The outdoor life in Greek and Roman Poets, and kindred studies

The Outdoor Life
in Greek and Roman Poets

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

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The Outdoor Life

in

Greek and Roman Poets

AND KINDRED STUDIES

BY

THE COUNTESS
EVELYN MARTINENGO CESARESCO

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

191 1

SEP 25 1950

TO DEAR MEMORIES

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

THIS book grew out of my own life south of the
Alps. I have walked with Virgil in his fields, and
listened with Theocritus to Sicilian folk-songs. The
poets of the Old World became for me not dead
poets but living men — living observers of things I
could observe myself every day. Antiquity was
not past but present.

To the sketches of outdoor life as revealed in the
poetry and in a few portions of the prose literature
of ancient Greece and Italy, I have added some
studies of subjects connected with the scheme of
the book which I always hoped to complete in its
present form, though the chapters were published
separately in the Contemporary Review. My thanks
are due to the Editor for allowing me to reprint
them.

Salb, Logo di Garda.

vn

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE ... I

II. HUSBANDRY IN THE GREEK DRAMATISTS . . 25

III. THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD ..... 39

IV. THE LAST GREEK PEASANT .... 59
V. NATURE IN THE EARLIER ROMAN POETS . . 79

VI. A PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS ... 96
VII. VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY . . . . .125

VIII. TlBULLUS AT HIS FARM . . . . .144

IX. OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD . . .157

X. THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA . . . .176

XI. NATURE IN THE LAST LATIN POETS . . .199

XII. TRANSFORMATION 217

XIII. THE DIVINE PASTORAL 235

XIV. PUER PARVULUS 246

XV. THE MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY . . . 267

IX

lies sejour des Dieux ! Hellas, mere sacred,
Oh ! que ne suis-je ne dans le saint archipel,
Aux siecles glorieux oil la terre inspired
Voyait le Ciel descendre a son premier appel !

LECONTE DE LISLE.

THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE

ONE summer day there was a young Greek who
tended his few sheep and fewer goats near the
Fountain Pirene. His manner of dress, the short
crook with which he vainly tried to catch one of his
scampering herd to obtain a draught of milk for the
stranger, above all, his simple face, enclosed in long
fair hair parted down the middle, might have
belonged to two thousand years ago. On that face
the excitements of millenniums had left no more
trace than on the faces of the drooping-eared sheep.
A little lower down, but still at some distance above
the village of Old Corinth, is the homestead of a
small peasant proprietor, a friend of the guide who
had gone with me to the top of the hill, and since
our efforts to get milk from the goatherd had failed,
we threw ourselves on the hospitality of this humble
lord of the soil. June is the most beautiful month
in Greece, because in June the oleanders are in flower,
but if you walk to Aero-Corinth on a June morning

you will be rather thirsty by the time you come back.
It is true that I might have drunk deep of the
Muses' spring, but I preferred to taste not, for the
prosaic reason that ice-cold water after a hot walk is
one of the best recipes for taking a fever. We sat
under the mulberry-tree before the door of the
cottage, and our peasant host, after washing the
glasses two or three times in our presence (which is
always done by the Greek people before offering you
to drink), set before us good wine, with the strong
resinous flavour that makes the wine far more refresh-
ing from the astringent qualities of the resin, though
it is not at first pleasant to the taste, excellent whole-
meal bread, two kinds of cheese, and ripe mulberries.
While we were eating, the peasant occupied himself
with looking through my opera-glass, which so
diverted and surprised him that he called his wife out
of the house to share in the amusement. When we
left I pressed on him a piece of paper money, which
he had evidently neither expected nor was much
pleased at receiving ; but his face brightened when I
offered him my hand, which he did not kiss as a
peasant in the unfrequented parts of Italy probably
would have done, but shook in the perpendicular
fashion represented on the ancient stelae. Greece is
the only country, as far as I have noticed, where the
peasants habitually shake hands among themselves,
and every time that I have seen them do it I seemed

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 3

to see a scene from one of those monumental bas-
reliefs which show the wife bidding a quiet good-bye
to the husband, the daughter to the mother, and so
on through all the ties of kindred — surely the
happiest way of commemorating the dead in marble,
the most tender and true and free from exaggeration.
The Greek peasant of the present time, whose condi-
tion has been described by a competent authority as
superior to that of any similar class in the world, is
an " object-lesson " in the study of the peasantry of
ancient Hellas. This is not merely the impression
of a passing traveller, but is borne out by the testi-
mony of all who have lived long in rural Greece. If
a biography ought to have a portrait at the begin-
ning, my Corinthian acquaintances may be taken as
faithful portraits of the husbandmen and herdsmen
some account of whom I shall endeavour to glean
from the early Greek poets.

The most radiant scene is that nearest the dawn.
Whether the description of the shield of Achilles was
a part of the original Iliad or a brilliant interpola-
tion of a later date, it must be considered our earliest
glimpse of European agriculture. How full of life,
how full of sun it is ! The rich, deep-ploughed
glebe, across which many ploughmen guided their
teams, hastening to see who could first reach the
boundary from which they started, where they were
met by an overseer who at the end of each turn

4 THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE i

handed them a cup of sweet wine ; the ripe, glowing
cornfield where the reapers plied the sickle, the
binders gathered up the sheaves, and the master,
standing king-like amongst them, looked on in silent
content, while under the trees servants were prepar-
ing a meal of basted meat sprinkled with white barley
for all employed ; the vineyard glorious with purple
grapes, which were gathered into woven baskets and
then carried away by young maidens and youths
whose dancing feet kept time to the sweet, pathetic
song of a boy who accompanied his clear voice on
the harp ; the smiling cottages, the fair meadow
flecked with snowy sheep, the kine lowing near the
music-making brook : golden it is, a golden life in
spite of catastrophes introduced less for the sake of
antithesis than from regard of truth. It is these
catastrophes which allow us to believe the rest. The
armed men who fall upon the piping shepherds and
their happy flock, the lions which carry ofF the bull,
represent the elements of natural strife inherent in
" the unhappy constitution of a world in which living
beings subsist by mutually devouring each other."
But the conclusion is not Schopenhauer's; instead of
" the consequent dread and distress of all that has
life " there is the passionate joie de vivre while it lasts.
Life is lovely, is worth living, though to-morrow we
die ; is worth drinking at full draughts ; the whole is
better than the half.

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 5

The rural background, which is kept in view by
means of similes through the whole Iliad^ shows the
poet's intimate familiarity with country sights and
incidents. The forest fire rushing along the tops of
mountains, the winged nations of wild geese, swans, and
cranes uttering shrill cries as they swoop down upon
the moist meadows, the insects swarming round the
shepherd's hut in the first warm days when the pails
brim over with milk, the various herds of goats,
cunningly separated by the goatherd if by chance
they mingle — these and a hundred other images in
the Iliad and Odyssey recall the common open-air
things of everyday observation. Beautiful and attrac-
tive girls are called '£ oxen-finders," because their
dowry, or rather their purchase-money, was paid in
oxen. There is frequent mention of bird-snaring ;
nets are placed in the underwood so that thrushes
and doves, flying towards their nests, are entangled
in them (cruel sport !) ; again, the vultures, circling
overhead, cause the small birds to beat down upon
the nets spread by the bird-snarer. Boys and
countrymen go bird-nesting, the eagles and vultures
make shrill lament over the loss of their unfledged
nestlings. How early the inarticulate appeal of
creatures mourning for their young reached the hearts
of poets is shown again by the touching story in the
Iliad of the young sparrows, not yet able to fly,
huddled together in a row on the topmost branch of

6 THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE i

a plane-tree, when a snake creeps up to devour
them, which also catches the mother as she flutters
close round, twittering piteously, a martyr to her
love.

In the Odyssey the important episode of the swine-
herd Eumaeus throws a flood of light on the economy
of a large estate. Eumaeus was the son of an island
king, or petty chief, but was kidnapped by his nurse,
a Phoenician slave-woman, who escaped with him on
board a Phoenician ship. She died on the voyage,
and the ship having been carried by the wind to
Ithaca, the sailors sold the boy to Laertes. Eumaeus
was already able to walk alone, but, according to the
habits of the time, he was still considered in want of
maternal nourishment. He was at once made a pet
of by Laertes' wife, who brought him up with her
own youngest daughter, and only when he grew to
be a youth did she send him to work in the fields,
without, however, showing him by doing so any
slight, or diminishing her affection, which lasted till
she died of grief for the absence of Odysseus. Hence-
forth he is to be regarded as a typical farm-servant,
and neither the fact of his alleged noble birth, nor
that of his nominal slavery, alters the case in the
least. Though a man " lost half his manhood the
day he became a slave," the position did not imply
the evils and the ignominy we attach to the name.
Freedom was lost — an immense loss to a Greek — but

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 7

otherwise the slave labourer and the free labourer
were treated exactly alike. Sir Richard Jebb noted
that there is not a single Homeric instance of a slave
having an unkind master.

When Odysseus set out, Eumaeus was already
working on the estate, and, in particular, he was
taking care of swine. It was thought a good and
respectable occupation, and I repeat there was no
harshness or caprice in sending one to it who had been
kept in the house as a spoilt child. This is worth
insisting on, because it is characteristic of the point
of view from which manual work was seen. On
the estate were many upper farm-hands in the same
position as that held by Eumaeus. Each of the
twelve herds of cows, the twelve flocks of sheep, the
eleven herds of goats, had a responsible guardian,
with a staff of men and lads working under him.
Every day the fattest goat and the fattest of the
swine were brought home for the master's table.
Eumaeus was not without the power of making some
private profits, though these were not large ; he
bought a serving-man out of his own money, or
rather its equivalent, since coinage was not known to
Homer. He also built of his own accord a hand-
some swinery for the accommodation of the pigs, and
a house for his own, with a portico under which he
could sit and a neat paling all round. This work
was the result of industry more than of outlay, as he

8 THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE i

seems to have collected and conveyed the stones, cut
down the wood, and done the building himself.

Odysseus, on returning to his domain, finds
Eumaeus sitting under his portico, employed in
making himself a pair of ox-hide shoes, which proves
that he wore shoes. What followed is " known to
every schoolboy," but it must not be missed out here ;
a lecturer on anatomy cannot suppress the backbone
because every one knows what it is like. Eumaeus
sees nothing in his master but a miserable-looking
old beggar, but he remarks that, even had the beggar
been more wretched, he would have done his best to
entertain him, since all beggars and strangers are of
Zeus* sending. It is his boast that, badly off though
he is, he has still enough to give to the poor. A
stranger or a mendicant (though of these last there
are few) meets to-day with exactly the same hospit-
able reception wherever he goes in Greece, as my own
experience testifies. Sometimes, too, he runs the
same danger that Odysseus ran of being made short
work of by the watch-dogs, which, with true dog-
dislike of tramps and dog-indifference to Zeus, set
upon the intruder and frightened Eumaeus out of
his wits lest they should call down the vengeance of
Heaven by tearing his guest into small pieces on his
very threshold. Later Odysseus' own old dog
recognises him in spite of time and in spite of rags,
and wags his affectionate tail as he breathes out his

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 9

life on the dung-heap — immortal tribute to dog-love
which some writers have sought to set aside, saying
that there was nothing else to indicate that Homer
had a just appreciation of dogs. As if that was not
enough !

Eumaeus is evidently a good deal afraid of his
own half-wild dogs ; he does not trust to his voice
to warn them off, but takes up stones to throw at
them. Yet even they can be affectionate towards
those whom they know — when Telemachus appears
they fawn round him, instead of barking.

The dogs having been driven away, Eumaeus
invites Odysseus into the house and prepares for him
a seat of rushes, over which he throws a thick goat-
skin. He would be able to entertain his guest in a
far better style (he now explains) if he were not at
the mercy of a worthless lot of young profligates
(the suitors), his own master having long since left
home, never to return. But for this, he would have
received before now a nice house and three acres and
a wife — a " long-wooed wife," whose bride-price he
is not himself, perhaps, able to pay, or it may be
that slaves were not allowed to marry until they
were, if not freed, at least placed on an independent
footing. Good masters, says Eumaeus, always
provide in this manner for their faithful servants ;
a very enlightening remark. Enlightening, also, is
the poignant regret which he expresses that, in con-

io THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE i

sequence of the reigning disorder at the palace and
of Penelope's seclusion, he cannot have access to his
mistress and receive her advice and kind words and
little useful presents, as the custom is. The Greek
great lady acted the same part in Homer's time as
the English lady of the manor acts with her cottagers
to-day.

Eumaeus proceeds to prepare the mid-day meal.
He kills two young pigs, and dresses them for
cooking. He roasts them on the spit, basting them
thoroughly with white meal, and after mixing a cup
of sweet wine (wine was always drunk with water)
he invites the stranger to partake. These are not
the prime fatted swine which have to be reserved
for the suitors — to Eumaeus' intense disgust — they
are only the common young pigs which are at the
disposal of the swineherds. By the evening, Eumaeus,
though not trusting himself to believe the statement
of his guest that Odysseus is alive and well and will
soon return, and though still feeling by no means
sure that he is not being imposed on by a practised
humbug, has, nevertheless, got into the highest state
of excitement. When the swine are driven home at
sunset and are entering their sties with a tremendous
grunting, he casts scruples to the winds and orders
the best of the herd to be slaughtered as a feast for
all. Long have they toiled for the swine of the
white tusks while others feasted ! They have a fine

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 1 1

supper, washed down with red wine, while bread is
served round by Mesaulius, Eumaeus' own man.
After much talk they decide to go to rest and the
host makes a bed for Odysseus near the fire, and
covers him with a large, thick cloak ; of these, he
has the two necessary for a change and no more,
which he explains to his visitor, intimating that in
the morning, before leaving, he must put on again
the rags in which he came. Never quite assured
about his guest's character, he thus cautiously guards
against one of those little mistakes of a loan for a
gift which have been known to take place (especially
in the matter of books) at a considerably later date.
The younger swineherds also sleep indoors, but
Eumaeus, putting on thick clothing and taking
with him his arms, goes out to sleep beside the
three hundred and sixty pigs which repose under the
shelter of a rock, the sows only being admitted to the
covered sties.

It is well to notice how, when Telemachus arrives,
Eumaeus " kisses him all over," a liberty which tells
of the familiar terms existing between dependants
and their masters. Imagine a French swineherd of
feudal times kissing all over the son of a marquis !
It might happen in Italy where the " touch me not "
part of the aristocratic idea never took much root.
In fact, it did happen to an English lady who had
bought some land in Romagna, and who met with

this kind of reception from her female dependants,
greatly to her dismay. In Homer labourers, servants,
and nurses address the grown-up members of their
masters' families, if they have known them from
their youth, as " my dear child," or " my sweet
light." There was no " fine gentleman " fear of
soiling one's hands. Telemachus helped to cut up
meat, and also to clean the place after the slaughter
of the suitors ; not an agreeable task, but better do
that than think that to work with your hands is
derogatory to your dignity. Perhaps the evils
once arising from fagging at English public
schools were balanced by the ethical good derived
from initiation into the sacred rite of toasting
sausages.

On the whole, Eumaeus, though unjustly neglected
in his own opinion, owing to the absence of his right-
ful lord, does not seem to have been so very badly
off even in his worst days. There are mandriani or
herdsmen in Italy who would be willing to change
with him. Before we have done with the Odyssey
we must glance at another agricultural type which it
contains, that of the prosperous peasant proprietor of
a fruit farm. This is what Laertes was, nor does it
matter that he was a roi en <?#*/, or to be more exact, a
retired king ; retired kings were as plentiful then as
they are now ; only the Greek could make himself a
genuine peasant at a moment's notice ; while king-

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 13

ship now, as a rule, seriously incapacitates a man for
any other trade. Laertes' fruit farm was a pleasanter
possession than most empires. It makes one in a
good humour simply to think of it. There was a
cheerful well-built house, round which were ranged
the farm buildings and labourers' dwellings, and
round these stretched the farm land. Every fig-tree
and olive and pear and vine was well and properly
tended ; the ground was well dug, there was not a
weed anywhere. We know without being told how
abundantly each tree and plant bore fruit, what an
air of well-being and order there was over all.
Odysseus finds his father alone in the vineyard,
engaged in hoeing a vine. To establish his identity,
he recalls how once as a child he followed him
through the orchard and teased him to give him
some fruit-trees for his own. Laertes made him a
present of thirteen pear-trees, ten apple-trees, and
forty fig-trees with a promise of forty rows of vines,
between which corn was sown as it is now. Happy
Odysseus ! What a modern note it is that is here
struck, though the modern child, with his garden-
plot and infant forest of chestnuts and oaks, has to
be contented with less grand things ! Be it small or
great, this first taste of property teaches that inner
love of plants, that interest in their growth and
development from day to day, which is far removed
from the mere capacity to admire a flower at a

i4 THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE i

flower-show or a fine head of asparagus when it
comes to table.

In the scraps of folk-lore called the Homeric
epigrams, one addressed to Glaucus, the head
herdsman, recommends that the watch-dogs be fed
before the gates, as they will thus be more inclined
to drive off intruders. Another refers to the ancient
custom of carrying a wooden swallow from house to
house and asking for largess in honour of the return
of Spring. It is substantially the same as the
Chelidonisma quoted by Athenaeus and as the
swallow-songs sung at present in the Greek islands.
I do not know that there is an older piece of folk-
lore on record which is still in current use.

The Homeric Hymns do not tell us much about
agriculture, but they are penetrated by that rapture
of delight in simple natural objects which was far
more real once than it is now. Indeed it may be
doubted if most of us understand it at all, though,
perhaps, we might understand it if we recalled the
absolute enjoyment felt on some day of childhood in
a meadow full of cowslips ; or it may be revealed to
us when after a serious illness we step out for the
first time into the pleasant air and bodily weakness
renders our mind less thought-bound, men da pensier
presa, opening the way for the immediate play of
emotion which, however it came about, transports us
outside ourselves and fills us with the god.

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 15

Ah ! then, we say to the passing moment, " Stay,
thou art so fair ! " But it does not stay; it gets into
the first express train and we into one starting in the
opposite direction.

Pan, the most captivating creation of Greek
mythology, is the concrete embodiment of the feel-
ings awakened by the woods with their fragrant
undergrowth, by the wet grasses starred with
daffodils ; unlike the too solid gods, his kindred,
Pan is half human and whole elf — a whimsical,
radiant presence interpreting that something which
answers, which lives and is conscious in the silence
of wide spaces, the solitude of the forest recesses.
The pointed rocks and snowy heights of the moun-
tains are his ; it is he who passes over the sunlit hills
and scales the highest summit that commands a view
of flocks scattered over the slopes ; he passes quickly
along the rugged chain, his soft fair hair floating in
the wind ; or he lingers near the streams shaded by
thickets ; or he reclines in meadows full of crocus
and hyacinth and sings so sweetly that no bird
pouring forth his soul amongst the first leaves can
ever sing sweeter. This is the Pan of the Homeric
Hymns, who with little change flits through antiquity
till the voice on the Ionian Sea announces that Pan is
dead, and dead with him is the first youth of the
world.

Close after the Homeric, .literature comes the

1 6 THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE ,

work which was regarded while the ancient civilisa-
tion lasted as the permanent text-book and scriptures
of husbandry. The extraordinary reverence in which
it was held would make the Book of Days of
Hesiod interesting even if it were not of great
interest in itself as a document in the study of
archaic manners. The importance ascribed to it by
an imaginative race shows how fallacious it is to
judge a people by only one side of their character.
Hesiod was a verista, a rather morose verista who
had not kept a single illusion. His advice is the
essence of plain common sense tinged a little with
pessimism. He makes the Boeotian peasant stand
before us as clearly as the Dutch peasant in the
" Village Fe"te " of Teniers. Many of his precepts
are no less sound now than they were in his own
day. Keep out of lawsuits, he says ; keep out of
debt. It is a dreadful thing to grow old and find
oneself in want. Get a youth of fifty as your
labourer (" un ragazzo di quarant' anni " is an ex-
pression I have heard used by an Italian sempstress);
if you have a younger man he will work by fits and
starts and throw his energy away on trifles ; besides,
he is sure to be always talking ! Choose an un-
married maidservant, women with children eat too
much (and have been known to hide something in
their aprons for the bairns). Give your labourer a
good t allowance of bread, and in winter give him

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 17

more than in summer, because the cold sharpens the
appetite. The oxen, on the other hand, need less
hay in winter as they do less work — a point open to
dispute. The ox is at his best for labour at nine
years old, he has left off being skittish. (Now we
should say that he was at his best at six.) Boys are
handy for scaring birds. Hesiod has the genuine
farmer's grudging spirit about the birds' small
pillage. After twelve years old (no abuse of child-
labour here, at any rate) boys should be given
something to do and not allowed to sit idle on the
wayside tombs and public seats, or they will be lazy
as long as they live. This is a wise counsel, so is the
following : Do not go hanging about blacksmiths'
forges and other places of public resort ; in short, do
not go to the osteria. Any one who knows peasant
life knows what happens when a man begins to loaf.
An artisan may loaf and work alternately ; the
peasant who loafs will loaf for ever. Nature is no
loafer and will not wait, and who of her servants
waits till to-morrow finds there is no to-morrow.
The idle peasant, too, grows quarrelsome and ends
by running his knife into his neighbour ; though
this is an original remark of the writer's and not of
the poet under consideration.

Winter is a miserable time. Hesiod does not
seize one glimpse of the gaiety of Virgil's winter.
The north wind lashes the kine, the snow drives

1 8 THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE i

along the valley, the rain soaks one to the skin.
Old age with his staff — the " three-footed man," bent
in back, his grey head bowed towards the ground,
always wretched, is now more utterly wretched than
usual. Only indoors the young daughter of the
house does not shiver ; her mother keeps her in lest
her hands should get chapped. She remains fair and
calm and tenderly cared for while all is wild without.
One would like the pretty maiden just as well if she
made herself warm by running in the wind and was
not afraid of the colour given by Jack Frost ; still
hers is a winning picture, one of the very few soft
touches on Hesiod's hard canvas.

The sensible peasant dresses warmly ; plenty of
homespun linen underneath, and a goatskin overcoat ;
good ox-hide shoes and wool socks. He fares on
the flesh of young oxen and kids, goats' milk and
wine and water are his drinks. He will do well not
to marry till he is thirty, when he is to take a wife
of fifteen. Pray heaven she may not turn out a
gossip ; a gossiping wife is the worst of evils. One
child is quite enough. It is curious to find this
prudent reflection at so early a date, when we should
have expected that children, who if they bring more
mouths also bring more hands, would have been
rather desired than otherwise. But, like the French
peasant, Hesiod was of opinion that a large family
was more trouble than it was worth, though he

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 19

piously adds, that if the number increases, the gods
may kindly provide for them after all. It is certain
that what he was thinking about was chiefly the
disposal of the property — just as it is what most
occupies the thoughts of the rural French — and the
difficulty of avoiding general ruin as well as a
perpetual state of loggerheads, should the necessity
arise of parcelling out the farm into minute lots.
There are also the marriage expenses to scrape
together. When there was a good harvest the young
men and maidens rejoiced, as it brought them the
prospect of marriage by increasing the peasant's
store.

Rural theft is not a novelty. Be sure, says
Hesiod, to have a house-dog with good teeth, and
feed him well, that he may ward off the <c day-sleep-
wake-night man," who comes to rob you of your
hay and other possessions. Above all, he insists,
work, work, work ! Do not put off till to-morrow
what ought to be done to-day. Do not find excuses
for sloth in the weather, the season, what-not. There
is always something to be done. Is the harvest
gathered, there is still wood to be hewn, ploughs
to be fashioned, a hundred tasks for rainy days, for
the winter, even for the night. Without grinding,
incessant work, the little proprietor comes to grief
with mathematical certainty. Even work he never
so well, the earth, " sad nurse of all that die," may

20 THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE i

make a bad return. Possibly he lives in some
squalid malarious village where he loses his health
and the fruits of his toil ; only such an eventuality
can justify a man in risking his fortune at sea.
Thucydides said that an arid soil made a great
nation because it forced men to become sailors.
Hesiod did not consider the gain to the State and
he saw nothing but probable loss to the individual.
He regards it as an act of folly in any one, who is
moderately well off, to leave dry land out of longing
for speculation or greed of money — a very bad
quality this last, he says. Yet, even when not
pressed by things going wrong at home, the peasant
along the littoral must often have felt, then as now,
the fascination of maritime ventures. We remember
the old peasant in that most powerful of realistic
novels, Verga's / Malavoglia, who risked and lost
his all in a cargo of lentils. To such as are
determined, cost what it may, to launch into specu-
lation, Hesiod gives the advice to begin in a small
way, and not stake everything in one throw. But
it is safer to let it alone ; le mieux est I'ennemi du
bien, content, though not happiness, is wisdom, the
half is better than the whole :

Chi troppo in alto va cade sovente
Precipitevolissimevolmente.

Renunciation, as Goethe taught, is the sole rational
rule of life ; it is no good having too high ideals for

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 21

yourself or for other people ; Prometheus was a fool,
and deserved his fate. One might go on for an hour
paraphrasing the most famous of Hesiod's sayings,
which, perhaps, was not his, but was already a
proverb. The concentrated caution of every nation
has produced its equivalent. In England the oftenest
quoted variant is that " Enough is as good as a feast,"
which so irritated poor Richard Jefferies, and which
he said was so contrary to Nature's own imperial
spendthrift ways.

Hesiod's lucky and unlucky days are only a little
further elaboration of the modern Italian peasant's
respect for the phases of the moon : for the world
he would not cut down trees or dig up potatoes in
the first quarter nor sow wheat in the last ; he carries
in his head a traditional almanac marked in black and
white, which he consults before performing any im-
portant or trifling action. In Greece itself every thing
is regulated by saints' days. Needless to say how
widely diffused is the old poet's belief that ill-disposed
persons bewitch or hypnotise cows and horses. Ac-
cording to Hesiod the Pleiades indicate harvest and
seed-time, the latter being also announced by the cry
of the cranes, whose periodic flight profoundly im-
pressed all these early observers. Theognis speaks
of the crane as the harbinger of the ploughing-season,
whose shrill voice smote his heart with the thought
that others possessed his flourishing fields, and that

22 THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE i

no longer his mules dragged the bent yoke of the
plough. He had been despoiled of his property
while on a voyage. Hesiod had also lost his paternal
acres, and in the cruellest way, some manoeuvre of
his brother having deprived him of them ; but his
misfortunes did not teach him sentiment. He could
be generous though, since it is said that he helped
this ne'er-do-well brother out of the little he had.
We can guess a good deal from the maxim : " Better
trust your own brother than your friend." He
whose advice was to be venerated long after he was
dead had doubtless bestowed it without the slightest
effect on the scapegrace whom so-called friends led
easily astray by flattery. A Christian saint once
commended Hesiod' s works especially to the atten-
tion of the young. " What other end," asks Basil
the Great in a passage which is noteworthy because
it shows that the poet was still popular among Greek
populations in the fourth century — " What other end
can we suppose that Hesiod had in view when he
made those verses which are sung by everybody, if it
were not to render virtue attractive to young men ? "
Hesiod had the feelings and even the prejudices
of a gentleman of the old school. He had no patience
with those who run after the nouveau riche, but he
respected poverty, and would not have the good man
left alone in his need. This son of a petty and not
thriving farmer grasped the relation of decorous

i THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE 23

manners to a decorous life : " Do not pare your nails
at table," he said. Had he frequented sundry tables
cThbte in the twentieth century, he would have added,
" Do not eat with your knife." Besides being a
realist, he was somewhat of a Puritan, and if he
says nothing about music and dancing in his Book of
Days it is to be inferred that those amusements were
not much to his taste. He recognised, however,
the position of the minstrel, and observed that the
quarrels and jealousies of that profession, as of others,
were of advantage in the long run, as they promoted
competition. Alas, that musicians should have so
early proved dis-harmonious ! Though intensely
orthodox, yet he saw that in matters of religion the
intention is everything. He tells you to take care
not to scoff at any poor little rustic shrine or altar,
raised by some simple soul on the roadside, which
you may pass on your way.

There is an ampler truth, a more real reality,
which they only possess who have been up the
mountain and have seen the other side. Hesiod
had not seen the other side of the mountain ; hence
he had his limits, though within these he was very
just. He had none of the Homeric admiration for
a dignified and fine old man ; he looked upon old
age as simply horrible. His most golden dream was
of a sleep which should overtake the vigorous man
in his prime. He would not have been able to

24 THE PEASANT OF ANCIENT GREECE i

understand the exquisite pathos which a Greek poet
of a softer age and clime, Leonidas of Tarentum,
threw into his pictures of the wane of life : that of
the old fisherman who falls asleep in his reed hut
after his long toil, as the light fails when the oil is
spent ; that of the old spinning-woman, who has
earned her bread spinning, spinning through her
eighty years, and ever humming her song as she
span, till the withered hand sinks on the withered
knee, and her work and her days end together.
Here is another euthanasia than any Hesiod could
have divined : the sweet and solemn rest " when
that which drew from out the boundless deep turns
again home."

II

HUSBANDRY IN THE GREEK
DRAMATISTS

IN the spring when the new wine was drawn off, the
great festival of Dionysus was held with appropriate
hymns and songs and games. The young men
joined in a kind of masquerade ; there were matches
between the villages, and one village or one company
of singers or one single singer became more famous
than the rest. Then dialogue was introduced, at
first, probably, in the form of chaff bandied to and
fro during the intervals between the choric songs.
The performers were called " goat-singers " either
because they were dressed in goat-skins to imitate
satyrs, or because they contended for the prize of a
goat, or again, from the sacrifice of a goat to the
god. It strikes me that they may have gone from
house to house carrying a goat-skin to collect largess
for the festival, as the children went round with the
wooden swallow. So people would have said :
" Here are the * goat-singers ' come back." The

25

26 HUSBANDRY IN THE n

word "tragedy" is derived from a goat-song.
One theory has been started that the god also had
a winter festival when sorrowful and pathetic songs
were sung instead of songs of mirth. Be that as it
may, the local folk-fe'tes of Attica prepared the way
for Aeschylus. The origin of tragedy (as of comedy)
was, as Aristotle said, " rude and unpremeditated."
It is true that, as with all the arts of Greece, we
must look to religion for its primal inspiration : if
there had not been the god there would not have
been the goat-singers. But the god embodied the
spirit of country-life, and tragedy came into existence
under the most rural of rural conditions. Like all
literature, it was born of folk-lore.

When, however, the drama became a great literary
and patriotic institution, it became the possession
of townspeople who had no great sympathy with
country things. Athens, the violet-crowned, was as
far as possible from having the significance of smoke
and darkness of a modern metropolis ; how far, any
one can still realise who stands in that alley in the
king's garden where, above the lovely leafage of bay
and myrtle, ilex and oleander, the temples of the
Acropolis suddenly appear against the clear sky,
nothing else of the outer world being visible, while
the faint hum of the modern city is drowned in the
song of nightingales. Nevertheless, morally as well
as materially, a town it was, in the most intense

ii GREEK DRAMATISTS 27

sense of the word ; and it is doubtful if the
Athenians would have appreciated an attempt to
" bring the scent of the hay across the footlights."
We cannot expect to learn very much about con-
temporary agriculture from the Greek dramatists,
though such hints as are to be gathered from them
on the subject are by no means without value.

Aeschylus was the first writer to scout the idea of
an early golden era, and to recognise that primitive
man had a life so hard and miserable that the most
unlucky of his descendants might own himself to be
better off. His description of human beings before
Prometheus came to their aid has been truly said
to be a correct account of the Stone Age. In the
Persians Aeschylus describes a service for the dead
such as in his day was certainly often performed
by the pastoral or village Hellenes, whose ritual the
poet transported among their enemies without any
pangs of conscience. The beautiful lines refer to
the libation :

Milk from the flawless firstling of the herd,
Honey, the amber soul of perfumed meads,
And water sparkling from its maiden source :
Here, too, the juice of immemorial vine
And scented fruit, rich gift of tawny olive
That never knows a season of decay,
And flowers, the little children of the earth
Disposed in garlands.

So fair an offering might cheer the saddest ghost !

28 HUSBANDRY IN THE n

Fain would one forget that the same people could
represent their heroes as gratified by the Dahomey
slaughter of innocent girls upon their tombs. Rites
of the sort mentioned by Aeschylus formed the rustic
obsequies both in Greece and in Italy. To this day,
in the island of Sardinia, where many ancient customs
are preserved, flowers and simple fruits, such as nuts,
are thrown into the open grave.

Not remote among the landscapes of a golden age,
but present in the fairyland which is somewhere —
somewhere on this actual earth, is the country by the
sea of Sophocles, a dream that, out of childhood,
knows that it is a dream and yet delights the
dreamer :

. . . Where each day is matured
The plant of Bacchus. In the morning's sheen
With blooming growth the land luxuriates,
Then by midday the unripe fruit expands,
And as day wanes the clusters purple o'er ;
At evening all the crop is gathered in
And the wine draught is mixed.

In the Oedipus Tyrannus the old herdsman dis-
tinguishes between a " bought slave " and one bred
in his master's house, and in a passage spoken directly
after by the Corinthian messenger, there is an interest-
ing reference to the practice still in force of sending
the flocks from the plains to the mountains from
March to September :

ii GREEK DRAMATISTS 29

. . . Sure I am

He knows when in the region of Cithaeron
He with two flocks and I with only one —
I was his neighbour during three whole seasons,
From springtide e'en to autumn for six months,
But during winter 1 my flock drove ofF
Unto my sheep-cotes, he to Laius' stalls.

In the same play the evil ways of Egypt are
reproved, where men sit indoors weaving at the loom
and their wives earn their daily bread abroad in the
fields — one of the many proofs that in Greece women
were put to do no hard outdoor work, though the
girls helped in gathering the grapes. In one or two
places Sophocles speaks of horses or mules ploughing,
and it seems that by the better-to-do peasants or
landowners they were preferred to oxen. The colts
were allowed to run wild till they were of an age to
work, when the advent of their servitude was marked
by their manes being cut short, a barbarous operation
against which Sophocles' generous spirit revolted.
" I mourn for my tresses," runs one of his fragments,
u as doth a filly who, caught and carried off by the
herdsman, hath her chestnut mane shorn from her
neck by a rugged hand in the horse-stables, and
then, turned into a meadow with limpid brooks, sees
her image clearly reflected with all her mane disgrace-
fully shorn off. Who, however ruthless, would not
pity her, as she crouches affrighted, driven mad by
shame, groaning for her vanished mane ? " Horse-

30 HUSBANDRY IN THE n

breeding must have presented serious difficulties in a
country so generally arid as much of Greece was even
then ; the best horses were brought over from Asia
Minor, and the race deteriorated after a few genera-
tions. That Athens could all the same be addressed
as the " breeder of horses," shows that the conviction
of the national importance of the horse induced the
Athenians to overcome all obstacles, and also, prob-
ably, that the country people of Attica were led to
give great care and attention to horse-breeding by
the high prices offered for good animals.

Far from the early Greek mind was the contempt
for the cultivator which generated a vocabulary of
ugly names, boor, clout, clodhopper, with many more,
and turned vilain into villain. But the amenities
of civilisation and the overwhelming weight attached
to purely intellectual development tend towards
the depreciation of the peasant whose philosophy is
not of the Schools, and Euripides perhaps gave
expression to a growing sentiment when he made his
Hector say, as Homer's Hector would not have
said :

Full prone the mind of rustics is to folly.

But in justice to Euripides it should not be
forgotten that he created one beautiful peasant type ;
a type that has grown into a literary race of high-
minded peasants or serfs whose derivation often
passes unnoticed. Euripides never drew a more

n GREEK DRAMATISTS 31

distinct character, though the touches are few, than
that of Auturgus, to whom Aegisthus married
Electra in the hopes that the slur of so unfitting an
alliance might prevent her from getting her rights
as Agamemnon's daughter. Clytemnestra would
have probably objected to her being killed ; the
next best thing, Aegisthus thought, was to marry
her below her rank. But Auturgus defeated the
device by becoming simply the respectful protector
of the royal maiden. He is called " old," but it is
clear that he was not much more than middle-aged
as he is not past doing hard and incessant work.
Though poor, he comes of a noble stock, a statement
that does not affect his position as a true peasant
any more than the kidnapping story about Eumaeus
made him less of a swineherd. Very likely it was
all true. How many illustrious names are owned
by Italian peasants ; nay, in how many cases it is
known that only two or three generations ago a
peasant family which now Jives on polenta would
have been recognised as equals by the highest in the
land. Something fairer in the skin, something more
gracious in their mien, is all that is left to distinguish
them from the great mass of cultivators. For the
rest, their feelings, their manners, their appearance
are of these. Auturgus is a peasant through and
through. He has the austere gravity impressed by
a life spent close to nature, watchful of the fated

32 HUSBANDRY IN THE „

return of her signs, face to face with the solemn
sequence of her seasons. Gently he chides Electra
for working at all ; he would not have her toil, she
was not trained for it. She answers that it is her
pleasure to help him as far as she can ; the labourer
coming home tired, likes to find all in order in his
house. So he consents to her fetching the water if
such be her will ; the spring is not far off. As for
him, at earliest dawn he will yoke his oxen and go
to plough ; idle wretches who are always invoking
the gods never earn a livelihood. As soon as he is
assured of the respectability of the two strangers,
who are really Orestes and Pylades, he asks them
into his house ; what there is, is at their service ; a
woman can easily improvise a little feast. There is
enough in the cottage for one day, at least, and if
the food be simple, hunger is a good sauce. He has
a fine indifference to their seeing his poverty, and
that genuine instinct of hospitality which is satisfied
when you know that you have offered of your best.
" Di quello che c' e non manca niente," as they say
in Tuscany. So Auturgus passes from the scene,
true peasant and true gentleman — a combination
not rare some thousand years ago, not rare now.

Two of the comedies of Aristophanes deal more
or less directly with agricultural affairs, the Achar-
nians and the Peace. In the former, the hero, Di-
caeopolis, though a citizen of Athens, is, before all

it GREEK DRAMATISTS 33

things, a country farmer. His heart is with his
farm, for which he longed, " which never said * buy
fuel,' or * vinegar,' or * oil,' but of itself produced all
things, and the * buy ' was absent." In this play
there is one of the hits against Euripides because
his mother sold watercresses ; Aristophanes thought
it degrading to work for your bread. Tired of the
Peloponnesian War, which had gone on for six years,
Dicaeopolis negotiates a private peace for himself
and his family. He is the " peace-at-any-price "
farmer, who excites great indignation among his
more patriotic or Chauvinist fellow-countrymen
(" Marathon men " and other old growlers), but
who goes his way unheeding. He buys eels and
all sorts of delicacies from the enemy, who may
traffic with him alone. He is perfectly content, and
indifferent to the sufferings of his neighbours ; nay,
he takes a positive pleasure in enjoying what they
are without.

If there were peace, sigh the Acharnian chorus,
" then would they plant a long row of vines, young
fig-trees, and olives, all round the estate. What use
to plant now for the spoiler ? "

While Dicaeopolis is greedily watching his con-
traband thrushes and other dainties being cooked,
another and the saddest victim of the war comes in
who has something worse to rue than the lack of eels
or hares : the eternal victim, the husbandman. In

D

34 HUSBANDRY IN THE „

all Greek tragedy there are few things more tragic
than this sudden entrance of misery into a farce.
The Boeotians have carried off the poor man's team,
his land lies fallow :

I'm ruinated

Quite and entirely, losing my poor beasts,
My oxen, I've lost 'em, both of 'ern. — FRERE.

His eyes are dim with weeping for his oxen. In
vain he begs for the least drop of peace, which he
seems to think a kind of quack medicine, kept in
bottles. With the ineffable egotism of the Sybarite,
Dicaeopolis bids him be off " to weep somewhere
else." He goes, repeating, " Woe's me for the
oxen which tilled my ground."

Trygaeus, in the Peace, is a much superior person
to Dicaeopolis, who, living long in towns, had suc-
ceeded in mixing up the mania for luxury of the
vulgar citizen with the stolid narrowness of the most
benighted provincial. Trygaeus is the country-
dweller in the strictest and the best sense. He has
learnt, from his stake in the country, to love the
fatherland and understand its interests. He, too,
desires peace ; not, however, for himself alone, but
for all the sore-tried land. He risks a great deal to
accomplish his purpose, embarking on a novel and
daring exploit on behalf of all the Greeks. He
risks coming to a bad end and becoming a subject
for a tragedy by Euripides — dreadful fate ! That

ii GREEK DRAMATISTS 35

he went to heaven on the back of an unpleasant
beetle does not lessen his moral virtue.

When he is engaged in getting Peace out of the
hole in which she was imprisoned, all sorts of people
try to aid him, but only the husbandmen succeed.
In reward, they are sent off to till their fields, and
Trygaeus follows to break up the long desolate
earth of his little farm and return to the old, sweet,
inexpensive pleasures, cakes of dried fruits, figs and
myrtles and sweet new wine, and the violet-bed near
the well, and the desired olives !

Peace alone, says Aristophanes, is the end of all
who lead an agricultural life. Little do the talkers
in the towns, who get up wars, know of the wretched-
ness they bring the husbandman ! Lions at home,
foxes in battle, they contrive to save their skin and
their chattels, while the peasant loses both. But
with peace, how enviable is the country lot ! How
pleasant is it to far merenda (the Italian word ex-
presses the sense exactly which " picnic " does not)
some autumn afternoon, when the soft providential
rain is falling on the sown fields, and the wood
sawn in summer crackles on the hearth. You
will call your wife to roast some kidney-beans and
bring out some figs and a thrush, and a bit of
hare, and call in a neighbour to share the simple
feast, and remember to reserve a bit for the old
father, and send the maid to call the man from the

36 HUSBANDRY IN THE »

field, for to-day is wet and he cannot hoe or strip
off the vine-leaves.

When Trygaeus goes home he finds that war has
lasted so long that the boys know only war-like
songs, but he would have the old songs back, such
as, " Thus they feasted on the flesh of oxen."
The poet complains more than once that the " old
songs " are being forgotten. "The Shearing of the
Ram," for instance, of Simonides, which everybody
once knew, was out of fashion with thejeunesse doree.
The craze for progress had penetrated even into the
country ; a theme illustrated in the Clouds^ the
comedy which has never been entirely cleared from
the tragic suspicion of having been instrumental in
causing the death of Socrates. Strepsiades, who began
with driving goats, dressed in a leather jerkin, is the
pattern of the enriched peasant, dense in intelli-
gence; a sort of Attic prototype of Verga's "Don
Gesualdo " ; the fore-doomed victim of his spend-
thrift relations. Phidippides, the graceless but super-
ficially sharp-witted son, who even in his sleep
dreams about horses, and whose only care is to waste
his father's store, gathers from the new theories
taught in the Thinking-shop a mass of arguments
to defend his conduct which so enrages his father,
who had sent him there in the hope of reforming
him, that he ends by burning the place down.

If Aristophanes has given some unlovely pictures

ii GREEK DRAMATISTS 37

of country-folk, when he paints Nature himself, he
never fails in that lyric ecstasy which is what made
him an immortal poet and not simply a comic
dramatist. The heavenly gift in him was precisely
the appreciation of natural things — the song of birds,
the flowery meads, the season of spring when the
plane-tree whispers to the elm. Appreciation carried
to the point where it becomes interpretation, counts
for ninety per cent in poetic genius.

Up to a certain point there is a great uniformity
in the Greek view of nature when it is considered
that, measuring by time, we might expect as much
divergence as between the views of Chaucer and
Wordsworth. It is always curious to reflect that,
while Roman poetry is nearly crushed into a century,
the Greek covers, from first to last, a space as large
as modern literature. Throughout the whole period
may be observed a positive enjoyment of pure beauty
that was much keener, as I have said once before,
than any the modern world knows of. The narcissus
does not give the joy to us that it gave the ancient
Greek, in spite of the narcissus farms in the Scilly
Isles. That spontaneous and unanalysed joy is the
permanent keynote of the Greek nature-song. But
the keynote may be the same while the tune is
different, and a change did appear latterly in the
Greek way of looking at natural phenomena ; the
tendency grew to associate them with human rather

38 HUSBANDRY IN GREEK DRAMATISTS i.

than with divine affairs. The heavenly bodies, for
instance, instead of compelling thoughts of godhead,
become the hands of a clock which bid man go about
his daily tasks, as in this very modern passage from
the Rhesus of Euripides :

Whose watch is it ? Who is it takes my place ?
The earliest signs are setting, the seven Pleiades
Show in the sky. The eagle through mid heaven
Flees. Why delay ! Rise from your beds to watch !
Awake ! The moon's bright splendour see ye not !
The dawning, yea, the dawning close approaches,
And this is one of the forerunning stars.

XENOPHON'S work on agriculture lacks the divine
afflatus of the Georgics and the patient, compre-
hensive research of Varro's De re rustlca ; its more
modest scope is shown by the name he ga,ve it : the
Oeconomicus, or as Etienne de la Boetid rendered
it, La Mesnagerie — a capital word that has gone
down in life ! Xenophon traced the rule of the
farm on rather general lines ; he starts from the
principle that, in the main, agriculture is made up
of common sense and diligence. To critics who
blame him as unscientific, I would submit that in
Southern farming, at least, these two qualities will
carry the cultivator farther than the most beautiful
steam - plough. The standpoint from which he
viewed the agriculturist was not without elevation,
though it did not strike him, as it struck Virgil,
that the husbandman was a sort of high priest. But
neither did he regard him as the mere servant of
private and selfish ends. The landed proprietor was

39

40 THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD m

the pillar of Society, and agriculture the life-blood
of the State ; the fields grew more than corn —
they grew men. This was his point of view.
Cultivating the land becomes a source of pleasure to
its possessor, of prosperity to his house, of health to
his body, which it fits for all the duties of the free
man. The Earth gives both the necessaries and the
charms of life. The lovely and fragrant garlands
with which we deck the altars are bestowed by her.
She yields a thousand varieties of nourishment, she
feeds the war-horse, she toughens the sinews of the
soldier. The soil inspires its tillers with the will to
die in its defence. How hospitable is the country
to its guests ! How joyous the blazing fire on
the hearth in winter, the cool, shady groves in
summer ! What more inspiring than a rural
religious/^ ? What life is pleasanter for the workers,
more delightful for the wife, more salubrious for the
children, more generous for friends ? The land
which brings forth its increase in proportion to our
zeal in cultivating it, teaches the primal law of
justice. We learn from husbandry to do to others
as we would that they should do unto us. The
wise husbandman encourages his labourers not less
than a general his soldiers, " for hope is as necessary to
slaves as it is to free men." (In the army Xenophon
was called "the soldier's friend"; he knew what
could be done with men by moral influence.)

THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD 41

No writer was ever more sincere ; he adorns
nothing and speaks from his own experience, which
is that of a man of the world who has made no
excursions into the clouds. He does not put
his own hand to the plough, but he is a firm
believer in the axiom that it is the master's eye
which soonest fattens the horse. It is absurd to
own an estate and know nothing about its manage-
ment. Nevertheless, he does not counsel perpetual
attention to business ; he would have agreed that
" no play " makes very dull boys. He looked upon
the pleasures of a country life as not Jess actually
profitable than its duties. What was the chase ?
A nursery for strategists. What was riding across
country? A school for cavalry. Four hundred
years later the Latin writer on agriculture, Columella,
criticised sport as folly and waste of time ; Xenophon
could not have imagined life in the country without
it, but he ennobled the pastime by the skill he
brought to it. He aimed at excellence in all he
attempted. He was the finest rider of his day and
his little treatise on horsemanship has won the praise
of every writer on the subject from then till now.
The Attic phrase of " handsome and good " suited
him both in its metaphorical and its literal sense, for
he was distinctly an homme du bien, and his good
looks were famous. Besides his love of open-air
athletics he had other Anglo-Saxon characteristics,

42 THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD m

such as the colonising instinct joined to affection for
home and the taste for adventure without the tastes
of the adventurer. But he possessed the defects of
his qualities : he had no idealism or " inwardness " ;
the problems of mind did not interest him ; he left
the Incomprehensible to take care of itself. What
interested him in Socrates was the man, and it is the
man that he makes known to us. But for Xenophon
we might have missed in Socrates that moral
perfection which Goethe rated the highest of all — the
reverence for those below us. Xenophon's Socrates
not only talks affably to all sorts of people ; he can
actually draw instruction out of them. How
gracious he is in the scene of the performing children !
How courteously he addresses the showman, how
readily he appreciates the cleverness of the little dancing
girl ! So far from despising the exhibition of a poor
little troop of wandering jugglers, he says seriously
(" after reflection ") that the child's skill in throwing
up and catching her hoops and dancing in time to the
music has confirmed a conclusion to which he has
been coming for a long time, namely, that women
are nowise inferior to men save in physical strength
and perhaps, a little, in mental balance. They can
learn all things, if properly taught, as quickly and
as well as men. When, afterwards, the child performs
a blood-curdling feat of jumping head downwards
into a circle of swords, he gently remarks that this

THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD 43

is, no doubt, very dangerous, but what possible good
is there in it ? Is there beauty in contortion ?
Would it not be less hurtful to the pretty children
and more pleasing to the spectators if they danced
to the flute dressed as nymphs or graces ? The
Sicilian showman, humanised for the moment, as
were all who came within Socrates' influence, acts on
the hint and improvises the little pantomime with
which the banquet ends.

When the question of training women comes up
in the Oeconomicus, Socrates makes no plea for educat-
ing their higher faculties, and this has been supposed
to prove that he was indifferent on the matter. But
he was not in the habit of proposing alterations in
the existing conditions of life ; he took men just as
they were, believing that their souls, or moral part,
could be improved through their minds, or intellectual
part, rather than by any change in outward circum-
stance. Still, it cannot be doubted that since he
admired Aspasia's mental attainments, he would have
been glad if her sisters, who thought themselves so
much better than she, had not been so far behind her
in humane culture. He granted that women could
learn, and Plato's thoroughly revolutionary views on
women's education are only the logical development
of this principle. Plato wished girls and boys to
be taught everything alike, even to fencing and
riding. He admitted that the very best men were

44 THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD m

superior to the very best women, but since many
women are more gifted than many men, why should
not they have an equal chance ? No one would
dispute this now, but it must have sounded mid-
summer madness at Athens, whose women had no
place in society at all. Theoretically they might go
to the theatre when tragedies were performed, but
it seems unlikely that the ladies of the upper classes
often went there. They had no opportunity of join-
ing in conversation with the other sex except in the
case of their nearest relations ; this continued to be
the case down to a late period. Cornelius Nepos
remarks that what is thought respectable in one
place appears quite the reverse in another ; so while
every Roman brought his wife to the feast, such an
act would excite horror in Greece. There seems to
have been no equivalent to the tea-gardens (without
tea) of Turkish cities, where you may see the veiled
ladies laughing and chattering among themselves as
though they had never a care. A mild form of
amusement, but better than none.

The Greek little girl was happy. She was the
pet still more of her father than of her mother.
She had dolls with jointed limbs which possessed
their proper names, their outfits, their baby-houses
and furniture. She played at numberless games,
but the favourites were ball and knuckle -bones.
A lovely Tanagra figure shows the Greek girl playing

in THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD 45

at this last universal game, which is also represented
as the sport of Niobe's daughters in a well-known
fresco found at Pompeii. 1 am still looking for a
part of the world where it is not played ; I, myself,
once played a match with a gipsy child at Granada
and lost it. When the Greek girl reached the mature
age of seven she was expected to offer her toys to
Artemis, a sacrifice recalled in some pretty lines in
the Anthology. But I think that the goddess gave
back at least the ball — a game of ball was recom-
mended by Greek physicians as the best exercise
after the bath. Artemis herself lives for ever as
the eternal girl, following the stag on the mountains
and the wild boar along the wind-swept summits,
but coming back to lead the dance, beautifully
dressed, and not disdainful of feminine tasks, for is
she not known as Artemis of the golden distaff?

Sophocles described the young girl rejoicing in
the flowery meads of her youth, till the maiden
becomes wife and mother and learns to know the
painful watches of the night, spent in anxiety for
husband and children. It would have been well for
her if such anxiety, the common lot of all, had been
the sole cause of trouble to the Athenian wife. It
seems that ill-assorted unions were rather frequent at
Athens, and if her home was unhappy, what had she
to fall back on ? A man, as Medea says, whose
home was unpleasing to him, could go abroad and

46 THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD m

enjoy the company of his friends, " but we must look
for happiness to one alone."

From the very beginning, from the Homeric
Age, the Greek had known what it was that made
a happy marriage. " May the gods grant thee a
husband and a home and a mind at one with him,"
Odysseus says to Nausicaa, ufor there is nothing
nobler than when man and wife are of one heart and
mind in a house, a grief to their foes and to their
friends great joy : but their own hearts know
it best."

It often happened that marriages were made up
by third persons who described inaccurately the
affianced couple to one another ; a fraud for con-
demning which Socrates praises Aspasia. Mischief
was the result. The bridegroom was not extremely
young ; thirty was thought to be a suitable age for
a man to marry at, but the bride was sometimes a
mere child, as we see from the charming little romance
of " The Wife of Ischomachus," for the better under-
standing of which I have strayed into these few
remarks on Athenian womanhood. It forms by far
the most original feature in the Oeconomicus, and
though it must be taken with several grains of salt,
it is still the best description we have of a Greek
interior.

Socrates observed that while the wife's power in
the household is only second to the husband's, she is

in THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD 47

the last person to whom he speaks openly about his
affairs, of which she commonly knows less than his
most casual acquaintances. This may be said to be
the text of the story which follows. Of Ischomachus
nothing is known except a shadowy mention in
Plutarch, but from what we do know of Xenophon
it is impossible to doubt that, in this instance, he is,
if not telling his own story, at least ventilating his
own ideas. Socrates is supposed to meet Ischomachus
in the portico of the Temple of Zeus the Liberator.
He asks him how it is that he has a healthy colour
and time to spare, though all Athens declares that
his estate is the best managed in Attica. To this
Ischomachus replies, that he can go where he likes,
because his wife is perfectly qualified to manage
everything at home. Socrates enquires if this ines-
timable helpmeet learnt her duties from her father
and mother. Ischomachus answers that this was
impossible ; when he married her she was scarcely
fifteen — what could she have learnt but how to spin
and card the wool and give it out to the maids ?
She had been brought up to have simple tastes ; that
was a good foundation, but all the rest she had learnt
from him. Then Socrates begs him to tell him all
about it — he would sooner listen than see the finest
horse-race. And so would we.

In Greek marriages, love was post-nuptial ; the
wooing began with the wedding instead of ending

48 THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD

with it. The little bride was very timid, very shy ;
the first thing to be done was to gain her confidence.
Ischomachus prudently did not begin his lectures till
the honeymoon was waning. He simply prayed the
gods to grant him the wisdom to teach and his
bride the heart to learn all those things that were
needed to make their union holy and happy. She
joined willingly in the prayer, which he thought a
good sign for the future. Then he waited till they
had got to know each other and to speak familiarly
on different subjects. Even when the schooling
begins in earnest, behind the teacher there is still the
lover. Nothing flatters a very young girl so much
as to speak to her seriously of serious things ; for
the rest, the wife of Ischomachus would have shown
but little wit had she failed to seize what there was
of elevated, pure, and true in the picture presented
to her of a woman's r61e. The prosaic details and
the narrowness of the canvas should not blind us to
the fact that the Greek conception of marriage lies
at the very root of all Western civilisation.

After the interval allowed for " becoming ac-
quainted," Ischomachus asks his wife whether she
begins to understand why he married her. She
most certainly knew that there would have been no
trouble in finding another wife for him, another
husband for her. Why did he choose her ? Why
did her parents choose him ? Was it not because it

THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD 49

appeared to both sides that they were truly fitted for
each other, and also fitted to serve the higher objects
of matrimony as heads of a household and founders
of a new family ? If the Divine Powers gave them
children they would join together to bring them
up aright, and the reward would not fail them of
having good children to bless their old age. But
even now, without waiting for that sacred bond, all
they possessed was in common. All that was the wife's
she had already given, and now he does the same, he
gives her all that is his. It is no more a question of
which of the two furnished the most, but it is well to
realise that the one who manages best the common
store is the one who brings the most valuable
contribution to it. " But how can I help ? What
can I do?" asks the young wife; "you manage
everything ; my mother only told me that * I was to
do what was right." Ischomachus says that he
received the same advice from his father ; but that
husband and wife did not do right if they neglected
to watch over the property and to improve it. " But
how," the wife asks again, " can she help ? "
Ischomachus says that this is the task marked out
for her alike by the gods and by the laws. Each has
an allotted share ; to the man fall heat and cold,
long journeys and wars ; to the woman household
duties. The first of all these is the care of children
— to which end the gods have implanted in woman's

E

50 THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD „,

heart an infinite need of loving little creatures.
Next comes the care of the household ; to point which
moral Ischomachus extols the queen-bee, though a
somewhat closer knowledge of natural history would
have made him select that far more intelligent house-
keeper, the mother-wasp. He develops the idea that
marriage is a divine institution in view to the children,
a social institution in view to the property. Your
duty to God is to bring up your children well ; your
duty to the State is to foster and not waste your
substance. Of course the conception of thrift as a
national virtue is absolutely correct, but its practical
application is foreign to English ways of thought.
Frugal living and a strict look-out over expenditure
suggest a tinge of meanness to the English soul.
Ischomachus saw nothing mean in saving since it
enabled him to give nobly to religion, to help his
friends in their need, and to contribute munificently
to the embellishment of the city. It would be
useless to rehearse all the items of domestic economy
which Ischomachus impresses on his docile pupil.
She is charged with the care not only of the provisions
for the table, but also of the farm produce which is
brought to be stored at home or to be employed for
spinning and weaving. The counsels of prudence
are summed up in the admonition : "To see that we
do not spend in a month what ought to last for a
year." One piece of advice touches a higher note ;

in THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD 51

" There is one thing," says Ischomachus, " which,
perhaps, you will not think very pleasant ; it is, that
when one of your slaves is ill, you ought to look
after him yourself and do all you can for his
recovery." " Ah ! " she cries, " there is nothing
that I shall like to do more than this ; they will love
me for it ! " — an answer with which Ischomachus
was justly delighted, and which evoked from him the
most beautiful little speech that any husband ever
made to any wife : " But the sweetest reward will be
when, having become more perfect than I, you have
made me your servant ; when as youth and beauty
pass, you will not fear to lose your influence, because,
in growing old, you will become a still better
companion to me, a better helper to your children, a
more honoured mistress of your home."

Ischomachus tells his wife that she should take
the trouble to instruct stupid or backward slaves in
their tasks ; they may then become in time capable
and devoted servants, priceless treasures in the house.
He goes more fully into the management of slaves
when he deals with the farm bailiff. He says that
like other animals men are influenced by rewards and
punishments. Noble souls are excited to do their
utmost by the desire of praise, ignoble ones by
convincing them that virtue pays. The first thing
to secure is the good-will of your dependants : with-
out this, very little can be done with them. But they

52 THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD

soon become attached to the master and his house if
he treats them kindly, and if, whenever a stroke of
good fortune befalls himself, he gives some advantage
to them. This is, I think, the earliest hint of
" sharing profits " ! For the rest, Xenophon declares
(for certainly it is he who speaks) that he has
known good masters with bad servants, but never a
bad master with good ones. It is disappointing to
remark that, elsewhere, he writes unsympathetically
of the " licence " accorded to Athenian slaves, who
were never allowed to be struck, and who wore
no distinctive class dress, so that "any one might
take them for free citizens." Xenophon preferred
the harsh practices in force at Sparta, which is only
another proof that it is impossible to guess a man's
public policy from his private disposition.

The dominant passion of Xenophon (if we take
Ischomachus as his interpreter) was order. He grows
lyrical in praise of the beautiful neatness of a man-of-
war, and the passage might have been written to-day !
This is the model which Ischomachus holds up to
his wife for imitation. How admirable is a tidy
linen-press or china-closet ! Nay, how lovely are
symmetrically arranged saucepans ! Here the author
has a suspicion that somebody will laugh, and perhaps
he was laughing himself. A young wife wedded to
such a martinet must have undergone various bad
quarters of an hour ; yet when she is really disturbed

in THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD 53

at the loss of something that was not in its right
place, her mentor made haste to discover that he
was himself to blame for it.

The most serious reproof that the wife of Ischo-
machus ever received was on quite a different score.
One morning she appeared with her girlish brow
whitened with lait (Tiris, rouge upon her cheeks,
and a pair of high-heeled shoes on her feet. She
was only following the fashion of the day. Athenian
ladies, in spite of the seclusion in which they lived,
had a perfect mania for cosmetics and gauds ; they
painted their necks and faces, darkened their eye-
brows, and wore a profusion of jewels. Self-adorn-
ment was even encouraged by the law which punished
any woman who was observed to be carelessly dressed.
It has been thought that artificial embellishments
became the vogue because real beauty, so common
among the men of Athens, was rare among the
women. Curiously enough, in modern Athens there
are far more handsome men than women, although
the most beautiful girls I ever saw were two sisters
moving in Athenian society ; but their family sprang
from the isle of Paros.

When Ischomachus saw his wife disguised as
above described, instead of telling her that she never
looked so well (which was what she expected in her
poor little heart), he began to ask the most irritating
Socratic questions. How would she like it if he

54 THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD

brought her a quantity of pinchbeck silver and
imitation jewelry ? " Oh ! do not say such dreadful
things," she exclaims. u Could I love you as I do if
you were to act like that ? " When she sees the gist
of his argument, which he pushes home with relent-
less logic, she takes the lesson in good part, and only
asks what she is to do to really become better looking
instead of only seeming so. As an alternative to
cosmetics, Ischomachus proposes plenty of exercise,
but alas ! it is to be all indoors. Running about the
house and offices to see that all is right, and lending
a hand to kneading the bread, hanging out the
clothes, and making the beds. This is the way to
get a good complexion and a good appetite, and the
maid - servants are encouraged when they see that
their mistress is not above joining in their work.
So ubiquitous a mistress would not be exactly
popular below stairs in a modern house. Women,
says Xenophon, are worth very little who are too
fine to do anything but sit all day with crossed
hands ; which is true ; still, it might have occurred
even to him, that the routine proposed for the wife was
cramped and dull compared with the vigorous out-
door life which he assigns to the husband. Ischo-
machus gets up early, and if he has no business to
transact in the town, his groom brings round his
horse and leads it before him to his farm (which, we
may suppose, was about three miles out of Athens).

in THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD 55

He walks the distance on foot for the sake of a
" constitutional." When he gets to the place he
watches the sowing or reaping or whatever rural task
is going on, and afterwards he mounts his horse and
rides away over hedges and ditches and hills and
dales — the sort of country one would cover in war-
time— never stopping at obstacles, but taking care
not to lame the horse if he can help it. On his
return the groom rubs down the horse and then
takes it back to the town, carrying with him a
basket of whatever farm produce is needed for the
kitchen. Ischomachus walks home at a brisk pace
and dines, neither too generously nor too meagrely,
so that he feels well and active for the rest of the
day.

An Italian proverb bids us praise the sea and keep
to the land ; many poets have praised the country and
lived in towns. But Xenophon was not a poet, and
he meant what he said when he gave the palm to a
country life. He was glad to say good-bye to towns
for good and all. Athens could never have been
the same to him after the death of Socrates, which
was the first news that met him on his return from
conducting the retreat of the Ten Thousand. Nor
did he like the whole trend of Athenian policy. It
is sad to feel that you have grown foreign in your
own land. Later, he was banished from Athens, but
even when the decree of banishment was revoked

56 THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD

and he might have gone back, he did not do so.
His one desire was to live out his days on the
beautiful estate which Sparta had presented to him,
where he took up his abode with his wife and two
little boys when he was still in the prime of life.
It seems that he was once compelled by the tide
of war to leave this estate, but there is reason
to hope that he regained possession of it and was
able to remain there till he died at the age of
ninety. It was in this delightful retreat that he
wrote nearly all his works, giving thus a practi-
cal illustration of one merit of country life not
noted in his treatise — the leisure it affords for
literary pursuits.

Scillas, the spot where Xenophon's property was
situated, not only lay in one of the prettiest parts of
Greece, but had the great advantage of being within
a few miles of Olympia, where every five years all
the most distinguished Hellenes assembled for the
celebration of the Olympian games. On one occasion,
amongst the visitors was Xenophon's old friend, the
Warden of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, to
whom, years before, he had entrusted a certain sum
of prize-money on the eve of a campaign ; if he
died the money was to be offered to the goddess, if
he lived it was to be restored to himself. This
money the Warden brought with him, and with it
Xenophon purchased some land near his own estate,

in THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD 57

rich in streams, fish, and game, which he consecrated
to Artemis. He raised an altar and had a statue
made just like that at Ephesus, only smaller and of
cypress wood instead of gold. Here, once a year,
all the rich and poor, men and women, of the country
round were invited to attend a festival, their wants
being supplied "by the goddess"; barley -meal
bread, meat from the sacrificed animals, wine, and
sweetmeats forming the bill of fare, supplemented by
wild boar, antelope, deer, and all sorts of game, the
spoils of a great hunt organised by Xenophon's sons
and his sporting neighbours some days in advance.
Was there ever a happier f0tey where each laid aside
his sorrows, his heart-burnings, his little jealousies,
his money-making, to rejoice in the sweet air glad-
dened by the sun and in the presence of an unseen
Power that hears and guards !

For Xenophon the gods controlled the events
of life and had knowledge of the past and future.
They could easily be made our friends ; they only
asked of us offerings of their own gifts, a grateful
heart, and no conscious concealment of the truth
when we called upon them to witness our word.
This was his religion and it served him both in bright
hours and grey. He was performing a religious
sacrifice when the message was brought to him that
his son Gryllus had fallen. Xenophon took the
garland from his head, but when the messenger

58 THE ATTIC HOMESTEAD m

added " nobly," he put it on again, saying, " I knew
that my son was mortal." Here we see the antique
spirit at its best : self-restraint in adversity ; pre-
ference of noble conduct to happy fortune ; recogni-
tion that the gods rule wisely.

IV
THE LAST GREEK PEASANT

We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought's slaves, and dead to every natural joy.

Empedocles on Etna.

FAILING further discoveries, we must attribute to
the sweet singer of Syracuse an entirely new literary
treatment of the peasant. Though the embryo of
the idyll is to be found in the old pastoral stories of
divine love affairs, as Theocritus himself implicitly
states, yet he was the first to treat the countryman
as a poetical personage who possesses inherent charm
and interest. He touched his moral qualities rather
with humour than with pathos, but he neglected
none of the traits which make the young Southern
peasant a beautiful feature in the landscape. He
first understood his relations with Nature — a Nature
not the sad nurse to all that die, but the bounteous
mother of all that live. At the same time, he drew
what he saw and not what he imagined. He did
not dress up lettered poets as shepherds, or the

59

60 THE LAST GREEK PEASANT iv

ladies of Versailles as shepherdesses. His rustics do
not discuss politics or theology, the favourite themes
of generations of succeeding swains. He idealised
in the sense that he took what was attractive and
left the rest ; but what he took was true, not false
— real, not artificial. It is the distinguishing trait of
his charming poems that with their wild -flower
fragrance they have a flavour of true rusticity.
Many pastoral poets since have been elegant and
some have been rustic, but the combination of the
two characteristics never again has attained to quite
the same perfection as that reached by the inventor
of the idyll.

Theocritus appears to have owed some obligations
to the poet Stesichorus, whose countrymen at Catania
have thought to compensate for the loss of all his
works by naming after him their finest street, which
they are sure is also the finest street in the world.
It is pretty certain that he owed more to folk-songs.
The very form of his amoebaeic poems was taken
from the toss-and-throw ditties sung at village fetfs,
and it is still in use at country song-tournaments in
Sicily. Livy believed it to be of Etruscan origin,
but does not give his reason for doing so. The
harvest-song of the Tenth Idyll is a real folk-song,
and one which has a venerable origin, since the
" songs of the god Lityerses " (at first elegies for
the son of King Midas who was killed in single

THE LAST GREEK PEASANT 61

combat with a mysterious stranger) were relics of
the sacrifice to the growth-genius, and of the pro-
pitiatory rite at the seeming death of Nature. Else-
where the story was told of a certain Bormus who
left his reapers to fetch them water to drink and
was never seen again. The theme of the song of
Theocritus is less romantic, but its name tells its
ancestry. Every kind of trade and occupation in
Greece and her islands had a singing accompaniment :
there were millstone songs, weaving songs, songs of
nurses, songs of baking-women, songs of bathing-
men, songs of labourers going to their work, songs
of shepherds and goatherds. There is not the least
doubt that such verse existed from the earliest times,
and it is not fanciful to suppose that the songs of
the shepherd and the goatherd were finer than the
mere work-songs, many of which were only meant
to secure regularity in the performance of a given
action. The care of the flocks and herds afforded
endless leisure in lovely surroundings : what could
more invite inspiration? This poetry, which only
asked for the "simple worship of a day," was
found, already beautiful, by the poet who gave it
immortality.

We know the scenery of the Idylls : it is that
scenery of the pure South which comes upon the
traveller one day as a sudden surprise after he
thought that he knew all about Southern Nature.

62 THE LAST GREEK PEASANT iv

Any one who has driven from Sorrento on the Bay
of Naples to Positano on the Bay of Salerno will
understand what is meant. At a particular point
where the road, edged with grey-green aloes, reaches
the crest of the mountain and where a new horizon
opens before us, we forget the familiar loveliness of
the Sorrento orange - groves in our wonder, our
bewilderment, at this new vision ; air and sea are
incomparably clearer ; rocks grow painted ; if the
vegetation is scarcer, it is also more vivid in hue ;
the sun seems to have taken off a veil. Wherever
there is this nature the peasant of to-day will remind
you of his prototype of over two thousand years
ago. He has piped and sung and wooed and
wed through the religious changes, the political
convulsions, that have gone on around him as he
did all these things when Theocritus took his
likeness. They were no piping times of peace
when the Idylls were written : Carthage and Rome
made Sicily the battle-field between East and West.
It was, however, one of the rare periods during
which the Syracusan people were perfectly contented
at home under the rule of a wise prince, and their
domestic tranquillity may have contributed to pro-
duce the psychological moment for the birth of
pastoral poetry.

An Idyll generally attributed to Theocritus,
though the authorship has been, perhaps with reason,

iv THE LAST GREEK PEASANT 63

contested — " Hercules the Lion - slayer, or the
Wealth of Augeas " — gives a minute description of
a latifundium, of which the counterpart could doubt-
less have been found in Sicily during the reign of
Hieron. Part of the land is laid out in vast corn-
fields, some thrice, some four times ploughed ; here
the vineyards turn to the sun, there the orchards,
while the rich pastures sloping towards the river
suffice for countless sheep and heads of cattle.
Yonder, sacred and undisturbed, is Apollo's grove
of wild olives. The husbandmen are lodged in
spacious dwellings. Hither often comes their master
the king, accompanied by his son, for even princes
deem that their house is safer if they look to it
themselves. There is the usual incident of the dogs.
The old husbandman drives them away, not by
throwing stones, but by merely lifting them from the
ground, and by reproving with his voice. " Strange,"
he muses, " what an intelligent creature is this which
the gods have made to be with men ; if only it knew
how to distinguish whom to bark at from whom not,
there would not be a beast to match it." To say the
truth, Hercules in his lion-skin might look rather
disreputable to even a wise dog, though his guide
would be too polite to admit it. It was the lion-skin
which afterwards caused a bull to run at him, whose
powerful head he easily bent to earth, catching the
horns, as the usage is with the Proven9al peasants in

64 THE LAST GREEK PEASANT ,v

their sports, which date back to the time when
Provence was Greek.

In the later Idyllists the wild-flowers of Theocritus
become beautiful garden flowers. Bion and Moschus
observed Nature truly, but they put themselves in it,
not the real peasant. It was recognised that in spite
of all the affinities between natural things and human
moods, man in the highest sense stands apart from
Nature ; hence the poignant cry :

Alas ! when mallows perish in the gardens,
The crisp-green parsley and the hardy anise,
They live again, and grow another summer ;
But we, the great and strong, the sons of wisdom,
When first we die, unknown in earthly hollow
Sleep a long boundless sleep that hath no waking.

ALFORD.

We find a last key to the feeling of Greek
antiquity about country things in the precious
collection called the Anthology. Here peasants
become real again, but in the workmanship there is
no rusticity ; there is the utmost detachment from
rusticity. These gems, so small and so perfect, could
only have been made by people who were not only
highly cultivated but also highly literary ; people
who weighed poetry entirely by quality ; with whom
four lines might create a reputation. They are the
handiwork of men who, seated at the banquet of all
that a great race had performed, arrived at the
appreciation of the simple by the knowledge of the

iv THE LAST GREEK PEASANT 65

complex. They indicate a "return to Nature,"
inspired less by the old joyous instinct than by the
finely trained sense of artists. They are full of the
love of a beautiful home. Leonidas of Tarentum,
when he thought of his Italian birthland in glorious
Athens, felt still that exile from it was worse than
death. The Greeks of Magna Graecia, of Byzantium,
of Alexandria, did not leave a national epic or a great
tragedy ; they had not the wild exuberance of growth
that is needed for the first, nor did they breathe
an air charged with dramatic electricity, such as
that breathed by Sophocles or Shakespeare. We
remember their civilisation by the roses of the
Anthology as the Romans remembered the great
city of Poseidonia by the roses of Paestum.

The position of that city, between the blue plain
of the sea and the green plain of the land, betokens a
race which did not hunger after heights, as did the
Greeks of Greece. These Greeks of Italy, in spite
of their one great star-gazer, were not constantly
looking up, but they were constantly looking
down — looking at the things at their feet.
They lacked the mental virginity of Homer, who
could speak sincerely of " godlike swineherds," and
they were without the affectation which uses such
terms insincerely. Nor did they see the peasant
chiefly in the transfiguring season of his youthful
love. He interested them most when he was old.

66 THE LAST GREEK PEASANT iv

The charming story of the two old fishermen who
discuss their dreams in the Twenty -first Idyll of
Theocritus bears some resemblance to the poems of
humble life in the Anthology ; but while it is
pervaded by a quiet laughter they are steeped in the
pur dictame of tears. The Anthology is a true book
of Pity and Death.

Here is the tomb of the shipwrecked sailor ;
there, that of the farm labourer, " a common Hades
under sea and land." Eumelus, the fowler, who
never kissed the hand of a stranger for food, made
his living with bird-lime and sticks. Now, at ninety,
he is dead and has left to his children bird-lime, birds,
and sticks. One without a name will not complain
because he is untended when dead ; but it grieves
him that the plough turns up his bones. The cows
come, wretched, of their own accord to their shed
from a mountain covered with snow. Alas ! their
master lies dead at the foot of an oak, struck by
lightning. How forlorn that vision of the unled
cows trooping alone down to the home that was
desolate ! The following by Antipater of Byzantium
seems to me the most pathetic thing in all poetry :
" A single heifer, and a sheep with wool like hair,
was the wealth of Aristides ; by these he kept off
hunger from his door. But he failed in both. A
wolf killed the sheep and labour pains the heifer,
and the herd of poverty perished, and he, having

THE LAST GREEK PEASANT 67

twisted a noose to his neck with the string that tied
round his wallet, died piteously by his cabin where
there was no lowing."

Agriculture is not a calling that leads, as has
been supposed, to the possession of a quiet mind.
Calligines, the countryman, consults a soothsayer
about the coming summer and the harvest ; he gets
the answer : " If there be rain enough and not too
much ; if the plants be richer in fruitage than in
leafage ; if frost visit not the furrows nor hail the
wheat ; if fauns eat not up the crop — then, unless,
after all, locusts descend on the land, a good harvest
may be hoped for.'* There are as many " ifs " now,
with a good many more thrown in. Fauns, dear
creatures, are dead, along with the gods ; but to-day
that part of the prophecy would run, " If trespassing
goats do not get at the crop " ; and maybe the
depredations were then also committed by goats,
and not by the guileless fauns after all, for the goat
is an ancient animal and wise, and quite capable of
arranging in a manner that blame due to him should
fall on the head of the innocent.

The pious ploughman sets apart certain " holy
unsown enclosures" for Pan, and the old shepherd
dedicates to him his crook now that he can work no
more, though he is still able to play on his reed-pipe.
Another old shepherd, Cleitagoras, laid to rest on
the mountain-side, prays that the sheep may bleat

68 THE LAST GREEK PEASANT iv

over him, while a shepherd, seated on a rough rock,
gently pipes to them as they feed.1 In this, which
is by Leonidas of Tarentum, there is the radiance,
not the gloom, of pathos ; and that same radiance
illuminates the epitaph from an unknown source, in
which the dear Earth is asked to receive into her
bosom old Amyntichus, who had laboured so long
for her, planting olives and vines and corn, watered
by well- cut channels, and herbs and fruit-trees.
" Lie gently on his head and cover him with flowers
in the spring." A thought is present here which
must have struck whoever has watched a rustic
funeral : the cultivator alone does not go into a
strange bed. He has been ever at one with Nature,
a complement to the earth he tilled, not a strange
wandering being on it. He is going to be part of
it now, and it seems sweet and hospitable, not cold
and foreign.

1 A traveller noticed in the new cemetery at Keropi, behind Hymettus, this
epitaph, which is exactly in the spirit of the Anthology : " Here lies Georgios —
after living seventy-five years — buried under his own wondrous oak." We think
also of the folk-song of the dying Klepht who orders that his grave may be
made " high and large,"

" And to the right a lattice make a passage for the day,
Where the swallow, bringing spring-tide,

May dart about and play,
And the nightingale, sweet singer,
Tell the happy month of May."

I was always puzzled by this " high and large grave " till I saw the " chapel-
tombs " dotted over the hill-sides in parts of Greece, and yet more frequently in
Corsica. No human habitation is near, no sown field ; only the asphodel and
the fragrant herbs cropped by some wandering flock. I have actually seen a
swallow going in and out of the window of one of these tombs.

iv THE LAST GREEK PEASANT 69

But these exquisite poets did not only see man
in the country ; sad enough it would have seemed
to them if only man were in it. They had the
tender love for all creatures which some people
think is a modern invention. What would be the
Anthology without the cicada, " that never knows
old age " ? The gentle poets who could pause on
their way to liberate a cricket from a spider's web
sympathised even with beasts of prey. Who can
find a prettier " lion-story " than that told by
Leonidas of Alexandria ? How, in a fearful night of
storm and hail, a solitary lion went to the hut of
some goatherds up in the mountains, his limbs
already stiffened with cold. The goatherds crouched
together, calling upon the gods, regardless of the
goats ; but the lion stayed through the storm and
then went away, having done no harm to man or
beast. Like peasants to-day in some shrine of' the
Madonna, so they hung upon an oak a picture of
the event as an ex-voto thank-offering to " Zeus,
who is in the hill-tops." But the honour is still
with the lion.

What dog has had a more touching epitaph than
the words inscribed by a Greek poet on the monu-
ment to his favourite : " Laugh not, you who pass,
though this is the grave of a dog : 1 have been
wept for " ?

The hen which cradled her nurslings under her

70 THE LAST GREEK PEASANT iv

wings till she was frozen to death, as still she tried to
protect them from the wintry snow ; the young
cow which, while ploughing, looks anxiously back at
the calf that follows her along the furrows — are they
not pitiful and gracious images ? It is clear that
some of the writers felt a scruple about animal sacri-
fices. Sometimes that scruple takes a pious form, as
when Zeus " the Ethereal " is beseeched to spare the
bull, " the ploughing animal," that bellows a suppli-
ant at his altar ; elsewhere it reveals a nascent scepti-
cism. Hercules needs a sheep every day to keep
away the wolves : does it much matter to the sheep
if it be eaten by wolves or sacrificed to Hercules ?
Hermes is praised for being satisfied with offerings
of milk and honey. Addaeus of Macedon made
immortal the husbandman Alcon, who, when his
ox was worn out by the furrow, forbore to lead it
to the slaughtering - knife through respect for its
labours, but turned it into a meadow of deep grass
where it showed its content by lowing for its freedom
from the plough. There are in Crete many Alcons
still whom nothing will induce to kill their four-
footed fellow-workers when they are weak with age.
However unjustly poets are suspected of paint-
ing fancy portraits, so it is only fair to the Greek
countryman — before we leave him — to see how he
looks in the cold light of prose. Happily the task
is both easy and agreeable ; Dion Chrysostom has

iv THE LAST GREEK PEASANT 71

given us the very thing we want in the plain, un-
varnished tale of " The Euboean Hunter," which he
declares to be " all true." For the sake of the story
we must take him at his word ; in a certain sense,
doubtless, it is truer than truth — what is told of an
individual belongs to a class. This heightens its
value as a document. He describes an adventure
which may be supposed to have happened about the
end of the first century A.D. Overtaken by a storm
the fishermen on whose boat the narrator had
embarked, were obliged to take refuge on the wild
coast of Euboea. The fishermen went to join others
of their trade, while Dion Chrysostom walked along
the lonely shore in the hopes of seeing some passing
ship which would take him up. He had been a long
time employed in this manner when he suddenly saw
at his feet a stag which had thrown itself down from
the cliff"; the waves beat against its still breathing
body. Then he thought he could distinguish the
barking of dogs, but the noise of the waves prevented
him from hearing distinctly. Nevertheless he
scrambled up the steep bank in the direction from
which the sounds came, and before long he saw the
dogs running to and fro in search of the stag that
had disappeared. At the same time, he saw a man
with a long beard and hair which, thrown back from
his forehead, fell gracefully on his shoulders. His
dress and semblance betokened a hunter. " Stranger,"

72 THE LAST GREEK PEASANT

asked the man, " have you seen a fugitive stag ? "
Dion Chrysostom showed him the place where the
creature lay and helped him to drag it out of the
water. Then followed an invitation to pass the night
in the hunter's dwelling, not far away. There was
no chance of embarking that day, it would be sheer
madness ; the storm showed no signs of abating ; and
the misty mountain-tops announced the continuance
of foul weather. When the hunter had heard how
the stranger came to be there, he bade him thank
the gods that he was alive ; there was not such a
dangerous spot on all the coast ; it was a veritable
sailor's grave. " You look like a townsman," he
added ; " you are so thin one would think that you
must have something the matter with you" — a
personal and hardly complimentary remark character-
istic of the peasant !

Dion Chrysostom followed him willingly. He
had not much to fear, for he had nothing but an old
cloak : poverty is sacred and no one touches the
destitute. As they walked towards the dwelling-
place, the hunter told his new acquaintance who
were the folk with whom he was going to lodge.
They were only two, himself and his brother, with
their respective families. Their fathers had been free
citizens though poor ; they kept the oxen of a
rich proprietor whose wealth had been his misfortune ;
it was even said that he was killed by order of the

iv THE LAST GREEK PEASANT 73

king because he was too rich — at any rate, as soon as
he was dead his goods were confiscated by the State,
the herds and flocks with the rest. The ox-herds,
their occupation gone, lingered in the mountain
valley where the cattle were led in summer, and where
they were grazing at the time of the catastrophe.
It was a charming place, with good water. Here the
two men decided to live on, supporting themselves
chiefly by hunting, which they were able to pursue
because two of the dogs that had gone with the sheep
and cattle when they were driven down the mountain,
came back to their old masters. At first they were
unused to the chase, but by careful training they
became capital hunting-dogs, and from pursuing
only wolves or suspicious-looking men, they learnt to
follow every sort of game. One point in the train-
ing was to feed them on flesh instead of on bread.

By and by the old people died, but not before
each had given his daughter in marriage to the son
of the other. These, with their children, were the
present occupiers of the huts to which Dion was
conducted.

One of the brothers had never been to the town ;
the other went there once with his father when they
were still the rich man's servants, and once on a far
more eventful occasion, the exciting incidents of which
he proceeds to relate to his guest.

It happened that their peace was disturbed by an

74 THE LAST GREEK PEASANT

unbidden visitor, who was no more or less than a
tax-collector ! He demanded money, to which they
replied that they had none, or they would have
placed it at his service ; they pressed on him two fine
deer-skins, which he took, but insisted that one of
them should go back with him to the town. So
the hunter saw again what he had seen as a child :
many big houses, a wall with towers, many ships
in the harbour. What struck him most were the
crowds and the noise — it was enough to deafen you.
The tax-collector took him before the magistrates,
and said, laughing, " Here is the man you sent me
to find ; he has nothing in the world but a hut and
an empty sheepfold." The magistrates did not
answer ; they were about to go to the theatre, and
the hunter went with them. There he found a worse
crowd than all the rest, which was behaving in what
he thought a most extraordinary manner ; it did
nothing but scream applause or disapproval. Some
of the speakers made long speeches, some only spoke
a few words, some were howled down as soon as they
opened their lips. At last there was silence, and the
hunter was led before the assembly.

Then a man whom he had never seen sprang to
his feet and pointed to him " as one of the wretches
who have stolen the lands of the Republic ; feeding
their flocks, planting vineyards, keeping slaves, oxen "
— in short, making thousands a year and not paying

iv THE LAST GREEK PEASANT 75

one penny of taxes ! Of course the impostor dressed
up to look poor, but let no one be deceived. And
there was something more to say ; these knaves,
these scoundrels, were also wreckers who lighted
beacons on the cliffs to lure mariners to their doom !
At this diatribe the populace became so much excited
that the hunter almost feared for his life. However,
another citizen got up and said that in his opinion
the cultivation of waste lands was a merit rather than
a crime. A violent wrangle followed between the
first and second speakers, and then the hunter was
called upon to make his defence.

He said simply that all the magnificent possessions
mentioned by his accuser were purely imaginary ;
they had none of them, but what they had sufficed
for their simple wants. If they could give anything
that the State would like to have, it might take it
and welcome. Somebody asked, " What can you
give ?" " Four splendid deer-skins," was the answer,
which provoked shouts of laughter. There were a
few other skins of bear and goat, but they were too
common to offer ; there were also some excellent
smoked hams and dried quarters of venison, and a
few bushels of beans and barley. Mockery and
scorn met this inventory, even after the addition of
eight goats, a lame cow and her pretty calf, two
hunting-knives, a few farm tools, two clean and tidy
huts with a wife and children in each. The hunter

76 THE LAST GREEK PEASANT iv

speaks calmly and respectfully ; only at the end,
when he refutes the charge of their being a nest of
wreckers, is he roused to indignation.

Then some one else gets up whom he fears to be
a fresh enemy, but this new orator states that he
now plainly recognises in the hunter the very man
who rescued himself and his father three years before,
when they were shipwrecked on that terrible coast,
and at the point of death with hunger and cold. He
took them to his hut and warmed and fed them, and
his wife rubbed their stiffened limbs with grease as
there was no oil. The poor folks kept them for
three days, giving them two fine deer-skins at parting,
and as if all this were not enough, the man who
stood there at the bar of the assembly took off his
daughter's covering to wrap round the speaker, who
was still suffering from exposure, while the young
girl clad herself in some poor rags, without a
murmur. After the gods, it was to him that he
owed his own and his father's life.

This speech produced an indescribable effect :
the assembly grew frantic with enthusiasm. The
moment would have been solemn if the hunter had
not gone across to his former guest and kissed him
and his father, who stood near him, on their faces.
At this the public laughed so much that the good
man understood that " in town people do not kiss
on the face." Gravity having been restored, it was

iv THE LAST GREEK PEASANT 77

decided to grant the men undisturbed occupation on
the land around their huts, and to confer a tunic and
a mantle on the hunter " who had stripped his own
daughter to cover a citizen's nakedness," as well as a
hundred drachmae for his household needs, which
his first defender volunteered to pay out of his own
purse. But the hunter would not take the money,
nor did he wish to take the tunic and the mantle,
though he ended by accepting them as they were
speedily procured and thrown over him. He was
with difficulty persuaded not to put his deer-skin on
the top of the other garments.

Such was the tale of the hunter. Dion Chrysostom
adds to it a little idyll which he describes himself as
having witnessed while he was the hunter's guest.
A handsome youth comes in with a hare which he
presents with a kiss to his pretty cousin, the hunter's
younger daughter. The Philosopher understands
the situation at a glance, and determines to try to
do the young people a good turn. Having elicited
what he had already guessed — that youth and maiden
were engaged to be married — he asks, Why put off
the happy day ? After a few idle objections, it is
confessed that there is no real reason for delay except
that they have neglected to prepare the victim which
must be offered to the gods on the occasion of a
marriage. " Oh, if that's all," cries a small boy, " the
victim has been ready for ever so long ; it is just

78 THE LAST GREEK PEASANT iv

out there, behind the hut." The children all run off
and come back cutting capers round a fat little pig,
which the young man had bought in the village with
the skin of a baby wild boar. They had been feeding
it up for months, and the only person who knew
nothing about the matter was the head of the house,
who, poor man, had racked his brains to account for
most mysterious gruntings. He takes the deception
good-humouredly, and two days later the simple
marriage rites are performed. The air is still and
all the stars have come back into the sky. How
different, says the story-teller, were these rustic
nuptials from the sordid marriages of the rich, with
their contracts and signatures and bargains and
duplicities, and the bickerings and quarrels that
often arose even on the wedding-day !

NATURE IN THE EARLIER ROMAN
POETS

SENTIMENT is the fairy moss, the silvery lichen,
which grows on the old walls — not unfrequently on
the tombstone — of interest. One cannot help feeling
respect for the unflinching directness of the people
that raised an altar to the god Stercutus. Those
who laid the foundations of Rome's greatness grasped
the fact that Italy is an agricultural country, and
that if you look to the crops, the heroes will take
care of themselves. Hence the paramount importance
and dignity ascribed to agricultural pursuits in the
early days of the Republic, and the favour and
support accorded to the cultivator of the soil.
Whoever knows anything of Italian agriculture
must have been struck by the care with which the
Roman laws of the old period provided against
the very troubles which beset the modern land-
owner.

He will certainly have personal experience of the

79

8o NATURE IN THE

mischief done by (i) ladri campestri, the petty
thieves who live by small but constantly repeated
depredations ; (2) intentional damage in harvest-
field or vineyard ; (3) loss caused by goats and
other animals which pasture in the lanes and acquire
great agility in jumping hedges. The shepherds
who lead their flocks from the plains to the mountains
in spring and from the mountains to the plains in
autumn, manage to maintain them for several weeks
in each season almost without cost. It is done partly
on the wayside grass, but this does not suffice.
There are peasants, too, who keep two or three
animals when their plot will only support one — for
the rest they must trust to heaven. I have seen a
sheep trained to take a hedge like a hunter. (4)
Encroachments of neighbouring proprietors on any
spot not often visited by the owner. The Roman
law looked to all these cases. He who wilfully
injured another's crops, or cut them down during the
night, was punished with crucifixion, or, if he were a
minor, he was consigned to the injured proprietor
to work as a slave till the loss should be recuperated.
A person who intentionally set fire to the fields or to
the grain was burnt alive ; if he did it by accident
he was flogged. The theft of agricultural imple-
ments was punished with death. You had a right
to kill any one who removed your landmark.
Monstrous as some of these penalties were, the spirit

EARLIER ROMAN POETS 81

which ran through such legislation was more con-
sonant with rural prosperity than that which inspires
the tender-hearted Italian juries who practically
refuse to convict under any of the above heads
because the delinquent is a povero diavolo, and what
can you expect ?

Besides the summary method placed in the hands
of the proprietor of defending his boundaries, these
were further protected by the god Terminus, whose
temple was on the Tarpeian rock and who was
represented without arms or legs because he never
moved. When it was proposed to build a temple
to Jupiter on the Tarpeian rock, the other gods,
who had their seat there, gracefully made way, but
Terminus refused to stir. The country people on
his annual festival covered their boundary stones
with flowers and sacrificed to the god.

Wise, and in the highest degree civilised, were
the Roman laws which promoted the opening of
markets and fairs, and prohibited any assembly that
might interfere with farmers on market-days ; which
allowed liberty to the grower to get the highest
price he could and discouraged monopolies; which
kept the public roads both safe and in excellent
condition, thus facilitating the transport of produce.

Then came the too easy acquisition of wealth, the
importation of Egyptian corn, the multiplication of
slave-labour, the increase of large holdings and the

82 NATURE IN THE

consequent conversion of much arable land into
pasture. No attempt can be made here to gauge
the effects of these changes on the Italian peasantry.
We often read of the Italian peasant class being
swept away, but if this happened, it showed a
remarkable faculty for resuscitation. Perhaps a
love of eccentricity made De Quincey argue that,
" there was not one ploughman the less at the end
than at the beginning," but his paradox may not
be farther from the truth than the theory of whole-
sale extirpation. Enough peasants were left to be
the chief transmitters of the old Italian blood which
was to tincture all the northern deluges, and so to
bear out Virgil's prophecy that the name of Italy
would survive every conquest, and that, by a fated
law, only those invaders came to stay who merged
their own language and character in the native speech
and birth-stamp of the people of the land.

Through all changes the idea remained, the idea
of the paramount importance and dignity of agri-
culture. The figure of the hero who, after saving
his country, returned to till his fields, had taken
hold of the Roman mind as the type of true virtue,
and the quality of a nation's ideals is as important
as the quality of its realities. When Trajan made
it a law that those who aspired to occupy public
office must possess a third of their substance in land,
he was wisely yielding to the influence of one of

v EARLIER ROMAN POETS 83

the continually recurring waves of popular opinion
in favour of husbandry. However much the
agriculturist was sacrificed, first to faction and
then to despotism, this opinion never really altered.
The taste for country things, of which all the
Roman poets were in some degree interpreters,
was built upon the national conviction of a national
necessity.

The account given by Lucretius of the first steps
of humanity was as good science as he could make
it. No line, no word is thrown in for the sake of
poetic effect ; though the story is avowedly con-
structed by guesswork, the guesses are based on
carefully weighed probabilities.

The type of his primitive man and woman is to
be looked for, not among contemporary savages
(who may have been descending all the while that
we have been ascending), but among our fellow-
creatures, the beasts of the field. Each animal in its
natural state follows the law which is fitted to
perpetuate its species. It is not the enemy of its
kind ; it has its own method of keeping its person
and its nest or lair clean ; the males do not ill-treat
the females ; parents bring up their offspring even
at a great sacrifice to themselves ; those species in
which the male is obliged to find food for the
female after the birth of the young ones are mostly
monogamous, and as long as the contract lasts it is

84 NATURE IN THE

faithfully observed. In the time of courting every
creature seeks to be admired by its mate. Here
are the materials which Lucretius used.

If, he says, the human race in its infancy had not,
as a rule, respected the weak and watched over the
woman and the child, it would very soon have come
to an end. He describes the discovery of language
much in the same way as a biologist of the present
day would do ; all creatures make different noises
under different circumstances ; the Molossian dogs
make one sound when they growl with fury, another
when they bark in company, another when they
howl in lonely buildings, a fourth when they shrink
from a blow, a fifth when they tenderly lick and
fondle their whelps, pretending to snap at them or
swallow them up, and whining in a low, soothing
note. Man, having a voice and tongue well adapted
to language, soon developed a rude form of articulate
speech. Then his education progressed rapidly.
The pretty, winning ways of children were what
first softened and civilised the wild human heart.
Men learnt the uses of fire, of which a flash of
lightning or the friction of dead branches was the
origin ; stone weapons were invented and animals
were tamed ; it occurred to one man to clothe
himself in a skin, not, alas ! to his advantage, for
his fellows, filled with envy, set upon him and killed
him, and in the struggle the skin was spoilt and

EARLIER ROMAN POETS 85

rendered useless to any one. So, perhaps, began
human strife ! Originally beauty and strength were
what gave the chiefship, but, by and by, wealth
began to interfere with that natural selection. Man
applied himself to the vast undertaking of cultivating
the earth : the forests retreated up the mountains ;
vineyards and olive groves and cornfields appeared
in the plains and valleys. The great invention of
how to work in wool substituted a better sort of
dress for skins. At first men, doubtless, spun as
well as delved, " since the male sex are far superior
in art and ingenuity in whatever they turn their
hand to," but the sturdy labourers jeered at their
stay-at-home brothers, and called them out to help
them in the fields : thus it was that women became
spinsters.

About this time Lucretius placed his Golden Age,
in which no privileged beings lead an impossible life,
but real rustics taste the joys of simplicity. Here
the real is beautiful, but it does not cease to be the
real ; there is as much reality in an arum lily as in a
toadstool. In fine weather, when the young men
had satisfied their hunger, they laughed and jested
under the trees, dancing with stiff, awkward steps
and crowning their heads with flowers and leaves.
Then they sang, imitating the liquid voices of birds,
and they found the way to make music on a reed.
The sweet, plaintive notes of the pipe were heard

86 NATURE IN THE v

through all the pathless woods and in secret haunts
and divine resting-places.

This generation, which had no empty cares nor
emptier ambitions, could be called happy, if men
could ever be called so. But of all writers Lucretius
was most conscious of the elemental world-pain which
none can escape. No day passes into night, no night
passes into day, that does not hear the cries of the
new-born infant mixing with the wails of the
mourners by their dead. Nor is man alone in his
sorrow ; while the calf bleeds before some lovely
temple, the mother, vainly seeking her child, wanders
hither and thither through the wood, leaving the
print of her hoofs upon the moist ground. Then
she stands still and fills the air with her laments, and
then hurriedly she returns to the stable to see if by
chance it is not there. Nor do fresh pastures, nor
the sight of other calves console her, for she nowhere
beholds the loved form.

With the exception of Dante no poet has the
restrained descriptive power of Lucretius, or, perhaps,
in the same degree, the art of choosing suggestive
words. A few lines bring a natural scene or a
person before our eyes so forcibly that no detail
seems to be wanting. His similes produce the
illusion of making a direct appeal to our eyes.
Take, for instance, that of the flock of grazing sheep
and frisking lambs scattered over the down " which

EARLIER ROMAN POETS 87

in the distance appears to be only a whiteness on a
green hill." Or take the portrait of the old
countryman whom we all have met :

And now, shaking his head, the aged peasant laments
with a sigh that the toil of his hands has often come to
nought, and as he compares the present with the past time,
he extols the fortune of his father and harps on this theme,
how the good old race, full of piety, bore the burden of their
life very easily within narrow bounds, when the portion of
land for each man was far less than now. — SELLAR.

When we speak of Nature we are generally
thinking of the desert, the Alps, the ocean, the
prairie — Nature without man. This is what was
rarely thought of by the poet of antiquity. Lucretius,
almost alone, contemplated Nature as detached from
man, of whose powerlessness he had a sense which
was more Eastern than European. He allowed,
indeed, that a human being might rise to a moral
and intellectual grandeur that exceeded all the
magnificence and the power of external Nature.
This great admission, clothed in words of singular
solemnity, is contained in the passage in which he
says that, rich and beautiful as is the land of Sicily,
there is nothing in it so sacred, wonderful, and
beloved as its philosopher — his master, Empedocles.
But men in the aggregate, what were they ? Specks,
atoms. Was it surprising that they should have
been seized with fear and trembling in presence of

88 NATURE IN THE

the shining firmament, the spiral lightning, the storm
at sea, the earthquake ; or that such sights should
have inspired them with the idea of the gods ? So
these frightened children fell on their faces and
turned their veiled heads towards a stone ; useless
rites, idle actions, devoid of real piety, since real
piety consists in viewing all things with a serene
mind.

Man's business was to cheerfully accept his posi-
tion as an atom. Even the awe which filled Kant
when he looked at the starry sky would have been
held by Lucretius to be a relic of superstition. He
meant his teaching to console ; life, he argued, which
is full of so many inevitable ills, would be made
more endurable were supernatural terrors away ; but
men preferred to keep their fears sooner than to lose
their hopes. >His conception of Nature as a living
power, a sole energy informing the infinitely various
manifestations of matter and spirit, was like some
great mountain wall rising thousands of feet above
us — grand but unfriendly.! He excluded from it the
spiritual passion which vitalised the later monism.
He would have excluded emotion from the universe,
but he could not keep it out of his own heart — a
heart full of human kindness, sensitive affections,
power of sympathy. The clashing of such a tempera-
ment with the coldest and clearest intellect that ever
man possessed, was enough to work madness in the

EARLIER ROMAN POETS 89

brain without the help of the legendary love-philtre.
The total impression left by De rerum natura is
that of the earth as a stepmother who grudges the
bread which, with pain and grief and by the sweat of
his brow, the husbandman seeks to extract from her.
The poetry of the Ego, lyrical poetry in its
modern sense, sprang into life full-grown with
Catullus. Even his allusions to Nature are personal ;
they are to Nature in its relation with his own state,
his own feelings, as when he likens his ill-requited
love to a wild flower which has fallen on the verge
of the meadow after it has been touched by the pass-
ing ploughshare. Anacreon had written love-songs,
and some poets of the Anthology had touched inti-
mate chords that awaken perennial responses, but
Catullus was the first to fling himself tout entier into
his poetry for better, for worse ; sometimes supremely
for better, sometimes very much for worse. Favoured
by an age when republican austerity had disappeared
in licence, and by the toleration of a forgiving
Caesar, he made poetry the medium of his loves,
passions, friendships, joys, griefs, hates, spites ; the
impartial mouthpiece of what was highest and lowest
in him. He was the first to be utterly reckless in
his choice of subjects ; one thing was as good as
another as long as it moved him. He looked on
poetry as a vent, not as a profession or as a road to
fame. It is impossible not to suppose that most of

9o NATURE IN THE v

his poems were improvisations. Could he have
made his individual intensity general, he might have
been the great tragic dramatist whom Rome never
produced — as one may guess from the terrible Atys.
He remained, instead, a poetical idler, whose small
amount of recorded work, almost a miracle (the
chance survival of a single copy) has preserved to
sure immortality.

He was the first, if not to feel, at all events to
express, the modern " wander madness," the longing
for travel for its own sake, the flutter of anticipation
in starting for new scenes and far-off " illustrious
cities." His fleet pinnace scoured the seas like the
yacht of a modern millionaire, to end its days, at
last, in the clear waters of the lovely lake to which
its master returned with the joy in home-coming
which stay-at-homes can never know, and which is
the sweet, unmerited reward of faithlessness. Here,
wedged in between the moist and leafy landscapes of
northern Italy, he found an enhanced memory of the
scenes he had left — the Sea of Marmara, the Isles of
Greece. The same colour of the arid earth ; the
same silver olives, the same radiant light and sun,
with waters still more translucently blue than those
of southern seas. It is easy to imagine that the
" all-but-island Sirmio" had been the Elysium of his
childhood, his first glimpse of a southern fairyland,
so that the charm of earliest associations combined

v EARLIER ROMAN POETS 91

with the delightful feeling of possession in rendering
it so dear to him. He had gone there as a boy with
that brother whose loss he was one day to mourn in
helpless sorrow among the olives under which they
both had played. The poem to Sirmio is the most
ideally perfect of all " poems of places," and the
truest. Two thousand years are annihilated by
Catullus's beautiful lines ; they have the eternal
novelty of Nature herself. The blue lake of Garda
laughs in its innumerable ripples as it laughed with
the household of the young poet in joy at his return.
Those who have heard the wavelets lap the stones
of Sirmione with a musical rhythm will be always
tempted to interpret the much-disputed epithet of
" Lydian " in the sense of " softly sweet in Lydian
measures " — the sense of " Lydian hymns," " Lydian
harmonies." It would seem that Tennyson so
interpreted it. Certainly, Lydian was a term more
commonly applied to music than to anything else.
But among scholars " golden " (from the golden
stream of Lydia) has more advocates. In a pictur-
esque sense this would not be ill-adapted. Sirmione
is the one spot from which the lake does look, at
times, actually golden, because it there takes the
sunset rays when the sun is close to the horizon ; in
the higher, mountain -girt regions "argentine" —
the gran* tazza argentea of Carducci — suits it better.
For the theory that Lydian means " Etruscan " (the

92 NATURE IN THE

Etruscans believing themselves to have come from
Lydia) there is this to be said : unquestionably there
were Etruscan colonies on the lake ; the name of the
village of Toscolano bears living witness to the fact
and there are other proofs. Scaliger did not know of
these colonies though his father was born on the lake
of Garda and should have heard of Toscolano. The
great Latinist ridiculed the idea of the " Tuscan
lake," and made a suggestion of a clerical error in
which many have followed him. But the waters will
remain " Lydian " to the end !

Of all peninsulas, Sirmio, and of islands,
Loved gem ! those either placed in still lake waters,
Or lashed each side by Neptune's mighty billows,
How gladly, how delightfully I hail thee !
From Thynia and Bithynian plains scarce deeming
I can have 'scaped, and reach thee now securely.
Oh, what so blest, as to be freed from troubles
When the mind lays aside its load, and wearied
Of foreign wanderings, we regain our homestead
And rest upon the couch so long desired ;
This, this, the full reward of all my labours.
Hail, pleasant Sirmio, kindly greet thy master ;
Rejoice ye, too, calm lake, glad Lydian water,
Laugh, and let all the household join the laughter.

Between the Tiburtine and Sabine territories, not
far from Rome, Catullus had another estate, to
which he addressed some merry verses that show him
in what was certainly his normal mood — gay and
paradoxical, with a stinging tongue which he took
no pains to control. For some reason he wished

EARLIER ROMAN POETS 93

the farm to be known as " Tiburtine," and it made
him very angry to hear it called " Sabine." The
occasion of the verses was a visit he paid to it when,
as he asserts, he had been given a bad cold by having
to listen to the terrible composition of an acquaintance
named Sextius. Coughing and sneezing, he fled to
his villa, doctored himself with nettle and basil, and
was soon expressing his best thanks to the " Tiburtine
farm " for making him well.

The two pretty poems to " The Garden God,"
attributed to Catullus, though there exists no proof
that he wrote them, would hand down to us, were
other record wanting, the memory of an essentially
popular cultus which was never looked upon by
educated people otherwise than as a harmless super-
stition. When Venus caused Priapus to be exposed
in the mountains, ashamed of being known as the
mother of such a fright, she closed the doors of
heaven upon him beyond recall. He never became
a proper orthodox god. Shepherds, however, were
reported to have saved his life, and peasants set up
his altars. At one time his worship seems to have
been accompanied by gross licence, but it had lost
this character among the Roman husbandmen of the
Republic. It retained indeed a crude symbolism.
The lore of peasants is not all fit for ears polite, as
would be remarked if everything that folk-lorists
collect were published. The peasant tongue does

94 NATURE IN THE

not know — how should it know? — the virtue of
reticence. But the uppermost feeling of the Roman
ploughman for his garden god was a sympathy of
the poor of the earth for the poor of heaven. Some
sorry saints have got into the calendar by a similar
mental process.

The Priapus of the Catullian poems becomes
likeable from his faithful care of the cot in the
marshes, thatched with rushes, where the poor
owners, the father and the son, thrive so well because
of their piety towards their protecting fetich, whom
they privately treat just as if he were a real god.
Besides the little offerings of the earliest spring
flowers, of green unripe wheat ears, yellow violets,
pale gourds, fragrant apples, and purple grapes, a goat
(" but say nothing about it") has sometimes stained
its altar with his blood, notwithstanding the risk of
offending the higher deities to whom the living
sacrifice was reserved. Grateful for which attentions
the garden god bids the boys be off to pilfer the rich
neighbour, obligingly adding, " This path will lead
you to his grounds."

It is possible that one other element entered into
the cultus of Priapus : some grain of the deep-rooted
tendency to associate monstrosity with divinity,
which seems to have begun with the syllogism —
the monstrous is abnormal, the divine is abnormal,
therefore the monstrous is the divine. Greece saved

EARLIER ROMAN POETS 95

the Western world from that awful heresy by formu-
lating the great truth at the basis of all truth, that
the divine is normal, is beauty, is law. But the
natural man inclines to backsliding, and not even to
this day in the regions that have inherited the light
of Greece is the contrary opinion wholly dead.

VI
A PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS

VARRO was the Admirable Crichton of the Romans.
He was easily first in the knowledge of all arts, all
sciences ; music, painting, the stage, had no more
acute critic ; a profound student of history and
language, he had the passion for antiquity of a
scholar of the Cinque Cento — since " antiquity "
already existed with all its sweet, real, and unreal
pleasures. He also had the serious curiosity about
astrology and kindred subjects which became so
general among the men of the Renaissance. Besides
all this, he was theologian - in - chief of the old
religion, and of his many lost works the sixteen
volumes in which he treated mythical, philosophical,
and popular theology are those which we must most
deplore. They would have supplied a want, felt by
every student, by furnishing a clear exposition of the
educated Roman's attitude towards the faith of his
fathers. Their value to us would have been the
greater because they were written in an outspoken

96

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 97

age ; not the time of Augustus, when you were not
respectable unless you were orthodox, but the
time of De rerum natura and the Atys. Varro was
born one hundred and sixteen years before Christ, and
lived to ninety. He dedicated his great theological
work to Julius Caesar.

He was skilled in navigation and tried in war ;
the fact that he was the first to leap on board the
enemy's ship when conducting a naval expedition won
him a rostral crown. He was past eighty when he
wrote the only one of his books that has come down
to us intact, the elaborate treatise De re rustica^
which probably suggested to Virgil the idea of writ-
ing the Georgics. A small portion of a work on the
Latin language is the only other surviving specimen
of Varro's contributions to literature, a poor salvage
out of nearer seven than six hundred volumes of
prose and verse !

His enormous literary activity is partly explained
by his early retirement from public affairs, in which,
as a young man, he made an important start, but
unfortunately not on the winning side. A partisan
of Pompey, he bowed to the inevitable by rendering
submission to Caesar, but henceforth his public career
was closed. Caesar appreciated his talents and was
disposed to be friendly to him ; one day, however,
Antony took a fancy to some of Varro's property and
managed to have it confiscated in his own favour by

H

98 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

reviving the memory of his connection with Pompey.
The object having been obtained, Varro was amnestied,
and still rich, he enjoyed a happy and diligent old age,
cheered by a wife who was much younger than himself,
and, while Cicero lived, by his intimate friendship.

For his wife, whose name was Fundania, he under-
took to put his long experience in agricultural matters
into a permanent form. She desired to cultivate a
recently acquired estate on the most scientific
principles, and as Varro could not count on remaining
for many years at her side, he wrote this treatise so
that when he came to die she might still have a guide.
Though the Roman "new woman" was making rapid
progress and the wall between the proper and
the improper was getting daily thinner, Fundania
was probably by no means a rare instance of a matron
who, besides attending scrupulously to her household
duties, was able to manage her own property down
to the minutest details. The normal slips out of the
ken of posterity because it is the normal. There
is not the least doubt that the Lesbias in every age
were far less numerous than the Fundanias. Italian
married women have been called indolent and
frivolous, but a great many, like Fundania, them-
selves administer the land which came to them as
their dowry. The husband advises, perhaps, but he
does not interfere, and such land is generally in good
order.

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 99

By way of opening, Varro rather frigidly invokes
the gods who preside over agriculture, Jupiter and
Tellus, the sun and moon, Ceres and Bacchus, Robi-
gus and Flora, Minerva who gave the olive, and
Venus who cares for gardens, Lympha who bestows
the heavenly rain, and Bona Eventu, without whom
nothing prospers. He then goes on to draw up a
list of those authors, " Greek and our own," whose
works his wife may study with advantage for light
on any points which by chance he forgets to mention.
Even Fundania, enthusiastic agriculturist as we know
her to have been, and good Greek scholar as she
doubtless was, must have looked with some terror at
the list of Greek authorities. For the Romans, as
for the men of Dante's time, the Greeks were
essentially color che sanno, not in philosophy alone,
but in physical science. The Greek books recom-
mended to Fundania were forty-seven. Xenophon's
work we possess, but nearly all this vast library has
perished ; so also has the great work in seventy-
eight books of the Carthaginian Magos, which was
considered of such value that it was translated into
Latin by decree of the Senate. The Carthaginians
were excellent farmers, and during their long
dominion in Sardinia they made that island the
granary of Carthage, an end obtained, however, by
imported slave-labour, which was the secret, more
often than people are inclined to admit, of the

ioo PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

wonderful productiveness in ancient times of lands
now sterile.

Varro does not go on, as he promised, to enumer-
ate the Latin authors ; perhaps the passage in which
he did so is lost, or he thought it sufficient to refer
to them separately, here and there, in the course of
his treatise. Columella, whose work on agriculture
became almost as famous as Varro's own, and who
had the courage to write a poem intended to fill the
gap left by Virgil on gardening, belongs to a much
later date. In Varro's time the best Roman writers
on farming were the two Sasernas and the elder Cato,
whose essay, De re rustica^ was regarded with
unbounded respect. The writer had passed into an
ideal region in which he held all the higher a place
because the world had moved so far and fast away
from him. Virgil's debt to Cato has been frequently
pointed out, while his obligations to Varro were
ignored. The most esteemed of contemporary
model farmers was an accomplished Roman aristocrat
of the name of Scrofa, to whom Varro pays many
compliments, though he makes some fun of his
infelicitous patronymic, still perpetuated in the family
of the Marquis Scrofa of Florence.

Varro's treatise is written in the form of con-
versations, and begins not without a certain dramatic
effectiveness. He was invited, he says, by the
Guardian of the Temple of Tellus to keep the feast

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 101

of seed-sowing, but on reaching the place he found
that his host had been called away on public business.
Several of his friends were there already waiting, and
when Varro arrived they were engaged in contem-
plating the map of Italy which was painted on the
wall. As they gaze at the map, the friends, who
were all persons well known to Roman society, speak
in praise of their fruitful mother-country. If the
eulogy is less glowing than Virgil's, it is not less
convinced. What country in the world has so
favourable a geographical position ? (" L'ltalie
parait faite pour conquerir 1'univers," wrote Gibbon
in his French journal.) The north is more healthy
and more fertile than the south (the " South " here
standing for Asia, and the "North" for Europe) ;
only you must not be too far north or you get to
the Arctic pole, where there is a six months' night
and a sea covered with ice. Varro's father-in-law,
Fundanius, observes that as even in Italy, where
night and day last so short a time, he is obliged in
summer to take a siesta at noon, what would one do
in a place where the nights and days each lasted six
months? After this sally, there is more praise of
Italy. What useful product is there which it does
not produce ? Is it less rich in vines than Phrygia,
to which Homer gave the name of " vine-bearing,"
or less abounding in corn than Argos, which he
called "wheat -bearing "? What wine approaches

102 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

that of Falerno ? What oil equals the oil of
Venafro? Where are there harvests like those of
Campania and Apulia ? Do not the fruit-trees which
cover Italy make it seem one immense orchard ? If
you travel through the world, do you find a country
in better cultivation ?

Other friends come, and among them the above-
mentioned Scrofa. Once or twice some one says, " I
am afraid the Guardian of the Temple will return
before we have done talking." The conversation
flows on the more naturally because it is not eloquent ;
one thing leads to another, and ofF and on it is
enlivened by a mild joke. It is surprising that the
habit of writing in dialogue did not sooner develop
into the novel. Varro gives each of his personages
little distinctive marks by which you may know him,
and by which, no doubt, he was recognised by those
who did know him.

Leaving generalities, he puts forth the opinion
that a splendidly cultivated estate (such as the one
owned by Scrofa on the Via Sacra) is a far pleasanter
sight than a profusely decorated house, and that when
you go into the country you look for well-filled
barns and not for the picture-galleries of Lucullus.
A discussion follows as to whether the scope of
agriculture is utility or pleasure, and whether in a
treatise on farming, tillage alone should be considered,
or flocks and herds as well. It is argued rather

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 103

speciously that stock-raising is only an accessory and
sometimes even injurious, as in the case of goats, which
injure vines and olives. Hence the sacrifice of a goat
to Bacchus, as he was supposed to see with pleasure
its destruction, but never to Minerva, as her antipathy
for it was so great that she disliked to see it at all.
A goat was sacrificed only once a year at Athens from
the fear that it might injure the wild olive which had
taken root of itself within the precincts of the
Acropolis. Varro remarks that authors introduce all
sorts of extraneous matter into their works on agri-
culture. The Sasernas, both father and son, interpret
the term so freely that they class making pottery or
working a silver mine under the head of Agriculture,
because it has to do with the agro — the soil. One of
the speakers interposes, " You laugh at the Sasernas
out of envy, picking out their weak points instead of
appreciating the many good parts of their books."
But bad examples are infectious, and they all begin to
recall the miscellaneous information garnered by these
two respectable authorities. This is one item : " To
remove superfluous hair : boil a yellow frog in water
till the liquid is reduced to two-thirds ; then rub the
skin with it." " As for me," says Varro, " I have
found a point which I am all the more ready to quote
because it concerns the health of Fundanius, for I
often see him knitting his brows from twinges in his
toes." a Speak out directly," cried Fundanius ; " I

io4 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

would much rather hear how to cure my corns than
how to plant a pear orchard." Here is the pre-
scription : " When the pain is felt, we can cure the
person who feels it, provided that at that moment he
is thinking of us." (" Well, I am thinking hard of
you ; cure me ! " says Fundanius.) The magic-
worker must repeat twice nine times :

Terra pestem teneto,
Salvus hie maneto
(Earth take the pain,
Let health remain)

— one of those Roman popular jingles which, prove
that there were rhymed folk-songs before rhyme was
admitted into literature. At the same time the
operator must touch the earth and spit on it, and it is
essential that it should all be done fasting. A few
years ago there was an old man at Bath who cured
warts much in the same way. He would take no
money in payment, but was willing to accept a pound
of tea.

In justice to the much-laughed-at Sasernas, Varro
afterwards said that the same sort of folly was to be
found in other authors ; even the great Cato gave
recipes for making two kinds of cake, and advised
those who wished to have a good appetite to eat a
raw cabbage soaked in vinegar (sauerkraut?) before
and after every meal. He means himself to avoid
such frivolities. Agriculture is an art and a science,

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 105

and there is none more important. Culture makes
the earth more pleasing to see while it raises its
money value. The first is a statement which no
Roman would have dreamt of contesting except,
perhaps, Lucretius, whose " divine resting-places"
can have been scarcely a ploughed field ; but in
Lucretius there was a grain of Orientalism which
would have enabled him to understand the mysterious
attraction of the wilderness for the solitaries of
Palestine. Lucretius would not have said as Socrates
said : " I am fond of learning something, and the
hills and the trees cannot tell me anything, but the
men in the city can." For which reason Socrates
walked in the town and not in the country ; though,
if Nature had nothing to give him, he had something
to give her, whereunto is witness the lovely myth he
invented for the grasshoppers, and again that other,
still more lovely, of the swans ! The ordinary Roman
had moved far away from the Attic love of towns ;
he liked a rural walk, above all, if it lay across his
own property. He could even appreciate a wood,
but his appreciation stopped short of the waste.
There must have been then, as now, hillsides clad
in the fragrant verdure of heath and lentisk and
arbutus and myrtle, which makes the uncultivated
lands of Corsica and Sardinia a garden of Eden to
the modern beholder ; but either Roman eyes could
not see their beauty, or the Roman mind wilfully

io6 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

rejected the idea that the unproductive could be
beautiful. If aesthetically faulty, this principle is
morally admirable. What fine sobriety is shown in
the derivation of the names of the noblest families of
Rome from the cultivation of particular kinds of
grain, as the Fabii, Pisones, Lentuli, Cicerones, etc.!
What a difference from Malatesta and Malacarne
and Pelavicino !

Varro has the good sense, however, to place even
productiveness in the rear of salubrity. It is wiser
to choose a healthy situation than a fertile one! if
you cannot have both. The cultivation of unhealthy
lands is a game of chance in which the speculator
stakes life and fortune. Nevertheless, science and
money may mitigate the unhealthiness of a site.
When Varro commanded the fleet at Corfu there
was an epidemic so severe that the houses were full
of sick and dead, but he ensured the safety of his
men by making new windows towards the north,
and closing those in the direction whence came the
pestilential air. The natural quality of the air varies
from the heavy, oppressive air of Apulia to the
light, healthy air of Mount Vesuvius. Cato said
that the best situation was at the foot of a mountain,
with a south aspect. If you are obliged to build on
low-lying ground, turn the face of the house away
from the marsh. In dry weather marshes breed
imperceptible animalcula, not to be seen by the eye,

YI PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 107

which penetrate into the human body through the
nose and mouth, and cause many dangerous diseases.
" What am I to do then," asks Fundanius, " if I
inherited such land, to preserve it from these malign
influences ? " The practical answer is, " By all means
sell it, and if you cannot sell it, do not live there."
Which makes one think of the answer of a young
man at an examination of veterinary students in
Lombardy. When asked what he would do with a
horse which had such-and-such a complaint, he
replied, " I should sell it at once " !

A high position, Varro points out, is always more
healthy than a low one, because the least wind blows
infection away from a height, and if there be noxious
organisms, whether bred in the vicinity or wafted
thither, the vivifying rays of the sun dissipate them
and the dryness makes them perish. For Varro it
may be claimed that he was a forerunner of Pasteur
and of Ross ; the minute insects, so small that the
eye could not see them, which spread disease, were
a fine guess for ages before the microscope. It is
almost disappointing not to find him advising his
friends to boil their drinking water, especially as he
might have taken the hint from Herodotus, who
mentions that Cyrus, the great king of Persia, when
on the march, only drank boiled water, which was
carried after him from place to place in silver vessels.
So true is it that there is nothing new under the sun.

io8 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

The farm-buildings form an essential branch in
rural economy. The barn should be large enough
to contain the whole harvest. Varro's dislike of
gorgeous country-seats is endorsed by Fundanius,
who declares that it is better to build on the principle
of " our ancestors," who thought it enough to have
a simple farmhouse with a handy kitchen and large
cellars for oil and wine (the best were those con-
structed with slanting, paved floors, as the new wine
often burst the Spanish tuns and even the Italian
jars). In short, it was once sufficient for a country-
house to possess what was required for the homestead,
while now it was expected to be imposing and elegant
and to rival those of Metellus and Lucullus, " to the
great scandal of the Republic." People study to
have dining-rooms east for summer and west for
winter, and never heed where the apertures of the
wine and oil cellars are placed, though much depends
on that, as wine needs cool and oil needs warmer air.

The English practice of planting trees round an
estate — which is never seen now in Italy — was in
favour with the Romans. Varro mentions that his
wife has planted pines round her Sabine property,
and that he has planted cypresses round some land
he owns near Vesuvius. Some prefer elms, which
are the best if suited to the soil ; others choose
whitethorn hedges or a ditch or a low wall to mark
the boundaries. In planting trees or vegetables it

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 109

is well to remember their natural antipathies ; olives
object to oaks, vines to cypresses and to cabbages ! —
a prejudice which the modern vine seems to have
outlived, as one frequently sees rows of cabbages in
a vineyard.

Before buying an estate it is prudent to find out
whether there are many thieves in the neighbour-
hood ; much land is rendered useless on this
account. Rural theft makes part of Sardinia un-
livable. What to plant should be regulated by your
distance from a town ; if near one, a great deal
may be made out of gardens ; violets, roses, and
other flowers can be easily sold at a good profit.
Those who live in remote places should have among
their slaves some who can do a little carpentering and
other artisan's work.

The soil was cultivated by slaves or by free
peasants or by both. The free peasants either
worked on their own small properties, helped by
their children, or on the land of others, working
for hire at certain periods, such as vintage and hay-
harvest. There was another class of labourers called
obaerati, which seems to have also existed in Egypt,
but what they were is not explained. Varro counsels
the employment of hired men rather than one's own
slaves to cultivate unhealthy land, and even on healthy
land to perform the more fatiguing tasks, such as
fruit-picking, vintage, and harvest. They ought to

no PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

be strong, not under twenty-two years old, with an
aptitude for agriculture. Ask them what they did
when serving their former master, and what sort
of cultivation is practised in the place they came
from ; in this way you can find out their degree of
intelligence.

The steward or bailiff should be strictly honest,
possessed of some instruction, and not too young.
He should be practically skilled in rustic labour,
and not only in its theory. He must never employ
violence when words suffice. The slaves should not
be too bold or too meek ; it is better not to have
too many of the same nation, as it is a source of
dissensions. Encourage the head ones with hope of
reward, such as gifts of money or a wife taken from
the slaves serving with them ; this attaches them to
the estate. The slaves reckoned the best and who
cost most are the Epirotes ; they are always married.
If you wish your slaves to take a pleasure in their
work, show consideration for the heads and for all
who do well, and consult them about the work to be
done ; this will make them think that they are less
despised. They will work the better if you give
them good food and good clothing, and exempt them
from the harder labour. The memory of any little
kindness will help them to endure hardships, and give
them affection for their master. Be sure that there
is a covered shelter near the threshing-floor, where

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 1 1 1

the men may rest during the hot hours. There is
reason to think that the spirit which inspired these
good counsels was, on the whole, general. It is not
worth while to inquire whether it was utilitarian or
humane ; love is often egotism, and virtue, as La
Bruyere said, " loses itself in interest." It is a wise
rule to treat human qualities objectively, and it is
agreeable to believe that there was nothing extra-
ordinary in the recorded case of a master who had
made himself so beloved by his slaves that when he
died they raised a monument to him out of their
own savings.

All the time that this long discussion is going
on the friends are still expecting the return of the
Guardian of the Temple, one of whose freedmen at
last appears on the scene, bathed in tears. He begs
pardon for the long delay, and asks them to be
present next day at the funeral. " What ! whose
funeral ? " they exclaim, rising from their seats. Be-
tween his sobs the freedman relates that his master
has been stabbed to death ; the assassin escaped in
the crowd, but some one said it was done by mistake.
The servant took his master home and called a doctor,
but in spite of their efforts he soon breathed his last.
This is why the man did not come with the news at
once, for which he again begs to be forgiven. Varro
concludes : " We accepted his excuses and descended
from the Temple, more struck by the events to

ii2 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

which humanity is exposed than surprised by that
which had just happened in Rome."

It seems that Varro really intended to break off
here, but the convenient friends who " wish for a
little more " were equal to the occasion, and, like a
true author, Varro did not need very much begging.
The promise to write, after all, on the animals of the
farm was made at the house of a common acquaint-
ance, who was ill. In true Italian fashion his numerous
visitors were about to begin an interminable discus-
sion in the sick-room, but mercifully (as one must
think) for the invalid, the talk was interrupted by
the arrival of the doctor. Next time, however, that
Varro met his friends they reminded him of the en-
gagement, and there was nothing to stop the copious
flow of conversation which was let loose forthwith.

He opens with a protest. In the good old days
people divided their lives by seven days out of nine
in the country, and they then could be strong and
robust without the gymnastics now introduced from
the Greeks, and hardly sufficing to keep in order the
sinews of the degenerate Roman. Nearly all the
heads of families were gone to live in town, leaving
behind waggon and scythe, and preferring to use
their hands for applauding in the theatre or the
arena rather than to turn them to account in furrows
or vineyard. Hence they have to import wheat from
Africa and Sardinia and wine from Cos and Chios.

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 113

The same country which saw shepherds found a town
and teach their children tillage, now sees the de-
scendants of those founders converting arable land
into pastures — an act of avarice contrary to all laws,
human and divine, for the nourishment of man ranks
before that of brutes.

After this exordium, which sounds rather as if it
came from a Socialist agitator, Varro confesses that
live stock may be useful for eating off the hay, and
also because of the manure. He once possessed many
sheep in Apulia and horses in the province of Rieti ;
and when he commanded the Greek squadron during
the pirate war (he means the squadron in Greek
waters) he often conversed with the masters of vast
flocks of Epirus. His experience, therefore, is both
extensive and practical, which does not always follow,
as you may have a lyre and not know how to play it,
and [you may keep flocks and be ignorant of the
shepherd's art. He describes the evolution of man
from a fruit-eating animal to the pastoral stage, when
he tamed wild creatures. The sheep, he thinks, was
man's first conquest, from its double service of wool
and of milk, and from its gentle nature, easily sub-
dued. In fact, the moufflon, or wild sheep of Corsica,
a very shy animal, becomes perfectly tame if born in
captivity, as may be seen at Monte Carlo, where the
moufflons kept in the garden are happy to eat bread
from the hands of visitors.

1 14 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

Even now all domestic animals exist somewhere
in a wild state : sheep in Phrygia; goats in Samothrace
and in the isle of Capraria called after them ; wild
pigs in all parts, if the wild boar is a pig ; wild
bulls in Dardania, Media, and Thrace ; wild asses in
Phrygia and Lycaonia ; wild horses in some parts of
Spain. The value of fleeces caused them to be called
" golden " in the old stories. An ardent if rash
philologist, Varro embraces the theory that Italy took
its name from its fine cattle. He gives a prominent
place to the ass as a farm animal ; there should be
three asses, he says, to every pair of oxen. They
turned mills, carried manure, and could be put to do
anything. The best ones came from Rieti, and a
very good one might cost a sum which would buy
a modern race-horse. He insists, unheeded to this
day, on the necessity of dry stables and sheepfolds.
Damp gives sheep a disease of the hard part of the
foot as well as spoiling the wool. The stable
windows should be to the south, and the slanting
floor should be kept clean by changing the litter
every few days. He mentions that goats are
always ailing, especially when kept in large herds.
Goats should never be allowed to enter the planta-
tions owing to their destructive habits.

Next, dogs are considered. They should be few,
but of good race, and shepherds' dogs are the best.
The dog is more attached to the shepherd than to

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 115

the flock. A Roman bought some flocks in Umbria
and stipulated that the dogs but not the men were
to be included in the sale. The shepherds were to
lead the flocks to their destination in the woods of
Metaponto in Magna Graecia, and then, secretly
and without the dogs seeing them start, they were
to return to their own country. This was done,
but a few days after the men departed the dogs
disappeared, and it came to be known that they
reached Umbria safely, though they had no food
but what they could find in the fields. Yet, says
Varro ironically, none of these shepherds had done
what Saserna prescribes in his book on agriculture :
" Whoever wishes to make a dog follow him gives
him a cooked frog." (N.B. — Dogs will not eat the
" green fat " of turtle, and it is doubtful if they
would eat cooked frogs, though the present writer
has never tried.) The prudent husbandman feeds his
dogs well on bones and what is left on the plates, or
soup made from bones, or barley bread in milk. If
they are hungry they wander and even turn on their
master. They should wear a leather collar with
spikes as a protection against wolves or other
enemies — a custom still observed in the Campagna,
where the dogs, which are very dangerous if met in
lonely places, are the direct descendants of those of
Rome.

The men in charge of large flocks and herds in

n6 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

the open should be robust and full-grown, and they
must always go armed. For small flocks which
return to the fold at night, youths or even girls will
suffice. They should be under a capable overseer,
of a certain age, as befits one in authority, but not
too old, for old men, like children, cannot climb
mountains or cover long distances. They should be
supple, quick, light, and strong, not only to follow
the cattle but also to hold their own with wild beasts
and brigands. Gauls are very good, especially for
taking care of beasts of burden. It is best to
marry the shepherds, as they will not then seek
their love far from the homestead. If possible, the
wives should accompany them to the hut or cabin
when they go to the forest or waste lands. These
women should be robust and active, but not ugly.
In Liburnia you may watch these shepherds' wives
carrying wood with one or two children at the
breast. In Illyris (Albania) they help the men in
everything ; you often see a woman cease from her
work and retire for a few moments, after which she
reappears with a new baby which she seems to have
found on a tree. In that country girls wander about
choosing whom they will and going where they
choose up to twenty years of age, nor is it thought
a reproach to them if they bear children. The head
shepherd or overseer should know something of
medicine, to be able to look after the sick when the

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 117

doctor is far off, or in slight illness when he can be
dispensed with.

Varro is called away (so he tells us) by a pressing
reminder of an invitation to a garden-party. Not
long afterwards he and Senator Q. Axius went to
vote for the nomination of the Aedile. They intended
to wait to accompany their candidate home when the
election was decided, and as the sun was hot they
went under the shelter raised for the public. There
they found a host of friends and they were soon all
talking about what forms the subject of the third
part of Varro's treatise, the minor produce of the
farm, which, as he shows, may add materially to the
income to be derived from it.

A simple rural life was Varro's unchanging ideal,
and he always goes back to the text, " We owe the
earth to Divine Nature, the towns to human
industry," which is the same as to say, " God made
the country and man made the town." But while
condemning the extravagant luxury of great cities
he was too sharp a man of business not to see that
the farmer might turn it much to his profit. The
succession of f foes and banquets in Rome ensured the
fortune of any one who could provide a large quantity
of delicacies at a given moment. The owner of a
single uccellanda, or bird - snaring place, sold the
thrushes which he took in one season for £500. The
ancient Romans had the same passion as the modern

u8 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

Italians for small birds, which survived, nevertheless,
in undiminished numbers till now, when the
possibility of quick transport, combined with the
enormous demand for them/or English tables, threatens
several species with extinction. Speculators in small
birds kept thousands in aviaries to have them ready
when they were in most request. Varro gives
minute instructions for the arrangement of these
aviaries. They should be near a river with little
running streams flowing through them, and high
hedges should shield them from the wind — a wise
precaution, as there is nothing that birds suffer
from so much as a draught. Each aviary was
partitioned into courts, the most privileged court
being reserved for nightingales and other songsters !
At Tusculum, Lucullus had a dining-room built
in the middle of an aviary, so that he saw the
live thrushes flying around whilst he was eating
the cooked ones. " But," said Varro, " he had no
imitators."

Spending for the mere sake of spending already
amounted to a mania. Hortensius, who was re-
ported to water his plants with wine, was the first to
serve up peacocks in a sumptuous repast when he
was appointed augur, " for which he was more
applauded by the dissolute than by people of
worth " ; yet many followed his example, and the
price of peacocks rose to such a point that an egg

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 119

was worth 33. 40!., and a peacock could be sold for
£2, more than the value of a sheep. Here was the
farmer's opportunity.

Then, as now, wild boars were plentiful in the
Pontine Marshes and the Maremme. On an estate
which Varro bought in the neighbourhood of
Tusculum the wild boars and the roebucks assembled
at the sound of a horn to eat the food thrown down
to them from a terrace. Some one present remarks
that he has seen a still more interesting thing at
Q. Hortensius' place near Laurentum, where a forest,
fifty acres in extent, was enclosed by a wall and given
the name of Wild Beast Nursery. Lying on couches,
on a raised spot, they dined in the forest, when all
at once Quintus called " Orpheus," and a slave
appeared dressed in a long white robe, with a lyre
in his hand, the image of his prototype. At a sign
from the host, " Orpheus " sounded a horn, and
hundreds of deer, wild boars, and other forest
creatures assembled beneath. It was a finer sight,
adds the narrator, than the combats of wild beasts
in the Arena.

Doubtless Varro was aware of what his friend
Cicero thought about the shows of the Arena :

The remainder of our diversions consisted in combats of
wild beasts, which were exhibited every morning and after-
noon during five days successively ; and, it must be owned,
they were magnificent. Yet, after all, what entertainment

120 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

can possibly arise to an elegant and humanised mind, from
seeing a noble beast struck to the heart by its merciless
hunter, or one of our own weak species cruelly mangled by
an animal of much superior strength ? 1

After reading these words it seems surprising
that in a much later age so highly cultivated a man
as Symmachus could fail entirely to see the pathos
of the fact that the Saxon prisoners, whom he had
counted on for the next day's gladiatorial show
(because they were strong and courageous), killed
each other overnight rather than fight to make a
Roman's holiday. But in that late time the Roman
pagan had an idea that these spectacles were wrapped
up in some way with the greatness of Rome, which,
they feared, the softer Christian sentiment would
undermine, and so they clung to them with renewed
enthusiasm. They might have remembered that in
Greece, though efforts were made to acclimatize
these shows (especially at Corinth), they never became
really national. Lucian tells that when it was pro-
posed to start them at Athens, a wise philosopher
stepped forward and said : " Men of Athens, before
you pass this motion, do not forget to destroy the
Altar of Pity ! " Their final disappearance was the
first moral victory of Christianity, and a great one.
It is sad that bull-fights remain, but fortunate that
when a Socialist deputy tried to introduce this blot

1 Cicero to Marcus Marius, A.U. 698.

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 121

on civilisation into new Rome, Italian public opinion
raised such a shout of indignation that the project
was promptly abandoned.

Fish was in great demand at Rome, and incredible
sums might be made by fish-ponds or wasted on
them. The humble fish-pond of the people, supplied
with rain-water and replenished by fish taken out of
rivers or lakes, brought in large returns. The
aristocratic fish-pond, furnished by Neptune and
constructed with elaborate art, was more apt to
empty pockets than to fill them. It cost a fortune
to build it, to stock it, and to feed the fish. One
possessor of such a fish-nursery made nearly ^200
a year by it, but it cost the whole profit to keep it
up. They were expensive toys rather than serious
investments. Varro once saw a sacred tank in Lydia
containing fish which came to the edge at the sound
of a flute and which no one was allowed to touch ;
the fish of the Roman noble are, he says, nearly as
sacred. Hortensius, who had spent a mint of money
on his salt-water fish-tanks at Bauli, was found out
in buying all the fish for his table at Pozzuoli. He
fed his fishes himself, and was much more anxious
lest they should be hungry " than I am about my
asses, which bring me in a good profit," Varro
scornfully remarks. Half the fishermen of the
place were employed in catching small fish to give
to the big ones, and salted fish was provided when

122 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

the sea was too rough for the boats to go out.
Hortensius would make you a present of a team of
mules sooner than of a single one of his mullets.
Lucullus gave carte blanche to his architect to ruin
him if he could manage, by means of subterranean
passages, to contrive a sort of tide in his tanks at
Baiae, so as to keep the water cool in summer, when
fishes in confinement suffer much from the heat, as
I have been told at the Naples Aquarium, a beautiful
and wonderful place, surpassing the dreams even of
a Roman fish-maniac.

Varro speaks of some one who was more anxious
about his sick fishes than about his sick slaves ; but
the story of the Roman " who fattened his lampreys
on his slaves " belongs to after -times. Like other
stories which are told for the benefit of youth, it
lacks exactitude. This seems to have been the truth :
a millionaire freedman of the name of Pollio Vedius
was entertaining Augustus at supper when a slave
broke a crystal goblet ; Pollio, enraged, ordered
him to be thrown to the fishes ; the slave appealed
to the Emperor, who asked his host to pardon him,
but Pollio refused. Augustus then pardoned the
man himself, and had all Pollio's crystal goblets
broken and the fish-pond filled up.

Bee-culture held an important place among the
farmer's minor cares. Varro believed, as Virgil did
after him, that bees could be obtained from a

vi PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS 123

slaughtered ox. He thought that honey was derived
from certain plants and wax from others ; the fig
yielding honey and the olive wax, while bean-flowers,
lavender, and almond-blossom were rich in both. If
the soil does not produce naturally the bees' favourite
flowers, especially thyme, which gives the honey the
spicy flavour so much appreciated in the kind im-
ported from Sicily or Corsica, they may be planted.
The Romans hated the indomitable Corsican, of all
their slaves the only one who could not, or would
not, live in servitude, who died like a wild bird in
a cage. But they had discovered that Corsican
honey surpassed even that of Syracuse or Hymettus,
and it does so still. The plan suggested by Varro
has been tried by English bee-keepers, with the
result, in one instance at least, that the bees obstin-
ately shunned the plot planned for them to seek
unlawful bliss among a neighbour's bitter-tasting
lime-flowers. Bees range over immense distances,
and, even were miles of thyme planted, how supply
the multitudinous sweets of Nature's alchemy ? How
give the fragrance of the macchiay by which Napoleon
recognised Corsica in the dark when he was being
taken to Elba ?

Varro says that bees, " birds of the Muses," can
be assembled or scattered by music, in which, perhaps,
we may see the origin of the famous tin kettles
which the English villager brings into action when

i24 PROSE SOURCE OF THE GEORGICS vi

his bees are swarming. There is no allusion to the
belief that bees desert a house if not told when the
master dies, but we hear that Roman bees disliked
solitude. They also disliked an echo, and were said
to fly away from a place where there was one. In
spite of imperfect knowledge, Varro had closely
observed their ways, their industry, their love of
only what is clean and sweet, their " cities," as he
calls them, and their government, about which he
makes few mistakes, except that he supposes the
queen to be a king.

The Friends in Council were still pleasantly
talking when their candidate for the office of Aedile
came on the scene with the news that he was elected.
After congratulations, they accompanied him to the
Capitol and thence each went to his own house.
So the treatise ends with a little touch recalling
that ever-present public life which wound itself in
and out of all the Roman citizen's interests and
occupations.

VII
VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY

Io toglier6 il poeta dalle scuole degli eruditi, dalle academic dei
letterati, dalle aule dei potenti, e lo restituir6 a te, o popolo di agricoltori
e di lavoratori, o popolo vero d' Italia. Egli £ sangue vostro e vostra
anima ; egli e un antico fratello, un paesano, un agricoltore, un
lavoratore italico, che dalle rive del Mincio sail al Campidoglio e dal
Campidoglio all' Olimpo. — G. CARDUCCI. (Per la inaugurazione d' un
monumento a Virgilio.)

To Virgil the problems of existence appeared in a
less complex form than to the great Roman poet who
preceded him. Like Lucretius, he was drawn to
the conception of Nature as a divine force, but he
shaped it in his own intellectual mould. He could
not think of such a force except as beneficent, and
thus the tilling of the soil became to him a holy
ministry, a kind of sacrament. The cultivator was
the priest who gave the gift on the altar to the
people. He co-operated in a divine scheme of which
man, nay, and the very gods, were the inevitable
instruments.

The idea that the cultivator of the soil is, in a
way, acting a consecrated part, was not confined to

125

126 VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY

Virgil ; it is noticeable, for instance, in that beautiful
essay of Cicero on old age, of which Montaigne said,
" il donne 1'appetit de vieillir." After declaring that
nothing contributes so much to a happy old age as
the management of a country estate with its well-
ordered vineyards, olive-groves and plantations,
Cicero answers the possible objection, " What is the
good of all this when you are too old to hope to see
your labours fulfilled and rewarded ? " in the noble
words : " If any one should ask the cultivator for
whom he plants, let him not hesitate to make this
reply : * For the immortal gods who, as they willed
me to inherit these possessions from my forefathers,
so would have me hand them on to those that shall
come after.' '

To rejoice in the good things of Nature, the
beautiful earth, the glorious sun, the fruitful fields,
was for Virgil almost an act of worship ; had he been
told that a preacher would arise who turned from the
genial light as from a snare, he would have charged
him with blasphemy. The view of the visible world
filled him with pious exultation ; but besides being a
religious man, Virgil was an artist, and Nature
delighted him because it is such excellent art. In
looking at a meadow he felt what Balzac felt when
he said, " Oh ! voila la vraie litterature ! II n'y a
jamais de faute de style dans une prairie."

Virgil's own origin (not differing much from that

VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY 127

of Shakespeare) had a lasting effect in determining
his character. He never became a thorough towns-
man ; even in his appearance there was said to be
something countrified. All his life he felt keenly
the loss of his father's farm on the Mintio. The
Civil Wars which ended with the fall of the Republic
at Philippi, were the cause of the confiscations in
which Virgil's property was involved. Cremona
having backed Pompey, its territory was given to the
soldiers who fought against him and in favour of
Augustus. The plaga del Mantovano, being near at
hand, had the same fate meted out to it. Scholars
have not yet decided the exact locality of the poet's
estate, though every villager of Pietole is ready to
stake his life on Dante's accuracy in placing it in
that commune. Tradition in such cases is not to be
lightly set aside, but strong reasons have been
advanced for thinking that the farm lay farther away
from Mantua and nearer to where the Mincio leaves
the Lake of Garda. This situation gives the scenery
of the Eclogues with the gentle hills so often
described in them. There is no doubt that Virgil
was thinking less of Sicily than of his childhood's
home when he wrote those early poems, in several of
which he alludes to his own troubles under what
must have been then a transparent disguise. It
seems that, touched by his songs, Augustus inter-
vened to save " all that land where the hills begin to

128 VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY Vn

decline and by an easy declivity to sink their ridges
as far as the water and the old beeches whose tops
are now broken " ; but that, either because it was
difficult to make an exception in his favour or from
some other cause, the Imperial benevolence was
speedily revoked. He describes the neighbours
bewailing the loss of him : " Who would now be
their poet ? " The farm hands know snatches of his
verses, just as Verdi's peasants at Busseto sang his
airs as they followed the plough.

If Virgil ever did hear any of his lines repeated
by peasant folk, one may be sure that he was better
pleased by it than by many a loftier sign of popularity.
He evidently listened with pleasure to folk-songs ;
he would never have spoken with scorn, like the old
poet Ennius, of " the songs of fauns and bards of
ancient times." He makes the long-haired bard
lopas sing of the sun and moon, rain and lightning,
the seasons, man, and cattle, at the banquet of
Dido. He notices the wife singing over her house-
hold tasks and the shepherd youths whose high voices
send a thrill of passion through the summer nights.
Any one who is familiar with the Italian folk-songs of
to-day must fancy that he catches in the exquisite
songs of Damon and Alphesiboeus something more
than the popular spirit — almost the words, here and
there, of folk-poets of long ago.

Virgil observed and remembered, and even when

vii VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY 129

he is most conventional there is an undercurrent of
truth,' of experience. In the first place, his enjoy-
ment is so sincere that even an artificial setting could
not make the substance of his picture false. He
actually thought that a town mansion crammed with
bric-a-brac bought or looted (which made a Roman
house of that period almost as impossible to turn
round in as an English house of this) was a less
agreeable place to live in than a plain farm interior,
surrounded by the luxury of the countryside.

Who was ever dull in the country that had eyes
and ears — if there was nothing but the birds, who
could be dull ? Virgil knew them well ; he watched
the winged legions as they hastened to the woods
at dusk ; he took attentive note of the larks and
kingfishers, the chattering swallows skimming over
the pools before rain, the wood-pigeon cooing itself
hoarse, and the sweeter turtle-dove in its airy elm.
He has been blamed for making the nightingale
bemoan her lost young which the cruel ploughman
had taken unfledged from the nest, because, it is
objected, the nightingale does not sing after the
eggs are hatched ; but if the objector would take
the train to Mantua in June he would hear nightin-
gales singing so loudly in the woods through which
the railway passes, as it nears the morass, that they
drown the noise of the engine. Climate and
environment have much influence on birds' singing.

K.

1 30 VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY Vn

Italians often say that the robin is not a singing-bird ;
and though he sings in my garden, in many places
he is a bird of passage and does not stay long
enough to sing. Nightingales stop singing sooner
in northern than in southern climes ; and the English
critic, though right as to his own birds, was wrong
as to Virgil's — a point worth mentioning, trifling
as it seems, for the reason that it shows how difficult
it is to decide offhand upon the reality or unreality
of the whole class of Bucolics unless you know the
country which inspired them. A more grounded
reproach against this particular passage would be
that it is not mourning which makes the nightingale
pour out his passionate soul in song — it is hope,
desire, pain, perhaps, not regret. But the error
belongs to the legend-weaver, to the child-man to
whom all the songs of birds sounded sad ; who, in
Sclavonic lands, interpreted even the cuckoo's cry
to mean a dirge.

Virgil has one bird-picture which now, at least,
is more English than Italian, that of the rooks
bustling among the branches of the tall trees and
cawing joyfully because the rain is over, happy in
their nests and little ones. The rookery remains in
England, with certain other free, wild things inter-
mixed closely with cultivation that give a sense of
the unexpected to the English wold for which in
Italy one has to go to the pathless Maremme or the

vii VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY 131

bare, mysterious deserts of the south. It is surpris-
ing, by the bye, not how many, but how few
suggestions of a wilder nature can be found in
Virgil's rural poetry. The land under cultivation
(according to some calculations a larger area than
at present) must have exhibited the same signs of
orderly arrangement, of minute utilisation of the
smallest spaces, that a well-cared-for Italian estate
exhibits to-day. Probably it was in the north of
Italy, then as now, that farming was most scientifi-
cally practised ; we know that the chief irrigatory
canals date from Roman times. As Virgil's landscape
is north Italian with the background which we feel
even when we do not see it, of the " aerial Alps,"
so his peasant is essentially a north Italian contadino.
Let us inquire what kind of life he Jed.

The luxuries which the Virgilian husbandman
allows himself in the way of food are fruit, chestnuts,
and pressed curd, the modern mascherpone. A salad
or a drink made with pounded garlic and thyme
refreshes him after moving the sweet hay through
the precious hours when the morning star shines
in the sunrise. At noon he sleeps under a tree
while the herds low not far off. When the smoke
rises from the village and the shadows lengthen on
the hills, he returns to the house where the girls
are carding wool and the wife is boiling down sweet
wine, which makes an excellent drink. She finds

132 VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY vn

time to ply the shuttle between her other occupa-
tions, singing as she weaves to make the toil less
tedious. There is always indoor work for women
to do where they spin the clothes of the family.
Only when the indestructible frieze made from the
peasants' own fleeces is replaced by shoddy cotton
are women set to do men's work out of doors.
That never-ending spinning was a bond of union,
too, between all classes ; " quando Berta filava,"
say the Italian peasants, remembering the queen
who spun. I have seen a coat made from what
was possibly the last piece of cloth spun by noble
Italian hands ; it came to Lombardy in the middle
of the last century, a gift from a Sardinian countess.
When Virgil's husbandman takes his evening
rest, his sweet children come round him, the girls
modest and fair to see, the boys willing to work,
not spendthrift, observant of religion, reverent
towards age. He himself is a careful observer of
feast-days ; on them he abstains from all hard labour,
only doing such light tasks as can offend no god,
raising a fence, snaring birds, washing sheep, or
driving the ass to the town with a load of apples,
and bringing back some needful tools. Winter is
his long rest-time ; then he invites and accepts
invitations to little-costing gaieties. Yet in winter
there are numberless small things to be done ;
storing olives, acorns, and bay-berries — those that

VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY 133

have been picked, for some always fall on the ground,
and under every old bay- tree there is a little forest
of young ones — a true detail. (What, one would
like to know, were bay-berries used for then ? Now
they are made to yield a strong poison.) Hunting
hares and netting roebuck are other winter employ-
ments ; and if the peasant wants amusement, he goes
to watch the herdsmen in their wrestling matches.
He has also the most charming of toys — a bit of
garden, half kitchen-garden half flower-bed. It
is the orto of the modern peasant, with its sage and
rosemary, its lettuces and leeks, its purple iris (Spade
di Sanf Antonio) and virgin lilies.

A peasant who is old and past hard work may
even devote himself wholly to a garden. Thus did the
ancient Corycian peasant turn a few poor abandoned
acres that had been thought good for nothing into
the sweetest place in the world. Around he set a
fence of thorns, inside he sowed a few vegetables,
and planted simple flowers. At night he could set
something on his table, a salad, a few onions, two
or three pears, and he felt possessed of the riches
of kings. His roses, sweet as Paestum's, were
before any one else's ; his fruit was the earliest to
ripen. And how well his bees flourished ; what a
rich store of frothing honey they furnished ! Happy
old man !

The husbandman had Nature always with him.

134 VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY vn

He lived with her beauty, and to live with the beauty
of Nature was worth all the fine houses with door-
posts set with tortoise-shell and cornices inlaid with
gold — so Virgil thought. Yet the farmer's son
knew too much of agriculture to imagine that all
was bliss in Arcadia. In the first place, there was
insecurity of tenure with a vengeance. You might
lose your land by sheer confiscation, as Virgil himself
had done ; or you might be shipped off bodily to
the torrid sands of the contemporary Massowah, or,
just as bad, to Britain, " totally separated from the
rest of the world." In that case, even if your home-
stead was not sequestered before you left, ten to one,
if you ever chance to come back, you will find some
brutal soldier in possession of the fields you tilled
with so much love. A strange man meets you with
the words, " These are mine ; get you gone, old
tenants ! " The present of kids which Moeris sends
the new master will neither soften his heart nor will
it carry with it the bad luck which the sender would
very gladly convey with it. Of human redress there
is none, and Virgil does not propose recourse to the
Black Art. He kept the charms, of which he had
an extensive knowledge, for the service of lovers,
who in the Roman provinces and in the Tuscany
weave the self-same incantations in A.D. 1911. Even
the were-wolves, spoken of by the poet, have their
descendants in the Cani guasti which frighten children

vii VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY 135

who go out after dark in Umbria. Virgil was
interested in charms because he had the soul of a
folklorist, but though he believed firmly in dreams
and omens, it may be doubted if he took witchcraft
very seriously. He would have been the first to be
surprised at finding himself converted into a wizard
in the Middle Ages.

Even if left, by a wonder, in peaceful possession
of his farm, Virgil's farmer has still his full share of
cares and ills. He suffers from dishonest farm-
servants ; from the hireling who neglects the flock
because he is a hireling, and who robs the lambs of
the milk which should be theirs. Then he is worried
by cranes and wild geese, and noxious weeds, thistles,
and wild oats, by mildew, wolves, mice, moles, weevils,
and harvesting ants, which, " fearful of an indigent
old age," take a toll upon his store. Also he thinks
that he loses somehow by toads in which he is mis-
taken. Furthermore, drought affects his crops, and
if not drought, then thunderstorms bringing the
horrid hail which rattles and dances on the roof,
and ill can the vine leaves protect the grapes against
it. A tremendous wind blows up, tearing the corn
from the ground and whirling it in the air ; rain
follows, a solid black blank of water which, when it
bursts, washes away the crops, and blots out in a few
minutes the patient toil of the year. Virgil must
have seen that sight often in Northern Italy, where

136 VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY vn

the cold air from the Alps meets the hot exhalations
from the Po in one spot or another, with fearful
consequences, on almost every summer day. No one
can tell what it is who has not seen it. Once, on the
evening of such a storm, all our peasants at Rovato
were eating small birds, sixty of which had been
found killed. Another time, I went to Roccafranca
the day after a temporale which will be remembered
for years ; the factor and his wife described to me
how they had watched the crashing downfall of hail,
consisting of large pieces of jagged ice, for ten
minutes ; not more. Then it ceased, the thunder
grew faint, and they went out to see acres on acres
of hay ready for the scythe ironed as flat as though
a steam-roller had passed over it, while the swelling
wheat-ears, severed with a certain neatness from their
stalks, were scattered in all directions. " We cried,"
they said. It was not their loss, it was ours ; but
they had witnessed the patient human labour
bestowed upon these fields where there would be
no harvest, and the tragedy of the thing struck them
more keenly than it did me. " And the nightin-
gales ? " I asked ; for a pair of nightingales nest
every year close to the house, arriving on the same
day in March. The nightingales, I was told, had
sung all the night as if nothing had happened ; the
dense foliage of the magnolias must have shielded
them.

VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY 137

In the south of Italy such storms rarely occur ;
Virgil's experience of them doubtless dated from his
Mantuan farming days, as he seems to suggest by
the personal note which he brings into the descrip-
tion.

There is much in the Georgics about the
intelligent care needed in cultivating the vines,
though the vine-dresser of those days had not to
be constantly abroad with his sulphur-sprinkler and
with the host of chemical messes on which his
successor depends in striving with diseases then
undreamt of. Nor do the olives appear to have been
subject to the decay (though it is an old disease)
which necessitates lopping and incision, leaving the
tree saved but maimed. The ground round the
trunks was broken up by the plough, but the
practice came in later of enriching it with rags,
unfragrant bales of which, of Oriental origin, disturb
the nerves of the sanitary reformer in his holiday
on the Riviera. What Lucretius so plainly foretold
has come to pass — the virgin soil yielded abundantly
if only scratched, but every generation has a heavier
toil in supplying that which has been taken away.

If the plants of the earth were healthier and more
vigorous in Virgil's time than they are now, no
modern cattle-blight was ever more destructive than
the very horrible rinderpest or influenza recorded in
the third Georgic. Some commentators have thought

138 VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY

that Virgil introduced this episode because Lucretius
had made similar use of the plague of Athens. It
can hardly be doubted, however, that it was based on
the tradition or recollection of a real fact. The
disease took the form of a mysterious malarious
epidemic, coming with unseasonably warm weather,
and affecting even the fishes, as influenza in the first
year of its appearance affected the trout and carpioni
of the Lake of Card a. There is one touch in the
narrative of which every one has felt the pathos
though not every one has recognised the truth — I
mean the reference to the ox that mourns for its
yoke-fellow and loses spirit and pines away. Our
bifolco bears out Virgil's correctness. Nor is it
strange if we come to think of it ; the effect of
sorrow or even of dulness on animals as on savages,
when they feel it, is far more fatal than it is on civilised
man. The many stories of dogs and birds that died
of grief may well be true, as most people can recall
some instance to the point. I knew a parrot which
hopped into the room where its master lay dead (he
was an old French physician) ; after looking at him
for some time, it hopped back again to its perch,
refused food, and in three days was dead. Self-
starvation is not always necessary ; the Maoris die
when they determine that they have lived long
enough, even if forced to eat. There is probably a
psychological state of passive abandonment which

VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY 139

kills very soon, but it is hardly ever reached by man
when he ceases to be primitive, except when his
vitality is lowered by illness and he "gives himself
up for lost " — the results of which every doctor
knows.

Apart from that great epidemic, it would appear
that animals were as liable to suffer then as now.
Life has even, says the poet, entailed our misfortunes
on the bees, of which he gives a deplorable account
in their sick condition. The Georgics is one of the
most faultless of poems ; but perhaps a reader here
and there has privately regretted that so much stress
is laid upon the details of these animal plagues.
But Virgil was resolved not to soften any of the lines
of his picture, not to " retouch " the photograph ; it
was a matter of conscience with him to be sincere.
In spite of these drawbacks he deliberately held that
the proprietor of a moderate-sized estate (he objected
to a large acreage) was a person greatly to be envied.
" Happy the husbandman if he only knew it ! "
Life is best judged by its compensations, and of
compensations, both on the lower and the higher
plane, the agriculturist has more than the followers
of other callings. His work is its own reward. If
Hesiod's cry was " Work, work, work," Virgil added,
" Yes, and in that work you will find the best return
that human existence can give." The poem of the
Georgics is a hymn to labour. If rightly read, we

i4o VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY

see in it also a hymn to patriotism. The old connec-
tion between the love of the land and the love of
our land, which is so near the root of the matter, and
which yet is so far from the thoughts of the town-
bred or nomadic politicians who are inclined to claim
a monopoly of the patriotism of the twentieth
century, was to Virgil an absolutely real fact. Man
in his simplicity gets to love the familiar features of
the landscape round him as he loves the familiar
faces which he saw when he was a child. Then steps
in the reflection, " Here my fathers died, and here
my children will live when I am dead " ; and to this,
again, is added, if he have even the smallest piece
of ground which he calls his own, the immeasurably
strong instinct shared by all creatures, to defend their
own nest, their own lair, against all comers. This
is the beginning of patriotism, and though it may be
called narrow or selfish, it was as good a thing for a
man to think of his country thus as to think of her
as a scantily dressed female figure on a monument.
Virgil himself combined the pride of empire in its
loftiest sense with the strong primitive love of his
birth-land which he had inherited from his yeoman
forefathers. The inspired Vates of the Roman race,
he was yet an Italian first ; he was indeed the first
poet of an United Italy.

" Rich in crops and rich in heroes," so he described
his country, and he was contented to sing of crops

VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY 141

and of heroes. He was quite as serious about the
first as about the last, quite as sure of the majesty
of the argument. He called the husbandman the
prop of the State. The story that he wrote the
Georgics at the request of the Maecenas with the fixed
purpose of attaching retired soldiers to the land
awarded to them is not likely to be true ; but the
appearance of the work was much more than a mere
literary event. Its success was immediate and im-
mense. Augustus had it read to him four times
running. Though Hesiod was venerated by all
generations of Greeks, it is not possible to imagine
him writing his Book of Days in the age of Pericles.
That he was archaic was one reason why they admired
him. It pleased them to picture their remote
ancestors being instructed by the rude old poet in

Ploughing and sowing and rural affairs,
Rural economy, rural astronomy,
Homely morality, labour, and thrift.

But their affection for these excellent things became,
little by little, somewhat platonic. While the
aesthetic aspects of a country life always appealed to
the Greeks they were not wrought (if we accept
Xenophon) to much enthusiasm by its practical
duties. On the other hand, Virgil found an audience
not only ready to admire his work as a great poem,
but also to take a lively interest in it as a farm
manual. Nor has this engrained Italian interest in

i42 VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY

agricultural operations ever died out. There is, for
instance, a month in the year when the most highly
cultured Italians in Lombardy think by day and
dream by night of silkworms. Some years before
his death, I called in June on the doyen of Italian
literature, Cesare Cantu. The delightful old man
greeted me with his charming cordiality, and began
to show me the books which lined his pleasant
apartment in the Via Morigi (Milan) ; but before
long came the inevitable question, " E come vanno i
bachi ? " and literary conversation had to retreat from
the field. Another time I was at Athens at the same
season. I had been conversing with the Italian
Minister about the Acropolis Museum, Eleusis,
Marathon, when he exclaimed with a look of ecstatic
pride, " Come and see my cocoons ! " The " ruling
passion " had induced him to educare (as the Italian
phrase is) a quantity of silkworms in the centre of
Athens, and there were the cocoons, the finest I ever
saw, neatly arranged on tables in the lower quarters
of the Italian Legation. One more modern instance.
At a great reception at Milan the Duchess Melzi
met Count Alfonso Visconti di Saliceto — last direct
descendant of the ruling house of Visconti, and him-
self a survivor of those Lombard aristocrats who
carried their valour to the farthest ends of Italy in
the wars for freedom. Holding out her hand, the
grande dame greeted her old friend with the cryptic

VIRGIL IN THE COUNTRY 143

exclamation, " Settanta-cinque ! " It simply meant
that one ounce of silkworms' eggs purchased from
him had produced seventy -five kilogrammes of
cocoons. The Count said, as he told the story,
" Nothing in the world could have given me so
much pleasure ! "

It was among people who had this sort of unsenti-
mental taste in country concerns that " II cantor dei
bucolici carmi " found an appreciation, not only
fervid, but also intelligent and sympathetically
critical.

VIII
TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM

THE country is the workshop of the many, the
playground of the few. To some it has been and it
will ever be less a playground than a hospital ; the
refuge from all the forms of disillusion : deceived
love, disappointed ambition, political discouragement,
simple ennui. Men fly the tedium of crowds for
solitude, at once narcotic and intoxicant, which sends
the soul to sleep and wakes it to delightful dreams.
Only the hermit in his mountain cell quite knows
the meaning of the word excitement. Such things
were always true, but they were not always rendered
an account of. The poet of antiquity who most
consciously " returned to Nature " to comfort his
sad heart with her healing sights was the Romano di
Roma, the Rome-born Tibullus.

Another poet had taken far from towns the
burden of an infinite sorrow, but not for comfort ;
not even venusta Sirmio could assuage its master's
all too real and too irremediable wound. The heart-

144

TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM 145

ache of Tibullus was also real to him, but it was
self-centred and to a certain degree self- sought,
unless we are to accept the results of temperament
as inevitable. He was haunted by a gentle but
persistent melancholy, which pervades his poetry like
a Leitmotif. Death had less a particular than a
universal meaning for him ; he does not seem to
have felt the sharp edge of any severe loss ; his
father probably died before he was grown up, and
his mother and sister lived to close his eyes. But,
as if in prevision of his own early end, he was for
ever aware of the presence of death, and he made
no Stoical boast of indifference to it — he was very
human. In his happiest time of love his cry is " Let
me behold thee when my last hour is come, let me
hold thee with my dying hand " ; he bids Delia to
his funeral, which, in his imagination, he distinctly
sees. When that was written he was in excellent
health, and was in possession of many of the best
gifts of fate — great talents, a handsome person, hosts
of friends, among whom was Horace, who thought
him particularly fortunate. Though a good deal of
property which he ought to have inherited was
confiscated, he was placed above the need of presents
from patrons, so that he could preserve a perfect
independence in his friendships with men of high
position ; an advantage of which those who had it
not, could, no doubt, keenly appreciate the value.

L

146 TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM

Of external causes for his low spirits two have been
discerned : the infidelities of the woman he loved
and could not help loving, knowing well her un-
worthiness, and, again, the soreness he felt as an
aristocratic Roman patriot at the downfall of freedom,
in which he drew no consolation from the larger
vision of a great Italy that shone on Virgil's pro-
phetic eyes. But if those things helped to give him
a distaste for the world, the secret of his melancholy
must be chiefly looked for in a mind without
ambition, almost without aspirations ; full of vague
regrets, wide sympathies, aesthetic sensibilities ; prone
to self-analysis, impressed with a sense of surrounding
mystery, but not with the desire to penetrate it.
Tibullus was the child of a tired age, of a century
sick with many of the intellectual maladies of our
own.

The principal part of the property remaining to
him lay at a place called Pedum, on the spurs of the
Apennines (not far from Palestrina), where the poet
had spent much of his childhood. The situation is
still delightful, and then presented a pleasant mixture
of cultivated land and woods. At this Pedum farm
he gained the intimate knowledge of peasant-folk
which enabled him to draw a series of country scenes
that combine the pious beauty of Millet with some-
thing of the crude humour of Teniers. Take one
of these, the forecast of a prosperous year. Laurel

vin TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM 147

boughs crackle in the sacred fire, and farmers rejoice
and thus interpret the omen : granaries will be full,
and the vats not large enough to contain the wine
when the rustic has trodden out the grapes and
sated himself with the sweet inebriating must. New
children will be born, and the little boy, the treasure
of the house, will catch his father's ears and kiss
him ; nor will the old grandfather tire of watching
his little grandson and prattling with the child in
broken words. It is strange that before the coming
of the master-teacher of "Tart d'etre grandpere,"
the two poets who best understood the charms of
babyhood were two young bachelors — Catullus and
Tibullus.

The rustics of Tibullus are not impossible
innocents, but it is with a tolerant eye that he
observes their excesses. He is more amused than
shocked when they take more than is good for
them. Once, indeed, he gives a little word of
reproof. The incident is in this wise : a peasant
owner goes with his wife and children to a picnic in
the Holy Grove. They have a " real good time " ;
prayers to the gods are succeeded by a feast al fresco,
and nothing occurs to mar their enjoyment. But
when the dusk comes and they drive back in the
cart, thoroughly tired as workers so easily are with
pleasure, the peasant, being not very sober, begins
to disagree with his wife. After they get home the

148 TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM

quarrel thickens ; spiteful words are bandied to and
fro, the wife has her ears boxed, and, alas ! her locks
cut of. Then she cries, and in the end he cries, too,
to see the work of his mad hands :

We fell out, my wife and I,
And kissed again with tears.

A satisfactory ending ; but, says Tibullus, how
much better it would have been to have only pulled
her hair down and not to have cut it off!

The most touching rites of rural piety were those
connected with the humble family worship of the
paternal Lares — the souls of the righteous departed
who were appointed or permitted to watch over the
living. How the Italian people clung to a belief in
a present and familiar guardian — one who had lived
on earth and who could sympathise with their small
necessities — may be still seen in the niche with an
image over the cottage door, or the shrine with a
picture in the corner of the cornfield. If the
peasant is extremely prosperous, a white cloth edged
with lace, which hangs down in front, is placed
before the picture or image, and on the cloth stand
two high-backed vases containing artificial flowers.
If the worshipper is very poor, the flowers are
real, and a disused meat-tin, picked up out of the
road, serves for a vase. The florid visage of the
Australian ox on the label looks down, not alto-

via TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM 149

gether incongruously, from many such a rustic
altar.

The attitude of the peasant's mind to his Lares is
transparently clear ; but what was that of the mind
of a highly cultivated man like Tibullus, who
belonged to a society which was rapidly ceasing to
believe at all, even in the august Immortals? It
might be difficult to find an analogy in Italy, but it
can be easily found in Russia. The educated Russian
who has travelled, feels the same for the family Icon
as the Roman poet felt for the family Lares. He
feels, in the first place, that this is an institution
connected with the sacred ties of kinship and even
with national life and sentiment ; that such an institu-
tion is very touching and interesting and is much more
worthy of encouragement than of contempt ; that,
for the rest, if there be a Power that hears, all
aspirations and the peasant's humblest sacrifice will
find their way to It — sa -prihe satt plus longue que
lui ; that, lastly, there is such a thing as Luck, and
the Icon brings luck, never mind how. This point
of view is sincere, within its limits quite as sincere as
some graver assumptions of belief. It is, moreover,
a matter of common observation that Aberglaube
flourishes at the time when serious religious con-
victions are increasingly shaken.

It was to the paternal Lares, at whose feet he ran
about as a child, that Tibullus's thoughts travelled

150 TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM vm

when he was starting to accompany his friend and
captain, Messala, in the expedition between the
Garonne and the "rapid Rhone." It was to them
that he addressed the simple prayer to be preserved
in the hour of battle. "Be it no shame," he said,
" that you are fashioned out of an old trunk, for
even so you inhabited the abode of my old
grandfather. The men of those days kept better
faith when a wooden idol stood in a small shrine and
received poor offerings. The deity was propitiated
if one gave it a libation from the new vintage or set
a crown of corn-ears on its sacred head. Whoever
had had his wishes fulfilled, carried offerings to the
god with his own hand, followed by a little girl
bearing fine honeycomb " (Kelly). If he escape,
he too will honour the Lares ; a pig shall be offered
up to them, which he will follow clad in white and
crowned with myrtle. And then he inveighs against
the horrors and stupidity of war, with the open
disgust of a man who could prove himself not only
brave, but exceptionally valorous, on occasion. Let
others make a boast of martial deeds : it is enough
for him to listen, as he drinks, to the stories told by
the garrulous old soldier, who traces his camp on the
table with his finger dipped in red wine. What folly
it is to seek death in war ; is it not always near,
approaching with noiseless feet ? In the next lines
we seem to hear not only the note of Tibullus's

TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM 151

sadness but the sigh of all antiquity at the gate of
death : " There are no fields of harvest below, no
cultivated vineyards, but fierce Cerberus and the
Stygian ferry-boat. A pale crowd, with fleshless
chaps and burnt hair, wander by the gloomy
marsh."

How much to be preferred to military glory is the
lot of the man who grows old in his cottage, with
his children round him ! He follows his sheep, his
son looks after the lambs, and when he comes home
tired, his wife prepares warm water to refresh him.
" May such a lot be mine ! " Tibullus had his
prayers fulfilled so far that he escaped scatheless, and
with no little glory, from the Aquitanian campaign,
in which he served Messala as aide-de-camp,
but the year after, when on his way to Asia with
the same commander, he fell ill with a fever at Corfu,
that undermined his once strong constitution. One
of his most beautiful elegies was written when the
fever was at its worst and he had almost abandoned
hope. What had he done to merit death ? He had
hurt no one, nor had he spoken "mad blasphemies
against the gods." His hair was black, and creep-
ing age had not come upon him. Unlike many
ancient poets, Tibullus did not hate old age ; he
had a tender wish to grow old and to relate the
events of his youth to the young. He begs his
friends to offer up sacrifices for his recovery, and

152 TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM vm

whether he lives or dies, at least to remember
him.

Tibullus minutely describes the Ambarvalia or
Spring Festival, when the fields were purified, a
ceremony resembling the blessing of the field and of
the beasts which is still in force under the religion
whose Founder was born twenty-six years after this
elegy was written. The rite, says Tibullus, had been
handed down to them from the old time, and it was
good and seemly to perform it. After the work of
the year comes this solemn day of rest ; it is a
Sabbath for all, the furrows rest, the ploughman rests,
the unharnessed oxen rest, with garlanded heads,
before their full manger ; the woman puts not her
hand to the spindle. The holy lamb is led to the
altar, followed by the folk wearing crowns of olive.
The greater deities are then invoked, Bacchus with
his grapes, Ceres with her corn-ears : " Gods of our
native land, we purify our fields, we purify our hinds;
repel, ye gods, all evils from our boundaries. Let
not our crops cheat the labours of the harvest with
deceitful blades nor the slow-footed lamb fear the
swift wolves. Then the sleek rustic, cheered by the
plenteousness of his fields, will heap large logs on the
blazing hearth ; and a crowd of born thralls, a good
sign of a thriving farmer, will sport, and erect
bowers of twigs before the altar."

Another interpretation of the words given here

vni TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM 153

as u bowers of twigs " is that they mean " baby-
houses " made in play by the slave children of the
house. Dark as is the blot of slavery upon ancient
civilisation, one is always being reminded that the
slaves (especially those who, like these children, were
born on the estate) were well cared for, and, as a
rule, kindly treated.

Tibullus praises the rural gods for having
instructed men in all the arts of peace : how first to
cover the little log-hut with thatch, how to break oxen
for the plough, how to put wheels to the cart. And
he praises the husbandman for having been the first
civiliser, the first to graft the apple, to irrigate the
garden, to press out the juices of the golden grape,
even to invent the elements of music and poetry.
It is well to notice how usually the ploughman, not
the shepherd, is the central figure in the Latin poetry
of the country ; it was more bucolic than pastoral.
Thus Tibullus points to the labourer as he who first
sang rustic words in determinate measure to relieve
him from the weariness of his long toil at the plough.
It was the labourer, too, who began to compose airs
to the oaten pipe in the rest-time after meals, which,
on the proper days, he sang to the garlanded images
of the gods. The Roman peasant is not here repre-
sented as piping to his divinities ; but pipers were
very early employed in the temples, perhaps soon
after the introduction of the pipe from Asia. They

154 TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM v,,,

seem to have been also engaged to attend funerals ;
Augustus cut down the number that might be so
employed to ten, and forbade the pipers to eat in the
temples. This led to a sort of strike ; the pipers
left Rome in a body, but were brought back by a
stratagem, which is related by Livy and Ovid.
When they reappeared they were masked, to which
Ovid ascribes the origin of people " wearing strange
dresses and chanting merry sayings to old-fashioned
airs on the Ides of June," practices suggestive of the
Carnival. With regard to piping in the temples, it
would be interesting to know whether the custom of
the Abruzzi peasants of playing on fife and bagpipe
before the shrines of the Madonna (as they used to
do during the Christmas week at Rome) does not
date back to some prae-Christian practice. These
rude musicians have handed their art down from
father to son from time immemorial, till it has
become an instinct with them to throw a devotional
meaning into their wild notes which even the human
voice rarely succeeds in expressing.

Tibullus recalls how, of old, the villagers assembled
once a year to sing the praise of Bacchus, when the
leader of the best chorus or the best individual singer
received a goat as a " not-to-be-despised reward."
This tends to show that the "goat-prize" theory
was the one in favour at that date to account for
the word " tragedy."

viu TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM 155

In spite of his criticism of war, the poet had more
than once a thought of returning to the camp, the
only active life open to one who preserved a haughty
detachment from the politics of the day, giving no
word either of eulogy or blame to that head of the
State whom his brother poets were saluting as divine.
Sometimes, without doubt, a secret voice whispered
to him that he was meant for a nobler part than that
of pouring out upon worthless objects the treasures
of a love which could not help forgiving. But the
personal ambition or impersonal enthusiasm that
might have spurred him to sustained action was
lacking ; he knew his weakness perfectly ; he turned
himself inside out and examined the contents with a
half-contemptuous smile. In theory he always held
to the same rule of life — to enjoy while you may,
while there is time :

Be merry ! Sec, the steeds of night advance,
And yellow stars enweave their wanton dance ;

After them, silent Sleep with sombre wings
And dreams of dark, mysterious countenance.

But like the Persian poet, of whom he often
reminds us, he knows only too well that a light heart
is not to be had for the asking. Those dark dreams
of his, which were probably a real experience, as he
more than once alludes to them, cast their shadow
over his most sunlit waking hours.

So we leave this Roman knight, taking a last look

156 TIBULLUS AT HIS FARM

VIII

at his handsome form as, in a simple dress, fore-
stalling Tolstoi's Levine (and Tolstoi himself) by
two thousand years, he followed the ploughing oxen,
or turned up the soil with a fork, or carried home
a strayed lamb in his bosom.

IX
OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD

INTELLIGENT children, who are always impressed by
the vague terror and majesty of Scandinavian
mythology, are seldom attracted by the more definite
and circumscribed myths of Greece and Rome.
They consider them wanting in seriousness, a grave
defect to the childish mind. They put them aside
as dead and cold. There are accomplished scholars
who have given years of patient study to the
elucidation of these myths and who yet end where
the children end ; though they know the most minute
details about the outward dress of Greek legends,
the soul utterly escapes them. Not all the learning
of the Schools can help so much to reveal the inner
meaning of the ancient stories as a few summer days
spent in a Greek island, where we sit among the
asphodel and walk in glades of olives which ascend
by solemn aisles from sea to mountain-top. There
we may gain the comprehension which is not thought
but feeling. Poets have sometimes gained it without

158 OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD ,x

any such help by the light that is within them — the
light of imagination. But the plain man who has
not that gift cannot do better than to take his classics
to the Mediterranean ; for instance, to Benizza, in
the island of Corfu, the spot which to the present
writer more than any spot till now visited in Hellas,
or Sicily, or Magna Graecia, realised the youth of
the world,

. . . when God
By man as godlike trod.

To be taught all that such a place can teach we must
be alone. No human voice must break upon the
silence, which is so complete that the chirp of an
insect or the note of a bird seems to have the volume
of a full orchestra. There we may read, or more
wisely recall in our minds without reading, a book
Latin in tongue but mainly Greek in inspiration, the
Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidius Naso. And if the
noonday sun give us the desire to sleep, our dreams
will be peopled by a fairy masque of gracious living
creatures : Daphne the laurel, Cadmus and Hermione
the gentle snakes, Arachne the spider, Narcissus
youth and flower, Progne the swallow, Cyane the
fountain, Galatea the summer sea, Naiad and Dryad,
dancing faun and flute-playing satyr, what are they
but materialised impressions, the truth of which can
never change ?

The primitive man did not seek to inquire into or

ix OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD 159

to explain natural phenomena, but to give a local
habitation and a name to the emotions which those
phenomena called forth in him. The great appear-
ances and operations of Nature, the sun and moon,
the progression of the seasons, the alternation of day
and night, he associated with supernatural forces
which could command him, but which he could not
command, although he might in some measure
propitiate them. For these he felt admiration
deepening into fear. On the other hand, the in-
numerable and familiar manifestations of Nature
with which he was brought into immediate contact
inspired him with another sentiment, which may be
summed up in the word fellowship. He was inclined
to view life as a continual shaking up of being into
new kaleidoscopic pictures, a general interchange of
parts that present new forms while retaining their
original elements. According to this theory, not
only animals, but trees, flowers, rivers, rocks become
pregnant with personality. Man did not cut himself
adrift from the other species or from inanimate
objects. He reached by intuition the idea of the
unity of Nature, to which all modern science tends ;
only, as has been said, in developing that idea he
depended not on reason but on emotion.

Nothing is more natural than that the primitive
mind should have supposed a close kinship between
all forms of life ; but if we think over it, we shall

160 OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD «

always see a kind of mystery in its inability to dis-
tinguish between life and no life, its unconsciousness
of that ultimate gulf which seems so absolutely
impassable to our average intelligence, and before
which the hardiest man of science still stands doubt-
ing. This is a point on which backward races throw
a great deal of light. A recent observer states, for
instance, that to the Indian of South America " all
objects, animate and inanimate, seem exactly of the
same nature, except that they differ in the accident
of bodily form." Again, it is quite sure that children
are constantly lapsing into ignorance of the existence
of any hard and fast line of division. A little girl
may know that her doll does not feel, but she believes
that it does feel ; her knowledge resting on the
assertions of persons whose word she is accustomed
to accept, while her belief rests on an instinct, old as
man, to think spirit or spiritual powers into matter.
To the brief announcement of a child's death from
burning during a very cold winter, the newspapers
added, " She was warming her doll." Poor little
martyr ! I myself recollect the anguish exhibited by
an Italian peasant child during an operation performed
on her doll ; to adjust an injured limb the scissors
had to be used and at every snip the child, who was
nevertheless trying to control her feelings, turned
white as marble and uttered a stifled sob. What she
thought I do not know, but she felt instinctively that

the doll was suffering pain. An identical instinct is
at the bottom of all fetichism, image-worship and
magic, whether black or white, in which matter is
employed as a vehicle.

Ovid's Metamorphoses and in a less degree his
Fasti are valuable not only as story-books and poems,
but as documents for the history of ideas. Ovid was
a collector of traditions on a vast scale. He had
an incomparable knowledge of legends, prejudices,
customs, rites ; if he embellished more than the
Folk-lore Society would strictly approve, there is
reason to think that he never invented. His own
state of mind in reference to the stories he retold
probably varied from that of the pious Catholic who
relates the pretty tale of St. Francis and the wolf to
that of the legend-loving sceptic who eagerly seizes
on the fable of St. Martha and the Tarrasque. The
former abstains from negation ; he even wishes to
believe and very likely he succeeds. The latter
re-echoes Voltaire's regretful lines :

On court, helas ! apres la verite ;

Ah ! croyez-moi, 1'erreur a son merite.

Ovid wrote at a time when the mania for everything
Greek had touched its high-water mark in Rome, and
he was influenced by the prevailing taste, but even
more, it may be guessed, by his own travels in Greece
and Sicily, still an entirely Greek land, though a
Roman conquest. He drank in the Greek spirit

M

1 62 OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD »

at its source, a spirit partly, but never wholly,
acclimatised among the people of Italy. When he
was miserably languishing in exile he fondly looked
back to his journeys over azure waves and to his
sojourn in Sicily, not far from the twin springs,
Anapus and Cyane : " Here a large portion of the
passing year was spent by me. Alas ! how unlike is
that region to the Getic land ! "

Ovid was almost morbidly affected by climate and
natural surroundings. He had that nostalgia of the
South from which Southern Italians, including those
who are only partially educated, suffer severely when
obliged to live even in the north of Italy. A cook
from the south, who had gone to a place near Udine,
wrote to me that he was going to leave his situation ;
he had nothing to complain of in his master and
mistress, but the " paese " was " totally impossible to
live in." It is not that their health generally suffers ;
they can bear the cold well ; it is their spirits that
give way. Ovid writes from Tomi (which was
somewhere on the Black Sea) that he is sorry to have
offended the inhabitants by what he has said about
their country ; they have been always kind and
hospitable, but how can they expect him to praise
their climate ? It makes even health hateful to him ;
all the year round it is cold ; spring brings no
flowers, nor does summer see " the naked bodies of
the reapers " ; the soil yields chiefly wormwood ;

ix OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD 163

there are no singing birds, except, perhaps, in the
distant forest ; what streams there are, are of
brackish water.

Of his own birthplace, Sulmo, he preserved the
tenderest memories. It was a small place, but healthy,
with a wonderful wealth of running streams, which
kept it fresh and green in the August heats. These
rivulets were also used for artificial irrigation.
Sulmo yielded corn, but the grape was its chief
produce, the vines being supported by elms and
trained in garlands from tree to tree in the manner
that still gives all that district and the neighbourhood
of Naples an air of superb luxuriance in the vintage
season, the only right time for visiting the South of
Italy. Ovid recommended an active interest in
agriculture as the best " remedy for love." What
healthier occupation for mind and body than to
watch the ploughing and sowing, the goats on the
rocks and the bees on the yews ; or better still, to
use the spade ourselves in planting the well-watered
garden and the pruning knife in grafting fruit-trees ?
He may have played at grafting in his orchards
near Rome, but in spite of his good advice, he
leaves us suspecting that he was less of a practical
agriculturist than a dreamer of dreams among the
woods and brooks. We fancy him roving as a
pensive boy to whom trees and flowers and all kinds
of creatures told their secrets.

1 64 OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD ,x

He was always putting himself into the place of
plants and animals, and thinking how one would
think in their position. This was evidently a habit
of mind with him, not a mere storyteller's device.
Probably he was quite young when he wrote the
long poem expressive of the feelings of a walnut-tree,
which has sometimes been supposed to be a veiled
satire, but without any good reason. The un-
fortunate walnut-tree, growing as it does by the side
of the road, sees its young fruit pelted with a hail-
storm of stones by horrid boys, who use the nuts to
play games, several of which Ovid describes. The
tree is hurt by cruel wounds that mutilate its
branches, and by injuries to its bark which leave the
wood bare. Instead of having its fruit gathered in
due season and stored by the thrifty wife of the
husbandman, it beholds its produce scattered, unripe
and worthless, on the ground. What business
have people to inflict such treatment on a respectable
tree which yields both fruit and shade ?

In the Treatise on Fishes, said to have been
written towards the end of his life at Tomi, Ovid
points out that all animals have a vague dread of an
unknown death, against which they defend themselves,
if they are strong, by their superior strength ; if
they are weak, by expedients and stratagems such as
that of the octopus of assuming the colour of the
place where it lies. No one seems to have given

ix OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD 165

Ovid the credit of observing this habit of" protective
coloration," on which Darwin and all recent
naturalists place so much stress. With the same
sympathetic penetration, he declares — and who will
deny it ? — that the horse that wins the race is
perfectly aware of his victory. Does he not hold his
head much higher than the others when he is led
forth to receive the applause of the crowd ? l

Ovid's love of animals is characteristically shown
in his elegy on Corinna's parrot. Perhaps he wrote
the elegy because Catullus had written a lament on
Lesbia's sparrow, but we are almost persuaded that
Ovid shed a real tear over the parrot, while one
suspects that Catullus left the weeping to Lesbia.
How affectionately he recalls its friendship with the
turtle-dove ; such a friendship exists at the present
time between a parrot and a white pigeon dwelling
at Sorrento. And how kindly the poet would
believe, " if there is any believing in matters of
doubt," that there is a blest abode for innocent
feathered souls in the world beyond, where the parrot
will make the birds wonder and admire by speaking
human words. Here on earth what love can do for
him has been done ; " a grave as little as his body
covers his bones."

The belief in an interchange of parts between

1 A horse which ran in the riderless races once popular in Tuscany, always
kicked its competitors when nearing the goal j by this means it won many
races.

1 66 OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD ix

man and beast, whether by the regular process of
the transmigration of souls, or by the violent one of
the working of an arbitrary spell, must modify the
thoughts, if not the conduct, of men in respect to
animals. We know, as a matter of fact, that it does
largely modify both thoughts and conduct. It does
not make men always humane ; but no one who
held it would say that he may beat his donkey, perche
non t cristiano, " because it is not a human being,"
for that is the meaning of cristiano in the peasant
speech of Italy. " Spare the snake, sir, it too has
but one little life," said the Indian servant to his
English master, who was attacking a cobra. Ovid,
naturally pitiful, was quick to seize this point of view
(though he might have drawn a line at cobras). He
saw that arguments could be deduced from the
doctrine of metamorphosis against animal sacrifices,
for which he felt a strong repugnance. Some poets
of the Greek Anthology touched lightly on the same
subject ; but Ovid returns to it persistently. We
cannot help asking whether the Roman priesthood
could have heard a fundamental institution of
orthodoxy so openly attacked without becoming
hostile to the raiser of such inconvenient questions.

If some blood must be spilt, Ovid would have the
" idle swine " pay the cost. The sow rooted up the
young corn with her snout and thus offended
Ceres ; the goat, also, had misbehaved by nibbling

ix OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD 167

the vine-tendrils. " But what didst thou, O ox, and
what did ye, O gentle sheep, to deserve a like fate ? "
In another place Ovid partly throws the sheep over-
board ; a sheep, he says, was guilty of eating up the
consecrated plants (rosemary, myrtle, tamarisk)
which a good old woman had been accustomed to
sacrifice to the rural deities. But he is faithful to
the ox, the animal which should be held sacred by
man, since it ploughs his fields. " Take the knife
far from the ox ; a neck fitted for the yoke ought
not to be smitten by the axe. Let him live, and
many a time may he labour on the hard soil."

In the last book of the Metamorphoses Pytha-
goras is made to ask, " How can you kill for food
the lowing calf, or the kid that cries like a child,
or the bird that has fed out of your hand? " This
plea is one of simple humanity, but the philosopher
reinforces it by urging that in the body of any slain
beast may have dwelt the soul of your father, your
brother, or, at least, of man. Ovid is delighted to
be able to bring a character on the scene who can
argue thus. We are not told, however, that Sulmo's
poet was a vegetarian. Was he then insincere ?
Not more so than we all are to-day or to-morrow.
In our dual lives our real self lives rather in what
we feel and do not, than in what we do and
feel not.

The prettiest episode in the pretty story of

1 68 OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD «

" Philemon and Baucis " was certainly an embellish-
ment due to Ovid's tender heart. The story itself,
though its origin has never been traced, was no
doubt traditional ; it is a variant of the class that
deals with receiving divine visitors unawares, a class
as old as Homer and as modern as the beautiful
mediaeval legends in which the visitor is Christ. In
the light of a description of humble life, " Philemon
and Baucis " is not to be surpassed ; it will bear to be
told once again.

Jupiter and Mercury in the shape of men craved
admittance at a thousand doors, but every one was
bolted against them. Then they came to a very
small cottage, thatched with straw and reeds. A
pious old woman and her old husband had lived here
since first in youth they were united, and made their
poverty light by sharing it. It was the same thing
if you asked for masters or servants ; the whole
household was but two. When the heavenly guests
knocked at this door they were made kindly welcome.
Baucis, the old wife, kindled the embers, and set a
pipkin on the fire full of herbs from their carefully
watered garden ; her husband meanwhile cut off a
little piece from the rusty side of bacon which hung
from the beam. Warm water was offered to the
guests to refresh their limbs, and a couch was spread
with those coarse cloths which were yet kept " for
best " and generally stowed away. Baucis busied

about the house as fast as her trembling old body
would go ; she steadied the broken leg of the table
by putting a potsherd under it, and then began to
place the repast before the guests. For gwtatio or
hors-d'atrvres, fragrant wild berries, radishes, curdled
milk and eggs cooked in the embers (the uova sudate
of the Lombard peasant) ; for piece de resistance,
bacon and boiled herbs ; for dessert, dried figs, nuts,
dates, plums, apples, grapes, and white honeycomb.
Each course was served with welcoming looks which
told of no lurking niggard feeling or indifference.

The wine, too, had been poured out and the old
couple remarked that the goblet into which they
poured it refilled of itself as soon as it was emptied.
When this had happened once or twice, they began
to feel (especially Philemon) frightened out of their
wits. The modesty of the unprepared entertainment
they had given to visitors who could cause such a
singular occurrence dismayed them to the last degree,
and by a simultaneous impulse they ran in search of
the single goose that guarded their cottage. But
their legs were slow with age and its wings were
swift, and, after a keen pursuit, the bird flew straight
towards the Immortals, who commanded that it
should be spared. So Ovid made a present to Jove
of the kindliest trait ever recorded of him.

The gods led their humble friends up a safe hill,
and then submerged the inhospitable village, sparing

170 OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD »

only their cottage, which was transformed into a
beautiful temple. When the old couple were asked
what boon they desired, they replied that they only
wished to serve their divine guests as priests in the
temple while they lived, and when their hour came,
to die together. So it was ; for, after a long life, as
one turned into an oak the other became a lime tree,
and they had no pain of parting, neither did one look
upon the other's tomb. How much truer and more
touching is this conclusion than that which an
inferior storyteller would have resorted to, and which
actually figures in some modern versions of the story,
namely, the transformation of Philemon and Baucis
into young people !

Anecdotes of humble but generous hospitality
were once so popular because such incidents were
within the experience of every traveller. Even now
it is not needful to go far from the beaten track in
order to match the old stories with new ones. If
you have been talking to a Montenegrin peasant by
the wayside, he will probably ask you, with his grand
air, to step into his house to take coffee, and in
Greece there is hardly a cottage where the stranger
would not be made welcome. Indeed, the ill-luck
of the gods in meeting with closed doors is rather
surprising. The same thing once happened to me,
though through nobody's fault. A friend and I were
benighted on the Col di Barranca ; between one and

ix OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD 171

two o'clock in the morning our light failed and we
knocked at every building we could discern in the
almost complete darkness with the hope of getting it
renewed. I cannot forget the dreary effect of
receiving no response. It was in the late autumn,
and these buildings, occupied by herdsmen in
summer, were one and all deserted.

Resembling the story of Philemon and Baucis in
some respects, but varied with delicate art, is Ovid's
telling of the peasant hospitality given to Ceres
during her search for Proserpine. Ovid treated the
legend of Proserpine twice at considerable length ;
in the Fasti and afterwards, with greater skill, in
the Metamorphoses. The most romantic of all
classic myths, it attracted him by its appeal to human
sympathies, its swift movement, and its picturesque-
ness. What scene ever made so charming a picture
as that of Proserpine and her girl companions in the
meads of Enna ? The Greek genius which invented
so many things, invented the type of joyous, healthy,
active girlhood, fearless and fancy free, which nearly
went out of the world till it came back with Shake-
speare. Ovid could see the beauty of that type, and
his maidens hurry and scurry in their innocent sport,
full of true life and careless rapture ; this one
plucking marigolds, that one wild hyacinths, others
amaranth and thyme and rosemary and many a
nameless flower, while she, the fairest, gathers the

172 OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD ,x

fragile crocus and white lilies. Girls and flowers,
which are most a part of Nature ?

Ceres, after she misses Proserpine, goes through
the whole island asking if any one has seen a girl
passing. When it gets dark, she crosses over to
Greece and lands at Eleusis, the name of which,
meaning " an arrival," still recalls her coming.
There lie the ruins of the temple where her mysteries
were celebrated, to the eye some of the least striking
remains in Greece, but powerfully suggestive to the
mind. The inverted torches on the broken columns
tell us of those with which the goddess lighted her-
self through that night journey. Eleusis, then,
according to Ovid, was nothing but the farm of the
old man Celeus, who, in the Greek version, was a
king ; but Ovid understood that poetic effect would
gain by giving him a humble station.

Ceres meets this old peasant, who is carrying home
acorns and blackberries and dry logs to feed his fire.
His little daughter drives two goats down the
mountain side. At home his baby lies sick in the
cradle. The little girl asks the goddess, who has
assumed the form of an old woman, " What are you
doing here, mother, all alone in the hills ? " How
the word " mother " pierces her heart ! The old
man begs her to rest under his poor roof; at first
she refuses ; then she yields to his prayer. " How
much happier are you than I, who have lost my

ix OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD 173

daughter ! " she says. But she discovers that her
good old host has also his troubles ; the house is in
mourning, his little son now lies past hope of
recovery. Then the divine visitor kisses the child
on its mouth, and the colour conies back to the white
cheeks and strength to the wasted body. All the
household rejoices, father, mother, and little sister,
for they are all the household.

The tale of the commonest grief and gladness was
never more feelingly told.

A good deal may be gleaned from Ovid's works
about rural ceremonies and beliefs which were
peculiar to Italy. On the Calends of May fell the
festival of Pales, goddess of the shepherds, who was
unknown in Greece. One of the customs connected
with it was the time-honoured and long-surviving
rite of jumping over or through the fire. The sheep-
folds were garlanded ; a fire made of rosemary, pitch-
tree, laurel, and Sabine herbs brightly cackled on the
hearth, millet cakes and warm milk are offered to
Pales, who is begged to protect the cattle and those
that tend them ; to pardon trespasses and short-
comings ; to mediate with the higher powers ; to
drive away disease from men and flocks and from the
dogs also, and to give plenty through the year.

Another peculiarly Latin folk-worship was that of
the Lares. The Greeks who, at least in towns, did
little more than sleep at home, could not have

174 OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD »

entered into the intense Roman sentiment of the
hearth. In Ovid's time the Lares became established
and endowed ; he says that there were a thousand at
the street corners in Rome, where Augustus had set
them up in company with his own genius, appointing
a body of priests to look after their worship. His
encouragement of this domestic and hitherto purely
popular superstition is characteristic of his policy in
religious matters. The Lares held their own at the
Crossways till they were rather succeeded than ousted
by Christian saints. Ovid mentions that the original
Lares were represented with a dog, the typical house-
guardian, at their feet ; and he makes the observa-
tion that " Crossways are dear to dogs as well as to
deities."

Again, the Ffoe des Marts was an essentially Roman
observance. Ovid will not condemn costly offerings
to the dead, but it is plain that he prefers the little
simple, rustic gifts of faithful love :

C'est 1'offrande des moindres choses
Qai rec^le le plus d'amour.

A wreath laid upon the tomb, scattered fruits, a few
grains of salt, corn soaked in wine, and the earliest
violets, with these the dead are content. It is said,
remarks Ovid, that departed forefathers have been
known to revenge themselves in a disagreeable way
for neglect on the part of their ungrateful descendants,
but upon that he expresses his own incredulity.

ix OVID AND THE NATURAL WORLD 175

It is his way to pick and choose between what to
accept and what to reject of the traditional lore of
which he had so vast a knowledge. He shrinks from
the idea of human sacrifice, and he therefore will not
accept it as accounting for the curious Roman custom
of throwing thirty images of old men stuffed with
rushes into the Tiber. The act was performed by
the Vestal Virgin from the Sublician bridge. Ovid
would refer it to the wish of some wholly imaginary
Greeks to have their bodies committed to the Tiber,
so that its stream might bear them homewards.
Thus, in the Middle Ages the dwellers on the Rhone
placed their unattended dead in the river, which bore
them to the sacred Alyscamp. In spite, however,
of this confirmation of the possible correctness of
Ovid's theory, there is very little doubt that the
Roman old men had a sacrificial significance. They
probably belonged to the family of puppets still, here
and there, devoted to fiery or watery elements (as the
North Italian Vecchia of Mid-Lent), all of which are
remotely reminiscent of immensely ancient rites of
propitiation to the genius either of growth or of
fruition.

X

THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA

THE summer palace of some Oriental king should be
considered, perhaps, the first villa : such a palace as
the Generalife must have been, in the days of its
splendour, a dream of fair women, bulbuls, and roses.
But in the more modest though still delightful
modern sense, the country pleasure-house is a dis-
tinctly Roman invention. The villa of the private
citizen could not have become an institution any-
where unless good and secure roads made access to it
easy. This condition was fulfilled under the Roman
government to an extent which must seem surprising
when we think of the frequent civil convulsions
which flooded Italy with dispossessed peasants and
disbanded soldiers. The roads were generally safe
and almost always good. It was not dangerous to
live in an isolated house, though no doubt it was
common to have not less than two or three families
of free peasants or slaves either lodged in a wing of
the master's dwelling or close by it. Thus the villa

176

x THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 177

became possible, but it was the idiosyncrasy of the
race that caused it to develop into an established
feature of Roman life. The Greek would never
have been able to understand the Roman citizen's
need of rural retirement.

It was probably well back in republican times
that the Roman began to look upon a house out of
town as rather a necessity than a luxury. As wealth
increased and with it restlessness, the custom of
having two or three houses became more and more
general. Lucretius describes, with his fine irony,
the man of fashion who, terribly bored in his splendid
town mansion, sets off suddenly for his villa as if it
were on fire and he going to put it out ; but when
he arrives there he begins at once to yawn or goes to
sleep, or even re-orders the horses and returns in an
equal hurry to the city. By the Augustan age the
two or three villas had grown to be five or six in the
case of rich and fashionable people, and they were
often as elaborate in their appointments as the house
in town. In other instances they preserved most of
the original simplicity of the farm-house. Horace,
for his own time, and Martial and Pliny the Younger,
for the later period of Trajan, give us abundant in-
formation about both kinds of Roman villeggiatura.

If Virgil remained always a man of the country,
in spite of living mostly in cities, no amount of
country life could make Horace other than a man-

N

1 78 THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA x

about-town. When he speaks of the country it is
not as Virgil or as Tibullus spoke of it ; he knows
nothing of Nature's mysteries, nothing of the eternal
sentiment of the field-tilling, nothing of the religion
of the plough. He is not one of the initiated, but
he enjoys and, within his limitations, he appreciates.
The country is good for his health and for his
appetite. It gives him a rest from the hundred
thousand requests and questions with which he is
importuned as he walks the streets of Rome. The
friend of Maecenas is supposed to be able to arrange
any little affair, to know all the news before it is
divulged ; in vain he pleads inability or ignorance.
It was all very flattering, and Horace is the last
person not to be flattered by it, but too much of it
becomes tedious. The whole day goes by frittered
away in trifles, and on such days he ardently desires
his rural retreat where sleep and leisure and the
Greek poets fill up the tranquil hours and the
evening brings a supper fit for the gods — beans and
bacon, washed down by wholesome wine, which costs
nothing since it is made on the estate. A friend or
two, staying in the house, enliven the board, but the
discourse does not run on other people's houses, or
on somebody's dancing ; serious themes are discussed,
such as the nature of good, and what constitutes true
happiness ; till, for a break, an old neighbour tells
the story of " The Town and Country Mouse," or

THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 179

some other ever-young ancient tale. When Maecenas
was going to dine with him, Horace told him he
must not expect Falernian or Formian vintages ;
there would be only the humble Sabian wine which
he had sealed up in a Grecian cask with his own
hands, in commemoration of some popular triumph
of the illustrious friend to whose generosity he owed
the estate where it was grown.

The poet preferred the rusticity of the Sabine
farm to the Rome-out-of-town life at Tibur, where
he also had a villa. Tibur in the season provided
more society than the capital itself; people ran to
and fro between the houses of acquaintances as they
do between the villas on the Lake of Como. In the
Sabine valley the real business of the country occupied
every one around, if not altogether the poet. In
one ode he laments that there will be soon no real
country ; mansions and parks and ornamental waters
replace simple cottages like his own " white country-
box " ; banks of myrtle and violets encroach on the
olive groves ; the elms, which supported the vines,
are cut down to plant plane-trees or shady laurel-
walks ; ploughed fields disappear in lawns. In this
ode it is by chance mentioned that the Romans then
liked to build their houses facing north, the contrary
to the present preference. " Chi paga per il sole
non paga per il dottore " is a proverb which shows
the faith put in a sunny aspect by the Romans of

i8o THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA x

to-day. Horace regrets the time when stately public
buildings were raised, but each man was content with
a poor place for his personal habitation. But the
Italian private citizen was already the greatest lover
and builder of palaces in the world out of Persia.

Horace was in all things the poet of moderation
(the only one). He could honestly disclaim earth-
hunger, and declare that he never went round his
fields longing to make crooked boundaries straight
by adding a bit here and enclosing an angle there.
Perhaps the fact proves him an amateur ; was there
ever a man really bred to possess land who was quite
free from this form of madness? Of his father's
farm in Apulia he seems to have preserved no
pleasant childish memories ; he remembers how poor
the soil was, and he never expresses pain that it went
the common way of confiscation. His father, a
freedman, eked out his livelihood as a tax-gatherer ;
it must have strained his every resource to send his
son, well provided for, to be educated in Rome
instead of placing him in a provincial grammar
school, as most of his richer neighbours did with
their sons.

Yet Horace knew the charm that comes from
possession ; the charm of saying " my own fields, my
own oxen." He loved the Sabine farm for every
reason, but most of all because it belonged to him.
He loves it so well that he trembles sometimes lest

x THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 181

he should lose it, but he is consoled by the reflection
that surely no evil eye will be cast upon so modest a
domain. The estate lay under Mount Lucretilis,
about thirty miles from Rome, in a valley which is
easily identified, and which used to be visited by so
many English pilgrims that the peasants were long
convinced that Horace was an Englishman. The
poet had five families of free husbandmen and eight
house-slaves. The homestead was managed by a
steward or fattore^ who gave his master plenty of
trouble. He had been a slave in Rome, fed on
rations, and hard worked, but instead of rejoicing at
his improved position, he pined for the tavern and
music-hall, and neglected the oxen and let the sluices
overflow.

All his life Horace had wished for a piece of land
which contained a garden, a stream, and a coppice,
and in the Sabine valley he found all three. To take
a nap, after his brief meal, on the grass by the
stream was to him that exquisite combination of
mental and physical ease which man is foolish to
despise because it is an enjoyment within the reach of
every other animal as well as of himself. He clearly
considered both his Sabine farm and his villa at
Tibur healthier than the capital, especially in the
autumn, " when every father and mother turns pale
with fear for their children " ; it may be doubted if
Rome was so exempt from malarial fever at that

1 82 THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA x

time as it is generally thought to have been, or that
it was ever so free from it as it is now. Once, when
he had promised Maecenas to be away only five days,
Horace remained at Tibur through all the month of
August, and he begs his " dear friend," if he would
have him keep well, to let him stay yet longer and
even pass the winter out of Rome by the seaside (he
was probably thinking of Tarentum).

Yet was not there a spice of truth in the taunt
which his servant Davus addressed to the poet, that
when he had been too long in the country he grew
moped to death ? We are almost invited to suspect
that there was ; the town was, after all, the life of
his life. One may be sure, by the by, that the
worthy Davus himself hated seclusion as much as
any Italian servant does to-day. Tibur he may have
endured ; there he could far conversazione with the
servants of other villas, but at the Sabine farm with
whom could he have due chiacchiere except with the
steward — another martyr? By immortalising the
amusing criticism of Davus, Horace shows that he
was the first to observe that " no man was a hero
to his valet."

In the story of Alphius the Usurer, who resolved
to turn countryman, but ended by trying to put out
on the Calends the money he had gathered in on the
Ides, we see a man who, whatever his education, has
a most superior power of appreciating the attractions

x THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 183

of the country. The picture he gives of them is the
best known, the most popular that exists ; even now,
when the habit of Latin quotations is gone, few
orators can get through a speech on a rural subject
without the lines :

Beatus ille, qui procul negotiis,

Ut prisca gens mortalium,
Paterna rura bobus exercet suis,

Solutus omni faenore, etc.

When it comes to the point, however, of abandon-
ing the "something he does in the City," he will
never find the courage to consummate the sacrifice.
We all know Alphius ; how he looks at every
advertisement in the paper of " a desirable Eliza-
bethan residence with grass land sufficient for three
cows " ; how he corresponds with the advertiser and
even goes regularly to examine eligible freeholds ;
and we know that he will die as he has lived in the
umbrageous recesses of his back office. There are
people who go through their whole lives nursing and
cockering an ambition which is not insincere, but is
completely unreal. It forms the recreation of their
dull hours, the romance soaring above their sordid
pursuits ; it is dressed up to look so exactly as if it
were alive that only a man's most intimate friends
are aware that he would be alarmed and distressed
beyond words if he were to-morrow called upon to
turn it from fiction into fact.

1 84 THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA x

The vine-tendrils hanging from tree to tree, the
lowing cattle, the honey in the comb, the sheep
yielding their thick fleeces to the shearer, the gliding
waters, the warbling birds, the holy and healthy sun-
tanned peasant bride, who piles up the logs for her
tired husband's return and milks cows and sets out
the evening meal of lamb or kid with olives,
mallows, and a jar of wine — who observed them
more lovingly than Alphius the Usurer ? And
sweet it is, he adds, while he sups, to watch the sheep
hastening home to the fold and the weary oxen
dragging from the fields the inverted ploughshare.
Very sweet, no doubt, but to-morrow he will be
back at money-lending.

Horace made only one real study of a husband-
man, but it is remarkable for original insight. With
few but sure touches he fixes the type of the peasant
who, after all, has- the best right to represent his
class ; a type far removed from the open-mouthed
yokel to be so well described by Calpurnius, who
would not have missed the show in the Arena for all
the kine of Lucania. The Ofellus of Horace has a
profound contempt for the luxuries of great cities.
His predominating quality is a serious patience ;
his single passion is thrift. He is the peasant who
paid the French war indemnity out of his savings ;
the rustic of whom Euripides wrote :

x THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 185

No showy speaker, but a plain, brave man,

Who seldom visited the town or courts ;a

A yeoman, one of those who save a land,

Shrewd, one whose acts with his professions squared ;

Untainted, and a blameless life he led.

Ofellus is not, like Melibaeus, consumed by helpless
rage at injustice which he cannot fight against. He
has realised the fact that man may command his
conduct, not his circumstances, and having acquired
this knowledge, he lets the learning of the Schools
alone. It is a fact that Nature herself is constantly
repeating to the tillers of the soil ; they live with
her in a primitive relationship which allows no
artificial screen to hide her might and their im-
potence. A fatalist at heart, Ofellus rises superior
to fate. Wealth could give him nothing he cares
to have, and he has the sense to see (in which he
departs, somewhat, from his modern brother) that
wealth is an entirely idle word except in so far as it
stands for what it can give. When he owned the
land which he now cultivates for the spendthrift
soldier who turned him out, he and his children
lived no more luxuriously than they do now. No
meat was eaten in the house on work-days except a
piece of smoked bacon, served with pot-herbs. If
a friend came to see him, why, he prepared a reason-
able feast, for he was no miser ; but a chicken or a

1 The Italian peasant will say when he wishes to impress you with his
respectability : " I was never in a law-court even as a witness."

1 86 THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA x

kid, with figs and grapes and his own pure wine (of
which a libation was duly offered to Ceres), made up
the bill of fare — not turbot or oysters brought at a
ruinous expense from Rome. Now that he and his
sons work for hire, their labour places them above
want and permits them to lead much the same life
as before. Fortune can hurt him no more, while
she may easily hurt the spoiler by robbing him of
his ill -acquired acres ; nay, who knows (though
Horace does not say so) that Ofellus will not again
become the owner of his land if he save long enough
while the other wastes ?

This contribution to the long tale of confisca-
tion is characteristic of the poet who at the age
of twenty -five (when the satire was written)
looked on life already with a calm, unemotional
eye, strictly resolved to walk round windmills, not
to charge them. His was the wit of a contented
heart, as Heine's was the wit of a broken heart.
He had not eaten his bread with sorrow, and he
did not know the heavenly powers, but what he
did know of life and Nature he could express
with a felicity that left little more to be said.
Horace's feeling for the country had no depths or
heights ; it is the feeling of every Roman, from
the senator to the tradesman, from the consul to
the money-lender.

The commonness of the taste rendered it a

THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 187

sort of bond of union between all classes. How
deeply it was ingrained is proved by its continued
existence under conditions not, on the face of things,
favourable to it. The increasing mania for sensa-
tional and often bloodthirsty spectacles, and the still
more ominous increase of unbridled self-indulgence,
would seem incompatible with the enjoyment of the
country ; yet Martial, who wrote when the vines of
Vesuvius were freshly covered with ashes, makes us
feel that rural scenes and life were as much appreci-
ated as ever. It is true that he somewhere hints
that the master may carry corruption among his
dependants, as the French seigneur was accused of
doing among his vassals ; an idea which would have
repelled Horace, who always dwelt on the pure
morality of the peasantry. There are, however,
several rural descriptions in his Epigrams that are
wholly pure and bright. We gather that, Spaniard
though he was, he took a sound Roman interest in
agriculture. He viewed it from the farmer's point
of view, which, then as now, was not invariably
exhilarating. Martial complains of over-cheapness ;
the husbandman was left to feed on his own produce,
and as there was more than he could eat, much lay
running to waste. There were places where wine
sold for less than water; corn, depreciated by the
Egyptian trade as it is now by importations from
America and India, sold for 8d. a bushel. Even

1 88 THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA x

when the harvest was abundant, the cultivator made
next to nothing.

But in spite of discouraging statistics, farming
was a pleasant occupation for the proprietor who
was a little of a capitalist. There is a secret satisfac-
tion in being your own provision merchant. What
a fool is a man like Apollinaris, exclaims Martial,
" who has a lovely country-seat and never goes near
it," leaving the bailiffs and caretakers to fatten on
the riches of the rare fish-ponds and all the other
plenty ! Martial himself proposed to give a country
banquet composed of lettuces and leeks, eggs cut in
slices, cabbage, chicken, and a ham which has already
appeared three times at table. If any one should
scorn the menu, let him, after an uninterrupted spell
of town-life, go straight to a very homely farm-
house, by preference belonging to him. How excel-
lent he will think his first meal. He will say that
everything tastes alike in towns, while this dish of
eggs and bacon, cooked over a wood fire, has a
flavour denied to the French chefs "faisans de Boheme,
sauce Perigueux." The illusion may not last long,
but as long as it lasts it is complete. Martial laughs
at his friend Bassus, who plays pretty at farming and
owns a vast town-house out of town where nothing is
to be had. Poultry, vegetables, and fruit are all
brought from the city, and the garden, full of laurels,
will certainly never put temptation in the way of the

x THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 189

local pilferer. With this gorgeous mansion he con-
trasts Faustinas' real rural homestead at Baiae. There
you will not see a park laid out with groves of myrtle,
plane-trees, and clipped box-hedges. Utility reigns
supreme, but it is that utility which charms. Close-
pressed heaps of corn fill every corner, and the wine-
casks are put out to air, smelling strongly of the old
vintage. Hither, in the late autumn, the rough
vine-dresser brings the ripe grapes. From the valleys
comes a sound of the bellowing bulls. The farmyard
muster roams at large — cocks and hens, geese and
peacocks, even pheasants and partridges, which seem
to have been reared at home ; the turrets are loud
with pigeons ; the pigs run after the steward's wife ;
the lamb bleats as it follows its mother. "Young
house-bred slaves, sleek as milk, surround the fire."
The steward does not go idling about or playing
games ; his amusements are useful — he fishes, or nets
birds, or goes a-hunting. When work is over,
friends and neighbours look in and partake of a
cordial but informal hospitality ; there is enough and
to spare for all. The cheerful-faced rustic comes to
pay his respects, nor does he come empty-handed ;
he carries white honey, or conical cheeses, while tall
girls, daughters of honest husbandmen, bring their
mothers' offerings in osier baskets. These were
presents, not tributes. There was slavery, not serf-
dom. The free peasant might be dispossessed by

1 90 THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA

the State, but he was not browbeaten, still less was
he knouted by the lord of the manor.

We think of the little gifts of the English villagers
to a popular squire, or, rather, to his wife — the
gleaning-cake, the basket of damsons, the guinea-
fowls' eggs, the elderberry wine, not to speak of
pen-wipers, kettle-holders, and mysterious card-trays
made of cloves and acorns. The giver understands
almost as well as the receiver that the gift is value-
less in itself, but valuable as a piece of symbolism.
And what it symbolises is not subjection but free-
dom ; the right of the freeborn freely to manifest
their goodwill.

If the rustic offerings spoken of by Martial mark
one kindly custom, another is revealed by the drop-
ping in of neighbours to share the evening meal.
We must suppose that Faustinus was a rich and
well-educated Roman, yet, like Horace before him,
he welcomed the society of his provincial neighbours ;
he could doubtless " talk of veals," as Dr. Johnson
recommended a curate to learn to do, the young
man having complained that in his part of the country
calves (which were there called " veals ") formed the
staple conversation. Apart from common interests,
there was then in Italy, as there is now, a sort of
mental unity between all classes, an intellectual
common ground independent of position or education.

" Of all the nations of Europe," wrote Charles

x THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 191

Lever in 1864, "I know of none, save Italy, in
which the characters are the same in every class and
gradation. The appeal you would make to the
Italian noble must be the same you would address to
the humble peasant on his property. The point of
view is invariably identical ; the sympathies are
always alike. . . . To this trait, of whose existence
Cavour well knew, was owing the marvellous unani-
mity in the nation on the last war with Austria.
The appeal to the prince could be addressed and
was addressed to the peasant. There was not an
argument that spoke to the one which was not re-
echoed in the heart of the other. In fact, the chain
that binds the social condition of Italy is shorter
than elsewhere, and the extreme links are less remote
from each other than with most nations of Europe."
It is impossible to speak of the Roman villa with-
out mentioning the name of Martial's benefactor,
Pliny the Younger, to whom we owe such full and
glowing accounts of his various country-houses, that
some homeless letterato once spitefully said that he
gave the idea of an auctioneer anxious to dispose of
the property. Pliny has a formal right to figure
among Roman poets, though we possess none of the
verses which his wife sang so sweetly (the wise
woman ; no wonder that he adored her). They were
sung at Rome, too, and even at Athens, which pleased
the author, who confesses that he also hummed them

1 92 THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA

to himself now and then, which perhaps means rather
frequently. One would like to hear the music of
the drawing-room ballad of the Roman world.
Pliny does not explain who wrote it ; it may have
been the rule, as in Elizabethan times, to write verses
for well-known airs so that every one could sing them.
He speaks modestly about his poems, but it is certain
that he cherished a carefully watered little hope of
their pleasing posterity. It is probably well for his
fame that we are excused from passing judgment on
them ; he was too good an orator to be a good poet.
Montaigne could forgive Cicero for writing verses,
but not for publishing them. Still, this literary
employment of the leisure of eminent Romans is
always interesting to remember.

Poet or no poet, he is the very prince of eulogists
of the country-house. It was the beginning and the
end of his dearest pleasures, the port whence he
started, the haven to which he returned. Wherever
he was, his thoughts wandered to his father's mansion
at the end of the lofty avenue in a suburb of Como
— " Your delight and mine," as he calls it in a letter
to Canerius Rufus. It is well worth remarking how
from his earliest youth this Italian gentleman was
deeply impressed with the duty of the cultured and
well-off resident in a country town or rural village
to make its interests his own, to endeavour to benefit
his local neighbours, both the poor and those of a

x THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 193

higher but yet not affluent class. His first essays
at the bar were made in pleading the suits of the
people of Tifernum-on-Tiber (his mother's place),
with whom he had been a great favourite in his boy-
hood. When honours and comparative wealth came
with his appointment as Consul he thought im-
mediately of building a temple for them at his own
expense, " not to be outdone in affection " ; and on
its completion he took a long journey to be present
when it was consecrated. At Como he founded a
school, so that the fathers of families might not be
obliged to send their sons to Milan to be educated,
and he sought the help of Tacitus for finding good
masters. He was always encouraging his father-in-
law, who was a munificent giver, in works of public
utility. That he was kind to his dependants is shown
by many traits ; he could well apply to himself
Homer's line, " He had a father's gentleness for his
people." When his slaves died he wept ; his only
consolation was that he had enfranchised them so
that they died free. He sent his servant Zosimus,
who was threatened with consumption, to pass the
winter in Egypt, and on his return, better but not
well, he arranged for him to go to a place in the
south of France, where he might try the milk-cure.
He gave a farm worth £800 to his old nurse.

In addition to his inherited palace, Pliny built two
villas on the lake of Como — one higher up, which he

o

194 THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA x

called the " Tragedy," from which you could see the
lateen sails of the fishing-boats skimming the lake at
dawn ; the other, " Comedy," on the extreme edge
of the shore, so that one could fish from one's bed.1
The Como property had the ineffable charm of early
associations ; it afforded fishing, hunting, and boating,
and its sweet tranquillity invited study ; but Pliny's
most enviable country-seats were at Laurentum and
in the Tuscan Apennines. In addition to these he
had a pied-h-terre at Tusculum and villas at Tibur
and Praeneste. Still he did not pass for a millionaire.
The house in Tuscany was built in an amphitheatre
of mountains, covered with ancient trees and skirted
by a belt of precious vineyards, below which, again,
were pastures. The land abounded in song-birds,
flowers, and springs of fresh water. Here the house
was turned to the south ; from the loggia you saw on
one side large and fruitful fields, on the other well-
kept lawns, roses from Tarentum, Pompeian fig-trees,
and whatever Italy could provide of best. In a cool
court a perpetual jet of water freshened the air. A
friend wrote to Pliny to dissuade him from going to
his Tuscan estate in summer, as he thought that it
must be unhealthy ; Pliny answered that, although
the coast (the Maremma) is not only unhealthy but
pestilential, there was no fear of illness in his high

1 The intermittent fountain, about which he was so curious, still rises near
what is called (but without historical warrant) the " Villa Pliniana."

x THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 195

valley, where people attained great ages and all seasons
were delightful. The spring, perhaps, was the most
perfect time ; but there was no great heat in summer,
and the rather sharp winters could be borne, as the
house was artificially heated as well as being full of
sun. Of course hot and cold baths on the most
approved system were ready at all hours. The recep-
tion rooms were arranged to afford the greatest variety
of view ; one of them was decorated in the Pompeian
style, with a marble dado surmounted by wall-
paintings of trees and birds. Out of doors tennis
and riding gave the needful exercise. Pliny was
more proud of the riding-ground than of any other
thing connected with the villa ; it was surrounded by
old plane-trees, linked together with festoons of ivy.
At its extreme end it formed a semicircle, cypresses
taking the place of the plane-trees, and inside these
was a hedge of roses.

Laurentum was in Pliny's time the Brighton or
Newport of Rome. It was approached by two
pleasant roads, passing through dense woods or
broad, open spaces, enlivened by horses, sheep, and
oxen, as the Campagna is now. The distance was
not too great for you to run down after finishing
your day's business in the capital. Scipio once
picked up shells along that shore as an ease from
public cares.

Pliny's house at Laurentum was what he called

196 THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA x

unpretentious, but comfort had been most carefully
studied, and even the servants' rooms were so neat
that guests might have occupied them. The villa
was flooded with air and light ; it was all doors
and windows. A glazed gallery led from the
courtyard to the dining-room ; behind were woods
and mountains ; in front, the Mediterranean. There
was a tower with a splendid view. Pliny often had
his dinner carried up to this tower, just as in the
Apennines he would dine, seated on a marble seat,
beside the marble basin of clear water at the end
of his garden. What a delicate pleasure in life is
shown by the little fact of these wandering meals.
I knew a Lombard nobleman who had the same
fancy ; he even once gave a dinner-party in a boat
moored in front of his villa on the lake of Garda.

Chosen books to read and re-read stocked the
shelves of Pliny's seaside library, and here, too,
there was a tennis-court as well as a magnificent
swimming-bath. Like all Romans of that date,
Pliny had a passion for collecting, but he did not
put his most valuable treasures in the Laurentine
house, which he wished to keep u modest and simple."
One of his best " finds," a Corinthian brass statue
of an old man, he sent to the Temple of Jupiter,
desiring only that his name and titles should be
inscribed on the pedestal. A modern donor would
not accompany the gift by that request, but, perhaps,

x THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA 197

he would be exceedingly disappointed if the thing
asked for were left undone.

Hadrian's " villa," near Tivoli, which was seven
miles round, and Diocletian's " retreat," the ruins
of which form the town of Spalato, show the Roman
taste for the country run wild and grown monstrous.
After the Empire fell, for a while terror and in-
security drove men to stay in towns when they
could not build for themselves fortified castles, the
antithesis of the villa. But with the first opportunity
the old love reappeared. In other countries the
castle gave birth to the exclusive country-seat where
the great noble lived as a king. The town-house,
if there was one, was a secondary affair ; often
there was none, as is the case to this day in Austria
and Hungary. In Italy, on the other hand, there
was a reversion to the Roman arrangement ; the
house in the city was the most important, but it
was supplemented by more or less numerous, more
or less splendid, villas. Not to have two houses
was destitution. Hence the crown of villas around
any characteristically Italian town ; Brescia, or
Vicenza, or Trento. The untravelled Italian looks
in amazement at the well-to-do Englishman who
admits that he has only one home. An Italian
" person of quality," who was obliged for the sake
of economy to spend all the year at his villa, might
complain as Browning makes him complain ; but

198 THE ROMAN'S VILLEGGIATURA x

were he forced to pass twelve months in the vaunted
city square there would possibly be suicide instead
of sighs. This time the poet, who dived deep in
the Italian mind, only brings to the surface half a
truth.

XI
NATURE IN THE LAST LATIN POETS

THE century of the first Christian and the last
pagan Caesar witnessed a truce of God between the
old order and the new — a truce not always kept.
The masses were loth to keep it, but among educated
men the principle of tolerance found wider acceptance
than in any other time till our own. Congenial
spirits joined in intellectual marriage, at whichever
altar they worshipped. Equality was more advanced
socially than politically, reversing what usually
happens, for in general people persuade themselves
to give their religious opponents the right to exist
long before they are ready to ask them to dinner.
Such a period favoured the cultivation of poetry,
though not the growth of a great poetry ; it produced
elaboration rather than strength, scholarship rather
than originality, art for art's sake rather than art as
the irrepressible expression of a nation's manhood.
The one great piece of literature that bears the date
of the fourth century was not poetry, but prose; it
is the Confessions of St. Augustine.

199

200 NATURE IN THE xi

The poets of that period were impelled to write
about Nature — a neutral theme on which they could
all alike write, but what they wrote is often spoilt by
conceit or formalism. Sometimes, however, through
the husk of conventionality we catch glimpses of the
great undiscovered treasure of modern sentiment.
The poet-professor of Bordeaux, Ausonius, describes
scenery in his charming poem on the river Moselle,
very much as a modern writer with a gift for word-
painting would describe it. He renews the golden
hours when we made the excursion from imperial
Treves. As we read his enthusiastic verses we
actually breathe once more the elastic air and see the
swift-rushing waters coursing before us ; we pass the
noble cities, the smiling villas, the woods and richly
cultivated slopes ; we hear the gay throng of vine-
dressers calling to one another, and the river boatmen
singing mocking songs to the country-folk who
return home along the banks in the late evening.
The river abounded in fish, whose pretty sports were
described affectionately by Ausonius — not, alas !
without a cannibalistic relish, for he was very fond of
good living. Where can we find a more vivid word-
picture of the magical effects of reflections than in
the following passage ?

The blue depths give back the river's wooded banks, the
waters seem full of leaves and the stream planted with vines.
When the evening star lengthens out the shadows and casts

XI

LAST LATIN POETS 201

the verdant hillside on the breast of the Moselle, what glow-
ing hues tinge the quivering surface ! All the slopes swim
in the ripples which hold them suspended ; the vine-wreaths
— that are not there — tremble, the grapes swell beneath the
crystal water. The deluded boatman counts the number of
the young shoots as he rows his bark skiff among the little
waves to and fro across the outline of the reflections where
the image of the hill loses itself in the water.

Ausonius might have said with a character in
Balzac's Medecin de campagne : " Ah, monsieur, la
vie en plein air, Jes beautes du ciel et de la terre,
s'accordent si bien avec la perfection et les devices de
Tame." His tenderest thoughts are linked with
memories of natural things. When Paulinus does
not answer his letters, he reminds him that all nature
is responsive ; the hedge rustles as the bees despoil
it, the reeds murmur sweetly to the stream, the
tremulous tresses of the pines hold converse with the
winds. It was a pathetic friendship, this, between
two men of irreconcilable temperaments — the light-
hearted Hedonist and the god-intoxicated saint.
Both were of the same religion, for it seems un-
necessary to have ever doubted that Ausonius was
nominally a Christian, though he had far less in
common with Paulinus than with a pagan man of the
world such as Symmachus. He loved him, but the
saying that to love is to understand is often tragically
wrong. Ausonius did not understand his former
pupil even well enough to gauge the abyss there was

202 NATURE IN THE *,

between them. He looked on his abandonment of
the world, in which no career would have been closed
to him, as an inexplicable caprice. Paulinus refrained
from argument ; he knew that what men are they
are — had he not given in to something very like the
sacrifice of a pig to console the peasants for the loss
of their ancient rites ? He did not rebuke Ausonius
for his frivolity, but after a time he wrote no more.
In what seems to have been his final letter, without
any reference to a last farewell he takes leave of his
old friend and master with the promise that he will
cherish him even after death, " for if the soul, sur-
viving the dissolution of our mortal coil, is sustained
by its heavenly origin, it must keep its sentiments
and affections even as it keeps its existence : *'/ can
no more forget than die, but must live and remember for
ever." A beautiful saying, worthy of the saint who
was one day to be followed to the grave by all the
Jews, pagans, and heretics of the remote South
Italian town to which he had exiled himself, and
where he had spread the faith 'by love, not hatred.

On his side, Ausonius lived out his blameless if
worldly life, and got a great deal of enjoyment out of
it. That was a good time for literary men, and the
Bordeaux professor rose to be Consul. He has the
refined taste, however, to prize beyond everything
the estate of moderate extent on the banks of the
Garonne which his father and grandfather and great-

xi LAST LATIN POETS 203

grandfather possessed before him. A devoted son,
he was grieved when the day came for him to be
lord of his " ancestral kingdom " ; though his father
was old, yet he died too soon. " When people love
each other," says Ausonius, with a touch of the real
tenderness which was his best gift, "it is so sweet to
enjoy things together." But this filial piety only
made him the more attached to his inheritance. It
is amusing to find him, like so many Roman literary
men, the hopeless victim of his steward. Philon, the
steward, was a Greek, who insisted on being called
eVtT/>o7ro9. His hair was wild and his appearance
lamentable, but his pretensions were enormous. He
cursed the gods when the crops went wrong through
his carelessness, and, at last, occupied himself wholly
with trafficking, racing from market to market, from
village to village, and imposing alike on the buyers
and on his master, who seems to have had an amiable
weakness for being cheated.

Ausonius once wrote a description of town-life
which throws light on the Roman longing for rural
repose. The town was a minor town in Aquitania
to which the poet had gone on business ; he is re-
solved to get away as soon as he can after Easter, and
heartily glad he will be. Who has not pictured, as
he walked in the streets of Pompeii, the dignified
calm of an antique city? No bicycles, no electric
tram-cars, no automobiles ; only men in togas moving

204 NATURE IN THE Xi

with deliberate steps. Ausonius lifts the curtain on
a different scene. In the midst of the clamours of
the mob and the vulgar rows at the street corners
one is seized with disgust at the seething human mass,
swaying up and down the narrow streets and blocking
up even the squares. A whirl of confused cries wakes
the echoes : " tene," " feri," " due," " da," " cave."
Here there is an escaping pig, there a mad dog ready
to spring ; in another place a scrimmage with badly
harnessed oxen. In vain you shut yourself up in the
most retired nook in the house ; the cries pierce through
the walls. Does it not make you long for the sweet
leisure of a rural retreat, where you can write cart-
loads of poetry with no other provision than the
poet's only luggage — blank paper ?

Martial gave not much better an account of Rome,
where he groaned over the cries of the baker at night
and the exasperating " two and two make four " of
the school children in the morning, for the Roman
schools were open to the streets except for a curtain,
and the ears of the passers-by were " assassinated " by
the repetition of the class lessons.

In Provensal poetry and afterwards in the early
literature of France, there was a mass of verse in
which the spring, the dawn, flowers, and leaves were
played with for the mere pleasure of naming pleasant
things. It was a taste as old as Anacreon, a copy of
one of whose songs is a folk-song to-day in Provence.

LAST LATIN POETS 205

But it was not a Roman taste, the seriousness of the
Roman mind rejected the use of words as pretty toys.
Ausonius wrote about the dawn and flowers as if he
had been one of the Pleiades. In spite of what by a
pun he called his " Italian name," he was, in truth,
one of those Frenchmen, before there was a France, in
whom Mommsen recognises all the characteristics of
their modern representatives. He gave Ronsard the
model for his most famous poem, a forgotten service, as
many have read " Mignonne, allons voir la Rose," but
few recollect where it came from. Critics have even
tried to rob poor Ausonius of his rose-poem because
it is " too good," and to bestow it on Virgil (who
never wrote anything in the same vein), but this
unkind attempt seems to have been abandoned. Here
is the poem :

It was the spring ; the dawn a softer breeze
Sent through the chill air of the passing night,
And Nature prophesied the golden light,

Though the mist lingered yet among the trees.

I wandered through the garden drinking in
The new life of the morning ; from the stalks
Hung the dew-laden leaves across the walks,

And the wet roses watched the day begin.

Did Dawn take from the Rose its vermeil hue,
Or did the new-born Day make blush the flower ?
Each wears the beauty of the morning hour,

To each the ruddy tint and heavenly dew.

206 NATURE IN THE xi

Of each is Venus queen, the flower, the star,

And e'en one perfume dwells perchance in each ;
But roses spread their sweets within our reach,

While the dawn's sweets are lost in vaults afar.

The little life of roses lasts an hour ;

Age kills them, for they learn not to grow old ;

The bud the morning star had seen unfold
The evening star sees droop and fade away.

Maiden ! gather the newly opened rose,

And gather it or ere thy youth be past,

For if the rose's bloom will perish fast,
The bloom of maidens all as quickly goes.

Before Ronsard, Bramante, better known as the
architect of St. Peter's than as a sonneteer, paraphrased
Ausonius with or without knowing it :

Dunque, mentre che dura il tempo verde,
Non far come quel fior che 'n su la pianta
Senza frutto nessun sue frondi perde.

Che quando il corpo in piu vecchiezza viene,
Piu di sua gioventu si gloria e vanta,
Vedendosi aver speso i giorni bene.

After Ronsard came Spenser :

Gather the rose of love whilst yet is time.

After Spenser, the inimitable parson with the gay
pagan soul who was surely own brother to Ausonius ;
after Herrick, Edmund Waller, rather gruesome
than gay, and in the train of these immortals, a host
of poets and preachers with baskets full of roses and
an assortment of morals.

xi LAST LATIN POETS 207

Each morn a thousand Roses brings, you say ;
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of yesterday ?

The poems of Ausonius are buried with yesterday's
roses, a fate that would not have distressed him
overmuch had he foreseen it, for he lived in the
present and wrote for his friends more than for
fame. He would have still enjoyed his morning
walk and the sight of the dew on the cabbages.
There were cabbages in that garden of his — a confes-
sion which honesty compels. Ausonius put his
cabbages in his garden and in his verses, and did not
think they spoilt either. It was an " old English "
garden, with shrubs and roses and grass and vegetables
mixed together. Who first made a walled garden in
Europe for flowers alone? Probably the Moors.
The anti-utilitarian instinct of the Oriental could not
endure confusing a plaisance with a potager.

At the end of the fourth century the country-
house was still the Roman's ideal of felicity.
Symmachus, the correspondent and ardent admirer
of Ausonius, had fifteen villas in Latium and
Campania. Like Pliny the Younger, his preference
was for Laurentum, but it seems to have been
forsaken since Pliny's time, as Symmachus says that
his villa " is not in such a wild, remote spot as people
think." He liked to hunt the wild boar whose
descendants fall to the gun of the king of Italy at
Castel Porziano. In summer he leaves the sea for

208 NATURE IN THE xi

the hills, where, of course, he has several charming
retreats. He has been accused of not appreciating
Nature because he speaks of pure air and leisure for
reading as the greatest attractions of a country life,
but he took care to carry his books to the loveliest
places in the world.

The great administrators of the Roman Empire
had that love of studious ease, that conception of
literary work as rest, which has characterised many
English statesmen and some, at least, of the British
pro-consuls in India, as, for instance, Mountstuart
Elphinstone, and more recently Sir Alfred Comyn
Lyall, than whom it would be difficult to imagine a
closer counterpart of the Roman public servant who
could both think and do — scholar, poet, soldier on
occasion, tried man of action, even the trend of his
mind seemed to agree with the resemblance ; he had
a shade of that antique melancholy which sprang
from a conviction of the worth of this fleeting life,
not from discontent with it. He was the only man I
have ever known who gave me the idea that he would
have been entirely at home in the Roman world.

Claudian, of Egyptian birth but purely Roman in
spirit, approached far more nearly than Ausonius to
the perfect style of the old poets, whose religion
remained for him the only faith ; it was natural
that he had fewer intuitions of modern sentiment,
but two out of his many idylls form distinct

LAST LATIN POETS 209

landmarks in the history of rustic poetry. The
idyll had been successfully revived by Calpurnius
a hundred years before, in eleven charming little
poems, which show, however, the predominating
Virgilian influence. In these two pastorals Claudian
struck out a line for himself ; he excluded all make-
believe, all prettiness — he is simply realistic. One
feels sure that he met the identical old man whom
he describes in the following lines on some excursion
to the country round Virgil's lake, which doubtless
he would have visited during his residence at Milan :

Blest he whose life in fields paternal spent,

With one same house as boy or man content ;

Propt now by staff on ground where erst he crawled,

Of his old home the ages are recalled.

Him has not fate through countless turmoils led,

Not to drink foreign waters has he sped :

Merchant nor soldier, waves nor wars with awe

Have scared him, nor hoarse clamours of the law :

Shunning affairs and cities howe'er nigh,

With freer glance he gazes on the sky ;

By crops, not consuls, he computes the year :

Apples show autumn, flowers that spring is near.

His field both hides and shows the solar ray,

And by the sun's round he divides the day.

From what small germ the vast oak sprang he knows,

And marks the grove that with his own growth grows ;

Deems far as Ind Verona close at hand,

Benacus' lake far as the Red Sea strand.

Yet with firm force, strong arms that never fail,

The third race sees the grandsire stout and hale.

Others may roam and distant Spain explore,

This man lives longer though they travel more.

P

210 NATURE IN THE xi

The old man is in easy though modest circum-
stances ; his narrow bounds are those of choice, not
of necessity. I knew an old gentleman who, living
within a few hours of Venice, had never seen the sea
nor wished to see it. But he died with the nineteenth
century; was it the last that will produce such types?

Claudian's poem on the " Gallic Mules " is even
more original than the one just quoted :

See the tame natives of the rapid Rhone,
Loose or in harness, like obedience own ;
A different order marks a different road,
They know which path to take without the goad.
Though each from the slack rein may distant be
And each from the hard yoke its neck could free,
Yet their hard toil with patience still they bear
And cries barbaric mind, with docile ear.
Their master's distant voice command retains,
The human voice sufficing 'stead of reins ;
When scattered this collects them, and again
Scatters, and makes them speed, or speed restrain.
" To left " the order — to the left they go ;
The call changed "To the right," and so they do.
Unforced by bonds, submissive, not afraid,
Servants, not slaves, nor fierce by freedom made,
They, like in will and like in tawny hue,
Dragging the creaking wain their course pursue.
Wonder no more that Orpheus' song could sway
Wild beasts, since cattle Gallic words obey.

There is other evidence that the Gauls were cele-
brated for their skill with mules and horses ; Varro
says, " Galli appositissimi maxime ad iumenta."
The pleased interest which Claudian takes in the

LAST LATIN POETS 211

doings of the clever creatures reminds one that,

o

though the Romans cannot be acquitted of in-
sensibility to animal suffering, they could yet be
charmed by any instance of superior intelligence in
animals. Statius told the story of a tame lion who
knew how to come out of its home and go back to it
without guidance ; when it died, the Senate and
people of Rome were in despair, and even Caesar
wept a tear.

Of the other late Latin poets in their relation to
outdoor life, the one most worthy of notice is
Rutilius, because he was more free from convention-
ality than the rest. Born in Gaul at the beginning
of the fifth century, he composed a voyage pittoresque,
narrating a journey from Rome to his native country,
which was then convulsed by barbarian inroads.
" When the fatherland is tranquil," he exclaims, " it
is pardonable to neglect it, but in its misfortunes it
has a right to all our devotion." He was very sorry
to leave the " beloved climate " of Rome, and before
setting out he kissed its sacred gates. He took the
sea route on account of inundations in the plains, and
also to avoid encounters with Gothic freebooters,
whose devastations rendered the roads dangerous.
His journey seems to have been the slowest on
record ; either from stress of weather or want of
wind, or because it was hot or because it was cold,
the ship was always putting in to shore, and Rutilius

212 NATURE IN THE

XI

and his fellow-travellers profited by the delays to
explore the coast. Sometimes they slept on land in
a slight, improvised shelter, after warming themselves
by a fire of fragrant myrtle branches — it was October
and the nights were chilly. On one of these
occasions they visited a town in Tuscany called
Falerium, famous for its beautiful white oxen, which
were highly prized in Rome for sacrificial use. No
one was indoors, for it was the celebration of the re-
birth of the germ after the fruit is gathered and the
leaves have fallen ; the hidden, mysterious renovation
of Nature :

The merry folk, dispersed in country lanes,
Solaced with joyous rites their weary hearts,

Because that day Osiris life regains
And life to every living thing imparts.

Keats had never read those lines ; yet he might
have been thinking of them when he wrote, in the
wonderful ode which breathes the spirit of antiquity
pure and undefiled :

What little town by river or sea-shore
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel
Is emptied of its folk this pious morn ?

In exploring the country round Falerium Rutilius
finds a farm, a charming place with a coppice at the
back and a fine fish-pond, broad and deep, in which
you could see the fish playing about. It would
appear that the poet and his companions were amus-

xi LAST LATIN POETS 213

ing themselves by stirring the water when they were
discovered by the owner, who resented their intrusion,
and declared that they were ruining his trees, his
pond, his fish, all that was his. A modern proprietor
might not be much better pleased with a party of
tourists who were making exceedingly free use of his
domain, but for the Roman the stranger was sacred.
This farmer (apparently a very good farmer too) was,
to use Rutilius' uncivil description, " a churlish Jew,
a sort of wild beast, unfit for human intercourse,"
and the offended Gaul screams his invective :
u Wretched race, mother of all errors, which scrupu-
lously keeps the frigid feast of the Sabbath and has a
heart more frigid than its religion. They pass in
idleness one day in the seven to imitate the fatigue of
their God after the creation. The other dreams of
these impostors would hardly find credence with
children. Would to God that Judaea had never
submitted to the arms of Pompey nor to those of
Titus. The contagious superstitions of the Jews
have only made the more way in consequence ;
this vanquished nation has proved fatal to its
vanquishers."

Fatal to its vanquishers ! " Qu'il est beau,"
wrote Pascal, " de voir, par les yeux de la foi, Darius,
Cyrus, Alexandre, les Romains, Pompee, et Herode,
agir sans le savoir pour la gloire de 1'Evangile ! "
So do extremes meet, the cry of despair and the cry

2i4 NATURE IN THE

of triumph. Rutilius reveals to us, as by a flash of
lightning, a pagan who was not tolerant — quite the
contrary. Fresh from the spectacle of a joyous
Nature fe"te, a vision confronts him of the cold, austere
ceremonial of the Hebrew temple. It oppresses and
stifles him. The thought of the Jews is confused
with the thought of the Christians, whom, like other
Romans, he regards as simply a Jewish sect. Presently
he comes across some real Christians who have colo-
nised the isle of Capraria, near which his ship passes :
" A sort of men more like owls than anything else,
calling themselves by the Greek name * monk.' '
They spend their lives shut up in cells " like vile
slaves," whether by order of destiny or by their own
morose temperament Rutilius does not know, but he
deems it folly to fly from the joys and sorrows of life
instead of taking its goods and putting up with its ills.
And in this criticism there is a certain discrimina-
tion, for without doubt in all times timid souls have
sought the cloister less to renounce joy than to shun
sorrow, though who can tell if sorrow did not find
them out? Happily for Rutilius, he soon forgets
Jews and monks in the excitement of a wild boar
hunt in the forests near Pisa ; the prize, a splendid
boar, is carried home with blowing of horns and
songs of mirth, like a stag in the Highlands. Mean-
while the sea rises mountains high, and the great
white waves break on the sands of Viareggio, on

LAST LATIN POETS 215

which, one day, they were to throw the body of a
greater poet ; but the storm subsides and Rutilius can
continue his voyage to the Bay of Spezia, where he
admires " the marble hills whiter than snow " — words
that close his poem as it comes down to us, for
the rest is lost.

Antiquity was already in the article of death.
Its last backward look in literature was cast on the
peasant, the last of the faithful. Whoever was the
author of the Greek romance which goes by the
name of the Pastorals of Longus^ he puts forth
unconsciously a defence of Paganism where it was
strongest — as the interpretation of Nature to simple
folk whose toil it consecrated and whose minds it
satisfied. He shows that degeneration had not
invaded the country ; Daphnis and Chloe are as
innocent as Paul and Virginia, and far more innocent
than the splendid dames and knights of the great
cycle of Christian romance, in which not the dawn
of love but its sultry meridian formed the text.

But just because the Roman peasant was not
debased, he felt little need to raise himself; just
because his religion was tangibly real to him, he
wanted no other. No European peasant, with the
possible exception of the Celt, ever had the nostalgia
of the Unseen known to Hebrew shepherds and Arab
camel-drivers.

In the towns, not in the country, the Christian

216 NATURE IN LAST LATIN POETS xi

Church found the ground prepared for it. The
idea of a divine brotherhood appealed to slaves ; the
idea of morally obligatory self-denial appealed to
men sick of self-indulgence, not only in the lower
but in the higher sense — indulgence in the appetites
of the mind, not only in those of the body ; the
presentation of a Perfect Object of loving service
appealed to the innate altruism of women ; the
promise of a peace which passeth all understanding
came as music to a society penetrated by the unrest
of an expiring epoch. And, it may be, chief among
the factors which prepared the great change was the
passionate desire to pierce the veil of death and
clasp hands once more :

Une immense esperance a traverse" la terre.

XII
TRANSFORMATION

WHEN the violet rocks of Paxos come into sight
between the blue of sky and sea after leaving Corfu,
the traveller must be cast in an insensible mould
who feels no strong emotion. Here it was, close
by the isle of Paxos, that nineteen hundred years
ago Ionian sailors heard uttered by an extraordinary
voice the words : " Pan is dead." So important
was the fact thought to be, that a messenger was
sent to communicate the news of it to Tiberius.
The Emperor's astrologers, questioned as to what it
meant, could give no answer. Our modern ears
will always hear in that extraordinary voice " the
melancholy long withdrawing roar " of the faith of
antiquity.

Pan was the Shelley among the gods. Was there
ever a description of a god that so suited a poet as
the description of Pan by Euripides suits Shelley ?

When Pan was a child his father Hermes took

him into heaven wrapped in a little hare-skin. All

217

2i 8 TRANSFORMATION xn

the Immortals were delighted, but most of all
Dionysus — himself the impersonation of the highest
Nature-rapture.

Pan grew up and exchanged the hare -skin
for a lynx-skin and took to the macchia — the
wild, open country — dancing among the hyacinth
and crocus starred meadows and filling the air with
sweet laughter. And he was the joy of all, as he
had been of the Immortals when he was introduced
to them as a droll and charming child.

Around the evanescent personality of the shepherd
god floated ideas too evanescent for formulae ; he
held a place, if not in the belief, at least in the
imagination of the cultivated Greek, which was the
larger because it was so undetermined. There was
a sort of tenderness in the tone in which they spoke
of him as of early memories that have become dreams.
The most beautiful prayer that was ever spoken
outside Palestine was addressed not to Zeus, not to
Apollo, not to Pallas Athene or Artemis Virgin, but
to Pan :

O sweet Pan and ye other gods, whoever ye be, grant to
me to be beautiful within.

So prayed Socrates in his only country walk.

The shepherd god was the embodiment of the
indwelling unconscious joy of Nature. In a sense,
he was the embodiment of the peasant himself.
Antiquity was not all brightness and sunshine ; over

xii TRANSFORMATION 219

the cradle of the Greek race floated the immense
conception of Necessity with its machine -like
punishment of evil, regardless of personal responsi-
bility and unaccompanied by the Hebrew promise
of an earthly reward to the just man who suffers or
the Christian assurance of paradise to the crushed
saint. And yet the natural aspiration of the Greek
was towards optimism, an aspiration which found
its goal in the Platonic vision of a perfect Universe.
The side of joy and sun was the side that the peasant
knew. For him the gods were gracious and they
were near. Some one divine who took an interest
in him, some one who lived in the temple in the
grove and who was pleasant with little offerings —
this was the Greek or Roman peasant's god. A
Neapolitan friar once begged of an Englishman a
few sous for a wayside shrine. " How can the
Queen of Heaven be in want of a few sous ? " asked
the Englishman. " It is not the Queen of Heaven,"
answered the friar, " it is the poor Madonna of the
grotto who has hardly enough to buy oil for her
lamp." So did the peasant of old look upon his
familiar gods, and much consolation he drew from
his point of view.

He did not ask the gods that he might be
beautiful within ; he asked them just to take care
of him and of his crops. The prayer in early Latin
preserved by Cato shows us how he prayed :

220 TRANSFORMATION xn

Father Mars, I pray and implore thee that thou wouldst
turn away from us diseases, seen and unseen, destitution,
desolation, distress, and violence, and that thou wouldst
suffer the fruits of the earth, corn, grass, and young trees,
to increase and thrive, and wouldst preserve shepherds and
their flocks in safety.

And surely this prayer also is good, and must
have comforted the heart that prayed. In spirit
it differs little from a prayer of the Athenians which
is quoted by Marcus Aurelius :

Send down, oh ! send down rain, dear Zeus, on the
ploughed fields and plains of the Athenians !

With these may be compared the prayer of Aeneas
on setting sail for Italy :

We follow thee, O Holy Power, whoever thou art, and
once more with joy obey thy commands. Oh ! be present ;
lend us thy propitious aid and light up friendly stars in
the heavens.

We are often invited to compare the beliefs of
primitive peoples which have become great with
those of people whom we are pleased to call savages,
for the purpose of showing that the same rude and
repulsive notions are found to be common to both.
Instead of always pursuing this plan, we might
occasionally try to discover what divine spark unites
them, what common glimpse of moral beauty pro-
claims them man. Perhaps we should find this
golden link in their prayers ; in prayer, a great poet

xii TRANSFORMATION 221

once said, it is sufficient to "look outside oneself."
It seems a long way from the ancient Roman
cultivator to the Hidery who inhabit certain islets
on the north-west coast of America, but the petition
of the first to Father Mars is very like the petition of
the last to their Sun Totem :

O thou, good Sun, look down upon us. Shine on us,
O Sun. Take away the dark clouds that the rain may
cease to fall, because we want to go hunting (or fishing, as
the case may be). Look kindly on us, O Sun. Grant us
peace in our midst, as well as with our enemies. Again
we ask, hear us, O Sun.

In the religion of the antique peasant the character
of a Nature cult still predominated. The poetic
attribution to the gods of human passions did not
touch him closely ; he was content to know that
they represented and governed natural forces which
he recognised as in the main benign — this was the great
point of superiority in Greek and Roman mythology
over the gloomy cults of Asia. The analogy of
kindlier and more beautiful physical surroundings
doubtless caused the modification — an example of
the power of ambient in differentiating races and
creeds. The peasant neither had the doubt nor the
indifference which disposes to a new faith. Nor had
he the moral cravings of a conscience which is always
growing. It is less philosophic scepticism than the
evolution of new moral ideals that works great

222 TRANSFORMATION xn

religious changes. The peasant had no ideals, only
realities, but they were good realities — respect for
the old folks, love of his wife (even though he did
lag a little in the town), love of his children, and
labour, continual but not hopeless or degrading ; and
finally, respect for the gods, who were quite as real
to him as men were. The peasant world is made
up of the peasant who works and the peasant who
does not work. The peasant who gets his work
done by women or by imported labourers is fond
of fighting, like the Corsican and the Montenegrin ;
the peasant who does all the work himself is fond
of peace, like the Greek and the Roman countryman
of ancient times.

Paganism, the " religion of rustics," as in the end
the ancient faith was called, formed, all along, an
agricultural religion, a name given to it by the most
spirituel and the least spiritual of ecclesiastics, the
Neapolitan neo- pagan Galiani. As the letters of
the witty Abbe are little known, I am tempted to
quote his shrewd remarks.

"La Georgique," he writes to Mme. D'Epinay in 1770,
"n'est plus un sujet de pogme a notre age. II faut une
religion agricole, chez un peuple coloniste, pour parler avec
emphase et avec grandeur des abeilles, des poireaux et des
oignons. Avec votre triste consubstantialit£ et transsub-
stantiation, que voulez-vous qu'on fasse ? II y a deux
sortes de religions : celles des peuples nouveaux sont riantes,
et ne sont qu'agriculture, medicine, athletique, et population.

xii TRANSFORMATION 223

Celles des vieux peuples sont tristes et ne sont que m6ta-
physique, rh£torique, contemplation, elevation de 1'ame ;
elles doivent causer 1'abandon de la cultivation, de la
population, de la bonne sant£ et des plaisirs. Nous sommes
vieux."

An agricultural religion naturally suited peasants.
The gods were divine benefactors who could be
rendered propitious by certain stated and simple
means. If things, nevertheless, went wrong, the
peasant is a man of infinite resignation. He began
again. If he died — well, the gods only do not know
death. The Beyond ? Plato blamed Homer for
saying that it was better to be the servant of one
who had not himself enough bread to eat, than to
be a king of ghosts, because this picture of Hades
as " a dreadful place " was likely to diminish men's
courage in face of death. But the peasant, if he
thought of Hades at all, probably did not think so
very ill of it. Anyhow it was a place of rest. The
Lares formed a cheerful link between the dead and
the living, and the peasant really believed in the
Lares, which the cultivated Roman did not. For
the rest, he had not the obstinate yearnings, the
restless curiosity, of more finely strung minds. He
felt that he was living conformably to a stronger
will which made — not exactly for righteousness —
but for order.

Suddenly the news was conveyed to the peasants

224 TRANSFORMATION xn

that there was not a word of truth in their religion ;
no, something worse ; that it all belonged to the
spirit of evil of whom they had never heard ; that
their gods were not merely a delusion, but hateful,
to be crushed, broken, maledicted. And they were
seized with the vertigo of the earthquake — that
peculiar sense that the one solid thing is giving way
under your feet, which alarms you or not, according
to the state of your nerves, but which certainly
impresses. The Church began to feel itself strong.
Heretics were first put to death in A.D. 385, and if
it were right to suppress heresy with the sword it
must certainly be right to suppress Paganism with
the pickaxe. The peasants, many of whom had
never heard of Christ, saw the approach of men
dressed in black and not much washed. " How can
dirt be pleasing to divinity ? " Rutilius had asked ;
but for many centuries it was thought to be one of
the surest means of salvation. Did not St. Bernard
say in praise of the Templars : " They never dress
gaily and wash but seldom " ? The " Black Men "
broke the statues and threw down the shrines. It
was in vain that Libanius, Julian's tolerant minister,
the Pagan friend of Basil and Chrysostom, implored
Theodosius to stay the hand of these missionaries of
destruction ; in vain he pleaded that to the peasants
the temple was the very eye of Nature, the symbol
and manifestation of a present deity, the solace of all

xii TRANSFORMATION 225

their troubles, the holiest of all their joys. In vain.
Through the length and breadth of the land the
peasants heard of Christ for the first time from the
mouths of the monks who were come to destroy their
altars.

Sometimes the very destroyers were seized with a
haunting sense of sacrilege, for it is recorded that
" to St. Martin of Tours the gods whose altars he
had broken, Jupiter or Mercury, Venus or Minerva,
came in dreams, bitterly reproaching him." How
much more horror-struck must have been the un-
converted !

To the man of simple mind his religion is always
the only one. Whether it is attacked in the name of
a purer or higher faith, or in the name of a harsher
or cruder one, or in the name of pure denial, it is
the same thing ; for him it is true — why inquire if it
is good or probable ? Wireless telegraphy is im-
probable, but it is a fact. This is precisely the basis
of belief of those who believe and who do not make-
believe-to-believe.

Therefore the peasant had the feeling of the earth-
quake ; but, as happens after an earthquake, the
sense of security returned. The pickaxe was not
proof; the altars might fall but the gods were real.
The peasants made this reflection, and, where they
could, they resisted ; where they could not, they
submitted — especially outwardly. They took care

Q

226 TRANSFORMATION xn

to retain a great part of their old religion. When
sick (as St. Augustine deplored) they sent for some
old Pagan woman who knew magic remedies. A
day or two before Byron died at Missolonghi he
asked those around him to try to find some " ugly
old woman " of magical repute, such as the Greeks
sent for when they were ill. The witch was actually
found, but as he did not again ask for her, she was
not brought to his bedside. The religion of one age
became the witchcraft of another, and witchcraft in
the South is still flourishing.

For many centuries much more than such-like
mere scraps of the old faith subsisted. Sacrifices
of fire and incense were tolerated after the killing of
animals was forbidden, but the peasants met for
a family feast, and in their hearts they consecrated to
their gods the animal killed. This continued for a
very long time. Originally the Emperor had not
encouraged recourse to actual violence ; indeed
Libanius' chief argument was that Theodosius could
not know or countenance the things done by the
" Black Men," who left the fields barren " to put
themselves, as they pretended, into communication
with the Creator of the Universe on the mountains."
But the Church pressed him forward, and the Church,
which had quieted the scruples once felt by it about
violence to heretics, could not be expected to have
any where it was a question of Pagans.

xii TRANSFORMATION 227

At first the crusade was limited to the Eastern
Empire, but it was taken up in the West by
Valentinian II., who forbade even hanging up
garlands, or lighting lamps, or the fire on the hearth
in honour of the Lares, or the libation before
drinking. Valentinian lost his life in consequence,
but, as usual, assassination did not effect its object.
Theodosius was now absolute in East and West, and
in the beginning of the fifth century the country
districts of Italy were scoured.

The official existence (so to speak) of Paganism
ended in the sixth century, when Justinian closed
its last-recognised refuge, the Academy of Athens ;
but in lonely and isolated places it lasted in its fullest
acceptation till much later. A side-light on the
position of latter-day Pagans is thrown in the
following extract from a letter written by Gregory
the Great to the Empress Constantina :

Having heard that there are many Gentiles in the island
of Sardinia, and that, according to their depraved custom,
they still sacrifice to idols, and that the priests of the island
have become lax in preaching our Redeemer, I sent one of
the Italian bishops there, who, with the help of God, con-
verted many of these Gentiles to the faith. But he has
informed me of a sacrilegious matter, namely, that those
who sacrifice to idols pay a tax to the judge that it may be
permitted to them ; of whom some, now being baptized,
have given up sacrificing to idols, yet still this tax which
they had been accustomed to pay for that purpose is exacted
from them by the same judge even after baptism. And

228 TRANSFORMATION «i

when he was found fault with by the bishop for this, he
answered that he had promised to pay so much for his post,
which he could not do unless by these means.

The Pope adds that in Corsica the islanders are
so ground down by taxation that they hardly pay
the taxes even by selling their own children. Here,
at least, is the Head of the Church in his best
character, that of pleader for the poor with the
great and powerful in the name of an authority
higher than theirs. Gregory has been accused of
destroying many classical works owing to the
attraction which they lent to Paganism, but on
what is considered insufficient evidence. In the
ninth century, the Mainots in the Peloponnesus
still worshipped the gods, and there were Pagans in
the Tyrolese valleys at the same date. No doubt
in some secluded spots they existed even later.

Then, on a certain day in a certain year, an old
man, bent and feeble, went forth softly to make the
last offering to the gods. Perhaps it was a garland
hung on a tree near the place where a shrine had
stood. He felt very sure that the offering was
accepted — he felt that the gods, forsaken now by all,
must be glad to see their faithful worshipper. Gods
have their troubles like men ; it is sad to be left
alone. The old man, when he had hung the flowers
on the bough, went back to his abode and lay down
on his bed, for he was tired. He closed his eyes

xii TRANSFORMATION 229

and he did not open them again. The last Pagan
was dead.

Before glancing at the process by which the
Southern peasants became as devoted to the new
faith as they had been to the old, we may notice a
point of some singularity. It is this. If we look at
the Christianity, not of Emperors and Black Men in
the fifth century, but of the first hunted Christians
in the tombs, we observe a tendency to assimilate
Christian dogma to the simplest pastoral symbolism
of the ancient myths — a tendency to form a new
religion agricole, humaner, diviner than the old, but
still rural, still speaking of the peace of the fields.
The Christians in the Catacombs, experiencing the
Italian need to give a pictorial rendering to their
faith, represented the Founder of it not as the Christ
enthroned on the Globe of the Ravenna mosaics, or
the Christ crucified of the modern Church Universal.
Historically Christ was still one who had failed ; the
spiritual conquest of all the world, which may have
seemed, at the time when the mosaics of S. Vitale
were made, an almost certain event (far more probable
than it can seem to us now), was to the Christians of
the second century at most a desire. Hence they
made no pictures of enthroned Christs. And as for
the Crucifix, an early Christian placed before the
crucified Christ of Velasquez would have felt a
thrill of horror, of outraged decency, as if he had

230 TRANSFORMATION xn

been shown the agony of one of his own friends who
had been put to death. The tragedy was too near.

The persecuted Christians represented Christ
under types taken from the ancient idylls, as
Orpheus with his lyre, or as a shepherd youth with
lamb or kid on his shoulder, standing among olive
branches and rose-trees, the fruits of summer, the
wheat-sheaves of autumn.

But she sigh'd,

The infant Church of love, she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave.

And then she smiled ; and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid
Her head 'mid ignominy, death and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew.

Under entirely changed circumstances the early
idyllic type came into use again among the scholar
poets of the Renaissance, who were no longer simple
and ingenuous, but steeped in a learning which they
were eager to display. Only one, the half-Puritan
Spenser, joins the classical terminology to an
impassioned earnestness which recalls the fervour
of the Catacombs rather than the preciosity of
humanism :

And wonned not the great god Pan

Upon Mount Olivet,
Feeding the blessed flocks of Dan

Which dyd himselfe beget ?

TRANSFORMATION 23 1

O blessed sheepe ! O shepherd great,

That bought his flock so deare,
And them dyd save with bloudy sweat

From wolves that would them teare !

The statue of Christ, young and beautiful, by
Michelangelo, in the Church of Santa Maria sopra
Minerva, which nearly all who go to see it call
" Pagan," is, perhaps, the only famous work of art
representing the Redeemer that would have satisfied
the early Christians.

Had the crusading monks trusted more to the
story of Christ the Good Shepherd and less to the
pickaxe, it is possible that the work of conversion
would have advanced more rapidly. As it was, the
slowness with which it advanced caused poignant
distress to true servants of Christ, who thirsted to
save souls and bring light to those who sit in dark-
ness and in the shadow of death. How was the task
to be accelerated ? There are problems which are
solved by acts, not by words. No Christian saint or
doctor would have said even to himself : " The way
to gain over the peasants is to assimilate the new
faith to the old." But, in practice, that was what was
done.

The doctors, however, had not much to do with
it. St. Augustine set his face resolutely against the
veneration of images, and insisted that Christ should
be sought in the Bible. But men of undoubted

232 TRANSFORMATION Xn

holiness, scattered about the country, could not resist
the temptation of trying " by all means to save some,"
and the way which proved by far the most efficacious
was to let the peasants keep or re-establish a cult
which, in outward particulars, was as like as possible
to the one they were called upon to renounce :

So these nations feared the Lord and served their graven
images, both their children and their children's children ; as
did their fathers, so do they unto this day.

Certainly the names were changed ; for Diana,
Guardian of the Harbours, there was Mary, Star of
the Sea ; for Diana, dwelling in the mountains, there
was Mary, Our Lady of the' Snows. Fortuna
Primigenia became the Madonna della Fortuna.
The names were changed, but is there so very much
in a name ?

A pretty story told by St. Paulinus illustrates
exactly by what steps the peasant began to feel at
home in the new faith. A countryman recommended
his beloved oxen to Felix, the legendary Saint of
Nolo. " He loves them better than his own
children ! " writes Paulinus, and his care of them
was extreme, but lo and behold ! one night they
were stolen out of the stable ! Thereupon the
countryman violently upbraided St. Felix for his un-
pardonable negligence (just as he would have done
if the negligent protector had been a sylvan god).
Nothing would satisfy him unless he recovered those

xii TRANSFORMATION 233

very same oxen — no others would do. Well, and
what happened ? Paulinus may tell it : " St. Felix
forgave the want of politeness for the sake of the
abundance of faith, and he laughed with Our Lord
over the injurious expressions addressed to him."
That night the oxen walked back into the stable.

Paulinus seems to have been the first person who
had pictures painted inside a church, though his
object was only to interest and edify ; he did
not intend them for veneration. Those pictures
were the lineal ancestors of the altar-pieces of
Raphael. Without them, let it be remembered, we
should have had no Christian Art.

Pictures in churches probably began everywhere
as a device to amuse the peasants, and the veneration
of images may have sprung from the peasants, in out-
of-the-way places, saving favourite statues of their
gods by giving them new names. In my own
garden there is a statue, called by the peasants " la
Madonna Mora," the head of which, certainly an
antique, much resembles the head of a Diana found
at Pompeii.

Thus did the country-folk, from being the last
Pagans, become the pillar of the Church, and when
the supremacy of Rome was threatened to its
foundations it was chiefly the peasants allied to the
" Black Men " who saved it.

Contact with a monotheistic race made the

234 TRANSFORMATION xn

educated classes in Byzantium ashamed of forms of
worship which intelligent Mohammedans told them
were Paganism over again. If success had crowned
the Iconoclastic movement, the cult of the Saints
would have been reduced within narrow limits, and
the power of the priesthood would have received an
irrevocable blow. It failed, from a coalition of
women, peasants, and monks (a great part of the
higher clergy was in favour of it). The Popes had
the fortunate accident of siding with Italian nationality
against strangers for the second time — the first was
in the struggle with the Arian Goths.

XIII
THE DIVINE PASTORAL

THE unique place which the Altissimo Poeta occupied
in the first twelve Christian centuries was due,
without doubt, to his fame as a prophet. This is
the most reasonable explanation of the ascription to
him of magical powers ; he could not have been a
prophet quite like the others, argued the unlearned
man, with his rough logic — therefore, he was a
beneficent kind of wizard. On the other hand,
scholars and theologians accepted the theory that
Virgil arrived at foreknowledge by divine favour ;
they did not think it necessary to bring magic on
the scene. There was one sceptic, a man whose
erudition was not less than his candour, which might
have led him to the stake had he lived at the right
time — St. Jerome. He turned the whole matter
into ridicule, but no one agreed with him. From
St. Augustine to Abelard, the flower of mediaeval
learning believed that the Fourth Eclogue was a
prophecy of the birth of Christ. Constantine the

235

236 THE DIVINE PASTORAL

Great, in his oration to the Assembly of the Saints,
brings the Eclogue forward to convince those who
were not convinced by a certain acrostic on the name
of Jesus Christ, which passed for a Sibylline prophecy,
and which, he says sadly, many persons supposed
to have been composed " by some one professing our
faith and not unacquainted with the poetic art " — to
have been, in short, a forgery, as it actually was.
Now, the Eclogue was not a forgery, and the Sibylline
prediction on which it was based was held to be
genuine. Constantine's enthusiasm for Virgil knew
no bounds : he called him the Prince of Latin poets,
and " this admirably wise and accomplished man."
His discourse on the Eclogue has been said to be
too scholarly for him to have written it, but it is
hard to set aside the positive statement of Eusebius
that the Emperor did write this and many other
orations in Latin, which were turned into Greek by a
special staff of translators maintained for the purpose.
Indeed, Eusebius gives one the idea that Constantine
was as fond of composing speeches as a Caesar of
a much later date.

An ancient legend tells of the visit of St. Paul
to Virgil's tomb at Naples, and Dante makes Statius
thank the Mantuan Vates for converting him.
Successive popes quoted the Eclogue as a prophecy.
Theologians pointed to various texts in Scripture in
which the existence of prophets among the Gentiles

xin THE DIVINE PASTORAL 237

seemed to be suggested. Though Dante's story of
the conversion of Statius does not seem to have
been true, there is no reason entirely to reject such
stories. The ancient world looked on prophecy some-
what as we look on astronomical predictions ; and
with minds so disposed, Virgil's oracle might work
a remarkable effect. To say, as has been said, that
the interpretation of the Eclogue in a Christian sense
was the result of " a curious misconception," fails
to do justice to the high intellect of the men who
so interpreted it. These men were influenced by
the religious atmosphere of their time, but they
would not have been so obtuse as to suppose a
Pagan poem to be a Messianic prophecy had it not
looked remarkably like one. It would have been
more curious if no one had been struck by the
resemblance. Without altering the meaning, as
Pope did, but by a very simple process of selection
and omission, it is easy to show the spirit in which
the poem was read. I have done this in the follow-
ing version, from which the mythological names
are left out ; but even these, which sound incongruous
to us, did not sound so in times when it was
common for poets to mix up Christian and Pagan
personages :

Sicilian muses, let me sing again !

But not to all gives still uncloyed delights
The leafy grove where I too long have lain ;

Lift then my rural song to higher flights.

238 THE DIVINE PASTORAL xm

Now comes the Age of which the Sibyl told,
When ancient Justice shall return to earth,

And Time's great book its final page unfold,

Since Time is ripe and hails the Heavenly Birth.

The Iron Race shall cease, and soon elate
A Golden Race its happy course begin ;

The nations dwell together without hate,
Man being born anew and cleansed of sin.

One, whom Immortal Presences surround,
Where light of life immortal grows not dim,

A happy world shall rule in peace profound,
His Father's virtue manifest in Him.

O Child ! Earth brings thee all her first green things,

Ivy and holly, winter's little store,
Undriven the she-goat her sweet burden brings,

And mighty lions affright the herds no more.

Dead lies the poisonous snake among the grass,
And dead the nightshade and the hemlock dead ;

Only sweet herbs spring up where thou shalt pass,
And flowering branches o'er thy cradle spread.

Dear Child ! begotten of the Eternal Sire,

The heavens to tell thce near with gladness rang ;

O could I see the world's fulfilled desire,
Then would I sing as poet never sang.

Still on thine eyes no mortal eyes have shone,
Thy mother waits thee still, weary the while ;

The full months bid her smile upon her Son,
Begin, O Child, to know her by her smile.

The prophetical view was, of course, unaffected
by the question of exactly what Virgil had in his
mind. On this point conjecture was divided. Con-

xiii THE DIVINE PASTORAL 239

stantine held that the poet " was acquainted with that
blessed mystery which gave our Lord the name of
Saviour," but that, to avoid persecution, he obscured
the truth and drew the thoughts of his hearers to
objects with which they were familiar. Others
believed, more rationally, that Virgil spoke he knew
not what — which did not interfere with the validity
of the prophecy, since the essence of prophetical
writings lies in their foreshadowing events of which
their authors had no intellectual perception. There-
fore, in the Ages of Faith, Virgil's conscious intention
was a secondary matter. To us, on the contrary, it
is a point of great interest, but we are as far as ever
from throwing light on it. Prejudice, which once
existed on one side, changed over to the other ; the
wish to interpret the Eclogue supernaturally gave
place to a wish to interpret it naturally : thus " lovis
incrementum," from being " progeny of Jove,"
became " protegt of Jove" — though the former
meaning seems, to say the least, a more probable one
than the latter. It was discovered that Pollio's son,
an intolerable person, really went about boasting
that he was the fated infant. This discovery is
important because it shows that Virgil's own con-
temporaries did not know of whom he was speaking.
But the theory it involves is the most extravagant of
all. Virgil says that the great event is to happen
while Pollio is Consul, which would be a strange way

24o THE DIVINE PASTORAL xm

of saying that the great event was the birth of his
own son. Apart from this, Virgil could not have
made such predictions about the son of a simple
administrator without committing rank treason
against Augustus. The theory of an Imperial off-
spring has much more to recommend it, only we can-
not find the Imperial offspring. One of the greatest
authorities on Virgil, Professor Sellar, decided against
the claims of the unfortunate Julia, previously regarded
as the best candidate. Some critics have seen in the
Fourth Eclogue the aspiration towards a new and
renovated Rome, but this is a case of" thinking into "
an ancient poet ideas which an ancient poet would not
have thought. On the whole, the most reasonable
opinion is that of Gaston Boissier, who brought to
the subject not only scholarship but a profound and
sympathetic study of the epoch. The accomplished
French writer declined to attach any definite meaning
to the poem, which he preferred to consider a reflec-
tion of the vague unsettlement and expectancy pre-
vailing in the Roman world during the last half-
century before Christ.

The dream of a return to a golden age was not
unknown in classical literature, but it was at the end
of the kite — a dream which knows itself to be a dream.
When the theory of the ages was treated by a realist
like Hesiod, he made the worst age come last, antici-
pating the modern oracles of degeneration. Aristotle

xin THE DIVINE PASTORAL 241

evolved a system of self-repeating cycles which
depended on the position of the heavenly bodies, but
it presents few analogies with Virgil's millennium.
The idea of a universal peace has been connected
from the earliest times with the birth or sojourn
upon earth of certain exceptional beings.

Virgil must have remembered what is called the
Twenty-fourth Idyll of Theocritus (though by some
it is supposed not to be by him). Professor Sellar
saw no trace of Theocritean influence in the " Pollio,"
but the " Pollio " and the " Little Hercules " both
deal with prophecies about a wonderful child. The
seer Tiresias tells how the mothers of a later day,
when they sit spinning in the evening twilight, will
sing the praise of Alcmena, and call her the glory
of womanhood. Her child shall be the greatest of
heroes ; he shall overcome men and monsters, and
there shall be peace on earth : " the wolf that finds
the kid in its lair shall not harm it." When all is
said, however, we cannot deny that the allusions, and
especially the general tone of the Fourth Eclogue,
remind us less of any classical myth than of parts of
the Hebrew Scriptures.

Why did no Roman Sir William Jones or Edward
FitzGerald draw the attention of his receptive,
inquisitive fellow-countrymen to the wealth of poetry
lying perdu in the Jewish sacred books ? How was
it that the Septuagint attracted so little notice ? It

R

242 THE DIVINE PASTORAL xm

is assumed that the Romans set their minds against
everything foreign that was not Greek, but this
seems to be disproved by the almost frantic way in
which, latterly, they ran after Oriental fashions in
religious rites. I have heard the suggestion that the
cause of the neglect of the Septuagint was the little
skill of its authors, which rendered many of the
finest passages of the original commonplace or
incomprehensible.

Virgil was a learned man and was particularly
versed in Alexandrine learning, but no one thinks
that he possessed direct knowledge of the Old
Testament ; had he read it, even in its imperfect
Greek form, it would have left more traces in his
works. On the other hand, it is possible that frag-
ments of Hebrew prophecies crept into the Sibylline
books which replaced the older ones that were
destroyed when the Capitol was burnt during the
first civil war. This would account for Virgil's
associating Messianic ideas with the sibyl.

It is also possible that the great revival of these
ideas among the Jews themselves led to their becom-
ing known and even giving rise to discussion among
the Gentiles. The opportunism of Herod the Great
— his ready exchange of the last shreds of Jewish
independence for the civilities of Caesar — drove the
more ardent spirits of patriots and dreamers to a
passionate rebound from despair to hope. The

xin THE DIVINE PASTORAL 243

Simeons who waited for the consolation of Israel, the
Annas who looked for redemption in Jerusalem, sent,
perchance, a magnetic thrill of longing through a
world which had nothing in common with their race
or their faith.

Besides Virgil, another famous Gentile was be-
lieved to have foreshadowed the birth of Christ.
This was Zoroaster, on whose prophecies an ancient
tradition affirmed that the Magi based their researches.
Zoroaster did predict that a Saviour would be born
of a Virgin, so that the tradition was not without
justification. No incident of the infancy of Christ
took so strong a hold of the popular imagination
during the early centuries as the Magi's visit. In the
homage of the Wise Men the Church saw prefigured
the subjection of the Gentile world. To emphasise
their symbolical significance, the "Wise Men" became
" kings." These changes happen automatically ;
people cannot relate a story without giving it a
colour of preconceived ideas. It was to guard
against similar unconscious modifications that the
Jews devised the extraordinarily ingenious method
for preserving the purity of the sacred text which was
carried out in the Massorah. If it is difficult to
keep a written canon pure, it is far more difficult to
prevent the phantasy of the pious from embroidering
" improvements " on that part of it which slips into
oral legend.

244 THE DIVINE PASTORAL xm

In the Roman catacombs there are two or three
drawings of the Virgin lifting up the Child to the
adoration of the Magi, and the subject reappears in
a mosaic in the sixth-century Church of S. Apollinare
Nuovo at Ravenna. Almost always when the subject
of the Nativity was treated in early Christian art
(which was not often) it was in connexion with the
Wise Men's visit. The same is true of early
hymnology. Synesius of Cyrene, the poet-bishop of
Ptolemais, who lived at the beginning of the fifth
century, wrote the impressive rhapsody which
E. B. Browning translated in her " Greek Christian
Poets":

What time thou wast poured mild

From an earthly vase defiled,

Magi with fair arts besprent

At thy new star's orient.

Trembled inly, wondered wild,

Questioned with their thoughts abroad —

" What then is the new-born Child ?

Who the hidden God ?

God, or corpse, or king ? "

Bring your gifts, oh, hither bring

Myrrh for rite — for tribute gold —

Frankincense for sacrifice.

God ! thine incense take and hold !

King ! I bring thee gold of price !

Myrrh with tomb will harmonize.

The Magi became great personages in the Middle
Ages by reason of their alleged relics, which were
first preserved in St. Sophia, then given to the city of

xin THE DIVINE PASTORAL 245

Milan, and lastly transferred to Cologne when Milan
fell into the hands of Frederick Barbarossa in 1162 —
a robbery which much distressed the Milanese, who
resolved to represent a mystery of the Three Kings
every year to keep alive the memory of their former
custody of these venerable bones. They always
hoped to get the relics back, and a few years ago they
did get back a portion of them, which were put in
the tomb at Sant' Eustorgio, from which they had
been stolen more than seven hundred years before.
Everything comes to those who know how to wait
— long enough.

Virgil himself frequently figured in the mysteries
of the Middle Ages, accompanied by the Sibyl. In
the earliest specimen extant, the office of the Nativity,
which was performed at Limoges in the tenth century,
" Virgilius Maro, goddess " (sic] " of the Gentiles,"
is asked if it is true that he was a witness to Christ.
The poet replies with a line from his Eclogue.

XIV
PUER PARVULUS

A STUDY of the religion of the modern peasant may
seem to have little to do with the outdoor life of
antiquity, but, in truth, the religion of the peasant
has reminded me as often as his agricultural methods
of the continuity of life in Southern lands. After
the stamping out of Paganism the country became
reconsecrated ; the Divine Presences returned ; the
sanctuary was back on the hilltop ; once more the
rude image looked kindly on the field. Much was
as it had been before. Nevertheless, in the peasant
himself a wonderful thing had happened : he had
made a discovery greater than that of the Pole, the
discovery of the next world. Harvest and seedtime
and the sleep of winter carried a new significance.

Over the golden grain light lies the well-turned furrow,
Deeper the furrow that waits, toiler, the end of thy toil :
Merrily plough and sow : e'en now in the dark earth's bosom
Quickens the living food and Hope forsakes not the grave.1

If there was less of unconscious joy, there was a

1 " Dem Ackerman " of Goethe.
246

xiv PUER PARVULUS 247

conscious joy that surpassed it. In place of the
human twin of the Faun of Praxiteles stood the
Vecchletto of the Sacro Monte — an old labouring-man
gazing upward with god -illuminated face. The
belief in a Beyond permeates the peasant's faith
in its entirety, and this must not be forgotten when
pointing out the externalism of some of his observ-
ances and the stage of development to which his
religious intelligence belongs.

There was no actual cult of the Infant Saviour
till the thirteenth century. Bonaventura, the
" seraphic doctor," related how the wish came to
St. Francis of Assisi so to commemorate the birth
of Christ as to move the people to devotion. This
wish he prepared to carry out at the castle of
Grescio with the greatest solemnity. That there
might be no murmurs, he first sought the permission
of the Pope, after obtaining which he put hay in
a manger and caused the ox and the ass to be
brought to the place, and around there was a great
multitude. It was a most beautiful night and many
lamps were lit and all the wood resounded with the
solemn sound of the songs chanted by the religious
brothers. The Man of God stood before the
manger full of ineffable sweetness, weeping for holy
joy. On a dafs raised above the manger, Mass
was said, and the Blessed Francis chanted the
holy Gospel and preached to the people on the

248 PUER PARVULUS xiv

Nativity of Our Lord, whom he called on this
occasion lo Bambin de Belem out of the tenderness
of great love.

Some of us have looked with mortal eyes on the
fields of Bethlehem which are still so fair and green.
With that unchanged setting before us, if we were
not dull indeed, we saw as in a vision the shepherds
who watched their flocks by night ; we heard as
in a dream the song of glory to God and peace to
man which, floating from the Syrian skies, has been
borne to the farthest ends of the earth. The divine
idyll related by St. Luke alone among the evangelists
seemed to take life and form. To me it is not
doubtful that memories carried away by the Saint
from the real Bethlehem suggested the idea of
making the scene of the Nativity live again among
his Umbrian hills.1 He knew that the humble
folk to whom he cared most to address himself
believe what they see. For the time being what
they see is real to them. They receive from it the
same emotions ; it receives from them the same
homage. It is not a matter of stocks and stones
but of the reverse of stocks and stones. It is an
intense power of imagination brought into activity
by the touch of a material spring.

It was the mission if not the conscious object

1 M. Paul Sabatier has been so kind as to send me the following dates which
coincide well with this theory : Journey of St. Francis in the East 1219-1220 ;
institution of the Pretepio at the castle of Grescio, December 24, 1224.

xiv PUER PARVULUS 249

of Francis of Assisi to develop the latent democratic
forces of Catholicism, and he foresaw, with the in-
sight of men of faith, the place which the manger
of the Babe of Bethlehem would conquer in the
affections of the Southern rural masses. Easter is
the great popular feast in the Eastern Church,
Christmas in the Latin, — especially in Italy. One
is the feast of the next world, the other of this.
Italians are fond of this world. Then, too, what
could appeal more strongly to the followers of the
plough, the keepers of the sheepfold, than the image
of the Child born " fra il bue e 1' asinello " ? The
poverty of the Holy Family, on which no emphasis
is laid in the Gospels, is dwelt upon constantly in
the later literature of the Nativity ; the simple
explanation of the birth in the stable — that there
was no room at the inn — is left out of sight. The
Italian peasant thinks, and draws patience from the
thought, that Joseph and Mary could not afford to
pay for a better lodging.

The erection of the first manger or presepio in
the castle of Grescio was painted by Giotto in one
of his frescoes in the upper church at Assisi. He
represents the Saint in the act of constructing the
manger, when the image of the child Jesus which
he holds in his arms miraculously wakes to life.
But the influence of the presepio in art had been felt
before that ; it may be perceived in the Nativity

250 PUER PARVULUS xiv

which Nicolo Pisano carved on the pulpit of the
Baptistery at Pisa. Though it is not necessary to
connect every artistic presentation of the Nativity
with the custom which soon prevailed in every house-
hold of erecting a manger at Christmas, it is yet
plain that there was an intimate relationship between
the two. Both the presepi and the treatment of the
subject in art tended to become more elaborate.
In the fifteenth century Benozzo Gozzoli introduced
trees, birds, and other natural things, and instead of
wintry snows, the earth was shown breaking into
blossom. By and by, the train of pilgrims increased
and the whole world was displayed on the march.
The great Nativity of Bernadino Luini at Saronno
illustrates this development of the once simple theme.
Convents and rich families began to spend lavishly
on their Christmas shows ; increased care was be-
stowed on the scenery ; Jerusalem, the holy city,
appeared in the distance, and the perspective was
managed with such skill that a surprising effect of
length was given to the motley procession which
wound down the mountainVoad. Trees, flowers, and
animals enlivened the foreground. A magnificent
specimen is preserved in the Certosa di San Martino
above Naples. The lasting popularity of these
exhibitions is proved by the fact that, a few winters
ago, a moving mechanical presepio was shown at
Milan, in which the figures were marionettes. It

xiv PUER PARVULUS 251

was a pretty sight, and so discreetly arranged that
it secured the patronage of the high ecclesiastical
authorities. At the day performance the little
theatre was always full of children and their nurses.
Unfortunately, after the Nativity came a scene of
the Massacre of the Innocents, with real screams,
almost as blood-curdling as the screams in Tosca.
But it was all much appreciated by the audience, for
children bear out the remark of St. Augustine that
people like that best on the stage which most harrows
their feelings. Some slight movement of the figures
is attempted now even in the churches; the three
kings, for instance, are made to canter round on
their mules, re -appearing — at suitable intervals.
There is no doubt that among the poor this kind of
spectacle excites deeply religious feelings. I shall not
forget the passionate, earnest face of one young girl
kneeling before a presepio — of what was she telling
the Virgin Mother ? The rich, if they go from
habit, yet are touched — at least by those memories
of childhood which are so close to religion.

It cannot be denied, however, that besides its
devotional aspect, the presepio has always attracted
the multitude as a beautiful show. Machiavelli
mentions a gorgeous Nativity exhibited in 1466
" to give the people something else than public affairs
to think about." Travellers came from far away
to see such exhibitions. In 1587 Tasso visited the

252 PUER PARVULUS xiv

presepio erected by Pope Sixtus V. in Santa Maria
Maggiore, — once called S. Maria ad praesepe from
its containing five boards which are said to have
composed the original manger at Bethlehem. But of
all the pictured mangers that which has obtained the
widest fame is the one displayed at Santa Maria in
Araceli. Lady Morgan and an infinite number of
writers have described it. The figures are life-size,
and the image of the Babe is that Santissimo Bambino
which legend reports to have been carved from the
branch of a tree on the Mount of Olives by a
Franciscan friar and painted miraculously, though
not artistically, by St. Luke. When I went to see
the Bambino I asked the lay brother in attendance
whether it still was taken out to visit the sick
for whom mortal hope was past. " Oh, yes," he
replied ; "it went out yesterday." " Are there
many cures ? " I asked. " Certainly there are," was
the answer, and no doubt a true one, for life may
often be saved by raising the patient's moral.
The image is covered with jewels, the gifts of
the grateful.

No place except " Betelem, che '1 gran parto
accolse in grembo," has so good a traditional right
to be associated with Christmas as Santa Maria in
Araceli. This right rests on a story which it is said
can be traced to the eighth century, but I do not
know where to look for mention of it before the

xiv PUER PARVULUS 253

fourteenth. The story runs thus : When the question
was proposed by the Roman Senate of deifying
Augustus, the Emperor consulted a sibyl (or sooth-
sayer) as to whether any one alive were greater than
he. After the sibyl had performed some invocations,
a vision appeared of a circle in which was a woman
holding a little child. " This child," said the sibyl,
" is greater than thou." At the same time a voice
was heard saying, " Here is the altar of Heaven."
These things happened on the first Christmas Day.
Augustus built an altar on the spot, which was
afterwards converted into the present Church.

In the octave of Christmas little Roman children
still " preach," as it is called, before the Holy Child ;
a sight which, even more than the presepio itself,
draws crowds to the Araceli ; for, like all children of
the South, they say their " pieces " with an infinite
charm that raises half a smile and half a tear.
Almost as soon as the institution of the Manger,
there grew up the custom of speaking or singing
before it. The privilege of expounding the event
which it represented passed from friars or priests to
peasants and children, and this added to the essentially
popular character of the rite ; it became, as it were,
a little Mass of the poor and pious laity. Lullabies
were written to be sung to the Infant Jesus, many of
them being composed in the person of the Virgin,
and even believed by the people to have been sung

254 PUER PARVULUS xiv

by her — a tradition perhaps known to Coleridge
when he wrote :

A mother's song the Virgin Mother sung.

One beautiful Latin lullaby was reverenced, in
particular, as the Virgin's own song, but there is
no proof that any sacred ninne nanne existed before
the lovely specimens written by the Franciscan Fra
Jacopone da Todi, who lived in the same century as
his master, and who is famous as author of the Stabat
Mater. The poor friar showed an almost inspired
knowledge of a mother's heart ; he almost fathomed
the unfathomable — a mother's love. Umbria with its
sun-painted hills, so like the hills of Palestine, gave
birth to the chosen saint, poet, and painter of the
Holy Child — Francis, Jacopone, and Raphael.

In the steps of Fra Jacopone followed a great
company, ranging from immortal poets to the
humblest folk-minstrel. Milton played his organ,
Herrick his pipe, Crashaw his viol with pathetic tones.
If Crashaw lacked the great Puritan's majestic sweep,
he approached more nearly to that impassioned
fervour, joined to a kind of confidential familiarity,
which is the note of early Italian Christmas songs.
His " Hymn sung by the shepherds in the Holy
Nativity of our Lord God " alternates between the
homely and the sublime ; between the vision to the
mortal eye :

PUER PARVULUS 255

Poor world (said I), what will thou do

To entertain this starry stranger ?
Is this the best thou can'st bestow —

A cold and not too cleanly manger ?

and the spiritual vision :

We saw thee in Thy balmy nest,

Young Dawn of our eternal Day,
We saw thine eyes break from their East

And chase the trembling shades away.
We saw thee and we blessed the sight,
We saw thee by thine own sweet light.

A lesser poet, Patrick Carey, whose poems, written
in the seventeenth century, were first published by
Sir Walter Scott, composed one charming verse :

Look, how he shakes for cold,

How pale his lips are grown,
Wherein his limbs to fold,
Yet mantle has he none.
His pretty feet and hands
(Of late more pure and white
Than is the snow
That pains him so)
Have lost their candour quite.

This is very like the Italian folk-lullabies, though
it is improbable that Carey was acquainted with them.
They were known, no doubt, to Mrs. Browning, but
her poem called " The Virgin Mary to the Child
Jesus " has other thoughts than those of the Italian
folk-singer, who would prefer Raphael's healthy Babe
with the goldfinch to the English poet's " child
without the heart for play."

256 PUER PARVULUS xiv

The songs and carols of the Holy Nativity cannot
be even counted here. Saboly, the Provencal poet,
called the " Troubaire de Betelem," alone wrote one
hundred and ten. From the point of view of litera-
ture, the finest Christmas poem, since Milton's hymn,
is the Natale of Alessandro Manzoni, the following
lines from which are considered by Italian critics an
incomparable specimen of the " grand style " :

L' angiol del ciel agli uomini
Nunzio di tanta sorte,
Non dei potenti volgesi
Alle vegliate porte ;
Ma fra i pastor devoti
Al duro mondo ignoti,
Subito in luce appar !

Here every word tells and every word is noble and
simple. The sentiment is purely Franciscan — the
great welling-up sentiment of democracy. I cannot
read these lines without thinking of one of the
grand democratic perorations of Fra Agostino da
Montefeltro, the humble brother whose eloquent
voice so often crowded the city churches of Italy,
not only with the faithful but with all the " sheep
out of the stable," — as a Milanese friend of mine
designates " Jews, Turks, and Infidels " in what he
believes to be most idiomatic English.

Nativity interludes and plays existed before the
time of St. Francis ; the first extant regular drama
performed at Christmas belongs to the precious

xiv PUER PARVULUS 257

manuscript of the Abbey of Saint-Ben6it-sur-Loire,
and it is one of the earliest specimens of a modern
drama (as distinguished from mere dialogues) which
we possess. Hrotswitha's imitations of Terence
alone preceded it. The Saint-Benoit play is called
Htrode. The shepherds (rather neglected in earlier
art and literature) now make their formal appearance
and describe how they have found the Babe lying
between two dumb animals. The three kings follow
with their offerings, which they present almost in
the words of the Greek Christian poet Synesius :
" Oh, King, take this gold. Gold is the symbol of
kings. Take the myrrh. Myrrh is the symbol of
tombs. Take the incense, for thou art truly God."
The Infant Jesus is brought out to them, not by
the Virgin but by two nurses ; the non-appearance
of the Madonna is, perhaps, to be attributed to a
scruple, soon to disappear, as to showing her in the
first moments of her motherhood.

If, however, Nativity mysteries existed before the
•presepio, they increased a hundredfold after the
veneration of the Infant Saviour became a common
practice. The Cumaean Sibyl usually appeared in
them accompanied by Virgil, and Moses and Aaron,
all the prophets, King David, Nebuchadnezzar, as
well as Balaam's ass (with a little boy inside it),
combined to make up what was dear to the mediaeval
playgoer, an enormously long list of personages.

258 PUER PARVULUS xiv

All of these figured in a mystery which was still
performed a few years ago in Rouen Cathedral. In
one Christmas play a hymn was sung to Venus —
even in the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini the riot of
emancipated fancy scarcely could go farther. Miracle
plays are supposed to have been invented by monks
to draw the people away from the attractions of the
ancient comedy, but the cure was at times worse
than the disease. For what we should call downright
profanity nothing can equal these fruits of the ages
of faith. And yet in the rampant licence of the
mediaeval mystery lay the germ of the splendid
freedom of the Elizabethan theatre. It must be
admitted, too, that in spite of extravagance, the
miracle plays show, here and there, a true dramatic
instinct which we might realise to a fuller extent if
we could see them acted. Many travellers go to
the wonderful plastic presentment of the Gospel
story on the Sacro Monte of Varallo with minds
set against it, but few come away without having
received an ineffaceable impression. The same thing
happens at Ober-Ammergau, and even at the ruder
performances given by Tyrolese peasants, whose
religious plays have not been improved to meet
the demands of modern taste.

Still more popular than the Nativity play was the
idyll, eclogue, or pastoral (as it was variously called)
which treated only the episode of the shepherds.

xiv PUER PARVULUS 259

Some good examples were written by the Spanish
poet Juan de la Enzina towards the end of the
fifteenth century. His shepherds, instead of being
theologians in sheepskin, are taken straight from the
brown Spanish hill-side ; they sit round the fire of
dry twigs and fragrant plants ; they play dice for
chestnuts, swear by the evangelists, and discuss such
local matters as the death of the Sacristan — when
suddenly an angel announces the birth of Christ and
they all set off for Bethlehem as if it were the next
parish. A Portuguese named Gil Vicente, who often
wrote in Spanish, also produced some realistic idylls
in which people talk of friars, hermits, breviaries,
calendars, and papal bulls. After signing themselves
with the cross the shepherds go to sleep ; while they
are asleep angels begin to sing, which wakes one old
shepherd of the name of Gil, who rouses his comrade
Bras and tells him that he has heard angelic strains.
" Are you sure," says Bras, "that it was not crickets ? "
Gil scorns the suggestion and orders the others to go
immediately to the village to buy a pipe, guitar, and
flageolet and a baby's whistle as presents for the
Infant Christ.

Innumerable Christmas pastorals sprang up in
Italy in the seventeenth century. Every person with a
pen made a point of writing one, from the poet of
reputation to the obscure village priest. Some of
these pieces were set to music by famous composers

26o PUER PARVULUS xiv

(alas, where is their fame now ?), in which form they
came to be called oratorios, from the oratories of St.
Philip Neri, where they were performed. Thus an
epoch-making word came into currency ; along the
aisles of the future sounded the grand choruses of
Handel and the thrilling flute-notes of Don Lorenzo
Perosi, in whose Natale del Redentore there is
something of the " ineffable sweetness " that filled
the Povere/lo as he stood before the first presepio.

When the taste for bucolics declined, the pious
pastorals suffered the same fate as the rest ; but the
peasants clung to them, and in some mountain villages
of Piedmont they are still represented on the
Christmas night. The best of the still-surviving
specimens is the one performed in the valleys of
Cuorgne. Count Nigra, the able Italian diplomatist,
remembered having begun his career as an ambassador
by figuring in it, as a child, in the character of a
herald angel with wings of peacocks' feathers. To
his enthusiasm for folk-lore we owe the publication of
the text.

The necessary personages in this dramatic scene
are eleven shepherds and one angel, but three angels
are preferred when they can be had. Mary and
Joseph do not appear. A side altar is converted into
a manger, in which the image of the Babe lies. Mid-
night mass has advanced as far as the Credo when
the performance opens with what is called an

xiv PUER PARVULUS 261

" angelic prologue." In this homily, the congrega-
tion are requested to be very attentive — then, on
this dark night, they will behold great portents.
They will see the shepherds draw near to worship a
new-born Babe, in whom, with melting hearts, they
recognise their Redeemer. The prologue ends with
the words : " Whoso desires happiness and justice,
let him seek them in God, for they are not to be
found among men, and now, may all things proceed
with order and may we meet one day in heaven."

A knocking is heard at the chief entrance ; the
priest opens the door and the eleven shepherds walk
into the church. They wear long white woollen
cloaks and broad-brimmed hats which they keep on
their heads. Each carries a staff in one hand and
his offering in the other. Montano brings a lamb ;
Alceste, two pigeons ; Volpino, honey ; Silvio, fresh
butter ; Evandro, milk ; Menalca, grapes (they are
hung up in a dry place so as to keep till December).
Tigrane carries a pair of turtle-doves ; Titiro, apples ;
Polibeo, eggs ; Mirteo, two chickens ; Melibeo,
cloth for swaddling clothes. The gifts remain with
the priest, but, like the ancient sacrifice, they are in
very truth offered to Deity. This custom has
endeared the ceremonial to the poor, who are so fond
of giving. They feel that their offerings actually
supply the wants of their Infant Lord, and feeling is
much more real than thinking or knowing.

262 PUER PARVULUS xiv

The crowd, which densely fills the little church,
leaves a clear space for the shepherds in the middle
of the building. Montano remarks that here they
are with their gifts, but he has no idea why Melibeo,
the oldest shepherd, has called them hither while the
sun is still asleep. Questions and answers gradually
disclose the fact that Melibeo supposed, from the
appearance of the heavens, the time to be come for
the birth of Him who should fulfil the promise
of Abraham. While they are speaking, Melibeo
suddenly declares that even now a light illumines
the sky, the grass grows green, streams freed from
ice run with a sweet murmur, flowers burst forth,
hill and valley smile as in April. The younger
shepherds, overpowered by fear, inquire if any one
ever saw so light a night, or rather, so light a day.
The congregation take this transformation on faith,
but there soon appears a tangible angel who invites
the shepherds to follow him to the manger. " Here,"
he says, " is the august palace of the Word made
man."

In the next scene, the shepherds, by their homely
remarks, elicit from the angel an exposition of
Christian doctrine :

Aheste. Look in how poor and rude a shed
The King of kings has found a bed.

Angel. Here 'twas he uttered his first cry,
That you might learn humility.

Montano. Naked he meets the wintry night.

xiv PUER PARVULUS 263

Angel, The road is hard to heaven's height.

Titiro. He shakes with cold in every part.

Angel. Yet doth a flame ignite his heart.

Melibeo. He never murmurs nor complains.

Angel. That you may learn to bear your pains.

l^olpino. Poor rags his body scarcely hide.

Angel. Thus to reprove the sins of pride.

Evandro. It seems as if the ox and cow
Were drawing nigh to warm him now.

Angel. The succour thoughtless beasts supply,
Less feeling man shall oft deny.

Silvio. In what deep poverty he lies !

Angel. To teach you greatness to despise.

Mirteo. He seems beyond all mortal aid.

Angel. Who trusts in God is ne'er afraid.

Menalca. His woeful state to pity moves.

Angel. So heaven tries the soul it loves.

Polibeo. His childish tears are falling fast.

Angel. Blood will be there for tears at last.

Tigrane. How soft his limbs ! How delicate !

AngeL One day the scourge will lacerate.
In this rude cradle you may see
Even Him whose mighty hand,
And whose eterne command,
Formed heaven, created earth, and ordered hell to be.

At this point each shepherd deposits his gift.
Apologies are offered for the poorness of the present,
except in the case of the lamb — an exception which
shows a rare sense of the fitness of things possessed
by the forgotten author whose work has lasted longer
than his name. The dedication of the lamb is
solemn : " Pure as thou art pure ; guiltless as thou
art guiltless ; fated victim as thou art fated victim :
Lord, may this my gift be acceptable in Thy sight."

264 PUER PARVULUS xiv

Of the other offerings, it is confessed that they are
but common things, though they are the very best of
their kind. (This is exactly what a real peasant says
when he makes you a present.) The apples are of the
sweetest ; the cloth took years to weave ; there never
was such honey ; the milk is milked from the pet
ewe. But what are such things for a king ? Each
giver, after his little speech, adds himself to his gift :

Ei t' offre tutto assieme
II dono e il donator.

Sometimes a kid, a wolf-skin, a hare, or a few flowers
are added to the gifts. The following rhyme
accompanies the flower offering :

These I gathered as I went,
Pretty flowers with sweetest scent,
Which among the ice and snow
In the ice-bound meadow grow.
Let them, too, Thy coming hail,
Let them, too, their homage yield ;
Thou, the lily of the vale,
Thou, the flower of all the field.

When the gifts have been presented, Montano says
that since their duty is done, they will go forth and
spread the good news abroad. " Let everything be
glad and rejoice. Let the Holy Name be graven on
the bark of all the trees ; let the air whisper it and
the crystal fountain reply. The birds, the wild
beasts, and the flocks shall learn to pronounce it, and
from every rock and mount and abyss Echo will
repeat the name of the Child born this night."

xiv PUER PARVULUS 265

The priest finishes the Mass, and the congregation
join in a carol :

I hear the people singing

Their songs of gladdest praise ;

The very skies arc ringing

With sweet angelic lays.
Rejoice, my heart, and sing with them,
For Christ is born in Bethlehem.

Out of the church the mountain-folk depart into
the silence of the Alpine winter night. Each lights
his torch, and takes his way slowly across the snow
to his own dwelling. Above shine the innumerable
stars.

In the Italian plains no plays or mysteries are now
performed, but in a corner of the cottage the manger
is still arranged with moss and a waxen Babe and, if
possible, a few wooden or paper animals. Before
this the children kneel. I have in my hand the
Christmas letters of four little Italian peasant girls.
Bettina, the eldest, promises "di pregare fervorosa-
mente il Divino Infante di conservare fra noi la
nostra degna Signora." Camilla, the second, writes :
" Non manchero in questi solenni giorni di inalzare
preci al Bambino celeste di ricompensare i suoi
benefici." Barbara, the third, inscribes "V.G.B."
(Viva Gesu Bambino) at the top of her letter. She
writes : " Ecco le feste del Santo Natale che io
desiderava tanto. Ora voglio scriverle una letterina
per dimostrare il mio amore. Preghero Gesu

266 PUER PARVULUS

Bambino che la faccia vivere lunghi anni felice e
contenta." Evelina, the youngest (aged seven),
writes in a large round hand : " Ecco le feste del
Santo Natale ; preghero Gesu Bambino per Lei."

I would as soon attempt to translate Dante as to
try to put these innocent outpourings into English,
but I give them here because they are not without
interest as documents in the history of the peasants'
religion, south of the Alps.

The Italian peasants fought hard for their old gods,
and they did more — they suffered for them. Then,
in time, they adapted themselves to the new faith or
the new faith adapted itself to them. Taine said that
the true religion of Italy was the worship of the
Madonna, and another writer, E. Gebhart, said that
the true God of Italy was the Bambino. Since they
wrote thus socialism has invaded the cottage and
indifferentism has taken possession of the palace, and
yet the heart of the people is unchanged. One thinks
of Byron's lines, which seem to have acquired a new
and deeper meaning :

But in a higher niche, alone but crowned,
The Virgin-Mother of the God-born Child,

With her Son in her blessed arms, looked round ;
Spared by some chance when all beside was spoiled ;

She made the earth below seem holy ground.
This may seem superstition, weak or wild,

But even the faintest relics of a shrine

Of any worship wake some thoughts divine.

XV
THE MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY

IT is always useful to remember how completely the
Renaissance in Italy was what its name implies — a
rebirth, not a new birth. The foreign deluges were
powerless to alter the Italian temperament. Virgil's
prophetic words came true : though the original
stock might be modified and reinvigorated from
abroad, it would still retain its name, its customs,
and its language. Nay, more, only those incomers
would remain who lost their own nationality and
grew to be one with the Italian people.

In a narrower sense the continuity of Letters had
never been broken, though in the eclipse of the Dark
Ages the threads are lost sight of. Such men as
Cassiodorus and Boe"thius were pure Italians nurtured
in the lap of Roman learning. We must always
bear in mind that for one such man whose eminent
position and public charges caused his name to be
handed down, there were hundreds, without doubt,
approaching him in scholarship and tastes, who, in

their quiet way, kept the lamp of learning alight.

267

268 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY

The attribution of this mission entirely to monks is
one of those off-hand popular judgments which call
for revision. When we go from Boethius, the high-
born Roman, to Pier delle Vigne, the low-born
Neapolitan, we see the same thing. Literature at the
court of the splendid Suabian as at that of the wise
Ostrogoth was represented by Italians, and in Sicily
the poets who lent lustre to the reign of the Norman
William were again of Italian blood.

A real continuity of spirit means, more than
anything else, the power of producing new forms.
Imitation is not heredity. If the seed of Italic
culture were alive, it would one day yield a new
efflorescence. This is what happened in Dante. As
every one knows, Dante first thought of writing his
Commedia in Latin. The fact, certainly, is not sur-
prising. Up till then Italian had been used by poets
as the musician uses a mandoline ; who ever thought
of singing of heaven and hell to such an instrument ?

But Dante made the discovery that Italian, instead
of being a mandoline, was a magnificent organ. His
profound patriotism enlightened him on another
point : to be a great nation Italy must have a speech
of her own which should be at once illustrious and
vulgar ; capable of the highest perfection and under-
stood by all. He undertook to give Italy such a
speech. Not that it is true to say, as has often been
said, that Dante created Italian ; some one else had

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 269

created it — the people of Italy. This is one of the
wonders of history ; how, unaided by literature,
during ages in which every even moderately educated
man wrote and largely spoke in Latin, the people of
Italy made for themselves a language which by the
time of Dante was simply the Italian we now have.
To appreciate the marvel it is only necessary to
compare a sonnet of Pier delle Vigne with a passage
from Robert Langland, or a canto of the Purgatorio
with one of the Canterbury Tales.

Dante's supreme merit was that he simply selected ;
he did not alter or refine or manipulate. Saturated
as he was with classical lore, he left Italian what he
found it, a pure vernacular. It is wonderful how
few Latinisms there are in his writings. A Tuscan
himself, he had no great affection for Tuscan modes ;
he admitted words which the later Tuscan purists
called dialect and barbarous. Dante was not a
" polite poet " any more than, with all his learning,
he was a pedant. He was a supreme artist who
never allowed his art to appear. As has been well
said by Carducci, there is in his poetry " la ingenuita
del canto popolare, come allodola che dagli umidi
seminati d' autunno, si leva trillando fin che s' incontra
e perde, ebra di gioia, nel sole."

The same high authority points out that Dante
was faithful to the genius of the people even in the
choice of his metre, which is that of the narrative

270 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY xv

poems that used to be recited by the wandering
balladist or story-teller at the street-corners.

The references to peasant- life in the Divina
Commedia are not numerous, but they are of great
interest. They are all in the form of similes, which,
in Dante, serve as actual guides to the mind's eye —
introduced not for the sake of embellishment, though
they do embellish, but to enable the reader to follow
the action of a series of familiar pictures, or, to put
it differently, to think in images.

No one could have written this opening to the
twenty-fourth canto of the Inferno who was not a
close observer of rustic character :

What time the hoar-frost on the ground simulates its
white sister but quickly wears away, the little peasant who
all things lacks, leaves his bed and looks out at the whitened
country : whereupon he slaps his thigh and goes back into
the house and grumbles up and down like the mole that
knows not what it does. Then he recovers his spirits ;
hope revives as he beholds how in a few hours the world has
changed its face. And he takes his crook and forth he
drives the sheep, poor fools, to pasture.

English words cannot catch the grave smile that
illuminates the lines — quintessentially realistic and
yet so tender. How give in English the shading of
" villanello," " pecorelle " ? Though for this last I
have ventured on a Shakespearean substitute as repre-
senting the sentiment behind the word, to convey
which is the real office of the translator.

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 271

The peasant who sees the fire-flies darting in the
valley " when the swarms of daytime insects yield to
the evening gnat " ; the goatherd who rests upon
his staff as his flock that lately scoured the heights
reposes, meekly chewing the cud, beneath the trees ;
the guardian of the kine, who lodges abroad beside
his sleeping wealth, watchful the while that no wild
thing comes anigh to scatter and affright — these and
other similes are examples of condensed description,
the truth of which can only be appreciated when a
scene like that described comes before our eyes.
The Tuscan poet, Giusti, said that he had never
rightly understood canto xxvii. of the Purgatorio
till he visited the Casentino district, where he saw the
nomadic shepherds and herdsmen who came up at
the beginning of the summer to pass the hot months
in the hills, bringing with them the utensils for
making cheese and a small shelter under which they
slept close to the herd or flock.

In each of these allusions the peasant is associated
with a natural scene of which he is at once the
complement and the thinking mirror. There is
kindness in them, not scorn ; Dante's scorn was for
evil-doers. Even the words in the Purgatorio about
the rough, untamed mountaineer who is speechless
with amazement when he first arrives in town, have
not the bad sense which some translators have given
them, because stupito means, of course, " surprised "

272 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY xv

and not a stupid." 1 At the same time it is more
than doubtful if Dante shared his master's conviction
of the felicity of the husbandman, or Virgil's respect,
which was unquestionably sincere, for the qualities
required to make a good agriculturist. The great
truth that what is dismissed as manual labour (as
though the hands worked of themselves any more
than the hand writes of itself) needs as much intelli-
gence in its way as the writing of books was, when
Dante lived, deposited at the bottom of the deepest
of wells. The peasant, who was almost a god to
Homer and almost a priest to Virgil, had fallen from
his high estate. How low he had fallen, and the
outcome in literature of the debased opinion of him,
cannot be discussed now. We are concerned at
present with his literary rescue.

It must be owned that in its origin the new
pastoral poetry was simply an academical hobby.
Eclogues were written because Virgil had written
eclogues. Virgil was the poet, the Master, the Genius
of the Modern Pastoral in Italy, the link between
two civilisations, the one name that had never been
forgotten, the one personality that lived with the
very life of the Italian race. Who doubted that

1 Are not all poets wrong in representing the countryman as so easily
impressed ? During an exhibition at Venice hundreds of peasants, led by their
priests, profited by the excursion trains to see the city. One old woman from
the mountains said, after visiting St. Mark's, that " it would be a beautiful church
if the inside was white-washed." The true peasant mind is critical — after a
fashion.

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 273

Paul wept over his grave ? His fame was beyond
the need of scholars or culture ; the people had taken
him to their hearts and enshrined him there. The
story that at Mantua they placed offerings of flowers
on a sort of altar below his statue is too likely not to
have been true. A Malatesta (of those who were
madly pious instead of being madly pagan) caused
the statue to be destroyed in 1397. But Virgil
remained, the one literary artist who had been made
the object of a cult.1

Virgil wrote bucolics and it was therefore proper
to write them. What was not immediately realised
was that the real charm of the Virgilian eclogues
depended not on his reading Theocritus as he him-
self was read by the poets of the Renaissance, but on
his having been born and bred in country scenes, on
his mind being so penetrated by the Lombard land-
scape which he knew, that he cannot help setting it

1 The statue was of Parian marble and probably the work of a Greek
sculptor. It is possible that it was erected during the poet's lifetime, in which
case it was, no doubt, a portrait. We may suppose that it was copied, in its
general lines, in the seated figure erected in the town hall of Mantua in 1227
by the noble Brescian who then held the office of Podesta, Loderengo Martinengo.
This statue still exists, and those who visited the Rome Exhibition of 1911 saw
it reproduced in the Lombard pavilion. It represents Virgil as a kind of
glorified peasant, with long hair, which was not the fashion in Rome in the
age of Augustus. The face has been described justly as " grave and beautiful,"
but it is not a great work of art — great art had ended and not begun again.
Yet how interesting it is to find the chief magistrate of Mantua engaged in
putting up a statue to the Altltumo Poeta nearly forty years before Dante and
Giotto were born ! A little time before, Loderengo Martinengo had proclaimed
Virgil " Signore di Mantrva," with the approval of the united communes, and
money was coined with his effigy.

T

274 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY xv

down in the middle of a Sicily which he had read
about. They failed to understand that truthfulness
was the rod by which their own work would also be
ultimately measured.

Truth, however, is not always literal. In art there
is the truth which shows the things seen as we all see
them, and the truth which reveals the archetypes of
the things seen ; which, by generalising, arrives at the
type not of one but of all. The writers of the new
pastorals did not begin by aiming at either ; they
merely sought to write pretty verses sprinkled with
classical names. The pastoral was used as the mouth-
piece of private loves and hates, friendships and
jealousies ; it was now a courtly panegyric, now a
political or ecclesiastical satire. But in its progressive
development something more genuine arose under
forms which are still artificial. Pastoral poetry
became an embodied sigh of relief at having got
out of the fasting and fighting Middle Ages into
purer air.

Two eclogues written in Latin are attributed on
what seems good evidence to Dante. It appears that
towards the end of his life he received an invitation
to go to Bologna from a brother poet who, from his
skill in bucolics, was called Giovanni del Virgilio.
The invitation and the reply were in the form of
eclogues, and these were followed at some distance of
time by another on each side. The Bolognese poet,

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 275

while professing the utmost reverence for his friend's
genius, chides him a little for using what Dante in his
reply calls the " trivial words that fall from women's
lips." Biographically this poetic correspondence is of
considerable value, but Dante's part in it — designed
on purpose to show that he could be rigidly classical
if he pleased — lacks the flashes of insight into country
realities that are to be found in the Commedia.

Petrarch, Boccaccio, and a host of lesser luminaries
of the fourteenth century wrote Latin eclogues, for it
was thought for a long time that Latin was still the
correct tongue when you were going to talk with
shepherds. A hundred years later, Boiardo and
Mantuan continued to hand down that opinion. The
last name is important in the history of pastoral and
almost dear to English ears. "Ah, good old Mantuan.
I may speak of thee as a traveller doth of Venice :

Vinegia, Vinegia,
Chi non te vede, ei non te pregia.

Old Mantuan, old Mantuan. Who understandeth
thee not, loves thee not." One must conclude that
Giovan Battista Mantovano was loved by Shakespeare
as he had been admired and copied by Spenser, and
as if that were not enough for one man of letters, he
has been recently beatified. The Carmelite monk
whose worldly pastorals are biting satires, while his
religious eclogues offer the most wonderful harle-
quinade of pagan and scriptural personages ever

T 2

276 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY xv

presented even in the fifteenth century, is, in spite of
his ultra-classicism, the originator of the new rustic
poetry. He knew the Italian rustic, and notwith-
standing the temptations of elegant Latinity in which
he was so great a master, he makes him speak as he
speaks. This, it may strongly be guessed, is why
Shakespeare liked him. He leaves the peasant un-
couth, almost repellent, but real. Although he was
certainly not conscious of assuming such a part, he
comes down to us also as the defender of the peasant
at a time when he stood sorely in need of one. While
others were accusing the villani of every impiety and
impurity, Mantuan praises their good morals and
sincere faith. It is always a gain to be reminded
that every medal has two sides and not one, and that
one belonging to the province of Zola. Mantuan's
sincerity in preferring the charms and occupations of
the country to the corrupt splendour of Society in the
days of Leo X., is proved by his own retirement to
his mountain monastery. He had no poetic sensi-
bility, but Italians do not need this for them to enjoy
a fine spot and pure air any more than it was needed
by their Roman predecessors.

It is interesting to compare with the descriptions
by Pliny or Symmachus of their country-houses, the
sonnet-sequence of the months by the Tuscan poet,
Folgore da San Gemignano, who lived about 1260.
Nothing was ever more delicately epicurean than his

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 277

programme for all the year, more full of health, of
life, of sane enjoyment. What month without its
pleasures ? In January you can go out several times
a day and pelt the country girls with snowballs ; in
February you chase the stag and the wild boar and
come home with mirthful songs to generous fare and
to sound sleep ; for March you have the seaside with
fishing-parties and good company and " not a priest
or a monastery anywhere in sight " ; flowery April is
the time to sing and dance a la Provenfale " to the new
German instruments " ; May the month of garlanded
balconies and stolen kisses ; in June, when there is the
first heat, you dwell up on a little eminence and pass
the idle days under the trellises of citron and orange ;
August takes you to a castle in the Alps with a well-
trained horse to ride at morn and eve ; in September
the falcons' hoods are slipped ; in October there is
bird-snaring (the inglorious Roman sport with which
Dante, alone of Italian poets, seems to have been out
of patience) ; finally, December sees the Wanderer
safe in a city in the plains with fires half up the
chimney and carpets spread on the floors — it sounds
quite English. And to keep up his spirits, indoor
amusements not unconnected, sad to say, with a
little gambling.

Another early poet should be mentioned here,
Franco Sacchetti, whose ballads and catches have the
true fragrance of the fields. His peasant girls are

278 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY xv

life itself, no stiff Arcadians fearing to spoil their
dresses, but lively, romping girls ; one hears their
very laughter as he may hear it to-day. They
persuade the miller to weigh them, and tease each
other as to who weighs most ; they rush, they jump,
they fly from the shower, they fall in the mud, they
pick and drop their flowers, they chatter all at once,
start when they see a grasshopper, scream when they
see a snake ; they are happy at home in the little
cottage with father and mother, but nowise averse
from love, yet thinking little of it, full of innocent
joy that asks no bettering. There is a note in Franco
Sacchetti, a lyrist scarcely remembered, that Italian
poetry never quite caught again. Who else has given
sisters to Nausicaa and her handmaids — the fearless,
hardy girls who drive the oxen, wash the clothes,
sing, and run, and play at ball ?

The Latin eclogues of the fourteenth century had
two poetic children of more consequence that they
were to modern literature : the mingled prose and
verse pastoral of which the earliest was the Ameto of
Boccaccio (written 1342), and by far the most famous,
the Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazzaro (written 1489-
1504) ; and secondly, the pastoral play, which again
became the progenitor of the opera.

The Arcadia was a work, if not in every sense
original, at least intensely individual, a far more
important point. Individuality is the quality which

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 279

vitalises works of imagination. A great landscape
painter copies his scenes from nature, but unlike the
photographer, he throws his own temperament into
the copy. It has been shown conclusively that
Sannazzaro borrowed not only from Virgil but from
nearly every writer of antiquity who treated rural
themes. Here it is no question of plagiarism ; the
anthology of beautiful ideas in the Arcadia could not
have been meant to deceive any one in an age when
the Classics were passionately studied. Still the
borrowing exists, and it says much for the genius of
the Neapolitan poet that the net result is — Jacopo
Sannazzaro. The individual character of the work
sprang in a great measure from its source in a private
sorrow. Sannazzaro as a child of eight had loved,
in a childish way, but irrevocably, a little girl of his
own age, his frequent playmate. When they grew
to be youth and maiden his love grew with him, but
being of a timid nature and fearing, it would seem,
dismissal, he never disclosed an affection which, in
spite of her maidenly shyness, little Carmosina may
have very likely shared.

At last Jacopo was in so wretched a plight that
he thought of suicide, from which he was only kept,
as he na'fvely admits, by want of courage ; as an
alternative he left Naples on a journey in France,
where he hoped to forget his love. This, however,
proved impossible, and he started suddenly home-

28o MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY xv

wards, resolute to put his fortune to the test, but only
to find on reaching home that Carmosina was dead.

The Arcadia was for Sannazzaro the Katharsis of
this sorrow. It was not written at once, but a life
of singular purity and of entire fidelity in love and
in friendship had kept clear and sweet the memory
of his young romance, while the lapse of time allowed
it to pass from the particular phase into the general
and hence become a possible subject of analysis.
Sannazzaro was one of the first writers of fiction to
attempt a psychological analysis of the growth of
sentiment. The Arcadia is, for the rest, before all
a poet's fairy-tale, and its popularity came precisely
from its detachment from any actual conditions of
life. The scenery was real ; it was the beautiful
scenery of Naples and Salerno, in which Sannazzaro
took an inexhaustible pleasure, and to many north of
the Alps the Arcadia came as a first revelation of
Southern Nature. Even now its graces of style and
what may be called its personal charm (since some
books have a personal charm as well as some people)
keep it from the oblivion into which the various
imitations of it have fallen, always excepting the
Arcadia of Sidney — a work of less literary complete-
ness than its model, but one which it is delightful to
think of as the summer pastime of a hero.

The Court of Charles d'Anjou at Naples in the
thirteenth century witnessed the first indication of a

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 281

secular rustic comedy in the shape of a little piece
composed by Adam de la Halle on the basis of the
old French popular cycle of Robin et Marion. This,
however, had no connection with Italian pastoral
plays, which, if derived from anything, were rather
indebted to the early Umbrian mysteries. But the
passage from the idyll, which, from the time of
Theocritus, generally consisted in dialogue, to the
acted scene was so natural that we need not inquire
what suggested it. The Italian pastoral drama is
often described as beginning with // Sacrificio of
Beccari, a writer of the sixteenth century, but it is
difficult to see what the Orfeo of Poliziano was,
unless it was a pastoral play. It was, in fact, called
from the beginning a " tragedy," though it is not
certain whether Poliziano gave it more than the
modest title of "favola." Written in two days,
amid the noise and hurry of the fetes in honour of
Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga's visit to Mantua in
1472, the Orfeo was thought lightly of by its author,
who was almost as great an artist in lyrical verse as
the Milton of the shorter pieces. He was inclined to
consign his " not too creditable child " to obscurity,
but it was immediately too popular for that to be
possible. Granting the reversal of the relative
importance of words and music, it is still easy for
any one who has heard Gluck's beautiful opera to
have an idea of the spell that bound the first

282 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY xv

spectators of Poliziano's play, which was also inter-
spersed with music of some simple sort. That spell
is the renewal in us of the emotions of the Young
World ; the chords of joy and sorrow in their
elementary essential forms responding to the touch
of Love and Death. The Orfeo was succeeded by
many " favole " in the sixteenth and early part of
the seventeenth century ; Beccari in the Sacrificio,
already mentioned, while keeping the name of
" favola " produced an elaborate play ; Ottavio
Rinuccini called his pastoral, Dafne, a " dramma
musicale " — which indicates a new departure. After
these and others like them, came two really important
works, the Pastor Fido of Guarini and the Aminta of
Tasso. Within its limits, Aminta is a poem of
perfect beauty ; for as a poem it must be judged,
not as a play. But there is no part of it so
engraved on the mind of the lover of outdoor things
as the lovely description of Armida's garden in the
Gerusalemme, to which we must also turn for Tasso's
pathetic picture of an old peasant happy in his
poverty :

La nostra poverta vile e negletta :
Altrui vile e negletta, a me si cara . . .

The nymphs in Aminta are far indeed away from
such homely realities.

The Pastor Fido was the work of a courtier and
man of the world " who wrote poetry too." And

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 283

what was singular, was that this poetry, laboriously
executed with the avowed purpose of rivalling Tasso.
came out, not excruciating like the mathematician's
fugue, but so incontestably exquisite in structure
that critics have never decided whether to rank the
Pastor Fido below Aminta or equal with it. Talent
was rarely so near succeeding in a race with genius.
Guarini thought well to introduce the satiric and the
erotic into his pastoral, and Cardinal Bellarmine is
said to have told him that the Pastor Fido had done
more mischief to morals and religion than Luther
and Calvin. The subject is one of the most purely
romantic stories of antiquity, that of Coresus and
Callirrhoe, and in spite of its mythological and
neo-classical form, Guarini's play has some noticeable
points of affinity with modern romanticism. He
altered and on the whole improved the story. A
young priest of Diana is faithless to his vows from
love of an Arcadian nymph. In consequence, a
pestilence descends on the land, which the goddess
consents to arrest only if the nymph or some one in
her place is offered as a living sacrifice. As a
voluntary victim is not forthcoming, the nymph is
conducted to Diana's temple for immolation. The
priest, her lover, must do the deed ; but when he
raises the sacrificial knife which is to slay her, he
plunges it into his own breast. The vicarious
offering satisfies the goddess, but the nymph kills

284 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY xv

herself on her lover's body. In the original legend
the priest, who serves not Diana but Bacchus, is the
instigator of the god in causing the epidemic which
is inflicted because a nymph of Calydon has rejected
his suit. This version would not agree with modern
sentiment, but it leads up to a final situation which
is perhaps stronger : the priest, stung by remorse at
his too successful vengeance, commits suicide to save
his victim.

Besides the Arcadian pastorals in prose and verse,
another kind of idyll made its appearance in Italy
which owed nothing to tradition. Its creator was
that prince among humanists, Lorenzo de' Medici,
who, like every one else, exercised his skill in the
ideal pastoral, into which he infused a freshness and
a distinction not often attained. Few eclogues have
stood the test of time as triumphantly as his Covinto.
But on a happy day, Lorenzo looked over Arcadia
into Tuscany. It is strange that the poets who were
composing so much about imaginary shepherds and
shepherdesses had not listened with more attention
to the beautiful real folk -poetry of the Italian
peasant. That they did not listen to it we have not
much proof before Poliziano, in whose rispetti there
are signs of the folk -poet's influence. Poliziano
really knew the country ; in his admirable stanzas
describing country-life in La Giostra there is much
more than a merely artistic welding of Greek and

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 285

Latin reminiscences. But it was left to Lorenzo
de' Medici to speak the very language, the common
everyday tongue, of the Tuscan countryside where
he rested in his splendid villas from the cares of
princes and the burden of a great intellect. In La
Nencia di Barberino he brings close to us a figure
that flits about in the books of old travellersun Italy
from Montaigne downwards : a charming figure
in a broad straw hat and a costume always becoming
and sometimes costly, with the brightest eyes looking
from under arched eyebrows, the head small and
well -shaped with delicately modelled ears, and the
mouth sweetly laughing and sweetly speaking — the
very mouth to prattle in accents that make professors
weep with envy. This quizzical and sprightly maiden
is the complete opposite of languid nymphs.

To her Vallera, the goatherd of Barberino,
addresses his love, admiration, hope, and fear in
stanzas which one reads at a breath, so natural, so
living are they in their sunny grace as of a Tuscan
landscape. How far had Lorenzo in his mind that
intention of parody which caused Gay to immortalise
Blouzelinda and Buxoma ? Some doubts have been
expressed as to whether he had any such intention,
but the doubters, in love with Nencia, are a little
wilfully blind to the unromantic character of the
compliments paid to her. The truth seems to be
that while it apparently did not occur to Gay that

286 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY xv

his rustic rhymes, in spite of the intolerable nomen-
clature, were proofs, not of the unfitness, but of the
admirable suitability of kindred subjects for poetry,
Lorenzo, a poet of higher order than Gay, did perceive
that Nencia was a delightful creature, and that in her
way, although of flesh and blood and a good cook,
she might be as poetic as the most diaphanous of
nymphs. The grain of irony, however, though it
was but a grain, had the effect of making the picture
not altogether true. The portrait is less fair than
the original. The real peasant girl and her peasant
lover have more poetry in them than Nencia and
Vallera. Where in Lorenzo's poem are those lyric
flights which we meet constantly in folk-songs?
There is truth but there is not all the truth, and
the part suppressed is the more beautiful.

On the other hand, we may be sure that his little
poem called La Caccia col Falcone does not lose in
veracity by the suppression of all the sentimental
associations which we are used to attach to that form
of sport ; nothing could be more lifelike than the
prosaic but amusing talk of the peasants who have
the care of the dogs and the hawks, with their
squabbles and reconciliations. We can almost see
the dogs answering to their names :

Chiama Tamburo, Pezuolo, e Martello,
La Foglia, la Castagna, e la Guerrina,
Fagiano, Fagianin, Rocca e Capello,
E Friza, e Biondo, Bamboccio e Rossina,

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 287

Ghiotto, la Torta, Viola e Pestello,

E Serchio e Fuse e '1 mio Buontempo vecchio

Zambraco, Buratel, Scaccio, e Pennechio —

a list which, with that of Ovid, would make the basis
of a chapter I should like to write on the names
of animals. Buontempo must have been Lorenzo's
own dog, to whom he thus secured a little space in
the House of Fame where Du Bellay established for
ever his cat Belaud.

The Magnificent had a profoundly human
penetration into the humble life of the very poor,
but the proof of it, far more than in Nencia or the
Caccia, is to be found in the fanciful allegory to
which he gave the name of Ambra after the Medicean
villa at Poggio a Caiano, above the Ombrone.
Ambra had been already celebrated by Poliziano in
exquisite Latin verses.

Lorenzo's poems treat the two rivers, Ombrone
and Arno, in the most approved neo-classical style,
when we come on a sudden, almost with shock, to
a brief interlude of intense descriptive directness.
The subject is one of those terrible and unexpected
floods caused by the melting of the snows or by
torrential rain, which turn a peaceful stream into an
engine of awful destruction beyond the power of
man to control or arrest. One must have observed
a swollen river rushing madly towards the Mediter-
ranean down what was, perhaps, the day before a dry

288 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY

shingly bed with hardly enough of water for the
washerwomen to wash their linen in, to form an idea
of the dread terror of Nature's changes. Lorenzo de'
Medici's lines describe one aspect of the desolation :
" Scarcely was the scared peasant woman in time to
unbar the stable to the beasts ; she carries her crying
child in a basket ; the elder girl follows, her shoulders
bent under the weight of wretched linen and wool.
The rest of the old household things are floating
around ; the pigs swim and the oxen stir distraught ;
the little sheep will never again be shorn. Some of
the family have taken refuge upon the house-tops ;
huddled on the roof, they look down upon their poor
wealth, all the fruit of their long labour and all their
hope — and from their fear they groan not, nor do they
speak words : the fear for life that fills their sad hearts.
Nor do they make account of what they held most
dear ; so does the greater care drive out all others."

Then we return to the dancing brightness of
Ombrone Amante Superbo as if in joyous rebound, but
who can read that description even in the ashes of
translation without being touched almost to tears ?

After Nencia there was the Beca of Lorenzo's
friend Luigi Pulci, of whom he says in La Caccia
that just when people were looking for him, he had
gone off brooding into a coppice with some fancy in
his head :

Vorra fantasticar forse un sonetto.

xv MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY 289

Then, the Silvana of Doni, the Tonia of Simeoni,
and many other imitations were produced in which
the naturalness of Nencia was rarely caught, while
the tendency to parody became more pronounced
and irritating. One exception must be made : the
Lament o di Cecco da Varlungo by Prior Francesco
Baldovini is a delightful poem, and if Sandra is a less
living character than Nencia, Cecco is certainly more
attractive than Vallera ; when he tells in his caressing
Tuscan dialect how he has taught a jay to talk like
a Christian and has tamed a little hare " which lies
down with my Giordano " (the dog), we agree with
him that Sandra is an " assassina " to despise such
pretty offerings, to which he would gladly add his heart,
only she has had that since long ago. This poem was
greatly liked by Metastasio. The gay little comedy
of La Tancia, of Michelagnolo Buonarroti (1611),
should also not be passed over without praise. The
peasants who live at cross purposes, and the insuffer-
ably conceited cittadmo whom Tancia despises while
he is lost in admiration of his own generosity in
wishing to marry her, seem ready-made for a comic
opera. Instead of irony there is fun, and we are
much the gainers. Had the authors of this style of
rustic poetry more often escaped from the strain of
false humour which vitiated it from its birth, it would
have borne far other fruits.

Meanwhile the Arcadian style rose in repute and

290 MODERN PASTORAL IN ITALY xv

sank in quality. There was not a scribbling Abbate,
a fashionable grand lady, a beardless and brainless
rhymester who did not call him or herself an Arcadian
and form one of a literary society dedicated to these
pastimes. The movement had its good side ; it
espoused the cause of pure Italian diction ; it made
literature popular; it contributed to the happiness
of a great many harmless individuals. It became, of
course, a sort of log-rolling and mutual admiration
institution, but any method of bringing together
cultivated people is not to be lightly condemned.
One work, difficult to classify, but connected in a
general way with outdoor poetry, the Bacco in
Toscana of Francesco Redi, emerges, splendid in
verve, in merriment, in absolute spontaneity, from
the frigid mass of literature in the seventeenth
century. It sparkles and glows and overflows even
as the generous wines which it celebrates, with an
innocent glee that might disarm a teetotaller.

By a curious chance it was in Sicily, its birthplace,
that the idyll took a new impulse of genuine, if
not great poetry, in the charming dialect poems of
Giovanni Meli. From Sicily has also come the new
treatment of rural life initiated by Giovanni Verga,
which has penetrated the arts of music and painting,
and of which the full development belongs to the
future.

Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

ESSAYS IN THE STUDY OF FOLK-
SONGS.

1 ' The poetry of the common people has found an advocate both
eloquent and erudite in the Countess Martinengo Cesaresco." — W. R. S.
RALSTON, Academy.

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7

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The Outdoor life in 3015
Greek and Roraan Poets. .08113