PERICLES.

GREAT LEADERS

HISTORIC PORTRAITS
FROM THE GREAT HISTORIANS

SELECTED, WITH NOTES AND BRIEF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

By G. T. FERRIS
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1889
Copyright, 1889,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

PREFACE.

Every one perusing the pages of the historians must have been impressed with the graphic and singularly penetrative character of many of the sketches of the distinguished persons whose doings form the staple of history. These pen-portraits often stand out from the narrative with luminous and vivid effect, the writers seeming to have concentrated upon them all their powers of penetration and all their skill in graphic delineation. Few things in literature are marked by analysis so close, discernment so keen, or by effects so brilliant and dramatic. In some of the later historians this feature is specially noticeable, but it was Hume’s admirable portrayal of the character of Alfred the Great that suggested the compilation of the present volume.

A selection such as this of the more striking passages in the great historians will serve, it is believed, a double purpose—first as a suitable introduction to these distinguished writers for those not acquainted with them, and next as a means of stimulating a taste for the study of history itself. It must be remembered that it is largely through their sympathies for persons that readers generally find pleasure in history. The sometimes noble and sometimes startling personality of great leaders exerts a fascinating effect upon all susceptible minds, and whatever brings this personality vividly before us greatly strengthens our interest in the records of the past. For these reasons this compilation will be found well adapted for the reading class in high schools and seminaries.

It is desirable to explain that in some instances the selections do not appear here exactly in the form of the original. Passages from different pages are sometimes brought together, so as to give completeness to the portrait, but in no other way has any liberty been taken with the text of the authors.

In making the selections, the primary object was to secure, in each instance, the most vivid and truthful portrait obtainable, but it was also thought desirable to render the volume as representative of historical literature as possible, and hence to include a wide range of writers. The work will be found to be tolerably representative in this particular, but some well-known historians do not appear, for the reason that their methods did not yield suitable material.

The selections terminate with the period of Waterloo, because, while great leaders have flourished since those days, the historical perspective is not sufficient to permit that judicial estimate so necessary for a truly valuable portrait.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ENGRAVED PORTRAITS.

GREAT LEADERS.

THEMISTOCLES AND ARISTIDES.
By GEORGE GROTE.

[Athenian statesmen and soldiers, the first named born 514 B.C., died about 449; the second, surnamed “the Just,” died about 468 B.C., date of birth unknown. During the Persian invasions of Greece, Themistocles was the most brilliant figure among the Greek leaders; his genius was omnipresent, his resources boundless. He created the maritime supremacy of Athens, and through him the great victory of Salamis was won. His political ascendency was finally lost through the distrust created by his unscrupulous and facile character, and he died an exile in Persia, intriguing against his native land. Aristides, less brilliant than his rival, was famous for the stainless integrity and uprightness of his public life, and his name has passed into history as the symbol of unswerving truth and justice. He also contributed largely to the successful leadership of the Hellenic forces against their Asiatic invaders. References: Plutarch’s “Lives,” Grote’s “History of Greece,” Curtius’s “History of Greece.”]

Neither Themistocles nor Aristides could boast of a lineage of gods and heroes like the Æacid Miltiades;[3] both were of middling station and circumstances. Aristides, son of Lysimachus, was on both sides of pure Athenian blood. But the wife of Neocles, father of Themistocles, was a foreign woman of Thrace or Caria; and such an alliance is the less surprising since Themistocles must have been born in the time of the Peisistratids,[4] when the status of an Athenian citizen had not yet acquired its political value. There was a marked contrast between these two eminent men—those points which stood most conspicuous in one being comparatively deficient in the other.

In the description of Themistocles, which we have the advantage of finding briefly sketched by Thucydides, the circumstance most emphatically brought out is his immense force of spontaneous invention and apprehension, without any previous aid either from teaching or actual practice. The might of unassisted nature was never so strikingly exhibited as in him; he conceived the complications of a present embarrassment and divined the chances of a mysterious future with equal sagacity and equal quickness. The right expedient seemed to flash on his mind extempore, even in the most perplexing contingencies, without the least necessity for premeditation.

Nor was he less distinguished for daring and resource in action. When engaged on any joint affairs his superior competence marked him out as the leader for others to follow; and no business, however foreign to his experience, ever took him by surprise or came wholly amiss to him. Such is the remarkable picture which Thucydides draws of a countryman whose death nearly coincided in time with his own birth. The untutored readiness and universality of Themistocles probably formed in his mind a contrast to the more elaborate discipline and careful preliminary study with which the statesmen of his own day—and Pericles specially the greatest of them—approached the consideration and discussion of public affairs. Themistocles had received no teaching from philosophers, sophists, and rhetors, who were the instructors of well-born youth in the days of Thucydides, and whom Aristophanes, the contemporary of the latter, so unmercifully derides—treating such instruction as worse than nothing, and extolling in comparison with it the unlettered courage, the more gymnastic accomplishments of the victors at Marathon.

The general character given in Plutarch, though many of his anecdotes are both trifling and apocryphal, is quite consistent with the brief sketch just cited from Thucydides. Themistocles had an unbounded passion, not merely for glory—insomuch as the laurels of Miltiades acquired at Marathon deprived him of rest—but also for display of every kind. He was eager to vie with men richer than himself in showy exhibition—one great source, though not the only source of popularity at Athens; nor was he at all scrupulous in procuring the means of doing it. Besides being scrupulous in attendance on the ecclesia and dicastery, he knew most of the citizens by name, and was always ready for advice to them in their private affairs. Moreover, he possessed all the tactics of the expert party-man in conciliating political friends and in defeating personal enemies; and though in the early part of his life sincerely bent upon the upholding and aggrandizement of his country, and was on some most critical occasions of unspeakable value to it, yet on the whole his morality was as reckless as his intelligence was eminent.

He was grossly corrupt in the exercise of power and employing tortuous means, sometimes, indeed, for ends in themselves honorable and patriotic, but sometimes also merely for enriching himself. He ended a glorious life by years of deep disgrace, with the forfeiture of all Hellenic esteem and brotherhood—a rich man, an exile, a traitor, and a pensioner of the Great King, pledged to undo his own previous work of liberation accomplished at the victory of Salamis.

Of Aristides, unfortunately, we possess no description from the hand of Thucydides; yet his character is so simple and consistent that we may safely accept the brief but unqualified encomium of Herodotus and Plato, expanded as it is in the biography of Plutarch and Cornelius Nepos, however little the details of the latter can be trusted. Aristides was inferior to Themistocles in resource, quickness, flexibility, and power of coping with difficulties; but incomparably superior to him—as well as to other rivals and contemporaries—in integrity, public as well as private; inaccessible to pecuniary temptation as well as to other seductive influences, and deserving as well as enjoying the highest measure of personal confidence.

He is described as the peculiar friend of Clisthenes, the first founder of the democracy; as pursuing a straight and single-handed course in political life, with no solicitude for party-ties, and with little care either to conciliate friends or to offend enemies; as unflinching in the exposure of corrupt practices by whomsoever committed or upheld; as earning for himself the lofty surname of the Just, not less by his judicial decisions in the capacity of archon, than by his equity in private arbitrations, and even his candor in public dispute; and as manifesting throughout a long public life, full of tempting opportunities, an uprightness without a flaw and beyond all suspicion, recognized equally by his bitter contemporary the poet Timocreon, and by the allies of Athens, upon whom he first assessed the tribute.

Few of the leading men in any part of Greece were without some taint on their reputation, deserved or undeserved, in regard to pecuniary probity; but whoever became notoriously recognized as possessing this vital quality, acquired by means of it a firmer hold on the public esteem than even eminent talents could confer. Thucydides ranks conspicuous probity among the first of the many ascendant qualities possessed by Pericles; and Nicias, equal to him in this respect, though immeasurably inferior in every other, owed to it a still larger proportion of that exaggerated confidence which the Athenian people continued so long to repose in him.

The abilities of Aristides, though apparently adequate to every occasion on which he was engaged, and only inferior when we compare him with so remarkable a man as Thucydides, were put in the shade by this incorruptible probity, which procured for him, however, along with the general esteem, no inconsiderable amount of private enmity from jobbers, whom he exposed, and even some jealousy from persons who heard it proclaimed with offensive ostentation.

We are told that a rustic and unlettered citizen gave his ostracizing vote and expressed his dislike against Aristides on the simple ground that he was tired of hearing him always called the Just. Now the purity of the most honorable man will not bear to be so boastfully talked of, as if he were the only honorable man in the country; the less it is obtruded the more deeply and cordially will it be felt; and the story just alluded to, whether true or false, illustrates that natural reaction of feeling produced by absurd encomiasts or perhaps by insidious enemies under the mask of encomiasts, who trumpeted for Aristides as the Just man at Attica so as to wound the legitimate dignity of every one else.

Neither indiscreet friends nor artful enemies, however, could rob him of the lasting esteem of his countrymen, which he enjoyed with intervals of their displeasure to the end of his life. Though he was ostracized during a part of the period between the battles of Marathon and Salamis—at a time when the rivalry between him and Themistocles was so violent that both could not remain at Athens without peril—yet the dangers of Athens during the invasion of Xerxes brought him back before the ten years of exile were expired. His fortune, originally very moderate, was still further diminished during the course of his life, so that he died very poor, and the state was obliged to lend aid to his children.

PERICLES.
By ERNST CURTIUS.

[A distinguished statesman, who built up and consolidated the power of Athens immediately after the Persian wars, born 495 B.C., died 429. His career was contemporaneous with the highest glory of Athens in art, arms, literature, and oratory. As an orator Pericles was second only to Demosthenes, as a statesman second to none. References: Grote’s “History of Greece,” Curtius’s “History of Greece,” Plutarch’s “Lives,” Bulwer’s “Athens.”]

Aspasia came to Athens when everything new and extraordinary, everything which appeared to be an enlargement of ancient usage, a step forward and a new acquisition, was joyously welcomed. Nor was it long before it was recognized that she enchanted the souls of men by no mere arts of deception of which she had learned the trick. Hers was a lofty and richly endowed nature with a perfect sense of all that is beautiful, and hers a harmonious and felicitous development. For the first time the treasures of Hellenic culture were found in the possession of a woman surrounded by the graces of her womanhood—a phenomenon which all men looked on with eyes of wonder. She was able to converse with irresistible grace on politics, philosophy, and art, so that the most serious Athenians—even such men as Socrates—sought her out in order to listen to her conversation.

But her real importance for Athens began on the day when she made the acquaintance of Pericles, and formed with him a connection of mutual love. It was a real marriage, which only lacked the civil sanction because she was a foreigner; it was an alliance of the truest and tenderest affection which death alone dissolved—the endless source of a domestic felicity which no man needed more than the statesman, who lived retired from all external recreations and was unceasingly engaged in the labors of his life.

Doubtless the possession of this woman was in many respects invaluable for Pericles. Not only were her accomplishments the delights of the leisure hours which he allowed himself and the recreation of his mind from its cares, but she also kept him in intercourse with the daily life around him. She possessed what he lacked—the power of being perfectly at ease in every kind of society; she kept herself informed of everything that took place in the city; nor can distant countries have escaped her attention, since she is said to have first acquainted Pericles with Sicilian oratory, which was at that time developing itself.

She was of use to him through her various connections at home and abroad as well as by the keen glance of her feminine sagacity and by her knowledge of men. Thus the foremost woman of her age lived in the society of the man whose superiority of mind had placed him at the head of the first city of the Hellenes, in loyal devotion to her friend and husband; and although the mocking spirits at Athens eagerly sought out every blemish which could be discovered in the life of Pericles, yet no calumny was ever able to vilify this rare union and to blacken its memory.

Pericles had no leisure for occupying himself with the management of his private property. He farmed out his lands and intrusted the money to his faithful slave Evangelus, who accurately knew the measure which his master deemed the right one, and managed the household accordingly; which, indeed, presented a striking contrast to those of the wealthy families of Athens, and ill corresponded to the tastes of Pericles’s sons as they grew up. For in it there was no overflow, no joyous and reckless expenditure, but so careful an economy that everything was calculated down to drachm and obolus.

Pericles was perfectly convinced that nothing short of a perfectly blameless integrity and the severest self-abnegation could render possible the permanency of his influence over his fellow-citizens and prevent the exposure of even the smallest blot to his cavilers and enemies. After Themistocles had for the first time shown how a statesman and general might enrich himself, Pericles was in this respect the admirer and most faithful follower of Aristides, and in the matter of conscientiousness went even much further than Cimon, spurning on principle every opportunity offered by the office of general for a perfectly justifiable personal enrichment.

All attempts to bribe him remained useless. His lofty sentiments are evidenced by the remark which he addressed to Sophocles, who fell in love even in his old age: “Not only the hands, but the eyes also of a general should practice continence.” The more vivid the appreciation he felt for female charms the more highly must we esteem the equanimity to which he had attained by means of a self-command which had become a matter of habit with him; nor did anything make so powerful an impression upon the changeable Athenians as the immovable calm of this great man.

Pericles was neither a lengthy nor a frequent speaker. He avoided nothing more scrupulously than superfluous words, and therefore as often as he appeared before the people he prayed to Zeus to guard him from useless words. But the brief words which he actually spoke made a proportionately deep impression upon the citizens. His conception of his calling was too solemn and lofty to permit him to consent to talk as the multitude liked. He was not afraid when he found the citizens weak and irresolute to express to them bitter truths and serious blame.

His speeches always endeavored to place every case in connection with facts of a more general kind, so as to instruct and elevate the minds of the citizens; he never grew weary of pointing out how no individual happiness was conceivable from the welfare of the entire body; he proved to the citizens the claim which he had established upon their confidence; he clearly and concisely developed his political views, endeavoring not to talk over his hearers, but to convince them; and when the feeling of his own superiority was about to tempt him to despise the multitude, he admonished himself to be patient and long suffering. “Take heed, Pericles,” he cried to himself, “those whom thou rulest are Hellenes, citizens of Athens.”

The principles of the statesmanship of Pericles were so simple that all citizens were perfectly capable of understanding them; and he attached a particular value to the idea that the Athenians instead of, like the Lacedæmonians, seeking their strength in an affectation of secrecy, were unwilling to overcome their enemies by deception and cunning stratagems. As the Persian war had seemed inevitable to Themistocles, so the struggle with Sparta loomed as certain before the eyes of Pericles. The term of peace allowed before its outbreak had accordingly to be employed by Athens in preparing herself for the struggle awaiting her forces. When at last the critical hour arrived Athens was to stand before her assailants firm and invincible, with her walls for a shield and her navy for a sword.

The long schooling through which Pericles had passed in the art of war and the rare combination of caution and energy which he had displayed in every command held by him had secured him the confidence of the citizens. Therefore they for a succession of years elected him general, and as such invested him with an extraordinary authority, which reduced the offices of the other nine generals to mere posts of honor which were filled by persons agreeable to him. During the period of his administration the whole centers of gravity of public life lay in this office.

Inasmuch as Pericles, besides the authority of a “strategy” prolonged to him in an extraordinary degree, also filled the office of superintendent of the finances; inasmuch as he was repeatedly and for long periods of years superintendent of public works; inasmuch as his personal influence was so great that he could in all important matters determine the civic elections according to his wish; it is easy to understand how he ruled the state in time of war and peace, and how the power of both the council and of the whole civic body in all essentials passed into his hands.

He was the type of temperance and sobriety. He made it a rule never to assist at a festive banquet; and no Athenian could remember to have seen Pericles, since he stood at the head of the state, in the company of friends over the wine-cup. He was known to no man except as one serious and collected, full of grave thoughts and affairs. His whole life was devoted to the service of the state, and his power accompanied by so thorough a self-denial and so full a measure of labor that the multitude in its love of enjoyment could surely not regard the possession of that power as an enviable privilege. For him there existed only one road, which he was daily seen to take, the road leading from his house to the market-place and the council-hall, the seat of the government, where the current business of state was transacted.

EPAMINONDAS.
By ERNST CURTIUS.

[The greatest of the Theban generals and statesmen, and one of the greatest men of antiquity; born about 418 B.C., killed on the battle-field of Mantinea in the hour of victory, 362. He raised Thebes from a subordinate place to the leadership of Greece by his genius in arms and wisdom in council. Eminent as soldier, statesman, and orator, Epaminondas was a model of virtue in his private life, and was not only devoted to his native republic, but in the largest sense a Greek patriot. References: Grote’s “History of Greece,” Curtius’s “History of Greece,” Plutarch’s “Lives.”]

It would be difficult to find in the entire course of Greek history any two statesmen who, in spite of differences in character and outward conditions of life, resembled one another so greatly and were as men so truly the peers of one another as Pericles and Epaminondas. In the case of both these men the chief foundation of their authority was their lofty and varied mental culture; what secured to them their intellectual superiority was the love of knowledge which pervaded and ennobled the whole being of either. Epaminondas like Pericles directs his native city as the man in whom the civic community places supreme confidence, and whom it therefore re-elects from year to year as general. Like Pericles, Epaminondas left no successor behind him, and his death was also the close of an historical epoch.

Epaminondas stood alone from the first; and while Pericles with all his superiority yet stood essentially on the basis of Attic culture, Epaminondas, on the other hand, was, so to speak, a stranger in his native city. Nor was it ever his intention to be a Theban in the sense in which Pericles was an Athenian. The object of his life was rather to be a perfect Hellene, while his efforts as a statesman were likewise simply an endeavor to introduce his fellow-citizens to that true Hellenism which consisted in civic virtue and in love of wisdom.

In the very last hour of his life, when he was delighted by the preservation of his shield, he showed himself a genuine Hellene; thus again it was a genuinely Greek standpoint from which he viewed the war against Sparta and Athens as a competitive contest for the honor of the hegemony in Hellas, an honor which could only be justly won by mental and moral superiority. The conflict was inevitable; it had become a national duty, because the supremacy of Sparta had become a tyranny dishonorable to the Hellenic nation. After Epaminondas liberated the Greek cities from the Spartan yoke it became the object of his Bœotian patriotism to make his own native city worthy and capable of assuming the direction.

How far Epaminondas might have succeeded in securing a permanent hegemony[5] over Greek affairs to the Thebans who shall attempt to judge? He fell in the full vigor of his manhood on the battle-field where the states, which withstood his policy, had brought their last resources to bear. Of all statesmen, therefore, he is least to be judged by the actual results of his policy. His greatness lies in this—that from his childhood he incessantly endeavored to be to his fellow-citizens a model of Hellenic virtue. Chaste and unselfish he passed, ever true to himself, through a most active life, through all the temptations of the most unexampled success in war, through the whole series of trials and disasters.

Epaminondas was not merely the founder of a military organization. He equally proved the inventiveness of his mind in contriving to obtain for his country, which was wealthy neither by trade nor manufactures, pecuniary resources sufficient for maintaining a land-army and a war-navy commensurate with the needs of a great power. He made himself master of all the productive ideas of earlier state administrations; and in particular the Athenians naturally stood before his eyes as models and predecessors.

On the one hand, he turned to account for his native city the improvements made in arms and tactics, which were due to Xenophon, Chabrias, and Iphicrates; on the other, the example of the Athenians taught him that the question of the hegemony over Greece could only be settled by sea. Finally, Epaminondas, more than any other Greek statesman, followed in the footsteps of Periclean Athens in regarding the public fostering of art and science as a main duty of that state which desired to claim a position of primacy.

Personally he did his utmost to domesticate philosophy at Thebes, not only as intellectual discourse carried on in select circles, but as the power of higher knowledge which elevates and purifies the people. Public oratory found a home at Thebes, together with the free constitution; and not only did Epaminondas personally prove himself fully the equal of the foremost orators in Athens—of Callistratus in particular—in power of speech and in felicitous readiness of mind, but, as the embassy at Susa shows, his friends too learned in a surprisingly short time to assert the interests of Thebes by the side of the other states, which had long kept up foreign relations with vigor, skill, and dignity.

In every department there were perceptible intellectual mobility and vigorously sustained effort. Of the fine arts painting received a specially successful development, distinguished by a thoughtful and clear treatment of intellectual ideas. Of the architecture of this period honorable evidence is to this day given by the well-preserved remains of the fortifications of Messene, constructed under the direction of Epaminondas—typical specimens of architecture constructed in the grandest style. Plastic art likewise found a home at Thebes. It was the endeavor of Epaminondas—although with prudent moderation—to transfer the splendor of Periclean Athens to Thebes.

Through Epaminondas Thebes was raised to an equality with the city of the Athenians, as a seat of a policy aiming at freedom and national greatness. It thus became possible for the two cities to join hands in the subsequent struggle for the independence of Greece. And, in this sense, Epaminondas worked beforehand for the objects of Demosthenes. If it is considered how, with his small resources, Epaminondas founded or helped to found Mantinea, Messene, and Megalopolis; how through him other places, such as Corone and Heraclea, likewise received Theban settlers—the honor will not be denied him of having been in the royal art of the foundation of cities the predecessor of Alexander and his successors.

But he was also their predecessor in another point. By spreading Greek manners and ways of life he enlarged the narrow boundaries of the land of the Greeks, and introduced the peoples of the North into the sphere of Greek history. In his own person he represented the ideas of a general Hellenic character, which, unconditioned by local accidents, was freely raised aloft above the distinction of states and tribes. Hitherto only great statesmen had appeared who were great Athenians or Spartans. In Epaminondas this local coloring is of quite inferior importance; he was a Hellene first, and a Theban only in the second place. Thus he prepared the standpoint from which to be a Hellene was regarded as an intellectual privilege, independent of the locality of birth; and this is the standpoint of Hellenism.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
By GEORGE GROTE.

[Son of Philip, King of Macedon, born 356 B.C., died 323. The greatest of the world’s conquerors in the extent and rapidity of his conquests, he began with the consolidation of his father’s conquests over the republics of Greece, overthrew the great Persian Empire, and carried his arms to farther India, within a period of thirteen years. At his death his dominions were divided among his principal generals. References: Grote’s “History of Greece,” Curtius’s “History of Greece,” Plutarch’s “Lives.”]

The first growth and development of Macedonia during the twenty-two years preceding the battle of Chæronea, from an embarrassed secondary state into the first of all known powers, had excited the astonishment of contemporaries and admiration for Philip’s organizing genius; but the achievements of Alexander during the twelve years of his reign, throwing Philip into the shade, had been on a

ALEXANDER THE GREAT.

scale so much grander and vaster, and so completely without serious reverse or even interruption, as to transcend the measure, not only of human expectation, but almost of human belief. All antecedent human parallels—the ruin and captivity of the Lydian Crœsus, the expulsion and mean life of the Syracusan Dionysius, both of them impressive examples of the mutability of human condition—sunk into trifles compared with the overthrow of the towering Persian Colossus.

Such were the sentiments excited by Alexander’s career even in the middle of 330 B.C., more than seven years before his death. During the following seven years his additional achievements had carried astonishment yet further. He had mastered, in defiance of fatigue, hardship, and combat, not merely all the eastern half of the Persian Empire, but unknown Indian regions beyond its easternmost limits. Besides Macedonia, Greece, and Thrace, he possessed all that immense treasure and military force which had once made the Great King so formidable. By no contemporary man had any such power ever been known or conceived. With the turn of imagination then prevalent, many were doubtless disposed to take him for a god on earth, as Grecian spectators had once supposed with regard to Xerxes, when they beheld the innumerable Persian host crossing the Hellespont.

Exalted to this prodigious grandeur, Alexander was at the time of his death little more than thirty-two years old—the age at which a citizen of Athens was growing into important commands; ten years less than the age for a consul at Rome; two years younger than the age at which Timour first acquired the crown and began his foreign conquests. His extraordinary bodily powers were unabated; he had acquired a large stock of military experience; and, what was still more important, his appetite for further conquest was as voracious, and his readiness to purchase it at the largest cost of toil or danger as complete as it had been when he first crossed the Hellespont. Great as his past career had been, his future achievements with such increased means and experience were likely to be yet greater. His ambition would have been satisfied with nothing less than the conquest of the whole habitable world as then known; and, if his life had been prolonged, he probably would have accomplished it.

The patriotic feelings of Livy dispose him to maintain that Alexander, had he invaded Italy and assailed Romans and Samnites, would have failed and perished like his relative Alexander of Epirus. But this conclusion can not be accepted. If we grant the courage and discipline of the Roman infantry to have been equal to the best infantry of Alexander’s army, the same can not be said of the Roman cavalry as compared with the Macedonian companions. Still less is it likely that a Roman consul, annually changed, would have been a match for Alexander in military genius and combination; nor, even if personally equal, would he have possessed the same variety of troops and arms, each effective in its separate way, and all conspiring to one common purpose; nor, the same unbounded influence over their minds in stimulating them to full effort.

Among all the qualities which go to constitute the highest military excellence, either as a general or as a soldier, none was wanting in the character of Alexander. Together with his own chivalrous courage—sometimes, indeed, both excessive and unseasonable, so as to form the only military defect which can be fairly imputed to him—we trace in all his operations the most careful dispositions taken beforehand, vigilant precaution in guarding against possible reverse, and abundant resource in adapting himself to new contingencies. His achievements are the earliest recorded evidence of scientific military organization on a large scale, and of its overwhelming effects.

Alexander overawes the imagination more than any other personage of antiquity by the matchless development of all that constitutes effective force—as an individual warrior and as organizer and leader of armed masses; not merely the blind impetuosity ascribed by Homer to Ares, but also the intelligent, methodized, and all-subduing compression which he personifies in Athene. But all his great qualities were fit for use only against enemies, in which category, indeed, were numbered all mankind, known and unknown, except those who chose to submit to him. In his Indian campaigns amid tribes of utter strangers, we perceive that not only those who stand on their defense, but also those who abandon their property and flee to the mountains are alike pursued and slaughtered.

Apart from the transcendent merits of Alexander as a general, some authors give him credit for grand and beneficent views on the subject of imperial government and for intentions highly favorable to the improvement of mankind. I see no ground for adopting this opinion. As far as we can venture to anticipate what would have been Alexander’s future, we see nothing in prospect except years of ever repeated aggression and conquest, not to be concluded till he had traversed and subjugated all the inhabited globe. The acquisition of universal dominion—conceived not metaphorically but literally, and conceived with greater facility in consequence of the imperfect geographical knowledge of the time—was the master-passion of his soul.

“You are a man like all of us, Alexander, except that you abandon your home,” said the naked Indian to him, “like a medlesome destroyer, to invade the most distant regions; enduring hardship yourself and inflicting hardship on others.” Now, how an empire thus boundless and heterogeneous, such as no prince as has yet ever realized, could have been administered with any superior advantages to subjects, it would be difficult to show. The mere task of acquiring and maintaining, of keeping satraps and tribute-gatherers in authority as well as in subordination, of suppressing resistances ever liable to recur in regions distant by months of march, would occupy the whole life of a world conquerer, without leaving any leisure for the improvements suited to peace and stability—if we give him credit for such purposes in theory.

In respect of intelligence and combining genius, Alexander was Hellenic to the full; in respect of disposition and purpose, no one could be less Hellenic. The acts attesting his Oriental violence of impulse, unmeasured self-will, and exaction of reverence above the limits of humanity, have been recounted. To describe him as a son of Hellas, imbued with the political maxims of Aristotle, and bent on the systematic diffusion of Hellenic culture for the improvement of mankind is in my judgement an estimate of his character contrary to the evidence.

Alexander is indeed said to have invited suggestions from Aristotle as to the best mode of colonizing; but his temper altered so much after a few years of Asiatic conquest, that he came not only to lose all deference for Aristotle’s advice, but even to hate him bitterly. Instead of “Hellenizing” Asia, he was tending to “Asiatize” Macedonia and Hellas. His temper and character as modified by a few years of conquest rendered him quite unfit to follow the course recommended by Aristotle toward the Greeks—quite as unfit as any of the Persian kings, or as the French Emperor Napoleon, to endure that partial frustration, compromise, and smart from personal criticism, which is inseparable from the position of a limited chief.

Plutarch states that Alexander founded more than seventy new cities in Asia. So large a number of them is neither verifiable nor probable, unless we either reckon up simple military posts or borrow from the list of foundations established by his successors. Except Alexandria in Egypt, none of the cities founded by Alexander himself can be shown to have attained any great development. The process of “Hellenizing” Asia, in as far as Asia was ever “Hellenized,” which has so often been ascribed to Alexander, was in reality the work of the successors to his great dominion.

We read that Alexander felt so much interest in the extension of science that he gave to Aristotle the immense sum of eight hundred talents in money, placing under his direction several thousand men, for the purpose of prosecuting zoölogical researches. These exaggerations are probably the work of those enemies of the philosopher who decried him as a pensioner of the Macedonian court; but it is probable enough that Philip, and Alexander in the earlier part of his reign, may have helped Aristotle in the difficult process of getting together facts and specimens for observation from esteem toward him personally rather than from interest in his discoveries.

The intellectual turn of Alexander was toward literature, poetry, and history. He was fond of the “Iliad” especially, as well as of the Attic tragedians; so that Harpalus, being directed to send some books to him in Upper Asia, selected as the most acceptable packet various tragedies of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, with the dithyrambic poems of Telestes and the histories of Philistus.

HANNIBAL.
By THEODOR MOMMSEN.

[A Carthaginian statesman and soldier, one of the foremost generals of antiquity, born 247 B.C., died 183. The series of Italian campaigns in which he imperiled the very existence of Rome are commented on by modern military critics as models of brilliancy and daring, combined with far-sighted prudence. Finally compelled to evacuate Italy, he was defeated and his army destroyed by Publius Cornelius Scipio, afterward surnamed Africanus, at the battle of Zama in Africa in 202. Exiled from Carthage, he spent the latter years of his life in fomenting war against Rome among the Eastern nations, and finally committed suicide to prevent being delivered over to the hands of Rome. References: Mommsen’s “History of Rome,” Plutarch’s “Lives.”]

When Hamilcar departed to take command in Spain, he enjoined his son Hannibal, nine years of age, to swear at the altar of the Supreme God eternal hatred to the Roman name, and reared him and his younger sons, Hasdrubal and Mago—the “lion’s brood,” as he called them—in the camp, as the inheritors of his projects, of his genius, and of his hatred.

The man whose head and heart had in a desperate emergency and amid a despairing people paved the way for their deliverance, was no more when it became possible to carry out his design. Whether his successor Hasdrubal forbore to make the attack because the proper moment seemed to him not yet to have arrived, or whether, a statesman rather than a general, he believed himself unequal to the conduct of the enterprise, we are unable to determine. When, at the beginning of 219 B.C., he fell by the hand of an assassin, the Carthaginian officers of the Spanish army summoned to fill his place Hannibal, the eldest son of Hamilcar.

He was still a young man, born in 247 B.C., and now, therefore, in his twenty-ninth year; but his life had already been fraught with varied experience. His first recollections picture to him his father fighting in a distant land and conquering on Ercte; he shared that unconquered father’s fortunes and sympathized with his feelings on the peace of Catulus, on the bitter return home, and throughout the horrors of the Libyan war. While still a boy he had followed his father to the camp, and he soon distinguished himself.

His light and firmly built frame made him an excellent runner and boxer and a fearless rider; the privation of sleep did not affect him, and he knew like a soldier how to enjoy or to want his food. Although his youth had been spent in

HANNIBAL.

the camp, he possessed such culture as was bestowed on the noble Phœnicians of the time; in Greek, apparently after he had become a general, he made such progress under the guidance of his intimate friend Sasilus of Sparta as to be able to compose state papers in that language.

As he grew up, he entered the army of his father to perform his first feats of arms under the paternal eye, and to see him fall in battle by his side. Thereafter he had commanded the cavalry under his sister’s husband Hasdrubal and distinguished himself by brilliant personal bravery as well as by his talents as a leader. The voice of his comrades now summoned him—their tried and youthful leader—to the chief command, and he could now execute the designs for which his father and his brother-in-law had died.

He took possession of the inheritance, and was worthy of it. His contemporaries tried to cast stains of all sorts on his character; the Romans charged him with cruelty, the Carthaginians with covetousness; and it is true that he hated as only Oriental natures know how to hate, and that a general who never fell short of money and stores can hardly have been other than covetous. Nevertheless, though anger and envy and meanness have written his history, they have not been able to mar the pure and noble image which it presents.

Laying aside wretched inventions which furnished their own refutation, and some things which his lieutenants Hannibal Monomachus, and Mago the Samnite, were guilty of doing in his name, nothing occurs in the accounts regarding him which may not be justified in the circumstances and by the international law of the times; and all agree in this—that he combined in rare perfection discretion and enthusiasm, caution and energy.

He was peculiarly marked by that inventive craftiness which forms one of the leading traits of the Phœnician character—he was fond of taking singular and unexpected routes; ambushes and strategems of all sorts were familiar to him; and he studied the character of his antagonists with unprecedented care. By an unrivaled system of espionage—he had regular spies even in Rome—he kept himself informed of the projects of the enemy; he himself was frequently seen wearing disguises and false hair in order to procure information on some point or another.

Every page of history attests his genius as a general; and his gifts as a statesman were, after the peace with Rome, no less conspicuously displayed in his reform of the Carthaginian constitution and in the unparalleled influence which as an exiled strength he exercised in the cabinets of the Eastern powers. The power which he wielded over men is shown by his incomparable control over an army of various nations and many tongues—an army which never in the worst times mutinied against him. He was a great man; wherever he went he riveted the eyes of all.

Hannibal’s cautious and masterly execution of his plan of crossing the Alps into Italy, instead of transporting his army by sea, in its details, at all events, deserves our admiration, and, to whatever causes the result may have been due—whether it was due mainly to the favor of fortune or mainly to the skill of the general—the grand idea of Hamilcar, that of taking up the conflict with Rome in Italy, was now realized. It was his genius that projected the expedition; and the unerring tact of historical tradition has always dwelt on the last link in the great chain of preparatory steps, the passage of the Alps, with a greater admiration than on the battles of the Trasimene Lake and of the plain of Cannæ.

Hannibal knew Rome better, perhaps, than the Romans knew it themselves. It was clearly apparent that the Italian federation was in political solidity and in military resources far superior to an adversary who received only precarious and irregular support from home; and that the Phœnician foot-soldier was, notwithstanding all the pains taken by Hannibal, far inferior in point of tactics to the legionary, had been completely proved by the defensive movements of Scipio. From these convictions flowed two fundamental principles which determined Hannibal’s whole method of operations in Italy, viz., that the war should be carried on somewhat adventurously, with constant changes in the plan and in the theatre of operations; and that its favorable issue could only be looked for as the result of political and not of military successes—of the gradual loosening and breaking up of the Italian federation.

This aim was the aim dictated to him by right policy, because mighty conqueror though he was in battle, he saw very clearly that on each occasion he vanquished the generals but not the city, and that after each new battle, the Romans remained as superior to the Carthaginians as he was personally superior to the Roman commanders. That Hannibal, even at the height of his fortune, never deceived himself on this point is a fact more wonderful than his wonderful battles.

THE GRACCHI.
By PLUTARCH.

[Tiberius Sempronius and Caius Sempronius, sons of Tiberius Gracchus by Cornelia, daughter of Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Hannibal and Carthage. The first, born 168 B.C., died in 133; the second, born about 159 B.C., died in 121. The brothers, though on both sides of the highest patrician rank and descent, espoused the democratic cause. Both rose to the rank of tribune. Tiberius carried through an agrarian law dividing the surplus lands of the republic among the poor, and was killed in a popular emeute. Caius caused to be passed a poor-law giving monthly distributions of corn. He also transferred the judicial power largely to the equites or knights, and proposed to extend the Roman franchise to all Italy. He committed suicide to save himself from assassination. References: Arnold’s “History of Rome” and Mommsen’s “History of Rome.”]

Cornelia, taking upon herself the care of the household and the education of her children, approved herself so discreet a matron, so affectionate a mother, and so constant and noble-spirited a woman, that Tiberius seemed to all men to have done nothing unreasonable in choosing to die for such a woman, who, when King Ptolemy himself proffered her his crown and would have married her, refused it and chose rather to live a widow. In this state she continued and lost all her children, except one daughter, who was married to Scipio the younger, and two sons, Tiberius and Caius.

These she brought up with such care, that though they were without dispute in natural endowments and disposition the first among the Romans of their day, yet they seemed to owe their virtues even more to their education than to their birth. And, as in the statues and pictures made of Castor and Pollux, though the brothers resemble one another, yet there is a difference to be perceived in their countenances between the one who delighted in the cestus, and the other that was famous in the course; so between these two youths, though there was a strong general likeness in their common love of fortitude and temperance, in their liberality, their eloquence, and their greatness of mind, yet in their actions and administrations of public affairs, a considerable variation showed itself.

Tiberius, in the form and expression of his countenance and in his gesture and motion, was gentle and composed; but Caius, earnest and vehement. And so in their public speeches to the people, the one spoke in a quiet, orderly manner, standing throughout on the same spot; the other would walk about on the hustings and in the heat of his orations pull his gown off his shoulders, and was the first of all the Romans to use such gestures. Caius’s oratory was impetuous and passionate, making everything tell to the utmost, whereas Tiberius was gentle and persuasive, awakening emotions of pity. His diction was pure and carefully correct, while that of Caius was rich and vehement.

So likewise in their way of living and at their tables; Tiberius was frugal and plain, Caius, compared with others, temperate and even austere, but contrasting with his brother in a fondness for new fashions and varieties. The same difference that appeared in their diction was observable also in their tempers. The one was mild and reasonable; the other rough and passionate, and to that degree that often in the midst of speaking he was so hurried away by his passion against his judgment that his voice lost its tone and he began to pass into mere abusive talking, spoiling his whole speech.

As a remedy to this excess he made use of an ingenious servant of his, one Licinius, who stood constantly behind him with a sort of pitch-pipe, or instrument to regulate the voice by, and whenever he perceived his master’s tone alter and break with anger, he struck a soft note with his pipe, on hearing which Caius immediately checked the vehemence of his passion and his voice grew quieter, and he allowed himself to be recalled to temper.

Such are the differences between the two brothers, but their valor in war against their country’s enemies, their justice in the government of its subjects, their care and industry in office, and their self-command in all that regarded their pleasures, were equally remarkable in both. Tiberius was the elder by nine years; owing to which their actions as public men were divided by the difference of the times in which those of the one and those of the other were performed. The power they would have exercised, had they both flourished together, could scarcely have failed to overcome all resistance.

Their greatest detractors and their worst enemies could not but allow that they had a genius to virtue beyond all other Romans, which was improved also by a generous education. Besides, the Gracchi, happening to live when Rome had her greatest repute for honor and virtuous actions, might justly have been ashamed if they had not also left to the next generation the whole inheritance of the virtues of their ancestors.

The integrity of the two Romans, and their superiority to money was chiefly remarkable in this—that in office and the administration of public affairs they kept themselves from the imputation of unjust gain. The chief things in general which they aimed at were the settlement of cities and mending the highways; and in particular the boldest design which Tiberius is famed for is the recovery of the public land; and Caius gained his greatest reputation by the addition, for the exercise of judicial powers, of three hundred of the order of knights to the same number of senators.

Tiberius was the first who attempted to scale the walls of Carthage, which was no mean exploit. We may add the peace which he concluded with the Numantines, by which he saved the lives of twenty thousand Romans, who otherwise had certainly been cut off. And Caius, not only at home, but in war in Sardinia, displayed distinguished courage. So that their early actions were no small argument that afterward they might have rivaled the best of the Roman commanders if they had not died so young.

Of the Gracchi, neither the one nor the other was the first to shed the blood of his fellow-citizens; and Caius is reported to have avoided all manner of resistance, even when his life was aimed at, showing himself always valiant against a foreign enemy, but wholly inactive in a sedition. This was the reason that he went from his own house unarmed, and withdrew when the battle began, and in all respects showed himself anxious rather not to do any harm to others than not suffer any himself. Even the very flight of the Gracchi must not be looked on as an argument of a mean spirit, but an honorable retreat from endangering others.

The greatest crime that can be laid to Tiberius’s charge was the disposing of his fellow-tribune, and seeking afterward a second tribuneship for himself. Tiberius and Caius by nature had an excessive desire for glory and honors. Beyond this, their enemies could find nothing to bring against them; but as soon as the contention began with their adversaries, their heat and passions would so far prevail beyond their natural temper that by them, as by ill-winds, they were driven afterward to all their rash undertakings. What would be more just and honorable than their first design, had not the power and faction of the rich, by endeavoring to abrogate that law, engaged them both in those fatal quarrels, the one for his own preservation, the other to avenge his brother’s death who was murdered without law or justice.

CAIUS MARIUS.
By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

[An able Roman general and leader of the democratic faction, born 157 B.C., died 86. The military skill of Marius finished the Jugurthine war and saved Rome from the Cimbri and Teutons. Though of plebeian birth he married into an eminent patrician family, and became thereby the uncle of Julius Cæsar, who attached himself to the Marian party in the political wars which raged between the popular and patrician factions, the latter being led by Sylla. The worst stain on the memory of Marius is the massacre which he permitted at the beginning of his last consulate. References: Mommsen’s “History of Rome,” Froude’s “Life of Cæsar,” Plutarch’s “Lives.”]

Marius was born at Arpinum, a Latin township, seventy miles from the capital. His father was a small farmer, and he was himself bred to the plow. He joined the army early, and soon attracted notice by the punctual discharge of his duties. In a time of growing looseness, Marius was strict himself in keeping discipline and in enforcing it as he rose in the service. He was in Spain when Jugurtha [6] was there, and made himself specially useful to Scipio;[7] he forced his way steadily upward by his mere soldier-like qualities to the rank of military tribune. Rome, too, had learned to know him, for he was chosen tribune of the people the year after the murder of Caius Gracchus. Being a self-made man, he naturally belonged to the popular party. While in office he gave offense in some way to the men in power, and was called before the senate to answer for himself. But he had the right on his side, it is likely, for they found him stubborn and impertinent, and they could make nothing of their charges against him.

He was not bidding, however, at this time for the support of the mob. He had the integrity and sense to oppose the largesses of corn, and he forfeited his popularity by trying to close the public granaries before the practice had passed into a system. He seemed as if made of a block of hard Roman oak, gnarled and knotted but sound in all its fibers. His professional merit continued to recommend him. At the age of forty he became prætor,[8] and was sent to Spain, where he left a mark again by the successful severity by which he cleared the provinces of banditti. He was a man neither given himself to talking nor much talked about in the world; but he was sought for wherever work was to be done, and he had made himself respected and valued; for after his return from the peninsula he had married into one of the most distinguished of the patrician families.

Marius by this marriage became a person of social consequence. His father had been a client of the Metelli; and Cæcelius Metellus, who must have known Marius by reputation and probably in person, invited him to go as second in command in the African campaign.[9] The war dragged on, and Marius, perhaps ambitious, perhaps impatient at the general’s want of vigor, began to think he could make quicker work of it. There was just irritation that a petty African prince could defy the whole power of Rome for so many years; and though a democratic consul had been unheard of for a century, the name of Marius began to be spoken of as a possible candidate. Marius consented to stand. The patricians strained their resources to defeat him, but he was chosen with enthusiasm.

A shudder of alarm ran, no doubt, through the senate house when the determination of the people was known. A successful general could not be disposed of as easily as oratorical tribunes. Fortunately Marius was not a politician. He had no belief in democracy. He was a soldier and had a soldier’s way of thinking on government and the methods of it. His first step was a reformation in the army. Hitherto the Roman legions had been no more than the citizens in arms, called for the moment from their various occupations to return to them when the occasion for their services was past. Marius had perceived that fewer men, better trained and disciplined, could be made more effective and be more easily handled. He had studied war as a science. He had perceived that the present weakness need be no more than an accident, and that there was a latent force in the Roman state which needed only organization to resume its ascendancy.

“He enlisted,” it was said, “the worst of the citizens”—men, that is to say, who had no occupation, and became soldiers by profession; and as persons without property could not have furnished themselves at their own cost, he must have carried out the scheme proposed by Gracchus, and equipped them at the expense of the state. His discipline was of the sternest. The experiment was new; and men of rank who had a taste for war in earnest, and did not wish that the popular party should have the whole benefit and credit of the improvements were willing to go with him; among them a dissipated young patrician, called Lucius Sylla, whose name was also destined to be memorable.

Marius had formed an army barely in time to save Italy from being totally overwhelmed. A vast migratory wave of population had been set in motion behind the Rhine and Danube. The hunting-grounds were too strait for the numbers crowded into them, and two enormous hordes were rolling westward and southward in search of some new abiding-place. The Teutons came from the Baltic down across the Rhine into Luxemburg. The Cimbri crossed the Danube near its sources into Illyria. Both Teutons and Cimbri were Germans, and both were making for Gaul by different routes. Each division consisted of hundreds of thousands. They traveled with their wives and children, their wagons, as with the ancient Scythians and with the modern South African Dutch, being their homes. Two years had been consumed in these wanderings, and Marius was by this time ready for them.

Marius was continued in office, and was a fourth time consul. He had completed his military reforms, and the army was now a professional service with regular pay. Trained corps of engineers were attached to each legion. The campaigns of the Romans were henceforth to be conducted with spade and pickaxe as well as with sword and javelin, and the soldiers learned the use of tools as well as of arms. The Teutons were destroyed on the twentieth of July, 102 B.C. In the year following the same fate overtook their comrades. The victories of Marius mark a new epoch in Roman history. The legions were no longer the levy of the citizens in arms, who were themselves the state for which they fought. The legionaries were citizens still. They had votes and they used them; but they were professional soldiers with the modes of thought which belong to soldiers, and besides the power of the hustings was now the power of the sword.

The danger from the Germans was no sooner gone than political anarchy broke loose again. Marius, the man of the people, was the savior of his country. He was made a consul a fifth time, and then a sixth. An indifferent politician, however, he stood aloof in the fierce faction contest between the aristocrats and the popular party. At last he had almost withdrawn from public life, as he had no heart for the quarrel, and did not care to exert his power. For eight years both he and his rival Sylla kept aloof from politics and were almost unheard of.

When Sylla came to the front, it was as leader of the aristocratic power in the state. Sulpicius Rufus, once a champion of the senate and the most brilliant orator in Rome, went over to the people, and as tribune demanded the deposition of Sylla. The latter replied by leading his legionaries to Rome. Sulpicius was killed; Marius, the savior of his country, had to fly for his life, pursued by assassins, with a price set upon his head.

While Sylla was absent in the East prosecuting that magnificent campaign against Mithridates, King of Pontus, which stamped him the first soldier of his time, the popular party again raised its head. Old Marius, who had been hunted through marsh and forest, and had been hiding with difficulty in Africa, came back at the news that Italy had risen again. Marius and Cinna joined their forces, appeared together at the gates of the capital, and Rome capitulated. There was a bloody score to be wiped out. Marius bears the chief blame for the scenes which followed. A price had been set on his head, his house had been destroyed, his property had been confiscated, he, himself, had been chased like a wild beast, and he had not deserved such treatment. He had saved Italy, when but for him it would have been wasted by the swords of the Germans.

His power had afterward been absolute, but he had not abused it for party purposes. The senate had no reason to complain of him. His crime in their eyes had been his eminence. They had now shown themselves as cruel as they were worthless; and if public justice was disposed to make an end of them, he saw no cause to interfere. From retaliatory political vengeance the transition was easy to plunder and wholesale murder; and for many days the wretched city was made a prey to robbers and cut-throats.

So ended the year 87, the darkest and bloodiest which the guilty city had yet experienced. Marius and Cinna were chosen consuls for the ensuing year and a witch’s prophecy was fulfilled that Marius should hold a seventh consulate. But the glory had departed from him. His sun was already setting, redly, among crimson clouds. He lived but a fortnight after his inauguration, and died in his bed at the age of seventy-one. “The mother of the Gracchi,” said Mirabeau, “cast the dust of her murdered sons into the air, and out of it sprang Caius Marius.”

MITHRIDATES, KING OF PONTUS.[10]
By THEODOR MOMMSEN.

[Surnamed “the Great,” born about 132 B.C., died in 63. This powerful Eastern monarch, who greatly extended his frontiers beyond his original kingdom, was one of the most formidable barriers to Roman power in Asia. He organized a league and severely taxed the military resources of the republic. Sulla spent four years in compelling him to submit to an honorable peace. In the second Mithridatic war he was successively defeated by Lucullus and Pompey. He finally committed suicide by the hands of one of his mercenaries. References: Mommsen’s “History of Rome,” Arnold’s “History of Rome.”]

Partly through the constant growth of oppression naturally incident to every tyrannic government, partly through the indirect operation of the Roman revolution—in the seizure, for instance, of the property of the soil in the province of Asia by Caius Gracchus, in the Roman tenths and customs, and in the human hunts which the collectors of revenue added to their other avocations there—the Roman rule, barely tolerable from the first, pressed so heavily on Asia, that neither the king’s crown nor the peasant’s hut there was any longer safe from confiscation, that every stalk of corn seemed to grow for Roman tribute, and every child of free parents seemed born for the Roman slave-driver.

It is true that the Asiatic bore even this torture with his inexhaustible passive endurance; but it was not patience or reflection that made him bear it peacefully. It was rather the peculiarly Oriental want of power to take the initiative; and in these peaceful lands, among these effeminate nations, strange and terrible things might happen if once there should appear among them a man who knew how to give the signal for revolt.

There reigned at that time in the kingdom of Pontus Mithridates VI, surnamed Eupator, who traced back his lineage on the father’s side, in the sixteenth generation to King Darius, son of Hystaspes, in the eighth to Mithridates I, the founder of the Pontic Empire, and was on the mother’s side descended from the Alexandridæ and the Seleucidæ. After the early death of his father, Mithridates Euergetes, who fell by the hand of an assassin at Synope, he had received the title of king when a boy of eleven years old; but the diadem had only brought to him trouble and danger. It is said that in order to escape from the daggers of his legal protectors, he became of his own accord a wanderer; and during seven years, changing his resting-place night after night, a fugitive in his own kingdom, led the life of a lonely hunter.

Thus the boy grew into a mighty man. Although our accounts regarding him are in substance traceable to written records of contemporaries, yet the legendary tradition, which is generated with the rapidity of lightning in the East, early adorned the mighty king with many of the traits of its Samson and Rustem. These traits, however, belong to his character just as the crown of clouds belong to the highest mountain peaks; the outline of the figure appears in both cases only more colored and fantastic, not disturbed or essentially altered.

The armor which fitted the gigantic frame of King Mithridates excited the wonder of the Asiatics, and still more that of the Italians. As a runner he overtook the swiftest deer; as a rider he broke in the wildest steed, and was able by changing horses to accomplish one hundred and twenty miles in a day; as a charioteer he drove with sixteen in hand, and gained in competition many a prize—it was dangerous, no doubt, in such sport to carry off victory from the king.

In hunting on horseback he hit the game at full gallop, and never missed his aim. He challenged competition at the table also; he arranged banqueting matches and carried off in person the prizes proposed for the most substantial eater and the hardest drinker. His intellectual wants he satisfied by the wildest superstition—the interpretation of dreams and of the Greek mysteries occupied not a few of the king’s hours—and by a rude adoption of the Hellenic civilization. He was fond of Greek art and music—that is to say, he collected precious articles, rich furniture, old Persian and Greek articles of luxury—his cabinet of rings was famous—he had constantly Greek historians, philosophers, and poets in his train; and proposed prizes at his court festivals, not only for the greatest eaters and drinkers, but also for the merriest jester and the best singer.

Such was the man; the sultan corresponded. In the East, where the relation between the ruler and the ruled bears the relation of natural rather than of moral law, the subject resembles the dog alike in fidelity and in falsehood, the ruler is cruel and distrustful. In both respects Mithridates has hardly been surpassed. By his orders there died or pined in perpetual captivity, for real or alleged treason, his mother, his brother, his sister espoused to him, three of his sons, and as many of his daughters. Still more revolting, perhaps, is the fact that among his secret papers were found sentences of death, drawn up beforehand, against his most confidential servants.

In like manner it was a genuine trait of the sultan that he afterward, for the mere purpose of depriving his enemy of trophies of victory, caused his whole harem to be killed, and distinguished his favorite concubine, a beautiful Ephesian, by allowing her to choose the mode of death. He prosecuted the experimental studies of poisons and antidotes as an important branch of the business of government, and tried to inure his body to particular poisons. He had early learned to look for treason and assassination at the hands of everybody, especially his nearest relations, and he had early learned to practice them against everybody, and most of all against those nearest him; of which the necessary consequence—attested by history—was that all his undertakings finally miscarried through the perfidy of those whom he trusted.

At the same time we meet with isolated traits of high-minded justice. When he punished traitors, he ordinarily spared those who were involved in the crime solely through their personal relations with the leading culprits; but such fits of equity are to be met with in every barbarous tyrant. What really distinguishes Mithridates amid the multitude of similar sultans is his boundless activity. He disappeared one fine morning from his palace, and remained unheard of for months, so that he was given over as lost; when he returned, he had wandered incognito through all anterior Asia, and reconnoitered everywhere the country and the people.

In like manner he was not only generally fluent in speech, but he administered justice to each of the twenty-two nations over which he ruled in its own language, without needing an interpreter—a trait significant of the versatile East. His whole activity as a ruler bears the same character. So far as we know, his energies, like those of every other sultan, were spent in collecting treasures, in assembling armies—which were usually, in his earlier years at least, led against the enemy not by the king in person, but by some Greek condottiere—in efforts to add new satrapies to the old.

Of higher elements—desire to advance civilization, earnest leadership of the national opposition, special gifts of genius—there are found, in our traditional accounts at least, no distinct traces in Mithridates, and we have no reason to place him on a level even with the great rulers of the Osmans, such as Mohammed II and Suleiman. Notwithstanding his Hellenic culture, which sat on him not much better than his Roman armor on his Cappadocians, he was throughout an Oriental of the ordinary stamp, coarse, full of the most sensual appetites, superstitious, cruel, perfidious, and unscrupulous, but so vigorous in organization, so powerful in physical endowments, that his defiant laying about him and his unshaken courage in resistance frequently look like talent, sometimes even like genius.

Granting even that during the death-struggle of the republic it was easier to offer resistance than in the times of Scipio or Trajan, and that it was only in the complication of the Asiatic events with the internal commotions of Italy that rendered it possible for Mithridates to resist the Romans twice as long as Jugurtha did, it nevertheless remains true that before the Parthian war he was the only enemy who gave serious trouble to the Romans in the East, and that he defended himself as the lion of the desert defends himself against the hunter.

But whatever judgment we may form as to the individual character of the king, his historical position remains in a high degree significant. The Mithridatic wars formed at once the last movement of the political opposition offered by Hellas to Rome and the beginning of a revolt against the Roman supremacy resting on very different and far deeper grounds of antagonism—the national reaction of the Asiatics against the Occidentals, a new passage in the huge duel between the West and the East which has been transmitted from the struggle of Marathon to the present generation, and will, perhaps, reckon its future by thousands of years as it has reckoned its past.

LUCIUS SYLLA.
By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla or Sylla (Felix) dictator of Rome, born 138 B.C., died in 78. Leader of the aristocratic party in the state, he destroyed the party of popular reform, became dictator, and proscribed thousands of the best citizens of the republic, who were hunted down like wild beasts. In the Social and the Samnite war, as in the first war against Mithridates, he displayed the genius of a great soldier, surpassing even that of his able rival Marius. He reorganized the Roman Constitution, concentrated all power in the hands of the senatorial oligarchy, and paved the way for Julius Cæsar to overthrow the liberties of the republic, though the latter belonged to the opposite party. References: Froude’s “Life of Cæsar,” Plutarch’s “Lives,” Mommsen’s “History of Rome.”]

Lucius Sylla, a patrician of the purest blood, had inherited a moderate fortune, and had spent it like other young men of rank, lounging in theatres and amusing himself with dinner-parties. He was a poet, an artist, and a wit, but each and everything with the languor of an amateur. His favorite associates were actresses, and he had neither obtained nor aspired to any higher reputation than that of a cultivated man of fashion.

His distinguished birth was not apparent in his person. He had red hair, hard blue eyes, and a complexion white and purple, with the colors so ill-mixed, that his face was compared to a mulberry sprinkled with flour. Ambition, he appeared to have none, and when he exerted himself to be appointed quæstor[11] to Marius on the African expedition, Marius was disinclined to take him as having no recommendation beyond qualifications which the consul of the plebeians disdained and disliked. Marius, however, soon discovered his mistake. Beneath his constitutional indolence Sylla was by nature a soldier, a statesman, a diplomatist. He had been too contemptuous of the common objects of politicians to concern himself with the intrigues of the forum, but he had only to exert himself to rise with easy ascendancy to the command of every situation in which he might be placed.

The war of factions which exiled Marius, placed Sylla at the head of the expedition against the King of Pontus. He defeated Mithridates, he drove him back out of Greece and pursued him into Asia. He left him still in possession of his hereditary kingdom; but he left him bound, so far as treaties could bind so ambitious a spirit, to remain thenceforward on his own frontiers. He recovered Greece, the islands, and the Roman provinces in Asia Minor. He extorted an indemnity of five millions, and executed many of the wretches who had been active in the murders. He raised a fleet in Egypt with which he drove the pirates out of the archipelago back into their own waters. He restored the shattered prestige of Roman authority, and he won for himself a reputation which his later cruelties could stain but not efface. During his Eastern campaign, a period of more than four years, the popular party had recovered ascendancy at Rome.

The time was come when Sylla was to demand a reckoning for what had been done in his absence. No Roman general had deserved better of his country; his task was finished. He had measured the difficulty of the task which lay before him, but he had an army behind him accustomed to victory, and recruited by thousands of exiles who had fled from the rule of the democracy. He intended to re-enter Rome with the glories of his conquests about him, for revenge, and a counter-revolution. Sylla had lingered at Athens, collecting paintings and statues and manuscripts—the rarest treasures on which he could lay his hands—to decorate his Roman palace. On receiving the consul’s answer he sailed for Brindisi in the spring of 83 with forty thousand legionaries and a large fleet.

The war lasted for more than a year. At length the contest ended in a desperate fight under the walls of Rome itself on the first of November, B.C., 82. The popular army was at last cut to pieces, a few thousand prisoners taken, but they were murdered afterward in cold blood. Young Marius killed himself. Sertorius fled to Spain, and Sylla and the aristocracy were masters of Rome and Italy. Sylla was under no illusions. He understood the problem which he had in hand. He knew that the aristocracy were detested by nine tenths of the people; he knew that they deserved to be detested, but they were at least gentlemen by birth and breeding.

The democrats, on the other hand, were insolent upstarts who, instead of being grateful for being allowed to live and work and pay taxes and serve in the army, had dared to claim a share in the government, had turned against their masters, and had set their feet upon their necks. They were ignorant, and without leaders could be controlled easily. The guilt and danger lay with the men of wealth and intellect, the country gentlemen, the minority of knights and patricians like Cinna,[12] who had taken the popular side and deserted their own order. There was no hope for an end of agitation till every one of these men had been rooted out.

Appointed dictator, at his own direction, by the senate, he at once outlawed every magistrate, every public servant, civil or municipal, who had held office under the rule of Cinna. It mattered little to Sylla who were included if none escaped who were really dangerous to him; and an order was issued for a slaughter of the entire number, the confiscation of their property, and the division of it between the informers and Sylla’s friends and soldiers. It was one of those deliberate acts, carried out with method and order, which are possible only in countries in an advanced stage of civilization, and which show how thin is the film spread over human ferocity by what is called progress and culture. Four thousand seven hundred persons fell in the proscription of Sylla, all men of education and fortune. Common report or private information was at once indictment and evidence, and accusation was in itself condemnation.

The political reform enforced by the dictator gave the senate complete restrictive control over legislation and administration. All constitutional progress which had been made in the interests of the people was utterly swept away. The senate was made omnipotent and irresponsible. Sylla’s career was drawing to its close, and the end was not the least remarkable feature of it. He resigned the dictatorship and became a private citizen again, amusing the leisure of his age, as he had abused the leisure of his youth, with theatres and actresses and dinner-parties.

He too, like so many of the great Romans, was indifferent to life; of power for the sake of power he was entirely careless; and if his retirement had been more dangerous to him than it really was, he probably would not have postponed it. He was a person of singular character, and not without many qualities which were really admirable. He was free from any touch of charlatanry. He was true, simple, and unaffected, and even without ambition in the mean and personal sense. His fault, which he would have denied to be a fault, was that he had a patrician disdain of mobs and suffrages and the cant of popular liberty.

The type repeats itself era after era. Sylla was but Graham of Claverhouse in a Roman dress and with an ampler stage. His courage in laying down his authority has often been commented on, but the risk which he incurred was insignificant. Of assassination he was in no greater danger than when dictator, while the temptation to assassinate him was less. His influence was practically undiminished, and as long as he lived he remained, and could not but remain, the first person in the republic. He lived a year after his retirement and died 78 B.C., being occupied at the time in writing his memoirs, which have been unfortunately lost. He was buried gorgeously in the Campus Martius, among the old kings of Rome.

POMPEY.
By THOMAS KERCHEVER ARNOLD.

[Known as Cneius Pompeius Magnus (or the Great), born 106 B.C., assassinated in Egypt by one of his own officers in 48. Best known as the most formidable rival of Julius Cæsar; his career was eminently fortunate till he sunk before the ascendancy of a greater man. He achieved brilliant victories for Rome, and was honored with three triumphs. Pompey was identified in the factional wars of Italy, with the party led by Sulla. He finally became triumvir in the division of power with Cæsar and Crassus. In the civil war which ensued Pompey was defeated by Cæsar at the battle of Pharsalia in Thessaly. After this defeat he fled to Egypt, where, as he was leaving the boat for the shore, he was stabbed in the back.]

The tears shed for Pompey were not only those of domestic infliction; his fate called forth a more general and honorable mourning. No man had ever gained at so early an age the affections of his countrymen; none had enjoyed them so largely, or preserved them so long with so little interruption; and at the distance of eighteen centuries the feeling of his contemporaries may be sanctioned by the sober judgment of history.

He entered upon life as a distinguished member of an oppressed party, which was just arriving at its hour of triumph and retaliation; he saw his associates plunged into rapine and massacre, but he preserved himself pure from the contagion of their crimes; and when the death of Sylla left him almost at the head of the aristocratical party, he served them ably and faithfully with his sword, while he endeavored to mitigate the evils of their ascendancy by restoring to the commons of Rome, on the earliest opportunity, the most important of those privileges and liberties which they had lost under the tyranny of their late master.

He received the due reward of his honest patriotism in the unusual honors and trusts that were conferred on him; but his greatness could not corrupt his virtue; and the boundless powers with which he was repeatedly invested he wielded with the highest ability and uprightness to the accomplishment of his task, and then, without any undue attempts to prolong their duration, he honestly resigned them. At a period of general cruelty and extortion toward the enemies and subjects of the commonwealth, the character of Pompey in his foreign commands was marked by its humanity and spotless integrity.

His conquest of the pirates was effected with wonderful rapidity, and cemented by a merciful policy, which, instead of taking vengeance for the past, accomplished the prevention of evil for the future. His presence in Asia, when he conducted the war with Mithridates, was no less a relief to the provinces from the tyranny of their governors, than it was their protection against the arms of the enemy. It is true that wounded vanity led him, after his return from Asia, to unite himself for a time with some unworthy associates; and this connection, as it ultimately led to all his misfortunes, so did it immediately tempt him to the worst faults of his political life, and involved him in a career of difficulty, mortification, and shame.

But after this disgraceful fall, he again returned to his natural station, and was universally regarded as the fit protector of the laws and liberties of his country when they were threatened by Cæsar’s rebellion. In the conduct of the civil war he showed something of weakness and vacillation; but his abilities, though considerable, were far from being equal to those of his adversary. His inferiority was most seen in that want of steadiness in the pursuit of his own plans which caused him to abandon a system already sanctioned by success, and to persuade himself that he might yield with propriety to the ill-judged impatience of his followers for battle.

His death is one of the few tragical events of those times which may be regarded with unmixed compassion. It was not accompanied, like that of Cato and Brutus, with the rashness and despair of suicide; nor can it be regarded like that of Cæsar, as the punishment of crimes, unlawfully inflicted, indeed, yet suffered deservedly. With a character of rare purity and tenderness in his domestic relations, he was slaughtered before the eyes of his wife and son; while flying from the ruin of a most just cause he was murdered by those whose kindness he was entitled to claim.

His virtues have not been transmitted to posterity with their deserved fame; and while the violent republican writers have exalted the memory of Cato and Brutus; while the lovers of literature have extolled Cicero; and the admirers of successful ability have lavished their praises on Cæsar; Pompey’s many and rare merits have been forgotten in the faults of his triumvirate, and in the weakness of temper which he displayed in conduct of the last campaign.

But he must have been in no ordinary degree good and amiable for whom his countrymen professed their enthusiastic love, unrestrained by servility and unimpelled by faction; and though the events of his life must now be gathered for the most part from unfriendly sources, yet we think that they who read them impartially will continually cherish his memory with a warmer regard.

SERTORIUS.
By PLUTARCH.

[Quintus Sertorius, a Roman general of Sabine extraction, born about 121 B.C., assassinated in Spain in 72. A prominent chief of the Marian party, he fled to Spain and held possession of the province against the dominant party at Rome for more than ten years. He was the one leader among the adherents of Marius, as Pompey was the one general among the followers of Sylla, who showed moderation and the spirit of clemency. His greatness was chiefly shown in his career in Spain. He displayed consummate generalship and skill in holding all the armies of Rome at bay till he was assassinated by one of his own officers.]

Sertorius at last utterly despaired of Rome, and hastened into Spain, that by taking possession there beforehand he might secure a refuge to his friends from their misfortunes at home. He armed all the Romans who lived in those countries that were of military age, and undertook the building of ships and the making of all sorts of warlike engines, by which means he kept the cities in due obedience, showing himself gentle in all peaceful business, and at the same time formidable to his enemies by his great preparations for war.

When Sertorius was called to Mauritania to assist the enemies of Prince Ascalis, and had made himself absolute master of the whole country, he acted with great fairness to those who had confided in him, and who yielded to his mercy. He restored to them their property, cities, and government, accepting only of such acknowledgments as they themselves freely offered. While he considered which way next to turn his arms, the Lusitanians sent ambassadors to desire him to be their general. For being terrified with the Roman power, and finding the necessity of having a commander of great authority and experience in war; being also sufficiently assured of his worth and valor by those who formerly had known him, they were desirous to commit themselves specially to his care.

In fact, Sertorius is said to have been of a temper unassailable either by fear or pleasure, in adversity and dangers undaunted, and no ways puffed up with prosperity. In straightforward fighting no commander of his time was more bold and daring; and in whatever was to be performed in war by stratagem, secrecy, or surprise, if any strong place was to be secured, any pass to be gained speedily, for deceiving and overreaching an enemy, there was no man equal to him in subtlety and skill.

In bestowing rewards and conferring honors upon those who had performed good service in the wars he was bountiful and magnificent, and was no less sparing and moderate in inflicting punishment. The Lusitanians having sent for Sertorius, he left Africa, and being made general, with absolute authority, he put all in order among them, and brought the neighboring parts of Spain into subjection. Most of the tribes voluntarily submitted themselves, won by the fame of his clemency and of his courage; and to some extent also, he availed himself of cunning artifices of his own devising to impose on them, and gain influence over them.

Among which certainly that of the hind was not the least. Spanus, a countryman who lived in those parts, meeting by chance a hind that had recently calved flying from the hunters, let the dam go, and pursuing the fawn took it, being wonderfully pleased with the rarity of the color, which was all milk white. At that time Sertorius was living in the neighborhood, and accepted gladly any presents of fruits, fowl, or venison that the country afforded, and rewarded liberally those who presented them.

The countryman brought him his young hind, which he took and was well pleased with at first sight; but when in time he made it so tame and gentle that it would come when he called, and follow him wherever he went, and could endure the noise and tumult of the camp, knowing well that uncivilized people are naturally prone to superstition, by little and little he raised it to something supernatural, saying it was given him by the goddess Diana, and that it revealed to him many secrets.

If he had received private intelligence that the enemies had made an incursion into any part of the district under his command, or had solicited any city to revolt, he pretended that the hind had informed him of it in his sleep, and charged him to keep his forces in readiness. Or, again, if he had notice that any of the commanders under him had got a victory, he would hide the messengers and bring forth the hind crowned with flowers, for joy of the good news that was to come, and would encourage them to rejoice and sacrifice to the gods for the good account they should soon receive of their prosperous success.

He was also highly honored for his introducing discipline and good order among them, for he altered their furious mode of fighting, and brought them to make use of Roman armor, taught them to keep their ranks, and observe signals and watch-words; and out of a confused number of thieves and robbers he constituted a well-disciplined army. That which delighted them most, however, was the care he took of their children. He sent for all the boys of noblest parentage out of all their tribes, and placed them in the great city of Osca, where he appointed masters to instruct them in the Latin and Greek learning.

His method of conducting the war against the Romans showed his military skill and foresight. By rapidly assaulting them, by alarming them on all sides, by ensnaring, circumventing, and laying ambushes for them, he cut off all provisions by land, while with his piratical vessels he kept all the coast in awe and hindered their supplies by sea. He thus forced the Roman generals to dislodge and to separate from one another at the last; Metellus departed into Gaul and Pompey wintered among the Vaccæans in a wretched condition, where, being in extreme want of money, he wrote a letter to the senate, to let them know that if they did not speedily supply him he must draw off his army. To these extremities the chiefest and most powerful commanders of the age were brought by the skill of Sertorius; and it was the common opinion in Rome that he would be in Italy before Pompey.

Sertorius showed the loftiness of his temper in calling together all the Roman senators who had fled from Rome and had come and resided with him, giving them the name of a senate. Out of these he chose prætors and quæstors, and adorned his government with all the Roman laws and institutions, and though he made use of the arms, riches, and cities of the Spaniards, yet he never would even in word remit to them the imperial authority, but set Roman officers and commanders over them, intimating his purpose to restore liberty to the Romans, not to raise up the Spaniards’ power against them.

He was a sincere lover of his country and had a great desire to return home; but in his adverse fortune he showed undaunted courage, and behaved himself toward his enemies in a manner free from all dejection and mean spiritedness. In his prosperity and the height of his victories he sent word to Metellus and Pompey that he was ready to lay down his arms and lead a private life if he were allowed to return home, declaring that he had rather live as the meanest citizen in Rome than, exiled from it, be supreme commander of all other cities together.

His negotiations with Mithridates further argue the greatness of his mind. For when Mithridates, recovering himself from his overthrow by Sylla—like a strong wrestler that gets up to try another fall—was again endeavoring to re-establish his power in Asia, at this time the great fame of Sertorius was celebrated in all places. Accordingly, Mithridates sends messengers into Spain with letters and instructions and commission to promise ships and money toward the charge of the war if Sertorius would confirm his pretensions on Asia, and authorize him to possess all that he had surrendered to the Romans in his treaty with Sylla.

Sertorius would by no means agree to it; declaring that King Mithridates should exercise all royal power and authority over Bithynia and Cappadocia—countries accustomed to a monarchical government and not belonging to Rome—but that he could never consent that he should seize or detain a province which, by the justest right and title, was possessed by the Romans. For he looked upon it as his duty to enlarge the Roman possessions by his conquering arms, and not to increase his power by the diminution of Roman territories.

When this was related to Mithridates he was struck with amazement, and said to his intimate friends: “What will Sertorius enjoin on us to do when he comes to be seated in the Palatium at Rome, who, at present, when he is driven out to the borders of the Atlantic Sea, sets bounds to our kingdoms in the East, and threatens us with war if we attempt the recovery of Asia?”

JULIUS CÆSAR.

JULIUS CÆSAR.
By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.

[A Roman general and statesman and founder of the empire, though its first ruler was Octavianus, his nephew and adopted son, who mounted the throne under the name of Augustus Cæsar. Born 100 B.C., assassinated in the senate-house 44 B.C. By many historians and critics Julius Cæsar is regarded as the greatest man who lived before the Christian era.]

In person Cæsar was tall and slight. His features were more refined than was usual in Roman faces; the forehead was wide and high, the nose large and thin, the lips full, the eyes dark gray, like an eagle’s, the neck extremely thick and sinewy. His complexion was pale. His beard and mustache were kept carefully shaved. His hair was short and naturally scanty, falling off toward the end of his life, and leaving him partially bald. His voice, especially when he spoke in public, was high and shrill. His health was uniformly good, until his last year when he became subject to epileptic fits.

He was a great bather, and scrupulously neat in his habits, abstemious in his food, and careless in what it consisted, rarely or never touching wine, and noting sobriety as the highest of qualities in describing any new people. He was an athlete in early life, admirable in all manly exercises, and especially in riding. From his boyhood it was observed of him that he was the truest of friends, that he avoided quarrels, and was easily appeased when offended. In manner he was quiet and gentleman-like, with the natural courtesy of high breeding.

Like Cicero, Cæsar entered public life at the bar. It was by accident that he took up the profession of the soldier; yet, perhaps, no commander who ever lived showed greater military genius. The conquest of Gaul was effected by a force numerically insignificant, which was worked with the precision of a machine. The variety of uses to which it was capable of being turned implied, in the first place, extraordinary forethought in the selection of materials. Men whose nominal duty was merely to fight were engineers, architects, and mechanics of the highest order. In a few hours they could extemporize an impregnable fortress on the highest hill-side. They bridged the Rhine in a week. They built a fleet in a month.

The legions at Alesia held twice their number pinned within their works, while they kept at bay the whole force of insurgent Gaul by scientific superiority. The machine, which was thus perfect, was composed of human beings who required supplies of tools and arms and clothes and food and shelter; and for all these it depended on the forethought of its commander. Maps there were none. Countries entirely unknown had to be surveyed; routes had to be laid out; the depths and courses of rivers, the character of mountain-passes had all to be ascertained. Allies had to be found in tribes as yet unheard of.

He was rash, but with a calculated rashness which the event never failed to justify. His greatest successes were due to the rapidity of his movements, which brought him to the enemy before they heard of his approach. No obstacles stopped him when he had a definite end in view. Again and again by his own efforts he recovered a day that was half lost. He once seized a panic-stricken standard-bearer, turned him around, and told him that he had mistaken the direction of the enemy.

Yet he was singularly careful of his soldiers. He rarely fought a battle at a disadvantage. When a gallant action was performed, he knew by whom it had been done, and every soldier, however humble, might feel assured that if he deserved praise he would have it. The army was Cæsar’s family. In discipline, he was lenient to ordinary faults, and not careful to make curious inquiries into such things. He liked his men to enjoy themselves. Military mistakes in his officers he always endeavored to excuse, never blaming them for misfortunes unless there had been a defect of courage as well as of judgment.

Cicero has said of Cæsar’s oratory that he surpassed those who had practiced no other art. His praise of him as a man of letters is yet more delicately and gracefully emphatic. Most of his writings are lost; but there remain seven books of commentaries on the wars in Gaul (the eighth was added by another hand) and three books on the civil war, containing an account of its causes and history. Of these it was that Cicero said, in an admirable image, that fools might think to improve on them, but that no wise man would try it; they were bare of ornament, the dress of style dispensed with, like an undraped human figure in all its lines as nature made it. In his composition, as in his actions, Cæsar is entirely simple. He indulges in no images, no labored descriptions, no conventional reflections. His art is unconscious, as the highest art always is.

Of Cæsar it may be said that he came into the world at a special time and for a special object. The old religions were dead from the Pillars of Hercules to the Euphrates and the Nile, and the principles on which human society had been constructed were dead also. There remained of spiritual conviction only the common and human sense of justice and morality; and out of this sense some ordered system of government had to be constructed, under which quiet men could live and labor and eat the fruit of their industry. Under a rule of this material kind there can be no enthusiasm, no chivalry, no saintly aspirations, no patriotism of the heroic type. It was not to last forever. A new life was about to dawn for mankind.

Poetry and faith and devotion were to spring again out of the seeds which were sleeping in the heart of humanity. But the life which is to endure grows slowly; and as the soil must be prepared before the wheat can be sown, so before the Kingdom of Heaven could throw up its shoots, there was needed a kingdom of this world where the nations were neither torn in pieces by violence, nor were rushing after false ideals and spurious ambitions. Such a kingdom was the empire of the Cæsars, a kingdom where peaceful men could work, think, and speak as they pleased, and travel freely among provinces ruled for the most part by Gallios[13] who protected life and property, and forbade fanatics to tear each other to pieces for their religious opinions.

“It is not lawful for us to put any man to death,” was the complaint of the Jewish priests to the Roman governor. Had Europe and Asia been covered with independent nations, each with a local religion represented in its ruling powers, Christianity must have been stifled in its cradle. If St. Paul had escaped the Sanhedrim at Jerusalem, he would have been torn to death by the silversmiths at Ephesus. The appeal to Cæsar’s judgment-seat was the shield of his mission, and alone made possible his success.

And this spirit which confined government to its simple duties, while it left opinion unfettered, was specially present in Julius Cæsar himself. From cant of all kinds he was totally free. He was a friend of the people, but indulged in no enthusiasm for liberty. He never dilated on the beauties of virtue, or complimented, as Cicero did, a Providence in which he did not believe. He was too sincere to stoop to unreality. He held to the facts of this life and to his own convictions; and as he found no reason for supposing that there was a life beyond the grave, he did not pretend to expect it. He respected the religion of the Roman state as an institution established by the laws.

He encouraged or left unmolested the creeds and practices of the uncounted sects and tribes who were gathered under the eagles. But his own writings contain nothing to indicate that he himself had any religious belief at all. He saw no evidence that the gods practically interfered in human affairs. He never pretended that Jupiter was on his side. He thanked his soldiers after a victory, but he did not order Te Deums to be sung for it; and in the absence of these conventionalisms he perhaps showed more real reverence than he could have displayed by the freest use of the formulas of piety. He fought his battles to establish some tolerable degree of justice in the government of this world; and he succeeded though he was murdered for doing it.

TRAJAN.
By CHARLES MERIVALE.

[M. Ulpius Trajanus, successor as Roman emperor to Nerva, born A.D. 53, ascended the throne 99; died 118. One of the most illustrious among those who wore the Roman purple, his reign was distinguished as much by happiness and prosperity as by lofty virtues. As a soldier, Trajan subdued the Dacians, completed the conquest of Germany and Sarmatia, annexed Armenia to the empire, and subdued the Parthians to the Roman yoke. His civic administration was no less notable than his military conquests and organization.]

The princely prodigality of Trajan’s taste was defrayed by the plunder or the tribute of conquered enemies, and seems to have laid at least no extraordinary burden on his subjects. His rage for building had the further merit of being directed for the most part to works of public utility and interest. He built for the gods, the senate, and the people, and not for himself; he restored the palaces, enlarged the halls and places of public resort; but he was content himself with the palaces of his predecessors. A writer three centuries later declares of Trajan that he built the world over; and the wide diffusion and long continuance of his fame beyond that of so many others of the imperial series may be partly attributed to the constant recurrence of his name conspicuously inscribed on the most solid and best known monuments of the empire.

The care of this wise and liberal ruler extended from the harbors, aqueducts, and bridges to the general repair of the highways of the empire. He was the great improver, though not the inventor of the system of posts on the chief roads, which formed a striking feature of Roman civilization as an instrument for combining the remotest provinces under a central organization.

The legislation of this popular emperor is marked generally by a special consideration for Italian interests. The measures by which he secured a constant supply of grain from the provinces, exempting its exportation from all duties, and stimulating the growers at one extremity of the empire to relieve the deficiencies of another, were directed to the maintenance of abundance in Rome and Italy. Thus, on the casual failure of the harvest in Egypt, her empty granaries were at once replenished from the superfluous stores of Gaul, Spain, or Africa.

Though Trajan’s mind did not rise to wide and liberal views for the advantages of the provinces, he neglected no favorable opportunity for the benefit of particular localities. His hand was open to bestow endowments and largesses, to relieve public calamities, to increase public enjoyments, to repair the ravages of earthquakes and tempests, to construct roads and canals, theatres and aqueducts. The activity displayed through the empire in works of this unproductive nature shows a great command of money, an abundant currency, easy means of transacting business, ample resources of labor, and well devised schemes of combining and unfolding them. Judicious economy went ever hand in hand with genuine magnificence.

The monuments of Roman jurisprudence contain many examples of Trajan’s legislation. Like the great statesmen of the republic, he returned from the camp to the city to take his seat daily on the tribunals with the ablest judges for his assessors. He heard appeals from the highest courts throughout his dominion, and the final sentence he pronounced assumed the validity of a legal enactment. The clemency of Trajan was as conspicuous as his love of justice, and to him is ascribed the noble sentiment, that it is better that the guilty should escape than the innocent suffer.

The justice, the modesty, the unwearied application of Trajan were deservedly celebrated, no less than his valor in war and his conduct in political affairs. But a great part of his amazing popularity was owing, no doubt, to his genial demeanor and to the affection inspired by his qualities as a friend and associate. The remains still existing of his correspondence in the letters of Pliny bring out not only the manners of the time, but in some degree the character of the prince also; and bear ample testimony to his minute vigilance and unwearied application, his anxiety for his subjects’ well-being, the ease with which he conducted his intercourse with his friends, and the ease with which he inspired them in return.

Trajan’s letters bespeak the polished gentleman no less than the statesman. He was fond of society, and of educated and literary society. He was proud of being known to associate with the learned, and felt himself complimented when he bestowed on the rhetorician Dion the compliment of carrying him in his own chariot. That such refinement of taste was not incompatible with excess in the indulgences of the table was the fault of the times, and more particularly of the habits of camp life to which he had been accustomed. Intemperance was always a Roman vice.

The affability of the prince, and the freedom with which he exchanged with his nobles all the offices of ordinary courtesy and hospitality, bathing, supping, or hunting as an equal in their company, constituted one of his greatest charms in the eyes of a jealous patriciate which had seen its masters too often engrossed by the flatteries of freedmen and still viler associates.

But Trajan enjoyed also the distinction dear in Roman eyes of a fine figure and a noble countenance. In stature he exceeded the common height, and on public occasions, when he loved to walk bareheaded in the midst of the senators, his gray hairs gleamed conspicuously above the crowd. His features, as we may trace them unmistakably on his innumerable busts and medals, were regular; and his face was the last of the imperial series that retained the true Roman type—not in the aquiline nose only, but in the broad and low forehead, the angular chin, the firm, compressed lips, and generally in the stern compactness of its structure.

The thick and straight-cut hair, smoothed over the brow without a curl or parting, marks the simplicity of the man’s character in a voluptuous age which delighted in the culture of flowing or frizzed locks. But the most interesting characteristic of the figure I have so vividly before me is the look of painful thought, which seems to indicate a constant sense of overwhelming responsibilities, honorably and bravely borne, yet, notwithstanding much assumed cheerfulness and self-abandonment, ever irritating the nerves and weighing upon the conscience.

THE ANTONINES.
By EDWARD GIBBON.

[Titus Antoninus Pius, born 86 A.D., mounted the throne 138, died 161; Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, adopted son and successor of the preceding, born 121 A.D., mounted the throne 161, died 180. The first of the Antonines was born of a respectable family, settled in Gaul, became pro-consul of Asia under Hadrian, afterward of a division of Italy, and was selected by Hadrian as his successor on account of his ability and virtues. Marcus Aurelius was distinguished not only as general and administrator, as a ruler of the most exemplary and noble character, but his name has descended to modern ages as that of the royal philosopher. His “Meditations” constitute one of the Roman classics.]

Under Hadrian’s reign the empire flourished in peace and prosperity. He encouraged the arts, reformed the laws, assisted military discipline, and visited all his provinces in person. His vast and active genius was equally suited to the most enlarged views and the minute details of civil policy. But the ruling passions of his soul were curiosity and vanity. As they prevailed and as they were attracted by different objects, Hadrian was by turns an excellent prince, a ridiculous sophist, and a jealous tyrant. The general tenor of his conduct deserved praise for its equity and moderation. Yet in the first days of his reign he put to death four consular senators, his personal enemies, and men who had been deemed worthy of empire; and the tediousness of a painful illness at last made him peevish and cruel.

The senate doubted whether they should pronounce him a god or a tyrant, and the honors decreed to his memory were granted to the prayers of the pious Antonines. The caprice of Hadrian influenced his choice of a successor. After revolving in his mind several men of distinguished merit whom he esteemed and hated, he adopted Ælius Verus, a gay and voluptuous nobleman, recommended by uncommon beauty. But while Hadrian was delighting himself with his own applause and the acclamations of the soldiers, whose consent had been secured by an immense donative, the new Cæsar was reft from imperial friendship by an untimely death.

He left only one son. Hadrian recommended the boy to the gratitude of the Antonines. He was adopted by Pius, and on the accession of Marcus was invested with an equal share of sovereign power. Among the many vices of this younger Verus, he possessed one virtue—a dutiful reverence for his wiser colleague, to whom he willingly abandoned the ruder cares of empire. The philosophic emperor dissembled his follies, lamented his early death, and cast a decent veil over his memory.

As soon as Hadrian’s caprice in friendship had been gratified or disappointed, he resolved to deserve the thanks of posterity by placing the most exalted merit on the Roman throne. His discerning eye easily discovered a senator about fifty years of age, blameless in all the offices of life, and a youth about seventeen, whose riper years opened the fair prospect of every virtue. The elder of these was declared the son and successor of Hadrian, on condition, however, that he himself should immediately adopt the younger. The two Antonines (for it is of them we are now speaking) governed the Roman world forty-two years with the same invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue.

Although Pius had two sons, he preferred the welfare of Rome to the interests of his family; gave his daughter Faustina in marriage to young Marcus, obtained from the senate the tribunitial and consular powers and pro-consular powers, and with a noble disdain, or rather ignorance of jealousy, associated him to all the labors of government.

Marcus, on the other hand, revered the character of his benefactor, loved him as a parent, obeyed him as his sovereign, and, after he was no more, regulated his own administration by the example and maxims of his predecessor. Their united reigns are possibly the only period in history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.

Titus Antoninus Pius has been justly denominated a second Numa. The same love of religion, justice, and peace was the distinguishing characteristic of both princes. But the situation of the latter opened a much larger field for the exercise of these virtues. Numa could only prevent a few neighboring villages from plundering each other’s harvests. Antoninus diffused order and tranquillity over the greater part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

In private life he was an amiable as well as a good man. The native simplicity of his virtue was a stranger to vanity or affectation. He enjoyed with moderation the conveniences of his fortune and the innocent pleasures of society; and the benevolence of his soul displayed itself in a cheerful serenity of temper.

The virtue of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was of a severer and more laborious kind. It was the well-earned harvest of many a learned conference, of many a patient lecture, and many a midnight lucubration. At the age of twelve years he embraced the rigid doctrines of the Stoics, which taught him to submit his body to his mind, his passions to his reason; to consider virtue as the only good, vice as the only evil, all things external as things indifferent. His “Meditations,” composed in the tumult of a camp, are still extant; and he even condescended to give lessons on philosophy in a more public manner than was perhaps consistent with the modesty of a sage or the dignity of an emperor. But his life was the noblest commentary on the philosophy of Zeno.

He was severe to himself, indulgent to the imperfections of others, just and beneficent to all mankind. He regretted that the death of Ovidius Cassius, who excited a rebellion in Syria, had disappointed him, by a voluntary death, of the pleasure of converting an enemy into a friend; and he justified the sincerity of that statement by moderating the zeal of the senate against the adherents of the traitor.

War he detested as the disgrace and calamity of human nature; but when the necessity of a just defense called on him to take up arms, he readily exposed his person to eight winter campaigns on the frozen banks of the Danube, the severity of which was at last fatal to the weakness of his constitution. His memory was revered by a grateful posterity, and above a century after his death, many persons preserved the image of Marcus Antoninus among those of their household gods.

If a man were called on to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of five successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded universal respect.

The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws. Such princes deserved the honor of restoring the republic had the Romans of their days been capable of enjoying a rational freedom. The labors of these monarchs were overpaid by the immense reward that inseparably waited on their success, by the honest pride of virtue, and by the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness of which they were the authors.

ZENOBIA, QUEEN OF PALMYRA.
By EDWARD GIBBON.

[Septimia Zenobia, of mixed Greek and Arab descent, dates of birth and death doubtful. Twice married, she reached through her second husband, Odenathus, Prince of Palmyra, a field for the exercise of her great talents. She aspired to be Empress of Western Asia after her husband’s death, and only succumbed to the superior genius or fortune of Aurelian, the Roman Emperor. The unsuccessful issue of two pitched battles and two sieges placed her in the power of Rome (273 A.D.). The clemency of the victor, though it made the captive an ornament of his triumph, loaded her with wealth and kindness, while it relegated her to a private station.]

Modern Europe has produced several illustrious women who have sustained with glory the weight of empire; nor is our own age destitute of such distinguished characters. But if we except the doubtful achievements of Semiramis, Zenobia is perhaps the only female whose superior genius broke through the servile indolence imposed on her sex by the habits and climate of Asia. She claimed her descent from the Macedonian kings of Egypt, equaled in beauty her ancestor Cleopatra, and far surpassed that princess in chastity and valor.

Zenobia was esteemed the most lovely as well as the most heroic of her sex. She was of a dark complexion (for in speaking of a lady these trifles become important); her teeth were of a pearly whiteness; and her large black eyes sparkled with uncommon fire tempered by the most attractive sweetness. Her voice was strong and harmonious. Her manly understanding was strengthened and adorned by study. She was not ignorant of the Latin tongue, but possessed in equal perfection the Greek, the Syriac, and the Egyptian languages. She had drawn up for her own use an epitome of Oriental history, and familiarly compared the beauties of Homer and Plato under the tuition of the sublime Longinus. This accomplished woman gave her hand to Odenathus, who from a private station raised himself to the dominion of the East. She soon became the friend and companion of a hero. In the intervals of war Odenathus passionately delighted in the exercise of hunting. He pursued with ardor the wild beasts of the desert—lions, panthers, and bears—and the ardor of Zenobia in that dangerous amusement was not inferior to his own. She had inured her constitution to fatigue, disdained the use of a covered carriage, generally appeared on horseback in a military habit, and sometimes marched several miles on foot at the head of the troops.

The success of Odenathus was in great measure ascribed to her incomparable prudence and fortitude. Their splendid victories over the Great King, whom they twice pursued as far as the gates of Ctesiphon, laid the foundation of their united fame and power. The armies which they commanded and the provinces which they had saved acknowledged not any other sovereigns than their invincible chiefs. The senate and people of Rome revered a stranger who had avenged their captive emperor, and even the insensible son of Valerian accepted Odenathus for his legitimate colleague.

After a successful expedition against the Gothic plunderers of Asia the Palmyrenian prince returned to the city of Emesa in Syria. Invincible in war, he was there cut off by domestic treason, and his favorite amusement of hunting was the cause, or at least the occasion, of his death. His nephew Mæonius presumed to dart his javelin before that of his uncle; and, though admonished of his error, repeated his insolence. As a monarch and as a sportsman Odenathus was provoked, took away his horse—a mark of ignominy among barbarians—and chastised his rash youth by a short confinement. The offense was soon forgot, but the punishment was remembered; and Mæonius, with a few daring associates, assassinated his uncle in the midst of a great entertainment. Herod, the son of Odenathus, though not of Zenobia, a young man of soft and effeminate temper, was killed with his father. But Mæonius obtained only the pleasures of revenge by this bloody deed. He had scarcely time to assume the title of Augustus before he was sacrificed by Zenobia to the memory of her husband. With the assistance of his most faithful friends she immediately filled the vacant throne and governed with manly counsels Palmyra, Syria, and the East above five years. By the death of Odenathus, that authority was at an end which the senate had granted him only as a personal distinction; but his widow, disdaining both the senate and Gallienus, obliged one of the Roman generals who was sent against her to retreat into Europe with the loss of his army and his reputation.

Instead of the little passions which so frequently perplex a female reign, the administration of Zenobia was guided by the most judicious maxims of policy. If it was expedient to pardon, she could calm her resentment; if it were necessary to punish, she could impose silence on the voice of pity. Her strict economy was accused of avarice; yet on every proper occasion she appeared magnificent and liberal. The neighboring states of Arabia, Armenia, and Persia dreaded her enmity and solicited her alliance. To the dominions of Odenathus, which extended from the Euphrates to the frontiers of Bithynia, his widow added the inheritance of her ancestors, the populous and fertile kingdom of Egypt. The Emperor Claudius acknowledged her merit, and was content that while he pursued the Gothic war, she should pursue the dignity of the empire in the East. The conduct, however, of Zenobia was attended with some ambiguity; nor is it unlikely that she had conceived the design of erecting an independent and hostile monarchy. She blended with the popular manners of Roman princes the stately pomp of the courts of Asia, and exacted from her subjects the same adoration that was paid to the successors of Cyrus. She bestowed on her three sons a Latin education, and often showed them to the troops adorned with the imperial purple. For herself she reserved the diadem with the splendid but doubtful title of Queen of the East.

When Aurelian passed over into Asia, against an adversary whose sex alone could render her an object of contempt, his presence restored obedience to the province of Bithynia, already shaken by the arts and the arms of Zenobia. Advancing at the head of his legions, he accepted the submission of Ancyra, and was admitted into Tyana after an obstinate siege, by the help of a perfidious citizen. Zenobia would have ill deserved her reputation had she indolently permitted the Emperor of the West to approach within a hundred miles of her capital. The fate of the East was decided in two great battles, so similar in almost every circumstance that we can scarcely distinguish them from each other, except by observing that the first was fought near Antioch and the second near Emesa. After the defeat of Emesa Zenobia found it impossible to collect a third army. Palmyra was the last resource of the widow of Odenathus. She retired within the walls of her capital, made every preparation for a vigorous resistance, and declared with the intrepidity of a heroine that the last moment of her reign and of her life should be the same. The siege of Palmyra was an object far more difficult and important; and the emperor, who with incessant vigor pressed the attacks in person, was himself wounded with a dart. “The Roman people,” says Aurelian in an original letter, “speak with contempt of the war which I am waging against a woman. They are ignorant both of the character and power of Zenobia. It is impossible to enumerate her warlike preparations of stones, of arrows, and of every species of missile weapons. Every part of the walls is provided with two or three balistæ, and artificial fires are thrown from her military engines. The fear of punishment has armed her with a desperate courage. Yet still I trust in the protecting deities of Rome, who have hitherto been favorable to all my undertakings.” The firmness of Zenobia was supported by the hope that in a very short time famine would compel the Roman army to repass the desert. But from every part of Syria a regular succession of convoys safely arrived in the camp, which was increased by the return of Probus with his victorious troops from the conquest of Egypt. It was then that Zenobia resolved to fly. She mounted the fleetest of her dromedaries, and had already reached the banks of the Euphrates, about sixty miles from Palmyra, when she was overtaken by the pursuit of Aurelian’s light-horse, seized, and brought back a captive to the feet of the emperor. Her capital soon afterward surrendered, and was treated with unexpected lenity.

When the Syrian queen was brought into the presence of Aurelian he sternly asked her how she had presumed to rise in arms against the Emperor of Rome? The answer of Zenobia was a prudent mixture of respect and firmness: “Because I disdained to consider as Roman emperors an Aureolus or a Gallienus. You alone I acknowledge as my conqueror and sovereign.”

However, in the treatment of his unfortunate rivals, Aurelian might indulge his pride, he behaved toward them with a generous clemency which was seldom exercised by the ancient conquerors. The emperor presented Zenobia with an elegant villa at Tibur, or Tivoli, about twenty miles from the capital. The Syrian queen insensibly sunk into a Roman matron, her daughters married into noble families, and her race was not yet extinct in the fifth century.

CONSTANTINE, THE FIRST CHRISTIAN EMPEROR.
By EDWARD GIBBON.

[Caius Flavius Valerius Aurelius Claudius, surnamed “the Great,” born 272 A.D., died 337. He was the son of Constantine Chlorus, who was appointed Cæsar, or lieutenant-emperor of the western part of the empire which was divided between the two Augusti, or emperors, Diocletian and Maximian. Constantine assumed the purple of empire by acclamation of his legions while commanding in Britain in 306. While leading his army to Rome to take possession of the capital, the legend relates that Constantine saw a blazing cross in the sky inscribed with [Greek: hen tohutph nhika], “In this conquer.” Thenceforward the Christian symbol was inscribed on the standards and shields of the army, and Christianity became recognized as the state Church, though Constantine did not profess the religion till his deathbed. In the year 323 he took the field against his brother-in-law Licinius, Emperor of the East, and by the defeat and execution of the latter he became sole ruler of the reunited empire. Among the most important events of his reign were the founding of the new capital of Constantinople (330) on the site of Byzantium, and the first great general Christian council (325), held at Nice, in Asia Minor. By the decision of the latter the Athanasian Creed, embodying the doctrine of the Trinity, was made the orthodox belief of the Church, and Arianism was condemned as heresy. The character of Constantine was stained by suspicion and cruelty, to which his father-in-law, his brother-in-law, his son, and his wife successively fell victims.]

The character of the prince who removed the seat of empire and introduced such important changes into the civil and religious constitution of his country has fixed the attention and divided the opinions of mankind. By the grateful zeal of the Christians, the deliverer of the Church has been decorated with every attribute of a hero, and even of a saint; while the discontent of the vanquished party has compared Constantine to the most abhorred of those tyrants who, by their vice and weakness, dishonored the imperial purple. The same passions have in some degree been perpetuated to succeeding generations, and the character of Constantine is considered, even in the present age, as an object either of satire or of panegyric. By the impartial union of those defects which are confessed by his warmest admirers and of those virtues which are acknowledged by his most implacable enemies we might hope to delineate a just portrait of that extraordinary man which the truth and candor of history should adopt without a blush. But it would soon appear that the vain attempt to blend such discordant colors and to reconcile such inconsistent qualities must produce a figure monstrous rather than human, unless it is viewed in its proper and distinct lights, by a careful separation of the different periods of the reign of Constantine.

The person as well as the mind of Constantine had been enriched by Nature with her choicest endowments. His stature was lofty, his countenance majestic, his deportment graceful; his strength and activity were displayed in every manly exercise, and from his earliest youth to a very advanced season of life he preserved the vigor of his constitution by a strict adherence to the domestic virtues of chastity and temperance. He delighted in the social intercourse of familiar conversation; and though he might sometimes indulge his disposition to raillery with less reserve than was required by the severe dignity of his station, the courtesy and liberality of his manners gained the hearts of all who approached him. The sincerity of his friendship has been suspected; yet he showed on some occasions that he was not incapable of a warm and lasting attachment. The disadvantage of an illiterate education had not prevented him from forming a just estimate of the value of learning, and the arts and sciences derived some encouragement from the munificent protection of Constantine. In the dispatch of business, his diligence was indefatigable; and the active powers of his mind were almost continually exercised in reading, writing, or meditating, in giving audience to ambassadors, and in examining the complaints of his subjects. Even those who censured the propriety of his measures were compelled to acknowledge that he possessed magnanimity to conceive and patience to execute the most arduous designs without being checked either by the prejudices of education or by the clamors of the multitude. In the field he infused his own intrepid spirit into the troops, whom he conducted with the talents of a consummate general; and to his abilities, rather than to his fortune, we may ascribe the signal victories which he obtained over the foreign and domestic foes of the republic. He loved glory as the reward, perhaps as the motive of his labors.

The boundless ambition which, from the moment of his accepting the purple at York, appears as the ruling passion of his soul, may be justified by the dangers of his own situation, by the character of his rivals, by the consciousness of superior merit, and by the prospect that his success would enable him to restore peace and order to the distracted empire. In his civil wars against Maxentius and Licinius, he had engaged on his side the inclinations of the people, who compared the undissembled vices of those tyrants with the spirit of wisdom and justice which seemed to direct the general tenor of the administration of Constantine.

Had Constantine fallen on the banks of the Tiber, or even in the plains of Adrianople, such is the character which, with a few exceptions, he might have transmitted to posterity. But the conclusion of his reign (according to the moderate and indeed tender sentence of a writer of the same age) degraded him from the rank which he had acquired among the most deserving of the Roman princes. In the life of Augustus, we behold the tyrant of the republic converted almost by imperceptible degrees into the father of his country and of human kind. In that of Constantine, we may contemplate a hero who had so long inspired his subjects with love and his enemies with terror degenerating into a cruel and dissolute monarch, corrupted by his fortune or raised by conquest above the necessity of dissimulation. The general peace which he maintained during the last fourteen years (A.D. 323-337) of his reign was a period of apparent splendor rather than of real prosperity; and the old age of Constantine was disgraced by the opposite yet reconcilable vices of rapaciousness and prodigality. The accumulated treasures found in the palaces of Maxentius and Licinius were lavishly consumed; the various innovations introduced by the conqueror were attended with an increasing expense; the cost of his buildings, his court, and his festivals, required an immediate and plentiful supply; and the oppression of the people was the only fund which could support the magnificence of the sovereign.

His unworthy favorites, enriched by the boundless liberality of their master, usurped with impunity the privilege of rapine and corruption. A secret but universal decay was felt in every part of the public administration, and the emperor himself, though he still retained the obedience, gradually lost the esteem of his subjects. The dress and manners which, toward the decline of life, he chose to affect, served only to degrade him in the eyes of mankind. The Asiatic pomp, which had been adopted by the pride of Diocletian, assumed an air of softness and effeminacy in the person of Constantine. He is represented with false hair of various colors laboriously arranged by the skillful artists of the times, a diadem of a new and more expensive fashion, a profusion of gems and pearls, of collars and bracelets, and a variegated flowing robe of silk, most curiously embroidered with flowers of gold. In such apparel, scarcely to be excused by the youth and folly of Elagabalus, we are at a loss to discover the wisdom of an aged monarch and the simplicity of a Roman veteran. A mind thus relaxed by prosperity and indulgence was incapable of rising to that magnanimity which disdains suspicion and dares to forgive. The deaths of Maximian and Licinius may, perhaps, be justified by the maxims of policy, as they are taught in the schools of tyrants; but an impartial narrative of the executions, or rather murders, which sullied the declining age of Constantine will suggest to our most candid thoughts the idea of a prince who could sacrifice without reluctance the laws of justice and the feelings of nature to the dictates either of his passions or of his interest.

The same fortune which so invariably followed the standard of Constantine seemed to secure the hopes and comforts of his domestic life. Those among his predecessors who had enjoyed the longest and most prosperous reigns—Augustus, Trajan, and Diocletian—had been disappointed of posterity; and the frequent revolutions had never allowed sufficient time for any imperial family to grow up and multiply under the shade of the purple. But the royalty of the Flavian line, which had been first ennobled by the Gothic Claudius, descended through several generations; and Constantine himself derived from his royal father the hereditary honors which he transmitted to his children. Besides the females and the allies of the Flavian house, ten or twelve males, to whom the language of modern courts would apply the title of princes of the blood, seemed, according to the order of their birth, to be destined either to inherit or to support the throne of Constantine. But in less than thirty years this numerous and increasing family was reduced to the persons of Constantius and Julian, who alone had survived a series of crimes and calamities such as the tragic poets have deplored in the devoted lines of Pelops and of Cadmus.

JULIAN THE APOSTATE.
By EDWARD GIBBON.

[Flavius Claudius Julianus, born 331 A.D., died 363. He was the nephew of Constantine, and was made Cæsar by his cousin the Emperor Constantius in 355. On the death of the latter, Julian became sole emperor in 361. Though bred in the Christian faith, his deep sympathy with the philosophy and letters of Greece, and his aversion to the factional bigotry of the Christian sects, caused him, on assuming the purple, to discard the doctrines of Christ, and attempt the restitution of paganism.]

The retired scholastic education of Julian, in which he had been more conversant with books than with arms, with the dead than with the living, left him in profound ignorance of the practical arts of war and government; and when he awkwardly repeated some military exercise which it was necessary for him to learn, he exclaimed, with a sigh, “Oh Plato, Plato, what a task for a philosopher!” Yet even this speculative philosophy, which men of business are too apt to despise, had filled the mind of Julian with the noblest precepts and the most shining examples; had animated him with the love of virtue, the desire of fame, and the contempt of death. The habits of temperance recommended in the schools are still more essential in the severe discipline of a camp. The simple wants of nature regulated the measure of his food and sleep. Rejecting with disdain the delicacies provided for his table, he satisfied his appetite with the coarse and common fare which was allotted to the meanest soldiers. During the rigor of a Gallic winter he never suffered a fire in his bed-chamber; and after a short and interrupted slumber, he frequently rose in the middle of the night from a carpet spread on the floor, to dispatch any urgent business, to visit his rounds, or to steal a few moments for the prosecution of his favorite studies.

The precepts of eloquence, which he had hitherto practiced on fancied topics of declamation, were more usefully applied to excite or assuage the passions of an armed multitude; and though Julian, from his early habits of conversation and literature, was more familiarly acquainted with the beauties of the Greek language, he had attained a competent knowledge of the Latin tongue. Since Julian was not originally designed for the character of a legislator or a judge, it is probable that the civil jurisprudence of the Romans had not engaged any considerable share of his attention; but he derived from his philosophic studies an inflexible regard for justice, tempered by a disposition to clemency; the knowledge of the general principles of equity and evidence; and the faculty of patiently investigating the most intricate and tedious questions which could be proposed for his discussion. The measures of policy and the operations of war must submit to the various accidents of circumstance and character, and the unpracticed student will often be perplexed in the application of the most perfect theory. But, in the acquisition of this important science, Julian was assisted by the active vigor of his own genius, as well as by the wisdom and experience of Sallust, an officer of rank, who soon conceived a sincere attachment for a prince so worthy of his friendship; and whose incorruptible integrity was adorned by the talent of insinuating the harshest truths, without wounding the delicacy of a royal ear.

Julian was not insensible of the advantages of freedom. From his studies he had imbibed the spirit of ancient sages and heroes; his life and fortunes had depended on the caprice of a tyrant, and when he ascended the throne his pride was sometimes mortified by the reflection that the slaves who would not dare to censure his defects were not worthy to applaud his virtues. He sincerely abhorred the system of Oriental despotism which Diocletian, Constantine, and the patient habits of fourscore years had established in the empire. A motive of superstition prevented the execution of the design which Julian had frequently meditated, of relieving his head from the weight of a costly diadem; but he absolutely refused the title of Dominus, or Lord—a word which was grown so familiar to the ears of the Romans that they no longer remembered its servile and humiliating origin. The office, or rather the name, of consul was cherished by a prince who contemplated with reverence the ruins of the republic; and the same behavior which had been assumed by the prudence of Augustus was adopted by Julian from choice and inclination. On the calends of January (A.D. 363, January 1st), at break of day, the new consuls, Mamertinus and Nevitta, hastened to the palace to salute the emperor. As soon as he was informed of their approach he leaped from his throne, eagerly advanced to meet them, and compelled the blushing magistrates to receive the demonstrations of his affected humility. From the palace they proceeded to the senate. The emperor, on foot, marched before their litters; and the gazing multitude admired the image of ancient times, or secretly blamed a conduct which, in their eyes, degraded the majesty of the purple. But the behavior of Julian was uniformly supported. During the games of the Circus he had, imprudently or designedly, performed the manumission of a slave in the presence of the consul. The moment he was reminded that he had trespassed on the jurisdiction of another magistrate, he condemned himself to pay a fine of ten pounds of gold, and embraced this public occasion of declaring to the world that he was subject, like the rest of his fellow-citizens, to the laws, and even to the forms of the republic. The spirit of his administration and his regard for the place of his nativity induced Julian to confer on the senate of Constantinople the same honors, privileges, and authority which were still enjoyed by the senate of ancient Rome.[14] A legal fiction was introduced, and gradually established, that one half of the national council had migrated into the East; and the despotic successors of Julian, accepting the title of senators, acknowledged themselves the members of a respectable body which was permitted to represent the majesty of the Roman name. From Constantinople, the attention of the monarch was extended to the municipal senates of the provinces. He abolished, by repeated edicts, the unjust and pernicious exemptions which had withdrawn so many idle citizens from the service of their country; and, by imposing an equal distribution of public duties, he restored the strength, the splendor, or, according to the glowing expression of Libanius, the soul of the expiring cities of his empire. The venerable age of Greece excited the most tender compassion in the mind of Julian, which kindled into rapture when he recollected the gods, the heroes, and the men superior to heroes and to gods, who had bequeathed to the latest posterity the monuments of their genius or the example of their virtues. He relieved the distress, and restored the beauty of the cities of Epirus and Peloponnesus. Athens acknowledged him for her benefactor; Argos, for her deliverer. The pride of Corinth, again rising from her ruins with the honors of a Roman colony, exacted a tribute from the adjacent republics for the purpose of defraying the games of the Isthmus, which were celebrated in the amphitheatre with the hunting of bears and panthers. From this tribute the cities of Elis, of Delphi, and of Argos, which had inherited from their remote ancestors the sacred office of perpetuating the Olympic, the Pythian, and the Nemean games, claimed a just exemption. The immunity of Elis and Delphi was respected by the Corinthians, but the poverty of Argos tempted the insolence of oppression, and the feeble complaints of its deputies were silenced by the decree of a provincial magistrate, who seems to have consulted only the interest of the capital in which he resided. Seven years after this sentence Julian allowed the cause to be referred to a superior tribunal, and his eloquence was interposed—most probably with success—in the defense of a city which had been the royal seat of Agamemnon and had given to Macedonia a race of kings and conquerors.

The laborious administration of military and civil affairs, which were multiplied in proportion to the extent of the empire, exercised the abilities of Julian; but he frequently assumed the two characters of orator and of judge, which are almost unknown to the modern sovereigns of Europe. The arts of persuasion, so diligently cultivated by the first Cæsars, were neglected by the military ignorance and Asiatic pride of their successors; and if they condescended to harangue the soldiers, whom they feared, they treated with silent disdain the senators, whom they despised. The assemblies of the senate, which Constantius had avoided, were considered by Julian as the place where he could exhibit, with the most propriety, the maxims of a republican and the talents of a rhetorician. He alternately practiced, as in a school of declamation, the several modes of praise, of censure, of exhortation; and his friend Libanius has remarked that the study of Homer taught him to imitate the simple, concise style of Menelaus, the copiousness of Nestor, whose words descended like the flakes of a winter’s snow, or the pathetic and forcible eloquence of Ulysses.

The functions of a judge, which are sometimes incompatible with those of a prince, were exercised by Julian, not only as a duty, but as an amusement; and, although he might have trusted the integrity and discernment of his prætorian prefects, he often placed himself by their side on the seat of judgment. The acute penetration of his mind was agreeably occupied in detecting and defeating the chicanery of the advocates, who labored to disguise the truth of facts and to pervert the sense of the laws. He sometimes forgot the gravity of his station, asked indiscreet or unseasonable questions, and betrayed, by the loudness of his voice and the agitation of his body, the earnest vehemence with which he maintained his opinion against the judges, the advocates, and their clients. But his knowledge of his own temper prompted him to encourage, and even to solicit, the reproof of his friends and ministers; and whenever they ventured to oppose the irregular sallies of his passions, the spectators could observe the shame, as well as the gratitude, of their monarch. The decrees of Julian were almost always founded on the principles of justice; and he had the firmness to resist the two most dangerous temptations which assault the tribunal of a sovereign, under the specious forms of compassion and equity. He decided the merits of the cause without weighing the circumstances of the parties; and the poor, whom he wished to relieve, were condemned to satisfy the just demands of a noble and wealthy adversary. He carefully distinguished the judge from the legislator; and, though he meditated a necessary reformation of the Roman jurisprudence, he pronounced sentence according to the strict and literal interpretation of those laws which the magistrates were bound to execute and the subjects to obey.

The generality of princes, if they were stripped of their purple and cast naked into the world, would immediately sink to the lowest rank of society, without a hope of emerging from their obscurity. But the personal merit of Julian was, in some measure, independent of his fortune. Whatever had been his choice of life, by the force of intrepid courage, lively wit, and intense application, he would have obtained, or at least he would have deserved, the highest honors of his profession; and Julian might have raised himself to the rank of minister, or general, of the state in which he was born a private citizen. If the jealous caprice of power had disappointed his expectations, if he had prudently declined the paths of greatness, the employment of the same talents in studious solitude would have placed beyond the reach of kings his present happiness and his immortal fame. When we inspect with minute, or perhaps malevolent attention the portrait of Julian, something seems wanting to the grace and perfection of the whole figure. His genius was less powerful and sublime than that of Cæsar; nor did he possess the consummate prudence of Augustus. The virtues of Trajan appear more steady and natural, and the philosophy of Marcus is more simple and consistent. Yet Julian sustained adversity with firmness, and prosperity with moderation. After an interval of one hundred and twenty years from the death of Alexander Severus, the Romans beheld an emperor who made no distinction between his duties and his pleasures; who labored to relieve the distress and to revive the spirit of his subjects; and who endeavored always to connect authority with merit, and happiness with virtue. Even faction, and religious faction, was constrained to acknowledge the superiority of his genius, in peace as well as in war; and to confess, with a sigh, that the apostate Julian was a lover of his country, and that he deserved the empire of the world.

The character of apostate has injured the reputation of Julian, and the enthusiasm which clouded his virtues has exaggerated the real and apparent magnitude of his faults. The vehement zeal of the Christians, who despised the worship, and overturned the altars of those fabulous deities, engaged their votary in a state of irreconcilable hostility with a very numerous party of his subjects; and he was sometimes tempted, by the desire of victory or the shame of a repulse, to violate the laws of prudence, and even of justice. The triumph of the party which he deserted and opposed, has fixed a stain of infamy on the name of Julian; and the unsuccessful apostate has been overwhelmed with a torrent of pious invectives, of which the signal was given by the sonorous trumpet of Gregory Nazianzen.[15]

THEODOSIUS THE GREAT.
By EDWARD GIBBON.

[Born in Spain, about 346 A.D., of a Visigothic family, and died 395. He was made Augustus, or co-Emperor of the West, by Gratian, in 379, but became by his great abilities the practical ruler of the two empires, with his imperial seat at Constantinople. Theodosius twice reconquered the West, where usurpers had made successful revolt, and became the acknowledged master of the whole Roman world. He was the last great emperor who shone brightly by his genius for military affairs and his skill in civil administration. Theodosius became so dear to the Catholic heart by his persecution of the Arian heretics that he was afterward canonized. At his death the empire was again divided, falling to his sons, Honorius and Arcadius.]

The same province, and, perhaps, the same city, which had given to the throne the virtues of Trajan and the talents of Hadrian, was the original seat of another family of Spaniards, who, in a less fortunate age, possessed, near fourscore years, the declining Empire of Rome. They emerged from the obscurity of municipal honors by the active spirit of the elder Theodosius—a general whose exploits in Britain and Africa have formed one of the most splendid parts of the annals of Valentinian.[16] The son of that general, who likewise bore the name of Theodosius, was educated, by skillful preceptors, in the liberal studies of youth; but he was instructed in the art of war by the tender care and severe discipline of his father. Under the standard of such a leader, young Theodosius sought glory and knowledge in the most distant scenes of military action; inured his constitution to the difference of seasons and climates; distinguished his valor by sea and land; and observed the various warfare of the Scots, the Saxons, and the Moors. His own merit, and the recommendation of the conqueror of Africa, soon raised him to a separate command; and, in the station of Duke of Mæsia, he vanquished an army of Sarmatians, saved a province, deserved the love of the soldiers, and provoked the envy of the court. His rising fortunes were soon blasted by the disgrace and execution of his illustrious father; and Theodosius obtained, as a favor, the permission of retiring to a private life in his native province of Spain. He displayed a firm and temperate character in the ease with which he adapted himself to this new situation. His time was almost equally divided between the town and country; the spirit which had animated his public conduct was shown in the active and affectionate performance of every social duty; and the diligence of the soldier was profitably converted to the improvement of his ample patrimony, which lay between Valladolid and Segovia, in the midst of a fruitful district, still famous for a most exquisite breed of sheep. From the innocent, but humble labors of his farm, Theodosius was transported, in less than four months, to the throne of the Eastern Empire; and the whole period of the history of the world will not perhaps afford a similar example of an elevation at the same time so pure and so honorable.

The princes who peaceably inherit the scepter of their fathers claim and enjoy a legal right, the more secure as it is absolutely distinct from the merits of their personal characters. The subjects who, in a monarchy or a popular state, acquire the possession of supreme power may have raised themselves, by the superiority either of genius or virtue, above the heads of their equals; but their virtue is seldom exempt from ambition, and the cause of the successful candidate is frequently stained by the guilt of conspiracy or civil war. Even in those governments which allow the reigning monarch to declare a colleague, or a successor, his partial choice, which may be influenced by the blindest passions, is often directed to an unworthy object. But the most suspicious malignity can not ascribe to Theodosius, in his obscure solitude of Caucha, the arts, the desires, or even the hopes, of an ambitious statesman; and the name of the exile would long since have been forgotten if his genuine and distinguished virtues had not left a deep impression in the imperial court. During the season of prosperity he had been neglected, but in the public distress his superior merit was universally felt and acknowledged. What confidence must have been reposed in his integrity, since Gratian could trust that a pious son would forgive, for the sake of the republic, the murder of his father! What expectations must have been formed of his abilities, to encourage the hope that a single man could save and restore the Empire of the East! Theodosius was invested with the purple in the thirty-third year of his age. The vulgar gazed with admiration on the manly beauty of his face and the graceful majesty of his person, which they were pleased to compare with the pictures and medals of the Emperor Trajan; while intelligent observers discovered, in the qualities of his heart and understanding, a more important resemblance to the best and greatest of the Roman princes.

The orator, who may be silent without danger, may praise without difficulty and without reluctance; and posterity will confess that the character of Theodosius might furnish the subject of a sincere and ample panegyric. The wisdom of his laws and the success of his arms rendered his administration respectable in the eyes both of his subjects and of his enemies. He loved and practiced the virtues of domestic life, which seldom hold their residence in the palaces of kings. Theodosius was chaste and temperate; he enjoyed without excess the sensual and social pleasures of the table, and the warmth of his amorous passions was never diverted from their lawful objects. The proud titles of imperial greatness were adorned by the tender names of a faithful husband, an indulgent father; his uncle was raised, by his affectionate esteem, to the rank of a second parent. Theodosius embraced as his own the children of his brother and sister, and the expressions of his regard were extended to the most distant and obscure branches of his numerous kindred. His familiar friends were judiciously selected from among those persons who, in the equal intercourse of private life, had appeared before his eyes without a mask; the consciousness of personal and superior merit enabled him to despise the accidental distinction of the purple; and he proved by his conduct that he had forgotten all the injuries while he most gratefully remembered all the favors and services which he had received before he ascended the throne of the Roman Empire. The serious or lively tone of his conversation was adapted to the age, the rank, or the character of his subjects whom he admitted into his society, and the affability of his manners displayed the image of his mind. Theodosius respected the simplicity of the good and virtuous; every art, every talent of a useful, or even of an innocent nature, was rewarded by his judicious liberality; and, except the heretics, whom he persecuted with implacable hatred, the diffusive circle of his benevolence was circumscribed only by the limits of the human race.

The government of a mighty empire may assuredly suffice to occupy the time and the abilities of a mortal; yet the diligent prince, without aspiring to the unsuitable reputation of profound learning, always reserved some moments of his leisure for the instructive amusement of reading. History, which enlarged his experience, was his favorite study. The annals of Rome, in the long period of eleven hundred years, presented him with a various and splendid picture of human life; and it has been particularly observed that whenever he perused the cruel acts of Cinna, of Marius, or of Sylla, he warmly expressed his generous detestation of those enemies of humanity and freedom. His disinterested opinion of past events was usefully applied as the rule of his own actions; and Theodosius has deserved the singular commendation that his virtues always seemed to expand with his fortune—the season of his prosperity was that of his moderation; and his clemency appeared the most conspicuous after the danger and success of the civil war. The Moorish guards of the tyrant had been massacred in the first heat of the victory, and a small number of the most obnoxious criminals suffered the punishment of the law. But the emperor showed himself much more attentive to relieve the innocent than to chastise the guilty. The oppressed subjects of the West, who would have deemed themselves happy in the restoration of their lands, were astonished to receive a sum of money equivalent to their losses; and the liberality of the conqueror supported the aged mother and educated the orphan daughters of Maximus. A character thus accomplished might almost excuse the extravagant supposition of the orator Pacatus, that, if the elder Brutus could be permitted to revisit the earth, the stern republican would abjure, at the feet of Theodosius, his hatred of kings, and ingenuously confess that such a monarch was the most faithful guardian of the happiness and dignity of the Roman people.

Yet the piercing eye of the founder of the republic must have discerned two essential imperfections, which might, perhaps, have abated his recent love of despotism. The virtuous mind of Theodosius was often relaxed by indolence, and it was sometimes inflamed by passion. In the pursuit of an important object, his active courage was capable of the most vigorous exertions; but, as soon as the design was accomplished, or the danger was surmounted, the hero sunk into inglorious repose; and, forgetful that the time of a prince is the property of his people, resigned himself to the enjoyment of the innocent but trifling pleasures of a luxurious court. The natural disposition of Theodosius was hasty and choleric; and, in a station where none could resist and few would dissuade the fatal consequence of his resentment, the humane monarch was justly alarmed by the consciousness of his infirmity and of his power. It was the constant study of his life to suppress or regulate the intemperate sallies of passion; and the success of his efforts enhanced the merit of his clemency. But the painful virtue which claims the merit of victory is exposed to the danger of defeat; and the reign of a wise and merciful prince was polluted by an act of cruelty which would stain the annals of Nero or Domitian. Within the space of three years, the inconsistent historian of Theodosius must relate the generous pardon of the citizens of Antioch and the inhuman massacre of the people of Thessalonica.[17]

ATTILA, THE SCOURGE OF GOD.
By EDWARD GIBBON.

[King of the Huns, the Etzel of German epic and legend, one of the greatest conquerors known to history. Date of birth unknown, that of death about 454 A.D. The dominion to which he succeeded included the Northern tribes from the Rhine to the Volga. At different times he ravaged the whole of Europe, and more than once threatened to extirpate Western civilization. The defeat which he suffered at the hands of the Roman general Ætius on the plains of Châlons-sur-Marne checked his power, and was probably the most murderous battle ever fought in Europe. Attila died from the bursting of an artery after a night of debauch, the occasion of the last espousal that swelled the army of his countless wives. By some of the chroniclers he is supposed to have been the victim of the newly married wife’s treachery. He was buried in triple coffins of iron, silver, and gold.]

Attila, the son of Mundzuk, deduced his noble, perhaps his regal descent from the ancient Huns, who had formerly contended with the monarchs of China. His features, according to the observation of a Gothic historian, bore the stamp of his national origin; and the portrait of Attila exhibits the genuine deformity of a modern Calmuck; a large head, a swarthy complexion, small, deep-seated eyes, a flat nose, a few hairs in the place of a beard, broad shoulders, and a short, square body, of nervous strength, though of a disproportioned form. The haughty step and demeanor of the king of the Huns expressed the consciousness of his superiority above the rest of mankind; and he had a custom of fiercely rolling his eyes, as if he wished to enjoy the terror which he inspired. Yet this savage hero was not inaccessible to pity; his suppliant enemies might confide in the assurance of peace or pardon; and Attila was considered by his subjects as a just and indulgent master. He delighted in war; but, after he had ascended the throne in a mature age, his head rather than his hand achieved the conquest of the North; and the fame of an adventurous soldier was usefully exchanged for that of a prudent and successful general. The effects of personal valor are so inconsiderable, except in poetry or romance, that victory, even among barbarians, must depend upon the degree of skill with which the passions of the multitude are combined and guided for the service of a single man. The Scythian conquerors, Attila and Zingis, surpassed their rude countrymen in art rather than in courage; and it may be observed that the monarchies, both of the Huns and of the Moguls, were erected by their founders on the basis of popular superstition. The miraculous conception which fraud and credulity ascribed to the virgin mother of Zingis raised him above the level of human nature; and the naked prophet who, in the name of the Deity, invested him with the empire of the earth, pointed the valor of the Moguls with irresistible enthusiasm. The religious arts of Attila were not less skillfully adapted to the character of his age and country. It was natural enough that the Scythians should adore with peculiar devotion the god of war; but as they were incapable of forming either an abstract idea or a corporeal representation, they worshiped their tutelar deity under the symbol of an iron cimeter. One of the shepherds of the Huns perceived that a heifer who was grazing had wounded herself in the foot, and curiously followed the track of the blood till he discovered among the long grass the point of an ancient sword, which he dug out of the ground and presented to Attila.

That magnanimous or rather that artful prince accepted with pious gratitude this celestial favor, and, as the rightful possessor of the sword of Mars, asserted his divine and indefeasible claim to the dominion of the earth. If the rites of Scythia were practiced on this solemn occasion, a lofty altar, or rather a pile of faggots, three hundred yards in length and in breadth, was raised in a spacious plain, and the sword of Mars was placed erect on the summit of this rustic altar, which was annually consecrated by the blood of sheep, horses, and of the one hundredth captive. Whether human sacrifices formed any part of the worship of Attila, or whether he propitiated the god of war with the victims which he continually offered in the field of battle, the favorite of Mars soon acquired a sacred character, which rendered his conquests more easy and more permanent; and the barbarian princes confessed, in the language of devotion or flattery, that they could not presume to gaze with a steady eye on the divine majesty of the king of the Huns. His brother, Bleda, who reigned over a considerable part of the nation, was compelled to resign his scepter and his life. Yet even this cruel act was attributed to a supernatural impulse; and the vigor with which Attila wielded the sword of Mars convinced the world that it had been reserved alone for his invincible arm. But the extent of his empire affords the only remaining evidence of the number and importance of his victories; and the Scythian monarch, however ignorant of the value of science and philosophy, might perhaps lament that his illiterate subjects were destitute of the art which could perpetuate the memory of his exploits.

If a line of separation were drawn between the civilized and the savage climates of the globe, between the inhabitants of cities who cultivated the earth and the hunters and shepherds who dwelt in tents, Attila might aspire to the title of supreme and sole monarch of the barbarians. He alone among the conquerors of ancient and modern times united the two mighty kingdoms of Germany and Scythia; and those vague appellations, when they are applied to his reign, may be understood with an ample latitude. Thuringia, which stretched beyond its actual limits as far as the Danube, was in the number of his provinces; he interposed, with the weight of a powerful neighbor, in the domestic affairs of the Franks; and one of his lieutenants chastised and almost exterminated the Burgundians of the Rhine. He subdued the islands of the ocean, the kingdoms of Scandinavia, encompassed and divided by the waters of the Baltic; and the Huns might derive a tribute of furs from that northern region which has been protected from all other conquerors by the severity of the climate and the courage of the natives. Toward the East, it is difficult to circumscribe the dominion of Attila over the Scythian deserts; yet we may be assured that he reigned on the banks of the Volga; that the king of the Huns was dreaded, not only as a warrior but as a magician; that he insulted and vanquished the Khan of the formidable Geougen; and that he sent ambassadors to negotiate an equal alliance with the Empire of China.

In the proud review of the nations who acknowledged the sovereignty of Attila, and who never entertained during his lifetime the thought of a revolt, the Gepidæ and the Ostrogoths were distinguished by their numbers, their bravery, and the personal merit of their chiefs. The renowned Ardaric, king of the Gepidæ, was the faithful and sagacious counselor of the monarch, who esteemed his intrepid genius, while he loved the mild and discreet virtues of the noble Walamir, king of the Ostrogoths. The crowd of vulgar kings, the leaders of so many martial tribes who served under the standard of Attila, were ranged in the submissive order of guards and domestics round the person of their master. They watched his nod, they trembled at his frown, and at the first signal of his will they executed, without murmur or hesitation, his stern and absolute commands. In time of peace, the dependent princes, with their national troops, attended the royal camp in regular succession; but when Attila collected his military force he was able to bring into the field an army of five, or, according to another account, of seven hundred thousand barbarians.

In all their invasions of the civilized empires of the South, the Scythian shepherds have been uniformly actuated by a savage and destructive spirit. The laws of war, that restrain the exercise of national rapine and murder, are founded on two principles of substantial interest; the knowledge of the permanent benefits which may be obtained by a moderate use of conquest, and a just apprehension lest the desolation which we inflict on the enemy’s country may be retaliated on our own. But these considerations of hope and fear are almost unknown in the pastoral state of nations. The Huns of Attila may, without injustice, be compared to the Moguls and Tartars before their primitive manners were changed by religion and luxury; and the evidence of Oriental history may reflect some light on the short and imperfect annals of Rome. After the Moguls had subdued the northern provinces of China, it was seriously proposed, not in the hour of victory and passion, but in calm, deliberate council, to exterminate all the inhabitants of that populous country, that the vacant land might be converted to the pasture of cattle. The firmness of a Chinese mandarin, who insinuated some principles of rational policy into the mind of Zingis, diverted him from the execution of this horrid design. But in the cities of Asia, which yielded to the Moguls, the inhuman abuse of the rights of war was exercised with a regular form of discipline which may with equal reason, though not with equal authority, be imputed to the victorious Huns. The inhabitants, who had submitted to their discretion, were ordered to evacuate their houses, and to assemble in some plain adjacent to the city, where a division was made of the vanquished into three parts. The first class consisted of the soldiers of the garrison and of the young men capable of bearing arms, and their fate was instantly decided; they were either enlisted among the Moguls, or they were massacred on the spot by the troops, who, with pointed spears and bended bows, had formed a circle round the captive multitude. The second class, composed of the young and beautiful women, of the artificers of every rank and profession, and of the more wealthy or honorable citizens, from whom a private ransom might be expected, was distributed in equal or proportionable lots. The remainder, whose life or death was alike useless to the conquerors, were permitted to return to the city—which, in the mean while, had been stripped of its valuable furniture—and a tax was imposed on those wretched inhabitants for the indulgence of breathing their native air. Such was the behavior of the Moguls when they were not conscious of any extraordinary rigor. But the most casual provocation, the slightest motive, of caprice or convenience, often provoked them to involve a whole people in an indiscriminate massacre; and the ruin of some flourishing cities was executed with such unrelenting perseverance that, according to their own expression, horses might run without stumbling over the ground where they had once stood. The three great capitals of Khorasan, Maru, Neisabour, and Herat were destroyed by the armies of Zingis; and the exact account which was taken of the slain amounted to 4,347,000 persons. Timur, or Tamerlane, was educated in a less barbarous age, and in the profession of the Mohammedan religion; yet if Attila equaled the hostile ravages of Tamerlane, either the Tartar or the Hun might deserve the title of “the Scourge of God.”

BELISARIUS.
By LORD MAHON.

[Born about 505 A.D., of Slavonic descent, died 565. He rose from a soldier in the imperial guard to the supreme command of the Byzantine armies. For thirty years the glory and bulwark of the Greek empire, his genius for war has been rarely surpassed, and the field of his triumphs extended from Persia to Italy and Northern Africa. In spite of his priceless services to his sovereign, the envious and treacherous Justinian was careful to deprive him of power and place, when the empire could spare his genius at the head of its armies. His name has become a synonym for loyalty that no ingratitude could shake. He died in poverty and obscurity, though it was in his power any time during a score of years to snatch the purple from his unworthy master.]

In person Belisarius was tall and commanding, and presented a remarkable contrast to the dwarfish and ungainly aspect of his rival Narses. His features were regular and noble, and his appearance in the streets of Constantinople after the Vandal and Gothic victories never failed to attract the admiration of the people. His character may not unaptly be compared to that of Marlborough, whom he equaled in talents and closely resembled in his uxoriousness and love of money. As a military leader he was enterprising, firm, and fearless; his conception was clear, and his judgment rapid and decisive. His conquests were achieved with smaller means than any other of like extent recorded in history. He frequently experienced reverses in the field, but in no case did he fail without some strong and sufficient reason for his failure, such as the mutiny of his soldiers, the overwhelming number of his antagonists, or his total want of necessary supplies; and it may be observed of him, as of Arminius, that sometimes beaten in battle he was never overcome in war. His superior tactics covered his defeats, retrieved his losses, and prevented his enemies from reaping the fruits of victory; and it is particularly mentioned that even in the most dangerous emergencies he never lost his presence of mind.

Among the circumstances which contributed most strongly to his success were the kindness which his adversaries met with at his hands, and the strict discipline which he maintained among his soldiers. The moderation of Belisarius appears the more entitled to praise from the fierceness and disorder usual in his age. It was his first care after every victory to extend mercy and protection to the vanquished, and to shield their persons and, if possible, their property from injury. During a march the trampling of the corn-fields by the cavalry was carefully avoided, and the troops, as Procopius tells us, seldom ventured even to gather an apple from the trees, while a ready payment to the villagers for any provisions that they bought made them bless the name of Belisarius and secured to the Roman camp a plentiful supply. To the soldiers who transgressed these rules the general was stern and unforgiving; no rank could defy, no obscurity could elude his justice; and, because he punished severely, he had to punish but seldom. But while the licentious and turbulent were repressed by the strong arm of Belisarius, his liberality cheered and animated the deserving. The gift of a gold bracelet or collar rewarded any achievement in battle; the loss of a horse or weapon was immediately supplied out of his private funds, and the wounded found in him a father and a friend. His private virtues promoted and confirmed the discipline of his men; none ever saw him overcome with wine, and the charms of the fairest captives from the Goths or Vandals could not overcome his conjugal fidelity.

But the most striking and peculiar feature in the character of Belisarius, as compared with that of other illustrious generals, was his enduring and unconquerable loyalty. He was doubtless bound to Justinian by many ties of gratitude, and the suspicion entertained of him in Africa may be considered as fully counterbalanced by the triumph and other honors which awaited his return. But from the siege of Ravenna till his final departure from Italy he was, almost without intermission, exposed to the most galling and unworthy treatment; he was insulted, degraded, and despised; he was even attacked in his fame, when restored to an important station, without any means for discharging its duties and for sustaining his former reputation. It would be difficult to repeat another instance of such signal and repeated ingratitude unless in republics, where from the very nature of the government no crime is so dangerous or so well punished as serving the state too well. When we consider the frequency and therefore the ease of revolutions in this age, the want of hereditary right in the imperial family, the strong attachment of the soldiers to their victorious general, while the person of Justinian was hateful even to his own domestic guards, it will, I think, be admitted that a rebellion by Belisarius must have proved successful and secure. On no occasion was he roused into the slightest mark of disobedience or resentment; he bore every injury with unchanged submission; he resisted the feelings of indignation, of revenge, of self-interest, and even the thirst for glory, which, according to Tacitus, is of all frailties the longest retained by the wise. Besides him, no more than six generals have been named by one of our most judicious critics as having deserved, without having worn a crown;[18] and the smallness of this number should display the difficulty of withstanding this brilliant temptation and enhance the reputation of those who have withstood it.

The chief fault of Belisarius seems to have been his unbounded deference and submission to his wife, which rendered him strangely blind and afterward weakly forgiving to her infidelity. But its mischievous effects were not confined to private life, and nearly all the errors which can be charged upon his public career are imputed to this cause. It was Antonina who assumed the principal part in the deposition of the Pope, who urged the death of Constantine, who promoted the prosecution of Photius; and in his whole conduct with regard to that worthless woman Belisarius appears alternately the object of censure or ridicule. His confidence in her must have tended to lower his official character, to fetter and mislead his judgment, and to prevent his justice and impartiality whenever her passions were concerned. The second reproach to which the character of Belisarius appears liable is that of rapacity in the latter part of his career. How highly would his fame have been exalted by an honorable poverty, and how much would the animosity of his enemies at court have abated, had they seen no spoils to gather from his fall!

The life of Belisarius produced most important effects on the political and social revolutions of the world. I have already endeavored to show that his reduction of Africa probably contributed to the rapid progress of the Mussulmans, but this and his other victories probably saved his country from impending ruin. During the fifth century more than half the provinces of the ancient empire had been usurped by the barbarians, and the rising tide of their conquests must soon have overwhelmed the remainder. The decline of the Byzantine Romans was threatened by the youthful vigor of the Vandal and Ostrogothic kingdoms. Although the founders of these mighty monarchies had been wisely solicitous for peace, they left their successors fully able to undertake any projects of invasion; and an alliance of these states against the Romans must have been fatal to the last. Had not Belisarius arisen at this particular juncture the Vandals, Goths, and Persians would in all likelihood have divided the imperial provinces among them. The Arian doctrines, of which the two former were zealous partisans, would then probably have prevailed in the Christian world, the whole balance of power in Europe would have undergone incalculable changes, and the treasures of Greek and Roman genius would never have enlightened modern times.

MOHAMMED,[19] THE FOUNDER OF ISLAM.
By EDWARD GIBBON.

[Born 570 or 571 A.D., died 632. Like all the upper classes of Mecca, his birthplace, the future prophet devoted himself to commercial pursuits, and in his twenty-fifth year he married the rich widow whose business he supervised. It was not till his fortieth year that he

MOHAMMED.

announced to the world his heavenly mission, his first converts being his wife and his uncle Abu Taleb. He was compelled to fly from Mecca to Medina, and the year of the flight known as the “Hegira,” 622 A.D., is the foundation of the Mohammedan era. Within a decade Mohammed converted nearly the whole of Arabia to his new religion, and the dominion of his successors was spread with a rapidity which is among the marvels of history.]

The plebeian birth of Mahomet is an unskillful calumny of the Christians, who exalt instead of degrading the merit of their adversary. His descent from Ishmael was a national privilege or fable; but if the first steps of the pedigree are dark and doubtful, he could produce many generations of pure and genuine nobility; he sprung from the tribe of Koreish and the family of Hashem, the most illustrious of the Arabs, the princes of Mecca, and the hereditary guardians of the Caaba. The grandfather of Mahomet was Abdol Motalleb, the son of Hashem, a wealthy and generous citizen who relieved the distress of famine with the supplies of commerce. Mecca, which had been fed by the liberality of the father, was saved by the courage of the son. The kingdom of Yemen was subject to the Christian princes of Abyssinia; their vassal Abrahah was provoked by an insult to avenge the honor of the cross; and the holy city was invested by a train of elephants and an army of Africans. A treaty was proposed, and in the first audience the grandfather of Mahomet demanded the restitution of his cattle. “And why,” said Abrahah, “do you not rather implore my clemency in favor of your temple, which I have threatened to destroy?” “Because,” replied the intrepid chief, “the cattle is my own; the Caaba belongs to the gods, and they will defend their house from injury and sacrilege.” The want of provisions, or the valor of the Koreish, compelled the Abyssinians to a disgraceful retreat; their discomfiture has been adorned with a miraculous flight of birds, who showered down stones on the heads of the infidels; and the deliverance was long commemorated by the era of the elephant.

The glory of Abdol Motalleb was crowned with domestic happiness, his life was prolonged to the age of one hundred and ten years, and he became the father of six daughters and thirteen sons. His best beloved Abdallah was the most beautiful and modest of the Arabian youth. Mahomet, or more properly Mohammed, the only son of Abdallah and Amina, of the noble race of the Zahrites, was born at Mecca, four years after the death of Justinian. In his early infancy he was deprived of his father, his mother, and his grandfather; his uncles were strong and numerous; and in the division of the inheritance the orphan’s share was reduced to five camels and an Ethiopian maid-servant. At home and abroad, in peace and war, Abu Taleb, the most respectable of his uncles, was the guide and guardian of his youth; in his twenty-fifth year he entered into the service of Cadijah, a rich and noble widow of Mecca, who soon rewarded his fidelity with the gift of her hand and fortune. The marriage contract, in the simple style of antiquity, recites the mutual love of Mahomet and Cadijah; describes him as the most accomplished of the tribe of Koreish; and stipulates a dowry of twelve ounces of gold and twenty camels, which was supplied by the liberality of his uncle. By this alliance the son of Abdallah was restored to the station of his ancestors, and the judicious matron was content with his domestic virtues, till, in the fortieth year of his age, he assumed the title of a prophet and proclaimed the religion of the Koran.

According to the tradition of his companions, Mahomet was distinguished by the beauty of his person, an outward gift which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused. Before he spoke, the orator engaged on his side the affections of a public or private audience. They applauded his commanding presence, his majestic aspect, his piercing eye, his gracious smile, his flowing beard, his countenance that painted every sensation of the soul, and his gestures that enforced each expression of the tongue. In the familiar offices of life he scrupulously adhered to the grave and ceremonious politeness of his country; his respectful attention to the rich and powerful was dignified by his condescension and affability to the poorest citizens of Mecca; the frankness of his manner concealed the artifice of his views, and the habits of courtesy were imputed to personal friendship or universal benevolence. His memory was capacious and retentive, his wit easy and social, his imagination sublime, his judgment clear, rapid, and decisive. He possessed the courage both of thought and action; and, although his designs might gradually expand with his success, the first idea which he entertained of his divine mission bears the stamp of an original and superior genius. The son of Abdallah was educated in the bosom of the noblest race, in the use of the purest dialect of Arabia; and the fluency of his speech was corrected and enhanced by the practice of discreet and seasonable silence. With these powers of eloquence Mahomet was an illiterate barbarian; his youth had never been instructed in the arts of reading and writing; the common ignorance exempted him from shame or reproach, but he was reduced to a narrow circle of existence, and deprived of those faithful mirrors which reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes. Yet the book of nature and of man was open to his view; and some fancy has been indulged in the political and philosophical observations which are ascribed to the Arabian traveler. He compares the nations and the religions of the earth; discovers the weakness of the Persian and Roman monarchies; beholds, with pity and indignation, the degeneracy of the times; and resolves to unite, under one God and one king, the invincible spirit and primitive virtues of the Arabs. Our more accurate inquiry will suggest that, instead of visiting the courts, the camps, the temples of the East, the two journeys of Mahomet into Syria were confined to the fairs of Bostra and Damascus; that he was only thirteen years of age when he accompanied the caravan of his uncle; and that his duty compelled him to return as soon as he had disposed of the merchandise of Cadijah. In these hasty and superficial excursions the eye of genius might discern some objects invisible to his grosser companions; some seeds of knowledge might be cast upon a fruitful soil; but his ignorance of the Syriac language must have checked his curiosity, and I can not perceive in the life or writings of Mahomet that his prospect was far extended beyond the limits of the Arabian world.

From every region of that solitary world the pilgrims of Mecca were annually assembled by the calls of devotion and commerce; in the free concourse of multitudes, a simple citizen, in his native tongue, might study the political state and character of the tribes, the theory and practice of the Jews and Christians. Some useful strangers might be tempted, or forced, to implore the rights of hospitality; and the enemies of Mahomet have named the Jew, the Persian, and the Syrian monk whom they accuse of lending their secret aid to the composition of the Koran. Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius; and the uniformity of a work denotes the hand of a single artist. From his earliest youth Mahomet was addicted to religious contemplation; each year, during the month of Ramadan, he withdrew from the world and from the arms of Cadijah; in the cave of Hera, three miles from Mecca, he consulted the spirit of fraud or enthusiasm, whose abode is not in the heavens, but in the mind of the prophet. The faith which, under the name of Islam, he preached to his family and nation, is compounded of an eternal truth and a necessary fiction, that there is only one God, and that Mahomet is the apostle of God.

It may, perhaps, be expected that I should balance his faults and virtues, that I should decide whether the title of enthusiast or impostor more properly belongs to that extraordinary man. Had I been intimately conversant with the son of Abdallah, the task would still be difficult, and the success uncertain; at the distance of twelve centuries, I darkly contemplate his shade through a cloud of religious incense; and could I truly delineate the portrait of an hour, the fleeting resemblance would not equally apply to the solitary of Mount Hera, to the preacher of Mecca, and to the conqueror of Arabia. The author of a mighty revolution appears to have been endowed with a pious and contemplative disposition; so soon as marriage had raised him above the pressure of want, he avoided the paths of ambition and avarice; and till the age of forty he lived with innocence, and would have died without a name. The unity of God is an idea most congenial to nature and reason; and a slight conversation with the Jews and Christians would teach him to despise and detest the idolatry of Mecca. It was the duty of a man and a citizen to impart the doctrine of salvation, to rescue his country from the dominion of sin and error. The energy of a mind incessantly bent on the same object would convert a general obligation into a particular call; the warm suggestions of the understanding or the fancy would be felt as the inspirations of heaven; the labor of thought would expire in rapture and vision; and the inward sensation, the invisible monitor, would be described with the form and attributes of an angel of God.

From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud. Charity may believe that the original motives of Mahomet were those of pure and genuine benevolence; but a human missionary is incapable of cherishing the obstinate unbelievers who reject his claims, despise his arguments, and persecute his life; he might forgive his personal adversaries, he may lawfully hate the enemies of God; the stern passions of pride and revenge were kindled in the bosom of Mahomet, and he sighed, like the prophet of Nineveh, for the destruction of the rebels whom he had condemned. The injustice of Mecca and the choice of Medina transformed the citizen into a prince, the humble preacher into the leader of armies; but his sword was consecrated by the example of the saints, and the same God who afflicts a sinful world with pestilence and earthquakes might inspire for their conversion or chastisement the valor of his servants. In the exercise of political government he was compelled to abate of the stern rigor of fanaticism, to comply in some measure with the prejudices and passions of his followers, and to employ even the vices of mankind as the instruments of their salvation. The use of fraud and perfidy, of cruelty and injustice, were often subservient to the propagation of the faith; and Mahomet commanded or approved the assassination of the Jews and idolaters who had escaped from the field of battle. By the repetition of such acts the character of Mahomet must have been gradually stained, and the influence of such pernicious habits would be poorly compensated by the practice of the personal and social virtues which are necessary to maintain the reputation of a prophet among his secretaries and friends.

Of his last years ambition was the ruling passion; and a politician will suspect that he secretly smiled (the victorious impostor!) at the enthusiasm of his youth and the credulity of his proselytes. A philosopher will observe that their cruelty and his success would tend more strongly to fortify the assurance of his divine mission, that his interest and religion were inseparably connected, and that his conscience would be soothed by the persuasion that he alone was absolved by the Deity from the obligation of positive and moral laws. If he retained any vestige of his native innocence, the sins of Mahomet may be allowed as an evidence of his sincerity. In the support of truth the arts of fraud and fiction may be deemed less criminal, and he would have started at the foulness of the means had he not been satisfied of the importance and justice of the end. Even in a conqueror or a priest, I can surprise a word or action of unaffected humanity; and the decree of Mahomet that, in the sale of captives, the mothers should never be separated from their children, may suspend or moderate the censure of the historian.

The good sense of Mahomet despised the pomp of royalty; the apostle of God submitted to the menial offices of the family; he kindled the fire, swept the floor, milked the ewes, and mended with his own hands his shoes and his woolen garment. Disdaining the penance and merit of a hermit, he observed, without effort or vanity, the abstemious diet of an Arab and a soldier. On solemn occasions he feasted his companions with rustic and hospitable plenty; but in his domestic life, many weeks would elapse without a fire being kindled on the hearth of the prophet. The interdiction of wine was confirmed by his example; his hunger was appeased with a sparing allowance of barley bread; he delighted in the taste of milk and honey, but his ordinary food consisted of dates and water. Perfumes and women were the two sensual enjoyments which his nature required and his religion did not forbid. Their incontinence was regulated by the civil and religious laws of the Koran; their incestuous alliances were blamed, the boundless license of polygamy was reduced to four legitimate wives or concubines; their rights, both of bed and of dowry, were equitably determined; the freedom of divorce was discouraged, adultery was condemned as a capital offense, and fornication in either sex was punished with a hundred stripes. Such were the calm and rational precepts of the legislator; but in his private conduct Mahomet indulged the appetites of a man, and abused the claims of a prophet. The youth, the beauty, the spirit of Ayesha, gave her a superior ascendant; she was beloved and trusted by the prophet, and after his death the daughter of Abubeker was long revered as the mother of the faithful. During the twenty-four years of the marriage of Mahomet with Cadijah, her youthful husband abstained from the right of polygamy, and the pride or tenderness of the venerable matron was never insulted by the society of a rival. After her death he placed her in the rank of the four perfect women—with the sister of Moses, the mother of Jesus, and Fatima, the best beloved of his daughters. “Was she not old?” said Ayesha, with the insolence of a blooming beauty; “has not God given you a better in her place?” “No, by God,” said Mahomet, with an effusion of honest gratitude, “there never can be a better! she believed in me when men despised me; she relieved my wants when I was poor and persecuted by the world.”

CHARLEMAGNE.
By SIR JAMES STEPHEN.

[Otherwise known as Charles I, or Charles the Great, Emperor of the West and King of France, born 742 A.D., died 814. Grandson of Charles Martel and son of Pepin, who, under the titular rank of Mayor of the Palace and Duke of Austrasia, had exercised the substantial functions of French sovereignty during the closing days of the Merovingian kings. Charlemagne was the true founder of the Carlovingian dynasty, and was by conquest the ruler over much of what is now Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy. He is one of the colossal figures in early European history. But even his genius, though gifted with the finest traits of the soldier, administrator, and law-maker, could not delay that tremendous revolution of society, which intervened between the collapse of the old Roman system and the establishment of feudalism. The most important events of his reign were the subjugation and conversion of the Saxons and the re-establishment of the Western Empire.]

The political maxims which Charlemagne acquired by tradition and inheritance had, to a certain extent, become obsolete when he himself succeeded to the power of his ancestors and to the crown of his father, Pepin. It was then no longer necessary to practice those hereditary arts with a

CHARLEMAGNE.

view to the great prize to which they had so long been subservient. But the maxims by which the Carlovingian scepter had been won were not less necessary in order to defend and to retain it. They afford the key to more than half the history of the great conqueror from whom that dynasty derives its name. The cardinal points to which throughout his long and glorious reign his mind was directed with an inflexible tenacity of purpose, were precisely those toward which his forefathers had bent their attention. They were to conciliate the attachment of his German subjects by studiously maintaining their old German institutions; to anticipate instead of awaiting the invasions of the barbarous nations by whom he was surrounded; to court the alliance and support of all other secular potentates of the East and West; and to strengthen his own power by the most intimate relations with the Church.

I have, however, already observed that Charlemagne had other rules or habits of conduct which were the indigenous growth of his own mind. It was only in a mind of surpassing depth and fertility that such maxims could have been nurtured and made to yield their appropriate fruits; for, first, he firmly believed that the power of his house could have no secure basis except in the religious, moral, intellectual, and social improvement of his subjects; and, secondly, he was no less firmly persuaded that in order to effect that improvement it was necessary to consolidate all temporal authority in Europe by the reconstruction of the Cæsarian empire—that empire beneath the shelter of which religion, law, and learning had so long and so widely flourished throughout the dominions of imperial Rome.

Gibbon has remarked, that of all the heroes to whom the title of “the Great” had been given, Charlemagne alone has retained it as a permanent addition to his name. The reason may, perhaps, be that in no other man were ever united in so large a measure, and in such perfect harmony, the qualities which, in their combination, constitute the heroic character, such as energy, or the love of action; ambition, or the love of power; curiosity, or the love of knowledge; and sensibility, or the love of pleasure—not, indeed, the love of forbidden, of unhallowed, or of enervating pleasure, but the keen relish for those blameless delights by which the burdened mind and jaded spirits recruit and renovate their powers—delights of which none are susceptible in the highest degree but those whose more serious pursuits are sustained by the highest motives and directed toward the highest ends; for the charms of social intercourse, the play of buoyant fancy, the exhilaration of honest mirth, and even the refreshment of athletic exercises, require, for their perfect enjoyment, that robust and absolute health of body and of mind, which none but the noblest natures possess and in the possession of which Charlemagne exceeded all other men.

His lofty stature, his open countenance, his large and brilliant eyes, and the dome-like structure of his head imparted, as we learn from Eginhard, to all his attitudes the dignity which becomes a king, relieved by the graceful activity of a practiced warrior. He was still a stranger to every form of bodily disease when he entered his seventieth year; and although he was thenceforward constrained to pay the usual tribute to sickness and to pain, he maintained to the last a contempt for the whole materia medica, and for the dispensers of it, which Molière himself, in his gayest mood, might have envied. In defiance of the gout, he still followed the chase, and still provoked his comrades to emulate his feats in swimming, as though the iron frame which had endured nearly threescore campaigns had been incapable of lassitude and exempt from decay.

In the monastery of St. Gall, near the Lake of Constance, there was living in the ninth century a monk who relieved the tedium of his monotonous life and got the better, as he tells us, of much constitutional laziness by collecting anecdotes of the mighty monarch, with whose departed glories the world was at that time ringing. In this amusing legend Charlemagne, the conqueror, the legislator, the patron of learning, and the restorer of the empire, makes way for Charlemagne, the joyous companion, amusing himself with the comedy or rather with the farce of life, and contributing to it not a few practical jokes, which stand in most whimsical contrast with the imperial dignity of the jester. Thus, when he commands a whole levy of his blandest courtiers, plumed and furred and silken as they stood, to follow him in the chase through sleet and tempest, mud and brambles; or constrains an unhappy chorister, who had forgotten his responses, to imitate the other members of the choir by a long series of mute grimaces; or concerts with a Jew peddler a scheme for palming off, at an enormous price, on an Episcopal virtuoso, an embalmed rat, as an animal till then unknown to any naturalist—these, and many similar facetiæ, which in any other hands might have seemed mere childish frivolities, reveal to us, in the illustrious author of them, that native alacrity of spirit and child-like glee, which neither age nor cares nor toil could subdue, and which not even the oppressive pomps of royalty were able to suffocate.

Nor was the heart which bounded thus lightly after whim or merriment less apt to yearn with tenderness over the interior circle of his home. While yet a child, he had been borne on men’s shoulders, in a buckler for his cradle, to accompany his father in his wars; and in later life, he had many a strange tale to tell of his father’s achievements. With his mother, Bertha, the long-footed, he lived in affectionate and reverend intimacy, which never knew a pause except on one occasion, which may perhaps apologize for some breach even of filial reverence, for Bertha had insisted on giving him a wife against his own consent. His own parental affections were indulged too fondly and too long, and were fatal both to the immediate objects of them and to his own tranquillity. But with Eginhard and Alcuin and the other associates of his severer labors, he maintained that grave and enduring friendship, which can be created only on the basis of the most profound esteem, and which can be developed only by that free interchange of thought and feeling which implies the temporary forgetfulness of all the conventional distinctions of rank and dignity.

It was a retributive justice which left Gibbon to deform, with such revolting obscenities, the pages in which he waged his disingenuous warfare against the one great purifying influence of human society. It may also have been retributive justice which has left the glory of Charlemagne to be overshadowed by the foul and unmerited reproach on which Gibbon dwells with such offensive levity; for the monarch was habitually regardless of that law, at once so strict and so benignant, which has rendered chastity the very bond of domestic love and happiness and peace. In bursting through the restraints of virtue, Charlemagne was probably the willing victim of a transparent sophistry. From a nature so singularly constituted as his, sweet waters or bitter might flow with equal promptitude. That peculiarity of temperament in which his virtues and his vices found their common root probably confounded the distinctions of good and evil in his self-judgments, and induced him to think lightly of the excesses of a disposition so often conducting him to the most noble and magnanimous enterprises; for such was the revelry of his animal life, so inexhaustible his nervous energies, so intense the vibrations of each successive impulse along the chords of his sensitive nature, so insatiable his thirst for activity, and so uncontrollable his impatience of repose, that, whether he was engaged in a frolic or a chase, composed verses or listened to homilies, fought or negotiated, cast down thrones or built them up, studied, conversed, or legislated, it seemed as if he, and he alone, were the one wakeful and really living agent in the midst of an inert, visionary, and somnolent generation.

The rank held by Charlemagne among great commanders was achieved far more by this strange and almost superhuman activity than by any pre-eminent proficiency in the art or science of war. He was seldom engaged in any general action, and never undertook any considerable siege, excepting that of Pavia, which, in fact, was little more than a protracted blockade; but, during forty-six years of almost unintermitted warfare, he swept over the whole surface of Europe, from the Ebro to the Oder, from Bretagne to Hungary, from Denmark to Capua, with such a velocity of movement and such a decision of purpose that no power, civilized or barbarous, ever provoked his resentment without rapidly sinking beneath his prompt and irresistible blows. And though it be true, as Gibbon has observed, that he seldom if ever encountered in the field a really formidable antagonist, it is not less true that, but for his military skill animated by his sleepless energy, the countless assailants by whom he was encompassed must rapidly have become too formidable for resistance; for to Charlemagne is due the introduction into modern warfare of the art by which a general compensates for the numerical inferiority of his own forces to those of his antagonists—the art of moving detached bodies of men along remote but converging lines with such mutual concert as to throw their united forces at the same moment on any meditated point of attack. Neither the Alpine marches of Hannibal nor those of Napoleon were combined with greater foresight or executed with greater precision than the simultaneous passages of Charlemagne and Count Bernard across the same mountain-ranges, and their ultimate union in the vicinity of their Lombard enemies.