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                            CHAPTER X

               Life and Morals in Greece and Rome

     The Glory That Was Greece -- Morals of the Athenians --
The Development of Religion -- Rise of Philosophy and Skepticism
     -- The Splendor That Was Rome -- Morals in Ancient Rome

                    THE GLORY THAT WAS GREECE

     IN the summer of 1922 I spent five weeks in Athens; and it
would not be far from the truth to say that I spent those weeks in
ancient, not modern, Athens. Day after day I mounted the hill, the
Acropolis, the center of the ancient city, which today proudly
bears the bleached bones of the most superb buildings that this
earth has ever seen. While all Athens slept its noonday sleep, I
sat on some stone on the flat summit of the hill, in the full blaze
of the August sun, and drank the beauty of the shattered marble
frame of the Temple of the Virgin, the Parthenon.

     Even in its ruin, discolored by two thousand years of time,
the Parthenon will thus hold a lover of beauty for days. No
photograph conveys an impression of its massive symmetry, its
blended air of strength and moderation, its princely form and
exquisite detail. It is a small building, compared with the temples
of Egypt or the great cathedrals of Europe or the mosque of
Cordova: yet its glorious facade towered above me, shining dully
like old gold in the fierce sunlight, framed in the brilliant blue
of a cloudless sky with a majesty that is indescribable. The spirit
of Paganism seemed, by some strange error, to mistake me for a
Christian, and to smile, as one does at a child, out of the marble
stones at my pride in the works of Christendom.

     I picture the temple as we know it to have been in old times,
and down the ages until, in the seventeenth century, red-hot
Christian cannon-balls falling upon Turkish powder, wrecked this
wonder of the world. It stood about sixty feet high, an exquisitely
simple, square building of a delicately veined white marble, its
stones so skillfully put together that it looked like a single
carving from some giant block. One could not see the lines between
the separate stones of its mighty columns; and so wonderful was the
genius of the architect that every line of the structure is so
cunningly waved that the temple looks more graceful and symmetrical
than it would if the lines were straight. Above, on the triangular
pediment, was a great group of figures -- representing the birth of
Athene -- carved in the finest-grained white marble by the most
consummate artist the world has ever known, Phidias. At the back
was a corresponding group; and both giant pieces of superb
sculpture, in pure white marble of Paros, gleamed against a
background of brilliant red. Round the temple ran a high carved
frieze, the Athenian procession in honor of Athene, with blue
background, every fragment of which is now a priceless work of art.

     I imagine myself entering, twenty-three hundred years ago,
with a group of wandering scholars from Egypt or Persia or Chaldea.
There were no windows. The light streamed through the great open
door and lit the simple hundred-foot-long interior. At the end was 




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a statue of Athene, forty feet high, carved by the master Phidias
out of ivory, vested in the most magnificent robes and accoutered
in pure gold. The arms and decoration used up seven hundred and 
fifty thousand dollars' worth of gold.

     Out in the open, on the partially leveled summit of the hill,
was a bronze statue of Athene, thirty feet high, the spear of the
warrior maiden -- she was goddess of war as well as wisdom --
glinting in the sun and catching the eye forty miles out at sea. On
one side of the hill was another beautiful marble temple, the
Erechtheum, in archaic style. There were old sacred treasures of
the people to be preserved -- the stone, for instance, that bore
the authentic mark of Father Neptune's trident -- and the more
liberal-minded artists of the new generation built this second
temple to accommodate them. And the gateway to the hill itself was
a massive and lofty marble portico, or series of arches, of great
beauty.

     I look out from the hill, five hundred feet high, in an air
still so pure that I see the lines of the mountains forty miles
away and the bays of the Mediterranean shining blue in the folds of
the picturesque coast. Down below me, all round the hill, was the
ancient city.

     Yonder is the field, with unadorned stone platform, where the
first democracy in the world held the first parliament. Not far
away is the stadium, the sport-ground of two thousand years ago, so
solidly built that fifty thousand people sit in it today to watch
modern sport and hardly see that it is an ancient building. On the
slope of the Acropolis itself, carved out of the rock, is the
ancient theater, where thirty thousand Athenians used to witness,
in the open air, the greatest comedies and tragedies that man ever
produced. Beyond are a few relics of the great temple of Jupiter,
once girt by more than a hundred superb marble columns. Below the
other side of the hill is a temple, the Theseum, so well preserved
that it looks only a century or two old. It rises now in a squalid
quarter, like a lady of the Russian nobility in a slum of Sofia,
and the children play hide and seek in its porches.

     Of the city, of secular Athens, apart from the theater and the
stadium, hardly a stone remains. It is always temples of false gods
on which man lavished most of his devotion and resources! But at
least in Athens there is no palace of king or emperor to tell of
the second great waste of human effort -- on royalty.

     We know that the central square of the city, the Agora, the
cattle-market of more primitive Athens, was lined with lovely
buildings. Along two sides were the civic structures, of handsome
limestone, carved by these great masters of the chisel. On the
other two sides were colonnades, where one might find shelter from
the sun. One had its inner walls painted -- Greeks called it the
"Stoa Poikile" -- and philosophers used to squabble and teach in
its shade; and, in fine, it gave birth to the finest non-religious
system of morals -- I mean the most austere system -- that the
world ever produced: the Stoic philosophy. "Stoa" is the Greek for
Colonnade; and it was here that Zeno anticipated Christ in his
moral fanaticism.


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     Thus one quick survey from the summit of the Acropolis assures
you that when literary men speak of the genius of ancient Greece,
or of "meteoric" Athens, they use no exaggeration. Athens was a
human miracle of achievement. There is hardly any field of human
thought and endeavor in which the Athenians did not rise to the
greatest height in the very dawn of European civilization.

     Ask any architect where were the finest structures that the
hand of man ever put together? In ancient Athens. Ask a philosopher
where was the greatest series of thinkers the world has ever known?
In ancient Greece, chiefly Athens. Ask a literary man where the
best verse and prose, the best comedy and tragedy, were created?
Ancient Greece. Ask a politician -- no, that would be useless: ask
a sociologist -- where the most rapid and brilliant political
evolution, from monarchy to complete democracy, took place? Ancient
Athens. Ask who invented the theater, the gymnasium, the stadium,
the public hall, the science of ethics or politics? The ancient
Greeks.

     We surpass them only in science and the application of
science; yet even here the earliest Greek thinkers provided
magnificent foundations, and it was the one great error of Athens
to turn to "spiritual" things and philosophy and neglect to build
on scientific truth which they first discovered.

     I have shown how paltry was the science of the Egyptians; and
how puny a conception of the universe the most learned of the
Babylonians had, after three thousand years' contemplation of the
heavens. But the Greeks had hardly been civilized a few centuries
when they discovered, or guessed, three great fundamental truths of
science: the vastness of the universe, the existence of atoms, and
the law of evolution. If Aristotle, one of the greatest intellects
of all time, had worked only on scientific lines, science would
have been largely developed two thousand years ago. And if the
Christian Church bad not subsequently crushed all science, we
should live now the wonderful life that our descendants will live
in the year 3000.

     To the historians of all later time this genius, or "meteoric"
brilliance, of the Greek intellect has always been a mystery. if
the Hebrews had had one-half of the brilliance of the Greeks we
should be reminded of it in every sermon. It would be a miracle, an
outcome of revelation and inspiration. But the Hebrews, though
tutored by two ancient civilizations, show not one-tenth the
achievements of the Greeks; and it has ever mystified scholars that
the first European nation to become civilized should, a few
centuries after its initiation to civilization, reach the high-
water mark in nearly every branch of culture. One has only to
reflect on the language we use today to realize the world's debt to
little Greece. Philosophy, ethics, politics, esthetics, democracy,
gymnastics, athletics, music, theater, chorus, comedy, tragedy --
these and a thousand others are Greek words, because they stand for
things which the Greeks invented or discovered.

     To talk of the "genius" of the Greeks is mere mysticism; and
it is only a new kind of mysticism when certain writers speak about
the wonderful "germ plasm" of the Greek race. These are words and 


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phrases. They conceal the need for real explanation. Nor can the
explanation be given by, as older writers did, reflecting on the
glorious climate, the picturesque world, the blue sky and the blue
sea and golden sun, of the Greeks. Greece is scorched brown during
most of the year and powdered thick with dust. It is arm-chair
philosophers who imagine it a land of perpetual flowers and fresh
green foliage. In any case, the sun and sea and hills are the same
now as they were two thousand years ago, and they inspire no
genius.

     It is a good opportunity to point out the real value of the
kind of explanation which we now call "scientific." It simply means
real explanation instead of verbiage and mysticism. The explanation
is given in realities, not phrases. That is why it is so deadly to
old thought. We either point out the real agencies at work or we
candidly confess that we have not yet discovered them.

     Now, we have not yet discovered the whole secret of the
Greeks, but a very little sketch of their history will show that we
have made a considerable advance. The Greeks, Romans, Teutons,
Celts, and Slavs are one family, and the ancestral tribe lived
some-where in the Caucasus district during the Ice Age. It moved
northward as the ice melted and forests full of game spread over
Europe. But the section of the race which was to give birth to the
Greeks soon turned south and made its way across the mountains to
the land we now call Greece.

     Here our discovery of the ancient civilization of Crete has
greatly helped us. The earliest Greeks, powerful barbarians with
iron weapons, destroyed Crete. Half the Cretan race fled to Asia
Minor, where they had long ago founded colonies; and in time large
numbers of the Greeks crossed the narrow sea to Asia Minor and
learned civilization from them. Nearly all the early poets and
scientists of Greek literature belong to Asia Minor.

     That is part of the explanation. Athens, in the extreme east
of Greece, was sheltered from the barbaric waves which continued to
pour south; and it was also very conveniently situated for
communication with Asia Minor. The physical circumstances, as
usual, explain more than germ plasm or genius or religion does. But
until the fifth century Athens had only a moderate civilization,
with no outstanding achievements except the abolition of royalty
and the creation of democracy -- the first democracy in history.
This does not puzzle us. Such a change was comparatively simple in
a small community like that of the Athenians, but quite impossible
in rigorously organized monarchies with millions of people and vast
armies of mercenary soldiers.

     For this, remember, is part of the wonder of Athens. It was
not an empire; we may ignore the sort of small empire it had in its
degenerate days. Athens was a city-state: a single city with a
moderate amount of the surrounding country. And it never had more
than a population of about four hundred thousand, of whom three-
fourths were slaves. In effect, a city of one hundred thousand men
and women produced all the talent we have seen: and all their
glorious creations were achieved with a treasury of only about
eleven million dollars, the cost of a big modern hotel!


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     What was it that so ensnared Athens in the fifth century? It
was the correct learning of the lesson of a terrific defeat and
then the avoidance of war for a century. The Persians completely
destroyed the old Athens in 479 B.C., and the Athenians, in
rebuilding, were fortunate enough to secure a statesman who was
also a thinker and an artist. Pericles proposed that they should
raise on the ashes of the older Athens the most beautiful city in
all the world: and that they succeeded will be told in the world's
literature until the end of time. Never again will such artistic
and literary wonders be crowded into one century by so small a
people.

     So we, largely at least, understand Athens. One of H.G. Wells'
many errors about the Greeks -- A.W. Gomme has shown in his "Wells
as Historian" how numerous they are -- is his statement that a
handful of the Greeks did all these wonderful things, and that the
vast majority were indifferent or hostile. He forgets that Athens
was a perfect democracy. Not a dollar could be used from the
treasury, not a building designed or raised, without the consent of
the twenty thousand male citizens and voters. Moreover, the theater
(which was also, in later years, the parliament house) seated
thirty thousand spectators, to witness the superb tragedies of
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as the comedies of
Aristophanes and Menander.

     Narrow-minded men the Athenians certainly were on the
religious side -- religion is always the great retarding influence
-- but even here they rarely enforced their laws. Professor Bury
has lately shown ("R. .A. Annual," 1925) that the condemnation to
death of Socrates had a political element. They were, at all
events, bigoted; but we have every reason to believe that they were
proud of their unique city and its unique achievements.

                     MORALS OF THE ATHENIANS

     We grant you all this greatness in the field of intellect, the
preacher says, but what was the spirituality, the moral level, of
the Athenians?

     That precious spirituality! I wish to talk quietly and
sensibly with my religious neighbor, and I ask him why he lays so
much stress on spirituality and virtue. He gasps in astonishment
and speechlessness. The truth is that he is repeating a shibboleth.
He has been accustomed to hearing these things. But I press for
reasons, and be attempts to give them. Why, he says, without a high
moral and spiritual level society itself degenerates, the intellect
is paralyzed, the energy is sapped, the great deeds of the strong
early race. ... He breaks down when be perceives my smile.
Precisely these Athenians, whom be accuses of lack of spirituality
and morality, maintained a splendid social order and gave the world
such brilliant intellectual achievements that no single nation,
even twenty times as large, will ever rival them. The whole
Athenian state, remember, was no bigger than Minneapolis, and not
one-tenth as wealthy; and this little corrupt state, as you call
it, produced "the most refined, brilliant civilization the world
has yet seen." Those, we shall see, are the words of a clergyman.



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     Let us have done with this kind of bunk. But surely, my friend
says, it is admitted by all the authorities that the Athenians were
very brilliant in art and intellect and very loose in morals. If
that were true though my experience is that the man who speaks
glibly about "all the authorities" could not even name three of
them -- it would follow that immorality is quite consistent with
brilliant art and intellect, if it does not actually promote them.

     But it is not true; and to disprove it, I will take at once a
high authority who is also a Protestant clergyman, Professor
Mahaffy. Indeed, in the work from which I am going to quote,
"Social Life in Greece," an express study of moral and social life
by a master of Greek literature, and therefore, even on the
academic side, the most reliable book we could choose, the conflict
of Christian (or clerical) sentiment and scholarly love of facts
(and even of the Greeks themselves) is somewhat amusing. Professor
Mahaffy is bound to hold that Christianity is superior to paganism;
but he is singularly unfortunate in vindicating his belief.

     In particular he forgets that, in comparing the Greeks of more
than two thousand years ago with modern times, he is not comparing
paganism and Christianity, Our generation is, as I have shown, not
Christian; and, being two thousand years later than the Greeks, it
ought to be a little wiser in its social life. But let us keep in
mind that, if we want to compare Greek morals with Christian, we
must not take the twentieth century or the end of the nineteenth.
We must take ages when practically everybody was a Christian; and
we may see in another chapter how sordid their morals were.

     Let us run through this most authoritative work of Professor
Mahaffy, as it naturally refers to morals every few pages; and,
since it covers the whole of social life, it will give us the
verdict of a Christian scholar on the charges which less scholarly
clergymen bring against the Greeks.

     Right at the start, in the introduction, Professor Mahaffy
betrays the embarrassment which his professional, and no doubt
personal, zeal for his religion causes. "The refinement of Greek
manners culminated in the gentle Menander," he says (p. 6).
Menander was the second greatest comedian of Athens, though few but
scholars ever heard of him. We have only fragments of his comedies.
On the other hand, we have a large number of complete works of the
other great Greek comedian, Aristophanes, and religious writers are
fond of quoting the scurrilities of some of those comedies as
"typical" of Athenian sentiment. Menander, as we see from the
fragments, was the opposite of scurrilous. "The gentle Menander,"
is the professor's customary way of naming him. He quotes these
"almost Christian" words from one of the fragments: "Prefer to be
injured rather than to injure, for (in so doing) you will blame
others, and you will escape censure." He tells us that Menander's
comedies reflected a state of moral and domestic sentiment very
like our own, and they were full of moral scenes and happy endings.
But, since only scholars read these things, we take our opinion of
the Athenian stage from Aristophanes.





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     Strange, isn't it, that those pious and industrious monks of
the Middle Ages, who "preserved for us all that is best in 
classical literature" -- you know the Catholic boast -- should have
so carefully preserved the "scurrilous" plays of Aristophanes and
so completely ignored the "almost Christian" comedies of Menander!

     However, Professor Mahaffy at once tells us that there were
"cruelties and barbarities" in Greek life. These, he says, were
"violently in conflict with the humanity of a Socrates, a
Euripides, or a Plato"; in other words, the world had not to wait
for Christ to correct them and they were corrected in Greece. But
the amusing thing is that Professor Mahaffy sees here an
opportunity to say a word for his religion. These blemishes he
thinks, "would exist now among us, but for two great differences in
our society -- one of them the direct result of Christianity. They
are the invention of printing and the abolition of slavery." I will
say only that Christianity had no more to do with the abolition of
slavery than it had with the invention of printing!

     And the Christian scholar immediately undoes even the little
be has claimed. He wonders at "the smallness of the advance in
public morality which has been attained." He confesses that it is
precisely in the field of morals that "we are led to wonder most at
the superiority of Greek genius, which, in spite of an immoral and
worthless theology, worked out in its higher manifestations a
morality approaching in many points the best type of modern
Christianity." This "modern Christianity" is good! He means
Christianity purified by modern humanitarianism. And he ends his
introduction thus: "Socrates and Plato are far superior to the
Jewish moralist [who is supposed to have been inspired], they are
far superior to the average Christian moralist; it is only in the
matchless teaching of Christ himself that we find them surpassed."

     It may seem ungenerous, after this hard stroke at the Old
Testament, to cavil with the praise of the New: but there is not a
point in the "matchless" teaching of Christ that cannot be matched
in the pagan moralists.

     We will, however, return to the philosophers presently. In his
survey of Greek literature generally, in so far as it reflects
Greek life (which we have no other means of knowing), Professor
Mahaffy finds no evidence whatever of the supposed low morals of
the Greeks. He quotes a number of the early poets and concludes:
"In all these quotations we see a moral attitude which is about the
same as that of average society in our day," (p. 106). This refers
to a time long before Socrates and Plato; and the Athenians grew
better, not worse.

     Next Professor Mahaffy analyzes the great early tragedian,
Aeschylus, and this is his verdict: "Let me add that no modern
theology has taught higher and purer moral notions than those of
Aeschylus and his school, developed afterwards by Socrates and
Plato, but first attained by the genius of Aeschylus," (p. 154).

     Not feeble praise for an age preceding the preaching of Christ
by five whole centuries, and before the best "prophecies" and
psalms of the Old Testament were written! (And pray remember all 


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the time that it is a devout clergyman I am quoting.) Aeschylus, he
says, "shows the indelible nature of sin, and how it recoils upon
the third and fourth generation, thus anticipating one of the most
marked features in Christian theology." I do not admire Aeschylus
for that; but perhaps the reader does. And finally the Christian
professor drives the lesson home in these decisive words: "The
agreement of Sophocles (in his "Oedipus") shows that these deep
moral ideas were no individual feature in Aeschylus, and that there
must have been a sober earnestness at Athens very far apart from
the ribaldry of Aristophanes. Such immorality as that of the modern
French stage was never tolerated among the Greeks, in spite of all
their license" (p. 155).

     At the risk, again, of seeming ungenerous, I must make two
comments. One is that the "license" here referred to is not proved
anywhere in the book, and it is at variance with every page of the
book. The second is that "the modern French stage" is not quite as
bad as the Paris stage used to be when France was Catholic; and
that I have seen in Catholic Mexico, Spain, Italy and Greece
whatever I have seen in secular Paris.

     The third great tragedian, Euripides, is put almost on an even
higher level:

          These [his heroines] are the women who have so raised the
     ideal of the sex that, in looking upon them, the world has
     passed from neglect to courtesy, from courtesy to veneration;
     these are they who, across many centuries, first of frivolity
     and sensuality, then [in the Christian Middle Ages], of
     rudeness and barbarism, join hands with the ideals of our
     religion and our chivalry, the martyred saints, the chaste and
     holy virgins of romance -- nay more, with the true wives, the
     devoted mothers of our own day (p. 204).

     Upon which, again, I will comment only that, as we shall see,
most of the stories of our "martyred saints" and "chaste and holy
virgins" are forgeries.

     These were the three greatest dramatists of Greece. These were
the tragedies which for centuries, twenty or thirty thousand
Athenians used to witness, sitting for many hours on stone seats,
in the theater on the flank of the Acropolis. The theater,
remember, more fully reflects the sentiments of the audience than
sermons do.

     Next to these was "the gentle Menander," full of virtue which
was truer to life because it was more homely. Next -- now we get to
the really dark spot -- was the great comedian Aristophanes.

     Aristophanes was unquestionably "licentious"; so the worthy
monks have preserved all his works for us. His "Lysistrata" is a
supremely funny and daring picture of a venereal strike on the part
of the women of Greece. Prostitutes walk on his stage, and talk
freely. Sex jokes are as common as in a French vaudeville -- or in
a high-class Chicago theater.




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     Well, Professor Mahaffy emphatically denies that we can judge
the morals of Athens by the comedian. Is it likely, he asks, that
such pictures are characteristic of "the most refined and brilliant
civilization the world has yet seen"? That is a shrewd blow at the
preacher in the nations which "lay in darkness and the shadow of
death." Incidentally, it hits Mr. Wells pretty hard. The simple
explanation, Professor Mahaffy says, is that Aristophanes neither
had a low opinion of woman nor wished to indict the women of his
time, but be had in mind merely "the remnant of some old religious
customs." Religion again!

     And later comes an even shrewder blow at Mr. Wells' division
of Athens into a score of refined people and a brutal mass:

          "Nor do I find any trace of that severance of amusements
     which is one of the saddest features of modern life, where
     refined art and high excellence are only exhibited under such
     restrictions [especially pecuniary) as to exclude the masses,
     which are now so brutalized that they require a separate
     literature as well as a separate art, if art it can be called,
     to amuse them in their rapidly increasing leisure. We hear of
     no Liberties, or Seven Dials [the old thieves' quarter in
     London], at Athens. We hear of no hells, or low music halls,
     or low dancing saloons. Even such vice as existed was chiefly
     refined and gentlemanly" (p. 255).

     No wonder the professor has to strain matters to show that his
religion has made the world better! If this be true -- and it is
the outcome of a study by a first-class authority of the whole of
Greek literature -- even our world is morally inferior to the
Greek: the medieval world was unspeakably inferior.

     In short, says Professor Mahaffy, "We have before us in
Plato's Dialogues, and in the numerous fragments of the Middle and
the New Comedy [plays too virtuous for the monks to copy], a life
not inferior to the best society of our own day" (p. 261). We find
the early barbarities ending in a humane penal system which casts
a blush upon "the most cultivated and humane European nation in the
nineteenth century" (p. 263). Of Plato's account of the death of
Socrates it is said: "There is, I think, in all Greek literature no
scene which ought to make us more ashamed of our boasted Christian
culture" (p. 265).

     But, you ask, if you have read any of these cheap and ignorant
flings at the Athenians, has the learned professor forgotten that
minx Aspasia, and the naughty hetairai, and Alcibiades, and the
immoralities of the gods themselves?

     Not in the least. Aspasia, the friend of Pericles, is, Mahaffy
says, merely lampooned by "the scurrilous buffoonery" of the
comedians. "There is no absolute proof of her want of dignity and
morality" (p. 214). She was a virtuous lady to whose house even
Socrates and Xenophon, the great moralists, went "for the purpose
of serious mental improvement." And there is no evidence that there
were hetairai at Athens (though there were at Corinth), and no
evidence that the hetairai were immoral. And as to the immorality
of some of the legends about the gods, the clerical professor 


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reminds us that several chapters of the Bible are "unsuited to
modern perusal" and that "manifest immoralities are read" out of
it. The portrait of Alcibiades in Plutarch, in fine, is said to be
"hardly of any use as a specimen of manners, for we are told that
he was in every way exceptional" (p. 221). And, to conclude the
list, the Greek love of boys was perfectly innocent, as Jowett had
proved long before, and Edward Carpenter has proved again in his
beautiful "Iolaus."

     I have almost let Professor Mahaffy write this chapter for me,
for I could not quote a more acceptable authority. In spite of all
his allusions to Christ, it is clear that the Greeks were not
morally inferior to us, and were far superior to Europe when it was
entirely Christian. I know modern Athens well; and I know that,
though it is intensely Christian, there is in it quite as much
looseness, and incomparably more unnatural vice, than there was in
ancient Athens.

     In sum, the Greeks, like the Babylonians and Egyptians, were
much the same as ourselves. They had the same ideals: they seem to
have observed them in the same proportion. The great mass of the
Greek women and girls were guarded in an almost oriental seclusion,
and they could hardly philander much, if they were so disposed. In
precise consequence of this there were prostitutes. Gay Corinth had
a great number of them: and the fast young man of Athens went there
as naturally as the young man of Chicago seeks the prostitution
quarter today. Human nature was just the same, human ideals were
just the same, then as now: and therefore I have attempted no sort
of detailed picture of the life of a Greek. It differed from ours
only in details which do not concern this book.

     But let me, while showing that even sexually the Greeks were
no freer than the Christians, point out once more that sex is not
the whole, or the main part, of morals. Justice, honor, kindliness,
truthfulness, generosity, temperance -- these are the great laws;
and I know no informed writer who thinks the Greeks were less
familiar with them than we are.

                   THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION

     The gods of the Greek were quite indifferent to moral laws.
They lied, cheated, quarreled -- and loved. The amours of the great
god Zeus were known to every little girl in Greece. If she were
pretty, she must almost have half expected any night a visit from
Zeus in the form of a bull, a swan, a shower of gold, or what not.
Greek literature abounded in stories of human virgins impregnated
miraculously by Zeus and giving birth to gods or demigods.

     If, therefore, the popular religion included only gods who
were very far from "holy," where was the sanction of morals, and
what was the real influence of religion? We must devote a very
short section to the Greek religion.

     The old gods of Greece, father Zeus and his wife and daughter,
Hephaestos and Aphrodite and all the rest, were brought down from
the northeast into the sunny peninsula by the early barbaric
Greeks. They were nature-gods, married and adjusted to each other 


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and given new attributes in the course of time. The Greeks bad no
sacred books about them in the same sense as the Hebrews. It is
from the early poets, Homer and Hesiod and others, that we learn
the stories.

     And a critical study of the Greek writers in different ages
shows that, since there was no "inspired" record (though Plato
works out a theory of inspiration of the poets just like the
Christian theory) to limit a man's imagination, the gods were quite
differently conceived by different individuals and at different
times.

     To the austere tragedians Zeus was the moral ruler of the
world; and, as we saw, none ever took moral principles more
seriously than they did. To lighter poets the amours of the gods
were good poetic material. In fact, Professor Mahaffy shows that
much, if not all, of the moral light-heartedness that was
attributed to the gods was not original in Greek religion. It was
the poets or bards at the courts of the petty and pleasure-loving
early kings who embroidered the legends with all sorts of amorous
adventures.

     In any case, these stories of the immorality of the gods had
no concern with the morals of mortals. A parallel case must at once
occur to the mind of any Christian reader. He is told that he must
not be vindictive. He must suffer injury or insult without
retaliating. But God does nothing of the kind. He inflicts an
appalling punishment on those who insult his majesty. It is a
platitude that God's ways are not the ways of mortals.

     So the Greek maid would not for a moment receive a lover
because of the example of Zeus. Any person of common sense will
assume that Greek maids admitted lovers in about the same
proportion as they have done since, and had done since civilization
began. Professor Mahaffy, the clergyman, is more zealous for Greek
sex-morals than I should be. I have no doubt that Aspasia loved
Pericles. She was a Milesian, not an Athenian, and could not wed an
Athenian. I assume that she dispensed with the ceremony; and I
assume that the hetairai, while unquestionably more like the
Japanese geishas than English or American prostitutes -- that is to
say, they were women who earned their living by entertaining in a
general way -- did admit lovers to a great extent.

     The plain fact is that the official religion as such was not
concerned with morals in Greece. It did not even teach any
particular theology about the gods. It taught nothing whatever
about a life after death. The Greek idea, generally, was much the
same as the Babylonian. There was some sort of life beyond, but it
was useless to try to penetrate the mists. The dead "slept" and
there was an end of it. The word "cemetery" makes the flesh of a
Christian creep, in spite of his certain hope of resurrection. But
it is a beautiful Greek word. It means the same as "dormitory"; it
is the "sleeping place." Glorious as life was in Athens, no people
ever met death and talked about death with such sane and serene
recognition of it as a natural fact.




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     Unlike the Babylonian, on the other hand, the Greek had no
belief in legions of devils whom the gods would permit to torment
him if he sinned. His sunny nature, the brightening of his whole
outlook when he came down from the northeast into his lovely home
by the sparkling Mediterranean, gave his religious development a
special character. He brought with him the belief in innumerable
spirits as well as the great gods. Originally these would be very
largely malicious or evil spirits, as we have seen amongst all
nations. Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, and others kept the evil
spirits as legions of devils in their religion; but the Greek
almost allowed them to pass out of existence. Just as his gods
became genial and pleasure-loving like himself, so his minor
spirits were mainly nymphs, dryads, satyrs, and so on: sportive and
generally fair creatures living in the woods and waters.

     In passing let me say a word about this "sunny nature" of the
Greek. It is more than a phrase, and it did color his religion. But
some misunderstand it and lightly assume that it must have meant
great freedom of morals.

     On the contrary, Greece produced the most austere of
moralists: the tragedians of our last section and the moral
philosophers of the next. And every dramatist or teacher implies a
large audience of like-minded people. But writers who confuse
lightness and looseness of mind are very superficial. In the first
place, a sunny nature might be disposed to transgress the sex part
of morals, the authenticity of much of which has always been, and
is, disputed, but it would be just as naturally disposed in favor
of the more substantial part of the moral or social code: the law
of kindliness, generosity, honor, just and friendly relations with
one's fellows.

     In the second place, however, one must remember that the
Greeks were also the first nation in the world to develop sport in
the modern sense. Our modern stadia, our Olympic games, the very
words gymnastics and athletics, are Greek. The Greek's love of
beauty was nowhere more conspicuous than in his love of a clean and
comely human body. Even the maidens, although they were carefully
guarded in the home, had their sports; and they had in the glorious
open air endless graceful dances which had not at all the same
tendency as the "buckle-polishing" of modern Europe and America.

     For the youths there was as fine and healthy a system of
athletics and gymnastics as exists anywhere in the world. Stadia
were as important as theaters. Both were in the open air; and both
might be said to be physically and intellectually healthful.
Olympia, which gave the name to the Olympic games, was a special
recreation city, up country, for all the Greeks. a cluster of
beautiful marble buildings, with exquisite sculpture, to which
crowds streamed for the games every four years. Our modern Olympic
games are degenerate imitations of these; for the Greeks had
intellectual, poetic, and musical contests, in superb halls, as
well as races and wrestling.

     The result was the creation of a magnificent type of young
manhood and womanhood. It was partly on this account that there was
in Greece a remarkable development of love of boys and youths. 


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Preachers have, apparently, not the least idea of the appalling
prevalence of pederasty in southern Europe today. I have met one
who naively believed that unnatural vice died out with paganism!
They are apt to think that the ancient Greek's love of boys was
evil. No doubt there were cases; but one authority after another
has shown that the Greek love of youths was healthy. It is enough
that the great moralist Plato gives us in his "Symposium" a glowing
and beautiful eulogy of the practice. Had there been in his time
any considerable abuse of the passion Plato would never have
written that page. Like other moralists, he thought the love of
woman merely sensual, and the love of youth for youth virtuous.

     The Greek had a sane and broad ideal of life to which the
world is only now returning: beautiful body, beautiful mind,
beautiful character -- or, equal cultivation of body, mind, and
will. The wonderful statues left us by the great Greek sculptors,
chiefly Phidias and Praxiteles, which are from living models, show
us the result. This manliness was the real expression of the sunny
nature of the Greek.

     In all this mortals differed fundamentally from the gods, and
there was nothing in Greek religion in the least analogous to
modern religion. There was no exhortation to "imitate" the gods.
They were in no sense models. Zeus was, as I said, often conceived
as the supreme guardian of justice, but the general Greek idea was
that certain other high and mysterious beings which they called
"fate" or "the fates" pursued the criminal and avenged law. Zeus
was just "Father Zeus." His full name really means (like Jupiter)
"the father in heaven" or in the sky. He sent the rain and the
sunshine upon just and unjust alike; but they came in fairly steady
and happy proportions in Greece, and so no one worried about Zeus.

     The official religion, in other words, never troubled about
ethics. Sacrifices, ceremonies, and processions -- artistic
developments of ancient practices -- were all that it enjoined. If
you seduced a man's wife or daughter, it was not the business of
Zeus. It was the business of the husband or father, and he paid
very close attention to it: much closer than we do. It was the same
with justice. It was a social matter, a secular concern. After the
contents of the last section you will realize that Greece is
really, like China and Japan, a splendid proof of the complete
superfluousness of religion in regard to character.

     The normal development of this religion would be that the
educated would tolerate it, perhaps practice it in public and smile
at it in private, as long as the mass of the people remained
sufficiently ignorant to believe in it. Remember that there was no
code of doctrine, no "sacred record," in Greece. It is, in a sense,
quite wrong to say that there were immoralities in Greek religion.
The stories of the amours of Zeus were in no sense dogmas. No man
need believe them, and the more serious probably did not. You were
still a good Greek if you thought Zeus merely the spirit of the
universe and the other gods and goddesses aspects of the same
principle. We shall see in the next section that educated Greeks so
believed, and that the final stage, Atheism, set in.




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     But quite early this normal development was complicated by
certain secret cults known as "mysteries," which the modern will 
best understand by thinking of the secret ceremonies of the
Freemasons. The "Eleusinian Mysteries," the best known, consisted,
in historic times, of a nine days' celebration at Eleusis. Every
freeborn Athenian had to be initiated, and had to take an oath
never, under pain of death, to reveal what he or she saw. We know,
however, quite well what they saw; but this is no place to describe
the long ceremonies.

     Just as the secret gatherings of the early Christians were
said to be for the purpose of orgies -- and as late as the fourth
century St. Ambrose tells us that they sometimes were -- so the
Greek mysteries" were said by early Christians to cover orgies of
indecency. It is now well known that, on the contrary, they
concentrated the most austere and pious elements of the Greek
nature. There is reason to think that originally the mysteries were
a secret cult (possibly with sexual rites, I should say) of the old
fertility-goddess Demeter or Ceres. But the emptiness of the
official religion for certain types of mind caused them to turn to
these mysteries.

     There are in all ages people who are not happy unless they
have an occasional or frequent opportunity to groan over their
sins. Moreover, the official religion not only gave no sure and
certain hope of a resurrection, but it never bothered about a
future life. The type of mind I have referred to cannot possibly
wait to see what happens after death, but must retire underground
periodically to try to forecast its future. These elements found
their expression in the "mysteries," which to a very large number
of the Greeks meant what the Holy Week services mean to the
Catholic or a revival meeting means to the American Protestant. It
must not for a moment be supposed that all the Greeks took their
religion gaily. A large number bemoaned their sins, and were
baptized, at the "mysteries" in the most exemplary and devastating
fashion.

     The cult of Dionysus (or Bacchus) was another new cult which
attracted the deeper religious fervor. He was the "spirit of the
vine." In his "mysteries" there was probably a representation of
the birth of the baby-god Dionysus like that of Horus in Egypt or
of Christ in Catholic churches today.

     The fact is that hardly one of the preachers who talk so
glibly about the pagan Greeks and their immoral Zeus has the least
idea of the immense amount of deep "spiritual" life, akin to the
deeper Christian life, that there was in ancient Greece. About the
middle of the sixth century, long before the Golden Age of
Pericles, a religious revival passed all over the country, and had
permanent results in the cults I have mentioned. It had also an
effect on philosophy, which had then begun, and we must see how
this in turn leads in Greece to the inevitable skepticism and to a
creation of systems of ethics without religion.






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                RISE OF PHILOSOPHY AND SKEPTICISM

     Greek philosophy is as brilliant as every other creation of 
the Greek intellect. The line of thinkers which that little nation
produced in the course of three centuries has no parallel in the
history of thought, and every conceivable variety or cast of
speculation made its appearance.

     The history of Greek thought is the procedure which the mind
of the race is now following. "In all that we do today," says one
of the best Greek scholars of Britain, G. Lowes Dickinson, "we join
hands with the Greeks across the abyss of the Middle Ages." And our
clerical friend Professor Mahaffy has a fine page (p. 2) which may
be summarized in the same sentence. He says that Egyptian moralists
and Hebrew prophets -- he seems to love a sly hit at Bible-
worshippers -- would, even if they were taught our language, quite
fail to understand our ideas; but any intelligent Greek would "at
once find his way." We are discussing just what he was discussing
in the Agora twenty-three hundred years ago. We are taking up the
development of human culture where it dropped from his hands more
than two millennia ago.

     Could there be a more eloquent eulogium of the Greek, or a
more deadly indictment of the Christian faith which has dominated
the world during the intervening two thousand years?

     But the course of Greek thought did not run smoothly. It was
distorted by religion. It turned away from science to "spiritual
truths"; and it has shown for all time how futile and mischievous
is that high-sounding appeal to us to turn from science to
spiritual truths. In this short section I can do no more than
emphasize that point and show how eventually Greek thought reached
its inevitable term in Skepticism.

     I have already said how Greek civilization first reached a
high development in the Mediterranean fringe of Asia Minor or on
the islands off the coast, and how this points to a mingling with
the refugees from Crete. The early Greek philosophers nearly all
belong to this region. In fact, we may say that philosophy was born
of the marriage of ancient Cretan culture and the fresh, strong
manhood of the newly arrived Greeks. But the most essential
condition to bear in mind is the liberty the Greeks enjoyed in Asia
Minor. They were in a colonial world; they were free to speculate.

     This Greek fringe on the coast of Asia Minor was known as
Ionia, and the first school of thinkers is known as the Ionic
school. From the start it was more scientific than metaphysical.
Its leaders studied nature, and man as a part of nature. They
sought the "first principles" of things, not in abstract
metaphysical formulae, and not at all in religion, but in physical
realities. Thales, the "father of philosophy," thought that water
was the original element out of which all other things came. It was
not a bad beginning, but just then the religious revival of which
I have spoken took place, and the next Greek thinker said that "the
infinite" -- not God, but something hopelessly indefinite -- was
the first principle. The third, Anaximenes, took air -- an infinite
quantity of air -- as the starting point. The fourth, Xenophanes, 
said that the primordial element was earth. The fifth chose fire.

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     We must remember that this was the birth of speculation about
nature -- apart from the windy metaphysics of the Hindus -- and
guesses were bound to be crude. But thought was really finding its
way onward. On the one hand, the world was being interpreted on
natural principles, without the absurdities of the Babylonian (and
Hebrew) creation. Xenophanes, the fourth thinker I mentioned,
emphatically called attention to the repulsiveness of the legends
about gods, and he seems pretty plainly to have been very
skeptical. The next thinker, Heraclitus, expressly denied that the
world was created by gods, and said that it was an eternally
changing substance. The next thinker in the line, Empedocles (of
the Greek colony in Sicily), whose mind was a strange blend of
mysticism and science, maintained that there was only one God, "a
sacred and unutterable mind"; in other words, he, in the fifth
century B.C., conceived God as the most advanced Modernists do
today.

     And these speculations about the universe, besides showing men
how to think without gods, led naturally to a belief in evolution.
If there was no "in the beginning," as Babylonians and Hebrews
said, if the universe was eternal, and there was one primordial
element of all things, then there has been an eternal evolution of
this element into the contents of the universe today. Every one of
these early Greek thinkers believed that; and the doctrine was
further developed by two of the boldest of them all, Leucippus and
Democritus, whom I would call the real fathers of science.

     About the middle of the fifth century Leucippus, another
Ionian Greek, hit upon the idea that matter must be composed of
"atoms." The universe consisted of an infinite number of atoms, of
different shapes and sizes, which have, without any directing mind,
gradually come together in the bodies we see today. Democritus
developed this idea with real scientific genius. All the contents
of the universe, including man, were the result of an eternal,
unguided, quite purposeless tossing and mingling of the atoms.
Democritus, moreover, while completely rejecting all religion,
worked out an elevated system of humanitarian morals. A.W. Benn, in
his small "History of Ancient Philosophy" (which may be recommended
to those who wish to go a little further) quotes several ethical
maxims of the materialist Democritus which fully match the
"matchless" ethic of Christ. They are in fact, much too moral and
austere for me.

     It need hardly be said that the working out in detail of such
an evolutionary theory, at a time when science was nearly all guess
work and there was little or no observation, led to much crudeness
and absurdity. But three very great principles had been fixed: the
eternity of the world and its independence of gods, the existence
of atoms, and the fact of evolution. At the same time these early
thinkers observed much in astronomy, and they were (for the time)
good mathematicians. Many of them visited Egypt, and learned
whatever the priests of Egypt could tell them. They obtained some
idea of the immense size of the sun and of the vastness of the
universe; and Pythagoras actually declared, for the first time in
the history of thought, that the earth revolved round the sun.




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     Here certainly was a most promising foundation for science;
but, as I said, religion hampered the development and diverted
thought to other channels. Anaxagoras took the speculations of the
physicists to Athens; and the democracy made him fly for his life
for uttering such impieties, although he judiciously blended his
science with some theological mysticism.

     Another train of thought, in Greece itself, had in the
meantime led to Skepticism. There arose a school of Sophists who
took pleasure in contending that the mind could come to no valid
conclusions whatever. The first of them, Protagoras, talked about
the gods even less respectfully than Confucius. "I cannot say
whether they exist or not," he said. "Life is too short for such
difficult investigations." Both this man and Anaxagoras were great
friends of Pericles, and it is clear that these skeptical ideas
pervaded the whole group of artists and thinkers of the Golden Age.
But -- partly in political opposition to the aristocratic party, to
which they belonged -- the democracy raged against them, and
Protagoras in turn had to hurry from the country.

     It was in these circumstances that Socrates, the leader of a
very different line of Greek thinkers, came upon the scene at
Athens, in the second half of the fifth century B.C. He was put to
death in 399 B.C. I do not mean that this great thinker and
moralist, whom H.G. Wells so strangely belittles, was at all
intimidated by the popular clamor against blasphemy. He was a man
of the highest and most independent character, and he met death on
the grotesque and utterly false charge of having corrupted the
young men of Athens, with a smile on his lips.

     But he naturally did not foresee any development of importance
to human welfare in these speculations about the ultimate
principles of things. No genius in the world could have anticipated
what science would one day mean to the race. What did it seem to
matter whether the ultimate principle was air or water or fire? Or
whether there were atoms? What did matter was that human conduct
should be effectively guided and that men should understand the
real nature of justice and "the good." So Socrates turned the
brilliant race aside from the foundations of science which had been
laid, and he provided instead the bases of philosophy and ethics.
Pythagoras, the Greek who had first realized that the earth
traveled round the sun, yet a strange mystic, had preceded him.
Philosophy was to be profoundly religious. Religion was to become
a philosophy.

     We have no works written by Socrates. His ideas are known only
from his pupils, Plato (especially) and Xenopbon; and very probably
Plato has given them a little color from his own more mystical
mind. But I need not here give any description of the ideas of
Plato. Like Socrates, he believed in one God, an eternal spiritual
being such as Modernists now offer us; be believed intensely in the
immortality of the soul, and provided proofs of it which we still
read for the beauty of the language and smile at for the feebleness
of the argument; and he was a most austere moralist, belittling
matter and the flesh, and tracing everything good and true and
beautiful in the world to "spirit."



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     In other words, Plato set a mischievous fashion which has not
yet died out. Half the verbiage that befogs the minds of people
today is due to this glorification of "spirit" and depreciation of
"mere matter"; and it begs the whole question whether the mind is
or is not material. The only profit of Plato to us is that he and
these other Greek thinkers show that the purest Monotheism could be
reached without the faintest gleam of revelation, and that they
anticipated the entire ethic of Christ centuries before he was
born.

     In fact, they prove in another way a truth which I have
previously established: that a man's philosophy of life, whether
materialist or spiritualist, religious or non-religious, makes no
difference to his moral ideal. The materialist Democritus had as
lofty sentiments as the mystic Pythagoras or the spiritual Plato.
The skeptical Alcidamas, a Sophist and Agnostic, was the first man
to denounce slavery; hundreds of years before anybody discovered
that it was condemned by Christian principles. The Agnostic
Epicurus had as sane and sober a conception of character as the
Theistic Aristotle. Morality is a human matter. It has its roots in
human experience, not in speculation.

     I have said the "Theistic Aristotle," but that great thinker
was far less mystic than Plato. His god, or Supreme Mind, was
unconscious of sublunary matters, and therefore not a universal
providence or a creator. Nor did he believe in personal
immortality. His system of thought is one of the most learned and
original ever given to the world. He summarized all the science of
his time, and he made a science of ethics and politics.
Unfortunately, he was also a metaphysician. He thought that besides
our knowledge of nature (ta physica) it was possible to get a
knowledge of things beyond the physical (ta meta ta physics, or
metaphysics), and these were more important and more worthy of the
mind. In that sense Aristotle, though for his time a great
scientific man, joined Plato in leading human thought astray.

     What I am chiefly concerned with here is that all these
thinkers were high moral idealists. It is worth while to stress
this, as to the average Christian it must seem very mysterious that
"wicked pagan Greece" should produce a line of lofty moralists to
which -- in the same space of time -- there is no parallel in the
history of thought. Athens was not so much the city of vice as the
greatest morality-making center the world has ever known.

     This culminated in the Stoic School. The philosophers used to
gather groups about them in their gardens or in public places, and
one of them, Zeno, chose the Painted Colonnade (Stoa Poikile) of
which I spoke in the first section. Hence the "Stoic" philosophy.

     It was not a religion, as it is so often called. Zeno and the
Stoics spoke of "God," but he was a material entity, and he was not
at all the author and vindicator of the moral law. The law was an
eternal part of nature, and a man was urged to live in harmony with
nature. This may seem to some a poor basis; but, as we shall see
presently, this philosophy inspired in the Roman world the greatest
humanitarian movement ever known until modern times. It kept
educated Romans at a high level of character, and it produced 


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Christ-like austere moralists such as Epictetus and Marcus
Aurelius. Let me repeat -- let me emphasize -- this most austere
and (in its more sober Roman form) most effective of moral systems
was a dogmatic Materialism! The Stoics ridiculed the very ideas of
spirit and free will: which we are asked to regard as the
indispensable bases of any moral conduct.

     Passing over schools of Pantheists, Cynics, and Sophists (or
all-round Skeptics), Greek philosophy ended in the system of
Epicurus. I hold that he was the sanest of all. He built upon
science, gathering together all that the early scientists had said
about the universe. He spoke of "gods" as beings somewhere out in
the abysses of space with whom a sensible man need not concern
himself. It seems to me that, like Confucius, he was really an
Agnostic. In any case, his ethics, one of the sanest systems given
to the world, had nothing whatever to do with religion. Moral law
was social law. Epicurus was -- contrary to the libelous,
ridiculous idea of his philosophy which Christian writers put into
circulation -- one of the most abstemious of men. "Tranquillity,"
the quiet life, was his idea. If he was wrong at all, it was in
being too ascetic.

     But Athens was now in full decay. The work of Greece was done:
nobly and brilliantly done. The republic, enfeebled by a long civil
war, had fallen. The monarchy of the Macedonians overshadowed it.
The philosophy of Epicurus reflects the time: the wish for a quiet,
passionless life. Those were the last days of autumn for the great
race. Its spirit was sinking. In vain did Epicurus strive to bring
men back to the foundations of science. They had no energy to
build. The work of civilization passed on to Rome.

                   THE SPLENDOR THAT WAS ROME

     Since I have already said that the ethical code of ancient
Rome was mainly the Stoic philosophy of the Greeks, and since the
official religion closely resembled the Greeks and did not attempt
to control conduct, I need not linger so long over the sister-
civilization. But ancient Rome is little understood except by
scholars, and there is no other nation of antiquity except the
Babylonian that is so often selected by preachers as an awful
example of depravity before Christ, or apart from Christianity.
Rome was the second Babylon, they say. Well, we saw what Babylon
really was; and the reader will now be almost as completely
disillusioned in regard to Rome.

     Let me first describe its people in a general way, for many of
the misunderstandings about Rome arise from certain broad ideas
which are almost entirely false. Ancient Rome has suffered in a
peculiar way in modern literature. Supplementing the preachers, who
never tire of speaking of its vices (of which they know nothing),
certain advanced social writers have calumniated Rome because to
them it was an awful example of capitalism. They confirm the very
common impression that the population of ancient Rome consisted of
a few very wealthy and very unscrupulous men and a vast army of
exploited and vilely treated slaves.




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     Even H.G. Wells, who at least knows that there was a large
body of free workers in Rome, has so wrong an idea of their
condition that he actually wonders if they were happy! You shall
learn their condition, and you will smile.

     First as to the economic question. The wealth of the Roman
capitalists or rich men is usually very much exaggerated. For more
than half a century scholars have been interested in calculating
the actual wealth, in modern currency, of these Roman millionaires;
it is almost enough to say that the largest fortune amongst them
that is definitely known to us is that of Crassus, who left less
than ten million dollars. Several people die even in England every
year with larger estates than that, while in America it would be
deemed a moderate fortune. The chief authority of the preachers,
when they trouble to seek an authority at all, is the Roman poet
Juvenal: an early "Bolshevik," the kind of prophet to whom they do
not pay the least attention in our own time. But we know positively
that the richest man of Juvenal's day had not one million dollars
a year, which I may, perhaps, capitalize as a total fortune of
about fifteen million dollars. In short, any six wealthy patricians
of ancient Rome could have been bought up by more than one
capitalist of modern America; and there are men in America who
could have bought up twenty of the richest patricians Rome ever
had!

     Next, it is quite a mistake to suppose that all the work in
Greece and Rome was done by slaves. Slavery is one of the blots on
the old civilizations; but we must remember that Greece and Rome
were only a few centuries out of barbarism; while Christian nations
had hordes of slaves not very long ago. To the Greeks and Romans it
seemed that enslaving a man was a humane improvement upon the older
practice of killing him when he was taken captive: whereas the
Christian nations raided Africa for the express purpose of
enslaving men. Finally, it is a sheer myth that the Christian
Church abolished slavery, or made any protest whatever against it
for many centuries; yet I have already quoted a Greek moralist,
Alcidamas, condemning slavery in the fourth century B.C., and one
Stoic moralist after another condemned it.

     No one really knows what proportion the slaves bear to the
general population in Greece and Rome. In Greece, the best
authorities say, they were three to one -- a recent Socialist
writer makes them thirty to one! -- and were humanely treated. In
the Roman Empire they are generally estimated at ten to one at the
time when incessant warfare brought millions of captives into the
Empire. Professor Belock, however, who has made a special study of
the matter in his work "Die Bevolkerung der griechisch-romischen
Welt," warns us that all these figures are enormously exaggerated,
and we will only deplore that the luxuries of the Romans, workers
(as we shall see in a moment) as well as patricians, were based
upon the labor of millions of rural slaves who were, generally,
badly treated. In the city of Rome they were not generally ill-
used, and from the first century onward they had the protection of
the law.





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     But it is of the free Romans -- most of the slaves were
foreigners -- that we have to speak. In Rome, when its population 
reached one million, there were between three and four hundred
thousand free workers; and they had a position of privilege and
entertainment which no "modern body of workers remotely
approaches."

     To begin with, they had in the city itself a superb public
home to which not even the richest city in the world today affords
a parallel. In American cities -- I remember Denver and
Minneapolis, for instance -- there is an admirable practice growing
of having "civic centers": pretty open spaces in the center of the
city, with gardens, handsome little buildings or colonnades, for
the citizens to enjoy. The very best of these is but a feeble
imitation of the marble heart of ancient Rome.

     In Athens, we saw, the Agora, the old cattle-market, was the
public square. It was lined with beautiful buildings and colonnades
and adorned with statues; and on one side of it towered the
Acropolis with its superb marble portico and exquisite temple. At
Rome the civic center was the Forum (also the old cattle-market, or
center of the primitive village of Rome). It was a very broad,
oblong space, richly adorned with statues and lined with marble
buildings from end to end.

     The Romans had not the artistic genius of the Greeks, but when
they incorporated Greece in their possessions, thousands of Greek
artists and scholars flocked to wealthy Rome and educated it in the
art of living. Temples, palaces, and public buildings, in the most
beautiful marbles the world afforded, lined each side of the Forum.
At one end stood the great Amphitheater or (as we call it)
Colosseum; at the other rose the sacred hill, the Capitol, with a
gold-roofed marble temple of Jupiter at the summit. And nearly
every building had broad, cool colonnades to shelter the Roman
workers from the sun. But this was not enough, and the Emperors
built a new series of Fora -- magnificent marble avenues and
colonnades, of which we still find exquisite fragments -- so that
in the end the Romans had nearly a mile of these wonderful
structures.

     I calculate -- I know old Rome well and have the deepest
affection for it -- that every Roman worker lived within ten
minutes' walk of this beautiful center. The workers were housed in
crowded tenement-blocks, four or five stories high, with very
narrow streets. But in their glorious climate one lives in the open
air most of the year, and there is in the whole world today no
civic center remotely approaching that which the Romans had to
lounge and play in.

     All very well, you say, but how much time had the Roman worker
for lounging and playing? Was he not, though nominally a free
artisan, really ground and exploited to create the wealth of the
patricians in their palaces on the hills? Was there a Christian day
of rest?





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     Here, I find, in lecturing on Rome, is the greatest surprise
for the modern worker. The old Roman artisan worked far less than 
any worker of modern times. The British or American worker is
employed on about two hundred and eighty days in the year. And
this, remember, is what the secular civilization of modern times
has done for him. A hundred years ago, when England was still
Christian, a man worked three hundred and ten days out of the three
hundred and sixty-five; and he worked fourteen to sixteen hours a
day for six full days a week! Now, let us say, the modern spirit,
not the Christian religion, has won for him an eight-hour day and
about eighty days' rest. And the pagan worker, at the height of the
Roman Empire, worked only about one hundred and seventy days a year
and played the rest!

     What his wage was in modern coinage it would be useless to try
to determine. Prices were totally different. His rent was high; but
apart from rent and his simple clothing (little more than a single
robe or tunic) his expenses were few.

     For this is the next great surprise. He received for nothing
the most solid part of his food -- corn (and at one time a little
pork and oil) -- and all his entertainments. Three times a week the
workers lined up on the "bread steps," and received their corn. It
was not a "dole." It was a right; and you begin to see how even the
Roman worker lived on the labor of slaves. It was armies of badly
treated slaves in Africa, Gaul, and Spain who produced his free
food. It was slaves working in the galleys who brought it to Rome.

     Most princely of all were the free entertainments of the Roman
worker. Mr. Wells repeats the popular opinion when he says that the
bloody games of the Amphitheater, where gladiators fought each
other or wild beasts, were the great passion of the Roman people.
The Colosseum, as we call it, was in its prime a magnificent
marble-lined building seating ninety thousand spectators. On fifty
or more days a year rich officials or emperors provided free shows
there for the Romans, and they were gala days, with gorgeous
processions, for the whole of Rome.

     But this brutal display, against which the Stoics sternly
protested, was not the great passion of the Romans. The
Amphitheater, I said, seated ninety thousand spectators. But the
Great Circus, the real pride and passion of the Romans, seated
three hundred and eighty thousand; the entire body of the free
workers of Rome. The chariot races in the Circus, the keen
discussions for weeks in advance, the same intense excitement as
there is in connection with a baseball match today, the universal
betting on the result -- these were the great sports of the Romans.
And no blood was shed, except by accident, in the Circus. The vast
crowd -- three times as large as the largest sports ground in the
world can accommodate today -- witnessed only chariot races, horse
races, foot races, wrestling, juggling, and so on. Performers were
brought from the ends of the world. The rival syndicates which ran
the chariots spent enormous sums. A Roman charioteer earned as much
as a good baseball player now does in America. And the Roman
workers never paid one cent for admission.




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     Then there were the theaters, also free, where the finest
mimes (actors without words) in the world performed and the 
classical tragedies of Plautus and Terence were given. Beyond these
were the baths: vast marble-lined structures, including princely
baths, libraries, gymnasia, and spacious colonnades. It was the
only entertainment for which the Roman worker paid. When the bells
rang the end of work at three in the afternoon, he could slip on
his clean tunic and spend hours in these unique pleasure-houses.
And the price was about half a cent! These palaces were gifts of
the emperors to the workers. The Roman had sold his democratic
birthright; but be got a tremendous price for it.

     Another part of the price was an abundant supply of pure water
to every floor of every tenement in Rome. As late as twenty years
ago I found the water so generally contaminated in Italy that one
had to avoid it. Two thousand years ago every worker had a supply
of the purest water, brought by aqueducts from the hills many miles
away; and the supply per person was as ample as in a modern city.

     Free schooling was the next gift. One of Mr. Wells' most
elementary errors is to say that Christianity, with all its faults,
at least abolished slavery and gave the world schools. As I told
him, no authority in the world on either subject would give him the
least support. No great leader in the Christian Church denounced
slavery for eight centuries after Christ. It was killed by economic
factors: by the killing off of the wealthy Roman slave-owners when
the Empire fell.

     As to schools, there could not be a more erroneous statement.
The Roman municipalities supplied free elementary instruction for
the children of all workers. Anywhere you went, in a suburb of Rome
or a small Italian town, you would see the teacher, in the porch of
a house perhaps, teaching the children how to write on wax-faced
tablets. Practically every Roman worker could read and write by the
year 380 A.D., when Christianity began to have real power. By 480
nearly every school in the Empire was destroyed. By 580, and until
1780 at least, from ninety to ninety-five percent of the people of
Europe were illiterate and densely ignorant. That is the undisputed
historical record of Christianity as regards education.

     The Roman Empire provided higher as well as elementary
education, and for the children of the workers this also was free.
Even shorthand was as well known to the Romans as it is to us. Few
people except scholars realize how the development of civilization
was broken off when Greece and Rome fell, how it was suspended
during the long domination of Roman Catholicism, and how we are
today "joining hands with the Greeks (and Romans) across the abyss
of the Middle Ages." High schools were 'Provided in all important
Roman centers; and there were a few still higher schools of the
type we now call universities (for law, medicine, etc.). The son of
the worker paid nothing.

     Medical service, again, was free in the city of Rome for the
poorer workers. Every temple of Aesculapius (the god of healing)
gave free medical treatment, and the municipality of Rome paid a
number of doctors to give free service to the poor. It is another
vain and ignorant boast of the preacher that Christianity first 


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founded hospitals and helped the sick poor. It is rubbish. Rome did
what it could for them in the then state of medical science; and
one has only to read what the "hospital" service was until modern
times to measure what the world owes to the Church in this respect.
It shattered Roman science and education, and it fought and
hampered the men who, like Vesalius, tried in the Middle Ages to
resume the development of medical science.

     Finally, there is the boast that if the Church did not give
the worker his modern Unions -- even the boldest preacher hesitates
to say that -- at least it gave the world the famous medieval
guilds, which inspired the Unions.

     And this is as empty a boast as the claim to have given the
world schools! I have proved elsewhere that the medieval guilds
were, at their start, fiercely resisted and drastically condemned
by the Church, precisely because they were pagan.

     The truth is that both Greek and Roman workers had a perfect
system of "Trade Unionism." All the tanners, builders, carpenters,
etc., of any district were incorporated in what they called a
"School" or "College" (in the original meaning of the word). They
had a clubroom, frequent suppers, and funds for burial and mutual
aid. Imperial decrees also plainly hint that they used their Unions
for economic, if not political, purposes. It is now actually
suggested that Paul, the tent-maker, used his trade connection to
travel over the Roman world and spread Christianity. At all events,
we know from inscriptions that slaves were admitted on equal terms
in many of these colleges, and women were sometimes enrolled as
members. The women of Rome were well on the way to winning, two
thousand years ago, the rights they had to fight for in our own
time.

                     MORALS IN ANCIENT ROME

     "Yes, yes," says my clerical reader impatiently, "I grant you
all these material things, but what of the spiritual and moral
condition of the Romans? It is in that priceless department of life
that Christianity counts."

     It is something that he grants these "material things." He was
probably totally unaware of them before, and had repeated hundreds
of times the shibboleth that Christianity had bettered the lot of
woman and the worker. It did precisely the opposite. Moreover, the
modern working man is not quite so sure as his fathers were about
the inferiority of these "material things" in comparison with
spirituality and virtue. However, I boldly take up the challenge
about the morals of Rome.

     And let me say that, as the reader will have gathered already,
I am not here going to give Rationalist bunk instead of Christian
bunk, as many do. I have said all through that the Christian
emphasis on sex-rules is mischievous: it obscures the far greater
importance of justice and honor, and it confuses real moral
principle in sex-relations with ancient ideas that the world is
discarding. I am not offering "the good life for its own sake"
instead of for Christ's sake. The only moral standard I acknowledge


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is a solid social rule. I am not straining evidence to prove that
pagans and Rationalists were all stained-glass angels. I assume,
after reading all the available evidence, that in the cities of
Babylon, Egypt, and Persia, in Athens and Rome, men lived pretty
much as they do in Paris and London, New York and Chicago, today:
and that is a bit more decently than they did in Christian times.

     In the case of Rome it is especially difficult and dangerous
to generalize. Now and again a very vulgar or half-mad emperor came
to the throne, and during his reign there certainly were orgies. It
is to the reigns of these men that the preacher turns for his
material.

     But he does not say -- I doubt if any religious writer in the
world has ever taken the trouble to count -- that of the twenty-
nine pagan Roman emperors twenty-one were admirable men of "good
character," and eight only were "bad" (and several of those
insane). Further, the twenty-one fine emperors ruled for two
hundred and forty-five years, and the eight vicious monarchs for
only seventy-five years, collectively. For one hundred and fifty
years -- nearly half the period -- Rome had a series of Stoic
emperors to which you will not find a parallel in the history of
Christendom; and under them the world made a humanitarian progress
that has no parallel except in our own "pagan" days. Let me add one
fact to what I have said in the previous chapter. In the first
century (A.D.), under the pagan emperors, more than three hundred
thousand orphans were reared in public institutions in Italy alone.

     Now those are facts and figures which any man may easily
verify. I will go further and give an amusing illustration of the
way in which the vices of Rome even under the bad emperors are
exaggerated.

     Years ago I was invited to write a series of biographical
sketches of the Roman empresses. I wrote the work ("The Empresses
of Rome"), covering five hundred years of Roman history and myself
examining the whole relevant Roman and Greek literature. I inserted
all the scandalous things said about the empresses and emperors,
only warning the reader when (as was most commonly the case) these
things were unreliable gossip. I told, from Juvenal, how the
Empress Messalina was said to have gone, night after night, to a
common brothel to prostitute herself and return to the palace, in
the words of the fiery poet, "tired, yet not sated, with men." I
told how the young Emperor Elagabalus, a maniac from Syria (not a
Roman), had the empire searched for a powerful male lover. I told
everything; and the publisher was disappointed at the slenderness
of the scandalous bits in the long prosy chronicle! To appease him
and the public -- he was not personally interested in such matters
-- I had then to write a similar series of sketches of the
Byzantine empresses ("The Empresses of Constantinople"), who were
all Christians, and the proportion of scandal was much greater!

     These facts show the kind of nonsense that is written and
preached about the "morals of Rome." It is very difficult for any
conscientious student to generalize. There are no statistics
whatever. Take the mass of the people. Were they more or less
immoral than in a modern city? Candidly, after reading practically 


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the whole of Latin literature, I don't know. There is no evidence.
There were plenty of brothels (lupanaria) in Rome. You might go
along a street and hear a curtain, stretched over the doorway,
rattle impatiently on its rod. A courtesan behind it was attracting
your attention.

     What of that? I go along in the "black and tan" district of
Chicago, and, under the glare of the arc lamps on the main road,
there are half a dozen brothels, with a score of colored girls
shamelessly laying hold of the coats of men on the pavement. I go
along a quiet street in Mexico City, and at the open door, or
before the door, of every house sits a prostitute, quietly
"soliciting your custom." I enter a cafe in Madrid, under its
Catholic dictators, and I count twelve obvious prostitutes at the
tables speaking to me with their eyes. So the world over. We have
not the least evidence that there was more of this in ancient Rome
than there is in London. In fact, when London was more Christian
than it now is, when seven-eighths went to church on Sunday instead
of one-eighth (as now), there were, the police reported (at the
beginning of the nineteenth century) twenty-five thousand loose
women to a million people. I doubt if there were nearly so many in
Rome.

     So I conclude that, on the whole, the mass of men were just
about as immoral as they now are, and rather less than in the
Middle Ages, when the clergy were nearly all immoral and some owned
brothels. All the evidence is consistent with the assumption.

     Talk about the vices of Rome always refers to the wealthy: to
one-tenth, or less, of the population. And this talk is mainly
taken from one writer, the poet Juvenal. As has been repeatedly
shown, Juvenal is quite unreliable as to facts. Every Roman
historian tells you that. To understand him, imagine the most fiery
and most rhetorical of modern democratic writers not curbed by a
libel law, and you realize how lightly he would reproduce the
wildest gossip. But you have to understand, in addition, that
Juvenal is not generally speaking of his own age. He wrote his
famous "Satires" about the year 90 A.D.; and the sins of Messalina,
which I have just quoted from him, had been perpetrated nearly half
a century before that! No historian would accept such evidence.

     Another scandal I have quoted, the folly of Elagabalus, is
taken, with hundreds of other spicy stories, from a series of Latin
lives of the Roman Emperors. It is anonymous, and historically
almost worthless. More scandals are taken from the fiery and
unscrupulous Christian rhetorician (writing long after the events)
Lactantius.

     One of the most serious contemporary critics of Roman luxury
is Ammianus Marcellinus. An old and severe soldier, be returns from
his campaigns to Rome, and, in disgust, describes what he sees.
Such men do not usually examine very critically the material they
use; yet even Ammianus, who is mainly concerned about effeminate
luxury, says little about vice. St. Jerome, writing in the same age
about the Christian priests and ladies of Rome, whom he knew well,
has far more to say about immorality. Salvianus, a priest, writing 



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in the next century, tells his Christian readers that the virtues
of the pagans, who have disappeared, shame the vices of the
Christians who have taken their place.

     In fact, it is fairly easy to sum up the morals of the small
wealthy class at Rome. To begin with, there was less adultery than
there is now or was in the Middle Ages. Adultery was punished with
death in Roman law. That law was rarely enforced, but intrigue
might get a man impeached at any time. The first emperor, Octavian,
who ruled for forty years during the most luxurious period of Rome,
sternly enforced the law, to the extent of banishment for life,
against his own passionately loved daughter Julia. That was
"wicked" Rome. Now, for the same offense, a man passes with a smile
through a divorce court.

     That is Modernism. Until modern times there was, as a rule, no
penalty to pay at all, except to confess, and repeat, your "sin."
That was Christendom.

     Apart from intercourse with a married woman, a man was free in
Roman (and all other) law. But there is no evidence that the middle
and wealthy class of Rome were more free in practice than they are
today. There was always a "fast set," and it grew larger under the
bad emperors. These men gave, in their marble mansions with cedar
ceilings, banquets which were orgies of choice wine and naked
Syrian girls, while slaves in the roof poured perfume and flowers
on the intoxicated guests. There is no reason whatever to think
that this set was more numerous, proportionately, than the
corresponding set which patronizes actresses and chorus-girls
today, and sets up mistresses in luxurious apartments.

     But these are just the things which "get into the papers."
Virtue, which we so much admire, is uninteresting. Vice, which we
deplore, fascinates us; and the more picturesque it is, the more
readily we read about it.

     Any real student of Roman literature will conclude that the
great body of the men and women of Rome were as temperate and
regular as we are. Really intimate and reliable pictures are best
afforded by private letters, which reflect the character of the
circle to which they belong. We have several volumes of such: the
letters of Cicero, Pliny, Seneca, and Symmacbus. Every single
letter could have been read without a blush by Theodore Roosevelt.
Bryan would have been disappointed in them. They reflect, in
different centuries, circles in which vice is ignored, as a thing
not done by gentlemen.

     I have already said that the Stoic philosophy had a wonderful
influence in Rome. Emperors were Stoics. Crowds followed Stoic
orators like Dion Chrysostom, or read Stoic moralists like
Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Most of the famous Roman
jurists, the creators of European law, were Stoics: humanitarians
of the highest character. A kind of blend of sober Stoicism and
Epicureanism was the philosophy of life of the gentlemen of Rome.
Their letters, and such works as the "Saturnalia" of Macrobius, a
slave author who describes what is under his eyes in his master's
house, give us the true measure of Roman character. lt was 
generally fine.

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     The two leading authorities of our time on the subject are
Gaston Boissier ("La religion romaine"), and Sir Samuel Dill, a
Protestant ("Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius," "Roman
Society in the Last Centuries of the Western Empire"). They agree
in this verdict. Dill, in particular, analyzes the whole Roman
literature for the first, fourth and fifth centuries, and he comes
to the same conclusion that I have. The middle- and wealthy-class
Romans, as a body, were as decent as we are. Another Protestant
writer, a close student of Rome, Dr. Emil Reich, breaks into
indignation when be notices ("The History of Civilization, p. 371)
how his religious colleagues slander Rome. "The average Roman
gentleman," he says, "was a firm believer in the pure doctrines of
the Stoic" and he writes a long and glowing eulogy of what he
sarcastically calls "these rotten Romans."

     This Roman world, like the Greek world, produced moralists
whose sentiments were the same as those of Christ. The Asiatic
religions which celebrated the birth of a savior-god in mid-winter
or the death and resurrection of a god in spring, became extremely
popular in the Roman Empire and prepared the way for Christianity.
The old Roman religion was actually suppressed and Christianity
substituted by force for it: and the world sank into barbarism
within a hundred years.

     I here conclude this brief survey of the real morals and
character and achievements of the great civilizations before
Christ. No shining sword divides the history of the world into B.C.
and A.D. It is ludicrous to repeat that these old civilizations lay
in darkness and the shadow of death. We have seen how, in ethic and
religious belief, they provide the whole material for the new
religion.



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