A  HISTORY OF THE LATER ROMAN EMPIRE FROM ARCADIUS TO IRENE

BOOK III

VIII

GREEK LITERATURE OF THE FIFTH CENTURY

An able critic of the first or second century AD describes a discussion which he had with a literary friend as to the causes of the decline of Greek letters; why, they asked, are literary works of supreme excellence, works in the grand style, no longer produced. His friend attributed it to the Empire of Rome, which kept the spirits of men in bondage; he considered that grandeur of thought, and consequently grandeur of style, were largely conditioned by political freedom. The critic himself, on the other hand, was inclined to defend the "peace of the world" against this impeachment, and to attribute the decadence of letters and the lack of inspiration to the decline of human character, to the growing love of money, the growing love of luxury,and, above all, the growing feeling of indifference.

A modern critic, accustomed to take account of the reciprocal influences of character on environment and of environment on character, would reconcile the disputants by observing that the discrepant opinions were only superficially discordant, and that each gave one aspect of the truth.

Now, while the decadence, so plain in the time of Longinus, could with little justice be called an effect of the Roman Empire, no better could the still lowlier condition which literature reached in the fourth and fifth centuries be called an effect of Christianity. But at the same time, just as the spirit of the Roman sway—the chill of imperial Rome—was a most favorable atmosphere for the rapid decay that had set in, just as it exercised a freezing influence on the wells of inspiration, so also the spirit of early Christianity was a most favorable atmosphere for the stifling of humane literature; and as Christian theology became current, and Christian ideas penetrated the minds of men, little breathing space was left for the faint life of that humane literature which had already travelled so far from its former heights. It continued to support in nooks and by­ways a flickering artificial existence; but the gods of Greece had gone into exile, and inspiration had departed with them.

Although Christianity looked upon pagan literature as full of demonic snares, just as she looked upon the heathen gods as demons, she did not disdain to learn the tricks and ornaments of pagan rhetoric, she did not hesitate to plume her arrow with the eagle's feather. Chrysostom, as a Christian priest, could not forget what he had learned in his youth from Libanius; Salvian’s treatise On the Government of God exhibits careful attention to the effects of rhetorical style. It was not till the sixth century that culture had declined so much that Gregory, the bishop of Rome, could warn his clergy against superfluous concern for grammar. Augustine, in his Confessions, only went so far as to marvel that men care to peruse the rules of grammar and not to obey the divine precepts. Both Augustine and Jerome were rhetoricians and stylists, Prudentius wrote Christian hymns in Horatian metres, Licentius even spoke of Christ as “our Apollo”. Just in the same way pagan art influenced Christian art, notwithstanding all Christian zeal against it. The habitations of the Greek gods were imitated in the Christian churches. Theodosius, who permitted the destruction of temples, who abolished the Olympic games, permitted his victories to be represented as the labors of Hercules. Representations taken from pagan mythology were constantly used in allegorical sense on Christian tombs.

It should be borne in mind that while zeal for the house of God exhibited itself prominently as zeal against the houses of the gods, those divinities had still a corner in men's hearts, the charm of paganism still lingered. For, once paganism had lost all power, the works of the ancients lost also their dangerous qualities, and then they were neglected. But in the fifth century the Christians themselves felt the glamour of antique perfection. We see Jerome shrinking in fear from his love of Cicero, we see Augustine shrinking in fear from his love of Virgil. The classics were, for many of the early saints, like beautiful horrors, possessing a double potency, to attract and to repel. Augustine calls Homer dulcissime vanus; and even Orosius confessed of his great contemporary Claudian that though he was a “most pervicacious pagan” he was an excellent poet. The children of light felt that they could not approach the children of this world in the finite perfections of genius. “Infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae”—no Christian of his day could approach that, and Augustine knew it.

In western Europe, among the Latin-speaking Romans, paganism held out longest, and offered most resistance to the new faith, and at the same time it is among Latin divines that we find the strongest abhorrence of pagan literature. On the other hand, in eastern Europe, where Christianity had spread rapidly, among Greek-speaking Romans, paganism clung less obstinately to life, and the feeling in regard to pagan literature was more moderate and indulgent—less saintly, we might say, and more rational. This difference of feeling may be considered as in some degree the beginning of that difference of culture which distinguished the East from the West in later centuries, when in the West indifference to letters prevailed, while in the East learning and the study of ancient writers never fell into disuse.

It may be wondered why no works of great literary value were produced in the fourth and fifth centuries under the inspiration of the great Christian idea which was changing the face of the world. Perhaps someone will contest the statement, and cite St. Augustine's City of God. But that work is not a work of great literary value; it is a work of great religious and theological value. The idea itself—the idea of the city of God in the world and not of the world—has, potentially at least, literary value, but the work itself possesses very little. The incomparably less important work of Sir Thomas More on an imaginary state has more worth in this respect than the City of God. Other Christian works of the time, remarkable in many respects, deserve this criticism in a higher degree, for example Salvian’s book On the Government of God. We go to Chrysostom or Cyril for history or doctrine, but no one would go to either for general ideas.

The fact is that there was a very small stock of new ideas current at the time, and there was no literary instinct. It may seem perverse to say that there was a small stock of new ideas in the face of the fact that the general view of the world was so thoroughly transformed. But the theories current were of a homogeneous kind; they were imbued with that theological tinge which renders thought unfruitful and unfits it for literary handling. The new spirit tended to stereotype itself in technical theology, and also to express itself in a particular phraseology; and thus the thoughts of the time lost their elasticity and their freedom in the bonds of dogma. Men’s minds wandered through eternity, but they wandered on a beaten highroad. That is partly the reason why the writings of the stoic philosophers have much more literary flavor than the writings of Christian theologians, although Stoicism was so much less effective than Christianity. On the speculations of the Stoics no trammels were imposed from without; the Stoics had no church, no ecumenical councils, no popes. And that too is partly the reason why the New Testament writers were far more fertile in original ideas, expressed with effect, than doctors of the Church in subsequent ages.

To note the want of literary instinct is merely to note the other side of the same fact—the subjective side of it. Literary instinct implies a certain elasticity and freedom of mind, because it implies the faculty of selection; it is not easily compatible with formalism or with dogma. The Christian divines had not this sort of elasticity, and they would not have cared to have it; just as they had not originality, and would not have cared to have it. That freedom of mind on which a doctrine or creed sits lightly would have seemed license to those who delighted in thralldom to a formulated system, just as originality would have seemed undesirable, or at least unnecessary, to those who considered that all things needful had been revealed. The want of literary taste among Christian divines may be illustrated by the case of Jerome, who did not care for and could not feel any charm in the style of the old Hebrew scriptures, in spite of the prepossession for them that his beliefs would naturally produce.

The same want of taste is displayed in his frigid and degrading comparison of the love of Christ to the love of woman, a comparison which is characteristic enough of the man and of the time.

It cannot be denied that there were pagans of some literary ability in the fourth century. Historians of literature deal very hardly with Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek writing in Latin; yet do we not feel that there is a unique literary quality in his curious style, as though the perfume of the fourth century had passed into his pages? And of Greek writers Julian had considerable literary talent. The Misopogon, which deserves attention as an attempt to express the most scathing satire with ironical urbanity, and The Banquet of the Emperors, are works that one reads without feeling an inclination to skip a line. He allows his own cultured personality to penetrate his writings in a way that no divine could do, and his writings therefore have a human interest.

Bat Julian and Libanius and Themistius had no successors. The only essayist of the fifth century who deserves to be mentioned was Synesius, the bishop of Cyrene. He was the pupil and friend of the unfortunate Hypatia; he was superficially imbued with philosophy; he appears for a moment on the stage of public affairs; he was fond of literary composition; he used to indulge in the pleasures of the chase in the vicinity of Cyrene. All these details remind us of Xenophon, who had the same stamp of respectability, a man fond of philosophy, not a philosopher. And we might add that as Xenophon represents the type of transition from the Athenian of the fourth century to the cosmopolitan of the age of Alexander and his successors, so Synesius, dividing his worship between Plato and Christ, is the type of the transition from the pagan to the Christian gentleman. If he had been brought up in the atmosphere of Constantinople he would not have been a Platonist, he would have been an unexceptionably orthodox Christian; if he had been brought up in the atmosphere of Athens he would have been a thorough-going pagan and refused to bow the knee to Baal; but brought up as he was in the atmosphere of Alexandria, which was at this time divided between pagan philosophy and Christianity, his pliable nature adapted itself to both influences and he became a platonic bishop. His works consist of rhetorical compositions, political essays and letters, which possess considerable interest. When he stayed at Constantinople he mixed in a circle of literary mediocrities, who enjoyed ephemeral notoriety, and he is himself a typical member of such a society.

Perhaps the most interesting and attractive feature in Synesius is his love of the pure intellect and his supreme disdain for mere ethical virtue. In this, although a Christian bishop, he was more unchristian than the heathen Neoplatonists; in this too he was more platonic than they. Plato did not set store by what we call “goodness”; he almost disdained the demotic virtues. It is curious to see the aristocratic spirit of the pure intellect in the fifth century AD, and it is only to be regretted that Synesius was not a stronger man.

Far the most important pagan Greek writer of the fifth century was the philosopher Proclus, of whose system I have already spoken. I have dwelt on the dearth of ideas of literary value in that age. Now Proclus has the credit of having expressed a thought that was well worth expressing in a form that deserves to be remembered—in a form that possesses literary value. He said that the true philosopher would never consent to confine himself to any one set of religious ideas; “a philosopher”, he said, “is the hierophant of the whole world”. Perhaps that is one of the few remarks made in the fifth century that deserves to be remembered in the words in which it was originally expressed. It contains moreover a thought which had long been in the air and had constantly inspired others than philosophers; it idealizes in the form of a philosophical maxim that cosmopolitan eclecticism which was practiced by such different persons as Alexander Severus and Constantine. Both a great philosopher like Proclus and a great statesman like Constantine can feel themselves above the world and the things, including the religions, that are therein; the eclecticism of Alexander Severus was merely that of a serious dilettante.

The poetical remains of Proclus are a few hymns, conceived in the same style as the famous hymn of Cleanthes to Zeus, and exhibiting the influence of the mystical Orphic poems. The gods are addressed as mythical beings; their attributes have second imports; and the reader feels that he does not possess the key to a chamber of theosophic significances. But they are not lifeless like formulated chants of a sorcerer or a vulgar theosophist; there is in them perceptible the breath of an “immortal longing” the same longing that was felt by Plato and by Plotinus. Proclus was ever pressing to the “way sublime”, and he prays to the sun, to Athene, to the Muses for pure light, the kindly light that leads upwards, the means of attaining thereto being the study of books that awaken the soul.

Athens, where Proclus studied and afterwards lectured, had preserved its fame as a university town since the days of Cicero, though it had not any political importance. It was the headquarters of the pagans, the “Hellenes”, who, suffered by the Christian Emperors to live quiet lives in unobtrusive retirement, still practiced secretly the old customary sacrifices, still worshipped Athene, Artemis, and Asclepius. They formed here a small cultured society, on which the “urbane” society of the residence might look down as provincial, and which the Christians held in abhorrence as profane. At the same time Athens was regarded with a peculiar respect; it was fashionable to go thither, and it was considered by some a mark of inferiority, almost of philistinism, not to have visited it.

The storm of the Visigoths of Alaric, which laid in ruins the temple of Eleusis, passed by the city of the philosophers without harming it much. But after the foundation of the university in Constantinople Athens gradually declined; it seemed as if the departure of Athenais had led to a cessation of the patronage of the goddess whose name she bore. Even when Synesius visited Athens (about 416 AD) he was not favorably impressed with it; in the description of his visit he does not say a word of the beauties of the place, the works of art or the flavor of antiquity. Desolateness and dilapidation over­whelmed for him all other impressions.

But while Athens was the home of the most profound philosophers, Alexandria was the centre of the widest culture, just as was the case in the days of Alexander's successors, when Stoics and Epicureans taught at Athens, while the schools of poetry and learning flourished in the great capital where they came into contact with the general movement of the world. In the fourth and fifth centuries all the Greek poets of any distinction wrote at Alexandria, and most of them were born in Egypt; there too pagan philosophy and Christian theology lived side by side.

We are told by Damascius, a pupil of Isidorus, that his master was superior to Hypatia not only as a man to a woman, but as a philosopher to a mathematician. This remark gives us an insight into the character of Hypatia’s philosophy. In contrast with those mystical and misty speculators, Iamblichus and the “Egyptian writer on Mysteries”, she laid stress on philosophical method, divisions, and definitions, as recommended by Plato, and followed rather the intellectual than the mystical side of Neoplatonism. The germs of both developments, the intellectual and the super-intellectual, were contained in the philosophy of Plotinus. The sober and rational character of this lady’s metaphysics may also be deduced from the teaching of her pupil Hierocles, who succeeded her after her death in 415. She was not only a philosopher and a mathematician; she also studied physics, a science which was then generally combined with mathematics. Her pupil Synesius mentions that he had constructed an astrolabe with the assistance of his “respected”  instructress, and in another place he asks her to superintend the construction of a hydroscope.

There was one remarkable poet in the fifth century, and only one, who had a sufficiently original manner to found a school of inferior imitators. This was Nonnus of Panopolis. It is particularly interesting to note that having been a pagan in his youth, when he wrote his Dionysiaca, he became a Christian in later years, and composed a paraphrase of St. John's Gospel in hexameter verse. He thus presents a parallel in Greek literature to Sidonius Apollinaris or Paulinus of Burdigala.

It is easy to say that Nonnus is artificial, that his long poem in forty-eight books lacks unity, and that he falls into prolix digressive descriptions. It is only in the ninth book that he begins the proper subject of his poem. But living, as he did, in a self-conscious age, how could he be other than artificial? To aim at simplicity when simplicity is not in the air is an affectation which can hardly fail to produce the ridiculous. Recognizing that he is always artificial and often tedious, we nevertheless feel in reading his verses that he had a really poetical mind, that he

“ran beside the naked swift-footed

And bound his forehead with Proserpine's hair”.

There are few pages on which we do not find some thought or phrase that pleases, if it is nothing more than the picture of Ganymede raising aloft a goblet in his scratched hand.

The twelfth book is one of the best. Hore wanders in search of the dead Ampelos, and having learned the symbols of prophecy from Hyperion, finds wherever she goes prophecies in writing relating to the death and resurrection of the youth. This introduction of writing into mythological history is characteristic. The effect produced on nature by the death of Ampelos is very charmingly portrayed, and the description of Pactolus restraining the flow of his water, wan with grief, and having the aspect of a dejected man, deserves to be noted for its subjectivity. Even when he wrote the Dionysiaca, in his pagan youth, Nonnus could not escape from the atmosphere of Christianity. A line, for example, like this,

Lord Bacchus wept, that mortals might not weep,

could hardly have been written before the air was permeated with Christian sentiment. But while a trait of this kind occasionally appears, the note of the poem is untrammeled fancy, and thus it has some points in common with the romantic poetry of the nineteenth century. The learning displayed in the composition is prodigious, yet Nonnus wields his lore lightly, and he is as far from the obscure dullness of Lycophron as day from night.

The poets whose influence chiefly affected his style seem to have been Homer and Euripides, the latter of whom was far more read under the Roman Empire than his great elder com-peers, because he had a premature tincture of that profound individualism and subjectivity which began to penetrate life in the fourth century BC. Both Homer and Euripides were favorites with Christians of culture, as may be gathered from the fashion of writing Homero-centra on Christian subjects, and from the Christus Patiens, an extant Greek drama which has been attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus, and which is practically a cento of Euripidean verses. Whether Gregory was the author or not, it is probably a product of this age, and it possesses some interest as a specimen of a class of dramas to which the medieval mystery plays partly owe their origin.

The paraphrase of St. John's Gospel which Nonnus wrote when he embraced Christianity is a curious composition, far superior to the ordinary Christian poem. We cannot read a line without seeing that it is the work of an adept, and although the simplicity of the original is lost, a very readable poem, with many interesting touches, is produced. It was really in its way a triumphant achievement, implying no ordinary poetical skill and command of language, to translate a Christian gospel into hexameters that have always a pleasing flow, and into words which, however they expand the original, never offend the taste.

We need not say much of the versifiers who imitated Nonnus and formed an Egyptian school of poetry. Tryphiodorus’ Capture of Ilion and Koluthos’ Rape of Helen may still be read, but they possess little interest. The Hero and Leander of Musaeus, who probably lived about 500 or a little later, has obtained a reputation which it hardly deserves. It has the merit of brevity and the merit of possessing unity, two advantages which Nonnus lacks, but in all other respects it seems to me inferior. Pamprepius of Panopolis, the friend of Illus, was a poet as well as philosopher, but we have no means of knowing whether he can in any sense be ranked as one of the school of Nonnus. The Athenian Empress Eudocia did not write secular poetry, or if she did no fragment has survived. The most striking of her compositions that remain is the versification of the legend of Cyprian and Justin a, which has been mentioned in a preceding chapter.

One species of literature, which had sprung up when the Greek spirit was already declining, reached its best bloom at this period, the romance. Between the world of the new Greek comedy and Roman fabulae palliatae—full of amorous gallants, lost maidens, angry fathers, and smart slaves moving in an atmosphere of loose morality—and the world of Boccaccio's Decamerone and Shakespeare's comedies—a gay Italian world, equally frivolous but more refined, in which the lights and shades of morality are not unattended to—there are two intermediate worlds. The first is that of Longus and Heliodorus and the story-writers of the fourth and fifth centuries; the second is that of Floire and Blanceflor, Imberius and Margarona, and the other romances which circulated first in the countries of the Mediterranean and thence found their way to northern Europe in the later Middle Ages. The outward influences that partly determined the evolution of the former were the opening up of eastern lands by Alexander the Great, the spirit of adventure that then set in, and the cosmopolitan life of Alexandria and Antioch; while the evolution of the latter was affected in somewhat the same way by the Saracen element that had penetrated southern Europe. The romance-world of the fifth century is also one of amorous gallants, of barbarous brigands and cruel pirates, of lovers disparted, of children lost in infancy, reared by shepherds and recognized by tokens, of faithful servants; but while it is marked by an unlifelike refinement and an absence of that naked dissoluteness which was a feature of ancient comedy, it has characteristics of Greek life, fibres connecting it with the antique intuitions, and these separate it not only from Boccaccio but from the cycle of medieval tales that was formed a few centuries later. It is a world in the air, which with the help of oriental material was built on the ruins of Greek life, partly to replace it, and which sought in foreign adventure the interest that city life no longer afforded. And we can detect, behind the artificial form, the sentiment of pagans, who, feeling in the Christianized Empire that “not here, 0 Apollo, are haunts meet for thee”, sought to revive their weary spirits on a Helicon of fancy, as Theocritus had sought in the sphere of his Sicilian idylls to escape from the close and stifling air of Alexandrian reality. It may be said that the romance succeeded the old drama and fulfilled in some respects the same functions, just as in modern times the novel-writer may be considered to have taken the torch from the composer of plays. In these romances love and adventure were interwoven; the spirit of adventure and travel in strange lands having come in with Alexander the Great, around whose name wonderful legends had soon entwined themselves, while fictitious love-stories may be traced back to Callimachus, perhaps even to Stesichorus.

Unfortunately we know nothing or little of the authors of three remarkable romances that were written at this period. Longus, the author of Daphnis and Chloe, is a mere name, and even the name is doubtful; Achilles Tatius, who wrote Leucippe and Cleitophon, is little better; of Heliodorus, whose Ethiopica became famous, we know only that he was a bishop.

All these stories have great similarity; we could easily believe that they were written by the same person. A diligent concern for elegance of style, for the choice of phrases and the order of words, characterizes them all; and quotations, or echoes, sometimes graceful, of old classical writers abound. An unfailing feature is the love of elaborate description of scenes of nature, in which, however, there is no feeling for nature in the modern sense. It is a purely sensual love of nature—the soft grass and the clear springs and the cool caves of the nymphs—just as in that idyllic passage at the beginning of Plato's Phaedrus, the great charm of the spot is that the grassy sward is so inclined that Socrates and his friend can comfortably lie down. Nature is a picture-frame for lovers; “the spot”, says Achilles Tatius of an agreeable place, “is pleasant in every way, and suitable for romances of love”. Flowers and fruit have an erotic import. The association of flowers, especially roses, with love and young maidens is natural and ancient; we find it in the fragments of Sappho. Flower-names are often chosen for heroines, Antheia, for example, and Rodane; the song in praise of the rose that was sung by the maiden Leucippe deserves special mention; and if there was not a “Language of Fruit”, love at least could be declared by the gift of an apple.

In the same way the descriptions of the persons of youths and maidens are long and minute; and we have a consciousness throughout that the writers are thinking of their diction more than of their matter. They have not the art of concealing their art.

The best of these romances and the most popular in recent times is that of Daphnis and Chloe, a shepherd and shepherdess of Mytilene, each a child of noble parents, exposed in infancy and found by shepherds. The chief motive of the story turns on the innocence of the boy and girl, who fall in love and are ignorant of their own desires. There is an idyllic realism in the description of Daphnis’ initiation that reminds us of a certain idyll of Theocritus, but it is not bolder than the narrative of Alcibiades in Plato’s Banquet. The maidenhood of Chloe is stainless until her marriage, and it is worthy of remark that in all these romances the chastity of women is considered to have a sort of preternatural value, and heroines pass through the most dangerous situations unharmed. This idea is one of the symptoms of a new spirit in the world, and contrasts with the old Greek feelings on the subject, which were not romantic. As an element that entered into the spirit of chivalry and thence into the notions of modern society the appearance of the new idea deserves special notice. In the sixth century we shall see it in operation on the occasion of the capture of Rome by Totila, the king of the Ostrogoths.

Daphnis and Chloe has perhaps more peculiarities than any of the other romances; the idyllic life of Mytilene, an island which, like Sicily, corresponded to the Arcadia of the Renaissance, invests it with a unique atmosphere. The far longer novel of Heliodorus, the Ethiopica, is more typical of the genus, and has had a greater effect on the development of romance-writing. The magic gem Pantarbe, the concealment in tombs, and fancied death, all the wild and varied adventures by sea and land, formed a large repertory from which subsequent writers borrowed motives and incidents.

Descriptions of pictures and works of art, resembling the descriptions of Philostratus, are constantly introduced by these writers, and have often considerable merit, reminding us of word-pictures by Gautier. The romance of Achilles Tatius, Cleitophon and Zeucippe, opens with a minute account of a picture of the rape of Europa. Love, as a little boy, is leading the bull in the midst of a landscape in which such details as a peasant stooping over a ditch at his work are portrayed. And in another part of the same story a picture of the rape of Philomela by Tereus is graphically described. The accounts which the same writer gives of the crocodile and the hippopotamus remind us of Herodotus, and had at that time a sensational value. The stage sword, that shut up like a telescope and proved the safety of Leucippe, is worthy of a modern “dreadful”.

The story of Abrocomas and Antheia is the story of the adventures and misfortunes of a pair of married lovers. The name of the author is Xenophon of Ephesus, but it occurs to one that Xenophon may be a pseudonym, and that the author may have adapted the names of his hero and heroine, Antheia and Abrocomas, from Pantheia and Abradates, of whom a touching story is told in the Cyropaedeia of Xenophon the Athenian.

History and romance stand in a relation of kinship to one another. We may say that they have a common mother, mythology, and this common origin seems to cause a certain association between them in later times; we have the romantic history of Herodotus, and we have the historical romance of pseudo-Callisthenes. Moreover, in the history and fiction of a period we generally see common characteristics. The affected artificiality of style which we tolerate in the rhetoric of Libanius, which attracts us in the romance of Achilles Tatius, repels us a little in the history of Eunapius; yet we cannot say that the style of historians was inordinately affected and far­fetched until Theophylactus wrote on the reign of Maurice. The love of travel, adventure, and things outlandish, which had developed since the days of Alexander, is reflected in the histories of the fifth and sixth centuries as well as in the fiction. Priscus gives us an account of his personal experiences in Hun-land, Nonnosus describes his adventures among the Ethiopians, and Cosmas relates his visit to the Indian Ocean.

The secular Greek historians of the fifth century were chiefly pagans. Olympiodorus, Eunapius, and Priscus flourished in the first half of the century, Malchus, Candidus, and Zosimus in the second half. Of these, only Candidas was an indisputably orthodox Christian; Eunapius and Zosimus were militant pagans; Olympiodorus and Priscus were quiescent pagans; Malchus seems to have been neither for God nor for God’s enemies.

Eunapius of Sardis wrote two books, of which only fragments have survived. One was a history of the Roman Empire from Claudius Gothicus (270 AD, the point at which Dexippus’ history ended) to the tenth year of Arcadius (404); the other was a collection of lives of philosophers and sophists. His style bears the impress of a training in rhetoric, which did not teach him taste, though a good critic thought he wrote prettily; he talks of a “rivery tear”. His spirit is that of an ardent pagan into whose soul the iron has entered, one to whom the new order of things seems “a world without any order”, an ecumenical mistake. Like all ardent pagans of the time he lavishes the most touching hero-worship upon the Emperor Julian (the last who combined the true belief with the power to enforce it), and crowns him with a halo of celestial light. “By virtue of the power of his nature and the greatness, not less than divine, that was in him, he constrained the inherent tendency that drags downward, and, rising above all the waves of life, he saw heaven and knew the beautiful things that are in heaven, in commune with the bodiless beings, being himself still in the body”. The last pagan Emperor, the last hero of the forlorn cause, who had died when Eunapius was a boy of sixteen, had entered into his “study of imagination”  and appeared to him half a god. There was a further bond of attraction in their common mysticism. Eunapius was a thaumaturge, and had been initiated in super­natural mysteries.

The Christian Emperors, on the other hand, are for him impersonations of all that is malignant and irrational, and Eunapius’ history is written from the point of view that the time is out of joint, and that the course of history is exactly what it should not have been. It is probably the first history ever written in Greek from this point of view. It was followed some years later by the history of Zosimus, whose work, as far as he completed it, has come down to us, and is one of our chief sources for fourth-century history. His political and religious opinions were the same as those of Eunapius, whose work was one of his main sources; but while the opposition of Eunapius to the new order of things was altogether inspired by his religious conviction, the opposition of Zosimus was partly affected by his experiences as an officer in the civil service.

Zosimus states expressly that he looked upon Polybius as his master and model in the art of history. He studied his style with diligence, as Demosthenes studied Thucydides, and he adopted, or adapted from him, rules of hiatus to which he makes the structure of his sentences conform. And Zosimus too, like his master, wrote a history dominated by a pervading idea, but an idea exactly the reverse of the idea of Polybius. Polybius’ history was written to prove the right of Roman conquest and the merits of Roman conquerors; Zosimus’ history was written to show the unright of Christian dominion and the demerits of Christian Emperors. Polybius justified history, Zosimus impugned it.

Of the nexus of cause and effect the notions of Zosimus are as infelicitous as those of contemporary Christian writers. He attributes the decline of the Empire in the West to the fact that the old pagan sacrifices were discontinued in Rome. His superstition is such that he wonders that no oracle foretold the greatness of Constantinople. Of positive historical errors which he employs to justify his political tendency, we may notice that he blames Constantine for having withdrawn all the frontier troops, whereas Constantine removed only the comitatenses from the defense of the marks, which were still protected by the pseudocomitatenses.

Of Olympiodorus, who was also a pagan, but apparently not bigoted, there is little to say. His history was rather a collection of materials for history, a silva or miscellany, as he called it himself, than a history in the usual sense; its style is so simple and uncared for as to be almost vulgar, thus to some extent anticipating the style of late chroniclers like Theophanes, but the substance is extremely valuable and trustworthy. Priscus, whose description of his journey and adventures in the land of the Huns has come down to us, was also a pagan. His style was very good, and we are impressed with the wisdom and the credibility of the writer. The discussion which took place in the Hun town concerning the comparative merits of the freedom of barbaric life and the trammeled existence of the civilized world is of special interest. Priscus was not only a scholar or “sophist”; he was a man who, moving in the midmost circle of the political world, had a near view of the most stirring events of the time. His history was continued by Malchus of Philadelphia (in Palestine), who wrote in the reign of Anastasius. It is in the pages of Malchus that we read the somewhat puzzling narrative of the marches and countermarches of the two Theodorics in the Balkan provinces. Malchus' style is clear and unaffected, though he was a scholar and a rhetorician; and he has a good reputation as a trustworthy narrator. In regard to his religion I should be inclined to suppose that he was a Laodicean; he is said to have been “not outside” the pale.

The only undoubted Christian who wrote secular history in the fifth century was Candidus the Isaurian. His style was frigid and in bad taste, abounding in poetical phrases inappropriately introduced; “in the suave”, says Photius, “he had no part or lot”, although it was just the suave that he attempted to achieve. He was orthodox of the orthodox, an admirer of the council of Chalcedon. The tone of the age rather than that of his own mind is illustrated by his derivation of Isauria, the land of rough and doubtless hairy moun­taineers, from Esau, the brother of Jacob.

On the Latin literature of the fifth century it is not my purpose to dwell at length. The most prominent prose-writers were Christian theologians, and the most prominent verse-writers, with two exceptions, were either converts to Christianity when they wrote, or became converts afterwards. Of the two exceptions, the most famous is Claudian, “a most obstinate pagan, but an excellent poet”, who towers above the heads of all his contemporaries. Most will agree with Teuffel, that he is far superior to Statius, who had the distinction of being a contemporary of Martial and Tacitus, in fertility, richness of fancy, and many-sidedness. We have already become sufficiently acquainted with the subjects of his historical poems, which throw a mixed light on the history of Arcadius’ reign; we need only add that his mythological poem “The Rape of Proserpine” shows him at his best. An inscription on a statue erected in his honor at Naples contains an ancient parallel to Dryden’s quatrain on Milton, an elegiac distich expressing that Claudian was Homer and Virgil in one. The other uncompromisingly pagan poet was Eutilius Namatianus, in whose eyes the Christians were “a sect more fell than Circe’s poisons”, as he said in his picturesque poem de reditu suo, describing his return to Italy from Gaul.

Of converts to Christianity, whose writings are partly or wholly pagan, may be mentioned Macrobius, Licentius, and Sidonius Apollinaris. Paulinus of Burdigala, who afterwards became bishop of Nola, was converted in time to write a panegyric on Theodosius I in celebration of his victory over Eugenius.

The poems of Sidonius Apollinaris, the son-in-law of the Emperor Avitus, possess the peculiar charm of transporting us into a circle of old Roman culture amid the alien surroundings of the fifth century. His pagan poetry is Roman, but decadent, infected with something not Roman; it is the poetry of one who might become a Christian. He is at home in Rome, amid the monuments of the pagan Emperors and the memorials of the pagan republic; but he is by no means at home in Ravenna, the capital of Christian Emperors, where all the buildings are of brick, the waterless city of marshes, “where the living thirst and the dead swim”. In the consulate of his friend and father-in-law the Emperor Avitus he spent pleasant days at Rome; he wrote and recited a panegyric on the Emperor; and it was decreed by the senate that a bronze statue should be erected to him in the Forum of Trajan, between the Latin and Greek libraries. Thus the poet of Avitus was set up in bronze beside the poet of Stilicho and the poet of Aetius. Twelve years later he was to become the bishop of Clermont.

Of Christian poetry, beside the hymns of St. Ambrose, the writings of Prudentius won popularity; they blended Horatian love-poetry with Christianity, as it were warm wine with cool water, and the mixture suited the taste of the day. The asclepiads of Severus Endelechius “on the deaths of cattle” exhibit the same Christianizing tendency as the writings of Paulinus. Two swains are introduced, complaining of the loss of their cattle by the plague, and as they talk, Tityrus, a Christian, enters driving along a herd of cattle which the pestilence had not injured. The animals had escaped, as Tityrus explains, because the sign of the cross was branded on their foreheads.

Into the characteristics of the ecclesiastical and religious writers, Augustine and Jerome, Salvian and Cassian, I cannot attempt to enter here; I can only repeat what has been said before, that they retained the form of pagan style and employed the arts of pagan rhetoric, while they contended against the pagan spirit. Besides Jerome's translation of the Bible, his enlarged translation of Eusebius' Chronicle was very important and served as a model for Latin chroniclers. Orosius’ History against the Pagans, written as a sort of supplement to Augustine’s City of God, attained less celebrity, and is now read more for its historical statements than its arguments. All these writers contributed in a greater or less degree to the establishment of a school of Latin theology, though Augustine and Jerome tower so far above the others that they may be considered its founders.