though there were reigns when, in the words of Tacitus, virtue
was a sentence of death, the emperors were not always insane. Vespasian
was a soldier, Hadrian a scholar, Pius Antoninus a philosopher, and Marcus
Aurelius a sage. Rome was not wholly pandemoniac. There is goodness
everywhere, even in evil. There was goodness even in Rome. Stoicism, a
code of the highest morality, had been adopted by the polite. Cicero, in
expounding it, had stated that no one could be a philosopher who has not
learned that vice should be avoided, however concealable it may be.
Aristotle had praised virtue because of its extreme utility. Seneca said
that vices were maladies, among which Zeno catalogued love, as Plato did
crime. To him, vice stood to virtue as disease does to health. All guilt,
he said, is ignorance.

Expressions such as these appealed to a class relatively small, but highly
lettered, whom the intense realism of the amphitheatre, the suggestive
postures of the pantomimes, and the Orientalism of the orgy shocked. There
are now honest men everywhere, even in prison. Even in Rome there were
honest men then. Moreover, paganism at its worst, always tolerant, was
often poetic. Then, too, life in the imperial epoch, while less fair than
in the age of Pericles, was so splendidly brilliant that it exhausted
possible glamour for a thousand years to come. Dazzling in violence, its
coruscations blinded the barbarians so thoroughly that thereafter there
was but night.

X

FINIS AMORIS

The first barbarian that invaded Rome was a Jew. There was then there a
small colony of Hebrews. Porters, pedlers, rag-pickers, valets-de-place,
they were the descendants mainly of former prisoners of war. The Jew had a
message for them. It was very significant. But it conflicted so entirely
with orthodox views that there were few whom it did not annoy. A
disturbance ensued. The ghetto was raided. A complaint for inciting
disorder was lodged against a certain Christos, of whom nothing was known,
and who had eluded arrest.

Rome, through her relations with Syria, was probably the first Occidental
city in which the name was pronounced. Though the message behind it
annoyed many, others accepted it at once. These latter, the former
denounced. Some suppression ensued. But it had no religious significance.
The purport of the message and the attitude of those who accepted it was
seditious. Both denied the divinity of the Caesars. That was treason. In