Chapter VII: "gods or Atoms?" (2)

The uppermost row contains his account of his purpose and something upon old age--very fragmentary. There follow a letter of Epicurus to his mother, and another letter from some one unidentified to one Menneas, and then a series of apophthegms and sentences. Thus fragment 27 is a column of ten lines to this effect: "Nothing is so contributive to good spirits, as not to do many things, nor take in hand tiresome matters, nor force oneself in any way beyond one's own strength, for all these things perturb nature." Another column proclaims: "Acute {219} pains cannot be long; for either they quickly destroy life and are themselves destroyed with it, or they receive some abatement of their acuteness." These platitudes are, as we may guess, an afterthought.

The middle row, the first to be inscribed, deals with the Epicurean theory of atoms--not by apophthegm or aphorism, but with something of the fulness and technicality of a treatise. "Herakleitos of Ephesus, then, said fire was the element; Thales of Miletus water; Diogenes of Apollonia and Anaximenes air; Empedocles of Agrigentum both fire and air and water and earth; Anaxagoras of Clazomenae the homoeomeries of each thing in particular; those of the Stoa matter and God. But Democritus of Abdera said atomic natures--and he did well; but since he made some mistakes about them, these will be set right in our opinions. So now we will accuse the persons mentioned, not from any feeling of illwill against them, but wishing the truth to be saved (_sothenai_)." So he takes them in turn and argues at leisure. The large fragment 45 discusses astronomy in its four columns--in particular, the sun and its apparent distance and its nature. Fr. 48 (four columns) goes on to treat of civilization,--of the development of dress from leaves to skins and woven garments, without the intervention "of any other god or of Athena either." Need and time did all. Hermes did not invent language. In fr. 50, we read that Protagoras "said he did not know if there are gods. That is the same thing as saying he knew there are not." Fr. 51 deals with death--"thou hast even persuaded me to laugh at it. For I am not a whit afraid because of the Tityos-es and Tantalus-es, whom some people paint in Hades, nor do I dread decay, reflecting that the [something] of the body ... [three broken lines] ... nor anything else." At the end of the row another letter begins (fr. 56) "[Diogen]es to Anti[pater] greeting." He writes from Rhodes, he says, just before winter begins, to friends in Athens and elsewhere, whom he would like to see. Though away from his country, he knows he can do more for it in this way than by taking part in political life. He wishes to show that "that which is convenient to Nature, viz. Ataraxia is the same for all." He is now "at the sunset of life," and all but departing; so, since most men, as in a pestilence, are diseased with false opinion, which is very infectious, he wishes {220} "to help those that shall be after us; for they too are ours, even if they are not yet born"; and strangers too. "I wished to make use of this colonnade and to set forth in public the medicine of salvation" (_ta tes soterias protheinai pharmaka_, fr. 58). The idle fears that oppressed him, he has shaken off; as to pains--empty ones he has abolished utterly, and the rest are reduced to the smallest compass. He bewails the life of men, wasted as it is, and weeps for it; and he has "counted it a good man's part" to help men as far as he can. That is why he has thought of this inscription which may enable men to obtain "joy with good spirits" (_te_[_s met' euthu_]_mias chara_[_s_]), rather than of a theatre or a bath or anything else of the kind, such as rich men would often build for their fellow-citizens (fr. 59).

The discussion which follows in the third series of columns need not here detain us. Diogenes appeals for its consideration--that it may not merely be glanced at in passing (fr. 61, col. 3); but it will suffice us at present to note his statement that his object is "that life may become pleasant to us" (fr. 63, col. 1), and his protest--"I will swear, both now and always, crying aloud to all, Greeks and barbarians, that pleasure is the objective of the best mode of life, while the virtues, which these people now unseasonably meddle with (for they shift them from the region of the contributive to that of the objective) are by no means an objective, but contributive to the objective" (fr. 67, col. 2, 3). Lastly we may notice his reference to the improvement made in the theory of Democritus by the discovery of Epicurus of the swerve inherent in the atoms (fr. 81).

Altogether the inscription is as singular a monument of antiquity as we are likely to find. What the fellow-citizens of Diogenes thought of it, we do not know. Perhaps they might have preferred the bath or other commonplace gift of the ordinary rich man. It is a pity that Lucian did not see the colonnade.

Side by side with Lucian, Sextus and Diogenes it is interesting to consider their contemporaries who were not of their opinion.

Perhaps, while the stone-masons were day by day carving up the long inscription at Oinoanda, others of their trade were {221} busy across the AEgaean with one of another character. At any rate, the inscription which M. Julius Apellas set up in the temple of Asklepios in Epidauros, belongs to this period. Like Diogenes, he is not afraid of detail.

[Sidenote: Marcus Julius Apellas]

"In the priesthood of Poplius AElius Antiochus.

"I, Marcus Julius Apellas of Idrias and Mylasa, was sent for by the God, for I was a chronic invalid and suffered from dyspepsia. In the course of my journey the God told me in AEgina not to be so irritable. When I reached the Temple, he directed me to keep my head covered for two days; and for these two days it rained. I was to eat bread and cheese, parsley with lettuce, to wash myself without help, to practise running, to drink citron-lemonade, to rub my body on the sides of the bath in the bath-room, to take walks in the upper portico, to use the trapeze, to rub myself over with sand, to go with bare feet in the bath-room, to pour wine into the hot water before I got in, to wash myself without help, and to give an Attic drachma to the bath-attendant, to offer in public sacrifices to Asklepios, Epione and the Eleusinian goddesses, and to take milk with honey. When for one day I had drunk milk alone, the god said to put honey in the milk to make it digestible.

"When I called upon the god to cure me more quickly, I thought it was as if I had anointed my whole body with mustard and salt, and had come out of the sacred hall and gone in the direction of the bath-house, while a small child was going before holding a smoking censer. The priest said to me: 'Now you are cured, but you must pay up the fees for your treatment.' I acted according to the vision, and when I rubbed myself with salt and moistened mustard, I felt the pain still, but when I had bathed, I suffered no longer. These events took place in the first nine days after I had come to the Temple. The god also touched my right hand and my breast.

"The following day as I was offering sacrifice, a flame leapt up and caught my hand, so as to cause blisters. Yet after a little my hand was healed.

"As I prolonged my stay in the Temple, the god told me to use dill along with olive-oil for my head-aches. Formerly I had not suffered from head-aches, but my studies had brought {222} on congestion. After I used the olive-oil, I was cured of head-aches. For swollen glands the god told me to use a cold gargle, when I consulted him about it, and he ordered the same treatment for inflamed tonsils.

"He bade me inscribe this treatment, and I left the Temple in good health and full of gratitude to the god."[51]

[Sidenote: Pausanias]

Pausanias speaks of "the buildings erected in our time by Antoninus a man of the Conscript Senate"--a Roman Senator in fact,[52]--in honour of Asklepios at Epidauros, a bath, three temples, a colonnade, and "a house where a man may die, and a woman lie in, without sin," for these actions were not "holy" within the sanctuary precincts, and had had to be done in the open air hitherto.

A more conspicuous patient of Asklepios is AElius Aristides, the rhetorician. This brilliant and hypochondriacal person spent years in watching his symptoms and consulting the god about them. Early in his illness the god instructed him to record its details, and he obeyed with zest, though in after years he was not always able to record the minuter points with complete clearness. He was bidden to make speeches, to rub himself over with mud, to plunge into icy water, to ride, and, once, to be bled to the amount of 120 litres. As the human body does not contain anything like that amount of blood, and as the temple servants knew of no one ever having been "cut" to that extent--"at least except Ischyron, and his was one of the most remarkable cases," the god was not taken literally.[53] The regular plan was to sleep in the Temple, as already mentioned, and the god came. "The impression was that one could touch him, and perceive that he came in person; as if one were between asleep and awake, and wished to look out and were in an agony lest he should depart too soon,--as if one held one's ear and listened--sometimes as in a dream, and then as in a waking vision--one's hair was on end, and tears of joy were shed, and one felt light-hearted. And who among {223} men could set this forth in words? Yet if there is one of the initiated, he knows and recognises [what I say]."[54]

None of the cases yet quoted can compare with the miracles of ancient days to be read in the inscriptions about the place--stories of women with child for three and five years, of the extraordinary surgery of the god, cutting off the head of a dropsical patient, holding him upside down to let the water run out and putting the head on again,--a mass of absurdities hardly to be matched outside _The Glories of Mary_. They make Lucian's _Philopseudes_ seem tame.

There were other gods, beside Asklepios, who gave oracles in shrine and dream. Pausanias the traveller has left a book on Greece and its antiquities, temples, gods and legends of extraordinary value. "A man made of common stuff and cast in a common mould," as Dr Frazer characterizes him,--and therefore the more representative--he went through Greece with curious eyes and he saw much that no one else has recorded. At Sparta stood the only temple he knew of which had an upper story. In this upper story was an image of Aphrodite Morpho fettered[55]--a silly thing he thought it to fetter a cedar-wood doll. He particularly visited Phigalea, because of the "Black Demeter"--a curious enough image she had been, though by then destroyed.[56] He was initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries.[57] He tells us that the stony remnants of the lump of clay from which Prometheus fashioned the first man were still preserved,[58] and that the sceptre which Hephaistos made for Agamemnon received a daily sacrifice in Chaeronea, Plutarch's city--"a table is set beside it covered with all sorts of flesh and cakes."[59] He has many such stories. He tells us too about a great many oracles of his day, of which that of Amphilochus at Mallus in Cilicia" is the most infallible"[60]--a curiously "suggestive superlative (_apseudestation_). He is greatly {224} interested in Asklepios, but for our present purpose a few sentences from his elaborate account of the ceremony with which Trophonius is consulted at Lebadea must suffice.

After due rites the inquirer comes to the oracle, in a linen tunic with ribbons, and boots of the country. Inside bronze railings is a pit of masonry, some four ells across and eight deep, and he goes down into it by means of a light ladder brought for the occasion. At the bottom he finds a hole, a very narrow one. "So he lays himself on his back on the ground, and holding in his hand barley cakes kneaded with honey, he thrusts his feet first into the hole, and follows himself endeavouring to get his knees through the hole. When they are through, the rest of his body is immediately dragged after them and shoots in, just as a man might be caught and dragged down by the swirl of a mighty and rapid river. Once they are inside the shrine the future is not revealed to all in one and the same way, but to one it is given to see and to another to hear. They return through the same aperture feet foremost.... When a man has come up from Trophonius, the priests take him in hand again, and set him on what is called the chair of Memory, which stands not far from the shrine; and, being seated there, he is questioned by them as to all he saw and heard. On being informed, they hand him over to his friends who carry him, still overpowered with fear, and quite unconscious of himself and his surroundings, to the building where he lodged before, the house of Good Fortune and the Good Daemon. Afterwards, however, he will have all his wits as before, and the power of laughter will come back to him. I write not from mere hearsay: I have myself consulted Trophonius and have seen others who have done so. All who have gone down to Trophonius are obliged to set up a tablet containing a record of all they heard and saw."[61]

A man who has been through such an experience may be excused for believing much. While Pausanias kept his Greek habit of criticism and employs it on occasional myths and traditions, and particularly on stories of hell--though the fact of punishment after death he seems to accept--yet his travels and his inquiries made an impression on him. "When I began this work, I used to look on these Greek stories as little better {225} than foolishness; but now that I have got as far as Arcadia, my opinion about them is this: I believe that the Greeks who were accounted wise spoke of old in riddles, and not straight out; and, accordingly, I conjecture that this story about Cronos [swallowing a foal instead of his child] is a bit of Greek philosophy. In matters of religion I will follow tradition."[62]

[Sidenote: Artemidorus of Daldia]

Pausanias mentions several oracles and temples of Apollo in Greece and Asia Minor--one obscure local manifestation of the god he naturally enough omitted, but a fellow-citizen of the god preserves it. "It was in obedience to him, the god of my land, that I undertook this treatise. He often urged me to it, and in particular appeared visibly to me (_enargos epiotanti_),[63] since I knew thee, and all but ordered me to write all this. No wonder that the Daldian Apollo, whom we call by the ancestral name of Mystes, urged me to this, in care for thy worth and wisdom, for there is an old friendship between Lydians and Phoenicians, as they tell us who set forth the legends of the land."[64] So writes Artemidorus to his friend Cassius Maximus of his treatise on the scientific interpretation of dreams--a work of which he is very proud. "Wonder not," he says, "at the title, that the name stands Artemidorus Daldianus, and not 'of Ephesus,' as on many of the books I have already written on other subjects. For Ephesus, it happens, is famous on her own account, and she has many men of note to proclaim her. But Daldia is a town of Lydia of no great renown, and, as she has had no such men, she has remained unknown till my day. So I dedicate this to her, my native-place on the mother's side, as a parent's due _threpteria_."[65]

Marcus Aurelius records his gratitude "that remedies have been shown to me by dreams, both others, and against blood-spitting and giddiness."[66] Plutarch, Pausanias, Aristides--dreams {226} come into the scheme of things divine with all the devout of our period. Artemidorus is their humble brother--not the first to give a whole book to dreams, but proud to be a pioneer in the really scientific treatment of them--"the accuracy of the judgments, that is the thing for which, even by itself, I think highly of myself."[67] The critic may take it "that I too am quite capable of neologisms and persuasive rhetoric (_ehuresilogein kai pithaneuthai_), but I have not undertaken all this for theatrical effect or to please the speech-mongers; I appeal throughout to experience, as canon and witness of my words," and he begs his readers neither to add to his books nor take anything away.[68] His writing is, as he says, quite free from "the stage and tragedy style."

Artemidorus takes himself very seriously. "For one thing, there is no book on the interpretation of dreams that I have not acquired, for I had great enthusiasm for this; and, in the next place, though the prophets (_manteon_) in the market-place are much slandered, and called beggars and quacks and humbugs by the gentlemen of solemn countenance and lifted eye-brows, I despised the slander and for many years I have associated with them--both in Greece, in cities and at festivals, and in Asia, and in Italy, and in the largest and most populous of the islands, consenting to hear ancient dreams and their results."[69] This patient research has resulted in principles of classification.[70] There are dreams that merely repeat what a man is doing (_enuphnia_); and others (_oneipoi_) which are prophetic. These last fall into two classes--theorematic dreams, as when a man dreams of a voyage, and wakes to go upon a voyage, and allegoric dreams. The latter adjective has a great history in regions more august, but the allegoric method is the same everywhere, as an illustration will show. A man dreamed he saw Charon playing at counters with another man, whom he called away on business; Charon grew angry and chased him, till he ran for refuge into an inn called {227} "The Camel," and bolted the door, whereupon "the daemon" went away, but one of the man's thighs sprouted with grass. Shortly after this dream he had his thigh broken--the one and sole event foretold. For Charon and the counters meant death, but Charon did not catch him, so it was shown that he would not die; but his foot was threatened, since he was pursued. The name of the inn hinted at the thigh, because of the anatomy of a camel's thigh; and the grass meant disuse of the limb, for grass only grows where the earth is left at rest.[71] The passage is worth remembering whenever we meet the word allegory and its derivatives in contemporary literature. Artemidorus has five books of this stuff--the last two dedicated to his son, and containing instances "that will make you a better interpreter of dreams than all, or at least inferior to none; but, if published, they will show you know no more than the rest."[72] The sentence suggests science declining into profession.

[Sidenote: Apuleius]

Far more brilliant, more amusing and more attractive than any of these men, whom we have considered since we left Lucian, is Apuleius of Madaura. Rhetorician, philosopher and man of science, a story-teller wavering between Boccaccio and Hans Andersen, he is above all a stylist, a pietist and a humorist. For his history we depend upon himself, and this involves us in difficulties; for, while autobiography runs through two of his works, one of these is an elaboration of a defence he made on a charge of magic and the other is a novel of no discoverable class but its own, and through both runs a vein of nonsense, which makes one chary of being too literal.

The novel is the _Golden Ass_--that at least is what St Augustine tells us the author called it.[73] Passages from this have been seriously used as sources of information as to the author. But there is another _Ass_, long attributed to Lucian though probably not Lucian's, and in each case the hero tells the tale in the first person, and the co-incidences between the Greek and the Latin make it obvious that there is some {228} literary connexion between them, whatever it is. The scene is Greece and Thessaly, but not the Greece and Thessaly of geography, any more than the maritime Bohemia of Shakespeare. Yet in the last book Apuleius seems to have forgotten "Lucius of Patrae" and to be giving us experiences of his own which have nothing to do with the hero of the _Ass_, Greek or Latin.

[Sidenote: The _Apology_ of Apuleius]

In the _Apology_ he comes closer to his own career and he tells us about himself. Here he does not venture on the delightful assertion that he is the descendant of the great Plutarch, as the hero of the _Ass_ does, but avows that, as his native place is on the frontiers of Numidia and Gaetulia, he calls himself "half Numidian and half Gaetulian"--just as Cyrus the Greater was "half Mede and half Persian." His city is "a most splendid colony," and his father held in turn all its magistracies, and he hopes not to be unworthy of him.[74] He and his brother inherited two million sesterces, though he has lessened his share "by distant travel and long studies and constant liberalities."[75] Elsewhere he tells us definitely that he was educated at Athens.[76] Everybody goes to the _litterator_ for his rudiments, to the grammarian next and then to the rhetorician--"but I drank from other vessels at Athens," so "Empedocles frames songs, Plato dialogues, Socrates hymns, Epicharmus measures, Xenophon histories, Xenocrates satires; your Apuleius does all these and cultivates the nine Muses with equal zeal--with more will, that is, than skill."[77]

Like many brilliant men of his day he took to the strolling life of the rhetorician, going from city to city and giving displays of his powers of language, extemporizing wonderful combinations of words. Either he himself or some other admirer made a collection of elegant extracts from these exhibition-speeches, still extant under the title of _Florida_. His fame to-day rests on other works. In the course of his travels he came to Oea in his native-land, and there married the widowed mother of a fellow-student of his Athenian days. Her late husband's family resented the marriage; and affecting to believe that her affections had been gained by {229} some sort of witchcraft, they prosecuted Apuleius on a charge of magic. The charge was in itself rather a serious one, though Apuleius made light of it. His defence is an interesting document for the glimpses it gives into North African society, with its Greek, Latin, and Punic elements. The younger stepson has fallen into bad hands; "he never speaks except in Punic,--a little Greek, perhaps, surviving from what he learnt of his mother; Latin he neither will nor can speak."[78] On family life, on marriage customs, on the registration of births (c. 89);--on the personal habits of the defendant, his toothpowder (and a verse he made in its praise) and his looking-glass, we gain curious information. Above all the speech sheds great light on the inter-relations of magic and religion in contemporary thought. A few points may be noticed.

What, asks the prosecution, is the meaning of this curious interest Apuleius has in fish? It is zoological, says Apuleius; I have written books on fish, both in Greek and Latin,--and dissected them. That curious story, too, of the boy falling down in his presence? As to that, Apuleius knows all about divination by means of boys put under magical influence; he has read of it, of course, but he does not know whether to believe or not; "I do think with Plato," he owns to the court (or to his readers), "that between gods and men, in nature and in place intermediary, there are certain divine powers, and these preside over all divinations and the miracles of magicians. Nay, more, I have the fancy that the human soul, particularly the simple soul of a boy, might, whether by evocation of charm or by mollification of odour, be laid to sleep, and so brought out of itself into oblivion of things present, and for a brief space, all memory of the body put away, it might be restored and returned to its own nature, which is indeed immortal and divine, and thus, in a certain type of slumber, foretell the future."[79] As for the boy in question, however, he is so ricketty that it would take a magician to keep him standing.

Then those mysterious "somethings" which Apuleius keeps {230} wrapped up in a napkin? "I have been initiated in many of the mysteries of Greece. Certain symbols and memorials of these, given to me by the priests, I sedulously preserve. I say nothing unusual, nothing unknown. To take one instance, those among you who are _mystae_ of Father Liber [Bacchus] know what it is you keep laid away at home, and worship in secret, far from all profane eyes. Now, I, as I said, from enthusiasm for truth and duty toward the gods, I have learnt many sacred mysteries, very many holy rites, and divers ceremonies"--the audience will remember he said as much three years ago in his now very famous speech about AEsculapius--"then could it seem strange to anyone, who has any thought of religion, that a man, admitted to so many divine mysteries, should keep certain emblems of those holy things at home, and wrap them in linen, the purest covering for things divine?" Some men--the prosecutor among them--count it mirth to mock things divine; no, he goes to no temple, has never prayed, will not even put his hand to his lips when he passes a shrine,--why! he has not so much as an anointed stone or a garlanded bough on his farm.[80]

One last flourish may deserve quotation. If you can prove, says Apuleius, any material advantage accruing to me from my marriage, "then write me down the great Carmendas or Damigeron or _his_ ... Moses or Jannes or Apollobeches or Dardanus himself, or anyone else from Zoroaster and Ostanes downwards who has been famous among magicians."[81] Several of these names occur in other authors,[82] but the corruption is more interesting. Has some comparative fallen out, or does _his_ conceal another name? Is it _ihs_, in fact,--a reference to Jesus analogous to the suggestion of Celsus that he too was a magician?

The philosophical works of Apuleius need not detain us, but a little space may be spared to his book _On the God of Socrates_, where he sets forth in a clear and vivid way that doctrine of daemonic beings, which lies at the heart of ancient {231} religion, pre-eminently in this period, from Plutarch onwards. His presentment is substantially the same as Plutarch's, but crisper altogether, and set forth in the brilliant rhetoric, to which the Greek did not aspire, and from which the African could not escape, nor indeed wished to escape.

Plato, he says, classifies the gods in three groups, distinguished by their place in the universe.[83] Of the celestial gods some we can see--sun, moon and stars[84] (on which, like a true rhetorician, he digresses into some fine language, which can be omitted). Others the mind alone can grasp (_intellectu eos rimabundi contemplamur_)--incorporeal natures, animate, with neither beginning nor end, eternal before and after, exempt from contagion of body; in perfect intellect possessing supreme beatitude; good, but not by participation of any extraneous good, but from themselves. Their father, lord and author of all things, free from every nexus of suffering or doing--him Plato, with celestial eloquence and language commensurate with the immortal gods, has declared to be, in virtue of the ineffable immensity of his incredible majesty, beyond the poverty of human speech or definition--while even to the sages themselves, when by force of soul they have removed themselves from the body, the conception of God comes, like a flash of light in thick darkness--a flash only, and it is gone.[85]

At the other extremity of creation are men--"proud in reason, loud in speech, immortal of soul, mortal of member, in mind light and anxious, in body brute and feeble, divers in character, in error the same, in daring pervicacious, in hope, pertinacious, of vain toil, of frail fortune, severally mortal, generally continuous, mutable in the succession of offspring, time fleeting, wisdom lingering, death swift and life querulous, so they live."[86] Between such beings and the gods, contact cannot be. "To whom then shall I recite prayers? to whom tender vows? to whom slay victim? on whom shall I call, to {232} help the wretched, to favour the good, to counter the evil? .... What thinkest thou? Shall I swear 'by Jove the stone' (_per Iovem lapidem_) after the most ancient manner of Rome? Yet if Plato's thought be true, that never god and man can meet, the stone will hear me more easily than Jupiter."[87]

"Nay, not so far--(for Plato shall answer, the thought is his, if mine the voice) not so far, he saith, do I pronounce the gods to be sejunct and alienate from us, as to think that not even our prayers can reach them. Not from the care of human affairs, but from contact, have I removed them. But there are certain mediary divine powers, between aether above and earth beneath, situate in that mid space of air, by whom our desires and our deserts reach the gods. These the Greeks call daemons, carriers between human and heavenly, hence of prayers, thence of gifts; back and forth they fare, hence with petition, thence with sufficiency, interpreters and bringers of salvation."[88] To cut short this flow of words, the daemons are, as is familiar to us by now, authors of divination of all kinds, each in its province. It would ill fit the majesty of the gods to send a dream to Hannibal or to soften the whetstone for Attius Navius--these are the functions of the intermediate spirits.[89] Justin's explanation of the theophanies of the Old Testament may recur to the reader's mind, and not unjustly.[90]

The daemons are framed of a purer and rarer matter than we, "of that purest liquid of air, of that serene element," invisible therefore to us unless of their divine will they choose to be seen.[91] From their ranks come those "haters and lovers" of men, whom the poets describe as gods--they feel pity and indignation, pain and joy and "every feature of the human mind"; while the gods above "are lords ever of one state in eternal equability," and know no passions of any kind. The daemons share _their_ immortality and _our_ passion. Hence we may accept the local diversities of religious cult, rites nocturnal or diurnal, victims, ceremonies and ritual sad or gay, Egyptian {233} or Greek,--neglect of these things the daemons resent, as we learn in dream and oracle.

The human soul, too, is "a daemon in a body"--the _Genius_ of the Latins. From this we may believe that after death souls good and bad become good and bad ghosts--_Lares_ and _Lemures_--and even gods, such as "Osiris in Egypt and AEsculapius everywhere."[92] Higher still are such daemons as Sleep and Love, and of this higher kind Plato supposes our guardian spirits to be--"spectators and guardians of individual men, never seen, ever present, arbiters not merely of all acts, but of all thoughts," and after death witnesses for or against us. Of such was Socrates' familiar daemon. Why should not we too live after the model of Socrates, studying philosophy and obeying our daemon?

[Sidenote: _The Golden Ass_]

The _Golden Ass_ is the chief work of Apuleius. _Lector intende; laetaberis_, he says in ending his short preface, and he judged his work aright. The hero, Lucius, is a man with an extravagant interest in magic, and he puts himself in the way of hearing the most wonderful stories of witchcraft and enchantment. Apuleius tells them with the utmost liveliness and humour. Magical transformations, the vengeance of witches, the vivification of waterskins--one tale comes crowding after another, real and vivid, with the most alarming and the most amusing details. For example, we are told by an eye-witness (like everybody else in the book he is a master-hand at story-telling) how he saw witches by night cut the throat of his friend, draw out the heart and plug the hole with a sponge; how terrified he was of the hags to begin with, and then lest he should himself be accused of the murder; how the man rose and went on his journey--somewhat wearily, it is true; and how, as they rested, he stooped to drink, the sponge fell out and he was dead.

Lucius meddles with the drugs of a witch, and, wishing to transform himself to a bird, by the ill-luck of using the wrong box he becomes an ass. He is carried off by robbers, and, while he has the most varied adventures of his own, he is enabled to record some of the most gorgeous exploits that {234} brigands ever told one another in an ass's hearing.[93] What is more, a young girl is captured and held to ransom, and to comfort her for a little, the old woman who cooks the robbers' food--"a witless and bibulous old hag"--tells her a story--"such a pretty little tale," that the ass, who is listening, wishes he had pen and paper to take it down. For, while in aspect Lucius is an ass, his mind remains human--human enough to reflect sometimes what "a genuine ass" he is--and his skin has not, he regrets, the proper thickness of true ass-hide. The tale which he would like to write down is _Cupid and Psyche_. "_Erant in quadam civitate_," begins the old woman--"There were in a certain city a king and a queen."

The old and universal fairy-tales of the invisible husband, the cruel sisters, and the impossible quests are here woven together and brought into connexion with the Olympic pantheon, and through all runs a slight thread, only here and there visible, of allegory. But if Psyche is at times the soul, and if the daughter she bears to Cupid is Pleasure, the fairy-tale triumphs gloriously over the allegory, and remains the most wonderful thing of the kind in Latin. Here, and in the _Golden Ass_ in general, the extraordinarily embroidered language of Apuleius is far more in keeping than in his philosophic writings. His hundreds of diminutives and neologisms, his antitheses, alliterations, assonances, figures and tropes, his brilliant invention, his fun and humour, here have full scope and add pleasure to every fresh episode of the fairy-tale and of the larger and more miscellaneous tale of adventure in which it is set--in the strangest setting conceivable. Cupid and Psyche is his own addition to the story of the Ass--quite irrelevant, and like many other irrelevant things in books an immense enrichment.

Another development of the original story which is similarly due to Apuleius alone is the climax in the last book. The ass, in the Greek story, becomes a man by eating roses. In the Latin, Lucius, weary of the life of an ass, finds himself by moonlight on the seashore near Corinth, and amid "the silent {235} secrets of opaque night," he reflects that "the supreme goddess rules in transcendent majesty and governs human affairs by her providence." So he addresses a rather too eloquent prayer to the Queen of Heaven under her various possible names, Ceres, Venus, Diana and Proserpine. He then falls asleep, and at once "lo! from mid sea, uplifting a countenance venerable even to gods, emerges a divine form. Gradually the vision, gleaming all over, and shaking off the sea, seemed to stand before me." A crown of flowers rests on her flowing hair. Glittering stars, the moon, flowers and fruits, are wrought into her raiment, which shimmers white and yellow and red as the light falls upon it. In one hand is a sistrum, in the other a golden vessel shaped like a boat, with an asp for its handle.[94] She speaks.

[Sidenote: Isis]

"Lo! I come in answer, Lucius, to thy prayers, I mother of Nature, mistress of all the elements, initial offspring of ages, chief of divinities, queen of the dead, first of the heavenly ones, in one form expressing all gods and goddesses. I rule with my rod the bright pinnacles of heaven, the healthful breezes of the sea, the weeping silence of the world below. My sole godhead, in many an aspect, with many a various rite, and many a name, all the world worships." Some of these names she recites, and then declares her "true name, Queen Isis."[95] The next day is her festival, she says, and her priest, taught by her in a dream, will tender Lucius the needful roses; he will eat and be a man again. But hereafter all his life must be devoted to the goddess, and then in the Elysian fields he shall see her again, shining amid the darkness of Acheron, propitious to him.

The next day all falls as predicted. The procession of Isis is elaborately described.[96] The prelude of the pomp is a series of men dressed in various characters,--one like a soldier, another like a woman, others like a gladiator, a philospher and so forth. There is a tame bear dressed like a woman, and a monkey "in a Phrygian garment of saffron." Then come women in white, crowned with flowers, some with mirrors hanging on their backs, some carrying ivory combs. Men and women follow with torches and lamps; then a choir of {236} youths in white, singing a hymn, and fluteplayers dedicated to Serapis. After this a crowd of initiates of both sexes, of every age and degree, dressed in white linen and carrying sistra,--the men with shaven heads. Then came five chief priests with emblems, and after them the images of the gods borne by other priests--Anubis with his dog's head, black and gold--after him the figure of a cow "the prolific image of the all-mother goddess" ("which one of this blessed ministry bore on his shoulder, with mimicking gait")--then an image of divinity, like nothing mortal, an ineffable symbol, worthy of all veneration for its exquisite art. At this point came the priest with the promised roses--"my salvation"--and Lucius ate and was a man again. The priest, in a short homily, tells him he has now reached the haven of quiet; Fortune's blindness has no more power over him; he is taken to the bosom of a Fortune who can see, who can illuminate even the other gods. Let him rejoice and consecrate his life to the goddess, undertake her warfare and become her soldier.[97]

The pomp moves onward till they reach the shore, and there a sacred ship is launched--inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics, purified with a burning torch, an egg, and sulphur, on her sail a vow written in large letters. She is loaded with aromatics; and "filled with copious gifts and auspicious prayers" she sails away before a gentle breeze and is lost to sight. The celebrants then return to the temple, but we have perhaps followed them far enough.

From now on to the end of the book the reformed Lucius lives in the odour of sanctity. He never sleeps without a vision of the goddess. He passes on from initiation to initiation, though the service of religion is difficult, chastity arduous, and life now a matter of circumspection--it had not been before. The initiations are, he owns, rather expensive.[98] "Perhaps, my enthusiastic reader, thou wilt ask--anxiously enough--what was said, what done. I would speak if it were {237} lawful to speak, thou shouldst know if it were lawful to hear.... Hear then, and believe, for it is true. I drew near to the confines of death; I trod the threshold of Proserpine; I was borne through all the elements and returned. At midnight I saw the sun flashing with bright light. Gods of the world below, gods of the world above, into their presence I came, I worshipped there in their sight." Garments, emblems, rites, purifications are the elements of his life now. Nor does he grudge the trouble and expense, for the gods are blessing him with forensic success. In a dream, Osiris himself "chief among the great gods, of the greater highest, greatest of the highest, ruler of the greatest," appears in person, and promises him--speaking with his own awful voice--triumphs at the bar, with no need to fear the envy his learning might rouse. He should be one of the god's own Pastophori, one of "his quinquennial decurions." So "with my hair perfectly shaved, I performed in gladness the duties of that most ancient college, established in Sulla's times, not shading nor covering my baldness, but letting it be universally conspicuous." And there ends the _Golden Ass_.

Was it true--this story of the ass? Augustine says that Apuleius "either disclosed or made up" these adventures. Both he and Lactantius had to show their contemporaries that there was a difference between the miracles of Apuleius and those of Christ.[99] The Emperor Septimius Severus, on the other hand, sneered at his rival Albinus for reading "the Punic Milesian-tales of his fellow-countryman Apuleius and such literary trifles."[100]

[Sidenote: Apuleius and his initiation]

Between these two judgments we may find Apuleius. He is a man of letters, but he has a taste for religion. Ceremony, mystery, ritual, sacraments, appeal to him, and there he stands with his contemporaries. But a man, in whose pages bandit and old woman, ass and Isis, all talk in one Euphuistic strain, was possibly not so pious as men of simpler speech. Yet his giving such a conclusion to such a tale is significant, and there is not an absurdity among all the many, in which he so gaily revels, but corresponded with something that men believed.

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In conclusion, we may ask what Lucian of Samosata and Diogenes of Oinoanda had to offer to Aristides and Pausanias and Apuleius; and what they in turn could suggest to men whose concern in religion goes deeper than the cure of physical disease, trance and self-conscious revelling in ceremony. Some spiritual value still clung about the old religion, or it could not have found supporters in a Plotinus and a Porphyry, but (to quote again a most helpful question) "how much else?"