ting and more valuable than a study of the causes that produced
and modified these successive ideals. Thus in the moral type of pagan
antiquity the civic virtues occupied incomparably the foremost place.
The idea of a supremely good man was essentially that of a man of
action, of a man whose whole life was devoted to the service of his
country. The life and death of Cato were for generations the favourite
model. He was deemed, in the words of an old Latin historian, to be of
all men the one 'most like to virtue.' This pattern retained its force
till the softening influence of the Greek spirit, permeating Roman
life, made the stoical ideal seem too hard and unsympathising; till
the corruption and despotism of the Empire had withdrawn the best men
from political life and attached a certain taint or stigma to public
employment; till new religions arose in the East, bringing with them
new ideals to govern the world. Gradually we may trace the
contemplative virtues rising to the foremost place until, about the
fifth century, the ideal had totally changed. The heroic type was
replaced by the saintly type. The supremely good man was now the
ascetic. The first condition of sanctity was a complete abandonment of
secular duties and cares and a complete subjugation of the body. A
vast literature of legends arose reflecting and glorifying the
prevailing ideal and holding up the hermit life as the supreme pattern
of perfection, and this literature occupies a place in mediaevalism
very similar to that held by the 'Lives' of Plutarch in antiquity.

Ancient art was essentially the glorification of the body, a
representation of the full strength and beauty of developed manhood.
The saint of the mediaeval mosaic represents the body in its extreme
maceration and humiliation. The rhetorician, Dio Chrysostom, in a
somewhat whimsical passage, which was suggested by a remark of Plato,
found a special moral significance in the fact that Homer, though he
places his heroes on the the banks of what he calls 'the fishy
Hellespont,' never makes them eat fish, but always flesh and the flesh
of oxen, for this, as he says, is 'strength-producing food' and is
therefore suited for the formation of heroes and the proper diet for
men of virtue. Compare this judgment with the protracted, and indeed
incredible, fasts which the monkish writers delighted in attributing
to the saints of the desert, and we have a vivid picture of the change
that had passed over