represent the foam of its mouth in his picture; but he was so

unsuccessful that he gave it up, and took the sponge, on which he used

to wipe the colours from his brush, and threw it at the picture. The

sponge hit the picture and produced a likeness of the horse's foam.

The Sceptics then hoped to gain ataraxia by forming some decision on

the lack of correspondence between things as they appear to the eye and

to the mind; they were unable to do it, and so suspended judgment

(_epeschen_); and then as if by accident the ataraxia followed---just

as a shadow follows a body. We do not say that the Sceptic is

untroubled in every way, but we own he is troubled by things that are

quite inevitable. For we admit that the Sceptic is cold sometimes, and

thirsty, and so forth. But even in these matters the uneducated are

caught in two ways at once, viz.: by the actual feelings and (not less)

by supposing these conditions to be bad by nature. The Sceptic does

away with the opinion that any one of these things is evil in its

nature, and so he gets off more lightly even in these

circumstances."[49]

A view of this kind was hardly likely to appeal to the temper of the

age, and the influence of Scepticism was practically none. Still it is

interesting to find so vigorous and clear an exponent of the system

flourishing in a period given over to the beliefs that Lucian parodied

and Apuleius accepted. Sextus, it may be added, is the sole

representative of ancient Scepticism whose works have come down to us

in any complete form.

One very obscure person of this period remains to be noticed, who in

his small sphere gave his views to mankind in a way of his own.

In 1884 two French scholars, MM. Holleaux and Paris were exploring the

ruins of Oinoanda, a Greek city in Lycia, and they came upon a number

of inscribed stones, most of them built in a wall. What was unusual

was that these were neither fragments of municipal decrees nor of

private monuments, but all formed part of one great inscription which

dealt apparently with some philosophic subject. In June 1895 two

Austrian {218} scholars, MM. Heberdey and Kalinka, re-collated the

inscription and found some further fragments, and now the story is

tolerably clear, and a curious one it is.[50]

It appears that the fragments originally belonged to an inscription

carved on the side of a colonnade, and they fall into three series

according to their place on the wall--one above another. The middle

series consists of columns of fourteen lines, the letters 1-1/2 to 2

centimetres high, fifteen or sixteen in a line,--each column forming a

page, as it were; and it extends over some twenty-one or two yards.

The lowest series is in the same style. On top is a series of columns

added later (as the inscription shows) and cut in letters of 2-1/2-3

centimetres, generally ten lines to the column--the larger size to

compensate for the greater height above the ground, for it was all

meant to be read. The inscription begins:--

"Diogenes to kinsmen, household and friends, this is my charge. Being

so ill that it is critical whether I yet live or live no longer--for an

affection of the heart is carrying me off--if I survive, I will gladly

accept the life yet given to me; if I do not survive, _DO_..."

[Sidenote: Diogenes of Oinoanda]

There ends a column, and a line or two has been lost at the top of what

seems to be the next, after which come the words "a kindly feeling for

strangers also who may be staying here," and the incomplete statement

which begins "knowing assuredly, that by knowledge of the matters

relating to Nature and feelings, which I have set forth in the spaces

below...." It is evident that Diogenes had something to say which he

considered it a duty to make known. This proves to have been the

Epicurean theory of life; and here he had carved up for all to read a

simple exposition of the philosophy of his choice.

The uppermost row contains his account of his purpose and something

upon old age--very fragmentary. There follow a letter of Epicurus to

his mother, and another letter from some one unidentified to one

Menneas, and then a series of apophthegms and sentences. Thus fragment

27 is a column of ten lines to this effect: "Nothing is so contributive

to good spirits, as not to do many things, nor take in hand tiresome

matters, nor force oneself in any way beyond one's own strength, for

all these things perturb nature." Another column proclaims: "Acute

{219} pains cannot be long; for either they quickly destroy life and

are themselves destroyed with it, or they receive some abatement of

their acuteness." These platitudes are, as we may guess, an

afterthought.

The middle row, the first to be inscribed, deals with the Epicurean

theory of atoms--not by apophthegm or aphorism, but with something of

the fulness and technicality of a treatise. "Herakleitos of Ephesus,

then, said fire was the element; Thales of Miletus water; Diogenes of

Apollonia and Anaximenes air; Empedocles of Agrigentum both fire and

air and water and earth; Anaxagoras of Clazomenae the homoeomeries of

each thing in particular; those of the Stoa matter and God. But

Democritus of Abdera said atomic natures--and he did well; but since he

made some mistakes about them, these will be set right in our opinions.

So now we will accuse the persons mentioned, not from any feeling of

illwill against them, but wishing the truth to be saved (_sothenai_)."

So he takes them in turn and argues at leisure. The large fragment 45

discusses astronomy in its four columns--in particular, the sun and its

apparent distance and its nature. Fr. 48 (four columns) goes on to

treat of civilization,--of the development of dress from leaves to

skins and woven garments, without the intervention "of any other god or

of Athena either." Need and time did all. Hermes did not invent

language. In fr. 50, we read that Protagoras "said he did not know if

there are gods. That is the same thing as saying he knew there are

not." Fr. 51 deals with death--"thou hast even persuaded me to laugh

at it. For I am not a whit afraid because of the Tityos-es and

Tantalus-es, whom some people paint in Hades, nor do I dread decay,

reflecting that the [something] of the body ... [three broken lines]

... nor anything else." At the end of the row another letter begins

(fr. 56) "[Diogen]es to Anti[pater] greeting." He writes from Rhodes,

he says, just before winter begins, to friends in Athens and elsewhere,

whom he would like to see. Though away from his country, he knows he

can do more for it in this way than by taking part in political life.

He wishes to show that "that which is convenient to Nature, viz.

Ataraxia is the same for all." He is now "at the sunset of life," and

all but departing; so, since most men, as in a pestilence, are diseased

with false opinion, which is very infectious, he wishes {220} "to help

those that shall be after us; for they too are ours, even if they are

not yet born"; and strangers too. "I wished to make use of this

colonnade and to set forth in public the medicine of salvation" (_ta

tes soterias protheinai pharmaka_, fr. 58). The idle fears that

oppressed him, he has shaken off; as to pains--empty ones he has

abolished utterly, and the rest are reduced to the smallest compass.

He bewails the life of men, wasted as it is, and weeps for it; and he

has "counted it a good man's part" to help men as far as he can. That

is why he has thought of this inscription which may enable men to

obtain "joy with good spirits" (_te_[_s met' euthu_]_mias chara_[_s_]),

rather than of a theatre or a bath or anything else of the kind, such

as rich men would often build for their fellow-citizens (fr. 59).

The discussion which follows in the third series of columns need not

here detain us. Diogenes appeals for its consideration--that it may

not merely be glanced at in passing (fr. 61, col. 3); but it will

suffice us at present to note his statement that his object is "that

life may become pleasant to us" (fr. 63, col. 1), and his protest--"I

will swear, both now and always, crying aloud to all, Greeks and

barbarians, that pleasure is the objective of the best mode of life,

while the virtues, which these people now unseasonably meddle with (for

they shift them from the region of the contributive to that of the

objective) are by no means an objective, but contributive to the

objective" (fr. 67, col. 2, 3). Lastly we may notice his reference to

the improvement made in the theory of Democritus by the discovery of

Epicurus of the swerve inherent in the atoms (fr. 81).

Altogether the inscription is as singular a monument of antiquity as we

are likely to find. What the fellow-citizens of Diogenes thought of

it, we do not know. Perhaps they might have preferred the bath or

other commonplace gift of the ordinary rich man. It is a pity that

Lucian did not see the colonnade.

Side by side with Lucian, Sextus and Diogenes it is interesting to

consider their contemporaries who were not of their opinion.

Perhaps, while the stone-masons were day by day carving up the long

inscription at Oinoanda, others of their trade were {221} busy across

the AEgaean with one of another character. At any rate, the inscription

which M. Julius Apellas set up in the temple of Asklepios in Epidauros,

belongs to this period. Like Diogenes, he is not afraid of detail.

[Sidenote: Marcus Julius Apellas]

"In the priesthood of Poplius AElius Antiochus.

"I, Marcus Julius Apellas of Idrias and Mylasa, was sent for by the

God, for I was a chronic invalid and suffered from dyspepsia. In the

course of my journey the God told me in AEgina not to be so irritable.

When I reached the Temple, he directed me to keep my head covered for

two days; and for these two days it rained. I was to eat bread and

cheese, parsley with lettuce, to wash myself without help, to practise

running, to drink citron-lemonade, to rub my body on the sides of the

bath in the bath-room, to take walks in the upper portico, to use the

trapeze, to rub myself over with sand, to go with bare feet in the

bath-room, to pour wine into the hot water before I got in, to wash

myself without help, and to give an Attic drachma to the

bath-attendant, to offer in public sacrifices to Asklepios, Epione and

the Eleusinian goddesses, and to take milk with honey. When for one

day I had drunk milk alone, the god said to put honey in the milk to

make it digestible.

"When I called upon the god to cure me more quickly, I thought it was

as if I had anointed my whole body with mustard and salt, and had come

out of the sacred hall and gone in the direction of the bath-house,

while a small child was going before holding a smoking censer. The

priest said to me: 'Now you are cured, but you must pay up the fees for

your treatment.' I acted according to the vision, and when I rubbed

myself with salt and moistened mustard, I felt the pain still, but when

I had bathed, I suffered no longer. These events took place in the

first nine days after I had come to the Temple. The god also touched

my right hand and my breast.

"The following day as I was offering sacrifice, a flame leapt up and

caught my hand, so as to cause blisters. Yet after a little my hand

was healed.

"As I prolonged my stay in the Temple, the god told me to use dill

along with olive-oil for my head-aches. Formerly I had not suffered

from head-aches, but my studies had brought {222} on congestion. After

I used the olive-oil, I was cured of head-aches. For swollen glands

the god told me to use a cold gargle, when I consulted him about it,

and he ordered the same treatment for inflamed tonsils.

"He bade me inscribe this treatment, and I left the Temple in good

health and full of gratitude to the god."[51]

[Sidenote: Pausanias]

Pausanias speaks of "the buildings erected in our time by Antoninus a

man of the Conscript Senate"--a Roman Senator in fact,[52]--in honour

of Asklepios at Epidauros, a bath, three temples, a colonnade, and "a

house where a man may die, and a woman lie in, without sin," for these

actions were not "holy" within the sanctuary precincts, and had had to

be done in the open air hitherto.

A more conspicuous patient of Asklepios is AElius Aristides, the

rhetorician. This brilliant and hypochondriacal person spent years in

watching his symptoms and consulting the god about them. Early in his

illness the god instructed him to record its details, and he obeyed

with zest, though in after years he was not always able to record the

minuter points with complete clearness. He was bidden to make

speeches, to rub himself over with mud, to plunge into icy water, to

ride, and, once, to be bled to the amount of 120 litres. As the human

body does not contain anything like that amount of blood, and as the

temple servants knew of no one ever having been "cut" to that

extent--"at least except Ischyron, and his was one of the most

remarkable cases," the god was not taken literally.[53] The regular

plan was to sleep in the Temple, as already mentioned, and the god

came. "The impression was that one could touch him, and perceive that

he came in person; as if one were between asleep and awake, and wished

to look out and were in an agony lest he should depart too soon,--as if

one held one's ear and listened--sometimes as in a dream, and then as

in a waking vision--one's hair was on end, and tears of joy were shed,

and one felt light-hearted. And who among {223} men could set this

forth in words? Yet if there is one of the initiated, he knows and

recognises [what I say]."[54]

None of the cases yet quoted can compare with the miracles of ancient

days to be read in the inscriptions about the place--stories of women

with child for three and five years, of the extraordinary surgery of

the god, cutting off the head of a dropsical patient, holding him

upside down to let the water run out and putting the head on again,--a

mass of absurdities hardly to be matched outside _The Glories of Mary_.

They make Lucian's _Philopseudes_ seem tame.

There were other gods, beside Asklepios, who gave oracles in shrine and

dream. Pausanias the traveller has left a book on Greece and its

antiquities, temples, gods and legends of extraordinary value. "A man

made of common stuff and cast in a common mould," as Dr Frazer

characterizes him,--and therefore the more representative--he went

through Greece with curious eyes and he saw much that no one else has

recorded. At Sparta stood the only temple he knew of which had an

upper story. In this upper story was an image of Aphrodite Morpho

fettered[55]--a silly thing he thought it to fetter a cedar-wood doll.

He particularly visited Phigalea, because of the "Black Demeter"--a

curious enough image she had been, though by then destroyed.[56] He

was initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries.[57] He tells us that the

stony remnants of the lump of clay from which Prometheus fashioned the

first man were still preserved,[58] and that the sceptre which

Hephaistos made for Agamemnon received a daily sacrifice in Chaeronea,

Plutarch's city--"a table is set beside it covered with all sorts of

flesh and cakes."[59] He has many such stories. He tells us too about

a great many oracles of his day, of which that of Amphilochus at Mallus

in Cilicia" is the most infallible"[60]--a curiously "suggestive

superlative (_apseudestation_). He is greatly {224} interested in

Asklepios, but for our present purpose a few sentences from his

elaborate account of the ceremony with which Trophonius is consulted at

Lebadea must suffice.

After due rites the inquirer comes to the oracle, in a linen tunic with

ribbons, and boots of the country. Inside bronze railings is a pit of

masonry, some four ells across and eight deep, and he goes down into it

by means of a light ladder brought for the occasion. At the bottom he

finds a hole, a very narrow one. "So he lays himself on his back on

the ground, and holding in his hand barley cakes kneaded with honey, he

thrusts his feet first into the hole, and follows himself endeavouring

to get his knees through the hole. When they are through, the rest of

his body is immediately dragged after them and shoots in, just as a man

might be caught and dragged down by the swirl of a mighty and rapid

river. Once they are inside the shrine the future is not revealed to

all in one and the same way, but to one it is given to see and to

another to hear. They return through the same aperture feet

foremost.... When a man has come up from Trophonius, the priests take

him in hand again, and set him on what is called the chair of Memory,

which stands not far from the shrine; and, being seated there, he is

questioned by them as to all he saw and heard. On being informed, they

hand him over to his friends who carry him, still overpowered with

fear, and quite unconscious of himself and his surroundings, to the

building where he lodged before, the house of Good Fortune and the Good

Daemon. Afterwards, however, he will have all his wits as before, and

the power of laughter will come back to him. I write not from mere

hearsay: I have myself consulted Trophonius and have seen others who

have done so. All who have gone down to Trophonius are obliged to set

up a tablet containing a record of all they heard and saw."[61]

A man who has been through such an experience may be excused for

believing much. While Pausanias kept his Greek habit of criticism and

employs it on occasional myths and traditions, and particularly on

stories of hell--though the fact of punishment after death he seems to

accept--yet his travels and his inquiries made an impression on him.

"When I began this work, I used to look on these Greek stories as

little better {225} than foolishness; but now that I have got as far as

Arcadia, my opinion about them is this: I believe that the Greeks who

were accounted wise spoke of old in riddles, and not straight out; and,

accordingly, I conjecture that this story about Cronos [swallowing a

foal instead of his child] is a bit of Greek philosophy. In matters of

religion I will follow tradition."[62]

[Sidenote: Artemidorus of Daldia]

Pausanias mentions several oracles and temples of Apollo in Greece and

Asia Minor--one obscure local manifestation of the god he naturally

enough omitted, but a fellow-citizen of the god preserves it. "It was

in obedience to him, the god of my land, that I undertook this

treatise. He often urged me to it, and in particular appeared visibly

to me (_enargos epiotanti_),[63] since I knew thee, and all but ordered

me to write all this. No wonder that the Daldian Apollo, whom we call

by the ancestral name of Mystes, urged me to this, in care for thy

worth and wisdom, for there is an old friendship between Lydians and

Phoenicians, as they tell us who set forth the legends of the

land."[64] So writes Artemidorus to his friend Cassius Maximus of his

treatise on the scientific interpretation of dreams--a work of which he

is very proud. "Wonder not," he says, "at the title, that the name

stands Artemidorus Daldianus, and not 'of Ephesus,' as on many of the

books I have already written on other subjects. For Ephesus, it

happens, is famous on her own account, and she has many men of note to

proclaim her. But Daldia is a town of Lydia of no great renown, and,

as she has had no such men, she has remained unknown till my day. So I

dedicate this to her, my native-place on the mother's side, as a

parent's due _threpteria_."[65]

Marcus Aurelius records his gratitude "that remedies have been shown to

me by dreams, both others, and against blood-spitting and

giddiness."[66] Plutarch, Pausanias, Aristides--dreams {226} come into

the scheme of things divine with all the devout of our period.

Artemidorus is their humble brother--not the first to give a whole book

to dreams, but proud to be a pioneer in the really scientific treatment

of them--"the accuracy of the judgments, that is the thing for which,

even by itself, I think highly of myself."[67] The critic may take it

"that I too am quite capable of neologisms and persuasive rhetoric

(_ehuresilogein kai pithaneuthai_), but I have not undertaken all this

for theatrical effect or to please the speech-mongers; I appeal

throughout to experience, as canon and witness of my words," and he

begs his readers neither to add to his books nor take anything

away.[68] His writing is, as he says, quite free from "the stage and

tragedy style."

Artemidorus takes himself very seriously. "For one thing, there is no

book on the interpretation of dreams that I have not acquired, for I

had great enthusiasm for this; and, in the next place, though the

prophets (_manteon_) in the market-place are much slandered, and called

beggars and quacks and humbugs by the gentlemen of solemn countenance

and lifted eye-brows, I despised the slander and for many years I have

associated with them--both in Greece, in cities and at festivals, and

in Asia, and in Italy, and in the largest and most populous of the

islands, consenting to hear ancient dreams and their results."[69]

This patient research has resulted in principles of classification.[70]

There are dreams that merely repeat what a man is doing (_enuphnia_);

and others (_oneipoi_) which are prophetic. These last fall into two

classes--theorematic dreams, as when a man dreams of a voyage, and

wakes to go upon a voyage, and allegoric dreams. The latter adjective

has a great history in regions more august, but the allegoric method is

the same everywhere, as an illustration will show. A man dreamed he

saw Charon playing at counters with another man, whom he called away on

business; Charon grew angry and chased him, till he ran for refuge into

an inn called {227} "The Camel," and bolted the door, whereupon "the

daemon" went away, but one of the man's thighs sprouted with grass.

Shortly after this dream he had his thigh broken--the one and sole

event foretold. For Charon and the counters meant death, but Charon

did not catch him, so it was shown that he would not die; but his foot

was threatened, since he was pursued. The name of the inn hinted at

the thigh, because of the anatomy of a camel's thigh; and the grass

meant disuse of the limb, for grass only grows where the earth is left

at rest.[71] The passage is worth remembering whenever we meet the

word allegory and its derivatives in contemporary literature.

Artemidorus has five books of this stuff--the last two dedicated to his

son, and containing instances "that will make you a better interpreter

of dreams than all, or at least inferior to none; but, if published,

they will show you know no more than the rest."[72] The sentence

suggests science declining into profession.

[Sidenote: Apuleius]

Far more brilliant, more amusing and more attractive than any of these

men, whom we have considered since we left Lucian, is Apuleius of

Madaura. Rhetorician, philosopher and man of science, a story-teller

wavering between Boccaccio and Hans Andersen, he is above all a

stylist, a pietist and a humorist. For his history we depend upon

himself, and this involves us in difficulties; for, while autobiography

runs through two of his works, one of these is an elaboration of a

defence he made on a charge of magic and the other is a novel of no

discoverable class but its own, and through both runs a vein of

nonsense, which makes one chary of being too literal.

The novel is the _Golden Ass_--that at least is what St Augustine tells

us the author called it.[73] Passages from this have been seriously

used as sources of information as to the author. But there is another

_Ass_, long attributed to Lucian though probably not Lucian's, and in

each case the hero tells the tale in the first person, and the

co-incidences between the Greek and the Latin make it obvious that

there is some {228} literary connexion between them, whatever it is.

The scene is Greece and Thessaly, but not the Greece and Thessaly of

geography, any more than the maritime Bohemia of Shakespeare. Yet in

the last book Apuleius seems to have forgotten "Lucius of Patrae" and to

be giving us experiences of his own which have nothing to do with the

hero of the _Ass_, Greek or Latin.

[Sidenote: The _Apology_ of Apuleius]

In the _Apology_ he comes closer to his own career and he tells us

about himself. Here he does not venture on the delightful assertion

that he is the descendant of the great Plutarch, as the hero of the

_Ass_ does, but avows that, as his native place is on the frontiers of

Numidia and Gaetulia, he calls himself "half Numidian and half

Gaetulian"--just as Cyrus the Greater was "half Mede and half Persian."

His city is "a most splendid colony," and his father held in turn all

its magistracies, and he hopes not to be unworthy of him.[74] He and

his brother inherited two million sesterces, though he has lessened his

share "by distant travel and long studies and constant

liberalities."[75] Elsewhere he tells us definitely that he was

educated at Athens.[76] Everybody goes to the _litterator_ for his

rudiments, to the grammarian next and then to the rhetorician--"but I

drank from other vessels at Athens," so "Empedocles frames songs, Plato

dialogues, Socrates hymns, Epicharmus measures, Xenophon histories,

Xenocrates satires; your Apuleius does all these and cultivates the

nine Muses with equal zeal--with more will, that is, than skill."[77]

Like many brilliant men of his day he took to the strolling life of the

rhetorician, going from city to city and giving displays of his powers

of language, extemporizing wonderful combinations of words. Either he

himself or some other admirer made a collection of elegant extracts

from these exhibition-speeches, still extant under the title of

_Florida_. His fame to-day rests on other works. In the course of his

travels he came to Oea in his native-land, and there married the

widowed mother of a fellow-student of his Athenian days. Her late

husband's family resented the marriage; and affecting to believe that

her affections had been gained by {229} some sort of witchcraft, they

prosecuted Apuleius on a charge of magic. The charge was in itself

rather a serious one, though Apuleius made light of it. His defence is

an interesting document for the glimpses it gives into North African

society, with its Greek, Latin, and Punic elements. The younger

stepson has fallen into bad hands; "he never speaks except in Punic,--a

little Greek, perhaps, surviving from what he learnt of his mother;

Latin he neither will nor can speak."[78] On family life, on marriage

customs, on the registration of births (c. 89);--on the personal habits

of the defendant, his toothpowder (and a verse he made in its praise)

and his looking-glass, we gain curious information. Above all the

speech sheds great light on the inter-relations of magic and religion

in contemporary thought. A few points may be noticed.

What, asks the prosecution, is the meaning of this curious interest

Apuleius has in fish? It is zoological, says Apuleius; I have written

books on fish, both in Greek and Latin,--and dissected them. That

curious story, too, of the boy falling down in his presence? As to

that, Apuleius knows all about divination by means of boys put under

magical influence; he has read of it, of course, but he does not know

whether to believe or not; "I do think with Plato," he owns to the

court (or to his readers), "that between gods and men, in nature and in

place intermediary, there are certain divine powers, and these preside

over all divinations and the miracles of magicians. Nay, more, I have

the fancy that the human soul, particularly the simple soul of a boy,

might, whether by evocation of charm or by mollification of odour, be

laid to sleep, and so brought out of itself into oblivion of things

present, and for a brief space, all memory of the body put away, it

might be restored and returned to its own nature, which is indeed

immortal and divine, and thus, in a certain type of slumber, foretell

the future."[79] As for the boy in question, however, he is so

ricketty that it would take a magician to keep him standing.

Then those mysterious "somethings" which Apuleius keeps {230} wrapped

up in a napkin? "I have been initiated in many of the mysteries of

Greece. Certain symbols and memorials of these, given to me by the

priests, I sedulously preserve. I say nothing unusual, nothing

unknown. To take one instance, those among you who are _mystae_ of

Father Liber [Bacchus] know what it is you keep laid away at home, and

worship in secret, far from all profane eyes. Now, I, as I said, from

enthusiasm for truth and duty toward the gods, I have learnt many

sacred mysteries, very many holy rites, and divers ceremonies"--the

audience will remember he said as much three years ago in his now very

famous speech about AEsculapius--"then could it seem strange to anyone,

who has any thought of religion, that a man, admitted to so many divine

mysteries, should keep certain emblems of those holy things at home,

and wrap them in linen, the purest covering for things divine?" Some

men--the prosecutor among them--count it mirth to mock things divine;

no, he goes to no temple, has never prayed, will not even put his hand

to his lips when he passes a shrine,--why! he has not so much as an

anointed stone or a garlanded bough on his farm.[80]

One last flourish may deserve quotation. If you can prove, says

Apuleius, any material advantage accruing to me from my marriage, "then

write me down the great Carmendas or Damigeron or _his_ ... Moses or

Jannes or Apollobeches or Dardanus himself, or anyone else from

Zoroaster and Ostanes downwards who has been famous among

magicians."[81] Several of these names occur in other authors,[82] but

the corruption is more interesting. Has some comparative fallen out,

or does _his_ conceal another name? Is it _ihs_, in fact,--a reference

to Jesus analogous to the suggestion of Celsus that he too was a

magician?

The philosophical works of Apuleius need not detain us, but a little

space may be spared to his book _On the God of Socrates_, where he sets

forth in a clear and vivid way that doctrine of daemonic beings, which

lies at the heart of ancient {231} religion, pre-eminently in this

period, from Plutarch onwards. His presentment is substantially the

same as Plutarch's, but crisper altogether, and set forth in the

brilliant rhetoric, to which the Greek did not aspire, and from which

the African could not escape, nor indeed wished to escape.

Plato, he says, classifies the gods in three groups, distinguished by

their place in the universe.[83] Of the celestial gods some we can

see--sun, moon and stars[84] (on which, like a true rhetorician, he

digresses into some fine language, which can be omitted). Others the

mind alone can grasp (_intellectu eos rimabundi

contemplamur_)--incorporeal natures, animate, with neither beginning

nor end, eternal before and after, exempt from contagion of body; in

perfect intellect possessing supreme beatitude; good, but not by

participation of any extraneous good, but from themselves. Their

father, lord and author of all things, free from every nexus of

suffering or doing--him Plato, with celestial eloquence and language

commensurate with the immortal gods, has declared to be, in virtue of

the ineffable immensity of his incredible majesty, beyond the poverty

of human speech or definition--while even to the sages themselves, when

by force of soul they have removed themselves from the body, the

conception of God comes, like a flash of light in thick darkness--a

flash only, and it is gone.[85]

At the other extremity of creation are men--"proud in reason, loud in

speech, immortal of soul, mortal of member, in mind light and anxious,

in body brute and feeble, divers in character, in error the same, in

daring pervicacious, in hope, pertinacious, of vain toil, of frail

fortune, severally mortal, generally continuous, mutable in the

succession of offspring, time fleeting, wisdom lingering, death swift

and life querulous, so they live."[86] Between such beings and the

gods, contact cannot be. "To whom then shall I recite prayers? to whom

tender vows? to whom slay victim? on whom shall I call, to {232} help

the wretched, to favour the good, to counter the evil? .... What

thinkest thou? Shall I swear 'by Jove the stone' (_per Iovem lapidem_)

after the most ancient manner of Rome? Yet if Plato's thought be true,

that never god and man can meet, the stone will hear me more easily

than Jupiter."[87]

"Nay, not so far--(for Plato shall answer, the thought is his, if mine

the voice) not so far, he saith, do I pronounce the gods to be sejunct

and alienate from us, as to think that not even our prayers can reach

them. Not from the care of human affairs, but from contact, have I

removed them. But there are certain mediary divine powers, between

aether above and earth beneath, situate in that mid space of air, by

whom our desires and our deserts reach the gods. These the Greeks call

daemons, carriers between human and heavenly, hence of prayers, thence

of gifts; back and forth they fare, hence with petition, thence with

sufficiency, interpreters and bringers of salvation."[88] To cut short

this flow of words, the daemons are, as is familiar to us by now,

authors of divination of all kinds, each in its province. It would ill

fit the majesty of the gods to send a dream to Hannibal or to soften

the whetstone for Attius Navius--these are the functions of the

intermediate spirits.[89] Justin's explanation of the theophanies of

the Old Testament may recur to the reader's mind, and not unjustly.[90]

The daemons are framed of a purer and rarer matter than we, "of that

purest liquid of air, of that serene element," invisible therefore to

us unless of their divine will they choose to be seen.[91] From their

ranks come those "haters and lovers" of men, whom the poets describe as

gods--they feel pity and indignation, pain and joy and "every feature

of the human mind"; while the gods above "are lords ever of one state

in eternal equability," and know no passions of any kind. The daemons

share _their_ immortality and _our_ passion. Hence we may accept the

local diversities of religious cult, rites nocturnal or diurnal,

victims, ceremonies and ritual sad or gay, Egyptian {233} or

Greek,--neglect of these things the daemons resent, as we learn in dream

and oracle.

The human soul, too, is "a daemon in a body"--the _Genius_ of the

Latins. From this we may believe that after death souls good and bad

become good and bad ghosts--_Lares_ and _Lemures_--and even gods, such

as "Osiris in Egypt and AEsculapius everywhere."[92] Higher still are

such daemons as Sleep and Love, and of this higher kind Plato supposes

our guardian spirits to be--"spectators and guardians of individual

men, never seen, ever present, arbiters not merely of all acts, but of

all thoughts," and after death witnesses for or against us. Of such

was Socrates' familiar daemon. Why should not we too live after the

model of Socrates, studying philosophy and obeying our daemon?

[Sidenote: _The Golden Ass_]

The _Golden Ass_ is the chief work of Apuleius. _Lector intende;

laetaberis_, he says in ending his short preface, and he judged his work

aright. The hero, Lucius, is a man with an extravagant interest in

magic, and he puts himself in the way of hearing the most wonderful

stories of witchcraft and enchantment. Apuleius tells them with the

utmost liveliness and humour. Magical transformations, the vengeance

of witches, the vivification of waterskins--one tale comes crowding

after another, real and vivid, with the most alarming and the most

amusing details. For example, we are told by an eye-witness (like

everybody else in the book he is a master-hand at story-telling) how he

saw witches by night cut the throat of his friend, draw out the heart

and plug the hole with a sponge; how terrified he was of the hags to

begin with, and then lest he should himself be accused of the murder;

how the man rose and went on his journey--somewhat wearily, it is true;

and how, as they rested, he stooped to drink, the sponge fell out and

he was dead.

Lucius meddles with the drugs of a witch, and, wishing to transform

himself to a bird, by the ill-luck of using the wrong box he becomes an

ass. He is carried off by robbers, and, while he has the most varied

adventures of his own, he is enabled to record some of the most

gorgeous exploits that {234} brigands ever told one another in an ass's

hearing.[93] What is more, a young girl is captured and held to

ransom, and to comfort her for a little, the old woman who cooks the

robbers' food--"a witless and bibulous old hag"--tells her a

story--"such a pretty little tale," that the ass, who is listening,

wishes he had pen and paper to take it down. For, while in aspect

Lucius is an ass, his mind remains human--human enough to reflect

sometimes what "a genuine ass" he is--and his skin has not, he regrets,

the proper thickness of true ass-hide. The tale which he would like to

write down is _Cupid and Psyche_. "_Erant in quadam civitate_," begins

the old woman--"There were in a certain city a king and a queen."

The old and universal fairy-tales of the invisible husband, the cruel

sisters, and the impossible quests are here woven together and brought

into connexion with the Olympic pantheon, and through all runs a slight

thread, only here and there visible, of allegory. But if Psyche is at

times the soul, and if the daughter she bears to Cupid is Pleasure, the

fairy-tale triumphs gloriously over the allegory, and remains the most

wonderful thing of the kind in Latin. Here, and in the _Golden Ass_ in

general, the extraordinarily embroidered language of Apuleius is far

more in keeping than in his philosophic writings. His hundreds of

diminutives and neologisms, his antitheses, alliterations, assonances,

figures and tropes, his brilliant invention, his fun and humour, here

have full scope and add pleasure to every fresh episode of the

fairy-tale and of the larger and more miscellaneous tale of adventure

in which it is set--in the strangest setting conceivable. Cupid and

Psyche is his own addition to the story of the Ass--quite irrelevant,

and like many other irrelevant things in books an immense enrichment.

Another development of the original story which is similarly due to

Apuleius alone is the climax in the last book. The ass, in the Greek

story, becomes a man by eating roses. In the Latin, Lucius, weary of

the life of an ass, finds himself by moonlight on the seashore near

Corinth, and amid "the silent {235} secrets of opaque night," he

reflects that "the supreme goddess rules in transcendent majesty and

governs human affairs by her providence." So he addresses a rather too

eloquent prayer to the Queen of Heaven under her various possible

names, Ceres, Venus, Diana and Proserpine. He then falls asleep, and

at once "lo! from mid sea, uplifting a countenance venerable even to

gods, emerges a divine form. Gradually the vision, gleaming all over,

and shaking off the sea, seemed to stand before me." A crown of

flowers rests on her flowing hair. Glittering stars, the moon, flowers

and fruits, are wrought into her raiment, which shimmers white and

yellow and red as the light falls upon it. In one hand is a sistrum,

in the other a golden vessel shaped like a boat, with an asp for its

handle.[94] She speaks.

[Sidenote: Isis]

"Lo! I come in answer, Lucius, to thy prayers, I mother of Nature,

mistress of all the elements, initial offspring of ages, chief of

divinities, queen of the dead, first of the heavenly ones, in one form

expressing all gods and goddesses. I rule with my rod the bright

pinnacles of heaven, the healthful breezes of the sea, the weeping

silence of the world below. My sole godhead, in many an aspect, with

many a various rite, and many a name, all the world worships." Some of

these names she recites, and then declares her "true name, Queen

Isis."[95] The next day is her festival, she says, and her priest,

taught by her in a dream, will tender Lucius the needful roses; he will

eat and be a man again. But hereafter all his life must be devoted to

the goddess, and then in the Elysian fields he shall see her again,

shining amid the darkness of Acheron, propitious to him.

The next day all falls as predicted. The procession of Isis is

elaborately described.[96] The prelude of the pomp is a series of men

dressed in various characters,--one like a soldier, another like a

woman, others like a gladiator, a philospher and so forth. There is a

tame bear dressed like a woman, and a monkey "in a Phrygian garment of

saffron." Then come women in white, crowned with flowers, some with

mirrors hanging on their backs, some carrying ivory combs. Men and

women follow with torches and lamps; then a choir of {236} youths in

white, singing a hymn, and fluteplayers dedicated to Serapis. After

this a crowd of initiates of both sexes, of every age and degree,

dressed in white linen and carrying sistra,--the men with shaven heads.

Then came five chief priests with emblems, and after them the images of

the gods borne by other priests--Anubis with his dog's head, black and

gold--after him the figure of a cow "the prolific image of the

all-mother goddess" ("which one of this blessed ministry bore on his

shoulder, with mimicking gait")--then an image of divinity, like

nothing mortal, an ineffable symbol, worthy of all veneration for its

exquisite art. At this point came the priest with the promised

roses--"my salvation"--and Lucius ate and was a man again. The priest,

in a short homily, tells him he has now reached the haven of quiet;

Fortune's blindness has no more power over him; he is taken to the

bosom of a Fortune who can see, who can illuminate even the other gods.

Let him rejoice and consecrate his life to the goddess, undertake her

warfare and become her soldier.[97]

The pomp moves onward till they reach the shore, and there a sacred

ship is launched--inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics, purified with

a burning torch, an egg, and sulphur, on her sail a vow written in

large letters. She is loaded with aromatics; and "filled with copious

gifts and auspicious prayers" she sails away before a gentle breeze and

is lost to sight. The celebrants then return to the temple, but we

have perhaps followed them far enough.

From now on to the end of the book the reformed Lucius lives in the

odour of sanctity. He never sleeps without a vision of the goddess.

He passes on from initiation to initiation, though the service of

religion is difficult, chastity arduous, and life now a matter of

circumspection--it had not been before. The initiations are, he owns,

rather expensive.[98] "Perhaps, my enthusiastic reader, thou wilt

ask--anxiously enough--what was said, what done. I would speak if it

were {237} lawful to speak, thou shouldst know if it were lawful to

hear.... Hear then, and believe, for it is true. I drew near to the

confines of death; I trod the threshold of Proserpine; I was borne

through all the elements and returned. At midnight I saw the sun

flashing with bright light. Gods of the world below, gods of the world

above, into their presence I came, I worshipped there in their sight."

Garments, emblems, rites, purifications are the elements of his life

now. Nor does he grudge the trouble and expense, for the gods are

blessing him with forensic success. In a dream, Osiris himself "chief

among the great gods, of the greater highest, greatest of the highest,

ruler of the greatest," appears in person, and promises him--speaking

with his own awful voice--triumphs at the bar, with no need to fear the

envy his learning might rouse. He should be one of the god's own

Pastophori, one of "his quinquennial decurions." So "with my hair

perfectly shaved, I performed in gladness the duties of that most

ancient college, established in Sulla's times, not shading nor covering

my baldness, but letting it be universally conspicuous." And there

ends the _Golden Ass_.

Was it true--this story of the ass? Augustine says that Apuleius

"either disclosed or made up" these adventures. Both he and Lactantius

had to show their contemporaries that there was a difference between

the miracles of Apuleius and those of Christ.[99] The Emperor

Septimius Severus, on the other hand, sneered at his rival Albinus for

reading "the Punic Milesian-tales of his fellow-countryman Apuleius and

such literary trifles."[100]

[Sidenote: Apuleius and his initiation]

Between these two judgments we may find Apuleius. He is a man of

letters, but he has a taste for religion. Ceremony, mystery, ritual,

sacraments, appeal to him, and there he stands with his contemporaries.

But a man, in whose pages bandit and old woman, ass and Isis, all talk

in one Euphuistic strain, was possibly not so pious as men of simpler

speech. Yet his giving such a conclusion to such a tale is

significant, and there is not an absurdity among all the many, in which

he so gaily revels, but corresponded with something that men believed.

{238}

In conclusion, we may ask what Lucian of Samosata and Diogenes of

Oinoanda had to offer to Aristides and Pausanias and Apuleius; and what

they in turn could suggest to men whose concern in religion goes deeper

than the cure of physical disease, trance and self-conscious revelling

in ceremony. Some spiritual value still clung about the old religion,

or it could not have found supporters in a Plotinus and a Porphyry, but

(to quote again a most helpful question) "how much else?"