The Ancient State

Hugh Nibley

© 1991 Hugh Nibley .

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form or by any means without permission in writing
from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P.O. Box 30178,
Salt Lake City Utah 30178. This work is not an official
publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of
the author and do not necessarily represent the position of
the Church or of Deseret Book. Deseret Book is a
registered trademark of Deseret Book Company.
 Key to Abbreviations

HZ Historische Zeitschrift
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental
Society
JEA Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
JQR Jewish Quarterly Review
PG J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae
Cursus Completus . . . Series
Graeca (Paris: Migne, 1857-66),
161 vols.
PL J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae
Cursus Completus . . . Series
Latina/Rom (Paris: Migne, 1844-
64), 221 vols.
PO François Nau and René Graffin,
eds., Patrologia Orientalis (Paris:
Librairie de Paris, Firmin-Di-dot,
 1903- )
PT Pyramid Text
RE Pauly-Wissowa,
Realenzyklopädie der classischen
Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 1894-1972)
RHR Revue de l’histoire des religions
 Table of Contents

Foreword
The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State
Tenting, Toll, and Taxing
The Hierocentric State
Sparsiones
The Unsolved Loyalty Problem: Our Western
Heritage
Victoriosa Loquacitas: The Rise of Rhetoric
and the Decline of Everything Else
How to Have a Quiet Campus, Antique Style
New Light on Scaliger
Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, and
Sophistic
Paths That Stray: Some Notes on Sophic and
Mantic
Part 1: Introduction through Proposition 4
Part 2: Proposition 5 and Proposition 6
Part 3: Proposition 7 and Proposition 8
Part 4: Proposition 9 to Conclusion
Illustration Sources
 Foreword

The essays in this volume represent a

very significant part of Hugh Nibley’s
scholarly corpus. Most of the papers were
previously published in academic journals,
including Classical Journal, Western
Political Quarterly, and Western Speech,
from the early forties until the midsixties.
The only essays in this volume not
previously published are “The Sophic and
Mantic,” originally a series of lectures
delivered in 1963 at Yale University, and
“Paths That Stray,” drafted at about the same
time.
The topics of these essays range widely:
the role of various objects—the arrow and
the tent, for example—in archaic state
formation; the political ideology and
religious and educational values of ancient
states; notes on Joseph Justus Scaliger, one
of the outstanding scholars of the seventeenth
—or any other—century. The theme—at root
deeply religious in nature—that pervades
most of these essays is the power and
pretensions of the ancient state. If the phrase
“The Greatest Show on Earth” had not
already been preempted and registered as a
trademark by Barnum and Bailey, it would
have served as an appropriate subtitle to this
volume, since it focuses on a central insight
of these essays: however compelling and
attractive the educational values, the royal
ideology, and the symbols and artifacts of the
state in antiquity (or in more recent times, for
that matter), they represent, at root, a vast
fraud—an endless and shameless effort at
personal and national self-aggrandizement.
Statecraft, as it has generally been practiced,
is merely priestcraft in another guise.
There is a legitimate “kingdom,”
Professor Nibley would remind us, but it is
not one that seeks power in this world. As he
notes in “The Hierocentric State,” apostolic
Christianity “was keenly conscious of all the
imagery of hierocentric rule and ritual and,
above all, of the contrast of the two
kingdoms. The Apostles . . . tell us, it is true,
that there is a universal throne—but it is not
on this earth. The devil is the ‘Prince of this
World,’ which is no place for the children of
the kingdom—they sojourn here as pilgrims
and as strangers. . . . Our heritage and
kingdom lie beyond: ‘here we have no
abiding kingdom.’ “At the center of this
divinely sanctioned kingdom, reflecting in its
features a heavenly model, is the temple.
Like the hierocentric state, the temple (the
subject of several of Nibley’s essays
elsewhere in the Collected Works) is
“oriented about a point believed to be the
exact center and pivot” of the cosmos.
Further, in many ancient states the tent is
inextricably connected with the temple. In a
dozen other ways, features of the ancient
state are like those of the temple. In one
crucial respect, however, they differ: the
former focuses on the kingdom of this world,
while the latter, though constructed on earth,
demands loyalty to a kingdom “not of this
world.”
Nibley’s breathtaking erudition—
reminiscent of the polymathic tradition of
scholarship represented by “the great Joseph
Justus Scaliger,” as he is fond of calling him
—can be seen throughout this volume. By
turns, he treats the sparsio, a subtle though
important feature of Roman religion
(reminding us that Dr. Nibley’s early
university training was in the Classics and
Ancient History); the arrow, a cultural
artifact found in ancient Egypt and
Mesopotamia, as well as among ancient
Indo-European peoples and the Indians of
North America; and the impact of the rise of
rhetoric in the Greco-Roman world and in
the ancient Near East.
The essays in this volume reflect
Nibley’s deep and abiding interest in—may
we even say passion for?—the origins of
ideas and institutions. In his “Intellectual
Autobiography” in Nibley on the Timely and
the Timeless (1978), Nibley writes that,
finding English to be derivative, he “took to
Old English to find what was behind it; what
was behind it was Latin, and what was
behind that was Greek. In those days we
thought that you had reached the beginning of
everything with the Greeks” (p. xx). Soon,
however, he came to understand that “if you
really want to get back of reality, science is
the thing; and, as Popper assures us, all
science is cosmology: I became a passionate
amateur astronomer.” Then he discovered
that, while “everybody wanted to be a
scientist,” few paid attention to “the records
of the race.” And so he abandoned the
laboratory for the stacks. We can be glad for
that decision, since this book—and the
others in the Collected Works—are its fruit.
Several of these essays reflect Nibley’s
quest for origins: he studies the arrow and
the tent as two primary artifacts in ancient
state formation; he examines the oldest
ideologies of the state (which reflect
conflicts that, as he states, “already exist[ed]
in the premortal sphere”); and he
investigates ancient values in learning and
education and their subsequent corruption by
the Sophists, who emphasized form over
substance and denied the prophetic,
providing a prologue to and explanation for
the educational—and spiritual—crisis of our
own age.
Despite the book’s title, these essays are
in fact often highly pertinent to our own time.
Astute readers will recognize in these essays
many now-familiar themes of Nibley’s
trenchant social commentaries. The foibles
of our age are nothing new, repeating what
has been done in other eras. For example,
“The Unsolved Loyalty Problem,” which
deals with loyalty and loyalty oaths in
antiquity, was originally written at the time
of the McCarthy hearings in the early 1950s
but raises soul-wrenching questions just as
relevant today as they ever were. “How to
Have a Quiet Campus, Antique Style,” was
composed on the occasion of a visit of a
former vice-president to the campus of
Brigham Young University, whom Nibley
calls “an authentic Rhetor—Greek, political,
ostentatious, and not overly scrupulous.”
This essay, as well as “Victoriosa
Loquacitas,” “The Sophic and Mantic,” and
“Paths That Stray,” speak to our own
educational and spiritual malaise as much as
to that in the ancient world. As I read
“Sparsiones,” where Nibley calls the
sparsio “the authentic heritage of the Golden
Age, the sublime economy of which remains
throughout antiquity, and indeed in religious
ideology down to the very present,” I am
reminded of themes developed in some of
his essays on current social and religious
issues in Approaching Zion (volume 9 of the
Collected Works), such as “Work We Must,
But the Lunch Is Free.” The sparsio may be a
manifestation, in a Greco-Roman context, of
the “lunch” offered by God that is out of all
proportion to man’s own effort and
contribution. All of this brings us back to the
profound, implicit message of these essays:
wealth, learning (and its imitations),
technology, and assertions of divinely
bestowed authority give a false sense of
security that are no substitute for the Gospel.
Some scholars write with the grace of
an elephant. It is one of Nibley’s virtues to
have a prose style that is both strong and
vigorous, while at the same time direct and
without affectation—something we would
expect, given his strong antipathy to the many
seductions of rhetoric. Reading him is a
constant pleasure, even where the argument
is subtle or a page studded with details. To
benefit most fully from reading Nibley, one
must be like a cup, ready to be filled to the
brim, and then some. Reading some of these
essays may require some effort, but that
effort is invariably well rewarded.
We wish to express our thanks to those
who have contributed to the production of
this volume. Contributors include Glen
Cooper, James Fleugel, John Gee, Fran
Hafen, Andrew Hedges, Adam Lamoreaux,
Brent McNeely, Tyler Moulton, Phyllis
Nibley, Art Pollard, Shirley Ricks, Mark
Simons, Morgan Tanner, James Tredway,
John Welch, and the staff at Deseret Book,
particularly Suzanne Brady, Shauna Gibby,
and Patricia J. Parkinson. Special thanks are
due to Michael Lyon, who provided the
illustrations for this volume.
Stephen D. Ricks
 The Arrow, the Hunter, and
the State

In the study of ancient statecraft one is

constantly running across references to a
gadget that seems so minor and so
mechanical that its great importance is easily
overlooked as a key to the nature and origin
of empire. It is the contention of this paper
that the marked arrow supplies decisive
evidence for describing the process by
which hunters were able to impose a system
of government on the world. The marked
arrow not only supports the growing
suspicion that the peasant societies of the
great river valleys became conquering
empires by virtue of a discipline forced on
them from without,1 but goes on to show how
such a transformation could take place.
Whereas only farmers possess the industry
and stability necessary to sustain a great
state, the marked arrow indicates that it was
nomad hunters of the steppe, with their
expansive and aggressive ways, who first
brought such a state into existence. Both
elements, expansion and stability, must be
combined if real empire—not a mere adding
of fields to fields on the one hand, or the
quick plunder of a continent on the other, but
a program and technique of permanent,
universal rule—is to be achieved.
The present study undertakes to show
how, by using marked arrows in a peculiar
way, prehistoric hunters solved the problem
of exercising dominion over vast and
scattered areas and then applied the same
solution to the more difficult problem of
welding peasant and nomad cultures into
some sort of union, resulting in the great
centralized state of historic times. Three
basic questions only will be treated: what
the marked arrow was, how it worked in
exercising its control over the closely knit
and widely ranging tribes of the steppes, and
how those tribes used it to coerce the
unwilling tillers of the soil to cooperate in
bringing forth the great state.

I.
Modern observers have described how
the native hunters of the northwestern coasts
of America secure their harpoons and
arrows by putting marks of identification on
them, thus guaranteeing both the return of the
weapon to its owner and the right of the
latter to possess the game it has slain.2 In this
as in other things these people have
preserved the ways of that Magdalenian
hunting culture of which their own has long
been held to be the last direct survival.3
From the same venerable source are
descended the marked arrows formerly
found all along the northern steppe of Asia
and among those Scandinavian bear—and
whale—hunters who in ancient as in modern
times placed their legally registered marks
on hunting arrows and harpoons (which they
also called “arrows”) to insure their return
to their owners and lawful possession of the
kill.4 This practice of marking arrows was
once general among the American Indians5
and still survives among primitive hunters in
various parts of the world.6 Indeed, nothing
could be more natural than to put some mark
of identification on a highly prized object
designed to be risked in the gamble of the
hunt.
But the mark upon the hunter’s arrow is
more than a mere identification tag; it is a
high and holy object, sharing the “immortal
power” of the arrow itself. An arrow in
flight is an awe-inspiring thing: once
released (so many a proverb proclaims) the
arrow is beyond human control and finds its
mark only by the workings of imponderable
fate. Throughout the world the arrow is a
prime instrument of divination and enjoys
first place in primitive games of chance;7 it
is the spirit weapon that alone can prevail
against the demons or pass through the
absolute void between other worlds and our
own.8 The incredible range and accuracy of
the primitive arrow that so astound the
civilized observer are proof to the savage
himself of the operation of a supernatural
power, as is evident in the prayers that the
legendary heroes of the steppe—Finnish,
Norse, Russian, Kazakh, Turkish, and Yakut
—address to their three enchanted arrows
before releasing them,9 and, for instance, in
the arrow-prayers of the Indian and the
Bedouin,10 all eloquently expressing the
humility of men about to entrust their lives
and their fate to a power beyond their
control.
The problem of the hunter is to enlist
this strange power in his own interest. This
requires recourse to the ingenious economy
of the hunting-fetish, that go-between without
whose aid a man can neither prevail against
the game he chases nor enjoy lawful
possession of it once taken.11 Among a
variety of fetishes that achieves these ends,
the mark placed upon a shaft is particularly
useful, for not only does it establish legal
claim to the kill, but it is “the soul of the
arrow,” directing the missile to its prey and
endowing it with superhuman force.12 Both
for identification and as hunting magic the
sign on an arrow is a preeminently practical
thing; it gets and it proves possession—a
point on which hunters are extremely
sensitive. Out of sight and beyond the hills,
the smitten quarry is still the sacred property
of him whose mark adorns the fatal arrow:
why shouldn’t such a useful claim to
ownership apply to other things as well? By
sticking his arrow in the ground beside any
object, the Vedda claims that object as his
own. A natural transition carries the
authority of the marked arrow into a wider
economy of human affairs.

II.
Throughout the ancient world a ruler
was thought to command everything his
arrow could touch. Thus, whenever a ruler
of the North would summon all his subjects
to his presence, he would order an arrow,
usually called a “war-arrow” (herör) to be
“cut up” and sent out among them. Upon
being touched by this arrow, every man had
immediately to “follow the arrow” (fylgja
örum) to the royal presence or suffer
banishment from the kingdom.13 The arrow
itself, in fact, was thought to pursue the
wretch who failed to heed the king’s
behest.14 The “cutting” of the arrow was the
placing of the royal mark upon it, giving it
the force of the king’s seal.15 As often as not
the arrow took the form of a simple rod
(stefni), bearing marks of authorization
while the message was delivered by word of
mouth, a technique recalling that of
Australian and some American primitives in
sending their message-sticks.16
The summons-arrow is common to the
whole northern steppe, where exceedingly
archaic forms of it are to be found and where
it has survived until recent times.17 Both as
war-arrow and invitation stick (depending
on whether it is rejected or accepted) it
appears among the American Indians,
especially of the Northwest.18 But its most
significant occurrence is found in altered but
easily recognizable forms in the classical
civilizations of the Old World.
The herald of Zeus goes forth to
summon his subjects, armed with a golden
wand that subdues all creatures with its
touch. Hermes got this staff originally from
Apollo, who brought it with him as an arrow
from the land of the Hyperboreans,
somewhere in the northern steppe.19 Hermes’
specialty is rushing through the air by means
of his messenger-staff, the caduceus, which
is winged at one end like an arrow and
pointed at the other; holding to this the god is
able to fly through space, to the upper and
lower worlds if need be, exactly as Abaris,
the Hyperborean shaman, flies over all the
earth as Apollo’s emissary when he grasps
the arrow that the god has given him as a
sign of his authority.20 It is not necessary to
multiply parallels to show that in the earliest
stratum of Greek legend we have a typical
summons-arrow, wending its way from the
far north to impose law and civilization on
the world in the name of Zeus.21 The first
message of Rome to Carthage was a
symbolic caduceus and javelin (hastae
simulacrum) inviting the Carthaginians to
submit or be subdued by force.22
In Israel the Lord, calling upon a city to
declare its allegiance to him, sends his rod
to it, and a herald (a man of tūshiāh), seeing
the name on the rod, calls out to the people:
“Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it”
(Micah 6:9). That this rod was an arrow will
presently become apparent.23
Figure 1. The marked arrows of the
four quarters, Zuñi Indians of New
Mexico, c. 1900. Usually the only
color used was a somber black
painted on the wooden shaft, but
sometimes the color of the
respective direction was used as
 well. In more finished arrows, the
tail feathers were notched and
tufted to correspond with the bands,
serving as mnemonic reminders of
the creation myths.

An impressive demonstration of the

authority of the summons-arrow is the early
and widespread rite of the four world-
arrows. The Olaf-Tryggvason Saga states a
number of times24 that summons-arrows
were sent “in the four directions.” For the
oldest and greatest festival of India, the
Aśvamedha, the king must send messengers
in the four directions to order “all who have
been conquered by his arrows” to appear
before him. The common use of the
summons-arrow in Aryan India makes the
meaning of the rite clear.25 At the creation of
the world, according to Zuñi doctrine, four
marked arrows, “the word-painted arrows of
destiny,” were carried “to the regions of
men, four in number” (cf. fig. 1), an event
resembling a yearly ritual of the Kwakiutls
of the Northwest.26 A variant of this is the
shooting of arrows in the four directions, as
in the Ghost-dance of the Sioux, where four
sacred arrows were shot into the air towards
the cardinal points to symbolize the conquest
of the earth by the tribe.27 A like practice is
attributed in Jewish legend to the Emperor
Titus and to Nimrod who, from Jerusalem
and Babel respectively, shot arrows in the
four directions and claimed dominion over
all that lay within their range.28 The rite
appears also in Indo-Iranian creation myths
and in the Sumerian story of Adad and the
Zu-bird.29 In the Old World and the New it is
also common to depict the swastika with its
four arms formed of marked arrows—plainly
the four world-arrows.
Related to the world-arrows is the
worldwide practice of making a sanctuary by
marking off an area on the ground with the
point of an arrow, dividing it into four
sections by a cross with its arms to the
cardinal points.30 The Germanic custom of
claiming land by shooting a fiery arrow over
it31 may be related to the oldest measurement
in India, which was the range of a throwing-
stick, or “measurement by arrow-casts,”
later supplanted by measurement in
bowlengths.32 The apportionment of land by
the drawing of arrow-lots was common to
the Assyrians and the ancient Norse (whence
the expression “lot and scot”)33 and recalls
the common medieval custom of transferring
the ownership of land baculi more, by the
conveyance of a staff or arrow.34 A marked
arrow passed among the guests at a royal
banquet in the North announced the
transmission of a man’s estate to his heir.35
 The ancient and universal concept that
God governs the universe and keeps order in
it by an arrow, the swift messenger of his
wrath that searches out and blasts any who
would challenge his authority,36 can only
have had its rise in a real summons-arrow,
for everywhere this heavenly arrow—the
thunderbolt—is held to take the tangible
actual form of a prehistoric stone-headed
arrow.37 It is the arrow of the summus deus,
held on loan by an earthly king as a gauge of
divine support, that everywhere gives the
latter his earthly power and authority,38 just
as the marked arrow of the individual hunter,
as a fetish or grant of supernatural power,
gives him might and dominion far beyond his
own puny capacity. The dread offices of the
marked arrow were not reserved to kings
alone. Throughout the northern steppe it was
the custom to require all who came to the
king’s assembly to bring arrows with them
and to present them personally to the king.
From these arrows a census was taken, each
man submitting but a single shaft, which
represented him and bore his mark, for “both
in the Old World and the New, the arrow
came to stand as the token and symbol of a
man.”39 To arrows thus used may be applied,
for want of a better term, the name “census-
arrow.”
The census-arrow is found among the
Scythians,40 Tartars, Persians, Georgians,
Norsemen, and American Indians,41 and it
survived in recognizable form in India,
Egypt, and the Far East.42 But like the
summons-arrow, it is most frequently met in
altered but unmistakable form among nations
that had long given up the hunter’s way of
life.
One of the oldest Jewish-Christian
legends tells how all the men of Israel were
required to attend a great assembly, each
bringing his staff, to be handed over to the
high priest and used in a lottery for the
distribution of brides.43 In the Qur’anic
version of the same story,44 it is not simply a
staff, however, but an arrow that every man
must present, and this conforms not only with
the primitive Bedouin usage, but also with
the original Jewish custom. For in Israel it
was necessary for every man at a national
assembly to be represented by a “rod” with
his name on it (Numbers 17:2); every tribe
was a rod as well (Numbers 34:13-29), the
tribal rods being “each one inscribed with
the name of the tribe.”45 Now the purpose of
these rods, Gaster has pointed out, was to
determine allotments of brides, and the
allotment was performed by throwing rods
into the air and reading their message by the
manner of their fall; this, Gaster observes,46
is “tantamount” to the shooting of arrows. It
is in fact the commonest form of arrow
divination, and seems to hark back to an
older dart, or throwing-stick, which is
commonly identified and interchangeable
with the arrow in archaic divination
practices.47 Gaster’s interpretation is
substantiated when one turns to the northern
steppe to find ancient Scythian, Turkish,
Finnish, Mongol, and Ossete tribes
regulating their land-and bride-lotteries by
the actual shooting of arrows that were
marked, like the rods of Israel, with the
contestants’ names.48 Related practices are
found throughout the North. Thus the winning
of Penelope has supplied Homer with a prize
nugget, which Finsler has traced back to the
northern steppe.49
The use of all these marked arrows in
the making of legal decisions takes us right
into the heliastic courts of the Greeks, where
every juror had to present a specially
colored wand (baktēria) for admission,
exchanging it for a symbolon, which he
would exchange in turn for his day’s
subsistence.50 Both the name and the use of
the token identify it (as any lexicon will)
with the classical tesserae, or feasting
tickets, and the first symbolon, or tessera
hospitalis, on record was the arrow that
Apollo gave to Abaris: the scholiast calls
this arrow a symbolon and says that it
supplied Abaris with all the food and drink
he needed.51 Another link between the
original arrow-token and the classical
tesserae is furnished by that common but
enigmatic form of tessera described as a
“section of reed.”52 For from time
immemorial the Arabs had employed reed
arrow-shafts, devoid alike of feathers and
heads, but bearing some marks of individual
ownership, “to make division” at their tribal
feasts.53 In the Pastor of Hermas,54 all who
come to the assembly of the Lord present
sections of willow-reed for admission, each
receiving his proper place as designated by
certain cuts (schismata) on his rod. Slips of
wood were used also in the North to assign
places at banquets, but these first appear as
arrows, with the specification that “every
man’s arrows were marked.”55 The red
Indian who received an invitation-stick
(usually arrow-formed) was required to
keep it and bring it with him as a ticket to the
feast.56
Why and how arrows, of all things,
came to be used as feasting tickets may be
best explained by an episode from the
Orvar-Odds Saga.57 The text gives an
authentic picture58 of a time when a great
hunting culture flourished on the plains to the
east of the Baltic. There is a tremendous
hunt, after which everyone returns to the
royal hirthstofa where each guest is
assigned his proper seat. All the game is then
brought in and thrown in a heap before the
king (as in the Greek katabolia), who
personally examines all the arrows and, as
the marking of each is noted, has his herald
give public recognition to its owner for his
contribution to the banquet. The same
pleasant rite enlivened the feasts of the
heathen Bedouin: Jacob has pointed out the
survival of the arrow-lottery from those
tribal meals of the Arabs at which all the
meat was first thrown in a heap and then
distributed by portions to each man as his
arrow was drawn and his name called out.59
Various hunting tribes of the Eastern and
Western hemispheres have the same
custom,60 whereas the Greek and Roman
tesserae follow the pattern: the tesserae
were regarded as lots and distributed by lot,
each holder receiving the right to share in a
feast to which he was supposed to have
contributed some prize of the hunt.61
Marked arrows could, like the Hebrew
rods, represent tribes as well as individuals
at the feasts. Each of the fifty-two Tartar
tribes in the time of Genghis Khan would
bring an arrow marked with its name to the
great assembly, where one man would be
chosen king of the whole nation by a double
lottery, first of tribal arrows and then of
shafts bearing the names of individuals
belonging to whichever tribe won the first
drawing.62 Bundles of fifty-two rods,
bearing individual and tribal markings, also
represented the full membership of Indian
tribes in assembly: Culin says these rods
were once arrows.63 Bundles of seven
divination arrows standing for the combined
gentes of the Osage64 recall similar tribal
bundles of the Scythians, Alans, Slavs, and
ancient Germans65 (who also chose their
leaders by drawing willow lots), and these
have been compared in turn with the Persian
baresma66 and the Roman fasces (cf. fig. 2),
a bundle of twelve rods (the rods of Israel
were likewise tied in a symbolic bundle of
twelve),67 standing originally for twelve
Etruscan tribes.68 The cosmic numbers
seven, twelve, and fifty-two have astral and
divinatory significance and suggest the
modern card deck, which Culin holds is
derived from “a quiver made up of the
different arrows of the individuals of a
tribe.”69 This communal aspect of the
marked arrow was always fundamental to its
nature, since arrow-marking was ever as
much a bid for public recognition as for
divine support.
 Figure 2. The earliest surviving
fasces, c. 600 B.C., is this Etruscan
votive model of iron (A) showing
Eastern influence in its use of the
labrys, the double-axe of Crete.
This venerable symbol was later
adopted by the Romans, who
modified it by using their own
securis axe first as a sign of
sacrifice and then later of war and
capital punishment. On a coin of C.
Norbanus (B) 83 B.C., the consular
fasces is flanked by a wheat kernel
and the snaked-headed caduceus.
 Our own dime of 1916 (C) was
popular until the symbol was
tarnished by the Fascist movement.
Here the arrow shaft comes full
circuit, fulfilling its destiny as the
ultimate embodiment of power.

III.
The rise of the great state depended, as
Moret has recently pointed out, among other
things on the development of writing, by
which art alone a ruler can extend his word
of command indefinitely in time and space.70
Such control at a distance was the very
function of the marked arrow, and Hilprecht
has given strong arguments for deriving the
earliest written documents, archaic cylinder
seals, from “the hollow shaft of an arrow,
marked with symbols and figures.”71 If
Hilprecht’s theory failed of general
acceptance, it was because no one could see
how the arrow fitted into the picture. In view
of the uses of the marked arrow by hunters,
however, that should be fairly clear,
especially if one considers a few related
facts that may be briefly listed.
1. The earliest gods of writing, Nebo,
Cadmus, Hermes, etc., were arrow gods.72
2. Some systems of writing of
mysterious origin, such as Ogam,73 Runic,74
and Himyaritic, first appear as arrow-
marking.
3. In the Far East, according to Culin,75
“the ancestry of the book may be traced to
the bundle of engraved or painted arrow-
derived slips used in divination” (cf. fig. 3).
4. The cylinder-seal and the arrow are
interchangeable not only as tokens but
actually as weapons (an utterly incongruous
equation in itself), the seal serving as an
arrow-missile, and the marked arrow
serving as a seal.76
5. The first writing, the first seals, and
the marked arrow all spring from the same
basic need: if, as Herzfeld maintains, the
idea of property that produced the seals and
writing is as old as humanity itself,77 may we
not look for a still older form of property-
marking than the cylinder seal? And is not
such a form the marked arrow, which
everywhere precedes it and so strikingly
resembles it? That the cylinder seal
originated very probably somewhere in the
north of Asia supports the suspicion.78
Whatever its origin, the writing of
documents was conceived for the same end
as the marking of arrows, and the two meet
on common ground in the archaic cylinder
seal; seal and arrow grew up together,
having performed identical functions from
the first as instruments of identification and
authority.
Equipped with such an effective tool,
the men of the steppes enjoyed a powerful
advantage over the settled agrarians who did
not have, because they did not need, anything
like it. Against them it was devastating and
achieved a permanent conquest; it was an
utterly cynical form of persuasion to which
they had no answer.
 Figure 3. From the famous Han
dynasty tombs at Ma Wang Tui,
174-145 B.C., come these examples
of a bamboo “book” (B) listing a
tomb inventory as well as a bundle
of notched peach wood sticks (A).
An archaic custom even then, each
stick represented the individual
servant who accompanied his
mistress into the next life. Today,
patients wishing to divine the god
of medicine’s prescription consult
the tsien tung (C) by shaking the
quiver-shaped bamboo container
until one of the inscribed sticks
“jumps” out.

The peasants of the Old World tell a

remarkably uniform tale of a mad hunter
from the North and East who claimed to rule
the world in the insane conviction that he had
conquered God with his arrow. Such a one
was the archaic and mysterious Nimrod, the
mighty hunter of the steppes, who shot an
arrow into the sky (standard shaman
practice)79 and when a shower of blood
ensued believed that he had conquered God
and won for himself the universal kingship.80
The story is based on a genuine hunting ritual
of great antiquity,81 but the literary records
all chill with horror at the thought of the man
who first turned his arrows from the hunting
of beasts to become “a hunter of men,” who
founded the first great state, invented
organized warfare, and “made all people
rebellious against God.”82 He it was who
challenged God to a shooting-match with the
blasphemous boast, “It is I who kill, and I
who let live!”83 In reply to which his
followers were turned to stone by God’s
arrows, while their leader was driven mad
in the same peculiar manner (by a fly in the
brain) as that Roman Emperor who would
destroy God’s temple and who shot his
arrow in the four directions from Jerusalem,
claiming dominion over the whole world.84
A hundred names might be substituted
for that of Nimrod. Japheth, the common
ancestor of the people of the northern steppe
(Genesis 10:2-5), as Japetus, challenged the
rule of Zeus and was smitten by the
thunderbolt, even as was his son Prometheus,
and for that matter all the other giants. It
needs only little research to learn that the
crime and the punishment of Nimrod was
repeated in the case of Aesculapius, his
father Apollo (the Admetus story), the
Hyperborean Orion, Sisyphus, Salmoneus,
the Emperor Julian (who was smitten by St.
Mercurius, the arrow of God), Romulus
Silvius, Otos and Ephialtes, Nebuchadnezzar
(as legendary son of Nimrod), Lepreus,
Bootes, the Cyclopes, Gog and Magog, Esau,
Goliath and his brother, who had an archery
contest with David,85 Eurotos, Philoctetes,
Herakles, and even Odysseus.86 The
Cannibal Hymn from pre-Dynastic Egypt
describes the deceased Pharaoh as a Mad
Hunter who seizes the government of the
universe and throws all things into disorder,
just as the equally ancient Vulture Stele
describes the great god Ningirsu as “a beast
of prey from the steppe,” even while
praising him as the author and ruler of all.87
Folklorists have long identified these
terrible hunters of the East with the
ubiquitous wild huntsman, a great lord or
lady who will do nothing but hunt, who holds
his agrarian hinds in utter contempt, and
publicly announces that he prefers hunting to
heaven. Invariably this monster is in the eyes
of the peasantry under a terrible curse, and
he usually ends up by being turned to stone
when God’s bolt overtakes him.88 Yet his is
the rightful rule: “In the rural life of Europe,”
write Peake and Fleure, “the waste and
hunting rights down to our time have
typically belonged to the ‘lords’ in a very
special and intimate way,” and they argue
that this equation of hunting and ruling is the
result of prehistoric invasions of Europe by
hunting nomads from the Russo-Turkestan
steppe.89 Such a conquest is not a unique
event in history, however, but a
characteristic one, as when in the eleventh
century Saxon farmers found themselves
saddled with the outrageous hunting laws of
an invading Norse aristocracy.90 It is the
monotonous theme of Asiatic history right
into the nineteenth century, when Khazakh,
Kalmuk, and Jungar nomads moved in from
the east to subject and “govern” the peasants
exactly as they were oppressed and
controlled by the Scythians in the days of
Strabo.91
 The tradition of the Mad Hunter
presents the uniform picture of peasant
societies enduring the overlordship of nomad
intruders from the perennial reservoirs of
central Asia, whose way of life was utterly
abhorrent to them, and to whom their own
was quite incomprehensible.92

IV.
But may the human race be so neatly
divided into men of the steppe and men
tilling the soil? It may indeed, and it is the
arrow that does the dividing. Since the bow
can be used effectively only by experts, its
general employment ceases whenever
hunting is given up as a way of life, only to
be resumed in periods of migration.93
Archery is thus either all-important or
negligible in a culture, and the ancient world
is divided sharply into two camps, those
who use the bow and those who do not.94
The division is of course geographical:
when encroaching forests drove the big game
out of Europe at the end of the Paleolithic,
the hunters followed their quarry, to preserve
on the steppes of Asia a way of life largely
förgötten in their former homelands.95 The
resulting cultural dichotomy is a basic fact of
history, since civilization as history knows it
is the rather calamitous result of bringing
these two forms together. Here the marked
arrow seems to have played a major role.
The civilized people of antiquity had a
common tradition that the summus deus at
the beginning of everything won dominion of
the universe by smiting a dark adversary
with an arrow.96 As has been seen, God
rules the universe by an arrow, and the
classic emblems of authority—scepter,
wand, spear, trident, double axe, crozier,
lotus-staff, fleur-de-lis, and so forth—may
be traced back rather easily to a common
identity with the prehistoric thunderbolt,
taking the tangible form of a stone-headed
arrow.97 Throughout the vast reaches of
Asia, men were, to use Pliny’s expression,
“under subjection to the reed.” From the
Chinese war-lord in the East to Saladin in
the West, the arrow—a real arrow and a
marked one—is the ultimate symbol of
authority, the banner itself being originally
but a message-strip tied to an arrow.98
With that arrow go those techniques of
empire which no farmers could have
invented: even Rome borrowed her theory
and practice of empire whole-cloth from the
East, where, so far as we know, the first man
to achieve actual rule of the civilized world
was no Egyptian or Babylonian (though they
all dreamed of being Cosmocrator) but
Khian, a nomad Hyksos from the steppes.99
 Symbols of rule and ownership at a
lower level were those armorial bearings of
the Middle Ages which, whether copied
from the tribal insignia of the East100 or
adapted from the earlier house-marks and
landmarks of the West,101 were originally the
arrow-marks of hunters.102 The aristocracy
were hunters, whose arrogant and
blasphemous mottoes (usually proclaiming
the bearer’s power to maim if offended) and
whose weird and unearthly disguises were
designed to inspire paralyzing dread in the
simple rustics who by the mere suspicion of
presuming to hunt on their own would incur
penalties worse than death. Whenever the
noble strain was threatened with extinction,
it could always count on eager volunteers
from the ranks of the bourgeoisie to
replenish the blood and maintain the hunting
tradition: add to Froissart’s testimony the
English glue-manufacturer in his vast, dark
“lodge,” or the Russian baron, or the German
industrialist of the nineteenth century
diligently cultivating the hunter’s way of life
in the midst of purely agrarian societies of
great antiquity.
The ways of the hunting nobility with all
their social and political implications have
been traced back to the great hunting parks of
Asiatic monarchs.103 These “paradises”
prove beyond any doubt that kings must be
hunters. The ancients, East and West,
visualized power, glory, and dominion as
embodied in the person of the Cosmocrator,
earthly counterpart of the creator, enthroned
in the midst of a vast assembly of birds and
animals as well as of men and jinns. The
picture of the great king being acclaimed in a
single mighty chorus by all living things
assembled before his throne meets us full-
blown in Sumerian creation hymns; it is
reflected in accounts of Adam, Yima,
Orpheus, Ninurta, and others as Lord of the
Animals and King of the Golden Age; it is a
favorite device of the Hellenistic orator and
the darling theme of Jewish and Arabic
commentators, whose Solomon sits in the
midst of the demons and animals as ruler of
the world; it produced the Physiologus and
the Bestiaries and provides the setting of
Reynard the Fox and many a scene in Kalila
and Dimna, Babrius, and Aesop, and it
begot the Medieval Parliament of Birds,
which is not so far from Aristophanes. And
wherever we are treated to this wonderful
spectacle of the world-king and the assembly
of the animals, whether in song, drama,
fable, or sermon, it is made to serve as a
commentary on government.104
But the grandiose concept of the
universal ruler gathering all the birds and
animals in his presence (the theme of the
Reynard and hoopoe stories is that one
creature alone fails to answer the summons)
is no mere flight of fancy nor invention of
allegory. Eyewitness accounts of the vast
ordered animal parks of the Great Khan, the
Mongol emperors at Peking, and the kings of
Persia, Assyria, and Babylonia leave no
doubt that the staggering project was actually
carried out as an adjunct of universal rule.105
The thing was adopted by the Hellenistic
rulers along with their claims to divine
authority and copied from them (or taken
over directly from Baghdad) by the
Byzantine emperors, who transmitted it in
turn to the kings of Europe—throne and court
everywhere follow the same pattern, which
is that of Solomon enthroned in the midst of
men and animals.106
The royal parks of central Asia (the
Chinese call the park the Paradise of the
West, and the Babylonians placed it in the
North, cf. Isaiah 14:13-14) were no
invention of royal vanity, for the system of
reserving certain areas in which animals are
sacrosanct (called by the Arabs jiwār) is a
perfectly practical one. The actual assembly
of the animals recalls the great tribal hunts or
animal-drives of the past: al-Bīrūnī has
described such a drive taking place in the
immense royal park at Baghdad in the tenth
century: it was ritual, of course, but when
was the hunt not a ritual?107 It should be
remembered that ritual animal-drives, like
the great dances of the Indians of the
Southwest, are aimed at increasing and
protecting the game as well as exploiting it.
But when game is thus protected, and
when it is herds of ungulates that one is
driving in the hunt, how close is hunting to
herding! Jacob speaks of the tame gazelles
that regularly turn up in the jiwār whenever
animals and men meet on a peace footing.
Nevertheless, hunting and not herding is the
original motif, though the distinction between
them is sometimes very fine.

V.
Though the arrow rules the world, its
victory is not final. For over against its
claims must be set the equally valid and
venerable claims of the Black-Earth, the
Mother of Gods and Men, inculcating the
deep conviction that a man can possess only
the earth he “quickens,” all other ownership
coming under the head of fraud. To those
who work the soil, the holding of more land
than one can exploit is wasteful and
meaningless, an offense to God and an
affront to Justice herself.108 The hunter’s
arrow, on the other hand, marked with his
noble “crest,” gives him, within the limits of
a preserve necessarily much vaster than that
of any farmer, the divine right to possess and
dominate whatever it can reach. And so the
issue is drawn: to those who held broad
lands, baculi more, the arrow was the high
and holy symbol of possession; to those who
cultivated those lands it was “looked upon . .
. as the appropriate missile of the robber, or
of one who lurked in ambush.”109 The
antithesis is complete: there is no
understanding between Abraham and Nimrod
because each is sure the other is mad.
At present a man’s signature performs
the offices formerly consigned to his seal
and for which but a few generations back the
actual possession of a staff or tally-stick was
indispensable.110 Thus man has taken another
step away from the arrow, but that is only
incidental: even the most primitive
alteration, the removal of head and
feathering, changed the form of the thing
almost beyond recognition. It is the function
that remains intact. A mere mark or symbol
still bestows proprietary right, operating
through unlimited time and space, over
anything on earth. This is no mere refinement
of lawyer’s wit, nor is it a universal human
concept: it is rather, as its lineage shows, the
hunter’s peculiar idea of property and right.
Since the marked arrow has long since
become an antiquarian oddity, it would be
wrong to claim that it still divides the world
into two camps as of old. Nevertheless there
is no other teacher that can show so well
how our world came to be a perennially
divided one. The marked arrow
demonstrates what without it would be a
mere surmise: that civilization is the issue of
a forced union between two fundamentally
hostile ways of life, a union which however
productive of history has never been a happy
one.

Notes
 This article was originally published
in Western Political Quarterly 2/3 (1949):
328-44.

Footnotes
^1. Moritz Hoernes, Natur-und Urgeschichte des
Menschen, 2 vols. (Vienna: Hastlben, 1909),
2:392-96; Thorkild Jacobsen, “Primitive
Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia,”
Journal of Near Eastern Studies 2 (1943):
159-72; Carl H. Bishop, “The Beginnings of
Civilization in Eastern Asia,” Annual Report
of the Smithsonian Institution (1940): 431,
433-45.
^2. Robert F. Heizer, “Aconite Poison Whaling in
Asia and America: An Aleutian Transfer to
the New World,” Bureau of American
Ethnology Bulletin 24 (1943): 421, 429-36,
440, 446; Aleš Hrdlička, The Aleutian and
Commander Islands (Philadelphia: Wistar
Institute of Anatomy and Biology, 1945),
130, 132; Theodor W. Danzel, Die Anfänge
 der Schrift (Leipzig: Vorgtländer, 1912), 38.
^3. The history of the problem is given by Walter
J. Hoffman, “The Graphic Art of the
Eskimos,” Annual Report of the U.S.
National Museum (1895): 763-65, 934-38;
see F. M. Bergounioux and André Glory, Les
premiers hommes (Paris: Didier, 1945), 232-
39.
^4. Hjalmar S. Falk, Altnordische Waffenkunde
(Kristiania: Dybwad, 1914), 101.
^5. Walter J. Hoffman, “The Menomini Indians,”
Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology 14 (1892-1893): 278; J. Owen
Dorsey, “Omaha Dwellings, Furniture, and
Implements,” Annual Report of the Bureau
of American Ethnology 13 (1891-1892):
287; William Bray, “Observations on the
Indian Method of Picture-Writing,”
Archaeologia 6 (1782): 160; Hermann
Meyer, “Bows and Arrows in Central
Brazil,” Annual Report of the Smithsonian
Institution (1896): 553, 561, 568, 571, 576-
82; Fritz Krause, In den Wildnissen
Brasiliens (Leipzig: Doigländer, 1911), 264,
 268-70, 360, 392-94.
^6. Danzel, Anfänge der Schrift, 34-38; Stewart
Culin, “Chess and Playing Cards,” Report of
the U.S. National Museum under the
Direction of the Smithsonian Institution
(1896): 881.
^7. Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, Handwörterbuch des
deutschen Aberglaubens, 10 vols. (Leipzig:
de Gruyter, 1927-42), 6:1597-98; Stith
Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1955), D1314.1.1-5; Stewart Culin, “Games
of the North American Indians,” Annual
Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology 24 (1902-1903): 36-43.
^8. On demon-arrows, see Ignaz Goldziher,
Abhandlungen zur arabischen Philologie, 2
vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1896), 1:29-33, 87-89,
116-17; Bächtold-Stäubli, Handwörterbuch
des deutschen Aberglaubens, 6:1597; Jacob
Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, ed. James E.
Stallybrass, 3 vols. (London: Sonnenschein
& Allen, 1880), 2:846. On the space-
traveling arrow of the wizards, Herodotus,
 History IV, 36, cf. Erich Bethe, “Abaris,” in
RE 1:16-17; James Darmesteter, The Zend-
Avesta, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1883),
2:153; Völuspá, 36-37.
^9. John M. Crawford, tr., Kalevala, 2 vols.
(New York: Columbian, 1891), 1:80-81;
Paul B. Du Chaillu, The Viking Age, 2 vols.
(New York: Scribner, 1890), 2:93-94; A. S.
Orlov, Kazakhskii Geroicheskii Epos
(Moscow: Academy of Sciences, 1945), 41,
n. 2; 83; N. K. Dmitriev, Turyetskie
Narodnye Skaski (Leningrad: Government
Press, 1939), 98-102; Friedrich Giese,
Türkische Märchen (Jena: Diederich, 1925),
75-89.
^10. Jeremiah Curtin and J. N. B. Hewitt,
“Seneca Fiction, Legends, and Myths,”
Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology 32 (1910-1911): 317-18; Frank
H. Cushing, “Zuñi Fetiches,” Annual Report
of the Bureau of American Ethnology 2
(1880-1881): 41-43; cf. Culin, “Chess and
Playing Cards,” 881, n. 1; Matilda C.
Stevenson, “The Zuñi Indians: Their
 Mythology, Esoteric Societies, and
Ceremonies,” Annual Report of the Bureau
of American Ethnology 23 (1901-1902):
317-49. The Arab hunter must call on Allah
with each bow-shot; Al-Bukhārī, Kitāb al-
Jāmi c as-Sahīh, ed. M. Krehl and T. W.
Juynboll (Leiden: Brill, 1908), 4:7, and
breathe on his arrows, exactly like the Zuñi;
Georg Jacob, Altarabisches Beduinenleben
(Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1897), 125. For
arrow-prayers in India, see Victor Henry, La
magie dans l’Inde antique (Paris: Leroux,
1904), 151-52.
^11. Cushing, “Zuñi Fetiches,” 39; John P. Gillin,
The Barama River Caribs of British
Guiana (Cambridge: Peabody Museum,
1936), 180, 183-84; Hoernes, Natur- und
Urgeschichte, 1:512.
^12. Eduard Seler, Gesammelte Abhandlungen
zur amerikanischen Sprach- und
Altertumskunde, 5 vols. (Berlin: Asher,
1902), 3:378; Culin, “Chess and Playing
Cards,” 881; Edward W. Nelson, “The
Eskimo about Bering Strait,” Annual Report
 of the Bureau of American Ethnology 18
(1896-1897): 157-61, cf. 154; Danzel,
Anfänge der Schrift, 34; Du Chaillu, Viking
Age, 2:92-94. To give his arrows greater
power and accuracy, Ishi changed the
markings on them; Saxton Pope, Hunting
with the Bow and Arrow (New York:
Putnam, 1947), 26-27.
^13. Saxo, Historia Danorum, ed. Hermann
Jantzen (Berlin: Felber, 1900), 244; for the
Norse expressions, see Richard Cleasby,
Gudbrand Vigfusson, and William A.
Craigie, An Icelandic-English Dictionary,
2d ed. (Oxford: University Press, 1957), s.v.
“herör.”
^14. Karl Weinhold, “Beiträge zu den deutschen
Kriegsaltertümern,” Sitzungsberichte der
Akademie der Wissenschaft zu Berlin.
Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 29
(1891): 548; the king’s arrow pursues
breakers of the King’s Peace; Bächtold-
Stäubli, Handwörterbuch des deutschen
Aberglaubens, 6:1598.
^15. Weinhold, “Beiträge zu den deutschen
 Kriegsaltertümern,” 548; Finnur Jónsson,
ed., Egils Saga Skalgrímssonar (Halle:
Niemeyer, 1924), 9, n. 10.
^16. Cleasby and Vigfusson, Icelandic-English
Dictionary, 42. The message-staff
(bothkefli) was readily “in einen Pfeil
umgeschnitzt,” Weinhold, “Beiträge zu den
deutschen Kriegsaltertümern,” 548.
^17. Weinhold, “Beiträge zu den deutschen
Kriegsaltertümern,” 548-49. German
Botenhölzer survived into the late Middle
Ages; Saxo, Historia Danorum, ed. Jantzen,
244, n. 1. Summons-arrows were used by
the Seljuk Turks in the thirteenth century;
these still survive in North India, Hoernes,
Natur- und Urgeschichte, 1:521; cf. the
“alarm-staff” of the Lama gods; Charles A.
S. Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbolism
and Art Motives (Shanghai: Kelly and
Walsh, 1941), 213.
^18. Walter E. Roth, “An Introductory Study of
the Arts, Crafts, and Customs of the Guiana
Indians,” Annual Report of the Bureau of
American Ethnology 38 (1916-1917): 582;
 Walter E. Roth, “An Inquiry into the
Animism and Folk-lore of the Guiana
Indians,” Annual Report of the Bureau of
American Ethnology 30 (1908-1909): 362;
Garrick Mallery, “Pictographs of the North
American Indians,” Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology 4 (1882-
1883): 87-88; Walter J. Hoffman, “The
Midē’wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of
the Ojíbwa,” Annual Report of the Bureau
of American Ethnology 7 (1885-1886): pl.
xii facing p. 226.
^19. Apollo gave the staff to Hermes as a
symbolon (Homer, Hymn to Hermes, 527-
30) exactly as he gave an arrow-symbolon to
his friend Abaris, the Hyperborean, who
used it as Hermes did his staff, to carry him
through the air as a messenger of the god;
O. Crusius, “Hyperboreer,” in Wilhelm H.
Roscher, ed., Ausführliches Lexikon der
griechischen und römischen Mythologie, 7
vols. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), 1:2819. On
the Hyperborean origin of Apollo’s arrow
and Hermes’ caduceus, see ibid., 1:2807-9.
^20. Crusius, “Hyperboreer,” in Roscher,
Ausführliches Lexikon, 1:2815. Origen,
Contra Celsum (Against Celsus) III, 31, in
PG 11:959-60, reports the belief that Abaris
shot himself through the air like an arrow, a
favorite trick of the Asiatic shaman.
^21. Robert Eitrem, “Hermes,” in RE 8:781-84,
and Ernst Samter, “Caduceus,” in RE
3:1170-71. It is the arrow which gives the
title of Pantokrator, ibid., 8:791; Otto
Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie und
Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck,
1906), 2:1072.
^22. Gellius, Attic Nights X, 27.
^23. Cf. Jeremiah 48:17; Ezekiel 19:10-
14;Abraham S. Yahuda, The Accuracy of
the Bible (London: Heinemann, 1934), 106-
13.
^24. Olaf-Tryggvason Saga, c. 102, 104, 222.
^25. Paul É. Dumont, L’Aśvamedha (Paris:
Geuthner, 1927), 38, 356, 384, 386. See n.
17 above.
^26. Culin, “Games of the North American
 Indians,” 33, 46; cf. Seler, Gesammelte
Abhandlungen, 3:378-80, fig. 6, for recent
Mexican Indian examples; Franz Boas, “The
Social Organization and the Secret Societies
of the Kwakiutl Indians,” Annual Report of
the U.S. National Museum (1895): 508-9,
517, 521.
^27. James Mooney, “The Ghost Dance Religion
and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890,” Annual
Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology 14 (1892-1893): 832, 915-17; the
conquest motif, 788-89.
^28. M. Gaster, “Divination (Jewish),” in James
Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and
Ethics, 13 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1928),
4:810, cf. Leonard W. King, “Divination
(Assyro-Babylonian),” in Hastings,
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,
4:785; the Nimrod version is in the Book of
Jasher 9:35.
^29. Albert J. Carnoy, Iranian Mythology, vol. 6
in Louis H. Gray, ed., Mythology of All
Races, 13 vols. (Boston: Jones, 1917), 302-
3, 308; Darmesteter, Zend-Avesta, 2:94-96,
 103; 1:18-21. The Zu-bird, contending for
the government of the world, was smitten by
the arrow of the god, who thereupon
“founds his cities in the four regions,” Peter
Jensen, Assyrisch-babylonische Mythen und
Epen (Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1900),
49-53.
^30. Carnoy, Iranian Mythology, 302-3, 308;
Bächtold-Stäubli, Handwörterbuch des
deutschen Aberglaubens, 6:1598; Francis La
Flesche, “The Osage Tribe: Rite of Vigil,”
Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology 39 (1917-1918): 234; Cushing,
“Zuñi Fetiches,” 42; Hoffman, “Menomini
Indians,” 196-99; Cicero, De Divinatione I,
17; Ludwig Weniger, “Feralis Exercitus,”
Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 9 (1906):
246-48.
^31. J. A. MacCulloch, Eddic Mythology, vol. 2
in Gray, Mythology of All Races, 201.
^32. E. Washburn Hopkins, “Remarks on the
Form of Numbers, the Method of Using
Them, and Numerical Categories of the
Mahabharata,” JAOS 23 (1902): 144-47; the
 arrow cast “is confined to estimating time.”
The Osage arrows that measure the earth “in
flight denote time” as well; La Flesche,
“Osage Tribe,” 207, 265-67, 369.
^33. Bruno Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien,
2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925), 2:275;
Benjamin Williams, “On the Land of
Ditmarsh and the Mark Confederation,”
Archaeologia 37 (1856): 381-83.
^34. Robert Riddell, “Some Accounts of a
Symbol of Ancient Investitures in Scotland,”
Archaeologia 11 (1794): 47; Octavius
Morgan, “On Episcopal and Other Rings of
Investiture,” Archaeologia 36 (1855): 393-
97; Williams, “On the Land of Ditmarsh,”
389.
^35. Flateyjarbók I, 164.
^36. See Aeschylus, Eumenides 727-30;
Prometheus Bound 358-63, 374, 917; Vergil,
Aeneid VI, 587; Hugo Winckler,
Keilinschriftliches Textbuch zum Alten
Testament (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903), 117,
123; Williams, Chinese Symbolism, 396-97;
2 Kings 13:17-19; Psalms 7:13; 18:13-18;
 64:7, and so forth; Zechariah 9:14; Qur’an
18:44; Bernhard Schweitzer, Herakles
(Tübingen: Mohr, 1922), 184-86; E. A.
Wallis Budge, Book of the Dead, Papyrus of
Ani, 3 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1913),
2:400-401.
^37. Christian S. Blinkenberg, The
Thunderweapon in Religion and Folklore
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1911), 87-101; Gerald A. Wainwright, “The
Emblem of Min,” JEA 17 (1931): 186-93;
Gerald A. Wainwright, “Letopolis,” JEA 18
(1932): 161-63; and Gerald A. Wainwright,
“The Bull Standards of Egypt,” JEA 19
(1933): 43; Gruppe, Griechische
Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte, 2:773,
n. 3.
^38. Hermann Kees, Ägypten, in Handbuch der
Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 3, pt. 1, 3a
(Munich: Beck, 1933), 177; Psalms 45:6;
Winckler, Keilinschriftliches Textbuch zum
Alten Testament, 117, 123; Henry, Magie
dans l’Inde antique, 151-63; R. C. Boer,
ed., Orvar-Odds Saga (Halle: Niemeyer,
 1892), vii-ix, xiv-xv, 14, 69; Crawford, tr.,
Kalevala, 1:167, 2:434, 530; when the hero
twangs his bow, Zeus himself thunders in
the heavens, Homer, Odyssey XXI, 410-14.
^39. Culin, “Chess and Playing Cards,” 881; cf.
Hoernes, Natur-und Urgeschichte, 1:562-
64.
^40. Herodotus, History IV, 81.
^41. Jean Joinville, Histoire de St. Louis (Paris:
Hachette, 1883), xciii, 475-78 (Tartars);
Clément I. Huart and Louis Delaporte,
L’Iran antique: Élam et Perse et la
civilisation iranienne (Paris: Michel, 1952),
381; Friedrich von Spiegel, Erânische
Altertumskunde, 3 vols. (Leipzig:
Engelmann, 1871-78), 2:86-87; Carnoy,
Iranian Mythology, 302-3, 308; that these
are census arrows appears from Havamal
120a, 130a; for the Indians, see Boas,
“Kwakiutl Indians,” 522; Garrick Mallery,
“Picture Writing of the American Indians,”
Annual Report of the Bureau of American
Ethnology 10 (1888-1889): 365; Culin,
“Games of the North American Indians,”
 227-29 (fig. 307), 51, 233-34.
^42. Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte, 1:521, n.
1 (India); C. R. Lepsius, “Der Bogen in der
Hieroglyphik,” Zeitschrift für ägyptische
Sprache und Alterthumskunde 10 (1872):
86, cf. Wainwright, “The Emblem of Min,”
190-91; James G. Frazer, The Golden
Bough, 12 vols., 3d ed. (New York:
Macmillan, 1935), 9:126 (Koryak); René
Grousset et al., L’Asie orientale des
origines au XVe siècle (Paris: Presses
universitaires, 1941), 442.
^43. Proto-Evangelium of James 9:1; Clement,
Epistola I ad Corinthios (First Epistle to
the Corinthians) 43, in PG 1:295; Angelo S.
Rappoport, Myth and Legend of Ancient
Israel, 3 vols. (London: Gresham, 1928),
2:254-58.
^44. Qur’an 3:39.
^45. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians
43, in PG 1:295.
^46. Gaster, “Divination (Jewish),” in Hastings,
Encyclopaedia 4:809-10.
^47. Julius Wellhausen, Reste arabischen
Heidentums (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1927), 132;
Culin, “Games of the North American
Indians,” 383, 33, 45; cf. W. J. McGee,
“The Seri Indians,” Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology 17 (1895-
1896): 198-200; Wainwright, “Letopolis,”
162, and “Bull Standards of Egypt,” 50-51;
Egidio Forcellini, Lexicon Totius Latinatatis,
s.v. “baculus,” no. 9.
^48. Dmitriev, Turyetskie Narodnye Skaski, 203-
5; Giese, Türkische Märchen, 115.
^49. Georg A. Finsler, Homer, 2 vols., 2d ed.
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1913-18), 1:1:84.
^50. Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution LXV,
1-4; Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae 297.
^51. Crusius, “Hyperboreer,” in Roscher,
Ausführliches Lexikon, 1:2819.
^52. See Hugh Nibley, “Sparsiones,” Classical
Journal 40 (June 1945): 538-39, nn. 152-
54; reprinted in this volume, pages 189-90,
nn. 152-54.
^53. Qur’an 2:216; Ahlwardt, ed., al-Mucallaqat
 II, 104; IV, 73-74; VI, 63; Theodor
Noldeke, Delectus Veterum Carminum
Arabicorum (Berlin: Keuther, 1890), 36, 77;
Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums,
131-33; George Sale, The Koran
(Philadelphia: Moore, 1850), 89; cf. the
story of cA’isha in the Sahīh of Bukhārī in
Ernest Harder, Arabische Chrestomathie
(Heidelberg: Groos, 1911), 21, and Al-
Harīrī, Maqamāt, s.v. “wasm.”
^54. Pastor of Hermes, Similitudes VIII, 1-6.
^55. Du Chaillu, Viking Age, 1:350-51; Jónsson,
Egils Saga Skalgrímssonar, 137 (XLVIII, 6-
7); Boer, ed., Orvar-Odds Saga, 38, 9-10;
“Hvers mannz skeyti var thar markat”; cf.
Havamal 8a.
^56. Mallery, “Picture Writing,” 365-66; cf. Boas,
“Kwakiutl Indians,” 522-23.
^57. Boer, ed., Orvar-Odds Saga, 39, 9-13.
^58. As Boer, ibid., has shown in his edition of
the saga.
^59. Jacob, Altarabisches Beduinenleben, 89-90,
110-12.
^60. Danzel, Anfänge der Schrift, 39; James G.
Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament, 3
vols. (London: Macmillan, 1919), 1:415;
Boas, “Kwakiutl Indians,” 522-23; Cushing,
“Zuñi Fetiches,” 32.
^61. Nibley, “Sparsiones,” 537-39, reprinted in
this volume, pages 161-62.
^62. Joinville, Histoire de St. Louis, 93, 475-78.
^63. The Algonquins used fifty-two rods; Culin,
“Games of the North American Indians,”
49; the Hupa fifty-three, ibid., 235; the Sauk
and Fox fifty-one, ibid., 233; cf. 228, fig.
307, 45.
^64. Alice C. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche,
“The Omaha Tribe,” Annual Report of the
Bureau of American Ethnology 27 (1905-
1906): 242; Francis La Flesche, “Omaha
Bow and Arrow Makers,” Annual Report of
the Smithsonian Institution (1926): 494.
^65. Herodotus, History IV, 67; Ammianus
Marcellinus, XXXI, 2, 24.
^66. The Persian king, sitting with the baresma of
divination spread out before him as he gives
 away wealth at the New Year (Carnoy,
Iranian Mythology, 299-300), recalls the
host at the Indian feast, giving all his wealth
to his guests, whose arrow-staves lie spread
out before him, Boas, “Kwakiutl Indians,”
508; Hoenir’s lottery in the Golden Age
(Völuspá, in Lawrence S. Thompson, ed.,
Norse Mythology: The Elder Edda in Prose
Translation [Hamden, CT: Archon, 1974],
17) and the King of Babylon “shaking out
arrows,” Meissner, Babylonien und
Assyrien, 2:275; Ezekiel 21:26.
^67. Clement, First Epistle to the Corinthians
43, in PG 1:295.
^68. Ernst Samter, “Fasces,” in RE 6:2002-3.
^69. Culin, “Chess and Playing Cards,” 881; cf.
W. M. Flinders Petrie, Scarabs and
Cylinders with Names (London: School of
Archaeology in Egypt, 1917), 4. Theodore
C. Foote, “The Ephod,” Journal of Biblical
Literature 21 (1902): 20-47.
^70. Alexandre Moret, Histoire de l’Orient, 2
vols. (Paris: Presses universitaires, 1941),
1:96-97.
^71. Hermann V. Hilprecht, The Babylonian
Expedition of the University of
Pennsylvania, 11 vols. (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania, 1896), 1:2:36;
William H. Ward, The Seal Cylinders of
Western Asia (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie
Institution, 1910), 3-4. If the cylinder seal
was derived from a cylinder amulet, Ernst
Herzfeld, “Stempelsiegel,” Archäologische
Mitteilungen aus Iran 5 (1932): 51-53, the
marked arrow itself is such an amulet.
^72. Alfred Jeremias, “Nebo,” in Roscher,
Ausführliches Lexikon, 3:64-65; Gustavus
H. Eisen, Ancient Oriental and Other Seals
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1940), 78-79; M. H. Ananikian, Armenian
Mythology, vol. 7 in Gray, Mythology of All
Races, 32-33 (Nabu); Alfred Jeremias,
Handbuch der altorientalischen
Geisteskultur (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1913), 82,
89-94, 114, 275, 277 (Nabu-Nebo as
Hermes-Mercury), 11, 18, 132, 146
(Nisaba, equivalent of Egyptian Neith);
Budge, Book of the Dead, 1:186; cf. Gerald
 A. Wainwright, “Some Celestial Associations
of Min,” JEA 21 (1935): 154. On
Texctlipoca, the Mexican Apollo-Hermes, as
arrow-god, see Seler, Gesammelte
Abhandlungen, 3:341.
^73. John Rhys, Celtic Heathendom (London:
Williams & Norgate, 1898), 268; G. Dottin,
“Divination (Celtic),” in Hastings,
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,
4:788; Charles Vallency, “Observations of
the Alphabet of the Pagan Irish, and of the
Age in Which Finn and Oslin Lived,”
Archaeologia 7 (1785): 276-85; Hoernes,
Natur- und Urgeschichte, 2:304; John A.
MacCulloch, “Die Kelten,” in Alfred
Bertholet and Edvard Lehmann, eds.,
Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols.,
4th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925), 2:610.
Taken together, these references make the
case clear. Rune, arrow, and feasting-ticket
are plainly identical in Havamal 8a, 120a,
130a.
^74. Jónsson, Egils Saga Skalgrímssonar, 240-41
(LXXII, 12-16); Du Chaillu, Viking Age,
 2:92; Williams, “On the Land of Ditmarsh,”
381-83; Jacob, Altarabisches
Beduinenleben, 110, n. 2. The oldest runes
appear on arrowheads, Blinkenberg,
Thunderweapon, 85; e.g., the Kovel
spearhead. The strongest rune was an arrow,
Williams, “On the Land of Ditmarsh,” 388.
^75. Culin, “Chess and Playing Cards,” 887.
^76. Jensen, Assyrisch-babylonische Mythen und
Epen, 45, 47; cf. E. D. Van Buren, “Seals of
the Gods,” Studi e materiali di storia delle
religioni 10 (1934): 170; Louis Ginzberg,
The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols.
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 1947), 4:151; Wellhausen, Reste
arabischen Heidentums, 133.
^77. Herzfeld, “Stempelsiegel,” 53.
^78. Jack Finegan, Light from the Ancient Past
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1959), 24-26.
^79. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature,
F1066; Uno Holmberg, Finno-Ugric
Siberian [Mythology] (Boston:
 Archaeological Institute of America, 1927),
404; Crawford, tr., Kalevala, 1:287;
Herodotus, History V, 105; G. M. Bolling,
“Divination (Vedic),” in Hastings,
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,
4:829; Roth, “Animism and Folk-lore of
Guiana Indians,” 361.
^80. Max Seligsohn, “Nimrod,” in Isidore Singer,
ed., Jewish Encylopedia, 12 vols. (New
York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), 9:309-11;
Book of Jasher 9:29.
^81. Herodotus, History IV, 26; James G. Frazer,
“The War of Earth on Heaven,” in
Apollodorus, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Harvard
University Press, 1921), 2:318-26;
Crawford, tr., Kalevala, 1:287; Book of
Jasher 9:20-26.
^82. Karl Preisendanz, “Nimrod,” in RE 17:624-
28; Alfred Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im
Lichte des alten Orients (Leipzig: Hinrichs,
1916), 158-60; Book of Jasher 7:29-47;
Clementine Recognitiones I, 30-31, in PG
1:1224-25. Josef Grivel, “Nemrod et les
écritures cunéiformes,” Transactions of the
 Society of Biblical Archaeology 3 (1874):
141-43, gives a list of his sinister epithets.
^83. Qur’an 2:258.
^84. Sale, Koran, 269, note e; Otto Keller, Die
antike Tierwelt, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Cramer,
1913), 2:447-51. The godless of Jurhum
were destroyed in the same way, according
to Al-Bakrī, in Kitāb Mucjam mā Istacjam:
Das geographische Wörterbuch des Abu
cObeid cAbdallah ben cAbd el-cAzîz el-
Bekrî, ed. Ferdinand Wüstenfeld, 2 vols.
(Göttingen: Deuerlich, 1876-77), 1:25.
^85. Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 95a.
^86. Strabo, Geography VII, 4, 6.
^87. Lucian, De Saltatione (On the Dance) 46,
includes Odysseus among other mad giants.
^88. Raymond O. Faulkner, “The ‘Cannibal
Hymn’ from the Pyramid Texts,” JEA 10
(1925): 102, 97-103; Anton Deimel,
Sumerische Grammatik (Rome: Pontifical
Biblical Institute, 1924), 142.
^89. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, 3:918-50;
Ludwig Laistner, Das Rätsel der Sphinx, 2
 vols. (Berlin: Hetz, 1889), 2:156, 225-28,
243-50.
^90. Harold Peake and Herbert J. Fleure, The
Steppe and the Sown (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1928), 59.
^91. Phillip H. Leathes, “Exemption from the
Forest Laws,” Archaeologia 15 (1806): 209-
24; Samuel Pegge, “On the Hunting of the
Ancient Inhabitants of Our Island, Britons
and Saxons,” Archaeologia 10 (1792): 165-
66; Dains Barrington, “Observations of the
Practice of Archery in England,”
Archaeologia 7 (1785): 47, 50.
^92. Grousset, L’Asie orientale, 304-5, 307;
Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte, 2:122,
392-403.
^93. On its sudden neglect, Hoernes, Natur- und
Urgeschichte, 2:487-88, 275-77; Sophus
Müller, Nordische Altertumskunde, 2 vols.
(Strassburg: Trübner, 1897): 1:253; Meyer,
“Bows and Arrows in Central Brazil,” 553,
560; Lucien M. Turner, “Ethnology of the
Ungava District, Hudson Bay Territory,”
Annual Report of the Bureau of American
 Ethnology 11 (1888-1889): 312; La Flesche,
“Omaha Bow and Arrow Makers,” 487-88;
Finsler, Homer, 1:2:69-71. On its readoption,
Ernest Sprockhoff, “Pfeilspitze,” in Max
Ebert, Reallexicon der Vorgeschichte, 14
vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1924), 10:106;
Müller, Nordische Altertumskunde, 2:131; F.
Lammert, “Pfeil,” in RE 19:2:1427.
^94. Pliny, Natural History XVI, 65.
^95. Sprockhoff, “Pfeilspitze,” 10:106, cf. 102-3;
Peake and Fleure, Steppe and the Sown, 32;
Carl Schuchhardt, Alteuropa (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1935), 135-37; Carleton S. Coon,
The Races of Europe (New York:
Macmillan, 1939), 166-68, 46-48, 71-74.
^96. A few examples: Enuma Elish (Babylonian
Creation Hymn) IV, 101-47; Heinrich
Schäfer, “Der Speer des Horus,” Zeitschrift
für ägyptische Sprache und
Alterthumskunde 41 (1904): 68-70; Lepsius,
“Der Bogen in der Hieroglyphik,” 80, 85;
Wainwright, “Letopolis,” 162; Darmesteter,
Zend-Avesta, 2:297; Wernicke, “Apollon,” in
RE 2:23; Crawford, tr., Kalevala, 2:434
 (Book 26); 1:284 (Book 19); M. Lauer, ed.,
Des Moses von Chorene Geschichte Gross-
Armeniens (Regensburg: Manz, 1865), 22;
Edward T. Werner, Myths and Legends of
China (London: Harrap, 1922), 182; Culin,
“Games of the North American Indians,”
32-35.
^97. For extensive comparisons, Blinkenberg,
Thunderweapon, passim; Arthur B. Cook,
Zeus, 3 vols. (Cambridge: University Press,
1914-40), 2:473, 574, 774, 777, 780, 786-
89, 798-806, 1045-49; Edward D. Clarke,
“On the Lituus of the Ancient Romans,”
Archaeologia 19 (1821): 386-400; H. B.
Walters, “Poseidon’s Trident,” Journal of
Hellenic Studies 13 (1892-93): 13-20;
Benjamin W. Bacon, “Eagle and Basket on
the Antioch Chalice,” Annals of American
Schools of Oriental Research 5 (1923-24):
6-8, 19; Yahuda, Accuracy of the Bible,
106-13.
^98. For China, see Culin, “Chess and Playing
Cards,” 882-83; on Ghenghis Khan and
Prester John, see The Travels of Marco
 Polo, ed. Manuel Komroff (Garden City:
Garden City, 1926), 87-88 (I, 49), the arrow
nature of the staves being clear from William
Crooke, Religion and Folklore of Northern
India (Oxford: University Press, 1926), 309-
10. On wands of office in the Near East,
Clarke, “Lituus,” 398; cf. the chart by T.
Canaan, “Mohammedan Saints and
Sanctuaries in Palestine,” Journal of the
Palestine Oriental Society 6 (1926): 129,
pl. 4, who also shows how the weapon
became a banner, 121, 123, 125-29; cf. Al-
Wāqidī, Futūḥ al-Shām (Calcutta: Thomas,
1854), 34; Joseph von Karabacek, “Zur
orientalischen Altertumskunde I:
Sarazenische Wappen,” Sitzungsberichte
der kaiserlichen Akademie der
Wissenschaften in Wien. Philologisch-
historische Klasse 157 (1908): 20-21.
^99. Frederick J. E. Raby, A History of Secular
Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 1:13-15; the
pedigree of the Imperial eagle is Asiatic;
Bacon, “Eagle and Basket,” 7. On Khian as
 first Cosmocrator, Moret, Histoire de
l’Orient, 1:475.
^100. Bertram Thomas, Arabia Felix (New York:
Scribner, 1932), 204, n. 1; 379, 69; Danzel,
Anfänge der Schrift, 35. That the wasm of
heraldry was originally an arrow-mark is
clear from Al-Ḥarīrī, Maqamāt, index, s.v.
"wasm al-qidh."
^101. Williams, “On the Land of Ditmarsh,” 384-
87; Danzel, Anfänge der Schrift, 34-41;
Edwin Freshfield, “Mason’s Marks at
Westminster Hall,” Archaeologia 50 (1887):
2-4. “The Marks of Sundrye of Chief Mene
of Virginia” (1590), as published in William
W. Tooker, “The Swastika and Other Marks
among the Eastern Algonkins,” American
Antiquarian 20 (1898): 339-40, are all
arrows.
^102. As in Scotland the arrow “crest” reproduces
the mark of the owner’s tartan, so the Arabs
call the marked arrow and the striped
garment of the nobility by the same name,
sahm; Edward W. Lane, Arabic-English
Lexicon (London: William & Norgate,
 1872), 1:4:1454-55, no. 8; Mal’ūf, Al-
Munjid (Beirut: Al-Tabca al-Kāthawlīkīya,
1937), 30, s.v. “burd”; Ahlwardt, ed.,
Mucallaqat I, 79. For a like identity in the
New World, see Meyer, “Bows and Arrows
in Central Brazil,” 553.
^103. Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte, 1:550-
57.
^104. August Wünsche, Salomons Thron und
Hippodrom, Abbilder des babylonischen
Himmelsbildes (Leipzig: Pfeiffer, 1906),
passim; August von Gall, Basileia tou
Theou (Heidelberg: Winter, 1926), 128-205;
Morris Jastrow, “Adam and Eve in
Babylonian Literature,” American Journal
of Semitic Languages and Literatures 15
(1899): 193-214; Darmesteter, Zend-Avesta,
1:11-12, 15-18; 2:98-101, 202; Albrecht
Götze, Kleinasien (Munich: Beck, 1933),
133-35; Michael Psellus, Xiphilin 442-44;
Lucian, De Astrologio 987; Dio
Chrysostom, Oratations XL, 32-41; XXXII,
63-66. Friedrich Dieterici, Thier und
 Mensch vor dem König der Genien
(Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1879). Thaclabi, in
Rudolf Brünnow, Chrestomathy of Arabic
Prose-Pieces (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard,
1895), 2. The literature on this theme is very
voluminous. For early Christian versions,
see Clement, First Epistle to the
Corinthians 43, in PG 1:295; Apostolic
Constitutions II, 56-57, in PG 1:722-38.
^105. The Travels of Marco Polo, Komroff, ed.,
104-8 (I, 60-61) (Great Khan); Grousset,
L’Asie orientale, 341-43, 367, 364 (China
and Indochina): Huart and Delaporte, L’Iran
Antique, 283, 372; Eduard Meyer,
Geschichte des Altertums, 4 vols. (Stuttgart:
Cotta, 1925-44), 4:37, 39, 55, 56 (Persia);
Jeremias, Handbuch der altorientalischen
Geisteskultur, 177-80, 193; Daniel 4:21-37
(Babylonian-Assyrian).
^106. William W. Tarn, “Ptolemey II,” JEA 14
(1928): 247; Constantine Porphyrogenitus,
De Caeremoniis Aulae Byzantinae (On the
Ritual of the Byzantine Court), Joseph J.
Reiske, ed., in Corpus Scriptorum Historiae
 Byzantinae, 2 vols. (Bonn: Weber, 1829),
1:404-6 (I, 89); Corippus, Justin II, 62;
Byzantine Ceremonialbook (tenth century)
in Gustav Soytes, Byzantinische
Geschichtschreiber und Chronisten
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1929), 33. On the
Baghdad version, Adam Mez, The
Renaissance of Islam (London: Luzac,
1937), 199.
^107. Al-Bīrūnī, Chronologie orientalischer
Völker, ed. Eduard C. Sachau (Leipzig:
Harrassowitz, 1923), 226; cf., Mez,
Renaissance of Islam, 419. The ancient
feast of Artemis the huntress at Laphria was
such an animal-drive, Pausanius,
Description of Greece VII, 18, 8-13. On the
jiwār, Jacob, Altarabisches Beduinenleben,
83, 220-21; cf. Hermann Gollancz, The
Book of Protection (London: Oxford
University Press, 1912), xxxiv, xliii-xliv, esp.
lxxxiv (no. 24); Ginzberg, Legends of the
Jews, 4:142; Bächtold-Stäubli,
Handwörterbuch des deutschen
Aberglaubens, 6:1400, 1404-6. See
 especially A. F. L. Beeston, “The Ritual
Hunt: A Study in Old South Arabian
Religious Practice,” Le Muséon 61 (1948):
183-96.
^108. W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the
Semites (London: Black, 1901), 95-96;
Boaz Cohen, “An Essay on Jewish Law,”
Proceedings of the American Academy of
Jewish Research 6 (1934-35): 124-25, 127,
136; Walter Ashburner, “The Farmer’s
Law,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 30
(1910): 97; 32 (1912): 87. Cf. Plutarch,
Solon XV, 5; Hesiod, Erga (Works and
Days) 272-314; Varro, De Re Rustica I, 10,
2; Plutarch, Numa 16; Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities III, 1, 3-
5.
^109. John Y. Akerman, “On Some of the
Weapons of the Celtic and Teutonic Races,”
Archaeologia 34 (1852): 186. Yet in the
Middle Ages only the rich used the bow;
Thomas D. Kendrick, A History of the
Vikings (New York: Scribner, 1930), 35;
Müller, Nordische Altertumskunde, 1:253,
 148; cf. La Flesche, “Osage Tribe,” 364.
^110. Hilary Jenkinson, “Exchequer Tallies,”
Archaeologia 62 (1911): 367-80; “Medieval
Tallies, Public and Private,” Archaeologia
74 (1924): 289-324.
 Tenting, Toll, and Taxing

Even in the great classic treatises on the

state, its image is never without a sinister
side. The combination of unlimited power
and limited wisdom can never be a
reassuring one, but it is the actual behavior
of sovereign states and princes that is most
disturbing. The key to understanding the
behavior of delinquents, we are often told, is
an insight into early background and
environment. It is the purpose of this paper
to show how the state spent the most
impressionable years of its childhood living
as an orphan of the storm in tents of
vagabonds where it acquired many of the
habits and attitudes that still condition its
activities.
Scene I—An Open Place: Thunder
and Lightning
It was not until early in the present
century that H. M. Chadwick pointed out
what should have been obvious to everyone,
namely, that epic literature, a large and
important segment of the human record, is the
product not of unrestrained poetic fancy but
of real years of terror and gloom through
which the entire race has been forced to pass
from time to time.1 We now have good
reason to believe, after many years of
controversy and discussion, scientific and
otherwise, that the violence of the elements
that forms the somber backdrop of the “Epic
Milieu” was more than a literary convention.
Many ancient sources recall that after the
waters of the Flood had subsided there came
a great “Windflood” which converted large
areas of the world to sandy deserts; A.
Haldar considers the Sumerian version of the
Windflood to be “an excellent example of a
text describing historical events in terms of
religious language.”2 The historical reality is
attested by windblown sand deposits from
various and widely separated periods, which
can be broadly correlated with some of the
major migrations of peoples.3
According to S. N. Kramer, “The
factors primarily responsible for the more
characteristic features of the Greek, Indian,
and Teutonic Heroic Ages” were at work “in
the ancient Near East as a whole” in the
earliest recorded times.4 These factors, i.e.,
a Völkerwanderungszeit and a general
disintegration of civilization, are always
accompanied and aggravated if not caused
by violent and prolonged atmospheric
disturbances. Wherever we turn, the earliest
records of the race offer the surprisingly
uniform portrait of a wandering storm-driven
hero—a Horus, Enlil, Marduk, Mazda, Zeus,
Teshub, Celtic Mercury, or Norse Othinn, to
name but a few—mounted on his thunder-
wagon and leading his toiling hosts across
the windy steppes while the earth trembles
and the sky gives forth with appalling
electrical displays.5
Biologists today are calling attention to
the interesting theory that when man, ages
before any recorded Völkerwanderung, was
forced out of whatever tropical paradise his
body was and still is designed to inhabit, it
was necessary for him to devise a system of
air-conditioning in order to survive in a
hostile alien environment. Within his clothes,
as Sir Dudley Stamp observes, even the
Eskimo “is living . . . in the steamy heat of
the Amazon Forest.” But the air he breathes
must also be tempered, and this is possible
only in the confines of a house which, since
its owner must keep moving, is necessarily a
portable house.6 During the crucial
migrational phases of their existence, men
have had to live in tents, superbly practical
dwellings which, aside from making survival
possible, have always satisfied the two
deepest “felt needs” of the race, namely, the
yearning for change and adventure and the
equally strong craving for protection and
security. The tent of the migratory chief is, as
J. Morgenstern informs us, both the
protective palladium of the tribe and its
invitation to journey “through a totally
unknown country.”7
We have pointed out elsewhere in this
volume that the earliest kings or leaders of
the people lived in tents.8 Pharaoh, who
ruled over the least migratory of people,
performed every major function of his
ritualized existence in a tent.9 Even the
pillars of his palace suggest the poles of a
tent that protects the wanderer by night in a
strange land (cf. fig. 4).10 Anu, the first and
highest of Mesopotamian deities, is “the
rider of the storms who occupies the dais
[tent] of sovereignty.”11 The tent of Moses
was a palladium for wandering Israel in “the
desert of darkness.”12 And when the oldest
cities were overwhelmed by the great wind,
the only refuge for the Lady Ishtar herself
was in the tents of the nomads, which have
ever been the asylum for the outcast and the
last redoubt of afflicted humanity under siege
by the elements.13 And if deity and
sovereignty dwell in tents, such tents are
understandably the proper place for oracular
consultations, solemn counsel, and inspired
leadership.14
 Figure 4. The gold-covered
portable canopy and furniture of
Queen Hetepheres (A) enable us to
see the refined taste of Old
Kingdom art, c. 2500 B.C. The same
kind of elegant columns were used
centuries later by Thutmose III in
his Festival Hall (B) at Karnak, c.
1440 B.C., where he described it as
a great ritual tent built to last
millions of years.
Figure 5. Long before Islam, each
Bedouin tribe had its own portable
shrine, the focus of its spiritual life.
A dome-shaped shrine (A) rides
atop a camel on this stone relief
from the Temple of Bel, Palmyra,
Syria, A.D. 32. Note the women’s
full-body veil, a practice still being
debated in the Islamic world. The
maḥmal camel shrine (B) persisted
into the later pilgrimages to Mecca,
as shown in this festive manuscript
illumination from Baghdad, A.D.
1237. This Egyptian version of the
maḥmal (C), destined for Mecca, is
shown in an English engraving, C.
1880. The custom lasted until 1952,
when it was abolished as being
idolatrous.
Figure 6. From the earliest example
of the wheeled vehicle in Egypt (A)
to its present-day descendant (H),
the persistence of these sacred
wheeled boats with their carrying
poles demonstrates the critical
importance of being able to move
across all types of terrain, both in
this life and the next. (A) Funeral
sledge on wheels, c. 1700 B.C. (B)
Model barge on wheels, c. 1554-
1529 B.C. (C) Funeral wagon, c.
350-300 B.C.
Discovered in Gaza, Israel, a
Jewish silver coin (D) of 450-300
B.C. shows a seated figure on a
winged, wheeled throne, a reminder
that the throne of God is commonly
called the merkāḇāh, wagon or
boat, in Jewish literature. Made
under Greek influence, it resembles
Dionysius on his winged, wheeled
throne (E) from a Greek vase of
500-400 B.C.
Thus the immovable throne of God
moves forward on wheels, as also
shown by the Ark of the Covenant
on an oxcart (F), Dura Europos
Synagogue, Iraq, c. A.D. 250, as
well as the throne of Christ pulled
by the beasts of the four quarters
(G), apse painting, Bawait, Egypt,
c. A.D. 500-600. (H) Ship-wagon
procession in honor of an Islamic
saint, Luxor, Egypt, 1960.
Figure 7. With the winged symbol of
Ahura Mazda protecting them from
above, Darius sites enthroned with
his heir Xerxes standing behind him
under a large canopy of tasseled
 netting (A). Though appearing
majestically immovable, the kings
are being carried forward by
twenty-eight representatives of the
Empire supporting a large platform
whose feet are carefully carved to
show that it is lifted up off the
ground. (A) Palace doorway,
Persepolis, c. 500 B.C. This motif is
also used on the five royal tombs
nearby (B).
In this recently discovered chariot
tomb of a Germanic chieftain (C),
600-550 B.C., a unique bronze
couch served him in death as it had
in life. Thought to have been
imported from the south, it is
supported by eight lady unicyclists
(D) lifting and carrying the king
forward, as did their Persian
counterparts.
 The ancient tribal shrines of the Near
East known variously as cuṭfa, markab,
maḥmal (cf. fig. 5), qubba, bait, ’aron,
teḇeṯ, and so forth, all had two
characteristics in common: they were,
according to Morgenstern, “all tents or tent-
like structures,” usually dome-shaped, and
all were mounted on a box-like frame or
understructure whose common name of
merkab meant either wagon or ship, and
shows that it was meant to provide
mobility.15 In an important study A. Alföldi
has recently made it possible for the student
to enjoy the surprising spectacle of great
royal tents moving all over the ancient world
on their ceremonial wagons (cf. fig. 12, p.
120),16 while J. Smolian now describes the
ritual itinerary of such vehicula sacra (cf.
fig. 6) in Europe and the East as common to
both kings and gods.17 Both studies discuss
the cosmic nature of the wheel-borne dome-
shaped shrine or royal baldachin, for
paradoxical as it may seem, such symbols of
supreme stability as the throne, temple, holy
city, and even sacred world-mountain are
often depicted either as revolving wheels or
as mounted and moving on wheels (cf. figs.
7, p. 40, and 11, p. 117).18
Throughout the ancient world divinity
and royalty, following the course and
example of the heavenly bodies, moved
through the spaces above and below in
covered wagons or boats or in a combination
of the two—the carrus navalis or ship-
wagon of the carnival procession.19 Such
vehicles were floats, moving through space
in a state of vehicles were floats, moving
through space in a state of suspension
between heaven and earth.20 As the early
migrants moved across the empty plains
where, as Altheim has noted, the cleansing
winds remove all tracks and landmarks,
leaving only the stars as familiar guide-posts
and companions,21 they felt themselves to be
moving among the heavenly bodies, and
actually that is what they were doing.22 In
ritual and mythology the distinction between
earth-travel and sky-travel often disappears,
while the ceaseless play of lightning in the
background is a constant reminder that the
tremendous powers of the upper world are
terribly real and not too far away.23

Holy Camp and Holy City

For the nomads the qubba or domed red
leather tent of the chief is the qibla by which
the tribe when it camps takes its bearings in
space (cf. fig. 5, p. 37), the qubba itself
being oriented with reference to the heavenly
bodies.24 For the Asiatics as well as the
Romans the royal tent was a templum or
tabernaculum, a sort of sacred
observatory,25 being like the tabernacle of
the camp of Israel and at the same time a
kind of planetarium or “model of all the
cosmos.”26 The central pole of the tent is
commonly identified with the pole of the
heavens,27 and the tent itself with the
Weltenmantel or expanse of the firmament;28
other tent-poles sometimes represent the four
cardinal points or the two turning-points of
the Sun at the summer and winter solstices.29
The tent-pole theme is carried over into the
pillars of temples and palaces, and even into
the columns of medieval churches and the
stately facades of our own public
buildings.30
The orientation of shrines, temples,
cities, and countries to represent earthly
counterparts of the cosmos has been the
subject of intensive investigation of recent
years. The first cities are now believed to
have arisen around sacred shrines, of which
the city itself, then the whole land, and
finally the entire earth was thought to be an
organic extension.31 It has also become
apparent that the shrine or temple, which in
time sought to draw all things into its orbit,
always made its first appearance as a tent.32
The classic example is that portable tent that
sheltered the Ark of the Covenant on its
travels, for which Solomon’s temple served
only as a sort of temporary resting-place.33
The archaic ritual tents of the Pharaohs have
their exact counterparts in the cult-huts of the
Mandu, which in turn have been shown to be
identical in form and function to the earliest
reed-shrines of Mesopotamia as well as to
the oldest Indo-European tent-shrines.34
And if the first temples were tents, the
first cities, whether in Asia, Africa, or
Europe, were camps.35 That fact is the key to
the whole problem of the Holy City or
hierocentric state, according to Korvin-
Krasiński’s observation: “The quartered
pattern of the world and space with the cultic
shrine in the center as representing a scale-
model of the entire creation, is actually
incomparably older than the world capital,”
having its origin “in the ceremonial camp,”
from which the pattern passed over to the
city by way of the great Megalithic ritual
complexes.36 We long ago called attention to
the ceremonial camps that sprang up around
the great hierocentric shrines during the
year-rites, and to the manner in which they
gave rise to certain enduring economic,
political, artistic, and religious features of
our civilization.37
The most wonderful thing about
Jerusalem the Holy City is its mobility: at
one time it is taken up to heaven and at
another it descends to earth or even makes a
rendezvous with the earthly Jerusalem at
some point in space halfway between.38 In
this respect both the city and the temple are
best thought of in terms of a tent, according
to Jerome,39 while the Church itself is also
best represented as a tent, at least until the
time comes when the saints “will no longer
have to use a movable tent,” according to the
early Fathers,40 who get the idea from the
New Testament.41 The Jewish sectaries of
the desert referred to the law itself as “the
royal tent,”42 and thought of themselves quite
literally as the camp of Israel sharing their
tents with the heavenly hosts.43 The idea of
the heavenly tent or Holy City as a place of
safety suspended above the earth meets us
also in the holy mountain and the shrine or
city that stands upon it,44 the holy island of
which the circular Atlantis is a type,45 such
floating shrines as Noah’s Ark and the moon-
boat of the Syrian Goddess,46 and in such
mysterious structures as the Hippodrome,
Hadrian’s Villa (cf. fig. 8), and the Kacba,
all of which were thought of as floating in
their own space remote from contaminating
earthly contacts.47 It is now fairly certain,
moreover, that the great temples of the
ancients were not designed to be dwelling-
houses of deity but rather stations or landing-
places, fitted with inclined ramps, stairways,
passageways, waiting-rooms, elaborate
systems of gates, and so forth, for the
convenience of traveling divinities, whose
sacred boats and wagons stood ever ready to
take them on their endless junkets from
shrine to shrine and from festival to festival
through the cosmic spaces (cf. fig. 6, pp. 38-
39)48 The Great Pyramid itself, we are now
assured, is the symbol not of immovable
stability but of constant migration and
movement between the worlds;49 and the
ziggurats of Mesopotamia, far from being
immovable, are reproduced in the seven-
stepped throne of the thundering sky-wagon50

Tent and City as Survival Outposts

In the oldest records of the race, as
Haldar has shown, the desert was a fearful
reality, “the dead-world of the steppe, that
began just outside the city wall.”51 “The
boldness of those early people who
undertook to found permanent settlements in
the shifting plains,” wrote H. Frankfort, “had
its obverse in anxiety.”52 Mowinkel
maintains that the very foundation of
religious ritual is man’s awareness that “the
world of life and blessedness is completely
surrounded by the world of death and
damnation, the desert, the wasteland, das E-
lend.”53 The patch of green won from the
desert by the waters of life or the circular
clearing in the forest is a haven of refuge, a
shelter and sacred vara in which men and
animals seek refuge from the savage storms
and equally savage monsters that range
abroad in the vast outer world.54
 Figure 8. Along with the many
replicas of famous places he had
seen on his travels, Hadrian also
 built uniquely personal structures
such as the so-called Maritime
Theatre in his villa at Tivoli, A.D.
177-138. It was actually a private
retreat for the Emperor, where he
could seal himself off from the
world by pulling in the two-part
pivoted bridges after him. Of
course, this flight to the center of a
circular island was more symbolic
than real, but it demonstrated his
understandable desire to escape
from his world.

At the beginning of the second book of

his cosmology, al-Kazwīnī describes the
first city as a sort of survival out-post, set up
by determined cooperative effort on an all
but uninhabitable planet. It is like a “space
station,” hermetically sealed off from the
hostile surroundings, completely self-
contained with gardens and pastures
included within its protecting walls, and
fully equipped with mosques, markets, baths,
and those means of aesthetic and intellectual
fulfillment which keep men from becoming a
danger to each other through boredom and
overcrowding.55 More familiar in Oriental
literature is the image of the super-palace in
its fortified oasis, whose inhabitants become
over-confident in their safety and end their
days in wicked debauchery as the great and
spacious building goes down in ruins before
the storm.56 The concept is still with us:
“This desire to dwell on a safe little island,”
writes L. Vax, “is what we call humanism. It
is nothing but the wish to build a city which
will shut out both the sub-human and the
super-human.” Once safe within the walls
we hear “the laugh of the libertines, . . .
meant to give them a feeling of relative
security,”57 but in reality an expression of an
inescapable fear of the terrors without.
That it is indeed the externi timor that
brings cities into existence and keeps them
going is indicated by what is called “the
paradox of the Moslem city,” the paradox
being that while in Moslem civilization the
city is “the indispensable focal point of all
material and spiritual culture,” life within
such a city is completely “anorganic and
disorganized.”58 What preserves the life of
such imperishable communities as Mecca,
Damascus, Jerusalem, and so forth, as
Professor Godbey pointed out long ago, is
the fact that they never lose their original
significance as shrines and asylums, thanks
to the unbroken persistence of the first
conditions under which they were founded,
namely the presence of a real and dangerous
wilderness just outside the gates; the holy
city is forever a place of refuge in a hostile
world.59
 The obsessive awareness of constant
and lurking danger without, which brought
the city into existence, is no less fundamental
in the formation of the state; the transcendent
importance of the king lies in the conviction
that with him there is safety, he alone can
cope with the powers of death and outer
darkness, meeting them head-on in the yearly
ritual-combat and spending the rest of the
year making his rounds in his perennial task
of imposing divine order on the benighted
outer fringes of the universe.60

The Royal Progress

In his divine mission of extending the
dominion of light and order the king is
constantly leading his embattled hosts into
dark and unknown regions on an eternal
Royal Progress. The student of the Royal
Progress who confines his attention to the
medieval and modern sources is puzzled to
find the practice flourishing in such widely
scattered places as Ireland, Central Africa,
and the islands of the South Pacific, while it
is absent on the steppes of Europe and Asia
where one would normally expect to find
migrating kings.61 Actually the Royal
Progress is a world-wide institution of great
antiquity, which turns up in a few backward
corners of the world in later times precisely
because it is only in such places that the
primitive conditions necessary to its
existence survive. If, for example, among the
nineteenth-century Baganda there could be
no capital because “for each king a new
royal enclosure is built,”62 the same system
prevailed in the Old Kingdom of Egypt
where, “paradoxically enough, the capital
was less permanent than the towns in the
provinces, for in principle it served for only
a single reign . . . . Until the middle of the
Second Millennium B.C. . . . there was no
truly permanent capital in Egypt.”63 If the
Tartars and Mongols built no temples or
cities because their gods traveled about on
wheels, the same held true of the Hittites and
Persians before them.64 In medieval Europe
it was the rule for a king to have no capital
but to move continually from place to place
with his whole court in a set ceremonial
Progress which never ceased. Such mobility,
according to the latest and fullest study of the
subject, was “the very essence of royal
existence,” prevailing in fact “in any
situation characterized by a typically feudal
structure of government,” that is, in any
Heroic Age or Epic Milieu.65
The Royal Progress ideally followed
the course of the sun, setting out from the
scene of the coronation at the winter solstice
and ending up at the same spot exactly a year
from the day of departure; it was so arranged
that each of the major solar festivals would
be celebrated at some important shrine along
the way, each such celebration being a minor
repetition of the coronation rite itself.66 The
whole operation is astonishingly like that of
Egypt, where the usages of the Royal
Progress are well documented from the
beginning.67 In Egypt as in the West the
king’s purpose in going from place to place
is to be recognized and acclaimed as the
bringer of good things, but it is also very
apparent that along with the festive and
sacral aspects of the royal parousia (and that
word establishes significant ties between
eastern and western, Christian and pagan
practices),68 the King’s Progress was meant
to dramatize the original seizure and
subduing of the land; it is always the
triumphal procession of a victor, pacifying
the land, receiving formal submission,
suppressing rebellion, rewarding loyalty,
imposing justice and order on the world.69
The Royal Progress goes back originally,
according to Peyer, to the overrunning of
“conquered farmers and herdsmen” by
“cattle-owning nomadic tribes. Hence,” he
concludes, “the journeys and entertainment
of the ruler (Herrscherreise und Gastung)
appear as the result of the superimposing of
the authority of nomadic warriors over
sedentary agrarians.”70 This, we have
maintained, is exactly the situation attested
by the evidence of the “marked arrow” in
many parts of the world.71 The Royal
Progress is a survival of the
Völkerwanderung, an annual repetition of
the Landnahme, with the king receiving the
ecstatic (often compulsory) acclamations of
the inhabitants, while long lines of cattle and
hostages—the children of local chiefs who
might make trouble—were being brought to
the “gisting” places as tribute.72
 Wherever the king went the people were
expected to “guest” him and his company for
three nights, though it was common practice
for them to move on after a night or two.
Since the whole existence of royalty was a
brilliant and impressive progress through the
lands, kings were never able to stop the
parade without forfeiting their principal
glory; and so the splendid royal junkets,
arrogant and benevolent, religious and
military in nature, which both overawed
their subjects and alarmed their neighbors,
remained right down until World War I “not
an optional policy but an organic need” for
the rulers of Europe and Asia.73
In the Saga of Dietrich of Bern, a basic
source for the understanding of the way of
kings, ancient and medieval, Asiatic and
European alike, we see the great Attila not
as a destroyer but as a beneficent liberator
moving ever from one stathr to the next,
staying but one night in each and hunting in
between.74 For the Royal Progress is also
the Royal Hunt, and animals are expected to
be as compliant as men to the rule of the
Cosmocrator.75 In the West the king was
before everything the Lord of the Forest, his
sylvan sovereignty resting on his
immemorial rights as a hunter.76 Hence the
royal beneficium to obedient subjects was
originally the king’s permission to use his
forest for woodcutting and grazing—not for
hunting;77 and the gradual reduction of the
common people to a state of total servility
toward the end of the Middle Ages was
effected largely through the manipulation of
the forest laws, first by the barons and then
by moneyed investors, whose legalistic
legerdemain in dealing with forest laws
resulted, according to Thimme, in the
concept of “property and dominion as we
understand them today.”78 But originally
there was only one king of the forest, and he
was a hunter.79
On his progress along the King’s
Highway or Royal Road,80 the monarch
spent his nights at castles which were not
proper dwellings but rather guarded supply-
dumps and fortified camping-places, where
one ate, slept, and worked under canopies
with rushes and straw beneath one. “Nearly
all the great Seigneurs,” writes Peyer, “from
the earliest times had no fixed residence, but
moved ceaselessly from castrum to
castrum," where the necessary supplies had
been gathered to provide for the guesting of
the lord and the support of his military
plans.81 The meaning of the well-known
derivatives of castrum—camp (castra) and
castle—needs no discussion.82 The
stopping-places of the Merovingian and
Carolingian rulers was a Pfalz (palatium,
palace), from the old word for a domed tent,
designating also “the celestial vault, the tent
of heaven,” that is, the age-old qubba of the
nomad chief.83 The basic idea is never lost
from sight as kings continue to feast, sleep,
and sit in state beneath gorgeous tents called
variously pavilions, canopies, baldachins,
heavens, and “states”—for the king to sit in
state means in the strict sense of the word to
be in his statio or camping-place on the
march (cf. fig. 11, p. 117).84

Trespassing Heroes
Since the business of the royal and
priestly qubba was “to lead the people upon
a migration through a totally unknown
country, to select for them the road which
they must travel, and to indicate for them the
place of their ultimate settlement,”85 the
problem of possible trespassing becomes a
very serious one for the owner of the tent.
“The laws of tenting,” says the Talmud, “are
the most difficult and complicated in all the
written and oral law.” Since the wanderers
are seeking a favored land, they are bound to
find the place inhabited if they ever get there;
and in the eyes of the natives, the invaders
can only appear as godless and evil men, the
Wild Huntsmen, the feralis exercitus. “The
steppe is the underworld,” wrote A.
Jeremias, “and in oriental tales the hunter is
the Man of the Underworld.”86 The attitude
of the settled dwellers in the land toward
their invaders is vividly set forth in a
passage from the early Christian Psalms of
Thomas:

I looked into the Abyss and

saw the Evil One
With his Seven Companions
and Twelve attendants;
I saw them putting up his tent
 and lighting the fire in it. . . .
I saw their traps and their tents
spread out. . . .
And I saw them lying about,
drinking their stolen wine and
eating their stolen meat.87

But there is something to be said for the

other side. The red tent moved into lands
only “in sheer desperation, when the very
existence of the . . . tribe was at stake.”88
Achilles makes it clear at the beginning of
the Iliad that it was not his idea to leave his
own domains to plunder other men’s; the
invader is not acting from choice. The
nobility of the Epic Hero is that in his tragic
predicament he does what he must, and even
his innocent victims amid their cries of
distress never accuse him of base or
reprehensible behavior.89 The great folk-
heroes such as Odysseus, Aeneas, Abraham,
Siegfried, or Abu Zaid are all homeless
wanderers, never sure of their status or
reception in strange places and often reduced
to dissembling and even to begging in
situations of almost unbearable tension.
Many ancient monarchs sought to relieve the
unpleasant tensions raised by the trespassing
issue by simply making a virtue of necessity,
glorying in their irresistible and hence
divinely sanctioned might and grabbing
everything they could as if by right.90 Yet
even the fiercest of these, such as the
Assyrian monarchs or Genghis Khan,
categorically deny that their dominion is held
by force alone, and tirelessly insist that they
conquer and rule by an express mandate from
heaven—even the bloody-minded hero of the
Egyptian Cannibal Hymn waves a written
document for all to see, “a warrant of
appointment as ‘Great Mighty One’ . . . given
him by Orion, Father of the Gods.”91
Surprisingly enough, the apparently
academic question of trespassing was of
great concern to the rulers of old. A clear
demonstration of that concern is to be found
in the well-known ritual combat of the Year
Rite, a show-down between two armed
heroes, each claiming to be the legitimate
heir to dominion and accusing his rival of
usurpation and fraud in the long-winded
legalistic stichomachia that should always
precede a formal duel.92 It is the classic
showdown between the invader and the
invaded, each accusing the other of trespass:
for if the defenders of a land have the sacred
mission of preserving the established order
from the onslaughts of monsters from the
outer darkness, the invaders are led by a
knight in shining armor who finds the land in
possession of the Dragon, the Lord of
Misrule, from whose primordial
misgovernment it is his sacred duty to
deliver it.93 The theme has recently been
studied by J. Trumpf, who notes that the
foundation of an ancient city can never
proceed in peace and order until the local
dragon, who has misruled and oppressed the
land from time immemorial, is got out of the
way. Trumpf duly observes (as we also have
done) that the nomads of the steppes, that is,
the normal invaders, refuse to acknowledge
the humanity of an enemy but can conceive of
any opposition to themselves only as some
form of monstrous perversion, the
annihilation of which is a holy calling.94
Thus they clear themselves of the charge of
trespassing.
But just who is the trespasser? By what
right do the prior inhabitants of the land
possess it? After all, the Trojans had sacked
as many cities and stolen as many cattle as
the Achaeans who invaded them. In the old
bestiaries it is the animals who claim prior
occupancy and accuse the human race of
trespassing upon the earth; the notable
treatise on the theme by the “Chaste Brethren
of Basra” depicts all the animals assembled
before the throne of Solomon to sue the
human race for trespassing—they complain
that men have driven them from their
homelands and have continued to pursue
them even into the deserts without any
vestige of legal right, like Shakespeare’s
banished nobility who go to the woods to act
like “mere usurpers, tyrants, and what’s
worse, to fright the animals, and to kill them
up in their assign’d and native dwelling-
places.”95
Although practically any nomad chief
who had both people and cattle at his back
considered himself to be legitimate,96 all
such people, as Tacitus observed, are liable
to meet their nemesis in others of their kind
with which occasional collisions are
inevitable.97 The result is a showdown, a
trial of arms in the chivalric or horse-rider’s
manner, which no true ruler can escape.98
The code of chivalry is not a settlement
worked out between farmers and nomad
warriors, between whom there is no real
understanding or even communication, but
rather a system of settling the touchy question
of possession between parties neither of
whose claims will stand too close an
examination.99 The claims of brute force are
denied in favor of the idea that combat itself,
if attended by the proper formalities, is a
form of divination which clearly proclaims
the will of heaven in the assignment of
property.100 Furthermore, what is won by
combat must be maintained by combat, and
the proud and truculent mottoes of heraldry
were a standing invitation to trial at arms. A
noble was required and expected to invite
assault, according to the rules of chivalry,
“because everyone seeks distinction, one
mark of which is to offend fearlessly.” “An
insult,” writes F. R. Bryson, commenting on
this, “was regarded as causing one of the
two parties to lose honor,” thereby forcing
him to fight to get it back.101 The prince who
hesitated to take issue when another set foot
on his lands vi et armis (“by force and by
arms,” still the official definition of
trespassing) actually forfeited his right to
their possession,102 as did the German rulers
after the death of Charles the Bald who, by
failing to expel poaching barons from their
forest lands, forfeited the legal claim on
those lands to the barons.103

The Battle for the Tent

The combat between chiefs was no
mere brawl but a splendid and formal affair,
with time, place, and procedure stipulated
ahead of time. Whether it was a set battle
between Pharaoh and an invading desert
chief,104 or a ritual chariot race between
rival Vedic princes,105 or a set-to between
Asiatic war lords, played like a game of
chess,106 or the elaborately ordered duels of
the sagas or jousts of the Middle Ages, it
was understood that the winner was to take
all, usually including the erstwhile loyal
retainers of the loser.107 The correct and
formal method of announcing one’s intention
of occupying a land was by the pitching of a
red tent upon it, such a tent proclaiming the
owner’s “unique position as universal ruler
—a superman and a cosmic being, according
to the views of the ancients.”108 To the many
examples given by Morgenstern we might
add that Adam in the beginning, according to
an old and widespread tradition, took
possession of the world as he journeyed
through it by setting up his red leather tent
wherever he went.109 How old the tradition
may really be can be surmised from a
prehistoric Egyptian festival in which the
Besitzergreifung des Landes, according to
W. Helck, was dramatized by the setting up
of red and white tents representing the two
worlds in conflict.110 Everywhere in the
ancient world the chief’s banner and tent
served together and interchangeably as his
flag of defiance wherever he went.111 The
setting up of the tent of the Ark at Gilgal was
a formal Landnahme, according to von
Rad;112 and among the Arabs “to pitch one’s
tent on strange or disputed ground was a
deed of honor.”113 The sacred tent and the
royal tent when they are not one and the same
are always pitched side by side, as
Morgenstern explains, pointing out that the
tent of inspiration makes it possible for “an
entire people [to] wander about in a strange
and unknown country with reasonable
assurance, and . . . at last find its proper
place for resettlement.”114 “The tent of the
Lord will not be replaced by a permanent
tent,” wrote the first of the Christian
Doctors, “until the final combat when the
Lord has put all his enemies beneath his feet
and bound the dragon.”115 The early
sectaries of the desert, as they raise the tent
of defiance to the hosts of Evil, view their
own tents as the camp of the hosts of heaven
ready to dispute for the possession of the
earth.116
When Alexander had seized the tent of
Darius he had achieved his final military
victory, for by that act, following an ageless
tradition, all the Great King’s holdings were
formally transferred to him.117 And when
Eumenes after the death of Alexander “found
it useful to carry with him as a mascot
Alexander’s tent, which he could represent
as still inhabited by his great master’s
spirit,” he was really announcing to the
world that the universal empire was now
his.118 The Greeks need not have borrowed
the chivalric pattern from the Orient, for
already in the Iliad Poseidon, “the owner of
the earth,” as both his name and his epithet,
Gaie-ochos, show him to be,119 rushes into
the council of the gods in great alarm crying:
O Father Zeus, what mortal upon the
boundless earth will ever again credit
the gods with intelligence or ability?
Haven’t you seen how these long-haired
Greeks have actually built a wall
around their ships and dug a ditch,
without having paid for the privilege by
appropriate offerings of submission to
us? The fame and honor of that deed
will spread as far as the sun shines,
while all that Phoebus Apollo and I
 have won in fair combat from the hero
Laomedon [i.e., the original holder of
Ilium] will be forfeited.
The whole concept of chivalry is
embraced in those lines.120
Of course the royal tent is surrounded
by a camp. At the primordial battle for the
possession of the world the Titans camped
on Mount Ortys while over against them on
Mount Olympus stood the camp of the
gods.121 In the days before Rome the kings of
the Veii, Volsci, Aequi, and other tribes used
to challenge each other by camping on each
other’s lands, the hosts being arranged aequo
campo conlatisque signis (on a level plain
with standards joined together), in the best
Oriental manner, with the avowed intention
of carrying off cattle and everything else
unless stopped.122 When the Romans joined
in the game their king would cast a spear into
the enemy’s land “to claim a place for their
tents” (ut castris locum caperent), with a
formal invitation to the owners to submit or
fight.123 In northern and eastern Europe
where “the lords of the land established their
dominion by open combat,” we have the
stirring picture of two imperial tents,
landtioldr, pitched in groves on either side
of a fair field, each surrounded by the tents
of its retainers um stathinn, as the mobile
base from which the land was to be seized
and governed. By herald and trumpet the two
rulers challenge each other to a trial of arms
and fight according to strict and formal
rules.124 Almost a thousand years later we
find the same sport in the great tournament of
Calais. “Three vermillion-coloured
pavilions were pitched near the appointed
place for the lists,” Froissart reports, “and
before each were suspended two shields,
one for peace and one for war. . . . Any who
desired to perform a deed of arms was
required to touch one or both of these
shields.” Hearing of the challenge on the
disputed soil of Calais, the nobility of
England “said they would be blameworthy if
they did not cross the sea,” which they did in
large numbers—for not to accept a challenge
is as ignoble as not to give one. “Sir John
Holland was the first who sent his squire to
touch the war-target of Sir Boucicault who
instantly issued from his tent completely
armed,” and the tournament was on. The
procedure was faithfully repeated for all the
days of the affair; an English knight would
touch the “war-shield” of a French lord
sitting fully armed and out of sight in his tent,
waiting to rush forth with great fury at the
first hint of a challenge.125
Even more puerile than such antics was
the ritual attack on the tent itself. Since set
combat was forbidden after sundown, the
wee small hours were reserved for the
standard attack on the rival’s tent, a vital
maneuver, since once the tent had fallen the
enemy’s morale, and often his resistance,
was broken.126 A particularly realistic
version is the sequel to the brutal trespassing
of the Adversary in the Psalm of Thomas
mentioned above: the issue was settled when
the true Lord burst on the scene, “pulled up
their tent and threw it over on to the ground,
kicked out their fire, tore open their nets and
set free all the captive birds in them.”127 The
ultimate in heroic gestures for the Arab was
a night-raid on the tent of a chief: “They
suddenly knock down the principal tent-
poles,” Burckhardt reported 130 years ago,
“and whilst the surprised people are striving
to disengage themselves, . . . the cattle [are]
driven off by the assailants,” though the main
purpose is to get not cattle but honor.128
Among the nomads the overthrow of a man’s
tent signifies the dissolution of his fortunes,
for his whole existence centers around the
main pole of his tent.129 When Crum, the
Great Khan of the Bulgars, made a night-raid
on the tent of the Emperor Nicephorus, he
made a drinking-cup of his rival’s skull to
commemorate the exploit.130 The tent-raid is
by no means limited to the East. Froissart
tells how Lord James Douglas rode into the
English camp by night, “galloped to the
King’s tent, and cut two or three of its cords,
crying at the same time, ‘Douglas! Douglas
forever!’” Fauquement did the same thing in
the Duke of Normandy’s camp, “cutting
down tents and pavilions, and then, seeing
that it was time, collecting his people and
retreating most handsomely.”131
Trumpf is puzzled by the peculiar rite
with which the oldest Greek founding
festival, the Septrion, commemorated
Apollo’s victory over the Python and the
founding of the world-center at Delphi. What
is peculiar is that there is no dragon in the
rite, but that should not seem strange since
Trumpf himself has the acumen to notice that
Pytho the dragon simply represents the
original inhabitants of the land. Instead of a
dragon-fight there is a troupe of men bearing
torches and led by a youth representing
Apollo, who in the dead of night steal up in
perfect silence on a tent or reed booth;
suddenly they throw their torches into the
tent, setting it afire, overturn a table that
stands in it, and then run away like mad
without looking back.132 An odd type of
dragon-fight, to be sure, but one whose
significance should be clear by now; it is
particularly interesting because of its great
antiquity.

Alternatives to Fighting: Toll and

Taxing
 Let us recall that what so alarmed
Poseidon the landowner at the sight of a
strange camp on his shores was the failure of
the campers to make proper payment for the
privilege of setting up on his land. They
were digging in, and unless immediately
called to account would cause the owners to
lose both face and property with nothing but
glory for themselves—trespassers are not
trespassers if they can get away with it.
Everywhere certain allowance is made for
campers who are merely passing through a
country; all that is demanded of them is good
behavior and a three-day time limit.133 But
those who frequented a land for long or
regular periods were required to pay tolls
and purchase safe-conduct to keep things
from getting out of hand.
The derivation of the word toll is very
doubtful, but on one thing all the authorities
are agreed, that it is derived from Late Latin
tolonium, meaning a toll-booth or tent. Toll
is defined as “payment exacted . . . by virtue
of sovereignty or lordship . . . for permission
to pass somewhere.” Specifically it is “a
charge for the privilege of bringing goods for
sale to a market or fair, or setting up a stall. .
. . It can only be claimed by a special grant
from the Crown.” It was collected at a toll-
booth, “formerly, a temporary shed erected
at a market, etc., for payment of tolls . . . a
booth, stall, or office at which tolls are
collected.”134 Wherever the merchants pass,
even on the sands of the Gobi desert, the tent
of the toll-collector awaits them.135 The
great fairs of Europe were tent-cities,
temporary camps set up yearly on the king’s
land, where foreigners were allowed for a
set period to camp and set up their booths.136
The two things to notice about toll are (1)
that the word always goes back to a tent or
booth of some kind—which makes one
wonder whether it might not once have meant
“tent-money” (Danish told “toll,” teld
“tent”),137 and (2) that it is a token payment
only, given in recognition of sovereignty or
lordship and never as a business
arrangement between equals; it does not
cover damages nor defray expenses but
simply recognizes ownership by a
prescribed ritual and solicits as a privilege
permission to camp on another’s land at a
designated spot and for a limited and
specified period of time.
A tax, like a toll, is payment for
temporary occupation of another’s land, with
the difference that the occupation in this case
lasts for a whole year, at the end of which a
new tax must be paid. The oldest taxes on
record are those tributes of the produce of
the land (a tithe or a fifth), which were
brought to the designated collection centers,
the local shrines of the god who owned the
land, as “rent paid for the use of the land.” In
making the collection and spending it in
pious works the king was the god’s agent and
the priests were his assistants.138 Thus the
earliest temple “functioned actually as the
manor-house on an estate.”139 Since as
countless hymns inform us, God owns the
earth and all that is in it, any payments made
by men to him are the purest token payments,
given not because he needs them but as a
gesture acknowledging his ownership. That
is why failure to pay even a trivial tax calls
forth quick and savage reprisals which are
out of all proportion to the money involved
but represent the correct official reaction to
an act of open defiance.140
For refusal to pay implies willingness
to fight and vice versa. From the earliest
times a king might live in peace with another
by paying him socage, that is, “money rent . .
. not burdened with any military service,”
i.e., money paid to avoid fighting.141 When
Sir Robert Knolles asked the Duke of
Picardy, “How much will you pay us in
ready money for all this country if we will
not despoil it?” he was not cynically selling
the Duke “protection,” since the latter was
expected to meet in joyful combat any who
came to despoil his lands.142 As explained in
the Oxford English Dictionary, the word tax
in its many contexts always retains the basic
idea of a charge brought against an intruder;
to be taxed always implies an element of
trespass, and the paying of a tax always has
the flavor of appeasement. The only thing
sure about the root meaning of the word
according to Skeat is that it signifies “to
touch” or tag, suggesting to the ingenuous
mind a possible connection between being
taxed and being tagged: once one’s war-
shield has been touched one must choose
between settling with the challenger by
meeting him in arms or by giving him a token
of submission for the luxury of remaining in
one’s possessions without a fight.143
The paying of tolls and taxes was not a
declaration of loyalty to the recipient and his
way of life, but a bid to be free of both. The
zeal with which the peasants of Europe
clamored to have the “irksome personal
services” including the picturesque
performances of the droit de gite converted
into a money tax or cash payment,144 the
eagerness of “the wealthy franklin [to pay]
money rather than be dubbed a knight,” and
the insistence even of the lesser nobility on
paying socage to enjoy “freedom from
scutage,” i.e., the obligation of chivalry,145
all express the basic idea of the money-tax
as a settlement defining the limits of
obligation beyond which the payer is free.146
No such area of personal freedom was
allowed by the mystique of feudalism, which
was a sacred covenant of total
commitment.147 Likewise toll is paid by
strangers in a country not as an act of fealty,
but for the express purpose of remaining
strangers without being considered enemies
or trespassers. The theory that one was taxed
to support the strong arm of the nobility in
return for its protection against attackers
from without was a late and contrived one
that effaced the original significance of the
tax as an escape from feudal obligations.148

The Old Order Remaineth

But feudalism has ever been tenacious
of its holdings and with the assistance of the
lawyer and the priest has managed to hold its
own in the most adverse circumstances. Far
from fading into the past, “absolute
monarchies,” as H. Kohn puts it, “were the
pacemakers of modern nationalism.”149 Far
from presenting a gradual unfolding of human
liberties, the passing of the Middle Ages
brings only their progressive curtailment as
the seizure of the common forest right by the
“ungezügelte[n] Jagdlust der Machtigen” (the
unbridled passion of the mighty for hunting)
is succeeded by the acquisition of those
rights by wealthy commoners who finally
exclude the public from the forest
altogether.150 At the end of the Middle Ages
Geoffrey Tête-Noire was considered
something of a monster because “none dared
ride over his lands”; but it took the modern
free world to come up with the absolute
dominion of the No Trespassing sign.151 The
survival of the feudal or chivalric way of
life into modern times can be illustrated by
Froissart’s Chronicle, that “complete body
of the antiquities of the 14th century,” in
which the king commands respect and loyalty
only to that degree to which he risks his
person in single combat and expends the
devoted energies of his people in tireless
military campaigning,152 where the nobility
live frankly by pillage, ever “seeking
adventures . . . for by all means, allowed by
the laws, of arms, every man ought to molest
his enemy,”153 where the great prelates of the
church raided each other’s domains in the
perennial manner of the war lords of the
steppes.154 A leading role is played by the
terrible free companies, who played exactly
the same game as the nobility and “made war
on every man that was worth robbing.”155
Even the common people when they arose in
their might to shake off the oppressor
operated in the accepted manner, organizing
themselves into bannered companies and
placing (by force if necessary) those of
noble birth at their head, impatient of the
lord who sat peacefully at home, but willing
to follow to the death any noble who would
lead them to deeds of glory and rapine on
others’ lands.156 In short, all classes aspire
to the same glory and think of success in the
same terms, because it never occurs to them
that there might be any other standard of
achievement. (Even our own society remains
hypnotized by the same goals that drew
Froissart’s “perfect prince,” Gaston de Foix,
who “loved earnestly the things he ought to
love,” namely gold, food, sports, shows,
“arms and amours” and above all a
successful business deal.)157 The cities were
no exception, but “during the late Middle
Ages . . . grew less democratic and took on
more of the coloring of their aristocratic
ambience.”158 They achieved independence
only to place themselves under the great war
lords or exalt their own leading citizens to
noble rank as they sent formal challenges to
each other and raided each other’s
possessions in the best chivalric manner.159
The long-debated question of whether
European cities were founded primarily for
protection or for trade ended with a split
decision,160 since the two advantages are
inseparable and at any rate seem to yield
priority to religion, for early markets and
towns grew out of “seasonal meetings of
hunters” devoted to ancient religious
observances.161 But whether it began as a
shrine, market, or fortified place of refuge,
the city always starts out as a camp, to judge
by the root meanings of the various words
for it: civitas from *kei-, “camp,” Stadt from
Old German stedir, “Landungsplatz”; Statt
(our state) from statio, a stopping-place on
the march; burg from phyrkos, the hastily
built fence surrounding a fortified camp
(town refers to the same fence, as does the
Slavic gorod).162 The Arabic mahalla is
also a stopping-place on the march, and it
has been shown that madina, long thought to
come from din, a place of judgment, is to be
related to maidan, a camp-ground or
jousting-field.163
The rising cities of the Middle Ages
naturally resented the archaic claims and
method of the lords in their castles, but they
resented them out of envy as they aspired to
the same rights and privileges. Gastrecht,
Schutzzoll, and Stapelrecht were urban
versions of tenting-rights, toll, and taxing
respectively, and as such were administered
with a severity that only the most tyrannical
baron would have risked. The cities offered
Pfahlbürgertum or shanty-town citizenship
to those who deserted their lords to settle in
tent-cities outside the city walls, where they
continued to pay a tax for camping on the
city’s land.164 City merchants complained
loudly against the onerous toll charger of the
barons even while they levied a high
Schutzzoll on goods passing through their
own territories.165 And while the droit de
gite was steadily whittled away for the king,
the cities used their Gastrecht and
Stapelrecht to forbid transients to acquire
property or engage in any business while in
the city.166 What the cities most resented was
the baronial courts of law, yet whenever they
gained power, the leading property-owners
of the town held a tight monopoly on all
judicial offices.167 Stadtluft macht frei (the
city air makes one free) not only by offering
shelter and anonymity to the refugee, but no
less by opening the doors of aggrandizement
and even nobility to the citizen.

The Rights of Man

But what of human rights, the rights of
man? Do they not break away at last from the
old ideology? They do not. They are a
product of the Enlightenment, which put
nature in the place of God and made man a
child not of heaven but of earth. Naturalism
and Humanism find man’s origin in the earth
and its elements: it is as a literal
excrescence of the planet that mankind has an
inalienable right to its substance and its
living-space.168 Baconian science, the
founding fathers, French revolutionaries,
Physiocrats, English liberals, pragmatic
philosophers and educationists, free-
enterprising capitalists and Marxists all see
eye to eye on one basic point and share with
each other and the ancient lords of the
steppes the fundamental gospel of One
World: it is here below in “the things of this
world” that a man must seek his fulfillment.
Instead of putting an end to the wild dreams
of Nimrod, the mad hunter of old who
aspired to bring all creatures under his sway
and in the best chivalric manner challenged
God to a duel for possession of the world,169
modern scientific thinking tends to confirm
man’s forlorn hope of seizing the earth for
himself.170
The monarchs of the past in their search
for permanent tenure went to spectacular
extremes to convince themselves and the
public that it was their calling to reign here
below as Lords of Eternity in the Garden of
Delights: from prehistoric Egypt to modern
England the Master of the King’s Tents and
Revels has exerted himself to present to the
eyes of men majesty benignly reclining in a
garden bower as he presides over a feast of
abundance to which all the world is
invited.171 This royal mummery was the
greatest tent-show on earth, according to
Alföldi,172 and it was staged all over the
ancient world in rites which “represent[ed] a
harmony between man and the divine which
is beyond our boldest dreams.”173 And yet
the great garden party soon becomes a great
bore, as king and caliph discover in
countless popular tales and legends; this
world can offer but a peep-show paradise
after all. The whole thing, aside from being
enormously expensive, is too strenuous and
contrived for real delight—it is vanity fair,
the tent-city from which the robber Pilgrim is
only too glad to escape even with empty
pockets, provided, of course, that he has
some other world, some New Jerusalem, to
escape to.174

The Other Nomads

The yearning for such a world and the
faith in its existence, or even the mere
possibility of its existence, has always
offered an alternative to the heavy-handed
warrior’s solution to the problem of survival
in a hostile world. Pilgrims, like all nomads,
have a deep distrust of anything that might tie
them down or hamper their freedom of
movement.175 The city especially, designed
to make man forget the marginal and nomadic
nature of life on earth and hence lose sight of
the distant Celestial City, is to the pious
pilgrim an object of loathing and
suspicion.176 Not only do the early Jews and
Christians think of themselves as das
wandernde Gottesvolk (the wandering
people of God),177 and not only does the
dogmatic constitution of the church (1964)
adopt for Roman Catholics the surprising
title of “The Wayfaring Church,”178 but
obsession with the idea of life as a
pilgrimage is no less conspicuous in Islam,
the religions of the Far East, and classical
antiquity—was there ever a more Passionate
Pilgrim than Pindar? How do the pilgrim
bands make out with the jealous, suspicious,
and insecure lords of the earth?
In rendering to Caesar what was
Caesar’s (cf. Matthew 22:21), the early
Christian was not recognizing divine
sovereignty but buying his way out; a sharp
distinction was made between paying Caesar
tax-money that was his (and there is no
question of excessive taxation since what
Caesar owns is nothing less than the orbis
terrarum itself), and giving him the homage
of a pinch of incense. The latter act was an
acknowledgment of divinity, and a good
Christian died sooner than make the
concession, while the former was merely a
recognition of ownership. The early
Christians were urged to “make . . . friends
of the mammon of unrighteousness” (Luke
16:9) as the best way to be rid of him,
paying quickly and gladly whatever fees the
masters of the earth imposed on them.179
Then they went their way, resolutely refusing
to own lands or houses of their own which,
they felt, would encumber them with worldly
obligations and vitiate their status as
strangers and pilgrims.180
It is understandable that the lords
temporal and spiritual looked upon popular
pilgrimages as dangerous and unnecessary.
For the pilgrim is unattached, with a
knowing and superior sort of aloofness
inherited from the sectaries of the desert, that
cool detachment that has ever brought down
upon the heads of the Jews the baffled wrath
and fury of the lords of the earth. For unless
the feudal mystique with appurtenances is
taken seriously, it becomes high comedy and
its authority collapses. What more deadly
threat to the whole system than refusal to
enter into the spirit of the thing? And
pilgrims do refuse; they are not to be bought
off, and though they are sometimes skillful at
procuring safe-conducts for themselves in
spite of the determined efforts of the lords of
the land to deny them all freedom of
movement, such passports are, like the
payment of tolls, a declaration not of
allegiance but of independence.181
The Crusades were a grandiose attempt
to combine the two types of nomadism. It
was the great lords themselves who after
bringing economic, political, and moral
collapse on Europe by their violent and
irresponsible ways offered to lead the
people of the West back to the Holy City,182
and when they got there affected to establish
the perfect model of feudalism in the Assizes
of Jerusalem.183 In this document we have
the supreme attempt of men of violence to
put the stamp of holiness on their
possessions, enlisting the awful sanctions of
religion to secure for themselves the
holdings which they had seized from each
other in total disregard of any right, and
imposing an eternal and inviolable stability
upon an order established by wild and
tumultuous brawling. In the Crusades the
whole legal and ecclesiastical fiction of
feudalism, laboriously contrived and
stunningly staged, soon degenerated into a
sordid free-for-all in which those who
sought to possess this world and the other at
once, wearing the armor of conquest beneath
the sacrosanct robes of unworldly pilgrims,
ended up possessing neither.184

The Return to Outer Space

Philosophy today is much concerned
with the feelings of loneliness and insecurity
that beset modern man. He is depicted as a
displaced person, allergic to his
environment, adapted “by at least five
hundred million years of vertebrate
evolution” to one type of life, but forced to
settle for an entirely different one.185 Man is
so far from home, indeed, that biologists
profess themselves at a loss to discover to
just what type of environment he is really
suited.186 In his present parlous state he
behaves as harassed and insecure animals
do, as many studies are now discovering.187
We find in both human and animal
communities two fundamental types of social
hierarchy, an “absolute hierarchy,”
represented by the now-classic pecking-
orders, and a “territorial hierarchy,” in
which men and beasts alike possess and
defend given territories according to strict
and formal rules. A creature’s territory is
“not so much . . . a solid area as . . . a
number of places,” which the owner visits in
regular rounds; if in his rounds he discovers
that an alien has invaded any part of his
territory the owner is under obligation to
fight or submit as a vassal to the
aggressor.188 At once the heroic feudal
pattern springs to mind; and it is reinforced
by the important rule that these highly formal
hierarchies of status and possession come
into existence only when the animals are all
under pressure, that is, where optimum living
conditions no longer prevail due to
overcrowding or other factors, or in other
words, where there has been a “Fall,” the
creature having been forced out of its
original paradise.189
Strangely enough, the idea now being
put forth by scientists of a long human
preexistence in a world quite different from
the one in which man now finds himself is
basic in the early Jewish190 and Christian,191
as well as Oriental192 and Platonic
thinking,193 all of which have a strongly
nostalgic other-worldly orientation. Science
and religion now join philosophy in asking,
“Why does man feel himself a stranger in the
world of nature?” It is not only the desperate
hero of the epic who feels out of place; even
the easy-living Victorian romantic resents his
earthly environment and hints at his kinship
with a higher world.194 If this is indeed our
only home, as the prevailing philosophy
teaches, if this is the only world we have
ever known, and if conditions have been
constant enough to allow “five hundred
million years” of survival without a break,
why are we perpetually ill at ease in our
environment instead of being beautifully
adapted to it? Why are we constantly beset
by yearnings for paradise?195 And why do
we look upon those who claim to be happily
at home in the present setting as either sick
souls, cretins, or hypocrites?196
It is a significant thing that those
societies which have most emphatically
renounced any belief in another world have
been the most eager in the exploration of
space. It would seem that as soon as men
become convinced that their whole existence
is to be limited to this planet they begin to
feel an urge to get away from it, yearning
like the Greeks with a strange pothos for the
deliverance of great distances and spaces, no
matter to what unknown doom it might lead
them.197 The rediscovery of outer space in
our time puts us in much the same position as
our ancestors on the eve of the great
Völkerwanderung.198 Our first reaction has
been the same as theirs: in his “monstrous
deracinement,” a Dutch philosopher
comments, “man has surrounded himself with
a protective cocoon against reality.”199 The
conquest of the earth by the closed car and
its extension, the mobile home—a
streamlined, hermetically sealed capsule,
air-conditioned against the rude elements
and totally insulated from any contaminating
contact with mother earth—is the expression
of an ideal which is most fully realized in jet
transportation, combining the snug security
of a private world with an exhilarating sense
of enterprise and power, and offering in
incongruous combination the supreme
satisfaction of relaxing in embryonic
coziness while moving with incredible and
effortless speed through an almost perfect
vacuum.200
The mobile tents of the ancients were no
contemptible step toward the achievement of
this ideal. Ancient and modern travelers do
not know which to admire the more in the
dwellings of felt and goat’s-hair, the skill
with which they are transported from place
to place or the efficiency with which they
meet every challenge of the elements. By
their ingenious insulation and mobility these
dwellings of the highest and lowest mortals
have made it possible for their owners to
survive in deadly outer spaces.

Conclusion
 If it comes as a surprise to learn that the
clothes we wear today were designed
thousands of years ago for the comfort of
riders on the windy steppes of Asia,201 one
is no less bemused at the thought that our
basic political philosophy comes from the
same world. Our storm-driven ancestors met
the challenge of their predicament with two
solutions: the one sought to make the earth a
permanent home and possess it wholly; the
other to move on to some happier home,
whatever and wherever that might be. The
one philosophy is based on the firm belief
that this is our only world, the other on the
equally convincing and far more easily
demonstrable proposition that we are
transients who “here have no abiding
kingdom.”202 The paying of tolls and taxes
has made it possible for the two ideologies
to coexist in the world; it is an arrangement
by which each side humors the other: the
payer of taxes concedes to the recipient the
right to imagine himself as the owner of the
earth, while the other in return for this
recognition allows his client the luxury of
imagining himself the citizen of another
world. The one while ceaselessly ranging
abroad in the earth thinks of himself as lord
of an immovable possession, while the other,
tied to his patch of glebe or dingy workshop,
thinks of himself as a courser through the
endless expanses of heaven. The common
symbol of both, the sign both of possession
and of wandering, is the tent.
Living in an atmosphere of emergency
and uncertainty, the state has always been
obliged to tax to preserve its identity. Taxes
are viewed by those who are asked to pay
the most as a personal insult and an affront to
the sacredness of property. That is exactly
what they are, and what they were originally
meant to be. An ancient tax-notice, an
imperious tap on the shield, was nothing less
than an invitation to a sojourner in a land to
justify his presence there either by satisfying
the claims of the owner to recognition or by
meeting him in open combat for possession.
We may deplore taxes, but we may not resent
them.

Notes
This article was originally published
in Western Political Quarterly 19/4 (1966):
599-630.

Footnotes
^1. Hector M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1912), and Hector M. Chadwick and Nora
K. Chadwick, The Growth of Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1932). The situation was suggested by Hugo
 Winckler, “Geschichte und Geographie,” in
Eberhard Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und
das Alte Testament, 3d ed. (Berlin: Reuther
and Reichard, 1903), 4.
^2. Alfred O. Haldar, The Notion of the Desert in
Sumero-Accadian and West-Semitic
Religions (Uppsala: Lundequist, 1950), 29;
in every case the land is turned into a desert,
ibid., 22, 26-29. The great violence of the
winds at the time of the Flood is indicated in
fragments of the Gilgamesh Epic, Tab. V,
12-20; Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh
Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1946), 48-49;
cf. W. G. Lambert, “New Light on the
Babylonian Flood,” Journal of Semitic
Studies 5 (1960): 117-18, and “A New Look
at the Babylonian Background of Genesis,”
Journal of Theological Studies 16 (1965):
296. Johannes B. Bauer, “Der priesterliche
Schöpfungshymnus in Gen. 1,”
Theologische Zeitschrift 20 (1964): 3, notes
that the wind which blows over the waters in
Genesis 8:1 is really a Gottessturm,
gewaltiger Sturm (divine storm, a powerful
storm). Cf. Pyramid Texts (PT) 298b-c,
326d, and Hesiod, Theogony 654-714.
Many later sources are cited in Robert
Eisler, Iēsous Basileus ou Basileusas, 2
vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1929-30), 2:107-
9, 113, 626-28. The great wind is mentioned
in Jubilees 10:26, and E. A. Wallis Budge,
tr., The Chronography of Gregory Abû’l
Faraj, the Son of Aaron, the Hebrew
Physician, Commonly Known as Bar
Hebraeus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1932), 1:8; and there are
interesting Arabic accounts in Rosa Klinke-
Rosenberger, ed., Das Götzenbuch: Kitâb
al-Aṣnâm des Ibn al-Kalbî (Leipzig:
Winterthur, 1941), 58, and Ferdinand
Wüstenfeld, “Die älteste ägyptische
Geschichte nach den Zäuber- und
Wundererzählungen der Araber,” Orient und
Occident 1 (1862): 331. For early Christian
references, see Eusebius, Chronicon
(Chronicle) I, 4, in PG 19:116; Epiphanius,
Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies) I, 1,
 5, in PG 41:184; Pseudo-Melito, in J. C. T.
Otto, Corpus Apologetarum Christianorum
Saeculi Secundi, 9 vols. (Jena: Mauke,
1872), 9:510-11; cf. T. Francis Glasson,
“Water, Wind and Fire (Luke III. 16) and
Orphic Initiation,” New Testament Studies 3
(1956): 69-71.
^3. E. Demougeout, “Variations climatiques et
invasion,” Revue historique 233 (1965): 11.
In the twelfth century B.C. the island of
Cyprus was covered by wind-driven sand,
ibid., 8, and what classical writers call the
great flooding of the northlands in the
second century A.D. was accompanied by
heavy deposition of such sands, ibid., 17-18.
Today it is maintained that the deserts of the
Near East and the Sahara itself were
produced largely through human agency
within historic times; Henri Lhote, Vanished
Civilizations, ed. Edward Bacon (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 12-32.
^4. Samuel N. Kramer, “New Light on the Early
History of the Ancient Near East,” AJA 52
(1948): 159.
^5. For Horus and his royal counterparts, see PT
393a-414c, 298a-299b, 308a-312a, 261, and
so forth; J. Zandee, “Seth als Sturmgott,”
Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache 90
(1962): 144-56; Pierre Montet, Le drame
d’Avaris (Paris: Geuthner, 1941), 87-88; for
the famous “Cannibal Hymn,” see Raymond
O. Faulkner, “The ‘Cannibal Hymn’ from
the Pyramid Texts,” JEA 10 (1924): 97-103.
The oldest shrine of Egypt was the
“Thunderbolt-city” founded by the Storm-
god, whose high priest was “the Warrior,”
Gerald A. Wainwright, “The Bull Standards
of Egypt,” JEA 19 (1933): 46-47. “This
storm was the raging of Ra at the thunder-
cloud,” and so forth, E. A. Wallis Budge,
The Papyrus of Ani, 3 vols. (New York:
Putnam, 1913), 2:384-85. Enlil, Anu, and
Ningirsu came into Mesopotamia as lords of
the storm; Thorkild Jacobsen, “Primitive
Democracy in Ancient Mesopotamia,” in
Henri Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy
(New York: Penguin, 1951), 147, 150, 153;
see also Marduk, R. Labat, Le Poème
babylonien de la Création (Paris:
Maisonneuve, 1935), 33-34. The earthly
king is “the storm-wind of battles,” Bruno
Meissner, Die babylonisch-assyrische
Literatur (Wildpark-Potsdam: Athenaion,
1927), 39, and aspires “to shine as Lord in
the storm,” M. Witzel, “Zu den Enmerkar-
Dichtungen,” Orientalia 18 (1949): 276.
Jürgen Smolian, “Kultischer Hintergrund bei
Wagenrennen,” Zeitschrift für Religions-
und Geistesgeschichte 17 (1965): 264-65.
The Greek Zeus is nephelegeretes, lord of
thunder-storms; Martin P. Nilsson,
Griechische Feste (Leipzig: Teubner, 1906),
2-3; Arthur B. Cook, Zeus, 3 vols.
(Cambridge: University Press, 1925), 2:851,
830-58. On Apollo, the migrating hero,
Wernicke, “Apollon,” in RE 2:20-21; as
storm-god, J. Rendel Harris, “Apollo at the
Back of the North Wind,” Journal of
Hellenic Studies 45 (1925): 229-42; on
Hermes as such, Wilhelm H. Roscher,
“Hermes als Wind- und Luftgott,” in
Wilhelm H. Roscher, ed., Ausführliches
Lexikon der griechischen und römischen
Mythologie, 7 vols. (Hildesheim: Olms,
1965), 1:2:2360-62; and on Herakles,
Bernhard Schweitzer, Herakles (Tübingen:
Mohr, 1922), 47-48. For the Hittite Teshub,
Oliver R. Gurney, The Hittites (New York:
Penguin, 1952), 192-94. “Der Wettergott
von Ḫalab” dominates the entire Near East,
see Horst Klengel, “Der Wettergott von
Ḫalab,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 19
(1965): 87-93. The insignia of the chief
Celtic god were the wheel, thunderbolt, and
hammer; Carl Clemen, Religionsgeschichte
Europas, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1926)
1:319-23. Othinn as successor to Thor is
both a wanderer and a storm-god; Cornelius
P. Tiele, Tiele-Söderbloms Kompendium der
Religionsgeschichte, 5th ed. (Berlin:
Grabow, 1920), 480-82; Schweitzer,
Herakles, 86. Even Alexander as a world-
conquerer is Lord of the Storm, his birth
being announced by supernatural thunder
and lightning; Pseudo-Callisthenes, Life of
Alexander I, 12, in Karl Müller, ed., The
 Fragments of the Lost Historians of
Alexander the Great (Chicago: Ares, 1979).
In Hebrew tradition “Geisteswind” and the
“Heere des Himmels” appear on the scene
together, recalling actual prehistoric
upheavals; Klaus Koch, “Wort und Einheit
des Schöpfergottes in Memphis und
Jerusalem,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und
Kirche 62 (1965-66): 276.
^6. Sir Dudley Stamp, “Man and His
Environment,” Scientific Journal 1 (May
1965): 76-78.
^7. Julian Morgenstern, “The Ark, the Ephod,
and the ‘Tent of Meeting,’ "Hebrew Union
College Annual 17 (1942-43): 263. Since
the function of the tent is shelter, ibid., 183,
it is the palladium or symbol of protection,
160, 184. While the root meaning of the
Greek skene is to shadow or shelter, “to live
in tents” had the popular sense of living
adventurously: “Hypo skenais kai en
allodapei diatemenoi” (dwelling in tents and
in a foreign land), Heliodorus, Aethiopica 5
(2, 13). The tent in the backyard still holds
 for the young the double appeal of
adventure and cozy security.
^8. See Hugh Nibley, “Hierocentric State,”
Western Political Quarterly 4 (1951): 238-
44; reprinted in this volume, pages 114-23.
The distinction between the leader of a
migrating band and a king in the
conventional sense has been treated by Karl
H. Bernhardt, Das Problem der
altorientalischen Königsideologie im Alten
Testament (Leiden: Brill, 1961), who finds
the transition from the leader of a nomadic
band (mkrb) to the sacral “Grösskonigtum”
(mlk) to follow normally on the
establishment of a settled capital, ibid., 169,
178-79. “The holy tent itself was a visible
and potent title to his [David’s] position as
king,” i.e., there was no conflict between the
two conceptions of dominion; Morgenstern
“The Ark, the ephod, and the ‘Tent of
Meeting,’” 242.
^9. Bernhard Grdseloff, “Nouvelles données
concernant la tente de purification,” Annales
du service des antiquités de l’Égypte 51
 (1951): 130-31, 134, 138-39: Even the great
ceremonial buildings retain the name of sḥ-
nṯr, “tent of the god,” and íbw, “reed
house.” The royal tent appears on
predynastic ivory tablets, Émile Massoulard,
Préhistoire et protohistoire d’Égypte (Paris:
Institut d’Ethnologie, 1949), 446, and is
often mentioned in the PT 319, 345, 349,
363, 690; “O King, Horus has woven his
tent before thee; Seth has stretched out thy
canopy; the father is sheltered by the divine
tent . . . in thy favorite [camping] places.”
^10. Adriaan de Buck, ed., The Egyptian Coffin
Texts, 7 vols. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1935-61), 1:253-54, Spell
60, is quite vivid. The lighting of fires in the
shrine (represented by the ideogram of a
tent) is to drive away the evil things that lurk
about at night; Alexandre Moret, Le rituel
du culte divin journalier en Égypte (Paris:
Leroux, 1902), 12-13.
^11. Jacobsen, “Primitive Democracy in Ancient
Mesopotamia,” 153.
^12. Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and
 Culture, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University
Press, 1947), 2:454-55; W. H. Irwin, “Le
sanctuaire central israelite,” Revue biblique
72 (1965): 164; see above, n. 7.
^13. Haldar, Notion of the Desert, 19. “Men of
all conditions and nations . . . look to the
Arab camp as a safe retreat and refuge,”
Philip J. Baldensperger, “The Immovable
East,” Palestine Exploration Fund
Quarterly Statement (1922): 170-71.
^14. In the Tent of Tryst the leader communes
with God and transmits the divine
instructions to the people; Menahem Haran,
“The Nature of the ‘Ohel Mocedh in
Pentateuchal Sources,” Journal of Semitic
Studies 5 (1960): 52-54, 57-58; Alois Musil,
Arabia Petraea, 3 vols. (Vienna: Hölder,
1907-8), 3:130, 353-55. All the great
patriarchs dwelt and communed with God in
tents; Immanuel Benzinger, Hebräische
Archäologie (Leipzig: Mohr, 1894), 11. The
veil of the temple would seem to be a
survival of a nomad tent representing
heaven; André Pelletier, “Le grand rideau du
 vestibule du temple de Jérusalem,” Syria 35
(1958): 218, 223-26; the antiquity of the
idea goes back to the prehistoric “reed wall”
through which Ut-Napishtim (the
Babylonian Noah) conversed with deity;
Lambert, “New Light on the Babylonian
Flood,” 118-19. We seem to detect an
Egyptian parallel in de Buck, Egyptian
Coffin Texts, 1:157, Spell 38.
^15. Morgenstern, “The Ark, the Ephod, and the
‘Tent of Meeting,’” 248; cf. 191-92, 194,
198, 201-2, 204, 206, 228, 254-55. The
author favors an original camel-mounting,
yet the oldest authentic example, from Dura
Europos, shows the Ark of the Covenant as
“plainly a small tent” mounted on a wagon
drawn by oxen, ibid., 250.
^16. András Alföldi, “Die Geschichte des
Throntabernakels,” Nouvelle Clio 1-2
(1950): 537-66. Alföldi emphasizes the idea
of the sheltering baldachin as the worldwide
symbol of royal authority, an aspect also
treated by Morgenstern, “The Ark, the
Ephod, and the ‘Tent of Meeting,’” 171-72,
 174-76, 178, 180-81, 196-97, 208, 212,
228.
^17. Jürgen Smolian, “Vehicula Religiosa: Wagen
in Mythos, Ritus, Kultus und Mysterium,”
Numen 10 (1963): 202-27.
^18. So paradoxical do these combinations appear
that scholars still have difficulty envisaging
the biblical picture of Solomon’s throne or
bed beneath a sheltering pavilion supported
by cedar poles and mounted on a wagon;
Jacques Winandy, “La Litière de Solomon,”
Vetus Testamentum 15 (1965): 103-10. On
the flying throne, August Wünsche,
Salomons Thron und Hippodrom, Abbilder
des babylonischen Himmelsbildes (Leipzig:
Pfeiffer, 1906). The Persian world-capital is
Hvaniratha, the cosmic hub of the “loud-
moving chariot,” the real city being built on
the plan of the wheel; Jürgen Trumpf,
“Stadtgründung und Drachenkampf,”
Hermes 86 (1958): 139. See especially
Werner Müller, Die heilige Stadt: Roma
quadrata, himmlisches Jerusalem und die
Mythe vom Weltnabel (Stuttgart:
 Kohlhammer, 1961), 101, 127-34. Throne,
temple, and holy city have often been
identified; H. P. l’Orange, Studies on the
Iconography of Cosmic Kingship in the
Ancient World (New York: Caratas, 1982),
917, 51-62, and so forth.
^19. As early as 2400 B.C., Shamash is depicted
as traveling in his wagon by day and his boat
by night; Smolian, “Vehicula Religiosa,” 203,
220; J. van Dijk, “La fête du nouvel an dans
un texte de Šulgi,” Bibliotheca Orientalis
11 (1954): 83-88. In Egypt such ceremonial
boats and wagons are attested in the Old
Kingdom; Smolian, “Vehicula Religiosa,”
214. The great gods of the Indo-Aryans are
all wagon-riders of the skies, ibid., 204.
Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, ed.
James S. Stallybrass, 3 vols. (London: Bell,
1883), 1:252. Ancient shamans regularly
commuted between earth and heaven in
their wagons; Alföldi, “Geschichte des
Throntabernakels,” 548-49; Smolian,
“Vehicula Religiosa,” 208-11.
^20. This is the sense of the “cloud [that]
 presumably rested upon the tent containing
the Ark” at its “various camping stations,”
Haran, “Nature of the’ Ohel Mocedh,” 50.
While Smolian, “Vehicula Religiosa,” 226,
scouts the theory of some that it was the
contemplation of the stars of the Big Dipper
(Charlie’s Wain) that first gave men the idea
of constructing a wagon, he does suggest the
ingenious theory that wagon-springs were
invented to hold the wagon-box and its
sacred contents in a state of suspension
above the earth, ibid., 215. Alexander’s
funeral car that moved from Babylon to
Alexandria was a huge cuṭfa, or suspended
shrine containing a throne; Diodorus,
Bibliotheca Historica XVIII, 26.
^21. Franz Altheim, Weltgeschichte Asiens im
griechischen Zeitalter, 2 vols. (Halle:
Niemeyer, 1947), 1:166. On the cleansing
offices of the wind, Eisler, Iēsous Basileus
ou Basileusas 2:104-6. “As a swiftrushing
mighty wind cleanses the plain,” Zend-
Avesta, frag. VIII, v, 30, in James
Darmesteter, The Zend-Avesta, 3 vols.
 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1880-87), 1:101.
^22. The Egyptians felt the heavens to be all
around them: “The King’s horror is to march
in the darkness without being able to see
those [stars] which are above him and those
which are below him,” PT 260:323; see R.
T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in
Ancient Egypt (New York: Grove, 1960),
130-32. Benjamin Schwartz, “A Hittite
Ritual Text,” Orientalia 16 (1947): 31, gives
a Hittite incantation expressing the common
belief that one can approach the stars by
climbing a very high mountain. According to
the cosmology of Theon, “the sun and the
planets around it form a party of travelers, a
‘caravan’—this being the exact meaning of
the Greek word synodia." Erik V. Erhardt-
Siebold, The Astronomy of John Scot
Erigena (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins,
1940), 16. The Arabic names of the
constellations show that the nomads thought
of themselves as moving and living among
the stars on their hunting migrations, Georg
Jacob, Altarabisches Beduinenleben (Berlin:
 Mayer and Müller, 1897), 159-60.
^23. The kings’ ceremonial wagons are taken
over directly from the sky-cars of their
divine ancestors; Smolian, “Vehicula
Religiosa,” 212, 214, 217, 219, 221-22.
Some ancient societies simply lived by
lightning; Seneca, Quaestiones Naturales II,
34; cf. Jacobsen, “Primitive Democracy in
Ancient Mesopotamia,” 138-40, 153-57.
^24. Cf. Gustave E. von Grunebaum,
Muhammadan Festivals (New York:
Schumann, 1958), 19; Knut Tallquist,
“Himmelsgegenden und Winde,” Studia
Orientalia 2 (1928): 147-50. Qibla and
qubba are cognate with Babylonian-Assyrian
kibrat, “die 4 Weltquadraten des Alls,” and
with the Sumerian kippat, “die 4
Weltecken,” Friedrich Jeremias, “Semitische
Völker in Vorderasien,” in Alfred Bertholet
and Edvard Lehmann, eds., Lehrbuch der
Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols. (Tübingen:
Mohr, 1925), 1:513. Without the qibla, the
wandering nomad would be lost in space,
Thaclabi, Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’ (Cairo, 1922),
 70.
^25. “Templum tribus modis dicitur . . . ab natura
in caelo, ab auspiciis in terra, a similitudine
sub terra,” Varro, De Lingua Latina VII, 6-
9; the claim that this idea is of Greek origin
does not detract from its significance, Stefan
Weinstock, “Templum,” in RE 2:5:481; and
Stefan Weinstock, “Templum,”
Mitteilungen des Deutschen
Archäologischen Instituts. Römische
Abteilung 47 (1932): 100-101, 104, 107,
109. On the universality of the concept, W.
Kroll, “Mundus,” in RE 16:563. It was as
leader of a migrating band that Romulus
would take his bearings on the heavens from
the door of his sacred tent; Samuel Pitiscus,
Lexicon Antiquitatum Romanarum, 3 vols.
(Venice: Balleoniana, 1719), 2:908. The
tent-temples of the Mongols were such
observatories; Henning Haslund-
Christensen, Men and Gods in Mongolia
(New York: Dutton, 1935), 282.
^26. The cosmic nature of various tents as the
“Himmelsgewölbe des Weltherrschers” is
 discussed by Alföldi, “Geschichte des
Throntabernakels,” 560-61. In Israel the tent
was a representation of heaven; Pelletier,
“Grand rideau du vestibule du temple de
Jérusalem,” 223-26; Albert Vanhoye, “Par la
tente plus grande et plus parfaite (He 9,
11),” Biblica 46 (1965): 5. Our quotation is
from Comas of Prague, Topographia
Christiana (Christian Topography) 5, in PG
88:201.
^27. The prehistoric Ben-stone at Heliopolis
seems to have been such a cosmic tent-pole;
Hermann Kees, Aegypten (Tübingen: Mohr,
1928), 1, 4, 6. Clark, Myth and Symbol in
Ancient Egypt, 59, quotes a Coffin Text:
“The Great God lives fixed in the middle of
the sky upon his support; the guide-ropes
are adjusted for that great hidden one, the
dweller in the city.” In PT 254 (280), the
king is “the star of those who stand in the
presence of the pillar [pole] of the stars.”
The concept is basic in shamanism: “The
pole in the middle of the shaman’s tent or
house is the symbol of the world-pillar. . . .
 The posjo thus pictures that part of the
universe where heaven and earth meet, and
where there is an opening . . . through which
one can pass to the outer world,” Nils Lid,
“The Mythical Realm of the Far North,”
Laos: Comparative Studies of Folklore and
Regional Ethnology 1 (1951): 62. The
Arabs call the World Mountain “the Central
Pole of the Tent,” Trumpf, “Stadtgründung
und Drachenkampf,” 133, n. 1, citing
Eliade.
^28. As the tent is a scale-model of the heaven,
so the royal Schirmdach is a “Miniaturbild
des Himmelszeltes,” Alföldi, “Geschichte
des Throntabernakels,” 538. For a general
treatment, Robert Eisler, Weltenmantel und
Himmelszelt, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1910).
The festival wagon of the Panathenaeon was
covered with a tent woven of the same stuff
as the cosmic mantle of Athenia, see
Smolian, “Vehicula Religiosa,” 225; and PT
587 (1596-97); cf. PT 690 (2094), the Lady
Nut receives such a garment when the King
builds his holy city. The Tabernacle is the
 likeness of the heavenly Temple, 2 Baruch
4:3-4.
^29. See n. 24 above. The four corner-poles of
the ccuṭfa, the Ark, and so forth, as well as
the central pole were decorated with astral
symbols; Morgenstern, “The Ark, the
Ephod, and the ‘Tent of Meeting,’” 179,
183, 194, 201. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
are called “the three tent-poles of the
world,” Eisler, Weltenmantel und
Himmelszelt, 2:286, just as Peter, James,
and John are “the three styloi (wooden
poles) of the church,” Galatians 2:9.
^30. The round capitol dome with its supporting
columns goes back to the Imperial Rundsaal
derived from the domed mobile pavilion of
the Asiatic monarch; Alföldi, “Geschichte
des Throntabernakels,” 563-64. Four tall
wooden poles stood in front of every
Egyptian temple, suggesting the "4 pure
poles” of the tent of Osiris; PT 303; cf. 264.
The pillars of the Torah shrine represent the
four tent-poles of the Ark; Joseph Sloane,
“The Torah Shrine in the Ashburnham
 Pentateuch,” JQR 25 (1934-35): 4-5.
^31. Sources in n. 18 above. The idea of organic
extension is treated by L. Voelkl,”
‘Orientierung’ in Weltbild der ersten
christlichen Jahrhunderte,” Rivista di
Archeologia Cristiana 25 (1949): 155, and
Hugh W. Nibley, “Christian Envy of the
Temple,” JQR 50 (1959): 101-3; reprinted in
CWHN 4:394-95. For a bibliography, Hans
Herter, “Die Rundform in Platons Atlantis
und ihre Nachwirkung in der Villa Hadriani,”
Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 96
(1953): 5, n. 9. “The first clear-cut trend
[towards urbanization] to appear in the
archaeological record is the rise of the
temple.” Robert M. Adams, “The Origin of
Cities,” Scientific American 203
(September 1960): 159.
^32. The oldest known stone temples are
modeled after tents, C. M. Firth,
“Excavations of the Service des Antiquités at
Saqqara (November 1926—April 1927),”
Annales du service des antiquités de
l’Égypte 27 (1927): 109, as is also apparent
 from prehistoric Mesopotamian seals. The
ccuṭfa or qubba, according to Morgenstern,
“The Ark, the Ephod, and the ‘Tent of
Meeting,’” may be of leather, 207-9, of
“thin wooden boards,” 157, or of wooden
lattice-work, 160. The same is true of the
Roman templum and tabernaculum, and
even of the golden domes of the great
Khans; Ibn Baṭūṭa, Riḥla (Cairo: 1938),
1:213. In studying archaic Mesopotamian
shrines, E. S. Stevens, “The Cult-hut or
Mandi of the Mandaeans,” Ancient Egypt
and the East (1934): 44, notes that “if a
nomad tribe settles it at once uses reed mat
instead of the woven wool tent-cloth,” the
former being cheap and easily replaceable.
Thus the material of the tent does not
change its essential form or nature.
^33. H. G. May, “The Ark—A Miniature
Temple,” American Journal of Semitic
Languages and Literatures 52 (1936): 215-
34; Haran, “Nature of the ‘Ohel Mocedh,”
50. “Solomon did not dare infringe the
primary significance of the Ark. It might
 ‘rest’ in a house of cedar . . . but it must
never cease to be the mobile vehicle of His
presence, ready at any moment to resume its
activity,” W. J. Phythian-Adams, The People
and the Presence (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1942), 16; cf. 23, 47.
^34. Cf. Stevens, “Cult-hut or Mandi of the
Mandaeans,” 39-41. The common Indo-
European root mand- signifies a structure of
woven stuff; Julius Pokorny,
Indogermanisches etymologisches
Wörterbuch, 2 vols. (Bern: Francke, 1959),
1:699.
^35. Memphis, the first Egyptian city, takes its
name from “the King’s campground,” Kurt
H. Sethe, Beiträge zur ältesten Geschichte
Ägyptens (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1905), 124-25.
Jerusalem was laid out on the pattern of the
camp of Israel; Haran, “Nature of the ‘Ohel
Mocedh,” 61, 64-65. All great Moslem
conquerors “established cities, or more
precisely fortified camps, which later
became cities,” Claude Cahen, “Zur
Geschichte der städtischen Gesellschaft in
islamischen Orient,” Saeculum 9 (1958): 62.
So also the great Asiatic conquerors, Priscus
Rhetor, De Legationibus Gentium ad
Romanos 58, in PG 113:724 (Attila). The
Mongol capitol was the urga or örgö,
“meaning ‘princely camp, palace,’” George
N. Rörich, Trails to Inmost Asia (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1931), 135.
For the same system in Africa, Hans C.
Peyer, “Das Reisekönigtum des
Mittelalters,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-
und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 51 (1964): 17-18;
Paul Radin, Social Anthropology (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1932), 79. For Europe
see below, nn. 162-65. Archaeology bears
this out: the oldest Egyptian towns were
camps of mat huts or windscreens,
Massoulard, Préhistoire et protohistoire
d’Égypte, 33-34; so also in Palestine, John
Waechter, “The Beginning of Civilization in
the Middle East,” Palestine Exploration
Fund Quarterly Statement 85 (1953): 130-
31. “Polybius VI, 31, 10, compares the
Hellenistic city to the camp of a Roman
 legion,” William W. Tarn, Hellenistic
Civilization, 3d ed. (New York: Meridian,
1951), 310, such camps following the same
pattern as those of the Hittites, Hurrians,
and Assyrians, Alexandre Moret, Histoire de
l’Orient, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses
universitaires, 1941), 1:462-63.
^36. Cyrill von Korvin-Krasiński, “Die heilige
Stadt,” Review of Werner Müller, Die
heilige Stadt, in Zeitschrift für Religions-
und Geistesgeschichte 16 (1964): 268, 270.
^37. See Nibley, “The Hierocentric State, 241-42;
reprinted in this volume, pages 118-21. The
Greek expression for “hold a festival” is
simply skenein, to put up a tent; Martin P.
Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen
Religion, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1955),
1:779-80.
^38. The fathers cannot decide whether
Jerusalem is in heaven or earth as it moves
between, Augustine, Contra Donatistas X,
26, in PL 43:409-10; Jerome, Epistolae
(Epistle) 46, in PL 22:485, 489; Paul
Baudrus Notae in Librum de Mortibus
 Persecutorum, in PL 7:621; Cyril of
Alexandria, Commentarius in Isaiam
Prophetam (Commentary on Isaiah) 18:18,
in PG 70:468; Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica
(Ecclesiastical History) III, 16-17, in PL
95:256-58.
^39. Jerome, Commentarius in Isaiam
Prophetam (Commentary on Isaiah) 10:33,
in PL 24:369. The Jews call the heavenly
Jerusalem “the true tent,” since it “descends
from heaven as a tent,” H. Rusche,
“Himmlisches Jerusalem,” in Michael
Buchberger, ed., Lexikon für Theologie und
Kirche, 10 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1930-
38), 5:367-68. The Fathers believe that the
veil of the Temple represents the original
tent of communion with God; e.g.,
Epiphanius, Against Heresies II, 1, in PG
41:1049; Cyril of Jerusalem, De Adoratione
in Spiritu et Veritate 9, in PG 68:589; Cyril
of Alexandria, In Joannis Evangelium IV, 4,
in PG 73:617; Theodoret, Ecclesiastical
History IV, 16, in PG 82:1161; Jerome,
Epistle 20, in PL 22:992; Raban Maurus,
 Expositio super Jeremiam (Exposition on
Jeremiah) XIII, 33, in PL 111:1065;
Thomas Aquinas, Summa III, 457-58.
^40. Origen, Commentaria in Evangelium
Joannis (Commentary on John( 10:23, in
PG 14:381. The Church is a tent because it
represents God’s coming to earth for
temporary sojourns with men; Richard of St.
Victor, In Apocalypsim Joannis (On the
Revelation of John) VII, 2, in PL 196:860.
The pitching of the tent outside the camp
represents God’s remoteness from this
impure world, Maximus Confessor, Capita
Theologiae et Oeconomiae, I, 83-84 in PG
90:1117; Wolber, Commentaria in Canticum
Canticorum (Commentary on the Song of
Solomon) III, 5, in PL 195:1203. In a very
early Christian source “the Father comes
down from above with his tent of light,”
Evangelium Bartholomei, in PO 2:190. The
Holy of Holies “is everywhere called a tent
because God tents there,” Theophylactus,
Expositio in Epistolam ad Hebraeos 9, in
PG 125:297.
^41. Cf. Vanhoye, “Par la tente plus grande,” 1-3.
Cf. also Cyril of Alexandria, De Adoratione
in Spiritu et Veritate 14, in PG 68:901.
John 1:14 reads literally, “the logos was
made flesh and pitched his tent [eskenosen]
among us”; and after the Resurrection the
Lord “camps” with the disciples, Acts 1:4.
At the Transfiguration Peter prematurely
proposed setting up three tents for taking
possession, Matthew 17:4; Mark 9:5; Luke
9:33; see Hilary, Tractatus in Psalmos 14, in
PL 9:300.
^42. Eduard Meyer, Ursprung und Anfänge des
Christentums, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta,
1921-23), 2:48.
^43. Yigael Yadin, The Scroll of the War of the
Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness,
tr. Batya and Chaim Rabin (London: Oxford
University Press, 1962), 4-5: the two camps
represent “the cosmic powers of light and
darkness,” 5; the camp is a holy place set
apart from all earthly contamination, ibid.,
70-75.
^44. Heinrich Zimmern, “Religion und Sprache,”
 in Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das
alte Testament, 352-53, notes that the
“Kingdom of God” seems to be localized at
the North Pole, where it corresponds to the
divine mountain. In Egypt the Urhügel
(primeval mound) is preeminently the point
of contact between heaven and earth; Hans
Bonnet, “Benben,” in Reallexikon der
ägyptischen Religionsgeschichte (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1952), 100.
^45. Herter, “Rundform in Platons Atlantis,” 1-
20. In Pharaoh’s garden all creatures enjoy a
safe asylum “suspended in the sky,”
Edouard Naville, “La destruction des
hommes par les dieux,” Biblical
Archaeological Society Transactions 4
(1875): 12-13. Such an island shrine in
Egypt was the island of Bigge, which was
identical with the hidden World-Mountain;
Hermann Junker, Das Götterdekret über das
Abaton, in Denkschriften der Akademie der
Wissenschaften in Wien 56 (1913): 35-37.
Such a combined world-mountain and island
was Mt. Kardu, from which the Ark sailed
 and to which it returned; Hippolytus, De
Consummatine Mundi (spuria) (On the
Consummation of the World), Fragmenta
Dubia 5, in PG 10:709. All holy places are
abstracted from the world; Iamblichus,
Protrepticus 21.
^46. One must swim to the shrine of the goddess,
which is in a moon-boat; Lucian, De Syria
Dea (On the Syrian Goddess) 12-13, 32.
Smolian, “Vehicula Religiosa,” 203, notes
that the moon itself “swims” in the clouds.
The Midrash to Genesis 6:16 speaks of the
Ark as a floating temple. Hippolytus,
Fragment 3, On the Consummation of the
World, in PG 10:707, tells how Noah took
the body of Adam to the top of a holy
mountain “which was the Paradise of God,
the dwelling of religion and purity,” to keep
it from the flood, and there “placed it in the
midst of a ship mounted on a wooden
framework.” From the wood of this
structure Noah made a thunderdrum which
summoned his sons to the Ark and brought
the storm. At the great Jubilee festival the
 Egyptians beat on such a shaman’s drum,
which represented the cosmos; Ludwig
Borchardt, “Die Rahmentrommel im
Museum zu Kairo,” Memoires de l’Institut
Français d’archéologie orientale 66 (1935-
38): 1-6.
^47. Wünsche, Salomons Thron und Hippodrom;
also n. 45 above. The Kacba orbited the
earth during the Flood, returning as the
Black Stone—a meteorite; Ad-Diyārbakrī,
Tarīkh al-Khamīs (Cairo, 1284 AH), II, 88.
^48. André Parrot, Ziggurats et la Tour de Babel
(Paris: Michel, 1949), 208-9; and André
Parrot, “La Tour de Babel et les Ziggurats,”
Nouvelle Clio 2 (1950): 159. Pierre Amiet,
“Ziggurats et ‘Culte en hauteur’ des origines
à l’époque d’Akkad,” Revue d’assyriologie
et d’archéologie orientale 47 (1953): 30;
Georges Contenau, Le déluge babylonien
(Paris: Payot, 1952), 246-47. In Egypt “la
pyramide et le mastaba sont des terrains de
transition entre la terre et l’au-delà" (the
pyramid and the mastaba are the places of
transition between the earth and the
 netherworld), Moret, Histoire de l’Orient,
1:235.
^49. Alexander Scharff and Anton Moortgat,
Ägypten und Vorderasien im Altertum
(Munich: Bruckmann, 1950), 56.
^50. Alföldi, “Geschichte des Throntabernakels,”
544-56. Towers were actually put on
wheels, e.g., by the Scythians; Xenophon,
Cyropaedia VI, 29.
^51. Haldar, Notion of the Desert, 68. Mildred
Cable, The Gobi Desert (New York:
Macmillan, 1944), 16, describes “the acute
terror with which the Chinese regard the
Gobi regions,” which begin at the very gates
of some cities. For the earliest city-dwellers
“the dead-world of the steppe . . . began just
outside the city wall,” Knut Tallquist,
“Sumerish-akkadische Namen der
Totenwelt,” Studia Orientalia 5/4 (1934):
21; and the city gates provided “the ritual of
shutting up of a city so that sorcery might be
excluded,” E. Douglas van Buren, “The
ṣalmé in Mesopotamian Art and Religion,”
Orientalia 10 (1941): 86.
^52. Henri Frankfort, The Birth of Civilization in
the Near East (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1956), 54.
^53. Sigmund Mowinkel, Religion und Kultus
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1953), 70; cf. 36,
75. The basic “ritual pattern” goes back to
the “Urhaltung des Menschen gegenüber
seiner Umwelt” (the primeval attitude of
man toward his environment), and proved
“Sicherung seiner ständig bedrohten
Existenz” (a defense for his constantly
threatened existence), Bernhardt, Das
Problem der altorientalischen
Königsideologie, 54.
^54. The Vara is both a city and a paradise; Zend-
Avesta, frag. II, 25-38 (61-123), in
Darmesteter, Zend-Avesta 1:16-19; Moses
Khorenatsci, History of the Armenians, tr.
Robert W. Thomson (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1978), 182-84 (II,
40-42); this is comparable to the rabbinic
picture in Babylonian Talmud Tacanith 31a.
Such a blessed oasis of refuge is the jiwār
 where men and animals escape the violence
of the elements; Thaclabi, Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’,
24, 213; cf. Pierre Grimal, Les jardins
romains à la fin de la République et aux
deux premiers siècles de l’Empire (Paris:
Boccard, 1943), 44, 86-90. The ancient
ringed camp of the nomads gave protection
from danger threatening equally from all
sides, and gave rise to some cities; Priscus
Rhetor, De Legationibus Romanorum ad
Gentes 3, in PG 113:713; Michael Prawdin,
The Mongol Empire: Its Rise and Legacy,
tr. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1940), 82-86; William of Rubruck,
Journal 21, in Manuel Komroff, ed.,
Contemporaries of Marco Polo (New York:
Liveright, 1928), 98, compares such
ringcamps to the camp of Israel.
^55. Al-Kazwīnī, Kosmographie, ed. Ferdinand
Wüstenfeld, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Dieterich,
1848-49), 2:4-5.
^56. Vivid accounts may be found in Nabih A.
Faris, The Antiquities of South Arabia:
Being a Translation from the Arabic with
 Linguistic, Geographic, and Historic Notes
of the Eighth Book of Al-Hamdāni’s Al-Iklīl
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1938); and (of great antiquity) Wüstenfeld,
"Älteste ägyptische Geschichte,” 331.
^57. L. Vax, “Le sentiment du mystère dans le
conte fantastique et dans le roman policier,”
Etudes philosophiques 6 (1951): 72, 74.
^58. Cahen, “Zur Geschichte der städtischen
Gesellschaft,” 61, citing Xavier de Planhol,
The World of Islam (New York: Cornell
University, 1957), ch. 1; cf. 64-66 in Cahen.
V. G. Kiernan, “State and Nation in Western
Europe,” Past and Present 31 (1965): 21,
25, maintains that there is no real
government at all in such cities.
^59. A. H. Godbey, “The Semitic City of
Refuge,” Monist 15 (1905): 624-25. That a
man was completely free and secure only in
the city, where alone he could realize his full
potentialities, was a favorite Sophist theme,
e.g., Dio Chrysostom, Discourse L, 1;
Philo, Quod Omnis Probus Liber 1; cf. Al-
Kazwīnī, Kosmographie, 2:4-5. As a city of
 refuge Babylon offered freedom (duraru) to
all the world; Godbey, “Semitic City of
Refuge,” 615.
^60. The King “is the pivot round which the life
of the community revolves. Upon his
physical vigour . . . depend the various
aspects of the well-being of the community,”
Lord Fitz R. Raglan, The Origins of
Religion (London: Watts, 1949), 74, citing
Samuel H. Hooke; cf. Bernhardt, Problem
der altorientalischen Königsideologie, 54,
67, 80.
^61. Peyer, “Reisekönigtum des Mittelalters,” 17-
20.
^62. Radin, Social Anthropology, 79. Tor Istram,
cited by Bernhardt, Problem der
altorientalischen Königsideologie, 58,
compared the coronation rites of 62 African
tribes and found that they regularly end with
the new king starting off on his Royal
Progress.
^63. Frankfort, Birth of Civilization, 97-98. The
Pyramid Texts describe the dead king’s
journey to heaven in terms of continuation
 of his Royal Progress on earth, e.g., PT 33
(24c-25b), 224 (218-20).
^64. Alföldi, “Geschichte des Throntabernakels,”
542-43. Among the Mongols the traveling
temple and tent-city accompany “the focus
of the universe, the life-giving residence,”
Prawdin, Mongol Empire, 330; Haslund-
Christensen, Men and Gods in Mongolia,
213, 283; Rörich, Trails to Inmost Asia,
343.
^65. Peyer, “Reisekönigtum des Mittelalters,” 1,
21.
^66. Cf. ibid., 1, 7-8, 12, 14.
^67. Of the ritual drama of the
Ramesseumpapyrus, Sethe writes that “das
Spiel vielleicht auf einer Reise, in der der
neue Herrscher nach der Thronbesteigung
sein Reich durchzog, an verschiedenen . . .
Orten widerholt werden sollte, in erster Linie
in den drei grossen Hauptstädten . . .
vielleicht aber auch an anderen bedeutenden
Orten” (perhaps the ritual drama should be
repeated in different places on the Royal
Progress in which the new ruler journeyed
 through the kingdom after his ascent to the
throne, particularly in the three great
capitals, but perhaps also in other important
places), which explains why the king
“uberall in dem Spiele in einem Schiffe
stehend auftritt” (appears everywhere in the
drama standing in a ship), Kurt Sethe,
Dramatische Texte zu altägyptischen
Mysterienspielen (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1928),
96. On the Royal Progress of the new king
and his mother, Junker, Das Götterdekret
über das Abaton, 27-29; and Hermann
Junker, Die Onurislegende (Vienna: Hölder,
1917), 129-31, 168; also Hermann Junker,
Der Auszug der Hathor-Tefnut aus Nubien
(Berlin: Reimer, 1911), 74-76; cf. Wilhelm
Spiegelberg, Der ägyptische Mythus vom
Sonnenauge (Strassburg: Schultz, 1917), 53.
^68. G. Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient
East (New York: Doran, 1927), 368-73.
^69. Peyer, “Reisekönigtum des Mittelalters,” 1,
7-9, 12, 14. On Pharaoh’s tour as a
Besitznahme of the land, Siegfried Schott,
Mythe und Mythenbildung im alten
 Aegypten (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1945), 17-19.
There are vivid vignettes in PT 273 (the
“Cannibal Hymn”), 274, 317, 508, 690, and
in the Coffin Texts, de Buck, Egyptian
Coffin Texts, 1:77, 221, 268-70, 289, 328,
330; 2:163, 231.
^70. Peyer, “Reisekönigtum des Mittelalters,” 12.
^71. See Hugh Nibley, “The Arrow, the Hunter,
and the State,” Western Political Quarterly
2/3 (1949): 344; reprinted in this volume,
page 20.
^72. So in Ireland, Peyer, “Reisekönigtum des
Mittelalters,” 12; Scandinavia, ibid., 14;
Spain, ibid., 7-9; and England, ibid., 1.
^73. Kiernan, “State and Nation in Western
Europe,” 35-37. Peyer, “Reisekönigtum des
Mittelalters,” passim, surveys the whole
European scene and finds no country
without the system.
^74. Carl R. Unger, ed., Saga Didriks Konungs
af Bern (Kristiania: Feilborg and Landmark,
1853), 220-23, 239-42. On the unique
authority of this source, Heinrich Prell,
 “Wildrinder und Drachen in der
Siegfriedsage,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte
32 (1944): 53, 71.
^75. See Nibley, “The Arrow, the Hunter, and the
State, 343; reprinted in this volume, pages
18-19. The idea goes back to very early
times, when the king as the “Man of the
Steppes” is the protector of animal and even
vegetable life; Witzel, “Zu den Enmerkar-
Dichtungen,” 279-80; Anton Moortgat,
Tammuz: Der Unsterblichkeitsglaube in der
altorientalischen Bildkunst (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 1949), 9-18, 22-26, 27-35. All
animals like all nations were expected to do
homage to the Emperor on his throne,
Wünsche, Salomons Thron und Hippodrom.
^76. Heinrich Rubner, Untersuchungen zur
Forstverfassung des mittelalterlichen
Frankreichs (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1965), 6;
Hermann Thimme, “Forestis: Königsgut und
Königsrecht nach den Forsturkunden vom 6.
bis 12. Jahrhundert,” Archiv für
Urkundenforschung 2 (1909): 101-54.
^77. Cf. G. Waitz, “Die Anfänge des
 Lehnwesens,” HZ 13 (1865): 90-91. Since
the last thing the peasant did was to hunt,
that was the last thing forbidden him,
Thimme, “Forestis, Königsgut und
Königsrecht,” 127.
^78. Down to the nineteenth century the basic
idea was that forest rights were a matter of
use rather than of abstract ownership. The
shift from Nutzungsrechte to Wildbann or
hunting rights began in Carolingian times,
Thimme, “Forestis, Königsgut und
Königsrecht,” 127, though the transfer from
hunting rights to absolute ownership came
very late.
^79. The idea of the ritual hunt as part of the
coronation ceremony, A. F. L. Beeston,
“The Ritual Hunt: A Study in Old South
Arabian Religious Practice,” Le Muséon 61
(1948): 148, seems to go back to the earliest
times, when the king appears in glyptic art as
a hunter who defends people and domestic
cattle from dangerous beasts of prey;
Moortgat, Tammuz, 9-18; Witzel, “Zu den
Enmerkar-Dichtungen,” 279-80.
^80. On the background of the Royal Road or
King’s Highway, Hans J. Rieckenberg,
“Königsstrasse und Königsgut in
liudolfingischer und frühsalischer Zeit (919-
1056),” Archiv für Urkundenforschung 17
(1942): 32-154.
^81. Peyer, “Reisekönigtum des Mittelalters,” 6.
The castles were the “main bases or
strongholds” of perpetually mobile
monarchs; Kiernan, “State and Nation in
Western Europe,” 32. The system can be
traced back to the policy of the Severi in
urbanizing and militarizing peasants, both
land-owners and tenants, by gathering them
in stathmoi, stationes, which were like forts,
Michael Rostovzeff, Social and Economic
History of the Roman Empire, 2 vols., 2d
ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), 2:426-27.
Stathmoi and stationes both mean “stopping
place on the march.” Caesar based his
overall European strategy on castles, Gallic
War II, 8, as did Alexander his Asiatic
strategy, Quintus Curtis, Vita Alexandri VII,
9 and 11. In the ancient Near East,
 marauding tribes and the kings who resisted
them both based their strategy on castles;
Alan H. Gardiner, “New Literary Works
from Ancient Egypt,” JEA 1 (1914): 31-32,
23-24. The system gave birth to
marketplaces and cities in Mesopotamia;
Bruno Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien,
2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925), 1:340-41.
^82. Castrum is traced ultimately to old Celtic
words meaning “woven structure” and/or
“covering, shelter.” The plural means
“fortified camp.” Castrum can also signify a
shepherd’s hut or the distance between two
camps; Alois Walde, Lateinisches
etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3 vols.
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1965), 1:180.
^83. Peyer, “Reisekönigtum des Mittelalters,” 3;
Alfred Ernout, Dictionnaire étymologique
de la langue latine, 2d ed. (Paris:
Klinksieck, 1951), s.v. “palatium,” deriving
it from Etruscan. “Tamerlaine built palaces
using them for the same purpose his
ancestors used tents. He wandered from
castle to castle, without spending more than
 a night or two in any,” Prawdin, Mongol
Empire, 478.
^84. Cf. German Betthimmel and Himmelbett.
For definitions, see Oxford English
Dictionary, 12 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1933).
^85. Morgenstern, “The Ark, the Ephod, and the
‘Tent of Meeting,’” 263.
^86. Alfred Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im
Lichte des alten Orients (Leipzig: Hinrichs,
1916), 316.
^87. Alfred Adam, Die Pṣalmén des Thomas und
das Perlenlied als Zeugnisse vorchristlicher
Gnosis (Berlin: Töpelmann, 1959), 3.
^88. Morgenstern, “The Ark, the Ephod, and the
‘Tent of Meeting,’” 190.
^89. Iliad 1:152-57; 21:106-13. Cf. E. V. Gordon,
An Introduction to Old Norse (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1927),
introduction. The Wild Host itself is driven
by the storm, n. 5 above.
^90. “I marched victoriously like a mad dog,
spreading terror, and I met no conqueror,”
 Daniel D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of
Assyria and Babylonia, 2 vols. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1927), 2:99,
no. 176. The Babylonian king is “the
founder of cities, the one who places troops
under the yoke . . . who tramples their lands
under foot . . . who expands boundary and
border,” and so forth; Carl Bezold,
Historische Keilschriftexten aus Assur
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1915), 11. On his Royal
Progress the Canaanitish hero announces,
“Nor king, nor commoner shall make the
earth his dominion. . . . ‘Tis I alone that
shall reign,” Theodor H. Gaster, Thespis:
Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Ancient
Near East (New York: Schuman, 1950),
183. The image of the invader is that of the
“ever-conquering and unconquerable host,”
Herodotus, History II, 46. “No people could
stand against them to whatsoever land they
came,” Unger, Saga Didriks, 145.
^91. Faulkner, “‘Cannibal Hymn’ from the
Pyramid Texts,” 98. When it is a necessity,
“raiding has always been regarded not only
 as a primordial right but as a noble
tradition,” Max A. S. Oppenheim, Die
Beduinen, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Harrassowitz,
1939), 1:34.
^92. Thus the bloody primordial contest between
Horus and Seth has a strictly legal side from
the beginning, Rudolf Anthes, “Note
Concerning the Great Corporation of
Heliopolis,” Journal of Near Eastern
Studies 13 (1954): 191-92, as is clearly
brought out in the text of The Contending of
Horus and Seth, in Alan H. Gardiner’s The
Library of A. Chester Beatty (London:
Oxford University, 1931), 8-26. The same is
true of the fight between Marduk and Kingu
in the Enuma Elish.
^93. Pharaoh is always the son of Horus or Re,
warding off the attacks of Seth and his
depraved followers; Montet, Drame
d’Avaris, 54-58. Alexander posed as
liberator of the people of Asia from the
barbarian bandits; Quintus Curtis, Vita
Alexandri VII, 6.
^94. Trumpf, “Stadtgründung und
 Drachenkampf,” 129-30, 142-45.
^95. Friedrich Dieterici, Thier und Mensch vor
dem König der Genien (Leipzig: Hinrichs,
1879), 1-6, 9, 11; cf. Aesop, Fables, no. 25.
For the great antiquity of the concept,
Spiegelberg, Der ägyptische Mythus vom
Sonnenauge, 47. The Persian king felt
responsible for the animals and fined himself
a piece of gold for every beast slain in the
hunt; Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (New York:
Modern Library, 1932), 2:985.
^96. This is clearly seen in the very early (c. 1960
B.C.) account of Sinuhe: While he was
among the Asiatics, a neighboring chieftain
came to his tent (B 109-10) and challenged
Sinuhe as a trespasser (B 114-25); Sinuhe in
formal combat “did to him what he would
have done to me: I seized what was in his
tent and stripped his camp, and thereby
became enlarged in wealth and possessed of
much cattle” (B 144-47). James B.
Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
 1955), 20.
^97. Tacitus, Germania 33.
^98. Down to modern times “each ruler saw
himself first and foremost . . . as a warlord.
He figured in tournaments and might even
lose his life in them,” but he could not avoid
them; Kiernan, “State and Nation in Western
Europe,” 22, 31. The wandering heroes of
the Avesta view all other nomads as robbers
and trespassers, to be challenged on the
spot, Arthur E. Christensen, “Die Iranier,” in
Albrecht Alt et al., Kulturgeschichte des
alten Orients (Munich: Beck, 1933), 211.
Agathias, History V, 25, tells how the hordes
of Asia consume themselves in perpetual
and ever-shifting combat which they think of
as noble. This culminates in the inevitable
showdown between the two unconquerable
hordes for the possession of the world,
Unger, Saga Didriks, 145 (Attila vs.
Ostanrix); Xenophon, Cyropaedia VII, 1
(Croesus vs. Cyrus).
^99. The rule is that all who ride are equally
noble, though not of equal rank, Unger,
 Saga Didriks, 144. Wandering knights may
not trust each other; Christensen, in Alt,
Kulturgeschichte des alten Orients, 211.
^100. A. E. Crawley, “Ordeal: Introductory and
Primitive,” in James Hastings, Encyclopedia
of Religion and Ethics, 13 vols. (New York:
Scribner, 1951), 9:507, and the series of
articles on the Ordeal that follows.
^101. F. R. Bryson, The Point of Honor in
Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1935), 35, 45.
^102. Unger, Saga Didriks, 233. If a noble “did
not maintain his own honor he could hardly
defend that of his prince or his country,”
Bryson, Point of Honor in Sixteenth-
Century Italy, 45.
^103. Rubner, Untersuchungen zur
Forstverfassung, 7-8.
^104. Alan H. Gardiner, “Piankhi’s Instructions to
His Army,” JEA 21 (1935): 219-20, and
Montet, Drame d’Avaris, 29, no. 3, both
comment on the striking resemblance to
medieval chivalry.
^105. Smolian, “Kultischer Hintergrund bei
Wagenrennen,” 264-65.
^106. M. E. Moghadam, “A Note on the
Etymology of the Word Checkmate," JAOS
58 (1938): 662; cf. L. Thorndike, “All the
World’s a Chess-board,” Speculum 6 (1931):
461.
^107. “Wheryn is al to wynne or al to lese,” R.
Dyboski and Z. M. Arend, eds., Knyghthode
and Bataile (London: Early English Text
Society, 1935), 11; an excellent source both
for the mechanics and for the philosophy of
chivalrous warfare. The rule, citing Black
Khalil, is that “the conquered are the
property of the conqueror, who is the lawful
master of them, of their lands, of their
goods, of their wives, and of their children,”
Edwin S. Creasy, History of Ottoman Turks:
From the Beginning of Their Empire to the
Present Time, 2 vols. (London: Bentley,
1854-56), 1:21; cf. Morgenstern, “The Ark,
the Ephod, and the ‘Tent of Meeting,’” 173-
74, 180-81, 187, 206, 209, and n. 123
below.
^108. Morgenstern, “The Ark, the Ephod, and the
‘Tent of Meeting,’” 207-23; the quotation is
from Alföldi, “Geschichte des
Throntabernakels,” 1.
^109. Cf. von Grunebaum, Muhammadan
Festivals, 19; Tha’labi, Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’,
24-25, 214.
^110. W. Helck, “Rpct auf dem Thron des Gb,"
Orientalia 19 (1950): 430. Cf. the “white
towns” of the Creek Indians, “in which no
violence could be done, and the ‘red towns’
or ‘war towns,’” Godbey, “Semitic City of
Refuge,” 607. “Mohammed himself
continued to employ the kubbe of red
leather,” even though he “had denounced
red as the color of Satan,” Morgenstern,
“The Ark, the Ephod, and the ‘Tent of
Meeting,’” 217, 219.
^111. On tent and banner as symbolic of each
other, see Morgenstern, “The Ark, the
Ephod, and the ‘Tent of Meeting,’” 160,
171, 179, 184, 187, 199, 205, 209;
Haslund-Christensen, Men and Gods in
 Mongolia, 125; T. Canaan, “The Palestinian
Arab House: Its Architecture and Folklore,”
Journal of the Palestine Oriental Society 13
(1933): 54-55; Stevens, “Cult-hut or Mandi
of the Mandaeans,” 43. Tent and banner
alike are a formal notice of defiance,
Giovanni P. Carpini, History 26, in
Komroff, ed., Contemporaries of Marco
Polo, 44; Unger, Saga Didriks, 285.
^112. Cited by Irwin, “Sanctuaire central
israelite,” 172-73, 183.
^113. Jacob, Altarabisches Beduinenleben, 211.
^114. Morgenstern, “The Ark, the Ephod, and the
‘Tent of Meeting,’” 261; cf. 180-82, 178,
197, 262; for a modern-day version, Carl R.
Raswan, The Black Tents of Arabia
(London: n.p., 1936), 86-97.
^115. Origen, Commentary on John 10, in PG
14:380-81.
^116. Yadin, Scroll of the War of the Sons of
Light, 6-8, 70-75.
^117. Alföldi, “Geschichte des Throntabernakels,”
556. A thousand years earlier the hero of a
 Ras Shamra ritual text drives his rival “out
of the seat of his kingship, from the tent,
from the throne of his Sovereignty,” Cyrus
H. Gordon, Ugaritic Literature (Rome:
Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1949), 20, 26;
later an Assyrian king boasts that his rival
“left his royal tent [with its] couch of gold,
the golden throne, golden footstool, golden
sceptre, silver chariot, golden palanquin, and
the chain about his neck, in the midst of his
camp and fled alone.” Luckenbill, Ancient
Records, 2:34, no. 67.
^118. H. Idris Bell, Egypt from Alexander the
Great to the Arab Conquest (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1948), 33.
^119. Gaie-ochos means not “earth-shaker” as
usually translated, but “earth-holder” or
possessor: “Posei-daōon, oder Posei-dās,
was ‘Herr der Erde’ heisst,” Herman A.
Hirt, Indogermanische Grammatik, 6 parts
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1927-37), 1:196.
^120. Iliad 7:442-63. The Greeks realized that the
Great King had no choice but to destroy
them once they had refused him tribute: “He
 cannot let us escape to laugh at him,”
Xenophon, Anabasis II, 4, 3-4.
^121. Ludwig Preller, Griechische Mythologie, 2
vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1872) 1:49-50.
^122. Livy, II, 50-51.
^123. Varro, in Servius, Commentarius in
Aeneidem IX, 52. The challenge: “Do you
give over your lands, your city, your
implements, weapons, wives, children and
property into the hands of me and the
Roman people?” Livy, I, 38, 2. The custom
survives in the Eastern Empire, as described
in The 1001 Nights (Bulak edition), 1:157.
^124. Unger, Saga Didriks, 52, 195-97, 202-4,
212. Quotation is from Georg von Below,
“Die Städtische Verwaltung des Mittelalters
als Vorbild der späteren
Territorialverwaltung,” HZ 75 (1895): 410.
^125. Froissart, Chronicle IV, 13.
^126. Morgenstern, “The Ark, the Ephod, and the
‘Tent of Meeting,’” has much to say on this
subject, e.g., 187, 209; see n. 117 above.
^127. Adam, Pṣalmén des Thomas, 11-12, citing
 Psalm of Thomas 7:1, 4-7.
^128. John L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins
and Wahábys, 2 vols. (London: Colburn &
Bentley, 1831), 1:142.
^129. To divorce a man his wife has only to
overturn his tent; Jacob, Altarabisches
Beduinenleben, 212. The most solemn oaths
were taken with the right hand on the main
tent-pole: “If the tent trembles the oath is
false,” Gustaf Dalman, “Aus dem
Rechtsleben und religiösen Leben der
Beduiner,” Zeitschrift des Deutschen-
Palästina Vereins 62 (1939): 60. “The tent-
poles are torn up immediately after [a] man
[without a male heir] has expired, and the
tent demolished,” Burckhardt, Notes on the
Bedouins and Wahábys, 1:101. The
antiquity of the concept is attested in a Ras
Shamra formula: “uptorn be the ropes of thy
dwelling, overturned the throne of thy
kingdom, broken the sceptre of thy rule!” H.
Louis Ginzberg, “The Rebellion and Death
of Ba’lu,” Orientalia 5 (1936): 197.
^130. John Zonaras, Annals XV, 15, in PG
 134:1360-61.
^131. Froissart, Chronicle I, 18 and 47
respectively.
^132. Trumpf, “Stadtgründung und
Drachenkampf,” 149-54. See n. 129 above
for a still older version.
^133. On the three-day rule, Peyer,
“Reisekönigtum des Mittelalters,” 5, 7; cf.
Egilssaga 78:59. The Arabs allow “a certain
liberty” of pasturage to those passing
through the country, Antonin Jaussen,
“Coutumes arabes,” Revue biblique 12
(1903): 256-57. When an army is merely
passing through Israel “the taking of wood is
to be allowed them; and ... they may also
camp anywhere and may be buried where
they fall,” Babylonian Talmud Erubin 17a.
^134. These definitions are substantially the same
in the Oxford English Dictionary, Universal
Dictionary, and Friedrich L. K. Weigand’s
Deutsches Wörterbuch, 2 vols. (Giessen:
Töpelmann, 1909-10).
^135. Cable, Gobi Desert, 86.
^136. For a full description, Raymond W.
Muncey, Our Old English Fairs (London:
Sheldon, 1935); cf. P. H. Ditchfield,
“Stourbridge Fair,” Journal of the British
Archaeological Association 19 (1913): 161,
163-64, 167, 171, 173.
^137. This of course is merely a suggestion. Just
how far one may go with this sort of thing
can be learned from the Feugians, who, it is
believed, “stabled ground sloths in caves on
Last Hope Island” within historic times, and
still live in “portable skin toldas [!] or tent-
houses,” Carlton Beals, Nomads and Empire
Builders (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1961), 41.
^138. W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the
Semites (London: Harper, 1901), 244-54; cf.
458-65. Samuel N. Kramer, “Sumerian
Historiography,” Israel Exploration Journal
3 (1953): 230; M. San Nicolò, “Materialien
zur Viehwirtschaft in den neubabylonischen
Tempeln,” Orientalia 18 (1949): 289-300;
Witzel, “Zu den Enmerkar-Dichtungen”
279-80; Kees, Aegypten, 42. The king
shared the take with the temple; San Nicolo,
 “Materialien zur Viehwirtschaft,” 306.
^139. Frankfort, Birth of Civilization, 54. To the
earliest Sumerian temples one paid
“Feldrentenbrote,” Anton Deimel,
Sumerische Grammatik (Rome: Pontificical
Biblical Institute, 1924), 210.
^140. Seen. 120 above. Some early examples in
Luckenbill, Ancient Records, 1:177-78, 182;
2:4, no. 7; 7-8, nos. 17-19; 8; Cf. Thimme,
“Forestis, Königsgut und Königsrecht,” 146.
^141. Witzel, “Zu den Enmerkar-Dichtungen,”
276. The earliest Indo-European kings
likewise paid to be left unmolested when
challenged, Paul É. Dumont, L’Aśvamedha
(Paris: Geuthner, 1927), 356. The definition
of socage is from Webster’s Dictionary.
^142. Froissart, Chronicle I, 285. “Although
moral virtue made even a private citizen
essentially ‘noble,’ it could not give him
rank,” which had to be bought and
maintained by prowess in arms, Bryson,
Point of Honor in Sixteenth-Century Italy,
15.
^143. A tax is basically “a compulsory
contribution” and to tax is “to charge a
person with some offence,” Oxford English
Dictionary; Walter W. Skeat’s Etymological
Dictionary traces the root to “tagsare; from
tag-, the base of tangere, to touch.”
^144. R. H. Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage in
England,” Past and Present 31 (1965): 15-
18; Froissart, Chronicle II, 73. Everywhere
peasants agitated for the right of paying
guesting charges in money; Peyer,
“Reisekönigtum des Mittelalters,” 5, 10-11.
^145. Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage in
England,” 3.
^146. The stock objection to new taxes is that
they nullify the agreement expressed in the
former taxes; Froissart, Chronicle I, 244; II,
83, 87, 158; III, 6. Anything beyond the
original tax was considered punitive, II, 128-
29.
^147. This is made clear in the fifteenth-century
preface to Dyboski and Arend, Knyghthode
and Bataile.
^148. The idea was not introduced into Germany
until the late twelfth century; Von Below,
“Städtische Verwaltung des Mittelalters,”
432. The nobility owe nothing to the
common people and disdain to bargain with
them; Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage in
England,” 19.
^149. Cited by Kiernan, “State and Nation in
Western Europe,” 21. With the
establishment of the prehistoric sacral
kingship, “history enters a groove from
which it is never to deviate appreciably,” E.
A. Speiser, “The Ancient Near East and
Modern Philosophies of History,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 95 (1951): 585.
^150. See nn. 75-77 above. The quotation is from
Rubner, Untersuchungen zur
Forstverfassung, 7.
^151. Froissart, Chronicle II, 143; II, 157; cf. III,
6.
^152. On the unique authority of Sir John
Froissart, Chronicles of England, France,
Spain, and the Adjoining Countries, tr. and
 ed. by Thomas Johnes, 2 vols. (London:
1857), 1:xli. Cf. Froissart, Chronicle I, 124;
II, 103. Even a blind king must fight in the
field, ibid., I, 129.
^153. Froissart, Chronicle I, 207; III, 1.
^154. Ibid., II, 131-35. Froissart, himself both a
knight and a priest, closely identifies the
interests of clergy and nobility, I, 176; III,
25.
^155. Ibid., I, 78. Both temporal and spiritual
lords, bidding for the services of these
outlaws recognized their rights to plunder
and even offered them titles of nobility,
ibid., I, 254, 324; III, 10. They differed
from the true nobility only in being, as they
styled themselves, “the Late Comers,” ibid.,
I, 214.
^156. Wat Tyler and John Ball put themselves
under Sir Robert Salle, ibid., II, 76, and the
Smithfield mob marched under the king’s
banner, desiring the king to lead them. The
same situation is found in France, I, 181-84.
^157. Ibid., III, 1, 5, 7, 9-10.
^158. Kiernan, “State and Nation in Western
Europe,” 26.
^159. Froissart, Chronicle I, 115, 184; II, 41, 46-
47; III, 36. The rich burghers adopted all the
trappings of nobility as their city
corporations bargained and made war with
kings and dukes exactly as the latter did with
each other, ibid., I, 43, 45, 98, 123.
^160. Favoring an origin in trade are Fritz Rörig,
Magdeburgs Entstehung und die ältere
Handelsgeschichte, in Deutsche Akademie
der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 49 (1952);
Hermann Aubin, “Der Aufbau des
Abendlands im Mittelalter,” HZ 187 (1959):
497-520. Markets were first introduced into
Germany in the ninth century, “the building
program of a Roman provincial market is the
same as that of the medieval German city,”
Friedrich Philippi, “Der Markt der
mittelalterlichen deutschen Stadt,” HZ 138
(1928): 235; cf. Ditchfield, “Stourbridge
Fair,” 161-74. Arnold’s theory that cities
grew up around forts is refuted by Von
Below, “Städtische Verwaltung des
 Mittelalters,” 428, though Christopher
Hawkes, “Hill-Forts,” Antiquity 5 (1931):
93, maintains that “politically the hill-fort . .
. was the Celtic version of the earlier Greek
polis.” Walther Gerlach, “Kritische
Bemerkungen zu neuen Untersuchungen
uber die Anfänge der Städte im Mittelalter,”
Historische Vierteljahrschrift 19 (1919):
331-45, notes that the great cities of Europe
did not begin as markets, but became cities
through Städterhebung by royal favor, ibid.,
345. Some ancient cities were founded all at
once, while others grew up gradually,
Camillo Praschniker, “Die griechische
Stadt,” Anzeiger der österreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Philosophisch-historische Klasse 84
(1947): 3.
^161. Carleton S. Coon, The Story of Man (New
York: Knopf, 1954), 122.
^162. For civitas, Walde, Lateinisches
etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1:224; for
stadt, Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches
Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin:
 de Gruyter, 1963), s.v. “stadt,” and Sigmund
Feist, Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der
gotischen Sprache (Leiden: Brill, 1939),
450-51. For gorod, burg, and town, see Jan
de Vries et al., Altnordisches etymologisches
Wörterbuch (Leiden: Brill, 1961), 164.
^163. For mahallah as a camp, Peyer,
“Reisekönigtum des Mittelalters,” 18; for
madinah, Meir Fraenkel, “Zur Deutung von
Medina ’Bezirk, Staat’,” Zeitschrift für die
alttestestamentliche Wissenschaft 77 (1965):
215.
^164. Von Below, “Städtische Verwaltung des
Mittelalters,” 408.
^165. Ibid., 401, 406-8, 432, 437-38.
^166. Alfred Schultze, "Über Gästerecht und
Gastgerichte in den deutschen Städten des
Mittelalters,” HZ 101 (1908): 487, 498-502.
^167. Ibid.
^168. Jean Albert-Sorel, “Le passe et l’avenir des
droits de l’homme,” La Revue des deux
Mondes (1 May 1965): 69-82, notes that the
Rights of Man first come to their own in the
 French Revolution; but the basic concepts
are set forth in the Baconian doctrine that
“replaced the name ‘God’ by the name
‘Nature’”; see Karl R. Popper, “Science:
Problems, Aims, Responsibilities,”
Federation Proceedings of the American
Societies for Experimental Biology 22
(1963): 961, who discusses the problem at
length. As for the humanist, “if men realize
that their careers are limited to this world,
that this earthly existence is all they will ever
have, then they are already more than half-
way on the path toward becoming
functioning Humanists,” Corliss Lamont,
The Philosophy of Humanism. (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1957), 68.
^169. Nimrod is not only the archetype of the
Wild Hunter, but he is also the founder of
the first state, the builder of the first walled
city, and the organizer of the first real army.
In countless old legends Nimrod illustrates
the idea that he who would own the world is
insane. For general references, see Nibley,
“The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State, 339;
 reprinted in this volume, pages 14-15.
^170. Josef Köstler, “Wald und Forst in der
deutschen Geschichtsforschung,” HZ 155
(1937): 469.
^171. Compare the Egyptian “Regulator of the
Festival or the Tent,” Massoulard,
Préhistoire et Protohistoire d’Egypte, 455,
with “The King’s Office of Revels and
Tents,” in William Bray, “Observations on
the Christmas Diversions Formerly Given by
the Lord of Misrule, and on the King’s
Office of Revels and Texts,” Archaeologia
18 (1817): 313-32. The latter was also a
“Christmas Prince or Revel-Master,” and
“dined . . . under a cloth of estate,” ibid.,
314. His main duty was “to keep the tents
and pavilions belonging to the King,” ibid.,
317, which moved all over the country on
carts, accompanying the king as he held
festival in one place after another, ibid., 329-
30.
^172. Alföldi, “Geschichte des Throntabernakels,”
554, 559-62, 564, tracing the institution
from Persia through “the royal festival tents
 of the Greeks,” 562, to the domus aurea of
Nero and the garden pleasure-domes of the
great Roman magnates, 563. A general
survey of the institution in the East is given
by Moortgat, Tammuz, 139-42; cf. Meissner,
Babylonien und Assyrien, 1:307-8, on the
shrine and palace as gardens of Eden. Cf.
Hugh W. Nibley, “Sparsiones,” Classical
Journal 40 (1945): 524-26; reprinted in this
volume, pages 152-54.
^173. Frankfort, Birth of Civilization, 24; see
Nibley, “Sparsiones,” 532, 540-43; reprinted
in this volume, pages 158-59, 162-64.
^174. The Greeks call any passing show or vanity
a skene, or tent, for which many illustrative
passages are given in Henri Estienne, Greek
Thesaurus (Geneva: Henricus Stephanus,
1573), s.v. “skene.”
^175. In expressing their preference of tents to
castles the lords of the steppes said, “Every
one who is shut up is [already] captured,”
Budge, The Chronography of Bar
Hebraeus, 1:470. Until recent times in
Mongolia it was “forbidden to all . . . to
 erect permanent masonry. The free steppe is
not to be ‘bound’ by heavy buildings,”
Haslund-Christensen, Men and Gods in
Mongolia, 284-85. Early Jewish and
Christian sectaries of the desert deplored the
Temple of Jerusalem as a depravation of the
mobility of god’s people on earth, H. J.
Schoeps, “Die ebionitische Wahrheit des
Christentums,” in William E. Davies and
David Daube, The Background of the New
Testament and Its Eschatology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1956), 121;
Phythian-Adams, People and the Presence,
159-60; William Manson, The Epistle to the
Hebrews (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1951), 35.
^176. The great sin of the human race was the
attempt to pull up stakes and “from living in
tents to go over to settling in a fortified
metropolis,” Ernst Sellin, in “Nachtrag” to
O. E. Ravn, “Der Turm zu Babel,”
Zeitschrift der Deutschen
Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 91 (1937):
371. “The Ahl Hayt, or People of the Walls”
 must pay a tax to “the Ahl Bayl, or dwellers
in the Black Tents,” because they “have
forfeited right to be held Bedawin,” Richard
F. Burton, Personal Narrative of a
Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah, 2
vols. (London: Bell & Sons, 1906), 1:114.
From the beginning “the city was a
questionable institution, at variance, rather
than in keeping, with the natural order,”
Frankfort, Birth of Civilization, 52-53.
There is an eloquent commentary on the
theme in Thomas E. Lawrence, Seven
Pillars of Wisdom (Garden City: Doubleday,
1935), introduction.
^177. “This world is but a temporary tenement,
our real dwelling is in the other world,”
Babylonian Talmud Moced-Qatan 9b. John
Chrysostom, In Epistolam ad Hebraeos (On
the Epistle to the Hebrews) II, 24, in PG
63:167, notes that while the ancient
Patriarchs “lived in tents as strangers and
pilgrims,” being tried and tested by the rigors
of a wandering earth-life, the Church has
become obsessed with a shameful passion
 for earthly security—“what a difference!”
He actually recommends that Christians
learn to live like the nomad Scythians,
despising security and rejecting the luxury
and defilement of city life, cf. John
Chrysostom, Homilia in Matthaeum
(Homily on Matthew) LXIX, 3, in PG
58:652. This is no mere rhetoric, since John
in a time of political and natural upheavals
had been forced to flee his city and live as a
refugee in the camps of Asiatic nomads,
John Chrysostom, Epistolae 127—43, in
PG 52:687-97. Another important book is
Ernst Käsemann, Das wandernde
Gottesvolk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1939).
^178. “The Dogmatic Constitution on the
Church,” chap. 7 in The Pope Speaks 10
(1965): 391-94. “Until the appearance of
new heavens and a new earth . . . the
wayfaring church . . . wears the ephemeral
look of this world,” 391; cf. 365, 382.
^179. They were to pay taxes, e.g., Luke 20:22-
25, to allow themselves to be exploited
 rather than to become involved in litigation,
Matthew 5:25-26, to play the world’s game
just enough to allay suspicion, Luke 16:9,
11. They gladly conceded the rich man’s
right to his worldly possessions, since they
claimed only heavenly ones; Luke 16:25.
^180. “Scit se peregrinam in terris agere, inter
extraneos facile inimicos venire, ceterum
genus, sedem, spem, gratiam, dignitatem in
coelis habere” ([Truth] knows that she is a
pilgrim in the earth, that she easily finds
enemies among strangers, but that she has
her race, home, hope, reward, and honor in
heaven), Tertullian, Apology 1, in PL 1:307-
8; cf. Epistle to Diognetus 1. On owning
lands, and so forth, Hermae Pastor
(Shepherd of Hermas), Similitudo
(Similitudes) I, 1, in PG 2:951-53; Hugh W.
Nibley, “The Passing of the Church: Forty
Variations on an Unpopular Theme,” Church
History 30 (1961): 138; reprinted in CWHN
4:178.
^181. On the purchase and sale of safe-conducts,
Irving A. Agus, “Control of Roads by Jews
 in Pre-Crusade Europe,” JQR 48 (1957-58):
96-98. The custom is ancient, Eugen I.
Mittwoch, “Neue aramäische Urkunden aus
der Zeit der Achämenidenherrschaft in
Ägypten,” Monatsschrift fur Geschichte
und Wissenschaft des Judentums 83 (1939):
95. On the importance of passports and the
reluctance of the nobility to issue and
respect them, Froissart, Chronicle I, 134,
189, 196, 225.
^182. Urban’s speech in 1095 lays strong
emphasis on the total collapse of European
society and the need for a general escape,
Fulcher, Historia Hierosolymitana I, 2, in
PL 155:825-41. Behind the Crusades was a
universal “Sehnsucht nach Freiheit,” Martin
Grabmann, Die Geschichte der
scholastischen Methode, 2 vols. (Graz:
Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt,
1957), 1:258.
^183. On the Assizes of Jerusalem, see J. B.
Bury, Cambridge Medieval History, ed. H.
M. Gwatkin and J. P. Whitney, 8 vols.
(Cambridge: University Press, 1924-36),
 5:303; Steven Runciman, “The Crown of
Jerusalem,” Palestine Exploration
Quarterly 93 (1961): 15; Angelo S.
Rappoport, History of Palestine (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1931), 282-85.
^184. Adolf Waas, “Der heilige Krieg,” Welt als
Geschichte 19 (1959): 215-16, describes the
Crusades as the feudalization of Christianity
by the ancient chivalric tradition. The rival
claims of the nobility provided “a lawyer’s
paradise” with all the royalty of Europe at
one time or another claiming the crown of
Jerusalem, Runciman, “The Crown of
Jerusalem,” 8-9. See E. de Roziere,
“Introduction to the Cartulary of the Holy
Sepulchre,” in PL 155:1106.
^185. P. Leyhausen, “The Sane Community-a
Density Problem?” Discovery 26
(September 1965): 33.
^186. “The optimum conditions for maximum
physical and mental achievement remain
unknown,” Stamp, “Man and His
Environment,” 78.
^187. Leyhausen, “The Sane Community,” 31.
 For a general survey, E. S. Deevey, “The
Hare and the Haruspex,” Yale Review 49
(December 1959): 161-79.
^188. Leyhausen, “The Sane Community,” 28.
On territorial mystique among primitives, see
Adolphus P. Elkin, The Australian
Aborigines (Garden City: Anchor, 1964),
27-39.
^189. Leyhausen, “The Sane Community,” 31-
33.
^190. Israel in the wilderness is cut off from the
presence of God, Babylonian Talmud
Moced-Qatan 19b; this world is not their
real home, ibid., 9b. Man’s true home and
origin is far away, Zohar I, 245.
^191. A very eloquent expression of this is the
early hymn known as The Pearl, for which
see Adam, Pṣalmén des Thomas, 1-28, esp.
24; see also 42-47. When men fell away
“the whole order of life upon the earth was
altered, with men in a state of rebellion
against God,” Clementine Recognitiones
(Clementine Recognitions) I, 29, in PG
 1:1223-24. The early logia of Jesus
(especially the Arabic ones) harp on man’s
lost glory.
^192. For this see the enlightening study of L.
Kákosy, “Ideas about the Fallen State of the
World in Egyptian Religion: Decline of the
Golden Age,” Acta Orientalia 17 (1964):
208-10; P. Montet, “Le fruit defendu,”
Kemi 11 (1950): 85-116.
^193. Plato, Phaedo 72E, 92D; Plato, Philebus
34C, 63E; Plato, Phaedrus 275A. The
departure of the gods from unrighteous
mankind is mentioned by Hesiod, Solon, and
Pindar.
^194. Othmar Spann, “Vom Gemeinleben des
Menschen mit der Natur,” Zeitschrift für
philosophische Forschung 4 (1949): 527.
“Why does the question, ‘What is man?’
today sound like a cry of distress?” asks
Herman Dooyewerde, The Twilight of
Western Thought (Philadelphia: Presbyterian
and Reformed, 1960), 174. Arland Essher,
Journey through Dread (New York: Devin-
Adair, 1955), discusses Pascal’s “Shudder
 before the Universe,” Kierkegaard’s
“Shudder before God,” Heidegger’s
“Shudder before Death,” and Sartre’s
“Shudder before the Other Person.”
^195. Wordsworth’s “Ode on the Intimations of
Immortality” is a classic example. Spann,
“Vom Gemeinleben des Menschen,” 536,
quotes Eichendorff: “Sagt, wo meine Heimat
liegt?/Heut’ im Traum sah ich sie
wieder,/Und von allen Bergen ging/Solches
Grüssen zu mir nieder,/ Dass ich an zu
weinen fing.”
^196. Mircea Eliade, “The Yearning for Paradise
in Primitive Tradition,” Diogenes 3 (1953):
18-30.
^197. “Yet this ‘adjustment’ to mass communities
does the human species no more good than
drug-addition or alcoholism,” Leyhausen,
“The Sane Community,” 32.
^198. Deevey, “Hare and the Haruspex,” 162,
165.
^199. By the 1920s the idea of a hostile outer
space was completely discredited: “The
 skies, as far as the utmost star, are clear of
any malignant Intelligences, and even the
untoward accidents of life are due to causes
comfortably impersonal. . . . The possibility
that the Unknown contains Powers
deliberately hostile to him is one the ordinary
man can hardly entertain even in
imagination.” Edwyn Bevan, Hellenism and
Christianity (London: Allen and Unwin,
1921), 81. Today “outer space is the space
of openness, of danger and abandonment,”
in which man is “the eternal hunted
fugitive,” O. F. Bollnow, “Lived-space,”
Philosophy Today 5 (1961): 31-39.
^200. J. Pucelle, “Alienation et deracinement chez
l’homme modern,” Algemeen Nederlands
Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte en
Psychologie 50 (1957-58): 58.
^201. William M. McGovern, The Early Empires
of Central Asia (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1939), 47-49.
^202. “Durch den donnernden Flutgang der
Jahrtausende tönt eine Stimme, tröstend und
warnend: des Menschen Reich is nicht von
dieser Welt. Aber daneben erklingt eine
brausende Gegenstimme; diese Erde . . .
gehört Dir, dem Menschen; sie ist dein Werk
und Du das ihrige: ihr kannst Du nicht
entfliehen. . . . Du musst ihr die Treue
halten. Diese unausgelöste Dissonanz bildet
das Thema der Weltgeschichte.” Egon
Friedell, Kulturgeschichte Ägyptens und des
alten Orients, 4th ed. (Munich: Beck,
1953), 3. Pere Lagrange dreamed in the
desert of “les images de la vie nomade, si
naturelle, si simple, si proportionée à la
fragilité de notre existence!” But he
reprimands himself for thus slipping away
from reality, M.-J. Lagrange, “Chronique,”
Revue biblique 12 (1915): 255-56.
 The Hierocentric State

In his great history of Greek religion,

Professor Nilsson comments on the neglect
by scholars of an institution of first
importance in the development of
civilization and the state.1 That is the
panegyris, the great assembly of the entire
race to participate in solemn rites essential
to the continuance of its corporate and
individual well-being. The meeting was a
tremendous affair (Pindar leaves us in no
doubt about that), yet it was paralleled by
equally great and imposing assemblies of
other nations all over the ancient world. At
hundreds of holy shrines, each believed to
mark the exact center of the universe and
represented as the point at which the four
quarters of the earth converged—“the navel
of the earth”—one might have seen
assembled at the New Year—the moment of
creation, the beginning and ending of time—
vast concourses of people, each thought to
represent the entire human race in the
presence of all its ancestors and gods.
A visitor to any of these festivals would
have found a market or fair in progress, the
natural outcome of bringing people together
from wide areas in large numbers, and the
temple of the place functioning as an
exchange or bank. He could have witnessed
ritual contests: foot, horse, and wagon races,
odd kinds of wrestling, choral competitions,
the famous Troy game, beauty contests, and
what not. He would note that all came to the
celebration as pilgrims, often traversing
immense distances over prehistoric sacred
roads, and dwelt during the festival in booths
of green boughs.
 What would most command a visitor’s
attention to the great assembly would be the
main event, the now famous ritual year-
drama for the glorification of the king. In
most versions of the year-drama, the king
wages combat with his dark adversary of the
underworld, emerging victorious after a
temporary defeat from his duel with death, to
be acclaimed in a single mighty chorus as the
worthy and recognized ruler of the new age.2
The New Year was the birthday of the human
race, and its rites dramatized the creation of
the world; all who would be found in “the
Book of Life opened at the creation of the
World” must necessarily attend this event.
There were coronation and royal marriage
rites, accompanied by a ritual representing
the sowing or begetting of the human race;
and the whole celebration wound up in a
mighty feast in which the king as lord of
abundance gave earnest of his capacity to
supply his children with all the good things
of the earth. The stuff for this feast was
supplied by the feasters themselves, for no
one came “to worship the King” without
bringing his tithes and first fruits.3
Volumes would not suffice to trace the
survival of present-day institutions
throughout the world from the practices and
rites of the ancient national assemblies. They
were the general reservoir into which the
myriad culture-streams of an earlier day
eventually found their way, and from which
are supplied in turn the mainstreams of our
civilization. Space will not allow us to
examine these magnificent gatherings one by
one, nor is it necessary to draw the same
identical picture a score of times; however,
since no work on the subject has to our
knowledge yet appeared (though the
evidence is neither suspect nor difficult of
access), it will be necessary to reinforce our
claims by passing quickly from west to east
over the ancient world, pointing out as we go
some of the more important sources to which
the student might turn for a description of a
score of the more illustrious assemblies.
Beginning in the far northwest, we may
take the great Things of Iceland as typical of
the primitive assemblies of the whole
Germanic North. The meeting place was a
mound (the holy logberg, mountain of the
law) in the center of a stone circle where the
four quarters of the island met; the president
of the meeting was a ritual king (the Gothi);
attendance was compulsory; booths, feasting,
games, markets, and the rest were never
lacking.4 Identical though more imposing
were the rites at Uppsala5 and at various
Teutonic shrines on the continent.6 Typical of
all Celtic nations was the Beltene fair of the
Irish at Usenech, held “at the turn of the
year,” at the hill where stood “the stone and
umbilicus of Ireland . . . regarded as being in
medio et meditullio terrae positus”
(situated in the center and middle of the
land).7 There the king of the new age was
established and the creation of the world
was rehearsed.8 An inscription from Ancyra
recording just such a fair of the ancient
Galatians9 reminds us that we are dealing
with no medieval innovations in the Irish
fairs or in those of Britain10 and Gaul,11
which follow the same pattern.
In moving terms, Cicero has described
the immemorial rites at Enna in Sicily: “It is
the exact center of the island, and is called
the navel of Sicily” where, at a sacred lake
in the top of a mountain, there congregates
once a year “a renowned assemblage of
people not only from Sicily but from other
nations and races.”12 Rome itself was
originally, and forever remained, a place of
universal assembly. The old Roma quadrata
was, or contained, a circular enclosure
divided into four equal parts, at the center of
which stood the lapis manalis, the seal of
the underworld, marking the mundus—a
term held by some to be identical with the
Greek kosmos.13 At the end of the sacred
roads stood the king’s house on the holy
mount. Hither repaired the whole human race
for the ludi saeculares, the universal
birthday party from which no human being
was permitted to be absent. On this
occasion, the king acted as host to all the
world; and having won a ritual contest with
the powers of darkness, the king was hailed
as father and king of the race for a hundred
years.14
The panegyris of the Greeks has
already been mentioned. Delphi furnishes the
best known, but by no means the only,
example. There the god sat on his holy
mound, “the middle omphalos, the navel of
the earth,” to bestow his blessing on the
multitudes that came along the sacred roads
to pay him homage on his birthday15 and to
live in booths and hold their feasts, games,
and markets.16 Jane Harrison and others have
fully demonstrated the royal combat, victory,
and coronation to be the original kernel of
the rites.17
Scholars have long noted the
remarkable parallel between the Greek rites
at Eleusis and those at the great Slavic shrine
of Svantevit: aside from the death-and-
resurrection motif of the mysteries, the
Slavic assemblies resemble those of other
nations in every particular.18 The great
Egyptian assemblies that astonished the
Greeks by their size and splendor were from
the beginning New Year’s gatherings to
celebrate the coronation of the king;19 the
place was the mountain of creation at the
center of the universe,20 and all the essential
aspects of the panegyris were
conspicuous.21 The Kaba at Mecca is still
thought to mark the exact middle of the earth
and hub of the universe; it is surrounded by
special shrines marking the cardinal points,
and the roads that lead to it are holy, the
main one being called the Royal Road.22
There at a set time the whole human race
must assemble in one tremendous concourse,
as it shall assemble on the Day of Judgment
before the throne of God.23 It was common in
the Middle Ages to represent Jerusalem on
maps as the exact center of the earth and to
depict the city itself as a quartered circle
(fig. 9). Long before the days of the prophets,
that place was the seat of a great assembly
and of the royal year-drama, of which many
echoes still survived in the Bible.24 The
records from Ras Shamra describe the same
type of rites in ancient Syria,25 and early
Christian writers tell of other great
assemblies in the desert.26
Figure 9. Like the famous Roman
castra of later centuries, this
Assyrian royal camp (A) has two
 intersecting avenues dividing it into
quadrants with scenes of
sacrificing and cooking. Even the
king’s horses have their own
elaborate tent as preserved on a
stone relief from the throne room of
Assurnasirpall II, Nimrod, Iraq,
883-859 B.C.
Millenia later the same ideal
geometry demands that the sacred
city of the Jews and Christians must
also be be perfectly encircle by
battlements, as depicted in this
Icelandic map (B), A.D. 1200-1300.
It ignores the actual shape of the
outer walls of Jerusalem but
accurately depicts its streets in the
cardinal directions (C).

The most complete descriptions of the

year-rites, as of the hierocentric doctrine,
have been supplied by the Babylonian
investigators, to one of whom (Father
Burrows) we are beholden for the term
hierocentric as that which best describes
those cults, states, and philosophies that
were oriented about a point believed to be
the exact center and pivot of the universe.27
Dumont and Albright have collaborated to
demonstrate the essential—prehistoric—
identity of the earliest Babylonian rite with
the greatest festival of India, the
Aśvamedha.28 But perhaps the most brilliant
of all the great assemblies took place at the
Persian Nauroz—continuing the very ancient
practices described in the Avesta and the
Vedas—when all the world followed the
Royal Road to the presence of the king to
present their gifts and feast as his guests on
his birthday, the New Year, the only day on
which his glory was visible.29 The great
annual assemblies at the courts of the
Mongol khans and the Chinese emperors (cf.
fig. 10), to which we shall refer below,
follow the identical pattern. It also occurs in
the New World and among primitive tribes.30

The Kingly Calling

But granted that these great assemblies
did take place, and that the rites were far too
peculiar and elaborate to have been
independently invented in a hundred different
places, what then? The dominant position of
the king in the hierocentric rites suggests the
kingly office as the natural point of departure
for further examination of the origin and
survival of the system.
 Figure 10. An 1880 eyewitness
sketch of one of the imperial
ceremonies at the circular marble
terraces of the Altar of Heaven,
Peking. Officials of the Manchu
government have erected a square
canopy over wooden tablets
representing the ancestor of the
Ch’ing Dynasty. It is on this same
sacred center that the Emperor
stands at the solstices in his role as
 the Son of Heaven. In the distance,
at the other end of the sacred axis,
is the oft-photographed Hall of
Abundant Harvests with its
encircling twelve columns and
three-tiered roof.

Within recent years a number of

important studies have appeared treating the
sacral kingship as a single uniform institution
throughout the ancient East.31 The orthodox
conceptions of kingship are not legion but
only one. This conception is clearly restated
by each monarch in his turn.
From the beginning Pharaoh is “ruler of
all that which is encircled by the sun,”32 he
is “the son of God, none can resist him; all
people are subject to him, his bounds are set
at the ends of the earth,” to him the gods
“have promised world dominion.”33 In
Babylonia where “the earthly was a
counterpart of the heavenly monarchy, but
distinct,”34 Naramsin called himself “King
of the Four Regions” and “King of the
Universe.” Goetze says that the Weltreich-
Idee was first carried out in practice by
those Semitic conquerors who made Akkad
the Mittelpunkt der Welt (center of the
world) at about 2600 B.C. Whether or not
this actually was the first world empire,
from that time on every state in the East
“erstrebt fur sich theoretisch die Weltmacht”
(theoretically aspires to world dominion).35
The Assyrian king duly called himself “King
of the four quarters of the world, the sun of
all peoples ... conqueror of the faithless ...
whose hand conquered all who refused him
submission . . . whose priesthood in the
temple and rule over all peoples, Enlil made
great from days of old”;36 and described his
divine calling and mission as that of forcing
all the world “from the rising of the sun unto
the setting of the same . . . to acknowledge
one supremacy.”37 The earliest kings of Elam
and Susa also described themselves as
“King of the four regions,” and “exalted
messenger and high-commissioner of
heaven,”38 even as the later Achaemenids,
“lords of all people, from sunrise to sunset,”
felt obliged to conquer all the world for
Ahura Mazda, to whose rule every enemy
was invited to submit before being
attacked.39 As late as 1739 a Persian shah
could stamp upon his money: “O coin,
announce to all the earth the reign of Nadir,
the King who conquers the world.”40
The Roman emperor is, from the first,
“virtutum rector” (instructor in virtues) of
the world, “salus orbis, Romae decus . . .
magnus parens mundi” (the salvation of the
world, the glory of Rome . . . the mighty
father of the earth),41 and so forth, after the
pattern of the old sacral kings.42 The basic
doctrine of Hellenistic kings is that every
true king is a universal king; the divine urge
of kings cannot be satisfied with anything
less than the world because Zeus the world-
king is the only model for them.43 The
Byzantine emperor, bearing the titles and
insignia of the Persian kings in conscious
imitation, was “by definition the master of
the universe.” “II a pour devoir . . . de
propager la foi orthodoxe a travers toute la
terre habitee, dont Dieu . . . lui promet la
domination” (he has as his duty . . .
spreading the orthodox faith throughout the
whole inhabited world, whose rule God
promises him);44 and he tells his son that
God has placed his throne “like the sun
before Him. . . . He hath given to thee as
worthy His own dominion over all men.”45
“Abscondat solem, qui vult abscondere
regem” (whoever wishes to hide the king
may as well try to hide the sun)! cries a
medieval panegyrist of the French king,46
who claimed to be the true successor of the
emperor and nothing less than “king of kings
and the greatest of princes under heaven.”47
The great Attila called himself totius mundi
principem (the lord of the whole earth) in
the firm conviction that the miraculous
finding of the sword of Mars that he bore
was a sign from heaven that he should rule
the world.48 He was greatly incensed when
he learned that a Roman ambassador had
declared him to be only a man, whereas
Theodosius was a god.49 In the sixth century,
the Khagan of the Turks declared that “all the
earth from the rising to the setting of the sun
is his inheritance, and all who have dared
oppose the Turks have been duly
enslaved.”50 A thousand years before, when
Darius demanded that a Scythian king bring
him earth and water, the latter replied that as
a descendant of God he was the only
legitimate ruler.51 The ninth and tenth
centuries of our era saw an epidemic of
world-kings in higher India, Cambodia, and
Java, all of whom “ambitionnaient d’etre
souverains universels” (sought to be lords of
the earth), mystically identical with the
universal God himself, for whom they sent
out their missionaries to win the world.52
When the papal legate Ezzelino
announced at the court of the Great Khan that
his master was “placed high above all the
kings and princes of the world, and . . . is
honored by them as their Lord and Father,”
his Mongol hosts held their sides with
laughter; the nonentity in the West was
claiming to be exactly what their Khan
obviously was in reality.53 “The Sky had
ordered me to rule all nations,” was the
sincere pronouncement of Chingis Khan,
Ssuto-Bogdo, the God-sent, “whose word
was heaven’s will.”54 To his successor, he
says: “Emirs, Khans, and all persons shall
know that I have delivered over to you the
whole face of the earth from sunrise to
sunset. All who . . . oppose . . . shall be
annihilated.”55 At the same time the pontiffs
of Rome were stating like claims in like
words, and when the Pope’s messenger told
Kuyuk that all princes were subjected to his
master, the latter answered: “The might of
the Eternal Heaven had given the Khagan all
lands from sunrise to sunset, and failure to
obey his commands was a crime against
God. . . . Any who made the slightest
resistance would be annihilated and
exterminated.” His seal bore the inscription:
“God in heaven, and Kuyuk Khan upon earth,
the power of God: the seal of the emperor of
all men.”56
When the Khan’s emissaries bore this
doctrine to the court of the Caliph (as the
pope’s legates had to his), the latter
countered with the identical doctrine: “You
have become in your own eyes the Lord of
the Universe, and think that your commands
are the decisions of fate. . . . Do you not
know that from East to West those who
worship God, from kings to beggars, are all
slaves of this court?”57 The corollary to this
is the doctrine that “war against those who
are not Moslems is a solemn obligation to
God. . . . It is a duty to attack the infidels,
even though they may have committed no act
of aggression.” All the world must be
repeatedly invited to accept Islam, and
whoever refuses must be wiped out by all
possible means.58 By the end of the tenth
century the Caliphs had under Turkish
influence and with the aid of the court
theologians preempted the tremendous title
of the Persian kings and announced that “all
the world must follow the guidance of the
Commander of the Faithful.”59
In China, the Ming emperors after the
expulsion of the Mongols “took over the
claim to world dominion” and “sent
embassies to every country over which
Kublai Khan had once held sway, demanding
instant submission.”60 At the other end of the
Mongol world, Tamerlane sought to fulfill
the prophecy that he “with the might of his
sword, will conquer the whole world,
converting all men to Islam.”61 Even then the
Grand Prince of Muscovy was preparing to
assume the might and glory of the Golden
Horde and to call himself God’s chosen one
and “the only orthodox sovereign in the
world.”62
All these sample claims, it will be
noted, are one and the same. There is no
variety among them, no nuances or fine
distinctions and shadings such as one might
expect. There are other royal claims, but this
is the common doctrine of the great
conquerors. It is clear and unequivocal in
each case: (1) the monarch rules over all
men; (2) it is God who has ordered him to do
so and, significantly, none claims authority
as originating with himself, but even the
proudest claims to be but the humble
instrument of heaven;63 (3) it is thus his
sacred duty and mission in the world to
extend his dominion over the whole earth,
and all his wars are holy wars; and (4) to
resist him is a crime and sacrilege deserving
no other fate than extermination. The most
obvious corollary of this doctrine is that
there can be only one true ruler on earth.
“The eternal command of God is this,” wrote
Mangu Khan to Louis IX, “in heaven there is
but one eternal God; on earth, there is no
other master than Chingis Khan, the Son of
God.”64
 In the great “provincial” cultures of
Egypt,65 India,66 China,67 and, as we shall
see, of Europe also, this doctrine of kingship
appears not as a local invention but clearly
as an importation from the steppes of Asia.
That is true even of Islam. When, in A.D.
979, the king of the Turks and Deilemites
kissed the earth before the feet of a newly
elected caliph, a Moslem general standing by
cried out in horror: “O King, is that God?”
But the new caliph was much pleased by this
custom of the plains, and in time this Central
Asiatic king-worship became a permanent
fixture in Islam as in Byzantium.68
This peculiar but universal conception
of kingship may be traced ultimately to
Central Asia through, among other things, its
close association in theory and practice with
the hierocentric point. The universal type of
hierocentric shrine bears many marks of its
origin.
 Mountain and Palace
At every hierocentric shrine stood a
mountain or artificial mound and a lake or
spring from which four streams flowed out to
bring the life-giving waters to the four
regions of the earth.69 The place was a green
paradise, a carefully kept garden, a refuge
from drought and heat. Elaborate
waterworks figure conspicuously in the
appointments and the rites of the holy place.
The long ritualized wandering of the
pilgrims through the desert, thirsting for the
waters of life; the idea that the sacred place
is a Vara outside of which all is a howling
desert; the groves and the cultivated gardens
where all creatures are at peace; the mighty
central tree that gives shelter to all the
creatures of heaven; the stories of a great
snake (dragon) that haunts the place and
frightens off those who come for the blessed
water70—all such things make it clear that
our hierocentric shrines are supposed to
represent an oasis, and forcibly bring to
mind Pumpelly’s theory that world
civilization originated in the oases of Central
Asia.
It is the water-mountain combination,
artificially produced at so many important
shrines, that most strongly suggests Central
Asia, where the cattle-dependent nomads
have always escaped the deadly drought of
summer by driving their beasts to ancestral
campgrounds at the source of a sacred river
high in the valleys of a holy mountain. It is
there that they elect their khans, and it is
from there that their world empires take their
rise.71 Throughout the world, those who
come to the great assembly are supposed to
drive cattle with them. The rites at Olympia
and Rome were founded when Heracles
drove his cattle, dying of thirst, to those
places.72 The Babylonian counterpart of this
hero is himself a seeker for water and is
shown on early seals watering his cattle
from an overflowing vase.73 In the north the
cow Authumla stands on the mountain at the
source of the four world-rivers. The Koran74
specifically states that the rites of Mecca and
all great assemblies are “over the cattle”
which God has given men for sustenance;
and, indeed, the common cult symbol of the
archaic assembly is the bull’s head.75 We are
reminded of the wonderful prehistoric rock
pictures which, all over the world, depict the
driving of great herds of cattle to holy water
holes.
The seasonal aspect of the great
assembly is but the beginning. The interval
of a year between meetings was too much to
assure firm government, and the sacred place
was often too awkwardly located. So
throughout the world we have a
multiplication of “law-days” and “crown-
days” which are but the duplication of the
year rite,76 while new and more useful
assembly places supplant the old. Thus the
stone of Tara to which the ancient Irish
would drive their cattle at the New Year was
moved to Tailtiu when that became the
capital, as the shrine of Delphi to which all
men drove their hecatombs was later moved
to Delos.77 William of Rubruck78 tells us that
while the real holy center of the Mongols
was the Ononkulitai (the ancestral burial and
assembly place on the holy Altai beside the
equally holy Onon River), for purposes of
administration it had been supplanted by
Karakorum, a centrally located roundup
center to which the tribute animals could be
most conveniently driven from all parts of
the empire. Chingis Khan’s great minister
Yeliu-Ch’uts’ai had “insisted that such a
fixed point was essential, so that the tribes
might know to what place to send tribute,
and come to regard it as a centre of
administration.”79 Chingis Khan himself
“fully realized the necessity of finding
himself a safe refuge, a definite, if movable,
center, that might become a rallying point, a
citadel, as it were, of his nascent empire,”
from which he might send out the “arrow
messengers” with his orders to all the
world.80 Baghdad, says Al-Fakhrī, was
founded in a holy place by the “Khalif of all
men” to be “the blessed city,” and “the house
of salvation”; but it was chosen as the most
central spot in the empire to be reached with
equal ease from all directions, and the tribes
of the four regions were admitted to it, each
by the appropriate gate.81 Thousands of
years before, the Babylonian and Assyrian
kings had observed the identical practice: “I
founded a city in the desert, in a waste, and
from its foundation to its top I completed it.
A temple I builded and placed a shrine of the
great gods in it . . . and I opened a road to
it.” Here we have a hierocentric point where
the king on his throne could “receive the
heavy tribute of the four regions in the city of
Assur, son of Shalmaneser, King of the
Universe.” “I opened a palace in the city of
Tushhan; the tribute of the land of Nidrun . . .
I received in the city of Tushhan.” “I opened
a palace in the city of Tiluli and received the
tribute of the land of Kutmuhi.”82 The names
of the gates of such places—always facing
“the four winds”—tell what they are for:
when they are not proclaiming an abundance
of water, they have such titles as “Bringing
the Products of the Mountains,” “The Gifts of
the Sumu’ anite and the Temite Enter through
It,” “Door of the Products of the Lands,” and
so forth.83 The oldest temple complexes in
the world, at Ur and Mohenjo Daro, were
such places of gathering, it is supposed.
The Persians kept the system, covering
the world with scale-models of the royal
palace to serve as local collection centers.84
The oldest of such shrines and collection
points would seem to go back to early
hunters. Xenophon tells of visiting a shrine
of the Asiatic hunting goddess, where hunters
would come to sacrifice and the lady would
feast all who brought their tithes with bread,
wine, and meat as they camped in their
booths in the sacred enclosure.85 This shrine,
he says, was an exact replica of the great
central temple of the goddess at Ephesus.
The picture of the prehistoric Anahita (the
same goddess to whom Xenophon refers) is
a genuine piece of steppe-lore: clothed in
magnificent furs and gold, the lady rides in
her great wagon from one of her thousand
castles to the next, each castle having a
hundred windows and a throne for Anahita
and standing in a cultivated oasis.86
Eyewitnesses have at wide intervals of time
reported the activities of just such great
ladies of the steppes, riding upon their
wagons from castle to castle.87
In Asia, whoever will found an empire
must first have a palace and a city. Xenophon
himself was suspected of planning to have
his soldiers settle down and found a city
which would be named after him, from
which he could spread abroad his dynamis
in all directions.88 This was long before
Alexander the Great did the same thing. It is
the immemorial Asiatic pattern. We are told
that patriarchs of the race did it in the
beginning;89 and, as late as the 1920s, the
holy man Dambin Jansang built a mighty
fortress in the midst of the Gobi from which
he actually dominated all of Central Asia.90
The “characteristic Central Asiatic city,”
according to a modern observer, is a cluster
of buildings and tents about a super-palace,
built to be the administrative center of all the
vast empty spaces around.91 Archaeology
has shown this to have been the normal order
in prehistoric times, when the city was
already but an appendage of the palace, and
the palace was a combination fort, shrine,
and trading center, like any real hierocentric
point.92 All organized society was centered
at that place which bore the name of “the
god, the tribe, and the capitol, where the
ancestral power was concentrated.”93 When
this fell, the empire fell too; and so we have
the concept of Babylon, founded by Nimrod,
the mad hunter, the plunderer and enslaver of
all the earth, full of “beasts and sheep, and
horses, and chariots, and slaves and the
souls of men,” that perishes in a day.

Kings as Hunters and Nomads

We have remarked elsewhere that
“Kings must be Hunters.”94 The royal hunt of
Asia is a great battue in which all the
animals are driven by a converging ring of
soldiers to that spot in the very center of the
contracting circle where the king sits on his
throne on a green mound. There the king
slays the beasts he chooses and gives his
“peace” to the rest, which thereby become
sacrosanct under his protection.95 Human
beings are treated in exactly the same way. A
Persian king after viewing a tremendous
animal drive significantly remarks to his
officers: “And when people regard us as
enemies and neither send up soldiers nor
tribute, we hunt them with all our might!”96
Xenophon loves to dwell on the absolute
identity of war and hunting in the Asiatic
economy (a doctrine dear to the Mongols):
the ruling nation is simply a moving army in
the field; when it is not hunting men, it is
hunting animals, and vice versa. Carpini tells
how Chingis Khan “became a mighty hunter.
He learned to steal men, and to take them for
prey. He ranged into other countries taking as
many captives as he could, and join[ed] them
unto him,”97 and so conquered the world.
That is exactly how the kings of Babylonia
and Assyria describe their own activities.
There is no contradiction, incidentally, in a
people being at the same time hunters and
cattle raisers. Ammianus notes, for example,
that though the Persians, Scythians, and
Alans drove their huge herds before them
wherever they went “like perpetual
fugitives,” they still lived by hunting animals
and plundering humans.98 Certainly the
oldest kings of the East described their wars
as super cattle and slave raids, in which
wild beasts, domestic cattle, and human
beings are driven in common herds to the
holy palace and shrine of the god.99
This is the old story of Nimrod, who
revolted against God, “became a hunter of
men,” and founded that abominable state
from which all the kings of the earth take
their authority.100 Even Apollo was in the
beginning a deadly hunter who came from the
steppes of Asia (the land of the
Hyperboreans) and slew the great serpent
that guarded the holy spring of Delphi, so
that he could gain control of the spot to
which all the Greeks brought their tribute,
and thereby became their ruler.101 So, too,
Othinn is pictured in the beginning as a
conquering nomad from the East, who rides
into new lands to conquer them, hold games,
and receive tribute; joining with the Asia-
manna, “formerly called the Aesir” (the As
or Alans), he built the castle, Sigtunir, and
held his great assembly where those twelve
judges officiated “who before had been at
Troy and were of the Turkish race.”102 All of
which points again to the steppes.
A nomad origin alone can account for
the most paradoxical aspect of all the
hierocentric shrines, namely their universal
mobility. Every great shrine, while claiming
to be the very point of origin of all things,
had its founding legend telling how it was
transferred through the air from some distant
place.
Furthermore, the doctrine that the seat of
world dominion, ever since it was sent down
in the beginning from heaven, has moved
from place to place among the nations, now
centered in one city and now in another, is
stated in one of the earliest Sumerian texts;
and, following Persian patterns, enjoys great
popularity among Jewish and Christian
apocryphal writers. Related to this concept
is the universal custom requiring the king at
his coronation to found a new palace and a
new city to be the center of the earth. This,
again, seems the direct antithesis of belief in
an ageless holy shrine marking the one and
only center of the universe; but, again, it is a
doctrine that the nomads of the steppes must
subscribe to. If palace-temple complexes
must be built as the only way of “binding
down” the conquered and organizing the
empire, the necessary mobility of the nomad
conquerors would force them to shift their
main center from time to time, thus producing
duplication. “Les tribus allaient de place en
place, tandis que les dieux restaient dans les
sanctuaires. Il fallait s’y rendre” (tribes went
from place to place, while the gods remained
in the sanctuaries);103 hence, of course,
pilgrimage is still a general and natural
institution and not merely a ritual in Central
Asia. That all visitors to all hierocentric
shrines must dress and act as pilgrims from
afar is a clear enough indication of the
nomadic nature of the institution.
As is well known, the oldest temples
were tents or huts of reed matting or some
other light material. The nomads of Asia still
employ these light tent-temples which, like
the ark of Israel, move about with them on
their wanderings. As soon as such a temple
is set up, it promptly becomes a center of
pilgrimage.104 Here we have a practical
explanation for what, in the rest of the world,
is purely ritual; namely, the setting up of a
sacred booth to serve as the main shrine
during the year-rites. Again, the fact that the
Jewish writers describe the throne of God
(certainly the most stable thing in the
universe) as mounted on wheels is indeed
perplexing, until one reads that the thrones of
the Great Khans were likewise on wheels,
so that they could be drawn along by horses
or oxen when it came time to move the camp
(cf. fig. 11).105 The apocryphal picture of
God entering paradise perfectly reproduces
the scene of the khagan arriving at the
summer kuriltai. The Almighty rides into the
glorious meadows on a huge wagon which
comes to a halt under the great central tree of
life, while all the people sing joyful hymns
of welcome.106
Paradoxically enough, the idea of a
hierocentric point is far more often brought
to the minds of nomads than of sedentary
people. The royal court of the Mongols is
“called in their language horda," says
William of Rubruck, “which signifies, the
middle; because the governor or chieftain
among them dwells always in the middle of
his people.”107 Every schoolboy knows (or
once knew) that the Northern king who went
into battle surrounded by concentric rings of
warriors—the “shield-wall”—was an object
of sacred trust; also that such an order of
battle is a tactical absurdity—except on the
open plains, where it has always been
standard with the kings of Asia.108 Many
observers have described the meticulous
care with which the Asiatic nomads orient
their camps to the four cardinal points—the
basic hierocentric idea. And what is more
natural than that wanderers over the
featureless plains should be ever concerned
with taking their bearings in the universe?
Herodotus tells us that when Asiatic
colonists went out at the command of Delphi
to found the kingdom of Libya, their leader
pointed to the spot where the new capitol
was to stand with the order: “Here we must
stop for here is the axis of heaven!”109
 Figure 11. This two-storied royal
wagon throne shows the Persian
king seated on his couch with the
crescent moon on his shoulders as
well as below him on his Sassanian
silver plate (A), c. A.D. 300. The
cherubs on either side lead the four
leaping zebu upward, identifying
the king lumbering along in his
wagon with the divine movement of
the heavens.
In the same way, a statue of a
deceased Roman emperor in a
wheeled temple is pulled by four
elephants in a procession
commemorating his deification, as
shown by the welcoming reception
of the gods above, on this ivory
panel (B), A.D. 425-450. The
popularity of this circus parade is
shown by the abundance of
commemorative coins: (C) brass
coin of Faustina Antonini, (D)
sertertius of Titus, (E) coin of
Domitian.
 The institution of the Royal Progress in
which the monarch moves like the beneficent
sun in a tireless round among his people is
another Asiatic practice. The Persian kings
were constantly on the move between their
various summer and winter palaces, and
medieval travelers have described how all
of Central Asia migrated with the seasons.
This is simply the necessary seasonal
nomadism of the grass-seeking cattle people,
and the Royal Progress is really royal
nomadism.110
The proper business of all kings, when
not sitting on the throne, is war and the hunt,
both requiring the nomadic way of life.
Tournaments and fairs are no less an
occasion for camping out; and even when the
king must live indoors, his palace walls,
covered with tapestries and skins, are made
to look as tentlike as possible.111 Indeed the
royal throne, like the royal bed (which in
Asia is identical with it),112 ordinarily stands
under a canopy which is nothing but a
“Turkish” tent.113 “A recent discovery,”
writes Gadd, “has revealed that the later
Assyrians described their earliest princes as
‘kings living in tents,’ and the same phrase,
occurring at the end of Babylonian history . .
. indicates that this means chieftains of desert
tribes.”114 This background the kings never
lost. To the kings of Asia the royal tent is as
much a part of the insignia as is the crown.
Tamerlane in the West and the Chinese
emperors in the East115 built their
magnificent palaces to resemble their
ancestral tents (cf. fig. 10, p. 105). The
tentlike character of the Achaemenid palaces
was carried over into the mosques of the
Near East and the cathedrals of Europe, so
that the great domed structures that sprang up
all over the world in the Middle Ages
appear both in form and decoration to be
reproductions of the great royal yurts of the
plains (cf. fig. 12).116
The arts and treasures that royalty has
always coveted are the arts and treasures of
the nomads—textiles, jewelry, arms,
animals, and slaves—all highly portable and
instantly redeemable.117 Louis XI, for all his
absolutism, was despised by other monarchs
as being “not royal,” because as a European
he saw where his true wealth lay. An Asiatic
king, who must spend his whole life on the
move, must carry the wealth of his kingdom
on his back, so to speak, if he is to enjoy it;
and this is the type of royal display that
passed throughout the world as kingly. The
highest expression of royal splendor is the
court with its endless feasting and hunting
and its display of gorgeous bric-a-brac
looted by a nobility whose whole life is a
military campaign. It might even be said that
the Renaissance was the rediscovery of the
sedentary arts—painting, sculpture, pottery,
books, architecture—as against the nomadic
arts of the Middle Ages, such as bardic
poetry, weaving, jewelry, arms, pageantry,
and so forth.

Figure 12. "Measuring once the

breadth between the wheel-ruts of
one of their carts, I found it to be
twenty feet over: I counted twenty-
two oxen in one team, the axletree
of the cart was of huge size, like the
 mast of a ship. And a fellow stood
in the door of the house, upon the
forestall of the cart, driving the
oxen."--William of Rubruck, c.
1250.
In the background, we can see the
various stages of erecting the
traditional yurt, still used today,
from the placing of the sacred
wheel frame of the smoke-hole, to
the lattice supports of the felt
pieces that form the tent itself. All
of the work is done by women, of
course.

It is in Central Asia alone that chivalry

and feudalism, like court ritual, have
survived to our day.118 And they are found
there in the beginning. From the first, the
conquerors of Asia brought the conquered
under control by forcing them to farm and by
building castles to watch them. The only free
men are the lords, who alone may hunt or
even mount a horse.119 They are allowed
freedom of motion because they are bound to
the monarch by solemn oaths—the code of
chivalry is an arrangement by which a
nomadic aristocracy is recruited (often from
conquered enemies) and kept in leash while
being allowed its freedom and enjoying the
service and support of grounded serfs.
Goetze has shown that chivalry and
feudalism are the normal products of Central
Asian economy, whence all the great empires
of the second millennium B.C. adopted
them.120 The system was taken over in the
West, along with the chivalric and heraldic
devices that still betray their origin by their
Asiatic nomenclature, at the time when
Europe, overrun by the wild hordes of Asia,
was itself simply a western extension of the
great Asiatic system. It never worked very
well in Europe, however, as Tennyson
wistfully observes, and whenever the
Europeans came in contact with the real
Asiatics, the latter were shocked and
disgusted at the laxness, treachery, jangling,
and hypocrisy that made European chivalry,
even for intelligent Europeans, a most
obvious farce.
The typical royal court is Asiatic in its
rites and appointments. In the Western world
those hunting parks which may not be
missing from the seats of royalty are but
feeble imitations at best of the stupendous
paradises of the East. Europeans, familiar
with the courts of the West, were simply
overawed in the presence of the Great
Khans. Their courts were crude and
barbaric, but they were the real thing. The
khan himself sat utterly majestic and aloof on
his high throne in the dim half-light of the
great dome (and what else could have
inspired the Byzantine emperors to have
their thrones hoisted up by derricks to the
ceiling?). “Upon the right hand of the great
Khan sits his first-be-gotten son and heir . . .
and under him sit all the nobles of blood
royal. There are also four secretaries, which
put all things in writing that the emperor
speaks. In his presence likewise stand
barons and others of his nobility, with great
trains of followers after them, of whom none
dare speak so much as one word . . . except
his jesters and stage-players, who are
appointed of purpose to solace their lord. . .
. All his barons present themselves before
him, with wreaths and crowns upon their
heads . . . some of them are in green, namely
the principal; the second are in red, and third
in yellow, and they hold each man in his
hand a little ivory tablet of elephant’s tooth,
and they are girt with golden girdles half a
foot broad, and they stand upon their feet
keeping silence.” At a given signal, all fall
upon their faces and touch their foreheads to
the earth. Around the walls the nobility are
arranged in tiers of thrones or benches,
proximity to the emperor being proportionate
to rank. A host of musicians hymn the
monarch’s praise with ceaseless and
terrifying din.121
If the king on his throne is doing his best
to imitate God on His,122 we must allow the
khans of Asia first prize among earthly
monarchs. Here is no sad and puerile
Byzantine masquerading, but an expression
of tangible power: the mechanical lions of
Constantinople were real lions before the
throne of the khan. There can be no doubt
that it is the Asiatic model that is followed in
the apocryphal descriptions of the heavenly
court, and the Byzantine court that served as
the model for all of Europe was itself
consciously copied from the East. The
livery, for example, which is little more than
a pretty conceit in the courts of Europe, has a
profound significance among the nomads, as
do the chivalric banners that go with it.123
When the Easter chorus in Constantinople
joyfully announces that the heads of the
emperor’s enemies are heaped up before his
feet, it is not difficult to detect a wishful
imitation of the Grand Khan, for the
collection of heads and scalps for the king
was immemorial routine on the steppes.
As the king sits in state at the New Year
(and every throne-day is but a repetition of
the New Year’s rites),124 all the world must
bring its tribute and lay it at his feet. In return
the king must pour out rich gifts without
measure, for he is the lord of abundance and
all things are his. The staggering turnover of
property in the form of gifts received and
bestowed has been the ruin of many a
European court; but it is sound economic
policy in a nation whose whole existence is
an endless campaign of looting and where it
is convenient to dispose of recent plunder to
another in all possible haste. The normal
economy of the “barbarians” runs down,
says Jordanes, as soon as loot stops coming
in;125 and Bar Hebraeus has given a vivid
description of the ruin of a court when its
noble members abandoned their customary
raids and filibusters.126

The Two Kingdoms

Highly characteristic of the hierocentric
doctrine is an utter abhorrence of all that lies
outside the system. The world inevitably
falls into two parts, the heavenly kingdom
and the outer darkness, a world of monsters
and abortions. Whoever is not of the frithr is
a nithung, without rights and without
humanity. All who do not willingly submit to
Alexander or Constantine are, according to
Dio Chrysostom and Eusebius, mad beasts to
be hunted down and exterminated. For the
Roman, all the world is either ager pacatus
or ager hosticus, says Varro,127 the only
alternative to submission being outrageous
rebellion. Anyone who resents the Roman
yoke is a guilty slave, says Claudian,128 who
should be consumed by remorse of
conscience. For the Moslem, all the world is
either Dār al-Islām or Dār al Ḥarb, the
latter being any spot in the world that has
refused to pay tribute and thereby made itself
guilty of rebellion, because everything in the
world without exception is the legitimate
property of the Moslems.129 We have already
noted the claim of the khans that whoever
resisted them was guilty of crime against
God. To Attila, those who resisted his yoke
were runaway slaves,130 and the Assyrian
kings constantly declare that whoever will
not take and keep an oath to them must needs
be exterminated as “wicked people” and
“rebels.” In a word, “the world without the
‘Kingdom’ remains in its state of primordial
rebellion,” and all who do not recognize the
divine king are truly “children of
destruction.”131
Here we have the root of that dualism so
characteristic of Asian theology and
commonly associated with Persia.
The doctrine is no mere abstraction,
however; it is a condition of survival among
the nomads of the steppes. Farmers may and
must live in pax, i.e., agreement, pact,
compromise;132 and, when they occupy a
region, they divide off the land—annually
and by lot, as a rule—and each proceeds to
cultiver son jardin (tend his garden) in a
way that absorbs all his thought and energy.
But when nomads clash on the open steppe,
one or the other must be utterly subjected. A
beaten enemy at large is free to recoup his
strength, bide his time, and by a lucky chance
or ruse overthrow his erstwhile conqueror—
a thing that has happened a thousand times in
the history of the tribes. An independent
chief is therefore aut Caesar aut nihil; the
alternative to conquering is to be a slave.
“Instant submission or annihilation” is the
formula, and every pastoral lord sends forth
his challenge to all the world: “either fight
me or submit to me.” By absorbing the
armies of the enemy, enslaving some and
binding others to him by sacred oaths, the
world conqueror builds up his world-host; “I
counted them among my people,” is the
Assyrian expression. For there must be one
people only: “With the Mongols,” says Bar
Hebraeus, “there is neither slave nor free;
neither believer nor pagan; neither Christian
nor Jew; but they regard all men as
belonging to one and the same stock. . . . All
they demand is strenuous service and
submission which is beyond the power (of
man to render).”133 The alternative to one
rule on the steppes is not only chaos but
sheer nonsense. Nomads cannot be held to
boundaries, and where more than one ruler
exists, they follow whom they will and life
becomes the intolerable anarchy to which
each great conqueror boasts that he has at
last put an end—invariably describing
himself as the liberator of the human race
from depraved pretenders and the restorer of
order in the world.
A natural product of this necessary
absolutism is the notorious cruelty of the
Asiatic princes which, often found in men of
magnanimous and even gentle nature, seems
to the Western mind nothing short of
pathological. But what is one to do when a
foe is not beaten until he has lost his
mobility? Where oaths can be trusted, they
suffice; where adequate supervision is
possible, it is enough. For the rest, the only
sure ways of immobilizing a dangerous
enemy are by beheading, maiming, blinding,
or mass transportation. The remarkable thing
is that the great conquerors rarely harm a
hair of anyone of whose submission they are
certain and always protest their preference
for gentle and philanthropic methods. It is
invariably the revolted cities and tribes, who
have violated the trust and forfeited the faith
of the king, that pay the terrible penalties.
Moreover, the kings of Asia were sincere in
believing that those who opposed them were
less than human,134 and ages of experience
justified their conviction that no creature on
the loose is to be regarded as harmless while
it is free to do harm if it will.
The conquering nomad must of necessity
either carry all his loot with him or deposit it
at guarded stations, in either case involving a
serious problem of transportation and
manpower. Yet whatever is left behind and
unguarded may, and almost surely will, be
used against the conqueror by some rival or
rebel; so there is nothing for it but to destroy
the stuff. The Mohammedan law orders that
prisoners and loot of war may not be left
behind or mutilated, but if they cannot be
carried home, they must be destroyed—
killed or burned.135 The Huns “obliterated
and smashed everything that lay in their
route,” but they did so reluctantly, for they
almost lost a battle with the Goths rather than
give up the vast burden of looted goods that
was impeding their motions.136 Many have
commented on the inconsistency of princes in
combining a passion for collecting beautiful
things with an absolute indifference to the
destruction of beautiful things. It is clearly a
heritage of the steppes, where the apparent
paradox makes perfectly good sense. All
observers have commented on the single-
minded devotion of the Asiatic nomads to the
accumulation of treasures (as nomads they
are hungry for such things); but when their
own survival is at stake, the stuff becomes
dangerous impedimenta to be destroyed out
of hand.
At any period of history the two top
hierocentric states may be seen damning
each other as Antichrist and resembling each
other like two peas. In the classic duel
between Justinian and Chosroes, George of
Pisidia describes the court ceremonial of
Persia as a carbon copy of that of
Constantinople, with the explanation that the
Oriental version is but a hideous parody of
the real thing. Chosroes replied in kind.137
This doctrine of the Two Kingdoms is
already full-blown in the old Babylonian
New Year’s hymn, Enuma Elish, in which
the evil court of Tiamat is described as a
perfect reflection—in reverse—of the
heavenly court of Anu. Emperors, caliphs,
shāhanshāhs, grand khans, popes, and kings
were all at one time or another paired off
against each other as rival world rulers;
while each, within his own sphere, “had to
eliminate rival contenders” for his office.
Always, the drama is described by their
constituents as the cosmic combat between
light and darkness, heaven and hell, between
two opposing ideologies, antithetical ways
of life while, in reality, they are identical.138
They are identical because they are
hierocentric—and that is a concept which
seems almost incapable of any variety: it is
always the same.

A Western Heritage
With the decline of the Roman Empire,
Europe became a battleground of the tribes:
“propter Gallorum terras graviter inter se
decertati sunt” (they fought bitterly among
themselves for the lands of the Gauls).139
Gibbon has told best of all the story of how
the “pastoral kings” of the steppes fought
each other for the control of the newly
opened lands of the West, exactly as they had
fought for their Asiatic grazing lands; and
how the native populations were either
driven like cattle (a favorite term with
contemporary writers) or allowed to live on
as serfs, meekly submitting to one haughty
lord after another. The most powerful of
these tribes, the Huns—“expeditum
indomitumque hominum genus” (an
unencumbered and untamed race of men)140
—under the mighty Attila, “barbariam totam
tenens” (master of the whole non-Roman
world),141 treated Europe simply as a
western province of their Asiatic empire.
Attila’s son Dinzio did, on European soil,
exactly what every Asiatic aspirant had done
before him in Asia; he rallied the remnants
of the tribes about him, and tried to seize a
city in Pannonia in an attempt to restore his
father’s Imperium.142 A later descendant of
Attila, Mundo, is even more typical, for he
went into the most desert part of Europe and
there, like Tamerlane and Chingis Khan,
gathered a band of outcasts about him, no
doubt making the most of his descent. He had
them proclaim him king and declared war on
the world, choosing as his base of operations
a tower on the Danube which was called
Herta—obviously the later Mongol Horda,
“the center” of dominion.143 These men,
typical feudal barons, were transplanting the
ways of the steppes into the West.
The West had long been preparing to
receive them, too. Generations of fighting
against Alans, Gepids, Goths, and Huns, and
of fighting with them shoulder to shoulder, in
alliance now with one and now with the
other, had transformed the Roman military
state into the thing it had been fighting.
Narses consciously and successfully
employed not Roman but Hunnish tactics
against the Franks, and the closing chapters
of Jordanes show a Roman army
indistinguishable from any barbarian horde.
The last chapter of all makes the significant
remark that the ultimate victor to emerge
from the world shambles was “victor
gentium diversarum Justinianus Imperator”
(the Emperor Justinian, conqueror of diverse
peoples). It was in this man Justinian that the
Huns won a great and abiding victory over
the West.
The Emperor Justinian displayed at all
times a single-minded devotion to the Huns
that puzzles and dismays historians.144
Apparently there was nothing he would not
do to please the Huns, even to the wrecking
of his own foreign policy145 and the ruination
of trade and agriculture throughout the
empire.146 A passionate devotee of the
factionists, he had worn their Persian beards,
Hunnish hairdo, Hunnish cloaks, Hunnish
shirts, and Hunnish shoes,147 the girdles and
brooches of the steppes having already
supplanted the more civilized styles of the
West.148 “The greatest destroyer of
established institutions that ever lived,”149
Justinian was determined to make the
Western world “completely change its
clothes”;150 and he succeeded.
All the absurdities and contradictions in
his policies vanish if we consider that this
Illyrian, who hated Greek things, was set
upon becoming a grand khan. Justinian
handed over the wealth of the state to the
Huns “who were always turning up” at court
(a significant note) in ever increasing
numbers.151 He would claim for himself all
the private property of the citizens, either
charging the Romans with a crime or
pretending that it was all being brought in to
him as gifts,152 and then promptly give it all
away again to the Hunnish lords before his
throne:153 a thing that made perfectly good
sense to his visitors from the steppes but
appeared to his Roman subjects as “a thing
that had never happened since the beginning
of time.”154 What he did not thus throw away
to the barbarians, says Procopius, he wasted
on absurd buildings,155 constructed simply to
outshine all other emperors—a thing that any
khan would have understood. This Hun-
worship actually amounted to the enslaving
of the empire, says Procopius and Agathias,
but that was how Justinian wanted it. He
insisted that all his subjects, from top to
bottom, be called his slaves,156 and instituted
the strictly Central Asiatic style of
prostration and foot-kissing.157 He was not
averse to giving the impression of being a
sort of super-shaman and apparently even
adopted the well-known Mongol custom of
making those who entered his presence step
clear of the threshold.158 In short, “instead of
acting like a Roman Emperor, he was the
complete barbarian in language, dress, and
thought.”159 What more could one ask? The
welcome barbarians poured into court from
all directions, to the immense delight of the
emperor, who never failed to send them
away loaded with gold,160 till presently “the
barbarians in general became complete
masters of the wealth of the Romans.”161 In
the end, all the offices and officials of the
state were supplanted by one office—the
royal court, and by two persons—the
emperor and empress,162 for the new
ascendancy of the empress, intensely
resented by Procopius, was the crowning
Asiatic touch.
Justinian’s weird innovations were no
ephemeral thing. They were but the
culmination of that process of Asianizing
which had been deplored by the poets of the
Republic. And they were there to stay.
Diehls, and indeed the ancients themselves,
see in Justinian the perfect type and model of
the true Byzantine monarch, and his court
became the model for every court of Europe.
The sedentary populations of the empire,
strictly forbidden to adopt the wandering
ways of the conquerors, were permanently
saddled with an adventurous hunting and
campaigning nobility. How utterly
unworkable the system was is vividly
described by Fulcher, who shows how in
time it led inevitably to the Crusades.163 In
the Crusades we find the nobility of the West
employing all the devices and insignia of the
Asiatics with accustomed familiarity, so that
Edward I can arrange for a coordinated
invasion operation with his Mongol allies
down to the smallest detail. The Europeans
fully understood all the gadgets of the East
and were as enthusiastic for a life of raiding
and adventure as any Bedouin. But the good
side of the Asiatic system completely
escaped them.
Christianity added nothing to the
hierocentric doctrine as such. The early
Christian theology was keenly conscious of
all the imagery of hierocentric rule and ritual
and, above all, of the contrast of the two
kingdoms. The Apostles, the Apostolic
Fathers, Diognetus, Tertullian, and the
Shepherd of Hermas tell us, it is true, that
there is a universal throne—but it is not on
this earth. The devil is the “Prince of this
World,” which is no place for the children of
the kingdom—they sojourn here as pilgrims
and as strangers. The conflict is not between
contending parties here below, but between
“this world” and the other. Our heritage and
kingdom lie beyond: “here we have no
abiding kingdom.”
Later Christian teaching adopted the old
hierocentric doctrine with enthusiasm; but it
did not, as Ferrero boasts,164 make it more
spiritual and intellectual: the lofty ideal of
the sacred universal empire is as abstract
and intellectual in Horace and Vergil as it is
in Dante. The vision of the universal ruler
seated at the center of the cosmos had been
fully appreciated and ecstatically
proclaimed by the theoreticians of
Alexandria in whose steps Roman emperors
and Christian thinkers willingly followed.165
Gilson, commenting on Pope John VIII’s
concept of the church, says that it was
identical with the Roman Empire, having the
same capital and the same idea, only plus
vaste.166 But what could be more vaste than
the urbs aequaeva polo (city coeval with the
heavens) of the pagan panegyrists, equal to
the universe itself? Diehl sees in Christianity
the addition of a profoundly religious
element to the old concept of the Imperium:
the prince is “transformed into the elect of
God.” But what Cosmocrator was ever
anything but just that?
In describing the new world church as
an improvement on the old system, each of
these three authorities admits the Church’s
indebtedness to that system. The absolute
predominance of the emperor, “equal to the
Apostles” (isapostolos), God on earth, the
supreme head of the church as well as the
state;167 the great imperial councils, a thing
new in the church but, as Gelzer and Batiffol
have shown, established usage in the empire;
the investiture of church-men by the emperor
with insignia originally confined to the
secular administration and borrowed from
the East;168 the new ritual and liturgy so
closely akin to old court ceremonies—the
laudes echoing the old imperial acclamation
and the liturgies praising God in the same set
terms which the panegyrists declaimed
before the emperor; the emergence of Christ,
the ever-victorious crusher of his foes, as an
object of terror and dread169—such are a
few of the well-documented indications that
the world church of the fourth century was
built upon the firm foundation of the old
sacral kingship. The Armenian monk Vartan
says the Christians prostrated themselves
before God as the Mongols did before the
Grand Khan.170 A trip to Constantinople
would have shown him that this pious
prostration was not reserved for the
Invisible God but was really the old
emperor-worship of Central Asia.
 To Conclude
That it was the people of the steppes,
engulfing the great “peripheral” civilizations
in wave after wave, who imposed
government upon the world, Oppenheimer
long ago made clear. What he failed to
observe is that hunters do not always “work
best alone or in small groups,” but on the
boundless plains have been wont to operate
in vast communal battues from the
beginning. More recently Goetze has
completed the picture in describing how the
Hurrians and their kind came out of the
regions of the North at the end of the third
millennium and taught the old city-states to
become world empires, supplying them with
the equipment for the task: the horse, the
chariot, the mounted archer, and a
thoroughgoing feudalism.171
In China, India, Egypt, and Europe the
successive waves of nomad invasion have
been like recurrent attacks of a disease, each
effecting a permanent change in the organism
and leaving a permanent deposit behind it.
The invaded civilizations, having absorbed
institutions and traditions of the invaders,
become increasingly susceptible to the
romantic appeal of the same, and in some
cases (e.g., Russia) contact between the two
worlds is never broken completely.
During the darkest period of its history,
when all the works of established
civilization were virtually destroyed, the
West reverted to a state of primordial chaos
indistinguishable from that which normally
prevails on the steppes of Asia. At that fatal
moment the liquefied resources of the West
were poured, as they had often been before,
into the Asian mold. The obvious solution to
the Asiatic predicament was the classic
Asiatic solution: with appalling meekness
the officials of the empire literally kissed the
earth before the feet of worthless and
arrogant emperors, while pastoral
conquerors settled down to establish their
accustomed economy of theft and tribute on
the newly won soil of Europe.
This is the dangerous heritage of the
hierocentric state. Removed from those
boundless land-spaces which gave it rise
and which alone offer boundless empire, the
hierocentric ideal becomes in practice a
pretentious ritual, pontificale et vide
(pretentious and empty); but in theory a
noble dogma, a pure idea of such compelling
logic, simplicity, boldness, and universal
appeal as to appear nothing short of a
revelation from heaven. The great Greeks,
like the prophets and apostles, saw through
the imposing fraud: “God never meant that
one man should rule all of cattle-raising
Asia,” says the ghost of Darius, addressing
at once the Eastern and Western worlds from
the stage of Athens. But the shallower minds
of the schoolmen were lost in ecstatic
contemplation of the universal king around
whom all things revolve in perfect circles.
No less so the schoolmen of the Middle
Ages, “cabined in the Absolute,” hypnotized
by the overwhelming authority of the One.
And so, too, the schoolmen of our own day.
Toynbee is confident that “religion is likely
to be the plane on which this coming
centripetal [we would say, hierocentric]
counter-movement will first declare itself,”
and recommends above all else the study of
“the part which the west has played in the
unification of mankind.”172
In the last chapter of his Histoire des
Croisades, Grousset has shown how Western
Europe, at the peak of its intellectual
splendor, utterly failed to comprehend the
enlightened world views of the Mongol
khans who, strongly favoring Christianity in
their own lands, were all but begging for an
alliance with the Christian West by which the
two could crush Islam. Significantly enough,
it was the vision of world-rule itself that
frustrated action. The cardinals who cross-
examined Rabban Sauma would not hear of
an alliance that might seem to march against
the Antichrist under any other banner—
Nestorian or Mongol—than their own. In
A.D. 297, the Emperor Galerius haughtily
rejected a generous offer of the Persians to
divide the rule of the world as equals, East
and West, and thus preserve the peace; the
Romans, says Petrus Patricius, simply could
not conceive of such a proposition as
anything but sarcasm or malice. When the
Persian ambassadors pointed out the risk and
folly of rejecting such a golden offer, the
furious emperor shouted: “The custom of my
ancestors has been to spare those who
submit and make war on those who
don’t!”173 That was all. It would seem that
nothing can so effectively block “the
unification of mankind” as that very
religious” centripetal counter movement” for
which Toynbee yearns, and that the West has
been less the author of such unification than
its consistent wrecker.
Men seem unable to leave the dream of
a hierocentric state alone. To recapitulate the
sections given above, we cannot blame
people if they yearn for (1) the grandeur,
color, and unity of the great assembly, (2) the
lofty and uncompromising certainty of
universal kingship, (3) the sense of refuge
and well-being in the holy shrine, (4) the
high and independent life of a chivalrous
aristocracy, (5) the luxury of hating all
opposition with a holy hatred, and (6) the
sheer authority of the institutions established
and maintained by force. These are the
strengths of the hierocentric state. Its
weakness is that it doesn’t exist. That “son of
the morning” who went up into the North,
placed his throne upon the mountain of the
assembly, and said, “I will be like the most
High,” only succeeded, we are told in
“weaken[ing] the nations” (Isaiah 14:14,
12).

Notes
This article was originally published
in Western Political Quarterly 4/2 (1951):
226-53.

Footnotes
^1. Martin P. Nilsson, Geschichte der
griechischen Religion, 2 vols. (Munich:
Beck, 1941), 1:778-79.
^2. Samuel H. Hooke, ed., The Labyrinth
(London: Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge, 1937); and Theodor H. Gaster,
 Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the
Ancient Near East (New York: Schuman,
1950), are general treatments of the subject.
See below for other references.
^3. For a general treatment of the year-feast, see
Hugh Nibley, “Sparsiones,” Classical
Journal 40 (1945): 515-38; reprinted in this
volume, pages 148-62.
^4. See Wolfgang Golther’s note in his edition of
Ari’s Íslending-abók (Halle: Niemeyer,
1923), 11-12; also Paul Herrmann, Island in
Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, 2 vols.
(Leipzig: Engelmann, 1907-10), 1:302-3;
Felix Niedner, Islands Kultur zur
Wikingerzeit (Jena: Diederichs, 1913), 45-
47.
^5. Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis
Ecclesiae Pontificum (History of the
Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremem) IV, 26-
27; Paul Herrmann, Nordische Mythologie
(Leipzig: Engelmann, 1903), 300, 501; and
Paul B. Du Chaillu, The Viking Age, 2 vols.
(New York: Scribner, 1890), 1:296.
^6. On the time, place, and nature of these
assemblies, see Alexander Tille, Yule and
Christmas: Their Place in the Germanic
Year (London: Nutt, 1899), 47-48, 71; Jacob
Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, tr. James S.
Stallybrass, 3 vols. (London: Sonnenschein
& Allen, 1880), 1:66-87; Herrmann,
Nordische Mythologie, 497-99, 503-4, 509;
Carl Clemen, Religionsgeschichte Europas,
2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1926), 1:355-61;
Tacitus, Annals X, 51; Thietmar Merseburg,
Chronicon I, 17, in Robert Holtzmann, ed.,
Die Chronik des Bischofs Thietmar von
Merseburg und ihre Korveier
Überarbeitung, vol. 6, part 9, of
Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1955); and numerous references
in the sagas, especially Finnur Jónsson,
Egils Saga Skalgrímssonar (Halle:
Niemeyer, 1924). The classic study of the
survival of the old Germanic assemblies in
the Middle Ages are Charles Du Cange’s
dissertations, “Des assemblées solenelles des
rois de France” and “Des cours et des festes
solenelles des roys de France,” in
 Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis,
10 vols. (Paris: Didot, 1850), 7:15-23.
^7. John Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and
Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic
Heathendom (London: Williams and
Norgate, 1898), 192. Another such stone, “a
petra quadrata in ora fontis,” is described in
the Book of Armagh, in Ioannes Zwicker,
ed., Fontes Historiae Religionis Celticae
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1934), 2:154. The stone
of Tara was moved to Tailtiu when that
became the capital, Rhys, Lectures on the
Origin and Growth of Religion, 207, 576,
585. See also Henri Hubert, “Le culte des
heros et ses conditions sociales,” RHR 70
(1914): 12, 15; and 71 (1915): 208-9; Henri
Hubert, Greatness and Decline of the Celts
(London: Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1934),
241-42, and L. D. Agate, “Pilgrimage,” in
James Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion
and Ethics, 13 vols. (New York: Scribner,
1928), 10:21.
^8. Henry d’Arbois de Jubainville, The Irish
Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology,
 tr. Richard Best (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis,
1903), 3; Hubert, Greatness and Decline of
the Celts, 1-4, 242; Rhys, Lectures on the
Origin and Growth of Religion, 409, 460,
514-17, 519-20, 459-60, 412, 581, 608,
614; J. A. MacCulloch, Celtic Mythology,
vol. 3 in Louis H. Gray, ed., Mythology of
All Races, 13 vols. (Boston: Jones, 1918),
28, 34-36; Hadrian Allcroft, The Circle and
the Cross, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan,
1927-30), 2:73, 20, 207.
^9. Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum No.
4039K, cited in Allcroft, Circle and the
Cross, 1:299; cf. Strabo, Geography XII, 5,
1.
^10. British assemblies described in a letter from
Gregorius Magnus (Gregory the Great),
Epistolae (Epistles) XI, 77, in PL 77:1215-
16; at the Council of Cloveshove, A.D. 747,
in Joannes D. Mansi, Sacrorum Concilorum
Nova et Amplissima Collectio, 31 vols.
(Graz: Akademische, 1901), 12:400; by
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum
Britanniae III, 5; see especially the Welsh
 version, tr. Acton Griscom (London:
Longmans, Green, 1929), IX, 1; III, 3. The
year-drama is described by Rhys, Lectures
on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 155-
58, 160-65, 562; cf. Mary Williams, “An
Early Ritual Poem in Welsh,” Speculum 13
(1938): 43-51; and Raymond W. Muncey,
Our Old English Fairs (London: Sheldon,
1935), 46, 103, 116, 145-47, 156, 162-63,
166.
^11. General descriptions: Athenaeus,
Deipnosophists IV, 34 (150-52); Venatius
Fortunatus, Vita Sancti Amantii X, 108-10,
in PL 88:522-23; Strabo, Geography IV, 3,
2-3; V, 11, 1; Gregory of Tours, De Gloria
Confessorum 11, in PL 71:836-37; Rhys,
Lectures on the Origin and Growth of
Religion, 383-86, 390, 394-96, 407-9, 419-
21, 429.
^12. Cicero, In Verrem III, 48, 106-7; LIII, 117-
18.
^13. André Piganiol, “Les origines du forum,”
Melanges de l’École de France de Rome 28
(1928): 250-51, 271-72, 276-78; Stefan
 Weinstock, “Templum,” Mitteilungen des
Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts.
Römische Abteilung 45 (1930): 118. On the
mundus as the model of the universe, J.-A.
Hild, “Mundus,” in Charles V. Daremberg
and Edmond Saglio, Dictionnaire des
antiquités grecques et romaines, 6 vols. in
10 (Paris: Hachette, 1877-1919), 3:2:2021-
22; and Wilhelm Kroll, “Mundus,” in RE
16:560-64.
^14. The basic descriptions in Zosimus, Historia
Nova II, 5-6; the Acta Ludorum
Saecularium in Theodor Mommsen,
Gesammelte Schriften, 8 vols. (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1905-13), 8:572-73, 598-99;
Statius, Silvae I, 6; Ovid, Fasti III, 525-30;
Cassiodorus, Variae VIII, 33. See especially
André Piganiol, Recherches sur les jeux
Romains (Strasbourg: Librairie Istra, 1923);
E. Diehls, “Das Saeculum, seine Riten und
Gebete,” Rheinisches Museum für
Philologie 81 (1934): 256-58; Georg
Wissowa, “De Feriis Anni Romanorum
Vetustissimi Observationes Selectae,” in
 Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur römischen
Religions- und Stadtgeschichte (Munich:
Beck, 1904), 154-74; Otto Huth, Janus
(Bonn: Rohrscheid, 1932); Fritz Blumenthal,
“Ludi Saeculares,” Klio 15 (1917-18): 232.
^15. Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae no. 12, in
William R. Halliday, The Greek Questions of
Plutarch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 72;
also 9, 35, and 59.
^16. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen
Religion, 1:778-82; and Martin P. Nilsson,
Griechische Feste (Leipzig: Teubner, 1906),
156-57, 319, n. 1; Paul Stengel, Die
griechischen Kultusaltertümer (Munich:
Beck, 1920), 190-216.
^17. Jane Harrison, Themis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1912), 389-96
(Delphi); cf. also Francis M. Cornford’s
study on Olympia, “The Origin of the
Olympic Games,” in ibid., 212-59, and
Gilbert Murray, “An Excursus on the Ritual
Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy,” in
ibid., 341-63.
^18. Clemen, Religionsgeschichte Europas,
 1:374-77, 386-87. Descriptions of the
various assemblies in Karl H. Meyer, ed.,
Fontes Historiae Religionis Slavicae
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 1931), 7, 35 (Ebbo), 63-
64, 66-67 (Dlugosz), 70, 77, 94-95 (Ibn
Rusta). Cf. Jan Machal, Slavic Mythology,
vol. 3 in Gray, Mythology of All Races, 279-
80, 286-87, 281-84, 295, 305, 307-9, 311-
12, and A. Brueckner, “Slaven und Litauer,”
in Alfred Bertholet and Edvard Lehmann,
eds., Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2
vols., 4th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925),
2:510-21; Helmold, Chronicle of the Slavs I,
16; 52; 69; and 83.
^19. Hermann Kees, Ägypten, in Handbuch der
Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 3, pt. 1, 3a
(Munich: Beck, 1933), 28, 175, 177-78,
195; Adolf Erman, Ägypten und ägyptisches
Leben in Altertum (Tübingen: Mohr, 1923),
41, 59-60, 294; Arthur Weigall, History of
the Pharaohs, 2 vols. (London: Butterworth,
1931), 1:118.
^20. C. N. Deedes, “The Labyrinth,” in Hooke,
The Labyrinth, 3-5, 13-14; Fritz Hommel,
 Ethnologie und Geographie des alten
Orients (Munich: Beck, 1926), 882-83, 761-
63, 935-38, 939-41, 948, 955-56; Kees,
Ägypten, 155-58; see especially H. R. Hall,
Review of Adriaan de Buck, De Egyptische
voorstellungen betreffende den oerheuvel, in
JEA 10 (1924): 185-87.
^21. On the rites: Plutarch, Isis and Osiris;
Herodotus, History II, 58-65; Deedes,
“Labyrinth,” 3-42; Hugo Gressmann, Tod
und Auferstehung des Osiris nach
Festbräuchen und Umzügen (Leipzig:
Hinrichs, 1923).
^22. Richard F. Burton, Guidebook to Meccah
(London: Philpot, 1924), 54.
^23. Ibid., 32, 43-44; Christiaan S. Hurgronje,
Het Mekkaansche feest (Leiden: Brill, 1899);
Julius Wellhausen, Reste arabischen
Heidentums (Berlin: Reimer, 1897), 84-94.
Arabic literature is full of the great
assemblies of men, jinns, animals, birds, and
so forth, the most impressive treatment of
the theme being in the text edited by
Friedrich Dieterici, Thier und Mensch vor
 dem König der Genien (Leipzig: Hinrichs,
1881), passim.
^24. Aubrey R. Johnson, “The Role of the King
in the Jerusalem Cultus,” in Hooke,
Labyrinth, 73-77; and also Eric Burrows,
“Some Cosmological Patterns in Babylonian
Religion,” in ibid., 53-56; A. J. Wensinck,
“The Semitic New Year and the Origin of
Eschatology,” Acta Orientalia 1 (1922):
158, 176; Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena
to the History of Israel, tr. J. Sutherland
Black and Allan Menzies (Edinburgh: Black,
1885), 17-28, 103-8; Alfred Jeremias, Das
Alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients
(Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1916), 647-48. That
there was originally only one festival, see
Albert Brock-Utne, “Eine
religionsgeschichtliche Studie zu dem
ursprünglichen Passahopfer,” Archiv für
Religionswissenschaft 31 (1934): 272-78.
^25. “Our Ras Shamra text affords the prototype
of New Year rituals still surviving in
Jerusalem in the 6th century B.C.,” says
Theodor H. Gaster, “Ras Shamra, 1929-
 39,” Antiquity 13 (1939): 316. Widely
identified with other rites by Theodor H.
Gaster, “The Story of Aqhat, I,” Studi e
Materiali di Storia delle Religioni 12
(1936): 127-32. See especially Lucian, De
Syria Dea (On the Syrian Goddess).
^26. E.g., that at Abraham’s Oak in Mamre,
Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica
(Ecclesiastical History) II, 4, in PG 67:941-
44, and Eusebius, Vita Constantini (The
Life of Constantine) III, 53, in PG 20:1116.
^27. Burrows, “Some Cosmological Patterns,”
46-57; Heinrich Zimmern, Das
babylonische Neujahrsfest (Leipzig:
Hinrichs, 1926); Jeremias, Das Alte
Testament, 6-34, 65-87. For the Sumerian
version, Morris Jastrow, Jr., “Sumerian and
Akkadian Views of Beginnings,” JAOS 36
(1916): 276-78.
^28. William F. Albright and Paul É. Dumont, “A
Parallel between Indic and Babylonian
Sacrifical Ritual,” JAOS 54 (1934): 107-28;
Paul É. Dumont, L’Aśvamedha (Paris:
Geuthner, 1927), is the classic treatment of
 the subject. On the Indian “navel of the
earth,” see Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,
“The Pilgrim’s Way,” Journal of the Bihar
and Orissa Research Society 33 (December
1937): 457, and E. Washburn Hopkins,
“The Divinity of Kings,” JAOS 51 (1931):
309, 311.
^29. Al-Bīrūnī, Chronologie orientalischer
Völker, ed. Edward C. Sachau (Delhi:
Chard, 1923), 221-24, 226-27, 230;
Herodotus, History IX, 110; Athenaeus,
Deipnosophists IV, 145a; Clemen,
Religions-geschichte Europas, 1:181-83;
Albert J. Carnoy, Iranian Mythology, vol. 6
in Gray, Mythology of All Races, 269-71,
293, 297, 299-300, 304-5, 307-8, 313-19,
and Albert J. Carnoy, “Iranian Views of
Origins in Connection with Similar
Babylonian Beliefs,” JAOS 36 (1916): 300-
320.
^30. Thus among the Quechua of Peru, Paul
Radin, Social Anthropology (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1932), 85-90, and the
Baganda, 82-84.
^31. To works cited above, add Cyril J. Gadd,
Ideas of Divine Rule in the Ancient East,
Schweich Lectures, 1945 (London: Oxford
University Press, 1948); and Henri
Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study
of Ancient Near Eastern Religions as the
Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1948).
^32. Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), 74; Alexandre
Moret, Histoire de l’Orient, 2 vols. (Paris:
Presses universitaires, 1929), 1:213.
^33. Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4
vols. (Jena: Diederich, 1928), 2:72; cf. Kees,
Ägypten, 172-85.
^34. Gadd, Ideas of Divine Rule, 34.
^35. Moret, Histoire de l’Orient, 1:355, 357.
Albrecht Goetze, Hethiter, Churriter und
Assyrer (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1936), 15-16,
39-40.
^36. Daniel D. Luckenbill, Ancient Records of
Assyria and Babylonia, 2 vols. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1926),
 1:passim.
^37. Ibid., 170, 185.
^38. Clément Huart and Louis Delaporte, L’Iran
antique: Élam et Perse et la civilisation
iranienne (Paris: Michel, 1943), 115-19.
^39. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4:21-22;
Huart and Delaporte, L’Iran antique, 289,
380.
^40. Sven Hedin, My Life as an Explorer, tr.
Alfhild Huebsch (Garden City: Boni and
Liveright, 1925), 85. In A.D. 562, Chosroes
called himself “divine, beneficent,” “King of
Kings,” “giant of giants,” “whose nature is
from the gods,” and so forth. Menander, De
Legationibus Romanorum ad Gentes, in PG
113:860.
^41. Optatianus Porfyrius, Carmina II; cf.
Rutilius Namatianus Claudius, De Reditu
Suo I, 47-48 and 61-66; Aelius Aristides,
Encomium Romae (To Rome) 30, 72, and
77; Propertius, Elegies III, 1; IV, 2 and 6;
Claudius Claudianus, Bellum Geticum (The
Gothic War) 623-47; Horace, Odes III, 5;
 IV, 2.
^42. Horace, Carmen Saeculare; Vergil, Aeneid
VI, 793-800; Vergil, Eclogues IV, 48-49. On
the hierocentric idea, “Janus est mundus et
mundus quattuor partibus constat” (Janus is
the world and the world consists of four
quarters), Augustine, De Civitate Dei (The
City of God) VII, 8.
^43. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses I, 37; II, 75;
IV, 4; XIV, 23; XXXVI, 22-23, 36; LVI, 4-5.
^44. Charles Diehl and Georges Marçais, Le
monde oriental de 395 à 1081 (Paris:
Presses universitaires, 1936), 55-56, 487-95.
^45. Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De
Administrando Imperio, intro., in PG
113:160, with much more to the same
effect.
^46. Gunter, cited in Du Cange, “Des cours et des
festes solenelles des roys de France,” in
Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis,
7:20, unconsciously quoting Esarhaddon:
“Where shall a fox go to escape the sun?”
Luckenbill, Ancient Records, 2:210, n. 523.
^47. Du Cange, “De la prééminence des rois de
France au-dessus des autres rois de la terre,”
in Glossarium Mediae et Infimae
Latinitatis, 7:112-15.
^48. Jordanes, Historia Getica Getarum (Gothic
History) 35.
^49. Priscus Rhetor, De Legationibus
Romanorum ad Gentes 3, in PG 113:708,
716.
^50. Menander, De Legationibus Romanorum ad
Gentes 14, in PG 113:904 (A.D. 575).
^51. Herodotus, History IV, 126.
^52. René Grousset et al., L’Asie orientale des
origines au XVe siècle (Paris: Presses
universitaires, 1941), 351-52, 355-56, 361-
62, 364, 367, 369, 406-7.
^53. Michael Prawdin, The Mongol Empire: Its
Rise and Legacy, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1940), 283.
^54. Boris Vladimirstov, The Life of Chingis-
Khan, tr. D. S. Mirsky (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1930), 65-66; Prawdin, Mongol
Empire, 367.
^55. Prawdin, Mongol Empire, 173.
^56. Ibid., 282. On the seal, Giovanni P. Carpini,
History, 26, in Manuel Komroff, ed.,
Contemporaries of Marco Polo (New York:
Liveright, 1928), 44.
^57. René Grousset, Histoire des Croisades
(Paris: Plon, 1936), 3:569-70.
^58. Ernst F. K. Rosenmueller, Institutiones Iuris
Mohammedani circa Bellum contra Eos
Qui ab Islamo Sunt Alieni (Leipzig: Barth,
1825), nos. 1, 3, 4, 5.
^59. Adam Mez, Die Renaissance des Islams
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1922), 132-33, 136,
332.
^60. Prawdin, Mongol Empire, 389. “According
to Chinese political philosophy there could
be in the world only one rightful ‘Emperor,’
however many kings there might be.” Thus
William M. McGovern, The Early Empires
of Central Asia (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1939), 321.
^61. Prawdin, Mongol Empire, 414.
^62. Ibid., 512-18.
^63. August Müller, Der Islam in Morgen- und
Abendland, 2 vols. (Berlin: Grote, 1885-87),
2:268, gives a psychological explanation for
this phenomenon.
^64. William of Rubruck, Journal 54, in
Komroff, ed., Contemporaries of Marco
Polo, 188.
^65. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 2:72, 311.
^66. Grousset, L’Asie orientale, 42: “La notion
du monarque universel ou tchakravartin . . .
provient des vastes dominations de l’Asie
Anterieure” (the idea of a universal ruler or
tchakravartin originates in the vast realms of
Western Asia).
^67. McGovern, Early Empires of Central Asia,
224, 245, 255, 268, 288, 294.
^68. Mez, Renaissance des Islams, 136; cf. 130-
43.
^69. Works cited above (nn. 4 to 29 inclusive)
nearly all mention this combination, but
special treatment of the theme may be found
in Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and
Drama, 138, 169-71, 185-86, 388; and Hall,
 Review of de Buck, Egyptische
voorstellingen betreffende den oerheuvel,
185-87.
^70. Elliot Smith and others have shown that the
special business of all dragons is to prevent
people from reaching water. Can this
otherwise unaccountable peculiarity be
explained by the retreat of amphibious
monsters—snakes and saurians—to the
shrinking water holes of a drought-ridden
world, there to become a frightening
obstacle to those who came there for the
“water of life”? T. Elliot Smith, The
Evolution of the Dragon (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1919).
^71. For the literal reality of the situation among
the Mongols of today, see Henning Haslund-
Christensen, Men and Gods in Mongolia
(New York: Dutton, 1935), 246, 281; the
election of Chingis Khan was at such a
place, Friedrich E. Krause, Cingis Han: Die
Geschichte seines Lebens nach den
chinesischen Reichsannalen (Heidelberg:
Winter, 1922), 11, 14, 18-19, 25, 28, 30, as
was that of the Mongol emperors of China,
according to The Travels of Marco Polo the
Venetian, ed. John Masefield (London:
Dutton, 1908), 166-71 (II, 6), the Naimans,
Krause, Cingis Han, 28, and Turks, Edwin
S. Creasy, History of the Ottoman Turks, 2
vols. (London: Bentley, 1854-56), 1:9-11;
Menander, De Legationibus Romanorum ad
Gentes, in PG 113:904, 885; the Golden
Horde, Carpini, History 25, in Komroff, ed.,
Contemporaries of Marco Polo, 42-43; the
Armenians, Moses of Chorene, Armenische
Chrestomathie, ed. Max Lauer, 2 vols.
(Wien: Braumüller, 1881), 2:40-41, 101- 2;
Persians, Friedrich von Spiegel, Erânische
Alterthumskunde, 3 vols. (Leipzig:
Engelmann, 1871-78), 2:53-54; Xenophon,
Anabasis I, 2, 7, as well as the ancient
Indians, Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli,
Handwörterbuch des deutschen
Aberglaubens, 10 vols. (Leipzig: de Gruyter,
1927-42), 6:1418-21; Hedin, My Life as an
Explorer, 460-61, 467-68, 122, all held their
great assemblies in such a setting. The
 Assyrian kings built their parks “like unto
Mount Amanus,” with special channels “for
the watering of horses” (cf. fig. 9, p. 103),
Luckenbill, Ancient Records, 2:162, 170,
185, 188, 269. The Goths met in such a
place, Jordanes, Gothic History 51, as did
the Scythians before them, Herodotus,
History IV, 52; and the Arabs believe that
Mecca was transported from Adam’s Mount
in Ceylon, which is such a place, Masefield,
ed., The Travels of Marco Polo, 372 (III,
23). Even the oasis of Ammon followed the
plan, according to Arthur B. Cook, Zeus, 3
vols. (Cambridge: University Press, 1925),
1:369, as certainly did the shrine of Dodona
—the oldest in Greece—which was
transported from Ammon’s oasis. The whole
picture is given in certain Babylonian hymns;
see Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien,
2:165, 167. The same in the ancient North,
Gylfaginning 4.
^72. Pindar, Olympian Odes II, 1-4, cf. I, 1-17;
Tertullian, Ad Nationes II, 10; Augustine,
The City of God VI, 7, 2; Plutarch,
 Quaestiones Romanae no. 35; Plutarch,
Romulus 4-5.
^73. Henri Frankfort, Cylinder Seals (London:
Macmillan, 1939), pl. XVIIc; p. 90;
Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 2:165.
^74. Qur’an 22:28, 34, 36.
^75. Hommel, Ethnologie und Geographie des
alten Orients, 118.
^76. Du Cange, “Des assemblées solenelles des
rois de France,” and “Des cours et des
festes solenelles des roys de France,” in
Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis,
7:15-23.
^77. Hyginus, Fabulae 140.
^78. William of Rubruck, Journal, 19, in
Komroff, ed., Contemporaries of Marco
Polo, 95.
^79. Prawdin, Mongol Empire, 205; cf. 239.
^80. Vladimirstov, Life of Chingis-Khan, 38.
^81. Al-Fakhrī, Al-Adab as-Sultaniyya wa’d-
Dawla al-Islamiyya (Cairo: n.p., n.d.), 117,
119.
^82. Luckenbill, Ancient Records, 1:295-96, 59,
 156, 154.
^83. Ibid., 2:170-71, 190, 268, 314, and so forth.
^84. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4:49, 55;
Herodotus, History I, 95; Xenophon,
Anabasis IV, 4, 4.
^85. Xenophon, Anabasis V, 3.
^86. Spiegel, Erânische Altertumskunde, 2:106.
^87. Xenophon, Cyropaedia III, 1, 8; Priscus
Rhetor, De Legationibus Romanorum ad
Gentes 3, in PG 113:720-21; Jordanes,
Gothic History 10; cf. Herodotus, History I,
205-14; the best description is in Ibn Baṭūṭa,
Riḥla, 2 vols. (Cairo: 1938), 1:214.
^88. Xenophon, Anabasis V, 6, 17.
^89. Thus Adam, Cain, and Noah, Book of
Jubliees 4:9, following the divine pattern,
Sibylline Oracles 3:772-76. Gadd, Ideas of
Divine Rule, 6, comments on the strange
persistence of building motifs in the earliest
creation legends.
^90. Haslund-Christensen, Men and Gods in
Mongolia, 151-52, 156. Cf. the case of the
Hun Jïjï in A.D. 43, McGovern, Early
 Empires of Central Asia, 191.
^91. Mildred Cable, The Gobi Desert (New York:
Macmillan, 1944), 133. Cf. Haslund-
Christensen, Men and Gods in Mongolia,
125, 128. Huart and Delaporte, L’Iran
antique, 307; Priscus Rhetor, De
Legationibus Romanorum ad Gentes 3, in
PG 113:725 (Attila’s palace).
^92. George Vernadsky, Ancient Russia, vol. 1 in
George Vernadsky and Michael Karpovich,
A History of Russia (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1943), 237-40, 248; cf.
292.
^93. Moret, Histoire de l’Orient, 1:278.
^94. See Hugh Nibley, “The Arrow, the Hunter,
and the State,” Western Political Quarterly
2 (1949): 338-40; reprinted in this volume,
pages 12-16.
^95. Prawdin, Mongol Empire, 185;
Vladimirstov, Life of Chingis-Khan, 51-52.
^96. Xenophon, Cyropaedia II, 4, 19-22.
^97. Giovanni P. Carpini, History, 6, in Komroff,
ed., Contemporaries of Marco Polo, 12.
^98. Ammianus Marcellinus XXXI, 2.
^99. Luckenbill, Ancient Records, 1:82, 86-87,
121-22, 189, 271; 2:392.
^100. Max Seligsohn, “Nimrod,” in Isidore Singer,
ed., Jewish Encylopedia, 12 vols. (New
York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), 9:309-11;
Clementine Homily IX, 4, in PG 2:244;
Jeremias, Das Alte Testament, 158-59; Book
of Jasher 7:39-46; 9:20-22.
^101. Homer, Hymn to Pythian Apollo 370-74;
Euripides, Iphigeneia at Taurus 1234-82.
^102. Snorri Sturluson, Edda Formali, chs. 10-
11.
^103. Moret, Histoire de l’Orient, 1:298.
^104. Haslund-Christensen, Men and Gods in
Mongolia, 310, 132-49. There were
Christian tent churches to match these
temple tents, Grousset, Histoire des
Croisades, 3:564, 722; cf. E. A. Wallis
Budge, ed., The Chronography of Gregory
Abû’l Faraj, the Son of Aaron, the Hebrew
Physician, Commonly Known as Bar
Hebraeus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford
 University Press, 1932), 1:505-6.
^105. Daniel 7:9; 1 Enoch 14:18; Menander, De
Legationibus Romanorum ad Gentes, in PG
113:885; Odoric, Journal, 12, in Komroff,
ed., Contemporaries of Marco Polo, 239-
40.
^106. Life of Adam and Eve 22:3; 2 Enoch 8:3.
^107. William of Rubruck, Journal, 21, in
Komroff, ed., Contemporaries of Marco
Polo, 98.
^108. Jordanes, Gothic History 40, the shield-
wall duplicated in the funeral-ring, ibid., 49;
Ammianus Marcellinus XXXI, 2; 7-8; and
12; Xenophon, Anabasis I, 8, 12; Huart and
Delaporte, L’Iran antique, 380; William of
Rubruck, Journal, 29, in Komroff, ed.,
Contemporaries of Marco Polo, 124.
^109. Herodotus, History IV, 158.
^110. Attila moved constantly from palace to
palace, accompanied by his mighty host, “in
the manner of the Scythians,” says Priscus
Rhetor, De Legationibus Romanorum ad
Gentes 3, in PG 113:720. Cf. for the same
 picture, William of Rubruck, Journal, 12, in
Komroff, ed., Contemporaries of Marco
Polo, 76; and Ammianus Marcellinus XXXI,
2.
^111. Odoric, Journey, 11, in Komroff, ed.,
Contemporaries of Marco Polo, 237; see n.
112.
^112. Attila sat on heaped-up rugs and cushions,
Priscus Rhetor, De Legationibus
Romanorum ad Gentes, in PG 113:732, and
his dining hall was hung with curtains and
rugs “like a Greek or Roman bridal bed,”
ibid., in PG 113:737. Batu’s throne was “like
a bed,” William of Rubruck, Journal, 21, in
Komroff, ed., Contemporaries of Marco
Polo, 99, and Scacatar “sat upon his bed
holding a guitar in his hand, and his wife sat
by him, ibid., 12, in Komroff, ed.,
Contemporaries of Marco Polo, 77. Ibn
Baṭūṭa, Riḥla, 1:26-27, actually calls the
Khan’s throne a firash (bed).
^113. The throne must be covered by a tent,
Menander, De Legationibus Romanorum ad
Gentes, in PG 113:885, and, indeed, “the
 canopied throne” is part of the original
equipment of the primitive nomad tent-
temple, according to Haslund-Christensen,
Men and Gods in Mongolia, 283.
^114. Gadd, Ideas of Divine Rule, 36.
^115. Prawdin, Mongol Empire, 477-78;
Tamerlane built his palaces like pavilions,
“using them for the same purpose as his
ancestors used tents.” The palace at Peking
was “supported” by two hundred silken tent-
cords, Masefield, ed., The Travels of Marco
Polo 146 (I, 57); cf. 166-71 (II, 6); cf.
Odoric, Journey, 11, in Komroff, ed.,
Contemporaries of Marco Polo, 237.
^116. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4:111;
Diehl and Marçais, Le monde oriental, 339;
Huart and Delaporte, L’Iran antique, 373.
The same artisans who built St. Sophia also
built the Mosque of Damascus, Ibn Baṭūṭa,
Riḥla, 1:52-53. It has often been observed
that domed tents are found originally only in
Central Asia, where the royal white yurt,
covered with brilliant color and design,
reached enormous proportions. It is hard not
 to see in the “golden dome” of the Grand
Khan, Ibn Baṭūṭa, Riḥla, 1:213, the
prototype of these golden domes that
everywhere rose above the heads of kings
and the altars of cathedrals. The Travels of
Marco Polo, ed. Masefield, 169 (II, 6),
speaks of what can only be colored glass
windows at the court of the Khan.
^117. Moritz Hoernes, Natur- und Urgeschichte
des Menschen, 2 vols. (Vienna: Hastlben
1909), 1:380. Mohammedan law defines
legitimate spoils as “clothes, arms, and
wagons.” Rosenmueller, Institutiones Iuris
Mohammedani, no. 28.
^118. Hedin, My Life as an Explorer, 107, notes
that the court ceremonial of Samarkand is
exactly the same as described by Clavijo;
and Haslund-Christensen, Men and Gods in
Mongolia, 297-98, observed in the royal
camp of the Torguts exactly the same tent
arrangement as the one which Xenophon
tells us was used 2,400 years before in the
camp of Cyrus.
^119. Rosenmueller, Institutiones Iuris
 Mohammedani, no. 53, pp. 11-13. Only the
horse makes noble; camels, mules, etc., do
not count—which betrays the Central Asiatic
origin of the code, ibid., nos. 31-32.
^120. Goetze, Hethiter, Churriter und Assyrer,
39-41, 110-12.
^121. Quotation from Odoric, Journal, 12 and 14,
in Komroff, ed., Contemporaries of Marco
Polo, 238, 242; cf. Priscus Rhetor, De
Legationibus Romanorum ad Gentes 3, in
PG 113:713, 737-38; Carpini, History, 20,
in Komroff, ed., Contemporaries of Marco
Polo, 35; Menander, De Legationibus
Romanorum ad Gentes 8, in PG 113:885;
William of Rubruck, Journal, 4, in Komroff,
ed., Contemporaries of Marco Polo, 63;
Masefield, ed., The Travels of Marco Polo,
182-86 (II, 10); Ibn Baṭūṭa, Riḥla, 1:213,
218.
^122. Edvard Lehmann, “Die Perser,” in
Bertholet and Lehmann, Lehrbuch der
Religionsgeschichte, 2:257. The Byzantine
court went so far as to imitate flying angels:
Note of Anselmus Bandurius, cited in
 Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De
Administrando Imperio 36, in PG 113:305-
7.
^123. The colors stand for the four quarters,
Carpini, History, 24, in Komroff, ed.,
Contemporaries of Marco Polo, 40; William
of Rubruck, Journal, 53, in ibid., 187; The
Story of Ahikar, 6:10-13, in R. H. Charles et
al., eds., The Apocrypha and
Pseudipigrapha of the Old Testament, 2
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913), 2:758-59.
On western livery, Du Cange, “Des cours et
des festes solenelles des roys de France,” in
Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis,
7:19-23.
^124. Du Cange, “Des cours et des festes
solenelles des roys de France,” in
Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis,
7:19-23.
^125. Jordanes, Gothic History 56.
^126. Budge, The Chronography of Bar
Hebraeus, 1:496.
^127. Varro, De Lingua Latina V, 33.
^128. Claudius Claudianus, The Gothic War 355.
^129. Rosenmueller, Institutiones Iuris
Mohammedani, nos. 13, 16, 22, 27, 39, 47-
48, 55.
^130. Jordanes, Gothic History 52.
^131. Robert Eisler, Iēsous Basileus ou
Basileusas, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter,
1930), 2:625; August von Gall, Basileia tou
Theou (Heidelberg: Winter, 1926), 241-42.
^132. See Wilhelm Nestle, Der Friedensgedanke
in der antiken Welt (Leipzig: Dieterich,
1938), and Harald Fuchs, Augustin und der
antike Friedensgedanke (Berlin: Weidmann,
1926), 39-40, 115-17.
^133. Budge, The Chronography of Bar
Hebraeus, 1:490.
^134. This is exhaustively demonstrated by
Semen Lipkin, Manas Velikodushnyu
(Moscow: Sovietski Pisatyel, 1947), a study
of the Kirghiz, in which the enemy chieftains
are invariably inarticulate monsters, while
the friendly ones are holy knights.
^135. Rosenmueller, Institutiones Iuris
 Mohammedani, no. 17.
^136. Ammianus Marcellinus XXXI, 3, 8.
^137. George of Pisidia, De Expeditione Persica
II, 240-55, in PG 92:1226-27; Menander,
De Legationibus Gentium ad Romanos, in
PG 113:824-25; though the other side do
everything we do, with us it is virtue; with
them a base perversion. See Theodore the
Alan, Alanicus 6, in PG 140:393.
^138. Illustrated by the arguments and discussions
in Priscus Rhetor, De Legationibus
Romanorum ad Gentes 3, in PG 113:708,
725, 728-29, 732. While the West posed as
champion of liberty, everyone was fleeing to
Persia: “Malunt enim sub specie captivitatis
vivere liberi, quam sub specie libertatis esse
captivi” (they prefer to live as free men in
the guise of bondage, rather than to be
slaves in the guise of freedom), Salvianus,
De Gubernatione Dei V, 5.
^139. Jordanes, Gothic History 58.
^140. Ammianus Marcellinus, XXXI, 2, 12.
^141. Jordanes, Gothic History 34.
^142. Ibid., 53.
^143. Ibid., 58.
^144. Agathias, History V, 23, in PG 88:1589-96;
Menander, De Legationibus Romanorum ad
Gentes, in PG 113:852; Justinian showed
this partiality even before he became
emperor, according to Procopius, Anécdota
XI, 5.
^145. Procopius, Anécdota XI, 12.
^146. Ibid., XXI, 26, 28-29; XXV, 25.
^147. Ibid., VII, 8-9; 11-14.
^148. Ibid., VII, 11-14.
^149. Ibid., VI, 21.
^150. Ibid., XI, 1.
^151. Ibid., VIII, 5.
^152. Ibid., VIII, 9.
^153. Ibid., VIII, 4-5.
^154. Ibid., XXX, 24.
^155. Ibid., XI, 3; XXVI, 23.
^156. Ibid., XXX, 26.
^157. Ibid., XXX, 23.
^158. Ibid., XII, 25.
^159. Ibid., XIV, 2.
^160. Ibid., XIX, 14-15.
^161. Ibid., XIX, 16.
^162. Ibid., XXX, 30.
^163. Fulcher, Historia Hierosolymitana I, 1-7,
especially Urban’s speech, chs. 2-3, in PL
155:825-41.
^164. Guglielmo Ferrero, Characters and Events
in Roman History (New York: Putnam,
1909), 233.
^165. “Christianity had adopted the astrological
Weltbild given by the East to the West,”
Frederick J. E. Raby, A History of
Christian-Latin Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press 1927), 70. One might trace
the unbroken descent of the hierocentric
universe from the Pythagoreans to Dante.
Clementine Homily 14, in PG 2:349, is a
good description.
^166. Éttienne Gilson, La philosophie au Moyen
Age (Paris: Payot, 1944), 253-58.
^167. Diehl and Marçais, Le monde oriental, 487-
95; Eusebius, Life of Constantine, passim,
 in PG 20; Louis Duchesne, Early History of
the Christian Church, 3 vols. (London:
Murray, 1931), 2:518-26.
^168. Louis Duchesne, Origines du culte
chrétien (Paris: De Boccard, 1925), 47-88.
^169. E.g., Saint Ignatius, Liturgy, in PG 5:972.
Of course, one spoke much of the
monarch’s all-pervading justice and
compassion, Theodore Silverstein, “The
Throne of the Emperor Henry in Dante’s
Paradise and the Mediaeval Conception of
Christian Kingship,” Harvard Theological
Review 32 (1939): 115-29, but what pagan
autocrat’s supporters did not do the same?
^170. Grousset, Histoire des Croisades, 3:565.
^171. Franz Oppenheimer, The State, tr. J. M.
Gitterman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1914), ch. 2; Goetze, Hethiter, Churriter
und Assyrer, 33-42, 85-87, 96-97, 117-20,
126-32.
^172. Arnold J. Toynbee, “The Unification of the
World and the Change in Historical
Perspective,” History 33 (1948): 25-26.
^173. Petrus Patricius, De Legationibus
Romanorum ad Gentes 12, in PG 113:668-
69.
 Sparsiones

The Roman practice, best described as

sparsio, of bestowing public donatives by
throwing things among the multitude to be
scrambled for in scenes of wild disorder has
never received the attention which its
strangeness solicits and its significance for
the study of Roman politics and economics
deserves.1 Though a preliminary view of a
neglected and highly speculative field cannot
but raise more questions than it answers, the
nature and importance of the sparsiones may,
we believe, be adequately demonstrated by
consideration of three points: (1) what was
distributed by sparsio, (2) by whom and on
what occasions, and (3) by what particular
methods.
 What was distributed by sparsio? The
articles scattered to the Roman multitude
have long been the object of careful study.
They fall into two classes, tokens and gifts
“in kind.” The tokens—tesserae, coins, little
balls, sections of reed, and such bizarre
objects as figurines and inscribed spoons—
are such by virtue of their designated
exchange value.2 As gifts “in kind” may be
classed figs, dates, nuts, sweets, and
cookies, as well as such less appetizing bits
as vegetables, fruits, grain, chick-peas,
beans, birds, and flowers.3 The solid
sparsio was often accompanied by a liquid
one of water, wine, perfume, or oil.4 Meal,
blood, and ashes were also strewn abroad in
rites in which the public scrambling played a
conspicuous part.5
The tokens in question were of course
“symbols” (the word originates with them, in
fact),6 but no more so than the other gifts.
Figs, nuts, fruits, meal, flowers, and so forth
are well-known symbols of fertility,
possessing in the sparsio the broader
signification of a “general blessing.”7 The
ancients tell us that a shower of chick-peas
and beans stands for omnia semina (all
kinds of seeds),8 and that Janus’s scattering
of sweets is but an earnest of sweet things to
follow through the year.9 The same motif of
abundance is evident in the tokens and
figurines,10 which were interchangeable with
gifts in kind and could represent omne genus
rerum (every sort of thing)11—it was not just
bread that the emperor scattered; it was
“perpetual daily bread.”12 The keynote is
abundance—abundance of everything good,
the plouthygeia of the Greek sparsio13 as it
appears in the gifts of the Hygeia, Thalysia,
Panspermia, Thargelos, and so forth, when
mixtures of grain and fruits were scattered
over the heads of the recipients to impart all
the blessings of life,14 and life itself.15 With
such a mixture the Romans showered their
archaic Vortumnus, god of the annus vertens
at his festival,16 and were themselves
showered at the year-feast of the Floralia,17
when “omnia semina super populum
spargebant” (they strewed every kind of seed
on the people), as well as nuts, flowers, and
beans, in primitive chthonian-agricultural
rites.18 But the true Roman equivalent of
plouthygeia is the strena, the king’s gift at
the New Year, which in its primitive form of
laurel branch seems to have figured in
sparsiones,19 as it certainly does in its other
forms.20 Whether the original sparsio was a
scattering over the people and fields of
Zeugungskraft (reproductive power) in the
form of blood, ashes, or fresh remains of the
dismembered year-god,21 or whether it was
a strewing of bloodless offerings such as
honey-cakes or mola salsa,22 it would be
useless to inquire, since both forms are
found together from the earliest time.23
Who gave the sparsiones, and on what
occasions? So far we are on familiar ground.
No one will deny that some sparsiones
followed a New Year’s pattern. But were
there any that did not? The answer is in the
negative. In maintaining that the great public
distributions were simply the extension of
unpretentious private festivities,24 scholars
have ignored the essential aspect of the
latter, especially where sparsiones are
concerned; namely, that they were not private
at all. Private sparsiones were for
celebrations marking some rite de passage
in a family—a birth, death, marriage,
coming-of-age, or the like.25 These are
precisely the occasions on which the
individual’s case, overpassing the bounds of
everyday life to establish contact with the
spirit world, becomes a concern of great
moment to the entire society.26 The Roman
funeral was a public affair;27 the Roman
people could in fact commandeer the funeral
of anyone at will,28 and compel the dead,
through his heir, to make that public
distribution which belonged to a funeral.29 If
the defunct could not afford this donative, a
public collection would be taken, a
“shower” which the heir would presently
redistribute as the dead man’s gift to the
people.30 At marriages it was the same story,
and bride and groom could no more evade
the obligation of scattering presents to the
populace than they could avoid the meal that
the populace threw at them.31 Likewise, the
triumphator both received and gave a
shower;32 indeed, Lord Raglan has recently
called attention to the obvious fact that
triumph, wedding, and funeral are in all
essentials ritually identical.33 Alike they
mark the beginning and end of a lifeperiod;
for the individual they are little New Year’s
days, celebrated with the same feasting,
games, greetings, and sparsiones as mark the
regular New Year,34 a time when public and
private rites seem to be wholly mingled and
confounded.35 The giver of a sparsio,
furthermore, ceased by that act to be a mere
private individual, for he received a statue in
his memory,36 and was annually glorified in
a public feast of his own providing.37
The striking resemblance of various
important Roman festivals to each other has
been explained by referring them to a single
common prototype.38 This was the Secular
celebration, the inauguration of the Great
Year, marking the life-cycle of the Roman
people, individually and collectively.39 And
this Secular rite was before everything the
great sparsio, deriving its name from the
primitive *ē-tlo-m, “was das Säen
ermöglicht” (that which sowing makes
possible)—the sowing, specifically, of men
and animals, the begetting of the race.40 The
central act of the celebration was the
redistribution to all the people by the king
(the emperor in the revived version) of
praemitiae—beans, barley, corn—which
they had brought in as year-offerings.41 Much
the same thing took place at Delphi
originally “on the birthday of the god”:42 all
over the ancient world, in fact, a royal
sparsio dramatized the begetting of the race
on the day of creation, the New Year.43 It is
quite proper that the chief patron of the
sparsiones should have been Janus, first king
and father of the race, and that the hero-kings
of the first age—Janus, Saturn, Semo-
Sancus, Cereus, Lupercus, Faunus, and so
forth—should uniformly figure in the role of
the sower.44 If private sparsiones had to be
given by one who was mactus (honored,
glorified) by virtue of standing for the
moment between one world and another (for
such is the rite de passage), the king was
always mactus: he was the type and model
of the one who give the sparsio.45
During the Republic, for example, a
magistrate giving grain on a lavish scale
could be charged with trying to play king to
the people,46 which clearly betrays the origin
of the system. The public donative as a royal
but at the same time very popular survival
was a source both of power and
embarrassment to the oligarchs. Cicero has
only praise for a system which enables great
men to win all but regal acclaim,47 yet he is
quite aware how ill the usage suits a
republican order and insists that public
liberality is a royal, not a private, virtue.48 It
is impossible indeed to conceive of a system
less compatible to the good order of the
Republic, or more plainly and fatally
designed to beget corruption in it, than that of
the Roman collections and distributions,49 or
any more blatant offense to every idea of
order and decorum (so dear to the Republic)
than a public scramble.50 The distribution,
particularly the sparsiones, it is safe to say,
could hardly have arisen and taken root
under the very noses of the conscript fathers
without their knowledge and consent: if they
were not suppressed along with newfangled
cults and luxuries, it is because they were
classified among the sacrosanct and
ineradicable survivals of an earlier day.51
Their immense vitality and popularity
carried them right through the Republic, in
fact, to become the very cornerstone of
imperial authority.
From the first the emperor was careful
to reserve to himself the sole right of making
donatives (cf. fig. 13).52 Not only was this
his exclusive and inescapable office,53 it
was also his one sufficient claim to rule if
all else failed.54 A reading of Dio,
Suetonius, or Tacitus will suffice to show
that a ruler at Rome was popular in that
degree to which he resembled a Saturnalian
king, and that from the first every emperor
made a determined effort to play that strange
and hilarious role.55 It was the people who
insisted on this: even though he forbade it,
they persisted in giving the emperor that
popular title of Dominus,56 the specific
fixture of public feasts,57 which proclaimed
to the scandalized world that he was
dominus et deus, nothing less than the old
festive king, dominus convivii, giver of all
good things,58 the equivalent of the Greek
basileus,59 the despotes who in the Old
Comedy bursts on the scene with a shower of
gifts and a clamorous invitation to all the
world to come and feast at his house.60
It was with this festive office of year-
king, with its boundless popular appeal,61
that the political rivals of the late Republic
played so dangerously. It was as praefectus
annonae that Pompey earned his title of The
Great and the right to wear royal insignia at
festivals.62 When a Crassus, Sulla, or
Lucullus gave a feast of abundance, it was at
the very Ara Maxima where Hercules, as
type and model of the victorious year-king,
had set the example.63 Brutus and Octavian
bid desperately against each other for the
right to play year-king,64 and Antony with
equal presumption could take the role of
King Lupercus at Rome or Dionysus at
Athens.65 Caesar’s Clodius posed as the
New Numa,66 and Caesar’s own regalia was
that of the festive king.67 It was, moreover,
as lord of peace and plenty that both he and
his successor enjoyed the grant of sovereign
power68 by a popular consent which recalls
the manner in which Cyrus became king of
the Persians in return for a timely feast.69
Indeed, it was an established procedure in
ancient times for an ambitious man to seize a
throne simply by getting himself made King
of the Festival and then, by exercising his
ceremonial right to demand year-gifts and to
redistribute them, reorganize the state while
refusing to yield up his royal office.70 It was
for that matter at the Ludi Saeculares that
Augustus himself assumed rule of the
world.71 An unbroken tradition binds the
imperial bounty to the Saturnia regna of the
fabled priest-kings: to the end the emperor
remains the magnus parens mundi, the lord
of peace and plenty, the New Hercules, King
of the Golden Age,72 “sowing his gifts
broadcast as a sower his seeds.”73
 Figure 13. On one of the finest
congiaria to survive (A), Trajan is
shown enthroned with his deputy
seated before him giving handouts.
Behind the deputy stands the figure
of the Liberalitas holing a tessera.
The man climbing the ladder
represents the people receiving the
Imperial donatives for the third
time, as declared by the inscription.
We see the curtains of the stagelike
aedicula drawn back, revealing the
haloed figure of the Augustus,
Constantius II (B), in typical
Byzantine splendor, c. A.D. 350. He
is seated on a odd-looking throne
and is showering gold coins with
his right hand to the people below.

What was the method employed in the

sparsiones, and why? On tokens used in the
distributions are found representations of the
emperor handing out gifts, or of Liberalitas
shaking out the contents of her cornucopia,
from a raised platform.74 Heliogabalus is
described as acting Phoenicio ritu when,
dressed as the Sun, he mounts a specially
built platform to shower gold and silver cups
on the people.75 Certainly the picture of
Gaius flinging gold and silver from the
palace roof76 suggests the famous scene from
the tomb of Ay (cf. fig. 14), in which
Amenophis IV throws gold from a palace
balcony while above his head, to make the
meaning clear, the Sun with outstretched
hands showers his gifts at the same time.77
But, while it has notable archaic affinities,78
the custom of casting gifts from a high
platform is no late Oriental importation at
Rome, for the old Republican usage was to
scatter nummos (coins) from the rostra,79
apparently the survival of a very primitive
native sparsio.80
Likewise the chariot from which the
emperor would fling his gold at the New
Year,81 while it has striking Oriental
parallels in the heavenly car or plow from
which the year-god showered blessings over
men and fields,82 has just as definite
counterparts in the North and West among the
Scythians,83 Celts,84 Greeks,85 and
Germans,86 all of whom remember in their
oldest ritual and legend the gold that fell
from the wagon or plow of the god at the turn
of the year. The holy vehicle also appears in
Rome as the chariot of the sparsio-giving
triumphator (cf. fig. 11B, p. 117),87 the
quadriga in the Vulcanal,88 or that heavenly
car mounted upon the topmost part of the
Capitol, upon which the fertility of the
Roman fields was believed to depend.89
 Besides the platform and chariot, one
must consider the linea, stretched high
overhead, from which, in some endlessly
puzzling fashion, sweets and tokens were
shaken down over the crowd in what the
ancients refer to as imber, pluviae, grando,
nubilia, and so forth.90 This is more than a
poet’s fancy. The sparsio that fell from on
high was actually thought of as falling from
heaven. Throughout the ancient world one
meets in legend and ritual the golden shower
that descends upon the world to fructify it on
the day of creation.91 The Roman version of
this is King Janus’s sweet rain of honey and
gold; it is the sparsio, from the golden
chariot92 or gilded platform,93 of gilt tokens
and golden grain, of crocus, saffron,
powdered chrysolite or bean-straw, gilt figs,
dates, and cookies—the golden color
predominates in the sparsiones:94 as in the
year-rites of India, everything that is
scattered is thought of as golden because or
est semence (gold is seed).95 What is more
natural than that such a shower should usher
in the aureum tempus (Golden Age) at the
Saturnalia?96
Figure 14. As stepfather of the
 renowned beauty Nefertiti, Ay
enjoyed Pharaoh Akhenaton's
confidence as shown by his titles—
Bearer of the Fan, Master of the
Horse, Father of the God (Father-
in-law of the King) as recorded in
his tob at Tel el-Amarna, C. 1350
B.C. He and his wife Tyi are shown
reverently cathing the wide variety
of gifts being thrown to them by the
entire royal family amidst
exuberant dancing and rejoicing by
the assembled court. Among the
usual golden necklaces we see
vases, signet rings, and the
earliest-known depiction of gloves,
painted red. To commemorate such
an unusual gift, he had himself
shown outside the palace showing
them off to his admiring friends
(inset).
 The golden shower belongs to the
familiar hieros gamos: it is the fructifying of
the earth by the shower, thought of both as
seed and as water, that falls from heaven.97
This treasure is stored in the inner chamber
of the Earth-Goddess98—represented at
Rome both by the temple of Vesta99 and the
treasury of Ceres, that immemorial shrine of
the plebs, wherein was kept both the yellow
grain and the yellow gold of the state,100 both
being scattered abroad at the proper time
under her sponsorship.101 It was Flora, the
Terra Mater, who “prima per immensas
sparsit nova semina gentes” (first scattered
new seeds among countless peoples).102 But,
though it reposes by right in the bins of the
goddess, the ultimate source of this wealth is
her heavenly spouse.103
This concept is familiar to the whole
ancient world. In the common Egyptian
formula “all things good and pure” are
“given of heaven, formed by the earth,
conveyed by the Nile.”104 “From heaven
shall abundance come down upon thee,” is
the Sumerian version,105 while Babylonian
Marduk filled the land with feasts of plenty
when he “poured out abundance over
Shidlam,”106 even as the God of Israel”
commanded the clouds from above, and
opened the doors of heaven, and had rained
down manna . . . and had given them of the
corn of heaven: man did eat angels’ food; He
sent them meat to the full; . . . He rained
down flesh upon them as dust,” etc.107
Though early Easter ceremonies furnish
some of the most striking instances of
sparsio,108 it was not through Christian
channels that the idea of the heavenly
donative reached Rome; for when the boys
of the city gathered beneath the Pope’s
window to sing for a largess at the New
Year, it was “quomodo qui ad Caesarem”
that they called to him to appear at his high
window like the sun, moon, and cloud, to
scatter good things over them.109 This
donative is the equivalent of the English
“singing cakes” or “singing silver,” which,
as in the Sarum usage, “must be caste out of
the steple, that all the boyes in the parish
must lie scrambling by the eares.”110 It
recalls the office of Augustus, who, upon
becoming patron of the iuventus, all over
Italy supervised such youthful scrambles for
tokens and sweets.111 There is an ancient
representation of the linea in action which
clearly portrays its heavenly nature. It is
from a lost glass vase of the fourth century
and depicts the distribution of the annonae:
high above a group of people with birds,
flowers, and festive mappae in their hands
fly two winged genii, each holding a string
of bellaria in either hand—they are plainly
heavenly purveyors of heavenly gifts (fig.
15).112

Figure 15. The praefect of the

Annonae, his wife, and two children
are interspersed with the smaller
figures representing the four
seasons—the full circle of the
Annus, or year. Both father and son
make the gesture of speaking (cf.
figure 17).
 The Romans not only received year-
gifts by sparsio, but made them in the same
way; that is, by throwing cakes, coins,
tokens, flowers, etc., into pits or waters
leading to the other world.113 Though this
practice is found among ancient peoples
everywhere,114 none make more of it than the
Romans. The original Roman stips was food
or a coin that was tossed or thrown to the
god; only later was it laid on the sacra
mensa.115 Archaic Roman offerings to
chthonian deities had to be thrown or tossed
in some way before being burned,116 quite
like the Jewish heave- and wave-
offerings,117 and the burning itself was a kind
of sparsio.118 Though throwing is a well-
known way of banishing evil, and the act of
sparsio may have been designed “both to get
rid of the evil and to distribute the good
fertility charm over the fields,”119 the main
thing about throwing objects, good or bad
(and who shall see evil in honey-cakes and
lucky coins?) is that thereby the gift or curse
is passed through the void, from one world
to another, as it were, with careful avoidance
of physical contact between giver and
receiver.120 The spirits are fed—at a safe
distance—by sparsio.121 If food fell from the
hand or the table by accident it could not be
retrieved, for it had passed to the spirits122
—to Hecate, who would redistribute it to the
poor (earthly counterpart of the spirits) by
sparsio.123
New Year’s gifts are both given and
received through the void. They fall in some
unaccountable way into one’s shoe or
stocking, or they are suddenly thrown in
through the window or chimney; they are not
transmitted directly, but descend
mysteriously in the night, like manna124—it
is even dangerous to recognize the giver.125
This avoidance of contact is the idea behind
royal sparsiones among certain backward
peoples of antiquity, where the king, living
aloof from the world of men, took his meals
behind a partition, removed only at the New
Year,126 or in a secret room,127 or at a table
set apart as if for a spirit from the other
world.128 The world was thought of as living
on the crumbs from his table,129 and he gave
his portions by throwing them to his subjects,
who would scramble after them “like
dogs.”130
One cannot sufficiently admire the
mentality which, having introduced the
tesserae into Rome as a means, for so we
are assured,131 of procuring good order and
regularity in the grain distributions, chose to
dispense the same in mad, universal
scrambles.132 The sparsio does not of itself
call for a scramble—there was more than
enough for all, and no one was allowed to be
disappointed.133 Plainly the undignified rixa,
direptio, rapina, tumultus, and so forth were
a regular and necessary part of the
business.134
What the scramble represented was a
sort of grab bag, for the sparsio was a kind
of lottery.135 The element of chance plays a
most important role in the distributions: the
fundamental principle even of the highly
regulated annona was at all times simply
luck, admission to the grain-lists being
determined solely by lot.136 Everything about
the Saturnalia smacks of divination—the
very food of the year-feast is prophetic.137 A
gift received by sparsio falls into one’s
hands by the imponderable working of fate;
it is a providential thing, a present for which
one is beholden to no man; it is a boon from
heaven, given with majestic impartiality in
bewildering abundance and unrestrained
disorder.138 It is a sign and a promise, a
communication from on high.
How far the ancients went in this
interpretation of the sparsio can be seen if
one considers the objects of the rixae. They
were sortes.139 The word comes from sero,
“set in rows,” i.e., “strung on a line,” and
goes back to the oracular shrines of
prehistoric Italy,140 where at the New Year
the Earth Goddess (as Fortuna)141 would tell
people their fortunes by means of lots and
dice.142 The lots—sortes—were hung on a
line, a linea, and “devenaient prophetiques
par le seul fait qu’elles etaient tirees sort”
(became prophetic for the simple reason that
they were cast).143 All this fits with the
sortes of the sparsio, which also came from
an oracular shrine, were perforated for
hanging on a line, were given out at the New
Year,144 and bore the name of Fortuna,145
whose gifts, moreover, were commonly
thought of as coming by sparsio.146 In form
as well as name the tokens are thus seen to
be real sortes.
Quite as specific is the borrowed term
for sortes, tesserae, which means simply
“dice” or “tablets.”147 Dice and tablets were
used together at the primitive divination
shrines, where one would compare marks on
dice with those on tablets to learn his
fortune.148 Just so the value of a tessera
could be realized only by matching it with
other symbols, the original tessera being
employed as a ticket of identification which
admitted the holder to a feast when it
matched a like token kept by the giver of the
feast.149 For admission to public feasts every
holder of a tessera had to have his name on
the bronze tablets or incisi kept on the
Capitol.150 The interesting custom of
admission to public feasts by ticket, though it
has been ignored by scholars, is found at
archaic year-festivals everywhere, from the
festival tablets of the Sumerians151 and the
arrows of the Asiatics (serving both as
tickets and as gaming pieces)152 to the
wooden tags of the Scandinavian North153
and the laurel leaf tickets of the primitive
Greeks and Romans—which, incidentally,
bring us back to the strena.154 Also
widespread is the idea of registration in a
great list of incisi, a “Book of Life” opened
at the foundation of the world, containing the
names of those to whom life is given for the
new age.155 To be written down in this book
is to be admitted to the banquet of life, to
receive a tessera, “a white stone, and in the
stone a new name written,” and with it a
share in the feast of the “hidden manna”
(Revelation 2:17), the food that falls from
heaven.
Such was the economy of the mystery
feasts, which present indeed the closest
affinity to the rites of the ludi saeculares, the
sowing festival,156 including tesserae157 and
sparsio.158 At the Saturnalia feast of the
Arval Brethren a gold coin was presented to
each of the guests as the gift of life itself.159
The sparsio of life-giving stones in the
Deucalion legend follows upon a casting of
dice, which determines the method by which
the race is to be created and also the lot in
life of the persons thus begotten.160 By a like
sowing Cadmus, at the beginning of the
“Great Year,” produced a race of men
fittingly called Sparti.161 It is only natural, as
Wissowa points out in the case of Fortuna,162
that people should come to think of one who
gives certain assurance of a boon as the
actual giver of the boon, and regard those
tokens which merely promise life and
prosperity as the very gift itself: the die or
sors which indicates the blessings of life to
follow is not to be distinguished from the
seed from which those blessings spring. The
tessera, like the Oriental seal, gave one a
place and a status in the world of men: it
was the gift of a grain tessera that assigned a
slave his freedom and his place in a tribe.163
As seal and tessera witness solemn
contracts between men and gods,164 the
sparsio of itself is such a contract: on the
giver’s part it promised a golden age of
peace and prosperity—this the sparsiones
songs make clear.165 As to the one who
caught the falling gold, he accepted a
contract on his part166 and recognized the
rule and dominion of his benefactor in
formal acclamations, found sometimes
actually written on the tesserae.167
 While the tesserae may be described
variously as tickets, tablets, coins, or
seals,168 they are particularly interesting as
dice. They actually take the form of gaming
pieces in many instances,169 and on some of
them the iactus venerius is indicated.170 This
last opens up a wide vista into the
background of the sparsio, for it recalls the
old Roman custom of choosing a rex bibendi
at feasts (the “king” being the first guest to
throw the Venus),171 a practice which can
have been inspired only by the example and
tradition of choosing the rex Saturnalius,
King of the Great Feast, by lot.172 Dicing, it
should be remembered, was legal at Rome
only during the Saturnalia.173 The Venus also
indicates the archaic background of those
tesserae lasciviae, which have shocked
scholars as symbols of Roman degeneracy
and decline,174 for it recalls a very
widespread and ancient legend of how the
king during the New Year’s feast casts dice
with a stranger from the underworld for the
hand of a fair lady and the possession of the
kingdom.175 This legend appears in the
oldest stratum of Roman tradition as the
story of Hercules and Acca Larentia, in
which the hero wins the lady and a feast by
dicing at the Saturnalia.176 Not to pursue
them further, the many and complex
connections between sortes, tickets, feasts,
goddesses, and the rest may be summarized
in the herald’s order at the Greek revels:
“Come hither, . . . that Tyche may by lot tell
each man where he is supposed to eat!”177
We have discussed the sparsiones of the
Romans only in a broad and general sense. If
the evidence is scarce enough to require such
treatment, it is also consistent enough to
support it. The multiple aspects of the
institution fit nicely together and may be
matched in every point with common
practices of other peoples, the same peculiar
elements appearing in the same complex
combinations. We can therefore with
confidence answer the three questions
proposed at the outset of this study in the
following general but specific terms: (1) the
objects of the sparsiones were tokens
symbolic of life, health, strength, and
abundance, and were actually exchangeable,
as far as possible, for the tangible realization
of these blessings; (2) they were given by the
king or his counterpart—emperor,
magistrate, or paterfamilias—as the living
representative of the father and founder of
the race, by (3) being scattered like seed or
rain from a celestial station in a manner to
simulate the sowing of the race itself on the
day of creation, with all the blessings and
omens that rightly accompany such a
begetting and amid acclamations that joyfully
recognize the divine providence and
miraculous power of the giver.
The sparsio is the authentic heritage of
the Golden Age, the sublime economy of
which remains throughout antiquity, and
indeed in religious ideology down to the
very present, the ultimate basis of the social,
economic, and political structure.

Notes
This article was originally published
in Classical Journal 40 (1945): 515-43.

Footnotes
^1. Treatment of the sparsiones must be sought
for in works dealing primarily with other
things. The most instructive of these are
Michael Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae
(Aalen: Scientia, 1969); Joachim Marquardt,
Römisches Staatsverwaltung, 3 vols., 2d ed.
 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1885), 3:475-96; Ludwig
Friedländer, Darstellungen aus der
Sittengeschichte Roms, 4 vols., 8th ed.
(Leipzig: Hirzel, 1910), 2:316-18; Ph. Fabia,
“Sparsio,” in Charles V. Daremberg and
Edmond Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités
grecques et romaines, 6 vols. in 10 (Paris:
Hachette, 1877-1919), 4:2:1418-19. The
ritual side of the sparsio is discussed at
length by Martin P. Nilsson, Geschichte der
griechischen Religion, 2 vols. (Munich:
Beck, 1941), 1:110-25; Francis M.
Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1934), 100-102 and passim; Samson Eitrem,
Opferritus und Voropfer der Greichen und
Römer (Kristiania: Dybwad, 1915), 261-69.
Less important works are indicated in the
course of the present study.
^2. Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, is the
classic treatment of the tokens, which he
also discusses in “Congiarium,” in RE 4:875-
80. Berve, “Liberalitas,” in RE 13:86-93,
also deals with the tokens, as does Martin
 Lipenius in his extensive Strenarum
Historia, in Johannes G. Graevius,
Thesaurus Antiquitatum Romanarum, 12
vols. (Rhen.: Halmam, 1694), 12:409-552.
^3. Types of bellaria are listed by Friedländer,
Sittengeschichte Roms, 2:316-18.
^4. The liquid sparsio is discussed by Fabia,
“Sparsio,” in Daremberg and Saglio,
Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et
romaines, 4:2:1418-19, with the exception
of the oil, which figures in the old bridal
sparsio (see below, n. 31), and in certain
primitive scrambles, see Servius,
Commentarius in Georgica 384.
^5. The blood of the October horse, mixed with
the ashes of the Fordicidia calves, was
distributed to all the people and strewn over
the fields; see Georg Wissowa, Religion und
Kultus der Römer (Munich: Beck, 1912),
200-201; Franz Altheim, Terra Mater:
Unter-suchungen zur altitalischen
Religionsgeschichte (Giessen: Töpelmann,
1931), 121. The fullest treatment of these
bloody sparsiones is Samson Eitrem,
 Beiträge zur griechischen
Religionsgeschichte, 3 parts (Kristiania:
Dybwad, 1917-19), 2:19-49. Both animals
in question had been the victims of violent
dismemberment, a wild tussle being held for
the right to sprinkle the blood of the horse;
in Sextus Pompeius Festus, De Verborum
Significatu Quae Supersunt cum Pauli
Epitome, ed. Wallace M. Lindsay (Leipzig:
Teubner, 1913), 190-91. The Greek
pharmakoi were hung with objects used in
sparsiones, such as figs, cakes, and so forth,
and their own ashes were scattered, in
Cornford, Origin of Attic Comedy, 55-56;
see below, n. 118.
^6. Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, 117;
Theodor Mommsen, “Das romische
Gastrecht und die romische Clientel,”
Historische Zeitschrift 1 (1859): 340-41; cf.
“symbol” in James Murray, ed., Oxford
English Dictionary, 12 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1933).
^7. For a broad treatment of this subject, see
Eitrem, Opferritus und Voropfer, 261-80;
 Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen
Religion, 1:113-15; Edvard Lehmann,
“Erscheinungs- und Ideenwelt der Religion,”
in Alfred Bertholet and Edvard Lehmann,
eds., Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2
vols., 4th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925), 1:26,
40-43.
^8. Scholiast to Persius, Satires V, 177-79.
^9. Ovid, Fasti I, 187-88: “‘Omen,’ ait [Janus],
‘causa est, ut res sapor ille sequatur, et
peragat coeptum dulcis ut annus iter.’” (“It is
because of the omen,” said [Janus], ". . .
that the taste follows the event, and that the
whole course of the year may be sweet like
its beginning.”)
^10. Whether or not the sigillaria and the dulces
figuras scattered at the Saturnalia (Martial,
Epigrams XIV, 222) were the same, as
some commentators on Statius, Silvae I, 6,
17, have maintained, originally representing
the body of the slain vegetation god
(Cornford, Origin of Attic Comedy, 102), it
is certain that as New Year’s gifts both
impart luck and prosperity. The principle of
substitution is very conspicuous in the
sparsiones. The rule, in sacra simulata pro
veris accipi (to accept imitation holy objects
as though they were genuine), makes
possible, says Servius, Commentarius in
Aeneidem (Commentary on the Aeneid) II,
116, the use of models de pane vel cera (of
bread or wax) for any costly object. Types
of substitution in sparsiones are discussed
by Eitrem, Opferritus und Voropfer, 277-78.
A special coin takes the place at Rome of
every kind of food offering or contribution,
so that in time such terms as visceratio,
epulum, cibus, sportula, congiarium,
munus, and so forth, come to mean simply
“a coin”; vid. lexicons, Hug, “Sportula,” in
RE 2:3:1884; Berve, “Liberalitas,” in RE
13:85, 88; Mommsen, “Das romische
Gastrecht und die romische Clientel,” 340-
42; Otto Toller, De Spectaculis, Cenis,
Distributionibus in Municipiis Romanis
Occidentis Imperatorum Aetate Exhibitis
(Altenburg: Bond, 1889), 77-90. This
substitution is very ancient with the Romans,
 see Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der
Römer, 428-29; cf. Deuteronomy 14:23-26.
^11. Suetonius, Domitian 4; cf. Suetonius, Nero
11; Suetonius, Augustus 98.
^12. Joannes Malalas, Chronographia XIII, 322-
23, in PG 97:481-84; Chronicon Paschale,
in PG 92:641; cf. Plutarch, Crassus 2.
^13. Aristophanes, The Birds 725-52 (a typical
year-song of the quête variety).
^14. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen
Religion, 1:116-18, 439, 503.
^15. Sparsio rejuvenates (Aristophanes, Plutus
1197-207) and restores the dead; see Cicero,
De Legibus II, 25 [63]; cf. Eitrem,
Opferritus und Voropfer, 262.
^16. Propertius, Elegies IV, 2; cf. Wissowa,
Religion und Kultus der Römer, 287-88.
^17. The festival of Flora was a duplicate of that
of Acca Larentia, Plutarch, Romulus 4-5; cf.
K. Schwenck, “Hercules und Acca
Larentia,” Rheinisches Museum 22 (1867):
129-31; Wilhelm H. Roscher “Acca
Larentia,” in Wilhelm H. Roscher,
 Ausführliches Lexikon der griechen und
römischen Mythologie, 7 vols. (Leipzig:
Teubner, 1884-1937), 1:6; Altheim, Terra
Mater, 142-43), which was a chthonian
“Totenmahl” held on Midwinter Night; see
Macrobius, Saturnalia I, 10, 17; Varro, De
Lingua Latina VI, 23-24; Gellius, Noctes
Atticae (Attic Nights) VII, 7, 7; Plutarch,
Romulus 4-5; and Plutarch, Quaestiones
Romanae nos. 34-35.
^18. Scholiast to Persius, Satires V, 177-79; cf.
Altheim, Terra Mater, 136. This seems to
have been the classic sparsio at Rome, for
when in A.D. 217 such distributions were
abolished, the Floralia was specifically
excepted; see Marquardt, Römische
Staatsverwaltung, 3:497; Dio Cassius,
LXXIX, 22, 1.
^19. The laurel switch was used in the water
sparsiones that accompanied the sprinkling
of ashes, blood, and bean-straw at the
Palilia; see Ovid, Fasti IV, 721-40; V, 675-
80; Zosimus, Historia Nova VI, 6; cf.
Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung,
 3:248, n. 7. Is it possible that the word
strena is to be referred to sterno, struo,
rather than to the hypothetical *st(e)re
suggested by Alois Walde, Vergleichendes
Wörterbuch der indogermanischen
Sprachen, 3 vols. (Leipzig: de Gruyter,
1927-32), 2:627-28?
^20. See below, n. 81, passages describing the
hypateia of the emperors at Constantinople.
^21. Cornford, Origin of Attic Comedy, 58-69,
85-86, 90-102, is especially convinced that a
sparsio must follow a sparagmos (tearing,
mangling) of the divine victim, with all the
connotations which Frazer has made
familiar. Cf. James G. Frazer, The Golden
Bough, 12 vols. (New York: Macmillan,
1935), 7:214-69.
^22. Ancient tradition gave the bloodless form
priority: Empedocles, in Hermann Diels,
Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols., 6th
ed. (Zurich: Weidmann, 1951), 1:362-63,
frg. 128; Plutarch, Numa VIII, 8; cf. Eitrem,
Opferritus und Voropfer, 273-74. Wissowa,
Religion und Kultus der Römer, 410, 412,
 holds the strewing of meal to be the older
form at Rome.
^23. E.g., in the clumsy strewing of bloodless
offerings over animal victims (Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities VII, 72,
15-18; Hyginus, Fabulae 277). The October
horse was decked with bread, and human
victims were adorned with the bloodless
objects of the sparsiones, see Cornford,
Origin of Attic Comedy, 55-56. On the
association of bloody and bloodless sparsio,
cf. Eitrem, Opferritus und Voropfer, 261-80.
^24. Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, 20-21,
and in “Congiarium,” in RE 4:875, 880, is
particularly insistent on this point, while
Berve, “Liberalitas,” in RE 13:82-83,
actually maintains that the sparsiones were
not only strictly private, but entirely
spontaneous and devoid of any motive but
the desire for a little fun.
^25. Occasions listed by Rostovzeff,
“Congiarium,” in RE 4:878; cf. Terence,
Phormio I, 41-51, on the gift days. On these
occasions one gave a coin to each member
 of the community (Pliny, Epistulae
[Epistles] X, 117; Plautus, Aulularia V,
107), or to a common fund (Georg
Wissowa, “Iuventas,” in Roscher,
Ausführliches Lexikon, 2:1:764; Wissowa,
Religion und Kultus der Römer, 58, 128,
135, 168), or received gifts from the same;
Terence, Phormio I, 41-51; Theodor
Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 8 vols.,
2d ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1856), 1:787, on
“Pfennigcollecten” at funerals.
^26. “Il n’y avait point de solennité au sein d’une
famille riche qui ne fût célebrée par une
gratification au peuple, par un festin public
ou des jeux” (there was no celebration
observed by a rich family that was not also
marked by a gift to the people, by a public
festival or by games), in V. Duruy, “Du
régime municipal dans l’empire romain,”
Revue historique 1 (1876): 348. The
interested presence of all the race, living and
dead, at these affairs is the subject of Erich
Bethe, Ahnenbild und Familiengeschichte
bei Römern und Griechen (Munich: Beck,
 1935), 1-5.
^27. Polybius, Histories VI, 53.
^28. Victor, De Viris Illustribus 15; Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities VIII, 58;
Livy, II, 16, 7; cf. III, 18, 11; II, 61, 8-9;
Dio Cassius, XXXIX, 64; XL, 49, 1-3;
XLVIII, 53, 5.
^29. Cf. Duruy, “Régime municipal dans l’empire
romain,” 349, for references; Johann
Kirchmann, De Funeribus Romanorum
(Lübeck: Jauchius, 1625), 583-84. From
Livy, VIII, 22, 2-3, it is plain that Flavius’s
distribution never would have been tolerated
on any other occasion than a funeral. The
compulsory public distribution is found in
ancient funeral practices elsewhere, e.g.,
Josephus, Jewish Wars II, 1.
^30. Victor, De Viris Illustribus 32 and 18; cf.
Pliny, Natural History XXI, 10, in which
this public contribution accompanies an
actual shower of flowers. On showering the
dead with good things, especially grain, cf.
Eitrem, Opferritus und Voropfer, 261-80.
^31. Vergil, Eclogues VIII, 30, “Sparge, marite,
nuces” (scatter, bridegroom, the nuts; cf.
Festus, Lindsay, ed., 178-79), is matched by
a like obligation put upon the bride;
Apuleius, Apologia 88; cf. Diodorus, XIII,
84; Pliny, Natural History XV, 86. Other
wedding sparsiones were the scramble for
the spina alba, which was broken up and
distributed among the people tanquam vitae
praesidia (cf. modern bride’s bouquet), and
the sprinkling of the threshold with oil by the
bride; Pliny, Natural History XXVIII, 135;
Servius, Commentary on the Aeneid IV,
458, a custom still observed in Syria. The
private katachysmata (handfuls of figs, nuts,
and so forth) that introduced a Greek
bridegroom or new-bought slave to his new
life (Aristophanes, Plutus 768) is not to be
distinguished from the great public showers;
ibid., 794-822.
^32. On the showering of the victorious emperor
or contestant by the people, cf. Herodian,
Histories VII, 10, 8; for the similar
phylloboloi (showering with leaves), cf.
 Pindar, Pythian Odes IX, 123-25. The
symbolism of the triumphal shower is
treated by Eitrem, Opferritus und Voropfer,
266-67, and Ludwig Deubner, “Die
Bedeutung des Kranzes im klassischen
Altertum,” Archiv für Religion-
swissenschaft 30 (1933): 79. Vortumnus,
showered with fruits at the turn of the year,
was the prototype of the triumphator;
Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer,
287-88. On the scattering of gifts by the
victorious emperor, see below, n. 81.
^33. Lord Fitz R. Raglan, “Magic and Religion,”
Folklore 50 (1939): 129. Thus the symbolic
nut shower of the wedding (Festus, Lindsay,
ed., 178) also appears in the year-rites of the
Saturnalia (Martial, Epigrams V, 30, 8) and
at funerals; see Eitrem, Opferritus und
Voropfer, 262-63. On the identity of funeral
and triumph in ritual, cf. Ch. Picard, “Les
Bûchers sacrés d’Eleusis,” RHR 107 (1933):
137-54.
^34. Cf. Wilhelm Schmidt, Geburtstag im
Altertum (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1908), 36-
 37. All bellaria were of the nature of second
tables (Gellius, Attic Nights XIII, 11, 7),
which would make them necessarily New
Year’s rites at Rome; Athenaeus,
Deipnosophists XIV, 639; cf. Jane Harrison,
Themis, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1927), 250-51. On the
significance of Roman festivals as
anniversaries, cf. André Piganiol,
Recherches sur les jeux romains
(Strasbourg: Librairie Istra, 1923), 145-48.
^35. The identity of birthday and New Year is
especially evident in the economy of the
more ancient collegia. Thus the Arval
Brethren and the Salii had the primary duty
of celebrating birthdays and the New Year
with identical rites, Wissowa, Religion und
Kultus der Römer, 345-47, and “Arvales
Fratres,” in RE 2:1472-73, 1485. The
college of Aesculapius and Hygeia gave its
sparsiones out on the emperor’s birthday,
the birthday of the college, and at the New
Year; Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae,
98. The identity of the emperor’s birthday
 with the New Year (the official birthday of
all Romans, for that matter, Wissowa,
“Arvales Fratres,” in RE 2:1485), is
emphasized by Statius, Silvae IV, 1-2. The
genesia is at once birthday and “Totenfeier”
(Schmidt, Geburtstag im Altertum, 9-13,
37-45; Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of
Souls and Belief in Immortality among the
Greeks [London: Kegan Paul, 1925], 167),
held at Rome for all the dead on Midwinter
Night (Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der
Römer, 233), when alone, says Macrobius,
Saturnalia I, 10, 18, the cry of “Io
Saturnalia!” was legal. The Matronalia, on
March 1, the old Roman New Year,
resembled a birthday celebration in every
respect (Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der
Römer, 185), while every Roman bride
celebrated her marriage with coin- and cake-
tokens not on the marriage day, but at the
Compitalia at the end of the Saturnalia; see
ibid., 167-68.
^36. Malalas, Chronographia, in PG 97:481-82;
Chronicon Paschale 262-63, in PG 92:641.
 Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta XII, 30, shows
how established the custom was. At all
periods the rewards for gifts of grain to the
people was a statue in one’s memory; Pliny,
Natural History XVIII, 15; Gellius, Attic
Nights VII, 7, 1; Chronicon Paschale 391,
in PG 92:1004. The statue and feast that
went with it amounted to cult veneration,
writes W. Buckler, “A Charitable Foundation
of A.D. 237,” Journal of Hellenic Studies
57 (1937): 1-10; cf. Duruy, Régime
municipal dans l’empire romain,” 347;
Samuel Dill, Roman Society from Nero to
Marcus Aurelius (New York: Wold, 1905),
275.
^37. In all the above instances the statue marks
the scene of such a feast. Not a single
instance is known in which a group observes
a memorial feast at its own expense (cf.
Schmidt, Geburtstag im Altertum, 37-38).
To be rich was to be a hero (Pausanias,
Description of Greece IV, 32, 2; Diodorus,
XIII, 84 and 90). Such donatives were “a
manifestation of power and enhancement of
 the personality” exalting the status of the
giver to a superhuman level; cf. Athenaeus,
Deipnosophists X, 418B, and the discussion
by Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and
Custom in Savage Society (London: Paul,
Trench, Trübner, 1926), 29; quote from the
latter.
^38. The definitive studies are by Georg
Wissowa, “De Feriis Anni Romanorum
Vetustissimi Observations Selectae,” in
Geschichtliche Abhandlungen zur
römischen Religions- und Stadtgeschichte
(Munich: Beck, 1904), 154-74; Ludwig
Deubner, “Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der
altrömischen Religion,” Neue Jahrbücher für
das klassische Altertum 27 (1911): 321-35;
Alfred von Domaszewski, “Die Festcyclen
des römischen Kalenders,” Archiv für
Religionswissenschaft 10 (1907): 333-34;
and Eitrem, Beiträge zur griechischen
Religionsgeschichte, 2:19-22. All are in
agreement that a single great festival was
either repeated or prolonged by installments
throughout the year; cf. Mommsen,
 Römische Geschichte, 1:788.
^39. No one was allowed to be absent from the
secular rites held in his generation, and no
one might live to behold those of another;
Zosimus, Historia Nova II, 5, 1; Suetonius,
Divus Claudius 21; Acta Ludorum
Saecularium, lines 52-57, in Theodor
Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften, 8 vols.
(Berlin: Weidmann, 1905-13; reprinted
1965), 8:572; cf. 578-80.
^40. E. Diehl, “Das Saeculum, seine Riten und
Gebete,” Rheinisches Museum für
Philologie 83 (1934): 255-56; cf. Fritz
Blumenthal, “Ludi Saeculares,” Klio 15
(1917-18): 242.
^41. Zosimus, Historia Nova II, 5. The
redistribution appears” unsinning” to
Blumenthal, “Ludi Saeculares,” 232, and
puzzling to Mommsen, Gesammelte
Schriften, 8:596, but has been explained
convincingly by Piganiol, Recherches sur les
jeux romains, 92-101.
^42. Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae no. 12; see
William R. Halliday, The Greek Questions of
 Plutarch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1928), 72-73.
On the primitive bringing of first-fruits to
Delphi, cf. Plutarch, Quaestiones Graecae
no. 35. The function of the god there was to
bestow equally crops and children;
Euripides, Io 301-3.
^43. See below, nn. 83, 86, 91. The ludi
saeculares are the founder’s festival, the
saeculum urbis conditae; Diehl, “Das
Saeculum, seine Riten und Gebete,” 370; cf.
371-72. The day of sowing is the day of
creation, for the Romans considered
“Erzeugung” and birthday one and the same
event; cf. Franz Altheim, “Altitalische und
altromische Gottesvorstellung,” Klio 30
(1937): 51.
^44. This subject has particularly engaged the
attention of Albert Schwegler, Römische
Geschichte, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1884),
1:212-39; and Ludwig Preller, Römische
Mythologie, 2 vols. paginated sequentially,
2d ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1865), 92-146,
294-374, 401-501. Of the large Janus
literature, it is sufficient to cite the summary
of the god’s offices and his predominance in
the economy of tokens and distributions
(Ovid, Fasti I, 185-86) by Otto Huth,
Janus: Ein Beitrag zur altrömischen
Religionsgeschichte (Bonn: Rohrscheid,
1932), 23 and passim. Does the Jano struem
of Cato, De Agri Cultura 134, refer to the
sparsio of cakes? The identity of New
Year’s distribution with feasts of the dead
and the gifts of the sower is generally
explained on the ground that the act of
opening the subterranean corn-bin is both a
chthonian and a New Year’s rite: this theory,
introduced by Otfrid Müller, has been
popular since its revival by William W.
Fowler, Religious Experience of the Roman
People from the Earliest Times to the Age
of Augustus (London: Macmillan, 1911) or
The Roman Festivals of the Period of the
Republic (London: Macmillan, 1899); cf.
Stefan Weinstock, “Templum,” Römische
Mitteilungen 45 (1930): 115; W. Kroll,
“Mundus,” in RE 16:561-63; Martin P.
Nilsson, “Die Griechen,” in Bertholet and
 Lehmann, Lehrbuch der
Religionsgeschichte, 2:297-98, 369; see
below, n. 101.
^45. That the private sportulae were never
bestowed in kind, as the public often were,
indicates their later origin; Hug, “Sportula,”
in RE 2:3:1885. Cicero, Epistulae ad
Familiares XI, 28, speaks of distributions as
private in the sense of having no
constitutional significance, i.e., as
nonpolitical; but there is no issue as to the
priority of private or public sparsio, since
any liberalitas is meaningless unless the gift
is made both (a) from private means and (b)
to parties outside one’s family circle. Thus
Augustus, in Monumentum Ancyranum I,
32-35, boasts:" populum universummis
impensis liberarem” (I freed the whole
people by my generosity), his private gift to
320,000 Romans being given on the very
public occasion of his assuming the tribunate
and consulship; ibid., III, 15-17. So Crassus
“out of his own means” fed all the Romans
for three months, but this again was to
 celebrate a consulship (Plutarch, Crassus 2);
so too with Caesar (Plutarch, Caesar 55-
56).
^46. For sources, cf. Theodor Mommsen, “Sp.
Cassius, M. Manilius, Sp. Maelius, die drei
Demagogen des 3. und 4. Jahrhunderts der
römischen Republik,” Hermes 5 (1871):
228-71; and Schwegler, Römische
Geschichte, 3:132-36, 282-98. The Gracchi
and even Caesar would come under this
head. Maelius expected to restore the
monarchy by giving but two pounds of grain
to every plebeian, a ridiculously small bribe,
unless for the people it had a deeper
significance. Cf. ibid., 3:314-15.
^47. Cicero, De Officiis II, 61-64; Cicero,
Epistulae ad Atticum I, 16, 12; Cicero, Pro
Murena 36; cf. Tacitus, Annals IV, 62;
Appian, Samnite History XI, 1, where he
writes that to give money and gifts to the
populace is an archaic Roman tradition.
^48. Cicero, De Officiis II, 73, 77; Cicero, Pro
Ligario VII, 23; Cicero, Epistulae ad
Familiares IX, 13, 4; Cicero, Pro Rege
 Deiotaro 26.
^49. Emphasized by Theodor Mommsen, De
Collegiis et Sodaliciis Romanorum (Kiel:
Libraria Schwersiana, 1843): 50-55; and
Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 1:787.
^50. Sparsiones are never objected to on
principle, but only because they have
become the plaything of the lowest classes;
Persius, Saturnalia V, 177; Minucius Felix,
XI, 37. Epictetus, Discourses IV, 7, 22-24,
objects to scrambling for figs and nuts since
dignified men do not scramble “for such
small stakes!”; cf. Cicero, Pro Murena 19;
Appian, The Civil Wars V, 12-13, 128;
Cicero, De Officiis II, 57.
^51. Just as the popular burials in the Forum,
though dreaded by the senate (Dio Cassius,
XXXIX, 64; XLVIII, 53, 5; cf. Livy, VIII,
22, 2-4), weathered every attack because
they were a primitive popular custom. Cf.
Lucan, Bellum Civile II, 222; David
Randall-MacIver, Villanovans and Early
Etruscans (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924), 73-
83.
^52. Cf. Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, 11,
39-40; Rostovzeff, “Congiarium,” in RE
4:876, 880; cf. Viktor E. Gardthausen,
Augustus und seine Zeit, 1 vol. in 3 parts
(Leipzig: Teubner, 1891-96), 1:2:588; Otto
Hirschfeld, Untersuchungen auf dem
Gebiete der römischen
Verwaltungsgeschichte (Berlin: Weidmann,
1877), 120.
^53. No emperor could escape loud popular
censure if he failed to give lavishly;
Suetonius, Divus Claudius 12; Zosimus,
Historia Nova IV, 16; Plutarch, Galba 18,
and so forth.
^54. See Berve, “Liberalitas,” in RE 13:89-90.
^55. The evidence is collected in Friedländer,
Sittengeschichte Roms, 2:299-305.
^56. Thus, during the sparsiones, “tollunt
innumeras ad astra voces Saturnalia principis
sonantes et dulci dominum favore clamant:
hoc solum vetuit licere Caesar” (they raise
countless voices to heaven proclaiming the
Saturnalia of the emperor and saluting their
lord with warm admiration; this alone Caesar
 forbade)—Statius, Silvae I, 6, 81-84.
Augustus strictly forbade this dominus title
(Suetonius, Augustus 53), as did Tiberius
(Suetonius, Tiberius 27). According to
Victor, De Caesaribus XXXIV, 4, Diocletian
“primus omnium post Caligulam
Domitiumque dominum se palam dici passus
et adorari se appellarique uti deum” (after
Caligula and Domitian, Diocletian was the
first of all of them who allowed himself to
be called “lord” [dominus] openly and to be
venerated and addressed as though he were
a god). Cf. Victor, De Caesaribus XI, 2, and
Victor, Epitome III, 8; XI, 6. The dominus
title would never have caused the scandal it
did, had it originated, as Theodor
Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht, 3 vols.,
3d ed. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1885-87), 2:760-63,
claims, in the old economy of the Roman
household, nor would it have been
inseparably connected with the title of deus
(ibid.) had it referred strictly to the private
relationship of servant and master.
^57. Cf. Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Leipzig:
 Teubner, 1934), s.v. “dominus”; Suetonius,
Domitian 13.
^58. Suetonius, Domitian 13; cf. Livy, XXIII, 8,
6-7. When Trimalchio regales his guests with
a sparsio, they immediately interpret it as a
religious donative stemming not from their
host but from the emperor: “Rati ergo
sacrum esse ferculum tam religiso apparatu
perfusum, consurreximus altius et ‘Augusto
patri patriae, feliciter’ diximus. Quibusdam
tamen etiam post hanc venerationem poma
rapientibus, et ipsi iis mappas implevimus.”
(We thought that it must be a sacred dish
that was drenched with such holy trappings;
we stood up straight and said, “May it go
well for Augustus the father of his country.”
But since many were grabbing for the fruit
even after this solemnity, we filled our
napkins ourselves.) Petronius, Satyricon 60.
^59. Claudius’s behavior at his revived version of
the archaic year-feast, where he waited on
tables, addressed his guests as domini, and
so forth (Suetonius, Divus Claudius 21),
closely resembles that of King Cotys;
 Athenaeus, Deipnosophists IV, 131; cf. X,
439. At the Saturnalia (Macrobius,
Saturnalia I, 7, 26; Athenaeus,
Deipnosophists XIV, 639-40), as at the old
sparsiones-festival of the Floralia (Dio
Cassius, LVIII, 19, 1), the emperor was
treated in every way as a festival king. Since
these celebrations are beyond doubt archaic,
the origin of the supreme office cannot be
dissociated from them (see below, n. 70).
^60. Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae 1144-65; cf.
Altheim, Terra Mater, 19. At the Saturnalia
the emperor keeps open house (Statius,
Silvae I, 6, 39-50).
^61. Amid all the vicissitudes of the late Republic
the common people of Italy remained loyal
to the folk-memory of a Golden Age, and at
the end of the Republic were looking
forward with particular enthusiasm to the
return of the Saturnia regna. Cf. Guglielmo
Ferrero, Greatness and Decline of Rome, 5
vols. (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1909-
10), 2:339; Vergil, Eclogues 4.
^62. Cassiodorus, Variae VI, 18; Plutarch,
 Pompey 28; Velleius Paterculus, Historiae
Romanae II, 40.
^63. Preller, Römische Mythologie, 650, 653-54,
657. At Rome the prototype of the feast-
giving year-king is Hercules, who takes the
place of the old local Cererius and Jovius as
sponsor of public feasts; cf. Piganiol,
Recherches sur les jeux romains, 121-25. It
is he who presides over the food distribution
of the Ara Maxima, an event which
Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer,
277, holds to be the oldest public rite of the
Romans: it was a true year-feast of
abundance, at which food was ostentatiously
thrown away; ibid., 278. Wissowa, in ibid.,
276-77, 282-83 (cf. 271), identifies this
Hercules with the autochthonous Garanus,
as in this same office he is identified with the
old native sowing-god Semo Sancus;
Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, 4:346,
368-69, 375-76; Preller, Römische
Mythologie, 79, 238, 634, 637-38. “The
ancients had a way of calling all mighty men
Hercules,” says Servius, Commentary on the
 Aeneid VIII, 203, and everywhere the hero
appears as the year-king; Dio Chrysostom,
Orations I, 50-74; Schwenck, “Hercules
und Acca Larentia,” 129-31; cf. Michael
Rostovzeff, Mystic Italy (New York: Holt,
1927), 137, on Hercules as the great mysta.
Even the Oriental year-king, as Ningizzida,
Ninurta, Ningirsu, Tammuz, and so forth,
“seems to be in possession of all the
attributes of Herakles,” Henri Frankfort,
“Gods and Myths on Sargonid Seals,” Iraq
1 (1934): 14.
^64. Appian, Civil Wars III, 21, 23-24; cf.
Kenneth Scott, “The Political Propoganda of
44-30 B.C.,” Memoirs of the American
Academy in Rome 11 (1933): 7-49.
^65. Cicero, Philippics II, 84-85; Athenaeus,
Deipnosophists IV, 148.
^66. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 3:290-91.
^67. Dio Cassius, L, 10, 2; Florus, Epitome II,
13; Suetonius, Caesar 79. Caesar’s public
feasts, given on a royal scale (Plutarch,
Caesar 5), are described as archaic by
Ausonius, Technopaegnion IX, 5.
^68. Plutarch, Caesar LV, 57; Tacitus, Annals I,
2.
^69. Herodotus, History, I, 126. On Cyrus as the
model year-king, cf. Alfred Jeremias, The
Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient
East, 2 vols. (London: Williams and
Norgate: 1911), 2:231-32, 274-76.
^70. In that way the gardener Ellil-banai became
king of Babylon in grauer Vorzeit (in the
mists of time); Bruno Meissner, Babylonien
und Assyrien, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter,
1925), 2:99. At Tarsus the Epicurean Lysias,
chosen “crown wearer” (Priest of Heracles),
refused to give up the insignia after the
festival and made himself absolute tyrant,
“first of all dividing the wealth of the rich
among the poor, killing all who refused to
contribute”; Athenaeus, Deipnosophists V,
215. Later, when the people of that city
formed factions, they crowned Cassius and
Dolabella as rival kings; Appian, Civil Wars
IV, 64. Cornford, Origin of Attic Comedy,
26, has very plausibly suggested that the
famous ruse of Pisistratus and his
masquerade-Athena succeeded because,
insofar as it concerned the old year-king, he
could rely “on the conception being familiar
to the simple-minded folk in ritual.” When
Timaeus wanted to become king of Cyzicus,
he began by “bestowing a largess of money
and grain upon his fellow citizens”;
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists XI, 509. The
formula was followed in Sicyon, where “the
king receives honors and in turn gives gifts”
of land, grain, and money to everyone (Livy,
XXXII, 40, 8-9). Distributions as a rule
follow confiscations, as in the case of
Molpagoras at Cius (Polybius, Histories XV,
21, 1-2), Charops in Epirus (ibid., XXXII,
5), Chaeron at Sparta (ibid., XXIV, 7, 2-3),
Phintias in Sicily (Diodorus, XXII, 2), Nabis
at Sparta (ibid., XXVII, 1), and so forth. In
Roman legend there are many traces of such
practice. When all the people chose Tullus
Hostilius king, he divided up all the royal
lands among them (Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities III, 1),
following the example of Romulus himself,
 who willed to each Roman a couple of
jugera as an heredium (Varro, De Re
Rustica I, 10, 2). King Numa “abolished
poverty by force” when he gave to the
masses “all the land which Romulus had
won by the spear”; Plutarch, Numa 16.
When Sextus, son of Tarquin, became King
of Gabii, he “destroyed the more influential
citizens and distributed their wealth among
the populace”; Zonaras, Annals VII, 10.
Lepidus had the people plunder and divide
the effects of all who opposed his (royal)
triumph, Appian, Civil Wars IV, 5, 31.
^71. Cf. Diehl, “Das Saeculum, seine Riten und
Gebete,” 348-52. It was at the great year-
festival of the Gauls at Lyons that Drusus
induced these people to accept Augustus as
ruler and god; it is evident from the ease
with which this plan succeeded that he was
following a pattern as familiar to the Gauls
as the secular celebration was to the
Romans; H. W. Lawton, “The Religion of
the Gallo-Romans,” in Speculum Religionis:
Studies in Honor of Claude G. Montifiore
 (Oxford, Clarendon, 1929), 73.
^72. Such symbolic titles are very common, e.g.,
Martial, Epigrams XII, 62, 1-4; Statius,
Silvae I, 6, 2; IV, 1: Vergil, Bucolics I, 6-7;
Seneca, Epistulae I, 73; Claudianus
Mamertus, Panegyrics V, 2; VI, 1;
Cassiodorus, Variae VI, 4; IX, 17; XII, 11;
Corippus, Justin IV, 165-74; Nicolaus
Damascenus, Vita Caesaris 12, and so
forth. The familiar concept of the king as the
ultimate source of the food supply,
expressed in these passages, needs no
discussion. “AUG" on coins “in effect raises
the Emperor to the level of a symbol
typifying, in a more than earthly capacity,
the blessings which the more humble of the
earth may enjoy”; C. H. V. Sutherland, “The
Historical Evidence of Greek and Roman
Coins,” Greece and Rome 9 (February
1940): 74. Caesar was the first Roman to
put his own image on coins, an honor
reserved before that time for deity; ibid., 72.
^73. Cassiodorus, Variae III, 29.
^74. Berve, “Liberalitas,” in RE 13:90.
^75. Herodian, Histories V, 6, 9.
^76. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XIX, 1, 5.
^77. R. Lepsius, Denkmäler, 3:103-9; reproduced
in E. A. W. Budge, A History of Egypt from
the End of the Neolithic Period to the
Death of Cleopatra, 8 vols. (London: Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1902), 4:121, 123;
cf. 127: the gifts include all the fruits of the
earth, but also many ankh tokens, showing
that the god is bestowing life itself.
^78. Dio Cassius, LIX, 25, 1-5: Gaius had
ordered a high bema erected on the shore
and from it supervised his soldiers as they
gathered shells from the beach, following a
mock combat. Then he gave them rich
presents, as if they had won a great victory,
and marched with the booty back to Rome,
where he immediately mounted another
platform to watch the people gathering silver
and gold in the same manner. The whole
story of the farcical British expedition, with
its island objective, its mock combats, its
triumph and collecting of shells and gold,
and so forth, closely resembles Alexander’s
 mythical expedition to the underworld
(Pseudo-Callisthenes, Life of Alexander II,
41), a tradition with an Oriental year-rite
background (cf. Julius Zacher,
Pseudocallisthenes [Halle: Buchhan-dlung
des Walsenhauses, 1867], 141-42); also
Octavian’s unsuccessful attempt to satisfy
his soldiers with such a token triumph;
Appian, Civil Wars V, 13, 128.
^79. Cicero, Philippics II, 16.
^80. Besides sparsiones, memorial speeches were
given from the rostra (Polybius, Histories
VI, 53, 2), where stood the golden statue of
Memory (Cicero, Philippics II, 84).
Herodotus, History IV, 26, describes the
same remarkable combination of sparsio,
memorial rites, and golden statue among the
Scythians, and compares it with the Western
genesia. The actual distribution of the
dismembered body of the defunct in the
Eastern rite may well represent the original
form of the visceratio or Roman funeral
distribution of meat (Livy, VIII, 22, 2;
XXXIX, 46, 2; cf. above n. 21). The older
 rostra, to which Cicero refers (Wissowa,
Religion und Kultus der Römer, 77), was
the seat of Lupercus (Cicero, Philippics II,
84; Suetonius, Caesar 79), and stood on the
site of the earlier Volcanal, a raised platform
from which the kings would address the
people (references in Samuel B. Platner and
Thomas Ashby, A Topographical
Dictionary of Ancient Rome [London:
Oxford University Press, 1929], 583). Livy,
XXXIX, 46, 5; XL, 19, 2, tells of showers
of blood in Area Vulcani, implying that the
spot was actually the scene of bloody
sparsiones. For another type of chthonian
sparsio taking place there, see below, n.
116.
^81. Heliogabalus varied the platform routine with
the golden chariot; Herodian, Histories V, 6,
6-9. The solar costume went with both, for
at Constantinople the emperors wore it for
their chariot sparsiones (Theophanes,
Chronographia, anno 791; Cedrenus, I,
710). In a relief from an ivory plaque one
sees the deified emperor in a chariot
 mounted on a very high wooden platform
hung with draperies (cf. fig. 118, p. 117);
Henri Leclerq, "Éléphant,” in Fernand
Cabrol and Henri Leclercq, Dictionnaire
d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, 15
vols. (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1907),
4:2656; cf. Herodian, Histories, IV, 2, 1-4;
Lucius Ampelius, VIII, 19. Representations
of exalted chariots are very common (see
fig. 11, p. 117 in this volume).
^82. The Babylonian year-god scatters seed from
his heavenly car or mountain top; cf. below,
n. 91. His special symbol is the plow (V.
Scheil, “La Charrue Symbole de Ningirsu,”
Revue d’Assyriologie et d’Archéologie
Orientale 34 [1937]: 42), which identifies
him with year-gods everywhere (cf.
Frankfort, “Gods and Myths on Sargonid
Seals,” 13-14), notably with Triptolemus
(Hyginus, Fabulae 147, with specific
reference to sparsiones), of whom Arthur B.
Cook, Zeus, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1925), 1:214, 225,
observes “a remarkable similarity between
 the equipment of Triptolemus and that of
Dionysus,” including chariot and plow.
^83. Herodotus, History IV, 5: the sacred gold of
the Scythians fell from the sky at the
creation, along with a plow. The one able to
take up this gold was declared king.
^84. Of great antiquity is the story of Lo(v)ernius,
Luernes, Ariamnes, etc., who feasted all the
Celts for a year and was acclaimed leader
and benefactor of the race as he “drove his
chariot across the fields, scattering gold and
silver for the thousands of Celts who
followed him”; Athenaeus, Deipnosophists
IV, 152; Strabo, Geography IV, 2, 3.
^85. Cf. Hyginus, Fabulae 147. The practice of
scattering seeds and chopped straw in the
wake of a plow or wagon at New Year’s still
survives in Northern Greece; Cornford,
Origin of Attic Comedy, 63.
^86. The Greek custom is found among the
Germans as well (Jacob Grimm, Teutonic
Mythology, tr. James S. Stallybrass, 3 vols.
[London: Bell, 1883], 1:275-76), imitating in
this case the Earth-Goddess and/or her
 consort, who ride through the sky on
Midwinter Night scattering shavings and
straw from their wagon or plow, bits which
on being picked up turn to gold; cf. Pseudo-
Callisthenes, Life of Alexander II, 41; Stith
Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1932-36), F342.
^87. The chariot of the triumphator is that of
Jupiter himself; Ludwig Deubner, “Die
Tracht des römischen Triumphators,”
Hermes 69 (1934): 320. It is also the royal
chariot (Velleius Paterculus, Historiae
Romanae II, 40) and the victorious chariot
of the games, to judge from Suetonius,
Vespasian 5.
^88. This quadriga had been placed by Romulus
himself in the temple of Vulcan (Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities II, 54,
2; cf. Platner and Ashby, Topographical
Dictionary, 583), the source of the archaic
sparsiones (see above, n. 80). It goes back
to the time when Vulcan ruled before the
arrival of Jove, Jérôme Carcopino, Vergile et
 les origines d’Ostie (Paris: de Boccard,
1919), 98-102.
^89. Plutarch, Publicola 13; cf. Emil Aust, Die
Religion der Römer (Münster: Aschendorff,
1899), 49-55.
^90. Martial, Epigrams VIII, 78, 7-12; Statius,
Silvae I, 6, 9-10; 20-27; Ovid, Fasti I, 185-
86, and so forth.
^91. To cases cited above in nn. 83-86 may be
added the golden sparsiones (soma, rice,
butter, gold, and so forth) of the
Aśvamedha, the archaic New Year’s
celebration of India; Paul É. Dumont,
L’Aśvamedha (Paris: Geuther, 1927), v-viii,
252-53. This rite has been identified with the
oldest Sumerian year-practices by William F.
Albright and Paul É. Dumont, “A Parallel
between Indic and Babylonian Sacrificial
Ritual,” JAOS 54 (1934): 107-28; cf. the
Babylonian sprinklings of honey and milk in
Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 2:238-
39. For interesting Armenian sparsiones, cf.
Zabelle C. Boyajian, Armenian Legends and
Poems (London: Dent and Sons, 1916), 49,
 commenting on Moses of Khorene. At the
Persian creation golden streams flow down
and a golden shower falls from heaven to
earth; Albert J. Carnoy, “Iranian Views of
Origins in Connection with Similar
Babylonian Beliefs,” JAOS 36 (1916): 301;
and Albert J. Carnoy, Iranian Mythology,
vol. 6 in Louis H. Gray, ed., Mythology of
All Races, 13 vols. (Boston: Jones, 1917),
299-300. For the flowing gold of the Ras
Shamra ritual texts, cf. George A. Barton,
“The Second Liturgical Poem from Ras
Shamra,” JAOS 55 (1935): 38-44. At the
founding of Athens and the birth of Athena,
Zeus sent a shower of gold over the place
(Pindar, Olympian Odes VII, 8 and 50). The
cases of Danae and others will come to
mind. The golden tears of the goddess give
life to the world as rain; J. Rendell Harris,
Picus Who Is Also Zeus (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1916), 45-47;
cf. Pausanias, Description of Greece II, 31,
14.
^92. In the chariot sparsiones cited above, n. 81,
 it is specifically reported that the chariot was
of gold; cf. Pindar, Olympian Odes I, 37-41.
^93. Martial, Epigrams VIII, 33, 3-4; and in
Martial, Liber Spectaculorum II, 3; for
saffron, Martial, Epigrams V, 25, 7-8. The
throne of Lupercus on the rostra (see above,
n. 80) was the sella aurea; Cicero,
Philippics II, 3; cf. Pindar, Nemean Odes I,
37.
^94. This theme is treated by Fabia, “Sparsio,” in
Daremberg and Saglio, Dictionnaire des
antiquités grecques et romaines 4:2:1419;
on gilding, cf. Rostovzeff, Römische
Bleitesserae, 116; Martial, Epigrams XIII,
27; cf. Mirabilia Romae I, 4 on the “golden
bread,” reminding one of the Dutch-gold on
the gingerbread figures at old-world fairs.
^95. Dumont, L’Aśvamedha, 249; cf. 15-16. Of
the importance of gold as a universal luck-
and fertility-charm nothing need here be
said.
^96. It is so described by Statius, Silvae I, 6, 40;
cf. Vergil, Eclogues IV, 6-10, where “nova
progenies caelo demittitur alto” (a new
 generation is sent down from heaven on
high) refers, of course, to the gens aurea of
line 9.
^97. It is the marriage of “the Earth-Mother and
the Heaven-Father, whose rain falls in a life-
giving stream into the womb of Earth”;
Cornford, Origin of Attic Comedy, 19; cf.
Morris Jastrow, “Sumerian and Akkadian
Versions of Beginnings,” JAOS 36 (1916):
290-95, and the broad treatment by G. W.
Elderkin, “The Marriage of Zeus and Hera
and Its Symbol,” American Journal of
Archaeology 41 (1937): 424-35. Water in
the New Year’s rites has a special fertilizing
power, discussed by A. J. Wensinck, “The
Semitic New Year and the Origin of
Eschatology” Acta Orientalia 1 (1922):
164-65 and passim. In the Indian year-rites
“water is seed”; F. Max Müller, ed., The
Upanishaas, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1879-84), 1:238-39. In the ancient Easter
rite the wax of the Easter Taper “is dropped
into the font in the form of a cross, and the
candle itself is dipped into it. . . . Then the
people are sprinkled with this Easter water”
(Henry J. Feasey, Ancient English Holy
Week Ceremonial [London: Baker, 1897],
238-39), while the wax of the taper itself
may be distributed among the multitude in
the form of little wafer-tokens to bring
prosperity for the year; ibid., 203-4. Greek
sparsiones were accompanied by liberal
water lustrations over the multitude;
Aristophanes, Pax 962-72; cf. Cornford,
Origin of Attic Comedy, 101-2. The liquid
and flower showers of the Isis cult
(Apuleius, Metamorphoses XI, 9) and the
sprinkling of Nile water in the same
(Servius, Commentary on the Aeneid II,
116, and IV, 512) certainly have the same
significance as the life-giving “drop” of the
Egyptian New Year. The sprinkling of the
life-giving water by the Pharaoh at the great
year-festival (the Sed Festival) is often
depicted in murals and reliefs; for example,
see Edouard H. Naville, Festival-Hall of
Osorkon II (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench,
Trübner, 1892), pl. XI and p. 24. Befeuchter
 and Befruchter are concepts identical with
those of the ancients; Altheim, Terra Mater,
150; Preller, Römische Mythologie, 335. Cf.
G. Dossin, “Un rituel due culte d’Istar,”
Revue d’Assyriologie 35 (1938): 9.
^98. From the golden horde of Demeter came the
sparsiones of the Thalysia; Homer, Iliad
9:534; Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen
Religion, 1:117; Cornford, Origin of Attic
Comedy, 27. Frigg, or Freyja, was called
Folla, Abundia, Dame Habonde, and so
forth, because “she bestowed prosperity and
abundance on mortals”; she kept “the divine
mother’s chest (eski), out of which gifts
were showered upon [the people]"; Grimm,
Teutonic Mythology, 1:308. This treasure
was “the gold of Frigg”; ibid., 1:307. The
treasure chamber of the goddess always
appears in close connection with the royal
marriage motif (Cornford, Origin of Attic
Comedy, 26-27), of which the story of King
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in its
numerous Oriental versions is perhaps the
most instructive instance, though the reader
 may recall various Celtic legends of the
same intent, such as Geoffrey of
Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae II,
14; cf. Herodotus, History II, 121-26; II,
135; I, 187, and so forth.
^99. This was the penus (provisions) of the
community and the arca pontificum
(treasury of the pontifices), from which
festival expenses were paid; Wissowa,
Religion und Kultus der Römer, 407, 471.
After half the blood of the October horse
had been sprinkled, the other half was stored
there for future sparsiones (ibid., 145; see
above, n. 5).
^100. Ibid., 300; it was the “Archiv und Kasse”
into which all fines were paid, and from
which the cura annonae was administered;
cf. ibid., 302, 297; cf. Altheim, Terra Mater,
118; Piganiol, Recherches sur les jeux
romains, 2, 12, 85, 91, 101, and so forth;
Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period
of the Republic, 74-79.
^101. In connection with the sparsiones the
goddess appears most often as Fortuna (see
below, nn. 141-46) and as Annona: the
Annona Augusti Ceres of the Imperial coins
representing “Ceres . . . in her guise as
Imperial Corn Supply”; Sutherland, “Greek
and Roman Coins,” 74-75. Annona is the
emissary (Oehler, “Annona,” in RE 1:2320),
and the indigitamentum of Ceres; Georg
Wissowa, “Annona,” in Roscher,
Ausführliches Lexikon, 1:360; Berve,
“Liberalitas,” in RE 13:89-90. Ceres
received and dispensed the praemitiae as
archaic patroness of the cura annonae and
of the primitive games (see above, n. 100).
Her mate is the year-god Janus-Cerus; Huth,
Janus, 22-23, 93; Wilhelm Roscher,
“Ianus,” in Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon,
2:1:30; Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der
Römer, 103-4, 109; and it has often been
noted that her festival was the year-festival
(Piganiol, Recherches sur les jeux romains,
91; Fowler, Roman Festivals, 74-79), the
primitive year being marked by the opening
and shutting of her subterranean corn bin;
see above, n. 44; cf. Altheim, “Altitalische
 und altromische Gottesvorstellung,” 47-50;
Wissowa, “De Feriis Anni Romanorum
Vetustissimi,” 154-55. The name Annona
refers specifically to the yearly office of
distribution.
^102. Ovid, Fasti V, 221; on Flora as Ceres, cf.
Altheim, Terra Mater, 132-33.
^103. The treasury of the goddess is also that of
Pluto, and the counterpart of the heavenly
treasury of Zeus; Cornford, Origin of Attic
Comedy, 27; Aristophanes, Plutus 131-34.
Lydus, De Mensibus IV, 85, argues that
Pluto is the Sun in the underworld with
Kore, who personifies “that power which is
upon the seeds as they fall from heaven to
earth.” At all times the substance of the
Roman sparsiones was taken in theory from
the aerarium Saturnii (Oehler, “Annona,” in
RE 1:2319), and Saturn’s temple was the
city treasury; Wissowa, Religion und Kultus
der Römer, 57. In the East the waters of
heaven and those of the underworld are
identical, and the gold shower is supplied
from a heavenly rain-pond, which is at the
 same time the water of the abyss; cf.
Lehmann, “Erscheinungs- und Ideenwelt der
Religion,” in Bertholet and Lehmann,
Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 1:105-6;
and Edvard Lehmann, “Die Perser,” in
Bertholet and Lehmann, Lehrbuch der
Religionsgeschichte, 2:228.
^104. Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), 296, cites
references to this.
^105. Anton Deimel, Sumerische Grammatik
(Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1924),
119; cf. 110: “von Phallus überschüssiger
Kraft, vom Hause des Sturmflutes, vom
Gebirge, dem heiligen Orte werde ich dir
[i.e., the King] einen Wind schicken: das
Land wird er mit Lebenshauch
beschencken.” It is the goddess who brings
forth this shower; Jastrow, “Sumerian and
Akkadian Versions of Beginnings,” 292-93.
^106. Hammurabi Code, Prologue, cols. 2-4;
Robert F. Harper, Code of Hammurabi
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1904), 5-9.
The Persian god sits in heaven “on a golden
 throne . . . with hands overflowing”;
Carnoy, Iranian Mythology, 229-300.
^107. Psalms 78:23-29 (for the New Year); cf.
Malachi 3:10.
^108. Cf. Wensinck, “Semitic New Year and the
Origin of Eschatology” 158-99; Feasey,
Ancient English Holy Week Ceremonial, 55-
72.
^109. “Domine aperi fenestram. Sol veni! Luna
veni! Nubes celestis cum manna veni!”
(Henri Leclerq, “Laudes Pueriles,” in Cabrol
and Leclercq, Dictionnaire d’archéologie
chrétienne et de liturgie, 8:2:1913.)
^110. Feasey, Ancient English Holy Week
Ceremonial, 74, 76-77; cf. 58.
^111. Suetonius, Augustus 98. As princeps
iuventutis (Augustus, Monumentum
Ancyranum III, 1-6) he would distribute
tokens marked MAG(ister) IUVENT(utis);
Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, 59; cf.
Hubert Démoulin, “Encore les collegia
iuvenum,” Musée Belge 3 (1899): 177-92.
^112. Henri Leclerq, “Annone,” in Cabrol and
 Leclercq, Dictionnaire d’archéologie
chrétienne et de liturgie, 1:2275-76, fig.
776. Leclercq’s explanation is that “deux
génies couvrent les époux de fleurs” (two
geniuses are showering the married couple
with flowers), although the objects on the
strings in no way resemble flowers, and the
strings are not held lightly like garlands, but
are clutched firmly and hang straight, though
at odd angles, as if they were being shaken.
^113. Plutarch, Romulus 11. The best-known
example is that of the Lacus Curtius, into
which every Roman tossed a coin or fruit
offering “quotannis ex voto pro salute eius”
(each year in fulfillment of a vow for his
welfare); Suetonius, Augustus 57; cf. Livy,
VII, 6, 3-6; Propertius, Elegies IV, 2, 61.
The mouth of the underworld was the
mundus, which has been persistently
identified with the subterranean public silo
from which the grain distributions were
made, the mundus Cereris (Festus, Lindsay,
ed., 144; Macrobius, Saturnalia I, 16-18;
see above, n. 101).
^114. “Diese Sitte der Münzspende an Quellen
und Flüsse geht durch die ganze antike
Welt,” according to Franz Dölger, “Die
Münze im Taufbecken und die
Münzenfunde in Heilquellen der Antike
Kultur- und Religionsgeschichtliches zum
Kanon 48 der Synode von Elvira in
Spanien,” in Antike und Christentum, 6
vols. (Münster: Aschendorff, 1929), 3:13,
who has treated the subject extensively;
ibid., 3:1-24. Additional instances of the
throwing of year-offerings into the abyss of
the netherworld are to be found in Sozomen,
Historia Ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical
History) 2, 4; Gregory of Tours, De Gloria
Confessorum 2, in PL 71:830-31; Pausanias,
Description of Greece I, 18, 7; VII, 24, 2;
III, 23, 9; III, 26, 1 (this Ino is identified
with the Roman Mater Matuta in ritual; cf.
Schirmer, “Leukothea,” in Roscher,
Ausführliches Lexikon, 2:2:2012); Lucian,
De Syria Dea (On the Syrian Goddess) 12,
and so forth. The Demeter pigs of the
Thesmophoria were thrown into a pit before
 being scattered over the fields, according to
Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek
Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), 30.
^115. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer,
429. One is reminded of the Greek
katabolia, the act of contributing one’s
offering to a public feast by throwing it onto
the common pile; Athenaeus,
Deipnosophists VII, 362; Johann Tzetzes,
Ad Hesiodum 2.
^116. Cf. H. J. Rose, “The Cult of Volkanus at
Rome,” Journal of Roman Studies 23
(1933): 58-61; J. Toutain, “Sur un rite
curieux et significatif du cult de Vulcain
Rome,” RHR 103 (1931): 136-37.
^117. Leviticus 5; 8:26-30; 14:6-7, 16; 23:11, 20,
and so forth. These rites are a complicated
series of throwing, waving, sprinkling, and
mixing of oil, blood, water, bits of meat, and
fruits of the earth, with much liquid sparsio
over altar, priests, and congregation. They
are full of instructive parallels which cannot
be treated here.
^118. As seen in the scattering of ashes to the
 winds, in which every vestige of the object
of sacrifice follows the course of the flame
and smoke to the other world. The ashes of
various “vegetation gods” were sown abroad
in true sparsiones; Jane Harrison,
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1908), 97-98. On burning as a means of
banishment, cf. Pausanias, Description of
Greece II, 10, 1.
^119. Cornford, Origin of Attic Comedy, 55-56;
Eitrem, Opferritus und Voropfer, 280-94.
^120. Roman practices of banishment recall the
Hittite system, which puts things “on the
road to the Sungod in the Underworld” by
throwing them into a fire, a stream, or a pit;
Albrecht Götze, Kleinasien (Munich: Beck,
1933), 146-47. The Sumerian compound for
“dedicate,” “sacrifice,” is a-ru, literally
“throw into the water,” writes Deimel,
Sumerische Grammatik, 42. Objects tossed
into the year-fires of Europe (Grimm,
Teutonic Mythologie, 1:43) were also cast
into holy fountains, both acting as “Bote
 zwischen der göttlichen und der
menschlichen Welt” (a messenger between
the divine and the human worlds); Paul
Herrmann, Altdeutsche Kultgebräuche
(Jena: Diederichs, 1928), 33; cf. 40, 59. The
year-fire itself is transmitted from heaven by
a burning-glass, a “type of the Orient on
high,” passing from the world above to that
below without any contact of the two;
Feasey, Ancient English Holy Week
Festival, 187-88, 180-81.
^121. Eitrem, Opferritus und Voropfer, 282-90;
Rose, “Cult of Volkanus at Rome,” 61; Paul
Radin, Social Anthropology (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1932), 306. The throwing of
food or stones keeps the spirits at a distance
either by satisfying them (Cerberus) or
scaring them off; cf. Thompson, Motif-
Index of Folk-Literature, H331; R231
(Atalanta motif); G512. With the sparsio as
a form of combat (e.g., confetti) the present
study is not concerned. It will be enough to
note that the adorea of kisses, flowers,
fruits, and vegetables (Plutarch, Cato Minor
 46) thrown to actors in the theater could, if
an actor did badly, take the form of a
shower of stones: in either case it was a
sparsio; but Franciscus B. Ferrarius, De
Veterum Acclamationibus et Plausu, in
Graevius, Thesaurus Antiquitatem
Romanorum, 6:82-88, warns against
confusing ritual combats with stoning rites
(cf. Eitrem, Opferritus und Voropfer, 290).
^122. The spirits were waiting to snatch it: they
were the Harpies, the rapacious dead;
Kirchmann, De Funeribus Romanorum,
578-80; Georg Weicker, Der Seelenvogel in
der alten Litteratur und Kunst (Leipzig:
Teubner, 1902), 20. In Babylonia the stray
animals that snatched food from the ground
were “the shadow-spirits of the dead”;
Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 1:419.
To appease such the Philageians would carry
some crumbs from the year-feast;
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists IV, 149C; cf.
Franz Dölger, “Die Eucharistie als
Reiseschutz: Die Eucharistie in den Händen
der Laien,” In Antike und Christentum,
 5:232-47, 258. After the German year-feast
the crumbs were scattered over the fields
with cries of “wôld! wôld!” (Grimm,
Teutonic Mythology, 1:156), the sowing of
the fields and the feeding of the dead being
the same act; Eitrem, Opferritus und
Voropfer, 262. For the Pythagoreans all food
that fell from the table passed tois ērōsi and
could not be used by mortals; Diels,
Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 1:463;
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent
Philosophers VIII, 34. Whatever is thrown
or dropped is lost to this world, whatever is
caught is gained; Pausanias, Description of
Greece I, 17, 3; Aelius Spartianus, Hadrian
XXVI, 7.
^123. Hecate takes a deipnon from the rich to
feed the poor, who must snatch the food
before it is set down; Aristophanes, Plutus
594-99; Joannes Tzetzes, Commentarii in
Aristophanem, vol. 6:1 of Scholia in
Aristophanem, ed. W. J. W. Koster
(Groningen: Wolters, 1960), 142. The
crumbs for Hecate (see Gulick’s note on
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists IV, 149C; cf.
III, 110C) were a sort of Hygeia-bread, like
the cakes of the Kollyridian rites; Franz
Dölger, “Heidnische und christliche
Brotstempel mit religiösen Zeichen: Zur
Geschichte des Hostienstempels,” in Antike
und Christentum, 1:13-14. The remnants of
the Christian agape, heavenly food, were
distributed among the poor; Evagrius,
Ecclesiastical History IV, 36, in PG
86:2:2769; I. Bekker, ed., Georgius
Cedrenus 1:686-88, as were the untouchable
remains of the great Slavic year-feast for the
dead; Jan Machal, Slavic Mythology, vol. 3
in Gray, Mythology of All Races (Boston:
Jones, 1918), 236. In Israel what fell from
the sacred bread-fruit tree in the temple
could be picked up only by the poor;
Babylonian Talmud Pesah 52b; cf. the
gleaning-law, Leviticus 19:9-10. Eitrem,
Opferritus und Voropfer, 263-64, 267, gives
other cases in which “die Armen vielfach
den Platz der Totenseelen eingenommen”
(the poor took the place of the dead).
^124. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, 1:273-74,
282. Unless the god unexpectedly lets fall a
shoe or ring, and so forth, from his statue,
these must be snatched from him unawares
by one who would obtain prosperity; ibid.,
1:114, n. 2. Cf. such year-motifs as
Gilgamesh snatching the tablets of Destiny,
Prometheus stealing fire, and so forth. The
throwing or accidental dropping of a spindle
into running streams at the New Year
gratifies the earth-goddess; cf. Adolf Wuttke,
Der deutsche Volksaberglaube der
Gegenwart (Berlin: Wiegandt and Grieben,
1900), 26 (24), 29-30, 32; Thompson,
Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, G423, a
motif occurring very anciently in the Ras
Shamra fragments; Barton, “Second
Liturgical Poem from Ras Shamra,” 38.
^125. See Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-
Literature, E545, 561, 373.
^126. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists IV, 145; cf.
146B; Herodotus, History IX, 110.
^127. Götze, Kleinasien, 153, 155 (of the Hittite
king).
^128. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists IV, 153. The
symbol of Orestes’ utter banishment from
the world of men is his eating alone at a
table set apart (Euripides, Iphigeneia at
Taurus 949-54).
^129. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists IV, 145;
Herman Kees, Ägypten, in Handbuch der
Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 3, pt. 1, 3a
(Munich: Beck, 1933), 64.
^130. Athenaeus, Deipnosophists IV, 151
(Thracian), 153 (Parthian). It is still
considered an ill omen in the East for food
to pass directly from the hand of a giver to
that of a receiver.
^131. Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, 13, 16-
17, 38, 55, is insistent on this point.
^132. Many were actually killed in scrambles for
tesserae (Dio Cassius, LIX, 25, 5; Herodian,
Histories V, 6, 10). Yet for Rostovzeff,
Römische Bleitesserae, 4, “Ausstreuen” is
nothing more than a convenient means of
distribution.
^133. Gifts were flung until “desunt qui rapiant,
 sinusque pleni gaudent” (there are too few to
grasp them all, and full laps shout for joy);
Statius, Silvae I, 6, 79-80. When “omne
genus rerum missilia sparsit, et . . . pars
maior intra popularia deciderat” (he
scattered gifts of all sorts of things, and the
greater part fell among the people), Domitian
gave the knights and senators a special
repeat shower, Suetonius, Domitian IV, 5;
cf. Suetonius, Augustus 41, and Duruy,
“Régime municipal dans l’empire romain,”
348. Rich senators complained if they failed
to get their share of these trivial “hand-
outs,” a plain indication of their symbolic
nature (Symmachus, Epistolae IX, 153; cf.
Commodian, Instructiones II, 34).
^134. Quite apart from the fun of the licentia
diripiendi (Suetonius, Augustus 98;
Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XIX, 1,
13, 93), there is an archaic background to
the rixae (brawls), as seen in Apollodorus, I,
9, 23; Hyginus, Fabulae 22, where Jason’s
sparsio of stones that begets a race of men
is followed by yet another which sets them
 fighting by the ears. Altheim, Terra Mater,
136, surmises a “kultische Bedeutung”
(cultic meaning) in the rixanti populo
(brawling mob) of Persius, Saturnalia V,
176, but is not more specific. The rixa
figures also in the Greek sparsio;
Aristophanes, Wasps 58-59; cf. Cornford,
Origin of Attic Comedy, 100-101.
^135. Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, 56, and
Friedländer, Sittengeschichte Roms, 2:317,
both use the term without following up the
clue.
^136. Hermann Dessau, Geschichte der
römischen Kaiserzeit, 2 vols. (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1924-26), 1:339.
^137. Alexander Tille, Yule and Christmas: Their
Place in the Germanic Year (London: Nutt,
1899), 31-32, 114-15. The famous year-
cake of the Slavs (Machal, Slavic
Mythology, 218-19) recalls the round Janus
cakes of the Roman New Year (Wissowa,
Religion und Kultus der Römer, 111, n. 3).
Contributions to the Greek feast had to be
caught, not purchased; Athenaeus,
 Deipnosophists IV, 141; Pausanias,
Description of Greece VII, 18, 7; cf. 1
Samuel 2:13-14, where the priest receives
his share by a sort of grab-bag. A fowl
alighting on the emperor’s table during the
scrambles of the Saturnalia was hailed as the
best of omens; Aelius Lampridius, Severus
Alexander XXXVII, 6; cf. Franz Dölger,
“Die Apollinarischen Spiele und das Fest
Pelusia,” in Antike und Christentum, 1:153;
and Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, 89,
on “die sacrale Grundlage der Jagd” (the
sacral basis of the hunt).
^138. All this is implied in the symbol of the
cornucopia, the impartiality motif in the
formula, “O dominum aequum et bonum”
(O just and good lord)! (Suetonius, Augustus
53; cf. Dio Chrysostom, Orations III, 73;
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists I, 13; Livy,
XXXI, 4, 6-7; Tacitus, Annals IV, 64).
^139. E.g., Aelius Lampridius, Heliogabalus 22;
Suetonius, Augustus 75.
^140. V. E. Ehrenberg, “Losung,” in RE 13:1459;
A. Bouché-Leclercq, “La Divination
 italique,” RHR 1 (1880): 43-44; cf. Cicero,
De Divinatione I, 34; II, 85-87. It should
not be overlooked that sero, serere also
means to “sow.”
^141. Ehrenberg, “Losung,” in RE 13:1455-57;
Bouché-Leclercq, “Divination italique,” 44-
45. In this capacity Fortuna is an old
autochthonous version of the Mother
Goddess (see above, n. 101).
^142. Ehrenburg, “Losung,” in RE 13:1455-57.
The great shrine of Fortuna Primigenia at
Praeneste was open only at the New Year
(cf. refs. in Bouché-Leclercq, “Divination
italique,” 46-47); so also the Pythian
originally gave oracles only one day a year,
on the god’s birthday (Plutarch, Quaestiones
Graecae no. 9).
^143. Bouché-Leclercq, “Divination italique,” 44;
Ehrenberg, “Losung,” in RE 13:1475;
Cicero, De Divinatione II, 85-87.
^144. The numerous tesserae from the shrine of
Aesculapius and Hygeia on the Tiber Island
fulfil all these conditions; Rostovzeff,
Römische Bleitesserae, 2-3, 99.
^145. Hers is the most common name on all
tokens; Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae,
97; Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der
Römer, 246; and designates the goddess as
“Spenderin von materiellen Gütern”
(distributor of material goods); Rostovzeff,
Römische Bleitesserae, 110.
^146. Seneca, Epistulae I, 74, 6: “ad haec, quae a
fortuna sparguntur, sinum expandit et
sollicitus missilia exspectat” (opens his arms
for what is scattered by fortune and waits
anxiously for her gifts).
^147. Cf. lexica; Mommsen, “Das romische
Gastrecht und die romische Clientel,” 340-
41; K. Regling, “Tessera,” in RE 2:5:851-54.
^148. Pausanias, Description of Greece VII, 25,
6; II, 20, 3 (where Tyche corresponds to the
Italian Fortuna).
^149. The classic treatment of this is by
Mommsen, “Das romische Gastrecht und
die romische Clientel,” 339-42, and Theodor
Mommsen, “Das romische Gastrecht,” in
Römische Forschungen, 2 vols. (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1864), 1:338-43. The need for
 such tickets argues their origin in public
rather than in the intimate private cult.
^150. Cf. Regling, “Tessera,” in RE 2:5:851-54;
Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, 1;
Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung,
2:128: the incisi (those whose names are
inscribed) possess “ein für allemal eine
tessera” (a permanent tessera) to match
their names in the list. Cf. Livy, VIII, 20, 8,
and Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der
Römer, 131, on the great tessera of the
state.
^151. Deimel, Sumerische Grammatik, 73, 77-78
(dated New Year), 86-87, 210, 224.
^152. Throughout the Middle East it was the
custom for everyone coming to the king’s
feast at the New Year to contribute an
arrow; Carnoy, Iranian Mythology, 306-8.
These were the baresmen used by the king
in divination as he sat “on a golden throne,
on a golden cushion, on a golden carpet . . .
with hands overflowing” (ibid., 299-300), as
appears from comparison with the Tartar
custom described by Joinville, Histoire de
St. Louis (Paris: Foucault, 1824), 475-78.
For the Scythian version cf. Herodotus,
History IV, 81; for the Caucasus, William E.
D. Allen, A History of the Georgian People
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner,
1932), 331. The use of lucky arrows in
determining portions at feasts is frequently
mentioned in Arabic sources, e.g., Qur’an
2:216; Mucallaqat, 2, 104. The same
association of arrow-token (or seal) and
feast is apparent in very early Babylonia,
where seals seem to have originated as
arrows or reeds (William H. Ward, The Seal
Cylinders of Western Asia [Washington,
D.C.: Carnegie Institute, 1910], 5), the
earliest of these being devoted to New
Year’s banquet themes. According to
Frankfort, “Gods and Myths on Sargonid
Seals,” 7, 6, their “designs of good omen,”
which reflect “the Babylonian New Year
festival . . . antedate by 2,000 years the texts
upon which we must draw.” The favorite
subjects of the very earliest seals are
banquet and hunting scenes; Leon Legrain,
 Archaic Seal Impressions (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1936), 4. The arrow
appears as a device for carrying a message
between this world and the world above in
much folklore, e.g., Herodotus, History V,
105. See “The Arrow, the Hunter, and the
State,” pages 1-32 in this volume.
^153. “Marks were cut on pieces of wood, . . .
and each person had his mark. Sometimes
the places at feasts were assigned by lot; . . .
images of some of the gods were sometimes
marked on the lots”; Paul B. Du Chaillu,
The Viking Age, 2 vols. (New York:
Scribner, 1890), 1:350. Runes and ogam
characters take their form from being cut on
such pieces of wood (John Rhys, Lectures
on the Origin and Growth of Religion as
Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom [London:
Williams and Norgate, 1898], 268), just as
Babylonian characters appear on seals “long
before we meet any instance of writing on
clay tablets”; Legrain, Archaic Seal
Impressions, 4. Such marks exactly
resemble the Hausmarken, or private seals,
 derived anciently from some southern
European alphabet “most like the North-
Etruscan,” according to Gustav Neckel, “Die
Runen,” Acta Philologica Scandinavica 12
(1937-38): 114-15; cf. 112-13.
^154. For admission to the primitive Greek feasts
the poor would present a section of reed or a
laurel leaf; Athenaeus, Deipnosophists IV,
140, 141E. The leaf would be given back to
the holder with a paste of oil and barley on
it, both laurel (ibid., IV, 140C) and reed
serving as cheap and convenient containers;
Campbell Bonner, “Notes on the Use of the
Reed, with Special Reference to Some
Doubtful Passages,” Transactions and
Proceedings of the American Philological
Society 39 (1908): 35-48. The laurel leaf
here has a token value, for one could pay
certain fines either with a cake (kamma) or
with a laurel leaf (kammatis); Athenaeus,
Deipnosophists IV, 141A. The leaf was put
to the same use by the early Romans, who
would cook their New-Year and birthday
cakes on them and call them panes laureati;
 Cato, De Agri Cultura 75-76 and 121. In
the East the strena takes the alternative form
of sections of reed under the Empire;
Malalas, Chronographia, in PG 97:481-84;
Chronicon Paschale, in PG 92:641. An
unexplained passage from Wilhelm Henzen,
ed., Acta Fratrum Arvalium Quae
Supersunt (Berlin: Reimer, 1874), 26, seems
to imply that there was a scramble in the
giving out of the panes laureati: “et panes
laureat(os) per public(os) partiti sunt; ibi
omn(es) lumemulia cum rapinis acceperunt”
(they distributed the panes laureati among
the crowd; everyone got the lumemulia
there in wild scrambles). Since the meaning
of lumemulia is entirely unknown (ibid.,
32), may not the rapinae refer to rixae of
the distributions rather than to “beets”?
^155. Wensinck, “Semitic New Year and the
Origin of Eschatology,” 172 and passim,
citing especially Ephraim Syrus, Hymn II, 2;
VI, 13. The heavenly Book of Life is
matched by like tablets kept in the
underworld; Aeschylus, Eumenides 273-75.
 The worst of all penalties is to be blotted out
from the Book of Life, to be “cut off from
among the people,” and so forth.
^156. Blumenthal, “Ludi Saeculares,” 231-32; cf.
Herodian, Histories III, 8, 10.
^157. The Golden Tablets of the Orphic mysteries
as “passports to the other world” (Rohde,
Psyche, 249-50 [vii, 21]) resemble the coins
or cakes with which the dead were expected
to pay their admission to the banquets of the
beyond, thus assuring their nonreturn; Paul
Sartori, “Die Totenmünze,” Archiv für
Religionswissenschaft 2 (1899): 210, 213. A
dos or sportula had to be presented by all
seeking entrance to the feasts of the various
collegia and mysteries; Dölger, “Die Münze
im Taufbecken,” in Antike und Christentum
3:9-12; Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der
Römer, 407.
^158. The Phyllobolia was one of the formal steps
of initiation into the mysteries; references in
Eitrem, Opferritus und Voropfer, 279. In the
famous picture of the heavenly banquet of
Vibia, depicting certain mysteries
(Rostovzeff, Mystic Italy, 145-46; cf.
Johannes Leipoldt, Die Religionen der
Umwelt des Urchristentums [Leipzig:
Deichert, 1926], no. 166), two youths are
seen in the foreground on a flowering field;
one of them scatters small objects which the
other gathers up and puts in his mouth;
Raffaele Garruci, Storia dell’arte cristiana
nei primi otto secoli della Chiesa, 6 vols.
(Prato: Giachetti, 1880), 6, pl. 494; Henri
Leclerq, “Agape,” in Cabrol and Leclercq,
Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de
liturgie, 1:839-40, fig. 186. Cf. Aischrion, I,
43, in Poetae Lyrici Graeci, ed. Theodorus
Bregk (Leipzig: Teubner, 1882), 2:517: “kai
theōn brōma agrōstin heures, hēn Kronos
katespeiren” (you have found dog’s-tooth
grass, the food of the gods, which Kronos
scattered about); and Carnoy, Iranian
Mythology, 308: “And there shalt thou place
the meadow where unceasingly the golden-
colored, where unceasingly the invincible
food is eaten.” The feast on the grass with
its miraculous abundance occurs in
 Herodotus, History I, 126; Matthew 14:19;
and Mark 6:39; and in the archaic Roman
year-feasts; Ovid, Fasti III, 532-40; this
Anna Perenna, the year-goddess, is identical
with Ceres; Altheim, Terra Mater, 93;
Henzen, Acta Fratrum Arvalium, 26: “in
cespite . . . sacr(um) fecer(unt)" (they held
the banquet . . . on the grass).
^159. A remarkable parallel is the Indian
Aśvamedha feast, at the end of which the
king gave to each priestly guest a piece of
gold of 100 grains, “because the life of man
is 100 years” (Dumont, L’Aśvamedha, iii,
15-16; cf. v; 249). Just so, after the Arval
banquet each of the brethren received a
sportula of gold coin, which is always
specified as 100 denarii (Henzen, Acta
Fratrum Arvalium, 13, 16-17, 26-27, 45-
46); though it is not stated that this is for one
hundred years, such was in fact the secular
life-span, and the coin was exchanged for
the wish, “augeat t(ibi) I(uppiter) a(nnos)"
(may Jupiter increase your years); ibid., 45-
46; cf. Wissowa, “Arvales Fratres,” in RE
 2:1475.
^160. P. Nigidius Figulus, frg. 99; Scholia ad
Germanicum (ed. Maas), 85, 154.
^161. Apollodorus III, 4, 1; Euripides, Madness of
Heracles 4-7; Hyginus, Fabulae 178; Ovid,
Metamorphosis III, 101-30; cf. Thompson,
Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, A1245. On
Spartoi from speirein, cf. Turk, “Spartoi,”
in RE 2:3:1538-40.
^162. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer,
261-62.
^163. Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung,
2:130.
^164. The seal was a contract between god and
man as it was between men; Otto Weber,
Altorientalische Siegelbilder (Leipzig:
Hinrichs, 1920), 1, 5. It was “the emblem of
the Creator God, as a symbol and guarantee
of his assistance,” W. M. Flinders Petrie,
Scarabs and Cylinders with Names
(London: University of London, 1917), 3-4;
also “a peculium of their owner,” that had “a
protective virtue . . . [and] may have
 conveyed a sense of divine companionship,”
Arthur J. Evans, The Palace of Minos at
Knossos, 4 vols. (London: Macmillan,
1935), 3:144. On the tessera as contract, see
above, n. 149.
^165. Such were the song of the Sicilian
bukoliasts (Nilsson, Geschichte der
griechischen Religion, 1:118), the Eiresione
song (ibid., 1:114), and the typical “quête”
song in Aristophanes, The Birds 723-36.
Latin equivalents of these are the laudes
pueriles, a collection of which may be found
in Leclerq, “Laudes Pueriles,” in Cabrol and
Leclercq, Dictionnaire d’archéologie
chrétienne et de liturgie, 8:1910-16, and the
panegyrics, collected in Henri Leclerq,
“Panégyrique,” in ibid., 13:1016-45. The
activities of these youthful New Year’s
choruses closely resemble those of the Arval
and Salian brethren; cf. Robert S. Conway,
Ancient Italy and Modern Religion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1933), 2-10. When a sparsio is given at a
private party, the guests spring to their feet
 and recite an acclamatio to the Emperor;
Petronius, Satyricon 60.
^166. This appears in a very ancient form of
marriage contract, wherein one party catches
the gold or silver thrown by the other;
Poetae Lyrici Graeci 2:299 (epigrams 2-3),
also in Elegy and Iambus with the
Anacreontea, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1968), 2:6-7 (epigrams 7-
8); Herodotus, History I, 199; Thompson,
Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, H316,
where both throwing and catching serve to
establish a contract. If the gifts thrown into
the abyss at the New Year disappeared, it
was believed that the god had accepted the
contract; if not, it was taken as a bad sign;
Pausanias, Description of Greece III, 23, 9.
^167. Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, 41.
Many of these acclamations are collected by
Ferrarius in Graevius, Thesaurus
Antiquitatem Romanorum, 6:104-15, 123-
36, 150-83, 199-230; and Leclerq, “Laudes
Pueriles,” in Cabrol and Leclerq,
Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de
 liturgie, 8:1910-16. The hundreds of
acclamationes almost without exception (1)
hail the donor as worthy and victorious, and
(2) wish him multos annos (many years).
^168. The principle of substitution is here in full
force. The common resemblance of tesserae
to coins is explained by the substitution of
coins and dice alike for those primitive
astragals of which Neolithic Italy has yielded
a great harvest, but which disappear
completely in historic times to survive in
altered form both as coins and as dice;
Ehrenberg, “Losung,” in RE 13:1485; Hugo
Blümner, Die römischen Privataltertümer
(Munich: Beck, 1911), 412, n. 12. The
Lydians, who are traditionally said to have
invented money, also invented lots and
games of chance, and that in an attempt to
solve the food-distribution problem;
Herodotus, History I, 94. Since writing
possibly began with seals, it is significant
that Cadmus, who begot the race by sowing
tokens, is also credited with the invention of
written symbols. Diogenes recommended
 the universal use of dice as money;
Athenaeus, Deipnosophists IV, 159; and
indeed gilt astragals marked like dice still
serve as money in the most civilized parts of
the East Indies. Blümner, Römischen
Privataltertümer, 415, finds that the
Romans never diced except for money, so
that the coin was part of the game. While
coins may have originated from seals
(Arthur R. Burns, Money and Monetary
Policy in Early Times [New York: Kelley,
1927], 37), dice and seals are also confused
and identified in archaic times; Fritz
Hommel, Ethnologie und Geographie des
alten Orients (Munich: Beck, 1926), 48-49
(Hittite), 66 (Etruscan).
^169. A large class of bronze and the whole class
of bone tesserae are tesserae lusoriae;
Regling, “Tessera,” in RE 2:5:851-54.
^170. Regling, “Spintria,” in RE 2:3:1814, and
Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae, 56-57.
^171. Horace, Carmen Saeculare I, 4, 14; II, 7,
25-26; Mau, “Astragalos,” in RE 2:1795,
suggests that this is the reason for calling
 Venus basilikos; cf. Plautus, Curculio 357.
^172. Tacitus, Annals XIII, 15; Cicero, Epistulae
ad Atticum V, 20, 5; Lucian, Saturnalia 2-4,
and 9; Seneca, Apocolocyntosis 8. The
Roman emperor learned the fortune of his
rule by dicing at the New Year in the shrine
of Fortuna at Praeneste (Suetonius,
Domitian 15) exactly as the Babylonian
monarch would dice in the Chamber of
Destiny, or the kings of the North would
cast dice in the temple of Uppsala to win
300 years of life; Paul Herrmann, Nordische
Mythologie (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1903),
531. King, high-priest (Cicero, In Verrem II,
2, 126), and scapegoat (Leviticus 16:8;
Babylonian Talmud Yoma 63b; Helmold,
Chronicle of the Slavs I, 52, and so forth)
were all chosen by lot.
^173. Martial, Epigrams V, 84; XI, 6; cf.
Suetonius, Augustus 71.
^174. E.g., Rostovzeff, Römische Bleitesserae,
59; Regling, “Spintria,” in RE 2:3:1814. Far
from being a late invention, just such
“obscöne Bleispiegel und Bleiplaketten”
 (obscene lead mirrors and lead plaques)
were found in the temple of Ishtar at Assur
(Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien,
2:438), and refer no doubt to that system of
ritual prostitution for which Herodotus,
History I, 196, actually finds parallels in
Italy; cf. Joshua Whatmough, The
Foundations of Roman Italy (London:
Methuen, 1937), 173.
^175. Best known in its Celtic versions; cf. Henry
d’Arbois de Jubainville, The Irish
Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology,
tr. Richard I. Best (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis,
1903), 178-82. A very old version of the
story is the Setna legend, dating at least from
the Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt, Max Pieper,
Agyptische Literatur (Potsdam: Athenaion,
1927), 93-94; Gaston Maspero, Les contes
populaires de l’Égypte ancienne, 3d ed.
(Paris: Guilmoto, 1906), 100-101. Pieper
identifies it with the Rhampsinitus cycle;
Herodotus, History I, 121-26, with its
remarkable dicing episode, ibid., I, 122, and
its tesserae lasciviae, ibid., I, 126.
^176. Macrobius, Saturnalia I, 10, 12-14;
Tertullian, Ad Nationes II, 10; Augustine,
De Civitate Dei (The City of God) VI, 7, 2,
in PL 41:184-85; Plutarch, Quaestiones
Romanae no. 35; Plutarch, Romulus 4-5.
Acca divided up all her property among the
Roman people, as did her mate at the Ara
Maxima, and they celebrated her bounty in
a midwinter feast at her tomb; Gellius, Attic
Nights VII, 7, 7, citing Cato; cf. Macrobius,
Saturnalia I, 10, 16; Varro, De Lingua
Latina VI, 23-24; Plutarch, Romulus 4-5;
Plutarch, Quaestiones Romanae no. 34.
From Herodotus, History II, 121-22, it is
plain that the lady of the Setna cycle, whom
Herodotus calls Demeter, is none other than
Acca’s indigitamentum, Ceres.
^177. Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae 687-88, 834-
37. Tyche, like Fortuna, was a dicing
goddess, and as such, like Acca, the
companion of Hercules; Pausanias,
Description of Greece II, 20, 3.
 The Unsolved Loyalty
Problem: Our Western
Heritage

A serious defect in recent discussions of

the problem of loyalty has been the lack of
any sound historical treatment of the
subject.1 Much that is contained in the
records of antiquity reveals a conscious
concern of early governments with the
problem of loyalty. Royal inscriptions and
letters, abundant ritual texts, and the fervors
of prophets and poets in every age of crisis
betray a desire to incite feelings not of fear
and submission alone but of genuine loyalty
in the hearts of subjects and citizens, and
might well be studied as propaganda
literature. But for the fullest and most
illuminating commentary on regimented
loyalty one must turn to the rich and
revealing records of the Roman world in the
fatal years between the victory of
Constantine and the sack of Rome by the
Vandals in A.D. 450. It is no accident that
scholars since World War II have gravitated
with unerring instinct and unprecedented zeal
to those documents that depict with unrivaled
clarity the starts, alarums, and desperate
devices of a world empire in disintegration,
striving before all things to inspire that
general loyalty which alone could arrest “the
internal decay of the second half of the fourth
century [which] had become as bad as a
cancerous growth.”2
The purpose of this paper is to consider
three significant aspects of the Roman
loyalty program in the period designated.
These are (1) the attempt to excite loyalty by
appealing to the traditions of Western
civilization while emphasizing a worldwide
culture-polarization, (2) the attempt to solve
the problem of divided loyalty by lumping
all good things together in a “one-package
loyalty,” and (3) the attempt of certain large
and important interest groups to use the new
loyalty as a club against old opponents,
thereby effectively wrecking the whole
program. In the course of the discussion it
will become clear that we are dealing not
merely with the desire of the Imperial
government for loyal subjects but with
concrete projects for the implementation of
that desire. The present study is essentially a
report on the effectiveness of those projects,
resembling as they do certain controversial
procedures of the present time.

Polarized Loyalties
In the fourth century A.D., Western
civilization was threatened with the greatest
crisis—internal and external—in its history.3
When cities (including the capital itself)
were as likely to be taken by the operation of
traitors and fifth-columnists as by enemy
assault, when the fate of the world depended
on the loyalty of some Gothic or Hunnish
general to an emperor who did not know his
own mind, when the armies of many nations
could be hurled against each other or united
in brotherhood by the force of a single order,
when powerful pressure-groups and colorful
individuals were bidding against each other
for the support of mankind, when the life of
prefect or governor could depend on the
whim of a military or city mob—at such a
time the survival of civilization depended on
the possibility of inducing the world at large
to declare its allegiance to some specific
thing and of holding it to that allegiance with
firm and sacred bonds. To the Roman mind,
fides, a sense of personal reciprocal
obligation, was the key to peace and security
in life—the very essence of the social
order.4 The same concept of loyalty imbues
almost every page of Greek tragedy,
investing it with a profoundly intimate and
domestic atmosphere, which distinguishes
the “Western” mind from the aloof ritualism
of the gorgeous East. But by the fourth
century long years of civil war and world
crisis had widely uprooted the old domestic
loyalties of Greek drama and Roman legend,
and turned the oecumene into a world of
displaced persons, inevitably drawn towards
the Big City.5 To take the place of the old
lost loyalty—the prisca fides—a new super-
loyalty was needed to guarantee the
permanence of the social order: men were
taught to declare allegiance to a super-thing,
a noble abstraction loosely designated as
Romania or Romanitàs.
 A host of studies has come forth in
recent years, showing the concept of
Romanitàs to be something very close
indeed to that “Western Civilization” by
which one conjures in our own day.6 At the
end of the fourth century, Prudentius repeated
what Aelius Aristides had proclaimed at the
end of the second: Rome is more than a
political or geographical entity, the mixed
blood of all the nations; its culture is Culture
itself, the extent of its rule is the orbis
terrarum, the oecumene, its mission the
realization of the Stoic doctrine “that nature
intended that all men should as rational
beings form a single community under the
guidance of divine reason.”7 The certainty
with which public opinion glorified the
empire as a world community is astonishing,
says Vogt.8 Nor was this apparent love for a
lofty abstraction a cold and impersonal sort
of thing: devout Christian writers display as
warm and vital an attachment to their Roman
heritage as the church itself in the fourth
century.9
This was the positive appeal to loyalty.
But men’s passions are more quickly and
keenly stirred by opposition than by
approbation, and the inevitable corollary to
the doctrine of Romania was that of
Barbaria. “Everything that existed outside of
this unified world was viewed by the
general public as desolation and
barbarism.”10 This again was an abstract and
artificial thing—it was the old doctrine of
the Two Worlds that has been discussed in
this journal before, but, for all its
hollowness, a highly effective force in
history.11 Externus timor, maximum
concordiae vinculum was an old Roman
maxim—the secret of unity is to find an
external foe. Since Republican times, Parthia
had been “the type and representative of the
untamed Orient,” the Eastern peril, the
symbol of Asiatic barbarism; but when the
Parthians were absorbed by the revived and
highly centralized Persian Empire, or during
the years when Barbaria was united under a
superman such as Attila, conditions were
present for a true world polarization, with
the East replying in kind to Western charges
of barbarism and aggression.12 The situation
may be illustrated by the story of Priscus on
the steppes.
In A.D. 448 a Roman ambassador who
had just arrived at the court of Attila, rex
omnium regum, on the plains between
Europe and Asia, came upon a well-dressed
Scythian who, to his surprise, spoke Greek.
He learned from the man that he had been a
successful merchant in Moesia, but when his
city fell, to save his business, he had joined
up with the conquering hosts and soon found
in the Scythian community a far better way of
life than he had ever known as a Roman.
[He said that] once the war was over,
anyone could live among the Scythians
in complete independence, being free to
manage his personal affairs exactly as
he chose with virtually no interference
from anybody. On the other hand,
anyone living the Roman way of life
stood a very good chance of getting
killed in case of war, being forced to
rely for his survival on the operations of
others, since the mean suspicion of the
government forbade anyone to bear
arms in his own defense. Furthermore,
those entrusted with the business of
defense were rendered ineffectual by
incompetent and cowardly commanders.
And the burdens of peace were actually
harder to bear than those of war—the
intolerable load of taxation and tribute,
 the insults and injuries of rascally
officials, the unequal application of the
laws, by which an offender if he was
rich enough got off scot-free, but if he
was poor felt the full weight and
majesty of the law for even the slightest
unintentional slip; and if he lived long
enough to see his case through the
courts, would find himself utterly ruined
by long, drawn-out, and expensive legal
proceedings. The most disgusting thing
about the whole business, he said, was
that law and justice were strictly for
sale.
“When he had run on this way at great
length,” says Priscus, “I finally asked him
politely if he would consent to listen to my
side of the story for a while.” Then Priscus
proceeded to point out that in theory there
never was a better system than the Roman, in
which each bore his proper burden, whether
on the farm, in the army, or in government
service. Priscus continues:
We are all bound to obey the laws, and
that goes even for the Emperor himself;
which is just the opposite of what you
say, that the rich can gouge the poor
with impunity—unless someone escapes
justice by hiding. But in general you
will find that what applies to the rich
also applies to the poor. . . . That is the
rule not only among the Romans but
everywhere in the civilized world:
every man thanks his private fortune for
whatever befalls him as a free man, and
is not dependent for it on the will of this
or that military despot.
The Romans, he says, treat their house-
slaves better than the barbarians do their
subjects, “and they certainly do not have the
power of life and death over them as your
Scythian masters do. By and large, it is a
free way of life.”
At this point, Priscus avers, his new
friend shed tears and confessed that the laws
were indeed fair and the Roman government
a good one, “but that the men who
administered it had lost the good old Roman
spirit, and had corrupted it.” To this the
Roman has no answer, and the conversation
is conveniently interrupted.13
Gibbon saw in this debate only an
effective statement of the case against Rome,
to which the “prolix and feeble declamation”
of the ambassador was no reply at all.14 Yet
Priscus plainly thinks he has won the
argument, and the modern reader, made wise
by new experience, knows that this is one of
those ideological discussions in which
neither side is ever beaten. For all his fine
Ciceronian after-thoughts, Priscus does not
invent the issue, for Agathias some years
later describes a general migration of
“Christian philosophers” to the court of the
Persian king, which at a distance looked to
them like a true Utopia,15 and Procopius tells
how the poorer classes, “the mechanics and
handworkers, were naturally compelled to
struggle with hunger, and many in
consequence changed their citizenship and
went off as fugitives to the land of Persia.”16
Salvian, a contemporary of Priscus, reports
from far western Gaul that “people are
everywhere going over to the Goths, the
Bagaudi or any other ruling tribe of
barbarians. . . . For they prefer to live as free
men sub specie captivitatis rather than to go
on living as captives sub specie libertatis.”
Worst of all, says Salvian, those who have
been the most loyal, deserving, and patriotic
Romans are the very ones who are now
“moved to declare that they wish they were
not Romans!”17 Here again it is the clash
between the Two Worlds, each describing
itself as the free world and its rival as a
slave-state. But if the freedom of the West is
for Salvian only “so-called freedom,” the
case is no better with the vaunted barbarian
freedom: the very purpose of Priscus’s
mission was to discuss the return to Attila of
numerous of his subjects who had fled to the
Empire seeking refuge from barbarian
“freedom.”18
On both sides the ancient propaganda of
freedom has a singularly hollow ring. Within
the overall polarization of East and West,
each of those conflicting spheres was in
itself a world of factions and parties, of rival
ideologies and rival cultures pitted against
each other in deadly conflict, yet so exactly
alike in everything but label (and usually the
rivals were contending for the possession of
some world-commanding label) as to give
the impression that one antagonist is simply a
mirror-image of the other. A visitor to the
field headquarters of any faction during the
civil wars that opened the fourth century
would have been at a loss to discover from
his surroundings whether he was in a
Christian or pagan, Roman or barbarian
camp:19 in either case he would find the
chief at prayer in his tent, long-robed priests
chanting and burning tapers or busily
practicing the arts of divination;20 and if he
came at the right time such a visitor might
even discover the nature of those signs in the
heavens that each commander devoutly
claimed as a special manifestation of
Providence to himself and his followers.21 If
our visitor toured about among the cities, he
might marvel, as did Agathias, that the
course of civil life was virtually the same in
the Persian and the Roman Empires,22 and if
he attended the synods of the church which
made the age illustrious, he would have
some difficulty to discern which side was
which; for, as Hilary observed, that group
which with fierce devotion supported a
doctrine at one session might within the
month be found espousing the very opposite
doctrine with equal fervor.23 If he went to the
games and shows that consumed almost the
whole time and energy of the urban masses,
the visitor would be required, as if his life
depended on it, to take his stand with one
noisy faction or another, with nothing in the
world to enable him to distinguish between
them save the colors they wore.24 Finally the
bemused wanderer, if he went to court on a
crown-day and stood in the presence of
God’s representative on earth, would surely
have to ask a bystander whether it was the
true ruler of the world he beheld or his
depraved counterpart—for the court ritual of
the two empires was identical,25 and it was
the custom of the emperors of Rome and
Asia to describe themselves in identical
terms, while each accused his rival of being
nothing but a base forgery and depraved
imitation of himself.26
This all-pervading identity of
institutions shows that we have here not a
real clash of ideologies at all but only the
rivalry of parties animated by identical
principles and racing for the same
objective.27 Yet loyalty to the West was no
glib and superficial thing but a deeply
ingrained cultural heritage. The concept of
civilization as liberalitas, the free way of
life, and of civilized man as one engaged in
liberal thought and speaking the common
language of all free, civilized men, as
opposed to the barbarian who was
necessarily inferior and necessarily a slave,
was deeply felt and clearly formulated in
late antiquity.28 It had far deeper roots, in
fact, than the copy-desk cliches of our own
day, for the permanent proximity of
unassimilated barbarians made the idea of
the Two Worlds an intimate reality. The age-
long struggle to repel, check, or annihilate
the perennial enemy from the steppes was
once popularly described as “the eternal
question,” “the strife between Europe and
Asia, between east and west, between Aryan
and non-Aryan.”29 But this is only the
Western version of the conflict which all the
great peripheral civilizations, from China to
Britain, have had to wage with the
“Heartland,” whose hordes have been dealt
with for thousands of years in the same
established ways: by subtle and disruptive
diplomacy, by the long and costly limes
(borders), by punitive and deterrent
expeditions, and, when all else has failed, by
the reluctant absorption of their barbarian
conquerors.
 The marvelous victories that thwarted
the great Persian attacks on Greece in the
fifth century B.C. had been to the men who
won those victories a plain manifestation of
divine power, a sobering and chastening
experience that placed all human pretense,
Greek and barbarian alike, in its proper and
humiliating perspective. But the men of a
later age and another mold, viewing those
successes in retrospect, preferred a more
flattering interpretation of events: Marathon
and Salamis were held up to posterity as a
brilliant demonstration of the natural
superiority of Western man over
barbarians.30 Whereas Aeschylus and
Herodotus have no found illusions about
Greek virtue and Asiatic baseness, the
educators of succeeding ages fed upon such
pleasing stuff and made it the mortar of a
common sentiment which, to quote Eduard
Meyer, “bound the civilized world together
from the Rhone to Cyprus, from the Dnieper
to the Crimea and Cyrene.”31
Thus Western Civilization was nursed in
the schools on a legend of Western
Goodness: Hic est Ausonia, the Western
World of clean, fresh, simple, unspoiled
pioneers. This fiction became the very
cornerstone of the official Vergilian doctrine
of Romanitàs—Rome was great because
Rome was good.32 The emperors who after
the second century took the names of Pius
and Felix were giving expression “to the old
Roman belief in the close association
between piety and good fortune,”33 while
indulging in the ingrained Roman vice,
blatantly paraded throughout the whole of
Latin literature, of dwelling with a kind of
morbid fascination on one’s own simple
goodness. School boys have been told for
centuries that the Romans were a simple,
severe, and virtuous folk, with a near
monopoly on pietas and fides, because,
forsooth, the Romans themselves always
said so, though almost every page of the
record contradicts the claim.34 What better
demonstration for the effectiveness of the
official propaganda? Teachers and orators
drilled the essentials of Western goodness
into their pupils and auditors until, by the
fourth century, when hardly a speck of
ancient virtue remained, men could talk of
nothing but that virtue.35 They go right on
sinning, Salvian reports, in the sublime
conviction that no matter how vilely they
may act, or how nobly the barbarians
behave, God must necessarily bless them and
curse the barbarians for being what they are.
Yet Salvian himself shows how well the
lesson has been taught when he stoutly
affirms that, after all, no barbarian can be
really virtuous!36
To the lessons of the schools, carefully
supervised by the government,37 was added
a more aggressive policy of deliberately
widening the gulf between the Two Worlds.
For centuries, barbarian and Roman, East
and West, had been mingling on terms of
greatest intimacy, producing a borderline
culture in which it was quite impossible to
draw the line between one culture and the
other.38 Priscus mentions quite casually the
presence of people from the West, visiting
relatives in the camps of the Asiatics; he
notes the busy coming and going of
merchants between the Two Worlds and
describes the kind hospitality shown him, a
complete stranger, in the homes of the
Easterners. But with this he gives us the
other side of the picture—the official side:
the ubiquitous activity of spies and agents in
Roman pay, the infusion into the very court
of Attila of large sums of Roman money to
corrupt and divide, the insane and mounting
conviction of each of the rulers of the two
halves of the world (both barbarians!) that
his was the divine calling to liberate the
human race from the intolerable ambition of
the other.39 The official attitude to the
barbarians was set forth a few years after
this in Synesius’s instructions to the feeble
Emperor Arcadius. According to the good
bishop, every Roman household has its
Scythian slave, every petty artisan and
craftsman his Scythian helper, and every
Roman street is alive with Scythian porters
and runners, “as if these people thought
service in Rome was the only thing.”40 As to
the moral qualities of these foreigners,
Synesius must admit that they surpass the
Romans in energy, honesty, reliability, and
perseverance.41 Yet for all that they are still
barbarians, and as liable to murder citizens
in their beds as were ever any of their
savage ancestors. “Your father made allies
of these Scythians,” he tells the young and
idiotic emperor: “He should have known that
there is no virtue in a barbarian. From that
day to this they have simply laughed at us.”
Lacking the heroic qualities of their fathers,
“they are slaves, for they are people without
a land of their own. Hence the proverb, ‘the
empty waste of the Scythians,’ for they are
always running away from settled life.”42
Plainly Synesius thinks that the primordial
ways of the nomads are some new sign of
degeneracy. So far was one of the most
learned men of his day, an expert advisor on
foreign affairs, from comprehending the
Asiatic way of life which was impinging
upon the Roman world at a thousand
points.43
For their part, the barbarians, at first
enormously impressed by the Empire,44
became resentful of the snubbing they
received and then, through long familiarity,
openly and increasingly contemptuous. “We
see the barbarians living intermingled with
us in our armies, our cities, and our
provinces,” says Sulpicius Severus, “yet
refusing to accept our culture as their
own.”45 In the fifth century, it was
impossible, especially in the Western
regions, to distinguish between Romani and
Barbari, since they had become completely
intermingled; in which state of things, he
says, it was the barbarians who insisted on
widening the breech, glorying in the name of
“barbarian” as the only fit title for free
men.46
There is no need to trace the endless
course of this futile and paralyzing game;
Nancy Lenkeith has shown how it persisted
right into the Middle Ages, when even Pope
Gregory would not come to an understanding
with the Lombards “chiefly because the
pontiff had a feeling of revulsion for the
barbarians. . . . The Romans . . . despised
Lombard laws, disliked their costumes,
customs, and smell.”47 The crippling effect
of the doctrine of the Two Worlds is
nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in
the pathetic doctrine of the Super-Weapon:
God has given the civilized world a super-
weapon, that all may know where security
and right reside. This wishful assurance is
another invention of the fourth century, as we
gather from the teachings of a later emperor
to his son:
This fire [Greek-fire] was revealed and
taught to the great First Emperor of
Christians, Constantine (as we are fully
assured by ancient fathers and divines)
by an angel from heaven, who gave him
emphatic instructions to the effect that
this weapon is only to be manufactured
among Christians—nowhere else—and
only in that city where they have their
capital, and absolutely nowhere else.
Under no circumstances is any sample
of the substance or the formula for it to
be transmitted to any other nation. It was
for the purpose of keeping this secret
under his successors that the same
Constantine had placed upon the high
altar of the Great Church itself an
inscription to the effect that anyone who
dares to give a sample of said fire to
any other nation forfeits thereby the
name of Christian and the right to hold
any government office, that such an one
should be stripped of any office he
holds, be declared anathema forever
and ever, and be made a public example
—even though he be the Emperor or the
Patriarch himself, or any other high
official . . . any attempt to break this
rule must incur the penalty. And he calls
upon all who have the cause and fear of
God at heart to treat anyone acting in a
contrary way as a Public Enemy and a
traitor to this supreme order, and to
consign him to the most humiliating and
painful death possible. It actually
happened once (for there are always
criminal types) that one of our generals
accepted a huge bribe from a number of
foreign (gentile) powers to provide
them with a sample of this fire; but God,
who would not suffer such a crime to be
perpetrated . . . smote the offender with
fire from heaven . . . and from that day
no one, whether Emperor, prince,
commoner, army officer or any other
mortal, has ever dared to think of such
an act, let alone making any attempt to
perpetrate it (cf. fig. 16).48
 Figure 16. Byzantine sailors squirt
Greek fire from bronze syringes in a
manuscript illustration of the tenth
century.

In this little lesson on loyalty, God,

Christianity, civilization, the empire, the
Imperial City, the government, and the
ministration of angels are all on the side of
the super-weapon, while those to whom the
fire is denied are all lumped together as
gentiles, foreigners, heathen, traitors, public
enemies, criminals, and damned. Nor does it
seem to occur to the devout monarch that if
God’s own fires are at the immediate
disposal of Western civilization, there is
little need for putting such desperate trust in
the virtues of naphthalene and military
security, or that an appeal to loyalty cannot
well be accompanied by hysterical threats
that only argue a lack of good faith in the one
who is appealing.49 Certainly the super-
weapon produced a serious weakening of
military fiber in the West, and, once in the
hands of the Arabs and Turks, was death to
Western fleets and cities.50

One-Package Loyalty
The hardest political problem with
which the Greeks and Romans had to
struggle was that of conflicting loyalties. The
holy court of the Areopagus proved the
problem insoluble when they deadlocked at
the trial of Orestes, and the letters of Cicero
set forth in detail the tragic dilemma of the
Roman with his immense capacity and
hunger for loyalty having to change sides
with cynical dexterity in order to survive in
the wars of class and faction.51 The fourth
century was one of those times in Roman
history when the tension of divided loyalties
had become so intolerable that the world
was ready for any settlement that would
guarantee a measure of peace, unity, and
security.52 The exhausted age accepted the
same emergency solution that had given
Rome the kingship, the consuls, and the
principate. The aureum aevum (Golden Age)
of Constantine that put an end to the long
reign of civil discord, as that of Augustus
had done three centuries before, was
formally launched with all the solemn rites
and theatrical properties familiar to the
Romans since the days of the fabled kings.53
The purpose of the gorgeous displays of
Diocletian and Constantine, pagan and
Christian, as of all royal ritual, was to
produce in the beholders a religious
experience which would command loyalty—
of that the poets and orators give us clear
assurance.54 The great scaffoldings, acres of
painted canvas, firmaments of tapers and
torches, fabulous displays of jewels and
lavish applications of gilt paint left no one in
doubt that the glory of the Lord was round
about.55 Heaven in Our Time was not
something to be worked for but something to
be accepted; not a hope, but a fulfillment, a
stupendous miracle, nay, the Christian
Emperor was hailed at his coronation as
“dominus noster . . . praesens et corporalis
deus” (Our Lord . . . God in the flesh among
us),56 and Christian and pagan orators vied
in proclaiming the long-awaited blessed age
of the prophets and the Sibyl.57 Like a man
distracted by the claims of a hundred
creditors, who turns all his bills over to a
lending agency in exchange for one simple,
ruinous obligation, so the men of the fourth
century lumped all their conflicting loyalties
together in one single, unlimited obligation
to the emperor and Romanitàs. All good
things became one vague and luminous
whole; whatever could command loyalty
was “in the composition of a specious
argument . . . artfully confounded in one
splendid and brittle mass.”58
Caecilius in the Octavius had charged
the Christians not with contempt of any
particular doctrine or practice of the ancients
but with failing to be duly impressed by the
whole magnificent agglomeration of antique
civilization as a fit object of veneration and
awe.59 To this noble composite the church in
the fourth century, as if to atone for her long
hesitation and former aspersions, declared
passionate allegiance, sustaining the
traditional heathen dogma, that Roma
aeterna was immortal and impregnable, long
after the canny pagans themselves had given
it up!60 Henceforward to be a Christian and
to be a Roman were one and the same thing:
“ubique patria, ubique lex et religio mea,”
cries Orosius, ". . . quia ad Christianos et
Romanos, Romanus et Christianus accedo”
(my country is everywhere, everywhere my
law and religion . . . because I associate
with Christians and Romans as a Roman and
a Christian).61 When Christian writers can
tell us that the distance between Roman and
barbarian is as great as that between
quadrupeds and bipeds,62 or that the laws of
barbarian nations “bear the same relation to
genuine law—Roman law—as a parrot’s
squawk to human speech,”63 we have come a
long way from the charity of the early
Christian writers, who loved, like certain
earlier Greek philosophers, to mock the vain
and artificial distinction between “Jew and
Greek, bond and free” (Galatians 3:28).64
But now the church was wholly committed—
dangerously committed—to the program of
the Empire: Prudentius boldly throws the
challenge to the pagan world, that victory of
Christian Rome over the barbarians will be
sure proof of the truth of the Christian
religion—one can imagine the reaction in
both camps when Rome was thoroughly
beaten!65
The complete identity of the interests of
the church with those of the Empire in the
fourth century was a revolutionary transfer of
loyalty. “The imperial cult remains,” writes
Alföldi, “only such forms as offend Christian
sentiments are a little veiled.”66 The Church
Fathers, diligently reconstructing history in
retrospect, made it appear that the church
and Rome had always been one.67 Eusebius,
taking the lead, announces that Christianity
and the Pax Romana “burst upon the world
together as if germinated from a single seed:
the twin blessing of the universe. . . . In the
same moment all error and superstition were
overcome and an end put to all war and
hostility among the members of the human
race. One Empire was set up over all the
earth and all men became brothers, having
one Father—God, and one Mother—true
piety.”68 In defense of this new one-package
loyalty, philosophy and theology, riding high
on the fashionable tide of Neoplatonism,
were Aaron and Hur upholding the
emperor’s hands: “God is One,” says
Lactantius, “therefore there cannot be more
than one ruler in this world: there are not
many masters in one house, not many pilots
in one ship, not many leaders in one flock or
herd, not many kings in one hive, nor either
can there be many suns in the sky, nor many
souls in one body.”69 These are the very
terms in which the Khans of Asia have been
wont to teach mankind the divinity of their
single rule—the West of the fourth century
and after speaks with a strong Asiatic
accent.70
Just as all obedient subjects are
embraced in a single shining community, so
all outsiders are necessarily members of a
single conspiracy of evil, a pestilential
congregation of vapors of such uniform
defilement that none can be ever so slightly
tinged with its complexion without being
wholly involved in its corruption.71 A
favorite passage with the churchmen of the
period was that which declared that to err in
the slightest point of the law is to break the
whole law. To accept the homoiousios (of
similar substance) in place of the
homoousios (consubstantial) is for the
enlightened Hilary not just a mistake; it is the
commission of every possible crime, the
consummation of all that is depraved; it
hands the whole world over to the Devil.72
By attending a discussion of the homoiousios
the emperor has anathematized the holy men
of Nicaea; thereby he has cursed all who
have ever approved of those men; thereby he
has damned his own father and set himself up
as the foe of divine religion, the enemy of the
saints, and a rebel against all sacred filial
obligation. Nay, he is worse than a Decius or
a Nero, for they fought only Christ the Son,
while he fights both the Father and the Son!
Again, the emperor who tolerates heretical
groups is not just a dupe and a fool, he is a
monster of iniquity, guilty of adultery, theft,
and murder—and that not in a mere, crass
physical sense, mind you, but in a spiritual
sense, which is infinitely worse.73 If the
emperor in question refuses to make a martyr
of the churchman who flings the coarsest
insults in his face, that does not soften his
guilt but only deepens it—he is only being
kind to be cruel, because he knows that such
kindness will put his priestly assailants at a
disadvantage.74 Yet from the festering depths
of unspeakable depravity there is one thing
that can save the debauched and unnatural
animal—by a single act, in fact, he can
redeem himself and become the holiest thing
on earth, an emperor under God. And what is
the miraculous prescription? It is very
simple: “Fac transitum ad nos” (Come over
to us)!75 All virtue is comprised in the fact of
membership in Our Group; all vice consists
in not belonging.76
It can be shown by a most convenient
syllogism that since God is on our side we
cannot show any degree of toleration for any
opposition without incurring infinite guilt.77
In the fourth century everybody was
officiously rushing to the defense of God;78
but John Chrysostom’s pious declaration that
we must avenge insults to God while
patiently bearing insults to ourselves is put
in its proper rhetorical light by the
assumption of Hilary that an insult to himself
is an insult to God.79 Therein lies the great
usefulness of the doctrine of guilt and
innocence by association that became so
popular in the fourth century: one does not
need to quibble; there is no such thing as
being partly wrong or merely mistaken; the
painful virtue of forbearance and the labor of
investigation no longer embarrass the
champions of one-package loyalty. No matter
how nobly and austerely heretics may live,
for Augustine they are still Antichrist—all of
them, equally and indiscriminately;80 their
virtues are really vices, their virginity
carnality, their reason unreason, their
patience in persecution mere insolence; any
cruelty shown them is not really cruelty but
kindness.81 Chrysostom goes even further:
the most grossly immoral atheist is actually
better off than an upright believer who slips
up on one point, since though both go to hell,
the atheist has at least the satisfaction of
having gratified his lust on earth. Why not? Is
not heresy in any degree a crime against
God? And is not any crime against God an
infinite sin?82
The insidious thing about such immoral
conclusions is that they are quite logical. The
cruelty of the times, says Alföldi, “cannot
fully be explained by the corruption of the
age; . . . the spirit of the fourth century has its
part to play. The victory of abstract ways of
thinking, the universal triumph of theory,
knows no half-measures; punishment, like
everything else, must be a hundred per cent,
but even this seems inadequate.”83
Compromise is now out of the question:
God, who once let his sun shine upon the just
and the unjust, and let the wheat and tares
grow together, now insists that the unjust
should cease to exist, that only wheat should
grow in the earth, and that only sheep should
inhabit it.84 In all seriousness the Emperor
Justinian announced to the churchmen his
intention of forcing the devil himself to join
the true church and thus achieving in the
world that perfect unity “which Pythagoras
and Plato taught.”85

Slanted Loyalty
We have considered the first two steps
in the development of loyalty propaganda in
the fourth century, namely, the establishment
of Romanitàs as an object deserving the
loyalty of all civilized men and the
identification of Christian with Roman
loyalty. The third and inevitable step was the
employment of this magnificent imperative
by various interest groups as a partisan
weapon. The partisan groups we shall
consider were the churchmen, the
landowners, and the professors. The story of
how the military went their own way and
followed their own code of loyalty,
cooperating only with governments and
individuals who were willing and able to
“make a deal,” and of how their slanted
loyalty brought them and the Empire to a
common ruin, has been told often and well
since the days of Gibbon. We need not repeat
it here.
We have just noted the use of absolutes
in clerical polemic. The results were what
might have been expected, but the ferocity of
party conflict within the church as described
by the writers of the fourth and fifth centuries
exceeds the wildest imaginings. Even those
men, St. Basil reports, who had fought the
uphill fight for decency and striven
conscientiously through the years to be just
and fair with others, in the end found
themselves forced to surrender and become
just like the rest, who were all engaged in a
frantic game of testing each others’ loyalty.86
The result, he says, is that the church is
entirely leaderless, everyone wants to give
orders, but no one will take them; the self-
appointed have grabbed what they could and
broken up the church in a spirit of such
savage, unbridled hatred and universal
mistrust that the only remaining principle of
unity anywhere is a common desire to do
harm: men will cooperate only where
cooperation is the most effective means of
doing injury to others.87 It was characteristic
of the Age of Constantine, says Burckhardt,
“that a man could be intensely devout and at
the same time grossly immoral.” There was
nothing contradictory in that—men had
simply discarded personal integrity for a
much easier group loyalty.88 “Who can swim
against the tide of custom?” cries Augustine,
who recalls how lightly he surrendered his
own conscience to the keeping of the gang.
The emperor’s formula for establishing
perfect unity and loyalty in the church and the
empire was that plan which the clergy
themselves constantly urged upon him and
his successors, importunately demanding that
he proscribe, banish, and anathematize
whoever withheld allegiance from their
particular parties. The Vita Constantini tells
how the emperor attempted to end each
crisis by outlawing all opposition, thereby
inevitably sowing the seeds of the next
crisis. But how could one expect a simple
soldier to question the proposition that
compulsory loyalty is the secret of universal
peace, when it was being pressed upon him
by all the cleverest men of the age? “The
barbarians reverence God, because they fear
my power,” he had declared, and everyone
had applauded his doctrine of compulsory
reverence.89
But it didn’t work. No sooner had
Constantine removed his last civil and
military opponents than the issue between his
Christian and pagan subjects became acute.
No sooner had he “given profound peace and
security to the Church” by restraining her
pagan opponents than the churchmen started
accusing each other of heresy with a wild
abandon that surpassed—as the emperor
himself observed—any performance of the
heathen.90 No sooner had his successors
removed the last heretic and received the
undying thanks of the church, than the true
believers were at each others’ throats. St.
Ambrose notes that it is harder to make
orthodox Christians live together in peace
than it is to eliminate heretics.91 The
problem was never solved, for the doctrine
of absolute, one-package loyalty would
allow no compromise.92
Consider next the landowners. The
aristocracy living on its great estates (though
possessing the wealth of the cities as well)
was a characteristic fixture of Roman society
throughout historic times; “the personnel of
the ruling class might change,” as it did
under Vespasian and Diocletian, but that
“could not have changed the nature of those
classes themselves,” who always remained
true to a type and an ideal.93 The victory of
the church only strengthened their hold, for
they claimed Latin Christianity as peculiarly
their own, and it has recently been argued
with some plausibility that the breaking
away from the church of “fundamentalist”
sects, beginning with the Montanists, was “a
series of peasant movements” protesting the
capture of the church by the propertied
classes.94
 Loyalty was the watchword of the great
landowners: pietas, fides, and fortitudo
were at all times “the three distinguishing
marks of the perfect Roman gentleman.”95
Their typical representative in the fourth
century was “aristocratic, senatorial,
traditionalist, anti-oriental.”96 But from
Cicero it is clear enough that theirs was
loyalty to a class alone, and their slanted
interpretation reduced the noble abstractions
in which they dealt so freely to “merely
shopworn catch phrases without real
meaning in history.”97 No word was dearer
to them than libertas, the glory of free
agency, but “the nobiles conceived of this
popular political catchword as meaning
freedom for them to exercise their dignitas,"
and not for people without money.98 In the
fourth century they “had plenty to say about
their humanitas, philanthropia . . . their
mercy, their pious serenity. . . . But such self-
praise carries no weight; the choice words
are a mere empty form.”99 In the Senate they
called loudly for arms to defend civilization
—when no personal sacrifice was involved;
and when the barbarians were at the gates
they spent their time not in meeting the foe
but in hysterical attacks on possible
subversives.100 When one considers the
magnificently planned and executed
defensive installations of the frontier, “one
cannot keep from being amazed,” say Diehl
and Marçais, “that they were not more
effective than they were, and that this
closely-knit network of skillfully deployed
fortresses let the invaders pass through it so
many times.” This grim defect is attributed
(1) to the economies of the government,
which, while giving away enormous wealth
to individuals, so reduced the personnel of
the border forces that “the strong places,
badly manned, were simply förgötten, often
without garrisons,” and (2) to the low
morale and frequent desertions of the
underpaid soldiers who remained.101
Nobody who could pay for defense was
willing to do it.
The great landowners “appreciated
civilization and culture very highly,” says
Rostovzeff, “their political outlook was
narrow, their servility was unbounded. But
their external appearance was majestic, and
their grand air impressed even the
barbarians. . . . For the other classes they
had neither sympathy nor understanding.”102
Their fault was not that they would enjoy the
good things of the earth, but that they would
enjoy them exclusively: “The earth is the
mother of all of us,” said the starving field
and factory-workers, “for she gives equally;
but you pretend that she is your mother
only.”103 Their ideal was Cato, whose
forthright and uncompromising dedication to
his own interests, whose unflinching
devotion to self and steely resistance to any
ennervating impulse of sympathy for others
had about it something of sublime
integrity.104 Skimming the cream of the
world’s natural resources on their vast tax-
free estates, these men thought of themselves
as natural-born leaders of men; they oozed
the virtue and loyalty of the prosperous: why
should they not be loyal to Rome? They were
Rome!105 Under the early emperors “the
state’s sphere of activity had been curtailed
to an astonishing degree; the state simply
secured peace and law in the world and then
turned it over to private exploitation.”106
Deeply loyal to a system that gave them
everything, the great owners could not
understand why all others should not be just
as loyal.107 Nor could they, who soon
learned that the secret of survival was
absolute servility and had made an art of
groveling to secure their broad acres, have
any patience with those who refused to play
the game.108
But when in the fourth century the
Imperial government went after a larger
share of the income in order to support the
costly wars of defense, the great landowners
displayed the quality of their patriotism by
resisting savagely and cunningly. They
quickly became experts in evading taxation
and shifting the expenses of war and
government to others.109 But it was their
busy speculation in grain that brought the
issue of loyalty into the open with the public
threat of the Emperor Julian “to have all
gentlemen arrested” for sabotaging his
attempts at price control. They in reply
accused the emperor of low demagoguery in
trying to fix minimum grain prices in the face
of drought and an artificial boom market
created by the army; and they not only
refused to sell at government prices, but
bought up what grain they could at those
prices to resell on the black market or
outside the price-control zone.110 Small
wonder that bishops, government officials,
and the common people blamed “the rich”
for deliberately engineering famines that
were profitable to themselves.111 Whether
these charges were true or not (and Libanius
admits abuses), the grain scandals present a
typical large-scale clash of loyalties, with
each side accusing the other of treason to the
respublica.112
This partisan concept of loyalty poisons
the whole stream of Roman history. Curio,
says Cicero, was wrong when he pleaded
that the demands of the people beyond the Po
were just but inexpedient: he should have
known that demands cannot possibly be just
which are not expedient to our interests:
“non esse aequam, quia non esset utilis rei
publicae.”113 This, the morality of
Trimalchio, was death to any true fides. At
the end of the fourth century when Stilicho
remained true to his master though it would
have served his interests to betray him,
native Romans could attribute his behavior
only to a lack of good sense—so completely
had they förgötten the meaning of fides at a
time when loyalty to Rome was on the tongue
of every orator.114 Just so the great
landowners, failing utterly to recognize real
loyalty when they saw it, sent their champion
Aetius against the very peasants who in an
“amazing” demonstration of loyalty to Rome
stopped Attila on the Catalaunian Plain and
in the end forced those peasants to join
forces reluctantly with the barbarians whom
they might have stopped for good had their
loyalty been trusted.115 “Whatever the
frequency of peasant revolts during the third
and fourth centuries,” says a recent
investigator, “they reached such a climax in
the first half of the fifth century as to be
almost continuous.”116 These were not slave
uprisings or barbarian invasions: it was the
scorned loyalty of the peasants, “ces hordes
indigenès qui dans leur rage détruisirent tout
ce qu’il y avait comme oeuvres de la
civilisation” (those native hordes who in
their fury destroyed all the achievements of
civilization).117
Last come the leaders of education,
which, in the fourth century, means the
professors of rhetoric. It was, as we have
seen, through the activity of professional
rhetoricians that “the Greeks became aware
of themselves as the makers and bearers of
Western Civilization.”118 By the fourth
century the rhetoricians, by a process that
cannot be described here, had gained
complete and absolute control of every
department of public life.119 It was what
Ammianus calls “the yokes of the Empire,”
i.e., the specialists in words, the fast talkers,
the experts on public relations, the
supersalesmen, who by substituting sound for
substance in their lush and busy careers
completely undermined the rickety structure
of the civilization which they claimed to be
rescuing.120 The secret of success in these
professions lay in their boasted power to
command loyalty, a talent for which the
world was willing to pay any price.
The ancients defined rhetoric as “the
technique of persuasion,” “the art of
convincing people,” or of convincing
everybody, of anything—for a fee.121 The art
which keeps people stirred up from
necessitas (need) rather than from puritas
(disinterested motives), scattering to the
public from its overflowing bosom an
abundance of delights, and thus leading them
to conform to its purposes—that art,
according to Augustine, is called
Rhetoric.122 The great power of rhetoric lay
in its unique ability to create artificial
values, “to make unimportant things seem
important,” in Plato’s words or, in those of
Clement of Alexandria, “to make false
opinions like true by means of words.”123
The rhetorician works with words alone: to
treat his profession as a science defeats its
purpose, Aristotle observes, which is to deal
not with real things but with words, and to
convince not by evidence, as science and art
must do, but by argument;124 he is the
supersalesman who sells not goods but, in
the last analysis, himself: “cupit enim se
approbare, non causam” (he desires to win
approval for himself, not his argument), says
the pious Seneca.125
The secret of commanding and
controlling loyalty, rhetoric teaches, is
always to give people whatever they want:
unlike Pericles, who invariably gave the
Athenians what they most needed and least
wanted, the Sophist studied to give his
public what it most wanted and least needed.
The very opposite of a true leader, the
rhetorician was by his own confession “the
slave of a thousand masters.”126 Philo
describes the general public as a harlot and
the rhetor as her minion, nay, her lapdog,
whose purpose in life is to obey her, wait on
her, and do all that gives her pleasure. It
would be hard to say who was the more
debauched by such a pact of mutual
corruption, the lady or her dog, for the rhetor
demanded a terrible price for his toadying:
by giving the public exactly what it wants,
Augustine boasts, the orator makes them clay
in his hands, a helpless automaton without a
mind or will of its own, completely at the
bidding of the skillful word-master.127 Dio
Chrysostom and Lucian have told how this
irresistible predatory profession, jauntily
sure of itself in handling the man in the
street, the gullible rich, and the lazy student
population, always won out because it
always pushed downhill128—selling whiskey
to the Indians was not a surer thing, or a
deadlier. Socrates prophesied in the Gorgias
that a true teacher would have no more
chance of holding his own against the
smooth-talking Sophists with their easy but
flashy and pretentious instruction, than an
honest physician would have of winning
child patients in competition with a pastry
cook who prescribed nothing but dessert.
Rhetoric was the ruin of all hard and honest
thinking in the ancient world, but it paid big
returns and swept all before it, to become the
great heritage of the Middle Ages from
Antiquity.129 Of the orating bishops, the glory
of the fourth century, Gibbon says, “the true
size and colour of every object is falsified
by the exaggerations of their corrupt
eloquence,” a verdict which subsequent
studies have fully confirmed.130
The only form of rhetoric that retained
any real vitality in the fourth century was the
panegyric, a formal set address in which the
orator, in the name of the people or Senate,
would declare undying devotion to the
emperor or any other leader, civil or
ecclesiastical, who had attained to a position
of great political importance.131 Fides was
the keynote, with ardent protestations of
unfailing loyalty, delivered in set,
conventional terms whose transfer from
pagan to Christian use may be traced on
coins and inscriptions as well as in the
orators.132 Augustine, himself a one-time
professional panegyrist, joyfully announces
that the panegyric art, far from being
discredited by Christianity, has received a
new lease on life; for if rhetoric contributes
a much-needed spice to the Christian
teaching, that doctrine in return offers the
exhausted panegyrist in the Christian God
what he most needs—a materia grandis of
unlimited possibilities.133 “The pagan
emperors had been traditionally devoted to
self-advertisement,” says Cochrane, “but it
remained for the first Christian sovereign to
discover a more effective instrument of
propaganda than any hitherto devised,” in the
Christian pulpit.134
From the capital the vogue for
panegyrics spread, under government
supervision, to the provinces. A local
professor of rhetoric would be chosen to
address the emperor as if he were present,
and all people would be expected to applaud
like mad “to prove their loyalty.”135 The
whole business was carefully controlled: the
subject matter was prescribed, the time and
place of delivery fixed, and the orator
chosen by the very man who was to be
acclaimed. M. Leclercq labors to exonerate
the panegyrists of the common charges of
being flatterers, liars, and pimps, on the
grounds (1) that they fooled nobody
(however hard, he admits, they tried), (2)
that they had no choice in the matter but had
to do what they were told (though they loved
every minute of it and fought for the
opportunity), and (3) that they were really
sincere.136 Precisely in this last argument
lies the most damning charge against the
panegyrists, the secret of whose success was
to make themselves sincere—for a fee. This
is the classic dilemma of the rhetorician,
who must employ all the exacting devices of
his art to persuade his hearers before all else
that he has no art.137 The sorriest victims of
the dilemma were the fathers of the fourth
century who, as has often been noted, use
their most lush and artificial rhetoric to
condemn the use of rhetoric.138
The result of this sort of thing was a
ghastly air of unreality that characterized all
attempts to win loyalty by formal persuasion.
When men tried to bolster up the vast inertia
of a sagging civilization with words alone, it
was the world that remained unaffected,
while the noble words were squashed flat
and had all the meaning squeezed out of them
by the dead weight of reality.139 The most
successful panegyric of the age was a
masterpiece in which the “ordinary reader . .
. seeks in vain some glimmer of
reasonableness, some promise of sense.”140
The victory of the decadent rhetoric of the
fourth-century schools was complete and
conditioned all the thinking of the Middle
Ages.141 Typical was the tendency to employ
lofty abstractions, which imparts to Christian
rhetoric an unmistakably pagan flavor which
persists to the present day.142 The significant
thing, however, is that the most movingly
eloquent protestations of loyalty, though they
did produce thunders of applause, failed to
generate genuine loyalty, and the great
Chrysostom observes often and with
bitterness that the populace which recognizes
him as perhaps the world’s greatest orator
will not pay the slightest heed to his mildest
admonitions, but continues to go about the
business of money-getting while he, Sunday
after Sunday, speaks to empty walls.143 The
world remained unconvinced, and to the end
of the Middle Ages the darling theme of the
rhetoricians, “the dream of a united
Christendom . . . was seen to have been a
dream.”144

Conclusion
Each of the three attempts to foster
loyalty in the century of crisis was a
conspicuous failure. The disillusionment
with the ideological appeal of West versus
East is voiced in Jordanes’s commentary on
the Battle of the Catalaunian Plain which, far
from being a cosmic struggle between
conflicting ways of life, proved to him only
one thing: When such a slaughter of nations
can be caused by the crazy obsession of one
man, or when the whim of some arrogant
chieftain can undo in an instant what it has
taken nature centuries to produce—that
proves that the human race lives for the
benefit of kings.145 One-package loyalty was,
as Alföldi shows, no less a hopelessly
artificial concept that could only ruin what it
meant to save.146 “Men were aware of the
danger that threatened,” writes Straub. “They
felt that the emergency of the time called for
drastic decisions; but the absolute
domination of Divine Grace left little margin
[Spielraum] for any attempts at political
reform. It is thus by no means surprising that
we are almost never confronted by any
concrete suggestion.”147 One does not reform
a holy system, and where the social order
was God’s order, “the human mind,” in
Bury’s words, “was cabined by the Infinite.
Thought was rendered sterile and
unproductive under the withering pressure of
an omnipresent and monotonous idea.”148 It
was an age of “utter incapacity to invent
anything new . . . devoid of all creative
power and helplessly submitting to current
practice.”149
Partisan appeals to universal loyalty
completed the crippling process: the whole
Tragik of the Middle Ages, says Ladner, was
the ruling out of all possibility of
compromise by a theory of loyalty which
was partisanship raised to the nth power (die
ins Ungemessene gesteigerten
Einseitigkeiten).150 “Reverence for
Augustine,” writes Father Bligh, “forbids me
to say that his justification of persecution
was wrong; but its fruits were evil in the
centuries which followed, and we may
suspect that, if he had had as much
experience to reflect upon as we have,
Augustine would have reverted to his first
opinion.”151 On the contrary, it is we who
are reverting to Augustine’s second opinion.
Rostovzeff sums up all the evils of the
age we have been discussing under one
head: oversimplification. “Everywhere we
meet with the same policy of simplification,
coupled with a policy of brutal
compulsion.”152 The “system of the late
Empire, despite its apparent complexity, was
much simpler, much more primitive, and
infinitely more brutal” than what had gone
before.153 “In times of crisis,” says Alföldi,
“when the choice of the Government is
simplified down to a plain ‘to be or not to
be,’ the policy that wins is that of the fire-
brigade, which elects to destroy the contents
of a house in order to save the naked
walls.”154 And the ultimate expression of
this blunt oversimplification was the army of
secret police, agentes in rebus, whose
business was to check on everybody’s
loyalty.155
The fourth century is not the twentieth.
But loyalty is a timeless thing, and if the
experience of the century of crisis proves
anything, it is that there is no problem of
loyalty. Conformity can be had by bribery,
flattery, or force, but one can no more
legislate loyalty than one can legislate love,
of which it is a part. “The professed object
of Constantine,” says Cochrane, “was to
legislate the millennium in a generation.”156
The legislation of loyalty lay at the core of
his plan, and its miserable failure should
mean something to a modern world in which
no ruler possesses a tenth of the religious,
political, and military prestige that
Constantine did. Since the essence of loyalty
is disinterested devotion, there is something
distressing in the attempts of the fourth (or
any) century to conjure it up by appeals to
interest, fear, or expediency.
Yet the “loyalty problem” is no mere
question of semantics; the substitution of
some such word as “security” or
“conformity” for “loyalty” in designating the
Executive Order of March 1947 does not
really change the complexion of the thing.
Loyalty is one of the few words in existence
about whose meaning dispute is virtually
impossible. Everyone knows what loyalty is,
and what a desirable, nay indispensable
thing it is to the survival of any community.
Like honor and chastity, it is strongest when
least talked about, and thrives only in a
climate of uncritical acceptance. A virtuous
investigation of loyalty is like a noisy
oration in praise of silence, and the
appearance of loyalty order and loyalty
legislation such as are found in the
Theodosian Code and elsewhere is a sign of
lost confidence, a desperate groping in
empty air for something which groping
fingers only push farther out of reach.
Two of the wisest contemporaries of
Constantine, reflecting upon his Nicene
Council, were not unaware of a serious
implication in the holding of formal
assemblies to decide upon the nature of God.
“For if they believed,” writes Athanasius,”
they would not be seeking as if for something
they did not have,” and Hilary says the same:
“The Faith must be inquired after, as if we
had none. The Faith must be written down,
as if there could be any baptism without faith
in Christ!”157 Just so, when we start defining
loyalty we demonstrate to the world that we
no longer know what it is. That is the lesson
of the Age of Constantine.

Notes
This article was originally published
in Western Political Quarterly 6/4 (1953):
631-57, at a time when the loyalty of many
patriotic Americans was being impugned by
political opponents.

Footnotes
^1. “We are facing an utterly new problem in
American life. . . . Others believe that some
or all ‘loyalty measures’ taken to safeguard
the nation in the cold war reveal ignorance
of the lessons of history and violate
fundamental democratic principles.” Thus
Morris Ernst, Loyalty in a Democratic
State, ed. John C. Wahlke (Boston: Heath,
 1952), vi. Cf. Public Affairs Pamphlet No.
179 (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1952), 1-6.
H. Westmann, “On Conflicts of Loyalties,”
Question 5 (Winter 1952): 5-15; C. R.
Nixon, “Freedom vs. Unity: A Problem in
the Theory of Civil Liberty,” Political
Science Quarterly 68 (March 1953): 88.
^2. András Alföldi, A Conflict of Ideas in the
Late Roman Empire, the Clash between the
Senate and Valentinian, tr. Harold Mattingly
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 40. Cf. below,
n. 6.
^3. Johannes Straub, “Christliche
Geschichtsapologetik in der Krisis des
römischen Reiches,” Historia 1 (1950): 52,
citing Johann Burckhardt, goes so far as to
call it a crisis unique in history; cf. Johannes
Straub, “Parens Principum,” Nouvelle Clio
3-4 (1952): 94.
^4. R. M. Henry, "Pietas and Fides in Catullus,”
Hermathena 75 (1950): 63, and 76 (1951):
48-57.
^5. “Carere patria intolerabile est. Aspice agedum
hanc frequentiam, cui vix urbis immensae
 tecta sufficiunt . . . ex toto denique orbe
terrarum confluxerunt” (Being without a
country is unbearable. Look at this crowd,
for whom the roofs of this vast city is
scarcely enough. . . . They have gathered
from every part of the world), Seneca, Ad
Helviam Matrem De Consolatione XII. Cf.
Cicero, Oratio Pro L. Cornelio Balbo IX,
24 (“libertas id est civitas”); Claudius
Rutilius Namatianus, De Reditu Suo I, 66
(“urbem fecisti, quod prius orbis erat”), and
so forth. The philosophers of the time
“addressed themselves to a world of
déracinés. They preached . . . salvation in
‘society’ regarded as distinct from and
independent of political forms.” Thus
Charles N. Cochrane, Christianity and
Classical Culture (Oxford: Clarendon,
1944), 31.
^6. To the previously mentioned works of
Alföldi, Straub, and Cochrane (especially
Cochrane’s second chapter “Romanitàs”),
add András Alföldi, The Conversion of
Constantine and Pagan Rome (Oxford:
 Clarendon, 1948); Joseph Vogt, Constantin
der Grosse und sein Jahrhundert (Munich:
Munchner, 1949); Walther Eltester, “Die
Krisis der alten Welt und das Christentum,”
Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche
Wissenschaft 42 (1949): 1-19; André
Piganiol, “L’Etat actuel de la question
constantinienne 1939-49,” Historia 1
(1950): 82-96; Aldo Marsili, “Roma nella
poesia di Claudiano. Romanità occidentale
contrapposta a quella orientale,” Antiquitas
1 (1946): 3-24, and other studies cited in the
course of this paper. For a complete survey
of the field and a demonstration of the great
increase of interest in it, K. F. Stroheker,
“Das konstantinische Jahrhundert im Lichte
der Neuerscheinungen 1940-51,” Saeculum
3 (1952): 654-80.
^7. Vogt, Constantin der Grosse und sein
Jahrhundert, 12-15; Aelius Aristides,
Orationes, ed. Wilhelm Dindorf (Leipzig:
Weidmann, 1829), 14:206-8 (360-62); 225-
27 (393-95); Prudentius, Contra Orationem
Symmachi II, 578-633; Claudius Rutilius
 Namatianus, De Reditu Suo I, 47-66: “fecisti
patriam diversis gentibus unam” (you have
created a single country for many diverse
peoples).
^8. Vogt, Constantin der Grosse und sein
Jahrhundert, 16.
^9. See below, nn. 69-73; P. Chavanne, “Le
patriotisme de Prudence,” Revue d’histoire
et de litterature religieuses 4 (1899): 333-
34, 412-13; Cassiodorus, Variae I, 21.
Gustave Bardy, L’Église et les derniers
Romains (Paris: Laffont, 1948), 48.
^10. Vogt, Constantin der Grosse und sein
Jahrhundert, 13; Marsili, “Roma nella
poesia di Claudiano,” 17-18, 23.
^11. Hugh Nibley, “The Hierocentric State,”
Western Political Quarterly 4 (1951): 244-
47; reprinted in this volume, pages 123-26.
^12. Vogt, Constantin der Grosse und sein
Jahrhundert, 19-20; Priscus Rhetor, De
Legationibus Romanorum ad Gentes 3, in
PG 113:736; Jordanes, Historia Getica
Getarum (Gothic History) 36; Claudius
 Claudianus, Bellum Geticum (The Gothic
War) 364-79; Horace, Carmen Saeculare I,
12 and 53-60.
^13. Priscus Rhetor, De Legationibus
Romanorum ad Gentes 3, in PG 113:726-
29.
^14. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (New York:
Modern Library, 1932), 2:256.
^15. Agathias, History II, 29-30, in PG 88:1393-
95.
^16. Procopius, Anécdota XXV, 25.
^17. Salvianus, De Gubernatione Dei (On the
Government of God) V, 3-11, in PL 53:96-
97. The same sort of thing was going on 200
years earlier; Michael Rostovzeff, The
Social and Economic History of the Roman
Empire (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1926), 348-49.
^18. Priscus Rhetor, De Legationibus
Romanorum ad Gentes 1 and 3, in PG
113:704-5, 708, 716, where each side
accuses the other of retaining its subjects,
 while denying the charge against itself. The
Romans were constantly demanding the
return of “deserters” who chose to live
among the barbarians; E. A. Thompson,
“Peasant Revolts in Late Roman Gaul and
Spain,” Past and Present 2 (November
1952): 15-18. Thompson cites a number of
texts, including the fifth-century comedy
Querolus, illustrating the degree to which the
Romans idealized the free and simple
barbarian way of life.
^19. Henri Grégroire, “La ‘conversion’ de
Constantin,” Revue de l’Université de
Bruxelles 36 (1930-31): 231-34; and
Grégoire Cassimatis, “La Dixième ‘Vexation’
de l’Empereur Nicéphore,” Byzantion 7
(1932): 152-54, has spread consternation
among the learned by showing how
historians have confused and even reversed
the roles of the great protagonists.
^20. Eusebius, Vita Constantini (Life of
Constantine) II, 4-6, in PG 20:981-93.
^21. Ibid. I, 28-31; II, 6, in PG 20:944-45, 985.
By an interesting coincidence, just such a
 heavenly manifestation is attributed to
Cyrus, the archetype of the divine king,
Xenophon, Cyropaedia IV, 2 and 15.
^22. Agathias, History IV, 29, in PG 88:1532.
^23. Hilary, Ad Constantium Augustum (To
Constantius Augustus) II, 5, in PL 10:566-
67.
^24. Ludwig Friedländer, Darstellungen aus der
Sittengeschichte Roms, 4 vols., 8th ed.
(Leipzig: Hirzel, 1910), 2:338-39.
^25. “Eine Audienz bei Chosrau mit Vela, strenger
Rangordnung der Dignitäre, dem
Silentiumsruf des Zeremonienmeisters
unterscheidet sich in nichts von der strengen
Etikette eines byzantinischen Silention” (an
audience at Chosrau’s court with veils, with
a strict ordering of dignitaries, with a
silentium called out by the master of
ceremonies cannot be distinguished from the
strict court etiquette of the Byzantine
silention); A. M. Schneider, “Das
byzantinische Zeremoniell und der alte
Orient,” Jahrbuch für kleinasiatische
Forschung 2 (1952): 163. The Roman
 emperors were forced to adopt this ritual in
the Prestigekampf (struggle for prestige)
with the East, according to András Alföldi,
“Die Geschichte des Throntabernakels,”
Nouvelle Clio 2 (1950): 541.
^26. George of Pisidia, De Expeditione Persica
II, 240-51, in PG 92:1226-27: “He [the
General of Error] occupies himself with
musical instruments, cymbals, impious din
of song, dances of indecent women in lustful
nudity. While thou, our General of Wise
Panoply, dost take thy pleasure in Psalms
played upon mystic instruments, a godly
singing rejoiceth thy heart as thou holdest
solemn sport with virgins. . . . He puts his
hope in the moon, but suffers violent eclipse
seeking to eclipse thy sun.” On the exact
resemblance of Christ and Antichrist,
Romanus, De Judicio Extremo 8-10, in Jean
B. Pitra, Analecta Sacra Spicilegio
Solesmensi Parata (Paris: Tusculan, 1876),
1:38-39. The antagonist is the perfect image
of the hero, but wickedly inverted, as in a
mirror: Eusebius, Life of Constantine II, 4,
 in PG 20:981; Julius Firmicus Maternus, De
Errore Profanorum Religionum (The Error
of the Pagan Religions) 23, in PL 12:1032-
33; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis XV de
Secundo Christi Adventu (Instruction XV
about the Second Coming of Christ) 12, in
PG 33:885, 1639. Naturally the painful
resemblance of the adversary to the hero
was attributed to a clever act of forgery by
the demons.
^27. Thus when Attila came upon a heroic
painting in Milan depicting himself at the feet
of the Roman emperor, he simply
transposed the figures of the two leaders—
the rest was as it should be, the clash being
not between “ideologies” but personalities
pure and simple, Suidas, cited by Gibbon,
Decline and Fall, 2:289, n. 53.
^28. This is fully illustrated by the references
given, under the heading of barbarus and
related words, in any large Greek or Latin
lexicon.
^29. Thus J. B. Bury, A History of Greece to the
Death of Alexander the Great (London:
 Macmillan, 1913), 230, who sees in the
Persian War “the first encounter in that still
unclosed debate.”
^30. Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 4
vols. (Jena: Diederich, 1928), 4:222-23,
277-316, 315-16, 340-75.
^31. Ibid., 4:342.
^32. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical
Culture, 65-72.
^33. Vogt, Constantin der Grosse und sein
Jahrhundert, 59; Cochrane, Christianity
and Classical Culture, 188-89, sees in these
titles an Oriental borrowing inseparable from
the “diadem and jewelled robes instituted by
his [Constantine’s] immediate predecessors.”
^34. Catullus beautifully illustrates both these
points; cf. Henry, "Pietas and Fides in
Catullus,” 63-68.
^35. E.g., Prudentius, Contra Orationem
Symmachi II, 488-91 and 503-23; Marsili,
“Roma nella poesia di Claudiano,” 11-13.
^36. Salvianus, On the Government of God VII,
2-3, in PL 53:130-32; V, 2-4, in PL 53:91-
 96. This reflects the traditional belief that “it
is natural for Greeks to rule over
Barbarians,” Euripides, Iphigeneia in Aulis
1400, and that “among Barbarians no
distinction is made between women and
slaves,” Aristotle, Politics 1252B. The
unquestioned acceptance of Roman
Goodness remained part of the permanent
heritage of the West, Nancy Lenkeith, Dante
and the Legend of Rome (London: Brill,
1952), 17.
^37. On government patronage and control of
literary education, Heathcote W. Garrod,
The Oxford Book of Latin Verse (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1944), xxvi-xxxvii (introduction).
^38. Rostovzeff, Social and Economic History,
458, 123-24, 201, 414; Vogt, Constantin der
Grosse und sein Jahrhundert, 19-21; F.
Vittinghoff, “Zur angeblichen Barbarisierung
des römischen Heeres . . .,” Historia 1
(1950): 389-407; Zosimus, Historia Nova
II, 34.
^39. The embassy was almost wrecked when the
report reached Attila that one of the Romans
 had said at dinner that his master was a god
while Attila was only a mortal; the remark
nearly produced a riot.
^40. Synesius, Oratio de Regno 15, in PG
66:1093.
^41. Ibid., in PG 66:1096-97.
^42. Ibid., in PG 66:1132, 1096-97.
^43. On imperial foreign policy during Justinian’s
reign, see Charles Diehl and Georges
Marçais, Le monde oriental 395 à 1081
(Paris: Presses universitaires, 1936), 79-81.
^44. Ibid., 71-72, 79; Jordanes, Gothic History
38.
^45. Sulpicius Severus, Chronicon Historia
Sacra II, 3, in PL 20:130: “exercitibusque
nostris, urbibus atque provinciis permistas
barbaras nationes . . . inter nos degere, nec
tamen in mores nostros transire, videamus.”
^46. Victor Vitensis, De Persecutione Vandalica
5, in PL 58:255b.
^47. Lenkeith, Dante and the Legend of Rome, 4.
^48. Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De
Administrando Imperio (On the
 Administration of the Empire) 13, in PG
113:184-85.
^49. Cf. the hysterical security rules of Valens,
given in Ammianus Marcellinus XXX, 1,
and discussed by Gibbon, Decline and Fall,
1:856-58, nn. 53-59.
^50. Describing the siege of Ancona by the
Saracens, a Florentine monk writes: “Ignis hi
conficitur tantum per Paganos/ Ignis hic
exterminat tantum Christianos/Incantatus
namque est per illos prophanos/ Ab hoc
perpetuo, Christe, libera nos.” Cited in
Charles Du Cange, Glossarium ad
Scriptores Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, 3
vols. (Paris: Osmont, 1733-36), 3:1308-9.
^51. For Cicero the solution of “the problem of
leadership in a free state,” was the existence
of a natural, unforced loyalty—“concensus,
concordia ordinum.” Cochrane, Christianity
and Classical Culture, 58-59.
^52. Rostovzeff, Social and Economic History,
449.
^53. The essence of Romanitàs is restoration,
 according to Cochrane, who notes of
Constantine’s program: “Once more, as in
the far-off days of Augustus Caesar, the
Roman world was stirred by a sense of fresh
hopes and fresh beginnings,” Cochrane,
Christianity and Classical Culture, 183. In
his inscriptions Constantine claims to be
restoring the Empire “to its ancient splendor
and glory,” Eusebius, Life of Constantine I,
40, in PG 20:956. Caelius Sedulius, Carmen
Paschale, in PL 19:549-752, is simply a
Christian elaboration of the Carmen
Saeculare that launched the Principate.
Restoration is the normal theme of the
panegyrics: even Authulf in taking over
Romania calls himself “Romanae
restitutionis auctor” (the father of the
Roman restoration), Orosius, Historiae
adversum Paganos (History against the
Pagans) VII, 43, in PL 31:1172.
^54. For new light on the special terminology
which demonstrated the “lealismo dei
Cristiani” (loyalty of the Christians) to the
old majesty, see L. Alfonsi, “L’epistola I
 clementina, i papiri magici, i ludi saeculari,”
Aegyptus 27 (1947): 111-14. Cf. Juvencus,
De Laudibus Domini, in PL 19:385; and
Juvencus, Triumphus Christi Heroicus, in
PL 19:385-88, for typical ties between the
old loyalty and the new.
^55. Compare Julian’s painted glory, Sozomen,
Historia Ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical
History) V, 17, in PG 67:1265-69, with
Constantine’s as described in the whole
fourth book of Eusebius, Life of
Constantine, in PG 20:1115-229. Also Cyril
of Jerusalem, Catechesis XIV de Christi
Resurrectione, in PG 33:841-44; F. Gerke,
“Das Verhältnis von Malerei und Plastik in
d. Theodos.-Honorianischen Zeit,” Rivista
di Archaeologica Cristiana 12 (1935): 140:
the new art of majestas was the result of a
“politisch gewordenen christlichen
Weltanschauung” (politicized Christian world
view). The super-ceremonial was no longer
mere form, but a “Wirklichkeit auf einer
neuen und höheren Ebene des Seins” (reality
on a new and higher plane of being),
 according to Schneider, “Das byzantinische
Zeremoniell und der alte Orient,” 154.
^56. Elias Bickermann, “Die romische
Kaiserapotheose,” Archiv für
Religionswissenschaft 27 (1929): 21, citing
Vegetius, II, 5. Cf. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical
History X, 4 and 9, in PG 20:848-80, 901-
6; Eusebius, De Laudibus Constantini 17,
in PG 20:1429-32, 1357; Eusebius, Life of
Constantine II, 19 and 29, in PG 20:936-37,
1005-8. F. Cumont, “L’éternité des
empereurs romains,” Revue d’histoire et de
litterature religieuses 1 (1896): 435-52. The
New Order is greater and holier (timiotera)
than heaven itself, according to John
Chrysostom, Expositio in Psalmum
(Exposition on Psalm) 148, in PG 55:483.
^57. Ammianus Marcellinus, XIV, 6, 3, and 6:
“Virtue and Fortune have formed a pact of
eternal peace . . . the tranquility of Numa’s
time has returned.” Eusebius, De Laudibus
Constantini 17, in PG 20:1429; Eusebius,
Ecclesiastical History X, 4 and 9, in PG
20:848-80, 901-6; I, 3-4, in PG 20:68-80;
 IV, 7, in PG 20:316-21 (quoting panegyric
orations); Lactantius, De Justitia V, 6-7, in
PL 6:569-74, 590-92; Epiphanius, Adversus
Haereses III, 2, 7, in PG 42:784-85, and III,
2, 2-3, in PG 42:776-77; Jerome,
Commentarius in Isaiam Prophetam
(Commentary on Isaiah) 18:66, in PL
24:674, 885; John Chrysostom, De Sancta
Pentecoste Homilia (Homily on the Holy
Pentecost) 1, in PG 50:454; John
Chrysostom, Contra Judaeos et Gentiles,
quod Christus Sit Deus (Against the Jews
and the Gentiles That Christ Is God) 11-12,
in PG 48:829-30; Ambrose, Epistolae
(Epistles) 12, in PL 16:987-90; Cyprian,
Epistolae (Epistles) 7, in PL 5:246-51; and
Cyprian, Liber de Lapsis (On the Lapsed),
in PL 4:479; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis
XVIII de Carnis Resurrectione XII, 18, in
PG 33:1049, and so forth.
^58. The quotation is from Gibbon, Decline and
Fall, 1:644, describing the legend of
Constantine’s vision. The justice of its
application in this instance may be seen from
 J. Gage, “Stauros Nikopolos: La victoire
imperiale dans l’empire chrétien,” Revue
d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 13
(1933): 370-400, on the steps by which
conflicting “Mystiques triomphales” were
ultimately fused into a single whole in the
Christian Imperial Cult. “The Roman world,
whether for the moment dazzled by the
prestige of the imperial physician or, perhaps
because of its sickness ready for the most
desperate expedient, appears to have
accepted his ministrations without much
visible indication of the scepticism which
they deserved,” thus Cochrane, Christianity
and Classical Culture, 197.
^59. Caecilius, Octavius IV-VIII.
^60. Straub, “Christliche Geschichtsapologetik,”
58-60, 76-77; Chavanne, “Patriotisme de
Prudence,” 349, 385, 400, 412.
^61. Orosius, History against the Pagans V, 2, in
PL 31:921-22.
^62. Prudentius, Contra Orationem Symmachi II,
816-17: “Sed tantum distant Romana et
barbara quantum/Quadrupes abiuncta est
 bipedi vel muta loquenti.” Cf. Ambrose,
Epistolam ad Romanos I, 14, in PL 17:57.
For the Byzantine emperors “barbarian” is
synonymous with “pagan,” and
intermarriage with barbarians is a crime,
Constantine Porphyrogenitus, On the
Administration of the Empire 13, in PG
113:185. A famous Byzantine formula states
that there are four mothers of heresy:
Barbarism, Scythism, Judaism, and
Hellenism; John Damascus, De Haeresibus,
in PG 94:677; Epiphanius, Anacephalaeosis,
in PG 42:840-45, 849; Chronicon Paschale,
in PG 92:112. A fourth-century wood
carving from Egypt depicts the “Vertreibung
der Barbaren von der Feste des Glaubens,”
the Faith and Romania being identical, Josef
Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom: Beiträge
zur Geschichte der spätantiken und
frühchristlichen Kunst (Leipzig: Hinrichs,
1901), 81-84, table 3.
^63. Lenkeith, Dante and the Legend of Rome,
25, citing the twelfth century Pseudo-
Irnerius. How Christianity actually deepened
 the gulf between Barbarian and Roman may
be seen from Origen, Commentaria in
Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos (Commentary
on the Epistle to the Romans) I, 14, in PG
14:861; cf. Jerome, Commentarius in
Epistolam ad Galatas (Commentary on the
Epistle to the Galatians) 2:3, in PL 26:380.
^64. Thus Tatian, Oratio adversus Graecos I, 27,
30, in PG 6:804-5, 865, 868; see especially
R. Massuetus, Dissertatio de Valentino, in
PG 7:44-49; Clement of Alexandria,
Stromata I, 15-17, in PG 8:776-802;
Tertullian, De Anima (On the Soul) XILX,
in PL 2:733-34; Didymus Alexander, De
Trinitate (On the Trinity) II, 18, in PG
39:729. Later writers compared this
Christian teaching with like teachings of the
Greek Philosophers: Nicephorus Callistus,
Ecclesiastical History IV, 10, in PG
145:1000; Nicephorus Gregor, Byzantina
Historia VIII, 8, in PG 148:569; Theodoret,
Graecarum Affectionum Curatio 5, in PG
83:944-52.
^65. Straub, “Christliche Geschichtsapologetik,”
 63-64; cf. Claudius Claudianus, Panegyric
on the Fourth Consulship of the Emperor
Honorius 98-99; Marsili, “Roma nella
poesia di Claudiano,” 15; Lenkeith, Dante
and the Legend of Rome, 18: “If Rome were
destroyed the physical basis of the
legitimacy of both Popes and emperors
would be lost together.”
^66. Alföldi, Conversion of Constantine and
Pagan Rome, 117; cf. 106, 110, 112, 115-
16. The fusion of Church and Empire is not
without its modern panegyrists, e.g., A.
Causse, “Essai sur le conflit du chistianisme
primitif et de la civilization,” RHR 78 (1918):
98-142, and 79 (1919): 175-223.
^67. Walter Volker, “Von welchen Tendenzen liess
sich Eusebius . . . leiten?” Vigiliae
Christianae 4 (1950): 157-80. Roman
secular history was also rewritten to prove
that the Romans had from the first been
God’s people; Lenkeith, Dante and the
Legend of Rome, 9.
^68. Eusebius, De Laudibus Constantini 16, in
PG 20:1421-29; cf. Prudentius, Contra
 Symmachum II, 578-95 and 634-40.
^69. Lactantius, De Ira Dei 11, in PL 7:110.
^70. Aristides, Oration 14 (To Rome), ed.
Dindorf, 200 (349), boasts that Rome has
achieved what Asia has always attempted to,
the rule of one man over all the world; in
Rome the Asiatic ideal is realized, ibid., 205
(359), 222 (389). “There are not two suns in
the heavens; how can the people have two
lords?” asks Ghenghis Khan, Friedrich E.
Krause, Cingis Han: Die Geschichte seines
Lebens nach den chinesischen
Reichsannalen (Heidelberg: Winter, 1922),
25. Bayazid’s official pronouncement reads
exactly like an excerpt from the Theodosian
Code: “The Koran says, ‘Disquiet is worse
than death,’ the Sultan, the shadow of God
upon earth, and the Lord of all true
believers, ought to reign in conformity with
the ever-to-be-imitated example of God,
alone upon the throne, and without
possibility of anyone revolting against him.”
Edwin S. Creasy, History of the Ottoman
Turks, 2 vols. (London: Bentley, 1854-56),
1:50-51. Typically Asiatic is Basil’s
panegyric to the Pope of Alexandria, who
shall trample his enemies under his feet:
Basil, Liturgia Alexandrina, in PG 31:1632.
Though Constantine “rejected the
pretentions of the Oriental sacred
monarchy,” according to Cochrane,
Christianity and Classical Culture, 179, he
retained and strengthened all that the West
had learned from it; ibid., 186, 188-89. The
Church Fathers of the age remind us at
times that all the pomp of this earth is mere
empty show, “a game for children,” a brief
masquerade, and so forth, e.g., Eusebius,
De Laudibus Constantini V, 6, in PG
20:1316-20, 1337-40; John Chrysostom, In
Epistolam II ad Corinthios Homilia
(Homily on the Second Epistle to the
Corinthians) 15, in PG 61:508-9; but these
are the commonplaces of the schools, in
striking contrast to Hilary’s frank and
sorrowful admission that the Church “diligi
se gloriatur a mundo, quae Christi esse non
potuit, nisi eam mundus odisset” (boasts of
 being loved by the world, which could not
be Christ’s [church], unless the world hated
it), Hilary, Contra Arianos (Against the
Arians) 4, in PL 10:611.
^71. For Claudius Claudianus, The Gothic War,
passim, all who deny humble submission to
Rome are faithless destroyers of peace,
mad, demented, feeble-minded, insane,
praedones, proditores, scellerati,
presuntuosi, superbi, barbari, clienti,
audacii falsi inerti, impii, rabiosi, perfidi,
and so forth, see Marsili, “Roma nella poesia
di Claudiano,” 17-18.
^72. Hilary, Against the Emperor Constantius 15,
in PL 10:593, 586, 602-3; cf. Hilary, Contra
Arianos, in PL 10:609-10: peace is the
greatest of blessings, but whoever accepts
any peace but ours is the Antichrist.
^73. Lucifer of Caliaris, De Non Conveniendo
cum Haeresibus, in PL 13:774, 786-87,
790-91, 806; Hilary, Against the Emperor
Constantius 15, in PL 10:598-99, 583.
^74. Hilary, Against the Emperor Constantius 8,
in PL 10:584-85.
^75. Lucifer of Caliaris, De Non Conveniendo
cum Haeresibus, in PL 13:806.
^76. Thus Optatus, De Schismate Donatistarum
(On the Donatist Schism) II, 13, in PL
11:966, can show that “the true Church
cannot be cruel,” since “dum sanat,
vulnerat” (it causes pain while healing), ibid.,
in PL 11:1020. Those whom we kill are not
martyrs, since only members of our church
can be martyrs, ibid., in PL 11:1013-15,
1019; our side cannot persecute, since we
are in the right, while anything that
displeases us is necessarily persecution, ibid,
in PL 11:1013, 1017; since we have the
Scriptures written in our hearts, all Scripture
we cite condemns you, while any you may
cite against us is void, ibid., in PL 11:1101.
Pacianus, Epistolae (Epistles) II, 5, in PL
13:1061-62, assures the Novatians that his
side does not persecute, since it attacks only
with words: “We deal with you like doves,
ore potius quam dente confligimus.” Yet
Optatus tells the opposition that when they
attack with words only they cut more cruelly
 than any swords, “slaying with the sword of
the tongue,” Optatus, On the Donatist
Schism II, 13, in PL 11:979, 983. Augustine,
Contra Donatistas (Against the Donatists)
II, 11, says that persecution by the Church is
“the persecution of love,” and that as long as
the Emperor persecutes on the right side he
does well, Augustine, Epistolae (Epistles)
43, in PL 33:321-23.
^77. Lucifer of Caliaris, De Non Conveniendo
cum Haeresibus, in PL 13:768-70, 774, 777,
787, 791. True, Lucifer is extreme, but
Athanasius, Ad Luciferum Epistolae 2, in
PL 13:1040-41, who calls him the most
inspired voice of the age, is himself no less
severe: “Christus recusat et respuit
obsequium tuum” (Christ rejects and
disdains your compliance), he writes to a
too-tolerant emperor, Athanasius, Epistolae
(Epistles) XVII, in PL 16:1002-5.
^78. “The common-sense republicanism of
Tiberius Caesar had prompted the sentiment
“deorum injuriae dis curae” (the gods’
injuries are matters of concern to the gods).
 Constantine, however, undertook to support
the prestige of deity by a law which forbade
blasphemous utterances under pain of a fine
of one-half one’s goods.” Cochrane,
Christianity and Classical Culture, 204.
^79. John Chrysostom, Homilia in Joannem
(Homily on John) LIV, 4, in PG 59:301;
Hilary, Against the Emperor Constantius II,
9, in PL 10:585: “unigenitus Deus, quem in
me persequeris” (the only begotten God,
whom you persecute in me).
^80. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos
(Narrations on Psalms) 62:15, in PL
36:684-85; Augustine, De Civitate Dei (The
City of God) XX, 19, 3, in PL 41:686.
“How can we be blessed unless we loathe
you utterly?” is Lucifer’s refrain, in Lucifer
of Caliaris, De Non Conveniendo cum
Haeresibus, in PL 13:770-71.
^81. Augustine, Contra Julianum Pelagianum
(Against Julian Pelagius) IV, 30-31, in PL
44:753-54, 763: “Unbelievers do evil even
when they do good.” Cf. Augustine,
Sermones (Sermons) CXLI, 3-4, in PL
38:777; Augustine, Epistles 113, in PL
33:322; Augustine, Narrations on Psalms
57:15, in PL 36:684-85. To call the emperor
Antichrist when he is mistaken “non est
temeritas, sed fides; neque inconsideratio,
sed ratio” (it is not rashness but loyalty, not
thoughtlessness but concern), and so forth,
Hilary, De Non Conveniendo cum Hereticis,
in PL 13:806. When the Emperor puts his
official severitas at the disposal of the
Church, “neither brother, beloved wife, nor
son” should be spared, all loyal subjects
being armed “to dismember the
sacrilegious,” Julius Firmicus Maternus, The
Error of Pagan Religions 30, in PL
12:1048. Writers of the fourth century
sometimes yield to principles of humanity,
“nec potest aut veritas cum vi, aut justitia
cum crudelitate conjugi” (truth cannot be
joined with violence nor justice with
cruelty), says Lactantius, Divinae
Institutiones (Divine Institutions) V, 20, in
PL 6:615; yet Lucifer can twist this
sentiment into a proof that the Church, being
 true and just, is never cruel, see n. 76
above. Jerome must confess a definite
conflict between the justa judicia of the
Church and her irrationabili (!) clementia,
Jerome, Epistolae (Epistle) 17, in PL
22:828, while Optatus pays a touching
compliment to kindness when he declares
that the Donatists should suffer death
because they lack charity! Optatus, On the
Donatist Schism III, 8, in PL 11:1018-19.
^82. John Chrysostom, De Virginitate 5, in PG
48:536-37.
^83. Alföldi, Conflict of Ideas in the Late Roman
Empire, 40.
^84. John Chrysostom, Exposition on Psalm 50,
in PG 55:530; John Chrysostom, Homilia in
Isaiam 6:1 (Homily on Isaiah 6:1) IV, 1-2,
in PG 56:121; cf. John Chrysostom,
Homilia in Matthaeum (Homily on
Matthew) XXXIII, 1, in PG 57:389, and
John Chrysostom, Contra Judaeos et
Gentiles, quod Christus Sit Deus 6 and 12-
13, in PG 48:821, 830-31; Eusebius,
Ecclesiastical History X, 4, in PG 20:847-
 80; Zeno, Tractatus II, 44, in PL 11:496:
“zizania . . . in laeta frumenta mutavit” (he
changed tares into useful grains).
^85. Cedrenus Georgius, Historiarum
Compendium, 2 vols. (Bonn: Weber, 1838-
39), 1:662.
^86. Basil, De Spiritu Sancto (On the Holy
Ghost) 76-77, in PG 32:213-17. This agrees
perfectly with the description in John
Chrysostom, Adversus Oppugnatores Vitae
Monasticae III, 8-10, in PG 47:361-65. The
fourth-century fathers “cast aside truth and
decency [Anstand] and converted
controversy into the business of questioning
personal loyalty,” thus Martin Schanz,
Geschichte der römischen Literatur, 4 vols.
(Munich: Beck, 1914), 4:1:534.
^87. Basil, On the Holy Ghost 76-77, in PG
32:213-17. According to Chrysostom, the
spirit of the times is well expressed in the
common remark: “I wish an earthquake
would come and kill everybody but me; then
I would be the richest man in Antioch!”
John Chrysostom, In Epistolam II ad
 Timotheum (Commentary on the Second
Epistle to Timothy) VII, 1-2, in PG 62:638.
^88. Jakob C. Burckhardt, Die Zeit Konstantins
des Grossen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-
Anstalt, 1929), 452. Optatus affirms that if
chastity and virginity are found among any
barbarian nations it is because something has
gone wrong, for that simply cannot be, in
Optatus, On the Donatist Schism III, 3, in
PL 11:999.
^89. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History II, 28, in
PG 67:1013-17. Later churchmen used
Constantine’s example to spur his successors
to acts of increasing violence against
unbelievers, P. Petit, “Libanius et la Vita
Constantini,” Historia 1 (1950): 581. In the
Theodosian Code XVI, 1, 2, all who differ
from the Emperor’s theology are declared
“extravagant madmen” who “must expect to
suffer the severe penalties, which our
authority . . . shall think proper to inflict
upon them,” cited in Gibbon, Decline and
Fall, 2:8. Constantine shows an “obvious
lack of any sense of the limitations of law,”
 says Cochrane, Christianity and Classical
Culture, 204; “Ses conseillers l’ont fait vivre
dans un monde d’illusions” (his advisers let
him live in a dream world), Piganiol, “L’état
actuel de la question Constantinienne 1939-
49,” 95.
^90. The Emperor’s famous letter is quoted in
Eusebius, Life of Constantine II, 71, in PG
20:1044-45; Socrates, Ecclesiastical
History I, 7, in PG 67:53-60; Sozomen,
Ecclesiastical History I, 16, in PG 67:909-
12.
^91. Ambrose, Epistles 12, in PL 16:988-89.
John Chrysostom, De Sancto Babyla,
Contra Julianum et Gentiles (On Saint
Babyla, Against Julian and the Gentiles) 8,
in PG 50:544, says that the Church was
better off under pagan emperors, because
the members fought less savagely among
themselves.
^92. Gerhard Ladner, “Das heilige Reich des
mittelalterlichen Westens,” Welt als
Geschichte 11 (1951): 143-53, especially
149. See below, n. 146.
^93. Thompson, “Peasant Revolts in Late Roman
Gaul and Spain,” 20.
^94. John Morris, “Early Christian Orthodoxy,”
Past and Present 3 (February 1953): 12, cf.
14: “In 500 A.D. the new world was
Christian; it was a very different Christianity.
The church . . . belonged to the world of the
rulers, not of the ruled.” Cf. Jean-Paul
Brisson, “Les Origines du danger social dans
l’Afrique chrétienne du IIIe siècle,”
Recherches de science religieuse 33 (1946):
280-316.
^95. Henry, “Pietas and Fides in Catullus,” 63.
^96. Marsili, “Roma nella poesia di Claudiano,”
23.
^97. C. D. Gordon, Review of C. Wirszubski,
“Libertas” as a Political Idea at Rome
during the Late Republic and Early
Principate, in Phoenix 6 (1952): 28, where
the quotation is found.
^98. Ibid.
^99. Alföldi, Conflict of Ideas in the Late Roman
Empire, 37.
^100. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 91-193,
comments caustically on this.
^101. Diehl and Marçais, Le monde oriental, 78-
79.
^102. Rostovzeff, Social and Economic History,
477. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 2:142: “The
nobles of Rome express an exquisite
sensibility for any personal injury, and a
contemptuous indifference for the rest of the
human species.”
^103. Philostratus, Vita Apollonii (The Life of
Apollonius of Tyana) I, 15; cf. Zonaras,
Annals XII, 10.
^104. Plutarch, Marcus Cato 5, says the
Athenians treat their mules better than Cato
did his faithful slaves, but the Roman
nobility regularly followed his example,
Zonaras, Annals XII, 10. Though Cato
opposed the foreign excesses of the rich,
Cochrane, Christianity and Classical
Culture, 30-32, the “villa-system” and
foreign policy he advocated as well as his
own acquisitiveness all favored the
tendencies he was combatting, ibid., 34-35,
 45, 55.
^105. Tacitus, Histories II, 61, blushes with
shame that “a plebeian had the presumption
to mix his name with the great events of the
time.” The Historia Augusta reflects the
violently partisan spirit of the nobility in the
fourth century, according to Alföldi, Conflict
of Ideas in the Late Roman Empire, 25. Its
fierce prejudices are apparent in Plutarch,
Coriolanus; Ammianus Marcellinus, XXVII,
4; Livy, VII, 6-7; Appian, Roman History
XII, 4; XI, 4; Zonaras, Annals VII, 14, and
so forth.
^106. Vogt, Constantin der Grosse und sein
Jahrhundert, 46.
^107. They were genuinely shocked when their
Scythian houseslaves (who had been
captured by trickery and enslaved in
disregard of solemn promises) staged a
rebellion in Asia Minor—treachery, they
called it, base ingratitude! Eunapius, De
Legationibus Romanorum ad Gentus 6, in
PG 113:657. The same thing is described
centuries earlier by Appian, Roman History
 XII, 4; XI, 4. “If it were not for the wealth
possessed by the rich,” they said, “the poor
would have no one to lend them money in
time of famine and so starve to death!”
Zonaras, Annals VII, 14. They believed all
things were created for them alone,
Symmachus, Epistolae (Epistles) II, 46;
even life was given to other creatures as a
means of preserving their flesh until they
were ready to eat or sell it, Varro, De Re
Rustica (On Agriculture) II, 4 and 10; III,
3-6; including human flesh, ibid. II, 10;
Seneca, Epistles I, 95; Philo, On Abraham
20-21.
^108. “Ruere in servitium consules, patres, eques.
Quanto quis inlustrior, tanto magis falsi ac
festinantes.” (Consuls, senators, and knights
were rushing into slavery. The more
distinguished the individual, the greater his
hypocrisy and haste.) Tacitus, Annals I, 7,
1, cf. 35. The groveling and timidity of the
Senate is a leitmotiv of Roman history:
Polybius, Histories X, 3; Cicero, Letters to
His Friends VI, 1; Tacitus, Annals XIII, 32;
 Aelius Lampridius, Heliogabalus 20; Aelius
Lampridius, Commodus 18-20; Suetonius,
Caius Caligula 11; Dio, Roman History
LIII, 20; LXXIII, 20; LXXVII, 8; LXXIX,
20.
^109. Thompson, “Peasant Revolts in Late
Roman Gaul and Spain,” 12; Salvianus, On
the Government of God IV, 6, in PL 53:76-
77; A. Hoepffner, “Un aspect de la lutte de
Valentinien Ier contre le Sénat: La création
du ‘Defensor plebis,’” Revue historique 182
(1938): 225-38.
^110. P. de Jonge, “Scarcity of Corn and
Cornprices in Ammianianus Marcellinus,”
Mnemosyne, Ser. 4, vol. 1 (1948): 238-45;
on the complex speculations of the corn-
dealers, P. de Jonge, “A Curious Place in
Ammianus Marcellinus Dealing with Scarcity
of Corn and Cornprices,” Mnemosyne, Ser.
4, vol. 1 (1948): 73-80.
^111. “The world is turned upside down that a
few men may be magnificent,” Salvianus,
On the Government of God IV, 4, in PL
 63:75; see Rostovzeff, Social and Economic
History, 475-77, 451; Ambrose, De Officiis
Ministrorum (On the Duties of the Clergy)
III, 7, in PL 16:169; Basil, Homilia Dicta
Tempore Famis et Siccitatis, in PG 31:304-
9, 321, 324; Cassiodorus, Variae II, 12;
Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of
Tyana I, 15.
^112. William E. Heitland, The Roman Republic,
3 vols. (Cambridge: University Press, 1909),
2:235-37, describes the growth of the
system in which the owner “took little
thought of the horrors perpetrated with his
sanction in the country side,” and the only
means of protest was rebellion.
^113. Cicero, De Officiis III, 22, 88.
^114. Straub, “Parens Principum,” 115; E.
Nischer-Falkenhof, Stilicho (Vienna: Seidel,
1947), 149-52.
^115. Thompson, “Peasant Revolts in Late
Roman Gaul and Spain,” 20; cf. 14-15.
^116. Ibid., 19-20.
^117. Walther von Wartburg, Les origines des
 peuples romans (Paris: Presses
universitaires, 1941), 269; Ammianus
Marcellinus, XXXI, 6; Sidonius, Epistolae
(Epistles) II, 1, 3-4; Orosius, History
against the Pagans V, 9, 5; Joannes
Malalas, Chronographia XVII, 420; Appian,
Roman History III, 1; 1, 5; IV, 6, 43;
Tacitus, Histories II, 51; II, 61; Zonaras,
Annales VII, 14. Heitland, Roman Republic,
2:379, notes that it was traditionally the
freemen rather than the slaves who ravaged
the great estates.
^118. Erwin Rohde, Der griechische Roman und
seine Vorläufer (Leipzig: Breitkopf &
Härtel, 1900), 319.
^119. Ibid., 316-17, 347; Schanz, Geschichte der
römischen Literatur, 3:235.
^120. Ammianus Marcellinus; the four yokes are
orating Sophists, lawyers, legal advisers, and
hack-writers; cf. Philo, On Drunkenness 79.
The good men were snowed under by the
fast-talkers, Dio Chrysostom, Discourses
XXXII, 6-13; Lucian, Astrology, Rhetor
Praecox (A Professor of Public Speaking),
 and Nigrinus.
^121. Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric I, 1, 14; I,
2, 1; Dio Chrysostom, Discourses XXXV,
7.
^122. Augustine, De Ordine II, 13, in PL
32:1013.
^123. Plato, Phaedrus 267A; Clement of
Alexandria, Stromata VIII, 376, in PG
9:753. It can “exercise persuasive powers on
any subject at all,” says Aristotle, The “Art”
of Rhetoric I, 2, 1.
^124. Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric I, 2, 11-13.
^125. Seneca, Controversiae IX, preface 1. “The
beginning of rhetoric is the probable, the
process is epicherrema, and the end is
persuasion . . . and admiration,” Clement of
Alexandria, Stromata VIII, 376.
^126. Philo, On Joseph XIII, 64; XIV, 67; cf. Dio
Chrysostom, Discourses XLVII, 19.
^127. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana (On
Christian Doctrine) IV, 6; 29; 37; and 51, in
PL 34:91-115; cf. Gustave Combès, Saint
Augustin et la culture classique (Paris:
 Plon, 1927), 54-55.
^128. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses 32-34;
Lucian, Nigrinus; The Dead Come to Life
or the Fisherman; Rhetor Praecox; The
Dream or Lucian’s Career.
^129. F. James E. Raby, A History of Secular
Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 1:1-47. The
education of Augustine was “celle d’un lettré
de la décadence formé par le grammaticus et
le rhéteur, avec en plus la dialectique.
Grammaire et dialectique! Mais ce sont là les
bases réeles de la scholastique” (that of a
well-read person of the late Empire
influenced by the grammaticus and the
rhetorician, as well as dialectic. Grammar
and dialectic! But these are the real
foundations of scholasticism)! Henri I.
Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la
culture antique (Paris: Boccard, 1938), 275.
The only difference between Augustine’s
brand of Christian rhetoric and that of the
pagan schools was that his was a simpler,
streamlined course, even more superficial
 than the other, ibid., 517-18, denoting “cet
abaissment du niveau général de la
civilization, qui déjà, tout autour d’Augustin,
annonce les temps barbares” (that lowering
of the general level of culture that heralds,
all around Augustine, the onset of the
barbarian age), 518.
^130. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 1:941. Johann
Zellinger, “Der Beifall in der altchristlichen
Predigt,” in Festgabe Alois Knopfler
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1917), 403.
Eduard Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa vom
VI. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis in die Zeit der
Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner,
1898), 2:623-24.
^131. Henri Leclerq, “Panégyrique,” in Fernand
Cabrol and Henri Leclercq, Dictionnaire
d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturigie, 15
vols. (Paris: Letouzey and Ané, 1907),
13:1:1037-38.
^132. Ibid.; G. Manthey, “Il significato primitivo
della legenda ‘Pax perpetua’ sulle monete
degli imperatori romani,” Rivista di
Archeologia Cristiana 28 (1952): 45-75.
^133. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine IV, 26,
in PL 34:117-18. On the early Christian
abhorrence of rhetoric, Zellinger, “Beifall in
der altchristlichen Predigt,” 403-4.
^134. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical
Culture, 207-8; cf. Italo Lana, Velleio
Patercolo o della propaganda (Turin:
University of Turin, 1952), 261, 294.
^135. “Et les assistants applaudissent avec fureur
pour prouver leur fidélité" (and the assistants
applaud furiously in order to show their
loyalty). Leclerq, “Panégyrique,” in Cabrol
and Leclerq, Dictionnaire d’archéologie
chrétienne et de liturgie, 13:1:1043.
^136. Ibid., 13:1:1042-44.
^137. Thus in the great prototype of Latin
Panegyrics, that of Pliny the Younger to
Trajan, the orator protests loudly and
repeatedly that this is a sincere, not a
rhetorical, discourse: Pliny, Panegyricus 54
and 72-74.
^138. Combès, Saint Augustin et la culture
classique, 75. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa,
 2:623-24; Rohde, Der griechische Roman,
348.
^139. Rohde, Der griechische Roman, 348; Dio
Chrysostom, Discourse XXXVI, 18;
XXXVIII, 40; Polybius, Histories VI, 57.
^140. Raby, History of Secular Latin Poetry,
1:73; Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2:652.
^141. See n. 128 above; Engelbert Krebs, “Die
Geschichte der scholastischen Methode bis
zum Beginn des 13. Jahrunderts,” Römische
Quartalschrift 27 (1913): 33. Of a piece
with the panegyric was the grandiose
monumental architecture, “Panegyric in
stone” that the Middle Ages inherited from
this period, Gerke, “Verhältnis von Malerei
und Plastik,” 140, 159-60, 162-63; K. Felis,
“Die Niken und die Engel in altchristlicher
Kunst,” Römische Quartalschrift 26 (1912):
24-25. It was Gaul, “das Land der
Rhetoric,” that preserved antique culture
through the Middle Ages, Norden, Antike
Kunstprosa, 2:631-33.
^142. Marsili, “Roma nella poesia di Claudiano,”
21. The first three pages of Pliny’s model
 panegyric to Trajan (Pliny, Panegyricus)
contain the abstractions: castitas, sanctitas,
libertas, fides, veritas, humanitas,
frugalitas, clementia, liberalitas,
benignitas, continentia, potestas, pietas,
abstinentia, mansuetodo, divinitas,
temperantia, facilitas, amor, gaudium,
modestia, moderatio, virtus, gloria,
gratiae, laus, severitas, reverentia,
conordia, concentus, hilaritas, gravitas,
simplicitas, honor, dignitas, and maturitas.
A full-blown “Christian” vocabulary.
^143. John Chrysostom, De Incomprehensibili
Dei Natura III, 6, in PG 48:725; John
Chrysostom, De Baptismo Christi 1, in PG
49:363-65; John Chrysostom, Reprehensio
1, in PG 51:143-45; John Chrysostom, De
Melchisedeco, in PG 56:257; John
Chrysostom, Homily on Matthew XXXIII,
1-3, in PG 57:387-92; John Chrysostom,
Homilia 1, in PG 63:461-62, and Ecloga de
Non Contemnenda Ecclesia Dei et Sanctis
Mysteriis Homilia 9, in PG:623-25, 629.
^144. Frederick M. Powicke, Legacy of the
 Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938), 46.
The failure of Rome to capture the real
allegiance of Europe is the theme of
Powicke’s essay. See below, n. 150.
^145. Jordanes, Gothic History 36.
^146. András Alföldi, “Die Geburt der
kaiserlichen Bildsymbolik,” Museum
Helveticum 8 (1951): 215.
^147. Straub, “Christliche Geschichtsapologetik,”
63.
^148. John B. Bury, History of the Later Roman
Empire, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1958),
1:16.
^149. Rostovzeff, Social and Economic History,
469.
^150. Ladner, “Das heilige Reich des
mittelalterlichen Westens,” 149.
^151. John Bligh, “The ‘Edict of Milan’; Curse or
Blessing?” Church Quarterly Review 153
(1952): 309. Origen believed that conversion
to Christianity would save the Empire.
“Alas!” says Bligh, “Things did not turn out
that way. . . . Corruption and oppression
 continued unabated, and brought the
tottering Empire to its fall.” Ibid., 313. Have
we any guarantee that an even less pristine
Christianity can overcome that “corruption
and oppression” which earlier Christianity
could not even alleviate?
^152. Rostovzeff, Social and Economic History,
476.
^153. Ibid., 459; cf. 452-53, 457, 473: “There
was indeed equality of a negative kind, for
no political freedom was tolerated, no
remnant of self-government was left, no
freedom of speech, thought, or conscience
was permitted, especially after the victory of
Christianity.”
^154. Alföldi, Conflict of Ideas in the Late
Roman Empire, 40.
^155. Rostovzeff, Social and Economic History,
460.
^156. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical
Culture, 211.
^157. Athanasius, De Synodis (On the Councils)
I, 1-2 and 6-7, in PG 26:684, 689; Hilary, To
Constantius Augustus II, 6, in PL 10:566-
67, 569; cf. Philostorgius, Historia
Ecclesiastica II, 3, in PG 65:468; Basil,
Epistolae (Epistles) 82, in PG 32:457.
 Victoriosa Loquacitas: The
Rise of Rhetoric and the
Decline of Everything Else

The declining years of ancient

civilization were beset by a feverish
preoccupation with rhetoric which suggests
nothing so much as a hopeless alcoholic’s
devotion to the bottle. Everywhere the
ancients give us to understand that rhetoric is
their poison, that it is ruining their capacity
to work and think, that it disgusts and
wearies them, and that they cannot let it
alone, because it pays too well and, having
destroyed everything else, it is all they have
left of remembered grandeur. It should be
immediately apparent that this arresting
phenomenon may have more than an
academic interest for our own age;
nevertheless, from this point on the reader, if
there be such, must draw all his own
parallels and conclusions. Our bemused and
saddened gaze is directed to the ancient
scene alone.
But was rhetoric a specific thing that we
should make such wild charges against it?
That is a question the ancients themselves
often asked. “It is often claimed,” says
Cicero, “that there is no such thing as an art
of speaking.” People protest, he explains,
that the greatest orators never took a lesson,
that the subject matter of rhetoric is dubia et
incerta (questionable and uncertain) since an
orator can speak on anything, and that public
speaking is an essential part of many
professions rather than a monopoly of one.
Hence, fine speech may be a gift or talent,
but it is not a science or art.1 To these
objections our Tully gives the stock answers,
which in his opinion outweigh them: the
“great orators” in question were such only in
the common report of the vulgar and by
proper standards would perhaps not deserve
the name of orator at all; it is true that speech
is a gift of nature but nature’s gifts can
always be made into something finer by a
proper discipline;2 as to vagueness of
substance, if you want to insist on the
rigorous rules of science “then it seems to
me that there is no such thing as an ars
oratoris [speaker’s art],” but are we bound
by such rules? What difference does it make
whether it is an ars or not, so long as it does
something that no other discipline can do?
After all is said, the orator remains a
specialist unique in his kind, and once he has
been briefed on any subject “can speak on it
far more elegantly (ornate) even than the
man who taught him about it.”3
 By far the most common ancient
definition of rhetoric (Quintilian concludes
after a survey of the field) is simply vis
persuadendi, the power of faculty or skill of
persuading.4 Corax, the father of the art,
called it that; Dio Chrysostom calls it “the
technique or skill of persuading the many.”
“The goal of the orator’s trade is to
persuade,” says the great Augustine; the
business of rhetoric is to move people, to
make an impression.5 That is also the
business of music, poetry, and drama, and
Cicero duly observes that the orator has
much to learn from the masters in those
fields, and as they have their props and
instruments so he has his: he works with the
spoken word and must know not only how to
make words ring with conviction but also
which words will convince.6
Neither the definition nor the nature of
rhetoric changed throughout the long
centuries of classical antiquity. Compare a
description of the rhetoric of the fifth century
B.C. with that of the fifth century A.D.:
The rhetorical art of the Old Sophistic
[writes Schmid] aimed at convincing the
thinking man by compelling arguments
or veiled and misleading pseudo-
arguments, by undeniable truth or its
substitute, by a carefully worked-out
probability made indistinguishable from
truth itself, to the point of winning his
assent to the speaker’s proposition; it
sought to inspire confidence in the
speaker as a solid and irreproachable
Citizen, hence the emphasis on a
blameless public life—even if it was so
only in appearance.7
St. Augustine has given [says Father
Combès] a rigorous and convincing
(achevée) analysis of all the parts, all the
powers, and all the seductions of the
rhetorical art, showing that it is necessary, in
order to inspire the soul of one’s hearers
with the frisson sacre, to seize upon that soul
by means of a learned dialectic, to charm it
by a cunning oratory, draw it along by a
moving eloquence and, before everything, to
multiply the prestige of the spoken word by
that of a virtuous life.8 In almost a thousand
years all that changed was the nature of the
audience, which had become under the
tutelage of rhetoric less intellectual and more
emotional.
Ancient rhetoric achieved its perfection
in three rapid steps. The first is represented
by the untutored eloquence of the great
statesmen of the Periclean Age, with
Pericles himself as the classic example, the
second by the conned and written speeches
of the next generation, and the third, which
overlaps the others in time but survives them
by many centuries, by the activities of the
professional orators, beginning with the
Sophists.9
Philosophy plus rhetoric produces
Sophistry. “The Old Sophistic,” says
Philostratus, “considered rhetoric necessary
to Philosophy.”10 The man who first most
successfully promoted the formal study of
rhetoric was that same Gorgias whom the
Sophists hailed as the father of their art.11 By
mixing rhetoric with philosophy he turned it
to Sophistry, for which offense Plato takes
him grimly to task. The charge is that he is
turning his talents from the honest search for
truth to the business of cultivating
appearances.12 That is exactly what his
teacher Empedocles (whom the younger
Aristotle calls the inventor of rhetoric)13 had
done; fretting like Dr. Faustus at the
limitations of the mind and despairing of
arriving at truth in the short span of a human
life,14 Empedocles found satisfaction in
pretending before the public that he had
already achieved all knowledge and
power.15 He becomes the most magnificent
of quacks and the father of a long line of
skillful impostors whose success depended
wholly on their adroit and irresistible sales
talk.
Gorgias was as disillusioned as his
teacher; he wrote three famous books to
prove (a) that nothing exists, (b) that if it did,
we could not know it, (c) that if we could,
we could not communicate our knowledge to
another, and having thus thoroughly debunked
the program of searching for truth the hard
way, cultivated a new and wonderful art of
finding success the easy way. He worked out
a technique, says Philostratus, which enabled
him to speak off-hand on any and all
subjects, and to prove or disprove any point
on demand, thereby bringing against himself
the shocked and scandalized charge of
“making the worse appear the better
reason.”16 Traveling everywhere, he proved
to the world that “nothing could stand up to
the arts of the rhetor”; displaying with
words, which captivated the fancy of the
rising generation and all that followed, was
actually a philosophical nihilism, Schmid
points out, that made a hash of all values,
including the sacred nomos—the moral
order of society—itself.17
Gorgias shares with his friend
Protagoras the glory and guilt of selling
rhetoric to the world. Protagoras concluded
that he was wasting his time trying to sound
the secrets of the universe in a short lifetime,
burned his books in the marketplace, and
turned to teaching rhetoric, achieving the
immortal fame of being the first man to make
a hundred minas at the trade.18 His famous
dictum that man is the measure of all things
led only too easily to the rhetorical gospel
that anything goes, “the Philistine morality”
which in the end destroyed Greek
civilization.19 Among a long list we cite only
these two, the first and greatest of the
Sophists; in proportion as their successors
were less gifted than the masters, they were
less scrupulous. With the so-called Second
Sophistic the rhetorical schools, having won
over the emperors to their program and
thereby having gained control of public
education, no longer felt it necessary to
continue the old lip-service to science and
philosophy but openly opposed and bested
them at every turn. “A host of men
possessing small knowledge and no skill,”
says one observer, completely captivated the
public by substituting sweet sounds for
ideas; issues gave way to personalities, the
most popular speaker being the best
entertainer.20 The Second Sophistic aimed at
nothing but selling the public exactly what it
wanted; the freshness and cockiness of the
Old Sophistic that had enabled its key
figures to match wits and words with a
Socrates, a Plato, or an Anaxagoras in a
brilliant tussle of ideas was gone, and in its
place was only a shrewd and studious
striving to please.21 The Sophists had
outbrazened the old reproaches and by a
generation of calculated charm and
magnanimity made the name of Sophist an
honorable and envied one; “the confidence
and self-satisfaction of these men show that
they were entirely unaware of the utterly
decadent nature of their accomplishment.”22
To the ancient mind the apex of human
success, the highest prize to which any man
could attain, was to be a Sophos, one of
those heroes of the mind, typified by the
Seven Sages, who, after giving wise laws
and examples to their own cities, wandered
free of earthly passions and attachments
through the universe, selfless and aloof, as
spectators of God’s works, seeking only
knowledge and carrying with them the
healing blessing of true wisdom, especially
of statemanship, for all who sought or
needed it.23 Hailed by adoring multitudes—
who often saw the aura of divinity around
them—humbly petitioned by great cities and
magnificent potentates, these incorruptible
wise men represented the pinnacle of real
human attainment.24 This matchless success,
the very essence of success, was from
Empedocles on the particular objective of
rhetoric, the Sophists fancying themselves as
true successors of the Sophoi.25 Like them,
they sought to give laws to cities, reconcile
warring factions, advise governors and
emperors, instruct communities on matters of
public health and economics, and serve as
commentators and guides in world affairs.26
The very first Sophists had found vast
captive audiences waiting for them, whole
nations assembled at the great games and
convocations of cities to which they were
sent as ambassadors.27 In the later period
from the heart of Asia to the Pillars of
Hercules we behold great cities assembled
in the breathtaking splendor of the theater,
hanging on the words of the great traveling
orator—between the elephant act and the
great rape scene.28 He tells them funny
stories and improving homilies, he boldly
rebukes their defects and excesses, orders
the huge throng like a child to behave itself,
or commends it on its good order and fine
appearance. He delights the city with an
outsider’s praise of its size and shining
beauty, or pours withering scorn on its luxury
and immorality. He flatters his hearers’
intelligence with his confidential manner as
the great news-commentator who knows the
inside stuff, discussing big world issues in
clever, conceited, short-winded discourses.
And they listen to him for centuries on end
because he represents civilization and saves
them from boredom. “All I ask,” cries the
great Chrysostom to the people of
Alexandria, “is to be counted among your
diversions.”29 So they shouted themselves
hoarse and paid cash on the line.
And the Sophist, unlike the Sophos, took
the cash. The classic test of the early
Christians by which one distinguished
between a true and a false prophet was
whether the man took money or not. The
same test marked the Sophist from the
Sophos, according to Plato. The teaching of
rhetoric, says Dio Chrysostom, should raise
up a generation of orators to be “saviors of
their cities,” only unfortunately he must
report that the prospective demigods are
wholly absorbed in the quest for fame and
money.30 “People thought Hippias, Polus,
and Gorgias were real Sophoi," he says. “I
can’t put on a show like they did, either
mantic, sophistic, rhetorical, or flattering.”31
It is plain what they were after and how they
intended to get it.
The key to the Sophist-rhetorical
technique of persuasion is probability. By
clever syllogisms the trained rhetor could
turn any proposition into a probability,
which he could in turn build into a certainty
by high-powered emotional appeal. That
was the orator’s one-two punch that nothing
could stand up to—first to the head, then to
the solar plexus—the characteristic Sophist
combination of genuine mental adroitness
with unabashed hamming.32 The main thing
was to establish the probability. The first
Sophists showed the way to do this by
breaking down the thing that made the
Greeks uniquely great, the high moral wall
between seeming and being.33 Seeming is as
near as you can ever get to being, Protagoras
and Gorgias argued—doxa, appearance, is
all we ever have to go by anyway; we can
never really say that a thing is so, but only
that it seems so—“Man is the measure of all
things.” The best training for the orator,
Cicero declares, is to “dispute about
everything, taking both sides of every
question and picking out whatever appears
probable in every proposition.”34 The less
truth there is in an orator’s cause, his Brutus
declares, the better the job he must do from
the probability angle.35 “The aim of
rhetoric,” says Celsus, “is to speak with
persuasion on dubious subjects of public
interest.”36 Clement of Alexandria has given
an interesting analysis of rhetorical
argument, its starting point, its method or
procedure, and its final goal. The beginning,
he says, is the probable, an opinion or an
appearance; the process is that of feeling
one’s way (epicheirema), taking cues from
the opposition, adroitly shifting back and
forth between logic and emotion (when the
opponent gets emotional, call him down to
earth, when he appeals to reason, ask where
his heart is); and the goal is to cause a
sensation, pull off a personal triumph, and
become an object of wonder and
admiration.37 In every case the probable is
the little handful of stuff on which the orator
goes to work; his business is to build it up
into something great. “The highest merit of
eloquence,” writes Cicero, “is to amplify the
object of discussion . . . to exaggerate and
amplify by speech.”38 “The rhetorical trade
makes small things great and great things
small,” says Plato.39 A classic illustration of
this is Lysias’s famous oration of the fig tree.
It is apparent from the beginning and the
conclusion of the oration that it had been
proved to everyone’s satisfaction that the
sacred fig tree that Lysias’s client was
charged with having destroyed had not
existed; there had been a mistake. One would
think that would settle the matter, but that is
the point where Lysias takes up his argument.
It is not the facts about the fig tree that
interest him but the probabilities of the case:
would his client be the type of man to do
such a thing if there had been a fig tree? That
for him is the whole issue. It is not surprising
that the orator lives in a world of high-
sounding intangibles—res, humanitas,
honores, savitas, officia, gratiae, laus,
commendationes, admiratio, and so forth—
which on every page of Cicero’s letters turn
out to be but a verbal screen for a hard and
sordid game of exploitation and survival
played without scruples and without
loyalties. “We must allow the rhetor to make
false, daring, somewhat misleading and
captious statements,” Gellius smugly
observes, “providing he keeps within the
bounds of probability,” and he disarmingly
explains that the rhetor must be permitted
that latitude since it is his business to stir
people up, his gravest offense being not the
championing of falsehood but any refusal to
defend it in a client’s interest.40
Such statements as that, meant to be a
defense of the profession but actually a
rather damaging indictment of rhetoric,
proclaim the uneasiness that is never far
from the surface of ancient treatises on
oratory, the awareness that there is
something basically wrong about the thing.
No one denied, of course, that rhetoric could
be abused—“cannot any good thing be
misused?” asks Antony,41 but the question
was whether it was bad as such, by nature.
That was a disturbing question which could
hardly be asked of an honest trade, and the
rhetoricians hurt their case by protesting too
much, constantly calling attention to the
billowing smoke by insisting that the fire
was not a serious one. Everywhere the
defenders of ancient rhetoric give the thing
away by unconsciously damaging statements:
the Sophists, for example, claimed to be
proud of their calling, yet the worst thing one
Sophist could call another was a Sophist.42
Themistius, a dean of Sophists and rhetoric,
protested to his university colleagues that he
deserved to be called a philosopher rather
than a rhetorician, since he spoke the truth.43
Gellius claims that Metellus’s speeches are
so honest that they actually deserve to be
read by philosophers, and that his honesty is
so great that he never has to avail himself of
every orator’s rightful prerogative of lying.44
It is usual to call any very clever man a
rhetor, according to Philostratus, “even if he
is honest.”45 St. Augustine is no doubt
reflecting the same popular sentiment when
he concludes a letter, whether unconsciously
or in jest, “But I must restrain myself, lest I
be thought by you to be engaging in
rhetorical rather than truthful activities.”46
Certainly he, like the other great fathers of
his century, admitted that rhetoric was a false
and mendacious art, even while confessing
that he found it a very useful and attractive
one.47 Cicero’s very proper assurance that a
rhetor will not hesitate to speak the truth
when it serves his purpose48 is more
damaging than any long catalogue of charges
brought against rhetoric by its enemies. And
how he gives himself away in his impatience
with the philosophers’ manner of delivery!
The philosophical style, he says with
distaste, is much too soft, it lacks popular
appeal, it is not ear-catching, has nothing
punchy about it, no emotional fireworks—no
volcanic rage, fierce accusations, pathetic
appeals, nothing sharp and cunning: “It is
chaste and upright,” he concludes, “an
uncorrupted virgin, so to speak.”49 And what
was his rhetoric by contrast?
The final plea of the orators in defense
of their art was the protest that unscrupulous
and unqualified men had misrepresented it
inside the profession and out. Rhetoric is a
terrible instrument in the hands of the wrong
man, we are assured; it is often necessary to
defend things like murder which, though bad
in themselves, are under certain
circumstances innocent and praiseworthy—
the orator can make them seem good or bad
at will, and so the most important
qualification for every orator to have is
honest intent, without which “nothing is more
pernicious in public or private affairs than
eloquence.”50 So we get the constant refrain
that the orator must be a paragon of virtues;
his is the most difficult and demanding of all
arts requiring qualities of character and
brain that are virtually non-existent in this
imperfect world.51 Rhetoric is the art of
perfection itself; if it is not perfect, it is
nothing, for nothing is sadder than a great
attempt that falls short.52 There is no excuse
for stupidity here, let alone immorality;
rhetoric should be left strictly alone by those
not properly endowed for it.53 But who is
properly endowed? To that question the
experts threw up their hands in despair and
declared in a single voice that the perfect
orator simply does not exist. The choice was
between perfection and a fiasco—and
perfection was out of the question!
If nothing is rarer than a good orator,
nothing is commoner than bad ones. The
rewards of rhetoric are tremendous; are such
rewards to be left lying about unclaimed
until the perfect orator comes along? As
might be expected, the worst people took to
rhetoric like ducks to water.54 For rhetoric
preached the gospel of success. The chance
for everyone to “succeed” was, Mommsen
declares, the soul and essence of the
principate, its justification for being, and its
driving power.55 It was the school of
rhetoric under the benign patronage of the
Good Emperor that offered this plum to
every ambitious youth in the Empire, and
“people of every class became inflamed
with a desire to achieve the new
‘success.’”56 The orator’s philosopher, says
Cicero, is not Aristotle (who loathed
rhetoric), but Carneades, because he was
always successful: “He never supported a
cause that didn’t win or opposed one that did
not fail.”57 Lucian illustrated the spirit of
rhetorical education in his story of the young
man who came to Harmodes, the greatest
flute player of the time, to take lessons, with
the specification that he was interested not in
becoming a good flautist but only in
becoming a successful one.58 Which is a
reminder that Isocrates, the founder of the
first real school of rhetoric, ruled against the
flute as a waste of time—it didn’t pay off.59
From the time of Isocrates on, wrote
William Schmid, “naked self-interest . . .
ruled in the rhetorical schools.”60 Success
meant getting ahead: all else was eliminated.
Cicero simply cannot understand those
Greeks who actually like to talk about things
that are both hard and impractical in the
schools; those people have no word for
“inept,” he says with scorn, but play with
ideas for their own sake; that for him is
against the whole spirit and purpose of
rhetoric, which aims to get results and no
funny stuff—we should keep our boys away
from such studies, he cautions.61 Why study
anything but rhetoric? is Seneca’s
challenge:62 what good is astronomy except
for fixing horoscopes and keeping
appointments? “Mathematics teaches me to
make of my fingers organs of avarice,”—that
is as far as Seneca can see; music is no
good, he says, because it will not stop fears
or still appetites, as rhetoric will; “geometry
teaches me to measure a field, how much
better to know how to measure a man?”—
human engineering is what pays; and who
cares about the niceties of grammar when
you can sell people without them?63
Seneca’s interest in things went only so far
as they would support his case; but even the
case concerned him wholly and simply as a
pretext for pushing his own career cupit
enim se approbari, non causam was his
slogan—“it is yourself you are selling after
all.”64
For the rhetor success meant three things
—fame, wealth, and power. Fame came first;
it is the one thing every orator wants. The
rhetorical brotherhood glamorized their
success with great skill both because they
enjoyed doing so and because it helped
business, and the youth of the world became
easily obsessed by an insanum gloriae
studium. Praise and glory are what everyone
wants in this life without exception, Cicero
insists; for his own part, whatever he does
has just one object: “To plant in the world an
everlasting memorial of myself.”65 Let no
one bring prudish charges of vanity or
selfishness against this, for “even the
philosophers inscribe their names on those
very books which they write against love of
fame!”66 Even the rhetors who affected
intellectual superiority to such things sulked
terribly when people failed to recognize and
applaud them in public places.67
People admire rhetors, Philostratus
reports, much as they admire skillful doctors,
seers, musicians, and even artisans, but in
this particular case their admiration is mixed
with caution—they distrust the admired
orator as a man who is out to promote
himself and and will use any means to do
it.68 The rewards of rhetoric were great in
polite society, the business world, and
politics.69 The government sponsored the
rhetorical schools as “nurseries for
statesmen,” from which it could always
replenish the ranks of high government
officials.70 Pathetically eager to recognize
even the feeblest signs of talent with
"$50,000 grants for $100 ideas” the state
actually cut the sinews of true statesmanship
by confining the training of its gifted citizens
to the make-believe world of the schools—a
toy world of toy ideas.71 Still, however
poorly trained, “the high officials,” Philo
observed, “are simply overwhelmed by an
uncontrollable stream of wealth.”72 The
orator was a pusher who never missed a
chance to put individuals under obligation to
him—“vobis honori et amicis utilitati et
republicae emolumento esse” (to be a glory
to yourselves, a benefit to your friends, and a
source of profit to the state).73 They kept
careful track of personal credits like funds in
a bank, a regular bookkeeping of honors and
obligations (you find it in Cicero’s letters)
that could be incurred by words and paid off
in the same coin. Words were legal tender,
but the rates were not fixed. “Bassus brings
you an empty purse and a speech,” Libanius
writes in a letter of recommendation. “Thank
God who has given us eloquence, and
remember that you owe your own position as
head of a province to your talent as a
speaker. . . . Reward Bassus and thereby you
will encourage others to study rhetoric.”74
In its vagueness and all-pervasiveness
the term rhetoric came very close to our
own “business,” or better, “public
relations.” No one could say exactly what it
was, yet no one had the slightest doubt about
its real nature or its absolutely predominant
place in the world. The rhetorician was a
general promoter, ingratiating himself with
powerful individuals or groups to run off
with a handsome cut of the profits from
clever deals engineered by himself, handling
other people’s affairs in the law courts,
guiding political opinion, generally flattering
and running errands for the great—the god
Mercury, the winged messenger and factotum
with the money-bags. Hermes the thief, with
the ready tongue and winning manners shows
how established the type really is. The rhetor
is “a pushing, driving, money-chasing
operator,” says Lucian, “who leaves any
sense of decency, propriety, moderation, and
shame at home when he goes to work.”75 “I
do not make money,” Dio protests, “I am not
interested in crooked deals. . . . I do not
promote things in the market place—for I am
not a rhetor!”76 “During those years,”
Augustine confesses in lush rhetorical terms,
“I taught the art of rhetoric, and, myself the
victim of cupidity, trafficked in . . .
loquacity.”77 “I hate to say it,” another one of
the greats confesses, “but verecundia
(modesty, decency, restraint), in itself a most
amiable trait, is a positive vice in an orator,
since it will make him hesitate, change his
mind, or even stop talking to think things
over.” The remedy for this infirmity is, he
says, fiducia, complete self-confidence.78
That was Gorgias’s secret of success in the
beginning: never lose your never—keep
talking no matter what happens. Some of the
most humane and sensitive men, like
Libanius, Themistius, or the great bishops of
the fourth century, showed uncanny skill and
dexterity in trimming and double-talk that
kept them in lucrative government positions
under the utterly conflicting policies and
tyrannical administrations of such emperors
as Constantine, Constantius, Julius, and
Theodosius. Theirs was the “flexanima atque
omnium regina oratio,” the always-winner
that could talk anybody out of anything.79 On
the lower level, the cities swarmed with
fast-talking operators who could always get
it for you wholesale and whose skill at
making something super-colossal out of
nothing was excelled only by their know-
how in the art of smearing.80
As the Sophos was unattached and
incorruptible, so the Sophist was unattached
and irresponsible. As a speaker he was not
held responsible for what he said in the heat
of an address,81 and as a politician he
answered to no one but himself.82 Critias
was not responsible for wrecking Athenian
democracy, Philostratus insists, for it was
doomed anyway. So with a clear conscience
he left his ruined city to spend years of
plotting and intrigue in other cities and
finally retired in the odor of wealth and
sanctity, leaving a trail of wreckage behind
him.83 The Sophist who told a young man
that he could get mentioned in all history
books by killing Philip of Macedon felt no
pangs of guilt when the fellow carried out
the deed; had not Gorgias protested with
wide-eyed innocence: “If a rhetor chooses to
use his skill for evil ends, is that any reason
for hating his teacher or expelling him from
the cities?”84 “Your mind is sick,” Diogenes
told a rhetor, “but your tongue feels
nothing.”85 What is wrong with that?
Isocrates asks with impatience. Is it a crime
to want to get ahead in the world?
Everybody works for money; what is wrong
with talking for money? Doesn’t everybody
practice piety, justice, and other virtues for
what they can get out of them?86
This unwillingness to accept
responsibility, which reaches its perfection
in the great Christian orators of the fourth
century,87 went hand in hand with a cynical
admiration for the clever ruse, the lie that
was not a lie: the world recalled with
delight how Protagoras was taken into court
by one of his students who had promised to
pay him a huge fee in case he won his first
lawsuit. The complaint was that Protagoras
was overcharging, and it was the young
man’s first case, so that if he lost he would
not have to pay Protagoras anything, and if
he won he would, of course, not pay. The
same story was told of Corax and Tisias, the
traditional founders of rhetoric.88
It was always remembered that there
was a bad as well as a good side to rhetoric;
but what was not recognized was a fatal
Gresham’s Law by which bad rhetoric, art,
and education, like bad money, will always
force the better product out of circulation.89
There can be no truce between the two, since
each is a standing rebuke to the other.
Socrates made this clear when he declared
no quarter with the half-truths of the
Sophists, who were just as determined to
settle his hash as he was theirs—and in the
end succeeded, as he predicted they would.
He explains how this Gresham’s Law works
when he assures Gorgias that a pastry cook
prescribing only dessert to his foolish
patients can always put an honest doctor out
of business.90 The teachers of rhetoric
competed openly and brazenly for students,
first against the philosophers, and then, once
the state had guaranteed support of at least
three Sophist teachers even in the smallest
town, against each other.91 The competition
was terrific, with each professor, like
Socrates’ pastry cook, promising easier and
shorter courses than anyone else, along with
assurances of good jobs, big pay, and
brilliant careers—" And you can do it all
lying down!” said the prospectus.92
Just as no parent who could possibly
afford it would deny his child decent
clothing, so ran the argument, so neither
could he deny them the more essential
adornments of the mind on which society
placed an even greater value.93 Everybody’s
children had to go to school—but not to
study!94 They came for fun and horseplay, “a
spoiled and conceited generation, insistent
on knowing all the answers overnight,”
impatient of any work or restraint, without
reverence for anything but success.95
Rhetoric, of course, was all they ever
studied: “Parents don’t want their children to
study the hard way,” Petronius complains,
but “insist that eloquentia is that most
important thing in the world and expose them
to it from infancy.”96 We are not interested in
making experts, the most successful
educationist of his day announced, “all we
intend to give the student is enough
background to enable him to follow the
authors.”97 This background was the skopos
or prothesis, that is, the “main idea” of each
subject, the flimsy skeleton to which rhetoric
would supply any desired amount of flesh.
This was the ultimate development in
rhetorical education, the final, Neoplatonic
stage, which in time reduced all thought to
impotence.98
In his discussion with Socrates Gorgias
repeatedly confirmed the definition of a
rhetor as one who addresses an ochlos—the
“multitude” is the audience to whom he
normally appeals in the interest of his
clients. Accordingly the values of rhetoric
are quantitative: How much? and How
many? are the questions it always asks.
Gloria like wealth is a function of size
alone: the greater the cheering multitude the
greater the glory and success of the one
cheered. There is no exception to the rule,
for all the fastidious and hypocritical
protests of those scholarly rhetors who
affected to despise the mob. Rhetoric,
according to Augustine, is the art which,
animated by necessity rather than “purity,”
scatters to the populace from its overflowing
bosom (the Roman equivalent of pockets) an
abundance of delights, thus leading them to
comply with his interests.99 You can get what
you want out of people if only you give them
what they want—without question and
without hesitation. The rhetor, says Philo, is
the slave of a thousand masters, the public is
a whore, and he is her minion and her lap-
dog.100 “What do you want me to do?” cries
Dio Chrysostom to the people of his native
city; “I’ll do it!”101 In Cicero’s opinion
Rutilius was the perfect orator in
background, training, and native endowment,
and yet he was a conspicuous failure
because of one fatal defect: “He could not
sufficiently accommodate himself to popular
taste.”102 No one who gets into this business
has a right to be fastidious: “necesse est aut
imiteris aut oderis”—unless you are
prepared to go all the way to please the mob,
you had better avoid it altogether.103 When
an anxious parent asked Antisthenes where
he should educate his son, the philosopher
answered, “If you expect him to spend his
days among the gods make him a
philosopher, but if he expects to live among
people make him a rhetor!”104
The orator must stoop to conquer, and a
quick and frightening rebuke awaits him if he
does not stoop low enough. For all his
toadying, Dio was banished for being
unsociable, Libanius had to clear himself of
the same terrible charge, and Apuleius was
investigated time and again because he was
suspected of being an introvert.105 Go easy
on philosophy, Cicero advises, don’t talk
over people’s heads—they don’t like orators
who make them feel stupid; best keep your
books at home for private leisure.106 He
might have cited the case of Hermodorus,
who was banished from the illustrious city of
Ephesus because he was guilty of excelling
in something: “If he must excel,” they said,
“let him go and excel over somebody
else!”107 Cicero’s own opinion is that “an
orator is pleasanter and more plausible to
listen to” when he doesn’t indulge in a lot of
high-brow stuff. “Everything must be
accommodated to the common judgment and
popular intelligence,” for the rhetor sells to
everybody.108 To find out exactly what
people wanted was the hardest part of the
rhetor’s work and the secret of his success; it
was the canvass or survey, the careful trial-
and-error game of empeiria, “to pick out just
those things that appeal most to listeners, and
not only delight them, but entertain without
ever tiring them.”109 Once you had that, the
rest was easy, simply “to scratch and tickle
the ears of those who want to be tickled,”
taking care never to speak harshly to them.110
The landslide of vulgarization once
started could not be stopped. Good men
were intimidated and banished from the
cities by mobs who could always count on
finding orators that would never contradict
them, society reserving its richest rewards
for those who could justify, condone, and
confirm its vices.111 Even a strong-minded
emperor who tried to stem the tide could
wreck his cause by refusing to play along
with the show-bred city crowds, and even
risk his person if he dared to talk back to
them.112 The orating bishop who tried to
introduce a fancy word or new idea into his
sermon might find an angry congregation
shouting back at him, or even have a riot on
his hands.113 There was only one thing to do,
as Augustine observed: don’t fight the stream
—go with it: vae tibi, flumen moris humani!
Quis resistet tibi? (Woe unto you, stream of
human custom. Who can resist you?).114 “For
all his intellectuality,” McGiffert writes of
the saint, “he was instinctively a conformist
and could never be quite happy unless the
majority agreed with him.”115 “What society
as a whole believes,” Augustine announces,
“that we also believe, and without an inkling
of doubt, even though there is not the
slightest evidence that it is true.”116 He
would have been as nonplussed as was
Polus, the ardent defender of rhetoric, when
Socrates told him that though he bring all the
important people in the world to support his
cause, “I only am left alone and cannot
agree, for you do not convince me; you only
produce many false witnesses against me, in
the hope of depriving me of my heritage,
which is the truth.”117 That is the opposite
pole from the rhetorical gospel, that the
difference between true and false, right and
wrong, good and bad, success and failure, is
the difference between twenty and fifty
decibels of applause.
To the pagan as to the Christian orator
no sight is more thrilling, no authority more
compelling, than that of the multitude
assembled in the theater (cf. fig. 17).118 The
favorite device of the great rhetor is the
ecstatic peroration in which the whole
human race is depicted as one magnificent
congregation, praising, condemning,
pleading, or acclaiming in a single
thunderous voice.119 The speaker identified
himself completely with his hearers: no
orator can be eloquent without an audience,
Cicero insists.120 “Me too” (in quo et me)
might be taken as Augustine’s slogan and the
secret of his success.121 He frankly
recommends a low, vulgar, and amusing style
as the most valuable acquisition of the
Christian orator and wholeheartedly
practices what he preaches in his tasteless,
artificial, profuse, and immensely popular
sermons.122
 Figure 17. The visual arts of the
period recorded the pervasive
influence of rhetoric by its
recognized symbol, the upraised
two fingers of the right hand. On an
 ivory panel (A), c. A.D. 400, a
Roman judge dictates the law to his
secretaries while acclaimed by two
men below, all three making the
oratorical gesture. It was also used
by masked actors (B), as in
manuscript Terence, c. A.D. 300, as
well as by worshipers of the
Eastern god Sabazios (C), who sits
making the sign on a bronze hand in
the same position, c. A.D. 200-400.
Christian sculptors merely
continued the long tradition when
they depicted Christ delivering the
Sermon on the Mount (D) in this
sarchophagus fragment, c. A.D.
300. The Lord is represented giving
the Divine Law, dressed as a Greek
philosopher, making the gesture
that will later become known as the
benedctio latina.
 But rhetoric did more than bow before
the storm: it worked hard to create and
intensify it, beginning with the first political
speakers who “systematically debauched”
the people for their votes.123 In the early
days, according to Cicero, it was the good
sense of the public that acted as a brake on
the orators: “semper oratorum eloquentiae
moderatrix fuit auditorum prudentia”; and
one of the first reactions to the professional
rhetors in Rome was to expel them from the
city.124 This “prudence of the auditors” had
to be broken down, and was: when Galba
tried to appeal to Roman “primitive
inflexibility and excessive strictness” he
only hurt his cause, says Tacitus, “for we
cannot endure the excess of these virtues
nowadays.”125 The same thing happened
among the Greeks, where the first reaction to
the Sophist techniques was one of shock and
alarm, and only an intensive campaign of
debunking established values, confounding
commonsense conclusions, and turning on a
vast amount of charm, wit, and synthetic
sincerity succeeded in breaking down the
general sales resistance. But once it was
broken, the talkers, “the yokes of the
empire,” as Ammianus calls them, had it all
their own way.126 Theirs was the big-city
world of late antiquity, a jazz world, hard,
restless, and superficial, suffering from
chronic theatromania and eternally jiving
and jumping to the latest hit tunes.127
Everywhere there is an insistence on the
folksy, the easy, and the commonplace in this
five-and-ten civilization that caters
especially to the tastes of women.128
This easy-going partiality to the cheap
and low-brow in no way reflected any real
humanity or humility, for lowness of taste
and morals was matched, as many an over-
intellectual rhetor learned to his sorrow, by a
fiercely arrogant insistence on stereotyped
uniformity and a quick suspicion of any hint
of independence or individuality. It was the
day of the large urban crowd, the warm-
weather, outdoor Mediterranean crowd,
healthy, excitable, superstitious, sweating,
and jostling at the games and shows.129 It
worshiped its fighters, its actors, and its
orators.130 Encouraged by the state to avoid
serious thinking, the crowd became under the
leadership of the experts not revolutionary or
radical but stoutly conservative,131 fond of
rough-house but mushily sentimental; in time
they even learned how to exchange
spontaneous tears and laughter for the nicety
and propriety of organized and directed
applause.132
The insatiable hunger of the people for
entertainment was matched by “an unbridled
passion for the spoken word.”133 There was
nothing they would not pay for
suaviloquentia, “pleasing speech,” the top-
selling novelty product of the Second
Sophist that caught on and stuck. The experts
knew exactly what would sell and what
would not; they had it all at their fingertips—
formulae that could get a reaction as quick
and predictable as a knee-jerk; even those
who knew how it was done, could not
escape “the noose of suaviloquentia." The
general public didn’t have a chance—the
rhetors simply get them drunk, says Lucian,
and go to work on them; flesh and blood can
no more resist the impact of a tried and
tested rhetorical assault than it can take a
cool appraising look at the Görgön’s head—
you are paralyzed before you know what hit
you.134 A properly trained rhetorician can
make his audience clay in his hands, helpless
automatons without a mind or will of their
own.135
 Rhetoric did not apologize for hitting
below the belt. Before an orator can stir an
emotion in other people, the teacher would
explain, he must first feel it in himself, and
“the nature of oratory is such that it moves
the orator more than it does any of his
hearers.”136 Who, then, could be more
sincere than the orator? Who will dare to say
his tears are not real? His profession
requires him to produce real tears. Is
rhetoric artificial? they ask, but what could
be more artificial than poetry, prose, or
dramatic composition? If actors can pretend
and imagine without shocking people, why
can’t rhetors? Do not philosophers take
either side of a question for purposes of
discussion—why shouldn’t we?137 The
answer is, of course, that of all these
practitioners the orator alone insists that he
is not doing what he is doing, namely acting.
As a crowning vindication of their ethics, the
rhetors neatly converted the truism that a
good orator must be a good man into the
corollary that rhetorical skill is proof of a
noble character.138
The effect of this sort of thing on serious
thought and learning can be imagined, but it
does not need to be: the whole history of the
Empire is there to illustrate it and to confirm
in every detail all the charges that Plato had
with unerring insight brought against rhetoric
in the beginning.139 Hippias, Gorgias, Polus,
Prodicus, and the other great Sophists
“achieved wonderful reputations,” Dio
Chrysostom recalls, “and acquired great
wealth in public activities from cities,
dynasts, kings, and private individuals. . . .
They spoke a great deal, but were sadly
lacking in intelligence,” and they confounded
issues and destroyed philosophy.140 It was in
their interest to do so, for they confessed that
public ignorance was their greatest ally and
that the less an audience knew about a
subject the more convincingly an orator
could handle it.141 No one would ever guess,
says Cicero with admiration, that his friend
Antony does not know Greek: by his
rhetorical art alone he can give the
impression more perfectly than any real
Hellenist can.142 Isn’t the knowledge of such
an art preferable to the piecemeal grubbing
out of harder and less rewarding stuff?
With the introduction of the Second
Sophistic the arts and sciences of the West
entered upon a period of decline from which
they were never to recover. At the same time
the school entered upon a career of
undreamed-of expansion and splendor. As
steadily as civilization sank in the scale the
school mounted on high, until the one
reached a peak of enduring glory and
authority at the very moment, in the fifth
century, when the other came to rest at its
final and permanent bathos. The cause of this
phenomenon, as Cauer has noted, was the
saturation of the Western mind: there came a
day when the cultural deposit of the past had
become too great for any mind to absorb,
while in the face of what had already been
done, all future creation lost heart.143 From
then on, learning the hard way had become
just too hard, and the creative spirit was left
with nothing to create. The only answer was
rhetoric, the wonderful art by which an
ordinary person could master all knowledge
“in his sleep,” and bring forth new and
original creations simply by rearranging the
familiar rhetorical building blocks in any
desired pattern. The very thing that stifled
learning was pure oxygen to the schools of
rhetoric. How easily they took over all the
functions of scholarship may be seen in the
case of the immortal Hermogenes. As a
boywonder (it was an age of praecoces
pueruli [precocious little boys]) he had
given exhibitions of his rhetorical skill
before the Emperor at the age of 15; his
sweeping and pretentious rhetoric convinced
the world that he was its greatest thinker, and
his writings on all subjects became
compulsory textbooks for generations to
come.144 Yet his actual contribution to
knowledge is exactly nil—he has nothing to
say. As the brain that feels for the whole
body is incapable of feeling itself or what is
happening to it, so the antique school seems
utterly incapable of judging of its own
ineptness. The actual productions of the
world’s most illustrious professors for
centuries on end are incredibly imbecile; in
reading them we blush for the authors, yet
they in perpetrating these childish horrors
are joyfully exhibitionistic of their very
worst traits, totally unaware of what a
shocking spectacle they make.145 Rhetoric,
like Mephistopheles, gave them success but
took away their brains in exchange.
By the fifth century the learning and arts
of the West present a horrible spectacle. As
rhetoric had broken the back of philosophy
by systematic sabotage and absorption, so
one by one it had occupied every field in
which money and fame could be earned.
Again it was Plato who had pointed out that
it was in its nature to do just that. Others
have told the story on which we need not
linger here; the poetry utterly devoid of life,
inanely and permanently preoccupied with
those abortive and fantastic devices so
admired in the schools: computistic rhythms,
acrostics, centos, picture poetry, neoteric
verse, and the rest; the scientific writings
reduced to mere displays of conventional
forms of expression and studied obscurity;
history and scholarship confined to
translations, commentaries, summas, and
epitomes; everywhere the strangely
monotonous and repetitious striving to be
stunningly different and impeccably
respectable at the same time, to pile a
humdrum Pelion on a conventional Ossa in
violent and cumulative attempts to achieve
the novel and sensational.146
It is no paradox that the gaudiest
excesses of rhetoric have a familiar ring.
The rhetorician’s business is to make an
irresistible impression immediately on large
numbers of people: his message must be
grasped and his persuasion succeed on the
first hearing—cool deliberation and the
gathering of facts would be fatal to his
profession.147 He has no choice but to “pour
it on”—copia is Cicero’s favorite word.
With satiation comes boredom—there must
be no satiation.148 Christianity gives rhetoric
a new lease on life, according to Augustine,
by providing the sore-pressed orator with a
materia grandis in which exaggeration is
impossible; from here on the orator can pour
out Niagaras of superlatives and still not
begin to do justice to an arsenal of absolutes.
Moreover, it brings a new spice to the jaded
appetites and yet requires nothing new either
of the speaker or the hearer, for the central
theme is God, the one theme most familiar to
the largest number of people: accordingly,
one never has to tell his hearers anything
they do not know already.149 The matter,
manner, and vocabulary of the Christian
sermon were borrowed whole-cloth from the
panegyric.150 Enormous economy of mental
effort was achieved by insisting on rigid
stereotypes in the rhetor’s techniques. When
rhetoric became Christian, according to
Norden, it bade a last farewell to ideas and
concerned itself henceforth “only with the
forms in which the idea had been clothed in
the Hellenistic world.”151 Augustine
compares the words of the pagan orators to
precious ornamental vases which he values
most highly—“only the wine of error they
contain displeases me.” The old rhetoric
interested him only as an empty jar, devoid
of content; as such he treasured it above all
else.152
From the second century on the chief
characteristic of every branch of science and
art is “the inability to create new
compositions.”153 The stereotype had
abolished the need of that: “things that bad
poets instinctively love to fashion,” are the
permanent legacy of rhetoric to literature.
Instead, everywhere we meet with the mania
for collecting, for cataloguing, for the
pointless quiz, the irrelevant “believe it or
not,” the literary and historical tags that lead
nowhere, the passion for merely stating
information. Strangely enough, real learning
was ignored, even as a means of making an
impression, and Ammianus can report in the
greatest days of the schools that the libraries
are shut up like tombs.154 In the rhetorical
education sponsored by Augustine, Marrou
perceives “un écho, une influence du
fléchissement général des études, de cet
abaissement du niveau général de la
civilisation, qui déjà tout autour d’Augustin,
annonce les temps barbares” (an echo, the
effect of a widespread decline in education,
of a lowering in the general level of culture,
all around Augustine, which heralds the
onset of the barbarian age).155 As ever the
rhetoricians themselves continued to protest
against the scandalous artificiality and
insincerity of their art—in the most artificial
and rhetorical terms!156
Some years ago it became fashionable
in informed circles to ascribe the emergence
of the Medieval mind to a process of
orientalization. Now while it is true that the
typically rhetorical is also the typically
Oriental and that the Rhetoric which
conquered the Western World was “the thing
that came from Asia,”157 what happened was
not a yielding to foreign pressure so much as
the running down of institutions to a point
where they reach a dead level to which the
East had sunk many centuries before and to
which it had become perfectly adapted. With
the triumph of rhetoric the West joins the
fraternity of fallen civilizations that live a
common, if not a congenial, life and share a
common mood. The Orient did not force
itself on the West but simply moved into a
vacuum.158
Turning to the East we find that rhetoric
has everywhere done its work and run its
course in past ages, and so rules with
uniform and undisputed sway from aeon to
aeon. All that reaches us from the Pyramid
Age of Egypt is a feeble and moralizing
literature that has survived only because it
was perpetuated and copied in the
schools.159 The papyri of the Old Kingdom
already display the fatal rhetorical passion
for saying the same thing in as many different
ways as possible, and by the Tenth Dynasty
all effort at creation seems to have ceased,
the writings of the time consisting solely of
endless learned citations from earlier
writings. The characteristically Egyptian
admonitions, the seboyet literature, laments,
and letters are simply school pieces to serve
as standards of form.160 Always it is the
sesh, the man trained in words, who sets the
tone; he it is “by whose speech others are
pleased,” “who is rescued from the mouth of
the vulgar and praised in the mouth of
important people”; he is the one “who will
never go hungry,” who will get ahead at
court, who is assured of an easy and
important career because he knows how to
speak pleasingly and write by the book.161
Insincerity and smugness mark the smooth,
copious, trite flow of phrases—“glatter
Phrasenschwulst” (pure bombast), Kees
calls it—that means success in public and
private life.162 “Style soon outlived its first
freshness, and gave way to an artificiality
and bombast which submerge the content.”163
The famous Eloquent Peasant belongs right
in our own Middle Ages with its exhausting
parallels and wearisome display of
rhetorical imagery.164 From the Middle
Kingdom on, according to Gardiner, “a
florid and metaphorical style” was
perpetuated as the “tales and semi-didactic
treatises . . . were copied and recopied in the
schools.”165 Finally with the Ramessid
period we reach the mood commonly
described as “typically Oriental,” in which
content vanishes and only spice, “the exotic
bloom of rhetoric,” remains, while restraint
and reason are thrown to the winds.166 The
next step is Alexandria, where the tradition
continues without a break and where Dio
Chrysostom found the city in his day given
over body and soul to the rhetors.167
It is the same with the Babylonians. The
student who learns the rules becomes an
important official, and among his fellows
“he shineth like the day.”168 From first to last
the school is supreme, with the result that
“no important addition appears to have been
made in nearly two millenniums” to any
branch of knowledge.169 “The period of
nearly 3,000 years through which the
monuments carry us,” writes Weber, “shows
in all essentials an unvarying picture of
intellectual life.”170 The vast heaps of tablets
yield nothing but an endless mechanical
repetition of the same stock stories and
figures; we look in vain for any sign of
evolution in this sort of thing, the experts
inform us—from century to century the
precious game goes on: a poem on the 360
uses of the palm, a debate between summer
and winter, a servant and a master, the palm
and the tamarisk, between two rival cities, a
tireless preoccupation with mere words,
with bizarre and studied archaisms, the
incredibly industrious but sloppy and
inaccurate rehashing of the same materials
with never a hint of originality or
remorse.171 The labors of the Babylonian
mind as described by Professor Meissner
are hardly to be distinguished from those of
our own Middle Ages as Professor Raby
describes them; they bear the same familiar
stamp, the indelible stamp of rhetoric.
The literature of the Arabs presents the
same appalling picture. Spengler’s
magischer Geist is but the thrall of rhetoric.
From the beginning “a few mediocre
textbooks completely ruled the schools for
centuries on end,”172 and the schools ruled
everything else with their maxim that correct
speech is more important than correct
thought.173 A thoroughly hackneyed
panegyric to the prophet in which he
displayed fifty-one rhetorical figures made
al-Ḥilli the greatest man in Baghdad, exactly
as a like panegyric to the Emperor had made
Sidonius the greatest man in Rome six
centuries before.174 By the eleventh century
the schools had brought the intellectual life
of Islam to a complete standstill; the culamā’
could think of nothing to do but to be
“continually rearranging and reordering the
materials at hand into new and meaningless
systems.”175 Heirs of the Sophist tradition
through Edessa and Alexandria, the Arabs
went the inevitable way of the rhetoric
school and by the thirteenth century had
reached familiar ground: mathematics
confined (as Seneca would have it) to the
reckoning of inheritances, astronomy to the
calculating of business and religious
engagements, medicine to the study of
astrology, and philosophy and theology to
fussy and pointless commentaries.176 Top-
notch scholars, utterly at a loss for ideas,
spent their days like the Sophists of old
traveling from university to university and
from mosque to mosque to give public
display to their wit and eloquence, or
attending conventions and busily writing up
their reports.177 As in rhetorical schools in
general, the most meticulous hair- splitting
goes hand in hand with the most wild and
undisciplined phantasy, but always the first
prize goes to the Flowers of Eloquence.178
The esthetic judgment of the schools “never
pays any attention to a composition as a
whole, but seeks poetic beauty only and
always in the isolated verse.”179 The story of
Kalila and Dimna, the oldest Arabic prose
work and to this day the most popular school
text in the East, is simply a sequel to the
Vitae Sophistarum, recounting the careers of
two foxy rhetors who traveled about from
court to court as teachers of political virtue
and tutors to princes; a good deal of the text
is taken up with their typically Sophistic and
thoroughly rhetorical discourses on how to
succeed in the world. Their slogan is, li-
kulli kalamatin jawāban, “for every
question there is an answer,” the maxim,
illustrated in so many Oriental tales, that a
ready tongue is equal to any emergency.180
But if Hajji Baba is a faithful
reincarnation of the clever Sophist, his type
is far older than Gorgias or even wily
Odysseus—it is the nominal offspring of
civilizations in collapse.181 There is no
geographical affinity between this sort of
thing and the soil of the East. The mind of
late antiquity was neither characteristically
Eastern nor Western but simply servile,182
the product of a world without moral
foundations.183 As Western civilization burnt
out, it came to look more and more like other
burnt-out civilizations—exactly as they had
visited Thebes-on-the-Nile in the fifth
century B.C., the scholars of the fifth century
A.D. visited Athens to enjoy its glamor and
prestige—and the resemblance naturally
facilitated all sorts of borrowings and
exchanges.184 However different the original
structures may have been, one pile of ashes
looks much like another. The most alarming
aspect of such ash-heaps is their
indestructibility—there is nothing left to
destroy, and so the rhetorical tradition is as
enduring as it is uniform. When all the arts
and sciences have reached the Dead Sea of
Rhetoric they simply stay there forever.
The much-debated “natural eloquence”
of the Bedouins raises the question to what
degree the high-flown, rhetorical, and
artificial style of various “barbaric” nations
(e.g., the Norse kenning) is the result of
contact with the decadent Greco-Roman
civilization and to what degree rhetoric itself
is “naturally barbaric.” Whatever the
answer, there is no question but that the
barbarians recognized in the rhetoric of the
schools an idiom very near to their own
minds and hearts. The faults of bad rhetors, it
was often noted, are conspicuously those of
barbarian rhetors. If barbarians were most
easily impressed by rhetoric, so were
women, children, and slaves. In East and
West it was the school, the rhetoric school of
late antiquity, that won over the barbarians to
another culture.185 No matter how
passionately they championed this or that
religion—pagan, Catholic, Arian, Moslem—
the kings of the tribes as one man went down
on their knees in common devotion to the
learning of the schools and took to
composing epigrams and inditing hollow
epistles in the starry-eyed conviction that
that was civilization. If the vices of
barbarian oratory were not actually acquired
from the schoolmen, they were certainly
confirmed and perpetuated by them.186
Simplifying, shortening, and spicing—
the trade secrets of the ancient rhetor’s as of
the modern journalist’s success—do have
absolute limits, and when these are reached
the rhetorical process has done its work. The
end product is something once thought to be
typically Oriental—the shadow theater of
comic book. In the typical Oriental romance
the labor of reading is supplanted by the
efforts of the graphic storyteller, whose
American counterpart is a pen-and-ink artist
capable, like his Eastern colleague, of mass-
producing amazingly vivid illustrations at
great speed. The skill of both these craftsmen
is readily explained by the fact that they are
simply drawing the same pictures over and
over again. The story is told in brief,
repetitive episodes, all strangely alike and
all richly spiced with sex and gore. A
wanton and meaningless procession of
extravagant images passes before us,
exaggerated to the point of insanity yet
hackneyed to the limit of dullness. In the old
familiar recital of dangers by land, sea, and
air we meet the same incredible monsters
again and again, the same men of superhuman
strength and women of sinister beauty, and
especially are we regaled by the same
routine declamations on the cruelty of life in
general and the present situation in
particular, with particular attention to the
tribulations of parted lovers. Mind is
supplanted by magic, the world becomes an
uncensored daydream full of wonderful
transformations and melodramatic
adventures.187 The rhetoric that fostered this
type of thinking ends up as “a wild jumble of
words [that] . . . aims at dramatic vividness
and merely succeeds in revealing his [the
orator’s] own mental nullity.” The world as
it passed from ancient to medieval times
“was in fact suffering from a sort of fatty
degeneration of the intellect,” expressed in
nothing more clearly than “the gush and
slobber” of its rhetoric.188
Pointing out the dangers and defects of
rhetoric does not change the habits of
rhetoricians. The young Hippocrates, in the
beginning of the Protagoras, blushes when
he admits to Socrates that he is taking up
rhetoric—but that does not change his plans.
Like the passions and appetites it feeds on,
rhetoric is one of the great constants in
human history. Because it is a constant,
nothing can tell us better the direction in
which a civilization is moving or how far it
is along the way. Like the residue of certain
radioactive substances, rhetoric, leaving an
unmistakable mark on all that it touches, may
yet prove to be the surest guide to the history
of our own times.

Notes
This article was originally published
in Western Speech 20/2 (Spring 1956): 57-
82.

Footnotes
^1. Cicero, De Oratore I, 20.
^2. Ibid., I, 21.
^3. Ibid., I, 23; cf. I, 14-15.
^4. Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria II, 15,
quoting among others Isocrates’ famous
definition, the peithous dēmiourgon, “maker
or deviser of persuasion.”
^5. Corax is cited by Aristotle, The “Art” of
Rhetoric II, 24, 11; Dio Chrysostom,
Discourses XXXV, 7; Augustine, Principia
Rhetorices, in appendix to PL 32:1441.
^6. Cicero, De Oratore I, 2, 10-11; III, 44, 174;
XX, 68.
^7. Wilhelm Schmid, Geschichte der
griechischen Literatur (Munich: Beck,
1940), 1:1:50-57.
^8. Gustave Combès, Saint Augustin et la
culture classique (Paris: Plon, 1927), 126.
^9. “Prolegomena,” Panathenaic Oration, in
Wilhelm Dindorf, ed., Aristides, 3 vols.
(Leipzig: Weidmann, 1829), 3:737.
^10. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 480.
^11. Ibid., 482.
^12. Ibid., 483; Plato, Gorgias.
^13. According to Diogenes Laertius, Lives of
Eminent Philosophers VIII, 57.
^14. His verses on the subject are quoted by
Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors
VII, 123-24 (—Against the Logicians I,
123-34) and are given in Heinrich Ritter and
 Ludwig Preller, Historia Philosophiae
Graecae, 10th ed. (Gotha: Klotz, 1934),
128-29.
^15. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent
Philosophers VIII, 54 and 77, and Ritter
and Preller, Historia Philosophia Graecae,
126.
^16. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 482-83.
^17. Schmid, Geschichte der griechischen
Literatur, 1:1:77-78.
^18. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent
Philosophers IX, 50-52.
^19. Ibid., IX, 51.
^20. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 511; 507.
For the best general treatment, see Wilhelm
von Christ, Geschichte der griechischen
Litteratur bis auf die Zeit Justiniens,
revised by Schmid and Stählin, 2 vols., 6th
ed. (Munich: Beck, 1924), 2:682-92.
^21. Von Christ, Geschichte der griechischen
Litteratur, 2:690.
^22. Ibid., 2:691.
^23. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 485, 487;
 Dio Chrysostom, Discourses XLIX, 6-15.
Barkowski, “Sieben Weise” in RE 2:2:2242-
62, hardly does justice to the theme, to
which a better introduction is Philostratus,
Life of Apollonius of Tyana, or the speeches
of Dio Chrysostom.
^24. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 487-90.
The endless ramifications of the theme of
the Seven Wise Men carry one all over the
East and back to very early times: it was an
ancient and established concept that the
Greeks adopted as a mainstay of their own
social order: “The sixth century, the most
critical period in the mental development of
the Greeks, came to be known afterwards as
the age of the Seven Sages.” Thus see J. B.
Bury, A History of Greece to the Death of
Alexander the Great (London: Macmillan,
1929), 321.
^25. Barkowski, “Sieben Weise,” in RE 2:2:2262,
could have made a much stronger case.
^26. Most of the thirty-three Sophists in
Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists, engage in
these activities: his Apollonius engages in all
 of them. See below, n. 27.
^27. Lucian, Herodotus 1-3; Isocrates,
Panathanaicus; Apuleius, Florida 3;
Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 493, for a
few illustrations. The first Roman orators
were “ambassadors sent to kings and nations
by the Roman people to represent our
republic,” being chosen for their skill as
speakers, according to Festus, s.v. Oratores.
^28. The picture is drawn from Dio, Libanius,
Eunapius, the Roman Panegyrists,
Philostratus, Philo, etc. Apuleius praises the
people who have come to hear him that “if
there is to be a mime you will laugh; if a
tightrope-walker you will tremble . . . if a
comedian applaud . . . if a philospher learn,”
Apuleius, Florida 5.
^29. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses XXXII, 5.
^30. Ibid., XXX, 3 and 19; XIII, 11.
^31. Ibid., XII, 14-15.
^32. The same combination was the secret of
Euripides’ matchless success. Professor
Jaeger sees in Euripides “the two Janus
 faces of Sophistry.” See Werner W. Jaeger,
Paideia: The Ideas of Greek Culture, tr.
Gilbert Highet, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1945), 1:329.
^33. Eduard Norden, ed., Die antike Kunstprosa,
2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1898), 2:508; cf.
Epictetus, IV, 8.
^34. Cicero, De Oratore I, 34, 158; cf. II, 7, 30:
“oratoris autem omnis actio opinionibus, non
scientia continentur” (the activity of the
orator has to do with opinion, not
knowledge). On doxa, Schmid, Geschichte
der griechischen Literatur, 3:38, n. 7.
^35. Cicero, Brutus XI, 22.
^36. Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria II, 15,
22.
^37. Clement of Alexandria, Stromatum
(Stromata) 8, in PG 9:557-602; cf. Clement
of Alexandria, Paedagogus I, 3, in PG
8:260; I, 10, in PG 8:356.
^38. “Summa autem laus eloquentiae est
amplificare rem oranando.” The orator seeks
 what is “ad exaggerandam et amplificandam
orationem accomodatum.” Cicero, De
Oratore III, 26-27.
^39. Plato, Phaedrus 267A.
^40. Gellius, Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights) I, 6,
contrasting the integrity of Metellus with this
commonly held idea of rhetoric.
^41. Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric I, 1, 13;
Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana (On
Christian Doctrine) II, 36: “non est facultas
ipsa culpabilis, sed ea male utentium
perversitas” (it is not the ability itself that is
to be blamed but the perversity of those who
put it to bad use).
^42. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 491.
^43. Von Christ, Geschichte der griechischen
Litteratur, 2:1006-7.
^44. Gellius, Attic Nights I, 6.
^45. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 499.
^46. Augustine, Epistolae (Epistles) XVII, 1, in
PL 33:83; “Sed me ipse cohibeo, ne a te
rhetorice potius quam veridice agere
existimer.”
^47. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2:623-24; Erwin
Rohde, Der griechische Roman und seine
Vorläufer (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel,
1914), 348.
^48. Cicero, Pro Cluentio LI, 142; cf. Pliny the
Younger’s insistence that his famous
Panegyric to Trajan is a sincere, not a
rhetorical discourse, Pliny, Panegyric 54
and 72-74.
^49. “Nihil iratum habet, nihil invidum, nihil
atrox, nihil miserabile, nihil astatum; casta
verecunda virgo incorrupta quodam modo”;
Cicero, Orator XIX, 64.
^50. Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria XII, 1,
1 and 27-45; II, 15, 20.
^51. Cicero, Orator I, 3; IV, 14; V, 17; Cicero, De
Oratore I, 2-5; 7; 18; and 50; Cicero, Brutus
VI, 23 and 25; Quintilian, De Institutione
Oratoria XII.
^52. Cicero, De Oratore I, 6 and 26-28; III, 22
and 84.
^53. Ibid., and n. 50 above.
^54. Petronius, Satyricon 1-4; in Lucian,
 Nigrinus, a common theme of satire.
Tacitus, Dialogus 30.
^55. Theodor Mommsen, “Boden-und
Geldwirthschaft der römischen Kaiserzeit,”
Gesammelte Schriften, 8 vols., 2d ed.
(Berlin: Weidmann, 1965), 5:617.
^56. Rohde, Der griechische Roman, 315.
^57. Cicero, De Oratore II, 38, 160. Quintilian,
De Institutione Oratoria XII, 1, 35, calls
him an unjust man because he spoke on
succeeding days and with equal facility both
for and against Justice.
^58. Lucian, Harmodes.
^59. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 506.
^60. Schmid, Geschichte der griechischen
Literatur, 3:78.
^61. Cicero, De Oratore II, 4.
^62. Seneca, Controversiae II, preface 3.
^63. Seneca, Epistulae LXXXVIII, 4; 10; 20;
and 39.
^64. Seneca, Controversiae IX, preface 1.
^65. Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta XI, 28; XII, 30.
^66. Ibid., XI, 26.
^67. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 511 (on
Nicetas in Smyrna); Libanius, Oration 40, is
comfort for a friend who failed to be
applauded in the streets. Cicero’s anxious
attention to the volume and direction of
applause when he entered the theater, as
depicted in the letters, is typical.
^68. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 499.
^69. Taking the form of gratia, opes, and
dignatis, respectively, Cicero, De Oratore I,
4, 15.
^70. John Bury, History of the Later Roman
Empire, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1923),
1:47; Rohde, Der griechische Roman, 324.
^71. Rohde, Der griechische Roman, 310, 362;
Martin Schanz, Geschichte der römischen
Literatur, 4 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1914),
4:1:546-47.
^72. Philo, On the Special Laws II, 20.
^73. Cicero, De Oratore I, 8, 34.
^74. Libanius, Epistulae 175.
^75. Lucian, Nigrinus 14-15.
^76. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses XLIII, 6; cf.
 Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 497.
^77. Augustine, Confessiones (Confessions) IV,
2, in PL 32:693.
^78. Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria XII, 4.
^79. Cicero, De Oratore II, 44, 187. That orator
was “made” who could speak fluently and
ingeniously on any and all subjects: “qui de
omnibus rebus possit varie copioseque
dicere,” ibid., I, 13, 59.
^80. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses XXXII, 12;
XLIII, 6; Lucian, The Dead Come to Life
35. The most vivid account of the
depredations of these people is found in the
letters of St. Basil.
^81. Isocrates, Panathenaicus 95; cf. Rohde, Der
griechische Roman, 348-49.
^82. Schmid, Geschichte der griechischen
Literatur, 3:37: the attitude was both
unsocial and irreligious.
^83. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 501-2; a
like case was Antiphon’s, in ibid., 498.
^84. Plato, Gorgias 457B. The case of Hermodes
the Sophist and Pausanias the assassin is
 discussed by A. Thysius, Valerius Maximus
(Leiden: Hackium, 1670), I, 8, 2, 9, p. 122,
n. 3.
^85. Lucian, Philosophies for Sale 9.
^86. Isocrates, Nicocles 1. The same frank
confession of self-interest may be found in
Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares III, 10, 9;
Augustine, De Disciplina Christiana 11-12,
in PL 40:675-76.
^87. Finely expressed in John Chrysostom’s
harangue against marriage, De Virginitate
60-74, in PG 48:580-87; celibacy is easier,
less complicated, does not raise so many
problems, and so forth. “It is pleasanter to
walk than to ride a mule.”
^88. Apuleius, Florida 18.
^89. Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria II, 16,
1-10, illustrates this strikingly when he
compares the bad uses of rhetoric to the
good: the former are all lively and profitable,
the latter all stuffy and ornamental, i.e.,
rhetoric gives courage to mighty armies,
guides great cities, teaches moral precepts,
 and sets man apart from the beast.
^90. Plato, Gorgias 464D-E.
^91. They even paid students to come to them,
Libanius, Oration I, 13; 15; 61 and 76; cf. I,
3 and 25-30.
^92. Lucian, The Dream; Lucian, Nigrinus. On
the pampering of students with easy courses,
see Albertus Müller, “Studentenleben im 4.
Jahrhundert nach Christus,” Philologus 69
(1910): 303-6.
^93. Cicero, De Oratore II, 28, 124.
^94. Augustine, Confessions I, 10, in PL 32:668;
Augustine, De Utilitate Credendi ad
Honoratum VII, 16, in PL 42:76. For an
excellent discussion, Franz X. Eggersdorfer,
Der heilige Augustinus als Pädagoge und
seine Bedeutung für die Geschichte der
Bildung (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder,
1907), 10-13. Cf. Dio Chrysostom,
Discourses XXXV, 8.
^95. “Statim sapiunt, statim sciunt omnia,
neminem verentur, imitantur neminem atque
ipsi sibi exempla sint,” Pliny, Epistulae VIII,
 23. The same in Dio Chrysostom,
Discourses XXXIII, 22. Cicero, De Oratore
I, 4, 14, says that every fame-hungry kid in
Rome insists on becoming an orator; cf.
Augustine, Confessions I, 17-18, in PL
32:673-74; Cicero, Letters to His Friends I,
4-5.
^96. Petronius, Satyricon 1-4.
^97. Proclus, Chrestomathia, ed. Hiller, 16, cited
in Fritz Schemmel, “Die Hochschule von
Athen im IV. und V. Jahrhundert, P. Ch. N,”
Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische
Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche
Literatur und für Pädagogik 22 (1908):
507-8.
^98. Ibid., 512. Rohde, Der griechische Roman,
387, says rhetoric ended up in the
“trunkenen Taumel neuplatonischer
Phantastik” (drunken frenzy of neo-Platonic
fantasy).
^99. Augustine, De Ordine II, 13, in PL 32:1013.
^100. Philo, On Joseph XIII, 64; XIV, 67; cf. XII,
35 and 59.
^101. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses XLVII, 19.
^102. Cicero, Brutus XXX, 114.
^103. Seneca, Epistulae Morales VII, 7.
^104. Stobaeus, Eclogae (Eclogues) II, 31, 76,
cited by Ritter and Preller, Historia
Philosophiae Graecae, 222.
^105. Libanius, Oration 2-3; 41; 63-64; Apuleius,
Apologia 6 and 9.
^106. Cicero, De Oratore I, 51, 221; cf. I, 52.
^107. Heracleitus, in Hermann Diels, Fragmente
der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols. (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1956), 1:178, no. 121; cf.
Cicero, Brutus XXII, 84: “Sed est mos
hominum, ut nolint eundem pluribus rebus
excellere” (but it is typical of human nature
not to concede that the same person can
excel in several fields).
^108. Cicero, De Oratore II, 36; and II, 31, 136;
XLI, 177; Cicero, Orator XXXIII, 117-18.
^109. Cicero, De Oratore III, 25, 97-98; on trial
and error, III, 25, 98; III, 26, 103.
^110. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata I, 3, in PG
8:712; cf. Augustine, Epistles I, 22, in PL
 33:90-94. The actual operation of rhetorical
technique is extremely easy, according to
Cicero, De Oratore III, 45, 176-it is the
most pliable of tools.
^111. Thus Dio Chrysostom, Discourses XXXII,
6-13; 18-20; and 31.
^112. Julian, Misopogon, is the classic illustration,
but Constantius and even Constantine had
the problem on their hands, as we see from
the letters of Lucifer of Caliaris and
Eusebius, Vita Constantini (Life of
Constantine). Cf. Ammianus Marcellinus,
XVII, 9, 1-7. The Emperor was expected to
declaim and be acclaimed in the strictly
conventional manner of the rhetorical
schools, for which see Edmond Saglio,
“Acclamatio,” in Charles V. Daremberg and
Edmond Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités
grecques et romaines, 6 vols. (Paris:
Hachette, 1877-1919), 1:20, and Johann
Schmidt, “Acclamatio,” in RE 1:148.
^113. Sozomen, Historia Ecclesiastica
(Ecclesiastical History) I, 11, in PG
67:885-89; Theophanes, Chronographia,
 anno 437. We have a great many notes on
this and related subjects, but it is hard to
believe that the reader wishes to see them.
^114. Augustine, Confessions I, 16, in PL 32:672-
73, speaking expressly of the rhetorical
schools.
^115. Arthur C. McGiffert, A History of
Christian Thought, 2 vols. (New York:
Scribner, 1932-33), 2:112; cf. 114.
^116. Augustine, De Utilitate Credendi ad
Honoratum 12, in PL 42:84; cf. Augustine,
Contra Donatistas (Against the Donatists)
XII, 31-33, in PL 43:413-16.
^117. Plato, Gorgias 471D-472A.
^118. Etienne Gilson, Introduction a l’étude de
Saint Augustin (Paris: 1929), 220-21;
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine I, 29-30,
in PL 34:30-32. For some interesting
examples, cf. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses
XXXII, 4; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews
XIX, 8, 2; Chronicon Paschale, 297, in PG
92:684-85.
^119. The rhetorical panorama is best represented
 by the Panegyrics, culminating in Dante,
Paradiso. See Hugh Nibley, “Hierocentric
State,” Western Political Quarterly 4/2
(1951): 226-53; reprinted in this volume,
pages 99-147.
^120. Cicero, De Oratore II, 83, 338: “Orator
sine multitudine audiente eloquens esse non
possit.” Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria
I, 9, believes that even the degrading moral
atmosphere of the rhetorical schools is out-
balanced by the crowded and busy
environment they provide, so necessary to
the student of rhetoric.
^121. Augustine, Confessions XI, 2, in PL
32:809-11. “Steeped to the lips in vulgarity”
is Professor Coulton’s apt phrase.
^122. Augustine, De Cathechizandis Rudibus 2,
in PL 40:311-12; ibid., 6, in PL 40:317; cf.
Augustine, De Civitate Dei (The City of
God) IV, 31; Augustine, Epistles 125, in PL
33:473-76; 126; cf. PL 33:476-83; Frederick
J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin
Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1934), 1:48-49. Norden, Antike
 Kunstprosa, 2:623.
^123. Charles Merivale, History of the Romans
under the Empire, 7 vols. (London:
Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans,
1852), 1:42.
^124. Cicero, Orator VIII, 24; the law is quoted
in Gellius, Attic Nights XV, 11; it is against
both rhetors and philosophers, who were of
course confounded.
^125. Tacitus, Histories I, 18.
^126. Ammianus Marcellinus, XXX, 4.
Anonymous, Breves Enarrationes
Chronographicae I, in Immanuel Bekker,
ed. (Bonn: Weber, 1843), 184-85, says the
Sophists were everywhere expected to
criticize and tear down everything; cf.
Thysius, Valerius Maximus I, 8, 2, 8.
^127. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses XXXII, 44;
48; 58-62; and 69-70; Philo, On Husbandry
7-8; Jerome, Epistolae (Epistle) XXII, 10,
in PL 22:400; Ad Eustochium 13; Pliny,
Natural History X, 43; Augustine, De
Cathechizandis Rudibus 16, in PL 40:328-
 30: the whole desire of the people is
“gaudere et requiescere in theatris atque
spectaculis” (to relax and enjoy themselves
at the theaters and games).
^128. Cicero, De Officiis II, 16, 56-57; Dio
Chrysostom, Discourses XXXII, 9.
^129. Seneca, De Ira III, 6; Apuleius, De Mundo
35; Samuel Dill, Roman Society from Nero
to Marcus Aurelius (New York: World,
1911), 232-50.
^130. For a recent treatment, Eleanor Clark,
Rome and a Villa (New York: Doubleday,
1952), 103-4.
^131. For some examples, Dio Chrysostom,
Roman History LIV, 17; Philo, On
Drunkenness 198; Philo, De Monarchia, in
On the Special Laws I, 8; Corippus, De
Laudibus Iustini Augusti Minoris II, 245-
55, in Merabandes et Corippus, ed.
Immanuel Bekker (Bonn: Weber, 1836);
Cassiodorus, Variae XII, 11, in PL 69:362-
63; Augustine, De Utilitate Jejunii 11, in
PL 40:716; Steven Runciman, Byzantine
Civilization (London: Arnold, 1966), 20;
 Norman H. Baynes, “Byzantine
Civilization,” History n.s. 10 (1926): 294:
“It was precisely when you were strongest,
when you were most alive, that you were
most rigorously conservative.”
^132. The extinction of laughter is a striking
phenomenon: Schmid, Geschichte der
griechischen Literatur, 1:1:17, n. 3; cf.
Runciman, Byzantine Civilization, 219-20;
the permanent mood because one of
“fickleness . . . bitterness, and uncharitable
cynicism. . . . It was not human life but
human nature that they rated too low.”
William G. Holmes, The Age of Justinian
and Theodora, 2 vols., 2d ed. (London:
Bell, 1912), 1:86; Commodian,
Instructiones I, 26, in PL 5:220-21; Salvian,
De Gubernationi Dei VII, 1 (on hollow
laughter). The mob was shocked by the
informal behavior of Antiochus; Athenaeus,
Deipnosophists V, 193-97. Directed
applause is often mentioned; Joannes
Malalas, Chronographia, XIV, 370-71, ed.
Ludwig Dindorf (Bonn: Weber, 1831), also
 in PG 97:552; Corippus, Justin I, 345-46,
358; Anonymous, Breves Enarrationes
Chronographicae 171; cf. Acts 19:34.
^133. Raby, History of Secular Latin Poetry,
1:92.
^134. Lucian, Nigrinus 5-6; Dio Chrysostom,
Discourses LXVI, 21 (the Gordon’s head);
Philo, On Drunkenness 198. “Noose of
suaviloquentia” is Augustine’s expression,
Augustine, Confessions V, 3, in PL 32:707-
8, though he advises that “dictionis suavitas
pro ratione argumenti procuranda est”
(smoothness of delivery is to be preferred to
force of argument), in On Christian
Doctrine IV, 14, in PL 34:101.
^135. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 4, in PL
34:89-122, passim; see Combès, Saint
Augustin et la culture classique, 54-55.
^136. Cicero, De Oratore II, 45, 189-90; cf. II,
46, 191.
^137. Ibid., II, 46, 193-94; II, 47, 196; II, 48; and
II, 51; I, 62, 262-65.
^138. Cicero, Brutus VII, 27; this is of a piece
 with the observation that an orator should be
honest because that makes it easier for him
to work on people, Quintilian, De
Institutione Oratoria XII.
^139. “A period of stagnation set in, tending
gradually towards settled apathy and
indifference to all purposive effort.” By the
third century, “an aimless abandonment to
pleasure became the distinctive mark of the
age,” thus Holmes, Age of Justinian and
Theodora, 2:558-59.
^140. Dio Chrysostom, Discourses LIV, 1;
XXXIV, 31.
^141. Plato, Gorgias 459.
^142. Cicero, De Oratore II, 14, 59; cf. Lucian,
Nigrinus 17.
^143. Friedrich Cauer, “Die Stellung der
arbeitenden Klassen in Hellas und Rom,”
Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische
Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche
Literatur und fur Pädagogik 3 (1899): 700-
702.
^144. Von Christ, Geschichte der griechischen
 Litteratur, 2:929-31.
^145. Schanz, Geschichte der römischen
Literatur, 4:1:501-8, 514, 516-50; cf.
Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2:643; by the
middle of the fifth century “die absolute
Geschmacklosigkeit” (absolute tastelessness)
was achieved, ibid., 652. The “new
mentality . . . was . . . not only indifferent
but hostile to the intellectual achievements of
the higher classes,” says Michael
Rostovzeff, Social and Economic History
of the Roman Empire, 2d ed. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1957), 533-34. Guglielmo
Ferrero, Characters and Events of Roman
History (New York: Putnam, 1909), 227:
“The picture of the Empire, so brilliant from
the economic standpoint, is much less so
from the intellectual: here we touch its great
weakness.”
^146. Schanz, Geschichte der römischen
Literatur, 3:238-44. Klaus Dockhorn, Die
Rhetorik als Quelle des vorromantischen
Irrationalismus in der Literatur-und
Geistegeschichte. Nachrichten der
 Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen.
Philologisch-historische Klasse (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1949).
^147. See the discussion by H. W. Garrod, The
Oxford Book of Latin Verse (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1944), xxxiv-xxxvii. Plato,
Gorgias 455.
^148. “It was of the essence of the rhetorical
method from Ovid onward to treat of a
given theme in detail until there was no more
left to be said,” thus Raby, History of
Secular Latin Poetry, 1:343.
^149. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine IV, 19,
in PL 34:106-7.
^150. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2:466; Schanz,
Geschichte der römischen Literatur 4:507-
11; Johann Zellinger, “Der Beifall in der
altchristlichen Predigt,” in Festgabe Alois
Knopfler (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder,
1917), 403-4.
^151. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2:466;
Frederick J. E. Raby, A History of
Christian-Latin Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon,
 1927), 4-6; “Artificiality and a servile
imitation . . . tended therefore to flourish.
That scholar was near perfection who could
compose in verse or prose according to the
recognized rules; provided that the form was
acceptable, the content was more or less
indifferent,” 5.
^152. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine IV, 2, in
PL 34:89-90; II, 50; Augustine, Epistles
LXIX, 2, in PL 33:239-40.
^153. András Alföldi, “The Crisis of the Empire,”
Cambridge Ancient History, 12 vols.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 12:225-26 (speaking of the plastic
arts); cf. Rostovzeff, Social and Economic
History, 521-22, on “the utter incapacity to
invent anything new . . . typical of an age
devoid of all creative power.”
^154. Raby, History of Secular Latin Poetry,
1:351.
^155. Henri I. Marrou, Saint Augustine et la fin
de la culture antique (Paris: Boccard,
1938), 517-18; cf. 275.
^156. Eggersdorfer, Der heilige Augustinus als
Pädagoge, 4-6; Rohde, Der griechische
Roman, 345-56.
^157. Quintilian, De Institutione Oratoria XII,
10, 16-17; Norden, Antike Kunstprosa,
1:251-70.
^158. Charles Diehl and Georges Marçais, Le
monde oriental de 395 à 1081 (Paris:
Presses universitaires, 1936), 3:113-15. The
numbers of the Sophists and rhetors were
recruited in steadily increasing proportions
from men of Oriental blood, who by the
fifth century completely dominated the field.
^159. Max Pieper, Die ägyptische Literatur
(Potsdam: Athenaion, 1927), 21.
^160. Ibid., 34-36. Alfred Wiedemann, Das alte
Ägypten (Heidelberg: Winter, 1920), 85-88.
^161. Adolf Erman, Ägypten und ägyptisches
Leben im Altertum (Tübingen: Mohr, 1923),
375, 434.
^162. Herman Kees, Ägypten, in Handbuch der
Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 3, pt. 1, 3a
(Munich: Beck, 1933), 284.
^163. T. Eric Peet, A Comparative Study of the
Literature of Egypt, Palestine and
Mesopotamia (London: British Academy,
1931), 130.
^164. Alan Gardiner, “The Eloquent Peasant,”
JEA 9 (1923): 6; Pieper, Die ägyptische
Literatur, 34-36.
^165. Alan H. Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar
(London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 2;
cf. 4-5, 17-24.
^166. Pieper, Die ägyptische Literatur, 88; Kees,
Ägypten, 79.
^167. Kees, Ägypten, 80; Rohde, Der griechische
Roman, 387.
^168. Erich Ebeling, Keilschrifttexte aus Assur
religiösen Inhalts (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1915),
1, no. 111.
^169. Bruno Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien,
2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1920-25),
2:154-55.
^170. Otto Weber, Die Literatur der Babylonier
und Assyrier (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1907), 2;
Bruno Meissner, Die babylonische-
 assyrische Literatur (Wildpark-Potsdam:
Athenaion, 1927), 1-2; both cited in Peet,
Comparative Study of the Literature of
Egypt, 8, n. 1.
^171. Meissner, Babylonien und Assyrien, 2:155,
335-37, 353-54, 357-59, 361-62, 429-30,
432.
^172. Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der
arabischen Literatur (Leipzig: Amelangs,
1909), 186.
^173. Paul Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (London:
Oxford University Press, 1947), 79-84, 94;
Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen
Literatur, 92-101; the literature was
completely dominated by rhetoric from the
first.
^174. Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen
Literatur, 201. Al-Bistani wrote a history of
the world entirely in words of double
meaning, ibid., 209.
^175. Ibid., 179; cf. 200, 227.
^176. Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der
arabischen Literatur, 2 vols. (Weimar:
 Felber, 1898), 1:245-46 and the following
section.
^177. Adam Mez, Die Renaissance des Islams
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1922), 162-80, an
amazingly close resemblance to the ancient
Sophists.
^178. Ignaz Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den
Islam (Heidelberg: Winter, 1925), 67;
Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen
Literatur (1909 ed.), 90 (on Mutanabbi).
^179. Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen
Literatur (1898 ed.), 1:15; Ibn Qutayba,
Introduction au Livre de la poésie et des
poètes Muqaddimatu Kitābi š-ši cri wa š-
šucarā’, tr. Gaudefroy-Demombynes (Paris:
Les Belles Lettres, 1947), pt. 23; cf.
Goldziher, Vorlesungen über den Islam, 74.
^180. The quotation is from Ibn al-Muqaffac,
Kalila and Dimna (Beirut: Imprimerie
Catholique, 1927), 136; cf. 31, panegyric
and praise of intelligence; 39, assembly of
the learned; 30, fame and notoriety are all
that count; 42-44, gloria the one object of
 life; 57, four tropes of rhetoric; 132, a
formal disputatio, and so forth.
^181. Adam Mez, Abulḳâsim, ein bagdâder
Sittenbild (Heidelberg: Winter, 1902): Abu
’l-Qāsim is the most celebrated Oriental
version of the vagabond-rhetor. Mez’s
introduction is a vivid description of the
rhetorical-mindedness of the decadent East.
^182. Libanius, Oration XXV, 1: the polarity of
free and slave dominates every aspect of
life; “a world of ants and camels without any
true equality,” says Lucian, Epistula ad
Saturnum 1, in Saturnalia 20; cf. Philo, De
Monarchia I, 9, in On the Special Laws I,
59-65; Plutarch, De Amore 26. “General
servitude was, indeed, the distinctive feature
of the age, but while there were different
grades and shades of bondage, there was no
equality,” Rostovzeff, Social and Economic
History, 527.
^183. Jaeger, Paideia, 1:332.
^184. This is seen in the translation literature,
which was all from Eastern to Western
languages, Von Christ, Geschichte der
 griechischen Litteratur, 2:166, 315, 542-
624, 665.
^185. Diehl and Marçais, Le monde oriental,
3:320-21, 417-86. Speaking of Christians
and barbarians alike, Von Christ, Geschichte
der griechischen Litteratur, 2:955, says
“der Hellenismus zwingt sie in seine
Schule.”
^186. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2:631-32,
notes that “Gaul, . . . von jeher das land der
Rhetorik,” continued to be so and to act as
“die Erhalterin der antiken Kultur,”
“wahrend des ganzen Mittelalters.”
^187. One thinks immediately of the Thousand-
and-One Nights and of the degenerate
Christian literature of the East, of which
some good examples may be found in
Montague R. James, The Apocryphal New
Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), 49,
53-55, 58-65, 70, 80-83, 337-49, and so
forth. The Oriental Acts are public
disputations in which the Apostles display
their rhetorical skill to packed theaters. The
pseudo-scientific element is not lacking, e.g.,
 in the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Life of
Alexander II, 38, the king sails under the sea
in a glass vessel or flies through space, as in
Lucian’s trip to the moon sequence in
Lucian, The Dream or Lucian’s Career 15;
cf. Lucian, Zeuxis. For comic-strip trivia,
Seneca, Controversiae I, 7, 4-5; V, 6; VII,
1, 4-5; IX, 6; X, 3, and so forth.
^188. H. Idris Bell, “The Decay of Civilization,”
JEA 10 (1924): 215.
 How to Have a Quiet
Campus, Antique Style

Special Announcement: Why no

footnotes? Because this article is merely a
summing up of what has gone before,
including several egregiously pirated
quotations from the author’s earlier efforts.
The various classical sources exploited have
already been exposed to public view. The
piece was done on short notice to help
celebrate the epiphany at the BYU of an
authentic Rhetor—Greek, political,
ostentatious, and not overly scrupulous. The
ecstatic reception of Mr. Agnew by the
student body was a moving demonstration of
the ageless vitality of the rhetorician’s craft.
 H. N., 1991
With the collapse of the old sacral
kingship all around the Mediterranean in the
middle of the first millennium B.C., people
were everywhere asking themselves what
forever after remained the golden question of
the civilized world: “Who’s in charge
around here?” By way of answer, a breed of
ambitious and often capable men, the tyrants,
moved in and took over in the name of law
and order; the fatal weakness of their
position was that their authority, resting
neither on birth nor election, could be
legitimately challenged at any time by
anybody that was strong enough to stand up
to them. So the world shouted paeans of
gratitude and joy when hard on the heels of
the tyrants another and a very different kind
of task-force appeared, a saintly band of
prophets, a generation of wandering
wisemen, the Sophoi, best represented by the
immortal Seven Sages. These men of
matchless intellect and sublime compassion,
after correcting the political and moral
disorders of their own societies, wandered
through the world free of earthly passions
and attachments, seeking only wisdom and
imparting freely of their vast knowledge and
perception to distraught and disorganized
communities throughout the ancient world. It
was their selfless activity that put the Greek
world on its feet after the Dark Ages, or so it
was believed.
Young men everywhere, fascinated by
the powerful minds and godlike
independence of these great teachers,
followed them from city to city in droves,
begging to become their disciples and vying
for the privilege of serving them and of
placing their fortunes (which were often
considerable) at their disposal. Great cities
and mighty potentates were willing to offer
anything for the healing ministrations which
the Sophoi gave to all free of charge. It was
a shame to see such a highly marketable
product going for nothing, and it was not
long before a new type of wisemen appeared
—the Sophists, meaning so-called or
pseudowisemen. They diligently imitated
every detail of dress, manner, and speech
which had endeared the real Sages to the
whole of mankind, by which bait they too
gathered disciples in their highly publicized
travels and were soon able to settle down
and establish expensive and fabulously
profitable schools in the big cities.
The special education in which these
schools excelled went under the name of
rhetoric, which was boldly and unashamedly
defined and advertised as the art of giving
people exactly what they want in order to get
exactly what you want out of them. To
palliate their sordid commercialism, the
Sophist teachers always insisted that they
were frank, searching, unsparing crusaders
of the Emancipated Mind, and it was
Socrates’ dangerous calling to expose the
fraudulence of that claim. He accused the
brotherhood of training their pupils “to
appear, in the eyes of the ignorant, to know
more than those who really know”; to which
they replied that they could see nothing
wrong with that since experience showed
that such clever sales techniques always
paid off. But what is that, Socrates protested,
but “a mere knack and a routine—busy work
. . . I call it foul, as I do all ugly things.”
Socrates also foresaw and prophesied that
any system of hard and honest education
would be forced off the market in short order
by a competing system which offered its
students fun and games at school and top
administrative jobs and big pay afterward.
For of course, the Sophists, as would-be
successors to the Sophoi, specialized in
preparing the young for important public
office and private fortunes: rhetoric was the
manipulation of people, especially in the
mass, and its professors promised wealth,
fame, and power to those who took their
courses, from which it can be readily seen
that Socrates was a troublemaker who would
have to be removed. And removed he was,
by that very class of professors who forever
after proclaimed him their patron saint.
Also removed from competition, as
Socrates predicted, was any field of serious
study that might distract the young from the
business of life—the business of making
money. This was done neatly and effectively
by setting up counter-courses in science,
philosophy, mathematics, and so forth,
which, while pretending to be the real thing,
were much shorter, easier, and spicier than
the old courses, promising the student
exactly the same results but with the
assurance (so said the brochure) that “you
can do it all lying down!” Teachers of
rhetoric, having thus forced all other
teachers out of business, soon began to
employ their irresistible weapons with
deadly efficiency against each other. The
escalation of competitive simplification,
sweetening, and spicing soon brought the
schools to that state of total inanity which
never ceases to amaze and appall the student
of ancient rhetoric, the most astounding
phenomenon of all being the endless
succession, generation after generation, of
world-renowned scholars and students who
have absolutely nothing to say but derive
their vital nourishment from the mere fact of
association with a tradition and institution of
learning.
 Keeping Out of Trouble
The century before Christ was a time of
chronic and mounting social unrest that by
the time of Caesar had become quite
unbearable—it was a world gone mad.
When it began to appear that Augustus
Caesar was the man to put an end to the
worldwide acosmia, all power was put into
his hands by a grateful humanity, and
whenever he modestly suggested laying
down the burden of his absolute and ever-
growing powers people simply panicked. By
shrewd economics and iron control of the
military, Augustus gave a feeling of security
to the whole world; his vast construction
projects were meant to give his people a
pleasing, nay a magnificent, environment; by
taking over the supervision and financing of
the youth-clubs throughout Italy, the inventus,
he brought under control the most dangerous
and irresponsible expression of the general
social malaise. But the cornerstone of his
grand design for preserving peace and order
was education.
As a boy, Augustus had been sent by his
uncle Julius Caesar to study with the great
Apollodorus in Apollonia. Apollodorus was
a typical Sophist whose writings have
probably done more to wreck the cause of
real education (by supplanting the reading of
original authors by his own required college
survey) than those of any other man. Now the
theme song of the Sophists was that
education is the solution to all social ills,
and Augustus firmly believed what the
secretary of a later emperor wrote, that
education alone gives Rome the right to rule
the world. Accordingly, he spared no pains
in searching out and encouraging any sign of
talent in the young. He would agree with
Pliny that the education of the poor is the
responsibility of the Princeps. Pericles had
made Athens “the teacher of Hellas” by
bringing together under his hospitable roof
the greatest thinkers in every field; the
Scipionic circle in Rome had tried the same
sort of thing. Augustus, following their
example, drew the professors of the East to
Rome with fabulous salaries and total
indulgence of their vanity: he not only
allowed them complete freedom of speech
but patiently suffered their outrageous
insolence.
After the death of the dull and busy
grind Hyginus, the presidency of the great
palatine academy went to M. P. Marcellus,
an ex-boxer who told the emperor, “You
supply the people, but we supply the
education”—and he got away with it. So did
his successor, Paelemon, an ex-slave who
announced that real education had begun at
his birth and would perish at his death;
though two successive emperors, Tiberius
and Claudius, both declared Paelemon
utterly unfit to teach the youth because of his
gross and vicious immorality, his position
was never in jeopardy, because he had
written a handbook of rules for correct
speech. Timagenes came to Rome from
Alexandria as a cook, got a job as a litter-
bearer, took up rhetoric, and ended up as a
close friend of Augustus, who tolerated his
unbelievable impudence in hopes that there
might be real intelligence behind it. There
was not. The Egyptian Apion was lured to
Rome from the presidency of the University
of Alexandria; Pliny called him “the drum of
his own fame,” and the salty Tiberius gave
him the title of “the cymbal of the universe”
to describe his brash and ceaseless boasting
and self-glorification. He produced nothing
of value.
Space will not allow us to unfold the
long catalogue of men who guided the
thinking of the civilized world for a thousand
years. Let it suffice to name Symmachus,
perhaps the most influential man in
scholarship and government the Roman
world ever saw, of whose greatest writing
Professor Raby wrote: “The ordinary reader
. . . seeks in vain some glimmer of
reasonableness, some promise of sense.”
What more compelling testimony could there
be than the careers of such men to the
miraculous powers of that system of
Education for Success inaugurated by the
Sophists of old? In time every town in the
empire was provided with schoolmasters at
government expense: three Sophists for a
small town, four Sophists and four
grammarians for county-court towns (agorai
dikon), and five rhetors and five
grammarians for cities. From Vespasian on,
the Imperial government paid the salaries of
teachers, including, under Severus
Alexander, the elementary teacher in every
village. Justinian issued his pragmatic
sanction “that the youth may be trained in
liberal studies throughout the domain.”
The student registering in any of the
schools was entering a world of make-
believe. Indeed, schole and its Latin
equivalent, ludus, both mean “play”—the
school is a little universe of its own where
one engages in such “liberal” activities as
are not prescribed by the exigencies of real
life. The “education for life” idea, Dio
Chrysostom noted, really turned the
schoolroom into a playroom and rendered
the student peculiarly unfit for life. One of
the main functions of the school was to keep
the young out of trouble by channelling their
energies into traditional and accepted areas
of expression. The system was originally
designed for upper-class youths, brought up
by slaves who spoiled them rotten,
traditionally permitted to indulge in properly
directed political rioting and midnight
depredations against the lower classes and
their leaders. They were petted and envied
by the whole society, which officially
prolonged adulescentia and its licenses to
the age of forty. “Nature itself suggests
desires to youth,” wrote Cicero, “and if they
injure no one else’s life, whatever they do is
endurable and pardonable . . . only a crank
would deny youth their amours with
courtesans.” Philostratus blasts the Romans
for their scrupulous attention to harbors and
roads while “neither you nor your laws show
the slightest interest in the children of your
cities, or in the young people or women.” St.
Augustine bears this out: if a boy was in
school his parents could forget about him; if
he was not in school nobody cared about
him.
The hell-fire clubs of Athens and the
scandalous rioting of Alcibiades and his
crowd were a direct result of the
“emancipated” and permissive teachings of
the Sophists. Of course, such behavior was
disavowed by the professors, who made a
special point of insisting that a teacher was
never to be held responsible for anything a
pupil might do; for that matter, a teacher was
not responsible for what he might do.
Lactantius says that the most immoral and
greedy professor he ever knew specialized
in courses in virtue and the austere life. And
why not? “What good does it do,” wrote
John Chrysostom, the greatest teacher of his
day, “to pay high salaries to teachers and
raise up a host of experts when the actions of
our society speak so much louder than their
safe, conventional platitudes? For discipline
of the mind is as far beyond mere lectures on
education as doing is from talking.”
The schools, designed to please and
attract the youth, made no attempt to limit
their fun but only to channel it. Quintilian,
after some hesitation, decided that the
corruption of morals, which was a natural
and expected part of life at the bigger
schools, was after all a price worth paying
for the stimulation, associations,
competition, and professional openings they
offered. Everywhere, as Rohde puts it,
“people of every class became inflamed
with a desire to achieve the new ‘success.’”
Parents pushed their children into it: “Full of
ambition for their children,” wrote
Petronius, “they don’t want to see them study
the hard way, . . . and of course everybody is
going to school in such numbers that you
can’t even count them.” They all want to
begin at the top, says Pliny, “want to know
everything at once . . . and are quite satisfied
with themselves as they are.” Should
institutions which cater to adolescent minds,
Quintilian wondered, be allowed to set the
tone of the whole civilized world? That is
the very thing, he decided, which brought
about the dire intellectual decline of the
times. But still, it was precisely because the
students were not given to any serious
thinking that even their wildest actions were
looked upon with indulgence: the students of
Carthage, St. Augustine reports, “commit all
kinds of outrages with perfect insolence and
immunity, things punishable by law, but
permitted by custom” to the students.
What kind of “protest” would one
expect from such students? The idealism of
youth had been harnessed and contained from
the beginning in the high-flown and altruistic
cliches of standardized speeches to be
learned by heart. Lysias’s “Twenty-fifth
Oration” (his very worst), was the model for
the schools because of its stereotyped
treatment of the prescribed theme, “No Man
is Born an Oligarch or a Democrat.” The so-
called Pagan Martyrs of Alexandria were a
band of professors who collided with a mad
emperor on the subject not of human rights
but of professional prerogative, and so lost
their heads. Real idealism is hard to find—
there were teachers with great hearts and
great minds, like Dyscolus, Eratosthenes,
Marcus Porcius Cato, and Aetius, but they
all found the doors of the schools closed
against them. Only Eratosthenes held his own
against the united malice of the faculty of
Alexandria.
In Egypt, where priest-led student
factions had been rioting for untold
centuries, the Romans shrewdly put
responsibility for social order in the hands
of the gymnasiarch, the local schoolteacher,
who was made president of the town council
or of the assembly of archons in the home
capital where he lived. But the rioting went
right on, with the gymnasiarch usually
leading one of the factions. “There is the man
who stirs up all the trouble!” cried the Jews
of Alexandria when the schoolteacher
Hierax entered the theater. Like the later
qudi, the gymnasiarch was out to promote
himself and sometimes rose to giddy heights
of power.
But everybody was playing the same
game. As Dio Chrysostom told his students
who hesitated to go the Sophist path: “Do
you think you are any wiser than Croesus,
who was the richest man in the world and
took the advice of Sophists?” “What’s wrong
with studying to get rich?” the great Isocrates
would ask, “why else do we exercise piety,
justice, and the other virtues if not to
promote ourselves?” If one is sincere, he
explains, there is no moral default, and any
properly trained rhetor knows how to make
himself really sincere. The student, Cicero
says quite frankly, “must refer everything to
his own ends” and never cease asking, quid
mihi utilius—what is there in it for me? The
program geared to “the naked self-interest
(which) ruled in the rhetorical schools” from
Isocrates on (Wm. Schmid) was all that any
ambitious boy could ask for; they all took to
it like ducks to water. “What song is
sweeter?” asks Cicero, “than that of the
rhetorician, . . . what is fuller, more subtle,
intellectual, admirable, fulfilling,
satisfying?”

Manus Manum Lavat

Discipline was not severe because the
student was in a position to blackmail the
teacher, and they both knew it. It was
common practice at Rome, according to
Augustine, for students to avoid paying a
teacher when the fees were due by
conspiring together and all of a sudden
removing to another teacher in a body. This
would mean disaster to the professor, whose
name, fame, and fortune naturally depended
wholly on the number of students he could
attract. So professors would pay students to
attend their lectures (a sound investment
since the state paid them by the numbers),
and every teacher at a great university had to
have his “chorus” of supporters among the
students, a devoted band who would recruit
more students (often by force), applaud their
hero hysterically at the end of every
sentence, heckle rival professors, and fight
rival choruses in the streets and at the games
and shows. At first the choruses were made
up of students from a single country—like
the Syrians at Athens who supported
Eunapius because he was a Syrian—but
membership soon became general as the
gangs would wait at the docks to carry off
newly arrived students as pledges (the
“foxes”) or send their scouts out into the
provincial cities to pledge boys intending to
come to Athens to school.
So from beginning to end the first
principle of rhetoric—that size and number
are everything—dominated the schools. In
return for their support, the students were
spared all discipline. The most famous
professor of them all, Libanius, has told how
his students would laugh, talk, yawn, catch
flies, look out of the window, sleep, draw
pictures, and do anything but listen to his
celebrated lectures, and then leave the hall
for the games, shows, parties, stews, markets
—anything but study. Why didn’t the most
influential teacher of his day make an effort
to check this sort of thing? Because the boast
and glory of his life was that he had more
students than anybody else. He was
enormously vain of his success as a teacher,
and well illustrates how the pact of mutual
corruption kept things going: in return for his
complete permissiveness he insisted on one
thing—that nobody ever criticize him;
because of his enormous following his
shallow letters (1600 of which survive)
carried great prestige and his name bore
irresistible authority: Libanius could make
or break any man’s career. And because of
his great influence and renown, it was very
much in the interest of any student to say he
had studied with Libanius. So who held the
whip handle after all? A multitude of
students made a Libanius, an Iamblichus, or
a Stilpon (at one time he had 30,000
students) great, and the hordes had no choice
but to follow the great man whose name
alone could give them prestige. The
astounding thing is that none of the great
professors ever produced anything of value
—the game is the purest make-believe, and
yet it went on and on for centuries as the
self-serving giants of education were able to
“keep up the appearance of success by
mutual praise and admiration.” It was the
education-government complex that kept
things going: the great professors were all
related by birth or marriage to each other
and to the imperial family; everybody knew
everybody else, and the school remained, as
the Sophists designed it to be, the door to
top-level positions in public life. The
students knew what they were after and that
only the school could give it to them. Why
should they ever rock the boat?
The collapse of ancient civilization was
marked by the rise, in the words of Fr. Blass,
of “despotism, servilism, and scholarship.”
Note that scholarship does not go down with
the ship. It torpedoes it. Years ago we wrote
that “the very thing that stifled learning was
pure oxygen to the schools,” namely, that
preoccupation with office-work, with
classifying and compiling and grading and
processing became the whole concern of
scholarship in the Dark Ages. Of course
there is plenty of learned noise all the time—
the one thing that kept professors going,
wrote Epicharmus, was their constitutional
inability to shut up whether they had anything
to say or not. (Indeed, Boethus of Tarsus
became the richest man in the empire by
guaranteeing to teach anyone to speak on any
subject for any length of time.) But aside
from that, the well of scholarship could
never run dry as long as the art of literary
criticism survived; professors took sides in
critical debates which endured literally for
hundreds of years as a learned pretext for
those wonderful academic feuds which of
course centered around personalities, spread
throughout the entire world, and gave to the
careers of the learned an appearance of real
emotion and enthusiasm: the smaller the
minds, the greater the vigor and dedication
they brought to the feuds. The favorite issue
for taking sides was not Homer or Vergil but
the “New (Asian) Education” versus the
“Old (Attic or Classic) Education”: they
were of equal age and as alike as peas in a
pod, but they provided the unfailing topic for
discussion that kept generations of
professors in congenial and remunerative
employment. The busywork of the schools
looked impressive from the outside, but as
Clement of Alexandria noted, there was
really nothing to it, “babbling away in their
own special jargon, toiling their whole
lifetime about special definitions . . . itching
and scratching.” It was all as easy as
sneezing once one got the knack of it. “It was
their own lack of productivity which forced
(the professors) to address themselves ever
and again to these same threadbare issues,”
wrote E. Norden.
 One theme above all provided the great
professor with a subject worthy of his pen,
namely the lives of the great professors,
beginning with his own. Favorinus, who
knew Fronto and Plutarch, was a friend of
the Emperor Hadrian, and taught at Ephesus
and Rome where the fabulously rich Herodes
Atticus attended his lectures, achieved the
pinnacle of fame by an oration on the subject
of his own greatness and left as his life’s
work a great chaotic opus in twenty-four
volumes—about himself. Illustrious men
travelled ceaselessly from library to library
gathering material on the lives of illustrious
men who had spent their lives travelling
from library to library gathering materials,
etc., etc. When one entered the school, one
automatically ceased to be one of the vulgar
—and that is why the vulgar clamored in
their thousands, at the invitation of the
emperor, to get into the school. And because
the door was kept open and the prize was
never beyond the hope of even the stupidest
boy, provided only he had ambition, the
school maintained its marvelous equilibrium
and stability for centuries. The ambitious
boys, the kind who lead student riots, were
the least inclined of all to protest.
The only real danger was serious
thought. This is well illustrated in the career
of Apuleius, who was showered with honors
and had statues of himself erected in a
hundred cities in recognition of his rhetorical
compositions in praise of smoke, of dust, of
sleep, of indifference, even an oration “In
Praise of Nothing”; but he had to face mobs
in the streets and prosecution in the courts
when it leaked out that he had private
opinions of his own—very devout religious
opinions, to be sure, but unconventional—
and had been up to such sneaky
nonconformist tricks as inventing a tooth
powder.
Whatever happens to the world, Seneca
the Elder assures us, the school is bound to
survive because there is nothing left to take
its place after (1) the natural law of decay
has done its work, (2) the growth of luxury
softens and corrodes a civilization, and (3)
the centralized government of the principate
leaves no issues for public debate. The
impression that the schools of every age
make on Eduard Meyer is one of “perpetual
decline.” Actually the ancient school did not
decline, for as Dionysius of Halicarnassus
says, it was already decadent in the time of
Alexander; it was born sick. The trouble is,
according to Dio Chrysostom, that there is
really nothing significant for young people to
do; there is no real demand for their
services, and so they all converge on the
university, the one place where doing nothing
is respectable. He mentions the phenomenal
growth of the big new universities, such as
that of Celaenae, where countless droves of
people flock together, people interested in
all sorts of litigation and business deals,
rhetoricians, political scientists, promoters,
flunkeys, pimps, procurers, teamsters
(muleteers), hucksters, harlots, dealers, and
con-men in every line—the new super-
university had become all things to all men.

Dormite Secure, Cives!

In its victorious career the school
overcame its two most serious opponents
with surprising efficiency and dispatch. They
were the church and the barbarians.
Christianity offered the world the one good
chance it ever had of breaking the vicious
cycle of corruption and fraud centering in the
schools. But the schools had a monopoly on
the Things of This World as well as the
Honors of Men, and the voices from another
world that might have brought men to their
senses were soon silenced. As early as the
second century, in the approving words of
Dr. R. Milburn, “uplifted eyes . . . turned
back to earth to find their assurance in hard
facts.” St. Augustine’s immortal De Doctrina
Christiana is but a rhetorician’s invitation to
the church to attain mental maturity by
signing up permanently with the university.
At the Council of Nicaea when the Christian
doctors were displaying themselves as
typical vain and wrangling professors, a
poor layman, one of the “confessors,” arose
in the audience and rebuked and abashed
them: Which was it to be, the Kingdom of
Heaven or the University? When the church
went to school and became respectable, and
when a bishop had to hold a university
degree in rhetoric, then the Christian
populace, cheated of their promise of
another and a better world, everywhere burst
out in appalling demonstrations of helpless
rage. The wild monks who attacked the
University of Alexandria were acting like
hysterical children, but what course was
open to them against the entrenched power of
the schools? In the end the police power of
the state, at the insistent demand of the great
orating bishops, mowed the protestors down
in hundreds of thousands. They made a
desert and they called it a peace, and so, as
Raby puts it, “the old life of the schools
continued, and men could think of nothing
better to aim at than what they had been
doing unimaginatively for centuries.”
Although the barbarians, Franks, Goths,
Visigoths, Vandals, Saxons, Arabs, and
others may have destroyed, they were
completely captivated by the schools. Their
kings and princes, stunned with admiration
of what they took to be a flowering
civilization, diligently set themselves to
composing letters and verse in the learned,
tasteless, and trivial manner of the schools,
and went all-out in largescale crash
programs of civilizing their followers
through the offices of the old established
educational system. “The grammatical art is
not used by barbarous kings,” wrote the
unbelievably insipid secretary of the
barbarian Theodosius to his master, who
took it all in. “It abides uniquely with
legitimate sovereigns.” And so the warlords
of the steppes submitted to the authority of
the schoolmen as willingly as the Christian
doctors had.
The school year at the University of
Athens was opened with prayers, offerings,
and a formal oration welcoming the students
to the “sanctuary.” Every school with its
sacred groves, temple, and library was in
theory a shrine of the Muses, a place of
inspiration and retreat from the world. Not
the least important factor in maintaining the
marvelous stability of the institutions was the
carefully cultivated atmosphere, the image of
deep and dedicated study, the look of
learning. The aura of sanctity which the
Sophists cast about themselves and their
schools, with their robes, their titles, and
their ceremonies, was the crowning touch of
their art, the ultimate answer to the critics
and the doubters. However prone to riot in
the streets and stews, the shows, baths, and
games, the students of the ancient university
always seemed to behave themselves pretty
well on the campus. The formula for
preserving order emerges with striking
clarity from an ample mass of documents
covering a long period of time. Whoever
would avoid serious student protest or
dangerous demands has simply to follow the
rules of the Sophist schools:
1. Free the student from the necessity of
any prolonged or strenuous mental effort.
2. Give him a reasonable assurance that
the school is helping him toward a career.
3. Confine moral discipline to the
amenities, paying special attention to dress
and grooming. The student will have his own
sex-life anyway.
4. Keep him busy with fun and games—
extracurricular activity is the thing.
5. Allay any subconscious feelings of
guilt due to idleness and underachievement
by emphasis on the greatness of the
institution, which should be frequently
dramatized by assemblies and ceremonies;
an atmosphere of high purpose and exalted
dedication is the best insurance against
moments of honest misgiving.
Here, then, was the secret of order and
stability in the ancient schools.
 New Light on Scaliger

No better introduction could be desired

to the life and works of the marvelous
Joseph Justus Scaliger than Mr. Warren
Blake’s fine study,1 nor is any theme more
timely than the story of the man who
demonstrated as none other how great are the
staying powers of scholarship in a world
fallen upon evil times. To all existing
Scaligerana, however, there remain yet a few
notes to be added, from hitherto neglected
sources, to correct some common
misconceptions.

The Name
It is well in holding up the image of
Scaliger as a guide and inspiration to the
studiosa iuventus (zealous youth) to
establish the proper pronunciation of his
celebrated name. There is an endearing
quality to “Scaliger” with a hard g;
something catchy—almost rakish—that is
missing from the universally recommended
“Scalijer.” The novice guilty of “Scaligger”
is sure to be corrected if not rebuked by the
polite insistence of his betters on the French
or Italian form of the name—as colorless to
our ears as the other is lively. It is with
considerable satisfaction that we are able to
propose to those who pedantically insist on
the soft g a no less pedantic and quite
crushing argument for the other.
Mr. Robinson’s useful collection of
materials on Scaligger includes a portrait of
the great man “from the engraving by J. de
Leeuw, made from a water-color portrait of
Scaliger which was painted shortly before
his death,”2 in which he holds in his left hand
a missive addressed “to Joseph Scaliger,”
while with his right he pens a reply headed
Is. Casaubono Iosephus Scaliger S. P. (cf.
fig. 18). Now the note which he holds from
Casaubon is addressed to Scaliger in
Arabic, the name being written with
exaggerated attention to phonetic values:
“Yūsuf Sqāligh-r.”3 The g of the name is here
rendered by Arabic ghain, and we are
fortunate in knowing the exact sound of that
letter when used by our two learned
correspondents, for Scaliger explains with
great exactness in a letter to his friend4 that
ghain is always to be pronounced as a hard
g, never like the soft French or Italian jim or
g, which must be represented, he insists, by
Arabic jim (“Gimel”):
Quia pronunciatio Gimel apud Arabas
in omni syllaba est, ut apud Gallos in
Ge, & Gi, hoc est, mollis. Quando
 autem Arabes Ga volunt usurpare,
utuntur’ ain cum puncto (i.e., ghain, as it
appears in the portrait), quod est
illorum g Germanicum . . . hoc est,
durum.
Since the Arabs always pronounce
gimel soft, like the “ge” and “gi” in
French. But when the Arabs wish to
pronounce ga [i.e., hard g] they make
use of the dotted cain which is the
German g.
In the portrait from the Senate Hall in
the University of Leyden (the frontispiece of
Robinson’s book) Scaliger is shown
solemnly penning an Arabic missive upside
down! But this is a slip that could not
possibly have occurred where it was a case
not of copying any Arabic writing at hand but
of actually composing the text, and we may
be sure that whoever it was who advised the
artist or supplied him with the writing—and
it may have been Scaliger himself—knew
what he was doing when he wrote the name
to be pronounced in the classical Latin, or
English, manner with a hard, guttural g.
 Figure 18. Portrait of Joseph
Scaliger

Scaliger as Autodidactus
It is more than a matter of idle curiosity
to inquire by what procedure the most
learned of mortals acquired his education.
After 1555, when he was fifteen, Scaliger
“never returned to school; nor did he get any
regular instruction at home.” At nineteen he
went to Paris to study with the great
Turnebus, but of that study he reports “non
diu viva voce, sed potius mutis magistris
usus sum” (I made use of silent masters
rather than living ones), and he applies to
himself Casaubon’s own protestations of
being “opsimathes et autodidactus” (late in
learning and self-taught).5 “Of the four years
Scaliger spent at the University of Paris,”
writes Pattison after long searching, “nothing
is known.”6 We only just glimpse the young
student for a brief moment as the door of his
solitary study closes upon him, and are left
with the picture—drawn by both Bernays
and Pattison—of the baffled beginner, failing
to comprehend the advanced lectures of
Turnebus, locking himself in a garret to seize
in time the crown of learning “aus eigener,
autodidaktischer Machtvollkommenheit” (by
his own, self-taught perfection of power), as
Bernays says.7 Bayle, in his Dictionary,
suggests a different motive for Scaliger’s
retirement, namely that he found Turnebus’s
class not too advanced but too slow and
backward, and so “he shut himself up in his
closet, resolving to use no master but
himself.” Bayle then goes on to note that
after mastering Greek, Scaliger “turned his
thoughts to the Hebrew tongue, which he
learned by himself with great facility.”8
Now it is definitely known that Scaliger
did not learn Hebrew “by himself with great
facility,”9 and yet in making the claim Bayle
is taking no greater liberties than when he
and others state that Scaliger was
autodidactus (self-taught) in Greek, the
authority for both claims being the same,
namely the important “First Epistle.” It is
only a complete lack of documents that
forces one to assume that he pursued a
course of self-education with brilliant
success in the more difficult field and total
failure in the other. Scaliger’s self-education
rests simply on the argument of silence.
The silence is now broken by a few
welcome words, scribbled beneath the
frontispiece portrait in a book of Scaliger’s
Epistolae Omnes, now in the University of
California Library, published in Frankfurt in
1628 and acquired in the same year by one
who signs himself Andreas Lucius, possibly
of the famous Swiss family of philologists.
Throughout the book Lucius has jotted down
marginal notes, among them the above
mentioned, which reads:
Solu(s) hic est sapiens, alii volitant
velut umbrae. Hic ille est, quem in
prima adhuc aetate tantopere admiratus
est vir in literis maximus, Hadrianus
Turnebus, ut portentosi ingenii juvenem
appellare non dubitaret. Ut in epistola
quadam ad Meursium scripta Jacobus
Gillosus Consiliarius Gallicus instatur
(sic).
He alone is wise, while the others flit
about like shades. This is the one who
even at an early age was regarded with
such admiration by the outstanding
literary figure of the time, Turnebus, that
he did not hesitate to call him a youth of
marvelous character. Thus Jacques
Gillot states in a letter written to van
 Meurs.
The Meursius in question is the
celebrated Jan van Meurs, in whose youthful
studies Scaliger had taken a lively interest.10
Jacques Gillot, who here reports on
Scaliger, was one of those whose chief
delight is to search out and cultivate the
genius of others, in which generous zeal he
made his home the intellectual clearinghouse
of the age.11 His keen interest in the studies
of others, as well as the fact that he and
Scaliger were studying the same things in
Paris at the same time (they were of about
the same age, Gillot perhaps somewhat
older), makes him the man most likely to
know the facts about Scaliger’s Paris dates.
Certainly the picture of the young student
commanding the admiration of the great
professor of Greek from the first agrees far
better with what is known of the man’s
character and accomplishments, of his policy
of always taking fullest advantage of
whatever instruction was available, of the
zeal with which he would throw himself into
the thick of any important discussion, than
does the strange picture of the abashed and
retiring youth which Scaliger only suggests
and which his biographers have filled out.
Scaliger was anything but a self-taught
recluse.

Scaliger’s Titles
One of the most engaging aspects of
Scaliger study is the variety of epithets
which have always been attached to his
name. From the hand of the enthusiastic
Lucius, we have a witness of how even in
Scaliger’s own day men were intrigued by
these gorgeous epithets; for that student
collects them as one would stamps and fills
the flyleaf of the book mentioned with lists
of Nomina Scaligero a doctissimis
hominibus data (names given to Scaliger by
learned men), much as Robinson has chosen
a number of such epithets as the opening
words of his book. Lucius’s collection,
which includes where possible the names of
the inventors of the various “blurbs” is
worth citing:
Abyssus eruditionis, Scientiarum mare,
sol doctorum, patris divini divina
suboles, genus Deorum, Perpetuus
literarum dictator, Hercules Musarum
(Casaub.), Unicum saeculi decus (Cas.),
Daemonium hominis (Lips.),
Literatorum Rex (Lips.), Illustrissimum
ingenium huius (?) aevi (Lips.), Magnus
filiarum Mnemosynes Antipes (Lips.),
Divini ingenii vir (Florens Christianus),
Maximum naturae opus o miraculum,
Extremus naturae conatus, Aquila in
nubibus (Lips.), Unus, cui tota Musarum
sacris operatorum cohors assurgit, cui
principes Musici coetus fasces
submittunt (Casaub.), Sol unicus
doctrinarum & eruditionis (Cas.),
Mirincus vir, & quem Homeri verbis
iure appelles: daiphrona poikilometen
(Lips.).
Bottomless pit of learning, a sea of
knowledge, a sun among the learned,
divine offspring of a divine father, race
of the Gods, universal lord of letters,
Hercules of the Muses, sole splendor of
the age, a little spirit of a man, king of
literati, the most distinguished spirit of
this age, the great offspring of the
daughters of Mnemosyne, a man of
heavenly character, oh miracle, the
greatest work of nature, the final effort
of nature, an eagle among the clouds,
 one to whom the whole host of Muses
gives preference because of the sacred
things of the workers, single sun of
erudition and learning, a remarkable
man and one whom you would rightly
name with words from Homer: skilled,
much devising.

Notes
This article, written in response to
Warren E. Blake’s “Joseph Justus
Scaliger,” Classical Journal 36 (1940): 83-
91, was published in Classical Journal 37
(1942): 291-95.

Notes
This article was originally published
in Brigham Young University Studies 9
(1969): 440-52.
Footnotes
^1. Warren E. Blake, “Joseph Justus Scaliger,”
Classical Journal 36 (1940): 83-91.
^2. George W. Robinson, Autobiography of
Joseph Scaliger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1927), 21.
^3. Written with long alif where a short one (on
which the accent would fall naturally) would
have done as well, and with emphatic qaf
instead of kaf; the transliteration does not
give the name its Arabic form, which would
be Iskalliji(ī)r, but attempts only to preserve
its current pronunciation.
^4. Joseph Justus Scaliger, Epistolae Omnes
Quae Reperiri Potuerunt (Frankfurt:
Aubriorum & Schleichii, 1628), LXII
(1606).
^5. Ibid., Epistola XXXV (1594).
^6. Henry Nettleship, ed., Essays by the Late
Mark Pattison, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon,
1889), 1:139.
^7. Jakob Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger
(Berlin: Hertz, 1855), 5; cf. Blake, “Joseph
 Justus Scaliger,” 85.
^8. Pierre Bayle, An Historical and Critical
Dictionary, 4 vols. (London: Harper, 1710),
s.v. “Scaliger.”
^9. Nettleship, ed., Essays by the Late Mark
Pattison, 138; Bernays, Joseph Justus
Scaliger, 36. We find Scaliger, very shortly
after taking up the language, seeking
instruction from various experts, ibid., 122-
24; Nettleship, ed., Essays by the Late Mark
Pattison, 1:202-5.
^10. Scaliger was greatly angered that one of
Meursius’s early promises should have been
spoiled by too much success, Joseph J.
Scaliger, Prima Scaligerana (Utrecht:
Petrus Elzevirius, 1670), s.v. “Meursius”;
Bayle, Dictionary, s.v. “Meursius,” writes:
“We learn from Vossius’s 114th Letter that
Scaliger had many strokes in them (i.e., his
epistolae) against Meursius, whose name
was suppressed in the impression by
substituting an asterisc [sic]." Cf.
Eyssenhardt, “Meursius,” in R. v.
Lilieneron, ed., Allgemeine deutsche
 Biographie, 56 vols. (Leipzig: Duncker &
Homblot, 1885), 21:538; and Weiss,
“Mersius (Jean Ier),” in Joseph F. Michaud,
Biographie universelle ancienne et
moderne, 45 vols. (Paris: Desplaces, 1854-
65), 28:155-57.
^11. Weiss, “Gillot (Jacques),” in Michaud,
Biographie universelle, 16:464-65. It was at
Gillot’s house that the authors of the Satyre
Menippee “were united in a veritable cult of
the absent Scaliger,” Mark Pattison, Isaac
Casaubon, 1559-1614, 2d ed. (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1892), 115.
 Three Shrines: Mantic,
Sophic, and Sophistic

I. The Mantic Substratum

In his recent study of the gods of the
Greeks, Professor Kerenyi compares the
classical scholar thumbing through his notes
and handbooks in search of an outworn creed
with Sir George Gray, who long ago had
joined in the feasts and dances of the Maoris
and learned their language and legends in
order to pluck the heart out of their mystery.1
The comparison is too sanguine. As long ago
as the fourth century, Synesius could report
as a quaint oddity the presence in the Aegean
islands of peasants who still believed in the
Cyclops2—but they have long since passed
away. No living informant can satisfy the
modern scholar’s craving for a firsthand
introduction to the gods of Greece, and if the
investigator goes to the written sources he
will soon find that they were all put down by
schoolmen (mostly Christians) who believe
the myths and legends as little as he does.3
How then can they or he presume to criticize
a religion in which they do not believe—is
that not akin to the folly of criticizing a
painting which one has not seen or music
which one has not heard? The insider and the
outsider do not experience the same thing at
all. Students of Greek religion, however they
may yearn for a whiff of incense or
asphodel, can smell today nothing but the
musk and floorwax of the stacks, the last
labyrinthine retreat of the ancient mysteries.
What justifies these remarks is the
conviction that there is something in Greek
religion which even at this vast remove of
time and in spite of the officious and bookish
handling of evidence can still reach us and
move us. To become aware of this thing the
modern analytic mind must be subjected to a
gentle softening process, first by placing it
over the low flame of a harmless
generalization.
For many years the regular reading of
the Old Norse sagas was part of a self-
inflicted curriculum to which I faithfully
adhered. Then one day in the midst of a
typical tale of family feuds and mayhem I
suddenly admitted to myself a proposition I
had known all along, but out of loyalty to my
own cultural heritage had refused to
acknowledge: “Let’s face it,” I said aloud,
“these people are not interesting.” From that
day to this I have not read a word of
Icelandic. But I have wondered why my
forebears are so uninteresting—after all,
their passion and their intelligence were both
of a high order, their deeds are nowhere
surpassed for nobility, depravity, violence,
or magnanimity. Why is it that the Greeks and
Arabs, as savage and villainous and tricky as
any people anywhere, continue to be so
fascinating, while Scandinavians, Slavs,
Armenians, and Byzantines leave us cold? I
have the answer: the Greeks and Arabs
always seem to be expecting something,
while the others are expecting nothing. E. V.
Gordon is right: the heroic stamp of the
Norse epic is its mood of utter hopelessness.
“A good resistance against overpowering
odds was made the characteristic situation. .
. . The gods themselves knew that they would
in the end be overwhelmed by the evil
powers. . . . Every religious-minded man of
the heathen age believed that he existed for
the sake of that hopeless cause.”4 The
Greeks and Arabs yield to none in their
depreciation of the hopes of this life; they
expect no more of this world than our Norse
forebears. The difference is their constant
awareness, more often implied than
expressed, of something beyond this world.
“God is the Knower,” says the Arab at the
end of every discourse, leaving the door
open for any possible subsequent
developments.
Socrates ended his life with a speech
that emphasized two points: (1) that he had
not found in this life what he was looking
for, and knew of no one else who had;5 and
(2) that failure had not in the least abated his
conviction that what he was looking for was
to be found.6 He never claimed to have found
his treasure, but he never gave up looking.
This attitude is most dramatically embodied
in the Egyptian culture. “Never on this
earth,” wrote Eduard Meyer, “have men
sought with such energy and persistence to
make the impossible possible in spite of
everything, . . . believing on its possibility
with a bitter tenacity.”7 “The impression
made on the modern mind,” writes I.E.S.
Edwards, “is that of a people searching in
the dark for a key to truth and, having found
not one but many keys resembling the pattern
of the lock, retaining all lest perchance the
appropriate one should be discarded.”8 It is
an awesome thing to contemplate the greatest
nation of antiquity, often described by
Egyptologists as the most hard-headed,
down-to-earth, shrewdly practical,
unimaginative, critical, and observant, level-
headed people on earth, as pouring out their
vast energies and treasure for centuries on
end in a wild gamble on the chances of
immortality.
But even in their most ancient writings
“we constantly come upon signs of
indecision and doubt,” writes Louis Speelers
of the Coffin Texts. “Confusion reigns . . .
both in literary expression and especially in
their cerebral realm.”9 The builder of the
Great Pyramid, we are told, “spent all his
time seeking for himself the secret
chambers,”10 searching in the ancient books
for the secrets of life, as many another
Pharaoh did after him. They had their doubts,
to put it mildly, but the point is that they
always kept searching and expecting. And so
they have never ceased to fascinate the rest
of us, while the scholars who take them to
task for their foolishness today interest
nobody. The Egyptians, so to speak, never
stopped looking behind the door (and in their
case the expression is more than a figurative
one), and so they appeal to us and excite us
strangely. And so the Jews, too—intelligent,
critical, skeptical, and sarcastic—can never,
try as they will, entirely free themselves
from the whisperings of the Kabbalah and a
haunting sense of wonderful things to come
(2 Nephi 6:12-14); while the early
Christians define their faith as pure
expectation: “the substance of things hoped
for” (Hebrews 11:1; emphasis added). The
wonder of the Bible for Alfred North
Whitehead is that it “excels in its suggestion
of infinitude. . . . Possibilities are infinite,
and even though we may not apprehend
them, those infinite possibilities are
actualities.”11 He ends his essay on science
and religion with the words, “The death of
religion comes with the repression of the
high hope of adventure.”
In all these cases the important thing is
not what is expected—Whitehead realizes
that he knows no more than Socrates just
what it is. What could be more vague and
illdefined than “infinite possibilities”? The
important thing is that something is expected,
but if that expectation is not real, it is
nothing. To be a believer you must be a
literalist with a mind open to “infinite
possibilities.” But traditional Christianity
loathes and disowns literalism—a crime of
which Catholics and Protestants have been
accusing each other over the centuries.
The theme of these talks is that the
Greeks (like the Christian church that later
followed in their footsteps), passed from a
primoridal “Mantic” order of things to the
“Sophic,” and lost their original mood of
expectation, putting something else in its
place. It passed from the Mantic to the
Sophic, and thence in its attempts to combine
the two, arrived at the Sophistic. The Greeks
passed through the same three stages before
the Christians did, and it was their particular
brand of Sophic and Sophistic that the
Church accepted. It is time to define these
terms, Sophic and Mantic.
Josephus, citing Manetho, describes an
Egyptian king who was obsessed with a
yearning to possess the prophetic gifts and
enjoy the heavenly visions of his ancestors
as a sophos kai mantikos aner—" a Sophic
and a Mantic man”;12 and Theophrastus
observes this significant dualism when he
points out that the Egyptians are the most
rational people alive (logiōtaton genos),
inheriting and inhabiting the most religious
of environments (hierōtatēn . . . chōran).13
These are the two basic human attitudes, the
rational and the religious. It was the age-old
struggle between hardheaded realism and
holy tradition that produced the bedizzening
subtleties and endless elaborations of
Egyptian theology from Heliopolis and
Thebes to Alexandria. And it was at that last
and latest center of holy thought—a city
built, literally, with funds contributed in hot
competition by rival priestly schools and
factions14—that the basic theological
concepts of the Jewish, Christian, and
Moslem doctors with all their sublime,
incomprehensible, and insoluble
contradictions took their life.
Dio Chrysostom, in his Discourse on
the Knowledge of God, describes his own
skill and training—the degenerate education
of his own day—as being “neither mantic,
nor sophistic, nor even rhetorical”15—(those
being the three natural levels of education).
The Greek word Mantic simply means
prophetic or inspired, oracular, coming from
the other world and not from the resources
of the human mind. Instead of Dio’s
Sophistic to describe the operations of the
unaided human mind, we use the much rarer
Sophic here, because, as is well known, in
time Sophistic came to be identical with
Rhetorical, that is, a pseudothought form
which merely imitated the other two in an
attempt to impress the public. The Mantic is
the equivalent of what Professor
Goodenough designates as “vertical”
Judaism, i.e., the belief in the real and
present operation of divine gifts by which
one receives constant guidance from the
other world, a faith expressed in varying
degrees among such ancient sectaries as the
Hasidim, Karaites, Kabbalists, and the
people of Qumran.16 The Mantic accepts the
other world, or better, other worlds, as part
of our whole experience without which any
true understanding of this life is out of the
question. “It is the Mantic,” says Synesius,
“which supplies the element of hope in our
lives by assuring us of the reality of things
beyond.”17 Mantic, hope, and reality are the
key words. What is expected is not as
important as the act of expectation, and so
those who share the Mantic conviction are a
community of believers, regardless of what
it is they expect.
The Sophic, on the other hand, is the
tradition which boasted its cool, critical,
objective, naturalistic, and scientific attitude;
its Jewish equivalent is what Goodenough
calls the “horizontal” Judaism—scholarly,
bookish, halachic, intellectual, rabbinical.
All religions, as Goodenough observes,
seem to make some such distinction.18 It is
when one seeks to combine or reconcile the
Sophic and the Mantic that trouble begins.
“True reason,” according to
Empedocles, “is either divine or human; the
former is not for discussion, the latter is
discussion”;19 and recently Charles Kahn has
argued that Empedocles himself is two
distinct thinkers, a Sophic and a Mantic, “a
split personality whose two sections are not
united by any essential link.”20 Since
Empedocles’ career is a unique and
impressive attempt to combine Sophic and
Mantic, his case illustrates the important fact
that the two are totally incompatible.
Whoever accepts the Sophic attitude must
abandon the Mantic, and vice versa. It is the
famous doctrine of Two Ways found among
the Orientals, Greeks, and early Christians—
if you try to compromise between them you
get nowhere, because as one of the Apostolic
Fathers points out, they lead in opposite
directions. Those who share the Mantic hope
of things beyond, whatever those things may
be, are in a very real sense a community of
believers, just as Christians, Jews, and
Moslems form a fellowship of “the People
of the Book,” because of their belief in
inspired books—even though they may not
agree as to which books are the inspired
ones.21 On the other hand, the Sophic society
unitedly rejects the Mantic proposition, and
it too forms a single community, as is
strikingly and amusingly demonstrated in a
1954 study of Professor Enslin, who, while
branding the teachings of Clement of
Alexandria as “rubbish, . . . pathetic
nonsense, . . . triple-A nonsense,”22 at the
same time hails Clement as a true gentlemen
and a scholar after his own heart, because,
even though his method produces nothing but
balderdash, it is at least not contaminated by
any supernaturalism—here was “a man who
prized brain and insight, who preferred the
voice of reasoned conviction to the braying
of Balaam’s ass.”23 Better false teaching
from a true intellectual than the truth from a
prophet. So fiercely loyal and
uncompromising are the Sophic and Mantic
to their own.
It behooves us to consider the Mantic at
this time because in our day its influence
(under the name of eschatology) is being
strangely and wonderfully expanded as the
steady continuance of new manuscript
discoveries calls for radical reevaluation of
ancient religion in general. If Christianity
and Judaism are being basically reappraised
at the moment, a reassessment of the pagan
religions cannot be far behind. Indeed, today,
bridges are being thrown out in every
direction over what were once unbridgeable
and yawning gulfs between cultures and
religions. Philological cables grow to
ideological spans between early Jewish and
Christian sectarians; Kostas Papaioannou is
bridging the gulf between the Prophets of
Israel and the Greek poets;24 while F. J. H.
Letters, in describing the religion of
Sophocles, describes something which
approaches the Gospel nearer than we have
supposed.25 New bridges are springing up
between the Old Testament and the New, and
between both of them and the Apocrypha,
between various ancient mysteries and
Christian rites, in a complicated network of
interrelationships between Egypt and
Mesopotamia, Canaan, Mycenae, Israel, the
Hittites, and all the Europeans. “Patternism”
now proposes to trace such ties back to
prehistoric times. No ancient religious rites
can be considered as spontaneous and
independent in origin, as not long ago
virtually all were thought to be.26 We now
learn that the cult of the dead was “as
meaningful and urgent for humanist Athens as
for hieratic Egypt,”27 and are assured by
Catholic scholars that “the wine miracle at
Cana was the same as the miracle in the
temple of Dionysus”28 and that “on the
Damascus Chalice, Christ is enthroned
among vine tendrils like Dionysus
himself.”29 The Dead Sea Scrolls are
teaching us as Christians to sit down to
dinner with strange cousins from all over the
East—Essenes, Ebionites, Gnostics,
Therapeutae, even Moslems—whom a few
years ago we turned out of doors as tramps
and aliens: Catholics and Protestants are
now falling over themselves to get to the
door to be the first to hail the forlorn
strangers of Qumran as long-lost brothers.
The common element that now makes it
possible to establish all these ties is a
universal Mantic substratum. This can
readily be seen in the enthusiastic
acceptance by pagans, Christians, and Jews
alike of the ancient inspired utterances of the
Sibyll. In the Mantic world of the apocrypha,
as of ritual and liturgy, the boundaries
between “Vertical Judaism” and primitive
Christianity become very tenuous indeed, as
do those between even the Christian and
pagan worlds: it was on Mantic grounds that
the early Christians hailed Socrates as one of
their own,30 that medieval Christianity made
a saint of Vergil, that the early Apologists
praised and quoted the Greek poets as men
of true religious insight or inspiration, and
the Apostolic Fathers before them mingled
Classical and Scriptural texts and histories
into one.31 The idea of a common “Mantic”
heritage, meaningless a few years ago, may
now be seriously considered.
It is high time we realized that there
must have been a solid body of fact behind
the strange unwillingness of Greeks, Jews,
and Egyptians to give up their Mantic
addictions. The whole Mantic tradition is,
from hoary antiquity, disciplined, organized,
institutionalized, and established over the
world. The importance of Delphi and
Eleusis, Olympia, and Delos in the political,
social, religious, and artistic life of Greece
testify to the vitality of the ancient Mantic
tradition. It reminds one of the common
denominator of all ancient civilization which
has been consistently overlooked, namely the
image that each great civilization thought of
itself as having been carefully planned in the
beginning, all its rites and patterns handed
down from above, a complete, perfect
structure, planned in detail from the
beginning as the faithful reflection of a
heavenly prototype32 present in sacred books
of great antiquity. Over against this, the
Sophic presented a theory of the evolution of
man from his primitive beginnings, following
“natural laws,” a theory which armies of
dedicated researchers have failed to make
even momentarily watertight to this day; not
that it might not be true, but if the old
förgötten doctrine of the divine plan,
conveyed to men in a primordial revelation
and since confirmed from time to time by
heavenly messengers, were to be given equal
time or even one percent of equal time, the
opposition would be hard-pressed indeed.
The “hierocentric” concept that all good
things have been conveyed to mankind from
above through divinely appointed operations
of holy shrines and persons is immensely
appealing, even in the abstract. But
transcending all theory is the fact, obvious
enough to the ancients if not to us, that all the
basic institutions of civilization—political,
economic, artistic, literary, military, and
scientific—did take their rise at the Temple.
If their legends were not enough to
remind them of that, all the great societies of
antiquity were required to meet at regular
intervals in vast popular assemblies of the
ritual renewal of the corporate life and the
dramatic rehearsal of the stories of how it all
came about. The great panegyris or
universal assembly of the entire race for
games, contests, feasts, and liturgy of great
splendor never let the people individually or
collectively forget the other world and their
ties to it.33 The highest expression of this
national eschatology was the Mysteries: only
one who had been initiated into them, says
Pindar, knows the beginning of life.34 Their
“substance,” according to Walter Wili, was
the preexistence, the present existence, and
the future existence of things—the full and
complete plot, that is, of the drama of the
universe.35 Without that story, Greek life lost
its meaning. “When Christianity put an end to
the Mysteries of Eleusis,” writes Walter
Otto, “Greek life itself seemed to have sunk
into the grave with them.”36 There was “no
deeper meaning” to the mysteries, Rohde
concluded, than the doctrine hen andron hen
theon genos, the coexistence of the human
race with the divine race; what more could
one ask for than the single divine complex
into which the Mysteries and great
panegyrises brought the two together. These
national disciplines never let the people
forget the other world and their ties to it, and
out of them came all the great creative works
of the Greeks. The moral of the mysteries,
says the shrewd Christian Synesius, is
simply that everything is divinely
administered, and that every man takes from
the mysteries what he individually is able to;
and he quotes the famous saying, “Many are
bearers of the narthex, but few are Bacchae,”
or, as we may put it freely, “Many join the
parade but few are really carried away.” As
might be expected, there were many in the
parade who got things wrong, and many
quacks and pretenders. P. Schmitt points out
that the word mysterion can signify,
depending on its context, “night ramblers,
magicians, bacchants, maenads, mystics,
cough medicine, the secret plan of a king, a
secret hidden cult.” All have one element in
common (if we assume that the cough
medicine is a secret recipe), namely, contact
with a higher, hidden source. The Latin
equivalent mysterium, Schmitt notes, has the
basic meaning of to “inspire” or “initiate,”
that is, to introduce someone to something he
could never discover for himself. But the
matter dealt with, or what Walter Wili calls
“the substance of the Orphic mysteries,” is
threefold: (1) the Creation and preexistence,
“the genesis of gods, the cosmos, and men,”
(2) the fall of man and its necessary
retribution, and (3) his ultimate destiny and
goal, expressed in the Pythagorean and
Orphic traditions in the doctrine of
transmigration of souls. These will be
readily recognized as the three great
eschatological themes of the past, present,
and future, as they are so clearly set forth in
the Egyptian Book of the Dead. One of the
strange phenomena of Greek life was the
way the “old, essentially Greek impulses”37
would revive from time to time, “ein uraltes
Erbgut neu belebt.”38 The most enlightened
Greeks and Romans were all initiates to the
Mysteries; the Greeks were as mercilessly
critical of humbug as the French, and all of
their writings that have reached us have been
screened by rationalistic pagan and Christian
schoolmen. It is indeed remarkable that in all
the literature we fail to find any derogatory
remark or witticism about the Mysteries.39
Even more remarkable is that none of a host
of outspoken and gossipy writers, hungry for
sensational talk, has ever divulged the
secrets of the Mysteries. We are very much
mistaken, Otto reminds us, if we think for a
moment that we can run the Mysteries to
ground simply by the use of modern
psychology and philology: such great things
are not to be so cheaply had, and we will
never know just what took place in the
Mysteries.40
The headquarters of the Mysteries were
also the great assembly places, the economy
of all the mysteries and the panegyrises
being inextricably interwoven. Musaeus, for
example, the high priest of Delphi, was also
director of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the
author of a great creation hymn, and the
founder of the first academy.41 He wrote
oracular poems and the Theogony. The
Theogony is in the tradition of the Creation
Hymn, eschatological and cosmic in its
sweep. The mark of divinity in all poetry,
according to Aristotle, is its capacity for
dealing with things in their universal aspect.
The Creation Hymn deserves special
mention because it was the ancient and
original office of the Muses to sing that
hymn, the great archetype of all music and
verse. All fields of knowledge belong to the
Muses, the wise women, the purveyors—not
the authors—of divine revelation; the
schools never förgöt their origin as holy
oracular shrines of the Muses with their
sacred temples, images (mostly memorial
busts of great teachers), lecture halls,
grottoes, walks, groves, and libraries. A
center of learning was a Musaeon, and the
Muses acted as intermediaries between the
divine and the human in all nine fields of
learning; the Muses were not worshipped
save as agents of gods. They were the
archaic oracular women whom we find all
over the ancient world, whose classic
representative is the Sibyll herself.42 Dio
Chrysostom tells how the Seven Wise Men
—those true Sophoi of which the rest were
all but imitators, mere Sophists—used to
meet at Delphi to unite their wisdom for the
help of the human race, imparting of their
knowledge to all who came to consult the
oracles there.43 In that day it was simply
inconceivable that wisdom could be
conveyed to the race anywhere but at the
properly appointed holy shrine. The ideas
which we designate as Mantic were thus
institutionalized for the ancients—in the
panegyris, the Mysteries, and the schools—
to a degree which we can hardly imagine.
For them it was easy to conceive of the
heavenly order as real, since one had
reminders of it all around one.44 Even when
the Mantic order was challenged, it was
possible to point to an argument in its favor
that the rationalists have never been able to
answer—the argument of creativity.
In his lost Hymn to Zeus, Pindar tells
how God in the beginning did not consider
his creation complete until he had also
created a voice to proclaim it (the same idea
exactly is presented in the Shabako stone,
which may be the oldest surviving Egyptian
document), specifically to proclaim his glory
by reciting the works of the Creation.45 The
great prototype of all Music and Verse is
thus the Creation Hymn, just as the prototype
of all creative human activity in art and
science is the creation itself. The Egyptians
were fairly obsessed with the idea that in
creating anything, a man was doing the work
of God; creation could not have any other
than a divine source or be anything but a
divine activity. The Devil cannot create; he
can only destroy. He is Apollyon, the
Destroyer, and nothing else.
In the early times there was a common
Mantic meeting ground of Christian and non-
Christian, just as in later times the common
meeting ground was exclusively Sophic.
Everybody agrees today that the
distinguishing characteristic of the Early
Christians was their vivid apocalyptic
expectations. Exactly what these
expectations were has ever been a subject of
controversy and endless discussion. But
again we must insist, though we do not know
and the Christians themselves did not know
just what great things were ahead, one thing
was certain: there were great things ahead!
Once we know that the prize is awaiting us
“with a firm assurance,” then when and
where we shall get it, and even what it is,
become secondary considerations—mere
details. It was so with Plato. Along with the
Bible, it is Plato who emerges in
Whitehead’s last analysis as supremely
satisfying—and for the same reason. Plato
always leaves the door open; he remains as a
good Greek should and as Solon the Wise
did, “forever a child,” aiei didaskomenos—
ever learning—naive, innocent, always
expecting. That would account for the fact
that, try as we will, we cannot view things
neutrally; we are not impartial observers, as
the Sophoi claimed to be. When we applaud
whatever is good and beautiful, it is not
blind, accidental force that we are
applauding (a mindless operation is just as
willing to produce a bad thing as a good
one); it is something good. We bestow our
approval and disapproval upon all we see
about us—how could that be if things just
happen?46
The Greeks were greatly impressed by
the fact, attested by long experience, that
even the greatest genius cannot create at
will.47 The moments of genuine creativity
are simply not within human control, all that
is within human control being what Plato
calls mere imitation, i.e., something that can
be taught—for to learn is simply to imitate.48
Even when they create by inspiration,
however, humans know that the result is but a
poor reflection of the divine original. The
greater the artist, in fact, the more frustrated
he feels.49 “Wise is he who knows much by
nature but, when men have merely studied
and learned their knowledge, they are
turbulent and intemperate of tongue, even as
a pair of crows chattering against the divine
bird of Zeus.”50 If creation were an
intellectual accomplishment, an act of human
intellect or will, that would not be the case.
Creation is not of this world; a place of
imitation at best “in the domain of art has
apparently but a small opinion of the earthly
counterparts of the celestial originals.”51
They are literally worlds apart; the heavenly
originals are no mere human ideas, but, as
far as we are aware of them, things actually
remembered from another world. For Plato,
what we recognized here as good, true, and
beautiful is but a dim recollection of what
we once saw in another and better world.
That is Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis.
The greatest Greeks were determined
defenders of the Mantic against the Sophic,
as we shall see later. Though not the best
argument for the Mantic, the first that
confronts us is the striking fact, of which the
Greeks themselves are keenly aware, that it
is precisely the greatest, most original, most
productive “geniale,” of their number who
insist most emphatically upon man’s
dependence on light from above. If it had
been any but the greatest poets (Pindar),
philosphers (Aristotle, Plato), scientists
(Eratosthenes), or dramatists (all of them),
who preached the complete dependence of
the creative mind on direct inspiration from
above, we could brush the doctrine aside as
speculation or pretense (and indeed, many a
minor poet and orator, imitating the great
ones, pretended to be inspired and made a
show of it);52 but we cannot treat with
condescension or contempt, regardless of
our education, the deepest convictions of the
very men who have given us the best we
have. If anybody knows what he is talking
about, these men should, and they are not
vague or equivocal regarding the reality of
the world. In his study of the Muses, Walter
Otto concludes that for the Greeks “the
whole work of the artist is to create,” and
that “creation is in the last analysis simply
revelation (Schopfung im Grunde eine
Offenbarung ist).” Those who have had to
acquire their art by study and learning alone,
Pindar reminds us, “can never be anything
but a flock of crows, jealously squawking
against the divine bird of Zeus.”53 Poesis
means creation, and is only true poetry to the
extent that it is creation and not imitation.
The dismal failure of a million zealous and
often highly intelligent imitators to produce
an inspiring (and therefore inspired) poem or
anything else truly original proves that we
have here something totally beyond human
ken, while those who do create are
unanimous in reporting that the process is
something equally out of their control. The
power to create is something not only
completely beyond the comprehension of the
uninspired, but equally beyond the control of
those who possess it: in the moment of
creation they are seized with a divine frenzy,
shaken, and even frightened.54
For the experience of creation, whether
in great calm or unbearable excitement, is a
profoundly religious experience. Rudolf Otto
showed that there is a thing which can be
broken down into no emotional or
psychological elements beyond itself, and
that is das Heilige, “the numinous,” that
which we call holy and cannot define beyond
calling it holy. As Otto says, this fundamental
requisite in the recognition of the Holy is that
it comes upon us but is never self-induced. It
is a holy thing, and the poet, to that degree to
which he is truly a poet, is an oracle and a
prophet. In music and poetry “the earliest
fragments are priestly incantations; . . . the
first poets, then, are the priests.”55
Conversely, Plutarch knows that the old
inspiration is passing away when the oracles
start to speak in prose instead of verse.56
The creator of the Greek epic, ode, and
drama is frankly a prophet and preacher of
righteousness, an inspired man; even
historians and orators are expected to play
the Mantic role: the sane and enlightened
Thucydides has baffled the critics by
affecting the oracular style of Aeschylus,57
and it remains an open question just how
seriously the prayers and incantations of the
orators are to be taken.
None is more insistent on the need for
revelation than Plato. Plato was the great
champion of the Mantic. He banned Homer
from his model state not, as the Sophists did,
because he was inspired (they made fun of
everything in Homer that was not strictly
rational according to their way of thinking),
but because with his inspiration he mingled
his own human contribution, or, as Plato puts
it, he mixed mere imitation with
inspiration.58 For Plato, whatever is not
inspired can only be mere imitation. True
knowledge comes to the race only through
men who prove their inspiration “when they
say many great things without knowing what
they say.”59 Such are the poets: “I know that
they do what they do not by any intelligence
of their own, but by a special nature, and
inspiration such as holy prophets and oracles
have, for they too speak many fine and
wonderful things without knowing what they
are saying.”60 The words of such men,
“inspired from heaven,” are, Plato insists,
the only fit instruction for the youth.61 His
own favorite poet was Pindar, one of those
poets “of heavenly gifts,” who taught that the
human mind is blind when it attempts to find
the path unaided by its own cleverness.62
“Whoever thinks,” says Plato, “that skill
alone will make a good poet; . . . [he] will
never attain perfection, but be surpassed by
the inspired madmen.”63 Both Plato and
Aristotle, according to Jaeger, “placed
inspiration above reason and moral insight . .
. because it comes from God”—for while
reason is far from infallible, “the sureness of
inspiration, on the other hand, is like
lightning.”64 Whoever receives inspiration
must be both ritually and morally pure “like
an instrument,” says Plutarch, “prepared and
fair-sounding.”65 It was both as a Platonist
and as a Christian that Justin Martyr
declared: “Neither by nature nor by any
human skill is it possible for men to know
such great and holy things; but only by a gift
that descends from above upon holy men
from time to time, who need no training in
speech or skill in controversy and argument,
but only to keep themselves pure by the
power of the Holy Spirit so that the divine
plectrum . . . can express itself through them
as on the strings of a lyre.”66
 This sort of thing suggests a kind of
pentecostal ecstasy to outsiders—something
like Nietzsche’s dionysischer Geist; and
indeed when the less gifted tried, as
inevitably they would, to imitate divine
obsession or to induce it by artificial means,
the result was a degenerate form of the
Mysteries, which did much to discredit the
genuinely Mantic.67 The Corybantic orgies
are not Mantic—quite the opposite; they
break the first rule of inspiration, as Manetho
explains it, that nothing can be forced; it is
not within human authority to command or
control revelation. We can make ourselves
fit to receive it (and a favorite image both of
the early Christian writers and the Greeks
was that of the musical instrument properly
tuned and prepared for God to play upon it
when and as He—and only He—chose to do
so), but we cannot produce it at will. What
all the descriptions of the phenomena of
inspiration from Plato to Sappho amount to
is that the creative person is himself
completely at a loss to account for how he
does it, while to imitate it is a pitiful device
indeed.68 So vivid and real is the Greek faith
in inspiration that students are now
attempting to explain it in terms of
shamanism:69 but the shaman is a false
prophet precisely because he seeks to induce
an ecstatic experience by artificial means
over which he presumes to exercise control.
It is when they descend to such devices that
such seekers of inspiration as Empedocles,
Pythagoras, and Apollonius are rightly
charged with quackery and assume the guise
of the shaman.
In spite of the danger of easy abuses and
even easier misunderstanding in the realm of
the Mantic, Plato showed an increasing
partiality to the Mantic over the Sophic.
“When I was young,” he has Socrates say, “I
was fanatically devoted to the intellectual
quest which they call natural science. Filled
with pride and youthful conceit
(hyperphanos), I was convinced that I could
know the reason for everything. . . . I was
always experimenting to discover the secrets
of nature and life.”70 He was convinced, as
was Socrates, “that no one need look any
farther than science for the answers to
everything.” That is the “Sophic” state of
mind clearly set forth. Then it was, he says,
that he read the passage that completely
changed his point of view: “There is a mind
that orders things and causes all things to
be.”71 The idea electrified him: “Somehow it
seemed to me just right, that idea that there
must be a mind responsible for everything.”
So he turned from the majority to join a very
small minority. “Shall we say,” he asks in
discussing the nature of the earth, “that God
the Creator made it? Or would you prefer the
teaching and language that everybody
follows today—that it all came about simply
by spontaneous cause and without any
intelligence?”72 Here we have the basic
dichotomy: on the one hand, things just
happen—the physis holds in itself the
explanation for everything; on the other hand,
things do not just happen. Note well that in
Plato’s day public opinion was all on the
side of the former.
At the end of his life Socrates explained
that he had taken the course he had through
the years “because, as I said, the way was
shown me by God through oracles and
dreams and by whatever other means divine
providence directs the actions of men.”73 He
was dead serious about this. “Listen to a tale
which you consider a myth,” he tells his
intellectual friends, “but which I believe to
be true.” Then he tells of the next world and
its judgments and concludes, “This,
Callicles, is what I have heard, and I believe
it to be true. . . . In a word, whatever
characteristics a man’s body presented in
this life, these remain visible in death. . . .
Now my concern is how I may present my
soul to the judge in its healthiest
condition.”74 The next world and the
judgment are his guiding light. “But you,” he
says to his Sophist friends, “the three of you,
you and Polus and Gorgias, the wisest
[sophoteroi] of all the Greeks alive at this
moment [and they would see no sarcasm in
this] can’t demonstrate the necessity of living
any other life than this earthly one.”75 When
Socrates asks the intellectual Meletus, who
is accusing him of sacrilege and calling for
the death penalty, “Do you believe that the
sun and moon are gods as lots of people
do?” the indignant Meletus replies, “Of
course not! The sun is just a stone and the
moon is a piece of earth.” Then Socrates,
who may well have shared Meletus’s
opinions on astronomy, points out to him that
because he and his friends think that
everything can be explained by such glib
and confident naturalism they must
necessarily fear death, as Socrates himself
does not.76 For Meletus and the three
Sophists there is nothing beyond this life; for
Socrates, what is beyond is all that is really
important.
What irony that the people whom
Socrates thus opposed all of his life, and
who brought about his death, should ever
after proclaim him as their patron saint! Now
professors of philosophy brush aside
Socrates’ own solemn profession of faith as
sarcasm or gentle irony, so that they can
maintain that he was put to death by
reactionary religionists instead of
enlightened professors. But to the charge of
atheism he emphatically pleads not guilty:
How, he asks, can he be a religious
innovator and trouble-making sectarian if, as
they also say, he is antireligious? How can
he be guilty of believing in false gods if, as
they say, he believes in no god?77 What is
most clearly brought out at the trial is not that
Socrates believes like others, for he does
not, but that he does believe, and that for his
faith he is willing to give his life.78 If there
is anything Socrates was not, it was a
barefoot liberal blasting away at
conventional beliefs. What he blasted was
conventional unbelief. Plato is simply
appalled at the Athenians’ lack of belief in
anything, based on the comforting popular
creed that science knows all the answers and
that the important thing in religion is to go
along with the group. This was the safe,
conventional, respectable creed of educated
Athenians, and Plato despised it. In the Crito
Socrates points out that his colleagues know
even less than he does about things, since
they think they know the answers while he at
least is aware of his ignorance; but of two
things he is convinced, (1) that the important
questions of life are eschatological ones and
(2) that these can be answered only by
revelation.79
Socrates never found the revelation for
which he was seeking, and he remained a
seeker to the end of his days. Only a believer
would have carried on the search, as Eduard
Meyer’s Egyptians did “with such energy
and persistence.” His credo is only a
preparatory one, but it is nonetheless
emphatic and explicit: he believes, namely,
that the way is still unexplored and the doors
still remain open and the means have been
provided to attain to the only knowledge that
counts; and as long as such is the case, no
one is excused from pressing the search.
Contrary to this position is the maxim of the
fourth century that it is better not to believe
anything than to differ from them in slightest
point of doctrine. The accent was not on faith
but on conformity—the discovery of
nonconformity in the Church is more
important, says St. Augustine, than the
discovery of truth. It was quite the opposite
in the Primitive Church, whose converts
were all made among people with a Mantic
inclination, that is, those who believed
something already. Much of Christ’s
discourse in the New Testament is addressed
to schoolmen, the Scribes and Pharisees,
who apparently often consulted with him,
and yet though he converted farmers and
soldiers, taxgatherers, fishermen, harlots,
and princes, there is no recorded instance of
his ever converting one of the Doctors. In the
Primitive Church one is expected to knock
before the door is open, ask before he
receives, and seek before he finds. To
believe in Christ you had to believe
something in the first place: the sick did not
have to make Peter’s confession before they
were healed, but they did have to have faith.
The people who would not believe in Jesus
believed in nothing—they said they believed
in the prophets, but they did not: if they
believed in the prophets, in the scriptures, in
Moses, or in God, they would believe in
Christ—but they do not. The greatest
Christian convert was a man who believed
all the wrong things about Christ—it was not
what he believed, but his capacity for faith
that made Saul of Tarsus eligible for
immediate enlightenment.
Saul’s case would seem to indicate that
it is more desirable to have faith in false
propositions than to have no faith at all.
Actually one cannot have faith in a false
proposition, since one cannot have faith in a
proposition at all. One does not have faith in
propositions, creeds, or institutions, to
which one is merely loyal. One has faith in
God alone—all else is subject to change
without notice. Faith does not seek security
by boxing itself in with definite and binding
creeds, as did the Doctors of the Church in a
time of desperate uncertainty and insecurity.
One does not cling to faith but to substitutes
for faith: drowning men cling to things, but
men of faith are not desperate and don’t cling
to anything. Professor Gaylord Simpson
likes to cite the case of Santa Claus as
providing the futility of all faith.80 But has
belief in Santa Claus ever closed the door to
knowledge as loyalty to a scientific credo so
often has? Is it better for a child to believe in
Santa Claus with the understanding that
someday he is going to revise his views than
for him to be taught, as some professors’
children are, only what is scientifically
correct from infancy, so that he will never,
never have to revise his views on anything
and thus go through life being always right
about everything? Which course is more
liable to lead to disaster, the open-ended
Santa Claus, or the ingrained illusion of
infallibility?
Did the pagans, then, have faith in true
principles? No more than the Christians.
Jesus made it perfectly clear that he
considered faith to be the rarest thing on
earth. The Greeks did not have true faith:
Plato was appalled by the lack of faith
among his fellow Athenians, and their
preference instead for a religion of popular
superstitions and smug conventional piety—
the belief that righteousness consists in going
to church, saluting the flag, and keeping
one’s nose clean.81 Thucydides’ History is a
terrible commentary on the fate of a
generation that had lost its faith, and the
whole literature of the following century is
one long and melancholy footnote to that
commentary. It is true that the old religion
had long been weak and ailing and the
oracles very feeble indeed,82 yet as Plato
feels so keenly, it was the only tie men had
with the other world, and it did have sacral
foundations worthy of respect.83 And now
comes a strange turn of events: within the
last few years a rich outpouring of newly
discovered documents has so broadened the
ancient religious community of East and
West as to embrace heretofore aloof and
incompatible sects in a single fold. And
within that fold Christianity finds itself
rubbing shoulders not only with desert
sectarians and pagan mystics but with
something very like Plato’s inspired
madmen.84 It would seem now that Greek my
thology is not the key to Greek religion, but a
red herring: it was the Christian apologists,
laboring the safe and obvious, who
established the image of Greek religion as
the Night Life of the Gods. No, the Greeks
did not have the true religion: even Plato
didn’t, and he knew he didn’t. His Socrates
is a seeker, convinced as he is that true
enlightenment can come only by revelation.

II. The Sophic Scaffolding: The

Rise and Prosperity of the Sophic
The beginning of the sixth century B.C.
is what Karl Jaspers calls the “Axial
Period” in human history.85 The significance,
according to Jaspers, was first noted by
Lasaulx, who in 1851 wrote: “It cannot
possibly be an accident that, six-hundred
years before Christ, Zarathustra in Persia,
Gautama Buddha in India, Confucius in
China, the prophets in Israel, King Numa in
Rome and the first philosophers—Ionians,
Dorians, and Eleatics—in Hellas, all made
their appearance pretty well simultaneously
as reformers of the national religion.”86 A
strange movement of the spirit passed
through all civilized peoples. The time was
marked by a series of popular revolutions
which everywhere saw the final overthrow
of the old sacral kingship; the great social
crises and world upheavals of the early
second and middle first millennia B.C. had
dealt shattering blows to the old sacral
order, and the sixth century saw the
completion of the process with what we
might call the great Sophic revolution. With
the passing of the priestkings, people
everywhere found themselves looking for
some other principle of authority for the
ordering of society; with oracles silent and
priestly lines extinct, who would have the
final word? Where could men turn for the
voice of authority? What could now
command their loyalty?
 For a time the tyrants tried their hand at
governing the world; there is everywhere a
sort of transitional period of tyrants, able
and often even idealistic men, whose right to
rule rested neither on hereditary office,
popular election, nor divine inspiration but
on their wits alone. Many a tyrant tried to
legalize his position by religious fictions and
ritual trickery—for the only alternative to
government by divine sanction seemed to be
brute power alone. It was the Greeks who
decided to go to the root of the baffling
problem of who has a right to govern his
fellows: that question became the theme of
much of their most enthusiastic discussion
and profound research in even more
significant phenomena than the tyrants in the
appearance of the so-called Seven Wise
Men. “The sixth century, the most critical
period in the mental development of the
Greeks, came to be known afterwards as the
age of Seven Sages.”87 These were the
original Sophoi, from whom we have taken
our word Sophic. To the ancient mind the
apex of human success, the highest prize to
which any man could attain, was to be a
Sophos, one of those heroes of the mind,
typified by the Seven Sages, who, after
giving wise laws and examples to their own
cities, wandered free of earthly passions and
attachments through the universe, selfless
and aloof, as spectators of God’s works,
seeking only knowledge and carrying with
them the healing blessing of true wisdom,
especially of statesmanship, for all who
sought or needed it. Hailed by adoring
multitudes—who often saw the aura of
divinity around them—humbly petitioned by
great cities and magnificent potentates, these
incorruptible wise men represented the
pinnacle of real human attainment. They
represent indeed the peak of human
excellence, but for all that they are purely
human—that is their significance. Like the
tyrants, the Sophoi represent a sort of
experimental phase; they were an attempt at
compromise between the Mantic and Sophic
on the principle that a very high order of
human wisdom has something divine about
it, making the true Sophos the equivalent of
an inspired leader. But the Sophoi had no
successors—only imitators, the notorious
Sophists, a very different order of men. What
set the Sophoi apart from their fellows was
not a peculiar type of wisdom but simply a
higher degree of intelligence—they had an
extra large amount of what everybody has
more or less of, but that was all. They lay no
claim to Mantic powers—Pythagoras
himself, the most “Mantic” wise man of his
time, was charged with quackery for trying
to preempt the glory of a prophet instead of
being satisfied to shine as a thinker. For all
the veneration they received from a world
yearning for guidance and starved for the
comfort of the Mantic order, the Seven Wise
Men represent a true Sophic revolution, a
deliberate renunciation of the Mantic. By
their own confession their complete
humanity is their glory and their tragedy.
Such is the gospel of Solon, who speaks
for them all. His earthly wisdom was of the
highest order, but what does he see beyond?
Nothing, as the typical Solonian utterances
make clear: “At every turn the mind of the
immortals is hid from men. . . . Like gaping
fools we amuse ourselves with empty
dreams.”88 The best anyone can hope for
from life is the contentment of possessing
children, horses, dogs, and good friends, and
“a stomach, lungs, and feet that cause him a
minimum of trouble; . . . and as a man gets
older his speech and intelligence
progressively fail him, and if he manages to
reach old age intact, it is high time for him to
embrace death.”89 In all this there is no
expectation but earthly expectation—it is
good, it is noble, it is heroic, but it is all
there is. The Mantic has become little more
than a figure of speech: “One man receives
from the Olympian Muses the gift of that
inspired sophia that men yearn for, and
another from Apollo the mantic gift of
prophecy.”90 Note the conjunction of mantic
and sophia—but to what purpose? For all
that, “no man knows at the beginning of an
enterprise how it is going to turn out,” and
“no divination or religious rites can help a
bit to avert what is going to happen (ta
morsima).”91 In the end the Mantic is
unavailing; a man’s only comfort and guide
is his own common sense.
Such is the mature mind of the Sophic,
bravely renouncing the wonders of the
Mantic because they are just too good to be
true. I once reviewed a book by a historian
who was convinced that any historical
account of events depicted as spectacular,
picturesque, or dramatic must necessarily be
a fabrication—this, for him, was the measure
of sound, safe, conservative scholarship.
Actually, the Sophic mind never seems to be
completely reconciled to the negative
doctrine in which it glories; one never fails
to detect in the sermons of the atheist a
peevish and bitter undertone, a vindictive
satisfaction in putting the Mantic in its place,
a tendency to gloat over the discomfiture of
the believer. This is another sign of the basic
Sophic insecurity, for to one who really
believed that the sum total of all experience
was zero it could not make the slightest
difference what other people might think on
the subject, and nothing could concern him
less than the fond illusions of his fellows.
Yet your Sophic thinker spends most of his
time and energy in preachments, denouncing
such illusions. Even more important in the
history of thought than the tyrant and the
Sophoi who tried, each in his way, to
provide a satisfactory substitute for heavenly
guidance in the affairs of men, was the
emergence of real science in Ionia at the
same time.
The most serious defect of the Mantic,
the standard objection to it in every age, is
that it does not lend itself to any kind of
control—“the Spirit bloweth where it
listeth”; it does not wait upon human
convenience, nor do its manifestations
comply with human expectations. Its
operations are always surprising—they
always catch men off guard. And here,
incidentally, we have another indication that
the Mantic and not the Sophic holds the key
to the real order of things, for reality, as C.
S. Lewis notes, “besides being complicated .
. . is usually odd: it is not neat, is not what
you expect. . . . Reality, in fact, is usually
something you could not have guessed. That
is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It
is a religion you could not have guessed. If it
offered us just the kind of universe we had
always expected, I should feel we were
making it up. . . . So let us leave behind all
these boys’ philosophies—these over-simple
answers.”92 This defense of the Mantic
position might well be taken by a Sophic
thinker as an attack on it, as an admission
that the Mantic is uncontrollable,
incalculable, and full of imponderables, as
indeed it is. The normal reaction to real
heavenly manifestation, whether to the
prophets of old, Zacharias in the Temple,
Mary at home, the shepherd in the fields, or
the Apostles on the Mount of Transfiguration,
is to be amazed and “sore afraid”—all must
be assured by the divine messenger that there
is nothing to be afraid of, that this is a joyful
and not an appalling event.
Whatever its correspondence to reality,
such a state of things can only be deplorable
to the neat and methodical world of science,
and it is understandable that in Miletus, at
the time when people were everywhere
dissatisfied with a Mantic order which had
lost much of its vitality and been discredited
by the Corybantic excesses of irresponsible
sectarians, certain clever men should have
decided to study things with the troublesome
Mantic left out. The other world cannot be
brought into the laboratory to be weighed
and measured; it cannot figure in any set
calculations because of its unpredictability.
Then why not simply leave it out of our
experiments and formulas and go along
without it? Why not study this world with the
other world left out, if only to see where it
will get us? It was proposed to confine all
study to matter that can be managed and
situations that can be controlled, i.e., to the
physis, the tangible, visible, measurable
world, as if it were all that existed or at
least all that could really be known. Thus
science became Science when it renounced
eschatology: “For scientific procedure,”
write Courrant and Robbins, “it is important
to discard elements of [a] metaphysical
character. . . . To renounce the goal of . . .
knowing the ‘ultimate truth,’ of unravelling
the innermost essence of the world, may be a
psychological hardship for naive enthusiasts,
but in fact it was one of the most fruitful
turns in modern thinking.” Yet after having
embraced this principle with ardor, the naive
enthusiasts of Ionia were soon to be found,
as modern scientists are, zealously holding
forth on no less a theme than “the innermost
essence of the world”93—which is what the
scientist is seeking to discover more than
anyone else. “Here we are,” cries an eminent
contemporary scientist, “and we had better
find some meaning or invent one for
ourselves so that we have some definite
mission to lend dignity to our life. If there is
a meaning, it obviously lies somewhere in
the vast areas of biology which are still
unknown to us, and we should have faith that
it is at least worth looking for by the usual
rational experimental approach.”94 Has he
förgötten that science, to be scientific, must
renounce all that sort of nonsense? To be
effective science must work in closed
systems, always assuming that the scientist,
when he sets up his experiment, is taking all
relevant factors into consideration. When the
scientist leaves his closed system and starts
talking in eschatological terms he is
exceeding his authority, going beyond the
bounds which science proudly sets for all
who would play the game according to her
rules. Only faith enjoys the luxury of being
open-ended. But is it a luxury? Who is to say
what unknown factors may not be highly
relevant to any situation? It is not for
science, having shut itself in the impregnable
castle of sensory experience and having
raised the drawbridge against all evil
premonitions from without to suggest picnics
in the countryside and exploring in the
woods. If we decide to treat the physis as all
there is, then of course we need look no
farther than physis itself for the explanation
of everything; and the physis is a closed
system—no matter how large it may be, it is
still perfectly complete and self-contained:
By turning from Mantic to Sophic we have
tidied up our calculations, but at the price of
putting ourselves in a box, as Heraclitus was
quick to point out to the Ionian physicists.
Heraclitus is known to the world as ho
skoteinos which, as Sophocles uses the
word, does not mean “the obscure,” but
rather “the recalcitrant,” “the gloomy one,”
the wetblanket, the man who throws cold
water on things.95 He earned the title by
asking his scientific friends to consider,
before they began making their pontifical
statements about things, just how reliable the
human organism is as a gatherer and
interpreter of information. Men’s eyes and
ears are, to say the least, unreliable
instruments, and if their senses are feeble,
their interpretive faculties are even more so:
all men are more or less asleep, and never
completely sober. Mere information
(polymathia) is pointless for all the pride
we take in it; the Sophoi have done with God
once for all—but they are always talking
about him; they are seeking the same
objective as religion—to explain everything.
And what are their chances of succeeding?
What about the objects they observe? They
are always changing, even while they seek to
limit and define them—“all things flow. . . .
You can’t step into the same river twice.”96
The observer’s own position is purely
relative, yet everything depends on the way
you are facing.97 So what hope have we for
real knowledge? Revelation, says
Heraclitus: “A man should listen to the
spirits [daimones, the same word is used by
Socrates]98 as a child to an adult”;99 “our
individual minds are pretty dull, but through
the ages there exists an unmistakable
consensus of humanity about things, an ethos
which is not the product of reason but of
revelation.”100 There is a common divine
logos in which we all have a share, and that
is the one thing we can be really sure of, “the
one criterion of truth.”101
By saying such things Heraclitus made
himself a controversial and unpopular figure.
The general public, at its wit’s end for moral
and intellectual guidance, embraced the new
gospel with open arms. Much the same eager
greeting awaited Darwin’s gospel, which
gave the Victorians what they most needed, a
genuine eschatology without Mantic
contamination. The whole appeal of
Darwinism lay in its thoroughgoing
protology and eschatology—it was a
universal hypothesis that answered all the
questions of life. Ionian physics also quickly
took eschatological form, its proponents
dogmatically holding forth on the one quality
or property or element that could, like
evolution later, explain the creation and all
subsequent phenomena. And this new
eschatology met with the same sensational
success in Periclean Athens that Darwinism
did in Victorian England. Its chief exponent
was Anaxagoras, who “believed,” according
to one of his disciples, “that theoria—
scientific investigation—was the purpose of
life, . . . while Heraclitus believed that the
purpose of life was to have joy
(euarestēsis).”102
It was, as might be expected, the
younger generation at Athens that hailed the
new scientific emancipation from the hoary
past with the greatest glee. The kids
suddenly knew all the answers. We have
already seen that Socrates admitted to some
youthful conceit (hyperphanos) in his early
attachment to the Sophic. The Sophists,
popularizers of science and common sense,
“attacked every illusion and every tradition
in the name of truth, clarity, objectivity,
consistency, and neatness in thinking and
speech.” Here was something that was easy
to understand, flattering to the intellect, and
liberating to the conscience. The public ate it
up. The basic proposition, clearly and
forthrightly stated by Hippocrates, is that
there is nothing supernatural, the elements of
which things are made being sufficient to
explain all phenomena.103 Implicit in all the
Sophist teaching, as Schmid points out, was
a basic atheism which, as far as the general
public was concerned, infallibly became the
main issue. Smart people were expected to
dismantle and debunk all old beliefs in the
name of a fresh, modern, emancipated
morality: the broad-minded Hippias prefers
“the frank and straightforward Achilles” to
“the wily and false Odysseus”;104 Protagoras
made the devastating discovery that the
opening lines of the Iliad are not a prayer at
all, being in the imperative. So what? snorts
Aristotle, any fool can see that it is a
prayer!105 The faith of many was shaken by
the scandalous disclosure that Crete has one
hundred cities in the Iliad and only ninety in
the Odyssey and that God who is said to see
everything in the Iliad has to send out
messengers in the Odyssey to report to
him.106 The great liberals boil with
indignation at the injustice and inhumanity
with which a god kills innocent mules and
dogs in wartime. This sort of thing,
presented with clever rhetoric, was glorious
and heady stuff for the youth of Athens.
In the year that Plato was born,
Aristophanes, a kid from the country,
produced his first play, a biting satire on the
Athenian youth and the new education that
was making them what they were: “Their
general lack of reverence disgusted him.
They struck him as dreadfully ignorant of
Homer and good literature. . . . Also they
were full of strange information, and
sometimes of shocking beliefs and
disbeliefs.”107 Pericles had declared,
“Athens needs no Homer to praise her”; the
city, J. B. Bury says, “enshrined the worldly
wisdom of men who stood wholly aloof from
mystic excitements and sought for no
revelation, in the fiction of the Seven
Sages.”108 It was Anaxagoras the physicist,
according to Plutarch, who taught Pericles
“to despise all the superstitious fears which
the awe-inspiring signs in the heavens arouse
in those who are ignorant of the real causes
of such things.”109 And it was just this
attitude of Pericles, Plato avers, that laid the
foundation for the ruin of Athens.110 Plato
rejected Homer as the perfect teacher for
exactly the opposite reason that Pericles and
the Sophists did—for them the poet was not
civilized enough, for Plato he had too much
of human cleverness.111 Plutarch tells how
the doctors eagerly sought for the few errors
and contradictions to be found in Homer,
while completely ignoring his matchless
qualities of greatness. Why? Because the
Sophic cannot tolerate the Mantic. Dionysius
Halicarnassus says the rationalist
philosophers “ridicule all the epiphanies of
the Gods”; all that was now so much old
baggage, dead wood of the past. The issue is
clearly drawn between two antithetical and
hostile views of life. We have seen that both
Socrates and Plato in their youth were
enthusiastic followers of the new learning
upon which both later turned their backs.
What is plain is that there is in the literature
of the Golden Age a strong tension, never
sufficiently studied, between the Sophic and
the Mantic: the men of genius are
consciously embattled against their rivals
and imitators whose special skill is in
beguiling the public. Socrates lost his life in
the battle, and he confidently predicted that
his teaching had no more chance of winning
out in competition with the delightfully
packaged and skillfully advertised product
of the Sophists than the sound prescriptions
of a good doctor would have in competition
with a quack who prescribed nothing but
candy for his child patients.
One of the most moving documents of
the confrontation of the Mantic and the
Sophic at Athens is a noble tragedy which
has received rough treatment at the hands of
the critics (although some think it is the
greatest drama ever written). “Strange to
say,” comments Sandys, “at the presentation
of the Oedipus Tyrannus, Sophocles was
defeated by a minor poet.”112 There must
have been a reason, and it must be the same
reason for which the present critics of
Sophocles denounced the play, in spite of its
transcendent genius, as a badly botched job
from the rational and moral standpoint. The
unpardonable defect of the Oedipus
Tyrannus is that in this titanic showdown
between the Sophic and the Mantic, it is the
Mantic that wins. Hence the play is
denounced as a moral fiasco. And so, like
the ancient critics, the present critics of
Sophocles—Kitto, Bowra, Sheppard, and
Letters113—all give it up as a hopeless
impasse. To quote one of them: “Whatever
were Oedipus’s defects, they did not justify
his fate. . . . They [the gods] have not only
yoked the cosmological law to their own
designs, but decreed their victim neither
compensation nor hope. . . . We must believe
the gods just, but the play does not help us to
see that they are.”114
“Oedipus is the victim of Fate. . . . His
doings, moods, and character in the drama
cannot make matters either better or worse. .
. . For us the deeper problem is thereby
made only more acute. . . . Sophocles hints at
no answer in the Tyrannus.”115 That is the
way it looked to Oedipus too—because he
was a Sophist. In this play the Sophic and
Mantic let loose with tremendous salvos at
each other, and because the Mantic wins, the
critics agree that the play is morally and
rationally bankrupt. Was Sophocles a fool?
No, but he was a priest and patron of
Aesculapius, who took his calling seriously
and believed as did Plato in inspired
utterance. This play is one of his
impassioned sermons specifically against the
shallowness of the brilliant intellectuals that
gathered around Anaxagoras at Pericles’
house after the show.
Oedipus had killed his father and
married his mother—but quite innocently. As
Letters points out, he had committed no
crime by Athenian law; he was not “guilty,”
but he was “polluted.”116 He is under a curse
brought on, as Aristotle notes, by a mistake,
and the critics are quick to point out (as the
chorus does in the play) that his mistake
consists simply in being an erring human
being—we are all in the same case. But a
way of escape and the redemption is open if
we are ready to accept it; we can be
cleansed of our pollution if we can bring
ourselves to repent and submit to certain
ministrations that we cannot perform for
ourselves. This Oedipus will not do. That is
his responsibility, and the tragedy is of his
own making. In the speech that opens the
drama, Oedipus tells us that for sixteen years
everybody has been telling him that he is
perfect (line 8)—an opinion with which he
readily concurs. But now there is a plague
and he must save the city. He admits that he
is as helpless as anybody, “no one is sicker
than I am” (hōs egō ouk estin hymōn hostis
ex isou nosei, 61-62), and that he must seek
instruction which can only come from the
holy oracles (68-77), for which reason he
has sent messengers to Delphi for orders and
is determined to do “whatever God reveals”
(77). To the king’s question, “What is the
word of the god?” the returning messenger’s
first word is esthlēn—wonderful! splendid!
It is good news indeed; he quickly adds that
there are hard conditions attached but
assures Oedipus that if the conditions are
met, “all will be well” (87-88). Is this
inexorable Fate? Having learned what is to
be done, Oedipus decides to act and leaves
the stage with the solemn declaration that
though he stand or fall, he will follow God
(144-46). The chorus then begs for divine
instruction—ambrote Phama—the child of
golden hope (151-58). To the end there is
hope for Oedipus, if he will only admit his
mortal limitations and repent. Throughout the
play, whenever Oedipus asks for divine
instruction he gets it—and in his vanity
refuses to follow it. To the Sophic mind,
“Sophocles hints at no answer”117 to
Oedipus’s predicament; but to the Mantic
mind the answer stares him in the face from
first to last. In the play, Oedipus receives
nothing but good advice and good news: the
former he rejects; the latter he willfully
misinterprets.
When the king returns to the stage it is
apparent that he is already slipping, for in a
ringing speech he emphatically dissociates
himself from the crime and grandly
announces that others must face reality, no
matter how grim (216-18). From here on he
keeps reverting subconsciously to the guilt
he will not acknowledge in himself in a
series of hypothetical situations: even if the
guilty wretch should be related to his own
wife; even if he should be living at his own
house—he will avenge Laius as if he were
his own father. Incidentally, all that is
necessary to clear the city of the plague is
for the guilty party to leave it—no further
punishment is required.
The aged blind prophet Teiresias enters
and Oedipus goes on his knees to him: “Save
the city! Save me! . . . We are in your hands!”
(312-14). The prophet’s reply, referring both
to Oedipus’s renowned cleverness and to the
tooclever Athenians, goes right to the point:
“Being smart can only be disastrous to a man
who doesn’t know where his cleverness is
taking him! [Pheu, pheu, phronein hōs
deinon entha mē telē lyēi phronounti] (316-
17). Then he asks Oedipus to let him go and
assures him, “It will be best if you bear your
burden and I bear mine” (320-21)—more
good advice that Oedipus refuses to take, but
he insists on prophecy. The whole company
goes down on its knees to the prophet, who
pronounces Sophocles’ burning indictment
on the lot of them: “All of you know
nothing!” (328). When he refuses to
prophesy, explaining to Oedipus, “I don’t
want to hurt myself or you” (332), the king
like a spoiled child loses his temper and
calls him kakōn kakiste, the worst possible
name—the vilest of the vile (334), to which
Teiresias replies by observing that the one
thing Oedipus cannot do is to admit a
weakness in himself—“in me you attack it
readily enough, but you simply can’t see it in
yourself!” (337-38).
Then it is the blameless Oedipus who
shouts back at the holy man: “Who wouldn’t
lose his temper listening to such treason. I
don’t take that from anybody!” (339-40).
So then the priest finally comes out with
it: “You are the defilement of the land!”
(354).
“How can you dare say such a thing!”
cries the outraged king; and then, after a brief
interchange, “How’s that again? Repeat it—I
want to know what you said” (359)—though
of course he understood perfectly well—he
doesn’t want to hear.
Teiresias: “You are the murderer you
seek!” (362).
Oedipus: “You won’t get away with that
a second time!” (363)—showing that he
heard him perfectly well the first time. “Say
as much as you like,” says Oedipus, “I won’t
listen to you” (365). Then, still the ill-
mannered child, he exploits a new angle—a
mean and shameless attack on the old man’s
blindness; and Teiresias in reply prophesies
Oedipus’s blindness—that is the theme of the
play, the blindness of which the Sophic and
the Mantic are always accusing each other.
Flinging all reserve aside, Oedipus shouts
the awful words: “It was not God, it was I
who solved the riddle of the Sphinx, by my
own unaided powers. I did it by using my
brains (gnōme kyrēsas oud’ ap’ oiōnōn
mathōn) and not by any supernatural hokum”
(398). This marks Oedipus as the official
representative of the Sophic position pure
and simple (exactly the way Anaxagoras
instructed Pericles) as Teiresias is of the
Mantic, when he replies, “I am not your
servant but God’s. . . . You have usurped
divine authority; you are willfully blind—in
darkness at noon. After all,” he reminds the
king, “you begged for my instructions” (410-
15, 432).
“But I never would have,” replies the
other, “if I had known you were going to
utter foolishness” (434). Such is the good
faith of Oedipus, the helpless victim of the
relentless gods, and yet the critics insist that
Oedipus is acting in good faith! The helpless
victim of an ancient curse! Teiresias’s
parting word to Oedipus is a fair enough
proposition: “Think it over, and if you ever
find that I was wrong you can call me a false
prophet” (460-62). The chorus then declares
that only God knows and men do not.
But does Oedipus ever play fair? He
proceeds to take the offensive as the best
defense against his own guilt feelings,
completely transferring his guilt to his
brother-in-law Creon. Then Jocasta enters to
tell Oedipus that the prophecy about his
crime—that he would one day kill his father
—has been proven false, since the king has
just died far away in Corinth and, reasoning
like a typical Sophist, triumphantly argues
from that that all oracles are a fraud (707-9).
To drive home her point she gleefully recalls
that it was also predicted that her former
husband should be killed by his son, and
instead of that he was slain by a stranger at a
place where three roads meet. This is of
course the worst thing she could have said,
but she thinks she is being terribly clever by
debunking all prophecy. Even when Oedipus
complains of feeling dizzy and nauseated at
her words (psychēs planēma k’anakinēsis
phrenōn, 726-27), she goes right on adding
one clever demonstration after another,
thinking that she is burying the oracles as she
digs the grave deeper and deeper. Oedipus
begins to admit that he has always suspected
things (785-86), and that he alone may be
morally responsible; still, how could he be
guilty when he was only obeying the oracle?
(821).
To this the chorus replies that Oedipus
is not condemned and that there is still hope
of complete deliverance (834-35). Is this the
“victim without compensation or hope?” All
that is required by the oracle to clear the city
of the plague is for the guilty party to leave
town—no further punishment is mentioned.
And hope is not long in coming: another
messenger arrives with wonderful news—
Oedipus has been elected king of Corinth
(939-40), where his supposed father has just
died a natural death (934); it will be
remembered that there was a prophecy that
Oedipus would kill his father, and now that
monarch has died of old age. Heretofore, the
one real disadvantage in his obeying the
oracle and delivering Thebes was that he
would in the process become an exile, but
now even that is taken care of; he has been
offered a splendid position, a promotion, in
his home town, and all he has to do is to
accept it and everyone will be happy. Instead
of that, he and Jocasta seize the occasion to
vent their savage spite on the oracles and
add a pious discourse on religious duty
(911-12). Jocasta, when she hears the news,
explodes with a Sophist shout of triumph: “O
oracles of the gods, where are you now!
(946). Now tell me what you think of your
precious prophecies!” (952-53). This is the
more shocking, since the chorus, lamenting
the disastrous general neglect of holy things,
has just vowed: “Though all others are
deserting the holy shrines [another reference
to the Athenians], I will never desert!”
(865). Oedipus vents his pentup tensions and
suppressed guilt feelings in a glorious,
savage, and needlessly ferocious
denunciation of all Mantic things:
“Halleluiah, wife! Who would ever take the
Pythian oracle or heavenly omens seriously
again?” (964-65). You see what they
prophesied, he says, and you see what
happened. He cannot in his relief resist a
merry witticism about the death of the old
king Polybus, “Perhaps I killed him, by
making him die of longing for me!”—in
which case the oracle would be right after
all—a delicious joke. Then an even more
vicious gibe: “Well, he’s taken all that
supernatural drivel (thespismata) down to
hell with him—it’s as dead and stinking as
he is!” (969-72).
“That’s just what I’ve been trying to tell
you all along,” says his delighted wife (973),
and delivers a thoroughly typical and
hackneyed Sophist speech such as Sophocles
had heard a thousand times: “Why should we
worry about these things? After all, they just
happen, and you can’t be sure about anything.
The best thing to do is just to try and get
along the best way you can, . . . and that
means paying no attention to dreams and
oracles and that sort of nonsense” (977-83).
To this commonsense sermon Oedipus
replies that they are still not in the clear,
since some prophecies still remain to be
disproven. Then, as the investigation
proceeds and the evidence begins to pile up,
it is Jocasta who begins to get panicky
—“Silly old stuff!” (1056); then shaken
—“That must be the explanation” (it was
absurd and she knew it); frantic—“I beg you
—do not pursue this” (1060); then desperate
—“For your sake ask no more!” (1066).
Then Oedipus, also desperate, tries to
invent an issue that betrays his feelings of
insecurity: Jocasta is making all this fuss
because she is ashamed of having married
one beneath her station—she and her fine
airs! (1070). She sees that her mate is
beyond hope and leaves him with the words,
“Oh you poor, miserable wretch! That’s all I
have to say—the whole thing is hopeless
now and everafter! That is all I can ever call
you!” (1071-72). He has reached the point of
no return and still tries to tell himself that it
is all her family pride.
“But I can’t lose!” he cries. “Lady Luck
is my mother!” (1080). This is the well-
known appeal to Tyche—Luck—which, as
they shed all vestiges of faith, was becoming
a veritable obsession with the Greeks: for
when faith moves out, superstition moves in
—everything is just chance, after all. Then
Merton, the aged herdsman of Laius who
knows the real secret of Oedipus’s birth and
upbringing, is dragged in and he too warns
the king not to go too far, to which good
advice Oedipus responds characteristically
like a wild man by ordering the old man
tortured: “We will make you talk!” though he
knows perfectly well what the answer will
be—“But still I must hear it!” (1170). This
is Ate.
The irony is that from the beginning of
the play, everyone, including Providence,
has been trying to help Oedipus, who has
been receiving nothing but good news and
good advice. The only disadvantage he has
to suffer is in becoming an expatriate from
Thebes, but now he has been offered a
splendid position, as king of Corinth—all he
has to do is leave town, with or without his
wife (and their marriage was only an affair
of state), and everything will be all right!
Here is no imponderable, inscrutable,
relentless working of an age-old family
curse, but a man able to receive salvation
any time he is willing to accept counsel. But
right up to the end he insists on accusing
others of his own crimes, dashing through the
palace with drawn sword looking for
Jocasta—she is to blame for all this! (1250-
60). And so, instead of leaving town in style,
he goes forth as an outcast like Cain, having
marked himself with blindness, crying like
Cain that his sufferings (nosēma, affliction,
disease) are greater than he can bear (1293-
94). What mania brought this on him? the
chorus asks (1299-1300), and further asks,
Why doesn’t he kill himself? Because he
knows that that would be no escape, for there
is indeed an afterlife (1369-71). Now he
knows the folly of trying to transfer his guilt
—“No mortal but myself can pay the price”
(1415)—Is he the god dying for the sins? the
Christ figure? No! He rejected all that as
outmoded. He has even blinded himself and
publicly confesses that the god, the oracular
Apollo he mocked, has smitten him with
blindness, though he himself struck the blow;
he can blame no one, for he is self-blinded
as the Sophists are; and his words to the
chorus are, “Be not afraid, only believe!”
(pithesthe, mē deisēte! 1414). His crime
was in destroying the foundations of faith,
and now he repents most terribly.
Creon announces that Oedipus is now a
true believer, “For now at last you believe in
the god completely” (1445). Yet to the end
he must admonish the departing outcast, who
orders his daughters to go with him, to learn
submission, and Creon’s last words to
Oedipus are, “Do not think that you are still
giving all the orders” (panta mē boulou
kratein)! Creon is now inheriting not the
curse but the arrogance of Oedipus, which is
to be his undoing! (1522). To the end,
Oedipus refuses to give in.
The closing chorus is a sermon for
Sophists: “Look fellow citizens, at Oedipus
here, the man who knew all the answers and
was as able as any man could be. There
wasn’t another who did not look with envy
on his brilliant career—and look where he
ends up—in utter disaster. So let us
remember that no man can be called a
success until he has reached the terminal of
life without having suffered any misery at
all” (1524-30). In other words, the only
happiness lies beyond “the termination of
this life,” not here. Where is the moral
nullity in all this of which the critics
complain?
We know that the great men who like
Sophocles took the side of the Mantic in his
showdown were very much in the minority,
and that the Sophists, the self-appointed
successors of the Sophoi, won the game
hands down—Longinus and Tacitus state the
case clearly enough. It was not the Sophoi
who raised a victorious banner in all the
cities of the ancient world, but their diligent
imitators the Sophists. Both, however, were
able to capitalize on the Mantic image. But,
having displaced the prophets, the Doctors
naturally aspired to their honors, supplanting
not only the inspired men in the popular
esteem but God himself! If everything
happens “without any guiding mind,” which,
according to Plato, “everybody believes
today,” then the human mind must be the only
mind we can believe in—and who can doubt
among human minds which are the greatest?
The unabashed self-glorification and sublime
conceit of the schoolmen becomes one of the
main themes of ancient and medieval
literature. A favorite maxim of the Doctors
was that the knower is greater than the
known, and where they are the knowers and
all the rest of the universe is the known, or at
least the object of their contemplation, where
does that leave us? As successors to the
seers of old, the schoolmen willingly
received and encouraged the veneration once
accorded divinity; the critic henceforward is
himself the Great Sublime he draws. Plato
chooses as the representative type of the
most vicious and dangerous order of
Sophists the clever and charming Gorgias—
utterly cynical and opportunistic. And this
Gorgias merchandised his wares by
addressing the holy national assembly of all
the Greeks at Olympia clothed in priestly
robes, cleverly imitating the solemn and
ringing measures of oracular utterance in the
new rhetorical style of which he was one of
the inventors; his golden statue stood in the
Temple of Delphi, where during the holy
season he had “thundered his Pythian speech
from the altar.”118
The Mantic pose was useful to the
Sophists, though it was but a meaningless
concession to tradition. Anaxagoras and his
fellows might reinterpret the old myths in
terms of physics, and the Orphic theologians
reverse the process by transmitting the
mythical gods into the elements and forces of
the cosmos, but with them such Mantic
gestures were but literary affectations. Paul
Schmitt now argues that the Greek
philosophers, contrary to the prevailing
impression, did not have a disintegrating
effect on Greek religion—but what religion?
Schmitt’s only proof of his thesis is that
philosophy continued to show respect for the
outward forms.119 I use the word Mantic in
preference to “religion” precisely because
the Sophists, once in control, were perfectly
free to apply the label of religion to anything
they chose. Many of the Sophists were, like
Toynbee, genuinely pious men, glowing with
a belief that “all creation has been groaning
and travailing to produce [them],” with a
deep and fervid feeling of their own
holiness.120 There is a Sophic religion: who
was more devout and dedicated than Thomas
Henry Huxley, who more evangelical and
saintly in our own day than Professor
Simpson? John Dewey was devoted to the
project of freeing religion from all Mantic,
unscientific associations by founding his
own religion in which the works of Dewey
would have the status of holy scripture—a
process about as meaningful as the
production of silent music or odorless
perfume. Any apparent compromise of
Mantic and Sophic can only mean that the
one has absorbed the other. That is nowhere
more clearly seen than in the writings of the
Church Fathers.
The Christian Doctors of the fourth and
fifth centuries were all well-educated men,
thoroughly grounded in the prevailing
doctrines of the day. When they attack
paganism it is always the literal and
supernatural, i.e., the Mantic, aspect of it that
they assail—a perfectly safe procedure, the
mere beating of a dead horse, since nobody
took that stuff seriously any more anyway.
The same fathers, however, have only
reverence and respect for the Sophic
teachings of the schools, which the Church
swallowed hook, line, and sinker. Minucius
Felix speaks for all when he announces that
all educated Christians believe exactly what
all educated pagans do, while all educated
Greeks are just as contemptuous of their
outmoded traditions as all educated
Christians are of theirs—the “old wives’
tales” over which Jerome and Chrysostom
pour such contempt. There was a real knock-
down, drag-out fight between the
“Allegorists” and the “literalizers” in the
Church, ending with complete victory for the
intellectuals: henceforth any reviving spark
of crackpot sectarian Mantic is attacked by
the churchmen with hysterical fury. That
group cannot be in the Catholic Church,
which claims to have prophets and
charismatic gifts, even though it follows all
the proper Christian forms. The Mantic has
become the very essence of heresy. The
Creeds of the fourth century and after were
Sophic, phrased in the jargon of the schools,
to the horror of many, if not most, good
Christians. There is nothing open-ended
about them, since their whole purpose is to
settle all problems once for all. The mood of
the early Fathers is one of desperation rather
than of faith; the fantastic cruelty and
intolerance of the fourth century are, Alföldi
observes, a natural expression of the thinking
of the times: “The victory of abstract ways
of thinking, the universal triumph of theory,
knows no half-measures; punishment, like
everything else, must be a hundred per cent,
but even this seemed inadequate.”121 There
was no place for the nonconforming Mantic
in this Sophic world of hundred-percenters.
St. Augustine completes the process of
de-Manticizing antique culture that began in
the sixth century B.C. It was he, we are told,
who cast the Christian and antique cultures
together “once for all in one mighty mold,”
thereby achieving that fusion of once hostile
traditions which make up the metal of our
own civilization to this day. But what the
great man put into the crucible was not the
whole of the Christian or the Greek heritage,
but only the Sophic part of each; that is why
he was able to fuse them. Much has been
written about Augustine as the man who
finally closed the books on chiliastic
charismatic Christianity, but what is not so
well known is that at the same time he
finished off the lingering traces of Mantic
glory in the antique tradition. His famous
justification for including the learning of
non-Christian antiquity in the curriculum of
the Christian schools was the doctrine of
“spoiling the Egyptians.” The Egyptians have
good stuff which we can use without danger
if we make a careful selection: “I have
nothing against their words,” he writes,
“which are rare and precious vessels; only
the wine of error they contain displeases
me.” The figure is an apt one: what the fourth
century valued in the ancients was not the
content of their work, but simply the
cellophane package of rhetoric, the
ornamental vases which the schools could
use only after they were empty.
The thousands of quotations that ballast
the writings of Augustine, which were to
furnish the whole Middle Ages with their
classical diet, have enabled specialists to
reconstruct with ease and confidence what
St. Augustine regarded as “the treasures of
the Egyptians.” They show that he did not
trust the ancients in their moments of
inspiration: Homer he hated; the lyric poets
he ignored; though he spent a good part of his
life in the theater, the only dramatist who
engages his fancy is the shallow and
conventional Terrence; when he read history
it was not the pages of Thucydides or Tacitus
but the dull, dignified school texts and
manuals of a Justin, a Pompeius, a Philippus,
or a Eutropius; most significant of all, though
a practicing orator and professor of the art,
he gives no sign of having read Demosthenes
or any of the Ten, or any orator at all, in fact,
but Cicero, whom he prizes especially for
his highly unoriginal philosophy. The only
writers of real gifts that appeal to him, Vergil
and Aesop, are those which he was taught to
affect as a small boy in school. In a word, he
preferred erudition to inspiration. Please
notice that he had no objection to pagan
writers as such, but only to the inspired
pagan writers, whom he condemns with
unerring instinct.
It may seem strange that it took
Christianity to drive the last lingering traces
of the Mantic court out of the world—it was
Theodosius who closed the last shrines of
the Muses. That is because the Christian
Fathers had a more clear-cut view and lively
dread of the Mantic from their long feud with
the old-fashioned Christians. The pagan
Doctors actually took some timid steps to
revive the Mantic in order to compete with
that early Mantic Christianity. But the
Christian Doctors had to compete with it too,
since it was wholly incompatible with their
program of taking Christianity to school. And
they attacked it with uncompromising
tenacity, even though they recognized that it
was indeed the old original Christian
tradition.
 III. The Sophistic Junkyard
There are many indications in the world
today of a general drift in the direction of
what we have been calling the Mantic. We
cannot do more than indicate a few of them
here—ten of the more striking phenomena
that have emerged since World War II and
seem to have been gaining in power ever
since.
1. The rediscovery of the eschatological
nature of the New Testament and the
Christian church comes as a great surprise,
not because eschatological elements had
been hidden away, but because they have
always been so glaringly apparent on almost
every page of the Bible. The astounding fact
that Christian eschatology actually had to be
rediscovered by Catholic and Protestant
alike in our own day is an indication of how
completely Sophic the thinking of the
Christians has been all these years. The new
trend can be illustrated by the use of the
word kerygma, referring to the literal-
eschatological preaching of the primitive
Christians as against the later moral-
philosophical emphasis. After a search
through the literature, the editors of the
Expository Times report that the word “thirty
years ago . . . hardly existed,” while today
“index references to it may well outnumber
those of any other single word.”122
2. But another theme now bids fair to
overshadow even eschatology in the
journals, a theme closely related to it but
considered taboo until quite recently. This is
the subject of revelation and inspiration.
“The return to ideas of inspiration and
revelation may be put down as one of the
marked trends of our biblical scholarship of
the last decade,” wrote S. Vernon
McCasland in 1954.123 It is, moreover, not
the safe conventional concept of revelation
that the experts are now toying with so
dangerously, but something, as one of them
says, very different from the traditional
formulations. It is in fact Mantic instead of
Sophic, a deliberate renunciation of the
traditional doctrine and a departure from
what the Church has from the first believed
concerning special revelation.
3. There is a growing partiality to
literalism today, since the discovery of a real
Age of the Patriarchs to take the place of the
mythical one, and a real primitive Christian
society to supplant a vague and hypothetical
one. Former liberals now break down and
confess that to read anything but a literal
meaning into Christ’s words when he
obviously meant them to be literal is “to
contort his message . . . to suit our
preconceptions”; and many a scholar is now
asking how we can continue to call
ourselves Christians unless we are willing to
believe the things which we now know the
original Christians believed. A surprising
example of the new literalism is the plea
now being made for an anthropomorphic
God—a word of opprobrium not long ago.
Are “the terms most commonly applied to
God . . . logically compatible with the
biblical God?” Professor Cherbonnier asks,
and replies with a ringing negative; the God
of the philosophers is not the God of the
Bible and never was.124 The one is Sophic,
the other, Mantic. The actual return of the
Jews to the Promised Land has given a new
sense of reality to ancient prophecy, and
many churchmen are now willing to concede
a literal fulfillment of prophecy which all the
Doctors of the Church—not the least among
them Luther and Calvin—rejected with
horror.
4. Christian churches everywhere have
begun to betray a marked hankering for the
old charismatic gifts. Protestants and
Catholics alike would now have us believe
that the old prophetic tradition was never
completely lost. But Professor Tillich knows
better: “This discourse,” he writes at the
introduction of a recent study, “is based on
the proposition that the prophetic tradition of
the Church was lost. It is one of the great
tragedies in the History of the Christian
Church, that this tradition actually and
virtually completely perished. . . . For St.
Augustine the Millennium is here, everything
essential has been achieved . . . in the
hierarchy of the Church. With this theory the
spirit of Prophecy was expelled from the
official Church.”125 We have already noted
that with St. Augustine, the most eminent of
the Doctors, the Sophic completely supplants
the Mantic in Christian theology; it is
reassuring to have Dr. Tillich say the same
thing, and especially to hear his declaration
that what happened was a major catastrophe.
Other gifts of the Spirit are also being
invited back into the churches today, and one
sober Episcopalian scholar glories that of
recent years glossolalia has appeared in the
Episcopal Church, of all bodies.
5. The new respect with which the
ancient Mysteries are being studied and the
laborious attempts to reconcile those
resemblances between them and the
mysteries of the Catholic Church which
cannot be explained away is a step in the
direction of the Mantic. For while authors
like Jung and Rahner remain stoutly Sophic
and scientific, they are constantly crowding
the rational over the line—just a little bit—
into superrational territory while gently
prodding the abstract and spiritual ever more
in the direction of the literal. It is a head-
swimming performance in double-talk. It has
been increasingly recognized in recent years
that the ritual and liturgy of the Church was
actually a substitute for the lost charismatic
gifts; the mass thus presents the ultimate
paradox, a controlled miracle, in which the
priest does everything but actually does
nothing. It is in precisely this “basic
contradiction” that Catholic scholars find the
wonder and mystery of the whole thing, the
mystery being simply that it cannot be
explained. Here at least is a momentary
relaxation of vaunted Sophic rigor—“steeled
in the school of old Aquinas,” who for all
that leaned so heavily on his precious
Areopagite to avoid the literalism of the
Bible.
6. With recent important manuscript
discoveries has come a new respect for the
old apocryphal writings. Not many years
ago, leading Catholic and Protestant
authorities on apocrypha and apocalyptic
could not find words to express their
contempt for the lurid, undisciplined,
stereotyped, and childishly literal thinking
that characterized this large and important
segment of Christian tradition. Today its
rising prestige is another sign of weakening
Sophic controls. Along with this has come
the rediscovery of Israel by both Catholics
and Protestants, who now want to call
themselves Israel, help rebuild Jerusalem,
and convince us that they have never really
broken with the prophetic heritage.
7. We have already mentioned the
bridges that scholarship is now building
between all sorts of ancient, medieval, and
modern religious societies and their
traditions, but we should not overlook the
discovery of the heretofore unsuspected
significance or even existence of what
Professor Goodenough calls “Vertical”
Judaism.126 It seems that the traditional
Rabbinic, Halakhic Judaism which we have
always thought to be the one and only
official religion of the Jews achieved its
Alleinherrschaft only after suppressing with
great difficulty an older and diametrically
opposed tradition of “mystic,” Hasidic, or
inspired Judaism. It is the old story of
Sophic vs. Mantic all over again, with the
Jewish Sophic teachings coming straight
from the Greek school of Alexandria,
whence the Christians and later the Moslems
also took their Sophic life. After all, the
spirit of the Sophic is as all-pervading, as
uniform in content, and as centralized in
origin as the Mantic. But the belated
recognition of the rights and claims of
Vertical as over against Horizontal Judaism
is a definite step in the direction of the
Mantic.
8. Perhaps the most significant bridge to
be flung out in our times is that which seeks
life on other worlds. True, the other worlds
are still just a possibility, but such a vivid
one that their religious impact is already
being felt. A recent symposium of American
scientists on the subject of “Life in Other
Worlds” turned into a general attack on any
tendency or desire to engage in religious or
otherwordly speculations on the subject.127
Was this onslaught on religion uncalled for
or irrelevant? Not at all. The reality of other
worlds is the fundamental thesis of the
Mantic. What other reason can there be that
the scientists so long, so dogmatically, and
with no evidence whatever asserted that
there just could not be life on other worlds,
and why today they almost panic to forestall
any Mantic interpretation now that they
concede its validity?
9. Another singular development of our
times is the attempt by hitherto impeccably
indoctrinated Sophic thinkers to break out of
their Sophic box by the use of drugs. The
consensus of these scholars, poets, and
scientists is that the Sophic world is a pretty
drab place, in spite of all the vaunted
enticements of science, art, and scholarship.
“Art is an Ersatz,” is the verdict of one of
these eminent experimenters, “the elegantly
composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.”
The general public unconsciously sustains
this verdict in its mass dependence on
tobacco and alcohol. The effects of certain
drugs were also achieved by mystics and
ascetics everywhere by various fasts and
exercises. Though the experiences induced
by mescalin and mushroom are recognized as
real and not as imaginary, still they are
strangely unsatisfactory. “The natural poetic
trance,” as Robert Graves puts it, “means a
good deal more to me than any trance
induced by artificial means.”128 That is
because, as we have already indicated, an
experience is not genuinely Mantic which is
in any way self-induced or controlled.
10. Another Mantic development of our
time is the phenomenal growth of the
Mormon Church, a growth quietly
proceeding with only scarce and reluctant
publicity. Some years ago I made a long
study of just what objections had been raised
against Mormonism in the past. From the
beginning it was always the same. Nobody
was really worried about polygamy, which
was in fact a welcome stick to beat the
Mormons with; the ferocious denunciations
from press and pulpit, the incitement of
mobs, and the stampeding of legislatures
always rested on one thing alone—the
incredible fact that in an age of modern
enlightenment, universal education, and
scientific supremacy there should be found
coexisting with Christian civilization a
community of primitives so ignorant, so
deluded and depraved as to believe in
revelations from heaven and the operation of
charismatic gifts. In the Journal of
Discourses, Mormon leaders steadily hurled
charges of gross darkness, total unbelief, and
pious double-talk against the Christian
clergy who insisted that Christians simply
could not fellowship beings so degenerate as
to believe in modern-day prophets and
angelic visitations. It was the purest case of
Mantic versus Sophic. Yet today it is the
same church journals that publish anti-
Mormon denunciations that ring with fervid
calls for a return to eschatology and
inspiration.
The trend towards the Mantic is so
broad and strong as to suggest a reversal of
the Sophic tide of 600 B.C. The Mantic was
exhausted then; today it is the Sophic that is
leading us nowhere. The old evangelistic
fervor of the Evolutionists with its gospel of
eternal organic progression is viewed with a
jaundiced eye today, when leading
evolutionists insist that evolution is a diffuse
sort of network process that is going
nowhere—it has no consistent direction. It is
significant that H. G. Wells, the prophet of
the glorious future that science was going to
give us, turns out to be most interesting when
he is writing about the past; his wonderful
world of the future is a crashing bore: glass
corridors under the sea may provide some
hours of fun, but the exhilaration of
exchanging stares with silent fishes can
deteriorate after a while into something like
a nightmare.
The Greeks too had their science
fiction. Friedrich Blass reports that when he
first read Lucian as a youth he was
convinced, as were the men of the
Renaissance, that he was in the presence of a
truly great creative genius, only to discover
later that Lucian, the clever debunker and
science-fiction writer, could not stand
rereading because he had no soul. Science
fiction, with its “suggestion of infinite
possibilities” and its spying on other worlds,
was an ancient, as it is a modern, substitute
for eschatology.129
Here let us correct a common
misunderstanding, namely that magic belongs
to the Mantic tradition. It does not: it is the
purest Sophic. The essence of magic power
is that it resides in physical objects—wands,
books, rings, robes, magic words, potions,
seals, amulets, charms, etc.—independent of
any higher power or moral order. Solomon’s
seal, Aaron’s rod, or the Philosopher’s Stone
will operate for anybody—they are self-
operating and self-contained, like the self-
operating cosmos of the naturalist. “The eye
makes itself,” we are told; we need look no
further than the atoms and molecules that
make it up for a full explanation of all that
transpires. This, according to Professor
Simpson, is the very essence of scientific
thinking. It is also the purest magical
thinking, looking no further than the thing
itself, or a connected but always limited
chain of things, to explain everything—
beyond the wand or the microscope or the
test-tube there is nothing.
But even a Sophic society needs, as
Professor Wallace O. Fenn reminds us, a
sense of something to live for, and this is
provided in various ways. Dr. Fenn himself
suggests the cult of scientific research,
particularly biology, as the answer, as
Anaxagoras did long ago (“From a very long
range point of view biological research
becomes the highest objective that can be
thought of for human life. . . . Unlike the
physical sciences biology can be almost a
religion in itself”)—but he himself is a
researcher and admittedly frustrated, since
biology is apparently no nearer to
discovering the meaning of life than it ever
was (“This problem of consciousness is one
which biology has never cracked”).130 It was
the Sophists themselves who supplied the
standard solution to the problem of keeping
hope and expectation alive in the human
breast by developing the cult of careerism to
a religion. Mere rank brings small
satisfaction to intelligent people, and ninety-
nine percent of the work done by those who
are climbing the military, civil, or corporate
gradus honorum does not really need to be
done; what keeps the elaborate, artificial,
and costly promotion structures alive is the
invaluable sense of expectation they infuse
into a society. As civilizations decline they
become progressively enveloped in a system
of creeping careerism in which eventually
every calling is a career and everyone lives
for promotion.
 As a stimulant to living, the cult of
travel has always figured conspicuously in
Sophic societies. The peculiar calling of the
Seven Sages required them to be always
moving about among the children of men as
the seven planets move through the Zodiac.
But long before their day, the roads
connecting the holy shrines and schools of
the East were worn by the feet of priests,
bards, teachers, and scholars constantly
traveling in their quest for wisdom and
sanctity. At the great centers they would
come to know each other and be known; life
was a pilgrimage to holy places in which
one acquired ever-increasing knowledge,
merit, and renown. The Sophists continued
the program, with increased emphasis on the
fame-and-fortune motif, and it was carried
on throughout the Middle Ages by the
Moslem Doctors. The extensive
Reiseberichte and Gelehrtenregister of the
Greeks and Arabs show how completely
dependent the Sophic world is on travel to
keep alive the spirit of expectation. It is the
airport culture of our own day.
Then there is Art as an Ersatz for the
Mantic—the menu instead of the dinner, as
Huxley put it. Great artists are Mantic souls,
but to be an artist without being a great artist
is being a king without being a great king—
an intolerable, not to say absurd, situation:
aut Caesar aut nihil: The mediocre artist
has an axe to grind with the niggardly Muses
and invariably takes refuge in the Sophic,
becoming the most intellectual of
intellectuals. A little inquiry will show that
the most determined and implacable enemies
of the Mantic are to be found not among the
scientists and scholars but among the artists
—particularly the painters. It may be said
that hatred of the Mantic is a pretty good
measure of frustration in any department.
 The aesthetic appeal of religious ritual
is highly recommended by many thinkers
seeking to salvage the undeniable human
need for religion from the wreck of
outmoded supernaturalism. This, however, is
a purely Sophic performance. The Mantic is
not at the disposal of Hollywood; it is not
photogenic and will not be manipulated. The
old Christian indifference to great works of
religious art, gorgeous antique liturgy,
gracefully gesturing priests, and lovely old
legends comes under attack in the Octavius
of Minucius Felix by a Roman gentleman
who equally deplores Christian
preoccupation with the other world in
preference to this one and their whole anti-
intellectual attitude. There is nothing in the
Mantic that could be used by a popular
picture magazine. The most glorious special
effects do not have even a hint of heaven.
Recently Martin Grabmann’s
Geschichte der scholastischen Methode has
been reprinted.131 The whole work is
devoted to an attempt to prove that in
embracing the philosophy of the Schools, the
Church was not betraying its original
tradition. Grabmann works valiantly to
anticipate and answer certain annoying
questions that the adoption of Scholasticism
by the Church inevitably raises. To the
natural question of why the Church borrowed
Scholastic philosophy in the first place, the
conventional answer is that it did nothing of
the sort, but spontaneously and independently
invented the art with no deference whatever
to the pagans. But Grabmann is too well-
informed to go along with that and prefers
the argument that philosophy, even false
pagan philosophy, can help us to a fuller
understanding of the content of revealed
knowledge by furnishing a strong and
reliable apodexis (demonstration), of the
things that have been left us through faith.
“Its purpose,” says Grabmann “is to give us
Vollbesitz der christlichen Wahrheit” (full
understanding of Christian truth). But is not
revelation itself the last word in apodexis,
and were not the Prophets and Apostles in
full possession of the truth? Yes, is the reply,
but we do not understand them fully, because
the revelation they received directly was by
nature übervernünftig—suprarational; so we
must needs have some rational discipline to
explain it. But can we explain the
nonrational in terms of the rational? If so,
why was not the “Christian truth” delivered
in rational form in the first place? Why must
it be reworked by the Scholastic discipline
in order to become intelligible?
Answer: Reworking is hardly the word;
Grabmann insists at all times that
Scholasticism “bedeutet keine inhaltliche
Umprägung und Entstellung des
Urchristentums” (implies no substantial
transformation and distortion of primitive
Christianity). To prove this he searched out
declarations of Justin, Clement, and others
that their teachings were not corrupting the
Christian faith. Of course they affirm that;
what else could they do? But the fact is that
they all worry a good deal about what they
are doing, while the mere assertion that one
is perfectly orthodox in spite of everything
carries little enough weight coming from the
very men who loudly protest against the use
of the Rhetorical handmaiden of
Scholasticism, while every page of their
work bears the stamp of Rhetoric. Why not
dispense with Rhetoric and Scholastic
altogether? Because, says Grabmann of the
latter, without it revelation is both
incomprehensible and unbelievable. Then
the Scholastic method can do what
revelation cannot do, namely convey a clear
and unequivocal message to men? Not at all!
“By its very nature,” says Grabmann,
“revelation assumes that it can be understood
by men, nay, it is the supreme act of
understanding.”132 Then we must ask again,
why must the intellectual machinery of the
schools be brought to the aid of that
supernatural power? Well, the whole
operation of Scholastic can be summed up in
the immortal formula fides quaerens
intellectum. Does that mean that faith must
still seek something after the perfect and
final revelation of the truth? If it is still
looking for something, it must be defective.
Answer: It is not seeking doctrine or
information but simply clearer and sharper
expression and definition of what it believes.
And for that it must turn to the ailing
schools of antiquity? Let us remember that
the schools had reached an all-time
intellectual low at the time the church chose
to embrace their methods. The church
married a “sick man,” says Duchesne, when
she joined forces with the state under
Theodosius;133 she married a much sicker
one when she embraced the schools of the
same decadent age. What could the church
gain by such a match? It is inconceivable that
the wedding could have taken place had
either of the parties retained its original
vigor and independence—but both, as the
writings of the Fathers make painfully clear,
were in a desperate condition. One of the
earliest fragments of church history is
Hegesippus’s remark: “up until then the
Church had remained a pure and incorrupted
virgin.”134 Up until when? Until the
philosophers took over. The last Roman, for
Grabmann, was also the first Scholastic,
who “minted the authentic coin of its Latin
terminology”—that noble Boethius, who in
his last hours was comforted not by religion
but by an allegorical visit from Dame
Philosophy.
Now again, why was the marriage with
philosophy necessary? Answer: “To
overcome the objections of reason to
revelation”—that is St. Augustine’s famous
reconciliation of Classical and Christian
learning. But how can you call it
reconciliation when it is always the church
that gives way? It is always reason that has
to be satisfied and revelation that must be
manipulated in order to give that satisfaction;
this is no compromise but complete
surrender, by which Theology “becomes the
train-bearer of the Old Queen Philosophy.”
Augustine’s long and painful “conversion,”
as he describes it, was the progressive
realization that Christian doctrine could be
accommodated to the teachings of the
schools by the application of Tichonius’s
Seven Rules of Tropology—but the tropes
are never applied to “the works of the
Platonists,” which remain the undeviating
norm, but always to the conveniently
adjustable Scriptures. The key word is
accommodation, and Schweitzer and others
have seen in the history of Christian dogma
one long process of de-eschatologizing. “The
result of the continued repetition of this
undignified retreat, during many
generations,” writes Alfred N. Whitehead of
the last phase of it, “has at last almost
entirely destroyed the intellectual authority
of religious thinkers.”135 Well, if they insist
on their authority being intellectual, what
other choice have they but to accommodate
with the best intellectual discipline of the
times?
The result of the marriage was that each
party contracted the other’s disease: both
were seriously weakened by the match, as
Eucken observes. Many have described how
Christianity acquired the worst vices of the
schools—shallow rhetoric, learned
obscurity, academic formalism, hair-splitting
subtlety, and above all a total inability to
create or discover. Grabmann repeatedly
comments on how the greatest Christian
thinkers for generation after generation can
do nothing but copy and compile. It was
Jerome who lamented that the ancients had
left him nothing to say—even as a Christian.
In Scholasticism, the Western mind,
according to Norden, reaches its bathos, and
even Grabmann admits that by the eleventh
century Christian philosophy had
degenerated into “eitle Sophistik.”136
Yet it had to be that or nothing. Without
“science and intellect,” Thomas Aquinas
assures us, the student of Christianity would
have nothing to study: nihil acquiret sed
vacuus abscedet—he would acquire nothing,
but go away empty. How bankrupt the
Doctors must have been to accept with open
arms the once despised contribution of the
schools! Nay, they gloried in it, satisfied that
in it they had the full equivalent of
revelation; like the smart-alec youth of
Pericles’ Athens, they had a “joyous
confidence in the omnipotence of logical
demonstration,” says Reinhold Seeberg.
“There was an ever-widening circle of
disputants who either depended solely upon
rational arguments or held that faith should at
least find confirmation in the deductions of
reason.”137 Even today the philosophia
perennis of the Catholic Church is “complete
trust in the power of reason, the absolute
validity of the law of causality.” The deadly
sin of Modernism, Grabmann announces, is
simply “the rejection of Intellectualism,” and
the transfer of religion “to a realm of
feeling.” “The Roman Catholic Church has
made reason its bulwark,” he cries, “against
the intellectual high crimes of the times:
Lack of order and system in thinking
(Unordnung und Regellosigkeit im
Denken), subjectivism, and the increase of
fantasy at the expense of logic—. . . shallow,
imprecise (verschommenes), confused, and
oracular expression.” All of these are
treason against the “clarity, precision,
sharpness, logical consequence, and
systematic structure” of Scholasticism. It is
only fair to recall, however, that St.
Augustine took the Sophic way only after
long and unavailing efforts to acquire an
experience of direct revelation: for him
logical consequence was a poor second best,
and he finally accepted it with a heavy heart
only because he had no choice.
Much of the literature and art of our day
is simply a bitter commentary on the
emptiness of the world. We can gain nothing
by joining the angry chorus, but we can get a
new insight into emptiness if we will stand
on a cold windy mesa in Tusayan just at
dawn on a spring morning. All around is
nothing but a vast expanse of sterile sand,
stretching to barren bluffs and volcanic
peaks on the dark horizon; except for the
dim, huddled houses of an ancient stone
village, there is only bare rock, the vast
ceaseless wind, and the fading stars. We are
in an empty, inhospitable, primordial world,
suspended between earth and sky on a high
cold rock, and there, in the midst of this
gloom and nothingness, there is a play going
on! A drama is being enacted with great
concentration and talent—and likely as not at
this hour without a single spectator. We think
of other dramas in the desert—Qumran or the
Siwa Oasis—and realize that this Hopi
dance in the vast emptiness of the
Southwestern Desert is our little world in the
vaster emptiness of space, where in the
infinite void on a bright tiny stage, all, all
alone, a play is being performed.
Shakespeare is haunted by the image of
the drama in the void: “the cloud-capped
towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn
temples, the great globe itself, yea, all that it
inherits, shall dissolve, and like this
insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack
behind.”138 It is the void that appalls him, as
it does other poets living in Sophically
oriented societies:

One moment in annihilation’s

waste,
One moment of the wine of life
to taste—
The stars are setting, and the
caravan
Starts for the dawn of nothing
—O, make haste!139
 “Welch’ Schauspiel!” cries Goethe,
“Aber ach, ein Schauspiel nur!”140 Only a
play? Actually the awful emptiness only
makes the drama the more marvelous. The
presence of nothing and the vast inane—that
we can readily understand; but that there
should be anything else besides, to say
nothing of a full-blown drama, is simply
incredible. If that little play can come out of
nothing, as the Sophic mind assures us it
does, then our troubles are over: if nothing
can produce that, then there is no end to what
nothing can produce. Once we have broken
through the barrier of existence, as the
Egyptians taught, the rest is easy; once the
incredible obstacles of coming to be have
been surmounted, that of continuing existence
becomes a mere technicality.
But what about the drama? If you miss
the first or last five minutes of a well-knit
play, you may try to guess what it is all
about, but you can never be sure; and if you
should see only thirty seconds or less of any
play, your guessing would be far-fetched
indeed. Well, we are pushed onto this earthly
stage in the middle of a play that has been
going on for thousands of years; we want to
play an intelligent part and, in whispers, ask
some of the older actors what this is all
about—what we are supposed to be doing?
And we soon learn that they know as little
about it as we do. Who can tell us the plot of
the play? The Sophic mind assures us that the
play is simply a product of lighting, rocks,
and wind and has no plot aside from the
plots we invent for it. In that book things just
happen—and there is no way of proving that
that is not so. The mystic makes a virtue of
the incomprehensibility of the whole thing;
he submerges himself in the darkness of
unknowing and wallows in his self-induced
and self-dramatizing mood of contradictions:
he is strictly a Sophic, not a Mantic, product.
The Mantic admits that the play is
incomprehensible to people of as little
knowledge and experience as ours, and
insists for that reason that if we are to know
anything at all about it, our knowledge must
come from a higher source, by revelation.
According to the Mantic way of thinking,
things do not just happen—and there is
absolutely no way of proving that that is not
so. The same starry heavens that have
supplied the Mantic with irrefutable proof
since time immemorial that things do not just
happen has always been the most self-
evident proof in the world to the Sophic that
things do just happen.
That drama on the windy rock at the end
of the world naturally puts us in mind of
Prometheus Bound, a drama that definitely
takes us back to the Mantic. The interesting
thing about the setting here is the way in
which Aeschylus teaches us that the drama in
the void is not in the void at all and that the
hero’s supposedly hopeless case is by no
means hopeless. Zeus and his Sophistic
counsellors (the messenger Hermes in this
play is the model Sophist) have tried to
consign Prometheus to utter isolation and
hopelessness; they have banished him to the
most distant and inhospitable region of the
universe and there chained him in the most
paralyzing and at the same time excruciating
manner possible. Plainly it is all up with
Prometheus. And yet the plan fails: the
whole play consists of a string of visitors
and messengers to Prometheus from other
worlds, and reminders of other worlds and
other orders that were before this one, and
yet others that will surely come after.
Prometheus’s isolation is only temporary, the
determined effort of the Sophists to nullify
his whole existence is a complete failure.
Like Job, Prometheus takes his comfort not
in the desperate present but in the assured
past.
Eusebius develops the theory that all
that is good and desirable in any civilization
is actually a survival from some previous
age of enlightenment when the Gospel was
on the earth and men received light from
heaven. Since civilization and the arts are of
course older than Christianity, he does not
presume that God’s gifts to mankind began
with Jesus, but conceives of earlier
dispensations when the earth was blessed
with divine visitations and showered with
heavenly gifts, only to be followed in the
course of human affairs by inevitable
corruption and apostasy. Dispensationism is
a conspicuous item in the Jewish and
Christian Apocrypha, in the early Christian
writings, and now in the Dead Sea Scrolls. A
dispensation is not a reformation but a
restoration, specifically, a return of
revelation—“again the heavens were open.”
Whenever revelation is resumed, the holy
order of things revives, while that holy order
cannot survive after revelation has ceased,
no matter how hard men try to preserve and
imitate its institutions. The sacral order is
thus completely dependent on revelation.
But that is not all. The uninspired,
secular order of things, which we have
called Sophic, is also, as Eusebius notes, a
derivative of the old Mantic society, living
on the capital of an earlier prosperity. The
primary function of the Christian Church, the
Doctors tell us, is to preserve unchanged and
undiminished the deposit of past revelation,
carefully guarding the cisterns which hold
the precious water which has long since
ceased to flow, as “living water” must flow,
from the source. Thus it would appear that
the substance of a civilization would be very
much the same whether the civilization is
“Sophic” or “Mantic”—it is the world view
of each that puts them poles apart. All this is
important when it comes to understanding the
peculiar role of Mormonism in the world.

Notes
“Three Shrines: Mantic, Sophic, and
Sophistic” were a series of lectures
delivered at the Sterling Library Lecture
Hall at Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut, under the sponsorship of the
Latter-day Saint Deseret Club at Yale on
May 1, 2, and 3, 1963.

Footnotes
^1. Carl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks (New
York: Grove, 1960), 4-8.
^2. Synesius Ptolemais, De Insomniis 147, in PG
66:1305.
^3. This is brought out, for example, in Aristides,
Apology 13, in J. Rendel Harris, The
Apology of Aristides on Behalf of the
Christians (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1893), 108-9.
^4. Eric V. Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), xxxi.
^5. Plato, Apology 19C, 20C.
^6. Ibid., 21E-23D.
^7. Eduard Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 3
vols., 5th ed. (Berlin: Cotta, 1926), 1:2:211-
12.
^8. I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt
(New York: Penguin Books, 1964), 29-30.
^9. Louis Speelers, Textes des cercueils du
Moyen Empire égyptien (Bruxelles: Dept,
1947), x.
^10. Westcar Papyrus 7, 6-7, in Alan H. Gardiner,
Egyptian Grammar, 3rd ed. (Oxford:
Griffith Institute, 1957), 228.
^11. Alfred N. Whitehead, quoted in Lucien
Price, “To Live without Certitude,” Atlantic
Monthly 193 (March 1954): 59.
^12. Josephus, Against Apion I, 236.
^13. Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica I, 9, in
PG 21:65.
^14. Aristotle, Oeconomica II, 2, 33.
^15. Dio Chrysostom, Discourse XII, 15.
^16. Erwin R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in
the Greco-Roman Period, 13 vols. (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1953), 1:18-21.
^17. Synesius Ptolemais, De Insomniis, in PG
66:1305.
^18. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols, 1:17-18, 20-
21.
^19. Empedocles, in Sextus Empericus, Against
the Logicians I, 122.
^20. Charles H. Kahn, “Religion and Natural
Philosophy in Empedocles’ Doctrine of the
Soul,” Archiv für Geschichte und
Philosophie 42 (1960): 3.
^21. O. D. Chwolsohn (Khvol’son), Die Ssabier
und der Ssabismus, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg:
Buchdruckerei der Kaiserlichen Akademie
der Wissenschaften, 1856), 2:15.
^22. Morton S. Enslin, “A Gentleman among the
 Fathers,” Harvard Theological Review 47
(1954): 238-39.
^23. Ibid., 230.
^24. Kostas Papaioannou, “Nature and History in
the Greek Conception of the Cosmos,”
Diogenes 25 (1959): 14.
^25. Commenting on Sophocles’ Eleusinian
fragment, in F. J. H. Letters, The life and
Work of Sophocles (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1953), 63-66.
^26. H. H. Rowley, “Ritual and the Hebrew
Prophets,” in S. H. Hooke, ed., Myth,
Ritual, and Kingship (London: Oxford
University Press, 1958), 246-47, 258.
^27. Letters, The Life and Work of Sophocles, 64.
^28. C. G. Jung, “Transformation Symbolism in
the Mass,” in Joseph Campbell, ed., The
Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos
Yearbooks (New York: Pantheon Books,
1955), 318-19. In the same volume, Hugo
Rahner’s article, “The Christian Mystery
and the Pagan Mysteries,” observes that “it
is of the utmost importance for the
 understanding of this mystery of the Cross
that we recall the fundamental structure of
all mysteries,” 371; and Hans Leisegang’s
article, “The Mystery of the Serpent,” notes
that “the Christian cosmos can be shown to
be directly related, both formally and
conceptually, to the Orphic cosmos,” 228;
while Paul Schmitt observes in his article,
“The Ancient Mysteries in the Society of
Their Time: Their Transformation and Most
Recent Echoes,” that Homer’s Hymn to
Demeter is an “almost medieval hymn,”
106.
^29. Jung, “Transformation Symbolism in the
Mass,” 319.
^30. Ernst Benz, “Christus und Sokrates in der
alten Kirche,” Zeitschrift für die
neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 43 (1950):
195-97; and Erich Fascher, “Sokrates und
Christus,” Zeitschrift für die
neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 45 (1954):
1-41.
^31. Cf., for example, Clement, Epistola I ad
Corinthios (First Epistle to the
 Corinthians) VI, 25, in PG 1:220-21, 261-
66. “Solon eidem regi finem longae vitae
intuendum praedicavit non aliter, quam
prophetae [Solon told the same king that the
end of a long life must be seen much as the
prophets did],” says Tertullian, Apologeticus
adversus Gentes XIX, 1, in PL 1:440.
^32. Hugh Nibley, “The Hierocentric State,”
Western Political Quarterly 4 (1951): 230-
35, 250-51; reprinted in this volume, pages
103-10, 130-31.
^33. Ibid., 226-30; reprinted in this volume, pages
99-103.
^34. Pindar, frg. 137: “Blessed is he who hath
seen these things before he goeth beneath
the hollow earth; for he understandeth the
end of mortal life, and the beginning (of a
new life) given of god”; John Sandys, tr.,
The Odes of Pindar including the Principal
Fragments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1968), 593-95.
^35. Walter Wili, “The Orphic Mysteries and the
Greek Spirit,” in Campbell, The Mysteries,
77.
^36. Walter F. Otto, “The Meaning of the
Eleusinian Mysteries,” in Campbell, The
mysteries, 14.
^37. Wili, “Orphic Mysteries,” 87.
^38. Theodor Gomperz, Griechische Denker:
Eine Geschichte der antiken Philosophie, 3
vols. (Leipzig: Veit, 1903), 1:65.
^39. Otto, “Eleusinian Mysteries,” 25, comments
on “the veneration of the Mysteries by such
men as Sophocles and Euripides.”
^40. Ibid., 30.
^41. Walter F. Otto, Die Musen und der göttliche
Ursprung des Singens und Sagens
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1961), 47.
^42. John E. Sandys, History of Classical
Scholarship, 3 vols. (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1921), 1:105-6.
^43. Dio Chrysostom, Discourse LXXII, 12.
^44. Chrysostom constantly harps on this theme
in his discourses delivered at the ancient cult
centers which had been converted to
Christian uses.
^45. Pindar, frg. 31, quoted by Aristides, In
Defense of Oratory 142D, 420.
^46. Plato, Phaedo 97B-C.
^47. Clementine Recognitions II, 65-67, in PG
1:1278-79.
^48. Dio Chrysostom, Discourse I, 58: Synesius,
Dio 10, in PG 66:1145; Sandys, History of
Classical Scholarship, 1:70-72.
^49. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship,
1:71.
^50. Pindar, Olympian Odes II, 81-87.
^51. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship,
1:71.
^52. See Philostratus II, quoted in Sandys,
History of Classical Scholarship, 1:336.
^53. Pindar, Olympian Odes II, 86-88. On
Pindar’s Mantic association see Basil L.
Gildersleeve, Pindar: The Olympian and
Pythian Odes (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1885), Olympian Odes II, 96-97.
^54. References in Sandys, History of Classical
Scholarship, 1:72, 389; Dio Chrysostom,
Discourse 1.
^55. H. W. Garrod, Oxford Book of Latin Verse
(London: Oxford University Press, 1952),
ix-x.
^56. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship,
1:303.
^57. Francis M. Cornford, Thucydides
Mythistoricus (New York: Greenwood,
1969), 201, 221.
^58. Plato, Republic X, 595B, 600E, 607A.
^59. Plato, Meno 99D.
^60. Plato, Apology 22C.
^61. Plato, Laws VII, 809-11.
^62. Plato, Meno 81B.
^63. Plato, Phaedrus 245A.
^64. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle, tr. Richard
Robinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), 240-
41.
^65. Plutarch, The Oracles at Delphi 22 (405A-
D).
^66. Justin Martyr, Discourses to the Greeks 8, in
PG 6:256-57.
^67. Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and
Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, tr.
 W. B. Hillis, 2 vols. (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1966), 2:257, 260, 294-97.
^68. Josephus, Against Apion I, 236: However
great his yearning for the gifts of prophecy
and revelation, the Pharaoh knew “that he
would incur the wrath of the gods if he tried
to see them by force.”
^69. Walter Burkert, “Goēs: zum griechischen
Schamanismus,” Rheinisches Musuem fur
Philologie 105 (1962): 36-56.
^70. Plato, Phaedo 96A-97B.
^71. Ibid., 97C.
^72. Plato, Sophist 265C.
^73. Plato, Apology 33C.
^74. Plato, Gorgias 523-26.
^75. Ibid., 527A-B.
^76. Plato, Apology 26D.
^77. Ibid., 24B-C, 26C-27E, 31C-D.
^78. Ibid., 23B, 32A, 41A-B.
^79. Plato, Crito 54B-E.
^80. Gaylord Simpson, “The World into Which
Darwin Led Us,” Science 131 (April 1960):
 974. Cf. Gaylord Simpson, Concession to
the Improbable: An Unconventional
Autobiography (London: Yale University
Press, 1978), 26.
^81. Plato, Laws IV, 715E-716B.
^82. Edwyn Bevan, Sibyls and Seers (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1929), 99-103,
shows how feeble the Greek Mantic
manifestations were compared with those of
the Hebrew. Socrates’ grateful acceptance of
his Delphic message suggests snatching at
straws; that oracle, as Heraclitus observes
(frg. 11), “neither declares nor conceals, but
gives a sign.” At no time does Mantic
inspiration seem to have been general.
Theophilus, To Autolycus III, 384, 7, in PG
6:1132; even the Egyptians were beset by
doubts from the very first, Erich von
Luddeckens, “Untersuchungen über
religiösen Gehalt, Sprache und Form der
ägyptischen Totenklagen,” Mitteillungen des
Deutschen Instituts für ägyptische
Altertumskunde in Kairo 11 (1943): 171-72;
Speelers, Textes des cercueils, lviii.
^83. For example, the “Greek people never gave
up the alluring fancy of a distant land of
blessedness,” Rohde, Psyche, 1:64.
^84. Schmitt, “The Ancient Mysteries,” in
Campbell, The Mysteries, 97; Herbert
Braun, “Der Fahrende,” Zeitschrift für
Theologie und Kirche 48 (1951): 32-38;
Ejnar Dyggve, “Les traditions cultuelles de
Delphes et l’eglise chrétienne,” Cahiers
Archéologiques 3 (1948): 9-28; Bevan,
Sibyls and Seers, 165-68.
^85. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of
History (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1953), 1.
^86. Lasaulx, in ibid., 8.
^87. J. B. Bury and Russell Meiggs, A History of
Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great,
4th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1975), 199.
Cf. Diogenes Laertius, Thales I, 22: “He
was the first to receive the name of sage, in
the archonship of Damasias at Athens, when
the term was applied to all Seven Sages.”
^88. Ivan M. Linforth, Solon the Athenian
 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1919), 159.
^89. Ibid., 167.
^90. Ibid., 165-67.
^91. Ibid., 166-69.
^92. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York:
Macmillan, 1952), 33.
^93. Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins, What
is Mathematics? An Elementary Approach
to Ideas and Methods (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1941, 1961), xvii-xviii
(emphasis added).
^94. Wallace O. Fenn, “Front Seat for Biologists,”
AIBS Bulletin (December 1960): 16.
^95. Used with reference to Heraclitus in Pseudo-
Aristotle, De Mundo (On the Cosmos)
396b20; Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et
Malorum II, 5, 15.
^96. Heraclitus, On the Universe 41.
^97. Ibid., 69.
^98. Plato, Apology 24C, 26B, 27C, E.
^99. Heraclitus, On the Universe 97.
^100. Ibid., 121.
^101. Ibid., 1.
^102. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata II, 21, in
PG 8:1076; in Otto Stählin, ed., Clemens
Alexandrinus, 6 vols., 4th ed. (Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 1985), 2:184; in Hermann
Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3
vols, 6th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1951),
1:149.
^103. Hippocrates, The Art XXI, 1-4.
^104. Plato, Lesser Hippias 365B.
^105. Aristotle, Poetics XIX, 7-9.
^106. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship,
1:36.
^107. Gilbert Murray, Aristophanes (London:
Oxford University Press, 1933), 19-20.
^108. Bury and Meiggs, A History of Greece,
199.
^109. Plutarch, Pericles VI, 1; cf. IV, 4: “But the
man who most consorted with Pericles . . .
was Anaxagoras, . . . whom men of that day
used to call ‘Nous,’ . . . because he was the
first to enthrone in the universe, not Chance,
 nor yet Necessity, as the source of its
orderly arrangement, but Mind (Nous) pure
and simple, which distinguishes and sets
apart, in the midst of an otherwise chaotic
mass, the substances which have like
elements.”
^110. Plato, Gorgias 518-19.
^111. Plato, Republic X, 595B, C, 600E, 607A.
^112. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship,
1:52.
^113. H. D. F. Kitto, Sophocles: Dramatist and
Philospher (London: Oxford University
Press, 1958); C. M. Bowra, Sophoclean
Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1944); J. T.
Sheppard, The Oedipus Tyrannus of
Sophocles (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1920); Letters, The Life
and Work of Sophocles.
^114. Letters, The Life and Work of Sophocles,
218, 221 (emphasis added).
^115. Ibid., 226, 229-30.
^116. Ibid., 220.
^117. Ibid., 230.
^118. Pliny, Natural History XXXIII, 82-83;
Cicero, De Oratore III, 129; Pausanias,
Description of Greece, X, 18, 7.
^119. Schmitt, “The Ancient Mysteries,” 114.
^120. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, Men and Events
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 313.
^121. András Alföldi, A Conflict of Ideas in the
Late Roman empire, tr. Harold Mattingly
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 40.
^122. “Notes of Recent Exposition,” Expository
Times 73 (1962): 226.
^123. S. Vernon McCasland, “The Unity of the
Scriptures,” Journal of Biblical Literature
73 (1954): 6.
^124. E. Cherbonnier, “The Logic of Biblical
Anthropomorphism,” Harvard Theological
Review 55 (1962): 190.
^125. Paul Tillich, “Die Wiederentdeckung der
prophetischen Tradition in der
Reformation,” Neue Zeitschrift für
systematische Theologie 3 (1961): 237.
^126. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols, 1:18-21.
^127. Life in Other Worlds, A Symposium
 Sponsored by Joseph E. Seagram and Sons
(1 March 1961).
^128. Robert Graves, Difficult Questions, Easy
Answers (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 93.
^129. Hugh W. Nibley, “Victoriosa Loquacitas:
The Rise of Rhetoric and the Decline of
Everything Else,” Western Speech 20 (Spring
1956): 76; reprinted in this volume, pages
273-74; Montague R. James, Apocryphal
New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925),
49, 53-55, 58-60, 70, 80-82, 83, 337-39.
The pseudoscientific element is not lacking,
e.g., in the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Life of
Alexander I, 38, the king sails under the sea
in a glass vessel or flies through space, as in
Lucian’s trip to the moon sequences in The
Dream; cf. Lucian, Zeuxis; cf. Seneca,
Controversiae I, 7, 4-5; V, 6; VII, 1, 4-5;
IX, 6; X, 3.
^130. Fenn, “Front Seat for Biologists,” 14-16.
^131. Martin Grabmann, Geschichte der
scholastischen Methode, 2 vols. (Graz:
Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt,
1957).
^132. Ibid.
^133. Louis M. O. Duchesne, The Early History
of the Church, tr. Claude Jenkins, 3 vols.
(London: Murray, 1924), 2:1.
^134. Hegesippus, Fragmenta, in PG 5:1321,
quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History
IV, 22, in PG 20:377-84.
^135. Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the
Modern World (New York: Macmillan,
1962), 270.
^136. Eduard Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2 vols.,
3rd ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1915), 2:711-12.
^137. Reinhold Seeberg, Text-Book of the History
of Doctrines, vol. 2: History of Doctrines in
the Middle and Early Modern Ages (Grand
Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1952), 105.
^138. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, act IV,
scene 1, lines 152-56.
^139. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, XXXVIII, tr.
Edward Fitzgerald.
^140. Goethe, Faust, 454.
Paths That Stray: Some Notes on
Sophic and Mantic
 Part 1: Introduction through
Proposition 4

The purpose of the excerpts that follow

is to save the student time—years of it, in
some cases—that would normally be taken
up with endless bull sessions, lonely heart
searchings, and very little research. The
quotations that make up most of our text are
taken from eminent authorities and are meant
to help the student make up his own mind.
The modern references cluster around the
turn of the decade, 1959-60, when the
Darwin Centennial was being celebrated, at
which time I gathered them in response to
challenges by students and teachers alike to
justify my reluctance to teach certain
generally accepted propositions.
 The natural objection to a handful of old
notecards flung in the reader’s face is that
most of the quotations are bound to be out of
date and that the people who made them
would today be considered questionable
authorities, if they ever were taken seriously.
But since Science is not a subject but a
method, every scientist, regardless of his
specialty or rank, can in a way speak for
Science—and does. The important thing,
however, is that we are dealing here not with
the old donnybrook between science and
religion but with the ancient confrontation of
Sophic and Mantic. The Sophic is simply the
art of solving problems without the aid of
any superhuman agency, which the Mantic,
on the other hand, is willing to solicit or
accept. Our civilization today is
“sophically” oriented, though far from
dedicated to scientific thought. Allen
Wheelis begins his book The End of the
Modern Age with a statement in italics: “The
vision which has determined the Modern
Age is this: Man can know the world by the
unaided effort of reason."1 This conviction
dominates every field of thought. Thus on the
dust cover of Mrs. Fawn M. Brodie’s highly
inaccurate biography of Joseph Smith, No
Man Knows My History, Mr. Bernard
DeVoto makes a stirring sales pitch as he
proclaims the author to be eminently
trustworthy as “a detached, modern
intelligence, grounded in naturalism,
rejecting the supernatural.”2 No matter what
one’s field, whether science, scholarship,
literature, or art, one must “reject the
supernatural” to be taken seriously.
That the pitfalls of both Sophic and
Mantic are shared equally by scientists and
religionists in our day, who both singly and
together ignore the blessings of both ways of
thought, is the theme of the instructive
reflections of the British biologist G. A.
Kerkut, who writes: “The serious
undergraduate of the previous centuries was
brought up on a theological diet from which
he would learn to have faith and to quote
authorities when he was in doubt. Intelligent
understanding was the last thing required.
The undergraduate of today is just as bad; he
is still the same opinion-swallowing grub. . .
. Regardless of his subject, be it
Engineering, Physics, English, or Biology, he
will have faith in theories that he only dimly
follows and will call upon various
authorities to support what he does not
understand. In this he differs not one bit from
the irrational theology student of the bygone
age. . . . But what is worse, the present-day
student claims to be different . . . in that he
thinks scientifically and despises dogma.”3
And today the theology student also thinks
scientifically and is not a whit behind the
aspiring scientist in being “grounded in
naturalism, rejecting the supernatural,” the
unqualified acceptance of which has always
been the principal charge of the ministry
against the Mormons. So let the reader
beware of confusing the issues of science
and religion as they are debated in our
present-day society with the perennial
confrontation of Sophic and Mantic which
lies behind it all. The few quotations that
follow, a mere sampling, are to indicate
where the age-old confrontation has led us in
the past.
For anyone who pays attention to “the
lessons of history,” few parallels could be
more instructive than that between the Greek
experience and our own in the confrontation
of Mantic and Sophic. The vastness of our
subject can best be encompassed in a series
of propositions and subpropositions, with a
few lyrical digressions.
 Proposition 1. Greek writers speak of
two ways of viewing the world, which can
be designated as Mantic and Sophic. A like
dichotomy characterizes modern thought.
Definition: Sources in Liddell and
Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon4 under
“mantic” (mantikos) use that word as
indicating what is inspired, revealed,
oracular, prophetic, or divinatory. The word
sophic, used to signify that which men learn
by their own unaided wits, though attested, is
very rare, but we shall use it in place of its
common synonyms “sophistic” and
“philosophic”5 to avoid the confusing
connotations which cling to them. Dio
Chrysostom characterizes the degenerate
education of his day as being “neither
mantic, nor sophistic, nor even rhetorical,”
those being the three accepted categories of
study.6 “Philosophy had two beginnings,”
writes Diogenes Laertius, the one
represented by Anaximander, the other by
Pythagoras;7 the former sought to explain
everything by investigation of the physis, the
physical universe alone (see the next
section), the latter held on the other hand that
only God really knows what is what, the
philosopher being merely his messenger.8
“One man,” said Solon, wisest of the
Greeks, “receives from the Olympian Muses
the gift of inspired sophia that men strive for,
and another from Apollo the mantic gift of
prophecy,”9 making the same distinction as
Empedocles: “True reason is either divine or
human; the former is inexpressible, the latter
available to discussion,”10 i.e., Mantic and
Sophic respectively.
As will appear from the quotations that
follow, the modern world makes the same
distinction, usually under the titles of science
(Sophic) and religion (Mantic).
 Proposition 2. The foundation of Sophic
thinking was the elimination of the
supernatural or superhuman, i.e., anything
that could not be weighed, measured, or
sensed objectively, from a description of the
real world.
A. This means that the Universe runs
itself without any conscious direction.
Modern Statements: “Today we have a
new conception of the universe as self-
governed and self-regulating, . . . instead of
the relatively restricted universe of our
traditional conception.”11 “Man is the
expression of universal, organic, social and
personal formative tendencies in a world of
accidents.”12 “The cosmos itself is
patternless, being a jumble of random and
disordered events.”13 “The final and natural
state of things is a completely random
distribution of matter. Any kind of order . . .
is unnatural and happens only by chance
encounters that reverse the general trend.”14
Ancient Statements: The Greek Sophic
began with the study of the physics as
comprising all things; Anaximander’s
apeiron (“the boundless”) by definition
included everything, with no possibility of
any power, influence, or substance being
unaccounted for, and this all-in-all was
purely physical in nature, a soma.15 His
successors in the Milesian school all sought
to explain the basic substance and creative
power of the universe in terms of one
element or another—but it was always a
physical element.16 They asked the question:
What picture of the world do we get if we
leave all supernatural (Mantic) elements out
of our investigations? Since Mantic things
cannot be weighed and measured, let us
proceed as if they did not exist. What picture
of the world would we get? This was a
loaded question, since the fact of the
discovery of anything could be taken as
absolute proof that the assumption of God
and the supernatural was unnecessary in
arriving at significant conclusions, hence
expendable, hence useless baggage, hence a
mere holdover from ages of superstition, and
finally a pernicious nuisance to be swept
into the trashbin as soon as possible. The
Mantic and Sophic do not get along well
together. “Did the natural world [physis]
come into being without cause or grow up
without any directing mind or consciousness
[dianoias], as everybody believes today, or
was it by thought [logos] and divine
knowledge [epistemas theias], by God?”17
“When I [Socrates] was young . . . I was
completely devoted to the intellectual quest,
as they call the investigation of the physical
world. . . . I was convinced that I could
know . . . how everything comes into
existence. . . . I knew that the brain was the
seat of sensation, thought, and hence of
knowledge itself, and that one need look no
further for the answer to everything.”18 The
“classical Greek atomists [were] . . . guilty .
. . of the impossible attempts to explain
everything by matter and motion.”19 After
Hippocrates, the medics “taught that demons
had nothing to do with sickness, but humors
and vapors were the sole cause of
disease.”20 This was the characteristic
attitude of the Sophic.
B. Whether intentionally or not, the
Sophic position was necessarily
antireligious.
Modern Statements: “Of all possible
schemes of the universe the one most hostile
to religion was that sponsored by the science
of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.”21 The scientific view of the
universe had three main foundations: (1)
matter, as the only form of reality, (2)
mechanical, as the only kind of law, and (3)
evolution, as an automatic process.
“Discouraging for humanity, the implications
are disastrous for religion.”22 “The earth has
changed throughout its history under the
action of material forces only, and of the
same forces as those now visible to us”;23
this teaching has “reduced the sway of
superstition in the conceptual world of
human lives.”24 “Darwin’s greatest
contribution” was to see that “evolution can
be explained in terms of causality alone and
does not require any teleological
conceptions.”25 “The origin and growth of
organisms has been natural, not in the least
supernatural. The primeval lightning, . . .
gases, . . . ultra-violet sunlight participated, .
. . and . . . here we are!”26 “No religious
dogma, such as primitive revelation, may be
introduced as a scientific ethnological
explanation.” We must not reduce “the
humanistic science of culture to theology.”27
“The issue of mortality versus immortality is
crucial in the argument of Humanism against
supernaturalism”28 (note here how
Humanism is completely committed not to
the Mantic but to the Sophic line).
Ancient Statements: “Ionic philosophy
was in conscious opposition . . . to the
cosmological, mythological poets and . . .
rejected everything theological,
mythological, or mystical, seeking to explain
the origin of the universe and its
development in purely physical terms of
natural philosophy.”29 Protagoras, in the
spirit of such scientific philosophers as
Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and the Eleatic
school, “attacked every illusion, every
tradition, by insisting on truth, clarity,
objectivity, consistency, and neatness in
thinking and speech.”30 He emphasized
honesty and uprightness, but “at the same
time robbed them of their religious
foundations. He recommends old-fashioned
honesty, but does not want any old-fashioned
ideas to go with it.”31 Of him Plato said,
“You can’t fool the gods either by flattery or
neglect.”32 Thus, Protagoras’s unsparing
attacks on Homer as a moral guide,
following the example of the Ionian
scientists, inevitably brought discredit on
religion itself,33 so that intelligent people,
following the teaching of the Sophists, were
expected to debunk and ridicule any old
values or beliefs as a matter of course. Thus
Protagoras says that the opening line of the
Iliad is not a prayer at all, as it is supposed
to be, being in the imperative case, to which
Aristotle replies in essence, “So what? Any
fool can see that it is a prayer.”34 Xenophon
protests the teaching of Homer and Hesiod
that “happiness [is] dependent on the will of
Heaven,” maintaining that man makes his
own happiness and is dependent on no one.35
Behind such hair-splitting criticism was
always an air of superior knowledge: Crete
had one hundred cities in the Iliad but only
ninety in the Odyssey; in the Iliad, the sun-
god is said by the poet to see everything—
yet in the Odyssey he has to send out
messengers; the gods drink unmixed nectar,
yet Calypso mixes a draught for Hermes—it
is the smart-alec debunking like that of our
own H. L. Mencken of the 1920s and
1930s.36 Trivial attacks on the morality of
the Greek scriptures were nonetheless
devastating: Hippias prefers the “frank and
straightforward” Achilles to the “wily and
false Odysseus.”37 Zoilus defends the
Cyclops, berates Odysseus and Apollo, and
finds all sorts of flaws and inconsistencies in
Homer—why does God permit innocent
dogs and mules to be killed?38 It was petty
and peevish, and sensationally successful.
Almost overnight the new smart
sophistication became “the common property
of educated people” in all Greece.39
C. Specifically, the Sophic dispensed
with the need for God.
Modern Statements: When Napoleon
asked Laplace how God fit into his
cosmology, he replied: “Sire, je n’ai pas eu
besoin de cette hypothese”—his system had
no need for a God-hypothesis.40 Newton saw
that mechanical hypotheses “lead straight
away towards atheism. Mechanical
hypotheses concerning gravity, as a matter of
fact, deny God’s action in the world and
push him out of it.”41 “Evolution is a fully
natural process, inherent in the physical
properties of the universe.”42 “Life may
conceivably be happier for some people in
the older worlds of superstition. It is
possible that some children are made happy
by a belief in Santa Claus, but adults should
prefer to live in a world of reality and
reason.”43 “It seemed as though the machines
man had invented made him more secure. . . .
He was ceasing to be (as the English farmer
complained in describing his occupation)
‘too dependent on the Almighty.’”44 “Thus
we must make an effort to achieve this new
conception of a self-regulating, self-
governed universe requiring no supreme
ruler or ad hoc causes and forces to keep it
running.”45 “Evolution now becomes not
only the Source of Comfort and Reassurance
. . . the Immanent and Omnipresent Creator . .
. [but] all the wonders which for Archdeacon
Paley were evidences of the existence of
God can on this view be put to the credit of
Evolution.”46 “The Infinite Universe of the
New Cosmology . . . inherited all the
ontological attributes of Divinity. Yet only
those—all the others the departed God took
away with Him.”47
Ancient Statements: From Anaxagoras
the scientist, Pericles learned “to despise all
the superstitious fears which the awe-
inspiring signs of the heaven arouse in those
ignorant of the causes of such things, who . . .
let their apprehensions about the gods throw
them into a sorry state of alarm.”48 “Whereas
the superstitious person, when he gets sick,
resigns himself to the will of Heaven, the
atheist tries to remember what he ate or
drank.”49 In exercising their right and duty to
debunk everything, the Sophists inevitably
zeroed in on God: for all their pious
dedication the net result of their teaching
was a sterile atheism.50 Dependence on God
was supplanted by dependence on oneself.
Critias in his lost play Sisyphus said the
gods were the invention of some primitive
politician, to keep the mob in line by fear of
Some One in the sky.
Proposition 3. Having dismissed the
Mantic, the Sophic becomes impatient of its
lingering survival, which it views with
uncompromising hostility.
A. Superimposed on ancient tradition,
the Sophic teaching claims to bring
emancipation to the human mind from hoary
superstition, and in so doing creates its own
facile evolutionary pattern of history.
Modern Statements: “Of all
antagonisms of belief, the oldest, the widest,
the most profound, and the most important, is
that between Religion and Science. It
commenced when the recognition of the
simplest uniformities in surrounding things
set a limit to the once universal
supersition.”51 Thanks to Darwin, “instead
of the gracious half-divine figures of the
Golden Age . . . we are shown a breed of
hairy gorilla-like creatures, huddling and
jibbering in caves; . . . undoubtedly modern
man is a much more complex being than
primitive man. He has developed a much
wider and subtler range of sensibilities and
interests.”52 “These beliefs are survivals of
an ancient animistic tradition which has for
so long directed human thinking about the
universe. . . . As an escape from this
conception, scientific studies and
formulations have, since the days of
Copernicus and Galileo, sought for order
and regularity in nature.”53 But some
scholars have balked at this idea. “Illusions
of grandeur take a number of forms,”
including “that which exalts our own age at
the expense of all past ages.”54 We must “rid
ourselves of the pious superstition of our
grandfathers that we have made splendid
progress and that the pitiful early centuries
lie . . . in the dense fog of their own
imperfection.”55
Ancient Statements: Western
civilization began with Hellenism and
should be called “Rationalistic
Civilization.” “All the development of
knowledge, of command over the forces of
Nature, . . . has had for its moving principle
a rationalism whose origin is to be found in
the Greek citystates.”56 Few students are
aware today that the ancient Sophists painted
a picture of “primitive man,” the hairy cave-
man, exactly matching that which we get
from Darwin.57 Thales, the founder of Greek
science, congratulated himself “that he was
born a Greek and not a barbarian.” The
philosophers followed suit, regarding
themselves just as naturally superior to other
races as to monkeys and ants.58 “Seneca
does not have to read the ancients to
condemn them—the moderns are superior as
such."59 Shahrastani divides the Rationalists
and Philosophers into (1) Sophists, (2)
Natural Scientists, (3) Materialists. What all
have in common is the rejection of
revelation.60
B. Arising as a protest to the Mantic, the
Sophic always depends on polemic for its
appeal; it feeds on the Mantic and is
negative and dependent in nature.
Modern Statements: “No less severe
was his [Lamarck’s] philosophical hostility
amounting to hatred for the tradition of the
Deluge and the Biblical creation story,
indeed for everything which recalled the
Christian theory of nature.”61 Darwin
claimed, “I had gradually come, by this time,
to see that the Old Testament from its
manifestly false history of the world . . . was
no more to be trusted than the sacred books
of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any
barbarian, . . . that the men at that time were
ignorant and credulous to a degree almost
incomprehensible by us. . . . Thus disbelief
crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at
last complete. . . . I felt no distress, and have
never since doubted even for a single second
that my conclusion was correct.”62 This was
in 1836-39, when Darwin was still in his
twenties and had as yet done none of his
scientific work—yet already his mind was
made up for all time; the negative part of his
doctrine was fixed, and in that negative part
lies his supreme contribution to
knowledge.63 “Darwin’s supreme
achievement was to make compelling the
inference that evolution has in fact taken
place. . . . Providing a basis for mechanistic
interpretation, it helped to free biology of
animistic influence.”64 Without something to
ridicule, the Sophic loses much of its appeal.
In his novel The Affair, C. P. Snow describes
the quintessential intellectual: “The old man
was happy. He felt as though back in the
Cambridge of the Nineties, when unbelief,
rude, positive unbelief, was fun.”65 “No man
of ‘unquestioning faith’ can be a member in
good standing of a true university. . . . A man
who is not prepared to challenge (earnestly,
respectfully, fearlessly) The Wealth of
Nations or Das Kapital, The Koran or The
Book of Mormon . . . is at heart no scholar
and no scientist.”66 Note that challenging
these things means to reject them outright,
i.e., not seriously to challenge them at all.
John Stuart Mill, reading the Gospel of John,
laid it aside “before he reached the 6th
Chapter, with the comment: ‘This is poor
stuff.’”67
Ancient Statements: When Epicurus
was fourteen years old (as with Darwin in
his twenties) and his teachers could not
answer his questions about the original
chaos of Hesiod, he turned away from
religion to philosophy for the rest of his
life.68 Lucian “ridicules the ancient poets for
pretending to be inspired interpreters of the
will of heaven.”69 His commonsense
ridiculing of old customs and beliefs made
Lucian a great favorite of the Byzantine
period and the Renaissance.70 Andocides, an
ambitious and unscrupulous operator, found
fame and notoriety through his association
with a group of individuals accused of
damaging the Hermes and making fun of
everything; he even joined the Eleusinian
mysteries in order to expose them.71 After
Augustus, smart Romans looked back on Old
Latin literature with loathing, since it lacked
the Greek sophistication.72 Entering the
scene as frank, searching, brilliant,
irreverent, unabashed thinkers,73 the Sophists
started out by lambasting Homer, the most
revered voice of all,74 but the Sophic
practitioners became a crashing bore when
they had nothing to attack but were left to
their own studies, tedious and hypercritical
as they are. Compare Plato’s Apology, Crito,
Gorgias, and Protagoras on the essential
barrenness of the Sophic.
Proposition 4. Claiming magisterial
authority, the Sophic acknowledges no
possibility of defeat or rivalry. In principle
it can never be wrong. Its confidence is
absolute.
A. Successive failures in no wise
discourage it.
Modern Statements: In 1954, Alfred
North Whitehead noted, “Since the turn of
the century I have lived to see every one of
the basic assumptions of both [science and
mathematics] set aside; . . . and all this in
one lifespan. . . . And yet, in the face of that,
the discoverers of the new hypotheses in
science are declaring, ‘Now at last, we have
certitude’—when some of the assumptions
which we have seen upset had endured for
more than twenty centuries.”75 “Each new
fashion or advancement in research was
hailed as just the thing to solve all life’s
mysteries. . . . Always just around the corner
was the answer to all the riddles.”76 But the
modern Sophists insist in carrying on in this
way: “To cry ‘We are ignorant’ is safe and
healthy, but to cry ‘we shall be ignorant’ in
the future is rash and foolish”; “he who
declares that they [any problems] can never
be solved by the scientific method is to my
mind as rash as the man [who] . . . declared
it utterly impossible [to talk] across the
Atlantic Ocean.”77 “So science has, it seems,
been so successful that it has inevitably
earned a great and strange reputation. . . .
Presumably these scientists are both so
clever and so wise that they can do anything.
Perhaps we should turn the world over to
this superbreed.”78
Ancient Statements: The sublime
confidence of the Sophist in his powers is a
stock theme in the Lives of the Philosophers.
The art of rhetoric was constructed to
guarantee that no Sophist would ever have to
admit defeat.79
B. Even when its most confident claims
are discredited and its predictions fail, the
Sophic remains unrepentant: those who
admit that natural selection is not the answer
go on insisting that it is still the first article
of faith.
Modern Statements: It is repeatedly
stated that Darwin’s greatest contribution
was the concept of natural selection as
providing the mechanistic explanation of
creation and evolution.80 Yet admittedly
natural selection does not work: “Even after
his great discovery of the operation of
evolution through natural selection he
[Darwin] still believed in Lamarck’s
doctrine of evolution through the inheritance
of acquired characters, a doctrine his own
work had rendered superfluous and indeed
erroneous.”81 “Since Darwin wrote, his
theory of natural selection has been
constantly in the minds of naturalists, who
have designed, but never satisfactorily
carried out, experiments to show that natural
selection does in fact occur.”82 “It has been
difficult to realize that . . . there is a
considerable and, it is fair to say, steadily
growing realization that natural selection is
not, and can never have been, that principal
cause of evolution that it is still too often
claimed to be.”83 “We are ignorant of the
causes and mechanisms of variation.”84
“Today, A. H. Mueller, M. D. Newell, and
G. G. Simpson are teaching contradictory to
Darwin’s doctrine of gradual evolution.”85
Likewise, uniformitarianism, once “the great
underlying principle of modern geology,”86
is being supplanted by the new plate
tectonics,87 but the Sophic does not
apologize for its past mistakes.
Ancient Statements: In their attempts to
explain everything in terms of matter, the
Ionic “physicists” soon formed conflicting
schools; and Heraclitus showed them the
contradictions and limitations implicit in
their program, the inadequacy of human
senses and instruments,88 the relativity of
things,89 the necessity of accepting fallible
human consensus as proof. For his services
Heraclitus was dubbed skoteinos, which
means the obscure, the wet blanket, the
trouble-maker; in other words they
dismissed him as a crank.90 Hippocrates
represents the never-say-I’m-sorry attitude
of the Sophics. The foundation of his system
was the doctrine that there are no causes
except physical causes to anything.91 He is
so positive as to condemn all religious cures
as sacrilege and all apparent miracles as
tricks.92 Where his own theories break down
and his methods fail, he rejects criticism: It
was not the method but the disease that was
to blame.93 “Think how much worse things
would have been without my
prescriptions.”94 The scientific cure is
always the right one—whether it works or
not!95
C. The Sophic remains undismayed by
setbacks, because it puts complete faith in
the ultimate infallibility of mechanistic
explanations.
Modern Statements: “I think it more
reasonable to doubt a mathematical theorem
than a well-established case of evolution,
e.g., that of the horse.”96 As soon as
nineteenth-century science “scented a piece
of mechanism [it would] . . . exclaim, ‘Here
we are getting to bedrock. This is what
things should resolve themselves into. This
is ultimate reality,’” and such was also
Darwin’s attitude.97 “The advocates of each
new fashion or approach to biological
problems nearly always assume that what
they have worked out . . . must of necessity
be true for all plants or animals.”98 When
Jacques Boucher in 1832 collected a few
stone hand axes and other flints he entitled
his five-volume catalogue of them On the
Creation—a few chipped flints explain how
everything came into being.99 “Physics, not
so very long ago (and with chemistry as a
kind of subsidiary), considered the world as
a type of great machine. . . . The fact that
many of the leaders of thought have moved
on well ahead of that point of view has not
yet been as widely appreciated as it should
be.”100 The fact that “the paleontological
record is horrifyingly incomplete” does not
dampen the confidence of scientists, who
“feel sure what this research is leading up
to.”101 The infallibility of our objectivity
permits even prophetic license. Bacon wants
to believe that physical things cannot be
manipulated by an observer, as words can,
even though he suspects that that is wishful
thinking.102 Men should, he says, experiment
and “bid farewell to sophistical doctrines”;
but how is experimental knowledge
conveyed and evaluated if not by the very
same words that the philosophers have
always abused?103
The Sophic even teaches that it is better
to get the wrong answer by its methods than
the right answer by any other! Thus while
Neville George admits that natural selection
was not a successful explanation of how
things happen, he still insists that it was
“Darwin’s supreme achievement” because it
inferred a “mechanistic” instead of an
“animistic” explanation that justified
“conviction of the fact of evolution.”104 All
efforts by the geologists of Trinity College to
discover water for a well on campus failed;
a local dowser was called in and succeeded
immediately. “There is no doubt of the
reality of the dowsing effect,” wrote
Trinity’s J. J. Thompson, but the dowser
could not be tolerated because no physical
explanation had been found. “Although . . .
the reality of dowsing” is conceded, “there
is no agreement about its cause,” and so the
dons indignantly denounced the dowsing.105
We must necessarily view all things which
we cannot explain “as unreal, as vain
imaginings of the untrained human mind,”
which since “they could not be described
scientifically . . . were in themselves
contradictory and absurd.”106 Newton got the
right answers, but scientists refused to
accept his explanation, which embarrassed
them: “We cannot deny [as Newton did] that
attraction belongs to matter just because we
do not understand how it works.”107 But how
can we affirm it either, if we do not
understand it? Newton’s position is rejected
for only one reason—that it leaves open the
possibility of the supernatural.
Ancient Statements: A Baconian faith in
pure observation, unencumbered by
preconceptions or prejudices, is expressed
by Lucretius: “The size and temperature of
the sun’s disk are no greater and no smaller,
nor can they be, than exactly what they
appear to be to our senses.”108 The same
holds true of the moon—it is exactly what it
appears to be.109 “O miserable human race,
to attribute such things to the gods!”110 “The
sun is just a stone, and the moon a piece of
earth.”111
“The radical error of Classicism is to
suppose that the history of mankind can
properly be apprehended in terms applicable
to the study of ‘objects’ in ‘nature,’ i.e., in
the light of the conventional concepts of form
and matter.”112 All other types of belief are
only for women, children, and slaves.113
Pouring contempt on every other
approach to knowledge but his own,
Hippocrates debunks such popular
superstitions as that garlic and onions have
an effect on the human system,114 that the
wearing of black has a depressing effect on
people,115 that a religious state of mind can
have an effect in fasting and healing,116 and
that the painting of the trunks of fruit trees
with red litharge will give an improved fruit
crop.117 Why red? Why not any other color?
he asks. He rejects all these “superstitions”
(though all are fully justified by centuries of
testing) because he cannot explain in each
case why it should be so;118 medicine is not
satisfied to know that a thing works and to
know what happens; as a true science it must
know why.119 Other doctors claim to be as
scientific as he and give different
explanations for things in the name of
science;120 his own explanations of
everything in terms of the four humors have
caused infinite mischief, but for that he does
not apologize, insisting that one should
always use the scientific cure even when it
does not work and avoid a traditional
remedy even when it does.121 He commends
the peasants for tying rocks to the branches
of olive trees not because it makes them
easier to harvest, but because the weight of
the rocks will by attraction cause the trees to
bear a heavier weight of fruit—that is, their
reasons are better than his, but he is the
scientist. Maimonides further deplores the
prescribing of certain superstitious cures by
the rabbis “since though experience has
shown that they work, reason cannot explain
why.”122 Hippocrates concludes his great
work on the Sacred Diseases with the
warning that the one thing to avoid is
“purifications, incantations, or any other kind
of vulgar or popular cure,” whether they
work or not.123
D. To remain invulnerable to all attack,
the Sophic has provided itself with certain
useful escape hatches, which it denies to the
Mantic.
Modern Statements: P. T. Mora writes
that he believes that moderns have
developed “what I call the practice of
infinite escape clauses . . . to avoid facing
the conclusion that the probability of a self-
producing state [matter alone in charge] is
zero. . . . These escape clauses postulate an
almost infinite amount of time and . . .
material (monomers), so that even the most
unlikely event could have happened. . . . By
such logic we can prove anything.”124
“Darwin, Huxley, Tyndale, and others,” all
draw these blank checks on time, “if enough
space and time were available, it could
happen and even happen frequently.”125 The
key to the sly circular argument is the word
“enough.” “Can all complexity be reduced to
simplicity as in physics if we work hard
enough? . . . What rubbish that it was once
thought so! . . . Such illogicality . . . was
never apparent then, back in the days when .
. . the Encyclopedia for the Unity of Science
was first appearing . . . from Chicago.”126
The tautological argument was never
allowed to the Mantic: “It is the triumph of
Geology, as a science, to have demonstrated
that we do not need to refer to vast,
unknown, and terrible causes the relief
features of the earth, but that known agencies
at work today are competent to produce
them, provided they have enough time."127
How much time was necessary? Enough to
do the job, whatever it was! One escape is
simply to admit an anomaly and go right on
as if nothing had happened; thus Marshall D.
Sahlins confidently predicted the results of
an experiment which was faulted drastically:
to describe the debacle he uses such words
as “startling,” “extraordinary,” and
“remarkable,” noting that the outcome
“suggests a startling conclusion,” the
opposite to what was expected. Yet he easily
readjusts the new facts to provide proof
instead of refutation for his hard-hit
theory.128 As Bacon observes, this is a
dangerously easy thing for any scientist to
do. Thus William W. Howells, having
declared that Darwin was right on a point,
adds, “Curiously, however, it is extremely
difficult to find demonstrable, or even
logically appealing, adaptive advantages in
racial features”129—as if admitting the
anomaly takes care of it. Darwin used the
same simple escape hatch of passing basic
questions by in silence: “Darwin did not
seek to account for variations. . . .
Variations, then, are a necessary condition of
the functioning of the evolutionary process.
Yet apparently they are causeless . . . from
the standpoint of the concepts of mechanical
causation, which is the only kind of
causation that science recognizes.”130 An
important escape hatch has always been
“wait and see”; as each new mechanism was
discovered it was treated as a nail in the
coffin of religion if not its death blow; and
as each mechanism failed to explain, it was
argued that there would always be new ones
discovered, that the discovery of past
mechanisms guaranteed that we were moving
in the right direction, and whether we came
to the final cause sooner or later, we at least
had enough to dismiss all nonmaterial
elements from our calculations.131
More sweeping is Harlow Shapley’s
escape clause: Life occurs automatically
wherever the conditions are right. Therefore
there is no need for explaining the origin of
life in terms of the miraculous or the
supernatural. “Where conditions are right,
there is chemical evidence that essential
complex materials which appear
spontaneously leave no reason whatever to
invoke the miraculous.” Here the unknown-x
“spontaneous” takes the place of unknown-x
“miraculous.” What is the difference?—
purely that between the Sophic and Mantic
attitude, a perfect circular argument: if
“conditions are right” glaciers will appear in
the midst of the Sahara. We must assume that
conditions are right for everything that ever
was or happened, and there is no reason why
conditions should not include God and
angels. In the same spirit Sir Gavin de Beer
turns the extreme inefficiency of the
evolutionary process to prove not that its
inexorable laws are not doing the job but that
there is no “design, purpose, or guidance” in
the universe, which would never bungle
so!132 A new escape clause for the
evolutionists is that human evolution, instead
of being mechanical, has since the
emergence of Homo sapiens been
consciously influenced and artificially
controlled by human will. “Consciously
directed co-operativeness has been the
major factor which determined the
evolutionary origin of Homo sapiens. . . . It
may be said, indeed, that if man (in the
broadest sense) invented culture, it was
culture which invented Homo sapiens."133
“Man is a being who has domesticated
himself, thereby placing himself outside the
brutish functioning of natural selection.”134
There is a controlling mind after all? No,
this is simply a mechanical process, since
man himself is a product of purely
mechanical forces—and so around in the
circle. It has become common practice to
appeal to the possibility of life on other
worlds as proof of no divine intervention;135
but to Latter-day Saints it has always proved
just the opposite.
Ancient Statements: “In the middle of
the fifth century B.C.,—when in turn the
unrestricted imagination of the Ionian
philosophers had failed to explain the riddle
of existence on physical grounds . . .
philosophy fell somewhat into disrepute. A
spirit of skepticism spread over the Greek
world, and the greatest thinkers, foiled in
their attempts to discover the higher truths,
turned their attention to the practical side of
education.”136 The new education, however,
retained and intensified the critical, negative,
irreligious element and intellectual prestige
of science. A like phenomenon is found
today: “The hypothesis of natural selection
has, also for a variety of reasons, gradually
acquired a not altogether healthy degree of
prestige, which is hard to break down. It has
become, if only by reiteration, so firmly
ensconced as part of our general outlook on
nature that it needs real determination to cast
doubt on it. Biologists are conditioned to it
from their earliest education.”137 It is not the
content but the mood, the overconfidence, the
negative power of the Sophic that is virtually
indestructible. Thus, however the Doctors
disagree, the basic hard-headed principle of
medicine remains. For Hippocrates it is:
Believe only what you see!138 But, he is
careful to provide his escape clauses.
 Notes to Part 1
These notes were compiled around
1963 in outline fashion and were intended
as an aid in research.

Footnotes
^1. Allen Wheelis, The End of the Modern Age
(New York: Basic Books, 1971), 3.
^2. Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946).
^3. G. A. Kerkut, ed., Implications of Evolution,
International Series of Monographs on Pure
and Applied Biology; Division: Zoology, vol.
4 (New York: Pergamon, 1960), 3.
^4. Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, Greek-
English Lexicon (London: Oxford
University Press, 1975).
^5. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent
Philosophers I, 12.
^6. Dio Chrysostom, Discourse XII, 15.
^7. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent
 Philosophers I, 13.
^8. Ibid., I, 12.
^9. Stobaeus, Eclogues III, 9, 23, lines 51-53, in
Ivan Linforth, Solon the Athenian
(Berkeley: University of California Press,
1919), 167-68.
^10. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians I,
122.
^11. Lawrence K. Frank, Nature and Human
Nature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1951), 39.
^12. Lancelot L. Whyte, Accent on Form (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 125.
^13. Lyall Watson, Supernature (New York:
Doubleday, 1973), 8.
^14. Ibid., 5.
^15. Aristotle, Physics III, 8, 208a.
^16. Aristotle, Metaphysics I, 3, 983b.
^17. Plato, Sophist 265C.
^18. Plato, Phaedo 96A-C.
^19. Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to
the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins, 1957), 213.
^20. Philostorgius, Historia Ecclesiastica VIII,
10, in PG 65:564.
^21. Cyril E. M. Joad, God and Evil (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1943), 108.
^22. Ibid., 113-14.
^23. George G. Simpson, “The World into Which
Darwin Led Us,” Science 131 (April 1960):
967.
^24. Ibid.
^25. Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific
Philosophy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1951), 199.
^26. Harlow Shapley, in Life in Other Worlds, A
Symposium Sponsored by Joseph E.
Seagram and Sons (1 March 1961): 27.
^27. David Bidney, “The Ethnology of Religion
and the Problem of Human Evolution,”
American Anthropologist 56 (February
1954): 17.
^28. Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of
Humanism, 4th ed. (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1957), 68.
^29. Theodor Hopfner, Orient und griechische
 Philosophie (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1925), 65.
^30. Wilhelm Schmid, Geschichte der
griechischen Literatur (Munich: Beck,
1940), 3:1:1:38.
^31. Ibid., 3:1:1:37.
^32. Plato, Republic II, 365D.
^33. Schmid, Geschichte der griechischen
Literatur, 1:1:129-30.
^34. Aristotle, Poetics XIX, 7-9.
^35. John E. Sandys, A History of Classical
Scholarship, 3 vols. (New York: Hafner,
1958), 1:29.
^36. Ibid., 1:36.
^37. Plato, Lesser Hippias 365B.
^38. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship,
1:33, 108-9.
^39. Schmid, Geschichte der griechischen
Literatur, 3:1:1:38.
^40. Koyré, From the Closed World, 276.
^41. Ibid., 234.
^42. Simpson, “The World,” 969.
^43. Ibid., 974.
^44. Joseph W. Krutch, “If You Don’t Mind My
Saying So . . .,” American Scholar 35
(Spring 1966): 182.
^45. Frank, Nature and Human Nature, 39-40.
^46. Stephen Toulmin, “Contemporary Scientific
Mythology,” in Metaphysical Beliefs
(London: SCM, 1957), 61.
^47. Koyré, From the Closed World, 276.
^48. Plutarch, Pericles VI, 1.
^49. Plutarch, Superstition 168B-C.
^50. Schmid, Geschichte der griechischen
Literatur, 3:1:1:37.
^51. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (New
York: Appleton, 1882), 11.
^52. Edwyn Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921),
191-93.
^53. Frank, Nature and Human Nature, [146].
^54. Robert L. Schuyler, “Man’s Greatest
Illusion,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 92 (1948): 50; cf.
Georgio de Santillana, The Origins of
Scientific Thought (Chicago: University of
 Chicago Press, 1961), 7-20.
^55. Paul Herrmann, Conquest by Man, tr.
Michael Bullock (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1954), 9.
^56. Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity, 14-15.
^57. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura V, 925-1010;
Seneca, Epistles XC, 7; Vitruvius, On
Architecture II, 1; Firmicus, Disputationes
Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem III, 1;
E. D. Phillips, “The Greek Version of
Prehistory,” Antiquity 38 (September 1964):
171-78.
^58. Nicephorus Gregor, Byzantina Historia
VIII, 8, in PG 148:569.
^59. Eduard Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2 vol.,
3rd ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1915), 1:308-9.
^60. Shahrastani II, 201, in O. D. Chwolsohn
(Khvol’son), Die Ssabier und der
Ssabismus, 2 vols. (St. Petersburg:
Buchdruckerei der Kaiserlichen Akademie
der Wissenschaften, 1856), 2:419.
^61. Sainte-Beuve, quoted in Charles C. Gillispie,
“Lamarck and Darwin in the History of
 Science,” The American Scientist 46
(December 1958): 397.
^62. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of
Charles Darwin: 1809-1882 (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1958), 85-87.
^63. Cf. Ibid., 87, n. 1.
^64. T. Neville George, Evolution in Outline
(London: Thrift Books, 1951), 16 (emphasis
added).
^65. C. P. Snow, The Affair (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1960), 271-72.
^66. Albert Guérard, Fossils and Presences
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1957), 265.
^67. John Stuart Mill, “Notes of Recent
Exposition,” Expository Times 70
(December 1958): 65.
^68. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent
Philosophers X, 2.
^69. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship,
1:316.
^70. Ibid., 1:317.
^71. J. F. Dobson, Greek Orators (London:
 Methuen, 1919), 53-57.
^72. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 1:156.
^73. Plato, Lesser Hippias 364B-365B.
^74. Schmid, Geschichte der griechischen
Literatur, 1:1:131.
^75. Alfred N. Whitehead, quoted in Lucien
Price, “To Live without Certitude,” Atlantic
Monthly 193 (March 1954): 58; for
examples of this sublime confidence no
matter what, see James R. Newman,
“William Kingdom Clifford,” Scientific
American 183 (February 1953): 79.
^76. Albert W. Heere, in a letter to the editor, in
American Institute of Biological Science
(AIBS) Bulletin (December 1960): 5.
^77. Karl Pearson, “The Knowledge of the
Natural World,” Part B, in Troy W. Organ,
The Examined Life (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1956): 118-19.
^78. Warren Weaver, “The Imperfections of
Science,” American Scientist 49 (March
1961): 101.
^79. Hugh Nibley, “Victoriosa Loquacitas: The
 Rise of Rhetoric and the Decline of
Everything Else,” Western Speech 20 (Spring
1956): 57-58; reprinted in this volume, pages
243-45.
^80. Theodosius Dobzhansky, “The Present
Evolution of Man,” Scientific American
(September 1960): 206; Sir Ronald Fisher,
“The Discontinuous Inheritance,” The
Listener (17 July 1958): 85, who notes that
the concept “was an old fancy which had
been revived by the philosophers of the
eighteenth century.” C. D. Darlington, “The
Natural History of Man,” The Listener (31
July 1958): 161, 165: “We are ready to
apply Darwin’s principles of natural selection
and evolution . . . in understanding and
controlling the future.”
^81. Ernest Jones, “Nature of Genius,” Scientific
Monthly 84 (February 1957): 82.
^82. D. M. S. Watson, “The Record of the
Rocks,” The Listener (10 July 1958): 52; cf.
P. T. Matthews, The Nuclear Apple
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), 143.
^83. Ronald Good, “Natural Selection Re-
 examined,” The Listener (7 May 1959):
797.
^84. Harry Grundfest, “Opinions on Darwin a
Century After,” Science and Society 24
(1960): 153, attempts to prove natural
selection being “still largely unsuccessful,”
152.
^85. Von Otto H. Schindewolf,
“Neokatastrophismus,” Zeitschrift der
deutschen geologischen Gesellschaft 114
(1963): 430.
^86. William D. Thornbury, Principles of
Geomorphology (New York: John Wiley and
Sons, 1954), 16.
^87. Nigel Calder, The Restless Earth: A Report
on the New Geology (New York: Viking,
1972), 15.
^88. Diehls, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, frg.
73.
^89. Plato, Cratylus 402A; Diogenes Laertius,
Lives of Eminent Philosophers IX, 9, 11;
Aristotle, On the Soul I, 2, 405a; on the
necessity of accepting fallible human
 concensus as proof see Sextus Empiricus,
Against the Logicians VII, 133.
^90. See the interpretation in Heinrich Ritter and
Ludwig Preller, Historia Philosophiae
Graecae (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1975),
25.
^91. Hippocrates, The Sacred Disease XXI, 1-4.
^92. Ibid., II, 1-10, 27-32.
^93. Hippocrates, The Art 2.
^94. Ibid., 3-6.
^95. Hippocrates, The Sacred Disease 21.
^96. J. B. S. Haldane, in Arnold Lunn and J. B.
S. Haldane, Science and the Supernatural
(New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935), 251.
^97. Sir Arthur Eddington, quoted in Joad, God
and Evil, 111.
^98. Heere, AIBS Bulletin, 5.
^99. Geoffrey Bibby, “The Idea of Prehistory,” in
Samuel Rapport and Helen Wright, eds.,
Archaeology (New York: New York
University Press, 1963), 18-20.
^100. John Rowland, “Science and Religion,”
Hibbert Journal 60/236 (1961/62): 5.
^101. M. G. Rutten, The Geological Aspects of
the Origin of Life on Earth (New York:
Elsevier, 1962), 2, 4. Cf. Rutten, The
Origin of Life by Natural Causes (New
York: Elsevier, 1971), 2.
^102. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum I, 59.
^103. Ibid., I, 64.
^104. George, Evolution in Outline, 16.
^105. Sir Joseph J. Thomson, Recollections and
Reflections (New York: Macmillan, 1937),
160.
^106. Pearson, “The Knowledge of the Natural
World,” 118.
^107. Koyré, From the Closed World, 274.
^108. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura V, 564.
^109. Ibid., V, 578.
^110. Ibid., V, 1194-95.
^111. Meletus, in Plato, Apology 26D.
^112. Charles N. Cochrane, Christianity and
Classical Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1944), 97; cf. Vitruvius,
On Architecture 8, on the Milesian school.
^113. Cicero, De Officiis II, 16, 56-57, and De
 Haruspicum Responsis, 12.
^114. Hippocrates, The Sacred Disease II, 20-46.
^115. Ibid.
^116. Ibid.
^117. Chwolson, Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus,
2:469.
^118. Ibid., 2:41-46.
^119. Hippocrates, The Art 6.
^120. Hippocrates, Ancient Medicine 13-15.
^121. Hippocrates, The Sacred Disease 2.
^122. Chwolson, Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus,
2:470.
^123. Hippocrates, The Sacred Disease XXI, 25,
26.
^124. Peter T. Mora, “The Folly of Probability,”
in Sidney W. Fox, The Origins of
Prebiological Systems (New York:
Academic, 1965), 45 (emphasis added).
^125. Norman W. Pirie, “Some Assumptions
Underlying Discussion on the Origins of
Life,” Annals New York Academy of
Sciences 69 (1957): 373.
^126. Julian Jaynes, “The Routes of Science,”
American Scientist 54 (March 1966): 95.
^127. Louis V. Pirsson and Charles Schuchert,
Introductory Geology (New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1920), 5-6.
^128. Marshall D. Sahlins, “The Origin of
Society,” Scientific American 203
(September 1960): 77-78, 82.
^129. William W. Howells, “The Distribution of
Man,” Scientific American 203 (September
1960): 114.
^130. Joad, God and Evil, 124-25.
^131. Ibid., 111.
^132. Sir Gavin de Beer, “Natural Selection after
100 Years,” The Listener (3 July 1958): 12.
^133. Sir Wilfrid LeGross Clark, “The Humanity
of Man,” Advancement of Science 18
(September 1961): 218.
^134. A. Thoma, “Métissage ou transformation
essai sur les hommes fossiles de Palestine,”
L’Anthropologie 62 (1958): 47.
^135. Calder, Mind of Man, 17-18.
^136. Dobson, Greek Orators, 9-10.
^137. Good, “Natural Selection,” 797.
^138. Hippocrates, The Art II, 6-11.
 Part 2: Proposition 5 and
Proposition 6

Proposition 5. The Sophic claims (A)

all knowledge for its province, to the
exclusion of all other claimants and the (B)
rejection of all other approaches. (C) It is
as aggressive as it is negative, and (D) is
filled with a crusading and reforming zeal.
A. Its province is all knowledge.
Modern Statements: “Theoretical
science is the attempt to uncover an ultimate
and comprehensive set of axioms (including
mathematical rules) from which all the
phenomena of the world could be shown to
follow by deductive steps.”1 “The West has
suffered from an excess of subjectizing the
world. When it does not know something, it
denies its existence. . . . That which is not
seen has never existed. . . . The tactic of
suppressing that which is not known is
ancient indeed in the scientific petulance of
the West.”2 “One thing that disturbs me is the
idea that science can solve everything. . . .
What man chooses to do with the discoveries
of science and their applications is beyond
science.”3
Ancient Statements: Aristotle’s great
scientific encyclopedia was handed down
through the generations as the compendium
of all knowledge, “diluted to the utmost and
rendered as far as possible mechanical.”4 As
such it was effectively employed by the
Sophists. The Summas of the Scholastic
philosophers assert the totality of their
knowledge: what is not in their book does
not exist.
 B. At the same time it claims to be the
only door to knowledge, all or partial.
Modern Statements: “No, our science
is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to
suppose that what science cannot give us we
can get elsewhere.”5 “Modern Science. . .
claims that the whole range of phenomena,
mental as well as physical—the entire
universe—is its field. It asserts that the
scientific method is the sole gateway to the
whole region of knowledge.”6 “The
fundamental principle of science is that it
concerns itself exclusively with what can be
demonstrated, and does not allow itself to be
influenced by personal opinions or sayings
of anybody. This is why the motto of the
Royal Society of London is Nullus in verba:
we take no man’s word for anything.”7
Ancient Statements: Aristotle’s
“analytical spirit . . . found its food in
positive science,” which is based on the “the
Hellenistic pictures of the world, self-
sufficient, emphasizing totality, . . . [though]
far removed from living research”—
research that was rendered unnecessary by
the all-embracing nature of the system; the
method was the answer, the medium was the
message.8 It was the intention of the
philosophers to supplant the poets as the
complete guides to knowledge.9 “The
Hellenistic systems . . . dogmatically
construct a fixed picture of the world out of
‘valid propositions,’ and in this safe shell
they seek refuge from the storms of life.”10
C. The others are not only ignorant, they
are thieves and pretenders: the Mantic must
be harried out of the land.
Modern Statements: The fallacies of
Scientism are that (1) “Science . . . alone is
sufficient to lead us to truth.” (2) Science can
save us. (3) Objectivism: only the tangible
and observable are real. (4) “Anything and
everything . . . can be understood best in
terms of its earlier and simpler stages.” (5) It
has a contempt for history. (6) It “involves
such dogmas as determinism and relativism.”
(7) It “enhances the pernicious cult of
power.”11 Thus the geologist of Richard
McKenna’s “The Secret Place” proclaims, “I
am as positivistic a scientist as you will
find. . . . The students blush and hate me, but
it is for their own good. Science is the only
safe game, and it’s safe only if it is kept
pure.”12 “Science has not only progressively
reduced the competence of philosophy, but it
has also attempted to suppress it altogether
and to replace it by its own claim to
universality.”13 “The touchstone of science is
the universal validity of its results for all
normally constituted and duly instructed
minds. . . . The glitter of the great
metaphysical systems becomes dross when
tried by this touchstone.” Science claims not
only exclusive right to the territory it has
occupied but also to any “territory that
science has not yet effectively occupied.”14
“All other philosophy is sheer humbug. . . .
There can be no wisdom without the correct
worldview of our generation.”15 “Do not be
bullied by authoritative pronouncements
about what machines will never do. Such
statements are based upon pride.”16 Is this
claim that we can design machines that will
do anything at all an expression of great
humility? “Whenever, therefore, we are
tempted to desert the scientific method of
seeking truth, whenever the silence of
science suggests that some other gateway
must be sought to knowledge, let us inquire
first whether the . . . problem . . . arise[s]
from a superstition,” etc. If not, then we must
not look elsewhere, but must be patient and
await the scientific answer, even though we
wait hundreds of years for it;17 patience is
here the escape hatch.
Ancient Statements: Rabbi Eliezer
asks, “Who is worse—the one who says to
the king, ‘Either you or I will dwell in the
palace,’ or the one who says, ‘Neither you
nor I will dwell in the palace’?” The former
is far worse, and that is the position the
Sophic takes. Its justification is that of the
man who had a wine cellar, “He opened one
barrel and found it sour, another and found it
sour, and a third and found it sour.” And he
said,” ‘This satisfies me that all the barrels
are unfit!’” Is he justified?18 The purpose
and practice of the Schools was to make it
possible formally and legally to ostracize all
who did not share one’s point of view. This
is intolerance more characteristic of the
Sophically oriented West than of the
pluralistic and Mantic East; it is not
characteristic of religions in general, but of
scientists and of religions which have
accommodated themselves to the Sophic
views of the time, such as the Schools of
Alexandria, Pumbadetha, Basra, and so
forth.19 The tyranny of the Schools needs no
illustration for college students of any period
of Western civilization! It is our Sophic
heritage.
D. Not content merely with its own
researches, the Sophic undertakes with
evangelical zeal to reform the follies of the
Mantic.
“After the publication of the Origin of
Species a controversy arose in Europe and
America. It was a struggle between the
Christian theological conception of man and
the conception held by science. . . . If you
were in this controversy, . . . you were either
for religion or you were for science.”20 “For
Huxley . . . the battle against the doctrine of
inspiration, whether plenary or otherwise,
was the crucial engagement in the fight for
evolution and for stopped freedom of
scientific inquiry.”21 “In all parts of the
world [evolution] has dealt a mortal blow to
the traditional and superstitious mythologies
with which men of all races have decorated
their ideas about human origins.”22 “The
most important responsibilities of the
geologists involve . . . [freeing] people from
the myths of Biblical creation. Many
millions still live in mental bondage
controlled by ignorant ranters who accept the
Bible as the last word in science.”23 “The
failure of our people to take evolution
seriously can be traced to . . . our domination
by antiquated religious traditions.”24
Proposition 6. The Mantic has its own
peculiar (A) flaws and (B) advantages. In
the long run it is preferable to the Sophic.
 A. Since the Mantic makes allowance
for the things beyond human control, it is less
tightly bound by determinism than the
Sophic; Mantic thinking enjoys greater
flexibility and latitude, and this opens the
door to all kinds of quacks and pretenders. It
is these who supply the Sophic with its
causa belli and its ammunition.
Modern Statements: Newton, though
firmly believing in God, could not accept the
denatured and abstract religious teachings of
his day, the result of centuries of eager
accommodation by religionists to the
prevailing science of their times. He turned
from a denatured Mantic tradition to a
straightforward literal understanding of the
Scriptures, which for him was completely
consistent with the literal and tangible nature
of his scientifically constructed universe.25
Like the Sophic, the Mantic practitioners
form schools which are even more
retrograde to the Mantic spirit than to the
Sophic, since they define, control, reward,
and punish orthodoxy and heresy. The Mantic
is defective in two ways: through too much
control and too little. On the one hand, the
schoolmen rigidly define, reward, and
punish orthodoxy and heresy; on the other,
wild-eyed sectaries and individuals go to
completely irresponsible excesses. The
essence of the Mantic, as the Didache points
out, is that it cannot be judged: who can tell
when another is receiving inspiration or not?
Years of religious oppression and
suppression have given all religion a bad
name. The abuses of the Mantic are real, but
they are not the whole story.
Ancient Statements: It was as a reaction
to the excesses of Orphism that “Greece . . .
enshrined the worldly wisdom of men who
stood wholly aloof from mystic excitements
and sought for no revelation, in the fiction of
the Seven Sages.”26 There is evidence that
Apollo and Athena were in early times the
sober and Sophic successors of the more
mystic religion of the Earth-goddess, though
their cults were also highly Mantic in nature,
“this new [method] of mantike [by] inspired
prophets” supplanting the more “primitive”
divination of chthonian allure27 because of
the abuses of the latter. The Sophic invasion
of the mid-fifth century was a further step in
the same direction in the manner in which the
Darwinian cult became a religious follow-up
as it were of the Reformation; but
Darwinism went much further than the
preceding reformation and abolished the
whole religious tradition.28 The schools took
over aggressively and eagerly, completely
supplanting their Mantic predecessors, the
inspired poets who were “older . . . and
considered themselves much wiser.”29
B. In spite of its susceptibility to
abuses, Mantic free-wheeling has the
advantage of the Sophic, which necessarily
takes a posture of unshakeable integrity and
undeviating rightness, thus placing its
pretensions in a very vulnerable position.
Modern Statements: “The university is
based upon scrupulous honesty of thought;
and that honesty must expire at the portal of
the three sectarian chapels,” i.e., it is pure
and cannot look upon faith with the least
degree of allowance.30 This means that the
flexible Mantic enjoys an advantage over the
brittle Sophic: “Computers usually work
with much greater accuracy than the human
brain but if any element in a computer
becomes faulty then catastrophic errors
occur. . . . In contrast to this . . . the brain
does not break down completely and,
although much information processing is
done rather inaccurately, the result is almost
never complete nonsense,” i.e., it is the
infallible Sophic machine and not the
bungling Mantic imagination which runs the
greater risk.31 “The [Sophic] idea that we
can at will, and preparatory to scientific
discovery, purge our mind from prejudices . .
. is naive and mistaken. . . . The rule ‘purge
yourself from prejudice’ can therefore have
only the dangerous result that, after having
made an attempt or two, you think you are
now free from prejudices—which means, of
course, that you will stick only more
tenaciously to your unconscious prejudices
and dogmas.”32
The posture of uprightness and perfect
integrity is an occupational necessity to the
Sophist, but it makes him very vulnerable
and therefore all the more touchy and
authoritarian.33 Thus it insists upon such-
and-such an explanation, for example, “that
the Darwinian mechanism is the only
possible one,” ignoring the fact that “the
number of competing theories is always
infinite,” and thereby closing the door to the
untrammeled explorations it advocates.34
The strength of the Mantic is that it not only
leaves the door open, but is willing to look
behind the door; its open-mindedness is now
recommended to science: “Science is not a
system of certain, or well-established
statements; nor is it a system which steadily
advances toward a state of finality. . . .
Every scientific statement must remain
tentative forever. . . . Science does not rest
upon rock-bottom,” but “above a swamp.”35
The unflinching scientific discipline that was
the pride and boast of the Berlin school of
Classical and Oriental scholarship at the turn
of the century not only deprived its
representative of the opportunity to make
great discoveries, but by its relentless
skepticism frequently led them into paths of
error, according to Eduard Meyer.36
 Paradoxically, scientists often pay
tribute to intuition, the one thing that strict
objectivity will not allow. Thus Darwin in
the jungle: “No one can stand in these
solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is
more in man than the mere breath of his
body.”37 “The favorite child of Darwinism is
blind chance,” but the amazing perfection
and complexity of biological processes now
rules this out: “If one will only let the
transcendent nature of every organic
phenomenon work upon him, one will then
discern the very opposite of anything like
chance.”38 In science, “progress has only
been possible by again and again returning to
the observation of the world as it is, by
stepping out of the laboratory and the
dissecting room (and I would add the study),
into the open air, forgetting for the time at
least the abstract methods, the images and
models, the selected and prepared specimens
of the scientific student.”39 In theoretical
physics “even a partial reversal of causal
relations means the substitution of the
question ‘What for?’ for the question ‘Why?’
. . . The question which begins a child’s
cognition of the world may also prove
legitimate in the exact sciences.”40 Aside
from intuition, man possesses a sensitivity of
sight and hearing which far excels that of
scientific instruments, and which should be
trusted.41
This recognition of the intuitive
embarrasses the Sophic. After announcing
that “the element of constructive invention,
of . . . intuition . . . remains the core of any
mathematical achievement,” Richard Courant
and Herbert Robbins warn the student that
“for scientific procedure it is important to
discard elements of metaphysical character
and to consider observable facts always as
the ultimate source of notions and
constructions,” and thus reap the “reward for
courageous adherence to the principle of
eliminating metaphysics.”42 For always the
idea is that “two different paths” lead to
knowledge. “The first, revelation, . . . is
closed to a great many people and
independent of rational thought. . . . The
second, on the contrary, is strictly rational
and scientific”—we cannot mix them.43 As a
result, “scientific philosophy” is a
contradiction, “the invention of thinkers
devoid of any true philosophical gift or
vocation. . . . Intuition is the sine qua non of
philosophy. . . . Philosophical intuition
cannot be deduced from anything else; it is
primary.”44 “No scientist has the slightest
idea what mass attraction is. . . . Though
popularly unrealized . . . the origins of
science are inherently immersed in an a
priori mystery.”45 “They try to ‘cover up’
their ignorance by asserting that no
fundamental mystery exists. . . . And the why-
for and how-come . . . of all the known
family of . . . generalized principles—thus
far discovered by scientific observation—. .
. are all and together Absolute mystery. . . .
Therefore in direct contradiction to present
specialization, all educational processes
must henceforth commence at the most
comprehensive level . . . that consists of the
earnest attempt to embrace the whole
eternally regenerative phenomenon Scenario
Universe. And this is what children try to do
spontaneously [see Kozyrev above]. . . .
Perversely, the parents tell them to forget
[the] Universe and to concentrate with A, B,
C, 1, 2, and 3. . . . Human life contains the
weightless omnipowerful, omniknowing
metaphysical intellect which alone can
comprehend, sort out, select, integrate, co-
ordinate and cohere.”46
Ancient Statements: The arrogance of
the Sophic over the Mantic, and the
disastrous results of this hubris, is the
subject of much of the best Greek literature.
Since our schools are Sophic, this fact has
been completely over-looked where it has
not been actually covered up. Heraclitus,
Pindar, Plato, Aristophanes, Sophocles, and
Euripides are full of gibes at the conceit of
the know-it-all professors and of warnings
against their insidious teachings.47
Aristophanes’ first play was a biting satire
on the Athenian youth and the new education
of “the skeptical purpose, and the insidious
sophistic”48 that was making them what they
were; “they were full of strange information,
and sometimes of shocking beliefs and
disbeliefs, which they had learnt from the
professional ‘sophists’ or men of learning.”49
It was the Sophists who effected the
death of Socrates, accusing him of sacrilege
and of leading the youth astray, the very
things of which they were guilty; and the
schoolmen to this day love to represent
Socrates as going about barefoot in Athens
debunking not the Sophic intellectuals
(which were his particular target) but the
Mantic traditions of the fathers—which he
always supported. “Socrates turned away
from Ionic Philosophy though his study of
natural science continued: he overcame the
skepticism and individualism of the
Sophists, but was himself transformed into
the [champion and] image of the free-
thinker,” so that “the dismantling
(Zersetzungsprozess) of religion” went on
unimpeded—in his name.50 For those
philosophers who recognized the necessity
and importance of the Mantic, the intellectual
quest did not end: for them philosophy is a
middle road, “the suspension between
ignorance and ‘wisdom.’” Aristotle did not
think of philosophy as the “totality of all
knowledge.”51 It was all the same tradition,
the Sophic itself being “a residue of the
dogmatic way of thinking” of the earlier
Mantic,52 operating on a different level
rather than the replacing of one authority by
another.53 Philosophy occupied for a while
the middle ground.54
C. Those whom the Sophic claims for
its greatest representatives lean strongly
toward the Mantic, though the Sophic
proposition condemns any such concessions.
Modern Statements: Newton is a
shining example of this. Dr. Ernest Jones
commented, “Most of Newton’s biographers
have suppressed the important fact that
throughout his life theology was much more
important to him than science, and,
moreover, theology of a peculiarly arid and
bigoted order.”55 The literalism of Newton’s
religious beliefs, which did not concur with
the prevailing religious teachings of his
time, shocks Dr. Jones as a scientist. As to
the all-sufficiency of matter, “That gravity
should be innate, inherent, and essential to
matter, so that one body may act upon
another at a distance through a vacuum . . . is
to me so great an absurdity that I believe no
man who has in philosophical matters a
competent faculty of thinking can ever fall
into it.”56 But Newton will not compromise:
“Newton’s God is not merely a
‘philosophical’ God, the impersonal and
uninterested First Cause of the Aristotelians,
or the—for Newton—utterly indifferent and
world-absent God of Descartes. He is . . .
the Biblical God, the effective Master and
Ruler of the world created by him.”57 Even
his “‘principles of mathematical philosophy’
are . . . radically opposed to those of
materialism . . . and postulate—or
demonstrate—its [the world’s] production
by the purposeful action of a free and
intelligent Being.”58 “Newton explicitly
recognized the challenge of the facts. . . . But
he held that the explanation of this was a
problem for religion, not mathematical
philosophy,” so he writes: “This most
beautiful system of the sun, planets, and
comets, could only proceed from the counsel
and dominion of an intelligent and powerful
Being.”59 He seems to be quoting the Pearl
of Great Price in such passages: “Does it not
appear from Phaenomena that there is a
Being incorporeal, living, intelligent,
omnipresent, who in infinite Space, as it
were in his Sensory, sees the things
themselves intimately, and thoroughly
perceives them, and comprehends them
wholly by their immediate presence to
himself.”60
Newton thus becomes a highly
unorthodox outcast of both camps: of the
“spiritual” and abstract Mantic of his time,
which did not derive faith from phenomena,
and which still deplores the “cosmism” of
the Latter-day Saints; and of the hard-headed
scientists who insist that if you deal with
phenomena it is not permitted to go any
farther.61 “Men will say at last that all
philosophy ought to be founded in
atheism.”62 “Mechanical hypotheses . . . lead
straight away towards atheism, . . . deny
God’s action in the world and push him out
of it. It is indeed, practically certain . . . that
the true and ultimate cause of gravity is the
action of the ‘spirit’ of God.”63 Newton’s
own disciples would not tolerate his
position; the very thing he took as proof of
God, the force of attraction, they promptly
converted into the opposite. But Newton
prophesied they would by a deep and
dangerous perversion of the very meaning
and aim of natural philosophy “at last sink
into the mire of that infamous herd who
dream that all things are governed by fate
[chance] and not by providence.”64 Newton
is not alone: it has been shown that the basic
“prerequisite of genius” in science is on the
one hand a refusal to “acquiesce” to the
Sophic dogmas of the day, “imperviousness
to the opinions of others, notably of
authorities,” and on the other hand of “a
curious credulity” in Mantic matters.65
Descartes, with purely scientific interest
in view, “entered into direct contact with the
intellectual atmosphere of the
Rosicrucians”66and believed that his world-
shaking discovery in mathematics was given
to him in visions.67 Some present-day
scientists also lean to the Mantic: “Yes, the
triumphs of the physical scientists are
impressive enough to explain why science
has a great reputation. . . . But the mysteries
of life—perhaps they are intended to remain
mysteries.”68 “The inductive format of the
scientific paper should be discarded, . . . and
scientists should not be ashamed, . . . as
many of them apparently are ashamed to
admit, that hypotheses . . . are imaginative
and inspirational in character. . . . They are
indeed adventures of the mind.”69 This
actually precedes the inductive format.
“Hypotheses arise by guesswork. That is to
put it in its crudest form. I should say rather
that they arise by inspiration.”70 “The most
beautiful thing we can experience is the
mysterious.”71
Ancient Statements: Aristotle turned
away from “the metaphysical and conceptual
attitude of his early decades” to pure
science; but in his old age he turned back
again: “He justifies metaphysics now by
means of the everlasting longing of the
human heart.”72 Aristotle’s first work was a
defense of the Mantic Homer against the
Sophist critics.73 Both Plato and Aristotle in
their old age turned with deepest devotion to
the teachings of Zoroaster. Neither lost his
scientific tendencies. Plato combined his
Socratic with the Eleatic science and
especially favored Pythagoras, in whom the
Mantic and Sophic combine in a remarkable
way.74 Plato and his predecessors “transform
an originally theological idea, the idea of
explaining the visible world by a postulated
invisible world, into the fundamental
instrument of theoretical science.”75 “By his
adoption of geometry as the theory of the
world he provided Aristarchus, Newton, and
Einstein with their intellectual toolbox.”76
Thus the Mantic Plato made solid scientific
contributions. He insisted that knowledge
came by inspiration, via anamnesis, as did
Pythagoras: “I do not teach myself anything, I
only remember.”77 Popper explains this
midway position between Mantic and
Sophic as the “second-order tradition”
which welcomed the heritage of myth as the
foundation for new and fruitful discussion
and investigation, instead of condemning it.78
The Poet is exalted up to the point where he
becomes another Pythian, whose ravings are
unintelligible to himself. “He is relegated to
an adyton, and between him and the public
the Philosopher keeps guard, who alone can
understand and interpret him,”79 according to
a recent interpretation which places
philosophy squarely between the Mantic and
the public.
The original line of inspiration is lost in
the mists of time, and may, as among the
Ancient Semites, have gone back “to the
shācir, the Knower, the possessor of
supernatural knowledge. He passed as a kind
of oracle for his tribe, as did the kāhin. . . .
His capacity was attributed to a special
spirit (jinn, or in Greek, daimōn).”80 Plato,
like Newton, insisted that the ultimate mover
was a divine spirit, Aristotle an entelecheia;
Pythagoras and Philoslaeus harmonia, and
Xenocrates number.81 These thinkers seem to
combine Sophic and Mantic, yet any
concession whatever to the Mantic
disqualifies them in this Sophic camp. Cato,
who “rejected the findings of Greek
philosophy in order to fall back upon a
shrewd peasant wisdom,”82 combines a
much lower order of Sophic and Mantic.
Sextus Empiricus is another who turns
against the Sophic, but in a “puerile and
pedantic” way, attacking its good (especially
its good) as well as its bad side.83 While the
students at Socrates’ school went deeply into
experimental science, to the amusement of
the more practically minded Athenians, “they
were [at the same time] much occupied with
religion and the after life.” So they offended
both the learned Sophist and the superstitious
man in the street.84 “It is your neglect of
geometry,” Socrates tells the businessman
Callicles, “which convinces you that you
should strive for a bigger share of things than
other men possess”;85 for business rejects
both the egghead Sophic and the impractical
Mantic.
“When I was young,” says Socrates, “I
was fanatically devoted to the intellectual
quest which they call physical research. . . . I
was convinced that no one need look any
farther than science for the answers to
everything.”86 Plato confesses the same
weakness and goes on to relate how he was
converted, not away from the study of
physical science, but to seeing in physical
science, as Newton did, the workings of a
divine and directing mind.87 At the end of the
Sophist, Plato defines a Sophist as one who
treats all traditions and beliefs as strictly
human productions. For him this will not do;
there was more behind it than that. The great
men of old—poets, diviners, statesmen, and
prophets—prove their inspiration “when
they say much that is true without knowing
what they say.”88 “Poetry is really a thing
divine and holy. . . . Its votaries (as Plato
would say) are in a state of fine phrenzy.”89
“I know that they do what they do not by any
intelligence of their own, but by a special
nature, an inspiration such as holy prophets
and oracles have, for they too speak many
fine and wonderful things without knowing
what they are saying.”90 The only fit
instruction for the youth are the words of
men “inspired from heaven.”91
Socrates explains his course of life
against the Sophists: “Because, as I said, the
way was shown to me by God, by oracles
and dreams and by whatever other means
divine providence directs the actions of
men.”92 “Listen to a tale which you consider
a myth,” he says to a gathering of Sophist
teachers, “but which I believe to be true. . . .
In a word, whatever characteristics a man’s
body presented in life, these remain visible
in death. . . . But you, . . . the wisest of all the
Greeks of our day, can’t demonstrate the
necessity of living any other life than this
one.”93 It is a direct confrontation of Sophic
and Mantic, and in the end cost Socrates his
life. In the same spirit, modern professors,
offended by the Mantic emphasis of Plato’s
Ion, deny its authenticity. It must not be
förgötten that the University never förgöt that
it was a Musaeon, a temple of the Muses,
who gave divine inspiration to men.

Notes to Part 2
Footnotes
^1. Jacob Bronowski, “The Logic of the Mind,”
American Scientist 54 (March 1966): 4; cf.
Julian Jaynes, “The Routes of Science,”
American Scientist 54 (March 1966): 95.
^2. Luís A. Sánchez, quoted in Carleton Beals,
Nomads and Empire Builders (New York:
Chilton, 1961), 64.
^3. Detlev W. Bronk, quoted in Vance Packard,
The Waste Makers (New York: David
McKay, 1960), 318.
^4. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle, tr. Richard
Robinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), 335.
^5. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, tr.
and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton,
1961), 56. This concluding sentence was
once required reading for all freshman at the
University of California.
^6. Karl Pearson, “The Knowledge of the Natural
World,” Part B, in Troy W. Organ, The
Examined Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1956): 120.
^7. Sir Gavin de Beer, “Natural Selection after
 100 Years,” The Listener (3 July 1958): 12
(emphasis added). Cf. John Wild, “The
Exploration of the Life-World,” Proceedings
and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association 34 (October
1961): 18, on science as the only truth.
^8. Jaeger, Aristotle, 373-74 (emphasis added).
^9. Dio Chrysostom, Discourse XII, 57-58.
^10. Jaeger, Aristotle, 376.
^11. Arthur W. Munk, “Philosophy, Science and
Man’s Plight,” Pacific Philosophy Forum 6
(September 1967): 13-16.
^12. Richard McKenna, “The Secret Place,” in
The Nebula Award Stories: Number Two
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 15.
^13. Nicolas Berdyaev, Solitude and Society
(London: Centenary, 1938), 12.
^14. Pearson, “The Knowledge of the Natural
World,” 120. Cf. Francis Bacon, Novum
Organum I, 54.
^15. Rudolf Jordan, The New Perspective
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1951), 171.
^16. Marvin Minsky, “Machines Are More Than
They Seem,” Science Journal 4 (October
1968): 3.
^17. Pearson, “The Knowledge of the Natural
World,” 119.
^18. Midrash Genesis Rabbah (Noach) 38:6.
^19. Hugh Nibley, “How to Have a Quiet
Campus, Antique Style,” BYU Studies 9
(Summer 1969): 448-50; reprinted in this
volume, pages 297-99.
^20. Leslie A. White, “Evolutionism in Cultural
Anthropology: A Rejoinder,” The American
Anthropologist 49 (July-September 1947):
402.
^21. John C. Greene, “Darwin and Religion,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 103 (1959): 717.
^22. Sir Ronald Fisher, “The Discontinuous
Inheritance,” The Listener (17th July 1958):
85.
^23. Dorsey Hager, “Fifty Years of Progress in
Geology: The Presidential Address to the
Utah Geological Society,” Geotimes 2
 (August 1957): 12.
^24. Hermann J. Müller, “One Hundred Years
without Darwinism Are Enough,” The
Humanist 19 (June 1959): 139-40.
^25. Ernest Jones, “Nature of Genius,” Scientific
Monthly 84 (February 1957): 81.
^26. J. B. Bury and Russell Meiggs, A History of
Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great,
4th ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1975): 199.
^27. Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and
Belief in Immortality among the Greeks, tr.
W. B. Hillis, 2 vols. (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1966), 2:290.
^28. Theodor Hopfner, Orient und griechische
Philosophie (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1925), 64-
65.
^29. Dio Chrysostom, Discourse XII, 57.
^30. Albert Guérard, Fossils and Presences
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1957), 266.
^31. N. S. Sutherland, “Machines Like Men,”
Science Journal 4 (October 1968): 47.
^32. Karl R. Popper, “Science: Problems, Aims,
 Responsibilities,” Federation Proceedings of
the American Societies for Experimental
Biology 22 (1963): 962 (emphasis added).
^33. Ibid., 963-64.
^34. Ibid., 964, 970.
^35. Karl R. Popper, quoted in Warren Weaver,
“The Imperfections of Science,” American
Scientist 49 (March 1961): 112.
^36. Eduard Meyer, “Die Bedeutung der
Erschliessung des alten Orients für die
geschichtliche Methode und für die Anfänge
der menschlichen Geschichte Überhaupt,”
Sitzungsberichte der berlinischen Akademie
25 (1908): 648-52.
^37. Charles Darwin, quoted in Max Rosenberg,
Introduction to Philosophy (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1955), 286.
^38. Heinrich Schirmbeck, “Evolution und
Freiheit,” Merkur 14 (June 1960): 523.
^39. J. T. Merz, Religion and Science, A
Philosophical Essay (Edinburgh:
Blackwood and Sons, 1915); 103, quoted in
A. P. Elkin, “A Darwin Centenary and
 Highlights of Field-Work in Australia,”
Mankind 5 (November 1959): 333.
^40. Nikolai Kozyrev, “An Unexplored World,”
Soviet Life (November 1965): 45, in which
the foremost Russian astrophysicist rejects
the finality of entropy.
^41. “Man Superior to Machine,” Science
Newsletter 71 (12 January 1957): 22.
^42. Richard Courant and Herbert Robbins, What
Is Mathematics? (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1941): xvii-xviii.
^43. Pierre L. du Noüy, Human Destiny (New
York: Longmans, Green, 1947), 3.
^44. Berdyaev, Solitude and Society, 15-17.
^45. R. Buckminster Fuller, Intuition (Garden
City, NY: Double-day, 1972), 39.
^46. Ibid., 41, 42, 46, 70.
^47. Plato, Gorgias 527B; and Pindar, Olympian
Odes II, 91-97, are two examples.
^48. George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism
and Literary Taste in Europe, 3 vols.
(London: William Blackwood and Sons,
1949), 1:22.
^49. Gilbert Murray, Aristophanes (London:
Oxford University Press, 1933), 20;
Saintsbury, A History of Criticism, 1:22-23.
^50. Wilhelm Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos
(Stuttgart: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1966), 539.
^51. Jaeger, Aristotle, 402.
^52. Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations
(New York: Basic Books, 1962), 51.
^53. Ibid., 12-15, 49-51.
^54. Herwig Maehler, “Review of E. N.
Tigerstedt’s Plato’s Ideas of Poetical
Inspiration,” Gnomon 44 (November
1972): 645.
^55. Jones, “Nature of Genius,” 81.
^56. Isaac Newton, quoted in Alexandre Koyré,
From the Closed World to the Infinite
Universe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1957), 178-79.
^57. Ibid., 225.
^58. Ibid., 241.
^59. Lancelot L. Whyte, Accent on Form (New
York: Harper and Brothers, 1954), 71-72.
^60. Newton, quoted in Koyré, From the Closed
 World, 208-9 (emphasis added).
^61. Edwin A. Burtt, The Metaphysical
Foundations of Modern Physical Science
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950),
282-84.
^62. George Berkeley, quoted in Koyré, From the
Closed World, 233.
^63. Newton’s conclusion of his General
Scholium; Koyré, From the Closed World,
234.
^64. Koyré, From the Closed World, 232.
^65. Jones, “Nature of Genius,” 80.
^66. Jacques Maritain, The Dream of Descartes,
tr. Mabelle L. Andison (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1944): 18.
^67. Ibid., 19-23. Cf. Carl Sagan, The Cosmic
Connection (New York: Doubleday, 1973),
103-4, and I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in
Science (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985), 131-32.
^68. Weaver, “The Imperfections,” 100.
^69. P. B. Medawar, “Is the Scientific Paper
Fraudulent?” Journal of Human Relations
 13 (1965): 6.
^70. Ibid., 5.
^71. Albert Einstein, quoted in James T. Adams
et al., Living Philosophies (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1931), 6.
^72. Jaeger, Aristotle, 337, 339.
^73. Wilhelm Schmid, Geschichte der
griechischen Literatur (Munich: Beck,
1940), 1:1:131; Aristotle, Poetics 25.
^74. Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos, 540-42.
^75. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 89.
^76. Ibid., 92.
^77. Lucian, Biōn Prāsis (Philosopher’s Auction)
3.
^78. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 126-
27.
^79. E. N. Tigerstedt, quoted in Maehler,
“Review of E. N. Tigerstedt,” 645
(emphasis added).
^80. Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der
arabischen Literatur (Leipzig: Amelang,
1901), 1:12.
^81. Macrobius, Saturnalia I, 14, 19.
^82. Charles N. Cochrane, Christianity and
Classical Culture (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1944), 32.
^83. John E. Sandys, A History of Classical
Scholarship, 3 vols. (New York:Hafner,
1958), 1:330.
^84. Murray, Aristophanes, 93.
^85. Plato, Gorgias 508.
^86. Plato, Phaedo 96A.
^87. Ibid., 97C.
^88. Plato, Meno 99D.
^89. Psellus, cited in Sandys, A History of
Classical Scholarship, 1:389.
^90. Plato, Apology 22C.
^91. Plato, Laws VII, 809B-11E; Plato, Republic
III, 394A-395E.
^92. Plato, Apology 33C.
^93. Plato, Gorgias 524, 527.
 Part 3: Proposition 7 and
Proposition 8

Proposition 7. The hostility of the two

camps is heightened if anything by a constant
going and coming between them, as pious
youth desert to the Sophic and aging
scientists return to the bosom of the Mantic.
The mingling of the two factions is more like
a melee than fraternization, with each party
trying to capture the banner of the other.
A. The claims of the Mantic cannot be
ignored or abolished.
Modern Statements: The antagonism
between Religion and Science “has its roots
deep down in the diverse habits of thought of
different orders of mind. . . . [An unceasing]
battle of opinion . . . which has been carried
on throughout all ages under the banners of
Religion and Science, has of course
generated an animosity fatal to a just
estimate of either party by the other”—but
they are both here to stay.1 “Revelation,
which is the basis of religion, is not itself
opposed to knowledge. On the contrary, . . .
revelation is what is revealed to me and
knowledge is what I discover for myself.
How could there be any conflict between
what I discover cognitively and what is
demonstrated to me by religion?” The
trouble is caused when “Divine Revelation .
. . becomes adulterated by the immediate
reactions of the human community in which it
takes place, and by the way in which men
make use of it to further their own interests. .
. . Why should one refuse to submit to
religion if one is content to submit to
science?”2 We can never escape the Mantic:
“All science is cosmology. . . . Both
philosophy and science lose all their
attraction when they give up that pursuit. . . .
Western science . . . did not start with
collecting observations of oranges, but with
bold theories about the world.”3 “The final
ends of metaphysics and of human reason as
a whole are the three great themes of God,
freedom, and immortality”—which can
hardly escape the Mantic.4
Scientists today are constantly
glimpsing areas in which experience goes
beyond the Sophic. When they do so, they
immediately recoil and apologize. Thus,
Nigel Calder repeatedly points out that the
relationship of thought to the brain “may be a
question of ultimate cause as refractory as
asking why the universe exists. But that is no
reason for doubting the reality of
consciousness, as a characteristic of living
brain tissue as rich as ours.”5 In other words,
just because we can never prove that the
matter of the brain produces thought is no
reason for doubting that it does! When
theologians use that argument they are
laughed to scorn. Again, “chemistry . . . may
sometimes overwhelm the mind, but the mind
can also dominate chemistry”—in that case,
who is the winner? Chemistry, of course:
“Both processes testify to the essentially
physical nature of the mind”—but why not to
the essentially spiritual nature of it, since it
dominates matter?6 Thus the dice are always
loaded in favor of the mechanism, but the
dice keep falling oddly. Though “‘the
ultimate in criteria of credibility . . . is
scientific objectivity,’ careful thinkers have
long been skeptical about the supposed
objectivity of so-called scientific facts.”7 So
an anthropologist confesses that he reaches
his conclusions “on a purely subjective
basis, . . . one step removed from [intuition].
. . . Is this good enough? If it is not, what
other method is available?”8
Ancient Statements: As we have seen,
both Plato and Socrates in their youth went
over from Mantic to Sophic, and later
reversed themselves; it was not
accommodation but conversion. Since
ancient society was sacral, its existence
without the Mantic was simply unthinkable.
One could not destroy the Mantic element
without destroying the society. This is
exactly what happened, according to
Thucydides, who, though he does not believe
the oracles himself, notes that disaster
follows upon their neglect. That is why the
smart-alec teachings of the Sophists with
their popular science were viewed not with
the indifference and contempt they deserved
on their own merits, but with horror and
alarm by the greatest Greek thinkers.9 Plato
often comments on the ruinous trend of
Sophic teaching; he attributes to Pericles’
learning from the physicist Anaxagoras “to
despise all the superstitious fears” (the signs
in the heavens),10 the attitude that laid the
foundation for the ruin of Athens.11
B. The Sophic attempts to take over the
religious prestige and prerogatives of the
Mantic, both as being (1) a religion in its
own right, and (2) as a countermeasure to
fight fire with fire and deprive the Mantic of
its unique advantages.
Modern Statements: (1) “Man . . .
appears to be not so much a rational animal
as an ideological animal. The history of
science, . . . especially since Francis Bacon,
may be taken as an illustration. It was a
religious or semi-religious movement, and
Bacon was the prophet of the secularized
religion of science. He replaced the name
‘God’ by the name ‘Nature’; but almost
everything else he left unchanged. Theology,
the science of God, was replaced by the
science of Nature; the laws of God were
replaced by the laws of Nature; God’s
power was replaced by the forces of Nature;
. . . God’s . . . omniscience . . . by the . . .
virtual omniscience of natural science.”12
“Perhaps we should turn the world over to
this superbreed. . . . Perhaps they should
design not only the churches, but the creeds
also. . . . The sad fact is that some scientists
themselves appear to believe precisely
this.”13 Anthropologist Edmund R. Leach
believes this and feels now is the time to
begin: “All the marvels of creation are seen
to be mechanisms rather than mysteries. . . .
All that remains of the divine will is the
moral consciousness of man himself. So we
must now learn to play God in a moral as
well as in a creative or destructive sense.”14
Wallace Fenn makes an even more
impassioned plea: “It may be that there is no
meaning to life. . . . Even so, here we are,
and we had better find some meaning or
invent one for ourselves so that we have
some definite mission to lend dignity to our
life. If there is a meaning, it obviously lies
somewhere in the vast areas of biology
which are still unknown to us, and we should
have faith that it is at least worth looking for
by the usual rational experimental approach.
. . . Unlike the physical sciences biology can
be almost a religion in itself.”15 Note the use
of “faith” and rational experimental
approach in the same sentence. “Dr. Huxley .
. . [had] no serious intention of disguising the
theological character of his writing, for his
account of Evolution is openly presented as
the theology of his own ‘Religion without
Revelation.’ . . . Evolution, then, takes on for
Dr. Huxley most of the jobs of the
discredited Deity. . . . God has failed: we
must therefore put our trust in Evolution.”16
 Attempts have even been made to wed
conventional religion and the religion of
science, as when the American Association
for the Advancement of Science “turned
amateur theologians and tried to prove that
science and religion are essentially in
harmony—that even St. Thomas was an
evolutionist. In order to make this
reconciliation possible, both science and
religion were emasculated of definite
meaning.”17
(2) It was necessary to don the robes
and the aura of religion in order to deprive
the opposition of its advantage; some put
forth the doctrine that science was not an
enemy of religion but an improvement on it,
a great forward step. Science itself was a
higher and nobler religion. This fighting of
fire with fire begot a missionary zeal in such
scientists as Huxley, Simpson, Römer, and
Shapley, who preached throughout the land
with evangelical fervor. “Here we see how
modern science is providing what religious
beliefs have always sought, a coherent set of
beliefs about the universe and man.”18
“There are still individual scientists [who] .
. . think of it [science] as a cult, a cult united
by a mystique called ‘the scientific method,’
. . . a kind of pure virginal objectivity that
has to guard its beauty against the wrinkled
advances of religion, art, or ethics.”19
“Religion has emerged into human
experience mixed with the crudest fancies of
barbaric imagination. Gradually, slowly,
steadily the vision recurs in history under
nobler form and with clearer expression.”20
“Man’s evolution is far more extraordinary
than the first chapter of Genesis used to lead
people to suppose. . . . The story of man is
far more wonderful than the wonders of
physical science”—but the Sophic must be
allowed to tell it.21 “It’s gratifying—or
should be gratifying to you—to be a part of
this magnificent evolutionary show, even
though we must admit ourselves to be lineal
descendants of some rather nauseating gases
and sundry streaks of lightning.”22
“Therefore from a very long range point of
view biological research becomes the
highest objective that can be thought of for
human life. In this respect the biologists
deserve front seats in the halls of learning
and the mission of AIBS [the American
Institute of Biological Science] becomes
closely identified with the mission of
mankind.”23 “Evolution now becomes not
only the Source of Comfort and Reassurance.
. . . It figures also as the Immanent and
Omnipresent Creator, . . . . whose Agent it is
man’s privilege to be. . . . All the wonders
which for Archdeacon Paley were evidences
for the existence of God can on this view be
put to the credit of Evolution.”24
 Missionary zeal is apparent in Dorcey
Hager’s presidential address before the Utah
Geological Society. “The most important
responsibilities of the geologists involve
effects of their findings on the mental
bondage controlled by ignorant ranters who
accept the Bible as the last word in
Science.”25 The heathen must be saved. For
the scientist "Proving—probing—all things
is the privilege of ardent faith, the freedom
that belongs to the children of light.”26 So the
Sophic practitioners who pour scorn on the
Mantic as “True Believers” speak in the
pious language of the sectaries of the desert,
in the end putting themselves forward as the
Children of Light. In reference to Arnold
Toynbee’s Study of History, hugh Trevor-
Roper writes, “In the tenth volume of his
work, . . . his Book of Revelation, the secret
is laid bare: the Messiah steps forth: he is
Toynbee himself. . . . All creation has been
groaning and travailing to produce him.”27
“Bacon’s naive view . . . became the main
dogma of the new religion of science, . . .
and it is only in recent years that some
scientists have become willing to listen to
those who criticize this still powerful
dogma.”28 “Dr. Huxley himself calls it ‘a
glorious paradox’ that ‘this purposeless
mechanism, after a thousand million years of
its blind and automatic operations, has
finally generated purpose’”—and produced
Dr. Huxley.29 Note the theological language
—a glorious paradox. Science fiction often
adopts the language and imagery of
apocalyptic (biblical) writings, as at the end
of When Worlds Collide, when “the League
of the Last Days,” made up of the world’s
top scientists, ushers in the Millennium.
“They shouted, sang. They laughed and
danced. The first day on the new earth had
begun.”30 There are very few of the more
grandiose ideas and titles in science fiction
which cannot be traced to the Bible. The
attitude is strongly authoritarian: “The public
has become willing to accept, with the
respect accorded scientific conclusions, the
scientist’s view on numerous topics that have
nothing to do with his special area of
competence, or with science as a whole”—
as a scientist he becomes an authority on
everything.31 With the Scientific revolution
“pride of physical place was replaced by
autodeification in the order of knowing. . . .
The Scientific revolution, . . . by denying the
relevance, if not the possibility, of non-
empirical, non-instrumental knowledge, . . .
made man the intellectual summit of the
universe,”32 the only prophet, seer, and
revelator.
Ancient Statements: The scholar
Longinus “is himself the Great Sublime he
draws!” The scholars, moving in on a sick
Mantic, took over religious teaching, and in
the process destroyed it.
The grossness, luxury, and immorality of
pagan priests of the official state religion
were as predictable as that of the monks of
the late Middle Ages: they were smooth,
hypocritical, and greedy.33 Conditions in
Athens at the time the Sophist teachers took
over have been described in the tenth chapter
of Gilbert Murray’s book Aristophanes.
“Religion had become a service club.34
Religion had declined: “Let fools talk about
justice or religion; the one solid good is to
have power and money.”35 Poetry itself had
become “an old harlot who has passed her
prime” but who pretends to be
ultrarespectable and proper; the official
morality cannot endure criticism or satire.36
Everywhere the scholars supplanted the
poets, to whom, as critics, they felt superior.
The Sophists pretended to be teaching a
higher form of religion, but their own
greatness was the first and last article of
faith. Thus an orator would end a speech
with a perfectly irrelevant prayer, “abruptly
and grotesquely with an invocation to ‘Earth
and Sun and Virtue and Intelligence and
Education, through which we distinguish
between the noble and the base,’”37 retaining
a Mantic tone by clumsy contrivance. The
Sophic teachers were constantly on tour,
lecturing in many cities and on every subject,
imitating the fabulous Seven Wise men of
old, and cultivating an aura of supernatural
wisdom which gave them the status of holy
men.38 The business goes back to Sumerian
times in the Orient.39 The Jewish Scholars
side by side with the Greek moved
constantly from city to city, acquiring great
fame and reputations for wisdom and
holiness. The system survived into Moslem
times40 and was carried over into medieval
Europe directly from the Sophist schools.
The world was the Sophist’ oyster as he
proclaimed his Sovereign immunity from all
restraints wherever he went; as a super-
thinker nothing could restrain him: he is
indeed none other than the true King. Of the
famous Proclus, president of the University
of Athens for forty-seven years, it is said that
“his pupils deemed him divinely inspired,”
and one visitor to his lectures saw a light
around his head.41 He preached that all
religions were true, thus rendering all
devoid of any particular appeal.42
When the Flavian emperors sponsored a
syncretium of the major religions in the cult
of Serapis, they met head-on resistance from
the Philosophers—the Stoics and Cynics.43
Yet these very philosophers would unite all
religions in the bonds of allegory, and it was
the “Stoic allegorizing which finally
dispelled all belief in the gods.”44
“Protagoras’s ethics and politics are
basically atheistic, even though . . . his ethics
taught eusebia [piety] and moral order
established by the unknown gods.”45 The
futility of his teaching was his vanity; his
celebrated dictum made man and no one else
“the measure of all things.” The Doctors
wanted all to be saved—but only if they did
the saving. Lucretius cannot abide the thought
of ignorant multitudes in thrall to ancient
superstitions while he has the one saving
truth—“O miseras hominum mentes, et
pectora caeca!”—he is full of missionary
fervor and, like any prophet, sees himself
borne victorious in glory to the skies. The
rhetorical art of the Sophists was devised as
a flexible tool to permit their mental and
spiritual domination in any field,46 while
retaining the appearance of the strictest
scientific detachment and accuracy; this was
possible by the use of doxa, the art of
cultivating appearances. Correcting the
thought and diction of the ancients, their
subtle scholasticism dazzled and conquered:
their method and authority carried right over
into the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages.
The Arabs inherited the same tradition:
Bukhārī begins his work on cosmology by
announcing that the beginning of wisdom is
that there is no God but God and that the
scholars (scientists, culamā’) are the heirs
and successors of the Prophets, and that they
have passed all knowledge from hand to
hand in a state of complete and perfect
preservation. God will smooth the way to
Paradise for those who follow them! This is
modest compared with the self-glorification
of the Doctors of the Talmud. The
Muctazilites are the purest of Sophic
teachers, always laying down rules about
what God may and what he may not do, like
the Scholastic Philosophers of Europe.47
 There was a constant game of dominant
and submissive going-on between the
ignorant public (which these men always
affected to despise) and the traveling wise
men, who appear either as martyrs or
masters of the mob. The Sophic contempt of
the ignorant was a permanent heritage of the
schools.48 Francis Bacon noted the futility of
the Ancient Schoolmen: “Now the wisdom
of the Greeks was professional and much
given to disputation, a kind of wisdom most
adverse to the inquisition of truth. . . .
[Pompously professional,] they are prompt
to prattle, but cannot produce; for their
wisdom abounds in words but is barren of
works.”49 But is the Modern Sophic immune
to such folly? “Much of the anthropological
writing of the time [the 1920s and 1930s]
was an attempt to show that the other fellow
thought wrongly.”50 In the case of human
footprints in very ancient rocks, if the
evidence is reliable, “then the whole science
of geology is so completely wrong that all
geologists will resign their jobs and take up
truck driving. Hence . . . science rejects the
attractive explanation.” In other words, any
evidence is rejected if it threatens our
careers!51 “Today’s ideological conflicts are
carried . . . deeper and deeper into the study
of [ancient] mankind.”52
C. In the end, the Sophic produces an
army of Fakirs that surpasses the best efforts
of the corrupted Mantic in its antics and its
arrogance.
Modern Statements: Compared to the
novelist, the image of the scientist in the
public mind (as revealed by an extensive
survey) is that of a uniquely intelligent,
manly, valuable, hard-working, and
dependable (albeit dull) individual.53 In
biology, thanks to Darwin, science “gives the
false impression that we know much more
about the origin of life than we actually
do.”54 Furthermore, we have been brought to
believe that scientists in general “thrive on
the replacement of their old and cherished
theories or beliefs by new ones” when, in
reality, it is against their natures to
“welcome with joy and satisfaction the
publication of a new theory, explanation, or .
. . scheme that would completely replace and
render superfluous [their] own creation.”
The history of science can therefore be
viewed “as a series of changing
‘orthodoxies’” in which scientists exhibit “a
certain measure of hostility to major
innovations.”55 Bernard Cohen considers
“any suggestion that scientists so dearly love
truth that they have not the slightest hesitation
in jettisoning their beliefs is a mean
perversion of the facts. It is a form of
scientific idolatry, supposing that scientists
are entirely free from the passions that direct
men’s actions.”56
Since the mid-1960s scientists in
various fields have engaged in controversy
regarding the true nature of the Orgueil
meteorite (a “carbonaceous chondrite”); this
debate, writes Walter Sullivan, “is a classic
example of a scientific discussion become
personal, emotional and enmeshed with
professional pride. The talents and ingenuity
of participants have been directed toward
proving their case, rather than seeking out the
truth. They have thus demonstrated that they
are human, but the wonderful self-discipline
and objectivity that we all call pure science
has suffered. The inconclusiveness of the
discussion also reflects the inadequacy of
our analytic methods. The Orgueil meteorite
has probably been more elaborately studied
than any other chunk of material on earth. Yet
. . . the complex and varied components of
this specimen defy precise definition.”57
“So far are they [science majors] from
having learned any humility, they are known
in every high school and . . . college as the
most insufferable, cocksure knowit-alls. . . .
[They are] entitled to pour scorn on other
subjects from a very great height.”58 “When
the Piltdown hoax was exposed at the
meeting of the Geological Society of London
in November 1953, it precipitated a violent
discussion. . . . The meeting soon broke up
into a series of fist fights . . . [and] the fracas
resulted in the expulsion of several members
of the dignified scientific body.”59 When
many valid objections to the evolutionary
hypothesis were brought forth by “people
who were not trained biologists . . . their
objections could be countered summarily on
grounds of ignorance, despite the fact that
Darwin’s hypothesis appealed so largely to
the evidence of common observation and
experience.” Many were deluded into
thinking that because Darwin recognized the
objections, “in this way he had disposed of
them.”60 “It is false that any reputable
anthropologist nowadays professes an anti-
evolutionist philosophy.”61 Pure snobbery
has cost the Sophic many a great discovery,
but without it the Sophic as such would not
survive. “It seems at times as if many of our
modern writers on evolution have had their
views by some sort of revelation. . . . Much
of what we learn today are only half truths or
less. . . . An incorrect view can . . .
successfully displace the correct view for
many years. . . . Most students become
acquainted with many of the current concepts
in biology whilst . . . at an age when most
people are, on the whole, uncritical. . . . In
addition, . . . most students tend to have the
same sort of educational background and so
in conversation and discussion they accept
common fallacies and agree on matters
based on these fallacies.”62 “Aleš Hrdlička,
the fanatic tzar holding to this [the Alaska-
bridge] theory, smote down anybody
suggesting other possibilities.”63 But “as
long as this [knowledge] is assumed,
insufficient effort will be put into the attempt
to find ways to obtain genuine evidence.”64
Ancient Statements: “Tear yourself
away from the solemn conventions of these
self-styled philosophers, who do not agree
among themselves and who announce a
doctrine as the truth the moment it pops into
their heads. They are full of mutual hatred
and jealousy and ambition.”65 They only
close ranks against the ignorant public,
which they despise and neglect.66 Even the
naked philosophers of Egypt and India were
jealous among themselves,67 and included
Apollonius in their rivalries. In Coptic
Egypt, holy men traveled around collecting
blessings from each other like the Sophists
before them.68 In the fifth century “these
defenders of a dying cause could at least
keep up the appearance of success by mutual
praise and admiration.”69 Vanity and
ineptitude were concealed behind altruistic
educational programs for improving other
people’s minds. “What good does it do you
to pay high salaries to teachers and raise up
a host of experts when the actions of our
society speak so much more loudly than their
safe, conventional commonplaces? For
philosophy of the mind (psychē) is as much
harder than text-book education as doing is
than talking. Should we teach more
philosophy? That is the very thing that has
brought us to this condition by destroying all
ultimate certainty.”70 Every scientist claims
that he has the answer, overcome by his own
line of reasoning (logos), quite aside from
the evidence itself. They are always
knocking each other down: each one clings
to his own theories, and so complete disunity
reigns, according to Hippocrates, who is
good enough to point out that the only real
science is his science,71 and that no amateur
may be tolerated in that.72 In Syria the
scholar Ephraim became the number-one
man by systematically attacking and finally
wiping out all the works of a far greater man,
Bardasenes. “Everything has been done to
obscure his memory and to consign him to
oblivion.”73 All the tricks of the Sophic
came to full flower among the Arabs; the
organized schools, inheriting the teachings of
the Sophists, had all the power. When one
scholar in his old age admitted extensive
forgeries, the Doctors replied: “What you
said then seems to us more trustworthy than
your present assertion,” and there was
nothing he could do about it.74
 Proposition 8. There are certain
inescapable limitations to the Sophic that,
while they do not destroy its sway fatally,
vitiate its power for good and disqualify its
claims to rule.
Modern Statements: “I doubt if we get
very far by the intellect alone,” claimed
Whitehead. “I doubt if the intellect carries us
very far. . . . The longer I live the more I am
impressed by the enormous, the unparalleled
genius of one philosopher, and that is
Plato.”75 The Sophic is reluctant to admit its
limitations, but they are there: “The most
useful approach for explaining evolutionary
changes is still teleology, an uncomfortable
state of affairs for the schoolbook logic
which poses as philosophy of science. . . .
Today, biologists are ashamed of teleology,”
though their “ateleological attitude . . .
verges on sterility, and indeed might signify
such, were it not that teleological reasoning
is substantially more common in the
laboratory and field than in the research
papers.”76 “It is not easy for a child to
abandon the purposeful perception of the
world so dear to his heart and go over to the
grim causality of natural science, . . . the
discipline of school studies.” But which
picture is right? “The picture of the world
actually observed may suggest the
incompleteness of the principles of the exact
sciences”; the school “tames the spirit of
man and laces it into the Spanish boot of
logical thinking. . . . The trouble . . . lies not
in the incompleteness of knowledge . . . but
in the deep discrepancy between the world
of the exact sciences and the real world.”77
Evolution was found wanting, but there was
nothing to take its place, so “this theoretical
bankruptcy has forced us back into the
evolutionist fold in spite of ourselves.”78
Though Proconsul “is not a good candidate
as an ancestor of the gibbons and siamangs, .
. . at the moment he is the best fossil
evidence available for the data and
provenience we seek”—so we accept him!79
While the Sophic has always claimed
the infinite view of the Mantic, today
“absolute limits” are beginning to appear:
Once “geometry was science and seemed
inexhaustible—yet in 300 years it was
exhausted”; there is an absolute limit to the
number of crystal forms or chemical
elements that can exist: “The implications of
this have crept almost unnoticed upon the
chemists and the physicists. Placing such
limitations upon nature runs quite contrary to
the traditional tenets of empiricism.”80
“Then, one night at a meeting of one of the
Cambridge scientific clubs . . . I heard one of
the greatest mathematical physicists say, with
complete simplicity:‘. . . in a sense, physics
and chemistry are finished sciences.’ . . . We
were in the sight of the end. It seemed
incredible to me, brought up in the tradition
of limitless searching, mystery beyond
mystery. . . . I resented leaving it. . . . I
wanted him to be wrong. Yet I could see
what he meant. . . . In the whole of chemistry
and physics, we were in sight of the end. . . .
It struck me how impossible it would have
been to say this a few years before. Before
1926 no one could have said it, unless he
were a megalomaniac or knew no
science.”81 “The external walls appear as
formidable as ever; but at the very center of
the supposedly solid fortress of logical
thinking, all is confusion. . . . The ultimate
basis of both types of logical thinking
[deductive and inductive] is infected, at the
very core, with imperfection.”82
The authoritarianism of the Sophic is
essential but fatal. Because of it, “at this
moment scientists and sceptics are the
leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is
admitted; fundamental novelty is barred.
This dogmatic commonsense is the death of
philosophic adventure.”83 “Our language is
made up only of preconceived ideas and can
not be otherwise. Only these are unconscious
preconceived ideas, a thousand times more
dangerous than the others.”84 This means
following the party line to promotion, with
its “excessive subsidy of the mediocre.”85
Science can never achieve the objectivity it
boasts: “Pursuit of knowledge [is] based
largely on hidden clues and arrived at and
ultimately accredited, on grounds of personal
judgment.”86 In science “we take our space
and time with a deadly seriousness” though
perception of them has been “furnished to us
by the machinery of our nervous systems,”
and “acquire[d] only by arduous practice.”87
Man’s “brain corrupts the revelation of his
senses. His output of information is but one
part in a million of his input. He is a sink
rather than a source of information. The
creative flights of his imagination are but
distortions of a fraction of his data. Finally, .
. . ultimate universal truths are beyond his
ken.”88 “If you ask me, ‘How do you know?’
my reply would be, ‘I don’t; I only propose a
guess.’”89 Outside of mathematics, “no
description or ‘definition’ will ever include
all particulars,” while mathematics “deals
with fictitious entities with all particulars
included, and we proceed by
remembering.”90 “Godel . . . proved that . . .
the question, ‘Is there an inner flaw in this
system?’ is a question which is simply
unanswerable.”91 “This is a rather shocking
thing to say—that science does not furnish
any really ultimate or satisfying explanation.
. . . Scientists—even the greatest ones . . .
cannot agree as to whether and how science
explains anything. . . . The explanations of
science have utility, but . . . they do in sober
fact not explain.”92 The explanation is
always a circular process.93 “The all, some,
and none categories of Aristotelian logic are
of little value in ethnology, or any other
social science.”94
“If cause and effect are absolutely
equivalent, the question ‘Why?’ is
meaningless. Therefore the exact sciences
answer only the simplest question in the
cognition of the world, ‘How?’”95 “It is
important to combat the assumption that we
have real pictures of the past; “these remain
possibilities and nothing more,” we will
never achieve proof, “only a stronger
probability” by continued research.
“Personal knowledge in [the exact sciences]
is not made but discovered, and as such it
claims to establish contact with reality
beyond the clues on which it relies [i.e.,
knowing is an art]. It [the skill of the
knower] commits us, passionately and far
beyond our comprehension, to a vision of
reality.”96 “We must be prepared for the
possibility that the human brain will never
be able to understand itself, or
consciousness or perhaps the nature of life
itself. If so . . . the theory of dialectical
materialism will be disproved.”97
“The world . . . will always be different
from any statement that science can give of
it. . . . We are always restating our
restatement of the world.”98 “In atomic
physics we deal with the sort of world
which would be sensed by intelligent beings
endowed only with a clumsy sense of
touch.”99 There is in our knowledge “a vast
gap which physics shows no signs of ever
being able to bridge. . . . It may even be that
whatever it is that is peculiar to life and
particular to thought lies outside the scope of
physical concepts.”100 “So long as we, like
good empiricists, remember that it is an act
of faith to believe our senses, that we
corrupt but do not generate information, and
that our most respectable hypotheses are but
guesses, . . . we [may] ‘rest assured that . . .
[we are not] sinful man aspiring to the place
of God.’”101 “Newton’s first law illustrates
another point, that the physical sciences are
based on an act of faith.”102 “The structure of
any language, mathematical or daily, is such
that we must start . . . with undefined terms. .
. . These undefined words have to be taken
on faith. They represent some kind of
implicit creed.”103 Thus we must dispense
with the whole foundation of the Sophic:
“All propositions which form the basis of
scientific knowledge are of such a nature that
universal agreement could be obtained about
them.”104 The physicist only wins back from
Nature what he himself has put into the
picture. Quantum theory and relativity “teach
the same lesson, . . . namely, that the world is
not constructed according to the principles
of common sense.”105
Ancient Statements: At the very
beginning, the limitations of the Ionian
School of physical science were pointed out
by Heraclitus, who thereby earned himself
the unflattering epithet of ho skoteinos,
which, as Sophocles uses the word, does not
mean “the obscure” so much as “the
recalcitrant,” “the gloomy one,” the man who
throws cold water on things. Heraclitus
asked just how reliable the human organism
is as a gatherer and interpreter of
information: how well equipped are we to
read Bacon’s “Book of Nature”? Men’s eyes
and ears are, to say the least, unreliable
instruments,106 and if their senses are feeble,
their interpretative faculties are even more
so: all men are more or less asleep, and
never completely sober. Mere information
(polymathia) is pointless for all the pride
we take in it; the Sophoi have done with God
once for all—but they are always talking
about him: they are seeking the same
objective as religion—to explain everything.
And what are their chances of succeeding?
What about the objects they observe? They
are always changing even while they seek to
limit and define them—“all things flow; . . .
you can’t step into the same river twice.”107
The observer’s own position is purely
relative, yet everything depends on it: “The
road up and the road down are the same
road”108—it all depends on the way you are
facing. So what hope have we for real
knowledge? Revelation, says Heraclitus: “A
man should listen to the spirits (daimones,
the same word is used by Socrates)109 as a
child listens to an adult”;110 our individual
minds are pretty dull, but through the ages
there exists an unmistakable consensus of
humanity about things, an ethos which is not
the product of reason but of revelation; there
is a common divine logos in which we all
have a share, and that is the one thing we can
be really sure of, “the criterion of truth.”111
The great Sophists—Gorgias, Protagoras,
Empedocles, and others, as well as Socrates
and Plato and Aristotle—all dealt with the
limitations of the Sophic mind.112

Notes to Part 3

Footnotes
^1. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (New
York: Appleton, 1898), 12.
^2. Nicolas Berdyaev, Solitude and Society
(London: Centenary, 1938), 5, 12.
^3. Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations
(New York: Basic Books, 1962), 136-37.
^4. Gottfried Martin, Kant’s Metaphysics and
Theory of Science, tr. P. G. Lucas
(Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1955), 129.
^5. Nigel Calder, Mind of Man (New York:
Viking, 1970), 262.
^6. Ibid., 95 (emphasis added).
^7. Warren Weaver, “The Imperfections of
Science,” American Scientist 49 (March
1961): 110.
^8. Russell Housfeld, “Dissembled Culture: An
Essay on Method,” Mankind 6 (November
1963): 50.
^9. Gilbert Murray, Aristophanes (London:
Oxford University Press, 1933), 101.
^10. Plutarch, Pericles VI, 1.
^11. Plato, Gorgias 518-19; Werner Jaeger,
Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, tr.
Gilbert Highet, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1945), 1:330-31.
^12. Karl R. Popper, “Science: Problems, Aims,
Responsibilities,” Federation Proceedings of
the American Societies for Experimental
 Biology 22 (1963): 961.
^13. Weaver, “The Imperfections,” 101.
^14. Edmund R. Leach, “We Scientists Have the
Right to Play God,” Saturday Evening Post
241 (16 November 1968): 20. Cf. Carl
Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York:
Random House, 1977), 237-38.
^15. Wallace O. Fenn, “Front Seats for
Biologists,” AIBS Bulletin (December 1960):
16. Cf. Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden
(New York: Random House, 1977), 237-38.
^16. Stephen Toulmin, “Contemporary Scientific
Mythology,” in Metaphysical Beliefs
(London: SCM Press, 1957), 61.
^17. Morris R. Cohen, American Thought: A
Critical Sketch (New York: Collier Books,
1962), 240.
^18. Lawrence K. Frank, Nature and Human
Nature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1951), 151.
^19. Julian Jaynes, “The Routes of Science,”
American Scientist 54 (March 1966): 95.
^20. Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the
 Modern World, Lowell Lectures, 1925 (New
York: Macmillan, 1962), 275.
^21. G. M. Trevelyan, History and the Reader
(London: Cambridge University Press,
1945), 24-25.
^22. Harlow Shapley, in Life in Other Worlds, A
Symposium Sponsored by Joseph E.
Seagram and Sons (1 March 1961): 27.
^23. Fenn, “Front Seats,” 14.
^24. Toulmin, “Contemporary Scientific
Mythology,” 61.
^25. Dorsey Hager, “Fifty Years of Progress in
Geology: The Presidential Address to the
Utah Geological Society,” Geotimes 2/2
(August 1957): 12.
^26. Albert Guérard, Fossils and Presences
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1957), 43.
^27. Hugh R. Trevor-Roper, Men and Events
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957),
311, 313.
^28. Popper, “Science: Problems,” 961.
^29. Toulmin, “Contemporary Scientific
 Mythology,” 62.
^30. Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, When
Worlds Collide (New York: Lippincott,
1933), 344.
^31. “The Integrity of Science: A Report by the
AAAS Committee on Science in the
Promotion of Human Welfare,” American
Scientist 53 (June 1965): 194.
^32. Charles R. Dechert, “Cybernetics and the
Human Person,” International
Philosophical Quarterly 5 (February 1965):
32-33.
^33. Commodian, Instructiones adversus
Gentium Deos 19 and 22, in PL 5:215-18.
^34. Murray, Aristophanes, 236.
^35. Ibid., 226-27.
^36. Plutarch, Moralia 853, quoted in Murray,
Aristophanes, 215.
^37. J. F. Dobson, Greek Orators (London:
Methuen, 1919), 198.
^38. Hugh Nibley, “Victoriosa Loquacitas: The
Rise of Rhetoric and the Decline of
Everything Else,” Western Speech 20 (Spring
 1956): 60; reprinted in this volume, pages
247-48.
^39. Edward Chiera, They Wrote on Clay: The
Babylonian Tablets Speak Today (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1938), 110.
^40. Hugo Winckler, “Staat und Verwaltung,” in
Eberhard Schrader, ed., Die Keilinschriften
und das Alte Testament (Berlin: Reuther and
Reicherd, 1903), 169-70.
^41. John E. Sandys, A History of Classical
Scholarship (New York: Hafner, 1958),
1:373.
^42. J. B. Bury, A History of the Later Roman
Empire, From Arcadius to Irene, 2 vols.
(New York: Macmillan, 1889), 1:315.
^43. Jean Gage, “La propagande sérapiste et la
lutte des empereurs flaviens avec les
philosophes (Stoïciens et Cyniques),” Revue
philosophique de la France 149 (1959): 73-
100.
^44. Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian
Mystery (New York: Harper and Row,
1963), 195.
^45. Wilhelm Schmid, Geschichte der
griechischen Literatur, in Walter Otto, ed.,
Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft
Munich: Beck, 1940), 3:1:1:37.
^46. Cf. Nibley, “Victoriosa Loquacitas,” 63-64,
70-71; reprinted in this volume, pages 253-
54, 265-67.
^47. Goldziher, Vorlesungen, 44.
^48. Eduard Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2 vols.,
3rd ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1915), 2:771.
^49. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum I, 71.
^50. M. A. MacConaill in “European vs.
American Anthropology,” Current
Anthropology 6 (June 1965): 306.
^51. Albert G. Ingalls, “The Carboniferous
Mystery,” Scientific American 162 (January
1940): 14.
^52. E. Hirshler, “Prehistory and the Birth of
Civilization,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 7 (1964): 97.
^53. L. Hudson, “The Stereotypical Scientist,”
Nature (21 January 1967): 229.
^54. M. G. Rutten, The Geological Aspects of
 the Origin of Life on Earth (New York:
Elsevier, 1962), 125.
^55. I. Bernard Cohen, “Orthodoxy and Scientific
Progress,” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 96 (1952): 505.
^56. Ibid., 505-6.
^57. Walter Sullivan, We Are Not Alone, The
Search for Intelligent Life on Other Worlds
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 147-48.
^58. Anthony Standen, Science Is a Sacred Cow
(New York: Dutton, 1950), 18.
^59. Science News Letter (17 July 1954): 40.
^60. Ronald Good, “Natural Selection Re-
examined,” The Listener (7 May 1959):
797.
^61. Robert H. Lowie, “Evolution and Cultural
Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 48
(April-June 1946): 231.
^62. G. A. Kerkut, gen. ed., Implications of
Evolution, International Series of
Monographs on Pure and Applied Biology;
Division: Zoology, vol. 4 (New York:
Pergamon, 1960), 155-56.
^63. Carleton Beals, Nomads and Empire
Builders (New York: Chilton, 1961), 67-68.
^64. Norman W. Pirie, “Some Assumptions
Underlying Discussion on the Origins of
Life,” Annals New York Academy of
Sciences 69 (1957): 373.
^65. Tatian, Oratio adversus Graecos (Oration
to the Greeks) 3, in PG 6:809.
^66. Epictetus, Discourses I, 12, 21; I, 18, 2-4;
II, 8, 7. Cf. Titus Maccius Plautus, The
Captives 300-308.
^67. Philostratus, Life of Apollonius II, 30.
^68. The Life of Apa Cyrus, in E. A. Wallis
Budge, Coptic Texts: Coptic Martyrdoms
Etc. in the Dialect of Upper Egypt, 5 vols.
(London: Oxford University Press, 1914),
4:383-85, fol. 25b, 27a.
^69. F. J. E. Raby, A History of Secular Latin
Poetry in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (London:
Oxford University Press, 1934), 1:75.
^70. John Chrysostom, Adversus Oppugnatores
Eorum Qui Vitam Monasticum Inducant 3,
in PG 47:363.
^71. Hippocrates, The Nature of Man I, 1-35.
^72. Hippocrates, Ancient Medicine I, 1-27.
^73. Paul E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza, The
Schweich Lectures of the British Academy,
1941 (London: Oxford University Press,
1947), 193.
^74. Reynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History of
the Arabs (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1953), 134; cf. Carl Brockelmann,
Geschichte der arabischen Literatur
(Leipzig: Amelang, 1901), 1:13, 80-81, 95,
126, 128, 185-86, 197, 200, 220-27.
^75. Alfred N. Whitehead, quoted in Lucien
Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1954), 132.
^76. Harry Grundfest, “Opinions on Darwin a
Century After,” Science and Society 24
(1960): 152.
^77. Nikolai Kozyrev, “An Unexplored World,”
Soviet Life (November 1965): 27.
^78. Kenneth E. Bock, “Evolution and Historical
Process,” American Anthropologist 54
(October-December 1952): 494.
^79. Charles F. Hockett and Robert Ascher, “The
Human Revolution,” American Scientist 52
(March 1964): 73 (emphasis added).
^80. P. LeCorbeiller, “Crystals and the Future of
Physics,” Scientific American 188 (January
1953): 56.
^81. C. P. Snow, The Search (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 168-69.
^82. N. Goodman, quoted in Weaver, “The
Imperfections,” 109.
^83. Price, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead,
7.
^84. Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science
(New York: Science, 1929), 129.
^85. Vannevar Bush, quoted in Eric Hodgins,
“The Strange State of American Research,”
Fortune (April 1955): 214.
^86. Michael Polanyi, “The Unaccountable
Element in Science,” Philosophy 37
(January 1962): 14.
^87. P. W. Bridgman, “Science and Common
Sense,” Scientific Monthly 79 (July 1954):
36.
^88. Warren S. McCulloch, “Mysterium
Iniquitatis of Sinful Man Aspiring into the
Place of God,” Scientific Monthly 80
(January 1955): 39.
^89. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 152.
^90. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity (New
York: Science, 1933), 68.
^91. Weaver, “The Imperfections,” 109.
^92. Ibid., 106-7, 111.
^93. See Rollin W. Workman, “What Makes an
Explanation,” Philosophy of Science 31
(July 1964): 241-54.
^94. Harold E. Driver and William C. Massey,
“Comparative Studies of North American
Indians,” Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society 47 (July 1957): 438.
^95. Kozyrev, “An Unexplored World,” 43.
^96. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1958), 64.
^97. Fenn, “Front Seats,” 16.
^98. George H. Mead, Movements of Thought in
the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University
 of Chicago Press, 1962), 507-8.
^99. P. T. Matthews, The Nuclear Apple
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), 127.
^100. Ibid., 141-42.
^101. McCulloch, “Mysterium Iniquitatis,” 39
(emphasis added).
^102. F. A. Vick, “The Making of Scientists,” The
Listener 61 (29 January 1959): 196.
^103. Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 152-53
(emphasis added).
^104. C. D. Hardie, Background of Modern
Thought (London: Watts, 1947), 124-25.
^105. Bridgman, “Science and Common Sense,”
33 (emphasis added).
^106. Heraclitus, On the Universe 4.
^107. Ibid., 41.
^108. Ibid., 69.
^109. Plato, Apology 24C, 26B, 27C, E.
^110. Heraclitus, On the Universe 97; in
Socrates’s works see Plato, Apology 24C,
26B, 27C, E.
^111. Heraclitus, On the Universe 1.
^112. Nibley, “Victoriosa Loquacitas,” 57-58;
reprinted in this volume, pages 243-45.
 Part 4: Proposition 9 to
Conclusion

Proposition 9. The world without the

Mantic offers the best test of the Sophic. It is
marked by (A) piteous disappointment, (B) a
puzzling deadness of spirit, and (C) a world
plagued by doubt, insecurity, cynicism, and
despair.
A. The Sophic program always ends in
failure, leading to disappointment and
disillusionment among its advocates.
Modern Statements: It now appears that
“the nineteenth century, which believed itself
boldly progressive, was spiritually a period
of obscurantism and reaction.”1 The vast
promises of the nineteenth century have not
been realized.2 The scientists, especially
astronomers, have turned out to be very poor
scientific prophets; and as a rule the better
the scientist, the weaker his prophetic
powers—they lack the Mantic touch.3
Ecological crises “reveal serious
inadequacies” which hitherto escaped notice
in many areas.4 There has been a comical
disproportion between the promises and
pretensions of anthropology and its
accomplishments.5 “It is obvious . . . that the
Wellsian dream [of a mechanized utopia] has
turned into a nightmare.”6 With all the talk
and promise of the exciting quest for
knowledge, “only one new chemical reaction
[has been] discovered by an American
chemical company during the last fifteen
years.”7 “Practically all who are now Ph.D.s
want to be told what to do. . . . They seem to
be scared to death to think up problems of
their own,” while the “idea for a jet engine .
. . was met with a massive indifference from
the scientific bureaucracy.”8 “In social
science, particularly, methodology is being
made the route to prestige.”9 “Fashions in
topics of study and methods of research have
come one after another. . . . As a result we
have botanists who know no plants and
zoologists who know no animals.”10 “Our
wealth of scientific gadgets and our vast
organization of scientific projects are in
heavy disproportion to our depth of
scientific thought. We ‘research the hell’ out
of everything: we contemplate very little.”11
In philology and scholarship a deterioration
of knowledge has taken place in the last
thirty years, especially in America. Today
the tendency in linguistics is in the “direction
of overall anarchy” in which most
classifications of unwritten languages
contain “elements of unreliability.”12 In
philosophy, “how many doctor’s theses . . .
are ever actually read by any one except the
examiners?”13 Instead of an insatiable,
predicted demand for scientists and
engineers, most of them soon become
obsolescent.14
Ancient Statements: With the rise of
rationalist (Sophic) Greek civilization, “one
might seem to have got a principle of
continuous progress. . . . In our modern
civilization, which reincarnates the Hellenic
principle, we ordinarily believe that such
continuous modification and improvement is
going on. But in the ancient Hellenic
civilization the promise and potency of its
principle in every line of activity . . .
seemed to meet with an arrest as suddenly
as it had begun.”15 Bevan is mystified by
this: Why did Hellenism, in the very moment
of completing its conquest, become
paralyzed? Why does the study of Greek
literature always stop at the threshold of the
Hellenistic period? Because only the Mantic
writers are interesting! The new education of
the Greeks thought of itself as throbbing with
life and vitality; to keep up the illusion it had
to go on progressively adding lurid to
sensational materials until in the end “the
powerful spicing had become the main dish”
and all was ruined.16 Education did nothing
to check intellectual and moral decline and,
if anything, accelerated it.17 Intellectually
everything ground to a halt, just as the school
reached the peak of its splendor.18 There
was a paralyzing finality about the arguments
of the Sophists, who “looked for no
revelation.” Under Sophist tutelage, “the
Athenians were already losing their sense of
political reality, . . . growing impatient of
sincerity and plain truth.”19 Isocrates’
conviction that education would be the
solution to everything turned out to be a great
disappointment. Contrary to expectation,
“There was no steady advance of natural and
mental science to serve as breeding ground”
for future scientists among the followers of
Aristotle, whose teaching was converted into
a “purely conceptual scholasticism.”20
Though the Sophists gave us “a 2000-year
unbroken tradition” of rational learning
beginning with Gorgias, the Schoolmen
expended those centuries in the usual
perennial arguments over the relative merits
of the New versus the Old Education.21 “And
the intellectual scribblers of the decadent
period” strongly influenced the thinking of
the Late Renaissance.22
B. The result is nihilism, societal
breakdown, and a puzzling deadness of
spirit.
Modern Statements: The “clearest and
the most comprehensive expression” of the
world view of Darwinism was given by
Tyndale, noting that in the “‘purely natural
and inevitable march of evolution from
atoms . . . to the proceedings of the British
Association for the Advancement of Science’
. . . life is of profound unimportance,” being
a “mere eddy in the primeval slime.”23 “We
must in all circumstances learn to accept the
fact that . . . in the longest run, the sum of all
human endeavour has no recognizable
significance.”24 “A scientific explanation of
the course of evolution therefore avoids
reference to either purpose or progress in its
recognition of the factors of change.”25 “Life
on earth is nothing but some elements
expressing generally available energy in a
specific rhythm. Man is nothing but a living
creature expressing general tendencies in
special reflections.”26 “That all the labours
of the ages . . . are destined to extinction in
the vast death of the solar system, . . .
beneath the debris of a universe in ruin, . . .
[is] so nearly certain, that no philosophy
which rejects them can hope to stand.”27
Hence the obsession with entropy, “the rigid
determinism desiccating the world actually
follows from the equations of mechanics and
is the essence of its laws.”28 “At the end [we
find the mute and terrifying world of
Pascal’s ‘libertin,’ the senseless world of
modern scientific philosophy. In the end] we
find nihilism and despair.”29 “Such
happiness as life is capable of comes from
the full participation of all our powers in the
endeavor to wrest from each changing
situation of experience its own full and
unique meaning.”30
Determined attempts are made,
especially in England, to obliterate all
distinction between the human mind and the
automatic computer. The idea is “that man, if
he is indeed nothing but an improved beast,
can by one more easy step be nothing more
than a mere machine—an object which
science can wholly analyze, wholly capture
within its special framework.”31 The robot
works on exactly the same behavioristic
principles as James Watson’s or John
Dewey’s human being; there is no essential
difference between them.32 Already people
are being programmed to act as machines,
“to behave like computers . . . I [Gordon
Taylor] am shocked that [the University of
Michigan] tolerated this,”33 while the
fundamental and eternal battle between good
and evil in humanity is disbelieved. “That
we can design ethical robots . . . is enough to
prove that man’s moral nature needs no
supernatural source.”34 “There is no morality
in life, no truth, no goodness, and no beauty.
Life in all its adaptability and elasticity is as
elemental as iron or sulfur or oxygen or
carbon. This is the correct perspective of
life. It would indeed save much trouble and
avoid many unnecessary errors if
philosophers and scientists could look at life
in the correct perspective.”35 “I like a
philosophy which exalts mankind. To
degrade it is to encourage men to vice,”
writes Diderot, yet in the next line goes on:
“When I have compared men to the immense
space which is over their heads and under
their feet, I have made them ants that bustle
about on an anthill. . . . Their vices and their
virtues, shrinking in the same proportion, are
reduced to nothingness.”36 Science “is
teaching them for the first time to use their
minds, not to seek reassurance in the face of
life’s suffering and separation, and not to
look for some escape from transitoriness that
is one of the unavoidable features of
existence, but to strengthen and multiply the
connective links that establish human life
more firmly in its natural habitat by
eliminating error and illusion and distortion
and rendering more and more transparent our
relations with one another and with the rest
of nature.”37 Thus it takes the easy way and
pushes downhill, making a virtue of the
negative: as if men did not already recognize
their miserable state! Science gives us a
world without values: aesthetic, ethical,
religious, “But a world which is without
value, Whitehead points out, is also a world
without meaning. . . . The world just is; it
cannot be explained.”38 This was the great
appeal of science to the Marxists: “The goal
was a completely materialistic theory of
life.”39 Marx thought his system was
“somehow deducible from Darwin’s
discoveries. He proposed to acknowledge
his indebtedness by dedicating Das Kapital
to Darwin.”40 On the other hand, A.
Wheelis’s End of the Modern Age shows
how laissez-faire capitalism was the direct
offspring and corollary of the same
naturalistic determinism, with the same
amoral materialism. So we read
conscientious scholarly Russian studies on
“From the Other Side to This Side: A Guide
to Atheism,” “Concreteness in Studying the
Overcoming of Religious Survivals,”
“Atheistic Education and the Overcoming of
Religious Survivals,” and “The Principles of
Scientific Atheism in Technical Colleges.”
Ancient Statements: How closely the
ancient Sophic attitude matches the modern
is revealed in a statement of Professor
Enslin of Harvard: Clement of Alexandria
scorns the” ‘simple’ Christians” who were
“afraid of Greek philosophy as children fear
ghosts.”41 Though Clement’s own writings
are full of “rubbish . . . triple-A nonsense; . .
. frequent highly fanciful, at times grotesque,
derivations of words and terms,” even
“pathetic nonsense,” they at least show him
to be “a man who prized insight, who
preferred the voice of reasoned conviction to
the braying of Balaam’s ass.”42 In the same
spirit, Origen, also a product of the
University of Alexandria, wrote, when he
read the Torah, “I blush to think that God
could have given these laws; the laws of
men, of the Romans, Athenians, Spartans, for
example, are far nobler and more
reasonable.”43 “Modern humanity for the
most part shares the view of Pliny” that “the
belief in rebirth or life after death is nothing
but a pacifier for children and belongs to a
mortality greedy for everlasting life.”44 The
strength of the Sophic is its appeal to the
obvious, its contemptuous dismissal of belief
in anything we cannot see, which enabled it
to turn the Mantic out of doors with ease,
merrily debunking anything that required an
effort of faith or imagination.45
The credo of the educated was and
remained Horace’s Nil admirari “don’t take
anything seriously”46—Horace describes
himself good naturedly as a cheerful pig
from the sty of Epicurus; but as for believing
in anything—credat Judaeus Appeles—let
the Jews believe that sort of stuff! The same
depressing and hopeless attitude dominates
in the Wisdom Literature of the Egyptians47
and of the Babylonians.48
C. It is the moral condition of life in a
world without Mantic that most strongly
proclaims the bankruptcy of the Sophic.
Modern Statements: “The beginning of
modern science is also the beginning of a
calamity.”49 Why? For one thing, robbing life
of meaning makes a hash of morality. The
fundamental principle of modern physics is
that “the transition of the world into the
equilibrium state [entropy], and hence its
death, is inevitable and irreversible. . . .
Thus, the world is to become a sheer desert-
like monotony. . . . Despite its significance
and progress, theoretical mechanics seems a
dry or even dull science. Perhaps this is an
emotional indicator of the incompleteness of
the principles of the exact sciences. The
trouble here,” continues Nikolai Kozyrev, is
“the deep discrepancy between the world of
the exact sciences and the real world,” while
all are taught to believe that the world of
science is the real world and the only
world.50 “Thus it comes about, fantastic
though it may sound, that men lie with their
neighbour’s wives denuded of the last shred
of a guilty conscience because observations
of the changes of Mercury’s perihelion
enabled Einstein to alter our ideas about
space-time!”51 The “problem of evil, . . .
science for five hundred years has
deliberately excluded from its purview.”52
“The force that devastated Hiroshima is
really insignificant by comparison with the
force that devastated the district of Watts,”53
but both may be traced to the same immoral
source. “There is no longer a philosophy of
nature; . . . the whole field of the knowledge
of sensible nature is given over to the
sciences of phenomena, to empiriological
science. . . . By the same token there is no
longer any speculative metaphysics.”54
Science is “now without superior direction
or light, is abandoned to empirical and
quantitative law, and is entirely separated
from the whole order of wisdom.”55
Everyone wants promotion and prestige
on the ship, “But where is the boat going?
No one seems to have the faintest idea; nor,
for that matter, do they see much point in
even raising the question. . . . Most see
themselves as objects more acted upon than
acting—and their future, therefore,
determined as much by the system as by
themselves.”56 This is plainly seen in the
dependence of our whole well-being on the
imponderables of the Dow Jones averages.
The Sophic promised that it could handle
everything: “Modern science and modern
conditions of life have taught us to meet
occasions of apprehension by a critical
analysis of their causes and conditions”
rather than by appealing to heaven.57 It has
always been promised that mankind could be
freed from all its shackles by technology.58
But now it turns out that the Sophic does not
even offer escape from dullness. “Truth is
not the only aim of science. We want more
than mere truth: what we look for is
interesting truth.”59 This is diametrically
opposed to most university departments that
teach that they are only doing their job when
they are dull and, like the Berlin School of
Egyptology, glory in their strict avoidance of
anything that might be interesting; they have
found something heroic in mere patient
plodding and had a horror of “Fantasie” and
“Romantik.” The highest reward for them
was professional status, as it is for the
heroes of C. P. Snow’s novels, all eminent
Cambridge scientists who have only one
object in life—to achieve ever more
“eminence.” They will engage in all manner
of fraud and deception to achieve it; their
work interests them only as long as they can
show off to the world and to each other.
“Darwinism has come, and has conquered,
and as a vital influence in the spiritual life,
has gone.”60 Science could not even hold up
its own end. “Because of the sterility of its
concepts, historical geology . . . has become
static and unproductive.61 Since then plate
tectonics have livened things up a bit, but
still “most of us refuse to discard or
reformulate, and the result is the present
deplorable state of our discipline.”62 What
kept them going? Showmanship, self-
dramatization: without the stage of the
university to show off on, where would most
of us be?
And so we have the present state of the
world described by Chicago University
physicist John R. Platt: “too dangerous for
anything but Utopia.”63 Science has made it
dangerous, but provides no Utopia. Jerome
Wiesner of M.I.T. claimed: “The armaments
race is an accelerating downward-spiral to
Oblivion.”64 So will accumulation of
scientific knowledge save us? It is now so
specialized that “even engineers would not
know how to reconstruct the machinery of
our civilization if it somehow collapsed or
was destroyed.”65 “The [amount of]
knowledge in the world [in 1960] is
doubling every ten years. . . . Soon . . . our
entire culture will have collapsed owing to
its incomprehensive complexity.”66 We have
reached a saturation point, though “probably
99 per cent of human ability has been wholly
wasted; even today, those of us who consider
ourselves cultured . . . glimpse the
profounder resources of our minds only once
or twice in a lifetime.67 There are “many
unpleasant ways in which the world can go
wrong [and very few in which it] can go
right.”68 The human animal may have fatally
overreached itself unless it takes on some
sense in the eleventh hour. Meanwhile, we
resign ourselves to Existentialism, “the
philosophical refuge of the despairing spirit
caught in the turmoil of moral crisis. It has
always been—and is today, essentially and
at its core, a bitter-sweet philosophy of
despair.”69 This is 100 years after William
James challenged the world to do the honest
thing and base its philosophy only on the
firm foundation of unyielding despair.
Ancient Statements: The ancients went
through the same experience and collapsed.
With the complete victory of the Sophic mind
a namenloses Elend (indefinable malaise)
covered the whole glorious Hellenistic
world. Christianity has been blamed for this,
but Christian influence became dominant
only after the churchmen themselves had
gone all out to accommodate to the
prevailing Sophic teaching of the time—that
of Alexandria: then it was that all joy
seemed to go out of the world.70 Long before
Christian influence was felt, the world of the
Roman Satirists was full blown: an utterly
cynical, immoral, and pessimistic world.
The rational (Sophic) mood of Hellenism
had emancipated men from moral restraints,
when, as today, they “speak and write as if
the relation of the sexes were something that
could be put on a plain, scientific, common
sense basis,”71 but at the same time, as
Bevan shrewdly observes, they became
everywhere obsessed with a passion for
bathing, a constant obsession with fighting
dirt and a fanatical desire to flee from it and
sweeten themselves—subconscious betrayal
of guilt.72
Intellectually, the accumulation of
knowledge reached a saturation point when
the cultural and intellectual “deposit of the
past had become too great for any mind to
absorb” and people simply gave up trying, as
they have today.73 The easy way was to
specialize and thus lose sight of the larger
questions of life; the best thinking of the
professors for centuries on end became
thereafter incurably trivial.74 Calls to a
revival of Hellenism got nowhere.75 The
great antique civilization subsided into a
restless, superficial world of theatromania,
mob violence, crime and corruption.76 The
only security was found in the university,
where the doctors held undeviatingly to the
age-old routines of hollow lectures, fierce
feuds, and adroit politics, oblivious to the
world collapsing around them. Quintillian
advises the young to “stay away from the big
schools!” with their cynicism and
immorality, but then admits that they do offer
the best chances for a career in any field. By
the fifth century nobody knew what to
believe, since the schoolmen had made a
virtue of questioning everything without
really looking for an answer—busywork and
self-deception had become the way of life.77
In the end it was the teaching of the
“physicist” that men should look for the
explanation to all things in natural causes
alone that laid the foundation for the ruin of
everything, according to Plato.78
Proposition 10. Our notes add up to
something quite unexpected. I had expected
to do the inevitable and call for a proper
balance between the Sophic and the Mantic,
each of which has its faults as well as its
virtues. But that is not the way it turns out at
all! Not for me, at least. Nothing could be
plainer than the lesson that the human race in
the times under survey has disastrously
neglected the Mantic. The Christian Church
went all out to identify itself with the Sophic,
as it still does.
Modern Statements: The founders of
Roman Catholic theology “had a boundless
esteem for the work of the Schools.”79 To
begin with, the Church claims to found its
case on reason. The Catholic believes that he
can produce reasoned and convincing, even
coercive arguments. Even the doctrine of the
Trinity can be proved indirectly by reason,
since “it is not . . . irrational to accept these
truths on the authority of the Church,
provided that you can prove by reason that
the Church is infallible”80 and “the
credentials of the Roman Catholic Church
can be proved by pure reason and by pure
reason alone.”81 “Medieval philosophy was
not so much a servant of theology as theology
was a servant of philosophy. . . . That was
the case of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who
strictly subordinated theology to Aristotelian
philosophy.”82 Under the Scholastic
philosophers, “philosophy called ‘Logic’
dominated the schools . . . logica sola
placet, science was everything.”83 The
logica nova84 of the twelfth century was a
heritage of the Ancient Sophist schools, “a
triumph of sophistry.”85 The mystical trends
of the seventeenth century were vigorously
condemned by the Church, since revelation
“is universally denied by the scholastics.”86
Even the early Jesuits were given a bad time
for toying with the idea of revelation.
Modern Protestantism objected to
Mormonism primarily on grounds of
scientific enlightenment—“seeing visions in
an age of railways” was Dickens’s withering
comment.87 Protestantism broke with
Scholasticism, but its rejection of revelation
led it straight into the arms of nineteenth-
century natural science and Hegel’s
philosophy of history, “formulated by
materialism and Darwinism into the dogma
that all historical phenomena may be
explained through mundane causes only and
that their development was or must have
been from a low to a high level.”88 Biblical
criticism insisted on following the rigorous,
unflinchingly skeptical procedures of
science.89 In a spirit of emancipation “they
talk of a religion without theology; but when
pressed as to what that means, they offer a
diffuse romantic sentimentalism, with
rhapsodies over a pursuit of goodness . . .
and at last to a sort of perpetual motion ever
‘upward and onward’ but with no indication
of any specific direction.”90 Alfred North
Whitehead sums up the process of
accommodation: Each new scientific
advance has “found the religious thinkers
unprepared,” until “finally, after struggle”
their teachings were “modified and
otherwise interpreted,” so that “the next
generation of religious apologists then
congratulates the religious world on the
deeper insight which has been gained,” and
so it goes with “continued repetition of this
undignified retreat, during many
generations.”91 And so from the beginning,
by a progressive accommodation, the
churches have always remained respectably
Sophic.
Today the churches are suggesting that
they may have erred in this, and are calling
for revelation to rescue them. “Liberalism
was the voice of secular confidence in
science, education and culture. It
accommodated its claims to fit human
expectations. . . . For this reason it failed to
find wings. Theological accommodationism
is a parasite dependent on its host. . . .
Liberalism is dead, or dying, as secular
confidence wains.”92
Statements on the Ancient Church:
“From the 5th century on the Church became
an ‘intellectual’ entity” and ever since one
sees in “the Church a thing of reason—un
être de raison.”93 Mosheim asked: Was the
conversion of the Doctors a blessing or a
curse for the Church? to which he replied: “I
must confess myself unable to decide the
point.” In the third century this led to serious
clashes between popular faith and the
sophisticated theology of the Doctors.94 The
Doctors won hands-down. The authority of
Alexandria prevailed, “recasting the
permanent elements of the church’s doctrine
in harmony with a religious philosophy of
Grecian character. What the Apologists were
compelled to do, these men willingly sought
to accomplish.”95 By the beginning of the
second century, “with perfect impunity . . .
they proceeded to do violence to the
scripture, blithely disregarding the original
teachings, . . . busily working out elaborate
structures of syllogisms. . . . They deserted
the Holy Scriptures for . . . Euclid, . . .
Aristotle, and Theophrastus.”96 Challenged
by Celsus, a doughty champion of the
Sophic, Origen yields to him on every point,
explaining that Celsus does not realize that
real Christians are all for science, too.97 In a
like situation, Octavius points out to his
educated friend that all real Christians are
philosophers, just as he is; the vulgar simply
don’t understand.98 The Churchmen
embraced Hellenism even though they knew
it had overcome early Christianity.99 “In the
philosophical interpretation of its
eschatological hope, Christian theology from
the very beginning clings to Aristotle,” who
“provided Christian philosophers with all
the elements out of which an adequate
conception of personality could be built up. .
. . One cannot fail to acknowledge the
Aristotelian origin of the main
anthropological ideas in early Christian
theology.”100 It is possible to call St.
Augustine, the founder of Catholic and
Protestant theology, “the first modern man”
because of his fides quaerens intellectum—
the Mantic seeking to become Sophic.101
Proposition 11. An approach to the
authentically Mantic is (A) desirable, and
(B) possible.
A. The need for a “return” to the Mantic
is felt today as it was anciently.
Modern Statements: “‘Modern man’ . . .
is the heir of . . . the sceptical tradition. . . .
In the present epoch a large and increasing
number of Europeans have expressed the
desire to return [to] . . . the religious
tradition. . . . Whenever they take it into their
head to ‘return,’ the shades of all the great
sceptics, Pierre Bayle and Voltaire, Ernest
Renan and Sigmund Freud and the rest, rise
up around them and persuade them, with
considerable success, that they cannot go
back. This is the religious dilemma of
‘modern man.’”102 They cannot go back,
because they were never there—their
religion was always Sophic. “The trouble
with the Bible has been its interpreters, who
have scaled and whittled down that sense of
infinitude into finite and limited concepts. . .
. Here we are with our finite beings and
physical senses in the presence of a universe
whose possibilities are infinite, and even
though we may not apprehend them, those
infinite possibilities are actualities.”103
“God grant that we are mistaken. But if we
have read the signs of the times correctly, . . .
the only salvation for mankind will be found
in religion.”104 “The ruling concept of our
day, the degrading and life-impoverishing
error of a Nature which is not deeply and
inwardly bound to our own natures, must be
overcome. The idea of a spiritual life
without spirit, that can be examined like a
problem in physics, must be overcome.”105
Ancient Statements: Plato and
Aristotle, after mastering the Sophic, both
turned whole-heartedly to the Mantic quest.
In the pagan world the cult of Serapis was a
determined attempt to turn Mantic; in the
Christian, the turning to Monasticism,
pilgrimages, and the temple show a yearning
for the Mantic,106 all strenuously opposed by
the Doctors of the Church.
B. Is it possible?
 “But today the Baconian approach is all
but dead. . . . How does a new hypothesis
come into existence? That is where intuition
comes in.” Peter Medawar claims that
“Scientists are usually too proud or too shy”;
where intuition is concerned, “they feel it to
be incompatible with their conception of
themselves as men of facts and rigorous
inductive judgments.”107 Some scientists
have suggested, to avoid yielding any purely
scientific ground, the idea of man initiating a
line of robots which then independently
culminate in the production of a perfect
robot, which proceeds to create—a human
race!108 thus bringing God into the picture
without having to apologize! Today there is
increasing realization in the churches that
“the living God to Whom men address their
prayers is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob, not the philosophers’ God, the idea of
the Absolute.”109 Countless articles today
point out that we cannot attain the Mantic
without revelation. For a definitive
statement, see the first section of the
Doctrine and Covenants.
We are not advocating pagan religion in
preference to modern science, since both
stand on the same foundation through
centuries of accommodation. Yet some
Christian leaders view Greek Mantic with
respect and even call for a return to it
through Christian channels!110 The true
seeker seeks everywhere—he is a true
scientist—but to search he must be a
believer; for even in the lab, “Ye receive no
witness until after the trial of your faith”
(Ether 12:6). To illustrate this, “Bacon . . .
was an enemy of the Copernican hypothesis.
Don’t theorize, he said, but open your eyes
and observe without prejudice (faith), and
you cannot doubt that the Sun moves and that
the Earth is at rest. By contrast, Galileo
[wrote:] . . . ‘I cannot . . . express strongly
enough my unbounded admiration for the
greatness of mind of these men who
conceived (the heliocentric system) and held
it to be true . . . , in violent opposition to the
evidence of their own senses.’”111 It is
perfectly proper to believe and seek, to have
faith and hope, and to labor to be worthy of
receiving revelation.
The Mantic is quite as intellectual as the
Sophic: it takes more pure mental calculation
to operate a Urim and Thummim than it does
to use an Egyptian dictionary, and the
brainwork required of the Saints is
formidable (cf. D&C 93:53). In a General
Epistle of the First Presidency in 1851 they
were told, “It becomes us, as Saints of the
Most High, to inform and become informed;
and to treasure up knowledge and wisdom
concerning all things.”112 Knowledge does
not have to be Sophic to be real and exact; in
the Melchizedek Priesthood Manual for
1972/73, President Joseph Fielding Smith
equated real knowledge with the gift of the
Holy Ghost: “There is nothing more
important in the lives of members of the
Church than to have the gift of the Holy
Ghost. There is nothing of greater
importance to the individual member of the
Church than the gift of knowledge, and this
does not come by observation but by
constant study and faith.”113 “There should
be no ‘laymen’ in the Church. . . . If there are
any such, then they have neglected their
responsibilities. . . . Each member of the
Church should be so well versed that he, or
she, would be able to discern whether or not
any doctrine taught conforms to the revealed
word of the Lord. Moreover, the members of
the Church are entitled [through obedience to
the commandments] . . . to have the spirit of
discernment.”114
 Proposition 12. It is Science that now
challenges the Sophic position. “Science”
has at least discredited the Sophic position.
Since the days of the ancient Atomists, the
Sophic view of life has rested on two
propositions: (A) that all existence is
composed ultimately of discrete irreducible
particles, beyond which and beside which
there is no reality; (B) that all things are the
result of the random accidental interactions
of these particles. Both these propositions
are today being declared bankrupt, not by the
philosophers and theologians, but by the
physical and biological scientists.
Modern Statements: The Atomist
proposition explained by Descartes: “From
complex whole move to less complex part.
Reduce! . . . from multiplicity to
uniformity.”115 Hume: “You will find it [the
whole] to be nothing but one great machine,
subdivided into an infinite number of lesser
machines.”116 “Humanities strove to become
sciences, each science to become physics, . .
. the ultimate destination in every field being
always that final elementary particle.”117 But
instead of the ultimate particle “our holy
mission to get it all straight has yielded an
ever-proliferating brood of erratically
behaving elementary particles. . . . ‘The
conception of objective reality,’ writes
Heisenberg, ‘has thus evaporated . . . into the
transparent clarity of a mathematics that
represents no longer the behavior of
particles but rather our knowledge of this
behavior.’”118 “The structure of a physical
system such as a proton is now seen to be no
absolute thing . . . but a relative concept
which depends on the energy involved and
the particular properties which are being
studied. . . . There is no substance in the
argument that physics must ultimately have a
full stop in constituent parts too simple to be
analysed further.”119 "[Banging] the hadrons
together . . . has completely upset the atomist
notion that there is a limit to divisibility. . . .
As the energy is increased there is no logical
limit to . . . what may be found as we look
deeper into space.”120 “There is really only
one law, which is that the total energy is
conserved.”121 “Energy . . . is the
fundamental physical quantity of which mass
and radiation—matter and light—are two
manifestations.”122
The clearest expression of the theory of
random chance evolution is Robert Jastrow’s
popular book Red Giants and White
Dwarfs123 (which has been required reading
in some courses at BYU): “Yet the fact is
that a single thread of evidence runs from the
atom and the nucleus through the formation of
stars and planets to the complexities of the
living organism.”124 “Darwin saw that the
forms of life existing on the earth today have
evolved gradually out of earlier and simpler
beginnings.”125 “We believe that at the
beginning there was only a cloud of gaseous
hydrogen. . . . It was the parent cloud of us
all.”126 “With the further passage of time,
cells developed . . . and living organisms
were started on the long road to the
complexity of the creatures which exist
today.”127 How? “Life can appear
spontaneously in any favorable planetary
environment, and evolve into complex
beings, provided vast amounts of time are
available."128 “Thousands of skeletons and
fossil remains mark the path by which life
climbed upward from its crude
beginnings.”129 The principle of natural
selection is, according to Jastrow, the great
“new law . . . discovered by Charles
Darwin,” which “guides the course of
evolution and shapes the forms of living
creatures—on this planet and on all planets
on which life has arisen—as firmly and as
surely as gravity controls the stars and the
planets.”130
Karl Popper would deny this so-called
law of nature even the title to a scientific
theory: “There is a difficulty with
Darwinism. . . . It is far from clear what we
should consider a possible refutation of the
theory of natural selection. If . . . we accept
that statistical definition of fitness which
defines fitness by actual survival, then the
survival of the fittest becomes tautological,
and irrefutable.”131 Other objections come
from biologists, geologists, physicists, and
others. “I want to warn against . . . the basic
assumption . . . that what is more simple in
metabolism biochemically is more primitive
and consequently older in the history of life.
This assumption is entirely unjustified.132 In
geology also,” ‘simple’ has also been largely
confused with ‘primitive’ and with
‘early.’”133 “The synthesis by natural
inorganic processes of such large,
complicated molecules [necessary for life]
happens to be well-nigh impossible under
present environmental circumstances. . . .
These large organic molecules cannot at
present exist on their own, inorganically; . . .
they cannot be formed regularly, or even
rarely, in natural inorganic chemistry and
even if this would be possible, they are
liable to immediate destruction.”134 Even if
life could be reproduced in the laboratory,
“we could not say from our experiments that
the living material in the universe arose in
this way. . . . The assumption that life arose
only once and that therefore all living things
are interrelated [Jastrow’s “single thread of
evidence”] is a useful assumption. . . . But
because a concept is useful it does not mean
that it is necessarily correct.”135 “Nothing is
definitely known about what did happen; all
is hypothesis, and though it is simpler to
assume that it was a unique occurrence, there
is no reason why this simple explanation
should be the correct one.”136 “But it is hard
to see how this [natural selection] operates
in the very early stages of development. It is
also hard to see why it has led to the
evolution of life forms of ever-increasing
complexity. If survival is the essential
characteristic for trapping fluctuations, very
simple organisms would appear to be just as
well, if not better, equipped than
complicated ones.”137
What many are pointing out today is that
the mechanistic-evolutionary theory reverses
both the direction of time and the order of
nature. By the laws of thermodynamics, “left
to itself, everything tends to become more
and more disorderly until the final and
natural state of things is a completely random
distribution of matter. Any kind of order,
even that as simple as the arrangement of
atoms in a molecule, is unnatural and
happens only by chance encounters that
reverse the general trend. These events are
statistically unlikely, and the further
combination of molecules into anything as
highly organized as a living organism is
wildly improbable. Life is a rare and
unreasonable thing.”138
Jastrow is presenting the position of
“the most extreme mechanistic faction . . .
that all phenomena of life are explainable by
means of our present body of physical and
chemical theories. The reason I feel sure that
this is not true is that these theories do not
seem adequate even for inanimate
phenomena. Most physicists agree that our
present theories do not suffice to understand
the nucleus of the atom, for example.”139 “In
biochemistry, based on this physics, we are
able to account fully only for isolated
phenomena, which will cease eventually. I
cannot reconcile physical principles with the
phenomena of life when considering the
whole living unit. It is interesting that Niels
Bohr concluded that life is a qualitatively
different attribute of matter, not subject to
current considerations in physics.”140
Here some recent reflections on the
evolutionary scene by eminent biologists are
not out of place: “Is there any positive proof,
from any part of the evidence, that evolution
has, or has not, occurred? There is no visible
proof, nor any kind of certain proof, either
way, anywhere.”141 “This theory can be
called the ‘General Theory of Evolution’ and
the evidence that supports it is not
sufficiently strong to allow us to consider it
as anything more than a working
hypothesis.”142 “Of course one can say that
the small observable changes in modern
species may be the sort of thing that lead to
all the major changes, but what right have we
to make such an extrapolation? We may feel
that this is the answer to the problem, but is
it a satisfactory answer? A blind acceptance
of such a view may in fact be the closing of
our eyes to as yet undiscovered factors
which may remain undiscovered for many
years if we believe that the answer has
already been found.”143 Today
“Neocatastrophism” teaches that during the
earth’s past there have been “drastic turning-
points, the cutting off of animal types,
characterized by a widespread more or less
contemporary extinction of numerous species
and emergence and even exuberance of
others.” This has led eminent geologists to
take positions which are “in opposition to
Darwin’s doctrine of gradual evolution,
natural selection, and extinction as a normal
process.”144 “The extinction can only have
been a sudden and decisive event,” and we
have “not only the dying out of older species
(Stamme), but also the more or less sudden
emergence of new ones,” so that we “should
speak of an anastrophe” rather than a
catastrophe.145 The “argument . . . that the
origin of life is essentially a problem in
probability . . . is an insufficient and actually
an unsuitable concept. Furthermore, this
appears to me as even a dangerous mental
attitude. It leads to a self-satisfied state of
mind. We have an illusion that the problem
can be explained with existing knowledge (a
very natural tendency in scientists) and this
lulls us into an attitude of not thinking really
about the problem.”146
Being tautological in nature, the
evolutionary hypothesis explains very little.
It has “two basic fallacies: . . . (1) it
assumes that there is only one way in which
a certain state of affairs, such as life, can
exist; and (2) it assumes that the probability
of a process can be calculated although its
mechanism is unknown.”147 It is a product of
hindsight: its authors wrote the answer-book
first, and then composed the problem around
it. “Science is only restrospectively
logical.”148 “We might ask, why was the
Piltdown monster accepted? The answer is
very simple; it had been taylored [sic]
according to scientific theory. . . . So when
such a creature [a crass forgery] was found,
the anthropologists recognized at once that
they were right.”149 “Most finds [of early
man] were made, and I am proud we can say
this, by men who wanted to find.”150 “There
is no doubt that the horse could have
evolved in the manner described. But had
Mr. Darwin lived fifty million years ago, he
would certainly not have been able to
predict that these changes would occur, even
if he had known how the environment was
going to change. Since his theory would not
have served for predictions then, it is not
adequate for an explanation now.”151 “To say
that the known changes could have been
brought about by the described machinery
does not explain these changes. . . . An
adequate explanation is one which would
have enabled us to predict the outcome,
before it took place. But none of the present
evolutionary theories enables us to make
such predictions.”152 “Many more questions
will have to be answered before an
evolutionary theory emerges that can make
even simple predictions.”153
Concerning the seven basic assumptions
of evolution, G. A. Kerkut writes: “The first
point that I should like to make is that these
seven assumptions by their nature are not
capable of experimental verification. They
assume that a certain series of events has
occurred in the past. Thus though it may be
possible to mimic . . . this does not mean that
these events must therefore have taken place
in the past. All that it shows is that it is
possible for such a change to take place. . . .
We have to depend upon limited
circumstantial evidence for our
assumptions.”154
Lyall Watson says, “life occurs by
chance and that the probability of its
occurring, and continuing, is infinitesimal. It
is even more unlikely that this life could, in
the comparatively short time it has existed on
this planet, develop into more than a million
distinct living forms. . . . To believe that this
took place only by chance places a great
strain on the credulity of even the most
mechanistic biologist. The geneticist
Waddington compares it to ‘throwing bricks
together in heaps’ in the hope that they would
‘arrange themselves into an inhabitable
house.’”155 In atomic particles “it is the least
massive and therefore longest living states
which are the most important.”156 “The
physicochemical principle of selectivity . . .
includes a tacit assumption of acquisition, of
positive action, of building up the
improbable and more complex from the more
probable, less complex and of actually
increasing stability as complexity
increases.”157 All of which actually reverses
the order of Nature.
R. Buckminster Fuller has much to say
on this theme. For him evolution
“reassociates those elements in orderly
molecular structures or as orderly organs of
ever-increasing magnitude, thus effectively
reversing the entropic behaviors of purely
physical phenomena.”158 This requires an
explanation: “My continuing philosophy is
predicated, first, on the assumption that in
dynamical counterbalance of the expanding
universe of entropically increasing random
disorderliness, there must be a universal
pattern of omniX contracting, convergent,
progressive orderliness” which presents us
with “an overwhelming confrontation of our
experience by a comprehensive intellect
magnificently greater than our own or the
sum of all human intellects.” The glory of
God is intelligence, or, in the words of P. T.
Matthews, “The sorting process—the
creation of order out of chaos—against the
natural flow of physical events is something
which is essential to life.”159 “A human
being is, at very least, an assembly of
chemicals constructed and maintained in a
state of fantastically complicated
organisation of quite unimaginable
improbability.”160 The reverse motion
[opposing the direction of entropy], although
formally allowed, is so improbable that it
can be dismissed as impossible.161 “Any
system will tend to degenerate into a
condition with a minimum amount of mass,
the largest number of parts and the maximum
amount of motion.”162 The answer to this has
always been: “You cannot say it is a state of
unimaginable improbability,”163 because it
actually happens. You can see it happen!
Therefore there is nothing fantastic or
miraculous about it.
“For practical reasons,” wrote P. T.
Mora, “we developed a simplifying
scientific approach in physics. We follow the
dictates of Descartes, that one must divide . .
. into as many parts as possible, and then
study the simplest first. . . . However,
complexity is an essential attribute of
biological systems. . . . furthermore, in
physics we avoid teleology, . . . but a certain
type of teleological approach must be
pertinent to the study of living systems.”164
But the simplifying process has come to an
end with the discovery that the ultimate hard,
indivisible particle of the atomists, whose
weight and shape alone accounted for all
phenomena, vanishes into energy patterns of
apparently endless complexity. Mr. Wheelis
throws up his hands in despair: “We isolate
what we study, simplify it, break it into
smaller pieces, wash it”165 and then, lo,
“mechanism disappears at precisely that
point at which we were finally going to nail
it down forever.”166 “We have sacrificed the
world for nothing.”167 And so it would seem
“we have come a long way on false
credentials. . . . We are not entitled to grace
in getting out, to peace with honor.”168 “We
have lived a delusion, we cannot know the
world. Aided or unaided we stumble through
an endless night, locked in a range of
experience . . . given by what we are and
where we live.”169 He quotes Bridgman of
M.I.T.: “Our conviction that nature is
understandable and subject to law arose
from the narrowness of our horizons. . . . We
shall find that nature is intrinsically and in its
elements neither understandable nor subject
to law. . . . The world is not a world of
reason, understandable by the intellect of
man.”170 “Between the electrical signals
coming through the eye to the brain and our
reaction to . . . a tree in blossom on a fresh
spring day, there is a vast gap which physics
shows no signs of ever being able to
bridge.”171 It may even be that whatever it is
that is peculiar to life and particular to
thought lies outside the scope of physical
concepts.”172 “The Universe is not only
queerer than we imagine—it is queerer than
we can imagine[!]"173 “And the real
beginning of education must be the
experimental realization of absolute
mystery.”174 “And the why-for and how-
come of all . . . generalized principles . . .
are all and together Absolute Mystery.”175
 Ancient Statements: If the ancients did
not have the sophisticated instruments and
methods now available, what they did have
was far superior to anything that we have
been willing to credit them with so far. Their
methods were different, but to judge by the
results, very effective.176 They had only too
great faith in the principles of mechanistic
materialism and natural selection (cf. Alma
30:15-18), and in the end turned from
atomism and determinism to esoteric studies
which have been dismissed as “mystical” but
which present-day investigation shows to
have been astonishingly fruitful in concepts
very close to some of the most sophisticated
scientific speculation of our time. Thus
Matthews notes that “it is fascinating how
close these diagrams [some very advanced
‘quark patterns’] are to the number pattern
which so impressed the Pythagoreans.”177
The cosmological patterns set forth in
numerous early Christian (“Gnostic”) and
Jewish works very recently discovered are
at very least extremely high-class science-
fiction. I myself am at present engaged in
gathering and comparing such work.178 That
Whitehead at the end of his life should turn
to Plato as the best exponent of the reality
around us is an indication of how far the
ancients projected their physical researches
into scientific speculation. In turning to
“mystic” speculations, Plato and Aristotle,
as Werner Jaeger shows, did not turn their
backs to the physical universe. It was the
Neo-Platonists and the later Doctors of the
Christian church, following the lead of the
scholars of Alexandria, who did that.

Notes to Part 4
Footnotes
^1. Albert Guérard, Fossils and Presences
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1957), 102.
^2. For laughs, see John Jacob Astor’s, A
Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the
Future, 6th ed. (New York: Appleton,
1898), 34-35; these pages provide a sketch
of the year 2000.
^3. Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (New
York: Harper and Row, 1962), chaps. 1 and
2.
^4. “The Integrity of Science: A Report by the
AAAS Committee on Science in the
Promotion of Human Welfare,” American
Scientist 53 (June 1965): 176.
^5. See Julian H. Steward, “Cultural Evolution,”
Scientific American 194 (May 1956): 69-
80.
^6. Joseph W. Krutch, “If You Don’t Mind My
Saying So. . . . .,” American Scholar 35
(Spring 1966): 181.
^7. William H. Whyte, Jr., Organization Man
 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956),
208.
^8. Ibid., 215, 223.
^9. Ibid., 226.
^10. Albert W. Heere, in a letter to the Editor, in
American Institute of Biological Science
(AIBS) Bulletin (December 1960): 5.
^11. Eric Hodgins, “The Strange State of
American Research,” Fortune (April 1955):
113.
^12. A. L. Kroeber, “Statistics, Indo-European,
and Taxonomy,” Language 36 (1960): 19.
^13. William K. Wright, “The End of the Day,”
The Philosophical Review 55 (July 1946):
328-29.
^14. Julian Jaynes, “The Routes of Science,”
American Scientist 54 (March 1966): 94-95.
^15. Edwyn Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921),
41 (emphasis added).
^16. Eduard Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2 vol.,
3rd ed. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1915), 2:655-56.
^17. John Chrysostom, Oratio in Epistolam ad
 Hebraeos XII, 30, in PG 63:211.
^18. Hugh Nibley, “Victoriosa Loquacitas: The
Rise of Rhetoric and the Decline of
Everything Else,” Western Speech 20 (Spring
1956): 70-71; reprinted in this volume, pages
265-66.
^19. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian
War III, 45, 5.
^20. Werner Jaeger, Aristotle, tr. Richard
Robinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), 5.
^21. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2:807.
^22. Ibid., 778.
^23. C. E. M. Joad, Guide to Philosophy (New
York: Dover, 1936), 524-25.
^24. F. W. Ostwald, Die Philosophie der Werte,
quoted in Stephen Toulmin, “Contemporary
Scientific Mythology,” in Metaphysical
Beliefs (London: SCM, 1957), 30.
^25. T. Neville George, Evolution in Outline
(London: Thrift Books, 1951), 118-19.
^26. Rudolf Jordan, The New Perspective
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1951), 177.
^27. Bertrand Russell, quoted in Clarke, Profiles
of the Future, 248.
^28. Nikolai Kozyrev, “An Unexplored World,”
Soviet Life (November 1965): 43.
^29. Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to
the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press, 1957), 43.
^30. John Dewey, Living Philosophies (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), 27.
^31. Warren Weaver, “The Imperfections of
Science,” American Scientist 49 (March
1961): 101.
^32. J. C. Loehlin, “Machines with Personality,”
Science Journal 4 (October 1968): 98.
^33. Gordon Taylor, “Focus,” Science Journal 4
(June 1968): 31.
^34. Warren S. McCulloch, “Mysterium
Iniquitatis of Sinful Man Aspiring into the
Place of God,” Scientific Monthly 80
(January 1955): 37.
^35. Jordan, The New Perspective, 144.
^36. Lester G. Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man
and World in Eighteenth Century French
 Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1959), 82-83.
^37. Nolin P. Jacobson, “The Cultural Meaning of
Science,” Hibbert Journal 65 (Spring 1967):
92 (emphasis added).
^38. Joad, Guide to Philosophy, 565.
^39. M. G. Rutten, The Origin of Life by Natural
Causes (New York: Elsevier, 1971), 4.
^40. Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Evolution at
Work,” Science 127 (9 May 1958): 1091.
^41. Morton S. Enslin, “A Gentleman among the
Fathers,” Harvard Theological Review 47
(October 1954): 241.
^42. Ibid., 230, 238, 239.
^43. Origen, In Leviticum Homilia 7, in PG
12:488-89.
^44. Pavel Poucha, “Das tibetische Totenbuch im
Rahmen der eschatologischen Literatur,”
Archiv Orientalni 20 (1952): 162, who
compares Pliny the Elder, Natural History
VII, 55, 189.
^45. Wilhelm Schmid, Geschichte der
griechischen Literature (Munich: Beck,
 1940), 3:3:11.
^46. Horace, Epistle I, 6, 1.
^47. Adolf Erman, The Ancient Egyptians: A
Sourcebook of Their Writings, tr. Aylward
M. Blackman (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), 85-88.
^48. W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom
Literature (London: Oxford University
Press, 1960), 33, 35, 41, 77, 81, 109, 266-
67, 278.
^49. Karl Jaspers, quoted in Gerald W. Johnson,
“Some Cold Comfort,” American Scholar
35 (Spring 1966): 193.
^50. Kozyrev, “An Unexplored World,” 27.
^51. John Langdon-Davies, Man and His
Universe (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1930), 319.
^52. Johnson, “Some Cold Comfort,” 195.
^53. Ibid.
^54. Jacques Maritain, Science and Wisdom, tr.
Bernard Wall (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1954), 48.
^55. Ibid., 50.
^56. Whyte, The Organization Man, 395.
^57. Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the
Modern World, Lowell Lectures, 1925 (New
York: Macmillan, 1962), 274.
^58. W. G. Haverbeck, Das Ziel der Technik
(Freiburg, 1965), reviewed in Zeitschrift für
Geopolitik 15 (1967): 6.
^59. Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations
(New York: Basic Books, 1962), 229.
^60. Joseph Jacobs, quoted in Grey H. Skipwith,
“The Origins of the Religion of Israel,”
Jewish Quarterly Review 12 (1900): 381.
^61. Robin S. Allan, “Geological Correlation and
Paleoecology,” Bulletin of the Geological
Society of America 59 (January 1948): 2.
^62. Ibid.
^63. John R. Platt, quoted in R. Buckminster
Fuller, “Vision 65 Summary Lecture,”
American Scholar 35 (Spring 1966): 218.
^64. Wiesner, quoted in ibid.
^65. Krutch, “If You Don’t Mind,” 183.
^66. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 216.
^67. Ibid., 213.
^68. Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, The
Year 2000 (New York: Macmillan, 1967),
263.
^69. Iago Galdston, “Existentialism as a Perennial
Philosophy of Life and Being,” Journal of
Existential Psychiatry 1 (Fall 1960): 379.
^70. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2:453-55.
^71. Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity, 156.
^72. Ibid., 145-54.
^73. Friedrich Cauer, “Die Stellung der
arbeitenden Klassen in Hellas und Rom,”
Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische
Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche
Literatur 3 (n.d.): 700-702.
^74. Nibley, “Victoriosa Loquacitas,” 70-72;
reprinted in this volume, pages 265-69.
^75. Justin, in PG 6:1316 (see response to
question 74).
^76. Hugh Nibley, “The Unsolved Loyalty
Problem: Our Western Heritage,” Western
Political Quarterly 6 (December 1953):
632-35; reprinted in this volume, pages 196-
200.
^77. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 1:20-21, 2:507.
^78. Plato, Gorgias 518-19; Werner Jaeger,
Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, tr.
Gilbert Highet, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford
University, 1945), 1:330-31.
^79. W. Bossuet, Judisch-christlicher
Schulbetrieb in Alexandria und Rom
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1915), 6.
^80. Arnold Lunn and J. B. S. Haldane, Science
and the Supernatural (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1935), 50.
^81. Arnold Lunn, The Flight from Reason (New
York: Dial, 1931), 21.
^82. Nicolas Berdyaev, Solitude and Society
(London: Centenary, 1938), 6.
^83. Norden, Antike Kunstprosa, 2:712-13.
^84. Maurice de Wulf, History of Mediaeval
Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York: Dover,
1952), 1:173.
^85. Ibid., 210.
^86. James Hastings, ed., “Mysticism,” in
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 12
vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
 1951), 9:100.
^87. Charles Dickens, “In the Name of the
Prophet—Smith!” Household Words 3 (19
July 1851): 385.
^88. Eduard König, “The Modern Attack on the
Historicity of the Religion of the Patriarchs,”
Jewish Quarterly Review 22 (1931/32):
120-21.
^89. Herbert W. Schneider, “Evolution and
Theology in America [“The Influence of
Darwin and Spencer on American
Philosophical Theology”],” Journal of the
History of Ideas 6 (January 1945): 3-18.
^90. Morris R. Cohen, American Thought: A
Critical Sketch (New York: Collier Books,
1962), 240.
^91. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World,
270.
^92. Nels F. S. Ferré, “Which Way British
Theology?” Expository Times 70 (July
1959): 305.
^93. Henri Leclercq, "Église,” in Henri Leclercq
and Fernand Cabrol, eds., Dictionnaire
 d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie
(Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1907), 4:2228-30.
^94. J. Lebreton, “Le désaccord de la foi
populaire et de la théologie savante,” Revue
d’histoire ecclésiastique 19A (1923): 481-
83.
^95. Reinhold Seeberg, Text-Book of the History
of Doctrines, vol. 1 of History of Doctrines
in the Ancient Church (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker Book House, 1952), 160.
^96. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V, 28, 13-
14, in PG 20:516.
^97. Anna Miura-Stange, Celsus und Origenes
(Giessen: Töpelmann, 1926) in Zeitschrift
für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und
die Kunde der älteren Kirche, Beiheft 4
(1926): 59-118.
^98. Minucius Felix, Octavius, in G. Goetz, Die
literarhistorische Stellung des Octavius von
Minucius Felix (Giessen: Töpelmann,
1926), 161-63.
^99. Justin, in PG 6:1316, Question 74.
^100. G. Florovsky, “Eschatology in the Patristic
 Age,” in Kurt Aland and F. L. Cross, eds.,
Studia Patristica II in Texte und Unter-
suchungen zur Geschichte der
altchristlichen Literatur 64 (Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 1957), 246, 248.
^101. Martin Grabmann, Geschichte der
scholastischen Methode, 2 vols. (Graz:
Adademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt,
1957), 2:87-91.
^102. Franklin L. Baumer, Religion and the Rise
of Scepticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1960), 19-20.
^103. Alfred N. Whitehead, quoted in Lucien
Price, “To Live without Certitude,” Atlantic
Monthly 193 (March 1954): 59.
^104. Pierre L. du Noüy, Human Destiny (New
York: Longmans, Green, 1947), 264.
^105. Cf. Hugh Nibley, “The Return of the
Prophets?” in The World and the Prophets
(Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1966), 258-
72; reprinted in CWHN 3:284-98.
^106. Hugh Nibley, “Jerusalem: In Christianity,”
in Encyclopedia Judaica 9:1570-75, and
 Hugh Nibley, “Christian Envy of the
Temple,” Jewish Quarterly Review 50
(1959/60): 109-23; reprinted in CWHN
4:323-54 and 391-434 respectively.
^107. O. R. Frisch, “Tactics and Strategy of
Science,” Science Journal 5 (November
1969): 84, a review of P. B. Medawar’s
Induction and Intuition in Scientific
Thought.
^108. Martin Greenberg, ed., The Robot and the
Man (New York: Gnome, 1953), vi.
^109. Berdyaev, Solitude and Society, 20
(emphasis added); cf. Norbert Samuelson,
“That the God of the Philosophers Is Not
the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,”
Harvard Theological Review 65 (1972): 1-
28; Robin Attfield, “The God of Religion
and the God of Philosophy,” Religious
Studies 9 (March 1973): 1-9.
^110. See Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and
Christian Mystery (New York: Harper and
Row, 1963), xv, 387-90.
^111. Karl R. Popper, “Science: Problems, Aims,
 Responsibilities,” Federation Proceedings of
the American Societies for Experimental
Biology 22 (1963): 962.
^112. “Fifth General Epistle,” Deseret News, 22
March 1851, 225.
^113. Joseph Fielding Smith, Selections from
Answers to Gospel Questions: A Course of
Study for the Melchizedek Priesthood
Quorums of The Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints 1972/73 (Salt Lake City:
Deseret News Press, 1972), 191.
^114. Ibid., 190-91.
^115. Allen Wheelis, The End of the Modern Age
(New York: Basic Books, 1971), 33.
^116. Ibid., 34.
^117. Ibid., 43.
^118. Ibid., 64.
^119. P. T. Matthews, Nuclear Apple, 117-18.
^120. Ibid., 116-17.
^121. Ibid., 16.
^122. Ibid., 19.
^123. Robert Jastrow, Red Giants and White
Dwarfs (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
^124. Ibid., 5.
^125. Ibid., 123.
^126. Ibid., 130-31.
^127. Ibid., 139.
^128. Ibid., 152.
^129. Ibid., 155.
^130. Ibid., 157.
^131. Popper, “Science: Problems, Aims,
Responsibilities,” 964.
^132. M. G. Rutten, The Geological Aspects of
the Origin of Life on Earth (New York:
Elsevier, 1962), 124.
^133. Ibid., 125.
^134. Ibid., 46.
^135. G. A. Kerkut, ed., Implications of
Evolution, International Series of
Monographs on Pure and Applied Biology;
Division: Zoology, vol. 4 (New York:
Pergamon, 1960), 8.
^136. Ibid., 17.
^137. P. T. Matthews, The Nuclear Apple
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1971), 143.
^138. Lyall Watson, Supernature (New York:
Doubleday, 1973), 5.
^139. J. G. Kemeny, A Philosopher Looks at
Science (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand,
1959), 211-12.
^140. Peter T. Mora, “The Folly of Probability,”
in Sidney W. Fox, The Origins of
Prebiological Systems (New York:
Academic, 1965), 46.
^141. J. Challinor, “Palaeontology and Evolution,”
in P. R. Bell, ed., Darwin’s Biological Work,
Some Aspects Reconsidered (Cambridge:
Cambridge University, 1959), 53.
^142. Kerkut, Implications of Evolution, 157.
^143. Ibid., 154.
^144. Otto H. von Schindewolf,
“Neokatastrophismus,” Zeitschrift der
deutschen geologischen Gesellschaft 114
(1963): 430.
^145. Ibid., 431.
^146. Mora, “The Folly of Probability,” 50.
^147. Norman W. Pirie, “Some Assumptions
Underlying Discussion on the Origins of
 Life,” Annals, New York Academy of
Sciences (1956): 370.
^148. Ibid., 371.
^149. G. H. R. von Koenigswald, “Early Man:
Facts and Fantasy,” Royal Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Journal 94 (1964): 76.
^150. Ibid., 69.
^151. Kemeny, A Philosopher Looks at Science,
200.
^152. Ibid., 199.
^153. Ibid., 207.
^154. Kerkut, Implications of Evolution, 7.
^155. Watson, Supernature, 8.
^156. Matthews, The Nuclear Apple, 105.
^157. Mora, “The Folly of Probability,” 47-48.
^158. Fuller, Intuition, 70.
^159. Matthews, The Nuclear Apple, 143.
^160. Ibid., 142.
^161. Cf. Mora, “The Folly of Probability,” 43,
49.
^162. Ibid., 71-72.
^163. Ibid., 142.
^164. Ibid., 49.
^165. Wheelis, The End of the Modern Age, 61.
^166. Ibid., 62.
^167. Ibid., 70.
^168. Ibid., 77.
^169. Ibid., 115.
^170. Ibid., 65.
^171. Matthews, The Nuclear Apple, 141.
^172. Ibid., 142.
^173. J. B. S. Haldane, in Clarke, Profiles of the
Future, 139.
^174. Fuller, Intuition, 50.
^175. R. Buckminster Fuller, Intuition (New
York: Doubleday, 1972), 42.
^176. Giorgio de Santillana, The Origins of
Scientific Thought (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1961).
^177. Matthews, The Nuclear Apple, 100.
^178. For a discussion of cosmological patterns in
early Christian (Gnostic) and Jewish works,
see Hugh Nibley, “Treasures in the Heavens:
Some Early Christian Insights into the
Organizing of the Worlds,” Dialogue: A
Journal of Mormon Thought 8/3-4 (1973):
76-98; reprinted in CWHN 1:171-214.
 Illustration Sources

Except where noted, the illustrations

have been drawn for this edition by Michael
Lyon (ML), Tyler Moulton (TM), and Glen
Cooper (GC).
Figure 1. Redrawn (ML) from Stewart
Culin, “Games of the North American
Indians,” Annual Report of the Bureau of
American Ethnology 24 (1902-1903): 214,
fig. 291.
Figure 2. Redrawn (ML) from (A) Dora
Jane Hamblin, The Etruscans (New York:
Time-Life Books, 1975), 123; (B) Michael
H. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage,
2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1974), 2: pl. XLVII, 4; (C) Cornelius
Vermeule, Numismatic Art in America
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1971), 145, fig.
159.
Figure 3. Redrawn (ML) from Hunan
Provincial Museum: The Han Tomb No. 2 at
Ma Wang Tui, Changsha, 2 vols. (Peking:
WenWu, 1973), (A) 1:100, pl. 93.3; (B) 2:
pl. 270; (C) Albert S. Lyons, Medicine, An
Illustrated History (New York: Abrams,
1978), 143, fig. 222.
Figure 4. Redrawn (ML) from (A)
Charles Singer, A History of Technology, 10
vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1954), 1:700, fig. 502; (B) Alexander
Badawy, A History of Egyptian
Architecture, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1966), 251, pl. 32.
Figure 5. Redrawn (ML) from (A)
Henri Seyrig, “Antiquites Syriennes,” Syria
15 (1934): pl. XIX; (B) Marie-Madeleine
Gauthier, Highways of the Faith (London:
Alpine Fine Arts Collection, 1986), 91, fig.
48. (C) Original English engraving from
Edward Lane, An Account of the Manners
and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 3
vols. in 1 (London: Knight, 1846), 3:65.
Figure 6. Redrawn (ML) from (A)
Heinrich Schäfer, Principles of Egyptian Art
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), pl. 40; (B)
Mohamed Saleh, The Egyptian Museum
Cairo, Official Catalogue (Mainz: von
Zabern, 1987), pl. 123 (carrying poles
restored); (C) G. Lefebvre, Le Tombeau de
Petosiris (Cairo: Imprimerie de l’Institute
français d’archäologie Orientale, 1924), pls.
XXX, XXXIV; (D) G. E. Wright, Biblical
Archaeology (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1957), 203, fig. 146 (the inscription JHU
was widely read as a late Aramaic spelling
of Jahweh while Wright reads it as Judah
but still does not explain the equally
surprising use by Jews of this Greek image);
(E) Hugo Gressmann, Texte und Bilder zum
alten Testament (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1927),
pl. CXLVI, 363; (F) Erwin Goodenough,
Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman
Period, 13 vols. (New York: Pantheon,
1964), 11: illustration 334; (G) H. P.
L’Orange, Studies on the Iconography of
Cosmic Kingship in the Ancient World
(New Rochelle, NY: Caratzas Brothers,
1982), 128, fig. 91; and (H) Christiane
Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen (New
York: Rainbird, 1963), 190, fig. 110.
Figure 7. Redrawn (ML) from (A) Erich
Schmidt, Persepolis, 3 vols. (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1953), 1: pl. 78
(heavily restored); (B) ibid., 3: pl. 43B
(tomb of Xerxes); (C) Dieter Planck et al.,
Der Keltenfürst von Hochdorf (Stuttgart:
Theiss, 1985), 102, fig. 119: (D) ibid., 97,
fig. 114.
Figure 8. (A) Mathias Ueblacker, Das
Teatro Marittimo in der Villa Hadriana
(Mainz: von Zabern, 1985), redrawn (GC),
pl. 50.1; and (B) ibid., redrawn (ML), pl.
53.1, plan 24, 27.
Figure 9. Redrawn (ML) from (A)
Pierre Amiet, Art of the Ancient Near East
(New York: Abrams, 1980), pl. 599; (B)
Werner Müller, Die heilige Stadt (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1961), pl. 7a; (C) F. Van der
Meer, Atlas of the Early Christian World
(London: Nelson, 1959), 31, map 39.
Figure 10. William Simpson, “The
Threefold Division of Temples,” Ars
Quatuor Coronatorum 1 (1886-88):
between pages 128 and 129, from a drawing
by the author.
Figure 11. Redrawn (ML) from (A)
L’Orange, Iconography of Cosmic Kingship,
41, fig. 19. Redrawn (TM) from (B) Kurt
Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1979), 70. Redrawn (ML) from (C) Seth
Stevenson, Dictionary of Roman Coins
(London, 1889), 358; (D) Cornelius
Vermeule, Jewish Relations with the Art of
Ancient Greece and Rome (Boston: Museum
of Fine Arts, 1981), 80; and (E) T. L.
Donaldson, Ancient Architecture on Greek
and Roman Coins and Medals (Chicago:
Argonaut, 1966), no. 57.
Figure 12. Henry Yule, The Book of Ser
Marco Polo the Venetian, 3rd ed. (London:
Murray, 1926), 255, “drawn by Sig. Quinto
Cenni on a design compiled by the Editor
from the description of Marco Polo and later
travelers” (ci); quotation by William
Rubruck in Manuel Komroff, ed.,
Contemporaries of Marco Polo (New York:
Liveright, 1928), 59.
Figure 13. (A) Stevenson, Dictionary of
Roman Coins, 245. Redrawn (ML) from (B)
Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality, 79.
Figure 14. Slightly restored and
enhanced (ML) from Norman de Garis
Davies, Rock Cut Tombs of El Amarna
(London: Archaeological Survey of Egypt,
1908), pl. XXIX, XXX.
Figure 15. Henri Leclerq, “Annone,” in
Fernand Cabrol and Henri Leclercq,
Dictionnaire d’archäologie chrétienne et
de liturgie, 15 vols. (Paris: Letouzey et Ané,
1907), 1:2275-76.
Figure 16. Redrawn (ML) from Trevor
Williams, The Triumph of Invention (New
York: Facts on File Publications, 1987),
134.
Figure 17. Redrawn (TM) from (A)
Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality, 55.
Redrawn (ML) from (B) L’Orange,
Iconography of Cosmic Kingship, 177, fig.
126; (C) Weitzmann, ed., Age of Spirituality,
184; (D) ibid., 415.