William Bodham Donne

“ The highways which conveyed to the warehouses of Carthage the ivory, gold-dust, slaves, and aromatic gums of Central Libya ran through miles of well-ordered gardens and by hundreds of villas; and it was the ruthless destruction of these country-seats of the merchant-princes of Byrsa, which forced upon them the first and the second peace with Rome.
The Grecian roads, like the modern European highways, represented the free genius of the people: they were often sinuous in their course, and, respecting the boundaries of property, wound around the hills rather than disturb the ancient landmarks. ”

“ Weary of civil broils and a disputed succession to the throne, that restless people had sued for a king at the hands of Rome, and not long after accepting, grew tired of him. Vonones, whom the Cæsar had sent them, was at first received with all demonstrations of joy. But his subjects soon began to despise him as a prince, whose education at Rome had rendered him unfit for an eastern crown. In his tastes and pursuits he was essentially a foreigner. He took no delight in horsemanship—and to be a fearless rider was, among the Parthians, one of the most indispensable of royal virtues. ”

“ If you look to move through this little volume in a direct line, after the present fashion of Railway Travelling, you will be signally disappointed. Nothing can well be more circuitous than the route proposed to you, nor more eccentric than your present guide. This book aspires to the precision of neither Patterson nor Bradshaw. Let men “bloody with spurring, fiery hot with speed,” consult those oracles of swiftness and rectitude of way: we do not belong to their manor. We desire to beguile, by a sort of serpentine irregularity, the occasional tedium of rapid movement. ”

“ While under his roof, Hippolytus devotes himself to the worship of Diana: like her he delights in the chase; like her also he shuns the snares of love or the chains of wedlock. Excelling in all manly exercises, and adorned with every virtue, he unhappily not merely neglects Venus, but irritates her by open expressions of contempt for herself and her rites: and he owes to this pride or exclusive zeal the hideous ruin which engulfs him. The offended goddess sets forth in the prologue her determination to destroy Diana's favourite, and gives her reasons for it. ”

“ Then did Roman soldiers rush forward like men who had to drive a Vologeses or Pacorus from the ancestral throne of the Arsacidæ, not as though they were hastening to murder their aged and defenceless emperor. In all the terror of their arms, and at the full speed of their horses, they burst into the Forum, thrusting aside the crowd and trampling on the senate. Neither the sight of the Capitol, nor the sanctity of the overhanging temples, could deter them from committing a crime which any one succeeding to power must avenge. ”

“ Even the sorrow of the Chorus is significant: it is composed not of susceptible women, but of ancient men—past the age in which the affections are active, and when the lengthening shadows on the dial often render the old less sensible of others' woe. And this tribute from the elders of the neighbourhood completes the circle of grief on the removal of Alcestis from all she had loved—from the cheering sunlight, the lucid streams, the green pastures, which from the palace windows had so often gladdened her eyes. ”

“ You may talk to a pleasant companion in your first or second class carriage without losing the thread of our argument; you may indulge in a comfortable nap without its being necessary for you to mark the page where you dropped off. It may be better to begin at the beginning, and read in ordinary fashion to the close. But it will not be much worse if you have a fancy for commencing with the end. In short, you cannot go wrong, so you do but read in a charitable spirit—not being extreme to mark the much which is amiss. ”

“ Did the fame that Cicero won by eloquence compensate him for the tragic end to which his orations against Marcus Antonius brought him? Believe me, my excellent friends, had it been your lot to live under the old republic, you would have been as famous, and perhaps as much harassed by anxiety and envy, as the orators you so much admire; and had it been their lot to live in these piping times of peace, the heroes of the bar would have acquiesced in the tranquillity we enjoy. It may not be easy—it may be impossible—for us to attain a great and splendid reputation as orators ”

“ Agamemnon, however, declares, he is so compromised with the Greeks that he cannot recede. His own life will be in danger from the infuriated host, if he any longer withholds the appointed victim. Again Achilles rushes on with the news that his soldiers have sworn to kill him, if for the sake of a young maiden he any longer detains them at Aulis. And now the daughter of a line of heroes shows herself heroic. She will be the victim whom the goddess demands. Troy shall fall: Greece shall triumph: in place of marriage and happy years, she will die for the common weal. ”

“ But Maternus is something more and far better than a verse-monger. Why should he waste precious hours on his 'Cato' or 'Thyestes,' his 'Agamemnon' or 'Domitius?'—he who is formed by nature to reach the heights of manly eloquence. As for your Saleius Bassus, it was very kind in Vespasian to give him lately fifty pounds; nay, the more so because our Cæsar is not usually so free of his money. But why should you, Maternus, who can earn thrice that sum when the courts are sitting, desire to put yourself on a level with an imperial pensioner? At the best, poets are very slenderly paid. ”

“ Perhaps the very antiquity of roads, and the wide arc of generations comprised in the subject, have deterred competent persons from attempting it; yet therefore is it only the more strange that incompetent persons have not essayed “this great argument,” since they generally rush in, where their betters fear to tread. A history of roads is, in great measure indeed, a history of civilization itself. For highways and great cities not merely presuppose the existence of each other, but are also the issues and exponents of two leading impulses in the nature of man. ”

“ Has any stage-poet, if we except Shakespeare, supplied moralists and philosophers with more grave or shrewd maxims than he has done? Has any ancient poet taken wider or more liberal views of humanity?
Again, the scenic philosopher was reputed unsound in his theology; and this, no doubt, is an offence in every well-regulated community. Without going beyond the bounds of England, we find that it was no want of will on the part of their opponents that saved Chillingworth, Hobbes, or even John Locke, from something akin to the cup of hemlock tendered to Socrates. ”

“ Had the coalition of Germans and Gauls been sound and sincere, had the authors and leaders of it added to their enthusiasm the steady and sagacious temper of the warriors and statesmen who had made Rome the mistress of the world, it is difficult to see how the empire could have survived, bleeding and faint as it was at the time from a fierce civil conflict of about eighteen months. ”

“ A few of our readers may remember the family coach in which county magnates rode in procession to church, to Quarter sessions, and on all occasions of ceremony and parade. The Landau, so fast disappearing from our streets and roads, was but a puny bantling of a vehicle in comparison with the older and more august conveyance. As the gentlemen rode on horseback, and the ladies upon pillions, on all but the great epochs of their lives, this wheeled mammoth was rarely drawn out of its cavern, the coach-house. ”

“ He lays flattering unction on his soul—perhaps somewhat in this wise: "My wife, as well as myself, must one day die: perchance the Fates may not be in haste for either of us—may even, with Apollo to friend us, renew the bond." When the inexorable missive comes for her, he is indeed deeply cast down: yet even then there is not a spark of manliness in him. ”

“ Whatever we loved, whatever we admired in Agricola, survives, and will survive in the hearts of men, in the succession of the ages, in the fame that waits on noble deeds. Over many, indeed, of those who have gone before, as over the inglorious and ignoble, the waves of oblivion will roll; Agricola, made known to posterity by history and tradition, will live for ever. ”

“ To allow our view of his character to be biassed by a person's opinions is not a discovery of modern times. It was by no means prudent for any one residing in Athens to be wiser than his neighbours in physical science, or to speak or write of the gods otherwise than custom sanctioned. The most orthodox of spectators at the theatre was justly shocked by being told, that the gods he had no scruples about laughing at in the "Frogs" or "Birds" of Aristophanes, were really little more than men's inventions—caricatures rather than portraits of the deity as contemplated by the philosopher. ”

“ A Roman mob was always ready to cry, "A bas les aristocrats!" and a London or Parisian one is always ready to do the like. Among the earliest and certainly the most conspicuous victims struck down by Sejanus, was Drusus, the emperor's only son. But the direct heir to the purple was beyond the informer's shaft: and the prince-imperial was murdered by the aid of his young wife Livia, whom an adulterous connection had previously brought into the snares of the ambitious minister. It was against the widow of Germanicus, her sons, and their adherents, that he first let slip his bloodhounds. ”

“ The deliverance of the friends and the priestess is still hard to accomplish; they are begirt with peril. Iphigenia knows too well the religious rigour of the Taurian king. Thoas is a devout worshipper of Diana; is an inexorable foe to Greeks. His subjects and his guards are equally hostile towards strangers and loyal to their goddess. If they cannot escape, the intruders will be immolated, and the priestess be a third victim on the blood-stained altar. And now Iphigenia proves that she is Greek to the core. She can plot craftily: she will even hazard the wrath of a deity by a timely fraud. ”

“ Never has the power of Rome been more depressed. In the winter quarters of the legions there is nothing but property to plunder and a few old men. Only dare to look up, and cease to tremble at the empty names of legions. For we have a vast force of horse and foot; we have the Germans our kinsmen; we have Gaul bent on the same objects. ”

“ But as soon as Hercules extracts from the servant the real cause of the family grief, all levity departs from him. He is almost wroth with his friend for such overstrained delicacy, and hurries out to render him such "yeoman's service" as no one except the strongest of mankind can perform. Alcestis has been laid in her grave; the mourners have all come back to the palace; and Death, easy in his mind as to Apollo, and secure, as he deems himself, from interruption, is making ready for a ghoulish feast on her corpse. But he has reckoned without the guest. ”

“ After referring to the sufferings already endured at Roman hands by every tribe of Britons, to the cruelty, rapacity, and lust of their oppressors, Galgacus proceeds to hint that there is a worm in the bud of the unwieldly empire.
"Do you suppose," he is made to say, "that the Romans will be as brave in war as they are licentious in peace? To our strifes and discords they owe their fame, and they turn the errors of an enemy to the renown of their own army—an army which, composed as it is of every variety of nations, is held together by success, and will be broken up by disaster. ”

“ In a war between Athens and Eubœa, one Xuthus had done them good service; his recompense for it was the hand of the Erectheid princess Creusa, and the issue of the marriage was Ion, from whom the Athenians claimed, remotely, to descend. But when, after the decline of Argos, they had risen to a level with Corinth and Sparta, they aspired to the honour of a divine ancestry on the spear-side, as well as that of a royal one on the spindle. A wandering soldier no longer sufficed; the son of Creusa must not be born in mortal wedlock, but derive his origin from a god. ”

“ However, it was not the men only who were exposed to the chances of war. Women were commonly spectators of their husbands' prowess, and "tradition says that armies already wavering and giving way, have been rallied by women, who, with earnest entreaties and loud shrieks, and bared bosoms, vividly represented the horrors of captivity, which the Germans fear with such extreme dread on behalf of their women, that the strongest tie by which a state can be bound is the being required to give, among the number of hostages, maidens of noble birth." ”

“ The character of Achilles is delineated with great skill and felicity. The hero of the Iliad is a most dramatic portraiture of one who has, in spite of his pride and wilfulness, many compensating virtues. If his passions are strong, so are his affections; if he is implacable to mailed foes, he is generous and even tender to weeping Priam: he knows that he bears a doomed life if he tarries on Trojan ground, yet though highly provoked by Agamemnon, he abides constant to the oath he had taken as one of the suitors of Helen. ”

“ There was scarcely a man in Rome who did not seem, by the voice of fame and the wishes of the people, designed for the sovereign power, rather than the very person whom Fate cherished in obscurity in order to make him, at a future period, master of the Roman world." [1]
Yet Claudius, in intention, was not among the bad Cæsars. Had he met with honest friends, and had he not been misguided by his freedmen and his wives, Messalina and the younger Agrippina, his rule might have been happy for his subjects and creditable to himself. ”

“ Of him no more need be said than that, by promising by his gods to shelter Medea, and yield her up to none, he removes the one difficulty in her way which still perplexed her. Now at last she is armed at all points—she has an assured home and protector, time to strike down every foe, weapons they cannot guard against, and means to escape if pursued.
Her wronged children shall be the instrument of her vengeance. As to Jason himself, she has changed her purpose; he shall not have the privilege of dying, for she can make life to him more wretched than many deaths. ”

“ To represent Clito as vending her own wares was an irresistible temptation to comic dramatists, indifferent whom they used for mirth and, laughter, whether it were a Pericles or a Cleon.
Like many fathers before him and since, Mnesarchus was puzzled about his son's proper calling in life; and so, as modern parents often consult some sound divine about the choice of a school for their lads, he took counsel of those who understood what the stars or birds of the air forebode as to the destiny of mortals. ”

“ Græcinus was a distinguished orator and philosopher, but these good gifts excited the envy of Caius Cæsar, who took the first convenient opportunity of getting rid of him. His mother, Julia Procilla, was a matron of the old Roman stamp. Under her wise and watchful guardianship, Agricola imbibed in early youth the virtues which he practised in mature years. In a period notorious for extravagance and excess of every description—vices that extended even to learning and philosophy—Julia kept always in view the wholesome doctrine of "a golden mean." ”

“ There shall be no more mirth or feasting in his dominions; the sound of tabret and harp shall never more be heard in his dwelling; black shall be his only wear; no second wife shall occupy the room of his first; had he the lute of Orpheus, he would go down to Pluto's gloomy realm, and bring her to upper air. He "doth profess too much:" he lacks the heroic spirit that dwelt in Polyxena, Macaria, and Iphigenia. Some excuse for one so weak as Admetus may perhaps be found in the view of death, or life after death, taken by the Greeks generally. ”

“ It was said that Vitellius expressed a brutal pleasure at the spectacle. He called for bowls of wine—he circulated them freely among his suite and soldiers—he declared that "the corpse of an enemy smells always well, particularly that of a fellow-citizen." We will now leave him in Rome, where he was of course greeted by the shouts of the populace, the flattery of the upper classes, and innumerable applications for places and favours. Well had Tiberius said of his Roman subjects, that they were "born to be slaves." ”

“ War is ever "work of waste and ruin." If the land were tilled at all, the green corn was taken by the enemy for horse-fodder; fruit-trees were cut down for fuel or fencing of camps; villages and homesteads, when no longer wanted by the Dorian invader, were wantonly destroyed. In place of the rich tillage, woodland, or pasturage which greeted the eyes of spectators from the walls or the citadel, there presented itself a wide and various scene of desolation. All that an Athenian, during many weeks in the year, could call his own, was the sea. ”

“ THE HISTORIAN.
There was a time when the works of Tacitus were far more familiar to English readers than they are now,—when sages like Bacon, and historians like Clarendon, drew from them moral and political adages, and appealed to them as manuals for statesmen. But in proportion as the power of the Crown in this country has diminished, and that of Parliament increased, the chronicler of ten Cæsars has ceased to be an oracle for our public men. He shares the fate of Cicero—he lives almost in name alone. ”

“ We are all pious worshippers of your 'great father' Neptune. We have built him many temples in Greece. Much have we endured by war and land and sea, and it will be very hard on us, after escaping so many perils, to be now roasted or boiled for a supper to Neptune's son."
The reply of Polyphemus is just what might have been looked for from such a sensual barbarian. It is unfilial, and even blasphemous. "A fig," he cries, "for your temples and their gods. The wise man knows of nothing worth worshipping except wealth." ”

“ The admiration, the affection of Pliny for his friend, the deep feeling with which Tacitus narrates the life and death of Agricola, the evident pleasure exhibited by him when delineating characters eminent for virtue, forbid us to imagine him austere or morose. But there are people, amiable and calm in disposition, who, when they take a pen into their hand, display a stern and acrid temper, more especially if they have a grievance or a theory to expound. ”

“ The gifts are envenomed. Glaucè and Creon, wrapt in a sheet of phosphoric flame, expire in torments. Jason is a widowed bridegroom; all Corinth is aroused to take vengeance on the barbaric sorceress. Surely this must be the end of the tragedy. No; "bad begins, but worse remains behind." One more blow remains to be dealt. Jason is wifeless, he shall be childless too, before Medea speeds in her dragon-borne car—the chariot of the Sun, her grandsire—to hospitable Athens. ”

“ Nay, Tacitus even cannot help admiring their conception of the Deity, or some of their social practices. "It is a crime with them to kill a newly-born infant." It was not a crime at Rome. The Jews held "that the souls of all who perish in battle, or by the hands of the executioner, are immortal;" and in this faith they fought valiantly; they contemned death; they rejoiced in the number of their children. Of "the Deity, as one in essence, they have purely mental conceptions. They call those profane who make representations of God in human shape out of perishable materials. ”

“ From the moment when the young daughter of Agamemnon is borne away from the altar at Aulis, she has been devoted to the service of Diana at Tauri—a goddess who, like the ferocious deities of the Mexicans, delighted in the savour of human blood. From that moment, also, Iphigenia has remained Ignorant of the great events that have taken place since her rescue. She knows not that Troy has fallen; that her father has been murdered and avenged; that her brother Orestes and her sister Electra yet live, but under the ban of gods and men ”

“ In this dreary silence we shudder, and speak in a whisper: all is dark and wrapt in mystery, doubtful and perplexing. Was Germanicus poisoned? Was Piso guilty? What urged him to his mad violence? Did the son of Tiberius die by poison,—Agrippina by the stroke of an assassin? All this was just as uncertain to Tacitus as to us."
And the doubts which hang over this reign increase when we turn from the pages of Tacitus to those of other writers, whether contemporaries of Tiberius or of a somewhat later period. ”

“ Is there any improbability in supposing Euripides, a man of the new era, to have viewed the grim though picturesque stories of the old and waning times as inconsistent with the bright, free, and intelligent Athens in which he dwelt? The pupil of Anaxagoras and Prodicus might well regard a people as little beyond the verge of barbarism for whom the priest was the philosopher, whose heroes yet strove with wild beasts, who trembled at the phenomena of nature, and among whom ignorance generally prevailed. ”

“ They did not possess the funds that Cimon and Pericles commanded for great public works. They presided over a jealous people by force of arms, and dreaded provoking it by offensive displays either of wealth or power. Not until the democracy was satisfied with its representatives, and proud of its land and its capital, was it possible to indulge in lavish, expenditure, or to win for Athens the titles of "the eye of Greece" and "the violet Queen." ”