Hermes. The old play says, you are not hurt if you don't acknowledge it. Suppose a few people have gone away believing in Damis, what then? A great many more believe the reverse; the whole mass of uneducated Greeks and the barbarians everywhere.

Zeus. True, Hermes, but that was a good thing which Darius said about Zopyrus. 'I had rather have one Zopyrus than a thousand Babylons.'

DIVUS CESAR.

THE 'Pharsalia' of Lucan is a passionate imprecation on the destroyers of the Roman Constitution. The Gods had permitted that in this world the enemies of liberty should triumph. Struggling for consolation, the young patriot persuades himself that perhaps in another world the balance may be redressed. With the aid of the witch Erictho, he re-animates the corpse of a lately killed soldier. The livid lips describe the forging in hell of the adamantine chains which are to bind Cæsar to the crags of an infernal Caucasus. The poet bids the champions of the Republic make haste to die, that in Tartarus they may trample under foot the tyrants whom Rome was adoring as divinities. At other moments the future seems as hopeless to him as the present. He flings the guilt upon the Olympians themselves, and finds no comfort save in the hope that they may suffer retribution at the hands of the common usurpers. The Gods had forgotten to be just, and their power would be taken from them. The civil carnage would raise mortals to the throne of heaven, their hands armed with lightnings and their brows crowned with stars.

As his last and practical conviction, Lucan seems to have concluded that from Gods of any kind no redress was to be looked for.

Victrix causa Deis placuit sed victa Catoni.

Justice was in man, or it was nowhere. If crime was to

be avenged, it must be on earth and by a human hand. He sacrificed his life, while only in his 28th year, in an abortive conspiracy against Nero, and along with his life the extraordinary gifts which his frenzied passion could not wholly spoil.

Throughout his poem a confidence that the right cause ought to triumph struggles with a misgiving that, in the administration of the universe, no moral purpose is discoverable. Perhaps it was in irony, perhaps it was in a sad conviction that the Gods-if Gods there were-were no better than Nero, that he addressed the emperor in the amazing lines with which he opens his subject.

After describing the desolation which Cæsar's wars had spread over the Roman world, he proceeds:

But if no other means the Fates could find
To give us Nero-if the Thunderer's self
Could reign but when the Giant's wars were done;
We then, oh Gods, complain not. For such boon
Our trampled laws, our violated rights,

Woe, sacrilege, crime, we gladly bear them all.
Strew thy dread plains, Pharsalia, with the slain.
Spirits of fallen Carthage sate your thirst
With Latin blood on Munda's fatal field.

Famish Perusium, perish Mutina,

Fleets drift to wreck on Leucas' iron crags,

And battles rage 'neath Ætna's blazing crest.

Yet Rome is still a debtor to the Gods

When she has thee. To thee, when late thou goest,
Thine earthly sojourn ended, to the stars,
The Heavenly palaces will fling wide their gates,
The Gods will lay their sceptres at thy feet
And bid thee choose among them. Wilt thou reign
Monarch supreme? Wilt thou prefer to guide
The car of Phoebus? Earth will know no fears
From change of lords beneath thy sure command;
And each divinity to thine must yield.

This only grant, that when the choice is made,
And thou art fixed in thy august dominion,

Seek not a throne within the icy North,

Incline not to the low-sunk Southern sky,

From whence on Rome thy beams askance may fall:

Too near the Poles thy overmastering weight
Will strain the nice poised balance of the world.
Dwell in the Zenith, where each rival light
Shall pale in thine and thou shalt shine alone.
Then shall the mists melt from the face of Heaven,
The sword fall blunted from the warrior's hand,
And peace shall reign and Janus' gates be closed.
Me now inspire, in this my enterprise.

With thee within my breast I shall not need
To sue the Pythian God for mystic fire;

In thee alone a Roman bard will find

Fit aid at need to sing a Roman song.

Many explanations may be given of this extraordinary language, yet no one of them is wholly satisfactory. When the deification of Claudius was voted by the Senate, Lucan's uncle, Seneca, had written a farce on the occasion, the ἀποκολοκύντωσις, or translation of the late emperor into the society of pumpkins. Lucan's lines may be conceived to have been written in a similar spirit of mockery. Claudius, however, was dead when he was turned into ridicule. Nero was alive, and was not a person with whom it was safe to take liberties. Call it adulation! But adulation of the Cæsars was the last quality to be expected in the 'Pharsalia' or its author. Let it have been conventionality; but there will remain to be explained the popular sentiment to which conventional language is necessarily addressed. How could educated Romans, who were still punctilious in observing the traditionary forms of the established religion, either utter or tolerate language which appeared like a satire upon religion itself? The elevation of illustrious mortals, when their earthly labours were over, to a throne among the stars had been for ages a familiar conception. The Twins glittered in the Zodiac among the August Twelve. Hercules, Perseus, and Orion displayed in the nightly sky the rewards prepared in heaven for the deeds which they had accomplished as men. Quirinus, the mythic founder of Rome, remained

the tutelary guardian of the Roman people. The spirits of heroic warriors, reincorporated in jewelled constellations, spread over the surface of the entire celestial sphere. That the great dead should have a home among the Gods was a natural and reasonable expectation. But never till the days of the Roman Empire had men been found to say of a man like themselves, still living among them, still subjected to the conditions of mortality, 'He is but waiting till he passes from the earth for the Gods to abdicate and leave the choice to him of the vacant thrones in heaven.'

For Nero it must be said that he was but accepting honours which had been already claimed by Caius Caligula, and which had been offered by the Senate to the least arrogant of his predecessors; for Lucan, again, was but repeating a note which had been struck already by a poet of an incomparably higher order. Augustus was studiously simple-careful to conceal the power which he really possessed behind constitutional forms, and sternly contemptuous of idle flattery. Horace, of all men of intellect that ever lived, was the least likely to condescend to extravagant and unmeaning compliments. Horace was not religious, but he never mocked at religion. Long indifferent to such considerations, he tells us, half seriously, that late in life he had been frightened back into belief. In the grandest of his odes, he refers the miseries of Rome to forgetfulness of the Gods, and he warns his countrymen that the sins of their fathers will continue to be visited upon them till they rebuild the temples and restore the fallen shrines. Yet Horace could address Augustus, with whom he was personally intimate, and with whom he continually dined, in language not less extravagant than Lucan's. Whichever of the Gods Augustus might be, whether Apollo, or Mercury, or Mars, Horace affected to believe that he was at least one of them. In pity for the wretchedness of his