Superstition in all ages is a term of unstable meaning. Men even of the same time will apply it or deny its application to the same belief. The devout beliefs of one period may become mere superstitions to the next. And, conversely, what for a time may be regarded as alien superstition, may in course of time become an accepted portion of the native creed. This was the history of those Eastern cults which will be described in coming chapters. At first, they fell under Cicero’s definition of superstition, viz. any religious belief or practice going beyond the prescription of ancestral usage.2278 But a day came when they were the most popular worships of the Roman world, when great nobles, and even the prince himself, were enthusiastic votaries of them.2279 The religion of Mithra, when it was confined to an obscure circle of slaves or freedmen at Ostia, was a superstition to the pontifical college. It took its place with the cult of the Roman Trinity when Aurelian built his temple to the Sun and endowed his priesthood.2280

Plutarch devoted a treatise to the subject of superstition. And his conception of it is more like our own, less formal and external, than that of Cicero. He develops his view of the degradation of the religious sense by contrasting it with atheism. Atheism is a great calamity, a blindness of the reason to the goodness and love which govern the universe. It is the extinction of a faculty rather than the perversion of one.2281 [pg 444]But superstition both believes and trembles. It acknowledges the existence of supernatural powers, but they are to it powers of evil who are ready to afflict and injure, to be approached only in terror and with servile prostration. This craven fear of God fills the whole universe with spectres. It leaves no refuge whither the devil-worshipper can escape from the horrors which haunt him night and day. Whither can he flee from that awful presence? Sleep, which should give a respite from the cares of life, to his fevered mind, swarms with ghostly terrors.2282 And death, the last sleep, which should put a term to the ills of life, only unrolls before the superstitious votary an awful scene of rivers of fire and blackness of darkness, and sounds of punishment and unutterable woe.2283 To such a soul the festivals of ancestral religion lose all their solemn gladness and cheering comfort. The shrines which should offer a refuge to the troubled heart, even to the hunted criminal, become to him places of torture. And the believer in a God of malignant cruelty betakes himself in despair to dark rites from foreign lands, and spends his substance on impostors who trade upon his fears. Better, says the pious Plutarch, not believe in God at all, than cringe before a God worse than the worst of men. Unbelief, calamity though it be, at least does not dishonour a Deity whose existence it denies. The true impiety is to believe that God can be wantonly faithless and revengeful, fickle and cruel.2284

The earnestness, and even bitterness, with which Plutarch assails the degrading fear of the supernal Powers have caused some rather shallow critics to imagine that he had a sympathy with scepticism.2285 How such an idea could arise in the mind of any one who had read his treatise on the Genius of Socrates or on Isis and Osiris, or on the Delays of Divine Justice, it is difficult to imagine. Plutarch’s hatred of superstition is that of a genuinely pious man, with a lofty conception of the Divine love and pity, who is revolted by the travesty of pure religion, [pg 445]which is repeated from age to age. It is the feeling of a man to whom religion is one of the most elevating joys of life, when he sees it turned into an instrument of torture. But the force of the protest shows how rampant was the evil in that age. Lucretius felt with the intensity of genius all the misery which perverted conceptions of the Divine nature had inflicted on human life.2286 But the force of Roman superstition had endlessly multiplied since the days of Lucretius. It was no longer the exaggeration of Roman awe at the lightning, the flight of birds, the entrails of a sacrificial victim, or anxious observance of the solemn words of ancestral formulae, every syllable of which had to be guarded from mutilation or omission. All the lands which had fallen to her sword were, in Plutarch’s day, adding to the spiritual burden of Rome. If in some cases they enriched her rather slender spiritual heritage, they also multiplied the sources of supernatural terror. If in the mysteries of Isis and Mithra they exalted the soul in spiritual reverie and gave a promise of a coming life,2287 they sent the Roman matron to bathe in the freezing Tiber at early dawn and crawl on bleeding knees over the Campus Martius, or purchase the interpretation of a dream from some diviner of Palestine or a horoscope from some trader in astral lore.2288 The Platonist, nourished on the pure theism of the Phaedo and the Republic, and the priest of that cheerful shrine, which the young Ion had each bright morning swept with myrtle boughs and sprinkled with the water of the Castalian spring,2289 whose holy ministry gladdened even the years of boyhood—a man with such experience had a natural horror of the dark terrors which threatened to obscure the radiant visions of Delphi and Olympus.

Livy complained of the neglect in his day of signs and omens which formerly were deemed worthy of historical record.2290 The contempt for augury in the time of Cicero was hardly concealed among the cultivated.2291 The details of parts of the ancient bird-lore eluded the researches of the elder Pliny. The emperor Claudius, lamenting the neglect of the ancient science, demanded a decree of the Senate to restore it [pg 446]to its former efficiency.2292 These are some signs of that general decay of old Roman religion in the last century of the Republic, which was partly due to philosophic enlightenment partly to the confusion and demoralisation of civil strife, but perhaps even more to the dangerous seductions of foreign superstitions.2293 Among the counsels of Maecenas to Augustus none is more earnest and weighty than the warning against these occult arts.2294 Augustus is advised to observe, and enforce the observance of the time-honoured ancestral forms, but he must banish sorcerers and diviners, who may sow the seeds of conspiracy against the prince. The advice was acted on. While the emperor rebuilt the fallen temples and revived the ancient Latin rites, 2000 books of unlicensed divination were in one day given to the flames.2295 The old religion, which had absorbed so much from the augural lore of Etruria,2296 was itself certainly not free from superstition. The wrath of the Lemures,2297 the darkness of the inner forest, the flash of lightning, the flight of birds, the entrails of a sacrifice, excited many a fear, and might cause a man to suspend a journey, or break up an assembly of the people. But the Romans had, in the early ages, after their orderly legal fashion, reduced the force of these terrors by an elaborate art which provided a convenient resource of statecraft, and a means of soothing the alarms of the crowd.

But foreign and unregulated superstitions, from the second century B.C., were pouring in from the East to put a fresh load on the human spirit or to replace the waning faith in Italian augury. In 139 B.C. Cornelius Scipio Hispalus vainly strove by an edict to stop the inroads of the star readers.2298 But treatises on this pretended science were in vogue in Varro’s time, and are quoted by the great savant with approval.2299 These impostors were swarming in Rome at the time of Catiline’s conspiracy,2300 inflating the hopes of the plotters. [pg 447]Suetonius has surpassed himself in the collection, from many sources, of the signs and wonders which foreshadowed the great destiny, and also the death of Augustus. And it is noteworthy that, among these predictions, are some founded on astrology.2301 On the day of the emperor’s birth, P. Nigidius, a learned astrologer, found that the position of the stars foretold a coming master of the world. Augustus himself received a similar forecast from Theagenes, a star-reader of Apollonia. He had his horoscope drawn out, and a silver coin was struck with the stamp of Capricorn.

This fatalist superstition infected nearly all the successors of Augustus in the first and second centuries. Astrology is essentially a fatalist creed, and the heir to the great prize of the principate, with the absolute control of the civilised world, was generally designated by that blind impersonal power whose decrees might be read in the positions of the eternal spheres, or by signs and omens upon earth. Suetonius, Tacitus, Dion Cassius, have chronicled, with apparent faith, the predictions of future power which gathered round the popular candidate for the succession, or the dark warnings of coming disaster which excited the prince’s fears and gave courage to enemies and rivals. It is not hard to see why the emperors at once believed in these black arts and profoundly distrusted their professors. They wished to keep a monopoly of that awful lore, lest it might excite dangerous hopes in possible pretenders.2302 To consult a Chaldaean seer on the fate of the prince, or to possess his horoscope, was always suspicious, and might often be fatal.2303 The astonishing thing is, that men had such implicit faith in the skill of these Eastern impostors, along with such distrust of their honesty. They were banished again and again in the first century, but persecution only increased their power, and they always returned to exercise greater influence than ever.2304 Never was there a clearer proof of the impotence of government in the face of a deep-seated popular belief.

Tiberius, who had probably no real religious faith, was, [pg 448]from his youth, the slave of astrology.2305 An adept had, at his birth, predicted his lofty destiny.2306 He had in his train one Thrasyllus, a noted professor of the science, who had often to read the stars in the face of death, and he was surrounded in his gloomy retirement at Capreae by a “Chaldaean herd.”2307 Claudius was pedantic and antiquarian in his religious tastes, and, while he tried to revive old Roman augury, he banished the astrologers.2308 A great noble who had the temerity to consult them as to the time of the emperor’s death shared the same fate. Nero, who despised all regular religion, except that of the Syrian goddess, was the prey of superstitious terror. The Furies of the murdered Agrippina, as in Aeschylean tragedy, haunted him in dreams, and he used the aid of magic to evoke and propitiate the awful shade.2309 When, towards the end of his reign, his prospects grew more threatening, the appearance of a comet drove him to consult Balbillus, his astrologer, who advised that the portended danger should be diverted from the emperor by the destruction of the great nobles. Some of the craft had predicted that Nero should one day be deserted and betrayed, while others consoled him with the promise of a great monarchy of the East with its seat at Jerusalem.2310 The terrible year which followed Nero’s death was crowded with portents, and all the rivals for the succession were equally slaves of the adepts, who exploited their ambitions or their fears. The end of Galba was foreshadowed, from the opening of his reign, by ominous dreams and signs.2311 The hopes of Otho had long been inflamed by the diviner Seleucus,2312 and by Ptolemaeus, who was his companion during his command in Spain.2313 When he had won the dangerous prize, Otho was tortured by nightly visions of the spirit of Galba, which he used every art to lay. Yet this same man set out for the conflict on the Po in defiant disregard of omens warranted by the ancient religion.2314 His end, which, by a certain calm [pg 449]nobility, seemed to redeem his life, was portended by a sign which Tacitus records as a fact. At the very hour when Otho was falling on his dagger, a bird of strange form settled in a much frequented grove, and sat there undisturbed by the passers-by, or by the flocks of other fowls around.2315 The horoscope of Otho’s rival Vitellius had been cast by the astrologers, and their reading of his fate gave his parents acute anxiety. He used to follow the monitions of a German sorceress. Yet, like so many of his class in that age, he had but scant respect for accredited beliefs. It was noted with alarm that he entered on his pontificate on the black day of the Allia.2316 The astrologers he probably found more dangerous than helpful, and he ordered them to be expelled from Italy.2317 But it is a curious sign of their conscious power and their audacity, that a mocking counter edict to that of Vitellius was immediately published by unknown hands, ordaining the death of the persecutor within a certain day.2318

The emperors of the Flavian dynasty, although their power was stable and the world was settling down, were not less devoted to Eastern superstitions than any of their predecessors. Vespasian indeed once more exiled the astrologers, but he still kept the best of them in his train.2319 He had consulted the oracle on Mount Carmel, and obeyed the vision vouchsafed in the temple of Serapis.2320 His son Titus, who may have had romantic dreams of an Eastern monarchy, consulted foreign oracles, worshipped in Egyptian temples, and was a firm believer in the science of the stars.2321 Domitian was perhaps the most superstitious of all his race. The rebuilder of Roman temples and the restorer of Roman orthodoxy had also a firm faith in planetary lore. He lived in perpetual fear of his sudden end, the precise hour and manner of which the Chaldaeans had foretold in his early youth.2322 Among the many reasons for his savage proscription of the leading nobles, one of the most deadly was the possession of an imperial horoscope. On his side too, the haunted tyrant diligently studied the birth-hour of suspected or possible [pg 450]pretenders to the throne. In the last months of his reign his terror became more and more and more intense; never in the same space of time had the lightning been so busy. The Capitol, the temple of the Flavians, the palace, even Domitian’s own sleeping chamber, were all struck from heaven. In a dream, the haunted emperor beheld Minerva, the goddess whom he specially adored, quitting her chapel, with a warning that she could no longer save him from his doom. On the day before his death, the emperor predicted that, on the next, the moon would appear blood red in the sign of Aquarius. On his last morning, a seer, who had been summoned from Germany to interpret the menacing omens and who had foretold a coming change, was condemned to death.2323

Hadrian, that lover of the exotic and the curious, was particularly fascinated by the East. He had probably no settled faith of any kind, but he dabbled in astrology, as he dabbled in all other arts.2324 It was a study which had been cultivated in his family. His great-uncle, Aelius Hadrianus, was an adept in the science of the stars, and had read the prediction of his nephew’s future greatness.2325 When the future emperor was a young military tribune in lower Moesia, he found the forecast confirmed by a local astrologer. He consulted the sortes Virgilianae about his prospects, with not less hopeful results. He practised with intense curiosity other dark magical arts, and the mysterious death of Antinous on the Nile was by many believed to have been an immolation for the Emperor’s safety.2326 Hadrian was glad to think that the spirit of his minion had passed into a new star which had then for the first time appeared. On every 1st of January, Hadrian predicted, with perfect assurance, the events of the year, down to his own last hour.2327 Even the last great imperial figure in our period is not free from the suspicion of having tampered with the dark arts. Julius Capitolinus reports a rumour that M. Aurelius consulted the Chaldaeans about the infatuated passion of Faustina for a gladiator.2328 In his [pg 451]account of the famous rainfall that miraculously refreshed the Roman troops in the Marcomannic war, D. Cassius ascribes the miracle to the magic arts of an Egyptian sorcerer whom M. Aurelius kept in his train.2329 Xiphilinus, however, who attributes the marvel to the prayers of the Thundering Legion, expressly denies that the emperor gave his countenance to these impostors. Another suspicious incident comes to us on the authority of Lucian. When the war on the Danube was at its height, the new oracle of Alexander of Abonoteichos had, by mingled audacity and skill, rapidly gained an extraordinary influence even among the greatest nobles in Italy. Rutilianus, one of the foremost among them, was its special patron and devotee, and actually married the daughter of Alexander by an amour with Selene! Probably through his influence, an oracle, in verse of the old Delphic pattern, was despatched to the headquarters of the emperor, ordering that a pair of lions should be flung into the Danube, with costly sacrifices and all the fragrant odours of the East.2330 The oracle was obeyed, but the rite was followed by an appalling disaster to the Roman arms. The impostor was equal to the occasion, and defended himself by the example of the ambiguity of the Delphic oracle to Croesus, before the victory of Cyrus. What part M. Aurelius had in this scene we cannot pretend to tell, but the ceremony could hardly have been performed without, at least, his connivance. Nor does his philosophic attitude exclude the possibility of a certain faith in oracular foresight and divination. He believed that everything in our earthly lot was ordained from eternity, and, with the Stoic fatalism, he may have held the almost universal Stoic faith in the power to discover the decrees of fate.2331

Nearly all the writers from whom we derive our impressions of that age were more or less tinged with its superstitions. Even the elder Pliny, who rejected almost with scorn the popular religion, was led by a dream to undertake his history of the wars in Germany.2332 His nephew, although he rejoiced at being raised to the augurate, and restored a temple of Ceres on his lands, seems to have clung to the old religion rather [pg 452]as a matter of sentiment than from any real faith. But he had a genuine belief in dreams and apparitions, and he sends his friend Sura an elaborate account of the romance of a haunted house at Athens.2333 His friend Suetonius had been disturbed by a dream as to the success of a cause in which he was to appear. Pliny consoled him with the hackneyed interpretation of dreams by contraries.2334 The biographer of the Caesars may contend with Dion Cassius for the honour of being probably the most superstitious chronicler who ever dealt with great events. Suetonius is shocked by the arrogance of Julius Caesar when he treated with disdain the warning of a diviner from the inspection of a victim’s entrails.2335 He glorifies the pious Augustus by a long catalogue of signs and celestial omens which foretold the events of his career.2336 Suetonius must have been as keen in collecting these old wives’ tales as the more sober facts of history,2337 and, if we may believe him, the palace of the Caesars for a hundred years was as full of supernatural wonders and the terrors of magic and dark prophecy as the Thessalian villages of Apuleius.2338 The superstitions of the Claudian and Flavian Caesars could nowhere have found a more sympathetic chronicler.

Immensely superior in genius as Tacitus is to Suetonius, even he is not emancipated from the superstition of the age. But he wavers in his superstition, just as he wavers in his conception of the Divine government of the world.2339 Although he occasionally mentions, and briefly discusses, the tenets of the Epicurean and the Stoic schools, it does not seem probable that Tacitus had much taste for philosophy. Full of the old senatorial ideals, he considered such a study, if carried to any depth, or pursued with absorbing earnestness, to be unbecoming the gravity and dignity of a man of rank and affairs.2340 Moreover, his views of human destiny and the Divine government were coloured and saddened by the Terror. Having lived himself through the reign of Domitian, and seen all the horrors of its [pg 453]close, having witnessed, in humiliating silence, the excesses of frenzied power and the servility of cringing compliance, Tacitus had little faith either in Divine benevolence or in tempted human virtue.2341 Even the quiet and security of Trajan’s reign seemed to him but a precarious interval, not to be too eagerly or confidently enjoyed, between the terror of the past and the probable dangers of a coming age.2342 The corruption of Roman virtue has justly earned the anger of gods, who no longer visit to protect, but only to avenge.2343 And, in the chaos of human affairs, the Divine justice is confused; the good suffer equally with the guilty.2344 Amid obscure and guarded utterances, we can divine that, to Tacitus, the ruling force in human fortunes is a destiny which is blind to the deserts of those who are its sport.2345 He probably held the widespread belief that the fate of each man was fixed for him at his birth, and, although he has a profound scorn for the venality and falsehood of the Chaldaean tribe, he probably had a wavering faith in the efficacy of their lore.2346 Nor did he reject miracle and supernatural portent on any ground of a scientific conception of the universe.2347 His language on such subjects is often perhaps studiously ambiguous. Sometimes he appears to report the tale of a portent, as a mere piece of vulgar superstition. But at other times, he records the marvel with no expression of scepticism.2348 And in his narrative of Otho’s death and the miracles of Vespasian, the threats of heaven which ushered in Galba’s brief reign in darkness broken by lurid lightnings, the neglected signs of the coming doom of Jerusalem, the glare of arms from contending armies in the sky, the ghostly voices, as of gods departing from the Holy of Holies, as in the tale of many another omen, dream, or oracle, the historian gives an awe and grandeur to a superstition which he does not explicitly reject.2349

Nor need we be superciliously surprised that the greatest [pg 454]master of historic tragedy, born into such an age, should have had the balance of his faith disturbed. His infancy and boyhood coincided with the last years of Nero.2350 His youthful imagination must have been disordered and inflamed by the tales, circulating in grave old Senatorial houses, of wild excess or mysterious crime on the Palatine, the daring caprice of imperial harlots, the regal power and fabulous wealth and luxury of the imperial freedmen, the lunacy of the great line which had founded the Empire, and which seemed destined to end it in shame and universal ruin. That the destinies of the world should be at the mercy of a Pallas, a Caligula, or an Agrippina was a cruel trial to any faith. The carnival of lust and carnage in which the dynasty disappeared,2351 the shock of the fierce struggle on the Po, in which the legions of the East and the West fought with demoniac force for the great prize, deepened the horrors of the tragedy and the gloomy doubts of its future historian. The dawn of a timorous hope, which broke under the calm, strong rule of Vespasian, was overcast, during the early manhood of Tacitus, by the old insanity of power which seemed to revive in the last of the Flavians. Such an experience and such an atmosphere were enough to disorder any imagination. The wild Titanic ambition in the Claudian Caesars, a strange mixture of vicious, hereditary insanity,2352 with a fevered imagination which, intoxicated with almost superhuman power, dreamt of unheard of conquests over nature, made the Julio-Claudian emperors, in the eyes of men, a race half-fiend, half-god. Men hated and loathed them, yet were ready to deify them. It did not seem unnatural that Caligula should throw a gigantic arch over the Forum, to link the imperial palace with the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol.2353 Men long refused to believe in the death of Nero, and his reappearance was expected for generations.2354 In spite of the Augustan revival, the calm, if rather formal, sanity of old Roman religion had lost its power over cultivated minds. The East, with its fatalist superstitions, its apotheosis of lofty earthly sovereignty, its enthronement of an evil power beside the good, was completing the overthrow of the national faith. The air was [pg 455]full of the lawless and the supernatural. Science, in the modern sense, was yet unborn; it was a mere rudimentary mass of random guesses, with as little right to command the reason as the legends which sprang from the same lawless imagination. Philosophic speculation in any high sense had almost disappeared. The most powerful system which still lingered, resolved the gods into mere names for the various potencies of that dim and awful Power which thrills through the universe, which fixes from the beginning the destinies of men and nations, and which deigns to shadow forth its decrees in omen or oracle. Awestruck and helpless in the face of a cruel and omnipresent despotism, with little light from accredited systems of philosophy or religion, what wonder that even the highest and most cultivated minds were darkened and bewildered, and were even ready to lend an ear to the sorcery of the mysterious East? The hesitating acceptance of the popular belief in clairvoyance hardly surprises us in a man like Tacitus, bewildered by the chaos of the Empire, and possessing few reasoned convictions in religion or philosophy. It is more surprising to find so detached a mind as Epictetus recognising in some sort the power of divination. He admits that men are driven to practise it by cowardice or selfish greed.2355 He agrees that the diviner can only predict the external changes of fortune, and that on their moral bearing, on the question whether they are really good or evil, he can throw no light. Yet even this preacher of a universal Providence, of the doctrine that our true good and happiness are in our own hands, will not altogether deny that the augur can forecast the future. We should, indeed, Epictetus says, come to consult him, without any selfish passion, as a wayfarer asks of a man whom he meets which of two roads leads to his journey’s end.2356 But the field for such guidance is limited, Where the light of reason or conscience is a sufficient guide, the diviner’s art is either useless or corrupting. Nor should any ominous signs deter a man from sharing a friend’s peril, even though the diviner may give warning of exile or death.

Next to Aristides, there is probably no writer who reveals [pg 456]so strikingly the mingled pietism and superstition of the time as Aelian. Although he preferred to compose his works in Greek, he was a native of the Latian Praeneste, that cool retreat of the wearied Roman, and the seat of the famous shrine of Fortuna Primigenia.2357 It is a disputed point whether Aelian belongs to the second century or the third. But the more probable conclusion, favoured by the authority of Suidas, is that he lived shortly after the time of Hadrian.2358 His historical Miscellanies are a good example of that uncritical treatment of history and love of the sensational which were held up to scorn by Lucian.2359 But it is in the fragments of his work on Providence, that we have the best illustration of his religious attitude. The immediate interference of the Heavenly Powers, to reward the pious believer, or to punish the defiant sceptic, is triumphantly proclaimed. Miracles, oracles, presages, and warning dreams startle the reader on every page. Aelian wages war À outrance with the effeminate and profane crew of the Epicureans, whom he would certainly have handed over pitilessly to the secular arm, if he had had the power.2360 He records with delight the physical maladies which are said to have afflicted Epicurus and his brothers, and the persecution of their sect at Messene and in Crete.2361 After the tale of some specially impressive interference of Providence, he launches ferocious anathemas at the most famous sceptics, Xenophanes, Diagoras, and Epicurus.2362 He pursues Epicurus even to the tomb, and pours all his scorn on the unbelieving voluptuary’s arrangements for biennial banquets to his shade.2363 He exults in the fate of one who, without initiation, tried to get a sight of the holy spectacle at Eleusis, and perished by falling from his secret point of observation.2364 It is needless to say that miraculous cures by Asclepius are related with the most exuberant faith. Aristarchus the tragic poet, and Theopompus the comedian, were restored from wasting and hopeless sickness by the god.2365 Another patient of the shrine had the vision, which [pg 457]was probably often a real fact, of a priest standing beside his bed in the night, bringing counsels of healing.2366 But the climax of ludicrous credulity is reached in the tale of the pious cock of Tanagra.2367 This favoured bird, being maimed in one leg, appeared before the shrine of Asclepius, holding out the injured limb, and, taking his place in the choir that sung the morning paean, begged the god for relief and healing. It came before the evening, and the grateful bird, with crest erect, with stately tread, and flapping wings, gave voice to his deliverance in his own peculiar notes of praise! The Divine vengeance is also displayed asserting itself in dreams. A traveller, stopping for the night at Megara, had been murdered for his purse of gold by the keeper of his inn, and his corpse, hidden in a dung-cart, was carried through the gates before dawn. At that very hour his wraith appeared to a citizen of the place, and told him the tale of the tragedy. The treacherous assassin was caught at the very point indicated by the ghost.2368 The last dream of Philemon is of a more pleasing kind.2369 The poet, being then in his full vigour, and in possession of all his powers, once had a vision in his home at Peiraeus. He thought he saw nine maidens leaving the house, and heard them bidding him adieu. When he awoke, he told the tale to his boy, and finished the play on which he was at work; then, wrapping himself in his cloak, he lay down to sleep, and when they came to wake him, he was dead. Aelian challenges Epicurus to deny that the maidens of the vision were the nine Muses, quitting an abode which was soon to be polluted by death.

Publius Aelius Aristides is one of the best representatives of the union of high culture with the forces of the religious revival. He saw the beginning and the end of the Antonine age. He was born in 117 A.D. at Adriani, in Mysia, where his family held a high position, his father being priest of Zeus. He received the most complete rhetorical training, and had been a pupil of Herodes Atticus. Travelling through Greece, Italy, and Egypt, and giving exhibitions of his skill in the fashion of the day,2370 Aristides won a splendid reputation, which swelled [pg 458]his vanity to proportions rare even in a class whose vanity was proverbial. He won the restoration of the ruined Smyrna from M. Aurelius, by an oration which moved the Emperor to tears.2371 With a naturally feeble constitution and epileptic tendencies, the excitement of the sophist’s life brought on an illness which lasted thirteen years. During that long ordeal, he developed a mystic superstition which, along with an ever-growing self-consciousness, inspired the Sacred Orations, which appeared in 177, long after his health had been restored. He visited many seats of sacred healing—Smyrna, Pergamum, Cyzicus, Epidaurus—and, often in a cataleptic state, between sleep and waking, he had visitations of the Higher Powers in dreams. They gave him prescriptions of the strangest remedies, along with eulogies on his unrivalled talent, which he was solemnly enjoined to devote to the celebration of his deliverance by the Divine favour.2372

Aristides zealously obeyed the Divine command. But whether his sole inspiration was simple gratitude and unsophisticated piety, crossed by superstition, as has generally been assumed, may well be doubted.2373 The truth is, that in Aristides met all the complex influences of his age, both intellectual and spiritual. He was the most elaborate product of the rhetorical school, with its cultivated mastery of phrase, its exuberant pride in the power of words, its indifference to truth, in comparison with rhetorical effect. The whole force of revived Hellenism was concentrated in this declamatory skill.2374 At the same time, the religious revival was very far from being a return to the old religion, in its clear firm outlines and simple wholeness.2375 The Zeus and Athene and Poseidon of the age of Aristides were not the divinities of the great age. Many influences had been at work to blur the clean-cut outlines of Hellenic imagination, and to sophisticate the ancestral faith both of Greece and Rome. Men wished to believe in the ancient gods, but they were no longer the gods of Homer or of Aeschylus, the gods worshipped by the men who fought [pg 459]in the Samnite or the Punic wars. Greek philosophy for eight centuries had been teaching a doctrine of one Divine force or essence, transcending the powers and limitations of sense, or immanent in the fleeting world of chance and change. Pagan theology had elaborated a celestial hierarchy, in which the Deity, removed to an infinite distance, was remotely linked to humanity by a graduated scale of inferior spiritual beings, daemons, and heroes.2376 Then came the religions of the East, with their doctrines of expiation for sin and ascetic preparation for communion, and visions of immortality. And, alongside of all these developments, there was a portentous growth of vulgar superstition, belief in dreams, omens, and oracles, in any avenue to the “Great Mystery.” Sophistic rhetoric, from its very nature and function, was bound to reflect the religious spirit of the age, in all its confusion. The ancient myths, indeed, were revived and decked out with rich poetic colouring. Yet it is not the simple, naÏve, old pagan faith which inspires the rhetorical artist. The pantheistic or theosophist doctrines, which were in the air, disturbed the antique character of the piece.2377 But the sophist, if he occasionally catches the tone of new mysticism, or even of rationalist interpretation, is nothing if not orthodox on the whole, and he anathematises the impiety of free-thinking philosophy, with the same energy as Aelian. Above all, Aristides is in harmony with the infinite faith in miracle and heavenly vision which was rife.

From whatever cause, the worship of Asclepius had attained an extraordinary popularity in the age of the Antonines.2378 The conditions of health and disease are so obscure, the influences of will and imagination on our bodily states are so marked, that, in all ages, the boundaries between the natural and the unknowable are blurred and may be easily crossed. The science of medicine, even down to the age of Hippocrates, or the age of Galen, had not abandoned all faith in the magical and mysterious.2379 Incantations long held their ground beside more scientific remedies. Health being the most precious and the most precarious of earthly blessings, it is not strange that, in an age of revived belief in the super[pg 460]natural, the god of health should attain a rank even on level with the great Olympian gods. His temples rose in every land where Greek or Roman culture prevailed. They were generally built with an eye to beauty of scenery, or the virtues of some clear, cold, ancient spring, or other health-giving powers in the site, which might reinforce the more mysterious influences of religion. And in every temple there was a hierarchy of sacred servants, who guarded a tradition of hieratic ceremonial and of medical science.2380 There was the chief priest, who may or may not have been a trained physician. There were the daduchi and pyrophori, who attended to the punctual service of the altars. There were the neocori, who were probably physicians, and who waited on the patients, interpreting their visions, and often supplementing them by other visions of their own.2381 There were also, in a lower rank, nurses, male and female, who, if we may judge from Aristides, performed the sympathetic part of our own hospital-nurses.2382 The patients came from all parts of the Graeco-Roman world. After certain offerings and rites, the sufferer took his place in the long dormitory, which often contained beds for 200 or 300, with windows open all night long to the winds of the south. The sick man brought his bed-coverings, and made his gift on the altar. The lamps were lighted in the long gallery, a priest recited the vesper prayers. At a later hour, the lights were extinguished, strict silence was enjoined, and a hope for some soothing vision from above was left as a parting gift or salutation by the minister as he retired.2383

Divination by dreams was one of the most ancient and universal of superstitions in the pagan world.2384 It was also one of the most persistent to the last days of paganism in the West. The god of Epidaurus was still visiting his votaries by night, when S. Jerome was composing his commentary on Isaiah.2385 Nor is the superstition unnatural. Sleep, the most mysterious of physical phenomena, gives birth to mental states which are a constant surprise. Thoughts and powers which are latent in the waking hours, then start into life with a strange vivid[pg 461]ness and energy. Memory and imagination operate with a force which may well, in an age of faith, be taken for inspiration. The illusion of a double personality, which results from the helplessness of the mind to react on the impressions of sense, also easily passes into the illusion of messages and promptings from powers beyond ourselves. Religious hopes and cravings may thus easily and honestly seem to be fulfilled.

But external causes also reinforced in the ancient world the deceptions of the inner spirit. The dream-oracle was generally on a site where nature might touch the awe and imagination of the votary. Few could have descended into the gloom of the cave of Trophonius without having their fancy prepared for visions.2386 Exhalations from secret chasms, as at Delphi and Lebadea, aided by the weird spells of the Nymphs who haunted such scenes, often produced a physical excitement akin to madness. Opiates and potions administered by the priests, with the effect of solemn religious rites, prepared the votary for voices from another world.2387 Soul and body were still further prepared for the touch of a Divine hand by rigorous fasting, which was enjoined as a preparatory discipline in so many mysteries of the renascent paganism.2388 The heavenly vision could only come to the clear spirit, purged as far as might be from the grossness of the flesh.2389 ??????s?? for the sake of healing became a great, and probably in the main, a beneficent institution in the temples of many deities,2390 pre-eminently in those of Isis, Serapis, and Asclepius. The temple of Serapis at Canopus in Strabo’s time was thronged by patients of the noblest rank, and was famous for its miraculous cures.2391 Among the many attributes of Queen Isis, none made a deeper impression than her benignant power of healing even the most desperate cases.2392 Her temples rose everywhere. Her dream interpreters were famous from the days of Cicero.2393 In her shrine at Smyrna Aristides had many of his most startling experiences. According to Diodorus, her priests could point to numberless proofs of the power of the great goddess to cure [pg 462]the most inveterate disease. But the great healer was, of course, Asclepius. The remains of his splendid shrine at Epidaurus are a revelation at once of his fame and power, and of the scenes and occupations in which the devout health-seekers passed their days and nights. In his temple on the island in the Tiber, dreams of healing were still sought in the time of Iamblichus. His shrine at Pergamum, which was the scene of so many of the strange visions of Aristides, in his many years of struggle with disease, was one of the most famous, and its inspired dreams were sought long afterwards by the emperor Caracalla.2394

It would be idle to speculate on the relative effects of sound medical treatment and of superstition, stimulated by more or less pious arts, upon the constitution of the sufferer. The virtues of herb or mineral drug, of regulated food and abstinence, of bathing in naturally medicated waters, above all of a continual freshness in the air, must have become a tradition in these sacred homes of the god of health. Physical disease is often rooted in moral disorder, and for such troubled, tainted souls, with hereditary poison in vein and nerve, the bright cheerfulness, the orderly calm and confidence of the ritual, which had such a charm for the soul of Plutarch, may have exorcised, for the time, many an evil spirit, and wiped out the memory of old sins. Soothed and relieved in mind and body, the sufferer lay in the dimly lighted corridor, sinking to sleep, with a confidence that the god would somehow make his power felt in visions of the night.2395 Through a sliding panel, hidden in the wall, a dim figure of gracious aspect might glide to the side of his couch, and whisper strange sweet words of comfort. But in many cases, there is no need to assume the existence of sanctified imposture.2396 A debilitated frame, nerves shattered by prolonged suffering, an imagination excited by sacred litany, ghostly counsels and tales of miracle, the all-pervading atmosphere of an immemorial faith, may easily have engendered visions which seemed to come from another world.2397

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But from whatever source the visions came, they had a powerful effect on the imagination, and, through that, on the bodily health. Some of the prescriptions indeed given by these voices of the night may seem to us ludicrous or positively dangerous.2398 But the tone and surroundings of these shrines, and the sense of being encompassed by Divine as well as human sympathy, probably counteracted any ill effects of quackery. The calm, serene order, which the hieratic spirit cultivates at its best, the cheerful routine of the sacred service, blending indistinguishably with the ministry to suffering, and consecrating and ennobling it, the confidence inspired by the sedate cheerfulness of the priests and attendants, reinforced by the countless cases of miraculous cures recorded on the walls,2399—all this must have had a powerful and beneficent influence. And the visitors were not all invalids. The games and festivals drew together many merely for society and amusement. The theatre at Epidaurus must have provided constant entertainment for a far larger concourse than the patients of the temple.2400 A healthy regimen, which is abundantly attested,2401 with the charms of art and surrounding beauties of hill and woodland, tended of themselves to restore peace and balance to disordered nerves. And the social life, especially to Greeks, was probably the most potent influence of all. We can see from Aristides that troublesome cases were watched by a circle of curious sympathisers.2402 In those marble seats, which can still be seen on the site, many a group, through many generations, must have sat listening to music or recitation, or discussing high themes of life and death, or amused with the more trivial gossip of all gatherings of men.

Amid such scenes Aristides spent thirteen years of the prime of his manhood. With all the egotism of the self-pitying invalid, he has recorded the minutest details of his ailments. He seems to have been disordered in every organ, dropsical, asthmatic, dyspeptic, with a tumour of portentous size, and agonising pains which reduced him to the extremity of weakness.2403 But the extraordinary toughness and vitality [pg 464]of the man is even more striking than his sufferings. Aristides regarded health as the greatest of all blessings, the condition on which the value of all other blessings depends. And he acted on the belief. His hundred days journey to Rome is a miracle of endurance.2404 Racked with fever and asthma, unable to take any food except milk, he struggled along, alternately through plains turned into lakes, or across the frozen Hebrus, amid storm or rain or freezing cold.

The effects of this journey in aggravated suffering from asthma, dropsy, nervous agony, are described with painful vividness. They were dealt with by the Roman surgeons in a fashion which makes one wonder how the patient survived such laceration.2405 The invalid hastened home to Asia by sea. The voyage was long and weary, a very Odyssey of storm and wandering. Aristides reached Smyrna in mid-winter, and all the physicians were puzzled to find any alleviation for his troubles.2406 Henceforth he passed, for thirteen years, from one temple to another, at the bidding of the gods—from Smyrna to Pergamum, or Chios, or Cyzicus, or Epidaurus—enduring often frightful hardships by land or sea. The description of his sufferings sometimes excites the suspicion that a warm imagination and the vanity of the literary artist have heightened the effect. A tumour of monstrous size,2407 agonies of palpitation and breathlessness, the torture of dyspepsia, vertigo, and neuralgia which doubled up his limbs, and seemed to bend the spine outward like a bow2408—these are only a few of the morbid horrors which afflicted him.

The divine prescriptions were often as astounding as the malady was severe. Fresh air, exercise, bathing in the sacred wells, fasting and abstinence, indeed, may often have been sound treatment. But to these were added astonishing prescriptions of food or drugs, purgings and blood-letting which drained the body of its slight remaining strength, and which horrified the attendant physicians.2409 But these were [pg 465]not the worst. Again and again, Aristides was enjoined, when in a high fever, to bathe two or three times in an ice-cold river running in full flood, and then race a mile at full speed in the face of a northerly gale. He obeyed in spite of all remonstrance, and the doctors and his anxious friends could only follow him to await the result of such extraordinary remedies. Strange to relate, their fears and forebodings proved groundless. Religious excitement, combined with immense vanity and a strange vitality, carried Aristides victoriously through these ordeals,2410 and his friends received him at their close, with an indescribable genial warmth spreading through his whole body, and a lightness and cheerfulness of spirit which more than rewarded him for these strange hardships of superstition.

The faith of Aristides must have been very robust. His tortures lasted for nearly thirteen years, during which the divine prescriptions only seemed to add to their poignancy. But he was upheld by the belief that he was a special object of the Divine favour, and he persistently followed Divine recipes, which ordinary human skill and prudence would have rejected. No doubts, such as troubled his attendants, ever crossed his mind. How far his illness was prolonged by this obstinate adherence to the illusions of sleep and superstition,2411 in the face of expert advice, is a matter on which it would be useless to speculate. It is probable that the imagination and exuberant vanity of Aristides made him a more difficult patient than the ordinary people who frequented these shrines of healing. It is also evident that there was a body of more or less skilled medical opinion connected with the cult of Asclepius. Practical physicians came to the temples,2412 with the benevolence and the curiosity of their craft in all ages, to observe and study, or to advise a cautious interpretation of the revelations of the night. Aristides has preserved the names of some—Theodotus, Asclepiacus, and Satyrus. Long observation of the freaks of individual temperament and constitution must have suggested to thoughtful minds, with some instincts of scientific method, that the supernatural vision should be interpreted in the light of experience. An awful dream of Aristides that all his bones [pg 466]and sinews must be excised, turned, in the hands of a faithful attendant, into a prediction of renewed vitality.2413 And although some of the nurses, to whom he is so grateful, confirmed his visions by precisely similar revelations of their own,2414 others, of the more skilled physicians, openly blamed his too confident reliance on his dreams, and his unwillingness to try the effect of more scientific treatment.2415 Their proposals, however, were sometimes so severe and heroic that we may excuse him for preferring on the whole the more patient and gentle methods of the god. The sufferer was sometimes favoured with epiphanies of Athene, Apollo, Serapis, and other great divinities, exalting him far above the rank of common votaries.2416 And Asclepius himself, to whom his special devotion was given, not only lightened his physical tortures, although after long years, but endowed him with hitherto unknown powers of rhetorical skill and readiness. The god became the patron of his whole professional life.2417 And Aristides regarded him as the source of fresh inspiration, in the exercise of that wordcraft of which he was the greatest master in his time. It is not hard to discern the meaning of this self-deception. Before Aristides began to visit the temples of the god, he was already a finished rhetor, possessed of all the skill which the Greek schools could impart.2418 Prostrated by bodily suffering for years, cut off from that life of brilliant display, which was so lavishly rewarded by applauding crowds, the vain and ambitious declaimer had lost not only his bodily health, but all the joy and excitement of rhetorical triumph. Suddenly he found his balance restored; the tide of energy returned to its old channels. He could once more draw music from the almost forgotten instrument. He had once more the full lecture-hall under his spell. What wonder that he should feel his powers redoubled when they were recovered, and that he should regard the god who had healed his bodily ailments as the author of a fresh literary inspiration?

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