and the noble. Every age in its decline has exhibited the spectacle of selfish luxury side by side with abject poverty; of —

"Wealth, a monster gorged

Mid starving populations":

but nowhere, and at no period, were these contrasts so startling as they were in Imperial Rome. There a whole population might be trembling lest they should be starved by the delay of an Alexandrian corn-ship, while the upper classes were squandering a fortune at a single banquet, drinking out of myrrhine and jeweled vases worth hundreds of pounds, and feasting on the brains of peacocks and the tongues of nightingales. As a consequence, disease was rife, men were short-lived, and even women became liable to gout. Over a large part of Italy most of the free-born population had to content themselves, even in winter, with a tunic, and the luxury of the toga was reserved only, by way of honor, to the corpse. Yet at this very time the dress of Roman ladies displayed an unheard-of splendor. The elder Pliny tells us that he himself saw Lollia Paulina dressed for a betrothal feast in a robe entirely covered with pearls and emeralds, which had cost forty million sesterces, and which was known to be less costly than some of her other dresses. Gluttony, caprice, extravagance, ostentation, impurity, rioted in the heart of a society which knew of no other means by which to break the monotony of its weariness, or alleviate the anguish of its despair.

"On that hard Pagan world disgust

And secret loathing fell;

Deep weariness and sated lust

Made human life a hell.

In his cool hall, with haggard eyes,
The Roman noble lay;

He drove abroad in furious guise

Along the Appian Way;

He made a feast, drank fierce and fast,
And crowned his hair with flowers

No easier nor no quicker past

The impracticable hours."

At the summit of the whole decaying system - necessary, yet detested — elevated indefinitely above the very highest, yet living

in dread of the very lowest, oppressing a population which he terrified, and terrified by the population which he oppressed was an Emperor, raised to the divinest pinnacle of autocracy, yet conscious that his life hung upon a thread; - an Emperor who, in the terrible phrase of Gibbon, was at once a priest, an atheist, and a god.

The general condition of society was such as might have been expected from the existence of these elements. The Romans had entered on a stage of fatal degeneracy from the first day of their close intercourse with Greece. Greece learnt from Rome her cold-blooded cruelty; Rome learnt from Greece her voluptuous corruption. Family life among the Romans had once been a sacred thing, and for five hundred and twenty years divorce had been unknown among them. Under the Empire marriage had come to be regarded with disfavor and disdain. Women, as Seneca says, married in order to be divorced, and were divorced in order to marry; and noble Roman matrons counted the years not by the Consuls, but by their discarded or discarding husbands.

To have a family was regarded as a misfortune, because the childless were courted with extraordinary assiduity by crowds of fortune-hunters. When there were children in a family, their. education was left to be begun under the tutelage of those slaves who were otherwise the most decrepit and useless, and was carried on, with results too fatally obvious, by supple, accomplished, and abandoned Greeklings. But, indeed, no system of education could have eradicated the influence of the domestic circle. No care could have prevented the sons and daughters of a wealthy family from catching the contagion of the vices of which they saw in their parents a constant and unblushing example.

Literature and art were infected with the prevalent degradation. Poetry sank in great measure into exaggerated satire, hollow declamation, or frivolous epigrams. Art was partly corrupted by the fondness for glare, expensiveness, and size, and partly sank into miserable triviality, or immoral prettinesses, such as those which decorated the walls of Pompeii in the first century, and the Parc aux Cerfs in the eighteenth. Greek statues of the days of Phidias were ruthlessly decapitated, that their heads

might be replaced by the scowling or imbecile features of a Gaius or a Claudius. Nero, professing to be a connoisseur, thought that he improved the Alexander of Lysimachus by gilding it from head to foot. Eloquence, deprived of every legitimate aim, and used almost solely for purposes of insincere display, was tempted to supply the lack of genuine fire by sonorous euphony and theatrical affectation. A training in rhetoric was now understood to be a training in the art of emphasis and verbiage, which was rarely used for any loftier purpose than to make sycophancy plausible, or to embellish sophistry with speciousness. The Drama, even in Horace's days, had degenerated into a vehicle for the exhibition of scenic splendor or ingenious machinery. Dignity, wit, pathos, were no longer expected on the stage, for the dramatist was eclipsed by the swordsman or the rope-dancer. The actors who absorbed the greatest part of popular favor were pantomimists, whose insolent prosperity was generally in direct proportion to the infamy of their character. And while the shamelessness of the theater corrupted the purity of all classes from the earliest age, the hearts of the multitude were made hard as the nether millstone with brutal insensibility, by the fury of the circus, the atrocities of the amphitheater, and the cruel orgies of the games. Augustus, in the document annexed to his will, mentioned that he had exhibited eight thousand gladiators and three thousand five hundred and ten wild beasts. The old warlike spirit of the Romans was dead among the gilded youth of families in which distinction of any kind was certain to bring down upon its most prominent members the murderous suspicion of irresponsible despots. The spirit which had once led the Domitii and the Fabii "to drink delight of battle with their peers" on the plains of Gaul and in the forests of Germany, was now satiated by gazing on criminals fighting for dear life with bears and tigers, or upon bands of gladiators who hacked each other to pieces on the encrimsoned sand. The languid enervation of the delicate and dissolute aristocrat could only be amused by magnificence and stimulated by grossness or by blood. Thus the gracious illusions by which true Art has ever aimed at purging the passions of terror and pity, were extinguished by the realism of tragedies ignobly horrible, and comedies intolerably base. Two phrases sum up the characteristics

of Roman civilization in the days of the Empire - heartless cruelty, and unfathomable corruption.

If there had been a refuge anywhere for the sentiments of outraged virtue and outraged humanity, we might have hoped to find it in the Senate, the members of which were heirs of so many noble and austere traditions. But even in the days of Tiberius the Senate, as Tacitus tells us, had rushed headlong into the most servile flattery, and this would not have been possible if its members had not been tainted by the prevalent deterioration. It was before the once grave and pure-minded senators of Rome the greatness of whose state was founded on the sanctity of family relationships that the Censor Metellus had declared in A.U.C. 602, without one dissentient murmur, that marriage could only be regarded as an intolerable necessity. Before that same Senate, at an earlier period, a leading consular had not scrupled to assert that there was scarcely one among them all who had not ordered one or more of his own infant children to be exposed to death. In the hearing of that same Senate in A.D. 59, not long before St. Paul wrote his letter to Philemon, C. Cassius Longinus had gravely argued that the only security for the life of masters was to put into execution the sanguinary Silanian law, which enacted that, if a master was murdered, every one of his slaves, however numerous, however notoriously innocent, should be indiscriminately massacred. It was the senators of Rome, who thronged forth to meet with adoring congratulations the miserable youth who came to them with his hands reeking with the blood of matricide. They offered thanksgivings to the gods for his worst cruelties, and obediently voted Divine honors to the dead infant, four months old, of the wife whom he afterwards killed with a brutal kick.

And what was the religion of a period which needed the sanctions and consolations of religion more deeply than any age since the world began? It is certain that the old Paganism was -except in country places - practically dead. The very fact that it was necessary to prop it up by the buttress of political interference shows how hollow and ruinous the structure of classic Polytheism had become. The decrees and reforms of Claudius were not likely to reassure the faith of an age which had wit

nessed in contemptuous silence, or with frantic adulation, the assumption by Gaius of the attributes of deity after deity, had tolerated his insults against their sublimest objects of worship, and encouraged his claim to a living apotheosis. The upper classes were "destitute of faith, yet terrified at skepticism." They had long learnt to treat the current mythology as a mass of worthless fables, scarcely amusing enough for even a schoolboy's laughter, but they were the ready dupes of every wandering quack who chose to assume the character of a mathematicus or a mage. Their official religion was a decrepit Theogony; their real religion was a vague and credulous fatalism, which disbelieved in the existence of the gods, or held with Epicurus that they were careless of mankind. The mass of the populace either accorded to the old beliefs a nominal adherence which saved them the trouble of giving any thought to the matter, and reduced their creed and their morals to a survival of national habits; or else they plunged with eager curiosity into the crowd of foreign cults among which a distorted Judaism took its place—such as made the Romans familiar with strange names like Sabazius and Anchialus, Agdistis, Isis, and the Syrian goddess. All men joined in the confession that "the oracles were dumb." It hardly needed the wail of mingled lamentations as of departing deities which swept over the astonished crew of the vessel off Palodes to assure the world that the reign of the gods of Hellas was over · that "Great Pan was dead." Such are the scenes which we must witness, such are the sentiments with which we must become familiar, the moment that we turn away our eyes from the spectacle of the little Christian churches, composed chiefly as yet of slaves and artisans, who had been taught to imitate a Divine example of humility and sincerity, of purity and love. There were, indeed, a few among the Heathen who lived nobler lives, and professed a purer ideal than the Pagans around them. Here and there in the ranks of the philosophers a Demetrius, a Musonius Rufus, an Epictetus; here and there among Senators an Helvidius Priscus, a Pætus Thrasea, a Barea Soranus; here and there among literary men a Seneca or a Persius — showed that virtue was not yet extinct. But the Stoicism on which they leaned for support amid the terrors and temptations of that awful epoch utterly failed to