d on semi-madmen, Ennui in Rome assumed colossal
proportions. Its victims sought for palliatives in cruelty and crime
elsewhere unknown, except perhaps in Oriental courts. Lucretius, in
the last days of the Republic, had discovered its deep significance
for human nature. To all the pictures of Tacitus it forms a solemn
tragic background, enhancing, as it were, by spiritual gloom the
carnival of passions which gleam so brilliantly upon his canvas. In
the person of Caligula, Ennui sat supreme upon the throne of the
terraqueous globe. The insane desires and the fantastic deeds of the
autocrat who wished one head for humanity that he might cut it off,
sufficiently reveal the extent to which his spirit had been
gangrened by this ulcer. There is a simple paragraph in Suetonius
which lifts the veil from his imperial unrest more ruthlessly than
any legend:--'Incitabatur insomniis maxime; neque enim plus tribus
horis nocturnis quiescebat, ac ne his quidem placida quiete, at
pavida, miris rerum imaginibus ... ideoque magna parte noctis,
vigiliae cubandique taedio, nunc toro residens, nunc per longissimas
porticus vagus, invocare identidem atque expectare lucem
consueverat.' This is the very picture of Ennui that has become
mortal disease. Nor was Nero different. 'Neron,' says Victor Hugo,
'cherche tout simplement une distraction. Poete, comedien, chanteur,
cocher, epuisant la ferocite pour trouver la volupte, essayant le
changement de sexe, epoux de l'eunuque Sporus et epouse de l'esclave
Pythagore, et se promenant dans les rues de Rome entre sa femme et
son mari; ayant deux plaisirs: voir le peuple se jeter sur les
pieces d'or, les diamants et les perles, et voir les lions se jeter
sur le peuple; incendiaire par curiosite et parricide par
desoeuvrement.' Nor need we stop at Nero. Over Vitellius at his
banquets, over Hadrian in his Tiburtine villa calling in vain on
Death, over Commodus in the arena, and Heliogabalus among the
rose-leaves, the same livid shadow of imperial Ennui hangs. We can
even see it looming behind the noble form of Marcus Aurelius, who,
amid the ruins of empire and the revolutions of belief, penned in
his tent among the Quadi those maxims of endurance which were
powerless to regenerate the world.

[1] See the prelude to _Les Confessions d'un Enfant du
Siecle_ and _Les Nuits_.

Roman again, in the true sense of the word, is the Lucretian
philosophy of Conscience. Christianity has claimed the celebr