University of Virginia Library

This march was made, and this execution done, by Sylla, on his return from the Mithridatic war. The partizans of Marius were still too powerful to be spared by the master of the sword. Plutarch mentions the slaughter, with the horrid addition, that eight thousand soldiers were put to death close to the Senate-house, immediately on Sylla's arrival, and that their outcries were heard within while he was delivering his speech; a terrible fitness of accompaniment for the denunciations of a tyrant.

Troubled times make men superstitious, and the convulsions which shook the republic towards its close, naturally kept all men in alarm. The Roman chronicles are full of disturbances of the skies. Valerius Maximus gives a train of prodigies, before and after the conspiracy, but strangely omits the wonders of the crisis itself. Dio fills up the vacancy; and the χεραυνοι εν αιθρια, and the ειδωλα ανθρωπων, were the common terrors of the time. Towards the final catastrophe of the republic those terrors thickened; and the paleness of the sun of Cæsar's death consummated the whole lofty and fearful series. Virgil has combined them all, in one of his noblest bursts of poetry:—

It is remarkable to see the manly mind of Cicero, the academic, condescending to the delusion of the day; Catil. 3.

Magic constituted a large portion of the hidden wisdom, and the more solemn superstitions of antiquity. Its field was sufficiently wide for the extravagance or the fears of the human imagination, for it gradually comprehended all the terrors, wonders, and wisdom of nature. But, in Rome, the public discipline was a formidable obstacle to practices, whose essence was concealment; and the feeble and popular science of the augural college succeeded to the early mysteries by which the sun was to be darkened, and the earth shaken. Even in the descent of Æneas to Tartarus, Virgil has ventured on scarcely more than the description of a common sacrifice. The hero arranges his victims, “Quatuor hic primum nigrantes terga juvencos”; and their slaying, and an invocation to Hecate, make the ceremony. The “Canidia, rodens pollicem”, with hir sisters, and her whole catalogue of horrid potions and rites; the “Uncta turpis ova ranæ sanguine”; the “ossa ab ore rapta jejunæ canis”; the “exusta medulla et aridum jecur”, which remind us of the cauldron in Macbeth, are treated by Horace with abhorrence, but with ridicule.

In Asia the lustre of the night fixed all eyes; the magician wrought his work by summoning the stars, and at length subsided into the ingenious absurdity of the astrologer. Yet the raising of the dead, or the admission to that unseen world, which stirs so natural and fearful a curiosity in all bosoms, were occasionally among his offices. Lucian, himself an Asiatic, gives, in his Menippus, a slight, but striking detail of the oriental ceremonies previous to a view of the place of the dead. He mentions his having made an agreement, for this purpose, with a wizard, named Mithrobarzanes, “a fellow with a white beard, and long hair,” who closed with him only after a good deal of entreaty. He began by bathing the aspirant in the Euphrates, for a month, beginning at sunrise, and with their faces turned to the east, constantly muttering some prayer as “unintelligible as a crier's proclamation”; in which he seemed to call upon the dæmons. After those operations, the magician spat in his face three times, and brought him back, without looking at any one by the way. In the mean time he was allowed no food but acorns, nor drink but milk and honey, or the water of the river Choaspes. They both slept upon the ground, in the open air. When this preparation was completed, the aspirant was led, about midnight, to the Tigris, when, having bathed, his purification was begun with a lighted torch, a sea onion, and several other things. The magician next walked round him, that he might be out of the power of apparitions. He was then led home, walking backwards. The remainder of the night was occupied in their equipment. The seer put on his official robe; and his pupil, the cap, lyre, and lion's skin, in which he was to personate Hercules. To those formal and lofty impostures of the East, cavalierly as they are treated by the satirist, the Thessala philtra, with the witches, and the whole tribe of ancient western necromancy, were equally vulgar and frightful.

A curious volume, and by no means a brief one, might be written, on the various forms in which Greek imagination consulted futurity: the divination by stars, eyes, voices, trees, birds, seals, dreams, stones,—practices so congenial to human weakness, that a great number of them harmlessly survive in the village superstitions of our day. But the African magic shared in the turbid and wild magnificence of the barbaric mind; and as it was probably the parent of the deepest rites of the ancient world, it still subsists in almost its original terrors. Some wandering knowledge on these subjects may be gathered from the dissertations De Magia Veterum, the works on the Rosicrucian Controversy, and that strange and idle book on Magic, attributed to De Foe.

Gibbon good-naturedly attempts to console us for the loss of the Alexandrian library by undervaluing its contents. To the poet or the historian the loss was partial, though the decads of Livy, and the annals of Tacitus, would justify no trivial regret. But in this conflagration we may have lost the whole detail of the arts of antiquity. It is almost impossible to doubt that the records of a multitude of fine inventions were among the treasures of the public libraries; and that in the great library of the chief artificer-city of the world, Alexandria,—described, with a melancholy contrast to its fallen glories, as the “Civitas opulenta, dives, fœcunda, in quo nemo vivat otiosus: alii vitrum conflant, ab aliis charta conficitur”, &c.—works of this order should not have held a distinguished station.

Modern science prides itself upon its superiority in exactness and application. But the question must lie dead, until we can revive the treatises of ancient knowledge. What could be known of modern physics from the declamation of a poet, or the allusion of a moral philosopher? Yet some of the most profound discoveries of later times, unquestionably were familiar to the powerful intellect of the old world;—the Copernican system; gravity; the equal velocities of bodies falling in vacuo; the acceleration of motion; the microscope; the planetary nature of comets:—“Quid ergo,” says Seneca, “miramur cometas, tam rarum mundi spectaculum, nondum teneri legibus certis, nec initia illorum, finesque notescere, quorum ex ingentibus intervallis recursus est. Veniet tempus,” he adds, with prophetic enthusiasm, “quo ista quæ nune latent, in lucem dies extrahat.” (Natur. Quæst.) Hippocrates explains the circulation of the blood by its common modern similitude, of a river returning to the fountain head. Ποταμοι δε μη κατα τροπον γενομενοι, αιματος περιοδον σημαινουσιν, &c. Του τι περιοδος εν τω σωματι οποθεν αρχεται, επι τουτο τελευτα.

It is not certain that the use of the magnet, in navigation, was known, though this has been argued; but its attractive power was observed, and Plato, in the Timæus, accounts for it on nearly the modern theory.

But the ancients undoubtedly were in possession of some extraordinary secrets, which have perished with them. Cleopatra's celebrated dissolution of the pearl in vinegar, which she drank, is beyond the power of modern chemistry. The reducing of the golden calf, by Moses, into potable powder, was another effort of the wisdom of Egypt, to which we have made but some doubtful appraches. The Tyrian dye, which, Pliny says, was of the colour of an oriental amethyst, has escaped us. The invention of malleable glass, perhaps the most curious and useful legacy that could have been transmitted to the comforts of posterity, is distinctly stated by Pliny, Petronius, and Dio. In the invention of gunpowder we have been anticipated by the remote antiquity of the Indians and the Chinese. The actual receipt for its composition, and the manufacture of a rocket, are detailed by Marcus Græcus, in the eighth century. The only grand invention to which the modern world can lay claim, (if even this was not known in China,) is printing,—fairly worth them all!

The allusions in the text require but slight explanation. Necromancy was the old generic title for all things strange to ignorance and fear. The islands stretching from Ceylon (Taprobana) to the “flammantia mœnia mundi,” the later seat of Sinbad's adventures, were held to be the very empire of sorcery. The grandeur of nature, in those remote and lovely regions,—the exotic luxuriance of the land of spices and incense,—the banks of pearl, and mines of diamond,—the eternal forests, haunts of animals, on which fable had been exhausted,—the superb and gloomy cavern-worship,—the boundless terrors of the Indian storm,—the matchless magnificence of the evening, when the typhoon has passed, and the sun, “that great sultan,” goes down into a sea of gold and purple, exalted the imaginations of men to all the wonderful and wild. The picturesque Greek peopled the forests with romantic life, and saw nymphs and fauns in the hills and valleys,—the darker yet more fervid spirit of the Indian invoked dæmons, and held earth, and the grave, in the chains of spell and talisman. The Indian invention of the numerals, and the perplexing obscurity of the arrow-headed letters on the Persian monuments, are familiar topics. I am not prepared to authenticate the title of magic to the discovery of the

nor of the barks

but the balloon and the steam-boat cannot fairly be placed beyond the teaching of those masters, to whom Milton boldly attributes the first bridge;—

the invention of gunpowder and cannon:—

or that still more unexpected anticipation of the gas lights:—

The memorable invasion, or rather emigration, of those German tribes, had occurred about forty years before the time of the play. Plutarch, with more than his usual animation, describes the alarm at their multitude, which came, ωσπερ νεφος, and the unsparing slaughter made by Marius and Catulus.

The limits of this tribe are not exactly defined. They possessed the present countries of Piedmont and Savoy, with a part of the ancient Helvetia. Gaul or German was a general name for the northern barbarians.