From this time forward the whole history of the Baglioni family is one

of crime and bloodshed. A curse had fallen on the house, and to the

last of its members the penalty was paid. Gianpaolo himself acquired

the highest reputation throughout Italy for his courage and sagacity

both as a general and a governor.[74] It was he who held Julius II. at

his discretion in 1506, and was sneered at by Machiavelli for not

consummating his enormities by killing the warlike Pope.[75] He again,

after joining the diet of La Magione against Cesare Borgia, escaped by

his acumen the massacre of Sinigaglia, which overthrew the other

conspirators. But his name was no less famous for unbridled lust and

deeds of violence. He boasted that his son Constantino was a true

Baglioni, since he was his sister's child. He once told Machiavelli

that he had it in his mind to murder four citizens of Perugia, his

enemies. He looked calmly on while his kinsmen Eusebio and Taddeo

Baglioni, who had been accused of treason, were hewn to pieces by his

guard. His wife, Ippolita de' Conti, was poignarded in her Roman farm;

on hearing the news, he ordered a festival in which he was engaged to

proceed with redoubled merriment.[76] At last the time came for him to

die 132 by fraud and violence. Leo X., anxious to remove so powerful a

rival from Perugia, lured him in 1520 to Rome under the false

protection of a papal safe-conduct. After a short imprisonment he had

him beheaded in the Castle of S. Angelo. It was thought that Gentile,

his first cousin, sometime Bishop of Orvieto, but afterwards the father

of two sons in wedlock with Giulia Vitelli—such was the discipline of

the Church at this epoch—had contributed to the capture of Gianpaolo,

and had exulted in his execution.[77] If so, he paid dear for his

treachery; for Orazio Baglioni, the second son of Gianpaolo and captain

of the Church under Clement VII., had him murdered in 1527, together

with his two nephews Fileno and Annibale.[78] This Orazio was one of

the most bloodthirsty of the whole brood. Not satisfied with the

assassination of Gentile, he stabbed Galeotto, the son of Grifonetto,

with his own hand in the same year.[79] Afterwards he died in the

kingdom of Naples while leading the Black Bands in the disastrous war

which followed the sack of Rome. He left no son. Malatesta, his elder

brother, became one of the most celebrated generals of the age, holding

the batons of the Venetian and Florentine republics, and managing to

maintain his ascendency in Perugia in spite of the persistent

opposition of successive popes. But his name is best known in history

for one of the greatest public crimes—a crime which must be ranked with

that of Marshal Bazaine. Intrusted with the defence of Florence during

the siege of 1530, he sold the city to his enemy, Pope Clement,

receiving for the price of this infamy certain privileges and

immunities which fortified his hold upon Perugia for a season. All

Italy was ringing 133 with the great deeds of the Florentines, who for

the sake of their liberty transformed themselves from merchants into

soldiers, and withstood the united powers of Pope and Emperor alone.

Meanwhile Malatesta, whose trade was war, and who was being largely

paid for his services by the beleaguered city, contrived by means of

diplomatic procrastination, secret communication with the enemy, and

all the arts that could intimidate an army of recruits, to push affairs

to a point at which Florence was forced to capitulate without

inflicting the last desperate glorious blow she longed to deal her

enemies. The universal voice of Italy condemned him. When Matteo

Dandolo, the Doge of Venice, heard what he had done, he cried before

the Pregadi in conclave, 'He has sold that people and that city, and

the blood of those poor citizens ounce by ounce, and has donned the cap

of the biggest traitor in the world.'[80] Consumed with shame, corroded

by an infamous disease, and mistrustful of Clement, to whom he had sold

his honour, Malatesta retired to Perugia, and died in 1531. He left one

son, Ridolfo, who was unable to maintain himself in the lordship of his

native city. After killing the Papal legate, Cinzio Filonardi, in 1534,

he was dislodged four years afterwards, when Paul III. took final

possession of the place as an appanage of the Church, razed the houses

of the Baglioni to the ground, and built upon their site the Rocca

Paolina. This fortress bore an inscription: 'Ad coercendam Perusinorum

audaciam.' The city was given over to the rapacity of the abominable

Pier Luigi Farnese, and so bad was this tyranny of priests and

bastards, that, strange to say, the Perugians regretted the troublous

times of the Baglioni. Malatesta in dying had exclaimed, 'Help me, if

you can; since after me you will be set to draw the cart like oxen.'

Frollieri, relating the speech, adds, 134 'And this has been fulfilled

to the last letter, for all have borne not only the yoke but the burden

and the goad.' Ridolfo Baglioni and his cousin Braccio, the eldest son

of Grifonetto, were both captains of Florence. The one died in battle

in 1554, the other in 1559. Thus ended the illustrious family. They are

now represented by descendants from females, and by contadini who

preserve their name and boast a pedigree of which they have no records.

[74] See Frollieri, p. 437, for a very curious account of his

character.

[75] Fabretti (vol. iii. pp. 193-202. and notes) discusses this

circumstance in detail. Machiavelli's critique runs thus (_Discorsi_,

lib. i. cap. 27): 'Nè si poteva credere che si fosse astenuto o per

bontà, o per coscienza che lo ritenesse; perchè in un petto d'un uomo

facinoroso, che si teneva la sorella, ch' aveva morti i cugini e i

nipotí per regnare, non poteva scendere alcuno pietoso rispetto: ma si

conchiuse che gli uomini non sanno essere onorevolmente tristi, o

perfettamente buoni,' &c.

[76] See Fabretti, vol. iii. p. 230. He is an authority for the

details of Gianpaolo's life. The circumstance alluded to above

justifies the terrible opening scene in Shelley's tragedy, _The

Cenci_.

[77] Fabretti, vol. iii. p. 230, vol. iv. p. 10.

[78] See Varchi, _Storie Florentine_, vol. i. p. 224.

[79] Ibid.

[80] Fabretti, vol. iv. p. 206.

The history of the Baglioni needs no commentary. They were not worse

than other Italian nobles, who by their passions and their parties

destroyed the peace of the city they infested. It is with an odd

mixture of admiration and discontent that the chroniclers of Perugia

allude to their ascendency. Matarazzo, who certainly cannot be accused

of hostility to the great house, describes the miseries of his country

under their bad government in piteous terms:[81] 'As I wish not to

swerve from the pure truth, I say that from the day the Oddi were

expelled, our city went from bad to worse. All the young men followed

the trade of arms. Their lives were disorderly; and every day divers

excesses were divulged, and the city had lost all reason and justice.

Every man administered right unto himself, _propriâ autoritate et manu

regiâ_. Meanwhile the Pope sent many legates, if so be the city could

be brought to order: but all who came returned in dread of being hewn

in pieces; for they threatened to throw some from the windows of the

palace, so that no cardinal or other legate durst approach Perugia,

unless he were a friend of the Baglioni. And the city was brought to

such misery, that the most wrongous men were most prized; and those who

had slain two or three men walked as they listed through the palace,

and went with sword or poignard to speak to the podestà and other

magistrates. Moreover, every man of 135 worth was down-trodden by bravi

whom the nobles favoured; nor could a citizen call his property his

own. The nobles robbed first one and then another of goods and land.

All offices were sold or else suppressed; and taxes and extortions were

so grievous that every one cried out. And if a man were in prison for

his head, he had no reason to fear death, provided he had some interest

with a noble.' Yet the same Matarazzo in another place finds it in his

heart to say:[82] 'Though the city suffered great pains for these

nobles, yet the illustrious house of Baglioni brought her honour

throughout Italy, by reason of the great dignity and splendour of that

house, and of their pomp and name. Wherefore through them our city was

often set above the rest, and notably above the commonwealths of

Florence and Siena.' Pride feels no pain. The gratified vanity of the

Perugian burgher, proud to see his town preferred before its

neighbours, blinds the annalist to all the violence and villany of the

magnificent Casa Baglioni. So strong was the _esprit de ville_ which

through successive centuries and amid all vicissitudes of politics

divided the Italians against themselves, and proved an insuperable

obstacle to unity.

[81] Pp. 102, 103.

[82] P. 139.

After reading the chronicle of Matarazzo at Perugia through one winter

day, I left the inn and walked at sunset to the blood-bedabbled

cathedral square; for still those steps and pavements to my strained

imagination seemed reeking with the outpoured blood of Baglioni; and on

the ragged stonework of San Lorenzo red patches slanted from the dying

day. Then by one of those strange freaks of the brain to which we are

all subject, for a moment I lost sight of untidy Gothic façades and

gaunt unfinished church walls; and as I walked, I was in the Close of

Salisbury on a perfumed summer afternoon. The drowsy scent of

lime-flowers and mignonette, 136 the cawing of elm-cradled rooks, the

hum of bees above, the velvet touch of smooth-shorn grass, and the

breathless shadow of motionless green boughs made up one potent and

absorbing mood of the charmed senses. Far overhead soared the calm grey

spire into the infinite air, and the perfection of accomplished beauty

slept beneath in those long lines of nave and choir and transepts. It

was but a momentary dream, a thought that burned itself upon a fancy

overtaxed by passionate images. Once more the puppet-scene of the brain

was shifted; once more I saw the bleak bare flags of the Perugian

piazza, the forlorn front of the Duomo, the bronze griffin, and

Pisano's fountain, with here and there a flake of that tumultuous fire

which the Italian sunset sheds. Who shall adequately compare the two

pictures? Which shall we prefer—the Close of Salisbury, with its sleepy

bells and cushioned ease of immemorial Deans—or this poor threadbare

passion of Perugia, where every stone is stained with blood, and where

genius in painters and scholars and prophets and ecstatic lovers has

throbbed itself away to nothingness? It would be foolish to seek an

answer to this question, idle to institute a comparison, for instance,

between those tall young men with their broad winter cloaks who remind

me of Grifonetto, and the vergers pottering in search of shillings

along the gravel paths of Salisbury. It is more rational, perhaps, to

reflect of what strange stuff our souls are made in this age of the

world, when æsthetic pleasures, full, genuine, and satisfying, can be

communicated alike by Perugia with its fascination of a dead

irrevocable dramatic past, and Salisbury, which finds the artistic

climax of its English comfort in the 'Angel in the House.' From

Matarazzo, smitten with a Greek love for the beautiful Grifonetto, to

Mr. Patmore, is a wide step.

137

ORVIETO

On the road from Siena to Rome, halfway between Ficulle and Viterbo, is

the town of Orvieto. Travellers often pass it in the night-time. Few

stop there, for the place is old and dirty, and its inns are said to be

indifferent. But none who see it even from a distance can fail to be

struck with its imposing aspect, as it rises from the level plain upon

that mass of rock among the Apennines.

Orvieto is built upon the first of those huge volcanic blocks which are

found like fossils embedded in the more recent geological formations of

Central Italy, and which stretch in an irregular but unbroken line to

the Campagna of Rome. Many of them, like that on which Civita

Castellana is perched, are surrounded by rifts and chasms and ravines

and fosses, strangely furrowed and twisted by the force of fiery

convulsions. But their advanced guard, Orvieto, stands up definite and

solid, an almost perfect cube, with walls precipitous to north and

south and east, but slightly sloping to the westward. At its foot rolls

the Paglia, one of those barren streams which swell in winter with the

snows and rains of the Apennines, but which in summer-time shrink up,

and leave bare beds of sand and pestilential canebrakes to stretch

irregularly round their dwindled waters.

The weary flatness and utter desolation of this valley present a

sinister contrast to the broad line of the Apennines, swelling tier on

tier, from their oak-girdled basements set with villages and towers, up

to the snow and cloud that crown 138 their topmost crags. The time to

see this landscape is at sunrise; and the traveller should take his

stand upon the rising ground over which the Roman road is carried from

the town—the point, in fact, which Turner has selected for his vague

and misty sketch of Orvieto in our Gallery. Thence he will command the

whole space of the plain, the Apennines, and the river creeping in a

straight line at the base; while the sun, rising to his right, will

slant along the mountain flanks, and gild the leaden stream, and flood

the castled crags of Orvieto with a haze of light. From the centre of

this glory stand out in bold relief old bastions built upon the solid

tufa, vast gaping gateways black in shadow, towers of churches shooting

up above a medley of deep-corniced tall Italian houses, and, amid them

all, the marble front of the Cathedral, calm and solemn in its

unfamiliar Gothic state. Down to the valley from these heights there is

a sudden fall; and we wonder how the few spare olive-trees that grow

there can support existence on the steep slope of the cliff.

Our mind, in looking at this landscape, is carried by the force of old

association to Jerusalem. We could fancy ourselves to be standing on

Mount Olivet, with the valley of Jehoshaphat between us and the Sacred

City. As we approach the town, the difficulty of scaling its crags

seems insurmountable. The road, though carried skilfully along each

easy slope or ledge of quarried rock, still winds so much that nearly

an hour is spent in the ascent. Those who can walk should take a

footpath, and enter Orvieto by the mediæval road, up which many a Pope,

flying from rebellious subjects or foreign enemies, has hurried on his

mule.[83]

[83] Clement VII., for example, escaped from Rome disguised as a

gardener after the sack in 1527, and, to quote the words of Varchi

(St. Flor., v. 17), 'Entrò agli otto di dicembre a due ore di notte in

Orvieto, terra di sito fortissimo, per lo essere ella sopra uno

scoglio pieno di tufi posta, d' ogni intorno scosceso e dirupato,' &c.

139 To unaccustomed eyes there is something forbidding and terrible

about the dark and cindery appearance of volcanic tufa. Where it is

broken, the hard and gritty edges leave little space for vegetation;

while at intervals the surface spreads so smooth and straight that one

might take it for solid masonry erected by the architect of

Pandemonium. Rubbish and shattered bits of earthenware and ashes,

thrown from the city walls, cling to every ledge and encumber the

broken pavement of the footway. Then as we rise, the castle battlements

above appear more menacing, toppling upon the rough edge of the crag,

and guarding each turn of the road with jealous loopholes or

beetle-browed machicolations, until at last the gateway and portcullis

are in view.

On first entering Orvieto, one's heart fails to find so terrible a

desolation, so squalid a solitude, and so vast a difference between the

present and the past, between the beauty of surrounding nature and the

misery of this home of men. A long space of unoccupied ground

intervenes between the walls and the hovels which skirt the modern

town. This, in the times of its splendour, may have served for

oliveyards, vineyards, and pasturage, in case of siege. There are still

some faint traces of dead gardens left upon its arid wilderness, among

the ruins of a castellated palace, decorated with the cross-keys and

tiara of an unremembered pope. But now it lies a mere tract of scorched

grass, insufferably hot and dry and sandy, intersected by dirty paths,

and covered with the loathliest offal of a foul Italian town. Should

you cross this ground at mid-day, under the blinding sun, when no

living thing, except perhaps some poisonous reptile, is about, you

would declare that Orvieto had been stricken for its sins by Heaven.

Your mind would dwell mechanically on all that you have read of Papal

crimes, of fratricidal wars, of Pagan abominations in the high places

of the Church, of tempestuous passions and 140 refined iniquity—of

everything, in fact, which renders Italy of the Middle Ages and the

Renaissance dark and ominous amid the splendours of her art and

civilisation. This is the natural result; this shrunken and squalid old

age of poverty and self-abandonment is the end of that strong,

prodigal, and vicious youth. Who shall restore vigour to these dead

bones? we cry. If Italy is to live again, she must quit her ruined

palace towers to build fresh dwellings elsewhere. Filth, lust,

rapacity, treason, godlessness, and violence have made their habitation

here; ghosts haunt these ruins; these streets still smell of blood and

echo to the cries of injured innocence; life cannot be pure, or calm,

or healthy, where this curse has settled.

Occupied with such reflections, we reach the streets of Orvieto. They

are not very different from those of most Italian villages, except that

there is little gaiety about them. Like Assisi or Siena, Orvieto is too

large for its population, and merriment flows better from close

crowding than from spacious accommodation. Very dark, and big, and

dirty, and deserted, is the judgment we pronounce upon the houses; very

filthy and malodorous each passage; very long this central street; very

few and sad and sullen the inhabitants; and where, we wonder, is the

promised inn? In search of this one walks nearly through the city,

until one enters the Piazza, where there is more liveliness. Here cafés

may be found; soldiers, strong and sturdy, from the north, lounge at

the corners; the shops present more show; and a huge hotel, not bad for

such a place, and appropriately dedicated to the Belle Arti, standing

in a courtyard of its own, receives the traveller weary with his climb.

As soon as he has taken rooms, his first desire is to go forth and

visit the Cathedral.

The great Duomo was erected at the end of the thirteenth century to

commemorate the Miracle of Bolsena. The value 141 of this miracle

consisted in its establishing unmistakably the truth of

transubstantiation. The story runs that a young Bohemian priest who

doubted the dogma was performing the office of the mass in a church at

Bolsena, when, at the moment of consecration, blood issued from five

gashes in the wafer, which resembled the five wounds of Christ. The

fact was evident to all the worshippers, who saw blood falling on the

linen of the altar; and the young priest no longer doubted, but

confessed the miracle, and journeyed straightway with the evidence

thereof to Pope Urban IV. The Pope, who was then at Orvieto, came out

with all his retinue to meet the convert and do honour to the

magic-working relics. The circumstances of this miracle are well known

to students of art through Raphael's celebrated fresco in the Stanze of

the Vatican. And it will be remembered by the readers of ecclesiastical

history that Urban had in 1264 promulgated by a bull the strict

observance of the Corpus Christi festival in connection with his strong

desire to re-establish the doctrine of Christ's presence in the

elements. Nor was it without reason that, while seeking miraculous

support for this dogma, he should have treated the affair of Bolsena so

seriously as to celebrate it by the erection of one of the most

splendid cathedrals in Italy; for the peace of the Church had recently

been troubled by the reforming ardour of the Fraticelli and by the

promulgation of Abbot Joachim's Eternal Gospel. This new evangelist had

preached the doctrine of progression in religious faith, proclaiming a

kingdom of the Spirit which should transcend the kingdom of the Son,

even as the Christian dispensation had superseded the Jewish supremacy

of the Father. Nor did he fail at the same time to attack the political

and moral abuses of the Papacy, attributing its degradation to the want

of vitality which pervaded the old Christian system, and calling on the

clergy to lead more 142 simple and regenerate lives, consistently with

the spiritual doctrine which he had received by inspiration. The

theories of Joachim were immature and crude; but they were among the

first signs of that liberal effort after self-emancipation which

eventually stirred all Europe at the time of the Renaissance. It was,

therefore, the obvious policy of the Popes to crush so dangerous an

opposition while they could; and by establishing the dogma of

transubstantiation, they were enabled to satisfy the craving mysticism

of the people, while they placed upon a firmer basis the cardinal

support of their own religious power.

In pursuance of his plan, Urban sent for Lorenzo Maitani, the great

Sienese architect, who gave designs for a Gothic church in the same

style as the Cathedral of Siena, though projected on a smaller scale.

These two churches, in spite of numerous shortcomings manifest to an

eye trained in French or English architecture, are still the most

perfect specimens of Pointed Gothic produced by the Italian genius. The

Gottico Tedesco had never been received with favour in Italy. Remains

of Roman architecture, then far more numerous and perfect than they are

at present, controlled the minds of artists, and induced them to adopt

the rounded rather than the pointed arch. Indeed, there would seem to

be something peculiarly Northern in the spirit of Gothic architecture:

its intricacies suit the gloom of Northern skies, its massive exterior

is adapted to the severity of Northern weather, its vast windows catch

the fleeting sunlight of the North, and the pinnacles and spires which

constitute its beauty are better expressed in rugged stone than in the

marbles of the South. Northern cathedrals do not depend for their

effect upon the advantages of sunlight or picturesque situations. Many

of them are built upon broad plains, over which for more than half the

year hangs fog. But the cathedrals of Italy owe 143 their charm to

colour and brilliancy: their gilded sculpture and mosaics, the

variegated marbles and shallow portals of their façades, the light

aë;rial elegance of their campanili, are all adapted to the luminous

atmosphere of a smiling land, where changing effects of natural beauty

distract the attention from solidity of design and permanence of

grandeur in the edifice itself.[84]

[84] In considering why Gothic architecture took so little root in

mediæval Italy, we must remember that the Italians had maintained an

unbroken connection with Pagan Rome, and that many of their finest

churches were basilicas appropriated to Christian rites. Add to this

that the commerce of their cities, which first acquired wealth in the

twelfth century, especially Pisa and Venice, kept them in

communication with the Levant, where they admired the masterpieces of

Byzantine architecture, and whence they imported Greek artists in

mosaic and stonework. Against these external circumstances, taken in

connection with the hereditary leanings of an essentially Latin race,

and with the natural conditions of landscape and climate alluded to

above, the influence of a few imported German architects could not

have had sufficient power to effect a thorough metamorphosis of the

national taste. For further treatment of this subject see my 'Fine

Arts,' _Renaissance in Italy_, Part III. chap. ii.

The Cathedral of Orvieto will illustrate these remarks. Its design is

very simple. It consists of a parallelogram, from which three chapels

of equal size project, one at the east end, and one at the north and

south. The windows are small and narrow, the columns round, and the

roof displays none of that intricate groining we find in English

churches. The beauty of the interior depends on surface decoration, on

marble statues, woodwork, and fresco-paintings. Outside, there is the

same simplicity of design, the same elaborated local ornament. The

sides of the Cathedral are austere, their narrow windows cutting

horizontal lines of black and white marble. But the façade is a triumph

of decorative art. It is strictly what has often been described as a

'frontispiece;' for it bears no sincere relation to the construction of

the building. The three gables 144 rise high above the aisles. The

pinnacles and parapets and turrets are stuck on to look agreeable. It

is a screen such as might be completed or left unfinished at will by

the architect. Finished as it is, the façade of Orvieto presents a

wilderness of beauties. Its pure white marble has been mellowed by time

to a rich golden hue, in which are set mosaics shining like gems or

pictures of enamel. A statue stands on every pinnacle; each pillar has

a different design; round some of them are woven wreaths of vine and

ivy; acanthus leaves curl over the capitals, making nests for singing

birds or Cupids; the doorways are a labyrinth of intricate designs, in

which the utmost elegance of form is made more beautiful by

incrustations of precious agates and Alexandrine glasswork. On every

square inch of this wonderful façade have been lavished invention,

skill, and precious material. But its chief interest centres in the

sculptures executed by Giovanni and Andrea, sons and pupils of Nicola

Pisano. The names of these three men mark an era in the history of art.

They first rescued Italian sculpture from the grotesqueness of the

Lombard and the wooden monotony of the Byzantine styles. Sculpture

takes the lead of all the arts. And Nicola Pisano, before Cimabue,

before Duccio, even before Dante, opened the gates of beauty, which for

a thousand years had been shut up and overgrown with weeds. As Dante

invoked the influence of Virgil when he began to write his mediæval

poem, and made a heathen bard his hierophant in Christian mysteries,

just so did Nicola Pisano draw inspiration from a Græco-Roman

sarcophagus. He studied the basrelief of Phædra and Hippolytus, which

may still be seen upon the tomb of Countess Beatrice in the Campo

Santo, and so learned by heart the beauty of its lines and the dignity

expressed in its figures, that in all his subsequent works we trace the

elevated tranquillity of Greek sculpture. This imitation never

degenerated into servile copying; nor, on the 145 other hand, did

Nicola attain the perfect grace of an Athenian artist. He remained a

truly mediæval carver, animated with a Christian instead of a Pagan

spirit, but caring for the loveliness of form which art in the dark

ages failed to realise.[85]

[85] I am not inclined to reject the old legend mentioned above about

Pisano's study of the antique. For a full discussion of the question

see my 'Fine Arts,' _Renaissance in Italy_, Part III. chap. iii.

Whether it was Nicola or his scholars who designed the basreliefs at

Orvieto is of little consequence. Vasari ascribes them to the father;

but we know that he completed his pulpit at Pisa in 1230, and his death

is supposed to have taken place fifteen years before the foundation of

the cathedral. At any rate, they are imbued with his genius, and bear

the strongest affinity to his sculptures at Pisa, Siena, and Bologna.

To estimate the influence they exercised over the arts of sculpture and

painting in Italy would be a difficult task. Duccio and Giotto studied

here; Ghiberti closely followed them. Signorelli and Raphael made

drawings from their compositions. And the spirit which pervades these

sculptures may be traced in all succeeding works of art. It is not

classic; it is modern, though embodied in a form of beauty modelled on

the Greek.

The basreliefs are carved on four marble tablets placed beside the

porches of the church, and corresponding in size and shape with the

chief doorways. They represent the course of Biblical history,

beginning with the creation of the world, and ending with the last

judgment. If it were possible here to compare them in detail with the

similar designs of Ghiberti, Michel Angelo, and Raphael, it might be

shown that the Pisani established modes of treating sacred subjects

from which those mighty masters never deviated, though each stamped

upon them his peculiar genius, making them more perfect as time added

to the power of art. It would also be 146 not without interest to show

that, in their primitive conceptions of the earliest events in history,

the works of the Pisan artists closely resemble some sculptures

executed on the walls of Northern cathedrals, as well as early mosaics

in the South of Italy. We might have noticed how all the grotesque

elements which appear in Nicola Pisano, and which may still be traced

in Ghiberti, are entirely lost in Michel Angelo, how the supernatural

is humanised, how the symbolical receives an actual expression, and how

intellectual types are substituted for mere local and individual

representations. For instance, the Pisani represent the Creator as a

young man standing on the earth, with a benign and dignified

expression, and attended by two ministering angels. He is the Christ of

the Creed, 'by whom all things were made.' In Ghiberti we find an older

man, sometimes appearing in a whirlwind of clouds and attendant

spirits, sometimes walking on the earth, but still far different in

conception from the Creative Father of Michel Angelo. The latter is

rather the Platonic Demiurgus than the Mosaic God. By every line and

feature of his face and flowing hair, by each movement of his limbs,

whether he ride on clouds between the waters and the firmament, or

stand alone creating by a glance and by a motion of his hand Eve, the

full-formed and conscious woman, he is proclaimed the Maker who from

all eternity has held the thought of the material universe within his

mind. Raphael does not depart from this conception. The profound

abstraction of Michel Angelo ruled his intellect, and received from his

genius a form of perhaps greater grace. A similar growth from the

germinal designs of the Pisani may be traced in many groups.

But we must not linger at the gate. Let us enter the cathedral and see

some of the wonders it contains. Statues of gigantic size adorn the

nave. Of these, the most beautiful 147 are the work of Ippolito Scalza,

an artist whom Orvieto claims with pride as one of her own sons. The

long line of saints and apostles whom they represent conduct us to the

high altar, surrounded by its shadowy frescoes, and gleaming with the

work of carvers in marble and bronze and precious metals. But our steps

are drawn toward the chapel of the south transept, where now a golden

light from the autumnal sunset falls across a crowd of worshippers.

From far and near the poor people are gathered. Most of them are women.

They kneel upon the pavement and the benches, sunburnt faces from the

vineyards and the canebrakes of the valley. The old look prematurely

aged and withered—their wrinkled cheeks bound up in scarlet and

orange-coloured kerchiefs, their skinny fingers fumbling on the rosary,

and their mute lips moving in prayer. The younger women have great

listless eyes and large limbs used to labor. Some of them carry babies

trussed up in tight swaddling-clothes. One kneels beside a dark-browed

shepherd, on whose shoulder falls his shaggy hair; and little children

play about, half hushed, half heedless of the place, among old men

whose life has dwindled down into a ceaseless round of prayers. We

wonder why this chapel, alone in the empty cathedral, is so crowded

with worshippers. They surely are not turned towards that splendid

Pietà of Scalza—a work in which the marble seems to live a cold, dead,

shivering life. They do not heed Angelico's and Signorelli's frescoes

on the roof and walls. The interchange of light and gloom upon the

stalls and carved work of the canopies can scarcely rivet so intense a

gaze. All eyes seem fixed upon a curtain of red silk above the altar.

Votive pictures, and glass cases full of silver hearts, wax babies,

hands and limbs of every kind, are hung round it. A bell rings. A

jingling organ plays a little melody in triple time; and from the

sacristy comes forth the priest. With 148 much reverence, and with a

show of preparation, he and the acolytes around him mount the altar

steps and pull a string which draws the curtain. Behind the silken veil

we behold Madonna and her child—a faint, old, ugly picture, blackened

with the smoke and incense of five hundred years, a wonder-working

image, cased in gold, and guarded from the common air by glass and

draperies. Jewelled crowns are stuck upon the heads of the mother and

the infant. In the efficacy of Madonna di San Brizio to ward off agues,

to deliver from the pangs of childbirth or the fury of the storm, to

keep the lover's troth and make the husband faithful to his home, these

pious women of the marshes and the mountains put a simple trust.

While the priest sings, and the people pray to the dance-music of the

organ, let us take a quiet seat unseen, and picture to our minds how

the chapel looked when Angelico and Signorelli stood before its

plastered walls, and thought the thoughts with which they covered them.

Four centuries have gone by since those walls were white and even to

their brushes; and now you scarce can see the golden aureoles of

saints, the vast wings of the angels, and the flowing robes of prophets

through the gloom. Angelico came first, in monk's dress, kneeling

before he climbed the scaffold to paint the angry judge, the Virgin

crowned, the white-robed army of the Martyrs, and the glorious company

of the Apostles. These he placed upon the roof, expectant of the

Judgment. Then he passed away, and Luca Signorelli, the rich man who

'lived splendidly and loved to dress himself in noble clothes,' the

liberal and courteous gentleman, took his place upon the scaffold. For

all the worldliness of his attire and the worldliness of his living,

his brain teemed with stern and terrible thoughts. He searched the

secrets of sin and of the grave, of destruction and of resurrection, of

heaven and hell. All these he has painted on the walls beneath the

saints of Fra 149 Angelico. First come the troubles of the last days,

the preaching of Antichrist, and the confusion of the wicked. In the

next compartment we see the Resurrection from the tomb; and side by

side with that is painted Hell. Paradise occupies another portion of

the chapel. On each side of the window, beneath the Christ of Fra

Angelico, are delineated scenes from the Judgment. A wilderness of

arabesques, enclosing medallion portraits of poets and chiaroscuro

episodes selected from Dante and Ovid, occupies the lower portions of

the chapel walls beneath the great subjects enumerated above; and here

Signorelli has given free vein to his fancy and his mastery over

anatomical design, accumulating naked human figures in the most

fantastic and audacious variety of pose.

Look at the 'Fulminati'—so the group of wicked men are called whose

death precedes the Judgment. Huge naked angels, sailing upon vanlike

wings, breathe columns of red flame upon a crowd of wicked men and

women. In vain these sinners avoid the descending fire. It pursues and

fells them to the earth. As they fly, their eyes are turned towards the

dreadful faces in the air. Some hurry through a portico, huddled

together, falling men, and women clasping to their arms dead babies

scorched with flame. One old man stares straightforward, doggedly

awaiting death. One woman scowls defiance as she dies. A youth has

twisted both hands in his hair, and presses them against his ears to

drown the screams and groans and roaring thunder. They trample upon

prostrate forms already stiff. Every shape and attitude of sudden

terror and despairing guilt are here. Next comes the Resurrection. Two

angels of the Judgment—gigantic figures, with the plumeless wings that

Signorelli loves—are seen upon the clouds. They blow trumpets with all

their might, so that each naked muscle seems strained to make the

blast, which bellows through the air and shakes 150 the sepulchres

beneath the earth. Thence rise the dead. All are naked, and a few are

seen like skeletons. With painful effort they struggle from the soil

that clasps them round, as if obeying an irresistible command. Some

have their heads alone above the ground. Others wrench their limbs from

the clinging earth; and as each man rises, it closes under him. One

would think that they were being born again from solid clay, and

growing into form with labour. The fully risen spirits stand and walk

about, all occupied with the expectation of the Judgment; but those

that are yet in the act of rising, have no thought but for the strange

and toilsome process of this second birth. Signorelli here, as

elsewhere, proves himself one of the greatest painters by the simple

means with which he produces the most marvellous effects. His

composition sways our souls with all the passion of the terrible scenes

that he depicts. Yet what does it contain? Two stern angels on the

clouds, a blank grey plain, and a multitude of naked men and women. In

the next compartment Hell is painted. This is a complicated picture,

consisting of a mass of human beings entangled with torturing fiends.

Above hover demons bearing damned spirits, and three angels see that

justice takes its course. Signorelli here degenerates into no mediæval

ugliness and mere barbarity of form. His fiends are not the bestial

creatures of Pisano's basreliefs, but models of those monsters which

Duppa has engraved from Michel Angelo's 'Last Judgment'—lean naked men,

in whose hollow eyes glow the fires of hate and despair, whose nails

have grown to claws, and from whose ears have started horns. They sail

upon bats' wings; and only by their livid hue, which changes from

yellow to the ghastliest green, and by the cruelty of their remorseless

eyes, can you know them from the souls they torture. In Hell ugliness

and power of mischief come with length of years. 151 Continual growth

in crime distorts the form which once was human; and the interchange of

everlasting hatred degrades the tormentor and his victim to the same

demoniac ferocity. To this design the science of foreshortening, and

the profound knowledge of the human form in every posture, give its

chief interest. Paradise is not less wonderful. Signorelli has

contrived to throw variety and grace into the somewhat monotonous

groups which this subject requires. Above are choirs of angels, not

like Fra Angelico's, but tall male creatures clothed in voluminous

drapery, with grave features and still, solemn eyes. Some are dancing,

some are singing to the lute, and one, the most gracious of them all,

bends down to aid a suppliant soul. The men beneath, who listen in a

state of bliss, are all undraped. Signorelli, in this difficult

composition, remains temperate, serene, and simple; a Miltonic harmony

pervades the movement of his angelic choirs. Their beauty is the

product of their strength and virtue. No floral ornaments or cherubs,

or soft clouds, are found in his Paradise; yet it is fair and full of

grace. Here Luca seems to have anticipated Raphael.

It may be parenthetically observed, that Signorelli has introduced

himself and Niccolo Angeli, treasurer of the cathedral building fund,

in the corner of the fresco representing Antichrist, with the date

1503. They stand as spectators and solemn witnesses of the tragedy, set

forth in all its acts by the great master.

After viewing these frescoes, we muse and ask ourselves why

Signorelli's fame is so inadequate to his deserts? Partly, no doubt,

because he painted in obscure Italian towns, and left few

easel-pictures.[86] Besides, the artists of the sixteenth 152 century

eclipsed all their predecessors, and the name of Signorelli has been

swallowed up in that of Michel Angelo. Vasari said that 'esso Michel

Angelo imitò l'andar di Luca, 153 come può vedere ognuno.' Nor is it

hard to see that what the one began at Orvieto the other completed in

the Vatican. These great men had truly kindred spirits. Both struggled

154 to express their intellectual conceptions in the simplest and most

abstract forms. The works of both are distinguished by contempt for

adventitious ornaments and for the grace of positive colour. Both chose

to work in fresco, and selected subjects of the gravest and most

elevated character. The study of anatomy, and the scientific drawing of

the naked body, which Luca practised, were carried to perfection by

Michel Angelo. Sublimity of thought and self-restraint pervade their

compositions. He who would understand Buonarroti must first appreciate

Signorelli. The latter, it is true, was confined to a narrower circle

in his study of the beautiful and the sublime. He had not ascended to

that pure idealism, superior to all the accidents of place and time,

which is the chief distinction of Michel Angelo's work. At the same

time, his manner had not suffered from too fervid an enthusiasm for the

imperfectly comprehended antique. He painted the life he saw around

him, and clothed his men and women in the dress of Italy.

Such reflections, and many more, pass through our mind as we sit and

ponder in the chapel, which the daylight has deserted. The country

people are still on their knees, still careless of the frescoed forms

around them, still praying to Madonna of the Miracles. The service is

well-nigh done. The benediction has been given, the organist strikes up

his air of Verdi, and the congregation shuffles off, leaving the dimly

lighted chapel for the vast sonorous dusky nave. How strange it is to

hear that faint strain of a feeble opera sounding where, a short while

since, the trumpet-blast of Signorelli's angels seemed to thrill our

ears!

[86] The Uffizzi and Pitti Galleries at Florence contain one or two

fine specimens of Luca Signorelli's Holy Families, which show his

influence over the early manner of Michel Angelo. Into the background

of one circular picture he has introduced a group of naked figures,

which was imitated by Buonarroti in the Holy Family of the Tribune.

The Accademia has also a picture of saints and angels illustrative of

his large style and crowded composition. The Brera at Milan can boast

of a very characteristic Flagellation, where the nude has been

carefully studied, and the brutality of an insolent officer is

forcibly represented. But perhaps the most interesting of his works

out of Orvieto are those in his native place, Cortona. In the Church

of the Gesù in that town there is an altar-piece representing Madonna

in glory with saints, which also contains on a smaller scale than the

principal figures a little design of the Temptation in Eden. You

recognise the master's individuality in the muscular and energetic

Adam. The Duomo has a Communion of the Apostles which shows

Signorelli's independence of tradition. It is the Cenacolo treated

with freedom. Christ stands in the midst of the twelve, who are

gathered around him, some kneeling and some upright, upon a marble

pavement. The whole scene is conceived in a truly grand style—noble

attitudes, broad draperies, sombre and rich colouring, masculine

massing of the figures in effective groups. The Christ is especially

noble. Swaying a little to the right, he gives the bread to a kneeling

apostle. The composition is marked by a dignity and self-restraint

which Raphael might have envied. San Niccolo, again, has a fine

picture by this master. It is a Deposition with saints and

angels—those large-limbed and wide-winged messengers of God whom none

but Signorelli realised. The composition of this picture is hazardous,

and at first sight it is even displeasing. The figures seem roughly

scattered in a vacant space. The dead Christ has but little dignity,

and the passion of S. Jerome in the foreground is stiff in spite of

its exaggeration. But long study only serves to render this strange

picture more and more attractive. Especially noticeable is the

youthful angel clad in dark green who sustains Christ. He is a young

man in the bloom of strength and beauty, whose long golden hair falls

on each side of a sublimely lovely face. Nothing in painting surpasses

the modelling of the vigorous but delicate left arm stretched forward

to support the heavy corpse. This figure is conceived and executed in

a style worthy of the Orvietan frescoes. Signorelli, for whose

imagination angels had a special charm, has shown here that his too

frequent contempt for grace was not the result of insensibility to

beauty. Strength is the parent of sweetness in this wonderful winged

youth. But not a single sacrifice is made in the whole picture to mere

elegance.—Cortona is a place which, independently of Signorelli, well

deserves a visit. Like all Etruscan towns, it is perched on the top of

a high hill, whence it commands a wonderful stretch of landscape—Monte

Amiata and Montepulciano to the south, Chiusi with its lake, the lake

of Thrasymene, and the whole broad Tuscan plain. The city itself is

built on a projecting buttress of the mountain, to which it clings so

closely that, in climbing to the terrace of S. Margarita, you lose

sight of all but a few towers and house-roofs. One can almost fancy

that Signorelli gained his broad and austere style from the habitual

contemplation of a view so severe in outline, and so vacant in its

width. This landscape has none of the variety which distinguishes the

prospect from Perugia, none of the suavity of Siena. It is truly

sympathetic in its bare simplicity to the style of the great painter

of Cortona. Try to see it on a winter morning, when the mists are

lying white and low and thin upon the plain, when distant hills rise

islanded into the air, and the outlines of lakes are just discernible

through fleecy haze.—Next to Cortona in importance is the Convent of

Monte Oliveto in the neighbourhood of Siena, where Signorelli painted

eight frescoes from the story of S. Benedict, distinguished by his

customary vigour of conception, masculine force of design, and martial

splendour in athletic disdainful young men. One scene in this series,

representing the interior of a country inn, is specially interesting

for a realism not usual in the work of Signorelli. The frescoes

painted for Petruccio at Siena, one of which is now in the National

Gallery, the fresco in the Sistine Chapel, which has suffered sadly

from retouching, and the magnificent classical picture called the

'School of Pan,' executed for Lorenzo de' Medici, and now at Berlin,

must not be forgotten, nor yet the church-pictures scattered over

Loreto, Arcevia, Città di Castello, Borgo San Sepolcro, Volterra, and

other cities of the Tuscan-Umbrian district. Arezzo, it may be added

in conclusion, has two altar-pieces of Signorelli's in its Pinacoteca,

neither of which adds much to our conception of this painter's style.

Noticeable as they may be among the works of that period, they prove

that his genius was hampered by the narrow and traditional treatment

imposed on him in pictures of this kind. Students may be referred to

Robert Vischer's _Luca Signorelli_ (Leipzig, 1879) for a complete list

of the master's works and an exhaustive biography. I have tried to

estimate his place in the history of Italian art in my volume on the

'Fine Arts,' _Renaissance in Italy_, Part III. I may also mention two

able articles by Professor Colvin published a few years since in the

_Cornhill Magazine_.

155

LUCRETIUS

In seeking to distinguish the Roman from the Greek genius we can find

no surer guide than Virgil's famous lines in the Sixth Æneid. Virgil

lived to combine the traditions of both races in a work of profoundly

meditated art, and to their points of divergence he was sensitive as

none but a poet bent upon resolving them could be. The real greatness

of the Romans consisted in their capacity for government, law,

practical administration. What they willed, they carried into effect

with an iron indifference to everything but the object in view. What

they acquired, they held with the firm grasp of force, and by the might

of organised authority. Their architecture, in so far as it was

original, subserved purposes of public utility. Philosophy with them

ceased to be speculative, and applied itself to the ethics of conduct.

Their religious conceptions—in so far as these were not adopted

together with general culture from the Greeks, or together with sensual

mysticism from the East—were practical abstractions. The Latin ideal

was to give form to the state by legislation, and to mould the citizen

by moral discipline. The Greek ideal was contained in the poetry of

Homer, the sculpture of Pheidias, the heroism of Harmodius, the

philosophy of Socrates. Hellas was held together by no system, but by

the Delphic oracle and the Olympian games. The Greeks depended upon

culture, as the Romans upon law. The national character determined by

culture, and that determined by discipline, eventually broke down: but

the ruin in either case 156 was different. The Greek became servile,

indolent, and slippery; the Roman became arrogant, bloodthirsty,

tyrannous, and brutal. The Greeks in their best days attained to

σωφροσύνη, their regulative virtue, by a kind of instinct; and even in

their worst debasement they never exhibited the extravagance of lust

and cruelty and pompous prodigality displayed by Rome. The Romans,

deficient in the æsthetic instinct, whether applied to morals or to

art, were temperate upon compulsion; and when the strain of law

relaxed, they gave themselves unchecked to profligacy. The bad taste of

the Romans made them aspire to the huge and monstrous. Nero's whim to

cut through the isthmus, Caligula's villa built upon the sea at Baiæ,

the acres covered by imperial palaces in Rome, are as Latin as the

small scale of the Parthenon is Greek. Athens annihilates our notions

of mere magnitude by the predominance of harmony and beauty, to which

size is irrelevant. Rome dilates them to the full: it is the colossal

greatness, the mechanical pride, of her monuments that win our

admiration. By comparing the Dionysian theatre at Athens, during a

representation of the 'Antigone,' with the Flavian amphitheatre at

Rome, while the gladiators sang their _Ave Cæsar!_ we gain at once a

measure for the differences between Greek and Latin taste. In spiritual

matters, again, Rome, as distinguished from Hellas, was omnivorous. The

cosmopolitan receptivity of Roman sympathies, absorbing Egypt and the

Orient wholesale, is as characteristic as the exclusiveness of the

Greeks, their sensitive anxiety about the ἦθος. We feel that it was in

a Roman rather than a Greek atmosphere, where no middle term of art

existed like a neutral ground between the moral law and sin, where no

delicate intellectual sensibilities interfered with the assimilation of

new creeds, that Christianity was destined to strike root and flourish.

These remarks, familiar to students, form a proper prelude to 157 the

criticism of Lucretius: for in Lucretius the Roman character found its

most perfect literary incarnation. He is at all points a true Roman,

gifted with the strength, the conquering temper, the uncompromising

haughtiness, and the large scale of his race. Holding, as it were, the

thought of Greece in fee, he administers the Epicurean philosophy as

though it were a province, marshalling his arguments like legionaries,

and spanning the chasms of speculative insecurity with the masonry of

hypotheses. As the arches of the Pont du Gard, suspended in their power

amid that solitude, produce an overmastering feeling of awe; so the

huge fabric of the Lucretian system, hung across the void of Nihilism,

inspires a sense of terror, not so much on its own account as for the

Roman sternness of the mind that made it. 'Le retentissement de mes pas

dans ces immenses voûtes me faisait croire entendre la forte voix de

ceux qui les avait bâties. Je me perdais comme un insecte dans cette

immensité.' This is what Rousseau wrote about the aqueduct of Nismes.

This is what we feel in pacing the corridors of the Lucretian poem.

Sometimes it seems like walking through resounding caves of night and

death, where unseen cataracts keep plunging down uncertain depths, and

winds 'thwarted and forlorn' swell from an unknown distance, and rush

by, and wail themselves to silence in the unexplored beyond. At another

time the impression left upon the memory is different. We have been

following a Roman road from the gate of the Eternal City, through field

and vineyard, by lake and river-bed, across the broad intolerable plain

and the barren tops of Alps, down into forests where wild beasts and

barbarian tribes wander, along the marge of Rhine or Elbe, and over

frozen fens, in one perpetual straight line, until the sea is reached

and the road ends because it can go no further. All the while, the iron

wheel-rims of our chariot have jarred upon imperishable paved work;

there has been no stop nor stay; 158 the visions of things beautiful

and strange and tedious have flown past; at the climax we look forth

across a waste of waves and tumbling wilderness of surf and foam, where

the storm sweeps and hurrying mists drive eastward close above our

heads. The want of any respite, breathing-space, or intermission in the

poem, helps to force this image of a Roman journey on our mind. From

the first line to the last there is no turning-point, no pause of

thought, scarcely a comma, and the whole breaks off:—

rixantes potius quam corpora desererentur:

as though a scythe-sweep from the arm of Death had cut the thread of

singing short.

Is, then, this poem truly song? Indeed it is. The brazen voice of Rome

becomes tunable; a majestic rhythm sustains the progress of the singer,

who, like Milton's Satan,

O'er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare,

With head, hands, wings or feet, pursues his way,

And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.

It is only because, being so much a Roman, he insists on moving ever

onward with unwavering march, that Lucretius is often wearisome and

rough. He is too disdainful to care to mould the whole stuff of his

poem to one quality. He is too truth-loving to condescend to rhetoric.

The scoriæ, the grit, the dross, the quartz, the gold, the jewels of

his thought are hurried onward in one mighty lava-flood, that has the

force to bear them all with equal ease—not altogether unlike that

hurling torrent of the world painted by Tintoretto in his picture of

the Last Day, which carries on its breast cities and forests and men

with all their works, to plunge them in a bottomless abyss.

Poems of the perfect Hellenic type may be compared to bronze statues,

in the material of which many divers metals 159 have been fused. Silver

and tin and copper and lead and gold are there: each substance adds a

quality to the mass; yet the whole is bronze. The furnace of the poet's

will has so melted and mingled all these ores, that they have run

together and filled the mould of his imagination. It is thus that

Virgil chose to work. He made it his glory to realise artistic harmony,

and to preserve a Greek balance in his style. Not so Lucretius. In him

the Roman spirit, disdainful, uncompromising, and forceful, had full

sway. We can fancy him accosting the Greek masters of the lyre upon

Parnassus, deferring to none, conceding nought, and meeting their

arguments with proud indifference:—

tu regere imperio populos Romane memento.

The Roman poet, swaying the people of his thoughts, will stoop to no

persuasion, adopt no middle course. It is not his business to please,

but to command; he will not wait upon the καιρός, or court opportunity;

Greeks may surprise the Muses in relenting moods, and seek out 'mollia

tempora fandi;' all times and seasons must serve him; the terrible, the

discordant, the sublime, and the magnificent shall drag his thundering

car-wheels, as he lists, along the road of thought.

At the very outset of the poem we feel ourselves within the grasp of

the Roman imagination. It is no Aphrodite, risen from the waves and

white as the sea-foam, that he invokes:—

Æneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas, alma Venus.

This Venus is the mother of the brood of Rome, and at the same time an

abstraction as wide as the universe. See her in the arms of Mavors:—

160 in gremium qui sæpe tuum se

reicit æterno devictus volnere amoris,

atque ita suspiciens tereti cervice reposta

pascit amore avidos inhians in te, dea, visus,

eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore.

hunc tu, diva, tuo recubantem corpore sancto

circumfusa super, suavis ex ore loquelas

funde petens placidam Romanis, incluta, pacem.

In the whole Lucretian treatment of love there is nothing really Greek.

We do not hear of Eros, either as the mystic mania of Plato, or as the

winged boy of Meleager. Love in Lucretius is something deeper, larger,

and more elemental than the Greeks conceived; a fierce and

overmastering force, a natural impulse which men share in common with

the world of things.[87] Both the pleasures and the pains of love are

conceived on a gigantic scale, and described with an irony that has the

growl of a roused lion mingled with its laughter:—

ulcus enim vivescit et inveterascit alendo

inque dies gliscit furor atque aerumna gravescit.

[87] A fragment preserved from the _Danaides_ of Æschylus has the

thought of Aphrodite as the mistress of love in earth and sky and sea

and cloud; and this idea finds a philosophical expression in

Empedocles. But the tone of these Greek poets is as different from

that of Lucretius as a Greek Hera is from a Roman Juno.

The acts of love and the insanities of passion are viewed from no

standpoint of sentiment or soft emotion, but always in relation to

philosophical ideas, or as the manifestation of something terrible in

human life. Yet they lose nothing thereby in the voluptuous impression

left upon the fancy:—

sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis,

nec satiare queunt spectando corpora coram

nec manibus quicquam teneris abradere membris

possunt errantes incerti corpore toto.

161 denique cum membris conlatis flore fruuntur

ætatis, iam cum præsagit gaudia corpus

atque in eost Venus ut muliebria conserat arva,

adfigunt avide corpus iunguntque salivas

oris et inspirant pressantes dentibus ora,

nequiquam, quoniam nil inde abradere possunt

nec penetrare et abire in corpus corpore toto.

The master-word in this passage is _nequiquam_. 'To desire the

impossible,' says the Greek proverb, 'is a disease of the soul.'

Lucretius, who treats of physical desire as a torment, asserts the

impossibility of its perfect satisfaction. There is something almost

tragic in these sighs and pantings and pleasure-throes, and incomplete

fruitions of souls pent up within their frames of flesh. We seem to see

a race of men and women such as have never lived, except perhaps in

Rome or in the thought of Michel Angelo,[88] meeting in leonine

embracements that yield pain, whereof the climax is, at best, relief

from rage and respite for a moment from consuming fire. There is a life

dæmonic rather than human in those mighty limbs; and the passion that

bends them on the marriage bed has in it the stress of storms, the

rampings and the roarings of leopards at play. Or, take again this

single line:—

et Venus in silvis iungebat corpora amantum.

What a picture of primeval breadth and vastness! The _vice égrillard_

of Voltaire, the coarse animalism of Rabelais, even the large comic

sexuality of Aristophanes, are in another region: for the forest is the

world, and the bodies of the lovers are things natural and unashamed,

and Venus is the tyrannous instinct that controls the blood in spring.

Only a Roman poet could have conceived of passion so mightily and 162

so impersonally, expanding its sensuality to suit the scale of Titanic

existences, and purging from it both sentiment and spirituality as well

as all that makes it mean.

[88] See, for instance, his meeting of Ixion with the phantom of Juno,

or his design for Leda and the Swan.

In like manner, the Lucretian conception of Ennui is wholly Roman:—

Si possent homines, proinde ac sentire videntur

pondus inesse animo quod se gravitate fatiget,

e quibus id fiat causis quoque noscere et unde

tanta mali tamquam moles in pectore constet,

haut ita vitam agerent, ut nunc plerumque videmus

quid sibi quisque velit nescire et quærere semper

commutare locum quasi onus deponere possit.

exit sæpe foras magnis ex ædibus ille,

esse domi quem pertæsumst, subitoque revertit,

quippe foris nilo melius qui sentiat esse.

currit agens mannos ad villam præcipitanter,

auxilium tectis quasi ferre ardentibus instans;

oscitat extemplo, tetigit cum limina villæ,

aut abit in somnum gravis atque oblivia quærit,

aut etiam properans urbem petit atque revisit,

hoc se quisque modo fugit (at quem scilicet, ut fit,

effugere haut potis est, ingratis hæret) et odit

propterea, morbi quia causam non tenet æger;

quam bene si videat, iam rebus quisque relictis

naturam primum studeat cognoscere rerum,

temporis æterni quoniam, non unius horæ,

ambigitur status, in quo sit mortalibus omnis

ætas, post mortem quæ restat cumque manenda.

Virgil would not have written these lines. A Greek poet could not have

conceived them: unless we imagine to ourselves what Æschylus or Pindar,

oppressed by long illness, and forgetful of the gods, might possibly

have felt. In its sense of spiritual vacancy, when the world and all

its uses have become flat, stale, unprofitable, and the sentient soul

oscillates like a pendulum between weariful extremes, seeking repose in

restless movement, and hurling the ruins of a life into the gulf of its

exhausted cravings, we perceive already the symptoms of that unnamed

163 malady which was the plague of imperial Rome. The tyrants and the

suicides of the Empire expand before our eyes a pageant of their

lassitude, relieved in vain by festivals of blood and orgies of

unutterable lust. It is not that _ennui_ was a specially Roman disease.

Under certain conditions it is sure to afflict all overtaxed

civilisation; and for the modern world no one has expressed its nature

better than the slight and feminine De Musset.[89] Indeed, the Latin

language has no one phrase denoting Ennui;—_livor_ and _fastidium_, and

even _tædium vitæ_, meaning something more specific and less

all-pervasive as a moral agency. This in itself is significant, since

it shows the unconsciousness of the race at large, and renders the

intuition of Lucretius all the more remarkable. But in Rome there were

the conditions favourable to its development—imperfect culture,

vehement passions unabsorbed by commerce or by political life, the

habituation to extravagant excitement in war and in the circus, and the

fermentation of an age foredestined to give birth to new religious

creeds. When the infinite but ill-assured power of the Empire was

conferred on semi-madmen, Ennui in Rome assumed colossal proportions.

Its victims sought for palliatives in cruelty and crime elsewhere

unknown, except perhaps in Oriental courts. Lucretius, in the last days

of the Republic, had discovered its deep significance for human nature.

To all the pictures of Tacitus it forms a solemn tragic background,

enhancing, as it were, by spiritual gloom the carnival of passions

which gleam so brilliantly upon his canvas. In the person of Caligula,

Ennui sat supreme upon the throne of the terraqueous globe. The insane

desires and the fantastic deeds of the autocrat who wished one head for

humanity that he might cut it off, sufficiently reveal the extent to

which his spirit had been gangrened by this ulcer. There 164 is a

simple paragraph in Suetonius which lifts the veil from his imperial

unrest more ruthlessly than any legend:—'Incitabatur insomniis maxime;

neque enim plus tribus horis nocturnis quiescebat, ac ne his quidem

placidâ quiete, at pavidâ, miris rerum imaginibus ... ideoque magnâ

parte noctis, vigiliæ cubandique tædio, nunc toro residens, nunc per

longissimas porticus vagus, invocare identidem atque expectare lucem

consueverat.' This is the very picture of Ennui that has become mortal

disease. Nor was Nero different. 'Néron,' says Victor Hugo, 'cherche

tout simplement une distraction. Poë;te, comédien, chanteur, cocher,

épuisant la férocité pour trouver la volupté, essayant le changement de

sexe, époux de l'eunuque Sporus et épouse de l'esclave Pythagore, et se

promenant dans les rues de Rome entre sa femme et son mari; ayant deux

plaisirs: voir le peuple se jeter sur les pièces d'or, les diamants et

les perles, et voir les lions se jeter sur le peuple; incendiaire par

curiosité et parricide par désoeuvrement.' Nor need we stop at Nero.

Over Vitellius at his banquets, over Hadrian in his Tiburtine villa

calling in vain on Death, over Commodus in the arena, and Heliogabalus

among the rose-leaves, the same livid shadow of imperial Ennui hangs.

We can even see it looming behind the noble form of Marcus Aurelius,

who, amid the ruins of empire and the revolutions of belief, penned in

his tent among the Quadi those maxims of endurance which were powerless

to regenerate the world.

[89] See the prelude to _Les Confessions d'un Enfant du Siècle_ and

_Les Nuits_.

Roman again, in the true sense of the word, is the Lucretian philosophy

of Conscience. Christianity has claimed the celebrated imprecation of

Persius upon tyrants for her own, as though to her alone belonged the

secret of the soul-tormenting sense of guilt. Yet it is certain that we

owe to the Romans that conception of sin bearing its own fruit of

torment which the Latin Fathers—Augustine and Tertullian— 165 imposed

with such terrific force upon the mediæval consciousness. There is no

need to conclude that Persius was a Christian because he wrote—

Magne pater divum, sævos punire tyrannos, etc.,

when we know that he had before his eyes that passage in the third book

of the 'De Rerum Naturâ,' (978-1023) which reduces the myths of Tityos

and Sisyphus and Cerberus and the Furies to facts of the human soul:—

sed metus in vita poenarum pro male factis

est insignibus insignis, scelerisque luella,

carcer et horribilis de saxo iactu' deorsum,

verbera carnifices robur pix lammina tædæ;

quæ tamen etsi absunt, at mens sibi conscia facti

præmetuens adhibet stimulos terretque flagellis

nec videt interea qui terminus esse malorum

possit nec quæ sit poenarum denique finis

atque eadem metuit magis hæc ne in morte gravescant.

The Greeks, by personifying those secret terrors, had removed them into

a region of existences separate from man. They became dread goddesses,

who might to some extent be propitiated by exorcisms or expiatory

rites. This was in strict accordance with the mythopoeic and artistic

quality of the Greek intellect. The stern and somewhat prosaic

rectitude of the Roman broke through such figments of the fancy, and

exposed the sore places of the soul itself. The theory of the

Conscience, moreover, is part of the Lucretian polemic against false

notions of the gods and the pernicious belief in hell.

Positivism and Realism were qualities of Roman as distinguished from

Greek culture. There was no self-delusion in Lucretius—no attempt,

however unconscious, to compromise unpalatable truth, or to invest

philosophy with the charm of myth. A hundred illustrations might be

chosen to prove his method of setting forth thought with unadorned

simplicity. These, however, are familiar to any one who has but opened

166 the 'De Rerum Naturâ.' It is more profitable to trace this Roman

ruggedness in the poet's treatment of the subject which more than any

other seems to have preoccupied his intellect and fascinated his

imagination—that is Death. His poem has been called by a great critic

the 'poem of Death.' Shakspere's line—

And Death once dead, there's no more dying then,

might be written as a motto on the title-page of the book, which is

full of passages like this:—

scire licet nobis nil esse in morte timendum

nec miserum fieri qui non est posse neque hilum

differre anne ullo fuerit iam tempore natus,

mortalem vitam mors cum immortalis ademit.

His whole mind was steeped in the thought of death; and though he can

hardly be said to have written 'the words that shall make death

exhilarating,' he devoted his genius, in all its energy, to removing

from before men the terror of the doom that waits for all. Sometimes,

in his attempt at consolation, he adduces images which, like the

Delphian knife, are double-handled, and cut both ways:—

hinc indignatur se mortalem esse creatum

nec videt in vera nullum fore morte alium se

qui possit vivus sibi se lugere peremptum

stansque iacentem se lacerari urive dolere.

This suggests, by way of contrast, Blake's picture of the soul that has

just left the body and laments her separation. As we read, we are

inclined to lay the book down, and wonder whether the argument is,

after all, conclusive. May not the spirit, when she has quitted her old

house, be forced to weep and wring her hands, and stretch vain shadowy

arms to the limbs that were so dear? No one has felt more profoundly

than Lucretius the pathos of the dead. The intensity with 167 which he

realised what we must lose in dying and what we leave behind of grief

to those who loved us, reaches a climax of restrained passion in this

well-known paragraph:—

'iam iam non domus accipiet te læta, neque uxor

optima nec dulces occurrent oscula nati

præripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent.

non poteris factis florentibus esse, tuisque

præsidium. misero misere' aiunt 'omnia ademit

una dies infesta tibi tot præmia vitæ.'

illud in his rebus non addunt 'nec tibi earum

iam desiderium rerum super insidet una.'

quod bene si videant animo dictisque sequantur,

dissoluant animi magno se angore metuque.

'tu quidem ut es leto sopitus, sic eris ævi

quod superest cunctis privatu' doloribus ægris.

at nos horrifico cinefactum te prope busto

insatiabiliter deflevimus, æternumque

nulla dies nobis mærorem e pectore demet.'

Images, again, of almost mediæval grotesqueness, rise in his mind when

he contemplates the universality of Death. Simonides had dared to say:

'One horrible Charybdis waits for all.' That was as near a discord as a

Greek could venture on. Lucretius describes the open gate and 'huge

wide-gaping maw' which must devour heaven, earth, and sea, and all that

they contain:—

haut igitur leti præclusa est ianua cælo

nec soli terræque neque altis æquoris undis,

sed patet immani et vasto respectat hiatu.

The ever-during battle of life and death haunts his imagination.

Sometimes he sets it forth in philosophical array of argument.

Sometimes he touches on the theme with elegiac pity:—

miscetur funere vagor

quem pueri tollunt visentis luminis oras;

nec nox ulla diem neque noctem aurora secutast

quæ non audierit mixtos vagitibus ægris

ploratus mortis comites et funeris atri.

168 Then again he returns, with obstinate persistence, to describe how

the dread of death, fortified by false religion, hangs like a pall over

humanity, and how the whole world is a cemetery overshadowed by

cypresses. The most sustained, perhaps, of these passages is at the

beginning of the third book (lines 31 to 93). The most profoundly

melancholy is the description of the new-born child (v. 221):—

quare mors immatura vagatur?

tum porro puer, ut sævis proiectus ab undis

navita, nudus humi iacet, infans, indigus omni

vitali auxilio, cum primum in luminis oras

nixibus ex alvo matris natura profudit,

vagituque locum lugubri complet, ut æcumst

cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum.

Disease and old age, as akin to Death, touch his imagination with the

same force. He rarely alludes to either without some lines as terrible

as these (iii. 472, 453):—

nam dolor ac morbus leti fabricator uterquest.

claudicat ingenium, delirat lingua, labat mens.

Another kindred subject affects him with an equal pathos. He sees the

rising and decay of nations, age following after age, like waves

hurrying to dissolve upon a barren shore, and writes (ii. 75):—

sic rerum summa novatur

semper, et inter se mortales mutua vivunt,

augescunt aliæ gentes, aliæ minuuntur,

inque brevi spatio mutantur sæcla animantum

et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt.

Although the theme is really the procession of life through countless

generations, it obtains a tone of sadness from the sense of

intervenient decay and change. No Greek had the heart thus to dilate

his imagination with the very element of death. What the Greeks

commemorated when they spoke of Death was the loss of the lyre and the

hymeneal chaunt, and 169 the passage across dim waves to a sunless

land. Nor indeed does Lucretius, like the modern poet of Democracy,

ascend into the regions of ecstatic trance:—

Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee,

Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.

He keeps his reason cool, and sternly contemplates the thought of the

annihilation which awaits all perishable combinations of eternal

things. Like Milton, Lucretius delights in giving the life of his

imagination to abstractions. Time, with his retinue of ages, sweeps

before his vision, and he broods in fancy over the illimitable ocean of

the universe. The fascination of the infinite is the quality which,

more than any other, separates Lucretius as a Roman poet from the

Greeks.

Another distinctive feature of his poetry Lucretius inherited as part

of his birthright. This is the sense of Roman greatness. It pervades

the poem, and may be felt in every part; although to Athens, and the

Greek sages, Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, and

Epicurus, as the fountain-heads of soul-delivering culture, he reserves

his most magnificent periods of panegyric. Yet when he would fain

persuade his readers that the fear of death is nugatory, and that the

future will be to them even as the past, it is the shock of Rome with

Carthage that he dwells upon as the critical event of the world's

history (iii. 830):—

Nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum,

quandoquidem natura animi mortalis habetur.

et velut anteacto nil tempore sensimus ægri,

ad confligendum venientibus undique Poenis,

omnia cum belli trepido concussa tumultu

horrida contremuere sub altis ætheris oris,

_in dubioque fuere utrorum ad regna cadendum_

_omnibus humanis esset terraque marique_,

sic:

The lines in italics could have been written by none but a 170 Roman

conscious that the conflict with Carthage had decided the absolute

empire of the habitable world. In like manner the description of a

military review (ii. 323) is Roman: so, too, is that of the

amphitheatre (iv. 75):—

et volgo faciunt id lutea russaque vela

et ferrugina, cum magnis intenta theatris

per malos volgata trabesque trementia flutant.

namque ibi consessum caveai supter et omnem

scænai speciem, patrum coetumque decorum

inficiunt coguntque suo fluitare colore.

The imagination of Lucretius, however, was habitually less affected by

the particular than by the universal. He loved to dwell upon the large

and general aspects of things—on the procession of the seasons, for

example, rather than upon the landscape of the Campagna in spring or

autumn. Therefore it is only occasionally and by accident that we find

in his verse touches peculiarly characteristic of the manners of his

country. Therefore, again, it has happened that modern critics have

detected a lack of patriotic interest in this most Roman of all Latin

poets. Also may it here be remembered, that the single line which sums

up all the history of Rome in one soul-shaking hexameter, is not

Lucretian but Virgilian:—

Tantæ molis erat Romanam condere gentem.

The custode of the Baths of Titus, when he lifts his torch to explore

those ruined arches, throws the wan light upon one place where a Roman

hand has scratched that verse in gigantic letters on the cement. The

colossal genius of Rome seems speaking to us, an oracle no lapse of

time can render dumb.

But Lucretius is not only the poet _par excellence_ of Rome. He will

always rank also among the first philosophical poets of the world: and

here we find a second standpoint for inquiry. The question how far it

is practicable to express 171 philosophy in verse, and to combine the

accuracy of scientific language with the charm of rhythm and the

ornaments of the fancy, is one which belongs rather to modern than to

ancient criticism. In the progress of culture there has been an

ever-growing separation between the several spheres of intellectual

activity. What Livy said about the Roman Empire is true now of

knowledge: _magnitudine laborat suâ_; so that the labour of

specialising and distinguishing has for many centuries been

all-important. Not only do we disbelieve in the desirability of

smearing honey upon the lip of the medicine-glass through which the

draught of erudition has to be administered; but we know for certain

that it is only at the meeting-points between science and emotion that

the philosophic poet finds a proper sphere. Whatever subject-matter can

be permeated or penetrated with strong human feeling is fit for verse.

Then the rhythms and the forms of poetry to which high passions

naturally move, become spontaneous. The emotion is paramount, and the

knowledge conveyed is valuable as supplying fuel to the fire of

feeling. There are, were, and always will be high imaginative points of

vantage commanding the broad fields of knowledge, upon which the poet

may take his station to survey the world and all that it contains. But

it has long ceased to be his function to set forth, in any kind of

metre, systems of speculative thought or purely scientific truths. This

was not the case in the old world. There was a period in the

development of the intellect when the abstractions of logic appeared

like intuitions, and guesses about the structure of the universe still

wore the garb of fancy. When physics and metaphysics were scarcely

distinguished from mythology, it was natural to address the Muses at

the outset of a treatise of ontology, and to cadence a theory of

elemental substances in hexameter verse. Thus the philosophical poems

of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and 172 Empedocles belonged essentially to a

transitional stage of human culture.

There is a second species of poetry to which the name of philosophical

may be given, though it better deserves that of mystical. Pantheism

occupies a middle place between a scientific theory of the universe and

a form of religious enthusiasm. It supplies an element in which the

poetic faculty can move with freedom: for its conclusions, in so far as

they pretend to philosophy, are large and general, and the emotions

which it excites are co-extensive with the world. Therefore,

Pantheistic mysticism, from the Bhagavadgita of the far East, through

the Persian Soofis, down to the poets of our own century, Goethe, and

Shelley, and Wordsworth, and Whitman, and many more whom it would be

tedious to enumerate, has generated a whole tribe of philosophic

singers.

Yet a third class may be mentioned. Here we have to deal with what are

called didactic poems. These, like the metaphysical epic, began to

flourish in early Greece at the moment when exact thought was dividing

itself laboriously from myths and fancies. Hesiod with his poem on the

life of man leads the way; and the writers of moral sentences in

elegiac verse, among whom Solon and Theognis occupy the first place,

follow. Latin literature contributes highly artificial specimens of

this kind in the 'Georgics' of Virgil, the stoical diatribes of

Persius, and the 'Ars Poetica' of Horace. Didactic verse had a special

charm for the genius of the Latin race. The name of such poems in the

Italian literature of the Renaissance is legion. The French delighted

in the same style under the same influences; nor can we fail to

attribute the 'Essay on Man' and the 'Essay on Criticism' of our own

Pope to a similar revival in England of Latin forms of art. The taste

for didactic verse has declined. Yet in its stead another sort of

philosophical poetry has grown up in this century, which, for 173 the

want of a better term, may be called psychological. It deserves this

title, inasmuch as the motive-interest of the art in question is less

the passion or the action of humanity than the analysis of the same.

The 'Faust' of Goethe, the 'Prelude' and 'Excursion' of Wordsworth,

Browning's 'Sordello' and Mrs. Browning's 'Aurora Leigh,' together with

the 'Musings' of Coleridge and the 'In Memoriam' of Tennyson, may be

roughly reckoned in this class. It will be noticed that nothing has

been said about professedly religious poetry, much of which attaches

itself to mysticism, while some, like the 'Divine Comedy' of Dante, is

philosophic in the truest sense of the word.

Where, then, are we to place Lucretius? He was a Roman, imbued with the

didactic predilections of the Latin race; and the didactic quality of

the 'De Rerum Naturâ' is unmistakable. Yet it would be uncritical to

place this poem in the class which derives from Hesiod. It belongs

really to the succession of Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles. As

such it was an anachronism. The specific moment in the development of

thought at which the Parmenidean Epic was natural has been already

described. The Romans of the age of Lucretius had advanced far beyond

it. The idealistic metaphysics of the Socratic school, the positive

ethics of the Stoics, and the profound materialism of Epicurus, had

accustomed the mind to habits of exact and subtle thinking, prolonged

from generation to generation upon the same lines of speculative

inquiry. Philosophy expressed in verse was out of date. Moreover, the

very myths had been rationalised. Euhemerus had even been translated

into Latin by Ennius, and his prosaic explanations of Greek legend had

found acceptance with the essentially positive Roman intellect.

Lucretius himself, it may be said in passing, thought it worth while to

offer a philosophical explanation of the Greek mythology. The Cybele of

the poets 174 is shown in one of his sublimest passages (ii. 600-645)

to be Earth. To call the sea Neptune, corn Ceres, and wine Bacchus,

seems to him a simple folly (ii. 652-657). We have already seen how he

reduces the fiends and spectres of the Greek Hades to facts of moral

subjectivity (iii. 978-1023). In another place he attacks the worship

of Phoebus and the stars (v. 110); in yet another he upsets the belief

in the Centaurs, Scylla, and Chimæra (v. 877-924) with a gravity which

is almost comic. Such arguments formed a necessary element in his

polemic against foul religion (foeda religio—turpis religio); to

deliver men from which (i. 62-112), by establishing firmly in their

minds the conviction that the gods exist far away from this world in

unconcerned tranquillity (ii. 646), and by substituting the notion of

Nature for that of deity (ii. 1090), was the object of his scientific

demonstration.

Lucretius, therefore, had outgrown mythology, was hostile to religion,

and burned with unsurpassable enthusiasm to indoctrinate his Roman

readers with the weighty conclusions of systematised materialism. Yet

he chose the vehicle of hexameter verse, and trammelled his genius with

limitations which Empedocles, four hundred years before, must have

found almost intolerable. It needed the most ardent intellectual

passion and the loftiest inspiration to sustain on his far flight a

poet who had forged a hoplite's panoply for singing robes. Both passion

and inspiration were granted to Lucretius in full measure. And just as

there was something contradictory between the scientific subject-matter

and the poetical form of his masterpiece, so the very sources of his

poetic strength were such as are usually supposed to depress the soul.

His passion was for death, annihilation, godlessness. It was not the

eloquence, but the force of logic in Epicurus that roused his

enthusiasm:—

ergo vivida vis animi pervicit et extra

processit longe flammantia moenia mundi.

175

No other poet who ever lived in any age, or any shore, drew inspiration

from founts more passionless and more impersonal.

The 'De Rerum Naturâ' is therefore an attempt, unique in its kind, to

combine philosophical exposition and poetry in an age when the

requirements of the former had already outgrown the resources of the

latter. Throughout the poem we trace a discord between the matter and

the form. The frost of reason and the fire of fancy war in deadly

conflict; for the Lucretian system destroyed nearly everything with

which the classical imagination loved to play. It was only in some high

ethereal region, before the majestic thought of Death or the new Myth

of Nature, that the two faculties of the poet's genius met for mutual

support. Only at rare intervals did he allow himself to make artistic

use of mere mythology, as in the celebrated exordium of the first book,

or the description of the Seasons in the fifth book (737-745). For the

most part reason and fancy worked separately: after long passages of

scientific explanation, Lucretius indulged his readers with those

pictures of unparalleled sublimity and grace which are the charm of the

whole poem; or dropping the phraseology of atoms, void, motion, chance,

he spoke at times of Nature as endowed with reason and a will (v. 186,

811, 846).

It would be beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the particular

form given by Lucretius to the Democritean philosophy. He believed the

universe to be composed of atoms, infinite in number, and variable, to

a finite extent, in form, which drift slantingly through an infinite

void. Their combinations under the conditions of what we call space and

time are transitory, while they remain themselves imperishable.

Consequently, as the soul itself is corporeally constituted, and as

thought and sensation depend on mere material idola, men may divest

themselves of any fear of the hereafter. There is no such thing as

providence, nor do the 176 gods concern themselves with the

kaleidoscopic medley of atoms in transient combination which we call

our world. The latter were points of supreme interest to Lucretius. He

seems to have cared for the cosmology of Epicurus chiefly as it touched

humanity through ethics and religion. To impartial observers, the

identity or the divergence of the forms assumed by scientific

hypothesis at different periods of the world's history is not a matter

of much importance. Yet a peculiar interest has of late been given to

the Lucretian materialism by the fact that physical speculation has

returned to what is substantially the same ground. The most modern

theories of evolution and of molecular structure may be stated in

language which, allowing for the progress made by exact thought during

the last twenty centuries, is singularly like that of Lucretius. The

Roman poet knew fewer facts than are familiar to our men of science,

and was far less able to analyse one puzzle into a whole group of

unexplained phenomena. He had besides but a feeble grasp upon those

discoveries which subserve the arts of life and practical utility. But

as regards _absolute knowledge_—knowledge, that is to say, of what the

universe really is, and of how it became what it seems to us to

be—Lucretius stood at the same point of ignorance as we, after the

labours of Darwin and of Spencer, of Helmholtz and of Huxley, still do.

Ontological speculation is as barren now as then, and the problems of

existence still remain insoluble. The chief difference indeed between

him and modern investigators is that they have been lessoned by the

experience of the last two thousand years to know better the depths of

human ignorance, and the directions in which it is possible to sound

them.

It may not be uninteresting to collect a few passages in which the

Roman poet has expressed in his hexameters the lines of thought adopted

by our most advanced theorists. 177 Here is the general conception of

Nature, working by her own laws toward the achievement of that result

which we apprehend through the medium of the senses (ii. 1090):—

Quæ bene cognita si teneas, natura videtur

libera continuo dominis privata superbis

ipsa sua per se sponte omnia dis agere expers.

Here again is a demonstration of the absurdity of supposing that the

world was made for the use of men (v. 156):—

dicere porro hominum causa voluisse parare

præclaram mundi naturam proptereaque

adlaudabile opus divom laudare decere

æternumque putare atque inmortale futurum

nec fas esse, deum quod sit ratione vetusta

gentibus humanis fundatum perpetuo ævo,

sollicitare suis ulla vi ex sedibus umquam

nec verbis vexare et ab imo evertere summa,

cetera de genere hoc adfingere et addere, Memmi

desiperest.

A like cogent rhetoric is directed against the arguments of toleology

(iv. 823):—

Illud in his rebus vitium vementer avessis

effugere, errorem vitareque præmetuenter,

lumina ne facias oculorum clara creata,

prospicere ut possemus, et ut proferre queamus

proceros passus, ideo fastigia posse

surarum ac feminum pedibus fundata plicari,

bracchia tum porro validis ex apta lacertis

esse manusque datas utraque ex parte ministras,

ut facere ad vitam possemus quæ foret usus.

cetera de genere hoc inter quæcumque pretantur

omnia perversa præpostera sunt ratione,

nil ideo quoniam natumst in corpore ut uti

possemus, sed quod natumst id procreat usum.

nec fuit ante videre oculorum lumina nata

nec dictis orare prius quam lingua creatast,

sed potius longe linguæ præcessit origo

sermonem multoque creatæ sunt prius aures

178 quam sonus est auditus, et omnia denique membra

ante fuere, ut opinor, eorum quam foret usus.

haud igitur potuere utendi crescere causa.

The ultimate dissolution and the gradual decay of the terrestrial globe

is set forth in the following luminous passage (ii. 1148):—

Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi

expugnata dabunt labem putrisque ruinas.

iamque adeo fracta est ætas effetaque tellus

vix animalia parva creat quæ cuncta creavit

sæcla deditque ferarum ingentia corpora partu.[90]

[90] Compare book v. 306-317 on the evidences of decay continually at

work in the fabric of the world.

The same mind which recognised these probabilities knew also that our

globe is not single, but that it forms one among an infinity of sister

orbs (ii. 1084):—

quapropter cælum simili ratione fatendumst

terramque et solem lunam mare, cetera quæ sunt

non esse unica, sed numero magis innumerali.[91]

[91] The same truth is insisted on with even greater force of language

in vi. 649-652.

When Lucretius takes upon himself to describe the process of becoming

which made the world what it now is, he seems to incline to a theory

not at all dissimilar to that of unassisted evolution (v. 419):—

nam certe neque consilio primordia rerum

ordine se suo quæque sagaci mente locarunt

nec quos quæque darent motus pepigere profecto,

sed quia multa modis multis primordia rerum

ex infinito iam tempore percita plagis

ponderibusque suis consuerunt concita ferri

omnimodisque coire atque omnia pertemptare,

quæcumque inter se possent congressa creare,

propterea fit uti magnum volgata per ævom

omne genus coetus et motus experiundo

179 tandem conveniant ea quæ convecta repente

magnarum rerum fiunt exordia sæpe,

terrai maris et cæli generisque animantum.

Entering into the details of the process, he describes the many

ill-formed, amorphous beginnings of organised life upon the globe,

which came to nothing, 'since nature set a ban upon their increase' (v.

837-848); and then proceeds to explain how, in the struggle for

existence, the stronger prevailed over the weaker (v. 855-863). What is

really interesting in this exposition is that Lucretius ascribes to

nature the volition ('convertebat ibi natura foramina terræ;' 'quoniam

natura absterruit auctum') which has recently been attributed by

materialistic speculators to the same maternal power.

To press these points, and to neglect the gap which separates Lucretius

from thinkers fortified by the discoveries of modern chemistry,

astronomy, physiology, and so forth, would be childish. All we can do

is to point to the fact that the circumambient atmosphere of human

ignorance, with reference to the main matters of speculation, remains

undissipated. The mass of experience acquired since the age of

Lucretius is enormous, and is infinitely valuable; while our power of

tabulating, methodising, and extending the sphere of experimental

knowledge seems to be unlimited. Only ontological deductions, whether

negative or affirmative, remain pretty much where they were then.

The fame of Lucretius, however, rests not on this foundation of

hypothesis. In his poetry lies the secret of a charm which he will

continue to exercise as long as humanity chooses to read Latin verse.

No poet has created a world of larger and nobler images, designed with

the _sprezzatura_ of indifference to mere gracefulness, but all the

more fascinating because of the artist's negligence. There is something

monumental in the effect produced by his large-sounding single 180

epithets and simple names. We are at home with the dæmonic life of

nature when he chooses to bring Pan and his following before our eyes

(iv. 580). Or, again, the Seasons pass like figures on some frieze of

Mantegna, to which, by divine accident, has been added the glow of

Titian's colouring[92] (v. 737):—

it ver et Venus, et veris prænuntius ante

pennatus graditur zephyrus, vestigia propter

Flora quibus mater præspargens ante viai

cuncta coloribus egregiis et odoribus opplet.

inde loci sequitur calor aridus et comes una

pulverulenta Ceres et etesia flabra aquilonum,

inde antumnus adit, graditur simul Eubius Euan,

inde aliæ tempestates ventique secuntur,

altitonans Volturnus et auster fulmine pollens.

tandem bruma nives adfert pigrumque rigorem,

prodit hiemps, sequitur crepitans hanc dentibus algor.

[92] The elaborate illustration of the first four lines of this

passage, painted by Botticelli (in the Florence Academy of Fine Arts),

proves Botticelli's incapacity or unwillingness to deal with the

subject in the spirit of the original. It is graceful and 'subtle'

enough, but not Lucretian.

With what a noble style, too, are the holidays of the primeval pastoral

folk described (v. 1379-1404). It is no mere celebration of the _bell'

età dell' oro_: but we see the woodland glades, and hear the songs of

shepherds, and feel the hush of summer among rustling forest trees,

while at the same time all is far away, in a better, simpler, larger

age. The sympathy of Lucretius for every form of country life was very

noticeable. It belonged to that which was most deeply and sincerely

poetic in the Latin genius, whence Virgil drew his sweetest strain of

melancholy, and Horace his most unaffected pictures, and Catullus the

tenderness of his best lines on Sirmio. No Roman surpassed the pathos

with which 181 Lucretius described the separation of a cow from her

calf (ii. 352-365). The same note indeed was touched by Virgil in his

lines upon the forlorn nightingale, and in the peroration to the third

'Georgic.' But the style of Virgil is more studied, the feeling more

artistically elaborated. It would be difficult to parallel such

Lucretian passages in Greek poetry. The Greeks lacked an undefinable

something of rusticity which dignified the Latin race. This quality was

not altogether different from what we call homeliness. Looking at the

busts of Romans, and noticing their resemblance to English country

gentlemen, I have sometimes wondered whether the Latin genius, just in

those points where it differed from the Greek, was not approximated to

the English.

All subjects needing a large style, brief and rapid, but at the same

time luminous with imagination, were sure of the right treatment from

Lucretius. This is shown by his enumeration of the celestial signs (v.

1188):—

in cæloque deum sedes et templa locarunt,

per cælum volvi quia nox et luna videtur,

luna dies et nox et noctis signa severa

noctivagæque faces cæli flammæque volantes,

nubila sol imbres nix venti fulmina grando

et rapidi fremitus et murmura magna minarum.

Again, he never failed to rise to an occasion which required the

display of fervid eloquence. The Roman eloquence, which in its

energetic volubility was the chief force of Juvenal, added a tidal

strength and stress of storm to the quick gathering thoughts of the

greater poet. The exordia to the first and second books, the analysis

of Love in the fourth, the praises of Epicurus in the third and fifth,

the praises of Empedocles and Ennius in the first, the elaborate

passage on the progress of civilisation in the fifth, and the

description of the plague at 182 Athens which closes the sixth, are

noble instances of the sublimest poetry sustained and hurried onward by

the volume of impassioned improvisation. It is difficult to imagine

that Lucretius wrote slowly. The strange word _vociferari_, which he

uses so often, and which the Romans of the Augustan age almost dropped

from their poetic vocabulary, seems exactly made to suit his utterance.

Yet at times he tempers the full torrent of resonant utterance with

divine tranquillity, and leaves upon our mind that sense of powerful

aloofness from his subject, which only belongs to the mightiest poets

in their most majestic moments. One instance of this rare felicity of

style shall end the list of our quotations (v. 1194):—

O genus infelix humanum, talia divis

cum tribuit facta atque iras adiunxit acerbas!

quantos tum gemitus ipsi sibi, quantaque nobis

volnera, quas lacrimas peperere minoribu' nostris!

nec pietas ullast velatum sæpe videri

vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras

nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas

ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo

spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota,

sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.

nam cum suspicimus magni cælestia mundi

ellisque micantibus æthera fixum,

et venit in mentem solis lunæque viarum,

tunc aliis oppressa malis in pectora cura

illa quoque expergefactum caput erigere infit,

ne quæ forte deum nobis inmensa potestas

sit, vario motu quæ candida sidera verset.

temptat enim dubiam mentem rationis egestas,

ecquænam fuerit mundi genitalis origo,

et simul ecquæ sit finis, quoad moenia mundi

solliciti motus hunc possint ferre laborem,

an divinitus æterna donata salute

perpetuo possint ævi labentia tractu

inmensi validas ævi contemnere viris.

It would be impossible to adduce from any other poet a 183 passage in

which the deepest doubts and darkest terrors and most vexing questions

that beset the soul, are touched with an eloquence more stately and a

pathos more sublime. Without losing the sense of humanity, we are

carried off into the infinite. Such poetry is as imperishable as the

subject of which it treats.

184

ANTINOUS

Visitors to picture and sculpture galleries are haunted by the forms of

two handsome young men—Sebastian and Antinous. Both were saints: the

one of decadent Paganism, the other of mythologising Christianity.

According to the popular beliefs to which they owed their canonisation,

both suffered death in the bloom of earliest manhood for the faith that

burned in them. There is, however, this difference between the two—that

whereas Sebastian is a shadowy creature of the pious fancy, Antinous

preserves a marked and unmistakable personality. All his statues are

distinguished by unchanging characteristics. The pictures of Sebastian

vary according to the ideal of adolescent beauty conceived by each

successive artist. In the frescoes of Perugino and Luini he shines with

the pale pure light of saintliness. On the canvas of Sodoma he

reproduces the voluptuous charm of youthful Bacchus, with so much of

anguish in his martyred features as may serve to heighten his dæmonic

fascination. On the richer panels of the Venetian masters he glows with

a flame of earthly passion aspiring heavenward. Under Guido's hand he

is a model of mere carnal comeliness. And so forth through the whole

range of the Italian painters. We know Sebastian only by his arrows.

The case is very different with Antinous. Depicted under diverse

attributes—as Hermes of the wrestling-ground, as Aristæus or Vertumnus,

as Dionysus, as Ganymede, as Herakles, or as a god of ancient Egypt—his

individuality is always prominent. No metamorphosis of 185 divinity can

change the lineaments he wore on earth. And this difference, so marked

in the artistic presentation of the two saints, is no less striking in

their several histories. The legend of Sebastian tells us nothing to be

relied upon, except that he was a Roman soldier converted to the

Christian faith, and martyred. In spite of the perplexity and mystery

that involve the death of Antinous in impenetrable gloom, he is a true

historic personage, no phantom of myth, but a man as real as Hadrian,

his master.

Antinous, as he appears in sculpture, is a young man of eighteen or

nineteen years, almost faultless in his form. His beauty is not of a

pure Greek type. Though perfectly proportioned and developed by

gymnastic exercises to the true athletic fulness, his limbs are round

and florid, suggesting the possibility of early over-ripeness. The

muscles are not trained to sinewy firmness, but yielding and elastic;

the chest is broad and singularly swelling; and the shoulders are

placed so far back from the thorax that the breasts project beyond them

in a massive arch. It has been asserted that one shoulder is slightly

lower than the other. Some of the busts seem to justify this statement;

but the appearance is due probably to the different position of the two

arms, one of which, if carried out, would be lifted and the other be

depressed. The legs and arms are modelled with exquisite grace of

outline; yet they do not show that readiness for active service which

is noticeable in the statues of the Meleager, the Apoxyomenos, or the

Belvedere Hermes. The whole body combines Greek beauty of structure

with something of Oriental voluptuousness. The same fusion of diverse

elements may be traced in the head. It is not too large, though more

than usually broad, and is nobly set upon a massive throat, slightly

inclined forwards, as though this posture were habitual; the hair lies

thick in clusters, which only form curls at the tips. The forehead 186

is low and somewhat square; the eyebrows are level, of a peculiar

shape, and very thick, converging so closely as almost to meet above

the deep-cut eyes. The nose is straight, but blunter than is consistent

with the Greek ideal. Both cheeks and chin are delicately formed, but

fuller than a severe taste approves: one might trace in their rounded

contours either a survival of infantine innocence and immaturity, or

else the sign of rapidly approaching over-bloom. The mouth is one of

the loveliest ever carved; but here again the blending of the Greek and

Oriental types is visible. The lips, half parted, seem to pout; and the

distance between mouth and nostrils is exceptionally short. The

undefinable expression of the lips, together with the weight of the

brows and slumberous half-closed eyes, gives a look of sulkiness or

voluptuousness to the whole face. This, I fancy, is the first

impression which the portraits of Antinous produce; and Shelley has

well conveyed it by placing the two following phrases, 'eager and

impassioned tenderness' and 'effeminate sullenness,' in close

juxtaposition.[93] But, after longer familiarity with the whole range

of Antinous's portraits, and after study of his life, we are brought to

read the peculiar expression of his face and form somewhat differently.

A prevailing melancholy, sweetness of temperament overshadowed by

resignation, brooding reverie, the innocence of youth, touched and

saddened by a calm resolve or an accepted doom—such are the sentences

we form to give distinctness to a still vague and uncertain impression.

As we gaze, Virgil's lines upon the young Marcellus recur to our mind:

what seemed sullen, becomes mournful; the unmistakable voluptuousness

is transfigured in tranquillity.

[93] Fragment, _The Coliseum_.

After all is said and written, the statues of Antinous do not render up

their secret. Like some of the Egyptian gods with whom he was

associated, he remains for us a sphinx, 187 secluded in the shade of a

'mild mystery.' His soul, like the Harpocrates he personated, seems to

hold one finger on closed lips, in token of eternal silence. One thing,

however, is certain. We have before us no figment of the artistic

imagination, but a real youth of incomparable beauty, just as nature

made him, with all the inscrutableness of undeveloped character, with

all the pathos of a most untimely doom, with the almost imperceptible

imperfections that render choice reality more permanently charming than

the ideal. It has been disputed whether the Antinous statues are

portraits or idealised works of inventive art; and it is usually

conceded that the sculptors of Hadrian's age were not able to produce a

new ideal type. Critics, therefore, like Helbig and Overbeck, arrive at

the conclusion that Antinous was one of nature's masterpieces, modelled

in bronze, marble, and granite with almost flawless technical

dexterity. Without attaching too much weight to this kind of criticism,

it is well to find the decisions of experts in harmony with the

instincts of simple observers. Antinous is as real as any man who ever

sat for his portrait to a modern sculptor.

But who was Antinous, and what is known of him? He was a native of

Bithynium or Claudiopolis, a Greek town claiming to have been a colony

from Arcadia, which was situated near the Sangarius, in the Roman

province of Bithynia; therefore he may have had pure Hellenic blood in

his veins, or, what is more probable, his ancestry may have been hybrid

between the Greek immigrants and the native populations of Asia Minor.

Antinous was probably born in the first decade of the second century of

our era. About his youth and education we know nothing. He first

appears upon the scene of the world's history as Hadrian's friend.

Whether the Emperor met with him during his travels in Asia Minor,

whether he found him among the students of the University at 188

Athens, or whether the boy had been sent to Rome in his childhood, must

remain matter of the merest conjecture. We do not even know for certain

whether Antinous was free or a slave. The report that he was one of the

Emperor's pages rests upon the testimony of Hegesippus, quoted by a

Christian Father, and cannot therefore be altogether relied upon. It

receives, however, some confirmation from the fact that Antinous is

more than once represented in the company of Hadrian and Trajan in a

page's hunting dress upon the basreliefs which adorn the Arch of

Constantine. The so-called Antinous-Castor of the Villa Albani is

probably of a similar character. Winckelmann, who adopted the tradition

as trustworthy, pointed out the similarity between the portraits of

Antinous and some lines in Phædrus, which describe a curly-haired

_atriensis_. If Antinous took the rank of _atriensis_ in the imperial

_pædagogium_, his position would have been, to say the least,

respectable; for to these upper servants was committed the charge of

the _atrium_, where the Romans kept their family archives, portraits,

and works of art. Yet he must have quitted this kind of service some

time before his death, since we find him in the company of Hadrian upon

one of those long journeys in which an _atriensis_ would have had no

_atrium_ to keep. By the time of Hadrian's visit to Egypt, Antinous had

certainly passed into the closest relationship with his imperial

master; and what we know of the Emperor's inclination towards literary

and philosophical society perhaps justifies the belief that the youth

he admitted to his friendship had imbibed Greek culture, and had been

initiated into those cloudy metaphysics which amused the leisure of

semi-Oriental thinkers in the last age of decaying Paganism.

It was a moment in the history of the human mind when East and West

were blending their traditions to form the husk of Christian creeds and

the fantastic visions of neo-Platonism. 189 Rome herself had received

with rapture the strange rites of Nilotic and of Syrian superstition.

Alexandria was the forge of fanciful imaginations, the majority of

which were destined to pass like vapours and leave not a wrack behind,

while a few fastened with the force of dogma on the conscience of

awakening Christendom. During Hadrian's reign it was still uncertain

which among the many hybrid products of that motley age would live and

flourish; and the Emperor, we know, dreamed fondly of reviving the

cults and restoring the splendour of degenerate Hellas. At the same

time he was not averse to the more mystic rites of Egypt: in his villa

at Tivoli he built a Serapeum, and named one of its quarters Canopus.

What part Antinous may have taken in the projects of his friend and

master we know not; yet, when we come to consider the circumstances of

his death, it may not be superfluous to have thus touched upon the

intellectual conditions of the world in which he lived. The mixed blood

of the boy, born and bred in a Greek city near the classic ground of

Dindymean rites, and his beauty, blent of Hellenic and Eastern

qualities, may also not unprofitably be remembered. In such a youth,

nurtured between Greece and Asia, admitted to the friendship of an

emperor for whom neo-Hellenism was a life's dream in the midst of grave

state-cares, influenced by the dark and symbolical creeds of a dimly

apprehended East, might there not have lurked some spark of enthusiasm

combining the impulses of Atys and Aristogeiton, pathetic even in its

inefficiency when judged by the light of modern knowledge, but heroic

at that moment in its boundless vista of great deeds to be

accomplished?

After journeying through Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and

Arabia, Hadrian, attended by Antinous, came to Egypt. He there restored

the tomb of Pompey, near Pelusium, with great magnificence, and shortly

afterwards 190 embarked from Alexandria upon the Nile, proceeding on

his journey through Memphis into the Thebaïd. When he had arrived near

an ancient city named Besa, on the right bank of the river, he lost his

friend. Antinous was drowned in the Nile. He had thrown himself, it was

believed, into the water; seeking thus by a voluntary death to

substitute his own life for Hadrian's, and to avert predicted perils

from the Roman Empire. What these perils were, and whether Hadrian was

ill, or whether an oracle had threatened him with approaching calamity,

we do not know. Even supposition is at fault, because the date of the

event is still uncertain; some authorities placing Hadrian's Egyptian

journey in the year 122, and others in the year 130 A.D. Of the two

dates, the second seems the more probable. We are left to surmise that,

if the Emperor was in danger, the recent disturbances which followed a

new discovery of Apis, may have exposed him to fanatical conspiracy.

The same doubt affects an ingenious conjecture that rumours which

reached the Roman court of a new rising in Judæa had disturbed the

Emperor's mind, and led to the belief that he was on the verge of a

mysterious doom. He had pacified the Empire and established its

administration on a solid basis. Yet the revolt of the indomitable

Jews—more dreaded since the days of Titus than any other perturbation

of the imperial economy—would have been enough, especially in Egypt, to

engender general uneasiness. However this may have been, the grief of

the Emperor, intensified either by gratitude or remorse, led to the

immediate canonisation of Antinous. The city where he died was rebuilt,

and named after him. His worship as a hero and as a god spread far and

wide throughout the provinces of the Mediterranean. A new star, which

appeared about the time of his decease, was supposed to be his soul

received into the company of the immortals. Medals were struck in his

honour, 191 and countless works of art were produced to make his memory

undying. Great cities wore wreaths of red lotos on his feast-day in

commemoration of the manner of his death. Public games were celebrated

in his honour at the city Antinoë;, and also in Arcadian Mantinea. This

canonisation may probably have taken place in the fourteenth year of

Hadrian's reign, A.D. 130.[94] Antinous continued to be worshipped

until the reign of Valentinian.

[94] Overbeck, Hausrath, and Mommsen, following apparently the

conclusions arrived at by Flemmer in his work on Hadrian's journeys,

place it in 130 A.D. This would leave an interval of only eight years

between the deaths of Antinous and Hadrian. It may here be observed

that two medals of Antinous, referred by Rasche with some hesitation

to the Egyptian series, bear the dates of the eighth and ninth years

of Hadrian's reign. If these coins are genuine, and if we accept

Flemmer's conclusions, they must have been struck in the lifetime of

Antinous. Neither of them represents Antinous with the insignia of

deity: one gives the portrait of Hadrian upon the reverse.

Thus far I have told a simple story, as though the details of the

youth's last days were undisputed. Still we are as yet but on the

threshold of the subject. All that we have any right to take for

uncontested is that Antinous passed from this life near the city of

Besa, called thereafter Antinoopolis or Antinoë;. Whether he was

drowned by accident, whether he drowned himself in order to save

Hadrian by vicarious suffering, or whether Hadrian sacrificed him in

order to extort the secrets of fate from blood-propitiated deities,

remains a question buried in the deepest gloom. With a view to throwing

such light as is possible upon the matter, we must proceed to summon in

their order the most trustworthy authorities among the ancients.

Dion Cassius takes precedence. In compiling his life of Hadrian, he had

beneath his eyes the Emperor's own 'Commentaries,' published under the

name of the freedman Phlegon. We therefore learn from him at least what

the 192 friend of Antinous wished the world to know about his death;

and though this does not go for much, since Hadrian is himself an

accused person in the suit before us, yet the whole Roman Empire may be

said to have accepted his account, and based on it a pious cult that

held its own through the next three centuries of growing Christianity.

Dion, in the abstract of his history compiled by Xiphilinus, speaks

then to this effect: 'In Egypt he also built the city named after

Antinous. Now Antinous was a native of Bithynium, a city of Bithynia,

which we also call Claudiopolis. He was Hadrian's favourite, and he

died in Egypt: whether by having fallen into the Nile, as Hadrian

writes, or by having been sacrificed, as the truth was. For Hadrian, as

I have said, was in general over-much given to superstitious

subtleties, and practised all kinds of sorceries and magic arts. At any

rate he so honoured Antinous, whether because of the love he felt for

him, or because he died voluntarily, since a willing victim was needed

for his purpose, that he founded a city in the place where he met this

fate, and called it after him, and dedicated statues, or rather images,

of him in, so to speak, the whole inhabited world. Lastly, he affirmed

that a certain star which he saw was the star of Antinous, and listened

with pleasure to the myths invented by his companions about this star

having really sprung from the soul of his favourite, and having then

for the first time appeared. For which things he was laughed at.'

We may now hear what Spartian, in his 'Vita Hadriani,' has to say: 'He

lost his favourite, Antinous, while sailing on the Nile, and lamented

him like a woman. About Antinous reports vary, for some say that he

devoted his life for Hadrian, while others hint what his condition

seems to prove, as well as Hadrian's excessive inclination to luxury.

Some Greeks, at the instance of Hadrian, canonised him, asserting that

oracles were 193 given by him, which Hadrian himself is supposed to

have made up.'

In the third place comes Aurelius Victor: 'Others maintain that this

sacrifice of Antinous was both pious and religious; for when Hadrian

was wishing to prolong his life, and the magicians required a voluntary

vicarious victim, they say that, upon the refusal of all others,

Antinous offered himself.'

These are the chief authorities. In estimating them we must remember

that, though Dion Cassius wrote less than a century after the event

narrated, he has come down to us merely in fragments and in the epitome

of a Byzantine of the twelfth century, when everything that could

possibly be done to discredit the worship of Antinous, and to blacken

the memory of Hadrian, had been attempted by the Christian Fathers. On

the other hand, Spartianus and Aurelius Victor compiled their histories

at too distant a date to be of first-rate value. Taking the three

reports together, we find that antiquity differed about the details of

Antinous's death. Hadrian himself averred that his friend was drowned;

and it was surmised that he had drowned himself in order to prolong his

master's life. The courtiers, however, who had scoffed at Hadrian's

fondness for his favourite, and had laughed to see his sorrow for his

death, somewhat illogically came to the conclusion that Antinous had

been immolated by the Emperor, either because a victim was needed to

prolong his life, or because some human sacrifice was required in order

to complete a dark mysterious magic rite. Dion, writing not very long

after the event, believed that Antinous had been immolated for some

such purpose with his own consent. Spartian, who wrote at the distance

of more than a century, felt uncertain about the question of

self-devotion; but Aurelius Victor, following after the interval of

another century, unhesitatingly adopted Dion's view, and gave it a

fresh colour. This opinion he summarised in a 194 compact,

authoritative form, upon which we may perhaps found an assumption that

the belief in Antinous, as a self-devoted victim, had been gradually

growing through two centuries.

There are therefore three hypotheses to be considered. The first is

that Antinous died an accidental death by drowning; the second is, that

Antinous, in some way or another, gave his life willingly for

Hadrian's; the third is, that Hadrian ordered his immolation in the

performance of magic rites.

For the first of the three hypotheses we have the authority of Hadrian

himself, as quoted by Dion. The simple words εἰς τον Νειλον εκπεσὼν

imply no more than accidental death; and yet, if the Emperor had

believed the story of his favourite's self-devotion, it is reasonable

to suppose that he would have recorded it in his 'Memoirs.' Accepting

this view of the case, we must refer the deification of Antinous wholly

to Hadrian's affection; and the tales of his _devotio_ may have been

invented partly to flatter the Emperor's grief, partly to explain its

violence to the Roman world. This hypothesis seems, indeed, by far the

most natural of the three; and if we could strip the history of

Antinous of its mysterious and mythic elements, it is rational to

believe that we should find his death a simple accident. Yet our

authorities prove that writers of history among the ancients wavered

between the two other theories of (i) Self-Devotion and (ii)

Immolation, with a bias toward the latter. These, then, have now to be

considered with some attention. Both, it may parenthetically be

observed, relieve Antinous from a moral stigma, since in either case a

pure untainted victim was required.

If we accept the former of the two remaining hypotheses, we can

understand how love and gratitude, together with sorrow, led Hadrian to

canonise Antinous. If we accept the latter, Hadrian's sorrow itself

becomes inexplicable; and we 195 must attribute the foundation of

Antinoë; and the deification of Antinous to remorse. It may be added,

while balancing these two solutions of the problem, that cynical

sophists, like Hadrian's Græculi, were likely to have put the worst

construction on the Emperor's passion, and to have invented the worst

stories concerning the favourite's death. To perpetuate these

calumnious reports was the real interest of the Christian apologists,

who not unnaturally thought it scandalous that a handsome page should

be deified. Thus, at first sight, the balance of probability inclines

toward the former of the two solutions, while the second may be

rejected as based upon court-gossip and religious animosity. Attention

may also again be called to the fact that Hadrian ventured to publish

an account of Antinous quite inconsistent with what Dion chose to call

the truth, and that virtuous Emperors like the Antonines did not

interfere with a cult, which, had it been paid to the mere victim of

Hadrian's passion and his superstition, would have been an infamy even

in Rome. Moreover, that cult was not, like the creations of the impious

emperors, forgotten or destroyed by public acclamation. It took root

and flourished apparently, as we shall see, because it satisfied some

craving of the popular religious sense, and because the people believed

that this man had died for his friend. It will not, however, do to

dismiss the two hypotheses so lightly.

The alternative of self-devotion presents itself under a double aspect.

Antinous may either have committed suicide by drowning with the

intention of prolonging the Emperor's life, or he may have offered

himself as a voluntary victim to the magicians, who required a

sacrifice for a similar purpose. Spartian's brief phrase, _aliis eum

devotum pro Hadriano_, may seem to point to the first form of

self-devotion; the testimony of Aurelius Victor clearly supports the

second: yet it does not much matter which of the two explanations we

adopt. 196 The point is whether Antinous gave his life willingly to

save the Emperor's, or whether he was murdered for the satisfaction of

some superstitious curiosity. It was absolutely necessary that the

vicarious victim should make a free and voluntary oblation of himself.

That the notion of vicarious suffering was familiar to the ancients is

sufficiently attested by the phrases αντίψυχοι, αντανδροι, and _hostia

succidanea_. We find traces of it in the legend of Alcestis, who died

for Admetus, and of Cheiron, who took the place of Prometheus in Hades.

Suetonius records that in the first days of Caligula's popularity, when

he was labouring under dangerous illness, many Romans of both sexes

vowed their lives for his recovery in temples of the gods. That this

superstition retained a strong hold on the popular imagination in the

time of Hadrian is proved by the curious affirmation of Aristides, a

contemporary of that Emperor. He says that once, when he was ill, a

certain Philumene offered her soul for his soul, her body for his body,

and that, upon his own recovery, she died. On the same testimony it

appears that her brother Hermeas had also died for Aristides. This

faith in the efficacy of substitution is persistent in the human race.

Not long ago a Christian lady was supposed to have vowed her own life

for the prolongation of that of Pope Pius IX., and good Catholics

inclined to the belief that the sacrifice had been accepted. We shall

see that in the first centuries of Christendom the popular conviction

that Antinous had died for Hadrian brought him into inconvenient

rivalry with Christ, whose vicarious suffering was the cardinal point

of the new creed.

The alternative of immolation has next to be considered. The question

before us here is, Did Hadrian sacrifice Antinous for the satisfaction

of a superstitious curiosity, and in the performance of magic rites?

Dion Cassius uses the word ἱερουργηθεις, and explains it by saying that

Hadrian needed a voluntary 197 human victim for the accomplishment of

an act of divination in which he was engaged. Both Spartian and Dion

speak emphatically of the Emperor's proclivities to the black art; and

all antiquity agreed about this trait in his character. Ammianus

Marcellinus spoke of him as '_futurorum sciscitationi nimiæ deditum_.'

Tertullian described him as '_curiositatum omnium exploratorem_.' To

multiply such phrases would, however, be superfluous, for they are

probably mere repetitions from the text of Dion. That human victims

were used by the Romans of the Empire seems certain. Lampridius, in the

'Life of Heliogabalus,' records his habit of slaying handsome and noble

youths, in order that he might inspect their entrails. Eusebius, in his

'Life of Maxentius,' asserts the same of that Emperor. _Quum inspiceret

exta puerilia_, νεογνον σπλάγχνα βρέφων διερευνομένου, are the words

used by Lampridius and Eusebius. Justin Martyr speaks of εποπτεύσεις

παίδων αδιαφθόρον. Caracalla and Julian are credited with similar

bloody sacrifices. Indeed, it may be affirmed in general that tyrants

have ever been eager to foresee the future and to extort her secrets

from Fate, stopping short at no crime in the attempt to quiet a

corroding anxiety for their own safety. What we read about Italian

despots—Ezzelino da Romano, Sigismondo Malatesta, Filippo Maria

Visconti, and Pier Luigi Farnese—throws light upon the practice of

their Imperial predecessors; while the mysterious murder of the

beautiful Astorre Manfredi by the Borgias in Hadrian's Mausoleum has

been referred by modern critics of authority to the same unholy

curiosity. That Hadrian laboured under this moral disease, and that he

deliberately used the body of Antinous for _extispicium_, is, I think,

Dion's opinion. But are we justified in reckoning Hadrian among these

tyrants? That must depend upon our view of his character.