The cultural graph of the third century follows loosely the curve of declining wealth and power. Nevertheless, in these tragic years we have the rise of notational algebra, the highest names in Roman jurisprudence, the finest example of ancient literary criticism, some of Rome’s most majestic architecture, the oldest romantic novels, the greatest of mystic philosophers.
The Greek Anthology summarizes the life of Diophantus of Alexandria (A.D. 250) with algebraic humor: his boyhood lasted one sixth of his life, his beard grew after one twelfth more, he married after another seventh, his son was born five years later and lived to half his father’s age, and the father died four years after his son—therefore at the age of eighty-four.31 Of his works the chief survivor is the Arithmetic a—a treatise on algebra. It solves determinate equations of the first degree, determinate quadratic equations, and indeterminate equations up to the sixth degree. For the unknown quantity which we denote by x, and which he called arithmos (the number)—he used a Greek sigma; and for the other powers he used the letters of the Greek alphabet. An algebra without symbols had existed before him: Plato had recommended, for training and amusing the youthful mind, such problems as the distribution of apples in certain proportions among several persons; 32 Archimedes had propounded like puzzles in the third century B.C..; and both the Egyptians and the Greeks had solved geometrical problems by algebraic methods without algebraic notation. Probably Diophantus systematized methods already familiar to his contemporaries;33 the accident of time has preserved him; and to him, through the Arabs, we trace that bold and esoteric symbolism which aspires to formulate all the quantitative relations of the world.
Papinian, Paulus, and Ulpian, the culminating trio of Roman law, all rose to power under Septimius Severus; all, as prefects of the Praetorian Guard, were the prime ministers of the realm; and all justified absolute monarchy on the ground that the people had delegated their sovereignty to the emperor. Papinian’s Quaestiones and Responsa were so distinguished by clarity, humanity, and justice that Justinian’s collections leaned heavily on these works. When Caracalla killed Geta, he bade Papinian write a legal defense of the act; Papinian refused, saying that it was “easier to commit fratricide than to justify it.” Caracalla ordered him beheaded, and a soldier performed the deed with an ax in the presence of the Emperor. Domitius Ulpianus continued Papinian’s labors as jurist and humanitarian. His legal opinions defended slaves as by nature free, and women as endowed with the same rights as men.34 Like most landmarks in the history of law, his writings were essentially a co-ordination of his predecessors’ work; but his judgments were so definitive that nearly a third of them survive in the Digest of Justinian. “It was because Alexander Severus ruled chiefly in accord with Ulpian’s advice,” says Lampridius, “that he was so excellent an emperor.”35 However, Ulpian had had some of his opponents put to death; and in 228 his enemies in the Guard killed him in turn, with less legality and equal effect. Diocletian encouraged and financed schools of law, and commissioned the codification of post-Trajanic legislation in the Codex Gregorianus. Thereafter the science of jurisprudence hibernated till Justinian.
The third century continued the art of painting on Pompeian and Alexandrian lines; its meager remains are Oriental and crude, and almost effaced by time. Sculpture flourished, for many emperors had to be carved; it stiffened into a primitive frontality, but no later age has surpassed this one in portraits of startling veracity. It is a credit to Caracalla, or a testimony to his dullness, that he allowed a sculptor to transmit him to us as the curlyheaded scowling brute of the Naples Museum. Two sculptural colossi date from this period: the Farríese Bull and the Farnese Hercules, both of them exaggerated and unpleasantly tense, but showing undiminished technical mastery. That sculptors could still work in the classic style appears from the chaste reliefs on the sarcophagus of Alexander Severus, and on the Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus. But the reliefs on the Arch of Septimius Severus at Rome frankly rejected Attic simplicity and grace for a coarse and picturesque virility that almost foreshadowed the rebarbarization of Italy.
Architecture at Rome now carried to completion the Roman flair for sublimity through size. Septimius raised on the Palatine the last of its imperial palaces, with an eastern wing seven stories high—the “Septizonium.” Julia Domna provided funds for the Atrium Vestae, and the pretty Temple of Vesta that still stands in the Forum. Caracalla built for Isis’ consort Serapis an immense shrine of which some handsome fragments survive. The Baths of Caracalla, finished under Alexander Severus, are among the world’s most impressive ruins. They added nothing to architectural science, following essentially the lines of Trajan’s Baths; but their frowning mass well expressed the murderer of Geta and Papinian. The main block, of brick and concrete, covered 270,000 square feet—more than the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Hall combined. A winding stairway led to the top of the walls; perched there Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound. The interior was garrisoned by a multitude of statues, and upheld by 200 columns of granite, alabaster, and porphyry; the marble floors and walls were inlaid with mosaic scenes; water poured from massive mouths of silver into pools and basins where 1600 persons could bathe at once. Gallienus and Decius raised similar baths; in the latter case the Roman engineers rested a circular dome upon a decagonal edifice, and supported it with buttresses in the angles of the decagon—an expedient with little past and much future. In 295 Maximian began the most enormous of the eleven imperial thermae, and named it with singular modesty the Baths of Diocletian. Here were bathing facilities for 3600 persons at one time, gymnasiums, concert and lecture halls; out of one room, the tepidarium, Michelangelo fashioned Santa Maria degli Angeli—with the exception of St. Peter’s the largest church in Rome. Structures only less monumental rose in the provinces. Diocletian built extensively in Nicomedia, Alexandria, and Antioch; Maximian adorned Milan, Galerius Sirmium, Constantius Trèves.
Literature prospered less, for it could seldom tap the wealth that gathered in imperial hands. Libraries grew in number and size; a third-century physician had a collection of 62,000 volumes, and the Bibliotheca Ulpiana was renowned for its historical archives. Diocletian sent scholars to Alexandria to transcribe classical texts there and bring copies to the libraries of Rome. Scholars were plentiful and popular; Philostratus memorialized them well in his Lives of the Sophists. Porphyry continued Plotinus, attacked Christianity, and called the world to vegetarianism. Iamblichus tried to harmonize Platonism and pagan theology, and succeeded sufficiently to inspire the Emperor Julian. Diogenes Laertius put together the lives and opinions of the philosophers in fascinating excerpt and anecdote. Athenaeus of Naucratis, having consumed the libraries of Alexandria, poured his chyme into the Deipnosophists, or “Sophists of the Dinner Table”—a dreary dialogue on foods, sauces, courtesans, philosophers, and words, brightened here and there by some revelation of ancient custom or some reminiscence of great men. Longinus, perhaps of Palmyra, composed a polished essay Peri hypsus “On the Sublime”; the peculiar pleasure given by literature (runs the argument) is due to the “lifting up” (ekstasis) of the reader by the eloquence that comes to a writer from strength of conviction and sincerity of character.IV Dio Cassius Cocceianus of Bithynian Nicaea, after a life spent in the cursus honorum, began at fifty-five to write his History of Rome (210?); in his seventy-fourth year he completed it, having carried the story down from Romulus to himself. Of its eighty “books” less than half remain, but they fill eight substantial volumes. It is a work of noble scope rather than high quality. It has vivid narratives, revealing speeches, and philosophical asides that are not always platitudinous and conservative. But, like Livy, it is disfigured with “portents”; like Tacitus it is a long brief for the Senatorial opposition; and like all Roman histories it cleaves narrowly to the vicissitudes of politics and war—as if life for a thousand years had been nothing but taxes and death.
More significant than these honorable men for the historian of the mind is the appearance, in this century, of the romantic novel. It had had a long preparation in the Cyropaideia of Xenophon, the love poems of Callimachus, the legends that had accumulated about Alexander, and the “Milesian Tales” told by Aristides and others in the second century B.C. and afterward. These stories of adventure and love pleased an Ionian populace so classic in tradition but so Oriental in mood, perhaps now Oriental in blood. Petronius in Rome, Apuleius in Africa, Lucian in Greece, Iamblichus in Syria, developed the picaresque romance in varied ways, with no special accent on love. In the first Christian centuries, possibly responding to an increasing audience of women readers, the novel of adventure merged with the romance of love.
Our oldest extant example is the Aethiopica, or “Egyptian Tales,” of Heliodorus of Emesa. Of its date there is much dispute, but we may provisionally assign it to the third century. It begins in a style honorable with age:
The day had begun to smile cheerily, and the sun was already brightening the tops of the hills, when a band of men, in arms and appearance pirates, having ascended the summit of a slope that overlooks the Heracleotic mouth of the Nile, paused and surveyed the sea. Finding no sail there to promise them booty, they turned their eyes to the shore beneath them; and this is what they saw.37
At once we meet the rich and handsome youth Theagenes, and the lovely and tearful princess Chariclea; they have been captured by pirates; and there befalls them such a medley of mishaps, misunderstandings, battles, murders, and reunions as might supply a season’s fiction today. Whereas in Petronius and Apuleius the chastity of maidens is a matter of swiftly passing concern, it is here the essence and pivot of the tale: Heliodorus preserves Chariclea’s virginity through a score of narrow escapes, and writes persuasive homilies on the beauty and necessity of feminine virtue. There may be here some Christian influence; indeed, tradition made the author become the Christian bishop of Thessalonica. The Aethiopica unwittingly fathered an endless chain of imitations: here is the model for Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda, the story of Clorinda in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, and the vast romances of Mme de Scudéry; here are the love potions, signs, moans, faintings, and happy endings of a million pleasant tales; here is Clarissa Harlowe 1500 years before Richardson.
The most famous love story in ancient prose was Daphnis and Chloë. Of its author we know only the name Longus; and we merely guess at the third century as his time. Daphnis is exposed at birth, is rescued and reared by a shepherd, and becomes a shepherd in turn. Excellent passages of rural description suggest that Longus, like his poetic model Theocritus, had discovered the country after long residence in the city. Daphnis falls in love with a peasant girl who has also been rescued from infant exposure; they tend their flocks in charming comradeship, bathe together in innocent nudity, and intoxicate each other with an unprecedented kiss. An old neighbor explains their fever to them, and describes from his own youth the sickness of romantic love. “I thought not of my food, I cared not for my drink. I could take no rest, and sleep deserted me. My soul was heavy with sadness, my heart beat quickly, my limbs felt a deadly chill.”38 In the end their fathers, now wealthy, discover and enrich them; but they ignore their wealth and return to their modest pastoral life. The tale is told with the simplicity of finished art. Translated into supple French by Amyot (1559), it became the model for Saint-Pierre’s Paul and Virginia, and the inspiration of countless paintings, poems, and musical compositions.
Akin to it is a fragment of poetry known as Pervigilium Veneris, “The Eve of Venus.” No one knows who wrote it, or when; probably it belongs to this century.39 The theme is that of Lucretius’ apostrophe and Longus’ romance-that the goddess of love, by inflaming all living things with reckless desire, is the real creator of the world:
Tomorrow let him love who never loved;
Tomorrow let him love who loved before.
Fresh spring has come, and sings her amorous song;
The world is born anew, and vernal love
Drives birds to mate, and all the waiting woods
Unloose their tresses to the showers of spring.
Tomorrow let him love who never loved,
And let him love who loved before.
So the limpid verse flows on, finding the work of love in the fertilizing rain, in the forms of flowers, in the songs of merry festivals, in the awkward tentatives of desirous youth, in timid trysts amid woodland haunts; and after each stanza the pithy promise returns: Cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit eras amet. Here, in the last great lyric poem of the pagan soul, we hear the trochaic cadence of medieval hymns, and a melodious premonition of the troubadours.