The Crest-Wave of Evolution / A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19

by Kenneth Morris

XVII. ROME PARVENUE *

The Punic War was not forced on Rome. She had no good motive for it; not even a decent excuse. It was simply that she was accustomed to do the next thing; and Carthage presented itself as the next thing to fight,—Sicily, the next thing to be conquered. The war lasted from 264 to 241; and at the end of it Rome found herself out of Italy; mistress of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. The Italian laya center had expanded; Italy had boiled over. It was just the time when Ts'in at the other end of the world was conquering China, and the Far Eastern Manvantara was beginning. Manvantaras do not begin or end anywhere, I imagine, without some cyclic event marking it in all other parts of the world.

————-
* This lecture, like the preceding one, is based on Mr. J. H.
Stobart's, The Grandeur that was Rome.
————-

We have heard much talk of how disastrous the result would have been if Carthage, not Rome, had won. But Carthage was a far and belated outpost of West Asia and of a manvantara that had ended over a century before:—there was no question of her winning. Though we see her only through Roman eyes, we may judge very well that no possibility of expansion was left in her. There was no expansive force. She threw out tentacles to suck in wealth and trade, but was already dead at heart. All the greatness of old West Asia was concentrated, in her, in two men: Hamilcar Barca and his son: they shed a certain light and romantic glory over her, but she was quite unworthy of them. Her prowess at any time was fitful: where money was to be made, she might fight like a demon to make it; but she was never a fighting power like Rome. She won her successes at first because her seat was on the sea, and the war was naval, and sea-battles were won not by fighting but by seamanship. If Carthage had won, they say;—but Carthage could not have won, because the cycles were for Rome. You will note how that North African rim is tossed between European and West Asian control, according to which is in the ascendant. Now that Europe's up, and West Asia down, France, Italy, and England hold it from Egypt to the Atlantic; and in a few centuries' time, no doubt it will be quite Europeanized. But West Asia, early in its last manvantara, flowed out over it from Arabia, drove out all traces of Europeanism, and made it wholly Asiatic. Before that, while a European manvantara was in being, it was European, no less Roman than Italy; and before that again, while the Crest-Wave was in West Asia, it was West Asian, under Egypt and Phoenician colonies. As for its own native races, they belong, I suppose, to the fourth, the Iberian Sub-race; and now in the days of our fifth Sub-race (the Aryan), seem out of the running for wielding empires of their own.

So if Carthage had won then, things would only have been delayed a little; the course of history would have been much the same. Rome might have been destroyed by Hannibal; she would have been rebuilt when Hannibal had departed; then gone on with her expansion, perhaps in other directions,—and presently turned, and come on Carthage from elsewhere; or absorbed her quietly, and let her do the carrying trade of the Mediterranean 'under the Roman flag' as you might say,—or something of that sort. Rome eradicated Carthage for the same reason that the Spaniards eradicated the Moors: because the West Asian tide, to which Moors and Carthaginians belonged, had ebbed or was ebbing, and the European tide was flowing high. Hamilcar indeed, and Hannibal, seem to have been touched by cyclic impulses, and to have felt that a Spanish Empire might have received the influx which a West Asian town in Africa could not. But Italy's turn came before Spain's; and all Hamilcar's haughty heroism, and Hannibal's magnanimous genius, went for nothing; and Rome, the admirable and unlovely, that had suffered the Caudine Forks, and then conquered Samnium and beheaded that noble generous Samnite Gaius Pontius, conquered in turn the conqueror at Cannae, and did for his reputation what she had done with the Samnite hero's person: chopped its head off, and dubbed him in perfect sincerity 'perfidus Hannibal.' Over that corpse she stood, at the end of the third century B.C., mistress of Italy and the Italian islands; with proud Carthage at her feet; and the old cultured East, that had known of her existence since the time of Aristotle at least, now keenly aware of her as the strongest thing in the Mediterranean world.

Now while she had been a little provincial town in an Italy deep in pralaya, Numa's religion, what remained of it, had been enough to keep her life from corruption. Each such impulse from the heaven-world's, in its degree, an elixiral tincture to sweeten life and keep it wholesome; some, like Buddhism, being efficient for long ages and great empires; some only for tiny towns like early Rome. What we may call the exoteric basis of Numaism was a ritual of many ceremonies connected with home-life and agriculture, and designed to keep alive a feeling for the sacredness of these. It was calculated for its cycle: you could have given no high metaphysical system to peasant-bandits of that type;—you could not take the Upanishads to Afghans or Abyssinians today. But as soon as that cycle was ended, and Rome was called on to come out into the world, there was need of a new force and a new sanction.

Has it occurred to you to wonder why, in that epochal sixth century B.C., when in so many lands the Messengers of Truth were turning away from the official Mysteries, and preaching their Theosophy upon a new plan broadcast among the peoples, Pythagoras, after wandering the east and west to gather up the threads of wisdom, should have elected not to return to Greece, but to settle in Italy and found his Movement there? I suppose the reason was this: He knew in what direction the cycles should flow, and that the greatest need of the future ages would be for a redeemed Italy; he foresaw, or Those who sent him foresaw, that it was Italy should mold the common life of Europe for a couple of thousand years. Greece was rising then, chiefly on the planes of intellect and artistic creation; but Italy was to rise after a few centuries on planes much more material, and therefore with a force much more potent and immediate in its effects in this world. The Age of Greece was nearer to the Mysteries; which might be trusted to keep at least some knowledge of Truth alive; the Age of Italy, farther away and on a lower plane, would be in need of a Religion. So he chose Croton, a Greek city, because if he had gone straight to the barbarous Italians, he could have said nothing much at that time,—and hoped that from a living center there, the light might percolate up through the whole peninsula, and be ready for Rome when Rome was ready for it. He left Athens to take care of itself;—much as H. P. Blavatsky chose New York at first, and not immediately the then world-capitals Paris and London;—I suppose we may say that Magna Graecia stood to old Greece in his time as America did to western Europe forty years ago. Had his Movement succeeded; had it struck well up into the Italian lands; how different the whole after-history of Europe might have been! Might?—certainly would have been! But we know that a revolution at Croton destroyed, at the end of the sixth century, the Pythagorean School; after which the hope and messengers of the Movement— Aeschylus, Plato—worked in Greece; and that although the Pythagorean individual Lucanians, Iapygians, and even Samnites— that noble Gaius Pontius of the Caudin Forks was himself a Pythagorean and a pupil of the Pythagorean Archytas,—it was, in the Teacher's own lifetime, practically broken up and driven out into Sicily, where those two great Athenians contacted it. We have seen that it was not effectless; and, what glimmer of it came down, through Plato, into the Middle Ages. But its main purpose: to supply nascent Italy with a saving World-Religion; had been defeated. Of all the Theosophical Movements of the time, this so far as we know was the only one that failed. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, each lasted on as a grand force for human upliftment; but Pythagoreanism, as an organized instrument of the Spirit, passed. When Aeschylus made his protests in Athens, the Center of the Movement to which he belonged had already been smashed. Plato did marvels; but the cycle had gone by and gone down, and it was too late for him to attempt that which Pythagoras had failed to accomplish.

So Rome, when she needed it most, lacked divine guidance; so drifted out on to the high seas of history pilotless and rudderless;—so Weltpolitik only corrupted and vulgarized her. She had no Blue Pearl of Laotse to render her immortal; no Confucian Doctrine of the Mean to keep her sober and straight; and hence it came that, though later a new start was made, and great men arose, once, twice, three times, to do their best for her, she fell to pieces at last, a Humpty-Dumpty that all the king's horses and all the king's men could never reweld into one;—and the place she should have filled in history as Unifier of Europe was only filled perfunctorily and for a time; and her great duty was never rightly done. Hinc lacrimae aetatum—hence the darkness and miseries of the Christian Era!

Take your stand here, at the end of the Punic War, on the brink of the Age of Rome; and you feel at once how fearfully things have gone down since you stood, with Plato, looking back over the Age of Grecce. There is nothing left now of the high possibilities of artistic creation. Of the breath of spirituality that still remained in the world then, now you can find hardly a trace. A Cicero presently, for a Socrates of old; it is enough to tell you how the world has fallen. Some fall, I suppose, was implied in the cycles; still Rome might have gone to her more material duties with clean heart, mind, and hands; she might have built a structure, as Ts'in Shi Hwangti and Han Wuti did, to endure. It would not be fair to compare the Age of Han with the Augustan; the morning glory of the East Asian, with the late afternoon of the European manvantara; and yet we cannot but see, if we look at both dispassionately and with a decent amount of knowledge, how beneficently, the Eastern Teachers had affected their peoples, and what a dire thing it was for Europe that the work of the Western Teacher had failed. Chow China and Republican Rome fell to pieces in much the same way: in a long orgy of wars and ruin;—but the rough barbarian who rebuilt China found bricks to his hand far better than he knew he was using,— material with a true worth and vitality of its own,—a race with elements of redemption in its heredity; whereas the great statesman, the really Great Soul who rebuilt Rome, had to do it, if the truth should be told, of materials little better than stubble and rottenness. Roman life, when Augustus came to work with it for his medium, was fearfully infected with corruption; one would have said that no power human or divine could have saved it. That he did with it as much as he did, is one of the standing wonders of time.

But now back to the place where we left Rome: in 200 B.C., at the end of the Carthaginian War. No more now of Farmer Balbus's fields; no more of the cows of Ahenobarbus; Dolabella's rod and line, and his fish-stories, shall not serve us further. It is the navigable river now; on which we must sail down and out on to the sea.

Already the little Italian city is being courted by fabulously rich Egypt, the doyen of culture since Athens declined; and soon she is to be driven by forces outside her control into conquest of all the old seats of Mediterranean civilization;—and withal she is utterly unfitted for the task in any spiritual or cultural sense: she is still little more than the same narrow little provincial half-barbarous Rome she has always been. No grand conceptions have been nourished in her by a literature of her own with high lights couched in the Grand-Manner; no olden Homer has sung to her, with magnificent roll of hexameters to set the wings of her soul into magnificent motion. Beyond floating folk ballads she has had no literature at all; though latterly, she is trying to supply the place of one with a few slave-made translations from the Greek, and a few imitations of the decadent Greek comedy of Alexandria;—also there has been a poet Naevius, whom—she found altogether too independent to suit her tastes; and a Father Ennius,—uncouth old bone of her bone, (though he too Greek by race) who is struggling to mold her tough inflexible provincial dialect into Greek meter of sorts,—and thereby doing a real service for poets to come. And there is a Cato the Censor, writing prose; Cato, typical of Roman breadth of view; with, for the sum of a truly national political wisdom, yelping at Rome continually that fool's jingo cry of his:—your finest market in the western seas, your richest potential commercial asset, must be destroyed. There you have the high old Roman conception of Weltpolitik; whereby we may understand how little fitted Rome was for Weltpolitik at all; how hoeing cabbages and making summer campaigns,—as Mr. Stobart says, with a commissariat put up for each soldier in a lunch-bag by his wife,—were still her metier,—the Italian soil, whether in actual or only potential possession—held already, or by the grace of God soon to be stolen—still her inspiration. And this Italian soil she was now about to leave forever.

The forces that led her to world-conquest were twofold, inner and outer. The inner one was the summer campaign habit, formed during several centuries; and the fact that she could form no conception of life that did not include it: the impulse to material expansion was deep in her soul, and ineradicable. She might have followed it, perhaps, north and westward; finished with Spain; gone up into Gaul (though in Gaul she might have found, even at that time, possibly, an unmanageable strength); she might even have carried her own ultimite salvation up into Germany. But we have seen Darius flow victorious eastward towards India, but unsuccessful when he tried the passes of the west; and Alexander follow him in the same path, and not turn westward at all. So you may say an eastward habit had been formed, and inner-channels were worn for conquest in that direction, but none in the other. Besides,—and this was the outer of the two forces,—the East was crying out to Rome. There were pirates on the other side of the Adriatic; and for the safety of her own eastern littoral she had been dealing with them, as with Spain, during and before the terrible Hannibalic time. To sit securely at home she must hold the Illyrian coast: and, she thought, or events proved it to her, to hold that coast safely, she must go conquering inland. Then again Egypt had courted her alliance, for regions. The Ptolemy of the time was a boy; and Philip of Macedon ind Antiochus of Syria had hatched a plan to carve up his juicy realm for their own most delectable feasting. It was the very year after peace—to call it that—had been forced on prostrate Carthage; and you might think an exhausted Rome would have welcomed a breathing time, even at the expense of losing her annual outing. And so indeed the people were inclined to do. But the summer was icumen in; and what were consuls and Senate for? Should they be as these irresponsibles of the comitia? Should they fail to look about them and take thought?—As if someone should offer you a cottage (with all modern appointments) by the seaside, or farmhouse among the mountains, free of rent for July and August, here were all the respectabilities of the East cooingly inviting Rome to spend her summer with them; they to provide all accessories for a really enjoyable time.

In this way eastern politics assorted themselves,—thus was the Levant divided: on the one hand you had the traditional seats of militariasm; on the other, famous names—and the heirs to the glory (a good deal tarnished now) that once had been Greece. The former were Macedon and Syria, or Macedon with Syria in the background; what better could you ask that a good square se-to with these? Oh, one at a time; that was the fine old Roman way; divide et impera; Mecedon now, and, a-grace of God, Syria—But let be; we are talking of this summer; for next, the Lord (painted bright vermilion) it may be hoped will provide. So for the present Philip of Mecedon figures as the desired enemy.—As to the other side, the famous names to be our allies, they are: Egypt, chief seat in recent centuries of culture and literature, and incidentally the Golconda of the time, endowed past dreaming of with commerce, wealth, and industries; and Rhodes, rich and republican, and learned too; and the sacred name of Athens; and Pergamum in Asia, cultured Attalus's kingdom. Are we not to ally ourselves with the arts and humanities, with old fame, with the most precious of traditions?—For Rome, it must be said, was not all Catos: there was something in her by this time that could thrill to the name of Greece. And Philip had been in league with Hannibal, though truly he had left him shamefully unsupported. Philip had been in league with Hannibal—with Hannibal!—Why, it was a glorious unsought fight, such as only fortune's favored soldiers might attain. The comitia vote against it? They say Hannibal has made them somewhat tired?—Nonsense! let 'em vote again! let 'em vote again!—They do so; assured pithily that it is only a question whether we fight Philip in Macedon, or he us on our own Italian soil. Of course, if you put it that way, it is Hobson's choice: the voting goes all right this time. So we are embarked on the great Eastern Adventure; and Flamininus sets out for Greece.

Now your simple savage is often a gentleman. I don't mean your Congo Quashi or Borria Bungalee from the back-country blocks of New South Wales—our Roman bore no resemblance to them; but say your Morocco kaid, your desert chieftain from Tunis or Algiers. Though for long generations he has lost his old-time civilized attainments, he retains in full his manners, his native dignity, his wild Saharan grace. But banish him to Paris, and see what happens. He buys up automobiles,—and poodles,—and astrolabes, —and patent-leather boots,—and a number of other things he were much better without. He exchanges his soul for a pass into the demi-monde; and year by year sees him further sunk into depths of vulgarism. This is precisely what in a few generations happened to Rome.

But meanwhile she was at an apex; touched by some few luminous ideals here and there, and producing some few great gentlemen. Unprovincial egos; like Scipio Africanus had been edging their way into Roman incarnation; they were swallows of a still far-off summer; they stood for Hellenization, and the modification of Roman rudeness with a little imported culture. Rome had conquered Magna Graccia, and had seen something there; had felt a want in herself, and brought in slaves like Livius Andronicus to supply it. Flamininus himself was really a very great gentleman: a patrician, type of the best men there were in Rome. He went to Greece thrilled with generous feelings, as to a sacred land. When he restored to the Greek cities their freedom,— handed them back to their own uses and devices, after freeing them from Philip,—it was with an infinite pride and a high simplicity. We hear of him overcome in his speech to their representatives on that occasion, and stopping to control the lump in his throat: conqueror and master of the whole peninsula and the islands, he was filled with reverence, as a great simple-hearted gentleman might be, for the ancient fame and genius of the peoples at his feet. He and his officers were proud to be admitted to the Games and initiated at Eleusis. I think this is the finest chapter in early Roman history. There is the simplicity, pride, and generosity of the Roman gentleman, confronted with a culture he was able to admire, but conscious he did not possess;—and on the other hand the fine flow of Greek gratitude to the liberator of Greece, in whom the Greeks recognised that of old time, and which had been so rare in their own life. At this moment Rome blossomed: a beautiful bloom, we may say.

But it was a fateful moment for her, too. The Greeks had long lost what capacity they had ever had for stable politics. Flamininus might hand them back their liberties with the utmost genuineness of heart; but they were not in a condition to use the gift. Rome soon found that she had no choice but to annex them, one way or another. They were her proteges; and Antiochus attacked them;—so then Antiochus had to be fought and conquered. That fool had great Hannibal with him, and resources with which Hannibal might have crushed Rome; but it did not suit Antiochus that the glory should be Hannibal's. Then presently Attalus bequeathed Pergamum to the Senate; which involved Rome in Asia Minor. So step by step she was compelled to conquer the East.

Now there was a far greater disparity of civilization between Rome and this Hellenistic Orient and half-orientalized Greece, than appeared afterwards between the Romans and Spaniards and Gauls. Spain, very soon after Augustus completed its conquest, was producing most of the brightest minds in Latin literature: the influx of important egos had hardly passed from Italy before it began to appear in Spain. Had not Rome become the world metropolis, capable of attracting to herself all elements of greatness from every part of the Mediterranean world, we should think of the first century A.D., as a great Spanish Age. Gaul, too, within a couple of generations of Ceasar's devastating exploits there, had become another Egypt for wealth and industries. The grandson's of the Vercingetorixes and Dumnorixes were living more splendidly, and as culturedly, in larger and better villas than the patricians of Italy; as Ferrero shows. We may judge, too, that there was a like quick rise of manvantaric conditions in Britain after the Claudian conquest: we have news of Agricola's speaking of the "labored studies of the Gauls," as if that people were then famed for learning,—to which, he said, he preferred the "quick wits and natural genius of the Britons." And here I may mention that, even before the conquest of Gaul, Caesar's own tutor was a man of that nation, a master of Greek and Latin learning;—but try to imagine a Roman tutoring Epaminondas or Pelopidas! So we may gather that a touch from Italy—by that time highly cultured,—was enough to light up those Celtic countries at once; and infer from that that no such long pralayic conditions had obtained in them as had obtained in Italy during the centuries preceding the Punic Wars. Spain at thirteen decades before Scipio, Gaul at as much before Caesar, Britain at as much before Caesar or Claudius, may well have been strong and cultured countries: because you wake quickly after the thirteen decade period of rest, but slowly after the long pralayas.

Roman Italy woke very slowly at the touch of Greece; and woke, not like Spain and Gaul afterwards at Rome's touch, to culture; not to learning or artistic fertility. What happened was what always does happen when a really inferior civilization comes in contact with a really superior one. Rome did not become civilized in any decent sense: she simply forwent Roman virtues and replaced them with Greek vices; and made of these, not the vices of a degenerate culture, but the piggishness of cultureless boors.—Behold her Gadarene stations, after Flamininus's return:—

Millions of money, in indemnities, loot, and what not,—in bribes before very long,—are flowing in to her. Where not so long since she was doing all her business with stamped lumps of bronze or copper, a pound or so in weight, in lieu of coinage, nor feeling the need of anything more handy,—now she is receiving yearly, monthly, amounts to be reckoned in millions sterling; and has no more good notion what to do with them than ever she had of old. If the egos (of Crest-Wave standing) had come in as quickly as did the shekels, things might have gone manageably; but they did not by any means. Her great misfortune was to enter the world-currents only on the material plane; to find her poor little peasant-bandit-souled self mistress of the world and its money, and still provincial to the core and with no ideas of bigness that were not of the earth earthy; with nothing whatever that was both spiritual and Roman to thrill to life the higher side of her;—a multimillionaire that could hardly read or write, and knew no means of spending her money that was not essentially vulgar. She had given up her sole means of salvation—which was hoeing cabbages; her slaves did all that for her now;—and so was at a loss for employment; and Satan found plenty of mischief for her idle hands to do. There were huge all-day-long banquets, where you took your emetic from time to time to keep you going. There were slaves,—armies of them; to have no more than a dozen personal attendants was poverty. There were slaves from the East to minister to your vices; some might cost as much as five thousand dollars; and there were dirt-cheap Sardinians and 'barbarians' of all sorts to run your estates and farms. All the work of Italy was done by slave labor; and the city swarmed with an immense slave population; the country slaves with enough of manhood left in them to rise and butcher and torture their masters when they could; the city slaves, one would say, in no condition to keep the semblance of a soul in them at all,—living dead. For the most part both were shamefully treated; Cato,— high old Republican Cato, type of the free and nobly simple Roman—used to see personally to the scourging of his slaves daily after dinner, as a help to his digestion.—So the rich wasted their money and their lives. They bought estates galore, and built villas on them; Cicero had—was it eighteen?— country-houses. They bought up Greek art-treasures, of which they had no appreciation whatever,—and which therefore only helped to vulgarize them. Such things were costly, and thought highly of in Greece; so Rome would have them for her money, and have them en masse. Mummius brought over a shipload; and solemnly warned his sailors that they would have to replace any they might break or lose. The originals, or such substitutes as the sailors might supply,—it was all one to him. As to literature,—well, we have seen how it began with translations made by a Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who put certain Hellenistic comedies and the Odyssey into Latin ballad meters; the kind of verse you would expect from a slave ordered promiscuously by his master to get busy and do it. Then came Father Ennius; and here I shall diverge a little to try to show you what (as I think) really happened to the soul of Rome.

It was a queer set-out, this job that Ennius attempted,—of making a real Roman poem, an epic of Roman history. Between old Latin and Greek there was the same kind of difference as between French and English: one fundamental in the rhythm of the languages. I am giving my own explanation of a very puzzling problem; and needless to say, it may be wrong. The ancient Roman ballads were in what is called Saturnian meter, which depends on stress and accent; it is not unlike the meter of the Scotch and English ballads. That means that old Latin was spoken like English is, with syllabic accent. But Greek was not. In that, what counted, what made the meters, was tone and quantity. Now we have that in English too; but it is a subtler and more occult influence in poetry than accent is. In English, the rhythm of a line of verse depends on the stresses; but where there is more than rhythm,—where there is music,—quantity is a very important factor. For example, in the line

"That carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,"

you can hear how the sound is held up on the word take, because the k is followed by the t in to; and what a wonderful musical effect is given thereby to the line. All the swing and lilt and rhythm of Greek poetry came in that way; there were no stresses, no syllabic accents; the accents we see written were to denote the tones the syllables should be—shall I say sung on? Now French is an example of a language without stresses; you know how each syllable falls evenly, all taking an unvarying amount of time to enounce. I imagine the basic principle of Greek was the same; only that you had to add to the syllables a length of sound where two consonants combining after a vowel retarded the flow of tone, as in take to in the line quoted just now.

Now if you try to write a hexameter in English on the Greek principle, you get something without the least likeness either to a Greek hexameter or to music; because the language is one of stresses, not, primarily, of tones.

"This is the forest pimeval; the murmuring pines and the hemlocks."

will not do at all; there is no Greek spondee in it but—rest prime—; and Longfellow would have been surprised if you had accused that of spondeeism. What you would get would be something like these—I forget who was responsible for them:

"Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent,
After Virgilian precedent and practice, in order."

Lines like these could never be poetry; poetry could never be couched in lines like these;—simply because poetry is an arrangement of words upon a frame-work of music: the poet has to hear the music within before his words can drop naturally into the places in accordance with it. You could not imitate a French line in English, because each of the syllables would have to be equally stressed; you could not imitate an English line in French, because in that language there are none of the stresses on which an English line depends for its rhythm.

But when I read Chaucer I am forced to the conclusion that what he tried to do was precisely that: to imitate French music; to write English without regard to syllabic accent. The English lyrics of his time and earlier depend on the principle of accent:

Sum'—mer is'—i-cum'—en in,
Loud'—e sing'—cuccu';

—but time and again in Chaucer's lines we find that if we allow the words their natural English stresses, we break up the music altogether; whereas if we read them like French, without syllabic accent, they make a very reasonable music indeed. Now French had been in England the language of court and culture; it was still spoken in polite circles at Stratforde-at-le-Bowe; and Chaucer was a courtier, Anglo-French, not Anglo-Saxon; and he had gone to France for his first models, and had translated a great French poem; and Anglo-Saxon verse-methods were hardly usable any longer. So it may well have appeared to him that serious poetry was naturally French in meter and method. There was no model for what he wanted to do in English; the English five-iambic line had not been invented, and only the popular lyricists, of the proletariat, sang in stresses. And anyhow, as the upper classes, to which he belonged more or less, were only growing out of French into English, very likely they pronounced their English with a good deal of French accent.

Now it seems to me that something of the same kind, with a difference, is what happened with Ennius. You are to understand him as, though Greek by birth, Romanior ipsis Romanis: Greek body, but ultra-Roman ego. One may see the like thing happen with one's own eyes at any time: men European-born, who are quite the extremest Americans. In his case, the spark of his Greek heredity set alight the Roman conflagration of his nature. He was born in Calabria, a Roman subject, in 239; and had fought for Rome before Cato, then quaestor, brought him in his train from Sardinia in 204.

A glance at the cycles, and a measuring-up of things with our thirteen-decade yardstick, will suggest the importance of the time he lived in. The Encyclopaedia Britannica gives A.D. 42 as the date for the end of the golden Age of Latin Literature. Its first great names are those of Cicero, Caesar, and Lucretius. Thirteen decades before 42 A.D., or in 88 B.C., these three were respectively eighteen, fourteen, and eight years old; so we may fairly call that Golden Age thirteen decades long, and beginning in 88. Thirteen decades back from that bring us to 218; and as much more from that, to 348. You will remember 348 as the year of the death of Plato, which we took as marking the end of the Golden Age of Greek. In 218 Ennius was twenty-one. He was the Father of Latin Poetry; as Cato the Censor, seven years his junior, was the Father of Latin Prose. So you see, he came right upon a Greek cycle; right upon the dawn of what should have been a new Greek day, with the night of Hellenisticism in between. And he took, how shall I put it?—the forces of that new day, and transmuted them, in himself as crucible, from Greek to Roman… A sort of Channel through which the impulse was deflected from Greek to Latin…

I think that, thtilled with a patriotism the keener-edged because it was acquired, he went to work in this way:—He was going to make one of these long poems, like those (inferior) Greek fellows had; and he was going to make it in Latin. (I do not know which was his native language, or which tradition he grew up in.) He didn't see why we Romans should not have our ancient greatness sung in epic; weren't we as good as Homer's people, anyhow? Certainly we were; and a deal better! Well, of course there was our old Saturnian meter; but that wasn't the kind of way serious poetry was written. Serious poetry was written in hexameters. If Greek was his native tongue, he may have spoken Latin all his life, of course, with a Greek accent; and the fact that he was sitting down to make up his 'poem' in a meter which no native-born Latin speaker could hear as a meter at all, may have been something of which he was profoundly unconscious. But that is what he did. He ignored (mostly) the stresses and accents natural to Latin, and with sweet naivete made a composition that would have scanned if it had been Greek, and that you could make scan by reading with a Greek rhythm or accent. The Romans accepted it. That perhaps is to say, that he had no conception at all of poetry as words framed upon an inner music. I think he was capable of it; that most Romans of the time, supposing they had had the conviction of poethood, would have been capable of it. It was the kind of people they were.

But that was not all there was to Ennius, by any means. A poet-soul had incarnated there; he had the root of the matter in him; it was only the racial vehicle that was funny, as you may say. He was filled with a high conception of the stern grandeur Romans admired; and somehow or other, his lines carry the impress of that grandeur at times: there is inspiration in them.

And now comes the point I have fetched all this compass to arrive at. By Spenser's time, or earlier, in England, all traces of Chaucer's French accent had gone; the language and the poetry had developed on lines of their own, as true expressions of the national soul. But in Rome, not so. Two centuries later great Roman poetry was being written: a major poet was on the scenes, —Virgil. He, I am certain, wrote with genuine music and inspiration. We have accounts of his reading of his own poems; how he was carried along by the music, chanting the lines in a grand voice that thrilled all who heard. He chanted, not spoke, them; poets always do. They formed themselves, grew in his mind, to a natural music already heard there, and existent before the words arose and took shape to it. That music is the creative force at work, the whirr of the loom of the Eternal; it is the golden-snooded Muses at song. And therefore he was not, like Ennius, making up his lines on an artificial foreign plan; to my mind that is unthinkable;—he was writing in the Latin spoken by the cultured; in Latin as all cultured Romans spoke it. But, mirabile dictu, it was Latin as Ennius had composed it: he was writing in Ennius' meter. I can only understand that Greek had so swamped the Latin soul, that for a century or more cultured Latin had been spoken in quantity, not in accent; in the Greek manner, and with the Greek rhythm. Ennius had come to be appreciable as meter and music to Roman ears; which he certainly could not have been in his own day.

So we may say that there is in a sense no Roman literature at all. Nothing grew out of the old Saturnian ballad-meter,—except perhaps Catullus, who certainly had no high inspiring impersonal song to sing. The Roman soul never grew up, never learned to express itself in its own way; before it had had time to do so, the Greek impulse that should have quickened it, swamped it. You may think of Japan, swamped by Chinese culture in the sixth century A.D., as a parallel case; but no; there Buddhism, under real spiritual Teachers, came in at the same time, and fostered all that was noblest in the Japanese soul, so that the result was fair and splendid. A more cognate case is that of the Turks, who suffered through suddenly conquering Persia while they were still barbarous, and taking on, outwardly, Persian culture wholesale; Turkish and Latin literature are perhaps on a par for originality. But if the Greek impulse had touched and wakened Rome under the aegis of Pythagoreanism,—Rome might have become, possibly, as fine a thing as Japan. True, the Crest-Wave had to roll in to Rome presently, and to raise up a great literature there. But whose is the greatest name in it? A Gaul's, who imitated Greek models. There is something artificial in the combination; and you guess that whatever most splendid effort may be here, the result cannot be supreme. The greatest name in Latin prose, too,—Livy's—was that of a Gaul.

And herefrom we may gather what mingling of forces is needed to produce the great ages and results in literature. You have a country; a tract of earth with the Earth-breath playing up through the soil of it; you have the components or elements of a race mixed together on that soil, and molded by that play of the Earth-breath into homogeneity, and among them, from smallest beginnings in folk-verse, the body of a literature must grow up. Then in due season it must be quickened: on the outer plane by an impulse from abroad,—intercourse with allies, or resistance to an invader; and on the inner, by an inrush of Crest-Wave egos. There must be that foreign torch applied,—that spark of inter-nationalism; and there must be the entry of the vanguard of the Host of Souls with its great captains and marshals, bringing with them, to exhibit once more in this world, the loot of many lands and ages and old incarnations; which thing they shall do through a sudden efflorescence of the literature that has grown up slowly to the point of being ready for them. Such natural growth happened in Greece, in China; in our own cycle, in France, Italy, England: where the trees of the nation literatures received buddings and manurings from abroad, but produced always their own natural national fruit:—Shakespeare was your true English apple, grown from the Chaucer stock; although in him flower for juices the sweetness and elixir of all the world and the ancient ages. But in Rome, before the stock was more than a tiny seedling, a great branch of Greece was grafted on it,—and a degenerate Greece at that—and now we do not know even what kind of fruit-tree that Roman stock should have grown to be.

How, then, did this submersion and obliteration of the Roman soul come to pass? It is not difficult to guess. Greek meant culture: if you wanted culture you learnt Greek. All education was in Greek hands. The Greek master spoke Latin to his boys; no doubt with a Greek accent. So cultured speech, cultured Latin, came to mean Latin without its syllabic stresses; spoken, as nearly as might be, with Greek evenness and quantity.—As if French should so submerge us, that we spoke our United States dapping out syllable by syllable like Frenchmen. But it is a fearful thing for a nation to forgo the rhythm evolved under the stress of its own Soul,—especially when what it takes on instead is the degenerate leavings of another: Alexandria, not Athens. This Rome did. She gained the world, and lost her own soul; and the exchange profited her as little as you might expect.

Imitation of culture is often the last touch that makes the parvenu unbearable; it was so in Rome. One likes better in some ways Cato's stult old Roman attitude: who scorned Greek all his life for sheer foppery, while he knew of nothing better written in it than such trash as poetry and philosophy; but at eighty came on a Greek treatise on manure and straightway learned the language that he might read and enjoy something profitable and thoroughly Roman in spirit.—Greek artists flocked to Rome; and doubtless the more fifth-rate they were the better a thing they made of it: but it was risky for good men to rely on Roman appreciations. Two flute-players are contending at a concert; Greek and perhaps rather good. Their music is soon drowned in catcalls: What the dickens do we Romans want with such footling tootlings? Then the presiding magistrate has an idea. He calls on them to quit that fooler and get down to business:—Give us our money's worth, condemn you to it, ye naughty knaves: fight!—And fight they must, poor things, while the audience, that but now was bored to death, howls with rapture.

So Rome passed away. Where now is the simple soul who, while his feet were on his native soil and he asked nothing better than to hoe his cabbages and turn out yearly for patriotic throat-cuttings, was reputable—nay, respect-worthy,—and above all, not a little picturesque? Alas! he is no more.—You remember Kelly,—lovable Kelly, who in his youth, trotting the swate ould bogs of Cohhacht, heard poetry in every sigh of the wind,—saw the hosts of the Danaan Sidhe riding their flamey steeds through the twilight,—listened, by the cabin peat-fire in the evenings, to tales of Finn MacCool and Cuculain and the ancient heroes and Gods of Ireland?—Behold this very Kelly now!—What! is this he?—this raucous, pushing, red-haired, huge-handed, green-necktied vulgarian who has made his pile bricklaying in Chicago;—this ward-politician; this—Well, well; Sic transit gloria mundi! And the Roman cad of the second century B.C. was worse than a thousand Kellys. He had learned vice from past-masters in the Levant; and added to their lessons a native brutality of his own. His feet were no longer on the Italian soil; that was nothing sacred to him now. His moral went as his power grew. His old tough political straightforwardness withered at the touch of Levantine trickery; his subjects could no longer expect a square deal from him. He sent out his gilded youth to govern the provinces, which they simply fleeced and robbed shamelessly; worse than Athens of old, and by much. The old predatory instinct was there still: Hellenisticism had supplied no civilizing influence to modify that. But it was there minus whatever of manliness and decency had once gone with it.

Karma travels by subtle and manifold links from the moral cause to the physical effect. There are historians who will prove to you that the ruin of Rome came of economic causes: which were, in fact, merely some of the channels through which Karma flowed. They were there, of course; but we need not enlarge on them too much. The secret of it all is this: a people without the Balance of the Faculties, without the saving doctrine of the Mean, with but one side of their character developed, was called by cyclic law, while still semi-barbarian, to assume huge responsibilities in the world. Their qualities were not equal to the task. The sense of the Beautiful, their feeling for Art and Poetry, had not grown up with their mateial strength. Why should it? some may ask; are not strength and moral enough?—No; they are not: because it is only the Balance which can keep you on the right path; strength without the beauty sense,—yes, even fortitude, strength of will,—turns at the touch of quickening time and new and vaster conditions, into gaucherie, disproportion, brutality; ay, it is not strength:—the saving quality of strength, morale, dribbles out and away from it: only the Balance is true strength. The empires that were founded upon uncompassion, through they swept the world in a decade, within a poor century or so were themselves swept away. Rome, because she was only strong, was weak; her virtues found no exit into life except in things military; the most material plane, the farthest from the Spirit. Her people were not called, like the Huns or Mongols, to be a destroyer race: the Law designed them for builders. But to build you must have the Balance, the proportionate development spiritual, moral, mental, and physical: it is the one foundation. Rome's grand assets at the start were a sense of duty, a natural turn for law and order: grand assets indeed, if the rest of the nature be not neglected or atrophied. In Rome it was, largely.

To be strong-willed and devoted to duty, and without compassion: —that means that you are in train to grow a gigantic selfhood, which Nature abhors; emptiness of compassion is the vacuum nature most abhors. You see a strong man with his ambitions: scorning vices, scorning weakness; scorning too, and lashing with his scorn, the weak and vicious; bending men to his will and purposes. Prophesy direst sorrow for that man! Nature will not be content that he shall travel his chosen path till a master of selfishness and a great scourge for mankind has been evolved in him. She will give him rope; let him multiply his wrong-doings; because, paradoxically, in wrong-doing is its own punishment and cure. His selfishness sinks by its own weight to the lowest levels; prophesy for him that in a near life he shall be the slave of his body and passions, yet keeping the old desire to excel;—that common vice shall bring him down to the level of those he scorned, while yet he forgets not the mountain-tops he believed his place of old. Then he shall be scourged with self-contempt, the bitterest of tortures; and the quick natural punishments of indulgence shall be busy with him, snake-locked Erinyes with whips of wire. In that horrible school, struggling to rise from it, he shall suffer all that a human being can in ignominy, sorrow and shame;—and at last shall count it all well worth the while, if it has but taught him That which is no atribute, but Alaya's self,—Compassion. So Karma has its ministrants within ourselves; and the dreadful tyrants within are to be disthroned by working and living, not for self, but for man. This is why Brotherhood is the doctrine and practice that could put a stop to the awful degeneratioin of mankind.

Rome was strong without compassion; so her strength led her on to conquests, and her conquests to vices, and her vices to hideous ruin and combustion. She loved her gravitas,—which implied great things;—but contemned the Beautiful; and so, when a knowledge of the Beautiful would have gone far to save her, by maintaining in her a sense of proportion and the fitness of things—she lost her morale and became utterly vulgarian. But think of China, taking it as a matter of course that music was an essential part of government; or of France, with her Ministre des Beaux Arts in every cabinet. Perhaps; these two, of all historical nations, have made the greatest achievements; for you must say that neither India nor Greece was a nation.—As for Rome, with all her initial grandeur, it would be hard to find another nation of her standing that made such an awful mess of it as she did; one refers, of course, to Republican Rome; when Augustus had had his way with her, it was another matter.

She took the Gadarene slope at a hand-gallop; and there you have her history during the second century B.C. Not till near the end of that century did the egos of the Crest-Wave begin to come in in any numbers. From the dawn of the last quarter, there or thereabouts, all was an ever-growing rout and riot; the hideous toppling of the herd over the cliff-edge. It was a time of wars civil and the reverse; of huge bloody conscriptions and massacre; reforms and demagogism and murder of the Gracchi:— Marius and Sulla cat and dog;—the original Spartican movement, that wrecked Italy and ended with six thousand crucifixions along the road to Capua;—ended so, and not with a slave conquest and wiping-out of Rome, simply because Spartacus's revolted slave-army was even less disciplined than the legions that Beast-Crassus decimated into a kind of order and finally conquered them with. It was decade after decade of brutal devasting wars, —wars chronic and incurable, you would say: the untimely wreck and ruin of the world.

It is a strange gallery of portraits that comes down to us from this time: man after notable man arising without the qualities that could save Rome. Here are a few of the likenesses, as they are given Dr. Stobart: there were the Gracchi, with so much that was fine in them, but a ruining dash of the demagog,—an idea that socialism could accomplish anything real;—and no wisdom to see through to ultimite causes. There was Marius, simple peasant with huge military genius: a wolf of a soldier and foolish lamb of a politician; a law-maker who, captured by the insinuations and flatteries of the opposite side, swears to obey his own laws "so far as they may be legal." There was Sulla, of the class of men to which Alcibiades and Alexander belonged, but an inferior specimen of the class and unscrupulous rip, and a brave successful commander; personally beautiful, till his way of living made his face "like a mulberry sprinkled with flour";— with many elements of greatness always negatived by sudden fatuities; much of genius, more of fool, and most of rake-helly demirep; highly cultured, and plunderer of Athens and Delphi; great general, who maintained his hold on his troops by unlimited tolerance of undiscipline. There was Crassus the millionaire, and all his millions won by cheatery and ugly methods; the man with the slave fire-brigade, with which he made a pretty thing out of looting at fires. There was Cicero, with many noble and Roman qualities and a large foolish vanity: thundering orator with more than a soupcon of the vaudeville favorite in him: a Hamlet who hardly showed his real fineness until he came to die.

And there was Pompey;—real honesty in Pompey, perhaps the one true-hearted gentleman of the age: a man of morale, and a great soldier,—who might have done something if his general intelligence had been as great as his military genius and his sense of honor:—surely Pompey was the best of the lot of them; only the cursed spite was that the world was out of joint, and it needed something more than a fine soldier and gentleman to set it right.—And then Caesar—could he not do it? Caesar, the Superman,—the brilliant all-round genius at last,—the man of scandalous life—scandalous even in that cesspool Rome,—the epileptic who dreamed of world-dominion,—the conqueror of Gaul, says H.P. Blavatsky, because in Gaul alone the Sacred Mysteries survived in their integrity, and it was his business, on behalf of the dark forces against mankind, to quench their life and light for ever;—could not this Caesar do it? No; he had the genius; but not that little quality which all greatest personalities,—all who have not passed beyond the limits of personality: tact, impersonality, the power that the disciple shall covet, to make himself as nothing in the eyes of men:— and because he lacked that for armor, there were knives sharpened which should reach his heart before long.—And then, in literature, two figures mentionable: Lucretius, thinker and philosopher in poetry: a high Roman type, and a kind of materialist, and a kind of God's warrior, and a suicide. And Catullus: no noble type; neither Roman nor Greek, but Italian perhaps; singing in the old Saturnian meters with a real lyrical fervor, but with nothing better to sing than his loves.—And then, in politics again, Brutus: type, in sentimental history of the Republican School, of the high old roman and republican virtues; Brutus of the "blood-bright splendor," the tyrant-slayer and Roman Harmodios-Aristogeiton; the adored of philosophic French liberty-equality-fraternity adorers; Shakespeare's "noblest Roman of them all";—O how featly Cassius might have answered, when Brutus accused him of the "itching palm," if he had only been keeping au fait with the newspapers through the preceding years! "Et tu, Brute," I hear him say, quoting words that should have reminded his dear friend of the sacrd ties of friendship,—

"Art thou the man will rate thy Cassius thus?
This is the most unkindest cut of all;
For truly I have filched a coin or two:—
Have been, say, thrifty; gathered here and there
Pickings, we'll call them; but, my Brutus, thou—
Didst thou not shut the senators of Rhodes
(I think 'twas Rhodes) up in their senate-house,
And keep them there unfoddered day by day.
Until starvation forced them to disgorge
All of their million to thee? Didst not thou—"

Brutus is much too philosophical, much to studious, to listen to qualities of that kind, and cuts the conversation short right there. Cassius was right: that about starving the senators of his province that surrendered their wealth was precisely what our Brutus did.—Then there was Anthony, the rough brave soldier,—a kind of man of the unfittest when the giants Pompey and Caesar had been in; Anthony, master of Rome for awhile,—and truly, God knows Rome will do with bluff Mark Anthony for her master!—It is a very interesting list; most of them queer lobsided creatures, fighting with own hands or for nothing in particular; most with some virtues: Then that might have saved Rome, if, as Mrs Poyser said, "they are hatched again, and hatched different."