The Anxious Pagan
by B.P. Reardon
"It was in the depths of winter. There was a bitter wind from the north, and frost. The pebbles were so glued together by the frost as to look like a network of crystal, and the water was what one would expect it to be in such a climate. When the manifestation of the god was made known, my friends came with me, also sane doctors who knew me well, and others, some anxious on my account, some out of scientific curiosity. There was a great crowd besides, for there happened to be a distribution of largess outside the gates, and everything could be seen very well from the bridge. There was a doctor named Heracleon, a friend of mine who confessed to me the next day that he had come convinced that at the very best I should be seized by a tetanic recurvation or something similar. When I came to the river, I had no need of any encouragement. Still full of the warmth of the vision of the god, I tore off my clothes, and, without even asking for a rub-down, jumped into the deepest part of the river. Then, just as if I were in a pool of mild water of just the right temperature, I took my time swimming and splashing about. When I came out, my skin was fresh and shining, my body was perfectly light, and the whole crowd of those who had come with me and those who had come later gave forth in splendid volume the famous cry: 'Great is Asclepius! I Who could describe what followed? All the rest of that day and in the evening until I went to bed I remained in the state in which I had came out of the bath; I did not feel my body to be drier, or any wetter; the warmth which I felt did not leave me, nor was any added to it; nor did this warmth seem to be such as any human device might have brought about; it was a sort of continuous animal warmth, of equal strength throughout all my limbs and over the whole surface of the body. I was in a corresponding state mentally. It was not an obvious pleasure, nor would you have measured it by the standards of ordinary human good cheer. Rather it was a certain indescribable sense of well-being which made all things seem of secondary importance beside the present moment, so that not even when I saw something did I have the impression that I was seeing it—so wholly close was I to the god ."2
The source of this remarkable narrative is the Religious Diary of one Publius Aelius Aristides, a Greek who was born in 118 A.D. in the north of Asia Minor, about 200 miles west of the modern Ankara and 100 miles east of the ancient Troy, and who died shortly af'ter 180 A.D. The incident Aristides describes—it is only one of the most dramatic of a number of such incidents—took place when he was 31. In Rome, Antoninus Pius, the adoptive father of Marcus Aurelius, was on the throne; in the Greek world, a cultural renaissance was in full swing, and Aristides himself was to become one of its principal figures in the principal Greek and Roman cities of the Mediterranean, Christian apologists were explaining their faith to often hostile citizens of a temporal empire, and struggling to meet the intellectual challenge of Greek cultural tradition.
Aristides could himself be the "anxious pagan" of my title. But he seems, one may say. not in the least anxious; he seems very confident, in his god Asclepius. We can perhaps solve the difficulty by saying that he is very confident in his solution, which is a rellgious solution, to his problems, to his anxiety. I am not suggesting that rellgious belief is necessarily a product of anxiety; it is rather the nature of his religious solution than the fact that it is religious that betrays his state of mind. This— Aristides himself, his state of mind, his solution—I shall return to shortly. At this point I shall broaden the question. For the anxiety extends beyond this individual, to other people, in hundreds of thousands, at this late stage of Greco-Roman civilization. Aristides is simply a particularly eloquent witness to an aspect of ancient—for our purposes specifically of Greek -- civilization that is not usually stressed: its irrational aspect.3
The critic says as much about himself as he does about the object of his criticism. So does the scholar. The nineteenth century, intoxicated with its own rationalism, saw rationalism in the Greek mind; we, with cause enough to think that rationality is the thinnest of veneers upon instinctive behaviour, are more ready to see what is irrational and complex in that society. Euripides' s Bacchae has probably never known so many revivals and adaptations as in our day. Euripides saw and recognized irrationality in his own day in the 5th century; thereafter, in the Hellenistic and later in the Imperial world, its incidence merely increases, to reach a high point, a frenzy, in the second century A.D. The interest of interpreters in this phenomenon, and in this period, has grown with the experience of the 20th century. So, too, has our interest in and sympathy for the situation of Greek civilization under Roman rule grown, as our disenchantment with empire has increased. W. H. Auden can call our age The Age of Anxiety; that is no doubt why I have chosen to discuss a similarly anxious age, the 2nd century A.D.—once, incidentally, characterized, by Gibbon, as “the most felicitous period of human history”; it seems ironic.
The second century is also, of course, a period in which more and more people are turning to Christianity. The outlines of that story, however, or at least the feel of that attitude, are not unfamiliar; so I shall be concerned with the pagan side of the coin.
What are people anxious about, at this period? Much the same things as worry us, one suspects. True, there is no bomb; but there is plague. There is no conflict of power-blocs; but that was not long coming, and there are political tensions enough within the structure of the Roman empire. The sheer size of the world, under that vast empire; the impotence, of individual or state, to control it; the impersonality of bureaucratic control; the absence of a clear direction in life such as the city-state of early Greece and early Rome had offered; for thoughtful Greeks, the sense of being submerged by an inferior cultural tradition, despite the spread of Roman citizenship, despite what could well be called a “special relationship” with the Big Daddy of the day; all of these caused unease, neurosis. Confused by the welter of experience, unable to digest it, many looked for lines of escape from uninterpretable and often unpleasant “reality” Let us follow some of these lines; but it will be impossible to disentangle them.
Aristides was, as I have said, a literary figure. His Religious Diary is one part of his work. The other, which concerns us here only indirectly, consists of some dozens of decorative, elaborate, highly literary speeches on a variety of topics, many of them for delivery on various ceremonial occasions; the nearest equivalent one can find in our society is the after-dinner speech, on topics public or private, delivered by a man of literary culture—it should be said also, however, that this genre, epideictic oratory, or display oratory, was one of the favourite literary vehicles of the day. The Diary shows a quite different side of Aristides's personality; it shows him as a religious fanatic, totally uncritical in his acceptance of the strangest manifestations of the divinity. And we have, as it happens, a picture of the other side of that coin; the comments of a rationalist upon religious credulity, upon excess of faith, as displayed by a great many people in Aristides’s part of the world.
They come from the pen of a much more famous and much better writer, Lucian of Samosata: Lucian the satirist, an exact contemporary of Aristides. Lucian, in his Alexander, or The False Prophet, describes how, not all that far from where Aristides was born, a charlatan by the name of Alexander set up a religious racket in order to make money out of simple folk anxious to believe in a revelation. First he laid the groundwork with an advance publicity campaign fit to earn the admiration of Madison Avenue; then he set up in business as oracle-monger. He constructed a model of a large snake with a human head and a mouth which would open and shut by remote control. This snake he set up in a small dimly-lit room and announced to the expectant countryside as an incarnation of a god—the god Asclepius, as it happens, again; Asclepius, the god of healing, was throughout Greek history one of the most popular and durable of all divinities. The crowds rolled in; they were allowed to file, open-mouthed, past a small opening through which they could catch for a second or two a glimpse of the barely visible but lifelike contraption opening and shutting its mouth; and they went away convinced that Asclepius had indeed come among them for their greater comfort. Then came the pay-off. It was given out that Asclepius would utter oracles. And the inquirers turned up in throngs, submitted their questions written down on sealed papyrus scrolls—along with a fee—and were duly impressed when a response was given to them which appeared indeed to answer their question, and yet more impressed when their scroll was returned with the seal apparently still intact. In fact the answers were not any more helpful than today's horoscopes; but like our horoscopes, they had an audience eager to make much of little. The trick with the seals was easy; Alexander simply melted the wax with a hot needle, read the question, and resealed the paper. Those he could not open he took a chance with by uttering a particularly ambiguous reply; and no-one ever noticed. And the money rolled in; Alexander's fame spread for thousands of miles; he had Roman senators among his clients, and contemporary coins, With Alexander's and his snake's images on them, prove that Lucian is not making it up.
Elsewhere, in a piece called The Lover of Lies, Lucian strings together, in similarly satirical vein, a series of anecdotes relating incredible supernatural phenomena as reported, and believed in, by a group of philosophers (of all people). Statues walk about; incredible old wives' remedies cure the worst diseases; Hecate reveals the underworld to a human being; magicians, exorcisms, resurrections, haunted houses, sorcerer's apprentices tumble over each other (the famous story of the sorcerer's apprentice does in fact occur here): the narrators outdo each other in lying, and Lucian, as their interlocutor, is gravely castigated for his scepticism. “They quite pointlessly” says Lucian , summing it all up, “prefer lies to truth by far; they love lying; they spend their whole time lying, for no reason whatsoever.”4
The evidence of this non-believer, then, points in the same general direction as does that of Aristides. What is one to make of it?
There are perhaps two different though related phenomena visible here. One is the phenomenon of sheer credulity, and its inverse, mendacity; the other, only less crude, is the attempt to interpret the unknown, the incomprehensible One believes the most incredible things, and believes them the more fervently the more incredible they are; or one interprets phenomena—invariably, in this age, putting a religious interpretation on them; and the more incredible phenomena are, the more powerfully do they show forth the god. What these attitudes have in common is they are both attempts to tame the unknown, to render it less frightening. One can propitiate, disarm, the unknown, the unseen, by throwing oneself on its mercy, by abandoning oneself to it uncritically; in which case, the harder a thing is to believe, the more virtue there is in believing it—the White Queen in Alice through the Looking-glass believed six impossible things before breakfast, on a good day, by sheer will-power. Or one can render the unknown less unfamiliar, and thus less frightening, by imposing on it a form of one's own creation, and thus giving it some kind of known dimension .One can approach it through faith or myth; both are arms against the unknown. This is valid for any age. It is valid for the 5th century B.C., with its Oedipus. It is more manifestly valid for the more highly-coloured 2nd century A.D.
The immediate reason for Aristides’s cold bath was medical. In his youth he had fallen seriously ill, and the doctors despaired of him. He turned finally to Asclepius, and Asclepius heard him. The Religious Diary is an autobiographical account of his long illness, covering his life, although with gaps, from his mid-twenties to his early fifties.5 Above all it is an account of the interventions of his saviour, who appeared to the sick man in dreams—130 of them, in the 90 pages of text—and prescribed him remedies. It was standard practice to induce such therapeutic dreams by sleeping in one of the sanctuaries of Asclepius, such as the one at Epidaurus; and it indubitably often worked, as is proved by the very numerous offerings dedicated to the god in his sanctuaries in gratitude for cures. Here I shall go no farther into the mechanics of the process than to suggest that the important factors in it were, first the vivid and impressionable imagination of the patient, for whom there was nothing at all absurd in placing such trust in an unseen healer, and who was surrounded, in the sanctuary, by scores of other patients in a similar state of ill-health and the same excited state of mind; and, second, perhaps, sheer medical experience on the part of the doctors in attendance and the sanctuary attendants who were in effect medical auxiliaries, and who acquired in years of service a stock of knowledge about common ailments which enabled them often unobtrusively, when discussing dreams with patients, to suggest perfectly rational cures, whose efficacy was subsequently attributed to Asclepius. One does not need to look very far for similar situations today: sanatoria, spas, shrines all flourish. And I imagine no doctor would be particularly surprised by the case of Aelius Aristides. My point here is that he illustrates vividly a frame of mind, a state of total devotion to his saviour. It does not even seem to matter very much what illness, precisely, he suffered from. Indeed, one might well ask, what illness did he not suffer from? To say that his troubles were mostly intestinal or respiratory is hardly to do him justice: one finds asthma, catarrh, fevers, tumours, neuralgia, facial paralysis, digestive disorders, bowel trouble, fits of coughing, curvature of the spine, migraine, rheumatism, convulsions, coughing-up of blood, stiff neck, bouts of choking; as has been well said, “A doctor in Molière could not have thought up so terrifying a catalogue.”6 Aristides is the consummate hypochondriac; he revels in his disorders. And he revels even more in Asclepius's remedies, for which the word "paradoxical" is, as we have seen, tame. He becomes, as he says, Asclepius’s thing. We may feel that the god's intervention could have been more efficacious, for time and time again, it would seem, Aristides fell ill again, and each illness was worse than the last. But he only glories the more in illness and saviour; he knows that he is not Asclepius's only patient, and feels that the worse his health, the more intense is his saviour's interest in him. The illness is necessary to him. Furthermore, the god’s interest extends not merely to Aristides’s health, but to every detail of his life; it extends to his income tax problems, and the god even predicts, accurately, how much expense his appeal is going to involve. And particularly it extends to his literary art. Asclepius will tell him to write, or not to write; to perform, or not to perform; to write in prose, or in verse; to write about this, or about that; he will even dictate whole passages to him verbatim. He is not only Aristides's doctor, he is his impresario. And Aristides is duly grateful to him; his whole artistic life and effort is but one long hymn to Asclepius; he is an artist, he feels, by the grace of God.
Let us leave Aristides’s dreams, and turn for a moment to dreams in general. For dreaming seems to have been a favourite occupation at this period; so we may judge from what we know of the contemporary art of onirocrisy, or dream-interpretation. As an art, onirocrisy was already ancient; we know it was practised in Homer’s day. But it certainly flourished in the 2nd century, and most of what we know of ancient techniques has come down to us in a handbook of this period by one Artemidorus, who, again, lived in Asia Minor. It is worth while glancing at its contents.
Artemidorus—who, by the way, was a professional diviner, and wrote treatises also on palmistry and on augury—takes it for granted that dreams are divinely inspired, and incidentally suggests how intense popular interest in onirocrisy was when he says that although he hesitated before writing his manual, "urgent contemporary need" for such a book made up his mind for him. This interest is further indicated by the fact that several systems of dream-interpreting existed -- Aristides, for instance, does not follow Artemidorus. It must be said that that system is extremely complex, in fact too complex for its creator, who loses himself hopelessly in his classifications. But its main lines are simple enough. First, dreams indicate the state of the dreamer’s soul; those who are not subject to fear or hope will be the less likely to have dreams. Secondly, dreams are of two broad kinds: some reflect the past and others predict the future, either directly or indirectly, allegorically. It is here, principally, that modern dream-interpreters would part company with Artemidorus; we do not, at least I believe that scientists do not, accept that dreams can predict the future. This entails a difference of method in their analysis. For us, only the cause of the dream is significant, and what we try to determine from the dream is the past and present condition of the dreamer (incidentally solving his troubles, some say, by this very process of identifying them). For Artemidorus, it is the outcome of the dream that matters. His efforts, in consequence, are mainly directed towards analysing the outcome of allegorical dreams, for these are the ones which need interpreting. His method is, first, to collect past dreams, discover what their outcome was, and find a similarity between dream and outcome; and second, on the basis of extensive clinical experience of this kind, to organise this material by analysing and classifying the dreams, thus making their identification by type, and consequently their interpretation, easier.
As far as it goes, this is scientific. But when one gets down to the details of classification, endless difficulties arise. For one has to consider not only the objective features of the dream, but also the experience and situation of the dreamer, for the same dream will mean different things to different men. Thus, to give an example, to dream of seagulls will signify, for those who sail the seas, extreme danger but not death; for seagulls plunge into the sea but are not drowned. For other men, the seagull is a symbol of greed, and presages a meeting with a rapacious person—a moneylender or a prostitute (incidentally, the 19th century German translator of Artemidorus thought it proper to omit from his translation all passages relating to sexual matters: so much for Freud, who by the way had great respect for Artemidorus) . Similarly, to dream of a net or a trap will normally presage danger and delay; but it will be a good sign if you are looking for something you have lost. To dream of war is bad, but not for a soldier, since it is his normal occupation. To dream of eating a book—have you ever dreamed of eating a book? But remember, this is at a time of a remarkable resurgence of literary activity—to dream of eating a book is all right for the educated, but for other people it means sharp and sudden death. University administrators please note.
The difficulties are obvious: the classification is never-ending. And when one adds to this the fact that the experience and situation of the interpreter has also to be taken into account, they become infinite in their reciprocal action; one is reminded of a mirror in which one sees a mirror in which one sees a mirror in which, etc. This applies notably to the linguistic interpretation of dreams, in which one deduces the meaning of a dream by a play on words or names. For such interpretation to be accurate, dreamer and interpreter must have exactly the same vocabulary and linguistic habits in general. In an extreme form of such punning, Artemidorus gives numerical equivalents to the letters of the alphabet —A = 1, B = 2, and so on—and produces by this means equivalences between words, which are taken as prophetic. In our terms, this might mean that if I dream of a mirror—value 91—it could mean that I was going to eat lobster, which has the same numerical value; or if I dream of ice-cream (value 58), it might mean that something important would happen tomorrow at noon (value 58). Similarly a zebra (52) could portend an encounter with a giraffe (52); or, no doubt, vice-versa, if one's acquaintance extends that far. The idea is simple enough. Occasionally there are striking coincidences. Seminar (79) you may like to know, equals spoon—spoon-feeding?—and herring— perhaps red herring; and rubbish. And the staunchest rationalist is given to think by the observation that sociology (120) is poppycock. But coincidence is what it is, after all. This is at best a parlour-game, a party-trick; if the children are fractious of a wet Sunday afternoon, this might keep them fairly quiet for half an hour.
Artemidorus may wish to be scientific, but he is not up to it; and his handbook ends up by being little more than a jackdaw's collection of oddities that illustrates, ultimately the same endless appetite for the unusual, the same uncritical attitude towards experience, as we have seen in Aristides and Lucian. As a final, comprehensive example of his method, I quote one of Artemidorus's entries: “a cat signifies an unscrupulous woman of low character; and a law-suit, for (the Greek word for "cat ") gale, has the same value as (the Greek word for "law-suit") dike,” (here I will interject that the English word cat might signify, for an academic, something much more frightening than a law-suit, something much more unprincipled and unscrupulous than any woman, for it equals, numerically, dean). "And death" (we are back to Artemidorus), "since it rots everything it gets hold of. And profits; for some call it Kerdo" (a pun on kerdos, profit). "One can distinguish among these meanings according as one sees it approaching or going away or suffering or doing something agreeable or disagreeable."7 And that is enough of Artemidorus.
This attitude may be seen, too, in another favourite Greek pastime, again going back to classical times, and again, characteristically, known to us through a second-century handbook, transmitted through the Middle Ages by Arabic culture. The book is a compendium of the kind one finds in every field of human inquiry in this age; it is the heyday of the compiler; one is reminded of the educational textbooks that abound today, the Portable So-and-So, The Best of X, A Handbook to Y, potted, preselected, predigested information to titillate the casual interest, the sated appetite. This is the study of physiognomy, the art of deducing the character of a person from his appearance. As with onirocrisy, we all of course do it, to some degree or other. And one Polemon purports to tell us how to do it; Polemon, by the way, was another of the bright stars in the literary constellation of the day. Physiognomy—I should prefer to call it "physiognomony" and thus restore a correct form to the English language; the Greek word physiognomonia was misspelled by an encyclopedia-writer of the 5th century A.D., and the misspelling became standard in mediaeval Latin and thence in English; the French have got it right;—physiognomony, then, is concerned with the whole physical appearance; not just the face, but all the parts of the body. Again, the author claims that his method is scientific, in that it proceeds from observation of his contemporaries; but again, he would appear to be overestimating himself.
The method consists, once more, essentially of observing similarities; and these are of three kinds, anatomical, zoological, and ethnological. Thus, to take zoological characteristics, if a man resembles a certain animal—and everybody does resemble one animal or another, Polemon assures us—he will have the character of that animal. If you look like an ox you will be "incapable of learning, devoid of common sense, lazy and slow; more fit to be governed than to govern; but honest, just, and strong." If you have the misfortune to look like a tortoise, "and I have seen a man who looked like a tortoise", says Polemon -- that is, if you have " a short neck, a broad back, big feet, and a wrinkled face", then you will be, as is the tortoise, "stupid, ineffective and ungrateful." Hard luck. For the anatomical criteria, the eyes are the principal witness, and perhaps this is not so silly. But there are others: the chin, for instance. If you have a cleft chin -- you may wish to remind yourselves whether you have a cleft chin, before I tell you what it signifies; if you have a cleft chin, you are a creature of low cunning and jealousy; if you do not have a cleft chin, you have an excessive sexual appetite. Says Polemon. As for ethnological criteria, there is perhaps no need to go into those in a land which knows Newfie jokes.
There is something in some of this. But a lot of it—most of it, perhaps—is mere haphazard invention. It would be very useful if it were reliable, because then one could be sure at first glance, as Polemon was, that a total stranger was "thoroughly wicked, lascivious, debauched, dissolute, dishonest and quite without conscience, a paragon of all the vices." But if some of us do tend to make such judgements, we would hardly call them any more than guesses. Polemon I s desire to see a pattern in miscellaneous phenomena runs away with him, and he illegitimately gives the name of scientific investigation to what is really no more than an undisciplined appetite for curiosities. It is interesting that a real man of science—the great doctor Galen, another contemporary of Aristides—is quite prepared to accept as valid the general principles, though not the excesses, of both onirocrisy and physiognomony. He believed that dreams were sent by the gods, and acted on them—to the point, once, of operating upon himself because a dream told him to. Similarly, he believed that character was shown by appearance. But in this case he has an intellectual structure behind his belief, in that he thought that one's appearance was determined, in its turn, by one's environment; the environment determines one's temperament, one's "humours", and thus, for instance, the look of one's eyes. And that is at least much more reasonable than simply to announce, as does Polemon, that long feet indicate a malicious disposition.
There are other pursuits, pseudo-sciences, that attempt similarly to interpret the unknown—astrology, for instance, is highly developed at this time—but that degenerate, like these two, into mere paradoxography, the collection of curious "facts"—in inverted commas. And the "facts" become curiouser and curiouser. A writer who is otherwise serious recounts, for instance, how a male homosexual gave birth to a child; tells us of six-year old mothers; and describes a centaur he has seen -- "not as big as the ones one reads about, but not small." And the theme of divine intention in these phenomena is never far away. One Aelian writes several treatises to illustrate divine providence. It is for instance divine providence which imbues animals with noble sentiments which in man are often notable for their absence. The case of Socles and his horse is a case in point. Socles was a very handsome young man, and his horse had, it would seem, an affectionate disposition as well as much intelligence: he "conceived", we are told, a violent passion for his master, and would snort when he came near, and whinny loudly when he patted him. When the youth mounted him, he obeyed every touch; if he was standing in sight, he cast languishing glances at him. Now all these signs of amativeness were charming at first; but when the horse became bolder and seemed as if he wished to take liberties people began to talk. So Socles, disliking scandal, and annoyed at the horse's intemperate affection, sold the animal. But the horse, unable to bear separation from his beloved, starved himself to death.8 Elsewhere in Aelian, we read that the trainer of a tame elephant had an elderly and rich wife. Now he was in love with another woman; and desiring that his wife's property should become hers, he strangled his wife and buried her, foolish man that he was, close by the elephant's stall. Then he married the other woman. But the elephant seized the newly-wed woman with its trunk, led her to where her predecessor was buried, and dug the body up with its tusks, thus showing by its actions what it could not express in words, and making clear to the woman what sort of man she had married—so much did it detest evil.9 This is the very spirit of the famous mediaeval collection of edifying stories called the Physiologus, which probably is to be dated, in its original version, to the second century, and which, with the blessing of the Church to help it on its way, became known from Ethiopia to Iceland. In it a Biblical quotation mentioning an animal, or a plant, or a mineral, is followed by an Aelianesque story, which is then interpreted as a Christian allegory.
Faith and credulity know no bounds. "Certum est quia impossibile est", said Tertullian in this period of the incarnation of God in Christ, ""it is certain because it is impossible"; "credo quia absurdum", "I believe it because it is absurd". I imagine that a theological or a psychological principle is involved in this statement—faith is not concerned with probability—and do not suppose that it is naive; but the notion certainly fell on fertile soil. Tertullian, as a Christian, has faith, hope, and charity, though one is bound to say that he hasn't a great deal of charity towards pagans. In the cultivated pagan of the day, this formula becomes faith, anxiety, and, with luck, charity. One such pagan, a famous one, is the emperor Marcus Aurelius himself; he too is the author of a diary, though of a very different kind from the cascade of bizarre dreams and actions that fills the diary of Aristides, of whom he is another almost exact contemporary. His Diary is called, simply, To Himself, or perhaps Meditations; it is written in Greek, by the way, though he is a Roman—Roman of Spanish extraction—because Greek was the language of philosophy. Perhaps "melancholy" might be a better word for Marcus Aurelius than “anxious”. What is life? he asks: an empty pageant; a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle; a tussle of spearmen; a bone flung among a pack of curs; a crumb tossed into a pond of fish; ants, loaded and labouring; mice, scared and scampering; puppets, jerking on their strings—that is life. In the midst of it all you must take your stand, good-temperedly and without disdain, yet always aware that a man's worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions."10 Yet he has faith: "universal nature's impulse was to create an orderly world. It follows, then, that everything now happening must follow a logical sequence; if it were not so, the prime purpose towards which the impulses of the world-reason are directed would be an irrational one. Remembrance of this will help you to face many things more calmly."11 Faith; a resigned philosophical faith; stoical, exactly, anything but ecstatic. Incidentally, he took opium.
Faith abounding: faith in Asclepius; faith in oracles; faith in prediction-merchants; faith in the world-reason; faith in the classical gods, Zeus, Athena, Artemis, Dionysus, though their cults are now quite transformed; faith in the mystery-religions, with their homes in Eleusis and elsewhere; faith in a profusion of Oriental divinities, Mithras, Sarapis, Isis, Osiris, Sabazius, Cybele, Attis, Men. And pot always a very discriminating faith; a clutching at the nearest straw, very often.
Faith in the gods, and in the works of gods. Among Aristides's other works are a number of fairly short prose hymns to various gods, Athena, Dionysus, Asclepius, Zeus, Hercules (now deified), Sarapis. Their content is conventional, their structure and style extremely formal and elaborate—this is in remarkable contrast to the utter and vivid disorder of the Religious Diary. But they contain usually—it is a standard element in such works—a recital of the god's benefactions to mankind. It is almost a little story; Aristides does not develop it in this way, but one can imagine that another writer might have elaborated it into something substantial; might have imposed a veritable narrative form upon such an expression of faith. If it comes to that, the Religious Diary is just such a narrative, it is itself a recital of divine benefactions, or aretalogy, the logos of the god's aretai. But the Diary is a one-dimensional narrative, a monologue; other people appear in it, but only fleetingly; Aristides is not interested in other people. Still, it does read rather as if one of Pirandello's Six Characters were In Search of an Author. And there are other examples of embryonic narrative creation in the period. In the early years of the third century Philostratus writes, among other things, a Life of Apollonius of Tyana which may have been meant as a pagan rival to the accounts of the life of Jesus. Apollonius, who himself lived in the first century A.D., was a man, not a god; a holy man, a wonder-worker; to some a saint, to others a fraud. Philostratus makes a near-novel out of his biography. To go back to Lucian, he wrote what he called a True Story; it is prefaced by the statement that it is pure lies from start to finish, and that this is the only true statement in the book; he then goes on to relate his marvellous adventures on a journey which took him to the moon, into the belly of a whale, to the Islands of the Blest, to Hades, and so on. It is in fact another satire on mendacity, this time on the mendacity of writers like Herodotus, who likewise recounted strange things in his Histories, though none so strange as this. The True Story is a sort of' comic novel, in fact; it is a continuous version of the short stories that Lucian strings together in series in The Lover of Lies. But it is still episodic, its form is still simple and linear.
None of these narratives, in fact quite reaches the point of being an imaginative recreation of human experience; of being myth, in other words, as the story of Oedipus is myth. The raw material is there; but it has not yet had form imposed on it. Let us come a little closer to the point at which, in this period, form is so imposed on experience.
A moment ago I left out of the list of flourishing religions the Christian religion, now, in the second century, beginning to spread faster and faster despite periodic persecution and continuous intellectual opposition. The omission was of course deliberate; as I said at the beginning, I am not talking about Christianity. But this limitation is of course artificial. One cannot thus arbitrarily separate Christianity from its context. I wish to turn for a moment to its immediate context; to the phenomenon, again flourishing in the second century, of Gnosticism.
Gnosticism, one might say, runs parallel to Christianity. It is probably pre-Christian in origin, although this is arguable; some have maintained that it sprang from Christianity; our knowledge of its nature and history is increasing every year as the documents discovered just after the Second War at Nag-Hammadi in Egypt and a decade or so later at Qûmran—these are the famous "Dead Sea Scrolls"—are deciphered and studied. Gnosticism is perhaps not so much a belief as a state of mind, an attitude; there is no one Gnostic doctrine, but rather, as St. Irenaeus, combatting the heresy, said of the "movement", "no two gnostics give the same account of their beliefs; each new arrival adds his piece to the scheme, or develops it in some novel way."12 Certainly it was wide-spread: "it was in the air, and it got into people's lungs", as one scholar has put it.13 Its basic premise was that the universe has a dual nature: there is both good and bad in it. The body is essentially bad; and gnostics taught that only the knowledge—gnosis—of one's own nature and the nature of God would enable man to find his way back to the On-High, there to find Good. This doctrine is expressed in a whole mythological complex, whose main features are as follows.
First, the world is a prison, which separates man from reality: Gnosticism is utterly pessimistic. God is not responsible for the condition of the world, for the world is not his creation. God is eternal, transcendent, and unknown. He is surrounded by divine beings interposed between the On-High and the world: they are called “aeons”, “spirits”, “brightnesses”, and are often four or seven or thirty in number, in different versions of the myth; this numerical symbolism is derived from the calendar . One of these beings, Sophia—wisdom, or knowledge—conceives excessive ambitions, and is driven from the presence of God. In her anger she creates the Demiurge, a maleficent power. And it is the Demiurge who created the world. To meet this opposition, God has endowed man with a spiritual element which makes him capable of seeking deliverance; and deliverance consists in the "knowledge" of God and of Man's true destiny. Human life, thus, is an effort to attain gnosis or "knowledge" , and thereby to liberate oneself from the world. And there is in this scheme another central symbol, the "divine woman"; often she is seen as Helen of Troy, who is identified with "divine thought"—Epinoia—and discovered in the shape of a prostitute, the symbol of fallen humanity. One of the leading Gnostic thinkers is said to have recognized this "divine woman", this "divine thought", in a woman he picked up by the docks in the seaport of Tyre; one wonders what she said when he expounded his discovery to her. This "fall", then, is the central pillar of the Gnostic myth; and the aim of life is to find the way to salvation in the face of the opposition of the evil spirits. "There is always the same cosmic catastrophe: a divine element has come down into the darkness, into matter, into the impure matrix; the problem is to save this spark that has come from on high".14 It all sounds as if it came from Durrell's Alexandrian Quartet; the fact is, of course, that much of it went, if indirectly, into that splendid creation.
This is the merest skeleton of the central myth; the complexity of its innumerable versions passes belief. But it will indicate the mythologizing tendency of the period. Imagination is imposing form on experience; and that is our theme. We are concerned with anxiety, with faith, with the interpretation of events. Of human events; imposing form on them, purposeful sequence; the purpose being to show how the world works, how things are.
The Gnostic myth, in one aspect an apocalyptic vision, in another aspect could be called material for literature. I turn now, finally, to similar material fully worked out in narrative form. For the second century, the period of so much activity of the imagination, is also, and it is not surprising, the period at which there blooms and comes to maturity a literary genre whose origins go back a century or two earlier, to late Hellenistic times—in Egypt, in all probability. This is the novel, the novel in prose; the last great literary creation of Greece; as major a form as epic, tragedy and comedy, though in practice it never reached the same perfection as did these three. The fact that it often does not figure in programmes of classical studies does not alter the fact that it exists.
There are novels or traces of novels from the first century B.C. to the fourth century A.D.; after that, of course, there are Byzantine romances, but that is perhaps another matter. We know of some thirty of them, of one kind or another Of these, a half-dozen non-Christian novels are more or less fully extant; and there are Christian ones too. Some of them, of the non-Christian ones, are very crude; others are extremely sophisticated. I shall describe one of them; it happens to be the crudest, but it is perhaps in a way the most typical, and I think it is the one that best fits my theme here. It is the Ephesian Tale of one Xenophon -- not the famous Xenophon, of course, but one of several writers who borrowed his name as a nom-de-plume; for the author of the Anabasis was a favourite literary model in our period.
In the Ephesian Tale, the young Habrocomes of Ephesus despises Eros, the god of love, for he is too handsome to love anyone but himself. Eros decides to punish him for his contempt; and one day Habrocomes sees the beautiful Anthia leading a procession to Artemis. He falls madly in love with her, and she with him. They both fall ill with love, and know not what ails them. Their worried parents consult the oracle of Apollo. Apollo in his reply, says that the young couple should marry, and that they will undertake a journey full of danger. The parents duly marry their children; and they also send them abroad, though that does seem to be looking for trouble. The young couple land at Rhodes, where they make an offering to Helius, the god of the sun. On continuing their journey they are attacked and captured by pirates. Subsequently they are separated, and the rest of the novel is a recital of the series of bizarre and hair-raising adventure: through which each one passes, and in all of which one divinity or another, of the several who are now interested in them, intervenes at the last moment to save hero and heroine. Anthia escapes from a number of situations in which she faces death or a fate worse than death. For instance she is made to marry a peasant, but persuades him, as does Euripides's Electra, to respect her person; married to another man, she poisons herself, only to recover later, as does Juliet, and to be carried off by brigands to Egypt. In Egypt she is, among other things, buried alive in a cave with two fierce hounds, which however she manages to tame. Sent to Italy, she finds herself in a brothel, but preserves her virtue by simulating epilepsy. At last she arrives back in Rhodes. Meanwhile her husband has travelled and suffered as much as she has; he has repelled the advances of two married women; he has narrowly escaped crucifixion and burning alive in Egypt; he has lodged, in Sicily, with a fisherman who keeps his dead wife's mummified corpse in his bedroom—this is a model of true love; he becomes a mason's labourer in Italy and finally he too arrives back in Rhodes—where, of course, there is a joyous reunion between the couple, who end up back home in Ephesus, where they live happily ever after.
All of which, of course, is reminiscent of nothing so much as the silent films of the twenties, of the Perils of Pauline; it is an analogy upon which one could elaborate. Others of these novels, be it said, are much more adroi in their construction. But they all tell substantially the same story: two young people fall in love but find themselves torn from their felicity, their familiar environment and each other, to embark on a series of vicissitudes in which they are guided and guarded by the unseen hand of a god, and which issues ultimately in their reunion and the restoration of their felicity. These are parables; this is human experience. The central themes of these stories are the isolation of the individual lost in a world toopig for him; his attempt to counter that isolation and to give himself an identity by loving; his tribulations in a world where he seems to be the plaything of chance; and the constant intervention of a beneficent deity. One may fairly call the novel a myth for the times. As such, it is the fullest literary expression one finds of the theme of anxiety; the most elaborately forged of the late Greek pagan's arms against the unknown.
Religious revelation; superstition; unbridled credulity; pseudo-scientific interpretation of: phenomena; pious sentimentality; paradoxography; philosophical resignation; lurid symbolism; literary creation; these are all non-Christian solutions to problems ultimately "solved", if one wishes to say that, by Christianity. Christianity was certainly the historical solution. And that explains why, for instance, the novel developed no farther than it did; the infant showed vast promise, but was stifled when young by ideology. The open society of post-classical paganism was followed by a closed society in which the great questions were questions to which the answer was known. The mode of virtue, of heroism, was pre-determined. I mentioned the Christian novels. Perhaps "para-Christian" is a better term for the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, for instance, in which there is a love-plot, as there must be in any literary creation which purports to describe fully human experience, but in which the development of that love-plot is singularly hindered by the fact that in the ideology of the writer of the novel, union between man and woman can be only spiritual union; absolute physical continence must be observed, even within marriage, if religious virtue is to be attained. That is a short and sweeping solution to the ills of the world. If the author had had his way, there would not now be any scholars or literary critics to examine his narrative technique; although that in itself might not be such a bad thing. This rather reminds one of novels of the early Soviet Russian régime, in which the hero is by definition he who produces the greatest mileage of drainpipes.
But all of that is another matter. It will suffice that I have tried to describe, and in some degree to analyse, the cultural physiognomy of an earlier Age of Anxiety.15
Notes
1. Delivered to the Ontario Classical Association, May l2th 1973, at Trent University. The title reflects that of E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, London, C.U.P., 1965, to which general reference may be made here. The topics here touched on are treated more fully in my Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.-C., Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1971, IIIe Partie, where fuller bibliographical information will be found to supplement the short list of works given in the following notes. The best history of literature to consult is that of A. Lesky, A History of Greek Literature (English translation of 2nd edition, London, Methuen, 1966).
2. Aelius Aristides 48. 19-23 Keil. Translated by A.-J. Festugière in Personal Religion among the Greeks, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1951, pp . 94-95.
3. But see, notably, E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1951.
4. Philopseudes 1.
5. See Festugiere, op. cit., Ch. 6, Popular Piety: Aelius Aristides and Asclepius, for an account of the Diary (Hieroi Logoi; and C. A. Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, Amsterdam, Hakkert, 1963 , for a full treatment.
6. A. Boulanger, Aelius Aristide et la so histi ue dans la rovince d Asie au IIe siècle de notre ère, Paris, de Boccard, 1923, p. 131 this is the standard comprehensive work on Aristides).
7. 3.28.
8. On the Characteristics of Animals 6.44 . Translated by F. A. Wright, A History of Later Greek Literature, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932, pp. 279-280.
9. 8.17. Translated by A. F. Scholfield, Loeb edition, 1959.
10. 7.3. Translated by Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin, 1964.
11. 7.75. Translated by Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin, 1964.
12. Harvey, v.1 p.188.
13. R. M. Grant, La gnose et les origines chrétiennes, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1964, p. 156 (revised edition of Gnosticism and Early Christianity, New York, Columbia U.P., 1959; English version revised 1966).
14. S. Rutin, Les gnostiques, Paris, P.U.F., (“Que sais-je?”) 1963, p. 49.
15. Further bibliography: general, S. Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, London, 1904, reprint New York, Meridian Books, 195 still useful); religion, J. Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire, London, Thames and Hudson, 1970; Christianity, R. M. Grant, Augustus to Constantine, New York, Harper and Row, 1970 (London, Collins, 1971); novel, B. P. Reardon, "The Greek Novel", Phoenix 23.3, 1969,291-309.
"It was in the depths of winter. There was a bitter wind from the north, and frost. The pebbles were so glued together by the frost as to look like a network of crystal, and the water was what one would expect it to be in such a climate. When the manifestation of the god was made known, my friends came with me, also sane doctors who knew me well, and others, some anxious on my account, some out of scientific curiosity. There was a great crowd besides, for there happened to be a distribution of largess outside the gates, and everything could be seen very well from the bridge. There was a doctor named Heracleon, a friend of mine who confessed to me the next day that he had come convinced that at the very best I should be seized by a tetanic recurvation or something similar. When I came to the river, I had no need of any encouragement. Still full of the warmth of the vision of the god, I tore off my clothes, and, without even asking for a rub-down, jumped into the deepest part of the river. Then, just as if I were in a pool of mild water of just the right temperature, I took my time swimming and splashing about. When I came out, my skin was fresh and shining, my body was perfectly light, and the whole crowd of those who had come with me and those who had come later gave forth in splendid volume the famous cry: 'Great is Asclepius! I Who could describe what followed? All the rest of that day and in the evening until I went to bed I remained in the state in which I had came out of the bath; I did not feel my body to be drier, or any wetter; the warmth which I felt did not leave me, nor was any added to it; nor did this warmth seem to be such as any human device might have brought about; it was a sort of continuous animal warmth, of equal strength throughout all my limbs and over the whole surface of the body. I was in a corresponding state mentally. It was not an obvious pleasure, nor would you have measured it by the standards of ordinary human good cheer. Rather it was a certain indescribable sense of well-being which made all things seem of secondary importance beside the present moment, so that not even when I saw something did I have the impression that I was seeing it—so wholly close was I to the god ."2
The source of this remarkable narrative is the Religious Diary of one Publius Aelius Aristides, a Greek who was born in 118 A.D. in the north of Asia Minor, about 200 miles west of the modern Ankara and 100 miles east of the ancient Troy, and who died shortly af'ter 180 A.D. The incident Aristides describes—it is only one of the most dramatic of a number of such incidents—took place when he was 31. In Rome, Antoninus Pius, the adoptive father of Marcus Aurelius, was on the throne; in the Greek world, a cultural renaissance was in full swing, and Aristides himself was to become one of its principal figures in the principal Greek and Roman cities of the Mediterranean, Christian apologists were explaining their faith to often hostile citizens of a temporal empire, and struggling to meet the intellectual challenge of Greek cultural tradition.
Aristides could himself be the "anxious pagan" of my title. But he seems, one may say. not in the least anxious; he seems very confident, in his god Asclepius. We can perhaps solve the difficulty by saying that he is very confident in his solution, which is a rellgious solution, to his problems, to his anxiety. I am not suggesting that rellgious belief is necessarily a product of anxiety; it is rather the nature of his religious solution than the fact that it is religious that betrays his state of mind. This— Aristides himself, his state of mind, his solution—I shall return to shortly. At this point I shall broaden the question. For the anxiety extends beyond this individual, to other people, in hundreds of thousands, at this late stage of Greco-Roman civilization. Aristides is simply a particularly eloquent witness to an aspect of ancient—for our purposes specifically of Greek -- civilization that is not usually stressed: its irrational aspect.3
The critic says as much about himself as he does about the object of his criticism. So does the scholar. The nineteenth century, intoxicated with its own rationalism, saw rationalism in the Greek mind; we, with cause enough to think that rationality is the thinnest of veneers upon instinctive behaviour, are more ready to see what is irrational and complex in that society. Euripides' s Bacchae has probably never known so many revivals and adaptations as in our day. Euripides saw and recognized irrationality in his own day in the 5th century; thereafter, in the Hellenistic and later in the Imperial world, its incidence merely increases, to reach a high point, a frenzy, in the second century A.D. The interest of interpreters in this phenomenon, and in this period, has grown with the experience of the 20th century. So, too, has our interest in and sympathy for the situation of Greek civilization under Roman rule grown, as our disenchantment with empire has increased. W. H. Auden can call our age The Age of Anxiety; that is no doubt why I have chosen to discuss a similarly anxious age, the 2nd century A.D.—once, incidentally, characterized, by Gibbon, as “the most felicitous period of human history”; it seems ironic.
The second century is also, of course, a period in which more and more people are turning to Christianity. The outlines of that story, however, or at least the feel of that attitude, are not unfamiliar; so I shall be concerned with the pagan side of the coin.
What are people anxious about, at this period? Much the same things as worry us, one suspects. True, there is no bomb; but there is plague. There is no conflict of power-blocs; but that was not long coming, and there are political tensions enough within the structure of the Roman empire. The sheer size of the world, under that vast empire; the impotence, of individual or state, to control it; the impersonality of bureaucratic control; the absence of a clear direction in life such as the city-state of early Greece and early Rome had offered; for thoughtful Greeks, the sense of being submerged by an inferior cultural tradition, despite the spread of Roman citizenship, despite what could well be called a “special relationship” with the Big Daddy of the day; all of these caused unease, neurosis. Confused by the welter of experience, unable to digest it, many looked for lines of escape from uninterpretable and often unpleasant “reality” Let us follow some of these lines; but it will be impossible to disentangle them.
Aristides was, as I have said, a literary figure. His Religious Diary is one part of his work. The other, which concerns us here only indirectly, consists of some dozens of decorative, elaborate, highly literary speeches on a variety of topics, many of them for delivery on various ceremonial occasions; the nearest equivalent one can find in our society is the after-dinner speech, on topics public or private, delivered by a man of literary culture—it should be said also, however, that this genre, epideictic oratory, or display oratory, was one of the favourite literary vehicles of the day. The Diary shows a quite different side of Aristides's personality; it shows him as a religious fanatic, totally uncritical in his acceptance of the strangest manifestations of the divinity. And we have, as it happens, a picture of the other side of that coin; the comments of a rationalist upon religious credulity, upon excess of faith, as displayed by a great many people in Aristides’s part of the world.
They come from the pen of a much more famous and much better writer, Lucian of Samosata: Lucian the satirist, an exact contemporary of Aristides. Lucian, in his Alexander, or The False Prophet, describes how, not all that far from where Aristides was born, a charlatan by the name of Alexander set up a religious racket in order to make money out of simple folk anxious to believe in a revelation. First he laid the groundwork with an advance publicity campaign fit to earn the admiration of Madison Avenue; then he set up in business as oracle-monger. He constructed a model of a large snake with a human head and a mouth which would open and shut by remote control. This snake he set up in a small dimly-lit room and announced to the expectant countryside as an incarnation of a god—the god Asclepius, as it happens, again; Asclepius, the god of healing, was throughout Greek history one of the most popular and durable of all divinities. The crowds rolled in; they were allowed to file, open-mouthed, past a small opening through which they could catch for a second or two a glimpse of the barely visible but lifelike contraption opening and shutting its mouth; and they went away convinced that Asclepius had indeed come among them for their greater comfort. Then came the pay-off. It was given out that Asclepius would utter oracles. And the inquirers turned up in throngs, submitted their questions written down on sealed papyrus scrolls—along with a fee—and were duly impressed when a response was given to them which appeared indeed to answer their question, and yet more impressed when their scroll was returned with the seal apparently still intact. In fact the answers were not any more helpful than today's horoscopes; but like our horoscopes, they had an audience eager to make much of little. The trick with the seals was easy; Alexander simply melted the wax with a hot needle, read the question, and resealed the paper. Those he could not open he took a chance with by uttering a particularly ambiguous reply; and no-one ever noticed. And the money rolled in; Alexander's fame spread for thousands of miles; he had Roman senators among his clients, and contemporary coins, With Alexander's and his snake's images on them, prove that Lucian is not making it up.
Elsewhere, in a piece called The Lover of Lies, Lucian strings together, in similarly satirical vein, a series of anecdotes relating incredible supernatural phenomena as reported, and believed in, by a group of philosophers (of all people). Statues walk about; incredible old wives' remedies cure the worst diseases; Hecate reveals the underworld to a human being; magicians, exorcisms, resurrections, haunted houses, sorcerer's apprentices tumble over each other (the famous story of the sorcerer's apprentice does in fact occur here): the narrators outdo each other in lying, and Lucian, as their interlocutor, is gravely castigated for his scepticism. “They quite pointlessly” says Lucian , summing it all up, “prefer lies to truth by far; they love lying; they spend their whole time lying, for no reason whatsoever.”4
The evidence of this non-believer, then, points in the same general direction as does that of Aristides. What is one to make of it?
There are perhaps two different though related phenomena visible here. One is the phenomenon of sheer credulity, and its inverse, mendacity; the other, only less crude, is the attempt to interpret the unknown, the incomprehensible One believes the most incredible things, and believes them the more fervently the more incredible they are; or one interprets phenomena—invariably, in this age, putting a religious interpretation on them; and the more incredible phenomena are, the more powerfully do they show forth the god. What these attitudes have in common is they are both attempts to tame the unknown, to render it less frightening. One can propitiate, disarm, the unknown, the unseen, by throwing oneself on its mercy, by abandoning oneself to it uncritically; in which case, the harder a thing is to believe, the more virtue there is in believing it—the White Queen in Alice through the Looking-glass believed six impossible things before breakfast, on a good day, by sheer will-power. Or one can render the unknown less unfamiliar, and thus less frightening, by imposing on it a form of one's own creation, and thus giving it some kind of known dimension .One can approach it through faith or myth; both are arms against the unknown. This is valid for any age. It is valid for the 5th century B.C., with its Oedipus. It is more manifestly valid for the more highly-coloured 2nd century A.D.
The immediate reason for Aristides’s cold bath was medical. In his youth he had fallen seriously ill, and the doctors despaired of him. He turned finally to Asclepius, and Asclepius heard him. The Religious Diary is an autobiographical account of his long illness, covering his life, although with gaps, from his mid-twenties to his early fifties.5 Above all it is an account of the interventions of his saviour, who appeared to the sick man in dreams—130 of them, in the 90 pages of text—and prescribed him remedies. It was standard practice to induce such therapeutic dreams by sleeping in one of the sanctuaries of Asclepius, such as the one at Epidaurus; and it indubitably often worked, as is proved by the very numerous offerings dedicated to the god in his sanctuaries in gratitude for cures. Here I shall go no farther into the mechanics of the process than to suggest that the important factors in it were, first the vivid and impressionable imagination of the patient, for whom there was nothing at all absurd in placing such trust in an unseen healer, and who was surrounded, in the sanctuary, by scores of other patients in a similar state of ill-health and the same excited state of mind; and, second, perhaps, sheer medical experience on the part of the doctors in attendance and the sanctuary attendants who were in effect medical auxiliaries, and who acquired in years of service a stock of knowledge about common ailments which enabled them often unobtrusively, when discussing dreams with patients, to suggest perfectly rational cures, whose efficacy was subsequently attributed to Asclepius. One does not need to look very far for similar situations today: sanatoria, spas, shrines all flourish. And I imagine no doctor would be particularly surprised by the case of Aelius Aristides. My point here is that he illustrates vividly a frame of mind, a state of total devotion to his saviour. It does not even seem to matter very much what illness, precisely, he suffered from. Indeed, one might well ask, what illness did he not suffer from? To say that his troubles were mostly intestinal or respiratory is hardly to do him justice: one finds asthma, catarrh, fevers, tumours, neuralgia, facial paralysis, digestive disorders, bowel trouble, fits of coughing, curvature of the spine, migraine, rheumatism, convulsions, coughing-up of blood, stiff neck, bouts of choking; as has been well said, “A doctor in Molière could not have thought up so terrifying a catalogue.”6 Aristides is the consummate hypochondriac; he revels in his disorders. And he revels even more in Asclepius's remedies, for which the word "paradoxical" is, as we have seen, tame. He becomes, as he says, Asclepius’s thing. We may feel that the god's intervention could have been more efficacious, for time and time again, it would seem, Aristides fell ill again, and each illness was worse than the last. But he only glories the more in illness and saviour; he knows that he is not Asclepius's only patient, and feels that the worse his health, the more intense is his saviour's interest in him. The illness is necessary to him. Furthermore, the god’s interest extends not merely to Aristides’s health, but to every detail of his life; it extends to his income tax problems, and the god even predicts, accurately, how much expense his appeal is going to involve. And particularly it extends to his literary art. Asclepius will tell him to write, or not to write; to perform, or not to perform; to write in prose, or in verse; to write about this, or about that; he will even dictate whole passages to him verbatim. He is not only Aristides's doctor, he is his impresario. And Aristides is duly grateful to him; his whole artistic life and effort is but one long hymn to Asclepius; he is an artist, he feels, by the grace of God.
Let us leave Aristides’s dreams, and turn for a moment to dreams in general. For dreaming seems to have been a favourite occupation at this period; so we may judge from what we know of the contemporary art of onirocrisy, or dream-interpretation. As an art, onirocrisy was already ancient; we know it was practised in Homer’s day. But it certainly flourished in the 2nd century, and most of what we know of ancient techniques has come down to us in a handbook of this period by one Artemidorus, who, again, lived in Asia Minor. It is worth while glancing at its contents.
Artemidorus—who, by the way, was a professional diviner, and wrote treatises also on palmistry and on augury—takes it for granted that dreams are divinely inspired, and incidentally suggests how intense popular interest in onirocrisy was when he says that although he hesitated before writing his manual, "urgent contemporary need" for such a book made up his mind for him. This interest is further indicated by the fact that several systems of dream-interpreting existed -- Aristides, for instance, does not follow Artemidorus. It must be said that that system is extremely complex, in fact too complex for its creator, who loses himself hopelessly in his classifications. But its main lines are simple enough. First, dreams indicate the state of the dreamer’s soul; those who are not subject to fear or hope will be the less likely to have dreams. Secondly, dreams are of two broad kinds: some reflect the past and others predict the future, either directly or indirectly, allegorically. It is here, principally, that modern dream-interpreters would part company with Artemidorus; we do not, at least I believe that scientists do not, accept that dreams can predict the future. This entails a difference of method in their analysis. For us, only the cause of the dream is significant, and what we try to determine from the dream is the past and present condition of the dreamer (incidentally solving his troubles, some say, by this very process of identifying them). For Artemidorus, it is the outcome of the dream that matters. His efforts, in consequence, are mainly directed towards analysing the outcome of allegorical dreams, for these are the ones which need interpreting. His method is, first, to collect past dreams, discover what their outcome was, and find a similarity between dream and outcome; and second, on the basis of extensive clinical experience of this kind, to organise this material by analysing and classifying the dreams, thus making their identification by type, and consequently their interpretation, easier.
As far as it goes, this is scientific. But when one gets down to the details of classification, endless difficulties arise. For one has to consider not only the objective features of the dream, but also the experience and situation of the dreamer, for the same dream will mean different things to different men. Thus, to give an example, to dream of seagulls will signify, for those who sail the seas, extreme danger but not death; for seagulls plunge into the sea but are not drowned. For other men, the seagull is a symbol of greed, and presages a meeting with a rapacious person—a moneylender or a prostitute (incidentally, the 19th century German translator of Artemidorus thought it proper to omit from his translation all passages relating to sexual matters: so much for Freud, who by the way had great respect for Artemidorus) . Similarly, to dream of a net or a trap will normally presage danger and delay; but it will be a good sign if you are looking for something you have lost. To dream of war is bad, but not for a soldier, since it is his normal occupation. To dream of eating a book—have you ever dreamed of eating a book? But remember, this is at a time of a remarkable resurgence of literary activity—to dream of eating a book is all right for the educated, but for other people it means sharp and sudden death. University administrators please note.
The difficulties are obvious: the classification is never-ending. And when one adds to this the fact that the experience and situation of the interpreter has also to be taken into account, they become infinite in their reciprocal action; one is reminded of a mirror in which one sees a mirror in which one sees a mirror in which, etc. This applies notably to the linguistic interpretation of dreams, in which one deduces the meaning of a dream by a play on words or names. For such interpretation to be accurate, dreamer and interpreter must have exactly the same vocabulary and linguistic habits in general. In an extreme form of such punning, Artemidorus gives numerical equivalents to the letters of the alphabet —A = 1, B = 2, and so on—and produces by this means equivalences between words, which are taken as prophetic. In our terms, this might mean that if I dream of a mirror—value 91—it could mean that I was going to eat lobster, which has the same numerical value; or if I dream of ice-cream (value 58), it might mean that something important would happen tomorrow at noon (value 58). Similarly a zebra (52) could portend an encounter with a giraffe (52); or, no doubt, vice-versa, if one's acquaintance extends that far. The idea is simple enough. Occasionally there are striking coincidences. Seminar (79) you may like to know, equals spoon—spoon-feeding?—and herring— perhaps red herring; and rubbish. And the staunchest rationalist is given to think by the observation that sociology (120) is poppycock. But coincidence is what it is, after all. This is at best a parlour-game, a party-trick; if the children are fractious of a wet Sunday afternoon, this might keep them fairly quiet for half an hour.
Artemidorus may wish to be scientific, but he is not up to it; and his handbook ends up by being little more than a jackdaw's collection of oddities that illustrates, ultimately the same endless appetite for the unusual, the same uncritical attitude towards experience, as we have seen in Aristides and Lucian. As a final, comprehensive example of his method, I quote one of Artemidorus's entries: “a cat signifies an unscrupulous woman of low character; and a law-suit, for (the Greek word for "cat ") gale, has the same value as (the Greek word for "law-suit") dike,” (here I will interject that the English word cat might signify, for an academic, something much more frightening than a law-suit, something much more unprincipled and unscrupulous than any woman, for it equals, numerically, dean). "And death" (we are back to Artemidorus), "since it rots everything it gets hold of. And profits; for some call it Kerdo" (a pun on kerdos, profit). "One can distinguish among these meanings according as one sees it approaching or going away or suffering or doing something agreeable or disagreeable."7 And that is enough of Artemidorus.
This attitude may be seen, too, in another favourite Greek pastime, again going back to classical times, and again, characteristically, known to us through a second-century handbook, transmitted through the Middle Ages by Arabic culture. The book is a compendium of the kind one finds in every field of human inquiry in this age; it is the heyday of the compiler; one is reminded of the educational textbooks that abound today, the Portable So-and-So, The Best of X, A Handbook to Y, potted, preselected, predigested information to titillate the casual interest, the sated appetite. This is the study of physiognomy, the art of deducing the character of a person from his appearance. As with onirocrisy, we all of course do it, to some degree or other. And one Polemon purports to tell us how to do it; Polemon, by the way, was another of the bright stars in the literary constellation of the day. Physiognomy—I should prefer to call it "physiognomony" and thus restore a correct form to the English language; the Greek word physiognomonia was misspelled by an encyclopedia-writer of the 5th century A.D., and the misspelling became standard in mediaeval Latin and thence in English; the French have got it right;—physiognomony, then, is concerned with the whole physical appearance; not just the face, but all the parts of the body. Again, the author claims that his method is scientific, in that it proceeds from observation of his contemporaries; but again, he would appear to be overestimating himself.
The method consists, once more, essentially of observing similarities; and these are of three kinds, anatomical, zoological, and ethnological. Thus, to take zoological characteristics, if a man resembles a certain animal—and everybody does resemble one animal or another, Polemon assures us—he will have the character of that animal. If you look like an ox you will be "incapable of learning, devoid of common sense, lazy and slow; more fit to be governed than to govern; but honest, just, and strong." If you have the misfortune to look like a tortoise, "and I have seen a man who looked like a tortoise", says Polemon -- that is, if you have " a short neck, a broad back, big feet, and a wrinkled face", then you will be, as is the tortoise, "stupid, ineffective and ungrateful." Hard luck. For the anatomical criteria, the eyes are the principal witness, and perhaps this is not so silly. But there are others: the chin, for instance. If you have a cleft chin -- you may wish to remind yourselves whether you have a cleft chin, before I tell you what it signifies; if you have a cleft chin, you are a creature of low cunning and jealousy; if you do not have a cleft chin, you have an excessive sexual appetite. Says Polemon. As for ethnological criteria, there is perhaps no need to go into those in a land which knows Newfie jokes.
There is something in some of this. But a lot of it—most of it, perhaps—is mere haphazard invention. It would be very useful if it were reliable, because then one could be sure at first glance, as Polemon was, that a total stranger was "thoroughly wicked, lascivious, debauched, dissolute, dishonest and quite without conscience, a paragon of all the vices." But if some of us do tend to make such judgements, we would hardly call them any more than guesses. Polemon I s desire to see a pattern in miscellaneous phenomena runs away with him, and he illegitimately gives the name of scientific investigation to what is really no more than an undisciplined appetite for curiosities. It is interesting that a real man of science—the great doctor Galen, another contemporary of Aristides—is quite prepared to accept as valid the general principles, though not the excesses, of both onirocrisy and physiognomony. He believed that dreams were sent by the gods, and acted on them—to the point, once, of operating upon himself because a dream told him to. Similarly, he believed that character was shown by appearance. But in this case he has an intellectual structure behind his belief, in that he thought that one's appearance was determined, in its turn, by one's environment; the environment determines one's temperament, one's "humours", and thus, for instance, the look of one's eyes. And that is at least much more reasonable than simply to announce, as does Polemon, that long feet indicate a malicious disposition.
There are other pursuits, pseudo-sciences, that attempt similarly to interpret the unknown—astrology, for instance, is highly developed at this time—but that degenerate, like these two, into mere paradoxography, the collection of curious "facts"—in inverted commas. And the "facts" become curiouser and curiouser. A writer who is otherwise serious recounts, for instance, how a male homosexual gave birth to a child; tells us of six-year old mothers; and describes a centaur he has seen -- "not as big as the ones one reads about, but not small." And the theme of divine intention in these phenomena is never far away. One Aelian writes several treatises to illustrate divine providence. It is for instance divine providence which imbues animals with noble sentiments which in man are often notable for their absence. The case of Socles and his horse is a case in point. Socles was a very handsome young man, and his horse had, it would seem, an affectionate disposition as well as much intelligence: he "conceived", we are told, a violent passion for his master, and would snort when he came near, and whinny loudly when he patted him. When the youth mounted him, he obeyed every touch; if he was standing in sight, he cast languishing glances at him. Now all these signs of amativeness were charming at first; but when the horse became bolder and seemed as if he wished to take liberties people began to talk. So Socles, disliking scandal, and annoyed at the horse's intemperate affection, sold the animal. But the horse, unable to bear separation from his beloved, starved himself to death.8 Elsewhere in Aelian, we read that the trainer of a tame elephant had an elderly and rich wife. Now he was in love with another woman; and desiring that his wife's property should become hers, he strangled his wife and buried her, foolish man that he was, close by the elephant's stall. Then he married the other woman. But the elephant seized the newly-wed woman with its trunk, led her to where her predecessor was buried, and dug the body up with its tusks, thus showing by its actions what it could not express in words, and making clear to the woman what sort of man she had married—so much did it detest evil.9 This is the very spirit of the famous mediaeval collection of edifying stories called the Physiologus, which probably is to be dated, in its original version, to the second century, and which, with the blessing of the Church to help it on its way, became known from Ethiopia to Iceland. In it a Biblical quotation mentioning an animal, or a plant, or a mineral, is followed by an Aelianesque story, which is then interpreted as a Christian allegory.
Faith and credulity know no bounds. "Certum est quia impossibile est", said Tertullian in this period of the incarnation of God in Christ, ""it is certain because it is impossible"; "credo quia absurdum", "I believe it because it is absurd". I imagine that a theological or a psychological principle is involved in this statement—faith is not concerned with probability—and do not suppose that it is naive; but the notion certainly fell on fertile soil. Tertullian, as a Christian, has faith, hope, and charity, though one is bound to say that he hasn't a great deal of charity towards pagans. In the cultivated pagan of the day, this formula becomes faith, anxiety, and, with luck, charity. One such pagan, a famous one, is the emperor Marcus Aurelius himself; he too is the author of a diary, though of a very different kind from the cascade of bizarre dreams and actions that fills the diary of Aristides, of whom he is another almost exact contemporary. His Diary is called, simply, To Himself, or perhaps Meditations; it is written in Greek, by the way, though he is a Roman—Roman of Spanish extraction—because Greek was the language of philosophy. Perhaps "melancholy" might be a better word for Marcus Aurelius than “anxious”. What is life? he asks: an empty pageant; a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle; a tussle of spearmen; a bone flung among a pack of curs; a crumb tossed into a pond of fish; ants, loaded and labouring; mice, scared and scampering; puppets, jerking on their strings—that is life. In the midst of it all you must take your stand, good-temperedly and without disdain, yet always aware that a man's worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions."10 Yet he has faith: "universal nature's impulse was to create an orderly world. It follows, then, that everything now happening must follow a logical sequence; if it were not so, the prime purpose towards which the impulses of the world-reason are directed would be an irrational one. Remembrance of this will help you to face many things more calmly."11 Faith; a resigned philosophical faith; stoical, exactly, anything but ecstatic. Incidentally, he took opium.
Faith abounding: faith in Asclepius; faith in oracles; faith in prediction-merchants; faith in the world-reason; faith in the classical gods, Zeus, Athena, Artemis, Dionysus, though their cults are now quite transformed; faith in the mystery-religions, with their homes in Eleusis and elsewhere; faith in a profusion of Oriental divinities, Mithras, Sarapis, Isis, Osiris, Sabazius, Cybele, Attis, Men. And pot always a very discriminating faith; a clutching at the nearest straw, very often.
Faith in the gods, and in the works of gods. Among Aristides's other works are a number of fairly short prose hymns to various gods, Athena, Dionysus, Asclepius, Zeus, Hercules (now deified), Sarapis. Their content is conventional, their structure and style extremely formal and elaborate—this is in remarkable contrast to the utter and vivid disorder of the Religious Diary. But they contain usually—it is a standard element in such works—a recital of the god's benefactions to mankind. It is almost a little story; Aristides does not develop it in this way, but one can imagine that another writer might have elaborated it into something substantial; might have imposed a veritable narrative form upon such an expression of faith. If it comes to that, the Religious Diary is just such a narrative, it is itself a recital of divine benefactions, or aretalogy, the logos of the god's aretai. But the Diary is a one-dimensional narrative, a monologue; other people appear in it, but only fleetingly; Aristides is not interested in other people. Still, it does read rather as if one of Pirandello's Six Characters were In Search of an Author. And there are other examples of embryonic narrative creation in the period. In the early years of the third century Philostratus writes, among other things, a Life of Apollonius of Tyana which may have been meant as a pagan rival to the accounts of the life of Jesus. Apollonius, who himself lived in the first century A.D., was a man, not a god; a holy man, a wonder-worker; to some a saint, to others a fraud. Philostratus makes a near-novel out of his biography. To go back to Lucian, he wrote what he called a True Story; it is prefaced by the statement that it is pure lies from start to finish, and that this is the only true statement in the book; he then goes on to relate his marvellous adventures on a journey which took him to the moon, into the belly of a whale, to the Islands of the Blest, to Hades, and so on. It is in fact another satire on mendacity, this time on the mendacity of writers like Herodotus, who likewise recounted strange things in his Histories, though none so strange as this. The True Story is a sort of' comic novel, in fact; it is a continuous version of the short stories that Lucian strings together in series in The Lover of Lies. But it is still episodic, its form is still simple and linear.
None of these narratives, in fact quite reaches the point of being an imaginative recreation of human experience; of being myth, in other words, as the story of Oedipus is myth. The raw material is there; but it has not yet had form imposed on it. Let us come a little closer to the point at which, in this period, form is so imposed on experience.
A moment ago I left out of the list of flourishing religions the Christian religion, now, in the second century, beginning to spread faster and faster despite periodic persecution and continuous intellectual opposition. The omission was of course deliberate; as I said at the beginning, I am not talking about Christianity. But this limitation is of course artificial. One cannot thus arbitrarily separate Christianity from its context. I wish to turn for a moment to its immediate context; to the phenomenon, again flourishing in the second century, of Gnosticism.
Gnosticism, one might say, runs parallel to Christianity. It is probably pre-Christian in origin, although this is arguable; some have maintained that it sprang from Christianity; our knowledge of its nature and history is increasing every year as the documents discovered just after the Second War at Nag-Hammadi in Egypt and a decade or so later at Qûmran—these are the famous "Dead Sea Scrolls"—are deciphered and studied. Gnosticism is perhaps not so much a belief as a state of mind, an attitude; there is no one Gnostic doctrine, but rather, as St. Irenaeus, combatting the heresy, said of the "movement", "no two gnostics give the same account of their beliefs; each new arrival adds his piece to the scheme, or develops it in some novel way."12 Certainly it was wide-spread: "it was in the air, and it got into people's lungs", as one scholar has put it.13 Its basic premise was that the universe has a dual nature: there is both good and bad in it. The body is essentially bad; and gnostics taught that only the knowledge—gnosis—of one's own nature and the nature of God would enable man to find his way back to the On-High, there to find Good. This doctrine is expressed in a whole mythological complex, whose main features are as follows.
First, the world is a prison, which separates man from reality: Gnosticism is utterly pessimistic. God is not responsible for the condition of the world, for the world is not his creation. God is eternal, transcendent, and unknown. He is surrounded by divine beings interposed between the On-High and the world: they are called “aeons”, “spirits”, “brightnesses”, and are often four or seven or thirty in number, in different versions of the myth; this numerical symbolism is derived from the calendar . One of these beings, Sophia—wisdom, or knowledge—conceives excessive ambitions, and is driven from the presence of God. In her anger she creates the Demiurge, a maleficent power. And it is the Demiurge who created the world. To meet this opposition, God has endowed man with a spiritual element which makes him capable of seeking deliverance; and deliverance consists in the "knowledge" of God and of Man's true destiny. Human life, thus, is an effort to attain gnosis or "knowledge" , and thereby to liberate oneself from the world. And there is in this scheme another central symbol, the "divine woman"; often she is seen as Helen of Troy, who is identified with "divine thought"—Epinoia—and discovered in the shape of a prostitute, the symbol of fallen humanity. One of the leading Gnostic thinkers is said to have recognized this "divine woman", this "divine thought", in a woman he picked up by the docks in the seaport of Tyre; one wonders what she said when he expounded his discovery to her. This "fall", then, is the central pillar of the Gnostic myth; and the aim of life is to find the way to salvation in the face of the opposition of the evil spirits. "There is always the same cosmic catastrophe: a divine element has come down into the darkness, into matter, into the impure matrix; the problem is to save this spark that has come from on high".14 It all sounds as if it came from Durrell's Alexandrian Quartet; the fact is, of course, that much of it went, if indirectly, into that splendid creation.
This is the merest skeleton of the central myth; the complexity of its innumerable versions passes belief. But it will indicate the mythologizing tendency of the period. Imagination is imposing form on experience; and that is our theme. We are concerned with anxiety, with faith, with the interpretation of events. Of human events; imposing form on them, purposeful sequence; the purpose being to show how the world works, how things are.
The Gnostic myth, in one aspect an apocalyptic vision, in another aspect could be called material for literature. I turn now, finally, to similar material fully worked out in narrative form. For the second century, the period of so much activity of the imagination, is also, and it is not surprising, the period at which there blooms and comes to maturity a literary genre whose origins go back a century or two earlier, to late Hellenistic times—in Egypt, in all probability. This is the novel, the novel in prose; the last great literary creation of Greece; as major a form as epic, tragedy and comedy, though in practice it never reached the same perfection as did these three. The fact that it often does not figure in programmes of classical studies does not alter the fact that it exists.
There are novels or traces of novels from the first century B.C. to the fourth century A.D.; after that, of course, there are Byzantine romances, but that is perhaps another matter. We know of some thirty of them, of one kind or another Of these, a half-dozen non-Christian novels are more or less fully extant; and there are Christian ones too. Some of them, of the non-Christian ones, are very crude; others are extremely sophisticated. I shall describe one of them; it happens to be the crudest, but it is perhaps in a way the most typical, and I think it is the one that best fits my theme here. It is the Ephesian Tale of one Xenophon -- not the famous Xenophon, of course, but one of several writers who borrowed his name as a nom-de-plume; for the author of the Anabasis was a favourite literary model in our period.
In the Ephesian Tale, the young Habrocomes of Ephesus despises Eros, the god of love, for he is too handsome to love anyone but himself. Eros decides to punish him for his contempt; and one day Habrocomes sees the beautiful Anthia leading a procession to Artemis. He falls madly in love with her, and she with him. They both fall ill with love, and know not what ails them. Their worried parents consult the oracle of Apollo. Apollo in his reply, says that the young couple should marry, and that they will undertake a journey full of danger. The parents duly marry their children; and they also send them abroad, though that does seem to be looking for trouble. The young couple land at Rhodes, where they make an offering to Helius, the god of the sun. On continuing their journey they are attacked and captured by pirates. Subsequently they are separated, and the rest of the novel is a recital of the series of bizarre and hair-raising adventure: through which each one passes, and in all of which one divinity or another, of the several who are now interested in them, intervenes at the last moment to save hero and heroine. Anthia escapes from a number of situations in which she faces death or a fate worse than death. For instance she is made to marry a peasant, but persuades him, as does Euripides's Electra, to respect her person; married to another man, she poisons herself, only to recover later, as does Juliet, and to be carried off by brigands to Egypt. In Egypt she is, among other things, buried alive in a cave with two fierce hounds, which however she manages to tame. Sent to Italy, she finds herself in a brothel, but preserves her virtue by simulating epilepsy. At last she arrives back in Rhodes. Meanwhile her husband has travelled and suffered as much as she has; he has repelled the advances of two married women; he has narrowly escaped crucifixion and burning alive in Egypt; he has lodged, in Sicily, with a fisherman who keeps his dead wife's mummified corpse in his bedroom—this is a model of true love; he becomes a mason's labourer in Italy and finally he too arrives back in Rhodes—where, of course, there is a joyous reunion between the couple, who end up back home in Ephesus, where they live happily ever after.
All of which, of course, is reminiscent of nothing so much as the silent films of the twenties, of the Perils of Pauline; it is an analogy upon which one could elaborate. Others of these novels, be it said, are much more adroi in their construction. But they all tell substantially the same story: two young people fall in love but find themselves torn from their felicity, their familiar environment and each other, to embark on a series of vicissitudes in which they are guided and guarded by the unseen hand of a god, and which issues ultimately in their reunion and the restoration of their felicity. These are parables; this is human experience. The central themes of these stories are the isolation of the individual lost in a world toopig for him; his attempt to counter that isolation and to give himself an identity by loving; his tribulations in a world where he seems to be the plaything of chance; and the constant intervention of a beneficent deity. One may fairly call the novel a myth for the times. As such, it is the fullest literary expression one finds of the theme of anxiety; the most elaborately forged of the late Greek pagan's arms against the unknown.
Religious revelation; superstition; unbridled credulity; pseudo-scientific interpretation of: phenomena; pious sentimentality; paradoxography; philosophical resignation; lurid symbolism; literary creation; these are all non-Christian solutions to problems ultimately "solved", if one wishes to say that, by Christianity. Christianity was certainly the historical solution. And that explains why, for instance, the novel developed no farther than it did; the infant showed vast promise, but was stifled when young by ideology. The open society of post-classical paganism was followed by a closed society in which the great questions were questions to which the answer was known. The mode of virtue, of heroism, was pre-determined. I mentioned the Christian novels. Perhaps "para-Christian" is a better term for the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, for instance, in which there is a love-plot, as there must be in any literary creation which purports to describe fully human experience, but in which the development of that love-plot is singularly hindered by the fact that in the ideology of the writer of the novel, union between man and woman can be only spiritual union; absolute physical continence must be observed, even within marriage, if religious virtue is to be attained. That is a short and sweeping solution to the ills of the world. If the author had had his way, there would not now be any scholars or literary critics to examine his narrative technique; although that in itself might not be such a bad thing. This rather reminds one of novels of the early Soviet Russian régime, in which the hero is by definition he who produces the greatest mileage of drainpipes.
But all of that is another matter. It will suffice that I have tried to describe, and in some degree to analyse, the cultural physiognomy of an earlier Age of Anxiety.15
* * * * *
Notes
1. Delivered to the Ontario Classical Association, May l2th 1973, at Trent University. The title reflects that of E. R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, London, C.U.P., 1965, to which general reference may be made here. The topics here touched on are treated more fully in my Courants littéraires grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.-C., Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1971, IIIe Partie, where fuller bibliographical information will be found to supplement the short list of works given in the following notes. The best history of literature to consult is that of A. Lesky, A History of Greek Literature (English translation of 2nd edition, London, Methuen, 1966).
2. Aelius Aristides 48. 19-23 Keil. Translated by A.-J. Festugière in Personal Religion among the Greeks, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1951, pp . 94-95.
3. But see, notably, E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley, Univ. of California Press, 1951.
4. Philopseudes 1.
5. See Festugiere, op. cit., Ch. 6, Popular Piety: Aelius Aristides and Asclepius, for an account of the Diary (Hieroi Logoi; and C. A. Behr, Aelius Aristides and the Sacred Tales, Amsterdam, Hakkert, 1963 , for a full treatment.
6. A. Boulanger, Aelius Aristide et la so histi ue dans la rovince d Asie au IIe siècle de notre ère, Paris, de Boccard, 1923, p. 131 this is the standard comprehensive work on Aristides).
7. 3.28.
8. On the Characteristics of Animals 6.44 . Translated by F. A. Wright, A History of Later Greek Literature, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1932, pp. 279-280.
9. 8.17. Translated by A. F. Scholfield, Loeb edition, 1959.
10. 7.3. Translated by Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin, 1964.
11. 7.75. Translated by Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin, 1964.
12. Harvey, v.1 p.188.
13. R. M. Grant, La gnose et les origines chrétiennes, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1964, p. 156 (revised edition of Gnosticism and Early Christianity, New York, Columbia U.P., 1959; English version revised 1966).
14. S. Rutin, Les gnostiques, Paris, P.U.F., (“Que sais-je?”) 1963, p. 49.
15. Further bibliography: general, S. Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, London, 1904, reprint New York, Meridian Books, 195 still useful); religion, J. Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire, London, Thames and Hudson, 1970; Christianity, R. M. Grant, Augustus to Constantine, New York, Harper and Row, 1970 (London, Collins, 1971); novel, B. P. Reardon, "The Greek Novel", Phoenix 23.3, 1969,291-309.
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